Month O' Musicals: Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

Vital Stats:
Year: 1954
Director: Stanley Donen
Stars: Howard Keel, Jane Powell, Russ Tamblyn, Julie Newmar (Catwoman in the 1960s Batman), Tommy Rall
Choreographer: Michael Kidd
Lyrics: Johnny Mercer

Summary:
Backwoodsman Adam Pontipee comes into town one day shopping for lard, molasses, chewing tobacco, and something he can't find behind the store counter: a wife. Amazingly enough, he gets a hard-working woman named Milly to agree to marry him, although he fails to mention to her that he has six other scroungy (slummocky, in the version I grew up watching) brothers back home. It's not long before she has them all cleaned up into mighty good-looking boys, ready to catch the eyes of the girls in town. But it's not only the girls' hearts that the brothers end up stealing away.

Memorable Moments:


The choreography really shines in the energetic, acrobatic dance at the barn raising. The tension built up between the brothers and the townsmen as they vie for the girls' attentions climaxes in a pretty funny fight scene.

What I love about it:
The wonderful Johnny Mercer lyrics in songs such as "Bless Yore Beautiful Hide", "Lonesome Polecat" ("Can't make no vows to a herd of cows.") and "Sobbin' Women".

I also find it amusing trying to choose a favorite brother out of the seven. My pick used to be the cute baby brother Gideon, but I'd say now he's just too young for me. Who's left? I find it hard to pine for Adam since he's taken so early in the movie. (Also, despite his nice singing voice, he seems a bit selfish and arrogant.) I'm afraid Benjamin belongs in the pretty but dumb category. Caleb, Daniel and Ephraim all kinda blend together for me -- two of them sport facial hair that is too reminiscently backwoodsy, and the clean-shaven one of the three is rather bland and boring.

My pick would have to be Frank. Although he does seem to have a bit of a temper (mostly seen in his sensitivity to being teased about his name) he's also the best at the handshake-wrestling-on-wood-boards thing. And he's got a chin dimple. I like chin dimples.

January, I dub thee... Month O' Musicals

Let me go on record about this: I am not a winter person. Cold, dark, snow, it's just not my thing. I'd love to spend the season hibernating, but instead I try to get by with fireplaces, hot chocolate, books, and of course, movies. And what type of movie is great for chasing the winter blues away? My vote goes to musicals!

Sure, not every musical tells an altogether happy story. But even in a darker musical, there is still a sense of unreality I find refreshing, cathartic even. (When is the last time you danced out your differences with someone, or put your deepest emotions into rhyming song?) And by and large, musicals are just peppy and silly and fun. If I turn one up loud enough, I can ignore the sound of the wind blowing the snow outside.

Therefore, I declare January to be my Month O' Musicals! My goal is not to create an all-encompassing list of musicals, but instead to look a variety from the genre. I want to watch and post about musicals both old and new, revisiting some favorites and maybe watching a new musical or two.

To start off, here's a scene from Gold Diggers of 1933. In my book, it doesn't get much better than this: crazy choreography by Busby Berkeley, a literal interpretation of the song's title for the costumes, and a super-cute Ginger Rogers inging-say. Here's "We're in the Money":

Jumping on the bandwagon (and NOT) with my 2008 movie list

So, like a lot of people at the end of the year, I'm making up a list of movies for 2008. I looked through this list of 2008 releases to see how many I've watched. Any guesses? It's a whopping three! I saw:

Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
Iron Man (unfortunately)
WALL-E (a couple times)

(I do still want to see some more on this list, like Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.)

Yes, three movies in a year would be rather pathetic for a movie blogger, but I did watch tons of other, older movies. This just goes to show a few things about me. Firstly, I am out of the habit of seeing movies in the theater. It used to be an almost weekly event for me, but living in NY for a while (with low funds and high ticket prices) cured me of that. I had to get more selective about what I watched, and became more content to wait to see things when they came out on video.

Also, I think it's possible that I'm just not a movie critic at heart. Sure, I enjoy ripping a bad movie to shreds and analyzing all the details of a good movie, but I'm not trying to be the next Roger Ebert or anything. Nobody pays me to sit through a crappy movie, and if they offered to I would probably tell them no anyway! I don't watch movies that I think from the start will stink. I also don't usually like being shocked, scared, or offended, which for me rules out (even popular) films with lots of language, sex, and violence.

Finally, this just reinforces my stand as a classic movie lover. While I only managed to see three new releases this year, I did see many new-to-me classic movies. Although I wasn't keeping track and therefore may be leaving some out, here's a list of old movies I sought out or discovered in 2008 (links are to my reviews):

Boomerang! (1947)
The Doll
The Grapes of Wrath
Hud
Jane Eyre (1944)
Rachel and the Stranger
The Thief
The Thin Man
The War of the Worlds (1953)
Witness for the Prosecution

Not that I didn't watch any newer movies, here's a few more recent movies that I watched in 2008:

Across the Universe
Dreamgirls
Eat Drink Man Woman
Enchanted
Helvetica
National Treasure: Book of Secrets
P.S. I Love You

I watched these newer ones with more mixed results than the older movies. I also re-watched tons of favorites, as I do every year, but I won't even try to include them here. So, that's my list. Where else could you find WALL-E and The Grapes of Wrath together for 2008?

How did you get into classic movies?

The poll is closed and the results are in. In answer to the above question, 8% of respondents got into classic movies thanks to school or a film class, 33% got started with recommendations from friends or family, and the majority (50%) found old movies on TV. That leaves another 8% that fell in love with classic movies some other way. (Yeah, that only adds up to 99%, but that's the numbers my poll gave me.)

This brings up other questions that can't be so easily gotten in a click-to-answer poll:

For those that found old movies on TV, what channel were you watching? TCM, AMC, or just a late-night showing of something classic?

For those who didn't find their answer on the poll, how did you discover classic movies? Video rental? Something else I haven't thought of?

For everyone: Was there one movie you can point to as being the first old movie you really got into? A movie that made you take notice and think, what other wonderful classics have I been missing?

As for me, I grew up watching old movies, so my answer would be family recommendations. But I've also benefited from video rentals and old movies on TV (especially TCM) for rounding out my classic movie knowledge. There are so many movies I have seen so many times since I was young that I can't remember my first reactions to them (Citizen Kane, Some Like it Hot, The Maltese Falcon) but there are a few that I remember discovering later, sometimes on my own, and loving the fact that I found them (The Hustler, Out of the Past, The Major and the Minor).

Whether you answered in the original poll or not, feel free to weigh in with your answers here.

My answer to the 20 Actresses Meme: I like Actors better

There's a 20 favorite actresses meme going around. It started at The Film Experience blog. I've had a terrible time trying to come up with a list of my own. Not because there are so many actresses out there, but because I've realized that there aren't a lot of actresses I think are really great. How can this be? I don't know. Maybe I am jealous watching someone else get the leading man of my dreams. Maybe I am jealous of really beautiful women. Maybe as a girl, I've just learned to be catty to other girls. Isn't that sad? Whatever the case, I have come up with a list of 20 actresses that don't (usually) annoy me:


That's Leslie, Lee, Marilyn, Cate, Grace; Katharine, pre-botox Meg, Ingrid, Tina, Judy; Meryl, Natalie, Ginger, Mary, Amy; Hayley, Gwyneth, Judy, Agnes & Lauren.

Cate Blanchett has the distinction of being the only one on this list whose movies I don't own. I just think she is a good actress (and she doesn't irritate me).

My favorites on here are Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman & Ginger Rogers.

As I was making this list, I decided it would be much more fun to make a list of favorite actors. I thought, surely someone is bound to answer back the top 20 actresses list with their top 20 actors, right? It might as well be me. And so I made this list, and it was such a breeze! Here come the men:

That's Clark, Henry, Gene, Joseph, George C., Spencer, Humphrey, Dana, William, Jack; Cary, Paul, Jimmy, Ray, Orson; Marlon, Kirk, Sidney, George & Alec.

You'll see this list was made with only classic movie actors. So as a bonus, here's another five new(er) actors I happen to like:

Jude, Harrison, Ewan, Leo & Tom.

If I tried to narrow this list down to top favorites, it would probably be Spencer Tracy, Jack Lemmon, Humphrey Bogart, Dana Andrews, Cary Grant, Ray Milland, Orson Welles, Jimmy Stewart, Paul Newman & Tom Hanks. See how much more generous I am to the males?

If you want to make your own list, feel free to choose actresses or actors or both. If you do actors, please link or comment here with your lists. I'd like to see some more testosterone about. Let the 20 Actors meme begin!