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Medium: I Married a Mind Reader (2005)
WandaVision precursor
Time stands still where love is concerned, and also hate. This episode features Paul blackthorne, who went on to star in the Dresden files one of my favorite ended-too-soon TV series, and Frances farmer. Allison begins watching and then dreaming about episodes of an old '60s TV show - I Married a Mind Reader. She dreams herself into the show. An old crime is resurrected. This is a poignant episode, not at all frightening but very moving. And there is lots of fun to be had seeing the Reconstruction of another old 60s TV show, and then seeing it updated in someone's mind.
The Tree Behind the Church (2006)
Primitive, yes, but this film kept my attention
I came across this on the Palm On Demand channel and started watching what was described as a horror movie. A bunch of 20-something actors are trapped in an old church that's been turned into a theater, from which emanates loud booms, strange flickerings of light, and angry voices. I immediatey think this is setting me up for a low-budget Evil Dead type special effects extravaganza of murder and dismemberment.
The movie veers off in a totally different direction, far more interesting. The actors fall into unconsciousness, and upon awakening (or have they?) are possessed by ghosts in 19th-century dress who play out, on the stage of the converted church, a drama of forbidden passion, injured pride, violence and racial hatred.
Yes, the acting is primitive. Yes, the primary special effect -- a jittery, yellowish-lit "flashback" camera technique -- is annoying. But the play within a play acted out by ghosts is intriguing, and the plot-line has echoes of Candyman but with a more complex moral and philosophical struggle with themes of love, passion, vengeance and forgiveness.
All in all, I liked this little student film. Originality and a sense of purpose outweighed the primitiveness of the film-making.
The Fine Line Between Cute and Creepy (2002)
This is the reason I love short films..
Came home from work today to find my husband about two minutes into Rob Shane's fourteen minute live action short, "The Fine Line Between Cute and Creepy." What a hoot! I agree with the comment that favorably compared this film to "Melinda and Melinda", which I saw about a month ago. "Melinda" dragged. "Fine Line" zipped along. The pleasures and perils of love in the 21st millennium, explored succinctly and with skill.
Every time I see a really good short, I remember what cinema is all about. Thank you, Robert Shane.
Rae Stabosz
The Running Man (1963)
Romancing the Stone-type exotic location adventure but with a darker plot
This movie had the misfortune of being released just around the time of JFK's assassination, where it got swallowed up in the general grief of the time. It did not do well at the box office, and one of its publicity stunts backfired when Dallas police saw personal ads in the newspaper signed by "Lee" and asking to meet up at an appointed place. The police thought it might be a Lee Harvey Oswald connection, not a Lee Remick stunt -- and spent some time chasing down this blind alley.
I caught the film while flipping channels in the middle of the night and quite enjoyed it.
Laurence Harvey plays an airline pilot/owner who loses out when a two-days' late insurance premium lets his insurance company deny his legitimate claim after he crashes his plane in the sea, narrowly escaping with his life. An honest guy with a love of risk-taking and a mutually reciprocated passion for his beautiful wife, Lee Remick, he decides to get back at the insurance company by faking his own death, with his wife's reluctant collusion. She hopes that this will get his anger out of his system and give them enough money to live comfortably, which seems to be why she goes along with the scheme. But at heart she just wants a quiet, comfortable life, an "ordinary life", she tells him. He, however, takes to life at the edges quite wonderfully, and pretty soon he's all about living the high life and risking their freedom with additional swindling schemes.
Alan Bates plays the insurance investigator who comes round to the wife asking questions after her husband's "death". He has a whole Columbo thing going on, asking questions in an affable, bumbling way that always seems to indicate he knows more than he is letting on. He turns up again in Malaga, Spain, where the couple has gone with the insurance money to start their new life. Again, he's got the questions that could be innocent or could be a dogged inspector following his prey.
Harvey decides that the best way to keep an eye on Bates is to invite him along to enjoy the Malaga sun and surf with the two of them. The three of them hang out together, swimming and eating and drinking and enjoying what Bates says is his vacation time and Harvey claims is a working vacation. Remick is supposed to be the new widow, technically single, who gravitates to the orbit of the Australian rich guy that Harvey is impersonating.
At the movie's emotional core is, yes, a love triangle, as Lee Remick grows disenchanted with her husband's attraction to the James Bond lifestyle while discovering that Alan Bates likes museums and quiet walks, like she does, and seems to like her.
So it's cat and mouse between the two guys on two levels -- over the insurance money and over the woman. The Malaga locations are glorious and reminded me of the villages in Romancing the Stone where Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas run across weddings, dancing, and general romantic danger.
The movie doesn't take itself seriously, and the characters are conflicted in a way that you don't know what to hope for and what the final moral and romantic resolutions will be. Will the husband redeem himself? Will the wife stay true to him or fall in with the man who is on his tail? Harvey is not irredeemable and we do feel sympathy for him, and see that he is more oblivious to his wife's unhappiness than deliberately mean. He treats her as an extension of himself and just doesn't recognize that she has no interest in playing Bonnie to his Clyde.
Good flick. Not great, but good.
Death of a Scoundrel (1956)
George Sanders as a bad boy you love to hate (and hate to love)
I caught this on Turner Classic Movies this morning and found it completely mesmerizing. I'm not quite sure what the other reviewer meant when he/she wrote that real people in the 50's didn't talk this way. Real people don't talk like the folks in Gilmore Girls, but I love that show. Complex, witty dialogue attracts me and this movie has it in spades. George Sander's character is an unapologetic liar, seducer, perpetrator of financial fraud, yet he remains charming and watchable at all times. I compare this to his scoundrel role in All About Eve; that character gave me the creeps when he revealed the corruption under the charm and cynicism. In Death of a Scoundrel, the character instead inspires a whole range of emotions including, finally, pity.
I laughed out loud throughout this movie, as Sanders' rogue juggles multiple women. In one scene, his servant announces a rich woman (Zsa Zsa Gabor) has come to his house unexpectedly. He quickly ushers out the woman with whom he's been having tea and romancing. Zsa Zsa comes in and while exchanging pleasantries with him picks up one of the teacups, examines it for lipstick, and says "Beautiful cup" as she sets it down.
In another scene, he is romancing a married woman and invites her to lunch the next day. She comments that he is very bold, seeing as how she is married. He replies that he finds her too fascinating not to pursue. She says, "But I am attached!", and he replies, "I don't want to attach you, I only want to borrow you for a while." Very funny, melodramatic, and eminently watchable film.