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October 26 movie: The 47 Ronin Part 2. When Part 1 left off Lord Asano was dead, his retainers were scattered, and the chamberlain was secretly plotting to avenge his death by killing Lord Kira, the man who provoked Asano. Part 2 is kind of political: to throw people off his trail, the chamberlain appeals to get the house of Asano reformed. Unfortunately his appeal looks like it may be successful, which would remove his cause for revenge. I didn't really get this part: it's clear that killing Kira is a crime and all the retainers will be sacrificing themselves regardless. So what do they care if it looks justified or not? Also, everyone seems to know exactly what the chamberlain is planning, so his attempt to conceal his motives wasn't very effective.

Lady Asano isn't dead, by the way, nor did she seem to have lost much social status. So maybe the hair-cutting in Part 1 was done to show her grief at the death of her husband. Or maybe her shame at her husband's disgrace. I don't know, it was never explained. Anyway the 47 ronin get their revenge about an hour in. The second half of the movie deals with them visiting their lord's grave, then turning themselves in and calmly awaiting their sentence. They all seem pretty happy. I guess maybe the pressure was off once they'd achieved their goal. And since they knew death was inevitable, they weren't upset about it.

October 25 movie: Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Having greatly enjoyed the three Wallace and Gromit shorts, I expected to love this. And I did. It's terrific! Very funny and happy, but the gentle fun it pokes at the villagers prevents any trace of saccharine. Georg and I both laughed our asses off. And though uber-tech CGI animation has its place, there's something incredibly charming about Nick Park's clay animation. I think it's the tactile quality. You can even see fingerprints on the faces at times.

The movie began with a hysterical animated short about four penguins on Christmas day. Even if hadn't enjoyed Wallace and Gromit (perish the thought) it would have been worth going for the short. Georg told me later that they were from the movie Madagascar, which I haven't seen. But I'd like to, if those penguins are in it.

No good trailers, although we did get one "what the ???" moment in the pre-trailer ads: a Honda Civic ad featuring music by MIA. First she's the darling of the music press, and now this. Can the media backlash be far behind?

October 23 movie: The Seventh Victim. I recorded this because the info screen described it as a young woman searching for her mising sister who discovers Greenwich Village satanists. Hey, I'm there! Actually the satanists are kind of dull, they look like a middle class bridge club or something. And the plot is really nothing to write home about. But the movie does have a nicely creepy atmosphere.

October 21 movie: What's Up, Tiger Lily? Another movie to watch while working. I've seen it a bunch of times and I have to admit, it doesn't really hold up to repeat viewing. It has very funny moments, but it tends to drag. This is a reminder to myself not to watch this movie but once in a long while.

October 21 movie: Van Helsing. BW Ventril was right: this movie has everything. Everything! It's got Dracula, Dr. Frankenstein and the monster, werewolves, vampire bat creatures, James Bond-meets-steampunk type gadgets, superheroes, it just kept going.

It was kind of like a deranged Abbott & Costello movie: Abbott and Costello Meet The Wolfman and Frankenstein and Dracula and the Vampire Bat Creatures. It wasn't just bad, it reveled in badness. Gloried in it. It was a glorious celebration of bad. All Van Helsing lacked to be absolutely perfect was mummies. Mummies and Godzilla.

October 16 movie: Swing Time. I think I've run out of things to say about this movie. So I'll just say how much I love it. It's one of those obscenely silly Fred and Ginger plots (although at least this one doesn't hinge on everybody neglecting to say the one sentence that would clear everything up instantly, like Top Hat). I think my favorite song in the movie is "The Way You Look Tonight."

October 16 movie: Waterloo Bridge. Good God this movie was depressing. I wouldn't have recorded it if I had known how it was going to turn out. Robert Taylor and Vivian Leigh play a soldier and a ballerina who fall in love in the early years of WWI. He's called up before they can get married, then lost for dead during the war, and she's alone and poor and ends up whoring to survive. Lo and behold, he's not dead after all! They reunite, but she can't handle the shame so she throws herself under a truck. Ugh.

October 15 movie: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. I enjoyed this, but not as much as I expected to. It had its great moments, but it seems like with every Wes Anderson movie I see, the beautiful moments get sparser and the meandering self-indulgence gets more intrusive. Great soundtrack though. I thought about buying the soundtrack album but I settled for downloading Seo Jorge's version of "Life on Mars?" from iTunes.

