It's Mother's Day

Rise and shine.

Do you have big plans? Whatever your mother wants today, she should have. Whether that's a bouquet of flowers, breakfast in bed, a night out on the town, "me" time, or any more unusual request... like, say, delivering a secret message to her lover that she's been forbidden to see, it should be hers...

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Stage Door: Oscar Flashback = Tony Prophecy?

I promised you a stage|screen colum each Tuesday. With the Tony Award nominations out this morning (see previous post), we already have so much to discuss but how is this for a twist on the flashback.

Remember this moment from the March 1995 Oscars? Tim Chappel and Lizzy Gardiner won Best Costume Design for the epic outback drag comedy The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

Sharon Stone with Oscar winning costume designers in 1995

Lizzy's credit card dress was all anybody could talk about the next week in fashion reviews, outside of nominee Uma Thurman's lavender Prada that is.

Several Tony winners have gone on to repeat their wins at the Oscars when the stage plays or musicals transferred to the bigscreen (think Yul Brynner, Shirley Booth, etcetera) but it doesn't usually happen the other way around. Trivia Expert Question: would this be the first time that someone won a Tony for reprising an Oscar triumph?

OTHER SILVER SCREEN CONNECTIONS!
Let Them Double as Rental Suggestions If You Don't Have Access To the Stage Plays

Screen-To-Stage
Best Musical Nominees Catch Me If You Can, Sister Act and Best Musical no-shows that were nominated in other categories like Priscilla and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown are all stage adaptations of hit movies.

Stage-To-Screen and Back Again
Both Musical Revival nominees How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and Anything Goes have made trips to the big screen in 1967 and 1956 respectively. How To Succeed is a typical adaptation but the Anything Goes film bears extremely little resemblance to the stage musical apart from some of the same songs. Driving Miss Daisy wasn't a big success in these Tony nominations but Vanessa Redgrave was nominated for reprising the Jessica Tandy role, a role that started on the stage.

Compare and Contrast
War Horse, one of the big tickets in town, is based on the book. The book is also the source of the upcoming Oscar Bait film War Horse from Steven Spielberg. It's not an adaptation of the stage play but they're both adaptations of the book. Got it?

If you can't see the plays, read the books or see related films

I've Seen That Face Somewhere Before
Mark Rylance, nominated for Jerusalem is a superb and acclaimed stage actor but unfortunately he doesn't work in movies very often. But some of you may remember him from his brief stint as  leading man of controversially explicit films like the beautiful period piece Angels & Insects (1996) or the stinging drama Intimacy (2001). Lily Rabe, nominated for her Shakespearean work in The Merchant of Venice, is the daughter of Jill Clayburgh and you may have seen her in the movies No Reservations, Mona Lisa Smile or as Ryan Gosling's loyal friend in All Good Things.

Ellen Barkin in "The Normal Heart" which has strangely never been made into a movieAnd though it pains me to admit it this, I've discovered recently that many younger readers are quite unfamiliar with Ellen Barkin. She's playing the stressed doctor in The Normal Heart, another revival of Larry Kramer's devastating AIDS drama (I saw the last revival which was great but people have been completely insane for this one so apparently it's unmissable.) Barkin's  screen heyday was in the late 80s (notably The Big Easy with Dennis Quaid and Sea of Love with Al Pacino). Her last high profile studio movie gig was Oceans 13 (2007). She's also Julianne Moore's bestie though that's neither here nor there, just a fun factoid.

Mother Gothel!
Donna Murphy, who hopefully won an army of new fans with her great work in Tangled, is Tony nominated again for Best Actress in a Musical for playing a woman from youth to old age in the tearjerker The People in the Picture. Murphy is  a two-time winner already.

Oscar Winners On Stage
Frances McDormand, Vanessa Redgrave and Al Pacino are all nominated for lead roles.

Will Any of The New Plays and Musicals Be Made Into Movies?
Your guess is as good as mine. Hairspray is a recent example of a movie that became a stage musical and then became a movie again based on its stage musical. Back and forth it goes. It's hard to know. Kander & Ebb's The Scottsboro Boys in particular might make an interesting transfer and we all know what happened with Cabaret and Chicago. Good People from David Lindsey Abaire has already had one of his acclaimed plays transferred (Rabbit Hole) and he's also a working screenwriter (his current gig being Oz: The Great and Powerful.) so maybe that show about a poor southie in Boston could make some sort of move.

April Showers: Edward Norton x 2

Hope you've enjoyed the April Showers series. There are SO many films we could have covered. (Tangent: I'm dying to know, for example, when the first shower sequence ever filmed was. The earliest I personally know of is Marilyn Monroe in Niagara (1953) which I meant to write about. Oops. But there has to be something earlier, right? I've searched but can't find any definitive info.)

