Moot Point

This week was all about re-watches; none of these were new to me, though I hadn’t seen West Side Story since high school, I’d forgotten how great it was.

1. Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954): This is another one that gets better every time. This time I kept noticing a) the great sound design and b) the totally awesome lighting. Jimmy Stewart’s apartment is always dark in the back just like a movie theatre omg. This movie is about voyeurism, you see.
2. Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly/Stanley Donen, 1952): Oh, I love you Singin’ in the Rain. I think it is a pretty great movie, and it fills me with joy. I made some actual critical notes about it for class, but it basically just fills me with glee. There’s always like a new thing that makes me laugh every time. This time it was from the “Broadway Melody” sequence, where he’s progressing from burlesque to high class shows: the little swagger he does in the “classy” production struck me as hilarious this time. Right at the beginning of this clip:
3. All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979): I also really love this movie. So, so much. It is semi-autobiographical and self-reflexive and about this guy facing up to his own mortality, but I will kick anyone who calls it “indulgent.” It has a musical number-open heart surgery scene, you guys. (Containing the immortal line: “Stop screwing around, Daddy!”) It ends with the hero singing “Bye Bye Life,” to the tune of “Bye Bye Love.” With Ben Vereen. It has lots of sequins. “Showtime, folks.” Even Alex’s grandmother likes this movie.
4. West Side Story (Robert Wise/Jerome Robbins, 1961): Like I said, I hadn’t seen this since high school. I remembered how fabulous the choreography was (especially “Cool”), but I’d forgotten how gorgeous the rest of it was. Two things that struck me this time were the way that you hear street sounds only when really bad shit is going down, and how gorgeous the whole thing is, cinematographically. Look at the way they’re framed. The light from the stained glass doors in her room basically separates them, lighting them in different colours, and at one point, they’re actually shot through her headboard, so there are like “bars” separating them. So you get this ominous sense that they are doomed even as the promise of the song seems the brightest. And then, at the end, Maria reprises it, but without any kind of underscoring. And I cry. Oh, how I cry.
5. Update: Andy Hardy’s Blonde Trouble (George B. Seitz, 1944): I kind of forgot that I watched this, which should tell you something about its quality. The main storyline involves Andy Hardy going to college and dealing with some comedic misunderstandings and so forth; it is not bad, but it is kind of mediocre and charming and easy to watch in the way that sitcoms are now. The B-story is about how Andy’s dad gets tonsilitis, and it is kind of fascinating, because his doctor turns out to be Chinese-American. The surprising part about this is how totally not racist this movie is (especially because I associate “horrible Asian stereotypes” and Mickey Rooney). The doctor is capable and a nice guy, and is good humoured in explaining to basically everyone that yes, he speaks English, he’s from Brooklyn, etc. (Weirdly, if you look at the actor’s filmography, it looks he played the same character in like, 5 unrelated movies between 1943 and 1947).

Have a good week, everyone. Next week’s Weekly Movies might be late because I’ll be home for Thanksgiving.

Despite the fact that I wasn’t going to watch half these shows, I managed to sample some or all of a bunch of the new shows. Here are my feelings on them (like anyone cares, this mostly an excuse to bitch about Big Shots):

Gossip Girl: Was like a joyless O.C., a fact that is really brought home by them running the first season of The O.C. on MuchMusic right now and it genuinely was funny and charming and clever. There were hardly any prime time soaps on when it started (now there are like 80) and it did this thing where the characters kind of acknowledged the craziness of the storylines, even though they were totally ridiculous. So they seemed like real people in an unreal place. Gossip Girl doesn’t really have that though: it seems so dour and lifeless. None of the actors really have much personality. I can see why people like it — it’s really pretty and there is hilarious fashion and, uh, lots of weirdly unexplained underage drinking — but it’s not my thing.

Chuck: Seemed okay; the lead guy is reasonably charming, it’s funny, and “Captain Awesome” made me laugh. Also, the ludricous “Chuck is the computer” premise is actually kind of theoretically fascinating if you’ve just been reading about the development of sound technology and film technology and the ways that they were discursively related to the body.

Bionic Woman: This also had a healthy dose of interesting cyborg body stuff, plus some gender politics hanging around (why are only women bionic?). Katee Sackhoff was good, and I’m okay with the classic “villain is more interesting than the hero” thing, but Michelle Ryan was very, very flat. I feel like there was tons of potential there, but I’m not sure if such a flat, grey, self-consciously artsy show will make it on network TV. Also, I kept having weird geography suspension of disbelief issues, because it uses real Vancouver places for sets, and I kept thinking, like, “Why would she drive all the way over to the University just to say hi?” I haven’t had the issue with BSG even when I recognize places, because it tends to be more fictional future buildings, not just random alleys, or like, where I catch the bus.

Dirty Sexy Money: I think this was my favourite pilot so far. It’s funny, it has Peter Krause, it has Donald Sutherland (who sells some pretty cringe-y dialogue), and it has Anna (she has lots of shirts that look like doilies). It is actually probably less hard on the rich than Gossip Girl, but it is actually kind of fun to watch, unlike Gossip Girl.

Cane: Was okay. Alex wasn’t into because of its basically being “Sugar Dynasty,” (and I totally made a “First you get the sugar, then you get the money, then you get the women” joke before the first commercial) but I kind of thought that was the point. I don’t think I’m going to keep watching, but it had some stuff in it. And most of the Cuban characters were played by actual Hispanic people, so that’s nice.

Big Shots: Is seriously a harbinger of the apocalypse. It was mostly described as “Sex and the City, with men”; but unlike Sex and the City, it shows nothing but contempt for women. It sort of has this “edgy” tone, but there is nothing remotely subversive about how hard it is to be a rich white CEO. Seriously, I like all the actors on it less because they chose to associate with this garbage. I can’t remember the last time I was so actively offended by a fictional filmed entertainment. (Actually, it was probably the end of the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie. I was at Zellers looking at Halloween costumes and bitching about how lame the girl ones were when I noticed that Elizabeth costume was an old-timey dress — which in the movies was treated as basically a metaphor for how restrictive life was for women — and it brought back all my rage.)

1. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941): I still don’t think that it is the Greatest Movie Ever Made, but I do think it was pretty amazing that a movie like this got made in Hollywood in 1941.
2. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1957): It’s totally “movies I have seen a hundred times already” week! It’s seldom a year doesn’t go by without me seeing this movie for one reason or another. It’s kind of amazing that this got made in Hollywood in 1957. It’s just so unrelentingly depressing, what with the death, and the madness, and the creepy makeover sequence that I always wince when I watch, and “I don’t think Mozart’s going to help at all,” possibly the single saddest line in the history of everything, followed by Scottie’s totally wrong assertion that “there’s an answer for everything.” But it’s also stunningly, amazingly beautiful. Every frame is like a painting; you totally drink in all the colour and the diffuse light and the glowing and it somehow makes the whole thing really appealing.
3. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, 2007): I’m still not totally sure how I feel about this whole thing, there were definitely some weird sexual politics, but Cronenberg’s been doing uncomfortable sex and violence since before it was cool, so I think he might get to be “examining” stuff like the cryto-gay villain who has the “crypto-” more or less subtracted it’s so obvious what’s going on and the woman who works with babies but is totally sad because she doesn’t have one (I don’t want to be too spoilery, but look at Naomi Watts’ costumes throughout the movie and then look at how she is dressed and shot at the end and you will know what I’m talking about). I didn’t love it as much as History of Violence, but I think Cronenberg does a really good job with this kind of genre movie: it’s amazingly well-cast (Vincent Cassel was great, but Armin Mueller-Stahl, who I’ve always liked, blew my mind), and he hits all the right notes, but he takes all the sex and violence just far enough that it’s noticeable, plus you get a brief passing glimpse of Viggo Mortensen’s junk. The much-talked-about bathhouse knifing scene is totally the centrepiece of the movie — it’s made more powerful because you basically just see him in suits up until this scene (with one big exception). There’s something ideologically slippery about Cronenberg that makes him really interesting; he’s not really trying to be ideological, he’s doing something else. Maybe he’s just pushing genres a little more to their logical conclusions, which pushes audiences to question their pleasure in said genres?

I also watched the last half of The Fountainhead this week: it was written by Ayn Rand and ends with a guy being applauded for blowing up some public housing. Objectivists suck. I wasn’t much of a fan of Gossip Girl either.

I’ve seen other people do this online, mostly TV critics, whose opinions people actually care about, but since I spent some time working this out, I figured I’d share. That’s what the internet’s for, right? New shows are underlined.

