I am very very behind on the reviews and I guess I have to accept the fact I'm just not going to get to all of them. This just proves I could not do this for a living, because whether something is really good or really horrific, I just can't always be arsed to organize my thoughts about it and present them in an amusing fashion. Well, maybe if I were getting paid. I dunno. Cash is a good motivator.
Anyway. Last night I attempted to watch my latest Netflix, How to Marry a Millionaire. I wasn't expecting much: just a light, fluffy comedy with eye-candy (Marilyn and Lauren and pretty clothes, right?) to pleasantly pass a post-work, exhausted Saturday evening. I should have known I was in big trouble when the first five minutes of the movie were a band playing the most incredibly insipid orchestral music imaginable, none of which had anything to do with the following plot. Seriously, if this is the crap people had to listen to in 1953, it's no fucking wonder rock music was invented.
And it's all downhill from there. I can ignore my distaste for the fact that we're supposed to be rooting for these gold-digging women. It was a different time. I cannot ignore my distaste that they're actually stealing, selling off the contents of the furnished apartment they're renting. Conscience-less larceny is cute? Excuse me? (Okay, I admit, George Clooney gets a pass in Ocean's Whatever, but a caper movie about professional criminals pulling off a big clever heist is different than a bunch of bimbos having no qualms about stealing other people's stuff in a quest to trick some poor assholes into being their gravy train forever more. It's NOT CUTE.)
Then the interminable jokes about Marilyn being blind without her glasses on, but her being too vain to wear them around men. Oy. The first time she walks into something is mildly funny; the 8th time in half an hour? Not so much. Besides which, while I know there was apparently no Sexy Librarian meme in 1953, making a beautiful woman in glasses just that much more sexy, c'mon now. She's Marilyn Monroe. Do we really think no one would give her a second glance if she wore her damn glasses?
And in further disappointment, I hated all the clothes. I guess that's just me. I'm finding, I guess, that unlike the thirties, some of the forties, and the sixties, the sartorial choices of the 1950s in the old flicks leave me really cold. While I want the entirety of, say, Nora Charles' or Holly Golightly's wardrobes, there's nothing in this movie I'd wanna wear. Which is, I guess, sort of a shame, with me being built nothing like Audrey Hepburn or Myrna Loy. Ah, well.
I fell asleep probably less than half way through the movie. I just couldn't take any more. I will, however, probably try to finish it tonight or tomorrow. Maybe it gets better! Ha!
xoxo
5 comments:
A heuristic you can use for pre-evaluating most any 1950's American film: the bigger the budget, the more it will suck.
Now there are plenty of low-budget '50s movies that suck donkey's, too, but the lower budgeted films could sometimes fly under the studio radar and thus prevent the excision of anything unusual or original in a film in favor of turning it into totally lame, absolutely inoffensive pap.
And why were they blandizing everything in sight? Because by 1953 the immense popularity of television and the divestiture of the studios by the theater chains who'd owned them meant all the studio bigwigs were running scared and afraid to possibly offend anybody. Nowadays, of course, the dated cultural sexism of HtMaM is far more offensive than anything they could have put on the screen 56 years ago.
And running scared of television explains the unrelated overture at the beginning of the movie. HtMaM was the first film ever shot in CinemaScope (though the second released). And CinemaScope, besides being very wide-screen, unlike television, had high quality magnetic three-track stereophonic sound, unlike television. That orchestral opening was intended to show off the stereo sound to theatergoers, who would never have had any opportunity to hear stereo sound before that occasion.
Incidentally, the composer and orchestra director of that piece was Alfred Newman, one of Randy Newman's three uncles and three cousins in the film music business. Now you know how Randy Newman's received 17 Oscar nominations: nepotism is never dead in Hollywood. ;-)
I'm glad there's at least some logical explanation for that orchestral crap, because otherwise it was totally WTF, as well as painful. Randy Newman's uncle still has a lot of explaining to do in my book. :-P
Hey, with a half-dozen close relatives in the film music business, good percentage of the Academy's music branch is probably related to Randy.
Admittedly, some of Randy's kin now be voting from beyond the grave, but I don't think that's every bothered the Academy before.
Okay. I finally finished this movie last night and the only part of it I liked--like the *one* scene I enjoyed--was Marilyn on the plane wih the guy whose apartment they were renting, falling for each other as he convinces her she ought to just wear her glasses. Someday, somewhere, someone will tell *me* I'm quite a strudel, and then I can die a happy woman. hahahahaha
I'll add (cause when it comes to old movies I can't stop adding) that I wouldn't be at all surprised if Fox shot the overture purely as a internal technological demo, and then when they were releasing HtMaM decided to just slap it on the front of the feature, 'cause, after all, they'd already paid for the damn thing.
Plus, of course, there would have been few, if any, 'Scope shorts or trailers to run with the feature otherwise; the whole CinemaScope format being brand new (and probably not yet any good way to quickly switch the projectors from magnetic to optical sound).
You may have to cut the Newman family some slack. ;-)
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