The Horseman on the Roof (1995)

Le Hussard sur le Toit

  This movie was recommended to me by my Peruvian paramour back in July or August.  It was pointed out to me that the only other opinion I listen to in movies is my cousin's.  True, she does get a monthly feature but that doesn't mean that I will ignore other suggestions and/or fail to give credit.  If you, dear readers, think there is a movie out there that I should see, leave me a comment about it and you will see it emblazoned here along with my unvarnished opinion.

So there.

I did rather enjoy this film.  I don't know that I'd call it an 'epic romance' but it's very good.  Olivier Martinez (hot!) plays an Italian calvary officer exiled in France during an outbreak of cholera.  He is being pursued by Austrian agents from the Hapsburg Empire due to political tensions at that time, just after the Napoleonic War.  While trying to get back to his native country, he is chased onto the rooftops of a town by an angry panicked mob, terrified of infection.  He ends up hiding in a house and then traveling with Juliette Binoche, a French noblewoman looking for her husband.

It's a beautifully understated movie and I only have one complaint.  After his first experience running across a town full of corpses, the calvary officer runs into a doctor who tells him that the treatment for cholera is the application of herbal elixir and then rubbing the extremities to promote blood flow.

This is the single stupidest piece of medical fiction I had heard in a while and every time he tried this method, it just took me right out of the film.  I know that at the time no one understood that cholera was a bacterial infection brought on by contaminated food or water, and that they were just doing the best that they could. I know that it's a totally nit-picky thing to judge the movie on.  I. Can't. Help. It.

Like I said, everything else about the movie is great.  I'm sure no one but me cares about the inaccuracy of cholera treatment, which I'm also fairly certain was only introduced so they could show Juliette Binoche naked.

Meet Joe Black (1998)

  So I went on a date Saturday night.  It was the second date so I went to his place to watch a movie.  This was the movie he picked.

Hi, I'm Lucy.  Have you met me?

So, of course, I hated it.

I vaguely remember when this movie came out.  I was still in my "I hate Brad Pitt" phase (I'll explain in a minute) so I avoided this movie like the plague.  Didn't even know what it was about until almost ten years later.  By then I was over the phase and found myself a tad bit curious.  But I had made my stance on it clear and I couldn't flip-flop like that.  So I'm secretly grateful that someone else picked it so I could satisfy my curiosity without selling out.

Ok, so the "I hate Brad" thing came about when I saw Legends of the Fall on HBO as a kid.  I fucking hated every minute of it and thought it was probably the stupidest, most senseless thing I had seen up to that point.  I was about 12 so it could be argued that I didn't have the emotional maturity to understand what I was seeing but I stand by the opinion that it was just a shitty film.  Anyway, I decided that the main problem with the movie was Brad Pitt.  He was just another pretty boy who couldn't act.  So I avoided everything with him in it like I owed him money.  Even Fight Club when it first came out.  I couldn't bring myself to watch.  Then I saw Snatch and it completely shattered my worldview.  He got dirty for that role and spoke like a fucking crazy person.  That was outstanding.  And I have liked him in most of the movies he's been in since.

Back to this movie.  Death Takes a Holiday has been remade several times since 1934.  (My personal favorite is the Terry Pratchett Discworld novel Reaper Man.)  It seems like it could have been a really great movie if they had cut 40% of the running time.  For instance, every scene with Marcia Gay Harden made me want to take a cheese grater to my eyeballs.  (She was the other sister, if you're trying to place her.)  Also, Claire Forlani has all the personality of a dust bunny.  Still, most of the dialogue was pretty good, especially the interactions between Anthony Hopkins and Brad Pitt.

I'm going to talk about the ending now so this will get a bit spoilery.  **Spoiler Alert**

Ok, so Death takes over the body of some random schmuck that Claire Forlani meetcutes in a coffee shop who then gets hit by a minivan.  He shows up at her dad's house so Anthony Hopkins can teach him what it means to be human in exchange for a few more days on the earth.  Along the way, he falls in love with Claire.  By the end of the movie, he has learned about sacrifice and puts Dead Schmuck's soul back in place and sends him off to be in love with Claire.

