William Hurt (1950-2022)

by Nathaniel R

Hurt as I remember him.

I read with total shock yesterday the news that William Hurt had passed away of cancer. There's something about growing up watching famous actors that ties your own ideas about time to their legacy, however loosely. When I heard the news I thought "Noooo he was so young!" before realizing that he was just shy of his 72nd birthday and not the handsome entirely fictional thin-haired 40something actor that I realized I pictured him as, a slightly aged version of his smoldering but callow young beauty, perhaps informed by the wearier sinister bald character actor of his later years. But William Hurt was actually 71 when cancer took him. So why had William Hurt become frozen in time for me? The answer lies not just in my own cinephilia but in the very distinct phases of his career...

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Movies to Make You Hot (& Sweaty)

by Seán McGovern

If summer is making you all hot and bothered (and sticky and sweaty), you should crank your movie watching up to your body heat. What are your favourite films set in the long, hot summer? My suggestions after the jump, cool off in the comments...

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Months of Meryl: One True Thing (1998)

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep. 

 

#26 — Kate Gulden, a suburban wife and mother dying of cancer.

JOHN: Here’s one true thing: Carl Franklin’s One True Thing is neither a Lifetime movie, an extended soap opera, nor a “chick-flick.” One True Thing is, in fact, a melodrama centered around a middle-aged woman dying of cancer, embellished with music and openly soliciting your tears. The maternal melodrama, a genre which Streep has revisited frequently, remains near the bottom of the genre totem pole, regularly maligned and dismissed by critics for all their attributes: it is proudly emotional, scored and scripted to produce waterworks, and an undisguised movie, unconcerned with presenting realism through its formal elements. One True Thing, like most contemporary maternal melodramas, is familiar and stylistically plain, and the film is admittedly hampered by a hackneyed framing device, but it also takes seriously issues central to women’s lives, exploring a mother-daughter relationship and issues of long-term marriage, especially the concessions made and female labor expended in keeping a household running smoothly. One True Thing deserves to be taken as seriously as Saving Private Ryan or any other masculine meditation on violence released in 1998. To immediately write off the film, and the genre to which it belongs, is to devalue and belittle the feminine concerns it explores...

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Watching Holly Hunter Like:

Beauty vs Beast: Make News Not War

Jason from MNPP here - I didn't take my lead on this week's edition of "Beauty vs Beast" from Nathaniel's "On This Day" post earlier but it's not a surprise that we'd both want to mark the 67th birthday of William Hurt with an acknowledgment of Broadcast News, because I think any sane person will snatch the chance to talk about Broadcast News when it's offered. I did actually contemplate a couple other of Hurt's performances for a minute - maybe Body Heat or The Accidental Tourist? But he's made a career of making the women across from him shine and I knew Kathleen Turner & Geena Davis would dominate those conversations...

... as would Holly Hunter, which is also why we're keeping her out of this even though it's Holly's birthday today too. Sorry, Holly! You'd win way too hard.

But does Hurt stand a chance against Albert Brooks' sweaty sidekick Aaron? The film's clearly on Aaron's side, no matter how kind it does try to be to Hurt's pretty boy destined for the anchor's chair. (Can you say Fake News?) Still it's some of Hurt's best work and Brooks, right-sided though he might be, sure can be a bit much, so I ask you...

PREVIOUSLY We were still riding high on Buffy fumes last week and so we had you face off the show's two best Big Bads, but you should never bet against a Valley Girl God with a taste for the shinier things - Glory stomped that puny human mayor with 60% of your vote. Said Matt St Clair:

"No contest. Glory. She is the best Big Bad of the series and had all the best lines.

"Did anybody order an apocalypse?"

"There's ice cream and puppy dogs in it for you if you start singing."

"So this is where the Slayer eats, sleeps, and...combs her hair."