java and flicks

you know you’re old when Starbucks Java Chip keeps you up at night. Why not organic, you say? Well, I can’t find the clip from Pope of Greenwich Village; ‘Charlie, you don’t need no jacket,  you ain’t got no job’, but that’s the gist of it. Eric Roberts and Mickey Rourke here, untouched by action flicks.

“It’s a perfect film.” 
-Johnny Depp

 

this is from the Big Lebowski-one of my favorite scenes. Slapstick doesn’t get much better.

 

and James Cagney as the hilarious Bottom in the Hollywood version of Midsummer Night’s Dream. 14 yr old Mickey Rooney as Puck. A classic comedy.

James Cagney and Mickey Rooney romping in a Shakespearian fairyland? This could only be A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Warner Bros.’ 1935 attempt at classing up the proletarian studio. The legendary German stage director Max Reinhardt had produced the play at the Hollywood Bowl to enchanted, sold-out audiences, and Warners decided to hand Reinhardt the keys to the studio (along with fellow Germans William Dieterle, co-director, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who adapted Mendelssohn’s music). Reinhardt created an eye-popping phantasmagoria, a movie laced with sparkling sequins, flying fairies, and moon-kissed forests. As for the words, Reinhardt had a collection of Warners studio players, notably James Cagney as Bottom, whose playing of “Pyramus and Thisby” with Joe E. Brown is perhaps the movie’s comic high point. The other actors are decidedly varied, and they tend to be overwhelmed by the production design. Not so Mickey Rooney, whose performance as Puck is a feral, antic act of imagination (he was 14 during filming); picture a boy raised by wolves who somehow memorized Shakespeare. His Puck growls and screams and mocks the drama of the other characters, a little postmodern imp before his time. (Critic David Thomson called this Puck “truly inhuman, one of the cinema’s most arresting pieces of magic”). The rest of the movie comes to earth with some regularity, but it’s a one-of-a-kind production, and a reminder of the lavish, unreal possibilities within a movie studio. –Robert Horton