Kristin Scott Thomas stares at an employee’s ass (seriously, that’s what she’s doing) in Tell No One
Or is he just easily swayed by subtitles? As I read his ecstatic review of Guillaume Canet’s Tell No One this morning (ecstatic might be something of an understatement; Holden practically orgasms as he raves about the film), I was reminded of his over-the-top praise for Marion Cotillard’s performance in La Vie en Rose, and again I was slightly baffled.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Tell No One (which I first saw last year when it came out on DVD in the UK — behold the power of the region-free DVD player), is a bad movie, because it isn’t. It’s as well-crafted and absorbing as any recent thriller I can think of. It just isn’t something you mention in the same breath as Vertigo or The Big Sleep.
Its plot is so rambling and nonsensical that I don’t dare try to describe it here, other than to say it’s about a doctor named Alex (played by François Cluzet, who is morphing into a Parisian Dustin Hoffman as he ages), whose wife Margot (Marie-Josée Croze of The Barbarian Invasions) was murdered eight years ago. Or was she? Alex, who has never emerged from the fog created by her death, starts to have doubts when he logs onto Yahoo! one day to find mysterious messages — somewhat miraculously, they have nothing to do with pills that cure erectile dysfunction — suggesting she might still be alive.
As the mystery deepens, the story gets increasingly (and eventually egregiously) preposterous. And it is modern technology, the very thing that gives Alex a reason to search for answers, that ends up being one of the chief reasons the plot doesn’t work. Tell No One, which was based on a novel by the American writer Harlan Coben (himself no Raymond Chandler) is ultimately the kind of movie that works best in a foreign language; the French scenery and subtitles distract from an endless stream of contrivances that would seem more glaring in, say, a Michael Mann production of the same material.
What sets it apart from other, similar movies is actor Guillaume Canet’s confident and sensitive direction. The characters in Tell No One might be a little slow on the uptake, but they’re presented as real people, not simply pawns in elaborate conspiracies, and are always afforded their dignity.
Minor quibbles include some odd casting decisions and the loud, mournful soundtrack. Yes, Jeff Buckley’s version of “Lilac Wine” is excellent. No, it doesn’t need to star in its own three-minute segment in a movie. As for the use of U2’s “With or Without You,” it had the unfortunate effect of making me burst into laughter, which isn’t quite what Canet was aiming for.
The casting of Cluzet, who is in his early fifties, and the thirtysomething Croze as childhood sweethearts is a head-scratcher, but Cluzet’s Cesar-winning performance is possibly the best of his career. There’s a similar age difference between Marina Hands, who plays Alex’s equestrian sister, and Kristin Scott Thomas, who plays her long-term partner (and Alex’s only confidante); that Scott Thomas and Cluzet are peers makes their characters’ relationship particularly believable, and the actors have an easy rapport that makes their scenes together some of the movie’s best.
Tell No One is now playing in limited release in U.S. theaters, presumably with a DVD release to follow. Suspense fans will find it a welcome summertime treat, and for all you fiendish lesbians who just want the cold, hard facts about the extent of its girl-girl action, I’ll have you know there’s just a brief kiss or two (gratuitous screen grab below) and a few domestic scenes between Hands and Scott Thomas.
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If you’ve always wanted to see Barbara Stanwyck face off against Judith Anderson (it was the child actress playing Stanwyck’s character who sent Anderson tumbling down the staircase in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers), the Criterion Collection is now giving you the chance to do just that: today it releases Anthony Mann’s The Furies on DVD.
Made in 1950, it was only Mann’s second western (he’d go on to direct many more), and his background in film noir is wonderfully apparent throughout: This is one of the most shadowy westerns ever made. It’s also one of the most melodramatic, which is why the casting is pitch-perfect.
Stanwyck plays Vance, the rather passionate daughter of cattle baron T.C. Jeffords (Walter Huston, in what would be his final film), and given the bond the two of them share, it wouldn’t be far-fetched to call this Electra: The Western. When Vance acquires a love interest in the form of Wendell Corey, T.C. can’t help but meddle. What Vance does when her father brings Judith Anderson home goes far past meddling.
To describe The Furies as psychosexual is a bit like calling Cries & Whispers depressing — it doesn’t really tell you the half of it. Think of it as a kind of precursor to Johnny Guitar, the most gleefully perverse of all westerns, but with incest instead of lesbianism. (And before I get my wrist slapped for using the words lesbian and perverse in the same sentence, let me point out that I’m not the one who wrote the fucking movies. I could never write a western unless horses were suddenly equipped with air conditioning.) And with high-quality acting from Huston, Stanwyck and Anderson, none of whom lumber in front of the camera with a dazed “WTF?” look in their eyes à la Sterling Hayden.
Woody Harrelson and Moritz Bleibtreu in The Walker
There’s an unwritten rule moviegoers have faithfully abided now for almost 30 years now about not seeing Paul Schrader films. The last time they cared about one was in 1980, when American Gigolo made $22 million in the United States, and at least $15 million of that had less to do with Schrader than Richard Gere’s genitals. It’s enough to make you wonder if there isn’t something about the filmmaker from Grand Rapids, Michigan that puts people off, but then who wouldn’t fall in love with a Bresson and Ozu-obsessed former Calvinist who wears big, thick glasses and has a penchant for porn, prostitutes and Blondie music?
The enduring popularity of the movies Schrader wrote for Martin Scorsese, including Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, suggests that the box office failures of Mishima, Light Sleeper, and practically everything else Schrader’s name has appeared on, has less to do with indifferent audiences than indifferent distributors. According to Box Office Mojo, his widest release was 1,041 theaters for Light of Day; that was all the way back in 1987, when its star, Michael J. Fox, was enjoying immense popularity due to the success of both Family Ties and Back to the Future.
His most recent film, The Walker, played in only 14 theaters, grossing a paltry $79,698 domestically. In the same year, in the same country, Wild Hogs made almost $170 million. A movie about Alvin and the fucking Chipmunks made $217 million. How does that happen? How does something like The Walker, an actual movie with actual ideas (made by an actual filmmaker and starring real actors, no less), make less than Elton John’s monthly flower allowance? How does it play on only 14 screens, the fewest of any Schrader movie since 1991’s The Comfort of Strangers?
Does Lizabeth Scott have Perez Hilton bookmarked? We know she glances at tabloid covers, if this blurb at Contact Music is any indication. The website quotes the 85-year-old actress, who has spent decades denying interview requests, as saying, “I saw Kate Moss and her new beau all over the cover on the news-stand and thought they looked like vagrants; so scruffy and grubby—just awful. I’d like to see Miss Moss smarten up her act. Doesn’t she know young women look up to her? She would have lasted 10 seconds under the Hollywood studio system.”
Scott goes on to praise Paris Hilton, Victoria Beckham and Dita Von Teese as celebrities with genuine senses of style, saying, “Two of the three might not be the sharpest tools in the box, but they are glamorous and always impeccably turned out.”
Could it be that Scott, the gorgeous starlet whose career was all but over by the time she was outed by Confidential in the mid-1950s (she sued them for libel, and contrary to what has been reported on several websites, didn’t win the case, which was dismissed on a technicality), is one of those anonymous posters who always replies to Hilton items about Dita Von Teese by typing “FIRST!!!!!!!!”? Or maybe she’s more the Dlisted type, preferring bitchy remarks about Victoria Beckham’s skeletal frame to crude, hastily drawn MS Paint penises pointing at the Spice Girl’s face.
I’ve yet to figure out where Contact Music got their Scott quotes from, so if anyone can help, drop me a line. And if you’ve never seen the luminous Lizabeth in a movie, you must rent The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, pronto. (The Paramount release, which has a nice transfer, not the $4.99 rush jobs by no-name companies.) Seeing Barbara Stanwyck, Lizabeth Scott and Dame Judith Anderson all in the same movie is a bit like watching Jodie Foster act opposite Alexis Smith in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, if you catch my drift, and Martha Ivers is indeed quite strange, one of the oddest noirs you’ll ever come across. Scott is superb in it as a mysterious young woman just released from prison.
It was only the second film she appeared in (Scott started her career in the theater, working as Tallulah Bankhead’s understudy in The Skin of Our Teeth, and years later there were rumors that parts of All About Eve might have been modeled on their relationship), but she wastes little time in illustrating why Paramount’s publicity department called her “The Threat.”
Though she was given little in the way of quality material during her all-too-brief career, Scott had the kind of sultry looks and prickly presence that were tailor-made for film noir, and was briefly seen as the studio’s answer to the Warner Brothers upstart siren Lauren Bacall. And, on a personal note, if I had to be shot by or because of a ’40s femme fatale, she would certainly make the short list of dames worth dying for, right alongside Rita Hayworth, Gene Tierney, Jane Greer and Yvonne De Carlo. (Geez, who knew I was so easy?)
UPDATE: The Scott quotes have been credited elsewhere to the Daily Express.
RECOMMENDED READING: There are Scott fans who’ve sent me defensive emails over the years about her sexuality, even though I never labeled it in this post. More than once I was told “She was a Republican!”, as if that means anything. (So was Rock Hudson.)
The man-crazy take on Scott is more of a recent phenomenon. It’s reflected on fan sites and in iterations of her Wikipedia page linking her to basically every man she was ever photographed with (even names that don’t help the cause, like Van Johnson), a curiosity that wasn’t as common prior to her 2015 death. Historically, the man she was most consistently linked with was producer Hal Wallis, and it was often insinuated that it was a transactional relationship on Scott’s end.
For the more traditional gay Hollywood take on both Scott and her Confidential woes, you might consider consulting books like William J. Mann’s Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969 and Diana McLellan’s The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood. The public and private travails of Scott only take up a few pages in each of those volumes, but the details will be of interest to certain readers.
Her name pops up unexpectedly in some memoirs as well. In Curtis Harrington’sNice Guys Don’t Work in Hollywood, the filmmaker (Killer Bees; The Cat Creature) recounts an early gig as a messenger boy for Paramount studios. He recalls lesbian rumors, including those linking her to Bankhead, following her from New York to Hollywood, despite common knowledge of her situation with Wallis. However, he adds nothing new to what’s been previously written.
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It has been a lazy weekend here at Cranky Central, a rare occurrence I’ve done my best to enjoy since it might not happen again for another five or six years. This morning I did all the usual Sunday things: went for a jog, worked on the yard, attended church — and if you believed a word of that, you are, I’m sorry to say, a complete sucker.
There was no jogging this morning, only sleeping late and trying not to trip over the cat as I finally shuffled into the hallway. There was certainly no church-attending, for reasons an upcoming unruly parenthetical aside make clear (but if not, never fear, we’ve previously tackled this subject). There was no working on the yard, just reading (Glenway Westcott’s Apartment in Athens, if you must know) and catching up on some movies I’d recorded off cable. Robert Duvall’s British accent was atrocious in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, but Alan Arkin was very cute as Sigmund Freud.
(Just don’t tell my grandfather I said that or he’ll renew his hope that I’ll end up with a Jewish doctor yet. The kind of Jewish doctor with a penis, I should clarify, because my grandma, who is more pragmatic than her crazy dreamer of a husband, has conducted exhaustive research on the matter and found that openly lesbian Jewish doctors do exist. In fact, she’s planning to start a televised nationwide search for one next fall on NBC. Lainie Kazan is currently in negotiations to host.)
I also devoted approximately five minutes of this somewhat dreary, overcast Sunday afternoon to thinking of a decent subject for today’s blog entry. Checking my Google alerts for topics that might be of interest turned up little worth writing about. For example, there was no way lesbian filmmaker Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss wasn’t going to tank at the box office following the financial failures of the approximately 953 recent studio releases about the war in Iraq, so what is there to say about it?
My eyebrows went up a little when I saw that several hours ago, TMZ published a blurb possibly questioning the Penélope Cruz/Javier Bardem romance, but it appears the story, originally titled “No Country for Old Girlfriends,” has disappeared from the site, meaning we might never know how this sentence, previewed via e-mail, ended: “The smokin’ hot actor has been romantically linked to Penélope Cruz for the last year, but Friday, in a little corner at the Chateau Marmont in LA…” (I know that Cruz is a 30-something actress in the international spotlight, which means it’s a matter of time before she marries some biological male type in order to reproduce, but once she extricated herself from painfully unconvincing PR-engineered relationships with her oddball Hollywood costars and started wearing suits and grabbing Salma Hayek’s ass in public, I briefly hoped she’d turn into something of a rebel.)
