Afterglow (1997)

And sometimes, just sometimes, movies are made to completely surprise, to deliver the unexpected, to tantalize and intrigue...

As this little project of mine moves forward, I am daunted by the selection of movies to watch. It's not the volume of movies I have to watch to meet my target, although with 500+ movies on the board it is a bit of a what-did-I-get-myself-into task. For me, one of the biggest challenges ahead of me is the knowledge that there is a vast amount of heavily serious viewing ahead of me, and I am not adverse to serious dramatic movies - and so it is that I sometimes find myself wondering what next am I delving into?

Enter Afterglow, a rather pleasant surprise - had I known it was Robert Altman producing, i might have been better prepared, he is after all the genius behind some of my favourite movies, like Pret-a-Porter & Gosford Park, movies which seem to balance substantial plot with a seriously dry and appropriate level of humour, but in this case, happy to be surprised...

Lucky (a philandering playboy handyman played by Nick Nolte) and Phyllis (a former B-movie star brilliantly portrayed by the legendary Julie Christie) are a mature married couple in a complicated marriage - wrought with frustration, regret and resignation. Jeffrey (a career-driven, anally retentive, repressed businessman played by Johnny Lee Miller) and Marianne (a bored, biological-clock-alarm-ringing, picture perfect, wife as played surprisingly well by Lara Flynn Boyle) are a young married couple in a complicated marriage - wrought with frustration, regret and resignation. These four starkly different yet surprisingly similar character are about to be thrust into an explosive, hysterical, whimsical, odd-ball, tragic set of circumstances which will forever alter the course of their lives.

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie, because in selecting it I had expected a heavy drama and instead got a movie which is hard to describe, a comedy drama romance - it was so intriguing, I was whole-heartedly invested but a few frames in.

So It's Julie Christie who is responsible for my viewing hereof, and it's rather a tragedy that a legend, an Academy Award winner and four time nominee for Best Actress (her 3rd nomination for Afterglow), an actress described as "the most poetic of all acresses" by Al Pacino himself, one of the most beautiful women ever to grace the silver screen, in today's day and age is lost as another face on screen, not well known by an entire generation of movie watchers - she is particularly brilliant in Afterglow, funny, tragic and deliberately larger than life. As good as Helen Hunt in As Good As It Gets? I am just going to have to rewatch all the performances of the year, Helen Hunt always was a winner for a brilliantly understated performance (and always been one I was just never 100% sure about)...

Afterglow is a rarity worth a watch, especially to those Robert Altman fans...

Afterglow is the first movie watched from the 1997 crop of movies and is now the 31st Oscar Nominated movie I have watched since I started this blog. I just realised I am going to have to sit through Titanic again, it's not that I didn't enjoy Titanic, I just don't know how I am going to sit through it again...

nuff said...