3 WOMEN 1977

Films that invite repeat viewings are my favorite. If the complexities of plot and character are authentic (and not simply incomprehensibility posing as profundity), each viewing unearths new pleasures and a deeper understanding of the film's themes.

Robert Altman's 3 Women is such a film, and it is, quite literally, a dream.

Shelley Duvall as Millie Lammoreaux

Sissy Spacek as Pinky Rose

Janice Rule as Willie Hart

Altman claimed that much of the basic structure of this genuinely mesmerizing discourse on identity theft came to him in a dream. There is little reason to doubt this assertion, given that 3 Women unfolds in the same shifting rhythms and fluid, non-linear logic of a dream half-remembered.
Altman regular Shelley Duvall plays Millie Lammoreaux, the Palm Springs femme non-fatale of the Purple Sage Apartments: a garishly mauve modernist complex that looks to have sprouted out of the ground like a cactus flower in the flat, arid landscape of the desert. Millie is an attendant at a spa for the elderly and fancies herself an irresistible man-trap.

Oblivious to the fact that to almost everyone, she is either invisible or insufferable, Millie blithely floats around on a lemon-colored cloud of delusion fueled by romantic longing and women's magazine clichés.
The lone dissenting voice is that of Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), the childlike, slightly spooky new spa employee who sees in Millie "The most perfect person I've ever met."

If Millie's personality is overdetermined, Pinky's is as unformed as an infant's (she has so little in the way of history or possessions that she could be a visitor from another planet). But since she is the only person to ever reflect back to Millie her own image of herself, the two enter into a mutually beneficial roommate/friendship relationship that has the "worldly" Millie giving the unrefined Pinky lessons in life. Lessons she learns all too well, as it turns out.

Lemon Satin and Tickled Pink
Millie's apartment is an overwhelming medley of sunshiny yellow and white.
It gives the impression of living inside an egg

The 3rd woman of the title is Willie (Janice Rule), the enormously pregnant, mostly silent artist who spends all of her time painting cryptic, luridly violent murals of anthropomorphic reptile people.

Willie is married to the hyper-macho Edgar (Robert Fortier), a swaggering, womanizing, former TV stunt double ("He knows Hugh O'Brian!") with whom she shares ownership of The Purple Sage Apartments and the town's lone hot-spot, Dodge City: a run-down, western-themed bar/ghost town where off-duty cops come to drink beer, shoot guns and ride dirt bikes.

Robert Fortier as Edgar Hart

With the introduction of the almost spectral character of Willie, 3 Women begins to take shape as something grounded increasingly less in reality, yet something more chilling and unsettling than fantasy. As the ad copy on the poster read: "1 woman became 2, 2 women became 3, 3 women became 1."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
This one is a true original. There is something so fascinating in Altman's use of magic realism in exploring the twin phenomenon of personality and identity as things both contagious and fluid. He creates unique characters and a world that is real but jarringly off-kilter (not in that self-conscious, Cohen Brothers way, mercifully). And in the finely observed details, 3 Women is often heartbreakingly funny while being downright eerie.

Craig Richard Nelson (A Wedding) and Sierra Pecheur portray Dr. Maas and Ms. Bunweill, the unrelentingly practical-minded operators of the health spa. Displaying inverse traditional male and female characteristics, the pair appear to have undergone a personality transference of their own.

What gets me about 3 Women is that no matter how unusual the characters and how off-rhythm their interactions are, everything feels as if it comes from an emotional and human truth. The characters may be amplifications...their traits and behavior given a surreal, dreamy oddness...but weirdly, it's that very quality that makes them come across more genuinely. It's as though you're watching people who have had their most hidden, inner selves moved to the surface.
For example, no one has probably ever met a person as rabidly devoted to the "Cosmo Philosophy" of femininity or those loopy "Kraft Kitchen" home economist credos as Millie in real-life (at least I hope not). But her embodiment and complete faith in the "How to Catch a Man" propaganda women have been fed for generations makes her character less an object of ridicule than someone we recognize and perhaps even empathize with.

The "fixin's" for one of Millie's characteristically indigestible socio-gastronomical nightmares

PERFORMANCES
Shelley Duvall gives one of the best performances of the 70s and certainly what I consider the best of her career. She can take a character comprised almost exclusively of derisible (if not absurd) characteristics and finds the humanity within. Though audiences are encouraged to laugh at Millie's ever-thwarted attempts at maintaining an air of sophisticated insouciance at all times (try as she might, she can't seem to prevent her flowing skirts from getting caught in her car door), one can't help but feel empathy for her poignant quest to mean something to herself.

Sissy Spacek, an actress able to project earthiness or other-worldliness at will, is remarkable in a role that requires her to be an enigma, but not a blank slate. Her ability to convey a childlike innocence without coming across as mentally challenged is attributable to Spacek's questioning; she seems to be taking information in like a computer. I love her transformation(s). She has inhabited three distinct women by the film's conclusion.

There's something a little terrifying in the kind of woman Pinky "becomes" after her accident

Janice Rule really surprised me in 3 Women because, prior to this film, I had only ever seen her in the truly atrocious Dean Martin Matt Helm film, The Ambushers -1967  (it's a Matt Helm film, did I really need to add the "atrocious" part?). If you ever want to see the definition of "reluctant sexpot," check out that film. Rule, decked out in a comic assortment of skimpy, mod outfits, is the glummest, saddest-looking sexist eye candy you've ever seen. In each scene, her every glance seems to transmit her wish to be anywhere else but there. 
Given that as a first impression, I was pleased to see her in what appears a more comfortable environment as the most puzzling member of Altman's trio. The same solemn sadness so distracting in The Ambushers is present here, but to infinitely more pleasing effect.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
The recurring motifs of water, mirrors, and other reflective surfaces give 3 Women a hallucinatory quality well-served by its haunting score and the flat, dried-out Palm Springs locations. The expansive emptiness of the land takes on the look of  Dali-esque dream landscapes.

3 Women

 

Clip from "3 Women"  1977

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Pinky- "I wonder what it's like to be twins...do you think they know which one they are?"

"Perhaps we are the same person. Perhaps we have no limits. Perhaps we flow into each other, stream through each other, boundlessly and magnificently."  Ingmar Bergman  Fanny and Alexander 1979

For years Woody Allen has been knocking himself out superficially channeling Ingmar Bergman, and here Robert Altman hits a bullseye his first time out with this incontestably American nod to Bergman's Persona.

What I've always related to in 3 Women is how it so poetically speaks to the need to connect and the essential human desire to be acknowledged. Looking at the film through the eyes of the college kid I was when the film was released, I'm aware of what I shared with Millie: pretentiousness, the need for self-invention (or re-invention). Also, what I shared with Pinky: a fear of growing up and a wish to remain childlike; a longing to care for and be cared for by someone.
Watching the film now as an adult, I find myself stunned by the keenness of its observations and touched by how gently Altman treats these damaged characters. Ultimately, I find 3 Women to be one of Altman's most humane works. And, after all these years, it remains, hands-down, my favorite of his many excellent films.

Pinky- "I had a bad dream."
Millie- "Dreams can't hurt you."

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 

THAT COLD DAY IN THE PARK 1969

The label of "misogynist" has followed the late director Robert Altman around since audiences were first invited to laugh at and identify with the anti-female, frat-boy antics of that annoyingly smug '70s geek duo of Elliot Gould and Donald Sutherland in M*A*S*H (hands down my least favorite Altman film).

Despite being responsible for some of the more cringe-worthy scenes of cruelty to women ever attributed to a single director (the coke-bottle-to-the-face scene in The Long Goodbye is the worst), in interviews, Altman has always asserted, rather persuasively, that he was, in fact, very sympathetic and respectful of women and that his films merely reflected...as a form of critique, one assumes...a reality for many women in a sexist culture. Of course, this argument would hold a good deal more weight were the women in his films not so frequently the sexualized objects of the male gaze, or depicted so unsympathetically in comparison to the male oppressors in the scene. (As reliable as a Hitchcock cameo, an Altman film almost always features a scene of a woman in some state of blunt nudity [usually in the presence of some form of humiliation] while male characters remain chastely clothed.)

But while Robert Altman may get it wrong a good deal of the time when it comes to depicting women onscreen, he's also one of the few directors, who, when he gets it right, does so spectacularly. Putting M*A*S*H aside, a film I consider to be sophomoric, boys' club dreck in spite of its reputation, Altman has an otherwise impressive track record of providing terrific roles for women in his films. The women may not be pillars of feminist ideology (in fact, almost all are neurotic or downright insane, as are most of the people in Altman films, anyway), but they are dimensional, recognizably human, and always compelling.

In his "plus" column I place That Cold Day in the Park (Altman's 2nd film), an off-beat, forgotten masterpiece of loneliness and sexual obsession.

Sandy Dennis as Frances Austen

Michael Burns as The Boy

Academy-Award-winning actress Sandy Dennis, on the downside of an unsustainable fire-hot popularity that began with 1966's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, stars as Frances Austen, a wealthy, 32-year-old woman living alone in a spacious apartment in Vancouver, Canada. Prim and cripplingly repressed, Frances lives a life of formal ritual, surrounded by friends who are at least 20 years her senior (they, like her staid apartment, appear to have been inherited from her dead mother).

One rainy afternoon she spies a young man sitting alone on a park bench and invites him in to get dry. The blankly cherubic 19-year-old (Michael Burns) speaks not a word, but allows the solicitous woman to bathe, feed, and eventually house him. The boy's silent passivity (he's never named) and apparent lack of friends or family enable Frances to project a great deal of her own loneliness onto his situation, awakening in her an acute awareness of her long-repressed desires. Before long, Frances' initial maternal concern gives way to darker obsessions as the boy comes to symbolize a last-chance grasp at life.

One of Frances' many joyless, ritualized social commitments

Something about the boy sitting alone in the rain touches Frances. A repressed woman who, up until this point, has given the impression of being rather icy and removed.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Movies about older women and kept men date back at least as far as 1950s Sunset Blvd. Movies about old coots chasing after young women date back even further and are often presented as joyous romps (There's a Girl in My Soup - 1970) or timeless romances (think of pretty much every early Audrey Hepburn movie), but rarely is the creep factor explored because these movies are written by, for, and intended to flatter the ego of men. But in a world where women are seen as girls, girlfriends, or wives, older single women tend to be depicted as the stuff of horror. 

Another thing I've noticed is that, whether due to gender-role preconceptions which ignore the fairly common strong-woman / weak-male dynamic (seen in non-stop parade on reality TV court shows), or these narrative's close association with homosexual authors - Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, and  Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's - films on the subject have always seemed to court a gay sensibility. Which is to say, the female characters in these stories could be replaced by a male without significantly altering the substance or themes of the narrative.

Sex Object
A rarity in most American films - Robert Altman asks us to share the feminine gaze.

Due to the predominance of male directors, writers, and cinematographers, movie audiences have grown quite used to the fact that films almost always represent the subjective male gaze. When on those rare occasions that gaze turns feminine and it's the male torso upon whom the leering close-ups are trained, audiences (particularly American males) are often made uncomfortable and don't quite know what to do with themselves. Film critics traditionally channel such discomfort into dismissing these films as being homoerotic or gay in their sensibility (the tact taken by critics reviewing the inarguably lousy but essentially harmless Sex and the City movies). Otherwise, they invoke a curious double-standard and label the male nudity as "gratuitous" or humiliating for the actor. At no time is the thought ever entertained that, for once, a film's gaze is intended to reflect the point of view of a female.

One of the strengths of That Cold Day in the Park is how it commits to reinforcing the gaze of its female protagonist and uses any ensuing audience discomfort to its atmospheric advantage. In a refreshing change of pace for an Altman film, a male (Michael Burns) spends most of the movie in various states of fetishized undress; the camera lingering over his bareness in a way usually reserved for comely starlets. From a narrative standpoint, all this suggested nudity underscores the character's vulnerability; but psychologically speaking, I like the way something so simple has the power to mess with so many minds. Men in movies are traditionally heroes and propel the plot. A great many, I'm afraid, are made uncomfortable when a male character is presented as not only passive, but subject to the whims of a woman.

Michael Burns, giving Joe Dallesandro a run for his money in the "passive, objectified male" sweepstakes

PERFORMANCES

Few actresses are as appealingly quirky as the late Sandy Dennis. Her performances are full of nervous mannerisms, eccentric tics, and vocal hiccups that you either love her for or else she annoys the hell out of you. I fall into the former category. In That Cold Day in the Park, Dennis has a role in which her trademark idiosyncrasies work toward defining an emotionally needy character stunted by a disturbing social awkwardness. I can't say her character is exactly likable (creepy is more the word) but Dennis's performance is touching and moves one to empathy.

