Actress Italian-Style.

Jose here.



As I was watching The Story of Adele H. yesterday it struck me how Isabelle Adjani is still one of the few actresses to have been Oscar nominated more than once for performances in a foreign language.
Only twelve actresses have received Best Actress nominations for non-English speaking roles (the Academy usually waits for them to work in Hollywood and then reward them...see Simone Signoret, Juliette Binoche, Ingrid Bergman and Penélope Cruz) and out of these ladies, only three have repeated; Adjani (75 and 89), Liv Ullmann (72 and 76) and Sophia Loren (61 and 64).
Out of them only Ms. Loren won.

This bears repeating and celebrating today, more than any other time, because it happens to be her birthday.
She was born, wait for it, 76 years ago in Rome where she spent her childhood dancing, playing the piano and migrating to the country after she was injured during an attack in WWII.
A shrapnel during a bombing hit her chin forcing her parents to leave the city to protect their daughter.
Shallow intermission but can you imagine if something else had happened to her face?
She became to be known the world over as a sex symbol and one of the most beautiful women that ever lived. Guess things happen for a reason huh?

Besides her blessed physiognomy Loren is also a phenomenal actress. Did you know she's the most awarded actress in history next only to Meryl Streep?
Watching Sophia play earthy characters and vamps is always a treat but I guess my favorite performance of hers is in the movie version of Verdi's Aida. She has never seemed more vulnerable and larger than life for me.



Take a look at her legendary face and tell us what's your favorite Sophia Loren film?

Red Carpet Lineup, Foxy Julianne and Berlinale Winners

With Berlinale wrapped, let's take one last looksie at random celebs working the premieres and photo ops. Part of our irregular red carpet lineup tradition. And then the awardage.

From left to right: I didn't know what Michael Winterbottom looked like, so I've included him here. He's a boyish 48. I think his career is pretty fascinating because it covers so much global ground and differing genre terrain. He's so prolific while still making intelligent films. I'm impatient so prolific works for me. That said, his new noir The Killer Inside Me might be one I'll have to skip. If festival types are so horrified by the violence I'm sure it's more than I can take.

Julianne Moore looking foxy on her way to fifty. She's gone a bit goth here with smoky eyes, black dress and black fingernails. More on her in a bit.


Two-time Oscar nominee Isabelle Adjani, who hasn't been working much, came out for the premiere of the comedy Mammuth in which she costars with another 80s French superstar Gérard Depardieu. The title refers to his motorcycle.

Tall Rebecca Hall was on hand to promote Please Give (my review). Nobody told her that premieres require evening gowns.

Renée Zellweger, juror, wore big black puffy sleeves for awards night. But apparently she isn't willing to get puffy again herself for Bridget Jones 3. This might be totally unfounded gossip... but is it really true that Zeéeeee blames a failed relationship on the weight she gained for Bridget Jones Diary? That's... uh... disturbing. It took her like two days to lose the weight. We have photographic proof from awards shows. Say what you will about her -- and I've said plenty about 'she who must not be named' over the years -- she can often work a red carpet. That's an eye grabber.

Finally in that lineup above we have Danish actress Lene Maria Christensen who was there to support her new picture En Familie. I included her because I never wrote about Frygtelig Lykkelig, Denmark's failed Oscar submission -- soon to be remade by the same filmmaker for audiences who are too dumb to read subtitles -- and I thought she was pretty interesting within it. I don't know how to put this exactly without sounding hideously insensitive but her face seems like a comedic one and yet she was playing the dramatic / sexual femme fatale of the piece. And it worked. Strange little film but she was highly watchable and now I'm curious. The film is in theaters now so if you like quirkly film noir, you should see it.

AWARDS
No festival is compete without the honors and prizes. We'll kick off with German born 70s icon Hanna Schygulla who was honored for her whole career. She's pictured here with her recent The Edge of Heaven director Fatih Akin. Congrats Hanna! I keep meaning to educate myself on the Rainer Werner Fassbinder years but it's slow going. Why can't time stop for a a couple of years and allow me to catch up on a century of cinema? At least the highlights.

