Birthday Invite to Matthew Eng

First, to Matthew Eng, a longtime reader of this website whose birthday is today, June 12. I have never actually met Matthew, but a little birdy (initials V.S.) told me that he has spent enough time on this site that he'd get a kick out of an e-mail or a tweet or a blogpost saying "Hello!" and "Happy Birthday!" and "Long Live All Those Actresses You and I Both Love!"

But I've decided to go Matthew and his birthday benefactor one better, because with the Northwestern school year finally wrapping up, and with my long year of waiting for tenure and for my book to come out (expect more soon about that!), it's clearly past time to get serious about reviving this website and blog.  I loved hearing that there are readers out there who still enjoy this site and its initial centerpiece of long-form reviews, because I haven't written one in quite a while.  Getting other, bigger, higher-stakes writing projects off my plate means getting to re-embrace lots of smaller and/or more personal ones, and I can't tell you how delighted I am to throw off the dust covers and get Nick's Flick Picks properly going again.  Hopefully all the plumbing still works and the electricity's still on.

So Matthew, for being such a devoted patron of NFP, and for having such a good friend who's such a fantastic person and wonderful student (which only assures me of how fantastic and wonderful you surely are, too), what would you like to hear about first?  You, like me, live with the indignity of having no Best Actress nominee who shares a birthday with you, or else I was going to profile one of her performances.  My research shows me that your birthday-mates include famous diarist Anne Frank, and I've never seen the Oscar-winning documentary Anne Frank Remembered or the classic Diary of Anne Frank, which netted so many Academy nods and a win for Shelley Winters, one of the very few Supporting Actress victors I have left to screen. Should I write one of those up for you?  Are those too depressing for a birthday celebration?

Would you prefer a review of a movie starring gorgeous Aussie stalwart Frances O'Connor, perhaps Patricia Rozema's oddball adaptation of Jane Austen's magnificent Mansfield Park? Something starring saucy, multi-talented African-American pioneer Nina Mae McKinney, such as her dazzling musical debut in Hallelujah! or the amazing pre-Code potboiler Safe in Hell? Maybe you'd prefer a review of one of last year's most terrific movies, Magic Mike, starring another Matthew, as well as June 12 birthday girl Cody Horn? That would also be a prompt to post my long-delayed Top Ten of 2012.  Maybe you'd enjoy a review of one of the only three movies that ever featured the legendary stage actress Uta Hagen, who originated the role of Martha in Broadway's original Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? If you're in the market for Uta, the movies I know I can get my hands on are the dark thriller The Boys from Brazil or the celebrated Jeremy Irons-Glenn Close potboiler Reversal of Fortune.

Or maybe you'd be more excited for a movie that shares your birthday, rather than an actor or actress who did so? A bit more digging reveals that The Witches of Eastwick, which I've never seen, and Predator, which I have, both opened on June 12, 1987. Six years earlier, Raiders of the Lost Ark bowed on June 12, 1981, as did the O.G. original Clash of the Titans. I've already reviewed the modern lesbian classic High Art (twice, in fact, because I love it), but not the other actressy arthouse venture that opened on June 12, 1998: the eccentric Balzac adaptation Cousin Bette, where Jessica Lange tries out period comedy, and everything ends with Elisabeth Shue and Bob Hoskins smearing each other's naked bodies with chocolate sauce. For real.

Or maybe the most obviously birthday-related linkage———and I'm not sure how you feel about this—is that you came into the world on the same day that Rosemary's Baby did. Don't worry, I'm sure that doesn't mean anything.

So, Matthew: pick one of the movies listed above, and I'll be delighted to review it: not just in honor of you, but as a gesture of solidarity with all my patient readers that I really am baaaack. Choose wisely (use the Force!), leave your answer in the Comments field, and have a fantastic day today!

P.S. One extra gift: June 12 is also the birthday of the hostess of the obviously best infomercial there ever was.  I give you Jennilee Harrison and the Infinite Dress. You're welcome. (Go easy on her, because as she may have mentioned, she doesn't have a mirror.)

Picked Flick #49: The Purple Rose of Cairo

"I've met a wonderful new man. He's fictional, but you can't have everything." So muses Mia Farrow's Cecilia in one of the most perfect and most perfectly played lines of dialogue Woody Allen ever wrote, a line that is equal parts honey and rue, just like the movie. Cecilia is a poor waitress, in at least three senses of the word: pitiable, without money, and wincingly bad at her job, lost as she often is in two kinds of daydreams. Some are about the movies she has recently seen, others about those soon to arrive in town. Even compared to the down-and-out customers and co-workers who surround her, even in contrast to her thuggish husband Monk (Danny Aiello), Cecilia's plight is especially dolorous, her happiness particularly moth-eaten. For some reason, this is how movies always portray inveterate filmgoers—who would haunt a moviehouse except someone in dire need of consolatory distraction?—but The Purple Rose of Cairo infuses real and enormous feeling into its characterization of Cecilia. She is constantly inspired by the movies to leave her husband and her current life and to imagine better versions of both, but then she is predictably rebuffed by how difficult it is to transform one's lot so utterly, and so she comes back. Her world is one of continual returns, and fairly early in The Purple Rose of Cairo, the misleading allure of popular fantasy seems almost as cruelly sad as the threadbare upholstery and the dim, amber-colored lighting in her apartment.

Did I mention, though, that The Purple Rose of Cairo is, at least in large part, a comedy? Alert as it is to the insuperable remoteness of reel life, it also concocts a dazzling, warm, and utterly joyful figure for the sheer pleasure of movies—the inexplicable way in which their silver flickers come to feel like a space you could happily inhabit, and the even more outrageous way in which cinephilia (which sounds a little like "Cecilia") starts to feel like a reciprocal adoration: if you love the movies enough, you start to sense or at least to dream that they love you right back. On her fourth or fifth trip to a matinée of The Purple Rose of Cairo, cheekily rendered as some mad Hollywood combo of Egyptian adventure, cabaret revue, and high-society romance, Cecilia is first noticed, then hailed, then magically wooed by the sweet-spirited movie character Tom Baxter, who literally walks off the screen to join her. The plaintive mood of small-scale tragedy has been so convincingly set by the preceding half-hour that the sudden rabbit-hole into comic farce is as unexpected as it is delightful. The rest of the movie, peppered with delicious dialogue and acted to perfection by the delicate Farrow and a buoyant Jeff Daniels, follows Cecilia's rapid courtship with Tom, then her run-in with Gil Bellows, the flustered actor who played Tom Baxter (and is also played by Jeff Daniels), and then her agitated decision about which of these figments—the matinée idol or his lovestruck alter ego—shall usher her over the new horizons of her life. The high spirits of the movie also encompass a zesty brothel interlude with Dianne Wiest and Glenne Headly; the Pirandellian fracas among the other Purple Rose characters whom Tom has abandoned; and a climactic montage, diced with expert period details and hammy innuendoes, in which Tom escorts Cecilia through the Hollywood dreamworld. All of these set-pieces and plotlines enliven the movie and invigorate the audience, but even they cannot compare to a short scene in a pawnshop, where Gil Bellows croons standards to Cecilia while she accompanies on ukulele, and the film leaps right into the stratosphere of movie bliss.

The Purple Rose of Cairo doesn't quite end how you expect, though it probably couldn't end any other way, and in wielding the masks of comedy and tragedy so deftly within the same film, it obviates any need for future Allen endeavors like Melinda and Melinda. Beyond the suppleness of the writing and the infectious, perfectly timed energies of the performers, The Purple Rose of Cairo works because the actual filmmaking emanates nostalgia and exuberance in such equal, doting measure. Cinematographer Gordon Willis, one of the truly indispensable figures in American movies, reanimates old-Hollywood idioms as perfectly as he did in Allen's Zelig, but with a sense of fun and depth that the one-joke premise of the earlier film didn't quite allow. For all of these reasons, Purple Rose situates you right in Cecilia's shoes: you recognize the limits and the artifice of movies, and you hope there is something more in your life to go home to, but nor would you want your life without the movies in it. The Purple Rose of Cairo was the first movie we saw in my high-school film studies course, where it was paired with Hitchcock's Vertigo, an even starker myth about the appeals and the dangers of gorgeous surfaces and emotional projections. In my mind, Purple Rose is also a natural companion to The Wizard of Oz, even though a reverse journey from color into black and white marks the threshold of fulfillment in this case, and the adage that "There's no place like home" echoes with even greater ambivalence. Beyond invoking connections to such undebated masterpieces, The Purple Rose of Cairo, in its admittedly tinier way, reveals itself with every viewing to be a masterpiece of its own, a witty and wise amalgam of innocence and experience. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1985 Orion Pictures.