the comfort of badness
April 26, 2000
I've just been reading Joe Queenan's 1994 book, If you're talking to me, your career must be in trouble: movies, mayhem and malice (and a truer--if not a longer--title was seldom penned). One of the essays in the book, "In the realm of the senseless" is a loving (or loathing) disquisition on Bad Movies He Has Known. And it's wonderfully funny and witty. While I do not feel that I can be as wild and witty, I too, would like to share the list of Bad Movies I Have Known, in the hopes that perhaps you, too, may be spared the interminable agony of actually watching these clunkers.
As Queenan notes, the one thing that these films would seem to have in common is that no script writer came near them. No director actually directed them; they merely took their salaries and vamoosed. These films more or less ... congealed, instead of being filmed and edited and assembled in the normal movie way.
Herewith follows BADNESS, in no particular order:
The Comfort of Strangers (1990): Queenan actually mentions this film, but only very briefly. Unfortunately, in not giving it a proud place in his essay, he slights it. For The Comfort of Strangers is badness of a rare stripe. It's stealth badness. All the elements are present for it to be a truly very nice film, of the terribly genteel Merchant Ivory stripe: a good cast, wonderful setting, A-list screenwriter. And yet ...
First, it takes place in Venice. The one in Italy, not the one in California. The settings are relentlessly lovely. Old crumbly Renaissance buildings everywhere. The art director and set decorators actually knew what they were doing with this film.
They were, perhaps, the only ones who did.
The cast should be wonderful. Rupert Everett, Natasha Richardson, Helen Mirren, Christopher Walken. We're talking the Merchant Ivory irregulars here. Weirdly, you can't actually say that any of the cast does anything less than a workmanlike job. Natasha Richardson, although not my favorite, is not a bad actress. Christopher Walken is ... well, at least he isn't guilty of false advertising. Although a trademark full-blown loony Walken performance in a film of this apparent elegance is, to say the least, entirely unexpected, when you see him, you know what you'll be getting. And Helen Mirren gives a performance that, as usual, seems to have been teleported in from some film other than the one she is currently inhabiting. (This is not an insult. Usually, she simply acts rings around everyone in a film with her, making you forget that she's NOT the character, while you realize that nobody else is inhabiting their characters quite as well.) Rupert is truly stunningly decorative in this film. (This sounds like a side note, but it isn't. Walken and Mirren make much of his character's beauty, much to his wife's discomfort.) Early on (possibly the first scene, although I don't remember specifically), he appears from the rear in his altogether. And his altogether is VERY all together. (The man has SHOULDERS. And other things. Nice frontage, too, at least the above-the-waist parts. One suspects that he was a spectacularly successful hustler when he plied The Trade, or could have been if he'd wanted to be.) A sight that could inspire millions. And, let us face it, the man is also a very good actor. (And not a bad writer. Gorgeous and multitalented. Doesn't it make you sick?) He acts up a storm in this film. (He kind of has to, really.) And yet ...
And yet somehow, all of this powerhouse acting talent, not one doing a bad job (though one is tempted to put a leash on Walken's scenery-chewing), can't save this film from becoming 107 of the most painful film moments known to mankind, because clearly THEY don't understand why they're doing this either.
Direction and writing should be above reproach. The film is actually written by both the author of the novel on which it is based, and Harold Pinter, of all people. Which is strange, because one would swear that no screenwriter had been anywhere near it, let alone one of that calibur. Paul Schrader (Mishima, Affliction, City Hall, etc.) supposedly directed this film, but it's hard to find evidence that he was anywhere near it at any time.
Basically, the film wants to be a nice little story about a kinky couple into SM sex (Walken and Mirren), who slowly entice a sweet young newly-married couple (Everett and Richardson) into their circle. Somewhere along the way (before, in fact, actually getting onto the screen), the sex in this story gets entirely misplaced, leaving only Walken casually abusing Everett every time they get together, and Mirren apologising for him and making it seem as though she might in fact be an abused wife. Why, one might ask, do they continue to get together after the first such instance? One might indeed ask that. As, in fact, the woman sitting in front of me in the theater at the time did. (She and her friend were much more entertaining than the actual film.)
In any event, you keep waiting for the sex, and it keeps not happening. And after 102 minutes of torture, you're just about at the end of your rope. But the movie has another five minutes of desperately intense and acute torture left for you (and, actually, Rupert), which makes the previous 102 minutes seem like something really nice and wonderous and good. (I will not keep you in suspense. Rupert dies gruesomely, and the drugged Natasha is forced to watch. I give away the twist ending because nobody should have to sit through those 102 minutes ever again. This is the point at which the woman sitting in front of me stood up and said, "I sat through all this crap for THIS?" I think she was expecting Rupert-enravishment.) We then discover that, instead of being serial SMers, Walken and Mirren turn out to be serial killers. (No, really.)
