With this selection, the watch-list for the Marriage and the Movies course finally enters the modern era, by which I arbitrarily take to mean movies that were made after I was actually born. The power couple here is played by Meryl Streep, who looks astonishingly young in this movie, and Jack Nicholson, who looks pretty much looks the same as he always does. If you pay attention, you’ll also spot Kevin Spacey as a minor thug in his first ever film appearance.
I have no idea how this film ended up in our to-watch list. Ordinarily this means that my wife added it to the list but she can’t recall where it came from either. Since she almost always adds romantic or animated films to the list and since this isn’t a cartoon despite its poster, I assumed that this was a romantic film.
Just because I thought very highly of Brazil and heard that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is both a cult hit and quite a unique visual experience, I was rather looking forward to watching it. As it turned out, this was certainly unique and not quite in the way I expected. It also really isn’t all that good, which probably explains why its Rotten Tomatoes rating hovers around the low 50s.
This is easily the most anticipated release of the year and, as the follow-up to the incredibly successful first film which I couldn’t stop gushing about, expectations for it were very high. The media blitz prior to its release was so relentless that it sometimes felt as if you’ve already watched most of the movie spread across the various teasers. Unfortunately while I’ve always suspected that this would have a hard time matching up to the first one, even those lowered expectations were largely dashed.
This pick for the Marriage in the Movies course is the longest one to date. At a full three hours long, it apparently qualifies as an epic and indeed includes both an overture and an intermission with orchestral scores! It’s also clearly an American propaganda film, made to bolster morale on the homefront while the Second World War was still raging. In most cases, that’s a recipe for a bad film yet Since You Went Away manages to be surprisingly effective and affecting.
As the biggest winner of last year’s Oscars, Birdman is a film that should automatically on any film aficionado’s must-watch list. But even apart from that I knew I wanted to watch it because it’s basically Michael Keaton playing a version of himself as a washed-up actor famous only for playing a superhero more than twenty years ago. Now that I’ve watched it, I’m glad to report that this is one of the rare occasions when the Academy pick for Best Film is absolutely the correct one.
Out of all of the all selections for the Marriage and the Movies course, this was the one that I looked forward to watching the most. Just imagine the thought of Alfred Hitchcock directing a marriage movie! As you might expect of the director and a film bearing the title Suspicion, it’s more about the shadow of murder hanging over a couple than a love story. I predict that the course’s professor will have interesting things to say about it!