April Showers: Joe Manganiello ♥s Pee Wee

You know what we haven't discussed yet? How totally delightful Joe Manganiello is in Pee Wee's Big Holiday (2016). The new film, Pee Wee Herman's first movie since 1988 (!) has been been streaming for a couple of weeks but it's a great fit for April Fool's Day because it feels so impossible that it happened at all. 

Because Pee Wee is Pee Wee and his work has always been skillfully aimed at both adults and children with equal panache, it's often filled with hilarious sexual innuendo that sails over the head of tiny tots but is playful enough not to spoil the exuberant innocence of the comedy for adults who are in on the jokes. Pee Wee Herman's Playhouse, the beloved series that ran for five seasons in the late 80s and early 90s was no stranger to the occasional hunky visitor but for the new film the hunky visitor graduates to full co-star level, courtesy of a very game and funny Joe Manganiello playing "Joe Manganiello". [A few spoilers ahead...]

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Alan Rickman (1946-2016)

Heartbreaking. Alan Rickman, one of the UK's most treasured showbiz mainstays has passed away at the age of 69. Though he occassionally dabbled in directing (The Winter Guest and A Little Chaos) he was best known as an actor of stage, tv, and big screen.  He's inarguably best known and beloved for the many years as Professor Snapes in the Harry Potter series. But for me, his career always makes me nostalgic for the early 90s. His career was energized by the success of Die Hard which led to a bunch of movies. 

When I saw Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) I was shocked that any film could contain so many performances that were all over the map in terms of quality - a chaos of acting styles and fumbles but he was always fun hamming it up as the Sherrif of Nottingham. I immediately typecast him as a villain. A year or two after Robin Hood I discovered in short succession the intense incest drama Close My Eyes (in which he is horrified to discover that is brother-in-law Clive Owen is sleeping with his wife), the claustrophobic thriller Closet Land in which he terrorized my then obsession Madeline Stowe (at the peak of her powers from roughly 1990-1994). But all my limiting ideas that that inimitable voice and the stern face meant he was a screen baddie were blown apart by this next one. My best girlfriend had fallen for this romantic comedy Truly Madly Deeply in which he plays Juliet Stevenson's ghost lover and demanded I see it. I fell hard. For them and the movie.

It's a great rental / streaming idea if you haven't seen it. This scene, which gives it its title, is my single favorite moment in Rickman's filmography.

What's your strongest memory of Alan Rickman's career?

How Ingrid Bergman Triumphed After "Indiscreet" Affairs

When Ingrid Bergman won the Academy Award in 1957 for Anastasia, it read like the end of a tinseltown screenplay: tarnished star, humbled by exile for her shameless behavior, returns to the city that made her famous, and is welcomed home with open arms. Of course, the truth was a little more complicated. Bergman was unable to attend the Academy Awards. Instead, she received the award from Roberto Rosselini while in the bathtub.

More importantly, despite the years of alienation and recrimination, the Swedish star was far from humbled. Even while attempting to attain a divorce from Rosselini, Bergman refused to regret her decade of tempestuous marriage and moviemaking with the neorealist director. She had taken risks, romantically and artistically, and the result had been more artistic freedom - if not mainstream acceptance - and three beautiful children. Neither did Hollywood fully embrace her. A pre-recorded intervew with Bergman was pulled from The Ed Sullivan Show when an audience poll rejected the idea. So, in 1957, with 2 Oscars, 2 divorces, 4 children, and tenuously positive box office appeal, the question was: what's next?

The answer came from Ingrid Bergman's old friend, Cary Grant. [More...]

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Annette Bening, the Romantic Comedienne

Andrew here. I could not let the celebration of 1995, which ends with tomorrow's Smackdown, pass without singling out one of the most important performances of the year from my favourite actress.

The American President represents a key moment in my Bening love affair because this – her tenth film after seven years in the business – represents my first meeting with her, and it was obsession at first sight. But enough about me. This mostly forgotten gem allows Annette to perform in a cadence that she's been rarely allowed to show her abilities - Annette Bening, at 37 years old, the best romantic comedy heroine of the 90s...

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Posterized: Ryan Reynolds

Contrary to what the P&A budget for Minions will have you believe, there are other movies opening this weekend. It's a big weekend in the top markets for LGBT releases. And nationwide a horror movie (The Gallows) and a new sci-fi body swap thriller Self/Less starring Ben Kingsley & Ryan Reynolds are also opening. I read a headline yesterday lamenting

WTF happened to Ryan Reynolds's career?" 

Ryan Reynolds in his first real year of stardom (2002) and now (2015). Images from Buying the Cow and Self/Less

And I thought: Well... nothing. It's always been this way!

He first won semi-stardom in 2002 frequently displaying his then amazing body (it wasn't the norm for male stars to look like cartoon superheroes OUT of costume just 12 years ago) in the popular college comedy Van Wilder and the lesser seen romantic comedy Buying the Cow. Since then it's been a constant annual barrage of mainstream comedies, mainstream action and franchise pics, and mainsteam horror. Some of his movies were barely screened or went straight to DVD but even those were populist ventures. Either Reynolds or his management just haven't had ambitions outside the multiplex. This has only very recently begun to change with experiments like Buried (good) and The Voices (terrible) which fit comfortably into populist genres but still were plainly too weird --even in screenplay stages -- for mass appeal. He's been perpetually "on the verge" but has never achieved anything beyond the B list. Okay, the B+ list.

So how many of his 24 pictures (excluding voice work and cameos) have you seen since his 2002 breakthrough? The posters are after the jump...

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