Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!
Look, we've all been there. Those days when everything is falling apart, or has grown stale beyond belief, or when a chapter of your life has just... ended. So you move on, you move out, and you hopefully move up in the world. It's not always easy, but sometimes you just have to do it. Just like characters do in these movies.
Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945) Mildred's husband is a louse - she provides more financial support for the family by baking pies and cakes, and he has a woman on the side. So she kicks him out, but has to find a way to support her two daughters on her own. In order to do that, she takes a job as a waitress, with the goal of one day opening up her own restaurant. Which she finally does... while failing to realize that she's unwittingly raised her daughter Veda into a snobbish bitch who doesn't appreciate any of her mother's hard work. One of the key works of the Old Hollywood Studio System, and the role that famously won Joan Crawford her Oscar.
Bridget Jones's Diary (Sharon Maguire, 2001) Bridget Jones is a 32 year-old "singleton" living and working in London, and has decided that she's heard one too many behind-her-back remarks about her appearance and personality. So she decides to make an active change in her life, and starts keeping a diary. She vows to quit smoking, lose weight... and stop fantasizing about her boss, the handsome womanizer Daniel Cleaver. Some of those things actually work out. This endearing adaptation of the popular novel earned Renée Zellweger a well-deserved Oscar nomination for her leading performance as the singularly British Bridget, and Hugh Grant and Colin Firth are well-matched as her love interests.
Wild (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2014) Cheryl Strayed has lost her mother and ended her marriage. She's lived recklessly and self-destructively for too long. Finally, she makes a somewhat rash decision: She's going to hike over a thousand miles on the Pacific Crest Trail. Alone. One of the most powerful films about spiritual reawakening and the power of memory I've ever seen, anchored by a never-better (and Oscar-nominated) Reese Witherspoon. All the better for the fact that it's based on a true story.
Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Come along and join us by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and saying a little something about them!
I'll get straight to the point. There is only one film with a female ensemble that matters, really. Every single one since is just a pale imitation. So let it be known that if you love movies at all, and especially if you love actresses, then you owe it to yourself to watch my first pick.
The rest are good, too, but they're not at all a patch on...
The Women (George Cukor, 1939) Yes, from Hollywood's annus mirabilis comes the greatest all-female ensemble ever assembled, getting to act one of its wittiest screenplays. When Norma Shearer's husband starts sleeping around with that hussy Joan Crawford, she goes out to a ranch in Reno so they can get a divorce.... and once that's done, she comes back to get revenge! The Women is an utter delight from start to finish. The only bad part is picking a favorite: Crawford, whose haughtiness makes it clear she's never anything but the lead in anything? Shearer, the all-too-human anchor who sends all her feelings straight through the screen directly to us? Paulette Goddard, the spitfire Shearer meets in Reno who could go toe-to-toe with any man? Mary Boland, delightful as the many-times divorced Countess who ALMOST puts over that she really does believe in "l'amour! l'amour"? Or the queen bee of fast-talkers, Rosalind Russell, whose gossipy gadfly may just be the true villain of the picture? I can't possibly choose. Can you?
8 Women (François Ozon, 2002) Only some of the greatest actresses in the world come from France, and somehow 90% of those are in this movie (the only biggie I can think of that's missing? Isabelle Adjani). Ozon's classic murder mystery setup (a man is murdered by someone he knows in his mansion in the middle of a snowstorm, everyone else tries to figure out which one of them did it) gets two twists: The first is that all the suspects are women. And what women! Deneuve! Ardant! Huppert! Béart! Darrieux! All cast perfectly to type and clearly having a blast with it. 8 Women is such a blast if only to get to watch these great actresses play off each other. What's that? The other twist? OH. It's a musical. Each of the titular eight women gets a character song to sing when the spotlight of the investigation falls on them. Not all of the ladies are good singers, but it doesn't matter; they know how to cover for their lesser abilities and perform the heck out of them anyway. It's stuff like that that make 8 Women such a joy.
Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007) BEFORE YOU START! Technically, this is NOT cheating. Yes, Death Proof was originally released as one-half of the Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez collaboration Grindhouse, but it also received a berth of its own at the Cannes Film Festival and was released on DVD as a solo feature (albeit both in a longer cut than in Grindhouse). And I'll be honest, the shorter Grindhouse cut is INFINITELY better than the longer "Director's Cut" version. But either way, Death Proof still has one of the greatest car chases ever committed to film, thanks to the brilliant casting of the great stuntwoman Zoe Bell (Uma Thurman's stuntwoman on Kill Bill) as one of a group of ladies who fall into the clutches of Kurt Russell's maniacal Stuntman Mike, who likes to crash his "death proof" stunt car into cars full of pretty ladies. Russell is at his magnetic best in the role, but it's really all about the two groups of women who fall victim to Mike (including the scorching hot Sidney Tamiia Poitier and Vanessa Ferlito) and who fight back (Bell, Tracie Thoms, and Rosario Dawson). The car chase that takes up almost an entire third of Death Proof is killer, but what's even better is what the ladies do once they catch up to the twisted Mike, the most cleverly edited scene of Tarantino's career, culminating in one of cinema's greatest finale freeze-frames.
Written (and this week I use the term very loosely) as part of The Film Experience's Hit Me With Your Best Shot series, hosted as always by our benevolent overlord, Nathaniel.
Look, there are many things to love about Nicholas Ray's incredible, impossible western melodrama, Johnny Guitar: Joan Crawford's costumes. Joan Crawford's hair. Mercedes McCambridge's unhinged, nearly Faye Dunaway-as-Joan Crawford-level performance. And anyone would be perfectly justified in talking about the women in Johnny Guitar, because women so rarely get to take center stage in westerns. And anyone would be perfectly justified in talking about genre conventions, or the difference in masculine/feminine aesthetics/gender roles and how the film upholds and/or subverts them. It's a brilliant, incredibly entertaining to watch film.
But, as much as I love Johnny Guitar and Nicholas Ray, and as much as I love actresses, and as much as I love Crawford and ADORE McCambridge's performance here, I could give two shits about them right now, because Sterling Hayden.
STERLING
FUCKING
HAYDEN
He's such a fucking MAN and I just want him to look at me with those eyes and sing to me with that guitar (I do not care one bit if he can't really play) and touch me with those hands. He's one of my all-time biggest actor crushes and I do not care that the whole point of Hit Me With Your Best Shot is supposed to be about looking at a film and its cinematography and how one works in service of the other and how film is an incredible art form because...
Sterling Hayden.
But I suppose I do have something to say, because my pick for Best Shot I really do feel encapsulates a lot about this crazy film.
BEST SHOT
It just makes me laugh. Sterling Hayden, epitome of masculinity, holding a dainty, PERFECTLY CLEAN, bright blue & white teacup. If that isn't the whole of Johnny Guitar in one image, then I don't know what is.
...except that OH WAIT, maybe I do, because this film also contains this classic piece of WTF:
Best Shot Runner-Up
No, seriously. WHAT. THE. FUCK.
If you haven't seen Johnny Guitar, I don't blame you. The film has been notoriously difficult to find on DVD, and even then mostly in not-very-good prints. But it is out on Blu-Ray now, as well as on iTunes and Amazon Instant apparently, so now you have no excuse. Do yourself a favor and watch it. It is "out there" in a crazy, melodramatic, completely unique way.
Some films loom so large over the cultural consciousness that you feel as though you already have an opinion about them before you even see them. Mommie Dearest, the adaptation of Christina Crawford's memoir about her mother, (in)famous movie star Joan Crawford, is one of those films. It is a camp classic! Faye Dunaway is incredible as Joan! But the movie itself is terrible! So bad it's good! It ruined Dunaway's career! It soiled the memory of Joan Crawford! The thing about those films, though, is that preconceived notions are quite often their undoing.
Mommie Dearest isn't great cinema by any stretch, but outside of a few scenes it's hard to read it as a camp classic, either. It's true that Dunaway goes big - VERY big - in her efforts to play one of the most larger-than-life movie stars ever to grace Hollywood, but outside of one scene (you know the one), I wouldn't say it's TOO big. Joan Crawford was a big personality. And to the eyes of a child, she was likely even bigger.
And that's the ultimate undoing of Mommie Dearest as good cinema - its source material. Joan may be the main character, but we're seeing her through the eyes of Christina, her adopted daughter, one who may or may not have very good reason to be traumatized by this woman, and who very likely has every reason to want to take her down. Whether what we see is true, "true", or false we may never know. But what is clear is that this is not a film that goes big in order to find bigger, deeper truths about its subjects - it's a film that goes big because its main subject was HUGE. It goes big because IT HAS TO.
Which is why my choice for best shot kind of surprised me. It comes very early on, but when I saw it I immediately held onto it, because it just felt right. After reaching the end of the film, reflecting on it, reading about it, and rewatching some of the better scenes again, I realized that this shot is the key to the whole film.
BEST SHOT
In Mommie Dearest, we're not seeing Joan Crawford as she was. We're seeing her through several filters - her daughter, her daughter's book, the screenplay, Dunaway's performance, the director's vision - enough layers to be like frosted glass. We can barely see her through not just all that has been put between her and us, but all that's been put between the film and us. Neither Crawford, Dunaway's performance, nor the film can stand on their own, without a filter between them and us. If even they ever could. There's so much history and cultural knowledge that came between this film and even audiences who saw it when it was originally released - and has only accumulated since - that I'm not sure it was ever possible to see this "blind," completely devoid of any preconceived notions of Joan, Christina, and even the film itself.
(It's also the closest Dunaway comes in the film to looking like the younger version of Crawford she's supposed to be playing at this point. When she has to play older, the resemblance and performance are uncanny, but she looks far too harsh for most of the first part of the film to look like the woman who was Mildred Pierce.)
* * *
Okay I couldn't let this go without bringing this up: I know everyone talks about that "NO WIRE HANGERS!" scene, but what's REALLY scary is what comes after that, when Joan makes Christina scrub the bathroom floor. I could only watch it with my hand attempting to cover my mouth - my jaw hit the ground the second the soap started flying everywhere and WOULD NOT CLOSE until about five minutes after it was over. It's the scariest, most hilarious, most hilariously frightening, most frighteningly hilarious thing I've ever seen, very nearly reaching the heights of the sublime.
Were I more sure of Mommie Dearest's quality or lack thereof - which I am still very much in debate over - I might have chosen it as my best shot. Because even all the preparation and cultural conditioning in the world did jack shit to prepare me for THAT particular shitshow.
Written for the blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. You can play, too: Just pick three films that match the week's theme!
This month's All in the Family Edition of Thursday Movie Picks focuses on that trickiest of familial relationships: Mothers and Daughters. These can be either the most loving or the most toxic relationships in a family. I've chosen to focus this week on the latter type, since they're usually more fun. I've included some spoilers for these films, and on the off-chance you haven't seen them (and really, you should, since these are all GREAT films), I've put them in white text. Just highlight and you'll be able to read.
Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010) Poor Erica Sayers. She got knocked up while in the corps of one of the most prestigious ballet companies in America, and it ended her career. Thankfully, she had a daughter that she could raise in her image. All she wanted for her daughter, Nina, was for her to grow up into the prima ballerina Erica herself never got the chance to be. But then her daughter went and got herself some psychological problems, and poor Erica had to work even harder to keep her daughter safe. And then, Nina finally gets noticed by the smarmy Artistic Director of the ballet company and gets the lead in Swan Lake, playing both Odile and Odette! Erica is so excited for her daughter, but this honor goes straight to Nina's head - she starts going out late at night, and locking herself in her bedroom, and stealing things from the company's former lead dancer. What happened to Erica's sweet little girl? And then Nina's crazy starts to manifest again, and despite all Erica does to keep her out of the spotlight that is clearly driving her insane, what does her ungrateful little daughter do? She FUCKING STABS HERSELF IN THE STOMACH WITH A PIECE OF BROKEN MIRROR AND DANCES UNTIL SHE FUCKING DIES. Poor Erica.
Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959) Annie Johnson is a sweetheart, beloved by all who come into contact with her. Except, that is, for her daughter Sarah Jane. You see, it is the late 40s and early 50s, and Sarah Jane is light-skinned enough (thanks to her father) that she can pass for white. This is something Annie cannot do and is not interested in doing. But as girls grow up, parents have less and less control over them, and soon enough Sarah Jane has graduated from high school and is working at the local library and dating a nice boy from the church. Or so she told her mother. In reality, she was dating a white boy who beat her when he found out she was black, and working as a performer in a seedy nightclub. When Annie finds out about this job, she rushes off to save her daughter, as any mother would. But the girl won't leave, and the commotion causes her to get fired. So she runs away, breaking her poor mother's heart. And what happens next between them will break your heart, too, unless you're a robot, because the final scenes of this version of Imitation of Life make it the single most effective tear-jerker in Hollywood history.
Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945) Veda Pierce is the biggest little shit of them all. How exactly she got that way is admittedly a bit of a mystery, since her mother is a hard worker who had to scrape and save and work her ass off to get what little she has. But Veda is an aspiring classical musician, and only has eyes for the finer things in life, which her mother who loves her dearly continues to provide - despite it forcing her to live beyond her means. And how does Veda thank her mother for her wonderful life? She puts the moves on her mother's husband (in James M. Cain's novel and Todd Haynes's miniseries with Kate Winslet and Evan Rachel Wood, she has a full-blown affair with him), and after he rebuffs her, she FUCKING SHOOTS HIM. And what does our dear Mildred do? She LIES TO SAVE THE LITTLE SHIT. Or at least, she tries to, but can't quite bring herself to go through with it. Which is fine, because no one should be able to slap Joan Crawford and get away with it.
