Day: May 13, 2019

Doris Day has passed at age 97. Nothing sad or tragic in this — she lived a long, luminous and bountiful life, if not over the last half-century then certainly during her 25-year heyday. Day was semi-hot between 1940, when her big-band singing career began to happen at age 18, and the launch of her film career in 1948. She was huge throughout the ’50s and early ’60s but it all began to wind down around 1965, when her “world’s oldest virgin” routine finally began to get old.

From “Doris Day Is More Or Less Okay,” posted on 1.10.10:

“Day was fairly great in Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back, Young Man With A Horn and Love Me or Leave Me. I remember something tart and tolerable about her performance in Young At Heart, in which she played the love interest of a dark-hearted Frank Sinatra. And she was reasonably “good” in those bizarre comedies of sexual constipation that she made in the early to mid ’60s.

“And yet it’s hard to think of another veteran of ’50s and ’60s cinema who was more of an icon for uptight middle-class values and zero sexuality.

“I know I suddenly liked Day a lot more when I heard that rumor about her having had an affair with Sly Stone — but that story turned out to be bogus. Day did apparently have a fling with L.A. Dodgers base-stealer Maury Wills.”

Day was offered the Mrs. Robinson role in The Graduate, but turned it down for moral reasons. Mistake.

In 2010 director Douglas McGrath (Infamous, Emma) made a case for Day, then 87, receiving a special career-honoring Oscar. McGrath wrote persuasively and with feeling about Day’s special qualities. She committed to her light-comedy roles, held her own with the likes of James Stewart, Kirk Douglas and James Cagney, and deserved a tribute for the same reason that Cary Grant was tributed in 1970 — i.e., because she was iconic.

The only Day performance I had a problem with was her costarring role in Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Man Who Knew Too Much. I adore aspects of this 1956 thriller (the murder in the Marrakech marketplace, the assassination attempt in Albert Hall) but Day’s grating emotionalism makes it a very hard film to watch. She cries, shrieks, trembles, weeps. And when she isn’t losing it, she’s acting pretentiously coy and smug or singing “Que Sera Sera” over and over.

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I caught Joe Berlinger‘s Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile last week. The reason I didn’t feel moved to post anything is that I was impressed as far as it went, but the only element that really got me was Zac Efron‘s icy, understated portrayal of serial killer Ted Bundy.

It’s a straightforward, well-measured, non-emphatic portrait of a fiend, drawn from the point of view of Bundy’s onetime girlfriend Elizabeth Kendall (Lily Collins). The source is Kendall’s book “The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy“. Kudos to screenwriter Michael Werwie for pruning it down just so.

I was never bored, irked or irritated, but it’s obviously and necessarily an alienating thing to sit through, and the whole time I was telling myself “this is fairly decent but I can’t say I’m enjoying it, and how could I?”

Efron is fascinating. Before this his best performance was in Me and Orson Welles, but this is much stronger for its subtlety. He’s playing an extremely scary guy without overtly signalling full-monster vibes. Well, he does but with dozens of little darting, brush-flick ways.

What other films contain a top-notch lead performance while otherwise making you wish they would end soon?

Hollywood Elsewhere hasn’t seen Mike Dougherty‘s Fat Godzilla (Warner Bros, 5.19) and I’m pretty much determined to excuse myself until it streams, but I strongly disagree with Steve Weintraub’s praise on principle. More doesn’t mean better. I’ll always prefer a monster film that invests in hints of things to come rather than one that pushes it all in your face.

From my 5.10.14 review of Gareth Edwards‘ Godzilla: “I liked the fact that Edwards tones Godzilla down for most of its running time. Over and over he uses suggestion — visual and aural hints and implications — instead of blatant show-and-tells. He deserves admiration for delaying Godzilla’s first big MCU roar until the two-thirds mark and also holding back on the trademark fire-breathing until the big super-finale, in which San Francisco gets it but good.”

Amidst the general dissatisfaction with last night’s Game of Thrones episode (“The Bells“), an assessment by Giant Bomb associate producer and Brooklyn-based comedian Abby Russell stands out. HE commentariat remarks are hereby requested.

“People like you must create, otherwise you become a menace to society.”

The last trailer for the endlessly bumped Where’d You Go, Bernadette didn’t mention director Richard Linklater. The newbie doesn’t state his name either, but at least it acknowledges it’s “from the director of Boyhood and School of Rock.”

The Annapurna film, which stars Cate Blanchett, Billy Crudup, Emma Nelson, Kristen Wiig, Judy Greer and James Urbaniak and has been described as a “mystery comedy-drama”, opens on August 9th.

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