Bests of the Bests Keep Getting Better

After telling you yesterday about all the great year-end features happening around the Web, two Near'n'Dears of Nick's Flick Picks came through yesterday with really delicious treats. StinkyLulu hosted the second edition of his grand annual party on behalf of supporting actresses. How I longed (and intended!) to attend. Had I found the time, I was going to ask, why is everyone so mad at Knocked Up for selling out the smart, classy dame to the barely redeemable schlump when Marge Simpson has been consigned to the same fate for more than a decade? In case we didn't notice, Marge is still the best thing going in The Simpsons Movie, and Julie Kavner makes something heroically poignant out of Marge's video-recorded goodbye to Homer, which made me only a little less tempted to scream, "YESSS!! She's finally getting away from him!"

I know we're supposed to love Homer, and yeah, I sorta do, but does he have to be that idiotic and congenitally self-absorbed? Does he have to steamroll his whole town and pull every rug out from under his entire family three or four times in the space of 90 minutes, and still get to star in the heroic finale? Oh, well: at least he keeps setting up Marge/Kavner for her sad, beautiful, bizarrely affecting variations on patience and marital resilience. And yes, the movie is hilarious, if a little standard-issue for the big screen. Lots of the jokes are zesty, but Kavner's voicing of that farewell made for one of the few moments truly worthy of the big screen. Then again, speaking of Supporting Actresses: why is Lisa in so little of this movie? She catalyzes the whole environmental-crisis angle and then gets all but buried? The whole movie's about fathers and sons. It's the There Will Be Blood of Simpsons narratives. No country for female Simpsons. The Emancipation of Bart Simpson from the Imbecile Homer Simpson. Harrumph. Women couldn't get a break in '07. Then again... not a new story.

But try telling that to Marisa Tomei, who this year continues a bright and eclectic career on film in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and on stage in Oh, the Humanity and other exclamations. If two estimable artists like Sidney Lumet and Will Eno don't already constitute an amazing year for an actress, Marisa keeps her game high high high in '08 with Darren Aronofsky and Nick's Flick Picks idol Caryl Churchill. Wanna hear about it? And way, way, way more about from the enchanting and talented Ms. Tomei? Well, fire up the positraction, and speed over to Nathaniel's site for his first-ever podcast, which starts with a generous, revealing, and vivacious interview with Marisa Tomei and ends with Nathaniel, Joe Reid, and I coffee-klatsching over the Screen Actors Guild nominations (well, the film categories). Now, why Nathaniel had to cast a wee pall over this delightful 45 minutes with even a short clip of Helena Bonham Carter "singing" is a little beyond me... but he won those points back a dozen times over by asking Marisa my pre-submitted question about pet indie films from her back catalogue that she wishes had gotten more attention. If you want to know which ones, you gotta listen! And why aren't you already listening, anyway? (Seriously: way to go, Nathaniel!)

Queer Film Blog-a-Thon: The Joy of Life

The Joy of Life is not just the title of the movie I am reviewing for QTA's Queer Film Blog-a-Thon: it also names the sensation I feel whenever I'm watching a queer film (even, in most cases, a bad one) or writing about queer films or reading about them or just thinking about them and appreciating that they exist.

Queer movies are the most important things in my life that aren't people. They are better than food, way better than drink. For me, they rank right up there with shelter and oxygen. I applied to graduate school so that I could write about them, and I devoted my entire Ph.D. dissertation to queer cinema: an ecstatic pleasure in itself, at least insofar far as "ecstatic pleasure" is the right framing concept for dissertation writing, but also a rare case of actually realizing a clear goal without wavering, after seven years of work. That's how much devotion and renewable wonderment they inspire in me.

I teach courses in queer cinema, around seminar tables and more recently in lecture halls, and many of my most delirious moments of professional joy come from the fresh discoveries of revisiting these movies, and from the ardent and sometimes unexpected enthusiasm—and even, just as much, the frustration and bewilderment and intellectual calisthenics—that these movies inspire in my students. I love that queer movies, truly queer movies, invite the viewer to delectate in style and aesthetics while simultaneously demanding intellectual engagement and exercise. Just like my favorite people, my favorite queer movies are smart and fun, and they never stop surprising.

Anyone in academia has surely had his or her moments of worrying about the potential gulf between scholarly theorizing and everyday life, and another reason I treasure queer cinema is not only that they bridge this gulf, but that they do so by insisting on the overlaps and contradictions and seductive connections between the scholarly and the everyday, instead of diluting them so much that they can neutrally get along. Queer filmmakers were and are often the same people as queer activists, and queer theory and filmmaking have influenced and challenged each other more consistently and more explicitly than one finds in almost any other vein of contemporary cinema, especially the commercial cinema. You don't get Velvet Goldmine or Boys Don't Cry or Brother to Brother or Swoon without Michel Foucault or David Halperin or Kobena Mercer or Judith Butler, but you also don't get, say, Judith Butler without Paris Is Burning—a film that almost single-handedly clarified her field-defining arguments between Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter but also highlighted the continued controversy and ideological aporia within her own thinking.

And I love that there are always more queer movies around than we think. Well beyond the greatest hits that we all think of quickly, "queer" cuts so deep and wide as a concept, in such brilliantly category-shifting fashion, that seemingly "straight" movies, "classic" movies, even "weird" movies can turn out to be queer. Also, sexual daring and erotic insight and intellectual vitality are really inexpensive as far as filmmaking assets go, so queer cinema drives as much energy from local, university, amateur, and do-it-yourself filmmaking as it does from big crews with (comparably) big budgets. To celebrate that legacy of new talents and exciting discoveries, I wrote my review for this Blog-a-Thon about Jenni Olson's The Joy of Life, a movie that's still working out the kinks and limits of a distinctive and promising approach to form, but well worth a rental and a rah-rah for future work by this director.

Enjoy the rest of the Blog-a-Thon (I confess that ModFab's piece is already a favorite for me), thank Queering the Apparatus for hosting it, and thank all the queer films and filmmakers in this universe for giving us so much to love and reconsider and be inspired or angry or gleeful or mournful or informed or enlightened or troubled by.

Montgomery Clift Blog-a-Thon: The Search

I'm a few hours late, but Montgomery Clift has waited 87 years for this blog-a-thon, 41 of them posthumously, so I'm guessing three hours in Central Standard Time aren't going to make him roll over in his grave. Plus, Nathaniel's parties tend to run late into the evening. Trust me, I know. And, I have an excellent excuse for being otherwise occupied, but more on that tomorrow. Best of all, I only have nice things to say about Monty in his first released movie, The Search, which I finally screened this morning after many years of anticipation. I think it's a high point for Monty and even more so for its director, Fred Zinnemann, and if you surf through the comments on her own phenomenal post, you'll find that Self-Styled Siren agrees with me, and who could want better validation than that?

Here, then, is my full review of The Search, and here is the rest of the blog-a-thon. Read them, love them, and rent more Monty! (I have seen 8 of his 17 movies, and these write-ups make me want to see more, especially The Misfits, which I own on DVD but have never watched, Indiscretion of an American Wife and Wild River, which I have on tape from TCM somewhere around here, and Freud, which is apparently harder to find than a good therapist whom your HMO will actually cover.)

William Wyler Blog-a-Thon: The Good Fairy

Goatdog, of whom I was a huge fan for years before I was a neighbor and a friend, is hosting a William Wyler Blog-a-Thon this weekend. Whether it was the announcement itself that inspired me or the completely hysterical and brilliant graphics, what began as a blog post about Wyler's The Good Fairy—a 1935 film I'd never even heard of that predates and completely differs from all of his big Hollywood hits, including Wuthering Heights, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Ben-Hur—turned into my first full review since God (or at least William Wyler) was a boy. Maybe one day I'll manage to churn out one of these that isn't about a movie that's already 72 years old... but I hope you enjoy this one, and though I didn't love the film, I did find it enormously interesting and well worth the rental. (It also goes without saying that the whole blog-a-thon is a real feast.)

Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness

This post is a strange non-sequitur after nearly a month of silence, especially with so many threads dangling and so many novelties (like a redesigned website!) looming on the horizon... but this is the weekend of Goatdog's 1927 Blog-a-Thon, and I hate to miss out. Once you see the beautifully illustrated and deliciously detailed showcase of Chicago cinemas in 1927 that Goatdog has prepared as the centerpiece to his feature, you'll want to participate, too.

All the Oscar enthusiasts out there probably know that during the first year of the Academy Awards, honoring films exhibited in 1927 and 1928, the "Best Picture" category was complemented by a second race called "Artistic Quality of Production," designed to honor films that made extraordinary achievements in their overall formal techniques and poetic modes of expression. F.W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans was the winner, and anyone who has beheld that pearly, rapturous masterpiece would hardly dispute the outcome. Still, rumor has it that the path to victory was cleared for Sunrise by some ideological misgivings about an equally esteemed and durable masterpiece, King Vidor's The Crowd; indeed, the Academy Board had originally anointed The Crowd as the winner until Louis B. Mayer spent all night filibustering against it.

The implication behind this widely accepted Academy lore is that the third entrant in this race, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, was a bridesmaid from the beginning. Given the legendary status of its fellow nominees, Chang may well have deserved its bronze-medal finish, but the movie, an enormous commercial hit at the time of its release, deserves a much bigger audience and more vocal critical support than it has tended to elicit. When Andrew Sarris published The American Cinema in 1968 and basically rewrote popular American film studies as a hierarchical constellation of auteurs, he didn't even afford Cooper and Schoedsack their own paragraph or chapter (this despite the critical and commercial colossus of King Kong), and Chang doesn't appear anywhere in his catalogue of 1927's major releases. Image Entertainment, through its Milestone Collection imprimatur, released a splendid and feature-packed DVD of the film back in 2000, but it's hard to find stores that stock it or places to rent it, apart from online behemoths like Amazon and Netflix.

What I love about Chang, a film as exciting and entertaining to teach as it is to watch, is that even a casual viewer can see how Cooper and Schoedsack are simultaneously feeding into the nascent genre of the feature documentary even as they are telegraphing the various short-cuts, contrivances, and white lies (in more sense than one) on which their sentimentally exciting and affectionate ethnographic adventure-yarn depends. Like its obvious model, Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook of the North, Chang introduces us to a genial but hardworking nuclear family who come to stand in for the entire region they inhabit (northern Thailand, in this case) and a vast imaginary field of "custom" and "tradition" that ostensibly permeates the area. Kru, our protagonist, his wife Chantui, and their children live in an elevated cottage with their pet monkey Bimbo (about whom more later). The family mostly live on the food they grow and the animals they hunt, though we also enjoy brief glimpses of a wider village life in which they participate, on the occasions when they leave their isolated home. Chang already makes for beautiful, engaging viewing just on the bases of the radiant location photography, the textures of the foliage, the ground, and the manmade structures, the spontaneous movements of the children and their pets.

As with Nanook, most of the humble "life" and domestic rituals we observe in Chang are recreations of already-outmoded or fanciful practices, enacted by a locally selected cast who were very conscious of performing for the camera. Kru really was married to Chantui, and their onscreen children really were their children, which is more than you can say for Nanook, and as the senior location scout and interpreter for the film crew, Kru himself enjoyed more of the creative process and was perhaps more creatively involved in the staging of his own (mis)representation than was Allakariallak, the Itinivuit man who played Flaherty's "Nanook."* In these ways, Chang captures a family group and a setting that are slightly more "real" than Nanook's, and yet the film flaunts its artificiality much more obviously. Some well-shot and extremely exciting sequences of "spontaneous" leopard attacks are nonetheless blocked suspiciously well toward the sightlines and placements of the cameras; the interior shots of the treehouse, in at least some instances, don't match the exterior perspectives of what is supposed to be the same structure.

Then there is Bimbo, the monkey, who pulls a peculiar triple-duty within Chang's terms as comic relief, as a primary site of audience identification (doting on the cute children, fleeing various predators), and as an uncomfortably anthropomorphized character, blurring the human/animal divide in ways that refract poorly on the film's representations of Kru and his family. If you count the title cards, I believe that Bimbo has the most "dialogue" in the movie, interacting with the family in a fully integrated way. He has some close shaves escaping a leopard and an elephant that make obvious use of rear-projection and other photographic tricks. Cooper and Schoedsack dote on Bimbo in a way that they don't on the human characters, and every viewer has to decide whether this choice relieves the humans of the obligation to be "adorable" or if Chang implies a mental, emotional, and linguistic continuity among the people of Siam and the gibbons in their midst.

