Here’s the fifth set of movies in my onging Patrick’s 100.

Sometimes the fun of a list of movies you like comes in just throwing out ten titles that aren’t of the same genre and have no real connection to each other at all. I’ve done a few sets that were all sci-fi, for example. This set, is a little of many genres just for fun.

As before, these are in no particular order. In fact, these are about as random as they come.

61. Carbon Copy (1981) - George Segal is a successful businessman (thanks to his wife’s father’s company) when a young Denzel Washington shows up on his door and calling him “daddy.” Hilarity ensues as Segal finds himself kicked out of the wife’s house and forced to live in the slums with his son…and learn a little about prejudice along the way.

62. The Caine Mutiny (1954) - As a general rule, I hate war pictures. This one is a rare exception. Humphrey Bogart is great at Captan Queeg, the paranoid soldier who puts his ship at risk leaving his senior crew members no choice but to take command of the ship.

63. The Cannonball Run (1981) - Yes, I’m serious. It is what it is, and that’s mindless entertainment, which we all need once in a while. And the bloopers during the credits are worth watching the whole movie for.

64. All The President’s Men (1976) - The story of the Watergate break-in from the vantage point of the reporters who wouldn’t stop searching for the truth. There are genuine scary moments in this tense drama, and that, I think is part of the point: Nixon’s White House was accused of almost everything under the sun, and finding yourself on the wrong side of that Oval Office was supposed to be scary.

65. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) - Who’d want to hijack a subway train? A group of heavily-armed men with a plan to make their crazy idea work. Some of the wisecracks are a little dated today, but it’s still a great film, headed by Walter Matthau as the New York City transit detective who’s determined to track down the hijackers down to the last Gesundheit.

66. A Christmas Story (1983) - Need I say more?

67. Outbreak (1995) - This is probably not a film that a hypochondriac should enjoy, but this medical thriller about a deadly virus on the loose in a California town is definitely on my list. There’s even a government conspiracy plot here. What’s not to love?

68. The Fugitive (1993) - One of the best movies Harrison Ford ever did, and Tommy Lee Jones steals the show repeatedly as the quick-witted marshall who is trailing the man wrongly accused of killing his wife. This is a long movie, but it pulls you in and doesn’t feel long at all.

69. Quiz Show (1994) - Robert Redford directed this movie about the quiz show scandals of the 1950s and the story of an American hero who fell hard after admitting that all was not as it appeared.

70. Wag the Dog (1997) - This is probably one of my all-time favorite comedies. A president gets involved in a sex scandal, so his secret advisers hire a Hollywood producer to fabricate a small world to unite the country around him and ignore the accusations. Despite all the laughs — and there are lots of them — it’s a little scary how plausible this made-up scenario seems to be.

Look for the remaining 30 in my list over the next couple of weeks.

Here’s the fifth set of movies in my onging Patrick’s 100.

Let’s hear it for some horror! Here’s a collection of ten movies on my list of 100 films I enjoy that are not for the faint of heart. Or something like that.

As before, these are in no particular order.

51. Halloween (1978) - What a great movie. The suspense really gets you, and for those of us who were lucky enough to see it when it first debuted, the shocks were amazing. Nowadays, this same kind of movie is so predictable that it’s almost hard to even fake surprise when the killer appears out of nowhere. But this one packed a real punch and still does. And that little music cue that happens when Jamie Lee Curtis is slumped against the doorway as Michael Myers rises up…if that doesn’t give you a chill, you’re not a horror fan.

52. The Thing (1982) - A murderous alien monster attacking scientists in a remote research station in the arctic. It’s tight quarters and no one knows who to trust. With a hint of cabin fever mixed in for good measure.

53. Christine (1983) - Another great horror soundtrack in this Stephen King story of the car that will not die, but will kill whenever it gets in gear.

54. Phantoms (1998) - Of all of the movies made from Dean Koontz novels, this one is the best, and really the only decent one. There’s a good mix of suspense and humor and somehow you’re left wondering if it just might be possible….

55. The Tingler (1959) - This is as campy a horror movie as has ever been made, but with Vincent Price as a mad scientist who discovers a live organism in the spines of people who have been scared to death, how can you lose? When this film first hit theaters, select seats were rigged with electrodes that would fire off at a critical moment to make the movie-goers feel like the Tingler had grabbed on. And there’s a masterfully-done color scene in this otherwise-black-and-white movie in which a deaf mute gets a fatal case of the Tingler’s grasp.

56. The Deadly Game (1982) - This was a stage play shot for television and aired on HBO in the early 80s. George Segal is an American traveling salesman in Switzerland who gets caught in a snowstorm and finds himself in the home of a collection of retired lawyers who have developed an odd parlor game. They invite him to play, and he agrees, not realizing that it’s a game that’s played to the death.

57. The Vanishing (1993) - Want to see the difference between what a European audience wants and what an American audience wants when it comes to the big ending? Then just rent the American version and the French version and watch them back to back, French first. The story involves a teacher who works up the courage to do something really terrible, and a man obsessed with finding, once and for all, the victim of the teacher’s little experiment.

