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February 26 movie: Muqaddar Ka Sikandar. The Bollywood movie night with Sylvia back in January was so much fun, that we did it again last night. Another Amitabh movie, this time a romantic melodrama. And by melodrama I mean an over the top, bigger weeper than Stella Dallas and Penny Serenade put together, get the extra box of tissues, we were tearing up before the opening credits, melodrama. Plus songs!

The first part of the movie features a boy with a remarkable resemblance to Amitabh, as an orphaned street urchin who gets a job as a houseboy working for a man so cruel that I would have thought it was ridiculous. Except that I once heard an episode of The Connection (or maybe The Story, those shows are basically the same) where Dick Gordon interviewed a man who had been a child slave in, I think Haiti? The poor kid was horribly mistreated by the family who owned him. Eventually the family moved to the US and he lived here in servitude for years before they found out that slavery was illegal in this country and turned him out into the street. He was an illiterate homeless teenager in a strange country, and somehow he managed to find a family to take him in, get a college education, get married and have a family of his own. And if that isn't a weeper beyond any movie, you are made of stone.

Anyway the life of the guy on the radio show was exactly how the boy Amitabh suffered in the movie. So if you've heard that show then you basically know the first act of the movie. The movie goes on to see Amitabh adopted, orphaned again, adopted again, get rich, meet a prostitute who falls madly in love with him, but it's no use because of his lifelong unrequited love for the daughter of the evil guy from act 1, who he forever calls "Memsaab." And that's just the basic set-up; it gets much more tragic later.

Several good songs, especially the first song which features Amitabh riding a motorcycle around Bombay. Also the prostitute has a couple of beautiful song & dance numbers. Sylvia and I were rooting for her, but we should have known that the hooker with the heart of gold cannot possibly compete with the pure love from childhood. At least, not in a weeper.

When I first started watching Amitabh movies I thought his success was just as a heartthrob, but he really is a fine actor as well. In this movie he wasn't playing dual roles like in Don, but he still showed a great range in the way he reacted to different situations and different characters. Every time he talked to his Memsaab, he transformed into the little boy from act 1. I think he must have have watched the child actor's performance to get the mannerisms down.

Overall I prefer the movies that end with Amitabh, his best bud and his girl dancing together and singing the title song. Rather than movies like this which end with everyone who isn't dead yet sobbing over Amitabh's body. Still, I enjoyed this a lot. I think we're going to make Amitabh Night a regular feature.

February 25 movie: Casablanca. This is one of those movies that's tough to write about. In fact, I have nothing to say about it that anyone would find interesting in any way. So I will just say that I adore Paul Henreid. Alas, his acting career was cut short by a HUAC blacklist, but it looks like there are plenty of early German language films I haven't yet seen. According to Wikipedia he was born with the name Paul Georg Julius Hernried Ritter Von Wassel-Waldingau. Now that's a name!

February 25 movie: Design for Living. Ernst Lubitsch directs Miriam Hopkins, Gary Cooper and Fredric March in a comedy about a menage a trois. I had been wanting to see this movie since I heard about it in a documentary about pre-code Hollywood. It's delightful! It's based on a play by Noel Coward, though I hear that almost none of Coward's dialogue survived and the racy story was toned way down. Even toned down it's pretty outrageous for Hollywood in the 30s. Hopkins meets Cooper and March, best friends living together in Paris, and falls in love with both of them. She can't choose between them so they make a "gentleman's agreement:" Hopkins moves into their garret apartment, platonically of course, and helps them with their work. With Hopkins as their critic and muse, both men achieve creative success. Eventually she breaks the gentleman's agreement, first with Cooper and then with March. Still unable to choose, she runs off and marries Edward Everett Horton. But eventually the happy threesome gets back together.

There's a lot of talk about "the Lubitsch touch," and it's here in full force. The whole movie sparkles. I found myself laughing a lot: sometimes because the jokes were funny, and sometimes because the movie was just so delightful that it made me happy to be watching it.

February 22-23 movie: Elizabeth I. This was the HBO miniseries from 2 years ago, starring Helen Mirren as Elizabeth and Jeremy Irons as Robert Dudley. Mirren is outstanding. Irons is wonderful too, although I wish they had given him more to do. On the other hand, maybe it's better that his part was a bit, ah, restrained. He does have a tendency towards the mass consumption of scenery. The actors playing Walsingham and Robert Cecil were also excellent. Essex too, although his vague resemblance to one of the hobbits was a little distracting.

The movie covers the latter part of Elizabeth's life: the failed attempts to arrange a marriage for her, the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, the victory over the Spanish Armada, her relationship with Essex, his rebellion, and her death. That's a lot to cover in a four-hour miniseries. It's not totally accurate (for instance the movie shows Elizabeth having clandestine meetings with both Mary and James of Scotland, neither of which really happened I think). But as I read on another review, if you get all your history from movies then you have bigger problems!

I like to look up the characters on the internets while watching a historical movie like this. From Wikipedia I learned that Essex' weaselly friend & co-conspirator Southampton was a major patron of Shakespeare. There's even a theory that the sonnets were written for him. None of that comes out in the movie of course; there Southampton is just a moustache-twirling sidekick. The funny thing about Wikipedia is that I happened to hit Sir Francis Bacon's page right after someone had added phony information: the first paragraph said that Bacon had starred in the movie Footloose and had won a special Fancy Footwork Oscar. Under the "Early Life" subhead it also said something very strange about Bacon eating his great-grandmother due to her resemblance to a giant pink crustacean. Five minutes later I went back to the page so I could show it to Georg, and it was gone already.

One final note about Elizabeth I: the gore level is very high for a costume drama. I counted two head-choppings, one hand-chopping, one hanging, and three unbelievably graphic depictions of the Babington conspirators being hanged, drawn and quartered. In a way I'm almost glad to have seen it, because I didn't know before what that meant exactly. And now I do know. Exactly. In horrifying detail.

February 19 movie: Blue Skies. Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby play friends in love with the same woman. This was more mature followup to Holiday Inn, with the two men asking the object of their affection to make up her mind, rather than locking each other into closets and so forth. It wasn't the best outing for either Astaire or Crosby. Lots of good songs though, and they have a fun comedic rapport.

February 18 movie: The Glenn Miller Story. This was a charming, though not terribly historical, biography of the famous big bandleader Glenn Miller. Lots of great music, and good performances by Jimmy Stewart and the always delightful Harry Morgan. And I have to admit that June Allyson is also good, even though she irritates me. The movie also includes non-speaking musical parts for Miller contemporaries like Louis Armstrong and Gene Krupa.

February 18 movie: Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. This movie is a conundrum. The plot is repulsive: first, a mountain man tricks Jane Powell into marrying him, not telling her that he lives with six brothers and he really wants a free laborer to cook and clean for the seven of them. She teaches the six bachelor brothers how to court the ladies in town, which they do with partial success, then they get tired of trying to win girls the old fashioned way and kidnap the objections of their affections. Turns out the girls liked being assaulted and literally dragged from their homes, and like being trapped up in the mountains even more. When spring rolls around they marry their kidnappers as soon as the pass is clear and they can get a pastor up there. The End!

With such a hateful story, why is this movie so charming? Beats the heck out of me. To be honest I enjoyed it in spite of myself.

February 18 movie: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Michael Powell movie that follows the life of a career soldier from a brash young man fresh off the Boer War to a stodgy old general who discovers during WWII that the world has left him behind. I found this movie thought-provoking and emotionally affecting, but I'm honestly too tired tonight to talk about it in any depth. I did read that Winston Churchill hated the movie because he thought it referred to himself. "Blimp" was not the main character's name, but was (I hear) a dirisive term used for the old guard in the British military at the time.

February 17 movie: The Devil's Advocate. Oh lordie. What can I say about a movie that stars dueling hams who think YELLING is the best way to show emotional intensity. And not one, not two, but three twist endings. Two of which you could see a mile away, and all three of which were totally stupid.

