Tag: movies

N is for The Night They Raided Minsky’s

To this day, I know the lyrics to the verse of “Take 10 Terrific Girls (But Only 9 Costumes)” by heart.

I had mentioned one movie in this blog possibly more than any other, save for Annie Hall, but never a formal post. So here it is.

NIGHT they raided minskys
The Night They Raided Minsky’s is a movie that tells about, as Rudy Vallee put it, the info seen above. It was broadly based on the book Minsky’s Burlesque by Morton Minsky (with Milt Machlin).

I saw this movie with my friend since kindergarten, Carol, and her friend Judy when I was 15 in 1968. Quickly, I developed a mad crush, unstated, for Judy, who I would never see again. The film was rated M, a precursor for PG, though with about two seconds of nudity, maybe it’d be PG-13.

Though I did not know it at the time, it was a troubled film. I did know that Bert Lahr, best known as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, “died before shooting was finished.” This was also the film debut of Elliott Gould, who would soon star in the movie version of MAS*H.

“The first cut was, by all accounts, dreadful.” The head of the studio reportedly said: “In all my years in film, this is the worst first cut I’ve ever seen.” Fortunately, film editor Ralph Rosenblum, who would later edit extensively for the directors Sidney Lumet and Woody Allen, including on Annie Hall, worked his magic. “His ‘save’ was detailed in his fine book When The Shooting Stop…The Cutting Begins.”

[Director William] Friedkin, who would be best known for The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973), “wasn’t around for any of the post-production, having moved on to his next film.

“The original idea from producer Norman Lear [later TV producer of All in the Family, Sanford and Son, and much more] was that he wanted this old-fashioned musical… to have a New Look. Just what that meant or what the New Look was supposed to be, nobody quite knew.” Luckily, Rosenbaum pulled it off.

I MIGHT have forgotten this film – I still have not seen it in 47 years – except for one thing. My grandfather, McKinley Green, was a janitor at what was then WNBF-TV and radio. When an album was removed from the radio station’s playlist, Pop got to bring them home and give them to his grandchildren.

When he brought home the soundtrack to The Night They Raided Minsky’s a year or two after the movie’s release, I glommed onto that LP immediately.

“The score for Minsky’s was written by Charles Strouse, who’d already written several Broadway shows, as well as the score for the film Bonnie and Clyde. The lyrics were by Lee Adams, with whom Strouse had written the Broadway shows Bye Bye Birdie; All-American; Golden Boy; It’s A Bird, It’s A Plane, It’s Superman; and others.”

To this day, I know the lyrics to the verse of “Take 10 Terrific Girls” by heart.
Take 10 Terrific Girls (But Only 9 Costumes) – Dexter Maitland.
This song showed up on the Muppets, sung by Statler & Waldorf.

Other songs include:
You Rat You – Lillian Heyman.
Perfect Gentleman – Norman Wisdom and Jason Robards.
The title song by Rudy Vallee.

But my favorite scene may be wistful What is Burlesque with Norman Wisdom and Britt Eklund.

Watch the last eight minutes of the film – in German, with that aforementioned brief nudity.

Here’s the late Roger Ebert’s review.

Writer Mark Evanier is MORE of a Minsky’s buff than I. He recently noted this piece of trivia involving a magazine. He discussed the failed Broadway-like musical from 2009. And way back in 2001, he mentioned how the movie was edited for television broadcast.

ABC Wednesday – Round 16

MOVIE REVIEW: Cinderella

The short before Cinderella was Frozen Fever, a sequel to the massively successful movie, with most of the original cast.

This was to have been a family outing a couple of weeks ago, to see the new live-action adaptation of the story Cinderella but we were all, in turn, under the weather. Finally, it’s school vacation week, the film is about to leave the Spectrum, so the three of us, plus a friend of The Daughter finally get to see this Disney film.

At some level, the Wife and I wish we had seen it sooner, for while it reviewed reasonably well (85% positive), it’s always the thumbs down that the mind remembers.
disney_cinderella_2015
Truth is, I’m not sure we NEED another Cinderella film at all. Still, it looked quite fine, the sets, and lovely costumes, and the production design. Director Kenneth Branaugh does a decent job with pacing this. One of the better scenes was the deconstruction of the carriage, shortly after midnight.

One of the complaints was that there was a lot of death in this film. Hey, there’s ALWAYS death in a Disney film from Bambi’s mother to (Finding) Nemo’s mother. In fact, one gets to actually get to know Ella’s mother (Hayley Atwell, Agent Peggy Carter in the Marvel TV show), and feels sad when (CAN THIS BE A SPOILER?) she dies. Often in the Cinderella narrative, she’s quickly, or already, dead. This narrative was a good choice.

Her father (Ben Chaplin) spends enough time with his daughter (Lily James, Lady Rose MacClare from Downton Abbey) before he decides to remarry. Cate Blanchett is, unsurprisingly, masterful as the stepmother, and we get a sense of why she’s so wicked. Her daughters (Sophie McShera, Daisy Robinson Mason from Downton Abbey; and Holliday Grainger, who has played villains Lucrezia Borgia and Bonnie Parker) are far more ugly inside than out.

That Ella meets the prince (Richard Madden, Robb Starkin in Game of Thrones) before the ball makes the narrative less the “Suddenly, their eyes meet, and they fall in love” of other iterations. It’s a bit more empowering without being too heavy-handed.

My favorite character may be the captain of the guard (Nonso Anozie from Game of Thrones), but there were other nice performances, by Stellan Skarsgård as the Grand Duke, Derek Jacobi as the King, and especially Helena Bonham Carter as the somewhat dipsy Fairy Godmother. Oh, the mice were good too.

The short before the film was Frozen Fever, a sequel to the massively successful movie, with most of the original cast, but none of its joy, unless you like the one joke, which is about booger snowmen. I was going to say it left me cold, but I was forbidden from doing so.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Through the sheer strength of the performances of the actors in The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel I found myself still carrying about the fate of their characters.

Second_Best_posterIf you did not see the movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which I enjoyed, you will be, I suspect, hopelessly lost watching the sequel, the aptly titled The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. You won’t understand most of the characters’ relationships or motivations.

Even before The Wife and I saw the film at The Spectrum Theatre, my friend Steve Bissette had written this parallel to, of all things, the Andy Griffith Show:

“For me, SECOND BEST’s Dev Patel [as Sonny] was thanklessly trapped in the 21st-century faux-Bollywood Don Knotts role. Like, if India was Mayberry, and Barney Fife was of course going to mistake the wrong person as “important” and treat the right person like dung, making us all squirm in embarrassment to the end. Only if, like, Barney ran a hotel with Maggie Smith, could dance really, really well, and had a really hot fianceé [Tina Desai as Sunaina].”

That would make the gruff character played by Maggie Smith the sheriff. The movie threw away her best line, possibly the best one in the film: “I went with low expectations and came back disappointed,” referring to the United States.

Steve’s framing was quite helpful, actually, in allowing the Sonny character from driving me crazy. Near the end of the film, not much of a spoiler, Sonny promises to be a better husband than he was a fiance.

This is NOT a great film, and I wouldn’t quite recommend it. Yet, through the sheer strength of the performances of the returning actors Smith, Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, and others, plus the newbies, such as Richard Gere, I found myself still carrying about the fate of their characters. They were old friends you catch up with at the reunion. And I like the second half of the film more than the first.

If you loved the first movie, tamp down your expectations of the second, and you might like it just fine.

MOVIE REVIEW: Still Alice

“The film Still Alice doesn’t so much progress as fade away, leaving only the memory of its central performance intact.”

stillaliceThe Wife and I saw the movie Still Alice the Saturday after Julianne Moore won the Best Actress Oscar.

I didn’t see the other nominees in the category, save for Felicity Jones in The Theory of Everything, but she was fine. Great, actually, as linguistics professor Alice Howland, who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease.

Alec Baldwin plays her husband John, somewhat self-absorbed with his own academic career; Baldwin’s played this type of character before.

Kate Bosworth is the annoying married daughter Anna. The guys playing her brother and her husband were mostly ciphers because they didn’t have that much to do.

The key family relationship is between Alice and her youngest daughter, an aspiring actress named Lydia (good name, that), played by Kirsten Stewart. I had NEVER seen her in any movie. The Twilight series actress was surprisingly not bad, though, as a friend of mine who happened to attend the same showing, she has a tendency to mumble.

Weeks later, I’m still trying to figure out why this movie, based on a book I have not read, felt a bit distant to me. I’m not sure, but here are some observations:

*There’s a scene that is out of focus, save for Alice. I KNOW it was showing her feeling disorientated, but it LOOKED as though perhaps she was going blind, and that was a distraction.

*Perhaps the emotional center was a speech, which came more or less in the middle of the movie, a time I actually teared up.

*The bathroom scene at the summer house was the most painful.

*The scene involving the video of Alice’s younger self almost played as a very dark comedy.

*The family, save for Lydia, seemed so shiny and put together.

This Spectator review says it better than I:

“The film doesn’t so much progress as fade away, leaving only the memory of its central performance intact. Still Alice thus joins a growing band of movies… which seem plucked into existence solely to fatten up a single performance for awards season, while everyone else — the rest of the cast, director, crew — goes on a starvation diet. The people around Alice are sketches.”

My mother had some sort of dementia in the months before she died, and of course, the disease manifests itself in many different ways. She was far older than Alice, not as well educated, not as self-aware. All of that probably colors the movie for me as well.

F is for 10 films that have influenced me

I was reading this Facebook chat with someone I knew and his friend, who suggested that the world was black and white until the early 1960s.

beingthereThere’s some online game in which you name ten films that heavily influenced your way of thinking, or world view, or whatever. They need not be GOOD films or your FAVORITE films. If I picked Annie Hall, which may be my favorite, it would be selected, as I noted before, because of my hatred of going into a movie after it starts, just like Alvy Singer (Woody Allen). But let me look elsewhere.

Being There (1979) – Can a guy uttering stuff he’s heard on TV be embraced as a wise and profound leader? Seemed ridiculous at the time, save for televangelists, but now reality-show “celebrities” often drive the national dialogue (see: Jersey Shore, Duck Dynasty, The Real Housewives of Topeka, et al.)

Field of Dreams (1989) – While I LOVE the baseball talk, especially as espoused by the James Earl Jones character, for me, the key is the relationship between Ray (Kevin Costner) and his late father, which ALWAYS gets to me.

King of Hearts/Le roi de coeur (1966) – Blurs the line between who is sane and who is not.

Long Night’s Journey Into Day (2000)- After apartheid fell in South Africa, there was a Truth and Reconciliation Commission designed, not to punish, but to have people own up to the abuses that took place. (A similar action took place in Rwanda, to great effect.) If only the United States had had something similar after the Civil War, instead of a brief Reconstruction, followed by years of Jim Crow segregation.

Midnight Cowboy (1969) – one can find friendship in the most unlikely places. Plus a pedestrian should assert his right to cross the street.

Pleasantville (1998) – I was reading this Facebook chat with someone I knew and his friend; the latter suggested that the world was black and white until the early 1960s. I suspect that perception comes from photographs and television largely being in b&w until then. The conceit of this movie is that once someone becomes really engaged in life, they turn from b&w to color. (Notice in this Pentatonix video, Evolution of Music, it segues from b&w to color in the early 1960s.)

The Truman Show (1998) – To his surprise, a guy’s whole life is actually a television show. Now, it seems, there’s no end of people who are willing to be on television, spilling intimate details, in exchange for counseling, money, fame. There’s even drama in going on those home rehab shows on HGTV. EVERYBODY is a star, for the requisite 15 minutes, it appears.

War Games (1983) – I didn’t think at the time that someone playing video games could almost start World War III. Since then, I’m less convinced of my initial convictions.

West Side Story (1961) – The movie looks a little dated, last I watched it, yet the music is timeless.

Woodstock (1970) – Music groups I was introduced to, such as Santana, plus groups I saw in a different light, such as Sly & the Family Stone. Someone on Facebook wrote last month, “The New York State Thruway is closed, man,” and right away there was a whole dialogue about brown acid and kosher bacon.
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5 Famous Movies That Shamelessly Ripped Off Obscure Ones.

ABC Wednesday – Round 16

Ramblin' with Roger
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