Forget those diamonds, sisters; Blondell is a girl’s best friend. Especially in the films she made during the Depression, when she and the country were young and brave and cracking wise, Joan Blondell comes off as the kind of loyal and level-headed, funny and fun-loving pal who can make even bad times fun, her big eyes shining and her bullshit meter clicking like a Geiger counter.

The cheery nature and bedrock reliability Blondell radiated sometimes got her miscast as a wide-eyed innocent in films like the vacuous Good Girls Go to Paris, in which she seems chagrined as the one-note title character, tossing off what feels like a half-hearted Shirley Temple impersonation. But she spent most of her onscreen time in a niche that fit her much better, playing a broad with a heart of gold. In Public Enemy, which screens this Saturday (pictured), Blondell plays the girl who marries the James Cagney’s character’s best friend, their happy relationship providing a counterpoint to Cagney’s tortured tap dances with his mistreated molls. And in Night Nurse, which screened earlier in the series, she plays a droll, eye-rolling, gum-chewing nurse who shows Barbara Stanwyck the ropes. Blondell’s B. Maloney is too cynical to object to the corruption she sees everywhere, but she’s too good a friend not to support Stanwyck when she rises up against it.

SUTTON:
So, Henry, I took Cowboys and Aliens' title—a sci-fi remix of "Cowboys and Indians"—as a promise of clever colonial allegory, like an Americanized version of District 9, but it turned out to be something more muddled and, as far as I can tell, fundamentally conservative. The aliens here—a fusion of the extraterrestrials from Alien and Independence Day—are just worse versions of The White Man, right? They've come to earth to mine its gold and wipe out its human inhabitants, a threat that forges a temporary alliance between otherwise hostile communities: Native Americans, settlers and outlaws. The latter two groups are led by characters whose names could come from a Mel Brooks movie, appropriate since Cowboys and Aliens is immensely indebted to Blazing Saddles: ruthless rancher and Daniel Plainview-esque proto-capitalist Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) and loner with a gun Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig). The humans forget their petty differences for a day to fight the greater foe, and pave the way for America's land-grabbing expansion. What did you make of Cowboys and Aliens' wacky Western symbolism, Henry?

It’s hard to reconcile our current image of Danny Elfman as the composer of the scores for Beetlejuice, Alice in Wonderland et cetera with the Danny Elfman of yesteryear. As the lead weirdo in the proudly juvenile neo-cabaret act The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, Elfman’s schtick used to be quite, uh, different. Elfman, his brother Richard and his bandmates made Forbidden Zone to try to encapsulate what their act, which features characters in blackface and cannibalized elements of vaudeville (“Your buns smell like lox, honey, I can smell them from here.”), was all about. Today, it’s a time capsule of that long-ago time when it was very hip to be deeply confusing.

But maybe this opportunism can serve as the raw materials for something a bit more spontaneous than a staid adaptation; it certainly has the cast for it, with Harrison Ford rumbling back to life, Daniel Craig taking a side-trip from Bond, and Sam Rockwell dancing (I assume; it will be kind of a ripoff if he's not [In that case there's always the Golden Globe-winning fan-made YouTube video Sam Rockwell: Dancing Machine -Ed.]). Jon Favreau directs; his Iron Man movies didn't have much visual pizzazz, but he shows excellent rapport with his actors, which is what ought to count here. Fingers crossed.

In La Plage, a lively animated short drawn in pretty pastels, a lovely summer beach is ruined by an invasion of loud, fat, chain-smoking, beached-fish-tormenting, butt-scratching boors—until a giant hand descends on the sand and shovels them into a mammoth catbox pooper scooper. That one-joke plot makes La Plage less subtle and/or ambitious than most of its companions at this year’s Animation Block Party, but nearly all share its wry take on stupid human tricks—and its empathy for the non-human animals who put up with us.