First and Last, May Flowers

the first image after the opening credit sequence (also filled with florals) and the last image before the end credits


Can you guess the movie?

Highlight for the answer: THE AGE OF INNOCENCE (1993). But doesn't it make you want to burst out into that My Fair Lady song "The Street Where You Live"

For all quizzes, click on the first and last label below.
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May Flowers, Vertigo

For the finale of May Flowers I thought we should gaze at Alfred Hitchcock's immortal Vertigo(1958). Aside from Vertigo descendants like Robert Altman's Three Women or David Lynch's Mulholland Drive what film is more appropriate for this time of year when we're ruled by twin sign Gemini? Hitchcock films generally deserve complete dissertations but we don't have Scottie Ferguson's (Jimmy Stewart) stamina when it comes to fetishizing doppelgangers. So in the space of this blogpost we merely glance at his introductions to Madeleine/Judy (Kim Novak).


Ferguson has been hired to follow Madeleine and as he first spots her in the deep rose red restaurant, Hitchock slow zooms out from Scottie (far right) at the bar and pans left, following his gaze, into the dining area filled with flowers and well heeled customers and even a painting of a floral arrangement framed by floral arrangements before it finally stops at Madeleine (tiny, far left) in her emerald green dress.

As she leaves the restaurant we get Kim Novak's first bewitching close up, carefully calibrated and emphasized by Hitchcock's editor George Tomasini and cinematographer Robert Burks. Scottie likes what he sees but this is a job.

Some enchanted evening
You may see a stranger,
you may see a stranger
Across a crowded room
And somehow you know,
You know even then
That somewhere you'll see her
Again and again.

-"Some Enchanted Evening" from South Pacific which (trivia note!) opened in theaters two months before Vertigo.

Scottie will indeed be seeing Madeleine again and again. His interest is piqued. Hitchcock sees this man's spiral into obsession coming long before he does. When Scottie next follows Madeleine she enters a door in an alley way and he enters, not knowing what he'll find there.

This is psychologically astute visual storytelling. Once he's in pursuit, Scottie is cast into shadow and suddenly it's all color, flowers, woman. This will be happening to Scottie again and again, albeit not in the literal sense. His personality will darken (obsessive bullying voyeur coming right up) and soon his life will be entirely focused on colors (it must be the gray suit!), flowers (his eyes darting from bouquet to bouquet) and this particular woman. All he will be able to see is Madeleine.

Or Judy as the case may be...


Scottie also first "meets" (okay, stalks) Judy, who looks suspiciously like Madeleine, in a setting bursting with colored petals. His eye is drawn there by a familiar bouquet... And then he spots Judy, introduced with a right profile closeup just like Madeleine. Her shot isn't as elegant but she's from Selina, Kansas. What did you expect?


Though she lacks Madeleine's class, she's practically a fraternal twin. Scottie will force the issue until she's identical. Hitchcock, Novak and Stewart aren't afraid to commit to unlikeable characters (pity that neither actor was Oscar-nominated for this, but then Oscar treated this masterpiece quite shabbily, extending only sound and art direction nominations) and the movie is richer and darker for it.

Vertigo makes you dizzy with its duplicate women, tripled bouquets -- oops, I didn't mention the third woman, Carlotta Valdes, and that painting that hypnotizes Madeleine? No?!


We can't venture there, lest we be sucked into the knotty insane spiral of all of these doppelgangers. We don't want to end up like Scottie or Madeleine who'll violently toss her flowers into the river before jumping in herself.

This movie was all too much for her.


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May Flowers, Sex and The City

May Flowers

I'm not sure that Georgia O'Keeffe would have loved Sex & The City but I'm pretty sure Sex & The City loves Georgia O'Keeffe. Those lady flowers are everywhere.


While it's true that you can't really make a wedding movie without a floral arrangement, Sex... doesn't just use flowers for the bouquet toss.

Just give me the damn symbolic vaginas
-The Bachelor (1999)

Flowers cling to Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie Bradshaw like she's a one woman photosynthesis factory. It'd be a stretch to say that every costume includes them but more often than not costume designer Patricia Field has dipped Carrie in vats of them: green florals (buying an apartment), red (bragging about her boyfriend), purple (single again), huge gigantor white florals just because. She's a photosynthesis factory and a color wheel.

Subtlety has never been Sex and the City's strong suit. The movie is all about the act of handing her ladyparts over to Big permanently, so they must be fully visualized. She even beats Big over the head with them!


Carrie has never been a shrinking violet, she's always an exhibitonist. She parades it around. She turns heads with it on the street. She even writes best selling books about it as you know.

The other women are not without their own floral motifs. Charlotte (Kristin Davis), always the most subdued, doesn't wear a lot of flowers but she's named her daughter "Lily" so she's done her part. Her sexuality was always goal oriented anyway.

The older women get floral representation too, albeit with less saturation. Carrie's envious editor (Candice Bergen) has given up. She's framed hers and hung it in her office.


Samantha (Kim Cattrall), who kept Sex in Sex and the City (the TV show) even when it forgot its libido late in the run, isn't having a lot of sex (in the movie). She wears no florals but in one key sequence she decides that she must have a pricey bit of jewelry at auction.

This flower ring is the essence of me. One of a kind.

It's a symbolic vagina for a symbolic vagina (oh, the folds and layers!). See, her boyfriend Smith Jerrod also wants to purchase the ring and Samantha's entire subplot becomes a tug of war between them. Smith wants her ladyparts for himself. She wants them back.

This leaves two characters and they're both conspicuously lacking in the flower power. 'Saint Louise from St Louis' (Jennifer Hudson) has no vagina. Poor thing. She's only there to help Carrie, so I guess they figure she doesn't need one?

And finally there's Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) who definitely has one but is being punished for pretending she doesn't. Her vagina is furious and only comes out once (barely visible: black on dark brown) to warn Big away from Carrie's vagina.

My vagina's angry. It is. It's pissed off. My vagina's furious and it needs to talk.
-The Vagina Monologues

Miranda is all work work work and 'let's get this over with' mood killer. Unless she learns to let Steve in, she'll never be able to wear bright floral prints again!

P.S. We'll find out if Miranda is back in bloom when Sex and the City 2 opens next year on this very weekend.
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"Crazy" May Flowers

May Flowers, evenings at 11... or thereabouts

I go crazy, crazy, baby, I go crazy
You turn it on - then you're gone
Yeah you drive me crazy, crazy

Remember when Liv Tyler wasn't yet "Arwen" and Alicia Silverstone wasn't yet "Cher"?



Yeah, me neither. (That was so many career phases ago. Crazy, indeed)

[This 1995 flashback has been brought to you by three vodka tonics and visiting friends from Michigan. gulp]

May Flowers, Sean Penn

May Flowers, evenings at 11... or thereabouts

Playing against type is an ancient Oscar-winning trick but it only works if you do it really well (or if enough people are hoodwinked into believing you've done it really well). A lot of people, including myself and Academy voters, rethought Sean Penn last fall due to his twinkly and affable work in Milk. The famously sour Penn was suddenly funny, likeable, warm... sweet even.

Sean Penn in 1996. Sweet smiling Sean was always in their somewhere.

In other words, not "Sean Penn".

How on earth will he follow Harvey Milk up?

He himself probably isn't feeling the pressure, "Great Actor" status having been granted long long ago, but I was curious. Would he return to directing, to more typically Penn parts? Turns out the 48 year-old actor is booked until he's 50. At least. He's got five new identities lined up for our cinematic enjoyment over the next two years.

Contemplative Narrating Penn: In Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (previous post) he plays "adult Jack" and since the film is focused on a father (Brad Pitt) and his three boys... I guess that means Sean Penn is playing Brad Pitt's son. Brad really did age in reverse!

Political Penn: In Doug Liman's Bush era dramatization Fair Game he's Joseph Wilson, the administration's nemesis and husband to CIA Agent Valerie Plame, played here by Naomi Watts. It's their third time playing Very Intense Screen Couple (see also: 21 Grams and The Assassination of Richard Nixon).

Tough Penn: I'm not sure who he is playing in Cartel, but it involves guards protecting a lawyer trying a mafia case.

Slapstick Penn: He's "Larry" in the Farrely Brothers The Three Stooges... but you knew that already. Jim Carrey is "Curly" and Benicio Del Toro is "Moe"

Rock Star Penn: I saved the oddest one for last. Odder than The Three Stooges? Maybe not. Okay okay, I saved the furthest away for last. Paolo Sorrentino, the Italian writer/director behind the award winning Il Divo, is prepping a movie called This Must Be the Place. The plot is unusual. A retired rocker (Penn) decides to find his dad's executioner, a former Nazi.

Excited for Penn's upcoming projects? Or are you more excited about the continuing drama of the on again off again on again off again on again off again (I actually think that's the right number of times) Robin Wright Penn divorce? Can those two crazy kids make it work? Or make it work again as the case may be?

May Flowers, Frances and Frances

May Flowers, evenings at 11

It's not a crime to look at Lange. So herewith, Frances Farmer in her prime (surrounded by... hmm, levitating flowers?) and the woman who played her in 1982's Frances, Jessica Lange. There are no flowers in this old photograph of Lange but I think you'll agree that she was in full bloom.


