199 reviews
It probably goes without saying but had Marilyn Monroe lived the long life as contemporaries Elizabeth Taylor, Joanne Woodward, Shirley MacLaine, and Sophia Loren, she wouldn't have become a multi-gazillion dollar industry. As some wag noted upon learning that the 42-year-old Elvis had swiveled his pelvis for the last time: "Good career move". Indeed, while she was fêted as a legend in her own lifetime, her probable suicide at age 36 made her immortal. And while fanboys and fangirls speculate on what might have been, can you seriously imagine a 50-or-60-or-70-something Marilyn peddling perfume or hawking her actor hubby's salad dressings or rebranding herself a New Age Guru or playing herself AND her mother in a TV mini-series? Me neither. But at least she wouldn't have been the subject of the countless garbage offerings humanity has been bludgeoned with since her death 60 years ago.
As I mulled over this latest garbage offering - garbage "auteur" Andrew Dominik's garbage take on garbage "wordsmith" Joyce Carol Oates's garbage novel "Blonde" - I came across his 2016 garbage draft of this garbage offering; it can be found under External Sites. As I noted in my take of garbage network CBS's 2001 garbage take of "Blonde": "There's nothing positive in this image of Monroe. It's disheartening that über-feminist Oates re-imagines her as The Dumbest Wh*re in Christendom". Oates published "Blonde" after Joe DiMaggio died, but while Arthur Miller and Marilyn's first husband James Dougherty were still alive. In Dominik's artsy-fartsy impersonation of von Trier impersonating Lynch, Dougherty is ignored (for which his family must be eternally grateful, I'm sure) as The Dumbest Wh*re in Christendom is violated over and over, figuratively and literally, by virtually every man she is unfortunate enough to cross paths with. Even when she is given agency by hooking up with "Cass" and "Eddy", the ne'er-do-well brats of Charlie Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson, respectively, she is put through the ringer. Why Dominik didn't just go all-out, and have Marilyn flogged and crucified in a vulgar send-up of "The Passion of the Christ" is beyond me.
Two things in this garbage offering have the "Me Too" and "Pro-Choice" mobs breaking out the pitchforks: Marilyn saying "Daddy" like a broken record; and having a conversation with her unborn child. This will cheese the Man Haters off to no end, but the "Daddy" is one of the few things this garbage offering actually got right: Miller recalled in his autobiography a then-overwhelmed Marilyn calling him "Papa" as she phoned him while making "Bus Stop"; a letter she wrote to DiMaggio in 1954 and sold by Hunt's Auctions in 2006 begins "My Dad", and in a note to him also sold by Hunt's, she refers to herself as "your baby". Speaking of, the "baby convo" is a hoot: "2001: A Space Odyssey" on crack. By the way, no woman gardens in a summer dress. And even the most amateur of Green Thumb Warriors know to wear gloves before doing battle with those pesky weeds. Upshot is, the real Marilyn was a Green Thumb Warrior who wouldn't have been caught dead doing battle with pesky weeds while wearing a summer dress and no gloves. And this Marilyn has an abortion (complete with "fetus-cam"!), so I honestly don't understand what the NARAL Nuts are whining about. But I digress.
This Marilyn isn't the only one put through the ringer. So is virtually everyone in her real-life orbit, beginning with Mother. In stark contrast to Patricia Richardson's Gladys in the 2001 "Blonde", Julianne Nicholson's Gladys is a wackadoodle with homicidal tendencies. Adrien Brody has been slouching his way toward Miller (pardon, "The Playwright") since "King Kong", and I had pegged Bobby Cannavale as DiMaggio (pardon, "The Ex-Athlete") since "The Station Agent". Here, Cannavale is King Kong and Brody is a standard-issue passive-aggressive snob. The toilet bowls Marilyn pukes her guts out into have more regard for her than "DiMaggio" and "Miller" do.
