Let's dance

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Months of Meryl: Ricki & The Flash (2015)

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep. 

 

#49 —Ricki Randazzo, a rock singer who returns home to the family she abandoned.

MATTHEW: Throughout his eclectic and gloriously unpredictable career, the late Jonathan Demme paved the way for peak performances from actresses as disparate as Mary Steenburgen, Melanie Griffith, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jodie Foster, Oprah Winfrey, Kimberly Elise, Thandie Newton, Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, and Debra Winger. Like George Cukor before him, Demme was devoted to telling stories about women, which comprise the bulk of his narrative output. The director committed to shaping these narratives with the same heady, inquisitive vigor and nonjudgmental consideration that electrified all of his subjects, from Anthony Hopkins’ lip-licking Hannibal Lecter to David Byrne, who indelibly bopped around the stage in a business suit at least six sizes too big during Demme’s landmark concert documentary Stop Making Sense.

Ricki and the Flash, Demme’s final narrative feature, sometimes conjures the capricious, loop-the-loop feeling of a concert documentary in its depiction of the type of story that Demme loved to tell, that of an unorthodox woman shouldering her burdens and confronting any and all perils as she forges ahead with the life she has chosen to lead...

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Months of Meryl: Into the Woods (2014)

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep.  

#48 —The Witch, a witch.

JOHN: In his reserved review of the original 1987 Broadway production of Into the Woods, Frank Rich summed up the plot of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s beloved musical as such: “Cinderella and company travel into a dark, enchanted wilderness to discover who they are and how they might grow up and overcome the eternal, terrifying plight of being alone.” Rich noted that, “in remaking Grimm stories, Mr. Sondheim's lyrics and Mr. Lapine's book tap into the psychological mother lode from which so much of life and literature spring.” Sondheim and Lapine’s dextrous, intertwined reimagining of classic Grimm fairy tales, from Little Red Riding Hood to Cinderella, offers a subversively adult version of these hallowed childhood fables and an artistic vision that seems fundamentally at odds with family-friendly Disney, the machine behind Rob Marshall’s 2014 screen translation.

When unhappy fans pressed Sondheim upon the film’s release to defend what felt like a compromised adaptation, he admitted that concessions were in fact happily made to secure a PG rating...

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Rita Moreno to return to movie musicals - for real this time!

by Nathaniel R

You may recall that we were briefly very excited about Rita Moreno's return to her home genre, the movie musical. News broke but then was quickly retracted that she had landed a wonderful part in the film version of Lin-Manuel Miranda's Tony-winning debut In the Heights which ran on Broadway from 2008 through 2011. Now, the news is for real but with a different film. She'll play "Valentina" in Steven Spielberg's remake of West Side Story. That's the "Doc" role, in a bit of racial and gender-flipped casting...

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Sir Ian prepares for "Cats"

Sir Ian McKellen was just on Graham Norton discussing his preparation for his role in Cats. As usual just when you think you couldn't love this man any more than you already do, he proves you wrong yet again.

P.S. Tom Hooper is still casting his adaptation of the phenomenally successful 80s stage musical. The household name stars have been announced for some times but they've been adding new-to-the-big-screen talents including two principal dancers from the Royal Ballet.