My partner and I were watching this film on the Lifetime network and adding its memorable quotes to the empty section here at its IMDb page. We soon started giggling at the audacity in innocence. The film concerns a summer between the 17-year-old daughter of a late-40s drunkard Dad punctuated mostly by an overused Ad Asner as one of the colorful locals. Anyhow, the film totally reads as a very soft porn tape. The father has his girlfriend, and the daughter meets a neighbor boy, but the sexual lives of the two cannot but help to color their moments together: in his trailer, bobbing in the lake, up on a roof, etc. Kudos for the nerve of the writers. Aside from this campy subtext, the story is not at all dull. The guitar is clichéd, but the tale moves tenderly forward!
Reviews
19 Reviews
The King and Queen of Moonlight Bay
(2003 TV Movie)
Under-the-Radar Dirty-Old-Man Gem
28 February 2010
The Family That Preys
(2008)
Film Filled with Deceit and Surprises Satisfies
19 January 2009
Another film filled with secrets and surprises. Good set-up of plot and characters, if a bit predictable. Writer, director, producer, actor Tyler Perry (best known for his "Big Momma" franchise) goes for a bittersweet comedy-drama that delivers well. We were quite satisfied with the story and filming. A lot of restraint (no one swears in the film, for example) and non-preachy religious themes. We sat through the credits. Great song sung by Gladys Knight. Woodard's arc is grand. Definitely recommended. Perry is evolving well in his milieu as his empire grows. A fun update of Southern Gothic genre and good performances all round, save for Taraji P. Henson, who is all tics and gestures. Surprised at the IMDb fan-base low rating ( <3/10 ). Perry is a natural to bring our "Hayes Hotel" musical to the big screen or Atlanta and Broadway! - Frederic Kahler
The Peterville Diamond
(1943)
Fast-Paced Delight!
17 September 2007
TCM is currently showing a slew of "forgotten" Teddington Studios films (which repeat next Monday), and this one is a template for any intrigue comedy. Black and white never look better in such low-budget parameters.
Who will hook up with whom? Who will be arrested? What will become of the diamonds and other stones (they call them "rocks" for Americanism)?
One note: the absurdly large corsages worn by the women at the lapel is a trend I should like to see reappear.
Jewel thieves and a laconic damsel entwine. The film is never dull, and very fast paced. O, that films today would learn from such minor gems! I am enjoying this feature and look forward to other Teddington productions via Warner Bros.
Who will hook up with whom? Who will be arrested? What will become of the diamonds and other stones (they call them "rocks" for Americanism)?
One note: the absurdly large corsages worn by the women at the lapel is a trend I should like to see reappear.
Jewel thieves and a laconic damsel entwine. The film is never dull, and very fast paced. O, that films today would learn from such minor gems! I am enjoying this feature and look forward to other Teddington productions via Warner Bros.
Dressed to Kill
(1980)
Museum Sequence is Awesome; Puns abound in Film!
7 March 2007
Warning: Spoilers
***SPOILERS ALERT***
For all its sleaze, "Dressed to Kill" is one heck of a fascinating film, and De Palma pulled out all the stops.
The museum sequence is one of my favorite passages in any film ever made. It ends with a hot taxi ride, but not before we see almost subliminal shots of the killer in the black trench coat outside the museum and who takes the second glove in extreme close-up when Kate gives up too soon the game. But let's rewind:
As best as I recall: Kate Miller (Angie D.) walks around the NYC/Philadelphia museum dressed all in white, then sits to stare at the huge canvases in one room while getting ideas ("nuts" from "Reclining Nude," for example) for her shopping list. A little girl inches away from her parents and tries to run off and play, business as usual in an art museum.
Then a man dressed all in black with sunglasses sits down next to Kate and that wonderful Pino Donaggio music begins, cellos cascading in unison, almost lamentingly so.
De Palma wanted to do the gay underworld film, "Cruising" (which Friedken got), but this is one heck of a cruising sequence between a man and a woman! Kate is fidgety, turned on, sexually frustrated by her lackluster second husband, but she removes a glove and flashes her big diamond. The guy gets up and leaves, but then she gets up and swivels on her heels and unknowingly drops the glove to follow him. Not one word is ever spoken in this sequence.
The mazelike camera work here is superb, very much as Alfred Hitchcock, with the many POV shots sliced between Kate's puzzled face and she tries to catch up with the man she now desires. The music is swirling and pounding and quite loud as Kate goes back to the first room to retrieve her lost glove.
But it is gone! And so is the mysterious man, as Kate shrugs with great disappointment and the music ends on a large chord. I never tire of this scene.
Outside, waiting for her, is her stranger waving her lost glove, beckoning her to join him for that cab ride!
Another point:
The man's apartment is stylish but filled with omens: the news magazine cover with a political cartoon and the words "Teddy Chips Away;" the canvas in the dim bedroom with its grotesquerie "skull;" the digital clock warning us that time is running out; Kate's pulling on her gold bracelets again, her chains, as it were, as her anonymous lover sleeps, who she will discover in a few moments in another, almost ear-splitting sequence, is hiding a secret in his drawers. Yes, puns abound in the film.
And how awful for Kate when she enters the elevator, as guilt wells up in her from the staring girl, that she's forgotten her wedding ring at the man's apartment. Now Liz Blake (Nancy Allen, De Palma's wife) intersects with the story as does the killer, who has followed Kate, and lurks in a red-lit stairwell behind the door. The music will certainly change dramatically!
Yes, it's sleazier than masterpiece "Psycho" but a satisfying film regardless. On US television, the film was edited, of course, and the horrifying murder is tempered by a red filter.
For all its sleaze, "Dressed to Kill" is one heck of a fascinating film, and De Palma pulled out all the stops.
The museum sequence is one of my favorite passages in any film ever made. It ends with a hot taxi ride, but not before we see almost subliminal shots of the killer in the black trench coat outside the museum and who takes the second glove in extreme close-up when Kate gives up too soon the game. But let's rewind:
As best as I recall: Kate Miller (Angie D.) walks around the NYC/Philadelphia museum dressed all in white, then sits to stare at the huge canvases in one room while getting ideas ("nuts" from "Reclining Nude," for example) for her shopping list. A little girl inches away from her parents and tries to run off and play, business as usual in an art museum.
Then a man dressed all in black with sunglasses sits down next to Kate and that wonderful Pino Donaggio music begins, cellos cascading in unison, almost lamentingly so.
De Palma wanted to do the gay underworld film, "Cruising" (which Friedken got), but this is one heck of a cruising sequence between a man and a woman! Kate is fidgety, turned on, sexually frustrated by her lackluster second husband, but she removes a glove and flashes her big diamond. The guy gets up and leaves, but then she gets up and swivels on her heels and unknowingly drops the glove to follow him. Not one word is ever spoken in this sequence.
The mazelike camera work here is superb, very much as Alfred Hitchcock, with the many POV shots sliced between Kate's puzzled face and she tries to catch up with the man she now desires. The music is swirling and pounding and quite loud as Kate goes back to the first room to retrieve her lost glove.
But it is gone! And so is the mysterious man, as Kate shrugs with great disappointment and the music ends on a large chord. I never tire of this scene.
Outside, waiting for her, is her stranger waving her lost glove, beckoning her to join him for that cab ride!
Another point:
The man's apartment is stylish but filled with omens: the news magazine cover with a political cartoon and the words "Teddy Chips Away;" the canvas in the dim bedroom with its grotesquerie "skull;" the digital clock warning us that time is running out; Kate's pulling on her gold bracelets again, her chains, as it were, as her anonymous lover sleeps, who she will discover in a few moments in another, almost ear-splitting sequence, is hiding a secret in his drawers. Yes, puns abound in the film.
And how awful for Kate when she enters the elevator, as guilt wells up in her from the staring girl, that she's forgotten her wedding ring at the man's apartment. Now Liz Blake (Nancy Allen, De Palma's wife) intersects with the story as does the killer, who has followed Kate, and lurks in a red-lit stairwell behind the door. The music will certainly change dramatically!
Yes, it's sleazier than masterpiece "Psycho" but a satisfying film regardless. On US television, the film was edited, of course, and the horrifying murder is tempered by a red filter.
Poseidon
(2006)
Awesome Reworking of Our Beloved Original
13 May 2006
Ahoy, shipmates, and I'm really glad that you are all not amongst the many who perished aboard the Southampton built POSEIDON.
We've just come back from a matinée and we all of us found the movie to be awesome. Some of the critics and other reviewers got things wrong here and there (which is annoying to a professional film critic), but I know sometimes you gotta see a movie more than once.
I totally respect the opinions of folks here who found it falling far short of our beloved original or just plain bad, but I really enjoyed this ride. A few things for now - and I think I can avoid any spoilers today:
1. The film was better than Petersen's "The Perfect Storm." In that film (probably out of some respect to its real-life casualties), we never really see what happens to the guys aboard altogether.
2. There is a character on board POSEIDON who is a lot like the 72 film's Linda Rogo, but with a twist!
3. Despite the fact the rogue wave comes so early in the film, we most certainly do learn so much about the characters who climb up through the ship and we certainly do care about them, especially when they are in peril and when some folks do not make it.
4. This is a non-stop "ride" if you will, and you will not be bored.
5. The film, in part due to its musical soundtrack, pulls a lot of emotion out of you, and I was often close to tears from the very beginning: knowing the great ship is doomed, seeing so many passengers and crew excited about New Year's, and the fact that music plays whilst the ship is capsizing.
6. There are plenty of rearranged bits from the original incorporated in POSEIDON, including dialog and the looks on people's faces during the course of the climb. And touches from Paul Gallico's book missing in the original return here.
7. One of the most impacting moments of the film is the silent exchange between two certain characters when one of them reopens an elevator shaft.
8. This film's characters have a lot of guilt written on their faces and there are moments, too, where what is not said is even more effective. For that, I say, the acting is generally very good.
9. Death visits every part of the ship and it isn't pretty. It's realistic and reminds us that when entertainment is so close to reality we are -- as was often the case with Hitchcock's films -- morally implicated by watching the spectacle.
10. There is a character in the film who is rather like Nonnie.
11. The line from the book about the ship seeming to be retching her bowels in mortal agony is not a one-time deal. It is repeated again and again and you do "care" for the ship as well as its characters.
12. When Gloria performs her songs (which are tailored to the tale just as "The Morning After" was), you want to get up and dance with the rest of the passengers. Party!
That's it for right now and I await more views on the film by my shipmates, but I will add one SPOILER, but you can avoid it by not scrolling down too far.
Whew! What an entertaining film!
Captain and Stowaway,
Frederic Kahler, founder of http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ssposeidon/
13. **SPOILER ALERT** The gay guy doesn't die in the end! Finally!
We've just come back from a matinée and we all of us found the movie to be awesome. Some of the critics and other reviewers got things wrong here and there (which is annoying to a professional film critic), but I know sometimes you gotta see a movie more than once.
I totally respect the opinions of folks here who found it falling far short of our beloved original or just plain bad, but I really enjoyed this ride. A few things for now - and I think I can avoid any spoilers today:
1. The film was better than Petersen's "The Perfect Storm." In that film (probably out of some respect to its real-life casualties), we never really see what happens to the guys aboard altogether.
2. There is a character on board POSEIDON who is a lot like the 72 film's Linda Rogo, but with a twist!
3. Despite the fact the rogue wave comes so early in the film, we most certainly do learn so much about the characters who climb up through the ship and we certainly do care about them, especially when they are in peril and when some folks do not make it.
4. This is a non-stop "ride" if you will, and you will not be bored.
5. The film, in part due to its musical soundtrack, pulls a lot of emotion out of you, and I was often close to tears from the very beginning: knowing the great ship is doomed, seeing so many passengers and crew excited about New Year's, and the fact that music plays whilst the ship is capsizing.
6. There are plenty of rearranged bits from the original incorporated in POSEIDON, including dialog and the looks on people's faces during the course of the climb. And touches from Paul Gallico's book missing in the original return here.
7. One of the most impacting moments of the film is the silent exchange between two certain characters when one of them reopens an elevator shaft.
8. This film's characters have a lot of guilt written on their faces and there are moments, too, where what is not said is even more effective. For that, I say, the acting is generally very good.
9. Death visits every part of the ship and it isn't pretty. It's realistic and reminds us that when entertainment is so close to reality we are -- as was often the case with Hitchcock's films -- morally implicated by watching the spectacle.
10. There is a character in the film who is rather like Nonnie.
11. The line from the book about the ship seeming to be retching her bowels in mortal agony is not a one-time deal. It is repeated again and again and you do "care" for the ship as well as its characters.
12. When Gloria performs her songs (which are tailored to the tale just as "The Morning After" was), you want to get up and dance with the rest of the passengers. Party!
That's it for right now and I await more views on the film by my shipmates, but I will add one SPOILER, but you can avoid it by not scrolling down too far.
Whew! What an entertaining film!
Captain and Stowaway,
Frederic Kahler, founder of http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ssposeidon/
13. **SPOILER ALERT** The gay guy doesn't die in the end! Finally!
Wickedly Perfect
(2004–2005)
You've Got to Miss Martha After This Connecticut Contest!
6 January 2005
Warning: Spoilers
Bottom line: I'll watch the show through to its end. But I won't tape it for posterity.
"Wickedly Perfect" had so much Martha Stewart, withOUT the Martha. Some things, like certain orgasms, just cannot be faked (tee-hee). But it was a hoot to watch, thank G-d. And who can expect to top Martha? Madonna? Clinton? Joan Lunden? The debut, though ipso facto erratic, was a good thrill and a good reminder that some of our so-called evils aren't so evil after all.
