By Doug Strassler

What with all the attention to recent earthquakes and hurricanes, I’d forgotten to pay attention to the coming of the fall movie season. Now, all of a sudden, it’s upon us, having crawled in like a little lamb. Today sees one of the season’s big entrants with the star-studded disease flick, Contagion.

I mean, looks at the who’s who of a cast: four Oscar-winning actors (Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet), and two additional nominees (Laurence Fishburne and Jude Law). Plus Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh is at the helm. It may just be a pulp popcorn flick about fast-moving germs, but it’s unquestionably a prettily dressed one.

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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.”

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!”

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.

By Doug Strassler

Just like Mark did yesterday in his smart analysis of Tate Taylor’s film adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, I too have been thinking about many elements of this summer smash. And though some people may have found various aesthetic flaws with the movie, it seems to be pretty universally liked.

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Check out my latest piece for MSNBC.com, which names the 5 most disappointing movies of the summer. (Hint: A film can make a lot of money and still be a disappointment.)

I interviewed film critics and everyday movie fans for the piece, and I even got to discuss Freaky Friday. It was a lot of fun. What do you think of the movies I chose? Which films would you add to the list?

I know the conversation about the film version of The Help has been going for a while, but since I just finished the book last week and just saw the movie on Saturday, I’d like to enter the fray.

A lot of people have suggested that the story of The Help is fundamentally troubling: In both the film and the novel, a white woman in 1960s Mississippi compiles the stories of black maids into a book, empowering them all in a time of segregation. As many have noted, you’ve got yet another fictional property that puts white people at the center of the Civil Rights Movement (a la Mississippi Burning or Driving Miss Daisy.) You’ve got yet another white author telling a Civil Rights story and reaching millions of people, while stories by black writers that have black people in leading roles continue to be rarities.

I can understand that frustration, and when I read Kathryn Stockett’s novel, I definitely encountered “white people are awesome!” moments, like when Skeeter Phelan (the writer) got to righteously disapprove of the prejudices of her well-heeled Southern friends. However, the book also features many scenes where white people—Skeeter included—arecasually racist without realizing it, which reminds the reader that every white person, no matter how decent, was culpable in the segregated South.

Plus, the black characters are written with equal dimension, equal amounts of good and bad traits. And since two-thirds of the novel is narrated by Aibileen (a maid with a gift for writing) and her brassy friend Minnie, black voices actually dominate the storytelling. So while I was always aware that a white woman was telling me a Civil Rights story, I was also drawn into a rich and interesting narrative that did a pretty good job of balancing its perspectives and intentions. Yes, characters like Hilly (the “evil white lady”) are over-sized caricatures, and yes, there’s plenty of treacly, preach sentiment, but not every popular novel can be written by Faulkner. Ultimately, the book strikes me as the story of two black women and one white woman who are equally important. It’s not a masterpiece, but I’m glad to know it.

I can’t say the same for the movie, which was written and directed by Stockett’s friend Tate Taylor. Though it tells roughly the same story as the novel, it makes several small changes that seriously upend the racial balance. Much more than the novel, the movie is a story about white people being awesome and noble.

I’m not saying the movie is malicious or racist. It’s trying really hard not to be. But some of the changes make the story much more palatable to white folks.

Here are three of the differences between the book and the film that seriously alter the message of The Help:

[MANY SPOILERS AHEAD]

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By Doug Strassler

Welcome to my second look at which overlooked film actors I believe to be overdue for a lifetime achievement Academy Award. For a look at the first entries on my list – and my very limited criteria – go here. And for a look at who has already won an honorary award, go here.

In truth, there are no rules. I’ve listed five performers with five fairly disparate styles and careers below. The one thing they have in common? They’re all singular talents who’ve in some way left an indelible mark on Hollywood.

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The fabulous Monkey See blog at NPR just posted my story on the tantalizing ethical issues in the new alien invasion movie Attack the Block.

Here’s a snippet:

When we first meet Moses, the hero of Attack the Block, we’re supposed to hate him. This is before gorilla-like aliens with glowing fangs swarm his London housing project and before he becomes the reluctant leader of the resistance. This is when he’s just a teenage thug with a gang of friends, attacking a woman on the street.

Have you seen the movie? If so, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

By Doug Strassler

This week, the Academy announced the recipients of its annual honorary awards, and none other than Darth Vadar himself, James Earl Jones, is this year’s winner. (The Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award will be bestowed upon Oprah Winfrey as well.) The honorary Oscar is a safe way to honor stars that were never able to win in a competitive category (though sometimes previous winners have been awarded these as well); it’s how actors like Barbara Stanwyck, Deborah Kerr, Kirk Douglas, and Lauren Bacall (just last year) finally earned the moniker “Oscar winner.”

And while the Oscar ceremonies no longer televise the honorary awards portion (opting instead to show short clips from a “previously held ceremony”), somethin’ is better than nothin’. And I started thinking about some of my favorite performers, major Hollywood players, who’ve never yet taken an Oscar home, though some have at least been invited to the ball. (A complete list of honorary Academy Award winners can be found here.)

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As part of the Dog Days of Summer Movies project over at Tomato Nation, I have just written a review of 1997‘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 Press and City 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.

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