Take Three: Judy Davis

Craig here, from Dark Eye Socket, with Take Three. Today: Judy Davis

Judy Davis as "Joan Lee" and Judy Davis as "Joan Frost" in NAKED LUNCH

Take One: Naked Lunch (1991)
The early nineties were extra literary times for Davis. She appeared in an adaptation of E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread, played novelist George Sand in Impromptu, supported John Mahoney’s Faulkner-esque Southern writer in Barton Fink and performed dual role duties in David Cronenberg’s controversial adaptation of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. Initially, as Joan Lee, she instigates a curious urgency within Peter Weller’s Burroughs avatar William Lee. She gets a “very literary high – a Kafka high” in a 1950s NY flophouse by injecting bug powder into her right boob. As you do. Then, as Joan Frost, the wife of eloping novelist Ian Holm, she flits and flirts around a North African port town, futilely arousing Weller to stray from his budding homosexual leanings.

Davis’ roles could be entirely different entities or the very same woman or some weirdly unfeasible concoction of both. The sarcastic boredom she expresses as junk-plugged Joan #1 couldn’t be further from the deliciously fruity joie de vivre she exudes as Joan #2; the ever-present look on this Joan’s face suggests she’s either just remembered or recently repeated a particularly saucy joke  -- maybe the kind of thing she feverishly typed in Arabic on her bug-morphed, Burroughs-voiced typewrite? She's all darting eyes and red-lipped pouting under falsely prim attire. Davis lets slip enough sly telling hints that she knows who she is and isn’t playing: do we want one Joan or two? she’s inferring. Whether she’s fingering a fleshy writing implement, re-enacting her doomed part in one of two “William Tell routines” or taking notes on some Interzone agents “feeding” from a mass of strung-up jism-dispensing mugwumps (as you do), Davis yields exemplary acting and exterminates all rational thought.

Take Two: The Ref (1994)
Her comic work doesn’t always get the acclaim it deserves but when she broadens her comic scope even slightly, it’s a treat. 

Click to read more ...

Cinema de Gym: Forrest Gump

Kurt here. On the day Forrest Gump was playing at my gym, it seemed only right that I swap out the elliptical for the treadmill: Run, cinephile! RUN!! In truth, part of me wanted to run right out of the building (this is a behemoth of a movie to chip away at with my modest column). But, I stuck it out, and I tip my hat to the gym's programmers, as I've never been so inspired to burn off as many calories as possible.
Forrest Gump tends to have that effect on people, ever since it ran away with every trophy in sight at the end of 1994. It's a you-can-do-it movie, through and through, with Forrest boasting Oprah-level propulsion – too busy to look back for more than a brief glance. The film itself doesn't wow so greatly the smaller it gets in the rearview, no matter how large it looms on the marquee and no matter how well it urges one to keep up with its star runner. Such is the plight of the overhyped phenomenon.
I like Forrest Gump just fine, but I think it works better as a capsule of Americana than as a movie. And, of course, to be a capsule of Americana is a big part of its aim. It's essentially 141 minutes of milestones and iconography, landmark moments and famous faces. Its underdog-rewrites-history conceit is a good one, always teetering on the edge of magical realism but too awash in actual events to truly show it. That vicious, wonderful – and very viral – review of Transformers: Dark of the Moon stuck it to Gump for being the evil initiator of archival footage manipulation, but it's hard not to find charm in the film's grainy tour of suddenly resurrected legends (JFK, John Lennon), however buffoonish the tour guide may be. I think my personal favorite thing about the film – if I may be so broad – is its sociopolitical Vietnam-era backdrop, which multiple films have since tried and failed to depict with the same buzzing cultural potency (ahem, Across the Universe, ahem). It's what pumps awesome power into Forrest and Jenny's Washington Monument reunion, surely one of the most iconic hugs in contemporary cinema. It's not strength of narrative, but strength of context that gives you butterflies – a movement and an era defined in an embrace. 

Hug it Out

And that's just one moment.
In its tireless forward motion, Forrest Gump, covers an awful lot of ground, each episode another page in the history book. So nimble is its pace that to tell you what I saw during my quick workout is to offer you a clip reel: the rise of the ping pong master, the boiling resentment of a legless Lieutenant Dan, the newsreel mooning of LBJ, the breaking up of the Black Panther “party” and, of course, that lovely aforementioned hug. All scenes that, appropriately, have now found their own places in the pages of history. However you feel about Forrest Gump, few films have so firmly cemented themselves into popular conversation, achieved such immortal quotability, and made themselves known to what seems like every adult media consumer. As I write this, I'm in a house with a ping pong table in the basement. Is it possible to play the game without thinking of a rubber-limbed Tom Hanks? Is it possible to open a box of chocolates without envisioning Sally Field, or a white bench in Savannah, Georgia? 

It was nice to revisit this movie after the major Hanks misfire of Larry Crowne, which won't put a dent in the smiley star's career, but surely bruised his credibility as a filmmaker. There will be no higher peak for Hanks than Forrest Gump, no better instance of his massively, uniquely beloved everyman/leading man persona. I wonder if he knew this when he was making the press rounds with Robert Zemeckis and Robin Wright, or when he collected his Oscar – that this was it, the summit, the key page in his history. I wonder if he wanted to stop and freeze instead of just keep running. 

Conclusions?

1. See above.
2. Movies about running are even better motivators than Matthew McConnaughey's abs. (Should I recommend Prefontaine to the gym programmers?)
3. Admittedly, the whole “box of chocolates” thing is pretty counterproductive here.
4. Qualms aside, Forrest Gump is something of treasure.  

What do you think of the film? Despite everything, it's surprisingly divisive, especially given the whole Pulp Fiction / Shawshank Redemption Best Pic defeat. 

Actress "Characters" Wins: Miranda, Clarice, Clementine

Talking Points!

Last month I asked you to vote on the most memorable characters within the ranks of the Best Actress nominees. It wasn't about who gave the best performances but which characters have stuck with you the most. Here are the results -- I assumed you'd like to see.

1991-1996 

1. *CLARICE STARLING (Jodie Foster) from Silence of the Lambs
2. THELMA (Geena Davis) from Thelma & Louise
3. LOUISE (Susan Sarandon) from Thelma & Louise
4. *ADA MCGRATH (Holly Hunter) from The Piano
5. FRANCESCA JOHNSON (Meryl Streep) from The Bridges of Madison County
   
   runners up (in descending order):  (four way tie for sixth place!!!) SERA Leaving Las Vegas, TINA TURNER What's Love Got to Do With It,  ELINOR DASHWOOD Sense & Sensibility and *SISTER HELEN PREJEAN Dead Man Walking and... coming in tenth *MARGARET SCHLEGEL Howards End
   
   observations: Clarice Starling had the widest margin of victory in any of the polls, a classic character indeed. I was a bit surprised to see Thelma just edge out Louise for #2 given that Sarandon was the "leader" but perhaps people still get the characters mixed up? Thelma, Louise and Ada were pretty evenly matched with Francesca just barely edging out that cluster of women competing for the the 5-Spot. I'm surprised that Margaret Schlegel was as low as she was (I would've voted for her myself) but I have noticed that today's film culture has greatly devalued the Merchant/Ivory filmography. A true shame because nobody does Brit lit adaptations like that historic team.
   
   weakest showing: Rose (Laura Dern) from Rambling Rose, Viv (Miranda Richardson) from Tom & Viv barely made a blip with 1% of the vote each. The surprise there is Rambling Rose since Dern's Oscar breakthrough was quite a memorable girl. But it's true that you never hear people talk about that film these days.

1996-2010 AFTER THE JUMP

Click to read more ...

Personal Canon #86: T2: JUDGMENT DAY (1991)

For the 20th anniversary of the James Cameron classic Terminator 2, Judgment Day a reposting of the Personal Canon essay on the film, easily one of the best actioners of all time with a performance by Linda Hamilton which rivals Sigourney Weaver's Ripley badassery ...and that's a nearly impossible feat.

T2: Judgment Day (1991)  Directed by James Cameron | Screenplay by James Cameron and William Wisher Jr | Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Robert Patrick, Joe Morton, S Epatha Merkerson and introducing Edward Furlong | Released 07/03/1991

Once the big profits for the small budgeted The Terminator began rolling in in October of '84, James Cameron became a hot commodity. He wasted no time on the follow up. Twenty-one months later the release of the much larger sci-fi spectacle Aliens (1986 -- to be celebrated here very soon) catapulted him from "filmmaker to watch" to the real deal. His long absence from the multiplex -- Avatar's December 2009 bow ended a 12 year drought -- made it easy to forget this basic truth: the director once moved swiftly through the stages of filmmaking if never quite as rapidly as his movies moved through their action. After Aliens, he left outer space for the deep seas with The Abyss (another hit) and having proved himself thrice over, returned to the killer robots that made his name.

"Model Citizen"
The Terminator cost 6 million to make, Terminator 2: Judgment Day would cost 100 million plus. The budget wasn't the only thing exploding: salaries, visual effects, setpieces, ambition, and public reaction were all supersized. Yet for all of this exponential external growth, Cameron smartly kept his focus tight and intimate.

Early shots give you the color scheme: fiery reds|steel blues. (Michael Edwards as JC.)

Sarah Connor's opening narration and the imagery of post-apocalyptic LA it plays over, both review the first movie and download Cameron's game plan for the sequel.

The computer which controlled the machines, Skynet, sent two terminators back through time. Their mission: to destroy the leader of the human resistance, John Connor my son. The first terminator was programmed to strike at me in the year 1984 before John was born. It failed. The second was set to strike at John himself when he was still a child. As before the resistance was able to send a lone warrior, a protector for John. It was just a question of which one of them would reach him first.

In other words, it's more of the same... only bigger which we notice immediately by way of shinier effects and massive fireball explosions. This repeat template is familiar but it won't be comfortable. We're also going deeper. The story structure is varied only enough to reflect the passage of time. But what has that passage of time wrought?

Upgrade U: The origin T-800 (Arnold) and the leaner meaner T-1000 (Robert Patrick)

As before... two naked men arriving from the future are introduced first. Once clothes are violently procured, their target is immediately identified by text (a phone book in the first film, a police car monitor in the second). Cut to target: John Connor (Edward Furlong). He's even introduced with a shot of a motorbike just like his mother was in 1984. So far so remarkably similar. This makes the slight tweaks stand out all the more. First, the film is more self consciously "funny" (the "Born to Be Bad" accompaniment to the T-800's intro). Second, both visitors from the future are instantly portrayed as formidable threats rather than as a David and Goliath mismatch. Third... where the hell is Sarah Connor?

Click to read more ...

Actress Polling - Final Days

Only a couple of days remain to vote on the "Character" Best Actress Polls that were posted earlier this month.

If you haven't already voted on 1991-2000 in particular please do so. That decade's polls got far fewer votes than 2001-2010 and it'd be great if another 400 of you voted to even things out a bit. You can vote for five characters in each poll!  I mean I'm dying to know whether you think Cynthia "Sweetheart" Purley in Secrets and Lies is more memorable than, say, cross-dressing Viola in Shakespeare in Love. Or whether you love Louise but not Thelma (aren't you required to vote for both?) or if you'd vote for Senator Laine Hanson from The Contender but would never buy a house from Carolyn Burnham in American Beauty. Have you ever ridiculed Nell "tae in the win'" or sold your body to an alcholic like Sera did in Leaving Las Vegas.

Go and vote: Which Best Actress characters from that era do you think about the most?