Crappy weather - 3" of wet snow. T-Day is over. No Wings game tonight. So I watched two old movies on Prime -- A Good Year with Russell Crow and Twilight with Paul Newman. The first was the better of the two; it got better as it went along. The second one was just ok - lots of faces of good actors - but not that great of a story.

 

Jump in the pool enough times and you find a really good one. A British movie, Atonement, was great. I highly recommend it. 2007 film on Prime.

 

It's a Wonderful Life-I watch this movie every year at holiday time, and love it every year in spite of it being dated, predictable and a bit corny. Originally filmed in glorious black and white, the version I saw tonight on Amazon Prime was colorized. I think I liked the b & w version better, but it didn't lose much in color. Starring Jimmy Stewart , Donna Reed and Henry Travers as Clarence AS2, and filmed in 1946, this is a must see movie. Believe it or not, the production cost of this film was about $3 million and it was considered a failure because it had a box office of less than $6 million. Only after it became a Christmas time classic did it begin to pay off. Directed by Frank Capra, many in Hollywood thought that he lost his touch because of this movie. I guess they were wrong. Anyway, see this film, it will put you into the holiday spirit.

And, remember, every time you hear a bell ring an angel gets his wings.

 

I found this jewel on YouTube. If you love southern rock or blues or soul or r&b or music in general, this is an amazing story about an amazing little town tucked away in northeast Alabama.

I would recommend installing an ad blocker (AdBlock works really well and is free and unobtrusive) so you don't have a bunch of commercials breaking up the flow of this musical journey.

 

I watched the original (1947) The Bishop's Wife. Cary Grant is a cool dude and Loretta Young is a babe!!

 

I saw an article about "Red Notice" on Netflix.
Flop in theaters. but biggest hit for netflix.
fairly good drama comedy.

 

I watched it on Netflix. It took me three nights to get through it. I enjoyed it and liked the ending. I just get too comfy in my recliner with Maury sucking blanket on my lap and fall asleep.

 

Thanks for recommending this, Mike. Having grown up in the South, I was always a fan of this type of music and this movie explains a lot to me. I already learned something from it: in Sweet Home Alabama by Lynyrd Skynyrd, one of the lines is "Now Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers'" I never knew who they were talking about, but now I know it's the name of the house band who were part of the history of Fame Studios. I have only watched about 45 minutes of the movie, but I paused it and will be back.

EDIT: I finished watching the entire movie. Very well done and well worth viewing, especially if you are into music history.

 

It was a slow morning so I watched The Last Battalion, a WWI movie made 20 years ago based a real event. All the reviews said if you like war movies you will like this one. I found it to be one of the most anti-war movies I've seen. A terrific true life story where hundreds died but the endless blood and guts and death from the start to the finish was more than I could take or wanted to see.

 

I've watched the first hour and its really interesting. What's frustrating to me is the video freezes up after the first 10 minutes on my iMac, which has much better speakers than my iPhone where I ended up watching it. This is an issue that I have all the time with YouTube. I think its issue with having so little RAM memory available on my old iMac.