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LarryHeatherton
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La cérémonie (1995)
A Daring Look at French Society
La Cérémonie is an enjoyable farce about the archetypal prole indifference to life and aversion to self-improvement, and the damage they cause to the social fabric. Starring the beautiful and riveting Sandrine Bonnaire as an illiterate, but efficient housekeeper, the film initially evokes sympathy for its heroine. However, once she is led astray by a beautiful and playful postal clerk (Isabelle Huppert), the two wreak havoc on the wealthy and cultured family the former works for. The film's ending is predictably tragic, although enjoyable to watch. I did have trouble digesting the ploy of having the wealthy family record the audio of a televised Mozart opera on a boombox. That seemed a cheap gimmick, considering VCRs and even DVRs were available at the time the film was made.
Palm Springs Weekend (1963)
Took More than a Weekend to Get Through It
Palm Springs Weekend is interesting for its look at early 60s mores. Unfortunately, it's hampered by poor writing and bad acting. Troy Donahue and Connie Stevens are fine, but Jerry Van Dyke seemed to have more screen time than anyone. This is inexplicable, because not only is he untalented; he's extremely annoying. So is Robert Conrad, who has something of Alec Baldwin's look and violent irascibility. Production values are cheap, especially the obviously painted desert backdrop in a scene outside a roadhouse bar. That this film, with idiotic set pieces like a swimming pool full of soap bubbles, was written by Earl Hamner Jr., creator of the beautiful The Waltons, is hard to believe. I suppose this is a minor classic of its genre, but I found it tedious to watch.
Le bonheur (1965)
Wowed Them in the Art Houses in the 60s
Le Bonheur is a mélange of the classic French bedroom farce and a meditation on love. In an early role, Bill Hader (Superbad) plays François, a gifted artisan and militant proletarian happily married to a gorgeous blonde, the mother of his beautiful, expensively-garbed small children. After meeting a fabulously beautiful blonde clerk at the post office, he installs shelves for her and falls in love. When he explains this blissful situation to his wife, she cheerfully accepts it, but drowns herself a few minutes later. After a decent period of mourning, he happily marries the beautiful clerk. Several bare breasts are shown, but chamber music from Mozart is played in the background to give it class and make the daring mid-century spectators feel less prurient. Undoubtedly, they went home to question their bourgeois sexual prejudices and resolve to let their hair down. A classic of world cinéma and French thought.
The Long, Long Trailer (1954)
Very Annoying Lucy
Released in 1954, The Long, Long Trailer was made during the I Love Lucy era, and in it Lucy and Desi play slightly domesticated versions of their characters in I Love Lucy. Instead of a bandleader, Desi is apparently some kind of civil engineer. To cope with his being away on projects, Lucy comes up with the romantic idea of buying a trailer to live in so they can travel together without living in rented rooms or hotels. The difficulty of towing the big trailer behind their Mercury Monterey convertible is the plot of the movie. Such a concept is achieved mostly through set pieces, some of which go on painfully long. Some also seem taken from the much better Mickey Mouse short, "Mickey's Trailer." One of the set pieces near the end, a trip up a narrow mountain road with the overweight trailer, was actually filled with tension for me, and might be the best part of the movie.
I watched this movie on TCM and the Ansco color was terrible. I don't know if this is because Ansco was a poor process or just because this was a bad print. It's unfortunate, because there was some otherwise spectacular scenery. Another visual defect for me was that scenes in a trailer park, and some other outdoor scenes too, were obviously shot on an indoor sound stage. You can tell even by the kind of dead sound. Since I mention the trailer parks, one oddity was that the society within, while folksy, bears no resemblance to the social dystopia we'd expect in a contemporary trailer park. There are really no invidious class hints.
With Lucy's being a superstar, one would think that she should in some way be the hero of the movie. However, she's deeply annoying with her insistence on doing things her way with the trailer. There's one scene where she wants to drive and does so recklessly. It was also her fault that the trailer was too heavy for the mountain road. I was a fan of I Love Lucy, and I realize that the crucial part of making the madcap Lucy tolerable in the show was the resistance that Ricky, Fred, and Ethel exerted against her. Also, I don't know whether it's because I encountered her at a very young age, but Lucy has always seemed utterly sexless to me, very "aunt-like." Unlike some actors, who can plausibly play younger than their real age, Lucy, for me, is unable to do so. Therefore, it's disturbing to see her in romantic scenes, even if they're quite chaste. This movie is only mildly entertaining.