Eric Bana as the time-impaired husband to Rachel McAdams in The Time-Travellers Wife.

Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana are one sexy couple in The Time Traveler's Wife, the film based on Audrey Niffenegger's popular novel about the guy (Bana) whose genetic anomaly causes him to slip in and out of time. But am I the only one who gets brain cramp during time-travel movies such as this where the past is dependent upon future that is  dependent upon the past? As Roger Ebert noted earlier this year of  J.J. Abrams' Star Trek -- where alternative universes intersected, enabling the Old Spock and the Young to be in the same mobius-strip timespace --  these movies are more fiction than science. It didn't bother me so much in Star Trek, but when I start thinking whether it's possible for a character to be in and out of time at the same time, it takes me out of the movie. (Having said that, the Harry Potter film -- was it Azkaban? -- where Harry and Hermione warn themselves of imminent danger, had a reasonable explanation, which I can't remember.)

Still, from The Time Machine to Time Bandits, I've always been a sucker for time-travel stories (including, as I admitted sheepishly in another post, the much-maligned but preposterously entertaining The Lake House and Kate & Leopold). In time-travel films I much prefer the wormhole explanation to most others. Very much like Contact, and also a little-known film called Happy Accidents (with Marisa Tomei and Vicent D'Onofrio), and Alain Resnais' underrated Je t'aime, Je t'aime. Also Terry Gilliam's The Twelve Monkeys and the movie that inspired it,  Chris Marker's La Jetee, And of course, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Terminator and Peggy Sue Got Married. Your favorites?

Gloria Grahame (1925--1981)

They called Gloria Grahame, that most enigmatic and evocative of screen presences, a suicide blonde because "she dyed by her own hand." The compulsively watchable, Grahame -- Oscar winner for The Bad and the Beautiful but more widely known as the vamping Violet in It's a Wonderful Life and Ado Annie in Oklahoma! -- is the star du jour Thursday August 13 on Turner Classics Movies (TCM).  The hard-to-see In a Lonely Place (1950), her best film (directed by her then-husband, Nick Ray) will show at 8 pm and Fritz Lang's white-hot The Big Heat (1953) at 9:45 pm. I can't imagine a better double-bill, one that eloquently captures sexual paranoia (Lonely Place, co-starring Humphrey Bogart as Grahame's hot-tempered lover) and social paranoia (Heat, with Glenn Ford as an honest cop rooting out mobsters and Grahame as a mob moll turned informant).

On screen Grahame, of whom a biographer claimed could trace her genealogy to Plantagenet royalty, specialized in the kind of dames no one curtsied to. She wasn't like anyone else, "the girl with the Novocaine lip," scribes wrote of her immobile upper lip that gave her a sexy overbite, this gal who gravitated to the role of  the worldly, slightly naughty, woman ever looking to trade up. You know, the good-bad girl. The first time I was aware of her flirty, deadpan delivery was in Macao (1952) -- Joseph Von Sternberg's very entertaining noir comedy starring Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum -- where Grahame plays the wife of a casino owner. When Grahame sees that a gambler has used his wife's diamonds as collateral, her itchy fingers draw to the jewels. "Diamonds would only cheapen you," her husband scolds. "What a way to be cheap!" she exclaims in a line that might have been her motto.

She's warmer as Bogart's neighbor in Lonely Place, a onetime kept woman now keeping company with Bogart's unstable screenwriter. Quoting Bogart's introduced screenplay, she delivers one the best lines in film history: "I was born when he kissed me; I died when he left me; I lived a few weeks while he loved me." (While making the film, her marriage to Ray was on the rocks. Gossip was that she had become romantically involved with her stepson, Tony Ray, then 14, whom she subsequently married when he came of age.) She was warmest as Debby, former moll, in The Big Heat, coming to Ford's hotel room, looking around at the bad furniture and joking, "What do you call this style, Early Nothing?"

Grahame, like Melanie Griffith after her, brings unpredictability to her line readings and instability to a scene and is mesmerizing to watch. I very much like her in her films with Vincente Minnelli, The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and The Cobweb (1955). In the latter, she's a psychiatrist's wife who deadpans to his client at the sanitarium, "The only way you can tell the doctors from the patients is that the patients get better."

I wish every day could be Gloria Grahame day. Your favorite Gloria?

Viggo Mortenson, "The Blouse Man," snogs Diane Lane, married woman, at Woodstock in "A Walk on the Moon."

I wasn't at Woodstock, but I was at "Woodstock." So, too, can you be on this 40th anniversary of the event billed as "The Aquarian Exposition" by renting Michael Wadleigh's macrocosmic concert film headlining Joan Baez, Joe Cocker, Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone and The Who (plus an audience of 400,000). Or by renting Tony Goldwyn's microcosmic A Walk on the Moon, an emotionally- and erotically-charged film with Diane Lane, Viggo Mortenson and Anna Paquin set in 1969 about a Generation Gap-defining mother and daughter who attend the concert, separately and surreptitiously, with their boyfriends. And I look forward to Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock, due in theaters August 28.

