(Still cold-or-allergy-ridden. We persevere.)

Last night I watched for the first time Intermezzo, a 1938/1939 remake of the 1936 Swedish film of the same name. It's a classic melodrama about adultery, starring the divine Leslie Howard as the violinist hero whose marriage breaks up when he meets a much younger pianist, played by Ingrid Bergman. ( ( Read more... )

Because of the week's tiredness and general bleah, I found myself relaxing by watching fashion documentaries on the various streaming sites (Amazon, Netflix, Hulu Plus). As one does.

The 2011 film Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, co-directed by the director of the new documentary Dior and I, was fascinating in its portrait of an eccentric ( Read more... )

1) When I was in the Nearby City's airport last month, I saw a handsome older man wearing a 'shorts suit' (ie. Bermuda shorts and jacket). He looked distinguished, tan, well-groomed, and altogether on point --which I wouldn't have expected. If he had been wearing a seersucker shorts-suit like this Dashing Tweeds outfit, via Grey Fox, I think I ( Read more... )

Because this movie is haunting me ( Read more... )

At last at last I got to see Only Lovers Left Alive. It was straight-out wonderful, feeding a lot of my aesthetic needs: languorous pacing (but nicely judged), sumptuously decaying locations, proper married-people romantic interaction between Adam (Tom Hiddleston's delicious character) and Eve (Tilda Swinton's awesome character), witty and metaphor ( Read more... )

Well, that was a crazy week and weekend. Was it actually a hundred days long? It rather felt like it.

But now it's Monday, and an easier day, and therefore we have time to meme and appreciate.

Via mamculuna, my ten most CRUCIAL CRUCIAL CRUCIAL-ASS movies, those that have defined me for good or ill, with a lot of childhood favorites included. I have a hard ( Read more... )

At the border of afternoon and evening, waiting for the right time to take Master Danger out on an errand, I decided I would pass a little time with television. The local weather wasn't on yet, so I still more idly checked other channels to pass a few moments ( Read more... )

In case you missed them --

The AV Club looks at Astaire and Rogers. I'm not completely convinced by Gwen Ihnat's readings of some of their films, but it's a good overview.

Emma Thompson is profiled in The Observer, in advance of a hoped-for film release of a film she wrote about John Ruskin and his wife Effie ( Read more... )

It is a day of rain and work here (with perhaps time to clean as well). That means, of course, that I am suddenly yearning for distraction from the many things I need to accomplish. ANYWAY, 8 Things:

1) I have a sudden mighty need to see Francois Truffaut's last film Confidentially Yours, a Hitchcockian homage starring Fanny Ardant ( Read more... )

Off to a profoundly busy day, but I first have to record a most amazing film I watched last night -- All Night Long, a 1962 Basil Dearden modern-day adaptation of Othello set in the London jazz world, with Patrick McGoohan as the adaptation's version of Iago ( Read more... )