Where You’ve Seen Them Before: Martin Scorsese’s “Silence”

Posted on January 7, 2017 at 3:20 pm

Martin Scorsese worked for thirty years to bring Shusaku Endo’s book Silence to the screen. It is finally in wide release this week, with an outstanding cast including:

Andrew Garfield is best known as “Spider-Man,” but he also co-starred in “Social Network” as Eduardo Saverin and most recently starred in “99 Homes” and “Hacksaw Ridge.”

Adam Driver, who lost 30 pounds for this part, appeared recently in both a prestige art-house film (a poet in Jim Jarmusch’s “Paterson”) and the biggest of the big-budget studio films (Kylo Ren in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”). A former Marine and a Juilliard graduate, he had a starring role in Lena Dunham’s “Girls” and sang with Justin Timberlake and his “Force Awakens” co-star Oscar Isaac in the Coen Brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis.”

Tadanobu Asano may be familiar to American audiences from the “Thor” films or “47 Ronin.”

Liam Neeson is one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, an Oscar winner for “Schindler’s List,” and an action star in the “Taken” films. This week he stars in both major nationwide releases, with a motion capture/voice performance in “A Monster Calls.” You can see him in “Love Actually,” “Leap of Faith,” “The Dark Knight Rises,” “Kinsey,” and “Rob Roy,” and you can hear him as the voice of Aslan in the “Narnia” films.

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HBO: Bright Lights with Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds

Posted on January 5, 2017 at 8:00 am

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1EnDqhFU6I

In tribute to Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, HBO has moved the premiere date of the documentary about them, a festival favorite, and it premieres on Saturday, January 7, 2016 at 8 pm Eastern.

Be sure to check out “Wishful Drinking,” Fisher’s one-woman show about her life, also on HBO.

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Tribute: Debbie Reynolds

Posted on December 29, 2016 at 9:41 am

This is a very sad time. One day after the death of her daughter, Carrie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds suffered a fatal stroke and now, suddenly, she is gone too.

Debbie Reynolds could do it all. She sang, she danced, she acted, she wrote, she produced. She was up for anything, always game, the ultimate show-must-go-on girl, and if she was not the girl next door, you wished she was.

Reynolds is one of the last of the classic era of movie stars. She has been an essential part of American culture since she was a teenager, starring opposite Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor in the #5 American Film Institute classic “Singin’ In the Rain” and keeping up with them tap for tap and an overturned sofa to boot.

No star ever showed more pure joy in performing. We see Gene Kelly fall for her and we happily join him.

She was best known as the all-American sweetheart with a series of sometimes sugary musicals and romantic comedies like “Tammy” and “The Singing Nun.” Here she is in “The Affairs of Dobie Gillis” with two more of the greatest dancers in movie history, Bobby Van and Bob Fosse.

In that movie, she sang a slow and sweet version of the same song she sang in “Singin’ in the Rain,” “All I Do is Dream of You.”

She co-starred with Frank Sinatra in the very retro “Tender Trap.”

She was a standout in the all-star cast of “How the West Was Won,” and she was perfectly cast in the title role of the brash musical “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” which she said was her favorite role.

I am especially fond of “The Mating Game,” with Tony Randall and Paul Douglas, about a happy-go-lucky farm family that lives on the barter system and the IRS auditor trying to investigate them.

She was a gifted dramatic actress, as we see in “The Catered Affair,” a gritty drama where she plays the daughter of Bette Davis and Ernest Borgnine.

I think one of her best performances is in the neglected gem “Divorce American Style,” a biting satire with Dick Van Dyke, Jason Robards, and Jean Simmons.

She was magnificent in the title role of Albert Brooks’ “Mother.”

She played Debra Messing’s mother on “Will and Grace” and Liberace’s mother in “Behind the Candelabra.” And she had an adorable cameo as herself in another neglected gem, “Connie and Carla.”

In addition to movies, Debbie Reynolds performed in nightclubs, theater, Las Vegas, on television, and had hit records and wrote best-selling books. She provided voices for “Rugrats,” “Kim Possible,” “The Family Guy,” and the title role in the animated “Charlotte’s Web.” She tried for decades to create a museum of Hollywood memorabilia and she was a tireless fund-raiser for good causes.

May her memory be a blessing.

Daily Beast: Best Overlooked Movie Performances

Posted on December 28, 2016 at 1:36 pm

At The Daily Beast, Marlow Stern has an excellent list of the most overlooked movie performances of the year, including Ryan Gosling in “The Nice Guys” (a masterpiece of comic timing and physical grace — great work from everyone in that film), Ralph Fiennes in “A Bigger Splash” (he said he took the role because of the dance scene, and he clearly has a blast with it), and Craig Robinson in “Morris from America.” All worth watching at least twice.

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Tribute: Carrie Fisher

Posted on December 27, 2016 at 3:55 pm

We mourn the loss of Carrie Fisher, who has died of a heart attack at age 60.

Her first two movie roles were in films that have becomes icon of their eras: “Shampoo” and the original “Star Wars,” now known as “A New Hope.” In both, she wore white. Other than that, they had little in common, introducing us to a performer with confidence and range. She has said that George Lucas gave her little direction as she had to watch a green screen that would some day have an image of her planet being destroyed. All he said was, “Look over there.” But, still a teenager, she instantly conveyed the fierce resolve that made Princess Leia a heroine to lift the hearts of boys and girls around the world and across the generations. She even survived one of the worst hairstyles in the history of movies.

She also survived a Hollywood childhood of chaos in the public eye. Her parents, Debbie Reynolds (who also became a movie superstar while still in her teens, when she made “Singin’ in the Rain”) and pop star Eddie Fisher were considered America’s sweethearts, until Fisher left Reynolds for the just-widowed Elizabeth Taylor (who would leave him for then-married Richard Burton). Fisher explored her relationship with her mother and her recovery from drug abuse in Postcards from the Edge, first a novel and then a movie starring Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine, and her relationship with singer Paul Simon, including a brief marriage, in Surrender the Pink.

She was an uncredited script doctor for many films, including “The Empire Strikes Back.”

If the heroine of a romantic comedy (or her sarcastic best friend) has a witty quip, more than likely that was written by Carrie Fisher. She reportedly sharpened up the dialog on “Sister Act,” “The Wedding Singer,” “Lethal Weapon 3,” and “Hook.” Perhaps her most apt role was as the quippy best friend in Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally. Slate has a lovely tribute to that role.

I was lucky enough to see her one-woman show, “Wishful Drinking,” based on her memoir. I loved the story she told about what happened when her mother found out she had dropped LSD. “So, she called Cary Grant,” Fisher said with a dry edge. “As one does.” And no one could bring down the house with one syllable the way she did in describing some of the people on her very complicated family tree. She would assign them their legal relationship and then pause for just a beat to add, “ish.”

Fisher was fearless about her failures and challenges, from her struggles with bi-polar disorder and drugs to personal upheaval. She was a devoted mother to her Billie Lourd, who is following in the family tradition by appearing on the television series “Scream Queens.”

Like fans everywhere, I sighed with happiness to see Han Solo and Leia embrace in “The Force Awakens” last year. And like fans everywhere, I wept to hear that she left us today. The Force was strong with that one. May her memory be a blessing.

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