The Producers (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

May 29, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Musical, Satire, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Uma Thurman, Will Ferrell
screenplay by Mel Brooks & Thomas Meehan
directed by Susan Stroman

Producers2005capby Walter Chaw Max Bialystock (Nathan Lane) is responsible for exactly the kind of garbage that runs for years on the Great White Way, except that for the purposes of The Producers, his plays close in a couple of days, leaving Bialystock constantly on the verge of bankruptcy and at the mercy of a long, horny line of elderly widows and rich spinsters. I don't think old women in pillbox hats renting Nathan Lane by the hour for a few dry humps is particularly funny (or realistic)–but some people, especially those reared on vaudeville, think it's hysterical. When auditor Leo Bloom (Matthew Broderick) casually mentions that it might actually be more profitable to stage a very expensive flop, Max hatches a plan in which the two will mount the worst stage production in history, thus bilking their investors out of a coupla million. After finding the worst playwright (Will Ferrell), the worst director (Gary Beach), and the worst actress (Ulla (Uma Thurman)), they proceed to stage a musical that celebrates the Third Reich called "Springtime for Hitler". Lo and behold, it's taken as tongue-in-cheek and becomes the talk of the town. You'd call it "irony" except that this eventuality is not at all unexpected–and wasn't even when it happened the first time, in 1968.

Love Me Tender (1956) [Cinema Classics Collection] – DVD

May 9, 2006Posted in1950s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, DVD, Musical, Western

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Richard Egan, Debra Paget, Elvis Presley, Robert Middleton
screenplay by Robert Buckner
directed by Robert D. Webb

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. As far as drugs go, Love Me Tender is more pot than heroin. It won’t curl your toes, but you’ll get a smooth, mellow buzz. It’s sort of the perfect film to watch on a Sunday morning on TCM while you’re eating a bowl of Cap’n Crunch. Love Me Tender doesn’t have a lot of urgency and it moves pretty slowly, yet there’s never a moment in which it’s not compulsively watchable–and at just a shade under ninety minutes, it doesn’t wear out its welcome. Director Robert D. Webb keeps the camera pretty still and shoots the outdoor scenes in long shot, the better to encapsulate the sheer enormity of the under-settled frontier. All this space lends the film a distinctly melancholy feel; there’s something lonely and isolated about the picture. But bittersweet is a flavour, too (a good one), and melancholy is the right attitude for this story and the right attitude for a film titled after Elvis Presley’s tragically romantic hit single “Love Me Tender.” This was the only film that ever killed off Elvis–and it earns the right to do so.

Mae West: The Glamour Collection [The Franchise Collection] – DVD

April 27, 2006Posted in1930s, 1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Musical, Romance, Western

NIGHT AFTER NIGHT (1932)
*½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring George Raft, Constance Cummings, Wynne Gibson, Mae West
screenplay by Vincent Lawrence and Kathryn Scola, based on the novel Single Night by Louis Bromfield
directed by Archie Mayo

I'M NO ANGEL (1933)
***½/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Mae West, Cary Grant, Gregory Ratoff, Edward Arnold
screenplay by Mae West
directed by Wesley Ruggles

GOIN' TO TOWN (1935)
***/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Mae West, Paul Cavanagh, Gilbert Emery, Marjorie Gateson
screenplay by Mae West
directed by Alexander Hall

GO WEST YOUNG MAN (1936)
*½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Mae West, Warren William, Randolph Scott, Alice Brady
screenplay by Mae West, based on the play Personal Appearance by Lawrence Riley
directed by Henry Hathaway

MY LITTLE CHICKADEE (1940)
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Mae West, W.C. Fields, Joseph Calleia, Dick Foran
screenplay by Mae West & W.C. Fields
directed by Edward F. Cline

