I don’t know what’s going on this Christmas day, but the incredibly smart and witty performer who proved that sex kittens can have brains, courage, and sharp claws when needed, has passed on at age 81.  Though a lot of us young geeks first knew Eartha Kitt as the Catwoman on the third season of the Adam West Batman television show  — where  the sudden dropping of the Bat on Cat flirtation that had flourished both with Julie Newmar on TV and Lee Meriweather in the sixties Bat-movie gave a lot of us an early education in media racial/sexual politics — she was first and foremost a live performer and an icon of the lounge era, and involved with a lot more than her once semi-obscure, now-iconic Xmas hit, “Santa Baby.”

The highlights and dramas of her career are probably well known to a lot of you — and can be read about via both Greencine and at the Huffington Post….Her comments on Vietnam in front of Lady Bird Johnson in which she experienced a harsher version of what later happened to the Dixie Chicks, and a big compliment from Orson Welles, who called her “the most exciting woman in the world,” was followed by being bitten by the ever voracious actor-director, who apparently mistook her for a blintz one night while she was playing Helen of Troy to his Faust. Whatever happened to her, she was an indomitable force who was never around enough for my taste, but who also kept working and never went away, until now.

There’s no doubt about it — she was one gutsy talent. Still, what I love about Ms. Kitt is the humor and ability to reach out to an audience as both an actress, and especially as a singer and cabaret performer. Lounges were made for the likes of her.

And we end on a slightly seasonal, slightly appropriate note. Everything really does change, but few of us hold the line better than Ms. Kitt did.

Okay, so Van Johnson wasn’t Cary Grant or Fred Astaire — but he wasn’t Victor Mature or George Raft, either. In other words, he might not have been one of the true greats but, yeah, he could act and dance and sing a little, besides. He was a very decent second-string movie star/actor who had a relaxed, natural quality that somehow played into portraying cynics in what appear to be his two best-remembered roles, both from 1954, The Caine Mutiny and Brigadoon. Another cynic role, which I guess I’ve missed but, due to advancing cinemanesia, I can’t be quite sure, is William Wellman’s 1949 Battleground, which, regardless, I need to check out (again?).

Looking at his obituary, one reason he might have done so well in these kind of roles is one heckuva messed up personal life for a guy who made it to age 92. This includes being apparently despised by his father, sued by his own mother (an alcoholic who had been abandoned him as a child), starting an ill-fated marriage with the ex-wife of (presumably also now ex-) best friend, Keenan Wynn, while the ink was drying on the divorce, and being the subject of a tell-all from his estranged daughter, published in (where else?) a British tabloid — on the year of his 89th birthday. I really hope he’s resting in peace now, at least.

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If you’ve read this far, you definitely owe it to yourself to also check out the Siren, who has has some typically apposite thoughts on Mr. Johnson’s work as well as some one-remove personal encounters with Mr. Johnson.

And remember how I said Van Johnson could dance and sing a little? From I Love Lucy, here’s another appearance I’m sure I must have seen at some point in my youth.

John C. Reilly, Neil Patrick Harris, Jack Black, Alison Janney, director Adam Shenkman and composer Marc Shaiman (Hairspray), and many others (including the great Andy Richter) remind me why I love liberal Hollywood.

Via Steve Benen and Whedonesque

This one’s pretty much for film geeks only (though the video below is recommended for all music fans)….

So, some time back, my highly esteemed blog-friend Brian Doan tagged me with the “12 Films” meme, which basically calls for the taggee to name 12 films he or she really wants to see, but hasn’t. Though I making any kind of selection found it a daunting task — I have two DVRs filled with movies I “really need to see” plus a NetFlix queue which is, I think, about 350 films long (a few are repeats of favorites or movies I want to take a new look at that I’ve seen before, but mostly not). I responded (eventually) with six films, with the other six to come…eventually.

