What movie did you watch?

No Rashomon last night, as it turned out. Instead, the racy Lubitsch comedy Design For Living, which posits that the only way bohemian artist pals Frederic March and Gary Cooper can find happiness is in a non-traditional threeway with Miriam Hopkins. Goddamn, I love pre-code Hollywood.

Design For Living started life as a Noel Coward play, but Lubistch handed the script over to Ben Hecht*, an uneasy mix at best. Coward hated the movie. But whatever got lost in translation from Coward to Hecht is more than made up by the trinity of actors at the core. Hopkins is a real corker in this. She's like the prototype Manic Pixie Dream Girl but without the inevitable "Surprise! She's dying of Tragic Movie Disease! That's why she coughed once in the first reel!" nonsense that usually accompanies a M.P.D.G. In a movie that is meant to be a trifle, her equal attraction to both men is surprisingly believable. Gary Cooper is dependably Cooperish, and Frederic March is ridiculously great in it**, as the sad-sack playwright who only seems to be happy when Hopkins is around. Well, who could blame him, really.

Even without the Code in full effect, they really had to tone down a lot of the innuendo in Design For Living. Not that a Lubitsch movie would ever go into full-on ribaldry - Lubitsch is the template for every attempt at "sophisticated" comedy that followed, usually poorly - but I do wish we had gotten a little bit more scenes like when Hopkins lounges on a fainting couch and comes-on to Cooper: "It's true we had a gentlemen's agreement... but unfortunately, I am no gentleman." Hopkins also gets a nice little speech about falling in love with two men at the same time:

"Interesting elimination"! Fantastic.

* Arguably the greatest screenwriter of all time. Hecht wrote the play The Front Page (later adapted into a pile of movies, including His Girl Friday), the script for the original Scarface (in 11 days!), Gunga Din, Wuthering Heights, Spellbound, Notorious, and was one of the highest paid script doctors in the business, polishing everything from Gone With The Wind to Strangers On A Train.

** You know how people have this insane idea that acting was too stiff in old movies? Watch anything with Frederic March in it.

Saw the following movies on the days leading up to Christmas. My response to them may very well be swayed by nostalgia.

Home Alone - Holds up, but as I get older I feel less and less bad for everyone in the film except for Daniel Stern's character. Kevin really is kind of a little brat, Catherine O'Hara's character is her own worst enemy, and really, forgetting your kid?

Christmas Vacation - Holds up, but is so much more slight of a movie than I remember. Also, I was disappointed upon doing a Google search to find that the perfume counter girl didn't end up posing for Playboy or anything. What up with that?

Die Hard (Christmas eve tradition) - Of course it holds up. What's wrong with you?

Lethal Weapon - Doesn't hold up. Controversial opinion, sure, but I'm stickin' with it. The whole setup at the end is a huge problem for me. Riggs and Murtaugh really allow Joshua to murder a cop just so he doesn't realize it's a trap? What the fuck? Also, could that whole kung fu fight on the lawn really have been more 80s action movie?

Arthur Christmas - Surprisingly good. Don't know why I say 'surprisingly', though. After all, it's an Aardman movie and has a lot of that sensibility. Funny, touching and nice to look at. A good time!

Scrooged - Holy shit, does this movie still hold up. If you don't agree, it's cos you're an asshole.

Elf - Still fun, but I donno if it has many more yearly viewings left in it for me.

Did not get around to Gremlins, Love, Actually or It's a Wonderful Life. Maybe next year! Also, Netflix, seriously. Add a 'Christmas movies!' tab that only appears starting in December. It'd make life easier. Not that it matters, since the only movie you had on the above list was Christmas Vacation.

I watched Project Nim, which was an HBO documentary about this chimpanzee that was raised among a human family as an experiment, and all his subsequent misadventures. It was really dark.

I also have been cleaning up old movies that have been kicking around the DVR, so I watched Water for Elephants (pretty good,) Red Tails (boring as fuck,) and We Bought a Zoo (not too bad.)

I adore Carol Kane in Scrooged. She's easily the best part, especially when she clocks Murray with the toaster.

All you need is those there four words.

Same here.

Just saw Lawrence of Arabia on the big screen for the first time, and it was using the new 4K restoration. Holy fucking shit that was amazing. :-)

'The Bourne Legacy'. As an action romp it's pretty enjoyable but I can't help feeling that its genetically enhanced agents unravel a lot of the stuff that made the Damon Bourne films so great. Things get really silly when the Asian T-1000 turns up (complete with expository dialogue that evokes Kyle Reese's "It can't be bargained with..." lines in 'The Terminator').

