Danny's Passionate Fish

It’s fitting that Passion Fish focuses on the life of a former soap star, as the movie itself often threatens to dive head first into the very melodrama playing out on the screens in the background. Thankfully, it never does. But it’s also a reminder that a soap opera without melodrama isn’t exactly a thrill.

Of course, Passions Fish doesn’t have thrills on its mind. Best to pour a glass of lemonade – or bourbon, have a seat and enjoy the Louisiana sunshine. To call this movie leisurely paced is generous. Sometimes I felt trapped in the chair with May-Alice. We get a parade of visitors to break up the monotony, but by the end, I was dreading the prospect of any more callers. Leave May-Alice alone so this thing can just end!

Okay, that’s disingenuous. Its not like this movie wasn’t good. It’s just long. And it crawls, so you feel every minute. Once I settled in, I came to appreciate the local color the movie offers, to bask in the culture – the long river rides, the dancing, the bugs. But I’m also not looking for a travel documentary. Okay, okay, enough harping!

Sure, the picaresque structure grew tired for me, but the people we meet along the way were never less than fantastically drawn. Writer and Director John Sayles has a real knack for bringing characters to life. In particular, I enjoyed the Colonel Sanders relative that stops in for a few drinks. Not white wine, not to his taste, I’m afraid, but he’ll ferret out any bourbon in the area! Like a bourbon truffle dog.

His scene’s a good example of that teetering melodrama. I kept expecting him to have some kind of ulterior motive. And maybe he did. But we never saw it. And he just disappears from the story. Same with May-Alice’s actress friends. I thought we were in for some big blow up, but, no, just a weird space alien monologue.  Really wonderful character work all around. And we haven’t even discussed our leads.

Mary MacDonnell and Alfre Woodard crush their roles as May-Alice and Chantelle. Okay, yeah, crushed is the wrong word. But I like the idea of describing anything in this movie with the word “crush”.  Sayles fucking crushes it with Passion Fish!  Woodard fucking destroys this intricate character portrait! MacDonnell’s subtly and depth fucking kills!

I’m done. But, really, I appreciate the way Sayles trusts us to watch the story unfold. The character reveals - the shades of depth they add - pile on with such slow assurance. It’s like a master class in how to make characters into real people. I feel like even the clerk at the supermarket leads a full, rich, Louisiana life.

When people talk about the death of adult dramas, they’re talking about this movie. Or story-driven porn, I guess. Depends on who you’re talking to. And even though this isn’t my favorite movie, I’d be on board for more like them. Something tells me we’ll run into quite a few of them on this adventure. And a little peek ahead tells me we’ll be seeing Sayles again down the road.

Sayles is a guy who’s been on my radar for a while now. He’s a pretty big figure in independent cinema, yet imdb tells me I’ve never seen any of his movies. Even the most likely candidate, The Howling, remains unseen. Obviously, that one’s on me. How have I missed a Joe Dante werewolf movie? But after this, I’m intrigued to look through his filmography. And even more intrigued, because while I’d never seen his films, I was unknowingly familiar with his work.  Which leads to my favorite Passion Fish related fact --

This is the man who directed a handful of sweet, goofy Born in the USA music videos! The Boss hurling a baseball? The Boss creepily fixing a babe’s car then stalking her? Sayles is responsible. He’s the best. I’m now a fan for life.

Couple things I wanna cover before I wrap up – why is the beginning of this movie loaded with cornball guitar riffs? Even for the time, they had to be silly. And they’re wildly out of place.  I propose a Passion Fish drinking game -- Take a shot every time Eddie Van Halen inexplicably scores this Oscar caliber drama!

Finally, about halfway through, it occurred to me that this movie would work much better as a TV show. It’s already paced like one. The character work is stellar. It even ends like a great episode of TV. We’re here, we’re changed, but we’re gonna keep moving. None of the story threads really wrapped. And, in hour chunks, I’d enjoy exploring the town and culture more. It just feels like an HBO show. And I imagine if it were written today, that’s exactly where we’d see this movie. Well, some people would see it. I’d wait for the reviews. Maybe binge watch it before the Emmys.

All in, not my favorite of the bunch. I’m glad we watched it though, because this, and movies like it are almost never something I sit down to watch. But there’s a lot to learn here. And plenty to like.

