Looped

Catching up.

I've decided that I can't write about Safety Not Guaranteed without spoiling it. I love the ending. Whatever reservations I still have about the film are mostly due to the film's sense of humor, which I felt too often devolved into a That 70s Show level of not-that-funny.

I also watched a forgettable Western at the end of July. War Arrow. Maureen O'Hara is the best thing about it.

Now, it's August. My viewing has slowed down a lot.

I've watched a few things with the girls, including The Lady Vanishes.

The Paleface might become essential. I enjoy it more every time I watch it.

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm is surprisingly enjoyable. Directed by one of cinema history's greatest action director. Starring one of cinema history's greatest cowboy actors. And Shirley Temple. Huh? It works.

I don't have much more to say about it.

Here's Graham Greene on Shirley Temple:

"Watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood that is only skin-deep. It is clever, but it cannot last. Her admirers—middle-aged men and clergymen—respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire."

Yikes.

I'm getting rid of a giant collection of Greene's film writing. Anyone interested in it?

Other than those movies, I've continued to keep up with Breaking Bad. "Fifty-one" is one of the greatest episodes in the series' astoundingly great run. Most episodes are good. Many are great. A few are better than just about anything else on screen, big or small, now or up against anything in the past. Of course, these episodes are built on the cumulative strength of previous episodes so it's hard to consider them in isolation.

Rian Johnson's Looper has become my most anticipated film of the year.

Finally, a train heist? A train heist?! A train heist!!!

Don't bother me. I'm busy composing The Ballad of Jesse Pinkman.