I don't intentionally keep writing up movies about isolation for my "Great Performances in Horror Actressing" series over at The Film Experience week after week (see also: Repulsion last week) but it keeps happening and, uhh, it makes some sense. This week I wrote a lil' ode to Shelley Duvall's top notch work in The Shining, which is by my estimation one of the single greatest feats of acting in any movie, period. I do think that the opinion on her work here has, over the past few years, greatly swung around to my side... but I'm gonna keep on yelling it just in case.
Even in the middle of a real-life Disaster Movie it turns out I'll get sucked into a Disaster Movie if it's on TV, even if it's a terrible one I have nevertheless seen a billion times before -- look no further than the hour I spent with Dante's Peak, beloved Dante's Peak, just the day before yesterday. (Is that the prequel to The Day After Tomorrow?)
.
Worse than the fact that I have gotten sucked into Dante's Peak for the five thousandth time, I just cried a little when the guy went over on the bridge? END TIMES
.
As a lifelong devotee of this often terrible -- or at the least terribly derivative -- genre, you come to know the tropes... hell you come to rely on the tropes. They're part of what makes the experience so satisfying time after time after time, decade after decade after decade. People often complain about the gooey moral centers of Disaster Movies -- the way they go out of their way to center and confirm the strength of the old-fashioned family unit, Dad and Mom and Son and Daughter and Dog, can't forget the dog.
.
.
There's always the generic family drama that you don't care about, you just want to get to the Good Stuff of the earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanos, the alien attacks and Sharknados. And if you go all the way back to the very first proper Disaster Movie, 1933's Deluge, this is still the case -- it turns a story about earthquakes and tsunamis devastating the entire globe into a love triangle! Of course...
... Deluge also ends with the extra third of that love triangle walking into the ocean to sacrifice herself, so this history is, uhh, complicated. Anyway in my forward-thinking brain those criticisms of conservativism are correct. And yet... my lizard brain don't give a hoot -- my lizard brain loves this shit. Save everybody and give me a damn gooey ending dammit! Reunite everybody in front of a sunrise, flags waving, generically patriotic music blaring obnoxiously as hugs happen in slo-mo -- I want all of it. That said some of these movies have done more with the tropes than others, and here's a list of some of my personal faves.
5 Great Disaster Movie Happy Endings
.
.
Mars Attacks!-- This list you're reading right now exists because I started thinking about Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! and its glorious deranged ending. Granted Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! has a gloriously deranged beginning and a gloriously deranged middle part to go with that gloriously deranged ending. But that ending! It's exactly what I picture the end of our current situation will be like. We all step out into the outdoors from some dark cavern, blinking our eyes in the too bright sunlight, a bunch of woodland creatures fly up, Annette Bening will be there in a wig and Tom Jones will start singing. That's what is going to happen right? I was promised Tom Jones.
Gravity -- I thought about including one of the most bombastic examples of the ending I described up top, like say your Armageddon ending (which is like 75% slo-mo and flags) or your Independence Day, which has people of every color across the globe yee-hawing over the downed saucers (which probably crashed on and murdered millions in the process). But I prefer Cuaron's little spin, with Sandra Bullock clutching that weirdly primordial patch of wet clay -- he shoots our natural soil like we're in a Star Trek episode, making home feel very foreign. Also for all of Gravity's emphasis on Sandy's astronaut being a Mother this ending does stand apart from the usual tropes in how internalized it keeps itself -- all that matters is this woman manages to stand and take a step, and another.
. .
Titanic -- Fuck you, haters! This is my list and I'm gonna include that old broad making an "Oopsie!" sound as she throws a priceless artifact into the ocean if I wanna, dammit. In all seriousness I will defend Titanic to my dying breath -- which hey might be tomorrow, so maybe this is it! -- and I love the sequence where the camera floats through the submerged ship and it comes to life and we see Jack and Rose dancing down there together once again. Yeah this is more "bittersweet" than "happy" but Rose gets a good life with horses and shit, and I'm crying just typing this, so fuck you! Heartless monsters!
The Impossible -- While I think the above scenes from James Cameron's and Alfonso Cuaron's epics are wonderfully acted it's the final moments from director J.A. Bayona's 2012 film about the 2004 tsunami that gets the Gold Medal performance-wise for Naomi Watts' deeply affecting portrait of terror and grief and relief and every other fucking thing that washes over her in these final moments. .
our current situation with cake. We all want cake.
. .
Starship Troopers --Starting and ending this list on subversive notes seems about right, and it doesn't get much more subversive than Paul Verhoeven's Fascist Satire about gorgeous fuckable human beings gleefully conquering and torturing all those filthy foreigners -- to the winner the spoils, ya goddamn buncha bugs! Whaddya wanna do, live forever???