SPOILERS ALERT!!! (This means I tell you some of the stuff that happened.) Two teams think they're lunching in an orchard, but they're actually there to gather as many apples as they can.
That was brilliant, because of our commercialism bias: the teams then had to use up ALL the apples they gathered so vivaciously. They would have been better off picking only a few. But the excess would look stunning for one of the two groups.
The one team, The Crafty Beavers (prurience?), created a "medieval" table (a judge's term) out of the apples and excelled with the candied apple with the invitation. That tickled the urban "poo-poo" judges, including the creator of the Gay-guys-as-women phenom, "Sex and the City." The other team, Team Artesian, crafted a ho-hum display table from middle-America, ca. 1983. SAD. The first team, en masse, had the spirit of Martha Stewart.
Remember, Martha reputedly uses "masculine" business tactics: pitting one executive against the other so the loyalty stays with her.
That works fine with the reality show phenomenon; Martha again is ahead of the pack.
It will be fun to see the folks unfold, the designers and chefs, the carpenter and the conceptualizer. And all of it under the campy glare of hostess Joan Lunden, who we may now add to the ranks of announcers solemnly swearing "and one of you will be voted off tonight." Tom, who is first to go, was a cute lunatic of neurosis and failed despotism. His squash-apple-tarragon soup lacked flavor and good presentation. He didn't stand a chance against the all-gal team he alienated at the last minute with the world's longest save-me speech......
Wit ain't jack to the shopper on the street.
We cackled cruelly when he was unanimously ousted.
BTW, can Martha watch this stuff in the pen? The 20,000-square-foot estate, the pretentious flutter of decor, renovated studios, and red shawls -- it all smacks of faux-Martha.
Never was a great pretender more missed!
"Wickedly Perfect" had so much Martha Stewart, withOUT the Martha. Some things, like certain orgasms, just cannot be faked (tee-hee). But it was a hoot to watch, thank G-d. And who can expect to top Martha? Madonna? Clinton? Joan Lunden? The debut, though ipso facto erratic, was a good thrill and a good reminder that some of our so-called evils aren't so evil after all.
SPOILERS ALERT!!! (This means I tell you some of the stuff that happened.) Two teams think they're lunching in an orchard, but they're actually there to gather as many apples as they can.
That was brilliant, because of our commercialism bias: the teams then had to use up ALL the apples they gathered so vivaciously. They would have been better off picking only a few. But the excess would look stunning for one of the two groups.
The one team, The Crafty Beavers (prurience?), created a "medieval" table (a judge's term) out of the apples and excelled with the candied apple with the invitation. That tickled the urban "poo-poo" judges, including the creator of the Gay-guys-as-women phenom, "Sex and the City." The other team, Team Artesian, crafted a ho-hum display table from middle-America, ca. 1983. SAD. The first team, en masse, had the spirit of Martha Stewart.
Remember, Martha reputedly uses "masculine" business tactics: pitting one executive against the other so the loyalty stays with her.
That works fine with the reality show phenomenon; Martha again is ahead of the pack.
It will be fun to see the folks unfold, the designers and chefs, the carpenter and the conceptualizer. And all of it under the campy glare of hostess Joan Lunden, who we may now add to the ranks of announcers solemnly swearing "and one of you will be voted off tonight." Tom, who is first to go, was a cute lunatic of neurosis and failed despotism. His squash-apple-tarragon soup lacked flavor and good presentation. He didn't stand a chance against the all-gal team he alienated at the last minute with the world's longest save-me speech......
Wit ain't jack to the shopper on the street.
We cackled cruelly when he was unanimously ousted.
BTW, can Martha watch this stuff in the pen? The 20,000-square-foot estate, the pretentious flutter of decor, renovated studios, and red shawls -- it all smacks of faux-Martha.
Never was a great pretender more missed!
Frances
(1982)
It's a haunting musical blonde abyss
27 May 2004
"Frances" excels in its artificiality, the way Hitchcock's "The Birds" did. Hollywood is abstract and pointed, the years are blurred like medicated passages of time and nothing is more secure than Home, which is undermined by its cruelly naive stage mother and a glorious but passive father, and as fate would have it, a damp, morose Seattle. I've seen the pink house that is most attributed to Frances' upbringing...
Little, alas, is made of the enormous soundtrack of harmonica backed by a 60-piece string orchestra. The composer John Barry would receive much esteem (and an Oscar) a year later for Sydney Pollack's Streep-Redford-Ralph Lauren gem, "Out of Africa," wherein Barry uses the Mozart piece he also used in "Frances."
Nada is mentioned of Farmers' lesbianism, but I myself cannot see how it could easily have been integrated into a story of a gal already doomed to succeed simply because she would not play The Game with The Man.
You'll note how the shadows of venetian blinds are utilized visually to show Farmer's entrapment in a system that works for most everybody else. There's one time where the blinds are only half across her body - there's still a chance. But we know in our souls that sometimes there can be no escape...
When you are alone - and you hear Barry's piano-sewn music, much of what we associate with Frances Farmer, and by extension her two "KC - Kids of Culture," Karen Carpenter and Kurt Cobain, wells like tears from the listening soul. Ho! Those ARE tears! The violins cut like sharks, the violas like shadowy razors, and the 'celli like nostalgia's daggers.
The colors, symbolic poses, and psycho dynamic tableaux in "Frances" are always heightened and always a bit supremely artificial - as if aliens resuscitated a hopelessly fragile and decayed Frances Farmer and got the poop on success in Tinseltown.
Little, alas, is made of the enormous soundtrack of harmonica backed by a 60-piece string orchestra. The composer John Barry would receive much esteem (and an Oscar) a year later for Sydney Pollack's Streep-Redford-Ralph Lauren gem, "Out of Africa," wherein Barry uses the Mozart piece he also used in "Frances."
Nada is mentioned of Farmers' lesbianism, but I myself cannot see how it could easily have been integrated into a story of a gal already doomed to succeed simply because she would not play The Game with The Man.
You'll note how the shadows of venetian blinds are utilized visually to show Farmer's entrapment in a system that works for most everybody else. There's one time where the blinds are only half across her body - there's still a chance. But we know in our souls that sometimes there can be no escape...
When you are alone - and you hear Barry's piano-sewn music, much of what we associate with Frances Farmer, and by extension her two "KC - Kids of Culture," Karen Carpenter and Kurt Cobain, wells like tears from the listening soul. Ho! Those ARE tears! The violins cut like sharks, the violas like shadowy razors, and the 'celli like nostalgia's daggers.
The colors, symbolic poses, and psycho dynamic tableaux in "Frances" are always heightened and always a bit supremely artificial - as if aliens resuscitated a hopelessly fragile and decayed Frances Farmer and got the poop on success in Tinseltown.
Blessed
(2004)
Stella and Heather go ahead, ahead!
