CinemaInternational

I saw it last year when it and a bevy of Columbia titles were on Amazon's streaming service.... But the print I saw was Color, not the black and white director's cut that TCM aired the other night. I thought it was a wonderful film and terribly underrated.

Yes, Meryl was great fun in She-Devil.... even if the scene I got the biggest kick of in the film had her in the backseat.... the scene where her mother Sylvia Miles spills all her dirty laundry to People Magazine.

And as it stands it was one of the best films of its year. Broke my heart when I saw it last summer.

If ever there has been one type of programming that is a bit of an enigma, it is the world of TV movies. Firstly, are they TV, or are they films? They first came around in 1964 when Universal started making them, and by the 70s and 80s, every channel was airing at least one new one every week. Plus, beginning in the 80s, cable stations started getting into the mix with TNT and HBO making high-quality ones with big-name casts. And yet within the last few years, they have mostly vanished. There were only 16 in the whole 2019-2020 TV season. I guess this is a post to reminisce about ones of years ago, to point out fine performances or films left mostly untended. Maybe we can shine a light on some things that should not be neglected.

True. Desperately Seeking Susan would have been the best fit for Smithereens of her others thematically, but that too was still a major studio production with recognizable names. Last time they aired Smithereens they teamed it up with her Making Mr. Right, also a major studio film. However, all of them do feel smaller and more Underground than She-Devil. (the prospect of Meryl Streep in a film shown on TCM Underground is very .... odd)

Cookie (1989) is the second half of TCM Underground tonight and its worth a look. Not a major film, but nice sharp playing by Emily Lloyd, Peter Falk, Dianne Wiest and Brenda Vaccaro makes it a fun little comedy.

That's the chain in the town I live.

The only problem I have had with TCM recently is that I really love catching up with a film for the first time, and recently it seems I always turn it on and its something I know and like (or love0 already. That said, I did see Executive Action this afternoon.

The sound sometimes is stronger than some DVDs, at least so it seems. Image? That varies. Some tapes looked washed out, but I saw one recently of 1956's The Mountain (with Spencer Tracy) and it looked pretty great.

I guess you could say that Basic instinct and Single White Female kind of straddled both of those types because they both had yuppies and they both emphasized sex and nudity. Thank you for the differentiation, I will add the turn Yuppie Nightmare to my lexicon.

I have to say though, 90s thrillers, the neo-noir types, are kind of a guilty pleasure for me. They are often stylish and have casts that are enjoying themselves. I would have loved to have been in an audience for 1991's Shattered just to see the audience go crazy over the twist. I actually saw one of that genre's ilk late last night, and unfortunately it only got really juicy in the last 45 minutes or so. That was 1993's Malice, which really didn't hit its full stride until Anne Bancroft dropped in for a foul-mouthed five minute cameo as a tipsy woman who held all the secrets of the film's plot. Bancroft was a blast. She knew her material was trashy and she played it to the hilt, and made her every line into great entertainment. She could have given a seminar at the time: How to steal a 107 minute film in only 5 minutes.

I have had videotapes on the mind recently. Even though much of the town where I live is closed up currently, I have been volunteering to help a local place get rid of most of the videotapes it loans out. I still watch them and have a player, but it makes my mind drift back to the actual video stores. They used to be everywhere for a while. My small town had 6 places you could go to for movies at the height of it all. And it just used to be so much fun browsing through the aisles for films and you could read about it and take it home for either a night or a few nights. There is only 1 left now. But I really do miss those days.

She tied for the Emmy in 1995 for that....

And TCM was just showing her in The Group last night..... She was a great talent.

I received the book as a gift last night. There is a lot to unpack from it. First of all it should be noted that much of the book strikes a regular Woody Allen tone, self-depreciating, wisecracking, acutely aware of his own faults and shortcomings in addition to others, obsessed by beauty (I swear it felt like he developed an unrequited crush on most of his leading ladies). But then there is the 1/5 of the book that deals with Mia Farrow. And that section is entirely bone-chilling. I'll leave it at that. But it did reveal one thing that makes all so much sense in retrospect. The Allen/Farrow relationship had begun as a combination artistic and personal relationship in the early 80s, but Allen write that romantically it was pretty much over by late 1987, and while they kept working on films and kept the appearance up of still being a couple (largely for the sake of three children), it was no longer anything more than that. It makes sense because if you look at the last four films they made together filmed after late 1987, in three of them she dumps him (New York Stories, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Shadows and Fog) and in the fourth (which he does not appear on screen), she leaves her husband (Alice). Very telling the more you thing about it.

I read portions of Garner's bio. The two truly liked each other, but were never romantically involved. He said that Hartley started wearing a T-shirt when she was out and about reading "I am not James Garner's Wife". When she gave birth to a child, she even had one made for the baby reading "I am not James Garner's baby"

Full Metal Jacket has a grim, disturbing, but exceedingly effective first act that comes to a shocking close, but after that, I never felt it was quite as interesting for the remaining 70 minutes. Maybe that's a minority opinion, but its how I felt at the time.

I read that one drive in in Florida became the first screen to open in weeks this past weekend.....

To try to sum up briefly from what little I know about Texasville (via what is printed online and what other details I could rustle up) is that Jacey became a film star for a while until her career crashed and burned. She returns a bit of a wreck but also a bit warmer and wiser, and immediately takes up into an affair with old [and married] flame Dwayne (Jeff Bridges), who is an oil baron of a company about to go belly-up, married to firey Annie Potts and has a teenage son who is a ladies man. Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) is cracking up emotionally even though he's the town mayor. Ruth (Cloris Leachman) is Dwayne's secretary. Lestor (Randy Quaid) seeks to undermine Dwayne as he is a rival businessman. Genevieve (Eileen Brennan) still works at the diner.

I shouldn't joke like this because I really like all of them, but James Garner, Doris Day, and Debbie Reynolds in Basic Instinct.

Again, I feel like the harbinger of death since I was just watching Gorky Park yesterday, and he was so good in it. That said, I guess I will always associate him first with Foul Play, one of my favorite comedies, but he was always good in roles such as the friendly bartender in 10, or as the increasingly malevolent trader in Never Cry Wolf, or as the alien leader in Cocoon.

Even non-slasher films had issues with the MPAA in the 80s. I'm reminded of the James Bond film Licence to Kill (which remains the most brutal film in that series). All the Bonds up until this one were PGs, and then you had this one with an exploding head, a character on fire, one getting ground up, shark bites, tortue, heart being ripped out of a person offscreen, and the film was slapped with an R. They edited a bit to get a PG-13, but interestingly, they sent the R-cut to the MPAA about 17 years after the fact and it got a PG-13 no questions asked.

Watched Gorky Park today. It got a bit too violent for me at times, but talk about an overlooked 80s film. It's a very solid thriller and all four main players are on top form: William Hurt, Lee Marvin, Brian Dennehy, and Joanna Pacula. The film is also blessed with a literate script. The music can be a bit much at times though.

War of the Worlds holds up very well; the funny thing about Marriage Story is that Criterion announced that they would be handling it later in the year only a day or two after I signed up for Netflix for a month so I could see it! (little frustration there) it was a good film, even if I do think the early parts were better than the later ones. Scarlett Johansson and Laura Dern were wonderful in their big scenes, and it was nice to see good supporting parts for Alan Alda and Julie Hagerty.

I think what happened with the nudity is this. Movies are always supposed to be framed, so to speak. There is what would normally be projected, plus there is some extra part of the image on all four sides (top, bottom, left, right) in case the projectionist or projector messed up the image, even though these extra parts were not supposed to be seen. My guess is that Bogdonovich originally framed the shot exposing all of the woman but not quite all of the man in front, but many theatres botched the image at the time so the man got more exposure so to speak. The botch continued to the original pan and scan videotape release (which due to the loss of width would show more up and down), but was changed for the DVD, likely back to what Bogdanovich originally intended. The reason i say this is because I have certain Roger Ebert review books at home, and some man wrote a question to Ebert about a disappearing nudity syndrome (namely Faye Dunaway in Network and even more nudity of Alice Krige in Ghost Story), and Ebert said it was likely because such things were not meant to be in the original image anyway, but just barely offscreen. This has to be it because TCM has not flinched from showing this male nudity before: The Deer Hunter, Never Cry Wolf, Return of the Secaucus Seven, The Silence of the Lambs, Persona, Who's That Knocking at My Door, Women in Love, Medium Cool, Woodstock, Walkabout, Ali; Fear Eats the Soul, Desperate living, The Onion Field, Amistad, Under the Volcano......