I, Tonya and an Obituary I Left Out Nearly 14 Years Ago

Yesterday, when I left Walmart (and yeah, go ahead and slam me for buying stuff there), I came across a Redbox kiosk and noticed that the film, I, Tonya, was now out on DVD (and likely download and so forth).  I went and rented it.

It was a good film although there must have been 10,000 f-words sprinkled throughout the movie.  Tonya Harding and then-husband Jeff Gillooly might have used such endearments in their real lives, but there is no reason to take up half the film with the obscenities.  Otherwise, it was a good movie, with Allison Janney deserving her best supporting Oscar as Harding's estranged and strange mother, LaVona Fay ("Sandy") Golden.  While Australian actress (and a producer of the film) Margot Robbie did well in the part of the beleaguered and disgraced former skating champion, she looked nothing like the real Harding.  She appeared to be way too tall for the part.  There was not one hint of an accent, which shows me how well some performers can hide their nationality (Robbie has a noticeable Aussie accent in interviews).

The movie basically is  what is known as a "mockumentary" using Citzen Kane-type flashbacks from "interviews" of Harding, her mother, her ex-husband, and those involved in the assault on Harding's skating rival Nancy Kerrigan back in 1994.  Harding, the real one, has always denied any direct involvement in the assault.  I am not going pass judgment on this case because then, as now, the details surrounding the events leading up to the assault have always been murky.  I personally kind of doubt she had much involvement in it because she had little to gain from it.  As it turned out, it completely destroyed her skating career--and she was one hell of a skater being the first American woman to complete a triple axel in formal competition--and it completely altered her life.   Born in 1970 and growing up in Portland, Oregon,  Harding mostly lived the rest of her life to date in relative obscurity, remarrying and raising a son in Washington state, and holding down a variety of (often male-dominated) jobs until this movie came out.

Not that her life up to that point was much to brag about.  Harding and her mother, as documented in the film, had a strained relationship.  No doubt the mother, Sandy, was a hard worker, working as many as three jobs to help her daughter become a professional athlete.  She sacrificed and sacrificed, and she never let Harding forget it.  She was one of those mothers who lived vicariously through her daughter, but she constantly belittled and verbally abused her.  She even physically abused her from time to time.  I can relate because I had a verbally abusive mother who was not the extreme of Harding's mother, but she was damaging nonetheless.  I could see why Harding felt so beaten down all her life and why she seemingly had a "hard," don't-give-a-shit demeanor.  Moreover, Harding in the film and in real life would now be called "gender non-conforming" because she liked a lot of so-called male things like hunting and fishing, auto mechanics, welding, and so on down the line.  She wasn't a typical "feminine" woman, and because she wasn't, she wasn't considered the "ideal" skating icon for the judges and other skating bigwigs.  Nancy Kerrigan, on the other hand, was more the ideal and appealed to the bigwigs. 

There was also some humor in the film if one could get past all the obscenities.  No doubt many people, especially younger viewers, went to YouTube to listen to some of the songs on the soundtrack, which were gleaned from the 1970s and 1980s, not the golden age of popular music, but there were some good songs during that time that were the perfect examples of songs that stick in your head for the rest of your life.  I was no exception.  I had heard all the songs on the soundtrack before, but I had to look them up on YouTube.  I eventually downloaded two of them for my iPod Classic, which is still going strong ten years after I bought it:  Supertramp's "Goodbye Stranger," a big hit for the band back in 1979; and "Gloria," a massive, massive, massive hit for singer Laura Branigan back in 1982 and a song that came at the end of the disco era or was even past it. 

And then something truly embarrassing occurred to me.  I have noted so many obituaries over the 15 years (can it really be THAT long) I have had this blog under various names and layouts. Occasionally I have been known to not know someone had died until months later (famed jockey Johnny Longden) or that I thought I had forgotten but in fact didn't forget at all (singer Desmond Dekker), but the case of Laura Branigan has got to be about the most egregious of all not just on my part but on the part of the media.  I had completely overlooked her untimely death in 2004 of an aneurysm she suffered in her sleep after having complained of headaches for a number of weeks.  She never got any medical attention for it.  Branigan had been more low profile in her later years.    Her husband of eighteen years had suffered from cancer, and he died of the disease in around 1996.  She had left show business to care for him and then returned to the stage and eventually to recording.  She was working on an album at the time of her death.  She never remarried.  Anyway, I had completely overlooked her death when it was made public all those years ago.  I decided to make it right today and give her some much needed attention. 

However, I wasn't the only person who screwed up with the late singer.  The entire media fouled up, too, when they couldn't even get her age right.  She was widely reported at the time of her death to be a mere 47 years old.  Now this screw-up would normally would be corrected a day or two after the death announcement.  Not with poor Laura, however.  It wasn't until twelve years later    after some people notified Associated Press there were some errors in her original obituaries.  The media didn't get her age right, or where she grew up:

When the pop singer Laura Branigan died, The Associated Press, relying on information from her management company, reported in an obituary on Aug. 28, 2004, that she was 47 and had been born on July 3, 1957.

After being contacted recently by one of Branigan’s fans, however, the AP conducted a thorough review and established that she had actually been 52 when she died. School records, newspaper articles written about her in the 1950s and 1960s, and testimonials from childhood friends all indicate she was born in 1952.

She is also best described as having grown up in Armonk, not Brewster, as the AP’s original obituary said.

Better late than never.

As for the movie, I give it three-and-a-half stars out of five.

How Many Ex-Wives Did Kris Kringle Have?

Each year at this time, I play classic Christmas movies on my DVD player. I have several movies/TV specials that I play over a period of four days:

Frosty the Snowman
A Christmas Carol (1938)
It Happened on Fifth Avenue
The Shop Around the Corner
Christmas in Connecticut
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
Holiday Inn
White Christmas
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
A Charlie Brown Christmas
It's a Wonderful Life
Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

This year I added another animated classic from Rankin/Bass productions, Santa Claus is Comin' to Town. It was first broadcast on television in 1970, but I never saw it when it came out, and, until yesterday, had never seen it. Rankin/Bass liked to do specials based upon songs, and this one was no exception. It was done with puppets/bendable figurines with stop-motion animation, which must have taken the filmmakers at least a couple of years to do. It was very difficult to do stop-action animation; a simple scene could take weeks if not months.

This one had several big name actors doing the voices, including Keenan Wynn, Fred Astaire (the voice of the mailman who narrated the story), and Mickey Rooney. The plotline was simply a biography of Santa Claus or Kris Kringle. Of course, it wasn't about the REAL "Santa Claus," St. Nicholas, the patron saint of children from which the legend sprang. It was all about him from childhood up to and through the time he began his first Christmas delivering gifts. It was a good movie, especially for children, with great special effects from the animation, but I couldn't help but laugh at the "in-jokes," intentional or not.

I laughed my ass off over the casting of Mickey Rooney as the voice of Santa Claus as an adult. Santa, of course, has always been depicted as an elf, which seem to be an appropriate role for the diminutive Rooney even if he never appeared onscreen. If you pay close attention to the movie, Santa Claus, far from being elfin in height, seems to tower over every other puppet in the movie, with the exception of "Winter," voiced by Keenan Wynn. I wonder if Rooney demanded it as a condition for signing a contract to do the movie.

That was funny enough, but then the movie continued on, depicting a romance between Kringle and his future wife, a puppet much tinier than Kringle/Claus, and it was even funnier. Finally the pair got married, which was shown in this show. I almost fell on the floor from laughter because of course Mickey Rooney was infamous for having so many marriages, so many divorces, paying up so much alimony and child support, and bankruptcies. I wondered aloud where the ex-wives of Kringle were.

Now it is very possible the producers of the film didn't intend to have these in-jokes in the movie, and such in-jokes would go over the head of kids, especially now, but it is equally possible that the producers knew exactly what they were doing when they hired Rooney for the title role.

Anyway, I will never see Santa Claus the same way ever again.

Love and Mercy

I finally got around to watching the film based on the psychological struggles of Brian Wilson, the creative backbone of the Beach Boys, called Love and Mercy. My sister enjoyed the film when she saw it in the theaters this past summer, so when it came out on DVD, I decided to rent a copy.

In some ways the film was confusing as it went back and forth from around the time Wilson and band were recording the album Pet Sounds, an album that is slightly overrated in my view because it was one of those "concept" albums trying to compete with the Beatles' equally overrated Sgt. Pepper, and the period of the 1980s, when Wilson was under the clutches of one Dr. Eugene Landy, one of the biggest assholes of the twentieth century. He was a complete and total quack. The Beach Boys tended to attract a lot of assholes--some would argue they even HAD assholes in the band meaning Mike Love, who doesn't come off all that great in the movie, but people know he has a tendency toward liking money and being weird. Since Brian Wilson and his current wife Melinda were involved with this film, the information in it is pretty much on the mark about Wilson's story. It is Wilson's story about his mental breakdown and his trying to get his life on track--this is not a movie about the Beach Boys. The other brothers and bandmate Al Jardine hardly register a blip in the story.

In defense of Mike Love, he was involved in collaborating with Wilson, and therefore he was due a share of the royalties of many of their hits. He had to sue Brian because the real asshole responsible for screwing him over--and all of the Beach Boys, for that matter--Murry Wilson, father of the Wilson boys--was long dead. Apparently Brian has no ill will toward Love, and vice versa. In fact, I don't think Wilson has a mean bone in his body. I think he might even be too forgiving of people who wronged him like his father and Landy, or maybe he feels there is no point now that they are long dead to hold a grudge. The fact Brian Wilson is such a good person is why he was so screwed over and so troubled so much of his life. I am glad he is on track now. His wife Melinda has a lot to do with it.

Anyway, the actors in the film look nothing like the real people. I was willing to suspend disbelief in that. The depiction of Melinda Ledbetter Wilson was more along the lines of Teresa Wright in the 1942 film classic Pride of the Yankees than the real Melinda, who is VERY no-nonsense in interviews. It is clear who is in charge in the Wilson household, and it ain't Brian. Melinda in the film is much more passive, more patient and understanding, where the real one I don't believe puts up with any b.s.

Anyway, I enjoyed the picture although there was almost nothing in the film I didn't already know. I say "almost" because I didn't know Murry Wilson had gotten revenge of sorts when the Beach Boys had fired him, and he turned around and had a Beach Boy knockoff hit with a Beach Boy knockoff group called The Sunrays. The song was "I Live For the Sun," a record I remember well but had forgotten about it for years until it appeared in this film. It sounds more Jan and Dean-like or Four Seasons-like than Beach Boys, but it is still good after all these years:



The group had only a couple of hits then they went their separate ways.

Anyway, the film merits a three-and-a-half out of five stars. The music is worth it, much of it from actual Beach Boys tapes.

Not "Wild" About It

Although I had trouble finding a copy of Wild, the 2014 film starring Reese Witherspoon about some woman trying to "find" herself while hiking much of the Pacific Coast Trail, I did manage to rent a copy today.

At least I didn't buy the goddamned thing. I wasted only a buck-and-a-half on an utterly pointless movie.

Nice scenery and all of that, but the near-pornographic sex (albeit very brief) about killed it for me. I don't care to see that shit in films, and it really isn't necessary to show that crap.

But more important, there were flashbacks on top of flashbacks that were interwoven into the hiking scenes. It all got totally confusing after awhile.

On top of that, the story took place in around 1995 (and based on a woman's real-life trek of trials on the trail), but the scenes filmed in Ashland, Oregon, were NOT realistic at all and looked like something out of the late 1960s or early 1970s.

Ashland has LONG been a haven for rich retirees and yes, some college students thanks to Southern Oregon University, but they didn't then dress like that depicted in the film and they don't now. There weren't a hell of a lot of vans with people in hippie garb around during that time. I thought, "Shit, if they don't care enough to be accurate about something like this, what the hell else is inaccurate?"

I give this thing just two stars out of five for the PCT. Period.

Worst Film to Ever Win "Best Picture" Oscar?

Watching this year's Oscar winner Birdman was a waste of two hours of my precious life, but it wasn't a total waste because I was working out on the kettlebells, resistance bands, and free weights while trying to endure it.

About the only thing notable about this film is in the technique director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu used, and that is to use the camera in such a way that the film looks like it was shot in a single take. However, this technique is nothing new. Alfred Hitchcock employed it in 1948 in the far-superior  Rope, which unlike Birdman took place in real time.

I guess the plot of this lousy picture is that a one-time successful actor tries to revive his career and his life by putting on a Broadway play or some damned thing. It's hard to make heads or tails out of it because the thing tries to go in all kinds of different directions and goes absolutely nowhere. You get a lesbian scene out of nowhere, you get an attempted rape onstage for no reason at all, and obscenities are spewed all over the place I suppose to try and pad this pic to 119 minutes.

Some have said this picture was created for art houses, where artsy-fartsy filmmakers get their masterpieces seen by artsy-fartsy film critics, who in turn try and con the general public into thinking these artsy-fartsy pictures are worth paying out major bucks to see. That's probably why Birdman won the Oscar, to try and get the public to see it and get it to make money.

