The ultimate himbo pursues his dancing dreams during one of the worst periods of New York City’s history, and ends up a cultural icon—off-screen, of course.
Starring John Travolta, Karen Lynn Gorney, Barry Miller, Paul Pape, Donna Pescow, and Martin Shakar. Written by Norman Wexler. Directed by John Badham.
Welcome to the Mary Versus the Movies newsletter! Guess who’s back. Back again.
This week: 12/06/2024
EPISODE 165 – CINEMA PARADISO (1988)
A Sicilian boy in post-war Italy is taken under the wing of the local projectionist, and begins a life-long love of the movies, while watching how the world changes around him. Winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, this is a funny, moving film about love, art, and community.
Spanning forty years, the film explores the many forms of love: the paternal love of Alfredo the projectionist for his surrogate son, the fatherless Salvatore; the love of Alfredo for the village of Giancaldo, where he shows films, and those villagers for their community; Salvatore’s love for the young woman Elena; and Salvatore’s love of both Alfredo and film itself. Film is the connective tissue, binding these characters to each other, acting as a way to express love for each other. The theater acts as the heart of the village, where people fall in love, in lust, suckle at their mother’s breast, even die. And as time passes, and the world changes, we see the heart of the village disappear.
It also raises questions about the nature of creation itself—what does it take to be a dedicated artist? Do we need to abandon our home, our families, our love, to dedicate ourselves to art? The answers it quietly finds are something I struggle with.
Starring Philippe Noiret, Salvatore Cascio, Jacques Perrin, Antonella Attili, and Agnese Nano. Written and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore.
EPISODE 166 – SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977)
The ultimate himbo pursues his dancing dreams during one of the worst periods of New York City’s history, and ends up a cultural icon—off-screen, of course.
It’s wild to watch this film in 2024, knowing it mostly as “the John Travolta disco movie”. It certainly is that, of course—and I was blown away by the dancing. It’s a shame we don’t have dance movies like we used to, even as musicals make a periodic comeback. A dance film isn’t a musical, it’s a different art form, and while I’m not saying Travolta is in the same league as Astaire or Kelly (and those films are a different era, a different form), he’s really, really good—which fits the character well: a lot of raw talent with a modern form of dance, that if refined could become great. It’s a shame we really didn’t get that going forward, thanks to the racial and homophobic backlash to disco (and frankly to dance in general in mainstream—i.e. white and suburban—society).
But beyond that, it’s a surprisingly dark film, sitting somewhere between the underdog optimism of Rocky and small-stakes neighborhood violence of Mean Streets. Racial tension, machismo, loss of faith, misogyny and rape are all on display in surprising and brutal ways. People may remember the fun club scenes, but what they forget is a story about hopeless people.
Starring John Travolta, Karen Lynn Gorney, Barry Miller, Paul Pape, Donna Pescow, and Martin Shakar. Written by Norman Wexler. Directed by John Badham.
HOLLYWOOD AVALON – TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT (2017)
We are joined with a special guest, Tim Ryan, the King of Janitors, for a watch of Michael Bay’s Arthurian epic, Transformers: The Last Knight, in which Mark Wahlberg teams up with a hot Oxford don who is apparently the last descendent of Merlin, and a selection of Autobots, to take on a corrupted Optimus Prime, using Excalibur. No, I’m not making this up. It’s a complete nonsense movie.
Starring Mark Wahlberg, Josh Duhamel, Anthony Hopkins, Stanley Tucci, Laura Haddock, Isabela Moner, Jerrod Carmichael, Tony Hale, Mitch Pileggi, Peter Cullen, Frank Welker, Gemma Chan, John Goodman, and Omar Sy.
This is a preview of the latest episode of our series Hollywood Avalon. To hear the entire episode, join the Mary Versus the Movies patreon for $3/month to hear this and the entire series Hollywood Avalon: https://www.patreon.com/maryvsmovies.
What else are we up to this week?
Mary: We left the United States four days after Trump’s reëlection, driving to New York through the smoke of forest fires in New Jersey and Brooklyn. It was unseasonably warm, like it always is now, but we knew Italy would be chilly, and god knows we needed the break. And while we were mostly cut off from the news–not entirely, we had our phones with us, but we never put a tv on or looked at a newspaper–the past, present, and future were stalking us in ways I didn’t expect. Which says more about my own ignorance than anything, because if there’s anywhere that is oversaturated with the passage of time, it’s Rome, “the Eternal City”.
It’s strange, walking around a city with its bones on display. There was a moment on our first day, as we walked towards the old Forum, where I was standing on a corner, fiddling with a camera (an old fashioned Rollie that takes film). Dennis grabbed me by the shoulders, turned my body, and said “Look!” A few blocks away stood the arches of the Colosseum. My brain had trouble taking it in–one of the most famous buildings in history, and I was casually, unexpectedly looking at it. It didn’t feel real. From there, we walked a couple of blocks more to the Forum itself, an open-air museum, where grass grows over marble and terracotta as a memento mori.
It was a whole week of moments like that. Standing in the Sistine Chapel and being stunned by the bright colors overhead, and massive Last Judgement with its pagan Christ. Turning a corner at the art school in Florence, and suddenly seeing Michelangelo’s David looming above the crowds, so much larger than I expected. Seeing Caravaggio’s Judith and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, swarmed by tourists. All these things I’ve only ever seen in books, or bad reproductions, now there in front of me–every brushstroke, every chiseled vein or lock of hair.
