Judy by the Numbers: "Chin Up! Cheerio! Carry On!"

Anne Marie is tracking Judy Garland's career through musical numbers...

1941 was a year of beginnings and endings for Judy Garland. It was the year of Judy's last Andy Hardy film (Life Begins for Andy Hardy, wherein nobody sang). And she wasn't just growing up on film - 1941 was also the year of Judy's first marriage: to David Rose, the musical director of the Tony Martin Radio Show. At only 19, Judy Garland was transitioning from child sensation to full fledged star.

The Movie: Babes on Broadway (1941)
The Songwriters: E.Y. Harburg (lyrics) and Burton Lane (music)
The Players: Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Virginia Weidler, Fay Bainter, Margaret O'Sullivan, directed by Busby Berkeley.

The Story: As the country entered World War II, the Freed Unit was lining up a series of nostalgia-inflected new hits starring Judy Garland for MGM. While Babes on Broadway looks at first glance like the typical "let's put on a show" backyard musical of 30's Mickey and Judy, some palpable differences manifest. First, there's the emphasis on Americana and patriotism, from Judy urging young British youths on in "Chin Up Cheerio!" to the (racist blackface) closing number, "Robert E Lee." This was the influence of World War II. Though Pearl Harbor happened mere days before Babes on Broadway was released, national sentiment was already turning towards the patriotic messages that would define wartime Hollywood. However, the movie's bigger hit was a more conventional Judy Garland number "How About You?"

In many ways, Babes on Broadway looks and sounds like the old Judy and Mickey - the two doe-eyed lovebirds sing to each other at a piano or on a stage while Mickey pulls faces. However, there are two marked differences: First, Mickey is no longer the focus of the movie - the two actors share camera equally. Second, Garland has graduated from the giant lace sleeves and tulle-lined skirts of "in-between" childish Judy, instead dressed fashionably in the latest style. Ziegfeld Girl and Little Nellie Kelly had proven Judy's talent was mature. Now it was time for her star image to reflect that transition, too.

Best Shot: The Beguiled (1971)

This week's Hit Me With Your Best Shot subject is Don Siegel's fascinating whatsit called The Beguiled (1971). It's little like Siegel's other collaborations with his muse Clint Eastwood and assigning it to a genre is also difficult both of which might explain its fairly quiet reputation. With the news coming that Sofia Coppola will soon be remaking it, our eyes drank every frame up. And wow is this story of a wounded Yankee grifter in A Confederate girl's school ripe for a revisit. You might say that imagining how Coppola's halflidded female gaze might view this is nearly as exciting as the movie itself but in some ways it already feels like a Sofia Coppola film. Profound interest in sensual and anthropological gazing at the desires of women who can't articulate their desires? Check!

Some of the English language posters are hilariously false, suggesting it's a shoot-em-up manly western. One poster actually has four men on it when Eastwood is the only man of significance in the movie and practically the entire film involves a group of women buzzing around and hypnotized by the sick man in their midst. So I've illustrated with a French poster that feels right.

Best Shot choices are after the jump...

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We Could Be Equals Just For One Day

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason on Equals.

I'd be curious to know if Lil Nicky Hoult got into his parents Blockbuster stash around the tender age of eight and saw some things he wasn't supposed to see... like perhaps the 1996 film Trainspotting and the 1997 film Gattaca? Because he's totally spent the past year trying to remake the two of them. Kill Your Friends, the Trainspotting wannabe, has already come and gone without much love lost or gained, and now we have Equals, a shiny "doomed by science fiction" romance for the Swipe Right Age.

Equals - the tale of a gleaming future where emotion's verboten - makes a much more successful case for itself. Yes it echoes Andrew Niccol in every perfume-ad pretty shot, all futuristic silvers and golds shimmering beneath the camera's upturned palm. You've never seen skin as devastatingly luminescent as Hoult's here - he resembles nothing less an unnamed organism from under the sea seeing light for the first time, a spectacle of unspeakable translucence squinting at the sun.

His purity has a point and a purpose though, beyond just its usual pretty surface charms - his cheeks flood with color, bathing the screen and the palette, pinkening, tells us he's seeing what a lot of us have for awhile now... namely hot damn, Kristen Stewart, you're on fire! Burn it up!

Yes, the other half of this romance is no stranger to the soft glow of twilight (you know, Twilight) but far from sullen here KStew is a barely contained nervy jangle, a tremor, dark eyes sunken in a sea of foam. She makes you lean in, which is what this romance needs - look closer. Closer. And once you do, once you're spinning in their orbit, wham, that's that. You're under. They make a surprising pair but they work, and there's defnitely a queerness to it - they're meeting in the middle, gender-wise, with their utilitarian costuming and eyelashes for days; love like an invention, self-built, new and shiny... so shiny it stings.

Grade: B

Remember Jason Scott Lee?

The Jungle Book last time around. Mmmmm, 1994.

Strike a Pose

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Manuel on Strike a Pose.

Perhaps it’s unfair to compare Strike a Pose with Madonna: Truth or Dare. After all, that now iconic documentary is really on a league of its own. Then again, this newer doc, which focuses on the male dancers from that 1991 film (and from the Material Girl’s Blond Ambition Tour) cannot help but drum up the comparisons. As a pseudo-sequel to Truth or Dare, Strike a Pose is perhaps less enthralling—no Warren Beatty or Antonio Banderas here—but just as entertaining. And while the first twenty or so minutes of the film do indeed feel like a sequel in spirit if not in name (we get to revisit the tour and the doc in ways that show us how much these dancers kept to themselves even as they seemingly opened up their lives for Madge and the camera), this documentary soon reveals itself to be something much rarer.

In profiling these men 25 years after the fact, Strike a Pose becomes a rare portrait of the middle-aged dancer, a figure that we’re not often offered on screen. It’s often hard to hear what these guys went through—you’ll be surprised to hear candid talks about AIDS that even Truth or Dare, despite its activist zeal given its time,couldn’t and didn’t breach—and it’s even more heartening to see their resilience. It was hard, many of them note, to have always lived with the, for better or for worse, “Madonna dancer” label especially given how their relationships to the Queen of Pop frayed soon after (addiction, rehab, and lawsuits didn’t help). By the time we see all of them reunite for the first time in decades and see them playing the infamous game of “Truth or Dare” again, you cannot help but feel a kinship to these people some of us have felt we’ve known for just as long. For Madonna fans, this is an unmissable film. But where directors Ester Gould and Reijer Zwaan succeed is in producing a touching portrait of ageing, of finding the inspiration and the drive to keep going even when the promise of youth (and the promise you had in your own youth) threatens to disappear.

Grade: B+