Dangling over Death: Harold (Lloyd) hangs on!

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Tahiti Trot: the twisted genius of Marlon Brando

Oh boy, Marlon Brando dancing in tight pants. I wouldn't even be on this subject at all today, were it not for Turner Classics and their insidious habit of showing movies that drag back whole chunks of your emotional history.

I don't want to think about this even now, because for a while there the musical score of this movie haunted me every damn minute, to the point that I had to purposely force myself to remember the William Tell Overture to drown it out.  The movie is On the Waterfront, and every few years I watch it, almost against my will. It's the movie for my life, and every time I see it I tell myself, "THIS time I won't cry. I know what's going to happen. I won't get caught up in it."

"This" time, I sobbed my guts out and didn't even know why, any more than I'd known all the other times. It had embedded itself in me: or has it ever NOT been embedded in me since the first time I saw it?

I was thirteen years old and "sleeping in the den", a special treat: I got to sleep on a creaky, lumpy pull-out sofa with brutal cold hardware on the sides, so I could stay up and watch a movie (or movies, depending on how long I could stay awake). This movie, this On the Waterfront just came on, and after a while my brother Arthur came in from wherever he'd been - out drinking, I think. We watched it together, and I recorded the sound track on an old Webcor reel-to-reel.

Is this why it became so embedded in my brain stem, because I listened to the sound track so many times? Is this why the glorious, ferocious Leonard Bernstein score still thunders through my brain whether I want it to or not? Or is it the fact that Arthur died in 1980, and this is one of the few fragments I have left of him? I remember we did a highly disrespectful satire of the movie, the two of us playing all the roles (I was Edie, Charlie and the priest) and recorded it on the Webcor. But I am sure it wasn't just a sendup. The movie had gotten to both of us.

I don't want to go into the details of the story, except to say it's the classic good-versus-evil struggle, integrity versus an almost cartoonish oppression. Brando plays Terry Malloy, a washed-up prizefighter ("I coulda had class! I coulda been a contend-ah! I coulda been somebody.") singlehandedly taking on savagely corrupt waterfront powerbrokers and winning. But not before a lot of compelling scenes with the virginal Eva Marie Saint, and a thunderous performance by Karl Malden as a renegade priest. "Boys: this IS my church!"

Somehow it comes around again, mysteriously, like a season. I've forced friends of mine to watch it with me over the years just to show them how it's the best movie ever made, even though I am sure they don't get it ("Look, look, there's a cross on the roof! An unintential cross! It means Charlie is going to be sacrificed, you know?"). Instead of losing intensity, as it probably should, its power seems to accumulate so that it now has the capacity to completely mow me down.

At thirteen, I found myself in a Marlon Brando phase. On the Waterfront came out in 1954, so it was as old as I was, and it was a little disappointing to discover that Brando was not the same man. Already he had turned very strange, had started to lose his astonishing good looks and charisma and gain a distressing amount of weight around his middle (later to transform him into a literal square, broad as he was long). He was hanging around with all these Tahitian women and having a whole lot of children with them. All this I had to find out at the library, in old books. Some movie mags had scandalous stories about him. But that was nothing to what came later.

I don't know what it is about the brilliantly talented, why they are so fucked up and so spookily gifted at throwing all their advantages away. For decades, actors and directors thought it was the greatest opportunity in the world to work with Brando, even as his reputation for being completely unprofessional and even nasty to his fellow actors had become legendary. That, and his alarming tendency to split his pants when he bent over. In a 1000-page biography by Peter Manso which is almost as heavy as Brando himself, one wardrobe mistress claimed that she had made him seventeen pairs of pants for a single movie, One-Eyed Jacks. I'm not buying it, but you get the idea.

When I recently watched On the Waterfront again, when I saw Brando eerily foreshadowing his own decline playing the slouching, seedy ex-boxer oppressed by forces he didn't understand, I saw an almost religious surrender, a willingness or even a need to lay open his own chest: "They got Charlie," he murmurs when he finds his brother (crucifixion-like!) hanging dead on a longshoreman's hook. It's more of a statement than a lament. Then comes a muted wail of grief: "I'm gonna take it out on their skulls." No other actor in history could pronounce a line like that, not even aware of what he was doing. When technique dissolves and an actor so astonishingly "becomes", there is simply no name for it.

Brando died a number of years ago, a huge man holed up in a mansion on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, Citizen Kane-like in his isolation and bizarre self-destructive habits. Supposedly on a strict diet, he bribed delivery boys from McDonalds to throw bags of burgers over the wall of his fortress-like home. He went a strange kind of crazy, and I won't even get into the horrors of his family, the madness, the murder, craziness and death of every kind. He even told one interviewer that he had nine children, when in truth he barely had eight (some of them the stepchildren of divorce). And at least one of them was sired with his Mexican maid.

But there is something about the cab scene in On the Waterfront - the scene sometimes called the most compelling and perfect in all of movie history - the way his brother Charlie pulls the gun on him, and Brando's response - almost gently pushing the barrel of the gun away from him and breathing in a kind of tender disbelief: "Wow, Charlie." In that moment he realizes (and somehow spookily telegraphs to us) that his brother is already dead, or, perhaps, has never really been alive.

We will never understand such genius and its frightening, illuminating, appalling ways.

WHO is that person singing?

