Margot Kidder plays French Canadian

I've continued watching the movies Quentin Tarantino discusses in Cinema Speculation, and I haven't had to jam too many of them in to keep pace with my reading. It helps when you only budget 20 minutes of reading time a day on trains. Don't judge.

Last night it was Sisters, the third previously unseen movie I've watched after The Getaway and The Outfit.

As those two were more or less carbon copies of each other, crime capers with equivalent three-star ratings on Letterboxd, it was a nice change of pace to get to the Brian De Palma psychological thriller, which I gave a half-star more than that.

I don't know what Tarantino's take on it is because I haven't gotten there yet in the book, but I know what I'm going to talk about today: the decision to make Margot Kidder's character French Canadian.

Now, Kidder herself is Canadian, but she's not French Canadian. Big difference. One speaks English with a barely detectable accent you can only perceive when they say "house." The other speaks English like a Parisian playing around with the language and its grammatical conventions for the first time.

So yes, Kidder has to sound like the latter in this movie, even though she's the former. (And she probably doesn't even say "hoose.") 

It's a curious choice.

Normally when an actor speaks English with an accent in a movie, it's for one of three reasons:

1) They are actually not a native English speaker, and this is the best they can do;

2) They are making a movie in English where the characters are from a particular part of the world, so they speak with that sort of accent to give us some sense of authenticity, when for commercial and practical reasons they can't actually film in the local language;

3) They are making a movie set in the past, and a generic British accent makes it sound more old-fashioned than their normal "just stepped off Venice Beach" accent would make them sound.

So what I'm saying is, Margot Kidder speaks with a French Canadian accent even though there is no story reason, no geographical reason, nor any practical real-world reason she has to do it. The movie, you see, is set in New York. The choice to make her French Canadian is, it would seem, completely random.

Fortunately, this is a pretty helpful scenario for our friend AI to pop its head in and lend a hand. 

This is what AI has to say about De Palma's reasons:

Brian De Palma wanted to add to the film's "joyful fakery" and create a sense of vulnerability that a foreign accent would provide. Her accent contributes to the dramatic and thrilling tone of the film, making her seem more "adorable" to other characters. 

However, I read elsewhere -- having trouble finding it right now -- that a lot of people at the time thought the accent was poor, even laughable. For her part, Kidder said she could do the accent because she had lived in Quebec.

And hey, I did think she did a pretty good job with it. Though maybe I'm just happy to discover my Lois Lane in movies where I'd never seen her. 

Honoring Kidder and surfacing from the bottom

I probably wouldn’t have watched Superman II Wednesday night only to celebrate the life of Margot Kidder. Although I cherished her on some level, this was really the only movie I much remember her from, as I only saw the original Superman like three times (one of which was in the past few years) and I only just saw The Amityville Horror last year for the first time. I’d memorialized her on the blog on Wednesday and that was probably enough.

But there was also an interest in surfacing Superman II from the bottom of my Letterboxd list for rewatched movies.

I’ll explain.

I’ve kept track of my movie viewings for a long time, but one of the most recent was starting to make note of when I re-watched a movie. That started about 12 years ago, in July of 2006. The first re-watch I recorded was Ghostbusters. I don’t know why Ghostbusters prompted me to start recording rewatches, or whether I made the decision and Ghostbusters happened to be the first one I saw after that. But either way, I’ve consistently kept track of every movie I’ve rewatched since then.

They say the flesh is weak, but so is the Microsoft Word file, even though I’m an avid backer upper. So when I started on Letterboxd maybe seven years ago, I decided to transcribe my list of rewatches over there, and kept adding any rewatch in both locations. Call it a cloud backup of sorts. I’d put the date watched in the notes field, so that information was preserved too.

When you add new movies to a list on Letterboxd, they automatically go to the end of the list. I might be able to tweak that but I’ve never figured out how. The list was more interesting to me, though, with the newest entries first. So each time I add a new movie, I change its number in the list from 400-whatever to #1, then it jumps to the top. (I’ve rewatched over 650 movies, but about 200 of them were before I started keeping track of rewatches, and I have not watched them since so they aren’t on this list.) This means that the same movie is always last.

For a long time that was Ghostbusters. Every time I moved the newest addition to the top, I’d have to first go down and look at the bottom and see Ghostbusters there.

But then I watched Ghostbusters again in 2016. And because no movie can appear in a Letterboxd list more than once, it was moved to the top, with the latest rewatch date added to the existing rewatch date.

The new last film on the list? Superman II.

It’s been that way for nearly two years, and because I like to consider very inconsequential things (which offers an explanation for this entire post), I had been idly wondering when I would give Superman II another watch and surface it from the bottom of this list.

And that brings you up to Wednesday night.

Now that I’ve watched it again, the new last film on the list could stand awhile, unless I artificially watch it just for the purpose of surfacing it. That movie is The Matador, and though that’s a film I like quite a bit, a third viewing is not really fighting its way into existence. I may soon surface the second-to-last movie on the list, though. That’s Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46, which I own and which I have been on the verge of popping into the DVD player for some time now.

I suppose I should actually devote some of this post to Kidder and Superman II, shouldn’t I?

I did appreciate Kidder in this movie, though I think I realized that I had slightly exaggerated just how charmed I am by her here. Although this is a childhood favorite that I thought was impervious to reevaluation upon multiple viewings, I had a number of small criticisms of the movie. I wouldn’t say that Kidder or her performance was one of them, though I didn’t feel the pang of nostalgia and sorrow I expected to feel when I watched it – that I feel when I watch Star Wars and see Carrie Fisher, for example. Ultimately it makes sense that Fisher would have had more of a sway over me than Kidder did, as she appeared in three beloved movies to Kidder’s one. The sense of sorrow is probably a bit greater as well as Fisher died before her work was really done, as she was going to appear in at least one (and probably only one) more Star Wars movie. (I should acknowledge also that Princess Leia in Jabba’s slave outfit was probably also working on my budding sexuality when I first saw it at age nine, and there’s no equivalent for Lois Lane – though if I had seen her turn in Amityville Horror there might have been.)

The interesting thing about Superman II on the whole was how hurried it felt to me on this viewing. You want a tight script to move you along in the action, but some of the jumps seemed downright nutty. For one, when the three Kryptonians first land in that hick town and start wreaking havoc, there is already talk on a concurrent newscast about the use of nuclear weapons being ruled out due to the risk to the population. Hasn’t the world only been aware of these three for like 15 minutes? Who’s talking about nuclear weapons? Sure, there was that incident on the moon, but at this point the powers that be are still likely trying to piece together what that was. When Zod takes the camera, he’s already asking if there’s no one on Earth to even challenge him. The very next scene, they’re changing the faces on Mt. Rushmore to their own. Isn’t that a little fast?

Then I was also reminded how little screen time there is between when Superman forfeits his powers and gets them back. It’s hard to say how much time is actually passing in the movie, but it couldn’t be more than a day or two, a week at most. The only scene outside the fortress of solitude is when he and Lois take a ride to a diner to get dinner and he has the fight with the local bully. He’s already walking back to the fortress (what happened to their car? And where did Lois go?) and already shouting in empty fury at his dead parents, telling them he “failed.” I should have timed it, but it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes of screen time.

Lex Luthor’s time with the Kryptonians also feels very hurried. Gene Hackman as Luthor is one of my favorite parts of the movie – he works so much better as comic relief than “the big bad.” But there’s barely any time between when he introduces himself and having to scurry to explain his relevance and avoid being killed. Both sides are shrewd enough and pragmatic enough for a feeling out period to be logical.

Still a favorite and I’ll still miss Margot Kidder.

Two of my three princesses are now gone

Margot Kidder died on Sunday.

My Lois Lane -- forget Amy Adams or Kate Bosworth -- is now gone.

On social media it was heralded as something of a joke. Not really, but a friend on Facebook memorialized her thus: "RIP Margot Kidder. Pro tip: memorize the recent winning lottery numbers in case Superman spins the earth backwards again." I don't fully get the reference to the lottery numbers, but I suspect it has something to do with Kidder's "crazy" later years, which allowed her to go out as a "joke" rather than someone we loved.

That post got 15 likes, two laughs, and one crying emoji.

I was the crying emoji.

I won't say I'm "taking it hard" -- an actual friend I knew, not well, but a friend nonetheless died of cancer the same day, and that's much worse. She was only in her early to mid 40s.

But I did consider how this now means I've lost two of the three princesses I grew up with.

I kind of always associated Kidder with two other women from movies around the same time, one of whom preceded her in death by about 18 months. Those two women are Carrie Fisher and Karen Allen, otherwise known as Princess Leia and Marion Ravenwood from the Star Wars movies and Raiders of the Lost Ark. They're all three brunettes, and they were all three love interests of seminal characters for me when I was growing up.

And two of them are now gone.

I never got to properly eulogize Fisher on this blog, as she died when I was on vacation in America and still had two weeks remaining of my stay. I don't think I wrote a single blog post the whole time I was gone. But I've felt her loss on numerous occasions, most notably, of course, when watching Star Wars: The Last Jedi (twice). So I'll make up for the oversight a little now.

You might think it strange to include Allen, as she appeared in only Raiders of the Lost Ark. (Well, she returned in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but you'd hardly consider that ten-year-old movie as part of my cinematic maturation.) But then again, Kidder only appeared in one movie that I watched with any regularity, which was Superman II, still far and away my favorite of those original movies, and the only one I've seen more than twice. (I've actually seen it more than ten times, as we owned it on VHS when I was growing up.)

The loss of Kidder struck me since the last time I saw her, she was so young. Last Halloween I finally saw The Amityville Horror, in which she's so young she's a downright sex object. Maybe not quite as young as the photo I've selected above, but young and vibrant, with her best years still ahead of her.

But only a few of them I guess. Kidder was gone from the Superman movies after Superman II, though I guess she did return in Superman IV for what I believe was only a cameo. Looking it up just now, I was surprised to discover that she worked pretty regularly for the rest of her life, but never in any roles that approached a signature role like Lois Lane. And to be honest, I couldn't name you a single thing she did without consulting IMDB.

But for a while there in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she had "it," that unmistakable combo of beauty and spunk that makes someone a star. Her Lois Lane was a real spitfire, the type who wouldn't take no guff from no one. And though Lois Lane is kind of the prototypical "woman who must be saved," in Kidder's hands, she was never helpless. In fact, I just think about the balls she shows trying to cover terrorists strapping a bomb to an elevator in the Eiffel Tower, or fighting back against the Kryptonians who captured her, ultimately punching Ursa down a crevasse in Superman's fortress of solitude after Ursa loses her powers. ("You know something? You're a real pain in the neck.")

Taken in combination with Fisher's death in late 2016, it does leave me saddened about the loss of these women who played an early role in my understanding of a cinematic heroine. Sure, they were products of their time in some respects, but they also stood tall and proud. Princess Leia wouldn't take no guff from no one either, and Marion Ravenwood? Forget about it. She can drink you under the table too. In fact, I think the term "drink you under the table" was coined for Marion Ravenwood.

I hope I'll still have Allen for a few more years, though she does turn 67 in October. Unlike the others, she is in good physical and mental health. And much as I might like to see her on screen again, I kind of hope she sits out the fifth Indiana Jones movie.

As for Princess Leia and Lois Lane ... they're both princesses to me, and may they rest in peace.