Bringing Up Baby - Howard Hawks - 1938

★★-Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant screwball romcom. It's where the term “screwball comedy” originated, actually. Oof. Has not aged well. 

Gist of it is a paleontologist (Grant) gets himself into predicaments involving a scatterbrained heiress (Hepburn) and a leopard named Baby. Shenanigans ensue. 

Personally, I can't really get over how that poor leopard probably had a pretty terrible life. Really ruins the comedy of it if you give a shit about animals. It's like that Eddie Murphy/Martin Lawrence movie Life. How can people possibly think a movie about two wrongly convicted men who spend their entire lives in prison could in any way be funny? Some things I just can't get past. 

Hepburn and Grant are both a couple of bitches in this flick. Hepburn is exactly like the unflattering Cate Blanchett portrayal in The Aviator. Her character is what film critic Nathan Rabin coined as the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” (MPDG) archetype in reference to Kirsten Dunst's character in Elizabethtown. Writing for the AV Club, he says the MPDG “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” 

The MPDG, along with other stock characters like the Magical Negro, pretty much has the sole function of offering mystical guidance to the protagonist (almost always a man). As in the case here, the MPDG lacks a distinctive inner life, as her primary role revolves around imparting crucial life lessons to the protagonist.

Grant, for his part, is the biggest weenie I've ever seen in my life. Grant based his performance on the forgotten Charlie Chaplin rival Harold Lloyd—a physical comedian of the silent era that was sadly ambitious and famous for his glasses. In turn, Grant's character here is what Christopher Reeve based his performance as Clark Kent in Superman on. So when Superman wanted to be a wimp, he acted like this idiot. 

I pretty much hated this movie. The speed and noise in this were terrible for two people with head trauma, so it was more or less unwatchable. The characters are horrible and remarkably unlikeable. Plus, the movie is not funny. Example. At one point Grant is wearing a woman's robe. A lady asks him why he is wearing that. He says, “I suddenly turned gay!” Hilarious!. I can't believe this is considered a classic. Fuck this movie. 

The Big Sleep (1946) is the greatest movie of all time

The Big Sleep. 1946 version. Great. Supposedly... But I thought it was sort of run of the mill. Just your typical beat-for-beat procedural detective flick. It is beautifully shot, interesting, and the ending is great. I think I was just expecting something a little more revolutionary. This is just fine.

Rotten Tomato Consensus: A perfect match of screenplay, director, and leading man, The Big Sleep stands as a towering achievement in film noir whose grim vitality remains undimmed.

Howard Hawks film. Bogie. Bacall, who is still alive! Second film together. The first, To Have and Have Not, also directed by Hawks, based on the work of Ernest Hemingway. The real life couple would do three more. The others, Two Guys from Milwaukee, Dark Passage, and Key Largo. This is supposed to be the best.  Based on the novel by Raymond Chandler, the first novel that features private detective Philip Marlowe, not to be confused with Sam Spade, the Dashiell Hammett gumshoe, the other hard-boiled detective made famous by Humphrey Bogart, with the William Faulkner working on the script. Lots of twists and turns. No one is to be trusted. Should love it but was sort of meh about it until the end. Liked it alright but got impatient.

That ending though. That was good shit. After we find out whodunit and what not, we get this big, isolated ambush scene but Marlowe gets the jump on the villain, Mars, played by John Ridgely, and at gunpoint makes him leave the house where his own goons await, ready to shoot the first person to come through the door. The scene is reminiscent of L.A. Confidential which that film obviously pays homage where Exley and White have their big gun battle out in an isolated bungalow.

Solid but not likely to make it past the next purge of my Plex server. Though it did get me interested in the Bogie's other work. Also, without this movie there would be no The Big Lebowski.

Edit: Oh yeah. 1946 is considered one of Hollywood's greatest years. I'm going to take five of Hollywood's best and look at several movies from those years and make the decision of which is top dog. Going to official announce what years I'll be looking at soon but I'm pretty sure 1946 is going to be on there. Tune in tomorrow for the other four.