1.     Husbands and Wives

2.     Lorenzo’s Oil

3.     Passion Fish

Passion Fish (Mike's Take)

Passion Fish

Written by John Sayles

Oh boy. I gotta tell you, man, I’m completely of two minds on this movie. For everything I really, really liked, there was something to frustrate me lurking right around the corner. Every single time. One step forward, one step, you know?

So this is going to be a pretty scattered write-up. Most of the stuff I really liked came in the first half, and most of the stuff I didn’t was in the back-end, so my cynicism will gradually creep in as I go. To me, this is a movie that starts strong and rambles its way to a pretty unsatisfying conclusion.

But about that first half, there are so many little things I appreciate. It’s the kind of subtle stuff that you might not notice if you weren’t aggressively taking notes like we are. I LOVE that the movie opens in the hospital. Like Lorenzo’s Oil, this movie isn’t wasting my time. May-Alice is in the hospital and it only takes a minute to figure out why. She’s paraplegic. We also learn she’s a soap opera star because the very first lines are her playing her character on television, which is a very clever touch. We know her past life, and we know what the rest of her life is going to be almost immediately.

She’s sent to her hometown to recover and a parade of caretakers come and go. I liked these scenes a lot, too. May-Alice’s acerbic nature caught me off guard, and I began to really like her, or at least enjoy her. It should be said that Mary McDonnell absolutely kills it in this movie. When it works, it’s usually because of her. Maybe my favorite small detail in the whole movie is how her native Louisiana accent slowly comes back over the course of the story.

Eventually, Chantelle comes into the picture. She’s a tough cookie, as they say. She ain’t gonna back down. Their dynamic is interesting and, once again, I like that the movie doesn’t go for histrionics. They feel like real people caught in a tough situation. But even though Chantelle’s relationship with May-Alice is ultimately the whole point of the movie, her introduction brings with it most of the movie’s problems. Characters flit in and out of their lives and never go anywhere. May-Alice’s alcoholic uncle, Chantelle’s drug dealer ex-boyfriend, May-Alice’s high school classmates, etc. That last one gave us a scene I actually enjoyed, but it never really built to anything. Only two characters really stick around, and they’re kind of sort of love stories? I don’t know. Passion Fish goes a long towards establishing that Rennie and Sugar could have a real impact on the ladies’ futures, but it never goes anywhere with either. Rennie is married and Sugar is… I don’t know. He disappears after the zydeco festival towards the end.

And then there’s Chantelle’s actual motivation for sticking around in this thankless job: she used to be a drug addict (which, admittedly, does parallel nicely with May-Alice’s apparent alcoholism) and lost custody of her daughter. She needs to get her life together so she can get her little girl back. But that whole thread isn’t introduced until like the last ten minutes! And for a movie that’s more than two hours long, that’s obnoxious. I have no time to get to know her kid, or care about her.

Once again, it leads to something I DO like. It’s a neat idea that Chantelle just wants her old life back right around the time May-Alice decides to let hers go. But it could have been developed more. Chantelle doesn’t have any real motivation for staying until the movie’s final moments, as far as we know. In all, this movie bugged me as much as it sometimes surprised me.

Two scenes I want to talk about that I couldn’t fit in above:

Okay, does every movie about someone with a disability have to feature a brief fantasy sequence where they don’t anymore? It has to be the most common trope of the entire genre, whether it’s about a real person or not. I actually rolled my eyes.

And, I did really like the picnic with her former co-stars. I thought it was going in one direction (they would all think Chantelle was some kind of rube, and that Louisiana was a hellhole) but they seemed genuinely concerned for May-Alice’s situation. In fact, my favorite scene in the whole movie was the girl who took over May-Alice’s character telling the story of the first part she ever had, in that weird indie alien movie. It’s a great little monologue. The only problem is that I have no idea how it relates to what’s going on in Passion Fish. All it did was make me feel bad for her when you find out later that she was fired because viewers refused to accept her.

So, yeah. Passion Fish. A movie that was somehow both exactly and nothing like I expected. Easily the weakest of 1992 thus far for me, but we’ve got two more to go! Onward and upward!

Lorenzo's Oil (Mike's Take)

Lorenzo’s Oil

Written by George Miller & Nick Enright

Man, what a year 1992 has been so far. We are really starting this thing off with the most uplifting movies, aren’t we? This entire movie seemed to be about fighting back against an endless torrent of hopelessness. So, a little bit of a downer.

I actually saw this movie once in high school. We watched it in my 10^th grade bio class. All I remembered from that viewing was Nick Nolte’s accent and Tommy Pickles’ voice distractingly coming out of Lorenzo’s mouth when he’s sick. I’m happy to report that I actually enjoyed this movie on a second watch.

The way the movie is structured is pretty excellent. The build-up to Lorenzo’s diagnosis was so smart and so economical. It just gets to the point and doesn’t waste my time, which is so refreshing. We see the kid playing in Africa over the opening credits, but the movie doesn’t spend a half hour showing us what a normal kid he is and I’m so thankful for that. And the pre-diagnosis movie has some striking images. Michaela holding Lorenzo down as he’s seizing all over the place hits pretty hard, and I also really like the long walk down the hospital hallway right after they hear the diagnosis for the first time. Chilling, and very real.

That brings me to one of the things I really liked. Doesn’t it feel like this movie should have had a lot more yelling and crying and other typically “Oscar-type” stuff? It’s very subdued with the exception of two moments: the fight that ends up with Michaela kicking her sister out of the house and their fight with the parents who run the Foundation. For me, at least, it made them feel like real people and less like movie characters.

In fact, my favorite scene is toward the end. It’s when Agusto is breaking it down for Michaela that even though they’ve helped Lorenzo survive, he’ll never fully recover and he asks her, “Did you ever think that all this work, all this struggling, might have been for someone else’s kid?” Then she cries. It’s the first time tears fall in this movie at all, if I remember it correctly. I just found it an effective way to hit typical “prestige movie” beats without doing so in a “prestige movie” kind of way.

And of course it has to be brought up that this movie was written by George “Motherfucking Mad Max” Miller, which is all kinds of nuts at first. This is the last movie I would have ever expected him to make, until he made the Happy Feet movies anyway, but in my research (the IMDb trivia page) I found out that Miller is actually a trained doctor. Cool! That goes a long way in this movie, since there are a lot of expected scenes of doctors explaining the illness to the Odones and, once the Odones have it figured out, them explaining it to everyone else around them. It’s unavoidable in movies like this but at least it’s all medically sound, and never comes off as phony.

Are there things that don’t work? Sure. I don’t really buy that Michaela would kick her sister out of the house, or how difficult the Foundation parents are to deal with. I’m pretty sure they are planted in there as superficial obstacles since, apart from Lorenzo’s horrific disease, the Odones don’t have many. They’re financially well-off enough to care for Lorenzo full time, and are clearly smart and capable enough to find a cure for a rare disease practically on their own. Obviously it’s too late to fully save Lorenzo, but nothing is truly standing in their way.

I don’t know, after having mostly slept through it in Mr. Collier’s class so many years ago, I actually ended up liking this movie a lot. Like I said before, Oscar Bait without ever feeling particularly Oscar-Baity. So bravo, man who made Beyond Thunderdome, well done.

Also, Laura Linney! Credited as “Young Teacher!” I love her.

Lorenzo's Oil (Danny's take)

            Movie number two – Lorenzo’s Oil. We didn’t bring this up last time, because the Woodman is such a damn icon, but we should make it a point to mention all the writers by name in these articles. It’s too easy to get caught up in the mystique of the director (of course, we’ll always talk about them too, no doubt).

So….

            Lorenzo’s Oil by George Miller and Nick Enright!

            If not for this project, I’m confident I’d have missed this movie entirely. Maybe, if timing were perfect, I’d have caught it in a hotel room or something, but that’s assuming I hadn’t seen the night’s rerun of Seinfeld recently. I’d simply never heard of this before, and we were alive when it came out. Granted, I was more concerned with Ninja Turtles and my own shit than prestige drama, but that’s hardly an excuse. Especially since, fully grown, but no less concerned for my shit

(it’s key to understanding what the body needs!), I’d consider myself a fan of George Miller. But I guess, even for the strange dichotomy of Mad Maxes and talking animals that are Miller’s career, this one’s an outlier.

            It’s also a movie that has all the hallmarks of Oscar bait. And, really, by that I mean it looks fucking boring. I can imagine us sitting in a theater while this trailer played and me rolling my eyes while making a jerk off motion with my hand. And that jerk would last until the trailer finished. I’d have to keep going. Even after you tried to shush me, because you’re clearly embarrassed. Especially since we’d be at the Queen’s theaters (Arclight), and everyone around us paid fifteen bucks for ticket. But, by the end of the trailer, and, by extension, my jerk, we’d all agree I was right. This does look like pandering garbage – sick kid, ACTING, rare disease, based on a true story, Margo Martindale. Okay, that last one’s a lie. She’s delightful. All right, so we know what it looks like, but is there more to this movie than it’s sleek, gold-seeking surface?

            Yeah, totally. This movie’s smart. Everyone in it’s smart. And it’s so, so refreshing. Because it assumes you’re smart too. It’s interesting to note that fellow nominee, Husbands and Wives, is also full of smart people. Maybe something was in the air? And, to clarify, I don’t mean this is a movie full of inaccessible geniuses. We’re not marveling at their feats of brainpower (another awards trick), we’re just impressed by their ability to handle their shit. When Lorenzo gets hit with this disease, his parents dive in like fucking superheroes to find a cure. It’s a thrill, and they spend a good chunk of the movie in the library.

           

            One of the things I love about this script is its ability to make us understand the rare disease in question - ALD. By the credits, I was ready to raid my kitchen, and cure the disease myself. The script goes out of its way to make you feel like an expert. Occasionally, I wished they’d breeze passed the science and get moving already, but I’ll admit I was mostly wrong on that. Because the cumulative affect of truly understanding the disease puts you in the parent’s heads by the end of the movie. You feel their victories, their losses more acutely. You can really grasp the debates they have, they pain they feel.

           

            And that’s another thing this movie does well. Yes, we’re rooting for the parents. Yes, we want them to find a cure at all costs. But we also understand the views of their opposition. The doctors and scientists aren’t evil, heartless bastards. They’re professionals. And their opinions are given equal heft. Same with the family that heads up the ALD foundation. They’re not monsters. And they aren’t presented as such. The script is extremely even-handed and it manages to make a complicated issue easier to digest. We’re not watching an inspirational sports movie here, and it’s nice that the medical community isn’t treated like the fucking Cobra Kai.

            Before we dig into a couple things that didn’t work for me, I wanted to point out another aspect that really did – this movie’s ability to veer into horror. It’s not strictly script related, but it’s there in it’s willingness to make Sarandon’s character pretty unsympathetic by the end. She becomes a single-minded monster. She wants to save that kid like Jason wants to slice up teens. And it’s there in the writing, but in the cinematography. Miller starts to get pretty creepy with the lighting and the low angles toward the back end. And Sarandon’s performance grows fiercer as the movie continues, allowing her to show a side of motherhood that’s more mother tiger than her previous guise as a story-reading mother goose.

            Praise. Praise. Praise. Okay, what didn’t work? It’s a little long. It does get draggy in parts. Above, I noted that all the science helped bring the movie home for me, and it totally does, but I probably could have done with one less “kitchen sink” metaphor. Or, to save time, maybe Sarandon only fires, say, two nurses, instead of the ten or so it feels like. Oh, and, maybe we don’t need dozens of shots of Lorenzo crying. Maybe. But that Tommy Pickles wail is amusing. And Nolte’s accent…I mean, look, it settles in. By mid-movie, I was able to just accept because I don’t think it’s bad so much as…goofy? I kept waiting for Groucho and Harpo to show up and join the shenanigans.

            Gotta say though, Lorenzo’s Oil worked for me. Maybe I just had low expectations going in, but either way, I enjoyed this movie. I appreciated it for it’s intelligence, and it’s willingness to trust that I’d follow along. If the rest of the prestige movies turn out this good, we’ll be in for a fun (sad, brutal, depressing) ride.

            And to continue --

1.     Husbands and Wives

2.     Lorenzo’s Oil

Husbands and Wives (Mike's Take)

Husbands and Wives

Written by Woody Allen

Okay, let’s begin this in earnest. You and me, talking movies, talking original screenplays, the most consistently interesting category at the Academy Awards. You get interesting concepts fleshed out, quirky ideas, no sequels, no remakes, no adaptations of any kind. So where do we start?

I find it very fitting that we start with Woody Allen, one of your idols, so you already have a much stronger frame of reference for this movie than I do. I love Woody, and I love his movies, but I’ve only actually seen a handful of them. Annie Hall, Manhattan, the “Essential Woody Allen” collection, if you will.

