A Star is Born... in the Ozarks

by Cláudio Alves

Ten years ago this weekend, the public met a new Hollywood star in the making. The movie that brought the world a new silver screen goddess wasn't the sort of big studio production that in the old golden days would've been the logic harbinger of stardom. Quite the contrary, the film in question was a modest indie. Director Debra Granik's Sundance prize-winning critical hit would go on to become a sleeper hit in arthouse release. We're talking, of course, about Winter's Bone and the performer bound for stardom's was future Academy Award-winner Jennifer Lawrence…

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"The Landlord" at 50

by Mark Brinkerhoff

50 years ago today the one and only Hal Ashby, then an Oscar-winning film editor (In the Heat of the Night, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!) made his directorial debut with the release of The Landlord. Based on a 1966 novel and starring an almost inconceivably baby-faced Beau Bridges, its plot is fairly run-of-the-mill today but must’ve seemed quite daring for the time: A young man named Elgar (?!), who comes from wealth and lives with his parents at their Long Island estate, decides to buy a “rundown” tenement house in the dicey, gentrifying neighborhood of Park Slope. (Imagine!)

The tenants are black, he’s white, and his scheme is to evict them all so he can convert the property into something posh—a vanity project, if there ever was one. 

Things do not go according to (his) plan...

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50th Anniversary: The strange case of Gig Young's Oscar

As a sequel to our recent look-back at the 42nd Oscars , please welcome guest contributor Orrin Konheim...

Fifty years ago, the Academy Awards marked an odd milestone when they awarded a Best Supporting Actor Oscar to Gig Young for They Shoot Horses Don’t They (1969) although they didn’t know history was being made at the time. Eight years later, Gig Young would shoot his wife of three weeks (and then himself) in the only known instance of an Oscar-winning actor committing murder.

His tale is a disturbing one with few answers...

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To Uma on her 50th Birthday

Happy 50th Uma!by Mark Brinkerhoff 

There is the world before Uma Thurman, and the world after Uma Thurman—or at the very least for the world of actressexuals (unite!). A movie star like no other, her origins are almost as mythical as her stature. The daughter of an erstwhile Buddhist monk and a former high-fashion model—I kid you not—Uma, as mononymous as any great, was born on this date in 1970 and lived mainly in the rural environs of interior New England and upstate New York (Woodstock, to be exact).

 

A self-described awkward, introverted child, she nonetheless cut an arresting figure, catching the acting bug early. She followed in her mother’s footsteps as a professional model starting at the tender age of 15. 

 

Uma's early Vogue cover. Shot by Patrick "We have Patrick" de Marchelier

 

Soon enough she landed in magazines and on the cover—twice—of British Vogue, where her Amazonian proportions and striking visage were put to effective, glam ‘80s use...

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"Rob Roy" at 25

by Eric Blume

It’s been a quarter century since the release of Rob Roy, a film directed by Michael Caton-Jones and featuring the pairing of Liam Neeson and Jessica Lange. The period drama is about the eponymous 18th Century Scotland clan chief Robert Roy MacGregor.

Evidently there was a box-office hunger for this type of film around 1995, since one month later Mel Gibson’s Braveheart opened. The latter tragically went on to win Best Picture some nine months later.  Both films feature tales of broad-stroke heroism, where the main figure is portrayed as a rebel fighting the system, full of masculine bravado and BDE (the un-fun kind)...  

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