Two Sonny and Cher Films from MGM

Chastity (November 7/04)

Chastity is a thoroughly bizarre and hopelessly dated relic starring Cher and written by Sonny Bono, though there's clearly a reason Bono would never pen another screenplay. Cher stars as the title character, a mentally unbalanced drifter who talks to herself. There's no real plot here to speak of; the entire film essentially consists of Chastity wandering from one town to the next, where she becomes involved with a variety of oddball characters. Director Alessio de Paola imbues the movie with the sort of excess one expects out of a film from the '60s, while Bono's script offers Cher the opportunity to act her heart out (her performance is actually one of the few redeeming elements in the movie). But the movie's unrelenting self-consciousness makes it impossible to ever really take it seriously; Chastity isn't a believable character in the slightest, and it's impossible to shake the feeling that the film exists solely because Sonny and Cher were looking for something to do.

out of

Good Times is an ideal companion piece to Chastity - though this is far from a compliment. The film is just as pointless and obnoxious as Chastity, having been made to appeal exclusively to fans of the singing duo. There's not much of a plot here; Sonny and Cher receive an offer to make a movie, and Sonny imagines himself in a variety of different genres (ie Westerns, detective movies, etc). Poor George Sanders (he was in All About Eve, for crying out loud!) appears as the film's villain, while William Friedkin makes his directorial debut (if nothing else, Good Times remains one of the few films in his oeuvre to lack a gritty car chase). The movie's incredibly thin storyline seems to exist for the sole purpose of allowing Sonny and Cher to sing a lot of silly pop songs and appear in cheesy sketches. And though the two performers do possess a good amount of charisma, it's just not enough to disguise the fact that this is nothing more than a bloated vanity piece.