SCREENING LOG - 9/10-9/16, 2001

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I only saw one movie. Movies seemed like too much of an escape with the world around me in shambles. Going to Brooklyn Heights at sunset last Saturday evening and watching from the Promenande as plumes of smoke rose from the altered skyline and people lit candles in hushed silence was more fulfilling than any movie I could have seen. But this week I embrace movies as a way to resume my life.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (dir. Howard Hawks, 1953)

Not a perfect film, but certainly one with amazing moments, mostly involving a certain Marilyn Monroe in her quintessential performance. She and Jane Russell (a Hawksian beast-woman if there ever was) scheme their way across the Atlantic in pursuit of love and diamonds, not necessarily in that order. The film feels surprisingly flat-footed at times for a director who was famed for his timing, but that doesn't stop Monroe and Russell as they jiggle and sass their way through vibrantly Technicolored, show-stopping numbers, esp. "Two Little Girls from Little Rock", "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend", and the jaw-dropping "Ain't There Anyone Here for Love" which makes the Men's Olympic team look like a bunch of prancing fairies and Russell a forlorn butch dominatrix. You can feel the sex oozing through every scene (even 12 year old George "Foghorn" Winslow has some perverse fun with Russell) as if it were a mysterious force that incarnates itself in manifold ways, always surprising. With madcap antics and the amazingly lurid use of color, Hawks turns sex into an audacious declaration of the irrepressible American spirit, which I guess is a fitting statement to make for these times, though I hadn't intended my viewing to be patriotic...

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