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The dawning of the equal rights movement for women is detailed in the movie Suffragette.
While well-received critically, this film is a box-office flop, despite the fact the Meryl Streep and Helena Bonham-Carter are in it.
With nice period detail, the film is about the dawn of the feminist movement. Sadly, it opened mid-December among stiff competition.
In Disney's Mary Poppins, the suffragette movement was made to look like something for dilettante, upper middle-class housewives, but this film tells a quite different story. Distinctly not the Disney version.
This is, in every way, a modern day women's picture, expertly made and I heartily recommend it to my readers ~~ men and women alike.
Ricki and the Flash is a movie with more than one pedigree It's directed by Jonathan Demme, Oscar winner for Silence of the Lambs and stars three-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep and Oscar winner (for A Fish Called Wand) Mr Kevin Kline. Somehow, that didn't translate into box-office success for this movie.
Meryl plays Ricki, an over-the-hill rock star now that she's hit sixty. Streep's performance shows off her range as she flexes her comedic and dramatic abilities with equal aplomb.
The ever-sexy Kevin Kline is a great match as her ex-husband, Meryl's daughter is portrayed by her real-life one, Mamie Gummer. Rick Springfield is surprisingly strong as Meryl's younger boyfriend.
The movie's refreshingly lightweight for those in the mood for this kind of entertainment. I felt the script was a little weak, frankly, particularly the dialogue. But it's a star vehicle and that's largely what carries it through.
Meryl's character looks as if she is trying vainly to compete with Madonna with her hair and jewelry in this film. But she sure can belt out a rock tune as she previously demonstrated in Postcards from the Edge. Look out, Lady Gaga!
Happy 66th birthday, Meryl Louise Streep, one of our greatest actresses ever!
She has won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in Kramer vs. Kramer, and two Best Actress Awards for Sophie's Choice (1982) and The Iron Lady (2011). She's had numerous other Oscar nominations and so many other stage and screen award nominations and awards.
And guess what? She's a Jersey girl (from Summit)! Luv huh!
She came to Hollywood's attention in The Deer Hunter (1978). Considered, largely, a dramatic actress, she's also been expert at comedy, in She Devil (opposite Roseanne Barr) and the excellent Death Becomes Her for example.
Loved her in The Devil Wore Prada, Iron Lady,A Cry in the Dark ("A Dingo Ate Me Baby!"), The Devil Wore Prada, Mama Mia, August: Osage County, Julie and Julia and so much more! She has never delivered a poor performance; not even in her badly advised The River Wild that tried to posit her as an action hero.
Like older actresses a'la Bette Davis, Meryl has not been afraid to hand in flippantly campy performances as she's aged, along with serious ones.
So, happy birthday, Meryl! I look forward to Suffragette and much more, feeling your best is yet to come!
Because dark tellings of fairy tales have become so "un-Disneyfied" and chic, returned to their dark, Hans Christian Anderson roots on tv and film lately, even today's Disney studio has come over to the "dark side" with films like Maleficent! And now comes Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods, released Christmas day and nominated for an Oscar this year. The Broadway songs are rendered superbly.
Meryl Streep enters by blowing a door down! She's a wicked witch who does a kind of a modified rap number. And she's Oscar nominated... yet again!
There's a cleverness to the lyrics and dialogue, unquestionably, in this intertwining of fairy tales. A touch of camp runs throughout, especially with performances by Streep, Christine Baranski, Tracey Ullman and Johnny Depp as a scary Big Bad Wolf, singing beautifully. (He did the screen version of Sondheims's Sweeny Todd, after all).
Directed by Rob Marshall, who directed the Broadway-based film versions of Nine (loved it) and Chicago (hated it), there is a mid-point where the story line's conceits grow a tad wearisome even if the songs and performances carry things along. Act 2 of the play is seriously compromised, however, in this film version; very Disney-ized... but in the bad way. And by the third act, we feel the film running out of petrol.
Into the Woods won a Golden Globe for Best Comedy or Musical this year as well as an AFI Movie of the Year Award. Definitely worthwhile, and I love that Hollywood is again green-lighting screen adaptions of stage musicals. Check this out and let me know your point of view.
It would seem legendary Broadway composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim became entangled in a thicket of words when The New Yorker claimed to quote him about the Disney version of Into the Woods, the version of Sondheim's musical that company is bringing to the silver screen. (The film will be released Christmas Day and stars personal favorites Meryl Streep, Johnny Depp, Christine Baranski and Tracey Ullman among others.)
Addressing a group of high school drama teachers, Sondheim was quoted by The New Yorker as saying: "You will find in the movie that Rapunzel does not get killed, and the prince does not sleep with the [Baker's Wife]." He also told his audience that the song, "Any Moment" was cut and that Disney brass warned him, "'we don't want Rapunzel to die,' so we replotted it. I
won't tell you what happens, but we wrote a new song to cover it."
News of this in the press instantly caused an uproar among musical-theater lovers!
Today, Broadway World reported that Sondheim quickly gave a rebuttal with this press statement:
An article in The New Yorker misreporting my "Master Class"
conversation about censorship in our schools with seventeen teachers
from the Academy for Teachers a couple of weeks ago has created some
false impressions about my collaboration with the Disney Studio on the
film version of "Into the Woods." The fact is that James (Lapine, who
wrote both the show and the movie) and I worked out every change from
stage to screen with the producers and with Rob Marshall, the director.
Despite what the New Yorker article may convey, the collaboration was
genuinely collaborative and always productive.
When the conversation with the teachers occurred, I had not yet seen a
full rough cut of the movie. Coincidentally, I saw it immediately after
leaving the meeting and, having now seen it a couple of times, I can
happily report that it is not only a faithful adaptation of the show, it
is a first-rate movie.
And for those who care, as the teachers did, the Prince's dalliance is still in the movie, and so is "Any Moment."
Now what do we make of this whole brouhaha? Seems like a bit of back-peddling out of the dark forest if you ask me. I mean, this is otherwise some serious misquoting on the part of The New Yorker. Did panicked Disney execs turn Grimm and put Sondheim up to this? Did he suddenly remember he's getting a percentage of the profits? What gives?
Into the Woods was shot at Shepperton Studios in the UK and is directed by Rob Marshall who also directed Chicago (which I was disappointed in for a list of reasons) and Nine (which I rather enjoyed).We shall see if this is a "first-rate movie" come Christmas, and whether Everything's Coming Up Roses once we're deep Into the Woods.
Actor Russell Brand commented, upon the death of Maggie Thatcher: "I do recall that even to a child her demeanour and every discernible
action seemed to be to the detriment of our national spirit and
identity. Her refusal to stand against apartheid, her civil war against
the unions, her aggression towards our neighbours in Ireland and a
taxation system that was devised in the dark ages, the bombing of a
retreating ship -- it's just not British."
"Conservative hostility towards the BBC was a constant theme in the Thatcher era. With her death there has been a fresh spike," read an editorial in The Guardian.
The BBC itself explains that BBC Radio "is planning to play Ding Dong the Witch is Dead, the Wizard of Oz
track being bought by anti-Thatcher protesters in the wake of the former
prime minister's death, on its chart show on Sunday.
"However,
in what is thought to be a first for the BBC chart show, the
corporation is considering having a Newsbeat reporter explain why a song
from the 30s is charting to Radio 1's target audience of 16- to
24-year-olds – none of whom will remember Margaret Thatcher's controversial premiership.
"The Official Charts Company said on
Thursday morning that Ding Dong the Witch is Dead was on course to reach
number four, up from 10 the previous day."
The rise of "Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead" on the UK chart began as a Facebook campaign. "Make Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead number one the week Thatcher dies," was launched on Monday. It asked people to download the song originally sung in the 1939 MGM movie, The Wizard of Oz.
Glenda Jackson, a star in her own right who left an Oscar-winning, major movie-star career to become the Labor MP in England's House of Commons, attacked the late Ms Thatcher as causing “heinous social, economic and spiritual damage” and further commented “The first Prime Minister of female gender, OK. But a woman? Not on my terms.” So much for only speaking good of the dead. (As another Oscar-winning actress, Bette Davis, once reputedly said of Joan Crawford: "My mother told me to only say good things of the dead. Joan Crawford's dead. Good." Ding dong!) By the way, I wonder if Meryl Streep -- who portrayed Prime Minister Thatcher in her Oscar-winning Iron Lady performance -- will ultimately be reached for comment.
The song has not charted on US radio, incidentally.
Below, a fabulous club remix by Jack2Monet, in case you care to join our friends in the UK in their celebration!
Nobody does drag like Meryl Streep. Notice the arch similarity of Meryl as Maggie and Milton Berle as Cleopatra.
Ah, Meryl and Berle! Lovely together, no? Meryl, seen here in drag as Prime Minister, and Uncle Miltie all dolled up as a queen: Hollywood royalty!
Fairly fresh from her star turn as Julia Child in Julie & Julia, the mercurial Meryl now transforms herself into Margaret Thatcher for the biopic, The Iron Lady. (Not a spin-off of Iron Man.) And I have to admit: I love this movie!
Ms Streep is one of today's movie stars who consistently astonishes in one role after another. Singing ABBA; playing a bitter, old nun; portraying Julia Child; being Doris Day (It's Complicated), Meryl took the knowing camp turn a great screen actress (a'la Bette Davis or Joan Crawford) does once she reaches a certain age. This probably began with Devil Wears Prada.
Reunited with her Mama Mia director, Phyllidia Lloyd, the two are up to great things. Politics put aside, The Iron Lady is presented as a star-driven women's picture. Meryl's Margaret struggles to get to the top, sacrificing attention to family and denying her feelings in order to get there, all the while wearing increasingly grander frocks in the trademark, tailored Thatcher style, and in the style of the classic women's picture as well.
Framed by showing Thatcher in her dotage, the film uses the conventional biopic flashback technique to show her rise from grocer's daughter to Prime Minister of England, warts and all. It's Thatcher's megalomania and grandiosity, her dogmatic pedanticalness, as much as her failing policies, that bring her to her downfall. Weepy moments and slyly funny ones abound en route.
You can despise Thatcher but completely enjoy The Iron Lady, oddly. Certainly, as an old-Hollywood-styled star vehicle, Ms Streep is in almost every frame and she carries this film magnificently on her shoulders in one of the very best performances of her career.
You might get a glimpse of what I mean from this trailer:
