Notes on NBC's THE VOICE

I watched The Voice last night.  I was fascinated with Michelle, a finalist in the finale.

I have no idea what her career plans are.  But I think her next move should be to play Greek singer Nana Mouskouri in a special TV biopic.

I write this with total love.  Because years ago, on a date when I lived in Milwaukee, I was the only black person at a sold-out Nana Mouskouri concert.

I loved it.  Mouskouri was marvelous.

Wishing you all the best, Michelle.  Big congratulations on making it to the finale.

And if she can't book the Nana Mouskouri biopic, maybe a revival of Auntie Mame...

To Sir Paul McCartney, With Love

Happy Birthday, Sir Paul!

After all these years, I am still amazed that I got to spend one hour with a true living legend, Paul McCartney.  This privilege, this honor, this great meeting occurred thanks to VH1.  I was a VJ and talk show host.  He was promoting his new 1989 album, Flowers in the Dirt.  I flew to London to tape a special interview show for the network.  We also talked about films.  A movie that deserves a second look and re-appreciation is A Hard Day's Night, the 1964 pop musical that starred The Beatles as themselves.  There's a touch of the Marx Brothers mixed in with the mayhem of the "mod" 1960s British scene at the time.  John, Paul, George and Ringo play themselves and lampoon their pop star images.  It's fun, funny and music-filled.  It's sweetly irreverent and very imaginative.

The Fab Four made its film debut in a winner.  I'm positive that the pacing and hip editing of A Hard Day's Night, directed by the innovative Richard Lester, had a huge influence on music videos two decades later.  This film came out in 1964, the same year the group made its first appearance on CBS' The Ed Sullivan Show.  The Beatles made TV history.

When Oscar nomination time came, the Academy really dropped the ball in overlooking A Hard Day's Night in one popular category.  More about that later.  Paul McCartney did eventually get an Oscar nomination -- in the Best Song category for writing the theme to the 1973 James Bond adventure, Live and Let Die starring Roger Moore.

Singer Tom Jones was a guest on my VH1 talk show and said that said that he definitely would've entertained the idea of auditioning to play 007.  Here's a clip of Sir Paul and me in London from our VH1 special.  He talks about the classic film role that got away.

When he mentioned director Franco Zeffirelli, it did not throw me off.  I was familiar with his work.  I'd seen the film.  Why?  Because going to see it was a field trip one day when I was a student in the post-riots Watts section of Los Angeles.  Our English Lit. teachers at Verbum Dei High School on South Central Avenue didn't have a big budget like schools in upscale middle class neighborhoods, so good movies in theatrical release were utilized as part of our fine arts education.  We took buses to areas like Hollywood or Westwood.  We saw fine films like A Man for All Seasons and Far from the Madding Crowd.  That Catholic school still holds a special place in my heart.  It's still in operation in Watts.

Now.  About the major Academy oversight at nomination time for the films of 1964:  Lennon and McCartney tunes in A Hard Day's Night were eligible for Best Song.  Eligible songs included "And I Love Her," "Can't Buy Me Love," "I'm Happy Just To Dance With You," "I Should Have Known Better," "If I Fell" and the title tune, "A Hard Day's Night."

Not a single one was nominated for Best Song.  The Oscar went to "Chim Chim Cher-ee" from Mary Poppins.  The Disney film song beat out "Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte," "Dear Heart" and "Where Love Has Gone," all songs from movies of the same name.  The fifth nominee was "My Kind of Town" from Robin and the Seven Hoods starring and introduced by Frank Sinatra.

A Hard Day's Night got two Oscars nominations.  One was for Best Original Screenplay and the other was for Best Music Adaptation and Scoring.  The songwriting team of Lennon and McCartney should've been nominated.  Their songs have endured.

Here's a DVD double feature recommendation for you:  Watch 1964's A Hard Day's Night and follow that with another film that deserves more attention today than it gets -- the 1982 family drama, Shoot the Moon, directed by Alan Parker.  A couple with four children breaks up after 15 years of marriage.  Albert Finney and Diane Keaton are so powerful as the bitter, resentful parents.  This was one of those top films that showed folks that Keaton was not just Woody Allen's Annie Hall.  One of my favorite scenes in Shoot the Moon has Keaton, as the emotionally devastated wife, in a bathtub and singing Lennon & McCartney's "If I Fell" to herself, in French.  A great scene with a song from the movie A Hard Day's Night.  Another moving performance, one that almost steals the film, came from the late Dana Hill as Sherry, one of their children.  She's the oldest child, overwhelmed trying to deal with the unhappy emotions of two people more than twice her age.  Dana Hill moved me to my soul with that performance.  My parents divorced when I was just starting high school.  I'm the oldest of three kids.  I knew how that character felt.  So, with the common bond of my favorite song by Lennon & McCartney, there's my DVD double feature top for you -- A Hard Day's Night and Shoot the Moon.

You might also want to check out this classic box office hit from Franco Zeffirelli.

Once again, I wish a very happy birthday to singer/songwriter, musician and humanitarian, Sir Paul McCartney.  Interviewing that gentleman will always be one of the highlights of my life.

And thank you, Verbum Dei High School, for the preparation.

Note to HBO Wolf Man

To:  Joe Manganiello of True Blood on HBO

Dear Mr. Manganiello, I was one of many millions eagerly awaiting last night's season opener.  True Blood has captivated my interest since its first season.  I didn't think I'd like it but the series is smart, witty, unpredictable and the characters are fascinating.  You've become the most memorable Wolf Man in pop culture since Lon Chaney, Jr in the 1940s.

Last night, I was eating some barbecue potato chips and watching the new season's premiere episode.  There was a full shot of your naked backside during your nocturnal wolf transformation in the woods.  I wasn't expecting that.

The sight of your butt made my butt so depressed that it wanted to kill itself.

I am still consoling it.  And there's a lot to console.

Put your pants back on.  Best of luck with the new season.  You're a very good actor.

Sincerely, Bobby Rivers

On DJANGO UNCHAINED

I watched Quentin Tarantino's anti-racist revenge fantasy, Django Unchained.  First of all, my favorite thing about it was the Best Supporting Actor Oscar-winning performance by Christoph Waltz.  Just like Dianne Wiest with Woody Allen, he won two Oscars in the same category for films from the same director.  Wiest was Best Supporting Actress for Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters and Bullets Over Broadway.  Waltz's previous Oscar was for Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.  He was a Nazi officer in that one.  In this western, he was a German bounty hunter who advises and helps Django, the freed slave.

They become quite the team there in the deep South two years before the Civil War.

I feel that Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds were better Tarantino films.  His trademark violence was literally overkill in Django Unchained.  The gun violence in Shane (1953) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967) was there for a reason.  It was making a point about a social issue.  In Django Unchained, I got the feeling that it was Tarantino gleefully doing another bloody shoot-out scene for the mere sake of a "Hey! Let's shoot a bad guy in the balls this time! That'll look freakin' awesome!" filmmaker freedom.  And he needs to quit writing himself into his movies so much.  Be like Hitchcock.  Make a brief cameo appearance.  When I now see him play a supporting character, it takes me out of the reality of the movie.  I'm thinking, "There's Quentin playing a character again.  And it's a character the movie doesn't necessarily need."

Django Unchained was inspired by the 1966 Italian western, Django, starring Franco Nero.  This was before Nero starred as Lancelot in the big Warner Bros. movie version of the hit Broadway musical Camelot (1967).  While making Camelot, he fell in love with his leading lady, Oscar-winner Vanessa Redgrave.  They are still together.

Nero has a cameo with Foxx in Django Unchained...because he played Django first.

Django was a hit throughout Europe.  There were further adventures of Django.

Then how the hell could this win an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay?  How did it qualify?  Did The Magnificent Seven get an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay of 1960?  Nope.  Folks said, "This is an American western remake of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai."  Django Unchained got its roots and title from Django the same way Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds was inspired by 1978's The Inglorious Bastards.  One of the stars of that 1978 movie is blaxploitation action movie star, Fred Williamson.  A big, handsome hunk o' onyx, he went from pro football player to a supporting role opposite Liza Minnelli in Otto Preminger's Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970) to starring in Black Caesar, Hammer, Hell Up in Harlem, The Legend of Nigger Charley and Boss Nigger later titled just Boss. Williamson's 1970s work, especially his image as Boss, is really the template for Foxx's look and attitude as Django.

Not that Tarantino didn't write some riveting material for his actors to play, but I feel this film is more an adaptation than an original screenplay. In Tarantino's screenplay, I really dig the dynamic between Django and the bounty hunter.  It's like the relationship between a shrewd white sports agent and a gifted professional black athlete client. Tarantino gave us a bad-ass antebellum Jerry Maguire in that aspect.

I admit it.  I have had my share of racial drama.  There were some corporate "plantations" I wanted to blow up.  So some of the revenge in Django Unchained did give me a tingle.  Also, I wished I'd had a broadcast agent like Dr. King Schultz.  Tom Cruise's Jerry Maguire could've learned a thing or two from Schultz's way of negotiating a deal.

Waltz is not the only one who shoots out a strong supporting performance.  Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson also hit it.  Jackson really burns up the screen as the house slave who is so dedicated to his vicious, egotistical master that he'll betray his own people to keep his comfortable and protected position working in the big house.

The versatile Kerry Washington also stands out as the slave Django loves and rescues.

If you saw Samuel L. Jackson in this film, I've got another one for you to see.  It reminds you how versatile and gifted an actor he is as he plays a modern and way more sophisticated, subtle character.  He's the head of a Los Angeles law firm in Mother and Child.  He has a tender relationship with another lawyer.  She's played by Naomi Watts.  Watts and Jackson are excellent together in this 2009 release.

Kerry Washington is in this drama too.  She's a woman in the L.A. area who desperately wants to have a baby but can't conceive.  Annette Bening, seen the next year as the protective and loving Southern California suburban lesbian mom in The Kids Are All Right, hit another home-run with this performance.  She's a Californian who gave her child up for adoption back in her youth when she was an unwed mother.  She's now a 50 year-old, married health care professional.  But no one seems to take care of her.  One reason is because she's so difficult.  This bitter woman is one heavy piece of furniture to deal with outside of her job.  She now wants to know what became of her child.  Naomi Watts' character somewhat drifts through life.  She's a rootless serial seducer, having sex but not really connecting emotionally.   The women played by Annette Bening, Naomi Watts and Kerry Washington will have a connection that we'll discover thanks to a very modern and helpful nun played by Cherry Jones.  I saw this movie because of an enthusiastic review it got from Roger Ebert.  I shared his enthusiasm after I saw it.

You really need to see Samuel L. Jackson here.  He's so good.

Naomi Watts, one of our best actresses around now, has an elevator scene in Mother and Child that just wore me out.  I sat there and whispered, "Wow."  Amazing.  And if only the Vatican could be as contemporary and liberal as the nun in this fine film.

I'd pitch Django Unchained followed by Mother and Child as a weekend Samuel L. Jackson & Kerry Washington double feature DVD rental.  But Tarantino's western is excessive.  He could've brought in a good movie at 2 hours and 10 minutes.  It's nearly 3 hours long because Quentin had to get his Sam (The Wild Bunch) Peckinpah groove on ("If they move, kill 'em").  Rodrigo Garcia's Mother and Child clocks in at 2 hours.

As you may know, director/screenwriter Spike Lee, someone who also writes himself into is movies, was livid with Tarantino and his Django Unchained.  I don't know if he actually saw the film but he was fuming about Tarantino's version and vision of African-American history.  Spike made a movie that also screened last year, like Django Unchained.  Let's just say Spike's Red Hook Summer was not in a league with Do The Right Thing, Malcolm X and his brilliant, searing documentary Four Little Girls.

I saw Red Hook Summer last summer at a private screening in New York City.  I was in town for a few days to tape a TV pilot.  I don't think Spike's film was released nationwide.  That's for the best.  It should not have been released.  It should've been denied parole.  Red Hook Summer clocked in at 2 hours but felt like it was nearly 3.

It's sort of a follow-up to Do The Right Thing.  But there are too many storylines and, despite some good actors (most notably Clarke Peters from HBO's The Wire as a Brooklyn pastor), the film drags and feels dated.  The saddest element is that Mookie from Do The Right Thing is in it.  He's got Morgan Freeman hair now and he is still delivering pizzas in that Brooklyn neighborhood.  No, he's not managing the pizza joint.  He didn't move up.  He's still delivering pizza and dressed like he was in 1989.  This sight made us black folks at the screening groan "Oh, Lawd.  Help him, Jesus."

Tarantino gave the public a film it wanted to see, a film that touched the current pulse in society.  It was a revenge fantasy set in the past that worked for these modern times.  We've been slapped in the face with the fact that America is not "post-racial" just because a black politician was elected to presidency in the White House.  Some of the old attitudes still exist in a new generation.

I've blogged that African-American playwright August Wilson won two Pulitzer Prize awards for Drama.  However, neither of those 1987 and 1990 plays has been turned into a big screen project like plays by Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Neil Simon and David Mamet.  Has Spike tried to direct a Hollywood adaptation of a Wilson play?

Christoph Waltz would've totally rocked in a Mel Brooks comedy like Young Frankenstein or Blazing Saddles.  If you see him host Saturday Night Live, you know what I mean.  What a talented actor.  He earned those two Oscars.

Good Actress Left TEETH Marks

I remember when I went to a critics' screening of the new 2009 movie, An Education.  Ten minutes into the movie several of us, including yours truly and my date, started looking at the press materials handed to us.  Using the light of the film onscreen to read, we glanced on the first pages to see "Who's the girl?"  Carey Mulligan just popped when she hit the screen, full of verve and charisma and talent.  That performance would put her in the running for the Best Actress Academy Award the following year.  I did the same thing at a screening in 2007 when I was reviewing movies on Whoopi Goldberg's syndicated weekday morning radio show.  But this critics' screening was different.  Only two of us were present in the theater.  I was the only one checking his press materials to see "Who's the girl?"  There was a glimmer of the 1970s/80s Teri Garr about her.

This movie didn't have the cachet of An Education.  Similar to Stephen King's Carrie, it was like a dark horror version of a classic fairy tale.  A lovely, sweet and shy high school student is awkward with the changes occurring in her young body.  Jess Weixler was excellent as Dawn.  This actress gave an "A" performance in a quirky "B" movie.

Dawn grew up in a dull small town that has a Three Mile Island look about it.  Could living near a nuclear plant have caused her unusual growth -- the way atomic power gave us mutant creatures in 1950s sci-fi movies?  We never really get that answer.  But we do see that when Dawn says "No" to a guy, she means it.  And he'd better listen.  She was cursed...and blessed...with the best defense against male sexual violence.  Think "the little man in the boat" meets Jaws.  Dawn has a condition called Vagina Dentata.

Don't speak medical Latin?  Take a look at the trailer to see what it all means.

And there you have it.  I doubt that any man can sit through this 90-minute horror story without squirming.  The storyline isn't quite as strong as Weixler's performance but the movie is so original and so freaky that it holds your interest.  Director and screenwriter Mitchell Lichtenstein did some clever work, giving us witty chills.  He taps into some primal fears about sex.  Dawn is a teen undergoing physical changes she can't control -- like Peter Parker shooting streams of a sticky substance out of his body as he mutates into Spider-Man.

Jess Weixler keeps Dawn believable and sympathetic.  She also blends in comedy without pushing it.  Very skillful, subtle work.  She doesn't comment on Dawn's character, she plays the insecure and confused reality of her.  There are flashes of camp humor, like a parody of the 1950s style of sci-fi movie acting, but not enough overall camp humor in the film to make this a full-blown guilty-pleasure send up of a genre -- like in a Mars Attacks!, Mike Nichol's What Planet Are You From? or The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

I'm sure that, given the subject matter, this was a difficult movie to market.  It's not exactly mainstream.  Many moviegoers and entertainment reporters missed out on a mighty fine performance by Jess Weixler.  She was definitely the First Lady of the Oval Orifice.  Dawn starts out as a lamb.  Will men turn her into a she-wolf?  That is the question.

I wonder if actor Michael Douglas has ever seen this movie.

MAN OF STEEL star

I'm sure you've heard the old saying, "There are no small parts...only small actors."

That really is true.  There are two actors who are golden examples of that.  They had small parts in the same 2006 movie.  A couple of years later, they were both on the Hollywood red carpet as Oscar nominees.  One of them will get a lot of attention this weekend when fanboys and others flock to see Man of Steel.  Even if the reviews are lukewarm, we know millions of guys are hot to see this new version of the old Superman story.  Actor Michael Shannon had a few minutes onscreen as a Marine in the Oliver Stone movie World Trade Center back in 2006.  Nicolas Cage was the star of Stone's film about the tragedy in New York City on September 11th.  Shannon was a minor player.

In 2008, his supporting role as the emotionally fractured adult suburban son in Revolutionary Road earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Viola Davis also had a few minutes in World Trade Center.  Her one scene was so powerful, so moving, that I stayed through the closing credits to see who she was.  Near the end of the credit roll came the listing "Mother in Hospital.....Viola Davis."

In 2008, her supporting role in Doubt starring Meryl Streep earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Now, Michael Shannon (right) plays a villain previously played by Terence Stamp (left).  He is Superman's main nemesis, Zod, in Man of Steel.

TV viewers have been watching Shannon as a lawman on HBO's Boardwalk Empire 1920s crime story series.  I'm interested in seeing what he does with the Zod role.

As for Viola Davis, she followed Doubt with a Best Actress Oscar nomination for The Help.

She made Oscar history with her second nomination.  Viola Davis is now one of the two black actresses who has more than one Oscar nomination for acting to her credit.  The other is Whoopi Goldberg (nominated for The Color Purple and Ghost).  Brava, Viola!

If you see Man of Steel this weekend, let me know how it is.  See what I mean about "There are no small part...only small actors"?  Michael Shannon and Viola Davis are two who went from bit parts to big attention thanks to their hard work and excellent skills.  Let that be a lesson to you.