58. Thr3e (2006) - Based on the book by Christian author Ted Dekker, Thr3e is the story of a college student tormented by a secret in his past and stalked by a psychopath. You won’t see the end coming, but they cleverly show you how all of the seemingly unlikely pieces of the puzzle do, in fact, fit together! Despite a few over-the-top performances, it’s still an entertaining, if lesser-known, picture.

59. Pet Sematary (1989) - Despite one of the most ridiculous songs, “I don’t want to be buried…in a pet sematary” and some spectacularly bad acting in parts, this Stephen King movie is still entertaining.

60. Poltergeist (1982) - “They’re here.” And of course, the problem starts with the television. Yeah, yeah…blame TV. This little movie is the only Poltergeist flick you ever need to see. Don’t waste your time with Part II, and don’t even consider Part III, which feels as though the script was blank after about page 20. Sometimes, you do everything you can and should do in the original.

There are more of my 100 Movies coming before the Arch-a-thon wraps up at noon, so stick with me.

Here’s the fifth set of movies in my onging Patrick’s 100.

I decided to do a collection of science fiction films in this grouping of ten, with a big concentration on Star Trek and Star Wars (and a few others thrown in for good measure).

As before, these are in no particular order.

41. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) - This is a lousy movie. It’s almost an exercise in how not to do a science fiction film when it comes to spending an hour and a half on special effects and about ten minutes on character development. But still, it’s important because it resurrected the Star Trek franchise and there are fascinating looks at the good old Enterprise that we’ve never seen before (or since). It also gave a new generation of fans the chance to warm up to what started at that weird little TV show.

42. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) - In a perfect world, this would have been the movie that relaunched Gene Roddenberry’s dream. This one had everything: a fantastic villain, special effects that didn’t get in the way of the story, action, adventure, location, and the connection between the characters that was oddly missing from the first picture. It is the second best of the Star Trek movies in my book, and I note with amusement that it contains what my mom calls one of the most annoying lines ever: when Kirk and company are looking at the Genesis project’s results inside the dead moon, Dr. Carol Marcus looks at Kirk and says, “Can I cook or can’t I?” Mom says she just wants to slap her over that line.

43. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) - Everyone knew Spock couldn’t stay dead, especially after dying twice in the second movie. But this story carried the family aspect of ‘Trek’ to the next level in a story about sacrifice and what friends will really do for each other when they’re important enough.

44. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) - I debated whether to include this one. It’s a great movie, but I have to admit no wealth of patience with a movie set hundreds of years in the future that then “cheaps out” by having characters come back in time to “present day” so they can shoot on location without building any elaborate “city of tomorrow” sets. Still, it’s a good story that unfortunately sets us up for film that seemed to want to take the “worst” title away from the first one.

45. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) - Other than a cameo for a couple of the original cast members in the next film, this was essentially the swan song movie for the cast of the original series. The elements of family here are alive and well and stronger than ever. This is easily, hands down, the best of the ‘Trek’ films; part of me wishes they would have just stopped here. And that collection of autographs that appear on the screen as the Enterprise makes its final trip home actually manages to still choke me up because it comes as the period of such a beautifully-rendered sentence.

46. Star Wars (1977) - I was seven when this movie came out. Archie was born that year. Ouch! This was the first “real” science fiction movie I saw in the theater, and it was the first science fiction film that made me like the genre. In fact, it was only after watching Star Wars so many times that I gave Star Trek, the TV series, a real try.

47. The Empire Strikes Back (1980) - This was a great movie, but there was just something odd here. It seemed to suffer from some kind of “middle child syndrome.” It was just stuck in the middle between the first one, which is great, and the last one, which was good, but it doesn’t seem to have a real ending to me. In fact, the first time I saw it, I thought maybe the theater had forgotten to show the last reel before rolling the credits. Still, it’s an enjoyable film, though I’d recommend having the next movie on my list warmed up and ready to play right behind it.

48. The Return of the Jedi (1983) - What a way to end a story. The good guys win — as if anyone thought they wouldn’t — the Force survives, and even evil gets its redemption. I’m not particularly interested in what happens after this picture because it ended so beautifully. And I never could get that interested in what happened before six pictures earlier, because I already knew what was going to happen four pictures later. So to me, the Star Wars trilogy will always be all she wrote on that franchise. Sorry, Jar Jar, “yer out!”

49. Soylent Green (1973) - And now for something completely different…this is a chilling movie, because somehow, despite all of the dire, worst-case scenario conditions depicted, somewhere, in the back of your mind, it seems like it could actually happen. Even when that famous last line comes, somehow, society seems just capable of doing what is being depicted. That’s a scary thought.

50. The Truman Show (1998) - If Jim Carrey makes a movie, there’s a 98% chance that I won’t watch it. I don’t like his brand of campy, over-the-top silly comedy. I don’t find it funny. But both of the movies on my list in which Carrey appears are roles in which he largely plays it straight, and this is one of them. I think on some level, we’ve all wondered what it would be like if our life was some weird reality show; I know I’ve had moments where I have felt like any minute some producer would step out from behind a wall and tell me that I was on Candid Camera or something like that. I like that it’s also a kind of commentary on society that everyone else would get so caught up in what ends up being…just a TV show.

