Cinema Hype

I’m pretty sure I can state the essence of Junebug in fifteen words or fewer, but I’m also pretty sure what I have to say is not the same as what writer Angus MacLachlan would say about his movie, or even want to hear about it. I’m also convinced that I speak for the people. Want to hear it?

Him, paraphrased: Junebug is about connection and lack of connection, about family, and about the fragmentation of modern life.

Me: Junebug is about Amy Adams and her enduring talent and general awesomeness.

If nothing else, I believe I have the Academy voters on my side: they nominated Adams’s performance for Best Supporting Actress in 2005, and not for nothing. Her performance is an early indication of what she does best: committing fully to being the sweetest (but not the brightest) girl in the world. For example:

I’m not going to lie: Junebug might have been called The Movie Where Amy Adams Makes Me Laugh and Cry, and Not Much Else Happens. She’s just that good, and the material works hard for her. To be fair, the rest of the cast also puts in a good effort. Embeth Davidtz goes above and beyond her usual cool-as-a-cucumber routine—she and Adams work some surprisingly good chemistry—and Ben McKenzie and Alessandro Nivola do what they can. But the script ultimately doesn’t help them out. Even if the performances are good, there’s not enough story articulated to include the viewer. It’s like trying to read MacLachlan’s mind, as if he had everything planned out but misjudged the amount of information the audience would need to stay connected, and the overall sense is more one of frustration than anything else—we want to know, but we’re left trying to follow threads that don’t really lead anywhere. If MacLachlan really was going for lack of connection, he got it. Too bad, too.

Amy Adams, Embeth Davidtz, Alessandro Nivola, Ben McKenzie, Junebug, Best Supporting Actress 2005, Angus MacLachlan

I had to wonder a little this weekend about the Best Picture nominee list in 1938. There must have been an intense historical epic in the running, right? A gut-wrenching war story? A too-long biopic? So how did a sweet little dramedy like You Can’t Take it With You end up with the golden statuette? Can you imagine if Juno had beaten out No Country for Old Men this last March? The 1938 ceremony must have been something like that.

You Can’t Take it With You is almost comical in its Capra-ness. This is right in the middle of his prime, after It Happened One Night and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and before Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Arsenic and Old Lace, and It’s a Wonderful Life, and it combines some of his favorite things: the common man, David and Goliath, the desperation of true love, the joy of community. It even takes place in a house that looks suspiciously like the Baileys’ in It’s a Wonderful Life, and stars Jimmy Stewart.

This is a movie that, in a sense, hasn’t aged all that well. Audiences—and especially Oscar voters—like to think they’ve grown over the years, and You Can’t Take it With You is a fantastically simple story. Whether or not films have grown more emotionally complex since 1938, Capra’s world feels out of pace and out of place, like sincerity has no place in our moviegoing world. On the other hand, well, it’s delightful. Spoiler alert: the good guys win and the bad guys become good guys, and Jimmy Stewart is adorable, and there’s amateur ballet and a harmonica duet and a healthy dose of (literal) fireworks. Capra takes this funny, noisy, lovable family out of their own living room and into the audience’s, din and all. And seeing them so close up, it’s hard not to smile a little at their scrapes and their can-do attitude and the way everything works out. We get their snappy dialogue and the carefulness of their characterization along with the general hilarity of being part of the family—it turns out that behind the fun, somebody knew what they were doing all along, such that the Sycamore-Vanderhof household is not only more fun than the suits they’re up against, but than their competitors in other movies as well. And that is an accomplishment: something to smile about in the Best Picture slot. Slick, Capra. Real slick.

Next on Project 501: Gone with the Wind (1939)

For more on the origins of Project 501, click here. For all Project 501 posts, click here.

You Can’t Take It With You, Moss Hart, Frank Capra, Jimmy Stewart, James Stewart, It’s a Wonderful Life, Oscar Best Picture winners, Best Picture, 1938, classic movies

I think I first knew I’d love Once when I watched the Oscars. “Falling Slowly” won for Best Song, and then there was that incident with Glen Hansard using all of Marketa Irglova’s talking time to give a wholly endearing victory speech, prompting Jon Stewart to let her come out and give her own adorable and inspirational remarks. I don’t have a ton of experience with low-budget Irish indie-music romantic dramas, but somehow this confluence of events—these people, rather—appealed to me.

Deep down, Once isn’t so far off the romance-movie track, complete with one especially improbably-lit scene involving a grand piano and an unfinished song. But then, if you can believe it, it’s also far simpler than most of what makes it to the theater: Boy meets girl, boy likes girl, girl likes boy, boy and girl record music together. Something like that. In fact, the straight-arrow plot is refreshing, considering the obvious and recitable formula we see in so many studio romances. Once lacks wacky friends, over-witty dialogue, and any kind of mid-wedding/pre-flight confrontation at the end—it turns that standard on its ear, actually—but instead, it has feeling and timing and a kind of quiet watchfulness that’s like a good, bittersweet folk song. (It’s also worth mentioning that this is a musical—not a massive dance-numbers-in-the-streets musical, but a story told through music. Be prepared.)

One of the best and most surprising parts of Once is how Hansard and Irglova—both professional musicians—wear the hat of “actor” so convincingly; neither comes across half as self-consciously as half the trained actors in Hollywood. If someone told me that Hansard—who looks, kind of hilariously, like a combination of Hugh Laurie and Dr. Cox from Scrubs—were the only lonely Irish musician in Dublin (or at least the loneliest Irish musician in Dublin), I’d probably believe it. Irglova sings and plays the piano beautifully, but even more importantly in this instance, she sparks. She’s the chemistry behind the movie; the light and warmth she brings to her onscreen relationship with Hansard isn’t far off from what she brings to their songs. This is a movie where the main characters don’t even have names (the credits call them “Boy” and “Girl”), but where character is built from the inside out and speaks without shouting, and the writing and acting mesh so that all the audience gets is ambience, in the best way.

Check out Once. You’ll get a song and a story stuck in your head, but you probably won’t mind too much.

Once, Glen Hansard, Marketa Irglova, The Frames, folk music, Dublin, Irish movies, Oscars, Best Song, Falling Slowly, Jon Stewart, Hugh Laurie, Scrubs

A friend of mine said recently of Michael Moore, “He’s one of those guys that you wish you disagreed with.”

It’s true. In Sicko, Moore’s reputation precedes him (one person in the film, when denied coverage by Cigna HMO, mentioned his name in a letter and mysteriously received treatment shortly afterwards). Ironically, Sicko is probably his least intrusive movie so far. Moore has done his homework and offers plenty of film and textual evidence to make his points, but stays away from the hounding and ambush tactics we’ve seen from him before. On the other hand, maybe he didn’t need to follow anybody around: plenty of people approached him with their stories.

That’s the thing about Michael Moore: he’s annoying personally, but like Moore himself, his movies don’t take no for an answer. The barrage of examples in Sicko, both of the failure of American health care and of the successes of national health care abroad, is constant, fascinating, and heartbreaking. Like any sensible and determined documentarian, Moore clearly edits footage to suit his own message, but what makes it into the movie (people whose children died after being refused care at an HMO emergency room; Ground Zero volunteers with respiratory problems who can’t get proper treatment; the elderly and indigent removed from Los Angeles hospitals and dumped on Skid Row wearing only hospital robes; the list goes on and on) is impossible to ignore, and it’s right there on film, as plain as day. It’s the audience’s job to be savvy and to make a decision: How much salt needs to go down with this movie?

Moore’s sensibility helps and hurts Sicko in equal-ish measure. His reputation for rousing rabbles certainly helped the movie at the box office, which is what Moore wants—increased attendance means increased money for him and an increased awareness of his message. In a sense, people are heading to the theater to see Moore himself, and he knows it, which is why his movies tend to be so determinedly first-person. On the other hand, watching Moore almost requires listening separately with each ear: one ear for the message of the film and one ear for Moore himself, his tactics and his (fairly shameless) editing tricks. The two cross paths in a sliver of combined sensitivity and common sense. That’s where, with any luck, the audience will end up as well.