Your favorite Woodstock performance? Movie? Defend your choice. I wasn't much of a The Who or Sly and the Family Stone back in 1969 (my tastes ran towards Baez, Hendrix and Santana), but looking at the film again for the first time in 39 years, I was overwhelmed by how much The Who ("Feel Me") and Sly ("Higher") distilled the flower power of the moment. For me, both Woodstock, made in 1969, and A Walk on the Moon, in 1999, are time capsules -- one captured at the moment, the other looking at 1969 through the kaleidoscope eyes of 1999.

Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinsom, the vamp and the vampire

According to sources of the well-sourced people.com, Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, stars of Twilight and the forthcoming New Moon, are more than co-stars. In the tradition of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, Pattinson's and Stewart's impressive screen physics has led to an off-screen romance, a development that will delight fans of the celebs who equally excite the editors of Tiger Beat and Vanity Fair.

After Catherine Hardwicke, director of Twilight, auditioned actors for the roles of intense Bella and velvet vampire Edward, she told Flickgrrl of the "electric charge" sparked by their screentest. So impressed was Hardwicke by the pair's chemistry -- and physics -- that she issued a warning to Pattinson, then 21, to steer clear of Stewart off camera because she was a minor. Besides, Stewart also had a bf, Michael Angarano.

Now that Stewart is 19 and Angarano appears to be out of the picture, the New Moon stars are keeping company. A veteran Hollywood observer might want to tell the couple that for every Bogart and Bacall (or Brad and Angelina or Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins or Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas) who play lovers on a movie set before seguing into the real-life roles, there are Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams, Russell Crowe and Meg Ryan and Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez for whom, once off the set, the candle is snuffed by the Santa Ana winds.

Your favorite on-set romance that endured? That didn't? (Thanks to Nick Tarnowski, for his help.)

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John Hughes, the onetime advertising copywriter turned filmmaker beloved  for family-friendly movies such as Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Home Alone, died of a heart attack this morning in Manhattan, reports Variety. The genial Midwesterner (he was a Michigan-born Chicago transplant who brought moviemaking to his adoptive city) was  Hollywood's High School Activities director. He made many movies set in secondary schools and the signal event in them was Who Would Take Molly Ringwald to the prom.

His movies with Ringwald defined the hair-band 1980s and his Matthew Broderick truancy comedy Ferris Bueller likewise defined the decade's ethos: Playing hard rather than working hard was the goal. I think of these movies very fondly even as I muse that as Hughes got older, the age of his protagonists got younger. He began with the teenagers of Sixteen Candles (1984) and proceeded, like Benjamin Button, to Baby's Day Out (1994). I have to ring off to write his obit, but I'm very very sad. Favorite Hughes movie? I'm going for Some Kind of Wonderful (1987).

Poll: Which are your favorite John Hughes movies? (494 votes)

Budd Schulberg, the self-described "Hollywood prince" who became the industry's keenest chronicler with the caustic 1941 novel What Makes Sammy Run?,  the screenwriter who worked with both F. Scott Fitzgerald (on Winter Carnival) and with Spike Lee (on a Joe Louis script, still unproduced), the Oscar-winning writer of the two seminal films of the 1950s, On the Waterfront and A Face in the Crowd, the conscience-pricked citizen who, after he witnessed his adoptive city in flames, founded the Watts Writers Workshop in 1965, has passed. He was 95.

One of the most colorful and complicated figures of the 20th century, Schulberg was the son of Paramount Pictures mogul B.P. Schulberg and a Hollywood brat who was chauffeured in a custom-made limo to the newstand where he hawked magazines. The childhood stutterer who trained pigeons (a hobby he gave to Marlon Brando's Terry Malloy in Waterfront) developed a confident and formidable voice as a screenwriter, sportswriter and novelist. The Harder They Fall, his 1947 expose of prize-fighting, became a best-seller and popular 1957 Humphrey Bogart film, the actor's last.  The Disenchanted, Schulberg's novel dramatizing his sodden collaboration with Fitzgerald, was a 1950 publishing hit. And to this day, his short story "A Dinner at Ciro's" remains the most perceptive group portrait of the movie industry. In 1951, Schulberg , the so-called "socialite Socialist" who had been a member of the Communist party in the 1930s, named names to the House Un-American Activities Committee, a move that brought him jeers from the Left and cheers from the Right.

Were these the only elements of his biography, Schulberg would be universally known. But he moreover had the uncanny instinct -- like an intellectual Forrest Gump -- of being an eyewitness to and major player in history. As James Fisher's lovely post in the Irish Times notes, "He was standing next to his friend Bobby Kennedy in a passageway at LA’s Ambassador Hotel when RFK was murdered in June 1968. He was seated ringside when his friend Muhammad Ali reclaimed his heavyweight title from George Foreman in Zaire in October 1974. That was nearly three decades after Budd not only arrested Leni Riefenstahl (Hitler’s favorite filmmaker) while working for his friend the legendary director John Ford in the wartime OSS; he wrested from her an implicit admission she knew about the Nazi death camps, a truth she subsequently denied for decades."

As a tribute to Schulberg, I personally intend to watch A Face in the Crowd when I get home tonight. You? Favorite Schulberg line of dialogue? Moment? This Budd's for you.

