Purple People Eater is based loosely (very loosely) on the song of the same name made popular by Sheb Wooley. In this movie version, Neil Patrick Harris finds some old records which once belonged to his father. When Neil plays Wooley's song, the purple people eater comes down from space. No reason given, it just happens. Purple people eater is one horned and one eyed, but only eats purple people. He's like a big goofy stuffed animal (or a ballpark mascot) and Neil names him Purple. Purple can play the horn out of the top of his head (and sometimes, actual notes are present on screen), so him and Neil form a band, which becomes famous locally and they even cut a record. They use their fame to do a benefit to save some old folks from getting kicked out of their homes by a greedy developer.
There are three musicians of note in Purple People Eater: Chubby Checker makes a guest appearance with the band and sings "Twist It Up ". Sheb Wooley has a part as an old friend of Neil's grandfather and Little Richard appears at the end of the film as the mayor of the town and helps get an ordinance passed saving the old folks from having their rental homes turned into expensive condos.
I'm not going to be too harsh on Purple People Eater because it's really a movie for kids....and I'm a long way from being a kid. For an adult, it's pretty dull with a weak plot and even the acting isn't very good; but I bet there are kids out there who have watched, or would watch this film over and over again.
Like some people I'm not a Monkee hater, I always thought they had some good tunes and their TV show was a mild diversion but, I have to say, this TV special Sucks! The main problem: not enough Monkees and Too Much Brian Auger and Trinity with Julie Driscoll (a group nowhere near as good or as important as they imagined themselves). There is so much Auger and Driscoll that it made 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee seem like it's their special with The Monkees simply being guest stars. To further add to my misery while watching this special, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and Fats Domino are featured only briefly and are used primarily as backing for Auger and The Monkees.
33 1/3 Revolutions has a plot of sorts, what I guess someone thought was "heavy man" (Hey! It was 1969!): The Monkees are stripped of their personalities and then molded back into plasticized Pop Stars and at the end of the special given their freedom to be individuals again. All of this is orchestrated for the most part by Auger and Driscoll. The Monkees dress up as robots and sing "Wind Up Man", this is followed by a scene with Auger in a stack of piano players (with himself at the top) and Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and Fats Domino all under him. This is the point where I almost became disgusted enough to turn the whole thing off. Next, Darwin (yes, it is supposed to be that Darwin) takes over and Paul Arnold and the Moon Express do an expressive dance....once again, I had thoughts of ending my misery.
Each Monkee, under the watchful eyes of Auger/Driscoll, gets a solo in order to discover their own personality: Mickey sings a funky "I'm a Believer", Peter gets all Eastern mystical with "I Prithee (Do Not Ask For Love)," Mike comes off best doing a split screen duo with himself with a country tune "Naked Persimmon (The Only Thing I Believe Is True)"and Davy, dressed as a toy and true to his musical theater roots, sings and dances to "Goldilocks Sometime."
33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee continued to go downhill for me as The Monkees, dressed as apes, performed Neil Sedaka's "I Go Ape", the "ape" Monkees evolve into a 1950s group and Auger introduces them as "idolized, plasticized, psychoanalyzed, and sterilized". The Monkees do a medley of 50s hits with Little Richard, Fats Domino, and Jerry Lee Lewis having very short song segments. Fats Domino gets slightly more screen time than the other two, although Jerry Lee steals the show in the few seconds he is on screen.
Auger decides the group should have complete freedom which leads to the final segment. Davy begins by singing "String For My Kite". Peter enters and shows off his skills on the harpsichord. Mickey and Mike show up and a party scene (extras were rounded up off Sunset Strip) develops with The Monkees, Buddy Miles Express, Brian Auger, Julie Driscoll, and Trinity all joining in on "Listen To The Band". The special closes on a book with a page reading "Chaos Is Come Again" and as the book closes we see the back cover reads "The Beginning of the End", which is apt since this is the last time The Monkees would perform as a quartet until 1986. 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee was such a disaster that two other planned specials featuring the group were deservedly scrapped.
It's hard enough trying to fit someone's life into a two hour theatrical movie. It's really hard to fit someone's life into a two hour TV movie, since once you remove the commercials, that only leaves approximately 86 minutes. Director Robert Townsend did a commendable job of hitting enough points in the life of Little Richard that you do come away with some knowledge about "The Architect of Rock and Roll".
