Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Holiday (1938)

Nick Potter: You know, this reminds me a little of the 

palace of Caligula. You remember Caligula, don't you, dear? 

Susan Potter: Oh, very well indeed. Whatever became of him?

I usually only post about my beloved Holiday around the, you guessed it, holidays. But what is the 140th anniversary of the comic legend and "lifelong committed bachelor" Edward Everett Horton if not a holiday? One of the great scene stealers there ever was or ever will be, Horton wandered through classics like Arsenic and Old Lace, Top Hat, Trouble in Paradise, The Gay Divorcee, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Design For Living, and on and on and on, stealing scenes left right and right off Cary Grant's bumbling lips and bumblingest hips, among many. We love him! That said Holiday is very much my go-to-fave (as it is for every single actor in it) -- but what's yours?

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Ball of Fire (1941)

Garbage Man: I could use a bundle of scratch 

right now on account of I met me a mouse last week.

Prof. Oddly: Mouse?

Garbage Man: What a pair of gams. A little in,

a little out, and a little more out.

Professor Potts: I am still completely mystified.

Garbage Man: Well, with this dish on me hands

and them giving away 25 smackaroos on that quizzola.

Professor Potts: Smackaroos?

Prof. Oddly: Smackaroos? What are smackaroos?

Garbage Man: A smackaroo is a...

Professor Potts: No such word exists.

Garbage Man: Oh, it don't, huh? A smackaroo is a dollar, pal.

Professor Potts: Well, the accepted 

vulgarism for a dollar is a buck.

Garbage Man: The accepted vulgarism 

for a smackaroo is a dollar. 

That goes for a banger, a fish, a buck, or a rug.

Professor Potts: Well, what about the mouse?

Garbage Man: The mouse is the dish. 

That's what I need the moolah for.

Prof. Oddly: Moolah?

Garbage Man: Yeah, the dough. We'll be stepping. 

Me and the smooch - I mean, the dish, I mean, the mouse. 

You know, hit the jiggles for a little drum boogie.

Professor Potts: Please, please, not so fast.

Garbage Man: Brother, we're going to have some hoytoytoy.

All The Profs: Hoytoytoy?

Garbage Man: Yeah, and if you want 

that one explained, you go ask your papas.

The script for Ball of Fire is so much fun (not a surprise given Billy Wilder was one of the writers)  that I had to share this entire lengthy passage of dialogue -- god I love this film. I didn't even need to include a portion involving Barbara Stanwyck here -- that's how you know it's good! But since I tend to give her all of the love for this movie I figured I'd focus in on her stellar leading man Gary Cooper today, given it's Coop's birthday. He was born today, the year 1901. Check out our extensive Gary Cooper Archives for more of him -- he's a forever MNPP fave, he is. One of the greatest faces (et cetera) ever put on screen.

5 Off My Head: Threesome Movies

I know I've told this story here before but in 1994 when the movie Threesome was released I was still very much a closeted high schooler, but I had to see it. HAD to.  This was before the internet so anything with any hint of gay content coming anywhere near my small upstate New York cow town was extremely rare. And yet here was this movie opening at our recently built five theater multiplex! I had to be there! So I sneaked into a screening one night... and bumped into one of my best friends from church. There with her current boyfriend. Her current boyfriend who I had done a little light fooling around with a few years previous. And she insisted on us all sitting together. It was an utterly mortifying experience for me, and probably drove me deeper into the closet for another six months lol. Oh well! 

Anyway threesome movies! They're a good topic for today because of Luca Guadagnino's Challengers being the number one movie in the country, and also totally ruling. So here are five of my favorites!

5 of my Fave Threesome Movies

3 (Tom Tykwer, 2010) 

Design For Living (Ernst Lubitsch, 19833)

The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003) 

Y Tu Mama Tambien (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)

Splendor (Gregg Araki, 1999)

---------------------------

What are your favorite threesome movies?

Gary Cooper, Enduring Hot

One of my favorite celebrity coffee-table books that I own is the 2011 edition of Gary Cooper: Enduring Style, which is basically a beautiful book of photos of Gary Cooper being super hot, the end. There are words or whatever but I'm a picture person and this one's got the goods. A gorgeous book, but it's been out of print for awhile and it goes for a couple hundred dollars now (not quite enough for me to retire on dammit). But lo, behold, awesome news -- it's being reissued! Out on August 8th and selling on Amazon for a measly fifty bucks, you can pick up your copy here if "Gary Cooper being super hot" is a thing that's up your alley. Which really, really oughta be.

5 Off My Head: Siri Says 1952

Here, a treat for your Monday -- now that I've got a break from the film fest stuff I'm diving back into trying to finish off my "Siri Says" series! The last one we did was back in April when I finished off the 1930s -- indeed we're getting perilously close to finishing this series, as I think we've got about ten years out of one hundred left to survey? In case you're new round these parts or just need a refresher this series is where I ask my iPhone to pick a number between one and one hundred, and then I give y'all my five favorite films from the year that corresponds to the number given. So for example today the number we've got is "52" and I will be giving you my favorite five films from the Movies of 1952. 

Funny enough I'm not finishing off the 50s this time -- I have at least one more year to go until I do -- which makes me kind of sad, as the 1950s are a pain in my ass. I don't love the 1950s to be honest! I've probably complained about this previously one of these times but it's all Noir and Musicals and big bloated Technicolor literary adaptations and it's just not my cuppa. I barely scavenged up this episode's top five and I mostly only like these films, as opposed to loving any (except the first one, which I deeply adore). But hey these are all turning 70 this year, I suppose that's of interest! And with that ringing endorsement I give you...

My 5 Favorite Movies of 1952

Ikiru

(dir. Akira Kurosawa)

-- released on October 9th 1952 --

High Noon

(dir. Fred Zinnemann)

-- released on July 24th 1952 --

Singin' in the Rain

(dir. Stanley Donen)

-- released on March 27th 1952 --

Clash By Night

(dir. Fritz Lang)

-- released on May 28th 1952 --

Don't Bother to Knock

(dir. Roy Ward Baker)

-- released on July 18th 1952 --

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Runners-up: The Quiet Man (dir. John Ford), The Narrow Margin (dir. Richard Fleischer), The Star (dir. Stuart Heisler), Monkey Business (dir. Howard Hawks), The Marrying Kind (dir. George Cukor), Pat & Mike (dir. Cukor)

Never seen: The Greatest Show on Earth (dir. Cecil B DeMille), The Bad and the Beautiful (dir. Vincente Minnelli), Umberto D (dir. Vittorio De Sica), Othello (dir. Welles), Forbidden Games (dir. René Clément), The Importance of Being Earnest (dir. Anthony Asquith), Sudden Fear (dir. David Miller)

--------------------------------------

What are your favorite movies of 1952?

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from: 

Love in the Afternoon (1957)

Frank: He who loves and runs away, 

lives to love another day.

The great Billy Wilder was born on this day in 1906.

I have never seen this movie before! Have you?

5 Off My Head: Siri Says 1926

May wonders never stop wondering, we're doing two editions of our "Siri Says" series in as many weeks -- what a spectacle! Who needs a Super Bowl when you've got this shit? It's a good time of the year for these posts because what the hell else is going on, movie-wise? We're post-Sundance and mostly only shit's being released in theaters, and everybody's sick of the Oscar conversations. So why not look back at movies-past? And this week we're going way way past, very nearly an entire century, to The Movies of 1926. (As explained last week I have too few years left for this series so I didn't actually ask Siri for a number between 1 and 100; I am now choosing the few remaining years from a hat, basically.) 

In fact we're going so far back that as far as I can come up with I've only seen five movies from 1926 total. My batting average with Silent Film is not great, Bob! So I put "Favorite" in quotes, which implies "Only" this go-round (although a few of these are straight-up masterpieces, to be sure.) And there are several films from this year I've always wanted to see, so do check out the "Never seen" list for more titles of note...

My 5 "Favorite" Movies of 1926

The General

(dir. Clyde Bruckman & Buster Keaton)

-- released on December 25th 1926 -- 

The Adventures of Prince Achmed

(dir. Lotte Reiniger)

-- released on July 2nd 1926 -- 

Faust

(dir. FW Murnau)

-- released on October 14th 1926 -- 

The Son of the Sheik

(dir. George Fitzmaurice)

-- released on July 9th 1926 -- 

Battling Butler

(dir. Keaton)

-- released on August 22nd 1926 -- 

---------------------------------------

Never seen: The Winning of Barbara Worth (dir. Henry King), Don Juan (dir. Alan Crosland), Beau Geste (dir. Herbert Brenon), The Sea Beast (dir. Millard Webb), The Student of Prague (dir. Henrik Galeen)...

... Tartuffe (dir. Murnau), What Price Glory? (dir. Raoul Walsh), Tell It to the Marines (dir. George W. Hill), La Bohème (dir. King Vidor), The Johnstown Flood (dir. Irving Cummings), Bardelys the Magnificent (dir. Vidor)

---------------------------------------

What are your favorite movies of 1926?

5 Off My Head: Siri Says 1935

This post hasn't even begun and I have lied to you. LIED. I don't know how we recuperate from this violence, but maybe me spilling the beans will help. You see normally when I do my "Siri Says" series I ask my telephone to choose a number between 1 and 100, and then I give me my five favorite movies from the year that corresponds with the number. That's you, know, kinda the entire idea behind the series. But when I took stock of the archives of this series back in January I realized that I only had 14 out of 100 years left, and to be quite honest it would have taken Siri half an hour at them odds to come up with a fresh number. So I didn't ask Siri! What I did was write the 14 remaining years down on slips of paper and choose the year from that. See?

At least this much is true! I never could have just written "1935" on a random slip of paper or anything -- that would be the work of a crazy person, and you're obviously, hehe, in the hands of the entirely sane here. Only a sane person would spend two paragraphs and what, a good minute of everybody's lives, detailing all of this in minute detail. So yes, the Movies of 1935 is where we're resting our heads this Monday afternoon, and... meh? Not the greatest year for the movies, save stone-cold masterpiece (the first one in my list below) and several solid-enough flicks after that. Tons of very serious literary adaptations this year (David Copperfield, Anna Karenina, A Tale of Two Cities, Crime and Punishment, Peter Ibbetson, A Midsummer Night's Dream) that feel a little musty now. But I dug up some good stuff...

My 5 Favorite Movies of 1935

The Bride of Frankenstein

(dir. James Whale)

-- released on April 19th 1935 --

Captain Blood

(dir. Michael Curtiz)

-- released on December 19th 1935 --

Mad Love

(dir. Karl Freund)

-- released on July 12th 1935 --

The 39 Steps

(dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

-- released on July 31st 1935 --

The Devil is a Woman

(dir. Josef von Sternberg)

-- released on March 15th 1935 --

-----------------------------------------

Runners-up: Top Hat (dir. Mark Sandrich), Mutiny on the Bounty (dir. Frank Lloyd), The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (dir. Henry Hathaway), Triumph of the Will (dir. Leni Riefenstahl), The Raven (dir. Louis Friedlander), The Call of the Wild (dir. William A. Wellman), Magnificent Obsession (dir. John M. Stahl), Mark of the Vampire (dir. Tod Browning), Anna Karenina (dir. Clarence Brown) 

Never seen: David Copperfield (dir. George Cukor), The Wedding Night (dir. King Vidor), Roberta (dir. William A. Seiter), The Informer (dir. John Ford), Alice Adams (dir. George Stevens), Peter Ibbetson (dir. Hathaway), Annie Oakley (dir. Stevens), Dangerous (dir. Alfred E. Green), Sylvia Scarlett (dir. Cukor), Toni (dir. Jean Renoir), An Inn in Tokyo (dir. Ozu) 

-----------------------------------------

What are your favorite movies of 1935?

5 Off My Head: Siri Says 1929

Somehow six months have passed since I did an entry in my "Siri Says" series -- shame on me! I had been doing pretty well with them last year but late July was right around the time I went into three straight months of film festivals so it's not too big a shock this series fell off right about then. I can't promise I'll keep up with this (Sundance is in just a couple weeks after all!) but for today I have a minute and the voice that lives inside my telephone was kind enough to give me an easy enough year (since I've seen very few movies from it) -- I was given "29" and so we're talking the Movies of 1929. 

This was an interesting moment in Hollywood -- beyond the fact that many of these movies are among the earliest batches of "Talkies" (The Jazz Singer came out at the end of 1927) 1929 was also the first year of the Oscars! On May 16th of that year Hollywood gathered together at a private dinner at Los Angeles' Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and awarded statues to their favorite movies of the previous two years, 1927 and 1928. Has anybody ever written about there being any overlap between sound innovation and the awards system? It feels like there must have been something in the air. Anyway right now we're talking the movies nominated and not nominated for the 2nd Academy Awards -- and now for my five faves!

My 5 Favorite Movies of 1929

Lucky Star

(dir. Frank Borzage)

-- released on July 20th 1929 --

Man With the Movie Camera

(dir. Dziga Vertov)

-- released on January 8th 1929 --

Blackmail

(dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

-- released on October 6th 1929 --

Un Chien Andalou

(dir. Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí)

-- released on June 6th 1929 --

Pandora's Box

(dir. G.W. Pabst)

-- released on January 30th 1929 --

----------------------------------------------

Runners-up: Wolf Song (dir. Victor Fleming), Sunny Side Up (dir. David Butler), Untamed (dir. Jack Conway), The Manxman (dir. Hitchcock), The Broadway Melody (dir. Harry Beaumont)

Never seen: The Virginian (dir. Victor Fleming), Diary of a Lost Girl (dir. GW Pabst), Eternal Love (dir. Ernst Lubitsch), The Kiss (dir. Jacques Feyder), The Awful Truth (dir. Marshall Neilan)

----------------------------------------------

What are your favorite movies of 1929?