Andy has seen Pabst's popularity rhythmically ebb and flow over the millenia.

Heh. I always love these lists of movies. My problem is that I've been a superhero fanboy since Showcase #4 (the first Silver Age Flash; I actually own the entire Silver Age of superhero comic books, except for Superman and Batman), but I'm also about a year and a dissertation from a Ph.D. in English, with a specialty in early theater. So, sometimes I like a movie because it's well-done action/adventure fun and sometimes because it's just a great film. For example, I'm possibly the biggest fan of Ang Lee's Hulk movie, because about 5 minutes into it I realized that I needed to switch the fanboy off and let the academic enjoy the regeneration symbolism and themes.

My favorite movies of this year were The Avengers (it is REALLY hard to make a superhero team movie for an audience that ranges from fanboys like me to people who have heard of Iron Man but nothing else, and Whedon nailed it) and The Hobbit, which is actually unique and historic. Captain America and Thor were very good superhero movies. Somebody may have made a great non-superhero film this year, but if so, it was in a genre that I don't like, so I didn't see it.

Explaining The Hobbit - back in 1967, I was told in a theater directing college class that it would take 6 hours of film to completely adapt a normal-length novel, which is why so many adaptations are so bad. I've tracked this ever since, and it is true. There is only one film I have ever seen that actually took the film time to do the whole novel - the 1968 Russian Government version of War and Peace, done as a celebration of the 50th anniversary of The Revolution. Amazing film, one of the best of all time, runs over 6 hours. But, then, there's The Hobbit. It should take 6 hours to adapt. But the first movie out of announced three is well over the two hours it should be, so it is actually padded. This is historic. Nobody, ever, that I know of in the whole world history of film, has ever done this - spent more film time than it would take to fully adapt the novel. And then there are the rabbits....

Spider-Man was the most disappointing. Someone apparently decided to try to do a piece of 1940s realism, claiming that he was doing a superhero movie. That worked terribly; Spider-Man himself doesn't even show up until an hour and 15 minutes of painfully bad Realism (the genre, as opposed to actual realism) have passed. Dreadful. And Uncle Ben and Aunt May are emotionally abusive, so no one cares what happens to them. And Peter Parker is not short of money. And he's a jerk. And he loses every fight with The Lizard. And there's no J. Jonah Jameson (Peter doesn't need money), so there's no humor. Ooog.

Batman was disappointing, but not as bad as Spider-Man. The puzzling thing to me is that I've read maybe a dozen reviews of Batman, and none of them have noticed that it's supposed to be a "fall and redemption" plot. Bane takes everything from Batman - the money, the "wonderful toys", his physical health, even Alfred quits. Then Bane throws Batman into a pit and taunts him with the info that one person has actually escaped from it. So Batman, after the least-believable chiropractic adjustment in history, starts doing crunches. He rigs up a safety line and tries to climb out. And fails. And does push-ups and tries and fails again. Finally, he realizes that the only way to get out is to get rid of the safety line and let your adrenaline do its job. That works. But the problem is, the audience is supposed to SEE all these emotional changes, and the movie doesn't do that. There are two reasons: 1) Batman has made a fetish of never showing emotion, and 2) Christian Bale is pretty good at playing Batman. Devoid of that theme, the pit scene is boringly long (everyone I went with told me this, in case I hadn't noticed), and you're left with Bane's insane ramblings that sound like he's trying to be a communist, but doesn't know what one actually is. At least, unlike some of the reviewers, I could understand the words Bane was saying through the mask. And the fight and chase scenes were pretty good. But overall, a poor superhero movie.

BTW, just in case anyone cares, here's my academic list of the best (as opposed to most fun) films I have ever seen, in no serious order:

The aforementioned War and Peace
Citizen Kane lives up to its rep
Peter Brooks did a wonderful version of The Mahabarata, the classic Indian epic
I had no idea Quentin Tarantino was capable of Inglorious Basterds
Kurosawa's Ran, adapted, by Kurosawa's own admission, from King Lear, which is certainly a good place to start

- Brock Hanke

Batman was disappointing, but not as bad as Spider-Man.

I never got the first Bale Batman film--did you? It seemed like a perfectly respectable, perfectly okay, wildly padded, completely humorless but nonetheless slightly goofy take (the Himalayas? Really?) on the whole origin business.

What saved the McGuire Spidermans was the heroes haplessness, and how his powers had him just as much as he had them. Oh, and J. Jonah Jameson. The first Batman was just so damned serious. I thought Iron Man disabused us of the notion that superhero movies had to be grim and studly throughout, and the character of Banner builds a fallability into Hulk that leavens the affair. Batman missed out on all of that.

I had no idea Quentin Tarantino was capable of Inglorious Basterds.

What was there about it that surprised you? I thought Death Proof paved the way for a lot of it.

Didn't even know about Pabst's, but now I do, and thanks for the tip.

Well of the many things you have been accused of, being a hipster has never been one of them.

Hey, I'll bet I'm the only one here who can recite Lenny Bruce's "Psychopathia Sexualis" (I'm in love with a horse that comes from Dallas) without missing a beat. That's gotta make up for associating Pabst with this, rather than with hipitude.

Okay, that Bruce bit may be about 50 years old, but it's still pretty comical, and I'm sure G.W. Pabst would agree.

Has anyone ever answered the question of why, despite its hundreds of channels, non-premium cable is only allowed to show 97 movies a year, and must always be playing A Few Good Men on at least six of those channels?

Has anyone ever answered the question of why, despite its hundreds of channels, non-premium cable is only allowed to show 97 movies a year, and must always be playing A Few Good Men on at least six of those channels?

Yes, but we won't be telling you because you can't handle the truth.

I have never been much of a Loretta Young fan--and still aren't, as to her late stuff--but JOLLY and Terp and others have caused me to reconsider her other stuff, and, yes, she was good, and very beautiful. In a light comedy, I remember the early James Cagney film Taxi with her as his main squeeze.

I have never been much of a Loretta Young fan--and still aren't, as to her late stuff--but JOLLY and Terp and others have caused me to reconsider her other stuff, and, yes, she was good, and very beautiful. In a light comedy, I remember the early James Cagney film Taxi with her as his main squeeze.

You'll certainly have a chance to reconsider in January. Every Wednesday night / Thursday morning they're running nothing but Loretta Young movies. Of the 37 total, only 12 are after 1933, and the first 20 consist of 1 silent and 19 pre-codes.

P.S. The last two of the month aren't pre-code, but they're very good anyway: Cause For Alarm (1951) and The Unguarded Hour (1936), co-starring Franchot Tone at his slimy best.

Morty - When Young, Loretta could really act, although her range wasn't huge. She ended up - I don't know why - being typecast as The Good Girl. When she aged, she took that stereotype over to her TV series, and looked one-dimensional as an actress. But she was capable of more. Cagney is, I think, badly underrated. All everyone remembers is the intense film noir criminal roles. But he, too, had more to offer; among other things, he was apparently a very good song-and-dance man. Not what you'd expect, given his resume.

Jack Carter - You just NAILED the McGuire Spider-Man movies. Real good taste there. I did "get" the first Bale Batman movie. The key was an interview I read from Christian, where he said that playing Batman amounted to playing three different characters: 1) Bruce Wayne the millionaire, who is a fop, 2) Bruce Wayne in private, who is a child (arrested development from having his parents killed), and 3) Batman, who is a monster. The first movie spends most of its time walking the audience through the three different characters, and how they mesh into one life. It spends a lot of the rest of the time looking at how normal people respond to the monster Batman. I thought it was a good setup for Batman II, the Heath Ledger Joker one. That was brilliant, largely because Ledger realized that Joker is more scary if you don[t play him as a tall, thin, towering guy, like he had always been shown, even in the comics, but as a short, little crazy guy. The key scene is the one where he crashes the criminal get-together and announces that he's the boss now. Some guy twice his size objects and Whack! He's stabbed so fast no one else can really follow the action. That kind of person is always scary. Ledger's Joker is what Rorschach in Watchmen was supposed to be like, and is like in the comics. A great, great acting job, possibly so intense that it deranged Ledger, leading to his suicide.

I'd seen good Tarantino movies before, including Death Proof, and knew Quentin was capable of a lot more than the gory B-movies he sometimes makes. But Basterds was a whole extra level. The key is looking at the Nazi officer's personal story - looking at it from the point of view of the officer, who ends up getting his head tattooed the hard way at the end. If you isolate that plot, the question is, "What went wrong? How did his manipulations come to this?" And the only answer is that he has an out-of-Nazi-character moment where he does NOT shoot that little Jewish girl in the back early in the movie when she is running away. If only he had shot her - if only he'd been a TRUE Nazi - none of this, including the death of his beloved fuhrer, would have happened, since she turned out to be the mass murderer of the Nazi hierarchy in her theater. There are VERY FEW moviemakers who would base even a subplot on the premise that one moment of humanity, instead of Nazi ideology, is a tragic flaw. To a modern audience. Actually killing Hitler was a common entertainment theme is movies and comics in the 1940s, but, then, they didn't know how he was going to actually die back then. Tarantino made this movie for an audience who ALL know how the history really came out. Just the daring of that is a cut above previous Tarantino, and Tarantino is always daring. I will note that the trailers and early reviews of Django Unchained indicate that he may do it again - it seems to be a VERY daring movie, like Basterds. In short, I think that Basterds is an even greater movie than its reputation, which is excellent indeed. I was blown away. When making the list, I had to choose between it and Amelie, a tremendous French Art Film from a few years back. But I don't actually like French Art Films, so Basterds won. Fans of Amelie may have completely different lists, but even I will admit that it's one hell of a film.

