Monday, July 9, 2012 at 4:00PM Our Miss Hathaway and The Bening, both wounded!
Get well soon divas.
Anne Hathaway, Annette Bening Monday, May 21, 2012 at 10:41PM 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.❞
Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 12:30PM 
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.
Annette Bening, Glee, Kristen Wiig Friday, August 19, 2011 at 10:31AM 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.
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?
Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 9:15AM Alex (BBats) here, doing a lil’ scouting in LA. Oh my oh my!
BBats and Beatty! This past weekend, I had the pleasure to revisit Dick Tracy (1990) on the big screen courtesy of the Los Angeles Times Hero Complex Film Festival. The film hasn’t aged a day due to that rich pulp style that seeps through every set piece, costume, matte painting, and actor. The main draw was a Q & A with Warren Beatty after the film! Now, I was battling the flu and taking notes as fast as I could, so keep that in mind and I wouldn’t say anything below was a direct quote.
Beatty stood in the wings as the film’s end credits rolled. Big applause for the film followed and I saw a big smile grow across his face. The moderator brought him out to thunderous ovation (duh). He seemed a little cagey and very careful in selecting his words; this Q & A was for the Los Angeles Times, he pointed out, and would be in print the very next day.
Hit the jump for some Beatty, Dick, and a lil' Bening action!
On Stephen Sondheim
'He did great stuff for this…I’m such a fan of Sondheim’s. Everytime I see one of his shows, I just fall apart on the first song.'
On the film itself
'I’m disgusting because I really do like it a lot.'
Beatty had been attached to the propertry since 1976. The moderator asked why he chose Dick Tracy. Beatty said that he didn’t want to do some picture where everything got blasted around, and that Dick Tracy was this guy who had been around forever and wanted to start a family. He paused and said he thought of it as a gentle picture. (Aside: I love when people call movies "pictures". Super classy.)
This next part is so funny, let's get it right by quoting directly from the Los Angeles Times.
“Little by little I found myself caught up enough in it to actually go and make a movie about it, because it was hard for me. … I always think of making a movie like vomiting. I don’t like to vomit, but I get to the point where I think, ‘I’d better go ahead and do this, and I’ll feel better.’”
Everyone rolled with laughter. The vomiting reference also maybe gives us a little glimpse as to why he hasn’t directed a film since Bulworth (1998). But back to the Q & A.
His desk needs a bucket.
Beatty began to compliment everyone in the cast and the moderator honed in on certain performances and how he cast the roles. Interestingly, Beatty compared the casting process to writing. When you cast someone it's an instant rewrite, even if you don’t change a word.
Madonna sings "MORE" in Dick Tracy and you know you want more, too: Bening, Pacino. Hoffman, Oscars and Dick Tracy sequel nuggets after the jump.
