Sing Auld Lang Syne and watch Dinner for One

 And now, just in time for New Year’s Eve, you must watch Dinner for One. This roughly 15-minute film (there are different cuts) is virtually unknown in North America. But it is a huge, HUGE, hit in Germany and some other European countries. It is watched almost religiously by perhaps half the German nation every New Year’s Eve. And its refrain “same procedure as every year” has entered the popular German vocabulary - in figures of speech, headlines, even political debates. It’s rather a silly and yet extremely charming sketch. Two English actors, Freddie Frinton and May Warden, play butler James and aged dowager Miss Sophie. Sophie has invited four of her closest friends to dinner only she doesn’t remember that they have died long ago. James fills in for them, adapting the mannerisms of each guest while also serving the meal’s courses and, of course, drinks. Each time he makes the rounds there is a toast, and you can image what takes place, increasingly hilariously, as the dinner proceeds. Dinner for One was written almost a century ago by Lauri Wylie and revived (in its original English) for German television in 1963. It has since become a cultural institution, as symbolic of New Year’s Eve as watching the ball drop (this year without crowds) and singing Auld Lang Syne. And many other Nordic European countries have also picked up the sketch. In fact, it’s now the most re-broadcast television program in history. So, tomorrow night, join tens of millions of people (mostly European) around the world, and watch this zany, absurd comedy for the ages. Who knows, maybe it will become a world viewing tradition yet.

Film clips - Cruise's tantrum, Woody's New York and movie characters never use the bathroom

The year 2020 is coming to an end and I haven’t been inside a cinema since March…..Disappointed by Turner Classic Movies (TCM) website redesign. As often happens when web sites are supposedly made “better” it’s the opposite. Pages can take up to a minute to load…..Tom Cruise’s temper tantrum on the set of the latest Mission Impossible schlock film? Ya, I can understand his impatience with people breaking Covid protocols on set but then again his crew is allowed to work while hundreds of thousands of small businesses aren’t. Figure this: he has his own money invested in the project, he can easily jet home stateside for Christmas, and now several people on the set have quit in disgust. There’s even a conspiracy theory: his tantrum leaked to create movie publicity…….Steven Soderbergh’s latest No Sudden Move stars Don Cheadle, Benicio del Toro, Jon Hamm, Ray Liotta. It’s the crime world of 1950s racially charged Detroit……The title of the – continually – release-delayed new Bond film No

Time to Die? How apropos for the times.....Speaking of, since March New York City has descended into a dystopian nightmare, being the early epicenter of Covid deaths, then Antifa and Black Lives Matter-related rioting following George Floyd’s death, soaring crime, and one of the harshest restaurant lockdowns in the US in a city where dining is synonymous with living. So, it makes me wonder how Woody, as in Allen, feels these days about his beloved metropolis, so evocated in films like Manhattan (1979) and even this year’s A Rainy Day in New York. He must be crying into his bucket hat……Has anyone else noticed that in every film, no matter when made, whenever a character is carrying a suitcase, it seems as lightweight as a feather? Has anyone also noticed that you can watch thousands of movie scenes and there is never, ever, a situation where a character actually has to use the bathroom? Except, that is, for bygone female characters to powder their noses and tough guys to snort cocaine or beat the living daylights out of someone. But not, you know, to use them for what they were designed for.

Local film notes: Windsor filmmaker Otto Buj, a founder of the Windsor International Film Festival (WIFF), has a new film about Detroit’s early 1980s punk music scene, and Windsor’s contribution to it. Dope, Hookers and Pavement premiered this fall at Detroit’s Freep Film Festival and will have its Windsor (Canadian) premiere in the new year……And Windsor’s Media City Film Festival, one of the world’s most critically acclaimed avant-garde festivals, started in 1994, is making its catalogue of films available online. The THOUSANDSUNS CINEMA - some 60 films – is available through Dec. 23.

Cary Grant is breaking out all over

Cary Grant has always been one of my favorite actors. Suave, debonair. oozing class, and the gentleman’s gentleman. Come to think of it they really don’t make them quite like that anymore. So, I’m happy to say that over the last two weeks my life has been deluged with Cary Grant one-thing-or-another. It started off with reading a review of what sounds like an exceptional new biography Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise by Scott Eyman. A night or two later I turn on TCM and there’s Eyman chatting with host Ben Mankiewicz in between a double feature of Grant and Ingrid Bergman’s Indiscreet (Stanley Donen 1958) and Grant and Doris Day’s A Touch of Mink (Ron Jeremy 1962). Then I get a Criterion Channel email announcing a whole slate of Cary Grant films they're showing this month. Wow! So, I caught Grant’s supposed breakout comedy The Awful Truth with Irene Dunne (Leo McCarey 1937), then The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (Irving Reis 1947) (top photo) and, by coincidence, last night on TCM, Grant and Rosalind Russell’s His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks 1940) (bottom photo). Grant’s roles in Indiscreet and A Touch of Mink were the more “mature” Grant I knew best, the aging but charming romantic dreamboat - the idealized older man - which we’d also seen in movies like Charade (Stanley Donen 1963) with Audrey Hepburn and North

by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock 1959) with Eva Marie Saint. The earlier films showed a still unmistakable Grant but obviously younger and fresh or fresher from his stage work in Vaudeville. Thought I knew he’d worked on stage in the 1920s – he was also a juggler - it was in these early films you actually see the physical versatility, indeed, slapstick. Lithe, with an immensely correct posture, Grant could collapse into all arms and legs, like when he quickly tranforms into an adolescent hot rodder picking up puppy love teenage Shirley Temple in Bobby-Soxer. Or, when he takes part in an obstacle race in the same movie. When it comes to script, Grant’s characters can be immensely witty but in a droll sort of way. Not so in His Girl Friday where, as a tough as nails newspaper editor he verbally dukes it out in amazing spirals of witty repartee with co-actor Rosalind Russell and a collection of newsroom misfits. So, from the 1930s through 1960s, we catch glimpses of Grant’s multi-dimensional roles. And give credit to the actresses. Irene Dunne is attractively brainy, Rosalind Russell sharp as tacks, Myrna Lou (in Bobby-Soxer) seductively intelligent, and Shirley Temple, the more mature version of the adorable child actor. As for Grant he’s simply an actor for all time. 

On the Wuhan China Covid front lines

 

Yes, we’ve lived through the Covid-19 pandemic nine months now and we might be beyond exhausted by this beyond distressing topic. But the virus’s original outbreak was in Wuhan China, a time when the rest of the world thought was a particular and strange virus confined only to that country. Foreign news reports showed a city we’d never heard of totally locked down, neighborhoods cut off by blue fences, crews in hazmat space suits roaming streets with disinfectant blowers. And while the virus has since spread worldwide numbing our senses the source of Covid-19 can still hold fascination, if only because the Chinese experienced it before anyone else. The documentary 76 Days (opening today virtually at the Detroit Film Theatre and Cinema Detroit) takes us deep into those front lines, literally into four Wuhan hospitals, with intimate and uncomfortable footage showing what it was like in hospital wards when people were increasingly being admitted with this strange and unpredictable disease. The first scene opens with a woman writhing in anguish as she’s prevented from visiting her dying father. “You’ll forever live in my heart!” she wails. In another scene, hospital staff try to open a door where a group of people are pressing in to be admitted. They’re admonished – “we’ll get to you eventually!” The scenes are punctuated by lone ambulances travelling though a surreal cityscape. The film’s chronology seems a microcosm of the pandemic itself. Eventually the wards settle down as patients are admitted and treated individually. There are four or five patients we follow. Most are aged and the staff have a habit of calling them “grandpa” or “grandma.” One unruly patient is referred to as a “Hubei (province) Local,” a rube. “Bloody big deal,” he scoffs at the virus. A nurse jokes that if he lives longer, he’ll have “even more bliss” with additional family generations. Another patient remarks,” this place is not bad, free medication and hot meals.” But a woman patient gradually deteriorates. “She used to always hold by hand,” a nurse says. Her bracelet is slipped off and saved in a plastic bag with her phone and identity card, eventually given to her weeping daughter. Almost every scene is set in the ICU with staff photographed as they scramble amidst chaos to intubate or set up IV lines. One nurse is philosophical. “Rich or poor, revered or despised, fate befalls all.” While 76 Days, which refers to Wuhan’s total lockdown earlier this year, has three directors, only two – Weixi Chen and “Anonymous” (to protect his identity in China) – had access to the hospitals, sometimes surreptitiously, with the aid of hospital staff who wanted to show the world what Wuhan was facing. Lead director Hao Wu remained back in the US as the pandemic descended on North America. He calls the footage, which he edited, “raw, intimate and deeply human.” Yes, it is.