Posts Tagged ‘Meryl Streep’

64th Golden Globe Awards

Took place on Sunday 15th January 2007 hosted by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association

Golden Globe Winners in The Film Categories:

Best Film Drama – Babel

Best Director: Martin Scorsese – The Departed

Best Film Musical or Comedy: Dreamgirls

Best Actor Drama: Forest Whitaker – The Last King of Scotland

Best Actress Drama: Helen Mirren – The Queen

Best Actor Musical or Comedy: Sacha Baron Cohen – Borat

Best Actress Musical or Comedy: Meryl Streep – The Devil Wears Prada

Best Supporting Actor: Eddie Murphy – Dreamgirls

Best Supporting Actress: Jennifer Hudson – Dreamgirls

Best Foreign Language Film: Letters from Iwo Jima (Japan/USA)

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64th_Golden_Globe_Awards

Into the Woods

Director: Rob Marshall

Cast: Anna Kendrick, Emily Blunt, Meryl Streep, James Corden, Chris Pine, Johnny Depp, Tracey Ullman, Christine Baranski, Lucy Punch, Tammy Blanchard, Daniel Huttlestone, Lilla Crawford, Billy Magnussen, Mackenzie Murzy

Memoirs of a Geisha and Chicago director Rob Marshall strikes gold with this cinematic adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim Broadway musical Into The Woods featuring a fabulous ensemble cast made all the better by Meryl Streep playing the meddling Witch.

Imagine Little Red Riding Hood teaming up with Jack the Giant Slayer, Cinderella and a forlorn Rapunzel, that is Into The Woods, a wonderful mixture of all the classic fairy tales thrown together in a delightful musical which is hinged with darkness and loaded with metaphors and familial moral codes about life’s unpredictability.

Director Marshall brings out the best in his cast including a superb performance by Emily Blunt as the barren Bakers Wife along with the irrepressible Meryl Streep as the evil Witch who asks the Baker, played by British actor James Corden to collect Cinderella’s golden slipper, a white cow, a lock of Rapunzel’s hair and a red cape naturally belonging to Red Riding Hood.

Oscar nominee Anna Kendrick (Up in The Air) holds her own as the doomed Cinderella who is wooed by a shameless prince played by Chris Pine (Jack Ryan, Shadow Recruit, Horrible Bosses 2). Cinderella’s evil stepmother is superbly played by Christine Baranski of The Good Wife fame and The Birdcage. Audiences should also watch out for British comedian Tracey Ullman who plays Jack’s exasperated mother. Child stars Daniel Huttlestone and Lilla Crawford are amazing as Jack the Giant Slayer and Little Red Riding Hood.

Three times Oscar winner Meryl Streep reunites with her Devil Wears Prada co-star Emily Blunt, and it is clear that both these actresses keep this wonderful musical firmly rooted in brilliance. Blunt is absolutely amazing, delivering some quick witted lines and belting out some wonderful songs while Streep relishes the chance to play the blue haired vain and selfish Witch who is desperate to reclaim her lost beauty by reversing a curse placed on her. The Witch also incidentally holds her daughter Rapunzel played by Mackenzie Murzy hostage in a tower and much to her horror, has fallen for a young but clumsy prince played by the gorgeous newcomer Billy Magnussen.

Oscar nominee Johnny Depp who was spine chillingly excellent in another Sondheim musical film, Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street makes a brief appearance as the cross dressing wolf who terrorizes Little Red Riding Hood.

Even though Into The Woods is aimed at children, there are certainly slightly darker adult undertones to this extraordinary film as unlike the fairy tales, not everyone lives happily ever after. For those that enjoy expertly directed and acted big screen musicals, like Chicago, Les Miserables and Hairspray, then Into The Woods is definitely recommended viewing.

Stephen Sondheim’s Into The Woods is a truly imaginative, witty and fabulous fable sure to enchant both adults and children alike and as a stage production it would be equally extraordinary to watch.

The 60th Golden Globe Awards

Took place on Sunday 19th January 2003 hosted by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association

Golden Globe Winners in The Film Categories:

Best Film Drama: The Hours

Best Film Musical or Comedy: Chicago

Best Actor Drama: Jack Nicholson – About Schmidt

Best Actress Drama: Nicole Kidman – The Hours

Best Actor Musical or Comedy: Richard Gere – Chicago

Best Actress Musical or Comedy: Renee Zellweger – Chicago

Best Director: Martin Scorsese – Gangs of New York

Best Supporting Actor: Chris Cooper – Adaptation

Best Supporting Actress: Meryl Streep – Adaptation

Best Foreign Language Film: Talk To Her (Spain)

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60th_Golden_Globe_Awards

The Giver

Director: Phillip Noyce

Stars: Meryl Streep, Brenton Thwaites, Alexander Skarsgard, Jeff Bridges, Katie Holmes, Taylor Swift, Odeya Rush, Cameron Monaghan

Australian director Phillip Noyce (Rabbit Proof Fence, Salt) takes on the big screen adaptation of the 1993 Lois Lewry allegorical Sci-Fi novel The Giver.

Shot mostly in Cape Town, with the iconic Greenpoint stadium as its main focal point, The Giver follows a Utopian society on a mesa, a sort of elevated plateau where a seemingly perfect yet ominously drugged society exists. Imagine a society with no colour, no differences, no desires and no envy, a society in which all the deeper human emotions have been eradicated.

Brenton Thwaites last seen in Maleficent, has a more prominent role as Jonas a young man who definitely realizes that this version of Utopia in which he graduates into is not quite as it seems. The Utopian Society is presided over by the Elder, in a strange casting choice for Meryl Streep to appear in a sci-fi thriller. Naturally Streep inhabits the role with just the right amount of malice and omniscience to scare the citizens of this perfect world.

Upon his graduation, Jonas is assigned to be the receiver of knowledge and must leave his constructed parents played in a deadpan fashion by Katie Holmes and Alexander Skarsgard and visit The Giver, a bearded and wise Jeff Bridges, who transports all of the society’s so called memories, painful and exhilarating to Jonas via human touch.

The Giver being the keeper of knowledge naturally lives in a library called The Edge, beyond which is Elsewhere. This film is purely allegorical and philosophical and whilst Jonas’s courageous attempt to escape the Utopian society are fraught with potential danger and deception, his rebellion is not based on a motivated counterpoint, nor for that matter is the real reason for creating such a bland uniform society. In essence Jonas is escaping a bizarre pristine gated community.

The Giver could have been a real significant sci-fi thriller yet despite some flamboyant directorial embellishments which include a whole series of memory flashbacks of human emotions, wars and iconic leaders, the film does not live up to its hype as something truly astounding unlike the Tom Cruise sci fi Oblivion. There are no twists or turns, more an allegorical tale about the importance of celebrating difference and appreciating individuality, two aspects which this Utopia suppresses ultimately leading to Jonas’s rebellion.

Despite the casting of Oscar heavy weights Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep, The Giver comes off as a mediocre version of The Hunger Games without the intensity or the violence. Thwaites as an actor holds his own as Jonas while the rest of the cast seem to pale literally in comparison except for the baby Gabriel, whom Jonas is desperate to save.

Then again babies don’t need to act, they are spontaneous. Its only constructed organized society which restricts adult individuality and creates a utopian order which given time will always unravel naturally. The Giver is bland viewing shot alternatively in black and white with dashes of colour, a narrative without much cathartic release, leaving lots of implausibility and questions. The film also stars Country Music Singer Taylor Swift as the mysterious Rosemary, Odeya Rush as Jonas’s love interest Fiona and Cameron Monaghan as his dubious friend Asher.

August: Osage County

Director: John Wells

Starring: Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Juliette Lewis, Julianne Nicholson, Ewan McGregor, Dermot Mulroney, Chris Cooper, Margo Martindale, Benedict Cumberbatch, Abigail Breslin, Sam Shepard

The Pulitzer Prize winning play by Tracy Letts, August: Osage County comes to the big screen with a stunning ensemble cast headed by the incomparable and superb Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady, Devil Wears Prada) as the pill popping matriarch of the Oklahoma based Weston family, who all gather together when Violet Weston, a malevolent matriarch played by Streep alerts her clan to the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of her heavy drinking poet husband, Bev Weston, a brief appearance by Sam Shepard. Oscar winner Julia Roberts plays the feisty eldest daughter Barbara who drags her straitlaced husband Bill Fordham played by Ewan McGregor and their teenage daughter Jean played by Little Miss Sunshine star Abigail Breslin.

Incidentally the playwright Tracy Letts is also an actor who recently appeared on the Award winning show Homeland. His take on an all female dysfunctional family in his award winning play is both perceptive and wonderfully written with Streep and Roberts savouring some of the best lines like – “Bitch, eat your Fish!”

