#joyce van patten

[forever70s]

Joyce Van Patten on the set of "Love, American Style" (1973)

[aswell84]

Peter Falk guest stars as Carbell Carney, a musician with a dark secret. Also, guest starring as Ethel, is Joyce Van Patten.

[thebarroomortheboy]

Love has its own particular point of view. It sees everything larger than life. Nothing is too ornate, too fanciful, too dramatic. Love demands the theatrical, and then transfigures it. It turns the grotesque into the lovely, as a child does. With it, we can see what we wish to see in other people. Without it, we can't see anything at all. We can search forever, and never find.

THE TWILIGHT ZONE | 4.17 PASSAGE ON THE LADY ANNE

[moviemosaics]

Mikey and Nicky

directed by Elaine May, 1976

[clemsfilmdiary]

The Stranger Within (1974, Lee Philips)

6/3/24

[animezinglife]

Grown Ups is a perfect example of how a simple movie concept that doesn't try too hard and stars the perfect cast will always hold up.

[yetihideout]

Yaphet Kotto and Joyce Van Patten squishing imaginary roaches in Larry Cohen’s incredible Bone, 1972. 🪳

[citizenscreen]

Happy birthday, Joyce Van Patten

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/11/2022: MONKEY SHINES

MONKEY SHINES drives me crazy for the sole, stupid reason that for much of my life, I have been walking the earth assuming that it is a Stephen King adaptation. This is absolutely not true. I'm sure I just think this because of George Romero's frequent collaboration with King, and because its famous poster so has the bold, exaggerated look of pulp horror covers from the 1980s. MONKEY SHINES is adapted from a novel by British author Michael Stewart, but the screenplay is by Romero himself. It is entirely possible that by 1988, a lot of King's style and approach may have rubbed off on the director, so maybe I'm not completely crazy for harboring this delusion: it's got psychic powers, a domestic animal that goes berserk, and small town drama overlayed with outrageous sci-fi and horror elements. But still, it bugs me that I thought this. I should know better!

MONKEY SHINES is a deeply weird movie that passes for normal due its above-par production value, fine performances, name brand actors, and naturalistic dialog. Perhaps also in the heyday of writers like King and Michael Crichton, this wacky sci-fi thriller, about a paraplegic who forms a corrupting psychic link with his helper monkey, didn't seem so unusual. But inside of this mainstream thriller is a freaky psychodrama with which Freud would have had a field day.

A Capuchin helper monkey named Ella enters the life of law student Allan Mann (Jason Beghe) when an accident renders him paralyzed from the neck down. His days are brightened by Ella's surprising competence and seemingly personal affection for Allan—and by the arrival of her trainer Melanie (Kate McNeil), who also develops personal feelings for Allan. However, the deeper Ella and Allan's bond grows, the more Allan is given over to emotion, struggling to control his escalating rage. Eventually it comes out that Ella is a test subject for an experimental drug, and as the resulting mind meld with Allan makes him more animal than man, it also enables Ella to act out Allan's wrathful impulses.

Somehow the monkey part of the movie isn't as bizarre as the interpersonal drama. When Allan becomes paralyzed, his whole existence turns into a power struggle with the women in his life. His plight begins when he is cuckolded by his own surgeon, and without his girlfriend around to help out, his mother Dorothy (Joyce Van Patten) forces her way into the house. Dorothy forms a sort of infantilizing tag team with the pious Nurse Maryanne (Christine Forrest, Romero's then-wife and frequent collaborator), from whom Melanie and Ella have to defend Allan. Where Maryanne is a castrating school marm type, Dorothy is inappropriately intimate with her son, insisting on bathing him and trying to drive out his new girlfriend. Melanie is mainly worried about Allan's increasing loss of civility…and also, perhaps, about Ella's increasing possessiveness. The monkey is firmly the other woman. There are male antagonists in the film—ambitious, inhumane scientists played by Stanley Tucci and Stephen Root—but they tend to take a back seat to Allan's conflicts with women. From his wheelchair-bound position, Allan needs to literally grow up, wresting power back from his nurse, putting his mother in her place, and choosing a mature relationship over the regressive, obsessive affair with the monkey.

MONKEY SHINES may look like a regular mainstream movie of the period, but with all that going on, it has more in common with a neurotic exploitation movie like THE BABY, or SOMETIMES AUNT MARTHA DOES DREADFUL THINGS, or BUTCHER, BAKER, NIGHTMARE MAKER. This may not be the sort of place where you normally expect to find a bunch of psychoanalytic rumination, but it's sure in there, and it's part of what makes MONKEY SHINES so surprising. That, and the fact that it's not a Stephen King movie.

But, there is one more thing about MONKEY SHINES the surprised me, personally. When I first started dating my husband some eleven years ago, we hit it off immediately, but we seemed like a pretty unlikely pair. I was (am) an inverted little horror ghoul, and he was almost aggressively normal: a friendly, handsome data specialist who liked beer, bikes, and coffee, and whose cultural tastes skewed just a little indie. I wasn't sure what I could have to offer such a person, but on our third date, he made an effort to reach across the aisle by informing me that when he was a kid, his mother's therapist was the former owner of one of the monkeys in MONKEY SHINES. We don't know if it was the star, Boo, or one of the lab extras (probably the latter), but this therapist had a framed lobby card mounted on his waiting room wall featuring the movie's shocking key art. My husband used to have to stare at it while he was waiting for his mother's appointment to end, and when he finally asked about it, he learned that the doctor used to have one of the movie's animal performers. When my then-new boyfriend told me this, I nearly fell out of my chair, and we've been laughing about it ever since.

[loveboatinsanity]

[randomrichards]

MIKEY AND NICKY:

A frustrated man

Tries to protect friend from mob

Night with a train wreck

[real-russ-jackson]

Day 26 — with friends

[cinemacentral666]

This Must Be the Place (2011)

Movie #1,063 • FRIDAY WILDCARD

If you can past whatever the hell it is Sean Penn is doing here (and I totally see how you might not!) you'll find a really weird and original, beautiful and insightful movie here. Not sure why I slotted this one in, but it ended up being right in my wheelhouse. Penn plays a retired goth-rocker in the vein of The Cure's Robert Smith who hunts down a Nazi criminal after the death of his father. It was directed by the guy who did the entire 19-episode run of The Young Pope/The New Hope on HBO which I really liked: Paolo Sorrentino. I haven't seen any of his other work but I am definitely going to now.

The tone is very similar to The Pope shows, right down to the insertion of visual non sequiturs, which seem cheap and artsy-fartsy on the surface if you don't submit to their grand weirdness and dedication to oblique storytelling (I saw some kind of parallel between the Vatican kangaroos and the albino buffalo, though please don't ask me to expand on that).

This movie is not about meaning but about feeling. And while it's artifice is ridiculous (not to mention Penn's ENTIRE deal), sure, that feels intentional and only serves the greater purpose more directly. Maybe it's an excuse to film goth Sean Penn wearing short shorts battling Frances McDormand in a heated game of handball in an empty pool...

...but maybe it's something much deeper. What that something is might differ greatly person to person. I'm still wrapping my head around it, honestly, but it's a place I'd much rather be than where most other films leave me.

SCORE: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️¼

[mythirdparent]

[columboscreens]

[hauntingbutch]

cant stop thinking about columbo talking to an unmarried older woman and being like sorry ma’am i thought you were… and she cuts him off and goes an old maid? and then later she’s like i know you have a secret. and not to be weird about the detective show but what does it mean what does it all mean……