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April 27 movie: AV Geeks: Schooladelic. I like these Hillsborough AV Geeks performances. Well, to be honest I could have lived without the noisy, restless, chair-kicking, floor-crawling, running-back-and-forth child who sat right behind me. But the show was about educational films for kids, so I can't be too resentful that kids came to the performance.

The theme was trippy educational films from the late 60s and early 70s. Not movies about drugs, but movies that appeared to have been made by people on drugs. It really lived up to that description. Some of the movies were so weird that I couldn't imagine how they were considered educational.

I recognized one: a Claymation animated short about two kids who change themselves into bean bags and travel to a magical land where they solve everyone's problems. It's every bit as weird as it sounds. I also enjoyed "Toes Tell," a wordless look at a girl who does everything with her feet, which reminded me very much of "You Need Feet" from the Rutles. Georg and I agreed that our favorite short was the first. I can't remember what it was called but it was a psychadelic animation (again, no words) for the Bicentennial. Skip said the animator was well-known and it looked a lot like XTC's Oranges and Lemons album cover. The best part was when the "American Gothic" couple showed up in the cartoon, and the man's eyeglasses were flashing white and red. Trippy, man!

ETA: Kevin identified the trippy bicentennial cartoon as "200" by Vincent Collins and found it online: 200

Also on the AV Geeks website I found the one about the children who turn themselves into beanbags: Malakapalakadoo Skip Two

They've also posted their very best short film ever, "Shake Hands with Danger." But maybe I just think it's the best because it was shown at the first AV Geeks performance I ever went to: Shake Hands with Danger

April 26 movie: The Little Princess. I love this movie! It's schmaltz of the highest order. Seriously, if you like corn, you have to see this. Shirley Temple is a sweet, generous little rich girl whose father goes off to the Boer War and is presumed dead. At which point the evil headmistress of Shirley's boarding school makes her wear rags and sleep in the attic and work as a servant. Plucky little Shirley spends the rest of the movie being a sweet, generous poor girl, until Queen Victoria shows up at the end and helps her find her daddy. I am so not kidding.

I read this book as a kid, and in retrospect it seems a bit masochistic the way the suffering is piled on this girl we're obviously supposed to identify with. There's something almost romance novelish about it. I haven't read any romance novels in a long time but back in the 80s it seemed like in every one the heroine had to bravely (and passively) endure a series of horrible punishments. Maybe they weren't all like that; maybe I was just bad at picking them.

(I was going to say the suffering is piled on this unfailingly cheerful girl, but then I realized that while Temple is unfailingly cheerful, I can't remember if the character in the book was.)

Anyway, back to the movie, it features dancing from Arthur Treacher, and Cesar Romero as an Indian manservant.

April 25 movie: Our Man Flint. After raving about The Silencers I just had to watch the first and best Flint movie again. And lucky me, my copy of the Flint collection arrived from Amazon just in time! It's a pretty good deal: for fifteen bucks I got both Flint movies and the pilot to a 1976 failed Flint tv series called "Our Man Flint: Dead On Target." Which, if you ever watch it, you will know immediately why it failed. Coburn wasn't in it, of course, and by 1976 (eleven years after Our Man Flint) the look and style was so totally different than the tv show had absolutely nothing to do with Flint. It was just a C-level detective show. We couldn't force ourselves to watch more than a few minutes.

The DVD also include trailers for a couple of movies, including Modesty Blaise. Which I've seen already, and it was so much fun that I watched the trailer again. Now I've got the theme song stuck in my head. "Modesteeeeee! Modesty!" Gahh! I've been listening to a variety of catchy tunes to try and drive Modesty away, and nothing works.

April 22 movie: The Silencers. A few weeks ago I wrote a bad review of The Ambushers, the third Matt Helm movie, and Dino Martin Peters posted a comment setting me straight. Based on his sheer Dinolove, I decided to give Matt Helm another try and rent The Silencers.

I'm not too proud to admit I was wrong. And pallie, I was wrong! The Silencers is terrific. Every bit as good as the Flint movies. I enjoyed it immensely. It's a must see if you like spy spoofs or the Rat Pack. It's hard to pick out one favorite thing, but I have to mention the wacky apartment with the round bed that slides across the room and dumps Helm into a giant bathing pool. And Dino sings! Funny versions of his famous songs, with new lyrics that relate to the plot.

Dino Martin Peters says Murderers Row is the best of the bunch, and Netflix doesn't have it, so I'm thinking about buying the Matt Helm series so I can see it. I'd also kind of like to see The Ambushers again. I think I would have appreciated it better if I'd seen The Silencers first.

April 22 movie: A Thousand and One Nights. A satiric version of the Aladdin story in the tradition of the Road movies. Lots of anachronistic jokes and breaking of the fourth wall, mostly provided by Phil Silvers. Who played Aladdin's best friend in a turban, long pointy sideburns and freaky cat-eye glasses. Well-worth seeing. Also starred Cornel Wilde as Aladdin. Who, sadly, looks more like he might be from the Middle East than anyone else in the movie. This is the whitest Thousand and One Nights imaginable. All the female characters are fair and blonde! Wilde and Silvers do a great duet called "No More Women/I Like Women", which I tried to find on CD but it doesn't seem to be available.

April 21 movie: Princess O'Rourke. This was a silly little comedy with Olivia de Havilland as a princess pretending to be a maid who falls in love with ordinary guy Robert Cummings. Also stars Jack Carson and Jane Wyman as Cummings' friends and the wonderful Charles Coburn as de Havilland's domineering uncle.

One thing I liked about this movie was part of the mistaken identity plot: while Cummings thinks de Havilland is an ordinary girl, he jumps to the wrong conclusion that Coburn is her sugar daddy. He's understandably upset, but he tells his friends that all he wants from her is honesty. Then when de Havilland says "There's something you need to know about me before we get married," he relaxes and says she doesn't have to say anything. He was telling the truth! He really did just want honesty. No high and mighty condemnation. When de Havilland seemed about to come clean, he forgave her. How refreshing for a 1943 movie.

snagged from dickumbrage, whose selections were so tough I couldn't guess any of them! I tried to make mine pretty easy.

Go to IMDB.com and look up 10 of your favorite movies.
Post three or four official IMDB "Plot Keywords" for each.
Hey guys, guess the movies!

1. lightbulb, chess, sabotage
2. parallel world, bathing, bad smell, train
3. poncho, undertaker, massacre
4. playboy, world domination, bouillabaisse
5. pest control, vicar, full moon
6. paranoia, costume party, mother son relationship
7. all male cast, gardening, motorcycle, machine gun
8. domineering mother, cigarette, psychiatry, brazil
9. telephone call, split screen, man pretending to be gay
10. rocket car, musician, escaped mental patient

ETA: if you want a hint, here's one more keyword for each movie:
1: number in title
2: witch
3: mule
4: spoof
5: vegetable
6: solitaire
7: tunnel
8: ugly duckling
9: interior decorator
10: sequel mentioned in end credits

ETA again: here are the answers, including kudos to those who guessed! Highlight the text to read the answers:

1. Stalag 17 Georg and Kevin!
2. Spirited Away
3. Fistful of Dollars close enough: Georg, Lisa, Kevin and anonymous!
4. Our Man Flint Lisa and Kevin!
5. Wallace and Grommit in the Curse of the Were Rabbit Georg and Bummble!
6. The Manchurian Candidate Georg and Kevin!
7. The Great Escape Georg and Kevin!
8. Now, Voyager also accepted Kiss of the Spider Woman from Kevin
9. Pillow Talk Georg, Lisa and Kevin!
10. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai in the Eighth Dimension Georg and Phil!

April 13 movie: Satte pe Satta. Amitabh Night is back! We had to take a few weeks off for me to have surgery and Sylvia to go to Puerto Rico. Which sounded like the most amazing trip ever.

It was great to see Sylvia again. We had it at our place this time, and made mini-hamburgers with spicy curry yogurt sauce, and a cucumber salad with spinach and green onions from our garden. What fun.

Satte pe Satta is a remake of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Which I had just recently seen, and I was surprised by how similar the two movies are. A lot of scenes were taken directly from the original: the drive up to the mountain house, the first dinner where the brothers act like animals, the bride stealing the brothers' clothes to wash them, the party where the brothers have a dance-off with the boys from town to win the girls from town ... They're basically exactly the same movies, except Satte pe Satta adds a whole big subplot about a beautiful rich girl in a wheelchair being the target of an attempted murder. Which was a good change, since Seven Brides for Seven Brothers was fairly low on plot as I recall.

One really cool thing about Satte pe Satta is that the family car is an art car! It's a sort of open jeep with enough seating for all seven brothers and all seven kidnapped girls, a bunch of horns attached to the front, and a kooky multi-colored paint job. And no one ever says a word about it! This crazy car is just there and no one ever comments on it. My god I love Bollywood.

Satte pe Satta also bucked the Bollywood trend in pacing: most of these movies are really exciting at first, start to drag at about the 90 minute mark, and then get exciting again to finish up with a bang. In contrast, Satte pe Satta starts out kind of dull. It finally gets going at about 45 minutes in and the pace never slackens from there. And I haven't even mentioned the kinky undertone (like Amitabh showing his love by flicking his switchblade at the object of his affection. No, really.)

The only negative to me is that the movie had more buffalo shots of portly Indian men than I ever wanted to see. Seriously, the brothers, who are not all that fit, spend the first half hour of the movie in their underpants. I could have forgiven it if Amitabh were included, but no! He's the classy brother who spends the entire movie fully clothed. Figures.

April 12 movie: The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Parts 5 and 6: Catherine Howard and Catherine Parr. I read that the Catherine Howard segment was fairly ahistorical, which is sad because the rest of the series is so scrupulously accurate. And really, what's the need to fuck around with the history here? The true story is so incredibly dramatic as it is. I had the same problem with the Cate Blanchett Elizabeth; for instance that famous " I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king" speech. In the Blanchett movie she gives that speech to a few people in her privy council. In real life she said those words while riding a horse, wearing armor, to inspire her army before battle. Why the heck would you change an event like that to make it less dramatic?

Anyway. I was annoyed at the inaccuracies in the Catherine Howard segment -- they make Catherine into a villain who coldly seduces Culpeper to try and get pregnant, while I think in real life she was just a silly young girl who had never learned to control her libido.

The Catherine Parr, segment, in contrast, was one of the best of the whole series. And that's saying something! I wish I had seen this miniseries before Elizabeth R. Because the actors who play Catherine Parr and Tom Seymour show up in both series. I recognized the actor who played Catherine Parr, and it was driving me crazy through the whole episode trying to figure out who she was. Looked it up afterwards and discovered that I've seen her in a couple of things, but the one I recognized her from was surely the "Checkmate" episode of The Prisoner. She played the Queen, the woman who is hypnotized into believing she's in love with Number 6, and then given a tracking device so the watchers can track him through her.

April 11 movie: Living on Love. Another one of those "lost RKO movies" TCM showed recently. This was a remake of Rafter Romance which they showed the week before. This time starring James Dunn (who I recognized from Shirley Temple movies) and Whitney Bourne (who I didn't recognize).

I didn't enjoy it as much as the original, for two reasons: first the pranks the roommates play on each other are much more vicious; and second there's no half-naked Ginger Rogers stepping out of her panties. The kindly Jewish landlord still provides much of the humor, but his kindly fat Jewish wife has been replaced by a kindly fat black maid. Also in the remake, the landlord sees the couple together and doesn't seem to mind. While in the original, the landlord has his son on lookout to make sure the couple never see each other (to avoid the impropriety of an unmarried couple sharing an apartment).

April 11 movie: We Were Strangers. This was an excellent thriller about the Batista revolution in Cuba. Jennifer Jones and James Garfield play Cuban revoutionaries plotting to take down the Machado government. I don't know much about this event in history, but I was struck by the point of view espoused by the movie. Not to put too fine a point on it, Jones and Garfield are terrorists. Their plan is to assassinate a high-ranking government official, then blow up the funeral, killing every major figure in the government and hundreds of civilians too. But the only time the word "terrorist" is used in the movie, it's against our sympathies: an evil policeman calls them terrorists while threatening Jones.

It just goes to show that you can't watch an old movie through a modern filter. This movie was made in 1949, just after WWII ended. I guess at that time people must have been more comfortable with the idea that sometimes civilians had to die in pursuit of an important military goal. It's hard to imagine a movie today in which the heroes plot to murder hundreds of innocent bystanders.

