THE LADY VANISHES (3), I should never have stopped smoking, and Netflix screws me again.

My doctor, if I had enough money and/or medical insurance to be able to afford a member of the medical profession, told me that quitting smoking would help to bolster my sickly immune system and would, to some degree, make me more invincible to sickness. Well, my fake doctor is total fake quack because for the third, maybe fourth time, since I quit the old cancer sticks I'm sick. Oh, and I know I've bitched about this twice in four blogs, but again, I'm fucking sick. And not the quick sickness that swings in for a day or so and then blows away with the wind, this is a lingerer, a sore throat, clogged nose, headache-y mess of an illness that has, for better or worse, clouded me. So thanks a lot Fake Doctor, all you've done is deprived me of the sheer enjoyment of slowly killing myself for the last year and a half. Thanks a lot, I'm going to go blow my nose.

I bring up my smoking and my sickness and my general distaste for my snot-drowned life right now, because I've been trying to think of, well something to write about Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes for three or four hours now and I can only really remember two things about the film:
1. A lot of people smoked a lot of cigarettes in this movie. I can remember, having seen this film in the painful months just prior to my last cig, that I was literally salivating as character after character sparked their unfiltered Lucky Strikes. There were times, when clouds of cell-killing smoke filled the train cars that The Lady Vanishes calls home, that I stopped the film, crawled in to my bed with an entire pack of gum crammed in to my mouth and just rode out the shakey withdrawals.

2. This was the type of 1930s-Hitchcock that I find enjoyable but not nearly as enjoyable as his later work. The plots aren't as intricate, the characters are more cut-outs than anything else, and as a youngin' who grew up on more modern film, the pitfalls and obstacles the two main characters fight through seem, well, wussy. If you're in to Hitchcock, this of course is a must see, and it's not a bad movie, just a lesser piece in the master's ouevre.

Well, I would be telling you something about lounge singer John Laurie's television show, Fishing With John, but f'n Netflix sent me yet another disc that wasn't just scratched beyond recognition but was completely, and totally broken in half. The problem with this is now I have t report this to the Robotic Overlords of Netflix and oh yes, they'll nicely respond and send me another disc, but deep in their caverns their little gnomes will be marking up my record with another smearing blemish. It's not my fault Netflix! Don't stop sending me movies! Blame the postal service! Blame your brutish packing machines! This isn't my fault!

Sigh ... my Netflix credibility is already slipping ... I can feel it.

Monday: Amarcord (4)