Having caught up with most, if not all, the contenders for this this year’s Oscars available for streaming on the various platforms, I decided to watch a film on Netflix that had been a minor contender for Oscar consideration two years ago.

Michael Lembeck’s Queen Bees did manage a nomination for an AARP Movies for Grownups Award in the Best Buddy Film category, losing to the quickly forgotten Tom Hanks post-apocalyptic adventure, Finch, about a man and his robotic dog.

Queen Bees is a comedy-drama about an old lady who locks herself out of her house one day while taking out the garbage with her dinner cooking on the stove. Before she can figure out how to get back into the house, the stove catches fire and the kitchen is destroyed. Strongarmed by her daughter, she agrees to temporarily move to one of those newfangled independent living senior homes while the kitchen is being renovated. There she will be forced to mingle with other old people for her own good. Sounds yucky, right? It would be except that the old lady is played by the ebullient Ellen Burstyn, 88 at the time of filming, and still a force to be reckoned with.

Burstyn has three sets of buddies. The first is her college bound grandson (Matthew Barnes) who must walk a thin line between her and his sourpuss mother (Elizabeth Mitchell). The second is the cardplaying group at the home consisting of Ann-Margret (79), Jane Curtin (73), and Loretta Devine (71). The third is amorous male resident James Caan (80) with whom she falls in love.

Interestingly, both Ann-Margret (Carnal Knowledge) and Burstyn (The Last Picture Show) were nominated for Oscars for the first time in 1971, losing the Best Supporting Actress award to Burstyn’s co-star Cloris Leachman. Caan received his only Oscar nomination in the Best Supporting Actor category for The Godfather the following year. He and co-stars Al Pacino and Robert Duvall lost to Joel Grey in Cabaret.

Actor-Director Lembeck is a veteran of such TV series as Murphy Brown and Friends. The son of actor-comedian Harvey Lembeck (Stalag 17), he goes for the funny bone more than the serious side of aging, even making Ann-Margret’s stroke and her boyfriend Christopher Lloyd’s Alzheimer’s sources for jokes amidst the poignancy.

It all ends happily in a sort of Love Boat kind of way with Burstyn and Caan marrying in the end. It might have gone down as an aw-shucks kind of ending with Burstyn and Caan having been given second chances at life together, but in real life Caan died the following year which kind of puts a damper on the whole thing.

While new films are harder than ever to find on home video, the studios still manage to come up with improved versions of previously released films.

Most of independent filmmaker John Sayles’ films, except for 1987’s Matewan, were previously released on DVD but not Blu-ray. Criterion, which released Matewan, has now given us Sayles greatest film, 1996’s Lone Star on Blu-ray and 4K UHD.

Set both contemporaneously in 1996 and in flashback in 1957 in a Texas border town, Chris Cooper plays a second-generation sheriff who has to deal with the discovery of a skeleton that may or may not be that of the sheriff who preceded his own father in the job 39 years earlier. His investigation unearths many long-buried secrets involving his father (Matthew McConaughey), his father’s predecessor (Kris Kristofferson), and many others. Also starring Elizabeth Pena as Cooper’s childhood sweetheart and Joe Morton as a straightlaced Army Colonel with family issues of his own, the film adeptly weaves both the central story and many subplots together in Sayles’ brilliant Oscar-nominated screenplay.

The double disc 4K release features a barebones 4K on one, and the film and special features on the accompanying Blu-ray. Extras include separate new on-screen interviews with Sayles, who reminisces about his career and the making of the film, and cinematographer Stuart Dryberg. Both are interesting and informative.

MGM has released a barebones Blu-ray of Arthur Hiller’s 1969 film, Popi, starring Alan Arkin.

The heartwarming comedy-drama is about a Puerto Rican widower who works three New York jobs to support his growing children (Reuben Figueroa and Miguel Alejandro). When his boys become involved with local gangsters, he concocts a scheme to get them out of the city into new lives with well-off Floridians who will give them the kind of life that he can’t. The only problem is they don’t want that, they want him.

Second-billed Rita Moreno is there to provide emotional support for Arkin and the boys when needed, but the billing is based on her name recognition. She doesn’t really do anything to warrant it.

Arkin received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor – Drama even though the film is more of a comedy. He lost to John Wayne in True Grit. Peter O’Toole won the Best Actor – Musical or Comedy Golden Globe for his highly dramatic performance in Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Wayne would go on to win the Oscar over Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy, Richard Burton in Anne of the Thousand Days, and O’Tooole. Arkin would have to wait until the 2006 awards to receive his Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine.

Classic Flix had released a restored Blu-ray of 1951’s Cause for Alarm!

Previously confined to public domain hell, the film looks fantastic but is hardly a masterpiece.

Directed by Tay Garnett (The Valley of Decision, The Postman Always Rings Twice), the 74-minute film is about a woman (Loretta Young) whose bedridden invalid husband (Barry Sullivan) believes she and their doctor (Bruce Cowling) are slowly poisoning him. He writes a letter to the local District Attorney on his deathbed, contrives to get her to mail it for him and then tells her what is in the letter before falling over dead. She spends the remainder of the film trying to retrieve the letter.

Produced by Young’s then husband, Ted Lewis, who later produced her legendary anthology TV series, it gives Young plenty of opportunity to overact which she does with abandon.

The only extra is the film’s trailer.

Happy viewing.