The Life and Times of a Midwestern Movie Addict

Finding that using past decades as back drops for his stories had worked well before in films such as Hairspray and Polyester , John Waters decided to travel back in time yet again for his opus to the 1950s, Cry Baby .  Similar in style to Hairspray , Cry Baby immerses itself in 1950s lore and showing the war between the 'Squares' and the 'Drapes' in Baltimore through classic tunes of the time.  Its not incredibly inventive, but it does effectively skewer the 'teen pictures' and songs from the 50s.  One has to wonder if the working title for the film was "The Leader of the Pack" because the story holds and strong resemblance to that song. The story begins in a Baltimore high school in the 50s while the students are getting their polio shots.  It seems like a typical day with the 'squares', or good kids, and the 'drapes', who are the hoods and trouble makers.  The two groups tease and make fun of each other just like usual...but someth...

I remember the first John Waters movie I saw, which based on its rating and violent content I should never have been allowed to see at my the age of 10.  However, my mother was always more concerned with what she thought I could handle rather than ratings.  For example, my sister and I were allowed to see Pretty Woman very young in our lives...which a lot of parents would have objected to due to the sexual content...but Miss J and I had no idea what the sexual innuendo meant at the time so it was ok.  We never repeated it, that's for sure.  Anyway, mom thought this movie looked funny and she also liked Kathleen Turner...so she figured what the hell.  Of course, it turned out to be something we all enjoyed as a family despite the fact that it was a horror comedy with bad language and gore.  But like I said, Mom knew we could handle it.  That movie was Serial Mom and to date it remains one of my all time favorites from John Waters.  I often wonder...

Long before Harvey Firestein was Big, Blonde, and Beautiful and Nikki Blonsky made her debut performance in film, John Waters made an unintentional family comedy in Hairspray.   Hairspray was never intended to be a mainstream hit, nor was it supposed to hugely popular, and it certainly wasn't intended to become one of the most popular musicals of all time.  Waters mainly wanted to write about segregation and discrimination, and wanted to do it in a less obvious way than most films had done by 1988.  He also wanted to write an homage to Baltimore's "Buddy Dean Show" which was the local answer to "American Bandstand" and which he loved as much as the rest of Baltimore's teens.  However, he couldn't help noticing how there were rarely any black dancers on the show and this seemed to him a wonderful backdrop for a story about segregation.  However, he needed a better in that some clean-cut white, attractive white person to notice the injustice and set o...

John Waters, you say that name in a crowd and some people giggle with secret pleasure and some people shiver with uncomfortable disgust (and others still shrug their shoulders and ask "who?").  However, you mention Hairspray and everyone yells "I love that musical!!"...some of them don't know that it started out as a non-musical film directed by Waters...and it was his first 'tame' picture. He began his filmmaking life making trash-sploitation pictures such as Desperate Living, Female Trouble, Multiple Maniacs, and the infamous Pink Flamingos which all featured the drag queen Divine as some kind of female reprobate involved in violent or disgusting acts.  However, with every filmmaker there comes a transition period.  Waters was metamorphosing out of his midnight movie phase and into becoming a more mainstream picture, but he needed someplace to start.  Polyester was that start.  For the first time, Divine was not playing a psychopath but rather, he w...

This weekend was supposed to be simple and fun.  I was going to come down to my old college haunt, close out my bank account and transfer everything into my new account, see Dad and wish him well, and hangout with some friends that I hadn't seen in much too long.  Everything was pretty perfect...in fact it was the perfect day yesterday and only one thing went wrong as I was leaving the bar we were all at.  Unfortunately, it was a pretty big WRONG.  I'll start with the bad news so that I can really focus on what was good about yesterday...someone either accidentally or purposefully took my coat from the bar last night, and that coat had the misfortune of carrying my house and car keys.  So I had to call my Dad to drive me home last night, file a police report, and now I'm puzzling how one gets a replacement key for a car and an apartment on a Sunday.  Until we figure this out, I'm stuck here...which is unfortunate because I have to work on Tuesday.  Now...

