The Cobalt Screening Room Balcony

Post #267: Continuing our ride on the Quality Train, today's feature is one of those films that have made me smack my forehead and realize I have to revise my Top Ten Of All Time List again, for failing to mark this as a worthy inclusion. Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Oscar Hijuelos, *The Mambo Kings Play Songs Of Love*, of which I own two autographed copies--one hardback first edition and an Advanced Reader's Copy before publication, the beautiful adaptation *The Mambo Kings* (1992) offers a scaled down version of the novel that serves delight and sorrow in equal measure.

Director Arne Glimcher, art historian and founder of The Pace Gallery with ten international locations, demonstrates in his film debut a keen eye for color, composition, pacing and drama, its soundtrack resting comfortably among the most exciting commentaries on the action I've found. Starring Armand Assante and Antonio Banderas in his first American film, learning English phonetically to deliver his lines after intense immersion in a Berlitz program, the story follows Cesar and Nestor Castillo, two talented musicians, as they pursue, achieve and lose their American Dreams. Cesar is a gregarious charmer and born performer/promoter who has a penchant for anyone who wears a skirt, while Nestor is a quiet, reflective, almost recessive dreamer haunted by the decimating betrayal of his Beautiful Maria, who has married the jealous and volatile gangster who owns the Havana club where the brothers work.

Confronting Maria and the rage of the Cuban mobster, Cesar learns Maria has married only to save Nestor from certain death at the hands of her possessive club owner, and now her husband. Shielding his brother from the truth, Cesar, bloodied and beaten, convinces Nestor to leave with him for America where their almost certain success awaits. It is 1952 and New York City shimmers with light and music in the evening while the Castillo Brothers work menial jobs in a meat packing plant by day. Their introduction to the magical world of mambo in America comes at the famed Palladium one night, as we see through Cesar's eyes the Dance Floor Of Heaven swirling with banks of cloudy fog which exist only for him. Onstage is Tito Puente and his band, and magically Cesar elbows his way to join him in one of the most electrifying drum battles on film. (Since Armand Assante is a drummer, Glimcher frames the duel perfectly, never substituting easily faked close-ups of the drum heads, but lingers on the two men in glorious trade-off riffs.)

Soon Cesar has developed a relationship with cigarette girl Lanna Lake (Cathy Moriarty, who plays Lanna with heart and insight), the brothers are taken under the wing of the influential Evalina Montoya (Celia Cruz, known internationally as "The Queen of Salsa" and "The Queen of Latin Music"--a real coup to get her for the film), they form The Mambo Kings, Nestor continues to write twelve versions of his heartbreaking ballad "Beautiful Maria Of My Soul" (which won an Academy Award nomination for Best Song), and success seems within their grasp. Nestor writes the music, Cesar knows how to perform it with infectious glee and romantic heat while Nestor solos on trumpet.

Having dealt with notorious gangsters in Havana, Cesar rebuffs and rebukes the business advances of powerful fixer Fernando Perez (Rosco Lee Browne), nearly sealing their fate to obtain bookings due to Cesar's pride. In the meantime Nestor, still pining away for Maria, finds himself attracted to the unassuming, shy and beautiful Delores Fuentes (Maruschka Detmers--oh, those eyes, O Lordy Mama); when she makes her first venture to the club where they play, unaware of Nestor's affection for Delores, Cesar invites her to dance in one of the most sensual, evocative and revealing scenes in the film. Delores moves from trepidation to unsteady acknowledgement of Cesar's passion to careful abandon in the matter of minutes, embarking on a romantic triangle that will carry the film's quiet moments to their end. Watch how differently the Castillo Brothers romance Delores through dance, separately but equally entrancing.

Okay, so I'm gushing over the romance in this film and the integral propulsive motion of the music. When Glimcher first received novel, delivered to him by Hijuelos himself on a Friday, complete with ink pen notes in the margin of the manuscript before publication, by the following Monday morning the director bought the rights and started searching for a studio. But several forward-thinking studios did not feel they could market such a securely Latino-based film--it is not the story of a well culled culture, mambo, after all--and rejected it until finally Warner Brothers optioned it with a paltry budget of $15.5 million jointly financed by Warner Bros., Le Studio Canal+ and Regency Enterprises. Glimcher had fifty days to complete it, and set out rustling up support.

Desi Arnaz (notably inhabited by his son Desi Arnaz Jr.) takes the Castillo Brothers on their next step up, as he invites them to appear on *I Love Lucy* in comedic roles and then singing "Beautiful Maria" live. This re-enactment of the Seaon 1, Episode 28, "Cuban Pals," is seamlessly created with original footage of Lucy interacting with our particulars--and the recreation was filmed on the exact sound stages of the original show. In presenting "Beautiful Maria" with the band, Glimcher ensured the entire stage was set in shades of black and white and filmed in black and white to replicate the look of the kinescopes. The sequence is cross cut between the song and the neighborhood's reactions as all the secondary characters bask in the cathode grey glow of the Castillo's television--a slow pan across the excitement and joy and aching despondency of the viewers.

*The Mambo Kings* is so high on my list of films precisely because of this causal balancing act of emotions. There are moments of transcendent happiness and scenes of great emotional tragedy that cuts right to the heart. Part of that rests in the hands of Glimcher, who captures the essence of the 1950s mambo culture and holds the audience enrapt in his handling of such themes as brotherly commitment, sacrifice, yearning (Cesar's for the spotlight, Nestor's for Maria, Delores for Nestor, and to a subtextual degree Cesar and Delores for one another and what they represent), the seductive and transformative/destructive power of love, misguided betrayal and the compulsive beauty of dreams in general, and immigrant's vision of America's promise specifically.

It's another of those international concoctions in which everything conspires for a lasting experience: Armand Assante is half Italian, half Irish, playing a Cuban, and he had to learn his Spanish phonetically. Antonio Banderas was born in the capital of the Province of Málaga, in the Autonomous Community of Andalusia, Spain, and also learned his lines in English phonetically. Arne Glimcher was born in Duluth, Minnesota, and Cathy Moriarty was born in the Bronx of Irish-Catholic immigrants. Maruschka Detmers was born in the Dutch province of Drenthe, but moved to France as a teenager and made most of her movies there, capturing the attention of Jean-Luc Godard. And Celia Cruz (nee Úrsula Hilaria Celia de la Caridad Cruz Alfonso) was born in Havana, Cuba, becoming one of the most popular Latin performers in the world.

So *The Mambo Kings* is a moving cross between The Hallmark Channel and The Playboy Channel--its narrative is clearly one of the most haunting sexpartite love stories I've seen (Cesar to Nestor, Cesar to Lanna, Nestor to Delores, Nestor to Maria, Delores to Cesar and Cesar to Delores) freighted with melodramatic pain and jubilation; and its love scenes, while tempered dramatically from the novel, are still graphic enough to keep the kids away unless you want to rocket them into puberty ahead of schedule. [And this will be one of the very few times you'll find me hailing the virtues of The Hallmark Channel, but doggone it, this film might just yank away at your tear ducts or at least give you a little gut punch in its closing moments. These people know how to sell the complications of affection.]

One of the greatest compliments I can give a director or actor is the wish to see more of his or her work. Right on down the line I can say that about all parties involved, though Glimcher directed only a handful of films, including *Just Cause* (1995) with Sean Connery and Laurence Fishburne. It's interesting (to me) to note the studio's original picks for the main roles were Jeremy Irons as Cesar and Ray Liotta for Nestor, with Annabella Sciorra as Delores (she had to drop out due to a scheduling conflict with the filming of *The Hand That Rocks The Cradle* (1992). In the early days of production Glimcher paid the cast's salaries out of his own pocket, he co-wrote "Beautiful Maria" with Robert Kraft, and that song was nominated for three of its six international awards. A short run of the story as a play was directed by Gllimcher with cast members including David Alan Grier and Cote de Pablo (Ziva on *NCIS*) though its move to Broadway was canceled.

I'm sorry, I'm gushing again. But I love (and have taught) the novel and the film, and while the novel covers the arc of the Castillo Brothers' lives and the film covers only three years, and the overall tone of the film's ending is more bittersweet, both versions stand proudly in my heart and mind. I can't dance, don't ask me, but *The Mambo Kings* surely makes me feel like I could. . . when no one's watching.
Enjoy.
Jeff

Jeff some real nice cars in Hot Cars that red 55 Chrysler 300 (even in black and white I know) was my fave. Hemi powered. And the dames the wooden dialogue yup that movie was fab.

Concentrate on those cars, Boss. Because this commentary is for you, and I'm sorry.

Post #268: Well, it was inevitable. The Quality Train of films had to be derailed at some point; I just didn't think it would lurch off the tracks so soon. And with today's feature, it not only went careening down the embankment, it slammed full speed into the back end of the Silver Streak, pushing it further into Grand Central Station and out into the street and into a construction hole in the sewer. As my sons would say, Holy Wow! This one competes with *Sex Kittens Go To College* and *Three Nuts* as a sub-basement, or perhaps debasement, of anything remotely, or perhaps remorsefully, resembling a movie. *Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance* (2015) hoped to capitalize on the terrific inelegance of its predecessor, upping the ante in terms of budget, pandering sexuality, and if you believe the cast members, action, and "talent." O, the pains of self-delusion.

Funded by Kickstarter, the film should have been kicked to the curb from the start. The making of a wonderfully awful movie is nearly always accidental. Its ultimate enjoyment comes from the filmmakers' steadfast belief that they're on to something explosive and cash generating, redefining a genre, even as the budget approaches a staggering $42.00. It cannot be planned and executed according to methodical inexperience--it must be allowed to blossom and flourish in its grand organic fertilizer of ineptitude. According to the laws of chaos theory and bumper stickers, like excrement, it just HAPPENS. And if you're lucky your cinematic effort turns out to be happy excrement. *Samurai Cop* achieved that, and as a uniquely incompetent piece of . . . action fodder, it remains laughably misguided.

But consciously trying to "update," "extend the story (what story?), and replicate its profound sense of abject stupidity twenty-five years later was the first in an endless line of missteps. For one thing Mathew Karedas (Joe Marshal) and Mark Frazer (Frank Washington) KNEW in the irradiated fallout of the first film that they had starred in an atomic disaster, and graciously they agreed, laughing at themselves and shrugging it off basically by not making any more films. But *Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance* sets out to make fun of itself and its source material and as such never makes the leap into honored Guilty Pleasure. . . because it's not a pleasure, and the guilt you might feel in watching it is not out of empathy for the egregious product and the poor schmucks who believed in it, but out of realizing you could have had used the 93 minutes more productively by repeatedly pounding your head with a brick or trying to stop a circular band saw with your tongue. (Oh, I hate it when that happens. . . .)

So what's the worst part of *Samurai Cop 2*? You will not have to log on to expansive scholarly blogs that debate that philosophical question, largely because most viewers agree if you just ignore this film maybe it'll go away quietly, never to resurface, unless it's re-awakened by some tremulous nuclear accident like Mothra, Rodan or King Ghidorah. And I realize I'm in a small way complicit in its publicity by writing about it, but call me The Town Crier, hoping to save you some tears of your own.

Like the old Chinese restaurant menu, choose one from Column A, one from Column B and one from Column C.

Column A: The plot (literally incomprehensible), or the actors (in addition to our returning protagonists, they've added Tommy Wiseau and porn stars);

Column B: The three directors (all inept individually), or the over reliance on slow motion (used in shots absolutely inconsequential to anything, like walking across the floor--I kid you not, Jack Paar)

Column C: The totally inappropriate, teeth-gratingly annoying background music (heavy metal and really awful rap with lyrics that drown out any dialogue on the screen), or the huge clumps of cheesy special effects (the purpose of which is never explained or made sense of).

Okay, diners, what's your pleasure? I know, let's turn this into a sort of You Choose children's book; you determine the path you want to follow and skip the chaff (Of course, you may have already done this by bypassing my commentary altogether, and I wouldn't blame you). In the immortal words, then, of Little Jack Little, here 'tis. . . .

COLUMN A: The Plot
Fu Fukiyama (Cranston Komuro) is now on top of the Yakuza syndicate, but--hold on--his Katana Gang is now at war with the Ginsa and Shinjuku Clans, I think. Anyway, there's a lot of chopping and stabbing, even more than a Food Network marathon, of largely interchangeable ninjas who even with a scorecard can't explain their allegiances. But we can figure out that Master Kitano (Lisa London) who's not Katana but head of the Shinjuku Clan is executed, which causes her son Linton Kitano (Tommy Wiseau) to reprise his Smash The Room scene from his movie *The Room*. Meanwhile, Frank finds Joe in self-imposed exile practicing Buddhism (because he can't get it right) and after another pointless fight with some ninjas who yell and flip over, Joe decides to join Frank. . . in doing whatever Frank is assigned to do by his Chief (Joe Estevez). Joe is in mourning because some clan kid killed his wife twenty-five years ago and he's now pledged himself to non-violence while he stabs, grimaces, beats to a bloody pulp and slices, dices and makes mounds of julienne fries of anyone who crosses him, of course in a totally non-violent way. Doggé Sakamoto (Bai Ling) screams her lines and enlists two Powder Puff wannabes (Lexi Belle and Nicole Bailey) who kill people and have pointless sex as much as possible with anyone handy or each other. Joe falls in love with the mysterious Milena Roberts (another porn star Kayden Kross, who at least can act) and that is about it, following the template of bang bang, kill kill, sex sex sex, cut cut (which is what the film needs as the editing is on beyond zebra in its incoherence), kiss kiss, shout shout let it all out, these are the things I can do without. Come on!

