"American Girl": Tom Petty at the Movies.

By Salim Garami

What's good? 

In memory of the musical legend Tom Petty, I couldn't help thinking about how the movies essentially introduced me to my love for his music (much as movies happen to introduce me to a lot of music I come to hold close to my heart) and I wanted to have something to say about it.

So I looked to two wildly different films that utilize the quintessential Heartbreakers classic "American Girl", the jangly pumping tune about a young girl looking out in hopes of a world outside her balcony. It was his second big hit, riding on the success of previous single "Breakdown", and it's instantly recognizable in the Diddley-esque high chords strumming and the sort of bass drum kick-snare pattern that makes one pop up and ready to move. It's no less infectious than any pop song of the day in its simplicity. So it only makes sense that so many films and tv series would be eager to use it in their soundtracks.

Take It Easy, Baby, and Find Out Which Films I Choose After the Break...

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you can ring my bell, ring my bell

Soundtracking: "The Lure"

Just in time for Halloween, musical oddity The Lure has joined The Criterion Collection. Here's Chris on its soundtrack...

Yet another Polish lesbian mermaid pop musical? Geez. For those that complain that musicals have no originality anymore, may I introduce a bloody disco ball of a film: The Lure. The story of two mermaids who come aground and quickly rise to success singing in a Warsaw nightclub, it’s both fairy tale and metaphor for female sexuality. But most importantly, the music kicks a whole lot of ass.

Led by young stars Marta Mazurek and Michalina Olszańska and with some disco diva stylings from Kinga Preis, the film is about the most delightful genre hybrid we have seen in some time. It’s a femme-centric mix of musical and horror, with more pointedly ironic sexuality than any music video once banned from MTV. It would be glib to describe it as a t.A.T.u. performing a Let The Right One In jukebox musical of Abba songs but that is the closest I can get to painting a vision of its giddy melodic morbidity. Or describing the fun of its singular strangeness.

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Dee Rees Bringing Flo Kennedy, Gloria Steinem, and The Fight for the ERA to the Big Screen in "An Uncivil War"

by Daniel Crooke

While her World War II-set Mississippi saga Mudbound continues to roll out across the fall festival circuit, steadily increasing its buzz along the way, rising director Dee Rees has set her sights on the feminist movement’s fight to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment for her next film: An Uncivil War. Particularly focusing on the work of iconic activists Flo Kennedy and Gloria Steinem in the early 1970s as they battle for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing equal protection under the law for all citizens regardless of gender, and against archconservative forces led by fundamentalist organizer Phyllis Schlafly, FilmNation will finance the film with production set to begin early next year.

This is an exciting new chapter in Rees’s already distinguished filmography – which, in addition to Mudbound, includes her tender, achingly gorgeous debut Pariah and the Emmy-nominated Bessie – and the story is ripe for the moment. After so evocatively illustrating in her earlier work the ways in which hard-won personal identity can be met with retaliatory cultural reverberations from the close-mindedness within and around your own community, Rees has set herself up for success to dissect the multi-layered muddle of how this feminist moment impacted America. Indeed, in her own words: “I'm particularly interested in digging into the messiness of the women's movement — the many different alliances that were formed and fractured and exploring who got left behind vs who got remembered.” Personally this quote reminds me of the backroom brainstorm meetings between the fractious feminist street bands of Lizzie Borden’s dystopian docu-manifesto Born In Flames, a film which happens to feature Flo Kennedy in a galvanizing supporting performance as an elder stateswoman of the cause. That story, like this one, is a tale of intersectionality.

As An Uncivil War marches into pre-production, who would you cast as Flo Kennedy, Gloria Steinem, and Phyllis Schlafly?

New Podcast: Desperately Seeking Smackdowns

Nathaniel welcomes our first all Los Angeles panel for this discussion of the 1985 film year. Comedian/Writer Louis Virtel (Billy on the Street), Producer/Writer Abdi Nazemian ("The Authentics"), Actress Nora Zehetner and Director/Writer Michelle Morgan (It Happened in L.A.). We just wrote about the Supporting Actress nominated performances of 1985 but now it's time to zoom out on the films and the film year itself when Oprah Winfrey and Madonna began their global takeovers, Anjelica Huston became a third generation Oscar favorite, and Out of Africa eventually won Best Picture.

Smackdown '85 Companion Podcast
(58 minutes)
00:01 Anjelica vs Oprah with a little Amy Madigan on the side
10:00 Our entire group has a Jane Fonda "problem" - shout-outs to Klute and lots of head-scratching over the plot of Agnes of God
20:00 Meg Tilly and Jennifer Tilly and Oscar trivia
22:00 Should they remake The Color Purple?
28:00 Syphilitic Out of Africa, Divisive Prizzi's Honor and their Oscar wins
35:30 Desperately Seeking Susan and Oscar's resistance to both Madonna and comedy

46:30 Twice in a Lifetime's weird messages and cathartic makeovers
49:40 Individual favorites from the year from each of us including (but not limited to): Clue, The Breakfast Club, The Goonies, Mask, The Legend of Billie Jean
55:00 Farewells and Credits

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Don't forget to read the smackdown and continue the conversations in the comments! 

Desperately Seeking Smackdown