| "Body Heat" sizzles on DVD | | Posted Tuesday, October 31, 2006 3:09:05 PM by Blog57 Team | | LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - "You're not too smart, are you?" the femme fatale says to the fall guy. "I like that in a man." Can't boil down film noir any better than that. The line comes from Lawrence Kasdan, circa 1980, who had bet big on the mostly forgotten genre for his first directing project. Kasdan was holding aces after writing "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "The Empire Strikes Back" but figured a face-first flop would keep him out of the director's chair forever. The B-movie genre's rat-a-tat dialogue sounded like sure box office. "The language of noir is very extravagant," Kasdan says in "The Plan," a terrific new documentary on the making of "Body Heat." Plus, "I felt like I would have a lot of fun." .... | |
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| | | Still Laugh-In | | Posted Sunday, October 08, 2006 3:03:40 PM by Blog57 Team | | Infamous comedienne Lily Tomlin is known for bringing notorious characters to life, including 6-year-old Edith Ann, the schizophrenic street lady Trudy from The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe and Ernestine the phone operator. It still surprised me when "Ernestine" was on my phone. Chatting from her home in California, the ever-lovable Tomlin offered the gist of her upcoming Omaha performance. "I'll do a lot of characters and talk to the audience [and] talk about Omaha … it's pretty freewheeling," she said, and she'll throw in bits and pieces about her life, inside and outside of show business. Tomlin began her career performing in coffee houses while studying medicine at Wayne State University in Detroit. She later moved to New York, appearing in clubs before bringing her act to "The Garry Moore Show" and "The Merv Griffin Show." Her work in the cast of "Laugh-In" made Tomlin and her many characters household names.... | |
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| | | Lauren Bacall, Blythe Danner receive Katharine Hepburn medals | | Posted Friday, September 22, 2006 1:11:38 PM by Blog57 Team | | PHILADELPHIA - Actresses Lauren Bacall and Blythe Danner on Saturday received the inaugural awards of a suburban Philadelphia college's new center honoring the independent spirit of the late Katharine Hepburn. Bryn Mawr College launched its Katherine Houghton Hepburn Center with a black-tie gala hosted by ABC News journalist Cynthia McFadden. The center seeks to honor the life and works of Hepburn and her suffragist mother, Katharine Houghton Hepburn - both alumnae of Bryn Mawr - and inspire a new generation of women to follow in their footsteps. Hepburn was a four-time Oscar winner whose films include "The Philadelphia Story," "The African Queen," "On Golden Pond," "The Lion in Winter," and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." The college also bestowed its first two Katharine Hepburn medals to Bacall and Danner, the Emmy Award-winning mother of Oscar-winner Gwyneth Paltrow, for embodying Hepburn's trailblazing ways.... | |
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| | | Theatre: A right royal performance | | Posted Monday, August 21, 2006 9:04:49 AM by Blog57 Team | | It is a brave, bold choice by the Royal Shakespeare Company to kick off with a revisiting of its Henry VI trilogy, from 2001, to open its new, 1,000-seat Courtyard theatre. It is clearly proud of this space, even though the foyer looks to me like an MOT test centre, complete with exposed pipes and dodgy-looking men with bad haircuts and dirty fingernails, sloping around not talking to anybody. Oh, no, sorry, those are my fellow theatre critics. The main auditorium, on the other hand, looks more like the interior of a nuclear power station, which is a good thing: a magnificent space. Henry VI must have been one of the weediest kings ever to have sat on the throne of England. Those authorities Sellar and Yeatman, authors of 1066 and All That, explain he ?was only one year old and thus rather a Weak King?, while his chaplain recorded that a Christmas show put on for him by one noble lord, featuring bare-breasted dancing girls, had him running out of the room wailing ?Fy, fy forsooth for shame yet be to blame?, whatever that means.... | |
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| | | "Thief of Bagdad" to open Buffalo Film Seminars | | Posted Wednesday, August 16, 2006 11:03:17 AM by Blog57 Team | | "The Thief of Bagdad," a classic adventure tale featuring "swashbuckler" star Douglas Fairbanks Jr., will open the 13th edition of the Buffalo Film Seminars, the semester-long series of screenings and discussions sponsored by UB and the Market Arcade Film and Arts Center. The series will take place at 7 p.m. on Tuesdays, beginning Aug. 29, in the Market Arcade Film and Arts Center, 639 Main St., in downtown Buffalo. There will be no screening on Sept. 19. The series will be hosted by Diane Christian, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of English, and Bruce Jackson, SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor of American Culture in the Department of American Studies and the Department of English. .... | |
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| | | Astounding assemblage of talent produced `To Have and Have Not' | | Posted Sunday, July 30, 2006 5:03:37 PM by Blog57 Team | | Howard Hawks' 1944 "To Have and Have Not"--in which immortal tough guy Humphrey Bogart met his match in 19-year-old first-time movie actress Lauren Bacall--is one of the great Golden Age Hollywood entertainments. It's also one of my all-time favorite movies, one that I've seen dozens of times since I first encountered it in college. Watching it, I always fall in love with the characters: not just with Bogey's wise-cracking fishing boat captain Harry Morgan and Bacall's insolent singer Marie Browning (a.k.a. "Slim"), but with Hoagy Carmichael as piano man Cricket, Marcel Dalio as hotel owner Frenchy and Walter Brennan as Harry's touchingly soused sidekick, Eddie the Rummy. The movie's source is Ernest Hemingway's novel, but Hawks and his screenwriters (including a second Nobel Prize winner, William Faulkner) changed the setting from Cuba and the Florida Keys to 1940 Martinique and jettisoned the novel's story after the first half hour--which still offers one of the best stretches of Hemingway on screen.... | |
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| | | The Future File | | Posted Tuesday, July 25, 2006 11:09:33 PM by Blog57 Team | | Cinematic bumblers Laurel and Hardy double as their "twin brothers" in Our Relations, a lavish comedy of errors set on the high seas. Screenings will be held Aug. 7 at the County Theatre in Doylestown and Aug. 9 at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute. The duo's short film Tit For Tat will also be shown. Tickets: $8-$8.75; $6 seniors and students. Information: 215-345-6789 (County) or 610-527-9898 (Bryn Mawr). • Shimmy like Frankie and Annette at the Beach Blanket Bingo and Dance Party, Aug. 11 at the Bell Atlantic Tower's "Top of the Tower" in Center City. The Greater Philadelphia Hotel Association sponsors; there will be a rum bar, hula and limbo contests, boardwalk foods, beach tunes, and an Annette Funicello look-alike contest. Proceeds will benefit the AIDS Fund of Philadelphia.... | |
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| | | Lauren Bacall to Accept First Hepburn Medal | | Posted Sunday, July 09, 2006 1:00:38 AM by Blog57 Team | | Screen legend Lauren Bacall will be the first recipient of the Katharine Hepburn Medal, the Katharine Houghton Hepburn Center Planning Committee has announced. The award, which recognizes "women whose lives, work and contributions embody the intelligence, drive and independence of Katharine Hepburn" will be presented to Bacall at a black-tie fundraising gala at Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts on Saturday, Sept. 9. The event, to be hosted by broadcast journalist Cynthia McFadden of ABC News, is one of several marking the launch of the Hepburn Center. Organizers have also announced the names of participants in two panel discussions to be held on the Bryn Mawr campus on Friday, Sept. 8, and Saturday, Sept. 9. A celebrated star of the stage and screen, Lauren Bacall was named among the top 20 female film legends of the 20th century by the American Film Institute.... | |
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| | | DVD Review: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang | | Posted Tuesday, July 04, 2006 7:03:49 PM by Blog57 Team | | An early shot in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is filmed from the bottom of a large Los Angeles swimming pool looking up through the ripples at Robert Downey Jr. He is staring down into the pool and just dipping his toe tentatively into the water as he starts a voice-over narration describing himself and the setting and promising to tell you how he got there. If that doesn't trigger immediate reaction and recognition, then this movie might not be for you. The setup is a direct reference to the famous opening sequence of Sunset Boulevard. In that film noir classic from five decades ago, we first see William Holden's corpse floating face down in a Los Angeles swimming pool, filmed from below, as he begins a voice-over to explain how he got to that point. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang keeps the noir references coming, both explicitly and subtly.... | |
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