But now, Brian has again tagged me again, with the dreaded “Alphabet” meme, calling for a listing of 26 films, one for each letter of the alphabet (”the” and “a”, etc., don’t count) we like or feel some personal connection or are favorites, or whatever. Since I still had a deficit of six films as yet to list in the original films-I-want-to-see meme, and to prove my point about the infinite nature of the first (especially considering my pretty omnivorous tastes), I have decided that I’m going to mutate this here ‘net virus and make it a list of 26 films I really want to see, but haven’t, in alphabetical order. I won’t be tagging anyone else with this, for I fear the viral responsibility. However, of course, anyone who wants to play is more than welcome.

The only trend I noticed here is a few notable films I’ve yet to see from directors I’m supposed to be sorta kinda expert on like Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock.

I should add that this was especially challenging for those less popular alphabet letter, as I’ve actually seen both Xanadu and Z (and wouldn’t even think of listing the former unless it was cut down to the one nice dance number with Gene Kelly and Olivia Neutron Bo…I mean Olivia Newton John — I love musicals too much to give it a pass and, while I’m not wholly immune to camp, my love of bad movies knows bounds, lots and lots of bounds). But okay, I admit the idea was born when I realized I’ve had Louis Malle’s Zazie dans le Metro on my DVR for a couple of years now. My musical tastes saved me elsewhere….

I have put asterisks next to films whose unseen status may be questioned by some (including me) or where I have a comment.

So, here goes….

Avanti
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia*
Cockfighter**
Diabolik
The Emperor of the North
Five Graves to Cairo
Green for Danger
Hallelujah, I’m a Bum
I Am Trying To Break Your Heart
Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten
Kagemusha***
Lifeboat
Mississippi Mermaid
Night of the Generals
One of Our Aircraft is Missing
Pistol Opera
Quo Vadis
Robin and the Seven Hoods****
The Spook Who Sat by the Door
Two for the Road
Used Cars
Verboten!
Wee Willie Winkie*****
X: The Unheard Music
YiYi
Zazie dans le Metro

And now, by way of thanking L.A.’s greatest all-time punk rock band for saving me….and, by the way, this is the first time I’ve seen this piece of film, which may or may not be in the X doc listed above. Why can’t more rock videos be this simple? Great stuff.

See asterisks below the fold…

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Thank you, Ms. Gale Garnett.

It seems like we’ve been losing a lot of the great talents of American popular music, particularly in its sixties R&B division, too early and too often these days. A month ago to the day, the great songwriter and producer Norman Whitfield left us, and media blogger Tim Windsor alluded in comments to Billy Bragg’s “Levi Stubbs’ Tears.”  Now, Levi Stubbs has left us.

Despite being born with a great voice and a really cool name, Levi Stubbs was not nearly as personally well known as he should have been — indeed, the Bragg song is probably his greatest source of name recogniation. Still, we’ve all heard his work, and most of us have been moved by it. He was the big, big voice at the center of the Four Tops. The great Motown vocal group was never quite as famous as the Temptations, but they scored a huge number of megahits and where every bit their artistic equal.

If you’ve somehow missed out on the Four Tops most monstrous hits, “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch),” “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” and “Reach Out I’ll Be There,” there’s still a good chance you know Levi Stubbs’ solo work as the voice of Audrey II, the Mephistophielian maneating plant, in the 1986 musical version of Little Shop of Horrors. It was an inspired choice. Stubbs was not only perfectly suited to Alan Mencken and Howard Ashman’s faux-Motown  score, but no one else on the planet could implore, “Feed me!” with more cartoonish urgency than Stubbs.

One of the great voices — whether lip synching one of his big hits with a little extra energy on some long forgotten teen show, performing live on some other show doing probably the single most bombastic tune in the Motown archives (and therefore one of my favorite records from the entire catalogue), the operatic “7 Rooms of Gloom,” covering an originally thoroughly Anglo-Saxon pop hit like “Eleanor Rigby” (I’m also partial to their version of the Left Bank’s even whiter “Walk Away, Renee”), embodying a houseplant with dreams or world domination, or playing for what appears to be one of those PBS boomer-bait music shows as late in 2004, no one could sell it, and mean it, quite like Stubbs. Without a doubt, he was one of the greatest.

UPDATE:  Marcus Errico had an additional live performance clip that was too good not to steal. A very relaxed, somewhat more sophisticated than usual rendition of “I Can’t Help Myself.” Nice.

Unfortunately, Jean-Luc Godard’s Week End is a mere runner-up and will not be among the films discussed starting Monday and on through the next ten days at the Britannica Blog by writer Raymond Benson, who’ll be taking us through his ten favorite films from the epic year. Benson is best known as a successful writer of thrillers, including being the author of a passel of officially sanctioned post-Fleming James Bond novels, and the person who guesses his #1 film from 1968 gets a free signed copy of his appropriately titled rock and roll thriller, A Hard Day’s Death. [Update: As Brian Doan reminded me in comments just now, Mr. Benson is even better known as the author of the hightly acclaimed reference, The James Bond Bedside Companion. Oops.]

Anyhow, your esteemed proprietor has been asked to participate by way of comments on a daily basis as Mr. Benson reveals his choices. I’ll be just part of a whole gang of, no doubt, painstakingly selected folk, including two friends of this here blog: David Hudson of the completely essential and utterly invaluble Greencine blog (syndicated over on the right of your screen), and the ever-amusing wordsmith, Alan Lopuszynski of Burbanked, one of the first movies bloggers to comment here and link to me. Also on board is sixties/seventies-specialist Kimberly Lindbergs of the rightfully acclaimed Cinebeats blog (which I really need to start reading a lot more often and probably should add to the blog roll if I haven’t already), Ray “Flickhead” Young, autodidact Steven Carlson and many other fine folk — including one guy actually associated with a print venue who has perhaps even met Jonathan Rosenbaum. (Other film bloggers are also invited to jump in.)

So, head over to Raymond Benson’s first post right now and take a look at his runners-up list, and start the speculation. Then return with me next week and see what we think.

Until then, use your time wisely. Prepare.

Today, we take jazz too seriously for its own good. There was a time, though, when jazz was at least as edgy and disreputable as rap and rock and roll were not so long ago. Four recent DVD releases raid the Warner Brothers library — and borrow the name of our nation’s best known movie tough-guy and jazz lover — to give us a fascinating but decidedly uneven look into the low down past of what we now call “America’s classical music.”

Read the rest at Premium Hollywood….

….That musicals are no longer “dead.” Especially if Joss Whedon is involved and they’re available for free via the ‘net.

The LA Times has the scoop. And here’s the actual link where, if things go right, you’ll be able to watch the first installment of  Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (and, later, the other two) for free. You can also buy them for $1.99 each if you have iTunes and really want to give the Whedon family your money. (A DVD — with a singing commentary track — is promised later on.)

This apparent smash success puts me in mind of back when I was fixated on Whedon’s big screen directorial debut, Serenity (it’s a long story). Universal tried “viral promotional” largely through some atmospheric/creepy viral clips featuring Summer Glau (currently on the “Terminator” TV series), and sort of assumed that message boards and blogs would do the rest. Of course, the movie was well below expectations at the box-office and the consensus was that, if anything could have helped that notoriously hard to pitch film (which has nevertheless enjoyed the predictable success on DVD), it would have been more traditional promotion, and a lot of it.

Is the lesson here that promoting something exclusively on the Internet really can work if you’re product is mainly available on the ‘net? Or has the Whedon fanbase simply grown that much larger — perhaps hitting a kind of critical mass where the fanatics influence the less fanatical to take a look? (Being free certainly can’t hurt that.)Well, since I don’t even time right now to watch the first 15 minute installment (but “Fresh Air” TV critic and Whedon fan David Bianculli says it’s good), I’m certainly not going to risk an answer, but I’m sure it’s something marketing people might be thinking about.

More later, I’m sure. And if you want more now, there’s tons  of stuff up about “Dr. Horrible,” among other matters, at Whedonesque if you go as of right now.

UPDATE: I’ve now seen the first two parts (the third part goes live Friday, 7/19) and I really, really like it. (Note to my friends: Yes, I know that’s quite a shock.) I will say that a big, big part of the credit goes to the three leads. Neil Patrick Harris as the nice-guy villian Dr. Horrible and Nathan Fillion as the noxious superhero Captain Hammer are similar performers in that each settles so nicely into a role that you’re tempted to think that’s all they can do — until you see them fit just as nicely, if not better, into some other role. I already knew that Harris could sing really well, but Fillion proves a worthy enough vocal foe as well. Also,  playing straightwoman with two super lunatics, Felicia Day does a wonderful job of playing and singing that most thankless of roles, the nice, normal person.

Definitely worth a look for anyone to whom the words “supervillain musical” have any interest whatsoever. Catch while it’s still free.

Also, those interested in Dr. Horrible’s web success might want to take a gander at this. (H/t Whedonesque, of course.)

The show creators said at peak, the site was getting 200,000 hits per hour. In fact, a representative from their web hosting company, Vireo Verio.com, called to tell them the site had crashed when, at one point, 1,000 people tried to access it in one second.

I don’t usually follow this stuff, but it sure sounds like a lot to me, even considering the rabidity of the Whedonites. If anyone reading can come up with comparison between this and other big web events, I’d be curious to see how (un?)precedented this is.

This post is my entry at William Speruzzi’s Ambitious Failure Blogathon at This Savage Art.

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If satire is what closes on Saturday night, how much courage did the creators of the stage musical Reefer Madness need to go ahead with their off-Broadway debut on September 15, 2001?

It must have felt a bit like the final moments of The Wild Bunch to attempt a take-no-prisoners satire, complete with orgies, murder, a little light cannibalism, and a Vegas-style Jesus Christ, within four days and a few miles of the disaster “that changed everything” — and it couldn’t have helped that pundits across the nation were busy declaring the end of irony, and good riddance to it. Jerry Falwell might have been declaring that gays, pagans and the ACLU shared responsibility for 9/11 with Osama and Mohamed Atta, but to read many writers you’d have thought the tragedy was God’s judgment for the success of Seinfeld. The musical Reefer Madness had run for a year in a half in Los Angeles, but it didn’t last long beyond Saturday night in New York.

With that background, it shouldn’t be any surprise that the 2005 Showtime film of the play, Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical refers far more starkly to the War on Terrorism than the War on Drugs. Made by the original team behind the stage productions, writer-composers Kevin Murphy and Dan Studney along with director Andy Fickman, the film takes aims at some big targets including red-baiting and political intolerance, racial hysteria, and, of course, sexual panic (both homo- and hetero-). All in all, just about all of the favorite social evils of most social liberals are ridiculed….with the odd exception of U.S. drug laws. For that, you’ll have to go back to Traffic.

Still, it’s definitely ambitious in terms of its political targets, and also ambitious in the sense that doing a traditional break-out-in-song style musical always risks ridicule — and doing one on a modest budget is a challenge on every level. As for it being a “failure,” as a made-for-cable film it’s hard to judge Reefer Madness commercially, but it seems to have met with a mixed critical reaction, though it also clearly has its share of fans on IMDb. It’s probably safe to say that if it had the festival reaction had been stronger (it premiered at Sundance) a limited U.S. theatrical release might have been planned. The made-for-cable label can be a face-saving fall-back position for a film deemed to have limited appeal — it sounds a whole lot better than “direct-to-DVD.”

As far as it’s artistic success or failure, it seems to me that as social satire it’s not very potent and as comedy it’s less than consistently brilliant, at least as written. So, then why does it make me laugh and why have I enjoyed watching certain scenes over and over?

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