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Reviews
Promising Young Woman (2020)
The hash with Variety, men as a species, and other thoughts
The idea that Carey Mulligan thinks she was being disrespected by a reviewer because of her looks seems preposterous. How anyone could look more fetching as she did in the film seems beyond crazy. Some of her outfits and optics of course were deliberately absurd, that was all purposeful. I have been a huge Carey fan since "An Education" finding her most amazing as Jean in "Inside Llewyn Davis". Her ability to speak in American sharpness is a towering thing, given that she seems to be from heavily Queens English Westminster. I did take exception with the zeal that her character (she?) took with humiliating and hurting other people indiscriminately. Liked the NYT comment about self-loathing. I kept wondering through the film, isn't there any healthy help that could be provided for this character to resolve her past. And at least, perhaps Cassie could have tried to engage in a variety of satisfying vocations: regional theater, local museums, weekly meditation groups, discovering new authors. All things we try when we are blocked.
Hunky Dory (2011)
Important Historical Moment Experienced Through Soundtrack, Some Inclusion Questions
Very astute of the submitter in the Character section of the Goofs to remind us that ELO's "Livin' Thing" was not known until later in 1976 as it was released in November along with parent album "A New World Record". "Hunky Dory" is a creature of the late spring of that year.
Nonetheless, the choice of music in this movie, as a remark, is simply outstanding. It finely captures that moment when the singer songwriter sound of the early 70s was giving way to late glam and early new wave sensibilities (a la Ferry, Bowie, Lee, Drake, Lynne). In fact, a book has been written ("Hollywood Film 1963-1976: Years of Revolution and Reaction") that pinpoints 1976 as the pivot year when the cultural reign of the 60s and early 70s ended.
As a disclaimer, I don't know what music was being played on the BBC in pre-Thatcher Wales; would she actually have been seen on BBC nightly television in 1976, three years ahead of her ascendancy, as she does in the film? But I do wonder about other culturally significant music of 1976 that might have been overlooked.
As a leading example, the advent of Queen's "A Night of the Opera," generally acclaimed the Sgt. Peppers of the 70s, plops squarely in May of 1976 when "You're My Best Friend" was picking up steam as the followup single to enormous "Bohemian Rhapsody," and the Elizabethan "39" was starting to haunt the airwaves. Irish heavy rockers Thin Lizzy sprang from regional jail at that moment and John Miles, whose title cut,"Stranger in the City," was a great, if passing, anthem to weary youth in Britain, peaking around April 1976.
Genesis' "Trick of the Tale" was a breakout commercial LP from 1976, loaded with snappy art-rock tracks, bespeaking a sense of melancholy associated with life change in English youth, though this might have been more suited to highbrow Charterhouse and Ellesmere, the latter featured as bedrock in 1978's Richard Burton vehicle, "Absolution".
The Rolling Stones released "Black and Blue" in April 1976 carrying a couple of textured, sentimental songs in single "Fool to Cry" and sadly reflective "Memory Motel," both all over the radio then. Too American sounding?
In the obverse, I question whether Ontario's Rush had really arrived in Wales at that point to the extent that the schoolboys could play, chord for chord, with no charts, a good bit of "Passage to Bangkok" on the brand new "2112" album. If you need a guitar-heavy AOR entry, why not England's Foghat? "Fool for the City" was sitting right there on album playlists in May of 1976.
Finally, 1976, of course, was the year of Peter Frampton, I am imagining the brilliant live versions of "I Wanna Go to the Sun" or "All I Want To Be (Is By Your Side)" as fitting period citations of prep yearning for flight. I won't mention anything about "Born to Run," the sensation of that stateside season, released several months prior to May of 76, as Middle Atlantic bravado would not sync with "Hunky Dory's" more woozy, Welsh bard effect. Nor would a recent UK platinum smash by The Three Degrees and its spawning movement, (gasp) disco, whose 1975 afterbirth, populated the times.
As a PostScript, I loved the choices of both "Strange Magic" and "One Summer's Dream," both underrated ELO dreamers. I can't help wanting more ELO from the period (understanding there is only room for two in this multi-artist effort) as their current "Face the Music" sported heady standards like "Nightrider" and "Waterfall"; and if we look back just several months earlier, the "El Dorado" album's ultimate orchestral Beatles paean, "Can't Get it Out of My Head".
We have only one film here, and "Hunky Dory" made its choices. My curiosity aside, they are fine decisions.
