Hysteria was a fun flick, which unfortunately chooses to romanticize and fictionalize a particularly antifeminist reality of the history of the invention of the electromechanical personal massager. The real Dr. Granville steadfastly refused to apply his invention to the treatment of female nervous tension, reserving it for nongenital and mostly male muscular massage therapy.
Elegy did not spell out its closure but you know what? a movie consisting of wallowing in its anti-protagonist's nauseating cowardice, jealousy and mean spirit doesn't elevate itself back to memorability or meaningfulness with frontal nudity, not even Penelope Cruz's. By the time the movie ends I find myself not caring if David and Consuela get back together. It'd probably be better for her if they don't. The only thing remotely interesting about their story is that it's based on the 2001 novel "The Dying Animal" by prolific author Philip Roth, of "Portnoy's Complaint" fame, as a sequel to his 1977 "The Professor of Desire". Is that a commendation? Well you tell me, do people sit around discussing Roth's work the way they do Stephen King, Fitzgerald, Vonnegut, Steinbeck, Salinger, Margaret Atwood? I suspect E.L. James (Fifty Shades) is more widely read than Roth.
Miss also reminded me we'd watched "Joe" (2013) recently, or as it got catalogued in my brain "that Nicolas Cage poorsploitation flick with the homeless actor who basically plays his drunk-ass self". (Because in my mind, the namespace for "Joe" is already taken up with the 1970 film.) "Poorsploitation" was an interesting coinage of phrase that some reviewer used to link "Joe" with "Winter's Bone". The phenomenon of poorsploitation film is a bit more interesting than Joe or Winter's Bone themselves, in my opinion.