Monday, July 22, 2019

Summer Reading Challenge: First Round-Up

This year's Summer Reading Challenge is off to a great start. 35 eager readers have signed up to participate and there are already some wonderful book reviews available for your perusal. While the deadline to sign up has now passed, I encourage you to read on your own or sign up next year. If you have already signed up, please make sure you submit your finished reviews in the official link form. Your reviews won't count for the challenge and the giveaway if you don't submit your links! Also make sure you share on social with the hashtag #classicfilmreading.

Now on to the reviews:

Aisha at Screen Dreams
Fay Wray and Robert Riskin: A Hollywood Memoir by Victoria Riskin

Andy at AndyWolverton.com
Moseby Confidential: Arthur Penn's Night Movies and the Rise of Neo-Noir by Matthew Asprey Gear
Noir City Sentinel Annual 3: The Best of the Noir City Sentinel 2010 by Eddie Muller
RKO Radio Pictures: A Titan is Born by Richard B. Jewell

Christine at Overture Books and Film
Glenn Ford: A Life by Peter Ford

Donna at Strictly Vintage Hollywood
About Face: The Life and Times of Dottie Ponedel: Make-up Artist to the Stars by Dorothy and Meredith Ponedel

Erin at Always Classics
Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn in World War II by Robert Matzen
Vivien Leigh: An Intimate Portrait by Kendra Bean




Lee at Totalle.net on YouTube
Kiss Hollywood Goodbye by Anita Loos




Raquel at Out of the Past
Dynamic Dames: 50 Leading Ladies Who Made History by Sloan De Forest (video review)
Fay Wray and Robert Riskin: A Hollywood Memoir by Victoria Riskin (video review)

Rich at Wide Screen World
All About Eve by Sam Staggs



Robby on Instagram
The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father’s Twentieth Century by Margaret Talbot
Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation by Mindy Johnson.
In Pieces by Sally Field

Sarah on Goodreads
Grace: Secret Lives of a Princess by James Spada
Such Mad Fun: Ambition and Glamour in Hollywood's Golden Age by Robin R. Cutler

Vanessa at Super Veebs
Audrey Hepburn: An Elegant Spirit by Sean Hepburn Ferrer
The Castle On Sunset by Shawn Levy
Norma: The Story of Norma Shearer by Lawrence J. Quirk
Olivia de Havilland: Lady Triumphant by Victoria Amador

Walter at WaltsPopcornBytes
Bring on the Empty Horses by David Niven
Fred Astaire by Stephen Harvey
Son of Harpo Speaks! by Bill Marx

Friday, July 19, 2019

Cinema Shame: Urban Cowboy (1980)


I'm chipping away at my 2019 Cinema Shame challenge. This year I gave myself the goal to watch 10 movies from my birth year 1980 for the very first time. I'm hoping I can tackle a few reviews this summer so I can keep up!

Oh boy. I'm not even sure how Urban Cowboy (1980) made it onto my Cinema Shame list. I'm just going to chalk it up to the fact that it met all of my criteria (film released in 1980 - check. film I haven't seen yet - check). But perhaps I should have skipped this one. It has NOT aged well and while I'm glad I watched it I'm not going to visit it again any time soon.

Urban Cowboy stars John Travolta as Bud, a small town cowboy who leaves for Houston to find a job in the oil business. He stays with his Uncle Bob (Barry Corbin) and Aunt Corene (Brooke Alderson) who take him out to the hottest club in town, Gilley's a hopping honky tonk bar where all the action happens. There he meets Sissy (Debra Winger), a bar regular with a spirited personality. They quickly fall in love and get married. Bud has his eye on mastering the mechanical bull at Gilley's and when former convict Wes (Scott Glenn) shows up at Gilley's Bud finds some competition for both the bull and Sissy. Bud and Sissy have a falling out driving Bud into the arms of the cowboy obsessed Pam (Madolyn Smith Osborne) and Sissy into the arms of Wes who teaches her how to ride a mechanical bull. As Bud trains for a mechanical bull riding competition, behind the scenes Wes is up to no good.