August: Osage County takes themes of addiction, inter-generational communication along with family secrets and rivalry to new heights as the entire Weston clan gather, but the plot is really anchored by the fierce exchanges between a disorientated Violet and her outspoken daughter Barbara, in a career best performance by Julia Roberts. Streep earned her 18^th Oscar nomination in 2014 for her almost tragic yet bitter performance of Violet Weston, a woman who clearly has not had an easy life on the mid-Western plans and has to cope with all the hardships including bringing up three daughters and an inebriated poet as a husband.

Julia Roberts (Erin Brokovich, Eat, Pray, Love) also earned a 2014 Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her brilliant performance as Barbara, a woman whose marriage is failing and is battling to cope with a rebellious teenage daughter, an uncooperative cheating husband and a matriarchal and incredibly demanding mother. The onscreen tension between Violet and Barbara is beautifully played out against the vast Oklahoma plains, with the landscape providing an emotional resonance to all the familial conflict that the Weston gathering produces where everyone’s own miserable secrets, faults and deceptions soon come to light amidst the hottest month of summer: August.

Director John Wells interweaves the chaotic scenes at the Weston mansion in rural Oklahoma with gorgeous shots of the mid-Western plains, giving a sense that these characters are grappling with not only their own turmoil but their unique identities apart from those prescribed by being part of a larger family group. And what a family it is.

Violet Weston’s two other daughters are the pacifying Ivy played by Julianne Nicholson and the free-spirited youngest Karen, played by Oscar nominee Juliette Lewis (Cape Fear) both of whom have to heed the dominance of their mother and eldest sister, along with the bitter rivalry which ensues.

As with all plays that are turned into film adaptation, much like the four character play Doubt, August: Osage County drives its narrative purely through an electrifying and barbed script, with Streep and Roberts delivering some vicious one-liners. The rest of the cast including Chris Cooper as Uncle Charlie and Margo Martindale, Benedict Cumberbatch (12 Years a Slave) and Dermot Mulroney provide a theatrical sounding board for the predominantly female driven story of rivalry, deception and loneliness.

What elevates August: Ossage County out of pure melodrama, although some aspects of the plot are questionable, is the groundbreaking and utterly absorbing performance of Streep and Roberts as mother and daughter Violet and Barbara fighting each other and their own apparent faults significant in the touching scene when they are both wondering aimlessly through an Oklahoma hayfield. This onscreen rivalry ironically is a reversal of Streep’s performance opposite Shirley Maclaine as Hollywood daughter and mother in the 1990 film about drug addiction, Postcards from the Edge based upon the best selling novel by Carrie Fisher of Star Wars fame.

August: Osage County is a compelling family drama, at times hysterical, at times poignant but a wonderful and incisive examination of a complex family dynamic which forces each member to  come to grips with their own flaws whilst becoming aware of a collective sense of misery, loss and impending loneliness. This film is a master class in ensemble acting and highly recommended viewing.

2003 Berlin International Film Festival Winners

The Berlin International Film Festival known as the Berlinale takes places annually in February and is regarded as one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world.

Winners of the four main prizes at the 2003 Berlin Film Festival were as follows: –

Golden Bear (Best Picture) – In this World directed by Michael Winterbottom

Silver Bear (Best Director) – Li Yang  for Blind Shaft

Best Actor – Sam Rockwell – Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

Best Actress (prize was shared) – Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep & Julianne Moore – The Hours

84th Academy Awards

26th February 2012

Oscar Winners at the 84th Annual Academy Awards

Best Film: The Artist

Best Director: Michel Hazanavicius – The Artist

Best Actor: Jean Dujardin – The Artist

Best Actress: Meryl Streep – The Iron Lady

Best Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer – Beginners

Best Supporting Actress: Octavia Spencer – The Help

Best Original Screenplay: Woody Allen – Midnight in Paris

Best Adapted Screenplay: Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash for The Descendants based upon the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings

Best Foreign Language Film: A Separation directed by Asghar Fahadi (Iran)

Best Documentary Feature: Undefeated by T. J. Martin, Dan Lindsay &  Richard Middlemas

Best Cinematography – Robert Robertson – Hugo

Best Make Up – Mark Coulier and J. Roy Helland – The Iron Lady

Best Costume Design – Mark Bridges – The Artist

Best Film Editing – Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Best Visual Effects – Hugo