Free Jake! Free Jake! Free Jake! No Jake isn't in prison -- at least not more than any of us are right now thanks to Coronavirus... and excuse me while I take a moment or two imagining being trapped in quarantine with Jake right now... excuse me I said I needed a moment OR TWO. Just count to two hundred, please.
Okay. What were we talking about? Oh right -- Free Jake! This billowy locked photo-shoot is for the latest issue of Another Man Magazine, and they're being nice enough to put this entire month's entire issue online for free. You just have to sign up over here (thx Mac) and they'll email it to you on April 6th. There's other stuff in the issue but come on. Free Jake! Speaking of hit the jump for the rest of this shoot...
During times of great stress they say we return to sources of great comfort, and these old photos by Lorenzo Agius of one-time BFFs Ewan McGregor -- who's also today's birthday boy -- and Jude Law are, for me, one helluva source of great comfort, even if I've probably posted them half a dozen times over the many years. Although I must admit there's an air of tension about them when I look at them now because I feel like we haven't seen Jude & Ewan hanging out in a long time? I loved that they were friends and roommates when we first got to know them -- they had their production company and everything, but checking now that folded in 2003. Have we seen them chilling lately? As in... the past fifteen years? Am I that out of date?
The great Shirley Stoler was born 91 years ago today -- I've written up some more extensive thoughts on her before but TCM was showing this movie specifically in the mid-afternoon a week... a couple of weeks... oh who knows. Recently! TCM was showing this movie in the middle of the afternoon on one of these accursed plague days and I was kind of aghast...
.
Well I thought I’d get something done this afternoon but then @tcm went and showed The Honeymoon Killers and I definitely needed to watch it for the twentieth time so pic.twitter.com/wUyR1zC3Y7
... (read: delighted) that I was able to watch on a basic cable channel Shirley Stoller smash an annoying old woman's head in with a hammer while the sun shone outside. I know I might sound like a commercial for TCM sometimes but god I wish -- I'd be their spokesperson any day. I'd also be Martha Beck's spokesperson any day. She knew how to do it. Lay around, eating chocolates, fucking hot Tony Lo Bianco and getting rich. Queen!
You know we're in A Real Place right now because I kind of cried a little bit reading this news meant for children -- Dolly Parton is going to read a children's book to, you know, "children" on YouTube every Thursday night for the next ten weeks. The YouTube channel is at this link here -- it's somewhat promotional in that there's a documentary about her famed Imagination Library, which has been donating millions of books to kids since 1995, that was scheduled to come out in April and which has just been moved back, release-date-wise to September. The doc is called The Library That Dolly Built and the trailer's down at the bottom of this post.
I don't know about you but there seems to be only one thing in this world that every person can agree on and that is Dolly Parton, and the thought of her reading a bedtime story to me once a week in these trying damn times is like the warmest blanket I've ever imagined; hence the tears. I will be there anyway, and I think y'all should join us. This becoming a thing sounds like the first actual sense of comfort I've felt in three weeks. Dolly is magic.
I never got around to writing up my thoughts on several films I saw screened at FLC's "Rendezvous With French Cinema" series at the start of this month -- hey remember three weeks ago? -- because, well, you know, other things started taking over our minds at that point, and it got hard to write. It remains hard to write, as the site over the past two weeks of scarce content attests. Anyway one of the films I never got around to reviewing was Cédric Klapisch's romantic drama Someone, Somewhere starring your boy François Civil seen here. Civil was in two films at Rendezvous; I talked about the other one in my intro to this year's slate right here. (And you can see lots more of him in this great big gratuitous post I did last year, too.) The film's not out here in the US (not sure when or if that will happen) but I do believe it's streaming across the pond, so to those readers I say, it's a nice movie. Sweet, thoughtful and romantic. You could do worse for distracting yourselves for a couple hours from the world around... well, the world. Hit the jump for more gifs...
Here's some nice news to invade our isolations -- who doesn't want to let the weirdo legend Udo Kier into their home right about now? He'll liven the place up, for sure. Udo is doing a live YouTube Q&A on April 1st with the filmmakers behind his immensely satisfying and timely new movie Bacurau out of Brazil, which I reviewed right here during the NYFF back when we still had FFs. BAM (that is to say the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which also has a stellar film program) is hosting Udo with directors Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, and it's at 8pm on the 1st. Pencil this shit in! Oh and see the movie too, if you haven't yet. (Here is the trailer.) You can buy tickets and watch the film online thanks to Kino Now, just like you're a person outside in the real world. Fancy! Below is the window for the Q&A on Wednesday -- I'll re-up this when the time comes!
