Take Three: Season 1 Wrap

Craig here with a quick pre-Xmas wrap-up of season #1 of Take Three. If you have a very short memory, that'd be the Sunday Film Experience series which looked at three notable performances from a supporting or character actor's work. 

The Big Cs: Considine, Cartwright, Cheadle

Last week’s actor Paddy Considine was the last Take Three for a spell (it's seasonal shenanigans, then everything Oscar here at The Film Experience). We began all the way back in May with Veronica Cartwright. All 29 Take Threes have been a pleasure to write. I've often found new admiration for the actors featured. It's fascinating what a spot of research and a few rewatches can do: who knew that I’d come to realise how much of a Peter Lorre fan I was had I not written about a trio of his perfs.

I veered from the strict definition of what constitutes a character actor/actress whilst featuring Don Cheadle, Kim Basinger, Steve Buscemi and Miranda Richardson, but the division these days is often blurry. With actors who alternate between lead and support,  “the rule” was always, where possible, to write about supporting work. On this note, I always saw James Franco as a solid support actor, so I cheekily wedged him in before the likely Oscar nomination and the eventual leading man career.

Coolidge, Washington, Ritter

I was overjoyed to read the comments on Jennifer Coolidge  and discover others excited by her comedic allure. My love of a trio of choice ‘genre gals’, Radha Mitchell, Melissa George and Rosamund Pike, was more controversial but those contemporary character actresses have seen their unfair share of derision, hence the Take Three love. Amanda Plummer, Kerry Washington and Emily Watson were easy choices since their work has been consistently bold and interesting. Another sterling trio – Laurence Fishburne, Paul Schneider and Harry Dean Stanton – made my job a weekly delight.

I'm keen to look at more classic Hollywood actors next year but we covered the always-wonderful Thelma Ritter and sturdy-as-steel Sterling Hayden. Alan Arkin was a choice to bridge the character acting generation. On more contemporary choices like Anna Faris and David Warner I spent more time actually watching clips on YouTube than I did watching the films in their entirety. (Faris in The House Bunny – although it wasn't an actual "take" – and Warner in The Man with Two Brains are two not-so-guilty pleasures.)

Foster, Huston & Hayden

My personal favorite Takes? It  was so much fun to research and write about Dianne Wiest, Deborah Kara Unger, Terence Stamp, Grace Jones,  Ben Foster and Anjelica Huston, (who I enjoyed so much that I included an Anjelica Addendum over at my own blog, Dark Eye Socket).

Take Three will return in February with a new batch of beloved faces, less heralded players and surprise curveballs. Thanks for your ongoing participation with this series. The positive, constructive, curious and interesting comments from Nathaniel's loyal readership has kept this series going.

Lined up as possible candidates next season: Carol Kane, Grace Zabriskie, Emily Mortimer, Charles S. Dutton, Julie Walters and Gloria Grahame. Plus ??? Do please offer suggestions for Take Three  in the comments.
*

By: Unknown On 10.00

Continue Reading

Take Three: Paddy Considine

Craig here with the last in the current series of Take Three. Today: Paddy Considine

Take One: Dead-end England, twice

"Phil" in My Summer...

Colin Firth, Daniel Craig, Colin Farrell, Clive Owen. And so on. When I think of an actor who encapsulates exactly what is crucial, surprising and truly versatile about British male acting right now, none of the above quite pass muster, for me. Paddy Considine, on the other hand, hits the mark. His two roles for director Pawel Pawlikowski – kindly arcade manager Alfie in Last Resort (2001) and Jesus freak Phil in My Summer of Love (2004) – couldn’t be any different from one another, yet both cover all the above attributes. Watch the two films back to back and tell me Considine shouldn’t be up for every great role an actor of his range and calibre could be suggested for right now. Then ask me why he doesn’t have a shelf full of awards already. We can then all lobby hard for the gongs to be shovelled Paddy’s way more often.

Considine put the mental into fundamentalist in Summer where he plays an ex-con turned Christian zealot converting Yorkshire with a cross on a hilltop. Phil’s internal rage fires up in Considine’s eyes in every one of his scenes, pre-empting his true conversion, his relapse, later in the film.

Considine in Last Resort

In Resort he's all heart and a breath of fresh air, amiably easing the desperate isolation felt by Russian asylum seeker Dina Korzun and her son. (The look on Considine's face when he comes home to them with a takeaway is perfection.) Alfie’s sacrifices – his beating of Korzun’s “pimp”, his early hours assistance in their escape, his stolid, ongoing protection – were some of the most altruistic, selfless acts a character has committed in a film this last decade. Considine was electric in both films  – in small and grand ways. Both films, two contemporary takes on dead-end England, form a pair of genuinely indispensable gems.

"Mike" in Cinderella Man

Take Two: Working hard for Uncle Sam

Considine's name in a film's opening titles guarantees my immediate interest. Two US-set films that he added some strong support to, but which on the surface could have felt like paycheck gigs were were Cinderella Man (2005) and In America (2002). Cinderella Man was of course the Russell Crowe show, but tucked away lower on the cast list Paddy popped in for a few minor scenes, adding a chunk of flat-capped rakish charm as Crowe’s New Jersey friend and co-worker Mike Wilson. The East Staffordshire-raised Considine fit into Depression-era America well, and mastered the NJ accent to go with it. His scenes with Crowe are heartfelt and are demonstrative of the essentiality of the  character actors in propelling a film's drama forward.

