With Six You Get Eggroll

Actors:  Doris Day, Brian Keith, Patt Carroll, Barbra Hershey, Jamie Farr, William Christopher, George Carlin
Rating:  7 out of 10, this was Doris’ last film and you can see the years starting to impact but she was still at the top of her game.  I guess she had a lot of personal issues because she never made another film after this which is a real shame.  She plays an appropriately older widow in this one where she meets widower Brian Keith and they embark on a romance and elope.  All of this is to the horror of the very controlling children of each.  I’ve always loved Keith’s understated acting and he shares a great deal of chemistry with Day.  He seems a much more appropriate pairing for Day than her usually “too pretty” leading men.  There is kind of a hand off between acting generations as Barbra Hershey debuts in this movie and reminded me why I had the childhood crush I had on her. The funniest thing about this movie is the comment on the social scene of the late 1960s as Hollywood tries to portray flower power and the hippies.  Jamie Farr and William Christopher, before their MASH days, play hysterically (and unintentionally) funny leaders of a motor cycle gang with psychedelically painted helmets.  George Carlin looking impossibly young also has some funny moments.  Overall just a fun look back into the 1960’s with the iconic actress of that era in her swan song.
MVP:  Keith as Jake Iverson proves a perfect foil and holds his own with Day’s character

Farr and Christopher - I Had to Add this One - Too Funny

Send Me No Flowers

Actors:  Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Tony Randall, Clint Walker, Paul Lynde
Rating:  5 out of 10, Back to Doris last night with a movie that came as an add on to one of the others I wanted to see.  This was not a good movie.  Day was good as always as the bright, perky housewife this time.  The problem was casting Hudson as a hyper-hypochondriac.  He was just not believable and neither was the notion that Day would put up with the incredible nonsense from her husband.  This is not how you expect from Hudson and he was not a good enough actor to pull this off.  Clint Walker, one of my favorite Dirty Dozen guys, tries to play a romantic rival but he’s even worse than Hudson.  He was nothing but big and should have stuck to action roles.  This is a totally forgettable movie with a contrived plot and most of the actors just going through the motions, definitely a pass.
MVP:  Day as Judy the long suffering wife of the idiotic Hudson

Expendables 2

Actors:  Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Terry Crews, Chuck Norris, Dolph Lungren, Jet Li, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Terry Crews, Jason Statham, Liam Hemsworth, Nan Yu
Rating:  8 out of 10, I decided to break up my Doris Day retrospective by going in a slightly different direction.  This is a completely guilty pleasure movie but boy does it rock.  It’s obvious that the 1980s action stars (and every single one of them still alive is featured) are well beyond their prime but this still is a hell of a lot of fun.  The movie starts off with a bang and doesn’t let up for small things like plot continuity.  It’s also great to have the governator back but its obvious politics were not kind to him.  This is a movie in two parts with some straight forward action for the first half but jumping into cartoonish when Norris appears.  This reaches its “high” point when Arnold rescues the Expendable from a mine driving the boring machine from his Total Recall movie.  But that’s alright because this movie was made for people like me who just want to see things blow up and the good guys win every now and then.  That’s what best about this – it doesn’t take itself too seriously (at all) and repeatedly pokes fun at the stars and their 1980s selves.  Nan Yu was kind of a romantic inetrest and she is a very ineretsting actress and can kick ass as well.  I think they realized any romance between her and Stallone would be kind of creepy (for her) and thankfully didn’t go that way.  Supreme popcorn fare, and that’s all right.
MVP:  Nan Yu as Maggie, holding her own with the action and keeping her head above water in this sea of testosterone

Lover Come Back

Actors:  Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Tony Randall, Donna Douglas, Edie Adams
Rating:  7 out of 10, my journey with childhood crush Doris Day continued with a film I never saw before.  It was another send up of the battle between the sexes that was fomenting in the early 1960s and features Day and Hudson at the peak of their careers.  Hudson plays another Neanderthal that thwarts the go getter Day as rival advertising executives.  Hudson really was an alpha male type despite his later revelations.  Day doesn’t often get credit for it but she was a ground breaker in the movies as a smart, confident professional female in a male dominated work environment.  The movie takes on the role of sex in a very straightforward manner which is surprising for a 1961 film.  There is also another fleeting reference to Hudson’s sexuality when he walks in wearing only a female’s mink coat that is only notable for what we learned later on.  Randall is incredibly funny as the spoiled rich son and Hudson's supposed boss.  This was another fun trip down memory lane that had my wife in stitches.  Over the past week she has become a devoted Doris Day fan, who knew?
MVP:  Day as Carol Templeton, the smart, sexy, and frustrated foil to Hudson’s cad

Pillow Talk

Actors:  Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Tony Randall, Thelma Ritter
Rating:  9 out of 10, my journey with childhood crush Doris Day continued with arguably her best film.  This iconic film holds up extremely well over five decades later.  The chemistry between Day and Hudson is palpable which is certainly a tribute to Hudson’s acting ability.   There was even a scene, so much more memorable now with the hind sight of the intervening years, where Hudson feigns homosexuality.  This movie actually takes other chances as well which makes it all the more enjoyable.  A professional woman in the 1950’s and the beginning salvoes of the loosening of views on sex that came with the 1960s among other themes.   It provides a very interesting glimpse back in time where there were party lines and completely different societal mores.  I really liked the split screens which are used extensively and Hudson tries to first confound and then win Day.  This technique as well as the entire movie was spoofed in Down With Love but here it’s a lot of fun.  That is the bottom line with this movie, its still very funny and a complete treasure.
MVP:  Rock Hudson as Brad Allen defining himself as the complete leading man of the 1960’s rom com (little did we know)

Move Over Darling

Actors:  Doris Day, James Garner, Chuck Conners, Thelma Ritter, Polly Bergen
Rating:  8 out of 10, a true guilty pleasure movie from my youth.  I was wandering through Amazon and happened upon some Doris Day movies from the 1960s and this one brought back some nice memories.  I put it on my wish list and my dutiful daughter promptly rewarded me with it as a birthday present.  It hearkens back to a more innocent time but it stands up well and is still incredibly funny.  Day plays Garner’s wife who reappears from a 5 year spell as a castaway thought dead just in time to thwart Garner’s marriage to Bergen.  Light hearted fun and it even has the Rifleman – Chuck Conners in a small role. I was fascinated with the back story which I was unaware of.  Apparently this script was originally meant for Marilyn Monroe and they actually started filming with her.  She was fired for unprofessionalism and died several months later so this was her last screen work (still hot).  The extras on the DVD are fascinating because they show several of the scenes with Monroe and then compare them to the Doris Day version.  At the same time Fox was shooting the Monroe version they were also pumping ungodly amounts of money into the Liz Taylor Cleopatra movie which was causing all kinds of financial problems for the studio at the same time Monroe was fired.  It offers an intriguing look into the Hollywood of the early 1960s.
MVP:  Doris Day as Ellen Wagstaff Arden proving herself as the once and always queen of rom-coms.

The Amazing Spider Man

Actors:  Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Martin Sheen, Sally Fields, Rhys Ifans, Dennis Leary
Rating:  9 out of 10, when this first came out I really questioned why because of the excellent Toby Maguire series (at least the first two).  I guess there was a lot of scuttlebutt in nerd world that the earlier films got some things wrong but nothing that made me think a new series was needed this soon.  I’m sure a lot of it came from the success of the Batman re-boot.  As I stated when I saw this in the theaters – I was very pleasantly surprised by this film.  It all has to do with casting because there isn’t a miss in the entire cast here.  The lead, Garfield, who was so impressive in The Social Network, strikes just the right amount of humor, wonder, and angst as Peter Parker.  The real revelation though is Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy who completely elevates her role out of the mundane and becomes an equal partner to Parker.  I really appreciated the way characters weren’t all completely good or evil – it leant a lot more depth to the story.  The plot was well done and moved the action at a brisk pace without losing sight of the fact they had a story to tell.  This was a huge set up for future sequels and given the quality of this offering I’m more than ready for those.
MVP:  Stone – another in a long series of stand out performances who makes Gwen so much more than just a pretty face – but she’s got that going for her too