Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Alec Guinness and April Fools

Yesterday was Sir Alec Guinness's b-day and in celebration, Turner Classic Movies had a marathon of his 1950s comedies. I took a break from grading to lunch and I was able to catch Our Man in Havana. It's a really cool movie written by Graham Greene. Sir Alec Guinness plays a vacuum dealer who gets inadvertently pulled into the world of espionage. He doesn't know what the hell he's doing though so he makes up names and information since he needs the money they're paying him to buy his daughter a horse. Then people who happen to have the names he's used start getting killed and hilarity ensues. A bunch of other Alec Guinness movies were on too, but I had to get back to grading so I guess they'll be left for another day. It's hard to believe, though, that only a few years later he was playing Prince Feisal in Lawrence of Arabia. I might have to watch that tonight, but I made the mistake last night of getting into the new BBC Robin Hood series on On Demand. I suppose I'll just be watching a few episodes of that. The show isn't great, but the swashbuckling sucked me in. The guy playing Robin is too young to have just returned from 5 years in the crusades, and the woman as Marian is odd looking. I have no problem w/ casting less than beautiful woman in action roles, in fact it's a nice change of pace, but considering that it's a big-budget TV show, I'm surprised that the casting director went w/ her.

As far as April 1 goes, I went w/ Warren and Georgina to a festival on Main St: The FestiFools. It was cool, but really brief. It was supposed to go from 4:00-5:00, but was over at 4:10. It featured large hand-made puppets walking down the road while dancing to a drum beat supplied by people banging on plastic buckets. It would have been a cool event had other things been planned, but 10 minutes just wasn't enough. On the ride there, I found out that they had both fallen for the little April Fools post on here. Other April Fools include Stacey, Greg and Jason. Wendy and Shannon saw through it right away though.

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