Month 39 Status Report

We're getting down to the final slog here. I have exactly 160 films left to review, and I freely admit that a part of me is starting to look ahead to future projects. I lost some focus in March, reviewing only 22 films from The List, which is much less than I would have preferred. Oh well.

April, of course, is another month, and a chance to refocus myself on finishing what I started. The problem I'm starting to have is an interesting one--with a much smaller list to deal with, my choices are a lot more limited, and it becomes a question of availability more than anything else. Expect the number of non-List reviews to increase slowly in the months ahead to reflect this. I'm hoping to keep up a pace of 5-7 List films per week, but I'm not sure how much longer the availability of films will allow that. I'm pretty much stripped my local library of necessary films, and have come close to doing the same with two other libraries I use. That's the biggest challenge right now.

That'll Do, Pig

Film: Babe
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

I was a hard sell on Babe. Seriously, I had no real desire to watch a movie about a talking pig the first time I became aware of it. I’m still a little bit in denial that Babe was nominated for seven Oscars including Best Picture. It’s a feel-good choice, I suppose, but I can’t imagine it got a lot of votes. Oh, don’t get me wrong; I’m a convert. I like the little pig. I liked it the first time I saw it, and I liked it again tonight, watching it with the girls while coloring Easter eggs. Babe, both the movie and the pig, is insufferably cute, and I mean that in a good way. It’s a great family film—entertaining for kids and adults, and that’s something pretty rare in the world.

Babe the pig (voiced by Christine Cavanaugh) is won by farmer Arthur Hoggett (James Cromwell) at a county fair, a nice prize for a farmer who is so old school he still uses a horse and wagon. The Hoggett farm is sort of hemorrhaging money in no small part because Hoggett and his wife Esme (Magda Szubanski) refuse to modernize in any way. The pig, of course, is there to be eaten eventually, as Mrs. Hoggett has dreams of a nice Christmas ham. Farmer Hoggett, though, sees something special in the pig when Babe helps defend the sheep against thieves and wild dogs.

Youth in Asia

Film: Yuen Ling-yuk(Ruan Lingyu; Center Stage; The Actress)
Format: Video from The Magic Flashdrive on laptop.

Every now and then I watch a film that I’m sure how to react to. Yuen Ling-yuk (which has a couple of dozen other names: Ruan Lingyu; Center Stage; Centre Stage; The Actress) is one such film. It’s an oddball of a movie, that feels like it doesn’t know what it wants to be, although it does. It’s brilliantly acted and filmed, unique in a number of ways, and I found a great deal to like here. I’m just not completely certain what I actually have to say about it. Bear with me; this might ramble a bit or go massively off-topic. You’ve been warned.

Yuen Ling-yuk) is in some ways a documentary about itself. It is also a biopic of the actress Ruan Ling-yu (Maggie Cheung). Ruan began acting at 16, starred in a number of films (about six of which survive), and took her own life at 24. The film is in part an exploration of what led to the suicide. It is also in part an discussion of the film itself by the actors and the director, Stanley Kwan. Frequently, we see scenes from Ruan’s life, and then the cast discusses what they think may have really happened or watches current footage of people who knew Ruan in the 1930s.

Less Arsenic, More Old Lace

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

How come Alec Guinness doesn’t get the props he deserves? I mean, if you look at the actors of his heyday, he might well be remembered, but certainly not with the same sort of reverence as an actor like Olivier. However, Guinness was much more versatile. He was capable of more than most actors of his time, and in fact most actors of today. A case in point is a film like The Ladykillers, a black comedic little number that puts Guinness in the guise of a criminal mastermind, a vastly different role from his criminal neophyte of The Lavender Hill Mob and just a year or two before his triumph in The Bridge on the River Kwai. Guinness was a cinematic chameleon every bit as versatile as someone like Peter Sellers, but with less recognition that he had that skill.

In The Ladykillers, Guinness plays “Professor” Marcus, a criminal genius set on stealing a massive amount of money with his four associates, the constantly worried Major Courtney (Cecil Parker), the smooth Robinson (Peter Sellers), the nervous hitman type Louie (Herbert Lom) and the loutish muscle man One Round (Danny Green). The caper is a simple one. They manage to block off traffic both behind and in front of an armored car, disable the guards, and stash the four suitcases of loot into a massive steamer trunk. The trunk is then wheeled into the train station.

Baby, It's Cold Inside

Film: The Ice Storm
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

The 1970s were a strange time. I don’t remember a lot of the early ‘70s because I was little. Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm takes place during Thanksgiving in 1973 in the middle of the Watergate scandal. All I genuinely remember about Watergate is that for much a year, boring political stuff with people saying things that I didn’t understand pre-empted my favorite television shows. So when we’re told that this time was filled with a dissolution of spirit, community feeling, and even marriage vows, I’m sort of forced to take people older than me at their word.

And that is what The Ice Storm is very much about. It would be tempting and extremely easy to simply claim that the film is almost entirely about sex. On a first look, and even a second look, that’s a pretty simple place to take it, but that would be selling the film short. A great deal of the film does, in fact, focus on sex, but it’s hardly the only thing going on here. No, sex—not the sexual freedom and liberation of the 1960s, but the more callous, sex for pleasure at the expense of others—is merely the most obvious and common symptom of the underlying problem the film is trying to expose.

Watching Oscar: You Can't Take It with You

Film: You Can’t Take It with You
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

At the start of the year I decided to watch everything that had ever won Best Picture at the Oscars. It was an easy decision, seeing that finishing off The List put me within shouting distance and picking up a few others here and there brought me even closer. It was, on an already packed list, a few extra weeks of viewing. And I figured I may as well put up a review of all of them, too. Really, what’s 20,000 words, more or less. It occurs to me, though, that there’s a reason many of the films that won this particular award are no longer considered “must-see” films. And so we have 1938’s winner, You Can’t Take It with You, another big winner that has justifiably sunk into obscurity.

In the finance world, no one has the clout of Anthony P. Kirby (Edward Arnold). He’s working on a major deal that requires that he buy up 12 city blocks worth of buildings, and he’s managed to do this with the exception of a single house. That house is owned by Martin “Grandpa” Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore), and there’s no way he’ll sell. He lives there with his collection of eccentric relatives and friends, each of whom does whatever he or she pleases at any given time, regardless of its quality, value, or use to the world at large. They’re sort of half commune and half open-door lunatic asylum, and they’re always recruiting new members.

Free Spirit

Film: My Brilliant Career
Format: VHS from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on big ol’ television.

There is a character in many a period drama that I almost always dislike. That character is the “free-spirited,” independent woman. I tend to dislike this character because in the movies, free-spirited usually translates as bitchy and unpleasant. I appreciate strong female characters and I like independence. But there’s an attitude with these characters that is a bit like biting down on a piece of tinfoil for me. So I tend to be leery of them. When I discovered that a character like this was at the center of My Brilliant Career, I went in with a number of reservations.

I needn’t have. Our main character, Sybylla Melvyn (Judy Davis) is fun to be around. She’s the sort of independent I like. She’s a true free spirit, someone who wants something more than what life as a young woman in late 19th century Australia typically offers. I understand her desire to want something more than a loveless marriage that may or may not work out. Sybylla claims to be bright and clever but physically ugly, which isn’t really true. She’s not even movie ugly. In fact, the biggest problem I see with her is that she has too damn many y’s in her name.