Birthday Invite to Matthew Eng

First, to Matthew Eng, a longtime reader of this website whose birthday is today, June 12. I have never actually met Matthew, but a little birdy (initials V.S.) told me that he has spent enough time on this site that he'd get a kick out of an e-mail or a tweet or a blogpost saying "Hello!" and "Happy Birthday!" and "Long Live All Those Actresses You and I Both Love!"

But I've decided to go Matthew and his birthday benefactor one better, because with the Northwestern school year finally wrapping up, and with my long year of waiting for tenure and for my book to come out (expect more soon about that!), it's clearly past time to get serious about reviving this website and blog.  I loved hearing that there are readers out there who still enjoy this site and its initial centerpiece of long-form reviews, because I haven't written one in quite a while.  Getting other, bigger, higher-stakes writing projects off my plate means getting to re-embrace lots of smaller and/or more personal ones, and I can't tell you how delighted I am to throw off the dust covers and get Nick's Flick Picks properly going again.  Hopefully all the plumbing still works and the electricity's still on.

So Matthew, for being such a devoted patron of NFP, and for having such a good friend who's such a fantastic person and wonderful student (which only assures me of how fantastic and wonderful you surely are, too), what would you like to hear about first?  You, like me, live with the indignity of having no Best Actress nominee who shares a birthday with you, or else I was going to profile one of her performances.  My research shows me that your birthday-mates include famous diarist Anne Frank, and I've never seen the Oscar-winning documentary Anne Frank Remembered or the classic Diary of Anne Frank, which netted so many Academy nods and a win for Shelley Winters, one of the very few Supporting Actress victors I have left to screen. Should I write one of those up for you?  Are those too depressing for a birthday celebration?

Would you prefer a review of a movie starring gorgeous Aussie stalwart Frances O'Connor, perhaps Patricia Rozema's oddball adaptation of Jane Austen's magnificent Mansfield Park? Something starring saucy, multi-talented African-American pioneer Nina Mae McKinney, such as her dazzling musical debut in Hallelujah! or the amazing pre-Code potboiler Safe in Hell? Maybe you'd prefer a review of one of last year's most terrific movies, Magic Mike, starring another Matthew, as well as June 12 birthday girl Cody Horn? That would also be a prompt to post my long-delayed Top Ten of 2012.  Maybe you'd enjoy a review of one of the only three movies that ever featured the legendary stage actress Uta Hagen, who originated the role of Martha in Broadway's original Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? If you're in the market for Uta, the movies I know I can get my hands on are the dark thriller The Boys from Brazil or the celebrated Jeremy Irons-Glenn Close potboiler Reversal of Fortune.

Or maybe you'd be more excited for a movie that shares your birthday, rather than an actor or actress who did so? A bit more digging reveals that The Witches of Eastwick, which I've never seen, and Predator, which I have, both opened on June 12, 1987. Six years earlier, Raiders of the Lost Ark bowed on June 12, 1981, as did the O.G. original Clash of the Titans. I've already reviewed the modern lesbian classic High Art (twice, in fact, because I love it), but not the other actressy arthouse venture that opened on June 12, 1998: the eccentric Balzac adaptation Cousin Bette, where Jessica Lange tries out period comedy, and everything ends with Elisabeth Shue and Bob Hoskins smearing each other's naked bodies with chocolate sauce. For real.

Or maybe the most obviously birthday-related linkage———and I'm not sure how you feel about this—is that you came into the world on the same day that Rosemary's Baby did. Don't worry, I'm sure that doesn't mean anything.

So, Matthew: pick one of the movies listed above, and I'll be delighted to review it: not just in honor of you, but as a gesture of solidarity with all my patient readers that I really am baaaack. Choose wisely (use the Force!), leave your answer in the Comments field, and have a fantastic day today!

P.S. One extra gift: June 12 is also the birthday of the hostess of the obviously best infomercial there ever was.  I give you Jennilee Harrison and the Infinite Dress. You're welcome. (Go easy on her, because as she may have mentioned, she doesn't have a mirror.)

