laura-6

I haven't read through the reviews -- forgive if I repeat observations made by others. Lexy Kolker is just amazing as Chloe/Eleanor, probably as talented as Drew Barrymore when she was a little girl (remember her in E.T.?) She's a talent to watch.

Everyone in the film is great, especially Bruce Dern and Emile Hirsch as Grandpa and Dad. Well cast overall.

Lovely blurring of reality vs fantasy here. And the sets help that sensation. Major kudos to the set construction/decoration crew: really gritty and detailed.

The CGI fits the film -- well-integrated and not gratuitous at all. Minimal exposition (very little info dump lets audience imagine the origin of the presence of the freaks). The major exposition half-way throught the film is a nod to that done within the original Night of the Living Dead -- tiny spoiler: news reports on TV.

Pretty absorbing and enjoyable.

Outside of the terrific acting, pacing, direction, soundtrack, the sound effects used in this film totally enhance it, esp. when Matt and Sweat are underground: just creepy and almost other-worldly. So carefully done. Kudos!

For some of us, the only recent recording of this film came from either TCM or PBS (can't remember which), wherein the sound sync was off kilter. Also, some images were fuzzy. The print shown on SHO(W)is crisp and in sync.

That has to do for those of us who await a DVD with Ms. May's comments -- we hope.

This is a drolly funny film with great location shots in New York City, parts of Long Island, NY as well as Maine.

The line that will live forever for me is this: "And she has to be vacuumed every time she eats!"

What a gem of a film.

Once upon a time, Channel 9 in New York featured the Million DollarMovie, which ran one movie all day long for a full day, a programming technique that has been copied by modern cable and satellite TV's in their endless repeats of movies and shows.

But in the early 70's, before the invention of the VCR, Channel 9 was a film student's dream in that he or she could watch a movie over and over for one day and really study it.

Beat Girl arrived on Channel 9, a few years after its run in British and, presumably, American theaters. I watched about eight hours of Beat Girl, in the generous, endless loop provided by Channel 9. This movie fascinated the 13-yr.-old me who had never encountered such rebellion and hostility on the part of a school-aged daughter towards her father, who has returned from a trip with a step mother for whom the daughter is unprepared.

At 13, rebellious, unhappy, and edgy, I needed a "bad-girl" paradigm, and this movie supplied me with her. I loved the heroine and despised anyone who would stand in her way. She left such an impression on me that I have been fascinated by "bad girls" ever since.

However, the film is so bad -- or good, depending on your point of view of gritty, early 60s "To Sir, With Love" England -- that you might want to stick around to see what happens to this sullen chick who's accompanied by some stoner boys to some bad jazz music. Or not: this is one low budget film with fairly terrible acting but there is a gritty earnestness to this film.

Look for Oliver Reed, John McHenery, and Adam Faith in secondary roles. As in all of 50/60 flicks. look for a moral -- but look for the moments of rebellion, too. And dig that crazy music.

Thelma Ritter as down-on-her-luck Ellen McNulty shines in the role of a mother-in-law mistaken for a maid. Ellen McNulty is a woman everyone would want to have on her side, but woe betide anyone who tries to fool her. Thelma gets the best lines, but all parts are well-written and the film's pacing is superb.

The always reliable, always theatrical, Miriam Hopkins, hams it up as a superficial socialite disappointed in her daughter's selection of the down-to-earth Val McNulty, an up-and- coming corporate man. When a newlywed couple and two mothers occupy the same apartment, watch out!

Part of the pleasure of watching a black and white film from the early fifties is the setting. The outfits, cars, decor (check out the apartment's wallpaper: just amazing in its boldness!) add to the film's substance.

The romantic resolutions at the end of the film are satisfying, and make sense, not always a feature of light romantic comedies.

Some of us older folk could compare The Others to both The Innocents and The Uninvited. It helps to have read Henry James' The Turn of the Screw; it also helps to be patient with this movie. If you don't particularly enjoy Nicole Kidman, it will damage your enjoyment of the film as she is in almost every frame, looking like a Hitchcockian version of Grace Kelly -- LIke the filmmakers weren't aware: her character's name is Grace. This is a yummy little ghost story, offering a nightmare or two to suggestible ones. Sweet dreams!

I have to preface this discussion by confessing a guilty pleasure: I love "women-in-prison" flicks. So Young, So Bad might be one of the first, and it might possibly be the best.

This is a good little film, and one of the first (1950) of the "women in prison" genre that had gotten quite a beating (no pun intended) from the critics at large as well as the audience. Anne Francis stars as the innocent. Rita Moreno (in her first film, I think) is the semi-hardened inmate who attempts to teach Anne the ropes.

There's some real tension in the film as the sweet Anne Francis tries to navigate an incredibly harsh prison system, protect the innocent (there's always at least one who has been mis-incarcerated), and reform the system. The girls are treated abominably by the system before help, in the form of modern sociology, arrives. Along the way, horribly demeaning punishments are meted out to the women. But it's all compensated for in the end.

I've noticed some obligatory ingredients present in "women in prison" films, which So Young, So Bad had a hand in creating: the mean female guard who beats the crap out of various inmates, both deserving and undeserving of punishment; the mean female inmate who controls everything ("You are mine, honey"); the "fire-hose turned on the inmates to control them" scene (a scene also used in "women as psychiatric patients" films as well); the incredibly sadistic warden who is killed/replaced/disgraced by the end of the movie (I recall that this one is replaced); the uprising that causes the outside world to come to the rescue of the inmates; and finally, the sorting out of those women who really need imprisonment (the rest of the cast outside of Anne Francis, Rita Moreno and the handful of second-bananas, plus the mean inmate, if she isn't shot dead or stabbed in the course of the film). So Young, So Bad is a genre-maker we all can enjoy.