Award Season

It's Academy Award Season.  One of the fun things about this time of year is watching old movies of winners and losers.  My favorite so far is the 1968 classic, The Subject Was Roses.

It has the stilted feel of a play-made-into-a-movie, but is a powerful film in many ways.  Three years after a massive stroke left Patricia Neal in a coma for 21 days, Neal appeared as the mother in the movie.  You can see the pain of her life on her face and she has a very slight limp that adds to her sad beauty.

Based on a Pulitzer Price-winning play, The Subject Was Roses, also stars a very young Martin Sheen who won a Tony Award for his role as Timmy on Broadway.  Jack Albertson plays the dad and won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as well as winning a Tony for his work on Broadway, were he starred along with Sheen.

The story centers on World War II veteran Timmy Cleary's return home after three years in the army.  He's changed, but his parent haven't.  Old disappointments and years of hurt surface between them with Timmy in the middle, only this time, Timmy sees himself and his parents through mature eyes.  The dynamic in the family has shifted as the sensitive young man and his long-suffering parents grapple with their lives and the changes in relationships that must come. Beautifully written and exquisitely acted, The Subject Was Roses is stunning in it's old fashioned storytelling power.

Red Squirrel Gray squirrel

There’s an article in the October 7, 2007, Sunday New York Times Magazine about the small, shy British red squirrel being overtaken by the big, brutish American gray squirrel. The gray American squirrels were brought to England as a novelty, but once the aristocracy got tired of them, they let the big bruisers lose into the countryside and the buggers have been causing havoc ever since. How American.

The metaphor of the delicate red squirrel representing traditional English values and culture that is getting overrun by the American behemoth (the gray is a better breeder and more adventurous that its British cousin) has been used before. There was an article, I think it was in Harpers, 15 years ago that used the red squirrel as a metaphor for English cinema. In a nut shell (ha!), films like Brideshead, Enchanted April, Remains of the Day, Howard’s End, and Sense and Sensibility show the Britannia that exists in our imaginations. The stories these films tell are from other centuries with no shadow of the post-colonial, multicultural, you-are-being-videotaped Big Brother England of the 21th Century. The English movies of the red squirrel kind are your basic Merchant/Ivory fare.

Though I can appreciate a Die Hard and an Independence Day, there's nothing like spending quality time with a classic “red squirrel.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/magazine/07squirrels-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin
Squirrel Wars, by D.T. Max, 10/7/07

A Series of Unfortunate Mistakes

Mistake #1
Going to bed too early. After an exhausting week, I wanted to read in bed at 9PM. Of course, after a few pages, I fell asleep, as did my partner. We woke an hour later. It was maybe 10 o’clock at night.

Mistake #2
Not admitting that we were awake. That way, we could get up, make coffee, and watch movies snuggled with the dogs in the living room all night. No, we tried to go back to sleep. You may remember that every night is movie night at my house. After listening to an hour and a half of the worst Doris Day movie, “By the Light of the Silvery Moon,” I gave up, put on my glasses, and watched the last ½ hour of ice skating while generation-wide and family-wide misunderstandings were cleared up in time for the happy slay ride to “The End.” It was painful.

Mistake #3
Dogs in bed. The dogs have taken to sleeping with me. Not my partner, but me. The other side of the bed is free for arms and legs to stretch and move from one side to the back and to the other side without encumbrances. The dogs want to sleep with their mum. I have a dog at my head--on a pillow mind you--having dreams of chasing evil squirrels. She dream barks and dream runs all night. The other dog is at my feet stretched out lengthwise not vertical so I have to curl into a ball on the edge of the bed.

This is not pretty and I'm not making those mistakes again. At least not numbers one and two.

Sanctioned Movies

Every night for the last nine years and counting, my partner and I fall asleep with a tape or DVD of a movie playing on the television. It's not my favorite way to drift off. In fact, "Drop me; pluck me like a goddamn whatever-it-is...creeping vine, and throw me over your shoulder like an old shoe" isn't the last thing I want to hear before drifting into slumber land. But it is the brilliant Elizabeth Taylor as Martha in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" That's why it's a sanctioned movie. A sanctioned movie is one that's allowed to lull us to sleep.

There are rules. It's not all anarchy at bedtime. One of the rules is that some movies are only played during their season. There are summer movies and winter movies.

Summer Sanctioned Movies:

Body Heat, 1981, William Hurt watches a waitress pull on her uniform in a stuffy hotel room as a natural gas fire burns in the red sky outside.

The very cacophonous Father Goose (1964) that I loved as a child but wakes me every time with crashes, mega phones and a screeching whistle of a theme song.

Wrestling Ernest Hemingway (1993)
Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)

Winter Sanctioned Movies:

Gosford Park (2001)
Moonstruck (1987)
One True Thing (1998)
Howard's End (1992)

Then there are the dreaded Christmas movies: Jim Carrey in The Grinch, Chevy Chase in Christmas Vacation, Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone, and the obnoxious Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol.

I try to subtly encourage my favorites, The Jane Austen quartet.

Persuasion, Emma, Sense & Sensibility and Pride & Prejudice (any version including the 6 hour BBC or the luminous Keira Knightley but miscast Simon Woods (I wig wouldn't have been overdone)).

There's a Saturday Night movie, The Odd Couple, a film for all seasons.

The Woody Allen's and the Doris Day's all have their say.

But, along with the Jane Austen's, my favorite are the quiet films. Alfred Hitchcock qualifies. Vertigo has little dialogue and long passages of moody music. Rear Window is the same. Set up. Story. Suspense. A beautiful, simple construction.

Strangely enough, my other favorites are kids movies. Having loved being read to as a little girl, I can listen to any Harry Pottery or Lord of the Rings movie and pass right out.

The truth is, that my partner is a writer and, with the exception of Mildred Pierce and the mystifying Frank Sinatra picture Hole in the Head, the dialogue of our dreams is wonderful.

Two for the Road (1967)



Best Friends (1982)
All About Eve (1950)
The Goodbye Girl (1977)
Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Sideways (2004)
Brideshead Revisited (1981)

Looking at the list, I'm struck by how each film is perfect. The directing, acting, and writing. They are perfect gems and I'm lucky to take them to bed.