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March 30 movie: The Illusionist. I really enjoyed this. It was not at all what I was expecting -- I had somehow gotten it confused with Lord of Illusions. Very different movie! Here I was, expecting a cheesy supernatural horror movie with the guy from "Quantum Leap," and instead I get The Age of Innocence meets The Usual Suspects.

I knew nothing at all about The Illusionist going in, and I think that was the best way to see it. The movie genuinely kept me guessing. For instance, ten minutes in I thought I knew how it was going to end, and then my predicted ending happened half-way through, and the movie went in an unexpected direction after that. I like a movie that can surprise me.

(No kittens, no best girlfriends, but it did have oodles of true love.)

March 29 movie: The Great Escape. Fuck you, Rose McGowan.

Apparently you cohost "The Essentials" on TCM now (from Molly Haskell to Carrie Fisher to you -- a downward trajectory to be sure). And in introducing The Great Escape last night, you announced that the film is remarkable for being "a war movie that women enjoy too!" which you followed by tittering, "I don't want to be sexist, but!" Wow, you don't want to be sexist. Congratulations; not being sexist is a worthy goal. I don't want to be sexist either. Here's a tip: if you really don't want to be sexist, don't say sexist bullshit on national television.

I watch a lot of movies. Probably more than you do, considering the inanity of your segment last night. And I am sick to the teeth, fed up beyond belief, with being told that my gender dictates my taste in movies. That I should prefer the ones featuring true love, best girlfriends and kittens. That I'm supposed to love Steel Magnolias and be bored by Sahara. Where did this idea come from, that stories about universal values and struggles are the sole property of men? In your world do women not possess or care about courage and ingenuity? Do you enjoy living in a world where half the human experience is assumed to be beyond you? I wouldn't enjoy that world at all, and I refuse to live in it.

So fuck you, Rose McGowan, and fuck everyone who thinks that being female means I'm not supposed to like war movies. My boobies and I like them just fine, thank you very much, and we think The Great Escape is a particularly good one. Now that I've got that off my .. ah .. chest, I think I'll watch a movie. One with nary a kitten or a best girlfriend to be found.

March 20 movie: Wattstax. I've been meaning to watch this since we saw DJ Spooky at Duke last month; his performance used many samples from this movie. It's a fantastic documentary about the 1972 Wattstax concert, and interviews/ruminations with people living in Watts, LA, at that time. The community interviews include Ted Lange (Isaac the bartender from "Love Boat") as one of a group of guys hanging out & making jokes about a lot of things, especially women as I recall. It's not clear whether this was his first appearance on screen or not. IMDB says he had a couple of bit parts in the same year Wattstax came out. But it's clear that he's one of the guys, not "Ted Lange, actor," when the movie was filmed.

March 20 movie: Point Blank. Wow, what a lighthearted romp! I rented this because of just watching Point Break. Also because I tried to watch it months ago, couldn't get into it, and ended up deleting it unwatched for some reason. Probably we were going on vacation and I was afraid the DVR would fill up, so I deleted everything I wasn't sure about.

Well this time I didn't have any problem getting involved in the movie. I guess I just have to be in the right frame of mind for a brilliant revenge flick starring Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson. The movie would actually be a cliche if not for Marvin's stellar acting. Also the interesting, somewhat experimental time shifts and camera work. Also features Keenan Wynn, Carroll O'Connor, John Vernon and James Sikking.

March 17 movie: Rear Window. I love this movie. And I don't have much to say about it. Jimmy Stewart is a total jerk to Grace Kelly in the first half of the movie, but then we are talking about Hitchcock. And Thelma Ritter gets all the good lines.

March 16 movie: Key Largo. Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and John Barrymore are held hostage by gangster Edward G. Robinson during a hurricane. As Georg pointed out, after Casablanca many if not most of Bogart's characters were basically Rick, the embittered loner who "sticks his neck out for no one," until something happens that makes him remember his values and willingness to sacrifice for the greater good.

One thing in this movie really bothered me. [minor spoilers:] Robinson kills a police officer, and then tells the sheriff it was two Native American petty crooks who did it. The sheriff promptly kills the Native Americans. When everything comes out in the end, the sheriff and Barrymore wring their hands a bit about how the deaths were just too bad, and then that seems to be the end of it. So apparently, in the 40s a police officer could shoot two people in the back because some random (and highly shifty) stranger said they might have committed a crime, and there would be no consequences aside from a vague statement of remorse. Or maybe that's only if the victims were a minority.

March 14 movie: The Legendary Nat King Cole. This was an hour long documentary, apparently made for TV, with a narrator who sounded unfortunately like John Oliver from The Daily Show. This left us waiting for him to say something snarky and ridiculous, which he never did. The documentary was pretty good, though it said a few things that weren't true according to the book I read.* The best part of the documentary was the bonus features, which included the complete performances of every song they had excerpted. It included a Trio-only version of "Nature Boy" (without strings) which I had never heard before.

*Nat King Cole by Daniel Mark Epstein. Really good book.

March 14 movie: Nat King Cole: Soundies and Telescriptions. As the name would suggest, this was a collection of soundies and telescriptions, which as near as I could tell are the same thing as soundies. All the performances were by either the three-man King Cole Trio, or the later Nat King Cole and His Trio (the Trio plus bongos). The dated ones were from 1950 or 1951, and the undated ones looked earlier.

The only weird thing about these soundies was that a few of them were strangely lit to make Nat King Cole look almost as white as I am. We couldn't tell if it was a mistake due to poor lighting, or a deliberate attempt to lighten his skin, maybe to make the soundies more appealing to white audiences? There were other soundies from the same session (you could tell by the set and clothes) where he looked like himself, but in those few that were badly lit he looked so strange. His hair and eyes were as dark as normal and his skin looked grey and ashen. We joked that those were the "Nat King Cole Zombie Trio."

March 12 movie: Our Dancing Daughters. Before she was a scary figure with hard hair, hard shoulder pads and a hard lip line. Long before Mommie Dearest made her the screeching harpy everyone remembers. Once upon a time Joan Crawford was a flapper with beautiful eyes, a winning smile, and a willingness to strip off her skirt, jump on a table and dance the Charleston in her panties. Our Dancing Daughters shows us that time.

March 11 movie: Point Break. A couple of days ago Patrick Swayze announced that he has pancreatic cancer. I'm honoring Swayze tonight with my favorite of his movies, Point Break. This movie was iconic in its day. Swayze plays an adrenaline junkie into extreme sports, robbing banks, and New Age aphorisms. Keanu Reeves is the FBI agent tracking Swayze's gang and joining the surfing world.

The AV Club has a fitting tribute with The Way of the Swayze: How to Be a Thoughtful Hunk.

March 10 movie: Futurama: Bender's Big Score. This was loads of fun. It was direct to DVD, which explains why I never heard about it in theaters. I felt at times that the series lost the funny & got too serious. For instance the episode about Fry's dog, that made me so sad that it was genuinely hard to watch. This time I thought they did a good job of balancing the pathos and the jokes. The jabs at Fox in the beginning were particularly funny. "But what does this mean to our many fans?"

March 10 movie: How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. I can't believe I never saw this before. Robert Morse stars as a cheerful con artist who scams his way to the top of the corporate ladder using an advice book with the same title as the movie. Rudy Vallee is the CEO who gets snookered, and Michele Lee is the secretary who falls for Morse. The movie is stagey at times, and also quite sexist, but if you can overlook those flaws it's so much fun. Great mid-60s decor in the office building. I wanted to copy all the color schemes. Also this movie (well, the play I guess) was the origin of the song "I Believe In You." Alas, the version in the movie can't hold a candle to the Sinatra/Basie version.

March 10 movie: The Happy Thieves. Rita Hayworth and Rex Harrison star as, guess what, happy thieves. Who are blackmailed into stealing a Goya painting. This wasn't a great movie, but it had good things about it. I liked the scenes where they rehearse the theft. And Hayworth and Harrison have great chemistry.

March 8 movie: Fistful of Dollars. Another movie I love so much I have trouble coming up with something to say about it. This time I was trying to figure out which I like better, this one of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. I think maybe the latter, due to the presence of Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach. "Tuco, known as The Rat!"

March 7 movie: The President's Analyst. My god I love this movie. That is all.

March 6 movie: Female. Another great pre-code movie. Ironically, just the day before watching this I read a post on Shakesville complaining about sexist use of the word female as a noun. This movie starred Ruth Chatterton as the president of an auto manufacturer. She's a tough as nails CEO who seduces every handsome employee, and then transfers the poor suckers to Peoria if they get too attached. Then she falls for inventor George Brent, which is actually a pretty decent story about valuing corporate strength vs. emotional strength. Unfortunately the last minute of the movie ruins it all -- as you would expect from a movie like this. Just turn it off when Brent says "No one's going to take your company away from you" and it's a great movie.

March 6 movie: Thou Shalt Not: Sex, Sin and Censorship in Pre-Code Hollywood. This was an interesting documentary about the Hayes Code. They shows lots of clips from pre-code movies. Most of which I had seen already, but a few I hadn't. More interesting to me was the history of the code: who was Hayes, who actually wrote the code, why wasn't it enforced at first, and then why did they start enforcing it.

March 5 movie: Night Nurse. Did I say Ann Vickers was the ultimate pre-code movie? Well I was wrong, the ultimate was Night Nurse. Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Blondell play nurses who discover a plot to murder two toddlers for their trust funds. Also, they change in and out of their uniforms. A lot. That's the reason for the movie: Barbara Stanwyck in a bra and half slip. And oh boy, what a reason.

The weird thing about this movie is that even after they've exposed the plot by the gangster chauffer (Clark Gable) and evil doctor to starve the two kids to death, while the drunken mother stands by and does nothing, no one ever suggests removing the children from the house. Even after it's all over, the good doctor says he'll help Stanwyck find a new job because the drunken mother will probably fire her! I guess child welfare laws were different in the early 1930s.

March 5 movie: Helvetica. This movie was so much fun! Spacegrrl came over and watched it with us. We saw that it was showing last week at some graphic design event, and we couldn't go, so we got it from Netflix and watched it here instead. In retrospect I'm glad; it was more fun to be relaxed and be able to joke around about the movie.

As the title suggests, it was a documentary about Helvetica. There were interviews with lots of typographers, including some who had designed typefaces I love and use all the time. The funny thing is that they all disagreed with each other. There were old school designers who thought Helvetica was perfection in type; postmodernist designers who hated Helvetica (including a woman who blamed Helvetica for both the Vietnam and Iraq wars!); and then young designers rediscovering Helvetica. The filmmakers were obviously talented designers too. There were many striking images of urban scenes with Helvetica on signage.

March 3 movie: Ann Vickers. This movie was about as pre-code as it gets. Irene Dunne gets pregnant out of wedlock, has an abortion (with some remorse but no other consequences), becomes a social worker & prison reformer, tries to stop a crooked warden from beating women inmates, gets blackmailed, takes over another women's prison, has an affair with a married judge (Walter Huston) and has a baby with him. The movie also features bribery, a woman being hit in the head so hard she's knocked out, another woman being flogged (in silhouette), and explicit references to heroin addiction. All this movie lacks is women in lingerie. Speaking of which, Night Nurse is on tonight! I'm recording it for later.

March 1 movie: Duck, You Suckers. All hail my brother-in-law! He gave me this movie for my birthday. Ever since I first heard of this, I've been dying to see it. And it lived up to my expectations. James Coburn and Rod Steiger star as a fugitive Irish terrorist and a Mexican bandit, respectively, who get caught up in the Mexican revolution. The movie wasn't perfect; it dragged a bit and didn't seem to know how to end. But, what am I saying? James Coburn in a Sergio Leone spaghetti western! That's all you need to know.

February 29 movie: Harlem Roots: The Headliners. A collection of soundies by Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong and Louis Jordan. It was good, but not long enough. Barely an hour if I recall correctly.

February 29 movie: Anna Lucasta. What a bring-down after all those sweet romantic comedies. I rented this because it starred both Eartha Kitt and Sammy Davis Jr. Well, Eartha plays a prostitute who was molested by her father. Her family was happy to be rid of her for the most part, and invites her back only because they hope she'll seduce a family acquaintance who recently came into money. Sammy plays her boyfriend, who cares about her in his own shallow way but can't/won't really help her. It's a sordid movie. And Eartha and Sammy don't sing!

February 29 movie: Royal Wedding. How I love this movie! The plot is a wonderful bit of fluff, and the movie includes one of Fred Astaire's most sublime dances -- the one in the exercise room -- and two of my favorites of his songs -- "How Could You Believe Me" and "I Left My Hat in Haiti."