Me, I'm old-school. Prefer films in theaters, on big screens, the way nature and John Ford intended. You may be new-school. Like instant-grat of a movie whenever, wherever. So let me alert you to SpeedCine, a portal that links to more than 13,000 titles that you can stream or download for free -- LEGALLY.

Via SpeedCine, just watched the first five minutes of the essential (and hard-to-find) Withnail & I  (1986), the Brit comedy starring Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann as '60s dropouts who go to their Uncle Monty's cottage for a little R & R. Reid Rosefelt, who co-founded SpeedCine with Bon Harris, calls their brainchild "a Google for helping you find legal movies." One film I intend yo watch on SpeedCine is the elusive Bigger than Life (1956), the great Nicholas Ray film starring James Mason as the guy who takes the wonder drug cortisone and becomes a megalomaniac.

Do you download movies? Generally speaking, where do you watch? Are there certain films that'll get you to theaters and others that are downloads or rentals? Why? Which portals do you recommend? (No illegal sites, please.) Many readers rave about  Netflix's Ruka application, but that's not free.  What do you think of SpeedCine?

Former roommates Judd Apatow and Adam Sandler at the "Funny People" premiere.

Writer-celeb Adam Sandler and writer-director Judd Apatow go way back. Twenty years ago the star, 43 next month, and the filmmaker, 41, roomed together in Los Angeles while trying to crack the fortress that is Hollywood. Videotapes of prank calls they made then open Funny People, Apatow's portrait of an uber-successful comedian without intimates (Sandler) who hires an adoring fan and aspiring comedian (Seth Rogen) to nurse him through a health crisis and write material for him. Is Funny People funny? I laughed, I cringed. (I was supposed to, I think.)

Going in (something of a slog, considering the trailer for the film was an object lesson in too much information), I wondered how Sandler's persona of the passive-aggressive eternal boy would mesh with Apatow's theme of the arrested-development male (see 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up) trying to evolve. Coming out, I'm not sure if it was a mesh or a partially-successful graft.

Whichever, my respect for Sandler as an actor continues to grow. Funny People gives him the scope to consistently surprise the audience with unmodulated anger and elastic voice. He has more colors in his performance than just blue (as in moroseness and profanity). Unbelievably, in 15 years he's made more than 20 feature films ranging from the juvenilia of Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore to the youthful romanticism of The Wedding Singer and 50 First Dates to the moody, broody man-on-edge in Punch-Drunk Love and Reign Over Me. The performance that best reflects all these different facets of the Sandler persona is his role in Spanglish. Still, I wish he would ditch gratuitous remakes like Mr. Deeds and The Longest Yard to develop material that challenges him as an actor. BTW, while I thought  I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry was strained, I laughed myself silly through You Don't Mess With the Zohan. Your thoughts on Sandler? Apatow? Funny People? Sharing too much information in a movie trailer?

Cary Grant as Mr. Blandings, worrying over an ad campaign for "Wham," a canned ham product

My favorite movie geeks are gearing up for the new season of the AMC cable series Mad Men, set in a Madison Avenue ad agency during the the JFK's Camelot era. Until it's back on air, may I suggest my six favorite movies about hucksters, some of which influenced the series in content, art direction and attitude?

(Pictured is Cary Grant, who famously twice played an adman, in the delicious Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, where he struggles over an ad campaign for canned ham, and in the superlative North by Northwest, where he is too busy eluding arrest to do any copywriting.)

1) Christmas in July (1940) Preston Sturges farce about an ordinary joe (Dick Powell) who thinks he wrote a winning slogan for a coffee company and spends the prize money before he's got the check.

2) The Hucksters (1947) Involving drama starring Clark Gable as a Madison Avenue yes-man who contemplates saying no to an autocratic client. Co-starring Deborah Kerr as the lady he wants and Ava Gardner as the dame who wants him. 

3) Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948) Charming Cary Grant/Myrna Loy comedy of a Madison Avenue copywriter suckered (by persuasive advertising!) into buying a colonial Connecticut fixer-upper.

4) A Face in the Crowd (1957) Budd Schulberg's and Elia Kazan's savage satire of the unholy marriage between Madison Avenue and politics stars Andy Griffith in his best role as a country singer who becomes a political demagogue. Co-starring Patricia Neal as the lady who wants him and Lee Remick as the babe he wants.

5) Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957) Frank Tashlin's cartoony lampoon of celeb endorsement stars Tony Randall as the adman out to land movie star Jayne Mansfield for his client, Sta-Put lipstick.

6) Putney Swope (1969) African-American admen take over an agency, giving it some soul and cool, and producing super-sexy ads in the Robert Downey satire starring Arnold Johnson.

7) What Women Want (2000) When a woman (Helen Hunt) is hired over him as the agency's creative director, Mel Gibson seeks revenge -- and then by magic is given the instrument to achieve it: The ability to know what female consumers want. Directed by Nancy Meyers.

8) In Good Company (2004) Dennis Quaid is excellent as a veteran ad salesman for a sports magazine who after a consolidation must report to a kid (Topher Grace) half his age. Directed by Paul Weitz.

Your favorites? Why? What am I forgetting?