It Happened One Night (1934)

2020 has become a year where trying new things is more common than doing things the way we used to. Many of those disruptions have been refreshing. In that spirit, I recommend you reserve some movie-night-in time for a 90-year old black-and-white flick that you'll have to rent for a buck or two — or three. For real.

If you've seen it, you'll probably relish this reminder to rewatch. If you haven't, this is the time to see the one movie that Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks, Hugh Grant, Jennifer Aniston, Bugs Bunny, and every rom-com and road trip movie of the past two centuries owes something to. I received a copy of It Happened as a gift in my young twenties and it fueled my passion for film discovery.

Although it never makes the cable rotation for a generation of movie-lovers, it was hardly a secret in its day. Frank Capra's It Happened One Night, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, is one of the first "talkies" and the Oscar Best Picture of its year. It's in a small list of films (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Silence of the Lambs) that won all five major Academy Awards.

The plot is simple. A spoiled heiress meets a newspaper reporter in search of a story and two opposites eventually attract. It also introduced America to hitchhiking as well as a scandalous "show a little leg" scene that required a stunt double in its day. And an undershirt-less Gable reportedly caused T-shirt sales to plummet.

Depression-era civilities, culture, and machismo aside, the script and banter are amazingly fresh and it's one of the breeziest movies you can spend one hour and forty-five minutes with.

In a nutshell: You've never seen the remake because no one can touch this magic. However, it has influenced films in every decade that followed.

Awards: Winner of every Oscar it was nominated for including the top five: Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay. 

The Ten Buck Review: Worth ten bucks.

Bad Education

This new film, starring Hugh Jackman, premiered at the 2019 Toronto Film Festival along with Jo Jo Rabbit, Hustlers, and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Lucky for us watching movies at home it was purchased for $20 million by HBO instead of a traditional film distributor.

Bad Education tells the true story of beloved Long Island school superintendent Frank Thompson (Jackman) and Pam Gluckin (Alison Janey) who stole millions from their district.

Jackman, who has played charismatic criminal/con-men before (notably P.T. Barnum and Jean Valjean), sinks his teeth into his first bad guy role. It's a bit jarring to see him play such a deeply unsympathetic character. He gets an A+ for this as does Janey, who is in I, Tonya mode.

I won't spoil the story except to say it's unbelievable and true. Other than serving as a cautionary tale, I'm not sure what a viewer truly  gets out of watching this story play out except that the performances pull you in. But I am sure that is fun to see a new cinematic film nowadays that's not a ten-episode series.

Simply put: Who doesn't need a quality film to pop up on TV about now?

Award potential: Jackman has a showy performance that could land award contention, but with HBO taking this film to TV, he and Janney will be contending for Emmy nominations, not Oscars.

The Ten Buck Review: Worth ten bucks.