Posts Tagged ‘Meryl Streep’
November 17, 2009 - 2:16 am
By Steven Zeitchik
“An Education” director Lone Scherfig recently lamented, good-naturedly, that she was tired of producers thinking of her for stereotypically female projects. “Everyone sends me scripts with these sweet stories,” she said. “I’ve done that already. I want to make a movie with chases and explosions. I want to blow things up.”
Scherfig might have a point about typecasting, but she also might consider herself lucky — at least she’s in a category in which women are finally getting their due. This awards season couldn’t be a happier time for female helmers — as many as three (Kathryn Bigelow, Jane Campion and Scherfig) could be nominated for best director. That would equal the total number of women nominated — can this be? — in the 73-year history of the award (Sofia Coppola, Lina Wertmuller and Campion, if you’re playing Trivial Pursuit).
And yet a look at a category specifically designed for women shows a different picture.
In the best actress field, there’s a single Oscar perennial (Meryl Streep, for “Julie & Julia”), some buzzed-about newcomers (Carey Mulligan and Gabourey Sidibe for “An Education” and “Precious,” respectively) and … that’s pretty much it .
July 19, 2009 - 2:00 pm
By Steven Zeitchik
As anyone within 50 feet of us over the past few days knows, the Julia Child impression is a strange and irresistible thing. It's impossible to come out of "Julie & Julia" and not feel a compulsion to try the voice done by Meryl Streep.
We ruminated a sleepless night or three on just who Streep's Child reminded us of, before sitting bolt upright in the middle of the night with the answer: Mrs. Doubtfire! The trill of the O, the toss of the head, the high-pitched and slightly upper-crust lilt —it's as though Robin Williams himself had donned yet one more coat of makeup and came on set looking like Meryl Streep (some compare and contrast fun with these two videos below).
Vocal impersonations aside, the bigger question is of course what happens to Nora Ephron's food fest when Sony releases it as a female-driven counterprogrammer in three weeks.
"Julia" is an unusual hybrid, as marketing material has reminded and a screening confirmed for us—two true stories, two book options, one not terribly deep exploration. There's a chick-flick-y look at a young, slightly insecure woman in New York (Amy Adams) trying to find herself through cooking (with the inspiration of Child's cookbook), cut together with a more serious examination of the roots of both Child's cooking and media celebrity when she lived in France in the middle of the century (an origin story, if you're feeling Comic-Con-ish).
The Child biopic part could have been blown out into something more expansive and the modern stuff with Adams turned into a frame story; that would have put this more in the awards-y biopic realm, but made it a more compelling film. As it is, the attempt at two stories creates one that doesn't entirely work on either count: the chick-flicky stuff seems obvious and the Child part hints at but doesn't go sufficiently deep on enough issues like her between-two-worlds French-American station and the McCarthyist paranoia that affected Child and her diplomat husband (Stanley Tucci).
The hope by Sony is clearly that women come to see it because of Adams' persona and the food themes/money shots, while a specialty filmgoer comes for the Child history.
There's precedent for that model. Box-office dynamics for the another summer comedy, "The Devil Wears Prada," worked in a similar way when it was released three years ago. In that movie, a young woman in New York also feels lost, tries to find herself through a craft/her work and is inspired/haunted by an iconic woman played by Meryl Streep (who also happened to have Stanley Tucci by her side). That pic became a girls-night-out hit while also nabbing a surprising chunk of the specialty and prestige audience.
The evolution of Adams' Julia is not nearly as dramatic or entertaining as the changes made by Anne Hathaway's ingenue, and Streeps' Child is not nearly as enjoyable as her Anna Wintour. But with so many millions watching cooking programs and networks these days, this movie may not really need a devil — just some deviled eggs.
By Steven Zeitchik
Catholics and lapsed Catholics turned out for “The Da Vinci Code,” stayed away from “Henry Poole Is Here” and gave the wholesomeness of a “High School Musical 3″ a <a href="http://www.catholic.org/ae/movies/review.php?id=30223
“>surprising amount of love.
Will the approximately sixty-five million people who comprise one of the country’s largest religious denominations turn out in numbers to drive the Miramax/Scott Rudin production about a priest who may or may not have abused an altar boy into a hit?
On Broadway, of course, it didn’t really matter; the awards and relatively small capacity of a single Times Square theater ensured that the play was a blockbuster by all measures. But for an arthouse movie that goes wide on Christmas Day, the question is more pointed. Certainly John Patrick Shanley’s film version of his own play (he called it tonight “the hardest screenplay he’s ever written”) won’t win prizes from many archdioceses.
But the audience that is rarely marketed to and in many ways lies beyond the grasp of marketing will hold a big key to whether this movie blows up.
“Doubt” — whether you love its performances or find them a little too theatrical, are primally moved to debate its ambiguities or ultimately think that the question of whether Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Father Flynn ‘really did it’ is like discussing angels on the head of a pin, to use a phrase (or all of the above, probably the most accurate answer) — is the kind of movie even the indie world is unfortunately moving away from: one that centers on the small dramas between flawed people.
