Breadlines and Champagne: Depression-Era Films at Film Forum

What better way to wallow in our recessionary blues (or escape from them) than with Film Forum's Breadlines and Champagne series, a month's programming of some of the greatest Great Depression-era movies--classic and obscure; socially conscious and extravagant; screwball and pre-Code--along with cartoon shorts, vintage newsreels and, yes, bread.

The series kicked off Friday night with the salty I'm No Angel, starring husky-voiced femme fatale Mae West and a very young Carey Grant (a rather odd romantic pairing). Vintage-tinged jazz group Vince Giordano & His Nighthawks--snazzy in tuxes--played a set beforehand, which had everyone in the theater bopping their heads and tapping their toes. A newsreel from 1933 showed the highlights of that year and included the phrase "Joseph Stalin, Uncle Sam's new friend..." (the same segment about the USSR's and U.S.'s improved relations also included the incredibly obvious yet still hilarious pun "red letter day"). Employees handed out bread to famished cineasts waiting in line before the show (now, if only they had champagne), and--sweetest of all--the whole evening cost only 25 cents (35 for non-members).

While the rest of the films won't be quite as cheap (regular price: $11), practically every night is a double feature--with a rare triple thrown in. And with classics like My Man Godfrey, It Happened One Night and 42nd Street, as well as salacious pre-Code entertainments like Baby Face (starring Barbara Stanwyck) and leftist social-realist parables, such as the sublimely named Hallelujah, I'm a Bum, how can one go wrong?

*Mae West and Carey Grant in I'm No Angel; image from Film Forum website

All Bio, No Soul

Some thoughts on Milk

Biopics and Talking Bugs

When I first heard of the upcoming movie Howl, about Beat poet Allen Ginsberg's seminal work of the same name, I, of course, thought the worst: that the film industry would desecrate yet another literary work/figure with the biopic treatment.

Yes, I'm jaded; still, my initial balking has given way to at least interest. First is the scope: the film will not focus on Ginsberg's life or the "creation" of Howl, but on the obscenity trial surrounding the controversial poem. This could, of course, easily cross into pedantic, preachy message-movie territory, but I like when biographical films have a more narrow focus, rather than just doing an overview of someone's life, which tend to be reductive and shallow. And the artsy biopic is particularly reductive--Pollack, Frida, and--the worst--Factory Girl. I think I would rather see a courtroom drama than a literary biopic.

Also, a film about censorship and freedom of speech is, regrettably, particularly prescient now; after all, Howl is just the sort of book vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin would likely want removed from her local library's shelves.

I heard about the film shortly after seeing another "Beat" movie, David Cronenberg's imaginative, trippy adaptation of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, which ended up being part adaptation of the book, part imagined explanation of the book's creation. I read the book in undergrad and actually remember very little, save for the protagonist being an exterminator and a passage involving a dildo named Steely Dan and feeling vaguely queasy throughout. So I don't know how much of the film was taken from the book, but I loved the manic quality of of it, made all the more unnerving with Ornette Coleman's free-form jazz improvisations, and the nonchalant absurdity of shooting up bug powder to get a thrill or having conversations with giant talking vaginal bugs who double as typewriters. The film is in this happy limbo of reality and absurdity until about the last 20 minutes, when a tidy explanation is given for all the talking bugs and secret government missions and made-up foreign cities inhabited by homosexuals. It seemed at odds with the rest of the film, which is brilliant--and it seemed unnecessary; with some thought and analysis we might have concluded that, yes, this was a film largely about the writing of Naked Lunch--a book, by the way, that also underwent an obscenity trial--rather than a straight-up adaptation. (The biggest clues are the friends of the exterminator--a hunky athletic type in flannels who seduces the protagonist's wife (Jack Kerouac) and a bespectacled, gangly poet (Ginsberg).) Or maybe we would have just taken it for a crazy, sci-fi movie about talking bugs. Ah well, ignorance is bliss, I guess.

Shameless Self-Promotion

If you haven't seen on my other blog, Gen X is taking over the world!!! (And that's a good thing.)

My Q&A with Lisa Chamberlain

Review of Slackonomics

"Drizzly. Dense mist in evening. Yellow moon."

So, what did George Orwell think about when not penning literary masterpieces?

Apparently, the weather.

Bodice-Ripper, Maybe

My one guilty pleasure: trashy, sensationalistic period films (sometimes known as bodice-rippers).

This is why I am so excited for Brideshead Revisted. The trailer looks so ridiculous, so intricately yet erratically plotted, so filled with latent homosexuality, so puritanically smutty (you know, there's enough sex to satisfy our prurient selves, but the sex--and the money, power, material wealth, etc.--always leads to destruction of the soul, which makes it then easy to rationalize our enjoyment of the film). Nevermind that it probably does the book (by Evelyn Waugh) a great disservice; resistance is futile, I must see this film:



However, when trolling about the Internet looking for a release date I came across some rather distressing news. The film is PG-13. Yes, PG-13. Perhaps this isn't the Dangerous Liaisons the trailer makes it out to be. (Why does everything have to be watered down so it can receive a PG-13 rating? It seems particularly silly in this case since the film clearly isn't being marketed to a young demographic, nor can I imagine many middle- and high-school girls clamoring to see an adaptation of a novel they have probably never heard of (this isn't Jane Austen or Wuthering Heights)--unless that girl was me circa 1998; I definitely would have begged my parents to let me see this.)

Anyway, great literary adaptation; delicious guilty pleasure; watered down period melodrama? We shall see.

A Haiku About Park Slope

So many mopeds
But nobody riding them
The new "It" item?

Everything Is Godard

While neglecting my blog, I've been reading about Godard, watching Godard, talking about Godard, breathing Godard... And wrote a review about a book about Godard.