Film
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I meant to include these links with the clips from Swing Time below. Fred Astaire's first dancing partner was his sister Adele, and they were famous as a stage act long before Fred got into movies. I know this only because there is a recent biography of the siblings which was reviewed in The New Criterion a…
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Weekend Music (and Dancing) Did I mention that I had finished watching Swing Time a week or so ago? (after discussing it here). These two scenes will give you a good idea of what it's like; they really constitute one scene, from fairly early in the movie, when Lucky (Fred) has only recently met Penny (Ginger). Of course,…
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I started to say this in a comment on the Some Like It Hot discussion, but decided to make it a separate post so I could find it later, if the subject ever came up again. I can't explain why so many people find men dressed as women to be so very funny. But I have…
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Some Old Movies I've been a little surprised over the past ten years or so to hear young people apply the term "old movie" to movies made as recently as the 1980s or mid-1990s. It makes perfect sense, of course, from their point of view. Or for that matter from a fairly neutral point of…
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This is a late '60s French movie by one of the New Wave directors (Eric Rohmer), generally regarded as a classic, so I fully expected to like it. But my reaction was lukewarm at best. I didn't know what to expect from the description: two friends, one Catholic and the other Marxist, spend an evening…
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Bah. Psycho Christian death cult. Obviously I'm prejudiced, but I didn't think it was a very good story even apart from the annoying specifics. The episode is called "Before the Frost," and is based on a novel of the same name. Aside from compliments to the actors and photographers, I really have only one good…
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I watched the second episode of season 3, The Dogs of Riga, a couple of nights ago. I think I liked the first one a little better. This one shared the atmosphere of the other, but is more gruesome and has more action and suspense–several people are tortured and murdered in a rather horrible way,…
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Waiting for the Hurricane This will be brief, as I've been busy most of the day making preparations for Tropical Storm Isaac, which is expected to be Hurricane Isaac by the time it makes landfall somewhere along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The tropics have been pretty quiet since Hurricane Katrina in…
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The local paper has a feature called "Today In History" or something like that, which notes significant events that have occurred on this date. August 4, for instance, was the date of: the murder of Lizzie Borden's parents in 1892, the declaration of war by Britain in 1914, and the arrest of Anne Frank and…
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The Quiet American This is about both the movie and the Graham Green novel. A few weeks ago the movie was shown on one of the cable channels that broadcasts movies uninterrupted (it wasn't TCM, so it must have been Sundance). On an impulse of curiosity I recorded it. I had read the novel some…
Light On Dark Water 