I Know What I LIke (in Your Wardrobe)

Film: Shadowlands
Format: Internet video on The Nook.

Like many from several different generations, I grew up reading, among other things, the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis. I didn’t get a lot of the religious imagery when I was a kid, and then re-reading them as an adult, I kind of wonder how I missed it, since Lewis applied his symbolism not with a brush, but with a trowel. Still, it’s hard for me not to claim that the books were formative for me in many ways. Despite being a heathen these days, I still love them. This is despite the fact that it’s easy to forget that the actual battles are only a page or two long and the bulk of the books is actually British kids walking around a countryside hoping that they get someplace with sandwiches.

It’s also worth mentioning that most colleges have a rare books collection. For instance, my alma mater has, among other things, a collection of dime novels and the papers of H.P. Lovecraft, which is damn cool. Wheaton College, in the town where I grew up, has a C.S. Lewis collection and even has his wardrobe, which I’ve seen. So I admit that while I expected (and got) a decent slice of religion from Shadowlands, which is about Lewis’s marriage, I was also pretty interested.

Matt Damon Won't Stay Rescued

Film: The Martian
Format: DVD from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

It’s kind of a running Hollywood joke that Matt Damon gets left places and has to be rescued. That’s the central plot device of The Martian: Matt Damon gets stranded on Mars and needs to be rescued. That might be the basic plot here, but the truth is that The Martian is less about rescuing Matt Damon and more about how balls-out cool space is. If you aren’t awed by space, amazed by it, or humbled by it, you haven’t really looked at it.

So at an unspecified time in the near future, The Martian proposes that we have sent a manned mission to Mars. A crew of six is on the surface of the planet doing Mars-y, space-y stuff when a massive windstorm crops up and threatens their small base. In fact, the storm is so significant that it forces an abort of the mission. The crew scurries to their craft to escape when a piece of blowing debris impales the crew’s botanist Mark Watney (Matt Damon), puncturing his suit and is biomonitor, which makes everyone think he is dead. The ship blasts off with a crew of five, leaving Mark on the planet wounded, but still alive.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actor 1955

The Contenders:

Spencer Tracy: Bad Day at Black Rock
James Dean: East of Eden
James Cagney: Love Me or Leave Me
Frank Sinatra: The Man with the Golden Arm
Ernest Borgnine: Marty (winner)

Road Trip

Film: The Trip to Bountiful
Format: DVD from Morris Area Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop.

I don’t like the term “chick flick.” I think it’s kind of demeaning. That said, there are certainly movies that are produced with a female audience in mind. The Trip to Bountiful is not merely a film produced for women; it’s a film produced for older women. This isn’t a mom movie; it’s a grandma movie. Our main character is an older woman and the main villain in the story is her shrewish daughter-in-law. There’s no question that this was made for the over-60 set.

Our story begins in post-World War II Houston in the apartment of Ludie (John Heard) and Jessie Mae Watts (Carlin Glynn), an apartment they share with Ludie’s mother Carrie (Geraldine Page). Ludie has begun working again after an illness and Jessie Mae and Carrie are constantly on each other’s nerves. Actually, that’s not quite true. Jessie Mae seems to be constantly perturbed with her mother-in-law. She doesn’t like Carrie’s habit of singing hymns to herself, doesn’t like the fact that she “pouts,” and wishes Carrie wouldn’t run so much since Carrie has a heart condition. All Carrie wants is to return to the town where she grew up, a little place along the Gulf coast called Bountiful.

Motherhood

Film: The Trespasser
Format: Internet video on The Nook.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: when I dip into the distant past on Oscar films, I’m never really sure what I’m going to get. In the case of The Trespasser, released in 1929 but eligible for the 1930 Oscars, I’m getting something that absolutely screams that it’s from the period just after the invention of talkies. Evidently, this was filmed originally as a silent movie and then rushed into talkie production when the world shifted to films with sound. It feels very much like that. The melodrama is so thick here that it appears to have been made with 50% tree sap. In its own way, it’s almost impressive just how many melodramatic notes it manages to hit.

Marion Donnell (Gloria Swanson, in her talkie debut) works as a stenographer for a lawyer, but as the movie begins, she is quitting her job. Why? Because she is eloping with Jack Merrick (Robert Ames), son of one of the most powerful men in Chicago. The two get married and spend a particularly blissful night together until the next morning when Jack’s father (William Holden, no not that one) shows up. Naturally he doesn’t approve of his son marrying a girl who actually has to work for a living and he’s convinced that Marion is a gold digger. He suggests an annulment followed by a change to introduce Marion to society. At least that’s what he tells his son. In reality, he’s going to do everything he can to destroy Marion, but she doesn’t give him the chance. She can’t convince Jack to walk out on the family money, so she walks out.

Off Script: The Descent

Film: The Descent
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.

Every movie viewer has holes in his or her viewing history. For me, the 1001 Movies list and then the various Oscar lists have been about closing as many of those holes as possible. It’s the same with the horror lists that I’m slowly getting through. Some of those gaps are more embarrassing than others. With horror films, The Descent has been a noticeable lacuna for the past decade. There’s a reason for this: despite my having owned a copy of the film for some time, I’ve been a little afraid to pop it into the player. I have claustrophobic tendencies, and watching people lost underground for an hour and a half put me on edge.

But, it’s one I’ve been intending to watch for a long time, and tonight I finally got the chance and also finally worked up the nerve. It was my intent to watch this at the end of last year, and then again last month, but here I finally am. And really, The Descent is pretty much everything I was told it was. This is a brutally scary film, one that certainly uses the conventions of the jump scare and a little bit of gore to good effect, but like the best of horror films, it doesn’t rely on them. This is a smart film, and the fact that it’s smart is one of the main reasons it works as well as it does.

Bad Religion

Film: The Crucible
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

Say the name Arthur Miller and most people will jump to Death of a Salesman. I’ve seen a bunch of different versions of that play, and while it’s a good play, I’m more or less over it. The Crucible is one that I’d heard of and knew a little about, but it’s not one I had seen until today. The Crucible, like any good play, is about a lot more than it claims to be about. On the surface, this is a story about the Salem witch trials and the hysteria that surrounded the area during that time. In reality, it’s about HUAC and the Hollywood blacklist, so it works both as a story and as allegory.

So, obviously, we’re in Salem, Massachusetts several hundred years ago, and everyone’s a Puritan. That presents a problem in the opening scene, since a large number of young girls have run off to the forest to participate in some sort of magic ritual headed by a slave named Tituba (Charlayne Woodard). Most of the girls ask for spells to make young men of the town fall in love with them, but Abigail Williams (Winona Ryder) kills a chicken, drinks its blood, and asks for the death of Elizabeth Proctor (Joan Allen). The girls are discovered by the town minister, Samuel Parris (Bruce Davidson), and two girls including his daughter become comatose.