Well friends, its been a helluva week here in town.  We had two snow days this week, Tuesday and Wednesday, and this was following a three day weekend where we had a snow day last Friday...so we've had a lot of time off recently in our district.  In fact, Tuesday and Wednesday were like having a second weekend right after Monday.  It was nice, I'll admit...but at the same time I got really bored as Wednesday waned into evening and I was concerned about pretty much being now a week behind in my lessons (Monday we didn't get to quiz what they'd read since last Thursday because it was a guidance counselor visit day).  I guess I can't complain much, it just means that its one less week to plan in the long run.  However, I know understand why my mother used to get so bored on snow days when I was a kid (she was a teacher and a principal).  Things were downright dull.  I got out of the house on Tuesday for a bit to go to the store, took about an hour I'd say...

So last night Bond came over and I shared some of my favorite action/mystery/thrillers with him. First was Mission Impossible and he enjoyed that...and was impressed when I told him that it was also directed by Brian De Palma...oh don't worry friends, I'm not gonna go off on that tangent again. But I did get Bond liking De Palma by having him watch Blow Out a few weeks ago, so knowing that he know has seen and respects two of his films makes me very pleased. The real star of the evening, and the film we enjoyed watching the most, was Stanley Donen's 60s thriller/comedy Charade . I can hear minor fans of the film already, saying "Wait! I thought Hitchcock directed Charade ?!"...and that is a commonly held misconception...though not baseless. The film, while being substantially more 60s saturated than Hitch ever was in his films, is still a tour-de-force of dark comedy and big twists. Cary Grant changes identities so many times in the film that by the end, if...

By 2002, De Palma fans were thirsty...he hadn't made a bona-fide thriller since 1998's Snake Eyes and his turn of the century sci-fi film Mission to Mars left much to be desired (and was more like his big Hollywood fare like Mission: Impossible and The Untouchables , meaning they were good but had little of the master's personal style).  It was almost as though he had given up on writing and directing his own films...perhaps due to the fact that he never seemed to get any appreciation for it.  But in 2002 he came back with a limited-release film that was not only another auteur project but was about as far away from his Hitchcock-homaging as he could get.  It was also the last great 'written and directed by' fiction film for the man, as since then he has only made the confusing The Black Dahlia and his reactionary documentary Redacted since then.  One can only hope that he's cooking up a good one in that brain of his, and that we will get to see it soon.  So ...

Ok, so you guys already know how big of a De Palma fan I am now...I mean I've done five posts in a row on films that he's written and directed and in a few of them I even did a bit of film school essay analysis.  However, even I have to admit that there are films of his that are indeed what the critics say they are...namely, ripoffs.  Now when I say that, I don't mean that he has totally cribbed an entire plot-line for a movie, though in places it comes very close to several Hitchcock films and even his own previous films.  However, if you think that will stop my blog from commenting on it, you're dead wrong.  So hold on to your hats folks, because tonight I'm reviewing Raising Cain ! Carter Nix (John Lithgow) is a child psychologist who is obsessed with the development of his young daughter Amy...so obsessed is he that he even begins kidnapping other children so that he can observe them and their development of identity.  To help him with this is his brother ...

Yes friends, I said I'd be back and here I am...ready to share with you my annual Groundhog Day tradition.  As lame as it may sound, my father and I for the past 7 years have watched Bill Murray in Groundhog Day ...a film as dedicated to the special day as it is about the weight of time.  I remember seeing this movie on an airplane when I was a kid and finding it mildly amusing...I found the time warp that Murray's character Phil Conners finds himself in very interesting.  I mean, what would it be like if you found yourself trapped in your worst day and couldn't escape it until you turned it into your best day?  It really challenged my young mind.  Later in life, I found myself drawn to the romance story and how Phil goes from trying to manipulate Andie MacDowell's Rita to really appreciating her...and also discovering that the best way to get her is to not try so hard. For those of you who don't know, Groundhog Day tells the story of weatherman Phil Conners (...

The last two De Palma A'la Modes were supposed to be up this past weekend, but I had a busy weekend and not much downtime last week in order to watch two more movies...oh don't worry, I watched movies...just not those two.  Life intervened again in my blogging, and rather than get upset about it and gripe about how busy I was...I'm doing what any sensible write would do in this situation...I'm writing about it. To tell the truth, there isn't all that much that happened last week or weekend that was terribly interesting.  I went to work everyday, convinced my students to read a novel ("Night" by Elie Wiesel, a truly wonderful and heartbreaking memoir) and got on my feet with my new Theater and Speech classes for the semester.  The Theater kids are the same for the most part (minus a few) and the Speech kids are all new and seem good.  I did run into a little drama over the casting of our senior class play..."Twelve Angry Men" (well...more like T...