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January 29 movie: Blowup. You know, if I'm supposed to like and appreciate something because it's Great Art, I usually end up hating it. Especially with movies. I like movies that entertain me, make me laugh or make me think. Being told to admire the artistic merits of a movie that isn't entertaining puts me right off. This is a prejudice that I'm trying to overcome, but I'm sorry, it's true in this case. Antonioni is just a boring fart who made boring movies. How could he make such a dull movie with such an interesting topic and setting? It's a suspense movie about a mod photographer in London who accidently photographs a murder. Sounded like it would be an exciting thriller with great fashion and art direction. Well, he got the clothes and the sets, but damn this movie was dull. Nothing happened for the first hour, and then when it finally got going he kept interrupting the flow. Plus the hero is a relentlessly unpleasant person. And what was that shit with the mimes playing tennis? I guess I'm trying to say that I did not enjoy this movie at all. Well, the photo shoots in the first few minutes, the clothes they were wearing, were fab. Herbie Hancock did a nice soundtrack. And it was nice to see Jane Birkin (Serge Gainsbourg's great love) in a movie, even if her part was totally stupid and demeaning. That's about all I can give this movie.

So much for great art.

January 29 movie: Zatoichi's Flashing Sword. This was the first Zatoichi movie I ever saw! A friend of my parents told me about the series, he had watched it when he was stationed in Japan in the 60s. He lent us this one on DVD and my dad and I watched it together. Guess what, Zatoichi gets involved in a war between rival gangs. They're fighting about the rights to transport people across a ford. There's a great fight scene in which Zatoichi puts out all the candles, so they'll all be in the dark, then ends up with the top half of a candle (still lit) sitting on the blade of his sword. Makes for some nice lighting effects, as he turns and points the sword with the candle on it at the various baddies.

The violence level increases again -- not the body count this time but the amount of blood, which used to be none but is now substantial. And the end is more grim than a lot of the others I've seen. Also I think this may be the first Zatoichi movie in which no woman falls for him. The daughter of one of the warlords does treat him very well, but there's no indication of any feeling beyond simple generosity.

January 28 movie: Monkey Business. I was so tired last night that I blew off the Icicles show and watched this instead. And fell asleep in the middle! I fell asleep in the middle of Monkey Business. That's how tired I was. But I made it through the Maurice Chevalier impersonations, my favorite part, then thanks to the magic of the DVR I finished the movie in the morning.

Do I even need to say anything about this movie? It's one of the Marx Brothers' earliest movies and one of their best, I think. One really weird thing: the theme song, which shows up a few times (in the opening credits, Harpo's harp number, and briefly whistled by Chico), was also used in the Hitchcock movie Rope. It was the tune the twitchy sidekick villain kept playing on the piano, shifting into a minor key and faster tempo as the movie progressed and he got more stressed out. It really put a weird spin on hearing the same tune in Monkey Business, especially at first when the tune was making me uneasy but I couldn't place the reference.

Jan 25 movie: The Last of Mrs. Cheyney. Romantic comedy set during a weekend party in an English country manor, starring Joan Crawford and William Powell. This movie was okay, a pleasant enough way to kill a couple of hours. But Joan Crawford isn't my favorite, there's something a little too fake and mannerly about her performance when she's trying to play a character with class. Or maybe she was always like that, I don't know. William Powell is always great, but he's better with someone like Myrna Loy or Carole Lombard, with whom he has actual chemistry. Also this movie commits a (to me) unpardonable sin: everyone but Crawford is supposed to be British, but almost all of them speak with their normal American accents. It's really confusing. Accents or no, there's good supporting work by Robert Montgomery and Frank Morgan.

The movie was shown on "guest programming night" featuring Bill Cosby, of all people. Robert Osborne seemed surprised that Cosby had chosen this movie, and the Cos couldn't really provide a reason beyond "I saw it once and liked it." Cosby also looked totally slovenly: wearing U Mass sweats and cap, Birkenstocks with white socks (ugh!) and dark sunglasses, and slouching so deep he was practically lying down in his chair. What a jerk.

Jan 24 movie: Without Reservations. Claudette Colbert plays the "authoress" of a wildly popular novel, apparently a ponderous tome about the ideal man who represents America's future. (hey, I wonder if she was supposed to be Ayn Rand?) On a cross-country train she meets two GIs, John Wayne and some other guy, and falls head over heels for Wayne. Problem is, he thinks her book is hooey, and so she hides her identity. Then they end up in a road movie having lots of wacky adventures.

I'm a huge fan of Colbert but Wayne does nothing for me. The two cancel each other out here, leaving the movie a big dose of "meh." Plus, a Claudette Colbert road movie is almost by definition going to look bad in comparison to It Happened One Night. They should never have tried to make that lightning strike twice. The one thing I really enjoyed in this movie was a cameo by Cary Grant, playing himself and refusing to play the main character in the movie version of Colbert's book. If I'd picked up on the Ayn Rand thing at the time that would have made me enjoy the movie more. She had to be Rand the way she kept droning on about the grand symbolic themes in her book.

January 23 movie: The Devil and Miss Jones. Was there a porno movie with this title? Because the title seriously makes me think "porn." And I'm not exactly a porn aficionado (hey! no remarks!) so it would have to be a pretty famous movie for me to know the title. The intro by that stupid Mankiewicz guy didn't say anything about it. Can I just say that I hate that guy. Why did TCM bring him in on weekends? What was wrong with Robert Osborne? Osborne sounds like he's actually seen the movies, knows who the actors are, and might conceivably have come up with his remarks himself. I'm sure they're both reading from a script but only Mankiewicz sounds like it. Who decided that being the grandson of somebody important makes him a good choice to host movies on TV?

Okay, enough ranting. The Devil and Miss Jones. Was a comedy with a social message, but not too serious, light and very funny, and had nothing whatever to do with porn. The Devil is Charles Coburn, a billionaire businessman who goes undercover as a lowly clerk in one of his holdings, a department store which is reportedly going union. Miss Jones is Jean Arthur, a salesgirl in the shoe department who takes Coburn under her wing and teaches him about life and kindness to your fellow man and blah blah.

The movie has a fairly leftist message: the union organizers are brave and noble champions of the downtrodden, while the store management, the bigshot lawyers, and Coburn (before his epiphany) are greedy, petty, nasty people. So it surprised me to learn that the director, Sam Wood, later provided key testimony to HUAC. But then again those were the days of the studio system so maybe he didn't have a choice about doing this movie.

Jan 23 movie: Charade. Considering this starred Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn and some fabulous clothes by Givenchy, it's kind of a surprise I had never seen it before. It's a fun, stylish thriller. Hepburn and Grant are fabulous, although I heard that he didn't like playing a romantic part opposite a woman so much younger than himself. Would that today's stars had the same scruples! James Coburn is always fun, although he has a film-killing Texas accent (by which I mean, whenever he speaks you can't think about anything except how bad his accent is). Also a nice supporting part by Walter Matthau, who helpfully dates the film by expositing that the CIA is the successor to the OSS, but the agency is so new no one's heard of it.

I was pleased with myself for figuring out the big surprise just a few minutes before I think I was supposed to. That's the best way: I get to feel all clever, but I haven't spoiled the movie for myself. And I was even more pleased with the movie for throwing one last twist at me which I wasn't expecting at all. That was a nice way to finish things up.

January 23 movie: The Program. I'm not sure if this counts as a movie for the list. I watched the whole thing, but fast forwarded through all but 5-10 minutes. It was kind of funny on fast-forward: it was like, "Duke, Duke, tobacco warehouse, Duke, hey where did that huge stadium come from, Duke, Duke." I was looking for the scenes filmed at Ninth St. Bakery, where I used to work. This is the second time I've watched this movie for that sole reason. And I still didn't recognize the Bakery! I carefully scrutinized every scene in which peope ate. But no damned Bakery. They must have thoroughly disguised the place. Or maybe my friends who still worked there totally lied to me. Oh yeah, the movie "spent a day filming there" and my friends "were in several shots." Right.

With all the fast-forwarding the whole movie took about 20 minutes. Even that was too much time to waste on this incredibly stupid movie. That's 20 minutes of my life that I can never have back!

January 22 movie: Tokyo Drifter. Whoo-ee, this was fun! Mid-60s yakuza movie with a crazy cool visual sensibility. Lots of super-saturated colors. I particularly liked a scene where the hero is walking through deep snow wearing a powder blue suit, and a nightclub in which everything (walls, piano, people's clothes) is yellow. I was reading a Seijun Suzuki fan site which said that "eccentric" use of color was a trademark of his, which his studio didn't appreciate. According to the fan site they often forced him to make black and white movies just to prevent his exploration of color. Which is a damned shame; the colors are practically the main character of this movie.

