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!

Party Down: 208* Occasions to Celebrate

* Soon to become 210, with Viola and Rooney. Or 211, with Viola, Rooney, and Tilda. Or 210, with Viola and Tilda. Or maybe the Actors Branch was really into Bad Teacher and we just don't know it yet...



I have been deliriously working all through the holiday "break," but it is obvious that the Holy Spirit, in Its infinite wisdom, takes real, genuine vacations. To adduce only the most glaring piece of evidence, no Best Actress nominee has ever been touched with God's thumbprint and dropped into the world any earlier than January 5. That sounds like at least four days of Law & Order from the couch, if you ask me. Of course, once the gifts started coming, they were good ones: Jane Wyman (b. 1917) and Diane Keaton (b. 1946) both celebrate their anniversaries today, though one is still with us and the other, like Sidney J. Mussburger, has already Merged with the Infinite. Still, film history would genuinely look different without either of these gals, and so we honor them.

We're going to keep on honoring them, and 206 other women, and whoever else joins their club on January 24. It ain't over till New Year's Eve baby Sarah Miles sings, or does whatever Sarah Miles does. I've had this calendar posted on my webpage for a couple of years now, as one more manifestation of the ridiculous and the sublime, one more excrescence of what Jane might have called my Magnificent Obsession. You can come and leave a flower any time you like, for anyone you like, provided that on at least one occasion her peers in the business gave her a really, really gold star, or at least urged her to think she was getting one. If your favorite actress is Rita Hayworth or Jennifer Jason Leigh or Alfre Woodard or Taylor Schilling, you're just going to have to wait until she cops that first lead-category nomination. (Based on sabermetric calculations, my money is on Alfre, then Jennifer, then Rita, then Taylor.)

To maintain the festivities, I'll be dropping in on the occasional birthday girl over the year and watching a title from her filmography that I have never seen. In some cases, the thrill of anticipation is through the roof, as I will finally catch up with some Buñuel, some Lang, some Hitchcock, and some Rossellini that I keep missing—or, you know, I'll finally see Kitten with a Whip, or the Village People vehicle Can't Stop the Music, which starred Best Actress nominee Valerie Perrine (emerita of the best-ever roster in the category) and was also directed by Roberto Rossellini. Sometimes I will be in trouble, but I will strive for the best. I shot myself in the foot last year, filling so many holes in order to write career retrospectives on Annette Bening and that young'un Jennifer Lawrence that I'm only left with a few dregs... unless Jennifer puts out a new movie this year, but I haven't heard a single murmur about her doing that.

I'll come up with something. I don't know how you spend your lunch hours, but I have confirmed a surviving and accessible print of a movie I have not seen by each one of these 208 210 209 208* women, even Ida Kaminská. I'm not promising whom I'll get to, and whom I won't. You know how I tend to do on these long-haul projects. I do have a job, and that's why these parties are surprises. I already threw one at midnight for Wyman, an obvious late-night reveler if ever there was one, who is dependably affecting if just a smidge unadventurous in this 1950 version of The Glass Menagerie that few people even seem to know exists. Not a perfect movie but still, on balance, a keeper.

If there's a movie featuring one of Oscar's anointees that you think I'll like or find interesting and that you know I haven't seen, feel free to suggest it down in the Comments. (You can flip through my back pages here, in case you haven't got 182 better things to do.) I won't promise, and I'm going to be stingy with hints about my often-spontaneous plans, but I'm still eager for nudges, even if I wind up saving 'em for later. You can also comment on the reviews I do post in this same space, so I won't be eating cake and lighting sparklers by myself.

Happy 2012, actresses and actressexuals everywhere. Together, let's think of the right gift for the woman who has everything, i.e., two consecutive Academy Awards and the stamina of a Galapagos tortoise, even though most people, hearing her name, would go "Who?" We don't have a lot of time. I'm thinking candlesticks.