The most interesting thing about this movie is its role in an important copyright law case. That big sculpture on the wall in Pacino's loft was an unauthorized reproduction of a sculpture at the Washington National Cathedral. I read that the infringement was considered particularly egregious because the sculpture was not only duplicated, but modified in a manner considered offensive by the creator (when it comes to life and "writhes erotically").

February 16 movie: Qurbani. Another Bollywood movie featuring a deep funk soundtrack by Kalyanji-Anandji. Not quite as good a soundtrack as Don, but then what is?

Here's a clip of the title theme (approx. 2 minutes long).

The movie was hard to follow, and a bit draggy. Which is frankly a problem in all Bollywood movies for me. Difficult to avoid padding in a 3 hour movie. On the plus side, Zeenat Aman stars. She's not a vengeful kung fu chick like in Don; here she's the lead singer of a nightclub act. Basically the Indian Abba. She's still my Bollywood girlfriend even when she's not kicking ass.

I tried for about an hour to rip a clip of her big number to MPG, Never did get it figured out, so I'll have to settle for the screen shot at left. Take it from me, it's a pretty amazing number. The backup singers in ill-fitting white bodysuits and silver gogo boots are what really make it.

[ETA: Thanks to the magic of Youtube, I found the disco dance number! It's flagged as questionable content, which is bizarre considering it has no violence, no nudity, and no subtitles. Just beautiful Zeenat Aman shaking her booty.]

Other nice scenes are a dance number by two the two male leads, wielding swords; an extended set piece in a garage, the point of which is the crash a car as badly as possible; and an extended intro dedication to Indira Ghandi's son, who died in 1980. His name was Sanjay but in the movie he was identified as "The Sleeping Prince."

February 16 movie: The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. I came across this while flipping channels tonight, and didn't intend to watch the whole thing because I had just seen it recently, but I got sucked in. Some suspense movies suffer on second viewing but this one is even better. There's a moment where Richard Burton's character is talking to a German agent who drops some information that seems trivial at the time, but means a lot if you know where the movie is going. With barely noticeable changes of expression Burton reveals the beginning of understanding: his eyes open a bit wide in surprise, then shift to the left, then down. Such a tiny gesture that reveals so much: comprehension, resignation, depair. I had seen Burton in another movie (can't remember what now) and found him kind of overblown and hammy. His performance here is total opposite: tightly restrained, razor sharp. Now I understand why people thought he was such a great actor.

February 12 movie: The Story of Dr. Wassell. Inspirational wartime movie about a Navy doctor saving the lives of twelve injured sailors who had been left behind on Java. Gary Cooper is perfectly cast as the unassuming country doctor from Arkansas who doesn't set out to be heroic, but winds up there anyway.

February 11 movie: Kiss Me, Stupid. This was supposed to be a comedy about Dean Martin as a Vegas singer (conveniently named Dean Martin) seducing a town full of women. It somehow shifted into a movie about an insanely jealous would-be songwriter played by My Favorite Martian, trying to keep his wife away from Martin. I found My Favorite Martian's character unpleasant rather than funny. Martin does a nice rendition of "S'Wonderful" at the beginning of the movie.

February 11 movie: Thirty Seconds over Tokyo. I said before that this is one of my favorite war movies, and I stand by it.

While watching, I was thinking about wartime movies, and the odd fact that the men who played soldiers and sailors during the war, the ones who inspired the homefront, were the ones who didn't themselves serve in the military. Van Johnson was injured in a car accident and was ineligible for medical reasons. I don't know why Robert Walker and Robert Mitchum didn't serve. Probably medical as well. It's not like being an actor could get someone out of the draft, although it could on occasion get a soldier a safe, relatively cushy stateside job, like certain ex-presidents I could mention. Heck, at least Reagan served. Unlike certain current presidents I could mention.

February 11 movie: Flying Tigers. Jaime Weinman said that some people are allergic to John Wayne, and that describes pretty well how I feel. But I'm trying to get over it, and this is a good place to start. Anna Lee, who I love, is it in. It's about mercenary flyers in China, fighting against the Japanese for money before the US got into the war. Lee is a nurse working in a mission right near the airfield.

