Albert Nobbs

Glenn Close plays a woman pretending to be a man so that she could get a job and then just kind of never stopped pretending.  Like Yentl, this is a story set in the bad old days when a woman couldn’t expect much out of life.  And, also like Yentl, this was a film that didn’t make much sense. Our hero/heroine is a small man working as a waiter at a residence hotel in Dublin in around 1918 or so.  This story was actually written in 1918, which makes me wonder, how common was this whole transvestite thing to get…

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Lift that barge, tote that bail

My dear sainted mother was a big fan of musicals of all forms and sizes. As a result I grew up watching TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Broadway Musicals (Show Boat / Annie Get Your Gun / Kiss Me Kate / Seven Brides for Seven Brothers) and so and so forth. I also got to see such turkeys as The Little Prince and Paint Your Wagon. The last new musical I watched and really loved was Victor/Victoria and that was twenty-five years ago. I might have liked All That Jazz, if they had hired someone who could sing or act…

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