Whatever its political implications, Chang (the Thai word for "elephant") is a remarkably efficient entertainment, packing more visual punch and pulse-quickening spectacle into 69 minutes than Trader Horn did, and with less jarring cuts between the personal scenes and the animal footage. Indeed, Chang's cameras get daringly close to several beasts, and though you notice and even relish the clear fictional contrivance of the climactic elephant stampede—it would be horrible if this razing of an entire village, portrayed to us as entertainment, were real—the pure, thundering spectacle of this sequence is quite something to behold. Watching one pissed-off elephant maul Kru's hut when she thinks he's kidnapped her baby is impressive enough, but a sprinting fleet of elephants is something altogether different, without so much as a pixel of special effects.

Chang scored with the public and with the industry. As you'll notice from the copious clippings and press notes included on the DVD, the exotic stories about the filming of Chang—frequently turning on the directors' reckless pursuit of the best, closest footage of their dangerous, unpredictable animals—were almost as crowd-pleasing as the film itself. If Chang's box office earned the duo the opportunity to direct King Kong, Cooper and Schoedsack's reputations as bold explorers and thrill-seeking image-makers certainly played into the Kong screenplay's decision to center the action around Carl Denham, a reckless filmmaker who'll do anything and venture anywhere for the right shot, and who promotes himself just as hungrily as Cooper and Schoedsack did. One tidbit on the Chang DVD includes this injunction from the directors and their studio to the theater-owners across the country exhibiting Chang: "If you are not in the habit of personally endorsing your programs, digress from the straight and narrow path just this once. Chang will live up to anything you say!" The filmmakers also declaim the virtues of projecting Chang inside pet-stores or zoo compounds, so that audiences could ostensibly watch the excited reactions of animals to their own on-screen images.

I haven't tried watching Chang in a zoo, but I have screened it for an auditorium full of restless, pent-up college undergraduates, and their reactions—excited, skeptical, nostalgic, ironic, but universally intrigued—were thrilling to gauge, and Chang's aspirations to "reality," even as it serially undercut its own pretenses in that direction, make it a fascinating time capsule of popular cinema at a moment where talkies were just arriving and the drift toward theatrical, narrative- and human-centered comedies and dramas was not yet graven in stone. Sunrise, in its more delicate and elegiac way, is just as commemorative of cinema's moment of reckoning, after thirty years of evolving traditions and on the cusp of seismic revolutions, ascendant studios, and much more standardized production. Cinema, up to that point, subsisted on a recipe of short "actualities" (acrobats flexing, boats docking, fires, kisses, rescues), nature photography, slapstick humor, formal experiments with light and continuity, and literary narratives. Chang gives you a little of all of this at once, and it's built, shot, and scripted to entertain literally anyone, from a 4-year-old to a nonagenarian member of its own original audience. Give it a whirl, tell your friends, and if you're drafting a film-studies syllabus pretty soon, consider giving the admittedly wondrous Nanook a rest.

* Turns out this family's a fraud, too! (Note the comment below.) Let's at least hope that Cooper and Schoedsack didn't keep filming while Kru and his compatriots cried for help and relief on their seal-hunting mission, as Flaherty allegedly did, and that Kru didn't die of starvation on an ice floe right after Chang came out, as Allakariallak/"Nanook" apparently did. Most of all, let's hope that reviewers like me will stop dropping tidbits of knowledge that turn out to be false, and stick to the center-ring task of reviewing and extolling what's on screen! Mea culpa. —the Management

Images © 1927 Paramount Pictures, 2000 Image Entertainment

Supporting Actress Blog-a-Thon, Served Up with a Smile

One especially frustrating confluence of being away from the internet and having my blog infested by a code-devouring succubus was that I missed out on celebrating the 1975 Supporting Actress Smackdown alongside my comrades in arms. This Smackdown was exceptional for all sorts of reasons: a clipreel from Nathaniel that was even sassier and more illustrative of the nommed performances than usual; a new and very welcome participant in all the smacking; two exquisite nominees from the same legendary film; better-than-expected work from the two nominees I hadn't seen before, even though their films were horrendous; and the announcement of a hiatus in Supporting Actress Sundays for a few months while our fearless leader StinkyLulu recharges his batteries and considers some tweaks to the format.

