Post by ronnierocketago on Nov 28, 2009 11:16:07 GMT
THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE (2005) - **1/2
I realized many things in watching NOTORIOUS. One, both the title character (Gretchen Moll) and lead adversary Senator Estes Kefauver (David Strahairn) were from my state Tennessee. She from Nashville, he from Madisonville. That's kinda cool.
Second, in that police sting of the adult bookstore, I noticed the complete contrast of pornography then and now. With the Internet now, you could almost access any sort of pornographic fetish you desire at mere typing. And for free unless you're a newbie netphile or just stupid. You're only bound by the depravity of your fucked up little mind, and sometimes state and federal laws. Sometimes. Even within our mainstream, I'm amazed with how my generation is just desensitized to some real screwy stuff. Or how many pornstars have become household names.
Quite different for perverts in the 1950s. No Internet obviously, which meant they had to physically leave the house. Such porn back then was even more of a social taboo, couldn't risk buying them at a newsstand. You could try the adult bookstore, but asides from avoiding the guys in trenchcoats, the porno rags amounted to pin-ups and "nudist lifestyle" journals (a gimmick to escape anti-obscenity laws with pseudo-science). None of them ever featured pubic hair. Who knows, you might get lucky and under the counter, the clerk has some racy bondage or girl fighting photos. Ohh, black boots with white laces! Wrestling!
The pin-up itself is really an increasingly arcaic term from the 1940s onward when that was the extent of porn for most men unless you were one of the few with a projector and got your (sticky) hands on a stag film, the precursor to those disgusting amateur home videos clogging up the Internet. Being a Pet or Centerfold today is a relic achievement. I hate to use the cliche excuse, but maybe the only people bothering to buy Playboy now really do enjoy the articles.
Bettie Page was probably the quintessential celebrity pin-up queen of the Eisenhower Decade. Never had a career outisde of the pages on TV or movies like most contemporary models, and I'm certain 99.9% of her fans at the time didn't realize she was southern. She made her mark for having an idealized and beautified organic-looking female body topped off with that peculiar hairstyle of hers. No surgeon anytime but God could carve something so fine.
After the Kefauver Committee put major legal heat on smut peddlers, she quit and disapeared into the dustbins of obscuirty. A few decades later, some pictures recirculated and she developed a cult fanbase and became an icon. Shit she even got referenced on Venture Bros. Good for her. It's a nice fitting punishment for the (probably fictional composite) actor boyfriend who dumps Page because of her "head-sick" profession. Nobody remembers you asshole. She's more remembered as an image than ever as an individual, and maybe that's the problem with NOTORIOUS. Outside of the poses, she's just not a compelling story.
In general I guess liked her character arc. She came from a very religious family (figures) who liked to model. She escaped to the city to become an actress but since she couldn't act her way out of a paper bag, she became a pin-up to pay the bills. She reasons that they're "tasteful." Gradually she moved to nude pictorals, arguing thatAdam and Eve were naked too in the Garden of Eve. Then with the S&M fetish photos because hey it was hurting nobody. It's fantasy. That was the extent of her work, yet that last controversial bit was what did her in because apparently some idiot died trying to replicate one of her scenarios. Ben Franklin was wrong, there is something else certain besides death and taxes.
Then after her career ended (apparently not out of choice), she believe it or not returned to her faith and became a missionary. The movie doesn't show her subsequent episodes where she (allegedly) went psycho, or made quite an effort late in life to make sure no photographs were taken of her in public, to ensure only her past image would be remembered. Either way I liked that a movie like NOTORIOUS, which like many other films point out and criticize the patriarchal cultural inequalities as sponsored by the Good Book, yet she comes back to what else she knew on her own terms and not out of guilt or whatever. Alot of rubbish in theology, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. We don't get that in Hollywood much in most such storylines.
But that's not the same as being intrigued or intellectually inspired as NOTORIOUS really wasn't. I guess I'm disapointed because I liked director Mary Harron's previous AMERICAN PSYCHO, which showed she could be thematic sharp and to the concise point. I mean she helped carve Christian Bale's thespian reputation. Since NOTORIOUS was written and directed by women, assumingly they had a feminist political commentary point to be made with such a figure. Cue obligatory rape scene.
Just right now I'm struggling to grasp what exactly she's doing here. Maybe I just missed the point, or she used perhaps the wrong material. You tell me. Oh sure they make the always topical point about the sheer hypocrisy of liberal society where titties and fucking is bad, but if under the right artistic "tasteful" license, it's acceptable. For trash, no! Remember the Janet Jackson flash flap? Or recently cable TV making a censorship effort to blur out the nude silhouettes in the credits of those old James Bond movies, or digitally adding bras to sexual-if-not-overt scenes. Yet year earlier when Kate Winslet showed us her boobs, TITANIC got a PG-13 rating and won the Oscar.
I did like those visual tidbits in showing how the pornographic industry operated in the 50s.Some people think such businesses are run by 40 year old creepy guys who live in their mother's basement, and that's incredibly far from the truth. For the most part, they are mom & pop joints. Well were, since they're all corporate now. If you walked onto a porno set, you would mostly see a crew bored beyond belief, waiting for lunch. Erotica ultimately is still a job. And folks are also usually surprised when they discover the numerous women who work behind the scenes. Accounting, directing, casting, scripting (why bother?), and so forth. Some are even the bosses.
See maybe thats what I would have prefered: A movie or documentary exploring the psychology and occupations of those seasoned women who help in objectifying other women, as feminists argue. What do they get out of it? What kind of satisfaction, artistic or creative yearnings, do they get? I liked this one random touch in the living room photoshoot scene where among the dressed-up professional male photographers you get this drag king camerawoman. She's just there, never explained never seen again, just doing her job with the guys, wanting a superb shot of Page's ass. No problem. Those scenes about those crew women in NOTORIOUS greatly interested me more than Page. They should have been the focus, not the props.
I know with the rating and review so far it sounds like I'm dismissing NOTORIOUS, which I'm really necessarily. With Harmon, you expect a nicely shot movie with a good cast. I think the cinematography going back and forth from color to black & white might just be a tad too pretentious. I get the notion, and I respect that, doesn't mean I have to like it. But something about that visual scheme just doesn't compute for me. Even if her character never compelled me, one must give Moll credit for going all out as Page, which ienvitably means we see her birthday suit. She looks good. I love Strathairn, but he doesn't have much to do here. Only enough to establish himself as the authority bad guy figure.
Which brings up something else. Like a many Hollywood movie about the 1950s, you have the cliche with the government (i.e. society) as the puritanical witch hunting rule makers, square dorks who want to ruin the fun for liberals, partygoers, and everyone else. Those fuckers who thought Elvis was too dangerous for them, unlike Pat Boone. Yes that Kefauver committee in retrospect is rather laughable in their whole misguided concern (backed by "the experts") about youths' fragile minds being ruined by porn and comic books. Not true at all. Blame it on TV. But remember in the late 1980s when the rap group N.W.A. was seen as a public menace by Time Magazine? Yes the late 80s.
What else is new?
Anyway Kefauver is portrayed as the bad guy because such movies need one, which is sorta unfair considering he led the first serious Senate investigation into the Mafia, tackled corporate abuse through legislation, and nearly lost his seat because he refused to sign the pro-segregation Southern Manifesto. Also was the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate in the '56 election. Yes a southern moderate-conservative (for that time) politician, but he's no fucking Al Gore Sr.
So why does Kefauver decide to not make Page testify after all? Did his committee have all the information and evidence needed to make her testimony superflurous, or were they afraid maybe her nice likeable non-slutty personality would have derailed their whole public circus? Or maybe like me, they thought she wasn't that interesting with her clothes on?