Subscribe to Comments
The 50 Day Movie Challenge asks one question every day, to be answered by a few paragraphs and a clip, if possible. Click here for the full list of questions.
Today’s prompt: What’s a movie you thought you would love that disappointed you?
When I first saw Pennies from Heaven (the 1981 version) on the schedule for the TCM Classic Film Festival, I was a little surprised – it was probably the most recent film of the festival, and I was like, this is a classic? Really? But the more I looked at it, the more excited I got to see it. It’s a musical, and I love musicals. It’s set in the 1930s, and I love Depression-era stories. It has Bernadette Peters in it, and I love Bernadette Peters (and the chance to see her in a film is rare). It also has Steve Martin, who’s fine, but his presence in a movie doesn’t influence my excitement one way or another. In any case, I was pretty stoked when I sat down to watch it.
And as every second ticked by my enjoyment fell further and futher and further until I was fairly hating the film by the end. First, the film has a bleak reality/joyful dream structure to it that can be fine, but put me off here because they’re integrated so poorly into each other. It’s just drab drab drab oh, sunny dance number. Second, all the songs are from the 1930s setting time period, but not only that, the original recordings are used so Steve and Bernadette are lipsyncing to them. That’s offputting, though I can kind of see, in theory, where they were going with that. But really, you put someone like Bernadette Peters in a movie and make her lipsync to someone else? WHY?! Third, I hated everyone in the story. They’re all despicable characters with no redeeming features, they make decisions that make no sense, and I didn’t believe anything that any of them did. When the end came around (*SPOILER* it involves Martin being framed and executed for murder), I just wanted them to shut up with the singing and kill him already, even though he was innocent. I didn’t care. I wanted out.
I tried and failed to find a clip of the recreation of the Fred and Ginger dance number “Let’s Face the Music and Dance”, because it was the only part of the movie I kind of liked, but even then I would’ve liked it a whole lot better if I had just been watching Follow the Fleet. Instead, here’s the first number from Peters. It’s not bad, per se, but the tone is weird and again, it’s not Bernadette singing.
Categories: Featured, FilmTags: 50 Day Movie Challenge, Herbert Ross, Pennies from Heaven, Steve Martin
I’ve had the Mythical Monkey on here before, but this post was too good not to include. It’s part of the series he’s doing through the silent era, but this post is entirely about Mary Pickford, one of the most popular and powerful actresses in the 1910s and 1920s. Dubbed America’s Sweetheart, she continued her streak of child parts in 1917, even though she was in her 20s at the time and had to use every bit of her intelligence and influence to even get them made. The more I find out about Pickford, the more impressed I am.
The difficulty that Terry Gilliam has with studios on nearly all of his films is well-known, and Brazil is a particularly well-documented case, but this is a really good read about the production and release of the film, based on interviews Gilliam did with his daughter Holly. Gilliam talks about his inspiration for the film itself, its design and plotting, and then goes on to discuss trying to get Universal to release it after they decided it was unreleasable. I found it particularly interesting that the film won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association award for best film and director of the year based on bootlegged copies LA critics had been passing around, since it wasn’t in general release. He also talks a bit about the different versions of the film.
Two posts from The Playlist over at Indiewire focusing on specific director’s filmographies. Criterion released two more Louis Malle films within the last month, and both of them make Lyttelton’s list of five intro films to Malle’s filmography. As noted in the comments, Malle is quite well-represented at Criterion, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing – he’s a varied and interesting filmmaker. This list ranges throughout his filmmography from the very New Wave-esque Elevator to the Gallows (whether Malle was a New Wave filmmaker depends on who you ask) to the patently bizarre Black Moon, one of the new Criterion releases. It’s a good intro, based on the three I’ve seen, to a filmmaker more people should definitely get to know. Meanwhile, I’ve only seen one Nicolas Roeg film, but this is a good place to start to dig further – a pretty detailed annotated list of Roeg’s films, along with an intro to his style and what he’s all about.
This is a really wideranging set of twelve silent films, from classics that everyone has seen like Metropolis to lesser-known Japanese and Brazilian silents. What I really like about it, though, is the inclusion of avant-garde films that may not necessarily be from the silent era but are still silent – like Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon and some of Stan Brakhage’s shorts. It’s easy to restrict “silent film” to a historical period, but some filmmakers continued using the techniques of silent cinema for long after it was technically necessary, often to great artistic effect. There are a whole bunch on this list I haven’t seen, but certainly want to check out now.
This is an older post even by the standards of this particular post, and it’s a compilation of even earlier posts, as Mark counts down the best classic film noir posters. I love 1940s posters in general, especially ones for B films (which a lot of noir films are), but I’ll admit that a lot of them start looking awfully similar to me pretty quickly. Mark brings his knowledge of graphic design to bear and does a nice job of differentiating them. He’s currently doing a similar series on classic sci-fi posters.
Chris is a great blogger focusing on silent film (he’s great to follow on Twitter, too – 
My only complaint about Blogdanovich, the blog over at Indiewire written by writer/director/film historian Peter Bogdanovich, is that the entries are tantalizingly short. I get that Peter’s probably a busy guy and I’m glad we get anything from him, but this is a great example. A bit about the importance of The 400 Blows in both French and American film (in the New Wave’s influence on New Hollywood, which Bogdanovich was part of), a bit about Truffaut and Hitchcock, and a personal anecdote about Bogdanovich’s interactions with Truffaut. I love this stuff, and Bogdanovich has such an interesting perspective on it as both a film lover and a filmmaker.
You thought some of the other articles in here were old…this one’s from 2009! Yeah, I been working on this post for a while. No, I just hit this post on a link from somewhere else (Self-Styled Siren, if I’m not mistaken), and loved the story in it, largely a quote from King Vidor’s autobiography about the lengths Lillian Gish went to in order to get the right emotion for a scene in La Boheme, but with surrounding context also worth reading.
I found I was throwing a bunch of links from Not Just Movies into my list of potential links for these posts, because really, every post is just that good. He does reviews ranging from new releases (I included his 
Source Code
Heartbeats
Ironclad
Life During Wartime Criterion
Leon Morin, Priest Criterion
Cracks
Limitless
Potiche
The Music Room Criterion
