I can't remember which movie started our "calendar movie" tradition. It might have been "April Fool's Day". Certainly, I'd already been occasionally pulling a movie down from the shelf when I realized that the date coincided with the subject matter or title of some movie or other. A couple of instances just occurred to me now, but that would be getting ahead of myself.
In any case, over the years we've established a tradition of watching certain movies on or near certain dates. As with any tradition, it's produced the "Oh my God, is it time for THAT movie again already?" feeling - it can be difficult to tease apart the reassuring sense of tradition from the realization that life is inexorably slipping away.
This year, on pulling our first calendar movie down from the shelf, I decided it was time to put together an account of our year's set of movie viewings and present it at year's end to a grateful nation. Or, it just occurred to me, I could post them incrementally to generate a year-long arc of suspense (or indifference). Here, then, is our movie calendar for 2018.
The new year's eve festivities weren't the Babylonian blowout they usually are, thank heavens. We had gone to a party at our neighbor's Jed and Jen's along with most of our friends from the neighborhood. New Year's Day then, wasn't completely wasted on convalescence as it sometimes is. The party was a lot of fun - the Mathises are wonderful hosts. We celebrated around their basement bar and enjoyed a lavish buffet of tacos, nibbles, and desserts provided by our hosts and brought by the guests. The traditional white elephant (purchased for below a certain price) gift exchange was lots of fun. I came away with a great foam cheese coozie. Our hosts had a great playlist going which was accompanied by baffling images of New Year's Eve celebrations broadcast on telly ("who are those people and what are they selling?") Things had wrapped up at the not-unreasonable hour of half one. Ordinarily we would have gone down to the Milwaukee lakefront the next morning for the Cool Fool Kite Festival, but it was far too cold and (paradoxically) windy for that - the temperature was in the single digits and the howling of the wind was plainly audible in the flue of our new range hood. Paul was off on an errand and was going to be gone for at least a couple of hours. I'd already gotten the idea that he wasn't entirely on board with watching "The Poseidon Adventure" (geddit? "on board"?) so I decided to begin the 2018 movie calendar on my own.
I had the opportunity to see this movie in the theater soon after its general release. We were (I think) staying at Okuma in northern Okinawa and the family were all going out to see the movie. For some reason I decided I didn't want to go and stayed home. (Okay, that's how I remember it. I'll perhaps check in with the family. It seems strange that I would have stayed home alone at the age of nine, I don't know.) I remember hearing the family talk about the film after seeing it - John was strongly critical of the captain's handling of the disaster - "he should have steered into the wave and taken it bow-on." Anyway, I didn't see the movie until years later when I watched it on TV while we were living in the Deepwood subdivision in Reston. I had already seen scenes from the film over at my school friend Brian's house - he had the Viewmaster reels.
What about the movie grabbed me? It takes place on board an ocean liner, for one. We'd crossed the Atlantic on the SS United States only a few years before and that trip had made a big impression on me. The excitement of navigating the corridors and companionways, and standing at the rail looking out over the ocean was brought back by the early scenes in the film. The diegetic theme "The Morning After" is effectively used, performed twice in the early part of the film, first as the band rehearses in the ballroom as the staff sets the tables for dinner and then during the New Year's Eve party. I'd heard the song a zillion times on the radio before ever seeing the film, so hearing it in context was like recognizing an old friend among the passengers.
The plot is, in a way, an inversion (gedddit? "inversion"?) of the Titanic story. The ship is at the end of her career rather than on her maiden voyage, the owner's representative urges the captain to proceed at a dangerously fast speed (the ship is under-ballasted and topheavy), the natural threat is an active rather than a passive one - seismic sea wave vs. iceberg. There's wonderful tension in the scene leading up to the capsizing - the scene shifts back and forth between the New Year's Eve festivities in the ballroom and the bridge where the captain receives information about the approaching threat. The setting is given credibility by the fact that the early "upright" scenes were filmed aboard the very ship on which Paul Gallico's novel is based, The Queen Mary, then as now in permanent berth in Long Beach. The novel is based on an incident that occurred while that same liner was in military service as a troop carrier during World War II. With a record-breaking 16,000 people aboard, the ship was struck by a rogue wave and came within 3 degrees of capsizing.
"The Poseidon Adventure" codified the all-star cast disaster format launched by "Airport" two years earlier. During the early scenes we meet the cast of characters and become acquainted with their various life situations and personality traits which will prove significant when the disaster strikes. The early scenes are also an opportunity to try to guess who will be DB3A (dead by the third act). The "Poseidon" cast includes a Jewish couple hoping to eventually make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, a retired cop and his new wife (a former sex worker), a preacher who preaches self-reliance, a sad bachelor, and others. The preacher is the catalyst for the second half of the film in that he rallies a group of the survivors to try to make their way up through the capsized liner to where an outside rescue is most likely to happen.
I love this movie and I think it's a cracking good adventure. If some scenes are a bit melodramatic, the spectacle is amazing and the scenario really pulls one in and convinces. The capsizing scene is fantastic and horrifying - a chaos of tumbling bodies and furniture. The logistics of escape are intriguing: how to get Susan down from her perch on the underside of a table affixed to the former-floor-now-ceiling of the Grand Salon. How to get up and out of the Salon ("The Christmas Tree!"). The survivors face an amazing array of challenges and obstacles - the fire in the kitchen, the underwater swim to the engine room, the dizzying heights of the vertical shaft. Yes, some of the scenes are melodramatic and some of the performances are blustery, but I'm still moved by Belle's and the preacher's sacrifices and by Nonnie's reluctance to abandon her brother's body.
Perhaps "The Poseidon Adventure" IS a disastrous choice with which to ring in the new year - but one could argue that it's all uphill from here.
Plans to see "Baby Driver" with our neighbors the Stangs were put on hold until later in the week. Paul and I made bourbon and gingers (bourbons and ginger?) and settled in to watch "The Shining". Snow was falling outside and the wind was once again audible in the exhaust chimney over the kitchen stove. Paul's Dad had been over earlier that day for cribbage and Paul's wonderful chicken tortilla soup.
When did the film make it onto our calendar? It had already, of course, been a staple of "Scary Movie Month" when we set up a theater in the garage in the lead-up to Hallowe'en. Paul and I have a crazy scheme of fashioning a movie screen out of snow on the patio and projecting the movie through the windows of the breezeway. That's certainly more feasible now that the breezeway is winterized and has a baseboard heater. We'll do that one of these years, I hope. In the meantime, "The Shining" serves as an antidote (or an intensifier) for cabin fever - we usually watch it sometime in January or February, preferably during weather so awful there's not a question of doing anything outside.
I first saw "The Shining" at the Fairfax Circle Theater in Northern Virginia in 1980, during its first run. I remember it being the scariest movie I'd seen to date. "Dressed to Kill", which I saw the same year at that same theater was close, but I think "The Shining" took the biscuit. It still holds up really well (whatever Katie and her friends might think). The scariest moment for me is, without a doubt, when Danny rounds that corner and sees the Grady sisters standing at the end of the next hallway. After their first appearance in the game room on Closing Day, one keeps wondering when they'll come back and when they do, it's pretty freakin' scary. Jack's incursion into Room 237 is probably the runner-up.
I'd read the Stephen King novel in high school and, for a while, found some aspects of Kubrick's version problematic. In the book, the evil entity in the hotel slowly works its way into Jack's mind and one witnesses his gradual descent into madness. In the film, the same character, as played by Jack Nicholson, seems batshit crazy from practically his first scene. There's far more backstory in the novel with respect to the various manifestations in the hotel. Kubrick includes some brief, tantalising references: the scrapbook on Jack's typing table (in the novel, the scrapbook he finds in the basement serves to convey much of the hotel's history), Jack's Stovington t-shirt (the school where Jack worked in New England), the glimpse of Roger and Horace through the doorway of one of the rooms (Horace Derwent was the original developer of the hotel and Roger his lover). I guess that's par for the course for Kubrick who neglects opportunities to explain the title of "A Clockwork Orange" and the nature of the satellites seen early in "2001: A Space Odyssey". I still don't know what he was driving at by showing Jack in the antique party photo at the end of the film. "You've always been the caretaker" says Grady to Jack earlier in the film - something to do with that, I suppose. For me, it goes against the idea that the hotel absorbs the psychic energy of its victims so that they haunt the hotel forever, not that they've somehow always been a part of it.
After decades of almost uniformly crap film adaptations of King's horrow novels, "The Shining" has, by a kind of adaptation attrition, become a classic. Kubrick's imagery is so wonderful, I've long since stopped being bothered by any thematic or storytelling wonkiness. Seeing it again this year, I was newly astonished by the amazing sets, not only of the hotel's interior (based not on the Timberline but the Awhanee) but the exterior as well. Only the long establishing shots were filmed at the Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood - the exterior scenes were shot using a full-size recreation of the lodge (well, a fiddled version of the facade, anyway) on a soundstage. The scene where Wendy pushes Danny out the bathroom window to slide down the snowdrift is astonishingly beautiful and the steadicam shots which follow Danny on his Big Wheel through the corridors of the hotel and then on foot through the snowy hedge maze are just amazing.
Another favorite bit is the wonderful series of aerial tracking shots that opens the film. While a synthesizer "Dies Irae" booms away on the soundtrack, the viewer is made to glide above astonishing vistas in the American West, soaring over an island in a lake, along mountain ridges, and then swooping down alongside Jack's yellow VW beetle as it follows the curve of a mountain road. King references "The Haunting of Hill House" in his novel and the car's progress towards it's doom-ridden destination recalls for me Eleanor's trip to the house at the beginning of Shirley Jackson's novel.
Our go-to Mardi Gras movie takes place in New Orleans but has no scenes set during Mardi Gras, strangely.
I was surprised to see "The Big Easy" described on an online review site as a "comedy-drama". There are certainly some comic moments but I think of it as a crime drama with a bit of comic relief. I first saw it in the theater during its original run. I think I introduced Paul to it (is that right, Paul?).
Historically, our Mardi Gras observance consisted of making jambalaya and watching "The Big Easy" while eating said jambalaya washed down with lashings of hurricanes. Oh, and I'd usually make a big cinnamon roll which would serve as our king cake. This year, however, we'd agreed to host a bunco party for a group of our friends. Rich had hosted prior bunco parties but, as he was going to be out of town, we volunteered to host in our newly renovated house. As the party was taking place on the Sunday before Mardi Gras, we decided to adapt our tradition to provide a theme for the gathering. Paul bought some wonderful decorations and jazzed up the spaces where the four bunco tables were set up (living room, breezeway, basement). I bought a couple of cookie cutters (fleur-de-lis and mask) and, along with the jambalaya and other foods, made and decorated some fun Mardi Gras cookies. The party was a big hit and was a wonderful inauguration of our redesigned space. We had plenty of jambalaya left over, along with one of the chocolate-bourbon-pecan pies I'd made. On the Friday that week, after going out for a fish fry at the Valley Inn with a group of friends, Paul suggested we watch "The Big Easy" to round out the evening. So, out came the jambalaya, the pie, and the Abita beer, and in went the dvd!
The film opens with the main titles superimosed over aerial footage of the waterways below New Orleans accompanied by the song "Zydeco Gris-Gris" by Beausoleil. The song provides a wonderful intro to the feel of the movie - it begins with just percussion, a drumbeat and cymbals, then a fiddle joins in, then the accordion and the rest of the instruments. The music transitions from tentative and spare to rich and joyful, while the footage takes us from day into night as the camera tracks from wilderness waterways up the river to the city. The titles end with a staggered zoom down into the Piazza d'Italia where a body floats face-down in the fountain. Yeah, it's a great title sequence. It draws one in, sets the scene and the tone, and asks the question that defines the plot of the film: "who is he and why is he lying dead in a public fountain?"
That question is answered in an intriguing and humorous fashion as the plot follows an Internal Affairs investigation by District Attorney Anne Osbourne (Ellen Barkin) into possible police corruption within the New Orleans police department. Her main contact in the department is Remy McSwain (Dennis Quaid), a brash young lieutenant detective. Early on in the story, it's revealed that there is indeed a certain amount of corruption: the "Widows and Orphans" fund siphons off crime scene cash and protection money - but is it a sign of deeper misconduct? Is there indeed a territory war going on between the mafia and the African-American gangs or is it being manufactured by bad actors, possibly within the police force?
The dialogue is very snappy. In a wonderful performance as Remy's defense attorney, Charles Ludlam greets Remy's mother (Grace Zabriskie) with the line "it's delightful to finally meet you in the flesh" - the lasciviousness with which he says "flesh" has to be heard to be believed. When Anne explains to Remy's mother that the reason she's unconventionally dressed at the party is that she was out running, Zabriskie responds with utter incomprehension: "Runnin'?" During their first lovemaking session, Anne admonishes Remy: "Stop doing that." "Doing what? That?" "No, that."