Despite all of Ms. Intimidating Cow Monster’s concerns, the wedding went without a hitch (now all everybody has to do is survive the party! So here’s a nice little watercolor valentine to celebrate our newlyweds!
This week’s selection I’m calling musical Cinderella films. That is to say musical takes on the Cinderella story. (I was planning on calling it Cinderella musicals but one of them was dance numbers rather than singing.)
My first film Jacques Demy’s Donkey Skin (Peau d’Âne) tells the story of a Princess of a magical kingdom,(Catherine Deneuve), where all of the servants have blue skin and the kingdom’s source of revenue is a magical donkey that defecates riches.
When his wife dies, the princess’s father the king vows to marry the first beautiful woman he sees. Regrettably, this is the princess. On her fairy god mother’s she tries to avoid the incest by stalling as best she can by asking her father for impossible gifts. Unfortunately, he manages to provide each item. When her final gambit, for him to give him the skin of his magic donkey, fails she runs away wearing the donkey skin as a disguise.
For all my fellow folklore wonks out there, I admit that Donkey Skin is not actually a Cinderella story. It’s actually is a closely related motif that includes such stories as Cap O’ Rushes and All-Kinds-of-Fur. However, as far as films are concerned, it works.
If I had known about this film earlier I would have watched this with Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête. It takes a similar approach
I found myself being fascinated by what were probably simple practical affects but I was completely stumped how they did them. The best example was when the princess was wearing her dress with the color of “good weather” which shows moving clouds. I assume the clouds are projected onto the dress, but at the moment I’m not sure with 70s tech why the projection wouldn’t show on anything else.
My next film, Charles Walters’s The Glass Slipper, as our very sarcastic narrator tells us, is the story of a cute orphan (Leslie Caron) who lives with her step-mother and step-sisters working as a scullery maid. Because her work makes her dirty she’s called Cinderella and… well… you get the idea.
The Glass Slipper is a mostly straight take on the Cinderella story, though it has a lot of fun with it and tries to take place in a mostly real 1950s E
The best parts of it are Leslie Caron who is almost cat-like in her performance, and Estelle Winwood as the very eccentric Mrs. Toquet who fills the fairy godmother niche (and at the very end is revealed to actually be the fairy godmother)
A quick-ish cartoon to celebrate our two favorite birthday boys, Mr. Charles Darwin, and Mr. Abraham Lincoln!
For this week’s selection, I went with neo-noir… a genre that, along with being simply modern takes on the Film Noir genre, deconstructs many of Film Noir’s traditional elements, focussing more on social and psychological aspects.
THe main reason for this selection was one of the biggest items on my “what do you mean you never saw it?” list, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown.
Jack Nicholson plays J.J. “Jake” Gittes a successful private investigator specializing in uncovering adultery. His latest client is Evelyn Mulwray, (Diane Ladd), the wife of Hollis Mulwray, chief engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power believes her husband is having an affair and wants Jake to follow him. The case goes pretty routine with Jake and his associates not getting that much luck. However a couple of days the real Mrs. Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) shows up to tell him his employer is an imposter. Soon after
It’s hard to be a Polanski
As for Jake, this is one of Nicolson’s best performances and serves as a brutal deconstruction of the hard-boiled detective genre. Jake may talk a good game, but in the
(On a quick note, this film has nothing to do with LA’s Chinatown it’s just a reference to Jake’s experience working that beat when he was in the police and all of the senseless corruption he dealt with there. )
In the next film on my list, Wim Wenders, Hammett, Frederic Forrest , plays a fictionalized version of Dashiel Hammet. .He lives a relatively secluded life in a cheap apartment, drinks and smokes too much which leaves him with a nasty recurring cough.
Right after finishing his latest short story, he runs into Jimmy Ryan,Peter Boyle, an associate from his Pinkerton days and agrees to help him. However the two are separated in the middle of chinatown and Hammett has to brush off his detective skills to find him… To make matters worse he lost his manuscript in the process.
This was an enjoyable film which did a nice job of recreating the period. While I have a sneaking suspicion Wenders was phoning it in just a little bit, since we’re talking about the guy who did Wings of Desire that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I especially liked how the narrative went back and forth between Hammett’s reality and that the fiction he is righting. It is much simpler both in the characters’ dialogue and the set with a muted color palette with the faint noise of a typewriter in the background.
As a way to clear my pallete of the dark nature of last week’s topic I chose a theme that I like to call “Sexy Western Comedy”. That is to say western comedies with a sex symbol as the lead. This way, I figured, I could get a good laugh and briefly ease my sad bachelor syndrome. Well, it sounded like a good idea at the time. .
The first film on my list was
The best thing I can say about this film is, Meh. My opinions go
The next film on my list, Elliot Silverstein’s Cat Ballou, as a pair of baladeers played by Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye tell us, is the story of Catherine “Cat’ Ballou. A young woman who has just returned from school to her home town of Wolf City, Wyoming, to become a school teacher. Once she returns she discovers a railway company is after her father’s land. She tries to get help but al she can get are a pair of incompetent cattle rustlers played by Michael Callan and Dwayne Hickman, and a washed out drunk gun fighter played by Lee Marvin.
However when her father is killed all Cat has left is revenge.
This film was… okay. It was amusing when it wasn’t being a heavy-handed sermon about the death of an era (that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the Shootist did it better.) For the most part, Lee Marvin stole the show doing a parody of himself. In my opinion, the best part of the film was George Orrison, Marvin’s stuntman who did an absolutely amazing display of drunken horse riding.
This week I watched a pair of thrillers involving people going undercover to infiltrate the mob… and perhaps vice versa.
The first film on my list Mike Newell’s Donnie Brasco tells the story of Joseph D. Pistone, (Johnny Depp), an FBI agent who goes undercover as a jewel thief named Donnie Brasco. Soon he befriends a long time mafia soldier Benjamin “Lefty” Ruggiero (Al Pacino). Lefty teaches him the way of the mafia and soon Donnie is climbing the criminal ladder. Can Donnie make it through this all with his life intact? Especially when his superiors in the FBI keep screwing things up with their own agenda?
As interesting as the tension of whether Brasco’s cover will survive or not, what really makes this film work is the friendship between Donnie and Lefty, and Donnie’s reluctance to let Lefty get caught when the shoe finally drops. But what was absolutely the best part of this film was Al Pacino as Lefty, playing him as a man who is frustrated that despite being a good soldier, has never made it anywhere in the mob hierarch, gets no respect and is now frustrated that the man he introduced into the life is doing better at it than he is.
The next film on my list, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed tells the story of violent Boston mobster, Frank Costello (Jack Nicolson) who grooms young man from the neighborhood, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) to attend
Meanwhile, the police department arranges that Billy Costigan Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio)A young man from a disreputable Southie background to go to prison on trumped up charges, so that he’ll have a criminal record and street crew when he gets out… Perfect for infiltrating Costello’s organization.
Soon, both organizations find out the possibility that they have been compromised. So now it’s the job of the mole to hunt down the mole… So who’s going to succeed first?
A remake of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs, this is a dark, cynical and violent film that is certainly up to Scorsese’s usual standards. While I definitely need to see Infernal Affairs I’ve seen enough Hong Kong action thrillers to suspect that Scorsese was making an effort to emulate many of the pacing and editing techniques used in many of such films. I especially liked how he parallels Colin and Billy throughout the film and Damon and DiCaprio have enough of a superficial resemblance, you get a serious doppelgänger vibe between the two of them throughout the film.
Finally, Jack Nicolson’s performance was a pleasure. So many of his roles are just him playing Jack it’s a pleasure to see the ocasisional times he shows off his range.
