playing in the background

All right. By popular demand (or by Ms. Pooks asking nicely … some days it doesn’t take a lot to qualify as popular demand), I will tell you exactly which “sappy romantic comedy” films I saw over the Thanksgiving holiday, as I mentioned in my previous entry.

It’s an exaggeration, of course, and I feel the need to explain the whole thing about Watching Movies While Working.
I like having background music or sound while I’m working on Web design or nonfiction writing or whatever it is I do on the computer these days. I picked up the habit in grad school of putting on movies in the background instead of playing CDs. At the time, I was writing screenplays and I may have thought that having movies playing would be inspirational. (All it meant was that I occasionally unconsciously stole a line from one movie or another.) Also, I had a lot of movies taped from cable TV the one summer I had access to cable, and I taped them in six-hour mode, three movies to a tape. So I could put on a tape and half-tune it out for six hours without having to mess with the VCR at all. The most popular tape back then was the one with Bull Durham and A Fish Called Wanda on it, but overwatching caused me to burn out a little on those movies, and now I only watch them with other people.
Many of the videotapes I own are movies I bought because they provide an excellent background to work, or housecleaning, or whatever. They’re not all romantic comedies, they’re certainly not all sappy, and most of them are very good quality movies. They are excellent background movies because they have a certain rhythm of dialogue, usually found with good writing, and do not contain any scenes that are too emotionally wracking, and I’ve seen them enough times that I don’t have to pay 100 percent attention to what’s happening onscreen.
So here is a list of the film I’ve used recently background movies at Chez Jette, usually when the boyfriend was somewhere else and I wanted some noise in the house while I worked.
Moonstruck (1987)—I don’t know why I like to put on this movie as often as I do. But it’s a nice movie to have on while I work; I can look up during the scenes I particularly like, or the lines I always enjoy hearing (“You don’t get along with anyone, do you?”) and I confess that I have a bad habit of stopping work during Nicolas Cage’s big speech near the end, if not actually getting up out of the chair and going over to watch it more closely. It’s cute and non-annoying.
Midnight (1939)—This is one of my favorite movies ever, and no one knows about it except me and maybe two other people. It’s from 1939, a very lucky year for Hollywood, but it gets overshadowed by the many big, popular movies from that year. It’s Claudette Colbert and Don Ameche, and no one really has much interest in Ameche these days. But you get to see Mary Astor with a surprisingly moon-pie face (because she’s pregnant, I found out later), Hedda Hopper, John Barrymore, and Monty Wooley. Screenplay by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, with some really amusing dialogue (“From the moment I saw you, I had an idea you had an idea.”) If this movie were available on DVD, I would buy it instantly, because my copy taped from late-night cable is starting to wear a bit. Some dated bits at the end—Claudette’s speech to the judge irritates me a bit—but I put it on at 3:30 am on Sunday when I couldn’t sleep at all, and after this movie plus some cocoa I felt much, much better.
Crossing Delancey (1988)—I can only watch this movie sometimes, because I want to give Amy Irving’s character a kick in the head, but I enjoy watching Peter Riegert in almost any movie so that balances it out. I like hearing The Roches, and I like yelling, “Don’t go with him, Izzy! He’s the guy who hired the one-armed man! Go find Herbie!” at the appropriate moment in the movie, because I’m a big dorky film geek who likes making jokes that only I will get. This movie was adapted from a play, and that feels obvious; I always feel like I’m missing big chunks of storyline somewhere and only bits of references to them remain in the movie. Somehow this makes it a good background movie, because then I don’t care if stuff feels missing.
Pat and Mike (1952)—I’m not as fond of Hepburn-Tracy movies as I am of Hepburn-Grant movies (see next movie listed), and this is probably my favorite of the lot. It’s not as big and brash a movie as Adam’s Rib, so it’s less well-known, but it’s sweet and fun. It also has surprisingly little of the nasty sexism that makes it difficult for me to like many Fifties movies. Hepburn decides to become a professional athlete in order to prove to herself that she is a successful person, since her worm of a fiance keeps pushing her down. (I yell at him while I’m watching this movie. He really is a little shit. I hope he is exaggerative rather than indicative of Fifties men, although I’ve known a few from this decade that resemble him.) Spencer Tracy is her manager, and you can guess the general storyline, but it’s still a good story. I watched this while cleaning the den and it was an excellent accompaniment.
Holiday (1938)—Oh, Holiday. I adore this movie. Why isn’t it on DVD? Why isn’t Bringing Up Baby on DVD? It’s a mixed-up world with skewed priorities, that’s for sure. I wish someone would release a DVD with both this version and the 1930 version that I haven’t ever seen because it’s impossible to find. Holiday really isn’t a background movie unless you’ve watched it many, many times, and then the voices of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant and Edward Everett Horton seem like old friends. And it’s a pleasure to have these old friends talking in the background about their plans to break away from big business and greedy corporate banking soul-suckers (okay, they use much more elegant phrasing), and how they’re going to find out what they truly want to do with their lives.
Emma (1996) and Persuasion (1995)—I love Jane Austen. You probably know that. These are my two favorite adaptations of Austen novels. The rest, I can take or leave. I love hearing some of Jane Austen’s wittiest lines uttered while I am trying to figure out how to edit some atrocious boilerplate that a client sent me. This version of Emma is very similar in tone and even in story to The Philadelphia Story, another movie I like watching over and over, which I believe was the intent of writer-director Douglas McGrath. And I’ve always had a place in my heart for Persuasion, the story of a woman whom everyone thinks is too plain and dull and old to fall in love or marry, and what happens when her old lover comes back to town. Call it the Sophie Thompson Film Festival if you want, but both movies are charming.
Those are just the movies I’ve had on recently. There are at least a dozen more that I would classify as background movies, which I either overwatched and need a break from (Hannah and Her Sisters, Shock Treatment) or which I want to watch with my boyfriend, since he hasn’t seen them and might like them (The Philadelphia Story, Breaking Away, Destry Rides Again). There are a few movies I can’t watch because the quality of my tape is so poor and they’re not on DVD yet (A Foreign Affair, Stage Door) and at least one I tried to watch as a background movie and got too caught up in the movie (Ever After).
And I haven’t even mentioned The Muppet Show—I have 15 DVDs of episodes and they make fine background noise and pictures. But not Sesame Street, unless I’m actively reviewing it … too much Elmo.