Boston Strangler - Matt Ruskin - 2023

★★★- Zodiac lite with some shades of Spotlight. You can watch it right now on Hulu. One of their originals. It's pretty good, but not nearly as great as its obvious predecessors. Though the combo of Keira Knightly (what a talent) and Carrie Coon (Gone Girl, Ghostbusters: Afterlife) makes this an enjoyable watch; however, the film has some problems. 

Gist of the movie is reporter Loretta McLaughlin (Knightly) breaks the story of the Boston Strangler murders. As the killer's body count rises, she continues the investigation alongside colleague veteran investigative journalist Jean Cole (Coon). The film has a lot to say about how shitty it was to be a working woman in 1960s, how cops sometimes take the easiest narratives, and how powerful old-school journalism used to be.

In addition to Knightly and Coon, the film stars Robert John Burke (I think of him as the lead in Thinner), Rory Cochrane (Dazed and Confused, Freck in A Scanner Darkly), Chris Cooper (Adaptation, American Beauty), David Dastmalchian (The Dark Knight, Suicide Squad, Dune), and Alessandro Nivola (The Many Saints of Newark, American Hustle).

Moves a little fast and the story is all over the place. The beats keep coming at you. She's at a crime scene, now she's talking to a cop, now she's home, now she's at work, now she's talking to another cop, now she's at a bar with her writing partner, now she's getting chewed out by her editor, now she's arguing with her husband. Repeat like six or seven times. Listened to a podcast about this and the possible Ann Arbor connection called Stranglers. Not sure I would have been a follow all this without having a 12-part docuseries under my belt.

I sort of hate mine and everyone's fascination with serial killers. They disgust and repulse me to no end. Yet I consume a lot of media based on these sick fucks whom I loath for bringing so much suffering into the world. All the victims die bad. Every once in a while I watch something so disturbing that I have to stop. Such has been the case for the last couple months. But goddamn do I love an investigative journalism movie. 

More than anything I love how they show the life of a journalist living a story. I've been there. It's a tough grind. You put in an incredible amount of time for no money, but there is nothing like it. That buzz of election night, basketball sectionals, watching the cops bring in a murderer. Thinking hard about it. Pouring your soul out. You live for that shit. Like a lot of movies like this, the film does a great job of putting you in that world. Hesitantly recommend. 

Insomnia - Christopher Nolan - 2002

★★★-“A good cop can't sleep because he's missing a piece of the puzzle. And a bad cop can't sleep because his conscience won't let him.” Yeah, not really my cup of tea. Saw this when it came out, dug that it was set in Alaska and liked the ambiance. However, wasn’t crazy about either Al Pacino or Robin Williams. Liked both of them more this time around, especially Williams, but it feels like an outlier for Christopher Nolan. It’s fine, but not genius like Memento.  

Gist of the movie is that a pair of homicide detectives from Los Angeles go to Alaska, for some reason, to investigate the murder of a teenage girl. The sun doesn’t set and the cop played by Al Pacino, who’s a bastard, can’t sleep. While chasing the suspect, played by Robin Williams, he ends of shooting his partner, probably by accident, but covers it up because his partner was feeding information to internal affairs back home. Williams’s character sees all this, and holds it over Pacino’s head so as to try to help him frame the dead chick’s boyfriend. So, you know, a real uplifting type of flick. 

MVP is Hilary Swank who plays local detective Ellie Burr, who is a fangirl of Dormer (Pacino’s character). He is apparently something of a famous investigator. She is really solid in this as a up-and-coming detective who is wrestling with her hero being an asshole/bastard cop. Williams, who I remember not liking, was actually pretty stellar, too. Sort of like his Oliver Sacks from Awakens that fucking kills young girls. 

Memento - Christopher Nolan - 2000

★★★★★-"We all lie to ourselves to be happy." Wow. Still fucking genius. Maybe more so than I remember. Holds the fuck up, I tell you. Christopher Nolan is perhaps my third favorite living director, depending on the day. This is the film that put him on the map. Rightfully so. 

Gist is a dude with anterograde amnesia (the inability to form new memories), can't remember anything short-term after 15 minutes. He got this way from an injury resulting from an attack on him/his wife, who was raped and murdered. Having developed a system where he uses Polaroids and tattoos to track information, he is tracking down his wife's killer. 

