Three new films and five new television episodes down. Included this week are films Holiday, Butterflies are Free and Paper Moon; and the latest episode of Glee plus the first four episodes of season 2 of True Blood.

So, here is what I watched this weekend:

HOLIDAY

My second experience with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant surpasses my first, Bringing Up Baby. In Holiday, Grant plays an idealistic middle class bank worker, Johnny Case, who falls for a young woman while on vacation, but doesn’t realize until he arrives at her spacious mansion that she is a very wealthy woman. He has a plan: save up a little money then retire young, experience the world and then, when he’s run out of money and has an idea of what he wants to do with his life, come back and go to work doing what he wants to do. The problem is that his fiancee doesn’t know about his plan and may not be too keen on its implementation.

Enter her idealistic sister Linda (Hepburn) who falls for Grant’s carefree ideals, but wants to see her sister happy and is certain she would not turn him down for wanting to be himself. And there lies the key to the film. Where one sister wants to live in the lap of luxury, the other, an admitted black sheep, doesn’t care what she does as long as she has fun doing it. While there’s no one who can go into this movie and not know exactly where it’s going, the fun of it is getting there. Hepburn showcases her comedic talent like I haven’t quite seen before. She was solid in Bringing Up Baby, but here, she’s luminescent. Grant delivers the same kind of performance, impressing me with his freewheeling and naturalistic performance.

Both Grant/Hepburn films were released in 1938, making them a fine pair to delight audiences, but while most audiences seem to favor Bringing Up Baby over Holiday, I feel the opposite. While I enjoyed Baby, there’s something about Holiday that’s more humanistic, engaging and entertaining. I was consistently in good humor while watching Holiday and felt myself actively rooting for Grant and Hepburn to get together. The secondary characters are significantly more engaging from Lew Ayres as Ned, Linda’s alcoholic, but sympathetic brother to Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon as the loving, down-to-earth couple with whom Johnny lived for a time. These people help elevate the film to a well acted character ensemble instead of just a simple showcase for Grant and Hepburn.

BUTTERFLIES ARE FREE

Based on the Leonard Gershe play, Butterflies Are Free is about a young blind man (Edward Albert) living on his own as he tries to get out from under the oppressive thumb of his over-protective mother. Living next door to a beautiful, flighty blonde (Goldie Hawn), his life takes a new turn when she invites herself over and begins invading his life, both physically and emotionally. And as he slowly falls for her, his nosy mother (Eileen Heckart) arrives to put a wedge between them and push her lonely, but happy son towards returning home.

After Long Day’s Journey Into Night, it was nice to come into a stage-to-screen adaptation without immediately feeling the weight of the subject. I hadn’t researched the film prior to seeing it and as I was watching, I was rather astounded that not until I got about half way through the film did I come to the realization that it must be based on a play. And while hitting that realization does put a lot of the story’s conceits and plot devices into perspective, it also made me realize just how little the film feels trapped on the boards. Albert is a natural in the film, giving away only at the right time his character’s condition and presenting a joie-de-vivre mask that’s almost indistinguishable from the real thing. Much of his talent is brought out by the carefree Hawn and the rigid Heckart, both delivering solid performances. I remember Heckart in many television shows and a handful of movies, and her gravelly voice and stern demeanor may have been typecast at an early point in her career, but she uses those techniques quite effectively here. While it takes some time to come to love her character, her first few scenes show a practiced talent put effectively on display.

Regarding Hawn? When I was growing up, Nick-at-Night ran re-runs of Laugh-In, an uproarious sixties sketch comedy series built on the hippy movement. So, until recently I had always thought of Hawn as the dumb blonde on that show, gyrating half-nude in the party scenes and waxing stupid-poetic in specific segments. Perhaps it was Dan Rowan and Dick Martin’s show that really put Hawn on the map, but her Oscar win for Cactus Flower sent her on a long string of big screen successes. Here, she appears in her second of five Oscar nominated films, four of which earned her co-stars either Supporting Actress Oscars or nominations (Eileen Heckart in this film and Lee Grant in Shampoo both won; while Eileen Brennan in Private Benjamin and Christine Lahti in Swing Shift were both nominated). And while she has earned most of her acclaim playing the idiot, she shows in Butterflies Are Free just how well she can do that, why her career was so successful, and that beneath that bumbling facade lies a whip-smart woman.