There are more of my 100 Movies coming before the Arch-a-thon wraps up at noon, so stick with me.

Here’s the third set of movies in my onging Patrick’s 100. This time, here are 10 comedies. They aren’t the only comedies on my list, but I wanted to try to offer ten titles that fell into the same genre.

The first 10 of my favorite motion pictures can be found here. As before, these are in no particular order. I invite you to come up with your own list of 100 movies!

21. Clue (1985) - I distinctly remember being bummed out when I learned a movie was being made about the classic board game. I was even more annoyed when I found out it was going to be a comedy. Then I saw the movie, and realized that it was so outrageously funny that I must have been crazy to doubt the grand plan. And it was an interesting little trick they played on movie-goers: the film was shot with three different endings that rotated. The home video version has an option that allows you to choose one random ending, as you would have seen at the theater, or to see all three solutions back to back. Leave it to the late Madeline Khan to steal the show with the “flames” speech toward the end. From the look on Martin Mull’s face, I’m convinced it was a blooper that was deemed funny enough to keep in.

22. Murder By Death (1976) - Before Clue, this movie might have been the greatest whodunit spoof. It was written by Neil Simon, which is pretty much all I need to say, but I won’t stop there: it featured a cast of oddballs, from David Niven to Peter Falk to Truman Capote, in a parody of all of the famous detectives trying to solve a murder that makes no sense at all. When you find out who really “done” it, it makes even less sense, but getting there is all the fun.

23. 9 to 5 (1980) - If you’ve ever worked for an idiot boss, you can find something in this movie to relate to. My favorite line comes when Lily Tomlin’s character thinks she has killed her supervisor. Her partners in the alleged crime, Dolly Parton and Jane Fonda try desperately to calm her down, when she blurts out, “Don’t be a fool, I’ve killed the boss! Don’t you think they’re not going to fire me for a thing like that!”

24. Airplane (1980) - This movie is so full of sight gags and puns that you have to watch it a few times before you begin to get them all. And even then, you miss things. You gotta love the captain’s odd questions and Barbara Billingsley’s stint as a “jive” translator. But Johnny, the screwball air traffic controller steals this show every time you think things can’t get more outrageous.

25. The Thrill of It All (1963) - You may well have never heard of this little gem. It’s not one of the most well-known comedies, but I remembered it from having seen it when I was little and it still makes me laugh. James Garner is an OB-GYN and Doris Day is his wife, who happens to be chosen to become a television commercial spokeswoman. Her success begins to overshadow his, and their entire household is turned upside down. And then there’s that business with the car, the swimming pool and lots and lots of suds. If you see it in a rental store, I recommend it.

26. My Cousin Vinnie (1992) - TV Land, which likes to call itself “Movie Land” even though it is, in fact, TV Land, just played this movie last week. That means, of course, that it will probably replay about sixteen more times over the next two months or so. But it’s definitely worth the watch. Joe Pesci and Fred Gwynne should have made more movies together. My favorite line from Gwynne comes in the middle of Pesci’s questioning of a witness about two juveniles in a strong Brooklyn accent: “What is a ‘yoot?’”

27. O’Hara’s Wife (1982) - This is far from a five-star film, and it is actually the first movie I’ve ever purchased on DVD in which the dub quality is so bad that I am actually geeky enough to go off about it. The levels are horrible: the video level is too high, the setup is too low, the sound isn’t great, either. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play? Yeah, yeah, back to the story: just when overworked attorney Ed Asner finally takes time for a vacation with wife Mariette Hartley, she suddenly dies. But she’s back in a flash, as a ghost, making sure he sticks to the plan. It has some funny moments, including a line from Asner to some lazy colleagues that I’ll admit to having stolen a few times in real life: “All it takes is a willingness to just get up off your lazy asses and just do it.” I did not follow that with throwing a stack of papers into the air, but believe me, I was tempted.

28. Ruthless People (1986) - This movie is just hilarious. Danny DeVito is planning to kill his annoying wife, Bette Midler, just as kidnappers come along and take her away. They demand ransom or she’s dead. Problem solved, right? Nope. The kidnappers realize she’s more than they can handle, prompting them to drop the price, and prompting DeVito to dare them to kill her. One of my all-time favorite movie lines comes when Middler learns she’s been “marked down:” weeping, she says, “I’ve been kidnapped by K Mart.”

29. Seems Like Old Times (1980) - Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase already appeared together in another movie on my list, Foul Play, and they’re together again in this film, written by Neil Simon. Chase is Hawn’s ex, Hawn is a defense attorney, her new husband is about to be appointed attorney general, and Chase is forced to rob a bank at gunpoint by kidnappers. This movie is full of Simon’s snappy dialog and lots of goofiness, but it’s great fun.

