Election (1999)

It was more of a non-graphic sex movie than I remembered. Sex between students, between teacher and student, a teacher and his friend's ex-wife.  

Broderick thinks he's a good teacher even as he retaliates against an ambitious, fatherless girl (Reese Witherspoon) running unopposed for president. He's mad at her for reporting his friend, another teacher, for molesting her. He gets a deeply religious yet sexually active football player to run against her. His angry Lesbian sister also enters the race. 

There was a good lesson for kids when Witherspoon stops cooperating with the school's investigation without a lawyer. 

My first brush with student body elections was in the first or second grade. They had fifth graders running for student president. We had to attend an assembly to hear their speeches which were pretty much identical and made no sense to me. They each promised to keep the hallways clean. I tried to picture them giving orders to the janitors. It was grade school. No one was in the hallways unless they were being marched in line somewhere.

We had a kid in junior high who strained to come up with an original platform and I thought he did pretty well. School dances made money, he argued. They were profitable. He promised more school dances. After he was elected I saw him trying to get teachers to volunteer as chaperones but they weren't going for it.

Available on the Criterion Channel, free on Pluto, free with a subscription on Paramount. $3.59 on Amazon or $3.99 on Apple TV or Fandango. Pluto is your best bet.

The Light that Failed (1939)

Starts with two tweens having fun with a handgun. The girl fires it too close to the boy's head and momentarily blinds him. Skips ahead. The boy had grown into Ronald Coleman. He's in the British Army and murdering Sudanese. Coleman is hit above his eye with a spear. Sadly, he survives. He returns to Britain and becomes an artist painting imperialist war scenes. This was based on a novel by Rudyard Kipling and you know what that guy was like.

He runs into his old girlfriend Maisie. She probably kind of owed him after almost killing him as a child, but she's working on being an artist herself and doesn't want to resume their relationship. 

Oh, and then his eyesight starts to go as a result of his war wound. 

With Walter Huston and Ida Lupino as an impoverished young woman he hires to model.

Directed by William Wellman.

Even if I could get past the killing and the British imperialism, there was no one to really get behind in this thing.

Available on The Criterion Channel.

Scream of Fear (1961)

A young woman's mother has died. She's paraplegic. Her parents were divorced. She returns to her wealthy father's villa in France. She hadn't seen or spoken to him in ten years. When she arrives they tell her he's gone, went away somewhere, but he'll be back. She hangs around with her stepmother and some household servants but starts seeing her father's corpse which appears sitting in chairs at night in the dark. She screams and rolls away each time, but when people come to see what's wrong they can't find the body.

She befriends the chauffeur who helps her investigate. There's a scene where he appears in a terribly immodest swimsuit. 

It looked beautiful, well-made in black & white. Not as scary or creepy as it might have been. There are a couple of twists at the end that weren't that surprising.

A Hammer film. Christopher Lee in a supporting role as the family doctor. Starring Susan Strasberg, Ann Todd and Ronald Lewis. Directed by Seth Holt.

Free on Tubi.

Coup de Chance (Woody Allen, 2023)

I saw this free on the Roku Channel. 

The title means "Stroke of Luck" in French. Story begins with a rich guy's young trophy wife running into an old classmate from high school.

I'd recently watched a YouTube video with writing advice for authors. It argued that you can use coincidence at the beginning of a story, but if later plot developments happen that way, it annoys the reader. And I was a bit disappointed in the ending. How many decades has Woody Allen been at it? Isn't it time he directed a gunfight?

I thought it was an antidote to Match Point, a story of murder among the upper crust which, for some reason, made the poor boy, the working class tennis pro, the villain as he mingles with a perfectly pleasant family of wealthy English aristocrats. 

Coup de Chance has a young writer living in a studio apartment targeted by his girlfriend's wealthy husband. 

I didn't really like the model railroad. It should have looked more European, like with a couple of model European hamlets for the train to pass through.