Vamp (1986). Stars Grace Jones. Many would say that it should be condemned on these grounds alone, as she is partially responsible for the worst Bond film ever made. (So, for that matter, is Christopher Walken. Hmm....) But, in fact, she's quite adequate when playing a larger-than-life parody of herself; she's perfectly tolerable in Boomerang, for example. The film also stars Chris Makepeace and Gedde Wattanabe.
It's dreadful.
One scene will tell you everything you need to know about this film. Chris Makepeace's character is being seduced by Grace in what turns out to be the Vampire Bordello from Hell and/or Outer Space. (No, I'm not making that up. I wish I were.) They reach that point where he thinks he's about to be deflowered, and the viewer knows he's about to be enVamped.
Grace bites a chunk out of his neck!
That's right. She doesn't sink her fangs in and slurp like a normal vampire. She bites a fist-sized chunk out of his neck and then starts licking ever so delicately at the hole. He, instead of screaming like a normal person, looks terribly surprised. Than he dies. Apparently, nobody told the writer about the whole reciprocal sucking thing that has to happen before you create a vampire child. Or that you have to die because the vampire sucked out all your blood and not because you simply bled to death from your jugular vein. After that, Chris (now enVamped and just a tad peeved about the whole thing) and his friends (nonVamped and trying to avoid the process) go about saving the earth from the invading space Vampire plague. (I'm STILL not making this up.) After which, Chris gets to take the sewers home. (He has this little daylight problem, you see.)
I watched this film with my best friend. (Part of an unexpected double bill with Flight of the Navigator, which is, in fact, a rather nice, fun movie, so this was one HELL of a tone change.) At one point--at several points, in fact--I asked him if he would please let us leave. He kept saying that he wanted to watch, because it HAD to get better.
It didn't.
He STILL owes me for that one.
It's THAT bad.
Night of the Comet (1984): Much like the above, but without Chris and Grace, with Catherine Mary Stewart and Mary Woronov (always a pointer) and Robert Beltran (who should have known better) and a comet taking the place of the vampires.
Radioactive Dreams (1986): Much like the above, but without Chris or Grace or Catherine Mary or Mary or Robert, WITH George Kennedy (who REALLY should have known better) and nuclear war, nuclear winter, its aftermath and assorted Mad Max villain-types taking the place of the vampires and the comet.
Tai-Pan (1986): Well ... I must admit to a soft spot inmy head for this one. (No, not my "heart", my "head", because it has to be there to prevent further brain damage.) See, this film is one in which, about a third of the way through or so, you can watch the actors suddenly realize that this film--the first Western film allowed to be done inside China itself, and even inside the historic portions of the Forbidden City itself--which had a budget bigger than almost every other film released that year combined, which is based on a popular (and very long) novel, which was directed and written by nobody anyone ever heard of (uh-oh), that this film ... was total and utter dreck. Not merely stealth badness in that you thought it should be good, but stealth in that the actors are taken by surprise. Now THAT is good stealth, baby!
Nonetheless, it's the sort of film which, if you go in knowing that it's one of the worst films ever made, is actually kind of fun to sit through. (This is a good thing, or else my best friend would be unable to pay back the karmic debt owed me for making me sit through the two worst movies I have ever paid for in this lifetime.) One of the best lines in filmdom (and it won't come across, I know it), comes when the virtuous son of Bryan Brown's character goes, with much reluctance, to a whorehouse. (His father wants him to lose his virtue, for reasons that are never quite understandable.) The prostitute works her wiles at him, and finally, in a last ditch heroic effort to save himself for marriage (which succeeds, by the way), he stands up to leave, and starts walking with his legs in a truly awkward position. (A position known to every man alive as the "I have an erection and my pants were too tight BEFORE that" walk.) When the man with him ask what's wrong, he groans in pain and then says (in a Scots accent so thick it almost has living texture), "I think I rrooptured meself!"
Anything with Shannon Tweed (with the possible exception of the old cable series "First and Ten") In fact, any film televised on Cinemax after 11PM (midnight Eastern time), when it earns its nickname of "Skinemax" by showing soft-core porn. (Really, what earthy use is softcore porn? It's both too explicit to leave anything important to the imagination, yet it manages not to actually show anything.) To be sure, Shannon herself isn't actually that dreadfully awful; she just picks dreadfully awful films. Straight men watch these films, as far as I can tell, because they get to see breasts galore. Straight women probably don't watch them, except in the company of gay men and other straight women, so they can all sit there and make scurrilous remarks about the starlets' breast enhancements. These films are also the land of The Botched Breast Job. Women who get good boob jobs don't appear in these films. In these films, you see women with scars so hideous, they still look painful. In these films, you see women whose implants have, apparently, moved around, so that they look to be the Four Breasted Woman From The FratBoy Planet. (And straight men apparently like this. Curious.)
Night Terrors (1992): a film which, despite being a Skinemax staple, deserves special mention. It stars Martin "Endless Love" Hewitt as a radio talk show host who has sex with his call-in listeners on the air (they come to visit) and who gets framed for murdering one of them. Keith "Kung Fu" Carradine is the major villain of the piece. Sam "Flash Gordon" Jones is the detective pursuing Martin as he tries to prove his innocence. It deserves special mention because it has more sex than I can remember ever before seeing in a Skinemax movie. (I confess, I watched because I wanted to see how low Martin and Sam and Keith had gotten. Also, there was a reasonable chance that Martin and Sam might get nekkid. Which they did, sort of.) It also stars Tracy Tweed, Shannon's sister. (With whom Martin gets nekkid.) Basically, despite being hotly pursued by both the bad guys AND the police, Martin finds time to have a lot of sex. Meanwhile, every woman (and I do mean EVERY woman) except Martin's One True Love--which, actually, it takes him a while to realize that she IS his One True Love, with all the sleeping around he manages to squeeze in whilst running for his life-- is a castrating bitch (sometimes literally), and/or a lesbian AND a prostitute (the "and" is used advisedly). I don't mean that there are one or two lesbian prostitutes. I mean that there's like HUNDREDS of lesbian prostitutes. And in "Night Terrors" entire length, there's maybe 10-15 minutes where some person or another isn't having sex.
I promise you, this isn't a recommendation. If you look at this film and are struck blind by its sheer badness, don't say I didn't warn you. (It was weeks before I could look at a television and not see breasts floating before my eyes.)
Penitentiary (1979): Dear god, this is a truly, MASSIVELY, hideously awful creature. I can't really tell you what it's about because I couldn't actually tell. All I can say is that Leon Issac Kennedy winds up in jail, defends his virtue successfully, which results in him being put on the prison boxing team. Women prisoners are brought in from the other side of the prison to be entertained by the boxing matches, so of course, there is much sex in the bathroom. (To say nothing of prisoners hiding in the ceiling. If you can get in the ceiling, why wouldn't you just escape instead of hanging around to seduce women prisoners? But anyway...) It should have killed off the blaxploitation prison flick, it really should. Instead ... it spawned sequels. (Penitentiary II and III. The third one has a character, if that's the word, called "The Midnight Thud." Run away, run away.... On the other hand, the review of P-III at IMDB is almost worth it having been made in the first place.)
Lifeforce (1985): Well, what'cha gonna do? It's based on a sometimes fun but desperately and SINCERELY trashy book called "The Space Vampires". Basically, these people bring back a space ship full of alien humanoids that they find on Halley's Comet. (No, I did NOT make this up.) The aliens then proceed to both have sex with and kill rather a lot of people. Sometimes simultaneously. They also run around naked rather a lot, which is, I believe, almost the entire appeal of this film. It's not quite bad enough to be hideous--it has actual production values, believe it or not--but the script doctor was out to lunch on this one. It's another one of those movies with the sort of cast that leaves you scratching your head and thinking, "How the hell did THOSE people get involved with THIS mess?" (There is a brief moment when it looks like Steve "Duane Barry" (from the X-Files) Railsbeck and Patrick "Captain Picard" Stewart are going to do the serious liplock. Instead, Stewart explodes and splatters onto the ceiling, thus ruining a lovely romantic moment.) It does have its moments, now and again, but mostly, Lifeforce is just a mess.
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970): The film in which Russ Meyer's breast obsession reached truly ridiculous heights. Badness di tutti badness. The film which means that Roger Ebert has to be ever so slightly kinder to truly BAD movies than he might otherwise want to be. (Or, conversely, the film which liberates him to torch them without mercy. Hard to tell, really.) For Ebert is credited with the story and some of the screenplay for this ... this ... this THING. This abomination before every deity that now, that has ever existed. It stars nobody you have ever heard of--I'm pretty sure this film probably destroyed many many many many many careers.
How ridiculous did Meyer's breast obsession get? In this film's climactic scene--one in which it looks like the hero, if that's the word, is possibly going to be molested, if that's the word, by the ... villain? Anyway, in the film's climactic scene, the villain (for lack of a better word), rips off its shirt and bellows, "For I am ... SHE-WOMAN!" And SheWoman has quite the pair of bazooms, despite being apparently a man in all other respects. (And you sit there looking at these gargantuan breasts, and all you can think is, through this whole film where this desperately skinny man has been running around in tight 70s clothing ... where the hell were THOSE things hiding? And what the hell is a she-woman, anyway? I mean, a he-man is supposedly a very manly man, and this person, whatever else they may be, is not an extraordinarily womanly woman.)
Unfortunately, as Roger Ebert was a University of Chicago alum (of sorts), and teaches the occasional course at the university, this film has become a graduation requirement. You are not allowed to see it before the end of your senior year; you are not even told that it exists until then, lest you find out about it and transfer in an attempt to escape its hideousness. On the fateful day, you are blindfolded, dragged kicking and screaming to the auditorium with the other people who will graduate the next week, tied to your chair, and made to watch. (Thankfully, as compensation, the next night they always stick on "Bedazzled", which, while tacky in its own way, is pretty funny, so it all kind of works out.)
And now you know about several films to avoid. If you watch them after these warnings, you have no-one to blame but yourselves....
Posted by iain at 11:12 PM
april 2000 gayboyvid festival!
And welcome to the latest edition of the quarterly (sometimes monthly) gayboyvid festival!
(No no no. Not THOSE gayboyvids. In fact, no male frontal nudity was ever involved. Not that could be seen, anyway. Well, except in that bathtub scene in Love is the Devil...)
Basically, over a couple of days, I just went bonkers and rented lots of gayboyvids just to see what I've missed in the past few months. After all, nothing like a bunch of pretty gayboys spritzing angst all over the place to put one's life into perspective.
So to begin:
Men men men (Uomini uomini uomini; Italy, 1995): No no no! Just say no! to this vid!
Basically, it's a film about four middle aged gay Italian men who ... exist. Honestly, there's no actual story involved with this film. We just sort of follow them around for no apparent reason. They have their various crises and whatnot--not terribly serious crises, at that, except for the one noted below--but there's no actual story.
The closest thing to anything like a coherent narrative comes in the middle of the film. Simonetta (Monica Scattini) is the best friend of the lot, their "fag hag", as she puts it. They abuse her behind her back, and she abuses them to their face. It's wondefully codependent. In any event, she falls madly in love with this pretty young thing, Luca (Paolo Reconti). So, predictably, do all the men, but Luca is unremittingly heterosexual. Nonetheless, one night, he winds up going out with all the men, and they all get wonderfully drunk and have a horribly good time.
Until Luca says something along the lines of "Gee, it's too bad you're all gay. It would be so much better if you were all straight." For this sin, they all decide that they should gang-rape him. Luckily, he gets away. He actually goes so far as to begin making a police complaint, but then he decides to withdraw it and just never see them again. Simonetta, needless to say, makes the same decision. And they just go on, tra-la, merrily through life.
Part of the difficulty, one suspects, is that Christian de Sica, one of the actors, is also the writer and director. Unfortunately, that meant that anyone who could have told him, "Hey, Chris, there's no there there! You ain't got no story, you ain't got no compelling characters, you ain't even got dick, for heaven's sake!" ... well, anyone who could have said that to him was him. For example, there's a couple of scenes in a gymnasium and shower that really should have gone. Although two of the men looked as though the gym might, just possibly, have been in their weekly routine, the others were clearly not the gym sort. Suspension of disbelief and all that, yes, but there are limits, and cute little round guys using a weight machine as though they've never seen one before EVER is pretty much mine.
To its benefit, Men men men does make a vague nod to the concept that gay life doesn't end at 40. (Not counting the one person who dies of a heart attack after the end of the film.) It doesn't end if you don't have a fabulous body. These people are alive and vital, and the script takes for granted that they should be. They're just pointless. Pity; somewhere in this film there's an interesting concept (in fact, two or three of them) trying to get out.
Love is the Devil (UK, 1998)
(Click the poster to see a review at Bright Lights Film Journal; click the title text link for IMDB information; click THIS LINK for the Strand Releasing producers' page.)
A reasonable subtitle for this film would be "Portrait of the artist as a middle-aged monster."
It's one of those films that's difficult to describe. Essentially, it's about the course of the artist Francis Bacon's relationship with inept thief and lover George Dyer. It begins so utterly improbably (though it seems that it actually did begin this way), that you're primed for almost anything. It seems that the affair began when George fell through Bacon's skylight in an attempt to burgle his studio. Bacon offered him the option of a one-night stand or the police, and George took the one-night stand ... which turned into quite a bit more, much to his cost. Unfortunately, Dyer was dead when the film was made, and wasn't the sort to do a lot of writing. You never quite understand why he went along with this. Given the studio, all he had to do was wait until he was in the main room, and make a break for it. For that matter, Bacon (Derek Jacobi) wasn't particularly robust; all George had to do was to knock him over to get out. But somehow, Bacon ... appealed to him. And this started a relationship that lasted seven years.
Jacobi is excellent at portraying Bacon (who, not surprisingly, refused to cooperate with the film). You get a good sense of a multifaceted person, with affection for George that he both can't show, and doesn't quite know how to show. (And, to be sure, doesn't seem to feel the need to show.)
Daniel Craig is also excellent as George Dyer. You get a very strong sense of the character, of a person being slowly torn up inside, and he's not quite sure how or why. Partly is't that he needs tokens of affection that Bacon is ill-equipped to give; partly it's ... something else. You're never sure what, precisely "something else" is. You just come to a slow realization that George is not quite "right" any more, if he ever was.
The other amazing performance comes from Tilda Swinton as Muriel Becher, Bacon's friend and agent. If you've only seen her in Orlando or Female Perversions or The Garden, you won't know her; she's not only physically unrecognizeable, but the character is brash, loud and over the top.
