Nov. 12 Fave Anne Hathaway film: I’m going to go with The Devil Wears Prada. Does she make the right choice to leave her job?

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2019-11-12

Day 6 Mike Nichols: Do I go with Working Girl, Postcards from the Edge or the one with the talking dolphin? I’ll just go with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? even though watching it is a harrowing experience.

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2019-11-06

Nov. 5 Vivien Leigh: Oh, fiddle-dee-dee, this is hard. I’m going with Waterloo Bridge, a wartime melodrama where Vivien Leigh plays a ballerina who falls in love with a soldier just before he goes into battle. Leigh’s performance is heartbreaking.

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2019-11-05

Day 30 Freebie 2: White Nights (1985) is set in Siberia and Moscow. It stars Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines, one who defected from the Soviet Union to the West and one who defected from the West to the Soviet Union. Weak plot, great dancing.

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2019-09-30

Day 25 South Pacific: The 1932 movie Bird of Paradise was based on a 1912 play that toured the US for over a decade. It’s hokum—this is where the trope of throwing virgins into volcanoes originated—but it’s enjoyable hokum.

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2019-09-25

Day 23 South America: Black Orpheus (1959) recasts the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, setting it in Rio de Janeiro. The movie’s soundtrack, which featured music by Luiz Bonfá and Antônio Carlos Jobim, sparked an international craze for bossa nova.

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2019-09-23

Day 16 Italy (2): In Italy in the early 1970s there was a boom in movies based on Boccaccio’s work and life. The best is Pasolini’s Decameron, which is set in the same Medieval era the stories were written in. Ribald or raunchy? It’s a bit of both.

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2019-09-16

Day 4 Australia (1): Malcolm (1986) is about a socially awkward inventor who is convinced by a crook to use his machines to commit crimes. Set in Melbourne, this low-key heist film features some amazing mechanical devices.

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2019-09-04

Day 3 Arctic. I’m going for The Thing From Another Planet. Made in 1951, and set in a research station at the North Pole, the movie tells the story of a plant-based alien that is described as an ‘intellectual carrot.”

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2019-09-03

Day 1: Favorite Tarzan Adaptation : I could be a wisenheimer and say the silent Tarzan of the Apes (1918) with Elmo Lincoln. But I have to go with Johnny Weissmuller in Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) primarily because of the yell.

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2019-09-02