rontaube

I am a Doris Day fan and have been for fifty some years but this special which was like many made at the time to counteract the revolutionary music and feelings of the sixties is much too syrupy. If you want to see her sing her songs rent her movies and you'll get much better production values. I am also a Perry Como fan and they sing well together but look closely when they sing together. Doris is always trying to look Perry in the eye and kiss him and he is always avoiding her gaze and her kisses. He has never been demonstrative that way and is clearly uncomfortable with her advances whether they were for fun or more serious. In other words you are uncomfortable for him. I wonder if they even had a live audience. It is well known that Doris did not like to perform before a live audience and much of the laughter and applause does sound canned. Watch the set pieces and you can see that they are suddenly transported from sitting on the grass to Perry sitting on a pillow or something. So it was not shot live even and was stitched together later by a poor editor. If you want to learn more about Doris from this DVD you won't. Better to read the new book about her, that I am reading and watch her movies.

I expected a traditional romantic comedy here and I suspect many men will not even tune in to what's going on when their girlfriends/wives drag them to it but I loved this movie. The trailer was kind of misleading. It seemed as if the two women (Winslet/Diaz) were switching boyfriends but what they switched was houses. Diaz moves from California to England and Winslet from England to California. The movie has lots of nice little plot twists and it was a real joy to see Eli Wallach playing a retired screen writer that I suspect was based on Ernst Lehman. Elis friends get together with him one night to talk with Kate Winslet's character and we see Bill Macy from Maud and Shelly Berman who was one of my most favorite comics from the sixties. Jack Black has a nice roll as a digital musician who talks to Kate about movie scores. There is even a little scene in a movie store where Jack is talking about the score of the graduate and the star Dustin Hoffman does a cameo. There are a few movie cliché's here but all in all the movie is a winner and who could not love Jude Law's children and the "napkin man". I was thinking while watching this that Kate Wnslet should be doing more romantic comedies and has the range of another favorite of mine Emma Thompson. They were in Sense and Sensibilty together. Another movie I loved. So if you're a guy give it a chance if your a gal you can't miss here.

I've seen this movie several times, most recently on DVD with an additional DVD that includes the premier and a documentary about James Dean. Each time I see this movie I see it from a new perspective. I learned from the DVD and from reading Elia Kazan's comments that the character Cal (played by Dean) is really Steinbeck in many ways in his youth and Kazan also identified with him. I learned that there was real friction between Dean and the man who played his father, Raymond Massey and that Dean deliberately provoked Massey to get angry with him to bring out the moment in the film of the father's feelings towards his son. I also marvel each time i see this movie at the outstanding performance of Jo Van Fleet. She deserved her best supporting actress academy award. This movie resonates on many levels as do most of Kazan's films. It is modern retelling of the garden of eden story and it is the story of the troubled youth of the fifties fighting against the conservatism of the Eisenhower years. It is a story of the confusion and conflicts in a family with a war approaching and it's a story about a woman (Van Fleet's character) who doesn't like being bottled up in a controlled religious setting. Many things to enjoy here and one wonders where the artists of Kazans stature are in this day and age. I only wish that all of Kazan's films were on DVD, such as Baby Doll and Wild River. I wonder if anyone but me notices that on the extra DVD where there is an interview with John Steinbeck that he shifts and contorts his mouth in a manner very like Dean in the movie. It was said that neither Steinbeck nor Kazan originally liked Dean but both agreed that he was perfect for the part and both identified with him very much.