February 10 movie: Second Chorus. Fred Astaire and Burgess Meredith star as perpetual college students who play in a college band. When they're forced to graduate, they try to get jobs with the Artie Shaw band, and vie for the affections of Paulette Goddard.

There are a couple of decent scenes, notably when Fred leads the band and tap-dances, but the movie is mostly ridiculous. I mean, the very idea of 41 year old Astaire and and 33 year old Meredith as college roommates going on their seventh year in school.

February 10 movie: Stagecoach. I think that "31 Days of Oscar" is my least favorite TCM feature. Almost every movie is either something I've already seen or something I have no interest in seeing.

I'm not typically a fan of Westerns. But, I really enjoyed Fort Apache when I watched it a few months ago, so I decided to give Stagecoach a try. I enjoyed it, but not as much as I expected to. It didn't have the character depth or moral ambiguity of Fort Apache. Still, it was exciting, and I'm glad I saw it.

(By the way, Fort Apache is an amazing movie and I highly recommend it, even if you don't like Westerns.)_

February 10 movie: The 40 Year Old Virgin. Kevin said that I would like this movie, and he was right. It wasn't great, but it was good. Funny, mostly unsentimental, sweet when it needed to be. And it did have moments of hilarity, like the big "Age of Aquarius" musical number, I like Catherine Keener a lot, and I think my favorite secondary character was Jane Lynch as the boss, who seems like a total hardass at first, but turns out to be cool .. maybe a little too cool.

My only criticism is too many jokes based on bodily fluids. Any is too many for my taste, and this one had about a half-dozen (pee and vomit). At least there weren't any jokes about poo. I would have had a hard time recommending the movie if there were.

February 9 movie: Jet Li's Fearless. Georg already wrote the movie up, so I'll just add a few details. I found some information about Huo Yuan Jia online, and it sounds like the melodramatic parts about his family dying are not historical, but the parts about him founding the famous wushu school (I wonder if that was where Jet Li studied wushu?) and fighting foreigners to regain prestige for China are true. It's also true that his death was blamed on poison, but it may actually have been due to misuse of Chinese medicine. And the main character in the classic Fist of Legend (also by Jet Li) was supposed to be a student of Huo Yuan Jia.

Also, while Li said at the time that this would be his last martial arts film, he's got another one in production right now. Maybe he meant that this would be his last wushu film.

I really enjoyed this movie. Georg mentioned that it was less arty than the Zhang Yimou movies like Crouching Tiger and that's true. Also, it's hard for me to articulate but it "read" more like a classic Chinese martial arts film, but with a bigger budget. Crouching Tiger seemed more .. more Western I guess. Jet Li's Fearless reminded me very much of Jet Li's Wong Fei Hung movies. Or like Fist of Legend now that I think about it.

And can I say that Jet Li's Fearless is a really dumb name for this movie? I can understand why they didn't want to call it Huo Yuan Jia in the US, since no one here knows who that is. (I'm kind of into Chinese movies and I had never heard of him.) But "fearless" doesn't describe any of the themes or motivations of the movie. It's not about conquering fear at all.

February 8 movie: The President's Analyst. James Coburn plays a psychiatrist hired to psychoanalyze the president. At first he loves the prestige of the job, but soon the stress and isolation start to get to him. He cracks under the pressure and tries to quit, only to discover that his most outlandish fears are true, and then some. This movie is utterly hilarious and supremely paranoid. I can't even describe how much I love it.

Part of my affection for The President's Analyst comes from the friend who introduced me to it. A wild man who styled himself Dr. Anubis Atomsmasher and was possibly even more paranoid than the movie. I will never forget how he lit up at the scene where the phone company makes its play. Like that made everything make sense. I love that crazy son of a bitch.

Unfortunately, though the phone company delivers some of the best humor in the movie, it may not translate well for anyone much younger than me. I remember when Ma Bell was broken up, but I was too young to have ever paid a phone bill myself. I wonder if that part of the movie would make any sense to someone in their 20s.

