MOVIES

 Since my primary source for illegally downloaded movies has gone freeleech (just look it up) for the holiday season I am jamming my folders with stuff I can't remember why I bookmarked months ago.  I was temporarily trying to uplift myself and watch a higher quality of film but that mostly just makes me want to plunge eyes-deep back into the crap that I find so soothing. First I have to make it through my backlog of  stuff I have had around for weeks, such as Polanski's Cul-de-Sac (1966) which I saw a few days ago and it is a very good movie of its type - a "one-set play" sort of thing where a bunch of people end up in the same place for one day and bring everything crashing down.  I guess I have seen about half of Polanski's works now and usually enjoy them - I thought Ghost Writer was great.  Yesterday I tried to watch The Adjustment Bureau for educational purposes but about halfway through I decided I didn't care if those two people defied the damn universe to be together because she was kind of a dick and he was kind of a pussy.  Then I tried to watch a Polish film, Angelus (2000) directed by Lech Majewski, which seemed to have potential with some offbeat mystical content in its depiction of an imaginary rosicrucian art cult among miners in communist Poland, but it is a bit abstract and broken into hundreds of brief vignettes and was not really compelling, story-wise.  Least unsatisfactory of the day and the one I made it all the way through was the stupidest and least coherent one, Gildersleeve's Ghost (1944).  I make a sort of a hobby out of seeing movies spun-off of radio shows and they are for the most part sub-par.  The Lum and Abner movies make it to just about par most of the time but I'll tell you the Fibber McGee and Molly movie Heavenly Days (also 1944) was just a big mess.  So is Gildersleeve's Ghost, but at least it was a palatable mess.  I have never cared much for the Great Gildersleeve radio program - I thought his 1950 program The Harold Peary Show much more entertaining.  Gildersleeve's Ghost begins with Peary in a double role as two of his ancestors who rise from the grave one stormy night, determined to help him win the election for police commissioner.  They do this by releasing the caged gorilla from the basement of the old dark house where a mad scientist is working on his invisibility experiments.  Then they vanish from the movie. Naturally everyone ends up in the old dark house on that stormy night, along with a gorilla suit in addition to the "actual" gorilla, a French Maid, an Invisible Woman, and a Negro Chauffeur.  How can you go wrong with those plot elements?  Also making an appearance is Jack Norton, drunk as usual.  It seems he appeared as a drunk more than 70 times.