Best Actress Birthday Party, Week 7

After last week, thank God this one's so easy... especially since real work has forced me to postpone the Suzman, Dern, and Stanley pieces for a few days. Janet famously sympathizes with the plight of the worker, Laura is totally enlightened, and Kim is already dead, so if they don't mind the delay, why should I? Further easing the load is a clerical error I discovered that had Maggie McNamara originally listed in February, though she actually belongs in June. I'm not that excited about Three Coins in the Fountain anyway, so hurrah for that! Meanwhile:

Born February 12–February 18:
Click here for the full list of entries

Feb 13: Stockard Channing (68)
New Review: ???
Stockard's Best Work: Obviously, as the one-in-a-dozen Broadway actress permitted to reprise her stage triumph in Six Degrees of Separation, where she's funny, sharp, deluded, believably frayed, and patently to the borough born.
I've Also Seen: Strutting her way through Grease, making a bigger impression on everyone, seemingly, than she did on me; as Meryl's upper-middle-class best friend who's around for a lot of ups and downs in Heartburn; as an abused wife with an eagle-eye for Adam's apples in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar; only half-trying and still more intense than the movie can really accommodate as the suicide in The First Wives Club; as the occasional ally of her husband, the President of the United States, on The West Wing, or maybe I just saw a disproportionate number of episodes where she was peeved at him; working through a complex script that asks and gets a lot from her but hasn't fully articulated itself in The Business of Strangers (my review); one of many Cadillac performers who surely thought Le Divorce would be at least a quarter as good as the amazing novel; and disappointingly glum in Woody Allen's Anything Else, although that movie would make anyone glum.

Best Actress Birthday Party, Week 6

This is gonna be tough, people...



Born February 5–February 11:
Click here for the full list of entries

Feb 5: Laura Linney (48)
New Review: The Laramie Project (2002)
Laura's Best Work: At the unambiguous center of a sprawling story and ensemble in Jindabyne, negotiating an entire cutlery set of conflicts, internal and external, tacit and confessed.
I've Also Seen: Cornering the market on Wholesome But Concerned in Lorenzo's Oil; still apple-cheeked as the president's mistress in Dave; the freshest-faced of all urban arrivées in Tales of the City; dressed down by Joe Mantegna as his son's schoolteacher in the unbeatable Searching for Bobby Fischer; in danger of seeming uninteresting in Primal Fear; still shaking some stiffness out of her limbs in The Truman Show (my review); a revelation, note-perfect in dramatic and comedic registers we hadn't seen yet, in the glorious You Can Count on Me (my review), though the Julliard polish comes back a bit in The House of Mirth; winning an Emmy for one of her few performances I just didn't buy, as a hard-to-love mother in Wild Iris; surely asking her agent to dream bigger after The Mothman Prophecies; swanning onto Frasier like a Platonic distillation of its demographic, and winning another Emmy; listing sharply the other way as a gal without mercy in Mystic River, without much time to pull that off; sweet and sad in Love, Actually; well cast but along for a very bumpy second-feature ride in P.S.; having hit a stride where she's interesting even in under-written roles, like the wife in Kinsey; better than that, even, in The Squid and the Whale, though perhaps assigned too many of these recovery missions; taking the check but not without showing us a character in The Exorcism of Emily Rose (my review); gutsy, funny, and functional in a smallish role in Breach; gloriously disheveled, tugged between impulses toward honesty and knee-jerk prevarication, in The Savages. Nothing since, but she's mostly been doing Broadway work and cable TV.
Where To Go Next: Among the features I haven't seen, I'm most compelled by the undisguised oddity of Mark Ruffalo's debut feature Sympathy for Delicious, though before I track that down, I'll want to put in the time on Linney's Emmy-winning performance in the TV miniseries John Adams and her subsequent awards-magnet role in Showtime's The Big C.

Feb 8: Edith Evans (124; died 1976)
New Review: The Importance of Being Earnest (1952)
Edith's Best Work: Her nomination for The Whisperers (performance review) is easily one of the category's high-water marks for its decade, and a haunting rendering of poverty, madness, and old-age loneliness.
I've Also Seen: Skeptical of Hepburn's resolve in The Nun's Story; fruity and rather generously nominated in Tom Jones; crusty and even more generously nominated in The Chalk Garden.
Where To Go Next: Almost certainly Look Back in Anger, which got boxed out this time by domestic you-said-you'd-wait-for-me issues that I was happy to honor. The Queen of Spades could also be a great, atmospheric divertissement, especially having just checked out Dickinson's and Walbrook's collaboration on Gaslight.

Feb 8: Lana Turner (91; died 1995)
New Review: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)
Lana's Best Work: The Hunter/Sirk remake of Imitation of Life makes equally good use of her gifts and her limitations as an actress. Being unforgettable can be just as rewarding as being brilliant, I should think.
I've Also Seen: Practically a distillation of whiteness as one of the three leads in Ziegfeld Girl, as a sympathetic girl who makes all the wrong choices; surprisingly appealing in the 1941 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with its thematically resonant switcheroo of making Turner the society lady and Ingrid Bergman the randy girl; doing her best but perhaps a bit over-awed by unworthy material and schematic revelations in Peyton Place.
Where To Go Next: Unquestionably Vincente Minnelli's Hollywood melodrama The Bad and the Beautiful. Whether Turner's good in it or not, and I hear she is, Gloria Grahame is lighting up the supporting cast, so at least one blinding-white blonde will be worth writing home about.

Feb 9: Janet Suzman (72)
New Review: ???
Janet's Best Work: She has an interesting, remote quality in Nicholas and Alexandra, but I'm not sure the performance fully pans out, mostly because the film doesn't.
I've Also Seen: Though she's been a leading figure in South African theater and an esteemed interpreter of Shakespeare for years, the only other effort I've seen is her off-camera coaxing of John Kani's moving performance as the director of Othello. Technically I saw her as Cusack's mother in Max, but few films have made less of a lasting impression on me.

Feb 10: Laura Dern (45)
New Review: ???
Laura's Best Work: As the shape-shifting imago at the wormhole center of David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE, naïve and uncertain and scared and debased
I've Also Seen: Gobbling ice cream cones in the background of the climax of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, prompting famous advice from director Martin Scorsese; as Rocky's blind and beautifully sympathetic girlfriend in Mask (Favorite Films entry); an archetype of small-town innocence, but not uncurious, in Blue Velvet; screaming "SAILOR!!!" with a notable itch in her crotch in Wild at Heart (my review); taking her memorable spin on the confused, buoyant carnality of the titular figure in Rambling Rose; mouth agape and up to her elbows in dino-shit in Jurassic Park; knocking around the background of Eastwood's A Perfect World, not at all concerned that that interesting movie isn't about her; boldly sour, comically refusing of anyone's sympathy in Citizen Ruth; inspiring the coming-out heard 'round the airport terminal, and 'round the world, on Ellen; an absolute joy as the encouraging, perpetually tipsy aunt in Dr. T & the Women (my review); whisked on as a sop to "old" times in Jurassic Park III (my review); having a lot to say about "finding your bliss" in a barely-lit sequence of Searching for Debra Winger, possibly shot on Rosanna's phone; perfectly plausible as the U.S. poet laureate with ideas of her own on one episode of The West Wing; briefly giving a bored audience something to be happy about in I Am Sam and The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio; blowing the roof off of spousal bitterness in We Don't Live Here Anymore; a compressed pleasure as half of a lesbian couple trying to have children in Don Roos' dishy Happy Endings; meeting current collaborator Mike White on his awkward directorial outing Year of the Dog; and really doing a favor to Friend Courteney Cox on the latter's short-film directorial debut, The Monday Before Thanksgiving.

Feb 11: Kim Stanley (87; died 2001)
New Review: ???
Kim's Best Work: Spindly, scary, and less overtly hysterical than I had expected in Séance on a Wet Afternoon and all the more unnerving for that, especially as the piece winds toward its discomfiting ending.
I've Also Seen: Irreducibly strange in her first film The Goddess, as though she's puzzled by the camera and it's intimidated by her; lending spare but effective voice-over to To Kill a Mockingbird; unforgettably proud of her non-conforming daughter but then instrumental in her destruction in Frances (my review); as odd and as powerful as ever with Jessica Lange (again), Tommy Lee Jones, and Rip Torn in a Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that was made for Showtime, I think, but easily trumps the Taylor-Newman-Ives version, particularly in the acting department.

January Birthday Girls

It's been real, ladies of January! And thanks to all the readers and commenters who turned out for these 14 reviews. If all keeps hewing to plan, we'll get another set of 14 in February, and hopefully a lot of them will be valentines.

For the record, the best of the movies I watched for this project in January was William Wellman's Heroes for Sale (1933, with Loretta Young), which would also qualify as my favorite of the reviews if I hadn't taken such saucy, thunderstruck pleasure in writing about Tim (1979, with Piper Laurie). Runners-up for the best movie were The Fountainhead (1949, with Patricia Neal), Rumble Fish (1983, with Diane Lane), and, for all my misgivings, Gaslight (1940, with Diana Wynyard). I'm proud of the pieces on The Emperor's Candlesticks (1937, with Luise Rainer) and on The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996, with Geena Davis), even if the State of the Union at the end of the latter one made me sad. Putting The Actress (1950, with Jean Simmons) to rights came easily, but thinking my way through my mixed reactions to The Little Drummer Girl (1984, with Diane Keaton), Barfly (1987, with Faye Dunaway), and The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004, with Emily Watson) was gratifyingly tough. Along with Gaslight, The Glass Menagerie (1950, with Jane Wyman), Twelfth Night (1996, with Imelda Staunton), and The Sea Gull (1968, with Vanessa Redgrave) offered auspicious occasions to ponder the relations between a superlative play and a strained film.

I hope you'll all be back in February, where profile subjects will include the lovely Laura Linney, the grand dame Edith Evans, the intimidating Kim Stanley, the amazingly eclectic Laura Dern, the tough cookie Stockard Channing, the under-valued Joanne Woodward, and the most recently deceased of all the Best Actress nominees, two-time winner Elizabeth Taylor.

Best Actress Birthday Party, Week 5

Another light week like last week, although this pace won't persist. I'll be dancing as fast as I can come mid-February. For now...



Born January 29–February 4:
Click here for the full list of entries

Jan 30: Vanessa Redgrave (75)
New Review: The Sea Gull (1968)
Vanessa's Best Work: Obviously, even Vanessa's second and third tiers of work would be a lot of actress's best efforts. If forced to single out her peaks, I always go back to her astonishing ingenuity in small roles in Julia (my review) and Howards End (my review, Favorite Films). Both times, she showed us the idea inside the woman and the woman inside the idea, in no time at all. I remember every beat of both performances. Her best lead performance, I think, was as Fania Fenelon, the increasingly dissipated, furious, and ambivalent concentration-camp prisoner in Playing for Time.
I've Also Seen: I've written academically on Redgrave's career, so I've seen a lot: getting her feet wet in Morgan! (Oscar ballot); opaque in Blowup (Favorite Films); so white-hot that miscasting was inevitable for a while, but especially in Camelot; taking risks, grand and garish, in Isadora; tremendous in a seemingly impossible role as a sex-crazed, hunchbacked Medieval nun in The Devils (my review); beautiful, uninhibited, but going down with the ship a bit in The Trojan Women; totally outwitted by Glenda Jackson in Mary, Queen of Scots; coasting on glamour, which is not a bad option, in Murder on the Orient Express; doing her best with odd scripts in Agatha and Yanks; saving Olive Chancellor from Henry James and from a stiff film in The Bostonians, without the easy route of making the character any comfier; very interesting as one of those impossible ciphers of David Hare's in Wetherby; very sly, if a bit overrated, in Prick Up Your Ears; a shrill, sexy, bold-stroke take on American South Gothic in Orpheus Descending (my review), and back on adjacent geography as the towering androgyne in The Ballad of the Sad Café; the raison d'être for Little Odessa, without even being in it very much; having fun in Mission: Impossible; extremely moving and unafraid of the icon in Mrs. Dalloway (my review); improbably stirring in Deep Impact; hitting another career peak, so devastating and candid is she in If These Walls Could Talk 2; soft but stalwart as Churchill's wife in The Gathering Storm; underseen, monologuing with theatrical stamina all through The Fever, directed by her son; trying her best to make Venus more than a wan Oscar play for O'Toole; doing her thing where she rides in to save a struggling film in Atonement; happy to co-sign the cause in The Whistleblower; and not as exciting to me as she was to many others, but still terrifically good, in Coriolanus
      She's also had blink-and-you-miss-her parts in A Man for All Seasons (my review); the rather moving Charge of the Light Brigade; the arch but hard-to-remember Oh! What a Lovely War; the turgid House of the Spirits, which she exits in high style; haunted in Smilla's Sense of Snow; a gaping jaw in Wilde, and again in Cradle Will Rock; institutional wisdom in Girl, Interrupted; haunted again in The Pledge; in The White Countess, nobody's favorite movie but surely a cherished memory for her; and fading away with everyone else in Evening, though her mates look appropriately awed by her.
Where To Go Next: I'm really intrigued by Laika's suggestion of Steaming and have it coming in the mail. Now that The Sea Gull has finally become available, though, I'm hoping some industrious outfit will distribute Red and Blue and especially The Sailor from Gibraltar, the two films Redgrave made early on with her then-husband Tony Richardson.

Jan 31: Jean Simmons (83; died 2010)
New Review: The Actress (1953)
Jean's Best Work: A controlled performance of a woman going in and out of control in Elmer Gantry, a film that intriguingly rides that line in every way, and allows this complicated woman a full-ish run of her dark, energetic, starchy, and ornery sides
I've Also Seen: A vague memory in Black Narcissus, but only because so much else is so overwhelmingly vivid; fine as Ophelia, a close-to-thankless part, and not well served by that track backward on the staircase in Olivier's Hamlet; fun once she's let loose in Guys and Dolls, though you can tell it's not her usual mode; not adding a lot in Spartacus; trying a bit hard at the start of The Happy Ending, but gradually quite affecting (performance review); hanging with the other ladies in How To Make an American Quilt, well after she'd virtually retired; lending a key voice to Howl's Moving Castle, well after having retired again
Where To Go Next: I'll eventually get to her Oscar-bait movies like The Robe and The Big Country, but first up will be her well-reviewed turn in Otto Preminger's acidic-sounding Angel Face. Still harboring hope I'll respond to this gal.

Best Actress Birthday Party, Week 4

As backloaded as the the current week is, with Patricia Neal and Geena Davis coming up on the 20th and 21st, next week is even more front-loaded, with these two gals blowing out candles right away on the 22nd. I'm happy to cull your suggestions a bit early, and don't be surprised if one of these gals has to wait a day or two for her party. Consider it like President's Day Observed.

Born January 22–January 28:
Click here for the full list of entries

Jan 22: Piper Laurie (80)
New Review: Tim (1979)
Piper's Best Work: I haven't seen her tough customer in The Hustler or her demented disciple in Carrie in so long that I can't really pick between them.
I've Also Seen: Disconcerting in ways Lee Remick could barely touch in the live-TV Days of Wine and Roses; goading Jeremy Brett to action and commanding the stage in a direct-to-video staging of Macbeth; intimidated by her child's deafness and by the grown daughter's anger in Children of a Lesser God; in an ensemble of actor's actors as David Morse's mother in The Crossing Guard; bullying Toni Collette and unconcerned about self-parody in The Dead Girl
Where To Go Next: If we're insisting on a theatrical release, then I'm guessing the Capote adaptation The Grass Harp, with Sissy Spacek, Walter Matthau, and Nell Carter. If TV movies count, I'm all about Piper as Magda Goebbels, with Anthony Hopkins as Hitler, in The Bunker. She was Emmy-nominated for that, and I'm betting she did it up real big. But if any medium will do, the answer is obviously Twin Peaks. I lived in Germany the two years it ran in the U.S., and by the time I moved back, it had come and gone. Never have caught up, but obviously must.

Jan 22: Diane Lane (47)
New Review: Rumble Fish (1983)
Diane's Best Work: Sexy, accessible, and believably conflicted as she juices up the second act of her career in A Walk on the Moon, a movie seen by too few people but savored by all of them.
I've Also Seen: Young, charismatic leader of the whelps in Six Pack; as Paulette Goddard, but not such that I recall her, in Chaplin; maybe a bit bashful as Stella to Jessica Lange's Blanche and Alec Baldwin's Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire; as good at fretful waiting as anyone could be in The Perfect Storm (my review); an appealing interview in Searching for Debra Winger; getting her nod for the commuter-train scene in Unfaithful (my review); a flattering audience surrogate and the centerpiece of light pleasures in Under the Tuscan Sun; stranded by a dumb script and stolid direction in Hollywoodland (my review), though everyone else seemed to like it; chafing, surely, under a new round of typecasting in Nights in Rodanthe
Where To Go Next: The 90s weren't the easiest decade for Diane, but I'm really eager to see Wild Bill, the no-doubt unusual biopic starring Jeff Bridges and Ellen Barkin and directed by Walter Hill. It's sitting right here on my shelf, and if it had been as short as Rumble Fish, I would have selected it.

