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January 29 movie: Little Miss Sunshine. I watch a lot of movies, but not a lot of new movies. And this is the first time I can remember that I've seen a movie nominated for Best Picture in the current year. I have mixed feelings about this movie. It was funny, I enjoyed it, but it was a bit ... mm. I'm having a hard time articulating what it was I didn't like. Too .. heartwarming? Facile? I had the biggest problem with Greg Kinnear's character. He's such a bastard at the beginning that for me he was unredeemable. At least, I didn't buy his redemption.

Maybe I'm being too hard on the movie. I did like Steve Carell and Alan Arkin's performances. And I have to admire a screwball comedy in which every character fails spectacularly, at everything that matters to them, which still manages to be upbeat.

January 28 movie: Too Many Husbands. This movie is basically the same as My Favorite Wife, except the genders are reversed. Fred MacMurray comes back from having been marooned on a desert island and presumed dead, to discover that his wife Jean Arthur has married his best friend, Melvyn Douglas.

My Favorite Wife clearly chooses sides & treats the second wife as an interloper, but here both husbands are treated sympathetically. For her part, Jean Arthur loves the lavish attention from two men who neglected her before, and is in no hurry to make a decision. [major spoiler] The movie ends with neither man winning Arthur, but rather a menage a trois. The final scene is the three of them dancing together, the two men looking a bit uneasy, and Arthur saying "Isn't this wonderful?" I might have expected that from a pre-code movie but in 1940 it's kind of brazen!

January 28 movie: Dragnet. There was a time, a few years ago, when I watched reruns of the Dragnet tv show every night. It turns out there's a Dragnet movie from that same era, starring Jack Webb. And it turns out that two hours of Dragnet is much like a half hour of Dragnet, only four times more. Which is not necessarily a good thing. I probably would have enjoyed four episodes of the show more. The movie tended to drag, but the biggest problem was the absence of Harry Morgan. I didn't realize how important Bill Gannon was to the show. Like the way he and Friday would nod at each other after the witness said something dramatic.

January 28 movie: The Americanization of Emily. One of the things I love best about Turner Classic Movies is the opportunity to see great movies I'd never heard of. To be precise, it's the combination of TCM and a DVR. Every week I review the info guide for TCM and set the DVR to record everything that sounds vaguely interesting. I probably end up deleting half the movies after ten minutes, but the other half yields some true gems.

Like The Americanization of Emily. I just finished watching it, and I'm sitting here wondering how I could never have heard of a movie so brilliant. It's an anti-war black comedy written by Paddy Chayevsky. [major spoilers follow:] James Garner stars as a self-avowed coward with a cushy job in London procuring cognac and women for a loony admiral (Melvyn Douglas). Garner meets and falls in love with Julie Andrews, an idealist who finds his pragmatism as contemptible as he finds her sentiment.

Douglas' only concern about the war is its PR value for the Navy, and he becomes obsessed with filming a movie of the first American to die on Omaha Beach, who naturally must be a sailor. When Douglas goes off the deep end, Garner's best friend James Coburn takes the movie idea and runs with it. Coburn forces Garner not just to participate in the D-Day invasion, not just to be first on the beach, but to be the first casualty, the star of his own pointless movie.

The movie loses its intestinal fortitude at the very end, wrapping everything up with a happy ending [major, major spoiler: he's not really dead] and way too much speechifying. But if you turn it off after the Omaha Beach scene it's an incredible satiric statement of the insanity of war. I'd rank it with Dr. Strangelove. Scratch that; it would be better than Strangelove. If for no other reason, because of the cast. Peter Sellers annoys me, while I adore Garner, Douglas and especially Coburn.

Georg commented that this 1964 movie was made about as early as it could possibly have been made. By which he meant, before the Kennedy assassination America was just not cynical enough for a movie like this. Some of Garner's speeches are amazing. At one point he even turns his scathing contempt on war widows, for promoting the false idea that death in war is noble and virtuous. This is the hero of the movie -- and he's talking to two war widows at the time! One of the best lines is said by Julie Andrews, when Coburn suggests that Garner is a hero: "Whatever for? All he did was die. Next we'll be putting up monuments to cancer and automobile accidents."

January 27 movie: Harry in Your Pocket. More James Coburn! I had seen the end of this a few weeks ago, and then lucky me, they had it on TCM On Demand. (Georg just discovered TCM On Demand. It's the most amazing thing! It's got a couple dozen movies shown recently on TCM, and it's just like pay per view, only free. Free! Too bad they didn't have My Kingdom for a Cook for that guy doing research.)

Anyway, in Harry in Your Pocket Coburn is a master pickpocket and Walter Pidgeon is his aging partner. They take in two amateurs as apprentices, and we learn about the mechanics of team pickpocketing while the team comes together, strengthens, and eventually unravels. The relationships among the four are complicated, and make for an interesting movie. It was nice to see that Pidgeon still had it. He created dignity in his character, even when the character was an over-the-hill coke-head pickpocket.

January 27 movie: Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round. Caper movie starring James Coburn. (I almost typed "Charles Coburn" by accident. That would have been a very different movie!) The pacing was off, kind of draggy, and the character development kind of flat. But I still really enjoyed it. The best thing about the movie was the footage of the Los Angeles Airport. An amazing mid-century structure. Does it still look like that? If so, I need to go book a flight!

[ETA: I forgot to mention, the movie includes a young Harrison Ford in his first movie role. He plays a bellhop with one or two lines.]

January 27 movie: The Greatest Show on Earth. This was called the most mediocre movie ever to win Best Picture. (That was before Gladiator.) True, the movie is aggressively mediocre -- it's basically a two hour advertisement for the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey circus -- but I still love it. For one reason: Betty Hutton. I heard that she practiced for months on the trapeze to make her character believeable. I love her melodrama dialogue: "You've got sawdust in your veins, Brad! Keep the circus rolling, and you don't care who it rolls over! Be careful, someday it may roll over you!" The movie also features Jimmy Stewart as a "crying on the inside" clown.

January 26 movie: In Like Flint. I don't like this sequel quite as much as the first one, Our Man Flint, but it still has much to recommend it. First and most importantly, of course, James Coburn. Also Lee J. Cobb as Coburn's sidekick, and Anna Lee as the matriarch of an all-lady villain organization. I could describe the plot, but really, who cares about the plot of a Flint movie?

January 26 movie: The Prize. Paul Newman plays a Nobel-prize winning author. I know, bear with me. Newman is in Sweden to receive his Nobel prize, and discovers a plot to kidnap another Nobel prize winner. This was a fair-to-middling thriller. Reminded me of Hitchcock, notably North by Northwest and Foreign Correspondent. Hah, I just looked up The Prize on imdb.com and found out it was based on a book by the same author who wrote the book on which North by Northwest was based. No wonder they had scenes in common.

January 25 movie: Don. How lame am I? We had Santa Salsera over to watch Don and I fell asleep again. So lame! One minute Amitabh was fighting off a dozen bad guys with a bamboo pole; the next thing I knew the movie was over and Georg and Sylvia were trying to wake me up. I missed the big fight scene in the graveyard, and the tightrope scene!

Up until I passed out it was a fun evening anyway. Sylvia shares our love of Amitabh, and we had Indian dinner to go with the movie. We made a lamb curry with potatoes and peas in the crockpot.

January 25 movie: Lord Love a Duck. My goodness, this was a strange movie. A black comedy and social satire that's brutally funny, deeply sad, and just plain vicious. Roddy McDowell is a super-genius high school student who goes to any length, even to murder, to realize the dreams of his platonic love, Tuesday Weld. Also stars Ruth Gordon, Harvey Korman, Lola Albright and Martin West.

Tuesday Weld is extraordinary. Her sexpot character is both a send-up and totally earnest. She's ludicrous, selfish, and should be hateful, but somehow Weld makes her sympathetic. The movie reminded me a little bit of Rushmore, especially the sequence of escalating failed murder attempts.

January 22 movie: Designing Woman. I love this movie. I've seen a lot of old movies about romantic couples who bully and manipulate each other into submission. In this movie Gregory Peck and Lauren Bacall believably love each other. And they learn to live with each other by compromising on small things (she goes to the boxing match with him; he goes to her fashion show) and big (he moves into her apartment even though he'd feel more comfortable someplace else; she pretends to believe his ridiculous story about the woman from his past, because she trusts him that it is in the past).

I said before that Peck doesn't expect Bacall to quit her job, but I didn't notice before this viewing that he does ask her about it. It's their first afternoon at her place, and he asks her, "So you like this apartment, and you like your job." She offers to leave the apartment and live wherever he wants, but she doesn't offer up the job. On the contrary, she repeats several times how much she loves her job. They argue about a lot of things (this is a romantic comedy after all) but her career is never an issue again. I really like that.

January 21 movie: Gold Diggers in Paris. Unmemorable entry in the Gold Diggers series, this one starring Rudy Vallee. I liked him a lot in The Palm Beach Story but I don't think he was up to carrying a movie on his own. He's really a better singer than actor.

January 20 movie: Broadway Gondolier. Dick Powell plays a classically trained singer working as a cab driver, who goes to Italy and poses as a gondolier so he can get a job singing for a radio show sponsored by a cheese company. The plot sounds convoluted, but is actually fairly simple as screwball comedies go. Joan Blondell costars, and there are also two songs by the Mills Brothers. Including "Lulu's Back in Town," which is one of my favorite Mel Torme songs. I had no idea it had been around since 1934.

January 19 movie: Don. Oh. My. God. This movie is amazing. 70's Bollywood extravanganza starring Amitabh in dual roles as a bad ass crime lord, and a kind-hearted slacker who has to impersonate the crime lord. The soundtrack is unbelievable. It's wacka-chicka brilliance. The movie is kind like an Indian Superfly. If that sounds the slightest bit appealing to you, you should rent this right now. Dishoom!

[Edited to add:] Georg did some research and discovered that while there is a soundtrack album for Don, it only includes the songs, not the score, i.e. the incidental music. Which is a shame because the score is definitely the best part of the movie. It was written by Kalyanji-Anandji, and the main theme shows up on Bombay the Hard Way, slightly remixed by Dan the Automater. Not that the songs are bad! We liked them too. Especially one near the end, in which Amitabh sings about the joys of mixing drugs, in this case a drink called "opiate" and betel leaf.

There's apparently an "unofficial soundtrack album" which someone made by ripping the incidental tracks off the DVD, which Georg is trying to track down. Meanwhile I had given myself today to goof off, so I spent the afternoon playing around with my Mac and figured out how to do the same. I probably won't have the patience to go through the entire movie and put together an entire unofficial soundtrack of my own, but I did make MP3s of a couple of the best tracks:

First, Roma's theme (approx 30 seconds). Roma is the heroine, played by Zeenat Aman and spends the movie kicking bad guy ass with her mad kung fu skills. I dare you to listen to this without jumping up and boogieing.

Second, the main title theme (approx 2.5 min). I haven't yet figured out how to rip a video clip out of a DVD, which is too bad because this theme plays over psychadelic green and orange images guaranteed to give you a major flashback. If I can figure it out before we return the movie on Monday, I'll post it on Youtube. Otherwise, rent the movie yourself! You know you want to. Be sure to get the original from 1978, starring Amitabh. Not the remake from last year starring Shahrukh Khan.

January 17 movie: Three Little Words. What fun! Fred Astaire and Red Skelton star in a biopic about Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, the songwriting team who wrote "Who's Sorry Now?" and "I Wanna Be Loved By You" among others. Vera Ellen costars as Astaire's wife, and they do a sublime dance number together called "Thinking Of You." Also features a very young Debbie Reynolds singing "I Wanna Be Loved By You," although she was dubbed by Helen Kane, who originated the "boop-boop-a-doop" thing.

I don't know anything about Kalmar and Ruby, but I read on the Wikipedia page about the movie that the portrayal of their relationship was fairly accurate. I loved how Astaire's character was a magician, and they had him doing magic tricks throughout the movie, even when it wasn't relevant to the scene. That's a nice touch of character development.

My only disappointment with the movie is the arrangements of the songs: lots of schmaltzy string-heavy stuff, not at all the way the songs would actually have sounded in the 20s. But I've long been resigned to the fact that Hollywood in the 50s and 60s just did not value historical authenticity in costume, props, song and dance styles, etc. That's one thing the movies do better now (although it sometimes becomes almost a fetish, with the costumes more important than the script).

January 16 movie: If You Could Only Cook. They're doing Jean Arthur movies all month on TCM, and I'm enjoying it immensely. I had only seen a couple of her movies before, and this one was lovely. Arthur plays a down-on-her-luck girl who meets Herbert Marshall on a park bench. He's rich, but he pretends to be unemployed too so he can flirt with her. They end up posing as a married couple so they can get work as the butler and cook for a pair of mobsters. And if you don't know where the movie is going from that premise, you haven't watched many screwball comedies. This was funny, light, and sweet. A romantic comedy snack!

January 16 movie: The Ex Mrs. Bradford. Speaking of movies like Nick and Nora! Apparently there were a bunch of these "screwball mysteries" in the 30s. And apparently Jean Arthur starred in many of them. This one had William Powell as a doctor, and Jean Arthur as his ex-wife, a mystery writer. It was a bit plot-heavy, but still enjoyable. Powell owns this genre, and he and Arthur have good chemistry.

January 15 movie: Adventure in Manhattan. Robert Osborne described this as Joel McCrea and Jean Arthur doing Nick and Nora. And with that description, the movie should have been a lot better. It wasn't bad; it just didn't sparkle. A movie that's compared to the Thin Man series should be scintillating.

January 14 movie: My Kingdom for a Cook. Charles Coburn (in one of his few starring roles) plays a cranky British writer who does a book tour in the US and alienates the ladies who lunch of Concord, Mass. Absolutely hilarious. Coburn's performance reminded us a lot of Monty Wooley in The Man Who Came to Dinner. Nothing wrong with that!

January 14 movie: Bachelor in Paradise. We recorded this movie because we thought it included the utterly amazing song "Aruba Liberace." Alas, "Aruba Liberace" is on the CD compilation called "Bachelor in Paradise," but it isn't in the movie Bachelor in Paradise. It's actually in the movie When the Boys Meet the Girls.

But since we had Bachelor in Paradise on the DVR, I went ahead and watched it anyway. It was an early 60s sex comedy with Bob Hope as a travel writer whose hugely successful series How the French/Italians/Swedish/etc. Live focuses on the sex lives of various nations. In the movie Hope moves into a planned community in California called Paradise to work on his next book, How the Americans Live. Lana Turner plays the only unmarried woman in the development.

The first half of the movie is hilarious. Hope gives daily seminars to the Paradise housewives on how to improve their sex lives, with generally disastrous results. Unfortunately when the movie changes focus to Hope and Turner it bogs down and becomes much less fun. Still, I liked Turner's character: a divorcee career woman who's built a pretty decent life for herself, and isn't sitting around waiting for a man to step in and take over.

January 11 movie: The More The Merrier. This was delightful! Due to a wartime housing shortage in DC, Jean Arthur rents half her apartment to Charles Coburn. Coburn turns around and rents half of his half to Joel McCrea, and then spends the rest of the movie playing matchmaker between Arthur and McCrea. (If that sounds familiar, you're probably thinking of the remake Walk, Don't Run, starring Cary Grant.)

All three principals were marvelous. I already knew Arthur and Coburn were great together from The Devil and Miss Jones, and here I especially loved the friendship between McCrea and Coburn. They laugh and hoot and read the funnies together in such natural way, they had me believing they must have been friends in real life. Charles Coburn was just fantastic in everything he did. Too bad his age put him into "character actor" territory. I bet he could have been a top comedic star if he'd been thirty years younger when talkies were invented.

And why wasn't Joel McCrea a bigger star in his day? There's a basic decency about him that's immensely likeable. He comes across like a regular guy, but a really good guy. Kind of like Jimmy Stewart. In this movie McCrea does a great job of selling his growing feelings for Arthur. The plot is contrived, but the love story feels totally natural. You can see him falling in love with her. This movie made me feel good.

January 10 movie: Left Behind. Am I a glutton for punishment? Maybe so, because I've had a persistent curiosity about this movie for some time. I found myself checking the program guide for the religious cable stations, hoping it would show up, when I remembered that I have Netflix. Duh!

The Left Behind movie was something of a pleasant surprise after the books. Granted my expectations were extremely low. And okay, the story is ridiculous, the plot is mechanical (what's the word for a movie where people move perfunctorily from Point A to Point B because the script told them to? That's what it is), the acting isn't great, and the special effects are nothing to brag about. It's a B movie; I didn't expect Oscar performances or a scintillating script.

The relief was that many of the stupidities and really hateful elements from the book had been changed. First and most importantly, they dropped the telephone fetish. Also the portrayal of the chaos immediately after the disappearances was much better than in the book. Most people in the book act like they've read the jacket and they know immediately they're in a Rapture story. In the movie people are running around screaming and demanding to know where their children are. Which is more realistic I think. I suspected this might be better in the movie, for the simple reason that the book follows the "Tell, Don't Show" method of storytelling to such an extreme degree, and it's difficult to make a movie without showing something.

Also the Hattie character, while still whiny and clingy at key moments, was much more of an independant person than in the books. My recollection of the first book is that Hattie exists for no reason except to feed the collossal ego of heroic asshole Rayford Steele. (And may I say, the casting was excellent on that score: the guy playing Rayford looked and acted the heroic asshole to a T.) But as the movie begins, she's gotten tired of Rayford's sexual games and is making a career change to get away from him. It's almost like she's a person with her own thoughts and motivations or something.

Another pleasant surprise was Bruce Barnes, the preacher who spends the entire book wearing a metaphorical hair shirt. In the movie he shows a bit of spine and even seems angry at God for a minute there. Don't you think that, if the Rapture really happened, Christians who didn't get chosen might be pissed? I have to think that someone, somewhere would have the reaction "So I'm not good enough for you, God? Well fuck you too!" Bruce Barnes doesn't go that far by any stretch (this is a Christian movie after all) but he does yell in the church and knock down a cross.

Also, the conspiracy theory obsession with the Jews and "international financiers" (whatever those are) is toned way down in the movie. In fact I think they don't ever say the word "Jewish" in connection with that subplot. Which is good because it's kind of ridiculous in the book: Slacktivist describes it as Jews, international bankers, the U.N. and international Jewish bankers at the U.N. In the movie, the character spouting these theories is portrayed as a conspiracy theory nutjob that most people ignore. Which perhaps is an admission on the part of the filmmakers of how ludicrous the antisemitic conspiracy theory subplot is.

Of course, the movie still doesn't reflect my world view to the slightest degree. And it has more than its share of flaws: for one thing, the perfunctory nature of the plot as I mentioned above. There's not much energy wasted on motivation or plot logic.

Also, ace reporter Buck Williams is just as strangely incurious in the movie as in the book. I found it hilarious that the pilot of his chartered plane asks all the questions one might expect an award-winning investigative journalist to be asking. Who did this, what do they want, will there be more disappearances, will the disappeared be back, what do they have in common, etc. Buck can't stop to ask these questions; he's busy traveling across country to meet his good friend the conspiracy nut!

And the conversion scenes fell pretty flat for me. I think that's simply a result of me not being in the target audience. For an onscreen religious epiphany to move me, it would have to be intense. (See Ordet, or even Song of Bernadette.) In Left Behind there's not much emotion conveyed in the conversion scenes. They're just sort of there. Maybe I was supposed to fill in the blanks with my own personal religious experience, which I do not have, and so the scenes were empty for me.

But overall I never wanted to put my foot through the screen, where I often had the fight the urge to throw the books across the room. I would never read those books again. And honestly, I wouldn't seek out this movie again. But I can imagine that if this movie came on TV at some point in the future, I might not change the channel. That's the best endorsement I can give it.

January 8 movie: Gold Diggers of 1933. Hey kids, let's put on a show! This movie has it all: great fashions, a dash of pre-code raciness, a completely twisted plot, and amazing Busby Berkeley dance numbers. The movie starts with Ginger Rogers wearing a bikini top made of pennies, and a giant penny covering her dainty bits, and singing "We're In the Money" in pig latin. And it just gets better from there.

The "In the Shadows" number must be seen to be believed. When the glowing neon violins come out, Georg was like, "Paging Laurie Anderson, call your office!" Seriously, I wonder if Anderson had seen this. It may be the best Busby Berkeley number I've ever seen. And I found it on Youtube so you can see it too! It's been edited a bit at the beginning, but the Busby Berkeley madness seems to be intact. Instead of the original song by Dick Powell, the Youtube version has the song "Possibly Maybe" by Bjork, which is a strangely good fit.

The last number, "Forgotten Man," isn't as sublime as "In the Shadows," but it was equally amazing for being so novel: a big Hollywood musical number about the Depression, featuring not rows of dancing girls in chiffon, but rows of "forgotten men" (bums) on breadlines. Apparently the dance number references a 1932 incident where WWI veterans demonstrated in DC and were attacked by the National Guard. I swear, I'd never seen anything like it.

Georg and I were talking about the odd fact that within the movie, these Busby Berkeley musical numbers are always supposed to be taking place on Broadway. But the numbers would never work on stage. They're all about overhead views and swooping crane shots that would be impossible for a theater audience to see. Plus the occasional special effects like split screens.