Numb (2007)
Excellent Movie
I have been rooting around for sometime now for a movie that would speak to the inertia that has settled over me in various cycles during the last decade or so. This would be a movie that would address the issue of being a potentially gifted person, but who is stunned by the oppressiveness of modern life: frightening economy, unpredictable jobs, the no-rules relational chaos of post-modernism.
The last movie I saw that got to this was "Wonder Boys," about an insightful English professor who couldn't function because of being emotionally stunned. While it is flawed and at times, forcing itself too much on you, "Numb" is that great new movie that gets into the struggle for identity.
Matthew Perry does a convincing job as Hudson Milbank, a modern LA freelance writer, trying to find meaning and connection. The film cleverly dances in and out of his early life, showing his times with fittingly remote and narcissistic parents, especially a destructive mother who is played perfectly by Helen Shaver, a great Canadian actress who masterfully conjures cold, chipper, semi-ice-queen figures.
It also has a hysterical and realistically frightening bit about a highly credentialed psychiatrist, Dr. Cheryl Blaine, played ably by Mary Steenburgen, who has her own bout with borderline syndrome and sexaholic tendencies, which she can't seem to restrain from unleashing on Hudson, who seeks her help with his condition.
The funniest line of the movie comes when she chases him out of a restaurant in a predatory moment, asking him about his family. To which Hudson, in a mid-trot, grunts to Tom, his writer sidekick played by Kevin Pollack: "uh...run." You can't decide whether Dr. Blaine is funny or terrifying, maybe the scariest female character since Sharon Stone in "Basic Instinct."
There are so many familiar handles in this movie, I can't even remember them all. Besides the out-of-control, counter-transferring female therapist, let's see...there was
-- Spending most of your leisure life in bed being hooked on one brand of inanely topical TV, in this case, The Golf Channel. Many of us have our times escaping into with some kind of nerdy TV; mine is The Weather Channel, for my ex, it is The Fishing Channel, and an old roommate couldn't live without The Military Channel.
-- Trying an unending series of anti-depressants, thinking you will find one magic pill to fix you. Hudson becomes so much a regular at the HMO pharmacy, that we see the pharmacist playfully wishing him luck with his latest prescription.
-- Being up and out at 4 a.m., insisting this is the only time you really feel good about the world.
And there are many more moments I recognize in this movie that come from the benumbing, joyless periods that seem to settle in on us. without answers, at various times in the post-modern world.
What director Harris Goldberg does that is so helpful is he makes many of the trapped moments funny and he resists offering up a trite resolution. Hudson finds hope in certain things and soon abandons them, going on to his next illusory beacon. It is a waiting game until he finds the next bit of relief, kind of like real life.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Never Again (1956)
Brilliant Cautionary Tale
An excellent sketch from the first season. Seems to be essaying the cocktail culture of the organizational man. We see the pressures wrought by the Madison Avenue set of the high 50s and how only a few were allowed to feel comfortable there.
Phyllis Thaxter, as the protagonist Karen Stewart, got her start in some Peyton Place type movies of the 1940s and then quickly moved into early television theater, performing multiple stints on venerable TV drama showcases as both the Ford and Motorola playhouses.
She does a spectacular job here as a woman past her youth who does not belong to the "smart talk" of the account exec peers of her fiancé, Jeff, played by a natty Warren Stevens. Her fight to stay whole is beclouded by a desperate descent into drink.
She staves it off through most of the sketch, but the inevitable incursion of an aggressive Madison paramoor, competing for the attentions of Jeff, pushes her over the edge and she goes into a violent drinking rampage.
I'm rooting for Karen until the end, seeing her basic intentions and sincerity as the match for any of those fast-talking ad ladies. And yet she has no sense of how to use that gift to compete. She simply panics and eventually turns to the martini for protection.
Hitchcock often created highly neatened vignettes about murder and personal sabotage, but in this one, he lets all the messiness hang out, the rage and the raw feelings of self doubt, to great effect. It is one of the most shocking of all Hitch's TV efforts because of the way the unprotected self is stripped down to its bare bones to survive, brilliantly demonstrated by Ms. Thaxter.
In the epilogue, the master provides an apologia for the power of the episode, saying he will not go into his usual tongue in cheek bit about the fate of a deserving antagonist. Instead, he suggests this is more of a cautionary outing in the hopes that it will prevent some struggling soul from a similar fate.
Unforgettable.