Who Needs a Movie?

So I've been watching a ton of movies lately. It's basically what happens when you're unemployed and have a Netflix account (a more pragmatic person would have canceled their Netflix account until they found gainful unemployment, but I've never been much of a pragmatist). Anyway if you're looking for a movie, I've seen a lot of good ones lately.

Gilmore Girls loves movies--both the characters, Lorelai and Rory, as well as the show's creators, producers, and writers: the Palladinos. In the fourth season, Lorelai invites Luke to movie night ("The Fundamental Things Apply") and she asks him what he's seen (which is nothing), rattling off a list of films: Casablanca, Chinatown, Bonnie & Clyde, It Happened One Night, His Girl Friday, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and Diner. All seven films also happen to be in my book of 1,001 movies. So since I had not seen five of the seven (and the other two only recently), I put them straight at the top of by Netflix que-u-e.

Casablanca is widely regarded as the pinnacle of Hollywood's Golden Age. I myself only saw it a year or so ago around New Year's--there was snow on the ground and I had an spare bottle of champagne. There's nothing I could possibly say that hasn't already been said. So if you haven't seen it, do that. Right. Now. (Unless, like a certain friend of mine, you've made it well into your twenties without seeing Star Wars. WTF? Star Wars may not Casablanca be , but it's Star Frickin' Wars!) Enjoy with a nice champagne cocktail. Responsible for "Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world," and a dozen more instant quotes.

Chinatown is a magnificent hard-boiled detective mystery. (How much do I love noir?) I saw it earlier this year for a class where I traced the Big6 stages of information literacy through the film--very exciting stuff. Although it's set in Los Angeles circa 1937 (and the sets are very good), there's something about seeing it in 1970s Technicolor that's slightly incongruous. I'm used to my 1930s noirs in black and white. Jack Nicholson plays our detective hero, Jake Gittes, made from the same mold as Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, who navigates the Byzantine plot. Faye Dunaway plays the femme fatale with the film's most shocking revelation--what is it about those dames? And John Huston is masterful as our villain. And, of course, the famous last line which nicely sums up the entire film: "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

Bonnie & Clyde also features Faye Dunaway along with a young Warren Beatty. (Did everyone else know that Mr. Beatty is the younger brother to one Shirley MacLaine? Because I sure didn't.) This anti-establishment picture was one of the first movies to take advantage of the new rating system following the abandonment of the Hays Code, and its fresh take on violence and sex was shocking at the time. Bonnie and Clyde rob banks, of course. For me, the emotional center of the film comes when Bonnie asks Clyde, "What would you do if some miracle happened and we could walk out of here tomorrow morning and start all over again clean? No record and nobody after us, huh?" And Clyde just doesn't get it, but then their relationship was doomed from the beginning as a lawless affair. As Bonnie's mother notes, "You best keep runnin', Clyde Barrow. And you know it."

It Happened One Night, by Frank Capra, is one of the first major screwball comedies. Claudette Colbert is Ellie, an heiress on the lam, and Clark Gable is Peter, a journalist now with the scoop of a lifetime. They can't stand each other at first, so naturally they fall in love. If you want a good romantic comedy (they haven't been making them since the nineties), go rent this (and maybe brush up on the story of Jericho--it's in the Book of Joshua). Each one gives as good as they take, and my favorite scene is when they roleplay a "perfectly nice married couple" to fool some detectives who are looking for Ellie.

His Girl Friday is another screwball comedy that raises the rapid-fire dialogue to scintillating heights. Rosalind Russell plays Hildy, an ace reporter, who's leaving the newspaper business to marry a nice, normal man. Cary Grant plays her former boss and husband, Walter, who can't bear to lose her and schemes to win her back. I did have a slight problem with this film since *spoiler alert* Hildy ends up with Walter. Of course, Roz Russell is going to end up with Cary Grant, and Hildy would be bored stiff as a "real woman." But her fiance is so nice, if dull, and Walter, though charismatic, is a liar and a crook. Still, it's very funny, and you'll have to watch it several times to catch all the dialogue.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre scored Oscars for father and son, John and Walter Huston. It tells the story of two listless, American drifters (Humphrey Bogart and Tim Holt) in Tampico, Mexico who, after listening to a grizzled prospector (Walter), decide to hunt for gold. They find the gold, and plenty of it, but this is no action/adventure x-marks-the-spot treasure story, rather it's the story of how money corrupts. Indeed, Humphrey Bogart undergoes a slow-burning psychological breakdown in a highly memorable and disturbing role. It's an excellent film not only for character study but also for its setting as it was filmed in an arid Mexico.

Diner was my least favorite of the seven films. One reason is probably it's lack of major female characters, but then Sierra Madre had none. Filmed in 1982, it's set in 1959 Baltimore, and features six friends, in their twenty-somethings, in a bittersweet coming-of-age story (but then growing up is always painful). They hang out, appropriately enough, at the local diner. Its heavy in dialogue, normally something that I love, and while the dialogue's quite good, I never quite connected to the characters. It's notable for helping to launch the career of several then unknowns including Mickey Rourke and Kevin Bacon. It's a fine film, just not my cup of tea. It did make me very hungry though. Anyone up for Luke's?

So if you're trying to decide what to rent next, why don't you try one of these on for size?