Love 'em and Leave 'em? A Brief Memory of Russell Crowe.

Have you ever loved a performance so much that your subsequent disinterest in the same actor is actually hard to wrap your head around? That's me when it comes to Russell Crowe.

I love everything about him in L.A. Confidential... but in particular the way he looks at Kim Basinger. God, the way he looks at her. It's just riveting. He easily made my Best Actor shortlist in 1997. For the record it went like so...

• Russell Crowe, LA Confidential
• Johnny Depp, Donnie Brasco
• Christopher Guest, Waiting for Guffman
• Ian Holm, The Sweet Hereafter *winner*
• Mark Wahlberg, Boogie Nights

I'd probably rejigger to make Christopher Guest the winner now that it's been 13 years (yes, Guffman arrived in '97 even though it's listed as '96 everywhere) and that performance is still the most hilarious I think I've ever seen.

But I'm veering off topic. Damnit.

Back on. I watched a few key Confidential scenes after reading Craig's Take Three: Kim Basinger this weekend and fell for Crowe's "Bud White" (great character name) all over again. Before L.A. Confidential hit I had only seen him in the Australian movie Proof (1991, not the Gwynnie Paltrow movie -- this one is more interesting) and in the western The Quick and the Dead (1995). And after L.A. I rented another Australian movie The Sum of Us (1994) and also loved him there.

So back in 1997 I assumed he was totally my new favorite actor. He became everyone else's favorite actor (at least for a few years)... but weirdly not mine. Not mine at all. So now when he has a new movie out (like The Next Three Days) it almost doesn't register with me.

<--- Crowe in Proof (1991).

I lost interest so quickly.

Have you ever had that happen to you with an actor / actress that you just really thought was going to be a personal fav? Does it mean that we let external forces get in the way? Does it mean we never loved the actor/actress but just the role they won / did justice to? Or maybe it's a complicated mix of all sorts of things like media saturation, public persona, film choices, personal quirks.

I'd love to hear stories if this has ever happened to you...
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Take Three: Kim Basinger

Craig here with Take Three. Today: Kim Basinger

Bay•sing•er

I think it’s time again to give Kim Basinger (remember, it's Bay-singer, not Bah-sinjahr, folks) some major credit. The lady's due. She’s gone from supporting eighties female through a love-hate (but Oscar-nabbing) nineties to her current career bloom as a character actress of some depth. Ms Basinger has always quietly impressed me. Here are three reasons why.

Take One: She loooovves purple.

Basinger’s career was birthed alongside the eighties. Feisty ladies in adventurous circumstances were her trade back then. Although through either slip-ups or fate she was often eclipsed by her male co-stars. In Never Say Never Again, The Man Who Loved Women, The Natural, Fool for Love, 9½ Weeks, No Mercy, Blind Date and Nadine she played second-fiddle female to, respectively, Connery, Reynolds, Redford, Shepard, Rourke, Gere, Willis and Bridges. These regulars of male-patterned eighties flicks manned the screen up to prematurely musty proportions, almost disguising Basinger’s versatile verbal retorts, bright mode of re-routing the drama her way and a daffy manner with a throwaway comic moment. She selflessly supported the fellas, but shone when it mattered.

With Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), she was the lone notable lady on set, and her Vicki Vale was more than mere distraction. Having to both glam-up the air around Michael Keaton’s dour-mouthed dark knight and de-glam the air around Nicholson’s garishly impish Joker was task enough. I've not read or heard of much credit being directed Basinger’s way for Batman, but in retrospect she’s to be cheered as a forceful female presence who cajoled Jack the Joker out of his randy advances. Outside of Michelle Pfeiffer’s ace feline-fatale in its first sequel, Basinger is still the only interesting lady in the Bat universe.

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Birthday Suits: Good Hair, and Good Music.

Celebrating the birthdays of the film-famous. If it's your birthday, we'll sing you a happy one in the comments.

Louise Brooks, Veronica Lake and Josh Duhamel

1906 Louise Brooks, dancer, silent film actress, icon, quotable diva, film critic, memoirist, ...Lost Girl, Lulu. Her hair is legend.
1908 Joseph McCarthy, he saw only Red(s). He's been a villainous figure in movies ever since, whether seen, unseen or fictionalized. See: Guilty by Suspicion, The Way We Were, The Manchurian Candidate, Good Night, and Good Luck. and many more...
1919 Veronica Lake, femme fatale, purveyor of the peek-a-boo bang (her hair also being legend). Kim Basinger didn't even have to get "cut" to look like this goddess in LA Confidential. She just had to sell those glorious blonde waves.
1945 Paul Hirsch, editor of Carrie, Star Wars (Oscar win), Ferris Bueller's Day Off and more...
1951 Zhang Yimou, fine director, awesome goddess worshipper. Think of what he did for both Zhang Ziyi (Hero, The House of Flying Daggers) and Gong Li (Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, Shanghai Triad)
1952 Chris Noonan, writer/director of the wondrous Babe (1995)
1954 Condoleeza Rice, crazy person. Also played crazily by Thandie Newton in W.
1972 Josh Duhamel actor often seen being chased by giant fucking robots and/or Fergie

How is this for a weird coincidence? Leopold Mozart and Johann van Beethoven were both born on this day in the 18th century. They would go on to father enormously important children. Their offspring are none other than immortal and beloved composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. There have been countless films about musicians over the years and there will be countless more -- silent purists may argue but music was a good match for the movies -- but in this particular arena will anything ever top Amadeus 's enviable success trifecta: critical/commercial/Oscar?