Happy Thanksgiving to you Americans

The Notebook (2005):

The Notebook is adapted from a best-selling novel by Nicholas Sparks, who is a member of a very exclusive club - the society of men who write timeless best-selling romantic novels for women. Since their membership roster is part of the vast body of erudition outside my areas of knowledge, the only other club member I can name is Robert James Waller, the guy who wrote The Bridges of Madison County. Those two men have some things in common, perhaps the most important of which is that they both came from outside the world of letters when they became novelists. Professor Waller taught applied mathematics and economic theory for a couple of decades before his first mass market book was published, and he was 53 years old when The Bridges of Madison Country became a publishing phenomenon. Nicholas Sparks had a business/finance degree and was working as a pharmaceutical sales rep when The Notebook broke through, although he had always wanted to be a writer and had written a novel when he was still a 19-year-old undergraduate at Notre Dame.

The Notebook qualifies as an official chick-flick by our objective definition: the score assigned by female voters (8.7) is a full point higher than the score from male voters (7.7). Therefore, instead of telling you how I feel about this movie, I think I can sum up its appeal with the following information. I have a nineteen year old daughter and a fourteen year old niece. The former's favorite movie was Titanic. The latter's is The Notebook. My niece and her friends watch The Notebook again and again, and they are still talking about it now, although it has been gone from theaters for more than a year, and was released on DVD five months ago. It is the ultimate film for eighth grade white girls, a Degas painting for the new millennium. Hell, I'm trying to figure out why this movie only grossed eighty million, given that every young teen girl loves it and that so many women of all ages have read the book.

This chart tells the story:

Yes, it is a chick-flick, but boys actually like the movie, and men don't hate it at all. The lowest score on the chart, 7.6, is still in classic territory, while the 9.2 is off the charts, and that score has actually been adjusted downward through some arithmetical finagling. The unadjusted average of these votes is 9.5! IMDb doesn't publish Top Ten lists by demographic sub-group, but this is probably the most popular film of all time among young girls. Amelie is rated only 8.9 by the same group.

And it made money. A lot of money.

Publishers have always known that there is a tremendous commercial market for "women's books." The Bridges of Madison County is the best-selling novel of all time, and Sparks's books are also phenomenally popular, with sales of about fifty million copies to date. Film producers also know that there is a massive latent market for "women's movies" - as Titanic and My Big Fat Greek Wedding have demonstrated - but that market tends to stay latent because film moguls don't really tap into that well as effectively as book publishers do. Most films continue to be made by and for men. The chick-flick gross potential normally remains dormant and its successes are difficult to predict. This was one of them. The film version of The Notebook debuted to tepid critical response (49% positive reviews) and a lukewarm opening weekend ($13 million), but it connected with female viewers. Their word-of-mouth network drove it along the same kind of path that Greek Wedding blazed, and The Notebook consistently piled on the ticket sales week after week until it had become a major commercial success ($81 million). The total-to-opening ratio of six-to-one is impressive since most films finish in the threes, but even that is still a far cry from the eighty-to-one racked up by Greek Wedding and the twenty-to-one achieved by Titanic.

The plot is uncomplicated. An old man is in a rest home. Each day he reads a romantic story to an old woman with senile dementia. As the story progresses, it becomes apparent that the story is their own, and that he is reading it in the hope that it will stir her memories of herself. The doctors tell him that senile dementia is irreversible, but that point doesn't seem to be important to him. In his view, he has nothing to lose and everything to gain. Even if he fails completely he is still getting a chance to re-live the greatest moments of his life with the woman he shared them with, and that alone gives him pleasure. And there is always that hope ...

Although there are romantic moments in both time periods, most of the action takes place in the flashbacks, which are pictorializations of the story he is reading from his notebook. Nick Cassavetes directed, and the older version of the woman is played by Nick's own mother, Gena Rolands. 

The Notebook has a very good chance to make the IMDb all-time Top 250 some day. It fact, it probably should be there now! The Hustler is rated #162, although it is rated 7.9 with 9000 votes, while The Notebook is rated 7.9 with 14000 votes!  IMDb does not explain all of its statistical modeling in depth, but they say that the top 250 list is based solely on votes from "regular voters." The Notebook is rated only 7.0 by their "top 1000" voters. (I wonder how many women are on that prestigious list. I wonder how many in that group have even seen a woman up close.) Despite the lack of enthusiasm from critics, and the IMDb "top 1000 voters," we can look back on it objectively, a year and a half after its release, and see clearly that it has become a classic of the "women's movie" genre. 

Rachel McAdams

Jamie Brown

 King Kong (1933):

According to The Numbers, King Kong was at the top of the box office in 1933 and grossed $10 million in the USA. Tickets used to cost 25 cents in those days, so 40 million people paid to see it, equivalent to about $250 million in ticket sales at today's average price. However, it must be noted that the population of the United States was only 125 million at that time, so Kong was seen by about one person out of every three. Extrapolating the percentage to the current population of 295 million would result in 94 million tickets, or about $600 million at today's ticket prices, competitive with Titanic! At the time of its theatrical run, per The Numbers, Kong was among the top four grossers of all time, exceeded only by Frankenstein ($12M), The Big Parade ($11M), and Tom Sawyer ($11M). All of those films were very strong performers. Frankenstein's $12 million would continue to hold the record for a non-animated film until 1941, when Sergeant York took the crown. Kong's 1933 total was as high as the 1948 champion! Because its costs were not exceptionally high, Kong was highly profitable for its studio. The Konger's budget was a modest $600,000 - equivalent to about nine million dollars today, per the U.S. Government database.

It also receives 100% positive reviews at IMDb, and the online comments about this film look approximately like the comments about Jesus at an agape.

So is it truly a great movie, to provoke such enthusiasm? No, not at all.

It was a major cultural event and a great technical achievement in 1933 (maybe - see the Variety review below), but there's nothing worthwhile watching today unless you are studying the history of filmmaking. Historically, it is extremely important, as important as Citizen Kane or Birth of a Nation. The film includes iconography that has become integral to the history of film as a medium, and everyone who loves movies can picture Kong atop the Empire State Building, or holding Fay Wray in his hands.

But ...

Although King Kong is historically important, it is very tedious work to watch the film today, a task roughly equivalent to reading Moby Dick in order to study the history of the American novel  - necessary, but not pleasurable.

The problems?

• The creatures and the special effects, which were undoubtedly impressive in 1933, are laughable today. Variety's contemporary review pointed out that some of it was even laughable in 1933:

There are times when the plot takes advantage of its imaginative status and goes too far. On these occasions the customers are liable to laugh in the wrong way. A most tolerant audience at the Music Hall broke down now and then, but on the whole was exceedingly kind. It seemed that while a few details were too strong to swallow the picture, as a whole, got them.

• The creature battles not only look fake, but they go on much too long and are repetitive.

• The damned ape keeps changing size!

• The acting is as bad as you'll see in any movie among the Top 250. I can say without exaggeration that it is not up to the standards of the Three Stooges shorts. (In fact, if you look closely, you'll see many of the same extras working with Kong and the Stooges.)

• The portrayal of dark-skinned people is approximately as subtle as the portrayal of Japanese soldiers in a wartime Bugs Bunny cartoon.

• Although the film receives a perfect 100% at Rotten Tomatoes, the contemporary reviews were not gushing. Variety declared:

It takes a couple of reels for ‘Kong’ to be believed, and until then it doesn’t grip. But after the audience becomes used to the machine-like movements and other mechanical flaws in the gigantic animals on view, and become accustomed to the phony atmosphere, they may commence to feel the power. As the story background is constantly implausible, the mechanical end must fight its own battle for audience confidence.

Fay Wray is the blonde who’s chased by Kong, grabbed twice, but finally saved. It’s a 96-minute screaming session for her, too much for any actress and any audience. With the blonde still screaming while in Kong’s palm atop the Empire state, after having screamed all the way from the first reel, another of the unbelievable facts is that Kong shouldn’t drop her and look for a non-screamer — even if he has to settle for a brunet. The light hair is a change for Miss Wray. Robert Armstrong, as the explorer, and Bruce Cabot, as the blonde’s other boy friend who doesn’t make her scream, are the remaining principal characters and are snowed under by the technical end.

