Natalie Could

TCM is running a Natalie Wood film festival this month. Back
in my sane and sober youth I loved me some Natalie Wood. For
little boys of color she was the ethnic "it" girl. Russian descended
Natasha Zacharenko played white-girl-turned-Native-American
(The Searchers), Hispanic (West Side Story), Jewish (Marjorie
Morningstar) and Italian (Love With the Proper Stranger).

Wood had this ineluctable quality of being able to play both the
tomboy (Gyspy and Inside Daisy Clover) and the vixen (Gypsy
and Bob&Carol&Ted&Alice); the ingenue (West Side Story) and
the full-fledged woman (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). She was Annette
Funicello and Marilyn Monroe rolled into one. And, for this child
of the sixties and seventies, that was a heady combination.

I felt as if I had suffered a personal loss when Wood accidentally
drowned while filming Brainstorm in 1983.

~rave!

Slanty-eyed White People Playing Asians Marathon

There is a slany-eyed white people playing Asians marathon on TCM today.

Thus far this morning I have seen that great Asian actress Katharine Hepburn starring as Jade Tan in the great Chinese resistance movie Dragon Seed (1944). This movie also stars notable "Asian" actors John Huston (as patriarch Ling Tan) and Agnes Moorehead (as third cousin's wife). There is a scene where Hepburn is holding an actual asian infant that looks eerily like Kim Hunter holding a real chimpanzee in Escape from the Planet of the Apes.

Dragon Seed was followed by that great Asian actor Anthony Quinn playing Chen Ta in "China Sky" (1945).

I am currently watching those great Asian actors Paul Muni (Wang Lung) and Luise Rainer (O-lan) in The Good Earth (1937). Is Luis Rainer the only Asian to win an Academy Award for Best Actress?

The Good Earth will be followed by:

The Bitter Tea of General Yen, (1933) starring that great "Asian" actor Nils Asther."

7 Women, (1966) starring Ann Bancroft (which I may skip because all the Asians are played by Asians)

55 Days at Peking (1963)starring that great "Asian" actress Flora Robson as Empress Tzu-Hsi and notable "Asian" actor Leo Genn as Gen. Jung-Lu.

~(no)rave!

The Not-So-Great Unknown

I watched the premiere episode of Persons Unknown. It achieved what I would have thought would be an impossible combination: it is giddily ridiculous and maddeningly engaging.

Instead of an island, this Lost-esque knockoff takes place in a hotel that is straight out of The Shining. You half expect Jack Nicholson to hack through a wall - "Heeere's Johnny!" - at any moment - or, at the very least to be found typing "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" ad nauseum on a manual typewriter.

Like a malevolent trickster, Persons Unknown baits and tricks you. The opening scene plays like scores of others we have seen before on countless episodes and incarnations of L&O, a single mother is distracted at a playground while her daughter wanders off and disappears. The mother lurches and screeches her daughter's name in a frantic and futile effort to find her when the authors insert a cruel twist - it is mommy who is about to show up on a milk carton. Which doesn't ratchet down your fear for the missing girl; it only acerbates it.

Then there is the bland band of abductees. These people have obviously been assembled for their particular skill sets - like the matronly white woman who conveniently knows all about biometric implants and slow-release tranquilizers - but stereotypes still abound. For instance, the black character, a trained soldier, should be the one in change but it is the generic "mysterious" white guy who consistently steps up to the mantle.

The black guy is, instead, used as sort of a mine canary. When a band of cliche-R-us refugees from a Chinese restaurant arrive to cook and serve copious amounts of Chinese food and everyone looks at it like little Mikey's siblings looked askance when first served Life cereal - "I'm NOT going to eat it!" And they don't eat it until "Little Mikey," the black guy, digs in and chows down.

"How is it?" a middle-aged white woman asks tentatively.

"Best damn Chinese food I ever had. I could eat it every day!" the black guy says as he shovels food into his mouth.

Later, when everybody reads their fortune cookies, the black guy says, "Mine is in Chinese."

Oh, yeah, the key that will unlock each of the hotel rooms where each member of the "lost" group initially and mysteriously finds him or herself is found inside each room's hotel bible.

I never would have found mine.

~rave? (I dunno. I will watch again, though)

Not Quite Wright

Just Wright, the new movie produced and starring Queen Latifa, plays like a not-so-special episode of Livin' Single, her sitcom that ran on FOX from 1993-1998. Latifa plays Leslie Wright, a 30ish, "big bone-ed," good ol' girl who is looking for love but continually finds herself in the "friend zone." Yet, full of pluck (if not much luck) Leslie sallies forth bright-eyed and bushy tailed, always leading with her big heart.

Leslie is a variation on Georgia Byrd the character Latifa played in Last Holiday but with much smaller dreams. Leslie is content with her job as a physical therapist, her old-and-busted mustard-colored Mustang and the big old house she is rehabing with the help of her father (Grey's Anatomy's James Pickens, Jr.). A chance meeting with Scott McKnight (Common), all-star point guard of the New Jersey Nets changes everything.

The casting, with the probable exception of Common (he is just tall enough to be almost believable as an NBA star) , is spot on - Pickens as Leslie's father, Pam (Coffy) Grier as her mother, Phylicia (The Cosby Show) Rashad as Common's mother and Paula (Precious) Patton as Leslie's gold-digging friend - but, with the exception of Common and Patton, this great cast is given precious little to do.

The core of the movie, the aftermath of McKnight suffering a possibly career-ending knee injury during the NBA All-Star game (improbably played at the Izod Center in New Jersey), should be his grueling rehabilitation under physical therapist Leslie's stern but capable hands, but is, instead, soft and shapeless, giving us none of the blood, sweat and tears this intense enterprise should engender.

Director Sanaa Hamri ((Something New) exhibits zero flair for framing NBA action. One wonders if she has actually seen a pro basketball game. The climatic basketball game in Teen Wolf has more dramatic tension than the game seven we-need-a-three-pointer-to-win snoozer that ushers in Wright's final act. And speaking of said game seven, we are given no sense of how this team (the Nets - Really?) has advanced to the NBA Eastern Conference finals without the "Great Scott," their biggest star, and we are given no insight into how McKnight feels about his team being so successful without him.

While most of the rom-com conventions are here, Just Wright remains sluggish in execution and lacking in drama. You sit there and you long for Hamri to set-off a Tyler Perry-esque emotional firecracker. Anything to ignite this languid enterprise.

Just Wright is anything but.

~(no)rave!

Scarjo, redux (2010)

There may be hope for the Scarjo Hotness Meter after all. After Scarlett Johansson tumbled from 2 to 34 in last year's Maxim Hot 100 (losing considerable "hotness" by marrying Ryan Reynolds) we feared for the worse but ("hail, glory!") she has rebounded to number 14 and made the SHM respectable again.

Using the recalibrated SHM, where Scarjo is par for the course, the ubiquitous Zoe Saldana is a -11. Rihanna is a -8. Eva Mendez is a -3. Selita Ebanks is a +2.

Dania Ramirez +16
Jessica Alba +20
Gabrielle Union +43

And, for the third year in a row, Halle Berry and Rosario Dawson remain so hot they are OFF the Scarjo Hotness Meter.

~rave!

Imma Be

Emma has been replaced by Isabella as the most popular girl's name.

I love Isabella as a girl's name. Isabella Rossellini is one of my
favorite names to roll around in my mouth. But Isabella should
not be a popular (or common) name. What are these parents
thinking?

Emma is such a good and plain name. Anybody can carry that
name around. There are very few women who have the beauty
and sweet, ineffable "lightness" of feminine being to carry a name
like Isabella (which means "My God is a Vow," incidentally).

When my children were young, I sent them to a private
Montessori school where there was this precious Chinese girl
named Isabella. I thought Isabella was the oddest name for an
Asian girl but little Isabella embodied that name in every
sense of the name.

This will not be true of every poor Isabella burdened with this
currently hot name.

~(no)rave!

She Creature

I stumbled across this movie on thrillerMAX this afternoon:
Mermaid Chronicles Part 1: She Creature (2001). I am surprised
I haven't seen this before as it stars Carla Gugino, a personal fave,

and is directed by Sebastian Gutierrez (who also directed my
favorite C. Gugino movie: Judas Kiss).

She Creature showcases Gugino in various stages of Victorian dress and undress in addition to featuring a red-haired, nekkid-from-the-waist-up (who later grows legs and becomes completely naked) mermaid played by Rya Kihlstedt. What happens after that ain't so pretty.

Gugino has apparently become Gutierrez' muse. She also stars in his movies Women in Trouble (2009), where she plays a character named Elektra Luxx, and Elektra Luxx (2010), where she plays a character named Electra Luxx. Ms. Kihlstedt is also a frequent Gutierrez player. She is in both Women in Trouble and Elektra Luxx.

Gutierrez also directed a movie called Rise (2007) starring Lucy Liu as a female reporter who wakes up in a morgue to find herself a member of the undead. She vows revenge against the sect that put her there and hunts them down. This movie also features Ms. Gugino.

I have already added Women in Trouble and Rise to my Netflix queue. Elektra Luxx is on my "saved" list.

~rave!