Recently, my mom mailed me some odds and ends from my childhood—old photos, favorite books, bits of writing, etc.
Imagine my amazement when I uncovered “Cinderella in ’88,” a story I wrote in 1988 that is remarkably prescient about the person I would become. Apparently, my core interests and my love of camp were already cemented when I was nine years old.
After the jump, I am happy to present this story in full. If you are a television or film executive, please email me to discuss development deals.
Note: Punctuation and phrasing are recreated exactly as they appear on the print-out my mom saved.
Please welcome back critic and editor Mark Peikert, who has some wonderful advice on how you  can spend your Labor Day: It involves a cocktail, Shirley Jones, and the phrase “big-assed whore.”
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There are a lot of reasons to love the little-known 1969 film The Happy Ending, written and directed by Richard Brooks. There’s Michel Legrand’s usual gorgeous score (including the Academy Award-nominated song “What Are You Doing for the Rest of Your Life?†with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, should you like that sort of thing). There’s Shirley Jones as you’re probably unprepared to see her, playing a professional mistress who memorably claims that the only options available to a woman without a college degree are “big-mouthed housewife or big-assed whore…. And [she] wasn’t going to be a big-mouthed housewife. Bobby Darin pops up as a campy gigolo pretending to be an Italian paparazzo, preying on wealthy American women in the Bahamas. And then there’s Jean Simmons’ Oscar-nominated performance as a drunken, raging, bitter housewife, the kind of character who might very well have inspired Stephen Sondheim’s song “Ladies Who Lunch.â€
Simmons and the film are at their best before Mary decides to escape her icy husband (an excellent John Forsythe) and concerned friends for a spontaneous trip to the Bahamas, where she learns to cast off the shackles of a patriarchy and learn to be an independent woman. A worthy and worthwhile lesson, to be sure, but what keeps The Happy Ending humming are the lengthy flashbacks to Simmons’ messy Mary. She guzzles vodka on her anniversary while watching Casablanca. She hides bottles of the stuff in hatboxes. She’s an afternoon regular at a dive bar. The movie’s tagline is a line Mary throws at her husband during a boozy brawl. “We’re not in love,†she snarls. “We just make love. And damn little of that!â€
In a few years, characters like Mary would cease to exist, but this is 1969, so the booze and prickly sexual politics flow freely.
Would a woman like Jones’ Flo, so nonchalant about her promiscuity, get a happy ending today? (Simmons got the sole Oscar nom for acting, but Jones certainly deserved some recognition for a matter-of-fact monologue about supporting herself through college with her body.) Would Mary’s dismal mothering skills—that her daughter found Mary after Mary’s suicide attempt is not reason enough to keep Mary from fleeing her unhappy home—be let off the hook as easily now as Brooks lets them? And are there any actresses left in 2011 whose faces retain the fine lines and character that Simmons so wearily flaunts here?
As is the case with Brooks’ other dark film about women and sexuality, 1977’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar, The Happy Ending isn’t available on DVD, but the movie has recently arrived on Netflix Streaming. Go ahead. Pour yourself a screwdriver and settle in.
As part of the Dog Days of Summer Movies project over at Tomato Nation, I have just written a review of1997‘s I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, which is one of the most wonderfully terrible movies I have ever seen.
Here’s a snippet of what I wrote:
As for activities, that leaves a session in the tanning bed, which Karla suggests to Julie as a way to clear her head. (She’s nervous, you see, because several island staffers have been gruesomely murdered.) It works, until FisherKiller locks her in the bed and cranks up the heat. She could cook in there, y’all! Especially since when her friends find her, none of them has the presence of mind to turn the damn roaster off before trying to get her out of it.
To read the rest—including my analysis of why this movie’s title is a syntactic nightmare—just go here.
I’d like to welcome guest critic Mark Peikert, managing editor of the New York PressandCity Arts, to tell us why the movie Frances is perfect viewing when you need to cut a bitch then buy a new gown. — Mark Blankenship
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When the world is a mean and infuriating place, there’s a little movie that I like to turn to: a two-hour-plus drama about a crazy blonde actress in 1930s Hollywood; her manipulative, fame-seeking mother; and a whole lot of hair acting. I’m speaking, of course, of 1982’s Frances.
For a movie as bad as Frances is (and it’s really terrible), Jessica Lange’s performance as the doomed Frances Farmer is unexpectedly good. Farmer’s tumultuous attempt at stardom has been largely fictionalized here, climaxing with Farmer being lobotomized, which… didn’t actually happen. At all. Director Graeme Clifford says on the DVD commentary, “We didn’t want to nickel and dime people to death with facts.†So instead we get a fictional best friend (Sam Shepard), a doctor performing that lobotomy with a hammer and an ice pick, and lots of mental asylum rape. Did much of it happen? Whenever Lange is on screen, it doesn’t much matter.
You guys, the YouTube-iverse has done us a major solid: It has given us Margaret Cho’s 1994 HBO standup special.
If you’re like me, then you watched this thing about a hundred times on Comedy Central. Cho’s skintight black jumpsuit is forever burned into my brain, as are the following jokes:
* “I’ll just cover it with leaves and hope somebody falls in.”
So it was a given, then, that Joe and I would eventually come to this: A year-by-year retrospective of all the Best Song Oscar nominees from 1980-1990. You know, that golden time when almost all the songs in this category were awesome and really deserved accolades.
But looking back, which Oscar-nommed tunes are the best? Which should’ve been dumped? And which winners truly deserved the crown? That’s what we’re here to discuss, one ballad-soaked year at a time.
This project will alternate between The Critical Condition and Low Resolution, and today, Joe is kicking things off with our look back at the Oscar-worthy songs of 1980. Take a look, leave a comment, and start humming the theme from The Competition.
NOTE: To see all the entries in this project, just go here.
Well, it’s here. The flip-flops and shorts are out, the shore traffic is gridlocked, and half-day Fridays have begun. Forget what the calendar says, summer’s here! And for that reason, I’m writing about one of my all-time favorite summer songs: Madonna’s “Borderline.â€
Technically, it’s not exactly a summer song. Released right after Valentine’s Day in 1984, it was really during the summer months that “Borderline†hit the charts, becoming, as Mark has pointed out here, the first Top 10 of Madonna’s blondely ambitious career. And while the next album saw several bigger hits – “Like a Virgin,†“Material Girl†– that became far more iconic, it was “Borderline†that helped introduce her early signature sound and persona.
Every now and then I do a little mental math that makes me realize just how old I really am. For example, Achtung Baby came out two decades ago now. And it was seventeen years ago that The Arsenio Hall Show went off the air. That means that someone who was born as Arsenio gave his last fist pump is now about to graduate high school (we hope).
Holy cow.
Recently I was thinking about one of my all-time favorite ‘80s movies, as I do, when I pulled that same old subtraction and gasped. The movie Just One of the Guys is now more than a quarter of a century old. WTF?!?
Welcome to the second installment of Oscar Actors In Retrospect, a four-part series wherein Roommate Joe and I revisit the Oscar-winning performances from 1990, 1995, 2000, and 2005 and see how they stand up to historical scrutiny.
Today I’ll be taking you through our reactions to Best Actor and Best Actress from 1995. To look at how we ranked the supporting categories, just visit Joe at Low Resolution. In all cases, let us know your rankings as well.
And join us next week for 2000, the year that Steven Soderbergh directed everything, up to and including your school play.
Quick: What’s Biutiful? Who is John Hawkes? If you’re following the Oscars this year, then you probably know the answers to those questions, but will you still know the answers in five years? In ten?
Obviously, the Oscars are great at crystallizing the most powerful cinematic moments of a given year. (Even if we’re furious that our favorites are left out, we can still use the actual nominees to clarify our love for the snubbed.) But as time passes, the awards become interesting in a completely different way. Eventually, old Oscar slates evolve into fascinating documents about who and what remains in the cultural memory. Quiz Show may have been a Best Picture nominee in 1994, but has it lingered in our minds as much as Speed, another film from that year? Meryl Streep won the 1982 Best Actress prize for Sophie’s Choice, and doesn’t that still seem like one of her defining roles?
Juicy questions, right?
To that end, Roommate Joe had the excellent idea of prepping for this year’s Oscars by putting some older contests to  the historical test. For the next four Thursdays, we’re going to look at the acting categories for 1990, 1995, 2000, and 2005, and we’re going to rank the nominees in order of their cultural staying power. We’re talking less about the greatness of a performance or our personal preferences—though we’ll consider them—and more about how relevant a performance seems in the harsh light of retrospect.
After the jump, you’ll find our takes on  Best Supporting Actor and Actress, 1990. To read our thoughts on Best Actress and Best Actor, just click on over to Low Resolution. And of course, let us know how you’d rank the categories.
