If the New York Times is going to pretend the newly dead actor Van Johnson was heterosexual, how can I believe what they write about anything else?
(As a bonus, here’s a link to an old magazine cover with Johnson looking not unlike Cynthia Nixon’s partner.)
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
If you’ll permit me to act like a squealing fangirl for a moment, I’ve gotta get this off my chest: Isabelle Huppert is God. I challenge you to watch La Cérémonie and The Piano Teacher (or Gabrielle, though that’s better left to the advanced Huppert viewer) and disagree. Or watch her cry in anything (the final moments of Merci pour le chocolat immediately come to mind) and tell me I’m wrong.
There has never been an actress like her: she is formidable in ways that defy description. Her face is somehow capable of doing things other actors can only dream about — and most of them aren’t even imaginative enough to do that. We’re talking about an actress who, using only her eyes, can tell you more in two seconds than entire movies with casts full of big-name actors and armies of uncredited screenwriters and a mercurial director and tens of millions of dollars worth of CGI effects couldn’t begin to tell you in three hours.
Not only that, I’m pretty sure she has magical powers. She can probably transport things across the room just by looking at them, or cure people of insomnia by snapping her fingers. That’s the vibe she gives off in every movie she makes — it’s impossible to think there’s anything she can’t do.
In today’s Independent, she sounds off on a variety of topics, including her part in Joachim Lafosse’s Private Property (and she’s right that the film isn’t focused enough on her character, though it’s still very much worth seeing); whether David O. Russell deserved Lily Tomlin’s wrath on the set of I Heart Huckabees (naturally, the answer is yes); and current acting trends. Speaking of which, when Huppert told reporter Kaleem Aftab that:
“Because of the current fashion for biopics, in the past few years there is this view that acting is the ability to be someone else, which I don’t think it is. Now, the more visible a performance, the better people think it is.”
How much you want to bet she considered mumbling Marion Cotillard’s name under her breath?
In literary news…
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has died in Moscow at the age of 89, and the Times responded by publishing an obituary that is almost as long as A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Check out the accompanying slide show for nine amazing pictures of Solzhenitsyn’s rockin’ beard.
And in ‘Someone please tell my grandpa about this’ news …
Did you know there’s a “Jewish HBO?” Neither did I, but now I gotta find a way to get my local cable company to carry it. You see, my grandfather has been a little bored with Turner Classic Movies and The History Channel lately, and he’s under the mistaken impression that when he can’t find anything to do, it’s up to the rest of us to entertain him. I love him and everything, but if that retired bastard calls me at work one more time in the middle of the day to ask what I’m doing, I might have to throttle him.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
Cyd Charisse, as everyone who regularly goes anywhere on the Internet already knows, died today at the age of 86. I have nothing insightful to say about her career. All things considered, I have nothing insightful to say about anything. But I did happen to catch her in East Side, West Side, a Mervyn LeRoy melodrama, a few months ago when it came out on DVD, and I have an observation to share with you bunch of homosexuals.
First, the set-up. The movie is a pretty typical Barbara Stanwyck vehicle: Stanwyck’s husband, played by James Mason, is cheating on her with Ava Gardner. That doesn’t make Stanwyck happy. Then Van Heflin comes to town, and that does make her happy. (You’ve got to hand it to Heflin: All he ever really did was wear a suit and act like a smart-ass, but in every other movie released in the 1940s attractive women were dying to fuck him.) Problem is, he’s dating Charisse, which leads to some brief tension between her character and Stanwyck’s.
Big deal, I know: Stanwyck had tension with everyone in her movies. Her characters were nothing if not tense. What’s different about her big scene with Charisse in East Side, West Side is that she doesn’t seem to be impatiently waiting to snap her next line; she seems to be considering, with some appreciation, the hotness of her younger costar. There was, for the record, a lot of hotness to consider.
Isn’t that a heartwarming remembrance? Yeah, well, I don’t have a lot to say about her — but I think Barbara Stanwyck would’ve hit it. I feel very classy right now.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
Richard Widmark, who died Monday at the age of 93, will no doubt be best remembered for his debut role, that of the gleefully psychopathic Tommy Udo in Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death. It was a dazzling introduction to moviegoers and critics alike; Widmark was electrifying and unpredictable and his Udo became an indelible creation, the kind of shockingly vile, violent weasel Steve Buscemi played in Fargo nearly fifty years later.
But Widmark, when his characters weren’t pushing wheelchair-bound women down staircases with wild-eyed, giddy abandon, was also capable of projecting an easy con man charm (even when his characters were morally conflicted, as in Samuel Fuller’s gritty Pickup on South Street), and, in Jules Dassin’s classic Night and the City, such palpable desperation that you’ll break into a sweat just looking at him. He was a fascinating actor, one of my favorites, and if you haven’t seen his work in the films mentioned here, you should head over to Netflix and add them to your queue.
Programming note: Widmark will be remembered by Turner Classic Movies with a 3-film retrospective on Friday, April 4th, but they’ve inexplicably chosen to show movies that kind of suck. What were you thinking, TCM programmers? Is The Tunnel of Love really the best you can do?
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
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