Post by Raffy on Dec 9, 2010 16:34:57 GMT -5
LOL. From the Boston GLobe
Taking aim once again at insatiable craving for fame
By Wesley Morris
Globe Staff / December 10, 2010
It’s possible that after two decades of watching Henry Jaglom movies, I’ve developed a tolerance. The richness, the crypto-famousness, the parade of cosmetically altered visages might have hardened into a new indulgent compound, in which Jaglom, who’s 69 now and has made the same movie about 16 times, expresses what passes for wisdom. It’s a limited grasp (what he knows wouldn’t survive outside certain Los Angeles ZIP codes), but it’s firm.
Jaglom’s movies — “Eating,’’ “Venice/Venice,’’ “Last Summer in the Hamptons,’’ “Déjà Vu,’’ “Going Shopping,’’ “Hollywood Dreams,’’ “Irene in Time’’ — are close studies of neurotic aspiration. What charm they have as a body of work is in their defiance of genres: They’re flatulently dramatic comedies. He’s one of the few filmmakers, perhaps the only one, whose style comprises other directors at their worst — Oscar Micheaux, Robert Altman, Alan Rudolph, Woody Allen. The nattering conversations, the loping, zoom-in camerawork, the flaccid wit: His movies are a premiere party from hell.
This is all to say, about his latest, “Queen of the Lot’’: Uncle. Very little in it suggests that Jaglom has changed. But I liked it. He might have been a visionary after all. Popular culture has become as shallow as his films, and, through entertainment geophysics, what seemed petty to us and relevant only to the women of Venice Beach, Brentwood, and Topanga Canyon now has a gospel charge.
“Queen of the Lot’’ is the tale of a comedic action star named Maggie Chase (Tanna Frederick). Maggie craves better fame. She has some DUIs and must wear an electronic ankle bracelet. She self-Googles and dreams of having as many “Google points’’ as Angelina Jolie. We see her cavort with her manager and the family of her unfaithful actor boyfriend, Dov (Christopher Rydell). She winds up falling for his brother, Aaron (Noah Wyle), a failed writer. Wyle is so naturally good that he throws off the rest of the movie. You can’t believe that a man this together and sexy would put up with any of these strange, scary-looking people. It’s just like watching “Arsenic and Old Lace’’ and wondering how on earth that batty family produced Cary Grant.
Aaron’s father, Louis (Jack Heller), is one of those Hollywood movie producers whose girth and gray make him seem important. His fortunes are on the brink of vanishing and foreclosure on his hillside chateau is in the offing, but all anybody wants to do is sit around and ruminate.
What will save them? A new movie? Louis wants his director friend to remake an Ernst Lubitsch comedy. The director is played by the actual filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, and he knows better. But the producer insists. So maybe they deserve to lose the chateau. Thank God, Maggie’s ankle bracelet is on America’s pulse: an interfaith reality show!
With all the talk of Lubitsch and Norma Shearer and with the fact that he’s called his movie “Queen of the Lot,’’ as in the studio lot, Jaglom’s not having any reality-show nonsense. Something more classical will come through, and it does. These are mostly the sort of awful people whose feet you sometimes try to run over with a shopping cart at the store, the sort of people who shop in ermine (ermine!) while talking on the phone and pushing around a cart containing only a carton of ice cream. Which is to say the movie is true. It’s like an unthinkable blend of documentary and farce: real, ridiculous, really ridiculous.
Jaglom understands the Hollywood caste system and has tremendous affection for people who think they’re on the bottom, like both Maggie and Frederick, who’s bad but uniquely so. She seems tall. She has great red hair, but her voice is pedestrian. That is not the voice of a star. It’s the voice of a celebrity. Her pitiful desperation is attractive the way disasters are attractive: She’s trying to channel Judy Holliday but got patched through to Courtney Love, instead.
At least twice, Jaglom mines good comedy from Frederick. Once when Maggie runs ecstatically to the paparazzi, handing out waters. Another, when she sits on a counter with Wylie, in a negligee, eating a pint of ice cream and cake but spitting each bite into the sink. She calls it “chatting’’ — all the chewing, none of the eating. It’s one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a movie, and the closest Jaglom has come to brilliant satire. It also explains why this woman is just chatting on a countertop and not Jay Leno’s couch.
www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2010/12/10/in_queen_of_the_lot_taking_aim_at_insatiable_craving_for_fame/
Taking aim once again at insatiable craving for fame
By Wesley Morris
Globe Staff / December 10, 2010
It’s possible that after two decades of watching Henry Jaglom movies, I’ve developed a tolerance. The richness, the crypto-famousness, the parade of cosmetically altered visages might have hardened into a new indulgent compound, in which Jaglom, who’s 69 now and has made the same movie about 16 times, expresses what passes for wisdom. It’s a limited grasp (what he knows wouldn’t survive outside certain Los Angeles ZIP codes), but it’s firm.
Jaglom’s movies — “Eating,’’ “Venice/Venice,’’ “Last Summer in the Hamptons,’’ “Déjà Vu,’’ “Going Shopping,’’ “Hollywood Dreams,’’ “Irene in Time’’ — are close studies of neurotic aspiration. What charm they have as a body of work is in their defiance of genres: They’re flatulently dramatic comedies. He’s one of the few filmmakers, perhaps the only one, whose style comprises other directors at their worst — Oscar Micheaux, Robert Altman, Alan Rudolph, Woody Allen. The nattering conversations, the loping, zoom-in camerawork, the flaccid wit: His movies are a premiere party from hell.
This is all to say, about his latest, “Queen of the Lot’’: Uncle. Very little in it suggests that Jaglom has changed. But I liked it. He might have been a visionary after all. Popular culture has become as shallow as his films, and, through entertainment geophysics, what seemed petty to us and relevant only to the women of Venice Beach, Brentwood, and Topanga Canyon now has a gospel charge.
“Queen of the Lot’’ is the tale of a comedic action star named Maggie Chase (Tanna Frederick). Maggie craves better fame. She has some DUIs and must wear an electronic ankle bracelet. She self-Googles and dreams of having as many “Google points’’ as Angelina Jolie. We see her cavort with her manager and the family of her unfaithful actor boyfriend, Dov (Christopher Rydell). She winds up falling for his brother, Aaron (Noah Wyle), a failed writer. Wyle is so naturally good that he throws off the rest of the movie. You can’t believe that a man this together and sexy would put up with any of these strange, scary-looking people. It’s just like watching “Arsenic and Old Lace’’ and wondering how on earth that batty family produced Cary Grant.
Aaron’s father, Louis (Jack Heller), is one of those Hollywood movie producers whose girth and gray make him seem important. His fortunes are on the brink of vanishing and foreclosure on his hillside chateau is in the offing, but all anybody wants to do is sit around and ruminate.
What will save them? A new movie? Louis wants his director friend to remake an Ernst Lubitsch comedy. The director is played by the actual filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, and he knows better. But the producer insists. So maybe they deserve to lose the chateau. Thank God, Maggie’s ankle bracelet is on America’s pulse: an interfaith reality show!
With all the talk of Lubitsch and Norma Shearer and with the fact that he’s called his movie “Queen of the Lot,’’ as in the studio lot, Jaglom’s not having any reality-show nonsense. Something more classical will come through, and it does. These are mostly the sort of awful people whose feet you sometimes try to run over with a shopping cart at the store, the sort of people who shop in ermine (ermine!) while talking on the phone and pushing around a cart containing only a carton of ice cream. Which is to say the movie is true. It’s like an unthinkable blend of documentary and farce: real, ridiculous, really ridiculous.
Jaglom understands the Hollywood caste system and has tremendous affection for people who think they’re on the bottom, like both Maggie and Frederick, who’s bad but uniquely so. She seems tall. She has great red hair, but her voice is pedestrian. That is not the voice of a star. It’s the voice of a celebrity. Her pitiful desperation is attractive the way disasters are attractive: She’s trying to channel Judy Holliday but got patched through to Courtney Love, instead.
At least twice, Jaglom mines good comedy from Frederick. Once when Maggie runs ecstatically to the paparazzi, handing out waters. Another, when she sits on a counter with Wylie, in a negligee, eating a pint of ice cream and cake but spitting each bite into the sink. She calls it “chatting’’ — all the chewing, none of the eating. It’s one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a movie, and the closest Jaglom has come to brilliant satire. It also explains why this woman is just chatting on a countertop and not Jay Leno’s couch.
www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2010/12/10/in_queen_of_the_lot_taking_aim_at_insatiable_craving_for_fame/