See you later, weekdays, and hello weekend!
Want to read something that feels like it will inevitably turned into a movie one day? Check out this awesome Washington Post profile of Rhonda Roland Shearer, a renegade provider of PPE to New York hospitals. It's not the first time she's done this either; Shearer jumped to action after 9/11 to play a similar role. Frustrated with bureaucratic slowness, she took it upon herself to act.
In order to provide this gear, however, Shearer goes hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. A partnership with HousingWorks helps defray some of the costs, but now there's a GoFundMe to help her efforts.
Now, what you came for...
DAY 57: Some Like It Hot (available on Amazon Prime)
Of any genre, comedy probably tends to age the poorest given how anchored it is to the time in which it was released. But my gosh, over 60 years later, and Some Like It Hot still absolutely undoes me. There's a reason this ranked as the American Film Institute's #1 comedy of all time -- it's a laugh riot from start to finish.
I loved the film when I first saw it many years ago, but a rewatch this week just confirmed how brilliant and funny Some Like It Hot really is. From idea to execution, this tale of two down-and-out musicians (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) in Prohibition-era Chicago delights through and through. After narrowly escaping a shootout by mobsters, the pair hops a train out of town by joining another band ... an all-female one. Things start to get really interesting when both men are taken by Marilyn Monroe's blonde bombshell Sugar Kane ... and one of them attracts an oblivious sugar daddy admirer.
Despite the cross-dressing element of the story, it's remarkable how Some Like It Hot never takes the lazy route of transphobic or gay panic jokes. (Admittedly, some of this is due to the production code at the time that limited more frank discussion of such topics, but it's still refreshing all the same). It certainly helps that the film is co-written and directed by the great Billy Wilder, a six-time Oscar winner who is among the most versatile talents Hollywood has ever seen. Who else can say they've made all-time classic dramas, comedies, film noirs, war movies and courtroom dramas?
The humor in the film is so varied in style that I'm convinced anyone can find something to laugh at. There's physical humor, clever dialogue, broad physical gags, nuanced facial reactions, rapid-fire scenarios, long setups with immense payoff ... you name it, Some Like It Hot has got it. This is about as close to perfect a comedy as there can be, and there's not a better time to discover (or rediscover) the immense pleasure of Billy Wilder's masterpiece. Come on, who couldn't use a laugh right now?!
Be good to yourselves and to each other,
Marshall