COLUMN A: The Actors
Mathew Karedas still looks like Weird Al Yankovic and enjoys baring his teeth, and his chest only once. Mark Frazer provides his now trademark Eddie Murphy OOooh Face directly into the camera when he faces the naked buttocks of his girlfriend who serves no purpose beyond fanboy nudity. Could Tommy Wiseau BE any worse than his work in *The Room*? Surprisingly, yes--most of the time he's behind a Batman mask and dark glasses (didn't he learn anything from Coco Chanel, that just before you leave the house, take off ONE accessory?) and he lumbers on haltingly in lengthy exposition that makes no tangible sense whatsoever about ruling the universe? So he's achieved his personal best at achieving entry into the Brotherhood of Completely Inconceivable Celebrity with this role. Plus he had to be fed all his lines off-camera. He's not funny in his lack of talent, he's just tedious and his acting is tired, devoid of any energy. But it's Bai Ling and Joe Estevez who tie for Worst Over-The-Top Performance In A D-Level Independent Film. Bai Ling cannot string three words together without pausing between them, then reciting them at the top of her lungs in halting cadence, while Joe Estevez has two settings on his vocal amplifier--11 and 75 on a ten-point scale. He doesn't recite lines, he screams and gesticulates as if he's suffering a grand mal seizure. No one talks in this film--they're too busy yelling and punching and gawking at their good fortune at being in the same room as porn stars (Zoey Monroe, from Detroit; Kayden Kross, Lexi Belle, Rachel Roxx, Charlotte Stokely--and okay, before I start getting instant messages about this, I subscribe to IMDB, that's how I know).

COLUMN B: Three Directors
Obviously they worked independent of one another, not even sending text messages to one another about what they were filming because scenes end abruptly without resolving anything, upcutting to another irreconcilable scene without the benefit of the merest whiff of a transition. A three-way all-female snapshot is inserted between action sequences for no reason I can isolate. And I've tried. Grainy hallucinatory exposition scenes between Joe and Milena, I think, are supposed to be coming from a television as Joe watches himself on the tube, but I can't be sure since there are no clues that this is what's occurring. But most distracting is the constant use of large subtitles introducing characters and their "significance" to the "plot." These title tracks are the laziest possible way of attempted audience orientation; all that's missing is an animated arrow indicating the person to whom the labels are referring. Only 25% of the script was used in filming--the remaining 75% was filmed through improvisation and daily script rewrites. Wow, you really can't tell. . . unless you're older than seven years old. If one director could muck this up, consider how much worse it can be if three inexperienced video jockeys vie for screen time.

COLUMN B: Slow Motion
When in doubt, which is during the entire production, slow down the camera. Frank is walking in a factory? Show his shoes moving across the concrete in slow motion. Joe has a sword fight? Extend it by slackening his arm movements. Someone has to fall down? Film it like a snail. Draaaaaawwwwww iiiiiiiiittt ouuuuuuuuttttt. . . .

COLUMN C: Background "Music"
Stop it. Just stop it.

COLUMN C: Not Very Special Effects
Especially jarring early in the film was the "explosion of blood" effect that honestly bore a striking resemblance to being hit with a powdered paint bomb--the wispy fluff of pale red dissipates in the air. And the Monty Python squirting is vaguely comical but just looks cheap and amateurish. Don't get me started on the silken Old Man River that flows from the side of a principal late in the film that is so patently an animated flowing of scarves struggling to appear "artsy" that you can't help but shake your head in dismay. And so far I have found no thoughtful or even cogent explanation of the *Star Wars* training ball equipped with lasers used by the Katana Clan. Schlocky with no discernible back story, this floating orb adds to the general impression of "WTF" rather than "Oh that is hilarious, it's so bad."

The Kickstarter budget for *Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance" is said to have totaled $1.5 million. By all that is holy, it just goes to prove that H.L. Mencken was correct in asserting no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. Its release directly to DVD and Blu-Ray proves the existence of a Higher Form of Life, for only someone searching out this debacle will find it, unless Netflix decides its profit margin is way too high and decides to air it to lose enough money to close the financial gap between the classes. But even then, please turn the dial and watch reruns of *Full House* or if you're decrying how the adult industry pays more than Disney,*Boy Meets World* and Maitland Ward. Lord, help us, can't someone find a long buried Rita Hayworth or Gene Tierney movie and give us some hope? I'll be right here, waiting.
Enjoy.
Jeff

Jeff I watched that movie. It was plain incomprehensible. I had no idea what was happening or why. Samurai cop looked like a poor mans Alice Cooper. Time has not been kind to him. Wow that was a stinking pile and not in the good way LOL. This was not ripe cheese it was just ripe.

Cheese is good! But cow flop is not. This is cow flop.

Post #269: You can always tell you're in for a special treat when one of the main vehicles driven by nuns is a Ford Edsel station wagon. And ratchet up the Giddy Meter when people talk like this when meeting rock and roll star Pau Anka: "Big deal. King Groovy comes to Dungeonsville to make with a song for po' little ol' us. What do you want me to do, kiss your foot?" Throw in The Platters and Mamie Van Doren as tough girl Silver Morgan, and you've got yourself a rocket sled to *Girls Town* (1959), another classic gigglefest from producer of *Sex Kittens Go To College* (1960) and *High School Confidential* (1958) Albert Zugsmith. Except this one is actually highly entertaining crap for a mere investment of 89 minutes.

High on the list of reasons to enjoy this juvenile delinquent morality tale is watching heartthrobs Paul Anka and Mel Torme duking it out while Gloria Talbot jiu jitsu's the brutal fruit out of lumbering, muscled tough and Mamie Van Doren and Elinor Donahue look on in startled panic, jutting out their chests at the action. What a crazy atomic cocktail, Daddio! Oh why don't they make movies like this anymore?

Because they're awful, that's why. But *Girls Town* can't be faulted for being so cautionary and hammy, because America was entering a new frontier, and "the youth" were reacting to important social changes, not to mention roaring, raging, Id-powered hormones, man. And in the final considerations, it's really quite the hip commercial for redemption and the Catholic Church, with St. Jude hanging around in case some lost souls want to sip some awesome sauce (Holy Water) after the drag races. When Silver asks what that holy water jazz is for, bad girl Gloria Barker (Jody Fair) answers, "It's plain ordinary water with the hell boiled out of it." Dig it.

As in any good exploitation film, *Girls Town* opens with a long shot of a young woman running in fear from a rampaging young man set on having his way well off the highway and near the sea. The two tussle and tango until the strapping young hulk encounters some loose shale and falls away with only the desperate grasp on a clump of beach weed between him and certain death as his quarry shrieks and stares above him. The vegetation not being subject to Trugrow treatments, the shrubbery's root system breaks away, and "Chip" lands in a twisted heap on a rocky shore, chipped and broken. Yeah, man, serves you right, like a crumbled cookie.

Silver Morgan (Mamie Van Doren), a girl with a questionable past mashing her potatoes with The Dragons, a drag race gang (and not a transvestite among them, just studly hipsters), is immediately caught in the headlights of scandal, as she was supposed to be on a date with Chip, and her lipstick has been found in his car. So QED--she killed him, as "witnessed" by Fred Alger (Mel Torme in a squeamy little weasel role leading the competitive Jaguar Gang). Judged guilty by everyone who matters socially, Silver (who's named Silver beyond the Lone Ranger's horse?) is sent to Girls Town (with no possessive apostrophe), not really a reformatory though it is run by sympathetic nuns. There she clashes with the pecking order, trying her snide best to be the top pecker, I suppose, as she alienates everyone save the innocent but specious Serafina (Gigi Perreau) who thinks her idol Jimmy Parlow (Paul Anka, swoon swoon) is in love with her.

But Silver (at age 28 off screen) is actually innocent, and a good girl deep down if you look past her inflated ego, recalcitrant attitude, her smoking, drinking and sneaking out in the middle of the night to go clubbing with Dick Culdane (Ray Anthony--really? But he's 37!) who privately lives up to his first name as he has been hired to gather enough evidence for a trial against her. Meanwhile, Silver's sister Mary Lee (a blonde Elinor Donahue, who's inherited her sister's torpedo brassieres and who will become Betty "Princess" Anderson on *Father Knows Best*) becomes embroiled in a blackmail scheme with Fred (who is actually 34 off screen), who goads her into a dangerous drag race in a cement riverbed that may kill them both. (I was going to make a really bad non-PC joke about Mary Lee's safety and her air bag deployment, but I think I'm above that.) But in the film she is supposed to be fifteen (when she is really 22 off screen)--holy schnikes, no wonder the guys were so stoopid in the fifties! They can't do math.

And so the plot thins out (it doesn't thicken) and along the way to death and destruction, wreck and ruin, laurels and hardy handshakes, we're treated to a songfest from Jimmy, including *Ave Maria* which I'm sure is a staple in just about every teenage rock 'n' roll exploitation film, though I haven't found Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard's versions of it yet. But then how many nuns are such hep cats as Sheilah Graham and Maggie Hayes who groove right along with the rapturous reformed bad girls who swing and sway while Jimmy performs a benefit performance just for them in the church rec room.

Now the marketing campaign for *Girls Town* panted, "This sexually explicit, low-budget film makes no pretensions about being anything other than offensive." And while it's true that one musical number ("Hey, Mama") was excised by the censors as being too provocative because it showed Van Doren's naked back in a shower, but you can watch it on Youtube and it will hardly raise your blood pressure or an eyebrow. Yes, it's steamy. . . because it's a hot shower but you'll be far more offended today by commercials at two in the morning for birth control or weed whackers. So unless you're still living in provincial Victorian times with antimacassars cloaking every stick of furniture in your house, don't sweat this movie.

*Girls Town* is B-movie material to be sure, but it's goofy and watchable nonetheless. *Mystery Science Theater 3000* also has a complete riff on it, which I will be receiving in two days but haven't seen yet, so if you don't wish to sift through the incredibly dated slang, some of which has come to imply very different meanings than intended in 1959 and as such will elicit an embarrassed sophomoric giggle or blush from you (as when Silver tells Fred, "The only way I blow is to blow the whistle on you")--watch the *MST3K* version, which is an edited cut of the film, trimming about fifteen minutes.

Some folks think its Christian undertones (overtones, you can decide) are didactic, But for me the "transformation" of Silver and the girls is more an indication of maturation than a lightning bolt of conversion, even though Saint Paul of Anka indisputably comes across as a curative, angelic influence in the face of disaster. He may be a "Lonely Boy" at the piano, but he is the answer to the nuns' prayers. So when you tally up the score on *Girls Town*, you've got the hot blush of youth in crazy make-out sessions, blazing hot rod races, outstanding sweaters stretched to their limits, smoking bad girls (when smoking was a sign of moral turpitude and not just a cancer inducement), rock and roll (kinda sorta), catfights, judo, and a cast completely oblivious to chronological age distinctions. Vroom vrooom, Babychick, in the words of Silver Morgan, "Not wonderful. Cool, crazy, fantabulous."
Enjoy.
Jeff

Jeepers creepers. I suddenly feel the need to dig up Reefer Madness and Sex Madness. And maybe Drag Strip Girls too.

Post #270: Yesterday's posting seems to have raised the hackles for some folks, as once again I have heard from a reader about my choice. Ahem. . .
*******
Dear Sir:
Dismayed I am in discovering my last missive was met with such careless disregard as though I were shouting into the maw of a vacuum. I have always prided myself on speaking from a place of unvarnished calm in the hope that civilized discourse would triumph over the nattering nabobs of negativism. Yet since your tireless and tiresome postings continue contributing most heartily to our decline of decency and glorification of the disdainful, I can only conclude we are perishing in an orgy of moral degradation. Your most recent cinematic epithet praising *Girls Town* notoriously surpassed previous posts in seeming to delight in vulgar wordplay involving and dedicated to the chestal area of the young women. One would have thought the main point of your rhetoric was to reduce the emphasis on the narrative exegesis and merely exercise an adolescent absorption in mammillary exhibitionism. Should you persist in your decadent deprecation of all things bodily, I should expect you'll be destined to a scenic tour of Hades for the rest of your natural eternal slumber.
Yours et cetera, Brigadier Sir Arthur Gormanstrop (Mrs.), nee Johanna Gambolputty de von Ausfern-schplenden-schlitter-kalbsfleisch-von Hautkopft of Ulm.

*******
Well, dang. It seems I've been flat busted. So, as it's becoming a regular feature in my postings, I apologize for any untoward behavior I've exhibited, and I pledge to develop more wherewithal in choosing my films. Today, for instance, we'll take a walk on the Mild Side, Lou Reed, with the 1962 extravaganza, *Married Too Soon* with no discernible star power whatsoever. And all sides being revealed, I'm not sure who the audience is for this movie, as it's a pain-by-the-numbers (sic) exercise in releasing the teenage protagonists from any form of individual responsibility or free will. It's one of those Blame It On The Parents screeds so prevalent in the wake of the juvenile delinquent genre of the time. But wait! The real pull of this picture is the knowledge it was written by the infamous and uncredited Ed Wood!

Here we have Tommy Blaine (Harold Lloyd Jr.) and Helen Newton (Jana Lund), two American kids growin' up in the heartland and doin' the best they can. Tommy works at the local garage and wins drag races on the weekend, as he slaps away as much money as he can for a college career studying medicine. Helen lives with her strict social climbing parents who think Tommy is a "Nobody."

Tommy and Helen are deeply in love, playing kissy face in Tommy's car overlooking the city one night when their reckless energy lurches out of control and they end up in the back seat of the convertible in a long, passionate kiss. That's all--no groping or wrestling or slap-and-tickle, just a big kiss. But it's enough to scare the jumping jillywiggers out of them since their passion is so strong. They immediately jump apart and on the spot decide to cross the state line (the territorial one, not Helen's) and get married. (If one kiss prompts this, what in God's name would an accidental glance across the forward bow of fabric cause? Let's not speculate, lest it inflame your sense of propriety. . . if you live in Ulm.)

The kooky kids keep this a secret, going to their respective parents' houses, giving the audience less than zero indication that they have consummated their marriage in any way. Now remember, this is an Ed Wood movie, so that leap from electrifying stimulation in the backseat from a kiss to incidental, matter-of-factual parting should not come as a shock since Ed was not known for logic and continuity. We go through roughly half of the 76 minutes of the film watching Tommy and Helen hide their marriage from everyone, almost from themselves as all they do is fight for seven minutes, break up for 52 seconds and then rush back into one another's kung fu grip to swear their repentance for having gotten angry.

So it's hard to imagine for whom this movie is made: It's not for older viewers (i.e., anyone over 25) as parents are excoriated for having their own lives and believing their progeny (who are actually well into their twenties) should not exercise their own judgment unless it aligns with their own goals for the kids; it's not for the In Crowd, because these two stiffs are as lugubrious as someone who's left the cake out in the rain, and I don't think that I can take, 'cause it took so long to bake it, and I'll never have that recipe again--Ohh NOO! If we stretch the imagination a bit, we could say that with the addition of the one highlight, Marianna Hill as Marla, who's like the town door knob (because everybody get a turn), the film might appeal intermittently to other overstimulated youth who find the malt shop and jukebox scenes to be really keen! But even they would be worn down by the histrionics of these two married mopes.

Things don't get much better when Tommy has to deal with the turgid drag of finances when he overextends himself by buying a house for his bride and remedies the damming of his cash flow by accepting hot car renovation jobs from slimy Grimes ("guest star" Anthony Dexter), who's so bad he even "stole" Marla away from clean-cut Mike. The cad.

But the greatest scene in the film occurs very late (Spoiler Alert) when Tommy has to deliver a freshly refurbished block-long car to its new owner, and--horrors of all horrors--the old ball and chain Helen demands she go with him, sensing something is amiss. En route they are chased by cops--who in defiance of every staunchly monitored police procedure ever--actually start discharging their weapons at the couple like they are Bonnie and Clyde in gingham and Brylcreme. The obligatory STREET CLOSED barracks are there for the smashing, so our Sweet Kids Gone Astray do just that and go airborne over a cliff, pinwheeling and smashing the car to bits.

"Miraculously" as the papers spin out for us, they survive, Helen completely unscathed and Tommy with broken arm. (Are you freaking kidding me? That was a densely forested cliff and they were free falling for a good fifty yards before they smashed down like Fireball XL-5! Oh, right--it's Ed Wood.) The parents are put on trial for being negligent anal retentives, the kids are all right, and everybody goes out to dinner as one big happy family, presumably at the malt shop where Marla and Mike reconcile and vow to be good partners. . . a year from now when they're not. . . TOO YOUNG FOR MARRIAGE.

Credits roll: Harold Lloyd Jr., the son of silent film star (without the Jr.), was falsely credited in the marketing copy as making his film debut here; no, he'd already done television work and played in seven films, including two I've commented on--*Girls Town* (1959) and *Sex Kittens Go To College* (1960). Sadly he died at the age of forty in 1971. Jana Lund's real claim to fame is delivering Elvis's first screen kiss in *Loving You* (1957), then moving "upward" to appear in "High School Hell Cats* (1959) and *Frankenstein 1970* (1959) before calming down to today's film. Marianna Hill appeared in 84 television and film projects, including *High Plains Drifter* (1973) and *The Godfather II* (1974) as well as some of the most well respected TV shows historically--*Star Trek*, *Mission: Impossible*, *Batman*, *Kung Fu*, *The FBI*, *The Outer LImits*, *Perry Mason* and scores more.

*Married Too Young* is another pedantic hard slog that reminds me of the "educational" films I watched in third grade civics class to warn us away from the evils of adulthood. According to Greg Luce at Sinister Cinema, "a producer for Headliner Productions claimed that Wood was brought in to finish up the troubled production, and can be credited with the last 15 minutes or so of the completed film." That would explain the hokey "dream" sequence in which Helen is tortured with the possibility that she . . . married too young. Marketing also pitched the movie as "young marrieds experiencing marital incompatibility because of uncontrolled biological urges of immature youth." In other words, horny teenagers make bad decisions. Duh. Except it's the parents' fault because they're lazy, obsessed with social position, emotionally absent and self serving dillweeds who are dooming the future to carbon copy clones of themselves. (I was going to call them boobs, but I've learned my lesson, by golly)

So today we offer a blueprint for all you folks out there who are either pregnant, going to be, have been, have contributed to the condition through willful action or accident, or are scared stuffless at the possibility. By all means, this is a primer illustrating the Biblical injunction of First Corinthians, 7:9 that it's better to marry than to burn in Hell for all eternity with lust. Yup, that's why most people I know got hitched. . . present company excepted, and me too. Here endeth the next lesson.
Enjoy.
Jeff

I served in the North African campaign with AG. Fine soldier bit of a stick in the mud but by God knew how to fight a Panza division. We showed old Jerry what for and still home in time for Kippers and Custard.

Yeah, she's a tough old bird, Seamus.

Post #271: TRIGGER WARNING: The following commentary breaks or at least bends into submission the tradition established some months ago in a couple significant ways: It features a film freshly released on Blu-Ray and DVD this week, it's a film perhaps not suited to everyone's taste (wait, nothing unusual in that), and it offers some outrageous action involving the easily categorized living dead and its class structure; therefore, there will be blood. But get past all of that and should you have a sense of humor over the Zombie Apocalypse and the dispatching thereof, *Zombieland 2: Double Tap* (2019) is one of the most rollicking good times I've had in a while.

No beating around the brains--I laughed out loud continually and was left sated at every turn of this movie. Look, it's not Ingmar Bergman or Olivier's *Hamlet*, but for what it's attempting (and succeeding admirably), this is one no-holds-barred sequel that in my mind surpasses the first entry ten years ago. *Zombieland 2: Double Tap* updates that film as our heroes have aged, zombies have evolved, and the popular culture references come at you so fast you're still laughing at one allusion when the next arrives with subtle stealth.

I found this one an untempered full-on satire of modern love and life and American obsession that is rare in this genre. It's rather like *Shaun Of The Dead* (2004) amped up without the British reserve, a cross-country road trip bursting with insouciant survivalist determination while addressing the serious theme of what constitutes family. And technically for all the blood that is spilled (and it is a lot), there is precious little repulsive gore so often associated with zombie extermination, just your standard squibs and airy sprays of colored Lysol issuing from heads. [If you are not a fan of these films, you may find that last statement grotesque and ill mannered, but if you've sat through any of the George Romero canon, the *Resident Evil* franchise, or the televised *Walking Dead* phenomenon, you will understand it's all in good fun--and *Zombieland 2* does not go in for languid explorations of the intestinal tract as many mavens do.]

Our intrepid band are back, intact, and moving to inhabit the White House, now a decrepit moss-grown manse, sitting in shades of gray amid the waste land and scrub not very well tended to by the viral-infected. Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) are ten years older and a bit wiser in the ways of zombie extermination, though now the brood have evolved from "Homers" (stupid, slow and largely harmless, named with The Simpsons' font), "Hawkings" (smart, named after Stephen Hawking), and Ninjas (stealthy and fast) to what Columbus calls "T-800s" (largely unkillable super zombies, named after *The Terminator* franchise).

Securing themselves in the White House is fine for a time, but Wichita and Little Rock wrestle with their own demons--Wichita feeling Columbus is too attached to her when he proposes with the Hope Diamond, and Little Rock seeking freedom from the shadow of her sister--and leave the men to fend for themselves. One month later as Columbus continues to mourn the loss of his love, he and Tallahassee scrounge in a mall where they meet Madison (Zoey Deutch), the quintessential ditz who's been hiding, appropriately, in a Pinkberry ice cream franchise freezer. Accompanying them back to the White House, she promptly beds Columbus shortly before Wichita returns with news that Little Rock has left for Graceland with a stoned-out pacifist named Berkeley (Avan Jogia).

Thus begins the road trip in The Beast, a Presidential limousine pimped out with every anti-zombie defense Tallahassee can conceive. Along the way they encounter hoards of super-zombies, Albuquerque and Flagstaff (Luke Wilson and Thomas Middleditch, who are carbons of Tallahassee and Columbus) and Nevada (Rosario Dawson), the proprietor of an Elvis-themed museum and motel. To explain more of the narrative would spoil the fun of watching it unfold, but you can rest assured there are a couple high-energy showdowns, including a masterful fight sequence in fluid camera movement in seemingly one take.

But it's the chemistry of the cast that completely sold me on this film. Everyone has perfect screen time and their interactions hold the comfortable bantering of blood relatives on an extended stressful vacation. I have never been a fan of Jesse Eisenberg; in fact, I think he has been the detriment to more than a couple movies I've seen him in. But here he acts as voice-over narrator and refreshingly off-balance comrade to Woody Harrelson's crusty leader whose 'Rules" guide their every action and reaction. Now if Columbus could just correspond his clock-inspired coordinates with reality, they'd stand an even greater chance of success.

Zoey Deutch, for me, steals the show with the most animated, air-headed bravura performance as Madison, who dresses in perpetual pink and makes the stereotypical Valley Girl look like a Rhodes scholar. Tallahassee appraises her early on, "Do you know why she's still alive?... Because zombies eat brains and she ain't got any." Her perky vacuity is expertly foiled by the coolly detached, sarcastic wit of Emma Stone, who simmers through her jealousy by eviscerating zombies with a custom AR-15 carbine resembling a PWS Diablo fitted with a Spike's Tactical Havoc Launcher. (It's big mother gun.)

As I mentioned, this may not be everyone's latte special, for it's a terrific challenge balancing non-stop comedy, social satire, romance, two shots to a zombie head (more if they're the progressive mutants) and thousands of marauding staggering undead charging an idyllic haven called Babylon (or Baby Lon, as Madison misreads it), but for those who can check their own brains at the door, settle back and roll like a soccer mom's family truckster, *Zombieland 2: Double Tap* can be one spectacular joyride with one of the Zombie Apocalypse's most cohesive post-nuclear families. Though I wouldn't want to spend Thanksgiving with them, I was more than happy to invest another 99 minutes in their company.

By the way, if you watch the film, stick around and don't fast forward through all the end credits; there are three addenda with a return visit from our favorite star from the first *Zombieland* who is hawking *Garfield 3*, whose release coincided with Day Zero, the first day of the zombie apocalypse. The cameos and dialogue here are well worth the wading through credits. Sharp-eared viewers will notice allusions to another of the star's famous movies as he fights an interviewer known for pointing out what's happening in your neck of the woods.

Self-referential, nutty (up or shut up) as you can get, and unexpectedly life affirming, *Zombieland 2: Double Tap* for me was one of the few sequels I will definitely double tap for repeat viewings.
Enjoy.
Jeff

Post #272: According to the head of the Memphis Board of Censors Lloyd T. Binford in 1953, today's feature was “rotten, lewd, immoral, just a plain raw dirty picture” and the clip I've added as a substitute for the trailer, “The Heat is On,” he deemed just a “filthy dance scene.” Friends, welcome to the third film to feature Rita Hayworth after her failed marriage to Aly Khan, co-starring under adamant protest Jose Ferrer, in the midst of his second nasty divorce and his being blacklisted by HUAC--*Meet Sadie Thompson* (1953), which was banned in Memphis.

I was pining away a few posts ago over a "lost" Rita Hayworth film to wash away the stench of stinky B-films, and while *Miss Sadie Thompson* is far from a long buried picture, gaining terrific notoriety upon its release, it is most decidedly Rita as a lost soul. Columbia head Harry Cohn, long a Hayworth admirer, was eager to place Rita back in the spotlight after her four-year absence from the screen, and so held very high hopes for her reinstatement as America's pin-up girl at thirty-five. But the heavily downbeat source material from Somerset Maugham (his short story "Rain") turned out to be a big misstep as *Miss Sadie Thompson* is the third version of the story, heavily sanitized, but still powerfully gritty in its narrative and execution.

While Rita's other musical treatments tended toward the light and airy, here she is solid and earthy, her sensuality intact but her body language much more bound to the ground than lilting. And that's necessary for the character she plays--she's not an ingenue or an elegant temptress like Gilda; she's less refined by circumstance, flighty but leaden by her past which she struggles so diligently to put behind her, on a constant restless denial by distraction. She may have been through with the past, but the past is not through with her. Rita still flashes her gorgeous eyes and mane of red tousled hair as well as her athletic figure, yet now she inhabits a soul wracked with regret and fear of disclosure.

She arrives in her full splendor on location in Kauai in a white blouse and blazing red skirt, propped on luggage so that she (and those watching her approach) might take it all in as they dock. Marine Sgt. Phil O'Hara (Aldo Ray) and his men, Privates Griggs (Henry Slate), Hodges (Rudy Bond) and Edwards (Charles Bronson), get quite the eyeful as they accompany Sadie to her brief layover as her passage is quarantined for a few days. Housed in the same tropical hotel are Alfred Davidson (Jose Ferrer), son of missionaries and now on the Board of Missionaries checking on the religious progress of that work, his wife, Dr. Robert McPhail (Russell Collins), an even tempered non-judgmental physician, and his wife.

The South Seas' intense humidity and near constant rain conspire to create a fetid particle accelerator in which the passions of the Marines--who have not seen a woman in two years, let alone one as sexy and flirtatious as Sadie--the fierce independence of our girl who just wants to have fun, the unbending recalcitrant zealotry of Davidson and the scientific, enlightened tolerance of McPhail clash, smash, crash and bash against one another in violent contrasts and confrontations.

Straitjacketed by his moral single-mindedness and dogmatic bigotry, Davidson investigates Sadie's background, discovering she was a "singer" at the notorious Honolulu Emerald Club, a pure den of iniquity where men go to have a good time with good time girls. Thus armed, Davidson wages a one-man crusade against Sadie's morally corruptive influence, as she gleefully sings and dances for the sex-starved marines. Ruthless and merciless, upholding the virtues of a "good Christian," he gets her deported back to San Francisco at the behest of the governor, who buckles under Davidson's political power. Finally confronting her painful, perhaps somewhat shady past, Sadie pleads to be allowed travel to Sydney, Australia, as Phil O'Hara has been stationed there, promising her a harmonious chance at happiness as his wife. To no avail, for Davidson's long arm of "justice" pulls too strenuously.

SPOILER ALERT: A shocking plot point follows, so if you do not want to know what it is, skip this paragraph. Now. What separates this incarnation of Maugham's story for the screen is its paradox. The Production Code insisted that the more lurid aspects of the story be toned down (many critics call it "Disneyfied") so the raw graphic punch of the original story is largely lost in translation; yet it's arguably the clearest representation of Sadie's sexual assault by Davidson of the filmed versions. The conflict between sex and religion is a central theme here, obviously, as the newly pious Sadie has sought redemption, found some strange false peace in Davidson's tutelage, and then lost it through betrayal by two men, her mentor and her genuine love, bruising her soul in the process. Some pundits suggest Rita Hayworth channels some of her own personal trials through this portrayal--her own sexual assaults in Tinjuana by her father, and her perpetual use by men of power for their own egotistical gains might have added fire to her identification with Sadie as an alter ego of sorts. And she was filming during her time of healing after her third failed marriage. "I naturally am very shy ... and I suffer from an inferiority complex," she said. "Basically, I am a good, gentle person, but I am attracted to mean personalities."