How fucking confused would this poor woman be?  She met a dude in a coffee shop, liked him, then he shows up with a completely different personality, inserts himself into her family's life as her dad's new BFF, begins a relationship with her, then suddenly develops amnesia and goes back to the personality he had before she fell in love with him on the same night that her dad dies.  Because romance or not, Death has a fucking job to do.  Plus, there's no guarantee that she'd actually like Dead Schmuck's actual personality so what if, after all that, they realize they have nothing in common?  She's going to feel so betrayed.  That seems like the worst possible thing Death could have done to her.  If he had just disappeared, she could have held on to all the positive memories instead of feeling like she's involved with a dude who has multiple personalities.

SuckerPunch (2011)

Don't let the poster fool you.  This movie sucked.  And I was so excited about seeing it.  I had been looking forward to this release since last summer.

It's less of a sucker punch and more like a slap in the face.

I will say that I didn't like 300 the first time I saw it.  I thought it was a chaotic mess and I didn't start to appreciate it until I had seen it 2-3 times.  I was super-excited about Watchmen when I heard it was being released because it's one of the most arresting graphic novels I've ever read, but I confess I was disappointed in some of the elements of the movie.

I wish I could say that SuckerPunch would get better after repeat viewings.  It won't.  It is all flash and no substance.  I was bored, bored, by halfway and by the final moments I was disgusted.  Transparent doesn't begin to cover how thin this movie's plot is.  Babydoll (Emily Browning) is a young girl locked in an insane asylum by her step-father so he can get her inheritance.  He bribes an orderly to ensure that she is lobotomized by a traveling doctor within five days.  So she rounds up some co-conspirators in Amber (Jamie Chung), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), Rocket (Jena Malone) and her sister SweetPea (Abby Cornish) and embarks on a quest to find 5 items that will secure their freedom while trying to avoid detection by Blue the orderly (Oscar Isaac) and Madame Gorski (Carla Gugino).

I don't know how spoilery this is but it's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest meets Call of Duty.  In her mind, Babydoll thinks of the asylum as a high-priced burlesque club that's a front for Blue's prohibition-era gambling and whorehouse.  Every time she "dances" she imagines different video game levels (down to first-person-shooter) that involve each of the five items.  Unlike Chicago, there is no interspersing of reality beyond the first 15 minutes.  So there's no way to know what the fantasy pieces correspond to, if the girls are actually being sexually abused or how creative they have to be to get the items.  Their characters are one-note at best but that's okay.  It keeps you from getting attached to them.

Also, there is no actual burlesque dancing in the film, so those of you who really wanted to see those costumes put to good use will be even more disappointed.  Yeah, they make a big deal about how great Babydoll is at dancing, like she's the reincarnation of Gypsy Rose Lee, and then they show you absolutely nothing.

Emily Browning actually contributes some vocals to the soundtrack on no less than 3 songs, including a really creepy (read: awesome) cover of "Sweet Dreams", and Carla Gugino and Oscar Isaac (Gorski and Blue) have a duet as well, so I'm wondering if this wouldn't have played better as a musical, if that was an idea that got left on the cutting room floor.  Along with plot and a sense of mystery.  Seriously, they ruin the movie before the opening credits by telling you exactly why Babydoll got put in the asylum.  If they had held on to that card until right before the final fight scene, the movie might have had some genuine pathos but they didn't.

Update:  So, the blu-ray extended edition reconstitutes the musical aspects and adds in a key scene with Jon Hamm.  It absolutely elevates this movie from Waste of Time to Decent But Flawed.

Due Date (2010)

  This was the second Christy pick for March and it has never become more apparent that our tastes in comedies could not be more dissimilar. 

She tends to favor slapstick phsyical comedy like Sex Drive or gross bodily humor like I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.  Due Date falls into both of these categories.

I heard this movie compared (unfavorably) to Planes, Trains and Automobiles but that doesn't really mean a lot to me since I also hated that film and haven't seen it since John Candy was still alive.

This story follows the impossibly stupid adventures of Peter Highman (RDJ) trying to get from Atlanta to LA in time to be with his wife as she gives birth.  He is thwarted in his attempt to fly by a wannabe actor/waste of oxygen in the form of Ethan (Galifianakis) who gets them both put on the No Fly list by saying the words "bomb" and "terrorist" on the plane.

Here's where the movie starts to get stupid.  After being kicked off the flight, Peter realizes his wallet was in his carry-on which is on its way to LA and he is now stranded at the Atlanta airport unable to rent a car or buy a bus ticket because he has no ID or credit cards.  Enter Ethan in a shiny new rental car headed towards Hollywood for his chance to be on Two and a Half Men. 

A normal person, in a city on business who suddenly finds themselves bereft of funds would probably use their cell phone to call back to whatever office they were at, arrange transportation back there, get their spouse to call the DMV for a copy of their driver's licence or just fax a copy of their passport to said office.  Problem averted.

This person gets into the car for a three day trip across the country with a man he despises.  And rightly so.  There is absolutely nothing redeeming about Ethan.  He is a self-centered, socially retarded pothead man-child with no concept of reality.  People like this are not endearing in real life.  They're the ones that get their friends arrested or killed with their stupid bullshit.

Peter has two opportunities to part ways with Ethan and fails to do so both times; once because he realized Ethan's dad's cremains were in the car (in a coffee can a la The Big Lebowski) which I can kind of understand because it would be even more douchey to steal the ashes of someone's relative along with their car, but the second time is inconceivable to me.  After a spectacular car wreck in Texas, Peter calls his friend (Jamie Foxx) to pick him up from the hospital and tells Ethan to go fuck himself.  His "friend" tells him that he should avoid bad karma before the birth of his child and that he needs to apologize and offer Ethan a ride. 

This is terrible advice.

If this happened to me, and my cousin came to pick me up, she would not tell me to apologize to the source of my misery.  She would offer to hit them with her car for me.  That's because she loves me and is a good friend. 

I know why the film-makers chose this way, because otherwise the story ends with a run time of 25 minutes, but that doesn't make it okay.  It's an utterly and completely ridiculous road trip movie without the surreal charm of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.

The Parallax View (1974)

  So, I found this movie on one of the dozens of movie sites I look at.  I don't remember which one exactly; it may have been Screenrant or even The AV Club.  It was part of a list of the greatest conspiracy movies of all time.

If this is considered one of the greats, we need to redefine the parameters. 

It could have worked.  Could have.  You have all the elements there.  Shadowy government/corporate conspiracy?  Check.  Intrepid journalist trying to uncover the clues?  Check.  Correlations to JFK/RFK assassinations?  Check and check.  And yet it still underwhelms.

Probably because they spent more camera time on Warren Beatty's ass than they did on the conspiracy mystery.  It was a nice ass but not nearly nice enough to make up for the gaping plot holes. 

For one, the tagline clearly states "He Saw Too Much" but he didn't.  In fact, he got turned away from the initial assassination on the top of the Space Needle for not having a press pass.  The only way he became aware of the conspiracy was when a lady journalist who was there shows up at his place all hysterical and spouting that someone is trying to kill her.  How does he know her?  It's implied that they had a sexual relationship at one point but the movie might as well have said "All journalists know each other" for all the background it provides. 

He only believes her after she mysteriously dies and then manages to stumble upon some truly laughable connections leading to the shadowy Parallax Corporation.  From a single personality test, he determines that Parallax is in the business of training assassins.  Their motives, indeed their titular "view" is never explained or even hinted at.  Apparently, they just enjoy killing senators and journalists.  No overt political agenda is ever presented.  We don't know why these senators.  In fact, at one point they attempt to kill two from opposing sides.  Are they anarchic or just mercenaries? 

I found the whole thing to be mediocre at best.

Gasland (2010)

So, this was one of the two documentaries from this year's Oscars that I didn't see during my big push.  It was sitting at the top of my queue for ages with that sad little epithet of "Very Long Wait" after its name.  I guess Netflix only had one copy.

This movie was fucking terrifying.  Let me get that out of the way right now.  Only terrifying things are scored with banjo music.  I am a paranoid little monkey on my best day and seeing shit like this just ratchets up my panic meter. 

People could set their water on fire.  WATER. ON. FIRE.

Not to say that this documentary deserved to win the Oscar.  Hell no.  The narrator is boring as fuck, the editing looks like it was done by an epileptic ferret and the pacing is slow.  Also, I am not one of those peacenik, nature-loving hippies so most of the message was kind of lost on me.  I don't so much care about pristine natural beauty.  I'm aware that we need it and I'm sure the planet would look weird without it, I just can't bring myself to be enthusiastic about it.

However, I am painfully aware of the need for clean drinking water.  And I don't like things that fuck with that.  This movie is basically Erin Brockovich 2:  Fracking Boogaloo.  Josh Fox, monotone narrator/documentarian, gets interested in underground natural gas wells after a drilling company offers him almost $100K for the mineral rights on his property.  He embarks on a journey to discover what the hell that entails that takes him across the country and all the way to Congress subcommittee meetings.  He meets people that have developed brain lesions (!!!) from exposure to toxic chemicals, people whose houses have exploded from leaked natural gas, and people whose water turns to goddamn plastic when you heat it, or just fucking catches on fire.

Now there has been a big push in probably the last ten years about not drinking so much bottled water, because of the amount of waste it produces, the gas it takes to haul it everywhere, and the petroleum products it takes to make the plastic in the bottles and all those people harp about how we have the Clean Water Act and the Water Quality Act that allows us to have clean, filtered, non-toxic water right in our homes.  And I was a big fan of that.  Mostly because I'm lazy and I don't want to have to drive to the store every time I want to get a freaking drink of water or make tea. 

Now it's like "pay out the ass for bottled water for the rest of your life" or "take the risk of getting holes in your brain by drinking tap".  We're all gonna end up in a post-apocalyptic desert world like Tank Girl.

Maybe that's not such a bad thing after all....

I CHANGED MY MIND!!!!

'Till the Clouds Roll By (1946)

  This is another of my old-ass musicals but this one is legitimate.  It's a biopic of songwriter Jerome Kern, who you've heard of even if you don't realize it.    His biggest musical was Show Boat, which was turned into a movie and launched the career of Ava Gardner.  His songs went on to be jazz standards for Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, among others ("I Won't Dance" and "A Fine Romance").  It's less of an accomplishment now, since no one's heard of it, but he also the musical that inspired the movie production of Sunny.  He won 2 Oscars and was nominated for 6 more.

This movie plays like a who's-who of talent.  Kathryn Grayson, Lena Horne, Van Johnson, Angela Lansbury (looking very hittable), and Judy Garland are all featured.  Vincente Minnelli directed his wife's musical scenes and is otherwise not associated with this film.  That's just a fun fact!

The whole film is told as a flashback after the successful opening of Show Boat on Broadway.  Kern directs his chauffeur to the brownstone where he met his mentor, Jim Hessler and then it chronicles his career.  After having been discouraged by the current trend of Broadway producers only buying English shows, Kern moves to London, meeting his future wife as well as legendary producer Charles Frohman. Frohman likes him so much, he hires him for a show back in New York, forcing the lovers apart.  Things go well for a time, giving Hessler and Kern time to write an entire musical only to be told that Mr. Frohman wouldn't be able to hear it because he was setting sail for England once more...on board the Lusitania.

Is it bad that I laughed myself sick when the camera panned over the name of the ship?  I wanna say that's bad.  It is funny the little coincidences that happen in life.  Kern only just missed the boarding of that ship. ( They water down the circumstances for the movie, depicting him as having worked all night writing songs when he actually was hungover after poker night.)

At any rate, after that brush with death, Kern went on to have many long-running musicals on Broadway in a career that lasted four decades.  So there you go.