Frances: "I remember my mother never stopped saying how lonely she was after my father died. 
She kept talking on and on, always reminding me how little company I was for her."

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I love it when directors do more than just use the camera to record the action. Altman makes great use of the concealment/distortion value of shadows, glass, mirrors, and reflective surfaces. A good deal of the sense of unease this film elicits is due to the way Altman bisects and divides the screen, keeping the characters in their own separate worlds even when they share the same space.

Isolated Worlds
Although lonely herself, Frances is unable to return the affection an equally
lonely suitor (Edward Greenhalgh) extends to her.

Barriers
An attempt to reach out.

Separated
Frances holds one-sided conversations with the boy who cannot (will not?) speak.

Window Blinds or Iron Bars?
The characters in That Cold Day in the Park live in various self-imposed prisons.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
I first saw That Cold Day in the Park back in the early 70s on a now-defunct San Francisco TV channel: KEMO-TV Channel 20 - which had this great late-night program called "The Adults Only Movie."  The movies were mostly foreign or art films (I must have been the only kid in my class who knew who Catherine Spaak was), but what 13-year-old could resist a program with a title like that? The version of That Cold Day In The Park I saw was heavily edited and viewed on a tiny black and white TV set in my bedroom, but it nevertheless blew me away and I sought it out many years later at revival theaters. Then, the film mostly impressed me as a kinky suspense thriller with a very powerful final act (and the male nudity didn't hurt, either). But over the years I have come to grow fonder of it as a labyrinthine character piece and dark treatise on loneliness. The shift of tone from somber drama to something unanticipatedly perverse is like a slow descent into madness.

Despite some cinematic evidence to the contrary, I really don't believe Robert Altman was a misogynist. His films with male leads have an off-putting thread of misanthropy and cruelty running through them, yet his films with female leads (The Company, 3 Women, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean) are infinitely gentler and markedly more humane. That Cold Day in the Park is almost delicate in the way it handles the Sandy Dennis character when it could have easily made her into some kind of a gynophobia-inspired monster.

OK, so the "grasping female" imagery doesn't support my argument, but is this a cool ad, or what?

I think in his own twisted way, Altman liked women a good deal more than men.


BONUS MATERIAL
Excellent review of the Richard Miles' 1965 novel at Pretty Sinister Books 

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2011

ANDY WARHOL'S BAD 1977

Back in my dating days, I had what I call my "Taste Test Films" (two such films, in fact: Robert Altman's 3 Women and Andy Warhol's BAD). These are films for which my appreciation is so intensely personal and self-defining that I used them as a gauge in determining the compatibility of my tastes with those of potential partners I felt I might be getting serious about. Both films are so completely my aesthetic, humor, and worldview, I reasoned that if someone didn't "get" these movies and their appeal to me, they likely wouldn't "get" or understand me, either. Similarly, if you were the kind of guy who appreciated the idiosyncratic allure of these films (spanning the rather broad spectrum between acute human empathy and outrageous, misanthropic black comedy), it was a pretty safe bet that you'd be my kind of fella.

3 Women is such a thoughtful, intriguing film that most anyone I was interested in was likely to find something to like in it, but Andy Warhol's BAD (directed by Jed Johnson, but a delirious mash-up of those camp/trash geniuses, John Waters and Paul Morrissey) was definitely the litmus test.

Carroll Baker as Hazel Aiken

Perry King as L.T.

Susan Tyrrell as Mary Aiken

Charles McGregor as Detective Hughes

Bridgid Polk as Estelle

Hard-as-nails Queens housewife Hazel Aiken (a perpetually pissed-off Carroll Baker) operates an electrolysis business ("Six-Hundred and Fifty hairs an hour!") out of the split-level suburban home she shares with her ailing mother; her ineffectual, unemployed husband; and her whiny daughter-in-law (Susan Tyrrell) and grandson. To make ends meet and subsidize her cache of furs, jewelry, and perfumes, Hazel also runs a dial-up, all-girl hit squad. Yes, no matter how mean or messy the job, if you've got the cash, Hazel has the right beautiful psychopath on her staff for the job. The dispassionate efficiency of Hazel's bloody, all-female enterprise is compromised when circumstance necessitates the reluctant hiring of a slow-witted punk (Perry King).

"Ow! God, this is electrocution!" 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Perverse as this may sound, Andy Warhol's BAD reminds me of a simpler, gentler time in America. Back when there was really such a thing as a "counter-culture," back when movies designated as "underground" or "independent" actually were, and back when the most transparently sanctimonious and hypocritical factions of the American public at least cared enough to pretend that things like morals and standards of decency mattered to them. All the better for those attitudes to be burlesqued in a film like this.

Stefania Casini as P.G

Today we live in a country where ignorance is rewarded (thank you, Jersey Shore), bad behavior is commonplace (Weiner, the sexting politician, Schwarzenegger the adulterer), and nobody denounces the hamburger for posing as steak (calling all Kardashians). Andy Warhol's BAD, once thought outrageously offensive enough to warrant an X-rating, is positively quaint and remarkably moral in comparison. I don't even think the movie would work today. You can't satirize the banal evil that lurks behind middle-class conformity, nor poke fun at tacky, suburban aspirations towards upper-class sophistication in a world that can't distinguish class from crass. 

French Provincial Luxury- Hazel, enjoying the fruits of her labors

Indeed, watching this film today feels like having front-row seats to the end of an era. What was once so hilarious about Andy Warhol's BAD  -- finding that behind the blandly respectable facade of a middle-aged suburban housewife lurked the cold, commercialism-rooted amorality of a Murder Inc. mob-boss   --  feels now like suitable fodder for the next reality show. In today's world, Hazel Aiken would be flooded with offers from daytime talk shows to "tell all." When the lowbrow and sleazy become the cultural standard for ratings, newspaper sales, and the fast track to celebrity, satire is out of place because the joke's on us. 

Andy Warhol's BAD tries very hard to be nasty and mean-spirited--what with the television that seems to be on in every kitchen scene, spewing nonstop bad news and tragedy--but the entire film feels more humane and kinder than any 10 minutes of The Bachelor.

Hit-girls, Marsha (left - Maria Smith) and Glenda (right - Geraldine Smith)

 flank the misanthropic Estelle as she plots revenge on a neighbor.

Estelle: "I'm telling you, people stink. All they do is eat, fuck, and watch TV."
Marsha: "I know. The more you smell, the more they stink."
Estelle: What's that supposed to mean?"

PERFORMANCES

To her credit, Carroll Baker held no illusions about Andy Warhol's BAD providing her with any kind of American film comeback (it's her first American film since leaving the country in 1965). 

Quoted as recently as June of 2011 on working on the film:

"It had nothing to do with filmmaking; it had nothing to do with any other experience I ever had. It was like working on the moon. But he (Warhol) wanted me, he cast me in it, I wanted to do it, and it was such a big hit in Europe."     - Carroll Baker  New Journey Journal

Baker's level-headedness serves her well in Andy Warhol's BAD, for she creates in Hazel Aiken, one of cinema's most memorably twisted villains. (The role was originally offered to America's Ethel Mertz, actress Vivian Vance, who turned it down, feeling it would alienate her audience and jeopardize her income from live theater and personal appearances.) 

I saw Andy Warhol's BAD the weekend after it opened on Wednesday, April 27, 1977, at the Music Hall theater in San Francisco (I went so soon because the reviews were so bad; I wasn't sure it would be there another week). They sold the T-shirt in the lobby. My original — the one above is a contemporary knockoff —I wore to tatters.  

Baker makes Hazel devilishly deadpan in the character's blinkered, single-minded belief that she is just doing what has to be done ("I like to help people!"). If June Cleaver were an avaricious psychopath, she'd be something like Hazel Aiken. A woman so lacking in empathy she cheerily arranges contract killings in her kitchen while viewing Polaroids of gruesome crime-scene slayings as if they were vacation slides. 

As the only remotely competent person amongst a menagerie of slackers and oddballs, Hazel's near-constant exasperation finds amusing, meta subtext in having Carroll Baker--an Academy Award-nominated, Method actress, working alongside Warhol's Factory "superstars"... many of whom sound as though they learned their lines phonetically.

(Substantiating my theory that big budgets sap the imagination of indie-filmmakers, John Waters, with a budget more than ten times that of Andy Warhol's BAD, mined similar material in 1994's Serial Mom, but it wasn't half as funny.)

Mary - "What kind of a grandmother are you? Having baby-killers in the house with a baby? She'd kill any baby!"

Hazel - (Indignant) "She would not! She only does what she's paid to do. You wouldn't pay her, so she wouldn't do it!"
Mary - "You're crazy! You're really not all there!"

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Movies about all-girl hit squads were an exploitation flick staple for years: Some Girls Do - 1969,  Doll Squad - 1973, Invasion of the Bee Girls - 1973, but the lady killers of Andy Warhol's BAD are something else again. These women aren't well-trained assassins or pros. They're just bored, amoral young women looking to make an "easy" buck. Though Stefania Casini, Cyrinda Foxe, and Barbara Allen are each hilariously blasé enforcers on Hazel's hit-women roster, my favorites Marsha and Glenda "We're a sister act"  (real-life sisters Maria & Geraldine Smith): the Laverne & Shirley of Dial-a-Murder. Armed with great bone structure, thick New York accents, and a canny sense of comic timing, their scenes are among the sharpest and off-the-chart funny in the film.

Dressed to Kill
Looking like models in a Laura Mars photoshoot, Marsha
(brandishing the stiletto) and Glenda lie in wait for their next victim.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Though I speak of Andy Warhol's BAD as a comedy, it qualifies as such only in its darkest, most absurdist shades. Everything it targets is the America that America pretends not to be, so if it is brutal, violent, sadistic, xenophobic, and cruel, well, that's the good ol' USA. What makes it funny at all is that it's like a parodic vision of America if somebody had spiked our drinking water with truth serum. These ugly people are monsters, but they're monsters I recognize. 

What works for me about this movie is that...unlike our pop culture and news outlets that make celebrities (or politicians) out of these reprehensible types, Andy Warhol's BAD sees and presents them as the contemptibly dim-witted bottom feeders that they are. 

Banality of Evil

As a movie fan, I find it reassuring when the monsters are easily identifiable—usually as crazily hateful maniacs and criminally unbalanced psychopaths. Perhaps that's because it's so unsettling in real life to be confronted daily with evidence that unspeakable evil is often perpetrated by the so-called "normal-looking" members of our society.

Hazel Aiken's cockeyed ethical standards, which are played for absurdist laughs (a proud capitalist, she willingly kills man, woman, or child for a fee, but draws the line at vulgar language and keeping stolen property in her home), underline what is so scary about most truly evil people: they consider themselves to be the most normal of all.

All In A Day's Work
Amidst the trappings of middle-class domesticity, Hazel gets a call for another contract killing

Hazel, with all her pragmatic speeches about personal responsibility, work ethics, and doing what has to be done because nobody else will do it, reminds me a lot (too much, actually) of the fear-goading political candidates, flag-waving radio commentators, and defenders of family values who cloak themselves in "old-fashioned values" to rationalize philosophies of hate.

The 1965 film The Loved One, which satirized the L.A. funeral industry, was promoted with the slogan "The motion picture with something to offend everyone!"  Twelve years later, Andy Warhol's BAD promoted itself with the New York Post review quote: "A picture with something to offend absolutely everybody." The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Hazel - "You're really sensitive, aren't you? Well, I can't afford the luxury to be sensitive because I have to do everything myself!"

 

I find it interesting to note that by current standards, neither The Loved One nor Andy Warhol's BAD, two films met with much hand-wringing over the declining state of decency and taste in the world, is particularly offensive. Indeed, in failing to in any way glamorize the lives and behavior of its principals, Andy Warhol's BAD is, as I mentioned earlier, a great deal more moral than what passes for "suitable for the entire family " TV entertainment today. It even throws a bone of hope to the audience when the lunkhead, played so nicely by Perry King, reveals that, as bad as he is, he isn't prepared to do anything for money. And given our current reality TV parade of self-degradation, how many people today can even say THAT?

Earrings and Lipstick

"Looks aren't everything."

Oh, and for the record, both of my "Taste Test" films have been officially retired. I showed them to a fellow I was dating who not only loved them as I did, but, on a single viewing, opened my eyes to insights and jokes contained in both films that I had never seen before. Understandably, I couldn't let a guy like that go. That was 16 years ago, going on 17, and we still get a kick out of re-watching these films together. Even after all these years, we can make each other laugh just by uttering the raging Estelle epithet: "O'Reilly O'Crapface."

Clip from Andy Warhol's Bad (1977)

I have this striking poster framed in my living room

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2011