My Arts Reporting and Reviewing Class is Reviewing Vicky Cristina Barcelona

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Which I had not seen until tonight. I was anticipating Girls Gone Wild but instead got Girls Gone to Europe, by which I mean the movie registers with me in the spirit of James "Portrait of a Lady" and Forster's "Room with A View," though in the latter it's really British Girls Gone to Italy.

But whoever said the British were really European?

This is a reductionist and retrograde approach, I'm sure, to reduce Woody Allen's film to that old chestnut, two varieties of American inhibition getting warmed up by the sun and the sun-in-the-blood of Spain and walking away sadder and perhaps wiser, secure not in who they are but in who they aren't.

But it is *a* way of looking at the film, and that's all a reviewer needs.

The Guy Said, 'Your Taste is in Your Mouth'

Trembling with excitement yesterday anticipating an evening watching a much-praised movie with friends on friends' Great Wall o' TV as I like to call it, though not in its presence because if I piss it off it looks powerful enough to fry me with microwaves at a hundred yards.

The classic in question was The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp, which Miz Gayle had procured because it was Michael Powell handiwork, and she was up to what cinephiles are always up to, that is, working through the oeuvre of the masters.

Now I had seen the damn thing back in grad school days but had a kind of amnesia about it, remembering only the principal actor and his gravelly voice. I just assumed I had been stunned with wonder at the time, which explained the fact my memory of the film was a circle around a vacancy.

So down we sat and within I'd say five minutes we were aware we were in for an evening of sociology. That is, the movie seemed kind of bad in terms of crisp, clear plotting and character motivation -- nice technicolor, though -- but it certainly did encourage us to engage in a bit of reverse engineering as we tried to figure out why the Brits made this movie right in the middle of War World II, when things were still in doubt.

(Released 1943, so probably made early that year or even in 1942, just when the Yanks started coming?)

The argument *seemed to be* that there were some good Germans, at least the ones who fled the country as the Nazis gained power -- though some who claimed that category were probably spies, so watch out -- and more to the point the British needed to fight dirty or at least fight sneaky to win the war because THE BRITISH YOU KNOW ARE JUST SO KIND AND FAIR.

So you wonderful old farts, get with the program.

It was kind of fun as a study of the limits propaganda places on art in a democracy in time of war against that great luxury in an opponent, to wit absolute evil -- though look at how brilliant wartime propaganda can be, as in Casablanca -- and Deborah Kerr played three separate parts spread over 40 years, women who looked exactly alike but weren't even related, but Miz Gayle said it probably meant she was a kind of placeholder, the ideal of British womanhood, which from one point of view suggested to a certain kind of British man women of a certain cast of face and mind were pretty much interchangeable.

Good job, Gayle. The active mind creates meaning, not un-Sibyl-like, and finds the fun.

We agreed it was maybe * or 1.5* out of five. And then I find this at wikipedia.

• David Mamet has written: "My idea of perfection is Roger Livesey (my favorite actor) in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (my favorite film) about to fight Anton Walbrook (my other favorite actor)."^[13]

Maybe they sent us the outtakes???????

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The Walls of Jericho

E. and I have watched a few movies during our lying in -- which I know once referred to pregnancy but I believe in repurposing vocab.

We do not go to many movies, partly because E. works long hours and then spends an hour or more on the phone talking her sister (the caregiver) and her mother (the care-eater) through the end of their day.

Also, she hates violent movies, and her notion of violence is broad. She screams at spring snakes out of cans.

But sick in bed we have watched a few movies on cable. We saw "Dreamgirls": That was thoroughly enjoyable, although I'm not sure the music was actually good, only that it reminded you of good music. We saw "Night at the Museum," which strived for sophomoric but fell back in freshmanic: no real genius in the slapstick, no real cleverness in the jokes.

Last night we watched "It Happened One Night" on Turner Classic Movies, a classic that neither of us had seen, though we had seen the famous excepts -- the hitchhiking, the absent t-shirt. What a fascinating bit of U.S. history, as Clark Gable bullied and intimidated rich and spoiled Claudette Colbert into her right role as dependent woman and democratic citizen.

It reminded us of our dads' idea of how a man should be treated, though my dad did a better job of accepting that other model from comedies of the time, that man ruled outside the home but woman ruled inside and any husbandly assertion of power in that context was just bluster, and comic.

Where did I read -- maybe in the Sunday NY Times? -- that the new slacker sex comedies are built around men in the 30s who behave like teenagers but who get the love anyhow, the moment the women (who are far more driven, more competent) understand hat an ineffectual sweet-tempered slug is all you can hope for in America in the 21st Century.

We don't know if that characterization of modern chick comedy is true. We don't go to many movies.

I was startled at how wideset Colbert's eyes are. I think I once read that black and white loved broad flat faces that hold the light. All I know is that another centimeter and Colbert would have looked like a flounder.