The Prizes
Golden Bear Bal (Honey) directed by Semih Kaplanoglu is about a boy searching for his missing beekeeper father. Will this be Turkey's Oscar submission next year?
Silver Bear Eu Cand Vreau Sa Fluier, Fluier (If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle), directed by Florin Serban. Romanian film is still roaring. This film also won the Alfred Bauer prize which is meant to reward innovative filmmaking.
Director Roman Polanski, The Ghost Writer. In theaters now.
Screenplay Tuan Yuan (Apart Together) about reunited lovers separated by war was written by Wang Quan’an and Na Jin
Best First Feature Sebbe directed by Babak Najafi (Sweden)

Actress Shinobu Terajima in Caterpillar
Actor This prize was shared between the leads of the Russian film Kak Ya Provel Etim Letom (How I Ended This Summer) Grigori Dobrygin and Sergei Puskepalis, pictured right, who play co-workers at a polar station in the Arctic. They're the only two people in the picture. The film also won a prize for its cinematography.

Since this is an A list festival there are a lot of prizes from other juries, audiences as well. Other films that were honored in some way include:

Son Of Babylon directed by Mohamed Al-Daradji which won two prizes
Waste Land directed by Lucy Walker, Joao Jardim & Karen Harley
Budrus directed by Julia Bacha
Daniel Schmid - Le chat qui pense directed by Pascal Hofmann, Benny Jaberg
Kawasakiho ruze (Kawasaki’s Rose) directed by Jan Hrebejk
Aisheen [Still Alive in Gaza] directed by Nicolas Wadimoff
En Familie (A Family) directed by Pernille Fischer Christensen
Parade directed by Isao Yukisada
El vuelco del cangrejo (Crab Trap) directed by Oscar Ruiz Navia
and Die Fremde (When We Leave) directed by Feo Aladag

TEDDY
Berlinale also has a queer tradition, honoring gay and lesbian films in their "Teddy" section. This is where Julianne comes back in. Lisa Cholodenko's lesbian family dramedy The Kids Are All Right (my review) took the top prize.

Writer Director Lisa Cholodenko gets a red carpet kiss from her star
Julianne Moore, 'the foxiest bitch in the world' (thx, Boogie Nights)

Other Teddy honors went to the documentary La bocca del lupo (The Mouth of the Wolf) directed by Pietro Marcello (read more about it), James Franco's directorial debut, a short film called The Feast Of Stephen (read more about it) and Open directed by Jake Yuzna which sounds rather outre and difficult to describe (you can read more about it but *NSFW*)

Congratulations to all the winners. One day we'll get to Berlin for the festival. If you've ever been, speak up in the comments.
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Vintage Isabelle

This photo of French goddess Isabelle Adjani (pictured left with Muriel Cathra) was taken 36 years ago... today! She was 3 months shy of her 18th birthday.


She seems quite pleased to be photographed... and why not? The future was bright. At the time she was doing television but her Oscar-nominated breakthrough The Story of Adele H was only two years away. That French film made her the youngest Best Actress nominee ever (a record she held until Keisha Castle-Hughes teared up in Whale Rider in 2003).

<-- Isabelle with Gael Garcia Bernal in 2003 @ Cannes

That's not her only claim to the history books. She is tied with Juliette Binoche and Simone Signoret for most Oscar nominations for a French actress (only two each --but that's more than Catherine Deneuve, Julie Delpy, Isabelle Huppert, Emmanuelle Devos, Ludivine Sagnier, Sylvie Testud, Jeanne Moreau and Emmanuelle Béart put together. sniffle). Another tie for the history books: Adjani is one of only four actresses (Sophia Loren, Liv Ullman, Penélope Cruz are the others) to have multiple nominations for performances IN a foreign language.

Highlights of Isabelle's career are many but these are the ones I think of first: She offered up the most exquisitely inviting neck in any vampire film (Nosferatu, 1979). She survived Ishtar ('87) and won an Oscar nomination for her very next film Camille Claudel ('89) and she gave birth to the first heir of Daniel Day-Lewis (Gabriel Kane Day-Lewis). On a more personal note... she also starred in one of only a handful of movies that yours truly has ever paid to see twice on opening weekend due to total in-the-moment euphoria (Queen Margot, 1994).


