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Feb. 27 movie: 24 Hour Party People. Deliriously fun movie, ostensibly about the 80's Manchester music scene but actually mostly about Tony Wilson, co-founder of Factory Records. There's lots of breaking the fourth wall, witty asides & in-jokes that could have so easily ended up annoyingly clever, but didn't. I'm a bit amazed that it worked so well. My favorite line was when the actor playing Wilson talks to the camera, pointing out a bunch of cameos including the real Tony Wilson, and says that one cameo was cut "but I'm sure it will be on the DVD." (In fact, I don't think it was.)

My only quibble is that, if you didn't know anything about the Manchester music scene, you wouldn't learn as much as you should (and what you did learn wouldn't always be true). I had heard that the movie was "about" New Order, but I was surprised by how little presence they had. Maybe the Happy Mondays, who do get a lot of screen time, fit in better with the story they were trying to tell. The Smiths and the Stone Roses aren't in it at all (I think they each get mentioned once). The portrayal of Ian Curtis was brilliant, but I really wished the movie had spent more time with him. I felt many times like allusions and references were being thrown out that would have made much more sense if I had known already what they were alluding to. (This feeling wasn't helped by the thick accents, and frequency of scenes in noisy clubs, which meant that I often had trouble understanding the dialogue.)

My short assessment: don't rent this movie expecting a thorough or accurate overview of the Manchester music scene, rent it because it's a damned lot of fun.

(I thought for sure I'd be humming music from the soundtrack today, but instead I'm hearing the Alex Gopher single "Party People," which was not in the movie, over and over. "Pa-arty, where's the party at? Party people, where's the party at?" Not a bad thing to have stuck in my head.)

I did watch a few movies last week while I wasn't posting. Here's a quick rundown:

Kwaidan. Forgettable series of Japanese ghost stories. In fact, I don't remember the movie well enough to comment further.

The Divorcee. I love Norma Shearer and was hoping for some racy pre-code action, but the, ah, race wasn't racy enough, and the icky gender attitudes got the best of me. Shearer plays a woman whose husband has an affair, then asks her to take a man's attitude towards infidelity (i.e. forget about it). She "takes a man's attitude" by going out and sleeping with one of his friends, at which point he dumps her in disgust. She spends a couple of years leading a pathetic, dissolute life before they eventually reunite. Yawn.

The Magnificent Seven. Funny how I was just wondering whether I liked Fistful of Dollars or Yojimbo better. In this case there's no contest. The Magnificent Seven is a good movie, but it just doesn't grab me nearly as well as its inspiration The Seven Samurai. Great stars though: Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Eli Wallach. Good soundtrack too. I was humming it for days after seeing the movie.

Down With Love. Do I even need to say how much I loved this movie? I really loved this movie. No surprise since Pillow Talk is one of my all-time favorites. I would have watched it for the clothes alone, but the movie was great fun too. David Hyde Pierce is uncannily good at playing Tony Randall. I wish they could have worked in my favorite line from Pillow Talk (said by Randall): "Jan, how could you fall in love with a tourist?"

Feb. 14 movie: Yojimbo. I've been trying to figure out which I love more: this or Fistful of Dollars. Badass, enigmatic hero? Check. Killer soundtrack? Check. I think the bad guys are slightly more fun in Yojimbo, and Mifune's strut is not to be missed, but Fistful of Dollars maybe still edges out victory due to the "apologize to my mule" scene.

I've got to get better about writing down entries in the movie list right away. I just remembered this, and I think I watched another movie on Saturday as well, but I can't remember what it was. Darn.

Feb. 16 movie: Pirates of the Carribean. Just in case you thought I was some kind of snob who only watches black and white movies or obscure art films. Not so! I'm all about the action movies, and I'm particularly fond of swashbucklers. This one was too much fun. Good swordplay, good effects, funny. I don't have much else to say about it though.

Feb. 16 movie: Pride and Prejudice. No, not the really good BBC miniseries with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. The really bad 1940 version with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier.

This movie is so wrong, in so many ways, I don't even know where to begin. Georg compared it to a boat that occasionally drifted vaguely on-course, but mostly just drifted. The dialogue has been changed so radically that I had been watching for 15 full minutes before I heard a line I recognized. The costumes are Civil-War era -- big hoop skirts and leg-of-mutton sleeves. Mr. Collins is a librarian. They waltz at the assembly. The Netherfield Ball has become a garden party, with Darcy and Lizzie trading quips over an archery lesson. The Hursts no longer exist, nor does Lizzie's visit to Pemberley.