October 15 movie: The 47 Ronin Part 1. I stumbled onto this on IFC about 20 minutes in. It's really interesting to me to see movies about iconic, semi-historical people or events from other cultures. (Like Chinese movies about Wong Fei Hung.) I imagine it's sort of like someone who didn't know much about the US watching a movie about Davy Crockett or Abraham Lincoln. They might not learn that much about who Davy Crockett really was, but they'd learn something about the values we have assigned to Davy Crockett, what his story means to us.

Anyway, the 47 Ronin is a famous story about 47 samurai who avenge their lord. According to the movie, the lord was unfairly forced to kill himself after a fight with another lord. The other guy was at fault but was in good with the emperor, so the 47 ronin's lord took all the blame. I'm not exactly sure of the details because I missed the first few minutes. When I came in the lord was just killing himself and the lord's wife was instructing her servants to cut off her very long hair. I don't know if that meant she was about to kill herself too, or if she was going to be banished to a lower class or something. She isn't seen again so I guess the hair-cutting tells you everything you need to know, if you're familiar with medieval Japan.

Part I dealt with the death of the lord and the arguing among the samurai about what to do. The chamberlain, who I gather was the head samurai in charge of the household, comes up with a plan to avenge the lord, gathers the loyal 47 (actually I guess that would be 46, since the chamberlain would be the 47th), and fakes out the other samurai who aren't part of the plan.

I didn't really understand that part of the movie. All the samurai want revenge, but most of them don't trust the chamberlain enough to sign an oath of loyalty in blood before knowing his decision. He tricks the ones who didn't sign into thinking that he's a dissolute drunk who doesn't care about revenge. But they all want the same thing! Why did he have to shut them out? Clearly I was missing something. I hope Part II clears it up. Which reminds me, I have to schedule that in the DVR right now.

October 13 movie: Dangerous. This was part of a series on TCM a couple of nights ago: they showed Dangerous, Slightly Dangerous, Dangerous When Wet, Dangerously They Live, and wrapped it up with Safety Last. Ha!

Anyway this was a Bette Davis weeper. Davis plays a jinxed actress who is taken in and given another chance by Franchote Tone. She works her jinx mojo on him, ruining him financially and socially, but then she sacrifices all to pay her moral debts. It wasn't a great movie, and without Davis it wouldn't even have been good.

October 12 movie: Horsefeathers. The movie has my all-time favorite Marx Brothers' visual gag -- burning the candle at both ends -- and a couple of my favorite songs: the "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It/I Always Get My Man" medley and "Everyone Says I Love You." I tried to learn that wacky Groucho dance from the opening number where he swings his leg in a circle, and I couldn't even begin to do it. Did he have double-jointed hips or something? I need to take up yoga.

Everyone says "I love you,"
but just what they say it for I never knew
It's just inviting trouble
for the poor sucker who says "I love you"

October 11 movie: Serenity. This was fantastic. I was a fan, though not an obsessive fan, and it really lived up to my memory of the series. Nice to see that Whedon's sense of humor and timing translates well to movies. I wonder how the movie would play to someone who had never seen Firefly. I hope it has a wider audience than just viewers of the show. I'd like to see Serenity make a big success and Whedon get more work.

Now, to rent the Firefly DVDs! I haven't watched the series since it originally aired. I remember I missed a couple of episodes, then I saw the one in the big hospital, thought to myself "wow, this show is awesome! I'll watch every single episode from now on!" and it was immediately cancelled. That was the last one they ever aired. Timing is everything.

October 9 movie: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Now this is a great Harry Potter movie. Fun and funny and exciting and scary. Gary Oldman, Emma Thompson and David Thewlis were great additions to the cast. I think Michael Gambon was a good replacement for Richard Harris. His Dumbledore seems a bit more enigmatic & a bit less harmless. For instance the scene near the end where he's patting Ron reassuringly, but accidently pats his hurt leg, hard. That reminded me more of Dumbledore as he is in the books.

October 9 movie: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. On Sunday I decided to revisit the Harry Potter oeuvre, but I didn't think I would get through three movies so I started with the second one. This is my least favorite of the three so far, for a few reasons: Ron's excessive mugging in the spider scenes, Moaning Myrtle's voice was annoying, and the final scene was over the top with Chris Columbus schmaltz. But there are some great things about it, not the least of which is Dobby. I can't wait for the fourth movie!

October 9 movie: The Guns of Navarone. Another great war movie. It's really interesting to compare this movie, made in the 60s, with movies like 30 Seconds Over Tokyo that were made during the war. The wartime movies are generally pretty straightforward. The GIs are heroes, the war wives are brave and supportive, the enemy are evil. It makes sense, since the movies had to inspire the homefront and lift people's spirits.

Ambiguity creeps into later movies like The Guns of Navarone. The Allied soldiers have conflicting motivations and are sometimes just wrong; and some of the Nazis are just soldiers, on the other side but not monsters. There's also a cold war sensibility: instead of talking about how they will end war forever and make the world safe for their children, the characters in Navarone wonder why peace is so much more complicated than war. Anyway, it's a great movie.

October 8 movie: Cry 'Havoc.' As possibly the only all-female war movie ever, this was an interesting novelty. As a movie, not so good. It's about a group of nurses at a field hospital in Bataan. There are men playing extras in a few scenes, I think only patients in the hospital. (Including Robert Mitchum in an uncredited cameo: he says "I'm alright" and then dies.) The Women handled the absence of men pretty well, but the strain of making a WWII movie without male actors had a negative effect on this one. The dialogue was stilted and stagey at times; I'd bet it was based on a play. The movie was really depressing too, as movies about Bataan always are, what with that whole "death march" thing on the horizon.

October 7 movie: Undercurrent. Katherine Hepburn stars as a country girl who marries sophisticated Robert Taylor. She gradually learns that he isn't what he seems, while both of them develop a growing obsession with Taylor's absentee brother (Robert Mitchum). This movie suffered from a plodding pace and a story worthy of the Lifetime Movie Network. The message seemed to be that marrying a man you barely know is a really bad idea, but falling for his brother, whom you've never met, works out pretty well.

October 5 movie: Son of the Gods. Oh my god (or is that gods), this movie was awful. It's about a Chinese man named Sam Lee who falls in love with a white woman, except she doesn't know he's Chinese. She learns the truth and freaks out, screaming at him, calling him "dirty Chinaman" among other names, and whipping his face in front of a hundred people. Lee goes home to New York, his beloved father dies and he decides that he hates all white people. There are a couple of scenes in a dance hall with white girls and Chinese customers, which is described as "disgusting" by the racist woman and her racist father. Then it turns out that Sam Lee isn't Chinese at all: he's a white foundling who was taken in by a wealthy Chinese couple and raised as their own.

It's so appalling I don't know where to start. This guy never noticed, in his whole life, that he didn't look like the rest of his family or community? And now that he's actually white, it's okay for that hateful bitch to be with him? About the least revolting thing in the whole movie is when Lee finds out his true ancestry, he does not abandon his adoptive family and run back to his erstwhile girlfriend. Instead he decides to honor his father's memory by continuing to live as a Chinese man and continuing to hate white people. Eventually of course he relents and reunites with the racist bitch. I'm assuming they don't live in his Chinatown mansion, she would never stoop to that. But the movie ends with the clinch so who knows.

And that, friends, is my 200th movie this year. Too bad it was such a stinker.

October 3 movie: Kill Bill vol. 2. I love this movie, are you surprised? The first one was so good, I was afraid I wouldn't enjoy this one as much. But I did. There was less blood than in the first one, but one scene that extremely grossed me out. This time we noticed in the credits that the same guy who played Pai Mei was also one of the Crazy 88's (the bald one).

I read an interview with Tarantino in which he said that he would probably never do another Kill Bill sequel. Because the only good sequel he could think of was having Vivica Fox's daughter grow up and seek revenge against the Bride. But that would require Uma Thurman still wanting to make the movie 15 years from now, and also he couldn't call it Kill Bill because Bill's already dead, but Kill Bride is a dumb title. He's right about that. But then again, Kill Kiddo wouldn't be so bad.