In In America he has a more substantial part, as cash-strapped Irish immigrant family man and struggling actor Johnny Sullivan. Samantha Morton and Djimon Hounsou snagged the Oscar nods, but the Academy missed out on honouring his shrewd and thoughtful turn. The film took on extra emotional heft whenever Considine was solo on screen, whether sadly scouring the NY streets for acting work or staring manfully across the city. Only an actor who’s worked hard on his way up could make such moments plausibly memorable. Both stateside trips were integral roles that he owned from the periphery. Any film historian glancing back at Considine’s career may see both films, perhaps rightly, as serviceable CV stepping stones that helped gain him his respected position today.

Take Three: Avenging Angel of the North

Director Shane Meadows and Considine go way back. They met on a performing arts course at Staffordshire's Burton College and have successfully, but intermittently, worked together ever since. Outside of the two Pawlikowskis, Considine’s appearances in three Meadows films offer up his most invigorating performances so far. He had a small role in 1999’s A Room for Romeo Brass and was the first half of Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee in 2009, but between the two was his gruff, electrifying turn as Richard in Dead Man’s Shoes (2004), a Nottingham-based revenge thriller in the mould of Death Wish; Kill Bill on a council estate. He plays a troubled soul easily turned to wretched violence by the abuse doled out to his younger brother. (The exact plot details of which I’ll keep mum about, for fear of spoilers.) He’s a Travis Bickle up North – a terminating force in a trench coat and gas mask. Think Charles Bronson playing the disgruntled miner in My Bloody Valentine.

Close to the edge: Paddy wears Dead Man's Shoes

This is the kind of role usually relegated to a shadowy bit player, the killer loitering in the background of a shot in a horror flick, but Considine brings him front and centre; he’s the (anti)hero and the devil, depending on how you see him. Watch the way he laughingly bares teeth through a kind of half-smile; at any minute this will sour into a scary sneer. Meadows' camera focuses in on his face, catches it slowly twisting into despair as the film barrels onward. The actor is especially formidable in the acid-trip party-gone-wrong scene. He’s fascinating to watch... and frighteningly good.

Three more key films for the taking:  24 Hour Party People (2002), The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1980 (2009)

By: Unknown On 11.49

Continue Reading

Take Three: Emily Watson

Craig here with Take Three. Today: Emily Watson

Take One: Upstairs 0 - Downstairs 1

The Academy often doubles up with their supporting ladies – i.e. Weaver and Cusack for Working Girl, Farmiga and Kendrick for Up in the Air, and so on. It was true also for 2001’s Gosford Park's Helen Mirren and Maggie Smith. I always thought a third should’ve been added. Watson delivered five-star service and, for me, the film’s best performance by a country (house) mile. She played Elsie, the knowing, spirited maid that doomed homeowner Sir William (Michael Gambon) liked to see doing plenty of overtime.

Among the film's interviewing mini-plots, Elsie’s narrative was an intriguing red herring, a side dish. But then Gosford Park wasn’t really about the murder as much as it was about class. Watson had plenty.

Watson in Gosford Park

Altman’s film was packed wall-to-wall with high-level thesping and hidden somewhere in the pack was Watson effortlessly showing everybody up. Mirren was great, Smith very good, but Watson's was the most likeable, instinctive and vibrant turn. In Gosford Park Watson proves adept at making familiar type seem fresh and altogether vital. She’s always believable on screen. Mirren’s emotional resolution was Gosford Park’s sad closer, but Watson sent the film off on a more optimistic note.

Take Two: Staring death in the face

We were all was vicariously looking out for Watson’s character Reba McClane in Red Dragon (2002). Given the circumstances, somebody needed to. Reba was the blind co-worker dubiously romanced by heavily-tattooed serial killer Francis Dolarhyde (Ralph Fiennes). Falling for the mentally-suspect mother’s boy was a mistake, sure, but appearances can be deceptive and Reba didn’t have the foresight. Their shared outsiderdom brought them together  but with one major difference: he was madder than a box of frogs, she wasn’t; he went around watching other people’s home videos, gluing folk to wheelchairs then setting them on fire and eating paintings, she didn’t.

Watson in Red Dragon

Watson was spot on in the role offering no concession to cliché, no unnecessary dwelling on the “disability” aspect, no life-affirming monologues. Instead she provides  solid, amiable character acting. Her final moments, wondering aloud to Edward Norton whether she “drew a freak”, are brief but minutely heartbreaking. Watson turned a shopworn character, twice mislabelled a victim, into a full-bodied person, coloring her in with nuanced detail. Reba wasn’t just a pitiable blind girl. She was refreshingly knowing, slightly cynical and  believably vulnerable in ways we don’t normally see.

Take Three: Hard times, clean hands

Grandiose, revisionist westerns made with lyrical verve, riper than thou character names and terse dialogue aren’t ten a penny these days, so it's best to relish them when they roll around. Ace Aussie oddity The Proposition (2005) was one of my films of 2006; Watson made my best actress list. Martha Stanley, the homely, nervy wife to Ray Winstone’s Captain was quietly electrifying. Here was a woman ill-adjusted to frontier lief, stuck in the (out)back of beyond in a godforsaken 1800s town built on violence. This delicate English flower wilted in the heat of the Australian desert. Emily's Martha gradually hardens to all that death and dust, but never accepts it. She’s one of writer Nick Cave’s best creations: like a doomed heroine in one of his murder ballads, but fleshed out and allowed to cautiously flourish.

Watson in The Proposition

Even though Martha was on the periphery of all the manly action, Hillcoat’s camera is still attentive to her. Through Watson’s beautifully underplayed performance we are granted access to her inner thoughts. When she overhears of her husband’s betrayal (concerning the flogging of a man believed to have raped and murdered her only friend), we not only witness her utter disbelief in cutaway, but the scene itself ends on her exhausted yet defiant stride out of her isolated house. Her blue-brown dress is at elegant odds to the expansive, harsh desert terrain she heads towards.

Watson in the bath

Watson's performance is a set of emotive actions finely woven together. Watch the way she inspects her water-withered hands in the bath as she talks of her grief, the way her deathly dream virtually obliterates her own waking perception of events, how her brittle defiance turns to resigned revulsion during the flogging scene and, in the brutal climax, her frozen terror. The reality of how hard a slog life was for Martha is etched all over Emily's face.

Three more key films for the taking:  Breaking the Waves (1995), Hilary & Jackie (1998), Punchdrunk Love (2002)

By: Unknown On 10.00

Continue Reading

Take Three: Terence Stamp

Craig here with Take Three. Today: Terence Stamp

Terence Stamp photographed by Terence Donovan, 1967

Take One: A family of Stamp collectors

Announced only as "The Stranger", Stamp waltzed into the home and lives of Teorema’s (Theorem/1968) wealthy Italian family like a bolt from the blue: in turn he sexed them all up good and proper, irrespective of gender, or even order, then left them reeling and the audience flummoxed. Everyone – on screen and off – was seduced by this perplexing guest. He left us all gagging for more. It was that naughty old Pier Paolo Pasolini’s fault. He dashed off his own personal spectator theory with the zestiest, most carefree and open abandon. Stamp’s stranger, most folk presume, is a Christ figure, a sexy Jesus substitute in the shape of a ‘60s heartthrob. The controversy of the film was aroused by this contentious quirk more than the frank and playful sexuality on display. PPP knew how to push buttons and he detonated a social-religious-cinematic bomb with his casting of Stamp in such a role.

On Stamp duty: Terence in Teorema

Teorema is a remarkable film – and Stamp is remarkable in it. He barely opens his mouth and still manages to bedazzle everyone and anyone in his sight line; he binds them all with the spell of his eyes and his crotch. (Seriously, Teorema must be the only film in which there’s a crotch shot every five minutes that isn’t a porno.) Each family member in turn glares at Stamp’s trouser lump prior to being whipped into a frothy frenzy and succumbing to his silently sexy ways. (He even attentively listens to post-sex confessions.) They are seduced, relinquished of their former burdens and transform in their own ways - they explode from their bourgeois closets. Yup, he bonks the family so much, and is so good at it, that each one forgets who they were: promiscuity, artistic endeavour, feverish catatonia and the immediate rejection of clothing are the by-products of his studly sexings. In fact, he bonks the family maid (Laura Betti) so much that she levitates. Now that’s liberation. As far as strange, Christly, wraith-like enigmas go, Terence Stamp’s not too shabby.

Stamp: sex god and foot rest (those are his own feet)

Take Two: Everyone look busy - Zod's coming!

Could you all please kneel...

Although Stamp cropped up as insolent insurrectionist General Zod in Richard Donner’s original Superman, it wasn’t until Superman II (1980) that he got to properly chow down on the scenery... before incinerating it with his special red-laser-eye effects. Zod’s gradual rise to unfathomable evil worked a treat for Stamp second time around. He looked miserably miffed stood on trial - and lorded over by a fat and fright-wigged Marlon Brando - as some ever-revolving space-aged hula-hoop kept his fury at bay. He looked downright pissed off squashed wafer thin inside a giant, flat, crystal rhombus, wedged between Sarah Douglas and Jack O’Halloran as Ursa and Non. (Maybe he was so pissed off because they together looked like a failed experimental theatre troupe flung into space.) You can imagine how unimaginably livid he must have been once he set foot on earth, ready to make Superman’s life a super nightmare. Well, he was more smug than angry: check Zod out, walking on water simply because he could. On top of that, he could finger a fake president at ten paces. The guy's got skills. 

For the love of Zod, at least look at what you're reducing to smithereens!

Stamp’s Zod was second-to-none - quite literally. As the head of cinema’s most loved evil alien triptych he led from the front. Indeed, he liked to stand in front of massive, well-placed billboards and frown in close-up as often as possible, before flying headlong into fleeing extras – that’s a sign of real villainous brass. You can keep your small-screen bald teen Lex Luthor and the lazy Kevin Spacey retread. Give me a Godlike Zod - someone who plays it weird with a beard. Terence stamped the role, his role, with a singularly daft yet unmatchable class. Rumour has it that Zod is to be the main baddie in Zack Snyder’s upcoming reboot. I hope that someone clever presses redial and gets Stamp back on board: he's the only actor who can pull off neatly-trimmed facial hair and a jump-suit and still be scary. On top of that he mastered the three vital prerequisites for comic-book villainy: wig work, wire work and superhuman fireworks.

You can all get up now, he's gone.

Take Three: The Lady is a Stamp

“What are you telling me? This is an ABBA turd?”

