Dangerous Expectations

For what it's worth...

I saw A Dangerous Method last night and enjoyed it. With the New York Film Festival press events in swing (the festival proper starts on the 30th) and other screenings happening to the side we've arrived at our favorite time of year... Prestige Picture let out of the gate! As we speak, Michael and Kurt are watching Lars von Trier's Melancholia (which I've already seen and found fascinating and difficult to let settle) so you'll be hearing about these two movies shortly and later on when they open, too. Fall season is best because even when the movies aren't perfect they offer plenty to talk (and argue) about.

This adaptation of The Talking Cure (a phrase used in the movie unlike its new title) won't hit until November so my proper review will wait but I wanted to note straightaway that it wasn't quite what I was expecting -- almost stately, subtle and one might even say uptight to the point of refusing catharsis. Keira Knightley handles her difficult role well and without vanity, jutting her jaw out grotesquely and contorting her body to the point that it's even more alien and angular than one might have ever found it before. It's as if she's never read any of the critiques of her beauty. (I would like to note that I don't take kindly to the common hateful screeds about the actual looks of actors that are so popular on the web but this is rather like Sarah Jessica Parker -- who I personally love to look at -- agreeing to co-star in a picture entirely about horses.)

Freud (Viggo) and Jung (Fassy)Loved Viggo as Freud but was quite surprised to have difficulty with Michael Fassbender for the first time. I'm guessing that repression is, like depression, difficult to act in a mesmerizing way. For what it's worth my favorite male portrait of stifling repression is probably Anthony Hopkins in Remains of the Day who I would have handed the Oscar to in 1993. I am not overly fond of Hopkins so maybe I just have issues with male repression onscreen? A point of comparison: I was similarly unwowed by Daniel Day-Lewis when he made The Age of Innocence which is the picture my mind kept drifting towards.

As to Oscar speculation: I suspect that if there is Oscar play then The Age of Innocence is a far better comparison than Remains of the Day. But I suppose it all depends on whether AMPAS is in a repressed well appointed 90s period piece mood (they've kind of moved away from that lately, right?) and how the competition holds up when all the game pieces are on the board. 

Top 100 "Characters" From 50 Years of Best Actressing

This past summer we polled you once or twice a month about the Best Actress characters that you think of the most often from the past 50 years of the cinema taking us all the way from 1961 through to this past spring's Oscars for the films of 2010! With the new fall season of The Film Experience kicking off and the Oscar films arriving, I thought we'd take one last look back at that polling.

It was quite fun for little OCD actressexual me to peruse and "sort" and all of that in excel. If you're OCD like me and want to know how I compiled the chart, which is listed in alphabetical order below and pictured in slide show format in chronological order, there's more information after the list. I'd love to say that we'd do 100 articles to celebrate (one for each of your fav' fictionalized ladies) but that would be an insane thing to promise. But we'll use the chart for inspirational somethings! Give these characters a big round of applause for all their years of entertaining service.

By all means if you haven't seen any of the 98 films represented, make it a viewing priority. 

Your 100 Most Memorable Best Actress "Characters"
50 Years | 100 Greats (1961-2010)  

List presented visually (chronologically) and in text form (alphabetically) after the jump. Plus: Statistics!

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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. 

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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

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