When Movie Campaigns Attack

Don't be alarmed ... even if I was.

It's one thing to receive creepy "gifts" in the mail. It's quite another when they're completely unrelated and yet they thematically compliment each other ...and they arrive on the same day. First, a bird with a bomb attached (courtesy of Four Lions which I keep hearing great things about. Movies, wait for me. I'm back to screenings in one week's time!).

And then a letter in a black envelope from "Nina Sayers." You know, the ballerina...

So I'm super excited to read the letter but I open it up and...nothing.

Or wait.

Feathers.

Is Alfred Hitchcock directing Oscar campaigns now?

"Every Ending... Has a Beginning."

The Birds (1963) gets the prequel we definitely needed...


The Birds (The Prequel) from NYSUfilms on Vimeo.

... because everyone hates movies without exposition / backstory. [/sarcasm] I love the gentle spoofing of our modern need for all mystery to be explained to us "We had no answer... until now". Ha!

Apparently this prequel trailer for Alfred Hitchcock's classic The Birds is a year old. But I'm just seeing it now thanks to @mattriviera and @mattzollerseitz so it's new to @me... and a delightful start to my morning it was, too. Good morning!
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Donald Duck is 76

Do you prefer "Daffy" or "Donald"? I can't say I've ever been much of a fan of either of the famous Ducks (maybe Howard, briefly, in the 80s). Maybe sea fowl just aren't my thing? I was, however, totally into Chip & Dale (and chipmunks) as a child. So here's seven minutes of funny Toy Tinkers (Best Animated Short Film Nominee, 1949) starring all three to start your morning:



Here's a list of the ten best Donald Duck cartoons from a real fan. And if you've never seen Donald's only Oscar-winning short, Der Fuehrer's Face (1942) you can watch it on YouTube.

The Disney and Warner Bros characters used to get Oscar nominated a lot in the Animated Short category. In the past couple of decades the closest thing we have to a perennial in that category is Wallace & Gromit or Pixar as a studio, if that counts, though their characters don't repeat.

You know what I think is a crying shame as animated short films go? That Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) didn't really become a franchise. Disney made three short films with the characters after that blockbuster hit: Tummy Trouble, Rollercoaster Rabbit and Trail Mix-Up though none were nominated at the Oscars. They had the misfortune of arriving in that stretch of a dozen years or so when there were never more than 3 nominees in that category.
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Julianne Moore, Bird Woman

For no particular reason whatsoever, a Julianne Moore post!

Julianne may have just been snubbed by her fellow actors for a SAG nomination but the exotic animals still love her. As does her bank account.

Julianne Moore and cockatoo

Seems like she's always hawking some product. Remember Revlon and the Coach bags? Next up: Bulgari. She's worked for them before but a new campaign "eccentric charisma" is on the way. I can't even begin to summarize the press release but I must quote...

Julianne Moore's extraordinary combination of Pre-Raphaelite splendor, sharp intelligence and contemporary charisma was captured for the occasion by photographers Mert Alas & Marcus Piggot, who chose a setting with an Oriental flavor. Opulent and richly colored as an exotic boudoir, furnished with sumptuous pillows, plush brocades, purple satin and peacock feathers, this is the frame that transforms Ms. Moore's unique beauty into a contemporary odalisque - mysterious, luminous and sophisticated. The utterly unexpected presence of exotic animals underscore her irresistible eccentricity and a temperament that defies all preconceptions.

That's what called "laying it on thick" yes? So so many adjectives. But she deserves them all.
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Curio: Odes to Tippi Hedren

Alexa from Pop Elegantiarum here. Maybe I'm just in Mad Men withdrawal, but lately I've been watching films from the early 60s with a closer eye to the fashion, mores, and themes of the time. After catching Marnie recently, I decided that Tippi Hedren is the closest Betty Draper doppelganger; with Hitchcock she had the same icy model facade hiding an unravelled interior. (Check out this old magazine with Tippi; modeling and horses, how very Betty!) Here are some crafty celebrations of the icon that I'm loving right now.


I really dig this chunky Tippi statement necklace by Melissa Loschy. She literally gives her wings. (And she's made some jewelry odes to Hitchcock, too.)


I especially fell in love with this fantastic Halloween costume awaitingdawn posted recently. A bird attack chapeau! Why didn't I think of that? And if anyone can come up with a Marnie costume idea for next year, let me know. Something involving a horse, perhaps?

Did you know that February is...

...National Bird Feeding Month? Well, it is. Feed the birds. Julie Andrews demands it.

the young ones are hungry, their nests are so bare...

Feed those birds. Feed them Tippi Hedren if you must, but feed them. Our winged friends need to consume half their body weight every day. (Ah, another excuse to throw The Birds into the DVD player. )

February is also Black History Month, American Heart Month and Chocolate Lovers Month but somehow I always get so tied up with Oscar that everything else that the shortest month of the year has to offer is forgotten. So here's to chocolate, birds, black history and Oscar winners.

Whoopi and bird

No, I have no idea where I'm going with this... sometimes I just start typing and can't stop. Plus I'm detoxing from Oscar and I never know where I'm going post that.

Do you? If so, help me!
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Which Bird Porns?

Mobile post sent by nathanielr using Utterli.  Replies.  mp3

You're So Vain. You Probably Think These Links Are About You

Jim Hill remembers effects man Stan Winston (RIP)
<--- MSN asks both Michelle Pfeiffer & Julianne Moore to eat donuts. It always freaks me out when I see my two ruling movie goddesses pictured together, in articles not written by... myself.
MNPP Guillermo Del Toro woos his already drooling fanboy legions with this "quote of the day"
Zombie Daily Rob Sacchetto draws a new zombie every day!
Accidental Sexiness Pedro, Penelope, and Blanca Portillo hit Madrid to promote Broken Embraces
Topless Robot Barbie as Tippi Hedren in The Birds? I LOVE IT.
Cinephilia the quotable Arden has unkind words for DDL in There Will Be Blood
Twitch Tony Jaa is finally on his way back to cinemas (what has he been doing?)
Bright Lights After Dark raves out on the career of Vera Farmiga. Maybe I should stick in this Never Forever DVD I have sitting here
Evening Class on TCM's "Asian Images in Film" series
The Guardian There's always someone. A defense of The Happening. Although when a defense starts with "it's not that bad" hasn't the debate already been lost?
Star East Hugh Grant and Zhang Ziyi to co-star in a romantic comedy?

And just in case you think I forgot about my love for them, I haven't. Here's a photo of The Bening, her sister in law Shirley Maclaine, her hubbie (and Shirley's kid brother) Warren Beatty who were all at the AFI tribute to [drum roll please].... WARREN BEATTY Congratulations your awesomeness! I love you.


If you haven't seen and worshipped his contributions to the cinema such as Reds, Shampoo, Bugsy, Bulworth, Bonnie & Clyde and Splendor in the Grass among others, than frankly, your loss. Get on that, will you?
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Pfeiffer Forever

Michelle Pfeiffer Blog-a-Thon Headquarters

Scroll down for my article and a list of all 37 participating blogs
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Libby Gelman Waxner, the humor columnist for Premiere once remarked that Michelle Pfeiffer was 'what God had in mind for humanity before the blueprints got all dusty and smudged in the glove compartment'. I've come to cherish such old school hosannas to her cinematic grandeur like they were ancient scripture. Since we don't see much of her these days, her name spoken aloud often registers as a surprise. I hear the name with its own exclamation point. In last year's brilliant Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man there's a scene in which Timothy Treadwell, the film's "star" of sorts, talks about the bears and their mating rituals. He calls the most desired female 'the Michelle Pfeiffer of grizzly bears.' For such a supposedly ideal human specimen, this was not the first time Pfeiffer was mistaken for an animal.

The Ferocity of Pfeiffer

This not-quite-human effect started with Ladyhawke in 1985. Prior to that she ran the risk of being an interchangeable member of Hollywood's blonde beauty pack (infinite in number they are). There was the gum chomping Pink Lady of Grease 2 and the angry icy Elvira from Scarface but she was still just an actress... merely human. She was not yet "PFEIFFER" the star. It would take this mystical role in Ladyhawke as Isabeau, a woman who was also a bird, and simple aging to make her beauty truly alien. Once the softness of youth faded you imagine her onscreen lovers could cut themselves on the browline or cheekbone. The features slowly starting revealing their exquisite if angular architecture. She is rumored to have landed the Isabeau part after a comedic audition in which she imitated our feathered friends. But Catwoman aside, it's not usually a laughing matter when Pfeiffer lets her inner animal roar.

It wasn't even a laughing matter in Ladyhawke. The comedy was delivered by the headlining star Matthew Broderick (intentionally) and its anachronistic synthesized rock score (unintentionally). Pfeiffer's work was all serious "I am sorrow" suffering. She doesn't go for laughs, she goes for the jugular. Not just as an actor but as a budding star. They say that many great stars understand intuitively their rapport with the camera. She must have known then, when she turned to the camera in the moonlight that black hood framing her otherworldly beauty, what a gift the film and the character were to her. Beautiful. Tragic. Not entirely human. The studio would wisely lift the image for the movie's poster. Broderick was the marketable star but Pfeiffer as a legendary face was the great takeaway of the film.

The Isabeau performance isn't avian in shape the way her later correlative woman/animal work was in Batman Returns, when she gave in completely to the stylization. But a nonhuman or animalistic detail finds its way into many performances. Is it the way her tongue sometimes lifts tantalizingly up, too visible in her mouth --not a cheap come hither, lip-licking starlet movement but just something her mouth does, opening with anticipation. Perhaps she's waiting to be fed? But mostly I see the animal in her eyes. Watch any given film and you'll see it. They move too quickly surveying danger or registering movement or, more distinctly, they refuse to move at all. It's in those killer shots where she holds her gaze a beat or two too long on a co-star that you begin to wonder. What is the person is to her? Friend? Lover? (gulp) Prey?

All of these fascinating alien or animal intensities are in full bloom in White Oleander (2002), which I consider among her very strongest work. In an excellent review in Salon, Stephanie Zacharek wrote:

"Ingrid, as Pfeiffer plays her, has both the look and composure of a self-possessed lizard: Her eyes, which we normally know to be a dazzling blue, are icy and cold here, and you could probably count the number of times she blinks during the whole movie."

I haven't counted Stephanie, but I trust that the number is very small. If Pfeiffer had been any less beautiful as a woman, her intensity as an actor would have scared audiences away long ago.

Bird. Deer. Reptile. Wolf. Cat

Comparing Pfeiffer to a reptile was not my idea but I was glad to hear someone else bear witness to her animal within. Back in Ladyhawke Rutger Hauer's man/wolf initally reads as the more imposing creature but it's Pfeiffer's woman/bird that gets scarier with the running time. See that unwaveringly ferocious contempt with which Isabeau locks her gaze on the bishop late in the film. One senses immediately that were this the bird and not the woman standing before him, he would already be missing his eyes.

From her breakthrough days as a cursed bird Pfeiffer's animal instints continue. You could claim the next incarnation as that startled frozen deer in Dangerous Liaisons but for this movie watcher, it's in the area of predator not prey where Pfeiffer comes alive. There's an extra kick to her work as Isabeau and Ingrid and Catwoman or any of her angry but more recognizably human characters that you don't get her in lighter or passive fare. It's her savagery peaking through. Maybe she played the wrong role in Liaisons. It's amazing when you stop to look over Pfeiffer's gallery of characters, that Merteuil and Valmont even made it to the final reel, let alone devoured her.

I get angry whenever watching Wolf that the film is tricked up with special effects to convey the lycanthrophe within. When that film's trailer first appeared in 1994 the marketing hook was all about winkily joking with the audience about the familiarity of Jack Nicholson as a beast, a tactic that also worked wonders back when the two stars first teamed for The Witches of Eastwick. In the trailer Pfeiffer is merely seen slumbering enticingly in a nightgown. I never bought that Sleeping Beauty routine for a second. I knew the film would contain more than one beast. And sure enough, there she was in the film haughty, hostile, bitter and even in the throes of passion, no schoolgirl pushover. At the end of that film after her character Laura has been bitten by a werewolf and her course is set, they throw yellow contacts on this goddesses baby blues. It's a redundant move. You've always been able to see the beast within.

It's for all of these reasons perhaps that Catwoman is so identifiable as a career peak. Never mind that that part was not originally hers (Annette Bening backed out when she became pregnant), it's a perfect fusion of actress and material and timing. She's fully in command of all of the tools in the actors arsenal, careful character modulation, comedic timing, physical and vocal control, ferocious nerve (try doing this without looking foolish. I dare you), and playful stylizations perfectly attuned to the director's sensibility. It's a great work of performance art. Everyone remembers those clever quips, her overt cat gestures (the licking. ohhhh the licking), and her hilarious throwaway "meow." I have one special favorite moment I find too delicious. Catwoman is having a conversation with the Penguin and she's circling a bird cage in his lair. Her laser focus hypnotically shifts from Penguin to the tiny bird and it's like there is no actress at all. Only this cat, this meal, this teasing game in her head.

She's a killer.



Pfans Make Me Hot
Your Blog-a-Thon Participants (Listed in Alpha Order)

As Little As Possible "...A Galaxy Pfar Pfar Away"
Auteur Lust "Cinema's Own Forbidden Fruit"
Being Boring "My Sexual Awakening (in Black Vinyl)"
Cinephilia "My (Sex) Life with Michelle Pfeiffer"
Coffee Coffee and More Coffee on Ladyhawke
Cutting Room "What Lies Within (Great Talent)"
film ick on What Lies Beneath
The Flick Filosopher on Catwoman's "gyno-power"
The Gilded Moose "BREAKING: Pfeiffer Pissed"
Girish on The Fabulous Baker Boys
Glitterati Gossip "Truly Timeless"
Mainly Movies "Susie Diamond is Forever"
Many Rantings of John on One Fine Day
ModFab "Pfeiffer's Fabulous Five"
Movies Madness "Pfor Ever and Always"
Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man on Batman Returns
My New Plaid Pants "Mistress of the Dark"
Nicks Flick Picks on A Thousand Acres
Noel Vera on Batman Returns
nOvaslim "Haute Poosee"
O.P.A.L. on her fandom
Oh My Trill "My Life Without Michelle"
!! omg blog !! "Catscratch Fever"
Oscar and the City Two memories of Pfeiffer
Pfangirl "Diary of a Lapsed Pfan"
Popbytes "Pfeiffer is an Amazon Woman"
Pop on the Rocks "Pfeiffer of the Opera"
Queer Beacon on White Oleander
Queering the Apparatus "Ohhhhh Witchy Woman"
Sarcasm w/ Light Cream Sauce on Witches... & Tequila Sunrise
Scene Stealer Top Five Performances
six things "Six Degrees of Michelle Pfeiffer"
A Socialite's Life on Michelle's comeback
Stale Popcorn Michelle in costumed glory
Stinky Lulu on Grease 2
That Round-Headed Boy "Michelle Pfeiffer's Short Stuff"
The World of Ramification Hottie of the Week



If you're just joining us... check out the blog entire. It's not all Pfeiffer all the time. [This is not a perfect world -ed]. It's just all Pfeiffer this week (the great one's birthday is tomorrow, woohoo) and whenever the topic blissfully comes up

If you need regular heavy doses of Pfeiffer here are the best websites on the net: Official Pfeiffer Admiration Location (updated frequently) * Michelle Pfeiffer: The Face * Bond's Michelle Pfeiffer Page * Noelle's Michelle Pfeiffer Page (dormant but extensive) * Pfandom (this is my own. Not regularly updated as it was pre-blog) *

UPDATE: If you liked this blog-a-thon check out the two others the film experience has hosted since: Vampires (October 2006) and Action Heroines (June 2007)

tags: Michelle Pfeiffer, catwoman, movies, cinema, celebrities

Movie Mashups 2

Don't ask. [click on image to left to see it in full] I can't even pretend to know where this thought came from. Maybe, like Harper Pitt, I am just hallucinating Antarctica.

Previous Movie Mashup: Crash the Musical and last year's mixes.

Current Movie Mashup now playing at a theater near you? King Kong. How many movies does Jackson reference in this thing? I ask sincerely. Loved the unexpected shout out to Billy Elliott. Kong is great fun but Jackson apparently never got any notes of the "less is more" variety or "quit while you're ahead," etc... This one goes to eleven.

March of the Penguin Lovers

So I go waddling off to this movie March of the Penguinstwo nights back with my favorite co-worker. I say 'waddling' because the nights events centered around penguins and, prior to the film, we ate scrumptious fattening cupcakes at Billy's Bakeryon 9th Avenue.

My friend and I both love penguins so naturally our response to the release was "we are there!" This might account for the movie's already sensational box office. At $16 million and counting it's one of the most successful docs ever. If everyone (literally) who loved penguins were to go see it I shudder to think how high the box office could go... it could share icy waters with Titanic, because, who doesn't love those cute tuxedoed critters?

[SPOILERS AHEAD] Surprisingly, for a movie about exceptionally cute birds who can't fly, it's also hard to watch at times. Penguins do die. One violent death felt uneccessary to show -exploitive even. Why show that? For When Animals Attack thrills? No thank you. And for every cute awkward floppy moment there's at least two ominous: "but it gets worse!" style doomsday narrative bombs for our favorite wild animal friends to fear. My co-worker cried basically the whole time. But for me the most difficult moment was a slow shot of one egg cracking and filling with ice. Deeply sad.

It's not that March of the Penguin doesn't revel in cuteness --it just doesn't have to work for that part. What it really wants to do is teach. The movie is educational, too... at least in that trivia-game "I did not know that" way. But I couldn't help but feel that the narrative was very narrowly focused --As if it did not want to overburden me in any way with thoughts extraneous to penguin marriage, childrearing and fidelity. Did Rick Santorum edit it? Kidding. (sort of) What I mean is that the movie just kept dropping issues as they came up if they did not relate to the procreative miracle. Were the filmmakers not interested in the penguins who didn't pair up or produce offspring? Or lost offspring halfway through but still seemed to be helping the team survive the winter? I cared about those marchers too. The movie doesn't.

After the movie in all its cool beauty (ice is really photogenic) was over I did feel a little bad for being hyper-critical. So I waddled away slightly embarrassed but happy to have basked in arctic cuteness for 80 minutes. B