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Entries in Billy Crystal (11)

Monday
Jun132022

75th Annual Tony Awards in Review

by Nathaniel R

© Theo Wargo/Getty for Tony Awards Production

Ariana DeBose, fresh off her Oscar win, hosted the Tony Awards with enough theater kid energy to make Anne Hathaway blush. No reviews  will be able to claim (in good faith) that she didn't work her ass off to entertain the audience. She was "on" in every moment, pulling faces, doing little dance moves, singing, and engaging with the celebrity audience. She mentioned the 75th Anniversary several times but in truth the show's Diamond anniversary wasn't any different than any other Tony show; they've always mixed a couple "special" reunion-style performances with showcases for the current musicals (the ones that are still open that is). Even the Sondheim tribute -- which we expected to be epic -- was just one number long: Bernadette Peters singing "Children Will Listen" from Into the Woods

Best Speech, Ticket-Boosters, A New "EGOT" winner, and more after the jump...

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Monday
Mar142022

Best of the Critics Choice Awards: Will Smith, Melanie Lynskey and more...

by Nathaniel R 

Lady Gaga literally watching the CCAs from London. Did you watch and if so where from?

Just hours after BAFTA had wrapped last night, the Critics Choice Awards were held. That means we've reached the end of the televised precursor awards; there are still a couple of non-televised precursors next weekend (the Producers and Writers Guild) but we're now in the home stretch. So let's discuss the highs of the CCA ceremony as well as what it all means (and doesn't) for Oscar, category by category...

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Thursday
Dec312020

Almost There: Meg Ryan in "When Harry Met Sally..."

by Cláudio Alves

Last week, we examined a Christmas movie performance that came close to Oscar glory to celebrate the holidays. Now that we're coming to the end of this cursed 2020, it seems appropriate to choose a New Year's Eve film. When it came time to pick such a picture, my mind immediately went to f Rob Reiner's 1989 When Harry Met Sally…, a perfect rom-com whose Nora Ephron-penned screenplay earned a much-deserved Academy Award nomination. Our focus shall be on the Sally of the title, Meg Ryan giving a comedienne's masterclass…

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Saturday
Apr082017

TCMFF Day 2: Carl & Rob Reiner Honored at Handprint Ceremony

by Anne Marie

While Turner Classic Movies is typically known for celebrating film history, today TCM made history. Carl Reiner and Rob Reiner, writer/director/actor/producer quadruple threats whose career includes Sid Caesar's Show of Shows, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Russians are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, The Princess Bride and This Is Spinal Tap, were the first father/son duo to be immortalized in the Chinese Theater handprint ceremony. Before the two cemented their legacy next to Marilyn Monroe, Al Pacino, and Trigger the Horse, friends and colleagues from their cumulative 135 year long careers paid tribute to two of the funniest men in Hollywood...

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Friday
Aug292014

When Harry Met Sally... (1989) Food for Thought

Anne Marie here on the 25th anniversary of a genre classic.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that any romcom made after 1989 owes large thematic debts to When Harry Met Sally… From the Meet Cute to the Bickering Couple to the Final Romantic Gesture (usually involving holidays and/or running), When Harry Met Sally… set a template that has defined an entire genre, and--depending on who you ask--killed that genre as well. But despite the cliches, Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron’s Oscar-nominated comedy script continues to sparkle 25 years later, because it is not a movie about romantic gestures. It is a story about people; their observations, their oversights, and most importantly, their food.

Watching When Harry Met Sally… for the first time, you’d be forgiven for thinking New Yorkers do nothing but eat and argue. As Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) meet, separate, meet again, fall into friendship, and fall in love, they do so against an ever-rotating backdrop of restaurants and parties. (Apparently nobody in New York cooks at home either.) A lingering fear in romantic comedies--a genre about bringing people together--is the fear of being alone, and these are public spaces that force the characters to interact with each other and avoid the lonely New York death that Harry jokes about early on. Most importantly, these settings also givethem a chance to eat.

It comes as no surprise that the woman who would write Julie & Julia twenty years later would be so interested in how food reveals character. Ephron establishes both of her young characters through how they eat. Of course, Sally’s infamously detailed instructions to the first waitress immediately brand the young blonde as a perfectionist who likes control. Meg Ryan's best scenes are ordering from the menu, which she does with neither self-consciousness nor self-awareness, making Sally opinionated but not apolagetic, and somehow very funny.

Sally Albright: But I'd like the pie heated and I don't want the ice cream on top, I want it on the side, and I'd like strawberry instead of vanilla if you have it, if not then no ice cream just whipped cream but only if it's real; if it's out of the can then nothing.

Waitress: Not even the pie?

Sally Albright: No, I want the pie, but then not heated.

But Harry is also announced through his food, or rather through his bad manners while eating it. In their very first interaction sharing a car driving into New York, Harry introduces himself to Sally and the audience by talking through a mouthful of masticated grapes, and spitting grape seeds at the window. He’s messy, but he’s relaxed. (Minor characters also interact this way, including a brief fling of Harry's who is wrong for him because she bakes and he hates sweets, and Marie and Jess, who bond on a blind date over an article about wine.) Even when they're eating instead of talking, Harry and Sally are deliberately drawn opposites.

In between bites of food, Harry and Sally work as mouthpieces for Ephron’s musings and philosophies on relationships. When Harry Met Sally… plays as a series of dinner table debates interrupted periodically by plot, sex, or food. It’s a testament to Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan’s charming chemistry that they can make the discussion feel like action, and not just while banging on the table with fake orgasms. Harry and Sally discuss sex, loneliness, real estate, death, the ending of Casablanca, and anything else that pops into Ephron’s mind. 

Primarily, they concern themselves with one question: Can men and women remain friends? Or, to update it to 2014, “Is attraction an insurmountable obstacle to friendship?” Twenty five years later, it’s still a question that single people ask themselves. For the last few years, we've been hearing the supposed death knell of the romantic comedy, with the insistence that this genre is too cliche. But the fact that I had the friend vs romantic partner debate last week says to me that this foreboding may be a bit premature. The best new romcoms, like Obvious Child, are movies that carry on Nora Ephron's real legacy: some scattered observations, a question or two, and maybe a little bit of comfort food.