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May. 8th, 2012 11:51 am
No "Victor/Victoria"
How sad is it that I'm trying to watch more television so that I'll spend less time online? (I realise that for the Huluïtes among you that sentence makes as much sense as "I'm trying to eat more in order to lose weight.") I was psyched for a cavalcade of Mad Men last night but it turns out there was only one episode available Free On Demand. So I followed it up with Thank You for Smoking, which Aaron Eckhart's Jeff-Daniels-meets-Jim-Carey likability made pleasant enough to watch.
At least it cohered as a film, which is more than I can say for our Sunday feature. It's been so damn long since we NetFlixed Sylvia Scarlett that I can no longer remember if it was actually recommended to me or if I simply concluded that you couldn't go wrong with Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Turns out that the truism that it doesn't matter what wattage the stars are if the writing is incoherent was as true in the Golden Age as it is today. Each scene has so little to do with the one before it it took ten minutes to figure out that it was a rom com rather than a melodrama and over an hour to determine who our heroine was supposed to end up with. Inconvenient characters die or disappear at the drop of a hat and money is the only problem until suddenly it isn't again.
On the upside, you get young Kate in (utterly unconvincing) boy drag, young Grant sporting a barely comprehensible Mockney, and an eccentric Russian pleasure-seeker played by an honest-to-Godunov Romanov. Rounding it out is Santa Claus from Miracle on 34th Street, a surprising amount of French dialogue, and some lovely footage of Cornwall. So not a complete waste, but justly forgotten all the same.
At least it cohered as a film, which is more than I can say for our Sunday feature. It's been so damn long since we NetFlixed Sylvia Scarlett that I can no longer remember if it was actually recommended to me or if I simply concluded that you couldn't go wrong with Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Turns out that the truism that it doesn't matter what wattage the stars are if the writing is incoherent was as true in the Golden Age as it is today. Each scene has so little to do with the one before it it took ten minutes to figure out that it was a rom com rather than a melodrama and over an hour to determine who our heroine was supposed to end up with. Inconvenient characters die or disappear at the drop of a hat and money is the only problem until suddenly it isn't again.
On the upside, you get young Kate in (utterly unconvincing) boy drag, young Grant sporting a barely comprehensible Mockney, and an eccentric Russian pleasure-seeker played by an honest-to-Godunov Romanov. Rounding it out is Santa Claus from Miracle on 34th Street, a surprising amount of French dialogue, and some lovely footage of Cornwall. So not a complete waste, but justly forgotten all the same.