November 15th, 2009, 2 Comments »
Today I saw Whip It, the rollerderby movie directed by Drew Barrymore. It felt pretty ordinary to me, and would have been disappointing without the excellent Ellen Page and Marcia Gay Hardin. The critics generally liked (but didn’t love) it.
Confronted with a very rainy afternoon, I lingered for a couple of minutes in the lobby of the cinema. I looked over the eight movie posters in the lobby, and was surprised to see that five of the films they promoted had been directed by women. I snapped some bad photos on my iPhone, and made this unpretty collage:
The films are, in order of my dodgy collage:
Of those five films, three are mid-level Hollywood flicks, one is a Canadian indie and one is a feature-length documentary. How surprising is that result? In 2007, of the 13,000 members of the Directors Guild of America, only 7% are women. I don’t claim that my little lobby survey has any sort of authority, but it’s at least a little encouraging. The role of director has always struck as one of the last bastions of near-total male domination.
I’ll admit a little of my own sexism here: I was surprised to learn that best movie I saw all year, The Hurt Locker, was directed by a woman. Kathryn Bigelow has made a minor masterpiece in that movie. I wonder how many other war movies women have directed over the past fifty years?
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December 5th, 2008, 4 Comments »
Last week I saw Rachel Getting Married, which is a lovely movie full of terrific, naturalistic performances. The script is quite strong, and is written by Jenny Lumet (she needs a Wikipedia article), the daughter of the great director Sidney Lumet.
I was reminded of what I think is an under-recognized phenomenon in Hollywood: many of the most popular actors, directors and other creatives are the offspring of Hollywood personalities. Here are a few examples:
- Angelina Jolie is the daughter of Jon Voight.
- George Clooney is the nephew of Rosemary Clooney.
- Bryce Dallas Howard is the daughter of Ron Howard.
It turns out that Anne Hathaway, the star of Rachel Getting Married, is the daughter of an actress.
I don’t raise this topic because I think it’s unfair. It happens in every industry–a little nepotism is unavoidable. I do think that it makes the American dream of “farm girl just in off the turnip truck becomes a star” all the more unlikely. As it is everywhere, in Hollywood, it’s who you know.
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May 30th, 2008, 9 Comments »
Yesterday I watched Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which was as mediocre as the name implies. When old auteurs return to much-loved franchises, they round off all the corners. All the blood, dirt and sex that made Raiders of the Lost Ark so great has vanished in the fourth installment. Steven Spielberg is still one of the finest cinematic storytellers around, but the story wasn’t quite up to the task.
But I digress. The fourth Indiana Jones movie was indisputably better than Transformers, which is where I first saw Shia LaBeouf. Er, check that, that’s where I first knew his name. He had some smaller roles in movies like I, Robot and Constantine.
In any case, I think he’s got a long career as an action hero in front of him. He’s not yet a particularly versatile actor (or he hasn’t had a chance to show his range). Still, he has that certain indiscernible quality that makes for a good male lead in modern action movies. He’s handsome, but not ridiculously gorgeous. He’s got a certain fallibility and a willingness to be goofy that I see in both Harrison Ford and Will Smith. And, having just watched the extremely busy trailer for Mummy 3, he’s got something of Brendan Fraser in him too. He also has a bit of John Cusack’s ineffable likability.
I don’t think he’ll Mr. LaBeouf will win an Oscar any time soon, but I’m guessing he’ll be entertaining us and avoiding computer-generated giant killer things for the next thirty years.
On a related note, I wanted to download the first Indiana Jones movie to watch it for, like, the twenty-fourth time. This doesn’t look promising:
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May 9th, 2007, 2 Comments »
Here’s a strange, strange story about Natalie Portman courtesy of those Silicon Valley gossip-mongers Valleywag:
The winsome movie star, who came to public notice as a 12-year-old in the charge of a grizzled assassin, is proposing a continuous video feed of her work and personal life…
Hollywood is freaked by the emergence of instant celebrities, in reality television, and on web sites such as Youtube. The agencies, and the stars, want in on the action, just as they did during the last internet boom. Thus CAA, the number one talent agency, put Will Ferrell, the comedic actor, together with Sequoia Capital. The result: Funny or Die, a version of Youtube for comedy clips.
I initially thought this was pretty groundless, but it sounds a lot more plausible when I remembered that I’d seen a couple of other pop stars co-opting the YouTube medium. From a marketing perspective, Portman seems like an obvious choice. She’s young, attractive and popular with the Web’s early adopters thanks to Star Wars and V for Vendetta.
I’m certainly no judge of this sort of thing, but Ms. Portman doesn’t seem like the type to be a publicity hound. I watched an interview with her on “Behind the Actor’s Studio” a while back, and she struck me as quite private.
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