Little Richard begins with him and his band at an outdoor concert in Australia. Richard sees a comet and thinks it's a sign from God telling him he should quit rock and roll and go back into the ministry.The rest of Little Richard is told in flashback style beginning with Little Richard as a young boy, moving on to his teenage years, his involvement in vaudeville, and finally becoming a huge rock and roll star. Leon, who also did a great job playing David Ruffin in The Temptations, is once again outstanding in the titular role in this film. Without Leon's excellent portrayal of Richard Penniman, this movie would have been far less than it is.
There are two main points Little Richard seemed to want to get across. One was that Richard enjoyed wearing women's clothes at an early age and on into adulthood. The other point was Little Richard was adept at reading "signs" to guide his personal and private life. Since Richard is listed as an executive producer in the credits, I can only surmise he wanted these two points driven home to viewers of this movie.
The best parts of Little Richard are the song performances, lip synced by Leon to actual Little Richard recordings. I can't quite say the same about Ty Hodges (who portrays young Richard), who appeared to be doing a Stevie Wonder impression during his one song performance. Gregory Gast did a fine job as Pat Boone, however, it was off-putting to me that he looked more like George W. Bush than Boone. Two other musicians of note are portrayed in Little Richard: Tressa Thomas makes a brief appearance as Ruth Brown and Conroe Brooks is great as Sam Cooke performing "Send Me Some Lovin'".
One final note on Little Richard, some misconceptions have arisen on the internet and quoted a fictional sequence in the film as being truthful. In Little Richard, he is shown performing at Simm's Peachtree Theatre in 1957 in Greenville, SC. This sequence has Richard stripping down to his gold lame underwear to show what a wild man he had become at that point in his career. While I can't dispute the fact Richard may or may not have stripped down to gold lame underwear on stage at some point in his career, I can set the record straight that there was NOT any such named theatre located in Greenville, SC.
If you get a chance (the dvd is out of print and quite expensive to buy used, but the movie does show up occasionally on BET), Little Richard is well worth viewing, mainly for the music and for Leon's performance; but please realize the movie is only a quick overview of the life of one of the founders of rock and roll. The film has fictional elements and true elements all mashed together to create an entertaining movie, it is NOT a documentary and as with any biopic should not be viewed as one.
I've had this DVD for quite some time, but put off watching it, since I really wasn't expecting it to be very good. While it's not the greatest biopic I've ever seen, Hendrix is far from the worse. Wood Harris plays Jimi Hendrix and does a competent acting job, although I never believed I was watching anything more than an actor pretending to be someone else.
The plot of Hendrix is built around an interview he is supposed to be doing on the last day of his life. This allows exposition from Jimi to move the movie through the various years of his life. We first see Jimi as a young boy living with his single father and a brief glimpse of his mother and her problems. The film then skips to Jimi getting out of the Army after breaking his ankle. Hendrix then follows Jimi through his early years of performing in different bands. One specific instance shows us Jimi being fired from Little Richard's band, because he felt Jimi was getting too much attention with his guitar playing and theatrics. Little Richard also claimed Jimi copied his pencil thin mustache. All of this moves pretty fast, since they're trying to fit Hendrix's lifetime into 100 minutes.
Jimi gets his big break when Chas Chandler (formerly the bass player for The Animals) sees him performing in a club and convinces Jimi to come to England, where he will manage him. In England, the one thing Jimi really wants to do is jam with Eric Clapton. After some persuasion from Chas, Clapton agrees to let Jimi jam with Cream (Clapton, Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce) on stage. This goes so well, Chas tells Jimi that he should form his own power trio and they recruit Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell and The Jimi Hendrix Experience is born.
The rest of Hendrix takes us through the ups and downs of his wildly successful career: We get a look at Jimi playing The Monterey Pop Festival. A short snippet with Jimi as the opening act for The Monkees. A look at the dissolution of The Experience. A quick stop at Woodstock with Jimi performing "The Star Spangled Banner". A very short looks at his free form jazz group, Sky Church, and the formation of Band of Gypsies featuring Buddy Miles on drums and Billy Cox on Bass. During all these phases in Jimi's career we get an inside look at his excessive drug taking and womanizing, his struggle to control and expand his own music, and the toll the road took on him.
There were two parts of Hendrix that I thought could have been done a little better. First, between a lot of scenes, we get shown "real life" clips (Beatles, Monkees, Woodstock, Kent State, Martin Luther King assassination, etc) to establish time and place. Unfortunately, a few of these scenes included people/events in the wrong time line. The other thing that jarred me out of the movie was Wood Harris' guitar playing. The movie, with some careful camera work, manages most of the time to hide the fact that Harris wasn't really playing the guitar and they used someone else's hands in any close-up shots. The trouble came when, in some wide shots, you could definitely see Harris' hands and the actual music being played didn't match.
Hendrix was denied the use of any original material that Jimi had recorded, so the movie is filled with covers of Jimi's covers - "All Along The Watchtower", "Hey Joe", "Wild Thing", etc. This worked out pretty good for the most part, but it did leave me wanting to hear "Are You Experienced", "Purple Haze", etc. I will say that Harris did a really good job of lip synching....whether he was lip synching his voice or someone else's I haven't been able to determine. IF you're a diehard fanboy of Jimi Hendrix, then you probably won't like this movie. IF you want a pretty decent overview of Jimi Hendrix's life, then I would definitely recommend Hendrix.
Since Rock Around The Clock had been such a success, this sequel, Don't Knock The Rock (DKTR) was quickly rushed into production and released in December of the same year (1956). DKTR however failed to garner as much success as the original movie. This caused a third movie in the series that would also have featured Bill Haley to be canceled. The failure of DKTR could also have had something to do with Haley's "rock and roll" career faltering around the same time.
In my opinion, it wasn't Haley who couldn't make this movie into a hit, instead the problem was the casting of Alan Dale (a friend of Alan Freed's) as Arnie Haines. In DKTR, Arnie Haines is supposedto be the biggest and greatest "rock and roll" star of the time. Alan Dale was a great big band singer and possessed a great set of pipes, but trying to pass him off as a great "rock and roll" singer was a fatal flaw in DKTR and I doubt audiences at the time bought the premise any more than I did. For a look at Alan Dale/Arnie Haines check out the trailer at the end of this review.
The plot of DKTR has Arnie and his band tired of the limelight and deciding to take a break and go back home to see their families and rest up. They ask Bill Haley to take over their bookings and he's glad to accommodate. Unfortunately, when Arnie and the boys arrive home they find that they're not welcome in their own hometown due to playing that "evil rock and roll" music. Adding to their woes is a nationally syndicated columnist, Arlene MacLaine (Fay Baker), who has come to town to check out Arnie and writes a column deriding their music. The publication of her column causes towns all across the U.S. to start canceling "rock and roll" shows.
Arlene's daughter Francine (Patricia Hardy) is on Arnies side and wants to prove her mother wrong. In order to combat the bad connotation that "rock and roll" has received Arnie, Francine, and Arnie's manager, Alan Freed, decide to stage a charity "rock and roll" show in the next town over. Francine will get her mother to attend and see there's nothing wrong with the music. Everything almost works out, but Arnie refuses the advances of a piece of "jailbait" (Jana Lund) and to get even she brings a bottle of liquor to the dance. All the hubbub about the liquor causes a fight to break out at the dance. The liquor and the fighting make "rock and roll" once again look bad when all of this is reported in the newspapers. Arnie comes up with a solution to show the old fogies that "rock and roll" isn't any worse than the music/dancing they grew up with and everyone comes to their senses for a happy ending.
Even though Bill Haley was listed as the star of DKTR, he's actually only a supporting player in the movie. Haley and The Comets get to perform several songs before and during the charity concert and Bill has a few speaking parts in the movie. The concert also includes The Treniers (fronted by twin brothers Claude and Cliff Trenier) who sing "Rockin' on Saturday Night" and "Out Of The Bushes" and prove what a great show band they were. Dave Appell and The Applejacks do "Applejack" and "Country Dance". Best of all we get some real "rock and roll" when Little Richard sings "Tutti Fruitti" and "Long Tall Sally". The only bad part of Little Richard's performance is he's not very animated, it appears someone told him "look into this camera" because no matter which way the shot is set up, he's always looking straight ahead.
A couple of things I neglected to mention in my review of Rock Around The Clock which also hold true for DKTR: There are some great dancers in both movies, as a matter of fact, the group dancers are much better than the featured duet dancers in both movies. I also found it odd that Haley's group included a steel guitar player. I imagine this was a holdover from Haley's country and western days. I'm not saying a steel guitar player can't rock (see Junior Brown or Robert Randolph), just that it's a strange instrument to see in a "rock and roll" band.
After watching several movies built around rock/country music with the plot secondary to the music, it was refreshing to see this light romantic comedy where the musical performances are integrated into the plot. Unlike some of the similar movies from this time period, The Girl Can't Help It (GCHI) could easily exist without the music acts and still be entertaining.
A gangster (Edmund O'Brien) wants to reclaim the limelight from his golden years of fame. His plan is to make his girlfriend (Jayne Mansfield) into a famous pop singer, then he'll marry her and as the husband of someone famous he'll have his name back in the newspapers. Of course, in today's world O'Brien would be counting on getting his own reality show. O'Brien hooks a washed up press agent (Tom Ewell) into his plan and everything is set to go. Only a couple of problems: Jayne can't sing, she'd rather be a housewife, and as if we didn't know this was going to happen - Jayne and Tom fall in Love.
Using the construct of the music business enables GCHI to include musical acts as part of the story. The very first music act we see in the movie is Nino Tempo (No April!) performing in a nightclub where Tom is sitting alone drinking. As the movie rolls along we get perfomances from Little Richard, Eddie Fontaine, Johnny Olenn, The Chuckles, Abbey Lincoln, Julie London, Gene Vincent And His Blue Caps, Eddie Cochran, The Treniers, Fats Domino, The Platters, and Ray Anthony
Tom gets a phone call at the nightclub to come talk about a job. Since Tom recognizes the address to be in a ritzy part of town, he agrees and that's when he first meets up with O'Brien and gets drawn into the plan; but more importantly, this sequence also includes the first appearance of Jayne Mansfield. She throws open some connecting doors and the director frames her in the doorway. With her perfect hourglass figure, I can only imagine the audience "gasping" when they first saw her on the big screen. Frank Tashlin, the director, who previously directed cartoons, has been quoted as saying "big breasts were some of the funniest things going". GCHI has a lot of of cartoon elements, including a great sight gag sequence as Jayne makes the Iceman's ice melt, the Milkman's milk explode and another man's glasses crack. The below photo from the movie seems to combine Tashlin's thinking about big breasts and a sight gag into one shot.
As with any movie with so many great music acts, everyone will have their favorite(s). I especially liked Little Richard and Fats Domino, but a lot of that has to do with the fact that they are both already two of my favorite performers and I'm thrilled anytime I get to see them. There really wasn't a bad or boring musical performance with any of the acts, which isn't always the case when so many performers are included in one movie. Julie London appears in a sultry dream sequence singing "Cry Me A River" that is still embedded in my brain.
GCHI is available in a DVD box set that includes "The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw" and "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?' OR You can rent it through Netflix OR catch it on The Fox Movie Channel, since it seems they show it at least once a month (sometimes more than once a month!)
I know that some of the facts in this biopic are not correct and that some events shown are not in the correct time line of the history of Sonny and Cher. However, that certainly did not keep me from thoroughly enjoying And The Beat Goes On (ATBGO). When you see facts below that are wrong, please remember, I'm only reporting the facts as ATBGO showed them to me.
The main reason I probably liked the movie so much is the two actors playing Sonny and Cher - Jay Underwood and Renee Faia are both fantastic in their roles, with Renee being somewhat more of a standout than Jay. That's not taking anything away from Jay who really does a good job. It's just Cher is such an interesting person that it seemed my attention was more drawn to her.
After watching ATBGO, much of what makes Cher tick is still a mystery to me. Some of that may be the result of the movie being based on Sonny's memoir "And The Beat Goes On", so we're really only getting Sonny's side of the story. Not that Cher comes off bad....anything but, in my opinion.
In Cher we see a person who is enormously talented and is guided by the somewhat Svengali Sonny. I really thought they both got something from the business part of their relationship. Cher got someone who knew how to guide a career and work the music business. Sonny got someone with talent and charisma, who he could attach himself to and have the music career he desired.
Besides the music/business side of their career, I also saw a couple who really loved each other and I don't think that love ever died, even though they eventually split up.
ATBGO starts with Sonny on David Letterman with Letterman asking him "What Happened". The movie then flashes us back to Sonny delivering meat, before he broke into the record business at Specialty Records as an A&R man. At Specialty, Sonny does a good job, even though we see one scene in which Sonny fails to get Little Richard (Walter Franks) to fulfill his contract with Specialty. This was during the period when Little Richard turned his back on Rock 'n' Roll and turned to religion. Little Richard consults Jesus for a decision...but Jesus says "No"!
Sonny eventually loses his job at Specialty, because according to the movie he had too much ambition. It seems he was pursuing other career lines, such as producing his own records, at the same time as his A&R job. Not long after Sonny is fired he meets Cher and they move in together. Sonny is out of work and needs a job to support him and Cher. He has always admired Phil Spector (Christian Leffler), so he goes to a Spector recording session and talks his way into a job as Spector's West Coast Promotion Man.
One day in the studio, Spector needs a demo vocal recorded, but his female singers have gone to lunch. Cher is in the studio hanging out with Sonny and Spector says he wants her to do the demo. Cher refuses to sing by herself, so Sonny stands by her side and sings a little bit with her until Cher's confidence is built up enough that she can sing on her own....thus we get the beginnings of the duo Sonny and Cher. Sonny really gets it into his head that he can make Cher into a star. When Spector won't record her, Sonny does it on his own and as they say....the rest is history.
After having huge success in music, Sonny wants to branch out and make a movie starring Cher, since The Beatles and Elvis had done movies. Cher tells him they're not that big of stars, but Sonny plows right along and almost loses everything they own in making the movie "Chasity". This is the first point in ATBGO that we see a strain on their relationship with Sonny eventually cheating on Cher.
Desperate for money, Sonny convinces Cher to take a job in Vegas opening for Pat Boone. Cher doesn't think they're "Vegas Acts", but eventually goes along with Sonny's plan. They're a big success in Vegas and this leads to, according to the movie, Sonny creating their TV show. With the TV show, having a child, and Sonny signing them up for more Vegas shows, we see the next strain on their marriage and Cher openly cheats on Sonny.
This is really the beginning of the end for the duo known as Sonny and Cher. The movie quickly moves to Cher suing Sonny for divorce over "involuntary servitude" and then skips ahead 14 years until their reunion duet on "The David Letterman Show" singing "I Got You Babe". As a coda to ATBGO, there is a short segment featuring the real Sonny Bono.
I enjoyed the movie from start to finish, and as far a biopics go, I thought it was one of the better ones, especially considering that it put 15 years into 85 minutes. You'll enjoy the movie more if you don't get too hung up on details; but after watching ATBGO, if you would like to read more on their career, the Wikipedia entry: Sonny and Cher, while incomplete, will still give you a rough idea of their career.
I knew before I started watching this movie that it was about Frankie Lymon's three wives (played by Halle Berry, Vivica A. Fox, Lela Rochon) and their fight over the rights to the song "Why Do Fools Fall In Love" and any other monies owed to Lymon's estate. Even knowing that, I was disappointed that the movie had so little about Frankie Lymon and so much about the wives. I came away from the movie not knowing much more about Frankie than before I watched Why Do Fools Fall In Love.
One problem is that the story is told in flashbacks from three different viewpoints. Each wife has her own idea about who Frankie was, giving the movie viewer no clear cut picture of him. The only things I gathered from this movie about Frankie was that he started out street corner singing; he was a real ladies man; he was generous with his money; he was a drug addict; and he did a lot of splits during his musical performances.
The movie starts out in black and white with the actor playing Frankie (Larenz Tate) and The Teenagers performing. This immediately established Tate as Frankie with the viewer and even though he didn't look much like Frankie, he had the dance moves down enough that it sets in the viewer's mind that he was really Frankie Lymon. After the opening, Why Do Fools Fall In Love goes to color for the rest of the movie except for the closing scene.
Why Do Fools Fall In Love was released theatrically in 1998, but plays more like a VH1 movie biography. It just didn't have the feel of anything but a cheaply thrown together movie and that's not blaming any of the actors, since everyone in the movie played their parts more than adequately with Larenz Tate as Frankie being the standout.
The best part of the movie was Little Richard who plays the part of Little Richard in the courtroom scenes (in flashback scenes he's played by Miguel A. Nunez). The real Little Richard does his Little Richard act of acting outrageous and hamming it up in the courtroom. Little Richard also gets to do one musical number near the end of the movie, plus add a coda to the movie about how musicians always get cheated.
Other musicians portrayed by actors in Why Do Fools Fall In Love are The Platters with Zola Taylor (one of Frankie's wives), The Shirelles, The Kinks (during the Hullabaloo segment) and for some unexplained reason Jimi Hendrix is shown leaving Morris Levy's (owner of Roulette Records) office.
One thing that didn't ring quite right was when Frankie goes to L.A. to live with Zola it's 1965 , but in the movie it appears they tried to make it look more like 1967, The Summer of Love. One other flaw that I found with Why Do Fools Fall In Love was that Frankie was just 13 at the time of his success and we never see a young teenager in Tate; he looks more like a young man throughout the whole movie. On the other hand, it would have been shocking (even if more realistic) to see someone that looked like a teenager going through the difficult things the wives explain about Frankie.
Even though the movie never purported to be about Frankie Lymon's life, I'm still left wishing that it has been more about Frankie and less about the wives and their viewpoints of what Frankie was like. Frankie's life would make one hell of a movie....think about it...working at the age of 10, hustling prostitutes for extra income for your family shortly after, having sex with women twice his age, marrying three different women, going AWOL from the army, being addicted to heroin from the age of 15, being cheated by your agent and recording company, getting off heroin but later dying from an overdose at the age of 25 by celebrating what you think might be a comeback. NOW, there's a movie!