- Brock

This is historic. Nobody, ever, that I know of in the whole world history of film, has ever done this - spent more film time than it would take to fully adapt the novel.

Not movies exactly, but I think this is true of I Claudius and Brideshead Revisited.

I initially read 86 as about The Mask of Doritos, which I would also watch.

But he, too, had more to offer; among other things, he was apparently a very good song-and-dance man. Not what you'd expect, given his resume.

Yankee Doodle Dandy is a fantastic look at Cagney the song-and-dance man.

I didn't see nearly as many current films this year as I normally do (combination of not living in LA anymore and Greencine just being the worst rental option for current releases), so 2012 gets an INC grade for me at this point, though, frankly, I haven't been very impressed with what I've seen so far:

Goon - B/B+
The Raid - B/B+
*Lincoln - B-
*Looper - C+
The Grey - B
*Brave - C
*Wreck it Ralph - B
*The Hobbit - C+
*Django Unchained - C
*Total Recall - D

*theater

Obviously, there's still a ton of movies I still need to see at some point: Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, Amour, Cabin in the Woods, Magic Mike, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Ted, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Killer Joe, Queen of Versailes, The Loneliest Planet, Holy Motors, The Master, Moonrise Kingdom, Photographic Memory, The Turin Horse, Searching for Sugar Man, Bernie, Declaration of War, Cloud Atlas

But he, too, had more to offer; among other things, he was apparently a very good song-and-dance man. Not what you'd expect, given his resume.

Yankee Doodle Dandy is a fantastic look at Cagney the song-and-dance man.

Infinitely better than that rah-rah wartime movie is the "Shanghai Lil" song-and-dance bit Cagney did on a bar counter with Ruby Keeler at the end of Footlight Parade. He's 11 years younger, far livelier, and has a much better supporting cast, which gathers at the bar and gives out with one sardonic comment after another as prelude to Shanghai Lil's appearance. Hookers dropping lines like "Say, that Oriental / dame is detrimental / to. our. in-dus-tree", and every ethnic group on earth chiming in with pithy remarks of their own.

EDIT: There's a brief ebay ad at the beginning of the clip that wasn't there when I first went to it, but it's well worth waiting out the 10 or 15 seconds it takes to get to the number.

That was fantastic, Andy. I'll admit I had never heard of Footlight Parade; is the rest of it worth it?

I'll second 113. Cagney has more dimension than onemight think, if all one has in mind is this gangster who slaps women around. He could sing, dance, and do comedy, as Footlight Parade clearly demonstrates. It's a fine comedy without taking the dancing and singing into account. He did some other light comedies, usually playing his tough guy for fun, in the '30s. Taxi, Hard to Handle, The Irish in Us, The St. Louis Kid, Lady Killer (where he takes a bite out of Mae Clarke's ###). He's also great in Billy Wilder's late screwball One, Two, Three.

The first Batman was just so damned serious. I thought Iron Man disabused us of the notion that superhero movies had to be grim and studly throughout, and the character of Banner builds a fallability into Hulk that leavens the affair. Batman missed out on all of that.

Batman Begins came out three years before the first Iron Man movie, which would explain why it missed out on what Iron Man paved the way for.

That was fantastic, Andy. I'll admit I had never heard of Footlight Parade; is the rest of it worth it?

Busby Berkeley made three great musicals, all in the same year (1933): 42nd Street; Gold Diggers of 1933; and Footlight Parade. All involve the same basic plot, namely the trials and tribulations of putting on a musical. All feature fabulous musical numbers, plus (and this is what sets them apart IMO) an unmatched mix of Warner Brothers stars and character actors: Warner Baxter, Ginger Rogers, Una Merkel, Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, Guy Kibbee, Warren William, Joan Blondell, Aline MacMahon, Ned Sparks, Cagney, Bebe Daniels, and so on and so on.

42nd Street probably has the best dialogue, centered around trash talking chorus girls like "Anytime Annie" ("The only time she ever said no, she didn't hear the question") and "Minnie the Mountaineer" ("Must have been tough on your mother, not having any children"). It also has the second best leading part (after Cagney in Footlight Parade), Warner Baxter's Julian Marsh as the play's chain-smoking and overstressed director. The closing shot of him standing anonymously by the exit doors while the departing audience says how "lucky" he was to have such an easy cast to work with is one of the greatest endings I've ever seen, in its cynical and yet accepting take on human nature. Baxter is absolutely perfect for the role

Gold Diggers of 1933 is probably the weakest of the three, but it's still a good 8.5 on a 10 scale. It starts out with Ginger Rogers singing "We're In The Money", first in English and then in Pig Latin, covered mainly by a giant gold coin and little else. The closing production number, "My Forgotten Man," is a beautifully bitter expression of the sentiments of the forgotten soldiers of WWI who were then relegated to the unemployment lines at the time of the movie. You also get Warren William, but unfortunately in this case he's a good guy, which means he seems vaguely out of his usual amoral and larcenous character.

Footlight Parade is all Cagney and Blondell, who always worked perfectly together as a sort of ideal working class Depression couple. The plot is kind of pedestrian, but with Cagney and Blondell just about anything works. And then there's that incredible "Shanghai Lil" finale that I linked to above.

And the truth is that you really can't go wrong with any of them, even if like me, you're not in love with the musical genre. I can think of only about 10 or 12 musicals I can bear to watch, but these three are right there at the top, both for the musical numbers and everything else.

I'll second 113. Cagney has more dimension than onemight think, if all one has in mind is this gangster who slaps women around. He could sing, dance, and do comedy, as Footlight Parade clearly demonstrates. It's a fine comedy without taking the dancing and singing into account. He did some other light comedies, usually playing his tough guy for fun, in the '30s. Taxi, Hard to Handle, The Irish in Us, The St. Louis Kid, Lady Killer (where he takes a bite out of Mae Clarke's ###). He's also great in Billy Wilder's late screwball One, Two, Three.

Morty, did you catch These Wilder Years the other day, the 1956 movie with Cagney and Stanwyck? It was about a wealthy business executive who returns to his hometown to try to connect with an illegitimate son he'd fathered 20 years earlier and then run out on. Stanwyck is the head of the orphanage who won't cough up the kid's adoption papers. That provides the basic tension in the plot, but Cagney and Stanwyck add a dimension to it that only actors on their pantheonic level can provide. If you haven't seen it, you should definitely catch it the next time. It's the best non-gangster or non-government agent role I've ever seen Cagney in, and Stanwyck is---well, she's Stanwyck, and nothing more really needs to be said. Greatest actress who ever walked the Earth.

Have you seen

One, Two, Three

? Maybe that is gangster role, though--he works as a head company man in Berlin for Coca Cola. He's also not a gangster in those light comedies of the early '30s I mentioned. Also, he made a couple of good westerns in the '50s--adds a dimension in one of them to the term cattle baron: Tribute to a Bad Man and Run For Cover. He's very good in Mister Roberts and the John Ford war comedy with Dan Dailey, What Price Glory. Just in case you haven't seen them and ever get the time and opportunity. He's a truly great actor as well as magnificent star.

I did see The Wilder Years. Not recently, though. It is good but definitely temperate. It's like the screwball comedy he made with Bette Davis, The Bride Came C.O.D: nice, but it could have been better. Still, it's good to see two thoroughbreds just set a pace and hold it effortlessly. It gives Cagney a chance to show some ordinary guy sensitivity, too.

Does it make me a bad person that one of my all time favorite movies is Starship Troopers? It came out the year I graduated high school and my buddy and I must've gone to see it in the theater every weekend for a month and a half. Not even the terrible acting and ridiculously stupid plot were enough to put a damper on the sheer awesomeness (and they possibly might have even added to the fun of it).

Does it make me a bad person that one of my all time favorite movies is Starship Troopers?


My friends and I could never quite make up our mind whether the film was pro-fascist or a warning against fascism. 95% of the film would make Leni Riefenstahl proud and another 4% is PG sexy time. But the opening sequence is somebody entering the military website. That opening raises the possibility that the idea is that this is the sort of fascist propaganda you would see -- and shame on the audience for buying into it. We figured that latter interpretation was too subtle for the filmmakers involved but you never know.

Similarly with Die Hard, I can never decide if its anti-feminist, pro-masculine subtext is (a) sub-conscious and unintentionally hilarious; (b) intentional with a wink; (c) intentional and kinda disturbing; (d) intentional and cynical.

Or with Andrew Dice Clay. I'd swear that, at first, he was playing a character you were supposed to laugh at but then, at least after the controversy if not before, he was playing the same character but you were supposed to laugh with him. Or did I just get tired of his schtick. (See also the first season of Married with Children which was a pretty good, albeit extreme, parody of the Cosby Show but then became, well, Married with Children.)

Have you seen

One, Two, Three

? Maybe that is gangster role, though--he works as a head company man in Berlin for Coca Cola.

the best cameo in that movie is Red Buttons doing an imitation of Cagney to Cagney--and Jimmy does a wonderful double-take and then continues in his character

My friends and I could never quite make up our mind whether the film was pro-fascist or a warning against fascism

Verhoeven's Starship Troopers is absolutely, 100% taking the piss out of the perceived pro-fascist bent of Heinlein's source version.

It's horribly ham-fisted and not half as clever as it thinks it is (and the inescapable problem with using pretty, dull, vapid actors for your satire is that you're stuck watching pretty, dull, vapid actors struggle to act), but along with his earlier Robocop it's clear that Verhoeven brought a darkly cynical and subversive attitude towards militarism and corporatism to his films at the time.

the best cameo in that movie is Red Buttons doing an imitation of Cagney to Cagney--and Jimmy does a wonderful double-take and then continues in his character

It has been a while since I've seen the movie, and I had forgotten this. Thanks for bringing up that memory.

the best cameo in that movie is Red Buttons doing an imitation of Cagney to Cagney--and Jimmy does a wonderful double-take and then continues in his character

One Two Three was alright, but it seems like it ends too soon. Like Cagney got sick of Wilder and wouldn't agree to film any more scenes.

Is there a bigger falloff for a director in a decade or so between Stalag 17 and Kiss Me Stupid?

Actually killing Hitler was a common entertainment theme is movies and comics in the 1940s, but, then, they didn't know how he was going to actually die back then.

Hey, they were still killing Hitler in movies in 1970 (Flesh Feast, with a way past her prime Veronica Lake.)

Walt et al - Starship Troopers the BOOK is meant to be a children's book written as propaganda supporting the Korean War (Heinlein was a far better children's author than an adult SF writer), and a paean to foot soldiers as being far superior to people like aircraft pilots and officers, who work at a distance, rather than up close and personal. I don't think much of propagandizing kids, so I don't think much of the book. The movie, however, is self-aware about this, and is actually done as a lampoon of the book. Since the director thought it important that enough of the book get through that the audience would have some idea of what he was lampooning, the movie is a wee tad disjointed. I don't think, however, that you're a bad person if you like it. Actually, I like most of it, and can use the mute button for the rest. The movie could use better actors, but, well, Denise Richards is not cast for her acting chops, and nobody else in the movie is really any better.

My politics, to give context, are moderate Socialism. Actually, most of my politics comes from reading George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells and then finding out that they were members of a political think tank called The Fabian Society. The Fabians still exist, but the modern version is not the same as the Victorian, because a lot of the Fabian ideas (like the League of Nations) were included in the aftermath of WWI. At that time, the Fabians had a VERY high reputation among professional politicians. That's all gone away now.

Veronica Lake, in her prime, was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. I don't know that I particularly want to see her past her prime.

- Brock

Aaaah Starship Troopers. I haven't seen that in ages. It has what has to be the most ridiculous hero bonus in movie history. At the beginning of the movie, during the invasion of Klendathu, there is a scene where about 30 Troopers surround one bug, and shoot it for about 30 seconds before it finally goes down. By the end of the movie Rico and is gunning them down by the dozens.

I am this close to downloading it now... might just be the vodka talking. Would you like to learn more...

Cagney has more dimension than one might think, if all one has in mind is this gangster who slaps women around. He could sing, dance, and do comedy, as Footlight Parade clearly demonstrates. It's a fine comedy without taking the dancing and singing into account. He did some other light comedies, usually playing his tough guy for fun, in the '30s. Taxi, Hard to Handle, The Irish in Us, The St. Louis Kid, Lady Killer (where he takes a bite out of Mae Clarke's ###). He's also great in Billy Wilder's late screwball One, Two, Three.

"Hard To Handle" is probably my favorite Cagney comedy. There are in-jokes all over the place, including several involving grapefruit. And Ruth Donnelly, one of the great character actresses of the '30s (you can find her in the likes of "Ladies They Talk About," as a women's prison matron, and "Hands Across The Table"), is a hoot as the mother of the girl Cagney's involved with.

