Norma Jeane

Film: The Goddess
Format: Movies! Channel on rockin’ flatscreen.

Kim Stanley had a very strange movie career. Evidently the bulk of her acting work was on stage, so she was only in movies infrequently. Despite this, she still managed a couple of Oscar nominations, and with The Goddess, she may well have been snubbed for a third. In this film, Stanley runs the gamut of emotions including a couple that lean toward the insane.

The Goddess is a sort of fictional biopic of Marilyn Monroe. At least the story seems very much based on her in a lot of ways. Young Emily Ann Faulkner (Patty Duke as a child, Kim Stanley as an adult) is born a few years before the Depression. Her mother (Betty Lou Holland) wants to give her away to relatives because she’s still young and wants to find another man to shack up with. But she bears down on it and gets a job and raises her child, who she completely ignores.

Trials of Job

Film: Leviafan (Leviathan)
Format: DVD from netFlix on laptop.

There’s a feel to Russian movies that I don’t think can be duplicated by anything but a Russian director. Even a short Russian film feels like an epic, and all of them feel like stories about how terrible things happen to average people. That’s absolutely the case with Leviafan (Leviathan). It’s long, and nothing good happens to any of the main characters here. Any happiness is fleeting, comes before something terrible, and usually comes out of a bottle.

Don’t forget that; alcohol is a theme in Leviafan. Evidently, the actors actually drank in a number of the scenes and frequently the takes used were after multiple attempts at the scene, so they were actually inebriated. This is certainly why they seem to be exemplary at acting like drunks. They really look the part.

Murder Most Foul

Film: Mystic River
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.

I’ve seen a lot of movies. Mystic River is the 292nd movie I’ve watched this year alone, and of those movies, 233 (including this one) were new to me. This is not an anomaly. Because of this, I’m not that easy to surprise. I was pretty sure I knew where Mystic River was going to go in the first 15 minutes. Then the movies spends the next two hours showing me that I was wrong. This is a film that doesn’t go in the direction I expected. It might start like a cliché, but it certainly doesn’t follow through. That’s always a good thing.

We start with a trio of kids playing hockey on the street in a Boston neighborhood. Their ball goes down a sewer, which forces them to give up the game. They spot some drying cement, and two of the boys scratch their names into it. The third is halfway through his name when he’s accosted by what looks like a police officer. He’s the only one of the three who doesn’t live on the street where the boys are playing, so the “cop” drags him off. It turns out this wasn’t a cop, and Dave, the young boy, is sexually abused for a few days before he escapes. This drives a wedge between the three boys.

We've Sprung a Leak

Film: Citizenfour
Format: Streaming video from HBO Go on rockin’ flatscreen.

Watching movies off a list means watching a lot of older films. This means that I’m frequently behind the times when it comes to more recent films. When I get the chance, I do try to catch up on newer films. I cooked all day yesterday, so I had the opportunity to watch a couple including Captain America: The Winter Soldier. In that movie, the evil organization Hydra has infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D. in an effort to locate and neutralize direct threats to itself.

This is a roundabout way of saying that the new 1001 Movies list is out and it includes Citizenfour (sometimes written CITIZENFOUR), the documentary about Edward Snowden and the release of data on NSA spying. It wouldn’t be difficult to see The Winter Soldier as a fictionalized, somewhat jingoistic version of Edward Snowden’s story. It’s interesting that a lot of the people who would cheer for Captain America in the one movie will happily brand Snowden a traitor for in many ways doing a less action-packed version of the same thing.

Grecian Formula

Film: Never on Sunday
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on laptop.

Some time ago, when I reviewed Zorba the Greek, I said that if you think of Greek music, you’re thinking of the music from that film. I was only partially right. There’s actually a very good chance that you’re thinking of the title song from Never on Sunday. This is a film I knew nothing about going in, and now that I’ve seen it, I’m extremely happy that it appeared on my Oscars lists. I liked this a lot more than I’d have thought based on the premise.

Homer Thrace (director Jules Dassin) is an American tourist in Greece. He’s been brought up by a father who loved all things Greek, convinced that Greek culture at its height was the height of human civilization. Homer loves Greek philosophy more than anything. He’s come to Greece to figure out what happened—what made Greek civilization fall? How did the flower of human culture and society fade?

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Director 1946

The Contenders:

William Wyler: The Best Years of Our Lives (winner)
David Lean: Brief Encounter
Frank Capra: It’s a Wonderful Life
Robert Siodmak: The Killers
Clarence Brown: The Yearling

Glurge

Film: Magnificent Obsession
Format: DVD from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

Douglas Sirk’s films were always packed to the gills with melodrama, but none that I’ve seen are as filled with maudlin syrup as Magnificent Obsession. This was evidently based on a book, and that must be the glurgiest, drippiest book that was ever written. I’ll go through the plot as usual here, and in about three paragraphs I will imagine all of you reading this rolling your eyes hard enough to strain a muscle. Keep in mind as you read this that I tend to like Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson, and I’ve also liked every Douglas Sirk movie I’ve seen to this point.

Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson) is a millionaire playboy of the type who does whatever he wants because he’s got the money to do it. He’s out racing around on his speedboat when he dumps it and needs to be rescued. The rescue involves a resuscitator, which means that the equipment wasn’t available locally. Normally this would not be an issue, except that the local doctor has suddenly had a heart attack and drops dead. With no resuscitator around, there’s no bringing him back.