Why Stamp was hesitant to take on the role of fifty-something transsexual Bernadette Basinger in Stephan Elliot’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), when he could deliver choice, juicy nuggets of dialogue like the above, is a mystery. It was a bold, atypical choice that I’m glad he said yes to. There were many other lines that sounded drily exquisite either rolled, or spat, out of Stamp’s mouth. Many were repeatable, some relatable, all were quotable – whether you’re an adventurous queen on a silver-stiletto-topped bus leaving a billowing molten fabric trail in its wake or not. Stamp was Priscilla’s conductress extraordinaire.

Transvision Stamp: three lady lizards on tour are thee

When I first watched Priscilla (I’ve thrice returned to it – all largely Stamp-induced viewings) the initial thing that struck me about his performance was how ladylike, how refined, he was. I mean this in the right way. A familiar, iconic actor known more often than not for playing dashing, virile swaggerers, Stamp had all the poise and decorum of an experienced woman having already lived two lifetimes only halfway through just the one. Throughout the film’s duration the congenial allure of the character never waned or faltered. It was incisive acting; he gave a very clever performance. And funny. It was in how Bernadette tilted her head, how she sat down, the choice of both age-correct and -incorrect clothing - and the way she wore them on stage and off; and it was chiefly in the staunch determination perceptible in her droll, weary voice when she was on verge of jacking it all in. Thank god for Bob and Alice Springs. But the unladylike moments of combative scuffle, with single-minded dunderheads down under, tickled just as much: “Now listen here you mullet. Why don’t you just light your tampon and blow your box apart, because it’s the only bang you’re ever gonna get sweetheart!” Charming. Ten-nil to Bernadette.

Three more key films for the taking:  The Collector (1965), Alien Nation (1988), The Limey (1999)

By: Unknown On 15.00

Continue Reading

Take Three: Melissa George

Craig here with Take Three. Today: Melissa George

Take One: This is the Girl

She was indeed the girl. But which girl? Camilla Rhodes? Just another nameless blond wannabe actress lip-syncing for her life? A slinky id to further lead Betty down Hollywood’s hellish rabbit hole - or take Diane for a five-dollar fool? She embodied what Betty/Diane always wanted; she represented what killed Betty/Diane. Of course she was Melissa George making the fake fifties pretty by miming her way through Linda Scott’s ‘I’ve Told Every Little Star’. The camera catches her pouts, puckers and pretend act up close and personal. She's the girl in a glossy 10x8; a haunting headshot in your face. One thing’s for sure: we’ll never know what, why or indeed who Camilla was. That’s the big unanswered anomaly of David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001). 

But it was that kiss that did it. A while back I briefly mentioned the screen bitchery of it all, but the nails dug in further than that. However amazing Laura Haring (the recipient of the kiss) and Naomi Watts (the recipient of the tease) were as co-leads, George defined Mulholland Dr.’s raunchy raison d'être. You can lead a girl to Hollywood, but you can’t make her a star, the film painfully posited. Someone like Camilla always gets there first. She embodied the poisonous allure of envy in one lipstick smear; that scorching make-up mark was the hurtful hot spot out of which revenge was born. George’s Camilla was the key player in Betty’s downfall. We should hate her for this, but something about her face, her pouty glance a split second after that kiss, inspires fascination. She’s pure wickedness. She was definitely the girl.

It ended with a kiss: Melissa George kills with a kiss in Mulholland Dr.

Take Two: George of the genre jungle

There’s much to be said for a stint of hard work. I’d never bemoan an actor their adulation just for being an overnight sensation, but the hard grafters, those willing to take ongoing employment to remain on the radar, often deserve extra kudos in my book. George has never been one to sniff at a hearty genre role. After the mini Mulholland break she took on a spate of roles, mostly horrors and thrillers, which many an actress in her shoes may have dispatched to their out tray with much haste. But the following quintet of genre titles from the '00s mid-section contained some of George's best work: The Amityville Horror (2005), Derailed (2005), Turistas/Paradise Lost (2006), wΔz and 30 Days of Night (both 2007).

George does genre: ambushing Amityville (left); 30 days of fright (right)

One could say the above flicks are as derivative as they come, and maybe they'd be right, but isn’t that partly the name of the genre game? Many of today’s established acting favourites started with a trek down generic lane. George is paying her dues and adding much characterful determination to these work-a-day projects (and has often been the best thing about them). She was good as the worrisome wife with a demonically-possessed husband in Amityville; and as Clive Owen’s cuckolded Mrs. in Derailed. Admittedly the dreadlocked hair she sported in Turistas was a mistake, but her spirited turn wasn’t. In wΔz she was the only cast member who looked like she knew what she was doing, and walked off with her own, and indeed everyone else’s, acting honours. And her forthright, no-nonsense approach to all things vampiric in 30 Days of Night impressed me greatly. These "guilty" pleasures, added to her sterling turn in Take Three’s film below, make her the number one genre gal of choice.

Take Three: Three-point turn

Arguably George gave her best performance to date as the mysterious, bedraggled and refreshingly unlikely main protagonist trapped aboard an abandoned phantom ship with six other bewildered souls in 2009’s time-warping mystery-thriller Triangle. (Imagine Donnie Darko committing a few Timecrimes whilst adrift on Hitchcock’s Lifeboat.) George's character, young single mum Jess, is desperate to get back on dry land - and within a stable time zone - to take care of her son – or to maybe clear up a few secret matters that she, and writer-director Christopher Smith, have been carefully withholding from us. George was better in this solid scary offering than many of her direct contemporaries have been in their last few higher-profile "legit" films. But there's little awards buzz around George as yet, though there should be. She's that good - and in wonderfully unexpected ways.

Jess' fear and exhaustion, which gradually and convincingly turns to forceful resourcefulness, is vividly conveyed by George through some highly tricky, elaborate scenes. Like the narrative, she never falters for a moment; her performance keeps the film afloat, and makes its often daft yet exciting twisty turns work well. In the film's final stretch she’s better than ever, and displays immense skill and depth during several rug-pull moments. It's these scenes that should convince anyone just how good she truly is. It’s a committed, bolshy turn from an exciting actress. I'd gladly watch George navigate her way through Triangle on a loop. Over and over and over...

Mel G shoots first, asks questions later (literally) in Triangle

By: Unknown On 13.51

Continue Reading

Take Three: Harry Dean Stanton

Craig here with this week's Take Three. Today: Harry Dean Stanton

Take One: One of the Lynch mob

Stanton has been on regular staff rotation for four David Lynch flicks. (Four-and-a-half, if you include TV oddity Hotel Room.) From 1990 to 2006 Stanton provided characteristic screen goodness for a quartet of Lynch's most enduring works. Chronologically he’s contributed to: Wild at Heart (1990), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), The Straight Story (1999) and Inland Empire (2006). He was great as, respectively: disorderly PI Johnnie Farragut tailing lovers-on-the-lam Sailor & Lula; Carl Rodd, irritable and dishevelled proprietor of the Fat Trout trailer park; frowzy front porch frowner Lyle Straight, estranged brother to lawnmower man Alvin; and Freddie Howard, dilapidated Hollywood has-been, both on-set and off-guard.

“I’ve already gone places” HDS laments his lot in Fire Walk with Me

They are sad-sack characters, all. Apart from Wild at Heart – his most substantial role for Lynch – he has little more than one big scene in each film. But he makes his singular moments count. His Lynch mob doesn’t vary wildly, and they’re all vividly ragged extensions of the HDS persona. I could watch him yap like a hyena in bed, as he does in Wild at Heart, and be eternally happy; I could listen to his dog anecdote from Inland Empire ten times and still manage a smirk; I could watch, and watch again, his eyes well up with tears out of trance-like regret over either the arrival of an old crone (Fire Walk with Me) or the arrival of an estranged brother (The Straight Story) and be more and more moved each time. What is it with Stanton’s Lynch figments that swerve the fatty showmanship of so much character acting and zero in on the uncanny emotion of life in minute ways? Every auteur could do with five minutes of Stanton’s blue collar characterisation in every one their best films.

"Oh Marietta Honey." HDS laments his lot some more in Wild at Heart

Take Two: x2 from 1979

Stanton’s been making films consistently for the last 54 years; it’s rare one goes by in which he’s not adding fine support somewhere or other. (Apart from 2008, Stanton has made films every year since his uncredited debut in Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man in 1956.) The early ‘70s saw him hit his stride, and 1979 saw him find his very own career groove. The two, key films he made in ‘79 were: Alien and Wise Blood. (He also made The Rose that year, and very good he was in it too.)

That's not Jonesy the cat! HDS is about to experience some Alien intervention

His Brett in Ridley Scott’s Alien was perhaps one of his most fondly recalled roles.




He’s the most relaxed and nonplussed of Nostromo’s crew (the polar opposite of Ripley). He showed more concern about retrieving Jonesy the cat than taking all this Xenomorph business seriously  - but he paid for that blithe unconcern, ultimately. His expression when the alien’s shadow glides over his face is similar to that when Grace Zabriskie’s mad voodoo woman offs him in Wild at Heart: it’s resigned, depleted of struggle. It's pure HDS. It’s the face he wears throughout Alien: that of an old-school astronaut whose days were likely numbered long before the facehugger burst onto the screen.

Left: Harry Dean as Asa in Wise Blood.

As Asa Hawkes, the “blind” street preacher who dragged his daughter around for religious sermons and ground-level grovelling (“Jesus is a FACT!”), he hid his sly expressions behind a pair of glasses in Wise Blood. This being John Huston’s adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s novel, high Godly fervour and maniacal, hothouse dramatics were the order of the day: Stanton gave us gritty variants of both in the film. His duplicitous, phony God-botherer didn’t convince the crowd ultimately, but the acting bowled a strike. In films as unique and as bewilderingly uncharted as this, it’s a good sign when Stanton comes along.

Take Three: "I knew these people... these two people..."

When Stanton wanders back to civilisation at the start of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984) we scrutinise his ragged face for signs of life, as much as his brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) does. Who is this silent, scrawny, no-name nomad in shopworn attire and with an expression even a dog would hesitate to wear on its most desperate days?

HDS gives the windswept look a go in Paris, Texas

He was Travis Henderson. The hangdog look had been eroded not only by four years' worth of desert winds but also a lifetime’s wash of salty, regretful tears. A bad past had left him unanchored and adrift. He and Jane (Nastassja Kinski) had a life together - of trailer parks and dead-end jobs - but that’s all backstory. It’s in the way Travis attempts to reunite his young son Hunter with Jane, and, more significantly, the journey father and son take to get there, that Wenders’ film blossoms into the unforgettable and quietly majestic road movie that's staked a beloved claim on many cinephile's hearts.

