Citizen Dame

This week, Lauren picks the movie and it's the 2011 New Zealand rom com Love Birds, starring Rhys Darby and Sally Hawkins.

After Doug's girlfriend leaves him, an injured paradise shelduck named Pierre helps him heal and to find new love with Holly, a veterinarian single mom.

Featuring a soundtrack entirely by Queen, Love Birds also stars Bryan Brown, Craig Hall, David Fane, and Emily Barclay.

We wind down the year with some grab-bag faves that we just really want to watch, beginning with a Thanksgiving holiday classic: John Hughes's Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (1987), in which Neal (Steve Martin) is trapped on a holiday road trip from hell with the friendly, lovable, and disaster-prone Del (John Candy). A forty-five-minute flight to Chicago can sometimes take three days, it seems.

Next week, Rhys Darby, Sally Hawkins, and a duck cause Lauren to have an existential crisis! We're talking Love Birds!

This week we finish out our LA neo-noir series with the revolutionary Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Robert Zemeckis directed this adaptation of Gary K. Wolf's 1981 novel, Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, a hilariously smart satire that leads hard-boiled private detective Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) on a journey to prove one of Toon Town's biggest stars, Roger Rabbit (voice of Charles Fleischer) is not guilty of murder. Together they must clear Roger's name and save him from the dreadful Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd).

Nominated for 6 Academy Awards and winning 3, the film was an astonishing blend of live-action and animation, creating new technology along the way. It is also the only film to include characters from both Disney and Warner Bros. together onscreen.

We're off next week, but we'll be back with some holiday cheer in December!

This week we grapple with the problematics of Chinatown (1974), arguably one of the greatest neo-noirs, with a fraught and complicated history thanks to its director, Roman Polanski. Starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, Chinatown represents the bleakness of noir amid the sunniness of LA, with a hefty dose of political and sexual corruption. Oof.

TW for discussions of sexual assault and incest.

We continue our look at Los Angeles-set neo-noir films, this time with the 1997 Academy Award-winning L.A. Confidential.

Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, and Kevin Spacey star as three very different LAPD detectives in a changing city where some cops embrace the corruption, some look the other way, and some are determined to root it out. An investigation into a series of murders in 1950s Los Angeles threatens to expose what's really going on beneath the sunny, shiny surface.

Based on the novel by James Ellroy, L.A. Confidential was directed by Curtis Hanson and also stars Kim Basinger, James Cromwell, Danny DeVito, David Strathairn, and Ron Rifkin. It was nominated for 9 Oscars including Best Picture, winning two: Best Supporting Actress, Kim Basinger; and Best Adapted Screenplay, Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson.

The Dames are back with Halloween hangovers and the start of Noirvember! This month, we're looking at neo-noirs set in 40s/50s LA. We begin with Devil in a Blue Dress, starring peak Denzel Washington as Easy Rawlins, an out-of-work machinist who gets caught up in the search for a missing woman, leading him into the seedy underworld and racist high society of the City of Angels.

Next week, we'll go into even more sun-soaked political corruption and police brutality with LA Confidential!

It's Halloween week! And what better way to celebrate than with the ultimate spooky movie season movie: HALLOWEEN! John Carpenter and Debra Hill's 1978 slasher is a must for fans of the season. But we only recognize the original as the One True Halloween movie. Jamie Lee Curtis stars as Laurie Strode, a 17-year-old babysitter whose night is ruined by 21-year-old mask-wearing, knife-wielding hospital escapee Michael Myers.

Happy Halloween from the Dames!

Spooky Movie Month continues as the Dames discuss the 1986 horror film The Fly. Directed by David Cronenberg, this adaptation of the 1957 film stars Jeff Goldblum as Seth Grundle, an eccentric scientist whose teleportation experiment goes horribly wrong when he splices himself with a fly. The film also stars Geena Davis and John Getz.

Clip from THE FLY courtesy of 20th Century Studios.

Spooky Movie Month continues as we look back at the zany 1980 Disney horror movie, The Watcher in the Woods. Adapted from Florence Engel Randall's 1976 novel, John Hough directed the film that was widely panned by critics, pulled from theaters, and given a new ending. The film stars Bette Davis, Carroll Baker, Lynn-Holly Johnson, Kyle Richards, David McCallum, Richard Pasco, and Ian Bannen.

Spooky Season starts in earnest, and we're kicking it off with a movie that scared the hell out of four-year-old Lauren: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Comedy team Abbott and Costello play baggage handlers who run into a bevy of Universal Monsters including Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi), the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney, Jr.), and the Frankenstein Monster (Glenn Strange), in a creepy castle in...Florida? The film would go on to become a template for horror comedies, and the most successful movie in the Frankenstein series since the original.

Next week will be The Watcher in the Woods (1980), which is weirdly hard to get a hold of (but well worth the effort!).