Erin Watches Movies

In March, I read The Big Short, and over the past weekend, I finally watched the movie version on Netflix. 

It’s a very good film. Although it's no secret I’m a big Christian Bale fan, and I really enjoyed his performance as Dr. Michael Burry, I thought Steve Carell’s performance was the best. (I did appreciate how Bale was framed so that the left side of his face was de-emphasized to help create the illusion that he had a glass eye, like the real Michael Burry. Good cinnamon tography.)

I didn’t realize it while I was watching it, but later when Tit Elingtin watched the movie at my suggestion, I noticed Tracy Letts in the cast list. As you may recall, I heard his name in “HardcoverBound 2,” first thought he was a female and probably quite feminist playwright, and then thought to associate him with the films Bug and August: Osage County. 

Tracy Letts has a small role in The Big Short. It makes sense. He’s a theatre kid, writing plays and acting in movies. Also, his mother was the writer Billie Letts, who wrote Where the Heart Is. It was turned into a movie starring Natalie Portman and Ashley Judd. (I saw it in the movie theater with my friend Jamie in 2000.) Judd, who was in Bug, has thus appeared in films by two different Lettses. 

I didn't read this.

But I digress. In trying to find out a little more about Letts’ acting career, I found upon a photo of Letts with Rebecca Hall and Michael C. Hall (no relation to one another). The Halls and Letts are involved in a film called Christine, scheduled to be released in October (next month).

I recently saw Michael C. Hall in Kill Your Darlings, the drama in which Daniel Radcliffe played Allen Ginsberg. I loved that movie. David Cross was adorable as Ginsberg’s poet father, Dane DeHaan* is dreamy even though Lucien Carr was a shit boyfriend to Allen (repressed much?), and Radcliffe is now my second-favorite movie Ginsberg after James Franco. I’ll always have a special place in my heart for the Norman Reedus/Keifer Sutherland/Courtney Love film Beat, with my sweet sweet baby Kyle Secor as David Kammerer, Carr’s creepy stalker. The Kammerer character in KYD is much better written and sympathetic, and Hall does an excellent job playing him.

Rebecca Hall, of course, played the long-suffering wife of Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) in The Prestige. It’s one of my favorite movies, and I’m not the only fan. The Simpsons had its season premiere this past weekend. Mr. Burns re-instated a vaudeville-like stage show like he remembered from his childhood, including a magic act performed by twins Sherri and Terri that referenced The Prestige.

I DID read Christopher Priest's novel - after I saw the movie

I’ve also been watching Rebecca Hall as Edwardian narcissist Sylvia Tietjens, opposite Benedict Cumberbatch, in Parade’s End. She will play the title character in Christine.

Christine is Christine Chubbuck, a real person whom I read about in He Who Shall Remain Shameless. 

Sylvia Tietjens isn’t a very sympathetic character. One tends to feel more sympathy for husband Christopher, who is desperately in love with spunky suffragist Ms. Valentine Wannop (Adelaide Clemens, a young Australian who played Myrtle Wilson’s sister in The Great Gatsby), but too old-fashioned to divorce Sylvia. I'm on episode 2 of the 4-part miniseries, and so far the most scandalous thing Christopher and Valentine have done is get lost in the fog and stay out together all night…sitting next to each other. Just sitting, physical contact at an absolute minimum. It’s like the opposite of Jane Eyre. Where Edward Fairfax Rochester was not concerned enough about pursuing the woman he loved while in a bad marriage, Christopher Tietjens was probably too concerned. Lots of unresolved longing and surreptitious eye contact ensue.

Christine Chubbuck, conversely, is a very sympathetic character. Life dealt her a hand so much worse than she deserved. Her severe depression cost her her life. Live on television. We can't see the actual footage, thank Something, but we will see a dramatized version. 

*I saw him in the trailer for Tulip Fever while waiting for Love and Friendship (a Jane Austen adaptation) to start in the movie theater. I want to see that. Christine might be too sad, even though I'm sure Rebecca Hall's acting will be great. Let's see Tulip Fever instead. As of this writing, its release is planned for February 2017. 

No, I did not read this book.

The Hanukkah Hotness, Night Six: Natalie Portman

Put on your kippahs, it's still time for Hanukkah! Yeah, I prefer the perfectly good Hebrew word kippah to the Greek word yarmulke - no offense to the Greeks. The Greeks aren't exactly the heroes of the Hanukkah story, but we'll let the historians debate over whether the Maccabees' revolt was against the Seleucid Empire led by the Greek king Antiochus IV Epiphanes or against a philosophy within Judaism itself that favored embracing Hellenistic culture.