Monday:

8:00: How I Met Your Mother, CBS
8:30: Is a wasteland. Snack Break!
9:00: Heroes, NBC

Tuesday:

Wow, what a dead day. Tuesday used to be my main TV night (I miss you, Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars!) I may give Reaper (CW, 9:00) a shot because Ray Wise is the devil, and if anyone can play the devil, it’s Leland Palmer. I guess I could watch House, but I am pretty much over that.

EDIT: Actually, I realized I have class and my dorky school reading group on Tuesday nights and I’m not enthusiastic about either of those options enough to actually seek them out if I’m not going to home anyway.

Wednesday:

8:00: Either ANTM (CW) or Pushing Daisies (ABC) if the latter turns out to be any good. So probably ANTM.
9:00: Bionic Woman (NBC)
10:00: Dirty Sexy Money (ABC)

Thursday:

8:00: In my only conflict of the week, Ugly Betty (ABC) is up against 30 Rock (NBC) from 8:30-9, I will probably find an alternate way to watch Ugly Betty, since I like 30 Rock more and Alex likes it as well.
9:00: The Office (NBC)
9:30: Scrubs (NBC)
…and Mad Men, until it finishes, which airs either really early or at weird, random times in my market (AMC)

Shows I will probably (ahem) find ways to watch, though I do not actually get them on my TV:
Dexter
Project Runway (Which I hear isn’t starting until November!)

Weekends are for movies (and homework!) (and Battlestar, when it comes back in–sigh–January); I should probably start watching that Friday Night Lights show everyone keeps talking about at some point though.

1. Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950): This has got to be one of my favourite movies of all time. I’ve talked about how much I love the series of dramas that came out in the fifties that showed the “dark side” of Hollywood; this one is totally the best one. I love the way he sort of brings in silent film aesthetics when he’s inside Norma’s house.
2. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (W. D. Richter, 1984): Apparently, this is some kind of cult thing, and I can see why, because it’s the most ridiculous movie ever made. Buckaroo Banzai is a half-American, half-Japanese surgeon/particle physicist/rock musician. Who is famous. We got through the Star Wars-y scroll that explained the premise, and I turned to Alex and said “He’s obviously had hundreds of girlfriends.” It’s pretty funny, but I got bored by the end, especially because it’s never clear how much of it is camp and how much of it is trying to be actually good. (About half the actors are doing one, half are doing the other, and John Lithgow is basically always a cartoon.) On the other hand, it is ridiculously pomo: it’s supposed to be a “continuing adventure” in a serial that doesn’t actually exist, in the tradition of old-timey sci fi serials. Also, Jeff Goldblum is dressed as a cowboy for most of the movie for no apparent reason.
3. Across the Universe (Julie Taymor, 2007): Aw, I’d only read a couple of reviews before I went to see this, and they were hesitantly positive, but this apparently got a 48% at Rotten Tomatoes. I assume that is because 52% of critics have cold, shriveled hearts. Honestly, you guys know I like everything, but this was everything I hoped it would be. Taymor’s not afraid to tell this big sweeping iconic sixties story, pushing at the edges of the boy-meets-girl musical genre, and I thought she did a pretty exceptional job of making the Beatles songs fit in naturally with the story — everyone knows they weren’t written for the movie, but it kind of feels like they could have been. Anyway, it’s gorgeous, like all the characters live inside the Beatles songbook, and when they need to express their unspoken emotions, they do it in Lennon and McCartney and occasionally Harrison-isms. It’s gorgeous and filled with lovely Julie Taymor touches — like all the puppets, including the five ladies who I think represented Vietnam. Anyway, it’s beautiful, and I guess it’s destined to a be a cult favourite.

So Rachel tagged me to do this meme where you get to objectify the boys:

Lust Meme (Good Catholic WASP Girl Version)

1) List 5 celebrities you would have sex with GET MARRIED TOO BECAUSE IT IS WRONG TO DO NAUGHTY THINGS BEFORE MARRIAGE, without even asking questions.
2) Put all of them IN ORDER of your lust RESPECT AND ADMIRATION FOR THEIR TALENT for them.
3) Say which movie/show/thing it was that hooked you.
4) Supply photos for said people.
5) Tag five people.

Jon Hamm

From TV’s Mad Men. I just talked about this, and how his character’s being an asshole just makes me want him more, but seriously: dude fills out a suit. Yum, shoulders.

