Ah Tuesday, or as I like to call it “Oh-No-Is-That-the-Garbage-Truck-Quick-Where-Are-My-Pants-Is-This-a-Bad-Lemon-or-a-Good-Kiwi-Never-Mind-Let’s-GO!”

Yesterday I spent much of the day at the American Consulate waiting for Hot Latin Boy to renew his tourist visa.

As such, I spent four hours people watching and wondering what sort of decision-making process would start out “What should I wear to my very important potentially life-changing government interview” and arrive at “shredded thigh jeans, shooties ordered from the back of Modern Streetwalker and a hickey the size of Gorbachev’s port wine stain.”

Baffling.

Anyway, it’s been a while, but since it’s time to resurrect the featurette and see What Miss Plumcake is…

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I love movies. You may already know that. In fact, I may have mentioned this fact before. And every once in a while, it’s fun to share with you all the gems I’ve found and enjoyed. So let’s do that today, shall we? Yes, yes we shall.

All of the films I’m going to recommend today are available through Netflix. I’ll also point out those you can get from Amazon.

Gunless stars Paul Gross as a wild west gunslinger who, on the run from a not very talented lynch mob and bounty hunter Callum Keith Rennie, finds himself in a tiny Canadian hamlet where nobody owns a pistol. The humor is very tongue-in-cheek, and a talented cast gives the wry script everything they’ve got. This is a film with few if any axes to grind, a slightly elastic take on history, and lots of heart. Turn off your mind and just enjoy it. Oh, and make sure you stick around for the credits. They’re liberally laced with outtakes that will leave you giggling.

In November of 1924, William Randolph Hearst’s yacht, the Oneida, set sail with a glittering cast of celebrities to celebrate the birthday of Thomas H. Ince, film producer. Before the weekend was over, Ince was dead. The official cause of death was a heart attack, but no autopsy was performed, nobody on the ship was interviewed by police, and Hollywood being Hollywood even then, rumors began flying. The most popular rumor of what had happened was that Hearst accidentally shot Ince mistaking him for Charlie Chaplin and believing Chaplin was having an affair with his (Hearst’s) mistress Marion Davies.

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Poor sweet Norma Jean died before completing the 1962 romcom Something’s Gotta Give, but not before leaving behind a few tantalizing test shots, like this wardrobe test featuring the radiant Miss M in a black and white bombshell dress.

The equally divine Miss Charles Busch admitted he had Marilyn’s dress in mind when he asked Michael Bottari and Ronald Case to design the famous black and white number for his smash satire Die, Mommie! Die! where he plays aging star Angela Arden whose career is as dead as her husband is about to be.

and now Coldwater Creek (I know, no I know, but I went through the whole catalog without coming down with early-onset menopause, maybe I’m just lucky) is offering a very pretty variation on the black and white floral theme.

This can easily be a four season dress. A pair of sweet heels and a clutch in sherbet colors makes it perfect for Spring. Little sandals for Summer, pumpkin skimmers (and maybe a thin ivy belt?) for Autumn and Winter is a no-brainer with screaming red stilettos and coordinating cardi.

Well I never!

Let me just say I am aghast, no, several ghasts at so many of your treasonous cinematic ways.

It’s like that time a few years ago when I played that April Fools joke where I shamefully admitted to having promoted Crocs in exchange for cash and prizes (do I LOOK like a mommieblogger? Do I talk about gluten-free cupcakes, knitting or fabric with owls on them? No, I do not.) and a whole bunch of people were calling for my head, offering themselves as my editorial replacement.

Treacherous harpies.

Of course there are classic films I don’t enjoy.

I adore Vivien Leigh but I’d be fine without sitting through another viewing of Gone with the Wind, and although I won’t say neither love nor money could make me sit through Lawrence of Arabia again, it would take large quantities of both to get me to watch Omar Sharif ride in from the horizon on his camel, no matter how cinematically important that scene remains.

(like this, but for about five minutes)

These are not bad films.

It’s the rare piece of pop culture that stays relevant 50 years (as in the case of Lawrence of Arabia, released in 1962) or nearly 75 years.

It’s amazing so many of them still are.

1939 brought us GwtW, The Wizard of Oz, Of Mice and Men, Ninotchka, Dark Victory, The Women, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Gunga Din, Stagecoach and a whole bunch of other classics that lend credence to the idea that it’s been all downhill in tinseltown since the clock struck 1940.

Ideals, tastes and conventions, not to mention technology, have changed dramatically since Greta giggled, so it’s important to appreciate film (or music or, I don’t know, body shape) on their own merits and not how well they compare to modern tastes, no matter how deeply or subtly engrained those tastes are.

Take, for example, the top musical hits from the same year.

You’ve got plenty of Glenn Miller, Bessie Smith singing “God Bless America”, a doubtlessly timeless ditty called “The Adventures of Piccolo Pete” and a personal favorite of mine, “Little Brown Jug” (it is a Plumcake family tradition to bounce wee children on one’s knees and sing Little Brown Jug, dipping them dramatically during the “we fell in!” line).

