Category: Uncategorized

By Jonathan Pacheco
Press Play Contributor

Nola (Tracy Camilla Johns) is a mythological goddess, a seductress rarely descending from her studio apartment, spending her time perched on her bed, which doubles as a sort of altar to her sexual prowess, decorated with more candles than a cathedral. She only makes love on her own mattress, but her suitors — male and female — are more than willing to make the journey for their reward will be great. Even her full name Nola Darling when spoken by her lovers, sounds more like a near-allegorical title that she demands than a true first and last name. Yes, she’s a seductress, but one whose greed is without malice.

Or maybe she’s simply a modern young woman who enjoys sex, openly and honestly soliciting several relationships — most frequently with Jamie (Tommy Redmond Hicks), an honest gentleman; Greer (John Canada Terrell), a model; and Mars (Spike Lee), a scrawny bike messenger — to fulfill her desires. In our society, the promiscuous male equivalent of this character has been accepted and even glorified for a while now, and not just in the black community. But a female who carries on strictly physical relationships with multiple partners? Well, we’ve got some nasty words for a lady like that, even 25 years after this film was made, don’t we? She’s Gotta Have It, while playful in ways we haven’t seen from its director in a long time, wouldn’t be a Spike Lee joint if it didn’t address and attempt to annihilate some serious, thought-provoking issues and stereotypes. Lee’s characters in this film are nonviolent, artistic, intelligent and successful (mostly). I don’t recall hearing the n-word, and in the closing credits Lee proudly points out, “THIS FILM CONTAINS NO JERRI CURLS!!! AND NO DRUGS!!!” Clearly, his first feature is a call to abandon past stereotypes and think progressively about how we socially and sexually identify black men and women — heck, all men and women.

And a first feature this very much is, as She’s Gotta Have It exhibits many of the expected traits of independent films by young directors. Most of the key performances, particularly those by Johns, Raye Dowell (as Nola’s desperate-to-get-her-to-switch lesbian friend Opal) and occasionally Terrell, are weak and at times downright bad. The camerawork gets a bit too literal when it cues conversations (tilt up, settle, and — line!), and in that sense it sort of tips off the viewer. Still, some of those first-feature characteristics are charming when seen in the context of Lee’s career thus far. It’s fun to see members of his family play key roles in the production, from his sister, a young Joie Lee, playing Nola’s former roommate, to his father, Bill Lee, doubling up as Nola’s onscreen father as well as composer of the film’s jazzy score. Through the film we discover a relaxed, familial production environment. When Mars is introduced, he’s seen speeding down a hill on his bike, heading straight for the camera, swerving at the last moment to miss it as he screams. Lee cuts to a title card, but over it we hear laughter and chatter from the crew. It fits within the documentary facade of the film, but to my ears it sounds like real reactions from Lee’s crew. Just before the end credits, the director lets his main players come out and take bows by having them slate a shot, then introduce themselves. A few add their own flair: an impersonation, a bass riff, a certain smirk. There’s a joyful atmosphere to the production that Lee wants you to see.

The film itself is comically playful in a way you don’t see from Lee anymore, partially because he’s molded himself into a singular filmmaker no longer in need of his early, slightly derivative techniques. There are jokes, moments and even stretches in She’s Gotta Have It that feel downright Woody Allen-esque, from Jamie’s chase of Nola through the streets of New York to some plain silly touches, such as Nola nearly falling asleep waiting for Greer to slowly undress, or the reveal of Mars’ sneakers during sex. Even Lee’s now-familiar speaking-to-the-camera montage technique, typically used for dramatic effect (the racial slur sequence of Do the Right Thing or the “I’m Malcolm X” montage in Malcolm X), is used comically in this film to catalog the lame pickup attempts of Nola’s would-be suitors (a scene that Kevin Smith would later ape in his own first feature, Clerks). I mean, at one point a man wipes snot with his hand, then briefly inspects it before finishing his pickup line; it’s endearing how goofy Lee gets.

Despite its humble budget and brief shooting schedule, She’s Gotta Have It is a great looking film, at times beautiful. Lee’s bold visual style is present, though not quite fully developed; the crane shot is missing from his arsenal and his use of handheld feels a bit raw. Cinematographer Ernest Dickerson makes great use of black-and-white film and the occasional dose of slow-motion, most notably in a few of the film’s sex scenes with characters set against a stark black background, lit almost exclusively in highlights and shot only in tight close-ups. Her breasts. His face, then hers. Mouths open in ecstasy. The film deliberately tries to be sexy, which is typically a turnoff for me, but here it absolutely works, as does one of its boldest moves, a single scene shot in color. While not as beautiful as the black-and-white photography, and ironically a bit more dated when we see the typical bright, clashing colors of the ’80s (as if Nola’s near-Eraserhead haircut didn’t tip you off), its inclusion is surprising and striking enough that it conjured an involuntary “Whoa” from me when it arrived.

It’s during this scene — Nola’s birthday celebration with Jamie — that she’s presented a cake with a trick candle that reignites after she blows it out. In passing, it’s another small, playful way to cap a scene, perhaps in reality a gag played on the cast, because as they laugh, Tommy Hicks sneaks a quick glance at the camera and then at the offscreen crew. Yet, the moment foreshadows Nola’s fate, doesn’t it? The candles wrapping around her bed like angels’ wings represent her sexual fire. She lights them before intercourse and extinguishes them after. She has a nightmare that includes flames engulfing her bed, her fear of her destructive sexuality in full metaphor. When she decides to become a celibate, one-man woman, part of her cleansing process entails removing candles from her altar and scraping off the excess wax.

But her celibacy doesn’t last when she realizes that’s not who she is or who she wants to be. In the film’s closing moments, she’s resigned to her reality, saying, “Who was I fooling?” as she stands against a curtain covered in a pattern resembling melted wax. Nola is that trick candle, only momentarily fooling he who thinks he can blow out her sexual fire. She’ll always reignite.

Jonathan Pacheco contributes film and theater criticism to The House Next Door and Edward Copeland on Film while only pretending to write on his own site, Bohemian Cinema. In order to eat, he works in the Dallas area as a darn good web developer. Follow him on Twitter, if you like.

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Press Play Contributor

EDITOR’S NOTE: Press Play features Matt Zoller Seitz’s latest slide show from Salon. He names 10 low-cost horror flicks that deliver more than their share of cheap thrills.

This slide show is inspired by Attack the Block, a low-budget horror film that truly does more with less. Director Joe Cornish’s comedic fright flick, about a bunch of juvenile delinquents defending their London housing project against alien invaders, looks as if it cost less than Daniel Craig’s butt-hugging designer chaps in the summer’s other extraterrestrial-themed thriller Cowboys and Aliens. Yet it has 10 times the thrills, plus unexpectedly rich characterizations, sharp performances and a wicked sense of humor. But what got me thinking about the film in the context of the low-budget horror tradition is the ingenious way it designs and presents its monsters. They’re essentially big balls of black fur with neon teeth, so visually solid, almost abstract, that they appear to absorb light. This lets Cornish hide the beasties in dark corners, the better to surprise us, but it also lets him showcase them full-frame, without worrying that we’ll study the creatures’ textures and deem them unconvincing. Only filmmakers with an outsider mentality would devise such an imaginative solution to a budget problem.

What follows is a list of great low-budget horror films that are similarly resourceful, putting showmanship, artistry and chutzpah where production values might otherwise go. The list includes several breakthrough features by directors who would later be considered significant, a couple of obscure masterworks that are rarely discussed outside of the horror buff community, and at least one film that has garnered an enthusiastic following because it’s just so damned shameless. This is a rich area of film history, studded with landmarks, curiosities and half-buried gems; my preliminary list had 20 titles, but I cut it to 10, the better to inspire “Where the hell is X?” reactions from readers. I eagerly await your own nominees for the greatest low-budget horror flicks of all time. Meet me in the cobwebbed darkness of the Letters section. MmmWAH HA HA HA HA!

Matt’s slide show starts here.

By Kim Morgan
Press Play Contributor

On August 1, Frances Farmer passed away. Here’s to Saint Francis.

Oh, Frances Farmer. She died 41 years ago August 1st and for those of us who love cinema, the power of performance and brave, talented, intelligent “bad girls” who do not go gentle into that good night — we should feel a pang of sadness. And frustration. Deep frustration. And we should be frustrated by the movie version of her life — Frances. Based on how many times I’ve watched the picture, I’m beginning to believe I harbor some kind of frustration fetish. I’ve viewed the movie more than necessary, in spite of its flaws and, finally had to concede that, even with Jessica Lange’s genius, kick-out-the-jams-motherfuckers performance, the movie is not going to change through time. I’m never going to be happy with how it fully depicts Frances Farmer, I’m never going to accept its romantic side story, and I’m never going to know the truth anyway (whatever that is), so why be frustrated? See, the frustration turns into questioning frustration. Which is … frustrating.

But my god, how I love when Jessica Lange loses her composure and understandably smacks that bitchy hairdresser (‘Your hair’s so thin, you’re gonna lose it if you’re not careful.“) in the face. And the intense power and pain I feel when she screams “You got no fucking right!” as the police break into her room, wake her up naked, and drag her out of the Knickerbocker Hotel. That hotel isn’t far from my apartment and every time I pass by, I not only think of Frances, but of Jessica spitting out her rightful invective. That moment comes to me with such immediacy that I’ve uttered “You got no fucking right!” spontaneously, perhaps disturbingly, under my breath. But this is my instinctive duty as a fellow native Seattleite. For some of us hailing from the soggy, boggy PNW, Frances is our girl, and not just our original riot girl who will one day get her revenge (god bless you Kurt Cobain), but our patron saint of “don’t fuck with me fellas!” — and the tragic aftermath that kind of behavior creates. Alas, no Pepsi for her.

And Jessica Lange gets this. Her ferocious, fearless beauty saved what could have been yet another studio mangling of the life and legend of a notorious woman. Miss Lange reminds viewers that once upon a time there was this actress named Frances Farmer, a gifted but troubled actress from the 1930s who was not just crazy, but superb. And was she even crazy? Certainly no more, and probably a lot less, than many a young, intelligent woman struggling in the often alienating business of show. Frances Farmer had a soul, natural born talent, a real, thinking, searching brain, an outspoken temper, inner demons and pure beauty. You’re not allowed to have all of those things at once.

