Movies -- A Recap -- Part XIX -- More "Oldies but Goodies"

I was surprised to discover that I had not seen A Midnight Clear (1992). It's the story of a group of US GIs in WWII who are assigned the task of holding Allied ground in the form of an isolated villa, besieged by Germans, while they run short of food and ammunition. It has a fabulous cast. It's heavy, but weird, and almost a little bit funny.

The Four Seasons (1981) is an Alan Alda film which I really enjoyed. It follows three couples who vacation together each season throughout the year, so the viewer follows them through marital problems, issues with kids, strains on their friendship, and more. It's funny and a bit risque.

I watched The Journey of Natty Gann (1985) a lot as a kid. I loved her determination and independence, and her dog/wolf.  The titular character is played by Meredith Salenger who went on to do lots of stuff, though nothing hugely newsworthy.  

Field of Dreams (1989) is truly a love letter to baseball. S has made a valiant effort of becoming a baseball fan for my benefit, but I didn't realize that he hadn't seen this movie until we watched the game between the White Sox and the Yankees this past summer. For my part, I forgot how darn funny the first half of the movie is, and I've seen it so many times that watching it is like visiting old friends.

Dogma (1999) is another cult classic that S hadn't seen. That really surprised me, because it seems to be right up his alley.  It's quick and funny, but certainly more of a niche flick than Field of Dreams.  We had to get it from the library in order to watch it. I couldn't figure out why it wasn't on any streaming service, but the internet enlightened me to the conventional wisdom that, rather than being owned by by the Weinstein Company (and accordingly being taken into receivership), it actually is owned by the Weinsteins personally - to this day - and has not been licensed to any of the streaming services.

I don't have any idea how we stumbled onto Voyage of the Damned (1976).  It's certainly not because either of us had read the book; I didn't even know it was a book until I started looking into this whole situation. It's a retelling of the true story of the SS St. Louis, a cruise liner which left Hamburg in 1939 headed for Cuba.  Many of the passengers aboard were Jews fleeing the increasingly oppressive Nazi regime, hoping for refuge.  I won't spoil the ending, but even if you don't want to watch the whole movie, check out the IMDB link above or the Wikipedia page to find out, if you're interested.

I'm sure I've mentioned previously that one of my law partners is super into old movies.  TCM is his favorite television station.  He has, for years, been bugging me about seeing Sophie's Choice (1982), which I finally did!  It's a small but excellent core cast: Meryl Streep as Sophie, Kevin Kline as her on-again-off-again boyfriend Nathan, and Peter MacNicol (who's been in all sorts of things but whom I recognize most clearly as the nutty Dr. Janosz Poha from Ghostbusters II) as their third wheel Stingo.  I won't tell you what the titular choice actually was, but suffice it to say that the main thrust of the plot is an exploration of Sophie's experience in Nazi-controlled Europe, including being sent to Auschwitz for a period of time.
Question: in the version we saw, either there weren't subtitles when the characters were speaking Polish or German or we couldn't figure out how to turn them on.  Was this just us, or was this a deliberate choice on the part of the director to omit them?
Either way, it was an excellent film.

And a couple of oldies but not-so-goodies (which don't get pictures):

Coneheads (1993).  I don't know what possessed us to watch this movie.  But it's really dumb. 

Beautiful Creatures is a popular a kid. I loved movie name.  The subject film here is the 2000 edition.  It was weird, and I didn't care for it.