funnystrange.com

Nov. 30 movie: Ready to Wear. In case you haven't heard, this movie sucks. It was supposed to be a cynical insider comedy, The Player of fashion, but it's just a chaotic, unfunny mess. For a while my ex and I had a tradition every Christmas day, of going to the Carolina Theatre to see an eagerly anticipated indie film that turned out to suck bigtime. Ready to Wear was one of them.

It's not all bad though. There are some good moments. Richard E. Grant is funny as a Galliano-esque designer. And there are lots of runway shows full of wacky, now tacky, early 90s fashions. The Isaac show had "Twiggy Twiggy" as soundtrack music, which if I recall correctly, was the first time I ever heard Pizzicato Five. That's something to recommend the movie. I remembered a couple of the shows from having seen them in magazines at the time, definitely Gaultier's eskimo collection. It makes me wonder how Altman filmed this? Did he film at the actual shows, with his actors in front row seats? It seems like he must have. It would have been difficult to recreate those shows with all the models and real industry people. And now I've put way more energy into thinking about this movie than it deserves.

Nov. 30 movies: The Best Years of Our Lives. Thoughtful, deeply affecting movie about three soldiers just back from WWII, dealing with emotional and physical battle scars and trying to find a place for themselves back home. The performances are nicely restrained, giving realism to the sense of loss and alienation. There's beautiful camera work by Gregg Toland, with these deep focus scenes where different things are happening simultaneously in the foreground, middle ground and background.

It's interesting to compare this movie to Since You Went Away, which is all about waiting for the soldier's return, and makes it seem like everything will be sunshine and roses after he gets back. It makes me wonder, when Claudette Colbert's husband came home after the movie ended, did he feel like a stranger to his family? Did he have recurring nightmares? Did his job seem trivial and pointless?

The three soldiers were Fredric March, Dana Andrews, and Harold Russell, who was not an actor but a war veteran and double amputee. Russell's performance is heartbreaking. He's the only person ever to win two Oscars for the same role: Best Supporting Actor and a special award for being an inspiration to veterans. The movie also starred Myrna Loy as March's wife, Teresa Wright as his daughter, Virginia Mayo as Andrews' wife, and a small part for Hoagy Carmichael as Butch, the proprietor of a little bar. Carmichael played the piano a couple of times but alas, didn't sing.

Nov. 29 movie: The Man Who Came to Dinner. No, this isn't the movie where Sidney Poitier wants to marry Spencer Tracy's daughter. That's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. This is a very funny movie with Monty Wooley as an imperious radio star who breaks his leg and has to stay in some hapless man's house over the holidays, and Bette Davis as Wooley's personal assistant, whose life he tries to control with hilarious results. It's way too early for a Christmas movie but this is so funny, it's worth watching any time of the year. Also stars Jimmy Durante as, well as himself basically. Durante plays himself in pretty much every role.

Nov. 27 movie: My Man Godfrey. A crazy thing happened tonight. I had no movies saved on the DVR, nothing from Netflix, and nothing good on TCM. What's a girl to do?

Dip into the DVD collection of course, with one of the great screwball comedies. William Powell plays Godfrey, a down-on-his-luck former Boston aristocrat who somehow ends up working as the butler for an insane Park Avenue family, which includes grumpy father Eugene Pallette, ditzy mother Alice Brady, bitchy sister Gail Patrick, long-suffering maid Jean Dixon, and our heroine, Carole Lombard. The family are mostly likeable, but there's an edge to the humor that keeps it from being saccharine. The humor also balances a storyline about homeless men which could have been heavy-handed and preachy, but ends up just a light social satire.

This movie is hilarious from beginning to end. The DVD has some nice extras, especially a blooper reel showing Carole Lombard flubbing her lines and then swearing like a sailor. I meant to watch the commentary by historian Bob Gilpin, which I heard was good. But once the movie started I wanted to hear the dialogue, so I turned the commentary off.

Nov. 27 movie: The White Sister. Clark Gable plays an Italian soldier who falls for Helen Hayes, an aristocrat. He messes up her engagement to an old drip, then WWI breaks out so Gable goes off to war. His biplane is shot down and she thinks he's dead, so she becomes a nun. Eventually he makes it back, but by then she's gotten used to being a nun and doesn't want to give it up. Something about not being able to marry Gable because she's already married to Jesus, or whatnot. Gable sort of kidnaps her and tries to make her admit that she loves him. And can I say, Gable played a lot of bad boys but forcing himself on a nun? That's pretty low. Anyway the Germans start bombing, Hayes starts praying, and Gable thinks better of the whole "kidnap the nun" thing and takes her back to the convent. Then he goes back into combat and dies. What a happy story!

This may be the first Clark Gable movie I've ever seen, after he became a leading man that is, where he doesn't get the girl. (Gone With the Wind doesn't count, because there he gets the girl, but doesn't want her.) I guess God trumps Gable.

Nov. 26 movie: Before Sunrise. What a sweet movie. But before I talk about it, I have to say that we tried to watch American Movie first, but turned it off after about a half hour. I heard it was funny, and assumed that meant "laughing with" funny, a celebration of a kooky amateur filmmaker. No, actually it was too cruel to even be "laughing at" funny. It was funny the way kicking someone in the nuts is funny.

Anyway, Before Sunrise. This is another one of those "can't believe I hadn't yet seen this" movies. We've had the DVD from Netflix sitting around for ages, but I've been resisting watching because I thought it would be talky and boring, like a slacker My Dinner With Andre. (Call me a philistine but I found My Dinner with Andre insanely boring. I can produce my own painfully clever dinner conversation, thank you very much.) But I was totally wrong about Before Sunrise. It was talky, yes, but also engaging, funny and sweet, and very romantic. There were a lot of great moments in the film, but I think my favorite is the scene early on where they're in a listening booth, playing this horrible American singer-songwriter, and Ethan Hawke wants so badly to kiss Julie Delpy, but every time he looks like he's going to, she turns her head the wrong way so he pretends like he wasn't. So sweet!

The ending was great too. I like a movie that doesn't wrap everything up in a neat little package, that leaves things somewhat open-ended and makes me care enough about the characters to spend time thinking about what happens to them after the movie ends. Of course the existence of Before Sunset means that they do meet again. Speaking of which, I need to add Before Sunset to the Netflix queue.

Nov. 24 movie: Since You Went Away. Oh my GOD I love this movie. It's an epic melodrama about Claudette Colbert holding her family together while her husband is away at war. The ensemble cast includes Jennifer Jones and Shirley Temple as Colbert's daughters, Robert Walker as Jones' love interest, Monty Wooley as the crochety roomer they take in, Joseph Cotton as the old family friend with an unrequited love for Colbert, Hattie McDaniel as the obligatory jolly maid, and Agnes Moorehead as the selfish, hoarding neighbor.

The movie was made during the war, and it's very much a propaganda piece encouraging American families to stay brave and help the war effort. Colbert works in a munitions factory, Jones is a volunteer nurse's aide, Temple collects salvage and sells war bonds. All the principles are great, but for my money the emotional heavy lifting of the movie falls to Jennifer Jones. She has the most character growth, and the most scenes that made me reach for the kleenex. Although at three hours, there were plenty of heartwrenching scenes to go around.

And I think that's all I can take of Tearjerker Night. I have Penny Serenade on the DVR but I think I'm going to delete it. This afternoon I teared up in my car over a story on the radio about a doctor who found a treatment for rabies and saved a young girl's life. I think I need to take a break from the melodramas.

Nov. 23 movie: Stella Dallas. Tearjerker Night continues with Barbara Stanwyck earning her title as the Queen of the Weepers. Stanwyck plays the title character, a crass, loud, vulgar woman who devotes her life to her daughter after her upper-class husband leaves her. Eventually Stella realizes that her daughter will be better off living the upper crust life with her father, but her daughter is too loyal to leave her. So Stella pretends not to want her daughter any more to drive her away. It's so sad. But don't cry, because Alan Hale is in it! With the biggest part I've ever seen him have. He plays Stella's best friend, a loud, crass, vulgar man who would be a much better match for her than her husband was. He loves her but she won't marry him because there's no room in her life for anyone but her daughter.

Nov. 23 movie: Imitation of Life. It's "Tearjerker Night" on TCM. I really needed a good dose of sentimental melodrama too. A good cry helps clear the sinuses. The Lana Turner remake of Imitation of Life is one of my favorite movies, so it was great to see the 1934 original with Claudette Colbert. It's basically the same story: two women, one black and one white, become friends and raise their daughters together. The white woman's daughter falls in love with her mother's fiance, and the black woman's daughter causes her mother heartache by abandoning her mother and passing for white. Lana Turner played an aspiring actress in the remake, but in this version the two women are partners in a hugely successful pancake business called "Aunt Delilah's Pancakes." (Hmm ... that sounds so familiar.)

According to Robert Osborne, this movie was criticized both by conservative audiences who objected to a white woman going into business with a black woman, and by black audiences because Louise Beavers (the black woman) doesn't establish her own home after they start making money, but prefers to remain in Colbert's house as a domestic. It did make me cringe to think that Beavers debasing herself, talking in "yas'm" dialect and begging to stay on as Colbert's cook, was progressive in 1934. But then again, I guess things hadn't improved much in 1959 when they made almost the exact same movie -- worse in some ways, since Annie (the black woman in the remake) isn't a business partner with her own share of the profits.

On the bright side, the movie also stars Alan Hale as the Furniture Man! Hale gives Colbert her big break by selling her all the furniture and fixtures for the first pancake restaurant, for no money down. Alan Hale makes any movie better.

Nov 23. movie: Day of Wrath. I put this aside the other day because I wasn't up for it, a bleak psychological drama set against 17th century witchhunts in Denmark. But I couldn't stop thinking about it until I had seen the rest. Brilliant movie, but man, what a downer. That Dreyer sure knew how to bring down the mood. I think I'll be in bed with the covers over my head, contemplating the meaning of fate, love, fear and evil. Send Fig Newtons.

Nov. 21 movie: Two Girls and a Sailor. This sounds like the punchline of a dirty joke, but actually it's the movie from last weekend that I forgot to write up. June Allyson, Gloria de Haven and Van Johnson star in an East Coast version of Hollywood Canteen. Allyson and de Haven are singers who run a wartime canteen -- an entertainment hall for the troops -- secretly funded by Johnson, a sailor they both have a crush on without knowing he's stupid rich. The canteen features performances by (starring as themselves): Harry James, Jose Iturbi, Xavier Cugat, Lena Horne, Gracie Allen, and another singer whose name I forget. The movie also featured Jimmy Durante as a washed up vaudevillian (not playing himself, I hope).

This movie was mostly forgettable but it had a couple of unintentionally funny moments: for one, at the very beginning, before Van Johnson bankrolls the big canteen, the two sisters host a nightly "private canteen," meaning that after their gig at the Flamenco Club, they walk up to random soldiers on the street and invite them over for an evening of singing, piano playing, sandwiches and soda pop. Which prompted me to yell at the screen, "Two women alone in an apartment with thirty military men? Are you insane? Haven't you ever heard of Tailhook?" Also, the big canteen had seating areas for soldiers, sailors and marines, but airmen got jack. Georg pointed out that there wouldn't have been many Air Force in New York, but then why were all those soldiers and marines hanging around the city for months on end? Rather than stopping in Manhattan for a day or two on the way to a base somewhere else, the same guys hang out at the canteen throughout the movie. Actually the war has pretty much no presence here. It's basically a "hey kids, let's put on a show" movie in which a lot of people happen to be wearing uniforms.

Like I mentioned, I've been sick. And therefore haven't done much of anything except lie around watching movies. Here's the round-up. Hope I don't forget anything.

Solomon and Sheba. Oh lordie this was bad. Biblical epic starring Yul Brynner (with hair) as Solomon and Gina Lollobrigida as the Queen of Sheba. In this movie I learned that the ancient Israelites believed slavery was a sin, the people of Sheba liked to get funky, and God spoke to His people with a wussy British accent. The depraved pagan rituals, clearly the point of the movie, are over way too soon. Then we settle in for the long, depressing retribution against the sinners.

Men in White. Clark Gable as a brilliant intern and Myrna Loy as his selfish socialite fiancee, who wants him to give up medical research and take a cushy Park Avenue practice. This movie was made in 1934, right after the introduction of the Hayes code. They seem to have basically made a pre-code movie and then simply dropped any scenes that wouldn't have passed the code. The result is a plot so elliptical that I'm still not exactly sure what happened. Gable secretly kisses a lonely nurse, and then he leaves the room and tells her to leave too, but she stays there alone. Next thing you know, time has passed and she's being admitted to the hospital as a patient. They never say what's wrong with her but the surgeon (Gable's mentor) asks about "the man who did this to her," and Gable wants to know why she never came to him for help. So I guess they must have had sex and her illness is somehow related. But it's not pregnancy, because they show her full body -- no pregnant belly -- when they put her on the operating table. But everyone seemed to know what was wrong without saying. After the surgery Gable promises to marry the nurse because her life is ruined and it's his fault, but she conveniently dies just after asking Loy to forgive Gable. Anyway I found this movie quite perplexing. Near as I could tell, the woman died of premarital sex. Or maybe just from that one kiss. If it had been made three years earlier, they would have shown Gable and the nurse in bed, and they would have explained what was wrong with her, and then thrown in a scene of a man hitting a woman for good measure.

A Free Soul. I realized near the end that I'd seen this before. It's a pretty depressing film starring Norma Shearer as the willfull daughter of a drunken lawyer (Lionel Barrymore). Shearer shacks up with a gangster (Clark Gable) who turns out to be a heel, then Shearer's upstanding ex-fiance (Lesley Howard) kills Gable to protect Shearer. It's kind of interesting to compare this 1931 movie with Men in White. A Free Soul has everything: gambling, drunken carousing, unmarried people living together, Gable hitting and pushing Shearer. Also interesting to see Gable as an outright villain, not just a rough-around-the-edges bad boy.

