Tuesday, December 30, 2014

The Long Double Feature

Ace's plan was a double feature of FUN IN ACAPULCO and BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA. It didn't quite work out. A few weeks ago we watched FUN IN ACAPULCO but we got started late, and only last night did we get around to BRING ME THE HEAD. Anyway, that's pretty quick compared to our George Lazenby Film Festival. The protagonist of each movie in our double feature is an entertainer in a Mexican bar. In the latter, Warren Oates's lover strums her guitar and sings to him as they race down the dusty road in a red car. In the former, Elvis Presley sings to a "lady bullfighter" about how there's "No Room to Rumba" in her red sports car, if you know what I mean, which brings up an interesting point. Angela said - and I agreed - that Elvis made the wrong choice vis-à-vis the lady bullfighter, who, as Angela pointed out, was a "bad-a**" and also sexually progressive, with a thriving career to boot, whereas Elvis went for the "good girl," who was the daughter of the hotel chef - the chef was a disgraced count or baron or something... never mind... and Ace disagreed with us and kept saying of the chef's daughter, "But she's Ursula Andress! She's Ursula Andress!" But she's not "Ursula Andress" in the movie! She's the chef's daughter, and very vaguely defined otherwise. As you know, I like just about everything, but I was afraid we were going to see some stock footage of bullfighting in the movie because of the "lady bullfighter" and I just don't like any movie with bullfighting in it (see also). But there was no bullfighting, though in a funny touch, Elvis seemed to work at a nightclub where he was only allowed to sing about bulls. He sang a song about bulls and then the next time he sang at the club he sang a different song about bulls! Ha ha ha! I imagined him going to the manager, like, "I'd like to sing about birds tonight," and the manager is like, "No! Only bulls! My customers only like songs about bulls!" At the beginning of BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA, when the guy tells everybody to bring him the head of Alfredo Garcia and they all jump in their cars and airplanes and whatnot and zoom away to look for the head of Alfredo Garcia, Dr. Theresa said, "It's like IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD." An apt analogy!