Yesterday was so warm I made a pitcher of iced tea, using decaf tea bags--but even decaf products still have some caffeine, as was proven by me being bug eyed at 1am.

I caught the movie "Alien III" as it was starting, and by golly, althought I didn't intend to, I was up till nearly 3am watching as it ended with Ripley swan diving into a vat of molten lead as that ghastly little alien she had been impregnated with burst from her abdomen and went into the furnace with her.

I've seen this movie before; it's entertaining enough so I'd stay awake. But two movies I've seen on cable lately I swear I will never ever watch again.

First is "Ethan Frome", based on a novel by Pulitzer Prize winning author Edith Wharton. A movie based on this book was made a few years ago, starring Liam Neeson. The story: Set in horse and buggy days in fictional Starkville Mass. Ethan is the only child of a middle class widowed mother. He is off at college when his mother becomes ill and needs him to come home and take care of her and the farm.

She sees how hard it is for him to take care of everything and suggests they send for a poor cousin who will come to the house and help take care of her. So cousin Zeena arrives and after Ethan's mother dies, Zeena is packing to go and Ethan feels sorry for her after she says she really has no place to go. He says You can stay here. She says not unmarried and in the same household.
So they marry, but Ethan finds that Zeena is a hypochondriac of the first caliber. His dreams of college gone, he struggles in a loveless marriage.

Zeena is incapacitated and suggests they send for a poor cousin to come help around the house. The cousin turns out to be pretty red haired Mattie who is incompetent around the house, but Ethan falls deeply in love with her. He represses his feelings so much--that's the way society was then--that you just want to scream at him.
Zeena begins to feel the current between Mattie and Ethan and sends Mattie away. On her last day Ethan does something Mattie has always wanted to do--he takes her sledding down a snowy slope--they crash and Mattie is paralyzed, and Ethan is left with a paralyzed leg, and other severe injuries, so that he moves around so crippled up it's hard to watch.

Zeena then has to take care of Mattie and help Ethan.
Though filmed in crisp beautiful color, it is snowy and cold throughout the entire movie--there is a feeling of bleakness and bitterness and acceptance; of starkness and coldness and unfillment and sadness--I can't watch it ever again.

Then there is Madame Bovary which airs on TCM every now and then. Based on the novel by Gustav Flaubert. B/W, released in 1949, Starring Jennifer Jones

This is also a period piece, about Emma, a farmer's daughter who reads romance novels and lives in a dreamworld of waiting for her prince to come along. The nearest thing to that is Charles, the doctor who comes to look in on her father. The doctor falls hard for her and they marry, but Madame Bovary is never satisfied. She runs up huge bills at various shops in the town where the doctor practices. She decorates their modest house, and has beautiful gowns made for her. And she is bored silly with her husband and child.

An aristocrat stops to see the doctor one day for a minor ailment and sees the charming Ms. Emma Bovary and invites them to a ball at his estate. Her husband says no, I'm not comfortable around those people, but she prevails and is stunning at the ball. She begins an affair with one of the aristocrats and plans to run away to Italy with him. She packs her trunks and waits by the door for his carriage to pick her up. He stands her up. She is suicidal.

Then she has another affair with Leon, a guy she thinks has money, and turns out he is nothing but a clerk. It doesn't help that her husband has been disgraced after a disastrous attempt at repairing a club foot, and that the bill collectors are hounding her for payment.

She stuffs her mouth with arsenic and dies, loved to the end by her husband. It's just too depressing. I swear I won't watch that again either although Jennifer Jones is so good in the title roll.

susil