Over at Thompson on Hollywood, blogmeister Anne Thompson has some advice for Renee Zellweger, whose career has sailed slowly into the doldrums so often encountered by actresses of a certain age.

I know some readers are allergic to Zellweger, whose chipmunk charm is not universally beloved. (Consider Jezebel's Women Who Women Love to Hate.) But I've very much liked her since I saw her in The Whole Wide World (1996), in an astonishing turn as Novalyne Price, the real-life 1930s Texas scribe who gets involved with Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian. Shortly after came Jerry Maguire, where she brought pith and marrow to Cameron Crowe's Manic Pixie Dream Girl (cf: Kate Hudson in Almost Famous and Bridget Fonda in Singles). While I haven't liked RZ in everything, sure liked her dramatic depth as the daughter in One True Thing, her comic frivolity as  Bridget Jones, her send-up of Doris Day in Down With Love, her brittle Roxie Hart in Chicago and that Ma Kettle character she played in the otherwise tepid Cold Mountain.

As everyone knows, 40 is a dangerous age for actresses -- including Meryl Streep, who muddled through She-Devil and Music of the Heart before re-emerging -- much to her surprise -- as both Actress and Movie Star in Adaptation, The Devil Wears Prada, Doubt, Mamma Mia! and Julie & Julia. Similarly, Diane Keaton foundered after 40 until she found Nancy Meyer -- who created Baby Boom, Father of the Bride and Something's Gotta Give for her All it takes is one good role -- think of Susan Sarandon's Annie Savoy in Bull Durham (she was 42) -- to transform an aging babe into a bankable goddess. Sandra Bullock is having a very good year with The Proposal and buzz is promising on her next film, All About Steve. Diane Lane has found a niche in starting-over films Under the Tuscan Sun and Nights in Rodanthe. Would that Angela Bassett, Michelle Pfeiffer Meg Ryan and Zellweger find the right material.

So I'm watching Taking Woodstock, Ang Lee's charmer about Elliot Tiber (Demetri Martin), who inadvertently made the storied Festival happen, and in walks Vilma, a musclebound blonde in a candy-pink dress, resembling Mamie Van Doren with stubble. S/he speaks in a familiar voice, like honey mixed with molten asphalt. Holy cow! Liev Schreiber in drag?!?

And how does Schreiber compare with other movie cross-dressers? Very favorably. While the effect is largely due to the contrast of pink frock with Deep Purple voice, his steel-ribbed sensitivity made me think he'd make a great Blanche DuBois.

I'd nominate him for cinema's genderbender Hall of Fame. Already enshrined? Greta Garbo's Queen Christina, Katharine Hepburn's Sylvia Scarlett, Doris Day's Calamity Jane, Julie Andrews' Victor/Victoria, Gwyneth Paltrow's turn in Shakespeare in Love and  Hilary Swank's Brandon Teena in Boys Don't Cry.   (I also would pull for Joyce Hyser in Just One of the Guys and Amanda Bynes in She's the Man, teen movies that dance over the slippery issues of heterosexual boys suddenly attracted to boys, not knowing that the object of their affection is a girl in jeans.)  Also enshrined are Cary Grant in  I Was a Male War Bride,  Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot, Dustin Hoffman's Tootsie, Robin Williams' Mrs. Doubtfire, Patrick Swayze, John Leguizamo and Wesley Snipes in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, and Terence Stamp, Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Nathan Lane in The Birdcage.

Stars are generic. A character actor is specific. Consider Stanley Tucci, the man with the liveliest deadpan on screen. The less he seems to do, the louder you laugh. Take his performance as Paul Child, spouse of the French Chef, in Julie & Julia. He doesn't have a lot of dialogue, but his reaction shots are the bearnaise to Meryl Streep's skirt steak. The movie is unimaginable without him. You could set Greenwich Mean to his timing. In the scene where Julia turns a bushel of onions into a mountain of dice, Tucci's Paul enters the kitchen, and lurches back into the wall in the face of the onion odor, eyes tearing. The move is balletic slapstick, a combination of Mikhail Baryshnikov and Stan Laurel.

It's worth noting that Stanley T played a Stan L-type figure in The Impostors, the hilarious 1998 movie he also wrote and directed, starring opposite Oliver Platt as the Oliver Hardy figure. (The two likewise played slapstick guys in Beethoven, where Tucci was the dogcatcher.) And that he was sublime in The Big Night, the mouthwatering indie he co-wrote, co-directed and co-stars with his high school bud Campbell Scott, about the immigrant restaurateurs who make a dinner for Louis Prima.

With the exception of TV biopics such as Winchell, most of Tucci's starring roles have been in material he initiated. In big-star screen fare such as America's Sweethearts and The Devil Wears Prada, his character literally supports the film. He functions as the fulcrum keeping the movie from seesawing.

Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana are one sexy couple in The Time Traveler's Wife, the film based on Audrey Niffenegger's popular novel about the guy (Bana) whose genetic anomaly causes him to slip in and out of time. But am I the only one who gets brain cramp during time-travel movies such as this where the past is dependent upon future that is  dependent upon the past? As Roger Ebert noted earlier this year of  J.J. Abrams' Star Trek -- where alternative universes intersected, enabling the Old Spock and the Young to be in the same mobius-strip timespace --  these movies are more fiction than science. It didn't bother me so much in Star Trek, but when I start thinking whether it's possible for a character to be in and out of time at the same time, it takes me out of the movie. (Having said that, the Harry Potter film -- was it Azkaban? -- where Harry and Hermione warn themselves of imminent danger, had a reasonable explanation, which I can't remember.)

Still, from The Time Machine to Time Bandits, I've always been a sucker for time-travel stories (including, as I admitted sheepishly in another post, the much-maligned but preposterously entertaining The Lake House and Kate & Leopold). In time-travel films I much prefer the wormhole explanation to most others. Very much like Contact, and also a little-known film called Happy Accidents (with Marisa Tomei and Vicent D'Onofrio), and Alain Resnais' underrated Je t'aime, Je t'aime. Also Terry Gilliam's The Twelve Monkeys and the movie that inspired it,  Chris Marker's La Jetee, And of course, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Terminator and Peggy Sue Got Married. Your favorites?

They called Gloria Grahame, that most enigmatic and evocative of screen presences, a suicide blonde because "she dyed by her own hand." The compulsively watchable, Grahame -- Oscar winner for The Bad and the Beautiful but more widely known as the vamping Violet in It's a Wonderful Life and Ado Annie in Oklahoma! -- is the star du jour Thursday August 13 on Turner Classics Movies (TCM).  The hard-to-see In a Lonely Place (1950), her best film (directed by her then-husband, Nick Ray) will show at 8 pm and Fritz Lang's white-hot The Big Heat (1953) at 9:45 pm. I can't imagine a better double-bill, one that eloquently captures sexual paranoia (Lonely Place, co-starring Humphrey Bogart as Grahame's hot-tempered lover) and social paranoia (Heat, with Glenn Ford as an honest cop rooting out mobsters and Grahame as a mob moll turned informant).

On screen Grahame, of whom a biographer claimed could trace her genealogy to Plantagenet royalty, specialized in the kind of dames no one curtsied to. She wasn't like anyone else, "the girl with the Novocaine lip," scribes wrote of her immobile upper lip that gave her a sexy overbite, this gal who gravitated to the role of  the worldly, slightly naughty, woman ever looking to trade up. You know, the good-bad girl. The first time I was aware of her flirty, deadpan delivery was in Macao (1952) -- Joseph Von Sternberg's very entertaining noir comedy starring Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum -- where Grahame plays the wife of a casino owner. When Grahame sees that a gambler has used his wife's diamonds as collateral, her itchy fingers draw to the jewels. "Diamonds would only cheapen you," her husband scolds. "What a way to be cheap!" she exclaims in a line that might have been her motto.

She's warmer as Bogart's neighbor in Lonely Place, a onetime kept woman now keeping company with Bogart's unstable screenwriter. Quoting Bogart's introduced screenplay, she delivers one the best lines in film history: "I was born when he kissed me; I died when he left me; I lived a few weeks while he loved me." (While making the film, her marriage to Ray was on the rocks. Gossip was that she had become romantically involved with her stepson, Tony Ray, then 14, whom she subsequently married when he came of age.) She was warmest as Debby, former moll, in The Big Heat, coming to Ford's hotel room, looking around at the bad furniture and joking, "What do you call this style, Early Nothing?"

I wasn't at Woodstock, but I was at "Woodstock." So, too, can you be on this 40th anniversary of the event billed as "The Aquarian Exposition" by renting Michael Wadleigh's macrocosmic concert film headlining Joan Baez, Joe Cocker, Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone and The Who (plus an audience of 400,000). Or by renting Tony Goldwyn's microcosmic A Walk on the Moon, an emotionally- and erotically-charged film with Diane Lane, Viggo Mortenson and Anna Paquin set in 1969 about a Generation Gap-defining mother and daughter who attend the concert, separately and surreptitiously, with their boyfriends. And I look forward to Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock, due in theaters August 28.

Your favorite Woodstock performance? Movie? Defend your choice. I wasn't much of a The Who or Sly and the Family Stone back in 1969 (my tastes ran towards Baez, Hendrix and Santana), but looking at the film again for the first time in 39 years, I was overwhelmed by how much The Who ("Feel Me") and Sly ("Higher") distilled the flower power of the moment. For me, both Woodstock, made in 1969, and A Walk on the Moon, in 1999, are time capsules -- one captured at the moment, the other looking at 1969 through the kaleidoscope eyes of 1999.

According to sources of the well-sourced people.com, Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, stars of Twilight and the forthcoming New Moon, are more than co-stars. In the tradition of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, Pattinson's and Stewart's impressive screen physics has led to an off-screen romance, a development that will delight fans of the celebs who equally excite the editors of Tiger Beat and Vanity Fair.

After Catherine Hardwicke, director of Twilight, auditioned actors for the roles of intense Bella and velvet vampire Edward, she told Flickgrrl of the "electric charge" sparked by their screentest. So impressed was Hardwicke by the pair's chemistry -- and physics -- that she issued a warning to Pattinson, then 21, to steer clear of Stewart off camera because she was a minor. Besides, Stewart also had a bf, Michael Angarano.

Now that Stewart is 19 and Angarano appears to be out of the picture, the New Moon stars are keeping company. A veteran Hollywood observer might want to tell the couple that for every Bogart and Bacall (or Brad and Angelina or Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins or Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas) who play lovers on a movie set before seguing into the real-life roles, there are Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams, Russell Crowe and Meg Ryan and Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez for whom, once off the set, the candle is snuffed by the Santa Ana winds.

John Hughes, the onetime advertising copywriter turned filmmaker beloved  for family-friendly movies such as Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Home Alone, died of a heart attack this morning in Manhattan, reports Variety. The genial Midwesterner (he was a Michigan-born Chicago transplant who brought moviemaking to his adoptive city) was  Hollywood's High School Activities director. He made many movies set in secondary schools and the signal event in them was Who Would Take Molly Ringwald to the prom.

His movies with Ringwald defined the hair-band 1980s and his Matthew Broderick truancy comedy Ferris Bueller likewise defined the decade's ethos: Playing hard rather than working hard was the goal. I think of these movies very fondly even as I muse that as Hughes got older, the age of his protagonists got younger. He began with the teenagers of Sixteen Candles (1984) and proceeded, like Benjamin Button, to Baby's Day Out (1994). I have to ring off to write his obit, but I'm very very sad. Favorite Hughes movie? I'm going for Some Kind of Wonderful (1987).

Budd Schulberg, the self-described "Hollywood prince" who became the industry's keenest chronicler with the caustic 1941 novel What Makes Sammy Run?,  the screenwriter who worked with both F. Scott Fitzgerald (on Winter Carnival) and with Spike Lee (on a Joe Louis script, still unproduced), the Oscar-winning writer of the two seminal films of the 1950s, On the Waterfront and A Face in the Crowd, the conscience-pricked citizen who, after he witnessed his adoptive city in flames, founded the Watts Writers Workshop in 1965, has passed. He was 95.

One of the most colorful and complicated figures of the 20th century, Schulberg was the son of Paramount Pictures mogul B.P. Schulberg and a Hollywood brat who was chauffeured in a custom-made limo to the newstand where he hawked magazines. The childhood stutterer who trained pigeons (a hobby he gave to Marlon Brando's Terry Malloy in Waterfront) developed a confident and formidable voice as a screenwriter, sportswriter and novelist. The Harder They Fall, his 1947 expose of prize-fighting, became a best-seller and popular 1957 Humphrey Bogart film, the actor's last.  The Disenchanted, Schulberg's novel dramatizing his sodden collaboration with Fitzgerald, was a 1950 publishing hit. And to this day, his short story "A Dinner at Ciro's" remains the most perceptive group portrait of the movie industry. In 1951, Schulberg , the so-called "socialite Socialist" who had been a member of the Communist party in the 1930s, named names to the House Un-American Activities Committee, a move that brought him jeers from the Left and cheers from the Right.

Were these the only elements of his biography, Schulberg would be universally known. But he moreover had the uncanny instinct -- like an intellectual Forrest Gump -- of being an eyewitness to and major player in history. As James Fisher's lovely post in the Irish Times notes, "He was standing next to his friend Bobby Kennedy in a passageway at LA’s Ambassador Hotel when RFK was murdered in June 1968. He was seated ringside when his friend Muhammad Ali reclaimed his heavyweight title from George Foreman in Zaire in October 1974. That was nearly three decades after Budd not only arrested Leni Riefenstahl (Hitler’s favorite filmmaker) while working for his friend the legendary director John Ford in the wartime OSS; he wrested from her an implicit admission she knew about the Nazi death camps, a truth she subsequently denied for decades."