"Hit Me..." Last Three Episodes!

Hit Me With Your Best Shot, the series in which we look at pre-selected features and choose the best (okay our favorite) shot has gotten a bit wobbly this past month (queue problems, off-blog deadlines) for which you have our hearty apologies. Here is a revised Season 2 finale schedule. We promise to stick to this one since the holiday craziness (Gay Pride / 4th of July) will have passed. Just three more episodes...

• Wed July 6th: Luchino Visconti's ROCCO & BROTHERS (1960)
• Wed July 13th: ALIENS (1986)  25th anniversary spectacular theme week!
• Wed July 20th: REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955) for Natalie Wood's bday

Please considering joining us. Spread the word to fans of Lt. Ellen Ripley or red jackets. Those weeks we did Beauty & The Beast and Moulin Rouge! were so fun. The more blogs, tumblrs and sites the merrier.

P.S. And a round of applause for all the previous participants this season. Please check out these blogs and add them to your reading queues if you like them: Movies Kick Ass, Awww the Movies, Film Actually, Antagony & Ecstasy, Stale Popcorn, Pussy Goes Grrr, Cinephilia & Sass, The Entertainment Junkie, Ahora, Victim of the Time, Film Misery, Amiresque, Encore Entertainment, His Eyes Were Watching Movies, Against the Hype, Serious Film, Tom Clift, Movies and Other Things, Okinawa Assault, Cheap Seat Reviews, Kyle Unscripted, Dial P For Popcorn, Intafada, Being Norma Jeane, Mosaical Musings, Derrek's Tumblr, Moved by a Screen Dream, Sketchy Details, Sorta That Guy, A Blog Next Door, Animation Revelation, Awards Nazi, The Red Headed Invasion, musicinephile, Melanie Lynskey, The Owls Are Not What They Seem and Missemmamm.

Movies are meant to be a communal experience. Thanks for getting that. If you've always meant to join in the screen-cap discussing fun, why not finish out the season with us battling acidic aliens or teen angst 1950s style? 

Best Shot: "Peggy Sue Got Married" ... Her Second 25th Anniversary

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!

• Movies Kick Ass "Reverse Dorothy"
• The Entertainment Junkie "one woman's hall of mirrors" -- this is a really interesting take celebrating my least favorite scenes. It's making me rethink them!
• Film Actually loves the film's quotability. It does have great lines. And hair. And teeth. And eyes.
• Missemmamm really loves Peggy Sue and shared her favorite moments
• Awwww, the Movies Peggy's wild night.
  

Hit Me... "The Woman in the Window"

In the Hit Me With Your Best Shot series we all chime in on what we think of as the best shot from a pre-selected movie. Last week 19 partipicants looked at Moulin Rouge!. This week, it's Fritz Lang's...

THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW (1944)

We begin with a great moment in Art Direction. The most curious attribute of The Woman in the Window is it's sexlessness. Despite having all the trappings of a traditional film noir including the femme fatale (Joan Bennett as "Alice Reed" pictured above) there's no sex in the movie, not even the implied offscreen kind. Naturally then, it has to be abstracted so how better to do so than placing a nude statue in Alice Reed's (Joan Bennett) apartment. It keeps her in the room even when she wanders out of it. It also gets framed between her and the three doomed men who want her throughout the course of the movie: the john, the pickup and the blackmailer.

Even the murder near the beginning of the film which informs every moment that follows is a kind of abstraction. We see it happening but it's not technically a murder so much as an accidental necessity involving self-defense. It's the covering up of this "crime" that's the actual crime, so The Woman in the Window seems to cheekily be happening behind glass, always a bit removed from itself.

Best Shot
Take this worrying witty shot of our sorry protagonist Professor Richard Wanley (Edward G Robinson).

outside his own story

He has just PURPOSEFULLY removed himself from the story in progress, his story!, by feigning sickness. But though he keeps mopping his brow nervously in the safety of the car, he can't help but keep twisting around to peer back in on the murder cover-up story, his story. His best friend happens to be the DA and has taken him to the scene of the crime where an investigation is underway.

Throughout the movie people will keep telling the Professor the story, which he already knows being the protagonist, and he will keep nervously listening and watching and nearly giving himself away.

All these layers of telling lift what might be considered a minor Lang picture into something that's quite fun to watch if you're in the right mood. It's a noir that happens more in your head than in your heart or loins.

My favorite sequence illustrating the humor of these "layers" of telling is when the word first gets out about the murder. The police are offering a $10,000 reward for information. Bear in mind that we've already seen the murder and the coverup firsthand. So has Alice, who is seen reading about it in the paper. The paper reads "Boys Scout Finds Slain Millionaire's Body". Cut to: a movie screen telling us the same thing (they used to show newsreels prior to movies starting). HEY, THAT'S US WATCHING THIS MOVIE. Cut to the Boy Scout in the news reel filling out his own details...

Layers of Telling in "The Woman in the Window"

I was practicing woodcraft in the woods just off the Bronx River Parkway extension when I found Mr... Mr. Mazard's remains.  No I was not scared, a boy scout is never scared. If I get the reward I will send my younger brother to some good college and I will go to Harvard.

Imagine it. A Harvard education AND a second "good college" for only $10,000 bucks? Sweet deal.

Accomplices To This "Best Shot" Crime

• Film Actually has been a tireless contributor to this web series. Check that blog out.
• Movies Kick Ass on Fritz Lang's constant "frames" within the frames.
• Pussy Goes Grrr two choices.
• Awww, the Movies picks a shot I almost picked. It's so "Dead Again". I bet Kenneth Branagh saw this movie before directing that.

What's next in this series?

Wed June 15th @ 10 PM: Peggy Sue Got Married (nominated for Best Cinematography at the Oscars) starring the one and only Kathleen Turner, 80s film-stealer Nicolas Cage and a few supporting cast members that went on to much greater fame in the 1990s.

Wed June 22nd @10 PM: Rocco and His Brothers (1960) 
Luchino Visconti's homoerotic drama about a widow and her five volatile sons. Those readers who loved I Am Love (2009) should definitely check this out as Visconti was a major influence on Tilda's auteur. Auteur giants like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola are also among Visconti's fanbase.

Join us! 
All you need is a blog, tumblr, flickr or site where you can upload your choice for best shot, with or without an essay or capsule as to why you chose it. We link up to participating entries!

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: "MOULIN ROUGE!"

In the Hit Me With Your Best Shot series we look at pre-selected movies and name what we think of as the best (or at least our favorite) shot. Anyone can play along and we link up. Next wednesday's topic is Fritz Lang's noir "The Woman in the Window".

But tonight, we celebrate Baz Luhrmann's "Spectacular! Spectacular!" which went wide on US screens ten years ago on this very day.

MOULIN ROUGE!

SHE'S CONFESSSSSSSIIIIINNNNGGGG!
She suddenly had a terrible desire to go to a priest."

We begin with a confession.

Though I was an early veritably possessed cheerleader for Moulin Rouge! since I beheld its genius on opening night at the Ziegfeld theater in NYC, though I saw it five times in the movie theater (a post '80s personal record), and though I named it Best of the Aughts when the decade wrapped, I hadn't actually sat down and watched Moulin Rouge! in full for at least five years. This wasn't intentional. I wrote about the movie so often from 2001 to 2005 that at some point I just put it on the shelf, afraid of breaking its spell. I worried, sitting down in the dark, the remote far from me as if I were back in the temple of the movie theater, 'would it still thrill?'

A silly question it was. From the first frames I was swept up. By the time Zidler and his diamond dogs came rushing at the camera (best shot!?!), a chaotic swishing mess of vibrant color, sexual promise and mashed-up music, I forgot to take any notes at all. By the time Satine, the sparkling diamond, descended from the ceiling onto the dance floor, I had completely blanked on the the "best shot" assignment. So, returning to skim again today, a decision: I would only choose a shot from the film's second half, which I haven't written as much about.

Moulin Rouge! famously borrows, sometimes with song and other times visually, from dozens of famous musicals but it's comic/tragic masks are not unlike the work of the great Stephen Sondheim. In many of Sondheim's most famous musicals, he starts out light and comic and you leave the theater at intermission for fresh air that you don't even need since you're already walking on it. Within seconds of returning to your seat, he's out to crush your heart. Into the Woods provides a famous and literal example: the first act, which is a play on famous fairy tales, ends with the "ever after" part. When you return for the second act you're left to wonder what comes next and that "happily ever after" part sure turns out to be a false bill of goods.

And so it goes with Christian and Satine's romance, which comes on, like the whole of Moulin Rouge!, in a heady hallucinatory rush of color, comedy and eroticism and then dives straight into tragedy after the (literal) romantic fireworks. Consider the juxtaposition of the shots above, one when Christian sings "I-I-I-I-I-I will always love you" (best shot!?!) and Satine is fully on board" and the much later shot of Satine, realizing she has to give Satine up singing "today's the day when dreaming ends" (best shot?!?) which she sings with her eyes glassy, not really looking at the caged bird sharing the frame, who we already know she feels a kinship towards (Someday I'll Fly Away). Both shots are audaciously clichéd, but that's how Moulin Rouge! plays it, boldly throwing ALL tropes at you and daring you to not reembrace them in a fresh dizzying form.

Zidler himself precipitates this vacant "you're dying"/ 'I'm already dead' staring and the longer I live with the movie the richer the Zidler/Satine relationship becomes. So for the moment, and there are roughly 100,000 shots worthy of the name "best" in the film, this is the one that absolutely kills. A slow cold zoom out on Zidler performing Zidler as The Maharaja (aka also the Duke) claiming Satine all over again. It drains the last life from our heroine. Art is imitating life and then life will imitate the art again.

She is mine. She is mine."

The cinematography by Donald McAlpine which so deserved the Oscars that year (sorry LotR), loves to shoot Nicole Kidman with blue light whenever she is bereft of love. Even in the "Elephant Love Medley" when she's first resisting Ewan McGregor she's lit in blue while he is glowing with warmer light right behind him. By the end of "Spectacular! Spectacular!", beginning with the exact moment when she coughs on stage, all the hot pink light which had been battling it out with the blue, vanishes to leave her like this.

She is mine. She is mine."

She always was... Zidler's that is. Christian was never able to steal her away, only playing with her in her gilded cage for that Summer of Love, 1899.

Madonna's classic "Like a Virgin" number is only used comically in the film, to mock the prostitute/john Satine/Duke relationship. But it could just as well have been used dramatically, with Satine in Christian's arms; thawed out, shiny and new. This beloved movie, ten years familiar, can still touch you for the very first time. It hasn't lost a drop of heart or magic in a decade's time. 

 

18 Children of the Revolution
Visit these fine blogs for more on this "Spectacular! Spectacular!"

• Victim of the Time "vibrant infatuations"
• Film Misery Christian, trapped
• Amiresque the blue eyes of Moulin Rouge!
• Cheap Seat Reviews thank you for curing him of his ridiculous obsession with love!
• Intafada afternoon delights
• Movies Kick Ass the camera loves her
• Film Actually "You're daying, Satine"
• Being Norma Jeane Midnight in Paris?
• Stale Popcorn "brash. cold. bright"  You can can can.
• Mosaical Musings "Roxanne... you don't have to put on the red light."
• Ahora Satine and her beauty.
• Derrek's Tumblr "romance on a grandiose scale"
• Moved by a Screen Dream Christian in agony
• Antagony & Ecstasy when in doubt, go puerile.
• Serious Film love/hate relationship: best and worst shot.
• Awww, The Movies couldn't possibly choose one.
• missemmamm "smoldering temptress?"
• Sketchy Details a sunny moment via "Come What May"
• Sorta That Guy a love that will live forever!

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May Flowers: Beauty & The Beast (1991)

may flowers

Under the heading of Better Late Than Never, let's take a look at Disney's classic Beauty & The Beast (1991). We ... or I should say you... covered it previously in the Hit Me With Your Best Shot series. I stumbled and fell down its gothic mansion steps, completely missing that spinning gala ball. (You know the one: Angela Lansbury sang the theme song in the background.) The related truth of the matter is that Belle isn't so punctual herself. She arrives at basically the last possible moment to rescue The Beast from the ancient curse. If he doesn't find true requited love before his magic flower loses its last petal, he remains a beast forever.

Halfway through the movie, Belle, against her captor's wishes, heads into the forbidden West Wing where she sees two distorted images. The first is her own face fractured into a half a dozen pieces in a broken mirror. The second is a portrait of The Beast, in his original form as the Handsome Prince Not-So Charming; hence, the curse.

 
In these two closely related nearly consecutive images, her beauty is momentarily as ravaged as his. It's a smart visual foreshadowing that they're actually soul mates, though neither of them know that yet. Belle does not jump in fear when she sees her own face splintered as many people do when surprised by a discomfiting reflection. Her curiousity is always engaged, proving a far more defining character trait of this particular heroine than fear. (She's not, as we realize fairly in the narrative, your garden variety damsel in distress.)

Moments later, distracted by a glow behind her, she finds the Beast's magical flower. In this riveting shot, my choice for the film's best as its gorgeously composed and marries color, character and narrative,  he leaps in to shield the flower from her curiousity. Curiousity may kill the cat, but the Beast is no feline; sure he's lion-like but this species is Hocusus Pocusus.

Do you realize what you could have done?

...he bellows, but are magical flowers, really that delicate? We're guessing no.

What he's really protecting is his own heart. It's the Beast and not the Beauty who is emotionally fragile. It's The Beast and not the Beauty who is emotionally rather than intellectually or physically driven, making Beauty & The Beast a wonderful twist on the traditional gender roles that Disney fairy tales spring from.

Pleasurable as that twist alone would be, the film is yet richer.

Allowing yourself to love and to be loved in return, something The Beast has yet to master, is neither a feminine nor a masculine challenge, but a human struggle. Beauty and The Beast has one of the best scores in animated musical history, but a Madonna song thrums in the background for me as the alternate and most descriptive soundtrack of The Beast's emotional journey.

You're so consumed with how much you get
You waste your time on hate and regret,
You're broken...
when you're hearts not open

Love is a bird, she needs to fly
Let all the hurt inside of you die
You're frozen...
when your hearts not open

Mmmm, if Belle can melt his heart. Mmmm, they'll never be apart.

BE OUR GUEST... AGAIN
If you missed the delicious group celebration, please visit these fine blogs which all sounded off on their favorite shots within the first animated feature to ever be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. The next episode of Hit Me With Your Best Shot will be on June 1st @ 9 PM EST when we celebrate the tenth anniversary of MOULIN ROUGE!

• Antagony & Ecstasy Belle and the Beast, who are rich opposites.
• The Red Headed Invasion The Beast, who is alarmingly expressive.
• Ahora 'The Provincial Life', which is most luscious.
• A Blog Next Door Belle, who wants. She wants more than she can tell.
• Film Actually Gaston, who is also a beast.
• Okinawa Assault Beauty & The Beast, which is suspiciously colourful.
• LS2GH Belle and the Beast, who see themselves as the other.
• Animation Revelation The Great Wide Somewhere, the forest to be more precise.
• Amiresque The Beast, who loves architecture. He loves it more than he can tell.
• Victim of the Time The crying or the dying, which are beautiful.
• Movies and Other Things Belle, who is no 'little wife'.
• Dial P For Popcorn Belle, who becomes an explorer.
• missemmamm Gaston, who uses antlers in all of his decorating.
• Against the Hype The Great Wide Somewhere, which has moved locales.
• Sorta That Guy Belle and the Beast, who could have danced all night.
• Cinephilia & Sass Belle and the Beast, who cozy up.
• The Entertainment Junkie The Beast, who is not as he once was.
• Serious Film The Beast, who is Prince Charming Character.
• Movies Kick Ass The crane shot, which is sweeping and magical.
• musicinephiles Belle, who moonlights as a nurse.
• Awards Nazi The Beast, who is too aggressive even in kindness