As I dutifully purged my inbox of links to wacky right-wing editorials about the evils of homosexuality and reviews of regional productions of Edward Albee plays, it hit me: Why not take this opportunity to celebrate the lovely and talented actress Emmanuelle Béart? It might be considered a bit off-topic, as it doesn’t have anything to do with the previously introduced subjects of today being Sunday (FYI, I have it on good authority that Béart is attractive all week long), or Javier Bardem, or homophobic editorials, or “The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia?” being staged in New Hampshire, either, but that doesn’t make it a topic any less worthy of discussion.
Béart, who was born in 1963, has worked steadily since the early 1980s and came to international prominence with a starring role in Claude Berri’s Manon of the Spring in 1986. (It was the second of four films she would make with her future ex-husband, the actor Daniel Auteuil, who will probably earn his own “In praise of…” here eventually because I’ll continue to love him no matter how many bad comedies he makes.)
Tutoring Isabelle Huppert on the art of seduction in 8 Women
It was Chabrol who famously described Béart as having “the face of an angel and the body of a whore,” a comment that, nearly fifteen years later, still appears in every fourth article about her. (Curiously, he said nothing about François Cluzet, her L’enfer costar, having the face of Dustin Hoffman and the body of your next-door neighbor.)
While she is undeniably gorgeous and frequently appears in sexually charged material, the fact of the matter is that Emmanuelle Béart is a talented and underappreciated actress whose characters are often complex, conflicted women whose curves are irrelevant. Even in a fluffy musical comedy like 8 Women, there is more to her French maid Louise than meets the eye, like the revelation that her indiscreet affair with the man of the house was borne less of desire than from a twisted need to ease the marital burdens placed on his wife (played by Catherine Deneuve), the true object of her affection.
If you’ve seen 8 Women, you know that Deneuve’s haughty character ends up in a clinch with her sister-in-law and arch-nemesis, a bisexual schemer played to perfection by Fanny Ardant. But unless you’ve seen director Anne Fontaine’s relatively obscure Nathalie…, you’d have no way of knowing that Béart and Ardant went on to have a kinda-sorta lesbian entanglement of their own.
Béart is a prostitute in Nathalie…, an inscrutable character hired by the troubled Ardant, who believes her husband (played by Gérard Depardieu) is straying, to seduce him and report back with all the pornographic details. If it sounds tortured and psychosexual and hopelessly French, that’s only because it is. What makes this movie memorable is that the only real tension in its bizarre love triangle is between Béart and Ardant, who is obsessed with other people’s sexual desires because she’s unable to express her own.
With Fanny Ardant in Nathalie…
Don’t seek out Nathalie…, a somewhat tedious exercise in painstakingly crafted art-house ambiguity, expecting to see a lesbian love scene. The closest you’ll come in Béart’s oeuvre is some kissing in one of her early efforts, a gauzy David Hamilton film about teenage girls and sexual awakenings; and a brief but explicit sex scene with Pascale Bussières La Répétition, which was directed by Catherine Corsini. (Yes, the same Pascale Bussières who left her Calvinist college and boyfriend to experience a lesbian awakening of her own under the big top in Patricia Rozema’s ridiculous When Night is Falling.)
There’s no love to speak of in La Répétition (and be warned, the title is an apt description of the screenplay), just obsession — a frequent theme in Béart’s movies — and about 87 varieties of fuckedupness. The actresses play friends whose bond is fractured in college; they are reunited ten years later, by which time Béart’s character has become a successful stage actress and Bussières a raving lunatic with stalkerish tendencies.
Their dysfunctional relationship eventually takes a sexual turn despite a serious lack of chemistry between the pals, who, in a small detail that might explain why the scene contains little in the way of eroticism, seem fundamentally straight. Though it’s the pathological behavior of the Bussières character that drives the plot of the movie, the murky motives of Béart’s insecure actress steal the show.