Stephen Colbert

Obviously, The Daily Show. I most love him when, like, a guest says something funny and he is trying not to laugh. It is the cutest thing ever. Also, being the foremost satirist of American politics and culture, in a time when America really needs a satirist, is hot.

Ryan Gosling

I remember him from as far back as Breaker High, which basically an inferior version of Saved By The Bell on a boat. Yes, I said an inferior version of Saved By The Bell. However, he did not win my, ahem, respect and admiration then, nor in The Notebook (“I wrote you 365 letters! I wrote you every day for a year!!!”), which I mostly just mocked. For me, it was Half Nelson, the most depressing movie ever, wherein he plays a crack-addicted public school teacher. But he is a sexy, dialectics-explaining, crack addict teacher.

Clooney:

I feel so generic, but the Cloon can’t be denied. Though I admit to wondering what his real life “confirmed bachelor” status means, it’s never really affected the entire world’s crush on him, so I’m certainly not going to let it stand in my way. I never really dug him on ER, but he won me over in Out of Sight, which contains one of my favourite love scenes of all time.

He gets extra points for also being a pretty good director.

Jake Gyllenhaal

IS THIS SHALLOW ENOUGH FOR YOU RACHEL? He is basically a human puppy dog; I never really think of myself as a Gyllenhaal fan, but whenever I see a photo of him, I just go “awwww.” I think I first saw him in Donnie Darko, and I found him adorable despite (or because?) of his crazy bunny visions. You just want to hug him, you know?

I’m skipping the tagging, because…I’m lazy. It is pretty fun though, so I do recommend it.

If I seem to have gotten suddenly stupider, it’s because I am watching the VMAs. Seriously, it’s more badly-produced than usual. At least Fall Out Boy is having a good time.

1. Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995): I remember quite liking this movie when it came out, ie, when I was 12. Usually movies I liked when I was 12 turn out to be pretty bad, but this is still pretty great. I love how good-natured the whole thing is; as social satire, it’s, well, it’s not exactly harsh, but it doesn’t pull punches. But it is pretty kind to the actual people in the movie. Also? Alicia Silverstone was really, really great — she managed to be likeable and convey that Cher is secretly actually smart, but doesn’t know it. It’s way, way better than it needs to be, even if I’ve always thought it was responsible for that spate of high school movies that were adaptations of Shakespeare. (I might just be thinking of 10 Things I Hate About You.) Anyway, I love everything about this movie, including “Rollin’ With My Homies” and especially the fact that the makeover is treated as an attempt to assert control in an uncontrollable world, being therefore more about the makeoverer than the makeoveree, and furthermore as having mixed results, at best.
2. 3:10 To Yuma (James Mangold, 2007): Holy wow. This is totally what I want from a Western: it’s a tiny, tense story about dudes and their moral codes, to which they stick the point of apparent absurdity. And those dudes are Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. I haven’t seen the 1957 version, but I can’t imagine that it was more brutal or more stark. They really get the brutish nature of life in the West, and you really get a sense of how isolated the towns are. Also, Ben Foster does a great job as the crypto-gay henchman, I thought to the point of making him sympathetic and three-dimensional, instead of just “dandy = evil.” But yeah, it’s a total dude movie, but it’s in a grand tradition of dudeliness that I find pretty fascinating. It was nice to see such a traditional, one dude against the world, doing the job he was hired to do, Western come out with such big stars. I love that shit.

Okay, when did Timbaland grow giant biceps? His arms are freakishly big. He looks like a pro wrestler.