Though I hate to end on a disturbing note I haven't been able to get Edward Norton out of my mind recently so we have to look back at American History X (1998).

Edward Norton as "Derek" in American History X

I'm not sure how Mr. Norton became lodged in my brain recently but if I had to guess it'd be the combo of Mark Ruffalo taking over the Hulk (they just started filming The Avengers) and a random flashback to The Painted Veil. Then at some point last week I said to myself "Edward Norton was Ryan Gosling before Ryan Gosling was Ryan Gosling" i.e. the actor that everyone thought was The Actor of His Generation, The Future. And then I really couldn't get him out of my head.

Norton famously gained much of his Great Actor reputation from American History X (1998), and won a longshot Oscar nomination for Best Actor. In the film he plays Derek, a loathsome racist who, after realizing his world view is full of shit while serving time in prison, tries to turn his life around before his younger brother follows his same dark path. It's disturbing to note how much acting cred can come from playing racist skinheads; Russell Crowe (Romper Stomper) and Ryan Gosling (The Believer) had similar artistic breakthroughs.

I've never known quite what to make of American History X -- it's one of those films like, say, Natural Born Killers, that seems to struggle with its own theme merely by addressing it. If you keep visualizing something awful through strong visuals and hugely charismatic acting, aren't you actually glorifying what you're supposed to be condemning? So this post is also a call for your opinions. I'm just curious how readers feel about the movie because it's one of those key late 90s Oscar players that I don't believe we've ever discussed. (I was in the Sir Ian McKellen camp that year but I was enormously pleased that Norton managed a nomination.)

As Derek begins to form a tentative friendship with a black prisoner, his neonazi counterparts turn violently against him. Showers are always bad news in prison movies. More after the jump [NSFW]

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April Showers: How Stella Get Her Groove Back

waterworks weekdays at 11

Travel back in time to that unfortunately brief time period when Angela Bassett was headlining movies. After the Oscar nomination for rocking that Tina Turner biopic and lending unforgettable fire (literally) to Waiting to Exhale she got her own picture to headline: How Stella Got Her Groove Back. The movie wasn't great but didn't it have one of the best titles of any book/movie/whatsit ever? The correct answer is yes.

To Shower or Not To Shower. That is the Question

How did Stella get her groove back, exactly?

Lots and lots of sex with Taye Diggs that's how! If that's how one does it, than singer/actress/wickedwitch Idina Menzel is possibly the grooviest chick on earth.

To shower or not to shower? They've just fought... again. These two are always arguing. But since getting her groove back in Jamaica, and returning to San Francisco with her studly groove-inducer in tow, she just can't resist his shameless display. Continued after the jump (mild nudity)

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April Showers: Diane & Viggo 'Busy Being Free'

waterworks weeknights at 11 in April

Have you ever wondered why people don't talk more about Tony Goldwyn's A Walk on the Moon (1999)?  It's one of those pictures that contains all sorts of stuff people came to love afterwards in embryonic or transformational stages. It was here that Diane Lane practiced the mesmerizingly guilty adulteress act that she'd be Oscar nominated for in Unfaithful (2002). It was the moment when Viggo Mortensen, so often backgrounded in pictures till then, revealed that he was a Star. It was also the mainstream bridge between Anna Paquin's sexually curious wicked child (The Piano) and sexually wicked curious psychic (True Blood) since she played one of her most ordinary roles as a teenager struggling with all the hormones swirling around inside her and outside of her as her screen mother (Lane) was also experiencing a sexual awakening.

It was even in A Walk On the Moon that Liev Schreiber played the uptight wronged husband and, perhaps learning that Sex-On-A-Stick-Wife-Stealer was the better role, flipped parts for The Painted Veil (2006),  bedding Naomi Watts (onscreen) which he's been doing ever since offscreen. Now, maybe we're reading too much into it. But the point is this: We like A Walk on the Moon.

Mostly it's an enjoyable picture because Diane & Viggo were at the arguable peak of their screen beauty and looked even more sensational paired. Certain star pairings just elevate everything, right? And does any actress do 'aroused but totally conflicted about it' as well as Diane Lane? There are moments in this performance that are just mesmerizing like the one pictured above wherein she shyly lets Viggo give her a necklace, briefly daring to meet his gaze before dropping her head into his chest in submission. Her shyness is fascinatingly mixed in by the actress because the repetitive act of visiting his mobile clothing store is rather brazen; she knows instinctively what awaits her therein. Viggo is such a smooth and hypnotic ladykiller that her legs are over his shoulders before she's realized she's horizontal. Next thing you know, she's let her hair down metaphorically enough to experience sex in the outdoors. Under a waterfall, God's own high pressure shower.

More after the jump [mild nudity] including a question for film historians with a minor in sex scenes.

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