You can’t really fault Glenn Miller or Bessie Smith even if they’re not your preferred genres, but for my imaginary money, the only song that sounds as fresh and painful today as it must have then is Billie Holiday’s haunting “Strange Fruit”.

It reminds me of a brutal breakup when I was 26.

Uh, the over-easy rejection of classic films, not the horrifying epidemic of lynching of the thirties and forties, although I once had to gently tell my sweet but occasionally oblivious voice teacher that even though he was doing an all Billie Holiday tribute, as a middle-aged white man from East Texas with a twang thicker than day old grits, he didn’t exactly have the cultural pedigree to get away with singing that particular song.

Anyhoodle.

Back when I was 26, my long-term fella dumped me HARD for an East German amnesiac who couldn’t remember her name.

I’m not EVEN making that up.

Although he’d always been all about my big girl body, and his new strudel had all the svelte daintiness normally associated with a brain-damaged East German shot-put champion (I’m just guessing about the shot-put part, but the rest is dead on) he told me

“Just because you don’t hate your size doesn’t mean your size is okay.”

I was, for one of the very few times in my life, speechless. How could someone so smart be so wrong wrong wrongitty wrong?

It was then I realized –because I’m not very bright and hadn’t figured it out sooner– that some people really did decide on a person or object’s value and virtue based on whether they liked it or not.

What a crippling way to live.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t empirically rotten films or people out there, and there’s a whole conversation to be led by someone much more erudite than I about the joys of good taste and whether the enjoyment of quality craftsmanship is better or purer than the pleasure derived from “ooh, shiny thing go boom!” and whether, from a pleasure aspect, having good taste is more of a blessing or a curse.

Oh, and the next person who dares to say The Searchers is a bad film, when it is fairly and universally acknowledged as one of the best American films ever made, gets a one way trip to the woodshed behind Villa Plumcake and will be treated to a lengthy lecture on its cultural import, visual beauty and merciless examination of racism and the attitudes about Native American genocide. You don’t have to like it, but it doesn’t mean it’s not great.

There are a lot of Great Classic Films I adore. Mention Casablanca, and I’m going to sigh joyfully and start quoting. Talk about Citizen Kane, and I shiver at the deathless images that pop straight into my brain. There are other Great Classic Films that do and will always make me happy.

But then there’s Gone With the Wind.

I know there are people who would willingly trample their grandmothers to see this film again, and more power to them. One of the most interesting Cultural Experiences of my life was going with Mr. Twistie (who is a huge fan) to see the 50th anniversary re-release at the Castro theater in San Francisco. I know Hattie McDaniel had all the same lines she ever did, but I didn’t hear one of them through the cheers, and the anticipatory screams for ‘Frankly my dear, etc.’ began about twenty minutes before the line was spoken.

It’s clear that a lot of people are passionate fans of this film. Me? I’m not one of them. I don’t find the story line terribly compelling, I can’t work up much nostalgia for the Antebellum South, and I don’t really care about any of the characters. No, scratch that last one. What happens is I see them and my slapping hand starts itching up a storm.

Not to rain on anyone’s parade, but this is a film I decided years ago to give a miss to at every possible opportunity.

The other Great Classic Film I will never sit through again?

That’s right, The Wizard of Oz.

I was pretty meh on this one even as a very small child. And then my parents gave me the book. After that, I was really done with the movie. There’s so much more in the book, and I read what L. Frank Baum said about what he’d hoped to achieve with his book. What he wanted was a real American fairy tale where the child had amazing adventures and it didn’t turn out to be all just a kooky dream.

For me, Oz is so much better when it’s real, when Dorothy goes back again and again and has further adventures that are equally real. I prefer the winged monkeys when they’re controlled by a magical golden cap. I prefer silver slippers. I like the balance of two good witches (North and South – which is where Glinda comes from), and two evil ones (East and West).

In my book, Judy Garland just isn’t compelling enough to make me like Oz as a coma fantasy.

My guess is that everyone has at least one Great Classic Film you couldn’t pay them to sit through again. One of my very best friends practically froths at the mouth at the mention of Citizen Kane, which, as I said before, is a great favorite of mine. My father couldn’t watch The African Queen (another great favorite of mine) because he said the boat couldn’t possibly work the way they had it set up. I believe him, too. He knew his boats. And you can see what I think of two of the most sacred cows of American cinema.

So what’s the Great Classic Film you intend to avoid for the rest of your life?

I love movies. I love some true masterpieces, some of questionable taste, some for their quaint awfulness. One of my favorite things is finding some jewel of an obscure film that’s all the more precious because nobody else on the face of the planet seems to know it exists.

But never let it be said that I’m stingy when it comes to sharing the cultural wealth! Today, I’m sharing with you all a smattering of the obscure, the offbeat, and the nearly unknown films that make me smile.

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Hey gang, in a continuing theme of bringing back favorite features, it’s time to find out What Miss Plumcake is:

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