by Dean | Jul 20, 2019 | General
What Bettie Page, famous for pin-up posing, experienced in childhood and adolescence is far worse than what she herself did for the porn business in the Fifties. As a child she was sexually abused by her father, which is almost ignored by Mary Harron’s film The Notorious Bettie Page (2005), and as an adolescent she was gang raped. She went on to study acting and to be photographed for erotic pictures, even S&M stock. Congressional hearings were held to determine if the stuff was socially damaging. Bettie felt conflicted. All this is in Harron’s dramatized film.
For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins (Amos 5:12). This is in the picture too. As a child Bettie goes to church; as an adult she accepts the concept of sin and converts to Christianity. She believes God wants her to stop posing, but does not regard posing as a bad and shameful thing. Quite naive, this Bettie Page; but she does convert, as did the real Bettie in 1959.
Not a terribly important film, Bettie is nevertheless beautifully made and straightforward. The time is the Fifties: at first Harron fashions the nice illusion that the movie itself is a Fifties flick. Before long, however, the adults-only material intrudes, as does color (though only when appropriate). Less lovely than the real Bettie, Gretchen Mol is nonetheless positively fine at portraying Page’s simplicity, cheerfulness, vulnerability, sex appeal, and religious awakening.
Cover of The Notorious Bettie Page
by Dean | Jul 18, 2019 | General
Ann Miller and Busby Berkeley—what a combination! Doubtless this would be true even if Berkeley’s choreography in Small Town Girl (1953) was mediocre but, unable to judge this particular art form, I don’t know whether it is or not. To my mind it’s pleasurable, as surely as Miller’s dancing is entrancing and forceful. Another kinetic treasure in the film, however, is dancer Bobby Van, moving beautifully for “Take Me to Broadway.” Miller whirls along on waves of percussion in “I’ve Gotta Hear That Beat.”
The book for this musical concerns a cocky New Yorker (Farley Granger) who spends time in a small town jail for speeding and insolence. The titular small town girl is blue-eyed Jane Powell, who at first seems pretty vanilla but is later very acceptable. And she sings well. In a cameo, so does Nat “King” Cole, on a fine song called “My Flaming Heart.” Ann Miller is the one to watch, though—and is adeptly used by director Leslie Kardos.
(Available for rent on YouTube.)
by Dean | Jul 16, 2019 | General
A Harold Lloyd picture, the 1932 Movie Crazy had many contributors to its screenplay and it paid off.
Funny, commendable antics bolster an engaging story about a clumsy aspirant (he wants to be an actor) who’s not a good fit for Hollywood but gains a contract there nonetheless. Lloyd plays him with his usual appeal, providing the everyman’s desperate stamina. Some first-rate humor during a downpour occurs in the film, and it is here that Harold meets Mary Sears, an accomplished actress who becomes the movie-crazy man’s unlikely lover. She is played by Constance Cummings, who appeared in a host of films in the early Thirties and proves in MC her ability with nuance.
It was always good to see Lloyd take his comedy seriously. Everything from Safety Last to The Cat’s Paw was the result.
by Dean | Jul 13, 2019 | General
Likable but foul-mouthed, comedian Aziz Ansari has turned up on Netflix with a new standup special (Right Now), and it’s political, provocative and silent about Trump. For a long time he demolishes identity politics and white p.c. Departing from this, he has a point about one black guy after another being consigned to jail for smoking weed, but is also inspired to say, “Say what you will about racist people, but they’re usually very brief. Newly woke white people are exhausting!” Ansari’s later material (about family and birth control devices), however, is weaker. Not quite unfunny but weaker. To me, Aziz Ansari Right Now is usually hilarious but whose language, alas, is intermittently disgraceful. More disgraceful than when I identify something liberal as bullshit.
by Dean | Jul 10, 2019 | General
What on earth am I hearing these days, in 2019, on contemporary pop radio? It is not at all like it was in the past, even the recent past.
Granted, Taylor Swift’s “Me” and the Jonas Brothers’ “Sucker” are fun, but—well, there’s also “Better Now” by one Post Malone. That the lyrics are trivial wouldn’t matter much if the melody was any good. It isn’t. Pink’s “Walk Me Home” is a decent album cut, but as a radio-played single, it too quickly becomes boring. The Ed Sheeran-Justin Bieber song, “I Don’t Care,” sounds like a million other ditties, while Andy Grammar’s “Give Love” is sentimental dullsville. As for Marshmello’s “Happier,” I don’t like the singing on it, and the song has no real hooks. “Dancing with a Stranger,” by Sam Smith, puts me to sleep. ALL of this stuff puts me to sleep. And, I should add, all of it is emanating from a local radio station that was never interested in playing Jewel’s “Two Hearts Breaking” or any of the singles from Kelly Clarkson’s All I Ever Wanted album except “Already Gone.” Thanks, guys.
by Dean | Jul 8, 2019 | General
Predictably, the hit movie Spy Kids spawned a sequel, Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams (2002), both directed by Robert Rodriguez. It’s another techno-fantasy for the entire family, featuring Carmen (Alexa Vega) and Juni (Daryl Sabara), spy kids employed by the OSS, which, as you know, eventually became the CIA.
