My project to see at least one representative film for every Walk of Fame star in the film category is now half done. Actually slightly more than half: 51.74% if you go contiguously, covering all of the south half and starting the northwest corner. And if you don’t worry about the stars being connected, I’m 88.52% done! Favorite movie discoveries: All About Eve and Design For Living. Worst movie discoveries: Jungle Bride and Ten Laps to Go.
If I put them in bunches like this, there’s nearly enough content to justify a post!
I watched 25 movies in the last 22 days. Here’s a sentence or two about each of them.
Madam Satan: Walk of Fame watch. The best thing about this is the dress.
Send Help: Works in spite of its ridiculous premise that Rachel McAdams could be unattractive.
Plan 9 From Outer Space: Terrible but earnest.
Arco: Probably a much better movie in the original French. The stunt English voice casting just doesn’t work.
The Heiress: Walk of Fame watch. Another movie that tries to make the Civil War era protagonists more palatable by claiming slaves actually had a pretty good time.
Little Women (1933): Walk of Fame watch. Fun to watch 26 year old Katharine Hepburn as the world’s most adult teenager.
The Nut: Walk of Fame watch. Sort of a silent movie live action Wallace & Gromit with some Mr. Bean thrown in.
Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man: Walk of Fame watch. Should be called The Wolf Man Wants to Die and Spends Less Than Ten Minutes with Frankenstein’s Monster.
Clash of the Wolves: Walk of Fame watch. Any movie that disguises a dog by putting a beard on him AND IT WORKS is okay by me.
Jezebel: Walk of Fame watch. Bette Davis destroys lives by wearing the wrong color dress.
Islands: It was fine, but so unmemorable that I had to look it up to remember what I watched.
Leave Her to Heaven: Walk of Fame watch. Pretty sure Heaven doesn’t want her.
Dancing Sweeties: Walk of Fame watch. Not very interesting story of a couple that gets married minutes after meeting as part of a promotion at a dance hall.
Stormy Waters: Walk of Fame watch. Hey, don’t cheat the captain of the rescue boat or he might have an affair with your wife.
The Magnificent Ambersons: Walk of Fame watch. Orson Welles could direct, but my favorite part was the end credits.
The Beast of Hollow Mountain: MST3K watch. Almost completely a cattle ranch story, with a little dinosaur sprinkled on at the end.
Starcrash: MST3K watch (hey, YouTube kept playing them!). Battle of the perms.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die: Sam Rockwell needs to be in more movies.
The Average Woman: Walk of Fame watch. The Below Average Movie.
Million Dollar Legs: Walk of Fame watch. Best use of W.C. Fields ever.
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie: Astounding. Brilliant. I wonder how much more I would have understood if I had watched the series.
4D Man: Monsterdon watch. Why test on safe an available materials when you can do risky experiments on yourself?
The Son-of-a-Gun: Walk of Fame watch. Some decent bits, but not great. The barely watchable print didn’t help.
Wuthering Heights: The script felt like it was written by someone who had the story described to them on the subway. Somehow made sex scenes between two ridiculously beautiful people boring.
Rocco and His Brothers: Walk of Fame watch. One of Rocco’s brothers sucks.
Fifteen of these were part of my “Watch something for every motion picture star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame” project. Many of them were not great. I just finished the south half of Vine Street and I’m moving back onto Hollywood Boulevard. I’ve got almost 80% of all the stars, and over 20% of those are contiguous. Contiguous section in red:
I’m not going to make any more individual stars for my blog, but I’ll eventually update my Walk of Fame Letterboxd list.
Nine days, eleven movies. Let’s whip through these!
No one can compete when Colman Domingo speaks.
Wait: Maybe Ralph Fiennes could compete.
The best thing to come out of this movie was Mariska Hargitay.
A hacked up mess. I wish the original John Huston cut was available.
I wonder what Godard would have thought of this pretty straightforward story of the making of Breathless.
Walk of Fame watches. In the first two films, Nick and Nora are the coolest people in the room, and almost always drunk. In the last (actually the sixth in the series), the are ten years older, they have a kid, they are often out of the loop, and they are far less entertaining.
Walk of Fame watch. The first movie from Metro Goldwyn Mayer, and it’s pretty wild.
It’s insane that they went from a dirt lot to the most famous theme park on Earth in just one year. And so much detail went into things that no normal person would ever notice. Fascinating.
I think I would have enjoyed this a lot more if it didn’t have the narration.
Best of this bunch: 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
Worst: The Loves of Hercules (but the MST3K riffing made it a fun watch)
I didn’t post anything about the last eleven movies I watched. I thought about doing eleven separate posts, but that sounds hard, so here comes Movie Lightning Round:
Exactly how I remember the year 2000.
“It’s a Wonderful Life,” except without any life.
Three hours of guys wandering through fields, and it’s great.
Mickey Mouse wasn’t in this at all!
My crush on Michelle Meyrink continues.
I’m not sure how something can have both too much Bowie and not enough Bowie.
Apparently the after-party for the premiere of Oklahoma! was the source of huge chunks of pop culture.
Any movie that stops the action for a five minute gay sailor musical number is all right with me.
I didn’t really need Peter Pan to have a tacked-on “AMERICA IS THE BEST” subplot.
A completely by-the-numbers musical western with zero memorable songs.
Gee, I wonder if the two women who can’t stand each other will grudgingly find mutual respect and then become friends?
Some of these were watched for my Walk of Fame project so I’ll end up posting about them again.
…and seriously: the not-musical Hail, Caesar! had a better musical number than anything in Belle of the Yukon.
The guy in front of me when I was walking out of the theater said “That was the most boring movie I’ve ever seen.” I guess he’s never sat through Radu Jude’s Dracula. Or the 1969 version of Dr. Dolittle.
But I know why he was bored. The trailers make this look like a zombie movie. And it is, but not very much. It’s really more of a contemplative story about an estranged relationship that happens to have some bodies coming back to life. The zombies are slow and easily avoidable as long as you don’t do something silly like go off on adventure by yourself to try and work things out with your husband.
I’m sure no one would call this movie a fun watch, but it was incredibly rough as a middle school teacher to watch and recognize the bullying and shaming that happens in this movie. I seriously considered walking out, and I never walk out of movies.
I don’t mean that this is a poorly made film. It’s very well made, and the performances all feel real- but more than a little PTSD triggering for me.
Jimmy Stewart at his Jimmy Stewartest. A very enjoyable ride. Also: I’d never seen this before, so I had no idea how much Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles was channeling Marlene Dietrich’s Frenchy. Mel Brooks got some very delayed laughter out of me.
I could have gone my whole life without seeing Fred Astaire in blackface.
Love & marriage in old movies is wild. “I met you three days ago. I love you! Let’s get married. Wait- you’re engaged to someone else? I guess I’ll marry this other guy. But now you’re not engaged anymore? Then I’ll marry you, and the guy I was engaged to will sing to celebrate our love!” Also: Rogers and Astaire never kiss. They often ALMOST kiss, but they never actually do it. Apparently this was a thing.
Betty Furness (1533 Vine Street, plus a television star at 6675 Hollywood Boulevard) plays Margaret, the woman who seems fine with her wedding being cancelled because her fiancee thought his pants needed cuffs. Furness move from acting into being a spokesperson for Westinghouse. That led to her becoming a consumer advocate, and then a reporter.
Sneaking in a last movie of 2025 to wrap up my “Fake posters for every movie I see in 2025” project. My letterboxd list says I’ve seen 254, but my fake poster count is 258 so I’m missing something somewhere.
What a great movie to end the year. It’s hilarious. Also: I never got why people were so enthralled by Marilyn Monroe. I get it.
Pat O’Brien (1531 Vine Street) plays a cop who manages to let a lot of people get shot. He was a very popular actor who appeared in over 100 films.
My LAST FAKE POSTER is… pretty good. Not a favorite, but an acceptable end to the project.
I guess I should do some sort of “wrap-up/what’s next” post tomorrow so that all my imaginary fans aren’t left guessing about my next project.