Prepping for Surgery

Film: The Hospital
Format: Internet video on laptop.

I haven’t been shy about my reasons for doing the Oscar round-up posts every week. These aren’t so much a celebration of Oscar as they are an accounting of just how often AMPAS gets it wrong. Still, there are times when I have to admire the balls they sometimes show. In 1970, George C. Scott won the Best Actor Oscar for Patton and he was my pick as well. Scott turned down the Oscar, though, becoming the first person to do so. So the Academy nominates him the following year for The Hospital anyway.

Scott was known for, among other things, being able to turn on the anger at the drop of a hat, something he shared with Lee J. Cobb, and the main reason I sometimes get the two mixed up. In The Hospital, he plays Dr. Herbert Bock, Chief of Medicine at a teaching hospital. The problem is that at the hospital, everything is coming off the hinges, much like his own life. Bock currently lives in a hotel since he has separated from his wife, he’s kicked his son out of the house, his daughter has had two abortions and has been busted for dealing drugs, and he’s currently impotent.

Not Another Holocaust Movie

Film: The Man in the Glass Booth
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on laptop.

I’ve said, ever since watching Son of Saul that it’s getting harder and harder to work me up over a story that concerns the Holocaust. There are, of course, millions of stories to tell about the Holocaust, but there are only so many one can take in one lifetime. Having seen Shoah and Night and Fog, it feels like I’ve hit my limit for how much inhumanity and true horror I can handle. The Man in the Glass Booth managed to do something I thought might be impossible. It presented a completely new Holocaust story.

We are presented with Arthur Goldman (Maximillian Schell), a wealthy Jewish industrialist living in New York. Goldman is highly eccentric and extremely paranoid, particularly about a blue Mercedes that he sees outside of his apartment again and again. He gives very strange commands to his servant Jack (Henry Brown) and his assistant Charlie (Lawrence Pressman). He is also surprisingly anti-Semitic. He is prone to saying completely outrageous things and shocking everyone around him.

Winner of "Least Imaginative Title" Goes to...

Film: Love Story
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on The Nook.

I make no secret of the fact that I am a fan of Roger Ebert. I think he’s one of the finest film critics to every sit behind a typewriter. Ebert came up with a list of film tropes that are some of the great observations of filmdom available. My favorite is what he called the Gandhi film, a film that one is happy to have seen but never wants to see again. I’m also a fan of “idiot plot,” or a movie where the problems could be solved in a couple of minutes if only the characters were not all idiots. The third that I love is “Ali MacGraw’s disease,” which is defined as a disease in which the only symptom is that the patient grows more beautiful before finally dying. That phrase comes from Love Story, a film that I finally got around to watching.

I had a lot of hope for Love Story. Romances aren’t my favorite genre, but there are plenty that I do like. I also tend to like my romances when they play more to the tragic end of the spectrum, and I knew going in that that’s what was on offer here. Additionally, Love Story was nominated for seven Oscars: the five listed in the tags as well as Best Supporting Actor and Best Original Score (the only one it won). So I genuinely was interested in seeing where this went.