Tina's comments (member since Oct 29, 2008)

Tina's comments from the Movies We've Just Watched group.

If only more people insisted on the performers listed above to be somehow boycotted from film. all of these lists include the highest paid, biggest draws for the current drek passing as entertainment. as usual tom, your analysis is spotless.

Adaptation had great editing and an interesting script. But I sympathize with loathing the National Treasure compartment. As I am also an ex-Cage fan, he is that much more unbearable. Middle age and tremendous wealth has muddied his interest into a mannered scrounge of color and texture. Gives a used Sugar Daddy wrapper in the gutter kind of feeling.

I do appreciate Holly Hunter. She's excellent on the stage and I wish for everyone to get a chance to witness her virtuosity in person.

But here's a list of potential causes for skin rash:

Tom Cruising
" zzzz Hanks
Seth Rogaine
Bradley Pitts
Kevin Costconer (gets one and only one pass for Bull Durham)
Arnold SixHummer California can't afford parks or humanity
Jackoff Blackout
Cameron Diazillated
Jennyfur Anistonstesia
Leo DiCapitated
Revolta
Ruse Willis
Dinty Moore
Pauly if you're over 40 it's a bad bad nightmare Shore
Sandra Buttocks
Owethem Wilson and brother
and a zillion other talents marketed for 10year olds which inspire my inner 10 year old to remember the revolutionary zeal and resistance of old Mad magazine and Wacky packs.

i'll talk to gc and wire the Bradlees
positively revolutionary!

(looking forward to that Varda dvd.... hint hint tee hee)


Phillip wrote: "we have to assemble a crew and do this, tina...that would be so funny. we would have to film it and document it all of course, tell gc to assemble a crew. let's do it."

wow too bad we can't all rustle up $3,000 a day. can we....?

i see. interesting that Rupert Pole thought so highly of it for that reason. Kind of touching.

Maryanne wrote: "Did anyone see the movie Henry and June??? I found it interesting because I wrote a book about Anais Nin and she was my mentor when I was learning to write.
Maryanne"

I am a believer in exhausting all research resources on the subjects which drive us; however, I understand the hesitation in seeing something dreadful which can powerfully taint our vision and soil our subject.

haven't seen Henry and June in years although I still have the soundtrack (some nice bits of Debussy and a Harry Warren hit done to iconic perfection by Bing Crosby. People forget that he was a serious sex symbol and the first pop star so his voice fits for such a picture but I don't remember where it appears.

I did not LOVE the movie when it came out but I did appreciate it. It's well cast. Everyone is a striking look alike to the photos of we have of Nin and the Millers. But this sort of ambition to have actors as lookalikes is to suggest re-enactment is all it takes to make a great film. Uma Thurman is a deliciously dry June, as she should be. Yet, I recall that dryness to run flat when the sexy bubbles weren't employed. That sort of became her thing, eh.

Enjoyed the book much more, which I guess is to be expected to the point of cliche. I do remember being in college at the time and fairly infatuated with Nin's writing like many of my peers indulging in bohemia and living against the backward grain of the Reagan era. Looking into the black, lacy, vaselined lens of Henry and June pointed toward a nostalgia much more scintillating, more realistic and much more relevant than the grease and taffeta nostalgia of Ron and Nancy.

The film was considered sensational but I'm sure it, again another cliche, is quite tame by today's standards of big love triangles.

As entranced as i was by unfettered hedonism, I remember the film to be a bit much. A little too full of its garter belts, lace and vaseline. But it's just not entertaining or even as thoughtful like, say, Cabaret. It has the same director of another era of exiles film of another good book, a much better book, with sensual characters and super sexy actresses with a comely leading man, "the Unbearable Lightness of Being."
Yet this too just didn't quite cut it for me and I'm thinking will be dated 20 years later. But given you've got some distance on your side, I have a hunch your subject won't be soiled. Although, do I misunderstand? DID you see it and you found it interesting?
But let me know. Maybe I should revisit my 20's to review Kaufman's 80's take on the 20s and 60s.

Not sure how long, but @criterion docs Salesman, Burden of Dreams, Harlan County, Monterey Pop are free http://criterion.com/festival

click on the "auteurs" button to the lower right, give them your email, they'll send you a verification and then you get to watch.

some truly great docs up for offer here!

Sam, Steve-O (who started this thing), Heidi, Kate,Tom, Phillip, Jill, Jean and Jenn :

Since this IS Good Reads, after all...
There is also a book out on the Maysles titled

A Maysles Scrapbook: Photographs / Cinemagraphs / Documents

For everyone in the Bay Area, they've got a copy over at Phoenix Books on 24th in SF.

I took a peek through it and loved the stills and information.

And I was a kid, so it really horrified me. But I LOVED it. It was so funny to me too.

It's great that Ruth Gordon had such success with a couple of inarguably odd and truly great roles so late in her life. What a character. For some reason, I remember she and Garson Kanin would make appearances on daytime talk shows in the 80s. They were so funny and out of place. I guess it was for the nostalgia factor and they chatted about the old days in hollywood and well were so undeniably funny and watchable. and i seem to remember them being on some CHEESY shows. i guess because the old ladies were home and watching.

(make those pink fuzzy slippers, of course.)

hey Leshawn,

Absofreakinlutely!!!!

Phillip, you are spot on with everything!

It is a perfect film. I remember the first time i saw it. It was a midday matinee on TV when UHF channels had that sort of feature, so I got to see it on a sick day from school. I had a high fever and was already half delirious and right away i knew this film was for me. It amazes from the beginning.

Everybody gets under your skin, Ruth Gordon does it in a way that's like fiber glass from insulation on fuzzy slippers. I say this in all sobriety.

Mia Farrow is totally perfect. Why is she almost always in her era and timeless?
But here it's iconic. You gotta know that David Lynch was all over this as a youth in the damp pacific northwest.

i forgot about the paper fire. now i want to see it all over again and again.

Watching Born Yesterday (1950) tonight for the umpteenth time with no regrets. Just adore Judy Holliday. One of my favorite recordings is Holliday with Mulligan, the record she made with her boyfriend Gerry Mulligan. What a great pairing. Sadly that record was never released while she was alive. They perform original songs of her lyrics and his music. It's delightful and poignant, like Judy Holliday herself.

If you have not yet seen Born Yesterday, do so immediately. It is, as William Holden says, "... the story of the selfish and unselfish" and that "... the idea of learning is to be bigger, not smaller."

These are themes which desperately need to be pursued to this day. (I realize this thought was taken on by Melanie Griffith 15 years ago, but I shiver to consider the results of that endeavor. )

So indulge yourself in the fudge thick head, gut and mouth of Broderick Crawford as Brock the millionaire junkman ("I hire and fire geniuses everyday!"), the most rational seduction of the fourth estate by the crisp tortoise rimmed warmth of William Holden and the luscious, dimpled vacuity that transcends all brutes in Judy Holliday.

Garson Kanin wrote the original play and then the screenplay. And we luck out that the actor, Judy Holliday, who played Billie Dawn on the stage, brought her performance to the screen. It is so rare that great theatrical originators find their way through a projector let alone a dvd player for us all to enjoy many decades later. George Cukor directs and lets Holliday's squealing delicacies of reaction play off Crawford's sometimes sympathetic shouting lout might as well be a mobster tycoon bruiser fierceness.

For some contemporary audiences, the honest violence here is too hard to take. But it's the honesty of his abuse that lends credence to her calling him a "fascist." She knows what she's saying and she's absolutely right on.

Dialog of this quality can only be handled by masters. And here they are. Since the play is something of a standard now, it would be hard for any actress to compete with Holliday's Billie Dawn. Mary Martin did a Garson Kanin directed performance for television (it was popular enough to compete with Elvis on Ed Sullivan) that was no doubt great... but Judy Holliday owns this piece. Thank goodness they filmed it.

Her acting is so musical and complex and understated and modern, it IS hard to figure out how she does it. The only person I can think of who comes close is Madeline Kahn (who did a revival of the play which I never saw but can imagine.)

The reality of fascism and institutional abuse hit Judy Holliday hard in the 50s.
Although she was not blacklisted from film, as were so many directors and writers, she was blacklisted from television for a crucial 7 years (often known as the "golden age of television".) The studio system was changing and now they had to fight to protect valuable commodities in their stars from zealous red-baiting senators and anyone else employed in the massive witch hunts that targeted artists.

Judy Holliday had an FBI file over 60 pages long for subversive crimes such as signing a petition to not go to war with Korea, recording a 1 minute announcement against censorship and book banning, and giving money (literally $1 or $2) to liberal causes. The verbal abuse she received from senators during a testimony was not far from the attacks her character endured in Born Yesterday.

The confusion and stress led to serious and understandable bouts with depression. She came down with cancer and died at the age of 43.
Still she left us with performances that are honest, funny and highly sensitive portrayals. She was that sexy and still challenged the status quo. She made everyone look under the camouflage of the bleach blond dizzy broad.

As in Born Yesterday, the McCarthy bruts found a triple threat that they couldn't let be. Tragically, the McCarthy abuses of power were much more serious and disruptive than the D.C. corruption Born Yesterday satirizes.

It's great to watch now during our new era of abusive power, corruption and scandal. It's especially poignant when the "f" word gets bandied about out of desperation and then loses its edge and often its definition. (This is especially frustrating when there is plenty of fascism to be pointed out!) It's great to tap into a patriotism that can sashay with a conscious. Because, we are reminded that for every bully that is Brock, we can be as smart as Billie Dawn.

ahh well... another time (he wins again). thanks for letting me know.
I'll have to look at the calendar on line.

Saw In the Heat of the Night for the first time in years and years the night before last and was still very impressed despite the onslaught of southern stereotypes.
It is so beautifully shot and such a great score. Wondering whether or not Quincy Jones *really* penned the music or just took credit (even though I didn't see his credit roll.) There is a tune signifying scary hick party that sounds a lot like Buck Owens but it's Glen Campbell. I just remember it looking like a contemporary movie when i first saw it on TV as a kid. And now it is most decidedly an old movie (1967). A lot of California looked like those scenes of the south that were really Indiana and Illinois. America's towns were still small in 1967. Now they're a mall. Part of the payoff for exposure and less isolation was homogenization. Despite the southern stereotypes, that kind of vile, violent bigot still very much exists in small town America (and elsewhere.) I got caught up in a similar situation in Fort Bragg 30 years after the film won so many awards. My boyfriend at the time, a tall African-American who, despite being raised in Tennessee and Davis, CA, was pointedly urbane and raised to idolize the "new black man" made iconic by Poitier. I'm white and having been raised in a smaller town than Davis, could pass for country. We were verbally and physically chased out of a cafe and bookstore, no less, and then out of town with the threat of a lead pipe and a baseball bat with a "lead core." The car chase scene in the Heat of the Night immediately reminded me of our having to out race a pickup truck full of good ol' boys who wanted nothing less than blood. They certainly achieved scaring the crap out of us. This was about 1999. It was one of the most surreal days of my life. Unfortunately, it was the kind of a day that came every so often for my friend.
In the Heat of the Night does a great job at grasping the core of racism as class struggle in the early scene where Rod Steiger can't figure out how Poitier could possibly have that much cash in his pocket.

Phillip wrote: "i saw Once Upon A Time In The West today at the Castro Theater during the SF Int. Film Fest. it was glorious seeing it on that big screen. and the soundtrack by Morricone is one of my all time fav..."

GC & I love this film. He bought it and it's at the place in Baja. Will try to take him to the castro to see it although it is like the monster teeth pull to get him into a theatre and out of the cave.

It is a BRILLIANT film.

RIGHT, the HBO production is a bio-pic, not a documentary. Since many people take bio-pics very seriously, or at least literally and the Maysles' film carries a certain amount of significance, the folks behind the HBO production have some obligations beyond set design and prosthetics. The challenges the actors face toward these obligations are many. It's good for people to think critically about them.

whatever one does, i hope people see the documentary first and the bio pic after.
the maysles film is a high point of the art of documentary film making, period.
i just wish that the hbo production didn't reenact that film but concentrated on the beales' earlier years. the doc reveals their former glories through still family photos and press clippings, so it has the feel of looking at their scrapbook... which allows for more nostalgia and longing to creep in to the picture.
it would be nice if the hbo production had done the reverse and shown stills from the maysles' film. but this is partly a jessica lange production/project and i think she very much wanted the challenge of playing those characters of the documentary as characters. it brings up a lot of issues around reality, performance, insanity, acting and documentation as these things all overlap.
This is part of what lends itself to the camp of the whole story.

But the thing is, apart from a story, these are real lives. The psycho-dynamics between the two are fascinating, funny, disturbing and enlightening. But their condition is also revealing. It uncovers the nightmare that most of us scramble to avoid or at least are very fortunate to not have to deal with. But it also uncovers some nightmares about class systems and emotional, I guess I want to say support systems, that can and will flee the scene when the parties stop and the money is vanishing. So it is also a tale of the vulnerabilities of those of us with bohemian sensibilities. Even when protected within "good families" such sensibilities run afoul of the business cycle, thus never guaranteeing the trust and securities promised in our old age. So the will to remain independent and different, bohemian, still remains a fight.
More than a few of us witness the realities of aging in this country and how money, status, company, engagement, and sanity can peel away with the paint and wallpaper. We see it in our elders or the elders of others and it's damn horrifying.
The fear of being alone and poor is so talked about among so many of my (primarily) female friends and myself (who are mainly visual artists and musicians uninvolved in the larger business cycle) that Grey Gardens touches on a real corner of anxiety. When are your good old days the good old days?
Despite her grudge against her narcissistic mother for stomping on her ambitions as an actress, Edith Beale went on to live an independent life to the age of 84. She wrote poetry and had regular correspondence with tons of fans, so ultimately she got some of the creativity and celebrity she desired.
I love Little Edie Beale for her resilience, insistence on personal style, intelligence, humor and honesty, despite her insanity. Seems to me that's what keeps their story such an endearing one to so many.

Brilliant review, Tom. You've articulated my cautious pessimism about the whole endeavor. Heard the interview with Drew Barrymore on Terry Gross.
When the played a sound clip from the HBO film, I didn't have the production values and prosthetics to distract me and I could concentrate on the voice.
It was better than expected. But just a clip. Haven't seen/heard the entire thing although now, after all the bru ha ha, I want to.
You tap the essence of the ear in your astute examples that reveal the absence of irony in the real Edie and the real story: very good families have eccentrics too. It's generational that Barrymore can't feel this reality for herself. The class in her family was removed by the time she was raised with the negatives artists and eccentrics are notorious for. Drew Barrymore could somehow struggle out of it and be thoroughly of her own generation. Edie Beale became stuck as a character of her class and finally a Warhol camp character of class Americana.

I guess I'm disappointed that someone so smart as Lange wants to re-enact the Maysles' film and not just have a play on their early life. But that would never sell I guess. Audiences have not only come to expect simulacrum; apparently, they need it. One could get practically apoplectic.

yo baby, i'm very good about borrowing. even graham lends me things and don't think even for a minute it's because he's biased.
i have no idea how you get so much done. it's awesome.
at moms. with flu in cherry flavored multi symptom relief wooz.

http://www.france24.com/en/20080723-vard...

Agnes Varda is about my all time fave director. LOVE her. That's HILARIOUS that you called me out on this because i just happened to open this thread by chance!!!
I've been getting over a flu this weekend. GREAT review PG. I've been wanting to see her film The Universe of Jacques Demy that she dedicated to him while he was dying of aids. Their marriage is a remarkable one, for sure.
Saw the collection and jaw dropped at the over $100 price tag. If finances were different I would've snatched it up in a second. Her work is viewable over and over. She is inspirational and instructive and the most reasonable romantic. She is the most unpretentious of directors.

The Gleaners and I... wow. who else could document dumpster diving as a monument to recycling french culture and make it so memorable and moving. Her work on the Black Panthers is iconic. Cleo is sooooo lovely and a timepiece. Everyone who sees Wendy and Lucy should see Varda's Vagabond from the mid-80s. I wish contemporary film makers had her kind of poetic class consciousness.
Wonder if I can make it over to PFA....

Thanks for the serendipity this morning. (!!)

sam fuller is a yes yes yes.
can't ever beat the steely self control of barbara stanwyck! will look into white dog soon. i can't remember if i've seen it. years ago my roommate and i went on a western rental festival and had such a great time with it. now they're cool again. thank goodness. i've felt like i've seen everything growing up with a western fanatic brother but there are always more!

Elaine wrote: "Phillip wrote: "that's because they can't wash MTV style editing out of their consciousness, along with their general lack of interest in anything that doesn't look just like them.

but, i mean, i ..."

Elaine, I think it's okay to dismiss the taste of youth. It's healthy to. My 80 year old mother has a hard time watching silent films (which I love) because they are so old fashioned for her. She can't stand anything with a ukulele for the same reason. she came from an era that wanted to progress from the corny rawness and awkwardness of the 20s. i find charm to all eras and often felt disappointment with my own.
The "Reality" MTV style DOES dictate a lot of consciousness now. It's everywhere in media and show business. A film like "Black Narcissus" is nuanced beyond the mellow drama in a way that silent film is. The films you cited don't subscribe to the same acting the same way, they are distinctly American in tone . Black Narcissus is English. The 1947 historical context gets easily lost and the sentimentality stands out like a sore thumb in a rather unsentimental culture we have today. Movies with nuns were taken very seriously in the 40s through the 60s. They are so charged now because of it!
At this point, the Sound of Music is enjoyed but her devotion seems a little campy. Sister Act is a comedy and for a college student, an old movie. "Doubt"
would be a great movie to show along side "Black Narcissus." One could compare the changes in the representation of the 3 r's: sexual repression, racism and religion. (We put the organ -or the orgone- in organized religion.)

That said, as it has always been, there are a lot of students who are deeply perceptive, don't even watch TV, and have a different sophistication that can take on older films, music, etc. Every generation has this.

Deborah Kerr has an acting style that is MUCH different than anything now. It was arch in her own day and she was often made fun of for it then.... but still was widely respected for a resolute dignity that for many in that era, represented the strength and dignity of England after the war. This sentiment is a context that has been dashed and dated since the swinging sixties.

(The problem with email is that even with emoticons such as phillip posted, commentary can seem harsher, blunter and more reductive than if verbalized. This will too seem outdated and with in it's own sentimental historical context in no time at all.)

I'm curious as to what course you teach that offers 10 films a semester. That sounds great.

ah ha...they did do an interview on npr.

and come to think of it i would bet meg, alex and tom would be interested in this production!

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story...

http://www.leavemealoneopera.com/