Fedya

Then Karen Carpenter would have looked that good, too.

The double-a in Kaaren Verne's name comes across as Danish or Swedish to me, even though she was German. Well, Germany did end up with a small Danish minority in Südschleswig after World War I....

Sure, but how can you know which pair of laces is going to break during the routine? Marat Safin once got defaulted from a tennis match for smashing all his racquets and having none left to play with.

Oh, there are a lot of more recent (at least, more recent than Taxi Driver) movies with difficult themes that I really liked. There are other movies where I found the characters difficult, but understood why the movies are highly regarded: Albert Finney's alcoholic in Under the Volcano is a great example of this, and I'd say Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann in Autumn Sonata are the same way.

Oddly, it seemed to me that scene was playing out in slow motion.

Taxi Driver (1976). Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) is a Vietnam Vet who, broken by the experience, is now working as a cabbie in New York of the era when Ford was telling the city to drop dead. Bickle doesn't like what he sees, so he decides to fix things in his own way, in part by helping out a young prostitute (Jodie Foster). Everybody says this is one of the greatest American movies of all time, but I found it an incoherent, meandering, baffling mess, with a lead character who was such a jerk I didn't care what happened to him. (For what it's worth, I was also left cold by Scorsese's earlier Mean Streets, but to nowhere near this extent.) 4/10

Flash photography probably does a number on the delicate fabrics. Not your one flash, but the millions it would ultimately get over the years.

Secret Ceremony sounds like a fascinating mess.

I'm reminded of the scene in The Best Years of Our Lives where Dana Andrews shows Teresa Wright a bottle of perfume at, I think $2.95 and tells her it's a rip-off at half the price.

You're not paying for the ingredients; you're paying for the name.

Jean Simmons wasn't even nominated for Elmer Gantry.

Damn Lawrence A's nimble fingers!

You do realize the painter was his father?

Rafer Johnson would play himself as a color commentator in 1970's The Games, loosely based on the 1960 Olympic marathon competition.

Well, I really am a crotchety blankety-blank like my avatar!

Did Zouzou bring her petals as well?

Have you stopped to think it takes talent to make Audrey Hepburn look drab?

Double or Nothing (1940). This "Broadway Brevity", a WB short, stars Lee Dixon as Bill, a stunt double who gets knocked out in a stunt. When the dentists use laughing gas during the dental work, Bill has various hallucinations about other doubles. The framing story is inane, but for those of use who are fans of old movies, the doubles are a hoot. Among the better ones were those impersonating Mae West, Greta Garbo, Joe E. Brown, Zasu Pitts (here pronounced "Zay-soo"), and Hugh Herbert. 8/10. Probably available as an extra on some DVD, but I watched as it filled out the time slot from the recent airing of The Divine Lady.

Nitpick: I think you mean Elisha Cook, Jr. Elijah Wood was probably a bit too young to be in Stranger on the Third Floor. And I've always enjoyed Elisha Cook whenever I see him in a movie. Even in Blacula.

Yeah, I'd like to see Sextette. Oh, you were still referring to Nathanael West, not Mae. They were on their way to F. Scott Fitzgerald's funeral when they got in that accident, weren't they?

Perl and sed are your friends. Of course, changing the references wouldn't be helpful to books about Diwali.

I thought it was a game of Twister.

The curtains are a macguffin.

Have you ever done any broadcasting? I was a newsreader at my college radio station ages ago, and even without having to worry about blocking, it's a lot more difficult than you'd think.

In A Night to Remember, the ship hits an iceberg. The Japanese attack at the end of From Here to Eternity.