I wanted to go hiking today, but we had a snowstorm blow through. It only dropped about 4-6 inches, but I hate driving in the snow, and hiking through the snow can sometimes be miserable, so I decided to hole up in my apartment instead. I have a collection of five Fred Astaire / Ginger Rogers movies that I've never gotten around to watching, so I decided to give those a try. The first one I watched is their most famous, Swing Time. The story is silly enough. Fred's character, "Lucky" Garnett, is an up-on-his luck gambler (hence his nickname) and dancer who is trying to get married to his hometown sweetheart. Unfortunately, her dad thinks Lucky will never make anything of himself. So, Lucky moves to New York to make his fortune. There, he meets Ginger's character, Penny Carroll. Penny and Lucky form a dance team. Inevitably, they fall in love, but Lucky can't pursue the romance because he is betrothed to someone else.

As you might imagine, things work out for Fred and Ginger. Like I said, the story is fairly silly. The characters, too, are pretty thin, and could just as easily have been called "Fred" and "Ginger" with no loss of movie illusion. Nevertheless, the Lucky gambler character is an extension of the suave Astaire persona which lets you know that no matter how bad things look, don't worry, they'll take a turn for the good soon enough. David Thompson, in his New Biographical Dictionary Film, says that, "Astaire is utterly tranquil, hence the inane playboy figures he embodies, men who exist only to walk sweetly across lounges, to preserve rigorous trouser creases and that high, carefree tone of voice."

The payoff of the movie is the dance and the songs. Goodness, the songs. Two of my all-time favorite songs are in Swing Time-- "Just the Way You Look Tonight" and "A Fine Romance". "A Fine Romance" is sung against an amazing snowscape, shown in the image at the top of this entry. I would like to hear the story behind choosing that backdrop. I'm almost positive that it is a studio set, rather than an actual location. I'm guessing that it was up for another movie, and they just used it for that one scene in Swing Time. I think that's the case because there's no special reason for the scene to take place in a winter forest. Probably, the makers of the movie noticed that all of the scenes take place in hotel rooms and night clubs, and they decided they needed an outdoor scene for a change of pace. As integral as the dance scenes are to the success of the movie, amazingly the first dance doesn't happen until almost a half-hour into the movie, when Fred, masquerading as a novice dancer, asks for a dance lesson from Ginger, whose character is a dance instructor. The climax of the movie is a 6-minute song-and-dance performance, "Never Gonna Dance". Fred and Ginger's characters are each about to marry other people, despite the fact that they love each other. Like almost all of Astaire's dances, it's filmed in a single take (there are a few cuts during the initial singing, but none after the dancing begins). In order to keep filming when the dancers went up steps, the camera was mounted on a crane. I have two favorite parts of this dance. The first is when Ginger initially breaks away from Fred after the first bit of dancing. Fred runs and grabs her. His head and hand shake before they dance again. It's an interesting thing to do, even a little bit awkward. It embodies the desperation of a lover who is trying to anything, anything at all, to keep the person he loves from getting away. My other favorite part is right before the end, when Fred spins Ginger three different times. The spins are amazing and energetic. It makes you excited to see them, especially after the somberness of the beginning of the dance. Below is a YouTube of the "Never Gonna Dance" number. I highly suggest watching the video on full screen. I've seen it about 5 times now, and it still takes my breath away, every time I see the dance.

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Today, I went to see the movie Happy-Go-Lucky (reviews here and here). It's a movie directed by Mike Leigh, who is famous for gathering actors together to start work on his movies without any script whatsoever. All he has is an idea about what the story will be. The actors go through weeks of improvisations with no cameras rolling until their characters are fleshed out and a story is developed. Leigh's body of work, the movies that come out of these collaborations, are known for being bleak, depressing stories of everyday Londoners scraping by in their desperate lives. Indeed, Leigh's most famous movie, Naked, is a soul-killingly downer of a tale. Even though a majority of Leigh's movies are bleak enough, it's a bit unfair to say that that's all he does. He made a movie in 2000 about Gilbert and Sullivan, called Topsy-Turvy, that was happy and exuberant. And his last movie, Vera Drake, unseen by me, was not especially dark. Nevertheless, Leigh seems to be known as a maker of depressing movies, and his newest work, the aptly named happy movie Happy-Go-Luckly, is being called a huge departure from his usual style.

A kindergarten teacher named Poppy is the central character in Happy-Go-Lucky. In real life, she may be insufferable. She is one of those people who is never even a little bit down, whose bubbly setting is stuck on max. If she's not joking, giggling, or bouncing, then she's not awake. I said that in real life, she would be insufferable, but it's hard to believe that in a 2-hour movie in which her character is on the screen for nearly every second, her shtick isn't excruciating. But it isn't. She grows on you. And this is a testament to the actress who plays Poppy, Sally Hawkins, who is expected to be nominated for an Oscar for her work in the movie. Happy-Go-Lucky starts off as a light-hearted few-days-in-the-life story of the eternally silly Poppy. It actually could have probably pulled that off for the whole duration. The counterpoint to Poppy's character is Scott, the tightly-wound driving teacher whom Poppy hires after her bike is stolen. Their back-and-forth is delightfully Abbott-and-Costello-like (or Dwight-and-Jim-like, or Cox-and-J.D.-like, pick your favorite comic duo). Poppy knows how to push Scott's buttons, and despite her seemingly kind nature, she can't help doing it. This interaction is the life of the movie most of the way through. After about the halfway point, several "serious" subjects are thrown into the mix, and, indeed, we see an interesting and deeper side to Poppy's character when she has to deal with a student who is coping with a troubled home life. But, ultimately, this is not a serious movie. When it starts to veer too far towards the darkly serious territory, it rings false. I don't think it is impossible that people like Poppy exist, but in the real world, there is a danger to being so innocently optimistic and cheerful. At times, the movie broaches this, but then it backs off. It either had to go all the way into the dark consequences that linger just on the other side of cheerfulness, or pretend that no such things exist, but going halfway was the worst of all choices. These missteps are small parts of the movie (although one of those small parts is right at the end), so it's little more than a distraction.

So trust me, though unceasingly bubbly, happy people may be grating in real life, not so in this movie. So you should give it a try. And you can have fun annoying your friends when you're out driving by repeating "enraha, enraha, ENRAHA!!!!" over and over again. Watch the movie, and you'll get it.

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I've been invited to spend Thanksgiving with a friend in the physics department and the friend's family. Which is a wonderful, amazing, very kind thing to offer. The thing is, the rule is, you can't just show up at someone's house for Thanksgiving with nothing. The other thing is, I basically know how to cook three things: (1) Hamburger Helper, (2) scrambled eggs, and (3) sweet potato casserole. Because the Pilgrims were primitive and didn't have supermarkets or chickens, apparently Hamburger Helper and scrambled eggs aren't considered proper Thanksgiving food. I could make a sweet potato casserole to bring to the dinner. But I've found out the hard way that there are always about 15307513074 sweet potato dishes brought to any given Thanksgiving dinner. So I want to bring something a little different. To that end, I googled "simple Thanksgiving recipes"... What I've found is, if you google any random recipes, they always involve stuff like "mincing" and "broiling" and "sauteeing". I'm sorry, but I need a recipe that says "cut this stuff up into little pieces" and "put this stuff in a pan and put the pan on a burner" or "turn your oven onto 400 and turn that dial to bake, then put your stuff in the oven". As soon as you tell me to "cube" or "tenderize" or "poach" or "reduce" something, I'm lost. Fortunately, I found a recipe for Honey Roasted Squash Rings that I think I can handle. Hopefully it'll turn out well. I'm going to buy all the ingredients and get it started tomorrow night. Squash is something like a pumpkin right? Or a zucchini? Or a cucumber? Do they label that stuff in grocery stores?

I'm already regretting saying yes to going to Thanksgiving dinner. I've mentioned before how I'm a loner. What that means is that the prospect of spending a full day meeting with and socializing with people whom I don't know and whom I've never met before is dreadful. I hate small talk. I hate talking about work or sports or where I'm from. I know, right now as I'm writing this, the rational part of my brain is telling me that it won't be terrible, and, in fact, it will almost definitely be a fun and entertaining and generally pleasant experience. But I'm dreading it. I honestly want nothing more than to stay home all day on Thanksgiving and watch House reruns and read and surf the Internet. But I live in a society, and part of living in a society is being social. So I'll be cooking my squash or cucumber or zucchini or whatever rings tomorrow night, and I'll meet new people on Thursday and that will be that, and probably when it's all said and done I'll have a good time. And then if I'm lucky, maybe I'll get home in time to watch some House reruns.

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