Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977)

Holy shit! Looking for Mr. Goodbar is pretty incredible. It’s so intense and intriguing. It’s a fascinating character study and a pretty extraordinary portrait of female freedom amid a deeply misogynist world. It also has truly great performances from Diane Keaton, Richard Gere, Tuesday Weld, William Atherton, and Tom Berenger. 

 The ending is… shocking and kind of insane and I feel completely stunned. 

 Honestly this is good. I know a movie like this could basically not be made today, but that’s what makes it so interesting. I am not at all sure why Goodbar is out of print, but you can't find it streaming anywhere and it's never been released on DVD.

Bite the Bullet (1975)

I wanted to like Bite the Bullet. It’s a kind of disaster film mixed with a western mixed with Grand Prix. But also I didn’t care about any of these characters. And interesting characterization seemed to have been the film’s only real raison d’être. So that’s puzzling. Anyway I guess I was kinda bored.

The Happy Ending (1969)

In The Happy Ending the acting is the showcase. Jean Simmons is excellent and so is Shirley Booth, who gives an understated, wonderful performance. Teresa Wright, who made such a career playing plucky, eager young women in the 1940s is great here as Jean Simmons' awful mother. Just all around the performances are excellent. Bobby Darin even has a great part!

Otherwise this feels in many ways like yet another movie about a sad, possibly suicidal, woman in an awful marriage in the 1960s who hasn't yet realized that it is marriage itself that is the problem. This the kind of part that Anne Bancroft really specialized in with movies like The Pumpkin Eater and The Slender Thread.

Blackboard Jungle (1950)

Well... Blackboard Jungle is about teaching high school in the inner city – I think we're supposed to be in Chicago. Glenn Ford plays the protagonist, and I love watching Ford at all times, so Richard Brooks' movie definitely has that going for it.

But I am hung up on the title, and if you look at this poster and combine the title with the poster, you get a series of images that are designed to communicate an old message. White woman, torn dress (or is it just hanging off the shoulder?), inner city kids, jungle... well it becomes fairly clear that we are in race-baiting territory.

Blackboard Jungle, to its credit, looks like it's selling one thing (a story about black students being unruly or unmanageable), but it's selling something altogether different. This is a film where race is everywhere and constantly being discussed, but this is not a film about race, and I'm not sure it has anything to say about race, either. Sidney Poitier plays the most important black kid in Ford's classroom, and it's hard not to love Sidney Poitier no matter what you're doing. Poitier's character turns out to be all right, as the kids in the '50s used to say.

This movie has good intentions, I think. But it takes a kind of colonialist or parochial tone that I found annoying, upsetting, and ill-advised. In many ways, Blackboard Jungle sees juvenile delinquency as a problem with the kids themselves and not their environments. The film's script attenuates this at certain points, but mostly Blackboard Jungle understands this to be the kids' behavior to be the kids' fault. I am skeptical.

The Professionals

This is completely perfect.

Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk

I think it is a really easy thing to say that the United Nations isn't doing enough about the situation in the Sudan.  It seems silly to quibble over whether what we are discussing is "ethnic cleansing" or "genocide."  And it is an easy question to ask when we ask "Would it take this long to act if 800,000 Europeans had lost their lives?"  Of course not.  They're Africans and the U.N. is slower to act because the problem is in Africa... and this is what it is: ridiculous, unconscionable, horrific.  But what, even, can the U.N. do?  So Annan is on the phone with the president in Khartoum.  So what!  What is he gonna say? "You really ought to stop funding the Arabs that are killing all of your Black Africans"  Yeah.  That'll work.  I'm not trying to be defeatist about the situation, but this isn't the U.N.'s fault so much as it is the fault of the murdering genocidal people who run the government in the Sudan.  Blaming the U.N. is so easy.

If you haven't seen the 1967 film of Truman Capote's classic crime novel In Cold Blood, you really ought to think about renting it or adding it to your Netflix queue.  It is an excellent crime thriller with a couple of very cool cinematic devices.  It lost me near the end of Act III, but made up for it with the ending.  Acts I and II are awesome though, and it is filled with sharp dialogue and some cracker jack editing.  Really fun stuff.  Plus it's got this great Noir-ish quality... smoke and men in hats and old cars.  I recommend it.

Tonight, Elizabeth and Jer and I went to see Home on the Range in LaVerne.  I HATE that town.  And I realized tonight why.  It's not the huge amount of white people that really drive me up the wall... it's their kids.  The white people are a bit much.  I hate not seeing any black or Asian people.  I think it's weird, but it's the enormous amount of kids that are everywhere that just makes me crazy!  My building does not have ONE teenager in it, and let me tell you, I think that's a wonderful thing.  The movie theatres I go to don't have little kids running around and no one talks during a movie at a Laemmle Theatre.  I've never seen it happen.  But at Edward's LaVerne 12, you can barely hear the movie for all the crosstalk that's going on.  The couple behind me were actually getting to know one another during the movie.  Buddy!  Don't spend the $8 each it cost to get in here and sit on a bench and get to know her.  The movie was only okay.  Roseanne is fun and Judi Dench and Jennifer Tilly are good too.  Plus... wouldn't you know it... Cuba Gooding Jr. is good in the movie.  Seriously, Home on the Range is Cuba Gooding Jr.'s best performance since As Good As It Gets. 

Tomorrow... Love's Labour's Lost at 11am.  Perhaps I will do laundry in the morning.  No way.  I already know I won't.  I'll make myself eggs and watch a movie in the morning and then drive to CSUP to get there just before 11.  Then I can breathe and stretch and think for a moment or to before we begin the madness.