Beauty vs Beast: Hannah's Sisters

Jason from MNPP here, looking out across this rainy New York City day and thinking of Woody Allen, as I'm wont to do. Today specifically we're thinking about his great 1986 film Hannah and Her Sisters, because today is the great Dianne Wiest's birthday, and that film won Wiest her first of two much deserved Oscars. (It doesn't hurt that the movie just celebrated its 30th anniversary on March 14th.) So today's edition of our "Beauty vs Beast" series it is!

We're facing off the "and the Sisters" of the title -- Weist as the recovering actress Holly and Barbara Hershey as the brother-in-law snatching Lee. Granted the awardage (and the general consensus that she totally deserved it too) might immediately tilt this contest in Wiest's direction in your mind, but slow yourself and don't make the mistake of under-valuing Barbara Hershey's fine work in the film; she makes the difficult and confused character of Lee pretty darn sympathetic and funny too. Much to my emotional consternation if they made online quizzes asking us which of the three sisters we are in this film I am sure I'd end up being a Lee.

PREVIOUSLY Last week nathaniel took over and delightfully went Full Tabloid, asking you to choose between the recently y'all to choose between the recently fractured power-couple Bennifer 2.0 -- y'all had the good sense to stand with Jennifer Garner to the tune of just under 70% of the vote. Said John T:

""I mean ehh on both of them but Jen seems like a nice person off screen and Ben like a jackass. As they're both gorgeous I will use that as my tiebreaker"

Birthday Beauty Break: Charlotte & Jennifer & Barbara & Laura

February 5th is a big day for Actress birthdays. Two of this year's Oscar nominees are celebrating birthdays today! How about that? Charlotte Rampling, Best Actress nominee, is 70 today and Jennifer Jason Leigh, Best Supporting Actress nominee, is 54. And to round out the 1-time nominee party, it's also Barbara Hershey's special day. She's 67.  Finally, since  The Lovely Laura Linney, turning 52, is one of our most beloved actresses we can't leave her out if we're talking Oscar love.  

HAPPY BIRTHDAY OSCAR BEAUTIES!

After the jump, I've selected 7 of their most important performances each (excluding current roles) and, to make it more fun, they're in chronological order so you can see how the careers overlap. Sound off on these beauties in the comments.

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Q&A Pt. 1: The Queens (by which we mean RuPaul, Helen Mirren, Best Actresses)

Ask Nathaniel column time. You ask. I answer. Herewith seven recent reader questions. Since last night was the finale of RuPaul's Drag Race, we'll end with two similar questions about that show but first, more typical actor questions. You're always asking them. Not a complaint. Just a fact.

PAUL OUTLAW: Which directors would you most like to see work ASAP with these performers (it can be someone new or a former collaborator): Tilda Swinton, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Michael Fassbender & Tom Hardy?

Tilda: Anyone. I'd even watch her in a Michael Bay movie though I'd prefer her in an Olivier Assayas. Oh wait, that's my answer.

Gugu: Anyone. She's new enough that we don't know what we have yet other than GREAT POTENTIAL.

Fassbender: We know he can do intense heightened drama and various masculine genres with the best of them, but I'm wondering if he has something more low-key naturalistic in him or how he'd fare in more typically feminine genres. One of my favorite performances of his is Inglourious Basterds which I know is neither of those things but I like how arch and cerebral he seemed as opposed to physical. It was a different mode for him. So a little more of that. I'd be curious to see him in an Alexander Payne style dramedy or Joe Wright in swoony romance mode.

Tom Hardy: It's time for something really erotic. Filmmakers keep covering up his beautiful face and this must stop. We know from Bronson that he's completey unafraid of gratuitous nudity so I wanna say Jane Campion and/or another A lister who is ready to dabble in an erotic drama, their own Ang Lee Lust, Caution type detour if you will.

TYLER: There are four women who are winners of the Cannes Best Actress prize twice over: Barbara Hershey (USA), Isabelle Huppert (France), Helen Mirren (UK), and Vanessa Redgrave (UK). What do you think of this group? Your favorite performance from each?

To  help readers catch up if they didn't know this statistic, those women won for the following films

Vanessa Redgrave - Morgan! in 1966 and Isadora in 1969
Isabelle Huppert - Violette Noziere in 1978 and The Piano Teacher in 2001
Helen Mirren - Cal in 1984 and The Madness of King George in 1995
Barbara Hershey - Shy People in 1987 and A World Apart (shared with co-stars) in 1988

More Questions after the jump...

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Robert Redford is "The Natural"

To celebrate Robert Redford's imminent return to cinema in "All is Lost" Team Experience will be surveying some of his classics and key films. Here's Anne Marie on The Natural.

Robert Redford is as American as apple pie and baseball. Actually, it might be equally accurate to say that apple pie and baseball are as American as Robert Redford. Like Jimmy Stewart before him, Redford personifies the American Man ideal. But unlike Stewart's earnest Everyman, Redford, with his golden boy good looks and sweet-but-sardonic smile, is the Mythic American Man model. Redford is not the star you relate to; he's the star you admire from afar. Robert Redford has spent most of his career playing variations on this character, but nowhere is his inherent legendaryness used to greater effect than in the 1984 film The Natural. The Natural is a movie about the American Myth through the lens of the American Pastime.

It would be easy to mistake The Natural for "just another sports movie." The plot certainly reads as another sentiment-drenched schlock-fest.  Roy Hobbs, a nobody who's past his prime, changes baseball and wins a championship with his talent, his courage, and a baseball bat struck by lightning. (I rolled my eyes even as I typed that.) However, to take this movie too literally is to miss its point. 

The Natural plays on a grander scale. Roy Hobbs is the Arthurian Hero wielding a legendary weapon. It's no coincidence that he leads a baseball team called the Knights. Barbara Hershey, in a small but striking role as the woman who ends his career before it begins, is Temptation. Glenn Close makes a rare appearance as the Good Woman, representing the wholesome life Hobbs missed before but could win back. Kim Basinger makes a not-so-rare appearance as the Sinful Woman, a blonde version of Temptation that Hobbs will have to overcome again. These are Characters with a capital "C," more important for what they symbolize than for who they are. If you don't believe me, watch how often characters are backlit. Strong backlighting is cinematography shorthand for Significant And Symbolic Character.

Glenn Close as "Good Woman" a few years before evil was her forte

I have to confess: I usually hate sports movies. I, like Margo Channing, detest cheap sentiment, which is the currency most sports films trade in. The underdog story is overdone. There are only so many sacrifices a man can make for a game before I question his priorities; and really, Rudy made one sack in one play, so why are we cheering mediocrity?

By that measure, I should hate The Natural too. But I can't. Maybe it's Robert Redford's rugged handsomeness (there is no such thing as "middle-aged" Redford; like wine, cheese, and good art, he just gets better with time). Maybe I just really love watching Barbara Hershey vamp. Maybe it's because I'm a sucker for movies about the American Dream, where one person can change the world thorugh earnest hard work. Whatever the reason, The Natural remains a personal favorite, as well as a classic.

Take Three: Barbara Hershey

Craig (from Dark Eye Socket) here with this week's Take Three. Today: Barbara Hershey

Take One: Beaches (1988)
Whilst Bette Midler played the brash let-it-all-hang-out role in Beaches, Hershey was required to provide the flipside, a more fragile, buttoned-up role. Of course, in Garry Marshall’s timeless, weepy but somehow sickeningly enjoyable sorrowthon emotional barriers are royally broken down. As a solidly played, and, at times (all times, in fact), downright sentimentally treacly showcase of female solidarity, it works, and works very well indeed. (The late ‘80s was a fruitful time for the re-animation of such “woman’s” pictures; see also Steel Magnolias, Working Girl et al.) Beaches was a classic two-hander: one performance perfectly complemented the other. As the luxuriously-named San Franciscan heiress Hillary Whitney Essex, Hershey exuded just the right kind of well-turned-out class.

Her performance really was consistently good, despite the stock genre mannerisms very likely insisted upon by the filmmakers. She amiably chipped away at the inherent brittleness of the role, made her character appropriately timid, unexpectedly fragile and actually a believable mess with many of the concerns that spoke to half the women watching. (The other half would’ve surely identified with Midler’s character – this is a large part of Beaches’ amiability.) As the requirements of the genre dictate, there are melodramatic turns aplenty – love rivalry, career diversions, terminal disease – and Hershey and co. revel in its cornball pleasures. In the process it gave Hershey her biggest exposure. It was a certified commercial platform on which she could do great work. She broke through the privileged whininess of the character and made such a prim, off-putting madam feel thoroughly deserving of our investment and sympathy. But didn’t Hershey look as if she wasn’t always best pleased to be the wind beneath Bette Midler’s wings?

Take Two: The Entity (1982)
Just recently Hershey’s made a bit of a re-emergence on the big screen in a couple of notable roles. Earlier this year we saw her add some major dramatic supporting greatness as the nervous-wreck mother in Black Swan (see below), for which she unfortunately missed out on a second Oscar nomination (her first and only so far was for Supporting Actress in 1996’s The Portrait of a Lady). She followed that as a nervous-wreck grandmother in haunted house person flick Insidious, too. But it’s not the first time Babs has battled apparitions from the afterlife. Her career has seen its fair share of paranormal activity: back in 1982 she caused a spooky stir as beleaguered Carla Moran in Sidney J. Furie’s The Entity; a role for which she should have earned her her first Oscar nomination.

Two years before the Ghostbusters zapped spooks left, right and centre, Hershey and her parapsychologists had to lure her spectres in with a fake house set-up and little more than a majorly unnerving atmosphere in order to trap the unnatural forces that have been pervading her home and her very being in frozen liquid helium. As you do.

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