Thoughts on It Could Happen to You

   

  On Tubi, I rewatched the 1994 romantic comedy It Could Happen To You, directed by Andrew Bergman (Honeymoon in Vegas, The Freshman), written by Jane Anderson (How to Make an American Quilt, The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio), and starring Nicolas Cage, Bridget Fonda, and Rosie Perez. It's based on a real-life story from 1984 where a cop and a waitress in Yonkers, N.Y., who were longtime friends, split the $6 million winnings on a lottery ticket that the cop shared with the waitress. While there was no romance between them, as both were longtime happily married to their partners (as the film ends with a disclaimer, each couple married over 30 years as of the film's release), in this movie, Nicolas Cage is a NYC cop named Charlie married to Rosie Perez's hairdresser character Muriel, and they live a modest life in Woodside, Queens. She wants a more upscale life, wanting him to make detective or make more money, while he's just fine playing stickball with the neighborhood kids and chatting with his cop partner and friend, played by Wendell Pierce. Bridget Fonda plays a waitress named Yvonne who is separated from her louse of a husband (Stanley Tucci), but cannot afford to get divorced, and had to declare bankruptcy because she is on the hook for his $12,000 credit card debt.

    Both are average working-class stiffs, and have a meet cute in the diner where she works, where Charlie is short on paying the tip, and offers to either double the tip or give half if he wins the lottery the next day. She brushes him off, but that night, he and Muriel win $4 million in the lottery, and much to Muriel's anger, he comes back to the diner, and presents Yvonne with the news that she won $2 million, which elates her, changing her life and having her give everyone in the diner celebratory ice cream scoops on their pie slices.

    The lottery winners become media sensations, making the cover of the New York Post several times throughout the film (this is explained more with Issac Hayes' character popping up throughout the film), and Muriel being more materialistic with buying furs and jewelry and looking into investment opportunities to increase their wealth, while Charlie often gives his money away to charitable acts, like renting a baseball stadium for the Woodside kids to play ball in, or Yvonne indulging in a mega-size jar of macadamia nuts as her splurge.

    The romance part is when Charlie and Yvonne spend more time together, slowly building an emotional affair, while he and Muriel, having been school sweethearts, are growing apart in having different values in life, and they just seem married in name only. So when Charlie and Yvonne's romance becomes more obvious, their story keeps making the New York Post cover, and when Charlie and Muriel have a heated divorce trial involving the lottery winnings, it only becomes more sensationalized in the media. 

    Though the film is set in the then-present of 1994, the film feels very old-fashioned, in a 1930s romantic comedy kind of way. The frequent updates with the newspaper headlines is very reminiscent of old Hollywood films that would do transitions with news headlines about the plot, and both Charlie and Yvonne seem more like old souls than contemporary people. The movie has a charm to it because the story could be set decades earlier and roughly still be the same, and it's endearing to watch.

    The film does have a mention of a more timely issue of the day, and it's a scene where Charlie comes to see Yvonne to tell her about the lottery winnings, and sees her being kind to a young male diner patron, who reads as queer-coded, with sunken, dark eyes and a pale pallor. Yvonne returns to Charlie, and he says, "He's got it, huh?" referring to the AIDS epidemic. Yvonne responds "Yeah, couple of years. He comes in a couple of times a week. He's starting to go downhill though, in and out of the hospital. What a world, huh? Makes you want to appreciate every moment." It's a sweet moment, and it convinces Charlie more to give her his half of the lottery winnings. 

    The film falters with the portrayal of Rosie Perez' character as a shrieking harpy, making her out to be a loudmouthed Hispanic stereotype, especially next to the white characters being more subdued, and it is a racist stereotype that makes her character seem really unlikable, whereas I emphasized with her because she wanted to learn more about investing opportunities to manage her wealth, and she had every right to be mad when Charlie would just throw money around without consulting her first, especially since the two of them and Yvonne would be obvious targets to get robbed since they were all so public with their spending. And since Charlie and Yvonne seemed to be clearly having an affair, and not hiding it, I also felt for her for being publicly cheated on. Muriel still pulled some dirty tricks during the divorce proceedings, but I couldn't see her character as the villain of the film, and felt the film would other her because she is a woman of color.

    Aside from that, I did like the film a lot. Nicolas Cage and Wendell Pierce made for a nice pairing as cop partners, with an ease between them, and Pierce felt like a more realistic person as a character actor, and would achieve greater fame from his role on The Wire several years later. And Seymour Cassel had a lot of charm as a older man flirting with Muriel on a millionaires' boat ride and giving her investment tips. The film is an old-fashioned romantic comedy that has an old Hollywood feel to it, and I found it lovely to watch.

Thoughts on The Boy and the Heron

 

    Today I saw Hayao Miyazaki's 2023 anime film The Boy and the Heron, (the original Japanese title translates to How Do You Live, referencing a 1937 novel by Genzaburo Yoshino but not an adaptation) which won the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature Film last week. It centers on a young boy named Mahito, who loses his mother during the Pacific War during World War II in a hospital fire, and two years later, his father marries his late wife's sister (as a tradition of widowers marrying their late wives' sister), and move to her rural estate from Tokyo, near the father's munitions factory. The estate has several elderly maids, who are excited to receive luxuries like chocolate and tobacco because of limited war rations. There. Mahito, struggling with grief and feeling depressed from his life being upended, made to accept his aunt as his new "mother," deliberately hits himself in the end with a rock after being bullied by classmates, as an act of self-harm and showing more of his pain on the outside, as well as a way to keep from going back to school. 

    At the estate, he meets a grey heron, who had led him to a sealed tower that was built by his granduncle, then later, now speaking, with human teeth and revealing another creature within the heron. His stepmother has been spirited away to another dimension, and the heron claims that he can take Mahito to her. Mahito is sure that it is a trap, but continues to follow the heron, with one of the maids, Kiriko, with him. There, they both enter into an underground world that plays with space and time, not just with Mahito and his stepmother and his mother, but with his granduncle, Kiriko, and a fire spirit. The heron, pelicans, spirits yet to be born, and large parakeets also play a big part in the different realms.

    It had been years since I had seen a Miyazaki film, and I'm only casually familiar with his films, having seen Spirited Away, Ponyo, and parts of Princess Mononoke and Kiki's Delivery Service. So I had forgotten how deep his films get into fantasy adventures, and get into layers involving family histories and legacies and confronting the pasts to mature towards the future. The film is based on Miyazaki's childhood, as he lost his mother as a child, his family left the city for the countryside during WWII, and his father worked for a company that was involved in the manufacturing of fighter plane components. So it is more of a coming of age film, focused on the relationship between a boy and his mother, and getting to communicate with her and say goodbye to her years after a sudden loss.

    It's an interesting film that I had to think about more, as well as read other analysis to understand. It's a film about self-acceptance, about accepting love from others and not isolating oneself, dealing with grief and loss, and finding meaning in uncertainty. I really liked the fire animation, which I thought was stunning and a beautiful mix of computer and two-dimensional animation. I liked being taken on the journey, seeing the strange fantasy worlds within worlds that Mahito goes through, and just going with it.

Thoughts on Inside Llewyn Davis, Cat People, and Rhubarb

    On Criterion, there is a curated collection of movies titled Cat Movies, all movies featuring cats in significant roles. I watched some over the weekend, and these are my thoughts on them:

    Inside Llewyn Davis (2013, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen). The Coen Brothers film that was Oscar Issac's breakout starring role, a look at the early 1960s folk scene in Greenwich Village in New York City, where Issac plays a struggling folk singer whose stubborn temper gets him in his own way, and causing him to make bad, short-term decisions that cost him any future success in the long run. Some are refusing to compromise to join a musical trio; rejecting royalties on a novelty song for a one-time payment of $200 and the song ends up a big hit; drunkenly blowing up at a performer and it coming back to bite him, and more. Issac gave a really great performance of a jerk loser who could sing and play, but didn't have any other charisma or talent to make him a standout folk singer.

    The cat is an orange cat that belongs to his friends, a cat that escapes out the door, locking Llewyn out, so he has to carry the cat around on the street and the subway while running his errands and checking up on his musical prospects. The cat later escapes again, and he chases it down the street, losing it, then finding it again, and feeling like the cat is giving him the runaround. It's fun seeing the orange cat, and Issac handled it well despite not liking cats in real life due to getting an infection from a cat bite. The Coens said the several cats they used on set were often difficult and hard to train, which is common for cats in Hollywood, with the exception of some well-known trained ones, like D.C. the Siamese cat in That Darn Cat in 1965. It will also be true for 1951's Rhubarb, which I also watched this weekend.

    Cat People (1942, dir. Jacques Tourneur) is a classic 1940s horror film about repressed sexuality and being an immigrant and feeling different than others, told with a lot of shadows and sound effects and innuendo that made it feel more haunting and intense than just scary. French actress Simone Simon starred as Irena, a Serbian emigre who comes to New York City and falls in love and marries a man named Oliver (Kent Smith), but is worried that because of an ancient curse, that she will become a feline predator if she gives in to physical desire and intimacy. She is repressed and stands out as the obvious outsider, including other cats and animals hissing and reacting defensively in her presence. 

    And when her husband and his assistant Alice (Jane Randolph) begin to fall for each other, Irena discovers the emotional affair, and follows Alice around, terrifying Alice with the shadows and growls of a panther. The film really stands out in those moments of fear, as Alice is being tormented but cannot actually see the danger, just walking faster at night while feeling stalked by something supernatural, and quickly getting into any available buses or cabs that she can find for safety.

    I really liked how this film played with a lot of shadowy imagery while using sound as horror, and how both Irena could be sympathetic as a werecat while also be a threat to another woman over jealousy. I had seen the 1982 remake, which benefited a lot from a looser standards on sexuality in film, as well as had excellent creature effects for the werecats, but this film is excellent for being a standout horror film in its repression and not showing everything onscreen.

    Rhubarb (1951, dir. Arthur Lubin) A silly screwball comedy about a millionaire who bequeaths his fortune and his Brooklyn baseball team to a feral cat he adopted, and makes the team's publicist (Ray Milland) be his guardian. This was a goofy comedy I watched today, and really enjoyed. A feral stray cat (played by Orangey, a Hollywood-trained cat that also appeared in Breakfast at Tiffany's as Cat) fights dogs and hoards golf balls, snarling and hissing at everyone, but the millionaire (Gene Lockhart) loves his tenacious spirit, and adopts him and turns him into a spoiled housecat. After the will is read out, his snobby and uptight daughter (Elsie Holmes) is horrified that she won't get the whole fortune as his closest heir (just $6,000 a year, which is equivalent to $71,000 today), and the loser baseball team is laughed at for being owned by a cat. The publicist works to spin things around for the team (including Leonard Nimoy in an uncredited early role) by seeing the cat as a good luck charm, only to find out his fiancée (Jan Sterling) is allergic to cats, and he's legally bound to take care of the cat.

    The cat becomes a media sensation to promote the team, and is brought to the games as a mascot, sitting with a leash on, with a rich old lady behind the seats to show off her cat to Rhubarb, and the whole thing just feels more embarrassing for a former mean street cat to be treated like a puppet for publicity.

    William Frawley, best known as Fred Mertz from I Love Lucy, was also in the cast as the baseball team's manager, and he would debut on I Love Lucy that same year. The film used fourteen cats besides Orangey, and also had difficulties keeping the cats trained, having multiple cats for different skills and talents. Orangey's real disposition was close to Rhubarb's, running away or scratching and biting actors, with a reputation as the "meanest cat," or a "real New York type cat." I liked this one as a silly movie to watch, that mostly just felt dumb and light to watch.

Thoughts on Little Odessa

    On Criterion, they have a collection of films by James Gray, and I’ve seen some of his films (Two Lovers, The Yards, We Own the Night), but never really got into his movies. I watched his 1994 directorial debut, Little Odessa, which I had heard of but didn’t know what it was about. It was a pretty intense and good crime drama starring Tim Roth as a hitman named Joshua who returns to his Brighton Beach hometown in Brooklyn (the title refers to the predominantly Ukrainian neighborhood of immigrants who moved there from Odessa, Ukraine), and has a complicated reunion with his family. His teenage brother Reuben (a solid Edward Furlong) still sees him as his older brother and wants to be close to him despite that Joshua has this cold, hardened exterior, and basically no soul left. Their mother (Vanessa Redgrave) is dying from brain cancer, and their father (Maximillian Schell) was abusive to his kids and is caring for his dying wife while having an affair with his girlfriend.

    I could see where a lot of Gray’s later films came from, as this had the fraught brother relationship from We Own the Night; the Brighton Beach setting of Two Lovers; and the guy with a shady past returns to his hometown and confronts his family of The Yards.

    For being then 25 at the time, Gray got a great cast for this film, and I liked how the film felt so insular in the Russian Brooklyn neighborhood and felt confining, and like a world away from anything else. It also felt of its time to watch because the characters openly smoke in the movie theater and don’t get hassled about it.

    It did make me laugh that Joshua kept making people promise not to tell others he was there, then being upset when others found out. He carried himself with slicked back hair, a long black leather coat, and a pissed off look on his face a lot, I think it was fairly obvious to anyone that he looked like a street hoodlum, and his presence wouldn’t be a secret.

    I could also see parallels with Furlong’s role here with his later teen brother role in American History X, where he looks up to his brother, who is a white supremacist and murderer, but still sees him as his brother, and takes the wrong influence from him. This role didn’t have Reuben want to be a gangster, but his ease with handguns seemed like a bad influence from his brother, as well as being around crime gangs in the neighborhood.

    I’m not always into these kind of crime drama movies, but this was interesting, and I included a scene of the brothers interacting.