A perfectly cast Streisand - at the top of her game - makes for a delicious CLEAR DAY

Barbra Streisand combined the kooky and classic sides of her personality perfectly when playing both Daisy and Melinda in her third film, ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER. Described in Paramount Pictures production notes as a “delightful combination of comedy, drama, fantasy and music, the film deals with a psychiatrist (Yves Montand) who becomes professionally and emotionally involved with a remarkable female patient, who possesses extrasensory powers and relives, under hypnosis, an earlier incarnation.”

Based on the 1965 Broadway success by Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane which originally starred Barbara Harris and John Cullum, the producers made some significant changes when transferring the play to the screen. Lerner revised his original story to accommodate the film's director, Vincente Minnelli (Gigi, An American in Paris), who requested that the regression sequences be changed from a Restoration to a Regency setting. Minnelli felt that “white wigs and writing with feathers gets to be very boring.” He wanted to make it Regency, because “the world was more inviting.” Also, several songs from the Broadway show were jettisoned while several new ones were added -and then cut!

Designed to be a sumptuous musical in the tradition of My Fair Lady and Camelot, On A Clear Day was originally meant to be a three hour “road show” release. Road show films were a special theatrical format treated as an event. Most road shows were shown with an overture, an intermission, an Entre Acte and “exit” music. Also, road shows usually had lengthy running times which limited the number of showings per day and therefore cut into studio and theater profit margins. But if a road show film was successful, it could mean a healthy run and large returns. (Think The Sound of Music.) Movie theaters also sold expensive keepsake programs featuring photos and articles about the film to generate even more revenue.

However, by 1970, the world of movies had changed and films began to tackle more contemporary issues. Lacking faith that an "old fashioned" property like Clear Day could attract a large audience, Paramount Pictures decided to abandon the road show format and delivered the film to theaters with an abreviated running time of 129 minutes. This meant that it could squeeze more showings into a day. This also meant that several filmed sequences had to be sacrificed to whittle down the film’s three hour running time. Sadly, Clear Day lost several key musical numbers, subplots, and scenes. It's for this reason that the film has attained a cult status among fans - somewhat like the “lost” version of Judy Garland’s A Star is Born. But unlike A Star is Born, On A Clear Day has never been restored. In fact, the cut sequences have never seen the light of day. It's doubtful that the missing footage still exists, unless the Minnelli estate — or Streisand herself — has preserved them somewhere.

Despite studio interference, Minnelli did an extraordinary job with what would become his last musical. The film is well cast with Jack Nicholson, Larry Blyden, Simon Oakland, Lew Ayers, Mabel Albertson and Bob Newhart lending expert support and Streisand is both reserved and natural as well as remarkably adroit at playing two radically different women in the same body. The colors are glorious. Streisand's period costumes are spectacular. And then there's that score; Magnificent! (The Broadway cast album won the Grammy.) Next to his sublime score to Finian's Rainbow, Clear Day contains composer Burton Lane's most memorable work for the theatre. And while we fans of the film will never stop hoping for the original three hour road show to miraculously turn up on home video one day, all in all, On A Clear Day You Can See Forever is a joy to behold -- in any incarnation.

HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY. . .

. . . because
unquestioning obedience
to corporate interests IS
the new patriotism.

Playing in the sand: ‘Prince of Persia’ is delicious summer movie fluff

First the United States invaded the Middle East, and now Hollywood has swooped in to finish the job: one day after the Sex and the City ladies landed in the Abu Dhabi doo-doo, setting off a dust storm of critical hate, PRINCE OF PERSIA: The Sands of Time seems primed to raise huffy hackles with a swords-and-sandals-style spectacular in ancient Iran. Based on a gulf-war-era video game, Prince of Persia stars Jake Gyllenhaal as the titular warrior who, scrambling up walls and vaulting across roofs amid camels, pomegranates and whirling dervishes, helps lead the search in wartime for, Praise Bruckheimer, weapons of not-quite-mass destruction.

As an example of the new pop-cultural crusades Prince of Persia is at once generically insulting and relatively innocuous. Set in the sixth century, the story involves Dastan (Mr. Gyllenhaal), the adopted son of King Sharaman (Ronald Pickup), who plucked the wee boy out of the streets to raise the child alongside his royal spawn, Tus (Richard Coyle) and Garsiv (Toby Kebbell). The film, directed by Mike Newell and written by Boaz Yakin, Doug Miro and Carlo Bernard, pays dutiful if cursory attention to the family angle. The father imparts wise words, and the brothers clasp hands and lock gazes, but the fraternal bonds are shredded after they invade a holy city and Dastan is ensnared in a palace intrigue.

Cut and chiseled, his pumped-up pectorals flashing, Mr. Gyllenhaal offers an updated spin on the mysterious Oriental lover of cinematic yesteryear. More butch than the silent-screen god Valentino (best known for playing the Sheik, an Arab rather than a Persian heartbreaker), Mr. Gyllenhaal instead follows — and runs and leaps — in the robustly muscular and acrobatic tradition of Douglas Fairbanks, the silent-film star whose Middle Eastern exploits were aggressively masculine. Granted, the resurrection of a sexpot Middle Eastern hero (even one played by a non-Persian actor) might not seem like progress. But given the strained relations between the United States and Iran, it’s a representation worth noting, particularly since Dastan’s worth is finally measured by his more peaceable actions.

This topical hook doesn’t sink very deep, admittedly; like a lot of action flicks, Prince of Persia exploits the headlines for familiar genre high jinks. Dastan hooks up with a pouty princess (an unfortunate Gemma Arterton) and engages in some funny business with a shady wise-cracking sheik (Alfred Molina, fortunately). Ben Kingsley shows up as Basil Rathbone, or rather Nizam, the king’s silky, suspicious brother. Shot in Morocco and in Pinewood Studios in Britain, the film is crammed with swirling sand, milling crowds, computer-generated cities and assorted narrative bits and pieces, some borrowed from the studio playbook (everyone speaks in a British accent, even, alas, Mr. Gyllenhaal), others recycled from the video game series by Jordan Mechner, who has a story credit.

The movie’s video game roots are most evident in the mechanized feel of many of the whiplash camera movements, which sharply zig and zag as if created by algorithms. Considering that he made the move from the art house to the blockbuster a few years ago with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Mr. Newell surely knew what he was getting himself into when he signed on with the producer Jerry Bruckheimer. Save for Michael Bay, who parted company with Mr. Bruckheimer a while ago, no director ever gets to put his own fingerprints on a Bruckheimer production. As usual, the talent in Prince of Persia is generally top notch — from the cinematographer John Seale to the parkour expert David Belle — but the ingredients have been masticated so heavily the results are mush.

For the most part this is perfectly painless mush. The movie is irrepressibly silly — what were you expecting? — but a few hours of Mr. Gyllenhaal jumping around in leather and fluttering his long lashes has its dumb-fun appeal, as does the sight of Mr. Molina planting a kiss on an ostrich in a big-screen spectacle that’s as much indebted to newfangled technologies as to old-fashioned Hollywood narrative strategies. If nothing else, it’s entertaining to think about how this mash-up of ancient Persian heroics and headline news might sit with the Iranian powers that be. In March 2009 a spokesman for the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, demanded an apology from Hollywood for “insults and accusations against the Iranian nation” over the last 30 years. Clearly, they had no idea they were about to be Bruckheimer-ed.

Downey's performance makes the 1987 fan favorite LESS THAN ZERO into something compelling and watchable.

It is not quite the compliment it may sound to say that Robert Downey Jr. steals every scene in Less Than Zero (even the ones he's not in). His co-stars in this botched film version of the infamous Bret Easton Ellis novel are Andrew McCarthy and Jami Gertz, both of whom so completely embody their characters' blankness that they leave two voids at the center of the story. Downey could mistakenly be judged to have walked off with the acting honors by default, the easiest victory since Theresa Russell (in a very similar role) wrested The Razor's Edge away from Bill Murray and Catherine Hicks. This, however, would be to severely underrate Downey's careful recreation of a life out of control. An accident waiting to happen, Downey's Julian roars with the painful last gasp of a party boy for whom time is running out. Lying upside down in McCarthy's red convertible, singing screwed-up Christmas carols as they cruise L.A. after dark, Downey portrays the side of drug use that the "Just Say No" folks most dread: It's fun to be high (that is, until it's not). Despite the screenplay's watered-down insistence that Downey and McCarthy are competing for the favors of Gertz's character, Downey instead slyly plays his part like it's torn from the scorched pages of the novel, where the two boys are lovers, not just friends. It's a bold choice that brings his character to vivid life: In addition to all the other emotional ravages he evokes, he shows us with his panicky, sad eyes that he knows he's losing McCarthy to Gertz. Not that all of this aspect of his character is in the subtext; to pay his debts off to his dealer Rip (James Spader), Julian acts as a prostitute for Rip's other male clients.

In his absurdly cheerful holiday shirt, the incorrigible Julian offers us the flip side of those too-neat TV movie plots about parents practicing "tough love" on their addict children; seen here from the helplessly self-destructive kid's point of view, the familiar tale is unbearably painful to watch. But Downey's energetic charisma keeps us from looking away, even when he takes us into the horror show of what it looks like when Julian overdoses. Downey makes us care how Julian, cut off by his family and hunted by his creditors, lives before he dies.

In the film's most resonant image, the sweating, shell-shocked Julian is feeling so like a cornered animal that even the reflections off a swimming pool take on the appearance of bars that entrap him. He won't, can't, go inside to a Christmas party: "I feel like Tiny fuckin' Tim," he says, so despondent that it's clear he knows no help will come, although he never stops lying outwardly. "It's not going to happen again, this; it's over," he'll tell anyone who'll listen, and Downey gives just the right hollow cadence to this automatic lie that fools no one. "I'm gonna probably go back into rehab." Downey conveys the physical hysteria of the hopeless addict with equal finesse. Long after the movie is over, one is haunted by the scene of Downey alone (his pals are doing Christmas dinner with their dysfunctional families), doing a lonely little soft-shoe routine. Simple, understated, unforgettable. It is a sublime moment.

It has been said that Downey's take on Julian was probably a case of life imitaing art. Perhaps. . . But that only makes the performance much more astonishing. Plenty of Hollywood's elite have tried their hands at the same type of role and come up wanting, even though they too were "living the role in real life." (Patty Duke in Valley of the Dolls anyone?)
 

And now... a TRUE American Idiot

Delicious Theatre: Greenday's AMERICAN IDIOT arrives on Broadway!

From The New York Times:
Stomping Onto Broadway With a Punk Temper Tantrum
by Charles Isherwood

Rage and love, those consuming emotions felt with a particularly acute pang in youth, all but burn up the stage in AMERICAN IDIOT, the thrillingly raucous and gorgeously wrought Broadway musical adapted from the blockbuster pop-punk album by Green Day.

Pop on Broadway, sure. But punk? Yes, indeed, and served straight up, with each sneering lyric and snarling riff in place. A stately old pile steps from the tourist-clogged Times Square might seem a strange place for the music of Green Day, and for theater this blunt, bold and aggressive in its attitude. Not to mention loud. But from the moment the curtain rises on a panorama of baleful youngsters at the venerable St. James Theater, where the show opened on Tuesday night, it's clear that these kids are going to make themselves at home, even if it means tearing up the place in the process.

Which they do, figuratively speaking. "American Idiot," directed by Michael Mayer and performed with galvanizing intensity by a terrific cast, detonates a fierce aesthetic charge in this ho-hum Broadway season. A pulsating portrait of wasted youth that invokes all the standard genre conventions - bring on the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, please! - only to transcend them through the power of its music and the artistry of its execution, the show is as invigorating and ultimately as moving as anything I've seen on Broadway this season. Or maybe for a few seasons past.

Burning with rage and love, and knowing how and when to express them, are two different things, of course. The young men we meet in the first minutes of "American Idiot" are too callow and sullen and restless - too young, basically - to channel their emotions constructively. The show opens with a glorious 20-minute temper tantrum kicked off by the title song.

"Don't want to be an American idiot!" shouts one of the gang. The song's signature electric guitar riff slashes through the air, echoing the testy challenge of the cry. A sharp eight-piece band, led by the conductor Carmel Dean, is arrayed around the stage, providing a sonic frame for the action. The simple but spectacular set, designed by Christine Jones, suggests an epically scaled dive club, its looming walls papered in punk posters and pimpled by television screens, on which frenzied video collages flicker throughout the show. (They're the witty work of Darrel Maloney.)

Who's the American idiot being referred to? Well, as that curtain slowly rose, we heard the familiar voice of George W. Bush break through a haze of television chatter: "Either you are with us, or with the terrorists." That kind of talk could bring out the heedless rebel in any kid, particularly one who is already feeling itchy at the lack of prospects in his dreary suburban burg.

But while "American Idiot" is nominally a portrait of youthful malaise of a particular era - the album dates from 2004, the midpoint of the Bush years, and the show is set in "the recent past" - its depiction of the crisis of post-adolescence is essentially timeless. Teenagers eager for their lives to begin, desperate to slough off their old selves and escape boredom through pure sensation, will probably always be making the same kinds of mistakes, taking the same wrong turns on the road to self-discovery.

"American Idiot" is a true rock opera, almost exclusively using the music of Green Day and the lyrics of its kohl-eyed frontman, Billie Joe Armstrong, to tell its story. (The score comprises the whole of the title album as well as several songs from the band's most recent release, "21st Century Breakdown.") The book, by Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Mayer, consists only of a series of brief, snarky dispatches sent home by the central character, Johnny, played with squirmy intensity by the immensely gifted John Gallagher Jr. ("Spring Awakening," "Rabbit Hole").

"I held up my local convenience store to get a bus ticket," Johnny says with a smirk as he and a pal head out of town.

"Actually I stole the money from my mom's dresser."

Beat.

"Actually she lent me the cash."

Such is the sheepish fate of a would-be rebel today. But at least Johnny and his buddy Tunny (Stark Sands) do manage to escape deadly suburbia for the lively city, bringing along just their guitars and the anomie and apathy that are the bread and butter of teenage attitudinizing the world over. ("I don't care if you don't care," a telling lyric, could be their motto.)

The friend they meant to bring along, Will (Michael Esper), was forced to stay home when he discovered that his girlfriend (Mary Faber) was pregnant. Lost and lonely, and far from ready for the responsibilities of fatherhood, he sinks into the couch, beer in one hand and bong in the other, as his friends set off for adventure.

Beneath the swagger of indifference, of course, are anxiety, fear and insecurity, which Mr. Gallagher, Mr. Esper and Mr. Sands transmit with aching clarity in the show's more reflective songs, like the hit "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" or the lilting anthem "Are We the Waiting." The city turns out to be just a bigger version of the place Johnny and Tunny left behind, a "land of make believe that don't believe in me." The boys discover that while a fractious 21st-century America may not offer any easy paths to fulfillment, the deeper problem is that they don't know how to believe in themselves.

Johnny strolls the lonely streets with his guitar, vaguely yearning for love and achievement. He eventually hooks up with a girl (a vivid Rebecca Naomi Jones) but falls more powerfully under the spell of an androgynous goth drug pusher, St. Jimmy, played with mesmerizing vitality and piercing vocalism by Tony Vincent. Tunny mostly stays in bed, clicker affixed to his right hand, dangerously susceptible to a pageant of propaganda about military heroism on the tube, set to the song "Favorite Son." By the time the song's over, he's enlisted and off to Iraq.

In both plotting and its emotional palette, "American Idiot" is drawn in brash, primary-colored strokes, maybe too crudely for those looking for specifics of character rather than cultural archetypes. But operas - rock or classical - often trade in archetypes, and the actors flesh out their characters' journeys through their heartfelt interpretations of the songs, with the help of Mr. Mayer's poetic direction and the restless, convulsive choreography of Steven Hoggett ("Black Watch"), which exults in both the grace and the awkwardness of energy-generating young metabolisms.

Line by line, a skeptic could fault Mr. Armstrong's lyrics for their occasional glibness or grandiosity. That's to be expected, too: rock music exploits heightened emotion and truisms that can fit neatly into a memorable chorus. The songs are precisely as articulate - and inarticulate - as the characters are, reflecting the moment in youth when many of us feel that pop music has more to say about us than we have to say for ourselves. (And, really, have you ever worked your way through a canonical Italian opera libretto, line by line?)

In any case the music is thrilling: charged with urgency, rich in memorable melody and propulsive rhythms that sometimes evolve midsong. The orchestrations by Tom Kitt (the composer of "Next to Normal") move from lean and mean to lush, befitting the tone of each number. Even if you are unfamiliar with Green Day's music, you are more likely to emerge from this show humming one of the guitar riffs than you are to find a tune from "The Addams Family" tickling your memory.

But the emotion charge that the show generates is as memorable as the music. "American Idiot" jolts you right back to the dizzying roller coaster of young adulthood, that turbulent time when ecstasy and misery almost seem interchangeable states, flip sides of the coin of exaltation. It captures with a piercing intensity that moment in life when everything seems possible, and nothing seems worth doing, or maybe it's the other way around.

DELICIOUS REMEMBERS: 'Designing Women' Dixie Carter (1939 -2010)

''Designing Women'' star Dixie Carter, whose Southern charm and natural beauty won her a host of television roles, has died at age 70.

Carter died Saturday morning on April 10, according to publicist Steve Rohr, who represents Carter and her husband, actor Hal Holbrook. He declined to disclose the cause of death or where she died. Carter lived with Holbrook in the Los Angeles area.

''This has been a terrible blow to our family,'' Holbrook said in a written statement. ''We would appreciate everyone understanding that this is a private family tragedy.''

A native of Tennessee, Carter was most famous for playing wisecracking Southerner Julia Sugarbaker for seven years on ''Designing Women,'' the CBS sitcom that ran from 1986 to 1993. The series was the peak of a career in which she often played wealthy and self-important but independent Southern women.

She was nominated for an Emmy in 2007 for her seven-episode guest stint on the ABC hit ''Desperate Housewives.''

Carter's other credits include roles on the series ''Family Law'' and ''Diff'rent Strokes.''

She married Holbrook in 1984. The two had met four years earlier while making the TV movie ''The Killing of Randy Webster,'' and although attracted to one another, each had suffered two failed marriages and were wary at first.

They finally wed two years before Carter landed her role on ''Designing Women.'' Holbrook appeared on the show regularly in the late 1980s as her boyfriend, Reese Watson.

The two appeared together in her final project, the 2009 independent film ''That Evening Sun,'' shot in Tennessee and based on a short story by Southern novelist William Gay.

The middle of three children, Carter was born in 1939 in McLemoresville, Tenn.

Carter was the daughter of a grocery and department store owner who died just three years ago at 96. She said at the time of his death that he taught her to believe in people's essential goodness.

''When I asked him how he handled shoplifting in his new store, which had a lot of goods on display, making it impossible to keep an eye on everything, he said, 'Most people are honest, and if they weren't, you couldn't stay in business because a thief will find a way to steal,''' Carter said. '''You can't really protect yourself, but papa and I built our business believing most people are honest and want to do right by you.'''

Carter grew up in Carroll County and made her stage debut in a 1960 production of ''Carousel'' in Memphis. It was the beginning of a decades-long stage career in which she relied on her singing voice as much as her acting.

She appeared in TV soap operas in the 1970s, but did not become a national star until her recurring roles on ''Diff'rent Strokes'' and another series, ''Filthy Rich,'' in the 1980s.

Those two parts led to her role on ''Designing Women,'' a comedy about the lives of four women at an interior design firm in Atlanta.

Carter and Delta Burke played the sparring sisters who ran the firm. The series also starred Annie Potts and Jean Smart.

The show, whose reruns have rarely left the airwaves, was not a typical sitcom. It tackled such topics as sexism, ageism, body image and AIDS.

''It was something so unique, because there had never been anything quite like it,'' Potts told The Associated Press at a 2006 cast reunion. ''We had Lucy and Ethel, but we never had that exponentially expanded, smart, attractive women who read newspapers and had passions about things and loved each other and stood by each other.''

Carter appeared on the drama ''Family Law'' from 1999 to 2002, and in her last major TV appearance she played Gloria Hodge, the surly mother-in-law to Marcia Cross’s Bree on ''Desperate Housewives.''

Carter said the role was far from the kindly woman she played on ''Designing Women.''

''It's a vast difference,'' Carter said while filming the series. ''Gloria Hodge doesn't have any redeeming qualities except her intelligence.''

In addition to Holbrook, Carter is survived by daughters Mary Dixie and Ginna.