January 8 movie: My Favorite Year. I wasn't planning to watch this, but it happened to be coming on when I sat down, and it turned out to be great. Peter O'Toole plays a washed-up, alcoholic former movie star who's obviously based on Errol Flynn. In fact, I looked it up and the movie is based on a real-life incident when Flynn showed up drunk for a guest spot on the Sid Ceaser "Show of Shows" TV series. The movie was funny and nostalgic. Also featured lots of good performances including Mark Linn-Baker ("Perfect Strangers"), Jessica Harper, Bill Macy, and the marvelous Selma Diamond. Blink and you'll miss it, but there's even a walk-on part for a very young Cady McClain (Dixie Cooney Chandler Martin Bodine Martin Martin from All My Children). But the movie is carried by Peter O'Toole.

January 7 movie: Jezebel. I love this movie. It's Bette Davis' movie, but Henry Fonda and George Brent are both terrific in it. I should really see more George Brent movies.

January 7 movie: Bewitched. Based on the reviews I was expecting this to be awful, but it was actually kind of funny. Nice to see Stephen Colbert and Amy Sedaris in small roles. I'm not a huge fan of Steve Carrell but based on this, I should give him another chance. And of course, Michael Caine makes any movie better. The movie didn't hang together super well & I found myself trying to figure out things that I really shouldn't have been worrying about. Like, why do Nicole Kidman's relatives have the same names as their counterparts on the show? Was she the basis for the original TV series? But then why was she so unfamiliar with the series? Still, I enjoyed the movie.

January 7 movie: The Gay Falcon. I think this maybe was the first Falcon movie? In any case, The Falcon was a series starring George Sanders (and later his brother, Tom Conway) about an amateur detective / ladies man. It seems like there were a lot of movies series around that time about suave amateur detectives. This was a fun bit of fluff, nothing to take too seriously. I enjoyed it, although it suffers the problem of a lot of murder mysteries: the villain seems to be a totally random person. I mean there's nothing leading up to it, the audience doesn't know of any possible motivation until after the reveal. It was nice to see Gladys Cooper playing her actual age, rather than the evil crone she so often portrayed.

One thing I definitely enjoyed better about the sequel I saw a few days ago: The Gay Falcon features a horrible stereotyped Chinese coolie butler, while The Falcon's Brother features a Chinese butler who's intelligent and fluent in English, but pretends to be a horrible coolie stereotype to get rid of annoying people. I guess that's an improvement.

January 6 movie: Foxy Brown. Part 2 of the Pam Grier special on TCM Underground last night. Foxy Brown was pretty much exactly the same as Coffy, except the violence was much uglier and the boobies were much fewer. Honestly, I didn't enjoy Foxy Brown. It reached the "unpleasant to watch" level of violence repeatedly.

I wonder why Foxy Brown is so much more famous than Coffy, which in my opinion was a better movie? I remember that when Jackie Brown came out, every time Pam Grier's name came up in the press, Foxy Brown would be mentioned too. I had never even heard of Coffy before TCM started running those promos. Although I probably would have, if I knew more about movies from the 70s. Georg had heard of it (though he hadn't seen it).

So far I've seen 3 movies from the TCM Underground series. I almost regret Foxy Brown. Not like it will give me nightmares or anything, it was just a bit more extreme than I was expecting. The other two -- Coffy and Electra Glide in Blue, which I saw last year when I wasn't writing up movies -- were both terrific. Movies I'd never heard of but am very glad to have seen. Which I guess is the point of the series.

January 6 movie: Coffy. I had never heard of this movie before, but TCM has been running a promo in heavy rotation for the past week, all about what an amazing film it is (along with Foxy Brown) and what an amazing actress Pam Grier is. And since I've been watching a lot of movies lately, I've seen this promo over and over. And though I'd never heard of Coffy nor seen Foxy Brown, I didn't need to be convinced of Pam Grier's awesomeness. So I recorded the movie.

I'm very glad I did. Coffy is indeed extremely awesome. It's a blacksploitation film about Grier hunting down the bad people (mostly drug dealers) who ruined the lives of her sister and her cop ex-boyfriend with heroin and a severe beating, respectively. It's a fairly repetitive plot: Grier works her way into a situation via her amazing charm and even more amazing boobies, identifies the bad guys, and kills them. Rinse and repeat. There's one really difficult scene to watch, where a group of bad guys kill another bad guy by dragging him behind a car. Otherwise the movie doesn't seem to take itself too seriously.