This movie came on Turner Classics, and it was one of those things where I was going to watch 10 minutes of it, maybe record the rest. . . and I instantly fell in. I've seen it (Alfie with Michael Caine) at least twice before so there were no surprises. But it didn't matter. Like Gone with the Wind, you watch it because you know what's coming next. It sort of brands itself on you because we've all known someone like that, or maybe several someones, or maybe we've seen traces of it in ourselves.

I didn't remember the ending and in fact, the end credits were different in one version I saw on TV, they didn't have the rights to the music or something. . .because I remember thinking, hmmmm, aren't they going to do "that song"?, and they didn't. I knew the melancholy Dionne Warwick version, but WHO was this person singing, this raw, heartstring-wringing, out-on-the-edges-of-loneliness rendition that seemed to squeeze all the bitter pathos out of the detestable, irresistable character we couldn't stop watching for the past two hours?

The arrangement over the stylish black-and-white credits had a definite '60s context, a sort of harpsichord-flute-heavy-percussion feel to it, and that alone should've given me a clue (and it did, after the fact!)  Then partway through the singing I guessed, then held my breath, wondering if I could be right, if it would be in the credits at the very end, and it was. All I can say is, it's a singer whose voice later dissolved into a heap of unattractive mannerisms, but back then, in 1966, before her real heyday even began, she had something, something raw and magnetic, something incredible which literally made me gasp. Artistry, all of it. And Michael Caine, and all that he was able to express. There is something beyond the scurrilous crap we have to live with every day. Listen for it.

(Oh, and - the person who uploaded this cut a few seconds off the end - like cutting the final resolving chord off a symphony - PLEASE don't do this! It matters!)

(And P. P. S.: I dreamed about this song all night! I dreamed about the movie, watching it all over again with a man I was supposed to know, someone with tattoos who spoke Cockney and seemed like some version of Michael Caine. I kept saying I watched the movie twice back-to-back over two days, which I never did, I couldn't stand to.  Like a tattoo by an inept or even sadistic artist, it leaves a bruise, a dark sordid shadow of pity mixed with contempt. For all his seeming redemption at the end of the movie, we know Alfie won't change. He'll keep attaching himself parasitically to women, men too, lower companions that just get lower, until he ends up being found in a cheap room somewhere, a violent suicide. I've seen it. Believe me.)

Levant and his "honeysuckle"

This is a bad version of a good clip. The clip I used to have (of the same song) mysteriously shrank, filling about 1/4 of the screen, which is too bad because THIS one leaves out a few seconds before and after the song which are completely charming. But this is a good example of Oscar's strange seductiveness, which does seem to apply to men as well as women. I mean. . . calling a man "Honeysuckle" is just a little too much, isn't it? Any nickname that has "suck" in it is suspicious to me.

This could be the start of something big

 

 

Just this. . . the merest hint of something I'm working on now. I haven't forgotten you, Harold! I've just been in mourning over the complete lack of interest I've had from publishers for my novel about your life, The Glass Character. But this experience far exceeds the success or failure of a mere book. It will live in Greatness.

Dark night: thoughts on the Colorado massacre

Like a lot of people, I find I can't live - can't go about my day-to-day activities and try to enjoy life - if I'm paralyzed with grief, horror and fear. At the same time, how can I NOT feel this, and feel deeply for the survivors who are reeling with shock and disbelief?

It COULD happen to me, or to you. We don't have special protection, even if we believe in "God" or "the angels".  It's NOT "a movie" or "part of the show". Those AREN'T "firecrackers", but gunshots! Gunshots that kill people.


Do you still think everything happens for a reason? Then tell me, explain to me: what was the reason for this?

I get sad and melancholy and I don’t know how else to feel when the news is so horrendous. In a sense, you have to just push it away. It’s not good mental health to practice so much denial, and it’s not honest either, but what else can you do, not go out because you’re afraid you’ll be gunned down? I don’t care about me, though I’d rather be cleanly killed than be like Gabby Gifford who is now reduced to a bewildered, childlike state.

It’s my loved ones I worry about. All the time, really. I worry about apocalypse of some sort. The weather, world climate, which is already deteriorating alarmingly, fire and flood, drought and snowstorm occurring where/when they shouldn't be, and I wonder what I am leaving for my grandchildren and their children, if they even have a chance to exist. And/or terrorism spreading like an evil ugly cancer, ultimate weapons, what they used to call “germ warfare” that would knock out so many people, there’d be no one left to try to cure it.

I know these are worst-case scenarios and the stuff of science fiction and  movies/books about the horror of dystopia, but still, did anyone anticipate 9-11? I don’t see how anyone could have, and that's what alarms the shit out of me. It was just a taste of what terrorists might do to us. If it happens again on a mass scale, of course it would be all-out nuclear war and the end of everything.

We can’t think about this, of course, but there is a cost to repressing it all the time. If you talk about it and openly express fear about it, you’re seen as a sort of party-pooper who doesn’t know how to have a good time (text-text-text, tweet-tweet-tweet!). I asked Bill once, “what’s IN all these texts? What are people texting about?” Bill said, “NOTHING.” And I think he’s right. They have no content, so all they are is a sort of mutual narcissism and a smokescreen insulating people from their feelings.  

Myself, I lasted about two seconds on Facebook because every time I tried to post anything serious, all I got was dead silence, or a nasty jibe meant to send up my comment or minimize it with a joke. I felt like I was eight years old and being ostracized on the playground once again.

I'm not in a personal crisis now, my life is stable if a little dull, and in many ways I am blessed beyond measure.  But that doesn’t mean I have no problems. Is it normal to have problems? People pretend they don’t. But all these sick evil people are emerging who think it’s OK to randomly murder strangers, even children. Meanwhile people say things like, “I thought it was part of the show.” During 9-11, people repeatedly said, “It looked like a movie.” Do we know the difference any more?

With all this emphasis on "social networking", we're increasingly wearing masks and becoming anyone we want to be. It's fun for a while, then an awful barrenness steals in and begins to eat away at the core, the very foundation of your soul. And for the most part, you're not even consciously aware of it. Everyone's doing it, after all, so it must be OK.

Constant shallow tweeting, texting and phoning about nothing drowns out the drone of horror in the background, the sound of those awful air-raid sirens I used to hear as a kid (supposedly, just being tested out, but tested out far more often during the Cuban Missile Crisis and at other points when the nuclear clock stood at a few seconds to midnight).

I never used to hear about random shooters when I was younger: did you? Did you hear about events like this, or Columbine, or people just randomly opening fire in mall food fairs?

Why is this happening now, when it never used to happen before? Though there is a tremendous amount of denial about this subject, in many ways our world teeters on the brink. Brink of what? Climate meltdown, terrorism on a scale so massive it's beyond our capacity to grasp - and, the thing no one talks about any more, vast, even grotesque overpopulation.

Being crowded together far beyond the carrying capacity of the planet, a planet we have poisoned grievously and choked with vast islands of dead computers and other forms of plastic that will never degrade, has done something to us. It's cooking up a huge vat of collective stress, the kind of stress that can explode alarmingly in a susceptible person. I have a theory about why so many people are becoming grossly obese: it goes beyond the ubiquity of junk food in seemingly every store. Cramming a chocolate bar in your mouth helps you push down that low-grade vibration of anxiety about our survival as a species.

Try to project all the problems we have in the world to fifty years from now. I am afraid to. I just don't see how we will be able to stop the juggernaut, the relentless progression of a destruction we set in motion ourselves, mostly through thoughtlessness and greed.

We treat these horrendous fires and floods as if they came out of nowhere, but I see it as the planet hitting back, finally unable to stand any more abuse. We HAVE changed the world climate, folks - irrevocably, and not for the better. I am afraid that these feeble attempts to reduce our "carbon footprint" is too little, too late.

But we are awfully good at numbing ourselves to the truth, whether with drugs, food, or an obsession with technology you can hold in one hand like an ice cream cone.

If a lonely, isolated, socially-deprived person with a fascination with weaponry begins to entertain an idea - an awful idea - what will stop him? He won't talk to a friend about it because he doesn't have any friends. ("He kept mostly to himself" has become almost a cliche in these situations.)  Friends aren't people any more - they're Facebook pages and "tweets". (And I think it's no accident that the inventor of this strange form of non-communication named it after the sound a silly, superficial, bird-brained creature.)

Every time something like this happens, authorities are quick to tell the public that it was an "isolated case", just one disturbed nut case whose mental illness had nothing to do with the rest of us or the alienated, anxiety-ridden, sick world we live in. That makes everyone feel better for a while. Doesn't it?

I don't know what to do about all this. It's as if I'm expected to care, but not care, or at least not care very much. I can't prevent another dark night, have no idea how to start. But the profound social isolation and alienation that gave rise to this horrific act affects all of us, without exception. 

So we don't know how to feel. We don't know how to go on. "We thought it was part of the show," the survivors said.

And in an awful kind of way, maybe it was.

Monster Chiller Horror Theatre!

This lacks in technical quality (turn up the sound a bit), but is pure nostalgia and a reminder of how good these guys were, especially together. We miss you, John!

Light and shadow: the Perkins curse

It occurs to me that one of these days I should post a blog entry that's about something. So I will return to an old fascination which, for reasons unknown, has re-asserted itself.

Maybe it's Turner Classic Movies, that fusty old vault of forgotten Hollywood. Things pop up that maybe are best left in there. What constitutes a "classic" is a judgement call, and I don't know who makes it: Robert Osborne, whom despite his too-fast and slurry delivery is fascinating to listen to, or some producer or other.

They have festivals, of course, and not long ago it was Tony Perkins' turn. It could be argued that his life was a tragedy, but you'd only be partly right. I'm rereading Charles Winecoff's incredibly detailed but largely uncharitable bio Split Image, in which he seems to put Perkins' often troubled and even twisted life through a fine sieve (or a blender). Obviously gay (or I don't think he would rhapsodize about Perkin's sexy, pouty lips in The Tin Star), Winecoff has little sympathy for the double life he had to lead, both to stay employed and to stay married to a woman who was warmhearted but more than a little naive.

It all came to a dead stop, so to speak, when Perkins died of AIDS in 1992. He was 60 years old, and Norman Bates, the self-proclaimed "Hamlet of horror", had somehow consumed his career. He began as a fine young actor, dazzlingly beautiful rather than handsome, irresistable to women (especially older women, who wanted to take him home with them - which even happened in his own lifetime), and capable of roles as varied as college basketball star, insecure deputy sherriff, mentally ill baseball hero, Quaker enlisting in the Civil War, carefree-but-troubled-young-lawyer-romancing-Ingrid-Bergman-in-Paris-in-the-1960s, etc. etc. etc.

