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DVD Smile
A small-town beauty pageant, and the turmoil it causes in the lives of its participants and sponsors, is the focus of this dark and witty cult comedy from Michael Ritchie (The Bad News Bears, Fletch). Bruce Dern shines in a rare comic lead as the chief judge of the "Young American Miss" contest, and his ability to find humor and pathos in his sad-sack character is well-matched by Barbara Feldon as a glacial former contestant, Geoffrey Lewis as a densely heartless sponsor, and famed choreographer Michael Kidd as (what else) the disillusioned pageant choreographer. Ritchie and writer Jerry Belson split the film's focus between the contestants (among them Annette O'Toole, Melanie Griffith, and Colleen Camp) and the sponsors and judges, and if the plot takes an absurd turn at the climax, Smile is ultimately a rare satire that cares for its characters while skewering their foibles. --Paul Gaita
Definitely an unsung film. Bruce Dern plays an RV dealer(Big Bob Freelander) who is also a judge in the Miss Teen USA pageant which comes to his town. Brilliant comedy about the whole pageant scene. From the opening credits(over which Nat King Cole sings "Smile") this film has you. Dern's trophy shop working buddy(played perfectly by Nichoals Pryor) is fed up with small town life and wants to bail out. It is he who begins to criticize the pageant and all the other small town social crap. Very funny through and through. Flawless cinematography by the one and only Conrad Hall. Spread the word on this one, it's another dangling classic waiting to find it's spotlight.
An underrated gem
I found a crusty old copy of Smile at a video store and decided to take a chance, expecting at best a mediocre comedy. But I was surprised. This movie is really good, one of the best comedies of the 70's. How it ever faded away into oblivion is a good question? This film is not dated at all. Unlike most old comedies, I found myself laughing throughout this whole movie. The humor is still fresh and revelant. The movie deals with a teenage beauty pageant and the hypocrisy of a small town. It balances the subjects pretty well, saying just as much as a Douglas Sirk film about the later subject. This is displayed through Barbara Fenton's psycho character and Bruce Dern. (Both who do excellent jobs in this movie. Patricularly Bruce who will go on my future underrated actor list.) This is the only film to deal with beauty pageants that has succeeded. It has so many great moments in it like the Mexican stereotype, the repressed geeky preteen boys running around town, and Annette O' Toole who shines in this movie as the redheaded dix. Her entry in the pageant is a classic.
'Smile' also has a great soundtrack......
From Ted Farley, compere extraordinaire (and master of the faux pas) 'Smile' also has a great soundtrack. Apart from Nat 'King' Cole singing 'Smile' (by Charles Chaplin) over the titles, the 'Smile' soundtrack includes the Beach Boys 'California Girls', Neal Sedaka's 'You're sixteen, you're beautiful and you're mine ' and others!
This 1966 masterpiece by Michelangelo Antonioni (The Passenger) is set in the heady atmosphere of Swinging London, and stars David Hemmings as an unsmiling fashion photographer hooked on ephemeral meaning attached to anything: art, sex, work, relationships, drugs, events. When a real mystery falls into his lap, he probes the evidence for some reliable truth, but finds it hard to reckon with. Vanessa Redgrave plays an enigmatic woman whose desperation to cover something up only seems like one more phenomenon in Hemmings's disinterested purview. This is one of the key films of the decade, and still an unsettling and lasting experience. --Tom KeoghMore Info about this DVD Actor(s): Vanessa Redgrave - David Hemmings Director(s): Michelangelo Antonioni DVD Release Date: Released the 17 February 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust is by consensus the great Hollywood novel, a poison-pen letter aimed squarely at the tinsel heart of the movie biz. Only in the 1970s could Hollywood actually hazard a film of this story, and the result is suitably corrosive. William Atherton is the observer Tod, Karen Black the blond starlet Faye, and Donald Sutherland the hulking Homer--but they are easily out-acted by the colorful supporting cast. In particular, Burgess Meredith's exhausted showbizzy salesman and Billy Barty's strutting dwarf are superbly crafted gargoyles in this Hollywood wax museum. Director John Schlesinger piles on the rancid atmosphere and rampant hypocrisy until the movie fairly drowns in its own grotesque vision. Long before the climactic apocalyptic riot, the film... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Donald Sutherland - Karen Black Director(s): John Schlesinger DVD Release Date: Released the 08 June 2004 Usually ships within 24 hours
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Philip Roth's novel of Jewish identity and assimilation in the suburbs of New York gets a spirited comic reading in this 1969 film, which marked the acting debut of model Ali McGraw (and who thought that was a good idea?). Actually, she's pretty good as the Jewish princess whose father has made a fortune in plumbing supplies. Richard Benjamin, who went on to become an odd sex symbol of the '70s, had just the right comic twist as the young man who can't overcome McGraw's middle-class morality with his sense of passion and romance. Jack Klugman is outstanding as her hard-driving and unyieldding father. A touchstone film. --Marshall FineMore Info about this DVD Actor(s): Richard Benjamin - Ali MacGraw Director(s): Larry Peerce DVD Release Date: Released the 08 June 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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"The cinema," Orson Welles famously noted, "is a ribbon of dream." 3 Women is one of few feature films on record as having taken form in a dream. The dreamer was Robert Altman, and although all his best work has an oneiric quality--the floaty zooms, the eerie pastels bleeding into one another, the slip and slide of characters' trajectories overlapping in the fluid accumulation of what passes for narrative--this last masterpiece in his amazing seven-year run of 1970s masterpieces is only more so. Shelly Duvall, that most unorthodox of Altman creatures, locks in the tone with her eerie portrayal of Millie Lammoreaux, a Texan hoyden whose nonstop prattle turns life into a stream-of-consciousness reverie even as most of the people in her vicinity studiously ignore her. Her... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Shelley Duvall - Sissy Spacek Director(s): Robert Altman DVD Release Date: Released the 20 April 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Maggie Smith is so witty and commanding in this film, you might forget that the script paints Jean Brodie as an ultimately self-deluding spinster. Dame Maggie won the first of her two Oscars for playing a teacher in 1930s Edinburgh more in thrall to her romantic notions of art and beauty than the real world, a cultivator of worshipping "Brodie Girls." (She exalts the Mona Lisa and Mussolini with equal fervor.) Smith's expert playing makes many of the brogue-heavy Brodie-isms worth memorizing ("She seeks to intimidate me by the use of quarter-hours.") and raises the picture above its generally theatrical style. Real-life husband Robert Stephens plays Jean's married lover, Celia Johnson excels as the hostile headmistress, and Pamela Franklin is the deadpan whistle-blower within Miss... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Maggie Smith - Gordon Jackson Director(s): Ronald Neame DVD Release Date: Released the 06 July 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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