The All-Nighter

On February twenty-ninth, the living room was vacant, so I decided to watch a few movies with a bowl of popcorn. It morphed into an all-nighter with three bags of popcorn, which I will try to to paraphrase.

At 10:45 pm, I watched Manhattan.

It was a good movie in hindsight, but not my personal favorite. Woody Allen directed and starred in it. The movie is about a middle-aged man, Issac Davis, who has a frustrating career as a television writer. He is going steady with a college student, Tracy, after his wife, Jill (Meryl), left him to become a lesbian. Issac and Tracy love each other, but in his heart, Issac knows that he would be holding Tracy back if they continued the relationship, so he lets her down easily. Issac then starts to fall for another woman whom his best friend is seeing also. She is similar to him in both career choice and age Issac spends the mass of the movie questioning which relationship is best for him: one with a woman half his age, or one that he has to keep a secret. He chooses Tracy, and is able to woo her back just before she gets on a plane at the airport. It's a black and white film, which I thought was very cool and added to the romantic essence, but in its totality, the film wasn't my favorite story to follow because I found it hard to relate to. But again, that's only my opinion.

A bit past midnight, I watched The River Wild.

The River Wild was really good, I thought. Gail Hartman (Meryl) and her family take a vacation to a family lake spot in Montana, and go white-water rafting to celebrate their young son's birthday. The trip turns sour when the family is terrorized and taken hostage out on the water by Kevin Bacon and his literal partner in crime. The pair takes advantage of Gail's white-water rafting skills and they warn her that if she doesn't use her skills to help them escape out of town, the consequences will be lethal. Gail, being a quick-thinker, outsmarts both men and is victorious in the end. The acticipating music certainly is no help, but if you don't count all of the times I yelled, "Meryl! Run, they're going to kill you," I still thought the movie was rivetingly good.

By about 2:30, my mom booted me out of the living room and up to my bedroom, but I still wasn't very tired, so I chose to watch She-Devil on my laptop.

At a party, Ruth Patchett (Roseanne Barr) and her husband, Bob (Ed Begley Jr.,) bump into the chic romance novelist Mary Fisher (Meryl.) Bob and Mary are attracted to the good looks that the other person has and the two of them hit it off at the party. Before you know it, Mary is Bob's mistress. Bob is able to manage Mary's money with his accounting job, and Mary, well, she's Bob's dream girl. Ruth can't compete with her, so she tries to ignore it, still in awe that she has met the famous Mary Fisher, and she bits her tongue until Bob leaves her for Mary and calls her a "She-Devil."

With that, Ruth spends the rest of the movie showing Bob what a She-Devil real is. She makes Bob and Mary's life together miserable by throwing unplanned curveballs at them left and right, all in the shadows. She even messes with the accounting files of Bob's clients, one of whom is Mary. Mary has adjusted her life for Bob, even though it's interfering with her writing projects and luxurious way of living. But by the end of the movie, Mary is furious that Bob has handled her money so recklessly and bitten the hand that feeds him. She leaves Bob and he goes to jail even though he didn't actually do any of the damage. It was all Ruth, and now, she gets to bask in the glory of her cheating husband going to jail.

The movie itself, I thought, was actually pretty funny and is an accurate depiction of karma. It's certainly something to see Meryl expertly play the whiney, pampered mistress. Picture Mary Fisher like if Barbie were a real person living in her dream house. That's how I thought of the character and her lifestyle.

At 3:15 am, I still had enough energy for Death Becomes Her.

The film's main character Madeline Ashton (Meryl) is a notoriously bad actress, but she has youthful looks. She's such a bad actress that people in the audience at one of her shows hate it and they start to leave, but I personally think it's one of the best, most energetic movie openings ever. I don't get why so many people hated it. Anyway, Madeline's looks are so youthful and fresh that they attract a man in the audience named Ernest, who is the fiance of Madeline's friend, Helen. The pair was supposed to get married tomorrow, but Ernest finds Madeline so attractive that she takes Helen's place at her own wedding.

Seven years later at a party, Madeline and Helen are reacquainted at a party and Helen looks years younger than Madeline. So, Madeline is on a pity drive around town, when a card, that was given to her by her plastic surgeon, slips out of her purse. The card takes her to the destination of a shrink's house, who gives Madeline a potion that promises to make her ageless forever. The one catch is that if she dies, Madeline will still live immortally, but she'll rot. When she returns home, Madeline finds out that Helen and Ernest have plans to kill her.

In short, Madeline gets her revenge by killing Helen, and Helen kills Madeline. But neither one of them die and instead their bodies take new forms with twists and turns inside and out. Ernest has absolutely no idea what's going on, and thinks that what he is seeing defies the laws of medical science because both women are not dead, but in a way, they are. This is where both ladies discover that they each took the same ageless potion from the same shrink, and they oddly begin to bond over it and become the sort of friends they used to be. Ernest is their makeup artist for the rest of his life because he has a career preparing deceased people for their funerals using spray paint.

Madeline and Helen spend a great deal of the movie banding together to get Ernest to take the last droplets of the potion so he can live with them forever, too. He is the only one in the movie to realize how precious life is and that it is not to be tampered with. Pretty soon, Madeline, Helen turn their innocent acts of coaxing into an all out chase and they run him out of town. The women keep each other company and help with maintenance upkeep on each other's bodies for the next thirty-seven years where we see them in the back row at Ernest's funeral with veils over their heads. By then, their bodies are horribly decomposed and they've fallen apart. Really, at the very end they fall apart.

I think the lesson in the film is very upfront and tride and true: Life is delicate, so appreciate it. Immortality isn't as glamorous as you think it is. It's actually a cool movie especially for October. It's not scary, but it has that literal deadly edge. How they got the special effects and makeup quality for that movie I will never know.

At 5:00 am, I realized that if I kept going, I could pull an all-nighter, and it would be a fun way to enter the new month. So, because I still had the energy to do so, I turned on It's Complicated.

This was a sweet movie, so I'm glad I ended the night with this one. The premies is that Jane Adler's (Meryl) ex-husband Jake (Alec Baldwin) cheated on her ten years earlier and married that woman, Agness, who was half Jane's age. Agness then cheated on Jake, but they remained together. It's not important for the movie's plot, but it serves him right. Anyhow, Jane and Jake are both in the same hotel for their son's high school graduation. They're drunk and do stuff they haven't done together in ten years. This has them wondering if they could make it work again.

This was a sweet movie, so I'm glad I ended the night with this one. The premiesis that Jane Adler's (Meryl) ex-husband Jake (Alec Baldwin) cheated on her ten years earlier and married that woman, Agness, who was half Jane's age. Agness then cheated on Jake, but they remained together. It's not important for the movie's plot, but it serves him right. Anyhow, Jane and Jake are both in the same hotel for their son's high school graduation. They're drunk and do stuff they haven't done together in ten years. This has them wondering if they could make it work again.

Meanwhile, Jane is having her kitchen redone, and she and her contractor Adam (Steve Martin) get fairly well acquainted during the renovation project, and because they're both divorced, they wonder if they could form a relationship together. This leaves Jane doing a lot of thinking, and Jake doing a lot of bouncing around between houses. Adam is sort of the quiet, observant guy all along who doesn’t speak his feelings quite often. In the end, Jane doesn't get back with Jake, nor does she permanently start going steady with Adam, because things are too odd with Jake sneaking around all of the time, and Adam voluntarily excuses himself from the romance, because he wants Jane to be happy, and she seems more attached to Jake, no matter how hard she tries to devote herself to Adam.

It's definitely a movie that I very much enjoyed. However, I can't understand why Jane wanted to redo her kitchen, because the movie was directed by Nancy Meyers, which means that she already had a strikingly good kitchen. Plus, I still wish Meryl would have gotten with Steve Martin by the end, because he seems like a nice, respectable guy. But, oh well, it's complicated after all.

That movie ended close to seven, which meant I had made it to sunrise. Then I slept, or crashed, for three hours. When I woke up, I started talking about all the plots and listing the movies in chronological order, so my dad suggested I start a blog "like that woman in Julie & Julia." It took me about another almost two months before I took him up on the offer and decided it would be a fun thing to do, but eventually, I decided to start what you see before you today.

Later, at eight that evening, I did watch Marvin's Room also.

It is about these two estranged sisters Lee (Meryl) and Bessie (Diane Keaton) who took two different life paths. Bessie chose to take care of her ailing parents in Florida, and Lee went to start a family in Ohio. They reconnect when Bessie is told by her doctor that she has leukemia and needs a bone marrow transplant to live. This devastating news combined with Lee's juvenile delinquent son who has just been released from an institution, Hank, (Leonardo DiCaprio) makes for a difficult Florida family reunion.

As it turns out, Bessie is the only one who can understand Hank, which is a good thing because Hank is the only possible match for Bessie. Throughout the movie, Bessie and Lee exchange personal stories of the past, which they never have done before, and a lot is discovered as they try to reconcile their different life paths. Sadly, as her condition worsens by the day, it's revealed that Bessie is afraid to go to sleep nowadays because she terrified she won't wake up. But Lee is strong when Bessie isn't. In a way, this tragedy does have its brightspot because it brings the two sisters together, and it also forces both Lee and Hank to step into each other's shoes, which in turn, strengthens their relationship as well.

If my memory serves me correctly, it never is said whether or not Bessie finds a match, but as I'm writing this now, I realize that wasn't the point of the movie. The point of it all was that no amount of mileage, or number of years, will create a divide that is too big for a family to bridge. The movie is called Marvin's Room because Bessie and Lee's aging father Marvin is bedridden in his room. It's that room in the house that holds the most family memories.

So, that's it. I slept pretty good later that night If you've read through all of that, kudos to you!

As always, thank you for the entertainment, Meryl.