An Embarrassment of Riches

The Anteroom of Eternity - by Alison

"Remarkable events often have ordinary beginnings. Never was this more true than with my talks with Dean Spanley."
So opens the movie Dean Spanley, a tale of forgiveness, transcendence and reconciliation. Every Thursday, Henslowe Fisk makes his way through the streets of London to visit his ancient, curmudgeonly and nihilistic father. The elder Fiske grumbles that his son's visits are a burden, and that the only thing special about a Thursday is to keep "Wednesday and Friday from colliding."

Fisk begins to wonder whether the time couldn't be spent in more enjoyable pursuits. At his next visit he insists that he and his father attend a lecture on reincarnation, held by a guru on his vast estate. The senior Fisk is skeptical: "Do you think if we had souls, they wouldn't get in touch? Of course they would!"

While at the lecture they meet a local vicar, Dean Spanley. He's an odd character who makes some intriguing comments about the possibility of an afterlife. Henslowe's curiosity is peaked and he invites Spanley to dinner to discuss the topic further. He discovers that, plied with the right amount of wine, the Dean is given to telling fantastic stories of another, half-remembered life. After recounting one such tale, Spanley pauses to reflect, "One moment you are running along, the next you are no more." As time goes by, Henslowe realizes that these stories sound vaguely familiar, and may hold the key to a more enlightened relationship between Henslowe and his father.

The role of the elder Fisk is given Scrooge-like depth by Peter O'Toole, a valid reason on its own to watch this gem. Sam Neill's portrayal of the Dean is by turns hilarious and moving. Add wonderful dialog and the gorgeous Edwardian setting, and you'll find a movie that bears repeated watching. You'll have plenty of time to do so, if, as the guru insists, "You are, my dear sir, in the anteroom of eternity."

ElecTRONic - by Steve Recently I've been on a bit of a way back kick for my movie tastes. No, not WAY way back. But back far enough to see how films from the 80s have held up over time. I grabbed a copy of the original Tron and plunked down to watch it last week. By today's standards, the graphics and computer animation seems clunky. It was 1982 after all! But what's interesting is that it actually holds up over time. And while it didn't gross much at the box office (the arcade game actually made more money than the film), it quickly became a cult favorite.

Two of the film's biggest fans have a bit of a cult following of their own, the duo known as Daft Punk. I've written of my love for them before, but what's great is that they came up with the musical score to Tron's sequel, Tron: Legacy. Sure, the sequel has better graphics, but the score is a glimpse into the true capabilities of Daft Punk. Working with an 85-piece orchestra, they were able to give the sequel the appropriate futuristic electronic funk for which they are so well known.

An animated series called Tron: Uprising is scheduled to premiere in 2012. Let's hope it will stand the test of time as well as Tron, the first.

Release your Inner Child - by Heidi

OK. I know there are a lot of holds on this, but trust me, it's worth the wait. Tangled was the most fun I had at the movies last year. I went to go see it with three other adults and we all agreed, including the one guy, that it was great. It's funny, it has catchy little songs and it's just charming. I watched it again recently with two teen-aged relatives and my mother and they all loved it too.

It's a retelling of the Rapunzel story. You've got the princess trapped in the tower except this time she has magic hair and her prince is a scoundrel with a good heart. There's a pet chameleon that's obviously intelligent and a horse with magical abilities. But it all works, even for an adult viewer, if you're willing to go with the magic for just 100 minutes. You can go back to being a grownup who knows better later. So, go get in touch with your inner child and watch a cartoon. This one is worth it.

Boudu Saved From Drowning - by Rachael It is a rare and wonderful thing when something makes me laugh so hard that I cry.

Recently it happened while watching the Colbert Report. Mr. Colbert was ostensibly getting etiquette lessons from a fellow who is apparently a Professional Proper Englishman. Colbert is utterly unconstrained: he has no rules to follow. He eats sugar by the spoonful, lets a cupful of cream slide down his chin. The Englishman is defined by rules. He is outraged, perhaps even angry, but he can hardly show it. He can only murmur ‘No, you musn’t’. And the more he protests, the more outrageous Colbert’s behavior becomes, spurned on by his foil.

The scene very much reminded me of the Jean Renoir movie that made me laugh just as hard, Boudu Saved from Drowning (Boudu sauvé des eaux). A homeless man is ‘saved’ by a middle class family, and what ensues is a great deal like Colbert and the Professional Proper. Boudu spits out his beer, he wipes chocolate on the duvet. He does not follow the rules, and it is enormously funny.

If you think that a movie made in 1932 is too darn old, or you're not a fan of subtitles, check out this YouTube trailer and reconsider. The Criterion print is lovely, and the film is a true treat.

Rejuvenation of the Spirit - by Nicola Does our gloomy weather get you down?  Would you like to have a new way of thinking about things?  Would you like to spend some time in a warmer and sunnier location, maybe do some things that would give you more pleasure in life?
The women in the following movies find pleasure almost by accident. Their senses are reawakened in different ways. In each one of the films, there is a very special scene where you may find yourself saying YES or maybe laughing out loud with the characters.

Babette’s Feast, takes place in a village in Denmark after the Paris uprising in 1871. It is based on a story by Isak Dinesen, which can be found in a collection of stories by the author called Anecdotes of Destiny.  Babette is a political refugee from France where, unknown to the Danish villagers, she was a gourmet chef.  She meets two sisters and out of the goodness of their hearts, they allow her to work as their cook and housekeeper in exchange for room and board. The two sisters lead a rather grim life where the atmosphere is all shades of gray and their very strict religion considers all pleasures to be sinful. Their father is dead but the 100th anniversary of his birth is fast approaching and they want to hold a celebration.  Babette has recently come into some money and she wants to prepare a special feast for the event. When Babette has worked her magic on the meal and the sisters taste the food, the simultaneous look of pleasure and guilt on their faces is priceless.
 
The second film is Enchanted April, based on the novel by Elizabeth von Arnim.  When I first heard the title and knew nothing about the film, I thought April was a person in the film. Instead, April refers to the month of the year.  Lottie and Rose live in England.  The weather has been rather cold, wet, and gloomy, just as our Oregon weather has been. They learn about a villa in Italy that is for rent and leap at the chance to visit there. They are not alone. Two other women, Mrs. Fisher and Caroline Dester, will be sharing the villa with them. Mrs. Fisher is played by Joan Plowright and if you are familiar with her film work, she is her usual forthright self and adds a few notes of discord to the mix. The sun, the warmth and the beauty of their surroundings, however, work their magic on the four people and they begin to relax and see their senses reawaken. Even Mrs. Fisher begins to loosen up. When the husbands of several of the women join the little group, their senses are reawakened as well.
 
The third film is Cold Comfort Farm, based on the novel by Stella Gibbons.  It is the 1930’s and cold comfort is indeed what you will find at that farm.  An old woman, Ada Doom, mostly just stays in her room, but when she mixes with the others, she is constantly muttering to herself “something nasty in the woodshed”. Ada is, of course, a rather crazy and spooky person. Be assured, though, that by the end of the film, you will know what has happened in that woodshed.
 
Into the mix comes Flora Poste, who is only twenty years old and has recently lost both of her parents. Although she comes from a well-to-do family, she only has a small inheritance. She wants to become an author in the style of Jane Austen and looks for a situation where she will have a variety of experiences with a variety of personalities. When a cousin asks her to move in with the cousin’s family on the farm, she agrees to give farm living a try.
 
There are plenty of colorful characters to fuel Flora’s imagination. The other relatives at the farm are rather rough around the edges and Flora tries to transform them into her image of refinement. Well, you can just imagine how well that goes over with the group!  Flora soldiers on, however, and she and the other residents of the farm begin to slowly change.
 
Flora tries to teach one of the women, who is almost perpetually pregnant, about birth control, and the woman bursts out laughing. She cannot imagine such a thing. Chances are you will find yourself laughing right along with the woman. Of course, birth control methods in the 1930’s were very basic and not always effective, but the incident is illustrative of some of the changes Flora tries to implement. If you try this film may you find it as enjoyable as I did.
 
Happy viewing!

Farewell Patricia Neal - by Rachael

The actress Patricia Neal died on August 8. She starred in one of my all-time favorite movies, A Face in the Crowd.

In any opportunity to wax on about A Face in the Crowd I tend to emphasize Neal’s co-star, Andy Griffith, who plays a lecherous, greedy, manipulative television star. Griffith’s charisma is incredible, and as we all know him so well as Sherriff Taylor it is mind-blowing to see him as Taylor’s evil twin, "Lonesome" Rhodes.

That topic exhausted, I will enthusiastically move on to the movie’s intelligent and hilarious take on television. 1957 seems awful early for such a biting and accurate indictment. Keep your eye on that rating!

But Neal’s character is the soul of the movie. She is the one who discovers and promotes "Lonesome" Rhodes, and who must destroy him. Because Rhodes is not simply crass. He is a fascist, and he plans to use his popularity to do real evil. Neal’s character is no raft borne by the tide; she is a moral creature and a true adult. And that makes A Face in the Crowd an all-too-rare treat: a movie in which a woman has world-changing power and responsibility.

Corn Right off the Cob - by Rachael The veil of preconceptions has been removed from my eyes and I see the light: Frank Capra made some very funny movies.
Best known for heavy-on-the-syrup fare such as It’s a Wonderful Life or Meet John Doe, Capra also made some sharp, occasionally acerbic comedies -- Platinum Blonde and It Happened One Night are right up there with the best of Ernst Lubitsch or Preston Sturges.
But the Capra movie that has really caught my imagination may be the most sentimental of all, You Can’t Take it With You.
The plot centers around the love affair between the wealthy Jimmy Stewart and the poor Jean Arthur, but the show is stolen by Arthur’s chaotic household: the perpetually pirouetting sister, the mother who happily writes plays that have no chance of being produced (the stack of completed pages held down by a kitten), the father setting off fireworks in the basement. And the soul of the movie, her Grandpa (Lionel Barrymore), providing the philosophy that guides them all. Grandpa is the antithesis of Mr. Potter (the character Barrymore played in It’s a Wonderful Life). The thing you can’t take with you is money, of course, so what’s the good of it: just do what makes you happy.
The movie ends with a rousing, anarchic rendition of ‘Polly Wolly Doodle’ played while the whole darn neighborhood watches the family dance wildly in a living room decorated only with a ‘Home Sweet Home’ sign. Corn? To quote another great, Howard Hawk’s Ball of Fire, “Right off the cob”.

Calling Mrs. Trumbull - by Jen Sometimes I get a bit impatient and want the children to grow up a little faster so I can share films with them that don't involve sarcastic cats or operatic turtles or crime-fighting dogs.

I confess I did recently make the possible mistake of letting Child the Younger watch many episodes of  I Love Lucy on library DVD with me when we were both lying ill and lethargic on the sofa. He has since stopped requesting viewings of Maisy in favor of "that funny heart show" and, really, it makes sense. If you are almost three and think your choices are between a primitively-drawn mouse and her friends who mutter mysteriously to one another in what sounds suspiciously like Serbo-Croatian OR Lucy hilariously trying to pretend twenty-five pounds of cheese is a baby (after sensibly flying to Europe WITHOUT child in tow) in order to fly said cheese home on an airplane without paying luggage fees, which would you choose?

But that is not really the sharing I meant to talk about sharing. What I would like to share is that great and bottomless treasure trove we have in the Criterion Collection. If you have limited viewing time (which, if you're like me, is already at war with your laundry-dishes-bill-paying-clean-out-this-random-cupboard-while-the-kids-sleep-time) and want to make the most of it, you really need to worship at the altar of Criterion with me. Unless, of course, you have your own reliable Mrs. Trumbull who will babysit your Little Ricky so you can fly off to Europe and see films in arty theaters. I'm guessing you don't, so here are three to get you started:

Eyes Without A Face may be the most lyrically filmed work of horror you will see in black and white.  A surgeon father in Paris is cutting the faces off kidnapped women in an attempt to cure his own beloved daughter's disfigurement.  It's suspenseful--mesmerizingly creepy--and possibly even more horrifying now that full facial grafts are a medical reality.

Ohayo is the very funny tale of two young Japanese brothers who take vows of silence to protest their parents' refusal to purchase a television set.  Set in a late 1950's Tokyo suburb, this is an exploration of changing cultural traditions with a side of fart jokes.  

The Passion of Joan of Arc was originally a silent French film released in 1928. It has been set to an amazing orchestral work, Richard Einhorn's Voices of Light, with a performance of the choral ensemble Anonymous 4. Believed lost to a fire, the film was miraculously found in perfect condition in 1981--in a Norwegian mental institution. This is art, and a higher power wants you to see it.

And if any of you do know where Mrs. Trumbull is hiding, I'd really like her number.

Camp or Classic - or Does it Really Matter? - by Ruby

I really love that silver shimmer of  black and white films: the contrasts, the shadows, the textures - light reflected in every actor's eyes - even the animal actors. And I've seen a fair number of old black and white films. But nothing prepared me for Josef von Sternberg's The Scarlet Empress, not even his best known picture, The Blue Angel. Beyond the beyond doesn't begin to describe it. In fact I'm not that sure where to begin. Von Sternberg himself calls it “a censor-baiting cocktail of sensual excess and riotous design” which is close to the mark. The Scarlet Empress definitely flouted the motion picture censorship guidelines.

