Movie Updates

Making reasonable progress on the movies.  Since the last update, we saw The Big Sleep and The Third Man.  (I came fairly late to Third Man, not watching it during my first pass through the noir canon in the early 90s. I can't recall offhand if I watched it before my first and only trip to Vienna, though I know that, either way, I wasn't inspired to take a tour of the Vienna sewers.  It's not that great of a movie (to convince me to walk through a sewer)...  I was much more inclined to visit the great museums in Vienna, and I went on a Kafka tour when in Prague just a few days later.)

We're likely to watch Etaix's last feature film, Le grand amour, tonight.*  I'm hoping next weekend we can sneak in Shoot the Piano Player on Friday, as it is fairly short at 81 minutes, and then probably Casablanca and Tati's Mon Oncle during the weekend proper.

Of course, I keep piling up great movies that we should get to by the summer -- Citizen Kain, Touch of Evil, Our Man in Havana, Key Largo, To Have and Have Not (even though the book it is based on is dreadful), The African Queen, and The Lady from Shanghai.  And this is before even getting started on Japanese films, or 80s classics or going back to the Marx Brothers or even further back to Chaplin/Keaton/Lloyd. Somewhere along the way, as I wrap up reading Don Quixote, I'll want to watch Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.  And apparently this is a controversial stance, but I have no intention of "cancelling" Woody Allen.  I'll plan on watching Sleeper, Manhattan and Annie Hall at a minimum with my son.  Probably Zelig and Bananas as well.

* As always a last minute snag.  However, instead of watching the next Fawlty Towers, I decided to watch the Northern Exposure pilot instead to see how it held up (and in a sense it is a good link to the "fish out of water" theme from The Third Man).  I forgot quite how abrasive Dr. Fleischman is in the pilot (even calling Maggie a prostitute!), but overall it is a very different paced and basically gentler comedy than Fawlty  Towers to be sure.  (I did not realize that the writers/producers were directly insprired by Fellini's Amarcord, but I can see that -- and at the pace we are going we may not get to Amarcord much before Northern Exposure, as we see 3 to 4 times as many TV episodes as movies...)  While it is still fairly low in the queue (and will be slotted in after the majority of the Britcoms**), I'd say it does hold up well.  Indeed, one of the main reasons I watched it was to decide how much it matters to me that some (and sometimes a lot) of the original music was replaced due to rights issues.  Apparently there is a Region 2 version of the full run of the series with all (or 99%) of the original music in place.  I will most likely breakdown and buy this.  Unfortunately, no such alternative exists (aside from pirated DVDs) of The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, which was never released on DVD in any region or even VHS back n the day.

** I mean at this pace, it is entirely possible I won't get back to it until the producers actually get their rumoured reboot off the ground, though it's already been delayed a couple of years, so I'm not holding my breath.