Top Ten: Ewan McGregor Performances

Tuesday Thursday Top Ten

With Ewan McGregor back in theaters with Beginners and with it being Moulin Rouge! week and all, how about a list of our top Ewan performances?

I have only the dimmest recollection of A Life Less Ordinary and I just didn't want to include that awful Star Wars prequel trilogy on principle (though Ewan survived it better than most of the actors) and it's possible I forgot something else... but here we go.

10 "Jerome" in THE PILLOW BOOK (1996)
I love Ewan's ballsy (ahem) taste in material... at least at that point in his career. His screen persona often reads sweet but he's quite a wild child in terms of the cinema.

09  "The Ghost" in THE GHOST WRITER (2010)
A tricky cipher part -- who is he really? we can't know -- that he pulled off well. It helps that the movie is so damn good: top ten list!

Tilda and Ewan in "Young Adam"

08 "Joe Taylor" in YOUNG ADAM (2003)
Arriving so quickly on Moulin Rouge!'s warm heels this one was a shocker. Ewan re-embraced the amoral danger of his star-making roles in the 90s, absent the devilishly winking charisma that made his previous unsavories so palatable. Bonus points for sexing up Tilda Swinton and and expressing his love of condiments. We generally drown our burgers in them, but he prefers them on live flesh.

07  "Alex Law" in SHALLOW GRAVE (1994)
I haven't seen Danny Boyle's feature debut since the 90s but it was one sick and slick calling card with a very young long haired Ewan acing his soulless roommate act.

06 "Catcher Block" in DOWN WITH LOVE (2003)
He probably owed this flirty cocky shot at romantic comedy headlining via Moulin Rouge! but who is better suited to it. Plus, he looked so good in his suits. This is a movie I keep meaning to rewatch.

05 "Curt Wild" in VELVET GOLDMINE (1998)
We mentioned 'wild child' earlier. None of his roles embrace that concept quite as obviously. Ewan, who doesn't leash himself when acting (to our eternal gratitude), played the hell out of this unpredictable glitter-spraying, pants-dropping, drug-taking, boy-kissing, fucked-up rock star morphing from glam rock abandon to... sedated "Curt" Cobain?

NSFW

04 "Phillip Morris" in I LOVE YOU PHILLIP MORRIS (2010)
That twinkly-eyed sweetness was used to great fey affect in this uneven but funny romantic comedy about a gay romance that bloomed in prison and couldn't quite break wiggle out from behind those bars. Have any of you seen this yet? So many actors biff it when they play up "gayness" but Ewan, always so at ease on camera and free of judgements toward his characters (think about it) came across so naturally. Few actors are as good at playing romance onscreen, he nearly always makes a solid case for why the other actor/actress is gaga for him.

03  "Oliver" in BEGINNERS (2011)
A great part of the success of this whimsical melancholy exploration of a dying gay father (Christopher Plummer) and his lonely straight son (McGregor), is how sympathetically Ewan embodies the role and how much chemistry he always has with co-stars. Loneliness can be a huge self-sabotaging drag in real life -- often turning people off when the sufferer needs to connect -- but in the movies it tends to evoke empathy in audiences. You watch and you wait and you desperately want Oliver to find love and happiness and to smile broadly and often... partially because he's Ewan McGregor. Stop hiding that famous grin!

02 "Rent-boy" in TRAINSPOTTING (1996)
A performance worth diving into a toilet bowl to experience.

image via "fucking awesome ewan"

"Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television to watch Ewan McGregor movies on!' (This film should have netted him his first Oscar nomination with ease. Alas... he's still waiting.)

1 "Christian" in MOULIN ROUGE! (2001)
When The Film Experience did a "Favorite Actors of the Aughts" in 2005, Ewan McGregor landed in the top 5 (yes, I hope to republish that later this year -- donate -- to look at the entire decade rather than just its first half) and here's what I had to say, paraphrased for this new context.

Ewan makes me feel. He makes me smile. Some actors we relate to as identity surrogates. We want to be them or see the story through their eyes. In the case of McGregor I find I'm always the other characters; I'm always with him. The apotheosis is the "Elephant Love Medley" scene. Like Nicole Kidman's 'Satine' I usually start out trying to resist Ewan McGregor (my critical/cynical self usually in control). As he keeps battering away at my defenses with his unique spark, humor, and openheartedness (both as character and actor), I start to cave. I resist, I complain, I explain all the reasons why not. But before long I am totally his.

It still applies. Come what may...

Links Unchained

Twitch is following the tweets on the casting of Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained. I have to say it's a little disappointing to hear the name Leonardo DiCaprio. One of Tarantino's greatest gifts is finding A list ready performances from B and C listers and if it's DiCaprio AND Will Smith...
Deadline They're always threatening it but it's actually happening again. Craig Brewer hired to reboot Tarzan. I will be crushed, crushed I tell you, if they don't hire an unknown for the ape man.
Pajiba has an open letter to Blake Lively's publicists concerning the nude pics. Very funny. Love the ending.

Awards Daily I was going to post a "Cast This!" game for the proposed Liz & Dick movie from Martin Scorsese, but Sasha beat me to it. I kind of love her second choice: Charlize Theron. Charlize, with dark hair, would make a FAR  more convincing Elizabeth Taylor than Angelina Jolie would, I must say. Just because Jolie is the closest thing we have to Liz in terms of global icon or wealth and glamour with fascinating love life does not mean she really looks like her.
Stirred Straight Up With a Twist Friends of Dorothy (Malone). Teehee
Antagony & Ecstasy on Terrence Malick's Badlands
My New Plaid Pants Quote of the day: Bradley Cooper on Wet Hot American Summer
Stale Popcorn asks a question that does haunt me on occasion: which is the better Marilyn Monroe performance: Bus Stop or The Misfits?
Serious Film I was late linking up to this in the Moulin Rouge! post but it's definitely worth a read. Michael has a push/pull love/hate relationship with Baz Luhrmann's polarizing musical... still!

Off Cinema
TV|Line Mad Men Season 5. The writers are back in the room. Ugh, such a long wait.
Winter is Coming Bitches Hilarious Game of Thrones tumblr
TV|Line Jane Lynch to host the Emmys. 5 things we want to see. I would like to co-sign on #4 (Best in Show related gag) and hoist it up to #1.
Sketchy Details surveys the "Original Score" contenders at the Tony Awards.
Boing Boing which keys on your computer do you hit the most?
Playbill the Spider-Man musical on Broadway owes Julie Taymor tons of funny. See, this is why you pay your bills on time... how embarrassing to have to pay someone who made it such a fiasco after the fact! ;)

And here's the new Robyn video simply because we love her. So should you. And we also love anything that reinforces the potency of the unbroken take; you don't need to cut every .5 seconds to generate visual energy!

There's just something about Robyn's voice. It was created in a beeker labelled "perfect pop star pipes"

Unsung Heroes: The Editing of 'Glengarry Glen Ross'

Michael C. from Serious Film here this week with an appreciation of the craftsman that took what could have been an incredibly un-cinematic project and turned it into one hundred of the most riveting minutes of the nineties.

Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)

Whenever a prominent stage play makes the trip to the big screen it is, without fail, greeted by throngs of film writers questioning how well the material has been “opened up” for the big screen. This always gets under my skin.  Never mind that many, if not the majority, of the most beloved stage adaptations were not “opened up” at all.  No, what gets me is the implied idea that there is something inherently uncinematic about dialogue. As if audiences say things like, “I guess it’s okay when Sidney Poitier tells Rod Steiger they call him Mr. Tibbs, I just wish they were doing something cinematic at the time, like dangling from a helicopter.”

a desperate phone call with Jack LemmonThe truth, of course, is that any film that makes you identify with the events on screen is cinematic. It can take place entirely in a restaurant, a jury room, or the mind of one paralyzed man; if it makes you forget the darkened theater with the sticky floor it’s doing its job.

Director James Foley along with editor Howard E Smith knew this when he made the film of David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize winning Glengarry Glen Ross (1992).  To paraphrase what he says in the DVD commentary, Ed Harris smoking a cigarette is as much a movie moment as Lawrence of Arabia coming over a hill leading a thousand men.  In the lesser Mamet films, the stylized writing can feel stilted and airless, but not this time. Throughout Glengarry we feel as if we are privy to the interior monologues of the characters.   

I could fill ten columns highlighting perfectly constructed moments but I’ll limit myself to three favorites:

Al Pacino's nomination was the only Oscar attention for the film

• Any discussion of Glengarry has to begin with Alec Baldwin’s legendary scene. It's an audacious move to begin the movie with one actor delivering an uninterrupted eight-minute monologue, but Foley and Smith get away with it largely by breaking the whole sequence down into a series of short scenes – Baldwin belittles Lemmon, Harris confronts Baldwin, Baldwin denies them the leads – that add up to one riveting whole. 
• There is a perfectly held moment just after Spacey has opened his big mouth and blown Pacino’s big sale and just before Pacino lets loose with one of the most memorable torrents of profanity in film history. It just holds on Pacino’s face as he absorbs what has just transpired, giving the audience an all time great “Uh-oh…” moment watching the fury gather behind his eyes.
• I love the way the filmmakers relax the film’s tension just long enough to let Lemmon’s Shelly “The Machine” Levine recount what he believes to be his great triumph to Pacino. It’s a small oasis of peace and contentment before the character’s final slide down to destruction. 

Throughout the film there is never a cut for it’s own sake, never a moment where Foley and Smith showoff just to prove that it’s a movie they’re making. Instead they rely on the basic language of cinema to give the bouts of verbal violence an impact that makes most movie violence feel like playing patty-cake.

Blargh!

Words just not coming out today. I have like 8 articles in progress, no joke.  I think Moulin Rouge!'s 7,620 seconds of orgasmic fabulousity short-circuited my brain. So, your turn... WHAT'S ON YOUR (CINEMATIC) MIND? Do tell.

(More later if the words ever generate in the brain, travel down to the fingers, tap out to the keyboard, appear on the screen. I think I remember that that's how it usually works.)

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: "MOULIN ROUGE!"

In the Hit Me With Your Best Shot series we look at pre-selected movies and name what we think of as the best (or at least our favorite) shot. Anyone can play along and we link up. Next wednesday's topic is Fritz Lang's noir "The Woman in the Window".

But tonight, we celebrate Baz Luhrmann's "Spectacular! Spectacular!" which went wide on US screens ten years ago on this very day.

MOULIN ROUGE!

SHE'S CONFESSSSSSSIIIIINNNNGGGG!
She suddenly had a terrible desire to go to a priest."

We begin with a confession.

Though I was an early veritably possessed cheerleader for Moulin Rouge! since I beheld its genius on opening night at the Ziegfeld theater in NYC, though I saw it five times in the movie theater (a post '80s personal record), and though I named it Best of the Aughts when the decade wrapped, I hadn't actually sat down and watched Moulin Rouge! in full for at least five years. This wasn't intentional. I wrote about the movie so often from 2001 to 2005 that at some point I just put it on the shelf, afraid of breaking its spell. I worried, sitting down in the dark, the remote far from me as if I were back in the temple of the movie theater, 'would it still thrill?'

A silly question it was. From the first frames I was swept up. By the time Zidler and his diamond dogs came rushing at the camera (best shot!?!), a chaotic swishing mess of vibrant color, sexual promise and mashed-up music, I forgot to take any notes at all. By the time Satine, the sparkling diamond, descended from the ceiling onto the dance floor, I had completely blanked on the the "best shot" assignment. So, returning to skim again today, a decision: I would only choose a shot from the film's second half, which I haven't written as much about.

Moulin Rouge! famously borrows, sometimes with song and other times visually, from dozens of famous musicals but it's comic/tragic masks are not unlike the work of the great Stephen Sondheim. In many of Sondheim's most famous musicals, he starts out light and comic and you leave the theater at intermission for fresh air that you don't even need since you're already walking on it. Within seconds of returning to your seat, he's out to crush your heart. Into the Woods provides a famous and literal example: the first act, which is a play on famous fairy tales, ends with the "ever after" part. When you return for the second act you're left to wonder what comes next and that "happily ever after" part sure turns out to be a false bill of goods.

And so it goes with Christian and Satine's romance, which comes on, like the whole of Moulin Rouge!, in a heady hallucinatory rush of color, comedy and eroticism and then dives straight into tragedy after the (literal) romantic fireworks. Consider the juxtaposition of the shots above, one when Christian sings "I-I-I-I-I-I will always love you" (best shot!?!) and Satine is fully on board" and the much later shot of Satine, realizing she has to give Satine up singing "today's the day when dreaming ends" (best shot?!?) which she sings with her eyes glassy, not really looking at the caged bird sharing the frame, who we already know she feels a kinship towards (Someday I'll Fly Away). Both shots are audaciously clichéd, but that's how Moulin Rouge! plays it, boldly throwing ALL tropes at you and daring you to not reembrace them in a fresh dizzying form.

Zidler himself precipitates this vacant "you're dying"/ 'I'm already dead' staring and the longer I live with the movie the richer the Zidler/Satine relationship becomes. So for the moment, and there are roughly 100,000 shots worthy of the name "best" in the film, this is the one that absolutely kills. A slow cold zoom out on Zidler performing Zidler as The Maharaja (aka also the Duke) claiming Satine all over again. It drains the last life from our heroine. Art is imitating life and then life will imitate the art again.

She is mine. She is mine."

The cinematography by Donald McAlpine which so deserved the Oscars that year (sorry LotR), loves to shoot Nicole Kidman with blue light whenever she is bereft of love. Even in the "Elephant Love Medley" when she's first resisting Ewan McGregor she's lit in blue while he is glowing with warmer light right behind him. By the end of "Spectacular! Spectacular!", beginning with the exact moment when she coughs on stage, all the hot pink light which had been battling it out with the blue, vanishes to leave her like this.

She is mine. She is mine."

She always was... Zidler's that is. Christian was never able to steal her away, only playing with her in her gilded cage for that Summer of Love, 1899.

Madonna's classic "Like a Virgin" number is only used comically in the film, to mock the prostitute/john Satine/Duke relationship. But it could just as well have been used dramatically, with Satine in Christian's arms; thawed out, shiny and new. This beloved movie, ten years familiar, can still touch you for the very first time. It hasn't lost a drop of heart or magic in a decade's time. 

 

18 Children of the Revolution
Visit these fine blogs for more on this "Spectacular! Spectacular!"

• Victim of the Time "vibrant infatuations"
• Film Misery Christian, trapped
• Amiresque the blue eyes of Moulin Rouge!
• Cheap Seat Reviews thank you for curing him of his ridiculous obsession with love!
• Intafada afternoon delights
• Movies Kick Ass the camera loves her
• Film Actually "You're daying, Satine"
• Being Norma Jeane Midnight in Paris?
• Stale Popcorn "brash. cold. bright"  You can can can.
• Mosaical Musings "Roxanne... you don't have to put on the red light."
• Ahora Satine and her beauty.
• Derrek's Tumblr "romance on a grandiose scale"
• Moved by a Screen Dream Christian in agony
• Antagony & Ecstasy when in doubt, go puerile.
• Serious Film love/hate relationship: best and worst shot.
• Awww, The Movies couldn't possibly choose one.
• missemmamm "smoldering temptress?"
• Sketchy Details a sunny moment via "Come What May"
• Sorta That Guy a love that will live forever!

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