Bravely into the breach steps Couch Potato. While CNN is mired in weather footage, CP wants to show you newshounds at their best: tenacious, principled, witty and attractive. We're all like that. Really. Don't believe it? Just watch His Girl Friday (1940). Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell are the ink-stained beauties in Howard Hawks' razor-witted screwballer about a newspaper editor who tries to bring his ex-wife back into the fold with a nutty crusade for justice-by-media (and by relentlessly belittling her new fiance). Not to be missed.
Watch one, watch the other: Unapologetic fans of old Hollywood will feel incomplete if they don't rewind at this point to 1931 for The Front Page. OK, it's the same movie -- the first screen version of the manic Hecht-MacArthur play. But it's just as good, which is more than can be said for the 1974 version with Walter Matthau or Switching Channels (1988) for that matter. Lesson: the remake game never works twice.
Need a new plot? Deadline-U.S.A. has a small case of the treacles, but it's stirring nonetheless -- and something to think about in this tabloid age. Bogart, additionally, is reason enough to watch. Spot Mr. Howell and Ed Begley Jr.'s father, and you get a gold star. Try The Paper (1994), co-penned (and cameoed in) by current TIME editor Stephen Koepp, if you've got to see something post-war, but please, please don't rent I Love Trouble, unless you really do. Because CP will find out where you live.
A little PR never hurt anybody, right? When it wants, Hollywood can make the chattering class look pretty good. We certainly need it.