lee_eisenberg

One of Alfred Hitchcock's British movies casts John Gielgud as a novelist during WWI whose death the government fakes so that he can go to Switzerland and deal with a German official who is plotting to undermine the British war effort in the Middle East. Madeleine Carroll - as the agent posing as his wife - is one of Hitch's early icy blondes (and damned if she isn't a knockout here!).

If the movie doesn't seem like what you're used to in a Hitchcock movie, then just remember that this was early in the Master of Suspense's career, so he was still figuring things out. In addition to the blonde, other Hitchcock themes present here are trains and mistaken identity (I didn't see Hitch's cameo; I don't know if he had one in this movie). Peter Lorre comes across as comical due to his over-the-top performance and exaggerated accent.

Yes, it's no "Rear Window" or "Psycho", but "Secret Agent" is worth seeing, corny though it is. I have yet to see a Hitchcock movie that wasn't worth seeing. I bet that the sight of Madeleine Carroll turned lots of British boys into men back in the day.

I didn't yet have Netflix when Christopher Guest's "Mascots" got released, so I didn't know about it until recently. I finally watched it. I liked it, although a lot of people apparently didn't. Maybe they felt like it was a rehash of his earlier work, or maybe they found the absence of both Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara jarring (I'd wager that those two were probably busy with "Schitt's Creek").

While I wish that Levy and O'Hara had appeared, I otherwise enjoyed this look at a mascot contest and the oddballs participating therein. If you've seen Guest's other mockumentaries, then you'll have an idea of what to expect here (I particularly liked Parker Posey's character).

Worth seeing, if not as great as some of Guest's movies.

The obvious thing about Bruno Mattei's "Terminator II" (called "Shocking Dark" in English) is that it has less in common with "The Terminator" than with another James Cameron movie: "Aliens". In fact, some of the scenes look lifted directly from the latter.

But beyond that, some things in the movie have come true. One thing is all the concerns about artificial intelligence, but there's also all the stuff about pollution and corporations taking control of entire polities. Weird how these exploitation flicks often predict this stuff better than the mainstream movies do.

Anyway, it's a nice, silly way to entertain yourself for ninety minutes. They probably had fun making it.