In Contention

Tag: Uma Thurman

  • Cannes jury includes Law, Thurman, Assayas

    [NOTE: We’re kicking off our daily Cannes preview series later today — stay tuned.]

    We knew months ago that Robert De Niro was presiding over this year’s Cannes jury, but the eight people joining him on the bench were finally named yesterday. Red-carpet stargazers should be pretty happy with this year’s crop: joining De Niro from the Hollywood side of things are Jude Law and Uma Thurman. (Perhaps festival director Thierry Frémaux is as big a fan of “Gattaca” as we are.)

    Filling the big-name auteur slot on the panel is Olivier Assayas, a three-time Competition entrant who some might say has earned jury president status. Other Cannes alumni include Chadian filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, who took the Jury Prize at last year’s festival for “A Screaming Man,” and Hong Kong action merchant Johnnie To, twice a Palme d’Or contender.

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  • The Great Performances: 2004

    Paul Giamatti in SidewaysIn Alexander Payne’s “Sideways,” Paul Giamatti gave the best performance by an actor in 2004, so said the New York Film Critics Circle, and how right they were.  So why, why, why was the actor denied an Oscar nomination?  Granted, it was a strong year, but his work was at the top of that heap and that snub was one of the biggest shocks of the year.

    Here was a man giving perhaps the finest performance in a comedic film since Dustin Hoffman in “Tootsie.” His co-stars go were recognized, save for the equally deserving Sandra Oh, but the leading man, around whose performance the film stands, is snubbed.  All I can remember saying is: “Wow.”

    Certainly Jamie Foxx deserved the attention he received for “Ray” and Leonardo DiCaprio was astonishing in “The Aviator,” even though he drew some criticism for before too youthful in the role. Rubbish, I thought.  He was superb, inhabiting Howard Hughes as he must have been in those days, brash, cocky, wealthy and willing to do anything that interested him.

    Clint Eastwood was terrific in “Million Dollar Baby,” while Jim Carrey gave a wonderful performance in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” — a marvelous piece of acting, in fact.  Equally fine, and dark, was Kevin Bacon as a pedophile struggling to start anew in “The Woodsman,” which was one of the most daring American films in a long time.

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  • The Great Performances: 2003

    Sean Penn in Mystic RiverThere is little doubt in my mind I am going to take some heat this week, so let’s kick it off right away with my belief that Sean Penn deserved his Best Actor Oscar for “Mystic River,” a performance of overwhelming ferocity and staggering emotional power.

    Yes, I too loved Bill Murray in “Lost in Translation,” and would have loved to have seen him win, but he didn’t, and frankly he lost to a stronger performance (in my opinion). I know it is a cliche to say the nomination is the reward, but I would hope that Murray would be happy with that.

    But there were so many great male performances in 2003!

    Robert Duvall was superb in “Open Range” as the wily old rancher who ends up in a gunfight for his life with his friend, played by the also fantastic Kevin Costner, by his side. Tom Cruise gave a great performance in “The Last Samurai” for director Edward Zwick, while Russell Crowe was again brilliant in “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,” adding to his string of stunning performances.

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  • THE LISTS: Top 10 Tarantino characters

    Christoph Waltz in Inglourious BasterdsIt’s been over a month since we cranked out an installment of The Lists, but with Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” set for release on Friday, it seemed a good time to cook up a new collective.

    When most people praise Tarantino’s skill as a screenwriter, they tend to focus on his well-honed ear for dialogue.  But I have always been much more enchanted by his ability to create a wide array of separately interesting characters that are nevertheless of a piece with the filmmaker’s pulp sense of the world.

    Each of Tarantino’s films are ensembles of one level or another, usually elevated off the page by the performances he gets out of actor eager to take on something fresh.  And no matter the quality of Tarantino’s work behind the camera, the material is always, if nothing else, unique.

    So a list of the greatest characters ever conceived by the man seemed to be the best course of action.  The list doesn’t merely include characters from Tarantino’s films as a director, mind you.  Those he conceived in original screenplays filmed by other directors were considered as well.  Eight films are featured on the list, two of them twice.

