I spent much of last week downloading all the back episodes of the Filmspotting podcast from the website starting all the way at the beginning with Cinecast #1. That would be about 196+ episodes that iTunes didn't have in their podcast library. I had to download them all individually. Oy.
And then iTunes imposed its will on me and uploaded the files into the music library. I can't get them out. I created a playlist and ordered all the episodes sequentially. Ha! Now I have two years of Filmspotting to listen to.
While I worked on all the downloads I watched Becket and Smart People. Smart People was good, very funny, especially Thomas Hayden Church and Ellen Page (who does the scariest robotic, psycho, "must-get-all-As" high school senior). Dennis Quaid was OK, better than he has been. Becket blew me away - is there a good reason why Peter O'Toole didn't get the Academy Award that year? I've seen My Fair Lady a number of times while growing up and Rex Harrison does a good job (I wonder if he'd have looked as good if they'd cast Julie Andrews as Eliza like they should have) but now that I've seen Becket I think Peter O'Toole got robbed (he's been robbed a lot because I guess he's becoming the Susan Lucci of Best Actor nominees) - he was perfect as King Henry II. I always knew Henry was a piece of crap but O'Toole just made it very real. I think we should have watched this in AP English (it is an adaptation of a play, after all) instead of that unbelievably bad version of Oedipus Rex we had to watch. Oh, yeah, and Apocalypse Now. Yuck.
What probably happened is that O'Toole and Richard Burton* (who played Becket) cancelled each other out. Bummer. Now I have to go bump The Lion in Winter up in the Netflix queue so I can watch O'Toole in another Oscar-nominated (but non-winning) turn as Henry, in company with Katharine Hepburn and Anthony Hopkins. I watched the TV movie version of TLIW with Patrick Stewart and Glenn Close a few years ago (Stewart=good, Close=whoa scary) so I should watch the 1968 motion picture again.
Current book-in-progress: The Mysteries of Udolpho for LbW December/January (I have The Castle of Otranto on order so I can get to the beginning of the Gothic craze)
Current knitted item: one yellow secret item (I grabbed the wrong needles, oops)
Current movie obsession: M (in the original German with subtitles - I really can understand about half of it)
Current iTunes loop: Filmspotting!
*I love to listen to Richard Burton, I do not like to watch him act. He looks stiff as a board in pretty much everything I've seen him in but I love his voice. Mmmmm.*
Did I send you that Burton Shakespeare thing I found? If not, let me know and I will.
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