But even with its refreshing attention to details, words and gestures — and likely plentiful acting nominations — the ultimate financial verdict remains a question.
Other recent plays-to-movies with similar creative goals haven’t always succeeded. “The History Boys” (also a verbally sharp film about potential improprieties between male teacher and student) and “Proof” faltered a bit; it’s bigger entertainments like “Chicago” that have flourished when moving to celluloid.
“Doubt,” which we caught tonight at its L.A. premiere at the Academy has, like fall movies and presidential candidates, the expected mix of pros and cons — virtues (soaring, sermonic dialogue; period and locational texture) question marks (a too-quick switch from factual ambiguity to moral ambiguity and then back again; Streep’s oddly Bostonish accent) and outright surprises (Amy Adams, feeling startlingly believable and ridiculously Oscar-worthy as the ingenue nun). What it lacks at the moment is a key indicator of its commercial prospects.
It’s notable that “Doubt” is the second movie this year, after Laurent Cantet’s “The Class,” that after an opening scene outside a school moves nearly all the action onto school grounds. Like “The Class,” it takes less for granted about the best way to educate preadolescents than you might think.
The fact that it’s a movie about the question of modernizing religion versus using religion as a bulwark against modernity will help it strike many more (organ?) chords than a movie about pedagogy, and many other stage-to-screen attempts, for that matter. Hopefully it’s enough to quell the you-know-what.
By Steven Zeitchik
We’re not too proud to admit we were amongthe initial skeptics of “Mamma Mia.” What struck us about the clip we saw back in the spring was how what played as camp on stage seems like it plays straight here, which would miss the point, and fun, of the show.
But maybe it doesn’t play that way after all. THR’s Ray Bennett is more giddy than a hot dog at a Swedish barbecueabout the new Meryl Streep-filled bigscreen rendition of the Abba musical.
“The most fun to be had at the movies this or any other recent summer…the family will be having a rollicking good time and dancing in the aisles…Meryl Streep in one of her smartest and most entertaining performances ever…It’s no stretch to think of her performance in Oscar terms…. there’s not an audience anywhere that won’t be smiling.” (Try putting all that to an Abba tune.)
Bennett’s a superior critic, and he makes a very persuasive case, but we’ll also admit we’re still not entirely convinced, at least based on the little we saw. The show was such great fun because it had this good-vibes singalong feel to it. But the musicals that tend to work onscreen these days are spectacles, things people can behold, not participate in (think “Chicago” or “Moulin Rouge”).
Of course it’s likely the movie will be a hit.
And then the offers will start pouring in to Roxette.
By Steven Zeitchik
First things first from the Meryl Streep gala (the best moment captured brilliantly here by S.T. VanAirsdale at Defamer) at Lincoln Center Monday night: The new “Mama Mia” drew some seriously mixed reactions.
Maybe it’s just the footage that organizers sneak-peeked — Streep belting out a 70’s kitsch lyric as she spins on the seaside mountaintop of a Greek island, interposed with long shots of the scenic coast and tight shots of a wordless, fidgety Pierce Brosnan — but what comes off as good camp in the live show translates here as the unintentional, Rocky Horror kind. A few in the audience started tittering until they realized it was supposed to play straight.
Afterward, some praised Streep’s singing, but Universal and director Phyllida Lloyd, the British opera director making her feature debut, may be turning skyward in the hope of a box-office recitative that’s more weighty than light comedy.
But enough about studio adaptations of decade-old theater adaptations of thirty-year-old Swedish pop ditties like “Wish I was dum dum diddle, your darling fiddle.” The “Mamma Mia” clip reminded once again — not that we, or you, needed it — of just how much range Streep has, and how much of it comes unexpectedly from her voice. Whether she’s singing for the pre-War working-class in “Ironweed,” speaking in the sing-song condescension of Miranda Priestley in “The Devil Wears Prada” or scratching out a perfectly loopy Minnesota accent in “The Prairie Home Companion,” Streep can adjust the vocal nuance so well everything else just seems to follow.
Then she came out and proved the point, projecting a kind of Broadway presence that managed to hold the attention of the thousands in Avery Fisher Hall like she was giving a dining-room toast. “I was really dreading this, for so many reasons. The dress. The speech. Seating the relatives with the stars.” Comic pause. “So many minefields.”
Lately, Streep has played either nurturing and conscience-stricken (”Prime,” “Lions for Lambs”) or commandeering and bluff (”Manchurian Candidate,” “Prada”). As we sat there inhaling all that talent, we wondered if she might, in an upcoming stint as Julia Child, bring back some of comedy and flair she showed in her previous roles. Or maybe just play a rabbi.
And then on cue, she dismissed our fears like Miranda Priestley dismisses assistants. “The famous people will get gifts from me tomorrow,” she told the audience. “I’m just giving you…the nod.”
