My Loyal Subjects...

Editor's Note: [trumpets! ♫♩] Please welcome back to The Film Experience our favorite very special guest.

Tis I, The Bening!

I thought I'd share a picture of my recent audience with loyal subjects like you in New York. Were you there? Someone made a terrible mistake and I was not on a raised dias. But the kids, they were all right.

Except this one who forgot to bow.

It's been two years since I last addressed you but I know that you have not forgotten about me. Especially not during Oscar Season where thoughts are surely never far from me. Who do you think we voted for? 

Your guesses will amuse us even more than Ms Swank's current film career!

Her Majesty, Annette.

What is Happening To My Girls?!?

Our Miss Hathaway and The Bening, both wounded!

Get well soon divas.

Monologue: Annette Bening. Still on the Grift.

1990 was the year in which I saw the least amount of movies in theaters. I was overseas and when I returned I devoured everything. I don't recommend missing an entire year of cinema but I also can't deny that it's fun to catch up in massive marathons. My favorite shiny new  plaything that year turned out to be Annette Bening. She had appeared in two movies before her breakthrough (The Great Outdoors and Valmont, the latter of which was barely released) but I wasn't familiar with her. In 1990 she ascended. She swiped a scene wholesale from Meryl Streep in Postcards from the Edge (in a way we didn't see again for another 18 years when Viola Davis rationalized away her son in Doubt) and sparkled and teased as Myra Langtry in The Grifters. She deservedly won her first Oscar nomination but the bid was doomed. "You in danger, girl" Ghost was a juggernaut and Whoopi Goldberg was impossible to deny..

Myra, delighted and curious, realizes her boyfriend is "on the grift"

Director Stephen Frears, then at his creative peak hot off Dangerous Liaisons, handed Bening The Grifter's pivotal centerpiece. It's not one scene exactly nor an unbroken monologue but a shifting series of impressions and exchanges in which Myra reveals her past (in voiceover flashback) and begins to rope in her future, altering the game board on which mother and son con artists Roy and Lily Dillon play (John Cusack and Anjelica Huston, the latter giving a mammoth Oscar-worthy performance.)

After Myra witnesses her boyfriend Roy "working the tat on those sailor boys"  she drops enough strange lingo to choke a lesser actress in an effort to rustle his cautious feathers and reveal himself.

Oh come on, Roy. 'The tat,' what you do for a living.❞

More including new Bening films...

Click to read more ...

Mama Bening Baby Wiig

JA from MNPP here. Have you heard about Imogene? Out next year, it's Kristen Wiig's follow-up to Bridesmaids - actually it's a project she'd been trying to get off the ground for ages that the super duper success of Bridesmaids made possible. It's directed by the duo of Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini who made the splendidly sour American Splendor, and is similarly dark in comic tone. Wiig plays the title character whose plan of using a suicide attempt to win back an extra boyfriend somehow, weirdly, backfires, and she's forced to move home and live with her... let's say difficult mother played by Annette Bening.

Bening! So surely you guys have heard about this movie already. Well there are some pictures and a poster online today, which you can see here. There's something reminiscent of Bening's Mars Attacks! character to the look of her character, isn't there? I say that with awe and admiration - that's one of my very favorite Bening performances.

Also in the cast are Matt Dillon and the chipmunk-cheeked croooner Darren Criss from Glee, the latter apparently playing a love interest for Wiig. Cue everybody gaping sack-jawed at the age difference - she's 38 while he's 24 - which hardly merits a mention when its say Methuselah Steve Martin pawing at Toddler Heather Graham or the like.

This is one of my most anticipated movies for 2012. While I love the ridiculous over-the-top characters Wiig hammers away at on SNL she's proven herself really smooth at how she's branching out into a movie career, playing identifiably human characters (so good in Whip It), complicating things when she could just go for an easy bug-eyed laugh.

Kristen Wiig & Annette Bening in "Imogene"

The Bening and freshly Bridesmaids minted Kristen Wiig are filming the comedy Imogene (2013) just 20 plus miles from where I type this. I absolutely cannot wait and my impatience demands that I assume this will get pushed up to 2012 calendar before long since they're already filming in summer 2011.

 photo src

Everyone knows Wiig is funny after years on Saturday Night Live and the Bridesmaids smash but people always seem to forget how hilarious The Bening is whenever her characters are called on for comic moments, even within heavy dramas. I'm guessing her status as Hollywood Royalty and Serious Actress obscures this.

In fact, one could argue that ALL of her best performances are comedic in nature, even if they're within dark, brooding or angsty films, The Grifters and American Beauty being two obvious examples.

⇐ Annette Bening's Imogene character, who is Wiig's gambling addict mama,  looks like a cross between Carolyn Burnham and Arlene from True Blood, right?

The film, directed by the American Splendor (2003) and Cinema Verite (2011) team of Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini , is about a woman (Wiig) forced to move back in with her mother after a staged suicide attempt to win back her ex-boyfriend fails.  In the most eye-brow raising bit of casting Glee sensation Darren Criss -- also recently spotted on set -- will play Wiig's love interest, though we assume he's not the ex in question. Wiig turns 38 next week, Criss is just 23. That age difference is absolutely normal for movies when the genders are reversed but it's still surprising and usually a large discussion point in the script (and may well be here) if the woman is older.

It sounds like a fun movie, right?