movies Archives - Page 42 of 118 - Ramblin' with Roger

Sigourney Weaver turns 70

Journeyer

Given the relatively few roles of hers that I’ve actually seen, I’ve nevertheless felt as though I’ve watched Sigourney Weaver in lots of films.

The first movie she was in, I’ve viewed several times, a non-speaking part as a date for Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) in Annie Hall (1977).

Then I went to see Alien (1979). OMG. She was fierce and strong and smart, and that was very appealing. No doubt that her character, Ripley, is one of the most significant female protagonists in all of cinema. I never watched any of the sequels – there were at least three – but I’m glad I saw the original. She did reprise Ripley briefly on the TV show Full Frontal with Samantha Bee in 2019.

In Ghostbusters (1984), Sigourney held her own as Dana in the mostly male film. I saw the sequel (1989) to this, but honestly, I’m not remembering it that much.

The performer played a real person, Dian Fossey, in Gorillas in the Mist (1988), a woman studying the primates and trying to stop their decimation. She was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Golden Globe for Best Actress for this role. She’s become a supporter of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and is now its honorary chairwoman.

Sigourney is the mean boss in Working Girl (1988). I know we’re supposed to root for the Melanie Griffith character over the conniving boss stealing her ideas, but Weaver, Oscar-nominated, was such a good villain! The Golden Globes picked as best supporting actress, meaning she won BOTH GG acting awards in the same year.

I loved Dave (1993), even though the Constitutional premise is absurd. Sigourney plays the First Lady, estranged from President Bill Mitchell (Kevin Kline). The White House staff use his doppelganger Dave (Kevin Kline) to cover up the fact that Mitchell had a stroke.

My, but The Ice Storm (1997) was depressingly good at portraying suburban ennui. She won the BAFTA Award – think British Oscars – for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.

Sigourney played The Warden in Holes (2003), and the voice of the ship’s computer in WALL-E (2008).

I wish I had seen the performer, trained at the Yale University School of Drama, on stage. She was a 1985 Tony nominee as Best Featured Actress In A Play in Hurlyburly.

On television, she’s hosted Saturday Night Live twice; I saw the 1986 episode but not the one in 2010. I’ve heard her speak fondly about her father, the late Sylvester L. Weaver Jr., better known as Pat. He virtually pioneered the very concepts of morning and late-night television programming in creating both the Today Show (1952) and Tonight! (1953).

Sigourney and Pat went to the Academy Awards together in 1987, when she was nominated for Best Actress for Aliens; she lost to Marlee Matlin in Children of a Lesser God.

Susan Alexandra “Sigourney” Weaver took her first name from a minor character in The Great Gatsby. My spellcheck does not like that first name, wanting to change it to Journeyer, which would also be appropriate.

She received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in December 1999. Sigourney Weaver turns 70 today. Read this June 2019 interview in PARADE.

September rambling: end the stigma

Musicians Across Five Continents

post-apocalyptic section
The Most Segregated City

Vlogbrothers: End the stigma

What happened to Jaye McBride could have happened to any of us

WAVE 3 News reporter kissed on live TV; here’s why it’s not cool – Sara Rivest is the daughter of Michael, a guy I know in Albany IRL

The differential privacy video the Census Bureau sponsored from MinutePhysics

Unmarried Partners More Diverse Than 20 Years Ago

Cokie Roberts, Pioneering Journalist Who Helped Shape NPR, Dies at 75

Longtime TV newsman Sander Vanocur dies at 91

Bill Schelly, R.I.P.

Amy Biancolli turns 56

The Surreal End of an American College

What Happens Right Before Your Best Employee Quits

Alan Zweig’s Vinyl documentary – a record collector’s expose

Baking Isn’t Hard When You’ve Got a Library Card

The Guardian: 100 best films movies of the 21st century. 1) I’ve seen 26 of them, at least two of which I disliked; 2) the year 2000 is NOT in the 21st century

Save on Internet Safety guide

Chef Boyardee: The Sine Qua Non of Homemade Pizza

Alex Trebek saying “genre”

Epergne: It’s time this Kitschiest of Obscure Vintage Treasures had a Comeback

The Evolution of a Fractured Coin of the Rebellion

The Modern Jonah

Now I Know: Who is MP and Why Are His Initials on My Checks? and An Aria a Day Keeps the Cougars Away and The Aquarium That Turned a Blind Eye Toward Bullies and The Island That Floated To Safety and Why We Give 21-Gun Salutes

English

The Beauty of Being Bilingual

Merriam-Webster dictionary adds ‘they’ as a nonbinary pronoun – America’s oldest dictionary claps back at grammar snobs as it embraces a more inclusive definition

Public is or Public are: “British English tends to see either a plural or singular verb, pronoun or noun as acceptable, depending on the context in which the collective noun is used. American English, however, is considerably more rigid in sticking with the singular. Though they too may reconsider occasionally, based on context.”

Harry Potter and the Poorly Read Exorcist

Boss Tweet

He is a threat to virtually everything that the United States should stand for

If This Isn’t Impeachable, Nothing Is and If Democrats put off impeachment until he does something worse, he’ll do something worse and His call to Zelensky was not out of the ordinary – for him and With the Gears of Impeachment Finally Grinding, the Hard Part Begins; also Lindsey Graham’s Impeachment Views in 1999 Vs. 2019

Iran Policy Is a Failure

Health Insurance That Doesn’t Cover the Bills Has Flooded the Market

The Race to Prepare for a Potential U.S. Exit From the World’s Mail System

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Legal Immigration

Travel ban really was a Muslim ban, data suggests

Comedian John Mulaney has the perfect analogy for what’s going on in our country today [explicit language]

MUSIC

What’s My Name – Ringo Starr

Playing for Change: The Weight – Robbie Robertson, Ringo Starr, and Musicians Across Five Continents

Old Town Road -Courtney Hadwin

Overture: L’italiana in Algeri, or The Italian Girl in Algiers by Giacchino Rossini

I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) – Sleeping At Last

Happy Birthday, Hans Zimmer edition

Coverville 1278: The Leonard Cohen Cover Story V

Love’s Creeping Up on Me – United Image, a 1971 Stax song that sounds more like Motown to me, and is billed as Northern Soul

All Kinds of Kinds – Miranda Lambert

Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris Trio Documentary

The importance of choir: John Rutter (there are about 20 seconds of him in b&w before he actually begins to speak)

Real Arrogance Over False Humility: The Beautiful Honesty of Joni Mitchell

The First Time I Met Prince, by Sheila E

Movie review: Blinded by the Light

Bruce Springsteen IS the Boss

Blinded by the Light (2019_film_poster) My wife and I were intrigued enough to go see the film Blinded by the Light on what turned out to be the day before it left the Spectrum Theatre in Albany. It wasn’t there very long.

The premise is that Javed (movie newcomer Viveik Kalra) is a Muslim young man in England. His family, including parents Malik (Kulvinder Ghir) and Noorhad (Meera Ganatra), had emigrated from Pakistan. Javed is finding life at school and home disspiriting. The overt racism he encounters on his way home in the country run by Margaret Thatcher made it worse.

Then, in the lunchroom and out of the blue, a Sikh young man named Roops (Aaron Phagura) lends Malik two cassettes by Bruce Springsteen and promises him that it will change his life. And it does.

The Boss’ words have liberated his creative vision. In doing so, he butts heads with his strict and controlling traditional father. What does this music of this Jewish American – “he’s not Jewish!” – have to do with them? What Bruce wrote related to the working class.

His confidence also helps him attract the attention of his classmate, Eliza (Nell Williams). A scene with Malik, Eliza, and her parents was painfully believable. Malik’s relationship with Eliza made the lyrics wrote for the band of his best friend Matt (Dean-Charles Chapman) more believable. Other pivotal people in Maloik’s life include his sisters, his teacher and a neighbor.

Blinded by the Light is based on Sarfraz Manzoor’s memoir Greetings from Bury Park, published in 2007. Manzoor co-wrote the script with director Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham) and her husband Paul Mayeda Berges.

This film has surface similarities with Yesterday: South Asian involved with a massively successful musician. It’s a very different film, stylistically.

Bruce Springsteen has given his thumbs up to the project. He loved Manzoor’s book and showed up at the premiere, even playing at the afterparty.

Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote: “Even when it feels as if we’ve seen this movie before, we’ve never seen it set to the sounds of the Boss, and we’ve never seen it from the point of view of this particular terrific kid and his family.” I highly recommend Blinded by the Light.

Movie review: Maiden

first-ever all-female crew to enter the yacht race

Maiden There has been a yachting race around the world race every three or four years since 1973. The documentary Maiden tells the tale of the Whitbread Round the World Race of 1989-90, starting and ending that season in Southampton, England.

Specifically, it follows the efforts of Tracy Edwards, a generally directionless 24-year-old cook on charter boats, to become the skipper of the first-ever all-female crew to enter the race. Spoiler alert: she succeeds in getting into the race, with a ton of ingenuity and some royal help.

Unsurprisingly, the other crews were less than encouraging and the misogynist yachting press took bets on whether she and her crew would even make it to the first major stop, in Uruguay.

The film, written and directed by Alex Holmes and edited by Katie Bryer, has great archival footage, interspliced with Edwards and her crew today. For a story with a resolution that is knowable, it is exciting, riveting and breathtaking.

As one reviewer noted, “You ain’t seen nothing till you’ve seen storms out on the freezing black Southern Ocean near Antarctica, with 500-foot water geysers from giant waves caroming off ghostly icebergs in the mist.” It manages to avoid most of the sports story tropes.

For one thing, the hero is more than occasionally portrayed in a less-than-flattering light; one vital crew member quit before the race even started. Others admitted that the pressures of creating a team, and the event itself, sometimes “made her incredibly unpleasant to be around. But there is also no denying her determination.”

You may not care about yacht racing; it’s not a topic I’m generally interested in myself. Yet I related to the largely inexperienced captain and her crew, making mistakes, yet persevering.

Maiden is also a story of female empowerment that, unfortunately, still relevant today. It received positive reviews from critics (98% positive on Rotten Tomatoes) and audiences (97%). I hope you get a chance to see it, preferably in a theater. My wife and I saw it last month, naturally, at the Spectrum in Albany.

Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice

She seizes control of her life’s narrative

I went to the 12:55 pm showing of the documentary Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany, NY on the day it opened in town. There were a total of five people there, and I suspect they’re all over sixty. (In fact, I know the pair of women in line were because they ALSO took the senior discount.)

I can tell you that we were all blown away. Sad that she no longer sing (mostly) because of her Parkinson’s disease. Her last concert was in 2009. If you’ve seen the movie up to that point, you suspect that someone who was less than the perfectionist she was/is could have milked her career for another two or three years.

Naturally, because I’m like that, I then went to the early Rotten Tomatoes reviews. 85% positive from the critics, 100% positive from the fans. I’ve decided to address the negative reviews.

“She suddenly seizes control of her life’s narrative, careening herself towards a series of bizarre, baffling creative decisions that inexplicably kept succeeding.” As the film makes clear, she was tired of being on the road in arenas.

The decisions to do Pirates of Penzance was a function of the music she grew up with. Joseph Papp would have given her the gig, but she wanted to be sure she was right for the part.

Ditto her three American songbook albums. She heard those tunes in her youth and wanted to sing them, getting someone like Nelson Riddle to arrange it, only to discover the man himself was available.

Her foray into Mexican music came from growing up singing in Spanish the tunes from her father’s heritage, Germans who moved to Mexico in the 19th century.

Hagiography?

“It isn’t long into the film when the hagiographic soundbites from famous interviewees become the dominant mode.” Also, “Ronstadt speaks of herself honestly and modestly, but the talking-heads tributes in this doc are trite.”

I have seen documentaries when one could say, “Why are THEY here?” as they ramble about the subject. But we’re talking Don Henley, who was a drummer for her in an early band before he met Glenn Frey and started the Eagles. Jackson Browne was part of that scene, touring with Linda.

Emmylou Harris was befriended by Linda after Gram Parsons’ death, as explained in the film. Dolly Parton, who in the extended trailer calls Linda a PITA. The alchemy of their three voices in the Trio sessions awed them all.

I got sufficient insight into Linda from herself and the others. There were details I had totally forgotten. The original version of Different Drum by the Stone Poneys – Linda Kenny Edwards, Bobby Kimmel- was not successful. But the re-recording made it to #13 on the pop charts in 1968.

If I had any complaints is that The Sound of My Voice gave short shrift to her latter output, at least a half dozen albums, including one with Harris and another with Ann Savoy.

If you love Linda’s music, see this film. If you’re not familiar with the range of her work, see this film. Here’s the Still within the Sound of My Voice, the opening tune from the 1989 album Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind.