Father of the Bride (1991)

Tonight and next Monday, TCM is running a two-night salute to comic actor Steve Martin. As it turns out, one of the movies that they're running is on my DVR thanks to my having recorded it during TCM's memorial tribute to Diane Keaton back at the end of January: Father of the Bride, which comes on tonight at midnight (so Technically May 12 in the Eastern time zone but the evening of May 11 in more westerly time zones).

Now, as you can probably guess, this is a remake of the 1950 film Father of the Bride starring Spencer Tracy as the father and Elizabeth Taylor as the bride. Indeed, the screenwriters on the original, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, get a writing credit here too. This time, it's Steve Martin as the father George Banks, with the late Diane Keaton as George's wife Nina. The two of them have a happy life in a Los Angeles suburb where George manages a comapny that makes athletic shoes. They've got a surprise baby who's now eight or nine (played by a young Kieran Culkin), as well as an adult daughter Annie (Kimberly Williams), who up until a few months ago was studying architecture in Rome for her master's degree. But the movie opens up with George doing a voiceover just after the wedding ended, and with the title, it's fairly obvious that the wedding is going to take place.

So we get the flashback to the day Annie returns from Rome. At the dinner table, she's got a big surprise for her father. While in Rome, she met a nice man who works as a "communications consultant". The two fell in love and have gotten engaged, which is a pretty big shock to Dad, who doesn't yet seem ready to "lose" his daughter to whom he's devoted in the way that fathers are to their daughters. Unsurprisingly, Dad also expects the worst as Annie's fiancé Bryan (George Newbern) comes over for a visit.

We're told from George's opening narration that everything's taken place over about four months, so we get the preparations for the wedding in a way that displays the truth of Murphy's Law: anything that can go wrong will. Annie and Nina want the best to the point of hiring a wedding planner Franck (Martin Short) who's an extreme parody. Franck's suggestions result in the price of the wedding going up and up to a point that seems a bit expensive even for today, not that I've priced out a wedding and reception recently. Bryan's parents are also wealthier than the Banks, which at least in George's mind creates a bit of conflict. And as in the original, there's even a point where Annie thinks of breaking off the engagement because she thinks Bryan has disrespected her.

As I said a few paragraphs ago, we already know from the beginning that the wedding is going to go ahead, and it seems as though everybody is going to live happily ever after, so the conflict of the plot, such as it is, involves exactly how we get to the joyous occasion and the reception. It's been an age since I've watched the original, but there are enough minor differences between the two versions.

I have to say that of the two, I think I prefer the original. They're both supposed to be comedies, but with Spencer Tracy leading the original, it's more of a gentle comedy. Steve Martin is certainly talented, but with his known quantity as a comedian, the result is something that often plays as a bit more zany. That's not necessarily bad, but I personally like the gentleness of the original more. The other thing in the remake that I think is a bit of a weakness is the enlargement of Martin Short's character. He's certainly a talented actor too, but Short is really overplaying his character.

Still, there's definitely a lot to enjoy about this version of Father of the Bride, and certainly anybody who's been through a wedding recently is going to like it.

Annie Hall

Another of the movies considered an all-time classic that I haven't blogged about here before is Annie Hall. I recorded it back in March when TCM ran it as part of 31 Days of Oscar, but never got around to watching it. I noticed in looking through the schedule that is has two airings on TCM in the coming week, one tomorrow (Nov. 27) at 6:15 PM, and the other on Dec. 2 at 1:45 PM, so I figured now was a good time to watch it and do a post on it.

Annie Hall is, I think, really the blossoming of Woody Allen playing neurotic New York types, with more emphasis on the neurosis than on the comedy surrounding his character the way that things like Bananas or Sleeper did. Here, Allen plays Alvy Singer, a comedian obsessed with death and still thinking about the love of his life that he lost, one Annie Hall (Diane Keaton). As Alvy starts thinking about Annie, cue the flashback....

Well, not quite. Annie Hall isn't a straight flashback story, although a lot of it is in what would normally be considered a flashback. However, it doesn't feel like a normal flashback in that the story of the relationship isn't told in a straight line from meeting through to breakup. Instead, the flashbacks go back and forth in time, while they're frequently broken to return to Alvy in the present day breaking the fourth wall and talking either to the viewer directly or to people on the street.

