THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE

Going into this film I was, as I suspect a lot of people will be, more familiar with Bettie Page the icon than Bettie Page the person. I was largely unaware of her interesting life story and I would assume that was the reason this film was made. It’s an interesting and enjoyable biopic of a person whose iconic image looms larger than life!

The film charts the story from Betties early days in Nashville, through to her move to New York, burgeoning modelling career and subsequent retirement following a governmental crackdown on lusty material!

On occasion I felt it could have done with a ted more exposition. For example, I was unclear as to whether the times she was in Miami were all a flashback, or took place in the timeframe of the film where she was becoming well known. I also felt that tonally, some of the incidents in her early life (including some disturbing sexual abuse), did not sit well within the context of a film aiming for the same light-hearted naïveté that Bettie herself seemed to possess. Still, this was not to the detriment of the film overall.

Gretchen Mol was totally convincing as Bettie, and it was also good to see the excellent Chris Bauer (aka Frank Sobotka from The Wire) and dependably brilliant Lilli Taylor playing Betty’s employers / photography entrepreneurs.

Shot in black and white, but flicking back and forth with colour, it was an entertaining, well made biopic. It was interesting to see the outrage that Betties pictures caused at the time in the light of their relative tameness by today’s standards. But of course it would be ridiculous to judge it by today’s values.

This film is worth checking out.

IMDB: THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE

TEETH

Saturday was Halloween. For some unknown reason, I decided it would be a good idea to abandon my plan to watch THE THING (one of the greatest movies of all time, and a worthy All Hallows Eve alternative to Carpenter’s Halloween which is always on telly). I favoured instead, to watch a movie I had not already seen, and thus I found myself watching Teeth.

The premise is interesting. A God fearing, celibate teen discovers she happens to have a second set of gnashers inconveniently located in her genitalia! Unfortunately this is where the term ‘interesting’ begins and ends as far as this movie is concerned. It’s badly acted, and criminally boring. There are a couple of amusing set pieces in the middle of the film, but it’s mostly just a tedious bloody chore.

The first hour or so is boring and annoying. Even when the ‘action’ starts up, the plot clumsily jerks to the end of the film with no real coherence or sanity. A sub plot with a policeman abruptly crops up and looks like it might actually go somewhere, but then disappears never to be seen again. It gives the impression that they came up with a good idea, a couple of set pieces, and then realised they had to build a film around it. They did not do a good job.

The metal dude older brother character is especially nauseating. Every word uttered is almost drowned out by an irritating Nu Metal soundtrack. As if some 18 year old kerrang reader is in the next room trying to drown the telly out with his latest Slipknot CD. As an aside, an easy way to avoid watching a shitty horror movie is just to look at the soundtrack. Any horror film that opts for an over reliance of Nu Metal is going to be shit because clearly the director is completely missing the point of metal, and thusly will miss the point of the horror genre in precisely the same way. This is an almost solid gold rule!

So yeah this film is a total waste of time. It says nothing and it does nothing other than irritate the piss out of me. It baffles me how an entire film can be made solely on a mildly interesting premise and nothing else. It wouldn’t surprise me if somebody somewhere is watching that shitty Simpsons episode with Kim Basinger and Ron Howard, and is about to rip off the idea of a film about a talking pie.

There is nothing of any merit here. Teeth is toothless.

IMDB: TEETH