Rebel Without A Cause

MERRY CHRISTMAS DEAR READERS!

TO GET IN THE HOLIDAY SPIRIT...

READ SOMETHING ELSE! 

BECAUSE I'M WRITING ABOUT JAMES DEAN IN REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE!

AND YOU CAN'T STOP ME!

Now, I've realized the format of this blog has gone a little astray. I actually had some structure to my older posts, so I'm going to try something new and go back to the old way of writing these posts.

MR. JAMES DEAN, THE REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE IN POP CULTURE

I think James Dean is the male equivalent of Audrey Hepburn. You might ask, "Why, Lila? Why would you ever say such a strange thing?" Well, I'll tell you. It's because they're freakin' everywhere. Posters, calendars, books about Hollywood celebrities, mugs, t-shirts, you name it. The two of them, although I don't think they ever appeared in a movie together, are major Hollywood icons and are engrained into our good ol' American culture (in my opinion, if you give a damn). I have seen plenty of Audrey Hepburn movies (Breakfast at Tiffany's, Roman Holiday, to name a few), but I had never seen a movie with James Dean.

Now, I have been curious about the movie Rebel Without A Cause specifically ever since I learned to drive and got my license. When my Mom had to add me to the auto insurance for our car, they had to have me come in and watch a short, dumb video that talked about safety and rules of the road, etc, in order to get a cheaper auto insurance (I guess so they know that I know how to drive, even though I have a license). In the video, was a teenager who did lots of bad things that made him a bad driver. It was really terrible and I don't remember much of it except for in this kid's bare bones set that was supposed to be his bedroom, was a life-size, cardboard cut out of James Dean in his red jacket from Rebel Without A Cause (I think it even had the title printed at the bottom). He was just in the background (sometimes even in the foreground, or in line with the actors). Nothing was said about this cut out. It was just there.

Now, what was the production design of this little stupid video trying to say? Was it supposed to help describe the teenager's character as a rebel without a cause (and perhaps suggest that's why he made such bad driving decisions)? Was it supposed to be strange subliminal messaging against the main message of the video (ie, one should rebel against the rules defined in the video)? Or was it some poorly judged reference to the fact James Dean died in a car crash? Well, I had to find out. And the only way this was possible was by watching the movie.

A BRIEF DESCRIPTION

James Dean plays Jim Stark, the new kid in town, someone who's used to spending the night in jail for getting into fights for being called a chicken. He likes a girl, named Judy, but she runs with a pretty rough crowd that forces him into situations that end pretty badly for one of the characters (I won't tell you who). While he wants to be popular and well-liked, he mostly wants a friend. He finds a friend in Plato, a kid who has nobody... no friends, no family.

MY THOUGHTS (IF YOU GIVE A DAMN)

I have to say, I loved the movie. I still have no freakin' clue what James Dean's cardboard cut-out was doing in that driver's ed video I was forced to watch, but it lead me to a pretty fantastic movie. I realize my description above is pretty terrible, but it's really because I don't want to give too much away.  I really think that it was amazing and, dear readers, wherever you are, you should all go watch it because I can't say it enough... it was really good.

Someone has to fact check me on this, but in my limited knowledge, this is the first movie to really tell the story of the teenager. My boyfriend disagreed and said that perhaps there were movies earlier on that had teenagers having a good ol' time, and this is the first movie that took teenagers seriously. This may be true, but it can't be that much earlier since teenage culture and the word "teenager" itself wasn't even invented until after World War II. Here's an article on the word "teenager" that, although I didn't read all of it and it is from a home-schooling website, seemed interesting and relevant to the movie. Enough of that tangent. My point is, this movie took on a whole new culture that had not been explored before (to my knowledge), and it is done well. I was fascinated the entire time. It really hit home how little has changed since the 1950s, because I've met people like James Dean's character and I know people like Plato . I was extremely sympathetic towards their characters. To this day there isn't a good system in place to help people like Jim Stark and Plato. It's a bizarre, as of yet, unexplained side effect of our culture today, here in America. I think this movie was truly ahead of its time. 

Before I finish up this post, I have to add a film student note about the production design of the movie and so forth. The colors in this movie was amazing. And James Dean's red jacket was brilliant and continues to be iconic today. I'm female and I still want a jacket like James Dean's in this movie. Maybe it was James Dean's jacket, or maybe it was the gorgeous James Dean himself, or maybe it was the fact it was shot in Technicolor, or maybe it was the camera angle, but I fell in love with the movie from the very first shot of the opening credits.

I want to make movies like Rebel Without A Cause.

COMING SOON: Will the future be brighter? We'll find out with Blade Runner... next.