Saw Lincoln. It was the most affecting movie I saw this year, with moments of genuine power. I teared up a few times, which is unusual for me. Unfortunately it's also pretty schmaltzy and should have ended about a half-hour earlier. Unsurprisingly, some of the most effective parts were just Day-Lewis delivering Lincoln's speeches. My wife recently read "Team of Rivals", the book on which the movie is based, and said that the movie seemed true to the book. Overall a great movie.

Just saw Sound of Music for the first time, and I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would.

Sunset Boulevard. It was great. A very onionated movie. Fuckin' Billy Wilder, guys.

I watched it because it was brought up when you nerds were talking about noirs.



Why were so many hardboiled/noir films/books set in LA? Is it just the legacy of Chandler and his Marlowe? Sunset makes sense because it revolves around the film industry and all the NYC stories make sense vis a vis crime and a zillion people in a city that never sleeps. Was LA a good location cuz all the writers lived there?

If you can, you should track down the original opening Wilder shot for it, where Joe Gillis' corpse is pushed down a morgue hallway as all of the other cadavers tell him how they died. It's fucking crazy.

And depending on how much Hollywood trivia you have stuck in your head like I do, Sunset Blvd. is more of an onion than you know. Many of the people in the movie are playing only slightly tweaked versions of themselves - Gloria Swanson really was a huge Hollywood silent star, and William Holden was on his way to being washed up in real life after a decade of alcohol abuse sidetracked his earlier promise. (Sunset Blvd. helped him get back in the game in a big way.)

But there's also Norma Desmond's butler, played by the great director Eric Von Stronheim, who had directed Swanson in many of her movies. (In fact, the movie he projects for Desmond and Gillis is one of the movies he had directed himself.) Casting him as a butler is probably the darkest joke in the movie, as Stronheim was famous for a crazy, crazy 1924 movie called Greed which Stronheim shot an unbelievable amount of footage for - 85 hours worth, according to Wikipedia. I remember hearing a rumour that his original edit of the movie was something like sixteen hours long, and there was a four-hour edit that (I believe) was actually screened in Europe. It tanked hard, one of the great famous early box-office bombs of the silent era, and Stronheim never really recovered as a director, although he eventually found some success as an actor.

We can't be friends. :(

(Don't mind me, I loathe pretty much all the Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals and their movie versions.)


Speaking of movie musicals, we saw Les Miserables with my family while we were in NJ. Our opinions varied from "meh" to "that was shit." I could've forgiven a lot if Russel Crowe wasn't the worst Javert ever. But he was! So I forgave nothing.

Aaww man, sorry, it was silly/cute/stupid and I couldn't help but smile at it, no matter how batshit insane it was. Plus the eldest daughter was damned cute.

Wow. I knew about Swanson and a little about Stronheim by wiki-surfing after I finished the movie, but I didn't know about Holden or the obsessiveness of Stronheim. The movie also has all those cameos -- Cecile B Demille is himself, Buster Keaton plays himself briefly, maybe some more? It works on so more levels than I think most movies of that ilk do and it's level of grotesqueness is awesome and never undermined by the stylishly crazy Norma and the rest.

Everybody in that "waxworks" scene - the one where Buster Keaton and friends come over to play bridge - was at one point a big deal. The woman is Anna Q. Nilsson, a Swedish silent actress who was in a ton of early Hollywood, and the other guy is H.B. Warner, who was a Jesus in Cecil B. DeMille's* silent The King Of Kings.

The more you know about Sunset Blvd, the more evil it gets. Even more incredible is that Wilder followed up Sunset with Ace In The Hole, a movie that is arguably even more misanthropic and harsh. Wilder obviously made tons of great movies, but Sunset and Ace In The Hole back-to-back is something else.

* Who is ALSO in Sunset Blvd, playing himself.

I'm gonna watch Ace tonight then! More classic Hollywood misanthropy!

The Guy from Harlem. I believe it was Bill that said that this was possibly the doofiest blaxploitation ever. I strongly recommend this version, which is not free, but is worth the price of admission.

The Imposter, a crazy documentary about a French dude who pretends to be this Texas family's son who went missing years ago...and they believe him!

Naturally, there is a Hell of a lot more to it than that.

I'd pretend it's a product of having worked on so damned many productions of the various R&H offerings, but I hated them before that, so clearly I am just a bitter old harridan with no joy in her heart. ;)

I saw 5 Minutes of Heaven which is about the Troubles in Ireland. A stupid teenager kills another teenager while his little brother watches. 30 years later they're going to meet on some BBC show about truth and reconciliation. Liam Neeson shows that he's still a good actor as the killer, but James Nesbitt is fucking amazing. He's funny, and manic, and so fucking angry it almost hurts to watch him.

