Happy Friday, friends!
The weekend? Aw, you shouldn’t have…
A little bit of joy to kick us off here — while one Hollywood Chris certainly dominated the headlines this week, he should certainly be on Guard because the other Chrises are not slowing down. I missed this last week, but check out Chris Hemsworth crashing a live news broadcast in Australia:
No new TIFF reviews today (or NYFF, which kicked off yesterday and I am also covering), but here’s a new movie you can watch from a streaming service! It’s perhaps a little too dark to serve as the main recommendation, but if you’re looking for a sharp revision to the teen illness movie, I’d recommend Babyteeth on Hulu. (And when you’re done, check out my interview with director Shannon Murphy!)
Here’s something cool that was news to me: in a number of states, you can track the status of your absentee ballot like a package! The Washington Post breaks down how you can go about accessing this feature, provided you are voting in a place that allows for it.
Lest you doubt we’re all connected, I can confirm that I did, in fact, see the effects of smoke blowing from the West Coast all the way to NYC. (Even from my tiny window out onto the world from being cooped up inside my apartment!) As if we needed a reminder that we’re all in this together, that a problem for Americans anywhere is a problem for Americans everywhere. If you want to see some pictures — nowhere near as dramatic as Oregon or San Francisco — Time Out New York put some together along with some organizations to help firefighters and civilians alike affected by the climate crisis.
Now, what you came for…
DAY 190: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (available on Netflix)
It would appear that, in honor of Netflix dropping their Ryan Murphy-created Ratched series today, they’ve also added *gasp* a film made before 2000: the movie that inspired the titular character, 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. This is among the all-time greats and one of only three movies to win the top five prizes at the Oscars (Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay). I had the chance to see it earlier this year in a thing called a theater, and its immense power rocked me to my core once again.
Perhaps a film about life inside a mental institution does not exactly sound like the most appetizing watch given how much time many of us have spent inside confined spaces ourselves in 2020. But One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is not claustrophobic in the slightest, nor is it a film defined by isolation or captivity. It’s a film alive with the crackling energy from Jack Nicholson’s live-wire of a performance as Randall P. McMurphy, perhaps the purest expression of his raw star power and magnetism. He’s not actually insane — at least, not when he arrives — but is still capable of bringing the crazy as he attempts to avoid doing hard labor in prison.
Yet his radical streak, emblematic of the ‘60s counterculture in which the film is steeped, butts heads sharply with the ward’s head nurse, Mildred Ratched (Louise Fletcher). Her stern, chilly performance is the stuff of nightmares … but just delicately pitched enough that I suppose Ryan Murphy felt he could reclaim the character for feminism. Director Miloš Forman, a Czech ex-pat, found in Nurse Ratched the embodiment of the totalitarian regime he fled in his communist homeland. It’s by no means the first or the last instance of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, but it’s certainly among the most memorable committed to cinema.
McMurphy inspires the men around him with the hope of rebellion in the face of Ratched’s tyrannical rule. Further, he helps them realize the ways in which the institution has warped their minds to accept a diminished sense of self. But little does he know that what keeps them under Ratched’s watchful eye is quite different that the forces binding him there, and that makes all the difference as he learns the upper bounds of resistance that authority will allow.
The system might eat some people alive. But that very act of disruption might set others free. As bittersweet a triumph as that might represent in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, it is still a triumph nonetheless. This painful progress of negotiating the limits of control and fighting for autonomy over our minds and bodies is part of the American experience. Here, it’s rendered in all its glories and pains.
Be good to yourselves and to each other,
Marshall