h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

That looks fun.

Hmmm.... It's a Hammer and Tongs production.

Yeah

I saw a movie when I was a kid about a group of early surfers who travelled the world looking for waves. It was kind of like a home movie that they had taken and then did some voice over during editing. Looked like it was very much about having fun and enjoying yourself and your friends and surroundings and not about high octane, amped up, caffeine fueled, big wave frenzy.

The Secret of Santa Vittoria.

A wry little film about an Italian town hiding 1,000,000 bottles of wine from the occupying German forces. And it's got Monica Vitti Anthony Quinn plays the bumbling idiot mayor of the town. And it's got Monica Vitti It's directed by Stanley Kramer, who also made Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Judgment at Nuremberg. And it's got Monica Vitti

Oh, and it's got Anna Magnani

Oops. Virna Lisi, not Monica Vitti.

Only slightly less

Women in Love.

Ken Russell's finest, by a country mile. This film had a profound effect on me the first time I saw it (in my early to mid twenties I'd guess), but I was a young and rather impressionable Gosho at the time. I have to admit up front that I've never read the book so I don't know for sure how faithful it is to the original material or how much of a Ken Russell production you could call it, but it is awfully intense and meaningful.

It seems like it's one of those films where everything came together just right. The right cast working with the right director working with the right material at the right time.

The only DH Lawrence I've ever read is Lady Chatterly's Lover, which was okay I suppose. Apparently Women in Love was a sequel to another book about the Brangwen family - The Rainbow. Women in Love can be had from the Gutenberg Project, but The Rainbow can't

Glenda Jackson has a sexual magnetism that oozes onto the film. I want to see A Touch of Class again. Haven't seen that for too long. And there's Eleanor Bron too. I just added Bedazzled to my Netflix queue. That's the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore original, not the remake.

Dagnammit! There are so many British films that Netflix doesn't have which I'd really like to see, like The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins or The Sandwich Man or Take a Girl Like You or Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush or most of the Carry Ons or All Neat in Black Stockings or Loot or Entertaining Mr Sloane or Catch Us If You Can or Only Two Can Play.

And yet they have this http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058969/

A film I've seen more than once and will see again, but why do Netflix have it instead of those others?

Oh... Wanda Ventham

The remake to Bedazzled makes me angry... and a bit physically... well, not ill, but something. I watched the original probably when I was in my early twenties and loved it. I knew the remake would be bad, but this was criminal. I've rarely seen such a hatchet job.

Gay Purree

What?

Into the Night.

I haven't watched this one since it first came out and I went to see it at the flicks when certain West End cinemas only charged £2 on Monday evening. This film's got so many twists and turns that I wonder if it's where Guy Ritchie got his inspiration from for Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. It's an innocuous little comedy, well done, nothing really special, and with plenty of cameo roles - Jim Henson, Roger Vadim, Carl Perkins to name but a few. In fact I remember seeing this film with my American girlfriend at that time and saying 'Hey, that's Carl Perkins!'. 'Who?' she said? I couldn't believe she didn't know who he was or what he was most famous for.

(Apart from being a talented musician in his own right, he wrote Blue Suede Shoes, in case you were wondering)

And here's a weird thing. The plot is mostly centred around the fact that Jeff Goldblum can't sleep. After watching the film I pottered about, then went to bed and had one of the best night's sleep I've had in a long while, and it's rare for me to get more than five or six hours a night these days! Must have been thinking about Michelle Pfeiffer

Or not. She's not really my type. Although I wouldn't kick her out of bed for eating crackers

On tele this afternoon was My Fair Lady ~ BBC1 Hepburn, Harrison, Pickles et al.

"Pull ourt the stoppa, let's 'ave a whoppa, bert get me tae the church on time........

Sir Stanley of Holloway

Y'know, when people where I work take the Mick out of me for the way I pronounce 'timbah' or 'lumbah' or 'pillah' (both the soft white things you puts your bonce on at night *and* the long straight things what holds buildings up), I think I'll just keep a clip of that part of the song on my thumb drive, plug it into the nearest PC and let it run

"I'll 'ave you 'Enry 'Iggins !"

The water in Majorca don't taste like what it oughta

The Big Job
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058969/

A Carry On film in all but name. Sid James, Lance Percival, Dick Emery, Joan Sims, Sylvia Syms, Jim Dale, Derek Guyler... and Wanda Ventham

Time for some catching up.

Crimes and Misdemeanors.
I'm not sure exactly where Woody Allen started moving away from his earlier comedic roots and the surreal brilliance of films like Sleeper, Broadway Danny Rose, Take the Money and Run... I think it was a long drawn out process that went back and forth. Maybe it started with Annie Hall. I remember going to see Radio Days and enjoying it, but a year or two earlier I'd seen The Purple Rose of Cairo and thought it completely unfunny. I liked A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy but didn't get a laugh out of it. Crimes and Misdemeanors just kind of washed over me. Perhaps I'm too used to seeing Martin Landau in Space 1999.

A Matter of Life and Death.
Thanks for the DVD Deke
Some people might think of Black Narcissus as Powell and Pressburger's masterpiece, others might go for The Red Shoes. I fall into the camp that goes for this film. Parts of it haven't dated too well - it's definitely a film of its time - but you have to take that into consideration when you watch anything whether it be a film or a television show. And it's got Wanda Ven... oh, I mean Kathleen Byron

Wall-E
You'll laugh, you'll cry... no, really. You'll cry. Considering that it's a Disney film its anti-corporate message is surprisingly up front, until you see the end of the film, which I won't spoil. There's a lot of 'message' in this film in one way and another and the animation is top class. But what do you expect - it's Pixar. It's a feelgood film, which spoils it a bit, but you'll enjoy it if you can get past that. Good eye candy.

I cried near the end of WALL-E also.

Who'd have thought it possible to get so emotionally involved with a couple of animated robots in a film.

Does Number 5 get 'disassembled'?

Oh, wait... that's something else.

And you just know that immediately before Wall-E began we showed an old, scratchy copy of the original trailer for Short Circuit