In a Lonely Place Tagged Articles at Cinematical

You know how it is on Valentine's Day, if you're not involved with (or married to) anyone. You try to avoid those annoying radio and TV commercials about how the men need to show their love by buying the women in their lives all kinds of fancy things. You attempt to make plans with friends, but they're all hoping for something romantic or planning to mope about their lack of romance. Maybe you join the Anti-Valentine's League, maybe you just try to ignore it all until the hype is over.

But there you are on Valentine's Day night with no plans, and naturally you gravitate toward the time-tested entertainment method of sitting in front of the TV with a good movie. Pizza and/or ice cream might also be part of the viewing process. For years, I liked to curl up with a thin-crust pizza from the local pizza joint, a pint of that Ben and Jerry's ice cream with the chunks of brownies in it, some Dr. Pepper (to be tres Agnes Gooch about it) and my favorite Valentine's movie, Some Like It Hot. After all, it is set around the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, so it's a delightfully sideways hat tip to the holiday. Plus, that glorious last line. But maybe you're in a different mindset on February 14. Here's a list of movies to cover whatever kind of mood might strike you that night, as you ponder which movie you want to spend St. Valentine's Day with.

Forget the Oscars, the new list is up of the 25 films inducted into the Library of Congress's National Film Board for 2007. Since 1992, the Library has been taking up 25 worthwhile films a year for preservation. Early reports focus on the more well-known, deserving films: Back to the Future (above), Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Oklahoma!, and Grand Hotel. Also on the list is 12 Angry Men, an early one by Before the Devil Knows Your Dead's Sidney Lumet, and the George Stevens/Laurence Olivier Wuthering Heights. Dances With Wolves and Days of Heaven, two American-as-all-get-out films, will now be safe in the vaults down in Culpeper, Virginia.

Let's have a look at some of the more obscure names on the list, though. One of my all time favorites is going in: the ultra-low-budget noir In A Lonely Place, with Humphrey Bogart in his best performance -- and yes, I saw Casablanca --- as the rageball screenwriter Dixon Steele, whose drinking problem may have led to murder. Peege (1972) is Randall Kleiser's thesis film at USC film school. John Waters' favorite director (according to the book Shock Value) is better known for The Blue Lagoon, Grease and Big Top Pee Wee. His short about a blind grandmother taken to the old folk's home, is supposed to be in a different class from his subsequent work.

From Lebanon, Kentucky, Our Day is only 12 minutes long; it's amateur filmmaker Wallace Kelly's account of his family between the 1930s and the 1950s. The 1926 Harry Langdon/Frank Capra The Strong Man is terrific. The once popular Langdon is a very odd moon-man comedian who anticipates everyone from Bill Murray to Bugs Bunny. And there's two experimental films being honored: 1969's Tom, Tom, The Piper's Son by Ken Jacobs. "An autopsy of the cinematic experience," raves Scott MacDonald in his new book Canyon Cinema); here, the avant-garde filmmaker revises a primitive 1905 film. He does to a movie what later samplers and rappers would do to old ballads. Glimpse of the Garden (1957) by Marie Menken is just that: a view of her garden and of the bird life therein. It's a fleeting moment preserved for 50 years..and now, we hope, for much longer than that.

Well before Dick Clark took over the mantle, Nicholas Ray was America's Oldest Teenager. The director, who made such classics as Rebel Without a Cause, Johnny Guitar, and In a Lonely Place, is well known (in a mostly affectionate way, at least early-on) to have spent most of his life steadfastly refusing to mature. Right up until his death, Ray battled drug and alcohol addictions, gambled heavily, and slept with lots and lots of people of both genders (his fourth wife, married as he headed into old age, was a woman he met when she was a teen) - much of which he recounted in his memoir, I Was Interrupted.

Said memoir is now being adapted for the big screen by Oren Moverman, and will be directed by Philip Kaufman, a director who, though he did make The Right Stuff and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, has seen his star decline rather significantly lately. (Unless, that is, you were a big fan of Twisted, in which case you probably think he's doing great.) What's most interesting about the news of this project is the fact that someone is actually going to get to play Ray - it's a potentially fantastic role, but the risk of turning the man into a caricature is a major one. (I can picture, for example, Anthony Hopkins getting way, way into the role.) Keeping in mind the fact that the movie is expected to focus on the last decade of Ray's life, who do you think should get the job?