Which leads me to the most-infamous scene in this garbage offering. John F. Kennedy was assassinated when I was almost 6 months old, so I've never had the reverence for him those who lived through "Camelot" have. And he always struck me as cartoonish: sunk-in beady eyes, plastic hair, square teeth, nasally voice which refused to enunciate words correctly (before you go there, I'm from Massachusetts). The torrid tales of "Camelot" which have dropped since JFK dropped confirm he was the worst sort of garbage human. And I'm surprised that no one else caught onto this, but this JFK is the stand-in for Dominik. How else to explain the perverted delight he takes in Marilyn being manhandled throughout his opus, yet never more so than when two Secret Service goons dump her strung-out self in the Presidential Suite to be manhandled by The Prez like an animated sex doll.
Ana de Armas's Marilyn talks like Zoolander with a Cuban accent while alternately mumbling like Brando and screaming like a banshee. Yet, as microbes on Mars know by now, in a "performance" which degrades both her subject and herself, she has scored a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award, AND an Oscar nomination! "¡Felicidades!" to her management.
The End is near, my friends.
As I mulled over this latest garbage offering - garbage "auteur" Andrew Dominik's garbage take on garbage "wordsmith" Joyce Carol Oates's garbage novel "Blonde" - I came across his 2016 garbage draft of this garbage offering; it can be found under External Sites. As I noted in my take of garbage network CBS's 2001 garbage take of "Blonde": "There's nothing positive in this image of Monroe. It's disheartening that über-feminist Oates re-imagines her as The Dumbest Wh*re in Christendom". Oates published "Blonde" after Joe DiMaggio died, but while Arthur Miller and Marilyn's first husband James Dougherty were still alive. In Dominik's artsy-fartsy impersonation of von Trier impersonating Lynch, Dougherty is ignored (for which his family must be eternally grateful, I'm sure) as The Dumbest Wh*re in Christendom is violated over and over, figuratively and literally, by virtually every man she is unfortunate enough to cross paths with. Even when she is given agency by hooking up with "Cass" and "Eddy", the ne'er-do-well brats of Charlie Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson, respectively, she is put through the ringer. Why Dominik didn't just go all-out, and have Marilyn flogged and crucified in a vulgar send-up of "The Passion of the Christ" is beyond me.
Two things in this garbage offering have the "Me Too" and "Pro-Choice" mobs breaking out the pitchforks: Marilyn saying "Daddy" like a broken record; and having a conversation with her unborn child. This will cheese the Man Haters off to no end, but the "Daddy" is one of the few things this garbage offering actually got right: Miller recalled in his autobiography a then-overwhelmed Marilyn calling him "Papa" as she phoned him while making "Bus Stop"; a letter she wrote to DiMaggio in 1954 and sold by Hunt's Auctions in 2006 begins "My Dad", and in a note to him also sold by Hunt's, she refers to herself as "your baby". Speaking of, the "baby convo" is a hoot: "2001: A Space Odyssey" on crack. By the way, no woman gardens in a summer dress. And even the most amateur of Green Thumb Warriors know to wear gloves before doing battle with those pesky weeds. Upshot is, the real Marilyn was a Green Thumb Warrior who wouldn't have been caught dead doing battle with pesky weeds while wearing a summer dress and no gloves. And this Marilyn has an abortion (complete with "fetus-cam"!), so I honestly don't understand what the NARAL Nuts are whining about. But I digress.
This Marilyn isn't the only one put through the ringer. So is virtually everyone in her real-life orbit, beginning with Mother. In stark contrast to Patricia Richardson's Gladys in the 2001 "Blonde", Julianne Nicholson's Gladys is a wackadoodle with homicidal tendencies. Adrien Brody has been slouching his way toward Miller (pardon, "The Playwright") since "King Kong", and I had pegged Bobby Cannavale as DiMaggio (pardon, "The Ex-Athlete") since "The Station Agent". Here, Cannavale is King Kong and Brody is a standard-issue passive-aggressive snob. The toilet bowls Marilyn pukes her guts out into have more regard for her than "DiMaggio" and "Miller" do.