4 April 2004
Cool Rumanian thriller that mixes "Rosemary's Baby" with "The Omen." It's about time we had one of these good, psychological creepers! Real sad to hear about David Hemming's death during the filming; they had to use a body double and some facial CGs for the important party scene. Miss Stevens ("Betty") is spiritual and sassy as the real tor/godmother who shows the couple a house by the lake that they cannot resist. We don't see her as much these years as we did with "Girls, Girls, Girls!" and "The Poseidon Adventure," but Stella still works it on the silver screen. Heather Graham pulls her own as the so-so mother-to-be-to-be...
To say anymore would involve spoilers, so I pause for now! Recommended at the very, very least for your autographed DVDs library. This is a spooooooooky flick with some class and a bluish cast. I give it 4 out of 10.
To say anymore would involve spoilers, so I pause for now! Recommended at the very, very least for your autographed DVDs library. This is a spooooooooky flick with some class and a bluish cast. I give it 4 out of 10.
Sparkle's Tavern
(1976)
In the face of AIDS and prudes, a bizarre, sex-positive film
17 January 2004
Before attending the screening in October, 1992, I'd been talking with friends about the mixed-up family dynamics of American values. `Imagine,' I said, `a family so lost that the mother is scrubbing the bathtub while her son takes his shower.'
Welcome to Sparkle's Tavern, a bizarre little hole-in-the-wall. In the Convenience Parlor in the back of the tavern are four more holes in the `Suck Stalls.' When the chorus girls and headliner Sparkle aren't singing and dancing, they're servicing the leather-cowboy patrons. Buster, the proprietor (and Sparkle's gay brother) runs around nervous all the time and occasionally helps out at the stalls: `All this [fluid] is going to give me the runs,' he says at one point. These siblings are terrified that their fragile, obsessive-compulsive mother will one day discover her children's secrets. When gang leader Jock `rapes' Sparkle in his apartment already full of `whiskey-laden, naked' bodies, his jealous, white-trash girlfriend, Brenda (comparable to actress Yvette Mimieux), spills the beans about Beth Sue (Sparkle) and her non-sensual, highly dramatic Mom. This info allows Jock to blackmail Buster and seize control of his tavern. Jock sends an invitation to Mrs. Blake for a free night at the tavern...
`Sparkle's Tavern' is a lusty, bizarre, sexually-dripping marvel of the emotional dangers in a dysfunctional family crippled with secrets and lost passions. Marion Eaton as Mrs. Blake is the marvelously pinched backbone of this body of decadence and Dionysian mania. After the `enlightenment,' Buster is stunned that his kooky, closed mother comes to his tavern. She brings a mysterious guest, Mr. Pupik (`pupik' is Yiddish for belly button), who sings revealing jingles and eats things like Christmas candy wrapped in slices of olive loaf.
Several incest references unfold. There's a terrific scene where the mother, emotionally inside herself, slides onto the kitchen floor, and in her print dress flows through a protracted orgasm; it's at first hilarious, then embarrassing, then glorious! Although her wish was granted instantaneously (she relived her entire life, this time without moral stresses), the orgasm was a kind of residue from the experience. Now everyone else wants to try it!
Director Curt McDowell died of AIDS in June 1987. Primary shooting of the film was done in two months in 1976, but it took eight years to finance and finish. An NEA grant finally secured McDowell's film. It was meant to open at the 1984 Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF), but the print and borrowed projectors couldn't play the film and the premiere was a disaster. It returned to San Francisco but has never before been shown in the Northwest. 1992's new premiere was the time to see this film, and it makes sense that it took so long. The complex moral issues of AIDS threaten to dam up our sexualities. Let this film pull the plug!
McDowell preferred to make sex films. Actor and fellow filmmaker George Kuchar told me that McDowell `had lost interest in the film because it didn't have hard-core pornography.' The four-stall fellatio scene is still highly suggestive - and hilarious! The `rape' scene is undeniably sexy, especially with the others crawling on the floor. Said Kuchar, `Curt was unhappy about casting his sister, Melinda, as Sparkle, because he felt she trailed off in her dialogue and singing.' Melinda's Sparkle comes off as lethargic and highly eroticized -- a kind of schoolgirl Mae West, superlative to David Lynch's `Laura Palmer' of `Twin Peaks.'
Kuchar also said McDowell wrote the clever, cliché-parodying story while high on acid in Yosemite National Park. The film is autobiographical, with Buster representing McDowell. Its humor, nerve and unconscious logic blow away the strangling, goof-ball irrelevancies of dubiously avant-garde filmmakers John Waters and Andy Warhol. Masturbation for McDowell is part of a sexual catalog, not a closed system of self-conscious art.
`Sparkle's Tavern' is also visually dense. Unlike McDowell's previous film of shadows on white walls (`Thundercrack') the sets here - all built in a loft - are crowded with rambling wallpapers covered with flowers, fruit, or significantly, wide-eyed children dressed as adults.
The moral is to find relaxation in the release of moral turpitude by separating judgement from sexuality. This is the key to recapturing one's sexual freedom and expression in the age of AIDS, a finely evocative legacy by Curt McDowell.
Welcome to Sparkle's Tavern, a bizarre little hole-in-the-wall. In the Convenience Parlor in the back of the tavern are four more holes in the `Suck Stalls.' When the chorus girls and headliner Sparkle aren't singing and dancing, they're servicing the leather-cowboy patrons. Buster, the proprietor (and Sparkle's gay brother) runs around nervous all the time and occasionally helps out at the stalls: `All this [fluid] is going to give me the runs,' he says at one point. These siblings are terrified that their fragile, obsessive-compulsive mother will one day discover her children's secrets. When gang leader Jock `rapes' Sparkle in his apartment already full of `whiskey-laden, naked' bodies, his jealous, white-trash girlfriend, Brenda (comparable to actress Yvette Mimieux), spills the beans about Beth Sue (Sparkle) and her non-sensual, highly dramatic Mom. This info allows Jock to blackmail Buster and seize control of his tavern. Jock sends an invitation to Mrs. Blake for a free night at the tavern...
`Sparkle's Tavern' is a lusty, bizarre, sexually-dripping marvel of the emotional dangers in a dysfunctional family crippled with secrets and lost passions. Marion Eaton as Mrs. Blake is the marvelously pinched backbone of this body of decadence and Dionysian mania. After the `enlightenment,' Buster is stunned that his kooky, closed mother comes to his tavern. She brings a mysterious guest, Mr. Pupik (`pupik' is Yiddish for belly button), who sings revealing jingles and eats things like Christmas candy wrapped in slices of olive loaf.
Several incest references unfold. There's a terrific scene where the mother, emotionally inside herself, slides onto the kitchen floor, and in her print dress flows through a protracted orgasm; it's at first hilarious, then embarrassing, then glorious! Although her wish was granted instantaneously (she relived her entire life, this time without moral stresses), the orgasm was a kind of residue from the experience. Now everyone else wants to try it!
Director Curt McDowell died of AIDS in June 1987. Primary shooting of the film was done in two months in 1976, but it took eight years to finance and finish. An NEA grant finally secured McDowell's film. It was meant to open at the 1984 Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF), but the print and borrowed projectors couldn't play the film and the premiere was a disaster. It returned to San Francisco but has never before been shown in the Northwest. 1992's new premiere was the time to see this film, and it makes sense that it took so long. The complex moral issues of AIDS threaten to dam up our sexualities. Let this film pull the plug!
McDowell preferred to make sex films. Actor and fellow filmmaker George Kuchar told me that McDowell `had lost interest in the film because it didn't have hard-core pornography.' The four-stall fellatio scene is still highly suggestive - and hilarious! The `rape' scene is undeniably sexy, especially with the others crawling on the floor. Said Kuchar, `Curt was unhappy about casting his sister, Melinda, as Sparkle, because he felt she trailed off in her dialogue and singing.' Melinda's Sparkle comes off as lethargic and highly eroticized -- a kind of schoolgirl Mae West, superlative to David Lynch's `Laura Palmer' of `Twin Peaks.'
Kuchar also said McDowell wrote the clever, cliché-parodying story while high on acid in Yosemite National Park. The film is autobiographical, with Buster representing McDowell. Its humor, nerve and unconscious logic blow away the strangling, goof-ball irrelevancies of dubiously avant-garde filmmakers John Waters and Andy Warhol. Masturbation for McDowell is part of a sexual catalog, not a closed system of self-conscious art.
`Sparkle's Tavern' is also visually dense. Unlike McDowell's previous film of shadows on white walls (`Thundercrack') the sets here - all built in a loft - are crowded with rambling wallpapers covered with flowers, fruit, or significantly, wide-eyed children dressed as adults.
The moral is to find relaxation in the release of moral turpitude by separating judgement from sexuality. This is the key to recapturing one's sexual freedom and expression in the age of AIDS, a finely evocative legacy by Curt McDowell.
Ghost Ship
(2002)
This movie is not bad at all!
11 November 2003
I missed the first 10 minutes of GHOST SHIP, actually. I guess I missed the grisly mis-en-scene. But I found the film quite enjoyable! I would give it 2-1/2 or 3 out of 4 stars.
My favorite line is when Jewish action hero Julianna Margulies (I forget how to spell it but her name is listed under text files among my 500 Famous Jews at another Yahoo site, "shtetl") says to the undead baddie, "What the f*** are you?" He or she (don't want to give it away) replies, "A scavenger. Just like you." This soul collector is near his/her quota.
It's a pity the crew eschewed the Coast Guard, a hard and fast rule on the seas. I LOVED the modernization of the disaster genre (actually, the genre is a part of Surrealism -- more later) when there were those Marilyn Manson- or Tool-styled montages of gold bullion toting, etc.
The Italian seductress, though void of personality, suggests the inability of most of us to communicate with the dead (I only do in dreams, I'm sure), because she and her lured sailor can't communicate except through sexual role-playing.
There was a lot of exploration, which meant decent sets, and they were.
The little Kate Moss-like character leads Juliana on a "special" tour to display the mystery again from 1962: the poisonings, the massacring, the slicing.
The recreating of a liner's golden days through reverse-filming and such was fun, if spooooooooooooky. And the ending was good and spooooooooooooooooooooky again. Irony and branding placement with Juliana in the "ER" transport.
So, we'll probably buy the cheap DVD. I am surprised that the film was so panned, despite that it borrows from AMITYVILLE HORROR, ABYSS, BTPA, TPA and a host (pun of the denouement of spirits) of other films. Let's add it to the disaster-surreal-thriller-liner stories, shall we?
Avast!
Frederic Kahler
My favorite line is when Jewish action hero Julianna Margulies (I forget how to spell it but her name is listed under text files among my 500 Famous Jews at another Yahoo site, "shtetl") says to the undead baddie, "What the f*** are you?" He or she (don't want to give it away) replies, "A scavenger. Just like you." This soul collector is near his/her quota.
It's a pity the crew eschewed the Coast Guard, a hard and fast rule on the seas. I LOVED the modernization of the disaster genre (actually, the genre is a part of Surrealism -- more later) when there were those Marilyn Manson- or Tool-styled montages of gold bullion toting, etc.
The Italian seductress, though void of personality, suggests the inability of most of us to communicate with the dead (I only do in dreams, I'm sure), because she and her lured sailor can't communicate except through sexual role-playing.
There was a lot of exploration, which meant decent sets, and they were.
The little Kate Moss-like character leads Juliana on a "special" tour to display the mystery again from 1962: the poisonings, the massacring, the slicing.
The recreating of a liner's golden days through reverse-filming and such was fun, if spooooooooooooky. And the ending was good and spooooooooooooooooooooky again. Irony and branding placement with Juliana in the "ER" transport.
So, we'll probably buy the cheap DVD. I am surprised that the film was so panned, despite that it borrows from AMITYVILLE HORROR, ABYSS, BTPA, TPA and a host (pun of the denouement of spirits) of other films. Let's add it to the disaster-surreal-thriller-liner stories, shall we?
Avast!
Frederic Kahler
The Cat in the Hat
(2003)
Dakota charming, Mike merely a special kind of educator
9 November 2003
Interesting, overly-CGI'd flick overscored by Dakota Fanning's Uma Thurman-like naivete schtick. The film is a nice notch in the belt of cartoons vis-a-vis FX and Mister Rogers proselytizing. Mike Meyers, now fabulously wealthy and still pushing hockey wholesomeness, leads the team in his now infamous Martha-Stewart-Lite scenario. Art is funky; long live art.
Deep Shock
(2003 TV Movie)
Heavy orchestrations bow down the film
9 August 2003
Sci-Fi Channel offers this lugubrious, insensitive and heavily-orchestrated North Pole would-be horror flick that is just slow enough to irritate and flashing enough lights to induce a kind of I-Don't-Care-to-Get-It epilepsy.
The Core
(2003)
If you fall asleep you'll miss, well, er, nothing!
30 March 2003
Warning: Spoilers
**SPOILERS**Okay sci-fi/disaster matinee fodder. So many plotholes that no one could drive over it without destroying his or her shock absorbers. **Possible SPOILER: the first death of the crew is a sudden surprise and a smarter bit in an otherwise uber-smart-not flick. Swank is wasted and unconvincing. Eckhart is a hottie. But for the majority of the story: it's turgid. I found myself seeking anything to entertain me, like the wordplay of Destiny-Density.
Nice bit in London that does a good take on "The Birds" and manages to make pigeons kind of terrifying! Kudos to the filmmakers, but this aint no "Superman." Which is a film that took months and months to film all kinds of sequences (the helicopter falling scene alone took FOREVER to film!).
FOREVER is how I describe the wait for intelligent turns. One does root for the crew, and the gawky computer hacker might bring a tear to your eye.