PAPER MOON

In 1973, an old-fashioned black-and-white film was not a common sight, Hollywood having long given up on the medium as an effective box office draw. Set during the Great Depression, Paper Moon tells the story of a common grifter (Ryan O’Neal) paying his respects to the woman who may or may not have sired his child who agrees to deliver the little girl (Tatum O’Neal) to her closest relatives in St. Joseph, Missouri, but ending up in a series of successful cons along the way and developing a familial relationship seldom reserved for people who can’t admit their even related.

A couple of important characters wander into Moses and Addie’s adventures, but the film has very little to do with them and remains solely a tale about their delicate relationship that teeters on father-and-daughter quality without adopting the name. Ryan and Tatum, as you may have guessed or already knew, are father and daughter in real life and that fact helps flavor their working dynamic in a positive and intriguing way. Tatum shows early promise as an actress, outperforming most other child actors. Her early scenes are a bit rough, but once she gets going, there’s no stopping her. Ryan, who got his start in television at the age of 19, may have been at the peak of his career with the release of Paper Moon. His roguish charm is perfect for the character and the result, paired with his daughter, is a strong co-lead dynamic unfairly categorized as lead-support at the Oscars resulting in Tatum earning an Academy Award, unfairly shunted to the category because she was only 10 at the time.

The film itself works on a number of levels, but most of them are due to the relationship between Ryan and Tatum. Some scenes feel a bit contrived (the con against the sheriff’s brother a perfect example), but the movie ends on a fairly perfect note, tonally and emotionally.

TRUE BLOOD, season 2

Guilty pleasure is probably the best phrase to describe the vampire obsession that is True Blood, a New Orleans-set horror drama about the supernatural events that surround the once idyllic town of Bontemps and its somewhat oblivious residents. In its second season, several plot hooks set up in the waning episodes of the first begin to take shape as we slowly find out more about Tara’s (Rutina Wesley) mysterious benefactor (Michelle Forbes), her past encounter with Merlotte’s owner Sam (Sam Trammell), the delicate balance of life in a vampire community and how Jason Stackhouse’s (Ryan Kwanten) sudden embracing of religion isn’t leading him away from temptation.

Although the two main characters, Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) and Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer), are still the focus of the show, the second season takes more interest in the secondary characters including all those listed above along with sheriff’s deputy Andy Bellefleur (Chris Bauer), Jason’s best friend Hoyt (Jim Parrack), Eric (Alexander Sarsgard) leader of the vampires in the area, and Sam’s new waitress Daphne (Ashley Jones). And it’s this that makes the show so unique. Few shows really let these types of characters shine through, but True Blood is that rare ensemble piece where sometimes you’re more interested in what happens to everyone else than the main couple. And that’s not to say Bill and Sookie aren’t experiencing an involving plotline, but the combination of all of the other elements just make this a fun little show to watch even if it doesn’t have a bountiful social commentary.

GLEE, episode “Grilled Cheesus”

Now that we’re three shows into the third season, things are finally starting to get better and what a blessing it is to have Mike O’Malley back in the mix as Kurt’s (Chris Colfer) father Burt Hummel. This episode revolves around Burt’s sudden heart attack and resultant coma and how Kurt most not only come to terms with the religious beliefs of his fellow gleemates who insist on praying for his father’s recovery, but also with his own failures as a son and his over-reliance on self to get through the sorrow.

The show knows how to push envelopes and it’s nice to see that no one backs down from their religious beliefs in order to placate either each other or a devoted television audience. Kurt isn’t persecuted for having no faith in God but he is shown that he should not be afraid of that trait in others and that his own personal beliefs should not interfere with doing what is best for his father and if that includes the positive energy that deep belief channeled in the right direction can provide then so be it. And what’s more impressive is that most shows would have the atheist converted into a belief in God or at least a grudging acceptance of the possibility, Glee doesn’t push that on the character. Kurt is allowed to continue with his personal beliefs and it isn’t religion that helps him through his pain, but friendship and compassion.