Mixtapes for Hookers

I don’t often talk about movies here, but having a sick boyfriend and being unemployed has done wonders for my cinematic intake.  In the past week alone I’ve watched a bunch and figured I’d share some thoughts about some of them.

Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965, Otto Preminger)

A creepy psychological thriller about a girl who goes missing shortly after her mother and the guy from 2001 move to England.  It’s a great example of the “tense sixties black-and-white drama where people get all crazy and it ends with people arguing out in the backyard” genre (see also: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; probably others I can’t think of right now.)  I rented it because the Zombies are in it, though they appear only on a TV screen in a pub scene.  I don’t know much about Preminger, since I thought Laura was very dull and overrated, but this one’s worth checking out.  The title sequence is also pretty awesome.

Black Narcissus (1947, Michael Powell & Emeric Pressberger)

Deborah Kerr’s the head nun as a group of sisters head to the Himalayas to open a school and infirmary for the locals.  They get involved with David Farrar, who wears short shorts and in each scene shows more chest than in the previous one.  Sadly, though the nuns might dig it, he’s not much of a looker for us in the audience.  The movie also features a totally flaming performance by Sabu, who thinks David Farrar is very lovely.  I liked the movie quite a bit, though it felt about twice as long as it actually was, and I sometimes had trouble telling which nun was which.

Billy Liar (1962, John Schlesinger)

Tom Courtenay plays the title character in this incredibly bleak “comedy”.  I’ve now seen a bunch of Schlesinger’s movies, and while I think he’s occasionally pretty good (Midnight Cowboy), he’s often pretty forgettable (Sunday Bloody Sunday).  His films take really interesting subjects, in this case the Angry Young Man phenomenon, and remove any sort of pizzazz that you might expect.*  While it works for New York hustling in Midnight Cowboy, it’s pretty dreary in Billy Liar.  Also, Billy’s engaged to two different girls; while one of them, the naive romantic, seems likely to fall for Billy’s lies and fascistic whimsies, I don’t quite get why the noisy trampy one would have ever wanted to marry such a big baby.  Julie Christie, who shows up towards the end, is by far the most likable and interesting thing about this movie, though I also liked the dance sequences, including a really huge conga line that made me laugh more than anything else in the movie.

[Also, I always wondered where the "lose yourself in London!" intro to Saint Etienne's You're In A Bad Way came from; now I know.]

(*The exception to this is Cold Comfort Farm, which he made decades later and which is one of my very favorite movies.)

Beautiful Thing (1996, Hettie MacDonald)

Though I watched more or less every movie that came out in 1996, I somehow missed out on Beautiful Thing, the British drama about two teenaged boys finding love on a council estate.  It’s sooooooo good.  I’m not generally one for the heartwarming dramas, but the characters in this movie are all rounded enough to keep it from being too sentimental.  The mom in this movie is wonderful, strong in some ways but needlessly petty and mean in others; but the best performance, probably, is that of Tameka Empson, the girl next door who wants to be Mama Cass.  The soundtrack to this movie is great, too, though I suppose being a Cass Elliott fan helps.  I think these days people call Beautiful Thing naive and dated, but don’t listen; I even got a little bit choked up at the happy ending.