Have you ever heard Cynthia Erivo sing 'The Last Five Years'?

by Nathaniel R

Twas very depressed last night scrolling through social media (rarely a good idea) when I chanced upon this reshare of a video from 2015 that I'd never seen. At some point just before The Color Purple' started its previews on Broadway a pre-fame (at last in regards to the US) Cynthia Erivo showed up at Marie's Crisis (for non New Yorkers, that's a very famous basement piano bar near Stonewall). She sang "I Can Do Better" in full (eagle eyes will spot her co-star Danielle Brooks right behind her). As a fan of Erivo and a crazy-obsessive Last Five Years stan (I went to the original Off Broadway run and listened to the cast recording on loop for a full year) this was pure heaven for five minutes...

Click to read more ...

How Had I Never Seen..."Xanadu"?

by Cláudio Alves

In these stressful days, it can be nice to sit back and lose ourselves in the escapist marvels of cinema. Of course, what constitutes escapism varies from person to person. Some love the bloodlust of gory pictures while others revel in good midcentury melodrama. Whatever your poison of choice is, now seems like a good time to indulge. For me, one surefire way of dispelling the doom and gloom of day-to-day life is to bathe in the glamour of movie musicals. Other prime sources of stress-relief are those movies which are so terrible, so unbelievably miscalculated, that their turpitude becomes entertaining. The logical conclusion is that there's no greater joy than watching a movie musical that's so bad it's good.

Well, that's precisely what I did one monotonous afternoon, trading in the frustrations of reality for the disco disaster fabulousness of Xanadu…

Click to read more ...

1981 Retrospective: Jessica Harper in "Pennies From Heaven"

Please welcome new contributor Nick Taylor. He's been sharing insightful comments on his reader ballots for years so he now joins the team to talk about Supporting Actresses who weren't nominated to coincide with our upcoming Smackdown events.

The 54th Academy Awards celebrated an insular group for 1981. Only nine films were represented between all four acting categories. If you expand that circle to include the nominations for Picture, Director, and Screenplay it's only a whopping twelve films hogging forty above-the-line slots. Every Supporting Actress nominee (to be discussed soon) had a co-star recognized in a different category. But when you look to performances outside of the nominated shortlist, like Kate Reid in Atlantic City or Karen Allen in Raiders of the Lost Ark, it’s hard not to wonder why things shook out the way they did.  

Or consider Jessica Harper’s perfectly controlled performance in Pennies From Heaven. Adapted from a 1978 British miniseries, Pennies follows song salesman Arthur Parker (Steve Martin, aces as a total cad), who views life through the rose-colored tint of the music he peddles but can’t see the damage he wrecks on others, and whose affair with lovelorn schoolteacher Eileen (Bernadette Peters, winning a Golden Globe for her delicate, nuanced turn) sends both their lives spiraling towards tragedy...

Click to read more ...

A Rita Hayworth lovefest

by Cláudio Alves

Born Margarita Carmen Cansino, Rita Hayworth was one of Old Hollywood's brightest and most glamourous stars. As it often happens with such legends of the silver screen, her life was an unhappy one, full of tales of abuse and five failed marriages, crippling insecurity, alcoholism and Alzheimers. Perhaps more hauntingly, her biographers agree that Hayworth despised her existence as a movie star and as a pin-up icon, longing to escape the movie business in her heyday. In Hayworth's later years, she would even come to express disdain towards some of her more famous movies like the iconic Gilda. Still, those same pictures, as well as other classics, made her an immortal legend.

To explore the filmography of Rita Hayworth is to confront the cruel incongruences of her biography, how the movies sculpted her into something bigger than life and made her suffer for it too…

Click to read more ...

West Side Story... is forever.

by Nathaniel R

Rita Moreno, still sensational at 88 years young.It occurred to us last week while looking at photos from Steven Spielberg's 2020 remake of West Side Story that a huge swath of the original cast members from the 1961 Best Picture winner are still with us today. It's not just the legendary trailblazer Rita Moreno though she's the liveliest of the bunch despite being the oldest at a spritely 88. 

So after the jump all the surviving cast members!

We honor their contributions to an indelible piece of film history even though there are a great many of them that didn't say in movies thereafter. Anyway, thiis is us doing our small part to suggest and hope that they get a bit of attention when the new iteration of the greatest musical ever written arrives. Invite them to the December premiere at least, Spielberg, won'tcha?

Here they are...

Character names in white = the actor is still with us today

THE JETS

Click to read more ...