One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Fantasy Films 1975.

Before watching the movie:

December is Oscar Bait season and on Yesterday’s Movies, this December is for those canonized movies that have become unquestionable in film culture.

I have seen mainly seen two opinions about this movie: glowing praise for Louise Fletcher, and faint repudiation of the depiction of mental health therapy techniques, particularly electroconvulsive therapy. I have this impression of a bleak slide into despair under the oppression of a corrupt and abusive mental health system. I also think this is one of the movies that made Jack Nicholson famous (or at least one of his earliest roles anybody talks about), so I’m curious to see if he’s got his recognizable style or if he’s more of a blank slate.

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Twilight Zone: The Movie

Twilight Zone: The Movie. Warner Bros./Amblin Entertainment 1983.

Before watching the movie:

I first learned that there was a movie based on The Twilight Zone when I read that the first meeting between John Lithgow’s character and William Shatner’s guest character on “Third Rock From the Sun” had them comment that they had similar terrifying experiences on an airplane, and that was a reference to the fact that Shatner had starred in the Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”, and Lithgow had played the same role in the Twilight Zone: The Movie remake of that story. I thought it was odd that of all the iconic stories told on The Twilight Zone, they chose that one to make a movie out of, but simply titled it “Twilight Zone”, as if the one story summed up the entire show. I much more recently looked it up and discovered that multiple stories are told in the movie, which really makes a lot more sense.

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