In the TCM promo, the director said he wanted to create a heroine women could identify with because she wins through her cleverness. She also wins through the power of her afro, in which she hides razor blades, and later a bobby pin she has sharpened into a weapon. And did I mention the boobies? The movie is full of them. There's one extended catfight scene which features the "oops, my top fell off!" move on almost a half-dozen women.

Georg didn't watch the movie but I made him watch one scene where they introduce a pimp named "King George," complete with a kick-ass costume (including capelet) and his own theme song, "George, George, George ... he's the king!" The movie also features that guy who played Major Sidney Freedman on M*A*S*H as a big bad drug dealer with ridiculous sexual proclivities and an even more ridiculous accent.

January 4 movie: Crossplot. Roger Moore is a mod advertising guy who discovers an assassination plot. It wasn't a very good movie. In fact you could say it was a pretty bad movie. But I loved it. The way that Lisa describes enjoying the Moore Bond movies, that's how I enjoyed this. It was silly, sexy fun, with great fashion. It must have been made right after The Saint because it was very much like that. Costarred Alexis Kanner, who played "The Kid" on the Prisoner.

January 4 movie: The Great Train Robbery. They were doing a thing on TCM last night, with actors who had played James Bond, in non-Bond movies. This was great! Very fun caper movie starring Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland and Lesley-Ann Down. I read the book a long time ago, in high school maybe.

January 3 movie: Going Hollywood! I thought this was a Bing Crosby movie, but it really wasn't. Actually Crosby was the love interest in a Marion Davies movie. I've seen a few Marion Davies movies, and I always try to figure out what makes them so terrible. No, terrible is too strong. Terribly boring is more like it. The best thing was group of three guys called the Three Radio Rogues doing impersonations.

January 3 movie: Here Comes the Groom. Bing Crosby and Fronchot Tone fight over Jane Wyman. Who is so unsympathetic that I spent the whole movie thinking Crosby and Tone should have tossed her over and run off together. They really seemed to like each other better than they liked her.

There's one really funny thing early in the movie: Crosby is in France, working as a post-war foreign correspondent, and Wyman sends him a recorded message on LP, to harangue him for not marrying her. When Crosby plays the record, a tiny Wyman appears on top the record and starts talking to him. Just like Princess Leia in Star Wars! Until the record skips, tiny Wyman tries to fix it and falls over on the record. Hi-larious.

January 2 movie: A Scanner Darkly. I'm home with a nasty cold. Ugh. But forget that, let's talk about A Scanner Darkly. I was excited about this when it came out, but somehow I forgot to go see it. I'm not really good with the movie theater thing. (I've started adding movies to my Netflix queue while they're still in theaters because that way I'm more likely to see them.)

I had never read A Scanner Darkly and I had heard the movie was a very close adaptation of the book. Which gave me concern that I might have trouble following the movie, but I didn't. In fact, Georg and I commented afterwards that the plot was much more straightforward than we were expecting. I guessed the big plot twist pretty early on, but it wasn't much of a deductive achievement if you've ever noticed how women behave in Phil Dick novels. And knowing didn't detract from my enjoyment of the movie, which was much more about mood and psychological issues than plot or suspense.

Though I can't compare it to the source material, it seemed extremely true to Phil Dick's style. I think the animation technique helped. Not just by allowing them to show things (like the hallucinations and the shape-shifting suits) that would have been hard to do plausibly in live action, but more fundamentally by distancing the actors, making them seem (pardon me for stating the obvious) unreal. I really enjoyed this movie. I think I'm going to go get the novel from the library.

January 1 movie: Diamonds are Forever. This wasn't that great of a movie, but it was fun, and nice to see some classic Vegas. I wonder what that hotel was that they had rebranded as "The Whyte House." I didn't recognize it.

January 1 movie: On Her Majesty's Secret Service. I haven't seen all the Bond movies, but of the ones I have seen, this is one of the best. Mostly because of Diana Rigg. Also I like George Lazenby as Bond. It's too bad he didn't do any more Bond movies.

January 1 movie: The Falcon's Brother. I was looking forward to seeing one of the George Sanders Falcon series, but it turns out this was a transitional movie: Sanders is in the first few minutes, and then the Falcon's brother (played by Tom Conway, Sanders' real life brother) takes over as the new Falcon. Still, it was basically what I expected & wanted: a fun, funny mystery with a suave hero. Not just suave, rico suave! Actually the Falcon wasn't all that rico. Mainly just suave.

December 31 movie: North by Northwest. I could only find one previous write-up of this movie, which is weird because I've seen it eleventy-thousand times. I watched it yesterday while drying my hair before we went out to a New Year's Eve party.

And that is the last movie of 2006. 231 movies in all. I was pretty good about keeping track of the movie list, though I'm pretty sure I missed a few here and there. Unfortunately, I failed miserably at writing them up. My first resolution for 2007 is to get back on track with the movie list. I might go back and write up some particular interesting movies from last year, but first I'm going to try and stay on top of current movies.

December 31 movie: Moonfleet. Stewart Granger is a jaded 18th century dandy mixed up with smugglers. He's also a cold-hearted son of a bitch, who ends up with an overly cute little boy on his hands. Sounds like it could be remade today, doesn't it? And it would star, let's see. George Clooney as the rakish dandy, and Owen Wilson as the supposedly endearing boy.

That movie would probably be a lot less dark than Moonfleet (though maybe not much funnier). I was expecting more of a comedic swashbuckler like Scaramouche. What the heck, I'll watch anything with Stewart Granger in it. His hair was in fine form, nice tall pompadour.

December 31 movie: Good Times. 1969 Sonny and Cher vehicle. That ought to say it all, but in case it doesn't: Don't watch this movie.

December 31 movie: The Last Man on Earth. This was the first adaptation of the book I Am Legend. The second being The Omega Man, and the third being I Am Legend, starring Will Smith and set to come out later this year. (And let's not forget the Treehouse of Horror episode "The Homega Man." Perhaps that's adaptation number 2.5.)

The Last Man on Earth starred Vincent Price. Who, I firmly believe, is one of America's most underrated actors. The movie kind of fell apart at the end, but for the first half hour I thought it was the best movie I had seen in ages. It's very thoughtful and internal, focusing more on Price's attempts to cope with loneliness and guilt than with his battle against the vampires. The vampires, by the way, kind of act more like zombies. They do show some vampire-like behavior: crave blood, allergic to garlic, can't stand sunlight, and an aversion to crosses is implied but never stated outright. But they move like zombies: shuffle, moan, attack clumsily. Plus there are some novelties: they can see themselves in mirrors but can't stand the sight of their reflection.

I read that besides the direct adaptations, the book I Am Legend was also a major inspiration for the Living Dead zombie movies. I also read an interview with the author of I Am Legend, who comes off like kind of a cranky jerk. He hates all adaptations of his work and wouldn't elaborate except to diss Vincent Price. I suppose I shouldn't fault him for being unhappy with the movie versions of his book. Even in the best of circumstances, a book can never be translated perfectly to film. An author often has a huge emotional investment in his or her work, and may find it hard to accept the compromises that have to be made. And these circumstances are hardly the best. I read an early draft of the upcoming I Am Legend and it was atrocious.

December 30 movie: Foreign Correspondent. This wasn't one of the giants in Hitchcock's catalog, but I enjoyed it a lot. Mainly on the strength of stars Joel McCrea and George Sanders. I love them both. They were doing George Sanders night on TCM, and I'm so bummed because I stupidly failed to record The Saint. I hope they show it again soon.

Foreign Correspondent was suspenseful and hung together pretty well, although its purpose mainly seemed to be pro-war propaganda directed at then-neutral America. Robert Osborne and Molly Haskell said the wartime message of the movie was ahead of its time, but they're wrong: it was absolutely of its time. I'm fascinated by movies made in that narrow window after WWII had begun but before the US got involved. It's a little startling to remember that before Pearl Harbor, there was significant anti-war sentiment in the US. Although I think Hollywood must have been solidly in favor of the war, because I've seen lots of movies designed to encourage pro-war feelings, but never seen one against US involvement. Some movies deal with the issue obliquely, without ever casting aspersions on anti-war people. This one was pretty straightforward: [spoiler alert] the movie is all about Nazi sympathizers who co-opt the peace movement and use it for their own ends. There are genuine pacifics who are duped into helping the Nazis, but by the end of the movie they've seen the error of their ways and joined the war effort.