WCBE 90.5 FM: "The New World," "The Notorious Bettie Page," "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World"

WCBE#252-FINAL
“The New World,” “The Notorious Bettie Page,” “Looking For Comedy in the Muslim World”
It’s Movie Time co-hosts, writers, producers:
John DeSando & Clay Lowe
For: WCBE 90.5 FM
Record Time: 1:30 pm, January 18, 2006
Air Time: 3:01 and 8:01 pm, January 20, 2006
Streaming Live on the web and “It’s Movie Time” on-demand at: www.wcbe.org

The Script

Clay
“The New World” will render you speechless . . .

John
“The Notorious Bettie Page” deserves her notoriety . . .

Clay
“Looking For Comedy in the Muslim World” is looking for fun in all the wrong places . . .

HIT MUSIC THEN UNDER FOR:

Richelle:
“It’s Movie Time” in central Ohio with John DeSando and Clay Lowe.’’

MUSIC UP THEN DOWN AND CROSS FADE TO MUSIC (CUT 1: WAGNER'S OVERTURE TO DAS RHEINGOLD) AND HOLD UNDER FOR BOTH JOHN AND CLAY'S REVIEWS

John
I’m John DeSando

Clay
And I’m Clay Lowe

John (“The New World”)
Clay, why am I seeing The New World so late in the Golden Globes, Oscar seasons? Having already sworn my allegiance to Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain for best picture, I now find Terrence Malick’s New World about John Smith and Pocahontas is probably a better film in most categories except acting.

**If you believe that cinema’s superiority over other art forms rests in its visual literacy, then New World is a classic.

**If you believe no other medium can capture so perfectly an era and ethos, the early seventeenth century Jamestown seems as beautiful, crude, inchoate, and lawless as it must have been.

In the end, while the settlers never come off well against the noble
savages, Malick has optimism in his title and his imagery. When Captain Christopher Newport (Christopher Plummer) says, “Eden lies about us still,” Malick makes the artistic statement of hope for a conquering nation that will eventually affect the world for good.

Clay “The New World”
Well, John, Terrence Malick’s The New World arrived in theatres just in time to be eligible for the Oscars but too late to become a serious contender for the Golden Globes.  Too bad, but that’s O.K., for the payoff of this movie, like the best things in life, is in the thing itself.
Elegant in its depiction of the beauty that stuns the first English settlers
as they glide into harbor, and equally awesome in its ability to capture
the sense of awe we see silently expressed in their faces, Terrence Malick’s opening shots in The New World evoke a sense of expectancy that rarely, if ever, has been so intensely captured on film.

His visual motifs repeat the imagery of his earlier films.  The weaving
fields of marsh grass recall the waving fields of wheat from Days of Heaven, and his close-ups of men in combat recall the violent moments that stunned us into silence in The Thin Red Line.

One well acquainted with both beauty and grief, Terrence Malick is a
filmmaker, who, like the poet William Blake, is able to discover and reveal universes in drops of water and grains of sand.

MUSIC DOWN AND OUT

John (“The Notorious Bettie Page”)
Clay: Let’s talk about beauty we both are acquainted with.   Here’s a way to have guiltless titillation and take a time travel back to the fifties: At The Wexner see The Notorious Bettie Page, a sweet biopic about the most famous pin-up of the last century.

Yes, see a fetchingly dark haired Page be innocently naughty with some
outrageously bondage costumes or none at all because Bettie could do it all with a naiveté so sincere you might believe she thought her soft, sadomasochistic photographs innocent indulgence for nice people.

Gretchen Mol plays Page with a clear-eyed innocence, the perfect embodiment of sex without guile. The Notorious Bettie Page fails only by denying us a look at her emotional life either by herself or with an important man.

Remember your Genesis: “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.” Neither was Bettie, who when she was naked, never seemed so.

Clay (“Looking For Comedy in the Muslim World”)
Well, John, no one is more naked on stage than a comedian who fails to
connect with his audience, and no one captures that sense of shame more painfully than that master of self-effacing comedy, Albert Brooks.  [Only Rodney Dangerfield did it better and he wasn’t nearly as classy.]

So does Brooks’ film persona in “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World” ever discover what makes a Muslim laugh?  No.

Does he entertain us because we can laugh at him at because of his failures? Not really.

And that’s too bad, because Brooks willingly mocks himself for not knowing how to escape the bubble of his own culture.   And he willingly feigns arrogance by not attempting to make references to the ironies and beliefs of cultures other than his own.

The failure of this movie is that Brooks sets up a great hypothesis but never follows it through.  He shows us how NOT to make a Muslim laugh, but he never shows us how.

But enough of elegant naturals, innocent nudes, and comedians who fall flat on their faces, John, because it’s grading time.

HIT DRUMS AND UNDER

John
Holy Natural Women,  Hooray!

John
“The New World” earns an “A” for its ASTONISHING ARTISTRY . . .

Clay
“The New World” gets an “A” because Terrance Malick proves AGAIN he’s the poet laureate of AMERICAN cinema . . .

John
“The Notorious Bettie Page” earns an “B” because sex isn’t all BAD . . .

Clay
“Looking For Comedy in the Muslim World” gets a “C” because it’s only about CRASHING and burning on stage . . .

DRUMS OUT

John
Clay, I’m off to the Caymen Islands with my Russian Pocahontas. I hope I haven’t spoiled her innocence with my sophisticated ways.

I’m outta here.

Clay
Swagger as you will, John, you’re the one who’s the lost Innocent.  Das
Vidanya . . .

I'm outta here too.

See you at the movies, folks.

HIT CLOSING MUSIC (AIN"T WE GOT FUN), THEN UNDER FOR:

Richelle:
The award winning “It’s Movie Time” is co-hosted, written, and now produced by John DeSando and Clay for WCBE 90.5.

MUSIC UP, THEN DOWN AND OUT

Copyright 2006 by John DeSando & Clay Lowe