30. Dr. Strangelove (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) (1964) - Ironically, two movies about World War III made their debut in 1964. The other was Fail-Safe, which I like a lot better than this one. But when you have Peter Sellers playing multiple roles including a president who admonishes colleagues by saying, “You can’t fight in here, this is a war room!” and none other than Slim Pickens riding a bomb to the ground like he’s on a bucking bronco, it has to place somewhere on the list.

There are my latest ten. Have you seen any of them? Are you likely to try any of them? Be sure to check back during the Arch-a-thon because there’ll be 40 more of my 100 Movies appearing this weekend!

Here’s the second set of movies in my onging Patrick’s 100. I know that it has been a while since the first post in this series, but I decided I wanted to save a few listings for this special weekend.

The first 10 of my favorite motion pictures can be found here. As before, these are in no particular order, although all of these happen to be films directed by the legendary Alfred Hitchcock. The first two on this list, Psycho and Vertigo are my favorites of his work.

My longtime readers probably already know that I’m an Alfred Hitchcock fan. I think he was a genius when it came to telling a story and there are still young directors being influenced by his work. There are some obvious titles that any fan of Hitch would have, and at least one that they probably don’t talk about all that much.

11. Psycho (1960) - Probably the best horror movie ever made, as long as you go in not knowing the surprise ending, Psycho was intentionally made in black and white because Hitch felt that color would be too gory. And it was made without nudity so that Hitch could have fun with the censors by creating the famous shower scene that showed no breasts, but made it look like you’d seen everything. So what did Gus Van Sant do in the remake? Go with color and nudity. Way to miss the point! For those of us who rush to get to a movie on time, or at least on time enough that we miss the endless previews and not any of the movie itself, we can thank this film for starting that tradition: in the old days, it was customary for people to just show up in the middle of a film and figure out what was what as it went along. Since the top-billed star of the movie was shockingly killed off in the first third, Hitch demanded that his audience see the movie from the beginning, and got movie theaters to play along, thus adding to the intrigue of what the movie was about. Even today, its low-budget shooting is enough to send a chill on a dark and stormy night.

12. Vertigo (1958) - One of these days, I’m going to go to San Francisco and see some of the real locations that appeared in this film. (If you’ve been reading these Arch-a-thon posts, you’ll know that soon I’ll have another, more important reason to visit that area, too.) Vertigo is a haunting film about a woman tortured by ghosts from the past, and an ex-detective hired to track her to make sure no harm comes to her. The detective becomes obsessed with the woman when tragedy strikes. But after he recovers, his obsession is reignited when he sees someone who could be the spitting image of woman he had been hired to protect.

13. Rope (1948) - This could be one of Hitch’s least-known color pictures, and that’s likely because of the fact that its odd shooting style made the pacing drag throughout. For this movie, Hitch decided to shoot the film as if it were a stage play. The camera moves around the set, following the action, drifting from one conversation to another where appropriate, and films a complete reel at a time. One film reel was about nine or ten minutes long, so you end up with a movie full of ten-minute takes pieced together while the camera pans behind someone’s back: it’s the old reel on one side, and when the camera moves back out from the person’s back, you’ve started a new reel. The problem with this, of course, is that you see precisely what Hitch was trying to hide. Screenwriter Arthur Laurents complained about the casting of the movie, which was supposedly about two gay killers who kill a classmate just to experience the sensation of killing (borrowing from the real-life Leopold and Loeb case) was supposed to have, as some minor subplot, the fact that their teacher had previously had some relationship with one of them; teacher Jimmy Stewart isn’t believable as having had a torrid affair with anyone, and since the alleged “gay” subplot is never even mentioned, you’re left thinking that something isn’t quite right beyond the murder itself. The concept of what they do with the body during a dinner party makes for a suspenseful flick despite the slow points.

14. The Trouble With Harry (1955) - Leave it to Alfred Hitchcock to turn a murder into a black comedy about a corpse that won’t stay in the ground! The whole “whodunit” part is almost lost in the race to keep the victim from being discovered, which makes it all the more fun.

15. Shadow of a Doubt (1943) - This is rumored to be one of Hitchcock’s personal favorites, his daughter has told interviewers, because he loved the idea of bringing menace to a small town. Uncle Charlie is that menace, and his namesake realizes during his visit to her comically-clueless family that all is not what it seems with everyone’s favorite relative.

16. Rear Window (1954) - While I like this movie, I don’t think I like it quite as much as most of Hitchcock fans seem to. I definitely like the concept, though, because if any of us found ourselves immobilized in our apartment which happened to overlook such an oddball collection of characters, we’d all sit there staring. But I think I’d at least be smart enough to make sure the lights were all off first! Raymond Burr plays a great heavy. (Pardon the pun.)

17. The Birds (1963) - Of all of Hitch’s films, this is probably the only one for which I could imagine a valid case for a remake. The technology of special effects back in the 1960s didn’t really do this thriller about birds suddenly turning on mankind justice. Then again, even with some effects that today look like effects, the acting and the suspense is still very enjoyable. A remake, though, could also help produce that ending Hitch wanted but wasn’t able to shoot because of budget constraints. The original ending — at least, the planned ending — had the human victims of the bird attack escaping their small town only to approach the Golden Gate Bridge and find it covered with birds. What an ending that would have been!

18. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) - The crash of the cymbals is the cue to murder. And the journey to that cymbal crash takes a typical American family from Marrakech to London in a web of deceit and espionage. Doris Day surprised the makers of the film for her dramatic acting ability, and the song she performed, “Que Sera, Sera,” became a hit, even if it didn’t make a whole lot of sense in this particular story.

19. Strangers On a Train (1951) - I’ll kill yours…you kill mine. Criss-cross. That’s the proposal from a man who hates his father to a man who hates his wife. The trouble is, one of the men doesn’t take the proposal as seriously as the other. It’s great suspense with some clever moments, including a humorous crowd shot at a tennis match.

20. North by Northwest (1959) - Let me say it upfront: I’m not particularly a fan of Cary Grant. I don’t really know what it was about him, but something just annoys me about him. Still, the fun of watching an ordinary man find himself in the middle of a case of mistaken identity and espionage. There’s that famous scene of Grant being chased through a corn field by a crop duster, and the big chase scene at Mt. Rushmore. Then there’s that shot at the very end of the film, the ultimate of double entendres. But you probably already know about that one, right?

So that’s my top Hitchcock picks. There may be a few more Hitchcock movies somewhere in the list, but these are my favorites of his work. Be sure to check back during the Arch-a-thon because there’ll be plenty more of my 100 Movies appearing this weekend!

Viral marketing for the new Batman film, The Dark Knight, caused the evacuation of a Texas television station.

Employees at KENS-TV in San Antonio received what is being described as an “ugly cake” with wires sticking out of it.  Assuming that it just might be a bomb or some other bit of bad business, police were immediately called and the station was cleared out until investigators could determine that all was well.

The cake, it turns out, appears to be one of several designed to promote the film.  Other cakes sent to theaters and film critics have featured telephone numbers written in icing on the cake, and cell phones sealed in evidence bags inside the cake.  Upon calling the number listed on the cake with the included cell phone, callers would presumably receive messages about the film.

This particular cake apparently came from a local theater chain, according to the industry site Newsblues.  A spokesman for that chain, Newsblues reports, said that an email should have been sent to the station alerting them to the odd delivery.

Ya think?

Paul of Aurora Walking Vacation just recently finished listing 100 of his own favorite films, so I thought I’d give my own list of 100 favorite movies, also split into ten parts.

You aren’t likely to agree with all of my selections, and that’s okay. There are some of you who will be shocked that some of your favorite movies aren’t on my list. One example will undoubtedly be The Godfather. I’ve never watched that film; I’m just not into gangster movies. I’m also not into westerns. And as a general rule, I’m not into war pictures, either, although I can think of at least two war movies that are on my list.

It’s important to note that these movies are listed in absolutely no particular order at all. I would be hard-pressed to come up with an actual ranking; it was difficult enough to come up with only 100 movies that top my list. There are probably a good 20 or so that should be here that are hanging out in the wings. These first ten are not necessarily my 10 favorite…they’re just 10 of my 100 favorite.

You are more than welcome to tell me with each set of ten how much you agree or disagree with each selection. And I hope you’ll be motivated to come up with your own list of 100 movies! It would be interesting to see how many pictures we all agree about.

So that’s the setup. Here are the first offerings on my list, and these are not my ten favorite movies…they’re just ten random selections out of my 100 choices:

1. Foul Play (1978) - I’ve probably seen this movie more than most of the others on the list. For some reason, I was fascinated with it by the time it made its way to HBO…and it was one of the first movies featured on that channel when my parents first got cable. Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase made a great team in this comedic murder mystery that borrowed several gimmicks from Hitchcock.

2. On Golden Pond (1981) -If Foul Play is the picture I’ve seen the most times out of the 100, this one probably comes in a close second. Katherine Hepburn and Henry Fonda were a great pair as the aging Thayers. The fight to repair a broken relationship between father and daughter was especially poignant when we later learned that much of the emotion the characters were feeling were felt by Fonda and his real-life daughter, Jane. This will sound strange coming from someone who was about 12 the first time he saw the picture, but I felt that I could identify with some aspects of Norman Thayer, Jr. And the older I get, the more I seem to feel that way.

3. Fail-Safe (1964) - If Henry Fonda had ever chosen to run for president in the 1960s, between this movie and The Best Man, he probably would have been elected. Fail-Safe, based on the novel of the same name, tells the terrifying story of a country’s machines getting out of control and launching what could be the start of World War III. The stark black and white photography and tight shots add to the tension as the president makes a stunning decision to save the world. If you’ve never seen this one, do yourself a favor and rent it.

4. 12 Angry Men (1957) - The third Henry Fonda title on my list is this fascinating look inside a jury room. A tough kid from the slums is on trial for murder, and what looks like an open-and-shut case becomes a case study in prejudice and discrimination. As the lone juror who votes “not guilty,” Fonda is brilliant. Lee J. Cobb gives a masterful performance as the last holdout whose trouble with his own son leads to the breaking point.