Which leads me to the most-infamous scene in this garbage offering. John F. Kennedy was assassinated when I was almost 6 months old, so I've never had the reverence for him those who lived through "Camelot" have. And he always struck me as cartoonish: sunk-in beady eyes, plastic hair, square teeth, nasally voice which refused to enunciate words correctly (before you go there, I'm from Massachusetts). The torrid tales of "Camelot" which have dropped since JFK dropped confirm he was the worst sort of garbage human. And I'm surprised that no one else caught onto this, but this JFK is the stand-in for Dominik. How else to explain the perverted delight he takes in Marilyn being manhandled throughout his opus, yet never more so than when two Secret Service goons dump her strung-out self in the Presidential Suite to be manhandled by The Prez like an animated sex doll.
Ana de Armas's Marilyn talks like Zoolander with a Cuban accent while alternately mumbling like Brando and screaming like a banshee. Yet, as microbes on Mars know by now, in a "performance" which degrades both her subject and herself, she has scored a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award, AND an Oscar nomination! "¡Felicidades!" to her management.
The End is near, my friends.
The makers of this "Girl Power" stomach bomb would have you believe that no harried housewife in human history had ever made a meal from scratch until Julia Child burst into living rooms across America on July 26, 1962 to save humanity from the horror of Swanson frozen TV dinners; I had to look up the date because the makers of this "Girl Power" stomach bomb couldn't be bothered to slap it on the screen. The upshot (and I doubt anyone has ever realized this) is that Saint Julia wanted to have it both ways: she poo-pooed the patriarchy (in the form of her stiff-as-a-starched-shirt papa) which "kept" Harried Housewife chained to her unhappy home, yet the heretics at Swanson never came out with a Boeuf à la Bourguignon frozen TV dinner -- she expected Harried Housewife to make THAT one all by herself!
The irony is Saint Julia was "saved" from becoming a Harried Housewife (albeit, an Über-Privileged Harried Housewife) by a man. Better yet, Paul Child "saved" Saint Julia "from" Stiff-as-a-Starched-Shirt Papa. As this IS HBO, John McWilliams is depicted as a Leftist Boogeyman: über-wealthy, über-conservative, über-bigoted, and (gad!) a Nixon supporter! Indeed, so taken are they with their Stiff-as-a-Starched-Shirt Papa Bashing, the makers of this "Girl Power" stomach bomb couldn't be bothered to give props to the three woman who helped make Saint Julia a household name: Louisette Bertholle, co-author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking; Knopf's Judith Jones, who pushed to get said opus published; and Knopf's Avis DeVoto, who edited and guided said opus.
Anyone familiar with Julia Child's life will find no big reveals here; anyone not familiar with her life will find even less.
The irony is Saint Julia was "saved" from becoming a Harried Housewife (albeit, an Über-Privileged Harried Housewife) by a man. Better yet, Paul Child "saved" Saint Julia "from" Stiff-as-a-Starched-Shirt Papa. As this IS HBO, John McWilliams is depicted as a Leftist Boogeyman: über-wealthy, über-conservative, über-bigoted, and (gad!) a Nixon supporter! Indeed, so taken are they with their Stiff-as-a-Starched-Shirt Papa Bashing, the makers of this "Girl Power" stomach bomb couldn't be bothered to give props to the three woman who helped make Saint Julia a household name: Louisette Bertholle, co-author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking; Knopf's Judith Jones, who pushed to get said opus published; and Knopf's Avis DeVoto, who edited and guided said opus.
Anyone familiar with Julia Child's life will find no big reveals here; anyone not familiar with her life will find even less.
I read an anecdote once about Sid Luft and Judy Garland sitting at a restaraunt bar when she said something and he belted her in reaction, knocking her off of the stool. No one reacted as she meekly got up off the floor, and crawled back onto the stool next to him. Some years after her death, an acquaintance ran into Luft tooling around in a Mercedes: he had bagged the rights to Garland's work, and was now living large. In 2002, he was ordered to pay The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences $60,000 for attempting to sell the juvenile Oscar awarded to Garland for "The Wizard of Oz" and its replacement. Yet up until his death, Luft insisted that he was the only person who ever cared truly for Garland and had her best interests at heart.
Though "Sid & Judy" tries mightily to make Luft The Knight In Shining Armor to Garland's Damsel In Distress, it ends the charade when we are introduced to the vipers who became her managers. It then wants you to see Luft as this hapless schmo whom Freddie Fields and David Begelman push out their charge's life when, in fact, the three formed an Unholy Trinity; to protect himself, Luft recorded the telephone conversations he had with Fields, Begelman, and most everyone else in Garland's orbit without their consent.
For those with even a cursory knowledge of Garland's life, nothing in "Sid & Judy" will come as a revelation, although learning that she aborted Luft's child, as both were married (she to director Vincente Minnelli; he to actress Lynn Bari), and he being a total cad about the whole thing, was a shock. It also made me wonder why she decided to not only stay with him, but marry him.
While the focus is understandably on Garland, we don't learn anything about Luft, as if he just popped up out of absolute nowhere. I had to do some research to learn that he had been a test pilot for Douglas (now McDonnell Douglas), and was in the Royal Canadian Air Force. I also learned that while married to Garland, he lost the custody battle for his son with Bari, the judge ruling that the Luft household "was an improper place in which to rear the boy." Ouch!
Not omitted is the perfunctory exploration of Garland's addictions, which I sympathize with, yet never understood. Like Garland, Mickey Rooney was the product of show business parents who found himself a cog in the MGM soul-sucking machine before he hit puberty. The demands made on him by his overlords were just as punishing as the demands they made on her. And his private life was an even-bigger train wreck than hers, if that's at all possible. Yet Rooney didn't fall into the abyss, shuffling off his mortal coil at the ripe old age of 93, 44 years after Garland died!
The last 15 minutes are rushed, as if director Stephen Kijak had grown bored with his subjects. He jettisons Garland and Luft from their own documentary, ultimately, in favor of someone who calls himself "Miss Major Griffin-Gracy". A "trans woman activist", he prattles on about Garland being an icon for people who suffer from gender and/or sexual identity issues as we watch him and his confederates descend upon her resting place like the Army storming Normandy; "cringe-worthy" doesn't begin to describe it.
Judy Garland and - dare I say it - Sid Luft deserve better.
Though "Sid & Judy" tries mightily to make Luft The Knight In Shining Armor to Garland's Damsel In Distress, it ends the charade when we are introduced to the vipers who became her managers. It then wants you to see Luft as this hapless schmo whom Freddie Fields and David Begelman push out their charge's life when, in fact, the three formed an Unholy Trinity; to protect himself, Luft recorded the telephone conversations he had with Fields, Begelman, and most everyone else in Garland's orbit without their consent.
For those with even a cursory knowledge of Garland's life, nothing in "Sid & Judy" will come as a revelation, although learning that she aborted Luft's child, as both were married (she to director Vincente Minnelli; he to actress Lynn Bari), and he being a total cad about the whole thing, was a shock. It also made me wonder why she decided to not only stay with him, but marry him.
While the focus is understandably on Garland, we don't learn anything about Luft, as if he just popped up out of absolute nowhere. I had to do some research to learn that he had been a test pilot for Douglas (now McDonnell Douglas), and was in the Royal Canadian Air Force. I also learned that while married to Garland, he lost the custody battle for his son with Bari, the judge ruling that the Luft household "was an improper place in which to rear the boy." Ouch!
Not omitted is the perfunctory exploration of Garland's addictions, which I sympathize with, yet never understood. Like Garland, Mickey Rooney was the product of show business parents who found himself a cog in the MGM soul-sucking machine before he hit puberty. The demands made on him by his overlords were just as punishing as the demands they made on her. And his private life was an even-bigger train wreck than hers, if that's at all possible. Yet Rooney didn't fall into the abyss, shuffling off his mortal coil at the ripe old age of 93, 44 years after Garland died!
The last 15 minutes are rushed, as if director Stephen Kijak had grown bored with his subjects. He jettisons Garland and Luft from their own documentary, ultimately, in favor of someone who calls himself "Miss Major Griffin-Gracy". A "trans woman activist", he prattles on about Garland being an icon for people who suffer from gender and/or sexual identity issues as we watch him and his confederates descend upon her resting place like the Army storming Normandy; "cringe-worthy" doesn't begin to describe it.
Judy Garland and - dare I say it - Sid Luft deserve better.
