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.

Mambo with the Honeymooners!

The Honeymooners Blogathon is an event dedicated to the CBS television show starring Jackie Gleason, hosted by Movie Movie Blog Blog II. For a list of participating bloggers, visit the link at the host site.

Earlier this year, I discovered for the first time that The Honeymooners only had one season. All those great episodes, those hilarious moments embedded into our collective unconscious from years of late-night viewings and holiday marathons, constituted a single season on TV?

Hard to believe, but it’s true: all 39 episodes—not counting the sketches from Jackie Gleason’s previous series, Cavalcade of Stars and The Jackie Gleason Show, nor the periodic revivals that came afterward—aired during the 1955-56 season and that was it... but what a run!

Picking one episode to talk about is like picking which Beatles song you like best, but I settled on one that not only features all four stars, but defines their roles well and even has one or two things to say about men and women.

The Battered Bastards of Baseball

The Battered Bastards of Baseball
Netflix viewing

I’ve seen quite a bit of minor league baseball, maybe as much as major league ball. Here in New York we have at least three minor league teams I know of, such as the Brooklyn Cyclones, who play in Coney Island, right on the boardwalk next door to the amusement park. Last year I took Virginia to a game. When I lived in Columbus, we had the Clippers, and I saw games both in their old stadium and in their newer one, closer to the downtown. I’ve seen games in other towns, too.

From a fan’s perspective, the game looks the same. The fastballs aren’t as fast, and the home runs not as big, but it still takes three strikes to get a batter out and three outs to end an inning. The big difference might be in the entertainment factor. The minor league teams work overtime to please the crowds with between-inning games, mascots, promotions, even cheerleaders. I was about to say they do it to a greater degree than the majors, but it’s been so long since I’ve been to a major league game I can’t judge.

When a labor strike cancelled the World Series in 1994, it shattered my faith in baseball for a long time, but I couldn’t stay detached from it forever. The minors, though I didn’t necessarily look at them this way at first, seemed like a reasonable compromise: a way for me to enjoy the game I loved as a kid without thinking about the things that ruined the game at the major league level for me: labor disputes, steroids and other drugs, contract negotiations. I know the minors aren’t immune to such things, but at least they’re less magnified. If a Cyclone star player doesn’t report to training camp, it doesn’t make the back page of the Daily News.

Joker

Joker
seen @ Cinemart Fiveplex, Forest Hills, Queens, NY

This is the movie everyone was so scared would incite another mass shooting?

I almost fell asleep while watching it!

In fairness, I saw Joker the day after a late night out with Virginia. I got home at three in the morning, so while I was wide awake by the time the movie began, I didn’t have much sleep. Still, by the time I started dozing off, maybe a smidge past the halfway point, I had already decided Joker was not saying anything new or different; that Joaquin Phoenix, while excellent in what will almost certainly be an Oscar-nominated performance, couldn’t make up for a largely derivative screenplay (though he does come close); and that Joker isn’t a love letter to Martin Scorsese. It’s a rehash of Alan Moore.

Judy

Judy
seen @ Kew Gardens Cinemas, Kew Gardens, Queens, NY

Why does she mean so much to so many people, even today, over fifty years after her death? It’s hard for me to truly appreciate. I think there were better singers than her: Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin, Billie Holliday, to name three. I think there were better actresses: Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck.

She had something different, something to which people instantly responded. Part of her appeal might have been the result of seeing her on the screen from an early age and watching her mature into a young woman. A big part of it was because of That Movie. I suspect some of it is also pity for her deeply troubled off-screen life.

She, like James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, became a symbol after her death, but the symbol changes depending on who you are and what kind of life you live. Some of us, like me, just see her as a immensely talented actress and singer, beaten down by the Hollywood machine but immortalized by her fans into something much greater in the end. Others...

I can’t speak to the gay perspective. Intellectually, I get the how of it—“Over the Rainbow” as an unofficial gay anthem; the association with musicals; her respect for gay culture—but the why runs deep, and far outside of my experience... yet one can’t discuss her without at least acknowledging this facet of her legacy.

Suffice it to say Judy Garland spoke to all kinds of people in all kinds of ways.

Judy is not the first film to depict her life, but it might be the most high profile, and coming as it does, so soon after the Gloria Grahame movie and the Laurel & Hardy movie (and even Juliet Naked if you wanna include fiction), it builds on a new sub-genre: “celebrities who spend their twilight years in England.” So remember, when you become rich and famous and decline in either your health or your popularity or both, hop on a plane to dear old Blighty for a third-act comeback and you’ll be just fine!

Actually, this film has a lot more in common with Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, the Grahame film: a May-December (September? Garland wasn’t that old) romance with a younger man, health issues, an inability to perform properly on stage. There were times during Judy when I thought I was watching the same damn movie—but this, of course, is much bigger and splashier. Perennial Oscar bridesmaid Annette Bening gets the short end of the stick again, which is too bad, because I thought she was good in Liverpool.

Renee Zellweger showed off her song-and-dance chops in Best Picture-winner Chicago. Here, she’s more song than dance, but she’s no less able, even if she doesn’t sound like Garland. The hair and makeup job make her resemble Garland, if not personify her (I recall when Anne Hathaway was rumored for the part; a closer fit looks-wise). It was difficult to not see her as Renee Zellweger, but that’s the risk you take when you play someone world-famous.

Judy would be a by-the-numbers biopic except for her. I never saw Chicago (or her other big Oscar film, Cold Mountain), so I had never really appreciated just how good she was. I loved her in Jerry Maguire, of course, but that didn’t prepare me for this. She makes Garland into a real person, one to whom being a good mother ranked almost as high in her life as being a good entertainer, maybe higher, and while the hair and makeup help sell the role, they are not the role; she is. I think there may have been a fear of her falling into caricature, but if she did, I didn’t sense it.

Not too much else to say about this one. Celebrity biopics always make potent Oscar bait for someone eager to stretch their acting wings, and while it’s still early to call a winner, Zellweger has to be considered a frontrnner.

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Related:
Judy and Liza

Carmen (1915)

Carmen (1915)
YouTube viewing

I’ve discussed Cecil B. DeMille here before—the blockbuster filmmaker with the moralistic streak. The guy whose films condemn sin but show you lots of it, in detail. A silent adaptation of Carmen seemed like a good fit for him—it’s not a Biblical story, but there are lots of people behaving badly in it.

Georges Bizet’s opera was first performed in 1875 in Paris, and it was plenty shocking for its time. The tale of the gypsy temptress and the two dudes whom she seduces didn’t catch on until it played outside France; by the time it returned home, in 1883, its fame grew. It has been adapted and readapted for film lots of times—I wrote, for example, about the contemporary all-black version, Carmen Jones. DeMille’s version was one of the very first for the screen, made forty years after its debut.

Carmen was one of thirteen films DeMille made in 1915, including the crime-of-passion drama The Cheat. His version of Carmen is actually based on the original novella, since the libretto was under copyright at the time. His brother William wrote the screenplay. The version I watched had the libretto on the soundtrack. I was surprised that I recognized some of the songs, but I guess they’re pretty famous.

Opera singer Geraldine Farrar (not to be confused with Geraldine Ferraro) played Carmen, and for 1915, she was pretty sexy. Carmen, let’s face it, is a bitch, but she’s a fascinating bitch. She charms Spanish soldier Wallace Reid because it’s her job (to distract him from a smuggling ring going on under his nose) and cock-teases bullfighter Pedro de Cordoba because... she can? From the get-go, she’s utterly confident of her abilities and she doesn’t suffer fools gladly, either: in one scene she gets in a vicious cat-fight with a woman who gives her static.

That same year, Raoul Walsh released his own version of Carmen, with Theda Bara, and Charlie Chaplin directed and starred in a Carmen parody called A Burlesque on Carmen, proving that the common phenomenon of similarly-themed movies coming out around the same time is older than most people think.