Birthday Suits: Nov 9th

Today's Birthdays 11/09
<--- 1869 Marie Dressler is awesome. She gave one of the most aggressive Best Actress winning performances evah. If you haven't seen Min & Bill (1933), you must. You must, you must, you must.
1883 Edna May Oliver feisty character actress
1886 Ed Wynn Uncle Albert from Mary Poppins. He loves to laugh... long and loud and clear. Audiences were always ready to laugh along with him
1922 Dorothy Dandridge first black woman to be nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars (Carmen Jones) and what a neat coincidence that she was portrayed by the first black actress to eventually win the Best Actress Oscar (Halle Berry) in the bio Introducing Dorothy Dandridge
1948 Bille August Danish director of The Best Intentions and Pelle the Conqueror fame
1955 Fernando Meirelles director of declining films: City of God, The Constant Gardner, Blindness. I'm not trying to be mean. But... um... do you have faith he'll pull out of it? Discuss.
1974 Giovanna Mezzogiorno of Vincere (2009) hoopla
1988 Nikki Blonsky I don't know about you but I could hear the bells when she sang in Hairspray

And finally let's hear some love in the comments for Hedy Lamarr, one of the most beautiful actresses of the 40s and one of the first to go nude on film in Ekstase (1933)


Where's her biopic? Or miniseries even. Seriously... you can practically see the scenes spanning the genres: (war drama) Austrian-Jewess Hedy drugs her own maid to escape her husband and Vienna in the 30s, then helps invent frequency hopping. I mean, how many actresses can claim the origins of modern ubiquitous technology? (romance) Hedy marries and divorces six men. (movies about movies) Hedy films one of the cinema's first sex scenes, Hedy's movie banned in Hollywood but they recruit her anyway, Hedy loses the "Ilsa" role to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, Hedy stars in Samson and Delilah! This is a biopic I would gladly watch... even if they framed it in that stupid end of her life looking back way.

European Film Awards: Un Prophète, Antichrist, The Reader

The EFAs are only 20 years old, a novice awards organization really, but their prizes offer up a rich variety of films, languages and genres. It's truly a grab bag and, if you're too Oscar focused, their prizes can be head scratching. Their 2009 Best Picture Nominees encompass three years worth of U.S. release dates:

• (2008) Slumdog Millionaire, Let the Right One In and The Reader
• (2009) The White Ribbon
• (2010) Fish Tank and Un Prophète.

Tis a pity we can't bring the world closer together for simultaneous multilingual film discussions.

The Best Director is filled with heavyweights. When will you ever see an Oscar lineup that's this populated with critical giants: Pedro Almodóvar Broken Embraces, Andrea Arnold for Fish Tank, Jacques Audiard for Un Prophete, Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire, Michael Haneke for The White Ribbon and Lars von Trier for Antichrist. Maybe a lot of what led to these nominations is reputation (I don't think this is anywhere close to the best work from any of the nominees, Audiard & Arnold excluded since I haven't yet seen those pictures) but it's still nice to read their names under "best".

Here's Best Actress because one should never go without them... Actresses that is, particularly the best ones.

• Penélope Cruz, Broken Embraces
• Charlotte Gainsbourg, Antichrist (Cannes Winner)
  
• Katie Jarvis, Fish Tank
• Yolande Moreau, Seraphine (César Winner)
  
• Noomi Rapace, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo --->
  
• Kate Winslet, The Reader (Oscar Winner)
  

You can see a full list of nominees here.

For me the big surprise was the snub of Giovanna Mezzogiorno. She's been collecting raves and honors for months as Mussollini's mistress in Vincere. Her absence feels like a snub not because she's deserving (I haven't seen the performance) but because the reputation of the star turn precedes it. Perhaps EFA voters just didn't like the movie (it was only recognized for Editing and Actor). The doubly nominated eyebrow raiser was Swedish thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo which will compete for Best Actress and Best Composer. Good year for Sweden with two films in major play at the EFAs... the other being that little vampire movie that could.

That Oscarless Prophet
Maybe I'm naive about its content -- I understand that its brutal but Oscar isn't automatically squeamish (they're inconsistent on that front) -- but from this vantage point I think Sony Pictures Classics made a bad decision delaying Un Prophete (A Prophet) until next February in the U.S. With 10 spots open for Best Picture why weren't more arthouse distributors looking at opportunities like this one? Wherever the Audiard picture has played it seems to have seized audiences by the throat. People come away raving. Who's to say that it couldn't have become a critical pet here in the US and competed in more categories than just Foreign Film come Oscar time? Why not build its rep as a masterpiece (if that's what it is) by opening it in August or September and letting people discover it / become obsessive about it? Seems risky to chance it all, marketing wise, on the unpredictable response of the foreign film branch.
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