And these elements are presented, though not as skillfully or as layered as they should have been. A chance to really tell her story, a tale straight from Nathaniel West or Horace McCoy, was clearly at hand when the film was conceived (read Farmer’s autobiography “Will There Really Be a Morning?”– never mind its questionable veracity, read it — and you can see why), but through script problems, studio requests, and one strange association with the conspiracy-obsessed ex-convict and probable liar Stewart Jacobson (played in the film as “Harry York” by Sam Shepard), Frances veers into fantasy — a fantasy Frances Farmer would not have appreciated.

Many fine films based on real lives or events stray from facts, add characters, or reinvent history (JFK and Nixon are supreme examples. Inglourious Basterds, brilliantly creates its own insane, inspired, collage mixed tape), but that’s not what makes Frances suffer. It’s more that the movie, though lovely period detail and certainly good, isn’t entirely focused, and so never creates a strong case about just why Farmer had to endure such torment — Harry York is an easy character to throw in. And as harrowing as many scenes play out, it also soft-pedals the core story — about one woman’s fight against both the indignities of Hollywood and the abuse of the mental profession. What happened to Frances Farmer is an abomination, and not because we’d never see her again shine as an actress but because her life was perversely and hideously stolen from her.

But in the hands of Lange, Frances is thoroughly watchable even when becoming an almost traumatizing experience. Lange not only looks like Farmer, but also embodies everything we’ve ever read about the talented star: The understandable drinking (who didn’t tear it up in Hollywood?), the rage (how many stars were under studio control? Farmer was just too strong-willed to take it), and the desperation to find freedom. But the powers that be — Mother, Hollywood, and the Mental Institution — helped keep this intelligent woman from getting healthy and furthering her art — and she had so much to give. Though much of Frances Farmer’s biography is speculative (including the book Shadowland), I’m not with those who believe she deserved to be incarcerated. She was a drunk, she was hard to work with, she was, to some, really crazy. So what? Some even think her stay in the mental ward has been over-dramatized. I’m not certain. My unique, beautiful great-grandmother was sent to the literal Cuckoo’s Nest (the State Institution in Salem, Oregon) as a young woman, and she died there. She should have never been in that awful, stinking, soul sucking place. Even sadder, she was stuck in that snake pit for so long, that when anyone realized she was fine to leave, she chose to stay. The past was over and she knew no other life.

These things happen to “different” women. And like the young ones who exhibit their so-called “eccentric” free-thinking thoughts, Frances would both be ostracized and praised for her precociousness. The picture begins in 1931 when a 16-year-old Farmer writes a high school essay entitled “God Dies” (At 16? In 1931? How fucking great is that?). This is just the first of many cases where she enrages Seattle’s moral majority, who later branded her a communist (her trip to Russia doesn’t help). A talented stage actress in college, Farmer lands in Hollywood, where she declares “I’m not a glamour girl.” Nevertheless, she marries a young actor and makes movies (mostly to her chagrin), including Howard Hawks‘ Come and Get It (a film she was reportedly proud of, despite what this movie wants us to believe).

Exasperated with Hollywood, Farmer ventures to New York and finds a home in the Group Theater, where she displayed great gifts, but (to her downfall) has a torrid affair with the married playwright Clifford Odets. After he harshly ditches her, she returns to Hollywood and falls into the legendary trouble that would slam her in horrifying mental institutions — where she underwent experimental medication, shock treatments, rape, disgusting facilities, and finally (and this is speculative) a lobotomy until her release in 1950.

Lange carries us through this hell with brilliance, but Frances decides to shift the focus of the relationship with Farmer’s deranged mother (perfectly played by Kim Stanley) to the more romantic overtures of Harry York. Lange and Shepard have wonderful chemistry, and he’s charming, but the poetic license here bothers me. According to the film, York tried to reach out to Farmer after her inconceivably unfair and colorful court appearance (well-documented in Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon in which we learn Farmer wrote her profession down as “cocksucker” — thankfully we see that in the movie as well).

Nice thought, but I’d rather see the entire courtroom dramas played out in their ball-busting, gory detail. Frances kicking and screaming in her sensible, disheveled suit is as iconic to me as Marilyn Monroe standing on the subway grate in The Seven Year Itch. The hair, the cigarette, the smirk — this is some woman, goddammit. I want more of her. Not some guy attempting to save the damsel in distress. But according to Frances, York was responsible for Farmer’s first escape from the sanitarium and the reason she was presentable for a hearing that excused from her first asylum (the film contends Harry sneaks into her ward and convinces a doctor to inject her with a drug that would make her more lucid). He also, allegedly, asked for her hand in marriage when she was under the legal guardianship of her mother, and he loved her until the end of her days.

Oh, life is but a dream but… bitch, please. I would burn down every rotten, abusive, mismanaged mental institution to bust Frances Farmer out of the loony bin. I understand the romantic impulse. But the idea that, despite everything written to the contrary — Farmer may have had a chance at a decent life had she just ran away with this Prince Charming is an ill-conceived cinematic fantasy, and an insult to Farmer’s memory.

It’s the ultimate irony that the story of “the bad girl of West Seattle,” the troubled non-conformist, the short lived Hollywood star who rarely censored her thoughts, was, even after death, under the control of a major studio who deemed her real life too depressing. As director Graeme Clifford states in the commentary on the DVD, you don’t want to “nickel and dime the audience with facts.” Pity. Farmer’s “facts” were never boring. And the movie isn’t either thanks to Miss Lange. Had she been given a little more control, or maybe had she been allowed to smack Stewart Jacobson in the mouth, hell even the hairdresser (without getting arrested) she could have directed this film — she’s the picture’s real auteur. Saint Frances would have approved.

This piece can also be viewed on Kim Morgan’s blog here.

Kim Morgan is a film, music and culture writer who authors Sunset Gun and her tumblr blog Sunset Gunshots. She’s written for numerous outlets including LA Weekly, The Oregonian, The Willamette Week, MSN Movies, Salon, IFC, Entertainment Weekly, GQ and Garage Magazine. She’s guest lectured at Cal State, presented movies at both the Los Angeles and Palm Springs Film Noir Festival and for the New School noir series, and served on the Sundance Film Festival’s short films jury. She’s appeared on AMC, Reelz and in the documentary feature American Grindhouse. She sat in for Roger Ebert, co-hosting Ebert & Roeper and has contributed to his newest show. Most exciting was guest programming for Turner Classic Movies. She’s currently working with Guy Maddin on his “Hauntings” project appearing in three films, two with Udo Kier, and one with a white wolf. She lives in Los Angeles.

By Kim Morgan
Press Play Contributor

Swoony, sexy, ethereal and finally, touchingly toxic, My Summer of Love is a picture with a darkness that’s heightened not by shadows, but by beautiful, unsettling light. Part Heavenly Creatures, part Three Women , part Polanski-tome, but an animal all its own, the picture is a coming-of-age tale that eschews the typical traps of that genre by making the friendship — and really, the love affair — between two precocious female adolescents into something both powerfully obscure and beautifully familiar.

Young, intriguing, different women/teens can be viewed as odd birds, no matter how acceptably “wacky” cinema attempts to paint them. We see movies like Mean Girls, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Juno, Easy A or even Thirteen, and are left with impressions that may ring true for certain aspects of the teen population, but remain utterly false for others. Girls who related to Ghost World (as I did and still do — though I find myself in both Thora Birch and Steve Buscemi, which disturbs me at times), don’t see the big deal in Thirteen, would laugh at the “mean girls” in school, and wonder why Juno would let some older guy convince her that Blood Feast was better than Suspiria. No way. In My Summer of Love, issues, or catch-phrases like “sisterhood” (especially in regard to traveling pants), and “rebellion” aren’t terms these beguiling leads would even bother to utter. That kind of drama is just there — the regular aspects or impediments to a type of life they’re attempting to escape and re-create. And re-creation is key.

The entrancing young leads are Mona (Natalie Press) a freckled, somewhat awkward but smart and spontaneous blonde with hints of a young Sissy Spacek. More robust and working class, she lives with her reformed-ex-con, now Jesus Freak brother Phil (Paddy Considine) above a pub/church meeting space. A lonely girl, she’s having a somewhat sick, un-fulfilling sexual relationship with a married man much older than her. (He nails her in his car, then leaves her on the side of the road. Wonderful.) In all likelihood, Mona yearns for a real friend and some real beauty in her life.

She meets that friend on a hot day after taking a spill from her scooter — a pathetic little thing without a motor that she pedals like a heavy bike, a perfect touch. This girl is making do. And she’s strong. But all that strength begins to melt as she stares into the glow of a princess. Recovering from her earthly spill, she looks up, and there appears the dark haired, patrician-lovely Tasmin (young Emily Blunt) who is with (of course), a white horse — a knight-ess in diaphanous armor. Intellectual Tasmin essentially “saves” Mona by welcoming the working class girl into the upper crust-ness of her family’s ivy-covered mansion. Of course her life isn’t so easy, either.

One of those rich girls with parents who pay her no attention, leaving her alone in the castle, Tasmin spends her days playing cello (Saint-Saen’s melancholy “The Swan” which, interestingly also serves as the name of Mona’s brother’s pub), trying on various expensive clothes, teaching Mona of Nietzsche and Edith Piaf, and confessing the drama of her dead sister. How did the sister die? From the tragic but glamorously teenage disease of anorexia. Yes indeed, you can be too rich and too thin. If this all sounds, for lack of a better word, pretentious, it’s supposed to be. Drama is delicious. And it makes a lot of sense by the picture’s end.

The movie amps up Mona and Tasmin’s intense friendship when they eventually become lovers — not only indulging their sexual longings, but doing what many teenage girls sadistically enjoy: Fucking with people, especially men. They really torture brother Phil, the Christian who harbors a palatable attraction for Tasmin. What’s brave about the movie is that, like Fish Tank (another terrific film about a teenage girl), My Summer of Love does not back away from the idea that their attraction could actually be sexy. But in contrast to the heroine of Fish Tank, Tasmin appears to be utterly in charge. In one scene Phil ambles up to the girls while they sunbathe. Innocent enough, except Tasmin is topless, and she looks at him with the most blasé yet unnervingly attractive expression, one that would bedevil even the most virtuous man. Her look says: “I’m young, I’m gorgeous, you want me, what’s the big deal other than I’m jail-bait and you’re a Christian? Now, let me torture you further.” What later happens between them is unexpected and, in its own way shocking. I won’t reveal it here.

But the situation with Phil does summon even more personality quirks in all characters and create tension between the two best friends. Their center-of-the-universe stance on life begins to crumble, and all of those head games reveal an extra cruelty and an unforgivable deception to come later. In deceivingly simplistic terms, you’ll see how utterly complex and inscrutable girl/love/friendship can be. and how simultaneously fake and utterly genuine this type of “female bonding” can be as it manifests itself. It’s not always pure as sunshine. But then, you can learn from toxic people as well. And even with heartbreak, it remains relentlessly romantic. For any woman who recalls an intense teenage bond, girl-girl love, this movie gets it so right, it really does hurt.

Which is why writer-director Pawel Pawlikowski’s movie is a stroke of near genius. Where did he pick this up? How does he understand girls so well? Are both Lars Von Trier and Sofia Coppola pen pals? Filming with a style that’s both picaresque and rough — like a Dogme film merged with the soft sexuality and undeniably gorgeousness of photographer David Hamilton — he lingers on young limbs intertwined in the sun, lips, freckles, eyes, hair. He covets, but with that nice layer of dirt. Nothing is perfect, of course. The film strikingly conveys the power of youth, but spikes it with a touch of evil that’s erotically creepy. These girls, no matter how much they go through or inflict upon others, are not mere victims, simplistic sex objects, or “mean girls”; they are exceptional and real and mysterious. You understand why teenage girls, sometimes with embarrassment, make us catch our breath — they fill us with ennui and, yes, desire. But because the performances are so potent and frequently funny, never once do you feel a sense of exploitation; it’s as if these young women are controlling the film’s frames through pure guile. They’re thinking, and they know what we’re thinking.

And many women know what they’re up to. I certainly did. By the picture’s end, you may relate to the girls, but you’ll also feel (and especially men will feel) a bit like Mona’s Jesus-freak brother. Yes. We love these girls surrounded by beauty, great authors, and melodramatically glamorous stories about wasted-away sisters, but we could easily resent them. When given the opportunity, they can be the snake in the garden, offering that delicious, juicy, apple. In My Summer of Love — if the darkness persists later in life — the apple will be offered to something neither they or any other teenage girl is, or ever was: Snow White.

Kim Morgan is a film, music and culture writer who authors Sunset Gun and her tumblr blog Sunset Gunshots.

By Sarah Bunting
Press Play Contributor

EDITOR’S NOTE: Press Play is proud to welcome New York-based critic Sarah Bunting to our site. She is the co-founder of Television without Pity.

Sequels fail for all sorts of reasons. The writing is crappy, or the casting doesn’t work, or the casting works but the actors phone it in. Some sequels fail because the project isn’t “about” anything but tie-in toys and fulfilling back-end contracts. Sometimes the original movie isn’t good but it did boffo box office thanks to a freak heat wave or because it’s release coincided with some unexpected world event, or it’s just self-contained and there isn’t anything left to say about, say, the Bateses, or police cadets, or killer sharks. Sometimes it’s an unappetizing combo platter of all those reasons just mentioned.

Sometimes it’s nothing more complicated than this: it’s hard to make a movie, period. Writing is hard, acting is hard, raising money is hard, keeping the boom mike out of the shot is hard. This is Ed Wood‘s true legacy to film filmmakers and their unforgiving critics. It’s that the reminder of what can go wrong (because that “what” is unraveling in front of you in every frame). Baked into every great movie, and into all the merely competent ones as well, is the record of a journey from one end of a minefield to the other.

A movie musical is even harder to get right, because now, in addition to writing and acting, you’ve got to worry about proficient (or at least easily disguised) singing and dancing. What’s worse, the suspension of disbelief will now require approximately 14 times as many pulleys as usual, because audiences will believe a dead guy in a hockey mask avenging himself repeatedly on the underdressed and slow-witted teenagers of a given region, as long as he doesn’t warble “Cuts Like A Knife” while tangoing his next victim down a creaky pier. (…For example.) The musical as a genre has its charms, but naturalistic it ain’t, and to overwhelm its native contrivances with catchy tunes and likeable characters is a tall order even once. Twice, don’t hold your breath.

In honor of the “Hollywood Musicals of the 1970s and 1980s” program currently underway at Anthology Film Archives, I revisited the ’80s sequels to a pair of ’70s musicals, sequels that bombed as spectacularly as their eminent parents succeeded: Staying Alive, the sequel to Saturday Night Fever; and Grease 2. What went wrong? Could it have been avoided, or was a debacle inevitable? What, if anything, can we learn from donnybrooks like these?

Staying Alive does have much to teach us, most of it about John Travolta‘s nether regions, “clad” as they are in whisper-light tights for much of the film. It also conveys ideas about acting (namely, that it is not synonymous with screeching, glowering, or merely wearing a headband); Brooklyn accents (evidently it is not, after six years, like riding a bike); and the cocainamatronic zombie corpses of the Bee Gees (ack).

Set six years after Saturday Night Fever, Staying Alive follows Tony Manero (John Travolta, resolutely pretending everything’s fine) into the cutthroat world of modern dance on Broadway. That last clause is everything that’s wrong with the film in a nutshell, but in case you care about trifles like plot and motivation (understand: Staying Alive itself does not), Tony has moved into a shady residence hotel in Manhattan and is trying in vain to make it as a dancer. He goes on depressing auditions; in between, he treats his semi-girlfriend, the too-patient Jackie, like shit, standing her up, going to her show to “support her” and then sleeping with the lead dancer, Laura (the dreadful Finola Hughes, best known as Anna Devane on General Hospital). Tony and Jackie get cast in the chorus of Laura’s next show, “Satan’s Alley,” and Tony semi-stalks the trust-fundie Laura, who was only interested in a one-night thing, while also glaring at Jackie during her bar band gigs because he thinks she’s sleeping with the guitarist (Frank Stallone). Finally, the lead male dancer in the show gets the boot, and Tony gets his chance to headline on the Great White Way. But has he lost himself?

Well, yes — in a modified Rocky picture, to which character, atmosphere, and logic are all incidental. Rocky himself, Sylvester Stallone, directed and wrote the screenplay (with Norman Wexler), which explains the adherence to sports-triumph formula although it doesn’t excuse it, but Stallone’s first and most irremediable mistake was to think that dancing is what made Tony Manero, or the original movie, interesting. Saturday Night Fever isn’t about dance; it’s about all the daily humiliations, inchoate longings, and stunted ambitions that Tony’s mastery of the floor threw into sharper relief. The dark, almost documentary texture of SNF is what makes it compulsively watchable and remarkable today.

That darkness is left behind in Staying Alive, forgotten. Much of the first film is forgotten, in fact, and SA suffers for that. It’s already something of a stretch that Tony would try to make a go of modern dance after an amateur disco victory, but Staying Alive seems to have no memory of how that “victory” went down: Tony feels he and Stephanie have won unfairly thanks to neighborhood racism, so he hands over their trophy, tries to force himself on Stephanie, then winds up on the Verrazano with his friends, where Bobby falls to his death. Oh, and Annette is functionally raped. Tony rides the subway — a seventh-circle experience in the New York City of that time — and finds redemption of a sort at Stephanie’s apartment, but the ending is something of a non-ending, a wordless comment on the bleak prospects of Tony’s life. It didn’t require a sequel; it only required itself.

But a sequel we got, with a barely recognizable version of Tony Manero; the Staying Alive script clearly believes that he’s the same boneheaded but basically well-meaning Tony, but he’s just a collection of goofy single entendres and patchy accent work that happens to exist in the body of John Travolta, not an identifiable person. The music of the original does date it somewhat, but in a time-capsule way, not in the “what were we thinking” way on offer in Staying Alive. The Bee Gees do contribute some “music,” instantly forgettable and lazy, the bottom of the coke bowl gleaming in the morning light, but it’s miles better than the Frank Stallone songsmithery forced upon us by nepotism. Typical of ’80s film tracks, “Far From Over” and others narrate the action we see on screen with the help of moist synthesizer and a great deal of unintimidatingly angry guitar. Saturday Night Fever‘s music was of its time, but also solid pop. Staying Alive‘s is of its time too, in a sense…the bombastic and yet disposable sense.

The drop-off in dancing quality is equally marked, although it’s probably less the quality than the relative watchability at issue. Disco is fun to watch, and it’s legible to civilians; even if you can’t do it yourself, you understand how it is done and you can see the difference between good at disco and not. The tense, self-important jazz hands and jetes of Staying Alive don’t look like anything you haven’t seen extras doing in the background of any Pat Benatar video; a little dry ice and a slo-mo button and it looks a lot more impressive, and no doubt it’s technically difficult — but the viewer is given no insight into whether that’s true, or why. The script tells us that Laura is a Viking of modern rhythms, but mostly we wonder why she doesn’t put that Ren-Faire-length hair up already if she’s so sweaty, or who decided to put John Travolta in a mummy diaper for the big finale. (Wonder no more: it was Mr. Bob Mackie. Obviously.) We also wonder what kind of rubes dress up in tuxes and pay premiere prices for a Broadway show 1) with no singing, 2) that appears to contain only two numbers, 3) that add up to about twelve minutes of show total. Warning. More mummy diaper ahead.

The dancing is unappealing, the music is dull, the writing immediately stamps out any sparks the acting can create, and as a follow-up to a striking story, it’s superfluous. The movie did quite well upon its release, somehow, but it’s no wonder Entertainment Weekly has called it the worst sequel of all time — it fulfills none of the functions of a sequel, or even of a narrative, period, and everyone involved is self-serious to the point of parody, miserable, or both. Staying Alive is often charged with turning out the lights on the Long Dark Night of the Travolta, and while I would actually blame Perfect, SA is a serviceable candidate.

At least Travolta had the sense to avoid the second iteration of Grease, the 1978 ’50s-inspired musical that chronicled the lives and hot-rod loves of a bunch of 35-year-old high-schoolers. Grease didn’t require a sequel either — although I for one would have welcomed an explanation of the ending, even in passing; when the car takes off, where exactly does it go? did Sandy and Danny die? is this an assumption into heaven? does the car land elsewhere, perhaps in a subdivision where they will now make their adult lives? — but it’s possible Travolta just wasn’t invited to participate; in Grease 2, the action resumes several years later. (And…Danny is maybe dead anyway, as I mentioned…?)

The job of starring in a career-ruiner falls to Maxwell Caulfield in the sequel, as English exchange student and Sandy cousin Michael Carrington. Sandy, of course, is Australian, but whatever — Michael comes to Rydell and promptly falls in love with Stephanie (Michelle Pfeiffer, game despite uneven writing that means she kind of has to play three characters), but Stephanie is a Pink Lady who wants nothing to do with his rarefied, bookish ass. Nor, however, is she interested in continuing her relationship with T-Bird Johnny Nogerelli (Adrian Zmed), who…is Adrian Zmed. She does cherish a fantasy of a “Cool Rider” on a motorcycle who will sweep her off her feet, so Michael buys a bike, restores it, and begins lurking around in a helmet and goggles that really do nothing to disguise him; Stephanie falls in love with Mystery Biker Guy and his gay-porn attire, but is still pretty mean to Michael, even though he’s a nice guy who’s helping the T-Birds cheat on their term papers, and even though IT IS OBVIOUSLY THE SAME DUDE. Take a look.

Grease 2 isn’t a complete miscarriage like Staying Alive is. It’s plagued by logic problems like the one above (and the downgrade from Travolta to Zmed, who is capable but has no hope of matching the charisma of the original); the timeline, despite occurring within a school year, is confusing, which allows the three microns of narrative tension that accidentally developed to leak out of the proceedings. Patricia Birch, who choreographed the original, directed the sequel — and nothing else ever again. You’ll understand why five minutes in; the shot composition is consistently baffling, particularly during all-cast dance sequences, with some dancers out of focus and others half offscreen. It’s hard to tell where everyone is in relation to one another, and the overall effect is that they shot the rehearsal by mistake. And the cast is marginally closer in age to their characters this time around, but their relative youth fails to close the significant gap in acting and singing ability.

It wouldn’t have mattered much; none of the songs sticks in the mind at all except the health-class break “Reproduction,” ably led by Tab Hunter as the science teacher. A fetal Christopher McDonald plays Goose, but none of the rest of the players got out of the ’80s intact except Pfeiffer and, to a degree, Caulfield, who despite ending up on The Colbys blames Grease 2 for routing his career trajectory into a gas-station toilet. His wooden line deliveries, cat-in-a-waffle-iron tenor, and marionettish dancing are actually responsible, but I suppose it’s true that the gold lamé cycling suit unzipped to the navel can’t have helped.

It’s not a good story; it’s not good musically; it’s not good. Caulfield is cute in that Unthreatening Boy Weekly way, and Pfeiffer is obviously a future star, but the costuming isn’t era-appropriate, the cinematography is wretched, and it doesn’t answer any questions raised by the original, or give us any insights into the time period. Staying Alive‘s sheer badness is entertaining. Grease 2 just makes the viewer impatient. But it’s a lot closer in quality to its parent, which is the dirty little secret of Grease: it’s not all that great either. It’s got great songs and magnetic leads, and its status as a classic lets us forgive the barrels of corn (and ham) it’s festooned with — but a lot of it is dumb. “Bite the weenie, Riz”? Sandy’s whole transformation at the end comes from watching a drag race, which makes no sense, and neither does the transformation itself, since Danny already fell in love with the good-girl version of her? Stockard Channing as a teenager?

But Grease does its job. We still know all the songs by heart. The plot is a bit bizarre, but the movie works as, among other things, a window into the ’50s nostalgia of the ’70s. The sequel is forced, frenetic, yet also flabby; it has nothing to say, and it can’t make its pictures pretty.

Sarah D. Bunting co-founded Television Without Pity.com, and has written for Seventeen, New York Magazine, MSNBC.com, Salon, Yahoo!, and others. She’s the chief cook and bottle-washer at TomatoNation.com.

By Simon Abrams
Press Play Contributor

Don’t call Life During Wartime a sequel. Though it does feature the same characters as writer/director Todd Solondz’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness_(1998_film)&quot;Happiness, it is very much its own narrative. In fact, that’s what Life During Wartime is about,. In it, Solondz explores the possibility of forgiveness and what it takes to lead a new life.

The personal baggage with which Solondz’s sympathetic losers struggle is considerable. In Life During Wartime these psychological issues manifest themselves in the form of emotional scars, ghosts and willfully suppressed memories of the past. While Life During Wartime is Solondz’s most satisfying provocation to date — mostly because of its connection to established characters in Happiness, it’s unfair to think too much about how it relates to its predecessor. As strange as this may sound, knowing objectively what happened to these characters and why they act the way they do toward each other feels like cheating. So, viewers of this movie are encouraged to imitate Solondz’s characters and try to look at and accept Life During Wartime on its own terms.

Life During Wartime follows a family of three sisters — Trish (Allison Janney), Helen (Ally Sheedy) and Joy (Shirley Henderson) — as they struggle with their respective life crises. While we witness and come to understand their individual issues, Life During Wartime is primarily a movie about couples. The dialogue between any two given individuals is the driving force of the film. Here, Solondz pays special attention to the way that people both misunderstand each other and misrepresent themselves when speaking in private.

Take the film’s opening conversation between Joy (Henderson) and Allen (Michael Kenneth Williams). The stumbling way that Allen tries to prove his worth to Joy is only matched by the reluctant way Joy responds to him. Neither one knows what to talk about nor how to respond to what is important in the conversation. So they fixate on what’s irrelevant.

For example, before he tells Joy that he’s still calling strange women on the phone, Allen rattles off a list of criminal activities he’s managed to stop doing. Joy nods her head to each activity in his laundry list out of sheer obligation. She’s no longer convinced that she loves him anymore.

Allen: “No more cocaine.”
Joy: “Uh huh.”
Allen: “No more crack.”
Joy: “Uh huh.”
Allen: “No more crack cocaine.”