As I said, Alvy is a New York comedian, with a best friend in Rob (Tony Roberts), a comedian himself who ultimately gets an offer to do a TV show out in Los Angeles. That's a place that, as we'll see later in the movie, is much different from New York. As for Annie (Diane Keaton), she's originally from Wisconsin and still has family out there, but she's come to New York to make it as a singer mostly; she eventually gets discovered by another singer, Tony Lacey (Paul Simon) and moves out to Los Angeles, putting a strain on the relationship.

In and around all this, we see how the two actually met (at a tennis club), how they decided to move in together, and then how they decided to move apart before the ultimate breakup and then, like the end of The Way We Were, running into each other by chance some time after the breakup.

Annie Hall is the sort of move that I think isn't quite for everybody, but more for people who are really into the whole idea of the art of making movies, especially less commercial movies. If you look at it that way, it's easy to see why critics and the in-the-industry people who make movies and vote on the awards would love this. There's urbane humor and situations for mature people, along with the techniques of breaking the fourth wall and the non-linear storyline that demands the viewer's attention. For people who consider themselves more casual fans or, like myself, non-film school types, I think I'd recommend other of Allen's work first. Other films, where Allen playing a neurotic character doesn't take over the film, work better.

The First Wives Club

Some time back during one of the previous free preview weekends, I had the chance to record the comedy The First Wives Club. I've already got a pair of posts planned for tomorrow, and at any rate I thought The First Wives Club was going to be on tomorrow, so I planned to post about it today. It turns out I'm off by several hours, as the next airing of The First Wives Club will be 7:38 AM Friday (Nov. 4) on HBO Comedy, and several times over the next two weeks on various channels in the HBO family.

The movie starts off with a brief prologue. At Middlebury College, the Class of 1969 is about to graduate. Four young women are best friends: Elise (played in the present day by Goldie Hawn), Annie (Diane Keaton), Brenda (Bette Midler), and Cynthia (Stockard Channing). They vow that they'll be best friends forever, not realizing that in the pre-internet days, best friends like this would almost invariably fall out of touch. With that in mind, we fast-forward to mid-1990s New York.

Cynthia is a divorcée, having been married to a wealthy Wall Street trader (James Naughton). She apparently got one of the Manhattan penthouses in the divorce, as well as alimonty to be able to keep living in the style to which she had become accustomed. But she finds out that her ex-husband is about to remarry, this time to a trophy wife, and for her that's the final straw. She writes a suicide note as well as writing to each of her former Middlebury friends, and throws herself off the balcony of her apartment.

She having been married to an important person in New York, and having offed herself in fairly spectacular fashion, her death unsurprisingly becomes front-page news, and causes her three friends from college to attend the funeral, after which the three go out to luncheon together after the funeral, meeting a second time after they receive the cards Cynthia had written them before her death. And, they find that each of them still has a lot in common with Cynthia apart from not being dead like Cynthia.

Annie is married to an advertising executive, Aaron (Stephen Collins), but he has been way too dominant in their marriage to the point that she sees a therapist. (Or mabye it's from all the neurotic Woody Allen movies she did.) And then she finds that Aaron is having an affair with the therapist. Brenda is already divorced, from discount electronics retalier Morty (Dan Hedaya), and is living in fairly modest circumstances. As for Elise, she became an actress, and even won an Oscar before time caught up to her and she couldn't age gracefully into older women roles. Her producer husband Bill (Victor Garber) starts having an affair with an ingenue actress Phoebe (Elizabeth Berkley), leading them to divorce too.

Once the three women find out they're all more or less in the same boat, they start thinking about revenge. How can they get back at their husbands and live a happy life? Perhaps if they pool their resources, they can start something called the "First Wives Club", and not only get back at their husbands, but use it to bigger and better things for women in general. However, they also learn that the same things that caused them to drift apart in the years after Middlebury are still there, and the inevitable personality clashes threaten to derail the whole plan.

