You Can Count On Me: Fraternal Cinema

In preparation for Thursday's Smackdown Team Experience is traveling back to 2000.

by Cláudio Alves

Mainstream cinema, such as it is, has an understandable fondness for the portrayal of interpersonal relationships. That's what happens when narrative cinema dominates and character-based drama is the rule. Nevertheless, it's interesting to note how some bonds are more privileged than others in storytelling. Romantic love is common. Friendship has its own subgenres. Parents and children are at the center of many tales. Enemies, rivals, hateful adversaries have their place too. But sibling relationships, though very common in life, are very rarely at the forefront of any given motion picture. Consequentially, when such a film appears, there's an added value to its existence. At least, that's how I feel.

Kenneth Lonergan's debut feature, You Can Count On Me, is probably one of the best examples of this rare fraternal cinema…

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Beauty vs Beast: Boxing Buddies

Jason from MNPP here - while we're all sitting patiently on our hands waiting for Black Panther to hit theaters this weekend let us use the occasion of today's "Beauty vs Beast" to gaze backwards in Ryan Cooglar's filmography to the flick that no doubt gauranteed him this Marvel gig, 2015's great big crowdpleaser Creed. Coming nine years after Rocky Balboa, Sylvester Stallone's original "goodbye" to the character that gave him his career, Cooglar's Creed opened the franchise up and breathed new life into the Philadelphian boxing saga via Michael B Jordan's Adonis, son of Rocky's deceased opponant and friend Apollo, and with Adonis' attempt to find selfhood in the shadow of his legendary father. The relationship between Rocky & Adonis formed the core of the film, it was one fraught with tension, which brings us to...

survey solutions

PREVIOUSLY Nobody was going to beat The Lovely Laura Linney on her birthday, not even Mark Ruffalo's probable finest performance opposite her in You Can Count On Me - she scored a sizeable 70% of your vote in the end, proving you can indeed count on her. Said RV:

"One of the all time great screen pairs -- both so flawed, both so connected to each other. Lonergan's uncomfortable (for me, maybe not for him) commitment to Casey Affleck aside, he deserves enormous credit for providing such rich writing and understated directing to two amazingly talented performers. "

Beauty vs Beast: Sibling Rivalry

Jason from MNPP here wishing us all the happiest Lovely Laura Linney Day! Today Linney is celebrating her 54th birthday, which means we're celebrating as well because she's a national treasure that one. But that happiness and celebration might not last long, I ruin everything, because I'm about to force a horrible choice on you with this week's "Beauty vs Beast" contest and ask you to consider choosing between the siblings of Kenneth Lonergan's 2000 sibling masterpiece You Can Count On Me -- Linney's hometown mama and boss-schtupper Sammy versus Mark Ruffalo's home-crashing money-grubbing seatbealt-wearing Terry. Vote and then tell us why you voted how you voted down below in the comments!

surveys

PREVIOUSLY Last week's Best Actor contest handed Timothee Chalamet a win as sound (to the tune of 87% of the vote!) as his trounced competitor Gary Oldman's eventual win at the Oscars next month is assured, so let's just enjoy us getting it right anyway. Said hepwa (and this is a fine list that I'd love to hear if anybody has any of their own to add to this list, too):

"There are five great young male performances in the past forty years, in chronological order: Dennis Christopher in "Breaking Away", Michael O'Keefe in "The Great Santini", Timothy Hutton in "Ordinary People", River Phoenix in "Running On Empty" and now Timothee Chalamet in "Call Me by Your Name"."

Happy 50th Mark Ruffalo !

by Eric Blume

Today marks the 50th birthday of one of our very best actors, three-time Oscar nominee Mark Ruffalo. Ruffalo burst onto the scene in 2000 with a remarkable lead performance in Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me.  His complex, layered work had critics fairly sprouting comparisons to Brando, and his gorgeous duet with Laura Linney still feels like the standard-bearer for on-screen sibling chemistry.  It’s astonishing to think Ruffalo missed out on an Oscar nomination that year, considering his performance is unquestionably better than several of the eventual nominees -- was it category confusion or lack of name-recognition? Oscar has remained historically slow to coronate good looking young actors, and that recognition remained on hold for him for over another decade...  

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Happy 50th to The Lovely Laura Linney

Laura at the airport in a rare sighting in 2013You guys. I keep an elaborate spreadsheet of important dates for blogging and I somehow missed that today was The Lovely Laura Linney's 50th birthday. How could I? Don't you miss her?

Laura has kept a low profile these past few years (apart from headlining Showtime's The Big C), and an extremely low profile -- like no profile at all -- this past calendar year, largely we assume because of her stealth pregnancy. No one even knew she was pregnant and then she was suddenly giving birth at 49!

So a very happy birthday to a one of a kind actress. And to think I thought she was a little bland when I first saw her on Tales of the City (1993) as Marianne. How wrong I was. I blame the apple-cheeked suburban beauty which threw me. She was the perfect Marianne, really, and she only got better from there. How glad I was to be wrong. One of my favorite Oscar nominations of the past decade, like easy top 5 favorite, was her surprise nod (which I predicted - go me) for Wendy Savage in The Savages (2008) which is my favorite of her performances though the one-two punch of her stealth hatefulness in The House of Mirth (2000) and that indelible sibling warmth in You Can Count On Me (2000) is when the fandom truly hit me. 

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney in "The Savages"

What's your favorite Laura Linney role and when did you first fall for her? Jason gives his answer at My New Plaid Pants. Yours?