Digital celluloid

Perusing my past blog entries I realized that I haven't reported on any movies that I had seen of late. Maybe that's what spurred me to do some writin' on this particular evening. Or maybe it was the purchase of a DVD collection of Preston Sturges' films this past weekend. Or perhaps even the start of Turner Classic Movies' 31 Days of Oscar programming.

Have I mentioned that I like movies? Gosh, I sure do! My current preference is for older movies, and there are so many out there that supply will never exceed my demand. There are two that I've seen of late that I must write about, one a newer film while the other is an older flick.

A very young and attractive Barbara Stanwyck stars in 1933's Baby Face. The film is about a girl whose father runs a speakeasy in their apartment catering to workers from a nearby factory. Stanwyck plays Lily Powers, who serves up beer and pleasures of the flesh to the customers. A few second shot in the movie, left on the cutting room floor in 1933 but restored by the Library of Congress in 2004, tells us that Lily has been pimped out by her dad since she was 14. Dad dies when his still explodes on him one night, so Lily finds herself out in the big world looking for a job. She finds one in a bank and soon finds that she can sleep her way to the top with each successive boss (she sleeps with the HR guy who does the hiring to get her job in the first place). I can't help but think that this film was the business model for Madonna's career. As she sleeps her way to the top, Lily manages to ruin a few relationships and engagements along the way, and manages to shrug off the suicide of one of her suitors in the film. It's an average movie in terms of quality, but I like Stanwyck's performance in this movie. And while Hollywood did have production codes in place at the time, they were not really enforced. Baby Face is one of the movies, if not the one, that caused Hollywood to crack down and enforce those codes.

Little Miss Sunshine. What to say about this movie? I had heard good things about it and watched to see it for myself. What a great movie. In a nutshell, a dysfunctional family takes a road trip to California so their daughter can compete in a child's beauty pageant. Greg Kinnear is the unlikeable dad who's trying to pitch his 9-step "Be A Winner" self-help plan. Alan Arkin is great in his role of the grandfather who helps Olive (played by Abigail Breslin) choreograph her talent routine for the competition. Steve Carell plays the gay former professor who tries to kill himself after being spurned by one of his graduate students. To the credit of the movie his role is not one of an over the top gay man, but someone coming to terms with rejection and the collapse of his world (a theme that plays out a couple of times in the movie). For me this movie was almost like The Grapes of Wrath meets National Lampoon's Vacation: a family which is in danger of falling apart heads out to California, the land of sunshine, a family member dies along the way. What a great movie. It pokes as much fun at children's beauty pageants as it does the family's adventures getting to California. And the ending is well worth waiting for.