A MESSAGE FROM YOUR HOSTESS -
Hello Kiddies -- Welcome to our fabulous cyberhome where we hope to entertain you with our delectable ramblings. Nothing too serious -- just whatever pops into our silly little head between laundry loads, dusting and a little vacuuming. Everything from the ridiculous to the sublime. So just sit yourself down in our gorgeously appointed living room and stay for a spell. But please remember to wipe your feet. (we just did the floors.) -- Air Kiss, HvR
Showing posts with label Delicious movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Delicious movies. Show all posts
Delectably, deliriously, dementedly awful, THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT is one of the very best Bad Movies of the '90s, no small accomplishment in a decade that also gave us Barb Wire, Boxing Helena, Color of Night and Showgirls.
The fun begins when Geena Davis, a demure, redheaded, schoolteaching single mother who suffers from amnesia and cannot recall having been the world's deadliest hired assassin eight years ago, collides with a reindeer. Voila. Davis begins to get hints of her previous vocation. In a dream sequence Sigmund Freud would have fired a patient for having, goody-two-shoes Davis stands atop a stormy cliff facing her sexy, bottle-blonde image in a mirror. "I want a cigarette," growls the tough-talkin' reflection, to which the nice Davis prissily replies, "I don't smoke." "Ya used to!" snaps the blonde. Director Renny Harlin chooses to cut from this all-too-revealing dream sequence to a dump truck picking up garbage (discuss meaning amongst yourselves).
Soon Davis's dark side starts cropping up during waking hours. The mere chopping of a carrot turns into a dicin', slicin' display of aggression that is, frankly, reminiscent of one of those infomercials for sharp cutlery. Whipping through every vegetable in the kitchen, Davis beams maniacally, "I used to do this. I'm a chef!" Perhaps not. When she nails a tomato to the wall with a perfectly tossed knife, her daughter and boyfriend are justifiably terrified. "Chefs do that," explains Davis. But later, when she tells her kid, who's just fractured a wrist, "Life is pain! Get used to it!" there's no pretending Davis's previous life was benevolent. To make the point even clearer, a one-eyed thug who knew hit woman Davis way back when breaks into the house and hits Davis on the head with a heavy pot, whereupon she knocks him out cold with a cream pie in the kisser, then breaks his neck, and, as her boyfriend watches, tastes the pie filling off the corpse, explaining, "Chefs do that."
Determined to discover the truth about her past, Davis hits the road with "low rent" private eye Samuel L. Jackson. While Jackson watches the classic Robert Altman film The Long Goodbye in a motel room the next evening (two characters are discussing cats, allowing Jackson to utter the line, "Yeah -- pussy is pussy"), Davis looks in a mirror in her room and again sees the skanky blonde version of herself, who suddenly reaches out from the mirror to try to kill her. Alas, she doesn't succeed.
All hell breaks loose when more bad guys from the past show up and try to extinguish Davis and Jackson. The attacks only serve to bring the amnesiac's deadly personality fully to the surface. Davis transforms the drab version of herself into a sleek blonde hit babe, who for some reason is wearing only a bathrobe and excessive eyeshadow. At the sight of a bloodstained arm bandage on Jackson, the new, true Davis suddenly opens her robe, flashes her bare bod at him, then rips off the bandage. "Same principle as deflowering virgins," she says. "I read it in this Harold Robbins book: guy bites her on the ear, distracts her from the pain. Ever try that?" "No," replies Jackson, "I sock 'em in the jaw and yell, 'Pop goes the Weasel!'" This spicy dialogue arouses Davis to pant in Jackson's ear, "I haven't had a date in eight years." Like the rest of us, Jackson isn't buying: "A beautiful white lady seducing the colored help? Get real, sweetheart. I ain't rich, I ain't handsome, and the last time I got blown, candy bars cost a nickel." Who says there's no longer a need for affirmative action?
The next day, a car full of killers chases Jackson, prompting Davis to strap on ice skates to outrace the speeding automobile and blast the villains. The mayhem reached a climax on Christmas Eve when Davis outwits her foes by (1) putting kerosene in a Betsy Wetsy-type doll, (2) taunting a knife-wielding killer with the line, "Oh honey, only four inches?" and, finally, (3) collapsing so that her daughter can reprise the innane line, "Life is pain! Get used to it!" At this point, you'll want to rewind to the scene that provided this movie with its place in Bad Moviedom. Yes, listen once again as Davis, driving an oil rig outfitted with a doomsday bomb, becomes the first (and, we'd bet, the last) action heroine to snarl at her opponents, "Suck my dick!"
Well, my darlings, I arrived home the other day, after an exhaustive bout of shopping, only to find my youngest and most precious (little Jimmy, jr.), watching something called GYMKATA. With the third cosmopolitan I had at lunch suddenly kicking in, I felt compelled to sit myself down and see what kind of pornography the little demon had infected my clean home with.
Gymkata is so deliciouly awful, so horribly moronic, we're positve that when MGM studio execs greenlit the project, somewhere, trillions of light years away, a planet exploded. Apparently, someone in 1985 thought it would be a great idea to hire Kurt Thomas to headline a movie. (That person is probably living at the Y today.) Young Thomas — a champion gymnast who got stiffed out of an Olympic appearance because of the 1980 boycott — delivers his lines like he just emerged from a coma ten seconds prior to filming.
But beyond our star's’ lack of thespian talent, the real challenge proved to be crafting a suitable vehicle that would showcase his impressive floor routines. Thus, the skill of "gymkata" was born - a hybrid of martial arts and... well... somersaults. This awkward-looking claptrap is shoe-horned into the skeletal framework of a 1957 book called "The Terrible Game" along with a love story where the girl speaks, perhaps, nine consecutive words during the entire film. The cherry on top was bringing in martial arts action film director Richard Clouse, (most noted for helming the Bruce Lee classic Enter The Dragon.) Of course, Thomas is to Bruce Lee what a Barbie Power Wheels is to Optimus Prime.
This laugh-a-minute reimagining of the book, "The Terrible Game" is actually The Most Dangerous Game, as designed by the President's Council on Physical Fitness. It requires the player to run around and climb a rope, and we're told that only a select few can meet this grueling challenge: either world-class gymnasts, like American champion Kurt Thomas, or 11-year olds who've passed sixth-grade gym.
The film opens with an angry white man -- Kurt's dad, (who's apparently playing on the Terrible Game Senior Tour) -- attempting to cross the rope bridge at Camp Snoopy. Villain Richard Norton (we know he's evil because he's wearing Sonny Bono's sheepskin vest from Wild on the Beach) shoots an arrow into Kurt's dad, who falls to his death. Cut to the United States, where the Olympic Games are being held in what looks like a high-school auditorium. American champ Thomas dismounts the parallel bars, and is immediately recruited by the CIA to play The Game, which is held in Parmistan, a mountain kingdom ruled by "the Khan." Kurt will be trained by Princess Ruballi, the Khan's daughter, and even though she spends the first half of the film attempting to do grievous harm to his groin (knee it, stab it, rope-burn it, etc.), Ruballi eventually becomes Kurt's love interest, because she's the only person in the film who's shorter than he is.
Kurt and the Princess white-water raft into Parmistan, where they're promptly attacked by Himalayan ninjas (clad in black Dr. Dentons). Hopelessly outnumbered, Kurt unleashes the secret martial art of Gymkata, and manages to overcome his assailants using the deadly power of Olga Korbut's compulsory floor routine from the '72 Olympics. Once in the capital, Kurt and the other competitors meet the Khan, (apparently a member of The Davy Crockett Hair Club for Men), who explains the rules: Basically, you run around and climb on various pieces of playground equipment until someone shoots you with an arrow. If Kurt wins, the U.S. will be allowed to build a "Star Wars" satellite-tracking station in Parmistan. If Kurt loses, he will be killed in the traditional way: shot with an arrow while playing the "Smack the Mole" game at a Chuck E. Cheese.
The next morning, the Khan announces that Sheepskin will wed Princess Ruballi after the game, with a reception to follow at a Medieval Times restaurant franchise. Then the competitors are off and running. Amazingly, Kurt makes it across the rope bridge without getting arrowed, and enters "The Village of the Damned," (a planned community for the criminally insane.) No one has ever escaped alive from this blood-soaked bedlam, and it is soon apparent why. In short order, Kurt is attacked by a man with a sickle, beaten to a pulp by a pack of Italian grandmothers, and mooned. Finally, the entire populace converges on Kurt, shrieking and waving various farm implements as they surround him in the village square. Fortunately, next to the communal well is the communal pommel horse. Leaping onto it, Kurt manages to kill the axe-wielding maniacs with a quick and deadly series of Magyar and Sivado cross-travel variations.
The surviving villagers give Kurt a 9.2.
The crazed peasants chase Kurt into a blind alley, where, surprisingly, one of the Himalayan ninjas reaches down and pulls Kurt to safety. The ninja then peels back his black mask to reveal that he is, in fact, . . .Kurt's father! (It turns out that he wasn't killed in that fall after all, just maimed.) Their tearful reunion is interrupted when Sheepskin shoots dad with an arrow ...again! Springing into action, Kurt heroically jumps onto a horse ... and rides away.
Sheepskin catches up to our fleeing hero and gives him a well-deserved thrashing. But Kurt cleverly goes into "rope-a-dope," outlasting his opponent until they get to the page in the script where it says he wins. Sheepskin takes a dive, and Kurt proudly rides back into town with Dad, who's been maimed some more, but is otherwise just fine. Now, at last, everyone knows the truth: Sheepskin is a traitor, and Kurt's dad is Rasputin. Oh ..., and Kurt wins The Game -- but it's anyone's guess as to exactly how.
As for my little Jimmy? As soon as Mommy's head gets clear, she's going to start looking into good military schools.
Leonard Nimoy, the sonorous, gaunt-faced actor who won a worshipful global following as Mr. Spock, the resolutely logical human-alien first officer of the Starship Enterprise in the television and movie juggernaut “Star Trek,” died on Friday morning at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. He was 83.
His wife, Susan Bay Nimoy, confirmed his death, saying the cause was end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Mr. Nimoy announced last year that he had the disease, attributing it to years of smoking, a habit he had given up three decades earlier. He had been hospitalized earlier in the week.
His artistic pursuits — poetry, photography and music in addition to acting — ranged far beyond the United Federation of Planets, but it was as Mr. Spock that Mr. Nimoy became a folk hero, bringing to life one of the most indelible characters of the last half century: a cerebral, unflappable, pointy-eared Vulcan with a signature salute and blessing: “Live long and prosper” (from the Vulcan “Dif-tor heh smusma”).
Mr. Nimoy, who was teaching Method acting at his own studio when he was cast in the original “Star Trek” television series in the mid-1960s, relished playing outsiders, and he developed what he later admitted was a mystical identification with Spock, the lone alien on the starship’s bridge.
Yet he also acknowledged ambivalence about being tethered to the character, expressing it most plainly in the titles of two autobiographies: “I Am Not Spock,” published in 1977, and “I Am Spock,” published in 1995.
In the first, he wrote, “In Spock, I finally found the best of both worlds: to be widely accepted in public approval and yet be able to continue to play the insulated alien through the Vulcan character.”
“Star Trek,” which had its premiere on NBC on Sept. 8, 1966, made Mr. Nimoy a star. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the franchise, called him “the conscience of ‘Star Trek’ ” — an often earnest, sometimes campy show that employed the distant future (as well as some special effects that appear primitive by today’s standards) to take on social issues of the 1960s.
His stardom would endure. Though the series was canceled after three seasons because of low ratings, a cultlike following — the conference-holding, costume-wearing Trekkies, or Trekkers (the designation Mr. Nimoy preferred) — coalesced soon after “Star Trek” went into syndication.
The fans’ devotion only deepened when “Star Trek” was spun off into an animated show, various new series and an uneven parade of movies starring much of the original television cast, including — besides Mr. Nimoy — William Shatner (as Captain Kirk), DeForest Kelley (Dr. McCoy), George Takei (the helmsman, Sulu), James Doohan (the chief engineer, Scott), Nichelle Nichols (the chief communications officer, Uhura) and Walter Koenig (the navigator, Chekov).
When the director J. J. Abrams revived the “Star Trek” film franchise in 2009, with an all-new cast including Zachary Quinto as Spock, he included a cameo part for Mr. Nimoy, as an older version of the same character. Mr. Nimoy also appeared in the 2013 follow-up, “Star Trek Into Darkness.”
His zeal to entertain and enlighten reached beyond “Star Trek” and crossed genres. He had a starring role in the dramatic television series “Mission: Impossible” and frequently performed onstage, notably as Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.” His poetry was voluminous, and he published books of his photography.
He also directed movies, including two from the “Star Trek” franchise, and television shows. And he made records, singing pop songs as well as original songs about “Star Trek,” and gave spoken-word performances — to the delight of his fans and the bewilderment of critics.
But all that was subsidiary to Mr. Spock, the most complex member of the Enterprise crew, who was both one of the gang and a creature apart, engaged at times in a lonely struggle with his warring racial halves.
In one of his most memorable “Star Trek” performances, Mr. Nimoy tried to follow in the tradition of two actors he admired, Charles Laughton and Boris Karloff, who each played a monstrous character — Quasimodo and the Frankenstein monster — who is transformed by love.
In Episode 24, which was first shown on March 2, 1967, Mr. Spock is indeed transformed. Under the influence of aphrodisiacal spores he discovers on the planet Omicron Ceti III, he lets free his human side and announces his love for Leila Kalomi (Jill Ireland), a woman he had once known on Earth. In this episode, Mr. Nimoy brought to Spock’s metamorphosis not only warmth, compassion and playfulness, but also a rarefied concept of alienation.
“I am what I am, Leila,” Mr. Spock declares after the spores’ effect has worn off and his emotions are again in check. “And if there are self-made purgatories, then we all have to live in them. Mine can be no worse than someone else’s.”
Born in Boston on March 26, 1931, Leonard Simon Nimoy was the second son of Max and Dora Nimoy, Ukrainian immigrants and Orthodox Jews. His father worked as a barber.
From the age of 8, Leonard acted in local productions, winning parts at a community college, where he performed through his high school years. In 1949, after taking a summer course at Boston College, he traveled to Hollywood, though it wasn’t until 1951 that he landed small parts in two movies, “Queen for a Day” and “Rhubarb.”
He continued to be cast in little-known movies, although he did presciently play an alien invader in a cult serial called “Zombies of the Stratosphere,” and in 1961 he had a minor role on an episode of “The Twilight Zone.” His first starring movie role came in 1952 with “Kid Monk Baroni,” in which he played a disfigured Italian street-gang leader who becomes a boxer.
Mr. Nimoy served in the Army for two years, rising to sergeant and spending 18 months at Fort McPherson in Georgia, where he presided over shows for the Army’s Special Services branch. He also directed and starred as Stanley in the Atlanta Theater Guild’s production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” before receiving his final discharge in November 1955.
He then returned to California, where he worked as a soda jerk, movie usher and cabdriver while studying acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. He achieved wide visibility in the late 1950s and early 1960s on television shows like “Wagon Train,” “Rawhide” and “Perry Mason.” Then came “Star Trek.”
Mr. Nimoy returned to college in his 40s and earned a master’s degree in Spanish from Antioch University Austin, an affiliate of Antioch College in Ohio, in 1978. Antioch University later awarded Mr. Nimoy an honorary doctorate.
Mr. Nimoy directed the movies “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock” (1984) and “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” (1986), which he helped write. In 1991, the same year that he resurrected Mr. Spock on two episodes of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” Mr. Nimoy was also the executive producer and a writer of the movie “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.”
He then directed the hugely successful comedy “Three Men and a Baby” (1987), a far cry from his science-fiction work, and appeared in made-for-television movies. He received an Emmy nomination for the 1982 movie “A Woman Called Golda,” in which he portrayed the husband of Golda Meir, the prime minister of Israel, who was played by Ingrid Bergman. It was the fourth Emmy nomination of his career — the other three were for his “Star Trek” work — although he never won.
Mr. Nimoy’s marriage to the actress Sandi Zober ended in divorce. Besides his wife, he is survived by his children, Adam and Julie Nimoy; a stepson, Aaron Bay Schuck; six grandchildren and one great-grandchild; and an older brother, Melvin.
Though his speaking voice was among his chief assets as an actor, the critical consensus was that his music was mortifying. Mr. Nimoy, however, was undaunted, and his fans seemed to enjoy the camp of his covers of songs like “If I Had a Hammer.” (His first album was called “Leonard Nimoy Presents Mr. Spock’s Music From Outer Space.”)
From 1977 to 1982, Mr. Nimoy hosted the syndicated series “In Search Of ...,” which explored mysteries like the Loch Ness monster and U.F.O.s. He also narrated “Ancient Mysteries” on the History Channel and appeared in commercials, including two with Mr. Shatner for Priceline.com. He provided the voice for animated characters in “Transformers: The Movie,” in 1986, and “The Pagemaster,” in 1994.
In 2001 he voiced the king of Atlantis in the Disney animated movie “Atlantis: The Lost Empire,” and in 2005 he furnished voice-overs for the computer game Civilization IV. More recently, he had a recurring role on the science-fiction series “Fringe” and was heard, as the voice of Spock, in an episode of the hit sitcom “The Big Bang Theory.”
Mr. Nimoy was an active supporter of the arts as well. The Thalia, a venerable movie theater on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, now a multi-use hall that is part of Symphony Space, was renamed the Leonard Nimoy Thalia in 2002.
He also found his voice as a writer. Besides his autobiographies, he published “A Lifetime of Love: Poems on the Passages of Life” in 2002. Typical of Mr. Nimoy’s simple free verse are these lines: “In my heart/Is the seed of the tree/Which will be me.”
In later years, he rediscovered his Jewish heritage, and in 1991 he produced and starred in “Never Forget,” a television movie based on the story of a Holocaust survivor who sued a neo-Nazi organization of Holocaust deniers.
In 2002, having illustrated his books of poetry with his photographs, Mr. Nimoy published “Shekhina,” a book devoted to photography with a Jewish theme, that of the feminine aspect of God. His black-and-white photographs of nude and seminude women struck some Orthodox Jewish leaders as heretical, but Mr. Nimoy asserted that his work was consistent with the teachings of the kabbalah.
His religious upbringing also influenced the characterization of Spock. The character’s split-fingered salute, he often explained, had been his idea: He based it on the kohanic blessing, a manual approximation of the Hebrew letter shin, which is the first letter in Shaddai, one of the Hebrew names for God.
“To this day, I sense Vulcan speech patterns, Vulcan social attitudes and even Vulcan patterns of logic and emotional suppression in my behavior,” Mr. Nimoy wrote years after the original series ended.
But that wasn’t such a bad thing, he discovered. “Given the choice,” he wrote, “if I had to be someone else, I would be Spock.”
Some movies are just so hysterically bad that they pose the question, "Can there really be too much of a good thing?" Purporting to show us what the pre-Civil War South was really like, Mandingo answers this query: You bet. With more violence, more nudity, more foul language, and more racism than any other flick we’ve ever seen, you’ll hate yourself in morning for laughing yourself silly, but if you put this maximum offender into your home video system of choice, just try looking away.
In the first ten seconds, slave breeder James Mason observes, about a slave starlet, "She’s Mandingo wench. You don’t let just any bud get her," to remind his crippled son, Perry King, of his family obligation. Local doc Roy Poole agrees, saying, "She’s craving, in the bud o’ heat. You pleasure her, she get better." The slave starlet tries to stall the inevitable by drawling to King, "I too black, I not fit for you." Mason settles the matter by stating, "Master’s duty to pleasure the wenches first time."
Then it’s back to the family mansion, where Doc Poole suggests that Mason’s rheumatism would improve if he’d put his feet on black children. So for the rest of the movie, Mason (astoundingly) uses two little slave lads as his foot stools.
King brings home a new stud slave, Ken Norton, another slave to be King’s mistress, Brenda Sykes, and — last but not least — a Southern belle whom King will marry, Susan George. King tells his pa, Mason, that Norton is "hung so big he’ll tear the wenches," then orders Norton to "shuck down those pants!" When the wedding night’s a bust — King sneers at George, "you thinkin’ I don’t know a virgin when I sleeps with one and pleasures?" — King turns to Sykes, driving George into Norton’s bed.
Mason tells George that to win King’s affection back, she should "do dirty things to get him in your bed and keep him there." Instead, George — whose incestuous relationship with her brother is her Big Secret — screams at King about Sykes, "That slut! You like black meat? You’d rather pleasure with a baboon?" and then (there’s more), when George learns Sykes is pregnant, she hisses, "You dumb animal!" and pushes Sykes down the stairs. Later, George discovers she’s preggers and — as the doctor’s wife so eloquently puts it after the delivery — "It come, only it ain’t white."
King cheers us up by promptly poisoning George, then finds the baby’s real dad, Norton. You’re not going to believe this — we didn’t — King settles the score by shooting Norton, then pushing him into a vat of boiling water, and then pitchforking him to death. In retaliation, one of Norton’s pals shoots and kills Mason, ensuring that he wouldn’t be able to overact in the sequel, Drum. Mesmerizingly heinous.
Ever wonder where Santa came from, and how it's possible he's been around so long? Santa Claus the Movie will tell you. It seems that in a faux medieval land there was a woodcutter who liked to make toys for children. Returning home one snowy Christmas Eve, Claus (David Huddleston) and the missus (Judy Cornwell) and the two reindeer pulling their sleigh froze to death in a sudden storm. But magic starlight reanimates them, as elves in green felt shanghai them to a Brigadoon-like North Pole HQ. "This is your home now," they titter evilly to the undead Santa, and so he's stuck there forever, amongst the barracks full of elves and sweatshops full of toys, which the immortal elves have been making in anticipation of his arrival.
Ancient elf Burgess Meredith tells Huddleston that he is "the chosen one," and that a prophecy foretold his coming. In this way, Santa Claus the Movie is just like The Matrix, only instead of being cool and exciting it's bizarro and satanically corrupt. More mysterious and unanswered is the question of how an immortal elf can become ancient -- or has poor old Burgess been shuffling and moaning his way around since the beginning of time?
Santa -- who is just as wooden as his toys -- seems not a whit disturbed by the prospect of an eternal, unrelenting hell of catering to spoiled kiddies around the globe. "Ho ho ho," you can practically hear him say, "I'm undead! Might as well make the best of it." Clueless by nature, he's prone to saying things like, one Christmas Eve, "Tonight there's not a child alive who's not bursting with joy and happiness," apparently oblivious to all the non-Christian children he won't be visiting. The question of the poor kids who invariably are forgotten by the Fat Guy is pushed aside as well -- though we imagine that Mrs. Claus, who lobbied for the exclusion of bad children at Christmastime, perhaps attached a rider to her bill disenfranchising the poor, as well.
Or maybe Santa is just an inhumanely callous monster -- perfectly understandable, given that he is, in fact, undead. By the time we reach the present day, and the second of the three plots in Santa Claus the movie, Santa has met Christian Fitzpatrick, a homeless street urchin who has to beg food off strangers. Santa takes Fitzpatrick hot-rodding in his sleigh as a special treat to cheer him up... but does Claus give the kid a home, parents, or even a warm winter coat? No. He just drops him off to fend for himself promising to return next Christmas Eve. (Not even a crappy wooden toy? Thanks for the buggy ride, Santa!)
The third - and final - plot involves an elf named Patch, (played with dexterous apathy by Dudley Moore), who defects to work for a sinister toymaker named B.Z., (played with the usual scenery-guzzling gusto of John Lithgow). Upon medical advice, we’re not permitted to discuss this subplot at all. (Our doctors have informed us that our medications cannot be upped any further.) Suffice it to say that in all the annals of pestilent filmmaking, this ranks right up there with the complete works of Michael Bay.
You must see Santa Claus the movie, if only to boggle at the horrifying-depths to which a big studio Christmas film can sink. It actually perverts the spirit of the holiday into something creepy, itchy, and laugh-out-loud insane Just be sure to set aside sufficient funds for a lifetime of therapy afterward.
At the height of their popularity, Lily Tomlin and John Travolta combined their considerable clout — and lookalike shag hairdos — to bring their careers to a halt with the screamingly funny melodrama MOMENT BY MOMENT about a Beverly Hills matron’s fling with a studly young gigolo. Written and directed by Tomlin’s longtime collaborator Jane Wagner, the movie commits two fatal errors: This ripe-for-parody trash is (inexplicably) played straight-faced, and Travolta’s character is (even more inexplicably) named "Strip." Everytime Tomlin speaks his name, she seems to be asking him to peel — even when he’s already naked, as in the hot tub scene that made audiences cry with laughter.
Travolta: "I love you. Do you love me?"
Tomlin: "Strip . . ."
Travolta: "You don’t love me?"
Tomlin: "Oh, Strip . . ."
Travolta: "I’m not good enough for you, is that it?"
Tomlin: "Strip! This is ridiculous. Oh, Strip!"
Travolta: "When you’re ready to admit you love me, you can have me, but not until."
Tomlin: "Strip!"
Names are not, however, the only problem. Tomlin’s meant-to-be-heartbreaking (but-we’re-afraid-they’re-side-splitting!) telephone conversations with her estranged husband go thus: "Trish," says the husband’s voice, "we’ve got to talk . . . What about the pool filter?" Tomlin replies, sadly "What about it?" "What do you want me to do?" he asks. "You decide," she says, before collapsing in tears.
As embarrassing as all this is, Tomlin never stoops to Travolta’s level. He agreed to be photographed from the waist down while tugging off his pants so the camera can lovingly stare at his, uh, bathing suit as he bumps ‘n’ grinds his way down into the sea. (And what was he thinking of when he agreed to call Tomlin such catchy nicknames as "Miss Ultra-Frost" and "Miss Fabu-Lash"?)
What was anyone thinking of when they decided not to cut out the howler scene in which Travolta says, "I’ve had it with cheap sex, it leaves me feeling cheap," and Tomlin replies, "I’ve never had cheap sex before — I was sort of looking forward to it."? Then there’s the foot fetish show at an art gallery, where Tomlin informs Travolta, "I don’t like to see you drink so much at your age," and he responds, "I’m not so young as I used to be — and this party’s going to turn me gray overnight." (It’s amazing that the movie’s reviews didn’t do just that.)
After they fight, Travolta says, "I’m splitting. Pretty soon you’ll be old enough to be my grandmother." "Where will you go?" Tomlin asks. Travolta runs through his options: "Maybe Vegas. A rich lady asked me to go to St. Tropez," then adds, in the film’s only believable moment, "I got offered a porno movie." When he’s gone, Trish runs through the house, calling "Strip, Strip, Strip, Strip!" then, embarks, wide-eyed, on a drive through Trailer Park America to find the hustler she loves. We located this rare gem on Universal HD cable network. It has never been released on home video. Write your congressman!
CLICK THIS LINK TO WATCH MERYL STREEP PERFORM A NUMBER IN THE FILM:www.vanityfair.com/vf-hollywood/2014/11/meryl-streep-sings-into-the-woods-video "Into the Woods" is a modern twist on the beloved Brothers Grimm fairy tales, intertwining the plots of a few choice stories and exploring the consequences of the characters' wishes and quests. This humorous and heartfelt musical follows the classic tales of Cinderella (Anna Kendrick), Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford), Jack and the Beanstalk (Daniel Huttlestone), and Rapunzel (MacKenzie Mauzy) - all tied together by an original story involving a baker and his wife (James Corden & Emily Blunt), their wish to begin a family and their interaction with the witch (Meryl Streep) who has put a curse on them. Rob Marshall, the talented filmmaker behind the Academy Award®-winning musical "Chicago" and Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides," helms the film, which is based on the Tony®-winning original musical by James Lapine, who also penned the screenplay, and legendary composer Stephen Sondheim, who provides the music and lyrics. Produced by Marshall, John DeLuca, "Wicked" producer Marc Platt and Callum McDougall, "Into the Woods" hits theaters December 25, 2014.
Quick now, who was the least likely musical talent to ever have hoped they'd make it as a star of the silver screen? If you guessed Luciano Pavarotti in Yes, Giorgio, Cyndi Lauper in Vibes, Mariah Carey in Glitter or Madonna in just about anything, then you've never seen Liberace in the 1955 howler SINCERELY YOURS. With his moist eyes, congealed smile and mortician's manners, Las Vegas headliner Liberace was doubly miscast here as a talented concert pianist who is also a practicing heterosexual.
Somebody must have realized just how ridiculous this project was, because how else would you account for this scene: when secretary Joanne Dru offers up a choice of PR opportunities - "How'd you like to ride an elephant for the circus?" then, "Would you like to be king of the avocado festival?" and finally, "Open a new aquarium?" -- Liberace is miffed at their inappropriateness to someone of his stature and storms into his bathroom, where his roommate and manager, William Demarest, is taking a bubble bath and chewing on a very large cigar. As if the tableau alone were not enough, Liberace tosses Demarest a washcloth and says, "Don't forget to wash behind. . . your ears."
But the real fun begins as gorgeous, rich Dorothy Malone understandably mistakes Liberace for a lowly piano teacher and haughtily informs him, "When your family has money, you're supposed to be accomplished. So I learned to paint, to ride, to dance, even to try and play the piano. Some people are born listeners--I'm one of them. But my family won't be convinced until I get a letter from you, saying I should stick to Mediterranean cruises and canasta."
Just as you're about to grab a pen and paper to take care of this matter yourself, Liberace sneers at Malone, "Where did you practice your scales - reaching for martinis?" Now that these two have expressed their mutual contempt, Liberace proposes marriage: "Did you ever wonder what it would be like spending a lifetime married to a musician?" he queries Malone. Just in case she's been overwhelmed by his charm, he goes on to warn her, "It's not easy competing with a concerto!" But hey, it's not easy competing with 10 percent of the male population either, right?
Malone is too in love to heed warnings, not even the one she gets at Liberace's concert from serviceman Alex Nicol, who utters words any bride-to-be should pay attention to: "He respects the classics, but from a sitting position - not from his knees." Meanwhile, up on stage Liberace is bouncing on his bench, rolling his eyes ecstatically, and smiling in such delirious self-enchantment he appears to be deep inside his own musical remake of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. Just when you're thinking you'd rather go deaf than listen to one more note from Liberace, he does. This situation puts an end to his concert career, allowing him to mope around his swanky Manhattan penthouse and, in Lana Turner style, to make many of the 29 costume changes that won this movie it's place in cinema history.
Dim bulb Malone isn't the first girl to wonder why her fiance hasn't been taking her calls, but she's probably the first to be given this excuse: "He's deaf." Putting on a bright face, Malone insists they should marry anyway, explaining, "I fell in love with a person, not a pianist." Actually, of course, he's neither, but it's a nice thought. His spirits restored, Liberace embarks on a 12-week course in lip-reading that goes by in what feels like real time. It all pays off, though, when we get to see how he applies this new skill. Leaning off his terrace while holding a big pair of binoculars, Liberace scans Central Park some 30 stories below. That's right, he's become a full-time, long-distance lip-reading voyeur.
To get full mileage out of this plot point, Liberace's hearing returns, and he races down to Central Park to eavesdrop in person on the latest twists in the two-hankie saga he's been lip-reading from afar. It seems that young Lori Nelson is pulling a Stella Dallas on her white-trash mother (Lurene Tuttle) by telling her she'll never fit in with Nelson's ritzy in-laws. After Nelson leaves, Liberace takes the heartbroken Tuttle in hand and happily buys her just the heels, hats and evening gowns he might have picked out for himself. That night he goes with Tuttle to a charity fund-raiser where all the snooty blue bloods are charmed by Tuttle, particularly when she talks Liberace into performing "The Beer Barrel Polka." Then, as divine punishment for this musical lapse, Liberace is struck deaf all over again.
A still hearing-challenged Liberace is casually gazing through his binoculars one night when his eyes settle on none other than his beloved Malone with his serviceman pal Alex Nicol in what is certainly a romantic rendezvous. Amazingly enough - since it's pitch-black outside - he reads their lips to learn that Malone is in love with the other man. What will Liberace do? It all ends happily with Liberace so quickly reconciled to life without wedded bliss that he hops up from his piano and tap dances "Tea for Two," which is meant to have you asking, "Is there no end to this man's talent?" You'll more likely be wondering, "Is there no end to this movie?" Well, yes there is, and it happens to have been the end of Liberace's chances at a starring screen career, too.
"Instant camp classic," giggled The New York Times about SHOWGIRLS. And how! It's been well noted that writer Joe Eszterhas lifted the plot of Showgirls from All About Eve, 42nd Street and Flashdance. It should also be pointed out that Showgirls owes a major debt to one of my favorite bad movies, Valley of the Dolls. What Eszterhas has done is combine the four femmes from Dolls into just two gals -- with schizo results. Elizabeth Berkley behaves like both a nice newcomer seduced by her boss and a self-destructive, psychotic bitch; costar Gina Gershon is both a sweet showgirl and a seen-it-all, show-biz monster. Even the stars we hear the filmmakers wanted for the Berkley and Gershon roles, Drew Barrymore and Madonna, couldn't have pulled off playing such split personalities. With two glassy-eyed doorstops in the leads, Showgirls is unadulterated farce from the get-go.
Our show begins when tough, young hitchhiker Berkley gets a lift from hunky sociopath Dewey Weber, who generously drives her to Las Vegas, then steals her suitcase (what does he think is inside?). Down-and-out Berkley moves in with dim-bulb waitress Gina Ravera, who remarks, "I haven't gotten laid in six months. My right hand's so tired I can hardly thread a needle!" Soon Berkley's got a gig as a cheesy stripper, but when she gets a look at the Big Time at the hotel Ravera works at, she witnesses a real Vegas show starring Gershon (who, despite the rhinestones glued to her boobs, is indistinguishable from any of the other dancers). A coked-up Gershon turns up at Berkley's strip joint with her hotel boss/lover Kyle MacLachlan, and pays Berkley $500 for a nude lap dance, during which Berkley, in a fit of originality, licks her own nipple. Whereupon Gershon encourages Berkley to audition for the hotel show.
Surveying the line of hopefuls, snide show producer Alan Rachins snarls at the first, "What are these, watermelons? This is a stage, babe, not a patch!" Viewing Berkley's nipples, he leers, "I'm erect, why aren't you?" Berkley is hired and proceeds to witness the dog-eat-dog world of showgirls: one chorine growls at seamstress Ravera, "You're gonna see a smilin' snatch if you don't fix this G-string." Well, maybe it's more dog-eat-dog-food: over lunch Gershon tells Berkley, "I've had dog food. I used to love Doggie Chow," and Berkley gushes, "I used to love Doggie Chow, too!" The brief bonding over pet food experiences ends when Gershon plays with Berkley's breasts, cooing, "You are a whore," and Berkley rejects her, sneering, "Bitch!"
Berkley is visited in her new, "classier" digs by her old strip-club pals, one of whom thinks Berkley "looks better than a 10-inch dick," and the other of whom comments, "Must be weird not having anybody come on you." Flush with success, Berkley goes after druggy McLachlan. Naked in his pool, she sits on him and does a whiplash-like imitation of sex which resembles nothing so much as an epileptic fit. (You'll want to add some Tide and throw in your laundry!) Then, having stolen Gershon's guy, she shoves Gershon down a staircase, and that night she takes Gershon's place in the show and becomes a star (although she, like Gershon, blends right into the chorus). Her triumph is spoiled when pal Ravera is gang-raped by a rock star and his friends. Suddenly, Showgirls veers off into Cleopatra Jones/Coffy territory, with Berkley becoming a martial-arts super-heroine -- Ninja Showgirl? -- who kicks the rocker senseless. After French-kissing Gershon farewell, an older, wiser Berkley blows town, hitching a ride with, yep, luggage thief Weber. The duo heads for L.A.--to work, we hope, for Zalman King in a sexy cable TV series lifted from their roles here: each week, a little lap-dancing, a little crime-fighting. (Well... I'd lap it up).
The Crush a 1993 gigglefest about a teen psycho-nymphet who makes life a living hell for the twice-her-age writer who's renting out her parents' guest house, is a fabulous Bad Movie gem. Alicia Silverstone plays this Lolita-ish minx -- think Poison Ivy in a Wonderbra -- who one second is displaying herself nude to renter Cary Elwes and the next is trying to murder his photographer girlfriend, Jennifer Rubin, by shoving swarms of buzzing wasps into a darkroom's ventilation system. We'd guess that Silverstone, who rapidly exhausts her repertoire of three expressions (coy, steamy, wacko), honed her acting licks studying the oeuvre of Cybill Shepherd. When she chirps lines at Rubin like, "Don"t worry, Amy, some guys really like girls with small breasts," we can only hope for Silverstone's sake that some guys like girls with teensy talent. And we'd guess that Elwes, who rapidly exhausts his repertoire of one expression (self-enchanted), honed his acting licks by studying the oeuvre of Ryan O'Neal. Just like O'Neal in What's Up, Doc? -- but that movie was intended as a comedy -- Elwes hopes to pass himself off as an intellectual by donning specs. Indeed, when Silverstone finds him chomping on a cigar while writing, he explains, preposterously, "Helps me think."
But it's in its crackpot plotting and kamikaze ripoffs of other moviemakers that The Crush attains Bad Movie nirvana. When Elwes can't hack a Pique magazine assignment about a Michael Milkenesque arbitrager, 14-year-old Silverstone secretly rewrites his story so brilliantly that it becomes a career-maker for him. Later, explaining her actions, Silverstone -- who sounds to us like she's learned every word of her dialogue phonetically--says, "Your split infinitives put such stress on the adverbs."
For plot reasons, Elwes's character just up and becomes stupid, which the actor does manage to convey. Long after Silverstone has etched "c-cksucker" onto the hood of his car, made a room into a candle-lit shrine to him and phoned him to say, "Guess what? Got my period. Definitely not pregnant," you'll be screaming aloud, "Ever think of moving, Cary?" Of course, if he did, we wouldn't get to savor such prize moments as Silverstone cooing, "Ever do a virgin?" Or the scene in which the heroine's rich daddy, wielding a pair of pliers, tells Elwes what he plans to do to the horny guys his little girl will soon attract: "Some friggin' kid'll be standin' there with his hard-on stickin' out of his pants," he says. "Hope I don't go breakin' it off!" By the time Silverstone gets around to the most implausible plot twist of all--she accuses Elwes of raping her and people actually believe her -- you'll be breaking in half with hilarity.
With two stars incapable of having a crush on anyone but their mirrors, we're afraid that writer-director Alan Shapiro's crush on Alfred Hitchcock is the only crush on display: Silverstone freaks out in full riding gear, like Tippi Hedren in Marnie; when Rubin fights off those wasps, it's shot like the finale of The Birds; then, falling, she grabs a curtain, like Janet Leigh in the Psycho shower. In the absurd climax, Elwes fights for his life on a twirling carousel straight out of Strangers on a Train, only this one's in an attic (don't ask).
Our favorite moment, though, is an original. Elwes, disturbed from his sleep by chopping noises and angry screams, investigates to find a sweaty, crazily wide-eyed Silverstone hacking away at lemons. He asks what she's doing and she hisses, "Making lemonade. Want some?"
Take it from your Auntie Helen, when you're ready for a long cool drink of laughter, catch The Crush.
Lauren Bacall Dies at 89; in a Bygone Hollywood, She Purred Every Word BY ENID NEMY, NY TIMES, AUG 12, 2014
Lauren Bacall, the actress whose provocative glamour elevated her to stardom in Hollywood’s golden age and whose lasting mystique put her on a plateau in American culture that few stars reach, died on Tuesday in New York. She was 89.
Her death was confirmed by her son Stephen Bogart. “Her life speaks for itself,” Mr. Bogart said. “She lived a wonderful life, a magical life.”
With an insinuating pose and a seductive, throaty voice — her simplest remark sounded like a jungle mating call, one critic said — Ms. Bacall shot to fame in 1944 with her first movie, Howard Hawks’s adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway novel “To Have and Have Not,” playing opposite Humphrey Bogart, who became her lover on the set and later her husband.
It was a smashing debut sealed with a handful of lines now engraved in Hollywood history.
“You know you don’t have to act with me, Steve,” her character says to Bogart’s in the movie’s most memorable scene. “You don’t have to say anything, and you don’t have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.”
The film was the first of more than 40 for Ms. Bacall, among them “The Big Sleep” and “Key Largo” with Bogart, “How to Marry a Millionaire” with Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable, “Designing Woman” with Gregory Peck, the all-star “Murder on the Orient Express” (1974) and, later in her career, Lars von Trier’s “Dogville” (2003) and “Manderlay” (2005) and Robert Altman’s “Prêt-à -Porter” (1994).
But few if any of her movies had the impact of her first — or of that one scene. Indeed, her film career was a story of ups, downs and long periods of inactivity. Though she received an honorary Academy Award in 2009 “in recognition of her central place in the Golden Age of motion pictures,” she was not nominated for an Oscar until 1997.
The theater was kinder to her. She won Tonys for her starring roles in two musicals adapted from classic films: “Applause” (1970), based on “All About Eve,” and “Woman of the Year” (1981), based on the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn movie of the same name. Earlier she starred on Broadway in the comedies “Goodbye, Charlie” (1959) and “Cactus Flower” (1965).
She also won a National Book Award in 1980 for the first of her two autobiographies, “Lauren Bacall: By Myself.”
Though often called a legend, she did not care for the word. “It’s a title and category I am less than fond of,” she wrote in 1994 in “Now,” her second autobiography. “Aren’t legends dead?”
Forever Tied to Bogart
She also expressed impatience, especially in her later years, with the public’s continuing fascination with her romance with Bogart, even though she frequently said that their 12-year marriage was the happiest period of her life.
“I think I’ve damn well earned the right to be judged on my own,” she said in a 1970 interview with The New York Times. “It’s time I was allowed a life of my own, to be judged and thought of as a person, as me.”
Years later, however, she seemed resigned to being forever tied to Bogart and expressed annoyance that her later marriage to another leading actor, Jason Robards Jr., was often overlooked.
“My obit is going to be full of Bogart, I’m sure,” she told Vanity Fair magazine in a profile of her in March 2011, adding: “I’ll never know if that’s true. If that’s the way, that’s the way it is.”
Ms. Bacall was an 18-year-old model in New York when her face on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar caught the eye of Slim Hawks, Howard Hawks’s wife. Brought to Hollywood and taken under the Hawkses’ wing, she won the role in “To Have and Have Not,” loosely based on the novel of the same name.
She played Marie Browning, known as Slim, an American femme fatale who becomes romantically involved with Bogart’s jaded fishing-boat captain, Harry Morgan, known as Steve, in wartime Martinique. Her deep voice and the seductive way she looked at Bogart in the film attracted attention.
Their on-screen chemistry hadn’t come naturally, however. In one of the first scenes she filmed, she asked if anyone had a match. Bogart threw her a box of matches; she lit her cigarette and then threw the box back to him.
“My hand was shaking, my head was shaking, the cigarette was shaking, I was mortified,” she wrote in “By Myself.” “The harder I tried to stop, the more I shook. ... I realized that one way to hold my trembling head still was to keep it down, chin low, almost to my chest, and eyes up at Bogart. It worked and turned out to be the beginning of The Look.”
Ms. Bacall’s naturally low voice was further deepened in her early months in Hollywood. Hawks wanted her voice to remain low even during emotional scenes and suggested she find some quiet spot and read aloud. She drove to Mulholland Drive and began reading “The Robe,” making her voice lower and louder than usual.
“Who sat on mountaintops in cars reading books aloud to the canyons?” she later wrote. “I did.”
During her romance with Bogart, she asked him if it mattered to him that she was Jewish. His answer, she later wrote, was “Hell, no — what mattered to him was me, how I thought, how I felt, what kind of person I was, not my religion, he couldn’t care less — why did I even ask?”
An Impulsive Kiss
Ms. Bacall’s love affair with Bogart began with an impulsive kiss. While filming “To Have and Have Not,” he had stopped at her trailer to say good night when he suddenly leaned over, lifted her chin and kissed her. He was 25 years her senior and married at the time to Mayo Methot, his third wife, but to Ms. Bacall, “he was the man who meant everything in the world to me; I couldn’t believe my luck.”
As her fame grew in the ensuing months — she attracted wide publicity in February 1945 when she was photographed on top of a piano, legs draped over the side, with Vice President Harry S. Truman at the keyboard — so did the romance, particularly as she and Bogart filmed “The Big Sleep,” based on a Raymond Chandler whodunit.
But her happiness alternated with despair. Bogart returned to his wife several times before he accepted that the marriage could not be saved. He and Ms. Bacall were married on May 21, 1945, at Malabar Farm in Lucas, Ohio, the home of Bogart’s close friend the writer Louis Bromfield. Bogart was 45; Ms. Bacall was 20.
Returning to work, she soon suffered a setback, when the critics savaged her performance in “Confidential Agent,” a 1945 thriller with Charles Boyer set during the Spanish Civil War. The director was Herman Shumlin, who, unlike Hawks and Bogart on her first two movies, offered her no guidance. “I didn’t know what the hell I was doing,” she recalled. “I was a novice.”
“After ‘Confidential Agent,’ it took me years to prove that I was capable of doing anything at all worthwhile,” she wrote. “I would never reach the ‘To Have and Have Not’ heights again — on film, anyway — and it would take much clawing and scratching to pull myself even halfway back up that damn ladder.”
“Dark Passage,” her third movie with Bogart, came after several years of concentrating on her marriage. Had she not married Bogart, she told The Times in 1996, her career would probably have flourished, but she did not regret the marriage.
“I would not have had a better life, but a better career,” she said. “Howard Hawks was like a Svengali; he was molding me the way he wanted. I was his creation, and I would have had a great career had he been in control of it. But the minute Bogie was around, Hawks knew he couldn’t control me, so he sold my contract to Warner Bros. And that was the end.”
She was eventually suspended 12 times by the studio for rejecting scripts.
‘And We Made a Noise’
In 1947, as the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Americans suspected of Communism, Ms. Bacall and Bogart were among 500 Hollywood personalities to sign a petition protesting what they called the committee’s attempt “to smear the motion picture industry.” Investigating individual political beliefs, the petition said, violated the basic principles of American democracy.
The couple flew to Washington as part of a group known as the Committee for the First Amendment, which also included Danny Kaye, John Garfield, Gene Kelly, John Huston, Ira Gershwin and Jane Wyatt. “I am an outraged and angry citizen who feels that my basic civil liberties are being taken away from me,” Bogart said in a statement.
Three decades later, Ms. Bacall would express doubts about “whether the trip to Washington ultimately helped anyone.” But, she added: “It helped those of us at the time who wanted to fight for what we thought was right and against what we knew was wrong. And we made a noise — in Hollywood, a community which should be courageous but which is surprisingly timid and easily intimidated.”
Nevertheless, bowing to studio pressure, Bogart later said publicly he believed the trip to Washington was “ill advised,” and Ms. Bacall went along with him.
A year after that trip she had what she termed “one of my happiest movie experiences” starring with Bogart, Lionel Barrymore, Edward G. Robinson and Claire Trevor in John Huston’s thriller “Key Largo.” It was Bogart’s and Ms. Bacall’s last film together. “Young Man With a Horn” (1950), with Kirk Douglas and Doris Day, in which she played a student married to a jazz trumpeter, was less successful.
Ms. Bacall’s first son, Stephen H. Bogart (named after Bogart’s character in “To Have and Have Not”), was born in 1949. A daughter, Leslie Bogart (named after the actor Leslie Howard), was born in 1952. In a 1995 memoir, Stephen wrote, “My mother was a lapsed Jew, and my father was a lapsed Episcopalian,” adding that he and his sister, Leslie, were raised Episcopalian “because my mother felt that would make life easier for Leslie and me during those post-World War II years.”
Rat Pack Den Mother
Ms. Bacall, however, wrote that she felt “totally Jewish and always would” and that it was Bogart who thought the children should be christened in an Episcopal church because “with discrimination still rampant in the world, it would give them one less hurdle to jump in life’s Olympics.”
She was, she said, happy being a wife and mother. She was also “den mother” to the so-called Hollywood Rat Pack, whose members included Bogart, Frank Sinatra, David Niven, Judy Garland and others. (It would evolve into the better-known Rat Pack whose members included Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.)
In 1952 she campaigned for Adlai E. Stevenson, the Democratic candidate for president, and persuaded Bogart, who had originally supported the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, to join her. The two accompanied Stevenson on motorcades and flew east to help in the final lap of his campaign in New York and Chicago.
Her film career at this point appeared to be going nowhere, but she had no intention of allowing Lauren Bacall the actress to slide into oblivion. In 1953 her fortunes revived with what she called “the best part I’d had in years,” in “How to Marry a Millionaire,” playing alongside Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable as New York models with sights set on finding rich husbands.
In the early 1950s the Bogarts dabbled in radio and the growing medium of television. They starred in the radio adventure series “Bold Venture” and, with Henry Fonda, in a live television version of “The Petrified Forest,” the 1936 film that starred Bogart, Bette Davis and Leslie Howard. In 1956 Ms. Bacall appeared in a television production of Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit,” in which Coward himself also starred. She would occasionally return to the small screen for the rest of her career, making guest appearances on shows like “The Rockford Files” and “Chicago Hope” and starring in TV movies.
Bogart was found to have cancer of the esophagus in 1956. Although an operation was successful — his esophagus and two lymph nodes were removed — after some months the cancer returned. He died in January 1957 at the age of 57.
Romance With Sinatra
Shortly after Bogart’s death, Ms. Bacall, by then 32, had a widely publicized but brief romance with Sinatra, who had been a close friend of the Bogarts. She moved to New York in 1958 and, three years later, married Mr. Robards, settling in a spacious apartment in the Dakota, on Central Park West, where she continued to live until her death. They had a son, the actor Sam Robards, and were divorced in 1969. She is survived by her sons, Stephen Bogart and Sam Robards; her daughter, Leslie Bogart; and six grandchildren.
Lauren Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske in Brooklyn on Sept. 16, 1924, the daughter of William and Natalie Perske, Jewish immigrants from Poland and Romania. Her parents were divorced when she was 6 years old, and her mother moved to Manhattan and adopted the second half of her maiden name, Weinstein-Bacal.
“I didn’t really have any love in my growing-up life, except for my mother and grandmother,” Ms. Bacall said in the Vanity Fair interview. Her father, she said, “did not treat my mother well.”
From then until her move to Hollywood, Ms. Bacall was known as Betty Bacal; she added an “l” to her name because, she said, the single “l” caused “too much irregularity of pronunciation.” The name Lauren was given her by Howard Hawks before the release of her first film, but family and old friends called her Betty throughout her life, and to Bogart she was always Baby.
Although finances were a problem as she was growing up — “Nothing came easy, everything was worked for” — her mother’s family was close-knit, and through an uncle’s generosity she attended the Highland Manor school for girls in Tarrytown, N.Y., where she graduated from grade school at 11. She went on to Julia Richman High School in Manhattan and also studied acting at the New York School of the Theater and ballet with Mikhail Mordkin, who had on occasion been Pavlova’s partner.
After graduation in 1940, Ms. Bacall became a full-time student at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts but left after the first year; her family could no longer subsidize her, and the academy at the time did not offer scholarships to women.
So she turned to modeling, and in 1941, at 16, she landed jobs with David Crystal, a Seventh Avenue dress manufacturer, and Sam Friedlander, who made evening gowns. During lunch hours she would stand outside Sardi’s selling copies of Actor’s Cue, a casting tip sheet, hoping to catch the attention of producers. She also became an usher at Broadway theaters and a hostess at the newly opened Stage Door Canteen.
Her first theater role was a walk-on in a Broadway play called “Johnny 2 x 4.” It paid $15 a week and closed in eight weeks, but she looked back on the experience as “magical.” Another stab at modeling, with the Walter Thornton agency, proved disappointing, but her morale soared in July 1942, with a sentence by George Jean Nathan in Esquire: “The prettiest theater usher — the tall slender blonde in the St. James Theater right aisle, during the Gilbert & Sullivan engagement — by general rapt agreement among the critics, but the bums are too dignified to admit it.”
Watching ‘Casablanca’
Later that year she was cast by the producer Max Gordon in “Franklin Street,” a comedy directed by George S. Kaufman, which closed out of town. It was her last time onstage for 17 years.
It was about this time that she saw Bogart in “Casablanca.” She later recalled that she could not understand the reaction of a friend who was “mad” about him. “So much for my judgment at that time,” she said.
In 1942, she met Nicolas de Gunzburg, an editor at Harper’s Bazaar, who took her to meet Diana Vreeland, the fashion editor. After a thorough inspection, Vreeland asked her to return the next day to meet the photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe. Test shots were taken, and a few days later she was called.
A full-page color picture of her standing in front of a window with the words “American Red Cross Blood Donor Service” on it led to inquiries from David O. Selznick, Howard Hughes and Howard Hawks, among others. The Hawks offer was accepted, and Betty Bacall, 18 years old, left for the West Coast by train with her mother. She returned to New York less than two years later as Lauren Bacall, star.
In her 70s, Ms. Bacall began lending her distinctive voice to television commercials and cartoons, and her movie career again picked up steam. Between 1995 and 2012 she was featured in more than a dozen pictures, most notably “The Mirror Has Two Faces” (1996), in which she played Barbra Streisand’s monstrous, vain mother.
The role brought her an Academy Award nomination as best supporting actress; the smart money was on her to win. But the Oscar went to Juliette Binoche for her part in “The English Patient,” to the astonishment of almost everyone, including Ms. Binoche.
Ms. Bacall — who received a consolation prize of sorts when she was named a Kennedy Center Honors winner a few months later — was perhaps prepared for the Oscar rebuff. Shortly before the Academy Awards ceremony, she told an interviewer that she hadn’t been happy for years. “Contented, yes; pleased and proud, yes. But happy, no.”
Still, she said, she had been lucky: “I had one great marriage, I have three great children and four grandchildren. I am still alive. I still can function. I still can work.”
As she said in 1996: “You just learn to cope with whatever you have to cope with. I spent my childhood in New York, riding on subways and buses. And you know what you learn if you’re a New Yorker? The world doesn’t owe you a damn thing.”
Delectably, deliriously, dementedly awful, THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT 
is one of the very best Bad Movies of the '90s, no small accomplishment in a decade that also gave us Barb Wire, Boxing Helena, Color of Night and Showgirls.
The fun begins when Geena Davis, a demure, redheaded, schoolteaching single mother who suffers from amnesia and cannot recall having been the world's deadliest hired assassin eight years ago, collides with a reindeer. Voila. Davis begins to get hints of her previous vocation. In a dream sequence Sigmund Freud would have fired a patient for having, goody-two-shoes Davis stands atop a stormy cliff facing her sexy, bottle-blonde image in a mirror. "I want a cigarette," growls the tough-talkin' reflection, to which the nice Davis prissily replies, "I don't smoke." "Ya used to!" snaps the blonde. Director Renny Harlin chooses to cut from this all-too-revealing dream sequence to a dump truck picking up garbage (discuss meaning amongst yourselves).
Soon Davis's dark side starts cropping up during waking hours. The mere chopping of a carrot turns into a dicin', slicin' display of aggression that is, frankly, reminiscent of one of those infomercials for sharp cutlery. Whipping through every vegetable in the kitchen, Davis beams maniacally, "I used to do this. I'm a chef!" Perhaps not. When she nails a tomato to the wall with a perfectly tossed knife, her daughter and boyfriend are justifiably terrified. "Chefs do that," explains Davis. But later, when she tells her kid, who's just fractured a wrist, "Life is pain! Get used to it!" there's no pretending Davis's previous life was benevolent. To make the point even clearer, a one-eyed thug who knew hit woman Davis way back when breaks into the house and hits Davis on the head with a heavy pot, whereupon she knocks him out cold with a cream pie in the kisser, then breaks his neck, and, as her boyfriend watches, tastes the pie filling off the corpse, explaining, "Chefs do that."
will tell you. It seems that in a faux medieval land there was a woodcutter who liked to make toys for children. Returning home one snowy Christmas Eve, Claus (David Huddleston) and the missus (Judy Cornwell) and the two reindeer pulling their sleigh froze to death in a sudden storm. But magic starlight reanimates them, as elves in green felt shanghai them to a Brigadoon-like North Pole HQ. "This is your home now," they titter evilly to the undead Santa, and so he's stuck there forever, amongst the barracks full of elves and sweatshops full of toys, which the immortal elves have been making in anticipation of his arrival.
Posts