This Is Spinal Tap. I tried to watch Day of Wrath, a Carl Theodor Dreyer movie about a woman in the early 17th century falsely accused of witchcraft. But I was so not up for that and ended up watching Spinal Tap instead. I don't really have anything else to say about it.

More Treasures from American Film Archives, part II. More silent movies restored by the American Film Archives. Highlights include: a gruesome version of the Three Little Bears in which Theodore Roosevelt shows up at the end, kills Mama and Papa Bear, captures Baby Bear, and then gives all Baby Bear's toys to Goldilocks. Also some early two-strip color films, including "The Flute of Krishna," the first recorded performance by the Martha Graham company. And an early Chinese-American film, and a "soundie" vaudeville performance by "The Original Singing Duck." The duck didn't really sing, just quacked on cue. And a Rin Tin Tin movie, and a bunch of neat pseudo-documentaries about life in New York at the turn of the century.

More Treasures from American Film Archives, part III. This one included a melodrama about tuberculosis by a female director, which was almost censored because they showed improper quarantine procedures (the healthy family members hugging and cuddling with the daughter who had consumption). The guy from the film archive explained that tuberculosis was a leading cause of death at the time, but still. I can't imagine the MPAA censoring a film because it depicted unsafe sex. Also a silent version of "Lady Windemere's Fan" by Oscar Wilde, which is ambitious to say the least. And a couple of "soundies": Calvin Coolidge giving a speech about lowering taxes, making him the first US president filmed in a talking picture; and Eddie Cantor telling jokes so offensive I didn't even understand them, and singing a song about how much better stupid women are. The chorus of the song was "The dumber they are, the better I like them, because the dumb girls know how to make love!" Also an 1896 movie of "Rip Van Winkle" starring an actor who had been a stage star since before the Civil War.

Nov 17 movie: Persuasion. I guess I'm on an Austen kick. This is a subtle, quiet movie, much less broad and funny than Pride and Prejudice. Which well suits the source material. Also my least favorite thing about the book -- its abbreviated length, due to Austen's declining health while she was writing it -- turns out to be an advantage in adapting it to a movie. Relatively few cuts had to be made to get it down to two hours. The two principle actors are wonderful, and I especially liked that Amanda Root blossoms so naturally that it's not clear whether her more attractive appearance by the end is due to makeup or just her own demeanor. But my favorite actor in this movie is Fiona Shaw (best known in the US as the evil aunt in the Harry Potter movies) as Mrs. Croft, Anne's mentor and future sister-in-law.

Nov 16 movie: My Man and I. On Tuesday Sylvia and I had another Ricardo Montalban night. This time her very cool friend Hilary joined us and we ate at Sitar India Palace beforehand, which was yum, then watched Sylvia's favorite Montalban movie, My Man and I. This was a touching story about Montalban as a Mexican immigrant who is thrilled to be a US citizen, then is cheated and falsely accused of assault by a chiseling white farmer and his wife. Also Montalban falls in love with Shelley Winters, a troubled young woman who can't seem to handle someone being nice to her.

I was impressed that this movie handled racial issues head-on. Maybe it's because I mainly watch older movies from the 30s and 40s, which generally wouldn't be so overt as to have the white bad guys using racial slurs against the hardworking Latino, to his face no less. Also the relationship between Montalban and Winters wasn't softpedaled. Montalban romanced white women throughout his hollywood career, but typically as the exotic "latin lover" (that was even the title of one of his movies) suitable for a summer fling. In My Man and I he wants to marry Winters, and it looks like he'd be good for her too. That's pretty forward for 1952. Winters, as always, blew me away. She had an amazing ability to be real, even if it made her unglamorous or even unattractive. How many Hollywood actresses would have been willing to play the parts she did, much less play them convincingly?

Nov 15 movie: Rabbit Proof Fence. For most of last century, official policy in Australia was to forcibly remove "half-caste" (i.e. white/aboriginal) children from their homes and raise them in education camps. This movie is based on a true story about three girls escaping from a camp in 1931 and walking 1200 miles back to their home town. The title refers to a fence stretching across almost the entire continent, which the girls follow to find their way home.

Rabbit Proof Fence was adored by critics, though Georg and I felt like it was too heavy handed and preachy. I guess it must be difficult to make a movie about such an appalling historical event without preaching at least a little. Kenneth Branaugh played Mr. Neville, the architect of the program that put the children in camps. It would seem to me that though Neville's actions were evil, at the time he must have thought he was doing good. But as Georg said, you could practically see Branaugh twirling his moustache (and he didn't even have a moustache). It would have been more interesting to find out why Neville thought it would improve the children's lives to take them from their families.

Lucky for me I was dozing on the couch when Georg put the movie on, so I missed the first half hour or so. Apparently I slept through the worst parts, like a scene where they measure the children's skin color to determine which will be mainstreamed into white society and which will be trained into the servant class. I woke up when the three girls had just run away, so the part I saw was mostly a road movie about the girls on their own, walking across a staggeringly beautiful landscape while evading the police and an aboriginal tracker hot on their heels.

To the movie's credit, I will say that Georg and I each predicted some horribly cliched stuff at the end which did not come to pass. Also, the acting by the girls was very good. And finally, I was glad to learn more about this historical episode. I had heard about it before, but only in vague terms.

Nov 13/14 movie: Pride and Prejudice. What fun to watch this -- the BBC miniseries with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth -- while I was cutting my fabric. So much better than the movie with Greer Garson and Lawrence Olivier. It's hard to imagine a better Austen adaptation. There were a few things added, notably any scene with just men talking to each other (Austen never wrote a scene with no women present), and a few tiny things taken out, but it was extremely faithful overall. Plenty of swoonworthy scenes of course, but lots of funny stuff too. Georg has been going around all afternoon saying "I am deeply vexed!" like Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

The weird thing is, I'm on an Austen e-list and some of the people there are offended by this movie because they think it's too licentious. For three reasons: first, the scene early on where Mr. Darcy is taking a bath, stands up and puts a robe on and you can see his bare back -- not his backside mind you, his back. Second, in the letter when Mr. Darcy mentions that Mr. Wickham was dissolute, there's a flashback of Darcy walking in on Wickham macking with a girl in his room. Third, at the very end during the wedding ceremony, they show all the bad guys and the bad ends they've come to, and Wickham and Lydia are shown lounging on a bed. I actually saw a post where someone called these scenes "Austen porn." These people seriously need to get a life.

? movie: Random Harvest. I was telling Georg the basic plot of I Love You Again when he said "Haven't you seen this movie already? No? Didn't you see another movie about a guy getting married while he has amnesia?"

Well what do you know, he's right. I forgot to write it up for the movie list but sometime during the summer I saw Random Harvest, a melodrama about Ronald Colman getting amnesia and marrying Greer Garson, then recovering his true memories, thus forgetting her along with the rest of his amnesia life. (I have to interject here, I'm not expert but I didn't think amnesia worked that way. But whatever!) I've heard this movie described as a brilliant romantic drama, but it really annoyed me. After he leaves her, Garson tracks Colman down and, rather than telling him who she is, takes a job as his secretary. She suffers silently for years, watching him court another woman and even eventually agreeing to a marriage of convenience so she can manage his social affairs. All the while she pretends to be satisfied with this abject subjugation. It's really quite appalling.

Nov 13 movie: I Love You Again. William Powell is a NY con artist who gets amnesia from being conked on the head. Amnesia turns him into a dreary, penny-pinching teetotaler in a small town in Pennsylvania. The funny thing is, all that happens beforehand. The movie begins with Powell getting conked on the head again, getting his original personality and memory back, and forgetting the nine years he spent in a small town in PA. He sets out to bilk the town, then discovers that he's married to Myrna Loy. Trouble is, she hates the penny-pinching drip he used to be and wants a divorce.

I don't know if that description makes any sense or not, but this movie was hilarious. Definitely "madcap," possibly even "zany." There is, however, one huge unanswered question raised by the movie: Powell showed up in this town a total stranger, with no idea who he was. Nine years later he was a pillar of the community, devoted to his mother, leader of social groups, manager of a pottery factory -- wait a sec. Devoted to his mother? Where did he get a mother from?

I seriously thought the movie was going to end with the real Larry Wilson, the man whose life Powell appropriated, showing up so that Powell and Loy could run off together. But there was nothing like that at all.

Nov. 12 movie: Once Upon a Time in Mexico. The "Mariachi" trilogy wraps up with a very fun flick. Quite a bit gorier than Desperado, which I think was due to Rodriguez getting into digital film, which made the special effects much less expensive. Or so he said in a DVD extra called "Ten Minute Film School," which was actually a ten minute ad for digital over traditional film.

Rodriguez compared the three principles (Antonio Banderas, Johnny Depp and Willem Dafoe) to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. But Georg and I agreed that they got two of them wrong: Banderas is "the good" of course, but they identified Depp as "the bad" and Dafoe as "the ugly" due to that whole "face messed up" thing. It seemed to us that Depp's character was much more like Tuco ("known as The Rat"), a bad guy but basically comic relief. Dafoe, like Lee Van Cleef, was the real villain.

