Romance & Cigarettes, or How I had waited long to see this why...?

Romance & Cigarettes

"Life is more than just a hard-on"

Why I had waited so long before watching this film is beyond me. It's an absurdist tale about ordinary people dealing with ordinary events in extraordinary ways through zany and literate dialogue. What other movie would feature a pregnant women ballet, a conversation about Ethel merman, a cat-fight between two Oscar winners, an affecting cameo by an Emmy/Tony winner, a speedo-loving straight man, a song celebrating red-heads, and an underwater relationship elegy?

Part post-modern musical, part-family drama, part-surrealist comedy, Romance & Cigarettes is a hilariously affecting (if uneven) film. But what I really loved was the cast. Oh the cast, they're all lovely:

And what kind of post about Romance & Cigarettes would be complete without a scantily-clad Bobby Cannavale?

Heavenly Creatures, or How this is Ms Winslet's career in a nutshell

Is Heavenly Creatures (Ms Academy Award WINNER Kate Winslet's film debut) a blueprint for her film career?

Let's take a look:

A kid and a princess.

A Kid in King Arthur's Court

Girl traveling in the rain.

Sense and Sensibility

Deranged girl syndrome.

Hamlet

Tragedy upon a boat.

Titanic

Forbidden desire.

Quills

Lovely bicycle rides.

Iris

'Capital Punishment' quandaries.

The life of David Gale

Diaries. Memories. Love stories. 

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Bedridden due to illness.

Finding Neverland

She sings!

Romance & Cigarettes

Sojourns in old-school bathing suits

Little Children

Having sex with a slightly less-hot person than yourself 

The Holiday

Pretty 1950s frocks

Revolutionary Road

Sexy bathtub scenes 

The Reader

Kate and Penelope, or How I swear I'll stop posting Kate pics soon...

... As long as she stops looking gorgeous:

And some Penelope so that I'm not all about the Kate love:

[source]

Best Lead Actress, or How Mum's the Word

A Blog Next Door's Oscar coverage 2009: for the lit theory junkie in me and the Oscar watcher in you.

Best Lead Actress 2009: 'The Freudian Mum'

AMPAS loves them some actresses. Or maybe I love me some actresses which is why I find the Actress categories much more interesting than the Actor ones (I mean, Kate and Meryl and Anne in one category easily trumps any lineup with Sean, Brad and Mickey, no?). Sadly when you think about it, the roles that AMPAS singles out in the actress categories are usually obscenely narrow (nuns! mums! whores! - did I miss any? I kid, I kid!) That said, to take the list of women that make up this list is to be immersed in a world of familial ties, exploring the tenuous relationship between women and children. Freud 101 if you will.

Kym, Christine, Sister Aloysius, Ray & Hannah are a motley crew of women that represent different ways in which society models motherhood and the care for children.

Anne Hathaway - "Kym" in Rachel Getting Married

Why didn't you take care of the child? Kym decries.

Of course at the heart of Demme's film there's an absent mother and a lost child. There's always an absent mother and/or a lost child when families are so fractured and seemingly happy but actually imbalanced as we have here. Kym is a wounded girl because she carries with her both the burden of her [SPOILERS - but not if you saw The SAGs clips for Best Actress] brother's death and of her mother's absence. The former is what gets the dramatic push, but the latter is what stays with you (bless you Debra Winger). Kym is a motherless young woman and it is that loss which resonates throughout her behaviour and which gets oddly displaced in the form of alcoholism and a drug addiction, showcasing a broken familial unit because of the inability of one woman to maintain her 'Mother' role. A 'mother' is all Kym wants, is all Kym needs/ed.

Angelina Jolie - "Christine MY!SON!BACK! Collins" in Changeling

I just want to take care of MY son! screams Christine.

