The Moviebook Project #1

 

For the last six months or so, I have taken on a reading mission of sorts – what I so imaginatively have titled “The Moviebook Project”…

The mission that I chose to accept is to read old movie tie-in paperbacks from the 1970’s and ‘80’s – both classic source novels and low-brow novelizations – and then watch the film version to study how it was adapted and how well it worked or didn’t work in both mediums. 

Basically, I’m trying to relearn the architecture of storytelling.

And okay, yes, it also happens to simultaneously feed three of my favorite fetishes – an obsession with the movies I grew up on (what film critics often call “the last golden era of Hollywood”), a collecting jones for vintage paperbacks in general, and my overall weakness for any sort of nostalgia.

So, it has been half academic study, half time-travel redemption.

With classic novels/movies (like The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws), I really could not believe that as a young movie geek I had so often skipped reading the source material – that I didn’t have the artistic curiosity or, more likely, was just too damn lazy.  So the unofficial rule for the project became that I had to find the very specific and iconic paperback versions I would and SHOULD have read back in the day. No glossy anniversary edition with “A New Forward By—“. I wanted to feel like I was browsing an old drugstore spin rack; pulling out the authentic original with all the same tactile sensations four decades later – even if it meant reading cramped type on an age-tanned page. 

It may seem like a silly requirement, and it probably is, but it made the hunt on Ebay that much more difficult, and therefore more fun. 

With the novelizations, the tricky part was finding decent copies at all. Many of them are much more expensive than the famous novels just by the mere fact of their obscurity, and in some cases, downright rarity.

To be honest, when I was younger I had zero interest in reading novelizations. I riffled through them in the bookstore but never bought them. The idea of trying to experience on the page what had already been filmed seemed pointless to me. I figured they were written by “hacks” and could only be clunky and obvious.

And some novelizations – many even – DO fall into that category.

But what I didn’t appreciate at the time is that these assignments were often given to talented novelists who, through no fault of their own, had just never broken out into mainstream success. These were hard-working writers who needed the paycheck, yes, but who couldn’t “phone it in” even if they wanted to because it was too important. Besides their natural love for good storytelling, they also wanted to take advantage of all those eyeballs on their work and steer readers to their other, more personal books.

Given a bit of a fool’s errand, they welcomed the challenge of somehow making the story their own and showing off their talent in the process.  

Time has humbled me (and how!), so I have genuine respect for all those poor ink-stained wretches now.

So what novels and novelizations have I read so far? 

  • True Grit
  • Klute
  • Straw Dogs
  • Summer Of ’42
  • The Hot Rock
  • Love Story
  • The Godfather
  • The Exorcist
  • Jaws
  • Paper Moon (Addie Pray)
  • True Grit
  • Network
  • American Gigolo
  • The Abominable Dr. Phibes
  • The Stepford Wives
  • Midnight Cowboy
  • The Friends Of Eddie Coyle
  • Marathon Man
  • Duel
  • Time After Time
  • Alien
  • The Thing
  • WW And The Dixie Dancekings
  • Candy
  • Bedtime Story
  • That Cold Day In The Park
  • Last Summer
  • The Front
  • Save The Tiger
  • A New Leaf
  • Deliverance
  • They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
  • Black Christmas
  • Inserts
  • Oh, God
  • Harry & Tonto

And, as you can see from the photos, I have many big-name titles (almost 200) still to go! As I make my way through the list, I will post updates, quick reactions, and probably a few in-depth reviews on the most interesting ones…

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A quick summary of my thoughts so far:

THE SOURCE NOVELS 

The aforementioned legendary titles, Jaws, The Exorcist, and The Godfather, lived up to their reputations and did not disappoint. Yes, they were pulpy potboilers whose sensationalist material was somewhat elevated by Spielberg, Friedkin, and Coppola respectively, but all three laid out very solid, specific templates for the resulting films. It is not difficult to see how they became bestsellers to begin with or why Hollywood snapped them up.

Love Story really surprised me. I find the movie cringingly mawkish and dated, but the novel is slim, spare, and evokes genuine feeling. 

Other titles ranged from very good (Deliverance, Summer of ’42, Oh God!, Marathon Man, The Stepford Wives) to pretty good (Straw Dogs, Save The Tiger, The Hot Rock) to only fair at best (Midnight Cowboy).

BUT FOUR NOVELS absolutely blew me away!

