Julie Andrews: Classic or Dud?

"My Favourite Things" are playing
Again and again
But it's by Julie Andrews
And not by John Coltrane

"This Is Hell" - Elvis Costello

an underrated actress, esp in Mary Poppins & S.O.B.

Julie Andrews growling while singing at a Jewish wedding in Thoroughly Modern Millie = one of the great pleasures of life

Verbally denoted as: "GrrrrrrrRRRRRR eedle-eedle-eedle-eedle"

if the song is OK instead of that SOM treacle, her singing is usu pleasant.

orig. cast recording of my fair lady is CLASSIC.

About as classic as it's possible to be.

There are dozens of clips of sheer gold on Youtube. Here she is singing along with her various selfs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9z_2fMsvVJU

i remember that ABC variety series she had -- like, duetting w/ Sammy Davis Jr.

she was awful as David Bowie in Victor/Victoria.

Actually, she's much more convincing as a bisexual/androgynous character than Bowie ever was, which contributes greatly to her massive stature in the GLBT communities (unlike Bowie).

Fact: she comes from the same village as Jimmy Pursey, which leads to the question, which one's faking the accent?

Could Pursey's delivery of the line "Stop being naughty, take our advice" in the song "Hersham Boys" be a nod to his erstwhile neighbour?

she was my ideal of feminine beauty when I was 7.

Great moments in history: Julie loses the role of Eliza Doolitle to the highly inferior Audrey Hepburn but wins the Best Actress oscar anyway.

http://www.achievement.org/achievers/and0/large/and0-015.jpg

Actually, she's much more convincing as a bisexual/androgynous character than Bowie ever was

she's horrible, especially when called upon to lecture Garner on sexuality.

I don't mean specifically in Victor/Victoria but throughout her entire oeuvre there are characters and performances of great significance to many, many gays AND lesbians.

Meaning the way her characters (including Maria, Mary Poppins and T.M. Millie) subverted the traditional ideas of femininity in the min-20th century, giving those on the sexual margins someone to identify with in mainstream entertainment.

on the whole I'm not very fond of Liza Minnelli either.

Not even as an influence on Bowie?

Millie is complicated, though: she wants to be a tough, modern woman just to go with the flow! But then after her last-ditch, most unconvincing attempt to be really vampy, the film ends with her actually saying "I don't want to be treated like an equal -- I want to be a woman!"

Alfred, judge V/V by 1982 standards -- it's at least as adventurous as Brokeback Lockjaw, and much funnier.

xpost My memory of Thoroughly Modern Millie is that it's pretty bad overall. I've got the soundtrack album which is 3/10 at best. Yet it won a bunch of Oscars including best song and best score.

Robert Preston's terrific, but the production numbers are tacky and songs meh.

plus Carol Channing as the extroverted heiress or whatever....

it's pretty bad overall... Yet it won a bunch of Oscars

"Yet" doesn't nec belong there.

RASPBERRIES

I did like that WWI musical Darling Lili w/ Rock Hudson -- the bomb that pretty much killed the movie musical.

i never liked her voice but her hairstyle is the worst of alltime

Victor Victoria is great, you're all off the rails. Not only is Julie Andrews K-ROWR as the charming Count Grezhinski, it's got Robert Preston, ppl. Robert Preston is even fun to watch in The Last Starfighter. You just can't lose with him.

Oh, speaking of which, and staying on topic -- S.O.B.

"Sally Miles, America's G-rated darling, in the B-U-F-F?"

Love that boobies scene from S.O.B. - may have been my first film boobies and I remember my dad delighting in showing it to me ... weird, huh. He also had an old college history textbook where he wrote 'julie andrews is a fink' on the side of the closed pages ...

she's got an early-years memoir out; her parents were drunks, and stepdad tried to get in bed with her. :( Sounds like a Mothers Day present!

I picked up Julie and Carol at Lincoln Center for $2.95 a few days ago. Been wanting to hear it ever since the mention of their 1960s medley (about 50 songs in 13 minutes) in Incredibly Strange Music. Of course, I never bothered to check youtube for it. Et voila:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctAMebjM6pc

Not as good as LMP's "Hits of '69." But it makes everyone who hears it just a little bit gayer.

what a looker

<3

who made it so such few individuals were given so much talent?

Watching S.O.B. tonight. Larry Hagman's hair = classic.

one of her funniest roles f'sure. also nice Larry Storch cameo.

"LIV ULLMAN!"

<3 Julie ANdrews

The movie was terrible! What a look into how sixtysomething fossils regarded the Me Decade.

I saw it on cable when I was 8, so it seems unfair for me to say it sucked.

Awesome Julie Andrews

<3 <3 <3 her

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72jrkIcHVbw

WHoa I just watched Thoroughly Modern Millie on Friday, and I was going to dig up nabisco's thoughts on it, and here they are. What a weird movie it was.

This circus thing is fabulous! Is it from "The Saga of Jenny – Star!"? I think I need to see this. Even the clowns did not spoil this clip. <3 the sequin devils!

Julie looks *great* with her hair like that.

Saga of Jenny is the song title
Her hair DOES look great like that!! I thought the same thing. This is agl for her.

I remember Thoroughly Modern Millie, but not very well. I remember wishing her outfits were cuter.

I agree, the outfits looked like Halloween costumes in a bad way.
I thought Carol CHanning was the best person in it.
The whole "Chinese caricatures selling pretty white orphans into sexual slavery" really was o_O

Can anyone argue with these lyrics?

Jenny made her mind up at 75 she would live to be the oldest woman alive, but gin and rum and destiny play funny tricks -- and poor Jenny kicked the bucket at 76.

Yeah, TMMillie was muy costumey and pretty disappointing for period clothes.

NOTE: I do not want any Jennies to kick the bucket now or at 76 but the lyrics of this song are v good in general and that's the part I always sing to myself when I think of this song. That and "Poor Jenny, bright as a penny -- her equal would be hard to find" and the part about how "she got herself a husband...but he wasn't hers."

There are times when Josephine Foster reminds me of Julie Andrews in the best possible way.

RIP your husband, Julie. My thoughts are with you. XOXOX

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pljyjiIMH9o

Ok, I love Julie Andrews. Still, I couldn't put my finger on it, but something about the whole smiling old timey trend reminded me of something, and I couldn't figure out what it was until I saw 5 minutes of Thoroughly Modern Millie just now (I have a night class, gotta wind down somehow) and realized that was it. The creepiness of fake nostalgia? Check. Corny? Check. Cutesy rather than cute? Clearly. It's not exactly the same, obvs, but it's at least one strain of the same bacteria.

It's not going to ruin my love of Julie Andrews because she was a lot more than whatever this is, but I cannot deny that the cardboard fake flappers and relentless smiling of the Lumineers cello girl have something in common.

I ended up watching about 15 minutes of Thoroughly Modern Millie last night at a friend's house and it was a profoundly weird, disorienting experience that raised a ton of questions, including "when did Hollywood discover LSD?"

the whole thing with Carol Channing and the baritone saxophone, I mean what the hell was that

really just what the hell was the thing with Carol Channing because every single thing I saw her do in the movie was incredibly bizarre, to the point where I started getting uncanny valley vibes from her

is it safe for me to google "uncanny valley" at work?

don't watch Skidoo! or do.

hahaha yes that should be safe but here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

I mean, Carol Channing has long been fascinating to me since that Alice in Wonderland thing she was in where she did that deranged song about jam so it wasn't a shock per se, but everything else in the movie was just as weird

(revived a Carol Channing thread to stop taking shine away from Julie Andrews, who was perfectly strange in the movie in her own right)

Never seen TMM, but it was '67, and both trad stage & film musicals were going the way of the dodo, so the studios were terrified about the lack of appeal to the boomers, so yeah they were trying anything to make em "relevant."

(that's one of the few A-line film musicals Channing did, as she was thought the kind of "big" Broadway personality who couldn't scale it down)

the 1971 'Willy Wonka..' is similarly disorientating and big-studio 'druggy', only saw it recently and was very surprised.

oh god yeah, "Willy Wonka..." is legendary for how creepy and bizarre it is

they're showing this universally panned dud in 70mm this weekend in Queens, and i really can't drag myself to it for 3 hours of 'historical interest.'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqalEWhEITw

The American Film Institute (AFI) Board of Trustees announced today that Dame Julie Andrews will be the recipient of the 48th AFI Life Achievement Award, the highest honor for a career in film. The award will be presented to Andrews at a Gala Tribute on April 25, in Los Angeles, CA. The AFI Life Achievement Award has won Emmy® Awards across five decades in its 48-year run and will return for its eighth year with TNT, followed by encore presentations on sister network Turner Classic Movies (TCM) in the fall.

omg for the first time i was sure she had died

STILL ALIVE!!!!!