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July 28 movie: The Loved One. A first for the movie list: I'm writing up a movie before watching it, and I've never seen it before. (I have written up movies before viewing them before, but always movies I'd seen so many times that I knew what I was going to say already.)

I ought to wait until I've seen the movie, but I just have to get this down before I forget. The opening credits have 3 stars and 11, count them, 11 "Cameo Guest Stars." First of all, how can a movie have a guest star? And second, a cameo is by definition uncredited. (I have to acknowledge here that Georg disagrees with my definition of cameo. He thinks a cameo is anytime a famous person does a walk-on, i.e. very small, part. I think a cameo is a famous person in an uncredited walk-on. He does agree with me that guest stars appear in TV series, not movies.)

In any case, a movie ridiculous enough to trumpet its eleven Cameo Guest Stars has got to be worth my time. And a great line up of Cameo Guest Stars, too! James Coburn, Milton Burle, John Gielgud, Tab Hunter, Margaret Leighton, Liberace, Roddy McDowell, Robert Morley, and two people I haven't heard of. I can't wait to see how the movie turns out.

July 28 movie: The Spoilers. John Wayne, Randolph Scott and Marlene Dietrich star in an adventure story about gold mining in Nome, Alaska. It's somewhat like Pittsburgh although here Scott is the villain. And he's a true villain, not a good guy at heart who makes bad choices, like Wayne was in Pittsburgh.

Marlene plays a saloon owner who wears amazing belle epoch gowns and a humongous Gibson Girl hairdo. Dietrich insisted on being lit from above, ideally directly over her head. (She had studied herself on film and decided her face looked "like a potato" when lit from any other angle.) Watch her in the movies sometime and you'll see it: the light source is always right above her. But this hairstyle is so huge as to shade her face when the light is above her. It's like a giant hat made of hair. It must have been quite a challenge to light her in this movie.

July 22 movie: The High and the Mighty. This 1954 movie must have been the model for the Airport series. It certainly seems to have established the pattern that disaster movies must follow. All the plot elements are there: the damaged airplane that doesn't quite have enough fuel to make it back to the US, the ensemble of passengers who learn life lessons from each other, the virtuous simpleton immigrants (they come across like the 50s version of the Magical Negro), the nervous captain who insists on doing things by the book (Robert Stack), the washed up ex pilot (John Wayne) who is The! Only! One! Who Can! Save! Everybody!

I enjoyed this immensely. I don't know why I used to hate John Wayne. Maybe I just never developed an appreciation for him before. I wish I had recorded Island in the Sky which TCM showed right around the same time.

July 21 movie: The Two Mrs. Carrolls. This thriller starred Barbara Stanwyck as The Dumbest Woman Who Ever Lived. If you just figured out that your husband (a very twitchy Humphrey Bogart) had murdered his first wife and was trying to murder you in the same way, and said twitchy husband wasn't there at the moment, and you had ample cash, which would you do:

1. Call a cab and get the hell out of there.
2. Call the cops and ask them to get you the hell out of there.
3. Go into the next room where your old flame happens to be, (and he's really worried about you), and ask him to get you the hell out of there.
4. Lie to your old flame that everything is okay, and send everyone away so you can be alone with your twitchy murderous husband.

If you picked #4, you're the Dumbest Woman Who Ever Lived! Just like Barbara Stanwyck in the movie!

July 21 movie: Neptune's Daughter. Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban in a movie that isn't repulsive! Yay! Costars Red Skelton and Betty Garrett as the comic pairing, also Keenan Wynn and Xavier Cugat, and Mel Blanc in a tiny role doing an exaggerated Mexican accent. Sounded just like Speedy Gonzales, what a surprise!

This movie was the first place I ever heard the song "Baby It's Cold Outside," and I still prefer the Montalban/Williams version above all others. (Sorry Dino!) In the movie it's very funny, after Montalban and Williams sing, Skelton and Garrett do the same song with the genders reversed. Also Cugat does a lounge/exotica number that's very different from what I expect to hear from him. If I hadn't known, I would have guessed Arthur Lyman or maybe Les Baxter.

July 21 movie: On an Island With You. Ages ago Kevin commented that some of these movies reminded him of the Onion story, "Area Man Arrested for Romantic Comedy Behavior." This is definitely one of those movies.