Best Actress Birthday Party, Week 3

Born January 15–January 21:
Click here for the full list of entries

Jan 16: Diana Wynyard (106; died 1964)
New Review: Gaslight (1940)
Diana's Best Work: Unquestionably, out of my very small sample, her take on the famously terrorized wife in the movie I just saw.
I've Also Seen: Her stiff, shaky, but nominated performance in Cavalcade (Best Pictures from the Outside In), which is not a great moment in Oscar history, especially since the transition from an Aug 1–Jul 31 eligibility calendar to the much more sensible Jan 1–Dec 31 window resulted in the 1932-33 ceremony inviting candidates from 17 months of top-flight movies. Best not to think about whom Wynyard bested on the way to her citation. Anyway, Wynyard was one of those actresses who made no bones about valuing the stage in every way above the screen, and only made 16 films in 25 years before her abrupt death at 56.
Where To Go Next: Diana has a tough task trying to elbow into a three-way Barrymore Act-a-Thon in Rasputin and the Empress. Speaking, though, of crowded rings, I gather from commenters that she makes a vivid impression as part of the large ensemble in her last film, the four-stranded Island in the Sun. (She's got the Blanchett part in the 1947 version of An Ideal Husband, but after my first two run-ins with Diana, I'm not convinced she'd import the subliminal slyness into that role that Cate so dexterously brought to it.)

Jan 20: Patricia Neal (86; died 2010)
New Review: The Fountainhead (1949)
Patricia's Best Work: Neal is one of those happy cases of a performer gleaning her Oscar for what is surely her best performance, as the aroused but worldly-wise Alma in Hud (my Favorite Films entry).
I've Also Seen: Extremely savvy and emotionally layered in A Face in the Crowd; sensual and moneyed in Breakfast at Tiffany's, like Nina Foch in An American in Paris; nominated for bearing up with a querulous husband, a war-scarred son, and whatever weighs on her own soul in The Subject Was Roses; and a miniature, late-in-life delight in Robert Altman's Cookie's Fortune
Where To Go Next: I'm most curious to beat a path to the sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. Otherwise, beyond her two Reagan vehicles from the same year as The Fountainhead, especially the Oscar-nominated The Hasty Heart, I've heard some good things—including from you guys—about The Breaking Point, Bright Leaf, Three Secrets, and the immediately pre-stroke Psyche 59. How Glenda Jackson ever found her way into starring in The Patricia Neal Story is fathomless to me but a mystery for another time.

Jan 21: Geena Davis (56)
New Review: The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)
Geena's Best Work: If all she'd ever shown us was dizzy, irked, fun-chasing, assaulted, recklessly emancipated Thelma in Thelma & Louise, she'd belong in the pantheon.
I've Also Seen: From a surprisingly not-enormous filmography, a goofy-sexy cameo in Tootsie, formidably intelligent and emotionally rich in The Fly; a good fit for Burton's whimsy in Beetlejuice; winning her Oscar as Anne Tyler's warmly offbeat dog-walker in The Accidental Tourist (my review), where she memorably puts paid to William Hurt's fickleness and unwitting condescension; and trying to resuscitate Irene Dunne in Speechless. Also, the episode of The Geena Davis Show where she teaches the kids The Hustle, and the one of Commander in Chief where she gets the gig.
Where To Go Next: As several commenters rightly pointed out, there is no excuse for me to have not seen A League of Their Own by now. Earth Girls Are Easy will probably come after that, but I can usually watch Davis in anything.

As always, propose your own favorites in the Comments, and respond to the reviews as they appear!

Best Actress Birthday Party, Week 2

Still trying to figure out the best way to collate comments on these Birthday Party reviews, and also to keep you posted about who's next up for her tribute. Let's try this.

Born January 10–January 14:
Click here for the full list of entries

Jan 12: Luise Rainer (102)
New Review: The Emperor's Candlesticks (1937)
Luise's Best Work: She has very strong sequences in The Good Earth, even though Anna May Wong should have had the part. The studio had to decline Wong because, according to the Hays Code, her casting would have implied "miscegenation" with Paul Muni, the white star playing her "Chinese" husband!
I've Also Seen: Generously Oscared and NYFCC'd in The Great Ziegfeld (my review; Best Pictures from the Outside In); trapped inside already-familiar mannerisms in The Great Waltz
Where to Go Next: No one seems too fond of Big City or Toy Wife from the 1930s; I'm more curious about Luise's small comeback, half a century later, in the Hungarian director Károly Makk's The Gambler, based on the Dostoyevsky story, and starring Michael Gambon, Polly Walker, Jodhi May, Dominic West, and the recently deceased John Wood.

