Filmsuck

Todd Haynes is co-host Dolores McElroy’s “favorite living director” for his films’ “meticulousness” and “visual splendor,” but above all the way he loves his subjects and makes them “vibrant and romantic”! Dressed for life at the front of a classroom, Haynes always projects the air of a nice, well-adjusted teacher--and indeed, he figured he’d wind up as a teacher who made experimental films on the side. But he made a splash in the late 1980s film world with his surprisingly moving film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, done in stop-motion animation using Barbie dolls as his cast, quickly became a leading light of the New Queen Cinema movement with his film Poison under conservative right-wing attack, and he’s been with us as a fascinating filmmaker ever since, with films as varied in content and approach as Safe, Far From Heaven, I’m Not There, Mildred Pierce, Carol, Wonderstruck, Dark Waters, and the new documentary The Velvet Underground.   

[MIND THE GAP: We got so embroiled in talking about Haynes, we talked right through a gap in the sound around the ten-minute mark. Just keep on listening, we come back strong!]

We know we’ve sung high praises for all our Great Old Broads, but wow, was Liza Minnelli an amazing talent! In our final installment of the series, we discuss this multi-media star, tailor-made for the New Hollywood of the 1960s. Even though she had famous Hollywood movie studio parents, Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli, Liza initially propelled herself toward life as a dancer and actor on stage. She had such early success, she won a Tony Award at age nineteen in her first leading role on Broadway, and the film industry quickly came calling. Ultimately becoming a star of all media--stage, screen, concerts, television--Minnelli gave her all in every performance, to the point that co-host Eileen notes that it’s exhausting just watching her sing-dance-act and do encore after encore. We talk about Minnelli’s extravagance and skill, her wild showbiz personal life, her admirable code of ethics, her relationship with her famous parents, and her investment in the glittering future. Minnelli poured every last ounce of herself into her performances, and we hope we returned the gesture this week on Filmsuck!

So much Liz that we needed two episodes to deal with all that stardom. Here we cover everything from the Liz-starring film epic Cleopatra that bankrupted 20th Century-Fox to near-death from pneumonia and an emergency tracheotomy to the scandalous Liz-and-Dick romance that included two marriages to Richard Burton plus one rebuke from the Pope to her Oscar-winning performance at age thirty-four as middle-aged harridan Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to rehab at the Betty Ford Clinic to groundbreaking AIDS activism...

And a whole lot more besides! 

Here's our very special Filmsuck episode featuring author and film columnist Jessa Crispin, who joins us in a gleeful, long-overdue takedown of Sofia Coppola films! 

In the latest Filmsuck episode, we're talking scary-beautiful sorceress-star Vivien Leigh who played Scarlett O'Hara and Cleopatra and Anna Karenina and Blanch DuBois and many other iconic film roles. We also take on the recent, remarkably stupid film studies scholarship about her. 

We're kicking off our "Great Old Broads" series with the fabulously overdressed silent screen star Gloria Swanson, who set out to become a definitive figure of excess in the highly excessive Hollywood of the 1910s and 1920s. You know her as Norma Desmond, the unforgettably mad has-been star determined on making a comeback ("I hate that word! It's 'return'!") in the great 1950 film Sunset Boulevard. Though she played the part so magnificently, even people who knew her personally became convinced Gloria must be Norma in real life, Swanson actually stayed very sane and very busy for decades after the Talkies revolutionized the film industry, working steadily in film, television, radio, and theater. But Gloria agreed with Norma in one major way--a star ought to look like a star!

In this Filmsuck Summer Film Series (FSFS) episode we're focusing on horror films set in vacation settings. We discuss the beachy shock effects of Jaws and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, and especially concentrate on the lakeside summer camp slasher terrors of Friday the 13th. Our special guest Ian Miller joins us to discuss the original Friday the 13th (1980), which was written by his father, screenwriter Victor Miller, whom Ian admits suffered from "Mommy issues." Hence his resentment of sequels featuring Jason as the iconic killer, when Jason's mother was meant to be the REAL killer.

We're kicking off our Filmsuck Summer Film Series (FSFS for short) with a tribute to films and TV about teen girls making the most of their magical interlude of freedom. We're also sharing some partially hidden gems that you might not know about: 2018 indie film Skate Kitchen and its current HBO series spin-off Betty, both directed by Crystal Moselle, about the NYC adventures of a real-life female crew of skateboarders, and the 2019 directorial debut of Oliva Wilde, Booksmart, a hilarious comedy about two high-achieving nerd-girls who spent their high school years studying and decide, on the eve of graduation, to have all their teenage fun in one epic night.

This week we're taking on the Ryan Murphy Problem by examining the new five-episode Netflix series Halston, produced and co-written by Murphy. It stars Ewan McGregor as the famous one-name fashion designer whose spectacular rise backed by huge corporate money made him a king of NYC in the Studio 54 era, and whose equally spectacular fall in a cloud of cocaine powder stripped him of nearly everything, including the Halston name. It's great material. So the question is, how does Murphy manage to screw it up?

In this episode of Filmsuck we justify our love for Tallulah Bankhead, the sensational star of stage, screen, radio, and television whose outrageous wit, frank enjoyment of recreational drugs and alcohol, and wild sexual adventuring made her as famous as her acting from the 1920s to the 1960s. She used to tell reporters, "Say anything about me, dahling, as long as it isn't boring," and we do our damnedest to honor her request.