List-Mania: Glenda Jackson & Lots of Triple-Crown Acting Trivia

This is a update/reworking of two previous posts about Triple Crowns!

Glenda Jackson is the oldest performer (82) to complete the Triple Crown

Since I'm on record as being annoyed that all anyone cares about is the EGOT it's time to celebrate our preferred obsession: The Triple Crown of Acting. That's when a performer manages the Emmy, Oscar, and Tony. To date only 24 actors* have accomplished this, with Glenda Jackson being the most recent recipient as of this past Sunday night at the Tony Awards. Triple Crowns have become much more commonplace in the 21st century since actors move much more fluidly through the three mediums than they did in before the turn of the century. TV has totally lost its stigma for movie stars and Broadway is more welcome to very short runs freeing major stars up to continue with their movie and TV careers without as much scheduling trauma.  A TRUCKLOAD OF TRIVIA AFTER THE JUMP...

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Top Ten: Annette Bening's Best Performances

The one and only Annette Bening turns 60 today. But, really, she's ageless. And with agelessness comes the superpower of never-peaking. She's been brilliant from the start and, if anything, keeps getting moreso. Herewith our ten favorite performances by The Bening, though should you ask us on another day the films and the order would change.

THE BENING'S 10 BEST

10 Mother and Child (2009/2010) 
Released in the early summer of 2010 to little fanfare, and immediately eclipsed by a much bigger summer hit in The Kids Are All Right,  she was moving playing an unlikeably negative and guarded woman who'd once given up a child (Naomi Watts) for adoption. 

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Q&A: Actors Who Should Be More Famous, Broadway Crossovers, and Animal Horror

Hello everyone!

Nathaniel, eternally cat-sittingWe haven't done a Q & A in so long so let's jump right in. In order to actually do these more often I'll answer just five or six questions at once. Hopefully this will stir up more focused comment parties, too!

PAR: Julianne Moore, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Annette Bening enter the thunderdome. Only one leaves. Who? - par

A: LOL! I hope you aren't being cruel and just making me sacrifice two of my all time favorites at the altar of, well, my Pfavorite. But if we're talking about cage matches in post-apocalypse desert landscapes my answer is The Bening. Moore would break down into crying jags in no time, becoming too vulnerable. Pfeiffer would seem like easy prey put up a very spirited and scary pfight but you know that The Bening is all wile and steel and surprise maneuvers. How else did she conquer Hollywood and Warren Beatty and continue to become even more incredible as an actress the older she got despite being brilliant right out of the gate?

STEVE G: What film out of Cannes 2018, that wasn't previously on your radar, are you most excited to see?

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Blueprints: "American Beauty"

Last month we dove into one of the most iconic shower scenes in cinema for April Showers. For May Flowers, Jorge takes a look into one of the most famous thematic uses of a flower in film.

American Beauty was at one point supposed to be titled American Rose. This is neither a coincidence nor an appropriate alternative. The film, a satire about American suburbia and the layers of darkness that society hides underneath their pretty but rotting exteriors, heavily uses the recurring image of rose throughout. Not just in the now iconic nude sequence with Mena Suvari. 

Roses appear through the script in many key parts, usually in places where a character is putting up a façade for the world, or when they are completely submitting to their darkest impulses. Or when those two collide. Let’s take a look at where the flowers ominously represent both the attachment and the repulsion against society’s “pretty” standards...

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Review: "The Seagull"

by Jason Adams

Nina (Saoirse Ronan) is sweetly exasperated by Konstantin (Billy Howle), whose avant-garde play she has just acted (and flopped) in for a small crowd of friends and relations. "Nothing happens in your play," she says. "It's all people talking. You ought to add a love story."

Anton Chekov, who wrote the maybe-you've-heard-of-it 1895 play The Seagull upon which this movie is based, was of course making a joke at his own expense --The Seagull is really nothing but talk and love stories. Half a dozen love stories are all twisted up, a gordian knot of romantic entanglements...

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