Georg has already mentioned the cooking lesson on the DVD, so I'll just add that the recipe, for puerco pibil, sounded fantastic and I really want to make it. And I think every DVD should have a cooking lesson in the features.

Nov 11 movie: Love on the Run. Did you know that Joan Crawford and Clark Gable made a lot of movies together? Well they did. (And they were having a love affair at the time, according to Robert Osborne.) This one is about Crawford, Gable and Franchote Tone chasing each other around Europe while two spies try to get some kind of map from them. Tone and Gable are rivals this time, alas no ho-yay to speak of. There is a funny scene where they all sneak into a palace and dress up like French royalty and the caretaker thinks they're ghosts.

Nov. 10 movie: Possessed. Bizarrely, Joan Crawford made two unrelated movies called Possessed. This is the one from 1931 costarring Clark Gable. This is a pre-code film about Crawford shacking up with rich Gable, then breaking up with him so he can run for governor of New York, then they get back together on the eve of his victory. It's not very memorable but there's a really nice shot early on where Crawford peers longingly in the windows of a passing luxury train, which I'm sure I've seen somewhere before. Maybe in Visions of Light.

Nov. 10 movie: More Treasures from America Film Archives. This was not one movie but a collection of silent films, plus the first known sound film ever, from 1894! It was 15 seconds of a guy playing violin while two other guys danced. Also included: The Suburbanites, a 1904 movie about a Manhattan family who move to the suburbs. Apparently this transition was just as difficult a hundred years ago as it is today, except the movers threw your dishes on the ground from a horse drawn carriage, not a van. And a 1909 short by D.W. Griffith, and have I ever mentioned how much I hate D.W. Griffith? Sure, he's influential and all, the architect of modern filmmaking, whatever. He's such a godawful preachy moralizer. I can't stand even his non-racist films.

There was also a strange 1910 version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in which a donkey accompanies Dorothy to Oz, and she does not get home to Kansas. And some ads -- the earliest from 1897! Early advertising was so effective. I can't wait to buy a tin of Flash Cleaner and visit the Electric Refrigerator Show. Also a western, and some serials, and melodramas of course. Honestly this was more about edumacation than entertainment.

Nov 9 movie: Suspiria. Lisa watched Suspiria with me tonight so I wouldn't have to watch it alone. As expected, it was creepy. Cree-pee. It never got scarier or gorier than the first big set piece, which I had already seen. That was a big relief: I knew I could handle that level of scariness but I wasn't sure if I could deal with more.

The stylishness of the movie, those amazing art nouveau sets, were the best part for me. I wonder where that building is, and whether it's open to the public. Because I go to Europe so often you know, I could just pop by anytime and see it.

Watching it with someone else really helped to break the tension. (And Moses helped too by sitting between us and purring.) Like when the girl falls into all the barbed wire, Lisa quipped, "oh yeah, that's where we keep the barbed wire!" Based on the barbed wire scene, we decided that Dario Argento is the master of "Stop! Enough!" We also decided that the coven has a faulty business model. If they keep killing off their students, the school isn't going to stay open for long, now is it?

Nov 9 movie: Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise). This movie was the worst ever. Alan Hale was a bad guy! A blackhearted villain! First he tried to rape Greta Garbo, then he shot Clark Gable's dog. God, it was awful.

There was a bunch of other stuff about Garbo and Gable being mean to each other, and the cruel wages of adultery, and Garbo shacking up with rich guys because Gable tossed her over. And there was a circus in there somewhere. I don't know, I was too devastated about evil Alan Hale to pay attention.

Mov. 8 movie: China Sky. This movie was pretty bad. Randolph Scott stars as an American doctor in a Chinese village that supports rebel fighters against the Japanese occupation. Take away the appalling stereotypes (the inscrutable Korean doctor who turns bad, the smart alecky "Short Rib" Chinese kid who loves American music and slang) and there's not much there. I only watched it because Ruth Warrick -- Aunt Phoebe from All My Children -- was in it. She looked really different back then. The movie also features Anthony Quinn as the leader of the mountain rebels. I know they used to do that all the time, but it still annoys me. Thirty Seconds over Tokyo managed to find actual Asian people to play the Asian parts; why couldn't this movie?

With about a half-hour to go I accidently pushed the wrong button on the DVR remote and wiped out the end of the movie. (You can pause a show and it will save it for up to an hour without recording, but if you change the channel it loses everything.) No big loss.

Nov. 8 movie: Ecstasy. 1933 Czech/Austrian film shocked the world with a teenage Hedy Lamarr (or Hedwig Kiesler as she was then known) scampering naked through the woods. The film was condemned by the Vatican and heavily edited for US release, but the fine folks at TCM have restored it, allowing us to see Lamarr in all her glory. The film also includes the raunchiest love scene (adulterous, no less) I have ever seen in an early film, with a close-up on Lamarr's face during orgasm.

The film is actually drab and plodding when it's not being totally hot. It weirdly ends with a long scene that reminded us of Soviet propaganda films: smiling workers swinging pick-axes and bountiful fields of wheat, that sort of thing. The movie also came across like a silent film with sound: there was some dialogue, but sometimes the movie would go for 20 minutes or more without anyone speaking. Most of the narrative was handled visually as in silent films. It's interesting because it seems to me that most American directors of the time, when first confronted with sound, treated movies like plays: lots of scenes of people standing around talking to each other. I wonder if the transition to sound was handled differently in Europe or if it was just this director.

But really, who am I kidding. There's one reason to watch this movie and it's Hedy Lamarr in the nude. There's a brief glimpse of full frontal, plus several lingering close-ups on her bare breasts. Hubba hubba. Robert Osborne said that when Lamarr moved to Hollywood she had to change her name to disassociate from the infamy of this film. Which makes a nice sound bite, but I think young Hedwig Kiesler would have been given a stage name regardless.

Nov. 6 movie: The Hucksters. I've seen this a couple of times before and it frustrates me every time. On the one hand, Clark Gable and Deborah Kerr have no chemistry whatsoever. Watching Gable ditch smoldering Ava Gardner for mousy Kerr is just bizarre. (Don't get me wrong; I like Kerr. She's just all wrong for Gable.)

On the other hand, the portrayal of the post-war advertising world is hilarious. Great supporting work by Keenan Wynn as a washed up, unfunny comedian; Adolphe Menjou (who did not play Seth Lord in The Philadelphia Story although I think he did every time I see his face) as the nervous ad agency president; and especially Sidney Greenstreet as the tyrannical soap baron who spits on the table and forces everyone to yell Right! and Check! on cue in meetings. Those guys are why I keep watching this movie. I think next time I'll fast forward all of Kerr's scenes and just watch the parts about the ad biz.

Nov. 3 movie: Mansfield Park. As a regency romance this wasn't bad, but as an Austen adaptation it was atrocious. Fanny Price is Austen's most controversial heroine because she's so ill-suited to modern sensibilities. In other words, she's a total dishrag and a lot of people can't stand her. I've developed an appreciation for Fanny, but she's still by far my least favorite Austen heroine. Anyway, it seems that the director of Mansfield Park was firmly in the "hate Fanny" camp, because the character in the movie is the polar opposite of Fanny in the book. This Fanny is proud, witty, and sure of herself. She's much more like Lizzy Bennet than like Fanny Price. In fact I think she's based on Austen herself: the movie Fanny is a writer and the passages she reads out loud all come from Austen's juvenilia.

There's also a subplot about the evils of slavery. I don't know if that's anachronistic or not; there may have been an abolitionist movement in Britain in 1806. But it is totally out of place in Mansfield Park. Sir Thomas' financial interest in slavery is only mentioned so obliquely that I didn't even realize what he was doing in Antigua the first time I read the book. There was never any opposition to it from the rest of the family, and the idea of Fanny criticizing her benefactor on moral grounds is just unreal.

There were a lot of other changes that irked me (like an on-camera sex scene), but the main problem is Fanny's character being so distorted. I guess they felt that the Fanny Price in the book was way too much of a wilting violet to make a good movie heroine. And they'd probably be right. But still, it seems like if you're going to make a movie out of a widely read book by a beloved author, you can mess around with the details but the core personalities of the main characters have to remain intact.

Nov. 3 movie: Lagaan. I had seen this already, and a frothy, happy Bollywood movie was exactly what I needed on Wednesday. Unfortunately, I don't have a whole lot to say about it. It stars Aamir Khan, probably the biggest male actor in Bollywood today. It's a plucky underdog tale about cricket. And it won an Oscar for best foreign film. The first dance number (where they celebrate the coming rainstorm) is the best, but the others are good too.

Nov. 4 movie: Mutiny on the Bounty. The 1935 verson, which I'm kind of embarrassed that I had never seen before. I've heard that it isn't super-accurate, at least in the portrayal of Captain Bligh. Apparently the real Bligh was stern but not a sadist, and none of the punishments seen in the movie were out of line for the British Navy at the time. Still Charles Laughton is great, as is Clark Gable and Franchot Tone. The ho-yay between Gable and Tone is palpable: there's one scene where their Tahitian girlfriends have wandered off to swim or something, and the two men are lying together on the beach, where I was yelling "just kiss him already!" at the screen.