As for the plot and editing - they often make no sense at all. I used to find this movie confusing and lacking in credibility when I was ten. First of all, when the ship arrives at an isolated, legendary island - it turns out that the captain can speak their isolated, legendary language. I suppose he took a legendary language minor at the Merchant Marine Academy, and I suppose he can speak every language in the world, since nobody knew in advance which language the natives would speak, or even if the island really existed at all. Then, the film simply skips over the problems of how the men got Kong on the ship, how they shackled him, and how they fed him on the trip back. One minute the giant Kong is prostrate on an island, then the next minute he has a one-ape show on Broadway in the next theater down from Jolson. Oh, yeah, then when he gets loose in New York, one of the world's most populous cities, he manages to find Fay Wray within minutes.

You know what is truly amazing to me about the critical comments about this movie? On a scale of 1 to 100, it's approximately a 10. Taken out of its historical context, it is not just a bad movie, but an abomination, one of the worst films you will ever see, maybe the worst unless you specifically make an effort to see bad movies. It is difficult to find even one good thing to say about the film - and yet the reviews are 100% positive! Talk about the ultimate Naked Emperor! To be brutally honest, you could get together with your friends, write a better script, and do better F/X on your PC. Moreover, you and your friends would probably be better actors than the people in this film, unless you hang around with Tom Green.

The new two-disk DVD, however, is tremendous. The original version of the film is now available, with all the censored scenes worked back into the film. Well, to be completely honest, it's almost the original version. The deleted/censored material is now fully restored except for the lost "spider sequence," which is covered in detail in the documentary. That gruesome sequence was shown only on opening night, and was subsequently deleted by the director himself.

• RetroCrush discusses the scenes which have been censored over the years.

• Here is the story behind the long-lost spider scene and Peter Jackson's attempt to re-create it.

The DVD even includes a commentary track by dead people - like the director and Fay Wray! Clever how they did that, although the director sounds like he's on an old-time 78 recording of a man shouting into a canyon! In addition to the two hours of film with the optional commentary track, there is another two and a half hours of documentary material about the movie, and yet another documentary on director Merian C. Cooper, who was as colorful a character as the Carl Denham character in the movie. Cooper not only wrote and directed, but even flew the plane that shot Kong off the Empire State Building!

Here are the complete contents:

• Disc 1: The Movie
• Original 1933 Film classic in Glorious Black and White, Newly Restored and Digitally Mastered
• Commentary by Ray Harryhausen and Ken Ralston, with Merian C. Cooper and Fay Wray
• I'm Kong: The Exploits of Merian C. Cooper -- 2005 documentary
• Merian C. Cooper Movies Trailer Gallery

• Disc 2: King-Sized Special Features
• RKO Production 601: The Making of Kong, Eighth Wonder of the World - 7 Part Documentary including...
• The Origins of "King Kong"
• Willis OBrien and "Creation"
• Cameras Roll on Kong, The Eighth Wonder
• A Milestone in Visual Effects
• Passion, Sound and Fury
• The Mystery of the Lost Spider Pit Sequence
• King Kong's Legacy
• Creation Test Footage with Commentary by Ray Harryhausen

Fay Wray

Now and Forever (2002, 2005):

Now and Forever is a romantic drama aimed at the young teen and pre-teen girl market.  Oh, my. Two of these in one day. If The Notebook is a perfect example of how a romantic girly drama can be done well, Now and Forever is an illustration of the flip side of the coin. It will just make you cringe.

A young white girl and a Native American boy are childhood friends in Saskatoon. She even rescues him from bullies. As they move into adolescence, she keeps him as a friend but can't see him as a love interest, much to his chagrin. She wants to hang out with the cool, rich kids. The coolest guy takes her to bed, then arranges for his pals to gang-rape her, as movie cool guys so often do. Luckily her friend rescues her, thus allowing her to run off to the big city to pursue her acting career, as movie small town girls so often do and presumably because they don't make movies in Saskatoon? (Hey, they made this one, didn't they?) Poor guy. Poor girl. He's obviously the right guy for her, but she still can't cast him as the love interest.

Following the trail of movie inevitability, she contracts a dread disease and returns to Saskatoon, but this time neither her Cree friend nor his father, who is the eternally sage aphorism-spouting movie chief, can save her. And yet, somehow, the film tricks up a happy ending.  Can you guess how? No matter how outrageous your guess, you'll probably underestimate the implausibility of it all. And I'm not exaggerating.

The script is weighted down by sentimentality, phony-baloney respect for Native American mysticism, and a "sixth sense" type ending, but even if it had played it straight it would have been no better than a bottom-dwelling after-school special. Some of the words used by critics to describe it include: "schmaltz," "hokey," "saccharine,"  "candy-colored,"  "cliché,"  and "hokum."

