From Water Babies to The East: 3000 movies on video

When I thought about writing a post to commemorate my 3000th movie seen on video, I didn't remember that I'd actually already done this for my 2000th.

What can I say. I notice, and write about, milestones.

Adding the movie Water Babies to this post showed me that a Water Babies label already existed, and I soon found the post where Anitchrist had been written about as my 2000th movie on video back on January 18, 2010. 

Little more than five years later, I've added another thousand.

The movie this time was The East, directed by the director with my favorite name in the biz: Zal Batmanglij. 

It was about 35 years ago that I got started watching movies on video. That first one, Water Babies, was watched at my friend Jed Lambert's house on his Betamax. As I wrote in the Antichrist post, I also remember watching The Black Hole at his house around that time, but I'd already seen that in the theater. The Black Hole may have been the first movie I ever saw twice, but that's another post for another time. 

This time around, it's probably as interesting to talk about the speed with which I watched another thousand as the milestone itself. Watching 1000 movies, period, in five years and two months would be pretty impressive for most people. But that discounts all the movies I've seen in the theater during that time.

However, I also acknowledge each time I reach another milestone of one thousand movies seen, so we don't need to go into too much detail there either. I'm at 4,157 right now, so don't worry, there's a while still to go before we get to the next one of those.

So what do I want to use today's post to do?

Not much. I guess I'm not feeling particularly philosophical today. 

It's a milestone and milestones should be marked, so let's just do that and be done with it.

Cormac McCarthy can stuff it

I have never read a Cormac McCarthy novel.

But from the films I've seen of his work, I'm tired of hearing people speak about him in such hushed and reverent tones.

He could be the most talented wordsmith to string phrases together since Mark Twain, but his stories leave me cold, and not in a way that nourishes me.

The first McCarthy adaptation I saw was the disastrous 2000 film All the Pretty Horses, starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz, and directed by Billy Bob Thornton. I didn't know who McCarthy was at the time, though I do remember hearing his name discussed -- to me he was just some novelist I had never heard of. Even if I had been inclined to blame McCarthy for the failure of the movie, I probably wouldn't have. All the talk was that the version Thornton wanted to make was entirely butchered by the studio, leaving the final movie without crucial passages that would have contextualized key parts of the narrative. I just wrote it off as one of those movies that never stood a chance.

The first movie I was conscious of being an adaptation of his work was the 2007 best picture winner, No Country for Old Men. I was with the movie big time for its first half, when it was following the beats of a good Coen crime thriller, with just enough narrative eccentricity thrown in to make it interesting. But then the Coens began engaging in an intentional campaign to frustrate us, leaving key confrontations and plot developments to occur off-screen, and petering out into an unsatisfying non-ending. (Don't worry if you disagree; you would obviously not be alone.) When I learned that this was very faithful to the way things go down in McCarthy's novel, I began to grow skeptical of the man.

Next up was The Road in 2009, which remains my favorite movie based on McCarthy's work. But I have to qualify that pretty significantly. First, just as an aside, I'll say that I believe I confused this novel with another one, since I got it into my head that it took place just after the Civil War, not in an apocalyptic future like the movie. That of course turned out to be wrong. As this was director John Hillcoat's follow-up to The Proposition, which I liked very much, and as post-apocalypse movies have always interested me (and were not quite as plentiful six years ago), I was super excited to see The Road. The only way to describe my reaction to the movie, then, was disappointment. I recognize it as a good movie, but it was bad bleak (like The Rover) rather than good bleak (like Children of Men). The Rover would not have been an available reference to me at the time, but it is now.

Then last night I saw The Counselor. The Counselor is not based on a McCarthy novel. Instead, it's a McCarthy original screenplay. What that does that's particularly instructive is it prevents us from blaming any intermediary for mucking up McCarthy's vision. Yeah, Ridley Scott had some say in why The Counselor was so bad, but those are McCarthy's words, unmolested and unfettered. Indeed, The Counselor is a base, disquieting affair, but I hesitate to use those words to describe it, as they make it sound more interesting than it actually is. I love being disquieted by a movie, but as with bleakness (which is also on plentiful display here), there are good and bad ways of being disquieted. McCarthy's way involves exclusively unlikable characters passively navigating a simple plot that's difficult to follow (how's that for a contradiction) because it's so clumsily executed and because the dialogue is overwritten to the point of preventing you from following it. What's more, the things that were supposed to be shocking about this movie ended up boring me. (And were, in fact, the reasons I watched it in the first place, despite the negative reviews.) The story is so muddled, in fact, that I had to consult the plot synopsis on wikipedia twice while the movie was still running, just to give myself the hope of possibly getting something out of the parts I had not yet seen. No such luck.

With these four McCarthy cinematic works as my evidence, I have decided the man is a one-trick pony. His every work is devoted to the idea that people are evil to their core, and any exception to this is an aberration, not a cause for hope. Oh, there may be different degrees of evil. Some people may just make choices that are contradictory to their nature because they sense an opportunity to profit. Others are naturally venal, but not openly harmful to people. And then there are just the anarchists, who seem to enact the most extreme forms of violence against others for the pure pleasure of it, and show nary an ounce of mercy. They comprise a disturbingly large percentage of McCarthy characters.

But everyone is compromised in some way or another, and there's no chance they are going to come to good ends. I suppose there's a certain moral rectitude to the idea that bad people come to bad ends, but then there are all those bad people in McCarthy's films who never get punished for what they've done, or whose punishment comes in truly unrecognizable forms. Where's the optimism?

Maybe I like The Road the best because it does end with just a hint of hope for the future. If I recall correctly (SPOILER ALERT), the boy's father dies, but he takes up with new guardians who seem to give him the distant hope of a new and enduring family unit. Of course, some of that is speculation, and The Road isn't so rosy as to guarantee us a positive outlook for the character. But it does not end on the purely bleak note of his other films. Maybe it's just that if you are going to put the world through an apocalypse, you have already amply demonstrated your pessimism, and are obliged to give us some possible ray of sunshine at the end.

Conversely, The Counselor is probably his bleakest. But it comes by that distinction cheaply, as it doesn't develop any of its characters enough for us to appreciate what's happening to them or why it's happening. These characters are basically cyphers, which leaves their ultimate position in McCarthy's moral universe totally arbitrary.

The only thing worse than the point McCarthy is repeatedly trying to make is having no point at all.

New Zealand, the "new" home for horror comedy

For a pretty darn small film industry, New Zealand sure does produce a lot of horror comedy.

Having watched Housebound last night as a themed Friday the 13th viewing, I have now seen two Kiwi horror comedies from 2014 in the past six months. The other of course was What We Do in the Shadows, which I watched on the plane back from the U.S. in November. These might also be the two preeminent horror comedies, period, from 2014, though I'd have to think hard about other contenders before I arrived at that conclusion. (Also, What We Do in the Shadows is really more of a straight comedy with a horror backdrop than a movie that's actually trying to scare you.)

However, calling New Zealand the "new" home for horror comedy is not exactly accurate, either. Kiwi horror comedy dates back to the 1980s and the sensibilities of future auteur Peter Jackson.

Jackson started his career with the horror comedy Bad Taste in 1987, and continued making movies in that vein all the way through The Frighteners in 1996, after which he plunged himself into Middle Earth and other Hollywood blockbusters, and never looked back. Though I understand he is actually going to look back in the next stage of his career.

So horror comedy seems to be in New Zealand's cultural legacy. Jonathan King made the horror comedy Black Sheep in 2006, about a flock of bloodthirsty sheep, and he specifically credited Jackson's early movies as an influence on the film's slapstick style. There have been a few others that seem to fit the bill over the years, but none that I've seen.

Wait a minute, Vance. A handful of movies sprinkled over a country's entire history of making films is not enough to really posit a trend, is it?

Maybe not, but the number of horror comedies relative to the total number of films certainly suggests that Kiwis are predisposed to this type of movie, or at least feel perpetually indebted to Jackson for inspiring them. According to wikipedia's page on films made in New Zealand -- which is by no means exhaustive, since it does not even include Housebound -- only an average of about three movies per year were being made in New Zealand as recently as the turn of the century. Very quaint. And in 2002, one of those three movies was Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, which has mostly foreign financing. Only in the past decade has New Zealand beefed itself up to between eight and ten movies per year ... but then as recently as two years ago, only two total films are listed -- and one of them is the second Hobbit film.

So to call New Zealand's film industry "fledgling" would still be quite accurate, which isn't such a surprise for a country of fewer than five million people (compared to Australia's 23 million). I think it's fair to say that horror comedy represents a disproportionate percentage of the country's output.

And they're pretty darn good at it. What We Do in the Shadows was perhaps my favorite comedy of 2014, though that isn't saying a lot as there were few comedies that really impressed me last year. Housebound isn't as consistently funny, though it did make me laugh out loud a half-dozen times. And it made up for that by genuinely scaring me on a couple occasions.

It's probably worth offering you a short synopsis of each to give you that extra little push to go see them. Both have delicious high concepts. What We Do in the Shadows invites a mockumentary crew into the Wellington mansion of a quartet of vampires who live together. They range in age from a sprightly couple hundred years old, and still suave, to an ancient Nosferatu type with gnarled claws and an ability to do little more than hiss. We get interviews with each, and the camera follows them around through their daily lives. It's as delightful and tonally perfect as it sounds. Housebound, on the other hand, takes place in a different type of mansion out in the country. Its protagonist is sent there for house arrest to live with her daffy mother after trying to rob an ATM. Her mother is convinced that the house is haunted, and she starts to believe the same after a series of unexplained events. They can't just leave the house, though -- the convict's ankle bracelet makes sure of that. It's already scheduled for a U.S. remake.

Both are worth your time, especially What We Do in the Shadows. And if you watch, perhaps you will help in some small way to boost New Zealand's meager output from three films per year to four.

And help ensure that there are plenty more great Kiwi horror comedies yet to come.

Go 3D in style

As if you weren't already spending enough money when you go to a 3D movie, Hoyts Cinemas thinks you might want to fork out an additional $15 to $20, just because.

At Hoyts -- at least the one at the Highpoint Shopping Centre -- you can buy your own 3D glasses, right there through a handy dandy vending machine in the lobby.

Note I said "can." They'll still give you a pair, as a ticket taker confirmed for me -- I had to ask him because I was concerned this was just another upsell. But the pair they give you will be flimsy and disposable. You'll get to see the movie's 3D effects, but you won't be able to do it in style.

I greeted this vending machine with a chuckle, but then I decided, "Hey, why not?" Surely there are people who do think it's worth doing. Australian society seems to function on the idea that people are not very attached to their disposable income, and this is no less of an egregious example than some others I've seen. Especially since one of the most common complaints I hear from people about going to 3D movies is "I hate the glasses."

You can get something that's functional, designed to go over your existing glasses ...

(Though note that they tell you it's "designer," which justifies the $15 charge.)

Or you can get something that's whimsical, based on an existing movie franchise ...

Or you can get something that's adventurous, also based on a (no longer) existing movie franchise ...

Or something that's extra fancy ...

Or something that's extra cheap ...

(Though I guess, still better than the free ones -- or maybe they are just trying to fool people into buying something they'll give them for free, which is perhaps the most shameful upsell of all.)

And then, finally, there are just the ones nobody wants ...

Me, I'm content just paying the $4 surcharge for 3D and being done with it. 

Gimmick fatigue

I'm told some people didn't like Birdman because they felt exhausted by the lack of edits. Essentially, the gimmick of making the movie seem like one continuous shot was a burden that distracted them and eventually ruined the experience of watching it. Perhaps they felt that an edit would give them a chance to breathe, like how you sometimes welcome an ad break in a particularly intense TV show.

I know what they're talking about now, but not because I watched Birdman again last night. In fact, I liked Birdman just about the same amount on second viewing as I had on the first, with the one difference being that it actually seemed to move faster for me this time. So in that sense you might say I actually liked it better.

I know what they're talking about not because of the movie I watched on Monday night, but because of the one I watched on Sunday night. That was Nacho Vigalondo's Open Windows, and it was a fatiguing burden indeed.

Vigalondo is the director of the 2007 time travel movie Timecrimes, which is one of my favorite small discoveries of the past decade or so. We went in without knowing anything about it, and were thrilled to see where it went, what surprises it had in store, and what individual bits Vigalondo contributed to the already saturated genre of time travel conundrum movies.

Vigalondo has apparently had another film in between Timecrimes and Open Windows, 2011's Extraterrestrial, but that was actually not on my radar until after I'd finished Sunday's film. So I pitched Open Windows to my wife as Vigalondo's long-awaited follow-up to our much-beloved Timecrimes, and it jumped straight to the top of our queue.

I did also know the gimmick going in, and though it probably worried me on some level, I figured it would work out fine in Vigalondo's hands. The gimmick is this: The entire movie is supposed to take place on Elijah Wood's computer screen. Whatever would happen in the story of an obsessed fan stalking an attractive movie star would be reducible to what could happen on the open windows on his laptop. But given the multifarious types of video feeds that can now be accessed on a person's computer screen, this still left a lot of possibilities for the type of action the audience could witness.

Too many, as it turns out.

Open Windows barely considers it a limitation that the action is confined to Wood's laptop. The character, Nick, changes locations multiple times and gets involved in all manner of complicated hacker intrigue without even once losing his internet connection, to say nothing of the loss of battery life on his laptop itself. I mean, seriously -- couldn't they have spared a single line of dialogue explaining why he never drops his internet? They couldn't, because there was too much else ridiculous to accomplish that they literally didn't have the time.

I will spare you a deeper description of what happens in Open Windows, but know this: It relates to multiple video chats with hackers and other shady personalities, instant access to live security cams and other unlikely recording devices (a bag full of "ping pong ball cameras," anyone?), an omniscient awareness of what's going on by any number of people (yet an inability to hear each others' simultaneous chats on Nick's computer), and the unfettered ability of anyone to send various apps and live camera feeds to Nick's laptop at a moment's notice. For a guy who appears to know something about computing, Nick has a truly shitty firewall, and displays no aversion whatsoever to clicking on mysterious links offered him by sketchy strangers. At the very least, he should be worried about downloading a virus.

Oh, and all these high-level hacks, frame jobs and other intricate planning worthy of Jigsaw in the Saw series are in service of a plot to humiliate a movie star. That's a rather too pointed commentary on our celebrity-obsessed culture. If these people had these computer skills, shouldn't they put them to better use by hacking into a bank and stealing all its money?

Perhaps the worst part of Open Windows, though, was the claustrophobia I felt 20 minutes in to a 100-minute movie, knowing that I was going to be trapped in its format for the next 80 minutes. Looking at -- and trying to believe the reality of -- these cascading windows on his computer screen was going to be a chore to get through indeed. Vigalondo seemed to know this, which is probably why he gets Nick out of his hotel room and has him driving around a rigged-up rental car for the movie's second half. Of course, this was the worst of both worlds -- like the biggest concept offenders in the found footage genre, it violates the conceit nearly as often as it adheres to it. So while we're still stuck on Nick's computer screen, we can't buy anything that's going on. We're being tortured by someone teasing us with our freedom, then snatching it away.

Open Windows would be just a failed attempt to execute an ambitious concept if it didn't end with a truly inexplicable series of absurd twists that can scarcely be reasoned out or reconciled with each other. So after cheating on an exhausting gimmick for most of the movie, but at least holding together a basic storytelling logic, it then entirely collapses as a narrative.

To be fair to Open Windows, I may have already been conditioned against this gimmick from an experience a couple days earlier. The reason Open Windows came up at all for discussion, actually, was that my wife and I watched an episode of Modern Family on Hulu where the entire thing takes place on the screen of Claire's laptop. While that was executed a lot more cleverly, it was similarly unlikely in terms of her multi-tasking and shuffling between windows -- with the number of digital balls she kept in the air in this episode, you'd think she were a twentysomething, not a fortysomething. Making matters a bit more exhausting, we didn't get a break from the gimmick at all, because a glitch in Hulu caused none of the ads to play. (It was this experience that put me in touch with the value of having an occasional one-minute break from what you're watching.) So while I was laughing and ultimately applauded the effort, I felt a bit worse for the wear by the time the 22 minutes were up.

Now imagine that over 100 minutes, and you'll get an idea of the relentlessness of Open Windows.

If anyone felt during Birdman like I felt during Open Windows, I truly pity them.

The regrettably brief prime of Kathleen Turner

Few actresses can have Meryl Streep's career. Streep is not only an outlier by continuing to work regularly and prominently for nearly 40 years, she's a significant outlier. It's a lot more common for an actress to rule the roost for no more than 10 or 15 years. Hollywood is just not kind to most actresses once they hit their 40s. It chews them up and spits them out.

There may be no better example of this than Kathleen Turner, who came on the scene, climbed to the top very quickly ... and then was gone.

Actually, not gone -- not for good, anyway. But her current incarnation is an unfortunate illustration of the major differences between an aging male star and an aging female one.

I was always aware that Turner was an actress of great beauty and great charisma. I mean, she had charisma with a capital C. She was genuinely spunky. It wasn't until I saw Body Heat on Thursday night, though, that I realized she also possessed a huge amount of sex appeal. Next to the word "sultry" in the dictionary, a picture of Turner in Body Heat appears. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's this picture:

After creating such an impression with her first starring role, Turner quickly made the world her oyster, starring in her most recongizable role in 1984's Romaning the Stone, then adding Peggy Sue Got Married and the sequel to Romancing the Stone, The Jewel of the Nile. The Accidental Tourist and The War of the Roses soon followed, and she also iconically voiced Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? 

The kind of stardom Turner was bound for seemed sustainable. It really felt like she could do no wrong. But around the time V.I. Warshawski came out in 1991, Kathleen Turner was over. The Kathleen Turner we knew previously, who was one of the hottest commodities of the 1980s, was over, in any case. She was only 37 at that point, but that was kind of it.

By the time she materialized in Serial Mom in 1994, I remember the sensation of having already kind of forgotten about and her and been surprised to see her turn up. And here she was being used to satirize the kind of wholesomeness which she had (at times) represented in her career (when she wasn't playing the femme fatale in Body Heat or a prostitute in Crimes of Passion, that is).

But what happened next with Turner was perhaps more unexpected. She started taking roles that played up the huskiness of her voice and some increasingly mannish qualities that were probably exacerbated by the fact that she stopped paying such close attention to maintaining her figure. I guess some of that is on Turner -- I mean, you have to keep going to the gym if you want any hope of sustained viability in Hollywood -- but what seemed unfortunate was that the industry began collectively thinking of her as some kind of monster, some kind of freak.

She kept appearing through the rest of the 1990s in increasingly more obscure roles, occasionally popping up in an arthouse movie (The Virgin Suicides) or an awful cash grab (Baby Geniuses). But it was around the turn of the century that things really changed for her. In 2001 she took the semi-recurring role of Chandler Bing's father on Friends. That's right, his father -- who had undergone a sex change into a woman.

Suddenly this was now how people saw Turner -- a gender-confused figure of fun. After Friends, she was off the scene entirely for five years before doing more voice work in 2006. But no longer was she doing the sexy rabbit. Now she was voicing an oversized circus freak in the animated film Monster House, who looked like this:

She had more TV in her future on Californication, but here again she was presented as repulsive. She played a character whose voracious sexual advances on Evan Handler's Charlie were always unwanted, and not just because she was his boss. She disgusted him, which is no surprise, because Turner was required to play the part over the top, emphasizing the character's basest and most raunchy instincts.

Twenty fourteen found Turner again being cast as a middle-aged woman who is supposed to be gross compared to her former self. She plays the grown-up slut Freda Felcher in Dumb and Dumber To -- a character both Harry and Lloyd lusted after when they were younger, yet whom they greet with looks of revulsion when they meet her again, 20 years later. We aren't supposed to be taken aback by this, because the last 15 years have asked us to adjust our perspective on Turner so that we think of her like they do: an abomination of a human being. At least Dumb and Dumber To doesn't overplay her outrageous behavior in an attempt to turn us even further against her -- more than anything, she just plays the part as exhausted, which may be how Turner really feels at this point. Except for the unfeminine plaid shirt, the following picture is even almost complimentary:

However, let's also not forget that the Farrelly brothers have been known for putting "freaks" in their films, like the character in Shallow Hal who has spina bifida. Is Kathleen Turner just another one of these freaks?

Look, fame is a two-way street. If Turner wanted to extend her prime, she knew what she probably had to do. She had to get work done, and she had to stay in shape. She could have gotten the 25 years that Julia Roberts has gotten, even if she couldn't have gotten Streep's 40. It was her choice to accept the roles offered to her where her curdled femininity was the point being emphasized.

It's just a shame that it had to be this way. If Turner were a man, she could have survived fluctuations in her weight. She could have kept getting cast in lead roles, because stories are written about middle-aged men. They aren't so much written about middle-aged women.

If I'm going to end more positively -- and with someone like Turner, I'd really like to -- I might say that Turner should earn our respect for being a Hollywood survivor. No, she's no longer glamorous, no longer young, no longer sultry. But she's still showing up on screen. She's still on our radar.

She's just working with what she's got. That's what she did when she had the looks and the figure, and that's what she's doing now that she doesn't.

And we should just be grateful that she didn't have the kind of work done that would have turned her into a true monster. At least she's still employable ... which cannot be said for someone like Meg Ryan.

Witches aren't scary - except when they are

Witches are just as prominent in the coterie of Halloween baddies as ghosts, goblins, vampires, mummies and zombies. But their union has not been doing a great job with PR. While many of those others can be quite frightening, witches are often consigned to the category of "funny" monsters. They may cackle and they may have green skin, but we can usually laugh them off. They're harmless.

Given this perception, it sometimes surprises me how many truly chilling movies there are where witches are the primary villains.

In each case that I have acknowledged this, I've written it off as an exception to the rule. But how many exceptions can you have before you start re-thinking the rule?

Here are five such movies, starting with the one I re-watched on Sunday night for the first time since 2006:

1) Suspiria (1977, Dario Argento) - I have to admit, the first two times I watched Suspiria, I thought the opening 15 minutes so terrifying that the rest of the movie inevitably paled by comparison. However, that opening is terrific enough that I went ahead and bought the movie on the strength of those 15 minutes alone. (The Goblins score certainly helped grease the transaction.) In thinking about Suspiria, I would sometimes tell myself that witches being the villains are a primary example of why the rest of the movie doesn't live up to that opening, when the identity of those antagonists has yet to be established. This time, though, the whole movie filled me with dread, and I appreciated certain things that maybe didn't land as effectively on previous viewings: like the supernatural, undead snoring of the witch Helena Markos, or that mysterious room in the top floor of the dance academy where the witches go to perform their rituals at night. The witches discomfited me enough on this viewing to inspire this post.

2) The Blair Witch Project (1999, Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez) - It's right there in the title, but I bet people don't often consider the fact that what they're afraid of in this movie is witches. Or, one witch in particular. But as with Suspiria, it's scary as hell, and some people consider this one of the most frightening movies they've ever seen. Perhaps the key is that you really don't know what you're afraid of in this movie -- you know they're looking for a witch, but all you actually see is inconclusive evidence of evil, all you hear are noises that your imagination conflates into whatever terrorizes it the most. But when you come right down to it, it's a witch that's giving us the spooks when we watch this, the granddaddy of the modern found footage movement.

3) Paranormal Activity (2009, Oren Peli) - I'm just now realizing that both of the most successful found footage horror movies of recent years use witches as their monsters. You find this out to a greater extent in the sequels to Paranormal Activity as the mythology becomes better developed, but it's a coven of witches at the center of all the spooky happenings in these movies. You get frightening flashes of them from time to time, and they are ghastly creatures indeed.

4) Rosemary's Baby (1968, Roman Polanski) - Yes, even Rosemary's Baby features witches -- witches in cahoots with the devil. Witches are the devil's servants, and never has that been more evident than when they ensnare a woman for the devil to impregnate. So again, as in Blair Witch, it's not what we see of the witch that scares us so much -- it's what we don't see. Minnie and Roman Castavet look and usually act like harmless old New York busybodies ... until we see what they are really like, through glimpses of a drugged haze, and near the end when the jig is finally up. Everything that's unholy and unsavory about Rosemary's Baby is tied to their status as these practitioners of the occult.

5) The Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Fleming) - And why not? Although Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of the West is in many ways the template for our modern green-skinned Halloween witch, she does not soft pedal the role in the least. And though she may not be terrifying to a lot of adults, her shrieking intensity has some real balls to it, and could scare the pants off plenty a little kid. I'm sure she scared me when I was young enough ... though I think the flying monkeys were slightly more traumatizing in that regard.

And Hollywood knows we're still secretly horrified by witches. Next up is this year's The Witch, which won the directing award at Sundance.

It may just be the next one to turn our skin green.

A tale of blossoming love

They say a new ranking year doesn't really get started until you see something you love.

(I don't know who says that. Shhh. You're getting sidetracked.)

Well, 2015 is officially GAME ON.

And when I talk about a tale of blossoming love, I'm not describing the plot of The Last Five Years. I'm talking about me falling in love with The Last Five Years over the last three days.

Depressed by the 1-2 punch of The Wedding Ringer and Jupiter Ascending that started my year, I was particularly susceptible to seeing a 2015 movie that actually figured to be good pop up on iTunes. The Last Five Years had only just gotten a theatrical release on February 13th, but you can't hold a thing like that against a movie these days. The game has changed.

The movie was only even on my radar because one of my friends in the Flickchart Facebook group, a noted musical theater buff, had been talking up its arrival for a while. And when it finally came, it didn't disappoint her. She ranked it 45th out of the 2300+ movies she had ranked, the highest she had ever ranked a movie on a first-time viewing since she began using the site.

Seemed worth a gamble.

Since I watched it on Monday night, my life has been kind of dominated by this thing.

But before I go singing its praises (pun intended), I should probably tell you a little bit about it, shouldn't I?

The plot is simple. Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan star as Cathy Hiatt and Jamie Wallerstein, a cute couple of New Yorkers who fall head over heels for each other and begin a doomed five-year relationship. We know it's doomed because the first number, sung by Cathy, comes in the immediate wake of reading the breakup letter he wrote her. We've begun at the end of their relationship, but hold on, that's not all. The second number -- this time sung by Jamie -- plunges us five years into the past, to their first romp in the hay, when he's reveling in her lack of Jewishness and how it would crush his mother. The story continues on that way, with Jamie's songs moving forward in time, and Cathy's moving backward.

There's something so simple and so fundamentally appealing about this format. It means the movie is essentially a sine wave of emotion, reaching a low point at the beginning and at the end, and a high point in the middle. Even within that structure, though, there's melancholy alternating with joy on every other track. The opening juxtaposition of Cathy's remorseful "Still Hurting" and Jamie's jubilant "Shiksa Goddess" gives us an idea what we've got in store, and keeps us from ever staying down for long. And it says something profound about how the two aspects of their relationship -- the initial joy and the eventual pain -- inform each other and ultimately intertwine. Kind of like in any relationship, which experiences its ups and downs even in good times.

What's wrong in their relationship isn't anything so profound. Jamie, an aspiring writer, has his novel published and becomes an overnight success. Cathy, an aspiring stage actress, trudges through a series of uninspiring auditions that go nowhere. Much as they would both like it to be otherwise, the relationship can't handle the disparity in their levels of self-actualization, and they eventually and perhaps inevitably land on different planes of existence. Their earnest attempts to save things are what give the movie its tragic soul.

So how much do I love this movie?

Well, I gave it "only" 4.5 stars on Letterboxd. But that was Monday night. Consider the events since then:

1) On Tuesday afternoon I watched it again. I was home with only my younger son, who had a whopping 4.5 hours worth of naps during the day. During the afternoon one, once I had determined I had had a productive enough morning, I gave the movie a second watch before my rental was set to expire later that night. It therefore joins a select few movies that got multiple watches during a single rental period.

2) On Tuesday evening I contemplated watching it a third time. I considered pitching it to my wife. The kids were in bed early, so if we'd started around 7:30, we could have watched it again before the rental expired around 9:15. (She didn't need to know about the second viewing that afternoon.) That would have been three times in 24 hours and twice in the same day. But I abandoned the plan when I saw that it would have required too much of a sales job on my exhausted wife, who is less inclined toward musical theater than I am anyway.

3) Later on Tuesday evening I purchased the soundtrack from iTunes. Freed from watching the visuals, I figured I could concentrate more on the thought-provoking and clever song lyrics. With an $11.99 investment added on to the $6.99 I'd already paid for the rental, that was nearly $20 spent on this movie in just over 24 hours.

4) On Wednesday morning I wrote a review of The Last Five Years for ReelGood. I tweaked it and fussed over it for probably two hours after I was finished. Granted, that was in part because my children kept bothering me. (Children. Who knew they needed things.) If you want to read it, the link may be up on the right by the time you read this.

5) On Wednesday afternoon I listened to the soundtrack on my iPod. This was instead of talking to my child -- the one who can talk -- while walking him to the park. That's not entirely unprecedented, since a long walk can feature long periods of silence, and I'd rather fill that silence with something in my ears. I figured that while listening to music (as opposed to a podcast), I could drop my earphones and answer any question he had to ask, without really losing anything. Nope. I got really annoyed whenever he interrupted me ... but to be fair, my suspicion that he had nothing really to say was confirmed.

6) At the park while he was playing and my younger son was napping, I finished listening and became highly annoyed when I discovered that the final song had failed to copy over to my iPod. I felt robbed of the movie's highly cathartic ending.

7) Now it's late Wednesday night and I am writing this post.

So what does Thursday hold? It remains to be seen.

Why do I love this movie so much?

For one, it seems like the modern-day musical I've been yearning for ever since Rent underwhelmed me 15 years ago. My then-girlfriend took me to see it on Broadway, fulfilling a desire I'd had for years. Perhaps it could never live up to that hype, as I walked away unsatisfied, and have yet to watch the film version. But the idea of a really terrific musical set in modern times stuck with me, which is probably why I reacted so positively to John Carney's Once, and stuck with the TV show Smash through its entire run, even as it underwent a demonstrable decrease in quality. The Last Five Years has scratched an itch I hadn't even consciously acknowledged before I saw it.

While my first exposure to this material is the film, and I will likely hold that above any other version of it, I suspect most of what's terrific about this show is there in book, not what Richard Lagravenese brought to it in his adaptation. I love his adaptation, but it's the songs and lyrics that so transport me. The life given them by Kendrick and Jordan is undoubtedly a major factor, especially since I have a wee crush on Kendrick (and like Jordan from the aforementioned Smash). But I give primary credit to the music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown, who knows how to blend the happy and the sad, the hilarious and the lacerating. He's literate without overwriting, and he's emotional without being schmaltzy. Well-played, good sir.

The filmmaking itself is also totally captivating. As I understand that the show itself is pretty minimal, featuring only Jamie or Cathy on stage with barely even any prop or set accompaniment, Lagravenese's fleshing out of the scenes is an unqualified success. He also sends his camera moving around his actors in subtle but inventive ways, adding a degree of difficulty to capturing the impassioned performances by the two leads. Just because he's filming a show, it doesn't mean he's trapped in a stage mentality, and the ways he bursts out of that are nothing short of enthralling.

And then there's the fact that I'm always drawn to intelligent attempts to analyze people's behavior in relationships. Some of my top movies of the year (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Ruby Sparks) have been about that ... not just casually about that, but specifically about that. The Last Five Years does not examine this with the same rigor as those, nor is it the movies those are ... but the fact that I'm even mentioning it in the same sentence means I think it warrants the comparison.

So you should go out and see this movie right away, right?

Depends. I'm not so sure it works as well for someone who's tepid on musicals. I'd like to think that a great movie overcomes a viewer's ingrained aversion to its genre, but the fact of the matter is, I have only my own subjective perspective to draw on. I love musicals -- ones that are done well, anyway -- so I'm within this movie's target audience.

More than anything, I'm grateful to The Last Five Years for reminding me that I do indeed love musicals. Movies like the recent versions of Les Miserables and Into the Woods may conspire to convince me otherwise, but then movies like The Last Five Years come along to save me. They wrap me up in a spell, and leave me wanting to consume no other form of sustenance for the time they've got their hold one me.

If that's not love, I don't know what it is.

Well, it's obsession at the very least.

Bambi aborted

Don't worry, you haven't stumbled into some awkward and politically charged discussion about the moment when a deer fetus becomes an actual deer.

Instead, I wanted to discuss a bullet I dodged -- so to speak -- earlier today.

It was my older son's Wednesday home from school, his one non-weekend day off per week. As part of my new schedule, I am now home that day too. It's always a challenge to find activities to do that can please both him and my 14-month-old, while also factoring in the younger one's naps. Of course, since the older one was sick over the weekend and still has a rather awful-sounding cough, I took the pressure off myself to be superdad today. I decided to throw on a movie -- one I hoped I could get him interested in, and watch with him. And since the movie was only 70 minutes long, I didn't even have to worry that I was wasting our whole day.

By now you've surmised it is the Disney classic Bambi of which I speak. However, given that this is one of Disney's oldest movies, and my son was weaned on movies that move at a much faster speed, there was no certainty I could get him on board for the viewing. If I were being completely honest with myself, I'd say that I selected this movie from the library more because I wanted to see it for the first time since my own childhood, rather than that I thought it would be a great match for him. That said, part of being a cinephile parent is trying to introduce your children to the classics, so they don't think that movies didn't exist before the 1990s. So that's the public face I will put on this somewhat selfish act.

Yeah, putting on Bambi for your child is not a superdad move, but at least it's better/more educational than throwing on any old crap. However, as we started watching, I wondered if Bambi was a gross miscalculation -- one that would actually be the opposite of a superdad move.

You see, this is a movie where the main character's mother dies.

That doesn't make it unique among animated movies, and especially not in the Disney canon. However, it is poor timing for a kid who has been asking a lot of ominous questions about death, and what comes after death. I'd just as soon not encourage those unanswerable questions any more than they will be encouraged by his natural curiosity.

He's seen movies where people die before -- you may recall this recent post about the traumatizing experience of watching Big Hero 6 -- and I certainly don't vet the content of the movies I plan to show him based on whether this is a main element of the plot.

So what made Bambi different? I think it was something about the sweetness and delicacy of the movie. I sensed my son becoming emotionally involved in ways he isn't always emotionally involved.

And that made what was about to happen a whole lot worse.

The things my son was saying were just too cute. He was responding to the movie in ways that delighted me, that I couldn't have imagined. "Is that his mommy?" he said, when seeing Bambi together with his mother.

Yes, kid, that's his mommy. But don't get too attached to her.

I started to feel a bit sick to my stomach.

And then came the scene where Bambi's mother needs to check the meadow for danger before she allows Bambi to come out into the open. "I hope there's no danger," my son said, concerned.

There's danger, kid. Oh my is there danger.

And then came the moment when the animals all start to look alarmed, and run for cover. I knew it was about to happen. I caught myself hoping that this might be the one iteration of Bambi in which his mother doesn't get shot by a hunter.

Well, it didn't happen in this scene. Like a good screenplay should, Bambi foreshadows the threat before it comes to fruition. I had a reprieve of at least a few minutes, which felt really necessary in that moment.

The next scene involves leaves floating in a lake. "That's a beautiful lake," my son said, offering a more mature and sentimental analysis than I sometimes remember he's capable of.

Then, in the very next moment, I was saved.

"This is boring daddy," my son said.

I was taken aback, given how much of a 180-degree turn this was from how he had just been experiencing the movie. I gave him a moment to determine if this is how he really felt. As much as I kind of wanted to turn this movie off, even more than that I wanted my son to display consistency, to continue to be invested in a movie that apparently had him riveted just a moment before.

"This is soooo boring, daddy!" he repeated, with more enthusiasm. "Can we please watch something else?"

Yes. Yes we could.

And this is how I was saved from having to have a discussion with my son about the death of parents at about exactly the halfway mark of Bambi. (I'll watch the other 35 minutes tonight myself.)

On the one hand, I'm a bit discouraged by how things played out. Having proven himself capable of becoming engrossed in an old-fashioned, "boring" movie, he then went completely in the opposite direction, wiping out all the cinematic maturity he had just displayed. The suddenness of his lost of interest was almost more alarming than if he had gradually lost his patience over the course of ten minutes.

On the other hand, I wasn't really in the mood today to answer another question about what happens when you die.

It occurs to me that there must be some kind of sweet spot in a child's maturity where they are young enough that Bambi does not seem dated and slow, yet old enough to have a somewhat adult response to the death of Bambi's mother.

If there is, it's not age 4 1/2, I guess.

Question your assumptions: Toy Story 2

So the first two times I've written posts under this banner, I've considered movies one might think of as sacred cows -- classics whose value is almost unquestioned. I revisited The Graduate and Rosemary's Baby the first two times I questioned my assumptions, four months apart from each other. Randomly, another four months later, I'm doing the series again.

This time, I'm doing things a bit differently by focusing on something much more recent, though still from last century. As with the other two, though, there are a set of clear assumptions I am grappling with, and it's still been long enough since I've seen it that I knew a new viewing would answer some of my questions.

