Take Three: Ida Lupino

Craig (from Dark Eye Socket) here with Take Three. This week actress and director  Ida Lupino

Ida Lupino a "sensation" circa 1941

Take One: The Bigamist (1953)
The Bigamist probes unseemly marital behaviour and stews on moral sorrows. At its centre is Edmond O’Brien toing and froing between two wives. But behind the camera as director, and in a supporting role as O’Brien’s second, San Francisco wife Phyllis Martin, is Ida Lupino. Her unfussy direction creates lean drama and her performance beautifully matches it, with nary an unnecessary furtive glance or superfluous line spoken. She’s a woman bored on a bus tour of Hollywood stars’ homes, chatted up by O’Brien’s depressed bigamist Harry Graham. 

 

Edmond as Harry: Haven’t you any interest in how the other half lives?
Ida as Phyllis: No, not particularly. I’m just crazy about bus rides – gives me a chance to get off my feet.”

Phyllis is smart, practical and wryly humorous. She’s world-weary enough to spot a chancer, but curious enough to give him his chance. Yet, she’s not someone to be taken advantage of. She’s part good-time gal, hired by a failing Chinese restaurant to perk up business that she herself acknowledges she’s failed to do, and part susceptible single girl. It’s clear she wants companionship, so she involves herself unknowingly in an already-married man’s emotions. Lupino deftly conveys just the right levels of guarded vulnerability and earthy pluckiness.

Lupino directed herself twice on screen prior to The Bigamist in Outrage (1950) and Hard, Fast and Beautiful  (1951) – but only in unnamed, uncredited cameos. Here she creates for herself a memorable emotionally driven character which she nails with snap and skill. With the cheeky shrewdness of a Hollywood pro, the perfectly cast Lupino gives herself the film’s best part.  As a director she clearly knows what kind of performance style the part requires; as an actress she fulfils the role with elegant yet slightly spiky precision. 

Two more takes after the jump...

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Learning to Love the Lantern Again

I'm pretty sure I've told y'all at some point or another that Green Lantern was a childhood favorite as superheroes go. I wore a Green Lantern t-shirt proudly. Before the shitty movie was a reality, that is. Recently I've taken to only wearing it on laundry days. My beloved worn shirt mutated into a Tee of Shame.

Last week, wanting something comfortable for a long days travel to Utah, I wore it. As I was walking through the Phoenix airport on layover an adorable little toddler pointed right at me while yanking on his father's pant leg and squealed: 

IT'S GWEEN LANTEUHN!"

I smiled and for the first time in ages didn't think 'Person on Street thinks I have terrible taste in movies!". I suddenly felt warmly toward the power ringed hero again.

I returned from Utah to discover that Green Lantern had come out of the closet (see liplock above). No, not Silver Age brunette Hal Jordan but Golden Age blonde lantern Alan Scott. He wears the ring in "Earth 2" a parallel universe. (For those of you who are unfamiliar with comic books, the ring of power changes owners periodically, and comic books are all fucked up with alternate realities anyways since heroes never age and their histories keep changing).

As much as a gay superhero movie would be a fun novelty, I hope they never make a Green Lantern sequel or reboot. Not that it wouldn't also be fun to see Ryan Reynolds making it with another man, even a ringed projection of another Green Lantern

Sorrry. My mind is its own power ring. It manifests my wishes...but even if Ryan Reynolds were Alan Scott and not Hal Jordan, if he's smart he'll never reprise the role.

On an unrelated but perfectly symmetrical note, please enjoy the awesome comic strip by the talented Anthony Holden which is embedded after the jump. It's a dance party!

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The Subscription Rush

This post was prompted by two readers who $ubscribed this week through no prompting of my own at all! Much love. Mwah. If you, like those readers, love the blog and want to help it get even more fab, won't you consider a cheap donation? There's a sidebar to your right and you can choose different options... (the cheapest being $2.50 a month). Tomorrow it's my birthday. BUT, UH, NO PRESSURE.

So here's a challenge if you're resisting: Visit the blog once a day this month (that's easy! And free) and each day decide if it's worth one dime and if so write YES on your calendar of choice. I'll just be standing by with my beggar's cup. There are 26 days left in the month of June. If by June's end you think it was most definitely worth a dime on 25 of those days, sign up. If 300 more of you subscribe I can pay my rent with just the proceeds from the blog. Paying rent is fun. Wheeee. If 2,500 of you subscribe I'll quit my consulting job and make the Film Experience my full time job again (it was when I was unemployed but I couldn't continue on that Depression Era road). If 100,000 of you subscribe I'll fly you all in for a massive party and we'll ride unicorns and bathe in the fountain of youth and I'll bake a cake full of rainbows and smi-- ... what? I'm a dreamer! Don't crush my dreams.

Burning Questions: Are We Ignoring Wes Anderson's Dark Side?

Michael C. here to try to look past the standard take on one of our leading filmmakers. 

Steve Zissou: This is going to hurt.

I have decided that I am no longer interested in reading reviews of Wes Anderson films that contain the word “quirky” in the opening paragraph. Same goes for “twee”.

Over and over I read that, what do you know, Wes Anderson has gone and made another Wes Anderson movie. It’s about time, don’t you think, that people take a more substantive look at a one of the most distinctive bodies of work of the last two decades? A body of work whose deeper currents are often ignored amid the same old talk about flat compositions and diorama sets. Anderson’s movies have a lingering impact that defies those would dismiss his carefully composed world as emotionally detached. Right below that carefully composed surface are the deeper currents of a director preoccupied with death, loss, and alienation.

With all the focus on his signature colorful style are we ignoring Wes Anderson’s dark side? 

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Review: "Snow White and the Huntsman"

This article was originally published in my movie column at Towleroad

"Fairy tale revisionism" has been rapidly climbing the Hollywood idea chart. In the past few years we've seen Alice in Wonderland, Rapunzel in Tangled, Red Riding Hood, and Snow White in Mirror Mirror (reviewed here).  There are several more on the way including Angelina Jolie as Maleficent terrorizing Sleeping Beauty Elle Fanning. This weekend Snow White returned to theaters for the second time in three months. Her timing is apt since the apple-munching princess is celebrating her 75th big screen anniversary (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered in 1937). Why so many fairy tales? Modern Hollywood thrives on branding so the more familiar the movie before it arrives the better. And what's more familiar than fairy tales?

Tale as old as time. 
True as it can be…  ♫

Oops wrong fairy tale. Regret to inform that Snow White and the Huntsman does not have a theme song sung by Angela Lansbury but let's borrow that song anyway as framing device. Snow White and the Hunstman does have a theme song but it's a less catchy dirge-like ballad. One of the seven dwarves coughs it out at a funeral until Florence and the Machine take over on the soundtrack as the heroes rise up against evil Queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron) in montage. 

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. If you can suspend your disbelief that Kristen Stewart is "the fairest of all them all" in a beauty contest with Charlize Theron, read on...

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