The Writer's Poke

The first time I watched Doctor Zhivago was about 30 years ago. A friend picked the movie, and I watched it over at his house with his parents. For whatever reason, they kept the volume very low, and I never bothered asking them to turn the volume up. As a result, I missed out on a lot of the dialogue, didn't follow what was going on in the plot, and got totally confused on who the characters were. Regardless, even though I was maybe 21 or 22 years old, I don't think I was the right age for this film to fully appreciate it, even if I could have heard what was going on.  Now that I'm in my 50s, and I have a little bit of life experience behind me, it's much easier for me to tap into what these characters were going through -- not that I've ever been through a World War and a Communist Revolution, but I'm maybe better at comprehending the idea of what people will do to survive, and how some people will cling to the idea that life is about more than just surviving....

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...