Coupling and Uncoupling

Film: Lovers and Other Strangers
Format: Internet video on the latest internet machine.

As the saying goes, dying is easy; comedy is hard. I’m certain that good comedy is incredibly hard to write, and I’m not going to pretend that I’m any good at it or that I have advice for people who write comedy. To me, though, the thing that would be the most difficult in terms of comedy is not so much the comedy, but making it funny for longer than a couple of years. Comedy doesn’t last in a lot of cases. Watch early episodes of Saturday Night Live, for instance, or SCTV. As much as you want it to, it just doesn’t hold up. That’s exactly the position we’re in with Lovers and Other Strangers.

This is supposed to be something like a sex comedy, sort of. At least a great deal of what we’re going to be dealing with is a variety of sexual relationships, each one more or less stereotypical in some way and each one different from the others. All of these relationships circle around the central story, the upcoming marriage of Mike Vecchio (Michael Brandon) and Susan Henderson (Bonnie Bedelia). Now, because this is exactly this sort of movie, what we’re going to get is a bunch of relationships, all with problems of one sort or another, crashing into each other.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 1999

The Contenders:

American Beauty (winner)
The Cider House Rules
The Green Mile
The Insider
The Sixth Sense

Off Script: The Tingler

Film: The Tingler
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

I love William Castle. I truly do. I’d be hard-pressed to call any of his movies great, but I also find them all completely appealing. There’s such a strange earnestness that comes in the work of Castle. No matter how strange and silly the premise, Castle really wants to have fun with the movies he’s making. He was also the absolute king of goofy promotions. With Macabre, he arranged for theater-goers to each have a $1,000 life insurance policy in case they died of fright and staged nurses in the theater with a hearse waiting outside. That’s genius. For The Tingler, he had seats in theaters running the film hooked up with vibrating devices that, at certain points in the film, would jiggle the person sitting in the chair. Castle dubbed this technology “Percepto!” and once again used this goofy idea of giving people something new in the cinema. He also allegedly planted people in the audience to faint at certain times in the movie.

For a movie with an 82-minute running time, The Tinger has far too much going on for any of its various plots to really reach fruition. Pathologist Warren Chapin (Vincent Price) is performing an autopsy on a man just executed by electric chair. Oddly, the autopsy is being observed by Ollie Higgins (Philip Coolidge), the dead man’s brother-in-law. Warren discovers that the man’s spine is broken, almost as if it was crushed in some way. This is something he’s seen before, but not specifically in someone executed. According to Warren, the man was scared before he died; this is a condition he only sees in someone who has died while terrified.

Oscar Got It Wrong: Best Original Screenplay 2011

The Contenders:

The Artist
Bridesmaids
Margin Call
Midnight in Paris (winner)
A Separation

Where There's a Will, I Want to Be in it

Films: Sudden Fear
Format: Internet video on the new internet machine.

NetFlix is a lot like an umpire or autocorrect. When it does its job well, you don’t notice it. It’s only when it screws up that we really pay attention to it. Umpires, autocorrect and NetFlix all take more crap than they should because of that. What this means is that yes, I have a complaint about NetFlix. Sudden Fear has disappeared from its available discs. What this means is that I looked for it online and found it at DailyMotion. I appreciate it being there; I didn’t appreciate the ads every five minutes for much of the running time.

Sudden Fear feels like a movie I should have seen years ago. It’s a film noir, and I love film noir. It’s also a damn good film noir. It’s stylish and slick, and while there are certainly elements like a good femme fatale, this is very much a “woman in danger” film. In fact, since our main character is being threatened with death over the contents of her will, it’s entirely about her being in danger and finding a way to survive it.

Wednesday Horror: Children of the Corn

Films: Children of the Corn
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on the latest internet machine.

It’s not a surprise that stories written by Stephen King would be frequently adapted into films. Certainly it’s something that King himself appreciates. In fact, he offers a bunch of his stories as something he calls “Dollar Babies.” Film students and new filmmakers have the right to adapt these stories into films, provided they aren’t commercially released and that King gets a copy, for the princely sum of one dollar. And, of course, there are dozens of commercial films based on King’s work. Sometimes you get classics like Stand by Me or The Shawshank Redemption. Sometimes you get complete turkeys like The Mangler. Sometimes you get films that have literally nothing in common with the original story beyond the name, like The Lawnmower Man. And sometimes you get Children of the Corn.

Children of the Corn, sometimes known as Stephen King’s Children of the Corn, is a not so terribly accurate or faithful adaptation of the original story by King. Oh, it gets the broad strokes of the story, but it avoids the completely downbeat ending and the incredibly disturbing coda, opting instead for something that is, I have to admit, a lot more cinematic. What’s odd here is that the vast majority of the killing in Children of the Corn happens in the opening few minutes. There are a couple of deaths further in, but this is much more about the atmosphere than it is about the gore or the deaths.

Education, After a Fashion

Films: Charly
Format: DVD from NetFlix on The New Portable.

Charly seemed very familiar to me. I realized at some point while watching that I’d seen part of this before. I’m pretty certain I hadn’t seen the whole thing, but there are a couple of moments that were shockingly familiar to me. If I have seen the whole thing previously, it was so long ago that this was not unlike a first viewing of the film. There are a lot of odd things about Charly and its Oscar journey. Cliff Robertson won this Oscar in what would be his only nomination and the only one for the film. It’s also an odd nomination in the sense that this is at least nominally a science fiction story, and Oscar tends not to like that genre for acting nominations.

Charly Gordon (Cliff Robertson) is an intellectually disabled man who wants to be smarter. While it’s never overtly stated in the film, it is implied that Charly’s deficiencies stem from a childhood illness that involved a very high fever. However, he is high enough functioning that he lives in his own room at something like a boarding house and has a job at a local industrial bakery. He also attends night classes with Ms. Alice Kinnian (Claire Bloom), where he works hard but struggles even with basics like writing his own name.