Parts of the film seem to show a fairly strong theatrical influence; several scenes come across as very deliberately stagey. Not a bad thing, just quite noticeable. It's a very controlled production, for all the periodic disorienting time shifts; the director clearly had very specific ideas about how and what he was doing with this film.
It all ends in tragedy, unfortunately. In fact, it ends more or less where it begins, with Bacon stunned by and contemplating George's suicide. Definitely worth the trip, if you're willing to go along, but it's not a happy happy film.
Trick (US, 1999)
(Click the box cover to the left for the IMDB information; click the link above for the publicity site)
I resisted watching this film for a long time. When it was in the theater, I just never got the chance, and then it came out on vid, and EVERYBODY was raving about it, so naturally, I couldn't watch it then. Besides, I had better things to do than to watch a couple of guys in hot pursuit of a place to get it on.
Well.
This vid is really really ... nice. And pretty dang good, too.
Thing is, 99.9% of all guys have been Gabriel (Christian Campbell), or something like him, at one point or another in their lives. Not necessarily gay or anything like that; just that horrible horrible mix of intense desire and intense insecurity all at the same time. (You 0.1% of guys who have always been massively confident your entire lives, you just go away. We're not speaking to you. We're in a cosmic huff.)
Basically, seemingly against all odds, Gabriel catches the attentions of Mark (John Paul Pitoc), a go-go boy, and they decide to have a nice little one-night stand. Unfortunately, the world decides to conspire against them. First, Gabriel's roommate (aka Tall, Blond and Really Stupid) comes back a couple of hours early with his girlfriend, who has been in Paris for several months, and he's not at all minded to let Gabriel use his apartment. Then the friend whose apartment Gabriel was going to borrow gets back together with his boyfriend, thanks to Mark's intervention. (Though I'm not at all sure how that actually worked, but it did.)
Then things get weird. It does turn out, much to everyone's surprise, that there are a few hidden agendas wandering around, and they're not quite where you would think. Somehow, despite getting talked about rather a lot, sex doesn't fall quite where you expect in this film; it's not quite about the sex.
The supporting roles are almost all perfectly cast. Perhaps the biggest surprise (though it really shouldn't be after House of Yes) is that Tori Spelling can actually act. She's a delight as Gabriel's ditzy best friend. And the other supporting roles are well cast and well acted. (Special mention should be made of Lori Bagley as Judy, Gabriel's roommate's girlfriend. It's not that she's a better actress than any of the others, but her voice ... her voice is a dead ringer for Marilyn Monroe's. It's hard to tell whether or not she's doing it deliberately, but I think not, in which case she'll have a rather hard time of it in her chosen profession.)
Thing is, it's difficult to say anything about this film. Partly because there really isn't a lot of plot; there's a theme threaded through several set scenes. Partly because to say much in detail about the scenes is to give away some of the film's charm.
Put it this way: rent the thing. It's a delight. You won't be disappointed.
Defying Gravity (US, 1997)
(Click the boxpic to go to the Wolfe Video page--the link undercuts their frameset, so you'll need to fiddle with the URL to see anything else there--and the text link for IMDB information.)
If you watch this vid, don't watch it after Trick, that's all I have to say. Not that it's bad, but the tone change will bring you down HARD.
To be sure, it is slow. Slow to get started, slow to keep going. If you don't go in knowing that it's all about a coming-out crisis (among other things), you'll get very frustrated, because it takes forever to get going. And everybody is young and pretty and devoutly insecure.
Griff (Daniel Chilson) is madly in love with Pete (Don Handfield). Pete is more or less in love with Griff. Unfortunately, neither of them quite wants it. Griff doesn't want to be gay, and Pete doesn't want to be with someone who doesn't want to be gay. Unfortunately, not only are they at college, but Griff is still in the old frat house; Pete moved out when he decided to come out, because your typical frat house is not necessarily the most gayfriendly place to be.
Things come rather abruptly to a head when Pete gets gaybashed right after he gets Griff to go to a gay coffeehouse (although he didn't tell Griff the clientele was mostly gay, which contributes to a lot of friction right there).
The frat boys themselves are ... unreal. Not in the sense that they're not realistic--I have, unfortunately, known far too many fratboys to believe that--but just that they feel somehow like they've sailed in from another planet. Some planet where, when someone you've known gets beaten to within an inch of their life, your first concern is how this reflects on your house during rush week. Unfortunately, being young and stupid and perceiving a crisis is just NOT a good combination.
Griff's meeting with Pete's parents in the hospital also occupies a sort of surreal plane. You get the feel that they've deduced quite a bit from things that Pete said to them, and that he has somehow not mentioned to Griff. Griff, meanwhile, is emotionally wounded and trying not to show it, and trying really hard not to seem gay, so it just makes for a truly surreal meeting, especially when the clue train chugs into the station and he begins to realize what they know and he panics. Not a good time for it.
Griff, after trying to hold things together for a very long time, eventually starts imploding in periodically spectacular ways, and finally Todd (Niklaus Lange), his best friend in the frat, gets him away from everything so he can recover a bit. (FYI, the title comes from something Griff says during this. It is, unfortunately, the one line that goes clunk! in the entire piece.) Griff finally gets the courage up to tell Todd what's going on. Todd, of course, figured it out by watching his friend crumble to bits. Being a good best friend, he's wonderfully supportive.
It eventually all comes together in a fairly ugly resolution which has the interesting side effect of forcing Griff to choose whether or not to stay in the closet. (Actually, there's a series of fairly spectacular and ugly scenes, all played very well and realistically.)
Even granted the desperately slow start and a somewhat stock ending--not too happy, not too sad, a tad too concerned with wrapping up loose ends you'd completely forgotten about, and quite a bit too long (how many endings does one film need? there are at least three in there...)--it's definitely worth seeing. It does manage to capture what it would be like to be young, to be desperately insecure, wanting everyone's approval and still wanting to be yourself, even when you're not sure what "yourself" actually is or how to manage it.
You know, I think next time, I'll do Better than Chocolate and maybe some of the gaygirlvids. I'm getting kind of tired of the boys, somehow.
Posted by iain at 11:08 PM
blondes, bazooms and bullets
April 10, 2000
You know, I have to admit, I kind of like Pamela Anderson Lee.
No no no. Not like like. I do not fantasize about resting my head between her pillowy bosoms. Just ... you know, plain old like.
I've never seen anyone with quite the sense of herself as a character/caricature as she has. And the plain fact is, within the limited range that she shows on VIP, she's actually a pretty good comic actress. (For the Pam-impaired, VIP is a show in which she plays an executive in charge of a personal protection agency. She's supported by her crack staff of incredibly smart and beautiful women and beautiful men.) In the most recent episode, for example, she spent a really extraordinary amount of time running around in a slip, huge garbanzo curlers and really remarkable shoes. Platforms, kind of. But with spike heels. Ouch. Anyway, watching her move in those shoes was frankly hysterical. They were so high that she couldn't take large steps (she'd have broken something), and she was running and squealing, and somehow, it was actually funny.
The truly funny part of the episode, however, was the search. Her friends suspected that a man she was falling for was, in fact, the person who had been hired to kill their client. she knew they were wrong, but she couldn't prove it. finally, when he came to pick her up for a date, she resorted to strip-searching him in the elevator. Sort of. Sort of hot and heavy kissing, interspersed with bits and pieces of his clothing going flying across the elevator. And how often do you figure you'd have a scene with a beautiful woman and a good looking man going at it hot and heavy, and at the end he is the one left standing not-quite-entirely naked.
Watching that episde did make me wonder, though: what do nonAmericans think Los Angeles is like? For that matter, what do most Americans think it's like? If you've never been there, and all you have to judge from are news items and television, it looks like a land where it's always sunny (except when it's either sliding into the sea due to rain or burning down due to lack of same), beautiful blonds of both genders with overstuffed/developed chests, and car chases featuring flying bullets and exploding vehicles happens at least daily, if not several times a day. (And, it's worth noting, only the bad guys ever get hurt in all this. And it's always because they have a car accident or something blows up.)
If ever I go to Los Angeles again, I fully expect to see cars careening down the highway full of people shooting at each other. I think it's everyone's divine right to see a car chase in Los Angeles at least once!
Just watched VH1's Divas 2000: A Tribute to Diana Ross. My overall reaction to the thing can pretty much be summed up as follows (and keep in mind that generally, fashion and hair are the sorts of things I have to be hit over the head with to notice them at all:
The first 90 minutes: Hillary Swank declares Diana Ross "Diva of the Millennium." How ... cute ... Donna Summer singing "Reflections" ought to be better than that, somehow. It just doesn't work. Where's that whoopwhoop instrument, anyway? ... Jeez, this is boring. Bloated and boring. Where the hell did all the energy of this thing go? Maybe I'll just play the Sims instead...
When Diana Ross first appears: AAAAAAHH!! KILL IT! KILL IT NOW!... Oh. That's her hair. Dear god in heaven, what HAS she done to it? It looks like a muskrat exploded on her head! And what is she wearing? Who on earth told her that wearing a vomit colored dress with gold fringe was a good idea?
After her first costume change: Um. Well. Clearly she has decided, "I AM The Diva Supreme, and I will wear what I damn well please." And she IS cruel, isn't she? making the audience sing along with her on the high notes of "Endless Love". And they love her for making them do it. Now THAT is a mark of Divahood, if anything is. Abuse them, but they love you anyway.
After her second costume change: Whoa. Who knew that a 56 year old woman could wear a dress that short and bring it off? and where the hell is the back of that thing? She says she won't bend over; she'd damn well better NOT.... Oh, I see. Her silver lack-of-dress matches Mariah's gold lack-of-dress.
