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Reviews
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002)
Urghhh
One of the worst films we've seen in a long time. I usually adore Maggie Smith but her "Southern" accent makes Dick van Dyke sound a convincing cockney. One of those movies that makes a wonderful cast (on paper) truly terrible. My lover gave up on it before the end but I went upstairs to him afterwards and challenged him to guess the last two lines of the film. I suppose it wasn't too much of a challenge to guess "I love you Mom" "I love you, too, ------- " (Fill in the blank. Here it was "Sunflower" a soubriquet that the character had never been called heretofore.) The daughter is supposed to have written a play about her childhood which is good enough for the play to have been produced on Broadway. And yet she wasn't even perceptive enough to know that her mother had had a nervous breakdown.............? Crap of the worst commercial order. Anyone who compares it to STEEL MAGNOLIAS, clearly only saw the crappy film, not the touching, steely and witty play.
Drowning Mona (2000)
A very pleasant surprise
This movie hasn't, as far as I know, been released in the UK. I picked up a copy in a bin at Walmart in Richmond VA for $5.80 (there were some decent titles like THE TRUTH ABOUT CATS AND DOGS and ALL OF ME there, so it wasn't all dreck) but rather supposed that with a cast like this it had to be a real bummer. Both my lover and I were very pleasantly surprised to find it a real laugh out loud black comedy (I mean that literally). It's pretty bleak in its view of its characters, most of whom are stupid and self-interested enough to make for a pretty misanthropic evening. But Casey Affleck and Danny de Vito manage to keep their characters sympathetic enough that we both cared enough. The film also manages to avoid the characters being glamorous, which is, I suspect, why a big audience wouldn't like it; this isn't a Hollywood view of small town white trash life. I've never seen Jamie Lee Curtis being allowed to be sleazy without it being sexy glamorous sleazy. And Midler's harridan is genuinely unpleasant, not the comic OTT that one has come to expect / dread. I'm looking forward to seeing it again.
Hans Christian Andersen (1952)
The Frank Loesser score is an original gem.
Watching this again (for only the second time) last night, I was just knocked out by the score. Presumably because of a Broadway-is-better-than-Hollywood bias, the piece tends to be dismissed in the Loesser oeuvre but every single number is a gem -- and the fullest score for a "family fantasy" since THE WIZARD OF OZ. I was particularly taken by INCH WORM, a really short song sung in counterpoint to the children's chanting of their mathematic tables after the schoolmaster has dragged them away from Hans' tales. Not long enough to have a commercial future (outside of a soundtrack album) it tells us more about Hans than most of the scene that precedes it.
As others have noted, Danny Kaye is totally bearable and the kitsch side of the film is now enjoyable for that. (The colours also recall WIZARD.)
This film deserves more recognition in the world of original film musicals. It's a rare classic score at the time of composer compilations or Broadway imports.