5. Anatomy of a Murder (1959) - This courtroom drama tells the story of an Army lieutenant who stands accused of murder after shooting a man who raped his overly-flirty wife. It is an interesting look at how society dealt with the subject of rape and temporary insanity.

6. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) - It’s hard to believe that I was a sophomore in high school when this movie came out. At the same time, it’s hard to believe that it wasn’t even longer ago than that. Matthew Broderick is the kid all of us wanted to be in school: the guy who could get away with anything. The fact that none of the rest of us could have begun to pull the stunts he did makes his character so easy to root for. That, and the fact that the vice principal, played by Jeffrey Jones, is exactly the kind of guy you want Bueler to beat at all costs. It was fairly mindless, but it’s the kind of mindlessness that still manages to entertain without making you feel like you’ve given an hour and a half of your life you’ll never get back.

7. WarGames (1983) - At the start of the personal computer revolution, when people were actually beginning to realize that computers in the home wasn’t such an outlandish idea, WarGames put the fear of God into parents who were convinced that their kid would be the one to fool NORAD into thinking the Russians were attacking. Thank goodness the Cold War lasted long enough for this one to get made. There’s just one problem that I’ll complain about as long as I live: when David and Jennifer made the reservation for two airline tickets to Paris, they did so in her name. Later, after David is arrested, McKittrick asks him who he (David) is going to Paris with. If the reservation had been in Jennifer’s name, McKittrick wouldn’t have known that David was even going to Paris.

8. Desk Set (1957) - When most people are asked to name their favorite Spencer Tracy-Katherine Hepburn picture, Desk Set is generally not it. But maybe the appeal of this one is that it is set at the headquarters of a television network and it focuses on the battle of man (actually woman) vs. machine that makes it so appealing. Of course, this was the late 1950s, which meant that the computers were of the giant, mainframe variety. Bet you’ll never guess who wins the war!

9. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) - Another Tracy-Hepburn picture on the list, and this time, the happy couple is married with a grown daughter who decides to get engaged. Trouble is, her intended happens to have, as Tracy’s character says in the famous closing speech, “a pigmentation problem.” Through lots of laughter and even some tears by the picture’s close, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner tackles interracial relationships in a way that really makes you think. The real story with this movie, though, was that Tracy was dying when production started, and insurance companies wouldn’t cover the picture because his health made the venture too risky; Hepburn and director Stanley Kramer put their own salaries in escrow so that they could make the picture, and Tracy made it through to the end during which he delivered a touching speech about the love he felt for his wife, emotion that clearly borrows from the real-life feelings the two legendary actors felt for each other. Tracy died just 17 days after filming ended.

10. Titanic (1997) - It was the film expected to sink two major studios, Paramount and 20th Century Fox. That was the rumor after this monster of a budget-breaker would be released six months late. But there’s something about this picture, framed around fictional survivor Rose Dawson’s story, that makes us think about the people on board the ship rather than the ship itself. There’s humor, there’s a love triangle, there’s the chase of the young lovers as they try to escape her destiny, and the ultimate suspense of the iceburg looming somewhere out there. By the time the burg is finally in sight, you’ve managed to convince yourself that somehow, they’ll miss it, after all. The real question is whether or not Rose actually dies in the last scene. I’m still not sure, although I tend to think she did. It doesn’t really matter, though, because either in reality or in spirit, her gesture of dropping the Heart of the Ocean over the wreckage has joined Rose and Jack together in spirit after all those eighty-plus years.

So there are the first ten of 100 movies on my favorites list. I invite you to come up with your own list as well…just leave a link here or at Paul’s blog.

I’m so glad that Thursday has finally arrived.  That means that I’ll no longer have to see all the commercials for the premiere of the new Indiana Jones movie.

It has been 19 years since the last Indiana Jones movie, and I have no idea what the official title was back then.  The first one, Raiders of the Lost Ark, came out when I was 11.  It didn’t interest me at all.  I never saw it in a theater, and I even managed to miss all the showings on HBO back then.  (And missing a movie that HBO decided to run was a feat in itself.)

I don’t really know why the series didn’t interest me.  All I know is that I never had any desire to go see any of them.

Even the legendary Sean Connery, playing Indy’s father, couldn’t entice me to go.

If you’re an Indiana Jones fan, I hope you go see this movie.  Soon.

Otherwise they might start a new round of ads for folks like me to sit through.

Actors Van Hansis and Jake Silbermann aren’t a gay couple, but they play one on TV. Actress Cate Blanchett isn’t male, but she played one in a movie. Actor Robert Downey, Jr., isn’t black…

Can you guess where this is going?

Yes, Downey is now portraying a black man in a new motion picture directed by Ben Stiller. The film, Tropic Thunder, is about a group of actors hired for a movie about Vietnam who find themselves dropped in a real jungle in the middle of a battle they don’t realize is real. Downey plays a black actor.

