Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Peabody Awards and more links: Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the links

***Special bulletin: The Peabody Awards have been announced, and among the winners is Borgen, carried in the US by LinkTV (and repeatedly touted on this blog), The Returned (Les Revenants) as presented by the Sundance Channel and the UK import The Story of Film: An Odyssey (on TCM here), and actual US productions in English such as Breaking Bad and Six By Sondheim...and the Canadian/UK/US co-production Orphan Black (and Orange is the New Black, for that matter).


Girls Against Boys
Below, the links to this week's reviews and citations; As always, please let me know in comments when I've missed yours or someone else's...and, as always, thanks to all our contributors and to you readers...a few more will be added (and re-added, since Blogger decided to erase several links when I added an image below) over the course of the day.

Bill Crider: Adventures in Babysitting  [trailer, including musical number: Elizabeth Shue, Willie Dixon, et al.]; Boris Karloff

Brian Arnold: A Wacky Races ad campaign

B. V. Lawson: Media Murder

Psycho-Circus
Dan Stumpf: Noose;  The Way to the Gold

Ed Gorman: recent reviews

Ed Lynskey: Where Danger Lives

Elizabeth Foxwell: Psycho-Circus (aka Circus of Fear);  Movies on the Radio:"105 Years of Film Music: Part Three - The 1940s"

Evan Lewis: Roy Rogers ads

Geoff Bradley: Donovan

Iba Dawson: Joan Crawford

Ivan G. Shreve: Coming Distractions: April on Turner Classic Movies; Charley Chase short films

J. Kingston Pierce: Bullet Points

Bandidas
Jackie Kashian: Jay Mohr; The Counselor

Jacqueline T. Lynch: Thunder on the Hill

James Reasoner: Bandidas

Jerry House: Judge Roy Bean (the television series)

John Charles: Raiders of Ghost City

John Grant: The Big Noodle [consider the date, today]

Juri Nummelin: The Rapture; The Sniper; McCabe and Mrs. Miller


Cat Run
Kliph Nesteroff: Country Music Holiday

Laura: Alias Nick Beal

Martin Edwards: UK tv crime drama roundup

Marty McKee: Fear in the Night; Prison Girls

Michael Shonk: Four Just Men

Mystery Dave: Cat Run
The Entity

Patti Abbott: Pelle, the Conqueror

Philip Schweier: Dick Tracy vs. Crime, Inc.

Prashant Trikannad: The Entity

Rick: Fred MacMurray

Rod Lott: Best Night Ever; Horror of the Blood Monsters; Return of the Evil Dead


The Hanging Tree
Ron Scheer: The Hanging Tree (the film, in passing)

Sergio Angelini: No Orchids for Miss Blandish

Stacia Jones: Marie Prevost TCM marathon

Stephen Bowie: Playhouse 90

Steve Lewis: Everybody Wins

Yvette Banek: Masterpiece Mystery!: "Endeavour"

Todd Mason:  Girls Against Boys
Not the band, in this case, but last year's suspense film is now in rotation on The Movie Channel, and I can recommend it with a few provisi...as a Psycho-style film featuring serial killing and a survivor coping with the effects of being raped, it arguably straddles the edge of horror on at least two counts, and doesn't break too much new ground (even in ambiguity), but it does move along at a good pace and makes its (fairly important) points only slightly muddily, notably, that perhaps eye-for-an-eye vengeance isn't so very rewarding so much as deadening, even for the survivors. I'm not sure I was convinced by the narrative as presented (even while agreeing with the primary point), but among other virtues it does remind me that one of my notions of Hell on Earth would be serving as a bartender in a typical dance club, even without being nearly as cute and prone to draw condescending propositions as stars Nicole LaLiberte, looking as much like a mannequin as is humanly possible, and Danielle Panabaker wearing crippling heels in apparently all circumstances (adding to either the [wet?-]dreamlike atmosphere or the lack of verisimilitude, or, of course, both).  The ending doesn't make everything as clear as the filmmakers hoped (as a rash of rather thickwitted reviews online and in the likes of the New York Times demonstrates), but does put a notable spin on everything beforehand. (The reviews for this one on Rotten Tomatoes, for example, demonstrate everything that's wrong with that sad excuse for an aggregator.)


Glad All Over: The Dave Clark Five and Beyond, A Great Performances Special (PBS, upcoming 8 April 2014 and thereafter, on PBS and World Channel stations) It's currently online at this link.

A rather good bio-documentary of the band, and particularly of Clark and his activities with the band and since, making a few points that I hadn't considered...at least one which simply didn't register for me as it did for Twiggy and Whoopi Goldberg and Ian McKellan: how sexy the band's members were (and, certainly, they were presentable...they met each other at a gym where they all worked out, no less).  And the point made by Bruce Springsteen and Steven Van Zandt (among other interviewees) particularly, that their records were more intensely propulsive and tactile than those of the Beatles or Stones particularly in the early years of their success, is one that might've been more obvious if for various reasons Clark himself, who took a lesson from Ray Charles and kept control of most of the band's masters and other business arrangements, hadn't kept a lot of the band's recordings out of the public ear for most of the last several decades (something barely touched on here). The strongest original songs by the band, very much including "Catch Us if You Can", were as good as anything recorded by the Brit rock bands in the mid-'60s (and with a strain of melancholy that was missing from a lot of their other, more exuberant recordings, at least at first listen).  The covers were more of a mixed bag. But, as with the film Catch Us if You Can, dealt with rather well here, this is worth seeing and hearing, even if, as with most such documentaries, you don't get to hear any song in its entirety.

And, for some of the less memorable examples of '60s pop culture, from Scopitones to bad variety shows, there's this post, as well.

3 comments:

  1. Not seen "Girls Against Boys" Todd but I am definitely persuaded that it's worth at least a quick look - shall see if I can sort a rental - thanks chum!

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  2. My blog is still down. But, if it had been up you would have found me writing about THE BAD GIRLS OF NOIR, VOLUME 2. Maybe next week...

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  3. Thank you, Sergio! I've seen clips of at least one version of NO ORCHIDS...but never a complete film, nor have I read the Chase novel.

    George, yours and Scott Cupp's blogs are sorely missed! We can publish your posts if you get itchy-fingered enough (or you can suffer with Blogger or WordPress or Tumblr glitches, of course)...

    ReplyDelete

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