Sunday treat: Self-Styled Siren

Today I want to lead you to my newest discovery: Self-Styled Siren, a blog dedicated to great classic (mostly old Hollywood) movies.

I don't agree with all her opinions, and God knows I haven't seen half as many films as she has, but she writes with an eloquence and a wit that makes me spend an an hour plus before I realize I should get up and do something. Her calm dismissal of a journalist who called Basil Rathbone "sexlessly debonair in the way Hollywood liked its leading men in the 1930s and 1940s" is way beyond my level of maturity*.

Not to mention she has an eye for details and an imagination that... let's just say she's made me want to rewatch The Maltese Falcon and try out some new interpretations.

For a sample blog entry, try Ten Things I Love About Old Movies.

Lenghty pimping end.

*Seriously? Rathbone is sexless? What. That's like... calling Humphrey Bogart effeminate. Or Mae West prudish. It's funny because the last Rahtbone movie I watched was Captain Blood where Rathbone's entire character is summed up as "'Allo, I am a French slutty pirate." I dare anyone to watch Love From A Stranger (not that you should, it's not very good) and not see that disconcerting level of sexuality he brings to the part.

The Scottish TV film

So after years of trying to talk myself out of seeing the notoriously disappointing Trevor Nunn TV adaption of my favourite Shakespearean play (Macbeth) starring two of my favourite actors (Ian McKellen and Judi Dench) in the lead roles, I succumbed.



It was... yes, disappointing (with the exception of the "Wherefore could not I pronounce 'Amen'?" part for some reason - it was killing).

But I'll come with an observation here: Apparantly Ian McKellen has spent the majority of his life looking like a gangly sixteen-yearold (he was forty at this point. Forty! He looked like he'd recently reached puberty!), until at fifty or so he aged overnight to that endearing grandfatherly look he's rocking these days.

I say this based on the highly scientific research of having watched, oh, nine or ten McKellen movies in my lifetime.