ONE NIGHT ONLY, JUST FOR THE HELL OF IT...
A.D.D.J. sweeneyflytrap
playing some music, as if it were my living room
at
THE BAR
This Thursday August 21st, 2008
5851 Sunset Blvd.
fashionable East Hollywood 90028
@ Bronson Avenue (next to the gas station)
http://thebarhollywood.com
- Cool little bar
- Smoking patio
- Good place to have a drink, a chat
- No cover
- Okay music
(well, depending on the mood i’m in.
Lately I've been into French pop and the soundtrack to "The Warriors")
Camp Rock
Deal (2008)
The Deal (2003)
Charles Dickens' London Works
Freshman Orientation
Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds
Her Best Move
Hurricane
Jekyll and Hyde - Together Again
King of the Gypsies (1978)
The Life Before Her Eyes
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
My Faraway Bride
Never Love a Stranger
Nixon
The Optomists
Please Vote for Me
Poisoned By Polonium
Prom Night
Quid Pro Quo
Recount
The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior
Serial
Small Back Room (Criterion)
Street Kings
Twenty-Four Eyes (Criterion)
Villa Rides
Wizard of Gore
TELEVISION:
Dexter - Season 2
Gossip Girl - Season 1
Gunsmoke - Season 2, Volume 1
House - Season 4
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Perry Mason - Season 3, Volume 1
Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles - Season 1
REPLACEMENT DVDS:
Adaptation
Blue Velvet
The Hammer
The Lost World: Jurassic Park
Nuts
Panic Room
The Squid and the Whale
Let me just play my cards, right now. On a lazy Sunday morning I laying on the couch watching something called “the family channel” I became completely absorbed watching 1998 remake of Disney 1961 sorta-classic The Parent Trap. Let me also admit, it wasn’t the first time I saw it. I went and saw it when it first came out, ten years ago in a prison cell -like movie theater at The Beverly Center Mall on a movie screen that appeared to be a large screen TV.
I was moved by it then. And even with this family channel berating me with commercials (a 127 minute movie in a three hour slot), I might of got even more teary eyed this time around.
Yeah, yeah you know the deal. Two lost lost identical twin little girls run into each other at summer camp, realize they are related and then switch places in an effort to get their estranged parents back together.
Of course you have to buy into the concept that a seemingly wonderful man and woman would break up and each take a kid and never speak of the other half of the family again.
Maybe shitty parenting was less questionable in the Rat Pack era. But it feels incredibly cruel in our kiddie indulgent America of today.
That said and hopefully if ignored, buying into it becomes easy because of the remarkably charming performance of the then eleven-year old Lindsay Lohan. Yes that’s right, before she became a drunken mess of a teenage and young adult, she was a very watchable little actress.
Little Lindsey was “discovered” for the Parent Trap. And six years later she did the fairly smart teen comedy Mean Girls. Freeing her briefly from the Jodie Foster-wannabe ghetto of Disney remakes including Freaky Friday and The Love Bug.
But since her white-trash behavior and penchant for bikinis and the then, paparazzi admiration of her newly formed bosom got her off track from being taken serious as a talent.
But like, say Jennifer Lopez before her, before becoming JLO she was an actress who showed enormous promise before her enormous... ego became the story.
In The Parent Trap, playing northern California Hallie and the British raised Annie it's not that Lohan shows some deep well of Stanislavsky training. But she does have a face and personality the camera loves. And other then a feeble accent and hair style shifting, the twin characters are pretty interchangeable. No, Lohan’s charm is her freckled face expressions of pain and her raspy voice (she musta started smoking a pack a day at around eight-years-old).
The original version was kinda a rip-off of The Patty Duke Show. It helped cement little Hayley Mills as Disney’s reigning queen of the sixties. Mills’ twins, who in retrospect seemed at least a few years older and as an actress she showed the potential to one day play, maybe Shakespeare’s Ophelia or Juliet . However it was always clear she was some kinda prodigy, she was not at all convincing as a real kid.
About as much as possible for a kid-actor in today's too cleverly written children roles, Lohan does ring true, even when the movie is over the top.
And though Act One: Their Meeting and Act Three: The Trap all are rung a little too tight in search of comedy. It’s Act Two: Parent and Child Reunion that got to me.
As each girl gets to know her parent for the first time, the movie takes it’s time. And when dealing with the American daughter with her English mother (Natasha Richardson) the movie even briefly plays it subtle and doesn’t hit us over the head.
There is a small moment when the little girl, lingers looking at the things on her mother’s dresser, her perfume bottles and makeup, a close-up of the feminine glass pieces of her lamp, the opening chords to Here Comes The Sun play, and then back to Lohan’s face fascinated with the dainty clutter of a woman’s world she had never been exposed to.
The scene mother-fucking nailed me. It was so sweet. And the tears were it evoked were earned, not forced on me.
Dennis Quaid’s pretty-boy charm works perfectly as the girl’s father and he more the adequately steps into the role memorably played by the great Brian Keith.
Richardson is fine as the mother, maybe less plucky then Maureen O'Hara was, but believable in the teen girl dream-job world as a wedding gown designer.
Elaine Hendrix really shines as Quaid’s creepy young love interest and foil to the twins.
The then, enormously successful screenwriter Nancy Meyer making her directing debut really provides the relationships with a subtly satisfying arc. It’s too bad her career would advance to hitting us over the head to feel emotions with the clunkers (and wildly popular) crap What Women Want, the way overrated Something's Gotta Give and the forgettable The Holiday.
Not that I'm gonna run out and rent say, Nim's Island (though it does look kinda watchable), but what can I say? As far as remakes go... it’s much better the whatever next week’s latest horror remake on DVD will be.
-sweeneyrules
American Mall
The Art of War II: Betrayal
Blood Scarab
CJ7
Diana: The Witnesses in the Tunnel
How the Garcia Girls Spent Thier Summer
Irina Palm
Kiss of Death (1973 - China)
The Orange Thief
The Search For John Gissing
The Secret
Smart People
TELEVISION:
DC Superheroes: The Filmation Adventures
Kenny Vs. Spenny - Volume 1
The Love Boat - Season 1, Volume 2
Prison Break - Season 3
South Park - Season 11
The Wire - Season 5
NEW ARRIVALS & REPLACEMENT DVDS:
Ghost World
Invaders: Season 1
Jerry Maguire
Love Finds Andy Hardy
Ong-Bak: Thai Warrior
Star Trek: Enterprise - Season 2
Star Trek: Enterprise - Season 4
Recently I rewatched Peter Weir’s haunting 1975 flick Picnic At Hanging Rock. Dug it the first time I saw it. But wowie, this time, I went gaga. Matter-of-fact, I’m obsessed now. I can’t stop thinking about this little flick. With it’s eerie pan-flute score and it’s Virgin Suicides-like dreamy teen-memory feel, I keep trying to put the pieces together in my head. What just happened? What did I miss? What was actually in the movie and what cracks in the story did my brain automatically fill in for me?
For those who haven’t seen it, here’s the Criterion DVD site's synopsis...
Twenty years after it swept Australia into the international film spotlight, Peter Weir's stunning 1975 masterpiece remains as ineffable as the unanswerable mystery at its core. A Valentine's Day picnic at an ancient volcanic outcropping turns to disaster for the residents of Mrs. Appleyard's school when a few young girls inexplicably vanish on Hanging Rock. A lyrical, meditative film charged with suppressed longings.
Based on a 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay which had already taken on a legendary status in Australia.
I can’t get enough info on it. I’m dying to learn more.
Unfortunately Criterion’s DVD is, um, lacking.
While the English 3-disc Deluxe Edition DVD is loaded with hours of extras including the 25 minute on-set documentary A Recollection: Hanging Rock 1900.
But what has me in a total drool, appears to be the feature length documentary (It's like ninety minutes long! That’s longer then your average Adam Sandler flick) called A Dream Within a Dream: The Making Of 'Picnic At Hanging Rock.
I've been combing the internet to see if anyone downloaded the doc, to watch on-line. But I haven't found it yet....YET.
* Some of the foreign additions also contain many of the deleted scenes. Which are explained with photo’s here.
* Apparently Hanging Rock itself has become a tourist trap which plays up the myths created by the movie and the book.
* This site, Castle Of Spirits explains the origins of the ‘fact or fiction’ behind the story.
* In the article Picnic at Hanging Rock: The Unseen Voices, writer John Godl discusses the casting of the young girls and the eventual complete voice over work done with one of the actresses work. For a guy like me who wants to gobble up all the info I can, it’s fascinating stuff. But Godl does get a little whiny about the voice actresses not getting their (kudos) due.
* I must say most of the user’s comments on IMDB are usually really lame.
But one ‘commenter’ fedor8 from Serbia weighed in (Not recommendable to MTV fans..., 7 August 2007) with some interesting observations and theories concerning the Botticelli Angel.
* Bookmice goes even further with the ideas and themes behind the imagery.
THIS JUST IN: I just came across these...
* Rock of Ages by Michael J Bayly which is loaded with info!
* Brett Mckenzie offers his "Solution to Joan Lindsey's Novel".
* In an interview with the director, Peter Weir points out some "mysteries aren't necessarily there to be solved".
Picnic at Hanging Rock is often compared to Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960) and perhaps Powell & Pressburger's Black Narcissus (1947). Fairly Roger Ebert compares the movie to David Lean’s final film, the adaptation of the E.M. Forster novel A Passage To India (1984). Both, unexplained mysteries involving suppressed Victorian sexuality and public hysteria.
I’m reminded of Don Siegel's The Beguiled (1970). In which Clint Eastwood plays a wounded Union soldier taken in by the residents of a girls boarding school, where he goes about seducing the Head master (Geraldine Page), the teacher and the students.
It’s a sorta Southern-Gothic yarn. Clint with his big, cool, blow-dried 70’s hair, in probably the closest he’s been to a villain and his most ‘sexual’. It’s also probably contains Eastwood performing more dialog then all his previous films combined.
Zelena at Live Journal fits both films ‘within the 'Girls' School' genre’.
A favorite genre of mine, that might also include Clouzot’s brilliant Hitchcockian thriller Diabolique (1955). As well as the more obvious The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) and The Children's Hour (1961) and the groovy Therese and Isabelle (1968) and the recent disappointing The Woods (2006).
You could also though in The Trouble with Angels (1966) and it’s sequel Where Angels Go Trouble Follows! (1968), along with the Australian flick Flirting (1991) and the French Innocence (2004) and the Canadian Lost and Delirious (2001) and the TV-Movie Satan's School for Girls (1973). Dario Argento has at least two, Suspiria (1977) and Phenomena (1984). And maybe I'd add the misplaced 007 classic On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969).
Here’s hoping we, the poor souls in the bloody-States who don't have region-free players, will someday get our own neato two or three disc version of Picnic At Hanging Rock (and how about The Magnificent Ambersons on DVD? Like Europe has.) Maybe new leadership from the White House in 09 will finally rescue us from being a third-world-country DVD-wise.
-sweeneyrules
Biography: John McCain
Bram Stoker's Dracula's Guest
Camp Out
Carmen (2003)
Chaos
The Counterfeiters
The Killing of John Lennon
Krull
My Brother is an Only Child
Nim's Island
Queen Sized
Slippery Slope
Starship Troopers 3: Marauder
100 Million BC
Tokyo Decadence
Turn of the Screw (1991 Opera)
When I Find the Ocean
TELEVISION:
Bob Newhart Show - Season 2
Doctor Who: The Five Doctors - 25th Anniversary Edition
Get Smart - Season 1 (Original)
Masters of Science Fiction - Complete Series
Remington Steele - Season 3
