Darling

As loyal readers of The Nob know, to fill the void in my viewing schedule after swearing off cable news following the fateful presidential election of 2016, I turned to reruns of The Simpsons and reruns of old movies on Turner Classic. I’ve chronicled how impactful The Simpsons have been in previous posts (and just last week The New York Timesanalyzed how this mere cartoon show has managed to be so remarkably prescient about the state of our nation). However, I haven’t had much to say about what a safe place TCM has been in these mournful days of our American putrescence. That’s an oversight I’m about to correct because just hours ago TCM saved me from writing another masochistic post about Trump. The particular subject was supposed to be the monumental hypocrisy on display in his phony performance before the National Prayer Breakfast, but I just couldn’t do it to myself…not on the day before Valentine's. So I switched attention--as we all must now and then to preserve our sanity--and decided to make of this post a reflection on some of the recent films we’ve watched during TCM’s 30 Days of Oscar. And so without further ado: 2001: A Space Odyssey : Well, I’ve actually already written about this one and proclaimed to have seen it more than 100 times. Some might think me crazy for that, and even crazier for watching it yet again. But I did, even though I have a DVD copy in my personal library. TCM was screening it in HD, and I just had to see what a difference that made. It was spectacular…easily one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever watched (or heard) on a home television. Lorna, who has seen it almost as many times as I have due to the fact that we worked at Cinerama together during its long run, settled in to join me. We were mesmerized. It’s one of those transcendental works of art that makes me feel sorry for those without the patience to stay with it. When it was over, we decided not to delete it just in case we want to watch it again. A Room with a View : It features a line-up of British actors that’s the cinematic equivalent of the 1927 Yankees…Helena Bonham Carter, Maggie Smith, Judy Dench, Denholm Elliot, Julian Sands, Simon Callow, Rosemary Leach, a very young Rupert Graves…and batting ninth a bizarrely cast Daniel Day-Lewis--bizarre only because of where his subsequent career would take him. While watching him eat scenery as the ultimate effete snob Cecil Vyse it’s impossible to anticipate his Last of the Mohicans, Lincoln, Christy Brown or Bill the Butcher portrayals. A second viewing, unfortunately, exposes the plot as an utter trifle elevated by the casting…and of course the room with that view, opening our eyes to an Italy Cleopatra, Ben Hur, and Spartacus never took us to.  
Sideways : Virginia Madsen lost out for the best supporting actress Oscar in 2005, up against the likes of Cate Blanchett, Laura Linney, Natalie Portman. What’s a girl to do? Well, what she did, I believe, was save Sideways. In re-watching it, I was struck by how very unlikeable are the two main characters played by Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church. Giamatti perfectly personifies the persnickety Pinot grape that he describes in the film’s key bit of monolog. And screenwriter and director Alexander Payne said he was attracted to the project by the characters’ very unlikeability. But it seems it would’ve been asking an awful lot of your typical Dan and Lorna audience to care about those tiresome buddies for two hours without the leavening effect of Virginia Madsen’s Maya, who gives Giamatti’s Miles the extraordinary nurturing he tells us the Pinot requires. Madsen’s non-Oscar winning performance seems flawless, while Payne’s Oscar-winning screenplay is not, the brilliant Pinot monolog notwithstanding. Having studied, written and trafficked in screenplays at a time when I was chasing that Oscar myself, I know perhaps a bit too much about structure, plot points, character arc for my own movie watching enjoyment. I can hardly ever watch a film without being aware of the scaffolding. At 30 minutes in…tra-la…behold our first plot turn...like clockwork. (The fact that I’m never conscious of these mechanics when viewing 2001 is one of the reasons I can watch it so many times.) Miles’s arc is supposed to take him from prickly, self-pitying loser to mature, loving, responsible man…and there are nice touches at the end that convey that growth. Upon re-watching, however, a grievous loose end is apparent. At the beginning of the film, Miles robs his nurturing mom, whom he treats abominably. The film ends with Miles, as far as we know, unrepentant about that theft…and his mother without recompense for it. That is a character arc in a nosedive.    That Hamilton Woman : With the Brangelina of their day, Laurence Olivier playing Horatio Nelson and Vivian Leigh (still channeling Scarlett O’ Hara) as Lady Emma Hamilton, it is a love epic set against the Napoleonic Wars. As often happens after watching one of these historical dramas, Lorna and I do a little research to see how much the filmmakers have screwed up the history. Surprisingly, in this case, they really seem to have undersold the intriguing character of Emma Hamilton…and the global impact of her and Nelson’s adulterous affair. It will be shocking to me if sometime before I pass on to the great movie lobby in the sky Hollywood hasn’t mounted another, more ambitious treatment of this amazing woman and her grand love story. (While I wait, TCM just offered up The Divine Lady, a 1929 silent version of the same story.)    Darling :  One of the more enlightening things about watching old movies is to be reassured occasionally that whatever unhappiness is kicking around in our own time was probably kicking around in some earlier time...and still the world turns. The opening credits of Darling play over a scene of a man replacing a billboard displaying a plea to fight world hunger with a large, glamorized picture of Diana Scott (Julie Christie), the Honeyglow Girl. Before a word of dialog has been spoken, the film has deftly communicated one of its messages that the hard responsibility of global citizenship gets papered over by celebrity, confection, and commercialism. Shortly thereafter, reporter Robert Gold (Dirk Bogard) is seen asking men on the London streets their opinions on the state of the nation. Their responses in this 1965 film could be right off the streets of Britain's great Brexit debate of 2016 or the USA in 2018:


Social symmetry aside, it’s Julie Christie in her complex Academy Award-winning performance in the title role who looms over all…including her pervasion of my innermost fantasy life. If you were a young man of a certain age in the 1960s you were susceptible to the “British invasion” on three fronts: The Beatles, the Bond films, and Julie Christie. I listened to the Beatles, watched 007, and hung a poster of Julie Christie over my bed. It was that picture of her as Honeyglowing Diana Scott. Crazy thing is that a year later, I met and became engaged to Lorna. I didn’t need a 70-foot Julie Christie smiling down at me from a movie screen to sell me on falling in love with Lorna. That was all Lorna’s doing. But the similarity between the two of them, captured in the photos above, symbolizes how much movies have bonded us for together for more than 50 years…from our Friday nights in the projection booth at the University Film Series, to our days working at Cinerama as usher and candy girl respectively, to exclusive showings at the Director’s Guild in LA, to drive-in movies with the kids, to the at-home joys of VCR, laserdiscs and DVDs, and to Netflix and beyond. It has been one of the supreme pleasures of my life to spend so many thousands of hours of it watching movies with Lorna.

Valentine's night feature: Wings of Desire .  

Happy Valentine's Day, Darling.