Heaven Can Wait (1978)

In my search for films with Charles Grodin with good ratings, I stumbled upon this one. For whatever reason, I have a difficult time finding 1970s films that I want to watch. Why is that? I mean, I have no problems finding films from any other decade, but beyond the "best well known" films of the 1970s, I tend to draw a blank.

And this one, I would have thought, would be better known. It was nominated for 14 Oscars and won 9. But nope. I went in to watching it without having a clue what the plot was about. Nor did I know that this is a remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), which features another one of my favorite actors, Claude Rains. (There's also a 1943 movie called Heaven Can Wait, but it has nothing to do with the 1978 version.)

Although I'm okay with fantasy, the premise of the film is a little absurd. I could forgive that, but I don't like how the ending is handled. In brief, Joe (Warren Beatty) is a back-up quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams. He's just found out that he's been picked to start the season, but then he's tragically killed. He doesn't realize that he's dead, and in questioning where he is, he soon finds out that it was a mistake. His spirit was removed before he was actually dead.

The kind agents of Heaven want to make up for the error, but his body has already been cremated. Why this should matter, I'm not sure, because his "body" would have already been buried. But anyway, they allow him to find a suitable just-dead body to put his soul into. It turns out to be a millionaire's body. He's in this guy's body for most of the movie, and he retains his own thoughts and memories. He even buys the Rams for $67 million dollars so that he can find his way to place himself in as starting quarterback for the Super Bowl, which is just about to happen.

In terms of the timeline, then, he's been this other guy for months. But this guy's wife and his executive assistant (Grodin) have long been planning to murder him. In the meantime, Joe has also fallen in love. So, it's no longer just that he wants to stay alive to be the Super Bowl quarterback, but he also wants to stay alive to be with the woman he loves.

But when the millionaire is killed, Joe has to enter another body. This time, for reasons never explained in the film, when he takes over the new body, he has to lose his own identity. He's prepared the woman that this might happen, so that she knows it's really him in a new body, but what difference does it make if he himself doesn't know that it's him?

I guess the ending is unnecessarily complicated. Let Joe continue to be Joe in the new post-millionaire's body, and I might like it a little bit better.

As is, I kind of felt like I was watching a made-for-TV movie, like those the networks used to make back in the 1970s and 80s. It's got Beatty and Julie Christie, but the overall quality of the film is only marginally better than a TV movie and it's difficult to believe that it actually got 14 Oscar nominations.

All that said, this is another remake that makes me want to go back and watch the original, if only just to see how the original handled things differently, and hopefully better.

Rating: 2/5 stars

"Digging for the Truth" Experiment #4 -- The Federalist Radio Hour

I first heard of Sean Davis last week. He created an online magazine called The Federalist in 2011, and he currently has about 500,000 followers on X. It was about last week that he posted something amazing. He suggested if the Supreme Court doesn't rule the way they should, not only should Trump just ignore the ruling, if they keep obstructing the administration, he should just dissolve the Court altogether. And I thought, wow. This guy is saying outrageous stuff like that, and there's an audience for it. So, I decided I'd listen to an episode of The Federalist podcast: April 17, 2025 -- Deportation, Due Process, and Deference to the American People (40 minutes) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/deportation-due-process-and-deference-to-the/id983782306?i=1000703904873 In the 40-minute conversation, the host and guest discussed why due process wasn't required for illegal immigrants. The case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia was mentioned for a brief second, but...

In Utero

In 1994, I wore my In Utero shirt to college. I’d walk down the hall, and people would look at the shirt. I still remember a professor looking at it, not apparently hip to the scene. She asked, “Bret, is there something you’re trying to tell us?” I had no idea what I was trying to say. Kurt Cobain had just shot his head off with a shotgun. Before that life-changing event, I hadn’t been the biggest fan of Nirvana, but I did recognize the immediate impact “Smells Like Teen Spirit” had on music, or at least on MTV. Nirvana had seemingly killed and buried Hair Metal, and they had done it single-handedly. What exactly was this “Alternative” sound? It was weird, because soon it felt like everything was “alternative,” and that didn’t make any sense. Once everything is the same, how can it be anything but standard, normal? Nirvana was okay, but at least at the time I was wearing the merch, I was much more into Offspring and Green Day and Tool. And that’s about as far as I went into...

I Must Betray You -- Ruta Sepetys

I appreciate the pacing. The author's epilogue includes her mission statement -- historical fiction as a way to keep history alive. Romanis is an obscure place, but she hopes people reading the book will take an interest in its history. She also makes the point that there are no clean endings. So, the evil dictator and his wife were killed, but the problems they created didn't magically go away, the country still had to find its way and move forward, and it was a process.

The Writer's Poke

Search This Blog