Happy Anniversary, Ann Savage!

Happy Anniversary, Ann Savage!


Ann Savage and Tom Neal in "Detour" (1945)
directed by Edgar G. Ulmer

The lead actors selected for the film were all relatively unknown players from the American B-movie circuit. Ulmer had already worked together with Tom Neal, ‘a poor man’s Clark Gable’, on Club Havana (1945), one of his fly-by-night melodramas for PRC. With the handsome looks of an ex-boxer and a preternatural capacity for sulking, Neal was cast in the role of sad sack Al Roberts, a talented New York pianist who, in his desperate attempt to reach his fiancée in Los Angeles, gets dealt a bad hand a couple of times over.


In the more critical role of Vera, Al’s acid-tongued nemesis, a thoroughly downand-out dame who fiendishly drops into the picture midway and keeps things in a headlock until her unceremonious exit, a feisty actress with a curiously apt nom de guerre, Ann Savage (née Bernice Maxine Lyon), was cast. Savage and Neal had previously played opposite each other in a few Bs for Columbia – William Castle’s Klondike Kate (1943), Lew Landers’s Two-Man Submarine (1944) and Herman Rotsten’s The Unwritten Code (1944) – and the two had an established screen chemistry and a bit of history, both on and off screen. (While shooting their first film together in 1943, Neal purportedly wasted no time overstepping the boundaries of professionalism, making an untoward pass at Savage by burying his tongue deep in her ear; she is said to have rewarded him with a prompt grazing of her knuckles across his face.


Ann Savage was brought in to see Ulmer on the set of Club Havana, with just over a week left before the shooting of Detour began; after a quick once-over, she immediately fell into favour with the director.


In a considerable departure from Goldsmith’s novel, the tale is told exclusively from Al Roberts’s perspective. Roberts serves as the film’s narrator – delivering half his lines in a pained, edgy voice-over whose primary task, beyond recounting his life as a cursed nightclub pianist and a cursed hitchhiker, is explaining the inexplicable, proving to himself, as well as to the audience, that he is essentially powerless in his losing battle against fate. The story of Al Roberts begins where it ends: on the open highway. Seated at the counter of a Nevada diner, in a tableau that evokes the canvas of Edward Hopper’s iconic 1942 painting Nighthawks, Roberts cries into his coffee mug. The tale he tells, whittled down from Goldsmith’s oversized script, is one of loss, with a tragic core that intensifies as the human wreckage piles up all around him until he is no longer able to find a way out. Source: www.palgrave.com

Clip Kisses, Jake Gyllenhaal, The Look of Love

It's a Wonderful Life (1946) directed by Frank Capra


I could have filled my entire top five with Jimmy Stewart's various lip-locks (The Philadelphia Story, Vertigo, Come Live with Me, Rear Window.) He was said to be nervous about filming this particular kiss, his first since returning to Hollywood after the war. The resulting embrace was so passionate that it raised eyebrows at the censor's office and ended up partially cut. Modern audiences might scorn at this momentary meeting of mouths (and the preceding lady-shaking) but the tension between Stewart and Reed cements it firmly in my list.


From Here to Eternity (1953) directed by Fred Zinnemann


Up there with the most iconic movie moments of all time, Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr's extramarital frolics in the surf left 1950s audiences hot under their collars. Supposedly many prints of the film ended up missing parts of the infamous scene owing to projectionists taking the cells home as souvenirs. Seeing it on the big screen for the first time last week, it struck me just how out of place their lack of inhibitions seem for a film of that period and it certainly hasn't lost any heat in the 60 years since its release. Source: www.guardian.co.uk



Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan in "Source Code" (2011) directed by Duncan Jones



Kirsten Dunst and Jake Gyllenhaal come across a bouquet of red roses, on 7th February 2005 in LA (new additions from IHJ gallery)


Kirsten Dunst and Josh Hartnett in "The Virgin Suicides" (1999) directed by Sophia Coppola


Tamsin Egerton and Josh Hartnett in SoHo, New York, on September 10, 2012


Hunky actor Josh Hartnett has reportedly moved on from ex-girlfriend Amanda Seyfried with another leggy blonde actress, his Singularity co-star Tamsin Egerton. According to US weekly Life & Style, Hartnett recently flew the 23-year-old St. Trinian's star over to the US for his birthday bash at the Icehouse restaurant in his hometown of Minneapolis. 'Josh doesn't usually bring his girlfriends home so this one must be special. He's really into Tamsin,' a source told the magazine. Source: www.marieclaire.co.uk


Love Hurts: Winterbottom’s Biopic a By-the-Numbers Look at London’s Infamous King of Soho - Michael Winterbottom continues on with his whirlwind filmography, unleashing one of his most standard projects in years, The Look of Love, a biopic on the rise of Paul Raymond, coined the King of Soho for his elevation of adult entertainment out of the gutter and into the public imagination. A trailblazer in Britain’s history as far as censorship and heterosexual nudity goes, there’s no doubt that Raymond is indeed a prolific figure and his personal life has just enough tragedy to make for a doable life and times treatment. However, once we’re given a few telling details about Raymond, his profession, and the three most important women in his personal life, it’s not hard to predict how Raymond and his ladies all eventually end up. Source: www.ioncinema.com


Director Michael Winterbottom and Tamsin Egerton attending 'The Look Of Love' premiere during the 2013 Sundance Film Festival


Raymond brags about his wealth -- telling everyone at his daughter’s wedding how much it cost, for instance -- and is a terrible name-dropper (“I’m friends with all the Beatles, except Yoko Ono of course.”) He sleeps with half his models, sometimes several of them at a time.


Yet Raymond failed to hold on to the three women he cared about. His first wife Jean, played by Anna Friel, won the biggest divorce settlement in the U.K. after he abandoned her for one of his performers. Fiona Richmond (leggy Tamsin Egerton) left to lead a “normal life” after seven years. Source: www.bloomberg.com

Happy Saint Valentine 2013!

Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in "Blue Valentine" (2010) directed by Derek Cianfrance


"From Blue Valentine I kept my wedding ring. I kept it on actually for… a while… After the shooting had stopped I was still wearing it, I couldn't quite take it off. And now I keep it above the kitchen sink where I do dishes as a little memento - I kept that."


William's famously set up home with her co-star Ryan Gosling for three months at the director's behest, so that the pair could convincingly play a couple falling in and then out of love. And just to make us feel even more envious than we ever imagined possible, she confirms in the print interview that "he was a pretty good husband, I have to say! He was always doing the dishes and I said, Ryan, I don't think that's realistic. And he was like, I know, but Michelle, you go home and do the dishes, I'm not going to make you do the dishes here too!" Source: fashion.telegraph.co.uk

Josh Hartnett ("Bad Valentine") video from Kendra on Vimeo.

Josh Hartnett ("Bad Valentine") video featuring scenes starring Josh Hartnett in "The Virgin Suicides" (with Kirsten Dunst), "40 Days & 40 Nights" (with Shannyn Sossamon), "The Faculty" (with Famke Janssen and Laura Harris), "Wicker Park" (with Diane Kruger), "The Black Dahlia" (with Hilary Swank, Mia Kirshner and Scarlett Johansson), "30 Days of Night" (with Melissa George), etc.



Songs: "Bad Valentine" & "I Want Your Love" by Transvision Vamp, "Baby Be Mine" by The Jelly Beans, "Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me" & "Excitable Boy" by Warren Zevon, "Lady Midnight" by Leonard Cohen, "Ooh Wee Baby" by Jeff Barry, "Got to Know the Woman" by The Beach Boys, "Take 'em or Leave 'em" by Amy Levere, "Goodnight Baby" by The Searchers, "Crazy 'bout My Baby" by Randy Newman, "Walk & Talk It" by Lou Reed, "The Wanderer" by Dion & The Belmonts, "Be My Angel" by Mazzy Star, "Forget the Flowers", "Someday Soon" & "Won't Let You Down" by Wilco, "Let the Good Times Roll" by Shirley & Lee, "Playboy" by The Marvellettes, "My Sugar Baby" by Connie Clark, and "(Now and Then There's) A Fool Such as I" by Elvis Presley.

Bonnie & Clyde miniseries, "Gun Crazy" inspired-opera, "Side Effects" (neo noir)

Holliday Grainger will play Bonnie Parker

Holliday Grainger and Emile Hirsch will play the infamous bank-robbing couple Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in Bonnie & Clyde, Lifetime/History’s four-hour miniseries directed by Oscar-nominated helmer Bruce Beresford and produced by Sony Pictures TV and Craig Zadan and Meron’s Storyline Entertainment. They join Oscar winners Holly Hunter and William Hurt, who were recently cast in the project.

Emile Hirsch will play Clyde Barrow

Written by John Rice and Joe Batteer, the mini is based on the true story of Clyde Barrow (Hirsch), a charismatic convicted armed robber who sweeps Bonnie Parker (Grainger), an impressionable, petite, small-town waitress, off her feet, and the two embark on one one of most infamous bank-robbing sprees in history. Hunter will play Bonnie’s mother Emma Parker; Hurt plays Frank Hamer, the Texas Ranger credited with tracking down and killing Bonnie and Clyde. Source: www.deadline.com

“Don Giovanni” runs Friday evening and Sunday afternoon in the Brown Theater. Directed by Kristine McIntyre, this production updates the staging with a set and costumes inspired by 1950s film noir. “Here we find a morally corrupted antihero, an emotionally scarred femme fatale, and a conclusion that is destined to come but resolves nothing for those who remain standing," says Roth. "Add an inescapable past of the antihero plus an urban setting in the darkest hour of night and you have basically film noir.” To fans of film noir, that rings a bell. The Louisville Film Society partners with the opera Wednesday night with a film noir double feature at the Dreamland Film Center (810 East Market St.).

