AN UNMARRIED WOMAN

A review requested by John Smith, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Against all reason and the evidence of the film itself, Our Miss Brooks is one of the most singular movies I've ever had occasion to talk about. As far as I can tell, it's the second feature film ever to be adapted from an episodic television series (Dragnet beat it by two years), perhaps the first theatrical movie to serve as an expanded series finale (it's not clear to me when exactly the film was released in 1956, the year that the fourth and final season of Our Miss Brooks aired on CBS), while simultaneously being the first theatrical remake of an episodic television series. If these last two points seem mutually exclusive, that's only because they are, and that's part of the strange fascination the Our Miss Brooks film holds.

And who is our Miss Brooks? She's a sharp-witted, put-upon English teacher at Madison High School, first portrayed by Eve Arden on a hugely successful radio show that started in 1949 and outlived both the TV and cinematic incarnations of the same character played by the same actor. As I understand it, the show balanced four years of her work dealing with the repugnant principal Osgood Conklin (Gale Gordon), teaching some kids who were comically dumb, pining for her boyfriend, hunky biology teacher Phil Boynton (Robert Rockwell), to finally just goddamn propose to her already, and kvetching to her gossipy landlady Mrs. Davis (Jane Morgan) about all of the above. The movie does much the same thing, though in a more ambitious and compressed frame; it opens with Connie Brooks's arrival in town, blurs through anything from several months to several years in a whirlwind, and then lands on most of its actual plotlines, circling around the tortured politicking by which Conklin convinces Connie to support his bid to be made district superintendent in exchange for his promise to make Phil the new principal at Madison, thus clearing the way for him to finally be able to afford to pop the question. Meanwhile, Connie is tutoring the bright but lazy and underperforming Gary Nolan (Nick Adams), son of newspaper magnate Lawrence Nolan (Don Porter), one of the richest men in town. And Don is quite taken with Connie's sardonic spunkiness, and he's much less reluctant to show it than Phil has been after all this time dating.

Two thoughts: this leaves us with another possible explanation for the movie: it's a wraparound prequel and finale to the show, but one which is enabled to function as a complete standalone narrative because the prequel elements do a fine job setting up all the characters and situations (it is, in fact, maybe the only TV series adapted into a movie with the same cast by the same creators I've seen that doesn't feel like it's trading on the viewer's knowledge of the show whatsoever; and this despite being a big hit when there were only three networks). And in this it is not merely the first of its kind, but maybe also the only one.

The other thought: golly gee whiz, the '50s, huh? It's not the only decade in American cinema where the motivating force behind the plot would be the female lead conniving to get her boyfriend a higher paying position so he could afford to propose to her so she could quit a job she was good at and enjoyed. But it's probably the decade where it doesn't seem that there could have been any other option. It's easy to get hung up on that kind of thing, and not very edifying intellectually, but still, it makes for an extraordinarily weird viewing experience; so heavily invested in the most reactive kind of Eisenhower Era social conservatism that one starts to wonder if the thing to do is regard it as some manner of deliberate camp. It can't really be that, of course. It definitely triggers our emotional responses in straightforward ways that assume that yes, we can't think of a better task for an adult woman with talent as a schoolteacher than to be constantly on a man hunt.

It does everything pretty straightforwardly, for that matter. The creative leads, director and co-writer Al Lewis, and co-writer Joseph Quillan, were both primarily veterans of TV - of Our Miss Brooks itself, naturally - and while the statement "this theatrical motion picture looks and feels like an episode of television" no longer has quite the same bite in 21st Century, back in '56, there's pretty much no upshot to that criticism. Our Miss Brooks has a crew who came mostly out of the movies, including Oscared cinematographer Joseph LaShelle and producer David Weisbart, a year after he oversaw Rebel Without a Cause, and all combined, they're just about able to force a kind of cinematic visual scale onto the material that balances out, if not exactly compensates for, the grimly by-the-numbers screenwriting. This is not the kind of comedy that startles you and catches you off guard; it is the kind for which the set-up for future gags is done that an even slightly savvy viewer will be able to map out the exact timing of the jokes sometimes whole scenes in advance. It is possible that this is what a half-century of sitcom evolution does for us, and viewers in '56 would have been quite absorbed by the comic shenanigans before them. But that requires assuming that World War II made everybody so stupid that they'd forgotten about comedy in the '30s.

This is, then, sitcom humor: big, broad, obvious sitcom humor. Stating that feels less like an insult than a simple definition. The weird thing about the movie, though, is that it's doofy comedy doesn't seem to matter really. There's nothing bigger, or broader, or more obvious in the film than Arden's mugging - she pulls faces like the bronze medalist at a Harpo Marx competition, wheeling her head around to grimace and bug out every one of her features simultaneously, somehow, to let us know exactly how mortified Connie is by the obviousness and venality of all the people she interacts with on a daily basis. It's not "acting" quite as much as it is "pantomime". And yet, while being the most conspicuously unhinged thing to be found onscreen, Arden is also clearly the film's saving grace. Her cartoon exaggerations, entirely out of proportion to the mild japery that goes on, push the film into a weirdly subjective realm, in which we find ourselves plugging through the constant bombardment of petty indignities that our Miss Brooks has to suffer through right along with her.

It provides an inexplicable tether of emotional honesty to a tossed-off lark that registers as a comedy more because of its happy lack of substance than because anything within it is particularly funny - comedy being subjective and all, I still don't feel even a little bit guilty about how much I wasn't laughing nor being tempted to laugh throughout the movie. It's tremendously easy to like Connie Brooks, to find her opponents offensive and her lovers frustratingly obtuse, simply because Arden has such an easy way of falling into the character's clownish beats, and make them feel comfortable. That's the TV connection, I have no doubt: even without trading on the viewer's relationship with the show (which was entirely nonexistent, for this viewer), it trades on the performers' relationship with the show, and the acting shorthand and fully worked-out personality that the performers have built. Our Miss Brooks is rather plain-looking cinema, and rote storytelling, and I doubt I'll have concrete memories of it a year from now. And yet, in the moment of watching it, Arden and some of her costars (not, unfortunately, Rockwell, a terribly uninvolving romantic lead) present characters who've been sharply-etched to the point that it's easy to get invested in watching them even if what they're doing isn't particularly interesting. That's a bizarre half-triumph, but it's far more than I expected when I started the movie or even during its pokey opening ten minutes, and I find myself fondly disposed towards Our Miss Brooks despite the paucity of things I can point to and state, firmly, "oh, I liked that." Television is just weird that way.

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THE LITTLE DRUMMER BOY

Hype is a brutal fucker. Coming to Whiplash cold, it might be entirely possible to find it a fun, nervy little sudser about Type-A personalities clashing with lacerating verbal violence, done up in an appropriately hyper if not terribly innovative style. Coming to it, instead, with the knowledge that it’s pretty much a done deal for an Oscar nomination or five, my response is instead a baffled, almost hostile, Really? That? It’s satisfyingly ragey soap opera for boys (and there’s another whole conversation to be had about the critical reception of certain genres, backstage melodramas, say, when they are focused on males instead of females; especially in the the case of a film where there’s a grand total of one major character who is a woman, a totally generic girlfriend who could be cut out of the film entirely with only minor changes made to the whole. But that is not this conversation), and it has a real barnburner of a performance bringing the antagonist to life, and the setting in the high-stakes world of top-tier New York jazz conservatories is novel, if not inherently grabby. But there’s not much about it that’s terribly special: back in the ‘90s, when style-driven indies were easier to find than they are now, there were a dozen films like this every single year. Though I suppose the fact that it hearkens back to a more robust period in the indie marketplace is something.

Something of a dark parody of the stock inspirational teacher film, Whiplash is the story of Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller), New York native, son of a happily unexceptional high school writing teacher (Paul Reiser), and hellbent on becoming the greatest jazz drummer of his generation. To that end, he has managed to enroll in the highly competitive and prestigious Shaffer Conservatory, where his relentless after-hours practicing catches the eye of Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons). Fletcher is the most celebrated instructor in the school, and the band he leads the most sought-after ensemble, but he’s also a verbally (and sometimes physically) abusive taskmaster, who has no mercy, forgives no mistakes, and has a seemingly bottomless well of imaginative cruelty to harass and push his students. Andrew has the terrible misfortune, or the great luck, if you look at it from a certain angle, to show the kind of promise that Fletcher has been hunting for his entire career, and thus the 19-year-old is subjected to the largest quantity of the bandleader’s dictatorial attentions. A bond forms between the two, but it is not an affectionate one; it is savage and relentless.

Points for bluntness of theme: without moralising one way or the other, Whiplash unapologetically claims that most of us are not special snowflakes, and that becoming exceptional takes a terrifying commitment that leaves little room for maintaining your humanity. And that’s a lot more honest and interesting than more of the usual “you can do it! whee!” boilerplate. It’s guilty of over-enunciating this idea, to be sure - it is spelled out explicitly in dialogue twice, once in a scene that works because of Simmons’s offhand delivery, once in a ghastly scene set around a dinner table that’s one of the most archly over-written things on offer in 2014 - and its commitment to not expressing an opinion whether the sacrifice of one’s soul is worth becoming a great artist does, at times, leave it feeling like it lacks a point of view or an overall purpose.

But then, the purpose is to be a corker of a two-hander, with Simmons spitting out the words of writer-director Damien Chazelle’s dialogue like a WWII bomber leveling a European city, and Teller managing just to hold on, which is pretty much all the script permits to the character for the first two-thirds or better. It’s a thriller at heart, which models itself after its protagonist’s frenzied drumming, building up in speed and collapsing and then starting off right where it left off. If the results are somewhat monotonous in tone, it’s not really fair to call that either a shortcoming of the movie, or a mistake: it is about single-minded people pushing themselves harder and harder and harder, so a certain single-mindedness and linear momentum is appropriate. The acting certainly falls in line with that - it is by far the most effective performance I have ever seen Teller give, in large part because it requires only a narrow range of expression - touching on the essential qualities of the characters without muddying them down with too much technique that would only tend to distract from the film’s overall momentum (it’s for this reason not at all Simmons’s best performance - perfect for the role, but a bit mechanical and too much on the surface - though I ‘m not going to begrudge him the Oscar nomination he has locked down for delivering it).

It is a sinewy film, all tensed-up and propulsive and alert, and while Chazelle relies a bit too heavily on close-ups of bloody hands and sweaty faces to put over the psychological cost of all that tension, the film's best moments (virtually all of them related to musical performance) are genuinely impressive filmmaking that suggest the first-time director's potential to do something great, though they're too conspicuous and isolated for me to credit that this is that great thing. The best scene, by far, is the last, which I hesitate to even describe (the entire edifice of the plot would disintegrate without the things it reveals about Andrew's mind, but it also feels anything but inevitable), but it's the one place where the editing, the camera angles, and the sound design - which is wonderful throughout, making the instruments and music active, physical characters alongside the people - are all working to create an excellent piece of physical cinema, hot and frenzied. The slower, more openly character-based scenes are a bit rockier; outside of his core duo, Chazelle has not deigned to give any of his side characters inner life, and this results in some strained, tedious places where Andrew is being fed lines by joylessly functional stick figures, and Teller screws himself up a little too hard to provide two characters' worth of emotion. But the good parts are very good, and the bad parts are unexceptionally mediocre, and even if it's nowhere remotely near the year's ten best films, Whiplash is an enjoyable potboiler with just enough insight into alpha male desire to feel like something slightly deeper.

7/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1990: In which we dance... the forbidden dance

My Hollywood Century project has, I confess, been subjected to some mission drift over the last twenty-odd entries. I described it, at the start, as:

Sometimes it will be a well-loved consensus classic, and sometimes a lost masterpiece. Sometimes an ill-made but important signpost in the course of mainstream cinema history, sometimes a forgotten piece of commercial junk food. Directors from the greatest auteurs to the most ignoble hacks...

There have been a lot of auteurs and signposts ever since the New Hollywood Cinema revved up back in 1967, and not enough hacks making junk food. But now we are at the dawn of the 1990s, a decade in which the American film industry lost its mind a little bit: with pressures from a world cinema that was as commercially aggressive towards North America as it had been since the 1960s, a newly-jazzed up independent scene that had never been so commercially aggressive, and, by the decade's end, the mainstream arrival of the internet and DVD, two technologies that enormously altered the cinema marketplace, there is perhaps no other decade in American film about which it's so hard to get a bead on its personality. It was a decade of the Baby Boomers being uncomfortable with growing old and Generation X finding itself ill-equipped to deal with responsibility, and the pop culture of the age reflects both groups' desperate attempts to retrench and figure out an identity. The decade began with a five-year hangover from the 1980s, and ended with an apparent attempt to regurgitate some weird hybrid of the 1960s and 1970s.

So what better way to commemorate the start of this most utterly confused decade without a soul of its own (there are many, many better ways) than with a feverish explosion of desperate filmmaking where the flop-sweat drops from the screen, and the desire to find any kind of anchor in culture far outweighs things like sanity: with nothing less than the most absolutely fucked-up double feature ever foisted upon cinemas. I would take your hand and guide you back to 16 March, 1990, the day a miracle happened, when two competing films were released, both centering on the short-lived dance craze from Brazil, the lambada. Talk about being hungover from the 1980s.

Better yet, and even more hungover, the films represent a singular moment in the history of the most colorful film producers of the newly-completed decade, Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, whose work as the leaders of the Cannon Group had defined so much of the action cinema of that era, before the legendary B-picture empire dropped into free-fall thanks to the massive failure of some costly ventures in 1987 and '88. Globus stayed with the shattered remains of Cannon, and it was there that he snapped up the rights to name a film Lambada, after a 1989 Portuguese-language track by French pop act Kaoma that had been seen great success in Los Angeles dance clubs. But Golan was faster on the draw at securing the rights to Kaoma's song for his film, The Forbidden Dance. Thus we have one film which could contain "Lambada" but, under the law, make only muted reference to that word in its advertising; the other could be titled after the song but not feature it. It is a fucking glorious candyland world in which we live.

Alphabetically, we begin with Golan's film, the one that made by his 21st Century Film Corporation under the insufficiently watchful eyes of distributor Columbia Pictures, and the film widely regarded as the worse of the two. Which is probably true, but The Forbidden Dance is such a giddy marvel of wrong-headedness that I would never think to call it worse than anything. It's much too fun for that.

The bitterly estranged Go-Go boys, both old hands at the whole "quickie cash-in movie about a dance fad" game - in happier times, they had given the world the most important of all breakdancing double features, Breakin' and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo - engaged in a kind of strange-ass arms race to get their films out as soon as possible. The Forbidden Dance, its story written in L.A. traffic, was prepped in December, 1989, shot in January, and released in March, a feverish turnaround production that rivals the rapid-fire speed of factory filmmaking back in the silent era. And oh my God, does it ever show. The Forbidden Dance has a script - by Roy Langsdon and John Platt, though I feel sorry about accusing them in public - doesn’t rely on clichés, as much as it is an elaborate lacework made of nothing else but clichés, given a personalising touch only in that the character names are original. And this is not, I don’t think, laziness, but raw animalistic desperation: there was no time for thinking about the screenplay, it just had be cranked out at lightning speed, and clichés were all that there was time for. The whole feels unabashedly like a first draft: I can’t imagine that some of the tattered holes in the construction of the story would have survived a good night’s sleep, let alone a thorough re-reading. Even at the level of gaudy message-mongering (and The Forbidden Dance is nothing if not a gaudy message movie), the film loses track of its own content for a huge chunk of the middle, trading in one batch of stereotypes for another, different batch.

The film announces itself, or what it thinks it is, or God knows what, with an aerial shot of what passes, reasonably, as South American jungle, as the peculiarly-punctuated opening title card announces that we are in:

Brazil-
The Amazon:
Mankind is destroying
the rain forest…

Not all mankind, mind you; just white mankind. Brown mankind is busily engaging in a tribal fertility dance of some kind that serves two purposes: 1) to establish that our heroine, a native princess, has an intuitive ability to dance the writhing, sexually evocative moves of the lambada; 2) that director Greydon Clark had only one problem with the depiction of indigenous peoples in cinema as it existed in the ‘20s or so, which is that it wasn’t nearly Othering enough. It’s kind of miraculous, is The Forbidden Dance: a film obsessed to the point of literal dysfunction with attacking the racism of well-off middle-class U.S. whites against Latino Americans that is itself perfectly sanguine about depicting those same Latin Americans with marginally less dignity and respect than was afforded to the Skull Islanders in the original King Kong. The film isn’t even minutes old before it treats us to Sid Haig as a boogedy-boo tribal magician whose only fully audible vocalisations are excited chants on the “ai-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi!” model. And then it turns around and makes its villain an absurdly caricatured bitchy, dried-up middle-aged white lady whose damn near every line includes the phrase “those people”, delivered with the sort of subzero acidity that makes it sound dirtier than all the curse words in English strung in a row.

Anyway, the white people destroying the rain forest are in the employ of Petramco, a multinational oil company. This so offends that native princess, Nisa (Laura Herring), that she receives permission from her father (Ruben Moreno) to travel to Los Angeles under the protection of tribal shaman Joa (Haig), to speak with the chairman of Petramco in person. With unexpected speed, she arrives in the States, raises a ruckus in the Petramco lobby, and is dumped on the street without her identification papers, making it look to all the world like she’s just one more jobless Mexican. And no, The Forbidden Dance doesn’t seem aware that Mexicans are not the same as urban Brazilians are not the same as the isolated tribespeople living deep in the jungle, ethnically, culturally, or linguistically (though since all of the nonwhite characters speak in the same brand of José Jiménez Eenglish, this last one doesn’t matter too much).

Nisa manages to get herself hired by a shrill, unlikable, racist lady (Shannon Farnon), whose unenlightened attitudes about immigrants are so overstated and awful that it’s hard to read it as anything other than comedy. This position doesn’t last very long - one doubts that many of this woman’s maids make it for more than a week or two - but it does serve to introduce Nisa to to the racist lady’s son Jason (Jeff James), who first spies on the lost princess as she expresses herself spiritually in her off-hours, which basically means that she’s fucking the curtains in the servants’ quarters. This convinces Jason that she’s the perfect replacement for his shrill, unlikable, racist girlfriend Ashley (Barbara Brighton) at the local dance contest where all the local kids - or local unemployed college graduates, to judge from the apparent ages of Jason and all his shrill, unlikable, racist friends - are vying to win a contest and appear on the live dance show hosted by Kid Creole and the Coconuts. And oh my God, you guys, Kid Creole and the Coconuts appear IN THE MOVIE! It’s so cool. That Menahem Golan, always willing to shell out to get a real superstar in his movie.

For Nisa, a chance to show up on the television means getting to spread her message about stopping the exploitation of the rain forest to a national audience, but it’s going to take some doing to get there. For one thing, Jason will have to convince the shrill, unlikable, racist people who exclusively populate his world that Nisa has any detectable merits as a human being. For another, Nisa is now working at a whorehouse.

The whorehouse angle keys us in to one of the most distinctive of all traits of The Forbidden Dance: it is fucking filthy. The movie always suggests a sleazy, borderline-pornographic exploitation of the dance trend that was famously (and apocryphally) so sexual that it was banned in Brazil, that was hastily turned into something PG-13 (barely) in the editing room. Hence the constant hovering threat of sexual exploitation and rape, hence the way that the Pure and Innocent and Uncorrupted By Civilisation Nisa proves to be a whiz at the dirtiest dancing ever put to film. I don’t know much about the real lambada, and maybe this is an accurate depiction of it, but I doubt it: while, as they say, all dance is the vertical expression of a horizontal desire, the stuff we see in The Forbidden Dance is mostly just dry-humping to music.

Compounding the overwhelmingly sleazy tone of the writing and Clark’s listless direction which adds to the detached, bored pornographer feel to the movie, it’s just horribly put together, at every level. As will happen when you give yourself five minutes to rehearse, shoot, and edit a movie. The acting is vile: Herring, who ultimately would end up at the farthest possible opposite end of the cinematic spectrum 11 years later, when she was the co-lead of Mulholland Dr., plasters on a bright smile and sometimes a little girlish pout to show that she’s angry, and expresses the innocence of a non-industrial savage by chomping down on all her syllables and using an odd, placeless accent. This results in things like her rendering of the word "chairman" as "chare mon", and since she uses the word around two-dozen times in a one-minute speech, we get a lot of time to reflect on the subtleties of her basic inability to deliver lines. This by no means puts her at or near the bottom of pile of a cast in which nobody is able to handle the clumsy, exposition-drunk dialogue that Langsdon and Platt thought they could pass off as a replica of speech, or the awkward, omnipresent, and wholly inauthentic expressions of cartoon racism. There is basically nothing human in The Forbidden Dance: only cardboard boxes which say things like "only my money-induced laziness prevents me from setting fire to all these wetback beaners", carboard boxes which say things like "rain forests are totally important, and I have a pretty smile", and cardboard boxes rubbing their cardboard junk up against other cardboard boxes as Kaoma funks out on the soundtrack. It's a deadly combination of inept political cartooning and fatigued, dirt-poor filmmaking anti-skills, in which only Haig's mesmerisingly awful Looney Tunes witch doctor has any kind of liveliness out of all the blank stares and flubbed line readings throughout the cast. It has my most passionate, enthusiastic recommendation.

* * * * *

The Forbidden Dance made less than half of what the Warner-released Cannon production Lambada made their shared opening weekend; but we are speaking in terms of the purest relativism. Lambada still opened in eighth place and made less than one-fifth of that weekend's #1 film, The Hunt for Red October. It also enjoyed marginally less pained reviews, though I can't understand this impulse: if we have to choose between two absolutely, unforgivably godawful lambada movies, surely the one that's a batshit insane eco-parable that only reluctantly pulls back from being out-and-out smut is preferable for all audiences at all times to a lazy Stand and Deliver rip-off that occasionally remembers its title, and accordingly plugs in a brief lambada scene notable mostly for how much it doesn't feel like the first half of an explicit sex scene. The film's refusal to commit to being a proper dance movie is so complete that it doesn't even end with the de rigueur dance competition climax - it ends with a high-stakes geometry bee. Having seen The Forbidden Dance multiple times in my life, but only finally catching up with Lambada for this review, I find myself feeling hideously ill-used: both films are terrible in almost every way - Lambada, for example, casts bone-white Virginia native J. Eddie Peck in the Edward James Olmos "inspirational teacher from the barrio" role, and leaves the character ethnically Latino - but Lambada is far less deranged in its concept of how to structure a narrative, and so lacks the sense of impossible confusion that helps to make The Forbidden Dance such a deliciously bad experience.

That being said, it's only better in a relative sense: this is still shockingly bad. The quick version of the story: Kevin Laird, born Carlos Gutierrez, is the bright young star of the math department at an exclusive Beverly Hills high school. Thanks to sexual infidelity elsewhere in the faculty, he's about to be put in charge of the whole department by the prissy, unpleasant Principal Singleton (Keene Curtis), but Kevin has a secret: at night, he's "Blade", the smokiest, sexiest dancer at an East L.A. club called No Man's Land (the "Man's" keeps blinking out, like we're meant to understand "No Land" as a metaphor, though a metaphor for what, I cannot say), and after the club slows down, he takes all the teenage club goers into the back room for even smokier, sexier instruction in high school math. Thus will he help them get their GEDs, though if Blade ever teaches them things like reading, history, or the physical sciences, we are not made privy to it.

This situation has apparently held for some time, and would hold for longer still, except that one of Kevin's students by day, Sandy Thomas (Melora Hardin), has grown sexually obsessed with him, and follows him to No Man's Land, where she gains the knowledge to blackmail him into teaching her the lambada, which even in Lambada's sanitised form is still naughty enough to pretty easily get him fired and put on all the watchlists that the state of California can dream up.

Everything in Lambada that pertains to the lambada is reduced to a second-act complication, there solely to compromise Kevin's dream of raising the poor East L.A. kids to the educational standards of his vile, enthusiastically bigoted slackoff white students. This qualifies as, at least, a bait-and-switch; especially since director Joel Silberg - the helmer of no less than Breakin' itself, along with its apostrophied spiritual sister Rappin' - is good at nothing else besides filming the handful of dance scenes. The cheap script he co-wrote with Sheldon Renan certainly offers no room for interesting character exploration or social expression; Sandy is nothing but a devouring sexual id for two-thirds of the movie, and none of the other students emerge from the fog of "white skin = generically shitty, bronze skin = sassy but noble". Kevin, meanwhile, is a slurry of all the boring inspirational teacher tropes that the writers could scrounge up, played by Peck with glistening, knightly sincerity and no personality whatsoever; though I did enjoy the visceral disgust he expresses during the dance with Sandy. The character is amazingly sexless - check out the non-chemistry with his wife - and that, more than anything, is what blands out Lambada, a film that name-drops the whole "banned in Brazil!" controversy, but indicates nothing of why that might have been the case. Too many lawsuits against teachers, I guess.

It's too actively poor for me to accuse it of being "boring" - it's more angering, if anything, with its ginned-up conflict between Kevin and Singleton, culminating in the most excruciating possible competitive math quiz, where the tension is all drained away first from Singleton's transparently unfair questions, an arbitrary way to keep the scores close, and then from school superintendent Leland's (Basil Hoffman) imperious "oh well, human spirit, so they win" judgment, an arbitrary way to give the film a happy ending. But it certainly lacks the unflagging bad movie energy of The Forbidden Dance. Lambada's relatively sincere approach to its subject isn't nearly as much dazzling as the wall-to-wall sleaziness of The Forbidden Dance; and its poor acting is far more blandly mediocre than jaw-droppingly incompetent. It's tacky and crude enough to successfully continue the defiantly shitty spirit of Cannon-That-Was, but a quarter of a century on, if you want to watch a clapped-out refugee of '80s filmmaking that jumps on a short-lived dance craze in the dopiest, most terribly mercenary way... I mean, it's just not even really a choice, is all I'm saying.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1990
-Edward Scissorhands starts a love affair between Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, and florid Gothic production design that lasts till the current day
-Patrick Swayze just wants to up and fuck some pottery, in Ghost
-Kevin Costner attempts to correct centuries of history and decades of cinema with the nobly pandering Dances with Wolves

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1990
-Finnish quirk-monger Aki Kaurismäki completes his Proletariat Trilogy with The Match Factory Girl
-Zhang Yimou and Yang Fengliang's Ju Dou is one of the earliest international successes of Fifth Generation Chinese filmmaking
-Abbas Kiarostami, Iran's most internationally renowned filmmaker, releases Close-Up, arguably his most important film

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