“I like to take these unusual characters and then make them as normal as possible because we all know that the tragedy and the abnormal always hides itself behind the normal.”
✨ Happy birthday to the exceptional Isabelle Huppert, one of the greatest and most fearless actors to ever grace the big screen! ✨
“Adolescent screen turns tend to be praised for their precocious hyper-expressivity or youthful dynamism, but Wang Yuwen does something different in An Elephant Sitting Still. In the late Hu Bo’s mammoth undertaking, a darkly poetic and nearly four-hour drama about discontented residents of contemporary China, Wang’s performance is defined by a deadpan, glassy-eyed grimace that covers the actress’ face throughout the majority of her scenes. Wang’s bracing simplicity as Huang Ling, a willfully disobedient schoolgirl, helps ground some of the more sensational elements of Hu’s conception of the character—her binge-drinking mother, her illicit affair with a married high school dean—within the realm of lived experience, as felt but not always as communicated by this recessive personality. An air of forbidding detachment clings to the actress, even when Huang is voraciously gobbling up pastries or a pitifully squashed birthday cake. By refusing to react, Wang cannily plays against the expectations of her character’s arc while providing a running commentary on a particular kind of teenage experience. Maybe one day, Huang will look back on the events portrayed herein with different, more palpable feelings, but for now she can only drift through the motions of an abysmal life she loathes. Blankness is often deemed a demerit in acting, a presumed indication of a performer’s vacuity, yet Wang’s blankness reveals not the absence of thought, but its painful concealment: in a world of so much sadness, what more can the young and isolated do but suppress and subsist? When Huang eventually lashes out at those who have failed to protect her after hours of grim impassivity, it begets a moment of volcanic release that the actress has earned by closely adhering to the state of silent despair that can so easily oppress those unready to fight it.” — Matthew Eng
The 12 Best Female Film Performances of Early 2019
(Source: TribecaFilm.com)
Happy 74th birthday to Liza Minnelli!
“New York, New York, Scorsese’s splashy, cynical, and masterfully-made postwar musical, was egregiously cold-shouldered upon its release, as was the singular star turn of Liza Minnelli, doing an adoring yet galvanizing variation on Mama Judy Garland’s legendary A Star is Born role. As Francine Evans, an aspiring 1940s singer who falls under the influence of De Niro’s callous, captivating saxophonist, Minnelli is perpetually in motion, propelled by an insatiable need to please audiences and lovers alike. Minnelli is, of course, a stupendous, show-stopping singer-dancer with a walloping and finely honed talent that decidedly belongs to the bygone studio era in which her mother rose to otherworldly stardom. Minnelli’s artistic mastery is startlingly reminiscent of Garland’s yet differentiated by the pure, jubilant passion she exudes at all times when performing; has any artist ever radiated more graciousness for an audience’s gaze than Minnelli, as if the enormity of her abilities didn’t already demand our undivided attention? But, more than anything else, it’s the actress’ tough-minded, deeply-felt emotionality—culminating in an elevator descent of tremulous, heartbroken stillness—that proudly places her Francine beside Garland’s Vicki Lester, Julie Andrews’ Maria von Trapp, Barbra Streisand’s Fanny Brice, and Minnelli’s own Sally Bowles in the eternal pantheon of preeminent, pitch-perfect musical performances.” — Matthew Eng
The 10 Best Female Performances in Martin Scorsese Films
(Source: TribecaFilm.com)
Happy birthday, Sharon Stone!
“Nothing and nobody else matters in Martin Scorsese’s Casino whenever Sharon Stone’s decadent and devastating Ginger McKenna slinks into a frame. Playing a bona fide hustler unhappily betrothed to De Niro’s smitten casino honcho, Stone is the single most striking element in Scorsese’s fact-based Las Vegas crime saga. The actress can take our breath away just by strolling into a room in a beautifully beaded Bob Mackie gown, but she’s also playing a real, anguishing woman to never less than riveting effect. Stone’s voluptuous emotional shadings make us believe every stage of Ginger’s ever-shifting character, whether it be the scam artist with a criminal knowledge to rival any man’s, the codependent lover, the keyed-up addict, or the materialistic housewife itching to get out of her lavish prison at any cost, even if it means offing her husband/jailor with the help of his equally infatuated best friend. Stone never sands down Ginger’s rough edges and her strident, exceptionally physical blow-ups in the film’s final act conjure an intricate and unabating intensity that some critics like to pretend is the exclusive provenance of men in Scorsese’s movies; they’re wrong, and Stone’s superb and rightfully iconic performance is the enduring proof.” — Matthew Eng
The 10 Best Female Film Performances in Martin Scorsese Films
(Source: TribecaFilm.com)
“Every time I stop to think about it, I’m really amazed. I think I’ve had an extraordinary life. And lots of times, I can hardly believe it’s me.”
Jennifer Jones, one of the most beguiling and unforgettable stars of Hollywood’s golden age, was born on this day in 1919. 💗
“Even when her characters stand at life-altering crossroads, Emma Thompson always radiates the cool confidence of a certified genius who possesses an unshakable belief in herself and her gifts. We may sometimes doubt the sustainability of the women she plays, but we never doubt Thompson’s ability to imbue their experiences with humor, grace, and profundity. Late Night’s Katherine Newbury, a venerated comedian facing the loss of the talk show that is her lifeblood, is a role tailor-made for the sharp-witted comedic gifts that Thompson is seldom invited to utilize in her latter-day career, save for the occasional awards show presentation. Her sardonic one-liners consistently kill, but Thompson also knows that a withering, well-timed look or a purposeful pause can speak equal volumes. Yet what really distinguishes Thompson’s performance is the prickly, supercilious air that enshrouds Katherine, a byproduct of the actress’ welcome disinterest in making the character palatable or easy to root for; Thompson is too honest an interpreter to sand down the off-putting edges of this deeply flawed woman or simply heroize her last stand against the turning tides of network television. That we root for Katherine nevertheless is a natural inevitability when casting Thompson, who guarantees that Katherine’s moments of pathos, vindication, and victory will be earned and balanced out by the plausible, warts-and-all multidimensionality that is this sublime artist’s stock-in-trade.
Late Night is very much Thompson’s show, but it’s also a reminder that screenwriter and costar Mindy Kaling shines brightest when writing to her strengths, one of which is endowing often naïve, sometimes corny, and permanently genuine underdogs with worth and vitality on the page and screen. As Molly, the tokenized and exceedingly green new addition to Katherine’s all-male writers’ room, Kaling delights by leaning in to the character’s earnestness with the unabashed exuberance of a comedian who is accustomed to, say, looking like a fool or extending an awkward moment a beat or two past the normal threshold of comfort. It would be easy to play a character this painfully sincere with winking, in-on-the-joke irony—in other words, to emphasize the lie of one’s own performance. Kaling excels by doing the opposite, committing so hard to Molly’s verbal and physical faux pas that we are not only amused by the character’s wide-eyed gaucheness but duly convinced of it. Yet Kaling also knows that sweetness need never be confused for simplicity, and she emerges as a terrific proponent for this would-be heroine, giving Molly the cleverness and dignity to make us believe she could lift the dinosaur that is Katherine’s show out of a creative rut. By film’s end, Molly has proven that her ideas, smarts, and “lack of boundaries” are imperative, and her creator has persuaded us that her performative wit and pluck are qualities which the floundering American comedy should continue to harness. Kaling’s performance, like Thompson’s, suggests the tougher, more pointed, less polite satire Late Night might have been, but watching this unexpected yet inspired pair play off one another is never less than a spikily satisfying diversion.” — Matthew Eng
The 12 Best Female Film Performances of Early 2019
(Source: TribecaFilm.com)
“I loved acting, which was never about money, the fame. It was about a search for meaning.”
Happy 87th birthday to the legendary Kim Novak, a wondrous actress who was capable of both deep emotion and hypnotic mystery and remains enshrined in film history forevermore!
“In the films of her husband and ongoing collaborator Jia Zhangke, Zhao Tao has burrowed into each of her central roles with the prowess of a performer willing to discard any and all traces of herself in the name of her characters. She is that phenomenal being: an actor entirely without vanity. Her performances exist where Jia’s work exists—at the intersection of life and art, a place where the differences between reality and fiction cease to matter. In Ash Is Purest White, Zhao applies her extraordinary, unselfish talent to the transmogrifying arc of Qiao, a gangster’s moll forced to build her life anew after making the ultimate sacrifice for her inamorato. As she did in her previous film with Jia, Mountains May Depart, the actress ages decades across this personal epic, relying not so much on conspicuous cosmetic transformation or surface-bound tics to signal maturation but her unadorned face, which can express anything and everything; here, it manages to contain and communicate a lifetime of anguish and lasting passion. By stripping her style down to the wordless, elemental basics of screen acting, Zhao makes certain that the clarity of Qiao’s emotions and her durable connection to the audience are never diminished. In doing so, she continues to occupy her rightful place as the heart—and breath—of Jia’s lifelike cinema.” — Matthew Eng
The 12 Best Female Film Performances of Early 2019
(Source: TribecaFilm.com)