Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 8:01PM 
Listen you outta ditch the two geeks you're in the car with now and get in with us but that's all right, we'll worry about that later. I will see you there."
Wednesday, July 20, 2011 at 9:18PM 
It's time to wrap up the Hit Me With Your Best Shot season with a 1955 classic. Why this one? Well, today would've been Natalie Wood's 73rd birthday and we love ourselves some Natalie Wood. She was, in fact, Nathaniel's first actress obsession, an obsession formed in the late 70s while watching TV airings of various 50s & 60s movies (with an emphasis on West Side Story which has its 50th anniversary this fall!).
Natalie suddenly died in 1981, drowning as you know, after falling from a yacht during a break from filming her last picture Brainstorm (which was later released in 1983). Wee Nathaniel was heartbroken. Enough with the third person but I needed the distance; this one hits so close to home. Let it suffice to say that it was the first time I'd ever lost anyone I loved, virtual or otherwise. I hadn't even lost a pet at that point in life! The heartache maybe felt as formative as Natalie's in Splendor in the Grass; a first love never to be forgotten if you will.
Today we're talking about Rebel Without a Cause (1955) because it gave Natalie her first of three Oscar nominations and because we've been thinking about "first love" and high school lately. (See, we've recently started rewatching Angela Chase falling for Jordan Catalano on Netflix.)
The Nicholas Ray movie -- part of that unassailable James Dean Trinity -- is a spectacularly enduring piece of teen angst. It's as mesmerizing and febrile with feeling today as we assume it was in 1955 even though it's now most decidedly a period piece. But this happens to all contemporary entertainments... the period part I mean. (The enduring part only happens to the lucky or the brilliant. Have you seen My So Called Life lately? It's just as great 17 years later only now it's as much a period piece as Rebel -- it's soooo '90s.) Time marches on.
Best Shot
This beautifully sustained shot (it lasts for over a minute) captures two era-defining icons of youth in what can accurately be described as langurous mutual auto-eroticism. Judy (Wood) and Jim (Dean) barely ever look at each other in this sequence, letting their bodies and their voices do all the communicating. But aren't they still in their own little worlds, only dreaming of colliding?
Directors rarely hold the camera on two faces simultaneously anymore and that's nothing but one of the greatest losses for the cinema. All great movie stars are auto-erotic, their principal love affair being with the camera rather than co-stars, but when they share a frame the power can feel infinite. (For a comic counterpoint example of this same face-pressing double whammy magic, see The Lady Eve with that sensationally funny scene where Barbara Stanwyck babbles incessantly while rubbing her face against an overheated Henry Fonda.) In this case the dual star magnetism doubles as youthful dreaming, disconnected from reality, though Judy and Jim are, in fact, speaking about connection. Judy is philosophizing about friendship, character, and love. She's about to launch into her famous "I love somebody" speech, the "somebody" is telling as she's caressing a man who is still more of an abstraction than a reality to her. Jimmy interjects.
We're not going to be lonely anymore. Ever ever. Not you or me.
The scene is heartbreaking for any number of reasons both for what precedes it and for what follows (poor Plato!), but mostly because you recognize it as a false prophecy, born of the loneliness it's trying to banish. Judy & Jim have long long lives ahead of them even if Dean and Wood didn't. Loneliness never stays away for good.
Rebels of the 'Best Shot' Cause
Friday, June 24, 2011 at 9:42PM 
I believe I've expressed my love for Raven of RuPaul's Drag Race before. I loved her ferosh wit and confrontational showmanship long before she owned me for good with her "I'm giving Michelle Pfeiffer Bitch" competition moment. Now, she's the main attraction (if you ask me) of Drag U, the spin off show with TV's most absurd premise: drag queens do makeovers on biological women. It's really quite quite perverse when you think about it. It's essentially telling women that their men will be hotter for them if they look more like drag queens! Is this show trying to create a whole future generation of trannychasers?
Earlier this year on Drag Race Season 3 movie-geeks everywhere were horrified to realize that half of the young drag queen contestants on the show had never heard of the high school classic Heathers (1989). This basic pop culture fail did not automatically eliminate them from the show even though there ought to be laws against that! So the self proclaimed Heathers of the competition banded together like true Mean Girls to belittle their pop-history-deficient competition. But Raven, queen bee of Drag Race Season 2, shows everyone how it's done on the season premiere of Drag U.
Manila tries the formerly successful mean girl moves on Raven. Manila starts throwing her shade at Raven and her makeover subject...
Manila: That's not sexy.
Raven: Why are you so concerned with Miss Denise. Should I call you Heather?
Manila: You wish you were a Heather!
Raven: Actually I don't. I'm a Veronica.
It's such a simple smackdown but it shuts Manila right up. See, everyone knows that Veronica > the Heathers. She's very.
Drag Queens, Heathers, High School Movies Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 9:59PM Hit Me With Your Best Shot is a series where we look at favorite images and choose a "best shot" from a pre-selected movie. The moments that most define a film, elevate it, or merely gives us the most visual pleasure. "Best" is a fluid adjective. TWO WEEKS FROM NOW (June 29th) we'll be discussing Luchino Vischonti's Rocco And His Brothers (1960). Won't you join us? It's supposed to be awesome.
Francis Ford Coppola's PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED (1986).
It's all in the transitions with Peggy Sue Got Married. And with Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner), who begins the picture distraught over her impending divorce and ends the picture by rejecting that new future (divorce) and for the recent past (troubled marriage). In the present tense, she's attending a high school reunion (a celebration of the past) while worrying about her future. And soon, after collapsing on the reunion's stage, she's thrust back into her own past... but aware that she shouldn't be there and viewing her past from the vantage point of the future. She's always out of time.
Note the way Coppola frames her at key moments, like this one above, where he separates her from things she is very much a part of, like this 25th High School Reunion. (I figured the movie's 25th anniversary year was a good time to revisit it and I'm so glad I did.)
In the lead up to the most magical and compelling shot in the film, she returns to her childhood home and considers knocking as the door drifts open of its own accord. Again we see the heroine separated visually from the main setting of the story, but in both cases she's about to enter into the present, whichever present that is, but she's doing so very tentatively. She either doesn't want to be there or she does but happens to be terrified. It's hard to live in the present but it's even harder when that present is the past.
The best shot in the film comes very early when Peggy Sue enters her childhood bedroom. Coppola moves the camera around the room and accelerates in a dizzying circle until we're back with the middle aged woman as she rediscovers her adolescence. There are no edits (THANK YOU!) as Peggy repeats the circling, rediscovering the room she grew up in. She seems utterly bewitched by the simplest things like a shoe on the carpet, her record player, a wee book. The room is lit so softly and superbly by the late cinematographer Jordan Cronenwerth and he was deservingly Oscar nominated for this picture! [Trivia note: His son Jeff was nominated just last year in the same category for The Social Network]. When Peggy finishes her tour, we've seen Kathleen Turner go from hypnotic trance to simple joy to confusion and then back to terrified, still not at peace with her time travelling.
WHAT is going on."
This fluctuation of mood in the space of one scene, is in perfect synch with the spotty brilliance of the movie which finds funny, sad, silly and mysterious ways to dig into the crazy moodswings of those hormonally charged teenage years while simultaneously commenting on middle aged "it's all behind me" panic. You could say the same of many time travel or body switching movies, but Coppola's vision is more adult than much of this peculiar subgenre. The movie is quite funny but it's also shot through with despair. Even the finale, a "happy ending" has a strange undertow of defeatist compromise, despite the fantastical happenings proceeding it. Even if you can go home again, you can't reboot your life; you have to make peace with it.
Peggy Sue peaked early. And so it is with Peggy Sue Got Married which is wonderfully compelling in the first third, less so in the second, and sputters and collapses at the finale. In a way the movie's primary weakness is absolutely fitting. It showed such promise during its youth! Does the movie's minor reputation reflect merely that it's an older person's film -- people Peggy Sue's age, who had the most to gain from its high school in the late 50s nostalgia would be hitting 70 about now -- or is it simply a result of its own shortcomings?
Arguably the movie is only a minor footnote now, but I still love it. If it's remembered it's mostly within the context of Coppola's career and family trivia (his daughter Sofia, her accomplished filmmaking career way ahead of her plays Peggy Sue's younger sister and his nephew Nicolas Cage gets the male lead) or as the for the peak of Kathleen Turner's short-lived mega stardom. It had a disappointing Oscar run. Turner's wonderfully playful work, which is complicated but looks easy (that's Oscar death!) is still a real beauty of a star turn 25 years later. The final image that really stung on this revisit, is not a single shot but two of them, fused in a slow melancholy dissolve.
Peggy Sue has just broken up with her boyfriend again in an attempt to save them both from their 25 years-later divorce. She sits tired and despondent, lights a cigarette and we dissolve to the next scene. The beautiful thing is that it looks just like a memory: Soulful, colorful, lively... but half-imagined.
Check out these other Peggy Sue articles!
Tuesday, March 29, 2011 at 11:21AM Congratulations to our Noni on a quarter century in the movies. Twenty-five years ago yesterday her first film (Lucas) hit movie theaters. Jump forward a quarter century and here she is again; Black Swan hits DVD today as if celebrating that very silver screen anniversary. People will be popping in the Black Swan DVD and Blu-Ray all over the place today and there she'll be, glass raised perversely. On her own behalf?
Oh sure, it's an in-character moment as "Beth", retiring prima ballerina, but don't think for a second that Black Swan's casting wasn't carefully orchestrated for the mirror affect of all those dark pale beauties not to mention the the cruel passing of the stardom and movie goddess batons.
I bring up this unpublicized anniversary because Noni could use a little public love... or at least Hollywood could use a public reminder that she still has many fans. When she's used correctly, as she was in Black Swan, she's really something else.
I fell instantly and madly in love with her the very first second I saw her in Lucas, which is as stated the first time anybody had the opportunity to see her onscreen. She was all of 14 but it wasn't pervy. This was 25 years ago and we were both babies... so age appropriate! Just look at her. This was the thunderous moment, burned forever into my brain.
I was bursting in my seat "who is this?!" Truth: This is the very first time I ever looked for a name in the movie credits. This was four years before IMDb even existed y'all. I memorized her name and hoped against all hope I'd see her again. Beetlejuice rescued me two years later. People kept calling it a "Michael Keaton Movie" and I'm like "WINONA RYDER! Squeeeee!!!" and everyone is like "who?" and after Beetlejuice nobody asked little me that anymore.
Lucas is a sweet movie but it fell apart right then and there because the whole movie is about how 14 year old Lucas (Corey Haim) has a crush on 16 year old Maggie (Kerri Green) and then THIS girl walks in, his friend Rina (Noni) and you immediately realize she loves him and he barely even notices her. So Winona is forced to look at Corey Haim (RIP) longingly for the whole movie. Like SHE is unworthy of him.
Oh, the humanity!
Do you remember the first time you saw Winona? And for those of you old enough to remember movie-watching before the internet (That would be 30somethings on up), did you ever have that "I must find out who this is!" credit scroll moment with anyone?
New to the Film Experience? Try us out for a few weeks to see if you like.
Related Posts of Note: Overheard: Black Swan, Sassy Gay Swan, Aronofsky's Favorite Actors