I've never seen any of Frances Farmer's movies (she didn't make many. Any suggestions?) so maybe that was a minor obstacle for me, but I am not a fan of the film. But I do enjoy a good Old Hollywood biopic. It's the one type of biopic that holds immediate appeal for me. So, can we please get some more of them about old Hollywood? Like... a lot more of them. Let's immortalize the immortals.

Didn't you love those lavish scenes in The Aviator when Jude Law was pretending to be Erroll Flynn and Cate Blanchett was pretending to be Katharine Hepburn and neither of them had to break a sweat to drip Old Hollywood charisma? I almost wish Scorsese had let a few other directors onto those sets to film other Old Hollywood biopics simultaneously.

But back to Frances... If the 1982 movie is to be believed Ms. Farmer was a self sabotaging volatile handful. Have you ever stopped to wonder which of today's superstar actresses are actually crazy people under their carefully constructed public personæ? On that note, you know there'll be an Angelina Jolie biopic by 2056!

My vote for a modern actress that deserves a stellar bio is Mia Farrow. My vote for an old Hollywood glamor movie (a la The Aviator) is Jean Harlow or -- I'm too predictable -- Norma Shearer... but especially if Joan Crawford figures prominently in that screenplay.


What's your dream movie star bio?
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May Flowers, Sophia Loren

May Flowers, weeknights @ 11:00

Sophia Loren in her twenties... Voluptuous!


Bizarre but true confession: I think I've only seen three Loren pictures (gasp!) and I only really remember one of them (Robert Altman's Pret-a-Porter, 1994).

Are you a Sophia fan? If so, which movies and performances do you most recommend? I mean besides her Oscar winning role in Two Women (1961).

<--- The movie star in Rome a few months before her 30th birthday (from LIFE Magazine). She turns 75 on September 20th this year. Is this a national holiday in Italy?

More to the contemporary point: Have you made a countdown chart for Nine the Musical yet? I'm tempted to build a 200 piece chain link out of construction paper, hang it on the wall and tear one link off each day until the movie opens. Not that I would know that Nine opens in exactly 200 days . I'm... uh... guessing. That's right. Guessing!


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May Flowers, Sleeping Beauty

May Flowers, weeknights @ 11:00

I don't know how many of you know this since I don't talk about animation that much but Sleeping Beauty is my favorite Disney classic. I love the color palette, the villain, the Prince (hubba hubba), and Briar Rose herself: keeper of the tiniest waist since Mammy cinched Scarlett O'Hara up tight by the bedposts.


I also enjoy "their most honored and exalted excellencies, the three good fairies"... or as Maleficent memorably dubs them, "the rabble."

Each fairy can give one gift to Princess Aurora (she's renamed for this movie for some reason). Flora the lead fairy, her name drawn from plant life, is first... "Little Princess, my gift shall be the gift of beauty" and then we get trippy visuals of flowers and the cosmos and a creepy choral number, too

One gift, beauty rare,
Gold of sunshine in her hair,
Lips that shame the red, red rose,
She'll walk in springtime wherever she goes!

Fauna gives the gift of song... though I'm not sure how that correlates to animal life... oh yes, birds! Merryweather gives... well Merryweather isn't really about anything other than comic relief and her love for the color blue. But blue is better than pink, so I always take Merryweather's side.

To escape Maleficent's curse, Flora suggests turning Aurora into a flower. Fauna likes the idea "Oh, she'd make a lovely flower!" But Merryweather (the best fairy, remember) warns that Maleficent will send a frost "she always ruins your best flowers." Maleficent manages to curse the girl anyway.


Cut to the tail end of the movie, this rare beauty with golden sunshine in her hair is awoken by love's true kiss. She holds a rose to her bosom. It wasn't shamed to be seen with her red red lips.
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May Flowers, Princess Grace of Monaco

May Flowers, weeknights @ 11:00

Fifty-four years ago last month, way back in 1955, movie star Grace Kelly attended the Cannes Film Festival (pictured below) -- it was held in April in those days. She had just headlined two Alfred Hitchcock hits Rear Window and Dial M for Murder and just barely won the Oscar for Country Girl. To Catch a Thief was arriving later that summer. She was in short, as super as superstars get.


During this very trip to Cannes she met Prince Rainier of Monaco! How crazy must that year have been for her? The courtship was aggressive and they married the following April.

Their royal union made her even more famous but ended her film career. Kelly never made another motion picture (though two were released in 1956: The Swan and High Society) and Prince Rainier subsequently banned screening of her films (according to at least one website it's still illegal to show Kelly films in Monaco). Reportedly the marriage got in the way of two comeback trips, the actress wanted to make: a reunion with Hitchcock for Marnie (1962) which went to Tippi Hedren and the ballet drama The Turning Point (1977) which eventually starred Shirley Maclaine and Anne Bancroft. In short, Prince Rainier was an enemy of the cinema.

If you stop to think about it, Cannes not only makes international movie careers it also destroys them. Exhibit: Grace Kelly.

The 62nd annual Festival de Cannes kicks off a week from today running May 13th through the 24th.

May Flowers, My Fair Lady

May Flowers, weeknights @ 11:00

The very first images we see in the classic musical and Best Picture winner My Fair Lady, before during and immediately after the opening credits are shots of flowers. Why the extensive florals? Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) is your main character is why. She's a flower girl. Not the kind what walks the aisle, mind you, but the kind what sells them on the street. Just so long as she stays off the curb. Almost as soon as we've seen her, dishevelled in the rain, she collides into dreamboat Freddy (it's still a mystery to me why she doesn't fall for him) and her wares go flying.

Look where you're going dear. Look where you're going. Two bunches of violets trod in the mud. A full day's wages.

When Freddy apologizes and walks away she tries some recompense from his controlling mum

Oh, he's your son is he? Well if you'd done your duty by him as a mother, you wouldn't let him spoil a poor girl's flowers and run away without payin'

Er... is she talking about what I think she's talking about? These old movies are so jammed with subtext.

Soon Eliza Dolittle is whisked off to live with Professor Higgins (Rex Harrison) as a socioeconomic / linguistic experiment but also as an elaborate three hour plot meant to transform her into Audrey Hepburn who the audience already knows she is. These old movies are as meta as modern ones.

But in every stage of her progression from Eliza to Audrey she's surrounded in florals. When she first enters Professor Higgins worlds she's surrounding by floral wallpaper and framed by clocks with floral decors. All the while she's dreaming of obtaining work in a florist shop. But first she needs to speak more genteel like.


Then when we first see her bedroom during her romantic awakening ("I Could Have Danced All Night") every inch of it is covered with delicate wallpaper of tiny flowers. By the time she hits the races they've gone to her head... the top and sides of her head and inside, too. She's a florid handful

Somebody pinched it and what I say is, them has pinched it done her in!

She only leaves the bloom and petals behind during her exquisite silver and shimmering coming out ball -- "I can tell that she was born Hungarian! ...a movie star -- but that night turns deeply unhappy.

So she leaves Higgins in anger. Now, she's no longer Eliza (flower girl) nor Audrey (screen royalty) but the cinematic fusion that the movie is waiting for her to be: The elegant movie star who is still wistfully connected to the humbler origins of her character.


Loverly.

I sometimes wish the movie ended right there with Eliza on her own, ready to explore her new identity. Wrap it up before the Freddy romance and that dread dutiful wife business with Professor Higgins slippers. But then, I'm a sucker for melancholy and complicated endings. And I really hate those damn slippers. I've half a mind to shy them at Higgins myself.

Take your slippers and may you never have a day's luck with them!

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May Flowers

May Flowers, Italian Style

May Flowers

May Flowers, Posterized

May Flowers Mash-Up

Presenting...

Perfume: The Story of An American Beauty
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May Flowers

May Flowers

April Showers Bring May Flowers

Before You Die, Uma Thurman's Career Flashes Before Your Eyes

Having never had a near-death experience, I have no idea how true it is that your life flashes before your eyes before you die. But given my actress, um, proclivities I wouldn’t be surprised if before I die, Uma Thurman’s life flashes before mine. She’s long been a divisive actress but whatever her flaws, she’s easy on the eyes.

Uma Thurman, even prettier than flowers. Well done God.

If one were feeling generous one could say roughly the same thing about her latest showcase, the drama The Life Before Her Eyes. It doesn’t want for surface beauty. But let’s set generosity aside, beauty being skin deep.

The Life Before Her Eyes is based, faithfully I hear, on the acclaimed novel by Laura Kasischke. It’s the story of two teenage girls whose lives are interrupted by a high school shooting. This might read like a spoiler but it’s early in the picture: the girls are trapped at gunpoint by a murderous classmate and asked to decide who should live and who should die. It’s a Sophie’s Choice moment but since it’s the kick off point to the story it lacks the potency of that wrenching reference point. The story splits itself in two, following one of the girls (Diana) as both an adolescent in the days before the shooting and as an adult still suffering survivor’s guilt and depression as the 15th anniversary of the shooting approaches...

Read the Full Review @ Pajiba
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