Emmy Review: Guest Actress in a Comedy

By Juan Carlos Ojano

More complicated than it seems, this race features acting veterans, comedic geniuses, and double the Maya Rudolph. Saturday Night Live has been dominant in this category since 2009 (the first year they were allowed to compete with the "Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program" category discontinued). So dominant, in fact, that they've only missed a nomination one year (2015) and in most of those 11 years they've had multiple nominations. SNL has won nearly 50% of the time since it began competing here. Meanwhile, Maya Rudolph makes history as the  first actress to be nominated in this category twice in the same year. Does that support her cause or result in a vote split? 

Let’s consider each nominee…

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Shelley Winters @ 100: Pete's Dragon (1977)

Concluding our Shelley Winter's Centennial party, here's new contributor Baby Clyde...

My film obsession started around the age of 12 when I somehow acquired my first "Encyclopedia of Movie Stars". It changed my life. I spent literally hours pouring over it, utterly entranced by the legends of the Golden Age of Hollywood. I remember it introduced me to the likes of Luise Rainier and John Garfield who I had never heard of before, but mostly I remember being totally confused by the entry on Shelley Winters.

Who was the glamourous woman who had been a sex bomb and serious actress before going on to win two Oscars and how was she in any way related to the harridan who had been the stuff of my childhood nightmares? Whilst I understood that actors played different roles, I don’t think I’d quite grasped at that point just how different they could be and how the same woman could go from this...

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The New Classics: Lincoln

By Michael Cusumano 

Abraham Lincoln abilities as a writer probably would have earned him a place in history even without his accomplishments as a statesman. He is surely the best writer that has ever occupied the Oval Office. Capable of expressing complex ideas with remarkable economy, he had a deft hand with allusions and was responsible for many evocative turns of phrase that resonate far outside the political context of their time, “The better angels of our nature” or “The dogmas of the quiet past”.  Hell, simply opting for “Four score and seven” over “eighty-seven” reveals a writer’s ear for the musical potential of language.

It's a fitting tribute then, that the most prominent film about the sixteenth president, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, with a screenplay by Pulitzer prize winning playwright Tony Kushner, exudes that same love of language. There’s scarcely a scene without some memorable linguistic spin. There's much to admire in Spielberg’s film from the beautifully worn production design to the momentous performances, but the real reason I’ve returned to it repeatedly since 2012 is simply because the characters are such fun to listen to. All of the film’s dramatic peaks involve the spectacle of verbal fireworks, particularly my favorite scene, where Tommy Lee Jones blasts his way out of a political trap firing off ornately worded insults like cannonballs... 

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2005: Ralph Fiennes in The Constant Gardener

by Lynn Lee

Our first glimpse of Justin Quayle is in darkened silhouette.  The second is a medium-long shot of him tending his garden.  The camera only comes in for a closeup as he’s hit with the worst news of his life—and even then, we see the impact register only gradually.  That slow burn reveal, that deceptive quietness masking layers of anguish, sums up not only The Constant Gardener as a whole but Ralph Fiennes as Justin. It's one of the finest performances of 2005 and among the best of the esteemed actor's career...

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Shelley Winters @ 100: The Middle of Her Century

We're celebrating the centennial of Shelley Winters. Here's Glenn...

That Shelley Winters has an autobiography isn’t surprising. But that book also had a sequel, Shelley II: The Middle of My Century. Hollywood loves a sequel, after all. And what a title! These 474 pages have been sitting on my shelf for a few years now since I picked it up in a secondhand book shop and unfortunately, like many books on my shelf, I have never finished it. No slight on Shelley, of course. I’m just slack.

For Shelley’s centennial, I thought it would be fun to pick quotes from random passages based on completely arbitrary rules...

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