Sunday Screening

OH MY GOD. Seems The Americanization of Emily, one of my favorite relatively-unknown classics, is available in full on YouTube (and in handy playlist form, at that). It's been up for over a month, which is a good sign that the YouTube Copyright Gestapo isn't on the hunt for it in particular, but these things often vanish suddenly so get it while you can. To whet your appetite, here is an appropriately bizarre and incoherent trailer:

Don't let the black & white fool you, this was 1964; the young James Garner plays opposite the younger Julie Andrews in a biting satire of war and war-politics. Almost unknown and criminally underrated, this is everything Dr. Strangelove should have been: calm, intelligent, and devastating. (I hold Dr. Strangelove, like all of Kubrick, to be criminally OVERrated, but that's for another day.) It's not a great film, to be sure -- the directing is lackluster, and Julie Andrews is not exactly known for her dramatic range -- but the writing alone makes it more than worthwhile. Paddy Chayefsky, who you probably know as the guy who wrote Network in 1976 and then died, is the force at work here; Americanization of Emily is one of a series of movies he did as he transitioned out of 1950s TV and radio. (I'm not qualified to comment on the rest of Chayefsky's work -- the only one I've seen is the absurd Paint Your Wagon from 1969, with Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood, singing. Let me tell you, the only worthwhile thing about seeing Paint Your Wagon is that you can subsequently say you sat through it -- a not insubstantial accomplishment, actually. ...I'm digressing.)

I imagine that some of you shiftless, MTV-addled teenagers will lack the patience to watch this whole movie (and you productive, career-building Harvard types certainly won't have the time); if so, I demand you at least watch this one scene. Here, James Garner devastates Julie Andrews' war-widow mother at a garden tea party, delivers a subversive speech about the virtues of cowardice, and in his grinning, clean-cut, all-American way, starts the 1960s. Skip to 3:27 and watch through into the next clip.

I'll leave you with that to ponder, and for heaven's sake, watch the entire movie. Meanwhile, enjoy the rest of your weekend; this is an open thread.

Sunday Screening

Apologies for the repeated focus on musicals lately, but I have become completely obsessed with this clip. Here's Rosalind Russell in "Conga!", the show-stopping number that ends Act I of Leonard Bernstein's Wonderful Town -- this is a 1958 television production, with the original Broadway cast. I'd explain the backstory, but I don't think it matters:

(This, also, is basically what it feels like to try to have a conversation at a Harvard party.)

Rosalind Russell, who doesn't get the memory she deserves, was a gifted and utterly hilarious actress. Her most famous role is probably in His Girl Friday, the 1940 Howard Hawks classic, alongside Cary Grant; one of the all-time great screwball comedies. Here's a taste:

Amazingly, His Girl Friday has lapsed into the public domain. (I know!) So you can watch or download the whole thing at the invaluable Internet Archive. Go do that.

The ur-screwball comedy is probably Bringing Up Baby, from 1938, also from Howard Hawks and Cary Grant (and with the inimitable Katherine Hepburn). Maybe I've blogged about Bringing Up Baby before; I don't care. It never stops being hilarious. For instance:

It saddens me so much to see modern-day filmmakers trying to imitate the old screwball vibe. It never works. (A while ago I saw The Hudsucker Proxy, an early Coen Brothers movie (1994), which was stylish and fun but totally unsatisfying. Intolerable Cruelty (2003) missed just as badly.) Maybe, instead, they could finally make Wonderful Town, which somehow missed the boat for 1950s musical films; after all, musicals are everywhere these days...

Enjoy the rest of your weekend, everyone. This is an open thread.

Sunday Screening

Above you see Gordon MacRae, performing "Oh What A Beautiful Mornin'" (from Oklahoma! of course). This is such a gorgeous piece of music -- it still sends chills down my spine -- that you can ignore the rather anachronistic, Roy Rogers-esque staging ("Well, good mornin', Billy!") and focus on both the song and MacRae's tremendous pipes. Sadly I can't say the same for the 1955 film of Oklahoma!, which is just unwatchably rank with 50s clichés. Completely white, completely gendered, completely artistically inambitious. Here's an example of one of the better scenes (the closing title number):

As heartwarming as that is, imagine if it hadn't been so obviously done on a soundstage, and if they had thought to add more than one camera angle. (My god, imagine what Busby Berkeley could have done with this.) They're singing about Oklahoma, but Oklahoma isn't there; just people in a studio.