The crypt of St. Francis of Assisi, knowing at least one saint’s resting place definitely had a real historical person there. The tombs of Michelangelo and Galileo in Florence, alongside Machiavelli; in the same church, there is a memorial to Dante, who was exiled and never returned to the city. The tomb of Saint Peter in the Vatican–but who knows who is really down there?
There were strange echoes; it’s one thing to see a monument still bearing the name of Mussolini–unnerving, but maybe understandable in a city full of statues of emperors. It’s another to see bobble-heads of him on sale in little souvenir shops, alongside statues of Trump. Each city we visited had a history of imperfect republicanism giving way to autocracy, whether the Roman Republic to the Caesars, Florence to the Medicis, or Venice to Napoleon. That the Venetian leader was called the doge felt like a little cosmic hammer against our heads.
These are just impressions; I feel like I’m still processing the trip. A week is a hell of a short amount of time to try and cram in three thousand years, like trying to swallow the ocean. Well. Maybe there will be other times–I did get two coins into the Trevi Fountain. OK, not the fountain itself, they’re renovating it, I threw it into a kiddie pool they set up for tourists, but the important thing is I got the coins in, and if there’s one thing I definitely believe in, it’s flimsy legends.
Dennis/Pizza: Italy Versus USA Pizza Showdown!
So I talk a lot about pizza in this newsletter, I figured I may as well head over to Italy to check how it’s done old style. We went up to JFK to fly over. A pensive Mary worries about her MVM audience in the airport bar below. “Will they survive without our podcast?” thinks she. I can’t think of anything else she’d be worried about at the end of the first week of November 2024…
While waiting for a flight, a family sits right next to us with a giant pizza box and proceeds to eat huge slices of NYC pizza right in front of me. I think I took it well.
We get to Rome and we go to the first pizza place we find. I think it’s called Bistro Monti across from the Basilica Papale di Santa Maria Maggiore, or something like that. We get this:
Turn your head sideways to see it, I don’t feel like figuring it out.
It’s a little too loaded with veggies but we were hungry. It looks pretty much like American pizza and they just had it on the menu outside. They kept telling us they had the best cappuccino so we had that. It was ok. Slowly we realize that a live version “Hotel California” is playing. It would end with applause then start right up again on a loop. We heard it about 4 times. I guess if you’re trying to ensare Americans that’s what they figure you want, or maybe it’s like a McDonald’s thing where it chases people out of there eventually. To be honest it was just good pizza, not something to burn down every pizza joint in America over. 3.5 out of 5.
The next day we went to the Pantheon and had a more authentic Italian pizza experience. We had about 15 minutes so we ran to a little place where a gruff lady stared at us. We learned that pizza is ordered by kilos, like a half kilo is good for a meal. We didn’t really know that and just pointed at slab of pizza with some kind of salami that looked good. Mary kept trying to hand Euros to her but she kept saying to use the machine, as there people just feed money into the machine Wawa-style. It looked like this:
Again, turn your head, I’m writing this in Open Office and I can’t figure these image alignments out. Anyways I don’t know what this is, but it was great! I think it’s a place called Pizza Minerva, right around the corner from the Pantheon. It has 2 stars, probably from lousy tourists who don’t want to know what a kilo is. Anyway it’s great and I’ll give it 4.75 out of 5 stars. The rest of the trip we had no pizza, it was pretty busy… I guess I should mention we planned this trip before and the actual intention was not to just review pizza. To be fair we didn’t hit Naples so I’m going to rate this trip as an incomplete. We did have plenty of pasta and gelato, though, and a lot of fun adventures. Below are some of the sites we saw:
It’s not in any real order, the annoyed pizza lady is next to the rhino mask. The fascist looking Task Force Service lightning dog was on a car hood we passed while leaving Rome. The other dog was wandering around Venice without a leash. The little statue next to the antennae strewn roof is David in Florence. We packed a lot into 6 days. In Rome we missed Gladiator 2 by a week, it would have been so cool to see it in Italian down the street from the Colosseum.
Eventually we had to come home. We took trains back to Hamilton Station in New Jersey from JFK. While in Penn Station I was agonizingly close to my beloved 99 cent slice pizza just outside, but Mary would have killed me if I ran out to get one. I had a Nico’s slice the following day. It had been a few days since the Pantheon and it hit the spot (not too hot, yet again). 4 out of 5. It was ok, and later in the week we were in Ambler and I had a “flatbread” at the bar with Mexican corn. I was ready for it to be a new experience, I like Mexican corn but to be honest the pizza taste overpowered the corn. I was a weird mix of pleased and disappointed. 3.4 out of 5. Later that week I had another Nico’s slice and that was also good. So in the battle of pizza between Italy and USA, I have to retain the small sample size of what I had. The best slice was Minerva’s outside the pantheon. The grumpy exasperated server added to the charm for me, I love grumpy servers. But I’ve had more pizza in the USA and to be honest I’ve had just as good pizza in NJ, Philly and NYC so USA WINS!
Like I said, we didn’t hit Naples, didn’t have pizza in Florence or Venice, or even Assisi (which was amazing otherwise, we did have fried olives there, I wish we had more of them). So maybe a rematch is in order.
NEXT EPISODE: We welcome special guest, the artist Michael Kupperman, to talk about Walter Hill’s cult classic The Warriors.
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