Tuesday, January 1, 2008

The Notorious Bettie Page (2005) (nat)

Don't you hate it when you decide to watch a movie on HBO that you think is going to be a fun, campy, sexy biopic of a woman overcoming the physical and sexual abuse in her past and present by taking control of her sexuality by posing for pin-up and bondage photos and that movie turns into the story of a wacko Christian who learns nothing from the world at large and returns to her wacko Christianity with more fervor than before?

That's this one. The version of the icon in this movie never takes control of her life, is the perennial naive farm girl (unaware that the bondage photos might be seen as a bit off), and is continuously taken advantage of by one man after another. She trades evangelical Christianity for the pin-up world after being abused by her father and gang-raped only to attach herself to various men and then go back to the evangelical nut-house version of Christianity after Congress begins probes into obscenity. She never learns anything and the movie has her forever failing at acting when she, in real life, had some parts in normal plays and etc. It's just not very interesting and doesn't have much movement as a story.

No comments: