In Contention

Tag: Ryan Murphy

  • Jill Clayburgh (1944-2010)

    It’s odd to think that younger readers may principally recognize Jill Clayburgh, the New York City-born actress who passed away yesterday after a long battle with leukemia, from her Emmy-nominated role in TV’s “Nip/Tuck” — where she played Bobbi Broderick, a vengeful victim of unsuccessful liposuction, done in the hope of securing a job ahead of younger, thinner rivals.

    It was a sharp, upsetting performance, all the more haunting because it was easy to imagine Bobbi as the soured middle-aged self of Erica Benton, the unaffected, sexually liberated divorcée she played, to career-making effect, in Paul Mazursky’s 1978 romantic dramedy “An Unmarried Woman.”

    The film is rarely spoken of today, but Clayburgh’s immense performance, balancing sweetly goofy comedy with stabs of untempered pain and anger, was something of a feminist touchstone for the depiction of “real” women in American cinema — she won Best Actress at Cannes for her efforts, and was nominated for an Oscar that unwisely went to Jane Fonda instead.

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  • Can we ‘Eat’ yet?

    For a major star vehicle, directed by the current ruler of prime-time television, that is only four days away from release, shouldn’t the profile of “Eat Pray Love” be a little higher right now? I admit I’m on the wrong side of the Atlantic; perhaps American streets, magazines and airwaves are flooded with promotional material for Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of  Elizabeth Gilbert’s chick-lit smash. But the film’s online presence seems decidedly muted, while reviews of any sort have yet to appear. What gives?

    Usually, when critics are kept from seeing or writing about a film until this late in the game, it’s because the product smells decidedly iffy. But that’s hardly the case with “Eat Pray Love”: the source material has a devoted following, the talent involved is top-flight, and the trailer was attractive and thoroughly ingratiating.

    As I made clear in a Page to Screen column recently, I detested Gilbert’s fussy, solipsistic memoir, yet the trailer’s promise of airy romance, luscious scenery and Julia Roberts at her most personable had me pegging the film as one of this summer’s most inviting; if it could win me round, the book’s legions of fans should practically be queuing at the theaters already.

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  • PAGE TO SCREEN: “Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert

    (Apologies for the delay in posting this column. Page to Screen will return to its regular Tuesday spot next week.)

    Chick-lit, the unflatteringly named brand of light confessional writing intended to universalize the problems of modern professional women, has been a beast of a publishing phenomenon since the near-simultaneous arrival on the scene of Helen Fielding’s “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and Candace Bushnell’s “Sex and the City” in the late 1990s.

    Marked by clear Transatlantic cultural differences, those volumes were nonetheless linked by their semi-autobiographical nature, their urban media milieu, a similar issue slate of sex, career, mild vice and the ongoing hunt for Mr. Right/Darcy/Big and a tone of chatty journalese – both, after all, were spinoffs of popular newspaper columns.

    They also have one other crucial thing in common: massively successful screen translations that continue to bear fruit. A third big-screen Bridget Jones outing is currently in the works, and you may have heard something about a film called “Sex and the City 2” this summer.

    In Fielding and Bushnell’s wake, then, have come a legion of female writers and journalists converting their personal experiences into bestseller status and swift deals with Hollywood: the success of such titles as “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Julie & Julia,” “Confessions of a Shopaholic,” and the male co-authored “He’s Just Not That Into You” hardly discourage the trend. (You could even argue for last year’s “An Education” as an arthouse twist on the formula.)

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  • OFF THE CARPET: 2008, a year in advance

    Another year, another set of wins…and another look ahead at what’s in store NEXT year.

    It’s never too late to take a long gander at what we might see dominating the film awards landscape in 365 days, and with that in mind, I’ve been doing my usual mulling over the possibilities for a few weeks to put together the sadly thorough examination of the 2008-09 award season that follows. Let’s get into it. There are some major considerations to take into account. right off the top.

    Like Leonardo DiCaprio, for instance, who is set to be the entertainer of the year. With performances in “Body of Lies” (Ridley Scott) and “Revolutionary Road” (Sam Mendes), DiCaprio is working with a duo of awards-proven talent this year. Perhaps that will work against him, much like it did in 2006, and no major Oscar success will come knocking. But we’ll wait until we see the performances. Each of them could be enticing.

    This year’s Best Picture Oscar victor Scott Rudin is back again, by the way, with “Revolutionary Road,” recently inherited by Paramount Vantage and probably one of the true “frontrunners” this far out that we could put our finger on. The only other film in Vantage’s arsenal is Edward Zwick’s “Defiance,” which could simply be a commercial success, but might find its way to multiple nods like “The Last Samurai” and “Blood Diamond” in recent years.

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