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The February 2017 Playlist

My apologies for the late arrival of this month’s playlist, but it’s here at long last. While it’s the usual genre/decade mess, there are some choice love-themed Valentine’s Day selections, like Dorothy Ashby’s gorgeous 1968 arrangement of “Come Live With Me” from Valley of the Dolls, the beautiful “Simple Song #3” from Paolo Sorrentino’s exquisite film Youth, and “Sometimes I Wish I Had a Gun” by Mink Stole. Enjoy.

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Shampoo, Carrie Fisher’s Brilliant Film Debut

When fans and writers discuss Carrie Fisher‘s film career, Princess Leia gets all of the attention – and for good reason. Leia was a damsel in distress who held her own and kicked considerable ass in the company of men. Fisher herself said, “I like Princess Leia… I like how she handles things; I like how she treats people.” I grew up with Star Wars. It’s an undeniable cultural phenomenon, and Leia is major for me, too.

But people either forget or are unaware that Fisher made her film debut two years before Star Wars in a little movie with Warren Beatty called Shampoo (1975). Directed by Hal Ashby, Shampoo revolves around a promiscuous Beverly Hills hairdresser (Beatty) who sleeps with virtually every woman who sits in his salon chair. It also stars Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn and Lee Grant, who play women he’s sleeping with who all think they’re the only women he’s sleeping with.

Carrie Fisher in “Shampoo” (1975)

In a small but unforgettable role, a then 17 year old Carrie Fisher displayed a precocious razor-sharp wit that was beyond her years at the time – a foreshadow of the disarming and inimitable sass that would become her trademark, a savvy that saw so clearly and hilariously through the hoax of show business and of life itself. In her brief performance as Lee Grant’s daughter and another one of Beatty’s conquests (or was he her conquest?), she beautifully outmaneuvered two of the most lecherous, manipulative and selfish grown-ups (one being her mother) that any adolescent in safe, rich, white suburbia might ever encounter.

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Rear Window (1954)

It’s been hot as hell here in New York City, and I’ve been thinking about some of my favorite “hot in the city” movies that take place here. Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” (1989), Sidney Lumet’s “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975), Billy Wilder’s “The Seven Year Itch” (1955) and Jules Dassin’s eternal classic “The Naked City” (1948) come to mind. But my absolute favorite is “Rear Window.”

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To Catch a Thief (1955)

One of my favorite movies ever made is one of my favorite movies ever made because it was directed by one of my favorite filmmakers (Alfred Hitchcock), it stars two of the most beautiful people who ever lived (Cary Grant and Grace Kelly) and it was filmed in one of the most stunning places on the planet (in the south of France, predominately in Cannes, Nice and the surrounding countryside).

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Why I Love James Bond

Ian Fleming was an average looking man with an ordinary physique. What he lacked physically he made up for with exceptional intelligence, wit, taste and talent for storytelling. From a privileged upbringing, he became a British naval intelligence officer (though not with assignments as intense as a 00 agent’s) and then a journalist. When he created the character of James Bond for his first novel (Casino Royale, 1953), Fleming essentially created an idealized version of himself: the man every women wanted to be with and every man wanted to be.

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