Despite their marginalized status as “genre fiction”, I have no problem at all calling them modern classics:

True Grit by Charles Portis. Pure literary gold. Stands the test of time as much as, and, in my opinion, is the equal of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. It inspired two great movies in very different eras and styles, and is still better than both.

Paper Moon (Original title: Addie Pray) by Joe David Brown. Pure literary silver? Similar in style and tone to Portis’ book, narrated by another young female protagonist in a hilariously colorful Southern vernacular, it has more significant differences from its great film counterpart (screenplay by Alvin Sargent), but is still pure reading joy from cover to cover. 

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? by Horace McCoy. Written in the lean style of a hard-boiled crime novel, yes, but also a searing expose of life during The Great Depression. Packs a powerful punch. 

The Friends Of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins. A gritty, messy, but always human, and very authentic look at the dealings of a group of low-level Boston hoods. Elmore Leonard called it the greatest crime novel ever written. He should know. And after reading it, I can’t imagine anyone arguing with him. It’s great stuff. Which makes it even more disappointing that the 1972 film directed by Peter Yates (Bullitt), starring Robert Mitchum no less, is such a damp squib. What a waste! But as Stephen King often says, the book is still there on the shelf… 

My prized 70’s Bantam paperback ($1.50)

All four of these books are MUST READS!

WORST SOURCE NOVEL

The Abominable Dr. Phibes by William Goldstein.

This book contained some of the worst published writing I have ever read in my lifetime – it somehow manages to be amateurish and pretentious at the same time. It was so impenetrable I couldn’t even finish it. After the success of the film, Goldstein wrote a handful of sequels…which almost as a strict bylaw of physics would have to be better than the original. Just god-awful. 

Candy and Time After Time – the latter NOT written by filmmaker/author Nicholas Meyer – were also complete messes on the page, but at least were coherent enough to finish. They were Tolstoy next to Dr. Phibes.

BEST NOVELIZATION

Bedtime Story by Richard Wormser. 

I broke my 1970’s theme by including this mostly-forgotten comedy from 1964 starring Marlon Brando, David Niven, and Shirley Jones. A silly, sexy farce about two con men in the south of France battling over a rich American widow, people know its more financially successful remake, 1988’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels with Steve Martin and Michael Caine. I prefer the original.

Of course, when I went to read the novelization I wasn’t expecting much at all, but RICHARD WORMSER just happened to be one of those talented jobbing writers I mentioned earlier who could never give any less than his best and he was clearly having a ball with this one. He manages to improve on the film by changing the narrative point-of-view with each chapter, giving each character their own opinionated say, which really adds to the fun. And if you love stories about the confidence game he gives a master class in the tricks of the trade. It is witty, clever, and actually had me laughing out load. 

If you can find a copy on Ebay I highly recommend you check it out. It won’t be my used copy though – I’m holding on to mine. 

This was such a joyful surprise I did in fact seek out Wormser’s other books. He wrote a lot of pulp detective stories and Westerns that can still be found. He never became a big name (his autobiography is sadly entitled “How To Become A Complete Non-Entity”), but 6 decades later his craft shines. 

Runner-Up: W.W. and The Dixie Dancekings by Thomas Rickman.

Much of what I just said also applies to this charming little comedy about a bank-robbing rogue (Burt Reynolds, natch) who cons his way into managing a Country-Western group in the 1950’s. This is a much sought-after title ever since Quentin Tarantino mentioned it publicly as a favorite of his (and despite the fact most of his fans have never seen and would probably just shrug at the low-key film) and as much I generally hate to agree with him, he is right about this one.

WORST NOVELIZATION

Black Christmas by Lee Hays

The movie is one of my favorite horror films and the paperback is so hard-to-find I could only read a PDF uploaded by a fan online. Any thrill I felt at finally (sort of) getting my hands on it quickly dissipated when I saw what a slipshod job it was. It feels like an assignment that a student on a coffee-fueled bender knocked out the night before his deadline. Given the B-movie standards of 1974, I’m sure that’s pretty much what it was. It is dull, rife with errors, and does not even attempt to add context or depth to the story or characters. In fact, it only muddies the mystery killer’s motivations – the most interesting part of the film!

Lee Hays went on to write other novelizations and they may be good, but this one is the most cursory excuse, exemplifies the worst, of the movie tie-in book.

I finished it, but hated myself all the way.

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Anyway…

More to come on this project and what I learn along the way.

Watch this, uhm, moviebookspace.

Unmoved, The Holdout

Why doesn’t THE HOLDOVERS, the latest film from Alexander Payne, work for me the way it seems to work for everyone else?

I saw it at a packed preview screening before the film’s official release, and the audience laughed and gasped at every mildly amusing line of dialogue or tiny plot development. Such was the forced nature of their reaction that I started to wonder if there were “plants” in the audience. They even applauded at the end. I suspect it was that thing  where people who get free tickets to a film are doggedly determined to love it no matter what. You see this a lot when you attend film festivals. There’s a long history of films that slayed at festivals only to die a quick death at the regular box office.

The question is did feeling so out of tune with my audience make me even more resistant than I already was to the film? 

Well, I don’t think it helped.

Like most movie geeks I can be stubborn that way.

It may also be I was hyper-critical because this genre, the slice-of-life sad/funny character piece, is usually my sweet spot as a filmgoer. I am a sentimental sap. I like nothing more than a movie that makes me care about loser characters and their personal crises and the catharsis of seeing them grow (just) a little bit and connect to other people. These types of “small” stories are becoming as rare as unicorns in the current cinematic climate and I have great nostalgia and hunger for them. So, my disappointment when they miss the mark, feel phony or contrived to me, is all that much greater.

It is also true Alexander Payne’s movies have always been hit or miss for me.

I loved ELECTION, his savage black comedy about High School politics with Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick. Payne’s snide misanthropy worked perfectly for that satire – it was almost exhilarating.

I didn’t share the widespread love, though, for SIDEWAYS, his first film with Paul Giammatti, which I felt was too cynical and pointlessly cruel to its protagonist. There is a fine line between giving us quirky flawed “losers” and showing actual contempt for them.

Later on, ABOUT SCHMIDT and NEBRASKA, while still martini dry, found a much gentler balance, showed more compassion for his characters.  It felt like Payne was growing not just as a filmmaker but as a human being.

On the other hand, I absolutely hated THE DESCENDANTS with George Clooney, a blatant awards bid which went soft to the point of melodrama. I did not believe a single moment of that film.

And, of course, the less said about the bizarre waste of time and talent that was  DOWNSIZING, with Matt Damon, the better.  

It may be that after that failure Payne (once again, as with THE DESCENDANTS)  over-corrected in pursuit of pleasing the audience. Because the bottom line with THE HOLDOVERS is that, unfortunately, I felt emotionally manipulated and never completely bought into the details of the story. From the first scenes, something about it seemed “written” to me – as opposed to alive and unfolding in real time before my eyes. It all felt “movie familiar” and too pat. 

I do respect the film’s desire to be true to the 1970’s time period – and, on that front, it succeeds. It has all the muted grime of my favorite era.

Everything else, though, from the overly-familiar setting (an upper-class boarding school) to the two lead characters, set in opposition but not enough to create actual tension, feels contrived. The subsequent “explanations” for why they are who they are – Giammatti getting kicked out of Harvard, the student (Dominic Sessa) having a father who is mentally ill – are more Mad Lib-style interchangeable screenwriting tropes than real reasons, real trauma. 

Even Da’Vine Joy Randolph, deserving of her Oscar win and definitely the film’s high point as the school lunch lady who has lost her son in Vietnam, is saddled with a fairly one-note character who never fully evolves. 



The final conflict, where the mother of the boy shows up at school angry that he has been allowed to visit his father in a mental ward, feels particularly fake. It makes little sense and is there only to force Giammatti’s character to take a stand of integrity for the young man even if it means losing his job at the academy. It is “Dead Poets Society” meets “Scent Of A Woman” all over again.

It seems to me Payne is always torn between his basic pessimistic nature – a snarky hipster’s view of “little people” – and his professional need to give an audience an easily digestible (if instantly forgettable) comedy. 

In any case, I hope he doesn’t take the wrong lessons from this film’s overly-generous critical reception, and next time gives us something that, whether downbeat or upbeat, is organic and authentic.

A feelgood movie needs to first make us feel it’s real.

When Sally Met 2023 – What Happens Later (Updated)

When I first read an early article about this project…that Meg Ryan was directing and acting in a romantic-comedy with David Duchovny based on a two-person play about old lovers meeting in an airport during a snowstorm…I had a strange feeling that this might actually turn out to be a good film.

Now, seeing this trailer, I think my initial hunch might just be correct.

