Change Your Image
Paul Weiss
Reviews
Pretty Things (2005)
Burlesque vs. neurosis with a budget: neurosis wins
I was quite eager to see what had been described as a "documentary" on the burlesque strippers of the second quarter (or so) of the last century. I worked as a live musician behind strippers in the mid 1960s, when the women I worked behind were already an anachronism. Older than I was by 10 or sometimes 20 years, they had an "act" (or a "shtick") with props and a narrative of sorts; they didn't disrobe completely; and there was no possibility of confusing the experience of watching their show with being a non-medical presence at a gynecological examination. They were also (to generalize, certainly) wilder than hell, full of life, and committed to a philosophy of behavioral laissez-faire which was truly mind-expanding to my young suburban self. Nevertheless, I am quite disappointed with the film.
OK, what is this film? First of all, to the degree that it explores the director's (and - should we also call her the female lead?) discomfort with her own sexuality, with her stammering, over-controlled and nearly inarticulate vocabulary of movement, and with her search for a new (and appropriated) vocabulary of movement which she hopes to be self-empowering, it may well be some sort of autobiographical essay, but exactly to that degree, it's not documentary. (By the way, watching her attempt to perfect some bumps, grinds, and shimmies while "en point" in ballet toe shoes is an example of the brittleness of her self-conception, and provides apparently unconscious self-parody. For a person who spends as much time as she does looking at herself in the mirror, she sees remarkably little, and nothing to laugh at.)
Also, in an effort to mold the expression of the strippers (yes, oldish women, but in the context of this film, first and foremost strippers) to cleave to a puerile combination of partly-chewed and regurgitated academic feminist theory and the psycho-babble of sex and power, she robs from the strippers the often formidable authenticity and power of their statements. They lay it out bare (as it were) and she hurries to wrap it up in something that's not so scary. Several times the strippers quite obviously are suffering her as an annoying, uncomprehending tourist to their world. At one point, one of the strippers says "Oh come on, now - you're not THAT naive!" Unfortunately, I think that the stripper may have been incorrect.
Given the inherent interest of the topic (to me, at any rate), and the rich color and authenticity of the old strippers in the film, it saddens me that I think the movie such a dog, but dog it is. A producer with a commitment to excise the egregiously self-indulgent and narcissistic strains from the movie would have resulted in a much stronger work. As it stands, you'll learn more about female burlesque (if not about stripping) from watching old Lucy reruns.
French in Action (1987)
Would you like to actually speak French?
Most of the comments posted so far seem to concentrate on "the babe," and those of you reading who don't know anything about the series will be ill-served by them. This is an instructional series, developed at Yale University, for learning French as it is really spoken. It is not "baby" French, nor is it vacation tourist French. If your goal is to actually be able to have a real conversation with real people, this series is (to my knowledge) without peer, and has become the model for current best-of-breed audio/visual courses for second language acquisition. It's in use at hundreds of high schools, colleges and universities in the U.S., and similar materials for other languages have been developed using "French in Action" as a model and a goal.
There's a lot of use of familiar (as opposed to vulgar) language, spoken in appropriate situations at normal native-speaker rates. After the first of the 52 episodes, you won't hear a word of English. Language is introduced at quite a good clip, but always in a situational context that allows you to figure out more-or-less what's going on. It's not necessarily a strategy which is comfortable for many learners - it's much more reassuring to be able to learn with the language broken up into grammatical "topics" which can be checked off in a day's time, or a week's. Unfortunately, most people won't be able to speak at a reasonable level after using a strategy like that. Without hearing lots of language, and producing lots of language, you'll never make it to your goal, unless your goal is to simply check off a language requirement on the way to a degree. If your goal is to be able to shoot the breeze with French speakers in a situation where the topic is not going to be limited to what a lame beginner you are, there are no better materials available.
One criticism of the materials in other comments is that the viewer must speak French before being able to understand the tapes. Not true. What is needed is a tolerance for "swimming" in partial understanding, and that's going to be the case in learning a second language for many, many years. A second criticism is that the materials are expensive. Yes and no... to buy them is costly, but they are all available free online whenever you'd like to see them from the Annenberg/CPB website if you have a reasonably fast internet connection. The associated textbook, which will enrich your learning experience immeasurably if you want to succeed, is quite reasonably priced, if compared to other textbooks, rather than airport books. (It's as well-structured for serious independent study as it is for a classroom setting, by the way.)
Over the years, I've studied 5 foreign languages formally, in contexts ranging from intensive classes of two weeks, to 8 years of classroom courses, and in addition, have gotten to the "please/thank you/may I have ..." level in a dozen others. The "French in Action" tapes are the best instructional materials I've ever seen.
Kaidan (1964)
Classical Japanese tragedy, Expressionist visual style
There's a good bit of discussion of this film as "horror"; may I suggest that it's horrific in the sense of the ancient Greek tragedies. There's no attempt to coerce your Hollywood-abused adrenals into delivering just one more squirt by means of some in-your-face special effect. In fact, for each of these slowly developed stories, once you've understood the premise, the story will unfold pretty much as you've guessed it must, inexorably, relentlessly. The ghosts aren't there to "spook" us, they're to show us our common human spiritual and emotional failings. The horror of a ghost wife, for instance, isn't that her chains drag noisily across the the hardwood parquet floor, but that we've created her by our insensitivity, our misplaced values, or our betrayals.
The visual style is stupendous! The action takes place in a disappeared, iconic world of classical medieval Japan, perfect, and admitting no trace of the reality of modern times. Overlaid is a European Expressionist color sensibility, with emotionally charged color displacements of sky and skin, as if Hokusai and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner had been working cooperatively on the sets and lighting.
This is a wonderful movie. Please ignore attempts to fit it into some box, some genre. Rather look at it as a mature work of art, which happens to choose old Japanese ghost stories as its starting point.