The singing in church was good this morning, and afterward during rehearsal too. We are getting into the Christmas music now, which I love to sing and I imagine you do too. Who doesn't love to sing Christmas carols & hymns? :)
Tonight's movie was called "Two Weeks In Another Town".
Okay, movie fans.......um, you know how I usually watch some pretty good movies and then write about them to the best or worst of my ability? Okay, you do know about that. I knew you did. And you also know that nobody is perfect, right? That includes me, naturally, and while I try to be "near perfect" in the Cinematic Sense, and only watch movies of reasonable quality at the very least, and never watch any that really suck, tonight I am sorry to report that I stumbled a little bit.
I ordered "Two Weeks" because I had done a Cyd Charisse search in the library database after seeing her in a recent Esther Williams movie. I've seen her famous musicals like "Brigadoon", and "The Band Wagon", and she was featured just last week in "It's Always Fair Weather". So I was just looking for any other movies she made that the library system might have, and this one turned up : "Two Weeks In Another Town", the town being Rome. It turns out that Cyd Charisse, despite third billing, hasn't nearly as much screen time as Kirk Douglas and Edward G. Robinson, the other two top billed stars. But the lack of Cyd screen time isn't the problem.
The problem is Camp, or rather.....Camp. Gotta use italics in this case. What do you think of Campy Movies, where things are Deliberately Outrageous and More Than A Tad Flamboyant?
I am not a huge fan of Camp myself. I like farce comedy better, or satire, or anything a bit more sophisticated or subtle. Camp is obvious and over-the-top, and thus it describes this movie pretty well.
Kirk Douglas (whose name must be pronounced with the appropriate clenched jaw, between-the-teeth intensity and voice cracking screechiness, like " Kiirkk! Duglesss"!) stars as a washed-up former star who has wound up living in a sanatarium for three years after a near fatal drunk driving accident. His relationships to his gold-digging man-eating wife (Charisse) and his mentor and favorite director Edward G., have been fraught with frustration. His ego has been crushed by both of these more powerful personalities, and he has wound up in a country-club psych ward for the wealthy.
His doctors, though, think him rehabilitated after three years. Nowdays it would be three weeks. Whoever heard of three years straight in a rehab center? But in the old days, when they were called Sanitariums, like the infamous Hotel California in Camarillo, many patients did indeed remain in custody for years.
So anyway, Kirk Douglas is deemed healthy by his doctors, and he simultaneously gets a phone call from Robinson, his former directorial mentor. Robinson has a job waiting for him in Rome! But when he gets there, it turns out not to be an acting job, but a role as head of the sound dubbing staff, a technical job.
Good grief, people. I can't believe I am going into such detail. It's Sunday night and I am tired.
But I do go into detail because it could have been a very good movie, if Director Vincente Minnelli hadn't turned it into a romp.
Basically, to cut to the chase, it's a movie about Movie People, and more specifically Movie People as they existed in the short-lived but very exciting culture of Rome in the early 1960s, when the Jet Set brought fresh hipness to the attention of the news media and made Rome the place to be for a short while : the city of Fellini and Sophia Loren. In the early 60s, cultural change moved very fast. I have remarked how, in the 1960s, each year seemed like five years because so much happened, on all fronts, from societal fronts, to pop culture, to science, to politics. There never has been a decade like the 1960s.
And so Rome, and Italy, were very hip to the cogniscenti for a short while in the early 1960s. That's what this film is about - actors driven crazy by the movie business, adultery and misogyny (a staple of the biz as we see today), and Diva behavior amongst tempermental actresses.
It's as if Movie People - and the people who surround them, the business people - think that the whole world revolves around them. And they react accordingly, due to the pressure involved.
The Kirk Douglas character tries to break out of this prison of egotism, but the problem for me, as your reviewer, is that it took everything I had as a Movie Fan, to make it through this flick.
It wasn't a terrible movie. I've seen worse every time I go to Redbox. It's just that it was so much different in style from what I am used to from Old Hollywood. I suppose I should've seen the 1962 release date as a warning sign. When Hollywood entered The 60s, in the pop culture sense, the movies often became fiascos. Maybe drugs and alcohol were a problem, I dunno. Tonight's movie was professionally made, but it depicts a somewhat reckless culture that was developing in movies which resulted in what was, in my opinion, the worst decade for cinema since it's creation.
The 1960s was not a great decade for movies overall, especially when compared to the previous thirty years. This is not to say that there aren't a lot of great films from the 60s, which there are, but only to say that a Camp style began to be exhibited in many genres, including things like "jokey spy movies", even Campy Westerns. It is like scripts were written to make a joke of things, when previously the job of movies was to tell stories and present great art.
"Two Weeks In Another Town" isn't horrible, it has it's moments, and it also has the fun that was early 60s Rome and that was European Culture in general, in the pre-JFK assassination and pre-Vietnam innocence that typified that era.
Unfortunately, it also has the Ham Acting and scriptural and directorial laziness and sloppiness, and Movie Business Self Indulgence of that era, and that's why I have to give it two Big Thumbs Down.
I barely made it through, and I did so only because of the star power and (over) acting of Messers Douglas, Robinson and Ms. Charisse, who would all normally be great in a normal movie.
Which this wasn't. :)
But hey, I'm probably still batting 99% in my other recommendations, so go check out a Submarine Movie or a Western, or "The 3 Penny Opera" or a Louise Brooks or Buster Keaton silent film.
Or read a book, maybe about Jim Jones. Man, what a koo-koo bird. He's one of the all-time champs.
And how 'bout them Rams? That was an Old Fashioned one they put on the Seahawks this afternoon.
Well anyway......see you in the morn. :):) Super tired.......my goodness.
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