I just watched the movie Gilda, because seemingly I've seen everything that's actually up my alley and am now just watching movies that are classics of one type or another. I liked the Rita Hayworth movie The Lady From Shanghai, but that had number one best dude Orson Welles behind it. Gilda is seemingly better-regarded though. It was directed by a guy I never heard of, but there is that bit of film history that cares more about movie stars than I do.

Casablanca is directed by a guy whose name I can't remember either, very much a studio film, and I don't like that one at all- I don't like the quotes associated. There are little scraps of dialogue in Gilda that I think are amazing, which is why I'm writing about the fact that I saw it. "Statistically, there's more women on Earth than anything else." "You can only die once, and he committed suicide three months ago." These are paraphrases.

I mean, most of the dialogue is impossible to follow the train of thought and meaning behind it, because it's just ridiculous and circling around points. But there are these little bits of straightforward lucidity. :

"and think about- would it be corny to say your sins?"
"yes it would."
"well, I said it anyway."

and those bits are amazing. I'm sure that if I watched it multiple times I would be able to quote from it as casually as any song lyric or good season of The Simpsons.

It's almost comparable to lyric writing in the way it works- Really inconsistent, but pitched at this certain high level so the bad is kind of atrocious, but you go with it for the moments it works- the punchlines and the choruses. And maybe these isolated lines don't work so well on this page, stripped of context, the same way "I'm out for presidents to represent me (say what) I'm out for presidents to represent me (say what) I'm out for dead presidents to represent me" might not work without inflection.

All talking about rap is done at least halfway for the benefit of Sam Hockley-Smith, who links to this blog from his sidebar.

But yeah seriously, pretty much any Orson Welles movie is better than any movie it would ever be compared with- even if the comparison isn't one of genre and shared star, but just time period and quality. If you were to compare The Trial to Psycho on the basis of Anthony Perkins being in both, I would assert that The Trial is better.