Movies from the Heart—Last Holiday

Moving the 2006 romantic film The Holiday, which I wrote about in my last blog, to a film that came out in the same year called Last Holiday, we’re looking at a very different film. Or are we?

The film was based on a 1950 screenplay by J. B. Priestley who was credited as the writer along with Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman. This is not an uncommon occurrence, for an old screenplay to be updated for a new generation. We see it all the time, don’t we? Look at how many versions of A Star is Born there have been, for example.

Some people decry “remakes” of classic films. Like somehow it was cheating to remake a successful film that’s already been made—as if the remake was just riding on the coattails of the original. And hey, sometimes that may be true, but certainly not always.

And I definitely don’t think it’s a cheat. Think about it—how many times have Hamlet and other great Shakespeare plays been performed around the world by different acting companies? Do we decry that? Certainly not! We’re very much OK with realizing that Hamlet is a terrific work that deserves to be put on in as many venues as possible. And I think there’s also the hope that it will continue to be performed as long as live theatre is a form of entertainment.

I think this attitude needs to travel to film. There are great works of art in the film world—comedies, dramas, even superhero stories—so why not continue to tell them for generations to come?

That’s exactly what Last Holiday did. Take a look at the trailer for the film.

Georgia has a hard time showing her feelings. And she’s a big-time dreamer. So much so that she keeps a scrapbook of her dreams. When it looks like her life is going to be cut short by a brain disease, she lets go of her reticence and starts to live.

She cashes in her savings and decides to take a dream trip to Europe and go out in style. The diagnosis makes it clear to her that there’s no time to lose, and that as she’ll never achieve all her dreams [like her crush on a colleague at work] she might as well enjoy the time she has left by living out some of them—the ones money can buy.

Of course, as this is a comedy, we discover quite early that the diagnosis is a mistake—but Georgia doesn’t know that. Probably a good thing, because it’s the diagnosis that got her away from being her reticent self to being the woman she only dreamed she could be.

Dreams. They come in all shapes and sizes. Next week we’ll look at some more contemporary dreams in The Devil Wears Prada.

Copyright © Diane Lake

08Sep24

Email Diane a question to Diane@DianeLake.com