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August 29 movie: Zatoichi. (Note: promotional materials are calling this film The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi, but the title screen in the movie itself just said Zatoichi. So that is the title I'm using.)

This is the 2003 remake by Takeshi Kitano. Wow. It rocked. I mean it RAWKED! Best movie I've seen in a long time. Zatoichi is so well-loved in Japan, and so firmly associated with actor Shintaro Katsu (who played Zatoichi in all the old movies) that this was a big risk for Kitano. It would be like Quentin Tarantino making a new movie about the Man with No Name, and making it work brilliantly. We had heard that this was an updated version of Zatoichi, set in the twenty-first century. Which I wasn't thrilled about, and I am so glad turned out not to be true. Kitano's style is well suited to the subject: Georg and I both felt that it was very much a Zatoichi movie, and also very much a Takeshi Kitano movie.

There were several great interludes where soundtrack music blended with percussion sounds created by peasants working in the fields (well done too -- I watched each actor and their movements synched perfectly with the sounds), some hilarious comedy scenes, and a bizarre musical finale that made me feel like the movie had suddenly gone Bollywood. Georg loved it; me, not so much. Though I have to admire Kitano for doing something so kooky. There were even touching subplots about two geishas, and about a ronin who becomes an unwilling bodyguard to the bad guys, to raise money for medical care for his wife. The movie was no more violent in terms of body count than an original Zatoichi film. True, there was more blood and gore, but it was so extremely fake as to be okay for even the most squeamish viewer. Actually that was my only criticism of the movie: I hate phony CGI effects in fight scenes. I much prefer the low rent effects of older movies, the wire work and packets of fake blood. But that's a minor quibble.

Zatoichi was funny, moving, and kicked my ass across town and back. Go see it!

August 28 movie: Zatoichi and the Fugitives. IFC showed a couple of original Zatoichi movies in honor of the release of Takeshi Kitano's new remake, and we're finally getting around to watching them.

For those of you who don't obsessively follow Asian swordfight movies, Zatoichi (played by Shintaro Katsu) is "The Blind Swordsman," an itinerant fighter who travels around the countryside helping people in need and killing bad guys. Lots and lots of bad guys.

There are over tons of Zatoichi movies, many of them available on DVD. I've only seen a couple but they've all been fantastic. All a bit formulaic though, I must admit. Zatoichi shows up in a new village, helps some people who take him in and offer him a job, he discovers some gangsters bullying his new friends, the gangsters humiliate him, he kills them all. Nothing really to distinguish Zatoichi and the Fugitives from the rest, except a supporting role for Takashi Shimura (veteran of many Kurosawa films) as the doctor who takes Zatoichi in.

I can't wait for Kitano's new Zatoichi. We're going to see it tomorrow afternoon. yay!

August 27 movie: Walk Don't Run. Yes, that makes three movies yesterday. What can I say, I couldn't sleep. Cary Grant's last movie has him playing matchmaker to a young woman and an Olympic athlete (Jim Hutton, father of Timothy Hutton) while the three of them share an apartment due to lodgings scarcity during the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. It's not a great movie, but considering how some silver screen stars ended up (Fred Astaire in The Towering Inferno, Joan Crawford in all those cheap horror movies, Barbara Stanwyck on The Colbys) it was a classy note on which for Grant to end his career. Not that he wasn't always classy. The highlights of the movie (for me at least) were Grant slyly whistling the themes to Charade and An Affair to Remember, a big set piece during the Olympic speedwalking race, and a small role for George Takei (Mr. Sulu!) as a police captain.

August 27 movie: Sign of the Cross. Wrapping up Claudette Colbert day on TCM (and how I regret not recording Tovarich, Midnight and Since You Went Away! But I'm really too busy to watch that many movies right now) with a Cecil B. deMille epic about the persecution of early Christians. Didn't the early Christians use the sign of the fish to identify themselves, not the cross? Whatever. Colbert plays the decadent Empress of Rome, who loves the prefect of Rome (Marcus Superbus, no I'm not kidding), who in turns loves an innocent young Christian girl (Mercia, again no joke). Charles Laughton also has a nice turn as Nero.

This pre-code movie is one of deMille's classic exercises in debauchery dressed up in a thin veneer of pious moralizing. The movie is as decadent as they could make it, with not much plot getting in the way of the sin, sin, sin: Orgies! Milk baths! Some kind of weird lesbian love dance! Torture! Gladiator fights! Amazons battling dwarves! A naked lady wearing only flower garlands, tied up and ravished by a gorilla! Another one eaten by alligators! Elephants walking on people's heads! Christians fed to lions! One of Claudette Colbert's nipples! It's all here, folks.

Trivia note: according to Robert Osbourne, the milk bath (more like a giant pool) was real milk, and since shooting took two days the milk started to spoil. Colbert was a trooper and sat in sour milk all day, but said later she had a hard time washing the smell off her skin.

August 27 movie: It's a Wonderful World. Jimmy Stewart is a detective whose client is framed for murder. He hides his client, thus making himself an accessory, then goes on the lam to find the real killer. On the way he kidnaps a poetess (Claudette Colbert) who quickly falls for him, and the two of them travel the countryside together trying to solve the crime.

They were clearly trying to recapture the magic of It Happened One Night here, and while it was good, it wasn't that good. That said, I love both Stewart and Colbert, I'll watch almost anything with either of them in it. Both is just that much better. And I did enjoy It's a Wonderful World, but if I were to recommend a madcap Claudette Colbert road movie it would definitely be It Happened One Night. (I can't think of a madcap Jimmy Stewart road movie off the top of my head.)

August ? movie: The Glass Bottom Boat. I saw this sometime in the past two weeks but I forget when exactly. Doris Day is a career girl working at a research lab who falls for her boss, Rod Taylor. Hilarity ensues when the military decides Day is a Mati Hari-esque spy. Overall this was a bit too slapstick for my taste. And I found it really disturbing when Day finds out they think she's a spy, and starts acting like a spy to get back at them. I guess it was supposed to be funny but all I could think was, "great way to get yourself declared an enemy combatant, lady." My other disappointment is that the glass bottom boat of the title is hardly in the movie at all. Just the very beginning before the credits, and then the action shifts to the research lab.

August 25 movie: Tender Comrade. Ginger Rogers stars in a weeper about four war wives sharing a rented house and trying to be brave while their husbands fight the good fight during WWII. There's a great cast but the dialogue is pretty clunky, and the movie never rises above itself to affect me the way Since You Went Away, the ultimate war-wife movie, does. Both were made during the war and obviously intended to raise the spirits of real war wives, and both are highly sentimental, but Since You Went Away manages to avoid the treacly, phony schmaltz that keeps Tender Comrade locked in mediocrity.

Unfortunately Tender Comrade is mainly known not for its own merits, but for its role in the McCarthy era 10+ years later. The director and writer were among the "Hollywood 10," and this movie in particular was used as an example of Hollywood's insidious influence on American minds. First off, because the word "comrade" is in the title (according to a title card it's from a Robert Louis Stevenson poem about the role of a wife). But mainly because the premise of four women living together and pooling their resources smacked of communism. Even star Ginger Rogers testified that she had objected to anti-American sentiments in some of her dialogue.

Watching this hyper-patriotic movie today, it's hard to imagine how anyone could have seen communist propaganda lurking within it. I guess it just goes to show how people will believe anything if they've whipped themselves into enough of a frenzy. The director, Dmytryk, wrote later of Tender Comrade: "Their motto is 'share and share alike,' which sounded quite innocently democratic when we made the film, but which turned up to haunt me a few years later when I was instructed that the real motto of a democracy is 'Get what you can while you can and the devil take the hindmost.'"

August 25 movie: Old Acquaintance. Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins play writers and best friends: Davis is a talented serious writer and playwright with more recognition than income, and Hopkins is a wildly successful author of trashy women's novels who "cranks them out like sausages." The movie follows their friendship/rivalry over three decades.

I would have liked this movie better if it were more balanced, if they had shown that each woman had something for the other to envy. Instead Davis is a paragon and Hopkins is a total shrew. It was still fun though. Hopkins throws herself into the role of a silly, selfish bitch with wild abandon, and the payoff (when Davis finally grabs her by the shoulders and shakes her really hard) is well worth it. It was during that scene that I realized I'd seen this movie before. But the first hour didn't seem at all familiar so I think I must have come in on the middle.

John Loder has a nice turn as Hopkins' husband. I've seen him in other things and really like his work. I'd like to see more of his movies, but I looked him up online and unfortunately most of his career was in the British film industry, starring in movies that sound great but aren't carried by Netflix. I think I might write to TCM and suggest they do one of their day-long specials on him. Although, with my luck they'd just show Hollywood movies in which he has supporting roles, many of which I've already seen.

August 24 movie: The Letter. Bette Davis in a noir-ish melodrama based on a Somerset Maugham story. The first few moments of the film have Davis coldly shooting a man as he tries to flee her house on a rubber plantation in Malaya. The rest of the movie unravels the story of why, focusing on a letter (thus the title). As you might guess from the source material, it's pretty depressing and decadent and everyone comes to a bad end. Actually, the lawyer's inscrutably obsequious Asian assistant makes out all right -- he gets a cut of some blackmail money and he doesn't get killed, arrested, ruined or consumed with guilt. But he's about the only one.

Good movie though. Very dramatic and subtle. I liked how long they waited after the letter's appearance to even let us know its contents. Most movies would feel obligated to have lengthy scenes of the characters standing around explaining to each other what the letter meant.

August 24 movie: Bell, Book and Candle. Every time I watch this movie it strikes me the same way: a half hour in I think it's the best movie ever, and by the end I hate it. Kim Novak plays a witch who lives in witchy contentment with her relatives Jack Lemmon and Elsa Lanchester, until she meets and falls in love with normal human Jimmy Stewart, thus losing her powers.

My problem with the movie is that Novak's witch life is portrayed as so marvelously cool. Giving it all up for Stewart seems like an appalling sacrifice. And seeing her change from a sultry witch in black trousers and bare feet to Donna Reed in heels and yellow silk, was just depressing. The message: love makes a woman lose all her power, but her life will be empty and unfulfilled until she debases herself for the man of her dreams.

I still watch the movie when it's on, if only to see Jack Lemmon's bongo-playing beatnik warlock. Ernie Kovaks also has a nice turn as a self-described expert on witchcraft.

August 19 movie: Jezebel. The rumor is that Bette Davis did this movie about a willfull Southern Belle because she was angry about not getting the part of Scarlett O'Hara. But as Robert Osbourne pointed out, that can't be true because Jezebel was released almost a year before they started filming Gone With the Wind. In fact, he said that one reason she didn't get to play Scarlett was that she had just done such a similar character.

In any case, Jezebel is a great melodrama about a bad, bad Southern girl who causes a lot of trouble and then redeems herself with the ultimate sacrifice. Lots of ladies flouncing around in huge hoops skirts and saying "I declare!" and men drinking mint juleps and challenging each other to duels. Good fun. Afterwards I watched most of Now, Voyager which I may have mentioned is my favorite Bette Davis movie. I love TCM's "Summer under the Stars."

August 14 movie: The Petrified Forest. Lesley Howard, Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart star in a talky but affecting drama about a bunch of people trapped in a rustic inn with a gangster. Most interesting to me was the way everyone projected their own motives and desires onto Bogart's desperado. Also interesting was a small subplot about the ideological clash between two African Americans: one Bogart's henchman, the other a rich man's valet. The gangster lectures the manservant on giving up his freedom to take orders from a white man, yet himself has no more freedom than the valet does. Each one is totally obedient to his respective boss.

Catching up with the August 13 movie: The Maltese Falcon. I think I've put off writing about this because I don't have a whole lot to say about it. Bogart is Sam Spade. There's also Mary Aster, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. The falcon is a macguffin. It's brilliant. That about sums it up.

I never realized before how closely the voice of Ren from Ren and Stimpy was based on Peter Lorre. I guess it should have been obvious all along, but it wasn't until Lorre loses his temper and starts screaming "You imbecile! You bloated fathead!" at Greenstreet that I caught on. It's pure Ren. Heck, he even looks a bit like Ren.

Although they say at the end that Lorre and Greenstreet are captured by the police, Georg and I always like to imagine that they get away and go on to Istanbul as planned. I wish they had made another movie about the adventures of Joel Cairo and the Fat Man. What I wouldn't pay to see that movie.

August 15 movie: H.M. Pulham, Esq. Robert Young is a rich Bostonian who spends the movie in flashback, thinking about the life he could have had as a New York adman with career woman Hedy Lamarr. Based on a book by John P. Marquand, this was a thoughtful, sensitive character study of the two leads: where they came from, what they gave each other & why they didn't last. I don't know what the book was like, but the tone of the movie is a wistful look back on lost opportunity.

Good supporting work by Charles Coburn as Young's father, Van Heflin as the best friend, and especially Ruth Hussey (Liz Imbrie from The Philadelphia Story) as the Boston woman everyone wants Young to marry. But I have to close with a major "Boo!" to TCM for messing up the schedule for this movie, so the DVR cut off about a minute before it ended. I think I have the gist of it but it would have been nice to actually see the ending.

August 15 movie: Night Nurse. Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Blondell play young nurses who uncover a scheme to murder two young girls for their trust funds. Which makes the plot sound much more substantial than it really is. The real point of the movie is Stanwyck and Blondell changing in and out of their uniforms, which they do as often as possible in this pre-code film. Seriously, the cost of lingerie must have been one of the largest line items in the budget. Also, a moustache-less Clarke Gable has a small part as a villainous gangster/chaffeur who punches Stanwyck's lights out (off camera).

Night Nurse allowed me to shut off my brain and soak up some cathode rays, and for that I thank it. But I can't otherwise recommend it unless you're hankering to see a very young Barbara Stanwyck in a bra and half-slip. Which, come to think of it, is a pretty good way to spend 72 minutes.

July 31 movie: Fist of Legend. Georg and I had seen this movie before, when we showed it at the Starlite Drive-in as a benefit for the Asian film festival. But it showed up on IFC so we had to watch it again.

I think this is probably the best martial arts movie I've seen. The fighting is excellent, more realistic than a lot of HK films but still full of impressive moves. The big fight scene between Morpheus and Neo in the first Matrix movie owes a lot to this film (both were choreographed by Yuen Wo Ping). I think I read an interview with Jet Li where he talked about developing a modern fighting style for Fist of Legend that incorporated Western boxing moves, to contrast with the historical films he'd been doing previously.

I could go on and on about the fighting, but there are a lot of martial arts movies with great fighting. What I really love about Fist of Legend is the story. (And I don't often say that about a HK action film!) It's set during the Japanese occupation of China and the plot focuses on conflicts between Japanese soldiers and the members of a Chinese martial arts school.

Fist of Legend is a remake of the Bruce Lee film Fist of Fury, which I haven't seen. I've heard that Fist of Fury was fairly one-sided and anti-Japanese. (Not that I can hold that against them under the circumstances: Fist of Fury was made only a few decades after the occupation, which was brutal to say the least.) But Fist of Legend is more nuanced: the Chinese characters aren't all heroes, and the Japanese characters aren't all evil. The story is about racism and conflict on both sides.

The IFC version was dubbed so some of the acting was lost, but at least the dubbing wasn't horrible. And I must thank them profusely for showing it in letterbox! Pan and scan would have ruined some of the best fight scenes.