The film is told through two sequences. The ones in color tell the story backwards in little chunklets. Basically, the audience sees shit the way he does, in these short increments with no idea how we got here until we get to the next chunk of time. The black-and-white scenes show what is happening chronologically. These sequences meet at the end of the film, producing the complete narrative. It is clever as fuck. 

Stars Guy Pearce as Lenny, the guy with the condition. I bought a shit ton of Guy Pearce stock after LA Confidential. Really paid off here. Some really good that guys in this film--you get Ned Ryerson (Stephen Tobolowsky) and Lieutenant Dangle (Thomas Lennon). Plus, total that guy Mark Boone Junior (most memorable part, for me, is as the pizza stealing FBI guy in Se7en). Jorja Fox, whom you might recognize from ER or CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, plays Lenny's wife. 

The only substantive female role is that of Carrie-Anne Moss's character. A lot going on with her. For a while, I thought she was just getting revenge on the guy that killed her person. She says some genuinely awful shit to Lenny and calls him a "retard." Even steals his pens so he can't write anything down before she tells him she is going to fuck him over (and fuck him) and that she will enjoy it more knowing that he's too stupid to remember. Ouch. But she ends up helping him. She might have figured out that the death of her dude was more the result of this other guy, played by Joe Pantoliano (the true villain of the movie), which is probably somewhat accurate. Still, I think she sees Lenny as a victim too, which is why she helps him. Her whole look and vibe are exactly like this girl I dated in 2002, who I watched this with. She thought that Lenny was the real villain, which I still think is insane. 

Nolan is the obvious MVP of the movie. Pearce is perfect but goddamn. It's hard to get over how great this film is or what it was like watching it for the first time. I've seen it roughly five times and like it more after every viewing. I still don't 100% get it, but I get closer with every watch. Multiple viewings are definitely a requirement. Crazy good.

Missing - Nick Johnson and Will Merrick - 2023

★★★★-Interesting, pretty solid flick. I was kind of surprised at how inventive the movie was and how much I liked it. Definitely worth a watch for people that can stomach the new way of doing found footage. 

Gist is one June Allen, embarks on a mission to locate her mother who mysteriously vanished while vacationing in Colombia with her new feller.The journey takes her through all the usual and not so usual twists and turns as she unravels the truth behind the truth type of shit. 

Movie stars Storm Reid who I only know as Meg from A Wrinkle in Time, and Nia Long. Nia Long is one of those unmistakable actresses that I know and love, but when I look at her filmography it's a bunch of stuff I haven't seen. At least for the last 30 years or so. 

There are also several “that guys” in Joaquim de Almeida who hasn't aged a day since I first saw him in Desperado, Ken Leung who is always the creepy Asian guy, and Amy Landecker who I see in stuff all the time but have trouble placing her for whatever reason. She reminds me of a cross between Jane Lynch and Amanda Peet. Also, June's dad, played by one Tim Griffin, looks exactly like Steve-O. It's distracting how much he looks like one of my favorite vegans (go team!). 

The shocking twist at the halfway point was bananas. Completely changes the movie's direction. It gets completely nuts. So nuts at this midway point that you know some shit is really going to go off the rails in the third act, which it does. It ends up being a really sad, fucked up movie. 

Learned a new word after watching this flick--”screenlife”. This is what you call a film that unfolds entirely through computer screens, tablets, smartphones, so forth. Some notable examples include Host, which is dope, Unfriended, and Searching (which is also great) with Harold from Harold and Kumar.

Funny little Easter egg is when the lead watches the Netflix special about the shit that goes down, the person who plays her is Jasmin Savoy Brown. On the one hand, of course she would play this girl in a fictionalized version. On the other, she is way to big at this point to do a reenactment on a true crime anthology. 

Body Double - Brian De Palma - 1984

★★★-Body Double. An old favorite from 1984, a real banner year for trash films, aka my brand. Love a neo-noir. I was a Brian De Palma super fan, but fear I've outgrown him. Didn't quite like it as much as I did as a younger person. Last saw it around 20 years ago. 

