Screening Log
This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.
August 2007 activity
Total Log Entries: 52
- Adam (9)
- Andrew (0)
- Chet (0)
- Chiranjit (1)
- David (0)
- Eva (0)
- Evan (0)
- Ian (5)
- Jenny (3)
- Katherine (0)
- Leo (5)
- Megan (2)
- Rumsey (4)
- Teddy (3)
- Thomas (5)
- Timothy (0)
- Victoria (0)
Total Comments: 35
- The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1)
- Maniac Nurses Find Ecstasy (2)
- When The Levees Broke: A Requiem In Four Acts (0)
- Eastern Promises (0)
- The Departed (0)
- Knocked Up (5)
- Little Children (0)
- Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer (0)
- The Bourne Ultimatum (0)
- Transformers (0)
- Being Michael Madsen (2)
- The GoodTimesKid (0)
- Carefree (0)
- Music and Lyrics (0)
- Inland Empire (0)
- Why We Fight (1)
- Paths of Glory (0)
- Hannah Takes the Stairs (0)
- Superbad (2)
- Jesus Camp (0)
- Titicut Follies (0)
- Ultraviolet (2)
- Eyes Wide Shut (1)
- Seraphim Falls (0)
- The Puffy Chair (1)
- Red Dawn (1)
- Robot Monster (0)
- Touch of Evil (1)
- A Clockwork Orange (7)
- Les Misérables (0)
- The Magnificent Seven (0)
- Nighthawks (0)
- Slaughterhouse Five (0)
- Hot Fuzz (2)
- Sunshine (0)
- Rescue Dawn (0)
- The Wild Blue Yonder (0)
- The Bourne Ultimatum (0)
- The 11th Hour (0)
- Shanghai Express (0)
- Trasgredire (0)
- Faces (0)
- The Bourne Ultimatum (0)
- Viva Baseball! (0)
- Holiday (0)
- Cloak & Dagger (6)
- Oepidus Rex (0)
- Dead Man’s Shoes (0)
- Sunshine (0)
- This Is England (0)
- Sweet Smell of Success (1)
- Once (0)
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Holiday / USA / 1938
Holiday shares much with The Philadelphia Story: director George Cukor, stars Grant and Hepburn, playwright Philip Barry, screenwriter David Ogden Stewart, and a Depression-era story of social climbing, featuring an average joe among the inordinately rich. Of course, Cary Grant is nobody’s average joe and Hepburn’s heroine, while as idiosyncratic as her similar character in The Philadelphia Story, is more fragile than frosty. This last is one of the film’s most daring aspects: a portrait of a wealthy socialite with girlish eccentricities that veer close to the edge of a crippling neurosis, and Hepburn plays this character with a fascinating combination of bristling frivolity and heartbreaking, almost childlike sensitivity. Against Hepburn’s fascinating, unstable performance, Grant’s charming, hard-working dreamer attains a strangely philosophical depth. His seeming idealism about giving up the chance to earn lots of money alongside his future father-in-law becomes nothing short of a search for the meaning and purpose of work, money, and romantic partnership.
In retrospect, all of this may seem like the most shallow kind of Depression-era Hollywood mythmaking, extolling the virtues of love over money at a time when the latter was, for many, hard to come by. But in the hands of Cukor & Co., this fantasy sheds its homespun hokeyness to become a slightly scathing indictment of the values of the extremely wealthy, and Grant’s romantic and professional dynamism is its own kind of New Deal, reviving middle class implacability and prompting Hepburn’s coddled and cosseted socialite to grow up into self-responsibility.
Like Philadelphia, Holiday blends fairy tale, slapstick, social conscious, and family drama into a very curious mix, and so it’s a film that seemingly doesn’t know (or else refuses to choose) what kind of film it wants to be. And this is fitting: the refusal of this kind of rigidity is precisely what these characters are looking for.
See also: Matt, Ian, and me on The Philadelphia Story
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Columbia/TriStar DVD
03 Aug 2007 5:17 PM | Submit Comment