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April 19 movie: Kill Bill vol. 2. Whee! What fun this movie was. We all (Georg, Lisa and I) enjoyed it immensely. It wasn't as violent as the last one in terms of sheer volume, but it was equally intense, and there were a couple of "eww gross" moments that had me covering my eyes.

I want to see it again just to catch more of the little details and references to other movies (example: at one point Uma Thurman's character says "I would have driven a motorcycle onto a speeding train for you," which is surely a reference to Michelle Yeoh's big stunt in Supercop). I tried to rent Shogun Assassin, which is mentioned by name in Kill Bill vol. 2, but Netflix didn't have it.

April 17 movie; Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I think that for me, this movie suffered from excessive hype. if I had seen it when it first came out, not knowing anything about it, I probably would have loved it. Unfortunately I spent years hearing how fantastic it was, practically the greatest movie ever. And it just couldn't live up to that. It was good and all, fun, kooky, great music, lots of funny jabs at pop music. (Not to mention John Cameron Mitchell's uncanny resemblance to Juliette Lewis.) It just, I don't know. After all that build-up I was expecting it to change my world. And it really didn't.

April 16 movie: Beau Brummel. From the info screen I was expecting this to be about a 19th century fashion designer who was friends with the future Edward VII, which is why I DVRed it. But actually it was about an annoying dandy (Stewart Granger) and social climber who falls in love with Elizabeth Taylor, who sensibly marries someone else, and befriends the Prince of Wales (the future George IV, not the future Edward VII, played by Peter Ustinov) to advance his social position. He fails to convince the Prince to give him an earldom, then has a big fight with him because he's an idiot. Then he has to flee his debts in Britain, and dies a pauper in France. What a waste of two hours!

April 16 movie: A Night to Remember. This 1958 British movie about the sinking of the Titanic was the one I was trying to remember the day Patricia and I saw the Titanic exhibit. It's just as good as I remember. It takes a restrained, almost documentary style (almost no soundtrack music!) that makes the tragedy more compelling than all the overblown melodrama ten James Camerons could muster. I was sobbing by the end of the movie.

I read that except for one major factual error (they show the ship sinking in one piece, not splitting in half) A Night to Remember is as accurate as they could make it: nearly every scene and line of dialogue came from survivor accounts. They included a lot of historical characters, never focusing on any one person's story. I like that approach better than using the sinking as the backdrop for one fictional romance. I think it helps to convey the enormity of it. (They did actually show someone rearranging the deck chairs! He was trying to build a raft.)

April 15 movie: Kill! Because of Kill Bill's imminent release, Independant Film Channel showed three samurai movies selected by Quentin Tarantino. We watched the first one, Kill! It was a little difficult to follow, at least at first, but all good fun with lots of references to other samurai movies. The fighting was extra gory, which was probably why Tarantino liked it so much. The star looked familiar, we thought he had played the man with the gun in Yojimbo. I looked it up in imdb.com and that was him, so two points for us! Not only that but he's been in tons of movies, including Ran (he played Lord Hidetora) and Kwaidan, that ghost story movie I saw a couple of months ago.

April 15 movie: Young Bess. Jean Simmons plays Princess Elizabeth, who loves Admiral Tom Seymour (Stewart Granger) from afar, except that he's married to her step-mother Katherine Parr (Deborah Kerr). Not a movie for the ages, but as historical melodramas go it was pretty good. And Charles Laughton was excellent as Henry VIII.

My memory of Elizabethan history was never that deep, and is fuzzy at best now. But from what I remember, Tom Seymour actually pursued marriage with Elizabeth as a play for the throne, and took Katherine Parr because he couldn't get the princess, but kept on trying to seduce Elizabeth as a sort of back-up. In the movie it's much more benign (no surprise there): Seymour really loves Katherine, but he and Elizabeth gradually fall in love anyway, then he's falsely accused of having aspirations to the throne. I'd like to know more about the actual story so I added Elizabeth R to my Netflix queue, I heard it was the most historically accurate movie (actually a miniseries) about Elizabeth I.

April 14 movie: Living in Oblivion. I had seen this before a couple of years ago, which is a good thing because I had it on while I was doing my taxes (why yes, I do my taxes at the last minute. Every year. In fact I'm rather bummed that my taxes are now so complicated that I can no longer do them on the evening of the 15th like I used to). Because this movie is so funny that if I had been watching it for the first time I would never have been able to pay attention to my schedules A, C and E.

I used to be friends with a woman who worked in film in NY and she said that Living in Oblivion's unglamorous view of independant film-making is spot-on, from the exploding fog machine to the spoiled milk to the beat up old station wagon to pick up the actors. Also I heard that the "Chad Palomino" character is a parody of Brad Pitt, with whom the director, Tom DiCillo, worked on Johnny Suede. Watching with that in mind, it makes a lot of sense. The guy playing Chad, James leGros, did have a Pitt-ish manner about him. I wonder if Chad's halitosis problem is shared by Pitt as well.

April 13 movie: Modesty Blaise. I was looking for cheesy good fun and boy, did I find it. The story was ridiculous and confusing, but the clothes were great. As were the ultra-modern set designs, including a cell with a purple and black op-art pattern on the walls, floor and ceiling, designed to drive Modesty (Monica Vitti) insane!

Terence Stamp was wonderful as Modesty's oversexed mod-boy sidekick. But then, when is Terence Stamp not wonderful? I don't know that I'd go out of my way to see this again, but it was worth one viewing at least for Modesty's constant costume and hairstyle changes, and for Stamp in his narrow trousers, driving an Austin Healey and singing dopey love songs

Just a note for anyone in the Triangle area who missed out on Monster Road: first, if you have digital cable they have it (along with a few other movies from Full Frame) available on Channel 550 for free. Also, it will be shown at the Hi Mom Film Festival, on April 22. No word on Hot Dog Man unfortunately.

April 5 movie: The Girl from 10th Avenue. This was a silly bit of fluff, as mid 30s movies about Manhattan society tend to be. But I'll watch almost anything with Bette Davis in it, and it didn't require much attention so was perfect for watching while I cut the fabric for my party dress.

Davis is an honest factory girl who rescues a high society guy (Ian Hunter) from being arrested for drunk and disorderly outside the wedding of the woman who jilted him. Davis and Hunter get drunk together and end up married. She rescues him from drinking himself to death (not all that plausible since they're both shown drinking all the time, but whatever) and eventually he realizes that he really loves her, not the other woman who by now wants him back.

A street-smart working class girl isn't the best role for Davis; she played headstrong heiresses much more convincingly. Honestly, the best thing about the movie was this rumor I had heard that studio costumers hated Davis because she was busty and refused to wear a bra. So they had to dress her to conceal and support her rather impressive bosom. I totally believe it from watching this movie. All her outfits have big, gathered & loose-fitting bodices. They make her look like she just had a baby. She must have given in on the bra thing, because by the late 30s her movie clothes tend to fit a little better in the bust.

April 4 movie: The Major and the Minor. Ginger Rogers wants to get out of NYC, but can't afford train fare home. What does she do? Why, dress up as a little girl to get the half-fare, of course. On the way she meets and falls for Ray Milland, an Army major who can't tell the difference between an actual 12 year old and a grown woman in pigtails. Hilarity ensues!

I wanted to like this, or at least watch it, because it's Billy Wilder's US directorial debut. But, yuck. I mean, yuck! Rogers might have made a convincing 12 year old in 1932, but by 1942 she was already 31. I guess they were trying to make "adult Ginger" more beautiful by comparison, but they did a terrible job of making her up as "child Ginger." She looks all blotchy and way older than she really was. The result was a prematurely aged Rogers in a little dress and pigtails, staring longingly at dumb-ass Milland and calling him "Uncle Phillip" while he calls her "dear child." Seriously cringe-inducing, though I suppose people with a infantilism fetish might enjoy it.

The creep factor got to me and I gave up halfway through. But I can tell you with near certainty that Milland and Rogers end up together, they get rid of his fiancee in such a way that the fiancee is humiliated and the blame is on her, and he gets his career back in active military service. The only thing I'm not sure of is whether Rogers eventually comes clean with Milland or poses as her own older sister.

April 2 movie: Monster Road. What a great movie! And I'm not just saying that because producer Jim Haverkamp is a former WXDU DJ and also used to live in the apartment above Georg's.

A bunch of us went to see Monster Road, a documentary about animator Bruce Bickford, at the Full Frame (formerly Doubletake) Documentary Film Festival. It had already won a couple of awards, including Best Documentary at Slamdance. Go Jim! It's well-deserved, and I hope they win something at Full Frame too.

The movie spends a lot of time on the relationship between Bickford and his father George Bickford, a retired space engineer who suffers from the early stages of Alzheimer's and is at least as interesting as his son. It has a great level of energy and really keeps the momentum going, with help from a score by local band Shark Quest (which, I read, will be released by Merge sometime this year). Unfortunately, the screening began at 11 pm. Which is about my bedtime, even on a weekend. I made a valiant attempt to stay with it, but still dozed off and missed about the last 20 minutes. At least I didn't drool on the people sitting next to me.

I hope they release it on video someday so I can see the end. I missed the part where Bickford discussed his childhood fantasy of drowning the Speedy Alka-Seltzer Man in a well. (Or maybe Georg was having me on about that bit.)

Over the weekend I had interesting conversations with both Lisa and Georg about the fantastical, compelling, and somehow immature nature of Bickford's work. Georg pointed out that this is a characteristic of a lot of "outsider" art. Because a lot of outsider artists are like Bickford: a solitary guy, driven to create, with no training, no compensation, no feedback, no audience. Without outside input the work is totally internal, totally personal, and largely unchanging. The work doesn't grow or evolve; it simply expresses (and feeds) the artist's obsessions.

I think this is why a lot of artists don't like the term "outsider art." Because it conjures up that image of a crazy man in a basement airing his personal demons by taking pictures of clay, or building whirly-gigs, or painting icons, or whatever. Some people in the art car community use the term, and we're certainly well outside the bounds of mainstream art. There are a few art car drivers who have that air of mania about them. But most art car people I've met are just, I don't know, people with decorated cars. Seems like a big difference to me.

April 2 movie: Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Good golly this backing up is taking a long time. I can't much use my computer while I'm doing it either. Nothing to do but watch movies while I watch the status bar. We're supposed to go to a party in a couple of hours and here I sit, burning backup CDs!

This is my least favorite of the three Lord of the Rings movies. When I saw in the theater, I remember being really annoyed at some changes that didn't really make sense to me (unlike the changes in the first movie, which mainly seemed sensible & flowed well with the original story).

I'm up to the big battle scene now -- I think this is the first time I'd done a write-up of a movie while still watching it -- and I'm enjoying it more this time. I think it's because I already knew about the changes, so instead of sitting there thinking "where the heck did that come from?" and being annoyed at the divergance from the book, I can enjoy it more on its own terms. Don't know if that makes sense.

Seeing the additional scenes on the DVD helped too. Although one thing confused me: They show Merry and Pippin drinking the Ent draught and getting taller, but I distinctly remember the four hobbits standing together at the end of the third movie and all being the same height. I guess by then they knew that scene with the Ent draughts wasn't going to end up in the theatrical version, so they didn't want to confuse people with the height difference. I wonder, in the DVD of the third movie, will they redo that scene with Merry and Pippin taller? Or just gloss over that bit.

April 2 movie: Holiday in Mexico. I watched this silly bit of fluff while backing up the entire contents of my computer in preparation for sending it off to the nice folks at Applecare. More on that later. First, the movie!

Jane Powell, teenage daughter of the US ambassador to Mexico, is clearly destined to be with Roddy McDowell, son of the British ambassador. Unfortunately she has a major father complex and ends up falling for Jose Iturbi. Meanwhile the teenage daughter of the French (?) ambassador falls for Powell's father. Hilarity ensues!

The description sounds rather creepy, but to my relief the would-be January-December romances are treated as wildly inappropriate by all the adults involved. Well, almost all -- the French ambassador is totally fine with US ambassador marrying his young daughter. The US ambassador has to pretend to be a gold-digging boor to get rid of them. Which is presented as an example of his diplomatic skills, protecting the girl from looking foolish. But it seems to me that destroying a relationship with a colleague isn't such a hot move, diplomatically speaking.

On the bright side, there's a lot of singing and music from Powell, Iturbi, and Xavier Cugat (who has a small part which mainly involves carrying around a chihuahua and avoiding a jealous girlfriend). Roddy McDowell is bizarrely sweet as the nerdy British ambassador's kid.

I just realized something really weird about this movie: It's called Holiday in Mexico but nobody in it is on holiday. They all live in Mexico. Huh!