...I have been shamefully lax about updating this blog. Part of the reason is that I took a vacation from classic movies to watch most of the first season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which was recently released on DVD. I also plowed my way through all six seasons of Sex and the City, which I became addicted to instantly once I started watching. I also rented a few SNL "Best of" discs, namely John Belushi, Gilda Radner, and Dan Aykroyd ("You're spending the night with Fred Garvin, male prostitute!"). I will also admit, with much shame, that I rented Batman & Robin. Okay, don't judge me! I was curious to see the crazy villains. I didn't know the whole movie was going to be a big ball of cheese!
There have been a few classic movies scattered in there, though. (I had to stop taping them from Comcast for awhile as I was gathering more than I could possibly watch, and using up all the space on my dad's DVR.) As I mentioned at the end of my last post, I did rent Airport '77, if only to see how aging Hollywood legends would survive trapped in a plane at the bottom of the ocean in the Bermuda Triangle. Dun dun dun! I'm happy to report that Olivia de Havilland, Joseph Cotton and Jimmy Stewart all survived (well, especially Jimmy, since he wasn't even on the plane). Sadly, Christopher Lee did not make it, but he sacrificed his life for the greater good.
Back in October I watched Kim, mostly because it had Errol Flynn in it. Not as much Flynn as I was expecting, though, and I've never been a huge fan of curly-headed moppets, although Dean Stockwell did a fine job.
After that came Sin Takes a Holiday, which lasted only about five minutes, as it was a very poor transfer to DVD. I'm beginning to realize a lot of these old, old movies are in the public domain, which allows any rinky-dink production company (Macady, I'm looking in your direction) to slap them onto to a DVD. Which is a shame, because I think there should be some kind of studio control over how their movies are released. Then again, they probably wouldn't put the effort into restoring and/or releasing copies of every old movie they find in the vaults, so maybe it's a draw.
January 21, 2006 will be my third anniversary with Netflix. In honor of that, I'd mention every movie I've rented, but the list is so long it would bore you to tears. One early rental I will mention is The Cat's Meow, about the mysterious death of Thomas Ince on William Randolph Hearst's yacht in 1924. Because if there's anything that fascinates me more than classic films, it's modern movies about classic film stars.
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