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Favorite Films
1) Summertime (1955)
2) The Innocents (1961)
3) Angels in America (2003)
4) The American Friend (1977)
5) Chinatown (1974)
6) Bringing Up Baby (1938)
7) Psycho (1960)
8) Nashville (1976)
9) Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971)
10) Bye Bye Brazil (1979)
11) Amarcord (1973)
12) Petulia (1968)
13) The Palm Beach Story (1942)
14) Hud (1963)
15) Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
16) Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
17) Citizen Kane (1941)
18) Sunset Boulevard (1950)
19) A Touch of Evil (1958)
20) The Panic in Needle Park (1971)
21) Wonder Boys (2000)
22) Midnight Cowboy (1969)
23) Scarface (1932)
24) The Player (1992)
25) Stage Door (1937)
26) Beat the Devil (1953)
27) Julia (1977)
28) Fargo (1996)
29) Ed Wood (1994)
30) The Third Man (1949)
31) Passion Fish (1992)
32) You Can Count On Me (2000)
33) It Happened One Night(1934)
34) Cabaret (1972)
35) The African Queen (1951)
Guilty Pleasures:
Hudson Hawk (1991)
The Parent Trap (1961)
Dr Zhivago (1965)
The Trouble with Angels (1966)
The Ten Commandments (1953)
There's No Business Like Show Business (1954)
Freaky Friday (2003)
Zabriskie Point (1970)
Reviews
Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994)
Seems to last for eternity
Interview with the Vampire opens with a great helicopter shot of the San Francisco Ferry Building and zooms up Market St. After that, everything is wrong. Christian Slater as a journalist? You're supposed to believe him in that role because he wears glasses and chain smokes. Brad Pitt was so-so as a disillusioned vampire, but looked so gorgeous in his fake teeth, who cares? But Tom Cruise was simply ludicrous as Lestat, delivering lines like, "I give you everlasting life and you fritter it away on the blood of poodles." Probably the book, which I found impossible to read, was every bit as bad as the film, but there must have been a way to film this garbage. After all, the sets and costumes were quite good, and the homoeroticism strongly emphasized, probably to Tom's intense annoyance. Seeing him with his mouth full of incisors pretending to be a bored with eternal life fop was more than anyone should be expected to bear. There may be some roles he can perform (Jerry McGuire), but god knows why anyone would believe him as a vampire. I tried to watch this twice, but the whole catastrophe was too embarrassing, not to mention dull.
Where Angels Go Trouble Follows! (1968)
Seriously weird
Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows, the sequel to The Trouble with Angels, is in sad need of a skilled director like Ida Lupino at the helm. This is a seriously weird movie. It looked as if halfway through the making of the sequel, someone decided the film needed "relevant" elements. "Relevant" always turns out to look hopelessly dated a generation later. It begins with hip Sister George (I wonder if this was an in joke about The Killing of Sister George, a contemporary play about lesbians) picketing a large institution. You never get to see what she opposes, only that she is for Peace and Involvement. Nowadays, she'd be blocking abortion clinics, but in the 1960's nuns were hip and anti-war. Think Mary Tyler Moore and Sister Sourire.
Anyway, George really is a pain, constantly complaining about anything and everything that doesn't pass her standards for Contemporary Meaning. Clothes are a big problem. The sisters wear antiquated habits, while the girls' gym outfits are designed for use in the 1940's, which means they have to be tossed into the dustbin of history. By the end of the film, the girls are frugging in miniskirts, and the nuns are wearing knee length midis that enable them to stride about with a sense of purpose.
A moment of high camp is achieved on a desert highway similar to the one Captain America and Billy were to roar up and down the following year. The bus breaks down, and the first passersby turn out to be Hell's Angels. They seem to have been on every Interstate between California and the Mississippi in those days. One of the bikers insults Sister George by calling her a penguin, then threatens her with a switchblade. Later, the leader of the pack asks if she was frightened. "Let's just say I never feared for my immortal soul." To which the biker replies, "Crazy," and moved by her spiritual depth, fixes the bus for her. Presumably we are all seeking the same higher truths, only some do it on Harleys. When asked how she pulled the bikers over to her side, George smirks, "We communicated."
The strangest part is that the object of the nuns' cross-country trip, a "youth rally" in Santa Barbara, is never actually shown. The girls do turn on in a psychedelically lit gymnasium at an all boys' school, and perform this weird tribal dance with the boys that looked group frottage. The producers may have worried that the rally would require too many extras, but the zillions of Indians in the Milton Berle sequence could have easily been converted to Catholic hippies. Anyway, the film ends with the bus roaring down the highway, and a cut to the sisters' "Change of Habit," those knee length skirts which they show off crossing a campus that now looks like The Harrad Experiment. What a disappointment.