What Are You Looking At? Nuthin'!

There are movies, and then there is Rent-a-Cop.

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.

Timeless Fashion for Our Troubled Times

Get yours at www.ichliebevalkyrie.com.dr

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While I continue to consider the ampersand to be one of the most brilliant forms of typography in human history, I think the worst member of the keyboard family (besides the option to use Comic Sans) is the exclamation point. There are times it and 120 point type are warranted -- end of times, new Scott Walker album, death of Jesse Helms -- but rarely in a movie title. Was it "Hello, Dolly!" or "Hello, Dolly! "?

Thus, I was pleased to see these quotes in Anthony Lane's review of Meryl Streep's latest outing in the current issue of The New Yorker which will help the rag be forgiven of any sins committed against the Obama campaign:

"Like many people, I was under the impression that the new Meryl Streep film was called 'Mamma Mia.' The correct title is, in fact, 'Mamma Mia!', and, in one keystroke, the exclamation mark tells you all you need to know about the movie. Billy Wilder tried the same trick with 'Avanti!', in 1972, but that felt like Chekov compared with this ferocious onslaught of obligatory good cheer.

And further:

"The legal definition of torture has been much aired in recent years, and I take 'Mamma Mia!' to be a useful contribution to that debate."

When a friend dragged me to this atrocity in its pre-Broadway staging a number of years back, I think it was being billed as some sort of feel good fest insured to blast people out of their post-9/11 funk. It only made me want to run to a cave in Central Asia, especially when there was an audience clap along encore in which the audience was expected to stand, an action I refused to participate by claiming my Constitutional rights to not be moved.

And then there is the ellipsis.

I'm going to go read some Chekov to get me out of this feel good funk.

Is That Too Continental?

Living in Manhattan in the summer of 1992, I was convinced that something dramatic, a near sea change, was in the air. Having the Democratic Convention in town made it seem I was in the virtual center of the world and that the grip of the Reagan-Bush dynasty. Locals were dissing that Madonna creature's Erotica album as "sex-lite" for square state queens, and there was a buzz about the so-called "new queer cinema" in which queers often celebrated their outlaw status.

I had mixed feelings about the movement but loved Tom Kalin's Swoon. His near-zero budget film combined archive footage, intentional anachronisms, nicely odd music, and droll performances that slightly echoed Guy Maddin but had its own unique vibe. The clip below from the opening is one of he sexiest sequences I've ever seen in a more or less mainstream film.


Though he's worked as a writer and producer for the past 16 years, Savage Grace is Kalin's first time back in the director's chair since his debut more than a decade and a half ago. I tried not to pay much attention to the luke warm to negative reviews. So I did my best to view it yesterday afternoon without too many expectations or already formed opinions. It shares with Swoon fags behaving badly, very badly and passes no judgment on it. It's as stylized as Swoon with sometimes arch dialog. "Shall we meet at the Stork Club for dinner? Say 10:30? Oh, is that too continental?" Julianne Moore's character Barbara Baekeland asks in the opening scene.
With bigger names stars, multi-continental settings, glorious shabby-chic Mediterranean interiors and gorgeously composed tableaus, the film looks amazing and held my interest as it weaved through its increasingly smarmy plot. Swoon didn't exactly make me walk away with sympathy for its sociopath leads, but it did make them incredibly appealing. Kalin may be the lone force in the genre of rich, killer fags, but Savage Grace didn't capture my heart or imagination the way Swoon did. maybe that's partially because Tony Baekeland lacked imagination or passion of Leopold and Loeb. Oh, his smarmy Spanish drug dealer boyfriend was not without his appeal, but the whole thing felt a bit icy even for someone of my Nordic disposition. I'm sure I'll eventually get the DVD and read up on the Baekelands but not with the passion that Swoon inspired.

Why? Just Because I Can

Chalk and Cheese at the Roxie

As far as X-rated musicals with Milton Berle, George Jessel, Stubby Kaye and Joan (Mrs. Anthony Newley at the time) Collins go, Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? is one of the better ones. Here, after a Busby Berkleyesque zodiac number, Joan (playing Polyester Poontang) proves that it was a crime that she didn't go on to do more musicals as she sings to a naked Newley. It screens at the Roxie Wednesday at 9:15 p.m.

The Things I Will Not Miss

In the world of gloriously bad musicals, I think none can top Ross Hunter's 1973 Lost Horizon. Though sadly we don't get to see George Kennedy sing and dance (which would be up there with the thrill of Lee Marvin performing "Wandering Star" in Paint Your Wagon, we do get to see Liv Ullmann and Peter Finch do a few numbers). Why Liv didn't go on to star in more musicals is a mystery to me. In addition, we get to see John Gielgud and Olivia Hussey play Nepalis. Bacharach's "oriental" orchestral ornamentations make Flower Drum Song seem P.C. by comparison.

Did Larry Kramer's anger that led to founding ACT UP really stem from Reagan's HIV/AIDS non-response or from have co-written the screenplay to this wacky classic?

The pinnacle, however, for me is this little tune, "The Things I Will Not Miss", in the library with Olivia and Sally Kellerman long before she pursued her lucrative career as the voice of Hidden Valley salad dressing. Hidden Valley. Shangri-La. Is there a connection?

Junk-quake & Flames

Growing up, I refused to see the multitude of disaster movies that plagued the big screens during the better part of the early to mid-1970s. Why have they recently slowly woven through my life with the connecting thread of George Kennedy? The year 1974 seems to be the apex when San Francisco in The Towering Inferno and Los Angeles in Earthquake blasted the screen. Tonight I am watching the later, albeit without the ground breaking Sensurround that accompanied it in theaters. How can you knock a movie that features both Marjoe Gortner and Pedro Armendariz Jr. (who, of course, is nothing compared to Pedro Armendariz Sr.)?

Most amazingly, it unravels the long standing riddle of the Hollywood Sphinx and the 1990s incident of the slapping of a police officer by Zsa Zsa Gabor. One of the earliest action sequences involves a crisis when a police car plows through Zza Zza's hedge and they are distraught. They knew what would follow.

Do these movies make us howl with laughter today because they are so horribly made, or because they so pathetically anticipate a reality that would so gruesomely be realized in the 21st century? Burning and exploding buildings, planes crashing without pilots to guide them and only the young and beautiful surviving. If you are Ava Gardner, a woman over 50 and not fit, you are doomed to be sucked into the sewers of Los Angeles. Same goes for poor Jennifer Jones, her Aqua-netted head bouncing off the gleaming windows of San Francisco's financial district's glistening towers as she meets the bitter fate of no longer being able to pass for 35.

I will only start to worry when these movies outnumber my Criterion collection library.