John Malkovich signs "John Malkovich" on a photo of John Malkovich

"Malkovich! Malkovich! Malkovich!"

Malkovich Career Honors

John Malkovich was just honored at the Munich Film Festival in Germany with a "CineMerit Award" so herewith a very impromptu top 4 performances. I loved him in his Oscar nominated work in Places in the Heart (1984) back when I was a kid but I don't remember the movie at all so I left it out.

Nathaniel's "Best" Malkoviches

1. Being John Malkovich (1999) -far and away his best. The Academy was insane not to nominate him.
2. In the Line of Fire (1993) 
3. Burn After Reading (2008)
   honorable mention: Dangerous Liaisons (1988) maybe he was a walking anachronism but I worship the movie, okay?

 YOUR TURN!

Ally Sheedy "We Were Under the Radar"

Gay pride week here in New York City has been eventful to say the least (see previous post) and the parade today was fun. But I thought what you'd most be interested in, given The Film Experience's leanings (actressexual), was a shared moment with Ally Sheedy!

I was on the guest list for Kiehl's Pride Party which was hosted by Dan Savage and his boyfriend Terry Miller of the awesome "It Gets Better" project (Can someone give them a Nobel Peace Prize already?). And so, to my utter delight, was Ally Sheedy. I had to reach out to her as she passed by me to tell her how much I loved her in High Art (1998). Once she'd stopped to chat, me being me, I had to then tell her I was rooting for her to win the Oscar but then she wasn't even nominated. Unspeakable Tragedy! Immediately after blurting that out, I worried I'd poured salt onto an old wound but instead she was all smiles, thank yous and bygones "We were under the radar!" she said cheerfully. We then swapped "Isn't Patty Clarkson awesome?" notes and to my surprise Ally introduced me to her lovely daughter. How is Ally Sheedy old enough to have a 17 year old daughter?!?  

I brought along my friend Jon and we're pictured to your left with Kenneth in the (212) who offers up an amusing rundown of the event and a rather skewed version of my chat with Ally Sheedy ;)  It's not that I don't love The Breakfast Club, trust! I just wanted to use the few seconds I had with her to talk about more pressing matters. And Oscar is always the most pressing matter, don't you agree?

In addition to a great crowd, the event featured gourmet cups of macaroni & cheese (4 or 5 different flavors. Don't confuse me with options) which everyone tried to pretend they weren't into. Everyone pretended badly.

How was your weekend? More on the weekend movies, box office and the True Blood premiere tomorrow. G'night.

"Character" Poll - 1991-2000

Saturday I asked you to vote on Best Actress Character Polls. This is not about the performances per se but the movie characters themselves.

It's to help me with brainstorming a secret project or two -- plus to get a general consensus on which characters you wonderful people out there in the dark obsess over most. So while we're discussing it, let's make the poll an even two decades.

Here's part 3 & 4 1991-1995 | 1996-2000. VOTE ON BOTH. Please choose up to but no more than 5 characters. Be honest about which characters you think of the most (which is not the same as who you think deserved to win.)

poll by twiigs.com

Here's part 4. 1991-1995. Same thing.

poll by twiigs.com

Thanks for voting.

And make sure to hit the other two polls if you haven't already. Thanks!

"Dick Tracy" Q&A with Warren Beatty

Alex (BBats) here, doing a lil’ scouting in LA. Oh my oh my!

BBats and Beatty! This past weekend, I had the pleasure to revisit Dick Tracy (1990) on the big screen courtesy of the Los Angeles Times Hero Complex Film Festival.  The film hasn’t aged a day due to that rich pulp style that seeps through every set piece, costume, matte painting, and actor.  The main draw was a Q & A with Warren Beatty after the film! Now, I was battling the flu and taking notes as fast as I could, so keep that in mind and I wouldn’t say anything below was a direct quote.

Beatty stood in the wings as the film’s end credits rolled. Big applause for the film followed and I saw a big smile grow across his face. The moderator brought him out to thunderous ovation (duh). He seemed a little cagey and very careful in selecting his words; this Q & A was for the Los Angeles Times, he pointed out, and would be in print the very next day.

Hit the jump for some Beatty, Dick, and a lil' Bening action!

On Stephen Sondheim
'He did great stuff for this…I’m such a fan of Sondheim’s. Everytime I see one of his shows, I just fall apart on the first song.'

On the film itself
'I’m disgusting because I really do like it a lot.'

Beatty had been attached to the propertry since 1976. The moderator asked why he chose Dick Tracy. Beatty said that he didn’t want to do some picture where everything got blasted around, and that Dick Tracy was this guy who had been around forever and wanted to start a family. He paused and said he thought of it as a gentle picture. (Aside: I love when people call movies "pictures". Super classy.)

This next part is so funny, let's get it right by quoting directly from the Los Angeles Times.

 “Little by little I found myself caught up enough in it to actually go and make a movie about it, because it was hard for me. … I always think of making a movie like vomiting. I don’t like to vomit, but I get to the point where I think, ‘I’d better go ahead and do this, and I’ll feel better.’” 

Everyone  rolled with laughter. The vomiting reference also maybe gives us a little glimpse as to why he hasn’t directed a film since Bulworth (1998). But back to the Q & A.

His desk needs a bucket.

Beatty began to compliment everyone in the cast and the moderator honed in on certain performances and how he cast the roles. Interestingly, Beatty compared the casting process to writing. When you cast someone it's an instant rewrite, even if you don’t change a word.

Madonna sings "MORE" in Dick Tracy and you know you want more, too: Bening, Pacino. Hoffman, Oscars and Dick Tracy sequel nuggets after the jump.

Click to read more ...

Unsung Heroes: The Editing of 'Glengarry Glen Ross'

Michael C. from Serious Film here this week with an appreciation of the craftsman that took what could have been an incredibly un-cinematic project and turned it into one hundred of the most riveting minutes of the nineties.

Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)

Whenever a prominent stage play makes the trip to the big screen it is, without fail, greeted by throngs of film writers questioning how well the material has been “opened up” for the big screen. This always gets under my skin.  Never mind that many, if not the majority, of the most beloved stage adaptations were not “opened up” at all.  No, what gets me is the implied idea that there is something inherently uncinematic about dialogue. As if audiences say things like, “I guess it’s okay when Sidney Poitier tells Rod Steiger they call him Mr. Tibbs, I just wish they were doing something cinematic at the time, like dangling from a helicopter.”

a desperate phone call with Jack LemmonThe truth, of course, is that any film that makes you identify with the events on screen is cinematic. It can take place entirely in a restaurant, a jury room, or the mind of one paralyzed man; if it makes you forget the darkened theater with the sticky floor it’s doing its job.

Director James Foley along with editor Howard E Smith knew this when he made the film of David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize winning Glengarry Glen Ross (1992).  To paraphrase what he says in the DVD commentary, Ed Harris smoking a cigarette is as much a movie moment as Lawrence of Arabia coming over a hill leading a thousand men.  In the lesser Mamet films, the stylized writing can feel stilted and airless, but not this time. Throughout Glengarry we feel as if we are privy to the interior monologues of the characters.   

I could fill ten columns highlighting perfectly constructed moments but I’ll limit myself to three favorites:

Al Pacino's nomination was the only Oscar attention for the film

• Any discussion of Glengarry has to begin with Alec Baldwin’s legendary scene. It's an audacious move to begin the movie with one actor delivering an uninterrupted eight-minute monologue, but Foley and Smith get away with it largely by breaking the whole sequence down into a series of short scenes – Baldwin belittles Lemmon, Harris confronts Baldwin, Baldwin denies them the leads – that add up to one riveting whole. 
• There is a perfectly held moment just after Spacey has opened his big mouth and blown Pacino’s big sale and just before Pacino lets loose with one of the most memorable torrents of profanity in film history. It just holds on Pacino’s face as he absorbs what has just transpired, giving the audience an all time great “Uh-oh…” moment watching the fury gather behind his eyes.
• I love the way the filmmakers relax the film’s tension just long enough to let Lemmon’s Shelly “The Machine” Levine recount what he believes to be his great triumph to Pacino. It’s a small oasis of peace and contentment before the character’s final slide down to destruction. 

Throughout the film there is never a cut for it’s own sake, never a moment where Foley and Smith showoff just to prove that it’s a movie they’re making. Instead they rely on the basic language of cinema to give the bouts of verbal violence an impact that makes most movie violence feel like playing patty-cake.