Posted on July 24, 2015 at 11:23 am
My friend and fellow critic Michael Mirasol has shared another of his brilliantly edited supercuts of movie moments, and this is one of his best. There’s nothing the movies do better than chases!
Posted on July 11, 2015 at 3:55 pm
In my book, The Movie Mom’s Guide to Family Movies
Little girls and bigger ones see a lot of what I call “makeover movies:” in a crucial scene Our Heroine gets a new dress and hairstyle (or just takes off her glasses) and her life changes. Sometimes she transforms herself, as Ella does in “The Bells are Ringing” , causing her to have enormous conflicts and self-doubt. More often, she is transformed by someone else. Cinderella gets a dress to go to the ball, where the prince falls in love with her. Sleeping Beauty’s ballgown is so crucial that the fairies’ fight over its color literally leads the bad fairy to her hideaway. The modern counterparts are Eliza Doolittle, who, like Cinderella, goes to a ball in borrowed finery (and accent) and dazzles everyone there (“My Fair Lady” ) and “Gigi” who is actually groomed by her grandmother and great-aunt to be a very elegant prostitute, trained almost like a geisha in manners and skills for pleasing a man. Over and over, we see the heroines rewarded for being passive pleasers.
Transformation themes have been a central part of stories long before there were movies. The examples above were fairy tales before they were on screen. And girls and women are not the only ones who are transformed; superheroes all have origin stories that are a form of makeover, though they are changing to fantasy versions for themselves, and not to get positive attention from the opposite sex.
VOX has a nice commentary on makeover movies.
Posted on July 2, 2015 at 10:20 am
Two-time Oscar winner Olivia de Havilland turns 99 years old today. She was one of the biggest stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood, appearing memorably opposite Errol Flynn eight times, most memorably in “The Adventures of Robin Hood.”
She could appear beautiful and glamorous, but some of her best roles were when insisted on looking plain: “Gone With the Wind,” “The Heiress,” and “The Snake Pit.” She is best remembered for her dramatic roles, but she was also a gifted comic performer, as shown in “The Strawberry Blonde” with James Cagney.
Entertainment Weekly had a wonderful tribute to her last year.
At 98, Olivia de Havilland is the last great star of Hollywood’s golden age, a woman who began her career during the rise of Technicolor in 1935, formed one of the most indelible screen couples of all time with Errol Flynn, and went on to work with James Cagney, Rita Hayworth, Montgomery Clift, Bette Davis, Richard Burton, Clark Gable, and Vivien Leigh. With her deep brown doe eyes and apple-cheeked smile, the two-time Best Actress winner excelled at playing heroines whose demure bearing belied a feisty core. The most famous of these great ladies was Melanie Hamilton, the tenderhearted foil to Leigh’s scheming Scarlett O’Hara in 1939’s Gone With the Wind. Based on Margaret Mitchell’s best-seller, the beloved epic has sold more tickets in its lifetime than any other film. And 75 years ago it cleaned up at the Academy Awards, winning eight of its 13 nominations.
Having outlived all of her costars (as well as the movie’s mad-genius producer, David O. Selznick, and the three directors he hired to steer the massive ship), de Havilland has been GWTW’s principal spokesperson for almost five decades, the sole bearer of the Tara torch. It’s a privilege she calls “rather wonderful,” as her affection for the film is genuine and deep. She’s seen GWTW “about 30 times,” she says, and still enjoys watching it for the emotional jolt it brings as she reconnects with those costars—Gable, Leigh, Hattie McDaniel, and Leslie Howard—who have long since passed on.
“Luckily, it does not make me melancholy,” she says via email a few days after our meeting. (Though an expert raconteuse, she’s conscientious about facts—”I want to be a font of truth”—and will discuss the finer points of her career only in writing.) “Instead, when I see them vibrantly alive on screen, I experience a kind of reunion with them, a joyful one.”
Ms. de Havilland lives in Paris, now, so we will wish her a bon anniversaire, with many thanks.
Posted on June 29, 2015 at 11:09 pm
Thanks to Sam Adams and Indiewire for including me in their survey of critics about our favorite movies from the perspective of a child. Here was my answer:
“To Kill a Mockingbird” somehow captures the voice of the novel in allowing us to see the story through the eyes of a child but with the understanding of the now-adult Scout who provides the narration. It is almost as though the camera is at a child’s eye level, as we, along with Scout, have a growing appreciation of what her father is doing and what kind of a man he is. Even the music expresses the wonder of children for whom so much of they see is equally new and intriguing, but who also take so much still for granted.
Posted on June 23, 2015 at 3:53 pm
Before “Inside Out,” there was another animated film that explored emotions and psychological and cognitive development. Based on the pioneering work of psychoanalyst Erik Erikson
This is a more abstract, demanding film than “Inside Out,” but for those who want to continue to explore ideas about the way our emotions and memories guide our lives, this is well worth a look. Listen for Meryl Streep’s voice, early in her career, in this clip.