When Urban Cowboy hit theaters in the summer of 1980, critics called it the country western answer to Saturday Night Fever and they were not wrong. It definitely had that vibe even if the dancing wasn't as prominent. The film was directed by James Bridges and based on the real life story of Dew Westbrook and Betty Helmer, two Gilley regulars whose romance was profiled in an Esquire article. This movie just doesn't sit well in the 21st century and I found it off-putting. The domestic violence in particular is hard to swallow. Sissy, played by Debra Winger, has to endure a lot of emotional and physical abuse. Both Bud and Wes treat her like shit. Bud starts off as a total jerk and then comes around by the end. Wes seems okay but his criminal past and his flirtatious nature makes it apparent early on that he's not one to settle down with. Even so, both Bud and Wes' characters do a sudden about face that I didn't quite see coming and felt like a plot fix. In the end, I was only really invested in Sissy and everyone else (except for Bob and Corene!) could go to hell in a handbasket. I can see some of what people enjoy about this movie. It has a great cast, a great sense of place and time and plenty of dramatic tension throughout. The mechanical bull riding scenes were so much fun to watch. But for me the events in the story were either too predictable or came out of the blue. Overall the film left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

Have you seen Urban Cowboy? What did you think? Did you like it more than I did?

Wednesday, July 17, 2019

Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache



"Here is a woman who helped invent cinema, and there is a silence around her. It's absolutely intolerable and even stupid that we can't see these films." - Nicole Lise Bernheim, circa 1975


I’ve heard it said many times that we must preserve Alice Guy-Blache’s legacy. I didn’t fully appreciate the weight of this statement until I saw Pamela B. Green’s documentary Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache. This early filmmaking pioneer was present for the birth of cinema and helped shaped it at its very inception. She wrote, produced and directed and used filmmaking techniques such as close-ups, tinted color, synchronized sound, double exposure and various special effects that would become essential to filmmakers in the silent film era and beyond. She worked with various studios and in 1910 co-founded Solax Studios in Fort Lee, NJ with her husband Herbert Blache and business partner George A. Magie. After two decades of work and a thousand films, she disappeared from the industry and was mostly forgotten. In the years that followed and as film history was taken more seriously, Guy-Blache’s contributions were not recognized in the same way as her peers, including other women filmmakers like Lois Weber and Dorothy Arzner. Her legacy fell victim to deceit and the spread of misinformation. At the end of her life, she fought to set the record straight on many matters and her daughter Simone Blache even published her memoirs. But history still threatened to forget Guy-Blache forever. What needed to change? Her surviving films needed to be found, restored, viewed, studied and discussed. The more we learn about Alice Guy-Blache and her work, the better we can maintain an accurate depiction of the early days of cinema and the people who made it all happen.

Be Natural takes an investigative approach as it explores Alice Guy-Blache’s life and career, uncovers information, seeks out family members and interviews contemporary filmmakers in an effort to give Guy-Blache the recognition she deserves. The documentary employs mixed media visuals, archival photographs, interview footage with Guy-Blache from the late 1950s and the early 1960s. The film is narrated by Jodi Foster who also served as executive producer. While I was watching the film I thought to myself that this would be just the sort of project that Hugh Hefner would have invested in and I was right! He was also an executive producer along with Robert Redford and Regina K. Scully among others. There are so many talking heads in this documentary that it’s a bit overwhelming. Some discuss Guy-Blache at length and others appear for just a quick soundbite. Filmmakers featured include Peter Bogdanovich, Geena Davis, Agnes Varda, Diablo Cody, Ben Kingsley, Ava DuVernay, Kathleen Turner, Gillian Armstrong, Janeane Garofalo, etc. There are also interviews with family members, historians, professors, authors and archivists. Classic film enthusiasts will recognize some familiar faces including Kevin Brownlow, Anthony Slide, Cari Beauchamp and Jan-Christopher Horak. The documentary was inspired by Alison McMahan’s book Alice Guy Blache, Lost Visionary of the Cinema and director/producer Pamela B. Green established a Be Natural research team who did the investigative work on the film.

The documentary is choppy and jumps around a lot. Sometimes at a dizzying pace. I wish it could have slowed down and taken its time a bit. That doesn’t diminish the documentary’s importance which is profound. The film speaks to those of us who believe in the preservation of history and the acknowledgment of great works of those who have since passed on. Time and neglect can erase history and its up to us to speak Alice Guy-Blache’s name, to watch her films and to let future generations know about her story. Be Natural leads the charge in the name of Alice Guy-Blache.

Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache is a profoundly important and enlightening documentary on an early filmmaking pioneer that time threatened to forget.

screens in select theaters this summer and fall. Visit the official website for more information. The film will be available on digital July 23rd and DVD August 20th from Kino Lorber.


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