Someone mentioned "Taxi!" among Loretta Young films. She got that role by default in late 1931 when Carole Lombard declined to be loaned out from Paramount to Warners. "Taxi!" became a hit and Lombard regretted her decision for years; one wonders if Cagney might have elicited that certain something Carole had which wasn't unearthed until John Barrymore and Howard Hawks did it in "Twentieth Century."

BTW, glad to be back. For a day or so, my computer was unable to access BTF. Happy 2013 to all.

Is there a bigger falloff for a director in a decade or so between Stalag 17 and Kiss Me Stupid?

Well, Preston Sturges fell off a cliff. He went from Unfaithfully Yours to The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend in six months. and never recovered. Those who do comedy seem to suddenly simply lose their touch, but even so, Sturges's fall is precipitous.

130:

I like in Hard to Handle how Cagney is always biting his girl on the lip or slapping her ass, and when she reproves him, "That hurts!" he replies, "That's love." It's a nice touch to his character.

That's one of my favorites. Another is Lady Killer. Cagney goes on a wild ride, starting as an usher in a movie theater to being involved with gangsters to being a stunt man, then star, in Hollywood movies. It's all done with irrepressible verve.

Hmmmm. From the comments above, I'm very tempted to finally get around to watching Starship Troopers. Didn't realize, somehow, that Verhoeven had directed; Robocop is one of those movies I didn't expect much at all out of but was genuinely wowed by. (I'd had the same experience a few years earlier with another sf flick, Road Warrior.)

Well, darn. Troopers isn't available from Netflix for instant viewing ... though having had wi-fi installed here at the house yesterday evening I'm getting only on intermittent connection via the Blu-Ray player anyway. Time to hook the ethernet cable back up, I guess; with any luck, that'll remedy the situation.

(I'm also getting really, really slow loading from BTF & am wondering if others are as well. Doesn't seem to be affecting the other sites I frequent.)

Starship Troopers comes along on a cable station about once every three days, which may be why it's hard to get from Netflix. As I wrote before, you will get much more out of it if you've read the book and can see the lampooning going on. It's important to remember that the original book is meant as children's propaganda. It's also worth remembering that Heinlein had several years when he could write but was otherwise in poor health. His Lazarus Long books are nothing more than the wishful ramblings of an old man longing for a return to his youth and also for immortality. Before that, he got into Ayn Rand, and some of his adult work (Farnham's Freehold) are essentially SF screed novels for Rand's ludicrous philosophy. Starship Troopers shows some signs of the Ayn Rand, although I don't have any complete chronology of what he wrote when, and whether there are some pieces that are not Rand screed even after he got hypnotized by her.

I thought that Robocop was OK, but nothing more than that. The premise was too close to Judge Dredd and the people who want policemen to think like Dredd for my taste (Judge Dredd is an English comic series that runs in a book called 2000 A.D., if I remember right. Most of the great English comic-book writers who migrated to America's higher pay (Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman) got their first tastes of fame writing Dredd. I don't know if the new English hot kid on the block, Kieron Guillen (sp?), wrote any Dredd or not, but he's a name for comic book fans to watch for.). There are two movies of Dredd, and each one is worse than the other. Robocop has Peter Weller, which automatically puts it ahead of the Dredd movies.

Road Warrior, though, was genuinely impressive, albeit depressing. Check out who dies and who lives. All the really competent people die (except for Mel Gibson's Mad Max). The bulk of the oil rig crowd does survive, but the cost is all their most talented people. VERY dystopian. VERY depressing. VERY well done.

Oh, and for 2012 movies, I thought that Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Slayer, was absolutely hilarious. One of the best comedies I've seen in years. - Brock

Well, Preston Sturges fell off a cliff. He went from Unfaithfully Yours to The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend in six months. and never recovered. Those who do comedy seem to suddenly simply lose their touch, but even so, Sturges's fall is precipitous.

Even Unfaithfully Yours was a big drop from Sturges's comedies. Not counting Easy Living and Remember the Night, which he wrote but didn't direct, he went on a roll from The Great McGinty to Hail The Conquering Hero, had a groaner in The Great Moment, and then recovered with The Sin of Harold Diddlebock before losing it completely after Unfaithfully Yours the next year. In terms of longevity, he was kind of the Clara Bow of directors, and he only excelled in one genre.

I like in Hard to Handle how Cagney is always biting his girl on the lip or slapping her ass, and when she reproves him, "That hurts!" he replies, "That's love." It's a nice touch to his character.

That's one of my favorites. Another is Lady Killer. Cagney goes on a wild ride, starting as an usher in a movie theater to being involved with gangsters to being a stunt man, then star, in Hollywood movies. It's all done with irrepressible verve.

Truth is, is there a single Cagney movie from the early 30's that isn't worth watching just for Cagney Alone? Lady Killer is terrific, but what about Blonde Crazy (my personal favorite, with Blondell and the great Louis Calhern), Picture Snatcher, and Smart Money?

I have to disagree about Unfaithfully Yours. Sturges has about six movies of masterpiece or near-masterpiece quality, and that's one of them. It's a great role he wrote for Harrison, with great lines, one that Harrison played variations on for the rest of his career, including his Henry Higgins. OTOH, I don't hold Diddlebock in that high of a regard. It's a great idea, but Lloyd was way beyond his acting prime. It clunks.

I don't know if I'd blame Sturges too much for the failure of The Great Moment. It was taken out of his control and he disowned it. And even so, it's interesting.

EDIT: Yeah, Sturges was limited to his genre (for that matter, so was Hitchcock)--but he got the most out of it, stretching it's limits.

There's a moment in The Roaring Twenties, not a great film by any means, but: Cagney and Jeffrey Lynn and Humphrey Bogart are bootleggers, and Cagney (at this point) doesn't drink. They get a new shipment in, and while Cagney is talking to one or the other or both of his partners about something unrelated, he tests the quality of the booze by shaking a few drops into his palms and smelling it on them. It could be a director's touch (Raoul Walsh knew what he was doing, too), but it strikes me as one of the million bits of "business" that Cagney would put into his roles, just adding some depth and nuance to an otherwise stolid scene. He pretty much invented acting in talking pictures.

Brock --

Yeah, I read Starship Troopers at age 15 or so, & while I liked it fine, even then I found the military rah-rahing way overboard. Other than Puppet Masters, which is one of my favorite novels ever (I'm a total sucker for alien-possession plots), I've found Heinlein largely unreadable for decades, mostly for sociopolitical reasons; I think Farnham's Freehold was the last novel of his I was able to choke down, back when I was a college sophomore circa 1978.

Never read any Judge Dredd (nor seen either movie adapation), so can't compare it to RoboCop. Gillen I know mainly from his ace Phonogram minis for Image a few years back. I'm sort of disheartened that he's since apparently hitched his plow to Marvel & to some of its flagship characters, simply because my interest into that company's mainstream universe ended about 1970 (same goes for DC, come to that).

Yeah, that's so true. Cagney was always in the moment. It's unfortunate that after a lot to time an icon becomes the captive of that public persona--even of the impressionist's caricature of that persona. The best, like Cagney (and Stewart and Grant) transcend that, but unless you seek out their other stuff, you just know them for what they became legendary.

OTOH, I don't hold Diddlebock in that high of a regard.

One line alone elevates that one way above the dew line. When Harold Lloyd is taken to a bar and says that he's never had a drink, Edgar Kennedy says, "Sir, you arouse the artist in me", and then concocts a drink called "The Diddlebock" that sets him off on a two day bender. It's a line with a million applications in life.

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There's a moment in The Roaring Twenties, not a great film by any means, but: Cagney and Jeffrey Lynn and Humphrey Bogart are bootleggers, and Cagney (at this point) doesn't drink. They get a new shipment in, and while Cagney is talking to one or the other or both of his partners about something unrelated, he tests the quality of the booze by shaking a few drops into his palms and smelling it on them. It could be a director's touch (Raoul Walsh knew what he was doing, too), but it strikes me as one of the million bits of "business" that Cagney would put into his roles, just adding some depth and nuance to an otherwise stolid scene. He pretty much invented acting in talking pictures.

Good observation, and its truth becomes apparent the more you see of Cagney in those early days.

Bogey was also fabulous as the one dimensional thug in that film, a role he perfected over the first decade of his Hollywood career. My favorite line came right in the opening scene, when they're in the trenches in the final moments of WWI. Bogart has a German lined up in his crosshairs just when the word comes of the truce, and Cagney shouts over to him (paraphrasing), "DON'T SHOOT! THAT BOY COULDN'T BE MORE THAN FIFTEEN YEARS OLD!" Whereupon Bogart flashes an evil smirk, pulls the trigger, and simply says, "He'll never see sixteen."

I think Morgan's Creek, Lady Eve and Sullivan's Travels are the top tier Sturges films. Then Unfaithfully Yours, then everything else except the one about the dentist which is bottom of the barrel.

I have to disagree about Unfaithfully Yours. Sturges has about six movies of masterpiece or near-masterpiece quality, and that's one of them. It's a great role he wrote for Harrison, with great lines, one that Harrison played variations on for the rest of his career, including his Henry Higgins.

Just saw this again & the Castro Theatre in SF (total palace for old movies) & it's even better than I remembered. The chart showing how the recording device works is absolutely hilarious, even more so on a big screen so you can really see it. Great black comedy, 10/10.

If I ranked Sturges's films, on this day I go with this ranking:

Sullivan's Travels
The Lady Eve
The Great McGinty
Miracle at Morgan's Creek
The Palm Beach Story
Unfaithfully Yours
Hail the Conquering Hero

Remember, if you think I slighted your favorite, I think they're all great--pretty near in their different ways equally great. That's seven that might be considered masterpieces for lesser film makers.

Then there's the merely excellent: Xmas in July, followed by the nevertheless good Diddlebock.

And, finally, the completely execrable Beautiful Blond from Bashful Bend.

(I don't consider The Great Moment Sturges's because it was taken out of his control and Sturges disowned it.)

Sturges took the screwball to a totally new level--or, if you prefer, made his screwballs a sub-genre unto themselves. The same can be said of all great artist working in any genre. Lubitsch is unique; so is Capra. Hawks's Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday--they're the closest in stylistic telling to Sturges. Hell, many have worked in the suspense-thriller field or made westerns, but there's nobody that did it like Hitchcock and Ford, or in the way they did it. Same with Sturges. He had it, he used it to the limit, then he lost it. Pauline Kael once blamed it on leaving Paramount Pictures: as she put it, he gained his independence but at the cost of becoming an orphan. He had a support system there that went down to the bit players. One thing you notice in Unfaithfully Yours is that it isn't replete with his usual eccentric supporting characters and bit players. That hurt, it's true, but I think he had just used himself all up in a meteoric burst of great comic creativity. And that's even more impressive when you realize all of the great stuff (except Unfaithfully Yours) issued forth from him about a three/four-year span. Looks longer because some were delayed because he was fighting with producers or censors.

Just saw this again & the Castro Theatre in SF (total palace for old movies) & it's even better than I remembered. The chart showing how the recording device works is absolutely hilarious, even more so on a big screen so you can really see it. Great black comedy, 10/10.

Yes, and it's hard to see now how this was a box-office bomb, even considering the times. Right around the time of the release of the movie, Harrison broke off an affair with Carole Landis and she committed suicide. The ensuing scandal swamped the movie, and Harrison fled to England. This was to be Sturges's comeback movie. It was to put him back on top, and it should have.

And of course one of the best lines in any Sturges film got a lot better almost 60 years later: Joel McCrea insisting, in Sullivan's Travels: "I want to make O Brother, Where Art Thou?!" I was reminded of that line last night while watching Almodóvar's Flower of My Secret, where a subplot revolves around an inane movie scenario – a scenario that Almodóvar went on to film, years later, as Volver.

A person has to pause (something that a Sturges movie doesn't encourage) and ponder a while to realize how really ambitious in concept and scope Sullivan's Travels is.

the trailers and early reviews of Django Unchained indicate that he may do it again - it seems to be a VERY daring movie, like Basterds

The only film I saw in theaters in 2012 was Django Unchained (many reasons, weird year for me in many ways). Unfortunately, though Django is fun in some ways, it's a silly, protracted movie. It's a little bit Brother Where Art Thou, actually (Don Johnson instead of John Goodman as an absurd Klansman), and it's a lot Coen-Bros. True Grit, and a wee bit Blazing Saddles, and it's very much in the pulp-Western idiom, with blaxploitation in the mix, and lots of character-actor cameos. But Inglourious Basterds was phenomenal, I agree, and Django is nothing of the kind. Just another goofy loud violent movie, IMO.

Sullivan's Travels was one of those films I'd wanted to see for approximately forever when I finally came across a copy (VHS back then, of course) at a nearby rental place back in ... the mid-'90s? Thereabouts, anyway. (I think the same place also supplied me with The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T about the same time.)

I need to watch it again; I remember liking it a lot.

Whereas of course I'm on record as maintaining that Tarantino needs to be beaten. Severely. After being tarred & feathered. And set on fire.

Death Proof was the most insulting awful thing I've ever paid full (well, matinee) price to subject myself to.* I've wanted that smarmy, self-obsessed piece chained up & brutalized ever since. I'd probably have hunted him down & done it myself if Zombie Planet, or whatever it was called, hadn't been half-decent.



*strong]Graffiti Bridge was probably just as bad, but that was probably a buck at a second-run house.