Modesty Blaise

Fabulous cast, highly regarded director, beloved source material, eye-popping design: What could go wrong?

In the case of Modesty Blaise, apparently a lot, though it's hard to put your finger on exactly what--probably for all of those reasons listed above.

So, we have the sensational Monica Vitti as super-spy Modesty, done up in a succession of stunning mod 60s outfits and wigs. When they put her in the catsuit and dark beehive, she does truly look like the heroine from the comics. Terence Stamp is most appealing as her sidekick; Dirk Bogarde does a fine, queeny turn as the arch-villain--and his pop-art Mediterranean villa is to die for.

If there's anyone I might look askance at in this matter, it's the director: Joseph Losey--better-known for dark psychological dramas such as The Servant and Eva. Modesty Blaise opens with our heroine in her all-white rotating penthouse, on her round bed, getting mercenary assignments and horoscopes (she's a Scorpio) from a houseboy in white tie and tails.... promising enough, but them the theme song kicks in: It sounds like Up With People in tone, if not content, and it presages a movie full of almost and not quite...

Anyway, a Sheik has a bunch of diamonds stolen, Modesty is hired to get them back by a committee of stuffy British tropes. Thus begins the rather silly and pointless plot. Dirk Bogarde chills around his lair with his organist and his lackeys and his dominatrix buddy who tortures mimes, occasionally sending a henchman or two off in an attempt to stop Modesty, who does not seem to be trying all that hard to do anything but look gorgeous and bemused.

There's only one big explosion--right at the opening--and very little in the way of the elaborate schemes and getaways or fancy lethal gadgets usually found in spy movies. We do get some lovely international locales--London, Paris, that fabulous Mediterranean villa--but that and the sensational outfits are about all we have from the high-gloss world of international espionage we all know so well from the movies. But apparently Losey admitted he had seen virtually nothing of the genre he was supposed to be parodying. That is not a good sign.

The movie ends with a romantic duet amidst gunfire and Arabs on jet-skis. It's meant to be exciting and amusing: It winds up being more dull and dumb. Frankly, Monica Vitti kicks more ass as the suicidal perfume heiress in The Scarlet Lady.

There were plenty of spy film spoofs during the 60s--Danger: Diabolik, Casino Royale, Dean Martin's Matt Helm films. None were entirely successful, but they all had their finer points. Mostly, when Modesty Blaise tries to be silly, it simply winds up being stupid. Still, this movie is a nice piece of eye candy and if you put it on in the background with Serge Gainsbourg or Stereo Total on the sound system, it should work quite nicely.

Siren

 Over at the Vegas Seven, i wrote a review of Siren, the dire vanity project made by Nevada politician Michele Fiore. Once upon a time, she thought singing in the movies would be what made her famous, now she's just another yahoo trying to be Sarah Palin and ride the right-wing entertainment complex to notoriety and hopefully a gig on reality TV. Whatever it takes to get a slot on Dancing With the Stars...

Spice World

Oh, this one takes me back. Way back.

 

Specifically, to a period in the late 90s. I was a music critic/editor and general NYC rock chick. It was the internet boom, the rise of downtown, the zenith of the major labels, it was a giddy motherfucking time indeed. And it was also the time of the Spice Girls, the cartoonish girl group that i and a number of my Lower East Side proto-hipster chick friends (un)ironically loved.

They were like the Monkees but with cool outfits and a line of dolls and stickers and books and lollipops and viewmasters and creepy inflatable toys and all manner of crap.

See that Ginger doll, second from left? Sitting in my library, still in the box,
right next to my NRFB Debbie Harry Barbie.

And, like any band that's more persona than chops and that has a ton of money and a young fanbase behind it, someone decided they needed to make a movie. Spice World tries hard to be A Hard Day's Night, but it actually doesn't even make it into Head territory.

The plot, such as it is, is the same plot these movies always have: Will They Make It To The

Big Gig, although this also has a dash of We Must Stay True To Where We're From  No Matter How Famous We Get. As you can imagine, a lot of time-killing shenanigans and amusing set pieces are needed to fill up this cream puff, but the Spice Girls and Spice World just don't have enough in them to pull it off.

 

There's a bit where the Spices swap personas--Posh as Baby, Scary as Ginger, etc.--and do mildly nasty impersonations of each other. The best part is when the girls flash forward to what they would be like as mothers--overly fecund and correspondingly cranky Baby, drop-'em-off-at-boarding-school Posh, bedazzled jogging suit Sporty, kente caftan earth-mother Scary and, my favorite, cocktail-swilling, rollers-and-rhinestones Ginger...

 

What Spice World has in spades is a truly insane amount of cameos: Elton John, Elvis Costello, Bob Hoskins, Bob Geldof, Jennifer Saunders (in Edina Monsoon mode), etc. Roger Moore plays their boss and Meatloaf plays their bus driver. Said bus has a little thematic nest for each Spice Girl--Posh has a runway and fashion magazines, Baby has a swing and stuffed animals, Sporty has exercise equipment and Scary has... zebra print. It is not explained why they need to careen around London in a bus, rather than just go home each night. I mean, they're not on tour. There is also a curious fixation on the bus' plumbing. Although maybe that's supposed to be humor, I dunno...

 

 

 All manner of shit is flung around in hopes that something sticks: Male strippers, drill sergeants, costume changes, childbirth, haunted houses, alien encounters, bomb scares... none of it is exactly dreadful, but none of it is particularly droll either.

 Spice World was truly the last of its kind: Today's teenybop stars already feed their fans a steady stream of Twitter and Youtube, so there's no need (or much desire) to bother with a full-length film. Which is just as well: Do you want to see Justin Bieber as a boxer or a carny? Selena Gomez beach party? One Direction meets the Phantom of the Park?

Now this is the movie i wanted to see...

The best one can say for Spice World is that it moves along. One wishes they'd gone a bit further--of course it wasn't going to be Beyond the Valley of the Dolls or Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, but it could have pushed a wee bit harder. Posh's peevish reaction to everything (summoned to meet a fan in the hospital, she begins screaming "It's Victoria!" in the comatose kid's ear) and Ginger's cleavage-flashing and boy-chasing hint at something that could have gone a bit more Ab Fab. Still, it's got "girl power" and, lord knows, it is a relic of its time.

... which leads me to one of my favorite conversation starters: "Did I ever tell you about the time I managed a Spice Girls tribute act?"

Back during the second Clinton administration, i had a cable access show and a shitty punk band. Even more than bar-and-party-gigs, my bandmates/improv troupe/girl gang were known for getting into full glamour drag and crashing high-profile parties. Once as we strutted into a Grammy after-party, people began shouting about us being the Spice Girls and thus a brief turn as a lip-synching Spice Girls tribute act was born. Before you ask, i was Managerial Spice, which meant that i did not have to dress up as a Spice Girl (i was actually in a heavy Mamie Van Doren phase then), but got to run them through their routines like an autocratic Russian ballet mistress, get everyone to the nightclub, give the manager our CD and have top-shelf Scotch with said manager, and finally collect our pay. (In drink tickets: After all, we were lip-synching in a nightclub, back before this was something Britney Spears could make five figures a night for.)

Fake Spice: Ginger, Scary, Baby, Posh, Stalker.

(Managerial Spice is behind the camera, natch.)

Xanadu

It was supposed to be the next Tommy or Grease. Instead, it was more like... fuck, it's not like anything. It's 80s roller disco 40s retro mythology clusterbang. It's Xanadu.

So, we open with a mural of the Nine Muses somewhere on Venice Beach springing to life. They all dance, then fly off into various directions in a a streak of neon and legwarmers.

Which begs the question: Where the hell did the other eight Muses go? Did Thalia fly away with a kilo under each arm to help with Stir Crazy and The Blues Brothers? Did Urania flit off to get high with Carl Sagan and inspire Cosmos? Was it Euterpe or Calliope who headed for the Sunset Strip to rock out on the lyre with Eddie Van  Halen? And, my word, which of these poor lasses wound up with Roman Polanski? One of them was played by Sibyl Danning, which means she apparently flitted off to inspire Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf, both for good and ill...

Olivia Newton-John is Terpsichore, the muse of dance, given to saying things like "Shakespeare's written sonnets about us. Beethoven's composed music for us. We're  not supposed to feel emotions... Wait! Doesn't anybody care about my feelings?" She rollerglides down the Venice boardwalk in search of a hot dog, a nickel bag or someone she can inspire into opening a nightclub with a nice big dance floor.

... which she finds in one Sonny Malone, a frustrated painter. (Don't ask why a singer is playing a deity of the dance who is inspiring a painter. Mythological sloppiness is to be expected in the movies.) Sonny himself is an artisan of a time long past. A time when, if you wanted an 8x8 foot version of your album cover to hang outside of Tower Records, you had to hire some guy to paint it by hand. And there was still a Tower on Sunset to hang it in front of. And record labels to pay for it all.

Sonny Malone is played by Michael Beck. And this was another reason Xanadu should have gone well: Beck was fresh off of his role as Swann, the war chief of The Warriors. "Whatever happened to that guy?" you've wondered.  And, well, what happened was Xanadu. Now, Xanadu has a sort of epic badness that can be truly entertaining but somehow I doubt that the idea was “I’m gonna make two movies that are total bewildering, facepalming flops that will one day be admired for, well, their facepalming badness.” The sad thing is that Xanadu is not the worst of the pair. That would be Megaforce, which involved Beck and Barry Bostwick cruising around the desert (actually Henderson) on quads wearing silver spandex jumpsuits.

When he’s being the surly artist, he’s pretty good. When he’s debating the nature of dreams with Gene Kelly, he’s okay. But any time he’s interacting with Olivia Newton-John or wearing dolfin shorts and conversing with Zeus in a neon minefield, he’s fucking awful--although who wouldn't be awful doing those things? They should've gotten Gregory Hines, which would at least has left us with some astonishing dance scenes. Or Richard Gere, who would have at least been fun to look at.

As for Miss Olivia Newton-John, well, she’s game, she tries, but she’s not much good. Especially when you consider that Xanadu bascially jacks its plot from the far superior Down to Earth, starring the truly godesslike Rita Hayworth as a Terpsichore who actually could dance supremely well. It also cribs a little from One Touch of Venus, which starred Ava Gardner, 'nuff said. Newton-John is pleasant and pretty but she's not much of a dancer--not next to Kelly, not that anyone ever could be. (Okay, okay, Fred Astaire, the Nichols Brothers, Ann Miller, Eleanor Powell, Hayworth. Or if you wanna go new school, Michael Jackson or Savion Glover. Anyway…) But she is at least essential to the soundtrack. In the movie... she mostly she just has to look pretty and rollerskate through dry ice.

Oh lordy. I had those barrettes. A few sets. I made them with plain ol' goldtone Goodys, two colors of satin baby ribbon and a few beads on the end if you're fancy.

After he's been kissed by a Newton-John and bitches about his lack of inspiration and how no one appreciates his talent and the man hassles him, Sonny meets Gene Kelly. Kelly is wearing a porkpie hat and playing clarinet while sitting on the beach. Kelly still carries himself like a prince. He's a bored, rich ex-jazz musician--wait, rich ex-jazz musician? the film at least has the decency to explain that he invested in real estate with his jazz musician money... or something.

So he agrees to partner up with  Sonny to open a nightclub. Because people just really dig Sonny. Chicks loan Sonny their mopeds, some dude lets him hitch a rollerskate ride on the back of his amazing bus (now that i think of it, so did Steve Gutenberg in Can't Stop the Music) and generally has everyone sitting around talking about how fucking awesome he is. I will not comment how Sonny's proclivity for dolfin shorts and financial reliance on a much older man with bespoke suits and real-estate holdings seems, well...

The scene where they both describe--and, in the world of Xanadu, thus enact--their respective visions of the club is one of the moments in the movie that actually works, in a weird way. Kelly's swinging' Bette Midler/Manhattan Transfer/Kid Creole vision of the 40s melds with Beck's shoulder pads/jumpsuits & synths version of the 80s, as enacted by the Tubes. It's basically a mash-up long before such things had a name.

The, back in the realm of horror, they also have a makeover scene with Gene Kelly, where he tries on a bunch of outfits. At Fiorucci. And then it become a big dance scene. And roller boogie scene. And it's ELO. Excuse me: I need to sit down.

During "Suspended in Time," Olivia sings a powerless ballad in some kind of Tron space mid-shot. No one can endure that treatment: Frank Sinatra barely survived in in The Tender Trap--the protracted mid-shot, not the Tron part. And then there's "Suddenly," which is basically just the audience having to sit through three minutes of "Couples skate only!" I assume that it was part of the contract that every. Single. Song. on the soundtrack be played in. Its. Entirety. Because five minutes out of every ten, Xanadu stops stone dead while an ELO song plays. They even resort to a bizarre animated sequence to find yet another way for Olivia and Sonny to stare soulfully at each other while Jeff Lynne warbles in the background.

Some bullshit about how Olivia is a muse and has to return to Olympus but she loves Sonny but Zeus says no but Hera says okay and Zeus says maybe, who gives a shit, isn't it time for happy hour yet...?

So the club opens. There's a montage of Hopper cocktail waitresses and Nagel go-go girls roller skating in circles to marching-band drums and disco war chants. The Olivia returns for an absolutely bombastic and completely mediocre musical number whose sole raison d' etre seems to be costume changes and genre changes, none of which amount to anything. Not the tiger-striped vinyl, not the fringed white cowgirl, not the beaded headdress and Flash Gordon knockoff, none of it...

Apparently it was a double bill of Xanadu and Can't Stop the Music that inspired the creation of the Razzie Awards.

I recall when this movie came out, the anticipation was huge. I remember sitting around the elementary school cafeteria table while a friend who had finally Seen. It. As soon as we set down our trays and popped open our lunchboxes, we eagerly asked her how it was. "Well [long pause] I liked all of the colors." She did not lack for opinions on other matters, so it became clear that Xanadu was not that all that we had been promised....