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Nov 26 movie: Stalag 17. When I've seen a movie over and over, I try to look for / think about something different on each viewing. This time I watched [name redacted] even when he wasn't the focus of the scene. He never gives it away, never looks the tiniest bit suspicious. Not until late in the movie, when Holden starts needling him and he realizes Holden is onto him. If anything, the only giveaway is the lack of reaction: there are a few scenes where something happens that surprises the other inmates, and [redacted]'s face is carefully blank. Which totally makes sense for his character.

[Edited to remove major spoiler -- sorry!]

November 25 movie: Latin Lovers. Now this is what we were in the mood for! Ricardo Montalban and Lana Turner smoke up the screen in glorious Technicolor. Also costarring Jean Hagen! (Lina Lamont in Singin' in the Rain.) As I had heard, Hagen has a beautiful voice. But the movie is all about Montalban and Turner. What a great combination. It's too bad they only made this one movie together. Montalban also has a great dance number with Rita Moreno.

The sexual politics of this movie are completely appalling: Turner is a powerful, rich woman completely unsatisfied with her relationship with an effete New Yorker emasculated by psychotherapy. What she really needs is a manly Latin man with enough machismo to put her in her place. The trick to enjoying a movie like this is to ignore and/or laugh at the horrible gender stereotypes.

November 25 movie: Border Incident. Sunday was Ricardo Montalban's birthday! Sylvia and I celebrated with dinner at Azteca Grill (I had frijolitos, it was good but not as good as the sopes) and we watched a Ricardo Montalban double feature.

Border Incident was first. It was a noirish police drama about Mexican illegal immigrants and the crooks who exploit them. Starred George Murphy as an FBI agent, and Ricardo Montalban as a Mexican federal agent. Also included Harold Da Silva and the wonderful Sig Ruman. The movie was good, but just not what we were in the mood for. The same thing happened with Mystery Street, one of my favorite Ricardo Montalban movies. It just didn't click when Sylvia and I watched it together. I'll watch Border Incident again some other time and give it a fair review.

November 21 movie: The Falcon Strikes Back. One of of the second incarnation of Falcon movies, starring Tom Conway (George Sanders' brother) as Tom Lawrence, Gay Lawrence's brother. Conway does a good job as the Falcon, and looks (and sounds!) a lot like Sanders. This was a serviceable entry in the Falcon series, focusing on crooks selling counterfeit war bonds, a resort in the countryside, and a puppeteer.

November 21 movie: The Falcon Takes Over. They've been showing serials during the daytime this whole month on TCM, and Wednesday was The Falcon. This one was based on the Raymond Chandler story Farewell My Lovely. Which I didn't know while I was watching it, leading me to wonder why this story was so much darker and grittier than every other Falcon story I'd seen. There's good supporting work from James Gleason and Allen Jenkins.

November 19 movie: The God of Cookery. Last night we were with a friend at Elmo's and ran into Calvin. Which was great. I've been reading his LJ regularly but I don't think I've seen him in person for years. He joined us for dinner and we had a nice time catching up.

At some point Calvin asked me if I had stopped writing up movies, and I had to confess that it wasn't intentional. I've hardly watched any movies in awhile because I've had less TV time in general, and also because I've been catching up on TV series like Battlestar Galactica and Project Runway.

Still, I have watched a few movies here and there, and haven't been writing them up. Which I feel bad about; I liked doing that. So I'm going to try to start again, with tonight's movie: The God of Cookery by Stephen Chow. Years ago when I worked for an Asian film festival, we tried to get this movie for the festival and it didn't work out. And I've wanted to see it ever since. We'd been checking Netflix every few months and they never have it, so finally I broke down and bought it on Amazon.

It was great! Well worth the wait. In a lot of ways it's basically mining the same territory as Shaolin Soccer, except about cooking instead of soccer. Not that there's anything wrong with that! Chow clearly loves classic HK martial arts films and has made a career out of funny, affectionate parodies/tributes to the genre. We especially liked the way the chefs would call out the names of their arcane techniques during the cooking competition. It was like Iron Chef with Shaolin warriors.

My only real criticism of the movie also applied to Shaolin Soccer: the female love interest has a serious disfigurement (in this case, a large scar across one eye and metal teeth that distort her face) because of which Chow's character rejects her in not a very nice way. Then he regrets it after it's too late, or so he thinks, but she shows up again at the end, her disfigurement magically gone. So now she's beautiful and it's OK for them to be together. For once I'd like to see Chow's character realize he was wrong to reject the plain woman, find her and reconcile with her, and have her still be plain. Yeah, I can keep hoping.