If there is a prototypical 'woman' in this lineup, it is Ms Collins who lives and breathes (and works, and skates, and yells, and breaks plates) for her son. This is the 'Mother' par excellence - no wonder the characters around her can't seem to understand why she wouldn't just nurture a kid who's the closest thing to her son (aren't they exchangeable?). Make what you will of potential arguments about patience, willpower or even conviction in Christine but beneath it all here we have a tale of a woman who's incomplete without motherhood, without her child even when the possibility of reconstructing the familial structure she had before is beyond her reach. A 'mother' is all Christine knows what to be, is all we expect her to be.

Meryl Streep - "Sister Aloysius" in Doubt

I WILL take care of children - whatever it takes, Sister Aloysius says to herself.

While Father Flynn construes her as a 'hungry dragon,' Sister Aloysius is the nurturing figure of the schoolyard. Whether it'd be with her fellow (at times blind) nuns, or with a particular black boy in class and church, Sister Aloysius takes it upon herself to be the earthly Mother Mary to those around her. Fixated on a rigid structure of what mothers should and should not do (roughly matching her static and somewhat 'traditional' mores and values), Sister Aloysius cannot understand the pragmatism and (alleged) indifference when encountering Donald Miller's mother. A 'mother' is all Sister Aloysius expects from women with children,

Melissa Leo - "Ray" in Frozen River

I make the decisions that need to be made to take care of my kids, Ray needs to tell herself.

Working in the same vein as Christine, Ray is a woman whose socio-economic circumstances thrust her into a world where what she is and how she needs to survive is underscored by her duty to her children and her family. The man leaves, but it is the woman who cannot escape the familial ties to her children and who takes the reigns of her life and job (yeah, let's call it a 'job') in order to be able to provide for her children. Out of all the women in this lineup it is she who most mirrors the type of woman we should admire. Courtney Hunt does my work for me stating that in making this film she wanted to 'break down audiences' cultural assumptions through the universal language of a mother's love' [src]. A 'loving mother' is what Ray exemplifies.

Kate Winslet - "Hannah" in The Reader

Come in, I'll take care of you, kid, Hannah says.

And then we come to the ex-Nazi prison guard. (I tell ya, had they nominated Winslet for her turn as April Wheeler in Revolutionary Road, this mini-essay would write itself: for what is April but the prime example of a woman actively refusing the 'motherhood' label society springs on women?) But Hannah - she becomes a sexually active nurturing figure in Michael's life - not so much a mother as a sexual mentress (yes, I'm making up words today). But hidden within the ambiguities of the film and the moral minefields of the narrative is the hidden assumption of shame in the relationship between a mature woman and a younger boy. This of course derives from both 'traditional' relational models between young men and older women (usually recasting a mother-son relationship - hey, even among males and females of the same age!) and yet Hannah never succumbs to treating Michael as anything other than a 'reader' and a lover. A 'mother' is what we might expect from Hannah but she escapes such 'paint by the numbers' relation with Michael.

Next Up: Leading Men and American Masculinity

Sam and Kate, or How VF pairs 'em together

Gorgeous, no?

[source]

Kate and Meryl, or How I'm Seeing Double

Accent + Holocaust film + Sexy scenes = Oscar?

The Reader, or How 2008 is really Kate's year

The Reader

Directed by Stephen Daldry

Written by David Hare

Starring: Kate Winslet, David Kross, Ralph Fiennes, & Lena Olin.

When I finished watching The Reader, I was exhausted. It's an emotionally draining experience. Take that as you will. Daldry and Hare have crafted not much of an emotional roller coaster as much as a carefully executed moral minefield - peppered with enough sex (and sexual tension) to last you a lifetime. 

While it seems the film's off-screen stories (Rudin vs Weinstein, rushed post-production, allegedly knocking TDK from its BP and Best Director noms at the Oscars, being now deemed 'That Holocaust Movie'...) I think Daldry's film is a wonder of a film, albeit one that seems to be poised to divide its audience, much in the same way it does so for its characters. The film centers around a taboo romance between an older woman and a fifteen year old that, while lasting only one summer, changes both their lives forever. 

