Remember Gandhi? Baby Jake? Harlow?

On this day in movie related history...

1893 Mahatma Gandhi committed his first act of civil disobedience refusing to move from a whites only first class section of a train. He had a valid ticket, after all. He was forcibly ejected in South Africa's Pietermaritzburg Railway Station. This event and many others from his nonviolent revolution were reenacted by Ben Kingsley in Gandhi, Oscar's Best Picture of 1982. (You can cover a lot with a running time of 191 minutes.)
1909 Jessica Tandy is born. Steals Michelle Pfeiffer's Oscar 80 years, 9 months, and 19 days later.
1917 Rat Pack royalty Dean Martin is born. Centennial next year.
1928 Perpetually underappreciated and totally awesome director James Ivory is born. Later makes masterpieces like A Room With a View and Howards End. Where's his Honorary Oscar, AMPAS? He's 87 people get on that immediately. 

1937 The original Bombshell, Jean Harlow dies suddenly at the peak of her fame at the age of 26. Where's her biopic?
1952 Liam Neeson is born.
1958 Prince is born. *sniffle*
1966 Tom McCarthy, the director of last year's Best Picture Spotlight (2015) is born
1972 One of the world's most handsome actors, Karl Urban, is born in New Zealand. Later goes to both Middle Earth and Space, the final frontier. Next up: Pete's Dragon and Thor: Ragnarok. Meanwhile in New York Grease opens on Broadway. It becomes a movie phenomenon six years later. It is never leaving us.
1985 Goonies and Perfect both open. "What's so wrong with wanting to be perfect?"
1974 Bear Grylls is born so we might one day see pampered A list actors try to look tough in survival mode in the wild... albeit with a film crew around them so how Wild are they really Running? 
1976 ”The Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” by journalist Nik Cohn is published in New York magazine. It becomes a movie very quickly, a classic too, Saturday Night Fever (1977)
1990 Universal Studios Florida opens. Original rides based on Jaws, Earthquake, and King Kong all experience technical problems.

Baby Gyllenhaal

1991 City Slickers opens, turning into a surprise hit. Jack Palance wins the Oscar and little boy Jake Gyllenhaal makes his film debut 
1998 The Lion King, the Broadway sensation based on Disney's mega-hit movie, wins six Tony Awards
2015 Helen Mirren wins her Tony for playing Queen Elizabeth on Broadway, a role that also won her an Oscar (The Queen). She also won an Emmy for playing a different Queen Elizabeth. She's just an audiobook about royalty away from her EGOT.

Linkbowl

Boy Culture revisiting Maurice with director James Ivory 30 years later
The Guardian previews Alone in Berlin, a new WW II drama starring Emma Thompson & Brendan Gleeson
Playbill How the Newsies choreographer got Channing Tatum tap dancing for Hail, Caesar!
The Film Stage 15 movies to see after you've seen Hail, Caesar!

Film Mixtape Chris Feil's top ten.
MNPP [nsfw] Tom Hardy on the set of Taboo... with tattoos 
Antagony & Ecstasy comparing current Best Picture nominees to previous Best Picture winners 
Pajiba on Star Wars...dildos? 
i09 argues that Virtuosity (1995) starring Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington now works as a 'bad movie we love' instead of just a bad movie 

Today's Watch...
I was watching George Clooney and Channing Tatum lounge and dance about in Roman soldier and Sailor costumes during the big game so I watched the new movie commercials afterwards. X-Men Apocalypse, Captain America: Civil War, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2, The Jungle Blook, 10 Cloverfield Lane, Jason Bourne, Independence Day: Resurgence are included after the jump.

Click to read more ...

Ruth Wilcox’s May Flowers

They’re arriving so late in the day because Mrs. Wilcox is a nymph who travels at night.

As far as evocative film openings go this lush green opening for Howards End ranks among the top for me. Really, though, many films would be vastly improved if they open with a strolling Vanessa Redgrave. more...

Click to read more ...

My Bellatrix vs. Minerva Fantasy

Today at a critics screening, upset that the film was out of focus, I ran out of the theater to tell the people in charge. On my way out I tripped on a step I didn't see in the dark and literally went tumbling, face first (luckily my hands hit the ground before my face). After the screening -- which I winced through in pain -- I looked down to see my foot covered in blood! My toe is all F***ed up.

This is a really long way of saying that maybe Potter fans put some sort of hex on me today, anticipating a negative review of the last chapter of the beloved franchise. But the truth is I was somewhat nice to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two in my review at Towleroad because it is 100 times better than Part One -- not that that's a high bar to jump -- even if I think it's wanting in a few key ways*. Let's say B/B- for solid if limited entertainment. In short: it's a worthy finale and totally representative of the series. 

*Like, for instance you have all these great adult British actors and they rarely interact. I mean I was D-Y-I-N-G for a Helena vs. Maggie / Bellatrix vs. Minerva showdown so I could pretend that Lucy Honeychurch was finally done with "Poor Charlotte"'s constant fussy meddling and enlisted the dark arts to take her down! (Merchant & Ivory's Harry Potter. Haha. Just try to imagine it!) I knew this battle wasn't going to happen because I've read the book but instead all I got was like a disappointing three seconds between Julie Walters and Helena (I'll readily admit it was a great moment in the book.)

Was the Harry Potter finale satisfying for you? Do you think Stuart Craig will win the Art Direction Oscar as a thank you for the whole series? He's been nominated for Harry Potter movies three times out of seven thus far (plus six noms with three Oscars before it).

Costuming Helena, Finding Sherlock, Winning Oscar

INTERVIEW
As one half of the first costuming team I ever noticed as a young movie fanatic, interviewing JENNY BEAVAN was a special treat. She's currently enjoying her ninth Oscar nomination for her work on The King's Speech. This is her third solo nomination. She and her former partner John Bright costumed the Ishmael Merchant & James Ivory period dramas that I grew up obsessing over: A Room With A View, Howard's End, Maurice and the like. When Jenny and I spoke to discuss her current Oscar run for The King's Speech, however, it was less period drama and more modern comedy. "I'm guessing as to what you're saying" she told me while technical difficulties had us both comically shouting into our phones / computers until the situation was resolved.

We began at the beginning.

Merchant/Ivory is after all, a very good place to start, both for a young film buff in the 80s and a costume designer embarking on a huge career in the movies.  "That was my start in the whole thing," Beavan recalled, noting that the films were great fun to do.

The Merchant & Ivory Days
John Bright's name was peppered throughout her conversation. In fact, she had just seen him earlier that day. I had long wondered why they stopped working together. "We were known as Jenny Bright and John Beavan," she says about their close partnership. "I mean, he is just one of my absolutely best friends and also my most important collaborator. Believe me we're still collaborating. Just not so officially."

As it turns out Bright owns and runs Cosprop, a hugely important costume house which specializes in period wear,  an enormous job in and of itself though he still does the odd film. I mention how much I love his work on the ravishing The White Countess (2005) with elicits a barrage of superlatives from Beavan. "Absolutely brilliant!" 

Howards End (1992), a masterpiece.

We discuss a particular moment in Howards End that I'm very fond of. The Schlegel sisters (Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham-Carter) walking home one evening run into Mr Wilcox (Anthony Hopkins). One can't get enough of the beauty of that movie. The clothes are so modest but there's such sensuality to them and something so resonant and bohemian about the sisters. Beavan credits the screenplay with the specificity that makes character costuming easier and the actresses with the film's modernity.

Beavan, having logged a lot of time in costume dramas, thinks there's real power with staying utterly within period. If you step away from the period, she explains "it looks wrong and then you get a sort of worry in the audience."  Producers, particularly the America ones, she shares, don't like to see hats in the movies. And sometimes you just have to use hats. "Everybody wore hats up until the 1950s in England!" she says with feigned exasperation.

My grandmother would never go out without a hat on. She wouldn't have felt dressed.

After the golden period of the Merchant/Ivory films, Beavan's official partnership with John Bright ended and  the designer got a chance to "fly a bit more my own." That's what one might call an understatement.

READ THE REST for thoughts on Helena Bonham Carter's style, "finding" Sherlock Holmes and more.

Click to read more ...