The Brady Bunch Movie

We Really Like Her: The Brady Bunch Movie

by    |  

We Really Like Her podcastWe Really Like Her! is a Toronto-based monthly screening series at the Revue Cinema. It is co-programmed and hosted by Emily Gagne and Danita Steinberg and aims to celebrate and highlight women in film. Our column, coinciding with our monthly screening, will give That Shelf readers a little insight into the thought process behind our film choices — from their cultural significance to why we love them.

This month, we are bringing The Brady Bunch Movie (1995) back to the big screen.

 

EMILY GAGNE
@emilygagne

Growing up femme in the ‘90s was a true gift. The era of so-called “girl power” wasn’t only a great time for empowering pop acts. It was also the heyday of studio comedies written and directed by women.

When I think of the comedy films that define my sense of humour, two ‘90s flicks immediately come to mind: Wayne’s World (1992) and The Brady Bunch Movie (1995). Directed by Penelope Spheeris (The Little Rascals, Black Sheep) and Betty Thomas (Private Parts, John Tucker Must Die) respectively, these movies manage the near impossible feat of balancing pop culture commentary with heart, their thoughtful threads about friendship and family stacked up against cameos from Alice Cooper and Davy Jones. This is why, despite their timely references, they are as good now as they were when they came out.

Advertisements

While we have been lucky to screen Wayne’s World at the Revue Cinema already, Danita and I have been waiting for the right moment to present The Brady Bunch Movie. The more underrated of the two, we truly believe it deserves to be as referenced as Wayne’s World, if not more.

Thanks to Thomas’s warm and wacky direction and the stacked cast led by Gary Cole and Shelley Long, The Brady Bunch Movie is more than just a satire of a beloved sitcom. Yes, the script references the show a fair amount (see: Christine Taylor’s Marcia getting hit in the face with a football). But it speaks to the ‘90s as much as it does the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, with the Bradys appearing adorably out of touch with their time period as they interact with the likes of RuPaul (as a fabulous guidance counselor who interacts with Jennifer Elise Cox’s pitch perfect Jan), and Michael McKean and Jean Smart (as nosey neighbours the Dittmeyers).

Betty Thomas may not be a household name like Nora Ephron, Nancy Meyers and Penny Marshall, but her comedic output deserves to be celebrated alongside them. The actress-turned-filmmaker has two films in the top 25 highest grossing films made by women (Dr. Doolittle and Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel). She is, like this movie, truly happening in a far out way!

 

 

DANITA STEINBERG
@danitasteinberg

I was raised by the glow of TV Land and Nick at Nite, both of which played the original television show so I was already well acquainted with one of pop culture’s most beloved families. I always enjoyed its wholesome and earnest sensibility. Plus, the theme song is a banger. Man, I really miss good theme songs. Anyway, by the time I saw The Brady Bunch Movie, I was primed to love it. I don’t even want to know how many times I watched that VHS tape, plus the dozens of times I caught it on cable.

One of my favourite parts about programming is when we can tap into that nostalgia, which we’ve done before with films like Crossroads, My Girl, and Mermaids. It’s so much fun to be in a theatre with an audience of millennials (and mostly women and queer folks) who were also total weirdos as kids. It’s also great to be able to share these films with the younger generation (I’m literally crying thinking about the group of tween girls at our screening of Harriet the Spy). These are movies they probably won’t stumble upon while channel-surfing because that’s not a thing that exists for them! And not to sound old, but they just don’t make off-beat, live action movies that appeal to kids anymore.

Advertisements

Like Emily mentioned, some of the best comedies to come out of the 90s were directed by women. Even though I didn’t realize it at the time, I love that these women shaped my sense of humour with films like Look Who’s Talking and Look Who’s Talking Too (Amy Heckerling), Billy Madison (Tamra Davis), A Very Brady Sequel (Arlene Sanford), Dr. Doolittle, and The Little Rascals. I’m grateful to all of them.

The Brady Bunch Movie is an oddball movie that feels like a fever dream. It’s satire, but in the kindest way possible. The writers (Bonnie and Terry Turner, Laurice Elehwany, and Rick Copp) and director Betty Thomas honoured the innocence and sincerity of the original, while also turning those old-fashioned ideals on their head. That subversiveness, paired with its campy energy and kooky cast of characters is what makes The Brady Bunch Movie a timeless classic that will never go out of style.

The Brady Bunch Movie screens at Toronto’s Revue Cinema Thursday, May 18th. Tickets available here.

Follow We Really Like Her! on Twitter and stay tuned for a look at their June screening pick!

Advertisements

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •


Comments

Advertisement

Advertisement

FROM AROUND THE WEB

Advertisement

Parker Posey in Party Girl

We Really Like Her: Party Girl

Rad as hell.

by    |  

We Really Like Her podcastWe Really Like Her! is a Toronto-based monthly screening series at the Revue Cinema. It is co-programmed and hosted by Emily Gagne and Danita Steinberg and aims to celebrate and highlight women in film. Our column, coinciding with our monthly screening, will give That Shelf readers a little insight into the thought process behind our film choices — from their cultural significance to why we love them.

This month, we are bringing Daisy von Scherler Mayer’s Party Girl (1995) back to the big screen.

 

EMILY GAGNE
@emilygagne

Parker Posey is often celebrated as a stellar supporting player, her roles in the Christopher Guest universe are seen as particular standouts in her wonderfully eclectic filmography, which also includes bit parts in Dazed and Confused, You’ve Got Mail, Josie and the Pussycats and Scream 3. But Posey is a killer leading lady too, as evidenced by the great films she starred in during the late ‘90s. This run began with 1995’s Party Girl, which gave Posey her first leading role.

What makes Parker Posey so irresistible is her dry wit, which, when paired with her willingness to “turn it up to eleven,” makes her a wholly unique personality. Both of these skills are on full display in Daisy von Scherler Mayer’s Party Girl, a film that fully understands how to channel Posey’s powers. From the scenes of her character (socialite-turned-librarian Mary) tearing it up on the dancefloor to the sequence when she discovers the joys of the Dewey Decimal System, you simply can’t take your eyes off of her or her absolutely outrageous outfits (extra special shout-out to costume designer Michael Clancy).

Advertisements

With someone else in the role, you might not be able to forgive some of Mary’s sins (see: that Middle Eastern party she throws, complete with culturally appropriative fashions). But with Posey at the centre, you can’t help but stick around to see what stackside shenanigans Mary gets up to next. You leave the film wanting an invite to Mary’s next shindig, or at least a chance to have her reorganize your record collection while you eat a falafel with hot sauce, a side order of baba ganoush and a seltzer.

As We Really Like Her! was designed to celebrate the under-appreciated women in front of and behind the camera, I hope that our Party Girl screening gives people a chance to appreciate Parker Posey for the true star she is, and always has been.

 

DANITA STEINBERG
@danitasteinberg

The only time I’ve seen Party Girl is when Emily and I took a trip to Los Angeles and we were lucky enough to catch a screening of it at the iconic New Beverly Cinema. It was a print of the film, and director Daisy von Scherler Mayer was in attendance. This was five years ago and we’ve wanted to program it ever since.

The challenge of programming films directed by women (and other marginalized filmmakers!) is sometimes they are near impossible to find. To screen a film, you have to pay a distributor for the rights to do so. If those rights don’t exist or they’ve been lost into the ether, you’re out of luck. It’s also ideal to have a DCP (Digital Cinema Package) or a Blu-ray to play, but of course, many films that are undervalued or deemed unimportant often don’t get made into those formats. In our years of programming, we’ve come up against these obstacles several times. This was the case for Party Girl. Then, a few months ago, it was announced that the film was finally getting a shiny 4K restoration Blu-ray. AS IT DESERVES! So, we jumped on it.

Like many of us, I spent my tween years watching movies in which the girl has to get a complete makeover to be an acceptable member of society: straightening her hair, ditching her glasses, getting her nose out of books. As a curly-haired, glasses-wearing bookworm, THAT WAS NOT THE MESSAGE I NEEDED IN MY FORMATIVE YEARS! Anyway, Party Girl is a different kind of coming-of-age story; one I wish I had back then.

Advertisements

What I love most about the film is just how subversive it is. It might be the only instance of a woman transitioning into glasses instead of out of them. That healed something in me. Not only that, Mary also discovers her passion for books, knowledge, and library sciences. Again, I felt seen. The movie is more about getting a career than getting a guy (even though she does that, too), which is radical even today. On a self-discovery journey, Mary is the living embodiment of fearlessly being your true self: fashionable, cool, independent, driven, life of the party, and smart all at the same time. That’s rad as hell.

Party Girl screens at Toronto’s Revue Cinema Thursday, April 13th, with a video introduction from director Daisy von Scherler Mayer. Tickets available here.

Follow We Really Like Her! on Twitter and stay tuned for a look at their May screening pick!

