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Oscars 2012: The movies’ most painful night

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 09:05:00 +0000

Maybe the joke about George Clooney kissing Billy Crystal in a fake scene from "The Descendants" would have been funnier if Crystal didn't actually look like an old lady. That moment was awkward -- like virtually everything else about Sunday's 84th Academy Awards, -- but it was also confusing. Was George supposed to be delivering a goodbye smooch to his wife, or his mom? Seconds later, we were treated to Crystal in blackface, or at least in tan-face, sorta-kinda doing Sammy Davis Jr. Extra-double awkward and confusing! Even if you've heard of Davis (and half the people watching probably hadn't), it took several beats to grasp exactly what target Crystal was shooting for. (It's been more than 25 years since Crystal played Davis on "Saturday Night Live.") Liberace's black half-sister, perhaps?

How Viola Davis took Meryl Streep’s Oscar

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:00:00 +0000

When I saw Viola Davis across the room, wearing a shimmering pink sheath dress, I wasn't quite sure what she was doing there. This was at the New York Film Critics Circle's awards dinner in January, a relatively intimate event that has a history of bringing out the stars. But it's not the Oscars or the SAG Awards or the Golden Globes; there are no TV cameras and no red carpet to work. More to the point, the awards are announced in advance, and Davis hadn't won anything. Maybe she'd have turned up anyway to support Jessica Chastain, her costar in "The Help," who was winning a supporting-actress award, but Davis was mostly on hand to introduce Meryl Streep, who had won the group's best actress award for her performance as Margaret Thatcher in "The Iron Lady."

“The Iron Lady”: Meryl Streep’s bravura turn as Maggie Thatcher

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 01:00:00 +0000

It's easy to take Meryl Streep for granted, and to view her uncanny ability to disappear inside virtually any kind of character as a form of shtick or a parlor trick. It's perfectly true that Streep has an appetite for larger-than-life characters and a natural instinct for showmanship, and that she's often at her best in mediocre or even sloppy films. But we shouldn't allow that to obscure the fact that she's one of the greatest stage and screen actresses of her time, or anybody else's time. (Indeed, Streep is something like the female Laurence Olivier, with the proviso that she made a far smoother transition to movie stardom than Sir Larry did.)

First footage of Meryl Streep as Thatcher

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 16:45:00 +0000

The highly anticipated first trailer for Meryl Streep's upcoming performance as Margaret Thatcher -- in a Phyllida Lloyd film, "The Iron Lady," set to be released in America on December 16 -- is now available. Here's the actress taking a crack at Thatcher's famously distinctive accent [from BBC Breakfast via the Huffington Post]:

To watch more, visit tag

Meryl Streep’s commencement speech: “Things are changing”

Tue, 18 May 2010 17:50:00 +0000

In her lovely commencement speech at Barnard College on Monday, Meryl Streep touched on a great many things: the importance of empathy; Streep's history, as a high school student, of performing the role of the amenable, agreeable, gaily giggling girl who appealed to boys; her experience of meeting Vassar classmates who allowed her brain to wake up.

Among the things she noted was that years ago, men used to tell her that their favorite of her performances was as Linda, the submissive, sweet character from "The Deerhunter." Now, Streep said, men are more likely to tell her that their favorite of her roles is as Miranda Priestly, the icy, complicated fashion magazine editor from "The Devil Wears Prada." This ability of men to not simply look down on or fall in love with a deflated and unthreatening female character, but instead to identify with a powerful, bossy, and intense one, is a vital sign of gender progress.

My love-hate relationship with Meryl Streep

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 01:20:00 +0000

I don't think it's possible, or even desirable, for moviegoers -- and that includes critics -- to be objective about actors. One of the deepest and most abiding pleasures of moviegoing is responding to performers, and so it makes sense that we often have intense and conflicted personal responses to them. That's what troubles me about the lockstep view of Meryl Streep as the consummate actor's actor, a performer who deserves our lifelong adulation simply because she works so hard at mastering accents. There is no religious tablet -- as far as I know -- that decrees we all need to be in constant awe of Meryl Streep. She can be as dull or as mannered as any other actor currently working, whether she's playing a frayed-at-the-edges modern do-gooder in "The Hours" or a bitchy, power-mad nun from the Order of the Sunbonnets in "Doubt." The former was a performance shaped around a big breakdown moment, the kind of show that's designed to make people say, "Brava!" but doesn't necessarily cut deeply; the latter was a triumph of primly pursed lips and glowering eyes, the kind of turn that makes admirers throw around words like "discipline" and "restraint" -- though when I look at a performance, the last thing I want to be noticing is the discipline.

Blogging “City Island”: De Niro? Willis? Or Michael Chiklis?

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 02:01:00 +0000

"City Island" was written in a kind of fevered rush in the infamous month of September 2001. I was seized with the idea and, unlike any of my other scripts, proceeded without an outline, watching the pieces of the story fall into place with an odd inevitability. Indeed, the writing somehow felt more like a process of taking dictation from some unknown source as I rushed to keep up with what the characters were saying and doing and where they were going. When I was finished, I showed the script to a couple of trusted friends and advisers and waited nervously; my fear was that it was an overcaffeinated writing binge that made sense at the time but would provoke more head scratching than hand clapping.

But to my relief, people seemed to like it. Very few notes or complaints. Lots of enthusiasm. Since this was the first time in my many years of screenplay creating that I’d had an experience quite like this, I decided that this meant this would be the first time that making a movie out of a script wouldn’t be a teeth-pulling, gut-wrenching, blood-letting experience.

The Oscar nominations: Trying to please everyone

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:03:00 +0000

So what was the inflated Academy Awards best-picture category, expanded this year from five to 10 nominees, going to bring us? More populism or more existentialism? Was it going to open the door to animated films, to fantasy and science fiction, to foreign flicks and low-budget indies -- or just to middle-of-the-road Hollywood sentimentality, calibrated to draw in heartland viewers who've increasingly tuned out the whole Oscar spectacle?

Given the Academy's catholic desire to please all its contradictory and overlapping constituencies, it shouldn't have surprised anyone that the answer was all of the above. And yet, somehow, it did. I think of the five extra nomination slots as the "Dark Knight" apology awards, but this year offered no exact TDK-cognate, i.e., no commercial-critical behemoth likely to be snubbed by the Academy members' peculiar blend of middlebrow snobbery. (Just to be clear: I didn't like "The Dark Knight" much, personally. But that's irrelevant when it comes to the Oscars. Given its alleged seriousness, cultural impact and box-office firepower, a best-picture nom should have been automatic.)

“It’s Complicated”: Another missive from romantic-comedy hell

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 01:23:00 +0000

That sound you hear now and then in the post-middle-age romantic comedy "It's Complicated" — something like the creaky cracking of a large frozen land mass whose surface has begun to melt just the tiniest bit — is the sound of Nancy Meyers having a sudden realization: Men are people, too. At least sometimes, if they happen to catch you in the right mood, maybe if they've just given you a good time in bed. The rest of the time, they're the Enemy, particularly if you're over 40 and still smarting over the cruel revelation that younger women exist. And that some (though not all) older men want them, perhaps more than they want you. Time to put on your mail-order art-to-wear kimono, pour another glass of chardonnay, and get together with your equally bitter girlfriends, all of whom have much to say about how much they hate everything with a penis, although once in a while — logic be damned — it would be kind of nice to touch one again.