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January 10 movie: Untamed. Joan Crawford's first talkie! Fairly lame movie, I must confess, plus the sound quality was terrible. It wasn't quite as bad as "The Duelling Cavalier," but it was in that territory. The best part of the movie was Crawford's pet monkey, who clearly pees on an actor in one scene. (The guy doesn't react to it, so I'm guessing it wasn't part of the script.) From then on the monkey wears a dark-colored diaper. Ha! I know, I'm twelve, but I thought it was funny.

The movie features Crawford as an hieress who grew up in the wild with her father, and adventurer. After Dad dies Crawford heads for the US and falls madly in love with the first young man she meets (Robert Montgomery, in one of his first movies). Crawford wore a short sundress that would be cute today, no shoes, and threatened to punch anyone she didn't like, male or female. She must have seemed positively feral at the time. And Montgomery was so skinny! He takes his shirt off at one point and he has tiny little arms.

It's kind of funny how aesthetics have changed in the past 75 years. Besides the lack of steroidal overdeveloped upper bodies, there's also a softness around the face and jawline that you would never see in a male movie star today. It's most obvious in a clinch: when the man leans in for the kiss in an old movie, he often gets a bit of a double chin. Movie stars today have like 5% body fat, so you never see that .. well I was going to say excess flesh, but it's not actually excess. Just the normal result of bending a normal neck.

January 10 movie: After Office Hours. Clark Gable and Constance Bennet are a newspaper reporter and a socialiate who solve a murder mystery on Long Island. It was a decent movie but nothing exceptional.

January 10 movie: Our Blushing Brides. This was a decent pre-code Joan Crawford vehicle. By which I mean a sleazy romp with premarital sex, crime, and lots of young ladies in lingerie. Robert Montgomery plays Crawford's love interest, but he's hardly in the movie.

January 8 movie: Woman of the Year. Okay, now I remember why I don't like Tracy/Hepburn movies. Hepburn is a driven, highly successful career woman, a political reporter who would have world leaders on her speed dial if speed dial existed back then. But the celebration of her success only lasts for the first act. The rest of the movie is spent humiliating Hepburn, exposing her as a failed wife, mother and woman.

I was hoping this movie would be about Hepburn and Tracy learning to accomodate each other to make their relationship work. But no, that would be a very different movie. (It would be Designing Woman.) This is about stand-up guy Tracy putting up with selfish shrew Hepburn until he can't take it anymore, tossing her over, and then grudgingly allowing her to beg his forgiveness for having a life of her own. He's like a fricking Promise Keeper.

The message of this movie is summed up when Hepburn's mentor, another successful woman, gives up her career to get married. The mentor explains it by saying, "I got tired of winning prizes. Now I want to be the prize." Ugh. Just, ugh.

January 8 movie: The Women. This was just what I needed. A witty comedy, a good antidote to the emotional movies of the previous day. The TCM intro mentioned that the all-female gimmick wasn't just the cast, but also the art on the walls and even the animals. I never noticed the art (did they mean female artists or female subjects?), and of course I have to take their word for it with the animals, but I did notice on a previous viewing that all the books on the shelves are by female authors.

January 7 movie: Princess Mononoke. I had intended not to watch this movie -- it's brilliant, but emotionally wrenching, and I was by myself because Georg was out of town. But I started watching the intro with John Lassiter, and then I was hooked and had to watch the whole movie.

It's just as amazing as I remembered. I love the depth of Miyzaki's characters. No one in this movie is completely good or completely bad. (Well, actually, Jiro is uniformly bad now that I think about it.) It occurred to me on this viewing that Ashitaki is the hero because he's the only character with empathy for all sides of the conflict. Eboshi is a villain because her compassion is so limited. She's profoundly generous to the people within her community but couldn't care less about anyone outside it.

I don't know if I was just feeling maudlin because of being by myself or what, but between this and A Night to Remember I was a basketcase that night. I mean it, I was sobbing while I brushed my teeth and made the bed up.

January 7 movie: A Night to Remember. This is an amazing movie about the sinking of the Titanic. Based on a well-researched book of the same name, almost every word of dialogue is taken from survivor accounts. The movie is incredibly affecting. I think the part that got to me the most was the officers of the Carpathia, racing to get there as fast as possible, knowing they won't get there in time.

January 6 movie: Spirited Away. TCM's Miyazaki series begins with one of the best. This is not just one of my favorite animated movies, but one of my favorite movies of any kind. Everyone has probably already seen this and discovered for themselves how wonderful it is, but if you haven't yet I won't spoil it for you. I'll just say briefly that the story is about a young girl who stumbles into a magical world. The movie is intended for kids but with a total lack of dumbing-down that makes it worthwhile for adults as well.

The TCM series features nice introductions by John Lassiter of Pixar, who is apparently friends with Miyazaki. The series is well worth watching just for the intros, even if you've already seen the movies.

January 6 movie: Play Girl. Like Life Begins, this was a Loretta Young melodrama about a down-on-her-luck young woman. I guess she must have made a lot of these during the Depression. There was another one after this, in which Young's husband George Brent is out of work, and resents Young for having a job. That description reminded me too much of the hateful Front Page Woman, so I didn't watch it.

Anyway, Play Girl. Loretta Young is a department store girl who gets married, finds out her husband is an inveterate gambler, kicks him out, becomes so destitute she has to turn to gambling herself, and then somehow reunites with her husband. Who may not be gambling anymore, but since he abandoned his pregnant wife to abject poverty I can't very well call him reformed.

Increased freedom of content didn't make the pre-code movies better films per se, in fact a lot of them are silly, sleazy trash. But I love the gleeful sexiness of them anyway. This one has a great line: one of Loretta Young's old friends from the department store comes to visit her, admires the dainties in her lingerie drawer, and then reminisces about "the old days, when we one had one pair of panties apiece." Imagine a 1950 movie getting away with dialogue like that!

Have I ever mentioned how much I love TCM? I don't know what I would do for entertainment if we didn't get it. Probably I'd buy World of Warcraft and fuck up my wrist gaming all the time. And then I wouldn't be able to work and then where would I be.

Anyway, the point of this post is TCM. I just saw their "This Month on TCM" ad for January and it is amazing. It was shots from Miyazaki movies cut together with shots from other movies they're showing this month. A pan across the Giant Warriors from Nausicaa followed by a pan across German WWI soldiers (from a movie I couldn't identify). The biplanes from Porco Rosso followed by a biplane air battle from Darling Lili. Deborah Kerr opening her windows in Black Narcissus followed by Sen opening a window in Spirited Away. That sort of thing. Besides Miyazaki they also showed clips from several Robert Montgomery movies (including a shot from The Divorcee that made me sorry I declined to record it last week), some Michael Powell, Vincent Price, and a bunch of other movies too.

It was a wonderful promo. I'm going to watch it again and see how many movies I recognize. And then I'm probably going to watch it another time.

January 6 movie: Life Begins. This was a nice little melodrama starring Loretta Young, about women in a "waiting ward" in a "lying in hospital." Translation, they had a whole hospital just for ob/gyn and in that hospital was a ward where they stuck all the hugely pregnant women to wait for labor to begin. The movie was mainly interesting for the portrait of obstetrics in the 30s. It seemed really dangerous. I though that childbirth became much safer when they started using anesthesia, which was long before the 30s I thought. (Queen Victoria had anesthesia for her last few deliveries, and that was in the 1850s.) But in this movie all the women are terrified of dying during childbirth. The women were treated like invalids as soon as they got there, not allowed to walk at all, even if they were perfectly healthy and not even in labor yet. I wonder how much of that was accurate.

The best character was a modern woman who dressed like Isadora Duncan, proudly announced that she was single, quoted psychology, and had all the best lines. Like this exchange with a sweet, matronly woman on the ward:

"You never know, he might grow up to be President of the United States!"
"Well, maybe. But I'm going to try to raise him right."

January 5 movie: Tom, Dick and Harry. Ginger Rogers plays a telephone operator trying to find love. I found this movie rather dull, except the dream sequences, which were creepy. Burgess Meredith plays one of her possible suitors.

January 5 movie: Darling Lili. Note to self: "I wonder if this is as bad as everyone says" is not a good reason to watch a movie. Especially if the movie is indeed as bad as everyone says. If you're thinking about watching this, I've got four words for you: Julie Andrews shower scene.

(Actually the bump-and-grind burlesque number may be even worse than the shower scene, just because it lasts so much longer. Either way, just because Blake Edwards was married to the woman didn't mean he had to inflict this on the rest of us. I'm sure he found his wife very sexy, and that's nice for them, but I do not want to think about Julie Andrews that way. Ever.)

January 4 movie: Elizabeth R. Seeing the Cate Blanchett version made me want to watch this miniseries again. I watched it over about 3 days, but since I already wrote about the series in detail I'll put the whole thing in one post this time and just say briefly that it is excellent, very engaging & not at all dry while still fairly accurate to the historical record.

There are 4 DVDs but the miniseries is on the first three. Disc 4 is special features, which as I recall are not that great. Anyway the miniseries comprises 6 parts:

1. Elizabeth's struggle to survive before she becomes queen (the first episode begins near the end of Young Bess);
2. her relationship with Robert Dudley;
3. efforts of the privy council to marry her to a French prince, and more with Robert Dudley;
4. the execution of Mary Queen of Scots;
5. the Spanish Armada;
6. her relationship with the Earl of Essex (also covered in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex) and Elizabeth's death.

My initial recollection was that Elizabeth (the Blanchett movie) had made up a bunch of stuff about Robert Dudley, but on rewatching I see that actually they compressed events from a couple of decades (episodes 2 and 3 of the miniseries) as if it all happened early on. For instance a big plot point in Elizabeth was that she can't marry Dudley because he's secretly married. Well he did secretly marry, which did make her very angry, but that was his third wife, decades after Elizabeth and Dudley had given up any idea of marrying each other. She knew all about his first wife; she was even at the wedding!

Also, I thought Elizabeth made that up about her French suitor being a transvestive, but there was a germ of truth to it: actually the older brother, duke of Anjou, was a transvestite. The younger brother, the duke of Alencon, was the one who courted her. Also the movie made it seem like Elizabeth was never interested in the Duke, but in the miniseries she very much was, or at least acted the part.

January 4 movie: Make Your Own Bed. This is a weird little movie about a rich guy (Alan Hale!) who can't keep servants. He entices a struggling detective (Jack Carson) and fiance (Jane Wyman) to take the job, by pretending that his life in is danger from Nazi spies. Then Hale hires a bunch of actors to play the spies, so Carson will stay interested in the case and keep posing as the butler. Problem is, Carson is a lousy detective and Wyman is a lousy domestic. Wacky hijinks ensue!

I wouldn't have watched this except, you know, Alan Hale. It's nice to see him in a major role. In most of his movies -- at least the ones they show on TCM -- he just gets a few scenes.

January 3 movie: Three Loves Has Nancy. Nancy is a Southern belle (played by an actress I didn't recognize) who goes to New York in search of the good-for-nothing fiance who had disappeared on her. Somehow she ends up staying at Robert Montgomery's apartment. She turns out to be an amazing cook (and also an extremely annoying woman) so naturally Montgomery and Franchot Tone spend the rest of the movie fighting over her. This wasn't a very good movie but what the heck, I like both Montgomery and Tone.

January 3 movie: Forsaking All Others. This was a serviceable romantic comedy starring Joan Crawford, Clark Gable and Robert Montgomery. Montgomery is a cad who leaves Crawford at the altar to marry another woman, then gets tired of the other woman and wants some action on the side with Crawford. Gable is the good guy who loves Crawford from afar and gets her out of the mess with Montgomery.

January 2 movie: Con Air. I like a dumb action movie as much as the next person, but sometimes enough is enough. This is just too stupid, too overblown, too preposterous. In fact I think that Con Air was the movie that put us off seeing every big dumb action movie. After this we realized that lots of stuff blowing up was not enough to make a movie worth watching.

I've often heard New Yorkers complain about movies that film in New York and mess up the geography, and I never really understood their annoyance before Con Air. The final set piece was filmed in Las Vegas, and yes, they get it all wrong. In this version of Vegas, the strip is nowhere near the airport, is only a couple of blocks long, and stops abruptly with the Sands at its end. Glitter Gulch has a long tunnel at one end, and the other side of the tunnel is blocked by the Debbie Reynolds casino. And best of all, right in front of the Debbie Reynold casino is a giant hydraulic poundy thing that operates even at night with no workers there. What the heck is the poundy thing doing in front of a casino? It doesn't make any sense!

January 1 movie: The Clock. This was a sweet, simple movie about Judy Garland and Robert Walker falling in love while he's on a two day leave before being shipped out for WWII. This movie wasn't a watershed event in the art filmmaking or anything, but I enjoyed it & was glad I watched it.

It was a perfect role for Robert Walker: an awkward, vulnerable kid. Judy Garland was a great costar for him. The best thing about the movie was the vivid picture of 1940s New York. I read online that the entire movie was filmed at the MGM studios in LA, which shocked me. I thought most if not all of the movie was filmed on location. The scenes in places I had been, like outside the Met and in Penn Station, looked totally real.

December 30 movie: The Great Escape. Ending the year on a high note, with one of my favorite war movies. I've written about it on previous viewings, so this time I'll just add that over the summer Georg and I saw a PBS special about the real events that inspired the movie. The special was fantastic. They had a team of archeologists excavate the third tunnel which the Nazis had never discovered. The team found all kinds of artifacts stashed inside the tunnel, like passport stamps made out of shoe soles. Then the show brought several survivors who had participated in the escape back to visit the site of the tunnel. They closed by showing a stone monument the survivors had made at the time, with the names of the 50 soldiers who had been killed. It was an amazing show. I highly recommend it especially if you've seen the movie.

December 29 movie: Rock Star.

"Georg, what band is this based on again?"
"Judas Priest."
"That really happened? Their lead singer quit and they replaced him with a guy from a cover band?"
"Yep."
"That's kind of pathetic."
"We are talking about Judas Priest here."

December 28 movie: Dream Wife. Wasn't I just saying that I liked movies about women who were good at their jobs? Well that's only true if the movie isn't repulsive. Deborah Kerr plays a high-ranking member of the State Department who's working on negotiations for a critical oil deal with an Islamic country. Strangely prophetic job for the 1950s. Anyway, Cary Grant plays her fiance, who pitches a fit because he can't stand being with a woman who has something in her life that matters besides him. To get back at her, Grant proposes to a princess from the Islamic country, who has been trained since birth to be the abject servant of her future husband.

Eventually Grant gets tired of of the princess. Because he realizes how empty and demeaning it would be to have a slave rather than a wife? No, because Kerr teaches the girl about Amelia Bloomer and Harriet Beecher Stowe and she gets uppity. I kid you not, the movie is that bad. I felt dirty after watching this.

December 28 movie: The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer. I've noticed recently that I'm drawn to old movies about women who have jobs and are good at them. It's sadly (though not surprisingly) rare in the 40s and 50s. Myrna Loy is a judge in this movie, and she's terrific. Cary Grant plays the shifty local character who plays off against her, and he's totally unconvincing as a shifty local character, but it's Cary Grant so who cares? The one thing that really put me off this movie was Shirley Temple as a boy-crazy teen with a crush on Grant. The conventional wisdom that the viewing public couldn't handle Shirley Temple as a sexual being was definitely true for me. It was creepy.

On the bright side, Grant had funny bit of back and forth dialogue: "You remind me of a man. What man? The man with the power. What power? The power of hoo-doo. Who do? You do. Do what? Remind me of a man. What man? ..."

December 28 movie: Eddie Izzard: Glorious. I think now we've seen all of Eddie Izzard's movies. This was a great one, probably my favorite next to Dressed to Kill. Which, as Georg said, will always be the funniest to us because it's the first we ever saw of him. Anyway, Glorious was filmed in England, and I'm guessing he wasn't thinking about selling the DVD in the US, based on the amount of British-specific humor.

December 27 movie: Wings of Desire. I love this movie, but I don't like to see it too often. It's rambling & unfocused, and too frequent viewings make problems like that harder to ignore. But I hadn't seen it in a long time, so I was able to appreciate & enjoy it as much as ever.