With a comical look on his face

I had a nice weekend with La New Yorkaise visiting, and truly buried the reefer wagon with a trip to warm, sunny Maastricht. The sun was shining and I was high and cheerful the whole time. We watched The Great Escape again early Sunday morning and I liked it even better the second time - and part of the reason La New Yorkaise and I are such close buddies is because of things like both understanding Charles Bronson was one of the most magnificent pieces of ass to walk the earth; a fact bizarrely lost on most women these days. In hot relief in The Great Escape; wifebeater, long underwear, emotional vulnerability and lots of dirt. Sweet. Throw me over your horsy's saddle and take me away from all this, you beautiful Tatar man. The rowboat also works for the fantasy file.

My point is that nice as a weekend as it was, now it all feels like it was leading up to last night, returning here after getting La New Yorkaise on the TGV back to Paris, curling up with the F-word, and watching Casablanca for the first time. I'd insisted we give it a watch, not because I expected it to be stupendous, but because it's such a big cultural reference point, and it was a hole in our education, that we'd seen dozens of things spoofing off it but never the it itself.

Holy shit. That's the best movie ever.

The storyline had me weeping like a tile, and you may put that down to my femininity if you like. But you'd be foolish, because aside from all the lovey-doveyness it was well evocative of a city full of desperate people, and absolutely absorbing - absolutely good. The writing was just jaw-dropping and those lines that people refer to ad nauseum are referred to ad nauseum for a reason. In context they're fucking brilliant. For me the best one was when Ilsa came back to the bar the first time when Rick was drunk and he got pissy with her. That has to be the greatest sequence of pissiness ever captured on celluloid. "Or aren't you the kind that tells?" Oh, sweet.

And the look, the noir and all those shadows and all those great shots, right from the pan into Sam leaning back and singing to everybody - it looked so good. The actors looked so good. Humphrey Bogart, that piece of battered driftwood, was perfect for Rick, and Ingrid Bergman was scrumptiously beautiful. The F-word pointed out what La New Yorkaise and I had been discussing that morning in reference to Charles Bronson - her face isn't vapid enough for her to be a famous beauty now. She had a big nose and strong features and a funny face shape, and while it all came together into this really remarkable and flawless beauty - that incredibly Scandinavian beauty - it would perhaps be much harder for her to get proper professional recognition for that perfect beauty now.

Scarlett Johansson, the Swede currently massaging the dreams of a generation of young men with that lovely rack, has such a docile little girly face, and even the notoriously beautiful Anglo actresses who aren't white and should be subject to different measurements of loveliness - Frieda Pinto, Halle Berry, for examples - all have butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth chewing gum commercial, boring boring girly faces. The only interestingly beautiful faces I can think of in American movies come from Spain or Latin America - Javier Bardem, Benecio del Toro or something, and Salma Hayek - now those are some real faces. I guess there's hope yet.