Cry of the City (1948)

I caught Robert Siodmak's Cry of the City this morning, and it's an excellent crime film. It's not shot quite as a noir, really, but it has plenty of wonderful shadows and play with light and dark throughout. It also boasts some excellent performances – Hope Emerson appears in a great small role and there is also a long sequence with a fabulous Shelley Winters. The film's best performance might be by young Tommy Cook who had previously had roles in such inauspicious movies as Adventures of Red Ryder and Jungle Girl.

There are many intriguing things to say about Cry of the City. It is, for one, a great example of a film made under the production code, where we can talk about bullets and fire guns, but we can't actually see anyone get shot. A woman, for example, apparently gets shot through a door, though the door's window doesn't break. A man is also stabbed to death with a switchblade through an office chair. There are two more shootings that happen in the film, neither of which looks even remotely realistic. This tends to leave 1940s writers completely off the hook – we never see where any bullets go in, so does the victim get shot fatally? Well, it's up to the writers! They just choose where they want the story to go.

Even more interesting is the film's own deeply conflicted attitude toward law enforcement and the criminal justice system. It feels very simple, watching the movie from the perspective of 2023, to see that it is actually the police who cause most of the trouble in this movie. As Victor Mature (the cop) lists all of the harm that Richard Conte (the alleged perp) has caused in act three, it's quite clear that in fact that harm has all been caused by the police themselves. All of it! What's even more intriguing is that Conte's character solves a separate crime for the police that they weren't able to solve on their own - one in which a rich old lady was allegedly tortured and killed for her jewel collection. Worse of all, perhaps, is that the lead policeman, at the end of the film, shoots an unarmed man in the back. This Cry of the City seems to present to the audience as justice. It's deeply unsettling, although I'm not sure I understand if Siodmak is as conflicted as I am.

Perhaps the key to all of this is that, according to IMDb, Conte was originally slated to play the cop and Mature the criminal, but Mature had played too many bad guys lately and 20th Century Fox swapped the roles. The criminals and those nominally assigned to catch them produce one another in Cry of the City, and it is this, finally, which makes the film as rich as it is.

The Fallen Sparrow (1943)

I persist in my fascination regarding WWII films made during WWII. The Fallen Sparrow, edited by Robert Wise (!) and directed by Richard Wallace, ​is well plotted and moves quickly. So much had happened by the end of the first 10 minutes, I was astounded by the amount of information we’d already gotten and had to look at my watch.

The best thing about this minor piece of anti-Nazi propaganda, though, is John Garfield. Despite the fact that The Fallen Sparrow was made as a vehicle for Maureen O’Hara, he’s just so good!  The camera loves him, and he’s a completely dynamic performer, immediately lovable despite his tough exterior. This film gives him some beautiful material to work through, including an intense monologue about torture in act one (of all places)! The monologue needs to be in act one because it needs to set up the psychological tension of the plot's twists and turns as well as the traumatic residue for the character.

Anyway, this is great. It's on the Criterion Channel until January 31st as part of a series celebrating Garfield's mostly underappreciated work as a performer.

The House on Telegraph Hill

Robert Wise's The House on Telegraph Hill is an excellent film noir. It's filled with surprises and it manages to be sexy and scary and suspenseful. It is, in many ways, a kind of riff on Rebecca and Gaslight, but it has new things to say and new ways to say them! Valentina Cortesa is great, and Richard Basehart is magnetic and attractive and rather disarming. The whole thing is actually quite disarming. Robert Wise's films noirs from this period are excellent. And this one is made richer and much more interesting by its link to survivors from the genocide of European Jews. This is, in other words, a post-Expressionist noir that's in many ways about both its German aesthetic roots and its U.S. American criminal subject matter. I loved this.

I Have So Much Time!

Well, not really, but still. I wish I could spend every day watching at least one movie. It would be great.
I spent most of today painting the new roommate's room. His name is Ryan and he is an MFA director here and a very good friend. The last roommate Tim had done a little damage to the walls of the room, so it needed to be repainted and we spent the day painting it a lovely rich brown color called "Crunch Granola." We're all about the Earth.

BUT, I wanted to talk abut the movies I've seen recently, because there have been some good ones.

