I'd like to ask TCM why they put most of their classic silent films on in the middle of the night. I just saw a promo for "The Crowd" that looked very appealing, but then it gave the time--2 a.m. Tuesday. It's hard enough to stay awake for a movie with dialogue, much less one that requires keeping one's eyes on the screen constantly. (I fell asleep after the first ten minutes of "Orphans of the Storm" last week, dammit.)

I do love TCM on Saturday mornings, though, when they usually have B flicks from the 30s, 40s, and 50s. This morning there was a Nick Carter movie with Walter Pidgeon as Carter and Donald Meek as his comic-relief sidekick. George Sanders and his brother both played The Falcon in one of those series, and Sanders also was The Saint. Perfect Saturday morning entertainment, though Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple can't be beat. (Unfortunately there are only four of those.)

It's a favourite of mine. Try The Trip also directed by directed by Michael Winterbottom and featuring Steve Coogan and, Rob Brydon

Watched Kind Hearts and Coronets from beginning to end for the first time in ages. It's a great film, about as dark as black comedy ever gets yet never off-putting. Most people know it's the movie that singlehandedly made Alec Guinness a superstar. What's surprising is how subtle Guinness's acting is. It's the kind of performance that would probably pass almost unnoticed in today's slambang world. How it ever made him a star is hard to fathom from the perspective of 2013. But I don't waste time questioning it. Guinness is a great actor whose talents were appreciated, as strange as that may seem.

Add the inimitable sexiness of Joan Greenwood and a devilish performance by Dennis Price in the leading role and the film is...fantastic.

Yes. Context.


CHAC one of my favorites.


Saw "360" and can say that while it's the most structurally interesting film of the last couple years (follows a chain of interconnected lives around the globe), it's oddly superficial, as if a stogie-chomping producer cried, "I want Babel Meets Love, Actually." I was fascinated, but somehow wound up never getting to know anybody except maybe Anthony Hopkins's's's character who is allowed a monologue at a support group meeting and generally manages to do more with less.

I get through it the same way I get through Huck Finn.

Either you don't mean that or I believe you haven't thought through the implications of what you're saying. In the first place, the time period of Huck Finn was such that "nigger" was the word any person in the south would have used. But the time of Kind Hearts, it most certainly was not the accepted word in Great Britain or anywhere else. It was already a very controversial term, perhaps used frequently in "private" i.e. personal conversation, but not used in "public" i.e. movies, magazines, newspapers.

In the second place, there's a distinct difference between the words Mark Twain puts in the mouth of his character/narrator vs. the language Twain uses himself in other works (or even the preface to this one) in describing African Americans.

The use of "nigger" in Kind Hearts, on the other hand, isn't there to make a point about the people saying it. Nor is there any awareness that something shocking is being said. It's just prejudice so blind, it does not even recognize itself as such.