All that I could have forgiven, if the characters at least had the right demeanor/attitude (we've already established they didn't have the right words to say). Only Lizzie was truly how I think of her, although Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and Caroline Bingley were also pretty much right. But everyone else was so, so wrong. Jane coquettishly approves of her mother's scheme to make her catch cold and have to stay at Netherfield. Mary is a flirt whose voice clears up at the end when she meets a nice officer. Darcy pursues Lizzie openly from nearly the first moment he sees her. By the time Lady Catherine reveals that her attack on Lizzie was a reverse psychology ploy to help Darcy, Georg and I were roaring with laughter.

Feb. 15 movie: Separate Tables. Nice little movie based on a Terence Rattigan play about a colorful assortment of people living in a small British hotel with, you guessed it, separate tables in the dining room. David Niven won an Oscar for playing a war veteran with a lot of secrets who befriends mousy Deborah Kerr. Also nice work by Gladys Cooper, who was scary good at playing evil controlling matriarchs. (She's also the horrible mother in Now, Voyager, one of my favorite movies.)

Feb. 11 movie: The Gleaners and I. Lisa, Christa and I watched this French documentary about scavengers last night. It could have been fascinating, but (in my opinion of course) the movie's flow was almost completely destroyed by the director's lack of focus. She includes lengthy shots of herself brushing her hair, looking out the window of her car, filming her own hand in close-up, and so forth. There's even a sequence (I didn't time it but at least a minute) of the ground and a bouncing lens cap, because as she explained, she let the camera dangle but forgot to turn it off.

I wonder if the problem partly stemmed from the camera. She mentioned in the narration that she was using a digital camera for the first time, and how much she loved it. Maybe the lack of need for economy with film led to the excessive moments about driving in the car or the wrinkles on her hand or etc.

I suppose this meandering personal record could make a good movie too, but it sure as hell wasn't the movie I wanted to see last night. I opined that she should have titled it "The Gleaners and Me! Me! Me!" Lisa summed up the film's message as: "Look at my hand. I am aging. Oh right, gleaners."

It's too bad because the (ostensible) subject matter was fascinating. She talked to actual gleaners (people who go into fields after harvest and take food left behind by the farmers), junk collectors we'd call "dumpster divers" in the US, homeless people who eat out of garbage cans, even a couple of magistrates who explained the laws regarding agricultural gleaning and urban scavenging.

I wish that someone else would take all her raw footage, throw away the stuff about her hands, and make the movie The Gleaners and I should have been.

Feb. 9 movie: Branded to Kill. I debated whether to include this one on the movie list, since I wasn't feeling well and fell asleep about 1/2 hour before the end. But I think I saw enough for it to count.

I was really looking forward to this movie, having loved Tokyo Drifter by the same director (Seijun Suzuki). Alas, Branded to Kill lacked the style that I enjoyed so much in Tokyo Drifter (super-saturated colors and a space age go-go sensibility). Also, Branded to Kill was a bit hard to follow due to many abrupt and seemingly random transitions. In fact Georg and I spent most of the movie saying to each other, "How'd she get there? Weren't they someplace else? Wait, they're back now. Huh?" I think it was a deliberate stylistic choice, but at times it came across a bit Ed Wood-ish -- people getting into a car for a short drive at night, and arriving in a different car during the day. It was that level of disorienting.

Feb. 9 movie: Vertigo. Jesus, what a downer. This is one of the few Hitchcock movies I hadn't seen, and I was totally unprepared for the ending. I had always been given to understand that Hitchcock didn't believe in the perfect crime, and therefore the baddies always get what's coming to them in the end. I'm not complaining that Vertigo was so much darker and more complex, but I have to admit that when the credits rolled I felt like I had been tricked. Maybe that was the point.

Feb. 8 movie: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. I had a really hard time getting involved in this movie. The concept was so rarefied (or to be less charitable, ridiculous) that I found myself with no empathy for the main character. So we've got this hit man, see, and he's obsessed with the code of bushido, right? Imagines himself a samurai! Oh and also, he only communicates with his employer via carrier pigeon.

What in the what now?

There was supposed to be pathos in his final self-sacrifice, I think, but since I was so disengaged it came across as pointless and stupid. And his giving the book to the little girl -- sucking her into his futile world -- just seemed perverse.

But the movie wasn't all bad. There was a cool scene where Ghost Dog (Forrest Whitaker) shoots some guy through the drainpipe of his bathroom sink (which turns out to have been cribbed from Seijun Suzuki's Branded to Kill, which we watched the next day). And I really liked the relationship between Ghost Dog and the Haitian (?) ice cream man (Isaach De Bankolé, the Parisian taxi driver in Night on Earth). I think I would have had a more satisfying viewing experience if I had fast-forwarded through the whole movie, only watching the scenes at the ice cream truck.

The other good thing about the movie was a very brief appearance by RZA, which prompted Georg to explain to me that his name is actually pronounced "rizza," not "are zee aae." Next time I have to say his name on the air, I'll sound a little bit more like I know what I'm talking about.

Feb. 8 movie: The Great Escape. I was going to say this was the greatest prison camp movie ever, but then I remembered Bridge on the River Kwai and Stalag 17. So let's just call The Great Escape one of the three greatest prison camp movies ever.

I read that it was based on a true story. Some changes were made, notably adding Steve McQueen's character, I guess to give the story more American appeal since the hero of the true story was British: Roger Bushell, called Roger Bartlett and played by Richard Attenborough in the movie. (Come to think of it, Bridge on the River Kwai did the same thing, adding William Holden's character to a true story about British prisoners.) But the tunnel escape really happened pretty much as described in the movie. As did the murder of 50 of the recaptured escapees.

I found a History in Film webpage that goes into nice detail about the actual events, and even compares the movie characters to the real people they were based on. The author of that page says that the movie is extremely accurate, especially about details like the lookout system in the camp, and the tricks to disguise the tunnel work. Although as Eddie Izzard points out, the movie has McQueen traveling to Switzerland by motorcycle and getting there faster than James Garner and Donald Pleasance by plane!

It was a good day on TCM; after The Great Escape they showed North by Northwest. Unfortunately I had to go to Stoneline so I couldn't hang around and watch it.

Feb. 8 movie: The Hidden Fortress. IFC was doing some kind of Kurosawa special, and I also taped Drunken Angel, which I hadn't yet seen, but based on the description I decided I'd rather watch The Hidden Fortress again. I've heard that this movie, about a samurai smuggling a princess out of enemy territory with the help of two peasants, was the basis for a lot of the plot of Star Wars, and it makes sense.

It was interesting to compare this movie with Once Upon a Time in China 3, which Georg watched last night (I was in and out of the room so I saw a bit of it). Jet Li as Wong Fei Hung, as is typical for Chinese action movies, is basically a superhero. He doesn't just fight bad guys; he's completely moral and upright, respects his father, saves women from foreign brutes, rescues puppies from burning buildings, etc. In contrast the heroes in Kurosawa movies are usually cranky bastards, and Mifune's samurai in The Hidden Fortress is no exception. In one scene the princess demands that Mifune rescue a young woman from her clan who's been sold into slavery, but he refuses. When the woman escapes and follows them, Mifune screams at her repeatedly to go away. He's not totally heartless -- he risks his life to save the woman after she sacrifices herself for the princess -- just unconcerned about the plight of random peasants.

Jan 6 movie: Ripley's Game. I enjoyed this, but I think I probably would have enjoyed it more if I'd had more context. I've never read Highsmith's Ripley novels or seen any of the other movies. This one, based on the third book, might have been a bad place to start. I had a hard time understand what Ripley was about & why he acted the way he did. I think I would have been better off starting with one of the movies based on the first book, which from what I hear explores how the character became who he was. That said, Ray Winstone was excellent as usual, and John Malkovich plays a sociopath almost disturbingly well.

I added Purple Noon and The American Friend to my Netflix queue. I'll be interested to see what I think of Ripley's Game after having seen other Ripley films.

Jan 5 movie: Some Like It Hot. I don't usually think of Some Like It Hot as a screwball comedy because it's a bit late for that genre, but it's one of the funniest movies I've ever seen, and it's got the zany humor based on gender roles down pat. If my movie list was a retrospective of the great screwball comedies (which sometimes I feel like it is), Some Like It Hot definitely belongs on the list.

I can't recommend this movie highly enough. Curtis and Lemmon are hysterical (check out Curtis' imitation of Cary Grant), Marilyn Monroe is a vision (including one gown which, from a distance, appears to be only a skirt), and Joe E. Brown gets the best closing line of any movie ever (no I'm not going to say what it is! You'll just have to see for yourself).

(I saw an interview once with Tony Curtis where he confessed that whenever he didn't know what to do as Josephine, he would purse his lips. It's totally true! He spends half the movie that way.)