But Stinky's just a little tired, y'all; he's not neurasthenic. Besides, the committed actressexual doesn't just plunge into celibacy at a moment's notice, so today's Supporting Actress Blog-a-Thon is more than adequate recompense for the January Smackdown that isn't to be. It's a glorious smorgasbord in and of itself, with movie bloggers all over the web stumping for one supporting actress performance from 2006 that they'd like to include in our collective, glittering time capsule. I haven't had time to read the other entries yet, but I'm already excited to hear praise for some overlooked gems, such as ModFab's ode to the very fine Kerry Washington in The Last King of Scotland, Nathaniel's gorgeous enthusiasm for the delicious Meryl Streep in A Prairie Home Companion (her best perf in 2006!), or Radio Allegro's praise for the superb Mia Kirshner in The Black Dahlia. I'm also ready to be convinced by some arguments for performances that I didn't quite love: for example, here's our resplendent host's commentary on Lindsay Beamish, the dyspeptic dominatrix in Shortbus.

For my own part, not just to avoid more consensus choices but because I think she's every bit their equal, I'd like to sing the praises of Ashley Johnson, a 23-year-old actress previously unknown to me, who contributed such an exemplary, unfussy, and wondrously humane performance as Amber in Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation. I am still recovering from my astonishment at the public and even the critical indifference to Fast Food Nation, which has yet to eke out even $1 million after seven weeks of release, a sharp and witty trailer, an interesting and generally favorable reception at Cannes, and two years of hype about the resurgence of liberal politics in Hollywood cinema, often in films much inferior to this one—an admittedly flawed and occasionally clumsy but smart, eloquent, detailed, and vividly acted panorama. Yes, in some passages, Eric Schlosser's nonfiction investigation has not translated sublimely into mellifluous dialogue or satisfying dramatic structures, but increasingly, the film manages the clever and principled trick of eliciting deep emotion and educated ire without compromising on its subdued, almost creepily mundane tone, sound, and look.

Johnson's performance is fundamental to the film's grand success in this regard. Cast as a fetching, agreeable, and breathtakingly self-assured teenager—a type we rarely see in movies, who makes even Rory Gilmore seem mush-mouthed and unappealing—Johnson already achieves quite a bit by communicating decency, intelligence, and lively affection for her single mom (Patricia Arquette), her gadabout uncle (Ethan Hawke), her friends, her dreams of college, her co-workers, even her alienating job at Mickey's, where she's surrounded by plastic furniture, felonious uniforms, chemical smells, and dead air, to say nothing of the shit-stained burgers and carbonated sugar-water. Amber persists, because Johnson does, in being game without being a dupe, responsible without being officious, jovial without being silly, equally at ease with adults and peers, and quite obviously liked even by her disaffected, criminally tempted cohorts at Mickey's, especially the character played by Paul Dano. Essential goodness, as the Smackdowners agreed in the comparable case of Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Mike Leigh's Secrets & Lies, is a deceptively difficult thing to conjure on screen, especially within the mandates of narrative film to complicate or "dramatize" that goodness through unexpected actions, accelerated evolutions, or contrived scenarios.

