Months of Meryl: Marvin's Room (1996)

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

 

#24 —Lee, a frazzled single mom and aspiring hairdresser who reunites with her ailing sister.

JOHN: Marvin’s Room begins with a slow outward zoom of assorted pill bottles and other medical paraphernalia scored to whimsically upbeat music that immediately establishes the film’s split personality between dysfunctional family comedy and sentimental illness drama. We soon learn that the titular Marvin is the bedridden and near-death father of Bessie (Diane Keaton) and brother of Ruth (Gwen Verdon), three members of a looney Floridian family. No sooner than Marvin’s illness and medical routine is introduced, Bessie is herself diagnosed with leukemia by Dr. Robert De Niro (who also produced the film). He recommends that Bessie's family members be tested for a possible bone marrow transplant. This diagnosis is the film’s engine, reuniting her with her sister Lee (Meryl Streep) and nephews Hank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Charlie (Hal Scardino), bridging a twenty year gap between this estranged family...

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1994 Revisits: "True Lies"

by Ben Miller

Arnold Schwarzenegger has never been much of an actor.  Instead he's a presence, an ideal; square-jawed, charismatic, with muscles on top of muscles.  But, his biggest advantage is how aware he is of his own ridiculousness. His job is to do competent action and spout a cheesy one-liner with the bravado necessary to sell it.  His greatest critical successes have leaned into these innate strengths. When paired with a good director and solid co-stars, his films work.

Everything came together with True Lies in 1994.  Director James Cameron was riding high after T2: Judgment Day made all the money a movie could make in 1991.  He originally entertained the idea of a Spider-Man movie starring Michael Biehn, but couldn’t make it work with 1994 technology.  Instead, he went with True Lies...

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Vintage '94: Vampires, Gumps, and Serial Moms

The Supporting Actress Smackdown 1994 Edition arrives in just two weeks (Sunday June 24th) so as we approach and you vote (hint hint), let's talk context in movies and entertainment.

Great Big Box Office Hits: 1. Forrest Gump 2. The Lion King 3. True Lies 4. The Santa Clause 5. The Flintstones 6. Dumb & Dumber 7. Clear and Present Danger 8. Speed 9. The Mask and 10. Pulp Fiction just barely beating out Interview with the Vampire to complete the top ten. 

Oscar's Best Picture Nominees: Forrest Gump  (13 noms / 6 wins), Pulp Fiction  (7 noms / 1 win), The Shawshank Redemption (7 nominations), Quiz Show (4 noms), and the surprise Four Weddings and a Funeral (only 2 nominations in the 'only 5' Best Picture era!).

After the jump more vintage '94 and our best guess as to what would have made the list in the current voting era of 5-10 nominees...

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Months of Meryl: The Bridges of Madison County (1995)

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

#22 — Francesca Johnson, an Italian war bride-turned-American housewife who falls in love with a visiting photographer.

JOHN: Francesca Johnson (Meryl Streep) is sipping a beer in a bathtub while a charming stranger waits for her to eat dinner downstairs. Francesca’s husband and two children have left for a trip to the Iowa state fair, but her few days of solitude have been quickly interrupted by the welcome arrival of Clint Eastwood’s Robert Kincaid, a travelling National Geographic photographer on assignment to shoot Madison’s quaint covered bridges. With her brunette bangs and stray wisps of hair dangling out from her updo, Streep lounges in the bath, watching the water from the shower head above drip down into her hands. Robert has just showered, and, in voiceover, Francesca relates the eroticism of the moment, their sharing the bathtub only minutes apart. Streep’s face has never looked more assured and aroused, even as she’s unsettled by the seismic consequences of this romance. The simultaneous thrill and troubling implications of the moment flicker on Streep’s face as she loses herself in thought, already foreseeing the end of this brief encounter while testing the boundaries between her desires and responsibilities.

In this scene, the magnificence of Streep’s performance elevates this admittedly soapy and conventional tale into the pantheon, a brilliant fusion of Francesca’s subjectivity given weight by a generous filmmaker and imbued with soul-shaking truth by a master performer...

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Blueprints: "American Beauty"

Last month we dove into one of the most iconic shower scenes in cinema for April Showers. For May Flowers, Jorge takes a look into one of the most famous thematic uses of a flower in film.

American Beauty was at one point supposed to be titled American Rose. This is neither a coincidence nor an appropriate alternative. The film, a satire about American suburbia and the layers of darkness that society hides underneath their pretty but rotting exteriors, heavily uses the recurring image of rose throughout. Not just in the now iconic nude sequence with Mena Suvari. 

Roses appear through the script in many key parts, usually in places where a character is putting up a façade for the world, or when they are completely submitting to their darkest impulses. Or when those two collide. Let’s take a look at where the flowers ominously represent both the attachment and the repulsion against society’s “pretty” standards...

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