It’s hard to say whether Sicko could have existed outside the realm of Moore’s body of work. Plenty of filmmakers could have taken an interest in the health-care industry; most probably couldn’t have made as a big a splash as he did. And for somebody who likes the splash, who thrives on the splash as much as he does, that’s what counts.

Sicko, Michael Moore, documentary

I tried not to put off watching The Great Ziegfeld, the Best Picture for 1936. After all, I’d just gotten back my momentum after quitting and starting again hiatus, and I do love a musical with large, expensive song-and-dance numbers. But then Pauline Kael had to go and say mean things about it—”It goes on for a whopping three hours, but through some insane editing decision Fanny Brice is cut off in the middle of singing ‘My Man’…a lavish, tedious musical biography,” she said—and it languished by the DVD player for a few weeks before I finally summoned the strength to watch it.

Kael gets the salient points right: lavish, musical biography, three hours, Fanny Brice cut off mid-song. As for the “tedious” comment…maybe, but to be fair, nothing here is either more or less compelling than any other overlong biopic. If anything, The Great Ziegfeld (the story of Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld, of The Ziegfeld Follies fame) is probably more the granddaddy of movies like Ali and The Aviator than anything else. Nothing really happens, per se, but then that’s sort of the problem with a lot of biopics: people with interesting lives don’t necessarily adhere to the kind of beginning-middle-end sequencing that we’re so used to. Aren’t all biopics at least a little boring?

Then there’s the catch-22 of the musical numbers. The Great Ziegfeld is three hours and six minutes long, and punctuated by examples of Ziegfeld’s famously extravagant musical numbers. By fast-forwarding, the impatient viewer can shorten the running time by twenty minutes, easy (by “musical numbers” we’re not talking “They’re Doing Choreography”; more like enormous, round parade floats rotating onstage). But fast-forwarding here is a little like munching on raisin bread and eating around the raisins. If you’re going to watch three hours of this guy’s life, shouldn’t the musical numbers sweeten the deal? I suppose it depends on the crowd and the crowd’s affinity for ladies singing under parasols. I’ll leave it up to you.

As for Kael and the Fanny Brice complaint, I’ve got to agree, and extend it to the supporting cast. William Powell doesn’t do much to distinguish himself here as Ziegfeld, but he’s surrounded by apparent geniuses doing what they do best. First, there’s Ray Bolger, who played the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz three years later, practically dancing holes in the stage; then there’s Luise Rainer, who won the award for Best Actress (and won again the next year), as Ziegfeld’s star-struck first wife. And finally there’s Brice, who’s like watching Gilda Radner’s grandmother, and who’s like a jolt of comic energy in the middle of all the languid chorus girls and their parasols. Fantastic.

With 82 years of hindsight since the 1936 Academy Awards, it’s fairly obvious that The Great Ziegfeld had to win Best Picture. It was MGM’s most expensive movie to date—production cost $2 million—and the investment paid off in terms of spectacle and later in terms of box office success. Maybe it wasn’t the best picture of the year (surely also-ran My Man Godfrey beats it for plot and dialogue?), but it sure was the biggest.

The Great Ziegfeld, Florenz Ziegfeld, 1936, Academy Awards, Project 501, William Powell, Luise Rainer, Ray Bolger, Fanny Brice

I finally saw The Notebook this weekend. Do you think they’re going to take away my Girl Card and my pearls, since it took me so long? It’s just one of those movies that’s supposed to call to women like some kind of subliminal siren: if you’ve got a pair of X chromosomes, get thee to a theater! You will not be allowed in without a full box of tissues.

I hadn’t seen it, I think, because its reputation preceded it. Have you Googled “sappy movie” lately? Check it out and see how many Notebook-related hits come up. I like sad movies as much as the next girl, but it’s a certain type of sad that I go for—it’s got to be the sadness of regular life, a particular shade of blue, or it always seems vaguely masochistic to me. I don’t go for that kind of thing, especially with my $10 ticket price.

