2016 Favorite Classic Movie Actress Tournament: Sugar And Spice

The "Sugar and Spice" division of the 1940s bracket.

Voting begins on March 6.

2016 Favorite Classic Movie Actress Tournament: Femme Fatales

The "Femme Fatales" division of the 1940s bracket. So help me, if you don't vote for Jane Greer, I'm hanging up my blogging spikes.

Voting begins on March 6.

2016 Favorite Classic Movie Actress Tournament: Classy Broads

The "Classy Broads" division of the 1940s bracket. There's nothing like a dame.

Voting begins on March 6.

2016 Favorite Classic Movie Actress Tournament: Ravishing Redheads

The "Ravishing Redheads" division of the 1940s bracket. Collect your favorites, collect 'em all.

Voting begins on March 6.

2016 Favorite Classic Movie Actress Tournament: 1940s Bracket

If you've been following the Monkey for any length of time, you've no doubt remember that Monty of All Good Things hosts an annual tournament of favorite classic movie actresses. Previous winners have included Irene Dunne, Ginger Rogers, Carole Lombard and Bette Davis. Last year, Natalie Wood romped to victory.

For the last four years, we here at the Monkey have been fortunate enough to host one of the brackets and we're back again. This year, it's the 1940s. Haven't done the '40s before, but it will feature some of my all-time favorites — Katharine Hepburn, Maureen O'Hara, Rosalind Russell and Jane Greer. Because she won the bracket last year, Greer Garson is the top seed.

Looking forward to it.

Here's a list of the match-ups:

RAVISHING REDHEADS
Greer Garson v. Esther Williams
Katharine Hepburn v. Joan Leslie
Maureen O'Hara v. Jeanne Crain
Rita Hayworth v. Ann Sheridan

CLASSY BROADS
Olivia de Havilland v. Jane Wyman
Ingrid Bergman v. Loretta Young
Vivien Leigh v. Wendy Hiller
Joan Fontaine v. Teresa Wright

FEMME FATALES
Gene Tierney v. Marie Windsor
Ava Gardner v. Joan Bennett
Lauren Bacall v. Claire Trevor
Ida Lupino v. Jane Greer

SUGAR AND SPICE
Rosalind Russell v. Paulette Goddard
Veronica Lake v. Joan Greenwood
Judy Garland v. Deanna Durbin
Betty Hutton v. Dorothy Lamour

I'll post some promotional banners and photos and whatnot in the coming days.

Voting begins on March 6.

The Favorite Classic Movie Actress Tournament Returns In March

Too, Too Funny

Sometimes you read a satire so biting, you just have to share it. To wit, from Richard Brody's movie column in the January 6, 2016 New Yorker:

What endures for the critics and their lay associates, for aesthetes who live for the beauty and the pleasure of movies, is [George] Lucas’s directing—of two films, “Attack of the Clones” and, especially, “Revenge of the Sith.” If Lucas had done nothing else in his life, he’d have an honored place in my personal pantheon for that work.

HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! Hilarious! Droll! Well-played, sir!

Oh, wait, I think he's serious ...

After twenty years, Katie-Bar-The-Door and I are letting our subscription to the New Yorker magazine lapse. Richard Brody's comments about George Lucas have nothing to do with it, but close enough.

By the way, we very much enjoyed the new Star Wars film, The Force Awakens. It's fun the way they used to be fun nearly forty years ago now. That there are people, including George Lucas himself, who don't like it for that very reason is explanation enough for how the franchise ran seriously off the rails in the dismal prequel years.

The Hateful Eight: Simply Great

"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." — Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

After getting shutout of a sold-out performance Saturday, Katie-Bar-The-Door and I drove back down to the AFI-Silver on Sunday to see the eighth film of Quentin Tarantino's illustrious career, aptly titled The Hateful Eight. Tarantino resurrected the long-abandoned Panasonic Ultra 70 film format, the same ultra-widescreen process used on the 1959 classic Ben-Hur (indeed, the film was shot with the same lens used to shoot the chariot race), and for one week only has released it in 98 theaters as an old-school roadshow engagement, complete with overture, intermission and commemorative program.

Just the way they used to make 'em in my childhood.

The story is essentially a three-hour retelling of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None in a Wild West setting. A motley crew of bounty hunters, war veterans, cow punchers, an Englishman with a fascination for the niceties of public executions and a gallows-bound Jennifer Jason Leigh wind up riding out a blizzard in a strangely-deserted general store deep in the trackless nowhere of a very empty Wyoming. They sit by the fire, drink coffee and talk, talk, talk.

And then when the talking is through, the blood and the bullets start flying.

Stripped of the filigree, this is the plot of every Quentin Tarantino movie ever made.

If you know and love Tarantino the way we do, you know you're in for a banquet of ornate oratory, digressions and shaggy dog stories that for someone eager to get to the point I suppose must be maddening. But I'll tell you right out, I like listening to a man who likes to talk and The Hateful Eight stars some of the great talkers of screen history.

Kurt Russell is the bounty hunter determined to see Jennifer Jason Leigh swing, Samuel L. Jackson is another bounty hunter lugging three dead bodies and a letter from Abraham Lincoln through waist-deep snow, Walton Goggins as a would-be sheriff finally gets a big screen role worthy of his silver-tongued talents, Tim Roth as the hangman channels Eric Blore in Top Hat, Bruce Dern is a broken-down Civil War general, and Michael Madsen is a passing cowboy who says he's just headed home to visit his dear old ma.

For such an out-of-the-way place, this deserted cabin starts to seem a bit like Grand Central Terminal. With the emphasis on "terminal."

This is Tarantino, and you know at some point you're going to get a bloodbath worthy of a 1970s horror movie, violence so over-the-top it has an innocence about it, like something a demented preschooler might doodle in his hymn book during a long, boring church sermon. As I put it in an e-mail to my good pal Mister Muleboy, "it's a 3-hour gabfest ... directed by a drunk Sam Peckinpah right after he'd seen John Carpenter's The Thing."

High praise, indeed.

What rating do I give it? Why, an 8 of course.

(8 stars out of 10).

Seasons Greetings (From Our House To Yours)

Sinatra At 100

Today is Frank Sinatra's 100th birthday. I'll skip the usual eight thousand word essay and instead simply suggest some stocking stuffers for that special someone in your life who might be ready to discover Ol' Blue Eyes but has no idea where to start:

The Capitol Years Box Set
(A terrific 3 cd collection from Sinatra's peak years, 1953-1961. 75 classic songs. A must for anyone with ears.)

Songs For Swingin' Lovers! (Unwilling to spring for more than one cd? This is best of the finger-snappin' Sinatra records, including such standards as "You Make Me Feel So Young" "Too Marvelous For Words" and what I consider the single best recording of his career, "I've Got You Under My Skin.")

Frank Sinatra Sings For Only The Lonely (Prefer your Sinatra sitting alone in a bar at 3 in the morning? This is the one to get, my favorite Sinatra album, featuring the classic suicide song "One For My Baby.")

Sinatra: Best Of The Best (Okay, so you really, really, really only want all the good stuff and you don't want to spend a lot for it. This has everything from "I've Got The World On A String" to "New York New York" and all the other hits in between. It's like $10. Go for it and feel good, you cheap bastard!)

From Here To Eternity (Sinatra was also an Oscar-winning actor. The best picture of 1953, From Here To Eternity is the story of love in the surf in the final days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.)

The Manchurian Candidate (My favorite Sinatra picture, here he unravels the mystery of a brainwashed American hero doing the bidding of evil Commies.)

On The Town (And one more makes lucky seven, this is a movie from Sinatra's early teen heartthrob period.)