I hadn't seen Toy Story 2 in something like 15 years. My #2 movie of 1999, it was one of those I saw in the theater and then saw on video almost as soon as it was available. I may have even seen it twice on video, possibly as recently as 2001 or 2002. Since then, though, nothing. On the contrary, I'm quite familiar with Toy Story, having received it on BluRay as a gift. That means its total viewings outnumber Toy Story 2 something like 8-2.

In those 13 to 15 years, I've gone from being uncertain if I could distinguish a meaningful difference in the quality of Toy Story and Toy Story 2, both five-star movies, to pretty clearly preferring Toy Story. The best example of that is my Flickchart rankings, which have Toy Story all the way up at #6 overall, and Toy Story 2 as "only" 118th. Further stimulating this consideration of Toy Story 2 was having caught part of Toy Story 3 last weekend when our family was away for the weekend with three other families. The kids were all watching Toy Story 3, and I got to sit in on the emotional ending. It was all I could do not to bust out crying, something that would have been hard to explain to a bunch of five- and ten-year-olds. I started to wonder if Toy Story 3 weren't better than I thought it was -- perhaps even challenging the quality of Toy Story 2.

(Favorite moment from the viewing, though: When the characters survive their close scrape with the incinerator at the end, my son looked up at me with a look of earnest glee and said "They made it!" The others sitting with him, all older, were nonplussed -- or at least were not similarly vocal. I will treasure the time that my son responds to happy endings totally without cynicism or skepticism.)

So when a BluRay of Toy Story 2 popped up at the library last week on a visit with my sons, I gobbled it up. I thought my older son would be especially ripe for a viewing, having just so enjoyed the next chapter in the saga. (And not really getting that he missed a part in the middle.)

I didn't know if I'd actually get to watch it with him, but the opportunity arose on Sunday morning, when he started the day by vomiting on the carpet. Now that he was officially sick, all kinds of previously inexcusable activities were now on the table -- like him getting to watch TV for most of the day, and me getting to plop down with him for the length of a whole movie. (The fact that he threw up twice more during the day removed any question of whether he was truly sick.)

Toy Story 2 is still a great movie, but there are in fact certain things that bothered me during this view, ranging from the minor to the major. I'll list them in no particular order:

1) The writing is not as casually sharp as it is in the first movie. One of the things that makes Toy Story such a pleasure is that its dialogue is almost exhaustingly clever. You don't truly become exhausted by it, of course, but it's densely packed with double entendres and other witty turns of phrase, without ever once feeling overwritten. Toy Story 2 does not feel overwritten either, but a lot of the incidental cleverness is lost, I noticed.

2) The villain -- Al of Al's Toy Barn, voiced by Wayne Knight -- would never fall asleep with an entirely full bowl of cheesy poofs on his chest. They make him out to be so repulsive and corpulent that he would have had to down at least half that thing, especially to get that quantity of artificial cheese topping on his fingers. It's a smart set piece that Woody needs to walk through the fallen snacks like a minefield in his attempt to keep Al from awakening, but I got stuck on the notion of just how many cheesy poofs escaped a fate in Al's stomach. (Remember, I didn't say all my complaints with Toy Story 2 were major ones.)

3) The exact rarity and value of Woody and his pals as toys seemed exaggerated. I'm no rare toy aficionado, but I have to assume that a museum in Japan would have other ways of acquiring a Woody's Roundup Gang without relying on an American toy store owner finally getting his hands on a Woody to complete the set. Also, was this deal perpetually in place, pending the finding of the Woody, so that Al only has to call up the Japanese once he's finally succeeded in his mission? Which happens without any premeditation, during a random Saturday morning yard sale? And even if this Japanese museum is as obsessed with this acquisition as they appear to be, how much could they possibly be paying Al? A couple grand at most? Surely not enough for Al to fly the toys to Japan himself, as if this cost would immediately become a drop in the bucket of the wealth that would soon be his. But perhaps the strangest moment in this transaction involves Al thinking he's gotten the upper hand and requesting that they "add a zero" to the end of what they plan to pay him. So suddenly he thinks the rare toys may be able to sell for ten times an amount he already thought was going to change his standard of living?

4) The toys are capable of too much in this movie. The adventure in Toy Story had the benefit of being life-sized, or perhaps I should say toy-sized -- going outside the house into the neighbor's yard and down to the local pizza restaurant was astounding enough. Needing to up the ante for the sequel, though, the writers had the toys not only get down to the local toy store (that's fine, I buy that an Etch-a-Sketch map copied from an ad on TV could help them accomplish this), but they also drive a car to the airport. Even allowing for the possibility that a team of intelligent toys could manipulate the controls of a car in the exact unison necessary to pilot the thing, how could they then steer it down busy streets and all the way to an airport, following another car quickly disappearing on the horizon? Even stranger may be the explanation about how they got back to Andy's house, which occurs entirely off-screen and is explained only be showing one of those luggage trains parked in the yard across the street. The return from the airport alone, after the primary conflict has been resolved, should have been a harrowing adventure that got all of them killed.

I'll stop at four complaints because look, this is still a Toy Story movie and it's still wonderful. I just might knock my five-star rating down to 4.75 stars ... and my #118 ranking on Flickchart down to 150-175.

How does it stack up with Toy Story 3? I guess I'll need a proper second viewing of that to say for sure.

Join me again next time -- maybe four months from now, maybe sooner -- for another exciting episode of Question Your Assumptions.

Birdman and Whiplash - the same movie?

Of course not.

But consider:

1) Both movies involve a protagonist who is obsessed with greatness. One is seeking a future greatness, one is looking back on a greatness he worries has vanished.

2) Both view their greatness through the prism of a bird. Andrew Neiman wants to become like Charlie Parker, a.k.a. Bird, and listens to Parker's CD Birdland repeatedly. Riggan Thompson became famous for playing a superhero with bird features, and worries that the world perceives him as nothing more than a man wearing a bird costume.

3) Both characters talk specifically about being remembered after they're dead. Riggan discusses his fears of dying in the same plane crash as George Clooney, and having people concentrate on Clooney's death rather than his. Andrew speaks about being willing to die young, drunk and full of heroin as long as it means he will be remembered.

4) Both protagonists undergo severe psychological torture while pursuing the performance they believe will define them, for better or worse.

5) Both protagonists bleed, literally, for their craft. In fact, they both receive serious head wounds for their craft.

6) Both are driven by a perfectionist who challenges them to succeed in unconventional ways. Andrew is tormented by his teacher, Terence Fletcher, who pushes his students past the brink of sanity and self-esteem in order to force them to try harder to attain greatness. Riggan is tested by two different characters, the actor Mike Shiner and the critic Tabitha Dickinson. Mike is always trying to push Riggan out of his comfort zone on stage to see how he will respond, while Tabitha lets him know that it will take nothing short of a miracle to get a good review from her. Both protagonists ultimately meet the high bar set for them by those who test them, but not without first engaging in a physical altercation. Those who test them also use acting as a devious method of manipulating them.

7) Both movies feature suicide attempts, either successful or unsuccessful, that result from the failure to live up to the exacting standards of the perfectionist.

8) Both movies feature the protagonist trapped outside a performance space due to unforeseen circumstances, desperate to make it on stage in time for his entrance.

9) Both movies prominently feature drums, either as a direct part of the plot or as the musical score.

10) Both movies follow characters from behind as they walk on stage, off stage, and through backstage corridors.

11) Both movies feature characters shot from behind looking out at the audience, with the footlights keeping us from seeing their audience.

12) Both movies speak of a miniature version of one of the characters. In Birdman, Riggan likens his show to a small version of himself, following him around and hitting him in the balls with a tiny hammer. In Whiplash, Fletcher dismissively refers to an assistant of his as "Mini Me."

13) Both movies make prominent use of understudies.

14) Both movies feature a romantic relationship that is ruined in part by the protagonist's quest for perfection.

15) Both movies take place in New York City.

16) Both movies end in ambiguous fashion, leaving the viewer to debate what actually happened, and what happens next.

Is 16 major similarities enough for you?

In my second viewing of Whiplash, my sixth favorite movie of 2014, on Sunday night, it was all made so clear to me.

Maybe my upcoming second viewing of Birdman, my favorite movie of 2014, will reveal even more.

Audient Auscars: Cimarron

This is the second in my 2015 series in which I'm crossing a bunch of best picture winners I haven't seen off my list, month by month.

When I posted in a Facebook film discussion group that I had started a 12-month journey to watch most of the best picture winners I hadn't seen, and mentioned that The Broadway Melody was not necessarily such an auspicious start, someone responded "Just wait until you get to Cimarron."

So there were no high hopes involved in sitting down Thursday night to watch the 2-hour and 4-minute movie on the last weeknight before the end of the month. I could have still watched it on a weekend night, but why ruin one of those with this kind of drudgery?

Well, characterize me as very pleasantly surprised by the 1931 best picture winner.

Yes, it was long, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't have to take a couple naps to finish it. That speaks more to the current mode of my existence than to any quality concerns with the movie. In truth, it was a very impressive technical achievement and sort of a moving love letter to the American pioneer spirit.

Cimarron tells the story of the 1889 founding of Oklahoma territory, specifically the Osage region (the same as in August, Osage County), from its literal beginnings. It's hard to imagine a more dramatic start than what happened here: Hundreds of carriages and single riders on horseback were unleashed at an exact moment on a specific day with a gunshot to commence the race, told that whatever piece of land they could claim would be theirs. (Ah, if acquiring property were so easy today.) It follows the fortunes of one Mr. Yancey Cravat (Richard Dix) and his family (wife Irene Dunne and children) over the course of nearly half a century, in which Osage grows from a bunch of carriages and shanties to a bustling metropolis, and all manner of social and sociopolitical growing pains are addressed in between.

Cimarron is a bit like a biopic of a region, rather than a person -- and in so being, is also a bit of a biopic of America. Yes, Dix's Yancey Cravat is its central character, but as he is also a yearning wanderer, he disappears from the narrative for stretches of time as well. Cravat is the personification of many things Americans at the time (and still today) considered to be the founding values of this country: a sense of adventure, a desire to expand, a will to amass wealth and success through personal ingenuity, and a willingness to accept people of all types and backgrounds. There is a prominent Jewish character accepted into the fold, and a former slave boy who also plays a crucial role in the proceedings (even if his handling from a directing perspective is sometimes too broad to leave a person feeling comfortable -- a symptom of that era of Hollywood filmmaking, I'm afraid). The movie also shows a sort of delightful pre-Code refusal to judge people of ill repute, as Cravat (in one of his incarnations as an attorney) defends a renowned prostitute against charges against her. I suppose the bedrock American values are also meant to include forgiveness, as it was this same prostitute who snookered Cravat out of his claim to a particularly choice piece of land back when the first land rush was on.

This gets at just some of the complexity lying underneath the apparently simple surface of Cimarron. When Cravat agrees to defend the prostitute -- in fact, takes up her cause without even being asked to do so -- it's a bone of contention between his wife and him, and it's even hinted that he had an improper relationship with her specifically and perhaps other women generally. I suppose this is part of the restlessness that characterizes Cravat throughout. So while there are many things heroic about the film's portrayal of Cravat -- he also builds a newspaper from scratch, and more or less single-handedly rids the town of a pack of outlaws -- it never ceases to view him with a certain degree of skepticism. It's a complicated portrait that probably would not have been possible when the Hays Code was introduced a few years later and things got a lot more black-and-white at the movies.

One delight is also to see the power that Cimarron hands to Cravat's wife, Sabra, who is portrayed as her own woman and a shrewd capitalist in her own right. When Cravat disappears on whatever ill-advised journey has seduced him, it's Sabra who is at home, presiding over their newspaper and eventually becoming the primary face of its success. Near the end she is even elected into public office, which seems like a terrifically progressive thing for a 1931 movie to show us. As the movie approaches its climax and we have aged 40 years with Sabra and a collection of other familiar townspeople, it's actually a bit moving to recognize how effectively the movie has introduced us to them and given them all little character arcs for us to follow. Cimarron creeps up on you, something that's a bit of a surprise for such a sweeping epic.

I mentioned that Cimarron is also technically impressive. It has numerous scenes that are bursting with extras, and though that was not necessarily anything new (D.W. Griffiths films relied heavily on extras for years), it's certainly a welcome reminder of what we have lost with crowd scenes able to be generated by computer today. And though I understand that the opening land rush, Cimarron's most famous scene, is indebted to a similar scene in a silent movie called Tumbleweeds, that didn't make it any less astounding to me. As those horses and carriages race toward manifest destiny, it gives you a huge kinetic rush, even watching it more than 80 years later.

Here's hoping Cavalcade has as many unexpected treats in store in March.