Happy Birthday, Sharon Stone

I love few actresses as much as I love Sharon Stone. In her autobiography Faye Dunaway compares herself to Stone at certain junctures in her book. The two women are friends, and I always thought the comparison an apt one.

The photograph above was taken during the Marina Abramović show The Artist Is Present. This is Stone looking into Abramović's eyes. It is a singularly insightful portrait, I think.

One of the things I will always remember about Stone is from her appearance in Inside the Actor's Studio, in which Stone referred to acting as bringing love into the room. This description has haunted me in a good way since she said it and I find it a particularly moving way of speaking about something that can so often be shallow and silly. Stone is the real deal.

Love. Her.

Classic Faye.

I am currently revisiting (read: obsessed with) this photograph of Faye Dunaway. Who is, if you can believe it, on Twitter @RealFayeDunaway.

Dear Lord I love her.

Viola Davis

I know this was making the rounds a month or so ago, but I wanted to share it again. If The Help is dumb about race (and it is) the actress who anchors the film is certainly not, and the clarity and hope that she shares about representation and roles for people of color on film are communicated beautifully in this speech.

Love her.

Gong Li

Do you know about Gong Li? She was Zhang Yimou's muse in the 1990s when they made Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, To Live, and Shanghai Triad together. She was also the female lead in Chen Kaige's Farewell, My Concubine. More recently she reunited with Zhang for Curse of the Golden Flower. She was also in the absurd USAmerican film Memoirs of a Geisha, but more importantly, she had a fantastic role in Wong Kar-Wai's 2046. She is a fierce, exciting actress, and I've always been blown away by both her incredible beauty and her onscreen power.

Love her.

Pacino

I have heard many people say that their favorite actor from the 1970s is Dustin Hoffman or Robert De Niro. There's also Jack Nicholson and Jack Lemmon and Roy Scheider and Gene Hackman and Warren Beatty. I like all these guys, but my favorite - that's my story and I'm sticking to it - is Al Pacino and has been for ages.

It's easy to say that he yells a lot in his performances these days. Fine. He has a lot to yell about. But, let's just go back a moment: Serpico and The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II and Dog Day Afternoon and ...And Justice for All. are really just the beginning of a career for a man who has continued to produced excellent, surprising performances for the three decades since ...And Justice for All. The man continues to choose difficult roles and is choosing, more often than not, excellent material as well. It seems unfair to compare Angels in America or The Merchant of Venice to, say, Meet the Fockers and Everybody's Fine, but... well, I just made the comparison. My point is that I think Pacino has continued to challenge himself and add to his own work with engrossing and powerful performances even though he is over seventy years old. It's a fine body of work, and I hope the fine performances keep coming.

Love him.

Jane Seymour Fonda

She is one of the most inspiring of all public figures, to me. It isn't just her extraordinary, raw, and powerful performances in so many good films from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, but also her dedication to social justice, her ability to age gracefully, and her constant re-evaluations of herself and her actions over time.

On one of her recent blog posts (she blogs!), she wrote the phrase "teach what you need to learn." I love this idea, because it approaches teaching from a place of one's own need to be taught. In thinking about my own pedagogy, I was reminded last week just how much listening is a part of teaching. The students - and this has been persistently true no matter what I am teaching and no matter who the students are - have to teach me how to teach them. Put another way, I need to learn (in every case) how I can best help them to learn.

Love her.

Love Her

Every once in a while one of these comes along that I have to repost.

Anna Wintour doing anything demands a repost.

Where the Real Countries Are

Since my last post involved references to the Oscar-winning art director and set decorator of The English Patient and a nod to the fabulous Kristin Scott-Thomas (about whom I continue to obsess) I thought I would revisit one of my very favorite parts of one of my favorite movies of all time. The passage below is from Anthony Minghella's screenplay, but it closely follows Michael Ondaatje's novel. 
As Katharine waits in the cave for Almásy to come back, she stares at the cave paintings and writes in her diary:

My darling. I'm waiting for you. 

How long is the day in the dark? Or a week? 

The fire is gone and I'm horribly cold. I really should drag myself outside but then there'd be the sun. I'm afraid I waste the light on the paintings and writing these words. 

We die. We die rich with lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we've entered and swum up like rivers. Fears we've hidden in - like this wretched cave. I want all this marked on my body. Wer'e the real countries. Not boundaries drawn on maps with the names of powerful men. 

I know you'll come carry me out to the Palace of Winds. That's what I've wanted: to walk in such a place with you. With friends, on an earth without maps. 

The lamp has gone out... and I'm writing... in the darkness.

The Wahlberg

I dunno how everyone else feels about Mark Wahlberg, but this is how I feel:
I love him. I try to go see every movie he is in. If Wahlberg is in it, I consider it a must-see no matter the picture's genre. Sometimes this makes for bad movie-viewing (I blame Peter Jackson for The Lovely Bones), but mostly it just means that I see movies I wouldn't normally see that have turned out to be good (Shooter, for example). Wahlberg has been recognized as a talented, award-worthy actor now for several years, most recently for The Departed, and I am glad that time has finally come because it is well deserved.

La Davis

The Master.

One of my favorite things that I've ever read about Bette Davis is an assessment from the film critic Bob Mondello. He sums up Davis's career with the following:

"Excuse me: a temper tantrum or two, a bitchy remark (or six)? Entirely understandable. Bette Davis may have raised her voice on occasion, but difficult? What she was up against was difficult.

"And despite that, for six decades, she played tough, sexy broads in a way that suggested that a tough, sexy broad was what any sensible woman would want to be."

Indeed, Bob, indeed.  

I love her. 

OBVIOUSLY.

Bridges

Love him.

Seriously, he has got to be one of the best actors to have ever graced USAmerican film. He has been underrated for years and is finally truly getting his due these days.

I confess to having thought him gorgeous in The Last Picture Show, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (which has gay undertones, let's not lie about that relationship with Clint Eastwood), and the original Tron; and then admired his acting in the 1980s (Starman, Jagged Edge, The Morning After, and of course The Fabulous Baker Boys).

The truth is, though, that his work has been stellar throughout his career. In the '90s he made Fearless, The Fisher King, The Mirror Has Two Faces, The Big Lebowski, and was then nominated for an Oscar in 2000 for The Contender.

Since then, he has been flat-out brilliant in The Door in the Floor and Crazy Heart, and is about to star in the Coen Brothers' reworking of True Grit. This man is awesome.

Also. I cannot wait for Tron: Legacy to come out.

Plato

While recently watching The Celluloid Closet in preparation for showing it to my Sexuality & Representation class, some clips from Rebel without a Cause came on the screen. "He died so young," I mumbled with a sigh. My roommate offered that "Yes, he did. And he only made three movies." I thought a bit about what she said, confused, and then I realized she was talking about James Dean and I had been talking about Sal Mineo.

Love him.

"Nine."

To say that I love her would be a vast understatement.

La Stone

I am not sure how other people feel about Sharon Stone. I adore her. She is, first of all, both incredibly sexy and ridiculously talented. And as a human being -- well, I don't know the woman, obviously, but in interviews -- I find her thoughtful, spiritual, generous, and inspiring.

 So damn fabulous.

Andrew Garfield

Currently risking a slight overexposure, Mr. Garfield has recently played significant roles in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (don't see it), and Boy A (see it!), and is currently doing excellent work in both The Social Network and (I've heard) in the film version of Never Let Me Go. He will also shortly be filling Tobey Maguire's shoes as the new Spider-Man, a development in which I have no interest whatsoever.

I'm a fan.

Kristin Scott Thomas

The one and only.
I love her.

Ms. Perez.

So, I realize that I've been putting a lot of YouTube clips up here, but... well, I don't have time, really, to be blogging and as it turns out, there's good stuff on YouTube that I think everyone should be checking out.

As it happens, gay marriage and I are not sweet sweet besties. I am, as they say, ambivalent. BUT people who want to get married (and this should be obvious) should be allowed to do whatever the hell they want to do.

Any opinion that is anti-gay marriage is fundamentally unsupportable. It is fine for queer people to sort of wish that gay people wouldn't want to support a system that is interested in legitimizing some relationships in exchange for deligitimizing others. Fine. But, um, if the law -- and I am not speaking about so-called rights, here, I am talking about the law -- allows some people to do something, it ought to allow all people to do that.

Also, I have always loved Rosie Perez, and this video is about her, so:



Love her.

Sometimes...

...you just feel like Tallullah Bankhead.