Gist is one Jake Scully (played by Bill Maher lookalike Craig Wasson) is an out-of-work actor who is going through a rough patch in his life after catching his girlfriend cheating on him. However, things turn around when he moves into a new apartment sublet by a new actor buddy (played by Gregg Henry whose still around, most notably playing Peter Quill's [aka Star-Lord] grandfather in the Guardians of the Galaxy flicks) and becomes obsessed with a beautiful woman (played by Deborah Shelton, whom I've not seen in anything else) who does nightly sexy dancing from the window of her nearby home. While creeping on her, he sees another uglier creep and grows concerned, eventually witnessing the woman's murder. Which is all to say that main creep dude becomes entangled in a web of deceit and danger as he investigates the murder and attempts to protect the woman he has been spying on. You know, typical thriller stuff. Along the way, he meets a pornographic actress named Holly Body (Melanie Griffith) who helps him in his investigation after figuring out she was involved. 

The flick is known for its stylish direction, suspenseful plot, and references to other films, particularly Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window and Vertigo. It was apparently controversial at the time of its release due to its explicit content which involves the porn industry, however, the peeping stuff is more unsettling these days.

Overall, Body Double is a tense and visually stunning thriller that showcases De Palma's distinctive style and flair for suspense. However, the plot is ludicrous and features extra sleaze. The last 20 minutes are comically outrageous. It's not nearly as great as I remembered. 

Quick shoutout to Barbara Crampton. She's one of my faves. You might remember from various Stuart Gordon movies like Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Castlefreak. Also the Ti West movie You're Next. 

This is her big screen debut. She's naked for the entirety of her performance. Also, Dennis Franz from NYPD Blue plays a bit part. He's an asshole B-movie director. 

The Lady Vanishes - Alfred Hitchcock - 1938

★★★★★ - I loved this movie. Hitchcock's second to last film before coming to the states.

Gist is a beautiful English tourist, Margaret Lockwood (a total babe [this was during Hitch's brunette phase]), travels by train across Europe with a motley cast of characters. Just before boarding the train, she takes a bump on the head and an elderly woman agrees to watch after her. In and out of consciousness, she awakens to find her companion has disappeared. The other passengers deny having ever seen her and gaslight her, saying she can't trust her own memory because of the blow to her head. She eventually employs the help of a musician, Michael Redgrave (who looks exactly like Paul Dano), whom she has had beef with going back to the hotel where the movie opens.

All the train stuff was filmed in a studio that used only one car for the entire shoot. Totally remarkable filmmaking.

The vanishing lady is something of a McGuffin that only sort of matters. The film gets a little bogged down with why she is being kidnapped and what have you.

Has a decent amount of humor to it. There is a great fight scene between Redgrave and Lockwood and this Italian magician who is in on the kidnapping. It takes place in the luggage area with all his magic props and a cardboard cutout of him looking on. The fight is realistic and terrible with a lot of slow choking and wild punching. The best comes after the magician has escaped being locked up through a trap door. Frustrated by the whole thing, Lockwood punches the cutout in the face.

Might be my all-time favorite train movie. Hitchcock is mostly associated with Strangers on a Train in this regard, but that really isn't a train movie. This takes place almost entirely on board.

Marnie - Alfred Hitchcock - 1964

★★★ - I’ve always been led to believe this was a great movie. It was not a great movie. Hardly any of it makes sense. Doesn’t really feel like a Hitchcock movie. Lotta melodrama.

I felt like Tippi Hedren mostly phoned it in. Sean Connery was pretty good. The actress that plays Tippi’s mother is maybe the worst performance in all of Hitchcock. Her accent is literally incredible.

The gist is Tippi’s character be scammin’. Connery, his character seems to be into that sexually or something. Never really figured out what his motivation was, honestly.

Like when Connery catches her, he has her tell him her story. She tells a tale about her mom being dead and desperate for cash. Let’s her go on forever and then tells her how he knows that was all bullshit. Then he decides to take care of her. Alright.

Ought to be sending her to jail. She ripped off a bunch of friends of his and stuff. When he marries her, those friends are at the wedding. She’s like, “welp, I’m going to jail.” But instead, Connery says that they want after he tells them what he has to say. No idea what the hell he’s gonna say to smooth that shit over.

Something I’ve noticed after 25 or so flicks. Men in Hitchcock movies are always forcing brandy on women in the morning.

Also, Hitchcock did love the violence-leading-into-sex move. When Connery inevitably gets rapey, the Bernard Herman score is at its most frantic and horrible. The whole time you ask, why is he doing this.

What an insane living situation this is. Sean Connery and his fake wife, his dad, and his widowed sister-in-law that is in love with him all under the same roof. Tippy has a nightmare, her normal, reoccurring one where she’s screaming. “Don’t hurt my mama.” The sister-in-law comes and shakes the shit out of her while Sean Connery is just looking at her. The sister-in-law leaves their room and sees the book Sean Connery is reading, “Sexual Aberrations of the Criminal Female.” If any of this is happening to me, I am reassessing as life has become way too complicated.

Everybody is sort of familiar with it with many claiming it as one of Hitchcock’s greats. But when you get into this run of films, things get pretty weird in his universe. Definitely question his genius at this level.

Overall, to me, it felt like someone imitating Hitchcock. Same with the Bernard Herrmann score. The whole movie just felt kind of off.

Foreign Correspondent - Alfred Hitchcock - 1940

★★★★ - Love a journalist thrust in into a spy-thriller or noir flick. Main guy, Joel McCrea, has a Tom Brady look. Plays a great dumb guy who finds himself unwittingly in an international assassination plot. Shares some DNA with North by Northwest in that way.

The paper he works for in New York sends him to Europe in 1939 just before the war broke out. The publisher tells him he doesn’t want him to cover the impending conflict, but really wants him to, I guess. This is the backdrop of the story. Everybody waiting for war, but thinking it’s not going to happen but knowing it will.

The publisher is sending the protagonist because he punched a cop. This is his “punishment” instead of being fired. He’s out of control and loves his job. If this were what being a newsman was like in 2023, I’d for damn sure still be on the job.

Bunch of people I recognize but no one really by name. This guy George Sanders looks just like Jason Segal. Recognize him as the raging asshole convinced Laurence Olivier was up to something in Rebecca. He was also Mister Freeze in the Batman show from the 60s.

Female lead, Laraine Day, was not much else. This was her biggest role. Didn’t really make it. Was a Mormon, too, similar to Scientology. I can’t enjoy someone’s work if I know they are a Mormon. Other groups that ruin it are Jehovah’s Witnesses, fundamentalist, Christians, conservative, rapist, wife, beaters, and racist. If you turn out to be a Trump supporter, I cannot even look at you. There is active rage there.

Pretty great film but has some flaws. Overshadowed by Rebecca, which also came out in 1940 and won the Academy Award for Best Picture. These are his first movies after arriving in Hollywood. This film is mostly forgotten, but shouldn’t be. Plus a heck of a plane smash at the end.

Speak No Evil - Christian Tafdrup - 2022

★- One of those elevated horror movies. Gonna have to remember that I almost always hate them going into the future. This was supposed to be up there with Barbarian and Nope for this year's best horror. Nah. 

Gist is a Danish family--mother, father, daughter--visits a Dutch family--mother, father, mute son--that they met on a vacation at the beginning of the movie. The hosts, it becomes clear, are fucking insane. The Danish couple, however, don't know how to read the signs and get the fuck out as shit starts to escalate and become more and more nightmarish. 

Hardly any of the movie is believable. The evil Dutch folks, it is revealed, has been up to some shit for a long time. One would assume 100s of years when we see the extent of it. However, I'm pretty sure we aren't supposed to think that they are supernatural in the end. 

All that said... I can’t imagine hating a movie more. Dahmer or Funny Games would be a palate cleanser after this fucked up watch. DO. NOT. RECOMMEND.

Goodnight Mommy - Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala - 2014

★★★- Yeah, fuuuuckkk this movie. Good or whatever, but extremely disturbing. Not happy I watched it. Cannot recommend.

The film is about a set of twins with a very complex relationship with their mother who had some sort of facial trauma. They live in a large isolated house where their mother seems off. The boys begin to question the mother's identity, believing that she isn't the same person as the one who went into the hospital. They begin to question if she is their real mother, and then, where their real is if this is in fact not the woman they know.

Slow burn leads to a horrific ending. The audience, like the boys, are never sure if this is a stand-in until the end, when the unimaginable answer becomes definitive. I see it has been remade in English with Naomi Watts as the "mother." I don't recommend that either. 

Gone Girl - David Fincher - 2014

★★★★- I just watched this over the weekend. I haven’t stopped thinking about it. What a fucking nuts movie. Towards the bottom of my flicks for Fincher, but still stellar. Love his films.

It’s almost humorous how elaborate the plot gets. Lotta Fincher themes getting explored here and done really well. Narcissistic sociopathy. Check. Scathing media takedown. Check. Trouble relationships with money and power. Check. Extreme misogyny. Triple check there. Amanda Dobbins, whom I love on The Ringer, asks if the film is “a misogynistic summary of all the ways that a woman can falsely accuse a man.“ Also, based on a Gillian Flynn novel. 

The Amazing Amy shit is a really great way to fuck somebody up. She has no real friends, a total sociopath, the only people in her life are her parents and people she’s manipulating (her husband, the dumb pregnant girl, so forth), but she is pretty capable and plays a great victim. Her husband, Ben Affleck’s character Nick, is really gonna have a shitty life. And in the end, they’re back where they started, in a loveless marriage but now there are no illusions, I guess. Here you are raising a child with a woman that was going to kill herself to frame you. That kid is going to be fucked, one of her playthings. 

Loved Tyler Perry. Wasn't a fan Neil Patrick Harris. Structure of the movie is pretty good. One thing I couldn’t really get behind is how the detective and everyone when the gone girl returns after having obviously murdered someone is just like, “meh, it was just a goof.” White people are indeed crazy.

Blackmail (1929) is the greatest film of all time

Detectives in glass houses shouldn't wave clues. Final silent Alfred Hitchcock movie from 1929. When it was being developed, The Jazz Singer, the first talkie, came out. That shit became all the rage and Hitchcock made a talkie version of the same flick which is cited as the first sound feature film. The silent one is better though. 

Gist of the movie is that this young lady who is maybe cheating on her (I guess) husband--who is a detective for Scotland Yard--goes home with a painter. His game is to get chicks naked and to "paint" them. The oldest trick in the book, apparently, because it is worn out even then. They flirt and he makes a move. She turns him down and he gets all rape/murdery. In what is obviously self-defense, she kills him. But she freaks and takes off, leaving a mountain of evidence behind. Luckily though her dude gets assigned the case and takes some of the shit she leaves behind when she sees that the victim is the guy his wife or whatever left with. She ain't out of the clear though as this homeless dude saw her and tries to blackmail them. 

Rapey vibes

But, surprise, they pin it on the homeless dude. Spoiler. She doesn't want him to get hanged for her "crime" though so she goes to Scotland Yard to tell the cops "who did it." When she's about to do as such, they find out the homeless dude died while being pursued by the cops. It's a pretty sweet scene that takes place in the British Museum, a truly remarkable building. Her conscience clears up real quick when they learn about that. So off they go, to live happily ever after, I'm sure. Ends with a real knee-slapper how "pretty soon, you'll see women detectives on Scotland Yard!" They all have real good laugh at that one. 

Stars Anny Ondra the chick who kills the dude in self defense. She famously spoke little English and ended up miming the words while another access spoke offscreen in the talkie version. Don't feel bad for her though. She continued to act in German and French films and married the German boxer Max Schmeling. He was famous losing the "Battle of the Century" to Joe Louis in 1938 and getting shunned by the Nazis. The Nazi Party didn't exactly jive with him either as he saved Jews by hiding them in his basement during the war. Later in life he became an executive for Coca-Cola and more or supported Joe Louis. He was solid. I imagine she was as well. They stayed married until her death in 1987. Their marriage was apparently super happy.  

John Longden plays her detective maybe husband who helps cover the crime up and pin it on the blackmailer. Cyril Ritchard is the guy who gets murdered who had it coming. 

Hitchcock is the MVP, obviously. This was something like his 10th film. All the shit he would become known for is there. The use of shadow and light. The Kuleshov Effect. The cameo. The beautiful blonde. The famous landmark. Really glad I watched it. Probably never watching it again though. 

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane is the worst movie of all time

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. How old do you have to be before people start treating you like a person? What the fuck, man? That is a difficult question in the universe of this film. One of the horror movies from my Greatest Year in Hollywood Project. This being one of two from 1976--the first was Carrie. Basic gist of this is that 13 is too young to take care of yourself... and probably to fuck. Weird shit. Did not like. Was too uncomfortable in too many ways. Seeing an old dude trying to sexually molest a child who maybe lives alone, torture killing her pet in front of her, strong arming her child boyfriend. All of that was not easy to set through. Then there was sex scene that nearly made me throw up. Never really prepared for that. But then that child whom I just suddenly watch go to the bone zone killing some pretty awful people... That I was for the most part okay with.

Okay. Gist of this movie is that Jodie Foster is the child of a professor or something. She claims he is around but he is most obviously to everyone not. She mostly tries to keep to herself but I think the school superintendent, played by Alexis Smith who was quite the looker and B-List starlet (she was like Ronald Reagan level famous) in the 1940s and 50s, and her rapey ass son, played by Martin Sheen, keep coming around, fucking with her shit. Being an independent tween or whatever of the world, can't have people come to her house and make her do shit. So she starts killing folks. Oh, and she gets a boyfriend which is dumb and filler mostly. You've never seen him or anyone else in the movie. It was also directed by a guy you've never heard of, one Nicolas Gessner, who did a handful of low-budgets and made-for-TVs before and after this and is still alive but hasn't had anything else to his credits since 1997.

Noice

So the movie opens on Halloween with Sheen's character showing up at Foster's house a few minutes before his kids come ringing the doorbell for candy. That is not how this works, man. And is obviously is putting it out there that he is DTF. Foster isn't having any of this shit. She is stern in a way that suggests old dudes are always pulling this shit. Days later, his mom starts snooping around, basically playing a truancy officer or something. She dies at the house from being an idiot, more or less, and Foster hides as much evidence as possible, but really isn't hiding shit. After a few days, Sheen comes back over while Foster is entertaining this magician boyfriend kid she met that day, don't ask, and gets all passive aggressive about his mom. He and Foster fucking know but they play the game until Sheen has had enough and tortures her hamster to death with a cigarette. Okay, movie, you fucking lost me. That was it. But I watched on, like an idiot.

Foster wins the movie, but at what cost? I mean she is indeed a kid that is going places. This is around the same time as Taxi Driver, also a 1976 watch, but more fucked up. You've been warned. The shit that I couldn't deal with in addition to the hamster torture had to do with her sex scene. I mean, is it too much to ask not to have animal deaths or fucked up kid shit in a movie? Those are my two things. I pretty much dig everything else. But this movie has both. Too much. So the shit I am talking about comes near the end when Foster's BF stays over. It is not super obvious they are going to fuck but then you realize that is where they are going. By the time you realize this, unable to completely mentally prepare that this is about to happen with a very young child actress, she is suddenly naked. Fuck, man, I didn't want to see that shit. I seriously almost spilled the groceries... But then I read in the trivia section on IMDB that it wasn't Jodie Foster that we saw nude but her at least of legal aged sister. Apparently, the producers of the film adamantly wanted this nude scene for god only knows what reason, and Foster refused and walked off set. Now, she doesn't talk a lot of shit about the movies she likes or dislikes that she was a part of, but she has hinted, somewhere but I don't know where, that this is a movie she is not extremely fond of, I think for obvious child labor/nudity reason.  

In any case, yeah, never watching that shit again. Do not recommend. The end is pretty satisfying though. But I won't give that shit away. 

Rear Window - Alfred Hitchcock - 1954

★★★★★-Rear Window. We've become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their house and look in for a change. Alfred Hitchcock. Jimmy Stewart. Grace Kelly. Doesn't get much better than that threesome. Among the legendary director's best. Got to see it on the big screen for the third time. This time at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater in Bloomington, IN. I love this film in an old historic theater. Also identify more with the character than my last watch as I spent that decade as a sports photographer and what have you.

Rotten Tomato Consensus: Hitchcock exerted full potential of suspense in this masterpiece.

For those who are unfamiliar, the gist is that a guy with a broken leg, too much time on his hands, and excellent photography equipment gets his nightly entertainment by spying on his neighbors in maybe the most interesting courtyard in all of New York. Eventually, the behavior he sees from one of the tenants causes to suspect him of murdering his wife. Against the advise of a policeman and with the help of his beautiful girlfriendish person whom he treats like shit (played by the lovely Grace Kelly) and his nurse Stella, he investigates, almost getting everyone killed in the process. Luckily he is a photographer with million watt flash bulbs that roughly have the effect of a punch to the face.

Some bullet points. Hate that the murdering fuck killed someone's dog. Someone can kill a person on screen and can be redeemed. But a dog killer can go fuck himself. Also, love the set of this movie. Was not a real courtyard. Was built on the backlot and filmed at Paramount Studios. Used to like the idea of looking out and seeing your neighbors do cool and sometimes shady shit but now that I am older see Stewart's character as sort of a sick fuck. This guy definitely has something going on. No wonder he can't commit to Grace fucking Kelly. One more thing, I dug how she ordered food from that fancy restaurant and they brought it to them in that crazy food case. This is at the beginningish of the movie. Shit was noticeably cool.

