Or, if you’re me, any day!

Up at Fantasy Magazine this week, I posted Ten Cheesetastic Fantasy Flicks for Summer. For once, there’s no competition for which one is best, because they’re all the best!

Except maybe Xanadu is the best.

(Look at those hostage eyes. Yipes.)

The thing is, some of the movies on that list are cheesy but legitimately good. The Mummy, for example, is pretty unapologetic summer-blockbuster pulp, but I’ve seen it quite a few times and it always holds up, because Pulpy and Bad are not synonymous, even though a lot of things that aim for Pulpy end up at Bad. (That’s another essay. I’m just noting it here.) Lost Boys is awesome, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is amazing. I’ll even make a case for Earth Girls are Easy being a pretty solid flick! (Somewhere, Joseph Campbell is cringing.)

But there are some movies (…XANADU) that defy explanation.

I mean, you CAN explain it. You can say Xanadu is about Kira, one of the Muses who routinely get sent to inspire various artists to great heights, and her job is to inspire an album-repo artist to quit his job and open a Xanadu-themed rollerskate nightclub with Gene Kelly.

But look at that sentence. Nothing in it makes any sense! The whole movie is like this.

Explaining it more doesn’t help. Kira and Sonny (Malone, his name is Sonny Malone, people tell you that constantly in this movie) accidentally fall in love, which the guy is supposed to do because stalking people gets the creative impulse going, but she’s not supposed to because her dad Zeus will get mad at her (literally, her dad is Zeus and he scolds her through a reverb pedal), so their love is Forbidden, just like her love with Gene Kelly was Forbidden back in the ’40s when she came down to inspire Gene Kelly to…do something artistically amazing that will make him rich and famous. (It doesn’t seem to have panned out. No one mentions it. Maybe it’s awkward.)

How will Sonny ever find the heart to take Gene Kelly away from his beach rock and make Gene Kelly shop for suits in a store filled with dancers and find the strength to keep the club going when all he can think about is that girl he keeps seeing who never, ever takes her rollerskates off, except during the animated love sequence, in which she turns into a bird with legwarmers?

(I’ve seen this movie like, six times. It never gets any less confusing.)

It was hard to choose a representative clip. The scene where the sisters wake up from the mural they’re painted on (really happens) is pretty good. It gives the right tone for the film, both because the song makes you want to slap your ears off, and because it looks like the people actually in the scene were just as confused as anyone else, and the choreography was called out in a series of impromptu orders. (“Look at your hands! You have some hands! Have more hands! HAVE MORE HANDS.”)

But I think this clip has to win.

Notes: this clip has been severely chopped, so you are missing out on the Gene Kelly-led rollerskating step routine and the part where Kira and her sisters sing this in half a dozen different styles, including Country Western, in which Michael Beck (SWAN, WHY) has to shake his shoulders like he’s trying to wrench an arm out of the socket so he can be excused to the medic and just keep running and never look back.

Also, many of those sisters aren’t the same sisters from the beginning of the movie. I’m just saying, that’s the kind of show you’re in for.

An awesome one.

A few days ago I mentioned the cheeseball glory that is Dhoom 2.

Today, we do a Bollywood 180 for Jodhaa Akbar, a sweeping historical drama based on the life of Akbar the Great.

Hrithik Roshan and Aishwarya Rai star in both. I’m glad I saw Hrithik in this before I saw Dhoom 2, and that is all I will say about that. (Aishwarya…does her best.)

Nutshell: In 16th-Century India, Jalaluddin is the young emperor of Hindustan, handsoming his way across the country, trying to be wise and just and whatever. Jodhaa is a stunning Rajput princess who’s married to Jalaluddin as a gesture of solidarity between Hindus and Muslims. Will these two incredibly genetically blessed people ever fall in love? Will Jalaluddin ever reconcile the two religions at war under his reign? Will this movie’s eight bajillion subplots ever get resolved? We’ll find out…in real time. (This movie is awesome, but it is also about eight years long.)

Let’s hit it.
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So, this weekend I saw Splice. I will be talking about it tomorrow, but it’s just not the sort of blog entry I want to face on a Monday. Especially since I also saw Dhoom 2 this weekend.

Dhoom 2 stars Hrithik Roshan and Aishwarya Rai, who had been paired to great effect in Jodhaa Akbar (despite Aishwarya’s lack of actual acting ability). I thought, “Well, they did well in the other one. Let’s check out Dhoom 2!”

Do you guys remember the first Mission: Impossible movie, when everyone had latex masks on all the time and they spent four hours just double-crossing each other and jumping around pulling off latex masks to reveal other latex masks and shooting bullets in an arc and running around and pulling off other people’s latex masks, and you spent the whole movie thinking, “What is wrong with these awful people in this movie I don’t understand?”

The maker of Dhoom 2 looked at that movie and said, “This is missing two things: dance numbers, and a man dressed up to look like the Queen. I can fix this.”

And so, Dhoom 2 was born, and the opening scene of Dhoom 2 is Hrithik Roshan parachuting down to a desert-crossing train (without being seen), dressing as the Queen Mother, stealing the Crown, and sandboarding to safety.

Then, he has a musical number in a nightclub telling you what the themes of the movie are. (Bollywood, don’t ever change.)

The plot swiftly becomes one of those movies where the Cop on a Mission and the Thief on a Mission do a lot of homoerotic fixating on one another and put a woman in the middle just so it doesn’t look too gay – in this case, the double-agent thief played by Aishwarya. It almost works!

…almost.

(And please note that in the video below, half the time he’s staring longingly off-camera, Abhishek Bachchan is there. Just saying.)