What a waste of talented actors like Michael Keaton. What a waste of film.

Many people think that 1952's The Greatest Show on Earth, a film I have seen and have on DVD,   is the worst ever to win Best Picture, but I am afraid Birdman  deserves that distinction.  There may be worse films that won Best Picture, for I haven't seen all of them, only most of them, but this is far worse than any of them I have seen so far. It isn't one of those movies that is so bad it's good.  There is not one redeemable feature about it.   It is pure torture.

One-half star out of five.

"Boyhood"

Every now and then on this blog I will review a book or a film or a television program, regardless of when it was made or written. Last night I rented a video of the 2014 film Boyhood, which had been nominated for a few Oscars last month.

It is a simple coming-of-age story, tracing the life a boy from age 6 to age 18, when he graduates from high school and begins college. The main draw for this film is the rather novel approach of the director, Richard Linklater, to film it over a period of a dozen years with the same actors, beginning in 2002, thus the characters age naturally. In almost all other films, if there are child characters who later age to adulthood in the film, two or more sets of actors have to be employed, while any adult actors who are supposed to age during the course of the film are simply made up to look older. I like this technique in this movie even though it risks the film being somewhat disjointed.

Boyhood is well-acted and well-made. I also enjoyed the Texas locations.

The only objections I have to it are too many obscenities spouted by the actors--not everybody uses the "f" word in casual conversation--and that the film was at least 45 minutes too long.

VERY few films should ever run much over two hours in length. At that point, as a filmmaker, you should shit or get off the pot, to use a casual obscenity. Unless the film is Gone With the Wind or a handful of other epics, don't do it.

In the old days of film, back in the 1930s and 1940s, most feature films ran about 90 minutes in length, give or take. That was to enable theater owners to run double features. Furthermore, within the shorter length, the films were paced much faster than they are today. A college instructor I had for a film class called it the "meter" of the film. Even and especially GWTW moved very quickly so that people stayed with it until the end of the nearly four-hour film. The pacing of motion pictures 70 or 80 years ago is yet another reason I think they were better overall than the films of today.

As for Boyhood, I give it three-and-a-half stars out of five.

Skip This One

Today I got around to watching a rental of 2014's Jersey Boys, directed by Clint Eastwood and based on the stage play of the same name. It is about the life and times of the 1960s vocal group (based a lot on doo wop singing of the 1950s) the Four Seasons, a group I despised in their heyday of the early sixties but grew to like them over the years as I appreciated more and more vocal group singing.

I had wanted to see this film for several months, but when I finally got the chance, I found it was a big disappointment. The good news is that there is no gratuitous violence or sex scenes--thank God--although there are far too many f-bombs sprinkled in the flick. People, even in Joisey back then, didn't often talk that way. I think Eastwood or his scriptwriter forgot the way things really were back then in terms of language. It wasn't until the late 1960s that the "f-word" was used with regularity until it got to the point people weren't shocked by it anymore.

But it wasn't the language that bothered me. It was the fact this was a pretty boring story, which tells me that Frankie Valli especially didn't have a very colorful life. He was short, but let me tell you, he was no Mickey Rooney in the lifestyle department, and his life story is probably not worthy of a feature film. Jersey Boys may be a lot better as a stage play, but I have never seen it so I can't say.

The actors' interpretation of the group's signature songs was okay, but let's face it. Few people can copy Frankie Valli with much success at all. I know this for a fact, for during the many times I drove to and from Reno and played the group's biggest hits like "Rag Doll" and "Let's Hang On," that I would get a sore throat for days and days from trying to hit the notes Valli could do with ease. (Frankie Lymon also did this to my vocal chords.) With that I had a newfound respect for Valli's talent. It's NOT easy singing falsetto and to do it for any length of time.

There were a few other groups and individuals during that era that tried to ape the Valli sound. There was the Newbeats, with its famous "Bread and Butter" tune, and Lou Christie, with "Lightning Strikes." Both of those acts were good, but most people didn't try to do to their voices what Valli did to his.

Amyway, watching the movie was kind of like watching paint dry. A few Four Seasons diehards might like it, but I say most people should just skip it. There are a couple of real Four Seasons recordings in the closing credits including the immortal "Rag Doll" for audiences to try and sing along with and wreck their vocal chords for a week.