The double feature spotlights the Bonnie and Clyde-style "couple on the run" subgenre, with Nicholas Ray's seminal 1948 film "They Live By Night" and Joseph H. Lewis's "Gun Crazy," a 1950 melodrama about a World War II veteran and a carnival sharpshooter who embark on a crime spree.

Peggy Cummins as Annie Laurie Starr in "Gun Crazy" (1950) directed by Joseph H. Lewis

The dramatic black and white tones of noir make an interesting pairing with the soaring highs and lows of classical opera. Imagine a glorious soprano singing "Gun Crazy" Annie Laurie Starr's lines: "I told you I was no good. I didn't kid you, did I? Well, now you know. But I've been kicked around all my life. From now on I'm going to start kicking back." Source: www.wfpl.org

Steven Soderbergh's new film Side Effects is mostly an engine for delivering Very Surprising Plot Twists. A big part of the way it does that is by switching up a kind of movie-of-the-week problem film (the struggles with depression; the pathos of a spouse returning from prison) with noir. So you go from female-friendly melodrama (with a female protagonist) to female-loathing noir (with a male protagonist). Noir and its attendant misogyny aren't really the point, in other words; they're just a byproduct of Soderbergh's rage for cleverness. A side effect, if you will.

Still, as the film makes clear, side effects—even ersatz ones—can matter quite a bit. In this case, a lot of the damage is not so much to the woman in the film as to the male lead, Jonathan Banks (Jude Law). Banks is supposed to be a caring, talented hard-working psychiatrist, with a loving wife and child.

But then his depressed patient, Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara) goes off the rails spectacularly—and everything Banks has worked for collapses. His practice, his professional reputation, even his family disintegrate around him.

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in "The Big Sleep" (1946) directed by Howard Hawks

Misogyny is, at least, attention. Chandler and noir may loathe women, but at least that means they think women are important. The Last Seduction makes Linda Fiorentino into a hyperbolic evil bitch goddess—but at least she gets to have the fun of being a hyperbolic evil bitch goddess. Side Effects, on the other hand, reaches into noir for its fascinating, deadly women—and then myopically insists that we pledge our allegiance instead to a standard Hollywood male protagonist and his reservoirs of oleaginous self-absorption.

Noir is terrified of feminization and powerful women —which means, in part, that it is able to conceive of, and even perhaps at times to point towards, both of those things. Side Effects, in contrast, borrows some tropes from noir, but they're chewed to nothing in the remorseless grinding of the plot. In the end, we're left, not with noir or with misogyny, but simply with the complacent smirk that signals that once again the good guy who is a guy gets to live happily ever after. Source: www.theatlantic.com

Most Awkward Couples for Saint Valentine

"People have written infinite pages about the chemistry between movie couples like Stanley and Stella Kowalski (Marlon Brando and Kim Hunter) in A Streetcar Named Desire or Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler (Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh) in Gone with the Wind. While we can’t deny the magic those iconic romances have lent to the silver screen, some of our favorite couples in film are the awkward pairings that don’t quite fit".

Rachel Dawes and Bruce Wayne: Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight was the pinnacle of the awkward romance between Gotham’s District Attorney and billionaire philanthropist Bruce Wayne. We weren’t huge fans of Katie Holmes in the role for 2005′s Batman Begins, but the casting of Maggie Gyllenhaal for Nolan’s sequel was downright weird. We’re huge fans of the actress, but the duo spent most of the movie looking like unwilling partners in a game of dodgeball.

Benjamin Braddock and Mrs. Robinson (and Elaine Robinson): It doesn’t really get more awkward than sleeping with your girlfriend’s mom. Benjamin Braddock starts his post-graduate career by embarking on a sexual relationship with the wife of his father’s law partner, Mrs. Robinson. What should be a fun way to waste his youth while figuring out the next steps in his confused life ends up becoming an affair with a depressed woman he has nothing in common with. Benjamin takes an interest in Mrs. Robinson’s daughter, Elaine, but mom’s competitive streak and creepy lies about their summer-long fling ruins his shot with her. With Elaine banished to a life of housewifery by her family, Benjamin manages to break up Elaine’s wedding in progress, and the film ends with the most awkward and uncertain moment of all.

Travis Bickle and Betsy: The pairing of unhinged cabbie Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) and Presidential campaign volunteer Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver is totally awkward — mostly because the relationship is inside Travis’ head. Betsy does agree to go on two dates with the stalkery driver, but Travis still hasn’t adjusted to life after Vietnam. He winds up taking Betsy to a porn theater, which pisses her off. Travis resents her disgust, but his rage isn’t wasted and helps inspire one of the coolest mohawks in cinema.

Jack Dawson and Rose DeWitt Bukater: Whoever says they don’t find Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose (Kate Winslet) at least a little awkward and annoying in James Cameron’s epic, Titanic, is totally lying. We admit that things would have been a lot more uncomfortable with the twitchy, brooding Jeremy Sisto in the part of Jack. DiCaprio’s casting, however, makes Winslet look like she’s making out with her little brother for 194 minutes. Source: www.flavorwire.com

More Film Awkward Couples:

Ben Affleck and Joey Lauren Adams in "Chasing Amy" (1997) directed by Kevin Smith

Going well beyond other Gen X movies such as Swingers and Reality Bites, Chasing Amy embraces the new generation with an unparalleled frankness. Although this boy-meets-lesbian love story is more mature than Smith's earlier work, its never before seen subject matter is indicative of Smith's predilection for ignoring the taboos of film. Source: www.imdb.com

Marley Shelton and Jake Gyllenhaal as Chloe and Jimmy Livingston in "Bubble Boy" (2001) directed by Blair Hayes

Ellen Page and Michael Cera as Juno and Bleeker in "Juno" (2007) directed by Jason Reitman

"Boxer-turned-homicide detective Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) single handedly brings order to the violence in a suitcase alley, and solicits the prizefighting support of fellow officer Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert (Josh Hartnett). The movie gets off to a creeping start as Lee and Bucky are elected by their police precinct to fight a politically motivated exhibition boxing match. The duo’s boxing nicknames "Fire" (Lee) and "Ice" (Bucky) disguise the ensuing alliance that the two men will share as detective partners and as friends caught in an oddball love triangle at the hand of Lee’s platonic girlfriend Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson)." Source: filmcritic1963.typepad.com


Josh Hartnett ("Bad Valentine/I Want Your Love") video - Songs: "Bad Valentine" & "I Want Your Love" by Transvision Vamp, "Take 'em or Leave 'em" by Amy Levere, "Not Dark Yet" by Bob Dylan, "Walk & Talk It" by Lou Reed, "Won't Let You Down" by Wilco, "I Found a Reason" & "That's the Story of My Life" by The Velvet Underground, "That's How Strong My Love Is" by Otis Redding, "The Greatest Love" by Lee Dorsey, "Goodnight Sweetheart" by The Platters, "My Sugar Baby" by Connie Clark, "Crazy 'bout My Baby" by Randy Newman, "Goodnight Baby" by The Searchers, "If You Love Me Let Me Know" by Elvis Presley, "Range Life" by Pavement, and "Heartbreak Hotel" by The Cramps.

"End of Watch": top-selling DVD and Blu-ray in the United States

Jake Gyllenhaal's police drama "End of Watch" is the top-selling DVD and Blu-ray in the United States, Rentrak announced Monday.

Coming in at No. 2 on the DVD and Blu-ray sales chart for the week ending Jan. 27 is "Taken 2," followed by "Death Race 3: Inferno" at No. 3, "Pitch Perfect" at No. 4 and "The Possession" at No. 5. Rounding out the top tier are "Frankenweenie" at No. 6, "Looper" at No. 7, "Ted" at No. 8, "The Dark Knight Rises" at No. 9 and "Dredd" at No. 10.

The No. 1 DVD and Blu-ray rental for the week ended Jan. 26 is "Looper." Source: www.realitytvworld.com

One of the more underappreciated movies by audiences in 2012 was End of Watch (2012) from writer/director David Ayer. When the Academy Awards allowed only five Best Picture nominations, it was easier to accept that a certain movie “just isn’t a ‘Best Picture’ kind of movie.” Now, with ten available slots for nominations—and frustrating film-lovers the past two years by selecting only nine—everything decent is “snubbed”, especially independent films that were teased into believing they now had access. And of all snubbed films, End of Watch is near the top of the list and now available in DVD/Blu-ray. (You can read my analysis of the Oscar nominations and the top films of 2012.) I recommend it to you heartily as both good cinema for the film and good social insight in the story and special features. Source: www.justpressplay.net

Jake Gyllenhaal and Anna Kendrick as Brian and Janet Taylor in "End of Watch" (2012) directed by David Ayer