Movies

THE TALL BLOND MAN WITH ONE BLACK SHOE (1972) is a French spy farce in which an ambitious intelligence official with an eye on his boss’s job becomes convinced the eponymous protagonist is a secret agent sent to eliminate him; what he doesn’t realize is that the boss has arbitrarily picked an innocent man out of a crowd to drive the underling to steps that will permanently discredit him (“We put out the cheese, he built his own trap around it.”). The results are hysterical as the Tall Blonde Man (Pierre Richard) wanders through a series of traps, attacks, seductions and conspiracies without the slightest idea what’s going on. Given the references to French privacy laws in the ending credits, I wonder if it’s a response to a specific French scandal; in any case, great fun, far superior to Tom Hanks’ remake, The Man With One Red Shoe. “Wait until you retire to get literary.”
THE TALL BLOND RETURNS (1974) when a cop tracks the deaths of the previous film to the intelligence head, who then tries to have Richard eliminated, fails, then has to prove he’s every bit the invincible secret agent he’s supposed to be (this is much more a James Bond parody than the first film). Not quite as funny as the first film, but still very good, and equally cynical. “I don’t care if he wet the bed until he was 12!”
I’ve sometimes told TYG that WHAT’S UP DOC? (1972) is Our Story, since it has a shy intellectual (Ryan O’Neal) meeting a wildly unconventional woman (Barbara Streisand) at a convention who immediately puts move on him (okay, maybe that’s not exactly how it happened 🙂 ). Director Peter Bogdanovich’s screwball comedy is, regardless, very funny and quite charming as Streisand seduces O’Neal away from fiancée Madeline Kahn, Sorrell Booke tries to steal jewelry, scheming musicologist Kenneth Mars competes with O’Neal for a grant and John Hillerman, Randy Quaid and M. Emmett Walsh get bit parts. Wonderful fun which TYG enjoyed too (though as usual she’s agog at 40 year old fashions and tech). “This man is in possession of top-secret government … underwear.”
BETWEEN THE FOLDS (2008) is a good documentary on modern origami, where designs range from ultra-realism (“So if you show up with a spider, next year someone comes back with a scorpion—eight legs and claws!”) to aesthetes who build designs around a single fold, not to mention practical applications (how to compress airbags, for instance). Fun, and some of the designs really are astonishing. “I think as I grow older, I use fewer folds.”