43. The 39 Steps. We always watch Hitchcock movies when we’re under the weather. This one is rather kinky, especially when the hero gets handcuffed to the hostile witness and they’re forced to shared a bed for the night.
44. Notorious. Another of our favorite Hitchcocks (A list of non-favorites would be shorter. I Confess and The Paradine Case would be on it). Readers of spy stories factual or fictional are familiar with the honey trap—using sex to manipulate or trap a source or enemy. Notorious has a double-honey trap: a secret agent (Cary Grant) makes a Nazi agent’s party girl daughter (Ingrid Bergman) fall in love with him, and then sends her to Brazil to seduce one of her father’s cohorts (Claude Rains). It’s sexy and twisted, and Hitchcock got away with a very long kissing scene. Watch it yourself.
45. The Way We Were. Strangely enough for someone who hangs out with gay people 98 percent of the time, we had never seen The Way We Were in its entirety until the other night. So that’s why the baklas love it: You could replace Barbra Streisand’s character with a gay man, and it would work. One could argue that she was playing a gay man. Robert Redford was probably the most beautiful earthling of the early 1970s. No wonder his Great Gatsby didn’t work: What was the point of pining for Daisy Buchanan when he was lovelier than she was?
Nakakasira ng ulo.
* * * * *
Transcendence is not. It’s flat, static and lazy; we would’ve been better off reading back issues of Wired from 10 years ago. Johnny Depp phones in his performance as a genius AI research scientist. Paul Bettany, who plays his colleague, actually phones in his performances as Jarvis in the Iron Man and Avengers movies (We learned this from the DVD commentary track), but he’s a lot more lively here.
Speaking of the Marvel Universe (Rebecca Hall was in Iron Man 3 playing basically the same character), we’ve heard that Johnny Depp is being courted for the role of Doctor Strange. Given Transcendence’s dismal critical and commercial reception, Depp might find an offer from Marvel more attractive now.
Does anyone have old Doctor Strange comics we could barter for? And basic sets of Lego blocks. They’re all sold by theme now, and cost arms, legs, spleens.
Source:
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