Well I was originally going to write up all this week's movies in one post, but there were too many of them. So here's the last of the Halloween movies that were saved on my DVR.

The Haunting. The remake had 100 times more special effects, but for my money the original was 100 times scarier. Seriously, I started watching this in the afternoon by myself, and I had to turn it off and wait for Georg to get home to finish. The plot is about the same in both movies and much of the tone and set design of the original was kept in the remake. Like the creepy statues everywhere, and the only really scary part of the remake (the scene early on when the two women hear pounding on the walls outside their room). But all that goofy stuff about Eleanor sacrificing herself to save the souls of murdered children was new to the remake. In the original the house just wants her because she's psychic, sort of like The Shining. The other woman (Catherine Zeta Jones's character in the remake) was dressed by Mary Quant, which was pretty cool.

Like Christa, the past few days I've been desperate for something shiny to distract me from, well, you know. For me it's been movies. I've watched a heck of a lot of them this week, starting with three by Mario Bava, who was featured on IFC on Halloween night. I'm not usually a big fan of horror, but Bava was supposed to be very influential on American horror movies, and he also directed Diabolik, which was goofy (so much so that they showed it on MST3K) but visually stunning, so what the heck. IFC showed an hour long documentary about Bava before running the movies, which was nice because it gave me a little background.

Black Sunday. Like all Bava's movies this had a lot of titles in the US but I think this was the most common. The Italian title was La Maschera del demonio (Mask of the Demon). It was one of the first post-war horror movies made in Italy (apparently the genre was banned during the fascist era): a gothic tale about a resurrected witch terrorizing a Russian village. It was fun though pretty tame compared to my expectations, based on what I knew of Italian horror. But I guess it's not fair to expect a 1960 film to be as intense (or as gory) as Dario Argento's work. Black Sunday did have some really memorable images, notably the witch's face all scarred from an iron maiden-type mask. In the documentary they said that Tim Burton had appropriated this visual for Sleepy Hollow. (ripped off, homage, what's in a word?)

Twitch of the Death Nerve. This is what they called it on IFC but I think it might be more commonly known in English as Bay of Blood. The original title is Reazione a catena (Chain Reaction). This was credited with being the first slasher film & being a primary inspiration for Friday the 13th. I think I mentioned that I'm not a huge fan of horror, and slasher films are probably my least favorite of the genre. But what the heck, it was so outrageously gory that it was kind of funny. There did seem to be a very convulated plot about people vying for property rights to a bay, but mostly the movie just sped from one set piece to the next, everyone killing everyone else in imaginative ways. There was a much-hyped "shocking twist ending" which was completely predictable if you knew there was a twist coming, simply because there was literally no one else left to perform the final killing.

Baron Blood. The original title of this one was Gli Orrori del castello di Norimberga (The Horrors of Castle Norimberga). Joseph Cotton plays a resurrected evil baron who buys back his ancestral home and rebuilds the torture chamber in the basement. Unlike the witch in Black Sunday, Cotton looks like a normal person when resurrected and has an unexplained source of funds. It was kind of sad to see an actor of Cotton's caliber in a cheap horror film, but like Vincent Price he gave it his all. This was made after Twitch of the Death Nerve but with a much lower body count and less gore overall.

The Bava documentary didn't say anything about Dario Argento, but I'm assuming that as Italy's first big horror director Bava must have had some influence on Argento. Argento started directing in the late 60's but I think I read that he mostly did "giallo" movies, crime thrillers, until Suspiria in 1977, the year Bava's last film was made. Which reminds me that I've had Suspiria on tape for years and have been trying to work up the nerve to watch it. Georg won't watch it with me and I'm too wussy to watch it by myself. Anybody up for seeing the ultimate horror film with me? I hear it's brilliant.

Nov 3 movie: The Man with a Movie Camera. This morning I really needed to forget about the fate of western civilization, for at least a little while, and spend time with something beautiful. Luckily I had this movie on the DVR. Just like the first time, I muted the TV and played the score by the Cinematic Orchestra, which I have on CD. I wrote the movie up already, and all I can add now is that it was even better this time because I was better at synching up the soundtrack. Unfortunately, it can't be matched perfectly because they seemed to have shortened some of the tracks on the CD. In a couple of places I had to repeat a track almost all the way through to make the next track start at the right time. Still, the points where the movie and score synched perfectly (the first 20 minutes or so, and the very end) were breathtaking.

I wish the movie was available with this score on DVD. They could have used the DVD commentary track to provide it as an alternate to the regular score (by Alloy Orchestra). Alas, I think the only way is to play the CD and DVD simultaneously like I did, an imperfect match-up, or to see the Cinematic Orchestra perform the score live. Which they may not do again.