Love Letters to Old Hollywood

This post could easily just be me drooling over Errol Flynn for a thousand words. I'm kinda sorta really in love with him, and I will protest until my dying day that he was a fantastic, underrated actor. Watching one Flynn film makes me want to watch ten more immediately, a particular addiction of mine that only Flynn can lay claim to. While I can't say I love every movie of his, I can say that I've always loved his performances, and The Adventures of Robin Hood happens to belong to both camps. Quite simply, it is one of the best films period, and so doing a review of it is a bit daunting. Good thing I'm not doing a review! Because it is Olivia de Havilland's birthday on July 1st, I wanted to focus solely on her in this film. Even if I didn't adore Flynn as much as I do, it would be hard to tear my concentration from him because let's be honest, he is the unequivocal star here. Does he have an incredible cast surrounding him? Oh yes. But Flynn had a h

For the past week, I've been in Prague. I left Paris with a very heavy heart, mainly because I felt like I was just getting to know the city. I'll admit it: the first two weeks were mainly wasted. I was really homesick, I've never exactly been in a big city, and most of the time I just wanted to stay in my room and cuddle up with Netflix. The last week was a rush of trying to see everything I could, and I'm happy to say I think I gave myself a fitting farewell to Paris. There was a lot I missed, but it'll be there the next time I go, so I wasn't too heartbroken over it. I won't delve into every little thing that happened -- I'll mainly stick to the film-related ones and some others like the monuments. My 8-hour flight to Paris was pretty brutal. I had a hard time sleeping and with just two hours to go, I decided to pull out my laptop and watch Neptune's Daughter to pep me up while I ate my breakfast. (By the way, plane food is the worst. I di

Alfred Hitchcock was a genius. You know why? Because he made To Catch a Thief . Many like to dismiss Thief as one Hitch's lesser efforts, but I think that's only because of the magnitude of his filmography. In context of that, yeah, Thief isn't in the top 5. But if you look at the film objectively, taking Hitch out of the equation, it's a fantastic, entertaining movie. I'm sure some of you think I'm nuts. I can't lie, though, I find Thief to be underrated a lot and it is highly unfair. Any director who was smart enough to put Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in the south of France in Technicolor deserves a medal. Add in the fact that the cinematography is perfection, the music is spot-on, and the screenplay is deliciously witty, and you've got a marvelous way to spend your time. You could accuse me of being biased towards Thief . It opened a lot of doors for me in the classic film world -- it was my first time seeing anything by Cary Grant, Grace Kell

Thanks to sweet Christina Wehner, I've received my fourth Liebster! If you haven't checked out Christina's site , you should -- she offers concise, well-written, and thoughtful pieces that are sure to make you think. The rules of the Liebster Award are as follows: answer the 11 questions asked by your nominator; nominate a maximum of 11 other blogs; and ask 11 of your own questions. The hardest part in accepting this award is the nominating of others. Normally, I don't get much of a response, or the bloggers I think of have either been nominated by me before or they have just been given a Liebster themselves. So, although it isn't very sporting, I don't think I'll be nominating this time around. I will, however, ask 11 questions and answer them myself. Feel free to share your thoughts on those in the comments!

Back in February of 2015, I wrote a post on The Notorious Landlady , an underrated comedy from Kim Novak and Jack Lemmon in celebration of their birthdays. I was relatively pleased with the post and it seemed to get a good amount of page views, but then, just a few days over the one-year mark, I noticed something horrifying: the post looked terrible . Apparently, when I switched backgrounds and messed with some formatting, it wreaked havoc on poor Kim and Co. Everything looked wrong, including the awful pictures I had taken from my TV. The post just couldn't be saved, so I deleted it in order to give The Notorious Landlady the great post it deserved. After all, it's been getting the shaft for years -- why should I contribute to that? The film opens on a pretty London square, where children are heard playing, people are out walking, and the leaves are falling. I love that the first shot is this sign about "No Unnecessary Noise," a funny piece of foreshadowing.