But—SPOILERS AHEAD!—here’s the thing. That was not the saddest movie I’ve ever seen. Not even close. If you want to know the truth, I didn’t even cry. I mean, come on! She ends up with the “right” guy! They end up so much together that they die together, hand in hand. And after a long and apparently happy life, that doesn’t seem like such a bad way to go, you know? The truly sad version of this movie would have ended with Rachel McAdams, James Marsden (who, poor guy, can never seem to get a date, which is absurd; look at him!), and their life of regrets and misery. I’m just saying. They’re going to have to come up with something better than that to melt my (apparent) heart of stone.

The Notebook, Nicholas Sparks, Rachel McAdams, Ryan Gosling, sad movies, sappy movies

I just saw an ad for the DVD release of Aliens vs. Predator. First of all, hasn’t that movie been out for, I don’t know, FOREVER? Or is it just one of those archetypal films—existing in the past, present, and future in the collective unconscious of the moviegoing public, perpetually on the brink of critical and financial success? (Note: Some research reveals that I am not crazy—in this respect, anyway—and that the concept of Alien vs. Predator has been around since the release of a 1989 comic book, and that the original film came out in 2004. This one’s a sequel. Was the first round a draw, or something? “Whew, I’m tired, and that tail-lashing thing you do is killing me. Can we rest up and meet again in 2007?” “Sure thing, man, and you’d better put a steak on that eye.”)

Secondly, where, exactly, did we get this mini-genre (genre-ette?) of the “vs.” movie? As a kid, our local video store had a copy of a movie called < href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0192175/">The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones, which seemed strangely aggressive to my eight-year-old self, and which raised a whole list of questions in my mind. Where did the Flintstones and the Jetsons meet? In the middle, say, 1988? Why the need for competition? Couldn’t my favorite stone-age family and my favorite space-dwellers live in peace in their respective eras? Why all the brawling? Can’t we all just get along?

Now, though, I think I see the appeal: it’s all about the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, and about the potential for total domination. We’re a culture that loves a good rumble, and it seems that this could be a healthy-ish and possibly hilarious outlet for our bloodlust. If, for example, we started a giant bracket system pitting film characters against each other, think of the fun! We could go by category and/or role type: Rhett Butler vs. Indiana Jones! The Mighty Ducks vs. The Bad News Bears! Cary Grant vs. George Clooney! Sure, there’d be some strange match-ups eventually, but someday, some character or another would emerge as the butt-kickingest film entity of all time. It’d be like American Idol meets Celebrity Death Match, and who wouldn’t watch that? Count me in.

A little background on Project 501: last year, I started watching and writing about all of the Academy Award Best Picture winners in chronological order and writing about them in this blog. After a prolonged break, I’ve resumed, making good time through the 1930s, and I’m well-intentioned towards (read: rewarding myself with) the 1940s. Anyone’s welcome to watch along—company on the road to theoretical good filmmaking is always appreciated.

Anyway.

In 1935, Mutiny on the Bounty must have been a blockbuster: an adventure on the high seas, packed with rough water, an even rougher villain (in theory), and Clark Gable steering the ship. The footage of the big ships rocking and rolling in the stormy seas is impressive, and it can only have cost a fortune. One might toss the word “epic” around.

For better or for worse, none of this can change the giggle factor. Historical correctness aside, Mutiny on the Bounty comes across as a dramedy at best, which might be insulting to the filmmakers, but it does make the movie go down smoother: the promise of upcoming hilarity makes the prospect of two hours of keel-hauling and swabbing the deck more palatable. Half of the actors, including Gable, flounce around in their Royal Navy uniforms sounding like they’re fresh out of Des Moines. Gable (who must have been self-conscious of his hippy figure, otherwise why did he always wear such enormous pants?) plays his usual charming good-guy self, except when he tries to play Master and Commander and gets all shouty and breathy. And don’t even get me started on the Tahiti love-interest sequences—cringe-worthy, and maybe the most entertaining parts of the movie. Who doesn’t love that soft-focus filter?

If there’s a take-away from Mutiny on the Bounty (besides “don’t enslave your crew”), it’s probably the transformation in villains over the last seventy years. Today, Bligh would be a mustache-stroker, and probably chewing on the scenery; as it is, he’s kind of a dope. A mean dope, certainly, but Charles Laughton’s big eyes and lips and his knobby nose make him look more bewildered than dangerous. His performance is fine, but by today’s standards it’s remarkably understated. Might the movie have aged better with a more ramped-up villain? Maybe, though overacting isn’t really what this cast needs.

Next up: The Great Ziegfeld and The Life of Emile Zola. Oh, you’re so jealous. Don’t lie.

Project 501, Oscar winners, Mutiny on the Bounty, Clark Gable, Charles Laughton, sailing, mutiny

When making an exciting but long-overdue comeback, is it best to sneak in the side door or to march up the front steps, flaunting one’s own late but eminent worth? We at CH are all for the latter—being occasionally late ourselves, not that we’d ever admit it—and so we say: Project 501 is back! It’s been a long vacation, but the chronological Oscar train is running once again, and so we’re starting up with the 1934 Best Picture winner, It Happened One Night. Like, now.

Feeling as I do about the current state of romantic comedies, my curmudgeonly little heart watched It Happened One Night and wondered why they don’t make ‘em like that anymore. In fact, I’ve decided that they do make ‘em like that anymore—or, in any case, they try. In fact, I’m testing the theory that all modern romantic comedies are the inheritance, or maybe imitators, of this one movie.

There are plenty of things in It Happened One Night that aren’t so common to the modern romantic comedy. Long, chatty scenes, for one thing. Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable spend a lot of time together, talking the whole time, and we’re there to see it all. No quick cuts here; just talk, talk, talk. These two are what the average therapist might call “verbal processors.” Indeed. There are also twin beds (how Pushing Daisies!), showing some leg to speed up the hitchhiking process, and—spoiler ahead—a total lack of kissing at the end, which generally doesn’t fly today.

But there are also lots of things that we see over and over again in romantic comedies generally, and maybe it’s a case of doing those things better rather than a case of doing them first—i.e. I’m not claiming these were new story elements, even in 1934—but it’s a little uncanny seeing a million other well-known and well-worn tropes played out in this one story. There’s the falling-asleep-on-the-other-person’s-shoulder bit, the pretend-marriage-to-distract-skeezy-stranger thing, and most importantly, the race to prevent a tragic misunderstanding and therefore save the relationship (Notting Hill, anyone?). Gable and Colbert are perfectly adorable—who knew pre-Rhett Butler misogyny Gable was so cute?—and they play all of these iconic scenes in such a way that imitation is inevitable. This may be the token romantic comedy, the Juno of its day, but it’s aged well and made its mark. Nicely done.

Next up: Mutiny on the Bounty! More Clark Gable!

It Happened One Night, Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Notting Hill, Juno, Oscar winner, Best Picture, 1934, Project 501

I wish Eagle vs. Shark had come along a few years ago. It just doesn’t seem fair: make a movie about love among the socially awkward and you’re always going to be trailing along behind Napoleon Dynamite, regardless of what you were aiming at in the first place.

In lots of ways, Eagle vs. Shark is a better movie than Napoleon Dynamite. Or maybe it’s just made of slightly stronger stuff: it’s heavier, sadder, funnier in parts, and it has a clearer plot arc. The leading man, Jarrod Jemaine Clement, now of Flight of the Conchords), is like Napoleon with trust issues and a post-high school blood vendetta, and his long-suffering love interest, Lily (Loren Horsley), is therefore required to be even more redemptive by the power of her love and devotion. So maybe it’s like Napoleon Dynamite for grown-ups.

So that’s the bad news: we’ve seen some of this before, and even when it’s funny, the recycled-air feeling doesn’t quite go away. The good news is that the parts we haven’t seen are really pretty good. Writer/director Taika Cohen does an impressive job of letting Jarrod be utterly off-putting and then using Lily’s lovability to make up for it: seen through her forgiving eyes, he becomes understandable, at least, even if he’s still being a complete twit. And he is a complete twit much of the time. But there’s something refreshing about a movie that doesn’t feel the need to prove that its characters are cool, or that they’ve somehow become cool over the course of the two hours you’ve spent with them, and Eagle vs. Shark doesn’t put itself out trying to convince us. Maybe that’s the point: these people were awkward when they met, and they’re still awkward, and yet here they are, trying to work things out. And trust me: if they can, anybody can.

Eagle vs. Shark, Flight of the Conchords, Jemaine Clement, Loren Horsley, Taika Cohen, DVD review

I just finished watching In Her Shoes, which I’d requisitioned from Netflix after finishing the book over New Year’s in the desert. Most of my deep thoughts on this movie fall somewhere in the “where can I get a wedding dress like that?” range, but there is one really very serious thing I’d like to talk about:

In what kind of universe is Mark Feuerstein not worthy of being a girl’s first choice?

I get that Simon Stein is a winner in the end, and that we’re supposed to believe that Rose is just too wrapped up in her own misery to notice. But do you look at this guy:

and think “Wow, he’s not really cute enough to get a date”? I just don’t think that’s a universe in which I can exist.

Mark Feuerstein, In Her Shoes, Toni Colette, Jennifer Weiner

Real Women Have Curves is not a surprising movie. Ana, a high school senior in East Los Angeles, feels pulled towards a life outside of her family and her neighborhood, but lacks the resources and support to actually get there. In the end, she works in her sister’s sweatshop for the rest of her life, gains zero respect for the women in her family, never falls in love, and remains trapped below an educational and economic glass ceiling based on the inherent drawbacks of the capitalist economy. The end.

Kidding.

The first part is true, of course, and we at CH bet you can guess a thing or two about how everything plays out. But a fairly obvious ending doesn’t make the journey any less pleasant, and anyway, the revelation of America Ferrera’s first movie is no small thing. We’ve been fans of Ferrera’s since she sobbed at Bradley Whitford (who shouldn’t be anybody’s father, because he’s Josh Lyman and that’s that) over the phone in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants–no offense to the rest of the sisterhood, but she routinely acts circles around them, even Amber Tamblyn, of whom we are also fond–but she carries this movie, dramatic substance and all, without even breaking a sweat. It seems risky, in retrospect, for a film to rest on the shoulders of an “and introducing…”-type actor, but she’s so graceful and so uninhibited onscreen that, in practice, we can’t imagine things going any other way. We’ve never been surprised at Ferrera’s awards-show dominance in the last year, and from now on we’ll only be surprised when she doesn’t end up on the dais.

Now can she come over for a sleepover? We’ll make popcorn!

Real Women Have Curves, Netflix, America Ferrerra

The opening of David Gordon Green’s 2003 indie film All the Real Girls is breathtaking: a young man and an even younger woman stand on a sidewalk at night, or maybe it’s in an alley, and share their first kiss–on the palm of the hand. It’s the beginning of a love story, but it feels like it might actually be the middle, or maybe getting towards the end. It feels real. Everything’s getting off to a sweet, kooky, and beautifully filmed start.

And then the rest of the movie happens. Turns out the man, Paul (Paul Schneider), is a notorious womanizer in a small North Carolina town; she, Noel (Zooey Deschanel), is an eighteen-year-old virgin home from boarding school. They fall in love. If that were the end of it, things would be fine–flawed characters trying to figure out true love makes for a compelling story, surely enough to fill the entire hour and forty-eight minutes. It’s all the little extra tacked-on things, the obvious indie-film quirkier-than-thou elements, that are problematic. Along with Paul and Noel, we get their families and friends, small-town rivalries and moments with the local kids. It’s supposed to be realistic, weird in the way that the world is weird, but instead it comes across as studied and, in the worst cases, a little embarrassing. As the story unfolds and becomes more and more dramatic, things get worse and worse. Patricia Clarkson’s even there, doing what she does best as the sad, wasted mother. This is definitely her kind of movie.

