The new film from Steven Soderbergh looks pretty cool. Gina Carano looks like a real badass.
Category: Actresses (Page 18 of 258)
Spoiler Alert – Don’t read more if you don’t want to know what happened on Game of Thrones!
If you haven’t been watching “Game of Thrones” on HBO, you should be watching it (get caught up with On Demand). With Episode 9, viewers were jolted with a plot twist that nobody saw coming, and Jeff Morgan thinks that’s a good thing:
That’s not to say his death was not sad. It was. It still is. There is a small pit in the part of my heart that loves a righteous character, but the shows that have given me such a visceral response are few and far between. I’m actually grateful to HBO for committing to a world that I can both love and fear and characters that I can both love and fear for. Ned Stark isn’t the only one to whom I would be sad to say goodbye. Arya, Jon, Robb, Drogo (despite his few lines), and even Jaime are all compelling enough that I want to keep them around. People are already calling down an Emmy for Peter Dinklage and his portrayal of Tyrion Lannister.
If I can take anything away from last week’s episode of “Game of Thrones,” it’s that more of television should be so gripping. If you were shocked, keep watching. If the death bummed you out, keep watching. If you’re upset, keep watching. Enjoy those feelings. Let them tie you to the rest of the characters. You won’t get the chance to experience a story like this very often.
I was shocked by the death of Ned Stark. He’s the kind of character you can build an entire series around, let alone one season. The series is loaded with great characters and performances, but you have to wonder as to who will emerge as the face of the series. The season finale is this Sunday night on HBO.
The DVDs and Blu-Rays have been piling up. So, it’s time to go through a bunch of them, with a bit of extra attention paid to movies that might appeal to dads, though I suppose moms might like some of these as well.
* Playwright George Kaufmann famously defined satire as “what closes on Saturday night” and these days you might as well define political thrillers as “what doesn’t get greenlit unless a bunch of big stars really want to do it, and then bombs.” “The Manchurian Candidate” is both political thriller and a satire and it didn’t fail at the box office, though it was kept out of circulation for nearly twenty years after its initial release for reasons that remain somewhat mysterious to this day.
I’m hardly alone in feeling this is probably the best political thriller ever made and possibly the second best political satire after “Dr. Strangelove.” Long after the end of the Cold War which spawned it, it’s continues to resonate with our political culture and it’s title still gives peoples the willies. Just ask John McCain.
Directed by John Frankenheimer and based on a novel by the mordantly comic suspense novelist Richard Condon of “Prizzi’s Honor” and “Winter Kills,”, you might know that it’s the story of what happens when a Soviet/Red Chinese brainwashing unit gets its hands on a group of captured soldiers, including Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey, who makes aloof bitterness very cool), the highly estranged step-son of a Joe McCarthy-like senator. Frank Sinatra does maybe his best acting work as a traumatized fellow soldier who realizes something might be up because of some very strange and very bad dreams he’s having — and the fact that he keeps calling the unpleasant Shaw “the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”
It’s a brave blend of politics, off-the-wall black comedy (what was called “sick humor” back then), suspense, and borderline Jacobean classical tragedy. Frankenheimer had a knack for making political material work dramatically, and also for drawing out strong performances. Janet Leigh (“Psycho“) was perfect as the female love interest, who was written so oddly by Richard Condon and screenwriter/playwright George Axelrod that many have theorized she’s actually an operative of some sort — an idea capitalized on in Jonathan Demmes’ disappointingly morose 2004 remake. The greatest casting coup here, however, is Angela Lansbury’s absolutely chilling turn as Raymond Shaw’s hated extremist Washington-hostess mother. She wasn’t the only less-than-pleasant character Lansbury ever played, but there’s something about what happens when actors who make a career largely playing nice people play extremely not-nice people that can be electrifying.
