All the New* Movies That I Have Seen

1. The Notorious Bettie Page (2005)



Well, as you can see from the item above, The Notorious Bettie Page certainly had one of the most memorable posters of the last five years. Unfortunately, it was a poster that promised a more sexually enticing movie than the filmmakers actually delivered.

Which is not to say that it was a bad movie. Gretchen Mol did a great job as the title character, bringing off scenes that would embarrass the heck out of less assured actresses and managing to create a believable character out of the type of person (in this case, a pinup girl who posed for nude, seminude and bondage fetish pictures) that most actresses would be tempted to play as a cartoon.

For that matter, director Mary Harron managed to downplay some of the more melodramatic aspects of the real Bettie Page's life, depicting the abuse she received from her father and her first husband in a surprisingly subtle manner. (Indeed, if not for the way Ms. Mol's character flinched when her father asked her in one scene to stay behind, one would never guess that the two of them had been in an abusive relationship.) Then there was a poetically photographed bus trip which was almost worth the price of the movie.

If the film did have a fatal flaw, it was the emphasis it put on the controversy surrounding fetishism. On one hand, the filmmakers did not exactly side with the conservatives who were trying to suppress the type of fetish photos Ms. Page so often posed for. On the other hand, they did not exactly put the distributors of said photos in a good light either. (Indeed, the constant distinction one photographer made between the type of respectable gentlemen who bought his “dirty” pictures and the not-so-respectable people who buy similar photos from other sources would seem to indicate that hypocrisy was to be found on both sides of the controversy.)

I have to give credit to the director for not exploiting the heck out of the most sensational aspects of Bettie Page's life but I can't really pretend that the result was the type of movie that most people are going to go out of their way to see.

It was what it was. And for me, that was good enough.

2. Ask the Dust (2006)

As I noted in an earlier post, the one thing that really wowed me about this movie was Idina Menzel's performance in a scene that should not have worked but did. And it says something about Ms. Menzel's performance that though she was stuck in an unflattering role, she lingered on in my memory long after her more famous co-stars (Salma Hayek, Colin Farrell and Donald Sutherland) were forgotten.

However, the film did not revolve around Ms. Menzel's character and the minute her character ceased to be part of the storyline, the movie went downhill. To be fair, the movie was based on a John Fante novel and many critics would argue that Fante's work is not all that easy to adapt. Yet the few changes made in Fante's story by director Robert Towne did not exactly improve the movie.

The movie was about a struggling Italian-American writer named Arturo Bandini (played by Colin Farrell) and his affair with a fiery Mexican waitress (played, por supuesto, by Salma Hayek). Bandini wanted very badly to become the next Ernest Hemingway but the film made it obvious from his impoverished surroundings that Bandini was still a long way from reaching that status. Then Bandini finally managed to get a short story published in a magazine.

He bragged about his success at a nearby diner and tried to impress the pretty waitress (mentioned above) who worked there. Unfortunately, the waitress was not impressed and when Bandini tried to prove that he was indeed a published author by handing her a copy of the magazine that contained his story, the waitress responded by disposing of said magazine in the trash.

His work, however, did manage to impress Vera Rivkin, the character played by Ms. Menzel. Rivkin was a Jewish-American housekeeper who, despite being a lowly servant, still managed to have more money than Bandini. Because she had been rejected by her husband, she tried to make up for her loneliness by playing both fan and patron -- as well as would-be girlfriend -- to Bandini. Unfortunately for her, Bandini did not exactly welcome her affection, preferring his unrequited romance with Ms. Hayek's character over any possible relationship with Ms. Rivkin. One of the funniest scenes in the movie involved Ms. Rivkin's failure to realize this. Yet it was to Ms. Menzel's credit that her character managed to be far more sympathetic than either of the two lead characters.

Unfortunately, Ms. Hayek was not so fortunate. Her character's fate seemed obvious to any fan of opera or Greta Garbo movies the minute she announced her first name, and it did not help that director Towne chose to have her character portrayed as an illiterate, no doubt operating under the theory that this would make some of her actions more understandable. (The book, of course, made no mention of the waitress's level of literacy.)

Though the movie tried very hard to make some valid points about inter-ethnic relationships in Depression-era Los Angeles (pointing out, for example, the prejudice against Jews, the prejudice against Mexicans, etc.), it never quite got around to telling a compelling story. Nor did it resist promoting the same ethnic stereotypes (the illiterate Mexican, the pushy Jew, the arrogant Italian) that it was supposedly preaching against. The result was not exactly a bad movie -- I did get the feeling that director Towne meant well -- but not exactly a good movie either. And definitely not a movie in the same class as earlier Towne films such as Chinatown and Personal Best.

It was what it was, and in this case, that was not enough.

*“New” in this case meaning “made since the year 2001.”