After her third and final costume change: Clearly, explosions is tonight's theme. She looks like she's in the middle of an exploding blue ostrich.
Cattiness and costume changes aside, the one thing that the show seems to have confirmed is that nobody can do Supremes/Diana Ross music like The Supremes and Diana Ross themselves; there's probably a reason why only one of their songs is generally covered (and covered frequently, oddly enough). For each of the Divanettes, so to speak--the tributary divas? everyone else, anyway--they did a number or two of their own and then a Supremes or Diana Ross song. And, with the exception of Mariah Carey, they all sounded really wrong. I don't know if it was just the general lack of energy level generally or the fact that they were mostly trying to keep the original arrangements more or less intact (a mistake, that), but they just sounded weak and flat (and periodically off key, to boot). I do have to admit, though, Miss Carey sounded very good in her arrangement--maybe because her voice is a good enough match that the arrangement didn't sound too odd, and she didn't try too hard to stick with the original sound. (How on earth they made a Heartbreaker/Love Hangover hybrid work, I have no idea, but work it did. I mean, I loathe "Heartbreaker", but that song combination worked.
VIP: the official site. It's rather dated, actually; it hasn't been updated since the series launch.
Pamela Online: May I just report that even though it's mostly not there, this site somehow disturbs me deeply. Or perhaps I mean that it feels somehow deeply disturbed.
Then again, why on earth wouldn't you run your own information/fan site?
But it still seems a bit ... well, weird done this way. I don't know why.
The other official PamTV site--or the official subsite, or the replacement for the official site which isn't there yet anyway (actually, it's not clear WHAT this thing is)--would seem to be sponsored by Altavista, as the first thing it does is load a Shockwave animation with an Altavista ad. And it includes her "Secret Diary"! Which, as it turns out, is exactly two pages of basic biographical information encoded into the SLOWEST loading Shockwave I can remember seeing in a while.
LIT joins VIP: from MTV News. A story about the episode in which the music group Lit was featured as guest stars; it resulted in the video "Miserable" by Lit "featuring Pamela Anderson Lee as Valeri" (which is horribly confusing, really. My guess is that you have to look at the shoes to tell if its' Pam or Valeri.) in which she quite literally eats the band alive.
reflections
April 5, 2000
Good heavens!
It's really true!
Diana Ross and the Supremes are going to tour! again!
Sort of.
I actually watched part of the Oprah show in which Miss Ross discussed the details of the tour and other things. (I have got to get on an Oprah show where she's giving away the good stuff. Each member of today's audience got a copy of "Diana Ross and the Supremes: the Ultimate Collection." But I digress.)
Insert Catty Moment Here: Miss Ross really desperately needs a new stylist/wigmaker. She's been looking like a hair bomb exploded on her head for more than ten years now. Isn't she tired of that look? Isn't it a pain in the tuchas? Isn't she ready for a change? I'm not a big one for even noticing hair or style, and it makes me want to get her a gross of hair geegaws to lock it down. Or maybe just a weedwhacker. (end catty moment here.)
You know, apart from everything else, it was a kind of interesting interview. Rather, an enjoyable interview. Finding out details and truths and whatnot. All the celebrity showbiz details that you normall get with this. What are you doing, why are you doing it (for the money of course--although, I believe, the official reason was "Because I felt it was time".)
The publicity preceding this tour has been , so far, unusually muted. Partly, of course, it's the extraordinarily ugly (as reported by the press) fight that preceded this tour. Apparently, the original idea was for Mary Wilson, the other surviving original Supreme, and Cindy Birdsong, who replaced Florence Ballard (who left when the Supremes were demoted to "and the Supremes" and later died) to be on the whole entire tour with Miss Ross. According to the accounts I've read, Mary and Cindy demanded to be paid exactly as much as Miss Ross, who reportedly declined. (It's worth noting that according to Diana Ross, the entire thing was negotiated between Wilson, Birdsong, and the promoters, and she had no input whatsoever into the results.)
Thing is, both positions are entirely understandable and entirely intractable. Wilson's and Birdsong's position was that they had contributed as much to the success of the original Supremes as had Diana Ross, as well has having toured with "The Former Ladies of the Supremes" in Britain; Mary Wilson had also had a career on stage. Diana Ross' position (or that of her agents and/or tour promoters), understandably, was that she was clearly the bigger name, and hence deserved a much bigger payday; also that she could tour with any two backup singers and bill them as "the Supremes" with Motown's blessing (the company owns the name, but given that he's her daughter's father, it's not likely that Barry Gordy would deny Diana Ross use of the name for one summer). Even an attempt to get Mary Wilson onto the bill just for the Detroit performance of the current tour foundered on billing and money.
Which, given the history of the change from just The Supremes to Diana Ross and the Supremes to Diana Ross and that separate entity known as The Supremes--it must have all felt appallingly familiar.
