Category Archives: Hollywood

Gorgeous Lady of the Week — Lucy Liu

Lucy Liu has had a pretty long run as one of the sexiest women on the planet. The Chinese-American beauty first burst onto the scene back in the late 90s as the ultra-hot, ultra-nasty Ling Woo on David E. Kelley’s Ally McBeal. Despite deliberately trading on a lot of stereotypes surrounding the cruel yet sensual “dragon lady”, Liu’s character was one of the first Asian females to be featured as a principal character in American television.

From there it was a one-way ticket to the top, as Ms. Liu was immediately tapped for big budget Hollywood features in 2000 like the Jackie Chan-Owen Wilson vehicle Shanghai Noon and, more importantly, the Charlie’s Angels reboot alongside Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore, a huge popular success. She had a key supporting part in the Oscar-winning Chicago in 2002 and then reprised her role as Alex Munday in 2003’s sequel, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle.

2003 also saw her work for auteur Quentin Tarantino on his cult revenge epic Kill Bill (Volume I & II) as samurai sword wielding yakuza boss O-Ren Ishii, the first killer to be crossed off Uma Thurman’s list. Beautiful and lethal, O-Ren’s snowy duel with the Bride is a coup de cinema in a major work that deserves to be revisited. A pale imitation like 2012’s The Man with the Iron Fists, in which she also starred alongside Russell Crowe, shows just how good a movie Kill Bill was in retrospect.

Seeming to get lovelier by the year, Ms. Liu is now an ageless 46 and continues to do important work, returning to television for the critically acclaimed cop drama Southland and the highly entertaining CBS hit series Elementary, where she plays an unconventional Watson to Jonny Lee Miller’s Holmes in New York City. She is also an accomplished visual artist and active in several charities, including as a spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign. Beautiful, accomplished, pioneering and whip-smart: Lucy Liu is the total package and definitely a MFL kind of woman. In fact, why she hasn’t been a Bond girl is beyond us. Better yet, we think she’d make a killer 008. You’re welcome, Eon Productions.

Classic Movie Watch — Patton (1970)

Among the greatest of war movies, 1970’s Patton features a mind-blowingly good performance by George C. Scott as the famously colorful WWII general that serves to catapult this epic far above the standard military biopic. The film is not only remarkable for the vivid on-screen portrait of a gifted but notoriously impolitic and ambitious American general helping to turn the tide of war in the United States’ favor but also for the off-screen context of being made at the height of rampant anti-war sentiment in the US and abroad due to the Vietnam War. You would have expected the film to be a hatchet job on an unrepentant warrior from the gung ho past and to reflect the anti-authoritarian zeitgeist of the time. You would also have expected a war-weary public to reject yet another nostalgic World War II movie released at the end of the 60s. Instead, it’s a straightforward yet nuanced portrayal of a seriously flawed but undoubtedly great military leader that earned popular and critical success from the get go with an unapologetically pro-US message. And through the movie we come to see that a man like Patton, a true lover of war who believed himself reincarnated from Roman Legionnaires and Napoleon’s soldiers, should probably be kept in a glass case that says “Break Open in Time of War”. But we also see that it’s surely good to have old soldiers like George S. Patton handy when the stuff hits the fan.

The famous opening sequence, a stylized and also sanitized version of Patton’s famously profane speech to the Third Army, remains one of the movies’ best “grabbers”, as well as one of the most iconic 6 minutes in the history of cinema. And despite Scott’s misgivings that starting with the speech would overwhelm subsequent scenes, that acts as a preamble and the movie gets better from there. It really starts with Patton’s arrival in North Africa to take command of a green and badly demoralized US II Corps after their mauling by Rommel’s Afrika Korps at Kasserine Pass, quickly whipping them into a cohesive fighting unit ready to take on the seasoned and highly accomplished German troops. By utilizing Rommel’s own tank tactics against him, we see the revitalized Americans fight back via impressive large scale armored tank battles thundering from the oversized 65mm widescreen print.

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Gorgeous Lady of the Week — Jessica Paré

With the iconic 1960s advertising series Mad Men winding down to its final episode, it seems entirely fitting that we pay tribute to one of the loveliest actresses to grace that or any other television series, the stunning Jessica Paré. With her lean and lithe body, huge green eyes gazing out from above high cheekbones and mischievous gap-toothed smile, Ms. Paré is at once a classic beauty and a unique one.

A native of Montreal, Quebec, the 33-year-old ingénue was raised bilingual in French and English and caught the acting bug as a child helping her father, a drama teacher and actor, rehearsing his lines. She quickly found success in Canada with 2000’s satire about beauty and fame, Stardom, opposite Dan Ackroyd. This led to more featured roles in 2001’s adolescent lesbian love story, Lost and Delirious, and her Hollywood debut in 2004 as Josh Hartnett’s jilted fiancé in Wicker Park.