It's also a thinking person's film. Those wishing to get any emotional schmaltz out of this sex/guilt ridden story will not be rewarded. Daldry and Hare craft more questions than answers, more conundrums than emotional payoffs and the way to understand this is to explore Winslet's unflinching performance of Hannah. She doesn't go for sympathy, and her ice-cold performance is at once puzzling but altogether appropriate in that really the film is constructed around wanting to know what/why Hannah is doing but you have to give props to a film that doesn't cheat itself out for a teary sappy ending. A-

Kate Winslet, or How I'm Seeing Double

Revolutionary Road, or How suburban ennui never goes out of style

Revolutionary Road
Directed by Sam Mendes

Written by Justin Haythe
Starring: Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kathy Bates, Zoe Kazan & Michael Shannon

There are moments in a movie that so perfectly encapsulate the mood, tone, look and rhythm of a film and its performers that you just have to sit back and catch your breath. Revolutionary Road, adapted from the Richard Yates novel of the same name, has many such moments but one in particular still haunts me. April and Frank (Kate and Leo) are at the dinner table joined by the Givings (including their clinically insane son John - an electric Michael Shannon). Lunch is yet to be served, so the conversation steers in an awkward direction when John, seeing past the well polished facade of the Wheelers, hits a couple of nerves with his wildly inappropriate (though for that, no less accurate) remarks about the Wheelers' plans. It's a moment that offers these very gifted actors a well-written and staged scene: Frank loses his temper, Mrs Givings swoops in to avoid a physical confrontation, John cackles an lashes out at the couple; and April... well, she just sits still holding her cigarette looking ahead even when John is raising his voice and uttering one of the most searing lines in the entire film. Winslet - a truly remarkable force in this film, shines in this scene for the amount of emotions she manages to portray in a single look. After the Givings leave, Mendes has a close up of Kate with Leo squirming in the background unable to contain his emotions; but all we're focused on is Kate's face - stern, thoughtful, impossibly at ease. 

In a way this scene epitomises what the film is about - in a way it is a battle of wills that echoes Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but it is also much more introspective (look out for the constant close ups of April as she turns a teary eye into a faked smile; and of Frank as he contracts his face, always so at odds in showing how he claims he feels) and more focused on small moments (the breakfast table, a dance at a party) that spiral into big blown out fight scenes (outside the car, around the house). The Wheelers seem unhappy, and maybe they are, but both are so enraptured by their seemingness that is hard to get at what each really wants - it is not for nothing that Mendes turns again and again to shots of mirrors and reflective surfaces, reminding his audience that what these characters show is almost if not more important than what they are, think and feel. And that in itself is the true tragedy of this suburban couple that so vividly comes to life in the hands of two actors that in a decade of working apart come together to give us another tragically romantic story of a couple at odds with what the world has to offer them.

Mendes and his production team deserve a shout out for making this aching story such a beauty to watch: Roger Deakins' cinematography beautifully plays with sunlit rooms that defy their own promise of warmth and homeliness; Kristi Zea's production design meticulously recreates this mythic landscape of American suburbia; Albert Wolsky's costumes are gorgeous (I fell in love with each of April's dresses, and loved seeing 1950s beach wear) and lastly Thomas Newman (who already won me over with his Wall-E score earlier in the year) here just blew me away with a score that simmers and soars apace with Yates' creations. A

The 20 Actresses Meme, or How my name is mB and I'm an Actressexual

This started over at The Film Experience, but I was tagged by JA over at My New Plaid Pants and it's already cropped up in a couple of other blogs I read, so here we go. 

My favourite actresses of all time:

(Clockwise) Felicity, Penelope, Natalie, Maggie, Emily, Amy, Tina, Bette, Lisa, Nicole, Judi, Alyson, Vivien, Mary, Kristin, Salma, Julia, Kate, Meryl and SMG

And now I need to tag some people:

POP COLONY

Rants of a Diva

Tapeworthy

2008 Watch Out For List, or How Amy, Meryl and Kate are back

Stars I Love

A star can make or break a movie (can you imagine Devil Wears Prada without Meryl or Pretty Woman without Julia?) and on occasions I'll find myself flocking to certain movies just to see my favourite stars act their way into (or out of...) a movie. Here's a list of who I'll be chasing at the multiplexes next year:

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
Release Date: March 7, 2008 (limited)
Lee Pace (of Pushing Daisies fame) and Amy Adams (one of my new favourite people after Enchanted and Junebug viewings) in the same movie!? After watching the trailer I had to stop myself from smiling (why is it that Lee and Amy do this to me?) That said, it is refreshing to look forward to watch movies where women's promiscuity is embraced in a comedic fashion.





Mamma Mia!
Release Date: July 18, 2008
I will follow Meryl Streep anywhere she goes (and yes, that included watching Lions for Lambs... snooze). And really, what movie with ABBA songs will not make me happy? (Yes Priscilla and Muriel I'm looking at you!) I have yet to see the stage version but with the recent Broadway-Hollywood hits we've seen in the past two years I'm hopeful. (Bonus: Dominic Cooper hottie alert!)



Revolutionary Road
Release Date: December 19, 2008
The World's favourite tragic-ridden boat lovers are back again under the directorial gaze of Kate's very own Academy Award Winning Director Husband Sam Mendes. The story? According to IMDB: 'A young couple living in a Connecticut suburb during the mid-1950s struggle to come to terms with their personal problems while trying to raise their two children. Based on a novel by Richard Yates.'

The List (Formerly The Tourist)
Release Date: April 25, 2008
Why do I feel as though a) I haven't heard of this movie outside my occasional IMDB stalking of its main stars (Ewan, Hugh and Michelle Williams), b) feel as though it's been in production/ post-production/ release hell for, well... forever and c) still think the idea of Ewan and Hugh involved in some sort of 'mysterious sex club' is endlessly alluring?


The Young Victoria
Release Date: TBA 2008
I'm not a big fan of costume dramas (I am one of the few who hasn't seen the allure of Blanchett's Elizabeth, or Rhys-Meyer's The Tudors for example) but I will watch Emily Blunt in anything. Especially if she's surrounded by an amazing supporting cast: Miranda Richardson, Rupert Everett, Paul Bettany, and Jim Broadbent.

Baby Mama
Release Date: April 18, 2008
If you are not yet in love with Tina Fey, there is something disturbingly wrong with you. Seriously: SNL, Mean Girls and 30 Rock should have wooed you by now. Catch her next year in this comedy about surrogate pregnancy.

Kate Winslet is Stunning, or How Redundancy is Repetitive

Gratuitous Kate Winslet Post

(Because she is amazing and I love watching her on screen and on red carpets.)

From The Envelope I got this beautiful picture of the always stunning Ms Kate Winslet accepting her artist of the year award at the BAFTA/LA Brittania Awards this past week.

Accepting her award Kate went through the list of past directors she has worked with and what they taught her:

"Peter Jackson, who gave me my first job, who taught me to find my muse. Ang Lee, who taught me control. Ken Branagh, who taught me not to be afraid of Shakespeare, not completely successfully, I'm afraid. James Cameron, who taught me to be a warrior, and that's not a joke, clearly, because none of you are laughing. Michael Apted, who taught me to hang on to my sense of humor through raging morning sickness. Richard Eyre, who taught me to be passionate and stand still at the same time. Jane Campion, who taught me how great it is to be a woman, and Michel Gondry, who taught me to try anything and risk looking stupid. Todd Field, who taught me the magic of collaboration, and Sam Mendes, who has unraveled my heart and taught me to let go."

Movies.com Reader's Poll, or How it is a travesty that I am required to pick between Kate and Natalie