Jennifer Jones' acting in this movie is incredible. Her character is so dark and she plays it with full conviction. I shouldn't have been surprised, having seen her range in Portrait of Jenny. But when I see her face I always think of the ethereal nun in Song of Bernadette. That character is worlds apart from this one. By the end I even forgot about the fair-at-best accent and accepted her as a Cuban woman.

(The accents are all kind of bad, kind of Speedy Gonzales, not to mention the conceit of having a bunch of Cubans speaking English with phony accents to each other. Only Garfield was spared, as his character was a Cuban-born American who grew up in New York.) The funny thing was, you could totally tell who was actually Latino and who was a phony by the way they pronounced "Cuba": Cue-ba or Coo-ba.)

April 10 movie: Cover Girl. I confess I did not like this movie. Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly play dancers in a nightclub, in love and trying to make it big together. Hayworth gets discovered on her own, as a fashion magazine cover girl. Kelly spends the rest of the movie trying to wheedle her into giving up her big break because he can't handle her success. When she refuses, everyone in the movie treats her like a pariah until she remembers her place: obedient to, and no more successful than, her man.

Ugh. At least the dancing was good. And Eve Arden was in it.

April 9 movie: Louis Jordan: Films and Soundies. This was a fun collection of performances by Louis Jordan. They seemed to be collected from three movies, none of which we had heard of. The first part of the DVD was all screwed up -- the image kept pausing for a few seconds and then jumping ahead -- and we were worried that the whole thing would be like that. Thankfully, it cleared up early on in "Beware" (my favorite Louis Jordan song!) and was fine after that.

The big surprise of this disc was a follow-up to "Beware"! "Beware" is a cautionary tale to men, warning them not to let women get the upper hand in a relationship. "If she calls you on the phone, and asks 'darling, are you all alone?' Tell her no! You got three girls with you!"

The follow-up song, which I had never heard of before, was called "Look Out!" It had the exact same melody as "Beware," but the lyrics were addressed to women instead of men. Instead of repeating "Beware, brother, beware," he sings "Look out, sister, look out!" I'd love to find a copy of this song on CD.

Another great song on the DVD was called "Reet, Petite, and Gone." It was a complimentary description of a woman. Georg said that "reet" meant hep or cool, though I don't know what he meant by "gone."

April 8 movie: Easter Parade. This is a lesser movie for both Judy Garland and Fred Astaire, but I still love it. My only complaint is, when did TCM stop showing Biblical epics on Easter? They used to do that every year! It was the best thing! Just like the war movies on Memorial Day, I looked forward to it all year. I would curl up on the couch with a blanket and snacks and spend all day watching Victor Mature wrestle lions, Gregory Peck get seduced by Bathsheba, Claudette Colbert persecute early Christians, Lana Turner lead crazy sexy pagan rituals, and most importantly, Stewart Granger wear the biggest pompadour in Sodom or Gomorrah. It just isn't Easter without getting to see Stewart Granger's hair.

(And before you say anything, I know those are mostly Old Testament movies. That's what they used to show. Now they usually show The Greatest Story Ever Told or King of Kings which are both terrible movies.)

April 8 movie: The Gazebo. Zany comedy starring Glenn Ford as a TV writer who kills a man and buries him under the gazebo. The murder victim is blackmailing Ford with nudie photos of Ford's wife, Broadway star Debbie Reynolds.

Put like that it sounds kind of horrible, but they made it work. It's a funny movie! The best part is Debbie Reynolds. I'm used to thinking of her as the innocent young girl of Singing In The Rain and The Tender Trap. I've heard she was a much more sexually confident person than those characters, and she gets to play that in this movie. [spoiler alert] When confronted with the nudie photos, she laughs in the blackmailer's face! She says the publicity would be good for her Broadway show. She apologizes to Glenn Ford for not telling him, but doesn't apologize for the photos. This is 1959 we're talking about here. It made me think about how rapidly social change must have been happening at that time. I can't imagine seeing a movie with this plot just five years earlier. Five years later it's almost the swinging 60s.

April 7 movie: The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Parts 3 and 4, Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves, were just as good as the first two. Beforehand I thought it didn't make sense to give a full ninety minutes to Anne of Cleves, to whom Henry was only married for two months. Actually it was really good, because they were able to go into the kind of depth I had missed in the Anne Boleyn segment.