Rock, Rock, Rock (1956)/King Kelly of the USA (1934)/Rock 'n' Roll Revue (1955)/Rhythm and Blues Revue (1955)

   This is one of those relics of film from before the days of MTV.  There was really no other way to get the acts you'd hear on the radio out to most of America other than to make a movie featuring a ton of acts.  The plot of this is ludicrously simple; a teenaged girl wants to go to prom with her boy but has to find a way to make money to buy a dress after her square of a dad cuts off her allowance.  There are a ton of stars from the 50's, including Chuck Berry and Frankie Lymon and the Teen-Agers.  He was the Justin Beiber of that decade, rocking a stage at 13.  He died at 25 from a heroin overdose, so Justin has a lot to live up to...

  Well, at least this is an original musical.  Although its existence means that I movie I really liked called Call Me Madam is basically a shameless rip-off.  That makes me a little sad.  But no one has ever heard of this and CMM starred Ethel Merman, gay icon, so I feel a little better.  Edgar Kennedy is a follies producer who falls in love with a princess on a transatlantic cruise.  Her country is flat broke (their only export is mops), so her father intends to marry her to some old guy from a neighboring country to pay off the mortgage.  Kennedy has to save the kingdom and save the girl from a loveless marriage.  He accomplishes precisely one of those.  Guess which.  

The dialogue is pretty crisp and overall this is a fun little movie.  Call Me Madam has catchier songs, better dancing, more recognizable stars, and it's in color, though, so I'm not going to be trading it out for this one any time soon.

  I'm going to put both of these together since they're basically the exact same movie.  Hell, they even used the same cut out pictures on the posters.  It's the exact same thing as Rock, Rock, Rock up above only they didn't even bother to string even a flimsy plot through it.  They're basically just music/comedy variety hours.  Man, TV really was a game-changer.  

Zombieland (2009)

  I know I'm coming to the Zombieland party a little late.  Honestly, if Netflix streaming hadn't been such a pain in the ass on Tuesday, I wouldn't have watched it at all.  The next one up in the queue was Romance and Cigarettes.  Zombieland was sitting down at #292.

The Internet Gods made their wishes known, however, and this was the only one that would play.  I will say that those were the best opening credits I have seen in a long time.  The pop-up rules were also quite entertaining throughout the film.  I didn't love the movie but it was a solid comedy.  I can't even call it a horror-comedy since there wasn't a single scare.  Not sure if that was the intent or just a misstep.  Even the big-name surprise cameo just didn't make a lot of impact on me.  Maybe because I'm not fanatical about any of his films either.  I like them; I just don't love them.

So, the story.  This is about a nerdy little dude who manages to survive the zombie plague (a la 28 Days Later) by being a complete social outcast and his quest to get back to his hometown, Columbus, OH, to see if any loved ones have also survived.  On his way, he meets a crazy-ass zombie-killer who is going to Tallahassee, FL on a quest to find Twinkies.  Woody Harrelson is at his over-the-top comedic zenith here.

Virginal Columbus thinks he may have found the survivor of his dreams when they run into feisty Wichita (Easy A's Emma Stone, who has now become an actress I will watch in just about anything) and her sister, Little Rock (Abigail Breslin has grown up quite a bit since her turn in Little Miss Sunshine).  Sadly for him, the two ladies are seasoned con artists who proceed to jack their rides no less than twice in order to make their way to Pacific Playland, an amusement park outside L.A. which is reputedly zombie-free.

The only times the movie drags its feet a little is when it's trying to build this unlikely (yet completely predictable) love story.  It is a lot of movie to dump on what amounts to a cast of 5, not counting the 1000's of (probably) unpaid zombie extras, but I think they could have punched it up a little more in those parts.

Also, I noticed Amber Heard (recently of Drive Angry) giving a fairly decent performance as Columbus' hot college neighbor-turned-undead.  I'd like to see her pop up in a couple more Easter egg roles.  I'm wary of giving her leads for fear of having a Meagan Fox clone.

But I digress.  In short, Zombieland is a fun little rom-com with zombies.  It won't rot your juicy little brain so feel free to watch repeatedly.  Mmmm, brains...

Red Riding Hood (2011)

  Sometimes, if I'm not feeling too particular, I'll go to the theater and see whichever movie is playing the soonest.  Saturday's trip to Red Riding Hood reminded me why I should stop doing that.

It's not that the movie sucks, although I didn't like it.  It's not that I paid to see a movie that I didn't like.  I chose it.  I said "yeah, okay, I'll watch that" instead of "hell no" and picking something else.  I suppose that some deeply buried part of me was curious how they were going to handle it.  This is a favorite fairy tale of mine, what with the gore and devouring of defenseless old ladies.  I wanted an epic vision that encompassed all that.

Instead, I got Twilight Redux.  Amanda Seyfried's Valerie shows a bit more spark and personality than her sparkly-vampire-lovin' counterpart, but still gets all wide-eyed and dithering over which of the two eligible bachelors she should settle down with:  the goody-two-shoes rich guy her parents picked out, or the rough-and-tumble smoldering bad boy.  Apparently, in this narrative, it's unseemly for the heroine to have them both.  Anyway, her village has been living with a werewolf for a couple of generations and after her sister gets killed, the local priest calls in a famed werewolf hunter named Father Solomon to kill the beast, but he ends up whipping the populace into a frenzy of paranoia and suspicion when he suggests that the werewolf is one of the townspeople.  Duh, that's what werewolf means.

I think if I had to describe this movie in one word it would be 'overwrought'.  It just tries too hard.  Too hard to be tragically romantic (they both love her, who should she pick?!), too hard to be suspenseful (is one of them the werewolf?!  /gasp), too hard to be a morality play (OMG she's a witch because she's wearing red!  Kill her!).  Not even dauntless co-stars like Gary Oldman, and Julie Christie can pull its nose out of the dirt.  Special shout-out to Lukas Haas as the priest.  He needs more roles.

The werewolf looks more like a Shetland Pony than a menacing beast, but otherwise the visual effects were pretty decent.  Honestly, there's no excuse for bad CGI anymore.  The cinematography is beautiful, but it all seems like stuff you've seen before and seen better.

The inquisition/witch-hunt parts in particular seemed shoehorned in to make Father Solomon more of a judgmental zealot but it just never feels like part of the character.  Props to them for bringing a variation on the Brazen Bull in the form of an Iron Elephant, though.

  The Brazen Bull was a torture device used back in Ancient Greek and then Roman days.  It was not, however, historically used by the priests of the Inquisitions but it is a spectacularly nasty device and makes a stunning point if you're trying to convince people to cease a certain activity.

Hard Candy (2005)

  I love, love, love this movie but I realize that it is not for everyone.  It has a one-two punch of a plot, disturbing to both men and women.  From my repeated viewings, I've found that women are generally uncomfortable in the beginning of the film where men don't get the full experience until about two-thirds through. 

The Three Stages of Hard Candy:

I was initially shown this film by a boyfriend who, if possible, was an even bigger film buff than I.  I remember tucking myself into a ball as far away on the couch as I could get from him, muttering about how much I fucking hated him for showing me this and what the hell was wrong with him anyway.  That was stage one.

Stage two began with the first twist.  I unfolded from the fetal position and leaned forward, confused and a little concerned.  Had I missed something?  What the hell was going on?  I was cautious, though.  Was I being baited only to be hit with more of the same creepiness?

By stage three, I was completely hooked, on the edge of my seat, eyes riveted to the screen.  I don't think I took a breath until the credits rolled.  I still felt like I needed a scrub with a Brilo pad but I no longer wished to kill my boyfriend.  In fact, I couldn't wait to get home so I could force my roommate to watch it.

I have inflicted this movie on several people since that day in 2007, most of them men.  It's become a personal litmus test for me.  Can you take it?  Can you appreciate it?  Are you worthy?  Fortunately, I either overestimate the impact or I have extremely good judgment of character, since I've only ever had one person be completely nonplussed.  Frankly, that lack of reaction made me wonder about him.  My most recent victim was my new paramour.  He liked Behind the Mask so I figured I'd up the ante.  He acquitted himself well in this challenge, which was most impressive.

"But Lucy," you say, "you haven't told us anything about the movie.  What is the plot?"

This is a valid point.  I really don't want to tell you at the risk of giving away too much.  I will tell you that the cast is sublime.  It takes actors of very high calibur to carry a movie this intense and do it all with only two main roles and two supporting.  Ellen Page proved she was outstanding in Juno, but here she is absolutely riveting as precocious, dangerously intelligent 14-year-old Hayley.  I had not seen Patrick Wilson in a lot of things so I was unprepared for how good he would be here as Jeff the 30-year-old photographer.  Because of this, I was optimistic about his role in Watchmen when it got announced.  Sandra Oh from Grey's Anatomy and Odessa Rae (billed as Jennifer Holmes for some reason) add increasing amounts of tension in their few moments of screen time but the bulk of the movie is Page and Wilson. 

Go ahead, give this one a shot.  You may be disgusted, distrubed, and defiled but you will definitely be interested.

Road Show (1941)/Hi Diddle Diddle (1943)

  So this is another one of my old-ass musicals.  It didn't have a lot of music in it but it was pretty good. 

This is about a millionaire who gets cold feet at his wedding, so his golddigger fiancee has him committed to an insane asylum.  Because apparently in the 40's it was that easy.  While in the looney bin, he meets Col. Carroway, a legitimate nut, who helps him escape.  They get picked up by a traveling circus run by a plucky gorgeous blonde and wacky shenanigans ensue.  The millionaire learns how to woo a woman without a checkbook and the blonde gets a handsome millionaire.  Everybody's happy!

  This is another film starring Adolphe Menjou (he played Col. Carroway in the above picture).  It's one of those almost-too-well-written old films where the plot is so convoluted that if you miss a couple of minutes, you've lost the thread of the whole thing.  It's almost Ocean's 11 level of conman shell-games as a father tries to help his son win back his new wife's inheritance after her jealous ex convinces her mother to lose it all on a crooked roulette wheel.  Meanwhile all the two newlyweds want to do is spend some "quality time" with each other for the two days of their honeymoon before the guy has to ship back out with the Navy but they keep getting interrupted by Menjou's crazy-ass schemes.  Pola Negri co-stars as Menjou's opera diva wife/sugar momma.  She's a Wagnerian soprano, which makes this only slightly a musical.  Now don't get me wrong.  I like the opera.  But Lohengrin just isn't the right soundtrack for zany madcap comedy.  You need some Barber of Seville up in that piece.

Rango (2011)

Nominated for Best Animated Film  I will own this movie.  It was adorable.

If you had asked me before what I thought about an animated spaghetti western involving desert animals, I would have wondered how much peyote you'd been smoking.  It works, though.  I think probably because the animals don't look very soft and cuddly.  I mean, look at that poster.  If you saw any one of those things inside your house, you wouldn't think twice about beating it to death with a fireplace poker.

There's a whole list of voice talent from Johnny Depp and Isla Fisher to Abigail Breslin, Bill Nighy, and Alfred Molina.

I know it's animated and it's done by Nickelodeon Studios, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend this to the under-7 crowd.  There are a few jokes clearly intended for adults (which are hilarious) and the theme is fairly dark.

Rango is a chameleon whose tank is bounced out of the back of his owners' hatchback on a desert highway as they try and avoid an armadillo in the road.  Rango talks to the run-over armadillo and finds that he is on a quest to "cross over to the other side" in order to find The Spirit of the West.  Already dehydrated, Rango is in search of water and is told there is a town a day's journey away.  The landscape animation is really beautiful, as are his fevered dreams.  He finds the town of Dirt on its last legs after their water supply has mysteriously dwindled and is able to successfully reinvent himself as a great western hero by killing the hawk that has been plaguing the town.  The mayor appoints him Sheriff and assigns him the job of finding out what's happened to the water.

As an adult, I found the main villain to be no surprise whatsoever, but then, I've seen Chinatown.  What's fun, though, is just how many bad guys there are.  There's the mayor's gang of henchmen (led by Ray Winstone's gila monster), a Hills Have Eyes-amount of creepy mole bank robbers, the hawk, and a rattlesnake with a gatling gun for a rattle.

This is one of those rare movies that really does have something to please everybody.  Kids will like it because it's animated, adults will like it because it's clever, and Western fans will like it for all the movie homages.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009)

  Due to the Oscar rush, I missed the Christy Experiment for February.  So she gets two for March.

Now, for those just joining us, the Christy Experiment is when my cousin Christy tries to humanize me with exposure to movies that she loves.  So far, it's not sticking but you never know.  This movie represents a slight departure, seeing as she didn't particularly care for the film but she wanted me to give it a shot and see what I thought.

I thought it was crap.

It's written and directed by John Krasinski, or Jim from The Office.  I don't watch that show and I don't know anything else about the man other than he's married to Emily Blunt from Sunshine Cleaning and that he looks like a young Craig Bierko.  Honestly, if this is the caliber of his work, he should go back to waiting tables.

The movie has no point, and barely even a plot.  It's a series of monologues by random men, taken in the name of science by a woman who was dumped by her boyfriend.  Purportedly, it gives insight into the way men feel about women but all I learned was that men are opportunistic assholes and what they know about women could be carried in a thimble with no fear of it sloshing over the edges.  Which I already knew.

It's not all pretension and hubris, though.  The piece featuring Frankie Faison talking about his father, the bathroom attendant, is beautifully poignant and there are a few genuinely funny moments.  However, most of it is banal when it's not insulting.

Definitely avoid this one.

Doll Face (1946)/The Great Gabbo (1929)/The Dancing Pirate (1936)

  This is a fairly cute old musical.  I have a fascination with Burlesque and this story was one of several written by the Queen of Burlesque herself, Gypsy Rose Lee, though billed under her real name, Louise Hovick.  The story concerns a burlesque performer named Doll Face who is rejected from legitimate musicals for being too uncultured.  Her manager hires a smarmy intellectual author to ghostwrite her memoir but then grows jealous when the author starts to pay too much attention.  The performances are quite good, considering that they actually got Perry Como, who famously insisted on only being in productions of "good taste", and Carmen Miranda.  I had always heard the name (she's the lady in the fruit hat) but I never understood why she was famous.  She is absolutely magnetic as The Nosey Best Friend, even if her accent is almost impenetrable.

  Take a look at that picture and tell me if this screams "happy musical" to you.

Me either.

So the movie is about an abusive ventriloquist, his long-suffering assistant, and his dummy.  Contrary to what the DVD sleeve says, this is NOT about how the dummy becomes a manifestation of his darker urges.  Instead, the dummy play the voice of reason and tolerance and the man himself is an arrogant asshole barely able to function in public.  He achieves great fame through his absolute mastery of ventriloquism after his assistant leaves him but ends up going completely insane when he can't win her back.

Erich Von Stroheim looks like a Bond villain (in fact, he actually played the creepy-ass chauffeur in Sunset Boulevard) and this is definitely one of his lesser films.  Avoid at all costs.

  I love how the poster promises Technicolor but the movie is in b&w.  That means I got screwed out of seeing all the pixels I was supposed to. 

Anyway, this is like Pirates of Penzance with a dude who's not a pirate meeting a girl and having to charm a town full of people.

Except this guy is a dance teacher from Boston who gets shanghaied onto a pirate ship to be a galley boy.  He escapes in California but gets caught by the townspeople who are going to hang him until the Alcalde's daughter decides she wants to learn how to waltz.  I would absolutely say pass on it, if it didn't have Frank Morgan as the Alcalde.  He was the Wizard from The Wizard of Oz.  It's weird because the character has almost all the same mannerisms, so it's like watching the Wizard pretending he's a Mexican municipal administrator named Salazar.  Seeing as I don't know any other films Frank Morgan was in, it's interesting to see.