Sunset Gun

Three Obsessions: Midnight Movies, Suddenly and Goldiggers

More obsessions and more DVDs to be released tomorrow including Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Anthony Mann's Cimarron, the Errol Flynn Western Collection and David Mamet's UFC movie, Redbelt. Also, check out Sept. 2 for the Fox noir titles Road House (a classic starring Ida Lupino, Richard Widmark and Cornel Wilde) on which I provide commentary with friend and "Czar of Noir" Eddie Muller. I also contributed to featurettes on Road House and the bizarre but beautiful Moontide (starring Lupino, Jean Gabin and Claude Rains).

As always, you can read all my DVD and Theatrical reviews at Strange Impersonation and check out whatever else I'm thinking at Pretty Poison.

As for now, Three Obsessions:

1. Midnight Movies  Only because I discussed the longstanding trend on the show Dailies for the Reelz channel. Though I briefly discussed newer pictures now being released at midnight, why movie fans like to attend the late late shows and why studios looove making money off of them, my favorites will always be the true cult movies, like Harold and Maude (which I'll be writing about soon), Showgirls or Rocky Horror (though I could never join that movie cult -- I just love the picture itself and the music -- "Science Fiction Double Feature" is a perfect, beautiful, epic song). Anyway, it all started with The Empire Strikes Back in my hometown, Seattle, but really on a larger scale, with Tim Burton's Batman -- which I talk about but was probably cut for time. There's never enough time! Dig the drunk singing The Star Wars theme...Jeeesus...I hope he's drunk.

2. Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)  Even scripter Gore Vidal admits to going way over-the-top with this Tennessee Williams adaptation, but bless the man for doing so. To please the production code, he had to -- making the film's homosexual character not only an enigma, but a faceless monster, perishing at the hands of fed-up native boys. Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Suddenly is another picture I watch with alarming frequency, but I can't fault myself -- the picture has it all -- Kate Hepburn at her most evil scene chomping best, perpetual fag-hag Liz Taylor donning not only the "it" bathing suit but being the "it" woman to procure young men for her chicken-hawk, native sodomizing cousin. Insane asylums, lobotomies, creepy Venus flytrap Gothic gardens, the Galapagos Islands, cannibalization! And then there's the beautiful Montgomery Clift, post accident (I happen to think he's still gorgeous -- just broken and more vulnerable) as Liz's supportive shrink (can you imagine Monty as your shrink? Wait a second...I totally can and wish he was). The movie finds the deliciously named Violet Venable (Hepburn) as a New Orleans widow unnaturally obsessed with her "poet" son Sebastian, who died while on vacation with her gorgeous niece Catherine (Taylor). I love how impeccably formal, insanely eccentric (she comes down to greet people in an elevator and has a garden filled with monstrous plants) and downright sick this woman is; her fixation on Sebastian being Oedipal with a capital O. But pretty Catherine's thoughtful shrink Monty will get to the bottom of this poisoned well leading to the movies memorable blood-curdling scream of "Help!" -- something that has invaded my dreams for years and years. Perfect hothouse Southern melodrama. I want to move there...

3. Goldiggers of 1933 (1933)  I can never get enough of this sexy, subversive picture. Though 1930’s Warner Brothers is renown for social dramas like I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang or the brilliant Wild Boys of the Road (you must track this down -- an under-seen masterpiece) and classic gangster films like Little Caesar with Edward G. Robinson and Public Enemy with James Cagney, they also provided some of cinema’s greatest musicals. My favorite being Gold Diggers of 1933, directed by Fugitive helmer, Mervyn LeRoy and more importantly, choreographed by that mad genius, surrealistic artist Busby Berkeley. With a take on what Americans love most -- money -- the film showcases a bizarre-o number of the famed song "We're in the Money" wherein a comely Ginger Rogers sings it in both English AND Pig Latin. (My God, how I love Ginger -- The Major and the Minor alone). Amazing for its ability to be light fluff, fantastically inventive in terms of set design and costuming and seriously relevant, Goldiggers proves that musicals aren’t mere escapism. And by the time Joan Blondell ends the film with the haunting "Remember My Forgotten Man," in which soldiers from World War I are shown in bread lines, you'll again remember that even the oldest of musicals had something to say. Absolutely sublime.

True Blue Kentucky Girl

One of my favorite country singers, one of my favorite biopics, one of my favorite pairings with Conway Twitty and a major movie for me as a child -- Coal Miner's Daughter -- it's near perfection. And if you don't like it, you can go to, as Loretta sang, "fist city."

Michael Apted’s biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter is a work of lovely contradictions that tie together so seamlessly, one is almost surprised by just how affecting it is. Among the contradictions: The movie is refreshingly honest yet wonderfully mythic; it’s gorgeously filmed, at times glamorous, yet down-home, gritty and grindingly real; and it’s rags-to-riches conventional yet incredibly unique, avoiding easy hillbilly stereotypes and folksy Southern niceties.

In fact, the movie’s a lot like its subject, legendary country singer Loretta Lynn, a young woman from the Appalachian Mountains who remained married to her first, troubled love and sang to the good-old-boy country music establishment with womanly candor while creating some of the genre’s most feminist-oriented songs. Take a listen to her controversial “The Pill” (about, yep, birth control) or “Fist City” (about beating up the woman running around with her real life philandering man) or, years after the 1980 picture, her album “Van Lear Rose” -- made with assistance from White Stripes' Jack White ("Portland Oregon" is such a great song it makes me miss my old stomping grounds) -- and you perceive a woman of singular passion, cleverness, will and mystery. And she's still going strong.

And the movie taps right into these elements of Lynn with a subtle, yet inspirational, power. With a fantastic Sissy Spacek playing Lynn (and singing all of her songs splendidly), the story takes us through the typical biopic tropes without feeling typical. Lynn is a sexually innocent child-bride in 1948 when she marries Doolittle Lynn (Tommy Lee Jones), an ambitious man who goes against the wishes of Loretta's father (the great Levon Helm) by moving his daughter far from home. The two have children (many -- and the first time is essentially a get-it-over-with moment of force), but not much of a life, and after giving Loretta a guitar as an anniversary present, Doolittle almost inadvertently unearths his wife’s boundless talent. From then on, it’s up and up and up.

What makes Coal Miner's Daughter so much different than other by-the-numbers biopics is its view of Lynn’s background. With British documentarian Apted (famous for the 7 Up series) at the helm, the film  looks at the hills of Kentucky with an intriguing mixture of exotic beauty and unromanticized sharpness.

Not once does the movie make Lynn’s underprivileged family members appear simply quaint or depressingly poor, instead showing their struggle and charming grit, much like Loretta and Dolittle (who put that woman through a lot of hell in her life, and yet she stuck by him), particularly during the couple’s journey toward stardom. And the cast is brilliant -- with Spacek giving a tour de force performance that spans many years, many triumphs and a few tragedies (including the death of close friend Patsy Cline played wonderfully by Beverly D'Angelo). A lovely tribute to an exceptional artist, Coal Miner’s Daughter does Loretta Lynn’s life, just as she sings in her iconic song, proud.

*For my friend Michael Jenkins. Wished your grandfather could have been more prominent in her on-screen life story.

Three Obsessions: Foxes, Pineapple and the Hammer

More long overdue obsessions (and an overdue new post for that matter. Excuse? This has been a terrible two months...lots of desert drama). But I'm not one to get personal here so I'll switch over to the numerous DVDs released while my blog suffered ghosts, heat, insanity and Comic-Con. Anyway, it's the blues titles -- Blues in the Night and Jack Webb's fantastic Pete Kelly's Blues that I ran out and bought, ASAP. After that, there's too many more to cover.

As always, you can read all my DVD and Theatrical reviews at Strange Impersonation and check out whatever else I'm thinking at Pretty Poison.

As for now, Three Obsessions:

1. Bette Davis as Regina Giddens in The Little Foxes   Ms. Davis has played some cold-blooded, malevolent shrews in her time, but her ruthless Southern matriarch Regina Giddens from The Little Foxes (directed by William Wyler and adapted from Lillian Hellman's play) is the ultimate Bette with a B (as in bitch). A woman with nary a trace of sympathy, Regina is a turn-of-the-20th-century schemer who can't stand not getting her way. After her ailing and honorable husband (Herbert Marshall) shows little interest, in fact disgust, in her newest entrepreneurial venture (with her two equally greedy brothers), she turns on the full-throttle heartlessness. She needs his money, he's got a bad ticker and, in the picture's most famous moment (spoiler alert), she watches him, stone cold and without assistance, collapse on the stairs while begging for his medication. Pinched, powdered and stiff, with a cruel mouth and swath of red lipstick that looks more like a blood smear, Davis was only in her early 30s when she played this older, severe woman. Being Bette Davis, an actress who insisted on her ghastly makeup for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, she pulls off her evil Southern belle from hell beautifully, or rather, with beautiful hideousness. And on a side-note, you gotta love that this was the great Dan Duryea's screen debut (1941) in which (imagine this ladies!) he gets slapped! He never let that happen again.

2. Loving The Pineapple Express   I saw The Pineapple Express for the second time and it held up. Even better. As I've written before, after reading so many negative reviews, I realized that I loved many things critics didn’t like about the picture -- the shaggy pacing, the lack of quippy-joke-a minute banter, the aimlessness (which is both fitting for pot-heads and at the same time, something I don't necessarily agree with since these guys, at least James Franco's wonderfully touching drug dealer Saul has some goals). I love the '80s touches from the music (Bell Biv DeVoe!) to Seth Rogen's car to the hit men’s clothes and yet, it takes place in current times. And the pop culture references are real rather than hip. So great. Though the picture is clearly sending up '80s action movies within the stoner genre, I find it interesting that no one (from what I've read anyway) has mentioned any kind of deeper message regarding drugs laws in this country. Not sure if Apatow (and the great David Gordon Green) were making such a comment, but after (spoiler alert!) the entire barn blows up and Kevin Corrigan really can't make it to dinner on time, because of essentially, a plant...this idea came to mind. The criminalization of pot is as absurd as Rogen dueling Gary Cole with a marijuana light.  Also, Franco, Franco, Franco. I've been stumping for him ever since I witnessed his range on Freaks and Geeks. Too long he's been the smoldering bad boy of the big screen (and don’t get me wrong, he’s good at that), but here, he's a sweet, understated goofball you absolutely fall in love with. Without him, the movie wouldn't have worked. He's the heart and soul of the picture. When he says he wants to make parks with septic areas for kids to shi* in, I effing believe him. With this, you totally get why Rogen comes to love him -- and truly, this movie plays like a love story between these two men. I damn near choked up when they were frolicking in the woods. No one really wants to grow up...And again, legalize it.

3. Fred Williamson  I ignore most celebrities I spy walking around L.A. (well, aside from the great Faye Dunaway but she started that) but when the glorious Inglorious Bastard Fred Williamson (a.k.a. Black Caesar and all those Charley movies that'll never be released solely for their titles) is just standing there on the sidewalk, you have to say hello. Added bonus, I now own one of the Hammer's personal silver lighters designed as...guess? A fist clenching a hammer (I should post a picture of that actually). Right on. I may be a honky but...come now brothers and sisters. Fuel the revolution!  And dig this...the man is over 70-years-old. With respect to his police Captain in Starsky and Hutch, he sure as hell doesn't look "too old for this shit." Damn.