If you want to stay home and watch movies on Halloween but actually getting your hands on the full slate of films on our Six Degrees of Frankenstein marathon seems like too much trouble, consider Turner Classic Movies your back-up. The channel began its 48 Hours of Horror this morning at 6:15 with a showing of Mad Love, the Peter Lorre-starring tale of fatal attraction for which I am a total nerd. Highlights coming up over the next two days include:
After moving the film’s release date from 2008 awards season to spring 2009, Paramount has taken The Soloistout of its opening night slot at AFI. The festival is expected to announce a new opening night film today.
Taylor Hackford’s Love Ranch, starring his wife Helen Mirren as a brothel owner and financed by ThinkFilm sister Capitol Films, is in search of a distributor. The director is shopping it to studios himself in the hopes of repeating the good fortune he found with Ray. “Directors have to be realistic about this process because people are so frightened right now,” he said.
Alec Baldwin will replace Rose McGowan as celebrity co-host of The Essentials, the Saturday night showcase of superclassics on TCM. His episodes will start airing in March.
After reading Anne Thompson’s post on the dismal reception given to the youth-baiting rethink of At The Movies starring Ben Lyons and Ben Mankiewicz, I decided I had better watch The Two Bens’ first episode online to see what all the griping is about. It actually starts off rather well: Mankiewicz is totally qualified for this job, although it’s a bit of a wonder he was even hired, what with his TCM-honed, “I am going to explain this very slowly because my viewers may be aged” manner of speaking. But then he tosses it to Lyons, who says something completely incoherent about Burn After Reading being “almost like an exercise in drama,” and then they cut back Mankiewicz, who struggles to croak out, “Yeah, that’s an interesting point,” whilst swallowing his own testicles. At that point, I stopped.
Interestingly, another thing that I wasn’t able to force myself to watch all the way through this week also had to do with the sorry contemporary incarnation of the former gold standard for televised movie reviews.
I’m heading out a bit early for the weekend (yes, the Week in Review is on its way), but before I go I want to give a shout out to some of TCM’s Summer Under the Stars programming coming up this weekend. Across Saturday and Sunday, they’re saluting the two greatest male musical stars of all time, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. I’m a sucker for certain of the Astaire/Rogers films (primarily Swing Time, and probably mostly because I think there’s something interesting about the fact that Fred is essentially a gambling cad who spends the entire movie flirting with Ginger but won’t seal the deal because he has a frumpy fiancee at home), but I’m really more into Gene Kelly.
Among the films screening on Sunday that I’d recommend: the Best Picture winning An American in Paris, directed by Vincente Minnelli and scored to Gershwin; It’s Always Fair Weather, which is essentially the Mad Men of mid-century musicals; and Take Me Out to the Ball Game, the last film Busby Berkeley directed without choreographing. Ball Game is more of a curiosity than anything else; rumor has it, Berkeley was too far in the bottle at that point in his career to really take control, and Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s credits for choreography.
The numbers aren’t “good”, exactly, but intriguingly off. Like the one above, where Kelly and Frank Sinatra sing a song where they tell a number of increasingly unlikely brags about making out with girls on the road and then never calling them. The chorus: thanks to Sinatra leading leading her on and leaving the next day, they sing triumphantly, “the sweetest gal at Vassar’s in the cold, cold ground.” Later, Kelly sings about how he “had to go” when he learned that one paramour was “just 11.” Of course, the cads eventually get their comeupance when they meet Esther Williams and Betty Garrett, but the movie’s a little more interesting in these WTF? moments.
If you listened to last week’s episode of FilmCouch, you’ll know that I have a pretty unhealthy relationship with TCM’s Summer Under the Stars. Every August, I become pretty much a total shut-in. Their strategy of programming 24 hours worth of films for a different star every day of the month forces the network to really dig into the archives sometimes. So day after day, I try to leave my house, but it seems like there’s always a chance that I’m going to miss something that’s not going to air until next August, if even then.
Such is the case with today’s tribute to Kim Novak. I don’t actually care about Novak’s work that much (although it’s always nice to have an excuse to watch Billy Wilder’s Kiss Me, Stupid, which airs today at 12 om EST), but she played a supporting part in Phffft!, Judy Holliday and Jack Lemmon’s follow up to It Should Happen to You, a film I’ve been trying to see for years. From what I know of it, it’s actually kind of a stretch to call it a Kim Novak film at all, but since Holliday didn’t make enough movies to qualify for her own Summer Under the Stars tribute, I’m not going to complain.
See a clip above. Phffft! airs this morning at 10:30 EST.
Rogen and Franco are hilarious in Pineapple Express, but the pothead to really watch out for is Danny McBride. Often relegated to brilliant and all-too-brief supporting roles, McBride stars in The Foot Fist Way, which is finally getting a gradual release thanks to Will Ferrell and Adam McKay. McBride’s magic lies in his ability to be a complete asshole 100% of the time on screen, while still charming the viewer. How does he do that?
ALSO, a call to Karina brings us back to the mid-twentieth century with some great television. What is it that makes AMC’s Mad Men so addictive? Need an excuse to not leave the house for the rest of the summer? Try TCM’s Summer Under the Stars.
AdLand points to this print ad, purchased by Turner Classic Movies, which backhandedly “supports” the striking writers. A mock-up of a crumpled screenplay cover page, the ad encourages striking screenwriters to “keep it up” because, “After all, the greatest movies have already been written.”
It’s only surprising that TCM, a brand built on heavy fetishism of the old studio system, would so blatantly taunt the WGA, in that it’s a surprise to see ANYONE express an AMPTP-sympathetic position these days. But the ad has sparked an interesting conversation over at LAist. Of course, the ad is condescending. But is it actually more sinister than that?
Oh man … I totally forgot about the Val Lewton blogathon, and now I’m way too busy with Sundance prep to write something up. In any case, it starts today, to coincide with the TCM premiere of Val Lewton: The Man In the Shadows. I saw Kent Jones’ doc (narrated by Martin Scorsese) at Telluride, and it’s definitely a must-see for fans of films like Cat People and I Walked With A Zombie who want a taste of Lewton’s lesser-known works.
Anyone could have guessed that last night’s Un-Golden Globes would be “weird”, but who could have guessed that it would have moved so many journalists to lapse into poetics? First Varietylikened the experience to a dream; then, the NY Times topped their coverage with this photo of an unusually long-faced E! anchor, with a caption pointing up his supposed existential dilemma. Now, David Poland’s getting into the act, with this revelation: “I don’t really like ghosts as much as I enjoy the living.”
A week or so ago, Jurgen Fauth mentioned that he’d bought an URL that he didn’t know what to do with. He’s since figured it out: IDrinkYourMilkshake.com has now become a web portal dedicated to aggregating discussions––and inevitable video mashups, as above––concerning There Will Be Blood. Act now, and you can even get an @idrinkyourmilkshake.com email address!
Bob Westal ponders Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. “Could this film be the next Duck Soup combining the silliest comedy and the sharpest satire?”
In some dusty file in the back of my mind, I’ve been compiling a list of Unbelievable Anecdotes Related To The Death of Celebrities. I haven’t heard a really good one since Indian film fans went on a bus-burning rampage in Bangalore ithat left five people dead, in response to the death of aging film star Rajkumar. Here in America, we love our stars, but apparently not enough to try to burn down our technology capitals when they die of natural causes.
So here’s another one for the file: according to the Associated Press, a 67-year-old woman died in a trailer at a Graceland campground yesterday after suffering heatstroke during a graveside procession intended to honor the 30th anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley. An 8-year-old boy was also hospitalized after suffering heat stroke during the event, which took place in 105-degree heat; another mourner, dressed in a black Elvis jumpsuit, “pulled an oxygen tank behind him with a breathing tube attached to his nose.”
I’m not at all prepared to go to such lengths to honor the occasion, but I did pull together a list of resources and writings related to Elvis’ movie careers. You can check that after the jump.
Today would have marked the 100th birthday of Barbara Stanwyck. Perhaps the greatest tough-cookie of an era in which tough-cookies were in no short supply, Stanwyck worked steadily from the 30s through the 60s. She had a rare gift for adopting the expected conventions of any given genre, while maintaining her signature blend of wise-cracking sensuality and drowsy hostility.
Some of Ms. Stanwyck’s must-see performances are screening on Turner Classic Movies today and tonight; though I’d prefer to watch Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire, the gem of the program is probably Baby Face, which airs tonight at 8pm EST. Baby Face was the ultimate pre-Code picture, and one of the least morally defensible products of Warner Brother’s early-30s stab at social relevancy. Stanwyck plays Lily, a saloon maid who, perhaps too-loosely interpreting the advice of her Nietzschean mentor, “accidentally” kills her father and, with her handservant/only friend in tow, hightails it to the big city to commence sleeping her way to the top.
The film was so racy in its original incarnation that when it was initially released in the relatively-wild pre-Code era, significant cuts had to be made to appease the censors. The original cut was found and screened at Film Forum in New York last year; as the New York Times‘ Dave Kehr put it at the time, “with its five full minutes of sleaze restored, it has to be seen to be not quite believed.”
For more on our girl Babs, check out these tributes from around the web:
“[I'd] rank Stanwyck\’s abilities above that entire Picturegoer list, even above Garbo, who was an instinctual actress and not the superb technician that Stanwyck was.” — Self-Styled Siren
“She was a great star, and also happened to be a rock-ribbed right-winger and anti-communist
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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After moving the film’s release date from 2008 awards season to spring 2009, Paramount has taken The Soloist out of its opening night slot at AFI. The festival is expected to announce a new opening night film today.
