FunnyStrange.com

Starting tonight TCM is running a series on Latinos in Hollywood, every Tuesday and Thursday for the whole month. They're showing the original The Mark of Zorro right now. Check it out!

March 4 movie: He Ran All the Way. Tense crime drama about a robber/murderer who hides out in a girl's apartment, terrorizing the girl and her family. Worth watching for the strong performances by stars John Garfield and Shelley Winters. Garfield especially created a compelling character.

Interesting trivia: writer Dalton Trumbo, director John Berry and star John Garfield were all blacklisted. Garfield died shortly after, making this his last movie.

March 5 movie: Night Unto Night. Dull melodrama starring Ronald Reagan as a research scientist with epilepsy. When the movie wasn't boring me, it was offending me by portraying epilepsy as something to be ashamed of.

March 11 movie: Nancy Drew, Detective. I had never seen a Nancy Drew movie before. And I must say, if this was representative then I never want to see another. Nancy Drew was not a sympathetic character! She was a spoiled, rich little snot who goes around smirking all the time and making sure everyone knows how much smarter than them she is. And she's really mean to her poor boyfriend. Why that kid stays with her I don't know. The scene that pushed me over the edge was when she gleefully humiliates the local sheriff, makes a fool of him in front of his entire staff, just because he had the nerve to try and do his job.

Were the books this bad? By the end of the movie I felt like Nancy Drew was a pretty unpleasant girl.

March 13 movie: Hollow Man. Oh my god this was bad. Bad. Not even bad-good. It was so ugly, so spiteful and sadistic, that I felt kind of sick while watching it. (Until the end, which was so ridiculous I got over my queasiness.)

March 13 movie: 21. I watched this because I had read the book. Bringing Down the House, a nonfiction story about a group of MIT students who developed a blackjack card-counting scheme and made millions in Vegas, until the casinos caught on and everything went all pear shaped.

Well, the movie was pretty incoherent. Having read the book I found that the movie made no sense, because nothing (the table games, the card counting scheme, the security company) worked right. It wasn't just different in the movie; it was changed in a way that made it make no sense. And I think that if I hadn't read the book, the movie would have made no sense because they do such a bad job of explaining everything. Really, if you didn't already understand the card-counting scheme you would never get it from this movie.

The only thing the movie did well was lots of good footage of Vegas. That's always fun.

March 15 movie: Reserved for Ladies. I cannot remember this movie at all. I even read a lengthy plot synopsis on IMDB and I still have no memory of it. Did I even watch it? Or did I decide not to watch it and forget to remove it from the list?

It's too bad; it sounded like a good movie.

March 16 movie: Accidents Will Happen. Ronald Reagan plays an insurance adjustor who starts out an honest go-getter, then gets caught up in an insurance fraud gang who stage phony accidents. Gloria Blondell plays his grasping, venal wife. I must say, this may be the most I've ever enjoyed a move that starred Reagan. It was well plotted, they neatly put together the phony accident scam, and even kept me guessing about Reagan's character.

March 19 movie: Million Dollar Baby. No, not the boxing movie with Clint Eastwood and whats-her-name. This was a 1941 movie in which May Robson finds out her father became rich by cheating his business partner. She decides to make matters right by finding the partner's descendant (Priscilla Lane) and anonymously giving her a million dollars. Jeffrey Lynn plays the lawyer she hires to give Lane the money, and Ronald Reagan plays Lane's boyfriend. It was a cute movie.

March 23 movie: Berserk! Late 60s Joan Crawford horror movie set in a traveling circus. If that description doesn't make you want to watch this movie, then you really shouldn't watch this movie. If, on the other hand, you read that and thought, "Wow! That sounds like crazy campy fun!" rent this now. Because that's exactly what this is.

April 6 movie: The Man in the Iron Mask. This was wonderful! Everything a swashbuckler should be. Louis Hayward, Joan Bennett and Warren William star. The plot focuses on Hayward in the dual role as the King and Phillippe, with the Musketeers in a supporting role. William (as D'Artagnan) has a tremendous presence considering he's mostly in the background. Also excellent work by Joseph Schildkraut as the King's evil advisor, and Alan Hale! He plays Porthos.

April 11 movie: They Were Expendable. This John Ford movie has really grown on me. It's Robert Montgomery and John Wayne as PT boat captains in the Philippines. In some ways it's the anti-John Wayne movie: Wayne has to overcome his cowboy urge to be the hero and grab high-profile assignments, learning that every job is vital, even the unglamorous ones. I read that Montgomery was fresh off active duty on an actual PT boat and provided a level of realism to the film.

May 3 movie: Pennies from Heaven. No, not the Dennis Potter movie with Steve Martin. This was the 1936 movie starring Bing Crosby. It's a sweet Depression comedy starring Bing as an amiable hobo who takes up with a grandfather & granddaughter down on their luck. Together they try to start a chicken dinner restaurant with Louis Armstrong as the house band, and the daughter is trying to evade being put in an orphanage, and Bing sings a lot. It was a lot of fun. The title song is especially good.

May 1 movie: Dr. No. Sean Connery is star of the month on TCM. Like fun! James Bond every Friday night. I am such a nerd.

May 1 movie: My Reputation. Barbara Stanwyck stars as a widow who fall in love with a military man (George Brent). She feels happy again for the first time in years, until everyone around her -- friends, her mother, her children -- openly condemn her for being such a slut. Doesn't she know she's supposed to live like a nun for the rest of her life?

It wraps up with a sort of, kind of happy ending, and it wasn't nearly as bad as movies I've seen with similar themes from the early 30s, but mostly this movie was depressing.

April 30 movie: She Couldn't Say No. Eve Arden and Roger Pryor star in this romantic comedy about a pair of lawyers on opposite sides of a case. Nice to see Eve Arden as the star for once. Also features Cliff Edwards (Ukulele Ike) as Arden's assistant. He has some good lines and gets to do one song.

April 30 movie: The Doughgirls. Jane Wyman, Ann Sheridan, and Alexis Smith star as three best friends who hate each other. Also they're all newlyweds whose husbands hate them. Then on the same day, they all find out they're not really married. What's a girl to do?

I found this movie unwatchable. I hate those screwball comedies about married couples who loathe each other. Here's a typical exchange:

Wife: "Oh Arthur, I love you."
Husband (rolling eyes and smirking): "Couldn't happen to a nicer fellow."

Making the friends all loathe each other too ratcheted up the unpleasantness to a level I just couldn't stand. Also the movie was too stagey -- almost the whole thing takes place in one room, with people constantly running in and out of doors. They tried to make comedy out of the overcrowding in wartime DC, just like The More The Merrier, but it's hard to do when the whole movie is trapped inside one room.

Eve Arden played a sassy Soviet officer, and even she couldn't save this movie. That's saying something.

April 20 movie: Whistling in the Dark. Red Skelton stars as "The Fox," the star of a radio mystery show, who gets tangled up in a real-life mystery. It was fun. Not cinema for the ages, but worth watching, genuinely fun.

Chauffeuring the wedding couple yesterday was fun. The photographer sat in the front seat and was all over the place -- she knelt on the seat facing backwards, and leaned far over into the middle to get good angles for her photos -- but she was pretty good at staying aware of me and moving out of the way when I needed the shift gears.

The bad part was afterwards -- I had promised them I would leave the car in front of the restaurant for about an hour so people could look at it. When we got there, in all the hubbub I accidently put my keys down on the hood of the car. Georg and I took off to get lunch, and when we got back, no keys. I had left the windows rolled down, and I spent about an hour in total panic thinking that I had left the cars inside and someone had taken them. Why anyone would take the keys and leave the car, I couldn't imagine. Still, it was a difficult hour of looking everywhere for the keys, then driving home to get the spare key, then driving back, meanwhile between waiting so long to eat and the stress I had the mother of all headaches. And then when we got back to the car with the spare key, Georg saw my keyring sitting on the hood, right where I had left it. Doh!

It's kind of funny now (though not at the time!). I think my car is the only car in Durham which you can leave your keys on top of for an hour in the middle of town, and no one will notice, not even yourself. I have a long history of leaving things on top of the car and driving around without them falling off. Usually things we were using to work on the decorations like screwdrivers, paint scrapers and rolls of masking tape. Once I drove all the way to Chapel Hill and back with a big pair of pruning loppers on the hood! I still don't know why they didn't fall off on the highway.

After all that excitement we had to make dinner (Georg) and tidy the house (me) before our friends Vicki and John came over. They used to live in Texas so we made pibil, rice and beans and Georg got really nice tortillas from Compare. Vicki and John have been all over the world and had all kinds of experiences. Looks like they may be moving to Australia soon.

I will be on air from 2-4 pm today with a birthday tribute to Bing Crosby. I learned a lot about Bing preparing for this show, and I'm really looking forward to it. If you like older music but you think of Bing Crosby as bland whitebread pop, tune in and find out how wrong that is. 88.7fm in Durham, webcast at wxdu.org.