All the elements were/are there to make it something special. Two actors who have fallen off the radar, are overdue for a comeback, in a romantic film about and for people who are aging out of romantic-comedy territory. There’s real novelty and potential in that. And then to be directed by an actress who was at one time the most famous representative of the genre, “America’s Sweetheart” herself, that gives it an even more interesting angle.

In recent years, Meg Ryan has more often been the subject of speculation about her plastic surgery mistakes than a working actress. She seemed to have retired from her acting career altogether. She made her directing debut in 2015 with a little-seen film called Ithaca, in which she had a small role. But otherwise, she was reduced to appearing in People magazine because of her on-again/off-again relationship with John Mellancamp.

So it’s genuinely nice to see her again – face older, yes, but nicely so, and relaxed – and to find in this trailer that she still has that witty, effervescent quality that made everyone fall in love with her 30 years ago. 

Until very recently, Duchovny pulled his own disappearing act for a long time there. And his own face looked suspiciously altered, took on a strange bloated Garry Shandling-like look. He often had a drugged, numb quality in the projects we did see him in. Here he seems to be back in both look and alertness and has just the right weathered sarcasm for this late-love story. 

The actors feel perfectly matched in temperament and acting style.

The film has a nice professional gloss, but looks appropriately intimate, not trying to hide that it’s a two-hander. The dialogue doesn’t feel overly jokey or forced (see: Ticket To Paradise with Julia Roberts and George Clooney…or, on second thought, don’t). The only point of concern for me is the surreal touch of the PA Announcement Guy actually responding to them – it might play well as a conceit when I see the whole film, but at first glance it seems like an unnecessary gimmick that might take away from the story’s reality. I hope I’m wrong and I may well be. It could be argued that this whimsical touch makes the contrived premise – stuck all alone in an abandoned airport after hours – more self-aware and easier to accept.  WWNED – What Would Nora Ephron Do?

Overall though, I’m very optimistic, and the timing feels right not just for the return of the old-fashioned romantic-comedy, but one that wears its wrinkles and exhausted love life with a sigh and a twinkle in the eye.

Here’s hoping.

POSTSCRIPT:

I was wrong. I was so, so wrong…

I finally got around to seeing this movie this week on Pay Per View. Despite reading some pretty withering reviews I still held out hope it was somehow misunderstood and underappreciated.

NOPE.

It is really that bad. It is a phenomenally, painfully bad movie. 

It is so bad it hardly makes any sense to point out the flaws because…well, life is too short. There were so many terrible choices made in the execution of what could have been, should have been, a bittersweet and mature Rom-Com about aging and regret and lost love, that I wouldn’t know where to start.

The screenplay is based on a play, but that is not the problem – the confined setting of being stuck in an airport during a blizzard, if played realistically, is the perfect excuse for a believable two-hander. The problem is there is absolutely nothing realistic about the way the two characters and the situation are written.  Turns out the God-like PA Announcer talking to them was a bad sign after all. Sure enough, the tone Meg Ryan seems to be going for is one of “magical fate” ala her old hit “Sleepless In Seattle” (she even dedicates the movie to Ephron), but that forced whimsy does not mix well with her awkward attempts at pathos and emotional catharsis in the third act. Since none of it feels remotely real, least of all the ex-lovers themselves and their history together, it is impossible to get engaged enough to care what happens. It is especially frustrating because, as I said before I saw it, these are two likable veteran performers who could really have created something special with better material.

But Meg Ryan The Director seriously fails Meg Ryan The Actress here…and David Duchovny, despite a valiant effort, doesn’t fare much better.

By the ending, when they are sat in two different airplanes side-by-side on the runway and mugging at each other through their windows as if just inches apart, all one can do is sigh and rub their face in pure misery.

And, god help us, that’s before the two planes’ contrails make a heart in the sky.

How could they have fucked this up so badly?

Somebody should have told Ryan she had a great premise, but a lousy script that needed a Page One rewrite. They should have told her that if she cut the cutesy stuff and played it real she could make a small modern classic.

As it stands…it is a complete waste of time.

Bittersweet, alright. 

Movie Poster Of The Week – A Rainy Day In New York

And sometimes a bad movie gets a great poster.

Well, in Japan, at least.

Soft-focus, simple, cinematic…

I love this shot of Selena Gomez and Timothy Chalomet kissing in the rain from the end of A Rainy Day In New York.  (Great title, too)

Unfortunately, the actual film it was selling is one of Woody Allen’s most strained and cringe-worthy late-career attempts to impose his 80-something sensibility on a contemporary story with characters in their 20’s. None of it rings true or is in any way amusing and it may have finally been a film too far for even his most stalwart defenders.

