April Showers Bring May Flowers. (Plus: More Film Bitch Nominees)

As illustrated by that pocketful of sunshine, Emma Stone.

April Showers: American History X (1998), How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998), A Walk on the Moon (1999), South Pacific (1958), Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), The Long Good Friday (1980), Groundhog Day (1993), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), The Hurt Locker (2009), I Robot (2004), Single White Female (1992), The Fifth Element (1997) and Shutter Island (2010).

May Flowers: Weekdays at noon. Any suggestions?

oh, okay, okay. I know we can't end without actually watching Emma doing "Pocketful of Sunshine" again. If the entirety of Easy A had been as great as this post-credits opening scene, the movie would have been an A+

P.S. This one-minute delight is nominated in the 2010 FiLM BiTCH Awards for Best Musical Number from a Non-Musical Film. Here's that last page of honorees in progress. Almost finished. Sorry for that weirdly protracted hiatus.

April Showers: Edward Norton x 2

Hope you've enjoyed the April Showers series. There are SO many films we could have covered. (Tangent: I'm dying to know, for example, when the first shower sequence ever filmed was. The earliest I personally know of is Marilyn Monroe in Niagara (1953) which I meant to write about. Oops. But there has to be something earlier, right? I've searched but can't find any definitive info.)

Though I hate to end on a disturbing note I haven't been able to get Edward Norton out of my mind recently so we have to look back at American History X (1998).

Edward Norton as "Derek" in American History X

I'm not sure how Mr. Norton became lodged in my brain recently but if I had to guess it'd be the combo of Mark Ruffalo taking over the Hulk (they just started filming The Avengers) and a random flashback to The Painted Veil. Then at some point last week I said to myself "Edward Norton was Ryan Gosling before Ryan Gosling was Ryan Gosling" i.e. the actor that everyone thought was The Actor of His Generation, The Future. And then I really couldn't get him out of my head.

Norton famously gained much of his Great Actor reputation from American History X (1998), and won a longshot Oscar nomination for Best Actor. In the film he plays Derek, a loathsome racist who, after realizing his world view is full of shit while serving time in prison, tries to turn his life around before his younger brother follows his same dark path. It's disturbing to note how much acting cred can come from playing racist skinheads; Russell Crowe (Romper Stomper) and Ryan Gosling (The Believer) had similar artistic breakthroughs.

I've never known quite what to make of American History X -- it's one of those films like, say, Natural Born Killers, that seems to struggle with its own theme merely by addressing it. If you keep visualizing something awful through strong visuals and hugely charismatic acting, aren't you actually glorifying what you're supposed to be condemning? So this post is also a call for your opinions. I'm just curious how readers feel about the movie because it's one of those key late 90s Oscar players that I don't believe we've ever discussed. (I was in the Sir Ian McKellen camp that year but I was enormously pleased that Norton managed a nomination.)

As Derek begins to form a tentative friendship with a black prisoner, his neonazi counterparts turn violently against him. Showers are always bad news in prison movies. More after the jump [NSFW]

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April Showers: How Stella Get Her Groove Back

waterworks weekdays at 11

Travel back in time to that unfortunately brief time period when Angela Bassett was headlining movies. After the Oscar nomination for rocking that Tina Turner biopic and lending unforgettable fire (literally) to Waiting to Exhale she got her own picture to headline: How Stella Got Her Groove Back. The movie wasn't great but didn't it have one of the best titles of any book/movie/whatsit ever? The correct answer is yes.

To Shower or Not To Shower. That is the Question

How did Stella get her groove back, exactly?

Lots and lots of sex with Taye Diggs that's how! If that's how one does it, than singer/actress/wickedwitch Idina Menzel is possibly the grooviest chick on earth.