After keeping busy if not quite breaking through in subsequent years with good parts in the TV series Jack and Bobby, the vampire comedy Suck and memorably topless in Hot Tub Time Machine, Jessica made a massive impact when she debuted as Megan Calvet in 2010’s Season 4 of Mad Men. Looking stunning in mod costume, Jessica imbued her fellow French Canadian character with coltish naiveté balanced by observant ambition. In short, Megan Calvet was a revelation and it’s no wonder Don Draper proposed to her after she was so good with his kids in Disneyland despite it shattering the lovely and intelligent market researcher Faye Miller’s heart (played by the lovely and intelligent Cara Buono). And in a case of life seeming to imitate art, or at least art imitating itself, it seemed as if the show ditched January Jones in subsequent seasons almost as completely as Don ditched the former wife, Betty, that she played to such early fame.

With Megan separated from Don in Hollywood and the entire cast of characters facing an uncertain future at the dawn of the 70s, Jessica Paré has done her finest, most emotionally challenging work to date this season. We’re not sure where she’ll pop up next but we’re fairly certain that even bigger things are on the horizon for this brunette beauty. We’ll certainly be watching the final Mad Men episodes with interest and hoping that certain Charles Manson/Sharon Tate-related rumors about her character’s fate are not true. And if we were lucky enough to be Megan’s chosen mate, we’d probably give up New York for the sunny L.A. climate and that beguiling, uncorrected smile. Heck, we might even give up advertising entirely. It’s not that hard with such a sweet incentive.

Classic Movie Watch — To Catch a Thief (1955)

One of Alfred Hitchcock‘s more effervescent cinematic cocktails, 1955’s To Catch a Thief is a must-watch for any cinephile or aspiring bon vivant. A gentleman can learn many lessons from the impossibly stylish Cary Grant as reformed (or is he?) jewelry thief and hero of the French Resistance, John Robie, aka “The Cat”. Grant’s Robie comes under renewed suspsicion when a series of high profile, high value robberies plague the glitterati of the French Riviera. His old war buddies, with whom he escaped from a bombed out prison, soon turn on him for fear of having their paroles revoked, leading Robie to endeavor to find out who the new “Cat” is before the police pin it on him or his old mates do him in to save themselves. Added to the heady mix is the lucious Grace Kelly in her prime as prim but sexy nouveau riche debutante Frances Stevens, determined to share in the excitement of “The Cat’s” criminal exploits and capture the uniquely intriguing Robie for her own pleasure.

Filmed largely on location in Nice, Cannes and Monaco, To Catch a Thief looks as stunning today as it must have when it was released if not more so because the coast and the Principality had not yet been so frantically overdeveloped. The helicopter shots of high speed drives through Mediterranean hills and villages are breathtaking. And the teasing rapport between the ultra-tan, ultra-suave Grant and the golden, precocious Kelly is pure cinema magic. It’s no wonder that Grant, along with James Stewart, was one of Hitchcock’s favorite male leads. They did four remarkably good films together — Suspicion, Notorious, Thief and North by Northwest — and Hitch was always able to coax the dark shadows of Grant’s sometimes glib personality to the fore. For the Master of Suspense, he was willing to reveal his weakness and even his unattractive side and if you know only the smiling playboy caricature of Grant you’ll be in for a treat watching any of those classic collaborations. One of the unquestionable cinema greats, Grant’s body of work for Hitchcock alone would put him near the top of any list of all-time best movie actors.

And as is well documented, Hitchcock was enraptured by Kelly as his ultimate cool blond with hot blood. After making three terrific films for Hitch in quick succession — Dial M for Murder, Rear Window and Thief — Kelly married Prince Ranier in 1956 and retired from movies to be the Princess Consort of Monaco. While the great director quipped that he was “very happy that Grace has found herself such a good part” he was in fact bereft and struggled in vain to find a new version of her in subsequent films. Hence he has Kim Novak with Stewart in Vertigo, Eva Marie Saint with Grant in North by Northwest, Janet Leigh in Psycho and Tippi Hedren in The Birds and Marnie. While all those actresses did admirable work in their own way, especially the very touching and tragic Kim Novak in Vertigo, it’s no doubt that Hitchcock would have preferred Grace Kelly in all of those roles. After watching her take Grant on a white knuckle ride through the hills of Monaco before stopping to picnic and slyly offering him the choice of a leg or a breast, it’s easy to see why. The fact that Princess Grace was killed in a car accident in 1982 at the age of 52 in those very same cliffs just adds a layer of poignancy to the near-perfection of To Catch a Thief.

A little Monday comedy — Bowfinger (1999)

It’s hard to believe that the sly and uproarious Hollywood satire Bowfinger is 15 years old. The Frank Oz directed film from a Steve Martin-penned script tells the tale of a band of show biz hangers-on struggling to make a grade Z sci-fi flick via a highly dubious workaround to the whole lead actors-knowing-they’re-shooting-a-movie thing. It still slays with its dead-on take of what makes LA the company town it is: unkillable dreams of fame, beautiful starlets with “felxible” morals and weirdo movie stars in need of cult control. Best of all, the unlikely comedy dream team of Martin as the titular never-was “producer/director” Bobby Bowfinger and Eddie Murphy, in priceless dual roles as paranoid exhibitionist action star Kit Ramsey and his mega-dorky brother Jiff Jiffrenson (a Steve Martin character name if ever there was one), create gold when they share the screen together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZUU563eAaM

And for laugh-out-loud, funny-as-hell scenes there really aren’t that many as good this one short of primo Mel Brooks:

Oh, for that complex Starbucks order! Definitely worth renting again or even buying the DVD if you haven’t seen it in a while. It’s that good and after all these years, it holds up hysterically well. Welcome to Mindhead and Keep It Together!

Classic Movies We’re Watching — Seven Days in May

When it comes to paranoid film thrillers, the 1960s and 70s were the golden age. And John Frankenheimer’s 1964 classic Seven Days in May was perhaps the grandaddy of them all. Now, you can argue that Frankenheimer’s undisputed masterpiece The Manchurian Candidate, released two years earlier, was actually the prototype for the cinema’s soon-to-be omnipresent conspiracy-minded neurosis. But while Candidate does involve a horrifying plan to bring down the US government, the key difference is that in Seven Days in May that threat is coming from inside the country.

Burt Lancaster as General James Mattoon Scott & Kirk Douglas as Colonel Martin “Jiggs” Casey

Spoilers below the fold…

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Remembering Philip Seymour Hoffman with laughter

It’s easy to forget between the sadness of his untimely passing and the accolades for his “heavier” work that Philip Seymour Hoffman was damn funny in comedic roles. In particular, his scenes in 1998’s The Big Lebowski stand out as masterful comic miniatures. He doesn’t have a lot of screen time in the movie but he wrings maximum hilarity out of his uptight sycophant character, Brandt. And his interactions with Jeff Bridges are pretty much priceless.

Notice how many quirky, funny tics and mannerisms he packs into that 2-minute scene. We’ll put another scene where he introduces The Dude to Bunny Lebowski poolside below the fold because it is definitely NSFW. Continue reading →

RIP Philip Seymour Hoffman, 1967 – 2014

We’ve lost one of our finest American actors. The brilliant and gifted Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead on February 2nd in his West Village apartment of an apparent intravenous drug overdose, most likely heroin. In addition to his many highly praised film roles, Hoffman was an accomplished stage actor and director, winning special acclaim for his lead work in excellent revivals of True West, Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Death of a Salesman. He was also a co-artistic director of the LAByrinth Theater Company in New York City. Part of Paul Thomas Anderson’s informal repertory company, Hoffman appeared in 5 of his 6 films to date, including the title character in last year’s The Master. He also won the Best Actor Oscar for his uncanny portrayal of Truman Capote during the In Cold Blood years in the 2005 film Capote. He was always a standout from his first big breakthrough as the no good prep school kid alongside Chris O’Donnell and Pacino in Scent of a Woman; to his irreverent priest matching wits with Meryl Streep in Doubt; to his wonderfully touching work in Tamara Jenkins’ underrated The Savages alongside Laura Linney. In fact, his standout parts are too numerous to do them justice here so I hope you’ll explore his filmography to see what a wonderful actor he was (see below for links) even if it hurts to think that we’ll see no more from him. You’ll probably also be surprised at how prolific he was.

He leaves behind his wife Mimi O’Donnell and their son and two daughters. Just an ineffably sad day for those who admired his work and his creative spirit. We are all truly poorer for his premature passing because you never really knew what delightful thing he was going to do next.

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s full Wikipedia bio is here.

His IMDB page is here.

Gorgeous lady of the week — Gemma Arterton

After bursting onto the scene as Strawberry Fields, the sexy spy destined to die drowned in oil in 2008’s underrated Bond entry Quantum of Solace, the dark and lovely Gemma Arterton found herself in great demand in Hollywood. And no wonder: with her curvy figure and expressive deep brown eyes, Gemma is one of the sexiest British imports since the Astin Martin Vanquish.

Trained at RADA, the talented chestnut-haired ingenue has appeared at the Globe in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and on BBC TV in the title role of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. But her quick wit and stunning good looks have also made her a hot property in high concept Hollywood blockbusters such as Prince of Persia, Clash of the Titans and Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters.

With several smaller scale projects either shooting or in post production, it should be interesting to see if the lovely 27-year-old Ms. Arterton can find material that will help evolve into a consummate actress as opposed to simply a super sexy super heroine. Then again, whatever roles she chooses, she’s probably always going to be super sexy. The girl can’t help it.

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