Even I Occasionally Watch Some Movies...

Since I don't have much to blog about at the moment, and most of the regular readers of this blog are quite avid cinephiles, I figured I'd recount this weekend's accomplishments -- the watching of THREE movies from start to finish. Okay, one of them I paid for and therefore couldn't walk out of, but still, there were three of them.

We started the weekend off with The Lady Eve, from the Preston Sturges collection. I believe I may have started to watch this once in Kansas, as the first fifteen minutes or so were VERY familiar and I know I saw them, and then after that nothing. I started and promptly fell asleep on a lot of movies in Kansas, and this may be one of them. This was very lighthearted, although from the get-go I remember thinking "Bringing Up Baby does this better, and Fonda is no Cary Grant". It's not a direct correlation, but there were some similarities. I enjoyed it, but of the four I've seen from the PSC, I still have to put Palm Beach Story at the top, followed by Sullivan's Travels, and the I'm not sure which comes next, The Lady Eve or the Great McGinty. Not that I disliked either, mind you. I think I chuckled more at McGinty, because he was such a rogue, although I think The Lady Eve was probably a better movie, but I've never been the hugest fan of Henry Fonda (at least not as the romantic lead) or Barbara Stanwyck. One question, though -- did they really wear bare-midriff evening gowns in those days? I know she was supposed to be exuding sex and none-too-subtly, but I couldn't see the invisible lining that many of the pseudo-revealing dresses of those days had. Those really did look like her ribs.

On Saturday night, I decided it was time to toss one to the masses of readers here and throw in To Be Or Not To Be. That, and for some reason the Enforcer didn't seem that thrilled about seeing this one, so I didn't feel the need to hold it any longer. I liked it a great deal, but I'm not sure I'd put it on the top ten. Of course, it's always hard watching older movies in the twenty-first century, because even though this movie came first, of course I'd seen The Producers first ("Heil myself"), so it gets kind of circular. Was it a serious comedy or a light-hearted drama? "They call me Concentration Camp Ehrhardt" indeed.

And speaking of Nazis and concentration camps, on Sunday I went to the movies to see Children of Men. It's one of those movies that you do leave the theater saying "I'm glad I saw it", but you don't really want that experience every day. Not a feel-good movie to say the least. I am a little tired of Western governments being equated to Nazis and Cylons, and I'm not sure whether I needed to see a movie about no one being able to have babies, but both of those are my issues, and not issues with the film. It's very much an updated version of 1984, so if you're in the mood for that kind of thing, think Clive Owen is the cat's meow, and want to hear lots of things explode, go see it.

So, for the most part, all the movies this weekend got a seven out of ten, which means 'very good films, but not likely to make a lasting lifetime impression'.

I'm still going to have to find someone to do a Bob and Bing Road movie festival with...