Tag: Mickey Rooney

Rapid Response: Breakfast at Tiffany’s

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” may just be the singular, classic girl movie. It may even be the first. Back in 1961 when this was released, Old Hollywood was still marketing movies to everyone, not just men or women. It also existed in a time when being chic and stylish was coveted no matter your gender.

But today ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s” the film, I can’t really speak for Truman Capote’s novel, has attained a new sensibility. Holly Golightly’s party animal sex appeal and looseness, her free-spirit conviction and her cute, yet sophisticated style and flair has made her an iconic symbol of the girls just wanna have fun lifestyle.

She has a cat too.  Continue reading “Rapid Response: Breakfast at Tiffany’s”

Rapid Response: Babe: Pig in the City

My relative Pat Graham’s capsule review in the Chicago Reader in 1998 for “Babe: Pig in the City” is elegant, bizarre and wonderfully written. He described it to me as a sort of faux-poetry, an alternative approach to reviewing a distinctly alternative film. You can read his whole review here.

And yet Pat said it best to me in person what George Miller’s movie is about. “You watch it, and the film says, Look at this! Look at this! Look at THIS,” he said pointing in every which direction.

I watched it, and sure enough I said, “What’s that? What’s that! What’s THAT?!”

“Babe: Pig in the City” is about as surreal a children’s film as you will ever see. It’s absurd, madcap and overwhelming, and yet the film has an operatic, poetic quality about it that doesn’t fit in the slightest.

The resulting film is a beautiful disaster. It’s colorful, yet cold and disconcerting. It’s chaotic, but not a predictable, boring maelstrom of action. It’s teeming with animals all with dopey dubbed lips, and yet there are so damn many of them that you watch in awe of how much effort this must’ve taken. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Babe: Pig in the City”

Rapid Response: National Velvet

 

Let’s call a spade a spade and acknowledge that for how much I’ve said these Old Hollywood movies from the late ’30s and ’40s up through the ’50s comprise just about the best time period for movies, there are quite a few that have aged terribly.

“National Velvet” is a fine example of a super corny, campy, hokey, dopey, feel good, family movie that would make a number of modern audiences wretch. Yet it’s survived based on its pedigree. Mickey Rooney was an insurmountably huge movie star when this movie came out in 1944, and at the age of 12, it was just about the first big role for the recently late Elizabeth Taylor, whose own movie stardom needs no further editorializing. It even has a small part for Angela Lansbury, who was nominated for an Oscar for a different film and lost to one of her “National Velvet” costars for Best Supporting Actress.

But the film could not be more cut and dry. A girl with dreams and ambitions to own a horse that she loves and cares for deeply ends up winning the horse of her dreams in a raffle, discovers the horse’s potential to race and jump and enters it to race in the Grand National race in 1920s England. She goes as far as racing the horse herself and winning, despite being disqualified for being an underage girl. Continue reading “Rapid Response: National Velvet”