Man with the Golden Arm Posted September 15, 2005 Report Share Posted September 15, 2005 Totonto Film Festival Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
medjuck Posted September 15, 2005 Report Share Posted September 15, 2005 Saw this film at the festival yesterday. Arm, if you like these photos you're going to like the film. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Man with the Golden Arm Posted September 15, 2005 Author Report Share Posted September 15, 2005 I only put up those photos for Evan's benefit. A toast of Yeager-meister it is! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
king ubu Posted September 17, 2005 Report Share Posted September 17, 2005 You'se talking of Jägermeister, Mister? Have the Helens arrived yet? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bright Moments Posted September 17, 2005 Report Share Posted September 17, 2005 (edited) thanks vint!! i wish i could get up to toronto! hopefully it will come to the miami film festival, otherwise i'll have to wait to "netflix" it! you did bring a smile to my face though! and she is SOOOOOOOOOO . . . .! Edited September 17, 2005 by Bright Moments Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kalo Posted September 18, 2005 Report Share Posted September 18, 2005 Gretchen Mol's not bad-looking, for sure, but the real Betty has her beat by quite a margin. Of course, very few besides the real Betty ever looked good with that hairdo. And I see that 'do coming and going in my quasi-bohemian Boston neighborhood every day. It's sort of a female mullet when you think about it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
medjuck Posted September 19, 2005 Report Share Posted September 19, 2005 Gretchen Mol's not bad-looking, for sure, but the real Betty has her beat by quite a margin. Of course, very few besides the real Betty ever looked good with that hairdo. And I see that 'do coming and going in my quasi-bohemian Boston neighborhood every day. It's sort of a female mullet when you think about it. ← I agree. That was one of the problems I had with the film. Mol didn't have that amazing Betty page sex appeal for me-- though she got closer to it when she got the hair do and took her clothes off. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Man with the Golden Arm Posted September 19, 2005 Author Report Share Posted September 19, 2005 You'se talking of Jägermeister, Mister? ← no, this Yeager, Mister. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BruceH Posted September 21, 2005 Report Share Posted September 21, 2005 Gretchen Mol's not bad-looking, for sure, but the real Betty has her beat by quite a margin. ← That's for sure. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bright Moments Posted March 9, 2006 Report Share Posted March 9, 2006 well, i finally got to see this movie this past monday at the miami film festival. it did not disappoint!! gretchen mol did a great job as bettie page. the director of the movie answered questions about the movie and bunny yeager was in the audience! BTW bettie page is still alive, in her eighties, and living on the west coast. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
clifford_thornton Posted March 9, 2006 Report Share Posted March 9, 2006 Page has disowned her career as a pinup, right? Born-again, or something? Shit, I feel like I'm born again every time I see those pics! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bright Moments Posted March 9, 2006 Report Share Posted March 9, 2006 Page has disowned her career as a pinup, right? apparantly not. in fact, hugh hefner recently helped her out so that she can receive some royalties from all those kitchen magnets, stickers, holiday cards etc. with her likeness. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brownie Posted March 12, 2006 Report Share Posted March 12, 2006 More news from Bettie Page... From AP today: PAGE MARVELS AT HER ENDURING POPULARITY More than half a century after her pinup pictures first appeared in magazines, cult idol Bettie Page is finally earning a good income for her work. From 1949 to 1957, Page posed in thousands of photos in seductive nurse, teacher, cowgirl, and jungle costumes, her hair styled in kitschy bangs. According to her agents at CMG Worldwide, Page's Web site, http://www.BettiePage.com, has received 588 million hits in the last five years. CMG markets not only Page's image but also those of Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana. Page, 82, is slowed by ailments including diabetes and stabbing pains in her back, legs and hands. But she still appeared recently — wearing bright red lipstick — to sign autographs of her pictures at CMG's offices. The company planned the event because demand for Page items is soaring. "I'm more famous now than I was in the 1950s," she told the Los Angeles Times in a Southern drawl. As she slowly signed, she reflected on her career. "Being in the nude isn't a disgrace unless you're being promiscuous about it," she said. "After all, when God created Adam and Eve, they were stark naked. And in the Garden of Eden, God was probably naked as a jaybird too!" Page has been living in different Southern California communities for the last 13 years. A film about her, "The Notorious Bettie Page," is scheduled for release in April. Page complained that the word notorious is "not flattering," but the film's producer, Pam Koffler, said it was meant ironically. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
7/4 Posted April 14, 2006 Report Share Posted April 14, 2006 Mysterious Skin From porn to born again: Harron's reverent biopic contemplates its subject's essential innocence by J. Hoberman April 11th, 2006 12:15 PM The Notorious Bettie Page Directed by Mary Harron Picturehouse, opens April 14 Half a century after her apotheosis as America's most popular pinup queen and under-the-counter bondage babe, 25 years after her cult first manifested itself in comix and fanzines, '50s icon Bettie Page has her biopic. Can the star on Hollywood Boulevard be far behind? Actually, The Notorious Bettie Page, directed by Mary Harron from a script written with Guinevere Turner, isn't Bettie's first feature. There have been several documentaries and straight-to-video dramatizations of her career—not to mention Jennifer Connelly's turn as the Bettie-styled heroine in the 1991 adaptation of Bettie-smitten Dave Stevens's retro comic book The Rocketeer. What distinguishes Harron's project is its propriety; in its avoidance of schmutz, it might have been directed with the white gloves favored by Gretchen Mol's prim-when-not-posing Bettie. Like one recent DVD compilation of the peep show pageants Bettie made for special-interest photographer Irving Klaw, Harron's biopic opens with a peek at the innocent raunch of mid-'50s Times Square. Unlike the DVD, however, The Notorious Bettie Page shows a hapless fan being busted for the crime of buying the bondage stuff, then cuts to the juvenile delinquency hearings conducted by Senator Estes Kefauver (near look-alike David Strathairn). Klaw's "pornography" was blamed for a teenage boy's inadvertent death and he was called to testify—as was Bettie, introduced demurely sitting in the outside corridor. A movie more attuned to historical ragtime might have made something of the fact that Kefauver, then running for president, and Bettie were both native Tennesseans—and that, thanks to Walt Disney, that state's greatest son, Davy Crockett, was in the process of providing American juveniles with a new, wonderfully merchandizable role model. The Notorious Bettie Page is not all that far from Disneyland, but there is room for only one icon. Harron flashes back to establish Bettie's fundamentalist background and the miracle of her innate, if abused, trusting nature. Without ever losing her essential innocence, Bettie makes the transition from small-town sex object to big-city camera-club model and beyond. Mol's fetchingly bewigged Bettie is a simple country girl—God-fearing and teetotaling. Dreaming of a stage career and studying the Method, she's cheerfully game for any sort of dress-up (or down). Bettie can't act but she can pose—that's the source of her pleasure, and that pleasure is infectious. So too her good nature: Bettie's goodness transforms the world. She is impervious to exploitation. Even the Klaws are shown as an affable pair of trolls. Irving (Chris Bauer) offers his models "some beautiful sliced brisket" while sister Paula (Lili Taylor) teaches the lesson of erotic tolerance: "It takes all types." What type was Bettie? A beautiful brunette in the age of blonde bombshells, a superstar in the seedy sub-Hollywood of the Times Square peep show, she is often conceptualized as a Bizarro World version of her near contemporary Marilyn Monroe. Both women were natural exhibitionists who projected not cold self-involvement but friendly generosity. Marilyn, as Norman Mailer wrote, "suggested that sex might be difficult or dangerous with others, but ice cream with her." That was all the more true of Bettie, given her job as masturbation fodder and her starring roles in Klaw's bargain-basement s/m romps. The dankest dungeon would be warmed in the sunshine of Bettie's smile or crumble under the force of her wink. All is fun. Even more childlike in her enthusiasm than Marilyn, she never seems happier than when prancing around in her underwear and a pair of nine-inch heels. Hers was essentially a solo act—and Harron's movie doesn't violate that solitude. Bettie exists for the camera; she is to be looked at but never touched. Although their script assigns her several lovers, the closest the filmmakers come to placing their heroine in a sexual situation is signaling her father's abuse or dramatizing the (offscreen) gang rape that sends Bettie from the hell of Nashville to the heaven of Times Square. And a glorious place it is. As demonstrated in I Shot Andy Warhol, Harron has a tremendous feel for period detail. There's a hyper-real, if unavoidably airbrushed, quality to her loving reconstructions of Bettie's iconic poses and Klaw's tawdry scenarios. And as with Tim Burton's similarly reverent and even more fetishistic Ed Wood, there's a whiff of embalming fluid. Not just art but life must be fixed for eternity. Burton solved the problem of Wood's sordid career by granting the "world's worst director" a success he never actually enjoyed. Ever self-sufficient, Bettie took care of that herself. In the late '50s, she gave up modeling and found Jesus. Her soul was saved even as her image was preserved on film. Marilyn died for our sins. Bettie lived to grant us dispensation. ("We're laughing all the time while we're doing this," she explains to her wildly disapproving boyfriend—a serious actor—when he discovers the Klawful truth.) Indeed, the movie's most hilariously obvious scene has Bettie trussed up, crucifixion-style, taking advantage of a break in the filming to prompt the director to remove her ball gag so she can explain her belief that she's been blessed with a God-given talent for posing. Rather than cast Bettie as a sex martyr of the repressive '50s, Harron and Turner contemplate her born-again beatitude. (They don't, however, mention her years of work as a counselor for the Reverend Billy Graham—a photo op, surely, for the ages.) Last seen, Bettie is preaching in a Miami park, giving herself to the lost souls she finds with the same open joy as she had offered her image to the great unloved. Not for nothing is this movie opening on Good Friday. It can be as boring as church. There's no snake in Bettie's Eden and no narrative to Harron's movie. It's more of an altar piece: Our Lady of the Garter Belt, the Fastidious Bettie Page. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
7/4 Posted April 14, 2006 Report Share Posted April 14, 2006 April 14, 2006 MOVIE REVIEW 'The Notorious Bettie Page,' Beyond the Va-Voom By MANOHLA DARGIS, NYT FOR a few blissfully underdressed years in the 1950's, Bettie Page was the pinup queen of the universe, or at least of lockers, garage walls and private stashes across the country. Blessed with a killer body and the perkiest smile this side of Sandra Dee, Ms. Page (she turns 83 this month) looked equally at ease wearing a homemade bikini or a fine mist of ocean spray. And while few people looked as happy naked as she did — the young actress Gretchen Mol, who plays her in Mary Harron's exuberant biographical film "The Notorious Bettie Page," comes charmingly close — in 1957 she buttoned her sweater for good, leaving the neon world of titillation and tease without a trace. For years, Bettie Page was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a web of expertly tied rope. Although she did her share of cheesecake, even gracing Playboy in nothing but a Santa hat and a rosy blush, she achieved her initial infamy as a bondage model. (Later, it was her disappearing act that fueled her notoriety.) In the early 1950's, she began working with the brother-and-sister team Irving and Paula Klaw (played by Chris Bauer and Lili Taylor), posing for untold numbers of photographs and 8- and 16-millimeter film loops with such self-evident titles as "Betty's Exotic Dance in High Heels." (Her first name was usually misspelled.) To satisfy the specialty market, the Klaws on occasion tied up their most popular model and stuck a ball gag in her mouth. In all likelihood it was these more outré images of Bettie crawling along a carpet in fetish heels or daintily spanking another seminude cutie that caught the government's censorious attention. (Now these fantasies seem almost quaint.) In 1955, Senator Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee Democrat and presidential hopeful who five years earlier had chased crime bosses like Frank Costello, turned his attention to pornography. (Around the same time, this same atomic-age Comstock helped put a muzzle on the comic-book industry in the name of preventing juvenile delinquency.) Ms. Harron and her screenwriting partner, Guinevere Turner, open their story with Bettie waiting to testify before Kefauver's subcommittee, shut out of the courtroom where a succession of men are lecturing one another on the evils of scantily clad women. Perhaps because Ms. Harron wrote about punk music in the 1970's (hers is one of the contributing voices in Legs McNeil's oral history of the scene, "Please Kill Me"), she comes across as the kind of enlightened chick who knows how to have a good time. Both of her previous features, "I Shot Andy Warhol," about the Pop artist's would-be assassin, Valerie Solanas, and "American Psycho," her excellent appropriation (and evisceration) of Bret Easton Ellis's novel, exhibit a shrewd, at times bitingly funny intelligence when it comes to what women want and why. In her work with Ms. Turner, in particular, who was also her screenwriting partner on "American Psycho" (Ms. Turner also helped write the lipstick-lesbian romance "Go Fish"), Ms. Harron manages to have her pleasure, visual and otherwise, and her politics, too. In this regard she receives terrific support from her obviously enthusiastic star. Until now, Ms. Mol has been best known for her premature designation several years ago as Hollywood's newest It Girl. The label seemed to plague her, and she all but faded from view despite promising turns in little-seen films. Maybe because she felt protected by her female director and female producers (six out of seven), or emboldened by the material, or maybe because she knows how beautiful her gently padded silhouette looks in the raw, Ms. Mol takes to this tricky role with the carefree expressivity you tend to see only in young children who have learned the joys of nudity, usually when their parents are throwing a dinner party. When she strips, Bettie soars. That's to the good of the film because while the pinup was mildly notorious, the fully dressed woman wasn't all that interesting. Born in Tennessee in 1923, she studied to be a teacher, veering into modeling after landing in New York. Initially, she posed for camera clubs, shutterbug groups that paid models for private sessions. (A year before she hung up her garters, The New York Times ran a classified advertisement for one such session: "Shoot model in glamorous clothes eves 8 PM, Sat 2 PM Bettie Page and others. Concord Camera Circle, 118 W 47th St.") Rather surprisingly, some of the clubs were racially integrated, and it was a black man, Jerry Tibbs (Kevin Carroll), who gave Bettie her trademark when he suggested bangs to obscure her prominent forehead. Ms. Harron moves fluidly through Bettie's early years, which included brutal abuse that might have had something to do with why she entered a profession that allowed her to create and control a sexualized image of herself. Even so, while Ms. Harron and Ms. Turner don't shy away from these dark episodes — and, notably, end Bettie's story before age and the really bad times intrude — they are too smart to draw a direct line between the traumas and the person who survived them. A self-made woman, Bettie Page created an enduringly resonant persona out of an arsenal of smiles and sneers, and her impressively pliant figure. Depending on the costume, the photographer (two of the finest were women, Paula Klaw and Bunny Yeager) and her own ingenuity, she was a dark angel, a harem girl, a naturist or a very naughty miss, but she was also always her own woman. If the inner Bettie remains somewhat out of focus here, even to the beatific finale, it's largely because what made her a sensation — both in the 1950's and the 1980's revival that made her into a modern cult figure — wasn't her acting aspirations or the religious convictions that might have pushed her to leave modeling, but that she was a genius of the body. It's a truism of art history that while men act, women appear, smiling demurely away from the gaze of the viewer. In many of her photographs, by contrast, Bettie looks straight into the camera with a grin that is by turns twinkling and devouring, and flips that old truism on its head by turning her appearance into a performance. She knows what you want; she wants it, too. In keeping with its subject, "The Notorious Bettie Page" is principally a work of gorgeous surfaces, shot mostly in silvery black-and-white film by the cinematographer Mott Hupfel, with an occasional splash of saturated color. Like the Klaws, Ms. Harron ties Bettie up and ties her down, puts her in towering boots and cinched corsets. Every so often, she complicates the story a little, as when she introduces John Willie (Jared Harris in top form), the bondage artist and publisher of Bizarre magazine, who devised some of Bettie's more outrageous poses. When he asks Bettie how she reconciles her love for God with her profession, she refers to Adam and Eve naked in the Garden of Eden. John Willie's idea of paradise wears more clothes, but he gets the picture, ball gag or no. "The Notorious Bettie Page" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes female nudity, kinky outfits, bondage and intimations of sadomasochism. The Notorious Bettie Page Opens today in Manhattan Directed by Mary Harron; written by Ms. Harron and Guinevere Turner, based partly on research from "The Real Bettie Page" by Richard Foster; director of photography, Mott Hupfel; edited by Tricia Cooke; music by Mark Suozzo; production designer, Gideon Ponte; produced by Pamela Koffler, Kathie Roumel and Christine Vachon; executive producers, John Wells, Ms. Harron and Ms. Turner; co-producer, Lori Keith Douglas; released by Picturehouse and HBO Films. Running time: 91 minutes. WITH: Gretchen Mol (Bettie Page), Chris Bauer (Irving Klaw), Jared Harris (John Willie), Sarah Paulson (Bunny Yeager), Cara Seymour (Maxie), David Strathairn (Estes Kefauver), Lili Taylor (Paula Klaw) and Kevin Carroll (Jerry Tibbs). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chris olivarez Posted April 15, 2006 Report Share Posted April 15, 2006 That one will never be shown in Pagosa. Looks like another DVD situation. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BruceH Posted April 15, 2006 Report Share Posted April 15, 2006 Gretchen Mol's not bad-looking, for sure, but the real Betty has her beat by quite a margin. You are so right. For one thing, the Betty Page body is out of fashion now. And her face seemed to fit her hair somehow. It was a whole package, a 50's ensemble, including the serenely happy expression. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Man with the Golden Arm Posted April 15, 2006 Author Report Share Posted April 15, 2006 For one thing, the Betty Page body is out of fashion now. out of style my Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bright Moments Posted June 5, 2014 Report Share Posted June 5, 2014 up for Chuck Nessa Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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