Podcast: Crazy Rich Asians and Glenn Close for Best Actress

Nathaniel R and Murtada Elfadl welcome Nick Davis back to the podcast this week for lots of Crazy Rich Asians talk.

Index (58 minutes)
00:01 Introductions. Randomness.
02:10 Nick has read the book that The Wife is based on!
05:01 Crazy Rich Asians talk. Lots and lots on with SPOILERS (sorry). We love the ensemble including Michelle Yeoh, Harry Shum Jr, Pierre Png, Gemma Chan, and more...
36:34 Older films we've been watching: Travels with My Aunt (1972) Your Name (2016), and Luchino Visconti's The Damned (1969)
42:00 Recent releases: I Feel Pretty, Madeline's Madeline, The Darkest Minds
50:45 Steve James new docuseries "America to Me"
54:00 Glenn Close for Best Actress! 

Referenced in this discussion
• Nathaniel's year old review of The Wife from TIFF
• Murtada's Desiree Akhavan interview
• Justin Chang's Crazy Rich Asians review
• Kelley Dong's Crazy Rich Asians review
• The 1972 Best Actress list

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

Crazy Rich Asians, The Wife

Months of Meryl: The Manchurian Candidate (2004)

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep. 

 

#30 —Eleanor Prentiss Shaw, manipulative mother of a Vice Presidential candidate brainwashed by an international cabal. 

JOHN: The one regrettable casualty of this feature-film series is, of course, Streep’s Emmy winning performance(s) in Mike Nichols’ 2003 HBO adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Perhaps we’ll have time to dig into that series in the future, but suffice it to say we rank her work in it quite highly. In 2004, Streep signed on to her first-ever remake, Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate, playing a role made famous by Angela Lansbury in John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film. Demme’s version updates Frankenheimer’s film and Richard Condon’s 1959 source novel to contemporary times, made amid the the Bush/Kerry election and thematically enmeshed in the U.S.’s “War on Terror.” Denzel Washington stars as Ben Marco, a Gulf War veteran whose puzzling memories and twisted dreams of serving in Kuwait drive him to uncover the sinister forces driving fellow soldier and newly-selected, left-leaning Vice Presidential nominee Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) into national prominence. Shaw’s blandly robotic demeanor is operated by his manipulative mother, Virginia Senator Eleanor Prentiss Shaw, heir to an American political dynasty but now working covertly for the ominous international private equity fund Manchurian Global...

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Months of Meryl: The Hours (2002)

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep. 

#29 —Clarissa Vaughan, a higher-up and hostess of the New York literary scene attempting to throw a party for her dying friend.

MATTHEW:  Even before Meryl Streep stepped before the cameras as the unraveling hostess Clarissa Vaughan on Stephen Daldry’s The Hours, the actress already possessed a role in Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer-winning, tripartite meditation on love, loss, and Virginia Woolf. Early on in Cunningham’s 1999 novel, Clarissa, while shopping for flower, catches sight of a movie star who may be Streep or Vanessa Redgrave or, much less excitingly for Clarissa, Susan Sarandon emerging from her trailer with an “aura of regal assurance.” Streep’s ephemeral appearance in what will prove to be one of the most pivotal days of Clarissa’s life signifies, quite literally, the sublime; her quasi-cameo is a perfect encapsulation of one of those chance, indirect encounters with a famous face that we use, with varying levels of embarrassment, to distract us from the mundanities of our daily routine, a glimpse of the extraordinary amid the everyday. That Streep the Star, who was gifted a copy of "The Hours" by Redgrave’s late daughter Natasha Richardson, is removed from Daldry’s film speaks to the many, many excisions that occur within any page-to-screen transfer, but it also informs us that Streep’s cinematized Clarissa Vaughan is simply beyond distraction...

I will always appreciate Daldry’s version as a rare if principally partitioned meeting of three extraordinary screen stars...

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Stage Door: "Teenage Dick" and "Boylesque Bullfight"

Stage Door is our intermittent theater column because there is more to live than cinema and also because cinema and the stage frequently interact...

Teenage Dick (Public Theater)
This very cheekily titled show -- so embarrassing to say or type! -- is actually Shakespearean. (What isn't when it comes to theater? We'd love playwrights and directors to leave Shakespeare behind for a few years and discover vast untapped realms, but they're all Bard addicts who perpetually need a fix.) If you're going to riff on the Bard, please have as much fun with it as Teenage Dick does! This comic interpretation of Richard III recast the disabled king as a teenager in hate with his boring high school and the jock star and Christian activist classmates he aims to take down via an upcoming student election...

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Moulin Rouge!'s Stage Life Begins

by Chris Feil

We've long been awaiting Baz Luhrman's masterpiece Moulin Rouge! to fulfill the seemingly ancient prophecy to make its way onto the stage. Well, that day has finally arrived as the musical's pre-Broadway tryout begins tonight at Boston's Emerson Colonial Theatre.

We have already been teased by Aaron Tveit singing the epic love song "Come What May" in a foggy theatre, but now we have the real goods we've been dying to see: Karen Olivo stepping into the large shoes of Nicole Kidman as the sparkling diamond Satine and a theatre completely transformed to Luhrman excess. While Olivo's costume (designed by this year's My Fair Lady Tony winner Catherine Zuber) might be somewhat understated from what we might have been hoping to see, we're confident there is further opulence coming once we see what the rest of the show has in store. As for the set, hold on to your hats...

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