Pi Day movie marathon

If you're a fan of Pi Day, then you already know that this year is pretty exciting. Usually Pi Day occurs on the date that represents the first three digits of pi -- 3/14. But THIS year, the date will be 3/14/15. And at 9:26:53 it will be the only time in our lives that the date and time will coincide with the first 10 digits of pi. Pretty exciting stuff!!

On 3/14/15 I'll be in Princeton celebrating -- my beloved hometown goes all-out for Pi Day since it's also the birthday or our most famous resident, Albert Einstein. But on Sunday, I'm going to extend the celebration with a pi-themed movie marathon! I thought I'd share my picks here in case you'd like to join me in my possibly-pathetic devotion to this mathematical holiday!










Here are some alternate picks in case you don't have access to these movies (also, you can use one of the other options for 5 and 3 if you want to do 10 digits of pi instead of 8, but that'll make for an even longer marathon)

1: One More Tomorrow, One Foot in Heaven, And One Was Beautiful, One Man's Journey, One Sunday Afternoon

2: The Two Mrs. Carrolls, Between Two Worlds, A Tale of Two Cities, Breakfast for Two, Trouble for Two, Two Women, Two for the Road

3: The Three Faces of Eve, A Letter to Three Wives, Sergeants 3, Three Godfathers, Three Comrades, These Three

4: Four Men & A Prayer, Four Wives, Four Mothers, Four's A Crowd

5: Five Star Final, Five Fingers, Five Miles to Midnight, Five Graves to Cairo, Five Came Back

6: My Six Convicts, With Six You Get Eggroll, The Deep Six, Six of a Kind

9: The Man With Nine Lives, Nine Girls


Happy Pi Day! :)

The Dark Mirror (1946)

Have you ever heard of seasonal affective disorder? If you get very down-in-the-dumps every February when winter seems like it'll just never end, that's SAD. I, however, seem to come down with SCD, seasonal cinema disorder. Okay, I invented the term but I'm pretty sure it's a real thing. Whenever fall rolls around I always feel a sudden urge to watch ALL THE HORROR MOVIES EVER. In the summer, on hot balmy days when everything seems to be moving slower than usual, I feel a strong compulsion to marathon frothy 60's comedies. And in the dead of winter when daylight lasts for two hours tops, and the chill in the air cuts straight to your bone, well, that my friends is film noir time.

Today I watched the psychological film noir, The Dark Mirror, starring Olivia de Havilland and Lew Ayres. I've had this on DVD for years and somehow never got around to watching it until now. Which is absolutely crazy -- how do you have this movie in your collection and not watch it immediately: Lew Ayres. Film Noir. Olivia de Havilland playing twins. LEW AYRES.

I really love when classic movies delve into twindom. It's so fun to watch one person playing two different roles in the same film and (for the most part) the scenes in which both girls are in the same frame are so seamless that it's absolutely remarkable considering the technology that was available at the time. It's not like they had computers in the 1940's to just cut+paste one Olivia de Havilland next to the other Olivia de Havilland.



I wouldn't say this movie was exceptional (as far as film noirs go, it's no Laura) but it was very enjoyable and I didn't predict the twists. Lew Ayres was his usual wonderful self playing a Dr. Kildare-esque psychiatrist who specializes in the study of twins. That comes in handy when twins Ruth and Terry are caught up in a murder investigation and the detective needs somebody to help figure out if one of them might be guilty.

The one thing that really set this movie apart was the way in which they differentiated between Olivia de Havilland's two characters, Ruth and Terry. In most twin movies, the girls will have completely different looks, or one will have a mole, or their hairstyles will be different, etc. In The Dark Mirror, Ruth and Terry look exactly the same. They dress the same in almost every scene in which they are together. They wear the same hairstyle. Even their nightgowns match! The one thing that helps you to tell them apart is their jewelry, and it's pretty awesome.

All of their belongings are monogrammed, even the compacts they carry in their handbags. And they have matching monogram brooches to wear when they aren't sporting their insanely wonderful name necklaces. If there was an award for "Best Use of Telling Twins Apart in a Motion Picture" this would win, hands down.

Laura (1944) and musings on movie-going

A few years ago someone asked me what my favorite movie-going experience had been, and I couldn't name even one that I had really enjoyed. Being a classic film fan with limited access to independent theaters meant that my experiences had been few, and unfortunately the disrespectful audiences meant that those few experiences had all been pretty bad. And then 2014 happened.

Last year I saw some of my favorite movies on the big screen (I still think I dreamed it -- pinch me?!) like Dr. Zhivago, Young and Innocent and Sunday in New York. I went to the TCM Film Festival and enjoyed every film surrounded by moviegoers with an equal (or possibly even more fervent) reverence for classic movies. My local theater, The Garden in Princeton, came under new management and started playing classic movies. (Seriously, am I dreaming?) All told, last year I managed to see 17 classics on the big screen. And with the exception of a mildly disrespectful crowd at the Film Forum (the original Japanese Godzilla isn't funny, what is the matter with people?) I enjoyed every one of those experiences immensely.

All that to say -- if I was asked the question again, if I had to choose my favorite movie-going experience now, with 16 great ones under my belt, my visit to The Garden this week to see Laura would definitely be it.*

Until last year, I always thought that the best way to watch a movie was at home, preferably in pajamas, surrounded by cats and junk food (or, more accurately, some form of potatoes.) But now I'm officially a big-screen convert. Why is it that a movie flickering on my 30" tv screen can impress me, but the same movie displayed in 52' Cinemascope can knock my socks off? Why is it that when I hear biting dialogue at home I giggle, but that same dialogue blasting through surround sound speakers gives me a full-on belly laugh?

Laura has been one of my favorite movies for a long time (thank you, intense Dana Andrews phase circa 2008) and I've seen it more times than I could count. I've always thought Clifton Webb's dialogue was absolutely hilarious, and I swoon (oh, how I swoon) when Dana Andrews is on screen. But seeing it at the movies was like seeing it for the first time. I knew all of the twists and turns, and yet they surprised me. The dialogue was as familiar to me as an old friend and yet it passed through my ears as if it were a new acquaintance. And.. let's just say swooning intensifies when the apple of your eye is 20' tall.

I can't say anything about Laura that hasn't already been said. It's a film noir masterpiece. It's beautiful, suspenseful, clever, witty, dark, slightly twisted and very addictive. Maybe I've been spending too much time binge watching things on Netflix (I have) but I felt myself wanting to play the next episode when the movie was over, desperately wishing that this wasn't the end. Of course the good thing about good movies is that, despite their lack of a second episode, they're ripe for re-watching over and over. And if this experience has taught me anything, it's that you're never so familiar with a movie that you can't enjoy it as much as you did the first time around. Especially if you're seeing it at the movies.


*That is, if I hadn't seen Sunday in New York on the big screen, introduced by Robert Osborne in person, accompanied by my very best friends in the whole world. Nothing else will ever top that. But saying Laura is my second-favorite would have been kind of anti-climactic, sooo...

Also, oops, I just realized my title has almost the same name as Laura's blog! 

A New Hope

Yesterday me and Kyle went to see Star Wars at The Film Forum in New York. He dressed up like Darth Vader and I did my best impression of a 1960's storm trooper.

I was originally trying to channel c3po with a gold glittery dress that's tucked away in my closet and hardly ever gets to see the light of day, but without any other accessories I just looked like I was going to a fancy party. After lots of last-minute closet rummaging I put this together and I was pretty happy with how it turned out! Once I stood next to Kyle... er.. Darth Vader.. I think it was more obvious that I was supposed to be a storm trooper.



It was really fun seeing Star Wars on the big screen. My experiences at the Film Forum tend to be really hit or miss. I'd say about half of the screenings I've attended have had wonderful, respectful audiences. When I went to see Dr. Zhivago two weeks ago you could have heard a pin drop in the theater. It was wonderful! When I saw the original Japanese Godzilla back in April, everyone was horribly disrespectful and kept laughing at things that weren't even remotely funny. If you've seen the Japanese version you know that it's a lot more serious and less B-movie than the American version. It didn't deserve that kind of reception.

Star Wars fell somewhere in between. Obviously a lot of Han Solo's lines deserve a little chuckle, but people seemed to be laughing AT the movie, not at the funny lines in the movie (if that makes sense?) I mean serious stuff, like when poor little r2d2 is damaged towards the end. I thought Star Wars would have been immune from this kind of thing?? It didn't ruin the screening for me like the Godzilla audience did, but it was still really annoying.

After the movie we decided to take advantage of Kyle's costume to get some photos around the city. We ended up walking to a lot of the major tourist attractions for a little series of Darth Vader going sight-seeing. My personal favorite was his selfie in Times Square, ha!

Torn Curtain (1966)

I consider myself a pretty big Alfred Hitchcock fan, and I think I've seen almost all of his movies, give or take a few silents... and Torn Curtain. I'm not entirely sure how it eluded me all these years but, until this week, I had never seen it. I've always heard that it wasn't too great, so I popped it into my DVD player with incredibly low expectations. And I was pleasantly surprised!

I thought it got off to a slow start and didn't really grab hold of me until we - the audience - were fully informed about what was going on. I've always thought that was one of the best trademarks of a Hitchcock movie, that you're aware of things that the main characters aren't. You know that there's a murderer about to whip back the shower curtain, but Janet Leigh has NO IDEA. Once I was in the know, though, I thought the movie was incredibly suspenseful and classically Hitchcockian.

The movie stars Paul Newman (the obsession continues) and Julie Andrews as an engaged pair of scientists about to attend a conference in Copenhagen. Paul Newman's character starts acting kind of fishy and before Julie Andrews can say "iron curtain" she's caught in an unexpectedly traitorous predicament. And that is when the movie starts to get really good.

Honestly there was a part of me that was just like "Oh my gosh, Paul Newman, just tell your finance what you're up to and end this charade! For the love of God just tell her already!" Secrecy as a plot device is always a major pet peeve for me. Of course, a lot of movies depend on misunderstandings or confusion to move the plot forward, so honesty might not always be the best policy when it comes to screenwriting. There were several moments in Torn Curtain where the suspense rested completely on the lack of communication between Paul Newman and Julie Andrews. It definitely added a layer of anxiety to the first hour or so of the movie, but it's still very annoying that Newman's character would hide such a ridiculously important secret from someone who was his intellectual equal, and his partner in life.

Unnecessary secrecy aside, Torn Curtain way exceeded my expectations. Maybe it's because my expectations were so low that I was able to enjoy it so much, or maybe it's just a really great, underrated movie that deserves a second look. Either way, I think it's definitely worth a watch. Oh, and (to ruin what could have been a perfectly serious review) Paul Newman is shirtless again, so there's that. ;)

It's available to rent on amazon here.

The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown (1957)

This probably seems contrary to what everyone who knows me would think, but initially I was put off by the title of The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown. I thought it might be one of those comedies that was a little silly, a little fluffy, but not really funny. Boy, am I glad I decided to watch it anyway. For several reasons --

The movie is actually hilarious, heartwarming and really cute. Jane Russell plays an over-the-top movie star/sex symbol who gets kidnapped on the night of a big premiere. Her kidnappers don't seem to know what the heck they're doing, so Jane Russell helps them out. At the beginning it seems like an obvious spoof on the big-name blonde stars of the era, but her performance becomes much more down-to-earth as the movie wears on. Even 60 years ago people still needed reminding that film stars are humans, just like us.

Jane Russell's costar in the movie is Ralph Meeker. His name rang a bell because a couple years ago, Millie went through a crazy Ralph Meeker phase and I'd been meaning to (with obviously little determination) see one of his movies ever since. And now I get it. I absolutely, totally, 100% get why she went bananas over this guy. He's kind of like a rougher version of Frank Sinatra, without the singing. He was ridiculously perfect playing the slightly inept, but well-meaning kidnapper. After The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown I kind of binge-watched every Ralph Meeker movie I could get my hands on this week. Me and Millie watched Kiss Me Deadly on Wednesday and it's mind-blowingly awesome, kind of confusing, and absolutely riveting. I'd write a review of that one too (because, really, you need to watch it) but Millie already wrote the best one ever right here.

But back to the movie. In addition to Jane Russell and Ralph Meeker (sigh.) it had a fantastic supporting cast, snappy dialogue and (spoiler!) with the exception of one of the last lines in the movie, Jane Russell's character was a headstrong, iron-willed (and fisted!) gal. So watch it for the laughs, the romance, the story, or Ralph Meeker's smile (mostly that last one.) but just watch it.