In Contention

Tag: Winona Ryder

  • The Great Performances: 1996

    Robert Carlyle in Trainspotting1996 was an odd year, a year when the independent cinema dominated the weak product emerging out of Hollywood. I am going to confess right off the top of this article (as I have numerous times before) that I was not a fan of “The English Patient,” which for me remains one of the most vastly over-appreciated films ever made.  I couldn’t stand Kristin Scott Thomas’s work, though I did enjoy the Dafoe/Binoche storyline.

    So with that out of the way, and firmly in mind, let’s go…

    The Best Actress race was clouded with the notion that Madonna was hell-bent on being nominated for her performance in “Evita,” which finally made it to the screen after years of starts and stops. Her performance split critics, but for me lacked the depth and edge that it was given on stage by Patti Lupone, and that Meryl Streep or Michelle Pfeiffer would have given the role. Her performance proved that Madonna should stop acting as she has little or no acting talent, and should stop making movies and trying to conquer Hollywood as she did the music industry.

    Honestly, the performance rarely rises above a really good community theater performance. Mercifully she was not nominated, but she did win the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical over the eventual Oscar winner, Frances McDormand in “Fargo.” The nominees for Best Actress included, McDormand, Kristin Scott-Thomas for the aforementionend “The English Patient,” Diane Keaton for “Marvin’s Room,” Brenda Blythyn in “Secrets and Lies,” and best of all, perhaps, Emily Watson in “Breaking the Waves.”

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  • What does early (and excessive) Oscar hype do to a film’s chances?

    Cover of Entertainment Weekly featuring The CrucibleIn 1996, a fall movie preview of Entertainment Weekly arrived in my mailbox, the cast of “The Crucible” staring back at me on the cover, making clear to me this was going to be THE film of the fall. There were rumors floating within the industry that the film, based on the Arthur Miller play, could conceivably be nominated for 12 or 13 Academy Awards, and it seemed a cinch for at least a Best Picture nod.

    Having directed the play twice, studied it at length in university and being a huge Arthur Miller fan, I was thrilled that the film was finally going to get the intense big screen version it deserve. The 1959 French adaptation was okay, but not enough people had actually seen it. Here was a chance for one of the greatest dramas of the 20th century to make the transition to film with a superb cast, including Daniel Day-Lewis, Joan Allen, Paul Schofield and Winona Ryder.

    Somewhere along the way Fox panicked and released the film late in December, and though Day-Lewis finished second in balloting for the New York Film Critics Awards, the picture never caught fire as it had been predicted to do. Instead it was a dismal box office failure, nabbing only a supporting actress nomination for Joan Allen and an adapted screenplay nod for Miller.

    “The Crucible” is a great film, with powerhouse performances from Day-Lewis, Allen and Ryder, though many critics attacked the latter. But was the film a victim of over hype, or were audiences simply too familiar with the story? What happened?

    The same sort of thing almost happened to Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” which at this time in 2005 was being touted as not just an Oscar nominee, but the likely winner for Best Picture and Best Director, sight unseen. It opened and was very good, but it wasn’t the searing masterpiece everyone had been hoping for.  And somehow “Crash” won the Best Picture prize.

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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.