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In the Sandbox with Carol Burnett

September 14, 2016 in Age Matters, Book Matters, Feminist Matters, TV Matters

queen carrolCarol Burnett is undeniably the unsung foremother of TV comedy. While Lucille Ball deserves praise galore for her groundbreaking 1950s sitcom, big-eyed, big-jawed, big-hearted, big-italics Burnett was one of the first women on TV to lead a regular variety hour. Emerging in the early 1960s as a star on Broadway and “The Garry Moore Show,” she signed a contract with CBS who tried to pigeonhole her into a sitcom. Instead she launched the smash “The Carol Burnett Show,” which lasted eleven seasons–a feat even now on network television–and helped make the careers of such golden girls as Vicki Lawrence and Bernadette Peters while resuscitating such secretly hilarious sirens as Shirley Temple and Rita Hayworth.

Now eighty-three, Burnett has written her third memoir, In Such Good Company, a tell-all about the show that entertained home audiences from 1967 to 1978. Stuffed with juicy tidbits about new and old Hollywood (you’ll adore tales of Carol Channing’s diet of whale blubber), the book is so frank and funny that it inspired me to hunt down some of the skits she describes so vividly. Continue Reading →

Bridget Jones’s Blergh

September 13, 2016 in Age Matters, Book Matters, Feminist Matters, Film Matters

bridgetIt sounds dumb and, in fact, it is, but I’m wrangling mightily with the question of whether I should attend tonight’s critics’ screening of Bridget Jones’s Baby. There’s the fact that it’s bound to be terrible (even the book is, and this is not the sort of franchise likely to transcend its origin material). Then there’s the issue of Zelweger’s face–reacting to the drama around it, reigning myself in from the impulse to hit people who feel comfortable opining on it. All told, I should probably not go to the screening–I can easily get out of the related assignment–but something in me feels I am abandoning another fortysomething woman felled by the culture that once built her up. And this is something I’ll just never comfortably do.

‘Sully’ and the 208-Second Molehill

September 9, 2016 in Book Matters, Country Matters, Feminist Matters, Film Matters, Reviews

sully“Sully” begins with a plane crash – a wobbly, fiery descent right into a Manhattan skyscraper. It’s a nightmare of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who in 2009 saved 155 people by landing U.S. Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River, and whose subsequent memoir, Highest Duty, provides the backbone of this film. It’s also a traumatic, what-if reference to September 11, 2001, which makes the timing of this release a mite cynical. In fact, undertaking this film at all is a mite cynical, or at least misguided. Because Captain Sullenberger’s heroics took only 208 seconds, fashioning a full-length feature worthy of it would entail another feat of heroism, and director Clint Eastwood isn’t the right knight for the job, not even with a white-haired, white-mustachioed Tom Hanks at the helm as the titular character.

Working from Todd Komarnicki’s screenplay, Eastwood attempts to build out dramatic tension, not only with that dramatic CGI opener (an echo of the opening sequence in his tsunami clunker, “Hereafter”) and by slowly meting out details of what really happened in the ill-fated flight. The conceit here is that, once the waves calmed on Sully’s save, National Transportation Safety Board investigators questioned whether the flight captain had unnecessarily endangered his passengers’ lives with his emergency water landing.

According to protocol, Sully should have returned to LaGuardia Airport or tried to land at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport, and both the airline’s insurance company and Sully wrangle with the consequences of his decision. But while zooming in on the pilot’s growing self-doubt and post-traumatic stress adds a much-needed depth to this tale, demonizing the commission feels like a flimsy effort to make a mountain out of a 208-second-long molehill. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy