Carrie Rickey, Film Critic
When I read this headline on New York magazine's Vulture website, I blinked twice and thought I was reading The Onion. Truth is funnier than satire.
Your thoughts?
Carrie Rickey, Film Critic
Movies are like people. Sometimes the more you see them, the more you see in them. In 2003 when I saw Steven Spielberg's Catch Me if You Can,"I thought it was a diverting tragicomedy with deft performances by Leonardo DiCaprio and Christopher Walken. Now (it's in heavy rotation on Cinemax) the '60s-era story increasingly resembles the source from which Mad Men flows. That is to say, it's a stylish and keen-eyed survey of the fault line separating the World War II generation and its spawn.
Spielberg's chronicle of teenage con artist Frank Abagnale, Jr. was billed as "the true story of a real fake." If it seems more emotionally resonant than his other films, perhaps that's because Frank Jr.'s saga struck personal chords with a filmmaker who came of age in the 1960s, idealized the cool of Sean Connery's James Bond, was devastated by his parents' divorce and pretended to be someone he was not. (Spielberg crashed the Universal Studios lot, commandeered an office and affected an expertise he did not possess.)
Spielberg invests this story about the young man caught between the keeping-up-with-the Joneses ethos of his father (Walken) and the work ethic of the FBI agent chasing him (Tom Hanks) with heartache, humor and longing. The false identities assumed by Di Caprio's Abagnale presage the false identity assumed by the con artist now known as Don Draper on Mad Men.
Carrie Rickey, Film Critic
From the polarized reaction, you would think that the President had just named a Supreme Court nominee. But it was the president of the Academy that named an Oscar host: Eddie Murphy. A good choice, for these reasons.
Murphy, like the most successful Oscar hosts of the modern era (Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Steve Martin), possesses these attributes. He comes from stand-up and can take the temperature of the audience. He has enjoyed success in movies. He is both of the industry and can make fun of it (unlike David Letterman, Chris Rock and Jon Stewart, perceived outsiders).
Thoughts on the choice to pin the Oscars on the Donkey?
Carrie Rickey, Film Critic
Meryl Streep has one crowded mantel. Seven Golden Globes, two Oscars, two Emmys, one AFI Life Achievement Award and one Lincoln Center honor. This morning the Kennedy Center announced she will be an honoree, along with singer Barbara Cook, singer/songwriter Neil Diamond, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and saxophonist Sonny Rollins.
Soon after she receives her Kennedy Center honors, almost certainly Streep will receive an Oscar nomination -- the seventeenth for the most-nominated actress in Academy history -- for her role as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. And she will almost certainly be up against Viola Davis (star of The Help), her co-star in Doubt. My guess, without having yet seen Iron Lady, is that a combination of a terrific performance and sentiment will carry the day for Davis.
Still, given the degree of difficulty in the roles Streep takes, she should own more Oscars than the pair she possesses (lead actress for Sophie's Choice and supporting for Kramer vs. Kramer). She deserved to be cited for Out of Africa, A Cry in the Dark, Adaptation and Julie and Julia. Thoughts?
Carrie Rickey, Film Critic
Someone -- was it Cary Grant? -- described the arc of celebrity in three steps: 1) Who's Cary Grant? 2) Get me Cary Grant! 3) Get me a younger Cary Grant. For the moviegoer, the dance from introduction to acclimation can take five steps, which weirdly, conform to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' five stages of grief, only with a happy ending.
I did this dance with Meg Ryan, Will Smith and Johnny Depp. Now I'm doing it with Anne Hathaway whose film One Day opens today.
First, Denial: Who says this kid with the freakishly large facial features can act? (The Princess Diaries.)
Carrie Rickey, Film Critic
After the love for yesterday's post about directors dissing directors, here's moviemorlocks.com on classic actors slamming their co-stars, with Marlon Brando and Bette Davis on the receiving end of the most derision.
I won't quote what Joan Crawford and Bette Davis had to say about each other, but you can. My favorite among these is Noel Coward's deathless putdown of Claudette Colbert (uttered while he was directing her on Broadway). Moviemorlocks doesn't have the slam exactly right, it's "Claudette, I could wring your neck -- if you had one."
The William Holden/Humphrey Bogart bad blood comes from the set of Sabrina, where Bogie felt he was too old to play Holden's elder brother and was annoyed that the younger hunk was having his way with their co-star, Audrey Hepburn.
Carrie Rickey, Film Critic
Her last movie was released in 1968. Her last album was released in 1994. She turned down the part of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. And she turned down all other professional offers that would woo her away from her animal-rescue work. So it's happy news that Doris Day, 87, is releasing a new recording next month, My Heart.
One of the tracks is the standard "Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries," produced by her late son, Terry Melcher, the legendary producer of The Byrds, The Beach Boys and Ry Cooder. Another is the Joe Cocker ballad "You are So Beautiful." One wishes that one of the songs she sang with Sly Stone were in this collection.
In her heyday as a recording artist, Day had a voice as rich and velvety as that of Ella Fitzgerald. Martin Melcher, her third husband, encouraged her to record upbeat songs (think "Que Sera, Sera") rather than the ballads that demonstrated her vocal and emotional range. Still, in her best movies like Love Me or Leave Me and The Man Who Knew Too Much she was able to show the breadth and depth or her acting and singing skills. Those are my favorite Day movies. I'm particularly fond of her rendition of "Secret Love" in Calamity Jane and "Mean to Me" in Love Me or Leave Me. You?
Carrie Rickey, Film Critic
Fanboys and critics are cruel about the work of directors, but evidently not so cruel as other directors are -- if Flavorwire's collection of the 30 nastiest director-on-director insults is any indication. (Hat tip, Anne Thompson). Even the supremely unflappable Clint Eastwood flips one to Spike Lee.
My favorite take-down is Jean-Luc Godard's of Quentin Tarantino: "Tarantino named his production company [Band of Outsiders] after one of my films. He'd have done better to give me some money."
Also amusing is the serve-and-return between Tim Burton and Kevin Smith. After Smith tweaked Burton for stealing the ending of Planet of the Apes from a Smith comic book, Burton snorted, "Anyone who knows me knows I would never read a comic book. I would especially never read anything created by Kevin Smith." To this, Smith retorted, "Which, to me, explains [effing] Batman."
Carrie Rickey, Film Critic
Tonight at 9 pm HBO airs Gloria Steinem: In Her Own Words, an hourlong documentary as sage and sprightly as its subject. In the film, Steinem, now 77, reflects on her 50-plus years surfing feminism's second wave. And looks forward to future outrageous acts and everyday rebellions. As she joked last Thursday after the preview of the film at the HBO screening room in New York, "For many of you, this is a home movie."
Peter Kunhardt's portrait is both an engaging introduction to an extraordinary figure and a memorable odometer clocking the miles women have marched from the 1960s to the present-day.
Steinem comments on the snapshots of herself as the long-stemmed "career gal" in 1960s Manhattan. She highlighted her hair because she wanted to look like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's). She went undercover as a Playboy bunny to expose the physical and emotional abuse of The Playboy Club. In the Mad Men era, she was one of many prominent "Mad Women." Steinem was (and is) plainspoken, persuasive and as powerful as she is pretty.
Carrie Rickey, Film Critic
This week marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Raymond Nicholas Kienzle, whose nom de camera was Nicholas Ray. While Rebel Without a Cause (1955) is his most famous title, his filmography is crowded with rebels, beginning with Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell as the young outlaws in They Live By Night (1948) to John Derek's juvenile delinquent in Knock on Any Door (whose ambition is to "Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse" to Jeffrey Hunter's Jesus in King of Kings (1961).
Some random thoughts on Ray:
1) What draws me to Ray movies is their human intimacy. Even when he works in widescreen formats, it's the landscape of the human face and body that most interests him, not the geological landscape. When he was a fledgling theater and radio producer in his native Wisconsin, Ray was tapped by Frank Lloyd Wright to come to Taliesin, the architect's Utopian "learn-by-doing school" in 1932. Ray would later say that his preference for the "horizontal line," was his tribute to Wright's aesthetic.
- A List of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago
- American Women Film Journalists
- Anne Thompson on Film
- Dave Kehr on Film
- David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson
- David Edelstein's The Projectionist
- Dennis Cozzallo on Film
- Edward Copeland on Film
- Flickgrrl posts 2/07 through 5/08
- Glenn Kenny's Some Came Running
- Green Cine Daily