For what it’s worth, I think Woody has been treated very unfairly for the last decade – it disgusts me the way the general public has presumed him guilty because of one accusation from a bitter Ex- that is completely unsupported by facts or common sense. A great career has been tarnished with a kind of mob mentality and idiotic group-think that makes me sick.

However, there is no avoiding the harsh truth: in that same decade, his movies have only gotten worse and worse. The last two I remember enjoying – and I seem to be in the minority, according to Rotten Tomatoes –  were Whatever Works (2009) with Larry David, and Magic In The Moonlight (2014) with Colin Firth and Emma Stone. I thought both were slight but fun diversions. In between them came his last financial and critical successes, Midnight In Paris (2011) and Blue Jasmine (2013), which I thought were good but overrated.

Ever since I have had an increasingly hard time just sitting through the entirety of one of his films. His dialogue was always a little stylized and stiff, but it was also brilliantly witty; now it just feels clumsy, amateurish even.

He has a new film debuting soon at the Venice Film Festival. It is entirely in French. He is in exile not just from his country, but his own language!  What are the chances the translated dialogue is any less stilted?

But hey, who knows?

It may be an amazing return to form – hope springs eternal…

Who doesn’t want one more great Woody?

And I also know no matter what happens now – or who objects, wants him canceled out of existence – his legacy as a filmmaker is secure.

I just find it sad that in this case his movie did not come close to fulfilling the grandly romantic promise of the above poster.

It might as well read: This movie is never coming to a theater near you.

Severed Head

I guess I was the only one in the world disappointed by the season finale of the Apple series, Severance.

I’m only reading rave reviews everywhere I look. People seem to be satisfied with the cliffhanger and all the unanswered questions and perfectly willing to wait a year for Season 2. But I can’t help but feel it is just the latest example of a syndrome all too common in TV nowadays – the creation of some vague conspiracy/mystery/dystopia where the questions only multiply with each episode and the true answers to what is going on remain elusive even at season’s end. Why? Because the creators don’t know the answers themselves and are just milking the weirdness until they can figure it out. It’s a cheat.

Call it The “Lost” Effect, after that series amped up the ludicrousness and made a mint doing it.

Not that Severance is not well made – the writing, acting, direction are all first-rate – or that I have not enjoyed it overall. But the “enjoyment” has hinged on suspense and wanting to know how this world operates. I knew there was way too much to resolve for the season finale to wrap everything up in a bow, but I still expected some morsels of substance, a little more meat on the bone to tide us over until it picks up again.

What we got instead was more frustrating than exciting. I’m not against cliffhangers per se, but there has to be some forward progress in the story in order to EARN that cliffhanger, and here I just felt they were vamping, filling, stalling for time. It felt like a craven act of subscription greed: “Want more? Pony up, bitches”.

Which honestly makes me wonder if it is worth coming back at all for Season 2.

I have found out the hard way that if the show runners are comfortable letting the audience down like this once, and they get away with it, then they will continue to do it again and again. Which means a lot of wasted viewing hours leading nowhere. If I think I’m being jerked around (like I did after 4 episodes of critical darling, Yellowjackets), I cut bait and move on. Wrong or right, if a show is trying to be everything and nothing, too much and not enough, its fingers in every genre with no real sense of consistency or true purpose, I feel like I’m being suckered. It has become more and more prevalent as streaming services compete for eyeballs. Shows are playing more like clickbait than well-thought-out complete stories that will deliver a proper beginning, middle and end.

It doesn’t matter how great individual episodes are if there is no overarching plan or ultimate destination for the story. I need to know you are not just making shit up as you go along – that you will explain all this crazy randomness and pay it off down the line.

So…yeah, I guess I was disappointed.

However, as I say, I seem to be completely alone in this reaction. The consensus is: “best show in years”, “well done, can’t wait for the show to return”.

I may be the one and only case of actual severence.

Movie Poster Of The Week – Blood Simple

You didn’t even have to enter the theater in 1985, or sit through their debut film, Blood Simple, to know the Coen Brothers, with their morbid, deadpan sensibility, were going to be a unique filmmaking force…

It was all right there in the poster.

It seems so, uh, simple now…hardly noteworthy; but at the time, posters for independent films were almost always garishly illustrated affairs filled with blood, explosions, fists and tits.  They reeked of desperation – anything to grab your attention.  In comparison, this was so subtle.  A wink and a whisper.  It promises: this is not your average cheap genre flick.  It has style.  Confidence.  Intelligence.  It suggests a twisty Film Noir plot – a steamy affair that leads to murder – with only two pair of feet (contrasted in boots and high heels) and a purse that has spilled out a motel key, a make-up compact, and a revolver.

It doesn’t matter there is no such scene in the film itself —

It makes us lean in, look closer…

Did she just drop it?  Has he even noticed it yet?  Is the gun meant for him?  Is he twisting her arm?  Are they kissing or fighting?  Both??    

And why don’t we see their faces, you might add.

Firstly, as just illustrated, because it is more interesting to imagine the drama in progress just out of/above frame.  After all, the image plays off a long-established cinematic trope: illicit lovers in over their heads.  So…who needs the heads?

But more relevantly, in purely practical terms, this film was a micro-budget thriller with two completely unknown actors in the lead roles (including future Best Actress and Mrs. Joel, Frances McDormand), so why bother even showing them?  The real “stars” were behind the camera.  Their precocious craft and attitude showing in all that arrogant blank space, glowing neon border…

Or, as seen below, by a possessive credit already snugly above the title:

And then there’s that tag line…    Breaking up is hard to do.

Raymond Chandler meets Neal Sedaka – the perfect smirk.  Promising us a sly modern spin on private-eye pulp.

When I first saw the poster in a multiplex lobby somewhere in the San Fernando Valley – the bare color version at top (but WITH that tag line) – it stopped me cold.  None of those critics’ quotes cluttering up the image yet and I didn’t need them.  I was sold.  Love at first teaser.

Where do I get my ticket?

It was the austerity/mystery I miss so much in today’s film advertising…

The fact the movie kept the poster’s promise and turned out to be just as cool and quirky, dark and smart, and truly surprising as I hoped it would be, was the historic part.  The Coens were off and running – kicking off one of the all-time great bodies of work in American film history.  And whenever their comedies got too obscure or fanciful (at least for mainstream consumption), they would return to their Noir roots and create hard-boiled crime tales like Miller’s Crossing, or Fargo, or their masterful adaptation of No Country For Old Men.

It all started with a not-quite-dead guy and a shovel.

And maybe the biggest compliment I can pay them – not that they ever curried anyone’s favor – is the fact that, as good as it is, Blood Simple lands maybe sixth or seventh on My Favorite Coens’ list.  Over the next few decades, they proved their genius over and over with Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou, A Serious Man, True Grit, Inside Llewyn Davis.

Most recently, their latest, The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs, a typically-droll but also poignant rumination on death, was my choice for Best Film of 2018.  If it had not been released on Netflix, I believe it would have made the Oscar shortlist.

And now it seems like they are closing up shop, inching towards the exit doors.

But, oh man, what an entrance.

 

Crazy Ex-Musical

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend wrapped its four-year run last night…

The final episode did a pretty decent job of saying farewell to Rebecca Bunch and her friends, and the concert afterwards was a nice celebration.

I won’t lie, I was increasingly disappointed in the show over the last two seasons.  For me, what began as such an audacious and wonderfully rude show, loaded with snarky musical numbers, became too focused on Rebecca’s mental health and a little too preachy for its own good.

All that therapy-speak about “getting help” and “doing the work”, along with a hyper-woke feminism and gender correctness, just seemed to smother all the dark comedy.  So much of what made the show work was Rebecca being wildly inappropriate and selfish.  With the subversive wit ironed out, she and the other characters were left with nothing to do but stand around and be nice to each other, blandly spout exposition.  The jokes dried up.

Even worse, the CW seemed to radically slash their production budget, taking them from Broadway show/MTV parody-level glitz all the way down to bare-bones college sketch show.  Every week there was less and less music, and what was there was less inspired, more cursory.  The creators were clearly exhausted.  And who can blame them?  They wrote a total of 157 songs over the last 4 years!  The novelty of the format was gone.  It was time to call it a day.

It was no surprise that in the end Rebecca Bunch discovered her true love was musical comedy and chose it over the three guys who (somewhat unrealistically) were pining and competing for her.  It was the message of self-actualization the series had been pushing since the end of Season 2.  Like her creator, she realizes songwriting is a way to drive the voices from her head and replace an unhealthy obsession with a creative one, an outlet for her vivid imagination.

(Although the conceit that all the musical numbers were in her head doesn’t jibe with all the songs sung by other characters without her even being present…but who’s nitpicking?  I don’t think the songs need any “explanation” at all.)

It may be a bit disingenuous to say she can’t pursue her talent and date someone at the same time – after all, Rachel Bloom is married in real life – but they had so neutered the male characters over the course of the season there was no real chemistry to act on anyway.  We didn’t much care anymore.  But again, I get it, that was sort of the point.  In the last scene, standing onstage at a nightclub filled with her friends, she says she came to West Covina to find love…and she did – she loves everyone in the room.  A nice touch that brings it full circle.

Then, after a full hour of build-up, she finally sits down at a keyboard to play us “a song I wrote”, and before she can strike a single note the show ends right there – like Tony Soprano eating an onion ring – giving us no big musical climax, no cathartic payoff after four years.  Instead, they just cut to the live concert where the cast reprised old songs for a packed audience of fans.

It felt like a cop-out, like they were limping over the finish line…

If ever a series deserved a big finish, this was it.

But I guess the real miracle is that the series ever existed to begin with.  What Bloom and her collaborators achieved (including Adam Schlesinger, the prodigy behind the band Fountains Of Wayne and Tom Hanks’ That Thing You Do) was something nobody else has ever done before on television and is not likely to happen again: they produced a quality musical sitcom with catchy, clever original numbers and big laughs week after week after week.

And they did it on sheer talent and force of will, all the while fighting low ratings and the hovering CW axe.  Not a small feat.

So, well done, Becks.

In memory, here are my choices for the Top Ten Songs that highlight the series at its very best…  (Only two hours from the beach!)

You can’t beat the very first number, “West Covina” – it set the tone for everything that followed: edgy but exhilarating, knowing but full of goofy unabashed joy and pure showmanship.  Not to mention that pretzel lift at the end…

 

This quickie about the lasting psychological effects of being unpopular in school was an instant classic.  Never fails to make me laugh.

This was wonderfully giddy satire – a parody of inspirational songs.

This second-year title song was the best ear-worm of the series.

This one takes the title as biggest, most elaborate production number – Rebecca’s take on Marilyn Monroe’s “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend”.

 

I think this is the sweetest/sexiest thing Rachel Bloom ever wrote –

She never failed to push the raunch envelope, but always in a fun way.  Hard to believe she got away with these two songs on TV –

Being my musical era, I had to love this disco tribute (and Soul Train homage) –

 

And finally, from Season 3, this wicked and perfectly realized version of a 60’s  girl-group song about Rebecca’s slightly evil mom –

For No Good Reason…

Actresses Sittin’ Around Smokin’ In ’77

This is a great series of shots…

They were taken in New York City, on November 21, 1977 – nearly 42 years ago – at a Thanksgiving party at a place called Sybil’s, “a new disco and backgammon club inside the Hilton Hotel”.  (Cuz, as everyone knows, after dancing the night away and doing cocaine there’s nothing better than sitting down for a long dull game of backgammon.  On Thanksgiving.)  Mostly it just looks like an excuse for three hot actresses of the moment to hit the town together.

The beautiful and talented trio – Amy Irving, Carrie Fisher, and Teri Garr – are lighting up cigs in black-and-white like their own private French movie.  Carrie was 21, Amy, 24, and Teri, 29.  Amy had just done Carrie (the movie, not Fisher – get your mind out of the gutter) and was dating Steven Spielberg, Carrie was hot off Star Wars and dating Dan Ackroyd, and Teri, of Young Frankenstein and Close Encounters fame, was just a few years away from flirting faux-angrily with David Letterman on national television.

They are all caught here at peak adorability…

And the sequence of the photos gives you a real feeling of being there.  You can almost hear them laughing and talking over each other.  Loose and having fun.  Clearly aware of the photographers, but enjoying the attention.

This shot was probably the only one that made the press at the time.    Notice how the cigarettes are discreetly cropped out.

Further Googling brought up this COLOR sequence…

I love this last faded one where Amy seems momentarily sad and spaced-out (even more French!).  God, she was sexy…  Just gorgeous.  That mane of curly hair.  But then, Carrie is kinda’ glowing too.  As is Teri in the shot before – then turning shy and wary just as quick, in that oddly self-conscious way of hers.  At one time or another, I had a movie-geek crush on all of them.

