Oscar Film Journal: The Love Parade (1929)

Welcome to the first Oscar Film Journal entry of 2026!  I did forty of these things in 2025 and hope to beat that record this year.  Let's get started....

Today's subject is one of the earliest Best Picture nominees, from the third annual Oscars (1929/1930).  Premiering in November 1929 and directed by Ernst Lubitsch in his first attempt at a talkie, the film is The Love Parade, a pre-Code musical starring Maurice Chevalier and a debuting Jeanette McDonald.  

The Love Parade is about a military attaché to a foreign embassy stationed in Paris, who gets sent back to his own country of Sylvania (Wait, you mean the same fictional country later featured in Duck Soup??) as punishment for a slew of scandalous affairs, ordered to report to Queen Louise, herself a confirmed bachelorette.  The pair of course hit it off right away; she is intrigued by his serial philandering and he in turn is fascinated by her disinterest in marriage.  They have a torrid affair and agree to wed, with the understanding that he will become a Prince Consort, a figurehead with no real power or responsibilities.  But almost immediately he's unable to come to grips with his newfound lack of purpose, and the relationship quickly falls apart.

NJPW WrestleKingdom 20 Review: Hiroshi Tanahashi's Final Match

The 20th annual NJPW WrestleKingdom show is in the books, and it ran the gamut, going from dismal to fantastic over the course of four hours.  It will be most remembered for the retirement of Hiroshi Tanahashi, but also for the long-awaited crowning of Yota Tsuji as the company's new face.  It was your textbook two-match show, like so many old WWE PPVs where the undercard was mostly skippable but the big matches delivered.  Let's examine the Tokyo Dome show that was....

So yeah, thinking about this show frustrates me in a way because if Gedo had just booked a few noteworthy undercard bouts we'd be talking about WK20 as a slam dunk.  As I said in my preview, if any card should've been assembled to hook new and lapsed fans alike who tuned in for Tanahashi's final match, this was the card.  But instead Gedo shoved everyone outside the top three matches into clusterfuck bouts and as a result no one really got time to shine.  If I'm a former NJPW viewer who bought a ticket to see Tanahashi retire, no one on this undercard is catching my attention other than Tsuji and Takeshita.  I will go to my grave not understanding the thought process behind this lineup.