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Flower Belle Lee reads some words off a school blackboard: "'I am a good boy. I am a good man. I am a good girl.' What is this, propaganda?" Thusly does My Little Chickadee sum up the appeal of its female star, Mae West, who invited all of us (but mostly women) to reject the nice behaviour we learned in school and chart a course based on glory and gratification. You can keep your Bette Davises and your Katharine Hepburns, so often punished for their lively behaviour or pushed into the arms of some man; rest assured that men found their way into West's arms and not the other way around. Certain proto-feminist elements are inescapable: long before Laura Mulvey was a gleam in her mother's eye, West would dare to return the male gaze and demand a sexual appetite equal to, if not exceeding, the men bound to use it against her in a double standard. There was only one standard in West's world, and she set it.

Dimples (1936) + Mad Hot Ballroom (2005) – DVDs

March 17, 2006Posted in1930s, 2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, DVD, Family, Musical

DIMPLES
**/**** Image F (colorized)/C (b&w) Sound C
starring Shirley Temple, Frank Morgan, Robert Kent, Stepin Fetchit
screenplay by Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin
directed by William A. Seiter

MAD HOT BALLROOM
*/**** Image B Sound B
directed by Marilyn Agrelo

Dimplescapby Alex Jackson When Chuck Workman juxtaposed Shirley Temple with Adolf Hitler in his underseen 1995 documentary The First 100 Years, he was dramatizing America's suckling on the opium pipe of Temple musicals while Hitler rose to power in Germany. This is reflective of the general attitude towards Temple in the 1940s: not only was she no longer cute, she also embodied a sense of brain-dead frivolousness in American film that the zeitgeist started snuffing out through soppy sentimentality, hardened disillusionment, or some combination of the two. Movies got heavy in the Forties, and Temple could not keep up with them.

Sundance ’06: A Darkness Swallowed

February 3, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Musical, Sundance
***/****directed by Betzy Bromberg by Alex Jackson A Darkness Swallowed is an experimental film consisting entirely of extreme close-ups of fossils, skins, rocks, and water droplets. There is a brief passage of voiceover in the beginning and a full-length soundtrack, but that's it as far as narrative cues are concerned. The film is supposed to be about the "nature of cellular memory" and "the physical traces that memories leave behind on and inside our bodies, and on and inside the earth." I had a considerably more banal philosophical question on my mind while watching it: I saw things in these…

Kronk’s New Groove (2005) – DVD

January 9, 2006Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical, Philippines, Romance

*½/**** Image A+ Sound B+ (DD)/A- (DTS) Extras C
screenplay by Tom Rogers
directed by Saul Andrew Blinkoff & Elliot M. Bour

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover You know you're watching a family film when: a) father issues dominate the plot; b) it talks down to the parents in the guise of speaking on their level; and c) the whole thing is larded with pseudo-in-jokes intended to make everybody feel smart. So it is with Kronk's New Groove, a straight-to-disc sequel (to an original unseen by yours truly) that posits the Emperor Kuzco's one-time adversary Kronk (voice of Patrick Warburton) in a race against time to impress his "Papi" with the classic wife/kids/house-on-hill bellwethers of success. Alas, it's an indifferently-concocted affair, with the minor character pushing more charismatic presences to the side and leaving nothing to distract from some feeble jokes, obvious plotting, and a total refusal to bring something new to the table.

Curly Top (1935) – DVD

December 13, 2005Posted in1930s, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Family, Musical, Romance

*½/**** Image F (colorized)/C (b&w) Sound C
starring Shirley Temple, John Boles, Rochelle Hudson, Jane Darwell
screenplay by Arthur J. Beckhard and Patterson McNutt
directed by Irving Cummings

by Alex Jackson It's funny how a film like Curly Top can feel so weird and so derivative at the same time. Starting with the writing, there is barely any plot to speak of. Shirley Temple is Curly Top, the orphaned child of two circus performers who has only her older sister Mary (Rochelle Hudson) to protect her from mean headmistress Mrs. Higgins (Rafaela Higgins). After becoming enchanted with Curly during a visit to the orphanage, wealthy benefactor Edward Morgan (John Boles) seeks to adopt her under the alias "Mr. Jones." Mary insists that she be adopted along with Curly, as she had promised her parents that the two would never separate. Morgan agrees, but as he spends more time with them he begins to fall in love with Mary. Though Mary likes Morgan back, she's engaged to the handsome Jimmie Rogers (Maurice Murphy). It's up to Curly to bring her "two favourite grown-ups" together.

The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) [The Criterion Collection] – DVD

December 6, 2005Posted in****/****, 1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Fantasy, FFC Must-Own, Music, Musical, Romance, The Criterion Collection, UK

Mustown****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Moira Shearer, Robert Helpmann, Leonide Massine, Robert Rounseville
written and directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger

Talesofhoffmancapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover No doubt thinking of their gushy ballet epic The Red Shoes, Pauline Kael once dismissed the pretensions of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger by declaring the duo “the Franco Zefferellis of their day.” This annoyed me intensely. Putting aside the fact that the erotic-sadist Archers seem natural Kael material, her smug put-down completely misapprehends their levelling approach to popular and elite art. A poser, Zefferelli reduces Shakespeare to soap opera and pretends it’s still Shakespeare. His ideas are schlocky and titillating, yet he insists that they’re the citadel of culture, in effect dishonouring both the articulation of what used to be called “high” art and the honest reasons we keep wallowing in trash. The Archers, meanwhile, were aware of the high/low distinction–they simply refused to enforce it, instead commingling with the sublime and the ridiculous as though they were equally critical to a healthy aesthetic diet, thus upholding Kipling’s dictum (frequently repeated in Powell’s memoirs) that “all art is one, man–one!”

Rent (2005)

November 23, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Musical, Romance

½*/****
starring Rosario Dawson, Taye Diggs, Wilson Jermaine Heredia, Jesse L. Martin
screenplay by Steve Chbosky, based on the play by Jonathan Larson
directed by Chris Columbus

Rentby Walter Chaw On the list of painful experiences, the modern Broadway musical ranks fairly high, so it's fair to wonder how an adaptation of Rent–by Chris Columbus, of all people–could have struck anyone as a bright idea. In all honesty, though, pretending not to understand the reasoning behind a project like this is disingenuous snobbery, because when something this terrible has proven to be that popularly galvanizing, it's only a matter of time, really, before Hollywood moneymen come calling with dollar signs in their eyes and memories of Chicago dancing in their heads. (I can only assume that that's also the reason the legendarily awful Phantom of the Opera got a greenlight with Joel Schumacher at the helm–and that Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane's stupendously popular (and similarly awful–film and play both) The Producers is set to bow this Christmas.) But with Rent, in place of a name like Webber or Mel Brooks to drive its inexplicable success, you find a genuine middlebrow cause célèbre, loaded well beyond safe with Message carried on the backs of a thundering stable of Alphabet City freaks and caricatures of freaks, each of them wilting from a romantic wasting disease (AIDS, naturally, or 'disenchantment' in place of source La Boheme's 'consumption')–the same one, not-so-incidentally, that claimed creator Jonathan Larson a few tragic months before Rent's triumphant debut on the Great White Way.

Oliver! (1968) [Special DVD & CD Gift Set!] – DVD

October 17, 2005Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Drama, DVD, Family, Musical, UK

***/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Ron Moody, Oliver Reed, Harry Secombe, Mark Lester
screenplay by Vernon Harris, based on the novel by Charles Dickens and the play by Lionel Bart
directed by Carol Reed

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There’s an exception to every rule, and Oliver! bucks one of the most depressing: that every bloated, twilight-of-old-Hollywood musical is crass and overblown. To be sure, Carol Reed was far from his The Third Man/Outcast of the Islands heyday when he directed this Oscar-winning roadshow, and one can sense a sigh of resignation as he puts on the mega-musical feedbag. But unlike the once-great craftsmen who started turning in horrors like Hello, Dolly!, the movie has style and credibility–Reed is genuinely interested in the narrative and the mood, as opposed to what other declining directors would highlight: the production design and the money. Oliver! is still sealed in an expensive cocoon, but what’s inside is a world worth watching and enjoying.

The Breakin’ DVD Collection (1984) – DVD

October 2, 2005Posted in1980s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Musical, Romance

BREAKIN'
**½/**** Image C- Sound D+
starring Lucinda Dickey, Shabba-Doo, Boogaloo Shrimp, Ben Lokey
screenplay by Charles Parker & Allen DeBevoise and Gerald Scaife
directed by Joel Silberg

BREAKIN' 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO
***/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Lucinda Dickey, Adolfo "Shabba-Doo" Quinones, Michael "Boogaloo Shrimp" Chambers, Susie Bono
screenplay by Jan Venture & Julie Reichart
directed by Sam Firstenberg

BEAT STREET
**/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Rae Dawn Chong, Guy Davis, Jon Chardiet, Leon W. Grant
screenplay by Andy Davis & David Gilbert & Paul Golding
directed by Stan Lathan

by Alex Jackson Ebony and ivory are living in perfect harmony in 1984's Breakin'. This is hardly a "white" movie, but it's not really a "black" one, either. It actually seems that Breakin' is genuinely multicultural: The film doesn't neutralize or marginalize blackness–in fact, it quite certainly celebrates it. But it's not black at the expense of excluding white faces. Instead of aligning itself with one particular racial identity, Breakin' aligns itself with a conglomerate of all of them. This is a party to which everyone is invited.

Follow the Fleet (1936); Shall We Dance (1937); The Barkleys of Broadway (1949) – DVDs

September 27, 2005Posted in1930s, 1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Music, Musical, Romance

FOLLOW THE FLEET
**½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Randolph Scott, Harriet Hilliard
screenplay by Dwight Taylor and Allan Scott, based on the play "Shore Leave" by Hubert Osborne
directed by Mark Sandrich

SHALL WE DANCE
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore
screenplay by Allan Scott and Ernest Pagano
directed by Mark Sandrich

THE BARKLEYS OF BROADWAY
**½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Oscar Levant, Billie Burke
screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green
directed by Charles Walters

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Every partnership has its ups and downs, as our soaring divorce rate will attest. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were no different, and a selection of their B-list titles–one of which is widely considered the beginning of the end and another of which trades on memories rather than on the present–bears this out: Although Follow the Fleet, Shall We Dance, and The Barkleys of Broadway are far from quintessential, they have their quintessential moments and show the pair and their creative partners colouring outside the lines. One of these, the sometimes-maligned Shall We Dance, is actually very good, and the bumpy rides of the other two are occasionally enthralling.

Clueless (1995) [Whatever Edition] + Dead & Breakfast (2005) – DVDs

September 26, 2005Posted in1990s, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Musical, Romance, Teen, Zombie

CLUELESS
*/**** Image A Sound B Extras B-
starring Alicia Silverstone, Stacey Dash, Brittany Murphy, Paul Rudd
written and directed by Amy Heckerling

DEAD & BREAKFAST
**/**** Image C+ Sound B Extras B-
starring Ever Carradine, Portia de Rossi, David Carradine, Bianca Lawson
written and directed by Matthew Leutwyler

by Walter Chaw Clueless is the pinnacle of a certain kind of smarmy teensploitation/Classics Illustrated vogue that saw Shakespeare (10 Things I Hate About You) and, in this case, Jane Austen (i.e., Emma) squeezed through the sausage mill of swatch-guards and Prada bags. It's the Shrek school of satire: mythological creatures made to act out master-plots in unfunny, unimaginative ways in stock mythological landscapes. In place of literal trolls, find euphemistic trolls in Alicia Silverstone and Brittany Murphy, posed opposite one another as after/before shots of one-trick lightweights. (So light is Silverstone, in fact, that her most recent attempted comeback was essentially as this character ten years later in NBC's prophetically-named "Miss Match".) The only interest in watching this relic in its new, ten-year anniversary "Whatever Edition" (also prophetically-named) is in trainspotting current sitcom stars in what, in retrospect, is a piece of work every bit as smug and self-loathing as Pretty Persuasion or Saved!.

TIFF ’05: Romance & Cigarettes

September 16, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Musical, Romance, TIFF
*½/****starring James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemiwritten and directed by John Turturro by Bill Chambers Dennis Potter was a genre unto himself, and when he died, he took his recipe for what Heinz Antor called "humanist postmodernism" with him. It's painful to watch writer-director John Turturro, one of the great character actors of our time, invoke the writer in Romance & Cigarettes, as he reduces Potter's notion of pop music as existential catharsis to exactly what it wasn't: a gimmick--an alibi for air band. In the spellbinding film version of Potter's Pennies from Heaven, Christopher Walken comically menaces…

Starstruck (1982) – DVD

August 31, 2005Posted in1980s, Australia, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blue Underground, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Musical

***/**** Image A Sound A (DD)/A+ (DTS) Extras B
starring Jo Kennedy, Ross O'Donovan, Margo Lee, Max Cullen
screenplay by Stephen MacLean
directed by Gillian Armstrong

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover By all rights, Starstruck shouldn't be as much fun as it turns out to be. Chief amongst the film's faults is its insistence on laying a '70s template over an '80s milieu: the harsh straight lines of new wave get rounded off, making for a completely incongruous let-it-all-hang-out attitude. Things are not improved by the tentative approach of director Gillian Armstrong, not known for extroverted behaviour in the past and seemingly unsure of herself here. Yet although it's rather like watching Meat Loaf belt out Gary Numan's "Cars" at the top of his lungs, the combination of bright happy colours and an aw-shucks demeanour is undeniably infectious. You wind up grinning uncontrollably despite Starstruck's decidedly uncool approach to being cool.

The Blues Brothers (1980) [25th Anniversary Edition (Widescreen)] – DVD

August 29, 2005Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Music, Musical, Road Movie

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, James Brown, Cab Calloway
screenplay by Dan Aykroyd and John Landis
directed by John Landis

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Long before Quentin Tarantino would run a tear across the super soul sounds of the '70s, there was the strange case of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in the deadly "Blues Brothers" affair. Sitting somewhere at the low end of White Negro trickle-down, the Blues Brothers were two conspicuously white soul singers who made up for in enthusiasm what they lacked in talent–though their "Saturday Night Live" clowning conveniently omitted this bit of information, half-expecting us to take them seriously as they tumbled and caterwauled their way through various musical numbers. Where a true hipster would have meticulously re-created their favoured forms, Joliet Jake Blues (Belushi) and his brother Elwood (Aykroyd) had nothing but "heart" and "sincerity"–a nice way of saying they were rank amateurs doing primitive karaoke. They were compellingly frantic performers, but they weren't the blues and never would be.

The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987) – DVD

July 24, 2005Posted in1980s, Adventure, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, DVD, Family, Musical, Sci-Fi

**/**** Image B+ Sound C
starring Anthony Newley, Mackenzie Astin, Katie Barbieri, "The Garbage Gang"
screenplay by Melinda Palmer & Rod Amateau
directed by Rod Amateau

by Alex Jackson I don't think that there is any getting around the fact that any true connoisseur of trash cinema has to see Rodney Amateau's The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. This was, after all, the feature film debut of Mackenzie Astin, a.k.a. the horny kid from "The Facts of Life", and of Spanish soap star Katie Barbieri. Just as the picture marked the start of a career for some, it marked the end of a career for others. The presence of child star, singer, and Joan Collins's bitchy ex-husband Anthony Newley is a chief selling point in the film's trailer, but he was on his way out. And The Garbage Pail Kids Movie was the last feature from television director Amateau, who seems to have viewed it as his own personal Fanny and Alexander, taking on writing and producing chores in addition to casting other Amateaus (J.P. and Chloe) in minor roles.

The Phantom of the Opera (2004) [2-Disc Special Widescreen Edition] – DVD

June 2, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Musical, Romance, Thriller, UK

Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera
*½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A
starring Gerard Butler, Emmy Rossum, Patrick Wilson, Miranda Richardson
screenplay by Andrew Lloyd Webber & Joel Schumacher
directed by Joel Schumacher

Phantom2004capby Walter Chaw At last, the moment where the stars align and professional bad filmmaker Joel Schumacher teams up with ace bad musical spectacle maven Andrew Lloyd Webber to create something that looks for all the world like Batman meets Liberace. There's never been a swooping crane shot Schumacher didn't like and there's never been a scale sung in falsetto to simulate ardour that Webber hasn't massaged; together, the two men give us a guided funhouse tour through a gaudy musical so bereft of real feeling and musicality that its inspiration has obviously run on Broadway for sixteen years now. (Offer a little hosanna that Sarah Brightman isn't in the film.) It's extraordinarily condescending to say so, but Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera is the perfect bracer for fans of "The Phantom of the Opera"–no button goes un-popped, no corset goes un-strained, and but for Minnie Driver as jilted diva Carlotta, not a one of the nicely-outfitted cast seems clued-in to the fact that there but for the grace of John Waters does the whole damned thing become The Rocky Horror Picture Show Redux. In fact, the only thing that could save this shambling monstrosity would be a few transvestites mirroring the action at the front of the cinema to the choral approval of the raincoat brigade.

Pooh’s Heffalump Movie (2005) – DVD

May 17, 2005Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical, Mystery

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C-
screenplay by Brian Hohlfeld and Evan Spiliotopoulos
directed by Frank Nissen

by Bill Chambers Pretty much everything I wrote about Piglet's Big Movie applies to Pooh's Heffalump Movie: it's inoffensive but laborious, and the soundalike replacements for the original vocal talent know the notes but not the music. (Think that friend of yours whose Homer Simpson impersonation is perfect in every way except for its inability to make you laugh.) Carly Simon contributes another pallid batch of stopgap ditties to another frail narrative in which Pooh Bear is again hustled off to the sidelines. But melancholy has returned to the fold (because, I suspect, a certain Britishness informs the tone this time around), and since that was key to the resonance of Pooh's early screen and literary outings alike, we should be grateful that Pooh's Heffalump Movie deals with more urgent themes than is customary.

Lullaby of Broadway (1951) + Calamity Jane (1953) – DVDs

May 16, 2005Posted in1950s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Musical, Romance, Western

LULLABY OF BROADWAY
*½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Doris Day, Gene Nelson, S.Z. Sakall, Billy DeWolfe
screenplay by Earl Baldwin
directed by David Butler

CALAMITY JANE
**½/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Doris Day, Howard Keel, Allyn McLerie, Philip Carey
screenplay by James O'Hanlon
directed by David Butler

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's a pseudo-indie movie whose title escapes me that thought it would get an easy laugh by having a pretentious film theory major call her paper "Doris Day as Feminist Warrior." The joke was bad not because it was too exaggerated–as it happens, it wasn't much of an exaggeration at all. Doris Day was such a cottage industry for '90s pop-cult studies that she was (distantly) second only to Madonna as an item for rescue and reclamation, making such a title not only plausible but also inevitable. It's easy to see why: while the "legendary" screen goddesses stood around waiting to be claimed by the hero, Day was going ahead with a career or obliviously transgressing some other gender rule–not enough to topple Hollywood patriarchy, but enough to give clear-eyed individuals fugitive moments of pleasure.