Judging from the response of the crowd on today's Oprah show, Miss Ross' position--that she and the music are the attractions and it doesn't matter who the Supremes actually are--seems to have been borne out. The crowd was absolutely frenzied to see Diana and the Supremes belting out those old chestnuts. And with style, too.
Many of these reunion tours have been much more about the nostalgia and the money than the music. Not that the artists involved didn't care about the music, but many of them have been in semiretirement, many have been off doing other things in the entertainment area, so that when they start performing together again, it just sounds awful (or at least it doesn't sound good, and not remotely like the original music; Crosby Stills Nash and Young and Earth Wind and Fire utterly fail to keep from leaping to mind here...). However, in this case, Diana has been performing nonstop for 40 years, and the current Supremes have been performing in Britain so everyone's in tune, musically speaking. They sound fan-freakin'-tastic, actually.
The plain fact is, of course, that the women touring with Diana Ross on the "Return to Love" tour (I keep wanting to throw a "Canal" at the end of that title) are perfectly and historically (if that's entirely the right word) entitled to be called "The Supremes". Instead of going with any two backup singers (which would, to be sure, have been a PR disaster), she decided that what she would do is to get the other women who were with the Supremes after she left. There was, to be sure, quite a lot of personnel turnover with the group in the last few years of its existence. Apparently in Detroit and one or two other cities, there may be as many as four to six Supremes behind her, but the principal Supremes for this tour will be Lynda Lawrence and Scherrie Payne. (Who, aside from briefly introducing themselves and giving their Supremes provenance, as it were, got to say not one nonmusical word.)
Judging from the Oprah show, some parts of the tour may also devolve into the Diana Ross' Greatest Hits Without The Supremes tour, but that shouldn't surprise anyone. After all, the woman has had a longer career without the Supremes than she had with them; if she wants to celebrate the entirety of her career, why not? (They didn't discuss whether or not the reconstituted Supremes will perform on next week's VH1 Divas 2000 Tribute to Diana Ross, but I'd expect it.)
It's not the same as it was the first time around, of course: not the same sound, not the same women. Miss Ross no longer has that shimmering high pure voice; after all, she's no longer twenty years old, so that shouldn't be expected. The Supremes don't sound the way they did when they were younger. Overall, the sound is just a shade deeper, more mature, maybe a bit more settled than the original. However, the arrangements have been tailored to match the vocal changes and restrictions, so that they're not straining to reach notes they can no longer hit. And as long as they keep the tunes, the cadences intact, it will be enough for most audiences. They know not to expect 20-year-old Diana, after all; what they want is the feel, the flavor of that group they remember from that long ago day. The feel and flavor of their youth.
That's the whole point of attending something like this, after all. Not to hear someone recreate something that, really, they simply can't; besides, these particular people never created that sound in the first place. The point of a tour like this is to revisit the past, to pull up old feelings, old memories, good ones, maybe to introduce your children to how your life used to be, something you used to enjoy. It might not even matter if the performance, the music were particularly good (although in this case it should be). The whole point is whether or not it can evoke what the audience wants, needs it to call from them.
I suspect The Supremes will be able to live up to their name in this case.
ADDENDUM 6 April 2000:an article in today's Chicago SunTimes, the difficulty with getting Mary Wilson on board wasn't all about the money. I'm not sure, exactly, what the difficulty was, but it wasn't the money. As far as I can tell, part of it seems to be that rumors of this have been drifting around for nearly a year, but Diana Ross didn't contact Mary Wilson and Cindy Birdsong until December 1999. (Boy, this tour came together FAST.) According to what she says on the Oprah site, Miss Ross didn't hear the rumors at all until quite late, and when she did, she contacted them.
According to an article in yesterday's SunTimes, however, it was at least partially about the money. And, it seems, about the fact that Mary Wilson and Diana Ross seem to loathe each other.
And according to this article and then this article from USA Today earlier this month, it was all about the money. (Well, and the respect that the money symbolized.) According to that first link, dated March 12, 2000, either the tour came together blindingly fast or someone involved flat-out lied to both Mary Wilson and the press (no wonder she's bitter!); the story cites (as we now know) credible rumor that Laurence and Payne will be touring with Miss Ross, to which Arthur Fogel, a tour promoter, said "emphatically" as reported, "There are no plans for a tour with anybody." It's also worth noting that in the same interview, he said, "There are lots of Supremes. It has everything to do with the music and not necessarily specific members of the group." Which should have told anyone which way THAT wind was blowing.
Cindy Birdsong does come off as a class act, I must admit. Said her piece just the once, and it was very neutral, comparatively, and then seems to have completely shut up about it.
The Supremes: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductees, 1988
The 70s Supremes (In other words, no sign or picture of Miss Ross is to be seen.)
Ross, Diana (biographical information at biography.com)
Yahoo! Music! The Supremes (includes discography; the Biography page actually goes into what looks like it must have been astonishingly acrimonious history at times)
Posted by iain at 11:34 PM | Comments (1)