John Wayne and Howard Keel's facial hair

These two topics are not super related but both are inspired by my watching habits over the past week.  Most of my posts are the result of what movies I've watched on TCM.  And this week has been pretty light because John Wayne is the star of the month for April.  And it culminated with showing mostly John Wayne movies all this week (or at least those are the only movies the popped up on demand on the TCM app). So, I hate John Wayne.  Okay, hate is kind of a strong word, but I definitely dislike John Wayne.  He did mostly Westerns and War movies, two genres I don't particularly care for, unless there is an actor I really enjoy (I'm thinking of Gregory Peck in The Guns of Navarone and The Big Country).  Furthermore, he specialized in the cowboys vs. Native American Westerns, which I like even less. But, I've tried to see John Wayne movies that are outside those two genres.  I saw The Quiet Man (at the AFI Silver around Saint Patrick's Day) and while I enjoyed the movie, both John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara were my least favorite characters in the movie (I really wanted to learn about the widow who ruled the village with an iron fist).  The movie I did watch on TCM this week was the film adaptation of Annie Get Your Gun.  And I could not stop staring at Howard Keel's naked face.  In Seven Brides for Seven Brother he has a beard and then a sensible mustache and in Kiss Me Kate, he has a mustache.  Seeing his naked upper lip was very distracting.  And so was knowing that everyone was so mean to Betty Grable (so much that she kind of stopped acting after that movie, which means I have another reason to like Dan Dailey because the both of them look so happy in pictures I've seen of them from their films together).

The Magic of Gregory Peck

So I learned this week that I love Gregory Peck so much that I would re-watch The Big Country (and I did). This in spite of ultra-creepy Chuck Conners and Burl Ives wearing the eyebrows of ten men.

So we agree to leave science out of it?

I watched the William Powell/Myrna Loy movie I Love You Again a few days a ago.  The plot hinges around William Powell recovering some memories after suffering amnesia.  And how does this happen, you may ask?  Well, through the very sound medical process of being hit on the head.  I love that in most movies, one hit to the head means amnesia and then the second hit to the head means recovering from amnesia.  This is not how amnesia works, by the way.

Beyond John Williams and Bernard Hermann: Film Composers to Know

Film scores have such great power because it can make or break a scene (or movie).  There are, of course, well known composers of great film score, the most famous is probably John Williams.  John Williams has scored most of Steven Spielberg's (and George Lucas) films. And of course no conversation about film composers can leave out Bernard Hermann, who composed the scores for lots of Hitchcock's films, most famously Psycho.   But there are several other really great composers to know (I'll cover both classic and modern film composers):

Elmer Bernstien:
Most Famous Scores: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Magnificent Seven, and The Great Escape
With a catalog that contained over 200 scores,  I love the variety of his music, you would never guess that the same composer wrote both To Kill A Mockingbird and The Magnifiecent Seven (though I can hear the influence of his mentor, Aaron Copeland).




Ennio Morricone
Most Famous Scores: The Untouchables, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (also, awesomely, he scored La Cage aux Folles)
Obviously you know this:


But this is one of my favorite pieces of music ever:


Also, I present music to use in case they send one of yours to the hospital (and you need to send one of theirs to the morgue; the score made me like The Untouchables way more that I thought I would):



Miklos Rozsa
Most Famous Scores: Ben Hur, Spellbound, The Lost Weekend, The Killers, The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers, El Cid, Double Indemnity, The Naked City, Adam's Rib, The Asphalt Jungle, The Thief of Baghdad



Dimitri Tiomkin:
Most Famous Scores: Dial M for Murder, Giant, Strangers on a Train, The Guns of Navarone, High Noon, Thing from Another World, It's A Wonderful Life



Alexandre Desplat:
Most Famous Scores: The King's Speech, The Artist, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Argo, Moonrise Kingdom, Rise of the Guardians, The Monuments Men



Michael Giacchino
Most Famous Scores: The Incredibles, Alias (TV Series), Lost (TV Series), Ratatouille, Fringe (TV Series with a really great theme!), Super 8, Star Trek (2009 reboot), Star Trek: Into Darkness, Up



Shoutouts to Howard Shore (The Lord of the Ring Trilogy),  Hans Zimmer, and James Horner.

And just because:


Now excuse me while I watch Raiders of the Lost Ark (or Jaws, or Jurassic Park, or Star Wars)

First World Problem

So occasionally, I will watch some more obscure movies or TV shows.  Like an old B-movie or a TV show from another country.  Over the past few years, I've been dipping in and out of Korean dramas (that are produced in South Korea).  I'm not sure what I like about them so much.  I like that fact that there are usually just one long (can be very long, I've seen one that has 33 episodes) so there is a known end.  And I think it allows the writer to slowly unspool the story and flesh out the characters more (although, I have seen my far share of plots that come out of nowhere and are shoehorned in).  Those this prevent a problem in that I can consume the entire series in a very short and intense period.  And then I feel like I should congratulate myself for doing that.  I understand that this is totally ridiculously, and getting through all seventeen episodes of The First Shop of the Coffee Prince in about 4 days is not an accomplishment.

Thoughts on Dan Dailey

I just finished The Girl Next Door which stars Dan Dailey as probably the only cartoonist who is also an accomplished dancer. I've seen a couple of Dan Dailey movies (alas no movies with his best dance partner Betty Grable, how Mother Wore Tights is not a DVD is a mystery to me) and I've always enjoyed him, but I have found something lacking.  He was a very tall dancer (and very handsome) and more on the graceful side than the athletic; so more Fred Astaire than Gene Kelly. Watching The Girl Next Door, I finally figured out my problem.  In the movies that I have seen with him, the costumers did not dress him to show off his dancing.  I'm not suggesting that they should have gone full Gene Kelly in The Pirate and dressed him in skin-tight shorts, but Dan Dailey was often is very loose (and high waisted!)  pants which did not lend themselves to showing off his body movements.  There is one Dailey/Grable movie on DVD (through Netflix anyway) which I might have to move to the top.  As a side note, the other Dan Dailey movie that I have seen was It's Always Fair Weather which I enjoyed mostly because Michael Kidd (the choreographer of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers) played on the characters and Dan Dailey and Michael Kidd's dancing was so good (even though Gene Kelly clearly choreographed the dance moves to suit his body and height, Kidd was a very inches shorted than Kelly and Dailey was several inches taller).