So many ripoffs of this movie it is insane. These are the ones I thought of in like one minute off the top of my head Disturbia (RW on house arrest), Fright Night (RW with vampires), Manhattan Murder Mystery (RW with Woody Allen and in a hallway), Men at Work (RW with the Estevez/Sheen bros), and The 'Burbs (RW on stay-cation plus Tom Hanks). Plus there was a really terrible remake from 1998 staring Christopher Reeve after his horse riding accident that left him paralyzed from the neck down. Bummer.

Stewart is pretty solid but yucks it up like he always does. Gotta give Kelly MVP status on this one. She so pretty and compelling in the part that she steals the show. Plus the actress that plays Stella, Thelma Ritter, is incredible. She really does a good job of jumping back and forth between being incredulous and extremely involved in the spying and what have you. 

North by Northwest is the great movie of all time

North by Northwest. Fantastic. Depending on the day, fave Alfred Hitchcock movie. Watch it every year. Cary Grant in this movie is the fucking coolest. 99% Fresh on Rotten Tomato, some fucking dipshit didn't like this movie. Again, what more do you fucking expect. If you haven't seen this flick, it is fucking awesome. It is what would happen if some hilarious guy was mistaken for James Bond and keeps idioting his way out of almost getting killed.

Rotten Tomato Consensus: Gripping, suspenseful, and visually iconic, this late-period Hitchcock classic laid the groundwork for countless action thrillers to follow.

Gist of this movie is that Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill is out to lunch at a fancy restaurant. A waiter goes around with a phone calling for George Kaplan. Thornhill calls the guy over to order or something. Some goons are the lookout for the guy who answers the calls for Kaplan. Seeing this exchange, they decide that fucking guy is Kaplan and make his life hell for the next two and a half hours of run time. Trying to kill him and what not by filling up with booze and putting him behind the wheel and trying to buzz him with an aeroplane. You know, normal stuff.

In addition to Grant, cast includes Martin Landau who actually won an Academy Award for Best Supporting for 1994's Ed Wood plays the right hand man to Phillip Vandamm whose the guy trying to have Kaplan killed (basically his henchman), James Mason who starred in all kinds of shit (A Star Is Born [the 1954 encarnation], 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Lolita, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, so forth) plays Phillip Vandamm, and Eva Marie Saint as love interest and bad ass spy Eve Kendall. Les Tremayne of Creature of Destruction which I did a video on couple of years ago makes an appearance as the auctioneer. Bernard Herrmann notably does the musical score. This one of his most recognizable.

If nothing else, it is definitely the funnest Hitchcock movie. First, Grant's character is hilarious, sort of a dumb guy but means well. He also has a habit of thanking people when they insult him. No universe where he doesn't win the movie. Love the scene where after he gets pegged as Kaplan and they take him to Mason's home and force all the booze down his throat and he wakes up whilst they are trying to drive him off a cliff. He manages to steady the car and then drive until finally getting pulled over for being all over the road. When he tells everyone what happened, everyone, including his mother, laughs at him hysterically. He is also asked how much he drank and responds with drunken hand gestures. You would think this would be a sobering experience for the guy but he drinks his fucking ass off for the entirety of the movie. At one point he orders a Gibson on a train. I was going to make one of these, read what it was (gin, dry vermouth, and a pickled onion), and started to dry heave. Then there is a the scene when the bad guys have him cornered in an auction house. To get out of the situation, he acts like an asshole. When the bidding for a painting is in the thousands, he starts putting in bids dollar and goes down when Les Tremayne rebukes him.  A woman then calls him a "genuine idiot." "Thank you," he says. Again, he is rebuked. Bidding is started at $800. "Eight," Thornhill says. He is thanked for getting into the spirit of things. "Eleven," he says later. "Thirteen," and when he is about to win, "thirteen dollars." Everyone laughs. He then says that is more than the painting is worth. Then he jumps up to $2000. "Excuse me?" "$2100... $2500." They ignore him and he keeps upping the bid. Finally they go to kick him out and the cops show up. At this point he punches a guy in the face. He is an all out wild man by this point. THe cops then let him go even though he is an international fugitive, long story. He finds out the chick he was into, Eva Marie Saint, whom I adore in pretty much everything, is the real Kaplan and her cover was blown, he takes off to go save her then we go have a brawl in a fictional Frank Lloyd Wright on top of Mount Rushmore. It is insane and fantastical and amazing. Best movie of all time, indeed.