Nun so Unworthy...

Film: Come to the Stable
Format: DVD from Geneseo Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop.

I really should have known from the picture on the cover of the DVD case that Come to the Stable was going to be a rough ride. There are plenty of movies involving nuns that I like. That’s a good thing because there are a surprising number of nun-filled movies on my Oscar list. But there’s something about this picture that screams that Come to the Stable is going to be filled with a particular religious cheese, the kind that expects us to believe that miracles happens strictly from wishing really hard that something was so and that even the most hardened heart can be swayed by the application of earnest prayer.

And yes, that’s exactly what we’re signing up for here. One wintery night, two nuns arrive in the town of (of course) Bethlehem somewhere in New England. These are the Chicago-born turned French nun Sister Margaret (Loretta Young) and the awesomely named Sister Scholastica (Celeste Holm). They have come to Bethlehem by virtue of a series of events. During World War II, the sisters worked at a children’s hospital that fell in the path of a military battle. Through the awesome power of prayer (hereafter referred to in this review as the “Poweraprayer”) the hospital was spared shelling and the children who could not be evacuated survived. Because it was the Americans who spared the hospital, the two sisters have come to build a hospital in America.

Legionnaire's Disease

Film: Morocco
Format: Video from The Magic Flashdrive on laptop.

There are plenty of conceits in older films that one learns to deal with, with enough of the films watched. One learns, for instance, that comedy tends toward the physical (which is fine) and that drama tends to mean melodrama. Directors and the talent hadn’t yet learned the art of being subtle with anything. The farther away we get from the silent era, the less this becomes a problem. I can deal with most of these conceits. The one I’ve never really been able to handle is the idea that many a director and moviegoer in the 1930s thought Marlene Dietrich could sing. She couldn’t, and so any film that involves multiple Marlene Dietrich torch songs is alternately comedic and painful for me. That’s what we’re signing up for with Morocco; Dietrich plays a vaudeville singer.

So strap in, because we’re getting a pair of Dietrich numbers before the first thirty minutes are up. We travel by map to exotic Morocco, where Amy Jolly (Dietrich) has arrived in Morocco to perform at a local club for the wealthy residents as well as the common troops of the local Foreign Legion regiment. She is accosted off the boat by a man named La Bessiere (Adolphe Menjou), but Amy Jolly is far too jaded to be interested in some fancy boy who tries to pick her up at the docks. As it happens, as Amy arrives, the legionnaires also return, one of those being a man named Tom Brown (Gary Cooper).

Hide and Seek World Champion

Film: Zero Dark Thirty
Format: Starz on rockin’ flatscreen

I do love having a DVR. Every now and then when I scan through what’s coming on a few channels, I find something worth recording. A couple of months ago during a free preview weekend of Starz, Zero Dark Thirty was playing, so I recorded it. Tonight I finally had the chance to watch it. Put simply, this is not the movie I thought it was going to be. That’s neither a good thing nor a bad thing; it’s just a thing.

On the surface at least, Zero Dark Thirty is the story of the pursuit of, location of, and ultimate death of Osama bin Laden, the man responsible for planning the 9/11 hijackings and attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. For a great many Americans, I can imagine that Zero Dark Thirty represents something akin to closure. Honestly, it was only a matter of time before this story made it to the big screen.

Great White Hunter

Film: King Solomon’s Mines
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

I’m going to do my best not to sound like a complete idiot by the end of this paragraph, but you might need to cut me a little slack. See, in the movie King Solomon’s Mines, things happen constantly, but nothing happens in this movie. Oh, there’s guys getting trampled by elephants, and people attacked by snakes, natives speaking Swahili, a missing guy, and even a quest for a lost diamond mine, but nothing freaking happens. I have never been this bored watching an action movie in my life.

The film starts by introducing us to the legendary Allan Quartermain (Stewart Granger), safari guide extraordinaire, great white hunter, able to shoot…whatever the hell Sean Connery said he could shoot in that crappy League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie. Anyway, while on safari, one of Quartermain’s guides gets gored by an elephant. Tired of the racket, Allan decides to hang ‘em up and quit the safari business. After all, he’s got a wife who died and a seven-year-old son back in England. Why stay in Africa?

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Director 1991

The Contenders:
John Singleton: Boyz n the Hood
Barry Levinson: Bugsy
Oliver Stone: JFK
Jonathan Demme: The Silence of the Lambs (winner)
Ridley Scott: Thelma and Louise

Hypothermia

Film: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Format: DVD from Western District Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop.

Think of the spy genre, and you probably think of James Bond or Jason Bourne. Perhaps the Mission: Impossible movies are more your speed. Regardless, when it comes to subgenres, spy films tend to fall firmly in the larger category of action movies. If you don’t get a little witty banter, some explosions and at least one quality death, it feels like a rip off. That was the big complaint for many about a film like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: compared with the rest of the genre and compared with expectations, it’s just a film where men sit in rooms and think at each other really hard. Well, that’s more the speed of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold as well. It’s not a coincidence that it comes originally from the pen of the same author, John Le Carre.

TSWCIFTC is a Cold War film both in terms of when it was made and in terms of the era it depicts. Alec Leamas (Richard Burton) is in charge of the West Germany section of “The Circus,” the intelligence gathering organization of Le Carre’s spy world. When yet another of his spies is killed crossing over from East Germany into West, Leamas is recalled to London. He’s offered a desk job, but doesn’t want it, preferring to stay out “in the cold” as a field operative. And so he’s given another task, this time to entrap the East German agent who has been the cause of so many deaths of his own men.

Drunk and Disorderly

Film: Arthur
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

I was extremely worried with the first ten minutes of Arthur. I don’t typically find drunkenness funny. More than that, I really don’t find drunks who find themselves funny to be that amusing, and that pegs our title character in a nutshell. “Strap in,” I thought. “This is going to be a rough one.”

Fortunately, Arthur Bach (Dudley Moore) is sober for the next half hour. The first ten minutes establishes Arthur as a drunken playboy who seems to live on scotch and pick up prostitutes more or less at random. And then it’s suddenly the next morning and Arthur is mildly hungover and while we still have to deal with his drinking, but he’s not sloppy drunk and giggling at his own jokes, at least for a while. This is also where we get an introduction to Hobson (John Gielgud), Arthur’s smart-assed butler, manservant, and possibly his only friend in the world. It’s obvious right away that Arthur is a man-child who has no responsibilities. He’s also incredibly lonely.