While channel-surfing (do they still call it that?) yesterday, I landed on a favorite movie, Mr. Holland’s Opus, starring Richard Dreyfuss.

Glenn Holland is a musician, primarily a composer, who decides to take a position as a music teacher in a local high school.  The plan is to teach for a few years, save his money and compose in his free time.  Anyone who’s been a teacher knows there not that much money to save and there’s no free time. In fact, he realizes almost immediately, “it’s a harder gig than I thought.”

A baby comes along – not part of the plan, but okay. Then it happens that the child, Cole, is deaf. Not only does this suck up any extra money but Glenn feels like he is unable to communicate with his child, can’t share with him the thing he loves most, music.

Ultimately, Mr. Holland spends 30 years at that high school and becomes a real teacher, finding enjoyment and reward working with  young musicians.  He and Cole learn to understand and appreciate each other.  A sweet story.

Kudos to the make-up department for making 48-year-old Dreyfuss look 30-40-50-60 so naturally.

The first movie I saw Richard Dreyfuss in was Goodbye Girl with Marcia Mason. (He played a musician)  I also loved him in The Education of Max Bickford, a television series in 2002 where he played a history professor in a small college.  It lasted 22 episodes – that’s not quite an entire season, I’m thinking – and a pox on the TV executive who canceled this excellent show.

About two weeks ago, on September 26, 2010, Gloria Stuart died.  She was 100 years old.  To those of you who are thinking ‘Who?’ – she played Old Rose in the 1997 film Titanic.  Now, if you have not seen this film, one might wonder where you have been.  After its debut it enjoyed an unusually long theater run and now is shown at least once a month, sometimes back to back, on TNT. Word has it now that James Cameron is converting Titanic to 3-D for release in April 2012, the 100th anniversary of the ship’s sinking.

Today I was talking to a couple of friends who boasted that they had not seen Titanic, indeed had made a conscious and concerted effort to not see it, since they already knew how it ended.  So, to those and any others in that category, I will say that the story of the ship’s first and last voyage was played through the eyes of Old Rose, a 101 year old survivor of the tragedy.  A mega flashback told of the ill-fated romance between Young Rose (Kate Winslet) and a young man of lower station (Leonardo DiCaprio).

When Gloria came out of semi-retirement to play Old Rose, she was 87 years old, but looked so good she had to endure hours in the make-up chair in order to appear as 101, as the script called for.  For her work in Titanic, she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress, the only nomination of her life, making her the oldest nominee ever. She lost to Kim Basinger (for L.A. Confidential), but was honored with a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame in 2000.

Gloria Stuart began her career in movies in the 1930’s starring in many of the lightweight dramedies that the studios were making as fast as they could.  Her most noted early credits include Claude Rains’ love interest in the original version of The Invisible Man and the obligatory beautiful young girl in the Shirley Temple movie Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Randolph Scott played the hero.

During her long career, Gloria Stuart appeared on stage, in film and on television. In 2001, at the age of 91, she was featured in episodes of Murder She Wrote and Touched by an Angel, with a recurring roll in the soap opera General Hospital.  Her last film credit was in 2004 in Land of Plenty, where she played ‘an old lady.’

Acting was but a part of the excitement that enriched Gloria Stuart’s time on earth. Go to Wikepedia or ontheredcarpet.com or simply Google her name to read about the artists’ books she wrote and published that can be found in museums and private collections. Or her trip to France when Europe was on the brink of World War II.

Rest in Peace, Gloria Stuart. Yours was a long and beautiful life.

This was Paul Newman Marathon weekend on Turner Classic Movies Channel – twenty four hours of sparkling blue eyes and rebellious anti-hero types.  I was present for much of it, though I did miss The Rack, a 1956 offering that showed at 6:00 a.m. while I was pushing serious zzzz’s.  I remember the general plot of that movie, but if I saw it at all, it was 50 years ago.  Maybe I’ll catch it some other time.

I did see some favorites, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Somebody Up There Likes Me, and The Sting. Another favorite, Absence of Malice, didn’t make the line up and Cool Hand Luke falls in the category of excellent movies I don’t need to see again (see previous post).

Despite a splendid body of work, it was years before Paul Newman received an Academy Award as a leading actor in a role.  After he was nominated 9 times and went home empty-handed, the Academy was embarrassed into giving him an honorary Oscar for “Lifetime Achievement.” This was in 1985, about twenty years before his lifetime ended.  Many more credits had been added to his resume by then.  By the way, when he did finally win an Oscar for The Color of Money, he wasn’t present at the ceremony.