January 22 movie: Singing in the Rain. I love this movie so much that I don't really have that much to say about it. Lots of great singing and dancing of course, and a funny story too. I think my favorite character is Jean Hagan as Lina Lamont, the spiteful star with the horrible voice. I've heard that she was a composite of several silent movie stars whose careers were ruined by talkies. But then again, I've also heard that this phenomenon (silent stars who couldn't act with their voices) was grossly overstated, and really the studios used it as an excuse to reassert power and get rid of a bunch of actors who had too much clout.

The only thing I don't like about this movie is the interminable "Gotta Dance" sequence. It stops the movie dead in its tracks, goes on forever, and doesn't even have that much dancing. I don't know why Gene Kelly had such a thing for those stupid fantasy dance numbers. I always fast forward through that part, but last night I was watching live so I had to mute and wait for it to be over.

January 22 movie: Zatoichi and a Chest of Gold. Zatoichi Madness continues with the blind swordsman helping a bunch of farmers rescue their stolen tax money. Zatoichi is starting to head into superhero territory: this is his most heroic and altruistic purpose in the series so far, he also rescues a little boy, and when the farmers suspect him of stealing the gold and beat him up, he doesn't fight back. But just so you know he's still Zatoichi, he sneaks into a bathhouse with a lady, then picks his nose while sitting in the bath with her. Ew!

The violence level has gone way up. We think that he killed more people in the totally gratuitous opening credit sequence than in the entire first movie. Also this is the first one to establish a time frame for the series: Zatoichi visits the grave of someone who died 3 years previously, which is marked "1842." Well I'm sure it said something else, I doubt Japan used the Western calendar at that point, but that's what the subtitle said. The plot focuses on a corrupt government official and there were a few things we didn't understand, probably because we're not familiar with 19th century Japenese politics. Still this was a good entry in the Zatoichi series.

January 22 movie: You Only Live Twice. Back to "lame Bond" again. Connery's sheer force of cool couldn't save this one, especially when he was forced to dress up like the most unconvincing Japanese man ever. He looked ridiculous. Less convincing that Katharine Hepburn in Dragon Seed. It was the same villain as in From Russia with Love, this time revealed to be Donald Pleasance and looking exactly like Dr. Evil. Also the pool of deranged bass with frickin laser beams strapped to their heads. Well okay, actually they were piranas.

The only good thing about this movie was the Japanese bond girl played by the same actress as Suki Yaki from What's Up, Tiger Lily? I think from now on if I have any desire to watch a Bond movie, I'll stick to early Sean Connery or one that's specifically recommended to me (i.e. On Her Majesty's Secret Service.)

January 20 movie: The Subject Was Roses. A young Martin Sheen plays a WWII veteran who comes home to bickering parents (Patricia Neal and Jack Albertson). I did not enjoy this at all. It may have worked as a play, but it didn't translate well to a movie. Partly because it was so obvious that the source was a play: almost the entire movie limited to a small area, the way the actors over-project their dialogue, even the style of dialogue felt stagey to me. But beyond that, I've decided that I really don't care for late 60's family dramas. It's obvious that Sheen's "angry young man" is supposed to be a shining beacon of truth-telling, exposing the rotten core of the unhappy family. But to me he comes off like a smug, rude little snot. I kept wanting to shake him and tell him not to talk to his parents like that.

January 19 movie: From Russia With Love. Okay, now I get the Bond thing. This one was also campy and silly, but Sean Connery is cool enough to carry it off. Roger Moore, not so much. As Georg pointed out the source material for Austin Powers is abundant: the villain stroking the kitty cat, the matronly Russian henchwoman, etc. I don't actually remember anything about the plot except that they were in Istanbul, there was a gypsy catfight, and the bad guys had daggers that popped out of the toes of their shoes. Austin Powers should have ripped that off too, it was so silly.

Jan 19 movie: Kinds Hearts and Coronets. According to Robert Osborne this is the movie that made Alec Guinness a star. The funny thing is, he isn't even the star of the movie. He just steals every scene he's in.

Guinness plays eight members of the noble D'Ascoyne family who are eliminated so that angry young Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price), son of a lowly branch, can inherit the dukedom. (Actually Price offs six of them: one dies of natural causes and one goes down with his ship.) It sounds gruesome but it's extremely funny, especially with Price's detached, self-serving narration throughout.

Guinness's ability to play all eight of the D'ascoynes is amazing. He really looks like eight different people. Some of it is makeup, but mainly it's acting. They do use special effects once, in a scene where all the family members are seated together in a church.

TCM also showed The Ladykillers, but I didn't record it because I had already seen it.

Jan 19 movie: The Lavender Hill Mob. It was Alec Guinness night on TCM, and I recorded a couple of his Ealing movies that I hadn't seen before. This was a very funny story about a meek, unambitious treasury worker whose bosses refuse to promote him because he "lacks ambition," while he secretly plots a caper to steal £1,000,000 worth of gold, melt it down and smuggle it out of the country as phony Eiffel Tower souvenirs.

Like all the Ealing movies The Lavender Hill Mob is dryly hilarious, both when the caper is going off without a hitch, and when it inevitably spins out of control. I think my favorite scene is when Guinness and his partner (the souvenir exporter) advertise for assistants by shouting at each other on a bus about an unlocked safe, then waiting at the site and hiring on the spot the crooks who show up to rob them.

I'm always amazed at how Guinness can transform himself just by changing his demeanor. He's famous for it in Kind Hearts and Coronets, but he does it here too. The meek treasury employee seems like a totally different person from the mastermind gold thief.

January 18 movie: Mystery Street. Last night Sylvia and I had another meeting of the NC Ricardo Montalban Appreciation Society. It was great fun! We had soft tacos with picadillo and chard with potatoes, and fried beans, all courtesy of Rick Bayless. Sylvia commented that the picadillo tasted like barbecue, which makes sense: it has tomatoes, sweetness from the raisins, and both spicy and smoky from the chipotles in adobo.

I was a little disappointed in the chard. The potatoes made the sauce kind of gluey. On the other hand, Georg and Sylvia insisted that they didn't think it was gluey. So maybe it's just that I haven't cooked potatoes in awhile and forgot how they cook up. The recipe has you boil the potatoes in broth, then add the whole thing to the chard and cook off the liquid, then stir in Mexican crema. Maybe next time I'll boil the potatoes in water, discard the water and then add fresh broth. That would get rid of some of the starchiness I think.

Okay, so the movie. This is my favorite Ricardo Montalban movie. It's a detective story, not a romance, and he never takes his shirt off. But in a way that's one of the things I like about it: instead of being typecast as the "latin lover" he's a smart, savvy professional.

I wonder what Montalban movie we'll watch next? We've already seen my two favorites (this and Fiesta) and Sylvia's, My Man and I. Hmm, maybe Neptune's Daughter. Probably it will depend on whatever TCM shows next.

January 17 movie: The Lord of the Rings: the Return of the King. I enjoyed this in the theater, and enjoyed it again on DVD. The extra scenes added a lot of depth to the story, although one thing I was really looking forward to -- Faramir and Eowyn getting together in the Houses of Healing -- was only barely touched on. Still, barely touched on is better than completely absent. Saruman's scene was excellent too. I can see why Christopher Lee was pissed off that his scene got cut.

As I suspected, the hobbits are all the same height, even though Merry and Pippin are shown growing taller after drinking the Ent-draught in the extended version of the second movie. No further elaboration on the controversial "who stole the Lembas bread" scene. I'm interested in what they say about it in the commentaries, but I'm not up to watching the whole movie again right now.

January 17 movie: The Tango Lesson. I'd already seen this movie, and had read some reviews back then. The reviews seem to fall into two categories: people who hated the movie and called it self-indulgent, and people who accuse the people who hated it of being sexist. Since the movie is about a relationship between an older woman and a younger, handsomer man, anyone who dislikes it must have a problem with powerful women.

I don't think I'm sexist, but I didn't much care for the movie. It's about a film director named Sally, played by director Sally Potter, who learns the tango from Argentinian dancing star Pablo Veron, played by Argentinian dancing star Pablo Veron. Meanwhile she's trying to make a movie (which seems completely wretched from the few clips they show) but is stymied at every turn by pencil-pushing studio executives who just don't understand her vision. Sound self-indulgent yet?

The good thing about the movie is the dancing. Lots of beautiful tangos and beautiful tango music. There's a particularly nice dance scene among four people at the end.

Jan 15 movie: The Great Escape. I might have been a little more charitable towards the Bond movies if I hadn't followed them up with a truly great action movie. The ingenuity, drive and sheer determination of the prisoners as they plan their escape is amazing. And all the more impressive knowing that the movie is closely based on a true story. The movie is funny too, like the sequence where the three Americans in the camp spend weeks snitching all the potatoes, build a still and distill the potatoes into rotgut, and then surprise the rest of the camp with a 4th of July celebration.

The attention to detail is also very nice: for example when Richard Attenborough first arrives at the camp, there's a strong implication that he's been beaten by the Gestapo and he has a weird bruise around one eye. As the movie goes on, the bruise gradually changes into a scar, which he still has at the end.