To get things out of the way so I can talk about the actual script, though, it’s pretty interesting that this was the last Woody movie Mia Farrow ever appeared in, and that it was released in the wake of all that unpleasantness. The things that were going on in the real world in 1992 certainly lend this movie a contextual relevance it might not have had otherwise. I’m not sure if that warrants further conversation, since we’re just talking MOVIE here, but it’s worth noting.

So onward towards “Husbands and Wives,” not the document of Woody Allen’s tumultuous personal life, but the movie Woody Allen made because he felt like it. It's wonderful and kind of funny that the very first lines of the very first movie we watched for this project are a brief diatribe on writing as a craft. You’re either good or you’re not. You can’t teach it. Gabe (Woody) is a writing teacher who believes you can’t teach writing.

I was struck by how honest this movie was. I know Woody has made as many dramas as he has comedies by I honestly believed, going into this one, that I was about to watch a comedy. As such, the movie caught me off guard. None of the four leads come off as particularly well-balanced people. Every time you almost like someone, you get Jack berating his girlfriend outside of a party, or Gabe attempting to seduce his student, or a confessional from an ex-husband hinting at Judy’s true nature.

About those confessionals, too. At first they reminded me of Spinal Tap, but the more I watched they seemed more like an early take on the style employed by “The Office” and “Parks and Rec.” I cite those examples partially because, with Spinal Tap, it makes sense that a documentary crew would be following them. Why are cameras constantly on Michael Scott? Why are they following this group of dissatisfied married couples? It makes no sense, but it works well stylistically. This is how we can get Gabe to confess things that he would never say to his friends. I really loved his addiction to “kamikaze women,” who crash and burn but take with you with them.

The movie is also great at portraying that seething rage that can accompany long-term relationships. These are people who can barely stand each other but stay together largely out of obligation. Once Jack and Sally announce their separation, Gabe and Judy see the opportunity to put the kibosh on their own relationship. Gabe goes after Rain, Sally starts looking for excuses to leave Gabe, etc.

About the only new coupling in the movie’s second act that didn’t click with me was Mike falling head over heels for Sally. Not just because Liam Neeson wasn't brutally murdering anyone with his bare hands while talking angrily into a cell phone, but also because Sally is so cold. The movie makes a point of that, but it never really goes into why Michael finds that so appealing. Jack and Sally (a whole year before Nightmare Before Christmas!) are miserable people. It makes sense that a younger woman would shack up with Jack, because he’s old, refined and smart. It makes sense that they would end up back together, too. I just don’t get Michael’s devotion to Sally, so strong that he nearly torpedoes his later relationship with Judy over it.

Those are some rough thoughts. I definitely really liked this one and was surprised by it at nearly every turn. I didn’t even realize until just now that the characters talk about their kids a lot but we never meet them. Are there any children in any Woody Allen movie?

Anyway, onto Lorenzo’s Oil, I suppose!

1992 - Husbands and Wives (Danny's Take)

Okay, Big Game, here we go!

            We’re looking at all the Best Original Screenplay Nominees. And first up is the year 1992. Why? Because you choose it! Here’s the list:

Husbands and Wives

Lorenzo’s Oil

Passion Fish

Unforgiven

The Crying Game.

            And since we’re tackling it alphabetically, with the winner last, we’re kicking it off with a personal favorite of mine – Mr. Woody Allen. We’ll be looking at Woody a lot over the course of this thing. Dude practically owns this category. He didn’t win every time, but he certainly could have. And having just rewatched Husbands and Wives, I’d argue this year certainly falls into a “could have” year. But he’s Woody Allen. Can’t win ‘em all. Plus, this movie came out during a particularly…strange…time for him.

            I know we wanna keep this chat about the screenplays, but there’s some real world stuff in this movie that’s pretty tough to ignore. We know Mia and Woody break it off in real life soon after this film, and you gotta wonder about some of these conversations. They certainly feel real. Like Woody’s got some serious source material to draw from. But we don’t need to speculate. Cause his personal life isn’t the script’s business. Just thought it was interesting.

            Let’s get it started! This movie has some kinda pseudo-documentary vibe going for it. Like, yes, we’re supposed to believe it’s a documentary, but we aren’t supposed to believe there’s an actual camera crew. Unless the crew was doing reenactments? Which, actually, man, that would have been a sweet ending. Or, maybe not. Anyway, it’s a strange approach.