1. Jon Hamm = lust. Not just the easy kind where I think he’s handsome — though he is — but the kind where it’s a little uncomfortable because his character’s also kind of a dick. This is not his wife.
2. The stuff. The stuff (TimesSelect archival article about the production design and period detail, sorry, but they will give you access if you have a functional school email address). In that article, Matthew Weiner says this: “The story is told in the details, and those details have their own life.” I love that he gets that: that the crap we surround ourselves with is not secondary to our lives, that it makes up our lives. I think it’s easier to do with a period show, because the props are interesting in and of themselves, and it’s a lot easier to be critical of the materialism of 1960 than it is to be of the materialism of right now, thanks a lot, reification. (Did I mention I’m apparently a commie now? The first phrase I actually thought of was “commodity fetishism.”)
3. The foregrounding of the political. Again, because the era is so far removed, the ways in which the characters are strongly shaped by sociopolitical forces and then-current ideologies is really, really clear in a way that I don’t think would fly if you made a contemporary show. Like, obviously people can see dominant ideologies at work in the here and now, but you have to work a lot harder to convince people that it’s not just the natural order. (See: feminism, gay rights activists, anti-poverty activists, etc. etc.) Mad Men works pretty hard to separate you from the characters — having Don be obviously sexist or anti-Semitic or whatever makes it pretty clear that you are looking at him from across a divide — and I think that is one of the points of the show.
4. How freaking gorgeous it is: for all that it is trying to be “realistic” and show how unhappy people were in 1960 — despite their ownership of all the modern conveniences — it is one of the best-looking shows on TV. The camera angles! The lighting! The way smoke lingers in the air, the way light glistens off a tumbler of whiskey. So beautiful.
5. The melodrama aspect of it. Though, as I mentioned, the show does a lot to distance you from the characters, ideologically speaking, it still manages to make the characters emotionally sympathetic. (The scene from this week’s episode? Where Peggy wipes away a tear and keeps on doing the twist?) We see them struggling to be happy and work within a set of ideologies that restrict a whole bunch of things about their lives; it is compelling, and I think really gets to the heart of what melodrama can do.

It is a love it or hate it kind of a show, but I really, really love it.

Oh man. So in case you guys aren’t up on Vancouver news, the city workers are on strike right now. This means that parks aren’t getting maintained, the libraries are closed, and that garbage isn’t getting picked up. This has been going on for weeks now; I have no idea why the city isn’t proposing anything. Actually, I do: the City awesomely started talking about how they were going to spend all the money they were saving from not paying their workers within days of the actual strike starting. This, as you can imagine, sucks.

There is a big pile of garbage outside my house. There are more bugs around. The pool at Stanley Park has turned a horrible shade of green.

But it sucks for some people more than others. If you, say, live in a condo, your garbage is picked up by a private company. You can probably just buy books and you have internet access in your house. If you live in the Downtown Eastside, not so much:

There are also the back alleys around town where household waste is piling up, and the plight of the Downtown Eastside, where people live in alleys and there are questionable conditions on a good day. In that part of the city, the concern is that you get human waste tossed out with the trash.

This makes me really sad; in Planet of Slums Mike Davis has a whole section about how many people literally live in shit, and how unsavoury the whole thing is for the priveleged. In other words: slums! Not just in the “Third World” anymore! Thanks Vancouver. Or as another writer puts it:

But what doesn’t ever get brought up is that there is only one portion of society that is truly suffering from this excess poop. Most of the rich folk in the West side all have private garbage collectors and life is continuing without a hitch of stench. But the po’ folks on the East side are the ones that depend on city workers to pick up their trash and are now the ones swimming in their neighbours’ semen. So why is one half of the city paying for labour bullshit while the other half gets off? [...] With a prolonged strike the city saves millions, which it is already planning to pass onto homeowners by cutting their property taxes (which side of Vancouver owns expensive property?), and our mayor gets to finally look firm on something.

I do technically live on the “West Side,” in that my address does have a West in it, but I live a block and a half from the boundary, and I am still poor. Also, beside the point. What actually prompted me to write this was this whiny editorial. “Boo hoo! The Anti-Poverty Committee dumped garbage at the mayor’s condo! It is totally unfair that he should have to step over deal with garbage in his home!” (This was basically my mom’s reaction when it was on the news last week too.) Uh, yeah, except, some people have to do this all the time.

My mom was all “Other people live here. They should keep the protests to City Hall.” But… City Hall is in a residential neighbourhood (incidentally, my residential neighbourhood). People have to live there too. Anyway: maybe the reason the APC is “devoting themselves to helping the well-fed, freshly laundered picketers outside city hall” is that those picketers, when they are actually working, are all that is keeping Vancouver from turning into Victorian London.

This city, it has turned me into such a commie. You can’t say we live in a classless society: everything comes down to class here.

(Links culled from various posts on Beyond Robson.)

A day late! Sorry internet! Long weekend confused me.

1. Paula (Rudolph Maté, 1952): So you guys all know how I love the maternal melodrama. Paula is kind of an example par excellence: Paula is a woman who is all depressed and “neurotic” because she found out she can’t have a baby. Then she hits a little boy with her car — which this old dude blames her for, and the movie acts is like totally her fault, but it’s not really her fault that this other truck was driving in front of her and then pulled out suddenly and there was an unsupervised orphan child in the road at night — but anyway, somehow through the shock of the accident he…forgets how to talk. She winds up taking him in and teaching him how to talk, and it’s unclear whether her motives are good or selfish, and then he remembers she’s the one who hit him. Basically, it’s all about this woman who is racked by guilt for…not really doing anything wrong. Loretta Young is really good in it though; I never really thought much of her but she totally carries this movie, and I think the way Paula’s characterization kept shifting was on purpose or at least, worked well.
2. The Invasion (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2007): This got incredibly poor reviews, but I don’t really understand why. Like, it’s got everything you want in a zombie movie: pretentious intoning about human nature, a broken nuclear family, references to earlier film in the cycle, and ridiculously blunt political allegory. Plus I thought they did the subtle, intense scary pretty well. The scene where Nicole Kidman’s trying to stay awake and then her son has to inject adrenaline into her heart? Hard core.
3. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941): I’ve been inspired to re-watch this ever since I read this Pajiba review, in which it is essentially asserted that Orson Welles is the Michael Bay of his day or something and Citizen Kane is just a hollow, technical masterpiece. You’ll probably see me in the comments noting that Citizen Kane was more of a frustrated mystery than everything else: it was an anti-biopic, a rejection of the idea that you could sum up someone’s life in a two-hour movie. “Rosebud is a sled” is such an inadequate answer to “who is Charles Kane?” because there is no answer to “who is Charles Kane?” Everyone just knows fragments, so that’s all our intrepid reporter can get from them. Basically? It’s as modernist as Hollywood ever got. This, of course, means that it was consciously difficult, lofty in tone, and drew attention to its form. Anyway, re-watching it, the idea that he’s just showing off his special effects is kind of silly. There’s nothing in it that others hadn’t done before — there are a couple of killer crane shots and stuff, but it wasn’t anything that hadn’t been done before. It’s best known for its consistent deployment of long takes in deep focus — a technique that Andre Bazin praised for its lack of artifice, “trickery,” or directing the audience’s attention — but Welles definitely wasn’t the only one doing this, William Wyler’s The Little Foxes came out the same year and uses a similar technique. Welles didn’t really do much that as new, but he was bold about what he did do. Anyway, the video I have comes with the trailer that RKO apparently used to promote Kane, in which a bunch of characters express different opinions about Kane, and then Welles voiceovers that you should go see the movie and decide for yourself — and I think that’s a guiding principle to watching Kane — it doesn’t do the thinking work for you. I understand why contemporary viewers don’t all dig it, but to say that Welles puts style over substance misses two things. One: style is substance, and two: I don’t think easy-to-watch entertainment is the only thing the cinema should do. Sigh. Anyway, I don’t think Citizen Kane is the greatest movie of all time (right now as far as I’m concerned it’s Killer of Sheep but I change my mind a lot), but I still think it’s a pretty great film.
4. Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955): Maybe it’s not as great as Kiss Me Deadly though. It opens up with a woman, naked except for a trenchcoat, screaming on a highway. It also features a glowing box that contains Cold War era nuclear anxiety. And sexism! But mostly, it’s awesome. It’s so unapologetic about how terrible everyone is. Also, finding a glowing box of death is a pretty good punishment to the unflagging detective who has to barge in everywhere with his phallic car. Oh, film noir.
5. The Big Knife (Robert Aldrich, 1955): This was shown with Kiss Me Deadly as part of a film noir series at the Cinematheque and it’s so, so not film noir. Embrace the melodrama, people. The melodrama is your friend. What’s not to love about the story of Jack Palance, film star, who’s married to Ida Lupino and feuding with crazy studio executive Rod Steiger, who has an awful secret shared with Shelley Winters, and who gets seduced by Jean Hagen? It the craziest cast ever. In the great subgenre of 1950s Hollywood movies about Hollywood — which includes The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), and A Star is Born (1954) — this is definitely the darkest. Because it was made outside the system, the studio is portrayed as basically unalloyed evil (they let some flack go to jail in place of the star and they also basically give girls contracts to whore around for out-of-town investors), and our hero is really kind of a terrible person, too. It is kind of overwritten and overacted, but in an entertaining way. I kind of believe that Hollywood people would totally overact even in their lives. Also, I loved the really loud drumbeats when Palance and Steiger are facing off.