This was not the film I’d intended to review this week. I’d something very different lined up. But you know what they say about serendipity? That it can suddenly come out of nowhere, and bowl you completely over. I won’t say The Midnight Story totally mesmerised me, but it made me change my mind about what my post was going to be about.
I hadn’t been able to decide on which film to review after Benazir, so I asked a bunch of friends to help me out – just by suggesting a genre. I got a varied lot of answers. Romance. Comedy. Social drama, à la Ladri di Biciclette. Suspense. Something with Cary Grant.
The result? This film, which is suspense, has a good bit of romance and comedy – and stars Cary Grant. (Sorry, Harvey: I’ll review something along the lines of Ladri di Biciclette sometime soon).
This photo of Eleanor Parker is the current wallpaper on my laptop screen:
…and I’ve decided it’s time to change it, simply because it gets in the way of my work. Every now and then, while I’m working, I need to move to the desktop to open a folder or file that’s there. Invariably, I end up gaping at the gorgeous Ms Parker and forgetting all about why I’d arrived at the desktop in the first place.
No prizes for guessing whom this prize post is dedicated to.
(For those who’re not in the know: I hosted a Classic Bollywood Quiz last year on this blog, and the prizes for that—one for each participant—was a post dedicated to that participant. My friend and fellow blogger Harvey got the Quick Worker Award for the quiz—he had to perforce submit his answers within a couple of days of the quiz being posted, and still managed to get 7 out of 10 right. Impressive).
So: the all-important question. Why am I dedicating this post (about a sweet man whose best friend is an invisible giant rabbit) to Harvey? No, not because I think my pal is nuts. But because Harvey was the one who recommended Harvey to me, and because I found this such an unusual film. And with such an endearing moral to it. Thank you, Harvey. That warmed my soul.
The highlight of last week was—no, not an old film that I watched at home, but a new film that I watched in a cinema theatre. The Artist. A couple of friends, both people with excellent taste in cinema, recommended it to me. So I wheedled my husband into coming to watch The Artist.
And, oh. What a film. What a wonderful combination of humour, emotion, heart-breaking sorrow—and hope. It’s been a long, long time since I saw a new film that made me gush so much. (Yes, well; that probably also had a lot to do with the fact that the gorgeous Jean Dujardin is very gushworthy).
This is the 300th post on this blog. A landmark for me, which I decided to celebrate with a film about 300-something.
The 300 Spartans is based on a real-life incident, the Battle of Thermopylae in about 480 BC, when a handful of Spartan warriors led by King Leonidas, faced up to the invading army of the Persian king Xerxes. The film begins just as the vast armies of Xerxes (David Farrar) are pouring into Greece.
Ever since I began this blog, I’ve maintained one annual tradition: on my birthday, I post a review of a film featuring a film personality who shares my birthday. I’ve reviewed Ittefaq (starring Nanda); Wild in the Country (starring Elvis Presley) and Baghdad ka Jaadoo (with Fearless Nadia). This time, it’s back to Baghdad – with Kerwin Matthews, who, like me, was born on the 8th of January. The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is typical Kerwin Matthews fare: he gets to swing a sword, battle an array of fearsome (sometimes unintentionally hilarious) monsters, and generally be the man who wins the day for the good guys.
So here’s remembering Mr Matthews. Happy birthday, and RIP.
We’ve been on a spate of tributes all this month. First, it was a farewell for Dev Anand, the man who embodied ‘leading man’ for so many Indians across generations. Then, there were birthdays – for the ‘hunkiest of them all’, Dharmendra, and then for one of Hindi cinema’s greatest thespians, Dilip Kumar. Somewhere amidst all those tributes, another great birthday got left out. Kirk Douglas turned 95 on December 9, 2011. So, here’s wishing Mr Douglas a (rather belated) happy birthday, and here’s looking at one of his best-known films.
I was – at least as far as emotional maturity is concerned – a baby when I first saw High Noon, and I didn’t care for it much then. Not that I wasn’t fond of Westerns; I adored Westerns. In book form, in cinema, in song. For me, the genre was all that was gloriously outdoorsy and never-say-die: cowboys and Comanche, Monument Valley, smoking barrels and rearing horses, the good versus the bad in that final gunfight. High Noon turned all of that on its head, and left me feeling uncomfortable and disappointed.
I didn’t realise till much later that that disappointment was not the disappointment of watching a film that was bad. Rather, it was the disappointment of discovering that what I’d been rejoicing in till then was not the ultimate in a genre. Some growing up had happened.
I have rewatched High Noon since then, and I’ve come to appreciate this film deeply. I still do like hard-core Westerns like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Stagecoach and The Magnificent Seven a lot – but High Noon is in a class all by itself.
“Racy stuff, eh?” said my husband, when I told him the name of the film I was going to review next.
No. Not at all. In fact, Midnight Lace has nothing steamy about it except a rather stylish black top that Doris Day wears in the climactic scene.
