‘Up’ Where We Belong

A young scout yearns to help an elderly widower in order to earn a merit badge.  A senior citizen unfurls hard-learned life lessons for the world.  Disney/Pixar’s Up is a lofty film that thrives off old fashioned values, and it is your new number-one 2009 summer blockbuster.  Complete with newsreel footage only a great grand-dad could recall, Up is a film which cherishes that very dated, old fashioned concept – great storytelling.  

In an age where Dreamworks’ feeds us a steady diet of kung-fu pandas and boogie-in-your-butt lemurs voiced by the guy that gave us Borat, three-to-thirteen year olds have a place to fill up on some traditional values – Disney/Pixar.  

My wife and I took our 6-year old boy to see Up on Saturday to a packed movie theater in Washington, DC’s Georgetown neighborhood.  All we heard in the theater was laughing, deep emotion and applause. And why not?  Up is film that, had it been produced with live actors decades ago, may have starred Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant.  It is classic American storytelling – true love, big dreams, self-reliance and fierce determination. It doesn’t need gimmicks, politically correct characters or audience focus-group testing to determine its destination.  It relies on Russell, who misses his Dad, and Carl Fredricksen, a lost old curmudgeon grieving over the death of his wife – they get us where we’re going.  You know them – they’re the sort of folks we see and meet most everyday.   (more…)

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Tags: audrey hepburn, cary grant, disney, feminist critics, Finding Nemo
Posted Jun 2nd 2009 at 4:47 pm in Entertainment, Politics, Reviews | 1495222 Commentshttp://bighollywood.breitbart.com/jmeath/2009/06/02/up-where-we-belong-by-jason-killian-meath/%27Up%27+Where+We+Belong2009-06-02+23%3A47%3A37Jason+Killian+Meath

Navigating the Gender Pass with ‘Gunga Din’

I have always thought that men and women are different. 

No kidding, professor.

No, really, they are. I don’t mean in all the right places, of course, but somewhere else, with movies, in enjoying the things we see in the movies. 

I remember seeing Gunga Din (1939) for the first time and knowing from the opening shot that this was my kind of film. This was a guy film. Not a wishy-washy movie filled up with dance numbers and kissing scenes, but a guy flick. Great guy stuff was in this movie, and I was sold on it from the first pounding of that thunderous mighty gong. When Alfred Newman’s score turned from playful to ominous faster than you can say, ‘trouble in Tantrapur’, I knew I was in for a good one. This was the kind of movie you watched on a Saturday afternoon with your dad or with your pals. This was adventure!  (more…)

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Tags: alfred newman, andrews, British, cary grant, chuck yeager
Posted May 21st 2009 at 5:58 pm in Entertainment, Politics | 1387383 Commentshttp://bighollywood.breitbart.com/smann/2009/05/21/navigating-the-gender-pass-with-gunga-din/Navigating+the+Gender+Pass+with+%27Gunga+Din%272009-05-22+00%3A58%3A22Schizoid+Mann

Haunted by the Memory of Her Song: Fifty Years of ‘Rio Bravo’

The sun is sinking in the west
The cattle go down to the stream
The redwing settles in her nest
It’s time for a cowboy to dream….

Exquisitely crafted, but never ostentatious. Pleasantly mellow, but never lazy. Thematically rich, but never preachy. Respectful of tradition, but never stolid. Deeply compassionate, but never descending into schmaltz. Five decades ago, a group of men now long-dead (and, it must be said, one smokin’-hot woman, still-living) followed an aged veteran director into the Arizona desert to make a humble, heartfelt western based firmly on quintessentially American notions of courage, decency, and good humor. The result of their collaboration, Rio Bravo (1959), remains one of the great visceral pleasures of cinema.

Howard Hawks’ masterpiece stemmed from his disgust with the joyless anti-heroics of uptight, melodramatic westerns like Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952) and Delmer Daves’ 3:10 to Yuma (1957) — dark “message movies” that seemed to revel in smugly depicting small-town Americans as cynics and cowards. The man behind such classics as Scarface (1932), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), To Have and Have Not (1944), Red River (1948), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) was in his early sixties in 1958, his career winding down after decades of constant production. He had interned for Famous Players-Lasky way back in 1916, and directed his first features in the mid-1920s. Thirty years later he was old and tired, and his last film, Land of the Pharaohs (1955), had been a disheartening flop. Since then, the previously prolific director hadn’t helmed a picture in three years, an unheard-of period of self-exile for a man who had cranked out movies regularly for decades. But the brazen slap across the face that High Noon had given America’s western mythology had bothered him. “I made Rio Bravo,” he later told an interviewer, “because I didn’t like High Noon. Neither did Duke. I didn’t think a good town marshal was going to run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help. And who saves him? His Quaker wife. That isn’t my idea of a good western.” (more…)

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Tags: 3:10 to Yuma (1957), academy awards, alfred hitchcock, Allen Barra, Angie Dickinson
Posted May 3rd 2009 at 5:30 am in Entertainment, Featured Story | 1221545 Commentshttp://bighollywood.breitbart.com/lgrin/2009/05/03/haunted-by-the-memory-of-her-song-fifty-years-of-rio-bravo/Haunted+by+the+Memory+of+Her+Song%3A+Fifty+Years+of+%27Rio+Bravo%272009-05-03+12%3A30%3A38Leo+Grin

Randolph Scott and the Left’s Rhetorical Knot

In the Sunday L.A. Times, Reed Johnson examines the evolution of the portrayal of gay characters on film from 1941’s “The Maltese Falcon” to last year’s “Milk.” In his paragraph covering the gap between “Falcon” and 1980’s “Cruising,” Reed lets this drop:

…Hollywood went back into the closet during the Eisenhower presidency and more or less stayed there until the late 1960s … Coyness and euphemism were the order of the day, with the likes of Rock Hudson and Randolph Scott impersonating big-screen macho men. (more…)

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Tags: cary grant, Los Angeles Times, Randolph Scott, reed johnson
Posted Feb 16th 2009 at 12:50 pm in Media Criticism, Politics | 5229885 Commentshttp://bighollywood.breitbart.com/jjmnolte/2009/02/16/randolph-scott-and-the-lefts-rhetorical-knot/Randolph+Scott+and+the+Left%27s+Rhetorical+Knot2009-02-16+20%3A50%3A58John+Nolte

Celebrity Video Palate Cleanser

After a month of celebrity videos ranging from creepy to disturbing, maybe this will help to take the edge off:

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Tags: Bette Davis, cary grant, Clark Gable, Hollywood Canteen, Rita Hayworth
Posted Feb 5th 2009 at 11:25 am in Celebrity News, Video | 4221829 Commentshttp://bighollywood.breitbart.com/jjmnolte/2009/02/05/celebrity-video-palate-cleanser/Celebrity+Video+Palate+Cleanser2009-02-05+19%3A25%3A10John+Nolte

TCM Pick O’ The Day: Friday, January 23rd

2am PST – Hollywood Without Make-Up (1966) – In this special, Ken Murray hosts his own behind-the-scenes home movies of some of Hollywood’s greatest stars. Cast: Ken Murray BW-50 mins, TV-G

Not a movie this time, but a delightful 1966 television special hosted by Ken Murray and starring his own home movies that date back to Hollywood’s silent-era when the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks wiled away their weekends at San Simeon, the estate owned by William Randolph Hearst and his wife mistress Marion Davies. The same estate Orson Welles somewhat recreated for his character in “Citizen Kane” who was modeled after Hearst. (more…)

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Tags: bogie, cary grant, chaplin, hearst, ken murray
Posted Jan 22nd 2009 at 5:35 pm in Today's Pick | 280619 Commentshttp://bighollywood.breitbart.com/jjmnolte/2009/01/22/tcm-pick-o-the-day-friday-january-23rd/TCM+Pick+O%27+The+Day%3A+Friday%2C+January+23rd2009-01-23+01%3A35%3A53John+Nolte