beamish14 wrote:Sam Wasson’s book The Big Goodbye is absolutely essential, and does an incredible job of deconstructing how Towne (and his friend, who should have gotten co-writing credit) wrote Chinatown
I agree. I loved it, not only for really capturing the excitement of the American New Wave in the late sixties to its confused downfall in the mid-to-late seventies, but for also showing that Polanski’s diplomacy, and his ability to massage and whittle away at a likely unreleasable tome with its very stubborn author, maybe makes him the true architect of Chinatown’s brilliance.
Not to take away from Towne’s achievement. Anyone who writes The Last. Detail and Shampoo (and even Tequila Sunrise) is okay in my books.
Heartily recommended! It’s also available at most online remainder book outlets for a song!
Towne's 1982 directorial debut, the Mariel Hemingway-starring female athlete/lesbian romance Personal Best, has got to be one of the most underrated films ever. It's absolutely worthy of bracketing with his best work in Chinatown and Shampoo, and IMO considerably better than The Last Detail.
There's a single angle super-slow motion shot of the two leads racing to the top of a sand dune that goes on for about 45 seconds, and they must have burned through a whole mag of film with every take. It's easily as, if not more riveting, than any other training sequence I've seen (probably because its not simply about the development of their bodies), and it took my breath away back when I saw it on VHS in the mid-eighties. It was just as stunning almost three and a half decades later when I revisited the film on the Criterion Channel.
And while I can guarantee you I didn't fully comprehend it as a teenage viewer, I was floored, this time around, at how non-judgmental Towne and the film are about the complexities of sexuality and orientation and sexual culture in sport, not just between the two women, but everyone else in their orbit.
What a film.
I'm assuming Criterion will add it to the collection one of these months.
Polish actor, director and educator Jerzy Stuhr. Per Radiance on their IG account: "a major Polish actor who worked with auteur directors like Kieslowski, Szulkin and Holland in his home country as well work in theatre and internationally with such directors as Nanni Moretti."
That's a considerable understatement of his importance in Poland, where he's been one of the best-loved actors for a full half-century. He was Krzysztof Kieślowski's favourite actor, to the point of writing lead roles specifically for him (The Calm, 1976; Camera Buff, 1979), and Stuhr later paid posthumous tribute by finally realising a hitherto unfilmed Kieślowski screenplay from the early 1970s (The Big Animal, 2000, which Stuhr directed as well as starred in).
But he really owes his high profile in Poland to playing lead roles in whopping local hits like Sexmission (1984), and for fathering Maciej Stuhr, another huge local star - father and son once played the same part at different ages in The Citizen (2014), the changeover being affected by the character's realisation that the woman he's sharing a bed with is a Communist spy. "That night, I aged decades!", says the narrator, as the older Stuhr takes over, which I can confirm first-hand triggered a huge belly laugh in at least one Polish screening.
More recently, both Stuhrs were delighted to find out that their films had been blacklisted by TVP, the main state broadcasting channel, for their outspoken criticism of the Law and Justice-run government, a revelation made by their successors after they won last autumn's general election - to them, it was a considerable badge of honour. (Agnieszka Holland and Krystyna Janda were also on the blacklist, which gave Andrzej Wajda's Man of Iron the impressive distinction of being banned by two ideologically different governments some four decades apart.)
For me, Stuhr is the exact Polish equivalent of people like Jim Broadbent and John Lithgow, in that they look pretty nondescript on first encounter, but have the most phenomenal range - all three are completely comfortable in everything from wild farce to the most heart-rending tragedy, sometimes switching modes mid-film. Although Stuhr was the lead in the darkly comedic Dekalog Ten, he'd have been just as comfortable in any of the more serious episodes - for instance, he'd have had no problem playing the father in Dekalog Four or the cuckolded, impotent husband in Dekalog Nine, and I can't help wondering whether Kieślowski considered him for either of those roles before settling on the one he ended up playing.
Coincidentally, the podcast that Michał Oleszczyk and I recorded last summer during a residence at the Kieślowski Archive in Sokołowsko was published by the Polish Cultural Institute in New York a couple of weeks ago, to mark what would have been Kieślowski's 83rd birthday. Since it's entirely about the film Camera Buff, Stuhr unsurprisingly looms very large indeed in our discussion, so it's become something of a memorial tribute.
