TROTDL
All right, guys, it’s a new month, so let’s take a look at February’s The Remains of the Day chart:
As those of you who follow my twitter feed will no doubt recall, I finally saw the 1993 Merchant Ivory production The Remains of the Day (starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson) early last month, enjoyed it tremendously, and then began weighing every movie I saw from that point on against the The Remains of the Day Scale (TROTDS).
As you can see, among all the movies I saw from start to finish in the month of February, not one of them successfully reached TROTDL. Among the contenders, only current Oscar hopeful The Hurt Locker, Yasujiro Ozu’s elegiac Tokyo Story, and 1950’s “camp” classic Sunset Boulevard came anywhere near TROTDL (although Boris Karloff’s 1968 swan song Targets did make an unexpectedly strong showing, due partly to its surprisingly realistic tone, partly to the undeniable KARLOFF-ness of Boris Karloff, and partly to a murderer who remains terrifying not despite his ill-fitting pants, but because of his ill-fitting pants).
I should note here that I DID, in fact, see the Lon Chaney version of Phantom of the Opera in February, as well, but as I saw it BEFORE The Remains of the Day, its proper place on the scale would be purely conjectural and, therefore, not within the purview of this experiment. It was real bad-ass, though.
Roger Ebert wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. For more information on Roger Ebert, go here.
before i saw The Remains of the Day, i saw Howards End, which is EVEN BETTER. it will blow your TROTDS right out your butt. it’s got the deadly Thompson/Hopkins/Bonham-Carter period drama triumverate.
I second Howard’s End. It is most beautifully tragic and awesome.
It seems almost… PERVERSE to try measuring Howard’s End on the The Remains of the Day scale. But I guess sometimes science demands perversity.