Why did he go so long without winning? Who knows. When Newman was nominated for Hud, Sidney Poitier won for Lilies of the Field. Instead of Newman winning for Cool Hand Luke,  Rod Steiger took home the Oscar for In the Heat of the Night.  He did some of his finest work in The Verdict, but lost to Ben Kingsley in Gandhi.

Paul Newman was a great actor and generous man, known in his later life for his philanthropic efforts.

The video store in my little town has gone out of business. I must admit that they had lost me to Netflix some time ago, but I still hate to see any small business close. They were the middle store in a strip of three units. The tenant on one end, a discount grocery, left a couple of years ago. Now there is only one store left to keep the strip alive. Empty buildings are so depressing but unfortunately a sign of our times.

All that being said: small business closing, empty storefronts, sign of our times, yada, yada – I  couldn’t wait to take advantage of their “10 movies for $20” sale.  Here’s a recap of what I bought.

I purchased four movies I had already seen.  I’ve said here before that if I like a movie I’ll watch it more than once.  First, I chose “Hope Springs” with Colin Firth.  Because I have a thing for Colin Firth.  I watched it and then mailed it off to my BFF because she has a thing for Colin Firth, too.  Bless his heart, he just never smiles!

I also picked up “Station Agent” which I reviewed here last winter.  Now I can watch it again whenever I want to. When I rented “Two Weeks” with Sally Field a few months ago, it really touched me. It’s the story of four adult children dealing with their mother’s terminal illness. After I watch it again, I will share my thoughts with you.  The last choice of a movie already seen was “Six Degrees of Separation” starring a very young Will Smith. This movie was made in 1993 and that was probably the last time I saw it.  I’m eager to see if my memory of an entertaining story is correct.

These are the movies still to be viewed: “The Secret Life of Bees” – in my Netflix queue to rent and in my stack of borrowed books to read soon, we’ll see what happens first.  “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers”, I chose this for the beautiful title. “Shop Girl” starring Steve Martin, from a novel by Steve Martin. As a fan, how can I go wrong?  “Touched” – chosen purely for the synopsis on the back of the DVD case. It stars Randall Batinkoff (you’d know him if you saw him). “Warm Springs” –  Franklin Roosevelt is my favorite president; this is the account of his bout with polio.  “Vera Drake” – again, chosen from the synopsis. It is a foreign film which sounds like it’s very serious with perhaps controversial subject matter.

I’ll keep you posted.

There are some movies I will watch over and over.  To Kill a Mockingbird comes to mind.  Others (Crash, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest) get only one viewing. Even though they may be excellent and win prestgious awards, the story line or telling is just too painful to watch more than once. I get the message and have no need to see it again.

I think Brothers, starring Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman, might just fall in the second category. Marine Captain Sam Cahill (Maguire) loving husband and father, is shot down over Afghanistan and presumed dead.  His family is devastated and black-sheep brother Tommy (Gyllenhaal) steps up to help grieving wife, Grace (Portman), and Sam’s two little girls get through the hard times.  Cut to the war zone. Sam is not dead after all but a prisoner.  He experiences horrible atrocities and only after several months of this and the death of all his men, he is rescued.  He returns to his wife and children a different person. He can’t adjust to “normal” life and sees Tommy being the person he used to be and will never be again.

This movie was billed as a story about “(Sam) learns that his brother has gotten dangerously close to … Grace, and his kids.”   And while that is in there,  this is really a story about war and how it destroys a person. That the casualties of war aren’t always dead.  That coming home alive isn’t easy for the career warrior.  Since stories about the current war are box office poison, if this movie was billed as what it is, no one would rent it.

But should you decide to – these three actors were excellent in their roles. The two little girls were precious and Sam Shepherd and Mare Winningham did a great supporting job as the brothers’ parents.

Yesterday, while I waited for the rain to stop, I caught a favorite old movie on Fox Movie Channel. The TV guide in the newspaper doesn’t carry a listing for FMC (why is that?) so that many of the films I watch there are already in progress when I tune in. But I digress.

The movie was No Highway in the Sky with James Stewart, Marlene Dietrich and Glynis Johns. It came out in 1951 and I saw it then in the theater and several times since on television. This story was shot in the wonderful years of film making when airplane seats were as large as recliners and passengers got involved in each other’s lives. Also, during this period, actors did not feign accents. This story took place in England and James Stewart played an aeronautical engineer whose theory predicted this particular model of airplane would have its tail fall off after a specified number of air miles. Glynis Johns was the stewardess and Marlene Dietrich a famous movie actress and a passenger on the flight.  Though I am assuming all were supposed to be English, Stewart drawled and stuttered in his usual style and Ms. Dietrich responded in her German accent.

