The back office looks pretty good on here. I found Digg River which works great. Nothing else exciting going on. Talk amongst yourselves.

Plain View #82 - February 21, 2008

snow day

bread machine

tet

Sliding Doors

Spiderman 3

Burn Notice

Lost Cities

Jojo's visit

religion

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Wow, with the exception of Follow the Fleet, I'm not so sure any of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers' movies were named for anything in particular. All of the titles are so generic and tell one nothing about the plot. In Carefree, Ginger Rogers plays Amanda, a woman engaged to a guy named Steve (it's actually a longer name, but p-h-e-n is a blacklisted word in b2e, apparently). She's not quite ready to get married, though, so Steve sends her to his friend, Tony, who is a doctor. Tony tries using hypnotherapy on Amanda after she makes up a crazy dream for him to interpret instead of telling him that she dreamed about him. When the hypnotism takes a wrong turn, Tony is on the run to save his own life and eventually win her over.

Sound crazy? Well of course it is! But there's something that works about Ginger Rogers running around with a shot gun. Yes, that happens.

I love the old Hollywood understanding of psychology, and how it got injected into some of the movies of the 30s. Between analyzing dreams and hypnosis, this movie takes it all to the extreme and makes it fun.

There are few dance routines that stand out in this movie. One is when Tony tries to impress Amanda with his dancing. Fred Astaire integrates golf clubs and balls at a driving range into his routine. I love it when he uses props to make the tapping and rhythm more intricate. Another is a dance scene at a big social event, where Fred and Ginger dance the Yam - not one I had actually heard of before. I don't know the technical term for what they do, but refer to the picture above, and imagine that repeated over and over in a full rotation throughout an entire building. Craziness. And, of course, the dream sequence is very flowy and pretty and shows off the couple's ability to unify their movement in more than just taps.

This one has tons of great supporting characters as well. I kept exclaiming, "Wow, that guy's in here too?!" Looking it up, that guy referred to the animated Franklin Pangborn, the grouchy but lovable Clarence Kolb, and a very funny Jack Carson.

It's always fun to see Ginger Rogers get to shine, and in this movie, her hypnotic do-whatever-I-feel-like-doing segment is pretty funny, especially when she borrows a policeman's baton to break a window. I had a lot of fun revisiting this one.