Related viewing: Béart’s lesbian-tinged films are hardly her best, though they’re overlooked enough that I wanted to give them some space here. A good overview of her work that’s available on DVD in North America would include Manon of the Spring, Un Coeur en Hiver (also known as A Heart in Winter), Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud and 8 Women (for the fabulous ensemble cast more than anything else). Hopefully André Téchiné’s The Witnesses, about the early years of the AIDS epidemic, will come out on DVD this year and join the list.
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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?
This week’s new DVD offerings are pretty dismal. The only absolute must-see is Criterion’s 4-disc set of Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (and even that doesn’t have me as weak-kneed and googly-eyed as last week’s Pierrot le Fou release), and the only genuine should-see is Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, which Netflix told me would arrive today. Guess what? Netflix lied. Netflix is, as Al Franken might say, a lying liar. If I could get all Say Anything for a moment, I’d like to strum an acoustic guitar and sing the following: “Netflix lies, Netflix lies, Netflix lies, when he cries.” (Thanks, everyone, and remember to tip your waitress.)
Now, where were we? If you like Robert Zemeckis, or if you want to see a digitized and naked Angelina Jolie, you might consider checking out Beowulf. If you want to see a non-digitized and naked Angelina Jolie, you should check out — oh, who am I kidding? Every last one of you already owns a copy of Gia. If you’ve ever wondered what became of Danielle Brisebois, you might enjoy Life After Tomorrow, a documentary about dozens of former child actresses who played the title role in productions of Annie. And if you’re a fan of Tom “The ‘Stache” Selleck, he stars in Sea Change, the fourth made-for-TV installment in Robert B. Parker’s Jesse Stone series.
Forget about Warner Brothers and their dopey Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan re-releases, the Criterion Collection is where it’s at this Valentine’s Day as they release a highly anticipated set of four early, classic musicals by the master director Ernst Lubitsch as part of their Eclipse series. The titles include The Love Parade, The Smiling Lieutenant (which stars Claudette Colbert), One Hour with You and Monte Carlo. As Dave Kehr put it in a review published today, the set is “indispensable.” It also has, in my opinion, the most attractive packaging of any Eclipse offering so far. I’m so getting it.
Before she lost her marbles, Joan Crawford was seriously hot.
Also in the classic movies department, Warners is dipping into the Joan Crawford vault (and why shouldn’t they, when everyone else did?) with The Joan Crawford Collection: Volume 2. In terms of content — it features A Woman’s Face, Flamingo Road, Sadie McKee, Strange Cargo and Torch Song — it’s more interesting than the first Crawford collection, but I don’t like this new Warner trend of putting the discs in a fold-out case and not making the films available individually. That one must also purchase Dragon Seed and Without Love to own Katharine Hepburn’s Sylvia Scarlett is a criminal offense, and one that consumers should not tolerate.
More new releases:
Spencer Tracy: “This screenplay is giving me indigestion.”
Has anyone else ever watched Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and found themselves hoping that Sidney Poitier or Katharine Houghton would get fed up with Spencer Tracy and yell, “How can you pass judgment on our relationship when you’ve been with a giant lez for the last thirty years?” I ask you these questions because, well, if I asked my Hepburn and Tracy myth-loving grandma, she’d pretend she didn’t hear me and comment on the weather. (It’s icy and overcast here today, if you were wondering.) Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner wasn’t all that great when it came out in ’67 and it isn’t all that great now, but people have been told it’s a classic and they accept without question what studio marketing schmoes and the dashing Robert Osborne tell them. Being an enormous Hepburn fan, I guess I can live with that. It’s when people revere Neil Simon schlock because they think they’re supposed to that I draw the line. Anyway, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was out-of-print for a short while and now Columbia has brought it back, on its own with a new 40th Anniversary Edition and as part of the new Stanley Kramer collection.
Ben Affleck’s directorial debut, an adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s Gone Baby Gone, is worth checking out for its gritty depiction of Boston and a fantastic performance by Amy Ryan, a Best Supporting Actress nominee.
Jane Austen’s life was not remotely like the pap that’s presented in Becoming Jane, but since when does historical accuracy count for anything in the movies? If you like Anne Hathaway, chances are you’ll like this movie. Of course, if you like Anne Hathaway, you’re used to mediocrity.