I was saddened to see that the director of this film is Bob Clark.  He made Porky's in 1982, which is one of the most popular comedies of all time, the third highest-grossing film of 1982, and is still the highest grossing Canadian film of all time. He followed that up in 1983 with A Christmas Story, which is well up there in the IMDb Top 250, and is usually considered to be the best Christmas movie of all time.

1982-1983 must seem like a long time ago to Clark. In those days he was used to reading his reviews and seeing words like "best" amd "highest." He has now made a 180 degree turn. His 2004 release was Superbabies 2, which is now the worst movie of all time at IMDb, and his 2005 effort was Now & Forever. Actually, I guess that isn't quite fair. Now & Forever was actually lensed in 2002, but the producers didn't really know how to market it, and couldn't strike a distribution deal. It sat around for three years before it received a perfunctory micro-mini-distro in the summer of 2005 and a DVD release in November of 2005.

I am guessing that it would be considered a watchable film by young women. Although I don't have sufficient evidence to make that determination (only nine votes from the 18-29 group at IMDb, and none from the younger group), the chart is quite persuasive so far:

age	male	female
below 18	no votes	no votes
18-29	5.1	9.8
30-44	5.9	7.1
45 or more	5.3	5.0

That 9.8 is based on only nine votes, but it is such a high score that one tends to feel it may be indicative of a genuine trend, but if you are over 30 and/or lacking a minimum of one vagina, I think I can safely advise that you are likely to hate it.

It does have one redeeming element - some nudity from Mia Kirshner, who is now the queen bee of the L-Word.

Mia Kirshner

Other Crap:

Movie Reviews:

Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.

Wild Orchid II: Two Shades of Blue (1992):

This is a Zalman King "couples erotica" piece. Like all of his other work, it is beautifully photographed, although a little dark. It has the look and feel of his early Red Shoe Diaries directorial efforts. Blue is about 16 years old, and travels from gig to gig with her junkie musician father. She gives her virginity to a club owner to get some junk for her father, as he is in bad shape. Unable to face what she had to do, he kills himself, leaving her alone and penniless. The club owner convinces her to become a prostitute at the establishment of a friend in which he hold partial interest. Meanwhile, Blue has met a young man with qualities that appeal to her.

Her stay in the fancy house was not to her liking, and the body guard, unwilling to see another life ruined, leaves with her, renting a house. She goes back to finish High School, and starts dating the rich young man, who also happens to be the quarterback of the football team. Her former madam doesn't let her escape the life so easily.

Blue is played by Nina Siemaszko, who shows breasts, buns, and a hint of bush. There is additional nudity from Gloria Reuben, Lydie Denier and several unknowns. IMDb says 3.5 of 10. This would have made a good Red Shoe Diary episode, but, at 111 minutes is way too long for the amount of plot it contains. The running time is stretched with lengthy photo montages that don't advance the plot. Also, the sex shows little passion. Siemaszko becomes a very sympathetic character, and does a good job with the role. This is a C- at best. It is well acted and photographed, but has a languid pace and little passion.

 

Scoop's note:

The DVD is not recommended, although the transfer is fine. Unfortunately, the DVD includes only the 108 minute R-rated version, which is missing the best Siemaszko nudity. There are two different VHS variations, one of which has the 112 minute version which is uncut and unrated.

Scoops-

No time for blather tonight, but I thought you would like the Albalicious collage and the latest joint ventures with Master Tuna's work. 
 

Lisa Glaser Humanoids ft Deep	Lorissa McComas Hard as Nails	Lynne Frederick Schizo	Maria Alonso Blackheart	Mayko Nguyen Going the Distance	Monique Parent Witches Breastwick
Monique Parent Witches Breastwick	Monique van de Ven Keetie Tippel	Salma Hayek Desperado	Salma Hayek Desperado	Sandy Brooke Star Slammer	Sherry Hilliard Owning Mahowny
Simonetta Stefanelli The Godfather	Stormy Daniels Witches Breastwick	Taimie Hannum Kama Sutra	Taimie Hannum Kama Sutra	Taimie Hannum Kama Sutra	Teri Weigel Savage Beach
Teri Weigel Savage Beach	Tracy Birch Dance With Death	Tracy Birch Dance With Death	Uschi Digart The Godson	Zehra Leverman The Protector	ALBA