The English Patient (1996)

  Yeah, this was the Christy pick for October in case you couldn't tell.  What a snoozefest.  I cannot believe it won an Oscar for Best Score, too.  That was the sappiest shit I've ever heard.  I wanted to stuff my ears with wax like Odysseus' crew against the Sirens.  Ugh.

I have no respect for this movie so I'm just going to break it down.  There may be some spoilers but, trust me, they're for your own good.

Okay, so this plane crashes in the Sahara at the tail end of WWII and the pilot is horribly burned and disfigured.  He claims amnesia so all anybody knows about him is that he speaks English.  Hence, English patient.  A nurse (Juliette Binoche) is tired of seeing people she knows getting blown up so she takes the burned guy and holes up in a monastery until he dies.  A Canadian spy who worked for the British named Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe) is pretty sure that Burned Guy is actually a Count Almasy, who they believed sold the Germans aerial maps that led them to capture Cairo.  Considering that Caravaggio lost both his thumbs to a German interrogator (Jurgen Prochnow), he's a little pissed about it.  In a long-ass series of flashbacks, we learn that Burned Guy was totally the Count and before the war started, he was part of an expedition of geologists and explorers.  He began an affair with a married woman (Kristin Scott Thomas) whose husband (Colin Firth) eventually attempted to kill them both by crashing a plane but only succeeded in killing himself and injuring the wife.  Burned Guy takes the wife to a cave and walks across the entire goddamned desert to get help for her, only to be accused of being a spy for the Germans and taken into custody.  She dies.

/deep breath

Interspersed amongst all of the flashbacks are bits of the nurse's story as she falls for a young Indian minesweeper (Naveen Andrews).  Frankly, they could have made them two separate movies and I would have been okay with that.  I wouldn't have watched either of them, but it would have made more sense.

Anyway, the Count confesses to Caravaggio that, yes, he totally sold those maps to the enemy so that they would gas up his plane so he could get back to the cave after escaping from British custody.  She's been dead for a couple of days at this point, but he loads her up in the plane and attempts to fly her somewhere but he gets shot down by different Germans and thus, burns.  He then asks the nurse to push enough morphine that he can die in peace.  I'm not 100% certain why they didn't do that at the beginning of the fucking movie, rather than have a trained professional battle nurse quit her post to hang out in a monastery with him until he was "ready to die".  Man had burns over 80% of his body.  Even with modern care, the odds of him making it were slim.  I would have gone all Angel of Death on him by the time the opening credits stopped rolling.  I'm just sayin'.