State of the Union (1948): Frank Capra's followup to It's A Wonderful Life, this is a film I've sometimes seen mentioned as Capra's last notable film. He made only a few in the 1950s, none of which people talk about, and then signed off with 1961's A Pocketful of Miracles, which was dull as anything. State of the Union sees Capra working with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, as well as a young Angela Lansbury (23 and playing a newspaper publisher, so presumably playing much older). This is Capra returning to the populist political well he drew from in many of his earlier films, and in a lot of ways it's the most explicitly programmatic, since it's about Tracy running for president. We thus get quite a lot of his political platform, which amounts to a massive expansion of the welfare state, foreign aid, and even world government(!). For political history junkies such as myself, the film is a treat for being littered with so many period-specific references.
This is my favourite of the Tracy/Hepburn films I've seen, mainly because it's not a 'battle of the sexes' framework (many of which ended up really condescending to Hepburn, this being the 1940s). There's also a really fascinating subtext here, presumably unintended, in that the narrative setup is that Hepburn is unwillingly estranged from her spouse, Tracy, who is increasingly falling under the spell of Lansbury's character. The film is, as such, a battle between these two women to influence him. Essentially, Hepburn is Louise Tracy, and Lansbury is Hepburn.
Hard Eight (1996): Paul Thomas Anderson's film debut, and heretofore the only one of his films I hadn't seen. I knew essentially nothing about this going in, which is the best way to view it. It's very slow starting out, and meanders, but it has a great ending. It's also interesting, looking back, to see how some of these actors became recurring figures in Anderson's stable of talent (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Philip Baker Hall) and others didn't (for instance, Gwyneth Paltrow).