To shower or not to shower? They've just fought... again. These two are always arguing. But since getting her groove back in Jamaica, and returning to San Francisco with her studly groove-inducer in tow, she just can't resist his shameless display. Continued after the jump (mild nudity)

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April Showers: Diane & Viggo 'Busy Being Free'

waterworks weeknights at 11 in April

Have you ever wondered why people don't talk more about Tony Goldwyn's A Walk on the Moon (1999)?  It's one of those pictures that contains all sorts of stuff people came to love afterwards in embryonic or transformational stages. It was here that Diane Lane practiced the mesmerizingly guilty adulteress act that she'd be Oscar nominated for in Unfaithful (2002). It was the moment when Viggo Mortensen, so often backgrounded in pictures till then, revealed that he was a Star. It was also the mainstream bridge between Anna Paquin's sexually curious wicked child (The Piano) and sexually wicked curious psychic (True Blood) since she played one of her most ordinary roles as a teenager struggling with all the hormones swirling around inside her and outside of her as her screen mother (Lane) was also experiencing a sexual awakening.

It was even in A Walk On the Moon that Liev Schreiber played the uptight wronged husband and, perhaps learning that Sex-On-A-Stick-Wife-Stealer was the better role, flipped parts for The Painted Veil (2006),  bedding Naomi Watts (onscreen) which he's been doing ever since offscreen. Now, maybe we're reading too much into it. But the point is this: We like A Walk on the Moon.

Mostly it's an enjoyable picture because Diane & Viggo were at the arguable peak of their screen beauty and looked even more sensational paired. Certain star pairings just elevate everything, right? And does any actress do 'aroused but totally conflicted about it' as well as Diane Lane? There are moments in this performance that are just mesmerizing like the one pictured above wherein she shyly lets Viggo give her a necklace, briefly daring to meet his gaze before dropping her head into his chest in submission. Her shyness is fascinatingly mixed in by the actress because the repetitive act of visiting his mobile clothing store is rather brazen; she knows instinctively what awaits her therein. Viggo is such a smooth and hypnotic ladykiller that her legs are over his shoulders before she's realized she's horizontal. Next thing you know, she's let her hair down metaphorically enough to experience sex in the outdoors. Under a waterfall, God's own high pressure shower.

More after the jump [mild nudity] including a question for film historians with a minor in sex scenes.

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April Showers: South Pacific

waterworks weeknights at 11

Tonight I thought we'd cover one of the most famous showers in entertainment history. It's not famous for the showering but for the singing. Raise your hands if you've ever sung this song in the shower.

I'm gonna wash that man right out of my hair
I'm gonna wash that man right out of my hair
I'm gonna wash that man right out of my hair
and send him on his way.

Nellie talks herself out of love "before i go any further i better not get started."

It's so catchy it's like a commercial jingle. (Didn't it get coopted for actual commercial jingles at some point?) The strangest thing about the sequence in South Pacific (1958) is that it's not actually sung IN the shower. I had totally forgotten this. Maybe "Billis Bath Club" charged extra for singing? I mean even "use of soap" is an extra there, an extra 5¢.

No, constantly fretful Nellie Forbush (Mitzi Gaynor) actually waits until AFTER she's out of the shower to shampoo her hair. And to sing.

Isn't that nuts?

Early Don't Ask Don't Tell signage (?) and Mitzi's backwards shower activities after the jump.

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April Showers: Angelina's Power Cleanse

Kurt here again. How do you like your Angelina Jolie? Hacking the Gibson under the name of Acid Burn? Wailing about her lost son in a cloche hat? Wooing the Hollywood Foreign Press opposite Johnny Depp in Venice? Please. You like her kicking ass, and with respect to fans of Wanted, she's really never done it better than in Tomb Raider, the underrated video game adap that houses what we can probably call her signature performance.

All of 24 when she shot the movie, Angie wasn't yet Salt skeletal, and still had some of those Gia curves to flaunt. She gets her chance when director Simon West shoots her in a post-training shower scene, where she washes off the sweat worked up from emptying clips into a killer robot.

I love this scene because it's so freaking gratuitous. West might argue that he included it to help humanize Lara Croft (tomb raiders need showers, too!), but we all know it has the same objective as a Maxim cover shoot. And who's arguing, anyway?

I'm still of the mind that Angie is the most perfectly put together female on the globe, and this scene might just mark the peak of that perfectly-put-togetherness.

More More More after the jump.

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