Showbiz History: Whoopi's win, Haji's legacy, and Aaron's scars
Sunday, January 24, 2021 at 10:00AM 9 random things that happened on this day, January 24th, in showbiz history...
Jeanne Moreau, Marcello Mastroianni, and Monica Vitti in "La Notte"
1936 Anything Goes, the musical comedy hits movie theaters with Bing Crosby and Ethel Merman in the classic roles of Billy Crocker and Reno Sweeney.
1961 Michelangelo Antonioni's star-laden classic La Notte has its world premiere in Milan...
It will later win the top prize at Berlinale and become Italy's sixth Oscar submission in the still new Best Foreign-Language Film category . Sadly, it ended up breaking Italy's 100% streak of Oscar nominations (they'd already nabbed five noms, 2 wins and 3 honoraries by then).
1971 It's the 50th anniversary of Ken Russell's The Music Lovers (1971) which premiered on this day and which we've always wanted to see. Maybe today is the day?
1976 The 33rd Golden Globes are held with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Sunshine Boys winning for film (we were just discussing Cuckoo's Nest substantial awards haul) and Kojak and Barney Miller taking the TV prizes.
1986 The 43rd annual Golden Globes are held with Out of Africa and Prizzi's Honor taking the top film prizes. The most interesting piece of this night historically is that not a single one of their acting winners (Jon Voight, Whoopi Goldberg, Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Turner, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Meg Tilly) repeated at the Oscars!!!
1997 Fierce Creatures opens in theaters, reuniting the cast of A Fish Called Wanda which had been such a sleeper smash in 1988. Lightning did not strike twice, though, and the film has been largely forgotten.
1999 The 56th annual Golden Globes are held with Saving Private Ryan and Shakespeare in Love taking the Best Film prizes and both Cate Blanchett and Gwyneth Paltrow won Best Actress, setting up those infamous battles at the Oscars that followed. David E Kelley, aka Mr Michelle Pfeiffer, was king of TV with his shows The Practice (drama) and Ally McBeal (comedy) both winning.
2006 Disney announces its buying Pixar for $7.4 billion
2014 I, Frankenstein is released with Aaron Eckhart as the very handsome creature (but for those pesky prosthetic scars). Remember that one? His co-star Yvonne Strahovski would later find much more success getting evil for The Handmaid's Tale.
Today's Birthday Suit
Canadian British-Filipino cult star "Haji" (real name "Barbarella" if you can believe it!!!) was born on this day in 1946. She co-starred in multiple Russ Meyer cult classics including Motorpsycho and Faster Pussycat Kill Kill... and even worked on a Cassavettes picture (Killing of a Chinese Bookie). Sadly all the streaming sites ignore her whole era and genre of filmmaking. We've never seen her Meyers pictures even though we've recognized the pop culture homages over the years. None of them seem to be available to rent except for the more mainstream Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. We were actually going to do Faster Pussycat Kill Kill for our old series "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" but couldn't ever find it.
Other showbiz birthdays today: Carrie Coon (Gone Girl, The Nest), Daveed Diggs (Blindspotting, Hamilton), Kristen Schaal (Bob's Burgrs, Flight of the Conchords), Spain's Belén Cuesta (The Endless Trench, The People Upstairs), French wonder Daniel Auteuil (Jean de Florette, Caché), French funny lady Karin Viard (Potiche, Delicatessen), Ed Helms (The Office, The Hangover), Matthew Lillard (Scream, Descendants), Sharon Tate (Valley of the Dolls, The Wrecking Crew), Mischa Barton (Lawn Dogs, The OC), Oscar winner Ernest Borgnine (Marty), Nastassja Kinski (Tess, Cat People), John Belushi (SNL, Animal House), actor/director Justin Baldoni (Jane the Virgin, Five Feet Apart), Stephen Huszar (Letterkenny, Christmas in the Rockies), Ann Todd (The Paradine Affair, The Sound Barrier), Belgium's Veerle Baetans (Broken Circle Breakdown, The Loft), Julia Dreyfus (Kill Bill, Inglorious Basterds), Michael Ontkean (Twin Peaks, Making Love), and singer Neil Diamond
Reader Comments (17)
Blanchett is a perfect example why actor should - given the opportunity - invest in theater experiences. Her two eras of acting, pre and pos Blue Jasmine are pretty distinctive imo. First capable technical yet a bit shallow acting, then best of a generation with Jasmine and Carol. Anyway, Montenegro should have won that year
Also, La Notte is a masterpiece, its one of my overs & overs. Thanks for continuing with this series.
Back in The 80's they weren't as much of a predictor of winners Streisnad won for directing Yentl and was snubbed..
Criterion needs to release "The Music Lovers " on Blu ray so we can enjoy Ken Russells movie musical genius
What a shame we can barely stream Haji movies! That gif alone has inspired many, many filmmakers and performers. (The most recent in memory being Rose McGowan in the opening scene of Grindhouse).
Yvonne STRAHOVSKI, Nathaniel.
am I the only one that found Matthew Lillard completely awards-worthy in Scooby Doo? He NAILED Shaggy, something I believed impossible back then (not even a fan of the original series nor characters, but Lillard achieved the impossible, that I would keep interested in the film, and even repeated views, just for him..). Typical case of great performance in a train-wreck of a film (even if James Gunn's screenplay dared to do the ultimate plot twist with Scrappy Doo, which pissed most fans, lol)
_'Julia Drefyuss (Kill Bill, Inglorious Bastards)'_
I cannot imagine that! Hahaha
@J: Nathaniel meant French actress Julie Dreyfus, who turns 55 today. I don't remember her role in Inglourious Basterds, but she played O-Ren Ishii's lawyer in Kill Bill. Her IMDb page:
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0237838/
I absolutely love the idea of a Globes without a single Oscar match. Speaking of 1985, why is Out of Africa so reviled on Twitter?
Brevity -- yes, that's who i was referring to. Her name is similar but it's *not* Julia Louis-Dreyfuss
Peggy -- right? It would be so exciting now.
La Notte.... *chef's kiss* A true masterpiece in cinema. Antonioni in the 1960s was unstoppable.
The Music Lovers is on YouTube in spectacular Panavision and looks sumptuous. Ken Russell and Glenda Jackson make lurid magic together.
Peggy Sue: My wife and I have been watching all the Best Pic nominees going backwards in time for the past few years, and we were in 1985 this summer. This is how I'd rank them:
Witness: A-
The Color Purple: B+
Kiss of the Spider Woman: B+
Out of Africa: B
Prizzi's Honor: B-
There's nothing exactly *wrong* with "Out of Africa," but it implicitly asks us to sympathize with an entitled while lady in Africa while generally relegating the perspectives of the Africans to the background. Oscar was (for some reason) very fond of these types of "white lady struggles amid the others" epics in the '80s, as I've now seen: "Places in the Heart," "A Passage to India," etc.
"The Color Purple" has its flaws for sure (length, for one, and not much of an interior life for some of the characters), but it's a better told story that pushes the emotional buttons more effectively, and has gangbusters performances from Whoopi & Oprah; both should've won.
The Color Purple is just about even with Out of Africa in terms of quality, the Oscar choice was solid. And the wonderful Klaus Maria Brandauer absolutely deserved that Oscar.
La Notte, although it is the least impressive Antonioni film of the early '60s, is, still, a stone cold masterpiece.
There are movies to be made about the lives of Black people in Colonial Africa, but Out of Africa is not that movie. The true story of a white European woman who runs a farm on her own during the Colonial era is also a story worth telling. A significant part of the story is her failure - the fact that she, as an interloper, does not understand the land (as the natives keep telling her). In the end, she realizes that the land is unfarmable using her Old World techniques and should be wild, she doesn't belong in Africa, and she returns to Europe.
Practically all Westerns (even modern Westerns that I enjoy, like True Grit and the Homesman) ask us to sympathize with the white settlers, while leaving the Native Americans whose land they colonize in the background (or worse, making them enemies), and yet they aren't examined like Out of Africa. I think that's interesting.
Paranoid Arnold hit's the nail on the head: OUT OF AFRICA "implicitly asks us to sympathize with an entitled while lady in Africa while generally relegating the perspectives of the Africans to the background.'"This kind of critique can become old fast, but here it seems justified. 1985 just seems a bit too recent for that to be a non-issue. (CLAIRE DENIS brilliantly problematizes this situation in her films, CHOCOLATE and WHITE MATERIAL.) Also, I can't think of a single best picture winner I found more butt-numbingly boring. I'd gladly watch GANDHI, THE ENGLISH PATIENT, or even SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE again, but I cannot guarantee I could make it through a revisit to OUT OF AFRICA . I'm in my 50s, and at this age, you realize you only have so many more years left.