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 […]

A review of Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s and Vanessa R. Schwartz’s It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture in The Los Angeles Times: link.

Here’s a link to my review of Caryl Flinn’s biography of Ethel Merman in Newsday. [pdf version here]

Ethel Merman on “The Love Boat,” with Ann Miller, Carol Channing, and Della Reese. Click through for Merman and the Muppets.

Here’s a link to my review of Lydia Lunch’s Paradoxia.

I remember watching Celine Dion perform Phil Spector’s “River Deep, Mountain High” on MTV’s first Divas Live extravaganza in 1998. I was full of contempt at the time, having endured a roommate’s long-running obsession with “My Heart Will Go On.” But then Celine took the stage. She wore a dark duster as though she were […]

Why indeed? This clip is long, and yet I never want it to end.

See more of Brenda Bergman and the Bodacious Ta Tas on the Maury Povich show singing “To Sir, With Love,” circa 1995.

A gray, rainy day calls for the blonds of yesteryear:

(Via)

Betty Hutton was considered “a brassy, energetic performer with a voice that could sound like a fire alarm,” but here’s a clip of the late chanteuse at a much different register:

For more characteristic mania, see Betty with Dinah Shore.
Betty Hutton, Film Star of ’40s and ’50s, Dies at 86 (NY Times)