3rd
Coming Soon to a TV Near You, Jan. 4 - 10, 2010
Being Julia (IFC, Monday, Jan. 4, 8:35 p.m.,Tuesday, Jan. 5, 3:35 a.m.)
Five years after her astonishing, Academy Award-nominated performance in American Beauty, Annette Bening returned to the screen in 2004’s Being Julia, a sophisticated comedy whose deep performances keep it from being fluff.
Directed by Hungarian Istvan Szabo and based on a W. Somerset Maugham story, the film focuses on a famous British actress in the ’30s dealing with being in her 40s. With Jamesian echoes in the relationship between older, British Julia (Bening) and a young American actor (Shaun Evans), the most exciting play afoot is the one for power in all its manifestation: the power of sex, the power of age, the power of youth, the power of love, the power of fame, the power of ambition.
Jeremy Irons is Julia’s husband and Michael Gambon is the ghost of an acting teacher past. Lucy Punch plays the role of Eve to Bening’s Margo Channing in a film that calls to mind All About Eve in many ways. While the entire film is good, the last act is a doozy.
Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night watching this meta gem about the theater and the theater of life. – Kathryn Jenson White
Blow Out (IFC, Wednesday, Jan. 6, 9:05 pm)
Brian De Palma movies can be as erratic as Kanye West at an awards show, but the filmmaker’s finest works are imbued with an almost carnal love of cinema. The criminally underrated Blow Out from 1981 might be the writer-director’s last truly great thriller (and yes, I am remembering Scarface and The Untouchables). John Travolta plays a sound-effects man currently working on a low-budget slasher flick when he stumbles upon a Chappaquiddick-styled incident involving a politician and a call girl. The politician drowns. The hooker, played with doe-eyed goofiness by cute-as-a-button Nancy Allen (then Mrs. De Palma) is saved by Travolta. Was it murder or an accident? And so begins a taut, tense story.
As is typically the case with De Palma, Blow Out is rife with the ghosts of other pictures — most notably Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and anything by Alfred Hitchcock — but such influences are distilled through De Palma’s decidedly sleazy, pop culture aesthetic. An absorbing, witty and thrilling celebration and critique of our voyeuristic society, Blow Out is well worth catching.
And it has a hell of an ending, to boot. – Phil Bacharach
Bardelys the Magnificent (TCM, Sunday, Jan. 10, 11pm)
I saw the second North American premiere of this rousing adventure story from 1926 at the Kansas Silent Film Festival last year—“second” premiere because the movie was thought lost for decades before being unearthed in a private collection in Europe. The third reel is missing, but production stills and clips from the trailer have been used to bridge the gaps in continuity.
Based on a novel by Rafael Sabatini, author of Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk, this romp is set during the 17th Century. Matinee idol John Gilbert, whose star faded with the coming of sound pictures, is Bardeleys, a dashing courtier who takes little in life seriously. He wagers that he can get the beautiful Lady Roxalanne de Lavedan (Eleanor Boardman, one of my favorite silent actresses) to fall in love with him.
It’s a silly premise, more fitting a screwball comedy than a costume adventure story, but director King Vidor is obviously having fun with a loving burlesque of Doug Fairbanks’ swashbucklers while delivering a fine example of the breed himself.
It’s not a great film and cinema history would have kept right on rolling along without it, but it is fun and this is a chance to sample the talents of two leads with whom you may be entirely unfamiliar. – Doug Bentin
