2006 - THE HOLIDAY, 1947 - LADY IN THE LAKE, 1951 - QUO VADIS...Three on the weekend

THE HOLIDAY-My wife and I took a road trip down to scenic south eastern Minnesota this Saturday. When we got back we were tired and vegged out in front of the tube that night. We ended up watching The Holiday on TBS. The plot is actually two stories. In the first story, the viewer has to decide who is prettier, Cameron Diaz or Jude Law. In the second story the viewer is forced to watch in horror as Jack Black is cast as the the romantic lead to Kate Winslet. Throw in a couple of cute kids and a colorful old geezer for no particular reason to make the movie drag on even more. This movie is full of tiresome inside movie jokes, no sale.

 136 minutes.


I had started Lady In The Lake a couple of weeks ago, so I finished it off on Sunday morning. This was one weird film. It's a movie made in 1947 by the actor Robert Montgomery using the camera as the main character. I guess they call it the subjective camera technique, as they said in the advertising "you are one of the characters". This movie was based on a Raymond Chandler story, and with all Raymond Chandler stories the mystery is so impossible to follow that by the end of the film I wasn't sure who had killed who and why they were killing anyone at all. This was an interesting failure but no sale.

 105 minutes

 

Finished off Sunday night with Quo Vadis a MGM spectacular. The odd thing about this movie was that it wasn't filmed in a wide screen process, so the movie looked great on our TV instead of the usual postage stamp size that you get with letterboxing. This is one of those ancient Romans persecute the Christians things. I enjoyed it a lot. The romantic leads Robert Taylor and Deborah Kerr were a couple of stiffs but I doubt they could have done anything with these characters anyway. However Peter Ustinov is great hamming it up as Nero and Leo Glenn is also pretty darn great as Petronius, the author of the Satyricon. His death scene is pretty darn great as well. You also get to watch the burning of Rome, Christians getting eaten by lions, Christians burned at the stake and a "cast of thousands" enjoying it all in the Coliseum you gotta love all that debauchery. Highly recommended.

 171 minutes.