Marcel Dalio shows off his new toy in one of my personal top 10, Jean Renoir’s 1939 “The Rules of the Game.”
It’s taking some time, but when I finally get my big screen/Blu-Ray/Home theater going, I might be doing my own impression of Dalio. I’ve been working with mostly Clinton-era tech, so this is a big change. Which reminds me: How long until Criterion puts this one out on Blu-Ray?
…I mean if you go in for that kind of thing. Here’s Ren Woods making me believe that anything is possible. Happy New Year, all.
For you youngsters, this is from Milos Forman’s very loose 1979 movie adaptation of “Hair.” Sure, you could call Twyla Tharp’s choreography a bit random and sloppy, but hey, she was doing her own thing.
Just because New Year’s Eve was last night is no reason the drinking has to end — hey, it’s almost Saturday night. Though, maybe, for some of us it should end. Still, no two movie characters ever drank more to less apparent liver or mind damage than those lovable dipsomaniacal detectives first created by full-fledged alky Dashiell Hammett in his novel, The Thin Man, and embodied to perfection by William Powell and Myrna Loy, Nick and Nora Charles. Cheers.
“You Got Served” meet your new best friend, “Fiddler on the Roof”
Thanks to ACDPresents, a student somewhere I take it, and my friend Wes for turning me on to this one. L’chiam, everyone.
A classic case of an “overnight success” who’s been working successfully for decades, Lesley Manville was just starting to be able to bask in the glow of a job extremely well done during the junket for “Another Year” last month. A few weeks later, the already simmering Oscar speculation around her performance in the latest film from maverick English director Mike Leigh got an early boost: she won the Best Actress award from the influential National Board of Review alongside a number of nominations elsewhere.
Lesley Manville began her career on the stage and British television, making her film debut with a minor role in Mike Newell’s 1985 melodrama, “Dance With a Stranger.” In 1988, she appeared in Mike Leigh’s worldwide breakthrough comedy, “High Hopes,” the first of six films so far with the director known for his uniquely collaborative approach. Notable roles in Leigh’s historically-based “Vera Drake” and “Topsy-Turvy” followed, along with numerous less well known films and television shows. It’s possible that she’s best known to the mass U.S. audience as Mrs. Cratchit from Robert Zemickis’ motion-capture “A Christmas Carol.”
In “Another Year,” Manville portrays Mary, a lonely and progressively more depressed alcoholic whose visits to the home of a contented therapist coworker (Ruth Sheen) and her husband (Jim Broadbent), become increasingly painful. It’s a powerful and all too real-seeming portrayal that has hit Manville’s career with enormous force.
Even without a huge number of awards, I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot of Manville from now on. During the post roundtable chatter, I half jokingly suggested that she should work on her American accent, and she reminded me that she had just recently finished doing the very American play by John Guare, “Six Degrees of Separation.”
Things got a bit interesting late in this group interview, when one of the other writers present asked a question which Manville, perhaps stung by some past public discussion of her short-lived late 1980s marriage to Gary Oldman, deemed overly personal. With a little luck, Lesley Manville will have to deal with more prying from less from the press in years ahead.
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