February 7 movie: Gold Diggers of 1935. Dick Powell, Adolphe Menjou and Alice Brady star in this installment of the Gold Diggers series. The plot is totally ridiculous, but of course the point of a Gold Diggers movie isn't the plot, it's the Busby Berkeley musical numbers. This movie includes the famed "Lullaby of Broadway" number, but my favorite was an earlier number featuring synchronized rows of ladies at pianos, swaying and undulating to the music. (The rows of pianos were undulating, not the ladies.)

February 6 movie: Come and Get It. Edward Arnold plays an ambitious lumberyard boss who falls in love with a saloon girl (Frances Farmer) but ditches her to marry the boss' daughter. Decades later he meets the saloon girl's daughter (also Frances Farmer), falls for her and competes with his own son (Joel McCrea) for her! Freaky!

I recorded this because of Joel McCrea, but it turns out he only has a small part. The movie is really about Arnold and Farmer. Also Walter Brennan, who plays Arnold's Swedish best friend. The title card at the beginning suggested the movie was going to be about the negative environmental impact of unchecked logging. Which seemed pretty forward-thinking for 1936. But the movie completely dropped that angle in favor of the soapy melodrama.

February 5 movie: The Maltese Falcon. I was reading an article somewhere about this movie, I think comparing it to Satan Met a Lady. The article made me want to see the movie again, so much that I put it into my Netflix queue. Then I realized that by the time it got to the top of my queue, I probably wouldn't be so hot to watch it anymore, and I should just wait for it to come around on TCM again. And then it did, just a few days later! What perfect timing.

[ETA: Turns out I wasn't the only person who watched this movie on Tuesday!]

February 4 movie: The Dirty Dozen. I spent Sunday afternoon watching this movie and working on a craft project. What fun, and what a cast! Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Sutherland, Charles Bronson, Jim Brown, Telly Savalas, and especially John Cassavetes. The best part is the team's triumph at the war game. The end gets pretty dark, and I have to say I think Telly Savalas' character is overplayed (hmm, the psycho mass murder turns out to be a psycho mass murder! Imagine that!) but still, this is a great movie.

February 4 movie: Naughty but Nice. Dick Powell plays a priggish small-town college music professor who gets seduced by that devil swing music. Powell gets a few funny scenes, but isn't really used to his full potential. (A movie about songwriting, and he only sings once!) For me the ensemble cast was best thing about this movie, especially Helen Broderick (Ginger's best friend in Top Hat) as Powell's wild and crazy hep cat aunt. Her best scene is when Powell first meets her. She hosts a jazz party and jams with the band, first on trombone and then on drums! Other standouts include Maxie Rosembloom as Broderick's butler, an ex-boxer named "Killer," Ann Sheridan as a scheming singer, Zasu Pitts as a daffy maiden aunt, and Allen Jenkins as an incompetent lyricist given to malapropisms.

Apparently in 1939, "panties" meant "short pants." This movie includes the line "You'd think that Donald still wore panties and a Buster Brown haircut!" Which was intended to mean, stop treating Donald like a child, but sounds very different now.

February 3 movie: Zanjeer. This was the movie that made Amitabh a superstar, and started him playing the "angry young man" characters that were his trademark in the 70s and early 80s. I enjoyed it, but not as much as I was expecting to. Amitabh's performance lacked the swagger of later movies like Don or Amar Akbar Anthony. I guess maybe because he wasn't yet a superstar when he made Zanjeer.

The highlight of the movie was a red-headed Muslim criminal (played by Pran, the tightrope walking dad in Don) who reforms and becomes Amitabh's best friend. A very fun, larger than life character. Also the music was really good. By Kalyanji-Anandji, it didn't have the deep funk vibe of Don, but it was catchy and enjoyable. Those guys rival R.D. Burman for my favorite Bollywood composers.

[ETA: I forgot one funny thing. The female romantic lead in the movie is played by Jaya Bhaduri, who went on to become Mrs. Amitabh Bachchan. She's a very small woman, and Amitabh is very tall, and he towered over her in their scenes together. At one point Georg and I had this exchange:

me: "Look at that height difference! He must be a foot taller than her!"
Georg: incredulous stare
me: "Oh right, you're a foot taller than me. Whoops!"

I think that Amitabh must have been more than a foot taller than Jaya. Because I come up to about Georg's shoulder, and she looked much shorter compared to Amitabh. If she's 5 foot even and he's 6'4", which could easily be the case, then there would be a 16 inch height difference.]

February 2 movie: Funny Face. I love this movie, but I don't much like the first part, where Audrey Hepburn is working in a bookstore and minding her own business, and the fashion people descend on her. On Friday night I happened to turn the movie on right after that scene. What perfect timing!

February 2 movie: The Professionals. Georg recorded this movie, and it was terrific! A Western starring Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, Jack Palance and Ralph Bellamy. It would have been perfect if James Coburn had also been in it. My only quarrel is with TCM: the movie before ran late, and The Professionals cut out about a minute early! We knew how it was going to end, but still! Damn you TCM!

February 1 movie: More Than a Secretary. Light comedy with Jean Arthur working as a secretary for George Brent, editor of a health and fitness magazine. The movie is worth it for the parody of 1940's fitness freaks alone. Besides that, Arthur and Brent have good chemistry, and somehow manage to rise above the ridiculous plot. This movie is silly good fun and I highly recommend it. Also features the earliest use I've ever heard of the term "land yacht." It's used to describe a small trailer Arthur uses to tow her stuff when she leaves New York in a huff.

February 1 movie: The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Talk about mental whiplash! This will sound stupid, but I had never heard about this movie before (nor the book), and the info guide said something about a British spy playing games with an East German spy, and when I saw that the top billings were Richard Burton and Claire Bloom I somehow got it into my head that this was going to be a sexy, fun movie about a male spy and female spy being devious and sexy. (I think I was unconsciously thinking of that Kids in the Hall sketch about the East German lady spy and the high school physics teacher, whose hot love mingles with the cold war until both reach a state of equilibrium.)

Needless to say, the movie isn't like that at all. It's dark, gritty, ambiguous, and cynical. It's also brilliant. I'm really glad I saw it. I just wish I had had some idea what I was in for.

February 1 movie: The Garden of Allah. Sometimes I'm glad I have the movie list. Because it gives me something to write about when I'm in no mood to write about my personal life. Like today! I could whine about not feeling well, or the weather, or a dozen other things. But instead I'll write up movies and we'll all be much happier.

The Garden of Allah is a romantic drama starring Marlene Deitrich and Charles Boyer, who meet in the North African desert and fall in love. It's a very silly movie, overwrought and melodramatic. I usually love Deitrich, even in bad movies. But she talks in this high-pitched almost whisper that's completely unlike her powerful, throaty, sexy voice. It makes her seem .. tentative, unconfident. Which doesn't suit her well. At least she has nice costumes.

February 1 movie: Yojimbo. I'm very annoyed with Netflix. The listing for Yojimbo clearly shows the DVD is from the Criterion Collection. And the Criterion discs always have great commentaries. I learned so much from the Seven Samurai and Ran commentaries.

So I put Yojimbo in my queue, and it arrived yesterday, and the disc is from Criterion, but no commentary! Dag nabbit! It's a great movie so I watched it anyway. But man, I was really looking forward to that commentary.

February 1 movie: The Clairvoyant. Claude Rains plays a phony mind-reader working in music halls, who suddenly develops clairvoyance for real. The movie shifts tones fairly drastically, and could have ended up silly, but is held up on the strength of Rains' performance. He was such a good actor.

January 31 movie: The Mating Season. This was a very funny movie starring Gene Tierney and John Lund as newlyweds, but the real star is Thelma Ritter as Lund's heart-of-gold working class mother. Ritter is amazing. She avoids the wedding because her snob son is ashamed of her. Then when she finally goes to meet her new daughter-in-law, Tierney mistakes her for the new cook. Tierney is in a jam, and Ritter, feeling sorry for Tierney and also lacking confidence in herself, goes along with the mistake and poses as the family cook. Miriam Hopkins is also excellent, playing the shrewish mother-in-law with scary perfection, and the movie also features Cora Witherspoon as a snotty queen bee.