Esther Williams plays a movie star filming in Hawaii with her fiance and costar, Ricardo Montalban. Peter Lawford is a Navy man who saw Williams on a USO tour a few years before, decided they had Twu Luv, and becomes her crazy stalker. He follows her around demanding her time and attention, kisses her without invitation, etc. When she refuses to dance with him -- she's very clear about not encouraging him in any way -- he kidnaps her and flies her to a deserted island. Where of course she forgets all about Ricardo Montalban and falls in love with her psycho stalker. Because nothing is more romantic than the Stockholm Syndrome.

My god this movie pissed me off. I wish I had turned it off when I realized where it was going. I kept watching for the dance numbers with Montalban and Cyd Cherisse. Jimmy Durante is also in it, and Xavier Cugat.

July 19 movie: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Hope you don't mind, I'm kind of Harry Pottered out right now. The only thing I want to say is that the movie theater ran local ads while we were waiting for the movie to start, and one ad caught our attention. For a hair salon, it advertised "doobies" among other services. We all cracked up, and I'm still mystified. Is "doobie" no longer a drug reference? What the heck does it mean now?

July 18 movie: Breakfast for Two. An heiress (Barbara Stanwyck) tries to reform a feckless playboy (Herbert Marshall). The movie was pretty much "meh" except for two things: Eric Blore as the butler, and also two surprisingly early examples of slang, one verbal and one gesture. First was "pub crawling," which meant the exact same thing in 1937 as it does today. Second was air quotes (holding up your hands, and raising and lowering two fingers on each hand to mimic quotation marks). Both were novel or unusual enough that the characters explained them to each other within the movie.

July 17 movie: Laawaris. This was a pretty good 70's Amitabh movie. Amitabh was born out of wedlock and given away to an abusive alcoholic father. Amitabh grows up to be a street-wise young man who'll do anything for a buck. Until he unknowingly meets his true father, who has devoted his life and wealth to helping the poor, out of grief over losing his girlfriend and child. (Dad kicked the mother to the curb in a particularly cruel way, Mom died in childbirth, and Dad was told the baby died also.) It's always nice to see Amitabh and Zeenat Aman (my Bollywood girlfriend) paired together. I just wish Zeenat had more to do! I know she can act from Don and Qurbani, I wish they would give her more opportunity.

There are a couple of great songs, no surprise with Kalyanji Anandji doing the music. The best one takes place in a crazy flashing disco room. I forgot to get a screen cap, alas! but I did find it on Youtube. It's well worth watching if you like the music on Bollywood Funk or the Bombay Connection series, or if you like Indian restaurants that look like a Christmas light factory exploded inside.

I did get a screen cap of Amitabh in drag, which he does in one of the later dance numbers. And can I say, Amitabh's features are not well suited for drag. He looks about as attractive as the Teamsters who dress up in grass skirts and coconut bras for the Mummer's Parade back in Philly. The most hilarious part was his hairy chest and stomach peeking out of the sari. He's quite the hirsute fellow.

July 16 movie: Jazz episode 3. This one dealt with the mid to late 1920s, and covered a lot of people: Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Jelly Roll Morton, and Josephine Baker among others. Plus more on Armstrong and Ellington. I can understand a little better now why some people have criticized the series for being shallow. Depth is impossible when you have to deal with the lives and careers of so many people in just a couple of hours. Still I think Jazz is doing a great job of putting these musicians into context. If all you knew about these artists was their names and maybe a couple of songs, after seeing this series you'd know which ones you wanted to learn more about.

What Jazz is best at, I think, is colorful stories about the musicians, often told by their contemporaries. By far the best story was Bessie Smith chasing away a gang of Klansmen through sheer force of will. The documentary tells this story without verification that it really happened (i.e. no documentation or witnesses). It's such a great story that I really want it to be true.

The documentary also gets into the legend about Louis Armstrong's song "Heebie Jeebies," which my dad had told me before. As the story goes, Armstrong was recording "Heebie Jeebies" and dropped his lyrics sheet. Not wanting to start over (recording being very expensive in 1926) he made up nonsense lyrics to fill in the song, thus inventing scat singing on the spot.

Alas, according to Wikipedia this isn't true. (Sorry Dad!) Wikipedia says there are earlier recordings of scat singing. But it is true that "Heebie Jeebies" was the first time most people ever heard scat.

Jazz is canny in their retelling of the legend: first they bring out someone who knew Armstrong. He says "There's this great story, maybe apocryphal, but I believe it's true ..." and starts telling how Armstrong invented scat. Then they cut to an old interview with Armstrong himself. Who, if you watch carefully, does not claim to invent scat singing, although he seems to be doing so. He says it was a thing the guys used to do among themselves for fun. Otherwise his account is the same as the legend -- dropping the lyrics sheet, spontaneously making up nonsense syllables so he wouldn't have to stop, etc. The narrator doesn't comment or provide any context (like, for instance, the factual information that there were earlier scat recordings).

My guess is that Armstrong's version of the legend is probably true. It probably was his spur-of-the-moment decision to scat on "Heebie Jeebies." He may even have really dropped his lyrics sheet. And it's undeniably true that "Heebie Jeebies" introduced the music-buying audience to scat singing. Who can blame Armstrong, a brilliant performer, for playing such a good story to the hilt?

I'm a little less forgiving of Ken Burns for the misleading, though technically factual, approach. It's an interesting example of how a documentary can propagate a falsehood without saying anything strictly untrue.

Some days I really miss Spy magazine and their "Separated at Birth" feature. How else to explain the remarkable similarity between Jon Lovitz and my favorite Bollywood character actor, Pran?

Another similarity: given the opportunity I'm sure both would beat the crap out of Andy Dick. Lovitz just did, and I bet Pran would too on general principles. Even at 87 years old, Pran could take him.

July 15 movie: Once Upon a Time. Cary Grant stars as a down-on-his luck Broadway producer who befriends a boy with a dancing caterpillar. This may be the silliest movie I have ever seen.

Loved it. Will write more later, behind a cut so as not to spoil anyone.

July 9 movie: Ocean's 13. This was great! My expectations were not high -- if it had simply been not as bad as Ocean's 12 I would have been happy -- and I was pleasantly surprised. I enjoyed it just as much as the first one. By which I mean the Soderburgh Ocean's 11. (The names are starting to get confusing here.) The original Rat Pack movie, Ocean's Eleven, is my favorite of all, though I have to admit that objectively, it's not that great of a movie. I love it for other reasons: the look into old Vegas and seeing all the Rat Pack together. (How can you not love Sammy as a singing garbageman?)

Moving most of the action back to Vegas in Ocean's 13 was a smart decision. Plotwise it's basically the same movie as Ocean's 11, and for once that's not a problem. On the contrary, they seem to have recaptured the fun that was missing from Ocean's 12. Without which you start to notice and be bothered by the gigantic plot holes. Watching this one, I noticed the plot holes and I couldn't have cared less. I was smiling throughout, and even laughed out loud several times. I had a great time watching this movie.

June 8 movie: Come Blow Your Horn. An aside, I have to say that I am writing this while listening to three whole CDs of the glorious George Formby, courtesy of my dear friend & music connection Sean. Thanks, Sean!

Okay, Come Blow Your Horn. It's a Frank Sinatra vehicle from the early 60s. Based on a Neil Simon play, it's about a shiftless lothario (Sinatra, natch) who corrupts his younger brother (Tony Bill), confounds his stereotypical Jewish parents (Molly Picon and Lee J. Cobb, who was 4 years older than Sinatra at the time), and fools around with women (Barbara Rush, Jill St. John and Phyllis McGuire). Sinatra's character is basically a retread of his character in The Tender Trap. Which is a better movie than this. Sinatra does sing the title song, in a montage while he and the kid brother walk around New York shopping for fedoras. And Dino has a funny cameo.

July 7 movie: Jazz. Episode 2 of the Ken Burns Jazz documentary. Why didn't we start with episode 1? Because Netflix doesn't have it. They have all the rest; maybe the first disc was lost or stolen or something.

Anyway, episode 2 goes up to 1924, and mainly deals with the early careers of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. Other figures are mentioned (like James Reese Europe, who I hadn't heard of before, and about whom I'd really like to know more) but the story is mostly about Armstrong and Ellington. At one point the narrator calls Ellington "the greatest American composer." Georg and I talked about it and we decided that statement is an arguable opinion, one that we may agree with, but as a bald statement of fact it's a bit controversial. A strong case can also be made for Gershwin instead. (We didn't consider living composers like Philip Glass, that's not really fair to compare someone who's still alive and active to someone whose entire body of work was complete long ago.)

Christa mentioned to me recently that a Divaville listener once called her up and took her to task for saying "Louie Armstrong" on the air, instead of "Louis" with an "s." She said the caller called it disrespectful and even implied that it was racist. I never heard that one before. It was interesting to take note of who said "Louis" and who said "Louie" in the documentary. In general the serious music types (like the narrator and the guy from the Armstrong museum) said "Louis." The fellow musicians who had worked with Armstrong and people who knew him said "Louie." With that in mind, unless I come across information that Armstrong himself preferred the formal version of his name or was offended by the nickname, I'll keep saying "Louie."

The next episode of Jazz covers 1924-1929. It will be interesting to see how much overlap there is between this series and the Divaville-type music I'm interested in. At some point the two will definitely diverge -- the later music we play on the show is much more pop than jazz -- but the early episodes should have a lot of interesting material.

July 6 movie: D.O.A. Often imitated but never matched, this is a terrific crime drama about a man who discovers he has been poisoned and has only a few days to track down his own killer.

Even if it were a bad movie (which is most certainly is not), it would be worth it for the opening scene of the hero marching down a hallway, into the police office, and announcing that he wants to report a murder. "Who was murdered?" "I was."

July 5 movie: Kabhi Kabhie. S. kindly left this movie for me to watch while I looked after her cat. It's one of those multi-generational romantic melodramas. Amitabh and Rahkee start the movie as star-crossed young lovers, who are forced to marry other people. Then the movie follows Rahkee's son, who's in love with a girl, who finds out she's secretly adopted, and shows up on her birth mother's doorstep, who it turns out is married to Amitabh, but the birth mother won't acknowledge the daughter, then the boyfriend shows up, and for some crazy reason starts hitting on the daughter's half sister (Amitabh's daughter), and the half sister already hates the daughter because she doesn't know they're sisters and resents the attention her mother gives her. Whew!

It goes on like that for, well, for about 2 hours and 45 minutes, being a Bollywood movie. Then everything resolves itself rather quickly via a chase scene on horseback through a bunch of explosions and a forest fire. Did I say this movie made sense? No, I did not.

My only complaint is that Amitabh is kind of a dick to his wife for most of the movie. I guess we're supposed to see that he's shut off his feelings after losing the love of his life. He makes it all up to her in the end with a heartfelt speech about how wrong he's been. It kind of reminded me of the trend in romance novels in the 80s, for a "bad boy" hero who acts like a jackass for the entire book just so that we can get a scene where he finally realizes how wonderful the heroine is, how much she's suffered, and how unworthy he is of her. I'm all for a redemptive story arc but some of these "bad boys" start out with misdeeds so extreme that redemption was't possible for me. (I'm talking drugging and raping the heroine in his first scene, no joke, that really happened in a book I read.) Of course Amitabh's behavior wasn't nearly so bad, he just sulks a lot and then acts like an ass whe he finds out his wife had a baby before she met him.

june 4 movie: Three on a Match. I thought this was a pre-code drama starring Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart, but it's actually so early that they weren't stars yet and both their parts are rather small. The stars are Joan Blondell and Ann Dvorak.

The movie follows 3 women (Dvorak, Blondell and Davis) who were friends as girls. Very bad, sordid, seedy things in that special pre-code way happen to one of them, and the others pick up the pieces. According to the movie, the title refers to a WWI superstition that if 3 men lit their cigarettes from the same match, one would die (because the time it took to light the third cigarette was long enough for the enemy to aim and fire). Wikipedia explains that the superstition was not actually from WWI, but was spread by a Swedish match manufacturer trying to get people to use more matches.

July 4 movie: The Sky's the Limit. Fred Astaire plays a Flying Tiger who meets Joan Leslie while on leave. Not one of Fred's best movies, but still well worth watching. The best part is the "One For My Baby" dance number. Which starts in a tiki bar! I didn't know they had tiki bars in 1943.

July 3 movie: Half Ticket. I got this because the Netflix description said it starred Pran (a Bollywood character actor I love -- he was the tightrope walking safe-cracking dad in Don). Actually it stars famed playback singer Kishore Kumar. This is the first example I've heard of where a playback singer also acted. And unfortunately, this movie doesn't recommend the practice. Kumar's hyperactive mugging and yelling was like fingernails on a blackboard to me. He's like the Jerry Lewis of Bollywood.

The plot of the movie has free-spirited Kumar getting tossed out of his father's house, and posing as a child -- a really big, really annoying child -- to get a half-fare train ticket. Pran is a jewel thief who slips his stolen booty into Kumar's bag to hide it from the cops. Then Pran spends the rest of the movie trying to get the diamonds back.

I can't tell you how it turns out, because I just couldn't sit through any more of Kishore Kumar's antics. Not even for Pran.

July 2 movie: The Refugee All-Stars. This is a documentary about Sierra Leonean musicians who meet in a refugee camp in Guinea and form a band. Their music gives them a purpose as they tour refugee camps, and finally return to Sierra Leone to make an album.

I don't know how they did it, but somehow the movie manages to avoid what Kevin calls "Anne Frank syndrome" (the conceit that all victimized people must be noble, gentle, kind, creative, and generally without fault). The members of the Refugee All-Stars aren't cardboard cutouts of heroic victimhood; they're just people. Who have an awesome band. And who had something horrifying happen to them and to their country.

June 30 movie: Ride the High Country. Excellent Western by Sam Peckinpah. Stars Joel McCrea as an aging former lawman doing odd jobs and trying to reclaim his dignity, Randolph Scott as McCrea's old friend, and Mariette Hartley as a young woman who complicates matters.

It always makes me sad to see an older actor I love in some terrible movie (for example, Agnes Moorehead on Bewitched, or Joseph Cotten in all those cheap horror movies). So it was really nice to see Scott and especially McCrea working in such good roles. (This is one of the things I love about Quentin Tarantino. I can even forgive him for reviving John Travolta's career, because of Pam Grier and Robert Forster in Jackie Brown.) In Ride the High Country the old guys look unassuming, but anyone who doesn't take them seriously learns their mistake pretty fast.

June 29 movie: AV Geeks: Triggerama. We ran into an old friend at dinner beforehand and ended up so late that I almost suggested we blow off AV Geeks and go straight home. I'm really glad we went though, it was a good one! One of the better installments I've seen.

Based on the title I thought this program would be about kids and guns, and I was totally wrong. (I even read Skip's description and I still didn't get it.) "Triggerama" refers to films that are supposed to "trigger" discussion. Open-ended films with lots of point-of-view shots, to make you feel like you're part of the story, that raise moral questions but don't provide an answer. Then whoever is showing the movie is supposed to turn up the lights and encourage the audience to discuss what they would do.

When we came in they were just finishing an incredibly depressing film about visiting a home-bound old man who feels like giving up because he can't get out of his house, and the city is supposed to provide him van rides to get around, but they won't. After that was a series of films about situations that might arise while driving. For instance: you pick up your friend to go to a movie, and his brother is having a party, and they offer you a beer before you hit the road. Or, you're driving late at night, you need to get home to finish your homework, and you pass a really bad accident. Each one ended with line "Remember, you're the driver."

Next was a bizarre short about a girl who won't eat breakfast, but refuses to say why. We speculated that maybe she's a zombie. Last was the best film, and also the only one that provided answers. Called "Shoot Don't Shoot," it was an educational film for cops, explaining when they would be justified in shooting at a suspect and when they wouldn't. The movie would act out little point-of-view scenes and you would have to decide whether to shoot or not. The really interesting thing is that they'd do each scene twice, and the second time would have a totally different outcome. For instance, the first time the suspect would raise his hands and drop his weapon, and the second time he'd pretend like he was going to drop it, but then he'd shoot at the cop. Then the narrator would come in and explain whether and when the cop was legally justified in shooting. It really made you think about the life-and-death decisions cops have to make in a split second.

June 28 movie: Here Come the Waves. Fun wartime movie with Bing Crosby as a movie star who joins the Navy, and Betty Hutton as identical twins who join the Waves. The movie is a promotional piece for the Waves, with lots of speeches about the meaningful work they do, big production numbers about how great they are, and nothing unpleasant like combat. The entire movie takes place in the US. In the movie the Waves run flight training sessions, work as air traffic controllers, all sorts of things. I guess it makes sense that every stateside job they could give to a Wave meant one more sailor they could send into action.