The illusion of accord in this scene totally devolves once a third party, in this case a waitress (Roslyn Buff), enters the conversation. The waitress recognizes Allen’s voice and then spits on him. She knows that Allen used to make lewd phone calls to women. She doesn’t know if he is still calling women but she does know he used to and that’s enough for her (“His voice is the same. Motherfucker.”). So she spits on him. The waitress’s self-righteous anger forces Joy, a painfully frail woman who works as a social worker counseling prisoners, to realize that with regard to her personal choices, she can’t be as forgiving as she’d like to be. It’s a blunt realization that she only achieves because a third party intervened, making this opening conversation the most explosive in Life During Wartime.

For this set of characters, miscommunication is all too common. It’s a painfully regular consequence of their interactions but still, it hurts to have to watch hearsay or even uninformed speculation affect Solondz’s pitiful characters. Joy’s mother Mona (Renée Taylor) knows as little about Joy’s relationship with Allen as does the waitress. But that doesn’t stop Mona from insisting that she knows exactly who Allen is. “Wake up and smell the coffee,” Mona shrewishly barks. “He’s a perv through and through. He was born a perv and he’ll die a perv.” It’s a ludicrous condemnation but one that will stick with Joy for the rest of the film (later, Joy paraphrases her mother when she condemns all men, in a conversation she has with her sister Trish; more on this later).

In fact, communication is so strained in this family that the simplest communication with or conjecture from a third party can cause all hell to breaks loose. For example, Trish’s (Allison Janney) son Timmy (Dylan Riley Snyder) becomes traumatized when a classmate named Avi Fleischer informs him that his father Bill (Ciaran Hinds) is still alive. Timmy hates his mother for lying to him not because he wants to have a relationship with his father but because his friend told him that his father is a pedophile. According to Avi, that makes Bill a terrorist — of all things.

Timmy: “Avi Fleischer said that pedophiles are terrorists and they stick their penises into your… tushy.”
Trish: “Avi Fleischer doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Fleischer puts this idea in Timmy’s head and because he doesn’t know what it means and Trish doesn’t know how to explain it, the issue at hand shifts from “Timmy’s father is still alive” to a histrionic fear of inheriting “faggot”-y traits.

Trish: “I lied to you because I love you, because I didn’t want any harm to come to you.”
Timmy: “But what if I become one though? I don’t wanna be a faggot. There’s this kid in my language arts class, and he is SO gay.”
Trish: “You won’t. It’s ok.”

In a way, Timmy and Trish both needed Fleischer’s ignorant comments to get them to address the fact that Bill is still alive.

Similarly, in the film’s final scene, Timmy needs Mark, the son of a man Trish is dating, (Rich Pecci) to help him turn his father into a ghost by sheer willpower alone. Mark, a recluse that’s weirdly obsessed with the idea that China will eventually take over the world, doesn’t say anything explicitly to Timmy about Bill. But he does tell him that he needs to, “forgive and forget,” as futile as that may be (“But it’s like freedom and democracy. In the end, China will take over and none of this will matter.”). We see Bill materialize out of nowhere and disappear just as quickly after Mark says this, as if Timmy conjured a vision of his father—just to make him disappear.

Once again, the intervention of an outside character that expedites the collapse of a relationship. The dissolution of Joy and Allen’s dysfunctional relationship is pointedly juxtaposed with Trish’s pathetic first date with Harvey (Michael Lerner), a divorcee that, unlike Joy, would rather forget than forgive his ex-wife. This endears him to Trish:

Harvey: “I can’t talk about my sex life.”
Trish: “I can’t either.”
Harvey: “There’s just so much I don’t understand.”
Trish: “Sometimes it’s better to not understand.”

No one intervenes here, which is why Trish deludes herself into thinking that she and Harvey could be happy together. She tells herself that Harvey is family-oriented and while he’s not handsome or well off in her eyes, he is pro-Israel, which for some reason matters a great deal to her.

Harvey and Trish connect because they both want to start afresh. This is an idea that initially appeals to Joy, too. Unfortunately for Joy, she wastes too much time listening to too many other people, all of whom try and fail to persuade her to leave Allen. Joy’s friends’ advice only winds up confusing her. She parrots her mother’s ungenerous edict about how all men are no good but can’t even finish repeating that obnoxious thought. This is an especially truthful scene. It’s a reflection of the myriad times that we embarrass ourselves by repeating a phrase, a fact or an idea that we picked up while talking to somebody else. Just by repeating it to a third party in a new context, we, like Joy, discover that that phrase simply doesn’t have the universality that we once thought it did.

Trish similarly repeats Harvey’s line about how she can’t afford to fail in her new relationship with him but who knows if that’s true or not or if it’s just something she’s thinking in that moment? Maybe there’s no difference. After all, later, after Harvey and Trish have sex, Trish no longer thinks being “family-oriented” is an important character trait. “Fuck family,” she spits out exhaustedly. “Fuck the kids. I just don’t care anymore.” The fact that she tells Harvey that she didn’t really meant what she said in the very next scene does not negate the fact that she appears sincere enough when she practically spits out, “Fuck family.” The same is true about her earlier conversation with Joy. She’s not insincere, just inconstant. “Love can really change a person,” she murmurs but we know better. People don’t change in Life During Wartime, just their circumstances, just their feelings.

Life During Wartime is now available on standard and blu-ray DVD.

Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in the Village Voice, Time Out New York, Slant Magazine, The L Magazine, New York Press and Time Out Chicago. He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Club and is a contributing writer at the Comics Journal. His writings on film are collected at the blog, The Extended Cut