Romance & Cigarettes, the John Turturro musical that stars James Gandolfini and Susan Sarandon, easily wins the award for the most bizarre release of the week. It’s also the release you most need to rent if you’re sick of the same old cinema.
Photos like this don’t require stupid captions.
I have mixed feelings about this Mark Wahlberg guy, who was perfect in The Departed but kind of seems like a dick. However, Joaquin Phoenix is cool and Eva Mendes is friggin’ foxy, so We Own the Night is in my Netflix rental queue. It’s about nightclubs, drugs, organized crime, brothers on opposite sides of the law (or are they?), blah, blah, blah. Did I mention that Eva Mendes is foxy?
HBO’s Tell Me You Love Me is pretty queer behind the scenes, but what you actually see on the show is rather heterosexual. And kind of boring, though anything that provides work for Jane Alexander is all right with me.
Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married?, released today by Lionsgate, poses a perfectly reasonable question, though I can’t see the title without wanting to respond, “You didn’t.”
Amy Heckerling directed I Could Never Be Your Woman, which stars Michelle Pfeiffer and Paul Rudd. Never heard of it? That’s because the Weinstein Company sent it straight to DVD. Heckerling going direct to DVD isn’t going to raise any eyebrows post-Loser, but anyone who starred in The Fabulous Baker Boys and Batman Returns deserves a little more respect.
Penelope Cruz with another blonde in Head in the Clouds.
It’s tough, sometimes, being a Woody Allen fan. You’re not just constantly put in the incredibly awkward position of being expected to defend the indefensible (see: marrying your girlfriend’s daughter), you’re also asked to defend films like Hollywood Ending and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. That’s why I was happy to read this shamelessly publicisty blurb in today’s Page Six:
SCARLETT Johansson has a steamy lesbian sex scene with Penelope Cruz in Woody Allen’s upcoming “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.” A source tells us: “It is also extremely erotic. People will be blown away and even shocked. Penelope and Scarlett go at it in a red-tinted photography dark room, and it will leave the audience gasping.”
Okay, so audiences would have to actually show up for a Woody Allen movie — or a Penelope Cruz movie, or a Scarlett Johansson movie, for that matter — in order to gasp. Chances are, that isn’t happening. And while it’s true that Match Point was a bit sexier than Michael Caine boffing his sister-in-law in Hannah and Her Sisters, it’s rather doubtful the former Allen Stewart Konigsberg will achieve a David Lynchian hypnotic, audience-silencing Mulholland Drive effect here. Still, what’s not to like about this?
Of course, I say that as someone who is so dedicated to supporting Penelope Cruz’s on-screen lesbian antics that I watched Head in the Clouds in its entirety. Even worse, I endured the interminable Don’t Tempt Me just to see her butchified and leering at Victoria Abril. Curiously, she didn’t seem all that different than she does on The Late Show.
“This poster is going to cause me a real headache with bitchy queens.”
Finally, the bleak DVD month of January is over and February’s first batch of new releases is primed to more than make up for it.
First, in the gay interest department, there is Neil Jordan’s The Brave One, starring the world’s most famous quasi-closeted actress, Jodie Foster. The Brave One is not a gay movie — it’s another of those films that finds Foster out for blood when something happens to her straight family — but the heterosexual Jordan’s work, from Mona Lisa to The Crying Game and Breakfast on Pluto, is often queer-inclusive, and Will & Grace producer Cynthia Mort’s name on the screenplay bolsters its gay credentials.
For those of you so eager to see Foster kick ass and take names that you can’t bear a 10-minute drive to the video store, Warner Brothers has made the download available for pre-order through Amazon Unbox for $14.99, which makes it cheaper than the DVD.
More new releases:
Robert Ford: “You were real pretty in Thelma & Louise.”
Also available for download is The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, the brooding Andrew Dominik western with gay undertones to spare. The cast includes Brad Pitt, Mary-Louise Parker, Sam Rockwell, Sam Shepard, Paul Schneider and the Oscar-nominated Casey Affleck as Robert Ford, who casts many a meaningful glance in Pitt’s direction.
“Is that Irène Jacob selling flowers over there?”