In other words, he was good. Good enough for Alfred Hitchcock, searching for someone to star in the mother of all slasher-films (Psycho), to say, "That young man over there. I want him."

Hitchy-baby, as I used to call him when he came over for beer and canapes, had an instinct for these things. Perkins was babyfaced, with marvelous dark eyes that could cloud over with an inexplicable anger. He was gangly and tall, with coathanger shoulders and very long arms, described by one friend as looking like a "prehistoric bird". He played the introverted loner to a T (for Tony), because in spite of his sweet smile and boyish charm, that's what he was.

I'm finding out, all over again, where it all came from. His father was Osgood Perkins, who lived up to his awful name: dire-looking, with a nose that could open letters. Absolutely cold, but addicted to the theatre and acting back when acting was very much paint-by-the-numbers. Was he any good? He fit the slot that seemed to be there, the slot with his name on it. Weirdly, he often starred as villains and other dark characters, typecast by his severe and unpleasant looks.

Osgood Perkins changed Tony's five-year-old life forever with a hell of a final act: dropping dead of a heart attack on his bathroom floor. Tony didn't cry, though he told People Magazine (in an infamous interview in which he almost outed himself) that he sobbed himself to sleep every night, thinking he had somehow killed him.

Tony inherited Osgood's scarecrow body, and as he aged his face began to twist and go off-centre, as if genes were finally having their way. He had a rich and varied career, if you take away the cheap slasher films he often resorted to in order to pay the rent and look after his wife and kids.

Yes. Wife and kids, though he was known all over Hollywood as a promiscuous homosexual. He was seeing a shrink called Mildred Newman (who co-wrote the blockbuster, groundbreaking psychobabble classic How to Be Your Own Best Friend), who believed she could straighten gay men out. In fact, it was her particular specialty. Another Newman disciple, one of Tony's longterm lovers, got married at about the same time. It was all very odd.

Berry Berenson, sister of supermodel Marisa, was from a blueblood family but came across as sweet and pretty, as well as pretty naive. Is that why Tony was so attracted? I can see them together for the first time (someone wrote a stage play about it: I'll try to find the link, as the guy playing Tony is phenomenal), Berry all breathless because she was finally meeting her idol and interviewing him for Andy Warhol's magazine. What was Tony Perkins really really like?

Next thing you know he was making her pregnant, but one wonders. This man was vastly complicated. He and Stephen Sondheim (yes, that Stephen Sondheim) hung out together and forced everyone around them into impossibly difficult word/mind games, a manifestation of the nasty, manipulative side of him. Yet, by all accounts, he was an attentive and loving father to his two boys, Osgood (ouch) and Elvis (double-ouch).

OK then, before this becomes another version of War and Peace, Perkins finally died of AIDS. For a long time he didn't say anything, but when he was near death he issued a statement to the effect that he had learned more about love and humanity and acceptance during his time in the world of AIDS than he had in his entire career in Hollywood.

When he lay dying in his bed, his friends brought sleeping bags over and literally camped around him. At one point, he woke out of a deep coma, sat up and said, "What's going on? What is this, a death watch?" It was the last laugh he'd ever get.

How we die is often a profound reflection of how we have lived. Devotion like this does not happen to people who are not deeply cherished. It's extraordinary, but just one more paradox in the enigmatic puzzle of his life.

There is a horrible postscript, or perhaps a few of them. On September 11, 2001, Berry Berenson boarded a plane she would never get off. The last few minutes of her life must have been horrific as the jet flew bizarrely off-course, sank lower and lower, then smashed into the World Trade Centre.

Why, why? These are unanswerable questions. On doing some digging, I turned up more sorrow. Elvis Perkins is a somewhat successful rock musician (Tony was a gifted pianist, as well as a screenwriter, painter and singer), but his songs are morbid and inspired by the death of his parents. Osgood, known as Oz Perkins, seems to dribble away on the IMDB after a few forgettable slasher-type films. Neither of them resemble their ideally beautiful father in his youth. They look coarse by comparison. What happened?

I have mixed feelings about Perkins. When Goodbye Again came on the other night (with the radiant, mature Ingrid Bergman playing his motherly lover), I was simply entranced. Perkins exuded a unique charm that somehow gripped you. It was powerful, a solar energy, dazzlingly bright but curiously cold. Did anyone really get close to this man? Did his one massive hit really destroy his career, or was he already dissolving into the tics, stammers and other irritating mannerisms that marked all his later films? Hitchy-baby didn't just randomly pull him out of the pack. He picked him because of his uncanny, even spooky ability to read his actors.

He picked him because Norman Bates was Tony's dark double, his father dying when he was five, his mother (in this case, rotting in the attic) sucking the air out of his life. He picked him for that disturbing untapped anger that made his dark eyes so fascinating. He was already Norman Bates, a character he would come to love and despise.

What's the conclusion? Sometimes success can be the worst thing that can happen to you. Is there a Perkins curse? Think of Osgood Perkins lying dead on his bathroom floor, Tony in a coma in his bedroom, Berry disintegrated in a second, his sons still stuck in glue or flypaper or some force field they can't break or even understand.

But think of the great times, hanging out with his sons, basking in Berry's warm unconditional acceptance, the obvious love of his friends, the Oscar nomination, the truly fulfilling parts that he nailed with his prodigious talent.

His delight in word games and mind games and singing (and by the way, he had a marvelous singing voice, lyrical and completely unpretentious) and playing his beloved piano.

This is a man who lived. Lived all the complications and contradictions of the painfully, profoundly gifted. I love him, I do. I can't get away from him, and he isn't even here. That's a man, is it not? That is a man.

Strauss gets his groove on: the Great Waltz (1938)

One brief shining moment

OK, here's the truth about what Jackie said. JFK's royal reign was never known as Camelot until after he died, and his widow spoke about that brief and supposedly idyllic time (Cuban Missile Crisis? Bay of Pigs?) in retrospect. So now everyone calls it Camelot.

Come to that, Camelot, as portrayed by Lerner and Loewe, was pretty hellish in itself.

I got watching it (again) the other night on Turner Classics. It's immediately addictive. I jumped in in the middle, and it didn't seem to matter. I first saw it at thirteen - went with my mother, who loved it and approved of my crush on Richard Harris (to nullify my previous crush on Tiny Tim) - then dragged my brother to it so I could see it again. He kept making sardonic comments (i.e. muttering "I wonder what the King is doing tonight" while Jenny and Lance were making feverish love), but it didn't really matter.

Ah! Richard Harris at his dishy best, Vanessa Redgrave trailing filmy gowns and hair red as flame (though she has one very irritating quirk: she never closes her mouth), Franco Nero looking so earnest his brow might break. Never mind that most of them didn't do their own singing. It worked for me.

I cried again last night, and I know why. It was "What do the Simple Folk Do?", near the end, when Arthur and Jenny try to grasp at one last wisp of happiness, and fail. The look he gives her has seventeen layers of emotion in it, shattered pride, longing, rage, impotence, desire, nostalgia. . . Jenny is simply skinless, her shame and guilt stripped bare.

These guys have great acting chops, even if the production is overblown and sometimes overacted. Franco Nero is just a big hunk, in the tradition of the non-acting Robert Goulet who started it all (but at least he did his own singing). BUT: here's the truly golden part.

While filming this extravaganza, Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero (who each presumably had other attachments) fell in love. I don't know if it was proximity, or what. They had a relationship which produced a son, parted, but remained friends.

Here's the incredible part. According to Robert Osborne, they met again forty years later, and - GOT MARRIED.

Now that is romantic.

Those grainy newspaper photos - well, I was in a production of Camelot a very long time ago. God, the costumes were great. I had an uninspiring part in the chorus (top photo - also a smaller version squeezed between the two actors, just under the stuffed dog) where I had to pretend to watch a joust that couldn't be staged (not enough room for horses in a high school gym).

There's sort of another part to this. I went to audition for Guenevere, and discovered a couple dozen other potential Gueneveres warbling away. The audition lasted forever. Though I think my voice was in its best shape then, I didn't get it. At best I must have come in third, as they double-cast it. The musical director of the show cast herself as Guenevere (?!! What the - ), and selected for her second choice a very strange-looking, almost Goth girl who really couldn't sing very well. Apparently, she had a "quality".

So. . .the production grinds on, beset with problems. Then, the self-cast Guenevere turns up pregnant (she was a Mormon in her mid-20s, and this was her fifth child), and the second-cast Guenevere gains even more weight from eating junk food while stoned, then just disappears.

SOOOOOO. . . who you gonna call?

Who you gonna get to jump in at the last minute (almost literally!) to play Guenevere, with nearly no rehearsal?

I said no. I said no because I was offended. I was offended because I was probably their fifth choice to begin with. I didn't have trailing blonde hair and I wasn't 25 years old (I was 29). They only asked me because they just assumed I would say yes. They assumed I would say yes because they knew how hungry and desperate I was.

I can just hear them: "Yes, but we know she's reliable." "She'll just jump at it! Remember how badly she wanted it?" To be honest, they knew they could use me and that I would flail around and scramble to catch up and never ask them for a thing.

I have never regretted my decision. The self-appointed lead, the music director who crowned herself Queen, was five months along and her costumes straining at the seams, but she went on because she was the only one left standing.

I won't be treated that way. So my one brief shining moment was brief indeed. By the way, everyone involved was furious with me, thought I was selfish and ruining the show just for spite.

(The clip is a real find, if a bit bizarre with its clunky subtitles. Gianni Marzocchi couldn't be more Italian, but it works because of his sweet, expressive lyric tenor. And the unabashed, lush, oversentimental, glorious romanticism, which is eternal.

Vanessa and Franco will tell you so.)

True Grit, by True-grit

Y'know, cowpokes, just about the last thang I wanna do right now is write a movie review. So I won't, even though I liked the new take on True Grit by the quirky Coen Brothers (previously known for putting characters through the wood chipper and stuff like that).

Like a lot of non-Western fans, I liked the old True Grit and wondered why it needed to be remade (though I was delighted to find that, even with all the changes, they retained one line, the immortal "Fill yore hands, you son-of-a-bitch!"). Jeff Bridges did a creditable (and credible) job filling the huge boots of John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn, this old guy who likes-da shoot up people, like. So this little girl, this Maddie whose father got shot? She goes to him.

She isn't sorry, but that's not the part I liked. I liked the fact that nearly all the men in this thing were shaggy-like. They had long greasy hair and chin spinach and "mustaches" (the sheer size of them demanding a plural form). Just look at an old photo of Buffalo Bill Cody, will you (I mean, right now), and you'll see how awe-then-tick-lakk this-all is. No clean-shaven guys here, no razors on the prairies (or if they had 'em, they were just a-usin'-em to flick chickens). Even the eyebrows were different then, way out. They grew different, maybe it was the soil.

So this Rooster guy, he has this horse, and it don't look like any Western movie horse ever seen, not like Trigger or Silver or Desperado or whatever-else. In fact, all the horses in this movie look like real Western horses, a surprise that was almost a shock. Cowboys liked their horses compact, tough, low to the ground and savvy, none of this Arabian dish-faced mane-tossing bullshit. Just get the job done, and on the minimum volume of oats.

These horses filled the bill. They weren't showy, in fact some-o'-dem were sort of mingy little things, their necks straight, coats shaggy-like as if they lived outdoors, which back then they did. One of them was an Appaloosa, the kind with the dots on the butt, and the dots stand up like felt. Don't know where they got them, but certainly not from Horse Central Casting. Maybe they scrounged around to find them in the real West? Who knows, but these horses resonated with me and my former life rocking along the trails in a beat-up old Western saddle on a mingy but sweet little horse named Rocky.

Nobody knew his pedigree, because like a lot of horses he didn't really have one. Cowboys went on faith back then, and good trading. Their bloodlines were mostly mustang with a little bit of a racehorse that broke loose once by mistake. And Spanish Conquistador blood that went way, way back, so once in a while one of them, mingy or not, would start high-stepping all by himself. You'd hear a single, sad note of Spanish guitar, then he'd go back to lopin' on down the lone prai-ree.

I liked the horses and the chin-spinach and the foul talk in this movie (not really obscenity, just language snarled and spat and raunched, as if, in the words of Tom Robbins, it had been strained through Davy Crockett's underwear). I wanted to get on one of those horses, an easy climb. I could lean down beside his thick ol' neck and tell him things. He'd know what I wanted before I knew it myself. He wouldn't ask much, but would give all he had.

A horse gets ridden into the ground in this movie, and it's hard to watch, but it's only to save a little girl's life. The horse literally runs until it groans and staggers and collapses, and Rooster Cogburn shoots it in the head, a mercy. They don't make horses that game any more. They don't make horse casting directors that pick mingy little, game little, shaggy little mustangs that run 'til they drop, either.

I'd like to see more of it.

Baby, don't go!

Like a lot of boomers, I remember the Sonny and Cher Show, which got more painful as time went on. Cher was already beginning to look embalmed (a process that has become so extreme, she now looks like a still picture of herself, her eyes and cheeks hollow in that fallen way of the grossly messed-with face). The two feuded, then divorced, but kept on performing together because there was money in it.

When Sonny died many years later in a skiing accident, piling into a tree, Cher got up at his funeral and sobbed and ranted, while his actual widow watched the highly inappropriate spectacle from her chair.

But hey, she's Cher! She's an Academy Award winner (which still serves as a kind of badge of "made it in Hollywood", even if it was 25 years ago). She's a rags-to-riches kind of gal, which still carries some sort of cachet in show biz. Gone are the days when, puffy-faced and large-nosed, her eyes smudgy and her hair hanging in two black curtains, she proclaimed the sappy anthem "I've Got You, Babe" to the much-hated Sonny, the man she couldn't wait to get away from (except at his funeral).

"Some people seem to think that Sonny was a short man! Well, I'm here to tell you that he wasn't short! He wasn't short on talent! He wasn't short on love! He wasn't short on. . . " (Let's not forget that Sonny wasn't short on discernment, either. If he hadn't "discovered" Cher at the bargain-basement counter, we'd be looking at an empty chair.)

But that's not what we are here to discuss.

Cher's in the news again. I've already recorded the recent 20-20 interview on my PVR, but haven't seen it yet. She's in this new movie called Burlesque. It' s being hyped to the max, but so was that other one, that Fellini-esque musical with Penelope Cruz in it: what was it called, anyway? Nine, or Ten, or Eight-and-a-Half? It flopped badly at the box office, maybe because no one in it could sing.

Aiding and abetting all the new-movie hype is the unsettling fact that Cher's daughter Chastity (perhaps traumatized by being given such a Godawful name) is now a man. Yes. No one knows what to call "her" now, least of all "her" mother, who is trying very hard to be cool about it, when we know she's not.

It would be hard to be cool about it, that little blonde tyke who came on at the end of every show, with such a sweet resemblance to her mother, turning into a big beefy linebacker with no clothes sense. "Chas" gradually became more and more androgynous over the years, put on a lot of weight, cut her hair shorter and shorter: in other words, came out by degrees.

Hey, nothing wrong with that! Cynthia Nixon chose a very large, short-haired, tough-looking, be-suited woman for a partner, didn't she? Cynthia Nixon, the red fox! Geez. She could have had anybody, couldn't she? Portia de Rossi is gay, isn't she? It shows it can be done. (Good on you, Ellen.)

So here we have Chaz Bono, or whatever his/her last name is now (Free-to-Be-You-and-Me, Lesbiangaybisexualtransgenderedundecided, Son-of-a-Bono: I'll resist the more obvious one, it's too mean). Obviously, a lot has been done to her, surgically and otherwise, but can't that also be said about her mother?

Cher has been injected with so many preservatives over the decades that she now looks like something from Madame Tussaud's House of Wax. When she retires, just prop her up in some souvenir shop in Niagara Falls. (Or put a wick in her. She'd make a nice Christmas candle.)

I don't really know what to say here. People have the right to be the way they are.

Yes.

And mothers have the right to be distressed, even if they're "iconic" (and you know what I think of that word). Cher is the Comeback Queen, and will use whatever is current in her life (including a dead ex-husband or a daughter who's a man) to get back into the limelight. And she has been known to do emotional flip-flops, marry heroin addicts and other extreme things.

At 64, she no longer has any of her original parts. They've all been gradually replaced. So who is she? She should know something about manipulating your identity

surgically, and perhaps hormonally.

Maybe if Chaz were a slim, good-looking, metrosexual sort of man? Maybe if he looked like Jon Hamm or George Clooney or some other out-and-out fox?

Hell, maybe I'd take him on.

Gush-a-thon

Hey, y'all. I don't know quite whas'sup with Oprah these days, but it seems her "farewell season" has to trumpet "a Very Special Oprah" every damn day now.

Having survived the Kitty Kelley debacle (the most unflattering star bio I have ever read), she's all geared up to put on Memorable Shows about Memorable

Things.

No issues, however. Not even Favorite Things, that gluttinous orgy of empty materialism. Most of them have to do with movie reunions. Oprah is big on reunions, not having been to her high school one (can you imagine the mob scene? The devastation to the buffet table?).

I recently sat through a Sound of Music reunion with the entire cast (actually it was nine people, and I really think the credits rolled for longer than that). An aged but wicked Christopher Plummer talked about his drinking binges during the shoot, and revealed that his nickname for the saccharine picture was "The Sound of

Mucus".

Oprah asked the eldest von Trapp daughter (I think it was the one who dated the Nazi: can't resist a man in a uniform!) what she had learned on the shoot. "Chris taught me a lot," she said sweetly. "What did he teach you?" (A life lesson that changed the course of her existence?)

"He taught me how to drink."

So much for "doe, a deer, a female deer," and all that rot. (Maybe it should have been "dough"). But hark! What see-est I now-est? She's doing it again, the reunion thing, only this time with the movie she refers to wistfully as the high point of her life, The Color Purple. Even back then, in '84 I think, when she was relatively unknown and had never acted before, she somehow butted everyone else out of the

way.

So now we have a Reunion of the Entire Cast, consisting mainly of a wisecracking Whoopi Goldberg (laying to rest rumors of a monumental feud sparked by Oprah cutting Whoopi out of a prestigious Legends Weekend to honor "accomplished" African American Women. I guess multiple Oscar nominations and 25-year careers aren't enough.)

Anyway, we got to see Whoopi's deluxe toilet, which was a blast and a half. She has a nice house, huge rooms. OK. We know Oprah is big on luxe housing. Then she trotted out Danny Glover, Rae Dawn Chong (what the - ?), and a few others we forgot about, the dame who played Shug Avery and all. Stephen Spielberg sent his video greetings, and Quincy Jones, looking half-stoned and sounding like Harry Belafonte on a bad day, was wheeled out to represent Living

Legends.

So what exactly was wrong with this show, aside from the kind of terminal gushing we used to see on SCTV's Sammy Maudlin Show? Why were there only a couple of references to Oprah Winfrey Presents The Color Purple, THE MUSICAL? I don't know much about it. No one does, because I don't think it did very well. Too grapey, or something.

But that's not what fried me.

What fried me is, this all started somewhere. The movie, I mean, and all the surrounding gush, and even the vulgar Broadway musical with Oprah's name

above the title (even though she wasn't in it anywhere).

Somebody, like, at some point, kind of, uh, er. WROTE THIS

THING.

I'll give them this: there was one, very brief mention of Alice Walker, with a shot of her that was on for maybe two seconds. Then they quickly moved on.

Let me tell you how wrong that

was.

If it weren't for Alice Walker's quirky little gem, NONE OF THESE PEOPLE WOULD BE UP THERE ON THAT STAGE.

None of these people would have had the career break of a lifetime by being cast in a Spielberg film that garnered 11 Oscar nominations (but no wins: another shutout, it seems. Oprah defends it by saying "it was ahead of its time". Does the name

Beloved mean anything to you?), had it not been for the diminutive,

brilliant woman

who penned the original novel in a sort of hypnotic trance.

I don't think Alice Walker got rich.

She went on writing, which is what real writers do, though no doubt The Color Purple is still her best-known work. Given its obscurity when the movie was made, it's doubtful she was paid a fraction of what the actors made (even the lesser-known ones).

Kitty Kelley's book talks about how Oprah quickly "dropped" Alice Walker once the movie contract had been signed. Kind of the way she "dropped" Whoopi, after Whoopi made a little joke in public about Oprah's absolute power in talk-show land.

Never mind that it was

true.

In spite of a lot of posturing, Oprah is uncomfortable with certain true things, and in spite of all her bafflegabbing, she must hate authors too. Remember poor James Frey being fried, live on the air, and wanting to commit suicide as a result? The drug memoir he wrote, A Million Little Pieces, turned out to have some fictionalized elements. Show me a memoir that

doesn't.

Oprah's naivete in this regard reveals that she isn't the sophisticated reader she pretends to be. She should have known that almost all memoirs are partly fictional. If anything, it's a sign that he actually wrote it

himself.

The next Oprah gush-a-thon will be a unique, one-of-a-kind, unforgettable Barbra Streisand show (hey, it went over well last time, and moved a lot of albums), in which Barbra floats onstage in a diaphanous floor-length Davinchsky gown and the same banged bob she wore in Funny Girl. (For some reason, really big stars get

frozen in time, especially regarding their hair.

You see it whenever they interview 95-year-old starlets from Hollywood's Golden Age, their lacquered 1940s do's sitting atop ancient faces bizarrely rearraged by primitive plastic surgery.)

Barbra still sings, but her voice is now in the lower register, and she no longer belts because she can't. Why she's doing all this after 30 years of being publicity-shy is anybody's guess. (Another album?) But soft! What comes next, I wonder?

Why. . . speaking of bad face lifts. . . it's. . . it's. . .

It's Robert Redford, in a VERY VERY Special Oprah, a reunion of the Cast of The Way We Were!!!

God, haven't some of these people died by now?

Everyone knows it's slinky

So what's the connection between the image on the left, a coiled spring, an insufferable racket, and bad popcorn?

I'll tell you.

When I'm in the mood for a bad movie, there's no stopping me, so paying about $25 at my local cineplex (named Scotiabank, after the bank that took it over from Paramount) wasn't quite the horror I thought it would be. I wanted some sparkling entertainment, some sleazy laughs. I wanted to see The Girls again.

I did watch Sex and the City. I DO watch it once in a while, '90s relic that it is. The highly improbable sexual frolickings of Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha were usually good for a guffaw, and once in a while you'd even see a flash of nudity.

But now the franchise has moved on to big box movies. They should've stayed on that other box, the smaller one, but never mind. This has very little to do with a pretty bad movie that went on far too long (2 1/2 hours, when a comedy should clock in at about 90 minutes, tops).

For an early matinee, the place was unusually crowded, and I had to climb like a mountain goat to find a seat, popcorn and drink smashed against each other so I wouldn't lose my purse, dripping umbrella (this is Vancouver) and 5000 napkins to keep my jeans from being saturated with grease.

Finally found a seat up in the gods, top row, with a young couple entwined just on my left. I mean entwined, like those photos you see of mating snakes.

And then.

Bom, bom, bom. . .

What walks downstairs, without a care, and makes a slinkety sound?

I swear! I could hear that theme song as a bizarre noise sank into the left side of my head.

Shhhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhhh.

Shhhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhhh.

This sounded for all the world like the metallic shoop-shoop of an ancient Slinky. But the thing is, it went on and on. And on. And on. And on And Andandnadndndnndd

I had to peek, to see what the hell was producing that sound. The guy was sitting on the left, with his bare forearm on the seat rest.

The girl was rubbing his arm.

And rubbing his arm.

And rubbing

And rubbing

And rubbing

Swoosh, swoosh. Shoop, shoop. Shhhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhhh. Shhhhhhhhh,

shhhhhhhhh.

Now I've sat beside or behind some humdingers, mucus-snorters, knuckle-crackers, popcorn-macerators, but - never this. A "rubber".

It might have been OK, well, more or less, if she'd stopped at some point. But she didn't. She rubbed his forearm all through the previews. She rubbed his forearm all during the opening credits.

SHE RUBBED HIS FOREARM ALL DURING THE GODDAMN FUCKING MOVIE.

The same patch of forearm. Her clothes were some sort of noisy nylon that shhhh-shhhh-ed when she moved, and every few minutes she squirmed around in her seat like a two-year-old being forced to sit still.

I tried everything: shooting them poisonous glances (they probably just thought I was nuts). Eating my popcorn really loud, except that there was someone on the other side eating hers even louder.

An hour went by. Shhhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhhh.

An hour and a half. The Girls went to Abu Dhabi or Timbuktu or somewhere, to get laid. It wasn't funny.

How could this guy have any skin left on his forearm? Why was his forearm suddenly an erogenous zone? Was this just a promise of another kind of rubbing that would happen after the movie? What the fuck was wrong with these people?

At about the two-hour-and-fifteen-minute mark, I was hearing the Slinky jingle in my head and couldn't shut it down:

"It's Slinky, it's Slinky, for fun it's the best of the toys

It's Slinky, it's Slinky, the favorite of girls and boys. . . "

This was preposterous, it was just unendurable, not to mention bizarre. I had to stop it. There had to be a law against public rubbing. I kept thinking how I would phrase my complaint. Excuse me, miss, but you're rubbing your boy friend too loudly in public. Excuse me, people, but you're acting like total weirdos.

I tried to focus on the movie, which was essentially inane and a waste of money (with only one good line: during their Middle East adventure, Samantha spies a desert hunk and exclaims, "It's Lawrence of My Labia!"). It was nothing more than a parade of Pravda and them other guys, who knows who they are.

But the endless, irritating, bizarre shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop went on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and. . .

I wonder why reality is so full of tortures like this, at least for me. Someone with less sensitive hearing might have ignored it. They were sitting on my left, next to the ear which is constantly attuned.

Finally I said to myself, that's it, this is ruining my $15 movie, I HAVE to do something. I can't just sit here and play victim to a whole lot of obscene shoosh-shoosh while Boyfriend gets a 2 1/2-hour hard-on. So I took a deep breath, and took action.

I got up and moved.