Supporting Actress Smackdown 1983

Please visit Stinkylulu's blog for The Supporting Actress Smackdown for 1983. I won't tell you who won, but my favorite performance in the field was Glenn Close in The Big Chill.

It's a rather queer field, really. Cher plays a lesbian, Glenn Close plays a cheating wife who asks her husband to sleep with her best friend so that she can have a baby, Alfre Woodard plays a devoted servant-pseudo-lesbian type (who isn't a lesbian, but still), Amy Madigan plays a woman who is married to Barbra Streisand (dressed as a man). Linda Hunt goes all the way and plays a Chinese man.

The Big Chill, Revisited

I first saw The Big Chill in 2004 but I watched it again today in preparation for the Supporting Actress Smackdown on Sunday. Some impressions:

It has been five years but I always had the impression that all the characters were around thirty years old. Now that I am almost thirty, I don't think these guys look thirty at all. Kevin Kline and Glenn Close each look about thirty-five. The others too. Goldblum looks younger, but that could be because he is an idiot in this film. This may sound weird, but I think this perspective is because I felt like I had more in common with the people in this film five years ago than I do now. It's strange. I would think it would be just the reverse.

I am a big fan of Mary Kay Place still.

I always thought that Jeff Goldblum was really stupid in this movie, and I could never figure out why the other people in the movie had this idiot joker as their friend. This still makes no sense to me, but this time around I found myself really irritated in addition by Kevin Kline. I think the four women, Tom Berenger and William Hurt are fascinating in this movie, but Kline and Goldblum are, to me, almost completely lacking in interest.

William Hurt gives a brilliant performance in The Big Chill. Like, he is truly excellent in this picture. He would win an Oscar in '86 (three years later) for his flamboyant performance in Kiss of the Spider Woman, but his work in The Big Chill is subtle and nuanced and interesting.

This film is not about suicide.

...But I actually think there is something in the work that William Hurt does in the film that goes toward explaining their friend's suicide.

And I know everyone says this, but the soundtrack is still amazingly good. And the moment when JoBeth Williams plays the Rolling Stones on the organ is fabulous.

Supporting Actress Smackdown 1939

Head over to Stinkylulu's blog to see the Supporting Actress Smackdown for 1939, including my contribution. My favorite performance of the year was Geraldine Fitzgerald's in Wuthering Heights, but not too many agreed... Check it out.

Supporting Actress Smackdown

I will again be participating in StinkyLulu's Supporting Actress Smackdown this June. This month we are revisiting all of the Supporting Actress nominees from 1939.

Stinkylulu's announcement is here.

Supporting Actress Smackdown

I participated in this month's SUPPORTING ACTRESS SMACKDOWN at Stinkylulu's blog. All of Oscar's Best Supporting Actress nominees from 1971 were screened by the participants. And then we discuss which performances we liked best, etc. This is my first time playing and it was great fun.
Most interestingly about this lineup is that some of the films were horrible. It's sort of amazing that the Academy knew enough (or was kind enough) to disregard how bad the films were to recognize the good work done by the actresses on the edges of these movies.
Please visit here.

The Last Picture Show

I guess I don't write too much about movies I've seen before. I don't really re-visit movies that often. But I am participating in the Supporting Actress Smackdown this month over at Stinkylulu's place, so that means I'm screening all of the Oscar nominees from 1971 for Best Supporting Actress. This means I needed to revisit The Last Picture Show, a movie I first saw in October of 2000. I'm sure glad I did, too. Seven years ago means most of my focus was on the young hero of the film (Timothy Bottoms) and my love for the very-cute-at-that-age Jeff Bridges, who is second-billed. The film is about sexual awakening in a lot of ways, so I'm sure that was drawing most of my attention back then.

But The Last Picture Show is a quiet epic of sadness and ennui. Larry McMurtry's script is a beautifully crafted thing and the black and white photography gives this film about the 1950s an air of something already forgotten even while it's being shot. It's a sad, lovely, movie with some absolutely brilliant performances. Ben Johnson in particular is just perfect as the town's lifeblood Sam the Lion. Check this flick out if you haven't seen it. It's worth the re-watch.

A Few Small Things

1. This Florida heat/humidity drains me. I come home and I want to sleep. I didn't sleep today though: I have far too many things to do to justify a nap.

2. I am completely obsessed with this singer Kate Walsh and her album Tim's House. I've been listening to it on a loop all day.