The actor playing Henry, Keith Michell, is incredible. He transforms himself from a brash, fit young man to an obese old tyrant, and somehow manages to remain sympathetic. You know, I liked the first two episodes of The Tudors when I saw them. But that show is nothing compared to this.

April 6 movie: Dogtown and Z-Boys. Having already seen this movie several times, Georg wondered why I had gotten it from Netflix. I kind of wondered myself. Well, it's been a couple of years. We don't get IFC anymore, which is where I saw it before. And I heard a story about Iggy Pop on NPR, and they played a bit of "I Wanna Be Your Dog," and it reminded me of this movie and made me want to see it again.

The music is excellent throughout. Actually, the amazing thing is that it isn't. A lot of the soundtrack selections are things that I would flee the room if they came on the radio. Somehow in the context of the movie, Peralta makes even the bad songs work. (With a couple of exceptions; "Maggie Mae" and "Cat Scratch Fever" still make me cringe.)

While watching Georg and I talked about what it is that makes this movie work. Somehow Peralta manages to capture the excitement of creating a new subculture. I've never gone near a skateboard but he made me feel like I understood what it was about. I saw his surfing documentary, Riding Giants, and it didn't have that energy at all. In fact I found it so boring that I didn't even finish it. Why does Dogtown and Z-Boys succeed where Riding Giants failed? Partly it has to be that Peralta was telling his own story in Dogtown. Otherwise, I don't know. Maybe it's due to my age, that I find 70s skate punks (who were only slightly older than me) more interesting than 60s surfer dudes. Do people who were teenagers in the 60s like Riding Giants better than I did?

April 5 movie: Rafter Romance. This was part of a "lost movies" special on TCM: six RKO movies that got caught up in some kind of rights dispute and haven't been seen anywhere since the 50s.

This one starred Ginger Rogers and Norman Foster (who I never heard of before) as two single people who are talked into time-sharing an apartment to save on rent. He works night shift and has the apartment during the day; she works days and has the apartment at night. They meet outside the apartment and fall for each other without realizing who they are, and it's a lot like The Shop Around the Corner or maybe even Pillow Talk. The best thing about the movie is sexy Ginger Rogers taking her clothes off, pre-code style:

1. Sitting on a bed with her skirt pulled up, removing her stockings;
2. Close-up on her feet as she steps out of her panties;
3. Removing her jacket to reveal that her "blouse" is actually a scarf draped over her otherwise bare torso, just barely covering her breasts. Va va voom!

Most of the good comedy comes from the kindly Jewish landlord who arranges the apartment share. Less funny is the pathetic rich older woman who wants to make Foster (a struggling artist) her kept boy.

April 4 movie: Pride and Prejudice. Disc 2 of the Elizabeth Garvie miniseries confirms my previous opinion: there's much to recommend this version but if I had to choose just one, I'd choose the 1995 Jennifer Ehle version. David Rintoul (Dr. Darcy in the earlier miniseries) isn't as expressive as Colin Firth. One might even call him wooden.

On the other hand, I did very much like Lady Catherine and Miss de Bourgh. Miss de Bourgh's performance was much more sympathetic than in the 1995 version, and I found myself feeling sorry for her. I think that's true to the text; Miss de Bourgh never does anything hurtful to anyone that I can recall. You can think of her as being trapped by circumstance and doomed by her mother to an unhappy life (although Elizabeth never feels any sympathy for her, I do). Then again, you could say that she never does anything bad because she never does anything at all. It's to the credit of the actress playing Miss de Bourgh that she could elicit my sympthy in a character with no lines.

Another nice thing about this version is that they spend more time in the sort of epilogue, the bit at the end where Darcy and Elizabeth explain everything that went before to each other. From a narrative point of view, I think the more recent script was right to cut this. But I love the characters and it's nice to spend a little more time with them at the end.

Many thanks to Kevin Maroney for finding a Youtube clip of the Buddy Ebsen/Vilma Ebsen/Eleanor Powell dance number Sing Before Breakfast!

The clip includes all the dancing and singing, but does have a couple of cuts: first, the clip starts with the two Ebsens silhouetted through a window, dancing. In the movie we then see Eleanor Powell in the room below doing the goofiest overacted reaction shots. Imagine an actor in a silent movie emoting "What is that sound up there? Where? There! It's someone dancing! I must go dance with them!!" and you've got the idea.

The clip skips all that (no big loss to the dance number, but it cracks me up so I was sorry not to see it) and jumps to the beginning of the dancing. Which in the movie is broken into two parts, with a few minutes of dialogue in between. Powell introduces herself to the Ebsens, some exposition that moves the plot along, and a few gags. Almost all the dialogue is cut from the clip, which jumps right to the continuation of the song and dance. Again, it was probably good to cut it, but I was sad to see it go as it included some funny lines from Buddy Ebsen. My favorite is when he spills the salt and Powell asks him if he isn't going to throw some over his shoulder. He replies "Naaah, I throw it over my eggs!" Another good line is "We like to eat breakfast at noon -- saves money on lunch!"

The Youtube clip also includes some extra stuff at the beginning and end: pictures of promotional posters for the movie, and the birth and death dates for the Ebsens. I hadn't realized that Vilma Ebsen died just this year. I think I read that she and her brother Buddy were a vaudeville team and broke into movies together, but she retired soon after Broadway Melody of 1936.

April 1 movie: Singing in the Rain. I watched this, I'm finally caught up on the movie list, and screw it, I'm going to bed.

April 1 movie: Paris When it Sizzles. How could William Holden and Audrey Hepburn have made such a craptacular movie? I don't understand it at all. But really, avoid this movie.

April 1 movie: Detective Story. Kirk Douglas stars as a detective whose thirst for justice warps him into a brutal, merciless thug. This was a great ensemble movie, where multiple stories happening simultaneously create a detailed picture of life in the squad room. Thankfully the wide focus on many different subplots means that it's not all about Douglas' scenery chewing. Which I'm really not crazy about.

April 1 movie: The Desperate Hours. Humphrey Bogart leads a gang of three crooks who hold a suburban family (led by dad Fredric March) hostage. This was an excellent, very tense drama. The premise is very similar to The Petrified Forest but I found the earlier movie too talky. That's not at all true of The Desperate Hours, no mean feat for a movie which mostly comprises people standing in a room talking.

Marc 31 movie: Birdman of Alcatraz. Burt Lancaster stars as Robert Stroud, a real-life prison inmate who raised birds in his cell at Leavenworth, wrote books about birds, and discovered a cure for a bird disease. The movie was based on a popular book of the same title, and was part of a national campign to get Stroud paroled. A campaign which failed: Stroud was transferred out of maximum security but not released. He died in a prison hospital, having spent almost 55 years incarcerated.

I read that the book and movie, though perhaps not factually inaccurate, did show Stroud in a generous light. Lancaster portrays a gentle, philosophical man, not the remorseless killer Stroud allegedly was. He was first imprisoned for murdering his girlfriend (wife maybe?) and then killed a prison guard. Excellent movie though.

March 31 movie: The Protector. This was Tony Jaa's second movie released in the US. Unfortunately, it's almost exactly like his first US release, Ong Bak. Except that instead of rescuing the revered village Buddha head, he has to rescue the revered village elephant. Which caused me a great deal of anxiety, it being a particularly violent movie. I read that The Protector includes the longest unbroken take in a fight scene ever (over four minutes).

March 30 movie: Woman Chases Man. With Miriam Hopkins, Joel McCrea, Charles Winninger and Eric Rhodes, this screwball comedy should have been much funnier than it was. It seemed to run out of steam near the end, and doesn't even really have an end so much as a stop.

March 30 movie: Bird of Paradise. I can't recommend this unless you're a huge fan of either Dolores del Rio or Joel McCrea. I am a huge fan of McCrea, which is why I watched it. McCrea shipwrecks himself on a Polynesian island so he can be with princess Dolores del Rio. They run away together and live a happy Gilligan's Island life together for .. the movie isn't very clear on how long. Long enough for McCrea to build them a hut and find them a goat, but not long enough for him to need a shave. Eventually McCrea's buddies come back and rescue them in the nick of time from the evil villagers. McCrea wants to take del Rio back to San Francisco but she sacrifices herself so that McCrea can escape.

The best thing about this movie is the McCrea spends the entire Gilligan's Island segment wearing only a loin cloth. Unfortunately the print is so bad as to prevent enjoyment of the scenery, either Polynesian or McCrean. He has a couple of scenes swimming in the loin cloth that I bet were outstanding, if I could have seen anything.

The moral of this pre-code movie seems to be that it's okay to shack up with a native beauty (in a literal shack no less), but she should be considerate enough to throw herself into a volcano and save him the embarrassment of introducing her to mother.

March 30 movie: Penthouse. Detective story starring Warner Baxter as a lawyer with underworld connections who solves a murder mystery with the help of Myrna Loy. Based on that description this sounds like a gritty crime drama, but it was actually a light & fluffy comedic, um, crime drama. Pre-Hayes code they were fairly explicit about some plot elements. For instance the ladies' jobs (Loy and her best friend are sort of bar hostesses/prostitutes), Loy's disappointment when Baxter behaves like a gentleman, and her willingness to shack up with him. I enjoyed this, although I found the male lead didn't have much presence. I had difficulty telling him apart from one of the other characters. Loy, on the other hand, was wonderful as ever. This movie was made the year before The Thin Man made her a huge star.

March 29 movie: Broadway Melody of 1936. I raved before about Buddy Ebsen and I will definitely watch this movie every time it's on, just to see Ebsen and his sister perform "Sing Before Breakfast." They have another dance number later in the movie, but it isn't nearly as good alas. I'm dying to see Born to Dance and Broadway Melody of 1938. Too bad Netflix has such a crappy selection of classic movies. Damn you Netflix!

March 29 movie: Pride and Prejudice. This is the 1970's BBC miniseries starring Elizabeth Garvie. I watched the first half. It has much to recommend it, for instance I think this is the best portrayal of Mrs. Bennet. She's a bit less of a caricature here, a bit less unsympathetic. You get the sense that she really is trying to do right by her daughters, and it's just a shame that she's too frivolous and foolish to actually help them. And the portrayal of Charlotte is interesting. From a modern perspective, Charlotte's choice to marry Mr. Collins is horrifying. But even though Elizabeth criticizes Charlotte in the text, I think that at the time Charlotte's point of view was considered more realistic and more sensible. That comes across in this miniseries, and does not in any other dramatization I've seen.

By a nose I still prefer the 1995 Jennifer Ehle version. Mostly because of Ehle's performance. So much of this story is about Elizabeth's internal conflict, and Ehle's very expressive face and body language communicated volumes. Not intended as a criticism of Garvie. The directing choice in the older miniseries was for voiced-over thoughts, which I don't particularly like unless it's done sparingly and very well. (Think Dune for an example of how bad this can be.)

Oh, and there's one more reason I will always prefer the 1995 version: the look.

March 29 movie: Constantine. This was exactly what I expected: an entertaining way to kill a couple of hours. Snickering at the questionable theology was at least as much of the entertainment value as the plot. I didn't know it was based on a comic book but I guessed so pretty early on. Hard to put my finger on why, there's just something comic-book-ish about the hero. The tortured superhero I guess.

March 28 movie: St. Louis Blues. I'm not sure how accurate this W.C. Handy biopic is, but the cast is amazing: Nat King Cole, Eartha Kitt, Ruby Dee, Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Malahia Jackson and Pearl Bailey. Eartha Kitt in particular dominated every scene she was in. She should have been as big as star as Lana Turner.

March 28 movie: Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. I think this movie suffers from heightened expectations. In other words, no movie could have lived up to the hype surrounding Borat. Luckily I had read a lukewarm review a couple of weeks ago, which diminished my expectations enough that I was able to enjoy it wholeheartedly. I'm probably the last person in America to see this movie (excepting people like Georg who have no intention of seeing it) so there's no need for me to describe the plot. I'll just say that I was surprised, and somewhat relieved, to realize how much of the movie was staged. If I hadn't seen press about angry unwitting participants (like the people at the rodeo and the feminists in New York) I would have thought it was all staged. I certainly hope Pamela Anderson was in on the gag.

One interesting thing about the press surrounding this movie is how differently certain scenes were interpreted by different reviewers. For instance, the New York Times called the scene in the gun shop the most chilling moment in the entire movie. Salon.com's review singles out that very same scene as a heartening example of someone who doesn't rise to the anti-semitic bait. I remember thinking that the gun shop owner must deal with a lot of wackos, if he could take Borat in stride without even blinking.