All About Eve

So, way back in the beginning of the summer, I wrote a little post about Ninotchka. Shortly after that post I debuted the blog to my friends via a link on my Facebook. Shortly after that, my good friend, known on blogger as mattgmallon, posted a comment that I should watch All About Eve. His exact words: "Watch the next six movies AS FAST AS YOU CAN, just so you can get to watch ALL ABOUT EVE!!!!!!!!! BETTE AT HER BITCHIEST BEST!!!!!! DOFIJ#)@($*#$)914932094 -Matt"

Well, I didn't get around to it as soon as I promised in my response. Once I got back to school, after the first USC football game I went back to his dorm and we watched All About Eve together. Well... as much as I could get through. I really liked the movie, but I was so tired from the game I only got about halfway or three quarters of the way through the movie when my eyes started to droop and my head started to fall forward, and jolt me awake. I wanted to do the movie justice, and I desperately did not want to fall asleep during the movie, so I promised him I would come back later to watch the rest.

Later unfortunately turned out to be much later. We both got busy, and when we were able to hang out, we usually forgot that I had to finish the movie and didn't get around to it. I finally sat down to watch it on Netflix instant on my computer when I had a little bit of time to spare and Matt and everyone else was busy doing homework and studying.. other things I probably should have been doing. Unfortunately, I got severely sleepy again while trying to watch the movie and was forced to take a nap before being able to get through the last twenty minutes. After three attempts, I finally was able to finish the movie, and check it off the list. 

I honestly did like the movie. I'm sure that it's hard for you to believe that since I just told you that I fell asleep twice during the movie, and took so long to get around to seeing it... but keep in mind this isn't the first time this has happened. Feeling overwhelmingly sleepy during a good movie was also problematic for Ferris Bueller's Day Off. This also occurred while I tried to watch The Searchers, a movie I have not yet written about because I have not yet finished it. It was even more of a problem than Ferris Bueller's Day Off and All About Eve... I was drifting off within the first twenty minutes. So, my sleepiness is not a sign that I did not like or enjoy the movie, but rather that I may have a problem of not sleeping enough (I'm in college, what can I say). 

But let me move on to discussing the actual movie.

Why is All About Eve culturally important? Not only it's a favorite film of one of my best friends', but also because it is probably the Bette Davis movie. Before All About Eve, I had never seen a Bette Davis movie. She's a pretty big classic figure in pop culture. Ever heard the song "Bette Davis Eyes" by Kim Carnes? Well, I'm obsessed with 80s music, so I have. When I first heard the song, I am ashamed to say that I didn't know who Bette Davis was. 

Cut to first semester of college in Drew Casper's CTCS-190 class (A bit of background for the non-USC film major reader: Drew Casper is a critical studies professor at USC who teaches, along with several other classes, 190, which is the Introduction to Cinema class that absolutely everyone in the film school is required to take. He's a professor you either love, or you hate. He's overdramatic, constantly says how much he hates Post-Modern films, and how much he loves Doris Day. I personally liked him and thought he was hilarious and entertaining. I meant to mention in my Baby Doll post that I had been watching the special features... and guess who was one of the people they interviewed for the special features? Drew Casper! There he was in my living room! It was shocking and hilarious.). Drew Casper mentions Bette Davis when he talks about the movie Whatever Happened to Baby Jane a movie that co-stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford (who we had just watched in Mildred Pierce, one of my favorite movies of all time now, and the movie I quote every time I'm drunk), and about how they hated each other. A huge fan of Bette Davis, Matt leaned over in his seat to me and spoke of the overload of sassiness that must have occurred on the set, and how Bette Davis would be able to take Joan Crawford any day.

For that class, I also read a good portion of the assigned reading. One of them was an essay about one of Bette Davis' movies, The Corn is Green and Mr. Skeffington, which I still have not seen, but I read about them anyway. Both of them (if my memory serves me right) talked about how amazing Bette Davis was, and yet how difficult she was to work with.

With Matt's blog comment first and foremost in my head, I watched All About Eve expecting a wonderful, sassy Bette Davis... and that's exactly what I got.

She has so many wonderful quotable lines in the movie. On the same top movie quotes list I referenced in my She Done Him Wrong post, one of Bette Davis' line from All About Eve appears as number nine on the list... "Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night."

Now, for those of you have not yet seen All About Eve, I'll give you a little background. The movie is about Bette Davis, whose character name is not Eve (as I expected from the title), but instead Margo Channing, a famous actress. Although she's getting older, she still gets to play the parts of twenty year olds in plays written specifically for her, and has a hot young boyfriend. But, when super-fan, Eve, is invited in from the rain and taken under Margo's wing, Margo begins to get a little bit worried that Eve, also an aspiring actress, might be out to steal her career... and her boyfriend. It all comes to a head during a birthday thrown for Margo's boyfriend. A friend of Margo asks her "We've seen you like this before. Is it over or is it just beginning?". And Margo responds... "Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night."

Someday I will watch this film again, and I will determinedly stay awake through the whole thing and watch it in one sitting.

I will certainly do that for Matt's movie, which he just finished the first draft of the script for. It's inspired about Bette Davis and her sassiness. It'll be made into a movie, if not by some studio or awesome indie director, I'll pick it up and make it. I would say more about it, but perhaps I want to leave a cliffhanger... so that you all will want to come back and keep reading my sporadic blog posts.

COMING SOON: Perhaps my favorite movie of the bunch I've seen thus far- Rebel Without a Cause.

Blow Up

Let me start off this post by saying: Blow Up... is... such... a... good... movie. I have absolutely no clue how it got on my list... but I'm really glad it did.

Well, it's on nearly every top 100 movie list I read when I first compiled this list (see my Movie List post for the links to my lists). But, I'm not exactly sure what made me pick it out of the many movies on the list I hadn't seen. But something about it intrigued me. Maybe it was the super awesome poster that happened to be next to the name at the time I looked it up. Or maybe it was because I was looking to put more movies from the 60s on my list and this movie happened to be made in the 60s.

But the point is that it's a really good movie... and no one's heard of it before.

I loved it. It didn't always make perfect sense to me the whole time, but I still loved it. Probably because it's the same era and tone of another one of my favorite movies, Easy Rider (may Dennis Hopper rest in peace).

After I watched the movie, I looked up other articles about it online, to try and figure it out (what did the re-occuring mime troupe mean?) and to learn a little bit more about its history. I think Roger Ebert puts it best in his article. This may seem like lazy blogging, but I honestly after I read this article I was like "I can't write any more about Blow Up, this article says it all!" So, take it away Mr. Ebert...

COMING SOON: Finally, the review of the film talked about by my one beloved comment on this blog- the sassy Bette Davis in All About Eve.

She Done Him Wrong... Again

So, after writing my barely coherent post on She Done Him Wrong last night (well, technically early this morning), I was inspired to watch the movie again. So, I did! It's a very interesting movie. I like it, but I wouldn't say it's the best movie that I've watched from my list. I'm surprised it was nominated for the Oscar for its year. Perhaps it wasn't as good of a year for Oscars? Although isn't 1933 technically considered part of Hollywood's "Golden Age"? Perhaps this will require further investigation. I may have to watch the other nine nominees of the year (yes, there were ten total, just like they recently changed it back to).

But the point of this post was not to put down She Done Him Wrong, but to instead marvel at the strangeness of the movie. I may have said in my last post that Mae West was ahead of her time (if I didn't say it, I meant to). But, when I watched the movie again, I tried to think of a Mae West equivalent today... and I couldn't think of anyone. I feel like there are a lot more female comedians today than there were in the 1930s (this requires more research though), but none of them do the type of comedy and the type of characters Mae West does. It's still not accepted for a woman to be so uber flirtatious. If Mae West were starting her career today, would she have any chance of becoming the star she was in the 1930s?

So, my vast many readers, I pose you this question: can you think of a Mae West equivalent?

That is all...

She Done Him Wrong

Who is Mae West, you may ask? Well, if you're asking that question, you obviously didn't write a paper Junior year of high school about comedy films during the Great Depression like I did. To answer the question, Mae West is a female comedienne and sex symbol. Despite the existence of people like Tina Fey, it is still, unfortunately, common belief that women aren't funny... let alone sexy and funny. To whoever may think this, I would like to point them in the direction of Mae West. I found her extremely ahead of her time and relevant today (then again, do sexual innuendos ever go out of style?). She is the Queen of innuendo. She's her own woman. She owns and runs her own nightclub and flirts with every man she damn well pleases to flirt with. She's smart, cunning, sexy and hilarious. 

Well, perhaps you don't recognize the name Mae West, but you might recognize the line "Why don't you come up some time and see me?". It's on AFI's Top 100 Movie Quotes list and is ranked as number 26. Haven't heard it? Well, it also happens to be one of the most misquoted movie lines and is often quoted as "Come up and see me sometime" (which exaggerates the innuendo of the line a little bit). She says it in She Done Him Wrong when she is talking to Cary Grant (yes, he got his start doing movies with Mae West) who plays the leader of a local temperance group. His character's name? Captain Cummings. Yes. His name is Captain Cummings. He hangs around the Lady Lou (played by Mae West) works at in order to ensure there's minimal trouble.