Julie Delpy writes, directs, stars in, contributes music to and probably hand-carved the furniture that appears in 2 Days in Paris, which costars Adam Goldberg — who, despite being 37 and decidedly male, comes off as something of an ingénue here. A scruffy, nervous, foul-mouthed ingénue, but we can’t all be Audrey Hepburn. It’s a lovely, oddball directorial debut (though the manic last few minutes disrupt its easygoing charm), and one that establishes Delpy as a filmmaker to watch.
Julie Taymor’s Beatles-inspired musical Across the Universe, starring Evan Rachel Wood — she who kissed Mischa Barton on Once & Again and Nikki Reed in Thirteen — and Jim Sturgess, gets the 2-Disc Special Edition treatment from Sony. Actress T.V. Carpio plays Prudence, a lesbian character who sings “I Want to Hold Your Hand” about a fellow cheerleader.
MGM pays another visit to Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, bringing it a few supplementary features this time around.
Cate Blanchett and director Shekhar Kapur re-team for Elizabeth: The Golden Age, to middling results, though the cast, which includes Geoffrey Rush, Clive Owen and Samantha Morton, is uniformly excellent.
Feast of Love, which has Selma Blair in a lesbian subplot that even director Robert Benton admits is undercooked, comes to DVD from MGM, if anyone cares. Morgan Freeman, Jane Alexander, Greg Kinnear and High Art’s Radha Mitchell star.
In need of a Diane Lane fix but unwilling to spend $10 on Untraceable? You can try Griffin Dunne’s Fierce People, an odd little number that gathered dust on Lionsgate’s shelves for two years before receiving a limited theatrical release in 2007. It has Donald Sutherland, Anton Yelchin, Kristen Stewart, Chris Evans, drug addiction, sodomy— your grandparents are sure to love it.
Kino has collected Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, The Color of Pomegranates, The Legend of Suram Fortress and Ashik Kerib in The Films of Sergei Paradjanov, a new box set. The titles are also available separately.
A Gallipoli that wasn’t directed by Peter Weir and doesn’t star Mel “Sugar Tits” Gibson is being released by Cinema Epoch. This documentary about the famous 1915 battle is narrated by Jeremy Irons and Sam Neill, who, as far as I know, don’t blame any of the bloodshed on the Jews.
Imitation of Life, both the 1934 original starring Claudette Colbert and the 1959 Douglas Sirk remake starring Lana Turner, gets the Universal Legacy Series treatment in this handsome double-feature.
Four lesser-known Jean-Luc Godard films (Passion, First Name: Carmen, The Detective and Oh Woe is Me) are being released together by Lionsgate, but it’s the upcoming Criterion release of Pierrot le Fou that everyone is really excited about.
David Grubin’s absorbing documentary The Jewish Americans, which recently aired on PBS, gets a speedy double-disc release. Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner is one of the interview subjects; video clips and lesson plans for teachers are available online.
You can be honest, lecherous lesbians. Before her face melted off, you watched NBC’s Third Watch for Tia Texada. And I won’t judge you for that, because I watched it every now and then for Nia Long. Neither appeared in the first season of the show, which finally debuts on DVD, but Bobby Cannavale did. That should count for something, I guess.
A cross-dressing Dustin Hoffman falls for Jessica Lange in Tootsie
Tootsie turns 25 with an Anniversary Edition from Columbia. Watch as Dustin Hoffman transforms himself into a woman who looks frighteningly like my great-aunt! Watch as his saucy soap actress Dorothy Michaels falls for comely costar Jessica Lange! Watch as Bill Murray acts very droll and Teri Garr very ditzy! The peppy score might make you want to kill Dave Grusin, but Sydney Pollack’s film holds up spectacularly well.
If ever a movie didn’t deserve a deluxe edition, it’s You’ve Got Mail, but Warner Brothers knows you get lonely and sentimental around Valentine’s Day and they’re not above squeezing another $12 from your wallet with this second release of the film. If you have to buy something to get all sappy to on the 14th, you’re much better off investing in The Shop Around the Corner. I tell you this as someone who cares: You can’t go wrong with Ernst Lubitsch and Margaret Sullavan.
