I appreciate Star System casting but wouldn’t Streisand’s Rose in a Gypsy remake have been on Social Security when potty training her daughters?
Annie Awards annually honor Outstanding Achievement, Character Animation in Live Action Productions. Nominees in this category last year included the bear in The Revenant. I rooted for the bear to win...twice.
Controversy surfaced after director George Cosmatos’s death when Tombstone star Kurt Russell claimed in an interview that he had ghost-directed that movie on Cosmatos’s behalf.
Fleming's James Bond invented the Vesper Martini in Chapter 7 and named it in Chapter 8 in Casino Royale. The drink’s recipe was actually created by Fleming's friend, Ivar Bryce.
The pool of the Nile Hilton in Cairo has mesh metal chairs hanging along its deepest edge so you can sit at ease submerged in the water reading your book.
At the Confederate Ball in Gone with the Wind, Rhett Butler pays to dance with Scarlett in her really wrong-hue ball gown—Widow’s Weeds Black.
Full-figured animals can also go on movie-jungle rampages. Elephant Walk’s Peter Finch realizes father Colonel Tom was a closeted Imperialist; Dana Andrews realizes he needs to find his own wife; Elizabeth Taylor realizes she can conquer the fiery staircase; and Appuhamy realizes not to talk to the Elephant People.
Audiences confused Tab Hunter and Troy Donohue. This confusion proved unfortunate for Donohue’s career.
“You Must Love Me,” the Oscar Best Song written for the movie Evita (1996), echoes Carmen Miranda’s “T’ai” with its “sympathetic begging” and simple, yet compelling, vocal styling.
At the Labor Day picnic, Rodney and Betty go skinny-dipping while good-girl Allison and Rodney’s little bother, Norman, go swimming in proper swimsuits. Town-gossip Marion is all too happy to tell Constance MacKenzie (Lana Turner—so you know what’s coming) that it was Connie’s daughter, Allison, whom she saw together naked with Norman.
Jeremy Iron’s characterization of the Mantle twins addresses family gatherings where the new baby looks exactly like Uncle Joe at that age except she has dark hair and he was bald, she has blue eyes and his were brown, he was fragile and she is plump, and she is a girl. Yet the whole family somehow sees the similarity. Go figure.
Neighbor Noel Coward called Ian Fleming’s Jamaica house, “Golden Eye, Ears, Nose and Throat.”
A busy run for William Holden from 1950 to 1955—I think I counted about 18 film credits and I know it is hard to choose the matinee idol’s best performance on the list. Between bedding Norma Desmond in 1950 and that Picnic dance with Kim Novak in 1955, in the same year Holden romances and ironically loses both Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina (only on screen) and Grace Kelly in Country Girl (he wins Kelly on screen during those same years in Bridges at Toko-Ri). Holden also challenged the censors in The Moon Is Blue, brought Broadway’s Born Yesterday to the screen, oh yes, and won the Best Actor Oscar for Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17. Playing younger or older—whatever his role—William Holden proved to be the hottest Hollywood Golden Age leading man.
Documentary Jane Birkin: Mother of All Babes runs 52 minutes.
Jackie Kennedy Onassis was a global enigma. Who is the mystery man Billy Crudup plays in the 2017 release Jackie about the 4 days after the JFK assassination—filming on location in DC, mostly in Paris?
It must be The Big Easy. Ingénue Judy Garland’s bold red ball gown is deemed seasonal and appropriate enough for dancing with your grandfather at Meet Me in St Louis's Christmas Ball; no one shamed her to Lazarus Island.
Somehow younger sister Joan Fontaine seems the Hollywood movie star, but big sister Olivia de Havilland was the one who scored two Oscars and was stalked before Stalking even had a name.
Ortolans! Reading about the gastronomic last meal of French President François Mitterrand made me queasy about the tiny birds twice over again.
My first movie was The Girls of Pleasure Island because I remember playing hooky from dance class to see it.
Diane Varsi was the young actress who earned an Oscar nomination for her Peyton Place debut with Lana Turner, then turned her back on Hollywood; Dolores Hart, another young star, (who made her debut with Elvis Presley) was the ingénue who abandoned Hollywood to become the nun.