Reader's Choice: Hitchcock's Troubling Divisive "Marnie" (1964)

Each weekend Nathaniel we'll be discussing a movie requested by you! SPOILERS ahead so if you haven't screened this on Netflix do that first.

The idea was to kill myself, not feed the damn fish.

Who is the most f***ed up character in Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie (1964)? The answer is not as simple as it appears. The titular ice queen blonde (Tippi Hedren) is sexually frigid, terrified of lightning, a compulsive liar, a serial thief, and disassociates almost instantly at the sight of the color red. She has so many issues she's a full series of crazy. But while Marnie is a loner she's hardly alone in her own film when it comes to needing serious amounts of therapy...

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Sir Sean Connery (1930-2020)

by Nathaniel R

Sean Connery at the 76th Oscars. Courtesy of HO/AMPAS

The Oscar winning superstar Sir Thomas Sean Connery has died two months after his 90th birthday. Connery's acting career began in 1953 as part of the chorus of a production of the stage musical South Pacific. Four years later his movie career began in earnest with several small roles the debut being a crime drama No Road Back.  Global fame would take another five years to arrive. It happened as the original 007 in Dr. No (1962), making Connery the figurehead of an colossally successful movie franchise. It's still running to this day 37 years after Connery let his license-to-kill expire.

He's the only James Bond to win an Oscar via 1987's mobsters vs cops drama The Untouchables. He retired from the screen after 2003's would-be franchise launch League of Extraordinarily Gentlemen but he remains beloved to multiple generations. After the jump, 12 essential Connery films to track his career (if we've written about them the link will take you there).

We lumped all Bond films into one because his career was so much larger than just the super spy...

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Last Chance Filmstruck: Unzipped, High Noon, Metropolis, Etc...

by Nathaniel R

Are you going to wait for the train downstairs? Why don't you wait here?"
     -Katy Jurado to Grace Kelly in High Noon (leaves Filmstruck May 31st)

Y'all. I have a really really hard time with how quickly titles come and go on so many different streaming services. Ugh! I do not like other people curating my movies for me. I'm too much of my own cinephile for that. I want to see what I want to see when I want to see it and usually for highly specific reasons that don't go well with the timetables of corporations! Nevertheless the world is not made to cater to my personal whims (imagine that!?) so I've had to adapt. I have ponied up for FilmStruck and its Criterion Channel entirely because they have more classics than other streaming services. This still hasn't remotely solved all the "where to find things" woes. Though Hulu, Prime, and Netflix are okay for the majority of movies that aren't more than 5-10 years old, everything else remains super-patchy at best and you're stuck with whatever any of these services feel like streaming for you in a given month. This is ESPECIALLY true of movie musicals which literally no service does a good job with. The lack of musicals has always been my primary beef with the Criterion Collection

Enough complaining! Filmstruck/Criterion does have plenty of goodies. As with all the other streaming services they play peek-a-boo with the titles, though. So let's play Streaming Roulette for everything that's LEAVING the service shortly...

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Links: Marnie, Pokemon, The Tempest, Emmys, and Squad Goals

MTV test your knowledge - is this person Miles Teller or Ansel Elgort? 
Forbes very positive piece on Suicide Squad's success. But what about the fact that it's a terrible movie and terrible movies aren't good for movie culture or franchise futures?
MNPP Gratuitous Robert Redford for his 80th birthday 
EW Catherine Zeta Jones joining the Feud miniseries. She'll play Olivia de Havilland
Comics Alliance Well we should have known this was coming. There's going to be a live-action Pokemon movie. Nicole Perlman, the Guardians of the Galaxy screenwriter is co-penning
Variety oops. a poster for Denis Villeneuve's Arrival has accidentally stirred up political trouble in Hong Kong 

MNPP's favorite movies of 1984
We Got This Covered Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon will reteam after Big Little Lies for a movie called Truly Madly Guilty, based on another best-selling love by Liane Moriarty -- I guess they all really liked each other!
Variety Lion starring Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman will be the centerpiece at the London Film Festival this fall
Tracking Board Marvel sure its spreading itself thin. Now Hulu will be making a Marvel series with Runaways. So that means they've got shows/deals with Netflix, Hulu, Freeform, ABC, and Disney.
Variety Speaking of spreading yourself thin: Lin-Manuel Miranda will write new songs for The Little Mermaid live-action remake. I love Miranda but that seems like a strange fit to me, given that The Little Mermaid's songs are so old school Broadway musical flavored
/Film why we shouldn't expect to see sequels from Laika. (Sigh. I would proclaim this as great news but we once thought Pixar wouldn't be defeated by regurgitation and we were wrong.)
Coming Soon Natalie Portman says she's done with Marvel movies
Playbill a mostly nude female production of The Tempest is playing this summers in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. For free. I bet it's better than the Julie Taymor version with Helen Mirren!
Good Morning America Amy Schumer explains how she got Goldie Hawn out of retirement for her new film 
New Yorker Richard Brody argues that Marnie, not Vertigo, is the film we should look to in regards to encapsulating Hitchcock's career...

The greatness of Hitchcock’s artistry, the musical sublimity of his images and the emotional power of his stories, isn’t separable from his carnality—rather, his greatness depends upon the worst and most bestial aspects of his character. Without them, he’d be the artisan of cinematic cuckoo clocks, and what’s all too often celebrated in the name of Hitchcock mania is precisely an abstracted craft that’s isolated from its source of power, from its dynamic principle, from its raison d’être.

Emmys
Variety Creative Arts Emmys will be split into two pre Emmys awards ceremonies
Vulture an extremely choice interview with RuPaul on his first Emmy nomination and everything being political... including politics. 

For Fun
Death and Taxes a kitty cat who really hates Donald Trump 
Ageist six secrets to outmaneuvering ageism and living your best life 
Towleroad "Greco-Roman wrestling at the Olympics is everything we wanted and more" 
Towleroad Pole vaulter defeated by his own pole -- oh, I'm sorry this one isn't "fun" but painful to watch 

Beauty Break: "I like thinking about the red dress..."

50 years ago today Marnie (1964) hit movie theaters and, as quite a divisive picture in the Hitchock filmography, ended one of the most beloved perfect runs that any filmmaker has accomplished in the history of ever  (1958-1962: North By Northwest, Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds).

So Marnie has a bad rep, posts about her don't get you riled up like other Hitchcock fests, and she's underseen today. Not to lovingly kick that crazy bitch while she's down but it occurred to me the other day when she popped into my head that Marnie's color phobia means she would never be able to see an Almodóvar picture. Her loss. And she would be absolutely terrified by Sara Goldfarb addictions in Requiem for a Dream. (I mean more terrified than the rest of us) 

I like thinking about the red dress. And the television and your father."

I dedicate this following gallery of beautifully cinematic red dresses to Marnie who fears them and to Ellen (currently battling Pazuzu) who likes thinking about them.

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