Rear Window

Film, 1954, dir. Alfred Hitchcock

I feel like this is one in a string of random things I've been reviewing that are not current, so this by way of explanation: I think this movie ended up on the old Netflix (soon to be Qwikster? Noooo!) queue because it's on the AFI top 100 movies list and I had never seen it before.  Not to say I've seen all the other ones, but you gotta start somewhere, right?

Loved it.  See it if you haven't.  Now, for the rest of the review.

Someone forgot to color in part of Ms. Kelly

Rear Window is about temporarily-wheelchair-bound Jeff (Jimmy Stewart) staring out the, um, rear window of his apartment all day.  He lives in this group of apartment buildings whose backs all face each other across a courtyard-type area, so he gets to spy on people all day long, because apparently no one ever closes their blinds.  One day he notices that one of his neighbors is missing and her bed is all packed up, but her husband is still there.  He becomes slightly obsessed with this anomaly--an obsession which proves to be contagious, because soon his girlfriend (Grace Kelly), his policeman friend, and his nurse are trying to solve the mystery too.

It's fascinating that Hitchcock can create a mystery full of clues without anyone ever doing anything except watching across the courtyard.  That means every clue must be only visual and has to be observed by one of the characters.  That aspect really brings the movie viewer along for the ride, because we're in the exact same position as Jeff--just watching.  This is one point among many that one could make that proves Rear Window is a well-considered Film (yeah, capital F Film--you know, with good cinematography and music and lighting and stuff.)  I'm not about to go all academic on you in this post, so if you want something dissertation-y, email me.

But still, some highlights:

Example of awesome dress.

• I haven't seen too many other Hitchcock films, so I wasn't sure how suspenseful it was going to be on a scale of Dial M for Murder to The Birds.  Most of the movie was just a slow build of curiosity, but the end had a few genuinely nail-biting moments.  Excellent payoff there.
• I greatly enjoyed the supporting characters who lived in the other apartments.  There's a scantily-clad dancer, a lonely single woman, a talented musician, some newlyweds, etc.  It's fun to meet all of them, however briefly.
• Grace Kelly has some awesome dresses.

Any other Hitchcock favorites I should see?  Probably Psycho...Vertigo...North by Northwest...Jamie says they're in the old AFI top 100 too.

Dracula

Novel, Bram Stoker, 1897

As a Twilight fan (sort of), I felt I owed it to myself to read Dracula.  My dad--who writes an intelligent and entertaining blog over here--has told me that he thought it was one of the scariest books he's ever read.  (Dad, if you're reading this and I'm misquoting you, my apologies.)  I'm not sure if I agree with that, but it was pretty creepy for sure.

500 pages! Ah ah ah!

I thought I knew the basic story of Dracula, but I think that was actually mostly based on the Count from Sesame Street.  So for anyone else in that situation, here's an overview: A circle of friends is plagued by a mysterious demon, so they call in Van Helsing, noted professor of crazy stuff, and together try to identify and destroy the evil force.

To be a little more specific: The book (written in an epistolary style with contributions from all the major characters) begins with the diary of Jonathan Harker, who has been sent by his employer to Transylvania to help a certain Count Dracula get the purchase of his new England home in order. (Gotta love those international real estate agents who make a lot of house calls.)  This is the longest contiguous section of the book, as Harker describes the at-best-unnerving and at-times-downright-terrifying experience of staying in Castle Dracula.  Spoiler alert--he makes it out, but Dracula too makes it to England, and all of a sudden people start dropping like flies.  The middle section of the book concerns a girl named Lucy, who is Jonathan's wife, Mina's, best friend, and her torment by an elusive monster of some sort--bet you can't guess what.  The rest of the books finds our heroes figuring out how to corner and kill the Count and the obstacles they encounter in trying to do so.

Bela Lugosi. Shiver-tastic.

Dracula is WAY longer than I expected it to be.  I read it on my Kindle (it's free! yay copyright law) so I didn't have a clear sense of how long it was when I started.  Not gonna lie, that middle part was really slow reading.  The whole Lucy part is also dragged out by the story of this guy Renfield, who's in an insane asylum and has a bug-eating fetish and seems to be connected to the Count somehow.  None of it seemed to be all that relevant to the major story line.  I really enjoyed the major story line when we did get around to it, though, and found Harker's opening account and the build-up to the climax to be thrilling.

I don't read a lot of Victorian novels these days, so I don't have a huge frame of reference for this, but it was very strange to me that the men in the novel took a very worshipful attitude to Lucy and Mina, the main female characters.  Everything the girls did was pronounced endearing, charming, witty, intelligent, and they were of course angelically beautiful at all times.  That oddity aside, I really liked that Mina was involved in the action and shown as a heroine, because I guess I was expecting that women in a book from this era would be more... dainty--cf. those crazy Bennets in Pride and Prejudice.  The Wikipedia article on the book suggests that there is a lot of critical literature about the roles of gender and sexuality in the novel (oh, did I mention that there are also these wild ghost vampire women who want to either have sex with or suck the blood of everyone? pretty interesting stuff there), which I would be interested in reading.

It was evolutionarily beneficial for Dracula's kind
to develop sparkles and foofy hair.

This post is getting longer than I intended, which is either because the book is long or because it is the masterpiece that many have called it so I end up having a lot to say about it.  So just a couple more points in bullet form:

• In this age of Twihards and vampire mania, it does get tedious when the characters spend the first half of the book wondering where these mysterious bite marks on the neck could have come from, but I can imagine that it would have made for a great mystery when vampire lore was less common.
• The mood of the book is one of its greatest strengths.  I felt more Gothic just reading it.  It made me want a fireplace and a cold winter night.  Just thinking about the castle makes me hear an ominous thunderclap.
• I bet there are some pretty good abridged versions of this book out there (if you believe that such a thing exists in principle, which I'm not sure I do.  But it might be worth looking into.)

Next up for me is Dune, which is also a doozy for length, I think.  Maybe I will post some status updates on the way through that one.  You can check out how far I am by being my friend on my new Goodreads account!  (Goodreads is sort of like Netflix meets Facebook but all about books.  It's awesome.)

Dexter, Season 5

TV show, 2010-11 season

Do any of you have Showtime?  Calling all premium cable owners.  I need a friend with Showtime so I can watch season 6 when it starts in October.

I've been a Dexter fan since Netflix had the first two seasons streaming about two summers ago.  Since then it has been an arduous process of waiting for each DVD by mail.  It's always worth it, though, because Dexter never disappoints.

This is Dexter. He kills people.

If you haven't seen the show at all, read this paragraph and then stop.  If you have seen the show, jump ahead if you like, where I will go more in depth about the particulars of this season.  Gone?  Ok, noobs.  Dexter is not for the faint of heart.  It's about Dexter Morgan, who is a serial killer.  But he's the good guy.  See, he only kills other killers.  Vigilante-like.  By day, he's a blood spatter analyst for the Miami Metro Police, so he's an expert in forensics and murder, a handy combination.  The series follows his close calls as he takes down one baddie after another, and also follows his family and friends--his potty-mouthed tough cop sister Deb, his girlfriend Rita and her kids, and his intriguing mix of police coworkers.  Each season has a driving plot arc that usually has to do with a tough-to-catch serial killer and how Dexter and the cops are both going after him/her.  The pace is good--early and mid-season episodes sometimes lose steam as they set up the big reveals to come, but those last few episodes are always a good payoff.  I recommend this series highly--to adults only--and only those adults who can handle copious fake blood and bad language.

Dexter with Deb.  They were married in real life. Gross.

Now for you veterans.  Note: spoilers throughout for this season.  I heard some of you didn't like season 5 as much as some of the previous seasons.  I agree that it can't top the Trinity killer, but I thought it was still a good to very good season.  I think its major weakness was that the bad guys (all of them up to and including Jordan Chase) were just not as deliciously maniacal as, say, Trinity or the Ice Truck Killer.  These were just some perverts.  So when push came to shove at the end of the season, it wasn't as fun when the bad guy went down.  I thought Julia Stiles held her own, though--that was one thing I was worried about when I heard she was in this season.  Lumen was an interesting enough character and Stiles played her just right.  The end of her plot line felt a little abrupt, and I was pretty heartbroken for Dexter.  He had what might be his only chance ever to share his lifestyle with someone he loves, and it didn't work out.  That makes me sad.  Leave it to me to get caught up in the romantic subplot of a serial killer show though.

Speaking of which, how about Quinn and Deb, huh?  What's up with that?  Like Deb, I came around on Quinn by the end of the season, after he stopped being a giant jerkface (he also stopped being a good cop, but whatever).  I was pulling for her to get her butt in gear and return his affection.  I hope that Deb has a least a few episodes of solid happy romance in the next season, but I'm not holding my breath.

Get out of my show, you baby.

I was also happy that we managed to ditch Astor and Cody.  They are always just in the way of more important plot lines.  And Astor still managed to get her drunk emo butt in the way of an entire episode.  Harrison was annoyingly both over-involved ("too many nanny stories") and under-considered ("now that I think about it, where is Harrison anyway?  still with the nanny?  that's weird")  I guess part of the draw of the show is trying to figure out how this guy can be a family man and a serial killer at the same time, but I feel like we kind of played that one out back when Rita was still around. I really just want some more creepy crime scenes and Dexter sneaking up on terrifying serial killers.  Also Deb.  I do like Deb.

Seeing Lumen let go of her "dark passenger" (I really hate that phrase) at the end of the season made me wonder if they are setting up the series finale.  Now that they've proven it's possible for a killer to come back to the light, they're allowing for Dexter to do that too.  I hope that we get some more good murders in before then though.  So, who's hosting me for season 6 watching parties?

Some Like It Hot

Film, 1959, dir. Billy Wilder

Random Bonus Review not mentioned in recent check-in!

AFI named this movie the funniest of all movies of the 1900's.  Let me go ahead and say off the bat that you will not laugh harder at this movie than you did at whatever your current favorite comedy is.  That being said, it's a fun little movie and a "classic" that you probably ought to have seen.  (Actually, it's not really a "little" movie--more on that later.)

It's about these two musicians, Joe and Jerry, who witness a brutal gang killing (seemingly the St. Valentine's Day massacre in Chicago) and need to run away so they don't get taken out too.  The only gig they can get at the last minute, though, is with an all-girl band.  So of course they dress up in drag, go by Josephine and Daphne, and get the heck out of Dodge.  They meet Sugar, the band's singer (slash ukelele player?), and Joe tries to win her heart in a complicated clothes-and-gender-switcheroo plot line that rivals Mrs. Doubtfire in quick-change dexterity.  Meanwhile, Jerry/Daphne buddies up with all the girls and ends up showing an old millionaire a good time.  Hilarity ensues, as well as a chase scene when the mobsters of course catch up with the band.

Joe and Jerry deciding how to portray women is what makes this movie funny.  I can't help but imagine that if the movie were made today as a screwball comedy, there would be a lot of gay jokes and unfunny stereotypes about women.  This movie manages to stay away from that, and it's funny because of the characters that they create.  Then there's the lovely Marilyn Monroe as Sugar, who gets some laughs here and there for her antics in trying to find a rich husband (which, of course, Joe is trying to portray).  She won a Golden Globe for her performance (as did the film itself for Best Comedy and Jack Lemmon as Jerry for Best Actor), and she is certainly magnetic on screen.

A few minor issues.  One, it's too long, as I alluded to in the opening paragraph of this review.  The amount of time it takes to set up the whole gangster plot at the beginning is disproportionately long.  Two, looking back from the future as we are, there is something uncomfortable about watching Marilyn be the dumb blonde without any apology.  She calls herself "not too smart" several times in the film for allowing herself to be drawn into affairs with no-good men, and dreams of a rich man to take her away to her dream life of luxury.  Oh, Marilyn.  I just want more out of my female icons sometimes.  But, she is beautiful and luminous and we manage to love her anyway.  Wilder certainly doesn't have any compunctions about showing off her assets with the costume choices, either.

Here is a longer and smarter take on the whole thing by Roger Ebert.  Try to ignore the fact that he talks about Monroe's breasts in detail, but otherwise a good read.  As he points out at the end of his review, you've got to watch this movie if you don't know the last line.  It's a classic.

Checking in!

Hey friends!

Sasha reminded me that I haven't posted in a while (visit her very popular blog at http://sashandem.blogspot.com), so here's an update.

• Movies: I saw The Help and it lived up to my expectations.  It might be one of those rare movies that I like better than the book--the book was good, but there were so many great performances in the movie...it's a tough call.  I didn't even know my perennial favorite Allison Janney was going to be in it!  Best surprise ever.
• Books: I've been reading Dracula (Bram Stoker) for like three weeks.  It's long.  And kind of slow.  But I do like it.  More on that later.
• TV: Finally caught up with season 5 of Dexter.  Have seen all but the last episode.  More on that later too.

I'll get on the ball trying to finish that book and be back with a real review soon.  Until then, here is a picture of a kitty: