The Film Experience™ was created by Nathaniel R. All material herein is written by our team. (This site is not for profit but for an expression of love for cinema & adjacent artforms.)
Hey, if it worked for Melissa Leo's Oscar run, maybe Pee Wee Herman can grab an Emmy nomination with his glamour shot?
image via Deadline via Facebook
...which is actually hers, but let's not split hairs tufts of fur. (Doesn't it seem like the Emmy nominations have the longest lead up time of any awards wait. I keep thinking they've got to have announced them by now but they're still six whole weeks away.)
P.S. I saw The Pee Wee Herman Show on Broadway on Broadway (duh) -- can't remember if I told you -- and though i had a g-r-e-a-t time it was basically an exercize in nostalgia. Which has its place, don't get me wrong, but I want NEW Pee Wee. I hope he has something cooking that actually gets served up in the near future.
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.
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|LineMad 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"
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.
Words just not coming out today. I have like 8 articles in progress, no joke. I thinkMoulin Rouge!'s 7,620 seconds of orgasmic fabulousityshort-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.)
Friday, June 3, 2011 at 10:36AM 
image via Deadline via Facebook