Er, wait a minute—the OSS in Spy Kids 2 is fictional; it isn’t the CIA. Okay, but there is still a mission here, now that a highly destructive device has been stolen and is located on a now oddball island. A scientist there (Steve Buscemi) is given to both miniaturizing animals and creating hybrid animals which, however droll, grow to deluxe size. (Not good.) For good measure, Carmen and Juni confront rivals in fellow spy kids Gary and Gerti Giggles, capable of outdoing our child heroes but also facing a disadvantage. They get their faces soiled with camel manure and their father (Mike Judge) turns out to be an appalling traitor and would-be murderer. When he protests over how things are going, his daughter Gerti, disgusted with him, says, “Don’t even start, Dad!”
I’m glad Rodriguez started the Spy Kids trilogy. In addition to having an entertaining cast, SK2 is comically rich and visually endearing. And, thankfully, it has nothing to say.
by Dean | Jul 5, 2019 | General
I return now to episodes of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone, in proper black and white.
From Season 3, we have “It’s a Good Life,” which Serling adapted from a short story. It presents us with an Ohio town where a six-year-old boy (Bill Mumy) possesses hair-raising supernatural powers. He is a malign “god”: for inhabitants under a malign god, life is not worth living. The townspeople are continually obsequious to the boy, nervous over his every whim. It is too much for some folks to even take in.
The piece is as dark as so many short stories have been. Rather less dark but still eerie is Serling’s “Mirror Image,” from TZ‘s dandy first season. It is the show’s great doppelganger episode, offering Vera Miles as a woman at a bus depot whose “twin” has been appearing before other people there. Why hasn’t Miles seen this doppelganger? Because it (no, she) is choosing to be elusive. Either she is up to something or she likes to play pranks. Entertainingly peculiar, “Mirror Image” is painstakingly directed by John Brahm.
by Dean | Jul 3, 2019 | General
There was never any point in calling the Ibsen play, A Doll House, a feminist work; it is neither feminist nor anti-feminist. But we can be confident in calling the Gillian Armstrong film, The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992), a feminist work. Though nearly as complex as A Doll House, this is precisely what it is; and it’s artistically sound.
An Australian film written by Helen Garner, it deals with a feminist writer, Beth, married (because of pregnancy) to a Frenchman, J.P. (Bruno Ganz). Both Beth and J.P. were once opposed to marriage in principle, and Beth tells a friend, “I had to buy my own wedding ring.” We feel safe in assuming, though, that J.P. is not the kind of man disposed to buy a wedding ring. Although charming, he is frequently selfish as well as needling and unreasonable. Some of what he says about Beth is probably true (he comments, “You were proud, I made you humble”—but at such a cost to Beth!); still, the woman is betrayed by both J.P. and Beth’s sister Vicki (Kerry Fox). And Beth is basically admirable. Lisa Harrow plays her magnificently, supplying the woman’s maturity, bemusement, vulnerability, outrage. But then all the actors are stellar.
Garner writes good dialogue and creates surprising and unusual details. There is limited narration. Gillian Armstrong—and editor Nicholas Beauman—are responsible for a fluid cinematic undertaking. During a walk with J.P., Beth rapidly shifts from good spirits to fury as the camera moves in for a tight shot of the couple, then reveals them at a bit of a distance. They silently walk back to their home, and it almost seems like a trudging—to trouble. The last days of chez nous. It is a formidable scene in a fine motion picture.
by Dean | Jun 27, 2019 | General
The 1954 Naked Alibi centers on some shabby police work which turns out not to be so shabby. Chief Joe Conroy (Sterling Hayden) strongly believes that Gene Barry‘s Al is the murderer of three police officers. However, Al is a family man who—no, wait. In truth Al is a neurotic louse, cheating on his wife with urban Marianna (Gloria Grahame). But does this make him a murderer?
Director Jerry Hopper‘s potboiler is a fierce ferret of a movie, adapted from a story called “Cry Copper.” It leaps from reasonable, anti-injustice compassion to a pro-justice bubbling swirl. There is scary agitation from Barry. Grahame, in yet another film noir, is mesmerizing because of her demotic beauty and voice, not her acting.
by Dean | Jun 25, 2019 | General
If you have Netflix, you might want to check out episodes of the old Twilight Zone series, by Rod Serling, from the first four seasons. Many disappointments crop up, yes, but many virtues are there too.
Among the disappointments, in the Serling-written “Nightmare as a Child,” for a woman (Janice Rule) to conjure herself as a little girl, the child she used to be, in order to revive unsettling memories is too blatant an invention. Serling does better in “The Hitch-Hiker,” in which Nan (Inger Stevens), driving cross-country, espies the same male hitchhiker everywhere she goes, and is terrified. The story quickly suggests the subject of the violence of strangers against women (is there foul play in the offing?), but this is not what occurs. Rather it is something more metaphysical. The episode is neatly, grippingly directed by Alvin Ganzer.
As lovely as Rule and Stevens, Ann Francis stars in ‘The After Hours.” Here, she is Marsha, a woman who seems normal but assuredly is not. She buys at a department store a golden thimble she finds she must return, only to be told that the floor she bought it on does not exist. Ah, but it does exist. It could well represent the Other, the Incomprehensible, in cosmic and human experience. Somehow Marsha herself represents this too. The episode (like the other two, featured in the first season) is more sapidly weird than arch, with grounded acting by Francis and mildly chilling acting by a couple of others.
To be continued