Basically the story advances, careening between horror and the grotesque, quickly followed by large helpings of bathos.  And everywhere the ghastly monstrous gargoyles inhabit the entire Kremlin, clutching massive candles in their stone fists. It takes eight ladies-in-waiting to open the gargantuan double doors of the private apartments. Marlene Dietrich is cast as the naif Austrian princess who marries the mad Russian Czar played brilliantly by Sam Jaffe. As the disillusioned Czarina Catherine, she turns temptress, and becomes deeply involved in court intrigue. Finally, she transforms herself into The Great, an exterminating angel who leads battalions of her husband's trusted guards against him.

Von Sternberg is the ultimate auteur/painter/puppeteer/lighting genius. Each frame stands alone as an individual painting reminiscent of Watteau, Fragonard or Brueghel. Von Sternberg's memoir Fun in a Chinese Laundry shares his side of the story, including details about his artistic theory. Believe me he's got his share of opinions. Did I forget to mention that Marlene D.'s daughter plays the young Austrian princess?

The Great American Cow...Girl - by Alison

If I say 'women in the wild west' what do you picture? For me it's an image of a beautiful young woman tied to the railway tracks as the train looms, a villainous mustachioed man lurking somewhere in the background. And that's too bad because there are plenty of Wild West stories with female characters who determine their own destiny.

True Grit was a great read long before John Wayne rode into the film version as Rooster Cogburn.  As a young teenager I reveled in the story of Mattie, a 14 year old girl who enlists the mean as dirt U.S. Marshal to help her find her father's killer and avenge his death. For girls growing up in the late 60's and 70's, female characters with gumption were few and far between, with the exception of Pippi Longstocking. It was a relief to see that there was room in the world for characters like Mattie Ross.

Another story of the vengeful female protagonist is the strangely compelling Caprice by George Bowering. A school marm turned vigilante sets out to avenge her brother’s death at the hands of two-bit criminals. Caprice is a stunning red head, over 6 feet tall, and a fine hand with a bull whip. She saddles up and chases the perpetrators across the west, circa 1890’s. The book is both a satire of the traditional western and a celebration of it, complete with no good varmints, honorable gentlemen and two Native American characters who observe the goings-on and provide philosophical commentary.

If there's any theme here, it's that women can be just as vengeful as their male counterparts. Jane Fonda starred in the incredibly campy Cat Ballou in 1965, an era in which women rarely played the lead role in a western. Cat hires a gunman to protect her father's ranch, and then later to avenge her father's death. When the hired man fails miserably at his job, Cat takes matters into her own hands. In between scenes, a comical pair summarize the plot in song.

If you're looking for a less satirical picture of women in the west, take a look at Molly Gloss's The Hearts of Horses. Set in 1917, when many of the men in Eastern Oregon have gone to war and ranch hands are in demand, Martha sets out to find work breaking horses. But her method is not to ‘break’ them so much as gentle them. Martha begins as an outsider, drifting in and out of the lives of people as she works with their animals. Eventually she becomes connected to the people and must let go of her comfortable perch as an observer from the saddle.

Movie Night - by Felicia If you remember my last post of movie recommendations, you know that I like flicks that are little off-center. Well, this list isn’t as eccentric, but they are definitely films that I really enjoy and highly recommend.

So I’ll start with Atonement. I tried to read the book and just couldn’t get into it, but the movie had me riveted. Aside from the thoroughly compelling story, it is an absolutely beautiful piece of cinematography. Add to that an A-list cast, and you have a memorable film with a twist at the end that will astound you. The story centers on forbidden love, a heinous crime and a lie that becomes so big, it swallows everyone in its wake. I absolutely loved this film.

I also enjoy a film that includes some great professional dancing. Since I don’t dance myself, I like to live vicariously through characters in movies. If you haven’t seen Billy Elliot, you are in for a treat. The story is so well-written, and the main character will make us all want to dance. Again, the cast is just amazing, and you get to see some really fantastic footwork. The main character, Billy, wants to be a ballet dancer. But his family isn’t having any of that. Boys don’t do ballet. But, boy, does Billy prove them wrong. Go, Billy!

Have you ever heard of a movie called The Edge? Well, neither had I until a few years ago. This movie stars Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin. A friend of mine recommended it, and I finally watched it. Part thriller and part adventure, it puts a very interesting twist betrayal and friendship (with the help of a very relentless bear). This movie will keep your adrenalin pumping until the very end.

Dangerous Liaisons came out in 1988 and stars one of my favorite actresses, Glenn Close. Again, the cast really makes this film. The chemistry between Glenn Close and John Malkovich is palpable, and this film is so decadent and sumptuous, that I have watched it probably about 20 times over the years. It’s one of those movies that I see something new in each time I watch it. Another reason to watch — the cast also includes Michelle Pfeiffer, Uma Thurman and Keana Reeves.