END OF SPOILER: Perhaps it's not surprising that the title of the film in Brazil is "A Mulher de Satã" ("The Satan's Woman"), though that moral pronouncement may well be more ironic than accurate, befitting the perception of Davidson. We might be well to consider that the number one song in America when Sadie is singing "The Heat Is On" was "How Much Is That Doggie In The Window." And the sharp exchange between Sadie and Davidson resulting in his outright calling her "a prostitute" is said to have shocked audiences in its brutal use of language. (For historical context you might recall that such powerfully charged language and imagery were frowned upon in film--in 1939 David O. Selznick was fined $5,000 for allowing Rhett Butler to say "Damn" to a woman, and Hitchcock shocked audiences to their core in 1960 by showing a commode in *Psycho*. Television censors did not allow the word "pregnant" to be uttered on the tube until 1962 on an episode of the *Dick Van Dyke Show* ("Never Name A Duck" September 26, 1962); even Lucille Ball's pregnancy was never referred to with that offensive word.)

So anyway, how's the film?

My gut reaction was "Woo, dark." Events of the last fifteen minutes combust quickly, and the last ten minutes careen from pain to joy fast enough to constitute whiplash for me. Rita Hayworth is, of course, dazzling if damaged, and I was struck by the weight of her mannerisms, literally inhabiting the body of someone who's been through a life of tension. She is still sexy and emotive, stripped down with minimal make-up and glowing for the camera. But it's a new level of glamour present in her, a more world weary and elusive plateau of carefree abandon, for something's gaining on her character and she's done her best to show the fire that lurks beneath it all.

Jose Ferrer is hateful if somewhat one-dimensional as Davidson, rarely registering any emotion whatsoever beyond indignation. While I understand his facade, it also struck me as almost a caricature of a real person. He's a one-note scowl with everyone, not just Sadie. Aldo Ray similarly comes across as lunkish to me, a stand-in for a flesh and blood person. Both he and Ferrer (which honestly surprised me, since Ferrer's Cyrano is one of my favorite performances) adopt little facial register, their eyes always a little blank, devoid of any interaction with the other actors. This, for me, makes the denouement a little tough to believe; their fates too sudden, as if the director decided it had all gone on long enough at 99 minutes and should draw to a close.

The cinematography is lush in Technicolor, and though the movie was filmed in 3-D, which was so popular at the time, I can't imagine a scene that would benefit from it, even though a good 3-D print is out there through Twilight Time in a limited release which is now sadly sold out. (eBay has one for sale for only $999.00, but another for $35.00) *Miss Sadie Thompson* moves briskly overall, even though it offers a strange musical number as Sadie serenades a group of native kids "Hear No Evil, See No Evil," a bouncy little number that is the antithesis of *The Heat Is On*. Perhaps its intent is to subtly undermine Davidson's heavy-handed moralizing, asserting Sadie's basic "goodness" in spite of some missteps along the way. I don't know, but it just feels weird amidst the rest of the movie.

But hey, it's Rita Hayworth, so I'm disposed to focus on her in my base maleness. Oh yes, it's a melodrama to beat the band, and I rather hate being lumped in with the leering GIs who slather over Sadie as if she's a medium-rare filet mignon, but even if *Miss Sadie Thompson* is peppered with imperfections, it still stimulates the rift between the exalted and the profane, even as the odds favor forgiveness.
Enjoy.
Jeff

Post #273: Director Norman Z. McLeod worked with some of the greats in Hollywood comedy, including The Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Buster Keaton, Danny Kaye, Cary Grant and the star of today's feature, Bob Hope. But that's all small potatoes when you realize the most important factoid in his illustrious career--he hailed from Grayling, Michigan. It's always heartening when the headlines read Local Boy Makes Good, and it's even better when his contributions to cinema are memorable comedies. And while today's feature *My Favorite Spy* (1951) won't necessarily surpass the pre-code successes of The Marx Brothers' *Monkey Business* (1931) and *Horse Feathers* (1932) in my book, it's still making people laugh over sixty years after its release.

The third and final entry into Bob Hope's *My Favorite. . .* series, this one capitalizes on governmental plots, crosses and double crosses, intrigue in Tangier, and the amorous attentions of Hedy Lemarr with great support from Arnold Moss. Bob stars as burlesque comedian Peanuts White, who bears an amazing resemblance to international man of mystery Eric Augustine, a cold-hearted purveyor of mercenary secrets. You can already see the plot from here, but plots are always secondary to Bob's performances anyway, so just roll with it when Augustine is hospitalized just as he's about to purchase a million dollar microfilm and Peanuts is recruited to impersonate him.

Peanuts, by the playbook of Bob Hope vehicles, is a lovable if cowardly schlub who is pulled kicking and screaming, literally, into the service of his country after a phone call from the President from Missouri. He's schooled in Augustine's mannerisms and once in Tangier immediately finds himself dealing with Lily Dalbray (Hedy Lemarr), a darkly seductive former flame who is secretly working with Augustine's arch enemy Karl Brubaker (Francis Sullivan doing his best Sydney Greenstreet) as well as regular assassination attempts at every turn. Assisting him in Tangier is Tasso (Arnold Moss), a seasoned agent posing as his valet and keeping him on track. But even he runs into trouble when the real Augustine (Hope again) escapes the hospital and returns to confront Peanuts in Tangier.

Of course this is an exercise in reducio ad absurdum, the deterioration of order into comic chaos flouting logic and capitalizing on Peanuts' hapless ability to improvise fakery in tight situations. The comedy is ever-present, though the first half of the film tends to lag; when we hit the midway point, the action starts to move more briskly and breezily, offering some inspired bits. By the one-hour mark of the 93-minute movie, McLeod's sense of comic pacing picks up dramatically, fulfilling the promise of a madcap escapade. The frenetic last twenty minutes--complete with a fire engine chase scene driven by Hedy Lamarr with Bob hanging from its extended ladder, a classic bit of slapstick we can trace back to Laurel and Hardy's *Hob Wild* in 1930 and riffed on for years to come--seem to signal a level of hilarity that could have been sprinkled in earlier for greater comic consistency.

Interestingly, Hedy Lamarr was less than pleased with her performance in the film. Relegated as she was to playing straight-woman to Bob Hope, she was not content being just beautiful scenery. “Any girl can be glamorous,” she once said. “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” She wanted to show her comic chops as well and actively lobbied to be allowed some scenes showcasing that side of her. For her work on the film she was to be paid $125,000 for ten week, while Bob's salary was his then standard per-picture fee of $150,000. But when she saw the final cut of the film, she was dismayed that many of her comic scenes were left on the cutting room floor, as Bob commanded sway over the final print. “I didn’t think we made that great of a teaming. We didn’t look right together,” she said, refusing to do any promotional tours for the film. Hedy never forgave him, and he never forgave her, though she did appear on one of his TV specials fourteen years later.

At the time of her death in 2000, Bob recalled, "I first met Hedy at the Hollywood Canteen—she was handing out autographs…I was washing dishes. That’s not quite true—she was a regular there, and danced and talked with the servicemen, cooked and served the food. My doing the dishes–now, that’s true. Not a very good billing then, but I shared equal billing with her in our film My Favorite Spy in 1951. I played two parts, and both of them were Hedy’s lovers. How about that for overtime?"

The supporting cast is first rate with John Archer, Luis Van Rooten, Frank Faylen (Dobie Gillis's father), and the stalwart muscleman Mike Mazurki. Cited by many viewers as one of Bob Hope's best, *My Favorite Spy* gains an 86% rating of 4 or five stars on Amazon, so it's sure to please fans. While I actually prefer the nutball craziness of the Road pictures, this *Favorite* entry is probably the strongest of the three with just a little fourth-wall breaking. Hedy Lamarr is gorgeous as usual, but I surely would have enjoyed seeing her cut loose a bit more as the lost footage promises; Bob Hope is certainly strong enough to allow a little sharing of the spotlight with his smart and sensual leading lady, as we can tell she enjoys slapstick in the final twenty minutes.

All things considered, *My Favorite Spy* will be a welcome diversion until April when the new James Bond film makes its appearance. Bond may be a little more suave than Peanuts, but he won't have Hedy Lamarr.
Enjoy.
Jeff

Post #274: Don't you just love movies that make you feel stupid? Now, I'm not talking about stupid movies like some of those I've posted in the past couple weeks that rot your socks and atrophy your capacity to count to fifteen on your fingers and toes. No, I'm referring to Cinema (capitalized to indicate exalted intelligensia) whose viewing strips you of any pretension of basic brain power, even as you remove your shoes once you've realized your fingers don't add up to fifteen, even on a good day. Such Films tend to make even the most pious Amish elder scream, "WTF?" (Of course, I can't prove that, as I haven't made an extended study of the Amish, but I'm hopeful I've made my point.) And so it is with today's feature, Jean-Luc Godard's *Prenom Carmen (First Name: Carmen)*(1983), a very loose tranfiguration of Bizet's opera (I think it was called *Carmen*, but now this film has me questioning everything).

Granted, my limited exposure to Jean-Luc Godard's oeuvre didn't help as I struggled to dismantle his vision, wishing I had been watching with Alan Turing, who helped crack the Germans' Enigma Machine. Here's what I've been able to decipher: Uncle Jean (Godard playing himself), a self-proclaimed washed up director who spends much of his time feigning illness in a hospital, is approached by his niece Carmen (Maruschka Detmers, on whom the filmmakers saved tons of money on wardrobe since she's completely nude during much of the picture) with a proposition: She wishes to take residence in his seaside apartment in Trouville to shoot a movie.

But Carmen is in truth a manipulative albeit attractive little baggage who plans to use the movie as a front for a bank heist and a ruse to get her uncle back into filmmaking for her own purposes. The robbery is comic in its ineptitude as patrons nonchalantly watch it all transpire, the cleaning lady mopping up victims' blood in methodical detachment, and Carmen falling in love with a bumbling, incompetent bank guard Joseph (Jacques Bonnaffe). Interspersing, or cross-cutting, this thread are scenes of a group practicing Beethoven's late quartets in rigid precision, our focus being drawn to a violinist Claire (Myriem Roussel) who, we discover, will become a love interest for Joseph. Carefully toss in some lingering shots of the ocean breaking on the shore, and you get the picture.

Back at Uncle Jean's apartment, Carmen admits to an incestuous relationship with her Uncle when she was young, warning Joseph, "If I love you, that's the end of you." They invest much of their time together. . . being together, though the "relationship" is singularly tumultuous, casually nude without a hint of eroticism, and stoically dispassionate, at least on Carmen's part. So when Joseph is arrested for his complicity in the robbery, it's Bye Bye Mister American Pie as far as she's concerned. She has other concerns, as the heist was a utilitarian job to gain seed money for a bigger plot to kidnap a wealthy manufacturer or his daughter. Cue the ocean breaking on rock formations. Gulls squawk, and the band--or rather the stringed group plays on.

Acquitted in no small part due to the defense of the fetching Claire, Joseph returns to Carmen, who now despises him but persists in wearing no panties and displaying her overgrown afro'd pudenda in the camera's foreground, while he is crestfallen with desire for her. Ostracized from the gang preparing the kidnapping, Joseph's protestations move Carmen to proposition the bellboy in front of Joseph, who tries to force his indignation and passion on Carmen in the shower. Good Lord, where are the shots of the ocean and the Beethoven practice when you need them?

Uncle Jean "directs" the kidnapping in the hotel where Carmen and her cohorts are staying, one of the nurses attending to Uncle Jean in the hospital is now his script girl, the string quartet play their Beethoven in the restaurant where the action takes place (OH! That's why we were following them through the film!), the police show up, having followed Joseph, and the whole place erupts in mayhem and gunplay, leaving Joseph to shoot Carmen who presumably in her last reverie asks, "What it is called when the innocents are on one side and the guilty on the other, when everything has been lost but you are still breathing and the sun is still rising?" The answer is "Daybreak." Cut to black and the words "In memoriam small movies."

*Sigh.* One thing I am sure of: the film lasts 85 minutes. And it's subtitled. (Wait, that's two things. . . I told you it made me question everything.)

So I am reminded of the great quote from *Pee-Wee's Big Adventure* (1985): "What's the significance? I DON'T KNOW!" (And if that doesn't disqualify me from hobnobbing with the ranks of the jaw-jutting, mah-teeny swilling patricians, stick around, I may yet sink lower.) Harnessing all my code-breaking skills, my extended college exposure through countless Italian and Swedish Cinematic Symbolism classes to unveil the cryptic and esoteric, and my vivid imagination, let's go exploring, Kids.

I think *First Name: Carmen* is about the inability to connect significantly in the "modern age." One of the film's main motifs is "holes" in all their forms--a lot of talk about physical caverns (Carmen says early on in the film, "When sh*t's worth money, the poor won't have a**holes," and Uncle Jean, who has a predilection for the anterior cavity, says in another context, "Young people are crazy! They have great memories, but they forget anything. They're in a black hole"), Uncle Jean rends his sleeve and asks for a wardrobe mistress to close the hole, and Joseph refers to jail as a sexual metaphor for entrapment (""Now I know why jail is called a hole"). So the holes represent emptiness, a lack of filling, which perfectly encapsulates the "love" exercised throughout the film--it is hollow, incapable of being holding substance.

Is the entire film Uncle Jean's dream while he's in the hospital? The last scene opening the film is the nurse (later Jean's script girl) turning out his light and ensuring he's comfortable. Since he has been working diligently on his "new" screenplay (two lines at a time--all he has to show for one day is, ''Badly seen, badly said.'' Says the nurse, who later turns up as Uncle Jean's script girl, ''You've worked hard today!'')--is *First Name: Carmen* his subconscious working out of his plotlines, making himself the star or focal point of the dream? If so, he has perfectly captured the wispy drift of the sleep of dreams, waves breaking, string quartet practicing, his niece floating from scene to scene unmoored emotionally, nude and uninhibited in his fantasy, he back directing. . . Is his mind reconciling his own lack of connection to the world, his critique of youthful indiscretions and irrational youthful passion? His aphorisms dropped casually throughout the film hint at disillusionment, ''The police are to society what dreams are to people,'' and ''The goal of classic capitalism was to produce the best goods possible . . . In today's world . . . the machines have started to produce goods nobody needs, from atom bombs to plastic cups.'' Perhaps the concluding word of the film suggests it has been the ebb and flow of his brainwaves like the ocean approaching "Daybreak" where another day offers new opportunities.

Beats me, Maynard. It's up to you to guess, I suppose. But it does seem to be an alternately comic and tragic exploration of emotional disconnection. Apparently the making of the film was not without its own communication issues. Marschka Detmers, just twenty-one when filming began, found Godard ill tempered and too sparse in his direction. Godard, conversely, found Detmers "too disobedient," as she would not listen to Beethoven or study the statuary of Rodin as the director required in preparation for her role. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard similarly found Godard "disturbingly vague about his wishes."

Detmers said of her audition: ". . .in the case of Godard of course, you don't have to be told twice to go and see him. I went to see him. I didn't know him at that time. Godard, I knew his name but I was very out of touch with what was going on in cinema. I had just arrived from Holland. And I remember that I went there really... I was... it was really an audition like any other for me. I had no idea. I arrived in his office at Neuilly. He was sat behind a desk and behind his huge black glasses. He gave the impression that he was bored to see me. It was about the most boring thing that he could imagine. And that's how it went... So, I arrived in his office I had to make a "hmmm" sound before he would look at me. Then he looks at me like this. "Ah, hello Miss. Do you have any photos?" I gave him a photo, he asked me to write my name on the back. And then it was: "Right, well goodbye". It was really as if I had made no impression at all, not at all, except that I felt extremely useless at that moment. Really incapable of prompting any interest from anyone."

So *First Name: Carmen* is less interested in pure narrative storytelling and perhaps more concerned with thoughtful deconstruction. With Carmen's life goal "to show people what a woman does to a man" and find an answer to the query "Why does man exist?" we ponder the significance of the tides--is Carmen a force of nature, eradicating every trace of herself like waves eating away at rock formations through slow erosion? Perhaps the plaintive gravel of Tom Waits' song *Ruby's Arms* sung while Joseph desperately tries to feel the static on the hotel television says it all best in the pain of lost love:

The morning light has washed your face
And everything is turning blue now
Hold on to your pillow case
There's nothing I can do now
As I say goodbye to Ruby's arms
You'll find another soldier
And I swear to God by Christmas time
There'll be someone else to hold you

There's some undeniable power in *First Name: Carmen* if you can just get past the urge to figure out its intent.
Enjoy.
Jeff

OK, so I dug up and watched Zombieland Double Tap. It was fun. But I must have been in the wrong state of mind when I watched it. I giggled here and there. But my only belly laugh, was when the blond bimbo kissed the dash. I'll wait a month or two and try it again.

But I agree wholeheartedly. Mini Vans are just wrong.

Space, sorry, old sport. Comedy is really subjective. But the Seat Belt Rule is well advised.

Post #275: Prepare to pick up your jaw from the floor, not because today's feature is awe-inspiring but because I am actually commenting on a Hallmark movie. Though perhaps my relative sanity has always remained questionable to you, this may push me over the edge in your estimation. So I'll ask your kind indulgence as I qualify my choice for today, *The Flamingo Rising* (2001) starring Brian Benben, Elizabeth McGovern and William Hurt, based on one of my favorite novels by Larry Baker (I have two autographed copies of it in different editions--first edition and advanced reader's copy). You can easily find the film on Amazon Prime--and VHS!

Okay: It's not the new standard for Hallmark weepies. There are no members of a royal family, no doe-eyed chocolatiers who run a quaint country inn in Cutebooty, Vermont, no inexpressibly bland hunky lumberjacks or vintners coming off a tragic loss of a spouse with a spunky but wise seven-year-old in tow, and no crusty but benign old park bench parker who dispenses aphorisms to the pigeons with supernatural insights into the human condition. *The Flamingo Rising* has its roots in the old Hallmark Hall Of Fame offerings before the Seasonal Affective Romance Machine started cranking out heartwarming yuppie slides that end with a pan to the sky.

Directed by Martha Coolidge, the narrative follows Hubert T. Lee (Brian Benben from HBO's series *Dream On*), a free spirited dreamer shaken to his core by what he's seen in the Korean War. Dedicated to celebrating life in an effort to erase from his mind the carnage of war, he adopts two Korean babies, promising them a life which will be grand and glorious and life embracing. It's the 1960s when our story begins and Hubert T. Lee constructs his ultimate home--the Flamingo Drive-In, offering the Lees residence inside "The Great Wall Of Life," Florida's largest movie screen. Joining him are his wife Edna (the radiant Elizabeth McGovern, now of *Downton Abbey* fame) and his adopted children Abraham (Christopher Larkin, who acts as narrator) and Louise Janine (Olivia Oguma).

And like any good tragicomedy we need conflict, here supplied by Turner Knight [West in the novel] (William Hurt) whose funeral parlor rests directly across the street from the Flamingo, a constant thorny reminder to Hubert T. Lee that death is always near. Thus begins the feud between the effusive showman who blasts "Oogam Boogam" from the drive-in's loud speakers while the staid funeral director strains to mete out some semblance of decorum during his serious ceremonies. Only Edna, the calm at the eye of the storm and the empathetic moral center of the story, has the strength and propriety to rein in her flamboyant yet quietly insecure husband and mediate the affection between Abraham and Turner's daughter Grace (Erin Broderick).

The three adult principals are inspired choices for Hubert, Edna and Turner, and they provide the backbone of the production, with Coolidge's fine eye for period details. Their scenes, especially those involving Elizabeth McGovern, sparkle and shine with humanity, even as Brian Benben's boyish exuberance yields to a fragile adult married to illusion and avoidance. The story dances through set pieces, vignettes that force confrontations between life and loss, as well as a highly compressed 98 minutes can allow. And anyone who's read the novel can attest, the final effect moves us to focus more on loss than gain--particularly what has been lost in the cinematic translation of the story.

Taken in isolation, without benefit of the knowledge of how good the story can be, *The Flamingo Rising* entertains with charming performances and some solid lessons on guilt, redemptive forgiveness and the celebration of life's blessings, if only in a snapshot, which is curious considering that the screenplay was authored by Baker himself and Richard Russo. The pivotal importance of Alice (Angela Bettis), a sophisticated employee of The Flamingo, is diminished almost to the point of being vaguely ancillary, near invisible, and much of her dramatic importance to Abraham's growth is blunted severely. Consequently, Baker's commentary on life in the crucible of fire that was 1968 is largely forsaken in the interests of time, and the characters' development is told in shorthand.

But again, a film adaptation's inability to live up to the source novel's power is standard operating procedure in most cases. Our mental pictures and long-range investment in a book allow for more reflection and individuated, very personal responses. And *The Flamingo Rising* falls prey to that. So uncovering the merits of the film alone offers some rewards beyond the leading stars' investment in their roles: The neon cowboy beckoning patrons to enter The Flamingo is a terrific evocation of the time, the coming-of-age storyline is honest and touching, the supporting cast of characters is just the right level of eccentric and colorful, and there are moments of great poignancy sprinkled among the comic. It's a nice family picture, though the tragic elements might actually cause a lump in the throat, especially at sunset.

If the film falls short of expectations, I would suggest a central drawback falls on the portrayal of Abraham. Christopher Larkin's one-note performance shows a lack of experience and emotional recognition, resulting in a mechanical reading of our protagonist's character. This flatness basically flattens out Abraham's color and by extension seems to make Benben's Hubert work overtime to compensate. His casting is flat-out a misstep, and an important one since he is in nearly every scene. Similarly, Polly (Lorie Baker) needs to be more vivacious as Abraham's secret crush and major pull for concession stand patrons. So many grace notes filled with missed opportunities.

On balance, though, Hallmark's version is a solid, if somewhat facile, journey into the heart of family. It offers lessons on commitment, joy, conflict resolution, personal freedom, the pains of maturation and acceptance of responsibility for our actions, and the coming awareness of life's transitory nature. As sweet and mannered as it is, how I wish the filmmakers had been allowed the budget and time to produce an extended adaptation of the novel, fleshing out the characters' secret lives more fully; the result would have been richer, funnier and more heartbreaking than it already is.

Martha Coolidge clearly understands how to balance the emotions and capture the rapturous innocence of our characters while offering a soundtrack of classic sixties rock 'n' roll that lends its own brightness to the color of the film. She weaves her scenes deftly and gains wonderful support from Benben, McGovern and Hurt, who all offer an open invitation to enjoy your time spent with them. In the words of *The Washington Post*'s critic Tom Shales at the time of the film's release, "A film like *Flamingo* is worth a dozen *Survivors* and is probably more 'real' even though wholly fabricated. It's more real because it connects more directly to life and to human joys and sorrows. How nice it is. How sweet it is. How beautiful it is."
Enjoy.
Jeff

Post #276: Let's keep things light by offering today's feature about the invasion of the United States and the potential for utter and complete annihilation through the invention and explosion of the dreaded Q Bomb, a hundred times more powerful than the H Bomb. Like the classic *Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb* (1964), today's feature, *The Mouse That Roared* (1959) holds the fate of the world in the hands of Peter Sellers in three roles. So duck under your desk, cover your head with newspapers, and watch for the blinding flash because we're off to the movies.

Director Jack Arnold (known for his 1950s sci-fi classics including *It Came From Outer Space* (1953) and *Tarantula* (1957), both of which I commented on here) signals his comic intent with the opening studio logo, Columbia's Lady Liberty lifting her skirt to reveal a mouse, from which she flees from her pedestal, her torch still hovering in the air. Arnold never told Columbia big wigs about this joke, fearing they would not approve, but it received such a thunderous laugh from the audience the joke remains.

Join us as we take in the visual splendor of the smallest country in the world, the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, resting in simple 12th century cultural isolation of the French Alps. Enjoy the heady bouquet of its chief and only export, Pinot Grand Fenwick, which has allowed the quiet agrarian society to flourish lo, these many years under the benign leadership of the Grand Duchess Gloriana XII (Peter Sellers). Sit in on the planning session of Grand Fenwick's Prime Minister, the crafty Count Rupert of Mountjoy (also Peter Sellers, in his best parody of Sir Alec Guinness) as an unscrupulous California vintner has usurped their dominance in the American market with a knock-off, Pinot Grand Enwick, thus rendering our host country impoverished. Be one of the first tourists to discover the Count's plans to declare war on America, then promptly surrender to take advantage of the US Cold War tradition of rebuilding their defeated's economy, returning Grand Fenwick to financial prosperity.

While in the Duchy, you and your party can accompany field warden, invasion leader and all around quiet, even-tempered Tully Bascombe (Peter Sellers once again) and his army of twenty volunteers dressed in chain mail and equipped with crossbows and arrows, as they take New York by storm--during a scheduled air raid drill which has left the metropolis as empty as a politician's promises. Take in the such sights as the New York harbor, the Empire State Building and Central Park in startling openness, all New Yorkers underground, leaving no one to whom Sully and his troops can surrender. It's a prize package worth . . . your weight in comedy wine casks.

Recalling the inventor of the Q-Bomb, Dr. Alfred Kokintz (David Kossoff) has housed himself and his daughter Helen (Jean Seberg) in New York, Tully and our intrepid band of medieval knights meet and greet the professor, resign themselves to declaring a win over the US, invite him and his daughter to join them as hostages, and take possession of his football-shaped Q-Bomb, which buzzes and boinks and whirs menacingly at any movement. With the blustery US army General Snippet (MacDonald Parke) in tow, they all return to the Duchy of Grand Fenwick victorious in their defeat of the superpower.

Far more a wondrously absurd fable satirizing Cold War politics than the dark masterpiece of Kubrick's *Dr. Strangelove* to be released in another five years, *The Mouse That Roared* nonetheless entertains in its every scene. Aided and abetted by a great supporting cast including Leo McKern (in my estimation the best Number 2 in *The Prisoner* series), William Harnell (the revered First Doctor Who), and Monty Landis. Stir in the opening credit sequence designed by Maurice Binder (the mastermind behind most of the title sequences in the James Bond franchise), and a stirring score by Edwin Astley (*Danger Man*, *The Champions*, *The Adventures of Robin Hood* which is referenced in "battle" sequences, as well as myriad film scores) and you have the makings of a classic.

Of course, it's Peter Sellers' game, hilariously lampooning Queen Elizabeth as the Grand Duchess who refers to her prime minister as Bobo and believes the United States is overseen by "Mr. Coolidge." It's a tour de force in triplicate for Sellers who was inspired to play multiple parts by his hero Alec Guinness's roles in *Kind Hearts And Coronets* (1949). His training in improvisation and his great success with Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe in *The Goon Show* contributed to a fast and economical set of performances that lingers long after the film has ended.

Jean Seberg, on the other hand, fares far less well as Helen, the professor's daughter and Tully's love interest, her past direction by Otto Preminger inhibiting her ability to take direction from the much easier, low key instruction of Jack Arnold. While Sellers' best work, Arnold found, was presented in the first take as his delivery and energy were most fresh, Seberg required upward from 20 takes for comparatively simple scenes, causing Arnold to postpone scenes until the next day. In her defense, Preminger, quite the perfectionist in his directorial style, was known to browbeat Seberg prior to shooting to ensure she gave the level of characterization he required in *Saint Joan* (1957) and *Bonjour Tristesse* (1958), the two films Seberg made prior to this picture; this left her terribly gunshy when dealing with the gentler, more accommodating Arnold. As *The Mouse That Roared* is only her third film, and her first not directed by Preminger, in many ways she was a novice "unlearning" the methods that Preminger had molded into her. Still, she and Peter Sellers became close friends and remained so through the years.

*The Mouse That Roared* is a slight 83 minutes, but really that is ample time to skewer the politics and perceived egotism of the Cold War, clipping along with a sweet mixture of slapstick and classical British understatement. It's harmless fun for the entire family sure to entertain all ages. The cinematography and playful spirit make this a spirited entertainment for a cloudy, rainy, inclement afternoon when the only pressing issue is remaining warm and in good humor. Like just about any Michigan afternoon in January or February.

Even though the mouse roars, scaring Lady Liberty from her Columbia pedestal, the mouse is harmless, as our Lady returns to claim her torch as the film fades to black. Clearly this little white mouse welcomes all takers.
Enjoy.
Jeff

Love this movie. It's just good silly fun.

Post #277: You're watching *Love It Or Lump It* on HDTV, America's favorite home renovation channel. It appears Hickory and Daybed have their hands full in today's episode as they work with three fussy vampires whose idea of style ranges somewhere between Classical Renaissance and Stately Colonial Ick. With a modest budget of $421 they're looking for a complete overhaul of their bathroom, kitchen, sitting room and basement wreck room with a color scheme to which the word "garish" hardly encapsulates. Can our professional designer and realtor rise to meet the challenge, and will our night dwelling home owners. . . Love It Or Lump It?

The featured still for today's film may easily scare you away from its source material, but I can assure you it's much more harmless than the shot allows. True, today's feature IS a vampire movie, not my usual cup of plasma, but *What We Do In The Shadows* (2014) is actually a sly, goofy mockumentary from New Zealand. In much the same zany but deadpan spirit as *This Is Spinal Tap* (1984), *Best In Show* (2000) and *A Mighty Wind* (2003), this venture into the underground society of modern vampires is less a scream of horror and more one of laughter.

Written and directed by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, who also play lead vampires Vladislav the Poker, aged 862, and Viago Von Dorna Schmarten Scheden Heimburg (né von Blitzenberg), aged 379, respectively, the film rounds out the "protagonists" with Jonathan Brugh as Deacon Brucke, aged 183, and the Nosferatu-inspired Ben Fransham as Petyr, aged 8,000. And, oh, what a lively deadly group they are too, cohabiting in a flat in the Wellington suburb of Te Aro. As our documentarians, equipped with crucifixes and a pledge from their subjects that they will not be eaten or attacked while filming, follow our undead through their nightly pursuits and housekeeping (Deacon is particularly lax in doing the dishes, much to the distress of Vlad and Viago who call a house meeting over it), we learn how challenging it can be to be dead on your feet and still alive for all eternity. Viago complains to Deacon, "You are a cool guy, but you are not pulling your weight in the flat..." To which Deacon responds, "Oh, I'm glad to hear that I'm cool."

Through their bus trips into town and their interactions we learn each of our principals is dealing with his own internal conflicts. Vlad continues to be haunted by his memories of his arch-enemy, The Beast, whom we meet late in the film at the Unholy Masquerade, a festive gathering sponsored by local vampires and witches. Viago wrestles with his missed opportunity to be reunited with his love, Katherine, after his familiar used the wrong postal rate on his coffin, delaying his reunion until after Katherine had already married. And Deacon, still stinging from the stigma of being outcast both as a former Nazi and a vampire, generally picks fights with just about anyone who crosses his path, indicative of his "young rebel" status. Petyr, conversely, does little beyond resting in his concrete sanctuary with the social graces of a rabid hedgehog.

Resting comfortably at their periphery is Deacon's familiar, Jackie (Jackie Van Beek), a married mother who yearns for eternal life, though Deacon resists turning her into a vampire much to her consternation. It is she who brings two "virgins" to dinner with her hosts (as the main course), though neither turns out to fulfill that criterion ("You were a virgin when we were seeing each other," Jackie breathlessly accuses Nick, an intended meal and former boyfriend, who responds, "Yeah, I was twelve"). The young woman victim was selected because she insulted Jackie back in elementary school. Nick (Cori Gonzalez-Macuer) is turned by Petyr and frequents the flat for the remainder of the film with his human friend Stu (Stu Rutherford), whose company the vampires enjoy more than Nick. A computer analyst, Stu introduces Viago to the internet and schools them in computer usage. Vlad particularly does "his dark bidding on the internet--"I'm bidding on a table."

Relying almost completely on improvisation with over 125 hours of footage, the film is an ensemble piece though arguably the anchor is Taika Waititi's Viago, a self-effacing peace-keeper who charms and mediates the volatility exhibited between Vlad and Deacon, who are fond of levitating and hissing in frustration at one another. Waititi and Clement wrote 150 pages of a script for the film but secreted them away from cast and crew to allow maximum spontaneity during filming. The result gives the genuine feel of looseness and surprise with some judicious editing of scenes that might otherwise lag. According to Waititi, the writing of the script took seven years, and editing the final print took one full year; it was derived from three different cuts--one consisting of jokes, one of straight narrative and finally a mix of the two, which is the final film.

But it's the almost coldly rational approach to the subject matter that makes *What We Do In The Shadows* such a fun romp. Everything is played straight, an "objective" chronicle of the daily grind when you have sharpened fangs and you occasionally hit a main artery by mistake, causing such a mess. And of course there are the taunting run-ins with the local werewolves, a decent lot of guys until the full moon surfaces, and then they're just hell to deal with. The effects are routinely special yet unobtrusive and always good for a startled laugh. For horror fans, it's a delight, riffing on the conventions of legend and popular culture appropriation, strangely "humanizing" (in the best possible way) these classic caricatures. For mockumentary lovers, its handheld camera and Viago's subtle mugging directly into the cameras treat their subjects with respectful awe--making *What We Do In The Shadows* the most heavily pirated film at 277,000 downloads,in Auckland.

It's also slyly touching when Viago is reunited with Katherine, now 96 ("Some people freak out a bit about the age difference. They think, 'What's this 96-year-old lady doing with a guy four times her age?'"), and Vlad faces down The Beast, as our protagonists struggle to prevent Stu from being eaten as the only human at the Unholy Masquerade. Altogether, *What We Do In The Shadows* has earned an impressive 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, Simon Abrams' praise on the Roger Ebert site, saying, "*What We Do in the Shadows* is an irrepressibly charming B-movie that never over-stays its welcome, and is both conceptually clever and admirably well-executed," and holds 4.5 stars out of 5 based on 5,025 Amazon reviewers. That's mighty impressive for a gang of guys several centuries old.

They're creepy and they're kooky, mysterious and spooky, they're altogether ooky, but they're not the Addams Family. They may have questionable taste in their decoration sense, but take a look at their house from the outside and you'll get a peek at Peter Jackson's (*The Lord Of The Rings* trilogy as well as *The Hobbit*) former office. It's 86 minutes and $1.6 million well spent on a bloody good time. Just leave the kids and the french fries home.
Enjoy.
Jeff

Post #278: What walks down stairs alone or in pairs and makes a slinkity sound? A spring, a spring, a marvelous thing, It gives a big lift when wrapped as a gift, a very likable toy. Its falling in place brings a smile to your face, something kids can enjoy. But it ain't Slinky, Slinky, for fun THAT's a wonderful toy. But what we have here is a failure to communicate with a hijacked android. And if your name is Vaseegaran or Sana, after the evil researcher Bohra gets ahold of it, you had better not be within several miles of it because this robot is one bad mother--shut your mouth! But it'll give you the shaft! Friends, strap yourself in, because you have never seen a more whacked out, bizarre genre-bending action movie than today's feature, *Enthiran (The Robot)* (2010) from India.

Listen: This is no idle hyperbole I'm spouting here. *Enthiran* is unlike any other movie I've seen with the possible exception of *The Happiness of The Katakuris* (2001), a Japanese musical horror comedy which I will probably comment on at a later date. First and foremost *Enthiran* is a high-powered sci-fi action movie. . . with a lot of comic moments, an extensive body count, a weird romantic triangle, and six fantastically elaborate interruptive music videos that push its full running time to 177 minutes with an intermission. It is also the most expensive Indian movie made to that date, an estimated $40 million American, and stands as the fourth highest grossing Tamil movie of all time (Rs 256 crore, or $2,838,771,200 American, worldwide). *Enthiran* was also the only Tamil film featured on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) list of the 50 best films of 2010.

Now I'll be the first to admit near total ignorance of Bollywood films, having seen perhaps only one or two. So perhaps this is par for the course, but initially I balked at a nearly three-hour tour of cloned robots. . . until I sat down and watched it, at which time I rationalized that three hours blew past me in a giddy display of special effects and stranger things than I've encountered in some time. True, stripped of the glitz and inventiveness of its set pieces, the plot itself is straight out of the Jack Arnold B-movie cache--a brilliant scientist creates a sophisticated android while alienating the affection of his gorgeous girlfriend, and incurs the wrath of his former professor by surpassing his teacher's abilities, setting off a personal vendetta in the heart of the greedy, power-mad mentor. But who cares? The meltdown is so freaking fun, jettison the analysis, damn the torpid Frankenstein comparatives--full speed ahead.

Dr. Vaseegaran (Rajinikanth) has toiled ten intense years perfecting his android Chitti (also played by Rajinikanth), the next generation in artificial intelligence, even as he has kept at bay his relationship with his girlfriend Sana (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, the face of Coca Cola South Asia and widely regarded as the most beautiful woman in the world with over 17,000 websites devoted to her). In an effort to test the limits between man and machine, Vaseegaran develops the technology to allow Chitti to experience human emotions. But this proves to be too successful as Chitti falls in love with Sana whom he protects unconditionally. To legitimize his advances, Vaseegaran seeks the validation and licensure from the scientific community, AIRD, but Dr. Bohra, Vaseegaran's jealous former professor, is a lone hold-out refusing final certification--with dastardly plans of his own for Chitti, as his own experiments have woefully failed.

Disenchanted and disillusioned, Vaseegaran disassembles Chitti and tosses away his parts. When Bohra gets his evil hands on Chitti and implants a red destruction chip in his system, allowing him access to the baser emotion of humankind like violence, egoism and narcissistic rage, the once kindhearted android morphs into a megalomaniac, Chitti v. 2.0, bent on possessing Sana entirely and mowing down anyone who gets in his way, including Dr. Bohra. And of course, being a classic Bollywood feature, as I've come to learn, we're treated to extensive, expensive, lavishly choreographed music videos (six in all sprinkled between dramatic sequences) of songs with catchy resilience by A. R. Rehman. The lyrics will probably not remain in your memory beyond your first hearing of them, but the sheer weirdness of their placement in the film and the physical sensuality of Aishwarya Rai Bachchan in myriad hairstyles and costumes will more than make up for it. The videos are jarring at first--imagine Mel Gibson and Danny Glover bursting into tangential commentary via thrumping beats and gyrating dancers in the middle of *Lethal Weapon* (1987). But after the third one, I kind of got used to them.

*Enthiran* is not afraid of bending logic or catapulting over convention. Evidence of this can be found in every frame, but several scenes are ready made for facepalming. A fight sequence in the congested space of a roaring train, an extended dialogue between Chitti and--I'm not kidding--marauding mosquitoes, and a ten-minute action chase on a freeway to rival *The Matrix 2* all make for jaw-dropping laughter and double takes.

If the first half of the film did not grab your attention--and why not? What were you looking for?--the second half sparks up the action with mercurial speed and more energy than you'll find in a particle accelerator. It whirs around you manically, as Chitti v. 2.0 starts production on a literal army of clones in his own image. No spoilers here, but the last twenty-or-so minutes are an all-out assault with special effects and an anarchic sense of humor the likes of which put this film in the Wow Factor of the first *Matrix* (1999) before the franchise got leaden with its own sense of urgency.

For many reasons *Enthiran* stands as the confluence of expert talent: Director Shankar Shanmugam, one of India's highest paid directors whose followers are quick to call him "genius," is presently preparing his final film, *Indian 2*, a sequel to his huge success *Indian* (1996), so that he might concentrate less on his 58-year career in film and more on politics. Shivaji Rao Gaekwad (Rajnikanth) who plays Vaseegaran and Chitti (both incarnations) has starred in over 100 films and is treated as a god by his Tamil fans, even though he himself is not Tamil. He’s actually billed as “SUPERSTAR Rajni” in his movies and the second highest-paid actor in Asia after Jackie Chan. He was conferred with the coveted Padma Bhushan in 2000, and Padma Vibhushan in 2016. In 2014, Rajinikanth was conferred with the Centenary Award for `Indian Film Personality of the Year` at the 45th International Film Festival of India. He claims meditation as his key to energy, and has said, "The happiest men in this world are child, lunatic and a sage." These guys are no slouches.

But the most sought-after woman in Bollywood is Aishwarya Rai Bachchan (Ash), the first Indian actor to be a member of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival. She is also the latest member of the elite L'Oreal Dream Team, joining renowned international beauties Catherine Deneuve and Andie MacDowell as L'Oreal's international ambassador. Best known for her striking blue-green eyes, this Miss World 1994 has become an icon all over South Asia and has a cult following in Pakistan while being the most photographed woman in India. Selective in her film roles, she has said, "I am not comfortable about kissing or nudity. [She claims she has never filmed a kissing scene and has no intentions of doing so] I am clear about what I want. I'll work only with good directors who'll offer me two-dimensional roles. The director and the role are most important. . . . It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice." The youngest actress to receive the Padmi Shri award, the fourth highest civilian honor, from the Government of India for her contribution to cinema, Ash was surprised to learn she earned a special Hollywood honor: "Wow! Me the most bankable Bollywood star in Hollywood? Thank you! I must confess that any acknowledgment of hard work makes me feel content. In all humility I want to thank all those who feel I'm bankable." You're welcome, though you deserve it.

*Enthiran* will give you pause if you want a comedy, an out-of-control action picture, a little obsessive romance, or extravagant musical. Yes, it's nearly three hours, but it's much more infectious fun than watching a Slinky walk down a flight of stairs. . . alone or in pairs. Space and Seamus, CD Man--this is a must watch. And for everybody else​--just do a Youtube search for the whole movie or find a nice dubbed or subtitled version on Amazon. No swearing outside of a couple funny excremental oath utterances, just two shots of blood and some groin kicks, so it's almost fun for the whole nuclear family.
Enjoy.
Jeff

And now I've got the Theme From Shaft stuck in my head.

Post #279: Well, here's another fine mess you've gotten me into. For pure unadulterated joy, you can not beat today's feature *Block-Heads* (1938) with two of my heroes, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Considered a little controversial when it was released, due to the audience's failure to understand black humor, *Block-Heads* nonetheless continues to surprise and delight even upon multiple viewings, still standing as one of my favorites in the Laurel and Hardy canon.