3. I had a thought about health insurance this evening. I was thinking of that black couple in Britain who are leaving the hospital with their baby in Sicko. Moore is asking them how much they had to pay and they are kind of chuckling about it. I think one of the reasons we can't don't yet have national healthcare in this country is that many, many people don't want everyone to have healthcare. They believe that some people don't deserve to have equality of medical care. I know I usually avoid the word equality. I have said before that I think equality is a uniquely American value and that I think equality is a red herring. My reasons for this opinion about equality are myriad, but I digress. I think that the majority of voters in this country believes that national healthcare would reward people who do not deserve to be rewarded. Medical problems and illness are equated with moral lapses in this country and this is an ideology that is constantly being reinforced. Disability narratives often work this way. The disabled person has something wrong in his/her heart and when he/she figures that out, he/she is now truly on the road to physical recovery as well. (This is, of course, ideological nonsense.)
Deep down, I think many people believe that people who get sick deserve it; that they've brought it on themselves. We all know that people feel this way about AIDS. But not just sexually transmitted diseases. I think people think this about nearly everything: cancer, freak accidents, anxiety, mental disorders, ad infinitum.

4. My friend Marcos was out to visit me the last couple of days and I had a great time with him. He taught me how to mix the perfect lemon drop and the perfect margarita.

5. I am off to ATHE—the conference for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education—in New Orleans next week. I was planning on attending the LGBT Focus Group's pre-conference, but—and I am completely baffled by this—though I am almost positive that there will be such a pre-conference, I can find absolutely no information about it on any website I visit. You'd think the gays would be better with technology. Ah well, I will scope it out when I am there.

6. In the month of August, I will be participating in the monthly Supporting Actress Smackdown over at StinkyLulu's blog. I am excited. It should be fun!

Alright, I have to teach in the morning. Time for bed.

Supporting Actress Blog-a-thon

John Curran's film of Somerset Maugham's novel The Painted Veil boasts some memorable performances, gorgeous scenery, beautiful costumes, an exotic locale and a heartbreaking score by Alexandre Desplat. It is a film, really in the tradition of James Ivory and Ismail Merchant more than it is anything else. Which is, of course, why I liked it so very much—liked it more, in fact, than Merchant-Ivory's final collaborative effort The White Countess.

This post is part of The Class of 2006 Supporting Actress Blog-a-thon hosted by Stinkylulu, so this post really needs to focus on the actressing at the edges that The Painted Veil (so handsomely) contains. The actress to whom I refer is sixties and seventies sex symbol/glamor icon and eighties and nineties "Mystery!" host Dame Diana Rigg, who, in The Painted Veil gives a lovely, sensitive performance of quiet grief and steely determination.

Naomi Watts' English aristocrat Kitty Fane, having lost her husband's love and relocated deep into the interior of the Chinese mainland, finds herself bored and feckless. She seeks out purpose at an orphanage run by a group of French nuns supervised by Rigg's Mother Superior. Though the relationship between Kitty and her husband Walter (an earnest-as-usual Edward Norton) it is the relationship betweenn Kitty and the Mother Superior that becomes crucial to the way the film works. The Mother Superior is what Kitty didn't have in her own mother back in England and both women accept the relationship quickly.

Rigg's work in these moments is exceptional. The actress is, of course, costumed in the full habit of the brides of Christ and so she has only her face and her voice as instruments. But the character emerges fully formed from the first scene: commanding the consumption of a specially-made madeleine and sternly refusing a male access to her convent. The Mother Superior is worn, exhausted from years of service and yet occasionally, in flashes of superb transformation, her eyes twinkle and hope dances in their spheres. When she talks about love with Kitty, Mother Superior speaks of her relationship with god as difficult but old and comfortable. She speaks of her contentment with her choice, but her actions are at odds slightly with this alleged peace. Mother Superior fights with all her power to bring Kitty and her husband back together and when given the opportunity, she forbids Kity from choosing nobility over her own happiness.

Her last word onscreen is "no," a command after which Kitty offers no argument. The film cuts away after the word. Rigg is so convincing, her character so compelling, we don't even need to see if Kitty has tried to argue. We know she hasn't. Rigg's delivery says that the argument is over. It's a brilliant performance.

Passive-Aggresive

I continue in my dark pattern of passive-aggressive behavior toward Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Faust and the hideous, horrible Faust casebook I have due for Dramaturgy on Thursday morning. I hate it I hate it I hate it and I don't want to do it. I spent four hours at the library today making photocopies of various history books having to do with the history of Germany (well it wasn't the German nation at the time, but for lack of a better word...

So instead of working on Faust I graded papers. Instead of working on Faust I talked to Jai on the phone for 45 minutes. Instead of working on Faust I took out the garbage... and started a load of laundry... and shopped on Amazon... and changed my outgoing voice-mail message... and responded to emails from my students... and read Stinkylulu's Supporting Actress Smackdown (even though I was woefully unprepared, having only seen three-fifths of the contenders)... and now I'm on here. Maybe I'll write a review of Superman Returns.

No. I will go back to Faust. I can do this. I can. If only Mephistophélès were here. I'd make a deal with him and get him to do my Goethe casebook for me.