Stanton was settling in to a fruitful phase in his career; Paris, Texas was his juiciest role. It was the kind of lead a tried and tested character actor of his calibre could only make his own. And he did. If Travis defines HDS’ career, then it’s a sound definition. It’s a performance that demands to be championed time and again through ongoing celebration. It’s a subtle, instinctive turn too: Stanton clearly knows Travis. So he never over-eggs his peculiarities. He doesn’t initially appear to undergo a vast transition over the film’s 147 mins, but by the time he’s in his car in the parking lot at the end, he’s a different man. His persona, for so long in freefall, has been altered for the better. Everything else is unquestionable class. And those zany walks, across the road from Hunter when he picks him up from school? That's acting.

Three more key films for the taking: The Hostage (1967), Repo Man (1984), The Green Mile (1999)

By: Unknown On 13.00

Continue Reading

Take Three: Kim Basinger

Craig here with Take Three. Today: Kim Basinger

Bay•sing•er

I think it’s time again to give Kim Basinger (remember, it's Bay-singer, not Bah-sinjahr, folks) some major credit. The lady's due. She’s gone from supporting eighties female through a love-hate (but Oscar-nabbing) nineties to her current career bloom as a character actress of some depth. Ms Basinger has always quietly impressed me. Here are three reasons why.

Take One: She loooovves purple.

Basinger’s career was birthed alongside the eighties. Feisty ladies in adventurous circumstances were her trade back then. Although through either slip-ups or fate she was often eclipsed by her male co-stars. In Never Say Never Again, The Man Who Loved Women, The Natural, Fool for Love, 9½ Weeks, No Mercy, Blind Date and Nadine she played second-fiddle female to, respectively, Connery, Reynolds, Redford, Shepard, Rourke, Gere, Willis and Bridges. These regulars of male-patterned eighties flicks manned the screen up to prematurely musty proportions, almost disguising Basinger’s versatile verbal retorts, bright mode of re-routing the drama her way and a daffy manner with a throwaway comic moment. She selflessly supported the fellas, but shone when it mattered.

With Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), she was the lone notable lady on set, and her Vicki Vale was more than mere distraction. Having to both glam-up the air around Michael Keaton’s dour-mouthed dark knight and de-glam the air around Nicholson’s garishly impish Joker was task enough. I've not read or heard of much credit being directed Basinger’s way for Batman, but in retrospect she’s to be cheered as a forceful female presence who cajoled Jack the Joker out of his randy advances. Outside of Michelle Pfeiffer’s ace feline-fatale in its first sequel, Basinger is still the only interesting lady in the Bat universe.

"I've just got to know. Are we going to try to love each other?"

Despite the thin characterization -- this comic strip gal is essentially Bruce Wayne’s Lois Lane – it’s a joy to look back at Batman’s first significant onscreen reincarnation and see a lively actress add a sultry playfulness to such a male-centric film.

Take Two: Not very hush-hush about Basinger’s Bracken

If Basinger blended the femme with the fun during the ‘80s, it’s no wonder Curtis Hanson cast her as Veronica Lake-a-like Hollywood hooker Lynn Bracken in 1997’s brooding Hollywood retro-noir L.A. Confidential. (There’s even a photo of Lake on Bracken’s wall and a clip of This Gun for Hire playing on screen.) It was a critical and commercial hit for Basinger after an early ‘90s career dip which saw four more Razzie noms to add to her collection. Her Supporting Actress Oscar win in early 1998, furrowed a few brows and boggled a few minds, as many thought hers was a slight and un-Oscarish role. (In my opinion the line-up that year wasn’t stellar – her only real competition being Julianne Moore for Boogie Nights.)

Basinger’s goods are initially concealed. Her onscreen skill not immediately apparent from the off. When she sways across the screen in a 1950s gown that's both expensive-looking and homely, it's hard to differentiate her from the flowing drapes in her Hollywood home. But it's in her interactions with her co-stars – often lengthy scenes filled with smoothly-delivered dialogue – where she earns every inch of that Oscar. She subtly, but seismically, cuts Pearce, Crowe and co. down to size with little but a withering turn of phrase, topped off with an elegant tilt of her head, before seducing them with implied tension creeping inbetween her spiky lines of dialogue.

She plays Lynn as a soft but sly soul, knowing but as fresh as the day is long. She’s poised and collected in every scene and well-versed in Hollywood style, but it’s all (intentionally) practised. If Basinger studied Lake’s work in preparation, it doesn’t show as onscreen imitation. And, if the research does peek through at times, it doesn’t matter. This actually enhances the performance. That’s who Lynn was – self-styled, only barely visible under the veneer of someone else, someone famous. As she herself said: “I'm really a brunette, but the rest is me.” And, indeed, that’s all the news that’s fit to print.

Take Three: Hot Damn Mama!

In the otherwise lacklustre arthouse awards bait The Burning Plain (2009) Basinger sizzles. She lifts the film out of its self-important stupor, breaking through its prestigiously wrapped exterior whenever she's on screen. As soon as her character Gina enters in her pick-up, the film comes alive. Gina is a New Mexico housewife and mother who secrets herself away to engage in an affair in a trailer with a local family man (Joaquim de Almeida). This mother comes with mastectomy scars and she's finally giving vent to what seems like years of surpressed passion considering her dull, loveless marriage. It's one of the most sorrowful and likeable performances I saw in 2009.

