Oldies Save the Week

Dog days of January are here indeed for new releases. Next up (down) is the uninspired and unfunny WHEN IN ROME---another case of wanting my money back except I saw this at a free screening. A young woman goes to Rome for a friend's wedding, falls for grooms best man, grabs up coins from a fountain, and finds that the men who threw in the coins will now fall in love with her and follow her back to NYC (???!!!!???) Obviously this story is not grounded in reality, but some fantasy la la land, and it is cloying and dull. You have been warned.

Fortunately, DVD's have been invented for granting the cinematic fix needed to get through a dull week going out to movies......first up this week was CRANK (2006)--a totally high adrenaline, nervous busy camera film that is nearly without redeeming social value, full of vulgar violence, crude sex and nudity (well, maybe that's a plus), wild unbelievable car chases and near escapes, excessive profanity, and gratuitous drug use. In other words, Toni and I rather enjoyed it. We found out too late that you can make this DVD into a "family-friendly audio experience" by listening to the movie with out expletives (!!!!)--unfortunately it's still got all that other "R" rated hardcore stuff. The plot--British actor Jason Statham (who deserves better) is injected with a poison that will eventually stop his heart (couldn't they just shoot him dead?), so to stay alive he must crank up his adrenaline to keep from falling asleep, which he does much to the distress of his enemies by doing hundreds of wild and extreme things, like crazy driving, sex in public, injecting epinephrine to his heart, so that he can spend his final couple of hours running all over LA trying to track down and kill the guy who injected him. It may offend you in any number of ways, but it won't bore you, and there are some crude (see above) laughs.

One of four films that features the delightful Margaret Rutherford as Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, MURDER AT THE GALLOP (1963) is a breezy, amusing murder mystery very memorable for the great cast including the hilarious Rutherford, Robert Morley, Flora Robson and Rutherford's real life husband Stringer Davis. The other delightfully British comedy/mysteries in that series include MURDER MOST FOUL, MURDER AHOY and MURDER SHE SAID and they are all priceless gems. I remember first seeing them with my sister during the summer of '69 on the 1pm matinee on TV. My mother thought it was awful that we watched TV in the middle of the day, but we took our lunch break from summer chores then, and the film(s) hold(s) up incredibly well today.

It was Flora Robson night on TMC so next up was a great Errol Flynn film that I'd never seen called THE SEA HAWK (1947), with Flynn as a charming pirate who convinces Queen
Elizabeth I (played by Robson )to allow him to plunder from Spanish ships as they come back from the New World with gold and treasures stolen from the indigenous people there. There is some romance (with a daughter of the Spanish Consulate!--Claude Rains) and some sword fighting, naturally, and some amusing political talk with the queen, full of double-entendres. This is a perfectly good reason for staying up until midnight--it is a lot of fun to watch.

Oscar nominees announced Tuesday 2 Feb, and my top films of the Year!