Mondays Movie Missives

• Professor Hobby: Tell me, what is love?
• Secretary: Love is first widening my eyes a little bit and quickening my breathing a little and warming my skin and touching...
• Professor Hobby: ...and so on. Exactly so. Thank you, Sheila.
• A.I. a movie that created a lot of buzz and spawned a lot of ethical debate is now nearly ten years old. I know a lot of younger movie loving people who haven't seen it but, I remember it as one of those movies you simply could not escape hearing about- the debate about the ethics of human esqe robotics was as pervasive as was the question whether A.I. was the best or worst movie ever made. I remember Mark Davis talking about it for his entire show one day after seeing it and speaking of it often for days later.
• The Big Fish and American Beauty: excuse me if I say these are two movies you simply cannot begin to fully appreciate unless you are at least a late 30s to early 40s male.
• The English Patient: the best most misunderstood movie ever made.
• I don't think I breathed for the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan and still get misty when I see it- OK I admit it, I bawl like a baby.
• Still impressed with how good animated movies can be today while being smart enough for grown ups to enjoy and safe for little ones. I think Lion king started that concept off with traditional type animation and Toy Story with computer animation.
• How can Lonesome Dove be one of the best westerns ever made and all the others based on books by the author using same writers etc. be among the worst?
• Tombstone- the best western ever made.
• High Noon still blows me away every time I see it- you can almost feel the knots in Gary Coopers characters stomach as he goes out to face certain death but, he faces it.
• The Wild Bunch: the good guys don't always win, the bad guys aren't always all bad, hero's can die like dogs face down in a dirty street, when people die violently it's often with blood everywhere their guts hanging out begging for mercy not spinning around, saying,"They got me Johnny tell Mary Sue I love her..." and holy smokes it was made in 1969! John Wayne hated Sam Peckinpah for this film saying publicly it, "destroyed the myth of the Old West".
• A favorite John Wayne story: "The evening before a shoot he was trying to get some sleep in a Las Vegas hotel. The suite directly below his was that of Frank Sinatra (never a good friend of Wayne), who was having a party. The noise kept Wayne awake, and each time he made a complaining phone call it quieted temporarily but each time eventually grew louder. Wayne at last appeared at Sinatra's door and told Frank to stop the noise. A Sinatra bodyguard of Wayne's size approached saying, "Nobody talks to Mr. Sinatra that way." Wayne looked at the man, turned as though to leave, then backhanded the bodyguard, who fell to the floor, where Wayne knocked him out by crashing a chair on top of him. The party noise stopped."
• Lifeboat was made in 1944 and is the story of 9 people in same after their ship is sunk by a U boat. The Uboat was also sunk during the engagement and the captain of it is picked up by them. Two hours or whatever of people in a B/W movie in a small boat in an empty ocean and it's riveting. Tallulah Bankhead practically carried the movie.
• She was known for a feud with Bette Davis leading to this cute quote, "Don't think I don't know who's been spreading gossip about me . . . After all the nice things I've said about that hag [Bette Davis]. When I get hold of her, I'll tear out every hair of her mustache." Regarding sex,"I've tried several varieties of sex, all of which I hate. The conventional position makes me claustrophobic; the others give me a stiff neck and/or lockjaw." About men and booze, "My father warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine". Education," I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education ." On any potential husband, "No man worth his salt, no man of spirit and spine, no man for whom I could have any respect, could rejoice in the identification of Tallulah's husband. It's tough enough to be bogged down in a legend. It would be even tougher to marry."
• She died in December 1968, her last words were ,"Codeine... Bourbon"
• Supposedly Red dawn is going to be remade with the flashpoint being Eastern Europe instead of the US. I hope that won't be like when Tom Skerritt disgraced er, I mean remade High Noon.
• Zombie movies: can't get enough of them, good or bad- for that matter, the worse they are the better I enjoy them.
• Any scary movie that effectively combines humor with fright factors is always way scarier than straight up slasher movies.
• If I had the means Casablanca would play in a loop on a monitor mounted on the wall like a picture frame in my house.
• I tend to like movies and call them favorites if at first I thought it would be a stinker but, turned out to be a good movie, I'm unsure if this is psychological.
• It doesn't bother me at all to go to a movie alone.
• My nephew auditioned for a Clint Eastwood movie.
• My dad was actually in a coffee commercial with a bunch of folks from my hometown of Decatur TX. I think the premise was they would do anything for a cup of that coffee and they were shown in the country making an epic walk toward town. There were giant planters, benches and some other props I don't recall left behind that were there for years on the square afterward. I think the brand was Kava or something like that.
• I have been on television news either 3 or 4 times.
• No, none involved high speed chases.
• Once for Boy Scouts, once at a job and a couple of other times I don't recall.
• My friends know I can predict with approximately 90% accuracy whether a movie will stink or not by the trailer and/or cover summary.
• It's like a superpower that I must use for good and not evil.