This is the first weekend in some time when we have more than a couple of new movies opening wide and it’s a weird one. We’ve got a powerhouse team of A-listers vying for first place against a 16 year-old musical phenom whose talent is, as least in the opinion of most adults and nearly all males, vastly less than phenomenal. Gotta love show biz.
Category: Actresses (Page 20 of 258)
Today’s theme is teen romance, attempted humor and single-word title division.
Disney’s “Prom” — via La Finke — gets some socially positive points for attempting to integrate one or two remarkably real-looking, non-beautiful teens amidst the usual parade of dreamboats, but I still wonder whether anyone over the age of 14 will actually want to see this. The trailer makes me think of an adult’s idea of what a teen movie should be, which of course is exactly what it is.
And now for something completely different in the way of teen romantic comedy. Critical claims of originality aside, “Submarine” clearly doesn’t mind paying homage to the 60s New Wave and “The 400 Blows” in particular as it adopts a novel by Joe Dunthorne. The plot sounds like “The Virginity Hit” minus the crassness, technology, and stupid Americans. Mixing in a bit of English deadpan with the Andersonian-esque quirk doesn’t look bad either.
The writer-director is Richard Ayoade, known to some of you as the deadpan Moss of “The IT Crowd.” The on-screen adults are Sally Hawkins, Noah Taylor, and Paddy Considine.
H/t /Film.
I was very sad to learn yesterday of the death at age 73 of a true grindhouse legend and an early icon of female empowerment. I had the good fortune of having a couple of longish chats with Tura Satana, the legendary star of Russ Meyer’s 1965 grindhouse tour de force, “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” and other light classics of exploitation cinema. We both appeared in my friend Cody Jarrett’s women-in-prison opus, “Sugarboxx,” though she actually got to speak. She enjoyed talking about the old days and I certainly didn’t mind listening.
One-quarter Japanese, Filipino, Cheyenne-Indian, and Scots-Irish, her story included a childhood stay in Manzanar, one of the internment camps where all Japanese-Americans on the West coast were illegally forced to spend World War II. She was a victim of a childhood rape who, she said, eventually tracked down all her attackers. That anger would later find an outlet in her work, to say the least.
Her performing career began with notoriety as an exotic dancer and martial artist. A gig posing erotically for photographs by aging silent comedy superstar Harold Lloyd led Lloyd to suggest a career in movies. She eventually made a brief appearance in Billy Wilder’s “Irma La Douce” and that was followed by her bone-crunching interpretation as the villainous/anti-heroic Varla in Russ Meyer’s insane mix of sexual innuendo and, for the time, shocking violence. She would likely have appeared in later Meyer films, but she was unwilling to do the kind of nudity that was his usual calling card. A certain amount of tragedy followed her later in life and her 1970s career was cut short by a bullet wound, her children, and a second career as a nurse.
Tura wasn’t Dame Judi Dench, but then Dame Judi is no Tura Satana. She was one very cool, very brassy woman who held an audience’s attention in a way that was entirely unique to her and entirely unforgettable.
For more, please do check out some of the links at MUBI and also Kimberly Lindberg’s really great 2007 tribute and bio. After the flip, I have a few key moments of Satana.
This is a sad one. The French actress who, along with Marlon Brando and director Bernardo Bertolucci, created a worldwide sensation/scandal in “Last Tango in Paris” has died much too soon at age 58. She later claimed to have been exploited on the film, which indeed was something of a scandal at the time in many quarters. The film today, however, plays much more as psychodrama than soft-core porn.
In any case, she went on to co-star with Jack Nicholson in Michelangelo Antonioni’s “The Passenger” and continued to work, but she was apparently troubled in various ways and it affected the rest of her career. Via David Hudson at MUBI, which as usual has a lot more on Schneider’s legacy, I was just reminded of her walking out of Luis Bunuel’s “That Obscure Object of Desire,” which sparked something of a creative coup when the great surrealist decided to replace her with two actresses.
Below is a clip from “Last Tango,” it’s somewhat NSFW, but not as much as you might expect. Considering her feelings about being naked in the film, I considered not using it, but the nudity is not explicit at all here and her acting here with Brando is just too lovely not to use. Also, I couldn’t find any other embeddable scenes. I’m not the biggest fan of “Last Tango,” but I’m sorry she couldn’t take more pride in her terrific performance in it.
Judd Apatow produces with his “Freaks and Geeks” cohort, Paul Feig, directing. The ever-controversial Kristen Wiig stars and cowrites with actress Annie Mumolo.
Regular readers know that I’m a fan of Apatow. I’m also generally well disposed toward most of the cast, Wiig included. (Though I find the quality of the vast majority of the writing on SNL these days kind of appalling, and she’s involved with that.) However, based on this trailer, despite precisely two funny moments, my reaction to the thought of seeing this movie is in line with Jon Hamm’s reaction to the thought of attending that wedding.
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