Change Your Image
MorrisZapp
Reviews
The Notorious Bettie Page (2005)
Fantastic presentation of Bettie and her times
This is a great portrayal of the era that the Bettie Page phenomenon came out of, and an honest, non-sensationalized presentation of her story. That's what people are calling a "thin plot"...too much of the boring existence of real life for them, I guess.
They did a fabulous job presenting the smut industry of that era. In today's porn industry, nobody has any pretensions of it being anything but serving a product to satisfy lust. Back then, people knew they were crossing a line of decency, but their mindset was still artistic, or at least they wanted to believe that.
So the people who made these magazines, at least the ones Bettie posed for, seem to have been rather nice chaps, mostly. It helps explain why Bettie's pictures always show her to be so genuinely happy and playful; they were making her comfortable and just asking her to be herself. Gretchen Moll captures that eerily well, and she also perfects Bettie's goofy, minced attempts at erotic dancing. I would venture to say that the future will find it hard to separate these recreations from the original surviving footage.
The one question I have at this point, is where did the biographical information come from? Isn't the real-life Bettie, supposedly alive and well, reclusive and unwilling to comment on her past? Early in the film they are bold enough to suggest that her father may have molester her as a girl, and that she was gang-raped as a young woman. That gang-rape scene seems to be setting the stage as a life-changing incident, but the story doesn't use it whatsoever...Bettie continues to be friendly and receptive to men's advances as though she's never had any bad experience in her life.
One last thing, the Special Features on the DVD contains a real Bettie Page reel from the past. (Is it really? I don't think it is Gretchen Moll's body. They really digitally scrubbed it to raise the production values.) They really found a gem from the past...a scene of Bettie in street clothes undressing in an ordinary small bedroom, shot intimately with a close camera. It goes beyond straight cheesecake because Bettie made a mood study out of it...her face has loneliness and regret on it, which could have been real, but comes off as a great performance.
Century (1993)
A neglected movie
I'm not surprised to see no reviews as of yet for this movie. I saw it in Brighton, England when it came out and have been checking shelves at video stores and libraries ever since then, and haven't found it.
I can't remember the story well enough to know whether the following is a spoiler or not, so beware...
The story addresses adherence to the idea of "Eugenics" in a time before genetic inheritence was properly understood. This ghastly philosophy held that it was society's obligation to try to rid the world of undesirable human traits (like disease) simply by preventing people having the affliction from procreating (even if it meant seeking to prematurely end the potential procreators life). The young doctor gradually discovers that his mentor is putting this belief to practice. This happens against the backdrop of the change of century on New Year's eve, Jan 31, 1899. An interesting piece about a lesser-known dark-age in science, whose inability to die a timely death may have led to the thinking behind the Nazi Holocaust.
Bob le flambeur (1956)
Great film noir
This movie is strikingly like "Rififi" which was reissued last year. Both movies have tough, hardboiled Dashiell-Hammett-like male characters who dominiate over the eye-poppingly beautiful female ornaments in their surroundings and talk in short, sarcastic metaphors. There is a strange sequence where they are practicing cracking a safe where the camera keeps panning to the financier's German Shepherd, for no apparant reason...pure cinematographic style, much like in Rififi (although I can't put my finger on a specific equivalent scene). Lest I repeat myself, the women in both films are really something. They are dressed and photographed in ways that are far more alluring than one is accustomed to in US films of the period, and their general 'look' seems to have foreshadowed US fashion by decades. The female lead in this movie has a very 1980's 'do.