    The only Tarantino-affiliated films that don’t appear are “From Dusk Till Dawn” (a personal favorite that, if I was asked on another day, might show up somewhere) and the “Death Proof” segment of “Grindhouse” (which, if I were feeling particularly generous one day, might yield a mention for Kurt Russell’s Stuntman Mike).

    All other Tarantino extravaganzas are well-represented.  Let’s dig in here…

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  • Still got it

    Sorry if there’s been a lot of star-gazing on the site lately, but while I was queuing in the supermarket this morning, I was struck by these magazine covers sitting appropriately side-by-side on a display rack. It’s interesting and heartening to see major face space given to two actresses on the wrong side of the industry’s favored age bracket — contrary to appearances, Uma Thurman is 39, while Julianne Moore is a full decade older.

    Uma Thurman Julianne Moore

    It goes without saying that they both look red-hot, while it’s just as redundant to note that they are both among the finest actresses of their respective generations. So where are the roles?

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  • Acting out

    Meryl StreepThe Guardian’s Ryan Gilbey offers an interesting piece today about screen acting, and the narrow criteria by which many of us judge it. He is writing principally in response to a recently released British film, “Helen,” a rigidly stylised meta-film in which actors play actors participating in a police reconstruction, which has attracted divisive reviews for the deliberately stilted performances of its cast.

    Complaining that many audiences place too much stock in “realism” in acting — using the deification of intensely studied, precise performers likes of Meryl Streep (“a walking manual on acting”) as an example — Gilbey argues the following:

    David Mamet writes that “We confuse ‘I like it’ with ‘It is very realistic.’ If we like it we say, ‘Yes, that’s very true.’” So truth becomes our alibi, our defence for that which pleases us.

    Given our myriad ideas of truth, it is no wonder we turn to the awards ceremonies to clarify and ratify. But while Sean Penn, Philip Seymour Hoffman or Meryl Streep win prizes, and their acting may feel true or right, it is detrimental to the craft to hold up as ideal only those performances that work as audition pieces, or as 30-second excerpts on Oscar night. The actors in Bresson’s Mouchette or Dumont’s La Vie de Jésus are but one component of those films’ defining philosophy and meaning; removed from that context, their performances have no meaning.

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  • Sigourney Weaver + who in ‘Alien 5?’

    Sigourney Weaver and Carrie Henn in AliensMeredith Woerner at io9 is wondering this week whether sci-fi/action writers will finally bone up and produce a sidekick to our modern cinema heroes and heroines worth the price of a ticket.

    She’s rightly spotlighting recent examples in “Live Free or Die Hard” and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” as reason to change the tide in the wimpy second fiddle circuit.

    Woerner brings the scuttlebutt regarding Sigourney Weaver supposedly being game for a fifth “Alien” installment in to fuel the fire even more, adding that Newt (from “Aliens”) and Winona Ryder’s Annalee Call (“Alien: Resurrection”) didn’t exactly pan out as they should have for badass, woah-man E.T. brawler Ellen Ripley in the past.

    Personally — I liked Newt — but I dig this topic, so let’s discuss.

    Weaver managed the impossible in 1986 when she actually landed an Oscar nomiantion for her role in James Cameron’s “Aliens.”  Sure, people are talking up Heath Ledger for a supporting actor mention in this year’s “The Dark Knight,” but Weaver was banging alien heads and walking away with a LEAD actress nod over two decades prior (giving ammunition to many who had hoped for a similar trick to be turned by Uma Thurman in 2003’s “Kill Bill: Vol. 1”).

    We must protect the Ripley legacy!  And I actually think giving her one fiesty, ferocious co-star would do just that.  And if Ridley Scott is indeed “enthusiastic” about going there again, it could be (could be) something special.

    Anyway, I say put Ripley up there with someone able to take the throne.  Like Vera Farmiga.  Anything but another “AVP” massacre.  ANYTHING.