Meow. It's Michelle Pfeiffer's Birthday!

To celebrate the 55th birthday of the one and only I thought we'd resurrect an old post about her Catwoman performance. If she's got nine lives so should this post. Please to enjoy...

Tim Burton's Batman Returns, the best Batman film (you heard me... throw down!) is now 15 21 years old and still one of the best comic book films. The movie didn't change cinema or its genre or significantly alter any careers. But it did send yours truly and millions of other Pfeiffer inclined moviegoers into a pfrenzy, arguably marking the apex of La Pfeiffer's cinematic reign. She was still in Oscar chasing mode (Love Field) and the full fledged move from heavy dramatic lifting into light mainstream fare (One Fine Day) and then blink and you'll miss her erratic appearances (Dark Shadows) was years away.

Ten Best Catwoman Line Deliveries
All the dialogue rocks but these are my favorite Pfeifferian readings

10 "Life's a bitch. Now, so am I"
Blockbusters love to shove quips on the public, in the hopes of catchphrase afterlife. This one’s pretty basic but Michelle sells it with true believer zeal.

9 more purring quips after the jump

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Top Ten: Non-Nominated Best Supporting Actresses, 1980s Division

Whew. That title is a mouthful. I know you already know what I mean though, you golden fiends. This very impromptu post is brought to you by a recent Tribeca revival screening of Martin Scorsese's indelible King of Comedy (1983) and this Movie Line interview with Sandra Bernhard herself -- to whom I'm dedicating the list -- who couldn't make it but definitely helped make the movie what it is. My one and only back and forth conversation with Sandra -- over Twitter, the sometimes leveler -- involved how freaking robbed she was for an Oscar nomination for that movie. I couldn't believe I was talking to her but I was not the least bit in doubt that she'd agree with me.

10 Best Non-Nominated Supporting Actress Performances of the 1980s

Honorable Mentions: I think Rosanna Arquette's "Surrender Dorothy" bit in After Hours was quite memorable though the rest of the movie has long since faded; I cherish Martha Plimpton in just about anything but mostly Shy People (1987) and Running on Empty (1988) back in her vibrant teenage River Phoenix-adjacent days.

I Apologize To: Kathy Baker in Street Smart, Mona Washbourne in Stevie (1981), Vanessa Redgrave in Prick up Your Ears and Jamie Lee Curtis in Trading Places who all won devoted fans for those performances in their respective years (and some awards buzz though not enough for Oscar) but, believe it or not, I haven't seen any of those movies!

10 Bridget Fonda, Scandal (1989)
and nine more divas after the jump...

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"VIRGIN ALERT! VIRGIN ALERT!"

All male periscopes down!"

Great Moments in Screen Bitchery #2,029

"Mean girls" have been around forever in High School Movies and then they weren't always the villains -- take Grease 2 for an example. The Pink Ladies are such bitches!

Complete the Sentence...

Michelle Pfeiffer stars in "Malavita" opening October 2013

"While Michelle Pfeiffer is at the grocery store I hope she picks up some  _______________ because ____________."

Top Ten 1980s

for discussion fun

Tootsie, one of the inarguably great American comedies

"The Tuesday Top Ten will get more article-like soon," he said (again). "It really will." But it was so much fun to discuss the 1930s and the 1970s, which are arguably the two most respected decades (critically speaking) of American cinema. So how about a decade that gets no respect? The 1980s. The '80s are tough for me to feel discerning about because I lived through them and was a) young and b) just falling in love with the movies and c) just falling hard for the movies so how could the cinema possibly have been hitting its nadir? I still have inordinate fondness for movies that might more safely be called guilty pleasures like Yentl, Superman II, Splash, Return of the Jedi, Clue, and about half of the filmography of John Hughes... and so on. I even like revisiting really bad movies from that decade. 

Off the top of my head my ten favorites of the decades. 

A Sean Young polaroid from the set of Blade Runner

1. The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen)
2. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott)
3. A Room With a View (James Ivory)
4. Tootsie (Sydney Pollack)
5. Dangerous Liaisons (Stephen Frears)
6. Amadeus (Milos Forman)
7. Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen)
8. Aliens (James Cameron)
9. Law of Desire (Pedro Almodovar)
10. Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg) 

With apologies too... Silkwood, Reds, Diva, The Empire Strikes Back, The Little Mermaid, The complete works of Michelle Pfeiffer, Moonstruck, Raging Bull, Jean de Florette, Manon of the Spring, The King of Comedy, Heathers, sex lies and videotape, The complete works of Kathleen Turner, The Shining, Victor/Victoria, The Right Stuff, Bull Durham, Little Shop of Horrors, The Terminator, Witness, Broadcast News, Running on Empty, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and Raising Arizona. I could go on and on and on but I'd better stop before I start singing Xanadu again.

 

I'd love to hear your lists, both guilty pleasures and critically lauded efforts you think deserve their reputations.