The First Wives Club is a movie with a fun premise, if one that isn't necessarily new, as there have been a lot of revenge comedies over the years. And to be honest, the material here turns out to be surprisingly slight, as there's a fairly slow buildup and not all that much in how the first wives get their revenge. But the three leading actresses really do pull off the material well, combined with some help from the support, and several cameos. I found it interesting that Kathie Lee Gifford would show up, since she was the much younger trophy wife #3 of retired football star-turned color commentator Frank Gifford. On the weak side there are a couple of musical numbers that bring proceedings to a screeching halt. Well, only one does since the second is at the end of the movie segueing into the closing credits.

So The First Wives Club is an uneven movie, but one that hits more than it misses.

Radio Days

I mentioned a few weeks back that Woody Allen's Radio Days was coming up on the TCM schedule, and that I was looking forward to watching it and doing a review on it here. Since then, I did watch it, so now you get the obligatory review.

Radio Days is the sort of movie that won't really get the more normal sort of synopsis I give here, one that give away a fair amount of the plot up until the climax. That's because Radio Days is a movie that doesn't really have that sort of straightforward plot, instead being a movie that's more a series of vignettes. Woody Allen narrates as adult Joe, who grew up in the late 1930s and 1940s (the adolescent Joe being played by Seth Green). Joe is looking back on his adolescence, and how the radio programs of the day shaped it, these being the days before TV became a thing.

Joe lives in Rockaway Beach, Queens, in a middle-class disproportionately Jewish neighborhood, or at least what passed for middle class in the late 1930s when the middle-class wasn't as well to do as it would become. Indeed, Joe lives with his extended family. In addition to his parents (Julie Kavner and Michael Tucker), there are his grandparents, a married aunt and uncle where the uncle keeps bringing home fish, and maiden aunt Bea (Dianne Wiest), who keeps dreaming of finding a suitable man.

Everybody has their favorite programs on the radio, although the most prominent two are young Joe's love of the superhero The Masked Avenger, and his mother's listening to morning show of husband-and-wife team Roger and Irene, a show that's roughly like a radio version of the old Regis and Kathie Lee on those episodes when Regis Philbin's real-life wife was sitting in for an absent Kathie Lee. Of course, one of the movie's subplots is that Roger and Irene's marriage isn't quite the idyllic life that it's portrayed as being on the radio show, as Roger is seeing a young cigarette girl Sally (Mia Farrow) who would like to break in to the radio businesses. (Irene has a lover too.)

Along the way, World War II intervenes, but not too severely as this is America and the east coast was never seriously going to be invaded despite people thinking they say U-boats on various occasions. A fair portion of the movie is a coming-of-age story for young Joe, but there are subplots involving the various men Aunt Bea is trying to meet; the lives of some of the radio stars; and the mystery of what Joe's father really does for a living as he always seems to have one get-rich-quick scheme after another.

As I said, there's not much of a plot here, as it's more about vignettes. But the vignettes almost all work, even if now and then they seem a bit too neat and tidy. Then again, life memories edited to fit into the running time of a Hollywood movie have a way of doing that. The vignettes also technically cover too much time, going from at least the "War of the Worlds" broadcast in October 1938 to New Year's Eve 1943; this again is something you don't really notice as you're watching the movie, however.

Overall, this Radio Days is more of a love story to Woody Allen's childhood, or perhaps the childhood of someone who would the age of an older brother, but the rosy memories are still entertaining even for someone like me who was born decades after Allen. I really enjoyed Radio Days, and think you will, too.

Baby Boom

Another of the movies that I had the chance to record during one of the free preview weekends was Baby Boom. It's going to be on again, tomorrow (May 4) at 6:31 AM on 5Star Max, so as always I made a point of watching it in order to be able to do a post here.

After a brief introduction telling the viewers about the contributions of modern women to the work force and how they can do any job they set their minds to, we're introduced to one of those modern women. JC Wiatt (Diane Keaton) is a management consultant in Manhattan getting close to becoming an executive at the firm run by Fritz Curtis (Sam Wanamaker). This being the 80s, she's a yuppie, and the sort that back in the day wuld have been called DINKs -- dual income, no kids. She lives with, but is not married to, boyfriend Steven (Harold Ramis), who is in a similarly demanding job.

One night as they're in bed, the phone rings, and it's for JC. There's a bad connection, but apparently what she gleans from the conversation is that some distant relative has died and JC was mentioned in the will, so she's going to have to sign for the bequest, with the busy lawyers traveling through Kennedy Airport. Now, this isn't the way wills work in real life, but if the writers had gone with real life, we wouldn't have much of a movie.

We also wouldn't have much of a movie if JC displayed the sort of acumen that allowed her to get to where she is in the business world. The woman she meets at the airport gives her documents to sign, and JC signs them without reading them. Sorry, but I was yelling at this terrible plot hole. Anyhow, the bequest JC receives is... a baby, a little girl named Elizabeth! Apparently, the deceased relative had no other close relatives, which again makes no sense, and just decided to give custody to JC without having seen her for years and not discussing JC getting custody of the baby should this be necessary.

JC continues her out-of-character stupidity by not fairly immediately going to her bosses and explaining the situation, but instead trying to take care of the baby and in such a way that it really screws up her work. It also screws up her home life, as Stephen was committed to not having a baby. Thankfully, the terms of the will allow JC to put the baby up for adoption if things don't work out. However, when she meets the couple who are going to get custody, she balks.

Still, JC tries to balance both work and personal life, losing the handling of a big contract in the process to a young co-worker (James Spader in a small role). So she decides she's going to get out of the rat race, even though she seems to have no clue about what she's going to do to make a living.

With that in mind, JC buys -- apparently sight unseen, or without asking a home inspector to do an examination -- one of those old country homes in Vermont that are a trope in movies about small-town New England. JC and Elizabeth go there alone, with Stephen not appearing in the rest of the picture. JC finds that she made an incredibly stupid decision, as the house needs a lot of work, and being a city girl, she doesn't know the first thing about country living, knowing only the gauzy brochure pictures.

The only thing the house has going for it is an apple orchard, but she can't get itinerant labor or a trainee doctor who grew up in an orphanage to pick apples for her. She does get a doctor in her life, however, in the form of local veterinarian Dr. Cooper (Sam Shepard), who tends to JC when she faints one day and he's the closest doctor around.

JC uses those apples to make gourmet baby food for Elizabeth, which she barters at the local stores as apparently everybody in small-town Vermont barters. One day, however, a bunch of yuppie tourists who think they can pull one over on those hick Vermonters -- indeed, JC is the sort of person who just a year earlier would have been one of those tourists -- sees the baby food and thinks its a great product to buy. JC, despite the stupidity she's shown a bunch of times up to this point, isn't that stupid, and realizes she might have a money-maker on her hands, selling overpriced trendyfood to gullible rich people. Heck, Starbucks has made billions doing just that.

The business becomes a success, and soon enough, national businesses come calling, specifically, the food conglomerate whose contract JC had been handling back in New York.

Baby Boom is an amiable enough piece of fluff, although you're going to have to suspend disbelief to watch it. It's hard to believe JC could make the dumb decisions she does at so many points. And then there's the stereotypical view of Vermonters. On the other hand, the movie is enough of its time that it's worth a watch just for another look at how the 1980s saw itself.

If you're looking for something that's not particularly demanding, and want to share a bowl of popcorn with some friends, you could do a lot worse than Baby Boom.

Interiors

I've had the Woody Allen movie Interiors sitting on my DVR for almost a year now, as I think I recorded it during last year's 31 Days of Oscar when it was in April because of the Academy's moving the ceremony thanks to the coronavirus panic. In any case, I recently got around to watching Interiors so I could do a post here on it.

Geraldine Page plays Eve, the matriarch of a upper-middle-class family. Eve is an interior decorator, with a sense of style that tends toward a lot of white; at the beginning of the movie she's got some ideas for her daughter Joey (Mary Beth Hurt). Joey has done some writing but hasn't really decided on what to do for a career; currently she's living with Mike (Sam Waterston), who is doing research on Marxism. (Plot synopses suggest they're not married, although I don't recall any dialogue in the movie that definitively says whether they're married or just living together.)

Joey has two sisters. Renata (Diane Keaton) lives in New York as do both Eve and the parents; she is a published poet whose husband Frederick (Richard Jordan) is also a writer. The third sister is Flyn (Kristin Griffith); she doesn't show up so often largely because she's an actress who has to go on location to do the low-budget movies, TV shows, and commercials that she appears in. It won't get her to the A list, but it seems that at least it will pay the bills.

