Confessional 3: Casablanca

Written by: Tony Lazlo, CC2K Staff Writer

In the case of Casablanca, I offer a similar excuse to my Schindler’s List argument on the previous page: No one will watch it with me. Even a guy I used to know who was an inveterate Bogart fan refused to watch it with me, brushing me off with the cryptic excuse, “You can only watch Casablanca with a girl.” (Looking back, I suspect that this guy harbored a thermonuclear fear of being perceived as gay.) Besides that, though, I also must confess to some prejudice against old movies. If a movie was made before the 60s and before the Spencer Tracy/Marlon Brando revolution in acting, I often have a hard time watching it. Old-style, 50s-era performative acting drives me up the wall, and seeing as how Casablanca has most of the same cast as The Maltese Falcon — a perfect example of an overrated old movie filled with crappy 50s acting, including a shitload of bad 50s acting by bad-50s-acting-zen-master Humphrey Bogart — I dread watching it for the first time. {mos_sb_discuss:4}