THE HYPNOTIC EYE

Alternately nasty and tedious 1960 b-flick that sells itself as a some kind of cautionary tale of the dangers of hypnosis. Women are disfiguring themselves and the police can’t figure out why, but the audience can by the third scene. With Allison Hayes slinking about, it is easy to guess what she has to do with the diabolical goings on. Directed by TV director George Blair; also with Jacques Bergerac, Marcia Henderson, Merry Anders and Joe Patridge.

Reign - pilot episode

The pits. American teen network CW does Mary, Queen of Scots. Everybody is conventionally TV attractive, bland and interchangeable with the casts of every other show on the network. The heroine is limp, sullen, and pale as is the current vogue, which I find preferable, even if that favor is infinitesimal, to the plucky spitfire cliché – the only TV alternative for shows of this type. The bastard brother of the dauphin in named “Bash.” Does more really need to be said?

The Goldbergs - series premiere - "Circle of Driving"

THE GOLDBERGS is a family nostalgia sitcom about growing up in the eighties. The comedy is alternately shouty and coy, and I’m not fond of either. Humor based on bygone fads is terribly easy and cheap – variations of look at the crazy stuff people used to (fill in the blank - wear, eat, watch on TV); the other major comic strand, the dysfunctional wacky family, is as cliché as they come.

The Mindy Project - season 2 premiere - "All My Problems Solved Forever..."

THE MINDY PROJECT is amiable and pleasant, if not terribly funny. The sitcom speak is a bit less obtrusive than in worse shows, but the dialogue still occasionally betrays the situations and characters for unnatural comic lines. Not as distrustful of the audience as a laugh-track sitcom, it utilizes the single-camera alternative: cutting to close up, mugging comic reactions from the actors, an elbow in the viewer’s side, nudgingly pleading for acknowledgement of the jokes, “Get it, get it.” You know in an early scene with Mindy and her beau seated precariously on a tree branch they will fall off it, and they do. Outside of the appealing lead, the cast is bland and forgettable.

2 Broke Girls - season 3 premiere - "And the Soft Opening"

2 BROKE GIRLS is an odd couple comedy: Beth Behrs is the chipper, vivacious, chic, optimistic blonde Caroline and Kat Dennings is her opposite, the dour, slothful, slovenly, pessimistic raven-haired Max. The pair are waitresses in a diner who in this episode open up a cupcake shop in a back room. Roughly half of the humor is derived from dick jokes, another twenty percent from vagina jokes, the remaining thirty percent divvied up among ethnic and racist stereotypes, drug jokes, jokes about Matthew Moy’s diminutive stature and jokes about Kat Dennings’s ample chest. The show’s racism is delivered with carefree aplomb, unlike the aggressive, attention-seeking, desperate racism of Fox’s DADS; and the crude humor comes with a snappy and cheerful zing – the nastiness never feels nasty because the characters take the insults with shrugs and indifference. The story becomes moralistic as it wraps up – the characters’ learn a corny lesson and hug it out. Not having seen this show before, which is now in its third year, I’m puzzled by Dennings’s muddied delivery – one would hope after two years she’d be better at getting lines out, but nearly each of her quips gets snagged and garbled in her throat.

Dads - pilot episode

The pilot episode of DADS could almost play like a satire of every bad Fox sitcom from the mid-1990s if its creators were cleverer. Instead, it just seems a continuation of that brain-dead legacy. Do “audiences” really still hoot and howl when an attractive actress enters a scene wearing a “sexy” getup? Perhaps due to network standards, its misogyny and racism do not raise offense, but shrugs, the show is impish rather than transgressive. What it never is is funny.

Telenovela Watch - summer novelas

A couple of my recent columns covering most of the telenovelas that have debuted in the United States this summer are available here and here.

The one gem is SECRETOS DEL PARAÍSO on MundoFox, a Colombian telenovela based on an early 1990s telenovela that seems utterly modern – a serious, complex look at devastatingly sad, lonely people. It’s the best telenovela of the year so far.

Telemundo’s DAMA Y OBRERO started well, but deteriorated into a mess. While the novela does not work, its lead actress Ana Layevska is doing some fantastic work. It is depressing seeing an actress with this much to offer slumming at Telemundo in parts frankly beneath her talent; one hopes she’ll one day get a juicy role where she can really stretch and show what she’s got.

Telemundo’s MARIDO EN ALQUILER is the best of their current lineup. Its lead actress, Sonya Smith, is badly miscast, but she’s so good, the telenovela mostly works anyway. It seems to exist on two realities – one side has solid, grounded performances. On the other side, there is some appalling cartoon acting from Martiza Rodríguez, Daniela Navarro, and Alba Roversi that keep this novela from ever becoming more than just decent. It’s hard to believe the same directors can be responsible for such a contrast in the quality of performances.

Televisa’s LA TEMPESTAD on Univision, while not the horror show we were rumored to be getting based on the press in Mexico, isn’t very good either. The central problem is the green leading lady, Ximena Navarrete – a spectacular blunder to cast a complete newcomer, especially as leading man William Levy is best as a reactor - he needs to be able to bounce off of somebody else’s energy. But Navarrete gives nothing, her inadequacies especially show up opposite a fine actress like Nora Salinas. Laura Carmine, an actress who proved capable of giving subtle, sensitive performances in QUIÉN ERES TU?, overacts fiercely here, but is enormously entertaining and strangely moving in what is ostensibly a spoiled villainess role. LA TEMPESTAD at least has enormous camp value which puts it a step above the rest of the duds making up the network’s current prime time lineup.

Finally, there is the thriller SANTA DIABLA on Telemundo. Telemundo execs were boasting in recent Variety articles about how their telenovelas, being produced in Miami, better reflected American life – and then they unleash this telenovela which shows not even the slightest understanding of the American legal system. The surprises and revelations in this novela come quick, but they aren’t grounded in anything substantive, so they seem like cheats. It is better looking and better produced than Telemundo's other two current novelas, and Carlos Ponce is an amusing villain - his unappealing screen presence finally put to good use; but its protagonists, Gaby Espino and Aarón Díaz, are ultimately weaker and less interesting than Layevska and José Luis Reséndez on DAMA or Sonya Smith and Juan Soler on MARIDO.

VIVA KNIEVEL!

The motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel stars as himself in this piece of the 1970s cheese. Drug lord Leslie Nielsen wants to arrange for Evel to suffer a fatal accident during a jump in Mexico so he can smuggle drugs across the border in Evel’s funeral trailer.

Like many athletes and showmen, whatever charisma Knievel may have displayed in his television specials vanishes when called upon to act a character, even himself.

Knievel seems an awfully square daredevil, an establishment hero, in red white and blue, promoting an anti-drug message, to push back against the counterculture. A real manly man, Knievel butts heads with feminist photographer played by Lauren Hutton, but she’s converted after a ride on his crotch rocket.

From 1978, directed by veteran Gordon Douglas; featuring Gene Kelly, Red Buttons, Cameron Mitchell, Dabney Coleman, Marjoe Gortner and Frank Gifford as himself. Some of the action in the climax is better executed than one would expect in a movie like this.

GOKE, BODY SNATCHER FROM HELL

A spaceship buzzes an airplane causing it to crash on a barren rocky landscape. The survivors are offed by a space vampire. The title promises a wacked-out ride, but this Japanese science fiction horror movie from 1968 is mostly a boring rehash of misanthropic clichés about the savagery of humankind in extremis and the typical throat-sucking monster attacks. Some late 1960s era turmoil is horned into the proceedings including assassination, terrorism, Vietnam, and of course the bomb, imbuing the movie with an appropriately apocalyptic backdrop. Hajime Sato (TERROR BENEATH THE SEA) directs; the movie stars Teruo Yoshida, Tomomi Sato, Eizo Kitamuro, and Hideo Ko.

Ratings

I have never fully understood why box office grosses and television ratings came to considered news of any importance outside of those with an actual monetary stake in the success and failure of the enterprises.

Now there are whole websites devoted to analyzing daily box office numbers and television ratings. The comments sections of the sites are filled with commentators who tout the numbers of their favorite movies and shows or denigrate the movies or shows that don't connect with audiences, their egos somehow boosted vicariously through a puerile assigning of "winners" and "losers," like the fans of sporting teams, pathetically needing their own tastes validated through utterly specious evidence of merit.

Los Peores Pasteles de Londres

A clip from the 2008 Madrid production of the Stephen Sondheim / Hugh Wheeler musical SWEENEY TODD, Vicky Peña performing Mrs. Lovett's first song, "The Worst Pies in London," as spectacular an introduce-a-character number as exists in musical theater.

The Spanish translation of Sondheim's lyrics do a fairly good job conveying the gist of what is said, and the rest of the work can be carried by the music - the character is all right there, even without the words - the humor, the chatty daffiness, the flightiness, the abrupt shifts in thought and attention.

The 'Mrs Mooney' section can't capture the brilliant construction of the original in detailing how she deals with the scarcity of meat:

Mrs. Mooney has a pie shop,
Does a business, but I notice something weird--
Lately all her neighbors' cats have disappeared.
Have to hand it to her--
Wot I calls
Enterprise,
Popping pussies into pies.
Wouldn't do in my shop--
Just the thought of it's enough to make you sick.
And I'm telling you them pussy cats is quick!

That marvelous onomatopoeic consonance of "Popping pussies into pies" and the surprise kicker at the end "And I'm telling you them pussy cats is quick."  Here's Caroline O'Connor's performance of "The Worst Pies" from the 2011 Paris production.

I'm not sure if the song's final joke every quite gets across,

Is that  just revolting?
All greasy and gritty,
It looks like it's molting,
And tastes like--
Well, pity

because it is too unnatural to say "And tastes like shitty" - the intended missing word to rhyme with the gritty, so I'm not sure the audience ever makes that connection - unless the actors somehow sell it. The joke only becomes apparent after the fact with Mrs. Lovett's improvised, "Well, pity," and then the audience figures out what the previous missing word is meant to be.

Surprisingly, the joke hits better in the Spanish version, merely because the rhyme is true:

Sólo grasa y nada más
Por más que lo intento

Por más que me esfuerzo
No logro que pierda
Su aroma de --

The mind naturally and immediately fills in the rhyming blank, "mierda," in a way that doesn't happen in the English original.

Finally, a 1980 British documentary made for the London premiere of SWEENEY TODD, Sheila Hancock, the actress playing Mrs. Lovett, talks about performing "Worst Pies" with some rehearsal footage and the composer performing the song at piano, while detailing the business.

Telenovela Watch - LA TEMPESTAD debut

This week's Telenovela Watch with a brief preview of LA TEMPESTAD, starring William Levy, 2010 Miss Universe Ximena Navarrate, and Spanish actor Iván Sánchez.  LA TEMPESTAD has struggled to catch on with viewers in Mexico, indeed, most of Televisa's latest efforts are floundering.  Any call for more original, modern, innovative telenovelas is seriously undermined by Televisa's lone hit - CORAZÓN INDOMABLE - as old-fashioned and tired a remake as Televisa has produced in recent years.

Telenovela Watch - CORAZÓN INDOMABLE

Some thoughts in my Telenovela Watch on the Mexican telenovela CORAZÓN INDOMABLE.  It’s a big hit in Mexico and is doing okay in the US.  I kept delaying tackling it as my opinion kept shifting: I liked the first episodes, hated the next 20, liked the Pygmalion stage, don’t care for what has followed.

Two on Margaret Sullavan

“’I know every movie of hers.  In her last movie, NO SAD SONGS FOR ME, she has a child and husband whom she adores, and Viveca Lindfors plays a woman who is teaching the child the piano, and Margaret Sullavan arranges a romance between her husband and Viveca, so that he won’t be alone, without telling them she’s dying of cancer, of course...So it’s self-sacrifice on two levels.  But you see, the way she acted, there was a toughness in her that prevented any of her movies from becoming really silly.  I can remember, when she looked in the camera, to the doctor who was telling her, and she said, “You mean—cancer?”’  He gasped in a hoarse voice.  ‘You know, she always spoke like that.  Something in her voice.  So I wrote a song, because she died of everything.  She died of rifle shot, she died of a machine gun, she died in childbirth, she tied of TB.  But she never died of the same thing twice, and I swear it was in her contract.’”  Stephen Sondheim from STEPHEN SONDHEIM, A LIFE by Meryle Secrest


"Margaret Sullavan was a star whose deathbed scenes were one of the great joys of the Golden Age of Movies.  Sullavan never simply kicked the bucket.  She made speeches, as she lay dying; and she was so incredibly noble that she made you feel like an absolute twerp for continuing to live out your petty life after she'd ridden on ahead, to the accompaniment of the third movement of Brahm’s First Symphony."  Gore Vidal

Favorite Movies of the 1940s

I was recently delving into the 1946 movie DUEL IN THE SUN for some reason or another which set me off on a dawdling undertaking of making a list of my favorite movies of the 1940s.  Below is that list and some sub-lists that also came about in the process.

Movies I think are great

Beauty and the Beast (1946, Cocteau)

The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945, McCarey)

The Big Sleep (1946, Hawks)

Black Narcissus (1946, Powell & Pressburger)

Blood of the Beasts (1949, Franju)

A Canterbury Tale (1944, Powell & Pressburger)

Canyon Passage (1946, Tourneur)

Cat People (1942, Tourneur)

Caught (1949, Ophuls)

Christmas in July (1940, P. Sturges)

Citizen Kane (1941, Welles)

Cluny Brown (1946, Lubitsch)

Le corbeau (1943, Clouzot)

Dark Passage (1947, Daves)

Day of Wrath (1943, Dreyer)

Duel in the Sun (1946, K. Vidor)

Dumbo (1941)

Experiment Perilous (1944, Tourneur)

Force of Evil (1948, Polonsky)

Foreign Correspondent (1940, Hitchcock)

Good News (1947, C. Walters)

The Great Dictator (1940, Chaplin)

Hail the Conquering Hero (1944, P. Sturges)

Heaven Can Wait (1943, Lubitsch)

High Sierra (1941, Walsh)

I Know Where I’m Going! (1945, Powell & Pressburger)

Isle of the Dead (1945, Robson)

Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1945, Eisenstein)

Ivan the Terrible, Part II (1946, Eisenstein)

I Walked with a Zombie (1943, Tourneur)

Jour de fete (1948, Tati)

The Lady Eve (1941, P. Sturges)

The Lady from Shanghai (1948, Welles)

Late Spring (1949, Ozu)

The Leopard Man (1943, Tourneur)

Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948, Ophuls)

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943, Powell & Pressburger)

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, Welles)

A Matter of Life and Death (1946, Powell & Pressburger)

Meet Me in St. Louis (Minnelli)

The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944, Sturges)

Monsieur Verdoux (1947, Chaplin)

Notorious (1946, Hitchcock)

Orpheus (1949, Cocteau)

Out of the Past (1947, Tourneur)

The Palm Beach Story (1942, P. Sturges)

Quai des Orfevres (1947, Clouzot)

Rebecca (1940, Hitchcock)

The Red Shoes (1948, Powell and Pressburger)

The Restless Moment (1949, Ophuls)

Rope (1948, Hitchcock)

Scarlet Street (1945, F. Lang)

The Seventh Victim (1943, Robson)

The Shop Around the Corner (1940, Lubitsch)

Suspicion (1941, Hitchcock)

La terra trema (1948, Visconti)

They Live by Night (1948, N. Ray)

They Were Expendable (1945, Ford)

The Thief of Bagdad (1940, Powell, Berger)

Thieves’ Highway (1949, Dassin)

The Third Man (1949, Reed)

To Be or Not to Be (1942, Lubitsch)

Under Capricorn (1949, Hitchcock)

Les visiteurs du soir (1942, Carné)

White Heat (1949, Walsh)

The Woman in the Window (1945, F. Lang)

The Woman on the Beach (1947, Renoir)

Movies I don’t think are great but enjoy immensely

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948, Barton)

Berlin Express (1948, Tourneur)

The Big Steal (1949, Siegel)

The Black Swan (1942, H. King)

Blood on the Moon (1948, Wise)

Body and Soul (1947, Rossen)

Border Incident (1949, A. Mann)

Born to Kill (1947, Wise)

Brute Force (1947, Dassin)

Casablanca (1943, Curtiz)

A Chump at Oxford (1940, A. Goulding)

Cobra Woman (1944, Siodmak)

Colorado Territory (1949, Walsh)

Daisy Kenyon (1947, Preminger)

Dressed to Kill (1946, Neill)

Escape in the Fog (1945, Boetticher)

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943, Neill)

The Ghost Ship (1943, Robson)

Go West (1940, Buzzell)

Green for Danger (1946, Gilliat)

Gun Crazy (1949, J. Lewis)

Hangover Squre (1945, Brahm)

The Heiress (1949, Wyler)

I Married a Witch (1942, Clair)

I Shot Jesse James (1949, Fuller)

Johnny Belinda (1948, Negulesco)

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949, Hamer)

Leave Her to Heaven (1945, Stahl)

Lost in a Harem (1944, Reisner)

Macbeth (1948, Welles)

Mademoiselle Fifi (1944, Wise)

The Maltese Falcon (1941, Huston)

Mildred Pierce (1945, Curtiz)

My Favorite Wife (1940, Kanin)

My Name Is Julia Ross (1945, Joseph Lewis)

A Night in Casablanca (1946, Mayo)

Nightmare Alley (1947, Goulding)

Now, Voyager (1942, Rapper)

The Outlaw (1943, Hughes, Hawks)

Portrait of Jennie (1948, Dieterle)

Samson and Delilah (1949, DeMille)

The Scarlet Claw (1944, Neill)

The Sea Hawk (1940, Curtiz)

The Set-Up (1949, Wise)

Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1943, Neill)

The Spiral Staircase (1946, Siodmak)

Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942, Thorpe)

This Gun for Hire (1942, Tuttle)

The Uninvited (1944, Allen)

Whirlpool (1949, Preminger)

The Window (1949, Tetzlaff)

The Wolf Man (1941, Waggner)

Mostly great movies with things that annoy me

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, Wyler)

Bicycle Thieves (1948, De Sica)

The Clock (1945, Minnelli)

Fort Apache (1948, Ford)

Gilda (1946, C. Vidor)

Going My Way (1944, McCarey)

The Grapes of Wrath (1940, Ford)

Henry V (1944, Olivier)

His Girl Friday (1940, Hawks)

How Green Was My Valley (1940, Ford)

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946, Capra)

Laura (1945, Preminger)

My Darling Clementine (1946, Ford)

Odd Man Out (1947, Reed)

Paisan (1946, Rossellini)

The Pirate (1948, Minnelli)

Red River (1948, Hawks)

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949, Ford)

The Southerner (1945, Renoir)

Sullivan’s Travels (1941, P. Sturges)

They Died with Their Boots On (1941, Walsh)

This Land Is Mine (1943, Renoir)

Mostly bad movies with moments of greatness

The Barkley’s of Broadway (1949, C. Walters)

The Curse of the Cat People (1944, Wise, Fritsch)

Dead of Night (1945, Crichton, Dearden, et al)

Detour (1945, Ulmer)

Easter Parade (1948, C. Walters)

For Me and My Gal (1942, Berkeley)

The Fountainhead (1949, K. Vidor)

The Gang’s All Here (1943, Berkeley)

The Harvey Girls (1946, Sidney)

Jane Eyre (1944, Stevenson)

Lifeboat (1944, Hitchcock)

The Long Voyage Home (1940, Ford)

The Paradine Case (1947, Hitchcock)

Spellbound (1945, Hitchcock)

Till the Clouds Roll By (Whorf)

Unfaithfully Yours (1948, P. Sturges)

The Unfinished Dance (Koster)

Ziegfeld Follies (1946, Minnelli)

Movies others regard as great that I don’t like

Adam’s Rib (1949, Cukor)

Arsenic and Old Lace (1944, Capra)

Double Indemnity (1944, Wilder)

Fantasia (1940)

Gaslight (1944, Cukor)

Gentleman’s Agreement (1947, Kazan)

Hamlet (1948, Olivier)

Key Largo (1948, Huston)

The Lost Weekend (1945, Wilder)

On the Town (1949, Donen & Kelly)

Open City (1945, Rossellini)

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943, Wellman)

The Philadelphia Story (1940, Cukor)

Pinocchio (1940)

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, Garnett)

Sergeant York (1941, Hawks)

Shadow of a Doubt (1943, Hitchcock)

To Have and Have to Not (1944, Hawks)

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948, Huston)

Woman of the Year (1942, Stevens)