Comic Harry Langdon was one of Stan's good friends, and as such added to the script of this film, borrowing heavily from his own short *Soldier Man* (1926). Look closely at the caricatures in the opening title card, as Langdon drew them especially for the film. We open on Stan, still guarding the trenches even though World War I has been over for twenty years--no one has informed Stan of this fact--and so he ends up in the old soldiers' home with a newspaper article covering his duty. Looking for a comfortable seat, Stan finds an abandoned wheelchair and after several attempts to negotiate its support for an leg amputee, he simply sits on his foot, giving the appearance he's lost his leg. This running gag, dark as it is, seems daring today as his friend Oliver mistakenly believes he's lost his leg in way and overcome with pity, carries Stan to his car to treat him to a sumptuous celebratory reunion meal.

All of the Laurel and Hardy trademarks are on full display her: Oliver being "happily" married for ten years to shrewish Mrs. Hardy (Minna Gombell, originally cast for Mae Busch), the laborious climb up thirteen floors to their apartment (and back down repeatedly), a feud with Finn (their favorite nemesis Jimmy Finlayson), an improvised fight with a bratty neighborhood kid (Tommy "Butch" Bond) playing football in the hall, the inevitable misunderstanding with Mrs. "Toots" Gilbert (Patricia Ellis), comely wife of outrageously jealous big game hunter Billy Gilbert, and a banquet of Laurel and Hardy signature moves, including "white magic" (Stan pulls down the shadow of a window shade and smokes a "pipe" made from his fist and thumb), the hat doffing and general destruction.

Also based on two of their earlier shorts, *We Faw Down* (1928) and *Unaccustomed As We Are* (1929), *Block-Heads* offers quintessential Stan and Ollie. To capture his amiable amble, Stan, who produced many of their shorts with a high polish, took the heels off his shoes (usually army shoes) which allowed him to shuffle; he also cropped his hair short on the sides and let the top grow so his famous "hair-twiddle" would billow upward naturally. To achieve his innocent out-of-it demeanor, Stan would focus on Ollie's forehead when addressing him, rather than meeting his eyes. Ollie, despite his size towering over Stan, prides himself on gentlemanly delicacy, his fingers twiddling rhythmically and his hat doffed to rest on his forearm in a chivalrous gesture. His "hold" is a classic stare into the camera to elicit empathy for the indignities he must endure by being Stan's friend.

When Ollie meets a former flame who, thinking he was unmarried, slips an indiscreet note under his apartment door, we are treated to more comic complications involving marital discord and an escalating conflict between the sexes. These scenes treat us to fast-paced deterioration both emotionally and physically, drawing the big game hunter Billy Gilbert and his wife into the mix. An interesting end note suggests the ending of this film, a gag centered around unfaithful husbands, was originally nixed by Hal Roach, who deemed it too gruesome, though by today's standards it would have been marvelous: The final shot was to have shown the heads of Stan and Ollie mounted on Gilbert's trophy wall, as Ollie turns to Stan and intones, "Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into." Unfortunately, that was never filmed.

*Block-Heads* offers us a great chance to see terrific subtle and slapstick comedy comfortably coexisting with two of the masters. (Amid the intense bickering between the Hardys, Stan tries to soothe tensions," If you want me to go, I'll stay as long as you like.") I hold a certain personal fondness for Jimmy Finlayson and Harry Strang as the recipient clerk of a football to the face as supporting members of the cast, while I would have preferred Mae Busch playing Mrs. Hardy with less immediate vitriol than Minna Gombell, but that's a minor quibble in such a fun film.

According to John Brennan and John Larrabee, Laurel and Hardy historians, "This is a film that almost wasn't. For eleven years, Hal Roach Studios had distributed their films through MGM. In 1938, Roach signed a new deal with United Artists, but still owed MGM one film under the old contract. Determined to make a film quickly and cheaply, a new L&H feature was the choice. The production was hurried and chaotic, Stan and Roach were not on the best of terms, and Stan's personal problems with his third wife Illiana distracted him from his work. In addition, both Stan and Babe were nearing the end of their Roach contracts, and there were strong rumors that this would be the last Laurel and Hardy film. Despite the problems, BLOCK-HEADS emerged as one of their best-ever features."

Largely considered the "last real" Laurel and Hardy film, meaning the last of their long line of classics, for they filmed thirteen more before retirement and ill health beckoned. But their legacy rides high in this picture, so treat yourself to a comedy that offers more laughs per it 56 minutes than most 90 minute comedies today. If this is a mess, I'm happy to be gotten into it again.
Enjoy.
Jeff

Post #280:  She was a frowsy blonde running down the cold dark street wearing nothing but a cinched trench coat and a look of panicked desperation. I would have driven right past her without a second's thought if she hadn't tossed herself in a broken calisthenic in front of my sports car and forced me off the road.  She was a weeper whose every breath sounded strangled by chicken wire and she'd be dead before I could get an oil change. Not much of a showing for her first feature, but experience told me you took the parts as they came, and this one came with a bang.

It's 1955, and the Kefauver Commission, those moral watchdogs committed to keeping America beautiful and free from ugly reality, has determined today's feature *Kiss Me Deadly* the number one corruptor of American youth, "designed to ruin young viewers."  Critics call it "the definitive, apocalyptic, nihilistic, science-fiction film noir of all time – at the close of the classic noir period."  Director Robert Aldrich (*Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?* (1962), *The Dirty Dozen* (1967) as well as *The Longest Yard* (1974)) conducted a campaign against Kefauver for freedom of speech among filmmakers. Yeah, this one came with a big bang.

Based on the Mike Hammer novel by Mickey Spillane, *Kiss Me Deadly* remains one of the most hard-boiled of all noirs, with little more than mounting frustration to compel Mike (the singleminded scowler Ralph Meeker) to backhand slap around anyone within an arm's length, male or female.  After picking up breathless escaped mental patient Christina Bailey (Cloris Leachman in her film debut) on a deserted country road that will never take you home, Mike and his passenger are ambushed and knocked unconscious. Mike regains consciousness in time to hear Christina's wails from being tortured, killed and stuffed with him in his car, which is sent sailing off a cliff.  If that opening doesn't grab your attention, the rest of the film will.

Waking in the hospital with his faithful secretary-and-more Velda (Maxine Cooper) hovering over him, Mike determines, "An ordinary little girl gets killed and it rings bells all the way to Washington. There's gotta be a pitch....I picked up a girl. If she hadn't gotten in my way, I wouldn't have stopped. She must be connected with somethin' big."  Her trail leads Mike to Christina's jittery roommate Lily Carver (Gaby Rodgers), who is in hiding as she's hunting down a mysterious box that's worth a fortune large enough to be killed over, as evidenced by Christina's fate.  The labyrinthine plot takes Mike deeper into mystery as the hoods who killed Christina are also after the box, and Mike's pal Lieutenant Pat Murphy (Wesley Addy) warns him off the case, vaguely hinting that it's all tied to the "Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, Trinity."  Anyone for a nice atomic breakfast?

*Kiss Me Deadly* is all mood, with the impressive black and white cinematography of Ernest Lazlo, who had an esteemed sixty-film record of achievement.  This is what noir is all about, even though the genre was on its last legs when this was made.  As Hammer, Ralph Meeker barely changes facial expressions when he's fending off the advances of women or b*tch-slapping people for information; he is arguably the coldest incarnation of Spillane's character committed to the screen, including Spillane himself in *The Girl Hunters* (1963).  He's not above feeling or giving pain, and he's more than at home in the seedy brutality of the world he inhabits.  You can bet it's gritty, but you take it on those terms even as you find yourself surprised by Meeker's total immersion into the role, playing the game by his own rules.

Frankly, considering the widespread influence of the Hays Office, witnessing the amount of violence in this film knocked me off my pins.  Instead of the old Philip Marlowe reserve and wisecracking, replacing the suave demeanor of Simon Templar and even Sam Spade, Mike Hammer earns his name as Robert Aldrich literally pulls no punches from anyone in the picture.  Before he's consumed by Stacy Keach's swagger and appreciation of every female form throwing herself at him, we have Ralph Meeker, who seems to delight in ramming a tough guy's head into the brick and mortar of old brownstones before round-housing him down two flights of stairs, strong-arming a frail but tight-lipped athletic club manager, and crunching a greedy little coroner's fingers in a desk drawer.  

Of course all this is clearly implied through skillful editing and camera angles, as is the sexual tension and shots of women's legs. Lily even attempts a seduction in a tight moment: "Kiss me, Mike. I want you to kiss me. Kiss me. The liar's kiss that says 'I love you.' It means something else. You're good at giving such kisses. Kiss me."  The film is hot in more than one way, for certain.  From a stylistic viewpoint, *Kiss Me Deadly* gives us some wonderfully expressionistic oblique camera angles, interesting shadowplay, and thoughtful directorial treats that come only from repeated viewings.  This is a film which has sent echoes down through time: Quentin Tarantino's *Pulp Fiction* (1994) What's-it In The Briefcase, Indiana Jones's Ark of the Covenant, as well as *Repo Man* (1984) and its hot car, the neglected *Southland Tales* (2006) "Fluid Karma generator," and *Ronin*'s (1998) mysterious suitcase all bear a debt to *Kiss Me Deadly*'s singular macguffin.

Much has been made of the film's original and altered endings, which I will not disclose here, for the shock and fun of the film comes from its final moments.  But it's sufficient to note that one minute of editing in the altered conclusion makes quite a difference in the apocalyptic drama.  It's a fast-paced adventure with just about everything you could ask for in a classic noir: sharp dialogue, hardened characters, a jazzy score by Frank DeVol (arguably most famous for his *My Three Sons* theme based on "Chopsticks"), and fabulous supporting cast including Albert Dekker as the notorious Dr. G.E. Soberin, Paul Stewart as Carl Evello, and Nick Dennis as Mike's ill-fated mechanic pal Nick Va Va Voom.  But setting it all in motion is an evocative theme sung by Nat King Cole (over Hammer's radio) whose lyrics underscore the film's true dynamic:

The night is mighty chilly, and conversation seems pretty silly
I feel so mean and wrought, I'd rather have the blues than what I've got.
The room is dark and gloomy, you don't know what you're doing to me
The way it has got me caught, I'd rather have the blues than what I've got.

All night, I walk the city, watching the people go by.
I try to sing a little ditty, but all that comes out is a sigh.
The street looks very frightening, the rain begins and then comes lightning.
It seems love's gone to pot, I'd rather have the blues than what I've got...

Hoowah.  For subtle emphasis the song is later repeated in a bar sung by a sensuous Mady Comfort.  But grace notes like these make the film a stand-out independent feature.  It's a Cold War extravaganza, with Mike's "answering service" a wall mounted seven-inch-reel-to-reel tape recorder as technology wafts at the edges of the narrative.  It's got suspense, power, precision, indelible performances, more than a little misogyny and misanthropy, but it also offers commitment and drive, making *Kiss Me Deadly* a durable, lasting time capsule that harbors fear of the future alongside small tolerance for the present.  If you're intrigued by noir, this is a can't miss proposition. even if it does subvert our youth and coax them into lives of incautious abandon.  Like tearing that DO NOT REMOVE label at the base of our mattresses while laughing madly in contempt of International Association of Bedding and Furniture Law Officials who think they can impose their morality on US. Don't crowd me, Joe.  We doan need no stinkin' mattress tags. . . . (Oh shoot, maybe Kefauver was right). . .
Enjoy.
Jeff

Post #281: Michael Caine once said, "Obsession is a young man's game, and my only excuse is that I never grew old." It would appear that Roman Polanski hasn't either, for he was 81 in 2013 when he directed his wife Emmanuelle Seigner, age 47, in today's feature, *Venus In Fur (La Vénus à la fourrure)*. For familiar Polanski themes surface almost immediately as we enter the Parisian theater wherein playwright and first-time director Thomas Novacheck (Mathieu Amalric) is holding unsuccessful auditions for his adaptation of Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's 1870 novella *Venus In Fur*--the interchangeability of art and life, sexual obsession, dominance and submission of the will, gender roles, and most importantly, power. (And yes, Virginia, that Austrian inspired the term sado-masochism, so high heeled boots and a dog collar are present)

As Thomas ends another day of ineffectual searching for his Venus, one last candidate, Vanda Jourdain, an out-of-work earthy but insistent actress, pleads for a chance to audition as Thomas prepares to leave in disillusionment. Disheveled, scattered and equally determined, Vanda finagles Thomas into giving her a place in the spotlight if only for a few minutes. Seeming to hold the depth of a frisbee, she mistakenly believes *Venus In Fur*, Thomas's adapted play, comes from a Velvet Underground song and has never heard of the original novella. Knowing he can quickly dispatch the woman with a cursory audition, Thomas begrudgingly submits, only to find her completely committed to the script, having memorized with understanding all its nuances. What ensues over the next 96 minutes is a seamless blending of fiction and fact which will allow audiences to say I Never Meta-play I Didn't Like as they sift out the various layers of the production.

One- or two-person shows run the risk of losing dramatic tension as the audience grows accustomed to the character/s, but *Venus In Fur* avoids that stumbling block by keeping the camera in motion and the characters pliable as if they're becoming different people. When Vanda asks Thomas to read with her, we see a tranformative performance first in Seigner and then in Amalric; Vanda is consciously aware of that shift, while Thomas's is slow and more insidious as he "becomes" his own adaptation. Add another layer to the work by realizing Amalric looks and acts like Polanski himself, playing off his own wife, and the spiral in the spiral and the wheel within the wheel spin more madly through the windmills of your mind.

As "Vanda von Dunayev" in the audition, Seigner's determined actress Vanda Jourdain takes on the calm control, mannerisms and Victorian coyness of her part, drawing more and more from Thomas's dry reading. Their thespian dance glides and swoops as the director and his charge argue over details and staging of the play's narrative and intent, with the actress Vanda openly criticizing the misogynistic overtones of the source material. “He’s a perv and she’s an object, just like every woman in 18-whatever,” she says. Thus we are drawn into a battle of attitudes, male and female dynamics, and sexual role-playing and manipulation resulting in a complex web of buried motivations being unearthed and brought into the light.

In the unfolding of the film (or is it the play, or is it the actual lives of the characters?), the social, emotional, cultural and sexual hierarchy of Vanda and Thomas morph, and as they exchange one another's places in that strata, it becomes a challenge to tell if or when the two meet on equal footing. Are they ever inhabiting a form of equality, or is one always dominant, forcing the other into submission? Notice how Vanda becomes Vanda von Dunayev and when Thomas relinquishes his playing Severin von Kushemski and becomes "Thomas," a not-too-fictional counterpart to his true desires or inner life.

Yup, I know, it's all very confounding, but it's also pretty pretty pretty pretty fascinating to watch. As the film moves along, it seems this stage ain't big enough for the two of us as Thomas's directorial control diminishes as to be negligible while Vanda assumes the commanding presence of Venus herself. They bicker, argue the politics of sex and gender, break character (or do they?) and leave us to wonder just how much Polanski has personally invested in his director; after all, Polanski has been charged with statutory rape and thus became a fugitive from American justice, lost a pregnant wife to the Manson Family's violence, escaped the Holocaust though his parents did not, and became an important director before being removed from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2018. So the investigation into the war of the sexes has grown to be a major theme in his films, which many critics deem worthy of the label "Art."

Make no mistake: *Venus In Fur* is full of adult language, themes and innuendo. But it's also a fascinating tour-de-force for the actors who command the screen and our attention with obsessive glee. Again, it may not be for everyone, but if you enjoy puzzling out its various allusions and contortions, you will be held in its grip till the end.
Enjoy.
Jeff

Post #282: Another break with tradition: Today's feature is currently up for six Oscars and 187 other nominations with another 178 wins. Its appearance on critics' Top Ten Lists is so long I can't list them all here, though I can tell you it's ranked at Number One on 45 critics' lists. And you may have watched this one slip under your radar since it's a South Korean film. No matter what I prefigured upon dropping this one in the DVD player last night, it confounded every idea I had about its power. No, it's not a sci-fi film by any stretch, even though its title and cryptic promotional posters would lead you in that direction. Welcome, my friends, to the first Korean film to win by unanimous vote at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival to win the coveted Palme d'Or prize; welcome to *Parasite* (2019) co-written and directed by a masterful Bong Joon-ho, whose *Snowpiercer* (2014) was my introduction to his craft.

First and foremost, I was totally caught off guard by how darned funny it is. True, the humor is pretty dark, but the first hour of its 132-minute running time (which goes by in a flash) is filled with circumstantial and social comedy. Oh, it is still there after the halfway point, but the plot veers off in a surprising direction that leads inevitably to a jaw-dropping denouement that may weaken your knees and make you shake your head. This commentary will go to elaborate ends to ensure you know as little as possible about its flow even as I urge you to invest a couple hours in its viewing.

Here are some bare bones to gnaw over: It's a largely humbling life for the struggling Kim family who live just below street level in a cramped and somewhat dingy apartment, barely subsisting on crumbs of salary from folding pizza boxes while chasing away drunks who routinely urinate on the building outside their window to the street. Son Ki-Woo (Choi Woo-shik) is visited by his close friend Min-hyk (Park Seo-joon) bound for overseas study and is presented with a scholar's rock, meant to bring the family wealth as a talisman, as well as a job opportunity: Ki-Woo can interview for Min's place as an English tutor to the rich Park family's daughter Da-hye (Jeong Ji-so).

Buoyed by Min's recommendation, Ki-Woo becomes a fixture in the Parks' elaborate and spacious home designed by a leading architect whose respected housekeeper Gook Moon-gwang (Lee Jung-eun) has remained with the house after the architect's passing. Slyly, Ki-Woo insinuates his sister Ki-jeong (Park So-dam) into their household as "Jessica," an art therapist who can aid in the growth of the Parks' introverted and perhaps troubled son. Quickly the entire Kim family have by extension gained their places in the Park family as servants, offering the framework for what director Bong Joon-ho has called his study of "fear, anxiety and comedy."

Deceptively simple in its execution, *Parasite*, early drafts of which were labeled *Parasites*, takes on such heavy topics as the wealth gap in class struggles, the insulation of wealthy from common mankind, the disunity of the working class, and the metaphorical significance of climate change in the global market. We are treated to a critique of capitalism with its dangling of prosperity and the ache that comes from the inability of some to achieve that dream in the profanation of the great promise. In this film there ain't no good guys, there ain't no bad guys, there's only you and me and we just feed off one another.

It's this moral murkiness that drives at least one level of the film. Who are the parasites? As much as we like the Kim family and empathize with their striving to get ahead--or at least find the elusive wi-fi signal which will assist them in guiding their part-time pizza box industry, they are at heart manipulative poseurs, not above ousting others for their own gain. Boon says their motivation is "a weird mixture of hope and this fear that you can fall even lower." Conversely, the Parks are completely oblivious to life outside their hermetically sealed mansion with its expansive, verdant yard and constant access to pure sunlight. Even Mr. Park's ( Dong-ik) company--Another Brick--suggests upper class conformity to social wills. To them suffering means canceling a birthday camping trip due to thunderstorms in favor of a garden party. "What a blessing the rain is," gushes Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeong), the clueless matriarch after their night under the stars is rained out, allowing them to throw a lavish social event when the sun shines.

Sunlight then becomes a potent symbol, something those of us who live in Michigan can attest to in January and February as we burrow into seclusion and gaze in wonder when Old Sol peeks out one day, sending us into paroxysms of fear and wonder as we try to determine what that glowing thing in the sky is after so long in cloudcover. In *Parasite* only the slightest shard of light shines into the sub-basement of the Kims, an implicit reminder that they too can escape the confines of their station, a climb upward where the air is suffused with brightness. Consider then the long expanses of glass walls ushering light into the Parks' home; they have achieved the higher planes and it's all been made possible through the labor of the invisible sufferers like the Kims. (Let's let the Parks' subterranean homesick blues drift here, as it allows NO light whatsoever, indicating an even lower level than the Kims' fate. . . . no spoilers.)

Other sharp commentaries include the water motif (water always flows downward but never the opposite, suggesting a social class corollary). When the Kims' home is flooded with sewage, watch Kim Ki-taek's (Song Kang-ho)'s look of utter revulsion as his boss Yeon-gyo prattles on about how rain is a blessing. For her, of course it is--her house rests high above the Kims', banked in such a way as to allow their overflow to destroy the Kims' meager possessions. What is a mere inconvenience to one family is the complete devastation of another. Excrement happens, but only to those unlucky enough to live just above its waterline, so smile and pass the ran-dom (That's a pun, as ran-dom is a noodle dish served with steak in the film).

Shot in 77 days, *Parasite* has been carefully crafted as Bong Joon-ho has stated that Ki-woo's tutoring job was "sadly the only way that families from two extreme ends of the class spectrum in modern-day South Korea can cross their paths convincingly in the story arc." Choi Woo-shik also sings the closing song, which illustrates the length of time Ki-Woo would need to invest in order to buy the Parks' house--564 years. And so the director says, "For people of different circumstances to live together in the same space is not easy. It is increasingly the case in this sad world that humane relationships based on co-existence or symbiosis cannot hold, and one group is pushed into a parasitic relationship with another. In the midst of such a world, who can point their finger at a struggling family, locked in a fight for survival, and call them parasites? It's not that they were parasites from the start. They are our neighbors, friends and colleagues, who have merely been pushed to the edge of a precipice. As a depiction of ordinary people who fall into an unavoidable commotion, this film is: a comedy without clowns, a tragedy without villains, all leading to a violent tangle and a headlong plunge down the stairs. You are all invited to this unstoppably fierce tragicomedy."

Bottom line: Schedule some time to watch this one before people start discussing it amongst yourselves and ruin the surprises that lie in wait for you. For me to break the tradition of commenting on older films or independents, something unique had to break through, and knowing our town as I do, I'm pretty sure this one never made a big splash alongside the seven theaters that ran *Star Wars IX" and the remaining five that ran *Frozen 2*. . . and maybe the one running *Garfield 3*.
Enjoy.
Jeff

Post #283: In our age it's comforting to know that deception and fraud and manipulation are foreign to us; from political leaders down to our TV therapists and game show hosts who gush over our every word we can rest in the assurance that we're never being lied to for some covert gain or personal agenda. For we have learned and internalized the aged wisdom of "LIar liar pants on fire."

But in Hollywood and therefore some small dark, fractious corners of government, where an endless conga line of the misbegotten dance through the revolving door of our court system, weeping, wailing and renting their garments amid shrieks of innocence unto death, long after their guilt has been spotlighted, trotted out with fanfare and incontrovertibly proven--that memo suggesting lying is bad has been lost. For some of these of the poor morally bankrupt, truth is taffy that sticks in your teeth. So it is with our feature today, a wonderful little ethical conundrum posed by Lawrence Kasdan, the director/writer behind four *Star Wars* films (1980-2018), *Body Heat* (1981), *The Big Chill* (1983), *Silverado* (1985), *Grand Canyon* (1991), *The Bodyguard* (1993) and many others. Yes, friends, welcome to *Mumford* (1999).

Hosting an all star ensemble cast led by Loren Dean as the titular Dr. Michael "Mickey" Mumford, this comic drama twists and shifts with ease, finally producing a likable group of semi-broken folk in search of truth and the ability to live with it comfortably. Doc, as he's called, has opened a psychological practice in the small town bearing his name, Mumford, where he lives simply and listens intently as his growing roster of patients seek him out. If he's anything, Doc Mumford is a quiet and attentive man, content with his modest apartment topping the home of Lily (Alfre Woodard), a restaurant owner and his only confidant.

His clientele are a mixed fruit salad of people and maladies:

*Pharmacist Henry Follett (Pruitt Taylor Vince) holds an obsessive interest in pulp fiction since his divorce;
*Housewife Althea Brockett (Mary McDonnell) is a compulsive shopper whose stately home is clustered with mail order items she neither wants nor needs, and her successful, self-absorbed husband (Ted Danson) wants Doc to "fix" her;
*Punk teen Nessa Watkins (Zooey Deschanel in her film debut) is mandated to attend sessions, with which she complies in silence until she discloses her fascination with glamour magazines and their "perfect" women;
*Billionaire and founder of the computer behemoth Panda Modem Skip Skipperton (Jason Lee in his pre-*My Name Is Earl* days) lacks friends and wants to pay Doc to play catch and converse with him;
*And the single, attractive Sofie Crisp (Hope Davis) suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome, inestimably low self esteem due to her critical mother's (Dana Ivey) influence and her doting father's (Kevin Tighe) recessive, easy going manner.

Only the narcissistic attorney Lionel Dillard (Martin Short) is denied Doc's attention. Such a successful practice has gained strength despite Doc's total lack of solicitation, so much so that rival psychologists Dr. Ernest Delbanco (David Paymer) and his protege Dr. Phyllis Sheeler (Jane Adams) have taken notice, especially under Lionel's vindictive prodding. Doc's practices, Lionel asserts largely due to rejection, are suspect, unorthodox, and ethically questionable, even as his results are solid.

Doc says, in startling honesty, which may ironically be one of his greatest strengths, "My method? I don’t have one really. Most of the time I’m faking it. You see, I think there’s not much that can be done about most problems. They’re too complicated, too deep-rooted by the time I hear about them. The most I can do, usually, is look, listen really closely, and try to catch some glimpse of the secret life everybody’s got. If I can get a sense of that, maybe, just maybe, I can help them out a little."

So, you ask, what does all this have to do with lying and manipulation, as my earlier tirade indicated. That's where the story gets a little dicey. Doc has his own demons worth exorcising, and only through the machinations of the plot do those demons sign up for palates. At its time of release *Mumford* earned solid and favorable reviews, though more than a few critics found a backstory rather off-putting. Certainly for a short period in the film there's a tonal change in a film that coasts along, like Doc himself, on a wave of charm and coziness. But the question of lying comes to the forefront which allows *Mumford* to become more than just a good-natured "feel good" movie; I often used this film in my ethics class, coaxing students to demonstrate their own moral judgment to argue the relative "rightness" of deontological versus teleological ethics. *Mumford* stands up to the inquiry.

Roger Ebert wrote, "There are no earth-shaking payoffs here. No dramatic astonishments, vile betrayals or sexual surprises. Just the careful and loving creation of some characters it is mostly a pleasure to meet. And at its deepest level, profoundly down there below the surface, it is something more, I think: an expression of Kasdan's humanist longings, his wish that people would listen better and value one another more. It is the strangest thing, how this movie sneaks up and makes you feel a little better about yourself."

Its 112-minute running time immerses us in the characters' lives, much in the spirit of Frank Capra films: These are frail, humane people who realize at some level their brokenness. Kasdan's eye is sure--he is not one to judge or mock these people, for their self-realizations come honestly, and Ebert is spot-on in his assessment: these are not tortured and tormented beings incapable of healing their wounds. They are our neighbors, our colleagues, ourselves looking for a little realignment as they butt up against today's stresses and question why no one ever told them this is the way life can be on occasion. No classes were offered in college on How To Get Along, and yet they're supposed to tacitly KNOW how to cope, or something is wrong with them. After all, Doc says at one point, "In a free society, you are who you say you are. If you screwed up on life, sometimes you can get another shot."

That optimistic tone saturates the story, and Kasdan's equanimity of screen time for his cast allows them to play off one another, at first isolated in their private pains and then reaching a casual awareness simultaneously. Althea Brockett explains the joy of self discovery guided somewhat passively through Doc's attention: "You know what this feels like?--When I was in high school the thing I wanted most when I was stuck in class, the thing that I was desperately in pursuit of, was a hall pass. That's all I ever wanted. I loved moving freely around the school while everybody else was trapped in there. That's how I feel right now. Like I have some giant - all day - hall pass." Under his quiet assurance everyone--even Dr. Delbanco, once his detractor--comes into his or her own.

Lest you think *Mumford* is a sweet, calming parable grown from the same garden as *It's A Wonderful Life* (1946) or *Going My Way* (1944)--and it is--let me remind you that 1999's adult audiences might expect something more than the homey warmth of those films. So *Mumford* accommodates that desire with some adult language, a smattering of nudity (as you can see in the featured scene) and some adult situations, so I wouldn't necessarily trot it out for Family Movie Night unless your family is unfazed by such things. But for folks who have grown up Fleetwood Mac's pleas of "Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies," *Mumford is a really fine under-the-radar choice.
Enjoy.
Jeff