Then I watched Take This Waltz which was twee and precious and not nearly as good. Sure, Michelle Williams has come a long way since Dawson's Creek, and this actually has Seth Rogen in a part where he's not a lovable schlump cracking jokes. He's just a lovable schlump. It was written and directed by Sarah Polley, and the whole thing just feels really Canadian, if that's possible with a majority of American actors.

Tin Tin doesn't suck and actually has some really good action sequences.

That being said, there was no way this wasn't going to be a bomb. I can't for the life of me figure out who the movie is supposed to be for - the motion-capture animation downright creepy (though I found it really interesting). The plot is convoluted and violent and contains an alcoholism sub-plot. The character of Tin-Tin is confusing. Is he a boy? A man? A mannish-boy? A boyish-man? A Twink?

It helps if you're a fan of the comics!

Ze ovairsees markets, you American clod. [Would twirling a pencil thin mustache at this point read as French Snob or Snidely Whiplash?] [Also, fuck you, Bebe from Persona 3, for firmly lodging this voice in my head.]

Seriously, though. Tin Tin was a sort of a landmark film in that it was never really intended to make its money domestically (the norm for big films is to primarily target the American audience - possibly with some allowances for outside markets, as with the title addendum in Captain America - and then suck up your foreign money as gravy on top of your domestic box office). In Europe, he's kind of a bigger deal than around these parts, and that's where the cash was supposed to come in from. I don't give quite enough of a crap about movies to investigate whether that actually happened, of course, but that's the theory.

Tintin? $77mil domestic, $296mil foreign. The budget was $135mil.

I've seen it before, but 'Moon' was on BBC2 last night. Just as good as it was the first time, and Sam Rockwell turns in an excellent performance as both iterations of Sam Bell; it's depressing that he wasn't at least nominated for a Best Actor Oscar (as far as I can tell from IMDB).

Watched Christine for the first time the other night, was on the Sundance channel which I also didn't even know I had.

Watching Finding Nemo for the first time in ages, since I got the Blu-ray for Christmas, it's so amazing.

Taken 2. Wow. Every single actor phoned in not only their acting performance, but their fight scenes. I believe even the script writer phoned in it, since half the father-daughter conversations appeared to be him hitting on her. Never mind Maggie Grace ain't sixteen and none of the far-away blurry shots of her would convince me otherwise.

I look forward to Taken 3, when the family dog goes missing.

Tin Tin was actually great. Had no expectations going into it besides some vague memories of watching the old French-Canadian cartoon series.

Watched Silver Linings Playbook. They took a fairly standard romantic comedy and had De Niro rough it up in an alley a bit to make it a little edgier. Okay date movie, kind of hectic on the editing. Someone wanted an excuse to have Jennifer Lawrence shake around and jiggle a bit, but thankfully she brings more to the role than that.

We watched Horatio's Drive which was a lighthearted Ken Burns documentary about the first cross-country road trip. It needed more teenagers and sexual hijinks to truly be a road movie, but it had a great dog.

Then we watched Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and I realized about halfway through that the title gives away who the mole is. I've read this book twice, and seen the old PBS version before. This was pretty good, although I still think that in the book you don't know who the schoolmaster is and it's a big reveal when he's identified. Because it's film, you know who he is as soon as you see him, so we miss that. We also never get how Smiley finds him in this version.

I watched This Means War with the missus last night instead of going out for X-mas Eve, and enjoyed it a lot. It's a stupid romcom but it's consistently funny both Hardy and Pike are fantastic in it. I'm not normally a fan of Reese Witherspoon, but she was good in this and her scenes with Chelsea Handler are great too.

Rewatched For Love of The Game, Costner's 3rd(?) baseball movie and my favourite of the 3. I know just enough about baseball to follow along but largely thats incidental to the film anyway. John C Reilly is really great in this as well (normally I can't stand him). It's on Netflix Instant, although Instant Watcher doesn't find it.

Pretty sure it doesn't.

Same in the BBC version, though. As I remember it the school subplot being unexplained in the novel didn't feel like added value when I first read the book, but I'm not big on buried plot ledes. I liked both adaptations, but the TV one is hard to beat with both superlative acting and casting, and the extra time to do more. I also much preferred the handling of the Esterhase confrontation which...

I could swear it's like this:

I think the difference with the schoolmaster stuff is that I read the book before seeing any dramatization, so it was one of those, "What the heck does this guy off teaching school have to do with anything?" Then when it's revealed who he is a lot of things make sense. In fact, I think the book opens with him at the school, then switches over to the goings on at the Circus.

I checked before posting ;)

Well you got me then.

Yeah, but someone new to the material might also think of

I just re-watched Garden State for the first time in several years. It's sentimental and sappy but I still enjoy it!