Rent one of her movies this week and drink up her beauty as hungrily as Nosferatu slurped from her alabaster neck.
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May Flowers (Francophile Edition)

The Vampire Blog-a-Thon

"They Want To Suck Your Blood!" ~ A Vampire Blog-a-Thon
Scroll down for bloody good reads @ 53 other vamping blogs
(click here if you to view blog-a-thon by specific film / subject)

I am a big wuss. It's true. The tiniest thing can frighten me. So I have no idea why I love vampires so much. Nor do I have an earthly clue why I had originally intended to write about Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark (1987)...

For that underseen horror film, Bigelow enlisted the cast of her then-husband James Cameron's Aliens (1986) to play a wandering group of bloodsuckers: Lance Henriksen, Jenette Goldstein and Bill Paxton are the alien soldier/prey gone western vampire/predator. In Near Dark's most famous sequence they enter a roadhouse and massacre the patrons. It's been a good twelve years since I've seen the film but I've never been able to shake Paxton's demonic "finger lickin' gooood" glee from my memory. Just typing this makes me long for vampires on the more romantic side of the undead fence. Since the most romantic thing about Near Dark is a marriage that shares actors, I'm opting out of a repeat viewing for now. A wuss and a softie.

So when it comes to my preferences in fictional monsters, I'll admit that I'm something of a beauty fascist. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is my favorite TV series of all time, but it has one recurrent motif that makes me die a little inside. Each time vampires in the Whedon-verse reveal themselves, their pretty faces morph into hideous mugs --a little too Klingon / Lost Boys for my taste. If you're going to sink your teeth into my neck, please look pretty while doing so. Don't scrunch up your face.

Since the vampire's "blood is life" myth haunts metaphor rich neighborhoods like Sex and Death, it's no surprise that it's so flexible a fictional genre. It changes with the times. Recent years have downplayed the seductiveness and amped up the savagery of the creatures of the night. When you stop to consider vampiric activity in the Blade and Underworld series or in 80s films like The Lost Boys and Near Dark the violence has become so foregrounded that the erudite romantic vampire is now a dinosaur.

Francis Ford Coppola's divisive batty Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) did try to resurrect the old-school vampire, but I'd say the operatic romance within it is the one thing that most assuredly did not work. In the form of delicious Winona Ryder (just ignore her tone-deaf line readings), this Mina Harker could certainly drive a man to drink...her blood. But in the form of Gary Oldman, this Dracula would have a hard time inspiring recriprocal lust. If you want to ressurect the fanged hypnotic ladies man, he shouldn't have a weak chin. A great actor Oldman may well be. A great romantic leading man he simply is not.

But if we can't have the swooning albeit incongruous romanticism of bloodthirsty killers, can we at least have eroticism? Occasionally we can, yes. The legendary sapphic makeout between Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger (yes, please) and Keanu Reeves's druggy romp with three nubial vamp brides (and how) in Bram Stoker's Dracula are two famous examples. But here are two more cinematic moments worth obsessing on. They're both chilling and sexually charged and, therefore, perfectly vampiric.

Nosferatu (1979)
Is any vampire uglier than Nosferatu? In Werner Herzog's expert adaptation of the silent classic, the disgusting, decayed Nosferatu leaning over the prone form of young and beautiful Lucy (Isabelle Adjani) is a forceful study in contrast. Their lone similarity is their mutually pale skin which, come to think of it, is a perfect statement itself: isn't Lucy already doomed, the moment she concocts her self-sacrifice?

Aside from a moody, well-judged cutaway to bats flying in slow motion, Herzog's camera doesn't ever look away -- for minutes on end -- from the blunt sexuality of Nosferatu's bloodlust. The creature is mesmerized by both the blood and the body. With sickeningly slow care he caresses her with his beastly clawed hands. This excruciating scene maximizes the feeling of violation, playing on the audiences fear of their own sexual vulnerability. Lucy, knowing the sun will soon rise and rid the town of this undead monster, pulls him closer as soon at a crucial moment. His violating lust will be his undoing. Her sexual martyrdom is on the disturbing level of Breaking the Waves.

Interview with the Vampire (1994)
Is any vampire prettier than Brad Pitt? This film adaptation of Anne Rice's bestseller gets a considerable boost from Pitt's potent auto-eroticism, which hit its peak with this film and Legends of the Fall (the combo of which sent him into the stratosphere). My favorite moment in the whole of the sumptuous but uneven Interview is when Louis (Pitt) is first bitten by Lestat (Tom Cruise).