The aching confusion Basinger conveys in one particular scene – where, her secret having been realised by her daughter, she has to be at once the admonishing mother and the shocked, rumbled adulteress, all whilst pinned to her kitchen sink by her child’s accusing gaze – is nothing less than astonishing.

That nervous, twitchy panic that Basinger often falls back on in lesser films – all deflected glances and lips-a-tremble – is skillful here, chimed in pure accordance with Gina’s situation. The hot shame of a mother caught in flagrante delicto has rarely been so maturely rendered on screen; never has Basinger looked so helpless, so in need of sympathetic intervention. Another actress, given to more histrionic outbursts, would've stopped the scene dead and danced over its corpse, but Basinger hits the mark with each awkward gesture. She was excellent elsewhere in the film, but in this one small scene Basinger gave us her character’s entire life. Where was Oscar nom number two?

Three more key films for the taking: My Stepmother Is An Alien (1988), 8 Mile (2002), While She Was Out (2009)

By: Unknown On 09.07

Continue Reading

Take Three: David Warner

Craig here with Take Three.

Today: David Warner

Heads, brains and faces, skewed or distorted, are the prominent concerns with today’s Take Three supporting actor David Warner: the lopping off, the removal of, and the obsessively creepy staring, respectively, are what it's all about. In The Omen, From Beyond the Grave and The Man with Two Brains Warner thrilled us in a delightful and devious manner. He's an ideal actor for Halloween season.


Take One: I'm starting with the Man in the Mirror

Double-dealing, in particular, was the name of the game in ‘The Gate Crasher’, the first segment of Kevin Connor’s 1973 Amicus portmanteau film From Beyond the Grave. Warner was Edward Charlton, who surely lived to regret the snagging of an ancient, dubiously prescient mirror from shopkeeper Peter Cushing at a cut-price cost. Warner plays Charlton as cocky and belligerent one minute, and fearfully seized up the next. He germanely conveys the icky terror of Charlton’s unique-antique situation. His slight and consistent facial twitches betraying his discomfort. You can practically feel the (assumed) beads of sweat snaking down his back whenever the séance-induced, Ripper-like spirit appears on "the other side". He’s the best filmic embodiment of why séances can be bad luck for all concerned.

Warner ensures that Charlton’s inherent nature is suspect; he takes duplicity and makes it his bitch. But really he was ultimately an unlucky chancer who simply picked the wrong shopkeep to fleece. All that’s left dangling at the end – the question suspiciously hanging over the film’s cycle of reflection-based entrapment – is: who did Charlton con next? Reproductions, replacements...ah, they can cost dearly.

The moral of the story: don’t be a selfish git. Or, to put it another way: never, ever mess with a Yorkshire-accented Peter Cushing.

Take Two:  Dial 666 for Warner




In 1971 Warner gave one of his best and most involving early performances as local “simpleton” Henry Niles in Straw Dogs. He was nailing scenes a year earlier than that, too, as Joshua in The Ballad of Cable Hogue. Warner was, to put it simply, one of the exemplary supporting/character actors of the 1970s. Seeing his name appear in a film’s opening titles was like a stamp denoting quality assurance. One of his most memorable ‘70s parts was as the unfortunate victim of Beelzebub’s window-based rage. It wasn’t just Gregory Peck and Lee Remick who had to contend with that little devil Damien in The Omen (1976), Warner had his fair share of supernatural strife, too, and ended up getting it in the neck. Quite literally.

As photographer Keith Jennings, he got embroiled with the powerful-in-more-ways-than-one family and attempted to help them ward off the most evil of all evils. Bad idea. In one of the film’s greatest moments (and one of cinema’s most rewatchable movie deaths) Warner drops his guard and loses his head. His ‘pane of glass to the neck’ death was one of The Omen’s many inventive ways to off the horned one’s opposition. It was less a coup de grâce and more a coup de double-glaze.

Yet before that infamous beheading, Warner added both gritty class and a funky zeal to the film in his earlier scenes, holding his own alongside more established thespian stalwarts like Peck and Remick, or being nearly mauled by a hound of death. It was a purely functional role, sure, but the kind that suits an actor of Warner’s range and ragged style. He played it with panache, and in the process became a part of The Omen’s heritage. I think the devil killed Warner off halfway through because he was tired of being upstaged by him.

Take Three: The Doctor with Two Brains and a gorilla

In Carl Reiner’s The Man with Two Brains (1983) he's the doolally, single-minded scientist Dr. Alfred Necessiter. He’s daft, bordering on insane, but Warner plays him with an immovably staunch, straight face. Though Warner is third wheel to the brilliant comic compatibility of Steve Martin and Kathleen Turner, he's no less an integral part of the film’s crazy comedy.

In his castle apartment complex with paper-thin walls he carries out his life’s work: a revolutionary non-surgical technique for removing human brains and storing them in jars. (Well, it makes sense to him.) When Martin’s lovestruck Dr. Hfuhruhurr ("H-f-u-h-r-u-h-u-r-r: Hfuhruhuuuurrrrr"), falls for one of Dr. Necessiter’s (talking) brain specimens, Anne Uumellmahaye, things get barmier: gorilla transplants and the borrowing of battering rams are only the start. The Man With Two Brains is essentially old b-movie horror given an ‘80s clown-faced makeover.

Warner’s a tweedy, geeky foil for Steve Martin’s madcap mentality and he knows exactly how to overplay mannerisms and underplay lines for maximum comic effect. His very best moment is when he claps his hands and blows a raspberry in a demonstration of what kind of being his “research” might lead to. I love him for lines like this: “Nonsense. If the murder of twelve innocent people can help save one human life, it will have been worth it.” And I love him in general for doing this movie.

Three more key films for the taking: Straw Dogs (1971), Time After Time (1977), Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)

By: Unknown On 15.00

Continue Reading

Take Three: Anna Faris

Craig here with Take Three.

Today: Anna Faris

Take One: Even cowgirls get the blues

I’m always up for a spot of Brokeback love. I know there's been plenty of attention around these parts in the past but let’s divert the love that-a-way. Let’s ride sidesaddle and gallop slightly away from Jake ‘n’ Heath. And Michelle 'n' Anne. And Ang. Hey, look, it’s Anna Faris as Lashawn Malone in Brokeback Mountain (2005).

I’d just seen Faris in Just Friends when barely a week later (January 2006) Brokeback was released here in the UK. The complete contrast between Faris in the two films caught me off guard. She pops up ninety-minutes in during a couples’ C&W night-out scene with Jake Gyllenhaal & Anne Hathaway.  She “talks a blue streak” without much pause for breath – and in doing so fills the gap where a homoerotic attraction is becoming increasingly apparent between Jack Twist and Lashawn’s husband Randall (David Harbour). Jack and Lashawn dance; she continues to chatter. A new scene comes and goes with Lashawn entering and chattering her way gaily through it.

It’s a minuscule part but one that actively enhances the film. And Faris, with a touch of cowgirl glamour creates a world for Lashawn that is surely real and would be utterly believable if we were to follow her story instead of Lureen’s and Alma’s. The other Brokeback wives have their moments of realisation and breakdown; Lashawn, being a passing, peripheral character, doesn’t get hers (Randall is another “confused” cowpoke). But, thanks to the key manner in which Faris makes palpable the glimmers of anxiety in Lashawn’s gasbagging, we know she’ll suffer as Lureen and Alma do.

Take Two: Coppola load of this casting coup

There are some things I liked about Lost in Translation (2003), and some things I didn’t. Anna Faris is the crux of my love-hate relationship with the film. I like her. I dislike the reason she’s (ostensibly) there. Faris is vibrant, lively and gleefully adorable as Kelly, the flaky blond actress who tender, sensitive Charlotte bumps into in the Tokyo hotel lobby. Her small segment – or I should say zesty interruption – perked me up just as I was beginning to get fed up with ScarJo’s misery. Faris shows her personality here even when she’s meant to be showing... Cameron Diaz’s, wasn’t it?

It takes a sharp skill to play a vapid, questionably-talented and intentionally annoying bimbo like Kelly, and do it well, but Faris possesses it; the role wouldn’t have been half as memorable or crucial without her.

Lost in Translation has its staunch defenders as well as its starchy detractors. I'm on the fence. But isn't Coppola fille displaying her snarky, precious side when she hires one – fairly unknown at the time – comedy actress to allegedly impersonate another – far more famous – one, just to imply something underhanded about the latter through the (admittedly spot-on) talents of the former? Is this indicative of the peculiarities of the largely hidden squabbles buried within the Hollywood community? It taints the film for me, but no matter. Faris knocks her scenes out of the hotel car park. She got to stretch her craft and add a different slant to her filmography whilst being wonderfully, enthusiastically familiar. Were we meant to share in Charlotte's lofty derision of Kelly? I know I didn't. I was too busy enjoying Faris.

Take Three: One order of Anna – to stay

For the third take, I meant to feature Faris' Monroe routine over a steaming manhole in The House Bunny. But after accidentally catching Waiting... (2006) for the third time, I couldn’t resist scribbling a few words on her role as Serena, ex-girlfriend to co-lead Ryan Reynolds, who works, like all the characters do, at the brilliantly named theme restaurant Shenaniganz.

Faris’ role is clearly supporting, but she breezes on screen with the bright confidence of a lead. Her pin-sharp and perfectly delivered put-down of Ryan Reynolds in one of Waiting...’s best scenes is a joy to watch and watch again. (Watch it many times: Faris’ timing is exquisite.) Faris and Reynolds (and scriptwriter Rob McKittrick) create an entertaining scene – a crude, rude re-take on the sparring couples slapstick banter - that's full of choice insults and great Faris facial expressions. Without much fuss the scene humorously reconfigures the tired old Battle of the Sexes thing into something daft and genuinely funny, just in miniature, with the couple wearing garish work uniforms emblazoned with their names.

Faris gets the upper hand. She keeps it, works it, and walks off with it by the time she’s verbally downsized Reynolds to a portion small fries. It’s a relishable, smile-inducing comic performance. I'm so on team Faris.

In a relatively short span of time, the actress has contributed so much to a commendable amount of movies that the three takes above (and three mentions below) don’t do her true justice. Judy Holliday, Lucille Ball, Goldie Hawn, Jennifer Coolidge... I’d be happy to include Faris in any future line-up of comedy gal greats. (Rumour has it that she'll be in Ghostbusters III and a remake of Private Benjamin. Good times.)


Three more key films for the taking: May (2000), Smiley Face (2006), The House Bunny (2007).

By: Unknown On 12.00

Continue Reading