More obsessions and more DVDs to be released tomorrow including Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom," Anthony Mann's "Cimarron," the Errol Flynn Western Collection and David Mamet's UFC movie, "Redbelt." Also, check out Sept. 2 for the Fox noir titles Road House (a classic starring Ida Lupino, Richard Widmark and Cornel Wilde) on which I provide commentary with friend and "Czar of Noir" Eddie Muller. I also contributed to featurettes on "Road House" and the bizarre but beautiful "Moontide" (starring Lupino, Jean Gabin and Claude Rains).

As always, you can read all my DVD and Theatrical reviews at Strange Impersonation and check out whatever else I'm thinking at Pretty Poison.

Now here's one obsession:

"Goldiggers of 1933" (1933)  I can never get enough of this sexy, subversive picture. Though 1930’s Warner Brothers is renown for social dramas like "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang" or the brilliant "Wild Boys of the Road" (you must track this down -- an under-seen masterpiece) and classic gangster films like "Little Caesar" with Edward G. Robinson and "Public Enemy" with James Cagney, they also provided some of cinema’s greatest musicals. My favorite being "Gold Diggers of 1933," directed by "Fugitive" helmer, Mervyn LeRoy and more importantly, choreographed by that mad genius, surrealistic artist Busby Berkeley. With a take on what Americans love most -- money -- the film showcases a bizarre-o number of the famed song "We're in the Money" wherein a comely Ginger Rogers sings it in both English AND Pig Latin. (My God, how I love Ginger -- The Major and the Minor alone). Amazing for its ability to be light fluff, fantastically inventive in terms of set design and costuming and seriously relevant, Goldiggers proves that musicals aren’t mere escapism. And by the time Joan Blondell ends the film with the haunting "Remember My Forgotten Man," in which soldiers from World War I are shown in bread lines, you'll again remember that even the oldest of musicals had something to say. Absolutely sublime.

Read more obsessions at Sunset Gun.

--posted by Kim