But it isn’t the same scenario as the 1980s flick Soul Man, in which C. Thomas Howell’s character made himself up as a black man to be able to attend college on a black scholarship; the audience is supposed to assume from the beginning that the character — and presumably the actor portraying him — is indeed black.

A still released ahead of the movie shows the successful make-up job and I suspect that the casual observer would never recognize Downey if they didn’t know who he really was. But fancy disguises aside, the casting is already causing controversy, and Downey has prepared himself for more, according to The Daily Mail, which reports some initial reactions:

“I’m not black and I find it offensive; are there not any talented enough black actors out in the world that they feel the need to hire a white guy to do a black guy?”

“They are infering that there are no good enough black actors to play a black person.”

There were similar reactions in 2006 when producers of CBS’s soap As The World Turns introduced a storyline in which Hansis’s character, Luke, came out to his parents, longtime characters Lily and Holden. And as the storyline has heated up, including the appearance of a love interest in the form of Silbermann, who plays Noah, so has the controversy.

But in this case, time has changed the direction of the talk, from questioning why the 52-year-old soap couldn’t hire actors who are actually gay to why the show hasn’t allowed the couple more than a single attention-getting kiss. It seems that not only gay fans of the show, but women as well, want to see more sparks between the characters, whom they have nicknamed “Nuke.” (That detail provides men with the answer to a question they’ve wondered for years: apparently there are some women for whom the thought of guy-on-guy action is as appealing as girl-on-girl action is to some men…but I digress.)

Then there was Blanchett, who revealed last year that she strapped down her breasts and “went for it” to portray rock icon Bob Dylan in the biopic I’m Not Here. She was one of seven to play Dylan in the film, and was the only female.

I don’t recall any men complaining about that casting. If anything, I heard that people actually were looking forward to seeing the performance, though I suspect many anticipated it the way a Nascar fan goes to a race anticipating a major pile-up.

Is it reasonable that only black actors should play black characters? Or that only gay actors portray homosexuals? Or even that men can’t play women and vice versa?

I don’t think so. I think different performers can bring different things to the table in a roll. And firsthand familiarity isn’t a necessity for other aspects of an actor. An actor need not kill someone before he can play a murderer on CSI:. An actress isn’t required to cheat on her real-life husband just so she can play an adulterous vixen on Days of Our Lives.

It’s supposed to be about what an actor brings to a role, even when that roll might be a bit of a stretch.  It’s so ridiculous to suggest that a situation like Downey’s is an admission that there are no black actors “good enough” to play a black man that I am amazed anyone would make the argument; how does a black actor “play” black?

The question should be about how a white actor would “play” a black man: I can understand the potential for offense if he were to portray a black man as a jive-talking “brotha” right out of 1970s stereotypes.  It doesn’t appear from what has been said so far that this was the intent in Downey’s case.  But I wonder how many who are protesting will actually go see the film to find out for themselves.

Are any of these scenarios — gender-bending, race-bending or orientation-bending — particularly offensive to you?

In this week’s edition of the Sunday Seven, I asked players to list the seven most obscure (and/or forgotten) movies in their favorites list. I figured I’d give you ten from my list. You may have heard of some of them, but I doubt if you’ve run across all of them.

1. The Deadly Game (1982) - This was one of a few plays shot for television and aired on HBO in the early 80s. It starred George Segal and the late Robert Morley. Segal is Howard Trapp, a traveling salesman who found himself lost in a blizzard during a Swiss business trip. Unluckily for him, he made his way to the home of Emil Carpeau, (Morley), a retired judge whose pastime was spending evenings with lawyer friends, retrying famous cases from history. They jump at the chance to work with “live” material, and Trapp finds himself fighting for his life.

2. Rope (1948) - This may be an Alfred Hitchcock movie that has a major name like Jimmy Stewart to offer, yet it’s still not one of the better known of Hitch’s films. It is based on a play by Patrick Hamilton and centers on a pair of young men who decide to kill for the thrill of it, then host a dinner party that puts them right on the edge of discovery. This movie was shot as if it were a stage play, and Hitch’s gimmick was to shoot an entire reel of film at a time, which led to ten-minute-long scenes with no cuts. The pacing suffered a bit, but it’s still an entertaining picture from the standpoint of will-they or won’t-they get caught.

3. O’Hara’s Wife (1982) - This was one of those movies that HBO loved, and ran constantly in the early 80s. Maybe that’s why I came to enjoy it. Mariette Hartley stars as the wife of an overworked lawyer (Ed Asner) who has finally agreed to go on an extended vacation. But just before they can leave, she suffers a fatal cerebral hemorrhage and comes back as a ghost. There are touching moments and elements of screwball comedy. It’s not a great film, but it’s not the worst you’d find, either.

4. ‘Night, Mother (1986) - This is a disturbing movie. Cissy Spacek is Jessie, a woman who has come to a decision about her future. Anne Bancroft is her simpleton country mother who has missed all of the warning signs and has a single evening to come to terms with what her daughter is planning. Ironically, the two become closer than they ever have been before as mother desperately tries to save her daughter’s life.

5. Storm of the Century (1999) - This was a miniseries written by Stephen King about a mysterious intruder who appears on a tiny island in Maine and demands an enormous price from residents to leave them in peace. Continue reading “My Obscure Movie List”

“TV Land is Movie Land.”

That’s the network’s new promo line for its Friday night movies that get repeated at odd times over the weekend when they’re not stuck in some kind of Westerns hell.

I hate the fact that TV Land is trying to offer movies.  Really, if I wanted movies, I’d go to the Movie Channel or one of its clones.  Seems reasonable to me:  TV Land = TV, Movie Channel = Movies.

But every now and then, as much as I hate to admit it, Movie TV Land will show a movie that I can’t seem to turn away from.  Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which is on now, is one of those movies.

I just hope that I don’t wind up with “Danke Schön” stuck in my head.

Brett Battles posted a T-shirt he found at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books:

I’d wear it proudly!

Trekkies have reason to celebrate: Paramount Pictures is, by the looks of it, going ahead with the eleventh Star Trek film, known so far only as Star Trek XI.

If I were going to make a new Trek film, I’d take either the cast from Star Trek: Voyager and give them a new adventure, or I’d take Sulu and the crew of the Excelsior and give the new adventure to them. It would be fine with me if they wanted to get a new crew with a new ship and give them the new adventure.

Of course, neither of these scenarios seem to be what the studio is planning. Instead, as I understand it, they’re going to “reboot” the original series with new actors playing the classic parts and set it (apparently) before the time of the original series.

Matt Damon has been tapped to play Captain James T. Kirk. Adrian Brody will play Mr. Spock. The curmudgeonly Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy will be played by Gary Senise.

Certainly some big names. Some interesting interpretations of those characters we’ve known for forty years are likely to come.

But I hate prequels. I absolutely despise them. For one thing, there’s very little surprise potential. Let’s face it: in a prequel to the original series, some alien kidnaps Kirk, Spock, and Rabinowitz. Even if Rabinowitz wasn’t wearing a red shirt, you’re all the more certain that if anyone’s going to die, it’s going to be him, because you know Kirk and Spock have a television and movie series-worth of adventures still to come.

Beyond that, today’s filmmakers are so high-tech when it comes to special effects that they can no longer afford to do things the “old” way. So a prequel to the original television series would look more like it was set after the original series because of the controls and displays. That’s why I couldn’t get into Star Trek: Enterprise.

There’s one more problem, too. Even if this new “rebooted” Star Trek is a huge hit, even if it’s a well-done new series of adventures that’s faithful to the original, I would have a hard time believing that this trio of actors is seriously committed to the potential series of new films that this 11th feature could inspire. If each movie to come features a different actor (or actors) in key roles, I’m going to be even less interested than I already am.

I’m trying to keep an open mind, but I don’t think it’s working all that well. What about you? Are you a Star Trek fan? Are you looking forward to this movie, or are you dreading it?

Some co-workers and I went to the theater last night to see the new movie Rocky Balboa. (Click the link to see the movie trailer.) I’m sure they added the last name so they wouldn’t have to go back and count up how many previous Rocky films there had already been. (This would have otherwise been called Rocky VI.)

You might be saying to yourself, “Isn’t Stallone 60 or so?” He is 60, and his age becomes a source of some humor in the picture. Basically, Rocky, who now owns a restaurant, sees an ESPN report in which a computer program has placed past and present fighters in the ring against each other and tabulated which is most likely to win. Rocky is named the virtual winner against an up-and-coming fighter. That gets him thinking. From there, you can figure out what he does next.

I won’t spoil the ending for you, but then again, I think the point of the Rocky franchise pretty much makes it impossible to spoil the ending: you probably have a good idea of what will have happened by the time the credits start rolling. You might not be exactly right — there’s a little room for surprise, at least — but you have a good idea.

I’m not a huge fan of the Rocky franchise: I saw the first two movies years ago, I saw the third two or three times, and I saw the fourth one about seven times total back when I had HBO and that was the movie that they ran every three hours that particular month. I never saw Rocky V, the last one made, and I heard I hadn’t missed anything. There are some nice flashes of memory that reference the earlier movies, and if you’re considering seeing it, you might want to watch the original one more time; there are some nice parallels to the original.

I’ll give you one warning, though. Early in the movie, there’s a solo piano arrangement of Rocky’s signature theme, called “Alone in the Ring.” You’ll know it when you hear it, and the first time you hear it, make yourself get used to it. By the time the movie’s over, you’ll be convinced that you’ve heard that same poignant little cue at least one hundred times. And it’s one of those little arrangements that slightly changes a note or two to make for the right mood, and in doing so makes it just annoying enough that you’re ready to strangle the piano player. Be prepared.

It wasn’t a bad movie, which sort of surprises me, considering that the last Rocky film wasn’t a hit and it has been 16 years since we revisited this territory. But assuming that this is the last Rocky movie — and it should be — it’s a nice wrap to the series.