So, about tonight's Hanukkah hottie:

There are about a million billion reasons to love Natalie Portman.



- She was born in Jerusalem and is a U.S.-Israeli dual citizen. She went to high school in Syosset, New York. I like to say "Syosset" because it sounds like it's in Parseltongue. Outside of her professional life, her family name is Hershlag.

- Her great-grandmother, a Romanian Jew, was a spy for the British during World War II.

- She has a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard.

- She was the producers' first choice to play Juliet in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, but eventually lost the part of Claire Danes because she was too young.



- She played Evey in V For Vendetta.

- She said this awesome feminist thing:

"I want [female characters] to be allowed to be weak and strong and happy and sad - human, basically. The fallacy in Hollywood is that if you're making a 'feminist' story, the woman kicks ass and wins. That's not feminist, that's macho. A movie about a weak, vulnerable woman can be feminist if it shows a real person that we can empathize with." Preach, sister.



Natalie Portman starred with Night 4 Hanukkah Hottie Kat Dennings in Thor and Thor: The Dark World, and with Night 5 Hanukkah Hottie Mila Kunis in Black Swan. (She was also in Your Highness with James Franco, but I didn't see it.)



But honestly, I've been impressed with Portman ever since Luc Besson's Leon, or The Professional. It was her first movie.



The next time I took note of her was as Amidala in the Star Wars prequel. I was obsessed with Star Wars when I was a kid. Now, I was born the same year the original film - Episode Four now - was released, and I was only 6 when The Empire Strikes Back come out, so I probably didn't see any of the movies until later in the '80s, when we got cable and/or a VCR. (Before that, we did have Episode Four on a projector reel, but it didn't have sound.) I do remember my R2D2 Underoos and being jealous of my friend Mark because he had plastic light sabres - we were probably fans of Star Wars without even having seen the movies when we were very young.



By contrast, when my niece Eira was four or so, she told me the entire story of Anakin Skywalker, from his birth to his death. She used to watch a Star Wars movie or two every night while she was falling asleep.



So in 1999, I was excited to see Episode One: The Phantom Menace, more from nostalgia than from anything else. How could it not be great? But then when my brother and I went to see it in the theater - meh, not that great. But that was not Natalie Portman's fault.

At one time, Portman was slated to play Elizabeth Bennett in the film adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but she has since dropped out. :( It is really too bad, because she would have made an awesome ninja Lizzie.

The Hanukkah Hotness, Night 5: Mila Kunis

Happy December! I hope you're having a lovely winter holiday season so far, whether or not you're observing Hanukkah.

A lot of people don't even realize Mila Kunis is Jewish. My dad thought she was Latina, and keep in mind, my dad is married to an ethnic Jewish woman. But she's from a Ukrainian Jewish family, born in what at the time was the USSR. Her parents tried to raise her as a religious Jew as much as they could in the Soviet Union, where religion was severely repressed.



I'm gonna be brutally honest here: Mila Kunis is here more because I think she's absolutely gorgeous than because I like a whole bunch of the work she's done. Like most people, I remember her mainly from That '70s Show on Fox. It's not one of my all-time favorite shows.



It is, however, kind of fun to imagine that Kunis' character Jackie Burkhart is a more grown-up version of spoiled young Veruca Salt from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Kunis played Rachel, the flirtatious hotel receptionist, in Forgetting Sarah Marshall with Jason Segel. Okay, I kinda love that movie. She co-starred with Justin Timberlake in Friends with Benefits, which I found neither very funny nor very romantic.



She was in Oz the Great and Powerful (as a witch) with fellow Hanukkah hottie James Franco. I haven't seen it yet, although I'm guessing my 7-year-old niece has. For a while, she walked around handing everyone notes written on Oz the Great and Powerful stationery from the dollar store, and she suggested we pretend there was an evil witch with flying monkeys, flying dinosaurs, and flying maids and butlers. (The irony is that her father, my brother, was terrified of the flying monkeys as a child and used to hide behind the couch during selected parts of The Wizard of Oz.)



I also remember Kunis from The Book of Eli, a not-particularly-good post-apocalyptic thing with Denzel Washington. She played a small role in the Tina Fey comedy Date Night (again with James Franco, playing characters named Whippit and Taste).



Her next project after that was Black Swan, which is my favorite of her movies. Here she starred opposite fellow Hanukkah hottie (tomorrow) Natalie Portman. (Winona Ryder plays a small role in it as well.)



Jewish women: our relationship with black eyeliner goes back to ancient Egypt.