Out of the Past - Into the Now ~ Vanity Fair's Tribute to Hitchcock

I came out of my hiatus just to tell you to watch the newstands for the March 2008 Hollywood Issue of Vanity Fair. It features a photo spread in tribute to the great Alfred Hitchcock! Yay! I saw a bit about it on TV. Basically they take well known contemporary actors and dress them up in scenes from different Hitchcock films. I am hungrily searching for a copy as I don't have one yet.

Here is what is in the issue...

Seth Rogan - As Cary Grant in North by Northwest
Renee Zelwegger - As Kim Novak in Vertigo
Scarlett Johansson - As Grace Kelly in Rear Window
Javier Bardem - As James Stewart in Rear Window
Naomi Watts - As Tippi Hedren in Marnie
Charlize Theron - As Grace Kelly in Dial M for Murder
Keira Knightley - As Joan Fontaine in Rebecca
James McAvoy - As Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train
Emile Hirsch - As Farley Granger in Strangers on a Train
Jodi Foster - As Tippi Hedren in The Birds
Marion Cotillard - As Janet Leigh in Psycho
Gwenyth Paltrow- As Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief
Robert Downey Jr. - As Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief

Life Boat
- Tang Wei; Josh Brolin; Casey Affleck; Eva Marie Saint; Ben Foster; Omar Metwally; Julie Christie


I almost hyper-ventilated when I saw the bit on TV. I need to buy a copy or two!!! Go out and get one, especially if you are a hardcore Hitchcock fan like myself! Check it out!

Turner Classic Movies 31 Days of Oscars

Don't forget me while I'm away! Come back to this site and check out TCM's DayORam for their 31 Days of Oscars festival.

Hiatus

I have to take a short hiatus from posting to concentrate on schoolwork. No worries, I'll be back. In the meantime, I leave you with a funny scene from A Night at the Opera (1935). It's a little fuzzy, but still enjoyable. Please enjoy. With two hard-boiled eggs! ::honk:: make that three hard-boiled eggs!

... and two hard boiled eggs.

Add to My Profile More Videos

Searching for A Patch of Blue in cloudy skies

When I started my last semester, taking on a full-time school load as well as maintaining a full-time workload, I had a burning desire to watch Yours, Mine and Ours (1968) (see previous entry). Something about 2 people tackling on a ginormous family gave me comfort with my load which seemed tiny in comparison. This time however, at the eve of the Spring semester, I felt like watching a very different movie from the Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda comedy.

On the eve of the Spring semester, I watched a film that I absoltutely love. I throw around the word "love" pretty loosely when talking about films. But in this case I have an emotional attachment to this particular movie as it finds its way into the recesses of my emotions and touches my heart on a deeper level than most of my regular cinematic experiences ever dare to delve into. This film is A Patch of Blue (1965).

A Patch of Blue has been on regular rotation on TCM for a few years. There is a good chance that on a quiet Sunday afternoon, you may find this playing on the channel. My first instincts were to change the channel. But after I watched the short documentary "A Cinderella named Elizabeth" (1965), which shows how Elizabeth Hartman got her first movie role as Selina D'Arcy in A Patch of Blue, I was curious to see how her performance turned out. The result, a movie that took my breath away.

If you haven't seen it yet, in a nutshell, this film is about a young African-American man, Gordon (played by the very handsome Sidney Poitier), who befriends a blind girl who is optimistic about life even though she lives with her promiscuous and abusive mother, Rose-ann (played by Shelley Winters), and her drunk grandfather (last performance by Wallace Ford). The two fall in love in a society in which miscegenation is a threat to a society that values the separation of races.

Why do I watch this film now, before my last big crazy-busy semester of my graduate school career? Because I love it and watching a film I love always comforts me in times of crisis. And also because watching poor Selina D'Arcy live a horrid life of destitution and abuse, on top of being blind, and to watch her still have a happy outlook on life reminds me to appreciate what I have and to not complain!