First off, I saw Jon Favreau's blockbuster Iron Man on Sunday morning for $4! And I really liked it. Those kinds of movies are not usually my kind of thing (Transformers, Spider-man 3, and even better ones like Casino Royale) because they don't have enough action in them. They get bogged down in sentiment and romantic subplots. The studios have also tended to cast very young actors in the parts lately, as well. And I lose interest when Superman and Lois Lane look younger than me. For my money, Iron Man fell into none of those traps. I thought it was nicely plotted, interesting, and never boring. There were about two minutes total of sentimentality. It wasn't always action-packed, but the times when stuff wasn't blowing up were filled with suspenseful moments and good acting. I liked this movie a lot. I know it made millions of dollars last weekend and hardly needs my blessing, but I think it deserves its millions. I'm a fan.

And a couple days ago I watched Edward Dmytryk's film noir (I've been on a kick lately) Crossfire. It's a kind of whodunit story where we know who the killer is after the movie is about half over. The rest of the film is about catching the bad guy: trapping him in his own lies. The film stars Robert Ryan, Robert Mitchum, Robert Young, George Cooper, and Gloria Grahame. What's cool about this film (from 1947) is that it's a movie about anti-semitism. Robert Young has this fabulous monologue near the end of the film that talks about hate and how it is like a loaded gun waiting to kill someone. I was worried that it was going to be preachy (like 1947's Best Picture winner, Gentleman's Agreement) but it's not; it's really great. I got a little teary-eyed during the speech, because it's about anti-semitism specifically, but it's also about homophobia or racism or prejudice of any kind that makes people hate one another instead of allowing people to live freely in the way they wish to live. Robert Ryan (who plays the film's main bigot) got an Oscar nomination for his work in the film, but Mitchum and Young are both great and Gloria Grahame is fabulous. My favorite performance in the film is a much smaller one from a much lesser-known actor, though. His name is William Phipps and he had a long career in television after this film, but his work in Crossfire is excellent and I wish he had made more films.

I also caught the great Lindsay Anderson's first film This Sporting Life, which stars Richard Harris as a British footballer who knows all the rules on the field, but can't seem to figure anything out off the field. It's a classic angry-young-man film and a really great one. I totally loved it.

Sunburnt Barbary

I've been nursing a sunburn the past couple of days, but I've been working too. I have almost finished my syllabus for my Play Analysis class that I begin teaching on May 12th, and I finished cutting the script for Midsummer, which has its first rehearsal on May 12th.

I've also watched a couple films. First, Torch Song with Joan Crawford as a crazy bitch actress/dancer/singer woman who hates everyone and is mean to everyone. Then a blind piano player walks into her life and everything changes. And by everything, I mean nothing. But she loves the piano player. It's a weird movie because it isn't that interesting, and the whole blind love-interest thing comes across as more token than anything else. Director Charles Walters doesn't understand points of view, either, and he gives us Joan's and then her lover's and then the other people in Joan's world. Because of this we never really feel for Joan and her bitchy self; she just comes across as a gorgon. There is a bizarre blackface number that might be worth the price of a rental, though. Joan sings a song called "Two-faced Woman" in blackface with a chorus in blackface and I have no idea why.

P.S. Marjorie Rambeau was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Joan's mother in this movie. Again, there is no explanation that suffices. The part is no more than a cameo and Rambeau's acting is hardly remarkable. So strange.

Today I watched Henry Hathaway's Kiss of Death from 1947 with Victor Mature and the late Richard Widmark. It's a fairly good noir about a crook who decides to go good and rats out some other criminals, specifically Tommy Udo, a grinning, giggling murderer of old ladies played by Widmark. The plot of this film is cool and Hathaway does a great job with both light and tension, but the dialogue doesn't quite sparkle, the plot lags near the halfway point, and it felt a tad predictable at times. Still, the performances are really superb. Victor Mature gives what is probably his best performance (the scene when he first squeals is extraordinary) and it gets better the more I think about it. Richard Widmark has the flashiest part and his is the one you really remember when the picture is over. This one is definitely worth the rental if you're into film noir.

Ace in the Hole

I previously wondered aloud why Kirk Douglas wasn't nominated for the Best Actor Oscar in 1952 for his excellent work in William Wyler's film Detective Story, but I got my answer today.

That's because I finally watched his other film from the 1951 awards season: Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole. Kirk Douglas clearly gave two of the best performances of 1951, because he is fucking brilliant in Ace in the Hole. The film also happens to be stellar: bold, unforgiving, beautifully filmed in a film noir style even though it follows a newspaper man, not the typical leading man for a noir film. Ace in the Hole is an extremely intelligent satire of media and reportage. Except that it isn't funny. Ever.

Instead it's pointed and smart, skewering sensationalist news media, their corrupt tactics, and the people who buy into their kind of journalism. The DVD of Ace in the Hole was only recently released by the Criterion Collection, so this gem of Billy Wilder's oeuvre has gone largely unseen. Now is the time to check it out. It's a great film with some great performances.

Five-O

Just a brief mention of some movie madness before I troll off to bed. (Grad school, as you might have guessed, has begun all over again and all of a sudden there is a lot of work to do...)

Saw Jules Dassin's Night and the City, which is really good except for a weirdly emotional second act that doesn't really ring true. The plot is about a loser small time con artist who has big plans to take over wrestling in London. It's totally a film noir thing, which is great. But there's all of this father drama and personal love drama that just felt strange to me. Richard Widmark is the star and he's great, but Gene Tierney is wasted as his love interest. I like her better as a bitch than in this movie, where she's really more of a Loretta Young wannabe. Still, the movie is worth seeing for noir fans. Jules Dassin is a great filmmaker, though this film is not up to the standards of, say, The Naked City.

Also caught Hot Fuzz which is easily the year's funniest movie. You probably know all about this movie already, but it's a satire of the buddy cop movie. And it also is a buddy cop movie, with about a dozen cool cameos (including Bill Nighy, Steve Coogan and Cate Blanchett) and a totally fantastic performance by Timothy Dalton. This movie is hilarious, raunchy, ludicrously violent, with some wonderfully executed action sequences. It's an action movie and a comedy and it's damn good at being both. Do not miss it.

Covering the Spectrum

A couple days ago I watched Claude Chabrol's adaptation of Madame Bovary with Isabelle Huppert. It's a very well-crafted adaptation with some excellent acting and absolutely gorgeous costumes. The story, though, remains very problematic for me. It's not a very feminist tale, is it? Emma Bovary is a woman who doesn't belong in her situation. She's too talented and too much of a dreamer to be stuck in her provincial existence. In this way, everything she does seems justified. But then she is painted as living an unsustainable existence, a burning meteor headed for a crash landing. It ends badly for Emma, and there seems to be a sense of justice in the story. She gets what she deserves. And yet, she doesn't get what she deserves; not if she is justified in her actions and is as life-starved as the author makes her out to be at first. It's a deeply ambivalent tale.

A hundred miles from Claude Chabrol is Judd Apatow's Knocked Up. I assume everyone has seen this movie already. If you haven't, you really must. It's very, very funny with some excellent acting. The movie is too long (as was Apatow's other film The 40 Year Old Virgin), but it's original and clever with a wealth of funny business. I liked it better than Virgin, but I don't suppose that will be the general consensus. My favorite performance in the film is by Leslie Mann, who plays Katherine Heigl's sister. First of all, she has fantastic hair throughout the film, but her comic timing is exquisite and I believed her in every moment. I also felt like I could always laugh at her, even when she was crying or screaming or being a shrew. It's a terrific performance. I also want to say something about Paul Rudd, who looks ubelievably, impossibly gorgeous. Clueless was twelve years ago and he is better looking now than he was then. It's incredible.

And then this morning my sister and I watched Jules Dassin's 1948 film The Naked City, which is out now in a Criterion edition that shows off its absolutely splendid film noir photography. This is a superbly crafted police drama. It's not as noirish as I was expecting, but I absolutely loved it on its own merits. It's a murder mystery and a bit of a melodrama, but it's mostly a detective story with the crusty, loveable Barry Fitzgerald as chief detective and a young Don Taylor as his legwork man. Check this one out if you're into really cool 1940s cinematography.

I'm leaving Los Angeles tomorrow morning, so the next week or so is a little bit up in the air, but I have had a very nice time here and I have been lucky enough to spend some serious time with a lot of friends.

L.A. Update #2

I've been keeping busier. Last night I went to see Luisa Fernanda at Los Angeles Opera. It was delightful. I hated the set, but I had never seen a zarzuela before, and this was a really cool experience particularly because I got to hear Plácido Domingo sing the lead male role. Boy does that man have a voice!
Being downtown made my heart ache to live in Los Angeles again. There's Southern California and there's Southern California. I realized today that I like living in Tallahassee a lot better than I like living in La Verne (where my folks live). Everyone is so white out here and it all feels so... I don't know how else to describe it except by using the word fake. Everything is a chain store: chain coffee and chain restaurants and chain clothing stores and more chain restaurants. Chain hardware stores and chain movie rental stores. Chain jewelry stores, chain bagel shops and chain auto mechanics. It's a town without a bookstore. At least Tallahassee feels lived in. It's an eerie feeling: like living in a big Hollywood movie where everything is predictable.
But downtown doesn't feel like that at all. It feels different and new and messy and unpredictable. I went to the opera with Derek. We didn't even dress up: jeans and dress shirts. And we had a great time. It's just so nice down there. And the weather! I love Los Angeles.

I finished Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's book Epistemology of the Closet which is really brilliant. And I started Foucault's The History of Sexuality Part II: The Use of Pleasure, but I am getting a little bored. I need some fiction in my life, I think. Maybe I will pick up some Noël Coward for a lark.

I've been watching movies too. Melville's Bob le Flambeur (1956) is easily as good as his later masterpieces Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge. I am in LOVE with Jean-Pierre Melville. This man makes some brilliant fucking movies. Bob is an über-cool heist film without a heist. And it's an obvious predecessor to what would be called the French New Wave. The French New Wave would have been unthinkable without Bob le Flambeur (or, I think, Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows, another must-see from the 1950s.) It's a mid-1950s noir, betraying Melville's fascination with all things Yankee, but it's attitudes and self-satisfaction are unmistakeably French. Add this one to your Netflix queue.

Captain Blood is your standard Errol Flynn swashbuckler. The first one, I think. I'd never seen it, and I liked it a lot. There isn't quite enough swordfighting for my taste, but it's totally fun nonetheless and the cinematography is amazing. It also stars Olivia de Havilland, who was in all of those 1930s Errol Flynn pictures with him—before she finally escaped with Gone with the Wind and started racking up Oscars for her shelves.

Everyone's been hailing Once as a new kind of movie musical. It's a really good film, but it isn't really a watershed event in movie musical history or anything like that. Actually, it's not even really a musical so much as it is a movie with a lot of music in it. The movie follows an aspiring musician in Ireland as he records his first album and falls in love. It's filled with songs that he strums out on a guitar. I really liked it, and it has a near-perfect ending, but don't go in expecting it to change your life. It's just a really cool indie.

And Sympathy for Lady Vengeance is no Oldboy. That's all I'm saying.

Three More Movies

Zhang Yimou's Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles is a story about an old man who has a nearly irreparable relationship with his son. To fix his relationship with his son, he decides to travel from Japan to China to film something for his son: something that his son has wanted to see for a very long time. The film is about technology and human relations—the technology sometimes intervenes, sometimes cannot help at all. It's an interesting movie about communication and translation and finding the ability to be clear about emotions without the help of media. It's Zhang Yimou, too, so that means that the movie looks gorgeous. This is a far cry from Yimou's wide, sweeping costume dramas that are usually more about style than substance (Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Curse of the Golden Flower). This, rather, is a simple story about human connection. I liked it okay, but I found it to be a bit of a retread of old material. I suppose I'm a bit tired of crusty old men finding new joy and new reasons for living in the eyes of children. It's an old story, after all.

Mommie Dearest is a fucking classic. I hadn't seen it until now. Faye Dunaway gives a performance that is sheer brilliance and the little girl who plays Christina Crawford, Mara Hobel, is extraordinary. Faye's transformation is, in itself, extraordinary. She tears into the role and it's absolutely delicious to watch. I loved every minute of it. It's campy, sure, and it's a horror movie, of course—a genre not traditionally taken seriously by anyone—but this is a great movie. (P.S. We also watched some of the John Waters commentary. That man is a genius.)

Today's movie was John Huston's film noir piece The Asphalt Jungle, which I loved. The ending is too 1950s for my taste, but it's still a great noir picture, easily one of the best I've seen.

Quick Update

So we had our first meeting for what is tentatively titled The New Musical Project. The producer Gretchen, the Musical Director Joe and I met with four of our six cast members, the accompanist and the stage manager. It was an informal meet & greet and Gretchen and Joe did most of the talking. I don't have too much to say about this show right now, but I am very excited to be working on a new show (I haven't really worked on my own show since Boys' Life and Brittney's one-woman show).

It is Spring Break in a couple days and I am going down to Sarasota with two of the directors for a couple of days to check out the Asolo branch of FSU's grad school (that's where the actor MFA program is) and then I'll be back in Tally on Monday.

And I watched Géla Babluani's 13 Tzameti tonight, which is a film all about style and tension. It does what it does very very well. It's a mood piece with lots and lots of suspense. It's also a real-life film noir (not neo-noir like The Black Dahlia and Brick; real noir.) But the film doesn't really allow the viewer in. It's a good movie, but impossible to relate to on any real emotional level (unlike the excellent afore-mentioned Brick).

Noir, Neo-Noir & More Coming-of-Age

I liked Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol a lot better than I liked The Third Man (which he made a year later in 1949), and I would venture to say the reason is that I think it's a better piece of film noir than The Third Man is. Sure, The Third Man is about murder and intrigue in post-war Europe and all kinds of consulates and things like that, and The Fallen Idol is really the story of a little boy's attachment to a servant, Mr. Baines. But as I complained about before, The Third Man isn't really in black and white: it's a gray film more than anything, if you get my meaning. And though the topic of The Fallen Idol is less typically noir than you'd expect, Reed shoots entire, riveting sequences like a master of German Expressionism. The plot, too, becomes more and more gothic as the film plays on and a true villain emerges in the form of the evil Mrs. Baines.

I saw The Fallen Idol in its limited re-release down at the Rialto theatre yesterday afternoon, and though I thought the sound quality left quite a lot to be desired, the movie is great: exciting, never obvious and definitely thrilling. And because the center of the film is an irritating, unpredictable young man with good intentions to burn, one never knows what will come out of the little tyke's mouth and how much damage he can do.
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Then it was off to see Rian Johnson's debut feature Brick, about which I've already raved. I wanted to add one thing, though. I read (was it in the L. A. Times?) a review that called Brick long on style and panache but extremely short on substance. I totally disagree with this, and I don't think I would've liked the picture as much if it had been true. (I do love movies solely because of style, but there aren't too many of them.) At Brick's noir-ish center is a group of young people who don't care one solitary bit about education, but who, in a godless world, are looking for a way to become important, to make their lives matter. Brick is a portrait of often drug-addicted, always self-important youth who establish hierarchies among themselves and move in circles of their own creation. Authority is always in question and re-negotiated on a daily basis through means violent, intellectual and monetary. But the motivating purpose behind these young people, we find by the film's end, is a desire to last longer: immortality through parenthood and/or the creation of a legacy (biological or not.) It's a fabulous film, definitely long on style and panache, but also a fascinating description of America's youth.

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This morning's movie was Louis Malle's 1971 Le Souffle a Cœur (Murmur of the Heart). It was alright. Challenging, I suppose, in it's day, but more coming-of-age stuff... and to tell you the truth I'm a little burned out on that. Plus it's all about sex. Sex, sex, sex. Which is interesting, to be sure, but it's Louis Malle, so it's heterosexual sex. Which, I am bound to say, is rarely interesting to me. The film is similar in subject to last year's Ma Mère, and Murmur of the Heart is far superior to that film, though that really isn't saying much at all.

Quick Reviews I Haven't Posted Yet

I'm behind on telling y'all what I've been seeing lately. All of a sudden I have things to do and projects to work on and friends who want to spend time with me. So here we go

Theatre:

Swan Lake, in a fabulous, completely thrilling production by Matthew Bourne returned to Los Angeles and is at the Ahmanson now (or will be until Sunday night). I saw it in the highest seats in the theatre and in a packed house last Thursday night. I totally loved it. Matthew Bourne is a genius, if a bit self-conscious, and the production is superb. This show is awesome and not to be missed. Thankfully, you can all get it on DVD since the show is almost ten years old.

Mother Courage and Her Children at Cal Poly Pomona's Theatre Department (my alma mater and on-again-off-again employer) was dreadful. It's a shame, too. Many of my former students were in the show and there is a lot of talent in the department: it just needs to be trained and tapped in the right ways. Letting the actors loose with little to no direction and giving them Brecht to speak is no way to teach a group of young actors anything, unfortunately, and that is just what happened with this production. It's closed, now, thankfully, so let's all start putting it behind us and move on to something more closely resembling good theatre.

Old Movies:

Terrence Malick's Badlands, his first feature film, is a really good film about disaffected youths (there are so many of these). I saw this movie after seeing Malick's other three (later) features, so I can only really watch it through the lens of Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line and The New World. So to me, Badlands is a fascinating piece about the loss of innocence and our ability to be controlled by forces around us; led, if you will, by those who are stronger than us. I don't necessarily mean forced or raped or anything like that, but just influenced, by will perhaps, by those we love and those who wish to affect us (and maybe even those who don't want anything from us.)

Carol Reed's film noir piece The Third Man is widely considered one of the best in the genre. It stars Joseph Cotten mostly with Orson Welles appearing eventually. Most everyone has seen this movie and I know I'm sort of late to the game on this one. I liked it, and it's rather good film noir, but not quite black and white enough for my taste (too much happens during the day). I kept wishing someone slightly stronger than Cotten was leading me around that the script was a little more hard-boiled. It's written by Graham Greene, so I should've expected it to lean toward the Romantic, and perhaps that's placing an unwanted requirement on the film. I don't know; once you've seen Robert Siodmak's The Killers, I don't think there's anywhere to go but down. Still, Welles is great, there are some really cool lighting moments and the chase scene at the end is awesome.

Movies from 2005:

Zhangke Jia's The World is a slow-paced Chinese movie that reminded me a lot of Tsai Ming-Liang's Goodbye Dragon Inn. The World is not quite as slow as that, but it sure takes its time. It follows several people around a theme park in Beijing that (get this) has replicas of monuments and buildings from all over the world. The main character performs in these huge extravaganza shows that are not like anything so much as those enormous dance shows staged by Lorenz Ziegfeld in the early part of the Twentieth century. It's mostly about consumer culture and how Capitalism is ruining China, but it's often touching and powerful. The end is awful and a huge letdown, but I liked it more than I disliked it. #63 out of 85 films.

And this morning I finally got to see Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle, which everyone should go see. It's easily the best animated film that came out last year and should undoubtedly have won the Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards (but then, they didn't hand out Best Picture correctly, either, did they?) I loved this movie. It's absolutely bursting with awesome vistas and new-fangled magic. It's powerful and moving and it had stolen my heart after the first twenty minutes. It also features the voices of Jean Simmons, Lauren Bacall, Christian Bale and (!) Billy Crystal. Rent this one for sure. Miyazaki is the mastermind behind Spirited Away and I think I may like Howl's Moving Castle even better than that film and that's saying a ton.

Movies from 2006:

Christian Carion's Joyeux Noël (Merry Christmas), which was France's entry for Best Foreign Language Feature last year, totally sucks and it shouldn't have even been nominated. It's a cheese-ball pile of silliness with few redeeming qualities. It will probably be one of the worst movies on my list for 2006. Joyeux Noël is full of hokey laugh-out-loud sequences that require all suspension of disbelief but ask to be taken with complete seriousness. More than once I said "Give me a break!" out loud in the theatre and had to be shushed by strangers. This film is allegedly based on true events, but I didn't believe a bit of it.

Thankfully, I followed up Joyeux Noël by going to see last year's winner of the Oscar for Foreign Language Film: Gavin Hood's Tsotsi. And let me tell you, this movie deserved its award. It connects to the audience immediately and never looks back. I couldn't help but love the anti-hero at the center of the film and I wanted him to succeed more than anything. Presley Chweneyagae, who plays the main character is mesmerizing and compelling. There is no way to watch this movie and not fall totally in love with him. Go see it.

Things Learned This Weekend

1. There is room for discussion at my parents' house about equality for women. My sister still says things like, "It's my opinion; I don't need anything to back it up." There's just no response to that, but I think I got through to my mom just a little. (Why we were talking about North Country, a film none of us has seen, I do not know.)

2. If he consumes large quantities of carbohydrate, Aaron can drink many glasses of wine (both red and white) and not get drunk.

3. Holiday parties can be a heck of a lot of fun: even for atheists. (Is "atheist" supposed to be capitalized? I'm gonna go with no.)

4. If you want to make Aaron talk vehemently for an hour and a half, just bring up the Intelligent Design theory.

5. I still don't understand Constance Congden's The Tales of the Lost Formicans, but I enjoyed it thoroughly.

6. Robert Siodmak's The Killers from 1946 is an awesome piece of film noir. The Criterion Collection DVD, which I recently Netflixed, also contains all kinds of articles and interviews about the film noir movement, which really enhanced my knowledge on the subject. It also contains an early short film by Andrei Tarkovsky of Ernest Hemingway's story. Really cool.
It also firmly proved the point in my head that that history teacher in university all those years ago who said that film noir was a movement of the 1950's was off his rocker. I thought so at the time (and questioned him in class) but I never really got an answer until yesterday. I still don't know what that guy was talking about.

I still haven't been to the movies yet this weekend. Bee Season, anyone?