I can't disagree with any of the Siren's selections--among them, Guys and Dolls, the Doris Day-Jimmy Stewart Man Who Knew Too Much, The Pink Panther, and the damp mold of Kiss Me, Stupid--and wouldn't disagree even if I could, because cross the Siren and you might get turned into a newt.
Happened just this morning. Guy entered her blog comments, blithely violated her one cardinal clubhouse rule (don't dis Citizen Kane), and poof!--he found himself turned into a newt.
No, you don't ruffle the Siren, just as you don't go swanking around town small-mouthing ABT dancer Sarah Lane. It just ain't wise.
Glenn Kenny stands up for Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid, finding in its philistine vulgarity and nasty nihilism a beautiful message for this Easter season.
Well, OK. To me, once you cast Kim Novak in anything, that's quite a load to push uphill, but some cineastes disagree.
But it takes a true streak of perversion to defend/rationalize/exonerate Ray Walston's performance in that film, even if he was pinch hitting for a far better first choice (Peter Sellers).
"I'll step up for Ray Walston," says one commenter, and when intelligent people start stepping up for Ray Walston it's time to step away from the Internet and question what we're doing with our wasted lives.
Walston is terrible in Kiss Me, Stupid, he was hammy and coarse in Popeye, and both films would have been better off hiring Red Buttons to play his damned harmonica from Hatari! instead.
There I said it, and I won't take it back.
I always thought it would have been smarter if Billy Wilder had moved the comma over one spot to the left and called the movie Kiss, Me Stupid.
It would have imparted the caveman subtextuality of the slob behavior informing the plot of this lousy comedy. "Me stupid." "Don't be so hard on yourself."
I once interviewed Mickey Spillane and asked him why he had a comma in the title I, the Jury but no comma in Kiss Me Deadly. His answer was something like, You've got to do something different with a title, give it a little twist.
True. And yet I feel that if he had called the novel Kiss, Me Deadly, it would have captured the pith of Mike Hammer's raging soul, and Kiss Me, Deadly--well, that would have conjured a blonde with lethal lips, which would have been too obvious.
No, Mick knew what he was doing. The masters always do.
Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2011/03/the-siren-has-a-list.html
Dick Cheney Barack Obama George Soros Aung San Suu Kyi Queen Elizabeth II
No comments:
Post a Comment