Kudos, then, to Linklater's direction and to his and Schlosser's script for clearing some space and defying some clichés so that Johnson can assemble the credible, layered, and intriguingly optimistic person that she does. Which isn't to say that Amber doesn't evolve over the course of the film. After involving herself with a student-activist group at a nearby college, Amber carries herself to the brink of a massive and dismaying realization, not just about her job at Mickey's but about the enormous social and political structures in which it participates. Amber soon finds herself engaging in anti-corporate guerrilla efforts that seriously jeopardize the ubiquitous approval and promised upward mobility that have surrounded her through the film. It's a tribute to Johnson that she has evoked Amber's potential and her soundness of character so strongly and uncloyingly that we shudder for Amber in these moments, even if we are politically sympathetic to her new intents; it's a further tribute that she doesn't jettison Amber's earlier personality in the throes of this epiphany, but expresses Amber's reluctance, panic, and mystification even as she sticks to her cadre's dangerous plan of action after several of her older, more experienced comrades have already fled the scene. The connecting thread is Amber's solid but complicated idealism: the very trait that once may have conditioned her blindness now forces her toward precarious action.

Amber teeters on a precipice between innocence and experience, helplessness and enlightenment, optimism and agitation at the end of Fast Food Nation, in a way that makes her both an audience surrogate and a gleaming projection of how we may wish to see ourselves. Few people in Fast Food Nation's audience are as legitimately green as Amber, even if we, like her, are allowing ourselves our very first frank look at the social and political enormities innate to corporatized food and abattoir economics. Johnson's performance poses germane and important questions: will political awareness require the tarnishing of Amber's happiness, even her goodness? By the same token, are her confidence and maturity fundamentally premised on naïveté and unknowing complicity? Where is the balance between communal responsibility and shallow self-interest within Amber's political enlightenment? We can see that her activism rewards, at least in part, her high-school dreams of sharper, more enriching friends, better invitations, more promising crushes on more interesting boys. She even suggests a nervous but powerful attraction for her uncle, or at least for his life of travel and thought and tale-spinning, so the connections between domestic influences and public conduct remain lucid and compelling in Johnson's delineation of Amber.

To ask more acting-specific questions, who besides Johnson could draw out the warmth and spontaneity in Patricia Arquette, who hasn't looked this comfortable or relaxed on screen since Flirting with Disaster? Who, short of Julie Delpy, has not only indulged Ethan Hawke in his freewheeling, coffee-shop improvisations but has actually sustained and improved them with her own bright-eyed, attentive, exquisitely pitched responses? How many actresses this young, and this new to cinema, can hold the screen so compellingly in shots of active listening, fond onlooking, genial small-talk, and the nearer and nearer tremors of a shifting inner life? Johnson is a terrific, fresh screen partner and a shrewd, disciplined actress, and she manages all of this with the ease of prime Kirsten Dunst, but without the aloofness or the heavy lids. She acts terrifically without ever seeming like she's auditioning for other roles, or straining to demonstrate her gravitas. In other words, she proves her superiority to most actors her age (at least when she's cast in the right part) without signalling that this, in fact, is her primary objective—a lesson from which the talented but sternly self-conscious Natalie Portman might take some notes.

Johnson's is the smile with which Fast Food Nation serves up its terrible news. The movie wouldn't work if the smile weren't so sparkling, and so real, or if the gathering storm of fear and knowledge weren't palpable beneath that smile.

(Images © 2006 Participant Productions/20th Century Fox)

Pfeifferiana

When I think about Michelle Pfeiffer, I think about Nathaniel, and when I think about Nathaniel, I think about how much he hates it when actresses muffle their natural beauty or, worse, actively dowd themselves down in order to chase an Oscar. I don't know whether he already harbored such animus toward this practice when Pfeiffer, his favorite actress, scored her first two Oscar nominations for two of her most radiant, self-consciously sexy turns in Dangerous Liaisons and The Fabulous Baker Boys, or whether it was thus Pfeiffer herself who instilled in his mind that one can be preternaturally exquisite and act terrifically and find a berth on Oscar's ballot... even if, you know, you maybe can't actually win. I'm sure Nathaniel hates it that Michelle lost to Geena Davis in The Accidental Tourist and Jessica Tandy in Driving Miss Daisy, but if, on either occasion, Michelle had lost to, say, Charlize Theron in North Country or Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby, I'm sure we would all still be breathing the ash from his own spontaneous combustion.

Those two performances as well as Michelle's nominated work in the somewhat underrated Love Field are all wonderful, but at risk of prompting Nathaniel's ire, my two favorite Pfeiffer performances both sort of wander down that garden path of cosmetic humility that customarily drives him a little crazy. Then again, when Michelle dresses down or slings hash or wears flannels or lets the tresses go unwashed, she never does it in a way that betrays any false exhibitionism (not to mention that she is never less than ravishing). She never chases Oscar, even when she's cast in a part that invites some showboating; she's too ego-less of a performer to take that approach, and beyond that, for me, her calling card as an actress is a laser-beam commitment to the severity and hard truths of her characters. No wig or costume, either frilly or frumpy, is ever going to get in the way of an emotional lucidity and an integrity like Pfeiffer's. She isn't, to me, the world's rangiest actress, or at least she doesn't seem so: some of her tics and inflections, especially that hard quality of her voice in extreme states of emotion, are a little predictable from role to role. And yet, when I sometimes get too comfortable with my assumption that Pfeiffer, however capable, works best in a confined register of parts—maybe because of her weird, recent predilection for undemanding soft-genre pics helmed by undistinguished directors—I look back over her filmography (often at some prompting on Nathaniel's site) and realize how unexpectedly she has popped up in some very disparate projects, and what new facets she has revealed in both her talent and her movies whenever she has traveled like that.

I'm staying mum about my favorite Pfeiffer performance, even though it's by many leagues my favorite, because it'll be coming up later—a good deal later—on my countdown of favorite films, and I don't want to spoil that fun. But my second favorite Pfeiffer performance is in A Thousand Acres, a movie that engendered little affection or admiration upon its 1997 release, partly because Touchstone Pictures had no idea how to sell it, and partly because, sad to say, director Jocelyn Moorhouse (Proof, How To Make an American Quilt) had next to no idea how to make it. Working from Jane Smiley's terrific but tonally delicate novel, as loamy and tough and deceptively complex as the Iowan soil, the film version of A Thousand Acres makes almost every conceivable mistake of packing in too much incident, editing according to inherited sequence rather than any specifically filmic vision, shamelessly intercutting very different takes within scenes (a true nightmare of anti-continuity), and letting a lot of well-cast actors either flail about (Lange, Robards) or dully congeal (Anderson, Leigh) because they don't seem to be getting any direction.

But then there's Pfeiffer, cast as the watchful and vengeful sister Rose, the Regan to Lange's Goneril, except that the movie's forcing of perspective through Lange (aka Ginny) and the sisters' crucial imbalances of knowledge and motivation basically shift all the nervy but righteous vindictiveness onto Pfeiffer. She can handle it. Boy, can she. From the moment you meet her, whipping up Salisbury steak in a casserole dish and un-self-consciously inhabiting a farm kitchen, Pfeiffer's eyes have got a mean tint of steel, and they seem even wider and more dilated than usual. Her character has just survived a bout with breast cancer, and is still getting acclimated to her mastectomy. She bears an uncertain relation to a handsome prodigal son (Colin Firth's Jess Cagle) who has just returned to Zebulon County, and she seems to bristle around her father (Robards), even when she's superficially making nice, even before the Shit Hits The Fan. Just watching Pfeiffer sitting in a lawn chair at the potluck dinner in the opening scene—legs splayed, elbows and neckline precipitously angled, dry ice in her eyes, while Lange perches with birdlike decorum by her side—it's clear that all the energy and friction in the film is gestating inside her body, her inner abacus of justice and, mostly, injustice.

As the revelations unfold, Pfeiffer stays within her simmering glory, even as the ramshackle editing and august but ill-situated photography show no real knack for capitalizing on the performance. The convolutions of Smiley's plotline, which feel so lean and hewn in the context of her prose, find their equivalent in Pfeiffer's taut but unembellished delivery. A lot of the biggest secrets are hers to reveal, but they're terrible secrets, and Pfeiffer's Rose takes an almost unseemly pleasure in bringing them forward. Even as the pendulum of moral right keeps swinging her way, we feel less and less comfortable with her, and we wonder how much we should trust her; Lange, usually so good at watercolor gradations and coiled psychologies, doesn't come anywhere near to where Pfeiffer does with a much less intricate approach. Wondrously, when Rose actually starts to break all kinds of ethical pacts, even those with her sister, we start to like her more: the actress's ironic management of empathy and outrage far exceeds what script-writer Laura Jones has achieved. All of this comes together in Rose's climactic monologue, delievered from a cot in a cancer ward, beneath an awful "cancer patient" wig, and amidst a chapter of the film that, even by its own poorly managed standards, feels listless, unformed. Pfeiffer's Rose has to list all the ways in which she has failed at life, but she preserves an enormous and wounding pride at her categorical refusal to gloss or deny: "I saw," she says, and it's the kind of pared-down screenwriting phrase that usually dies up there on the screen, but Pfeiffer brings it fully across. You wish there were more than half a movie around her, but there's certainly a whole movie in her, and it's the one you wind up remembering.