• • • • • • • • • •


Comments

Advertisement

Advertisement

FROM AROUND THE WEB

Advertisement

Mamma Mia!

We Really Like Her: Mamma Mia!

Thank you for the Meryl.

by    |  

We Really Like Her podcastWe Really Like Her! is a Toronto-based monthly screening series at the Revue Cinema. It is co-programmed and hosted by Emily Gagne and Danita Steinberg and aims to celebrate and highlight women in film. Our column, coinciding with our monthly screening, will give That Shelf readers a little insight into the thought process behind our film choices — from their cultural significance to why we love them.

This month, we are bringing Phyllida Lloyd’s Mamma Mia! (2008) back to the big screen.

 

DANITA STEINBERG
@danitasteinberg

Musical lovers are often woefully starved at the box office. In the fifteen years (!!!) since Mamma Mia’s release, there have only been about a dozen live-action, big-budget musicals and a lot of them are pretty bad (do not talk to me about Nine or Mary Poppins Returns). This is part of the reason I love revisiting Mamma Mia! at least once a year, especially in March when grey slush is everywhere you look here in Toronto. After last year’s screening at the Revue Cinema was such a hit, Emily and I decided it would be an annual tradition.

In 2008, it was the height of the Meryl-aissance. She’s always been one of our most talented and beloved actors, but between 2006 and 2011, she made 13 films. All of a sudden, a woman in her late 50s and early 60s was one of our biggest box office draws. That had literally never happened before and I was loving every second of it. At the time, Mamma Mia! was the highest grossing film directed by a woman, as well as starring a woman over 50.

Advertisements

On a personal note, I’ve been a huge Meryl Streep fan for most of my life, spending my high school years devouring her 50+ movie filmography. Then, several years ago, she became even more dear to me when Emily and I, very new in our friendship, started our first podcast, What About Meryl?. Over the course of a year, we watched her films and talked about them every week, learning a lot about each other in the process. So, programming and watching any Meryl Streep movie together will forever be special.

Above all else, though, I just genuinely love this dang movie. It is joy personified and you can tell the entire cast is having the time of their lives. The chemistry between Meryl Streep, Christine Baranski, and Julie Walters is off the charts, Amanda Seyfried is charming as hell, and Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, and Stellan Skarsgård are delightfully goofy, happy to take the backseat and let all the women shine.

While it may get shrugged off by some cynical grumps, I will be celebrating Mamma Mia! until the end of my days. Director Phylida Lloyd made a beautiful, colourful, feel-good movie that demands to be seen with an ABBA-loving crowd. Our screenings are a safe space for dancing and singing and crying, so the vibes will be immaculate.

EMILY GAGNE
@emilygagne

Here we go again!

When we first screened Mamma Mia! at the Revue Cinema last March, the audience erupted into applause as soon as “Dancing Queen” finished. At first I thought it was because that song is an eternal banger, the ABBA track that everyone and their grandma can recite from memory. But on further reflection I realized that this was likely a moment of catharsis for our overtly femme audience. After all, it is a scene rarely seen on the big screen: a horde of women of all different generations shirking their responsibilities to shake it by the sea, each and every one of them feeling the beat from the tambourine (oh yeah!) in their own special way.

Advertisements

While I love Mamma Mia! for the many reasons Danita states above, one of the things that keeps me (and I’m sure many others) coming back to this endlessly charming film is the fact that it unabashedly celebrates women’s agency, especially in terms of sexual expression.

Sure, it helps that someone like Meryl Streep gets more and more stunning as she ages. But her character (single mom and small business owner Donna Sheridan) isn’t the only one who gets to, well, get it in Mamma Mia!. From the scenes of Amanda Seyfried’s Sophie reading salacious stories straight out of her mom’s diary to Christine Baranski’s Tanya seducing young men on the beach, this movie isn’t afraid to suggest that women can and should do whatever they want, with whomever they want, at any and all ages.

A movie made by a woman with women in mind, it’s no wonder Mamma Mia! was such a success upon release and remains so beloved. Like the popular stage musical that came before it, it aimed to represent the underrepresented way before larger calls to action to do so, and it did it all with such passion and so little pretension. To paraphrase the eternally catchy title track, how could we resist programming it?

Mamma Mia! screens at Toronto’s Revue Cinema on March 23 at 6:45 pm.

Advertisements

Follow We Really Like Her! on Twitter and stay tuned for a look at their April screening pick!

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •


Comments

Advertisement

Advertisement

FROM AROUND THE WEB

Advertisement