MY MOVIE SHELF: Steel Magnolias

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 168  Days to go: 119

Movie #270:  Steel Magnolias

“Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion.”

When Steel Magnolias came out, that’s how I would describe it to people. How, one second I’m crying my eyes out and the next I’m dying of laughter, and how amazingly great that was. It was really the first time a movie had elicited that kind of bold physical reaction from me, and I’d be hard pressed to think of even a handful that have come out since that could do it even half as well. Steel Magnolias is a rare gem.

The story of six women living in Louisiana, Steel Magnolias feels like home to me. My mother’s family is from the deep south, and growing up we spent several weeks there every summer and sometimes in the winter as well. These people are my people. The characters of Steel Magnolias are people I recognize, with familiar habits and personalities and lifestyles. The gathering together of food to care for people who are suffering a hardship is commonplace. The catty but not malicious gossiping about everyone in town is just as common. The blending of church and community, of town functions and socializing at the beauty parlor are all rituals I’ve both witnessed and taken part in. That kind of authenticity and familiarity really helps bring the movie to life.

It’s often labeled a chick flick, as if that’s something to scoff at, but Steel Magnolias lifts up female relationships in a beautiful way. When Shelby (Julia Roberts) faces several health scares throughout the film, Truvy (Dolly Parton), Ouiser (Shirley MacLaine), Clairee (Olympia Dukakis) and Annelle (Daryl Hannah) are there for Shelby and her mother M’Lynne (Sally Field). Whether it’s to tell a joke or give a hug or just to grasp a hand in solidarity, these women support each other through all the ups and downs that come in life. Through laughter and tears and everything in between, these women stick together and build each other up.

I have to say, I never really related to Shelby the way I suppose I probably should have when I was younger. There’s an arrogance of youth that perpetuates the idea that nothing bad will ever befall them, and no one will ever die. I had that same arrogance, I swear, but Shelby always struck me as selfish and stubborn. She was also inordinately difficult toward M’Lynne, but perhaps that’s just part of the nature of mothers and daughters. I have been inordinately difficult with my own mother from time to time, and she remains the one person in the world who can drive me crazy at the drop of a hat. Still, Shelby and new husband Jackson (Dylan McDermott) both seemed so in-the-moment, unaware of risks and consequences and mortality. That’s always been sad to me, and one of many reason why I’ve always felt compassion toward M’Lynne.

I’ve always felt for Truvy, too, whose husband Spud (Sam Shepard) was always distant and rarely showed his love for her, even though it was always there. And I’ve loved Clairee’s color and humor and her desire to make everything more enjoyable. I’ve even commiserated for Annelle, who enters the film sort of lost and spends the vast majority of it trying to find her place. But most of all, I love Ouiser, because she and I share the same misanthropic tendencies, though I do openly love a lot more things than she does.

Steel Magnolias is full of important life lessons for any woman to internalize. Never have a groom’s cake at your wedding if it looks like a bleeding animal. Never allow your husband to shoot birds out of your trees. Listen to doctors when they tell you things. When someone screams they want to hit something, offer them up a hated individual. Tell people you love them more than your luggage, even if nobody knows what it’s supposed to mean. And most importantly, get someone to do calisthenics for you if you’re ever in a coma. (I would add that this person also be in charge of your leg shaving. It’s very important to have a girlfriend for this purpose. If I am ever in a coma, dear God, someone shave my legs for me.)

Also, always always always have a group of girlfriends you can count on. In many ways, they will be some of the most important relationships in your life.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Forrest Gump

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 263 Days to go: 258

Movie #114: Forrest Gump

If you talk to people about Forrest Gump today — “movie” people, especially — I find they are pretty derisive about it. They say it’s simple and hokey and cloying, that it’s not a great movie, that it’s one of those laughable Oscar picks from years gone by that no one would ever take seriously today. But I saw Forrest Gump with my mom on opening weekend. And I was well and fully aware of Tom Hanks having just won the Best Actor Oscar a few months prior for the previous year’s Philadelphia. Yet I sat there in the darkened theater in awe of Hanks’s performance as Forrest, and I knew he would win the Oscar again. Couldn’t deny it. And it wasn’t like years later when I knew Denzel had won the moment his nomination was announced for Training Day — I didn’t even need to see the movie to know that one, although seeing the movie only cemented my certainty. With Forrest Gump, I was kind of in disbelief as I watched, telling myself it simply wasn’t done, to have someone win twice in a row. It almost never happened, but none of my arguments convinced me. Hanks embodied an entirely different soul in that movie, completely shedding everything that made him Tom Hanks. I knew, without a shadow of the doubt, that he would win the Oscar, and no one would find a way to deviate me from that belief for the next eight or so months.

There was also a bit of a kerfuffle later that year, when Pulp Fiction came out — another groundbreaking and earth-shattering film in a year full of them — that Forrest Gump shouldn’t win Best Picture. Truth be told, I love both of those movies, as well as two others of that year’s Best Picture nominees (Four Weddings and a Funeral and The Shawshank Redemption), and if I were picking on that twenty-year-old ballot it would be Shawshank by a mile and a half. But it was twenty years ago and I don’t get a vote anyway, and Forrest Gump is exactly the kind of movie the Academy loves — feel-good, crowd-pleasing, well-acted, touching and completely non-controversial. Of course it was going to win.

The thing is, though, Forrest Gump is all those things.  It’s delightful and funny and just fun to watch, plain and simple. The jokes are light and easy, the characters are charming, and the soundtrack is flipping great. (Best music cue: right after Lt. Dan (Gary Sinise) has given Forrest and Bubba (Mykelti Williamson) the rundown on how to act in Vietnam, there’s the faint sound of The Beach Boys “Sloop John B,” “This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on.”) Sally Field is just the perfect amount of fierce and homespun to be Forrest’s mom, and Robin Wright (who I can see resembling herself in later roles, all the way to House of Cards, but who I can’t, for the life of me, see her resembling herself as Buttercup in The Princess Bride — like, at all) as Jenny is all soft heart and hard edges and she walks that line really well. Even the stuff that could easily look outdated in the twenty years of advancements that have occurred since the film was released — the archival footage with Forrest grafted in, Lt. Dan with no legs — is still virtually unnoticeable as CGI.

And who doesn’t still smile at Bubba’s list of shrimp or at seeing Forrest jump off his boat to swim to Lt. Dan, only to have the boat crash into the dock behind them? It’s still incredibly charming and incredibly quotable and incredibly fun to watch. It just is.

“You ever been on a real shrimp boat?”

“No, but I’ve been on a real big boat.”

I mean, come on. That’s funny.