Once Cruise has buried his face in Pitt's neck, turning the moviegoing audience green with envy, the movie stars lift off into the air. For a blissful moment or two each time I watch this Neil Jordan film, I believe that the director will make a convention-defying choice and leave the camera resting on the glory of Pitt's face in ecstacy, his eyes fluttering. (As it turns out, it's quite orgasmic to be bitten by a vampire. But maybe everything is sexually heightened when you look like Brad Pitt?) Sadly, Jordan succumbs to the mediocrity of traditional back and forth editing, cutting to Tom Cruise's less attractive and now bloody-toothed face. Gross.

But this is the way of all things vampire: the repellent and hypnotic in tandem.

Update: you'd like to view the blog-a-thon by film & subject click here

The Bloodsucking Blogs
Flickhead has capsules on five favored vampire flicks
Gallery of the Absurd imagines Interview with the Antoinette
House of Sternberg posts original short fiction The Starving
Certifiably Creative offers up Theater Des Vampires
No More Marriages on Pittsburgh as the star of Innocent Blood
Eddie on Film views Fright Night as the top 80s vampire flick
Forward to Yesterday gets political w/ Guy Maddin's Dracula
Silly Hats Only on George Romero's Martin
As Little As Possible loves Dracula: Dead and Loving It
Modern Fabulousity pays tribute to Klaus Kinski as Nosferatu
Low Resolution stays up late From Dusk Till Dawn
Stale Popcorn sings a love song for (sexy) vampires
goatdog on the dwindling House of Dracula at Universal
Cinemathematics on vampire imagery in Shadow of a Doubt
Burbanked Blame the screenwriter: blood sucking edition

...And Still More Undead
Richard Gibson goes contemporary: Martin and The Addiction
When I Look Deep... pits Drácula against Dracula
Pfangirl on a "bloody awesome trio" of lady bloodsuckers
QTA loves the ladies. And so do the ladies in Vampyros Lesbos
Cinema Fromage 'yeah baby, Dracula in 70s London'
zoom-in requests a DVD fix of The Addiction
Stinky Lulu loves Ketty Lester in Blacula
Way of Words on women: from victims to vampire slayers
Music is My Boyfriend offers tunes for the blog-a-thon
Pen15 Club "When Hilary Duff attacks"
My New Plaid Pants finds Paxton ‘finger lickin’ good’ in Near Dark
Nicks Flick Picks on Coppola's Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Being Boring on the homo-cautionary Interview…
Culture Snob resurrects and old look at Nosferatu
The Horror Blog 'fesses up to some anti-vampire prejudice

The Vampires Are Everywhere!
Tuwa's Shanty on Martin & Nosferatu
Catherine Cantieri the giant sucking sound of 1992's Dracula
The Boob Tubers asks the eternal question: Spike or Angel?
novaslim says a "vuck you" to Grace Jones in Vamp
European Films on Frostbite, a Swedish horror comedy
popbytes recommends Christopher Lee in Hammer's Dracula series
Glitterati points out the most unbelievably cast vampire…ever
100 Films the monster mashup: Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein
Peter Nellhaus on Brides of Dracula
Bright Lights After Dark 'Browning and the Slow Club' (Dracula)
Tim Lucas declares his half dozen favorite vampire flicks
Film Vituperatum Ninjas and Vampires --uncanny similarities!
Film of The Year 'That's Why The Lady is a Vamp'
All About My Movies Angelina Jolie IS a Vampire
Critic After Dark two vampire movies from The Philippines
Agence Eureka a vampire gallery
Cinevistaramascope finds Herzog's Nosferatu superior to Murnau's
Auteur Lust obsesses on Persona: 'The Vampire's In Us'
Bitter Cinema a treasure trove of YouTube vampire trailers
Cutting Room remembers his first time...w/ Bram Stokers Dracula
Watts With Words 'Suck Me' on homoerotic vampires
Jurgen Fauth's Muckworld a 60 second tribute to Kinski as Nosferatu

Happy Halloween! Pray for Sunrise

UPDATE: If you liked this blog-a-thon check out the two others the film experience has hosted on Michelle Pfeiffer (April 2006) and Action Heroines (June 2007)

Tags: blogging, dracula, vampire, Nosferatu, vampires, horror, film, movies, blogs, Halloween, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise