Love Letters Pt. 2: Kathy Najimy, Rosemarie DeWitt, Xander Berkeley

Melanie Lynskey Guest Blogging!

I made a little dream list of people I respect and admire beyond all reason and sent them a little e-mail saying:

I've seen you do work that has made me want to write you a love letter because it's moved me so deeply. Who or what would you like to write a love letter to? What piece of art or artist or feeling has moved you in this way?"

Here are a few amazing responses I got. [PART ONE featured Zachary Quinto, Ahna O'Reilly and More...]

PART TWO

To the beautiful, soul-baring goddess Rosemarie DeWitt "my love letter to you is mostly me obsessing about: Rachel Getting Married OF COURSE BECAUSE I'M IN LOVE WITH IT"

Rosemarie's love letter:

Seeing Mark Rylance in "Jerusalem" is momentarily eclipsing every other performance I've seen or fallen in love with. He made me rethink what was possible as an actor and at the end of that play my body was literally quivering in anticipation of the gods coming. I felt as if I had witnessed some sacred ritual and was blown away by the transformative power of that kind of whole bodied- soul stirring-storytelling. I had long admired him but now my love for his work makes me feel like a 14 year old girl who would hang a poster of him on my bedroom wall. And in fact I have the Playbill cover hanging over my desk. :)
-ROSEMARIE DEWITT 

Sonya Walger and Adam Scott in "Tell Me You Love Me"To the glorious, strong, sexy, and really fucking brave actress Sonya Walger "my love letter to you is mostly me obsessing about: Tell Me You Love Me..."

Sonya's love letter:

I have a strange moment I think of often when I work and it was when I first became aware of this fragile line between life and art and how the best work leaves you not knowing which one you just witnessed. my grandmother was on the board of governers for a school near her house and she would diligently attend all the school plays and fetes and events even though none of her grandchildren/family attended. she took me with her to see the school play of "BUGSY MALONE". I must have been 8 or 9, and the kids peforming must have been maybe 14-15? I couldn't believe what I saw. I was blown away. I'd never seen anything so glamorous, so alive, where everyone was having so much fun. I'd been to plays in London and musicals, but nothing, nothing like this. It was completely transporting and unlike anything I'd ever seen. And at the very end, they all sang the finale, and Bugsy pulled Blousey into his lap and they were all breathless, panting as we stood and applauded, rained applause on them, and he beamed at her and pulled her in and kissed her. quickly, on the mouth, on stage. and I remember feeling so alive in that moment, so completely full of wonder, was that real? was that supposed to happen? is he allowed to kiss her? was that in the script? (although I doubt I knew the word script at that age). I think about it still.

I wonder if those kids remember that production, those kids now in their 40's with wives and children and jobs and mortgages. I wonder if it sparked anything in any of them the way it did in me. i think about it often, strangely, that one tiny moment in a school play. and I still don't know exactly why or what it means, except, that, as I said, it made me feel so alive, so engaged, so curious, so full of wonder for what they had done, pulled off, been swept up in. and more than anything, it made me long, body and soul, to be up there with them too. to be kissed on Bugsy's lap."
-SONYA WALGER 

Gillian Jacobs, Xander Berkeley, Kathy Najimy, and Matt Ross after the jump

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Oscar Horrors: Redressing Dracula

HERE LIES … Eiko Ishioka’s costume work for Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), which smothered the rest of the nominees with reams upon reams of flamboyant fabric to slither away with the statue that year. And it damn well deserved it, too.

JA from MNPP here. In the fall of 1992 I was fifteen years old and had found myself in the first blushes of cinemania, and as a budding horror enthusiast I was obsessed with Francis Ford Coppola’s film before it had even come out. It was more difficult way back then before the internet so we relied on things called “magazines” to keep us in the know, but I went one step further where this movie was concerned – I bought the “pictorial moviebook,” as it calls itself on the cover, and I studied it like the bible. And with its heavy focus on Ishioko’s work it was the first time I’d ever given much thought to a film’s costuming.

As Coppola had said, he wanted the costumes to be the set…

And are they ever. Ishioka was a visual artist and had done some memorable work for the stage version of M. Butterfly and Paul Schrader’s 1985 film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters before this, and she brought with her an eccentric batch of influences, to put it mildly. From the human musculature that influenced Dracula’s armor in the opening scenes…

Visual splendor and bizarre influences after the jump...

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Best Shot: "Peggy Sue Got Married" ... Her Second 25th Anniversary

Hit Me With Your Best Shot is a series where we look at favorite images and choose a "best shot" from a pre-selected movie. The moments that most define a film, elevate it, or merely gives us the most visual pleasure. "Best" is a fluid adjective. TWO WEEKS FROM NOW (June 29th) we'll be discussing Luchino Vischonti's Rocco And His Brothers (1960). Won't you join us? It's supposed to be awesome.

Francis Ford Coppola's PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED (1986).

It's all in the transitions with Peggy Sue Got Married. And with Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner), who begins the picture distraught over her impending divorce and ends the picture by rejecting that new future (divorce) and for the recent past (troubled marriage). In the present tense, she's attending a high school reunion (a celebration of the past) while worrying about her future. And soon, after collapsing on the reunion's stage, she's thrust back into her own past... but aware that she shouldn't be there and viewing her past from the vantage point of the future. She's always out of time.

Note the way Coppola frames her at key moments, like this one above, where he separates her from things she is very much a part of, like this 25th High School Reunion. (I figured the movie's 25th anniversary year was a good time to revisit it and I'm so glad I did.)

In the lead up to the most magical and compelling shot in the film, she returns to her childhood home and considers knocking as the door drifts open of its own accord. Again we see the heroine separated visually from the main setting of the story, but in both cases she's about to enter into the present, whichever present that is, but she's doing so very tentatively. She either doesn't want to be there or she does but happens to be terrified. It's hard to live in the present but it's even harder when that present is the past.

The best shot in the film comes very early when Peggy Sue enters her childhood bedroom. Coppola moves the camera around the room and accelerates in a dizzying circle until we're back with the middle aged woman as she rediscovers her adolescence. There are no edits (THANK YOU!) as Peggy repeats the circling, rediscovering the room she grew up in. She seems utterly bewitched by the simplest things like a shoe on the carpet, her record player, a wee book. The room is lit so softly and superbly by the late cinematographer Jordan Cronenwerth and he was deservingly Oscar nominated for this picture! [Trivia note: His son Jeff was nominated just last year in the same category for The Social Network]. When Peggy finishes her tour, we've seen Kathleen Turner go from hypnotic trance to simple joy to confusion and then back to terrified, still not at peace with her time travelling.

WHAT is going on."

This fluctuation of mood in the space of one scene, is in perfect synch with the spotty brilliance of the movie which finds funny, sad, silly and mysterious ways to dig into the crazy moodswings of those hormonally charged teenage years while simultaneously commenting on middle aged "it's all behind me" panic. You could say the same of many time travel or body switching movies, but Coppola's vision is more adult than much of this peculiar subgenre. The movie is quite funny but it's also shot through with despair. Even the finale, a "happy ending" has a strange undertow of defeatist compromise, despite the fantastical happenings proceeding it. Even if you can go home again, you can't reboot your life; you have to make peace with it.

Peggy Sue peaked early. And so it is with Peggy Sue Got Married which is wonderfully compelling in the first third, less so in the second, and sputters and collapses at the finale. In a way the movie's primary weakness is absolutely fitting. It showed such promise during its youth! Does the movie's minor reputation reflect merely that it's an older person's film -- people Peggy Sue's age, who had the most to gain from its high school in the late 50s nostalgia would be hitting 70 about now -- or is it simply a result of its own shortcomings?

Arguably the movie is only a minor footnote now, but I still love it. If it's remembered it's mostly within the context of Coppola's career and family trivia (his daughter Sofia, her accomplished filmmaking career way ahead of her plays Peggy Sue's younger sister and his nephew Nicolas Cage gets the male lead) or as the  for the peak of Kathleen Turner's short-lived mega stardom. It had a disappointing Oscar run. Turner's wonderfully playful work, which is complicated but looks easy (that's Oscar death!) is still a real beauty of a star turn 25 years later. The final image that really stung on this revisit, is not a single shot but two of them, fused in a slow melancholy dissolve.

Peggy Sue has just broken up with her boyfriend again in an attempt to save them both from their 25 years-later divorce. She sits tired and despondent, lights a cigarette and we dissolve to the next scene. The beautiful thing is that it looks just like a memory: Soulful, colorful, lively... but half-imagined.

Check out these other Peggy Sue articles!

• Movies Kick Ass "Reverse Dorothy"
• The Entertainment Junkie "one woman's hall of mirrors" -- this is a really interesting take celebrating my least favorite scenes. It's making me rethink them!
• Film Actually loves the film's quotability. It does have great lines. And hair. And teeth. And eyes.
• Missemmamm really loves Peggy Sue and shared her favorite moments
• Awwww, the Movies Peggy's wild night.
  

'Happy 50th Nastassja' That's One From Our Hearts

Nastassja Kinsi by Richard Avedon

Editors note: For Nastassia Kinski's 50th birthday, I asked Glenn to write up a bit on her appearance in "One From the Heart" since it's a movie I know he loves (even more than me and I like it quite a lot) and also because I like to mark the big milestones for actresses and films. If you haven't seen this movie rent it. If you're too young to know Kinski's work, other must sees include Roman Polanski's Oscar nominee "Tess", the horror remake "Cat People" and Wim Wenders "Paris Texas". Here's Glenn from the great blog Stale Popcorn.

I’m going to commit what must be one of the ultimate cinephile no-no’s and go on the record as stating One from the Heart is my favourite Francis Ford Coppola film. Yes, moreso than The Conversation or Apocalypse Now, even moreso than The Godfather parts one and two, Coppola’s One from the Heart is a personal favourite that, to be sappy and pun-tastic at the same time, I hold very dear to my heart. I don’t have time to get into the hows and the whys, because I’m here to discuss Nastassja Kinski!

Is she for real?

Kinski’s Leila first enters the picture over 30 minutes in, her hair slicked back, waving a sparkler, wearing a beaded yellow one-piece costume and draped with a cape. When Frederick Forrest asks “Is she real?” you have to wonder the same thing. This was Kinski’s first American production and her film following her breakthrough in Roman Polanski’s Tess and she couldn’t have a more eye-popping entrance.

Before long she’s romancing Forrest by performing a dance routine in a neon-lit martini glass to the bluesy trumpet of Tom Waits’ Oscar-nominated music. Coppola himself has said that he envisioned Kinski’s Leila as a "Felliniesque circus performer to represent the twinkling evanescence of Eros,” whatever that means, but her sexy gymnastic routine around the rim of this giant, novelty prop remains the film’s most lasting, and seductive, image. Coppola didn’t exactly make Kinski stretch herself by casting her as an exotic, German goddess, but in the mean time he cemented the image that we all still have of her. And then, poof, “like spit on a grill” Leila is gone; the perfect encapsulation of Las Vegas’ intoxicating, but short-lived high.

But didn’t she leave quite the impression?