A Wink and a Smile: The Art of Burlesque (2008)

  Okay, I'll say it.  I'm obsessed with burlesque now.

Ob.

Sessed.

This documentary has been sitting in my queue for almost a year and still had thirty movies ahead of it but Netflix streaming knows no boundaries!

Here's the thing:  real people do burlesque.  Women and men.  And they're not all drag queens, although drag is considered a form of burlesque.

And you don't have to look like Christina Aguilera to do it!  The documentary follows 10 women enrolled in Seattle's Academy of Burlesque. (That's a real thing.  I shit you not.)  It's a six-week course that teaches women from all different backgrounds the timeless art of the striptease.

I know what you're thinking:  any idiot can take off their clothes.  That's not art.  But that's not all burlesque is.  It's an attitude, a way of life, a glitter-filled way to poke fun at societal norms.  After all, satire is making fun of rich people by other rich people.  Burlesque is making fun of rich people by everyone else.

Let me illustrate this with a video.  Agent Provocateur is a high-end British lingerie company and this video is one of their advertisements that combines their product with a rather scathing view of American politics.  Um...it's definitely NSFW.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWNiBaZme_w&has_verified=1

The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942)

  See?  Here's a Thanksgiving movie.  And you thought I couldn't do it.  All right, it's set over Christmas, but come on!  It was close.

This, of course, is the poster for the play and not the movie but I liked it.  It's got almost an Edward Gorey kind of feel to it.

Anyway, The Man Who Came to Dinner is a classic comedy starring Bette Davis and Monty Wooley.  Never heard of the last guy?  That's because he starred in the original Broadway version and did such a good job they put him in the movie.    He plays a man named Sheridan Whiteside, a famous critic and radio personality, who injures himself on a set of icy stairs and is forced to remain in the home of a Midwestern couple until he recuperates.  In retaliation, he becomes the worst houseguest imaginable with a list of demands a mile long, a disagreeable demeanor, and threats of lawsuits.  He even attempts to wreck his long-suffering secretary's budding romance with the local newspaper man because he can't stand the thought of hiring someone new.

It's catty and backstabby and fun and I found it to be a very nice ending to a hectic day.  I know I had to be on my very best behavior because I was a guest in someone's home and it was delicious to watch someone else be on their very worst.

Tangled (2010)

  Happy Thanksgiving!  In the spirit of not finding holiday-appropriate movies to watch, here's the newest Disney film!

This is the story of Rapunzel, the princess locked in the tower and forced to grow hair of a ridiculous length until she is rescued.  In this case, the story begins a couple of months before the princess is even born when the queen falls ill and requires the use of a magic flower to heal.  Unfortunately, the flower was being utilized by a selfish old lady to reverse the effects of aging so she's really pissed when they take it.  The princess is born and the old lady figures out that the girl's hair will perform the same trick but only if it's never cut, because if it is it loses its magic and turns brown instead of gold.

As a natural brunette, I have to say that particular plot-point rankled.

So she kidnaps the girl and locks her in a tower for eighteen years.  Right about then, the hero of the story (less of a hero and more of a thief on the run for stealing the Lost Princess' crown) climbs the tower and Rapunzel sees her ticket out.  From there, it's a pretty standard Quest movie.

This is the 50th animated film in the Disney Classics series and I have to say, it felt a little flat.  Not to say it was bad, because it wasn't, it just didn't reach the heights of say Aladdin or Beauty and the Beast.  There isn't one memorable song in the whole movie.  The only one that's close (in that I remember bits of it) is the "I've Got a Dream" song when they're in the Snuggly Duckling.  That part is adorable.

The animation is beautiful.  The mix of CGI and hand-drawn makes for a very deep world even if you go the 2D version over 3D.  And I believe that this is the first Disney animated movie to show a character bleeding, which is a stylistic change to say the least.

So I didn't walk out thinking it was a travesty but I'm probably not going to rush and buy it when it hits DVD either.  Which is a shame, really, since I own about 80% of all the animated Classics and I hate when my average starts to fall.

The Getaway (1972)

  This was a terrible movie.  It was boring as shit and made no sense.

Steve McQueen is in jail and has a ridiculously hot wife.  He doesn't want to be in jail so he tells his hot wife to go make a deal with the crooked sheriff so he can get parole.  She accomplishes this by sleeping with the sheriff.  Steve spends the rest of the movie pissed off at her about this. 
The crooked sheriff wants Steve to rob a bank because Steve is a master thief.  Maybe my concept of "master thief" is different than director Sam Peckinpah's, since in my world master thieves are the ones that don't get caught.  Crooked Sheriff sends Steve off to rob the bank with two random dudes; one is completely forgettable and the other is a dyed-in-the-wool psychopath.  Guess what happens?

/Final Jeopardy music

If you said "The forgettable guy gets capped when the heist goes wrong and the psychopath goes all psychopathy" congratulations!  /confetti cannon

Now Steve and his hot estranged wife take their marital problems on the run with a half million dollars in loot.  The Crooked Sheriff's goons and Rudy the Psychopath pursue, all the way to a hotel in El Paso...which was a terrible idea since nothing good ever happens in El Paso.