I wrote this movie up already last year and can only add an embarrassed admission that I haven't yet read any of the books about the true story. I even put a hold on the one by Paul Brickhill at the library, but I never picked it up.

Jan 15 movies: Live and Let Die, The Man with the Golden Gun and The Living Daylights. I've never really gotten the appeal of James Bond. I'd seen a few; some were reasonably entertaining, some were totally lame. None made me think that this should be a major movie franchise. Some cable channel (Encore I think) is showing a marathon all weekend, and I was feeling lazy yesterday, and what better time to give the series another try? I watched James Bond all afternoon and honestly, didn't see anything to change my opinion.

Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun were both Roger Moore movies, and man oh man did they stink. Awful! Nothing but bad jokes, bad car chases and bad sex. At least The Man with the Golden Gun had Christopher Lee. He's always good. And he looked so young! Well actually, not young. But young compared to Lord of the Rings. He looked so ... middle-aged. Also I finally understand why Krusty the Klown has a third nipple. I never got that joke before.

(This movie also seemed comical because I kept thinking about Woody Allen and hearing the title in my head as The Man with the Golden Gub.)

The approach to sexuality in these movies is so adolescent. All about conquest with no emotional involvement, but still heavily romanticized, with the silly fantasy settings and the PG-13 action. Everything about Bond is adolescent. Not just the sex but the super-spy thing, being better than everyone else, the silly gadgets and so forth. James Bond is like that boy you knew in junior high who kept making up ridiculous stories about his superman-like abilities. Maybe the people who like the series got into it when they were adolescent boys. Like Piers Anthony and twelve year old girls. I have never met a fan of Piers Anthony who didn't start reading him when they were a twelve year old girl. But I digress.

The Living Daylights was a little less stupid. (I guess it says something about me that I found a chase scene with two people sledding down a mountain in a cello case less stupid.) Georg opined that Timothy Dalton didn't get a fair shake at playing Bond, because the Roger Moore movies were so awful they had driven away most of the fans, and camp value was all people wanted from the series anymore. There was also that little historical awkwardness of wanting us to root for the plucky Muhajadeen in Afganistan. Well, hindsight and all that.

Jan 14 movie: House of Flying Daggers. I haven't checked, but I think this may be the first movie I've seen in a theater since Hero. Which is kind of funny. Apparently sweeping martial arts epics by Zhang Yimou are the only thing that will pry my butt off the couch and get me to a theater.

Before talking about the movie I have to mention the trailers. We saw one for Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle, which looked so good I actually applauded in the theater. His Shaolin Soccer was brilliant. And as Georg pointed out, since it's not being released by Miramax, there's a good chance it won't be chopped up to hell.

The bad news in movie trailers was Kingdom of Heaven. Which is a grand, heroic epic about the Crusades. You heard me, the Crusades. During a problematic (to say the least) war in the Middle East, Hollywood comes out with a movie glorifying the ugliest episode in Christian-Islamic history. We were both so appalled that our jaws literally dropped. How much lower can Hollywood sink? What's next, a heroic epic about the Conquistadors? The Albigensian Crusade? The Inquisition?

Okay, enough about that. Hopefully the Crusades movie will stink as badly as Alexander did, and sink as fast, and then I won't have to hear about it again. Now on to the movie we actually did see: House of Flying Daggers. It was excellent. Zhang Yimou is brilliant at sweeping epics. The visuals are amazing, the fight scenes are terrific, the cinematography is exquisite, and as usual his sense of color (not just to make the movie pretty but to carry meaning) is beyond compare. I never read reviews of movies I plan to see, but I would imagine that everyone is, or at least should be, talking about the two big set pieces: the "Echo Game" at the beginning, and the battle in the bamboo forest. Both scenes are amazing.

This felt like a romance set in an adventure story, unlike Hero which felt more like an adventure movie with a love story in it, if that makes sense. Which brings me to my only criticism. It's not really even a criticism, just my personal issue, which is that Zhang Ziyi leaves me cold. She just doesn't do it for me. She was okay in Crouching Tiger and Hero, where she only had to support the better actors. Maybe by the time she's Maggie Cheung's age, she'll be able to carry a movie of this scope. Too bad she can't do it now. (In my opinion of course.)

Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro were both good, very convincing. (I'd seen them both in other movies but didn't remember them until I looked them up on imdb.com.) But the two of them can't hold up the triangle on their own when Zhang is in the middle doing nothing for me. In what should have been a heartbreaking tragic ending, I just sat there thinking. "Wow. Nice scene. Too bad Maggie Cheung and Michelle Yeoh are too old for this part. Whatever happened Brigitte Lin?"

Which is not to say that I didn't like the movie. I loved it. Just that I was emotionally disengaged; the romance story didn't draw me in.

Jan 14 movie: Zatochi On the Road. Again my thanks to IFC for showing all these Zatoichi movies in order. We don't know yet if they're going to show them all, or just the early ones. But we're definitely enjoying it while we can. This was the fifth in the series, and (we think) the first one to be a completely stand-alone episode: no characters in common with the other movies (excepting of course Zatoichi). Also the violence level has racheted up. This time Zatoichi is helping a nobleman's daughter get home to Edo before her evil husband's soldiers find her and kill her. Zatoichi exposits that the girl stabbed a man in the face to get away, but she acts way too meek and helpless throughout the movie to make that believeable. Anyway, this is classic Zatoichi: he sets rival gangs against each other, kills a lot of people, the girl falls in love with him and he ditches her. Because he's a loner.

Zatoichi is the unlikeliest romantic hero I've ever seen. He's not handsome, walks with a stoop, has a weak chin, his face is always dirty and sweaty, and in this episode we learn that he talks with his mouth full. The big romantic scene between Zatoichi and the girl takes place while they eat rice balls, and he talks with his mouth full of rice and has rice all over his face! Then they're ambushed and he jumps up and kills all the bad guys, with rice still stuck to his face! Bizarre and brilliant.

Jan 13 movie: The Palm Beach Story. This is one of my favorite Claudette Colbert movies, but now that I've seen them both in rapid succession I have to say that Midnight edges it out as my favorite of her romantic comedies. But then there's It Happened One Night ... damn it, I can't decide. They're all wonderful.

As Preston Sturges tend to do, the plot is difficult to sum up in one sentence. It features Colbert running out on the husband she loves (Joel McCrae) and hooking up with a wealthy bachelor (Rudy Vallee, playing "John D. Hackensacker," and guess which real-life billionaire he was supposed to be). She hopes to manipulate Vallee into giving McCrae the $99,000 he needs for his kooky invention (an airport suspended above Manhatten), while pretending McCrae is her brother so he won't interfere. Mary Astor plays Vallee's man-crazy sister, and one of the high points of the movie is Robert Dudley as The Weinie King, a cranky old deaf man who helps both Colbert and McCrae. Another highlight is the Ale and Quail Club, proving that drunk rich guys with rifles are funny! And Vallee gets to sing which is always nice.

Jan 12 movie: Mrs. Miniver. The mother of all "life on the homefront" movies, none other than FDR credited Mrs. Miniver with being the single greatest influence on American civilians learning how to cope with life during wartime. Greer Garson plays an upper-middle class British woman (in other words, rich but not titled) holding her family together in the early stages of the war. Made just after Pearl Harbor, the Minivers and their village try to maintain some bit of normalcy in their lives, while wondering if "normal life" even means anything anymore. It's lower on the melodrama and higher on the drama than Since You Went Away. Which makes sense since the war had much more immediacy to the family in Mrs. Miniver: the village is bombed repeatedly, the son is in the RAF, the father (Walter Pidgeon) gets volunteered for a brief but dangerous mission at Dunkirk, even Mom faces off with an escaped Nazi in the kitchen. Everyone is very British and stiff upper lip and "I say old man, dashed bit of luck there" when the house gets bombed. But the movie is incredibly affecting, even moreso than Since You Went Away. Don't think I'm a sap but I'm tearing up now, just thinking about the final scenes. Okay, I am a sap.

The only false note for me was Walter Pidgeon, who totally has an American accent. He didn't even try. Everyone else really is British or at least does a passable impression of it, and here's this American dad sticking out like a sore thumb. I spent much of the movie wondering if the character was supposed to be American, in which case how did he end up in that little village and why didn't anyone ever comment on it. Really distracting.

Jan 11 movie: Since You Went Away. I didn't mean to watch this again so soon, but I was flipping channels and came across it about a half hour in, and I was hooked. I had forgotten all about the part early on where Jennifer Jones has a childish crush on Joseph Cotten. The two of them had such good chemistry; I wish they had made more movies together. And Agnes Moorehead is great fun as the villainous neighbor, wondering "why do they have to have so much flag-waving?" and then opining that if everyone had hoarded food like she did, there wouldn't be any shortages at all.

My only negative comment isn't so much about this movie, but in general: why do so many black housekeepers in movies incorrectly use big words for comic effect? It's really not funny and it happens in a lot of old movies. Perhaps it's supposed to suggest that the servant class weren't just uneducated, but uneducatable: give them a two-dollar word and look how they mangle it. So therefore why feel bad about keeping a whole class of people down, when they couldn't do any better. And that is my political rant for the day.

Jan 11 movie: The Lady Eve. This movie is up there with The Philadelphia Story as one of the great romantic comedies. Barbara Stanwyck plays a card shark who falls for her mark (Henry Fonda), then after he rejects her sets out for revenge by posing as Lady Eve Sidwich and making him fall in love all over again. It's hilarious, though I don't have much more to say that I didn't already say last time.

Jan 10 movie: The Bourne Supremacy. Ooh, shiny! Action and suspense! Georg and I both thought this was good, but not as good as the first Bourne movie. To some degree this is because Franke Potente got killed after ten minutes. Sorry if I spoiled the surprise, but you can tell she's not long for this world one minute in, so it's not much of a spoiler.

Jan 9 movie: Portrait of Jennie. A strange, thoughtful movie about a struggling painter (Joseph Cotten) who meets and falls in love with a woman (Jennifer Jones) living outside time. I can't explain it better than that and I'd rather you see it than read my hamfisted attempt to describe the plot. Robert Osborne said that Selznick originally planned to make this movie with Shirley Temple, and film it over the course of five years so that the actor would actually age along with the character. But then he met and fell for Jennifer Jones, and good thing too because I can't imagine anyone else in this movie. She does an amazing job of portraying Jennie as a little girl, teenager and then mature woman, without modern make-up techniques to do the work for her.

The funny thing about this movie is that I've seen it at least once before, but I remembered the ending completely wrong. I won't say what I thought because that would give everything away. But I will say that I liked my ending better. It was more of a gothic romance type ending.

Jan 9 movie: A Day at the Races. This lesser Marx Brothers movie is still quite funny. Probably the most famous thing in it is "Get your tootsie-frootsie ice cream!" My favorite bit is when Groucho has dinner with a scheming woman. She keeps saying "thank you" and he keeps snapping right back "thank yao!" It's one of those things that doesn't translate well to print but trust me, it's funny.

Jan 7 movie: So Proudly We Hail! Another wartime film from Claudette Colbert. In this one she stars as a nurse in Bataan. According to a title card the movie, made during the war, was inspired by the true story of eight nurses who managed to get out of Bataan before the whole region fell. As you might imagine, the movie is pretty dark. They tried to make it inspiring but when the eight nurses get out, they leave behind everyone else in the movie. They didn't even know about that whole "Bataan Death March" thing when they made the movie, but the knowledge of history made the story even more grim.

Jan. 6 movie: Clerks. We had just watched the documentary so what the heck. My main feeling is that it's funny at all, but jeez, Kevin Smith didn't have much interaction with women at that point in his life. The female characters talk more like a lonely fanboy's imagination than like any woman I've ever met, and the resolution for them is kind of appalling: one ends up catatonic because of having had sex with a corpse, and the other walks out intent on degrading herself sexually because she's mad at the main character. The first time I saw this movie, years ago, I wasn't so repulsed by that stuff and was more able to enjoy the movie as a whole.

Jan 6 movie: Army Air Forces Training Films. TCM showed a series of short films made during the war by the Army Air Forces. This sounded like it would be really boring, but actually it wasn't at all.

First we saw a recruitment film starring Jimmy Stewart, who was apparently in the Army Air Forces at the time, though he never said what he did. I gather that some actors in the military didn't seek special treatment (for instance Clark Gable volunteered at age 41 and was a pilot in combat duty) but others had pretty cushy jobs (Ronald Reagan worked in the press corps and never left California). They never said when this film was made, but we guessed it must have been fairly early in the war. Stewart's pitch was basically that men should join the Army Air Forces because you made good money, got good training, and didn't need a college education to be an officer. The optimistic tone of the movie was a bit shocking. Stewart made the war sound like a grand adventure and constantly used sports metaphors (like referring to enlistment as joining an All-American team). It made me think of a British recruitment film I saw a long time ago, starring Leslie Howard. That movie was much more grim, all about how the Empire would band together courageously in the face of terrible odds and so forth. Stewart's tone was much more "go team! rah rah!" At least Stewart didn't use cowboy metaphors. I guess that was Reagan's thing.

After the Jimmy Stewart movie was a narrative film about how captured airmen should handle enemy interrogation. The men are separated and one by one they fall for every trick in the book, inadvertently giving up tons of critical information about an upcoming mission. There's a nurse who pretends to be sympathetic to them and lets the doctor yell at her so they'll think she's on their side, another who poses as a prisoner, and so forth. They don't even know anything official about the mission, but they know a bunch of seemingly useless details which the Nazis trick them into revealing and then piece together in order to figure out the mission and crush it. The movie ends with the commander of the failed mission explaining what happened, then turning to the camera and saying "Don't tell. Don't. Tell. DON'T TELL!"

At some point I realized that I had seen this movie before, but the first time I didn't realize it was an army training film. I thought it was just a movie with no-name actors.

After this was a documentary made at the time about the Army Air Forces film division. This was really boring and I only watched about half of it. We also did not tape "How to Recognize the Japanese Zero," starring Ronald Reagan. But there was a clip of it in the documentary which made me wish I had taped it. Apparently it was another narrative, about friendly fire because of soldiers who can't tell the difference between their own planes and the enemy's. Now that I think about it, I may have seen this one before too.

Jan 5 movie: You'll Never Get Rich. Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth star, and this is going to sound cold, but my main impression of this is that now I understand why the Astaire/Rogers movies are the only ones people remember. Hayworth gives it her best shot, but she just isn't a good match for Astaire, on or off the dance floor.

Astaire also seemed to be trying to shake off his image and come across like an ordinary joe, which is another big problem with the movie. He's an army private who spends most of the movie locked up in the guard house for a variety of minor infractions, and looking, if not ill-at-ease not totally at home with the character. He only seemed to come into his own at the very end of the movie they let him put on white tie and dance.

Jan 4 movie: Now, Voyager. This is still one of my favorite melodramas, nay, favorite movies. There are a few false notes, mainly focused on Paul Heinreid's daughter, whose dialogue is sometimes painfully treacly. But the movie is full of wonderfully complex relationships. All the principles except the little girl -- Bette Davis, Paul Heinreid, Gladys Cooper, Claude Rains -- are at the top of their games. When so many movies have people acting in random ways, for no other reason than because the script told them to, it's a treat to see a movie about character growth that makes me believe it.

Jan 4 movie: Snowball Effect: The Story of Clerks. We briefly feared that this would turn out like IFC's "documentary" on Spinal Tap, nothing but a series of celebrities recounting their favorite parts of the movie. Fortunately, it was instead an interesting and funny look at Kevin Smith's youth, how he got interested in filmmaking, how he made Clerks and how the movie got picked up by Miramax. The most interesting part to me was about his two best friends from high school, with whom he had had some kind of falling out that none of them wanted to talk about. Smith originally cast one of the friends as the lead in Clerks but the guy basically blew it off (showed up not knowing any of his lines even though he'd had the scrpt for a month). So Smith fired him, but then put him back in the movie in a bit part (one of the customers). I'd love to know more about that story.

January 3 movie: Stage Door. Tremendous ensemble movie about young women sharing a boarding house and trying to break into the theater. The cast is amazing: Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, Lucille Ball, Eve Arden, Ann Miller, Adolphe Menjou, and that's just to start. Constance Collier (the mean older sister in My Man Godfrey) has a nice turn as a jaded goldigger, as does Andrea Leeds as the movie's tragic figure. This is very much a women's story. They don't go all the way to the all-female cast gimmick like The Women, but the few male characters are nearly invisible. Menjou plays the only male part you could even call a character.

December 24 movie: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. The Mystery Science Theater treatment of this movie is revered, but honestly the movie is so bad that there isn't much for them to do with it. Still, it's great to see Joel's version of MST3K again. TV's Frank and the invention exchange! Gypsy and original voice Crow!

I know I watched a movie on the 31st, but I can't remember what it was. Darn!

January 1 movie: Zatoichi's Crazy Journey. Also known as Masseur Ichi, The Fugitive, the fourth in the series has Zatoichi getting involved in a conflict between two warring gangs. Which is basically the plot of most Zatoichi movies. I like the stately pace of the early Zatoichi movies, but I have to say that after four movies it's getting difficult to keep track of all the recurring characters. There's something to be said for the episodic, later films.

January 2 movie: Midnight. I love this movie! Have I ever mentioned how much I love this movie? Oh yes, I have. It still has Claudette Colbert, Don Ameche and John Barrymore, and it's still hilarious. The best part is still Barrymore braying into the phone, pretending to be Ameche's drunken daughter (you really have to see it for that to make sense). But it's all funny.