We get a sense from the way Eve just waltzed right in to Joey's apartment and started moving stuff around to re-decorate the place that she can be a bit demanding. She's so demanding, in fact, that her husband Arthur (E.G. Marshall) has decided to leave the house and engage in a "trial separation". That trial takes him on a vacation to Greece, and devastates Eve, who acts as though she relied on Arthur quite a bit.

Things are about to get quite a bit worse for Eve, however. Arthur returns home from Greece and announces that he met a nice American widow there, Pearl (Maureen Stapleton). Pearl is everything Eve is not, gregarious and mildly bohemian in that she's learned how to do card tricks and the like. It's easy to see why somebody like Arthur who spent 30-odd years with a woman like Eve would suddenly turn to a person like Pearl. Eve responds to the announcement that Arthur wants a divorce so that he can marry Pearl by attempting to commit suicide.

If there was a rift between Arthur and Eve, there are also rifts between other members of the family. Renata worries about Joey's apparent aimlessness, while Joey has issues with the way her parents treated her and Renata differently. Renata and Joey both also have problems to deal with with the respective men in their lives. That's going to become even more of an issue when Arthur and Pearl decide to have a small wedding ceremony, for family only, in the family's beach house out on Long Island. Eve shows up some time after the actual ceremony, leading to the film's finale.

Interiors is a movie that seems to sharply divide people in their reviews. It's easy to see that the acting is good, as is the direction and production design. But at the same time, it's incredibly difficult to identify with the various characters in the movie, which is almost unrelentingly depressing. Some critics have suggested this was Woody Allen trying to make an Ingmar Bergman movie, and that's not an unfair description. (My first thought for the color scheme was reminiscent of Track of the Cat, but of course Bergman's use of ever more red in Cries and Whispers is fairly similar to the disproportiontely white color palette in Interiors.) It's quite talky, and for a long time it feels as though the movie isn't really going anywhere.

I didn't dislike Interiors to the extent that some people might, but I also definitely didn't like it as much as those who praise it clearly like it. So this is one that you absolutely need to watch for yourself and draw your own conclusions about. Interiors is not a movie for everybody, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, or an insult to the people who find it's not for them.

Manhattan

Another of the movies I finally got around to watching recently to do a blog post on is Woody Allen's Manhattan.

Allen plays Isaac, a writer living in late-1970s New York with a screwed-up personal life. He's got an ex-wife Jill (Meryl Streep) who has come out as a lesbian and is living with her female partner. Jill, meanwhile, has written a book about her relationship with Isaac, which is to become a best-seller, at least amongst the set of people that forms Isaac's (and Woody Allen's) cultural milieu.

Isaac, for his part, has met Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) and started a relationship with her, which wouldn't necessarily be a big deal except for the fact that she's only 17 while Isaac is in his mid-40s, shades of the controversy that would pop up in Woody Allen's own personal life some decades later.

And then, to top it off, Isaac has a best friend Yale (Michael Murphy) with his own personal problems. Yale has a wife, but he's also got a mistress in Mary (Diane Keaton). And when Yale introduces Isaac to Mary, Isaac and Mary start up a relationship of their own, despte the fact that Isaac still has feelings for Tracy.

Along the way, everybody meets and talks, and meets and talks some more, with various bon mots thrown in and some sort of resolution between Isaac and Tracy being provided in the film's final scene.

I suppose whether you like Manhattan is going to depend entirely upon whether you like the films of Woody Allen, especially those starting with Annie Hall, or not. I enjoy some of Allen's earlier movies, like Sleeper, Bananas, and Take the Money and Run, and also enjoyed the later Purple Rose of Cairo (which of course doesn't star Allen; he only directed). But I've never been a fan of the "neurotic Allen", so Manhattan is one that I'm rather ambivalent about.

Allen made the conscious decision to film in black and white, and the cinematography is certainly a notable part of the movie, with a bunch of striking images of New York City of the era. That's a big plus, although of course for me it wasn't enough to overcome the plot problems.

Still, if you like Woody Allen, I think you're definitely going to like Manhattan. If you haven't seen any of his movies, I'd suggest starting with the earlier stuff.