Movie Log: Roxanne, Arsenic and Old Lace

I'm catching up on movies I missed the first time (or can't remember if I ever saw to begin with). I spent the last decade seeing only about one movie a month, so I missed a lot -- and I mostly saw really bad movies in college, so there's a lot of ground to cover there as well.

Roxanne I saw last Thursday; I got it from Netflix because I'd seen L.A. Story a month or so back and loved it. Roxanne is another Steve Martin romantic comedy (actually, I think those two are the only Steve Martin romantic comedies), and it's more formulaic and less quirky than L.A. Story. It's still smart and engaging, even to a viewer like me who tends to like the idea of a romantic comedy more often than I like the actual execution of the idea. And we do sort-of see Daryl Hannah naked for five minutes or so, which makes any movie much better.

Arsenic and Old Lace is also very funny, and I probably saw at least parts of it at one time. (I think we did a workshop version of the play in some drama class or group I was in, way back in the dawn of time. I'm pretty sure I was Jonathan.) The movie is very stagey and set-bound, but I usually enjoy that -- and it's a beautiful set, too. It is weird to see Raymond Massey reacting to all of the Boris Karloff jokes; those much have worked much better on stage, with Karloff in the same part. By today's standards, it's not that black of a comedy, especially since no one dies in the course of the movie's action, but Cary Grant is great (as is the rest of the cast), and it still holds up very well.

And by the time I get home today we'll have two movies there, so I'll probably watch Shopgirl and Nanny McPhee over the weekend. (And, if that isn't the first time those two movies were mentioned in the same sentence, I'll eat my hat.)