Birthday Suits 11/07

1891 Miriam Cooper silent film star of the DW Griffith wing of Hollywood (Intolerance, Birth of a Nation)
1903 Dean Jagger Oscar winner for the war drama Twelve O'Clock High. Can't say I've seen that one. Anyone?
1923 Gene Callahan started working in feature films in 1960. He'd won two Oscars for Art Direction (The Hustler and America, America) by April, 1964. Quick study, yes? I imagine he had great stories to tell: his first movie scenery was chewed by none other Liz (BUtterfield 8) and Brando (The Fugitive Kind) and he worked right up until his death, closing a fine career out with those Steel Magnolias and Reese Witherspoon's debut Man in the Moon. If you haven't seen the latter, I recommend. Sweet movie and Reese had full star charisma even at 14.

1943 Joni Mitchell ♫ oh I could drink a case of you, darling... and I'd still be on my feet
1949 Judy Tenuta Buy her gifts, pigs. If you remember Judy, god bless you for being as old or older than me
1970 Morgan Spurlock Super Size-d his moment, parlaying it for a tv series. Next?
1972 Jeremy and Jason London, hot 90s twins (that's Jason, pictured). I actually think it's rather odd that twin stars are as rare as they are. Aren't twins automatically fascinating? At least on first (and second) impression. I always wonder how casting directors decided which London they wanted since they rarely have acted together. For what it's worth, Jeremy leaned TV (Party of Five and I'll Fly Away) and Jason tilted big screen (Dazed and Confused, To Wong Foo...) in their heyday. Both are still working regularly.

Blue Steel Reborn!

I caught my reflection in a spoon while I was eating my cereal, and I remember thinking, 'Wow, you're ridiculously good looking. Maybe you could do that for a career.
-Zoolander

Zoolander looks borrowed from ONTD

Question: If vampires can't see their own reflection, how did Edward (Twilight) know he could be "professionally good looking"? Yes, Robert Pattison is just as versatile as Derek Zoolander! We hear he's working on a new look for the sequel but you 'you gotta tame the beast before you let it out of its cage.'

Not the Leaves of Grass You're Thinking Of

When someone says "Leaves of Grass" does your body sing electric, lost in memories of glorious fragments from the pen of the great Walt Whitman? Mine does. So, when I first heard that Edward Norton was starring in Leaves of Grass (2009) I thought we had a queer civil war era biopic on our hands. We don't get many of those.

Ed Norton and Ed Norton in Leaves of Grass (2009)

But unless Walt Whitman actually had a pot-smoking identical twin brother, this is not the Leaves of Grass I'm thinking of. Presumably Hollywood didn't have poetry on its mind when it co-opted the famous title. Writer/Director/Actor Tim Blake Nelson directs Norton in this comedic crime thriller about twins: one a college professor, the other a criminal. Should Edward call Lindsay Lohan (Parent Trap) for tips? It's not like his new co-stars Richard Dreyfuss, Keri Russell and Susan Sarandon have ever played twins.
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I'm Seeing Double

I have been spending too much time @ JAMD lately. I was going to make one of those "red carpet rendezvous" posts but for now, I'm seeing double.

Mo & LiLo @ Filth & Wisdom

For a split second flipping through thumbnail photos I thought these two were the same person. Crazier still: They're at the same event and it's an event for Madonna herself. Is this homage or is the pool of celebrity stylists dangerously under-populated these days? Now accepting job applications.

pointless trivia note: Lindsay Lohan was born two days after Madonna's third album True Blue hit record stores in 1986. Have you any doubt that Papa Don't Preach video, then in its first week on MTV, was playing at the exact moment Lindsay let out her first wail ?

<--- Another twin twosome at another event on the other coast the very next day. I wouldn't have thought to fuse them but they've done it for me. The two ultra thin long haired brunette forty-something kajillionaires with younger thirty-something husbands of lesser fame were attending an event at the Director's Guild in Los Angeles. Comparisons end there. One of them does not own an Idaho home filled with dolls or apply live leaches to her skin to keep herself looking fresh. (That we know of...)

The Piano (1993)

A Reader Request (long time in coming --my apologies Scott!)
#9 Personal Canon: The Movies I Think About When I Think About the Movies

The menu on the 1999 DVD edition of The Piano is a hideously misleading photoshop tragedy. It’s garish, poorly composed and off putting. I won't even reprint it here to illustrate my point. It's too horrifying. I dare say I’ve never seen a poorer match between a menu and the film that follows. It’s the last less than exquisite image one will see once “play movie” is selected. If you’ve never seen the film before and you (like me) have been burdened with the unwitting purchase or rental of this particular edition, press the buttons quickly.

On to the beauty! There's so much of it...

Like mother, like daughter (Anna Paquin & Holly Hunter in The Piano)

I saw The Piano in Salt Lake City in November 1993 and I’ve never forgotten the experience. The movie held me in rapt attention from its first stirring images and Holly Hunter's high pitched but quiet delivery of one of the greatest opening monologues I'd ever heard

The voice you're hearing is not my speaking voice but my mind's voice...

I remember my best girlfriend’s hand gripping my arm during the most brutal sequence late in the movie. She was so upset she nearly bolted from her seat. I vividly remember exiting the theater after the credits rolled, both of us in a daze. We knew we’d seen something great but what exactly had we seen? Watching The Piano for the first time can feel like confronting a gorgeous but alien presence. It’s utterly transporting but also unfamiliar. Your rational mind will tell you that this shouldn’t be the case. But deeply sensual films are uncommon. What’s more, films shot through with feminine mystique, energies and point of view are arguably the rarest forms of cinema. The Piano stood womanly and defiant and far removed from other films that came before it and sadly, perhaps, has remained a foreign thing. It's still a rarity.

Jane Campion’s masterpiece, with its eerily beautiful New Zealand landscapes (before Lord of the Rings popularized the place for Hollywood) and bold femininity, felt otherworldly in 1993 but like all truly great art, it proved unusually accessible despite the challenging gauntlet it threw down. It was a major arthouse and critical success, loved by both the intelligentsia and the more middlebrow Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Before it closed its run it had won eight Oscar nominations, three statues, a sizeable box office gross for the time and a passionate enduring following.

The film begins with a curiously fuzzy image. The next cut reveals it as a POV shot: we’re looking through the fingers of Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter) who is partially covering her eyes... from what we’re not sure. The camera doesn't stay subservient to Ada's point of view but rather begins to study her, this curious mute creature. Hunter's fascinating performance, incongruously both stony and expressive, demands it...

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