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December 25 movie: White Christmas. Not exactly a remake of Holiday Inn, in fact not a remake at all. But they both have Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas." I think I prefer Holiday Inn because it has Fred Astaire. But White Christmas has Rosemary Clooney and Vera Ellen singing "Sisters." Which I hear Pinky does an excellent version of, and maybe if we pester her enough she will sing it for us. Vera Ellen, by the way, is amazingly athletic. Her legs are so muscular they could belong to a fitness model today. I had to wonder if those legs were considered attractive at the time: I thought in the 50s people preferred a softer, more curvy look. Ellen is all sinew and muscle. She also wears a horribly tight girdle that pinches her waist into a waspy shape that I found a bit painful to look at, which may have been an attempt to give her lean, athletic frame some approximation of an hourglass figure.

Anyway, enough about Vera Ellen's body. The movie is fun, silly and implausible with lots of great singing and dancing. Which is all you can ask for in a musical. I especially appreciated "Choreography," the dance number where Danny Kaye makes fun of Martha Graham and Gene Kelly.

This is the second year in a row we've watched White Christmas on Christmas Day. Last year was at the late lamented Madstone Theater; this year on commercial television with Georg's folks. I wonder if this is our new Christmas tradition.

December 22 movie: Yours, Mine, and Ours. Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda play a widow with 8 children and widower with 10 who marry, thus inspiring "The Brady Bunch." The main difference is that the movie begins before the couple meets, and the kids are a lot nastier. Particularly Fonda's sons, who are merciless to Ball. They spike her drink the first time they meet her and make her seriously ill, and then harangue her non-stop for the first year of the marriage. (I did learn the handy tip from the drink-spiking scene that vomiting is a cure for drunkenness: Ball is totally plastered, disappears into the bathroom to be sick, then comes back sober.)

This movie was funny, but should be avoided by anyone who can't take the sound of children yelling. Also anyone who was conscripted into caring for much younger siblings will probably be given nightmares by this movie. There's one scene near the end where Ball is asked how she manages to provide such a happy, well-run home for 19 kids (by this point she and Fonda have had another, the crazy freaks) and she gives some goo-goo eyed response about having a lot of love, a little discipline, and a husband who doesn't criticize. When really it's obvious that the family would go to hell without the older kids acting as nannies to the younger ones.

There's also some lame conflict over counter-culture which ends in one of the older daughters being nearly assaulted by her boyfriend, and her telling him to get a haircut. That scene was totally "huh?" but it was happening off to the side while everyone is trying to get Ball to the hospital to deliver child #19, so they kind of blow right by it. And the movie ends with the oldest son being drafted and happily marching off to join the Marines in Vietnam. The father is a Navy man which I guess is why the son is so cool with being drafted, but still, that kind of creeped me out. "You're off to experience and possibly commit unspeakable horrors! If you're lucky your wounds will only be emotional! Bye! Don't forget to write!"

December 19 movie: Morning Glory. Katharine Hepburn plays a naive ingenue full of misconceptions about the theater, struggling to make it as an actress in New York. Several theater bigwigs take her under their wing and give her all the breaks they can, but she still fails because she's a terrible actress. Until the very end when she magically becomes the greatest star the stage has ever seen. Blah, blah, blah. This movie really annoyed me. I think Hepburn's naivete was supposed to be quirky and endearing but I found the character insufferably pretentious. I think I watched too many movies last weekend.

December 19 movie: Zaotichi Enters Again. The third Zatoichi movie has Zatoichi returning to his old village and meeting up with his sensei, who is a bad, bad man. This shocked me. I've never before seen a Japanese movie in which the hero's sensei turns out to be a villain. Zatoichi and the sensei's little sister want to marry, but the sensei refuses because he wants her to marry someone who will bring him prestige. We thought the sister was a goner as soon as Zatoichi admitted that he wanted to marry her. Lucky for her Zatoichi promises to give up his violent life, and then has to abandon her when he fights again at the end. "I guess I am that kind of man," he says, which literally translates as "I'm a loner, Dottie, a rebel." Zatoichi also admits the prostitutes as a shameful thing, so maybe it wasn't as socially acceptable in a historical Japanese film as I thought. I got the impression in the second movie that there was nothing untoward about it.

December 18 movie: Bombshell. When I got home from Bad Buffy Night I discovered that while I was away, Georg had bought and hung up pine garland in the living room, the very day we'd sadly decided that we didn't have time to decorate this year. What a sweetheart! Between the garland and the groovy glowing Santa that my aunt gave me, the house is looking downright festive.

I was too wound up to go right to sleep, so I sat in the living room writing up movie posts, enjoying the pine fresh scent, and watching Bombshell. Jean Harlow plays a Hollywood starlet coping with a freeloading family, and a studio publicist who feeds the press scandal stories about her and thwarts her efforts to build a normal life, because he fears the public won't find her so interesting without a constant flow of gossip in the papers. The movie is played as broad comedy, and it is very funny. But I have to admit I found it also very sad, almost tragic. The bare bones of the story are apparently based on Clara Bow (Harlow's character is named Lola Burns and called "the It girl," back in the day when that meant no one but Bow) but also to some degree based on Harlow herself, who also had a family of moochers to support. It's so sad to think of Bow (and Harlow as well) being exploited by all those people who live off her and care so little about her, except as a meal ticket.

Now I've made the movie sound depressing, when it really is very funny. Made before the Hayes Code, it's full of salacious details that would never have made it into a movie just a couple of years later. And it's a hilarious parody of Hollywood the money-making machine. It's just funny with a sharp, painful edge.

December 18 movie: I'm With Lucy. The final entry in our Bad Buffy night was this chick flick costarring David Boreanaz (Angel), and I must say this was the best of the bunch. We almost didn't watch it but I'm glad we did. The movie follows Lucy through five apparently disastrous blind dates. We're told at the very beginning that she's going to marry one of the men, but we don't find out which one until the very end. Boreanaz plays one of the dates. He's the polar opposite of Angel -- so un-mopey and un-brooding that he seems to have no internal life at all -- and he has awful hair. They lightened it and curled it and it looks frizzy and crunchy and awful. Other dates were Henry Thomas (Elliot from ET), that Scottish guy from Four Weddings and a Funeral who's on BBC America all the time, and two other guys I didn't recognize.

"Chick Flick" is a dirty word in many circles but I enjoyed this a lot. Of the three movies we watched, this is the only one I would watch again & would recommend to others. It was lucky that we watched the movies in ascending order of quality. If we'd watched the best one first, and gone downhill from there, I wouldn't have felt as good about sitting through 3 movies in a row like that.

December 18 movie: Scooby Doo 2. Part 2 of our Bad Buffy Night was this one, featuring Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy) as Daphne. I hadn't seen the first one and I don't have a whole lot to say about this one. It was fun though I don't think I would have enjoyed it if I had been watching it by myself. To its credit, I will say that we intended to watch just a few excerpts, but got sucked in and ended up watching the whole thing.

It's exactly like the cartoon, except that Daphne acts like Buffy. At least, I don't think that in the cartoon Daphne used to fight the monsters with pole-axes. Also, Shaggy does this weird thing with his neck where he tenses it up all the time so the veins are popping out. Someone pointed it out early in the movie, and from then on I couldn't stop staring at his freaky veiny neck every time he was on screen. Seth Green (Oz) is also in it, which makes this one another bad Buffy double-shot. Alas, no one said "I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling kids."

December 18 movie: Rip It Off. Lisa, Shayne and I got together yesterday for Bad Buffy Night, which means watching bad movies that star former cast members of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This involved a complex negotiation to find movies that were first of all, bad, secondly, unviewed by any of us, and third, not totally objectionable because of utter badness or other reasons. For instance, Shayne and I just weren't up for a horror movie, which ruled out Darkness Falls. And we didn't get Cruel Intentions because we'd all seen it.

Anyway, we started out the Bad Buffy extravaganza with Rip It Off, which from the packaging appeared to be a fun Alyson Hannigan (Willow) vehicle about young women doing a casino heist that their boyfriends are unable to pull off. We were expecting a chick Ocean's Eleven. Unfortunately the movie was actually really depressing and ugly and most of the characters are unpleasant and have terrible dialogue. Hannigan isn't as much of the star as we expected, and she plays a lesbian junkie whore and the woman she loves dies at the end. So in other words, the last two seasons of Buffy made this role a natural for her.

On the bright side, the movie also featured Alexis Denisof (Wesley, and Hannigan's real life spouse) as one of the boyfriends. So it was a bad Buffy double-shot, so to speak. Denisof plays a small-time Russian crook who dresses like a jamoke: shiny track pants, sleeveless Tshirts, big gold chain with a cross, and very, very bad hair. He also speaks with the worst Russian accent ever. With a name like Alexis Denisof, you'd think he would have at least one Russian relative to practice the accent with. But no such luck apparently. Denisof isn't quite as evil as the other Russian boyfriend, but close. Also he lives in an apartment with giant spatulas hanging in the kitchen. We rewound over and over, trying to figure out if the spatulas were a decorative element, or it was a trick of perspective and they were just normal spatulas badly filmed. I'm going with the decorative element. And it says something about the movie that the spatulas were the most interesting thing. As the credits rolled Shayne summed it up better than I can: "Now we know why this movie was direct to video."

December 17 movie: The Return of Zatoichi. The second Zatoichi movie takes place a year after the first, with Zatoichi returning to pay his respects to the grave of the samurai he killed in the first movie. Zatoichi also fights with his brother, who had stolen the woman he loved, and kills a bunch of bad guys. Also he meets up again with the woman who fell for him in the first movie, but refuses her again. And he sleeps with a prostitute, which I gather is more respectable in a historical Japanese film than it would be in an American film. It's great to get all this backstory on Zatoichi. The later movies are all so episodic: Zatoichi shows up in a town, befriends some honest people who fall afoul of gangsters, then Zatoichi kills all the bad guys. It's been really nice to see how the Zatoichi story began. We got the next one on the DVR today and I can't wait to watch it. Yay to IFC for showing these movies!

December 16 movie: Pork Chop Hill. Gregory Peck stars as a captain whose men are ordered to take and hold a hill in Korea "at any cost." Not only are the American soldiers outnumbered and undersupplied, they all know the battle is futile. The hill is strategically meaningless but is a point of contention at the peace negotiations. There's no gory violence a la Saving Private Ryan but the horror of war and chaos of battle is amply depicted.

The only false note for me was the very end, a stirring monologue by Peck about how much the soldiers had achieved for their country. But the whole point of the movie (for me at least) was the pointlessness of their heroism and sacrifice. But I guess the movie is ambiguous enough that, while it seemed like a powerful anti-war film to me, it could be just as powerful a pro-war movie to a hawkish viewer.

December 15 movie: The Perils of Pauline. Betty Hutton plays Pearl White, silent movie star best known for the serial "The Perils of Pauline" (thus the title). The movie is fairly forgettable except for Betty, luminous as ever. The scenes where they were filming the silent movies were funny though. Everyone jumped around in these jerky movements to simulate the sped-up look of silent movies. I also watched the TCM "Private Screenings" interview with her. She was amazing, so candid and genuine. It's rare to see a celebrity speak from the heart like that. I wonder if she was always like that, or if it was being out of the public eye for so long that made her sound so unstudied in her interview.

December 15 movie: Yolanda and the Thief. Fred Astaire plays a con man who tricks a Latin American heiress (Lucille Bremer) into believing he's her guardian angel so he can bilk her out of millions. Except she really does have a guardian angel. Who guilts Astaire into giving the money back, and then orders him to marry her. Weird movie!

Not nearly enough dancing, almost no singing. And Astaire seemed to have been studying at the Gene Kelly school of choreography, because the biggest number was one of those awful dream sequences that stop the movie dead in its tracks and don't even have that much dancing. Also, Astaire was getting to the age where his wooing a teenager (the actress clearly wasn't, but the character was fresh out of convent school) was a little creepy. Even more creepy was the girl's position as de facto ruler of the fictional tiny Latin American country. Her family's corporate holdings controlled practically the entire GNP, and the peasants treated her like a demigoddess. So Astaire married his way into ownership of a corporate nation-state. How romantic!

December 15 movie: God Said, Ha! Julia Sweeney's one woman show about the year in which her brother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, her entire family moved into her house to care for him, and then she was also diagnosed with cancer. It sounds godawful depressing but it's actually really funny and touching. The funniest part is when they have to give the brother a shunt in his head, and the doctor persuades him by saying that all his patients who have shunts love them. After which the brother goes around saying "I love my shunt!" all the time, and when they watch ER he yells at the screen "Give him a shunt! He needs something to love!" Also funny is her acknowledgement of how awful and unfunny the Pat character became, and how everyone (including her) wished Pat would go away unfortunately before it did.

December 14: Blind Swordsman: The Story of Zatoichi. Not exactly clear on the title of this one. The info screen called it Zatoichi: The Life and Opinion of a Blind Masseur, but I used the title that appeared in the film itself. Well in the subtitles, to be precise.

We think this was the first Zatoichi movie. Like all the others, Zatoichi somehow gets involved in a squabble among petty gangsters, although he doesn't kick as much bad guy butt as usual. In the other Zatoichi movies I've seen, he's always seeking a legitimate job, but in this one he calls himself a gangster several times and doesn't have a problem working for one of the gangs. There's a little bit of backstory; he says something vague about how he used to be a legitimate masseur until three years before, and that he practiced swordsmanship on his own, no formal training.

Zatoichi looked so young in this film! He's still an unlikely hero: not very handsome, and a bit greedy. Which is one of the things I really like about Zatoichi. He's not some saintly altruist who travels the countryside helping the needy and refusing all reward. He wants to make some money, and he doesn't mind doing the occasional unsavory work to get it. There's a subplot about a young woman whose brother is trying to force her to be with (maybe marry, or maybe just have sex with) a gangster, but Zatoichi doesn't rescue her: the would-be husband dies in the gang war. She falls for Zatoichi and wants to go with him but he refuses because he's a loner, Dottie, a rebel.

December 11 movie: Battleship Potemkin. Speaking of silent Soviet films, they were showing this on PBS on Saturday night so my dad and I watched it. Did you know there is a whole new PBS station in the Philadelphia area? They have three now! An embarrassment of riches. I used to answer the phones during pledge drives for NJN, the South Jersey station, and I think once or twice I did WHYY too. One time they were showing ice skating, and they cut off the end of someone's routine to go to the pledge drive, and we were flooded with furious calls. Like there was anything we could do about it. We wrote down their complaints but I don't know if anyone from the station ever even read them. I guess it made the callers feel better, which is something I suppose. That was the most interesting thing that ever happened.

Anyway, the movie. Does it make me sound pretentious to say that I enjoyed it? Because I did. The print was really good, sharp images and hardly any scratches. I had seen the famous "Odessa Steps" scene before but not the whole movie. I was surprised that it turned out to have a happy ending. Well, except for all those dead Odessans on the steps, I guess it wasn't a happy ending for them. But still, the overall tone of the movie was so grim that the ending came as a surprise. When the rest of the fleet supports the mutineers at the end I was kind of like, huh?

December 10 movie: Dress to Kill. This is my favorite Eddie Izzard movie. My dad and I watched it but my mom was tired and went to bed early. I guess I was tired too because I didn't laugh as much as the first time I saw it. It was funny though. There are a lot of funny bits but I especially like the part where he speculates on how Jerry Dorsey came up with the stage name "Englebert Humperdink" (my dad told me it was the name of a composer, which I had not known before, but the bit is still funny), and also the part about England conquering a bunch of countries through clever use of flags.

December 9 movie: Man with a Movie Camera. Yes I know, this makes the 4th viewing this year. I had the DVD and wanted to show it to my folks. I think they enjoyed it. We talked about the fact that, as I have heard, the movie was so far ahead of its time it put the director, Dziga Vertov, on the outs with the Soviet government. Although my dad pointed out that might have been due also to the images of homeless people early in the film, in the segment on the city waking up. After all, street people aren't supposed to exist in the workers' utopia.

We also talked about how much more difficult it must have been to create the split screen and superimposed image effects in 1929, with no computers or Final Cut Pro, and how effectively these techniques were used. Not just to look fancy but to add meaning to the film. There's one segment in particular which shows major and minor events of life -- a birth, a divorce, a marriage, people riding in a car, a wounded man in an ambulance, etc -- cut back and forth with a close-up of the camera lens, and the cameraman's eye superimposed over it. The first couple times I saw the movie, I thought I was actually seeing his eye through the lens but eventually I realized that it was two separate images. The eye flickers back and forth frantically like the cameraman is trying to capture all these moments, not miss out on anything. Which is a pretty interesting visual comment on the movie as voyeurism.

(Trivia note: searching on The Man with a Movie Camera turns up the 1929 film in imdb.com, but Man with a Movie Camera returns a 2005 horror film in production. You'd think that with such similar names, they'd give you both results on either search and let you pick the one that was appropriate.)

Dec. 5 movie: Imitation of Life. Went over to Shayne's house on Sunday night to have dinner and watch the Lana Turner version of Imitation of Life. Great fun and a great movie. We almost didn't get to watch it because the DVD didn't arrive in time from Netflix. Visart had it on video, but it was an old, beat up video which Shayne's VCR didn't like. But Dave acted as tech support and got it working for us. (The funny thing is, the DVD finally arrived on Monday, the day after we watched the video! I would have watched it again with commentary, but there was none, no extras at all in fact.)

It was really interesting to watch it after both of us had just seen the Claudette Colbert version. They're both basically the same story: a white woman and a black woman become lifelong friends and raise their daughters together. I've heard that the Lana Turner version is considered one of the great melodramas and I certainly agree, it's one of the best I've seen.

The racial story was much more the focus of this version I thought, and portrayed much more graphically. For instance there's a really intense scene where the black daughter, Sarah Jane, has been passing for white and her white boyfriend finds out. He calls her the "n" word, beats her up and leaves her lying in a gutter with blood on her face. Jeez, nothing like that happened in the '34 version!

Shayne and I agreed that the Annie (Juanita Moore), the black woman in this version, was portrayed with more depth and personality than Delilah, the character in the first movie. Delilah was basically a mammy, not very smart, talking in a cringe-worthy dialect, and wanting nothing from life but to take care of her daughter and be Claudette Colbert (Bea)'s housekeeper. Like Hattie McDaniel in, well, a lot of movies. But more sweet and not as smart. Delilah and Bea are technically business partners, but really that means that Bea gave her a share of the profits because she came up with the recipe. Delilah doesn't actually have anything to do with the business, except cooking in the restaurant before they hit it big with the pancake mix.

In the later film, Annie is still Lora (Lana Turner)'s housekeeper, and in a way it's a step back because Lora is an actress so there's no business for Annie to be part of. But Annie does seem to have more of an independant life. There's a very telling scene where Annie mentions her friends, and Lora expresses surprise that she has friends. Annie says "You never asked," and goes on to say that she has hundreds of friends from her church, lodges and social clubs. The relationship between the two women is still totally one-sided, but this is presented as a failing on Lora's part. In the earlier film, it never seems to occur to anyone that Delilah would have a life of her own, or that Bea would care if she did. Even after they're rich, Delilah and her daughter still live downstairs in the servant's quarters. At least Annie and Sarah Jane have bedrooms upstairs with the family in Lora's house.

I wish that they had presented more life options for Sarah Jane, the daughter. The only alternatives she seems to have are to pass as white, or to date chauffeurs. There's no opportunity for her to better herself without denying herself. Shayne pointed out that there probably were very few opportunities for black women so in that way the movie was being realistic. I don't know a whole lot about racial politics of the 50s, but they lived on the outskirts of New York. It seems like there had to be a black community with professional opportunities there, if anywhere. But I guess the point was that Sarah Jane hated her heritage and didn't want to be part of a black community.

There's a whole other storyline in the movie about the conflict between Lora (Turner) and her daughter Susie (Sandra Dee), which I didn't write about because it's more typical melodrama fare. Lora's driving ambition for acting success makes her an absentee mother, Susie falls for Lora's love interest (Steve Archer, the only name that's consistent between the two movies), Steve wants Lora to abandon her career for him, blah di blah. It's an interesting story about people wanting things for the wrong reasons, and their relationships suffering because of it. But it's not as compelling as the Annie/Sarah Jane story. (Sandra Dee is too cute for words though. She was married to Bobby Darin; I wonder who's playing her in the Kevin Spacey biopic?)

I think that if you examine this movie from a modern perspective on racial issues, there's a lot not to like and even to be offended by. But looking at it in the context of the time it was made, it must have been ground-breaking. Annie sums up the message of that part of the movie when she says "It's a sin to be ashamed of who you are."

The ending is a massive tearjerker, but I'm proud to say I managed to get through it with just a few sniffles. Usually by the time Mahalia Jackson sings, I'm bawling.

December 4 movie: Man with a Movie Camera. I know, I just saw this a month ago. But the DVD just arrived so I had to watch it. Well, I thought I had done a pretty good job of synching the soundtrack and the movie, but I was way off. What I didn't know was that the soundtrack doesn't start up for three minutes; the first few minutes of the movie are silent. Plus a couple of tracks are twice as long in the movie as in the CD. No wonder nothing synched up. It almost felt like watching a different movie this time. Really: this was my third time watching the movie and I kept seeing new stuff and wondering if it had been added for this DVD. Which is kind of weird, because obviously they didn't add any footage. I guess that's the power of a good soundtrack.

There are some DVD extras: a couple of Cinematic Orchestra videos, which I'm sure I'll be more interested in watching when I haven't just seen the same music in the movie, and a short "making of" which I watched the first few minutes, but it was boring so I turned it off.

December 3 movie: Definite Article. This was a stand-up routine by Eddie Izzard. Does it count as a movie? I think it does. It's 90 minutes long and it's on a DVD. In which case I should also mention Unrepeatable and Circle, two other Izzard DVDs we've watched recently.

In case you couldn't guess, we really like Eddie Izzard. He's done some acting but we most like his standup. He's very funny and his jokes tend towards topics like history and old movies, not so much the typical standup routines of flying on airplanes or going to bars or current politics, etc. My favorite of his performances was Dress to Kill, which we saw last year on HBO. I don't know if it's truly the funniest or if it's just the one that I saw first, but either way it seems the funniest to me. One of the reasons Georg delayed getting a website was that he couldn't get cakeordeath.com, which refers to an Izzard joke from Dress to Kill about how the Anglicans would have run the Inquisition, offering heretics the choice between cake or death.

Unrepeatable was his first performance to be filmed. It's funny, it has potential, but there are more typical standup jokes than in the others. He does have a very funny bit about The Great Escape, in which the cats are digging a tunnel called Charlie behind the couch, and also mysteriously wearing cat trousers so they can carry the excess dirt from the tunnel into the garden. (There's an extended bit about The Great Escape in Dress to Kill so it was interesting to see that he was working on the idea already.)

Definite Article is the one we watched on Friday. Actually I fell asleep (no reflection on the movie, it was the face-full of exhaust I had gotten from David's truck that knocked me out early) and finished watching it last night. It seems like he had found his voice by then, it's very funny and the topics are more like Dress to Kill. My favorite part was the letter the Corinthians write back to St. Paul, in which they tell him "Fuck off! Why do you keep writing us letters? You arrogant bastard!"

We watched Circle a while ago, I think maybe in October when I watched a bunch of movies but forgot to write any of them up. I don't remember Circle that well, but I did think it was funny. My only criticism is that I guess by the time he filmed Circle he had gotten more famous because of the success of Dress to Kill, and the audience was a bit obsequious. Applauding madly every time he said something remotely clever, you know what I mean? That's a minor complaint though, it was still funny.