Kill Fee

If I had not seen it with my own eyes this past week at MoMA, I probably would not have believed it possible that one movie could contain this and this.

Those legs.
More than all the slinking Cyd Charisse did with Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, it’s the manic heights she scales with Kirk Douglas in Vincente Minnelli’s careening Two Weeks in Another Town that I’m thinking of. I wish there were a clip of her first scene in the film floating around youtube.
I’m pretty […]

Have the Olsen twins been reading Little Dorrit?
The New York Observer reports that the “puckered smile that makes the Olsen twins’ seem engaged (”We’re happy to be here!”) yet reserved (”Teeth are so crass!”) has a name. It’s called “the Prune.””
And I am reminded of my friend Frostine’s wonderful (but alas, silent) blog Prunes and […]

From Don Siegel’s The Killers (1964).
“I like what you’re doing with the car. Just stick with that.” Ronald Reagan delivers that line like he’s taking direction from David Lynch.

From “Swann Song,” Judith Thurman’s account of Yves Saint Laurent’s final haute-couture show in 2002:
There was plenty of cerebral whimsy to offset the noirish sex play: feather minis suitable for a showgirl’s wedding to a peer; a minuscule suède tunic from the sixties worn with high-heeled waders; swanky cocktail dresses that exposed a nipple; a […]