Which is a shame, because this show tries so hard to create an image of a mythic America; it's all about community values and the shared sense of place. (Hello, Garrett.) Of course, maybe it was all more believable in the 1940s and 50s, which came before that great turning-point in American culture -- let's put it somewhere around Easy Rider -- when "real" began to mean "unwashed."

On that note, here's one of my all-time favorite portraits of "real" America. From 1979's Being There, which every film lover should see -- this is scene where Peter Sellers' character, a mentally handicapped gardener who's spent his entire life tending a palatial Washington estate and watching television, steps outside for the first time and sees what the city around it has become:

"A garden? What you growin', man?"

Nothing tops that. (Or that version of "Also Sprach Zarathustra," which is by Eumir Deodato.) Enjoy the rest of your weekends, everybody; this is an open thread.

Sunday Screening: Primary-Appropriate Edition

So I gather there were some primaries yesterday -- awfully poorly promoted, if you ask me -- in Nebraska, Louisiana, and Washington State. Leaving aside the outcomes of those contests (which I gather favored some crazy youngster named "Omaba" or whatever), I'd like to take you all on a video tour through the cultural artifacts that I, however unfairly, associate with these particular places.

LOUISIANA is a vast and complex state with its own unique heritage and culture; it's one of the most fascinating parts of America. In keeping with that spirit, here is a completely arficial, possibly offensive, stereotype-laden country song about a one-armed Cajun:

That of course is "Amos Moses" by the inimitable Jerry Reed, who for the record is not from anywhere close to Louisiana. This song was a hit in 1971, and you can still hear it on the radio today, as well as on the flawless soundtrack to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in 2004.

Jerry Reed is probably best-remembered for his straight-country contributions to the Smokey and the Bandit movies, but he also had a number of novelty hits like this one -- the best example is his famous "She Got The Goldmine (I Got The Shaft)", which everyone ought to hear once. (I also urge you to check LimeWire for his theme from the 1976 Burt Reynolds film "Gator", if only to hear the immortal line "Everything's okie-dokie in the Okeefenokee.") Alongside Tony Joe White, Jerry Reed is probably one of country's most purely entertaining figures, and he deserves a bit more attention. Anyway.

WASHINGTON STATE is of course the home of grunge rock, Starbucks, and Microsoft, among others; but for me, I will never think of the Pacific Northwest as anything other than the land of BILL NYE:

Bill Nye the Science Guy (1993-1997) is possibly the greatest accomplishment of educational television, or at least right up there with Sesame Street and The Electric Company. Not since the age of Watch Mr. Wizard had there been so direct and earnest an attempt to bring science to young people by TV; but Bill Nye fused it with a manic, self-conscious, postmodern comedic fury that could only have come out of the 90s Pacific Northwest (the people behind this, including Nye himself, had previously run a local Seattle sketch-comedy show called Almost Live). The result: perfection.

If you feel like wasting an entire afternoon, or possibly day, one kind soul on YouTube has posted a bunch of full-length Bill Nye episodes (get 'em while they're hot, since Disney's probably on the copyright warpath). One thing I urge you to do is go through an clip you've just watched, and listen carefully to the sound effects -- this show was lavished with witty sound production. (I'll never forget the day in seventh grade geography, Elora P.S., our class sitting unsupervised watching a Bill Nye video, when the crazed shop teacher Mr. Rupnow came wandering in and rewound the tape so we could "listen to the sound effects without distraction." It was a magical experience) Also, be sure to sign the petition to Disney to either put the show back on the air, or release it on DVD for the non-educational market; this decade's young people should not be deprived of such genius.

Finally, NEBRASKA for me will always be the land of Alexander Payne movies. Granted, I am only thinking of two -- 1999's Election and 2002's About Schmidt (I will never forgive him for going mainstream and setting Sideways in California), but they're both so impressive and so scrupulous to their Omaha setting. Here's a heartbreaking clip from About Schmidt, with Jack Nicholson playing against type in what should have been a Best Actor performance:

It makes sense to set these movies, which are about the banality and meaninglessness of life, in a place like Nebraska. Flat, empty, generic. And Payne tends to it with such care; think of the Omaha skyline montage at the beginning of About Schmidt, or the constant reappearance of those skeletal electric towers throughout Election. I can't think of many other present-day filmmakers who use manmade landscape like that. If you haven't seen these movies, they're worth your time. (Election, to boot, is hilarious.)

Anyway, to top it off, here's a fun (if rather unfair) mashup of Reese Witherspoon's character from Election with Hillary Clinton:

...I feel kind of bad posting that -- and yet it's so perfect...

I'm going to go take a shower. Enjoy what's left of the weekend, everybody!

Disaster Movies

Well isn't this a metaphor for like eight different things:

Iraq's largest dam is in danger of collapse and hundreds of thousands of people are at risk from a massive inundation in Mosul and Baghdad, according to US documents released Tuesday.

US experts have warned Baghdad that the Mosul dam in northern Iraq could buckle under the water pressure and let loose a 20 meter (66 foot) wave onto the regions below, based on assessments by the US Army Corps of Engineers (ACE).

Jesus, talk about adding insult to injury. Say you're a regular guy from Mosul, maybe you're finally getting your life together after five years of utter lawlessness and chaos, and just as you're nailing the final shingle back onto your roof that the Americans blew out, suddenly -- WHOOOOSH -- here comes the Tigris fucking River 60 feet high at your face. This would be the moment where you look up at the heavens and shout, like my beleaguered father did after one particularly disastrous month, "Don't forget to plow salt under the earth while you're at it!"

Of course there's apocalyptic news on the home front too -- I give our media credit for some increasingly evocative analogies in their attempts to describe our precarious financial situation. Look at this, from CNN Money (of all places):

...imagine the Detroit metropolitan area, which the Census Bureau estimated had 2.08 million households in its 2000 Census. Now picture virtually every house or condo empty, with a for sale sign in the front yard of every home, from inner-city Detroit to its suburbs, all the way to nearby cities such as Flint and Ann Arbor.

This is supposed to be an illustration of how many vacant homes are for sale, itself a sign of weakness in the housing market; but it comes off more as a scene from a Michael Moore-style post-industrial midwestern hellscape. (Props for unintentional accuracy, I guess.) Along the same lines you have to love this graphic, from an important Fortune article on the credit debt crisis:

Subtle it's not -- though to fully get the message across, they'd have to show the bomb being held by a smiling consumer in the crowded parking lot of a furniture store. (Read that article, especially the bottom bit about England.)

...I wonder why it is that James Howard Kunstler has suddenly elbowed his way into the more widely-read blogsophere. Kunstler, the relentless prophet of peak oil, has always been too apocalyptic for my taste -- I don't see how you can read him regularly unless you enjoy fearing your own mortality -- but he is not alone in his aesthetic and he is gaining followers by the day...

My point is that there's a growing undercurrent of end-of-the-world angst hiding at the back of the episteme, one that's tied directly to our dire economic and geopolitical situation. Look at the culture -- while too generous a conflation of Hollywood and our politics always risks the wrath of Roy Edroso, I don't think you can ignore the fact that this fall's upcoming blockbuster is Will Smith playing, quite literally, the only living boy in New York (link fixed). Have we always been so damn excited to go see movies about the total failure of mankind? (Don't even get me started on Southland Tales -- seeing The Rock and Stifler in a musical narrated by Justin Timberlake is a sign of the apocalypse in and of itself.)

Of course this film was last made in 1971, when Charlton Heston was The Omega Man. That was one of the first of the great 70s popular angst films, which mostly either about zombies or involved cars crashing into buildings, and lasted until the end of the Carter era when disco died and Airport became Airplane!. The point about how that 70s "disaster cinema" reflected the disintegration of social order, and later the energy and inflation crises, has been made a thousand times over.

Socioeconomic instability sends shock waves throughout a culture, and it's often more easily observed there than in the economic figures themselves (statistics, of course, have a funny tendency to bend when they look like they'll lead to uncomfortable conclusions -- and either way you'll never read about them, considering today's media). I guess the difference this time around is that we get to enjoy our mortality in hi-def 1080i widescreen, brought to you by your friends at MasterCard ("Priceless!") -- that is until your friends at MasterCard come back to repossess the TV...

Sunday Screening

So I was planning a whole post about interstate highway sign lettering, the history of the telephone system, and French children's TV; but I had to can it when I saw this. Holy mother.

...Words fail.

You're probably familiar with Gene Kelly, and you're almost certainly familiar with Judy Garland, but I bet you hadn't seen that. It's from The Pirate, a 1948 Vincente Minelli picture that per Wikipedia was one of the first major "box office flops." One can see why.

The MGM musicals were always better when they didn't rely on "exotic" locales to spruce up their scenes; it made the talent less lazy. In this case I think both Kelly and Garland knew it didn't matter, and they decided to just have fun with it. Kelly looks like he's about to bust out laughing through this entire thing.

FUN FACT: This was one of only three films that Judy Garland and Gene Kelly ever did together. Of the others, one was 1942's For Me and My Gal, an otherwise boring Busby Berkeley propaganda film that gave Kelly his screen debut; and the other was 1950's Summer Stock, Judy Garland's last MGM project. (She would later do A Star is Born as well as her incredible appearance in Judgement at Nuremberg and a couple other things, but by that point the drugs were taking their toll.) Summer Stock is best remembered for this stunning, and somewhat creepy, number:

Gives me chills. This was the last part of Summer Stock to be filmed; it was an incredibly tough project, mainly because Judy Garland was having severe struggles with addiction even then, and in this scene you can tell Judy is some 20 pounds lighter than she was in the rest of the movie.

Anyway, also, here's some bonus Gene Kelly being funny:

If by some colossal failure of education you haven't seen Singin' in the Rain, this guy has helpfully put it all up on YouTube (I'm sure the authorities will come grab it any day now, so get it while you can) -- parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. And I at least insist you watch the Moses Supposes scene, which is possibly the greatest thing ever committed to film.

...Well, that's it. (Posting from me will be sporadic over the next few weeks, since I'm going home to Canada. For those who aren't familiar with it, visiting my Canadian hometown is like stepping into 1987; Kim Mitchell is routinely on the radio, and cellphones are scary things that city people use. My Internet connection up there is still delivering news about the Dukakis campaign. So I leave Dem Apples in the capable hands of Sam, Garrett, Rob, Cora, and anyone else who wants to post. Enjoy the rest of the summer, everyone.)

Sunday Screening

I have to agree with Ryan that the upcoming film adapation of Get Smart looks, and there is no other word for this, awesome.

Of course many of the recent movie adaptations of classic TV have been miserable failures -- see Dukes of Hazzard, Bewitched, Charlie's Angels, etc. -- but I hold out hope in this case for two reasons. One, because unlike most of those other shows that are fondly remembered today, Get Smart sucked. It was terrible. It wasn't witty, it wasn't clever, it wasn't satirical, it wasn't even INTERESTING a lot of the time. I admit that the Cone of Silence bit was funny, but other than that, nothing. Also at times it was surprisingly racist:

(In the same sense, it's hard to watch I Dream of Jeannie nowadays without noticing that it was amazingly, unrepentantly sexist.)

The other reason I expect this movie to be great is that Steve Carell happens to be one of the best comedic talents of our time. His YouTube catalogue is surpisingly thin (I wish Viacom had left up the old Daily Show clips -- his "Produce Pete" segments were irresistible), but here's one gem. THIS was a symbolic turning-point in 21st century comedy, 2003, where the upstart Carell in the space of one scene completely steals Bruce Almighty from its ostensible star, Jim Carrey. And I note with a little disappointment that this was the only worthwhile moment in Bruce Almighty.

I think I speak for all of us when I say: "LOUD NOISES!"

This has been your Sunday Screening.