Topaze

The 2020 Barrymore Trilogy Blogathon is an event honoring the prolific Barrymore family of actors, especially the siblings John, Ethel and Lionel Barrymore, hosted by In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood. For a complete list of participating bloggers, visit the link at the host site.

Topaze

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The Barrymore clan of thespians dominated the American entertainment field more than any other family in the 20th century. The modern representative, Drew, is very much active; she currently has a daytime talk show on TV.

The clan goes back at least as far as the 19th century and possibly further than that—this article gives you an overview—but classic movie fans are perhaps most familiar with the triumvirate of siblings John, Ethel and Lionel. I’ve talked about Ethel before; for this year’s blogathon I’ll discuss John.

His father Maurice was a Broadway actor and a middleweight boxer, and was the first in the family to assume the stage name Barrymore (he was born Herbert Blythe), after English actor William Barrymore. John’s mother was also an actor, Georgiana Drew; the Drew name has also been handed down the generations. John was the youngest of their three children, after Lionel and Ethel.

Love Among the Ruins

The Spencer Tracy & Katharine Hepburn Blogathon is an event celebrating the lives and careers of the famed Hollywood couple, presented by In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood  and Love Letters to Old Hollywood. For a complete list of participating bloggers, visit the links at the host sites.

Love Among the Ruins

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Katharine Hepburn made more TV movies than you might suspect for an actress whose film career began in 1932 and was almost as active in the theater throughout her life. 

Her migration to the small screen began after the death of Spencer Tracy in 1967, probably not a coincidence. All told, she made nine films for television, beginning with a remake of The Glass Menagerie in 1973 and ending with One Christmas in 1994, her final film role.

In 1972, Hepburn appeared on The Dick Cavett Show and was asked if she would ever make a film with Laurence Olivier, the legendary British actor who was so big they named an acting award after him. Hepburn smiled and said, “Well, neither of us is dead yet. Even though you may think so.”

And that set certain wheels in motion...

The Rutles: All You Need is Cash

The Rutles: All You Need is Cash

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Ten years of this blog and I have yet to talk about Monty Python. For now, I’ll say what practically everyone else says about the British comedy troupe: they’re hilarious, I thoroughly enjoy their material, both on TV and in the movies (I own Holy Grail on DVD), and I could watch them all day. But this is not about Python as a group, just one of them: Eric Idle.

In the sixties, Idle appeared on the ITV children’s show Do Not Adjust Your Set with Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin and Terry Jones and met John Cleese and Graham Chapman as a guest on At Last the 1948 Show.

Idle and the others from Adjust were offered an adult, late-night show at around the same time Cleese and Chapman were offered a series by the BBC. In 1969, after a taping of Adjust, Cleese arranged a dinner meeting between the six of them to discuss a collaboration, and a legend was born.

Monty Python’s Flying Circus aired on the BBC from 1969-1974, and afterwards, Idle and the others pursued solo projects. In 1975 Idle created the sketch show Rutland Weekend Television, with music by Neil Innes. It was during this period that the two came up with characters that spawned a life of their own.

The Girl Most Likely To...

The Girl Most Likely To...
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Joan Rivers might have been the first female stand-up comic I had ever seen. I had seen comedic actresses on TV—Carol Burnett, Isabel Sanford, Nell Carter—but I associated Rivers with stand-up. I would see quite a bit of her on TV, and she was part of the zeitgeist at the time.

I thought she was funny, not so much for the things she said as for the way she acted: gossipy, manic, catty. It’s a safe bet I knew no one in real life remotely like her.

In 2010 there was a documentary on her, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work. It provided insight on where she came from and how her distinctive brand of humor originated. I remember she said in the doc, and I’m paraphrasing, something about how “ugly” women made better comediennes. I suspect she was making a distinction from comedic actresses, because we can all think of beautiful examples of those: Carole Lombard, Rosalind Russell, Madeline Kahn.

If this were true, was it a form of compensation? Tina Fey is good looking, no doubt. Would I call her sexy? The word can mean different things to different people. I wouldn’t kick her out of my bed; I think she’d be a lot of fun to be with and would have lots of interesting things to say, and that’s sexy, in its own way. But I think we all know what Rivers was referring to: objective physical beauty.

Thursday’s Game

Thursday’s Game (AKA The Berk)
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With 21 Emmys and three Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, James L. Brooks is an undisputed legend of the big and small screens. Let’s count the hits he was involved in creating, shall we: The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Rhoda. Lou Grant. The Tracey Ullmann Show. And of course, The Simpsons—and that’s just TV.

Switch to the movies and you can add Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News and As Good As It Gets, all Best Picture nominees he directed and wrote. As a producer, you can even add Jerry Maguire, Say Anything and Big.

Before all of that, though, he was just a TV writer from Brooklyn working his way through the 60s. He had been a copywriter for CBS News, writing for broadcasts and documentaries as well as some work as an associate producer before switching to sitcoms, like That Girl, The Andy Griffith Show and My Three Sons. He created the show Room 222, the second one with a black lead character.

In 1970, he and Allan Burns created MTM. 29 Primetime Emmys later, it made him a major player in television. Here’s a nice appreciation of the show from TV Guide in the context of the pandemic.

In 1971, Brooks tried his luck with a feature film. Thursday’s Game was an ABC movie that didn’t air until April 1974. Gene Wilder and Bob Newhart are two guys who enjoy a poker game with friends every Thursday night. When the game breaks up because of a fight and they need something new to do, Wilder and Newhart are forced to confront their inadequacies in life, especially when Wilder loses his job producing a crappy game show.

This all-star cast looks like a powerhouse now, but in 1971 many of them were not yet household names: Ellen Burstyn (two years before The Exorcist), MTM cast members Valerie Harper and Cloris Leachman, Rob Reiner (the same year All in the Family debuted), Norman Fell (five years before Three’s Company) Chris Sarandon (four years before Dog Day Afternoon) and Nancy Walker (same year as McMillan and Wife and three years before Rhoda, not to mention those Bounty commercials). By the time Game aired in 1974, some of these people were better known, including Brooks.

Game feels like the sort of thing the future creator of Terms of Endearment would write. It has its funny moments—Walker plays an unemployment agency counselor, and her scenes with Wilder are cute—mixed with a little drama: Wilder and Burstyn’s marriage is in jeopardy due in large part to his inability to admit he lost his job; he pretends his Thursday night poker game is still going on, but he actually stays out all night with Newhart, which naturally stresses her out. Game is less funny-ha-ha and more funny-ain’t-life-peculiar.

Steve at Movie Movie Blog Blog wrote about Game last year. I agree with him in that the poker scene in the beginning was a highlight and that nothing afterwards is quite as funny as that. The manic explosions Wilder was so great at are reined in and I admit, I kinda longed for more of them, but this isn’t that kind of movie. Indeed, at times Wilder looked like he was exploring his sexy side(?): he has a couple of shirtless scenes with Burstyn and Harper tries to seduce him in another scene. Young Frankenstein this is not.

I’d say Game is worth checking out overall, especially if you’re nostalgic for 70s television.

Mondo Trasho

Mondo Trasho
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It took fifty years or so, but the world has caught up with John Waters. Just turn on your TV and you’ll realize there can no longer be any doubt. Whether or not that’s a good thing, well, that’s up to you to decide... but I will say this:

As an artist, no matter who you are or where you come from, no matter what your intentions are—whether you wanna provoke or shock with your art or whether you wanna create beauty, however you perceive it, or whether you just wanna make a million dollars and retire to the south of France—you’re never, ever gonna please everybody, and attempting to try is an exercise in futility.

It’s something I wish I could remember more often. I struggle with the conservative mores I was brought up in, and at times I’ve wanted to push my art further, whether it’s my visual art or my writing, as I alluded to recently. To embrace “trash,” to find virtue in modes of expression that run far left of center and to be open about it, takes guts, because even in 2020, there’s gonna be somebody ready to hang you for it.

I suspect Waters realized this a long time ago.

Xala

Xala
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I’m glad I found one pre-1980 African film during this cinematic world tour to write about. I can’t say I know anything about the kinds of movies that come from the motherland; any film set in Africa I’ve seen was usually produced by an American studio, like Disney’s Queen of Katwe, or a European one, like the animated Kirikou and the Sorceress or the more recent A United Kingdom. The Gods Must Be Crazy may be the only other African-produced film I’ve written about here (South Africa and Botswana, according to IMDB).

Senegal is in west Africa. Here’s a pre-virus profile of the country from the BBC, but the key bit of info here is this: Senegal won its independence from France in 1960. Three years later came the debut film, a short, from a man who would go on to become one of Africa’s most prominent cinematic voices: Ousmane Sembène.

History of the World part I

History of the World part I
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Oy gevalt, could we use some comedy right now! For a long time, I had avoided Mel Brooks’ History of the World part I because I had read it wasn’t as good as Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein, and as it turns out, I was right.

History was more cartoonish, but it lacked Saddles’ subversive bite or YF’s knowing winks to film history—it made me think of other films, like Life of Brian and Spartacus, but it made me wish I was watching those films instead. If this had been made by anybody else, it might’ve been passable, but Brooks sets a much higher standard for laughs than most.

History is exactly what it says on the tin; a series of vignettes set in different time periods throughout world history: the Stone Age, Biblical times, Ancient Rome, the Dark Ages and the French Revolution. Brooks appears as a variety of characters, along with his regular repertoire of actors—Harvey Korman, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, etc.—plus Gregory Hines, Dom DeLuise, Bea Arthur, and Brooks’ old boss from television, Sid Caesar. Orson Welles narrates!

Jojo Rabbit

Jojo Rabbit
seen @ Kew Gardens Cinemas, Kew Gardens, Queens, NY

Last month I had said I didn’t find Knives Out as funny as other people did and I questioned whether seeing it with an audience made a difference or not. Now I’ve seen another comedy film, Jojo Rabbit, a movie I found hilarious, as did the audience I saw it with—one woman behind me was laughing her head off for most of the movie—and irony of ironies, the first time I looked it up online after seeing it, I encountered all these reviews saying how unfunny it is. (Its overall Rotten Tomatoes score, however, is a “certified fresh” 80, which is very positive.)

Granted, director Taika Waititi, who also adapted the screenplay from the book Caging Skies, walks a tightrope, attempting to find humor in a story taking place in Nazi Germany with Adolf Hitler (sort of) as a supporting character. I was reminded of the 2018 Cold War comedy The Death of Stalin, which also balanced humor with the realities of life within a fascist regime—and, of course, older comedies like Life is Beautiful, The Producers, To Be or Not To Be and The Great Dictator.

Jojo deals with a young Hitler Youth recruit, one so devoted to the Nazi cause he imagines Hitler himself as his best friend, and what happens when he learns his mother is secretly hiding a Jew in their house. Why is the movie funny? For one thing, the dialogue feels almost contemporary, which is incongruous with the time and place. The Nazi characters are depicted broadly; the situations they’re put in ridiculous. Hitler especially, played by director Waititi, is practically a cartoon—and yet there are moments that remind you these are Nazis and if you’re a dissenter, or a Jew, you trifle with them at your risk. And there’s an overall message of tolerance that’s heartfelt and welcome, particularly in this time where anti-Semitism is making a comeback.

The child actor, Roman Griffin Davis, carries the bulk of the movie. He gives Jojo a naive fanaticism that almost makes him endearing. Jojo doesn’t quite measure up to his peers, most of whom bully him, but he’ll do anything to be a true soldier like his absent father, off fighting in the war. His idealized version of Hitler acts as a kind of surrogate father, but none of this is as frightening as it sounds because of the goofy tone of the movie.

And then Jojo discovers the teenage Jewish girl and things change for him; that which he’s believed in all his life about German superiority is called into question. It was good to see Thomasin McKenzie from Leave No Trace again; she plays the Jewish girl and I think she’s even better here.

Jojo is pretty different from Knives; both are satirical, but to different degrees, and Jojo, by nature of its subject matter, is more risqué and “out there.” Did that make it easier to laugh at? Could be. Knives was an ensemble; we saw the story through different perspectives, some of which were funnier than others and all of whom were adults. Jojo is told from the angle of a ten-year-old with a very specific worldview, one we wouldn’t normally laugh at, but here it’s purposely exaggerated to a bizarre extent.

Laughing helped us, the audience, approach the premise more easily, whereas with Knives, there was no trepidation of the premise to overcome. It was easier to accept at face value, and while it was entertaining, I don’t think I felt the need to laugh as much as I did with Jojo. From the first scene and the opening credits—yes, this was a rare film with opening credits, set to the tune of the Beatles’ “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” in German—it gave us permission to laugh at it... and we did. Knives wasn’t quite like that, at least not for me, but that’s okay.

Eating Raoul

The Beyond Star Trek Blogathon is an event which spotlights Star Trek cast members, from all the shows, in different roles. It is hosted by The Midnite Drive-In and Hamlette’s Soliloquy. For a complete list of participating bloggers, visit the lists at the host sites.

Eating Raoul
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On Star Trek: Voyager, Robert Beltran played Commander Chakotay, the first officer to Kate Mulgrew’s Captain Janeway. He was part of a group of renegades called the Maquis, Starfleet officers and ordinary citizens pissed off at the Federation for signing an unfavorable peace treaty with a former enemy. The Maquis expressed  their anger through terrorist attacks. Janeway was hunting down Chakotay’s group when they both ran afoul of a powerful alien being who sucked them into a distant part of space. To get back home, the Starfleet and Maquis crews must set aside their differences and work together.

BBC America reruns Voyager episodes, so I’ve watched it again in another attempt to find the good in the show, and I have kinda warmed up to it overall. Chakotay originally struck me as dull and little more than Janeway’s lapdog, and he has had his moments, but honestly, little has changed my mind on that score. A large section of the Voyager fandom have ’shipped him and Janeway, and there were moments where it looked like sparks might have flown between them in a Sam-and-Diane, will-they-or-won’t-they fashion, but of course, nothing came of it because the writers were adverse to permanent change. Don’t get me started on that.

Top 5 movie-going moments of 2019

2019 was the year I learned to stop worrying and love Netflix. Well, okay, that may not be completely true, but I can’t deny I went to the movies fewer times because of it. Is that a good or a bad thing? I’d say the jury is still out on that one. Netflix is convenient, almost too much so, perhaps—and the fact that it has enabled me to save money and see new releases at home is a game-changer. That said, I won’t abandon the moviegoing experience that easily. Things like the following can still happen:

5. Seeing Movieworld reborn as the Squire Great Neck. It’s further away from me than the old Movieworld location was and it has less character, but it exists, it’s still a bargain, and with enough advance planning, I can get there for the price of a single bus fare. The spirit of Movieworld, a local movie theater that cares about its patrons, is alive and well and I am grateful.

Is comedy always better with an audience?

Knives Out

So Sandi and I were discussing Knives Out, the new murder mystery, and she confirmed for me what I was uncertain about at first: it is meant to be a comedy. When I told her neither I nor the audience I saw it with found it that funny, even though I still enjoyed the film, she was all “Whaaaaat? But what about so-and-so and such-and-such a scene” and I agreed they were amusing, just not the laugh riot she and her audience thought it was. And that got me thinking...

I think we can agree that not all comedy is created equal. There’s the traditional pie-in-the-face gags of slapstick, which never really goes out of style. There’s the wacky, almost non-sequitor-like wordplay found in the Marx Brothers or Monty Python. There are sex jokes and innuendo, like you’d find in Benny Hill or the Carry On films. There are the more highbrow comedies based on class distinction, that Oscar Wilde dealt in, and the ones based on race or gender, like the humor of Chris Rock or Sarah Silverman. You get the idea.

Regardless, I had always believed experiencing humor with an audience had a way of amplifying the jokes, making them more enjoyable than if you were alone, but that’s not entirely true, is it? Duck Soup is hilarious whether you see it with other people or not; so is Annie Hall. Two different types of humor, yet both hold up as examples of funny movies—at least according to critical reception, box office success, and their places in film history, markers which are about as objective as you’re likely to get—with or without an audience.

Knives Out

Knives Out
seen @ Cinepolis Chelsea, New York NY

Knives Out is a movie based on an ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY. These days it’s rare that such a beast exists in Hollywood, much less one that becomes a hit, much much less that it’s written and directed by the same person, so I feel it’s important to establish this up front. In this case, that person is current wunderkind Rian Johnson, the guy who directed the Star Wars movie everybody hated—or so it seems, if you go by social media.

I did not see The Last Jedi, nor am I likely to anytime soon. I’m burnt out on Star Wars right now, and being reminded of it everywhere I go these days doesn’t help—but I am familiar with Johnson’s career before he hit the motherload. He did the SF time travel flick Looper, which was interesting, and he did an earlier one called Brick, a suspense movie of a different stripe from the sound of it, which is currently in my Netflix queue.

Johnson has become the new caretaker of the Star Wars franchise: he’s slated to write the next three movies after this month’s latest installment, The Rise of Skywalker (which he did not write or direct). If so, I hope it doesn’t mean a moratorium on films like Knives, because it was good. If you’ve heard about it, you know it’s a modern-day, Agatha Christie-style murder mystery, with an all-star cast.

Daniel Craig plays the sleuth looking to solve the mystery, a character who’s more Tennessee Williams than Agatha Christie. Craig puts on a broad Southern accent for this one, and once you get past the sight of James Bond talking like Burl Ives in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, he’s actually not bad. I wouldn’t call him flamboyant; it’s just that he stands out among a cast of very Northern, very modern characters.

In this story, you’re led to believe a specific someone committed the murder; in fact, halfway through the film you even see how the deed was done, but the murder only leads to subsequent events that are equally important—and was it a murder anyway, or did it only look like one? Johnson guides you down one blind alley after another before changing the rules of the game so that you’re no longer sure of anything. It’s quite clever.

Is Knives meant to be a comedy? The marketing for it, as well as interviews with Johnson I read, made me think so, but neither I nor the smallish audience I saw it with (perhaps 20-30 people) did a great deal of laughing. That’s okay, it was still an excellent movie, but I was kinda hoping it was a comedy, in the vein of earlier flicks like Clue and Murder By Death.

If I’m not mistaken, this is the first fiction movie I’ve seen that directly discusses the current occupant of the White House. His actions are debated in a scene where they’re both condemned and defended, and while this scene doesn’t play into the plot, it gives us a deeper insight into the squabbling family of the story: their privilege, their conscience, and ultimately their cluelessness. One of the big themes of Knives involves immigration and what it means to live in America as a foreigner, but Johnson doesn’t hit you over the head with it, to his credit. This movie’s real good.

Have I talked about Cinepolis before? It’s in Chelsea. The national chain took over this local theater a few years ago and they’ve done a good job. Gourmet food though not on the level of Alamo Drafthouse, single-digit matinee screenings (barely; it’s $9.50, but still), reclining seats with trays, even programmed events and film series. It’s a good bargain, for Manhattan.

Neighborhood links

Joker director Todd Phillips, previously known for his raunchy R-rated comedies like The Hangover trilogy, has said one reason he made Joker, a drama, was because it was difficult to make irreverent comedies, since audiences are more easily offended these days.

Is it true? The numbers don’t lie: when the tween comedy Good Boys opened at number one this summer, it was the first R comedy to do that in over three years. Once again, PG-13 appears to be the safer choice for Hollywood studios now; in a recent interview, Eddie Murphy, whose R-rated Rudy Ray Moore biopic Dolemite is My Name is playing on Netflix, confirmed as much. This Variety piece from 2017 also theorized a change in the culture, but cited the immediacy of late-night television as a factor...

...which brings us back to Phillips’ theory. I know my tastes have evolved over time. I don’t seek out R comedies (Murphy’s movie notwithstanding), but I don’t think I ever did—unless Kevin Smith made them. Why don’t I go to R comedies as much anymore? If I’m being honest, I suppose I want a little more... sophistication. All those Lubitsch and Wilder and Sturges movies made an impression! Plus, a movie like The Hangover works better if you go with friends, and practically none of my friends, who are over forty, like me, have any interest in them either.

Fear of being offended is not a factor for me (I laughed at the “porch monkey” jokes in Clerks 2), yet I can’t deny “woke culture” is a palpable presence these days. Twitter users are ready and willing to pounce on anything that carries even a hint of being un-PC, and if they have led to a decline in irreverent comedies, that would be a shame and a waste. It may be with the best of intentions, but I don’t like the thought of pop culture settling into a safe middle ground where everything is sanitized. If I choose not to see a Hangover-type movie, that should be my choice—and I should be free to change my mind without fear of censure. At the same time, I hope I don’t have that fear-of-offense attitude myself, but if I do, I’m gonna work at changing it.

——————

Lonergan (L), next to the Wyler sisters.
I don’t know who the moderator was.

Last month, Virginia and I had the privilege of attending a New York Film Festival screening of one of my favorite classic films, Dodsworth. It was a new restoration, screened at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, and the daughters of director William Wyler, Catherine and Melanie, were in attendance for a Q&A, along with Manchester by the Sea director Kenneth Lonergan.

This was the first time I had seen it with an audience, and once again, I found the experience of hearing other people laughing at moments I didn’t necessarily find funny jarring. I’ve seen other film bloggers talk about this when it comes to old movies, and now I understand this feeling better: you see a film made in a different era, you connect with it, and then you see it with a crowd and that connection changes because others don’t react to it the same way you do. I doubt the audience thought Dodsworth was campy, and I don’t think they were being disrespectful; their reactions just rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t get like this when it comes to more recent movies, or if I do, the feeling’s not as acute. That’s the chance you take with an audience, but it’s okay.

Regardless, the restoration was beautiful. The Wyler sisters and Lonergan discussed casting, including William Wyler butting heads with Ruth Chatterton; Mary Astor’s great performance despite the scandalous divorce she was part of at the time; the overall acting; and the film in a historical context. Virginia loved the film, as I knew she would.

———————

I saw Ad Astra again, this time with Ann, who wanted to see it. I think I understand the movie better the second time around. As I explained to Ann afterwards, the bigness of the movie, the Kubrick-meets-Malick aspect of the storytelling and filmmaking might have blinded me to the humanity at the heart of it all, but the second viewing made it easier to see the characters as people, and I appreciate it better. If you wanna talk about it further, spoilers are allowed in the comments to this post.

More on the other side.

Zombieland: Double Tap

Zombieland: Double Tap 

seen @ Cinemart Fiveplex, Forest Hills, Queens, NY

This one’s really not worth overthinking. It’s gory, bloody, silly fun. If you liked the first one, you’ll like this one too. And I did. To hell with the critics.

Happy Halloween!

P.S. Don’t do what I did. See it with a bunch of your friends. With an audience that’ll appreciate movies like this.

Dolemite is My Name

Dolemite is My Name
Netflix viewing

I would’ve been fifteen years old when I went to see Eddie Murphy’s concert film Raw. As I recall, someone recommended it to me. I was still getting used to seeing films by myself, and somewhere along the line I realized I could get into R-rated movies, despite them being technically verboten for me, thanks to my size, which made me look older, and lax ticket booth clerks.

And I wanted to see this one. Eddie was the reason I stayed up late on weekends to watch Saturday Night Live. Stand-up comedy was a new concept for me. I only knew Eddie’s predecessors—Bill, Richard, Redd—through the safe lens of television, both live-action and animated.

SNL was different. It came on late at night; that right there made it seem illicit, almost dangerous. The cast might do or say something... naughty! And Eddie, in particular, walked that tightrope in skits that were not only hilarious, but spoke to me in a way unlike Joe Piscopo or Billy Crystal, funny as they were too.

So why wouldn’t I want to go see him uncensored? I was too young to have seen 48 Hrs. or Trading Places and I only knew Beverly Hills Cop through the soundtrack, so this was a golden opportunity, and I took it—and I never regretted it. Eddie was part of that wave of black superstardom that swept through pop culture in the 80s: Michael and Prince and Whitney in music, Magic and Kareem in sports, Bill on TV. Everybody knew them, everybody loved them. It was a renaissance.

Blinded by the Light

Blinded by the Light
seen @ Kew Gardens Cinemas, Kew Gardens, Queens, NY

I’ve got an unanticipated buildup of posts and I need to clear the slate, so this will be a smaller post than I had planned. Blinded by the Light is inspired by a true story about a teenager of Pakistan descent, living in a nowheresville English town in the 80s, whose world is rocked when he discovers the music of Bruce Springsteen for the first time.

I enjoyed this one a whole lot, and not just for the nostalgia factor. Director Gurinder Chadha, who also did Bend it Like Beckham years ago, presents us with a lead character, and a situation, not unlike what you might’ve seen in the 80s and 90s films of John Hughes or Cameron Crowe, but the racial aspect is a clear and important distinction: being Pakistani alienates newcomer Viveik Kalra not only from his economically depressed town, but from his disapproving father, an immigrant just trying to look out for his family the only way he can, because he knows no one else in this bigoted environment will. Bruce’s music (which you either love or hate; you can guess how I feel) speaks to Kalra like nothing else does and tells him there’s someone else, half a world away and part of an entirely different culture, who understands.

Light is also a joyous, exuberant story that’s a pure expression of youth, which someone will turn into a Broadway musical one day, I have no doubt. Indeed, it borders on being a musical already. Any potential comparisons to Yesterday, another film about someone of East Asian descent who bonds with Western rock music in an unusual way, are unfounded, partly because of the sci-fi aspect and partly because the romance here felt more organic. I had a great time watching it.

Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris

The Adoring Angela Lansbury Blogathon is an event celebrating the life and career of the actress, hosted by Realweegiemidget Reviews. For a list of participating bloggers visit the link at the host site.

Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris
YouTube viewing

Is it wrong of me to think of Angela Lansbury as a television actress? Sure, she has a long and distinguished career in film, not to mention on stage, but for someone who grew up when I did, I can't help but think of her, not as the young, curvy starlet from films like Gaslight and National Velvet, or the middle-aged thespian from The Manchurian Candidate and Bedknobs and Broomsticks, but as the old lady who solves murder mysteries every week on CBS.

Meet the Feebles

Meet the Feebles
YouTube viewing

How about that Peter Jackson, huh? I think it's fair to say he was nobody (in America, anyway) until Lord of the Rings made him a superstar, but of course, he had been making films in his native New Zealand for years.

I remember watching his American breakthrough, The Frighteners, on video during my video store years. I liked it, but it didn't do well commercially. It came as a surprise to me that he was chosen to take on Rings, especially as a trilogy.

To anyone who knew his pre-Hollywood work, it must have been a bigger surprise. His NZ films were a lot weirder and gorier. For someone born on Halloween, perhaps that's appropriate.

Even a dramatic film like Heavenly Creatures — the film that made many of us aware of a young, curvaceous beauty named Kate Winslet for the first time —  had its bizarro moments. I've written about Dead Alive, a film I still think is the ultimate zombie movie, going places of which George Romero never dreamed.

None of that, however, prepared me for Meet the Feebles.

Imagine The Muppet Show directed by John Waters and that'll give you some idea of what it's like. It's puppetry, small, large and in-between, and it's adult. Profanity, violence, satire, it's all there, and you better believe there's puppet nudity and sex too.

In the film, Meet the Feebles is the name of a Muppet Show type TV variety show. We get a look backstage at the illicit affairs, scandals and depravity that goes on when the cameras stop rolling. It's an ensemble, but much of the action centers around Heidi, a Miss Piggy type diva in the form of a life-sized hippo.

The puppetry is impressive, and it looks like it cost a pretty penny to create. The variety of the characters range from a smallish fly tabloid reporter to a humongous spider who appears late in the film in an elaborate outdoor sequence. Some of them are cute, like the romantic leads, a porcupine and a poodle, while others, like the show's sleazy producer and his henchmen, are anything but.

Jackson co-wrote Feebles with his long-time collaborator and future wife, Fran Walsh, along with Stephen Sinclair and Danny Mulheron, who operated the Heidi puppet.

The humor is pitch black, of course, but the ending is tragic, so Jackson manages to make you sympathetic to Heidi's fate. Mostly, though, Feebles is one WTF moment after another.

Adult puppet films turn up every so often here in America. The recent Melissa McCarthy film The Happyland Murders sank like a stone this past summer; Trey Parker & Matt Stone's Team America fared a little better, made at the height of their South Park fame.

Puppetry, though, like animation, is mostly regarded in America as kiddie fare. I don't see that changing anytime soon, if at all, but give Jackson props for daring to make something as over-the-top and insane as Feebles. It's not for everyone, but Jackson fans should check it out for sure.

Topper

The Greatest Film I've Never Seen Blogathon is exactly what it says on the tin, hosted by Moon in Gemini. For a complete list of participating bloggers visit the link at the host site.

Topper
YouTube viewing

Okay, first, I don't really believe Topper is the greatest film I've never seen before. I decided at the last minute to take part in this blogathon and I needed a film I could get my hands on quick, so to speak, so I chose this.

Here's a short list of "great" films I have yet to see: The Sound of Music, Alphaville, Throne of Blood, La Strada, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Seven Beauties, Wild at Heart, The Age of Innocence, Empire of the Sun and A Beautiful Mind.

Some I never saw because they didn't appeal to me, some because I never got around to it, and some I think are overrated. Perhaps I'll watch a few of them one day. Don't know.