November 18, 2007 - November 24, 2007

More Old Hollywood looking good

John Wayne

Myrna Loy (The Thin Man) and Ramon Navarro (Ben Hur)

Ronald Reagan (with Richard Todd)

Posted by Steve Monaco at November 20, 2007 10:58 PM

The Monday Movie Quiz #150

A bona fide classic this time that shows up on practically every "Best of" list in the world. But do you recognize it without the star?

Remember: It's only easy if you know it! If you do, by all means send me an email by late Sunday night with the title. If you're correct, expect to riot in the proud feeling of seeing your name in next week's rhymeless winner's circle.

Posted by Steve Monaco at November 19, 2007 12:54 AM

Last week's Movie Quiz winners

Last week's quiz movie in question was the supremely feel-bad film Requiem for a Dream (2000), starring Ellen Burstyn (my own favorite living American actress) and directed by Darren Aronofsky ("Pi"). Of course, you'd expect no less than total immersion into the sewer of the soul from a movie based on a novel (and co-written) by Hubert Selby, Jr., author of Last Exit to Brooklyn, but even so, this one went the extra mile.

It's a year in the lives of four hopeless addicts, including a son (Jared Leto) and his mother (Burstyn), and as Peter Bradshaw described in the Guardian, "Their excursion into the progressive circles of hell is recorded by Aronofsky with such precision that the whole film is unsettlingly like a gruesome yet compelling vivisectional experiment." His equally on-the-nose Guardian associate, Philip French, had the best assessment of the film's conclusion: "The final cross-cutting between the mother undergoing ECT at a New York psychiatric hospital, the son having his gangrenous arm sawn off in a Florida prison and the girlfriend submitting to painful anal sex at a Long Island orgy is hard to watch and impossible to recommend." And then some!

The performance by Ellen Burstyn, however, is not only highly recommendable but possibly the best thing she's ever done. Besides being so perfectly fine-tuned as the lonely, strung-out old lady who yearns to be somebody (in a red dress), her performance is also remarkably brave for someone who was, for many years, a genuine movie star. Not only does she display her age nakedly-- maybe even, as above, brutally-- but she also allows herself to keep looking worse. Jack Nicholson was given a lot of credit for going through a third of Chinatown with part of his face bandaged, but it's nothing to how Burstyn looks in this: a hairdo and dye job that first evoke Bozo and then the Bride of Frankenstein (complete with electrodes in the head), an embalmer's makeup job, and a face sweatier than Rodney Dangerfield's. It's a tour de force performance that doesn't look very nice-- needless to say, the Academy gave the Actress Oscar that year to Julia Roberts.

As for Aronofsky's constant, eye-zapping split-screen effect, it works well but it made me feel oddly nostalgic for the '70s. Michael Wadleigh used it in Woodstock, of course, and there was even one movie, Wicked, Wicked, that was done completely in what was called Duo-Vision. But it goes back even farther, and I wonder if this wasn't the real influence on Aronofsky's technique (since he was born after it was cancelled, he must have seen it in reruns):

A sizable group of people with right answers this week, most expressing no interest in seeing the film a second time (even the ones who thought it was great!), a sentiment I share. So congratulations and a moving refrigerator to the following winners: Vince Tuss, Wayne Palmer, Song-Un Lee, Chris Hesler, Mark Gisleson, Bill Hearne, Patricia Maples, Eric Castro, Jeffrey Rapp, Spencer Abbe, Bob Redwing, Michael Knox, Michael Mattson, Donald Greene, ron frigstad, Nick Rupar, Ross Orenstein, Drew Shaw, and Dennis Lynch.

Posted by Steve Monaco at November 18, 2007 11:21 PM

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