Months of Meryl: Doubt (2008)

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

 

#40 —Sister Aloysius Beauvier, a nun and Catholic school principal who wages battles with a suspicious new priest.

JOHN: Arriving at John Patrick Shanley’s 2008 film adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt felt like stumbling upon a waterfall in the desert. After a fallow period marked by smallish, adequate performances in dull-to-dreadful films, Meryl Streep finally inherited a meaty, challenging role in a tony adaptation well worth her time and talent, and alongside fellow acting titans at that.

In Doubt, it is 1964, and Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Streep) is the harsh and unforgiving principal of a Catholic school in the Bronx. Feared by most students and routinely respected by her fellow nuns, especially the younger, guileless Sister James (Amy Adams), Sister Aloysius comes to believe that a heinous crime has been perpetrated under her roof...

Click to read more ...

Soundtracking: "A Star is Born (1954)"

Chris Feil's weekly look at music in the movies will be revisiting all of the musical remakes of A Star is Born in coming weeks. Here is 1954 and Judy Garland...

Musicals are known for their required suspension of disbelief, the fact that we must buy into a reality where people simply burst into song. But the legacy of A Star is Born has its own kind of suspension of disbelief: the notion that whatever legendary songstress that leads each version is some undiscovered talent. George Cukor’s 1954 version (the first to properly musicalize the story birthed in William A. Wellman’s 1937 original) requires the greatest leap. But there are few cinematic superstars in history as immediately convincing in their gifts as Judy Garland.

Casting such a powerhouse as a woefully undiscovered talent is absurd on paper, as if the film exists in some fantasy land where maybe she’s never opened her mouth or humans have ceased to have ears. Our buy-in to the conceit of the plot has to be as momentous as her implacable voice...

Click to read more ...

1972: The Emigrants

Editor's Note: We will now resume our intermittent investigation into 1972 films for the impending smackdown -- though it will not be this weekend due to unfortunate delays. Here's Eric Blume on the Oscar favored foreign epic The Emigrants, available to rent on Amazon or iTunes.

It’s fun (and by fun, I mean zero actual fun) to watch Jan Troell’s 3 hour and 20 minute epic film The Emigrants and try to figure out how this slow-burn, where nothing good happens to any of the characters for the entire running time, made it into the Oscar race, not in one year but in two!  Due to different rules than we have currently, The Emigrants was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in 1971, and then for the 1972 Oscars was nominated for a whopping four of the big eight categories:  Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Liv Ullman), and Best Adapted Screenplay.

The Emigrants mostly follows a peasant family in rural Sweden in the mid-19th century. Despite back-breaking work, the father (Max von Sydow) and mother (Liv Ullman), realize that they cannot survive on their farm.  A series of horrible events befall them before they decide to leave for a 10-week boat journey to America in hope of a better life. Another family, who leave for the promise of religious freedom, joins them for the grueling ordeal...

Click to read more ...

Funny Girl at 50

by Tim

This past week bore witness to one of the most very important anniversaries imaginable: Funny Girl turned fifty. And if you don't know what Funny Girl is and why it matters, I'm a little shocked you found this site, but I'm happy to explain that it's a Best Picture-nominated musical directed by Oscar favorite William Wyler, and the film debut of cabaret singer-turned-Broadway star-turned embodied deity Barbra Streisand. Who also got some Oscar love, winning Best Actress in a tie with Katharine Hepburn's turn in The Lion in Winter.

Not least among the achievements of Funny Girl is that, when thus compared head-to-head with one of the grandest dames of screen acting, Streisand looks like pretty worth recipient of that honor. Funny Girl, as scripted by Isobel Lennart (who also wrote the book for the 1963 stage version, also starring Streisand), is a gift to its lead, offering pretty much everything you could want to demand of a musical theater actor: broad comedy! tear-jerking heartbreak! steel-willed fortitude! songs where you have to be manic! songs where you have to be pensive!

Click to read more ...

Best Actress - New Oscar Chart

by Nathaniel R

Beware the premature envelopers! The Best Actress race is far from over and it's very exciting. I still suspect that Glenn Close wins IF nominated but Lady Gaga could IF nominated (though we suspect she's just winning Best Song despite the early hoopla). And who knows, perhaps Olivia Colman in The Favourite will go lead (we still have her in the supporting chart) and from early reports she could also win IF nominated. Then you have Carey Mulligan and Melissa McCarthy, both arguably doing the best work of their careers. Nicole Kidman, Emma Stone, Emily Blunt, Toni Colette and Viola Davis all in very flashy roles or high profile films and Yalitza Aparicio as a highly sympathetic debut in a critical favorite. 

The grid above shows you what we predict are the current top ten (alpha order) but a lot can change once the movies... 

1. Face the public
2. Fine tune their Oscar campaigns and press play/
3. Meet the first wave of precursors which will generally shun some worthy competitors and embrace others and in ways that are not always easy to predict until suddenly everyone is doing the same thing and it is.

Ah the agony and joy of Awards Season. It's not much further away. One thing is for certain. If any competitors from the first half of the year want to reemerge or move up the chart, they need a strong campaign. Only Toni Collette in Hereditary remains in the top ten from the year's first half and it's not because other contenders (Elsie Fisher, Charlie Theron, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Pfeiffer, etcetera... ) didn't do fine work, too. It's just people have short memories and they like shiny new toys.

UPDATED OSCAR CHARTS: Actress, Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Foreign Film