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Movie Reviews: The Rocker, The House Bunny, Death RaceAlso, America the Beautiful, The Longshots and moreBy L.A. Weekly Film CriticsPublished on August 20, 2008 at 6:40pmAMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL The scattershot America the Beautiful recapitulates vintage Beauty Myth trumpery: Beauty standards make us average frumps miserable and are the conspiratorial invention of a cabal of Madison Avenue execs working in concert with Patriarchal Hegemony. Director Darryl Roberts, a well-intentioned softie, follows early-blooming 13-year-old Gerren Taylor up the ranks of supermodeldom, with visits to the plastic surgeon and wretched, pop-scored montages. The title’s indefensible; the implication is that beauty standards are a particular province of the U.S., but there’s no evidence provided as to what separates us from other modern, media-soaked nations (and even less made of the fact that, for a people allegedly obsessed with self-image, we’re fatties). The eminently obnoxious Eve Ensler shows up to bolster Roberts’ central thesis: We’re all helpless to resist the hypnotic tune of advertisers, magazine editors, and the runway bunch. Of course, in the real world, no industry is more widely mocked and disdained than fashion, and tuning out commercials is something most cognizant people learn to do by kindergarten. Nevertheless, Roberts & Co. seem to demand a paradigm shift — say, a return to the pre-industrial Eden (anorexia, we’re told, came to Fiji along with the first televisions). Good luck with that. (Culver Plaza; Regency Academy; Sunset 5) (Nick Pinkerton) GO ANITA O’DAY: THE LIFE OF A JAZZ SINGER A good deal livelier than the usual music-doc embalming, this worshipful tribute to jazz singer Anita O’Day — completed shortly before her death in 2006 by her then manager, Robbie Cavolina, and co-director Ian McCrudden — is rescued from its own adoration (and too-busy, faux-’50s graphics) by its subject: a tough cookie, racetrack devotee, and brassy raconteur who may be the least self-pitying reformed addict in the history of pop biographies. Whether in film clips dating back to her 1940s emergence in Gene Krupa’s big band, or in interviews taken near the end of her life, the mercurial O’Day remains a voracious, vivacious presence who resists being filed away, even as the directors marshal hall-of-fame testimony from her many admirers — from Margaret Whiting and Dr. Billy Taylor to actor-director John Cameron Mitchell, who compares her spontaneity to Cassavetes. As opposed to her scandalous autobiography High Times Hard Times, the movie is downright reticent on subjects such as a backstage rape and subsequent abortion. The directors prefer to secure O’Day’s due as, in the words of critic Will Friedwald, the only white jazz singer who belongs in the company of Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. To watch her landmark tea-dress slink through “Sweet Georgia Brown” at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival is to hear every syllable expressed as if at the spark of conception, fully formed and felt. (Music Hall) (Jim Ridley)
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