I'm already bored and I'm just trying to write a synopsis.  Bottom line:  everyone dies except Steve and Hot Wife and they patch up their differences over the border in Mexico.  The End.

/yawn

The only reason to watch this movie at all is the trainwreck that is Sally Struthers.  Oh, yes, the "won't someone feed the children and pass me another bucket of chicken" lady from the TV ads.  She gets involved as the ditzy vet assistant who takes up with Rudy the Psychopath.  It is never clear whether she's a hostage with Stockholm Syndrome or just too stupid to realize that Rudy is not a warm-and-fuzzy kind of guy.  Even if he does like kittens.

Plus, no boobs.  There is absolutely no reason why at least one of the chicks in this movie couldn't have shown something.  Hot Wife goes braless the entire film but never actually shows anything (which should be freakin' impossible.  I have only ever gone out braless twice and both times I was terrified of slippage and ended up taping my clothes to me).  Stupid Sally has no reason to be on-screen if not to display some ta-tas.  But no.  You get a flash of side-boob and that's it.  Lame.

Unstoppable (2010)

  Tony Scott has done the impossible:  he made a movie about trains interesting.  I was not going to go see this movie because my experience of trains is of sitting at those stupid little blinking red lights as I wait for an endless procession of identical cars to pass at roughly one-third the speed of paint drying.  Even after my brother recommended it to me I was disinclined to go but I figured the hell with it.  I hadn't seen a movie in theaters since RED in October and nothing else looked good at all.

It was outstanding.

The whole movie hinges on a series of bad decisions that, by themselves, wouldn't have been major but combined to form a catastrophe.  Ethan Suplee is pissed at his boss for breathing down his neck so he cuts corners by not connecting the air brake.  He gets down from the moving train to flip the track switch and the throttle slips.  Now there's a runaway train hauling toxic and highly combustible chemicals.
Chris Pine is a conductor only four months out of training.  Because he's on the phone about a restraining order his wife took out on him, he miscounts the number of cars he's supposed to add to his train and takes five more.  This will later prevent him and Denzel from being able to get onto a side track, forcing them to play chicken with said runaway train.
The people at Corporate keep trying to minimize the damage to their shareholders, refusing to be aware of how dangerous the situation really is.  They decide not to derail the train in an unpopulated area and try several other methods, each one progressively more desperate and dangerous.

The casting for this movie was spot-on.  Everyone did such a great job, especially Rosario Dawson.  They did everything they could to minimize her inherent beauty to make her more realistic, including hiding her rather large bust.

I know it's hard for women in Hollywood to make the transition from "hot girl" to "real actress" and I'm glad she's getting that chance.

The Lovely Bones (2009)

  This is one of those rare times that I remember HBO is useful for more than Boardwalk Empire and TrueBlood.  You may remember this film from the list of Oscar nominations in February.  Stanley Tucci was nominated for Best Supporting Actor but lost to Christoph Waltz for Inglourious Basterds.  Now that I've seen both films, I have to say I would have voted for Tucci but only by the smallest margin.  He was amazing in this movie.

The story is narrated by Susie Salmon, a fourteen-year-old girl who is murdered in a cornfield on her way home from school.  From her strange shifting world of Limbo, she is able to see the ripple effect her death has on the lives of her family and her killer.

Now, I watch a lot of True Crime shows and I spent several formative years fascinated by serial killers.

...

What?  Like you don't have hobbies?

Anyway, I appreciated the small details presented by Tucci's performance as the killer.  The stalking, the carefully innocuous facade, the meticulous planning leading up to the actual act and followed by an equally meticulous clean-up and trophy-taking.  It was a beautifully disturbing role and played with a quiet menace.  He was the cancer eating away at the Salmon family, twisting them into bloodless shells.

It's impossible to have a 'happy' ending when you know up front that the main character is dead, but the movie manages to be satisfying, at least on a karmic level.

Peter Jackson's eye for the fantastical seemed ever-so-slightly off to me on this film, which is really the only critical thing I can say about it.  His Limbo just seemed to be missing something.  I just don't think it went far enough into surreality but I can't really point to an example of where it should have gone further.  It's just one of those little niggling things that distracts from the overall effect, like an itchy tag on the inside of a really soft cashmere sweater.

Casino (1995)

  I was hoping to have had this posted for you last night but it just didn't happen. As a matter of fact, I'll confess that I cobbled together that TV update in one window while the movie played in another simply because Casino is about 30 seconds short of being a full 3 hours and I was never going to make my midnight deadline. 

Not that you shouldn't still enjoy A Bit of Fry and Laurie because you totally should.

This movie really exemplfies Martin Scorsese's aesthetic for mob movies.  It's flashy and loud with multiple voice-overs, rampant drug use, violence, characters that never end up enjoying their lives of crime, and the word 'fuck' (422 times!).  Seriously, the only thing that separates this from Goodfellas is the backdrop of the Vegas Strip.  That and DeNiro's wardrobe.

There is a lot of pastel. Although I do applaud any man who can wear pink.

As a movie, it's meh.  As a look back at popular fashions from 1973-1983, it's outstanding.  Seriously, I think the costume department should have been nominated for an Oscar just for Sharon Stone's hairstyles.