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...budget studio fantasy. Minor Accomplishments gets off to a middling start, with a forced, satirical episode involving a cult and '70s movie icon Sally Kellerman. It gets realer and funnier in the next three, which focus on Jackie's dream: writing a long-gestating biopic about her aunt, a '30s Roller Derby star. The movie gets sold--not by Jackie but by a man she briefly dates who steals the idea. She ends up hired as his writing assistant, while--adding insult to insult--the studio decides to convert her idea into a tween movie set in the present...
...drawling feminist sarcasm rarely seen since Roseanne left sitcomdom. Cynical yet principled, bitter but still ambitious, Jackie wants to conquer Hollywood yet not be of it. (She refuses, for instance, to drive.) She's the kind of tough, tart 21st century broad you would expect to idolize a '30s Derby queen: she's armed with a Billy Wilder wit and unafraid to throw elbows. And it's refreshing to see a sitcom about a woman past her 20s who is obsessed with her career clock, not her biological one. A minor accomplishment? Maybe, but one to be proud...
...Walked by Night and Border Incident - that lifted Mann from the bondage of B-minus musicals, got him hired by a major studio (the major, MGM) and form the bedrock of his current furtive eminence. Higgins had written several Crime Does Not Pay docudrama shorts for MGM in the '30s. And when the police-procedural docudrama became a popular feature-length genre in 1945 with the success of The House on 92nd Street (produced by Louis de Rochemont, who had fashioned miniature versions of the genre for the dramatized newsreel series The March of Time), Higgins jumped in, and Mann...
...lowlifes in low lighting. And if Higgins supplied the craft of Mann's noir films, cinematographer John Alton surely served up the art. Before hooking up with Mann, Alton had a nomad's r?sum?: born in Hungary, an assistant in Hollywood silent films, shooting pictures in Argentina in the '30s, then B and C movies back in America. The two men clicked as collaborators, sparking with extreme visual tropes, each instantly elevating the other's work. "I found a director in Tony Mann who thought like I did," he told Todd McCarthy in the illuminating introduction to Alton...
...actually surprised that the Madonna audience was as young as it was - mostly people in their 20s and 30s. And I wouldn't call the concert laid-back. Programmed within an inch of its life, is more like it. The choreography, the elaborate video presentations, even Madonna's patter - there's almost no sense any more of an artist interacting spontaneously with the audience. Even the way the concert ends - her big hit "Hung Up," blackout, lights go up, goodbye! Not even an encore. Sure, encores have gotten to be as programmed as anything else, but at least there...