October 3 movie: Between Two Worlds. John Garfield and Paul Henreid star as part of a group of people who die and then wake up on a mysterious ocean liner. They're your basic cast of cliches: the rich snobby woman, her hen-pecked husband, the arrogant self-important businessman, the kindly working class woman, etc etc. They all sit around talking endlessly and making each other miserable, reminding me alternately of No Exit and that Simpsons episode where Homer ends up on the Ship of Lost Souls. Then Sidney Greenstreet shows up as God's representative and sends them each to their eternal reward or punishment. That part of the movie was moralistic and creepy. It would have been better if they'd let Greenstreet ham it up and act evilly gleeful about condemning people to eternal torment. But since he was acting on God's orders, he was all restrained and sanctimonious about it.

I normally love Paul Henreid but this was a stinker. There wasn't even any suspense about what happened to the people, because Henreid and his wife figure it out right way. The only character I really liked was Edmund Gwenn as the ship's steward.

October 2 movie: Double Wedding. Screwball comedy starring Myrna Loy and William Powell, in between the Thin Man movies. I don't know if I was in a bad mood or what, but I didn't enjoy this half as much as a I thought I would. Powell plays a free spirited bohemian artist who lives in a trailer, and Loy is a stuffy businesswoman trying to marry off her sister.

September 30 movie: Dark Victory. One of Bette Davis' best movies I think. I already described the plot so this time I'll say that Davis' clothes are amazing. The first time she goes to George Brent's office, she wears this coat trimmed with fur that had me drooling. I so want to make a version of that coat. Hancock's has some nice fake fur that would work, but it's $40 a yard. I'm waiting for one of their "50% off a single cut" coupons so I can buy a yard of it.

September 28 movie: 30 Seconds Over Tokyo. I think I've mentioned before how much I love this, a dramatization of Doolittle's famous air raid on Tokyo. It may be my favorite war movie. Spencer Tracy stars as Jimmy Doolittle but he's actually not in the movie that much. The story focuses on one bomber squad, led by pilot Van Johnson, and follows them from volunteering for the mission, through training, the attack, crash landing in occupied China, their rescue by Chinese rebels and escape from the Japanese. I guess I just gave the movie away but come on, it's a (fictionalized) true story.

While I'm giving things away I'll mention one of my favorite scenes: the Chinese have to amputate Van Johnson's leg and the anaesthesia wears off in mid-procedure. Johnson falls into a delirium in which he hallucinates talking on the phone with his wife, while in the background two men cut down a tree with one of those giant two-handled saws. It sounds like a cheap, gross laugh, but the way they do it is creepy and surreal and highly effective.

Robert Walker is in the movie also. There's something strange and sad about him that always makes me feel sympathy for his characters. You just want to hug him and bake him a pie to make him feel better. Robert Mitchum (who does not inspire feelings of pie-baking) also has a very small part as the pilot of another plane.

Sept 27 movie: Ed Wood. Hoo boy, I have fallen behind on the movie list. I think I have some kind of low-level cold. I'm sleeping more than usual and I'm still tired all the time.

Enough about that. On to Ed Wood. This movie is such a weird combination of gleeful and tragic. So many wonderful performances, all with such sympathy for the gang of crazy kooks -- Martin Landau, Johnny Depp, Jeffrey Jones, Bill Murray, Lisa Marie, and Vincent D'Onofrio in such a good impersonation of Orson Welles that I thought at first they had dubbed in old clips of Welles' own voice. I love this movie, but I have to admit I fast-forwarded some of the most depressing parts. Especially when Bela Lugosi was in the hospital. I'm going to check if Netflix has the Ed Wood documentary. What was it called? Look Back in Angora I think.

Sept 25 movie: The Red Shoes. Another one in the Michael Powell series. Again the use of color is impressive, and the dancing is beautiful. But I have to say, the two male leads really annoyed me. They were both so awful to Moira Shearer.

Sept 20 movie: Black Narcissus. I'm a sucker for movies about nuns. This one is Deborah Kerr as the leader of a group of Anglican nuns getting their spiritual asses kicked by the Himalayas. They showed this as part of a special series on Michael Powell on TCM last month. The use of color is what people always talk about with Powell's films, and it is impressive. But the thing that struck me most was Deborah Kerr as the harsh, imposing sister superior. She made this movie the same year as The Hucksters, and the contrast with the querulous, timid mouse she played in that movie is shocking. I didn't know she was capable of it.