If I feel stressed at all this week I'm just gonna think about Jesse Bradford mediating shirtless with a giant turtle, and maybe that'll make me feel better. In one way or another, anyway. (via)
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, my favorite Rainer Werner Fassbinder film and a helluva good flick on the topic of Social Isolation, is going to play on TCM this weekend! Unless you're a nutty night owl you'll have to set your DVRs -- they're not showing it until 2:15am Sunday night / Monday morning (thx Mac) which is way past my bedtime. Especially now that I'm inside this apartment all the time -- don't know about you but I've been going to bed earlier every night. Anybody else?
Anyway it's not just the classic Petra that TCM's gifting us -- they're doing a Fassbinder double-feature with a much scarcer flick of his, Satan's Brew from 1976. Unlike Petra, which has gotten the fancy Criterion treatment (which funny enough I just bought a copy two days ago!), Satan's Brew remains woefully under-seen -- the DVD is out of print but you can watch it on Criterion Channel -- and not just because it's got Rainer leering at boyfriend Armin Meier with all the NSFW sleaze he can muster. It's maybe Fassbinder's weirdest movie, freewheeling and unhinged, and from what I recall very funny. You know... in that Fassbinder way. Which is to say not typically funny, but funny. Listen, just listen to me and watch it. Watch 'em both!
Well this is a nice treat! Mr Porter has just gifted us with a new photoshoot of Devs actor Karl Glusman right after I tweeted about him last night. How kind of them! There's also a poll at that link if you're so inclined -- I'm just a-okay with pictures for the moment. For one thing they help me set up the poll I tweeted about...
I should do a poll on this (perhaps tomorrow) but the cute boys of #Devs are the only thing giving me good feelings tonight pic.twitter.com/2e68L4zMpJ
Not that I'm exactly making the contest fair, given all the photos of Glusman I'm surrounding it with. Well you can click here for a nice extra picture of Jin Ha to somewhat level the playing field. That said I've been Team Karl ever since his 3D spooge hit me in the eye during Gaspar Noé's art-porn Love. Call me a serial monogamist all you want but I'm committed once that happens. Hit the jump for the rest of this shoot...
Hey everybody -- I'm having one of them overwhelmed and run-down days that I am sure each and every one of y'all have gone through over the past weird couple of weeks, more than once, and will have again. So I've gone and shut myself off with a double-feature of long crazy-big and never-before-seen distractions; just finished Fellini's Juliet of the Spiritsand now I'm working on Michael Cimino's infamous studio-destroyer Heaven's Gate. Cuz why not? Anyway since weekends no longer exist I'll probably post over the next couple of days, unlike days of yore, so until then...
Wait how does anybody do work at home when TCM is showing shit like Juliet of the Spirits all afternoon pic.twitter.com/71UqnVjiMu
I don't know much about the actor Dennis Morgan except he was in Christmas in Connecticut and according to Wikipedia he was a "lifelong staunch conservative Republican" so perhaps I should tread lightly, posting his picture. But then I've seen his Christmas in Connecticut co-star my beloved Barbara Stanwyck described as a Republican and I always cut her slack because 1) I fucking adore her and 2) that meant kind of a different thing sixty-ish years ago. Anyway this morning I saw this photo of him taking a bath in the 1943 movie The Desert Song and I figured I'd ask if y'all have any words on the actor Dennis Morgan. Hmm?
I missed about 97.5% of the big Twitter brouhaha that apparently happened with the director of Daniel Radcliffe's new movie Guns Akimbo -- I just vaguely know he went nuts and said a bunch of offensive things and everybody canceled writing anything about the movie. I have no desire to know what happened or to wade into that conversation -- if I did I would have by now, and now...
... we got bigger shit to deal with in the world. It's a shame for those of us who like Dan and who've been waiting for him to get another good showcase, but I'm not exactly worried about the guy who was richer than god before he hit drinking age; Harry Potter fine. Speaking of, fine that is, hit the jump for the rest of this shoot...
In the interest of shortening what was already going to be a long post I will abbreviate the start of this scene -- Little Judy is riding in the backseat through the dark, through the night, with her asshole father and her wicked stepmother Rosemary in the front seat when the car gets stuck in the mud. They get out and start walking towards the closest house, but because Judy can't keep up -- being, you know, a little girl -- Rosemary comes back and throws Judy's teddy bear into the trees. Because, tale as old as time, that's what wicked stepmothers do. Judy though, she's got quite the vivid imagination! Hit the jump for the rest...
Posts