This suspending of disbelief happened often in the movies back then. The thriller Gaslight takes place in London, yet the stars all spoke in their native accents: Ingrid Bergman (Swedish), Charles Boyer (French), and Angela Lansbury (English).  Joseph Cotton (American) played the head of Scotland Yard.  (It is said that during the making of this film Ingrid Bergman spoke so little English that she learned her lines phonetically and often wasn’t sure what she was saying.)

Back to No Highway in the Sky. The reviews said one would enjoy it much more if one read the book first. So I investigated to find that the novel No Highway was written by Nevil Shute in 1948. He wrote many novels during the middle of the Twentieth Century.  His best known work was On the Beach, written in 1948 about nuclear war and the end of the world.  This book was made into a movie with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. Mr. Shute was never happy with the director’s (Stanley Kramer) interpretation of the relationship between the two main characters. (Gregory Peck agreed with the writer.) In the book, the two fall in love but do not consumate their relationship because of Peck’s feelings of loyalty to his dead wife. Mr. Kramer decided the audience would never believe that two people could resist the pull of sexual attraction for a higher feeling of loyalty. Too bad Stanley Kramer had so little faith in our ability to suspend our disbelief.

One night recently, during Turner Classic Movies’ 31 Days of the Oscars, I watched (again) Ordinary People a wonderful film from 1980. I was first introduced to this movie about 1995 when I was training as a crisis line volunteer. The social worker conducting the session used excerpts from this story to show examples of post traumatic stress disorder and the young man’s dramatic breakthrough in his counseling.  The few scenes I saw piqued my interest and I rushed out to rent and watch the whole movie. It’s a favorite.

Timothy Hutton plays seventeen year old Conrad Jarrett who survived a tragic accident that killed his brother and he is excellent in this role.  At twenty, this was his first film.  His early experience  was in television – Disney, mostly – but that doesn’t mean he was a novice actor. His scenes are powerful and riveting. He won an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.  (I wonder about this, because he seemed like the lead character to me. But I don’t know how these categories are decided.)

The psychiatrist is played by Judd Hirsch, who at the time this movie was made, was starring in the TV hit “Taxi.” This was quite a departure from his usual roles and earned him a nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Ordinary People is from a novel by Judith Guest (her first novel) and won an Academy Award for Best Motion Picture and for Robert Redford as Director. Also, Alvin Sargent won the award for Best Writing for adapting the novel into a screen play.  Mary Tyler Moore was nominated for the Best Actor in a Leading Role for her protrayal of the mother. Her performance was outstanding, containing not a bit of the sweet, naive career girl she played on television.

This picture won at the Golden Globes and several other award ceremonies during 1981. But how much more acclaim can a drama about mental illness earn than for someone in the profession to say, “Yes. This is how it is. They’ve got it exactly right.”

One of the many blessings of an unexpected snow day is having a good movie in the house waiting to be seen.  I watched The Station Agent twice during the two-day snow break, the second time with two twenty-year-old young men who found it as delightful (though they wouldn’t use that word) as I did.

When his only friend dies, a young man born with dwarfism (Peter Dinklage) inherits an abandoned train station in rural New Jersey. Perhaps to escape what his life is (rude jokes, a stranger taking pictures), Finbar McBride decides to go to Newfoundland, NJ, and live in quiet seclusion. But his solitude is soon interrupted by two locals and Fin reluctantly becomes acquainted with an artist, Olivia  (Patricia Clarkson), suffering grief/ depression, and Joe (Bobby Canavale) a talkative, tries-too-hard, Cuban hot-dog vendor.

Fin’s stoicism, Olivia’s I-can-handle-it- no-I-can’t phase of the grief process and Joe’s exuberance that covers underlying tension in his life makes them unlikely candidates for friendship. The story of how their relationship develops is told with tenderness and humor. The tagline for the foreign DVD release was: “Loneliness is much better when you have someone to share it with.”

Peter Dinklage is a fine actor, whose work has been mostly off-Broadway. TV viewers will recognize Patricia Clarkson and Bobby Canavale from their many appearances there.

The Station Agent is rated R for language, but (for me) that did not get in the way of the beautiful story.