          One that, for me, took a while to fall into, especially given how prolific this style has been the last decade or so. It has rules now! Or, at least solid conventions that most people adhere to. Not so much with Woody’s script.  At first, I found it a little off-putting. I liked the fly-on-the-wall business during the scenes, but didn’t much care for the talking heads. As it rolls on, however, those talking heads start to illuminate the scenes, and they’re able to bring in characters we might not have otherwise met.

          Speaking of the characters, man, are they all hilariously pretentious. We’ve got an art critic, a writer, some kind of architect – if it’s an artistically fulfilling, well-paid dream job, someone has it in this movie. There’s a party scene later and I guarantee there was a conductor, a film director and a jazz pianist in attendance. It’s strange though, I think in most other films, it’d be a knock against the writing – to be so outrageously pretentious – but here, Woody just builds it into the fabric of the world. These people are ALL smart, ALL well spoken intellectuals. That’s the universe they live in. And, sometimes, it makes them seem like assholes. At that same party, when Jack pulls his aerobics instructor away, I’m fully on her side. She punctures the sealed-off world these people live in just enough for us to realize there’s another part of Woody’s New York, we just aren’t seeing it. And I’m fine with that.

          And I think that sealed off concept applies to our main characters basic desires too. There’s a line later in the movie that, for me, sums the whole thing up. Just after sleeping together, Sally turns to Liam (and I’m not calling him anything but Liam!) and says they had a “separate, nice experience”. I feel like that’s what all the characters are looking for, even if they don’t know it. They all claim they want connection, trust, honesty, a partner, but what they really want is to be individually satisfied. To be made whole, on their own terms, using the pieces of another person, but never fully accepting them. It’s why Jack can’t stay with his aerobics instructor (I might have made that one work). It’s why Sally can’t stay with Liam. And why Woody and Mia eventually break up too. By the end of the movie, Jack and Sally do compromise. They end up together. But, based on their closing interview, I’m not so sure the movie advocates for compromise.

         Brief interlude – there’s one scene, late in the film, I want to point out that seems to serve as a counterpoint to all of this. At Rain’s party, Woody gives us a moment with Rain’s parents. It isn’t much, but it does show that two people can be in love. The wife mentions they’re coming up on twenty-five years together and they seem absolutely smitten. It’s nice.

          But compromise doesn’t breed comedy, and this movie is very funny. Watching this again reminds me just how excited I am for that Woody Allen sitcom we’ve got coming up. He’s a master of the form. We’ve got that killer opening, with Jack and Sally bluntly announcing their divorce. That wonderful scene with the aerobics instructor discussing the Zodiac, to Jack’s increasing embarrassment. Jack, Sally and their two, new lovers collected in the same house. All of these scenes were written for maximum conflict. And they’re so, so effective. And hilarious.

           Okay, so, why? Why was this nominated? It’s all about character here. Each one is deep, flawed and so very human. This movie is digging for a certain truth regarding marriage, and, on it’s own terms, finds it. I feel like it’s pretty even-handed about the whole thing too. Marriage is about the perfect balance of, well, everything – truth, honesty, love, sex, shame, lust, desire, passion, camaraderie, as one character says “a buffer against loneliness”, compromise and about a million other things – and if any of these components aren’t working, sure, you can try and make up for them in different areas. Or not. And that’s up to you. And the characters make their choices, and, by the end, find themselves in very different places. For better or worse, till death or some tiny grievance do them part.

        Man, I hope doing this makes us more organized writers. Gives me a new respect for the folks that churn out five reviews every Friday. And I already had a lot of respect for them. Anyway, there were some thing I loved, but couldn’t work into the actual writing. Here goes:

I love Woody’s credits. They make me so happy.

I love the way they talk about sex – it’s so abstract. “Too cold in bed”, “Inhibited”, “Make love”. When Woody delivers that monologue about Harriet Harmon, it has to be one of the least sexy things ever. I love it.

These characters must have constant access to a thesaurus.

Look out, it’s Liam Neeson! Remember when it wasn’t funny to see him in movies? I’ll watch him kick ass all day, but dude used to be an actor!

It’s so wonderful that Judy views Liam’s weeping over poetry as a positive trait.

“Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television” – Woody’s the best.

Change equals death! Never change!

--

Finally, I’m going to keep a running rank of these movies as we go. So, by default –

1. Husbands and Wives