Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actress 1993

The Contenders:

Holly Hunter: The Piano (winner)
Emma Thompson: The Remains of the Day
Debra Winger: Shadowlands
Stockard Channing: Six Degrees of Separation
Angela Bassett: What’s Love Got to Do with It?

Viva Cuba?

Film: Before Night Falls
Format: DVD from NetFlix on The New Portable.

Because my job involves a great deal of reading, I don’t read for pleasure a lot. It’s one of the reasons I watch movies. Movies are a break from reading for me, and these days (and for the last decade or more, really), reading has been associated with work. Because of this, a lot of my “reading” comes in the form of audio books. The problem is that my local library’s collection is packed to the rafters with biography and autobiography, and I find that those genres leave me pretty cold. The same is kind of true with movies, which made Before Night Falls a hard sell for me. But hey, I’m getting to the point where I can’t keep putting off movies that I’m not particularly interested in watching. And this one at least stars Javier Bardem, and actor I really like.

Before Night Falls is the story of Reinaldo Arenas (Javier Bardem), a Cuban author who was writing during the Cuban revolution. Arenas, in addition to being something of a counterrevolutionary and of a talent that made him dangers to Castro and his minions, he was also homosexual, which made him a threat in very different way. Eventually, Arenas managed to get out of Cuba and wound up in the United States, essentially living in exile until he died of AIDS. What this means is that despite being based on a true story and likely following the story as cleanly and accurately as possible is going to be very paint by numbers in a lot of respects.

Wednesday Horror: I am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House

Film: I am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

A great deal of modern horror is about putting as much blood on the screen as it will take. I’m not generally a fan of gore for its own sake. When it is used well as a legitimate part of the story, it can be extremely effective. When it shows up just for shock value or as fan service, I think that it generally fails. Because of this, I find it really interesting when a film takes the opposite path. The epically-named I am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House is a movie of the second stripe. The goal here is to produce an atmosphere of dread without covering the screen in blood.

We are presented with hospice nurse Lily Saylor (Ruth Wilson), who has just been hired on as the live-in help of horror author Iris Blum (Paula Prentiss), who is slowly descending into dementia. The house in which the two live is old and, as befits the genre, both creepy and gifted with a strange, mysterious history. The original owners of the house never lived in it; they vanished on their wedding day. Iris has lived in the house for ages, and as Lily continues to live there, she begins to suspect that at least one of Iris’s books may have been relayed to her by a ghost that resides in the house.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actor 1951

The Contenders:

Humphrey Bogart: The African Queen (winner)
Arthur Kennedy: Bright Victory
Fredric March: Death of a Salesman
Montgomery Clift: A Place in the Sun
Marlon Brando: A Streetcar Named Desire

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Director 1972

The Contenders:

Bob Fosse: Cabaret (winner)
John Boorman: Deliverance
Jan Troell: The Emigrants
Francis Ford Coppola: The Godfather
Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Sleuth

Finishing the AFI Top-100

Film: Sophie’s Choice
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on The New Portable.

For the last several years, I’d seen 99 of the AFI Top-100 movies. I avoided and avoided that final movie (film #91 on the list, if you’re curious) for no reason other than the fact that I knew what the story was and didn’t want to subject myself to it. In truth, I never really set out to watch the AFI Top-100; I’d seen the 99 that I had by watching the 1001 Movies list and then seeing virtually every Best Picture nominee as well. The one that seemed to sneak past and that wasn’t on either of those two massive lists is Sophie’s Choice. So it’s yet another Meryl Streep nomination (and win) and yet another Holocaust story.

Sophie’s Choice takes place a couple of years after World War II. A young Southern man with the unusual moniker of Stingo (Peter MacNicol) arrives in New York with the goal of penning his first novel. He moves into a gigantic pink house, painted that color because the late husband of owner Yetta (Rita Karin) got a deal on the paint in question. Stingo takes the room and is soon introduced to Zofia Zawistowski (Streep) and her live-in paramour Nathan Landau (Kevin Kline). As good new neighbors, Zofia (who goes by Sophie) and Nathan invite their new neighbor to dinner, an invite that gets spoiled when Nathan has a manic episode of jealousy and storms out of the house. This is going to be something of a theme.

Wednesday Horror: Return of the Living Dead

Film: Return of the Living Dead
Format: On Demand on big ol’ television.

One of the most enduring ideas concerning movie zombies is that they love to eat brains. That trope didn’t come from Romero’s films, where the dead started mindless and eventually started to evolve and ate anything they could from their victims. No, the common idea that zombies love brains comes from 1985’s Return of the Living Dead, a movie where the zombies talk, can use tools and think, and eat brains because, as we’re told by one highly decayed corpse, they are the only thing that deal with the pain of being dead and feeling one’s body rot.

We start in a medical supply warehouse where Freddy (Thom Mathews) is being shown the ropes by Frank (James Karen). After a quick tour of the warehouse and a look at the variety of skeletons, dogs divided in half for anatomy study, and other things, Frank decides to impress his new coworker by bringing up Night of the Living Dead. According to Frank, it was based on a real outbreak, and the zombies (and yes, he actually says the word) were accidentally shipped to this Louisville warehouse by the army and are in the basement.