Alicia Silverstone is the Virgin Queen in 'Clueless'

Amy Heckerling & Alicia Silverstone on set of 'Clueless'

That woman in the black shirt, blue jeans and high-top sneakers is Amy Heckerling, the director of the ultimate "girl" movie, Clueless. The blonde in the black down jacket is then 17-year-old Alicia Silverstone, who stars as the spoiled and sheltered Cher Horowitz in Clueless. Doesn't Amy look like the mother? And Alicia as her obedient daughter? Amy could easily be asking Alicia to clean her room. This messy room is what Cher's room would look like if she didn't have a computer to pick out her clothes.

Cher uses a computer to place clothes on a photo of her full body. The outfit she chooses for school is     a blazer with notch lapels and a drop waist pleated mini skirt. The whole outfit is in yellow and black plaid. It's a riff on the preppy school uniform but the Starburst color, midriff cardigan and knee socks with Mary Jane heels feminize the prep uniform and emphasize the shape of a woman's body, just as Cher says, "it makes people think of sex." The knee socks and Mary Jane's are also great illusion, resembling knee-high boots. Cher digs in the prep toolbox and creates an edgy look, and isn't that what being a teen is about: one foot in adulthood and the other in childhood?

After getting a bad grade, Cher leaves the yellow behind for black: she wears a sheer black midriff shirt with ruffled cuffs (sort of witchy, like something out of The Craft) with a white tank top underneath, and black pants. The sheer shirt is loose-fitting, but Cher makes sure that the one thing that clings at her body (the tank) is showing. This outfit is also one of many times that Cher wears a midriff but wears a shirt underneath so that no skin shows. In other words, a tease. A suggestion. 

While Cher's best friend Dionne sports "courageous fashion efforts" (duly noted by Cher) that include tight leopard pants and full navel, a hat with a hot pink flower & bow--that is its own warped version of Audrey Hepburn's wide-brimmed hat in Breakfast at Tiffany's--Cher keeps it conservative. For the first half of the movie she wears jumpers, oxford collar shirts with sweater vests (not unlike the most popular boy in school Elton and her dad Mel), and when she has the opportunity to be full-on sexy in a camisole, she wears a T-shirt under the camisole. She's a virgin, you see. You know what it is, Cher dresses like a goody-two-shoes. 

Then the goody-goody decides to wear red. That red Azzedine Alaia mini-dress. Straps that hug the shoulders. A U-neck line trimmed in embroidery that shows off her cleavage. And those princess seams outlining the curves of her body. Then there's the H-back revealing skin, but not all of it, of course. 

After Dionne's "hymenally-challenged" comment, Cher leaves the T-shirt skin blockers and shows some skin. Spaghetti straps here we come! The famous Calvin Klein mini-dress, pure white and skin tight. Another red mini-dress, but it's a halter dress this time. All of these fashion choices are for a guy who dresses like James Dean and wears a pompadour. 

Cher's catty rival Amber spends the movie trying to throw Cher off with her gonzo style--midriff army jackets, combat boots, dog tags, red sailor jacket and sailor hat--but even she can't resist Cher's subversive preppy style, even donning the same burgundy mini-dress with empire line ribbon. Cher even gives her distinctive style to dowdy, flannel-wearing Tai molding her into a preppy goddess. 

So, wondering how Cher ends her fashion journey? Well, she ends it in a carnation pink mini, matching bolero and big hair. She went from clueless to pretty in pink. 

It's All About Snakes & Drive-By's on Fergie's New Single "L.A. Love"

Fergie in her high school days

Hey, isn't that D.J. from "Full House." No, that's Cher Horowitz the Beverly Hills rich girl from Clueless. Uh-uh, it's Michelle Pfeiffer in her beauty pageant days. I'm gonna tell ya right now, that's Fergie the pop star, wearing a pearl choker and a plunging neckline. She's a California girl. And NOT the Katy Perry kind.

That pretty girl is Fergie in her high school days in Hacienda Heights, California. Her new song "L.A. Love" is all about California, despite the shout-outs to other places. Those groan synths are the things of nightmares. Really, the whole song sounds like she's creeping in a Chevy Impala to do a drive-by…while smoking a blunt. She's positively predatory when she sings "lay back, slow down" on that B-section, her voice vibrating on the word "lay" moving like a snake. My heart just dies for the weeping snake charmer flute on the chorus. That flute is drawing out the chola in her. (She does have Mexican in her blood).

Los Angeles-bred DJ Mustard produced "L.A. Love" and his signature "heys" make you feel like a thug not to be messed with. Maybe that's getting ratchet. It makes me think of Beyonce's lyric on "Grown Woman": "because I walk with a vengeance." It's that inner cool, bad-ass, whatever you wanna call it. It also makes you ready to party, ready to murder the dance floor. Fergie said on the radio yesterday that the one thing that's different now that she's a mom is she can't stay out as late. Fergie is a party girl from way back. She's also a cheerleader from way back and that's why she hosts those New Years Eve gigs on TV, full of energy.

Where are the big Fergie vocals? some may wonder, but she's a rapper on this song. What she lacks in clever lyrics she more than makes up for in flow. The way she says "Texas grill Cadillacs/threw me everything back" is like liquid. Press rewind. Oh, and Lun-dun!

Escape from Polygamy is Sexy, Stylish fun, who would have thought?!

Ryder and Julina in promo shot for film

Peasant shirts and prairie skirts. Floral-pattern Laura Ashley dresses. Blazers with Oxford shirts. Let's face it, a polygamist community is a more stylish version of the Amish. You'll see these things in the made-for-TV movie Escape from Polygamy BUT you'll also see sexy scenes that have no actual sex in them. You'll see exhilarating pop culture references and, you'll see a third act for the ages.

Polygamy is the story of two teens who fall in love and fight to escape a polygamist community ruled by an abusive leader. 

Jack Falahee. He with eyes like Jeremy Irons and a crooked smile that hints at darkness. He plays Ryder, the teenage son of a prophet in a polygamist community. He dresses in shirts unbuttoned to reveal his chest and kicks around in chukka boots. This is a 2013 movie, but I saw it after seeing his steamy turn in the new Shonda Rhimes hit "How to Get Away with Murder"; so watching him play the virginal Ryder feels like he's trying hard to repress the sex in his acting. On "Murder," Falahee speeds up heart beats as Connor Walsh, a gay and complex law student who's fully aware of his prettiness, letting his sex appeal vroom-vroom like a Ferrari. 

In peasant shirts and prairie skirts, comes Julina, a teenager who moves into the polygamist community with her mother. Yes, the same community where Ryder lives. Haley Lu Richardson plays Julina with a self-possession that quickly becomes the movie's independent core. She struts like the cool girl that she is, pairing prairie skirts with Chuck Taylor's. Her face gives me young Lauren Conrad minus the mean girl snake eyes. As pretty as she is, and as sassy as she is, Haley doesn't bring sex to her role. Ryder is very much the high school senior that dad doesn't want your freshman ass to date, but he's more stylish than jock-ish, with that trim and delicate body of his. There's a rebelliousness in his acting. At the end of the day, Ryder and Haley give me best friends, not Romeo & Juliet. 

The third act of Escape from Polygamy is the drop-a-house-on-you moment where a witch is killed by a house and a teenager arrives in a foreign land. In short, it's the Wizard of Oz moment of the movie, and Ryder plays Dorothy. Damon Hill's entertaining script never stalls, but it's in the third act that things explode with color. I won't say where Ryder goes to, but it feels like independence. A Katy Perry impersonator tries to dazzle Ryder with her bra made of whipped cream cans. In one shot, pink light illuminates Ryder's face.

 A young, pale and skinny man named Micah (Jake Weary), with a bouncy blond pompador, struts into the movie; Jake Weary manages to bring effortless sex to the role, but it's flashier than what Falahee gives to Ryder. He's wired and his eyes are crazy. It's also in those crazy eyes that you get to see that he's lost. Unexpectedly, he helps the film lead to a waterworks moment that will surprise you, but you didn't think you were that invested in the movie. You will get lost, and you'll feel like you had to escape from polygamy too. 

Bugs and Blondes with Cookies N Cream

Rayna Hecht goes blond.

Alicia Florrick is a real bitch. But she's a magnificent bitch. In Season 6, Episode 5 of The Good Wife, it's a game of Before and After, like that plastic surgeon ad that Andy Warhol made into museum art.

Alicia is a skinny lawyer with even skinnier Carol Burnett legs. But she wears designer suits. Alicia meets her Before in the courtroom: it's Jill Hennessy who used to be the medical examiner on Crossing Jordan. Jill plays a power lawyer named Rayna Hecht, whom Alicia was trying to woo for her own firm. Rayna used to have dark, shoulder-length hair, but now she wears an orange tan and long blond hair. She's a new woman trying on a new look. She even wears a scarf tied in a bow--around her long neck--to show how new she is.

It's a game of Before and After.

She's so Versace-esque. She's the Versace vision, that Rayna. That appealingly orange tan and that blond-with-dark-roots hair contrast would make Donatella Versace salivate.

Alicia Florrick is a real bitch. But she's a magnificent bitch.

Alicia's brand of bitchiness is the kind I like to buy: juicy and sweet, like, pulled pork and apple pie. She bears her straight, white teeth like a wolf. Before she was a wolf, she was a humiliated politician's wife…the good wife. Rayna is the Before, unsure, without Alicia's connections: the governor husband and the most powerful lawyers in Chicago. She's power-hungry despite ALL the power she possesses.

It's a game of Before and After. Alicia and Rayna both speak in firm, smoky altos, tailor-made for the rich and powerful, but Alicia has an army. She's the Governor's wife for Pete's sake. Rayna doesn't have all that power. 

Diane in cookies N cream dress.

All hail Queen Diane who tries her hand at being scream queen when she squeals at the sight of a cockroach. How perfect that a cockroach comes when Diane's wearing that delicious black-specked white sheath dress (with black short cardigan sweater). The dress looks like cookies N' cream AKA crumbled Oreo's in a sea of white chocolate. Mmm-mmm. 

De Palma's 'Passion' is full of Powder, Rouge and Coca-Cola

Christine and Isabelle laugh together.

Brian De Palma's film Passion definitely left me asking the question, "what could have been?" Interestingly, my first time seeing the film was in June 2013 at 11pm on my Macbook onYouTube. Trust, I was excited because I had been waiting since early 2012 to see Passion since they announced Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace were attached to star. Midway I fell asleep. Yes, I was a bit tired, but the movie is mostly boring with a lot of potential.

Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace play advertising executives Christine and Isabelle in Berlin, Germany who fight over a smart phone commercial, which finds them competing for dominance. It's worth saying that Passion is an English-language remake of Alain Corneau's French thriller Love Crime which starred Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier as the dueling career women because that film made me mad hitting my spot for revenge. The reason it achieved this is because its structure is procedural, making it a tried and true exercise, while Passion is disjointed, but daring in some ways.

The problem is not that the female leads in Passion are the same age, and not having a 20-year age gap like in Love Crime, but that Rachel McAdams doesn't have someone to pose a threat to her high-powered boss. As the underling, Noomi Rapace is a blank canvas who exudes strength, while the only weapon McAdams's Christine has over Rapace is beauty. Rooney Mara would have been a great Isabelle, being only five years younger than McAdams, so there would be the slight age gap, which would add more tension. Also, Mara has a bitchy streak that would spice up the film's double-crosses, maybe even pushing McAdams to get meaner. McAdams's Christine is a high-ranking business woman in her early 30's with a pretty powder-and-rouge face who tries really hard to look elegant, but professional by wearing double-breasted suits, pants and tasteful knee-length dresses; to see the gradual transformation of Mara from awkward assistant in baggy suits to slinky haute couture would be breathtaking. Rapace rocks the pant suits, but she's not believable as competition for Christine.

Passion starts to get interesting after Christine dashes Isabelle's hopes of overtaking her by taking away Isabelle's man Dirk (who's also Christine's boyfriend played morosely by Paul Anderson), which causes Isabelle to crash her cute Euro car into the Coca-Cola vending machine: this crash summons a wobbly craziness that shakes up the movie's boring first half--which in a way mimics the boring atmosphere of the office place. It's when Isabelle starts popping pills and reality starts dissolving into dreams that you know you're in a Brian De Palma film.

McAdams's performance is one of the main strengths of Passion because she shows sympathy for her villainous character, which is hard to do. She's camps deliciously as if she's licking the last of some wonderful morsel from her lips, and hungry for more. De Palma's invasive close-ups reveal Christine's struggle to remain smiling and to swallow when she steals Isabelle's smart phone idea right in front of Isabelle. In a scene with McAdams in a bath tub talking on a smart phone (not smart!), she's looking on her computer at a photos of a new house in New York, which she plans to move to. Her large eyes are moist with a desperation and relief that she gets to leave Germany. This scene hints at this 33-year old woman's lack of roots: she has no family of her own, estranged from her parents (if you believe the story she tells Isabelle) and she has no appreciation for the concept of kids. All Christine has is professional success.

As the film wraps up, there's a Heathers-like concept of regeneration (cut off one head and another grows back): Isabelle's assistant Dani (the spunky Karoline Herfurth) makes the "best use" of Christine in a pitiful scene with Isabelle. It becomes clear after a dissolve from a close-up of Rapace's sad, calm face into an atmospheric funeral scene that Christine truly comes out on top. She's the ghost of every steely, power-hungry woman that came before; she's Bette Davis, she's Joan Crawford, she's Regina George. Although, I was never scared of her like I was of Kristin Scott Thomas as Christine in Love Crime.

Love & Admiration in "Passion" Trailer







Christine chats up Isabelle in backseat of chauffeured car.



REVIEW OF TRAILER FOR BRIAN DE PALMA’S “PASSION”

A STORY OF WOMEN FIGHTING for power—and love in the workplace, the teaser trailer for Passion dances a waltz to the sound of a clock ticking. A blond woman in a red power suit walks fast; a brunette turns her head fast; the blonde joins the brunette on a sofa fast and slows down as the sofa sways from her motion. The trailer for Brian De Palma’s film is full of approaching and retreating movement that uses the visual vocabulary of his past films as a language to speak about today’s smart phone world.

The two women are blond Christine (Rachel McAdams) and brunette Isabelle (Noomi Rapace), a boss and protégé at a Berlin ad agency; they always seem on the verge of something, as if something’s bubbling just under the surface. The ticking clock soundtrack is no doubt meant for suspense, but it makes me think of the element of time that drives all of De Palma’s films: clocks, split screens and multiple chances for a person to right a wrong populate his films. In particular, his trademark split screens speak to the nature of things happening at the same time: while someone watches late night reruns of “King of Queens” a person gets murdered.

The trailer speaks to the idea of things in the world happening simultaneously; there is a narrative that runs throughout the trailer, despite not being linear. When Isabelle sits nervously in an office, she wears an upper crust blue scarf; cut to Christine wearing an upper crust blue scarf, but more convincingly; cut to Isabelle in the same scene with Christine, but now Isabelle is wearing the blue scarf and Christine is not: it’s visual storytelling at its best. When Isabelle sits stiffly in the office, she looks like she snuck into her boss’s office to pretend to be the boss. Think of the autograph seeker trying on Eve’s cape and holding her award as she looks at her image reflected times five in a mirror, in All About Eve, or Heather #2 holding Heather #1’s red Scrunchie: it’s all about a person wanting to replace someone else by becoming them.

At this point the protégé is hanging out in the boss’s office and wearing the boss’s scarf. Next, after the boss gives her scarf to her protégé, she says with bedroom eyes, “We make a really good team,” bringing these two women closer together. Wouldn’t you know the next shot is of the boss and protégé at a party (work-related), with the boss holding Isabelle’s face in her hands examining it like an artist admiring her creation? This is where the word “seniority” comes in, because in business “seniority” refers to rank and not age, but since Christine and Isabelle are both in their early 30s Christine interprets seniority as trying to look older and dominant. At the party, Christine wears dangling, phallic earrings with her hair fixed in a severe French bun, while Isabelle looks underdressed, almost school girl-like; maybe because her black blazers and pants look like a school uniform, as well as her bowl-cut bangs.

As all of these images of Christine and Isabelle move gracefully across the screen, there are POV shots of someone walking through a house at night; Venetian blind shadows decorate the house, which looks to be Christine’s house. The Passion trailer has a pattern of entering and exiting, which falls under the category of approaching and retreating. The first shot of the trailer is a POV shot of someone opening the door to Christine’s house; cut to the open door of Christine’s chauffeured BMW that closes once she exits. Then there’s nervous Isabelle inside an office, but it’s still a public space because the office is made of glass, like a fishbowl; not to mention that there are probably cameras in the office. It’s not until Isabelle shares a drink with Christine on Christine’s sofa that they’re in a private space. But are they really?

Drawer full of sex toys & a Kabuki mask.

The person in Christine’s house walks up her stairs closer and closer to the bedroom. Isabelle stirs her cup of coffee/tea in a spiral motion, sitting in Christine’s immaculate white kitchen, as the maid irons on a crisp white iron; note how Isabelle’s fuming eye darts for a split second and then returns to its original position. Christine walks smugly into an office presumably not hers, wearing the much discussed high-waist trousers; of course there’s a mini alabaster statue of a man about to dive off the edge: foreshadowing much? Christine wears a hilarious plastic smile framed by ruby red lips that’s made all the more funny by the fact that De Palma chose to show this scene with the audio from another scene (Christine and Isabelle riding in the backseat of Christine’s chauffeured BMW). Follow that with Isabelle walking into Christine’s office while Christine sits waiting for her; Isabelle has been summoned and the room is painted in Venetian blind shadows, a nod to noir, entrapping Isabelle as if in a prison cell, while Christine is free of any Venetian blind shadows, casually smoking her cigarette with her hair free from her trademark bun.

Inside the backseat of Christine’s chauffeured BMW, Christine chats up Isabelle trying to find out more about her mysterious protégé; the two women are in the same clothes as the work-related party, and probably they’re en route to the party. The back window of the BMW has Venetian blinds a la the cab in On the Waterfront: does this make Isabelle Marlon Brando? Also, there’s the cab in De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, which tells what can happen in a moving cab. De Palma’s camera pans 360 degrees around Isabelle sitting on a bench looking down at her smart phone, while a bus stop billboard for a ballet is next to Isabelle.

Then there’s the De Palma drawer that pops up in many of his films: someone opens a drawer and it contains a plot device. Inside a bedroom Isabelle opens a nightstand drawer full of sex toys and a Kabuki mask, and in the process opens a drawer of De Palma films past. Dressed in a man’s shirt (that likely belongs to Paul Anderson’s character Dirk), Isabelle becomes the cheating wife Jenny from Raising Cain who opens drawers to find birthday gifts that could reveal her infidelity; she becomes the cheating wife Kate Miller in Dressed to Kill who opens a drawer to find a report from the health department stating that the stranger she slept with has VD; she becomes the black-clad Nicolas Bardo in Femme Fatale who opens a drawer to find a gun. The Kabuki mask—molded from Christine's face—that Christine makes her lovers wear is in the drawer and proves to be an important plot device since it appears three times in this trailer.

All the smoking in this trailer puts me in the mind of film noirs, which in relation to De Palma puts me in the mind of Femme Fatale where the main characters smoke like crazy. Christine smokes in her chauffeured BMW while talking on her smart phone (Panasonic?) with devilish eyes; she even talks on her smart phone when taking baths, like Laure Ashe in Femme Fatale who smoked in the tub, but didn't go as far as use a electronic device, but let’s hope she doesn’t fall asleep and dream of life as Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity.




Someone wearing a Kabuki mask gets it on with Christine.



Things end up back to the bedroom, just as Christine’s bedroom eyes foreshadowed, and a blindfolded Christine feels her way through the hallways of her home en route to the bedroom. She wears a silk robe that makes me see Liz Blake at the end of Dressed to Kill, in that feminine robe and the nightmare she would have in the bedroom. Back to the BMW with Christine and Isabelle on their way to the party: Christine the boss tells her protégé she wants to be “loved” instead of “admired”; she moves swiftly from bared teeth to bedroom eyes. Again Christine moves in aggressively, always taking the initiative while Isabelle reacts.

               

The trailer comes to an end with a bed-headed Christine giving what else but the bedroom eyes to the intruder in her house; the leather-gloved intruder removes Christine’s blindfold and caresses her head tenderly. Then BOOOOOM!!! That mask of Christine’s face moves into the camera. It’s fitting that the trailer ends in darkness like when we close our eyes at night to sleep, or dream. 

  

Son, Brother, Father in 'Untouchables'

Kevin Costner as Eliot Ness in The Untouchables

The first time I tried to watch The Untouchables, I had recorded it on DVR, but with the commercials on AMC, the movie took up 150 minutes of DVR space, so I prioritized and decided that I could chuck The Untouchables to make room for more important programming.

Maybe a month later I recorded it again on DVR and this time the movie flew by.  From the first explosion killing a child it's clear that Brian De Palma's Prohibition film is about the threat to the family.  This is when a young Kevin Costner, as FBI agent Eliot Ness, flaunts his sturdy German looks and farm boy identity to fight Chicago's crime. The first time he tries he fails and becomes the embarrassment of the FBI. He's down and out with a wife and daughter at home, but no male friends. This is where Sean Connery comes in to inject the perfect dose of mature masculinity into Ness's life.

Forming a team with a few other men, Ness heads into a cat and mouse with the criminal Al Capone and his associates. Ness's team becomes known as the Untouchables. The team becomes a brotherhood and a second family for Ness. The fact that this group of men becomes a family chokes me up as if I were hearing a powerful melisma in an opera. It makes perfect sense that the murder of Jim Malone (Sean Connery) is intercut with an opera Pagliacci that Al Capone (Robert De Niro) cries crocodile tears for. It's at this point that I feel like I'm in a disaster movie like 1972's The Poseidon Adventure, when I was connected to the characters so much that I hoped each one made it out alive. Like when Linda Rogo (Stella Stevens) falls into the fire causing Ernest Borgnine to break your heart with his grief.

Being an only child, I always wanted a brother. Every time a cousin or friend stayed over at my home, it was the most exciting thing in the world to me. The Untouchables is like many of De Palma's films because the brother-seeking protagonist becomes stronger at the film's end and finds his place in the world because of a family unit. Who doesn't want to find their place in the world, where they belong? The brotherhood saved Eliot Ness and made him a better father and overall better man. Who knows where Ness would have ended up if he hadn't met Jim Malone. He might have become a drunk lost in the world because of his failure to be a man. By saving himself, he saved his family.

If I hadn't urgently watched The Untouchables, I would have missed Sean Connery's Oscar-winning performance. He plays a character who plays father figure and brother to a younger version of himself. He tries to redeem his life by helping Eliot Ness take out Chicago's crime and making the world a better place. I may have erased the movie from my DVR, but it will stay forever in my mind.