HOUSE OF YES
Tagline: Meet Jackie O. She's elegant, glamorous, and well bred. When you've got it all, you can get away with murder.
PRESHOW ENTERTAINMENT: WHEN I'M OLD ENOUGH... GOOD-BYE!
Pizza: Artisan
THE HOUSE OF YES IS A DEVILISH MOVIE
FEATURING SNAPPY PATTER, WRY HUMOR
AND EVERYONE'S FAVORITE PORTMANTEAU WORD - TWINCEST
FEATURING SNAPPY PATTER, WRY HUMOR
AND EVERYONE'S FAVORITE PORTMANTEAU WORD - TWINCEST
If you would have told me that there's a movie starring Tori Spelling and Freddie Prinze Jr. that's pretty good, I wouldn't have believed you. But I saw it myself. It's THE HOUSE OF YES, based on the play (and you can really tell this was based on a play) by Wendy MacLeod. I saw this movie in the theater when it came out in 1997, and again when the Random Movie Generator selected it for tonight's feature presentation.
By 14, Jackie-O (in a flashback, where her young self is played by Rachel Leigh Cook-Nathanson) was already obsessed with Kennedy/Onassis (were they called Onassedy back then?), able to give Jackie's O's White House tour speech using her own house as a stand-in. But she breaks character when she gets to daddy's room, and from there, the tour rides off the rails. This kid's nutty, and if you need further proof - in voiceover, she tells us that after the Kennedy assassination, she, accompanied by her brother Marty (Josh Hamilton), went to an Ides of March party (umm, isn't that when Caesar was assassinated?) dressed as Jackie Onassis with a pillbox hat, ketchup for blood on her pink Chanel dress with "macaroni kinda glued on, like... brains." This is heard before we really meet anyone, which means we're in for a black comedy. Don't believe me? It's soon revealed that at 14, she slept with brother Marty. But hey, who here hasn't done wacky things when they were 14?
Soon, a hurricane knocks the power out (toldya it was based on a play), but this hurricane won't do as much damage as what's going on inside this house - a house whose exterior looks a little White House-y, but a closer look inside reveals that it needs maintenance. There's a picture missing from the wall, and some of those bookshelves feature books turned flat, as if in defiance of the others.
There are so many things going on beneath the surface of THE HOUSE OF YES, and they're all witty, wacky, funny and alas, tragic. The threat of Lesly's presence in Jackie-O's face is animalistic. And poor Lesly is no match for the rabbity Jacky-O, who grew up in a house where no one said "no" to her, hence the film's title. She is a spoiled brat, as Lesly accuses her of being in a moment of defiance.
With camera push-ins and people appearing seemingly out of nowhere (and that dramatic hurricane outside!), and even someone running for their life from that haunted HOUSE OF YES, this movie plays like a horror film. Well, I mean, a horror film on the outside and a psycho-dramedy on the inside. I suppose it's an internal horror film. The material could have been tonally gothicized, akin to WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?, but darker and funnier (though JANE is also funny). But they're not just trapped in the house because of the hurricane. These people are trapped in the house because that's who they are - a family stuck in a bubble, whose ideas of what is acceptable are skewed, and there's no one around to tell them otherwise. They're like The Addams Family, or Spielberg when he made 1941.
It's the dialogue that fuels this movie, whether it's one-liners dipped in snark, like when Lesly tells Jackie-O "I can't talk like that about your brother," Jackie-O responds, "Just pretend he's not my brother. I do." Or the characters' snitched-out stories about each other, like the foreshadowing one Anthony tells Lesly about Jackie-O flushing Marty's lizard down the toilet because he really loved it. And then there's the just plain funny ones, like: Jackie-O: "Oh please, if everyone around here is going to start telling the truth, I'm going to bed."
Posey, who has a twin brother in real life (draw your own conclusions, I'm staying out of it), is wonderful in this movie. She leads her small cast around on leashes as if they were her dogs (I saw Posey with her dog in West Hollywood once, so I know!). It's not just how she delivers her ball-of-fire patter, it's also how she listens as others are talking to her. She's processing what they are saying, rather than waiting for her next line. Posey's made some shitty movies and some great ones. I believe THE HOUSE OF YES might be her best, and undoubtedly meatiest, performance. It's a good role in general, and it's a great role for her. She makes the 85 minutes, largely in one location, breeze by. STORY SEEMINGLY FROM LEFT FIELD: I went to a SEINFELD taping once which included a line that killed me. Elaine's boss Mr. Peterman, alone in his office, is reading a newspaper. After a beat, he says to himself, "Parker Posey. I just don't get her." Obviously, Peterman hadn't seen THE HOUSE OF YES. By the way, when they ran the episode, they cut the scene before the line. So there, now you're inside Hollywood, thanks to me. You're welcome.
PRESHOW ENTERTAINMENT: WHEN I'M OLD ENOUGH... GOOD-BYE!
WHEN I'M OLD ENOUGH, GOOD-BYE (1962) is another ephemeral film. I really love these things. This cautionary tale warns us about the danger of dropping out of high school (by means of a work permit from the school, so it's not nearly as naughty as it sounds) to get a job. And that's what Doug does, despite warnings from his father and guidance counselor that with a high school education, you can get a job, and without one you can't. Of course, this was as much propaganda then as it is now. "No more part-time for me, Bonnie," he tells his girl. And even though he starts in the mail room, he dreams big, looking at suits in shop windows, getting his own bachelor apartment, and making his friends jealous...especially Carlos, who now also wants to get a work permit. But what he doesn't tell Carlos and his friends is that he got the pink slip...and I don't mean the one under Bonnie's skoyt. While Doug is hopping from dishwasher to truck unloader, we see his friends learning English and electronics, playing football and basketball. And Bonnie? She's got a new boy.
Will Doug dissolve into nothingness, or do the right thing and return to school?
What I found interesting in this 28 minute short was that the high school was interracial. Black, white, Hispanic. Pretty cool for 1962. Very cool for a film to come out of "Your State Employment Service, affiliated with the United States Employment Service."