There’s also a comedy-relief cop, and a pregnant harpy wife, and a fun-loving tropical lady, and a lady cop who’s been tracking the thief dude for years but immediately gets the case taken off her hands by Cop on a Mission, and is never heard from again, and Hrithik and Aishwarya do a lot of looking at each other in slow motion, and one of the heist scenes involves a lucky placement of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. It’s just that kind of movie.

A lot of it, I admit, goes beyond fun-cheeseball and into painful-cheeseball, so if you’re looking to save time and wince-hours then you should probably just skip to Hrithik’s scenes all the time. His cheese is at least hilarious. (You’ll notice in the video below that sometimes he has a goatee and long hair – this is considered one of his many disguises. When he finally shows up on the mountainside with the short hair, she’s completely bowled over at who it is, even though all he really did was shave.)

Seriously, after this she talks to him when he has a fake goatee and some long hair on – they have an entire game of basketball together! – and when he shows up with the short hair she’s like, “OH MY GOD IT’S YOU.” She’s not the sharpest sandwich at the picnic.

Hrithik really impressed me in Jodhaa Akbar (which I swear I will talk about this week, I promise!), which was a Super Serious Drama that I straight-up enjoyed and thought was a quality film, so this was…a change. But he sells it the way any good movie star sells whatever movie they’re in, and his scenes are far and away better than any of the rest of that movie.

Fun fact: this movie has a kiss between Aishwarya and Hrithik (a Bollywood no-no), and it landed the movie in court under charges of indecency and being derogatory to women. Don’t know how that turned out; I do know that in Jodhaa Akbar there is a semi-kiss that seemed like a very intentionally choreographed “kiss my ass,” and I’m guessing this is where that came from.

I cannot recommend this movie, as it is so painfully cheeseball that it is largely unwatchable. It is, however, no worse than Octopussy. (What could be?) So if you are in the mood to laugh at an action movie and hum along to the occasional musical number, this might fit the bill.

I do know that, if anything DOES make this movie worth watching, cracking up at how much the camera loves Hrithik Roshan is that thing. It happens early, it happens often, and it happens to be hilarious.

Best part: I was thinking about writing this up, and I thought, “Well, it won’t be the same without a compilation of Hrithik Roshan walking in slow-motion towards the camera with his shirt unbuttoned and his scarf fluttering in the wind, but where the hell am I going to find that?”

Turns out someone made it, and put it to a love song. Thank you, internet. Thank you for everything.

Wow, that was kind of a long hiatus! (I made the last one in 1996, it looks like.) I know this has become something of a habit, like that time I tried to make a picspam of my French vacation and only got two-thirds of the way through, so if you are a literalist it looks like I never actually came home but am instead blogging from an attic somewhere overlooking the amusement park in Rouen. (Note to that person: well-spotted, mon frère!)

But I have my act together now, and the time has come for another Catherine Cookson Experience!

Today’s is different from most of the others, because I genuinely love this one. It is a pulpy mess, and I enjoy every second of its cheesy glory. You will be able to tell this soon, but I thought I might as well warn you up front: this one is awesome, and I have the eight thousand photos to prove it! This is The Rag Nymph.

Vital Stats:

Era: 1850s, looks like.
Heroine: Millie
Siblings that require looking-after: Well, initially Millie is the one who needs looking-after (when you were niiiiiiiine!).
Illegitimate (Self or sibling): It’s like a Law and Order episode; it takes you almost until the end to find out, and by then you don’t even care.
Asshole Father?: Oh, jeez. Every father in this thing is a total jerkbag.
Romantic interest(s): Mr. Bingley, Paul Atreides. Tough call!
Bairnsketballs: Nope.
Fistfights: Somebody knifes a pimp. It counts!
Assaults: Oh jeeeeeeeez.

Under here, more When You Were Nine goodness.
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There’s something ceaselessly awesome about silent films. They’re a living time capsule of social mores, markers of technological leaps, proof of humankind’s deep affinity for storytelling, employer of piano-players everywhere.

The great ones are fantastically evocative and moving. The bad ones are hysterical.

Conveniently, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is both!

Also apparently a little judgey!

The story is straightforward: Dr. Jekyll is virtuous and awesome. Then he goes overboard with the science and ends up as villainous stringy-haired Hyde, until the love of a beautiful maiden redeems him and he kills himself. Though the film has some fancy techniques, including a flashback to Ye Olde Italy, the strength here is the cast, which is 100% Grade-A veteran muggers.

As with most movies she was in, the best thing about this movie is Nita Naldi:

Her intro card. I kind of wish we could still get away with these. You got ten words of exposition right up front!

Unfortunately, with Nita they were a waste, since she did a pretty good job conveying “world-weary dance hall girl who faces her world alone” all by herself:

However, when she sees Handsome Barrymore, she perks right up and slithers on over to introduce herself.

The movie’s conceit is that this one moment is enough to make the engaged Jekyll want to separate himself into two personalities, purely so that one of them can make out with this chick. I buy this.

Sadly, it’s hard to mack on a lady when you are about 70% less handsome than the last time she saw you. (A+ Pained Expression, though, Nita!)

Even though Nita Naldi is the screen siren of my heart, Barrymore is no slouch in this, either. There’s a makeup change between Jekyll and Hyde, but Barrymore being Barrymore, the transformation is mostly attitudinal:

This is pretty much how all the Jekyll scenes go: thumping around, mugging into the camera, waving at hookers. Shine on, you hammy diamond.

Though my favorite scene is still the pervy old aristocrat at the opening dinner party, and John Barrymore’s priceless facial expressions as the morals are discussed.

Subtext: approved!