Does Clueless count as a high school movie? Because it could be the anti-Auntie Mame movie in that Cher Knows What's Best for everyone, but Cher gets it wrong where Auntie Mame gets it right.

I think Clueless was mentioned above, but it's also based on Austen's Emma, in which Emma does get matchmaking completely wrong.

My can't-not-watch movie is Singin' in the Rain despite the fact that I can recite the dialogue and probably dance (badly) most of the choreography.

A particular favorite of mine as well. I always get sucked into the Harry Potter movies and LOtR movies and stuff like Van Helsing and Underworld. Chronicles of Riddik, too.

A fun interview with the film programmer for the Roxie in SF:

"The Blue Dahlia’s (1946) not even on DVD, and that’s an interesting movie if for no other reason than because Raymond Chandler wrote it. Everything I’ve read about the making of that film, it sounds like it really got compromised by the director who kept improvising dialog on the set. You can’t do that with Chandler. You should go to prison for something like that! That’s why I don’t like Billy Wilder — he fucked with Chandler."

[link]

Heh. The Blue Dahlia's not on DVD but they show it on TCM all the time. (And I usually watch it 'cuz I'm hot for Ann Sothern and Anne Baxter like that. eta: Oops, they're in The Blue Gardenia. Whole other noir blue flower movie.)

Back in the 90s the Roxie put on these huge Noir festivals that would run for six weeks every year and they'd just sell out the run. It was great!

But that was when most of those movies weren't otherwise available. Plus they had shows of rarities like Noir TV including John Cassavetes ubercool jazz-pianist-private-eye show Staccato (finally out on DVD last year) or Lee Marvin's TV show M Squad.

The image they lead that article with is from Dementia which is this fantastic beat-noir-jazz-surreal oddity. I used to have the DVD for that.

And, of course, it's framed against that famous arcade in Venice, CA which has been used for so many movies (most notably Touch of Evil).

Heh. Coincidentally my Film Noir Collection Boxed Set arrived on Friday with 9 DVDs: The Killers, Double Indemnity, The Big Steal, Crossfire, Out of the Past, The Blue Dahlia (Region 2 FTW!), The Glass Key, This Gun for Hire and Murder My Sweet (aka Farewell My Lovely). Not bad for €21 (about $30). I hardly dare to admit that of all of those I have only seen Murder My Sweet and Double Indemnity in their entirety, and it's been a while for both, though I show a clip from DI in the Noir part of my course.

I predict a Noiry autumn this year.

I didn't realize that Ride the Pink Horse was so hard to get on DVD, though like the programmer I'd been trying to find it for years and then they finally showed it on TCM.

(I realize it sounds like a porn title, but it's actually a gritty little noir that's set in Mexico. It's a movie that haunts your imagination a bit. Certain scenes and shots linger in your head.)

Barry Gifford published a great collection of reviews for B-movie noirs titled The Devil Thumbs a Ride and he was the first person to articulate to me that particular fascination for those short, cheapie noir movies like "jagged like chunks of the psyche."

In a bit of synchronicity, this is the third article I've read today talking about the problem of living in a culture where all songs and all movies are instantly available. Which, of course, we all love, but it's also had all these unintended side effects which damage institutions of culture: bookstores, record stores, film series.

I saw Simon Reynolds interviewed for his new book called Retromania and he talks about the value of boredom, how his son never has a space to daydream because he's got a stimulating environment on and available to him at all times. You don't go out and seek culture or hunt it or form relationships about finding Italian giallos from the 70s, or rare punk singles, or whatever. It just comes to you with a click, and so your attention tends to be cursory. You don't sit through a third-generation dub of a tape because you can scan through it in seconds on YouTube or a shared file.

In a way, not having things Right There made you think about them and obsess about them for years before you could get them. So you'd take a bus across town on a rainy night just to see some Seijuin Suzuki movie that didn't even have subtitles (as I did in the 90s).

And I'm not interested in the issue as a matter of fogeyism ("It was better in those days when we were deprived!") or nostalgia ("I miss the smell of record stores...") But in a non-judgmental way, just curious about how taste is formed, and culture is fomented. There seems to be the same positive effect of having structure in formal poetry, or limited resources in filmmaking which forces more interesting solutions. Limiting the palette can liberate a painter, and narrowing the scope of interest can, I suspect, focus it and make it more intense.

I can't quite imagine going back (and do remember how arduous it was to research something pre-internet, which involved much time in libraries with microfilm, or academic journals or browsing through bookstores). But there is also something deleterious to having Everything All The Time.

I predict a Noiry autumn this year.

You're in for a treat. Those are some of my favorite noirs, particularly The Killers, and Out of the Past are top ten in the canon for me. Also, I'm fond of the Alan Ladd/Veronica Lake trilogy of noirs, including The Glass Key and (especially) This Gun For Hire.

Yes, I have seen at least one of the Ladd/Lake ones, but again it's been so long that I can't recall which.

In a way my post nicely ties in with yours about availabilty, David, and I do agree with a lot of those points. But I've been seeing a lot of "what's happened to boredom?" articles recently, which suggests something of a meme.

Also, it's one which apparently hasn't quite reached my kids, as I still hear "I'm booooored" reasonably often.