The frustrating thing here is that so much of what’s wrong isn’t really wrong. It’s not that Green doesn’t know a good thing; it’s more that he doesn’t know where to stop: the supporting characters are too quirky, the dialogue is too lyrical. It feels indulgent, like Green couldn’t bear to cut out the bits he liked best (though we hear that an entire first act about Paul’s philandering past was cut during editing), so that everything’s just a little bit precious. On the other hand, when he leaves well enough alone, some truly lovely moments shine through.

And there are some things to love in All the Real Girls. Zooey Deschanel (next up as Janis Joplin!) and Paul Schneider are both excellent, natural on camera and transparent in a way that probably gives the script an extra measure of grace. It’s a beautiful film, all lit with gold and interspersed with images of North Carolina in the fall. The score is simple, guitar-y, evocative of autumn and mountains and smoke. There’s that first scene, and some other simple, sad moments sprinkled throughout. In some ways, it’s exactly what it should be. And in some ways, it’s way too much.

All the Real Girls, DVD reviews, Zooey Deschanel, Paul Schneider, David Gordon Green

1. Kate Beckinsale, pre-hot. Back before she was bombed at Pearl Harbor and sold a copy of Love in the Time of Cholera, she was young and unpolished and very, very charming. We find that she does “pert, straightforward ingenue” surprisingly well, and her performance indicates that she has, in fact, read the novel. Extra points for getting to read the line, upon reuniting with her true love, “Charles, you have got heavenly teeth!”

2. Besides the hilarious novel by Stella Gibbons, it’s the title of an old episode of Are You Being Served?, which I didn’t understand until recently. I feel much better now. Thank you, Netflix!

3. Stephen Fry–yes, as in Dr. House’s former comedy partner–perpetually trying to chase Beckinsale down in an attempt to kiss her, ask her on a “walk” (if you…know what we mean), tell her she’s inhibited, and ask her, “Miss Poste, do you believe women have souls?” Oh, Mr. Mybug. Where would we be without you?

4. A truly creepy opening scene that has little to do, tonally, with the rest of the film–there’s nothing scary about Cold Comfort Farm, except maybe the general squalor, but Flora soon gets that in order–but gets things off to a good start, and introduces the ubiquitous “something nasty in the woodshed!”

5. Wonderful casting, both of the stars-at-the-time and the stars-in-the-future variety: Joanna Lumley doing her Ab-Fabbiest thing, Ian McKellen preaching hellfire and damnation, Rufus Sewell looking hot in a tux and probably doing some acting as well, etc. Hilarity ensues.

It must be fall. When your friendly neighborhood movie blogger can’t even identify the http://www.tvondvdbuzz.com/top-dvds-for-the-week-of-september-24/top-selling DVD for the week without running off to IMDB, the hot season is clearly over.

That’s pretty much how it goes: I must have blinked and missed We Are Marshall, the trailer for which left only a shadow of an impression on my mind, despite a) being a sad, inspirational death-and-football movie and b) having a pretty awesome cast, including David Strathairn and Ian McShane. (Question: Is there an issue when a healthy young woman would movie-stalk Strathairn over, say, Matthew Fox? Though just barely. And for very different reasons.) It was one of those movies that rings a bell somewhere deep in scary interior of my brain, but I thought it hadn’t come out yet, or had come out a decade ago, or worse yet, I hadn’t thought of it at all. Perhaps they’d have done better with the Alive model? Everyone likes a good football movie (Hello, Rudy), but a football and cannibalism? Bring the Oscar voters running, people. Clearly, nobody asked me to attend those particular vision meetings, and aren’t they sorry now?

The rest of the list for this week isn’t much better. And so it goes: the Oscar releases are already out and the summer blockbusters won’t arrive until Christmas. It’s us, our sofas, the “movies we feel like we should watch” sections of our Netflix queues, and a long, bleak, desert-y stretch of new-release wasteland. Either that, or we can spend $10 to watch the fancy trailers for the the theatrical releases we will want to see as soon as the studio schedule sees fit.

It’s gonna be a long fall.

DVD sales, We Are Marshall, David Strathairn, Ian McShane, Matthew McConaghey, Matthew Fox, football movies