Top Tens: Movie Bookshops

I was laying bed last night and the idea for this post just jumped in to my head. Sadly this meant I had to get up and make some notes. For a (former) book dealer this should have been an obvious post a long time ago but I was trying to avoid my other love - movies and books shouldn't mix, I wish somebody would tell Hollywood!

A little google will bring up several other similar lists it seems and incredibly the initial four scenes I thought of were on these lists. Fresh ideas were needed otherwise what's the point? This required my superb memory (and asking Leah for help.)



10. When Harry Met Sally... (1989) Dir. Rob Reiner

One of my favourite movies from when I first started watching film, the mid 90's provided me with Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan on one of only three VHS tapes in the house, lucky it was so funny and sweet and actually interesting to a teenaged boy.

The bookshop scene is the moment when Harry and Sally meet for the first time in years and actually start to become friends, so in the scheme of things it's a pretty important moment and has a few laughs, including visual humour such as being in PERSONAL GROWTH, I don't think I'll have what he's having.

9. Annie Hall (1977) Dir. Woody Allen

The Oscar winning film from master film maker Woody Allen, showcased the darker and the softer sides of the (at the time) renowned comedian features a memorable scene in which he introduces Diane Keaton to the pessimistic side of his personality. I'll let the clip speak for itself:

8. Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets (2002) Dir. Chris Columbus

I believe the shop is called Flourish and Blotts, which is a terrible name for a bookshop in my opinion. But it does have a lot of books, look at them all piled up everywhere, the sign of a book lovers dream come true. The great thing about the scene from this movie rather than when we return in later instalments is that it's the first appearance of my favourite character/performance of all 8 movies, Kenneth Brannagh as Gilderoy Lockhart.

7. Notting Hill (1999) Dir. Roger Michell

I can't help but enjoy Hugh Grant, the fact that he almost always plays the same character doesn't bother me because ever since I saw Four Weddings I've felt like I identified with his bumbling Englishness. Notting Hill is a nice movie, despite Julia Roberts and her giant face, it has a fair few laughs and a famous travel book shop that no longer exists apparently. I will not hold the fact that it is merely a travel specialist shop against it as the following scene contains several things that have happened in Elizabeth's bookshop in the past year or so; an unexpected celebrity arrival (see blahblahblahloves Emma Thompson for full anecdote,) the bookseller (me) making a fool of himself/the customer choosing to ignore the bookseller's intelligent recommendation, the removal of a book from a thiefs underwear (see review of Jen Campbell's book Weird Things Customers Say In Bookshops for full anecdote,) and Dylan Moran. My friend Chloe returned from the little girls room to find a shop empty except for Bernard Black himself sitting behind the counter and she promptly freaked him out by hugging him. Go Chloe! Yes, we were all very jealous of her fortuitous bathroom break.

6. Before Sunset (2004) Dir. Richard Linklater

The beautiful sequel to Richard Linklater's brilliant Before Sunrise, this time in Paris, who could resist? The bookshop in question is none other than world famous, in real life, Shakespeare & Co. of Paris. The same bookshop seen in Woody Allen's recent charmer Midnight In Paris infact. The scene in question is the moment the pair of lovers from the Before Sunrise are reunited after nine years as Ethan Hawke is giving a reading from his autobiographical novel based on his experience of the first movie. The bookshop is important to the scene which in turn is important to the movie and Shakespeare & Co. should get at least one mention don't you think?

For lovers of Paris on film I also highly recommend Julie Delpy's directorial debut Two Days In Paris which co-stars the excellent Adam Goldberg.


5. Funny Face (1957) Dir. Stanley Donen

Things to know about Funny Face: Audrey Hepburn is the most beautiful bookseller I've ever seen. Fred Astaire is creepy looking and the relationship between the two of them is massively off-putting. The film itself is bizarre and features an even stranger 'bohemian dance sequence' in a Paris nightclub. The bookshop has a wonderfully ancient feel to it, despite the exceedingly cinematic spiral staircase, who wouldn't want to climb up those rickety old wodden steps to find the rare first edition of Graham Greene's first novel that was never reprinted with an incorrect price tag?

4. Ministry of Fear (1944) Dir. Fritz Lang

It was an OK adaptation, filled with some brilliant cinematography and featuring a crazed Nazi bookseller. There's always a place for Fritz Lang and noir here on blahblahblahgay. Check out the full review from our noir-a-thon.


3. Easy A (2010) Dir. Will Gluck

Emma Stone didn't win the Oscar, you may call me crazy but I would suggest that she should have. The bookshop in question is in real life the world's largest outdoor(!) bookshop Bart's Books and was privileged to find itself playing host to the following Q&A with the girl with the pocketful of sunshine:

• Olive Penderghast: Do you have a religion section?
• Bookstore guy: It's right over there. Can I help you with something?
• Olive Penderghast: The Bible.
• Bookstore guy: That's in bestsellers, right next to Twilight.

2. Beauty and the Beast (1991) Dir. Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise

It was Leah's major contribution to the post, personally I don't remember the scene but she assures me it is a major contributor to what people of our generation think of when they consider the typical antiquarian bookshop, especially those ladders on wheels.

1. The Big Sleep (1946) Dir. Howard Hawks

Phillip Marlowe at his best as played by Humphrey Bogart in this classic adaptation of Raymond Chandler's noverl. It actually features two bookshops across from each other. One the hideout for an illicit operation, the other an excuse for Marlowe to pass time with the bookish girl, ridding her of the unattractive glasses and ponytail and proving that She's All That had some noir class at it's core.

EDIT: The first comment caught me short, I realised the post wasn't actually finished. The pleasure of having put the list together seems to have caused a brainfart.

I should mention that I discounted Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind despite the creepiness of Elijah Wood in Barnes & Noble and Serendipity because it was just plain dull as far as movies go. And as for the following question just what the hell did I forget? Alan has got a head start, feel free to leave your complaints in the blahs.

Noir-a-Thon: Ministry of Fear (1944)

Moving our Noir-a-Thon on to the second of the Graham Greene adaptations, Ministry of Fear is directed by the man behind classics such as Metropolis and M, Fritz Lang. You can find the Noir-a-Thon vault here.


Director: Fritz Lang
Starring: Ray Milland, Marjorie Reynolds, Dan Duryea
Year: 1944
Country of origin: USA
Language: English

Synopsis: Ray Milland inadvertantly gets drawn in to a Nazi spy ring at an English County Fair and doesn't know who to trust as he tries to clear his name for murder and reveal the spy ring to the police.


What Indie Nights? review

Greetings BBBG readers, it's Leah 'I'm-running-out-of-ways-to-introduce-myself' from What Indie Nights?. I suppose 'from What Indie Nights' is a good enough way. Maybe I should just start introducing myself with a random fact - did you know that in England that if someone doesn't die within a year and a day of another person intentionally harming them, it can't be called murder?

Of course you didn't.



And as I sit here, drinking cold chocolate (it's like hot chocolate, only when the person making it was too lazy to heat up the milk) and thinking about Ministry of Fear, I wish it weren't true, because Fritz Lang intentionally harmed me with his adaptation of Graham Greene's wartime novel and I think I died a little inside.

Ok, ok, I may be being a little hyperbolic, but truly, that movie was no noir, and it was a pretty poor example of any genre. As Toby will tell you, there are some lovely scenes, but they're lost in the drab, uninspiring story and confusing characters - including one bumbling private detective (there's your first clue, folks, that one's a big noir no-no) who lets his client come with him on a stakeout and then doesn't appear again for the whole film. I like to call him Mr. Plot B. Device, P.I.



Firstly, and I know we (or especially, I) harp on about this a lot, but there's no femme fatale. At all. There's one American actress pretending to be an Austrian refugee with a 'brother' who looks a lot like Joel Cairo from The Maltese Falcon (another clue!) and behaves like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth.

Our hero is an ex-mental patient who's about as tough as a kitten rolling in sparkly pink sugar and with much less charisma - the poor soul won't look at another cake for the rest of his life after the dreadful events following his release from hospital! Just imagine - you're mistaken for another man and given a secret code that wins you a cake at a country fair - terrifying so far - and are then pursued in a gentlemanly manner by a faux-blind old codger who crumbles your cake before your eyes to find - what? The real eggs with which said cake was made? The audience's engagement with the story? Nope, it's the MacGuffin, of course. To top off this really traumatising experience, a man is apparently shot during a relatively unrelated seance and you're framed for the crime! Now you have to go on the run, trying to avoid capture as well as discover just what made that cake so delicious- er, I mean, dangerous. Wouldn't you be afraid of cake forever, too?



Sure there were a lot of characters with shady motives, but none of them were really characters, more like occasional pieces of dialogue spoken by pieces of furniture. Someone got double crossed, I think, but I'd struggle to tell you who. There was no real sense of threat to our hero, the crimes committed take second place to watching Marjorie Reynolds flutter her eyelashes, and we're left with a sense of general confusion and malaise. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that the movie was out-and-out silly, pretty boring and totally devoid of suspense or atmosphere.



Now the most disappointing thing for me: I've gone on record as a Graham Greene devotee, so I suppose you can take or leave my opinion on this one depending on your view of things, but the man could write atmosphere and subtle nuances even if he had to write a microwave manual (the microwave would have a shameful past and end up reconsidering its faith in Microwave-God whilst making astute and poignant observations about its own mechanisms) and it's a crying shame to have his work butchered like this.



Until next time, fellow travellers on the path of noir, and let us hope it's a better next time...

Blahblahblahtoby review

I've been struggling to find thoughts for this review. It's a film that is possibly as convoluted as the genre gets with very few redeeming features. Fritz Lang, the master film maker himself directed this and it was seemingly, loosely, based on Graham Greene's novel of the same name. Aside from those names I'm pretty much stumped. If you thought I didn't like Laura last week (which I did by the way) then you will probably think I hated this one.

The adaptation is quite a drawn out proposition, with apparent crosses and double crosses, misunderstandings and lies littering the course as obstacles for our hero to overcome within the 88 minute run time. Which is fine in a film noir if you care about the characters or the storyline but in this instance you don't learn enough about any of the characters beyond what's required for the plot to continue and the story is told in nothing more than plot points, moving gracelessly from one scene to another.



I haven't read the original novel so I cannot compare the two but this has all the hallmarks of a bad adaptation, not least because there are none of the usual qualities of a Graham Greene story such as the study of humanity or human behaviour.

This is probably the worst of the Fritz Lang movies I've seen, his direction isn't bad, in fact there are some great visual moments such as shooting somebody through a door from a dark room but they're lost on a movie as unentertaining as this and watered down by the fact that at no point do you believe that this is happening in Central London, during The Blitz. It is not grey or oppressive, people are not concerned with the bombings or even the war at all, it's a terrible Hollywood recreation all the more offensive as the film was made during WWII.



If you've seen the end of the theatrical version of Blade Runner then you've seen the end of Ministry of Fear, it's hard to say which one is worse. In Blade Runner it's an awful addition to a good movie but in Ministry of Fear it's an awful addition tacked on to an already poor movie.

On to categorising it within the noir motifs so I can concentrate on, hopefully, a better noir next week. This was a simple On The Run story with not so much gangsters in place of Nazis/Commies but actual Nazis. And worst of all, there's a happy ending. A very happy ending. Complete with the kind of dialogue and gurning more at home in a slapstick comedy.



This film doesn't actually appear in the Film Noir Encyclopedia, which leads me to believe that it may not even be a film noir. I admit my judgement may have been clouded during my research by the fact that this was an adaptation of Graham Greene by Fritz Lang, a combination I couldn't resist. I think I deserved better!

Seen it? Disagree? Were you also disappointed by the adaptation? Graham Greene fans this is a call to arms! Leave me your blah below.

And now for some coming attractions

The Week In Movies 26/9/11 - 2/10/11

Another week over, another month in fact, everyone's been writing their monthly roundups, there's been a lot of movies seen around the blogosphere and I feel like I'm a bit light on number of movies seen, comparatively. I will say this though, I've been very lucky, most of the films I've seen have been very good. I've been recommending TOKYO DRIFTER and WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION but that ignores the fact that I also saw RED STATE and ATTACK THE BLOCK. Tough call. I recommend seeing all 4 of them if you haven't already.

This weeks film from the Noir-a-Thon is the Graham Greene/Fritz Lang movie Ministry of Fear, as always that review will be posted on Tuesday.

We're big fans of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia in this house so seeing Charlie in the very funny Horrible Bosses was a nice treat. The three TV actors make for a believable group of friends and the three big name movie stars play terribly cliched characters and are possibly guilty of overacting. The humour of the movie is often telegraphed so you see it coming from a mile away but that doesn't actually stop it from being funny. If you read Scott's review over at FRC you may have seen him compare it to The Hangover, it may not be as funny but it's possibly more believable than The Hangover which counts for something when it comes to humour.

After writing my recent 7 Movies To Help You Cope With Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Withdrawal Symptoms article I discovered that there were two sequels to my favourite of them, The Ipcress File. The first of which is Funeral In Berlin. It's nowhere near as good as the first one, suffering from a bad choice of director who decided to try to pitch the film as a James Bond clone and a slightly more ludicrous plot than the original. Michael Caine was not as obtuse as in Ipcress File, so a lot of the humour was missing, but as Harry Palmer he is excellent. Ken Russell directed the third part, Billion Dollar Brain, and I hope to watch it next week.

The week ended with two fine examples of non English language cinema. Seijun Suzuki who directed last weeks favourite, Tokyo Drifter, was responsible for the better of the two, A Tattooed Life. He took an ordinary yakuza story set in the early twentieth century and turned it in to something wonderful with the kind of cinematography that can leave you breathless and add meaning to the simplest of scenes. There is a rather spectacular final act which will have you wanting to rewatch it on a regular basis and the influence on Quentin Tarantino is once again apparent. If last week I was a fan of Suzuki this week I am enamoured.

As I mentioned last week I've been wanting to see How I Ended This Summer since last summer's outdoor cinema season and this weekend I managed to grab it from the DVD store at last. It wasn't the movie I expected it to be but it was quite wonderful to look at. The premise of a psychological thriller based around a veteran weather observer and a young protege at a Russian monitoring station near the Arctic Circle is strong, the visuals are the movie equivalent of a Land Rover Discovery 4WD and the acting is very strong. I found the characters and their interactions intriguing but the final act failed to take full advantage of the preceding 90 minutes and in my opinion was the difference between it being a great film and simply a good one. Check out the review from Bonjour Tristesse for more information.

The blahblahblahgay turnoff of the week is the quite awful 50 Cent film Set Up. Co-starring Ryan Phillipe and Bruce Willis, I thought I'd give this heist/revenge thriller a chance to entertain me but it was quite simply appalling after 30 seconds. I gave it more time than I should've because I was hoping the appearance of Bruce Willis might pick things up but alas it wasn't to be. As with a lot of bad movies the major problem with this was the script but you can add some terrible acting to that.

Leave some blah below. Did anyone get a chance to see Tokyo Drifter yet? Anyone got an opinion on the Harry Palmer trilogy? Anyone see anything worth talking about? Or for that matter did anybody finish Set Up?