Wasn’t she set to star in another film which was set to be her return to the screen because if that’s the case and she didn’t finish it then her death just got very much more sad. Fantastic actress too and part of the reason why Kubrick’s The Shining works as well as it does.
flyonthewall2983 wrote: Thu Jul 11, 2024 5:28 pm
Her contributions to children's programming for my generation are immeasurable
I was going to say that every episode of Faerie Tale Theatre is on Facebook, and in a lot of ways, that's my favorite work she's done given how hands-on she was and how she tapped her connections, all of whom seemed to relish the opportunity to do something unusual.
The rock and roll themed one with Little Richard and the guy from ZZ Top (I know there was a ton more) is the one that comes to mind the most. Jamie Lee Curtis posted stills from her episode playing Annie Oakley.
TechnicolorAcid wrote: Thu Jul 11, 2024 4:59 pm
Wasn’t she set to star in another film which was set to be her return to the screen because if that’s the case and she didn’t finish it then her death just got very much more sad. Fantastic actress too and part of the reason why Kubrick’s The Shining works as well as it does.
This NYTimes profile from earlier this year and her imdb page only mention The Forest Hills, a werewolf movie whose cast also includes Edward Furlong and Dee Wallace. Its site mentions 2023 horror fest appearances and there are some reviews out there; Times piece mentions a release this past spring but that doesn't seem to have happened.
The best Olive Oyl too. (Popeye is a film adaptation that is kind of ruined by being a Robert Altman film where ensemble characters witter away endlessly in an unstructured free-for-all, but at the same time only Altman would have been able to bring Duvall in to play that role)
Last edited by colinr0380 on Fri Jul 12, 2024 8:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
TechnicolorAcid wrote: Thu Jul 11, 2024 4:59 pm
Wasn’t she set to star in another film which was set to be her return to the screen because if that’s the case and she didn’t finish it then her death just got very much more sad. Fantastic actress too and part of the reason why Kubrick’s The Shining works as well as it does.
This NYTimes profile from earlier this year and her imdb page only mention The Forest Hills, a werewolf movie whose cast also includes Edward Furlong and Dee Wallace. Its site mentions 2023 horror fest appearances and there are some reviews out there; Times piece mentions a release this past spring but that doesn't seem to have happened.
Well it’s nice that she had one final film finished before she died even if it was released a bit under the radar.
Faerie Tale Theatre was formative for me as a child, and for that I have always cherished Shelley.
Considering that she made only about twenty-five feature films and had mostly retired from acting by age 50, the roster of directors she worked with is impressive: Altman, Kubrick, Woody Allen, Campion, Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, Guy Maddin, Steven Soderbergh, Fred Schepisi.
In one of her recent interviews (I think in the New York Times) she made a comment about Altman directing one of the episodes of Faerie Tale Theatre, which I found interesting because he's not credited on any of them. I wonder if he did one uncredited, or if she was misremembering.
Going through Duvall's filmography, I'm reminded why I initially undervalued her work as an actress - she was fairly active in the '90s, but if that was your only exposure to her work, you were really missing out. I think Roxanne was the first substantial performance I can recall seeing, one that Glenn Kenny just cited as somewhat disappointing as "Duvall’s first 'normie' movie, with Shelley in a second-banana role as Steve Martin’s helpful god-sister." If you can clear your memories and go through her filmography in order, it feels pretty astonishing, like watching someone you weren't used to seeing in Hollywood movies expanding her range each time out. You'd have to wonder what else she was capable of given how diverse and offbeat those roles were and how she nailed each one.
She did manage an occasional interesting film in the '90s (Altman-loving cinephile Soderbergh didn't forget her, neither did Jane Campion), but one that popped out was Suburban Commando. I had to refresh my memory, but that was a star vehicle for Hulk Hogan. I had to look up the director, Burt Kennedy - turns out he was the screenwriter for Budd Boetticher's greatest films (specifically The Tall T, Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station) and he was later a credited screenwriter for IMHO Clint Eastwood's greatest film, White Hunter Black Heart. Anyway, not exactly the film I'd picture (or hope for) if someone told me Burt Kennedy was making a movie with Shelley Duvall, but no surprise either. (That's a knock on the state of the industry, not Duvall or Kennedy.)