Nice bit in London that does a good take on "The Birds" and manages to make pigeons kind of terrifying! Kudos to the filmmakers, but this aint no "Superman." Which is a film that took months and months to film all kinds of sequences (the helicopter falling scene alone took FOREVER to film!).
FOREVER is how I describe the wait for intelligent turns. One does root for the crew, and the gawky computer hacker might bring a tear to your eye.
Epoch
(2001 TV Movie)
This movie is just fine, believe it or not!
25 January 2003
For once I'm stumped by the cybercritics who contribute to IMDB. "Epoch" is not that bad Z-grade flick some cynics asserted. I was pleasantly surprised, which pleased my boyfriend, who wanted to watch another Sci-Fi film. I ate crow on this one after consulting this website. David Keith is an easy hunk who's engaging, and Stephanie Niznik does a Mary Wouronov-like turn as Kelly McGillis and Jodie Foster (the psychic lovers of "The Accused").
The movie's mystery is consistently upbeat despite the standard brutality of the military sectors. This is quite unusual, refreshing. Even the threat of nuclear war has a fey warmth in this tale, as if a blanket wrapped round you will neutralize the deadliest virus.
"Epoch" is consistently intelligence without arrogance. The cheap special effects are equally charming, evocative of the 1950s, and as effective as the inserted computer-generated screens that fill the film's landscape.
Brian Thompson actually does some character development as Captain Tower, and James Hong is spare and most amusing.
Lots of unexpected turns adorn this smoky gem. Congratulations to the cast and crew, and "Tsk-tsk" to all my fellow critics who dogged the show a little too communistically.
The movie's mystery is consistently upbeat despite the standard brutality of the military sectors. This is quite unusual, refreshing. Even the threat of nuclear war has a fey warmth in this tale, as if a blanket wrapped round you will neutralize the deadliest virus.
"Epoch" is consistently intelligence without arrogance. The cheap special effects are equally charming, evocative of the 1950s, and as effective as the inserted computer-generated screens that fill the film's landscape.
Brian Thompson actually does some character development as Captain Tower, and James Hong is spare and most amusing.
Lots of unexpected turns adorn this smoky gem. Congratulations to the cast and crew, and "Tsk-tsk" to all my fellow critics who dogged the show a little too communistically.
Taken
(2002)
"Twin Peaks" + "E.T" = "Taken"
12 December 2002
Warning: Spoilers
Possible spoiler...
"Twin Peaks" even has the letters for "Taken," which is Spielberg's prod at David Lynch surrealism, easily projected considering the milieu of alien abduction and UFO's in general. The military has a starring role here, like the white-washin' leaders of Amityville's "Jaws" community -- as inept, insensitive, even barbaric shakers (a necessity in a culture with 275,000,000 denizens). Mothership, indeed!
I would not watch this stuff twice, even 'though one night I sat through an episode 3 times. We're at the 18th hour tonight and it's not any better. Is all the time-shifting and people-aggregating nonsense suppose to be so compelling that we cry. Well, I cried at times, because even the most antiseptic, character-driven drivel can leave its mark. The men are all potent, then sensitive. This is schlock. The bad guys (or gals) are as cardboard as, well, cardboard -- an utter waste of masculinity. But then Spielberg excels with little boys. And girls...
Heather Donahue should have stayed in the "Blair Witch" hell she emerged from (a more entertaining outing), and the little Dakota Fanning was so tediously wise as the John-Boy Walton of this epic Cavalcade of Snitches. I am Gay, so I appreciate Reb Spielberg's stabs at dignity and seriousness. Such campiness: the glory days of Seattle, when females ruled the men who made new rock, the huddling of abductees as if this were Dachau. Give me a break. It was all too much!
If your a UFO whore like my lover, go for it. Dream. Believe. Hope. (Which is a vulture that picks at the heart as Jean Rhys wrote.) But get real. This wanna-be "Berliner-Alexanderplatz" via David Lynch is like eating pizza, daily. Daily. Every day. Yuck!
The cleverness of aliens tends to get penalized when they're south of the border, but adulated when they come from upper-north. "None of this really happened" is a line from "American Psycho" not the investigative, entertaining and heart-tugging journey that this was not. No offense!
"Twin Peaks" even has the letters for "Taken," which is Spielberg's prod at David Lynch surrealism, easily projected considering the milieu of alien abduction and UFO's in general. The military has a starring role here, like the white-washin' leaders of Amityville's "Jaws" community -- as inept, insensitive, even barbaric shakers (a necessity in a culture with 275,000,000 denizens). Mothership, indeed!
I would not watch this stuff twice, even 'though one night I sat through an episode 3 times. We're at the 18th hour tonight and it's not any better. Is all the time-shifting and people-aggregating nonsense suppose to be so compelling that we cry. Well, I cried at times, because even the most antiseptic, character-driven drivel can leave its mark. The men are all potent, then sensitive. This is schlock. The bad guys (or gals) are as cardboard as, well, cardboard -- an utter waste of masculinity. But then Spielberg excels with little boys. And girls...
Heather Donahue should have stayed in the "Blair Witch" hell she emerged from (a more entertaining outing), and the little Dakota Fanning was so tediously wise as the John-Boy Walton of this epic Cavalcade of Snitches. I am Gay, so I appreciate Reb Spielberg's stabs at dignity and seriousness. Such campiness: the glory days of Seattle, when females ruled the men who made new rock, the huddling of abductees as if this were Dachau. Give me a break. It was all too much!
If your a UFO whore like my lover, go for it. Dream. Believe. Hope. (Which is a vulture that picks at the heart as Jean Rhys wrote.) But get real. This wanna-be "Berliner-Alexanderplatz" via David Lynch is like eating pizza, daily. Daily. Every day. Yuck!
The cleverness of aliens tends to get penalized when they're south of the border, but adulated when they come from upper-north. "None of this really happened" is a line from "American Psycho" not the investigative, entertaining and heart-tugging journey that this was not. No offense!
Signs
(2002)
This "Birds" rip-off makes a great gift for enemies...
22 September 2002
Warning: Spoilers
My boyfriend insisted and I acquiesced . I "knew" this film would be lamer than a three-legged octopus. I could "see" the tedium before it enveloped us in the theater at the lovely new casino off of the strip in Las Vegas. The experience of seeing films in the theater gets heightened these days with the LOUD trailers and the computer-designed Welcomes before the film. The lights dim and "signs" [sic] (I will have my fun!) begins. Ah, people in the cinema. Ah, people in the cinema scared a bit by the sudden film cuts and Dolby bumps and our contagious sarcasm wafting o'er the seats like the *Spoiler?* poison gas of the (unscramble so as not to be a spoiler) ISANLIE.
To stretch this soft bit of bombast on the bias, "signs" ' director/writer/producer/egregious cameo of the most pretentious self-consciousness a nerd can splay/mother/father/brother/good cop/... takes away two hours (oops, almost wrote "years") away from the viewer's life, therefore this film would, to order, make a lovely gift for someone you don't really like. Just warn the others...
The film borrows from Alfred Hitchcock's super "The Birds" (1963). It borrows the mood, being trapped in a house, the flashlight "tour" (here relegated to bottom of the barrel actions by our tedious male dults --is that "projection," director?), the teary eyes of the cast, like our good cop who gives good Jessica Tandy. There are the pictorialized gazes at the mysterious, clouded skies. And Mel Gibson is the spitting image of Rod Taylor as Mitch Brenner in the original, but he's emoting like Tippi Hedren!
So it borrows from "Birds." So the director "gets it" when a master hits us full force, the way David Lynch has learned but still can't quite paint the same way. So! That's just a comment. This film is like a pungent but thin Jean Rhys novel left to rot in misty watercolors of the insensitive mind of a male. I'm sorry to say that, especially since I am male. A sensitive, feminine epiphany, common in better Indian epics, threads its way through this torture of glasses of water and faux-macho Joaquin posturing. I doubt you'll be able to appreciate it.
Lame film about aliens not being the nerdy hoaxsters of England's '70s past, an option trammeled immediately. Some dumb, illogical touches jump out afterward. A good example: Mel follows his children's cries into the cornfields. He finds a crop circle. Camera pans up and there are more circles, unbeknownst to them. It does not engage the viewer. It is a stale movement. And then there is no helicopter investigation for the Philly media. So it's suddenly global. Flashbacks, Star Trek time wormholes, wicked witched killed by water, murdered dogs (?!).
I did not very much care for this movie. Mel Gibson is losing it, but good. God, I miss Carl Sagan!
I hope, gentle readers, that my review has taken you on a copy-cat journey, like the "cut-about, jumble it with snail pacing ("thought?") and a cavalcade of symbols" journey of this film. I should've known, because an infant in the lovely, new theater was throwing up harshly a little after the film started.
To stretch this soft bit of bombast on the bias, "signs" ' director/writer/producer/egregious cameo of the most pretentious self-consciousness a nerd can splay/mother/father/brother/good cop/... takes away two hours (oops, almost wrote "years") away from the viewer's life, therefore this film would, to order, make a lovely gift for someone you don't really like. Just warn the others...
The film borrows from Alfred Hitchcock's super "The Birds" (1963). It borrows the mood, being trapped in a house, the flashlight "tour" (here relegated to bottom of the barrel actions by our tedious male dults --is that "projection," director?), the teary eyes of the cast, like our good cop who gives good Jessica Tandy. There are the pictorialized gazes at the mysterious, clouded skies. And Mel Gibson is the spitting image of Rod Taylor as Mitch Brenner in the original, but he's emoting like Tippi Hedren!
So it borrows from "Birds." So the director "gets it" when a master hits us full force, the way David Lynch has learned but still can't quite paint the same way. So! That's just a comment. This film is like a pungent but thin Jean Rhys novel left to rot in misty watercolors of the insensitive mind of a male. I'm sorry to say that, especially since I am male. A sensitive, feminine epiphany, common in better Indian epics, threads its way through this torture of glasses of water and faux-macho Joaquin posturing. I doubt you'll be able to appreciate it.
Lame film about aliens not being the nerdy hoaxsters of England's '70s past, an option trammeled immediately. Some dumb, illogical touches jump out afterward. A good example: Mel follows his children's cries into the cornfields. He finds a crop circle. Camera pans up and there are more circles, unbeknownst to them. It does not engage the viewer. It is a stale movement. And then there is no helicopter investigation for the Philly media. So it's suddenly global. Flashbacks, Star Trek time wormholes, wicked witched killed by water, murdered dogs (?!).
I did not very much care for this movie. Mel Gibson is losing it, but good. God, I miss Carl Sagan!
I hope, gentle readers, that my review has taken you on a copy-cat journey, like the "cut-about, jumble it with snail pacing ("thought?") and a cavalcade of symbols" journey of this film. I should've known, because an infant in the lovely, new theater was throwing up harshly a little after the film started.
Bloodline
(1979)
Good entertainment how-to if you can't be rich and glamorous
16 September 2002
I had the good fortune as a teenager to sit through "Bloodline" each day or night for the week it ran in Freeport, Illinois. Later, when I ran away to NYC, I watched it again on my first little screen in a tiny, sloped theater-in-a-complex. I scoured Central Park for one of the scenes shot there against a graffiti-dusted bridge. Ahh... It was my last fix for a while on what chic is, what perseverance, trust and fabulous Parisian locales can do for a lost soul... Then I ran away to France. It would a few more years before I made it to Paris, but when I did I searched out Hotel de Crillion, Maxim's, Notre Dame. The Sydney Sheldon book was a bore compared to the film. Seeing these great international actors together -- Romy "Shrew in Silk" Schneider and Irene "Show me your back!" Papas, for example -- gave me a great shot of what it must be like to tread life's waters in Gucci and Bulgari (back when Gucci didn't seem so silly (watch out! is Chanel next?)) This film, about the Roffe Pharmaceutical heiress (Audrey Hepburn)tagged for murder because she won't go public with the stock market, has a great soundtrack, with lovely resolution, and if you can get the album or CD you'll catch a funky tune not used in the film. All those bits of different languages, different people: "Kennst du dieser Mann?" "They make cheese!" "Poland? This time of year?". What about that tacky snuff-murder sidebar (Roffe's film stock is being used to discredit the company)? You have to admit that that bald man is a hotty. I am in a whirl of support for this little picture and I'd see it again and again. Sometimes the best teachers in life are lurking in the cinema. It's not just about art! Look at Audrey's friendship with her Dad's aide, Beatrice Straight. What about that "senseless" death when Audrey goes back to get earrings? The cool unfolding opening credits and shocking change in music? And I could write a book on all that absolutely fabulous Givenchy clothing!!! The velvet applique and crystal-studded gown she wears to meet Gazzara (another hotty) at the "Guess who?" restaurant? How about the OD green wool cape as she meets about a new formula that can save Roffe? How about her chic sweater and cords as she crawls across the imbricated roof of that villa in Sardinia? Reprising the Jewish ghetto in Crakow? Horses and syringes? The ubiquitous tied-up silk robe Audrey wears? Count me in! This was one of her best "adult" roles. She got a million bucks to do it, it gave her family even more security, and I say she infused the project with inestimable elan. It is a satisfying and slightly sickening love story. Long live Audrey Hepburn! (May she rest in peace.)
Eyes Wide Shut
(1999)
Shrouded Treat of a Coy Gay Man's Odyssey!
12 September 2002
Delightful, if lugubrious, motion picture is so chock full of symbolism -- or so it would seem -- that the critics got tangled up, confused, and missed the big pic. Tom Cruise is Kubrick's "A-Gay" doctor, the kind of clean, prissy, masculine, smoldering -- and here's the point: -- urban homosexual who, succesful and glimpsing into the old-boys' decadence of privilege in the big city, gets the itch to see the rest of things. It's that urge we have to feel into our fathers' shoes, a big fat Freudian sex symbol.
Anyhoo, "Eyes Wide Shut" is so fun to watch -- G*d only knows all the anguish some viewers got in their guts watching it, because Kubrick fully employs his now toungue-in-cheek style of existential doom and sobriety like so many lights on the Christmas trees in the film. Let it go, he says in this story, and feast on something as unsettling as a guy wanting sex, AIDS, buggery, lies, overdoses, anything that his partner can't have, or because the partner wants it!
Nicole Kidman, as the partner, deliver's one of Gaydom's hottest contemporary fantasies, the naval officer. (Remember Richard Gere in "Officer..."?) The partner is an underused psychosexual term for one's wife or boyfriend or lover, who, in their efforts to integrate in relationship, unwittingly offer chances to be undermined as an individual. As with most of Kubrick's films, there is plenty of time to think about it amid the strangely grained visuals. It's like the deliberately muffled dialogue in "Alien" in reverse: Think and listen rather than view. Let the visuals lull you to think. A fun and intelligent story, like "Eloise" at the Plaza Hotel. Cruise, like Jodie Foster, is a well-thought-out careerist. Their movies flow through their lives like a logistics system. How's THAT for working the system?
Relax and enjoy a perverse and easy fable!
Anyhoo, "Eyes Wide Shut" is so fun to watch -- G*d only knows all the anguish some viewers got in their guts watching it, because Kubrick fully employs his now toungue-in-cheek style of existential doom and sobriety like so many lights on the Christmas trees in the film. Let it go, he says in this story, and feast on something as unsettling as a guy wanting sex, AIDS, buggery, lies, overdoses, anything that his partner can't have, or because the partner wants it!
Nicole Kidman, as the partner, deliver's one of Gaydom's hottest contemporary fantasies, the naval officer. (Remember Richard Gere in "Officer..."?) The partner is an underused psychosexual term for one's wife or boyfriend or lover, who, in their efforts to integrate in relationship, unwittingly offer chances to be undermined as an individual. As with most of Kubrick's films, there is plenty of time to think about it amid the strangely grained visuals. It's like the deliberately muffled dialogue in "Alien" in reverse: Think and listen rather than view. Let the visuals lull you to think. A fun and intelligent story, like "Eloise" at the Plaza Hotel. Cruise, like Jodie Foster, is a well-thought-out careerist. Their movies flow through their lives like a logistics system. How's THAT for working the system?
Relax and enjoy a perverse and easy fable!
Richard and Mattel aren't amused at the honesty of anorexia.
25 February 2002
Part 1: An important film by one of the few AIDS-awareness directors. All of Todd Haynes' films/stories symbolize the alienation, decay, and whenever possible, rebirth, of the gay man vis-a-vis AIDS. We've lost so many to AIDS, and although today the horror slumbers often, the story here is just as gripping. Combining the details of Karen Carpenter's existence with his motif/approach, Haynes tells us a lot about the suffering, solitude, and emotional blackmail that comes with that yearn for success. I am amused that most film critics stuck to the surface story and paid lip service to Karen Carpenter's ordeal as a girl in a nuclear family bubble. Civil sympathy is a bit of a bore.
Richard and Mattel, the creators of Barbie, have blocked the film's availability; all prints are legally supposed to have been destroyed. Richard blocks it because of the usage of the Carpenters' music, which ought to be public domain anyway!. Mattel blocks it because of the usage of Barbie dolls for all the characters and the overt implication that plastic existence has drastic consequences.
It's amusing and then gripping the overlays of text, music upon music, narrative, darkness, and camera pans that punctuate the film. But the surface story -- Karen lost in her own world of hopeless perfection as envisioned by her domineering mother, Agnes Carpenter -- is a fine one as it depicts a cultural shift from Vietnam's horror to Nixon's false-father stability. (The Carpenters were invited to perform for the President at the White House.) Wholesomeness, in Haynes' tale, requires grit, profanity, endless self-subterfuge and a propensity for collapse. That A&M Records is seen to be malevolent cannot be Karen's reason for self-starvation. That the rest of the rock world is living it up while Carpenters sweat it out in the studio cannot be the reason either. And yet the reason for her illness, like the bird attacks in Hitchcock's 1963 thriller, is never disclosed -- as if it could be, and Haynes shows us his chains of reasoning and events and all we can do is marvel at the Edgar Allen Poe Barbie Dolls and Karen's gradual transformation into Munch visual madness.
Todd Haynes takes liberties with what happened, but usually only as a convenience; it all comes through and through regardless: the family's accidental discovery that Karen could sing like nobody else; the switch from laxatives to syrup of ipecac and vomiting; the allegations that Richard Carpenter has always been homosexual.
Word-of-mouth will get you a copy of the film, which only benefits from the acres of great music the duo produced. Karen Carpenter is dead, like so many other against illness and massive ignorance. Haynes' paean to her strength and helplessness, her soulful gloom and snatches of love, transforms the viewer, who is pressed to create his or her own Barbie-format epic!
Richard and Mattel, the creators of Barbie, have blocked the film's availability; all prints are legally supposed to have been destroyed. Richard blocks it because of the usage of the Carpenters' music, which ought to be public domain anyway!. Mattel blocks it because of the usage of Barbie dolls for all the characters and the overt implication that plastic existence has drastic consequences.
It's amusing and then gripping the overlays of text, music upon music, narrative, darkness, and camera pans that punctuate the film. But the surface story -- Karen lost in her own world of hopeless perfection as envisioned by her domineering mother, Agnes Carpenter -- is a fine one as it depicts a cultural shift from Vietnam's horror to Nixon's false-father stability. (The Carpenters were invited to perform for the President at the White House.) Wholesomeness, in Haynes' tale, requires grit, profanity, endless self-subterfuge and a propensity for collapse. That A&M Records is seen to be malevolent cannot be Karen's reason for self-starvation. That the rest of the rock world is living it up while Carpenters sweat it out in the studio cannot be the reason either. And yet the reason for her illness, like the bird attacks in Hitchcock's 1963 thriller, is never disclosed -- as if it could be, and Haynes shows us his chains of reasoning and events and all we can do is marvel at the Edgar Allen Poe Barbie Dolls and Karen's gradual transformation into Munch visual madness.
Todd Haynes takes liberties with what happened, but usually only as a convenience; it all comes through and through regardless: the family's accidental discovery that Karen could sing like nobody else; the switch from laxatives to syrup of ipecac and vomiting; the allegations that Richard Carpenter has always been homosexual.
Word-of-mouth will get you a copy of the film, which only benefits from the acres of great music the duo produced. Karen Carpenter is dead, like so many other against illness and massive ignorance. Haynes' paean to her strength and helplessness, her soulful gloom and snatches of love, transforms the viewer, who is pressed to create his or her own Barbie-format epic!
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