Jan 14: Faye Dunaway (71)
New Review: Barfly (1987)
Faye's Best Work: How many actors of either gender can claim three classics as bulletproof, and as bullet-riddled, as Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, and Network (my Favorite Films entry), scoring Oscar nominations for all three?
I've Also Seen: Saucy and smart in the original Thomas Crown Affair; somehow holding that dress up in The Towering Inferno; interesting and laudably bold in Mommie Dearest; The Handmaid's Tale; quickly seen but great for atmosphere in James Gray's strong sophomore feature The Yards, where she's almost upstaged by her glasses; and, though I don't remember her in it, The Rules of Attraction
Where to Go Next: Even with some of Faye's 70s catalog still to peruse (Little Big Man, The Three Musketeers, Three Days of the Condor, The Eyes of Laura Mars, even the turgid-sounding Puzzle of a Downfall Child and Voyage of the Damned), the only real competition Barfly had as the Dunaway title I'm most eager to catch up with is Arizona Dream, her collaboration with director Emir Kusturica and co-star Johnny Depp—and, from what I hear, a film and a performance of which she's very proud. Eventually, I'll want to poke around more of her 90s character work, too, in Drunks, which sounds like Barfly Redux, and in the Spacey-directed Albino Alligator, which is set in a bar. (Is a healthy liquor budget built into her contract?)

Jan 14: Emily Watson (45)
New Review: The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004)
Emily's Best Work: Breaking the Waves is the obvious and correct answer, but where were all her nominations and gongs for being so flinty and credible in Gosford Park, while Maggie Smith just did her Thing?
I've Also Seen: Interesting as George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss (my review); wasted in The Boxer (my review); deservingly nominated for Hilary and Jackie; a standout in Cradle Will Rock; rewardingly un-typecast in Punch-Drunk Love and Red Dragon; a voice in Corpse Bride; exemplary in The Proposition; understanding an odd project beautifully in Synecdoche, New York, my favorite film of 2008 (my review)
Where to Go Next: Reader recommendations poured in for The Luzhin Defense, Separate Lies, Wah-Wah, and Cemetery Junction, any of which I'd be up for, as I would be for the peculiar-sounding but slightly too Giamatti-heavy Cold Souls. I'm most upset with myself, though, for missing the weeklong Chicago runs of two recent Watson tours-de-force: Within the Whirlwind, a buried awards play that screened as part of the Polish Film Festival at Facets, and Oranges and Sunshine, for which she scored a modicum of awards heat. Emily's also currently up for SAG and Golden Globe awards for the serial-killer TV drama Appropriate Adult, in which I gather she has the Clarice Starling role, more or less. I would iTunes that so fast...

I'll look in the comments for your responses to this week's reviews and for recommendations of further viewing—or suggested re-viewing, if you think I've gone wrong somewhere!

Best Actress Birthday Party, Week 1

The first week of my sustained birthday party for Best Actress nominees of the past has come to a close, with new full-length reviews posted for movies that I had never previously seen, featuring early-January babies Jane Wyman, Loretta Young, Diane Keaton, and Imelda Staunton, all pictured above. You can click on any of their photos to read the review in which they appear. Based on site stats, the fewest of you have ventured over to the Heroes for Sale piece, but it's by far the best of the movies and a great, 70-minute rental option that I'm sure plenty of people would enjoy—available in the third of TCM's Forbidden Hollywood DVD sets. And can I say it's the review I'm most proud of? Plus, Loretta pretty much wins the beauty pageant in a walk, right? Particularly given that Jane and Diane ruthlessly disqualified themselves on hair alone.

Born January 1–January 9:
Click here for the full list of entries

Jan 5: Jane Wyman (105; died 2007)
New Review: The Glass Menagerie (1950)
Jane's Best Work: All four of her nominated performances were good ones, but my favorite Wyman performance went unrecognized, in the now-classic All That Heaven Allows
I've Also Seen: Lost in the crowds of Gold Diggers of 1933 and My Man Godfrey; flat and underwritten in The Lost Weekend (Best Pictures from the Outside In); bravely stony in The Yearling (performance review), to her real-life daughter's distress; interestingly warm but flinty in the hard-to-find The Blue Veil; warming up for Sirk, and operated on by a shirtless Rock Hudson, in Magnificent Obsession
Where to Go Next: Wyman disliked Stage Fright, her outing with Hitchcock, and loved Miracle in the Rain, for Rudolph Maté

Jan 5: Diane Keaton (66)
New Review: The Little Drummer Girl (1984)
Diane's Best Work: My far-and-away favorites are her Oscar-winning work in Annie Hall, her unrewarded nomination for tip-top drama in Reds, and her blistering, not-even-shortlisted work as a still-furious divorcée in Shoot the Moon
I've Also Seen: Barely registering in Lovers and Other Strangers; likably daffy with Woody in Play It Again, Sam and Love and Death; a quiet linchpin, running on woundedness and later on anger in The Godfather and The Godfather Part II; shirking typecasting, semi-successfully, in Looking for Mr. Goodbar; newly brittle for Allen, coldly in Interiors (my review) and comically in Manhattan); lacking any spark in Crimes of the Heart; returning favors to old friends in The Godfather Part III and Manhattan Murder Mystery; less comfortable than Goldie but more bearable than Bette in The First Wives Club; tender and nominated in Marvin's Room, even if Streep sticks longer in the memory; spirited and fun if a bit overrated in Something's Gotta Give; intriguing when she's tetchy in The Family Stone; squandered in the stillborn Morning Glory
Where to Go Next: I'll pick a drama over a comedy six days out of seven, so for me, Mrs. Soffel will come around sooner than Sleeper

Jan 7: Loretta Young (99; died 2000)
New Review: Heroes for Sale (1933)
Loretta's Best Work: Given how little I've seen, her second-tier but proficiently rendered part in Heroes might take the cake, though I like the soft-touch melancholy she brings to The Bishop's Wife, devout in her faith but shaken in her marriage
I've Also Seen: Decency personified, without just being dull, in The White Parade; duller in Kentucky; weirdly Oscared for The Farmer's Daughter; nominated again in Come to the Stable
Where to Go Next: A bevy of promising destinations: Laugh, Clown, Laugh; up against Harlow in Platinum Blonde; Taxi!; Zoo in Budapest; likely a good fit for Borzage in Man's Castle; a hit in The House of Rothschild, one of her two 1934 Best Picture nominees; neck and neck in a beauty contest with Tyrone Power in Second Honeymoon; challenging herself with Orson Welles in The Stranger; and in Rachel and the Stranger, which is sadly not a sequel to the Welles

Jan 9: Imelda Staunton (56)
New Review: Twelfth Night (1996)
Imelda's Best Work: Can anyone seriously dispute that it's Vera Drake (my review)? Maybe so: she's absolutely devastating in a single sequence you'll never shake in her other collaboration with Leigh, for Another Year
I've Also Seen: A Branagh supernumerary in Peter's Friends and Much Ado About Nothing; still small-scale, but hilarious crossing one room and sprinting out of another in Sense and Sensibility; a small part of the palace of delights in Shakespeare in Love (my review; Best Pictures from the Outside In); funny in voice-over in Chicken Run; telling Swank to buck up in Freedom Writers; a delight to many but a lost memory to me in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, save for her pink suits; taking it big but more affecting than I thought she'd be in the flyaway Taking Woodstock; a face on a stem, which is the most you'd want to be, in Alice in Wonderland
Where to Go Next: TV, I imagine: the Gambon Singing Detective, and Emma's old sketch show Thompson

I got a little breather in the middle of this week, but we've got two-time champ Luise Rainer, unfairly under-employed Faye Dunaway, and current War Horse supporting player Emily Watson blowing out candles before an even bigger party, the Golden Globes, drops on Sunday night. Though, on second thought, if I had the option to go to this year's Golden Globes or go to a party with Jane, Loretta, Diane, Imelda, Luise, Faye, and Emily, I'm pretty sure I'd— oh, wait. Tilda's nominated. All right, well I'd almost pick my own party.

P.S. A fun tidbit for you actressexuals: Jane Wyman tells Rex Reed in a 1968 New York Times interview, on the eve of filming How to Commit Marriage with Bob Hope, that she and Loretta Young were great pals during their studio years. They had offices next door to each other and would swap scripts. Jane's predominant memory was of inheriting all of Loretta's dowdy-girl roles and trading her a bunch of P.Y.T.s in return, laughing, "Loretta, the girls in these are too pretty for me!"

P.P.S. People who wish I'd chime in more often on current releases can at least enjoy some thoughts about Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in the Little Drummer Girl piece and my conjectures about Clint Eastwood's enduring appeal for certain critics at the end of the Heroes write-up. The Glass Menagerie and Twelfth Night make good companions for all you theater geeks. See? Value added!