Wow, I have been watching a lot of movies over the past two days. More than normal, even. Gorging on them, really. I don't think it's safe. I feel funny. But
I'm on hiatus, so what else am I going to do? It's been a lot like a
McNeil's Movie Korner Film Festival, but
McNeil isn't around so it's a Lonely Film Festival. Oh, sure,
Dr. Theresa sits in once in a while but she does things during the day like a real human. Coincidences pop up,
the kind you get during an actual McNeil's Movie Korner Film Festival. Why, just today I accidentally watched two movies in a row with
Cesar Romero in them - 25 years apart in the making! Imagine if you will the awakening of my giddy childlike wonder at such an occurrence. The first Cesar Romero movie was WEE WILLIE WINKIE, starring
Shirley Temple. It was in this
John Ford box set I've had for years, filled with oddities by that director I've only begun to sample. The next Cesar Romero movie was IF A MAN ANSWERS, which McNeil gave me years ago, but not
as long ago as he gave me that
John D. MacDonald novel I finally read. IF A MAN ANSWERS was still in the plastic. In more ways than one! It made the blunt, sentimental colonialist propaganda of WEE WILLIE WINKIE look downright politically subtle by comparison. Ford at least gave his murderous revolutionary bad guy (Cesar Romero) some warmth and complexity. Meanwhile, the greatest fantasy that
Sandra Dee's brain can possibly generate is that of tying on an apron and serving an enormous white pie to Bobby Darin.
(I regret that I found only this single tiny, low-grade representation of the giant fantasy pie on the "internet." But you can tell that it's a really big pie, right? Also some birds fly out of it but one of them just seems to lie there and flap sadly and I don't think that was on purpose.) After all that I guess I thought I should have some
Godard, kind of like slugging back a shot of wheatgrass. But LA CHINOISE made me think of McNeil too.
You know how McNeil loves carpet and furniture in the movies! And LA CHINOISE is a movie about furniture. That is a lie I just typed with my own fingers but I guess I'll stick by it, I mean, look at that lamp. At least you could put WEE WILLIE WINKIE and LA CHINOISE in conversation with each other, I mean, they were made on the same planet, hey, I told you I was going crazy, okay, time to take an aspirin and watch more movies.
