Uncle Alberto in the Mist Above Como

It's hard to explain, and after all, we are not an explaining people. Explanations are always an embarrassment, usually reserved for those people who don't know which of the seven forks to use on the third course. It's much easier just to not invite such people to our dinner parties.

Our dinner parties are fewer these days, but they do still happen. We have come to enjoy most of them in silhouette. In the 1910s, in that brief idyll before The War, Uncle Alberto posed for a series of silhouettes cut furiously from ebony card stock by a Bulgarian artisan with tiny barber clippers. He captured every essence of Uncle Alberto, all of it in a silhouette darker than the pre-dawn sky. For a few lira he was captured for eternity, his soul carved from the abyss.

Cousin Cecile never understood why that portrait meant so much to him. Perhaps that's why she gave it to little cousin Ramona who thought it was the image of a sideshow attraction and placed it in her toy box where Uncle Alberto finally found solace hugged by a ceramic giraffe named Igberto and a felt horse named Alain.

I Want the Prime Rib Buffet and Bobby J

Another great find through a tip from Gavin Elster. This is almost like the male bookend to that wonderful Samantha Sang video from a few days earlier.

Sadly, I must admit that I missed Bobby J the first time around. Though back in 1984 I got hit on by several guys who looked just like Bobby J. Wait, there is something very familiar about the swaying of his hips.

So, what's your theory on Bobby J? I can easily picture him working as a car loan officer as some lowly branch bank, buys his duds through International Male's catalog and has been pursuing his Euro Disco career at night. I hear that he's a smash in Jersey Boys at the Ray Stevens Theater in Branson, Missouri.

What's your theory?

Mina Moment: Un colpo al cuore

Taking Back the Exclamation

Some bad movies are so memorable I am sure that I have seen them even though I have, even after I finally see them for the first time. Case in point is Boom (alternately known as Boom! which I finally saw last night). It confirms a long-standing theory I have had that back in the late 1960s, there was a movement within the studios to save a big budget movie in trouble by adding an exclamation point to the title. Cases in point: Star! (1968), Hello, Dolly! (1969) and Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) I think the main reason that last one failed is the stacatto nature of the punctuation that should have been a crescendo of tora. Tora! TORA!!!!!

I've not seen any back story on it, but apparently Boom (as it is credited in the opening titles and some early posters must have gained the exclamation point after test screening. Some marketing genius must have recognized that no one would pay to see a movie called Boom, but they would come in droves to see one called Boom!

Boom sort of reminds me of Eckhardt Tolle's The Power of Now. Tolle says that the book was written so that you could pick it up and read any two pages out of sequence and gain something from those few paragraphs. I think the same is true of Boom, and it's really hard to watch more than five minutes of it at a time. For example, the six or seven minutes of the Asian themed dinner party with Liz Noël Coward as the Witch of Capri is a brilliant, free-standing short play, and it's unfortunate with all that comes before and after it. Liz is offended that Coward sees her Kabuki gown and asks if they are having Chinese food, but she has no problems having sitar players provide the incongruent musical mood for the evening.

Boom is a sort of non-linear movie and probably makes more sense viewed in separate, short sittings and in no particular sequence. It also is sort of like tofu or eggplant in that it could be paired with just about anything -- the Mediterranean villa works nicely with the one in Contempt, the script is a shadow of Night of the Iguana, and like Bunny Lake Is Missing, it has Coward playing a witty old perv.

Dysfunction, the Sixties and Italian Tweeters

I am no real fan of Cher nor would I suggest that she should go back to dysfunctional marriage, but I still feel that she and Tina Turner did their best work in the 1960s and early 1970s, especially Tina. What's Love Got to Do With It? Well, to me Tina was at her best when doing stuff on the order of "Sexy Ida", "Funkier Than a Mosquito's Tweeter" and "Flatbush City Limit".

Cher, I think, never topped "You Better Sit Down Kids" in which she sang the song from the perspective of a man leaving his wife. That was the first time that I realized the gender roles handed down to us up to the mid-1960s did not have to be sustained. And, boy, if the video above were not disturbing enough for the audio, what was up with those mannequins?

However, some of the stuff Cher and Sonny did in Italy around 1965 or so was the top of their form in my mind. The closest she came to ever getting back to that was with Eros Ramazzotti in 2001 with "Piu Che Puoi". I've never figured out what the hell he is doing under that underpath, but he looks damned fine doing it.



"The Beat Goes On", however, was best done in the version below by Mina Mazzini. It proves that back in the 1960s, Rome was far more swinging than London.