I also can’t resist mentioning the fight scene between Sinatra and Henry Silva as a North Korean spy, which Frankenheimer was often proud to mention was the first use of martial arts fighting styles in an American film. Seeing it again, it’s not only more brutally effective than I remembered as Sinatra and Silva all but destroy Laurence Harvey’s Washington apartment, but — especially in the initial moments when Sinatra instinctively begins fighting the Silva character without even knowing who he is — it’s pretty obvious to me now that it had to be one of the main inspirations for the terrific first fight scene in “Kill Bill, Volume I,” in which Uma Thurman and Vivica A. Fox lay waste to a Pasadena living room.
The Blu-Ray is, by the way, not a deluxe restoration, but it includes all of the excellent features that earlier DVDs have included and the print has been kept in excellent enough shape that a new restoration isn’t really necessary. It looks great. Super highly recommended, though pricey.
We’re still trying to wrap our heads around this one. A “Super Groupon” appeared in our inbox this afternoon, offering tickets to Matthew McConaughey’s upcoming legal thriller “The Lincoln Lawyer” (which is not being screened for the majority of critics) for six bucks. The fine print: the ticket must be purchased through Fandango. This is a nifty way to promote a movie, but it also raises some questions.
“How much did you pay to see my movie? HOW MUCH, damn it?”
What is Fandango’s surcharge for this transaction?
Groupon recently ran into trouble when they ran a deal with FTD Flowers, and FTD turned right around and raised their prices for Groupon customers only. Groupon eventually made good on FTD’s bait-and-switch – and surely bitch slapped FTD back to the Stone Age for their truculent ways – but what is Fandango going to charge for “processing” these orders? A buck? two bucks? Not really much of a deal once you factor in surcharges.
That’s the lesser of our concerns, though, by far.
How will Lionsgate report the sale of these tickets?
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Groupon sells one million tickets to “The Lincoln Lawyer” through this promotion. Groupon has a 50/50 sharing policy with their clients, which means that Lionsgate would net $3 million from the deal. However, those are a million potential full-price tickets that they just sold, meaning that, with the national average at $8.00 per ticket, they could report that those tickets were the equivalent of $8 million in receipts, giving them a much better than expected opening weekend, which as we all know is the true worth of a movie these days. Later, when the movie has run its course in the theaters, they can cook the books, if necessary – after all, they might actually make that money back once that bloated opening weekend total hits the wire – when the movie ships to DVD and VOD. Call us suspicious, but it looks as though Groupon just inadvertently created an elaborate shell game that will allow every studio to goose the profits of any movie tracking below expectations.
Why do we get the sense that there is nothing about this Groupon that is meant to benefit the consumer?
Considering the controversy that surrounded its initial release, an action-packed plot line involving impulsive crime and platonic love-on-the-run, and its iconic ending, “Thelma and Louise” once seemed well on its way to the status of a genre-creating classic along the lines of “Bonnie and Clyde.” Today, it plays like a glossier, more sentimental, and politically charged variation on “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” but there’s nothing wrong with that. Written by Callie Khouri and directed by Ridley Scott, the story is as simple as any western. Tightly-wound waitress Thelma (Susan Sarandon) and too-sweet housewife Louise (Geena Davis) hit the road, ducking her ridiculously chauvinist husband (Christopher McDonald). Their plans for a relaxing fishing vacation die alongside a probable serial rapist (Timothy Carhart) who is impulsively murdered by Thelma after attacking Louise. In no time, the two women are playing cross-country cat-and-mouse with a sympathetic police detective (Harvey Keitel), surviving via some help from Thelma’s smitten boyfriend (Michael Madsen) and armed robbery.
Khouri’s Oscar-winning screenplay feels slightly glib, though its humor, emotion, and some moral complexity remain. Scott’s showy, ultra-confident direction looks great on MGM’s 20th anniversary Blu-ray and involves the usual barrels of ersatz rainwater and a shot of Thelma applying make-up at a crowded ladies’ room mirror that was copied three years later by a famed admirer of Scott in “Pulp Fiction.” Still, it’s Sarandon’s and Davis’ show. When they hold hands at the end as they make their final leap of faith, we’ve got to kind of love these two women and believe they love each other, and we do.
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