I watched Preston Sturges's Unfaithfully Yours last night and would highly recommend this to the Buffistas. The movie is about a conductor, played as a stiff upper Brit by Rex Harrison, who, through the machinations of his brother-in-law (played by the unlucky rich guy from The Palm Beach Story), believes that his young wife is having an affair. The first amazing thing about this movie is the way that it makes the performance of an orchestral work into pure drama. Sturges films at least four full performances (that's all I recall) of works by Rossini, Wagner, and Tchaikovsky, the first a rehearsal and the other three part of a concert. During the concert, as Harrison conducts, he imagines three possible ways to deal with his wife's infidelity, all pitch-black funny with the others in the cast a few hairs over the top (because this is in his imagination, see?). After the performance, he decides to implement his plans, with a hilarious sequence of errors, possibly the funniest scenes involving a man plotting to murder his lovely wife to ever hit the screen. Sturges is always great, and this one's as good as Sullivan's Travels and The Lady Eve. My praise doesn't get any higher.

Remade with Dudley Moore, IIRC.

Well, I bet that wasn't nearly as funny.

I suspect not, but I bet his conducting was better.

Well, I bet that wasn't nearly as funny.

It wasn't. And I say that having never seen the Preston Sturges version.

I suspect not, but I bet his conducting was better.

I dunno. Rex really loses himself in his conducting.

And I say that having never seen the Preston Sturges version.

As I've said before, I think the Coens took all of their screwballity directly from Sturges. If you like their comedies (or even their dramas), you'd probably love Sturges's movies.

As I've said before, I think the Coens took all of their screwballity directly from Sturges.

Some of their fast talking characters - like Tony Shaloub in The Man Who Wasn't There, and Barton Fink - seem more Hawksian to me. I also think they have a big dose of Nathaniel West in their work.

I saw a big chunk of Stardust Memories this morning before work. It made me miss Jessica Harper. She's probably one of my favorite actresses of the 70s. Plus, of course, Charlotte Rampling, which is always good.

There's a lot of fast-talkin' in the Sturges, too. I don't know how much of it he got from Hawks.

Jessica, I just read fonebone's review of the new Cronenberg. I was looking forward to it before, and I'm really looking forward to it now.

In Raq's A Year Later Movie Reviews, we watched Lemony Snicket last night.

The good: Art Direction. Sunny. Liam Aiken, who played Klaus. The end credits. Sunny. Using three books to get enough story for a movie.

The bad: Jim Carrey. The music (except for the theme for "The Littlest Elf" which was perfect). Jude Law. The pacing. Jim Carrey. Using three books to get enough story for a movie.

I have to say that I didn't enjoy the books. I tried, a couple times, as I thought they were exactly something I should like. But they were too contrived, with nothing genuine in them. All artifice, no honesty. For me, they failed as books, but I thought they might make an okay movie. Not quite. The movie reminded me of the Myst computer game series: beautifully rendered environments, where you have little micro-adventures in one and move on to the next, with little or no honest human interaction.

The boy who played Klaus went a long way toward reversing that - he played his role well and with honesty and authenticity. His scenes were almost like a real movie.

Sunny was great, much better in a movie format than in a book format.

The whole thing might have been salvaged if they hadn't cast Jim Carrey, or hadn't had him be all zany, all the time. But I doubt it, as the other adult characters were also played as contrived charicatures.

The end credits were really pretty though, and almost as long as the movie themselves.