Beauty vs Beast: Say it With Streep

Jason Adams from MNPP here with our fourth and final LGBT themed "Beauty vs Beast" poll of this year's Gay Pride Month, and what happier -- dare I say gayer -- coincidence could we stumble into than a rainbow bright overlap with the 70th birthday celebration of our queen, all hail, Meryl Streep. Yes it was this past Saturday, but this is the sort of thing that should also get its own month, ya know? For our purposes we turn our eyes to Meryls two explicitly queer roles, that of the wife-turned-lesbian-turned-author Jill in Manhattan and that of the party-tossing Janney-kissing Clarissa in The Hours. 

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PREVIOUSLY Y'all killed Eve, but just barely, with last week's Killing Eve poll, giving it voer to Jodie Comer's turn as the villanous Villanelle with just 52% of the vote. Said Dancin' Dan:

"Look, I LOVE Sandra Oh and I LOVE her performance as Eve... but Jodie Comer's Villanelle just steals the show. I love the little smile she gets whenever she's about to go into assassin mode and kill somebody. She just enjoys what she does, and enjoys the lifestyle it has allowed her to live. She's an icon."

Posterized: Julianne Moore, Leading Roles Only

by Nathaniel R

Let's start a new season of Posterized, shall we?

With Gloria Bell expanding nationwide (or thereabouts) let's talk about Julianne Moore's leading roles. She's now in her Post-Oscar years which can be tricky territory for actresses but if Gloria Bell is indication she still has a lot more left in her.

We can't do the ginger goddess's entire filmography on Posterized because she works almost as much as Nicole Kidman, and apparently considers no part or no project too small to be part of. She's been in over 70 movies since her debut in the horror flick Tales of the Darkside (1990) but many of those were supporting roles. So let's focus on ONLY the films that she either headlined or co-headlined (in case of films without one clear lead) for this week's episode shall we, which takes us down to a far more reasonable 27 pictures. How many have you seen? All 27 posters are after the jump...

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Months of Meryl: An Epilogue

John and Matthew watched every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep. 

Meryl has been a superstar for 40 years now

MATTHEW: You never forget the performers who first reach out to you from an illuminated screen and lay claim to your gaze, mind, and devotion. Before I knew anything about the art of screen acting, I knew about the miraculous and almost mythic marvel that is Meryl Streep. Months of Meryl was an undertaking that exhausted and aggravated me without end: for every unparalleled Silkwood in Streep’s filmography, there are at least two The House of the Spirits; for every forgotten or underrecognized gem like The Seduction of Joe Tynan, One True Thing, or A Prairie Home Companion, there are at least three Still of the Nights, Primes, or Dark Matters. But, more importantly, this project illuminated a great deal about a veteran artist whose empathetic interest in the lives of others moved me at such an impressionable age and will never cease to do so.

Watching and writing about Streep’s films side by side by side for well over a year has not taught me a single overarching lesson, but only deepened my appreciation for her mastery...

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Queer TIFF: "Vita & Virginia" and "Tell It To the Bees"

Nathaniel R trying to catch up on those festival reviews! 

Herewith two films about married women breaking out of their heteronormative bonds for passionate lesbian affairs. And what I thought were two movies written by famous actresses though, in fact, only one was...

What would Virginia Woolf make of the multiple cinematic attempts to capture her enigmatic persona in two hours flat? Hell, what did the literary icon make of the movies themselves since they were invented in her lifetime? If I'm ever able to interview Woolf expert, actress/writer Dame Eileen Atkins, I plan to ask her. Woolf was most famously played onscreen by Nicole Kidman in The Hours in which Atkins had a small role. Now it's the ever bewitching Elizabeth Debicki's turn in Vita and Virginia, written by Atkins from her play of the same name...

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Months of Meryl: The Hours (2002)

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep. 

#29 —Clarissa Vaughan, a higher-up and hostess of the New York literary scene attempting to throw a party for her dying friend.

MATTHEW:  Even before Meryl Streep stepped before the cameras as the unraveling hostess Clarissa Vaughan on Stephen Daldry’s The Hours, the actress already possessed a role in Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer-winning, tripartite meditation on love, loss, and Virginia Woolf. Early on in Cunningham’s 1999 novel, Clarissa, while shopping for flower, catches sight of a movie star who may be Streep or Vanessa Redgrave or, much less excitingly for Clarissa, Susan Sarandon emerging from her trailer with an “aura of regal assurance.” Streep’s ephemeral appearance in what will prove to be one of the most pivotal days of Clarissa’s life signifies, quite literally, the sublime; her quasi-cameo is a perfect encapsulation of one of those chance, indirect encounters with a famous face that we use, with varying levels of embarrassment, to distract us from the mundanities of our daily routine, a glimpse of the extraordinary amid the everyday. That Streep the Star, who was gifted a copy of "The Hours" by Redgrave’s late daughter Natasha Richardson, is removed from Daldry’s film speaks to the many, many excisions that occur within any page-to-screen transfer, but it also informs us that Streep’s cinematized Clarissa Vaughan is simply beyond distraction...

I will always appreciate Daldry’s version as a rare if principally partitioned meeting of three extraordinary screen stars...

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