What makes it sad is when you remember that, of the three, only Amy is alive and well in 2019.  Carrie, of course, died of a heart attack at the end of 2016, and Teri is very ill with advanced Parkinson’s Disease.

I don’t know if smoking has any connection to Parkinson’s, but Carrie’s lifelong habit most likely played a role in her premature death (an anti-smoking group actually used her image in their ads afterward).  But she also had plenty of other contributing factors.  I don’t think 20 cans of Coke a day were much help.  There were years and years of hard drugs, her ballooning weight, and simply being manic-depressive takes a pretty heavy physical toll all by itself.

But then, all that Quirkiness-Without-A-Cure, the vices, the pain, all of it, also made her a brilliantly clever novelist and screenwriter.

And in these pictures at least, she is still young and cute, happy and healthy…  They all are.  Frozen that way.

It’s nice to see our space princess smiling…

In any case, she would probably tell us she had no regrets.

And to fuck off.

 

Albert Finney 1936-2019

Albert Finney was an actor’s actor.

I’m sure many obituaries are saying the same thing, because it’s true.  He wasn’t a recognizable name (let alone, face) to the majority of “civilians” out there, but to actors and anybody in show business he was a legend.  He was one of those true acting talents that remained pure no matter what he did, who elevated the final product no matter what it was.  He had no interest in publicity or the Hollywood game.  He made odd career choices, choosing characters decades older and playing against type when he could have easily been a leading man.  He “disappeared” for years, and then would show up in a completely different type of film and wow you all over again with his craft and presence.

The first time I saw him on screen as a kid was in Scrooge, a musical version of A Christmas Carol.  I loved it.  It is still my favorite version of that classic story.  But I had no idea who he was as a name actor.  How could I?  Here he was in his mid-30’s, playing the stingy, crotchety old title character with grotesque relish and a bald cap, and no doubt driving his agents crazy.

Then a few years later, an even greater favorite of mine, Murder On The Orient Express.  He was absolutely brilliant as the eccentric Hercule Poirot – nobody has ever matched him, certainly not Kenneth Branagh in his execrable remake – but again, I had no clue it was the Scrooge guy, or how he had TWICE made himself utterly unrecognizable to play the part.  The perverse joy of hiding in a character like that clearly thrilled him in a way that playing, say, a Michael Caine-type part of a spy or womanizer didn’t.  He didn’t want to be pinned down with a persona, idolized, or really even known at all.  That wasn’t the job.  That wasn’t the fun.  He just wanted to show up, slip into the costume and surprise you.

He may have been making movies, but his work ethic and philosophy were still tied to the theatre.  It wasn’t about image, it was just about ACTING.

You see this in his unusual choice of Annie and The Dresser as well.

Of course, eventually all that integrity and not playing the Hollywood game ends up putting a pinch on your wallet, so in the early 80’s he did what all great British actors do and took a few movies just for the money – little B-movies like Wolfen and Looker.  But he still emerged with dignity intact.  He was unsinkable, no matter what the material.  You could never catch him phoning it in.

Then in 1982, he gave what I consider to be his finest performance on film, Shoot The Moon – a somber but exhilarating look at divorce with Diane Keaton, written by Bo Goldman and directed by Alan Parker.  It is a film I am constantly having to introduce people to, totally overlooked and forgotten, but it gave him a chance to play a low-key, much more naturalistic slice-of-life and he showed a whole new side of his talent.  No longer “hiding” in a bigger-than-life character, he stood still and let his character, George Dunlap, be exposed in all his mid-life frailty.

The ending, which is truly wild and could easily have stretched credulity, pivots entirely on Finney’s ability to show us both George’s polite outer-calm and his repressed fury, and he makes it utterly believable and so poignant.

In a way, it serves as a kind of bookend to his breakout role as the prototypical Angry Young Man in the 1960 British film, Saturday Night And Sunday Morning.  I strongly recommend you find and watch that movie as well.  Shot in crisp black-and-white, Finney plays a hard-drinking factory worker torn between cynicism about his dead-end life and a young woman who offers him simple happiness.  He transforms what could be an unlikable cad into a flawed hero we actually care about.  It is easy to see why it made Finney a star.

I would round out his best screen work with Miller’s Crossing, Erin Brockovich, and Big Fish.  Even his tiny cameo in Skyfall was a joy.

As with all great actors, you always want more.

But in the end he did it his way.

The “civilians” might have only a vague awareness of the man, but the roles he played are indelible and forever – they do all the talking for him.

Each one of them a bloody marvel.