And what a lot of trouble there is! The most amazing thing about this movie was not marveling at how many obvious innuendos they were able to sneak past the censorship of the time (actually, many point to this film as one of the reasons why the production code was put into place), but also at how much plot happens in a mere 69 minutes (yes, this raunchy comedy is cleverly 69 minutes long). I am incredibly bias (and I think this came up before in my post about Gone With the Wind) when it comes to the length of a movie. I think, the shorter the movie, the better. Ever watch the deleted scenes on the DVD? More often than not, you can see the reason the editor cut it out in the first place. Even for movies that I am a super fan of (like the masterpiece Hot Rod), I like better with the extra scenes cut out. However, because shorter movies have less time to repeat things, it means you have to really pay attention to make sure you catch everything that's going on. Inevitably bits and pieces are missed, bits of plot, or a joke or two, but I think this makes viewing it a second time even better. She Done Him Wrong is an incredibly complex story with lots of twists. It moves at an incredibly fast pace and the Mae West's hilarious innuendos come from all directions. I haven't had the pleasure to watch it again since I saw it the first time, but I can't wait. And you know what? I can do that practically whenever I want! It's not a chore like watching Gone with the Wind. Even though Gone with the Wind is a more critically acclaimed movie than She Done Him Wrong (although, both films were nominated for Best Picture in the Academy Awards... She Done Him Wrong happens to be the shortest film to ever to be nominated Best Picture, and Gone with the Wind is the longest), I would much rather sit down to watch She Done Him Wrong over and over again. 

COMING SOON: Blow Up... which if I were Mae West, I would make into a sexual innuendo.

Baby Doll

I am now officially on Winter Break. I finished my last final on the 14th, flew back last night and spent the day today taking a much needed break from doing anything at all, whatsoever. 

But now it's time I get back to business. And by business, I mean writing this blog post that I've started approximately five times, but have never finished. It's about Baby Doll, the very last movie of my summer list that I actually watched while still on Summer Break. So, it's high time I write about it.

Baby Doll isn't a movie that's very well known. It's one I put on the list before I decided the theme of this blog would be classic movies in pop culture. My parents are film buffs and they had never even heard of this movie. But, that doesn't mean I went into this movie without any expectations.

I'm not exactly sure how this movie got on my radar. It's written by Tennessee Williams, so that might be how I found out about it. I was in a little play written by Tennessee Williams my freshman year of high school called The Dark Room. To try and understand the play better, we all sat down and watched a PBS-esque documentary on Tennessee Williams' life... and boy, did he have quite a life. If you don't know anything about Tennessee Williams, the main thing you should know is that he was incredibly afraid of going insane his entire life. His sister, who he was very close to, suffered from schizophrenia (and his mother might of as well, I don't remember exactly... look it up yourself). She was in and out of mental hospitals and eventually got a lobotomy. Since insanity was so close to him, he was desperately afraid of going insane. This makes a whole lot of sense when you watch his works, especially A Streetcar Named Desire.

Now on to Baby Doll. The movie's about a woman nicknamed "Baby Doll". Her father arranged a marriage for her at the age of 18, right before he died, with the clause that his daughter and her new husband, would not consummate the marriage (that means have sex, folks), until she turned 20. Before her 20th birthday, she sleeps in a separate room, the nursery. It's like the picture on the movie poster above. It's strangely childish, yet seductive, which is the perfect description of her character and the whole tone of the movie.

With my background knowledge of Tennessee Williams, his other work and the subject matter, I viewed this whole movie as a terrifying drama about a woman who is completely trapped. Her husband is creepy (at the beginning of the movie he watches her sleep in her crib through a peep hole) and demanding. Her only escape comes from Eli Wallach's character, who is equally sleazy. He seduces her in order to get information about his burnt down cotton gin. Half the time during this movie I was afraid of her getting raped, and half the time I was sure she was going to get killed.

Apparently this movie is a comedy.

I was shocked, SHOCKED, when I saw that it was categorized as a "Dark Comedy", and people's reviews on Netflix said things like "This movie was sooo funny" (that was not an actual quote, but you get the point). Now, I'm in an improv troupe at USC. I watch stand up comedy more than I listen to music. I know comedy. And I know dark comedy. I consider Harold and Maude dark comedy. But Baby Doll is NOT a dark comedy. It is just dark. And Tennessee Williams is NOT a comedic writer. He's a man who is terrified of going insane, and has the constant feeling of being trapped, and that's exactly what this movie reflects. The only thing funny about this movie is that someone labelled it with a "comedy" sticker at the DVD store. 

Perhaps I did miss something. Perhaps I do need to give the film a second chance, and try and see it through a more comedic lens. But, I would like to do a poll. My dear readers, (oh my dear inexistent readers) please watch this movie. Watch this movie and get back to me about whether you think it's a comedy or not. I would really like to know.

Sincerely,

Lila

COMING SOON: 69 minutes of the Masteress of Innuendo- Ms. Mae West in She Done Him Wrong.