Farm wife? Cancer patient? Gingham? Dust of the plains? Big closing speech? Yep, all that, and still no Oscar nod for Pfeiffer, or even a whisper of a chance, even in the bum year for lead actresses that was 1997. Even at the Golden Globes, where the reaching to fill the category was an audible moan in the ballroom, it was Lange who scored what Holly Hunter so memorably described as a "Hamburger Helper nomination." I didn't get it then, and I don't now, but you never get the sense that Pfeiffer cares about these sorts of things. And why should she, with her work so amply and deftly behind her? She grasped the role. She co-produced the film. She held fast under poor stewardship and among struggling colleagues. She put it over. She saw. Now you go see. (And go here for more posts in Nathaniel's Pfeiffer Blog-a-thon, on this, the eve of her 48th birthday. That's eleven years older than Gillian, and she's still a vision!)

Even More Reindeer Games

Here's an entire preview reel of coming and in some case constant attractions: three sandboxes in which Nick's Flick Picks has been invited to make lists and sandcastles and mudpies (oh my!).

First, I realize with utter horror that I have not plugged the ModFab 6, a sexy sextet of wonks and wags that ModFab and his readers elected a couple of months ago to weigh on occasionally on matters big and small: artistic, political, ephemeral. ModFab's is still the blog I most admire for breadth of interests, regularity of updates, ratio of laughs, streamlined innovations of form, and the occasional, delectable sharpness of claw. Meow, indeed! The half-dozen angels winging around our proud and fearless Charlie include some regular bill-sharers on my own blog (Nathaniel, Dr. S), two more recent but huggable acquaintances (par3182 and StinkyLulu), and the fetching Melissa, whom I've met one single time—but as Jacqueline Susann reminds us, once is not enough, and I can only imagine she was thinking of Melissa when she said this. Most recently, Tha 6 have suggested some pastimes for Spring, some dance-floor necessities, and some diamonds in the rough hauteur of the Whitney Biennial. You never know what we'll be up to, into, or down on next, so stay tuned!

Meanwhile, two of the 6'ers are exciting my taste-buds with their own projects. Nathaniel, with the rodeo swagger of Jack Twist himself, has lassoed more than two dozen bloggers as participants in his Michelle Pfeiffer Blog-a-thon, kicking off on April 28th, the eve of Her 48th birthday. You don't have to be a Pfan to read—or, better yet, to post your own Pfilm review, Pfeiffer-related memory, tangential observation, praise-poem, watercolor, acrostic, Pfeiffer-themed quilt-pattern, velvet canvas, or any other tribute you might devise. Just send a URL off to The Film Experience, and he'll tie it all together, boosting traffic for all and raining glory down on Her Pfeline Elusiveness.

Lastly, StinkyLulu is now devoting every holy day of rest to a truly spiritual enterprise: Supporting Actress Sundays, turning each week to a nominee from years past. The 411: Stinky consecutively screens and reports on all five nominees from a given race, and at the end, Nathaniel, me, and all of you are invited to weigh in with your own impressions and shoulda-won vote. Right now, even as we murmur, Stinky is nearing the end of the 1958 cycle. Today, you can read why he found Oscar's own choice, Wendy Hiller in Separate Tables, to be such a pleasant surprise. Next week, we three talking heads have our scheduled smackdown. (Some disagreement has already been registered in relation to Martha Hyer in Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running). From now until then, you can cast your own vote as to what year Stinky should take up as his next renter's obsession.