Do You Remember a Movie About a Witch Who Makes Blueberry Pancakes?

Posted on May 18, 2011 at 8:00 am

If you remember seeing a movie in school about a witch who made magical blueberry pancakes, then you must be in your late 30’s or early 40’s. The New York Times has a great piece by Jennifer Mendelsohn about how that film, Winter of the Witch, continues to enthrall some of the children who saw it in 1969-the 70’s. It is a simple, short film made on a very low budget, but it features the distinguished actress Hermione Gingold as the witch and Anna Strasburg (wife of the great acting teacher) as a single mother who moves with her son into a house with a witch who cooks magical pancakes that make people happy.

By all rights the quirky little production should have faded away, just like the quaintly dated turtlenecks and headscarves it features. But something about “Winter of the Witch” burrowed its way into the consciousness of a subset of children who saw it, and it never left, leading many to search for it well into adulthood. “Those colored dots must have burned themselves into some peoples’ brains,” wrote Gerald Herman, who directed the low-budget film for $500 while a student at New York University, in an e-mail.

It has inspired a blog, The Cult of the Happy Pancake Witch, where you can watch the whole film.

The Fall TV Season — Girls Gone Wild (And Retro)

Posted on May 17, 2011 at 3:52 pm

Maureen Dowd had a good column about the upcoming fall season on network television, which features a lot of, well, let’s look at her headline: Corsets, Cleavage, Fishnets. She surmises, correctly, I believe, that the number of new shows about women in sexy outfits is a reflection of the anxiety that the increasing disparity between men in school and the workplace. “Mad Men” has presented viewers with the simplicity of a world in which women did not compete with men (and looked like Christina Hendricks). Dowd quotes a male producer:

All the big, corporate men saw Christina Hendricks play the bombshell secretary on ‘Mad Men’ and fell in love. It’s a hot fudge sundae for men: a time when women were not allowed to get uppity or make demands. If the woman got pregnant, she had to drive to a back-alley abortionist in New Jersey. If you got tired of women, they had to go away. Women today don’t go away.

And so, we have a series about stewardesses. Not flight attendants, but stewardesses, back in the days when airline fares were set by the government so airlines competed for customers with how alluring their stewardesses were. There is a series about Playboy bunnies, also set back in the good old days before feminism. Dowd says:

Set in mobbed-up Chicago in the ’60s, the script glories in “chasing Bunny tail” and opens panting: “The Door Bunny at the entrance to the Playboy Club. The ears. The tail. The satin. The breasts.” Bunny Janie’s “cleavage could pick up a salt shaker.” Our leading lady, Maureen, a Cigarette Bunny in corset, fishnets and stilettos, is described this way: “20, Norma Jean before she was Marilyn, an untethered, unconscious sexuality.”

We’re also getting a reprise of two old series with babes fighting crime: “Wonder Women” and “Charlie’s Angels.” “The remake of “Charlie’s Angels” that ABC is adding to its fall TV lineup is a masterpiece of subtlety,” Dowd says. “It takes at least 15 minutes before the three girls get wet.”

She notes that there are some promising series about smart, capable women on the schedule, too. But it will be interesting to see which shows win the ratings.

Behind the Scenes at Pixar

Posted on February 12, 2011 at 8:00 am

The New York Times has a rare behind the scenes look at Pixar:

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Behind the Scenes

Kennedy Miniseries Rejected Again

Posted on January 18, 2011 at 9:46 pm

As the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s inauguration is celebrated in Washington this week, there are headlines in the entertainment news about a miniseries about the Kennedy family that has been pulled from the broadcast schedule. Greg Kinnear and Katie Holmes play the President and First Lady. The History Channel announced that it would be showing the miniseries in December of 2009, but after working with the producers to try to ensure its accuracy were still unable to conclude that it fit with their other programming. Now, according to the New York Times, it has also been turned down by Starz, FX, and Showtime.
It is scheduled for broadcast in 30 other countries.
What do you think? Would you watch it?

More on Red-Band Trailers

Posted on March 29, 2010 at 9:50 am

Brooks Barnes writes in today’s New York Times about the increased accessibility of “red-band” trailers, movie previews that contain R-rated material.

Over the last two years, movie marketers have flooded the Web with R-rated video ads known as “red band” trailers. While most trailers are approved for broad audiences, the red-band variety typically features profanity, nudity or other material deemed inappropriate for children….he Web has proved extremely hospitable to them despite a difficult-to-enforce industry rule that restricts their release to sites that use age-verification tests.

Barnes describes what the MySpace executives call an “anomaly,” which made the controversial “Kick-Ass” trailer available without any age verification to ensure that it was only being seen by viewers 17 and older. John Phillips, chief executive of Aristotle, a maker of age verification technology, calls the MySpace security system “a ‘total joke,’ a ‘train wreck’ and a ‘continued embarrassment.'” MySpace counters that Aristotle’s system is also easy to fool. All of which means that the challenge for parents in protecting children from R-rated trailers with nudity, drug use, an 11-year-old shooting someone in the face and using extremely crude language and more is a little tougher — and even more important.