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/84th_Academy_Awards

The Iron Lady

Director: Phyllida Law

Cast: Meryl Streep, Alexandra Roach, Jim Broadbent, John Sessions, Julian Wadham, Nicholas Farell, Olivia Colman, Richard E. Grant

The first moment Oscar winner Meryl Streep (Kramer vs Kramer, Sophie’s Choice) appears on screen as Baroness Thatcher in Phyllida Law’s The Iron Lady, the viewer knows that they will be treated to a towering portrayal of one of the most influential and controversial leaders of the Western World in the 20^th century former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The Iron Lady, which chronicles Baroness Thatcher grappling with her old age and the loss of her beloved husband Dennis, played by Oscar winner Jim Broadbent (Iris) depicts an elderly  and at times not so iron lady looking back on a landmark and eventful political career.

Streep’s performance of the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher both as an old woman and as a ruthless and powerful Conservative politician is outstanding and is worthy of Streep being one of the few actresses to win three Oscars in an impressively brilliant and diverse career spanning from such earlier films as Kramer vs Kramer and The Deer Hunter, through to Sophie’s Choice, Ironweeds and Out of Africa to the more recent performances in Mamma Mia and The Devil Wears Prada.

The Iron Lady is as much about the making of a politician, the sculpting of a prolific and charismatic female leader as Prime Minister of Britain that Margaret Thatcher was during the tumultuous 1980s, as a testament to an aging woman who cannot deal with approaching senility and the fact that her once great career is drawing to a gradual close. Meryl Streep, helped with superb make-up by the Oscar winning team of J. Roy Helland and Mark Coulier portrays all the nuances  and strength of a unrelentingly headstrong politician, along with all the subtle  insecurities of breaking all the initial conventions of being the first female leader of Parliament in the cut-throat male dominated world of British politics while sacrificing her family life and domestic duties to achieve her political ambitions.

Whilst The Iron Lady does not sequentially follow Thatcher’s political career in the 1980s, it is portrayed through a series of perfectly crafted flashbacks showing the flashpoints in Margaret Thatcher’s political career from the IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton at the 1984 Conservative Party conference to the Falklands War and also the eventual ousting of Thatcher as leader by her own party at the height of Britain’s participation in ending the Cold War.

Phyllida Law, director of Mamma Mia, shows a slightly parodic view of Margaret Thatcher beautifully portrayed by Streep as well as thematically points to the personal dilemma of all great leaders, that of having made your mark on history and now having to deal with the greatest challenge of all, old age and dealing with one’s own mortality.

Unlike Stephen Frears superbly directed film The Queen which also dealt with a living icon, the British Monarch an Oscar winning performance by Helen Mirren, focusing on a specific period of British history, the death of Lady Diana; The Iron Lady is more fluid in its narrative, depicting Baroness Thatcher in the 21^st century reminiscing about her prominent political career three decades earlier, in which as Prime Minister she was never one to compromise. Whilst The Iron Lady as a film is not superb and flawed in narrative and direction, it is Meryl Streep’s unbelievably brilliant portrayal which makes up for any cinematic defects.

Julie & Julia

Nora Ephron’s latest film Julie & Julia – follows two separate but true stories about Julia Child rise to fame through French cuisine by surviving the McCarthy era in Paris learning Gourmet Cuisine and 50 years on, Julie Powell’s blog account of a year of cooking exquisite dishes from the famed recipe book that was Julia Child’s piece de resistance, Mastering the Art of French Cooking and how it got to be published in 1961.

Child having spent years in Paris with her diplomat husband, took up Gourmet cooking lessons and was determined to eventually introduce French cuisine to the American home.

While Ephron’s film should be treated as a comedy and a gastrononic delight it by no means rivals the brilliant Babette’s Feast or Chocolat. While films whose main subject is cuisine is always difficult to market, Ephron manages through a fairly quirky script to capture the two distinct eras that both her heroines lived in. Child and her husband had to deal with the McCarthy era, where everyone was treated with suspicion due to Communist paranoia sweeping America, not helped by their early years spent in China.

Juliet Powell and her husband Eric played by Chris Messina lead a less glamorous life across the pond, in Queens, New York where Powell sets herself a blogging and cooking deadline of a year to cook every recipe in Child’s bible on French cuisine as a way of distracting her from a call centre job dealing with the families and relatives of 9/11 in 2002.

While there was 50 years apart in their lives, both women were trying not to deal with the realities of a world that did not make sense.  And who could blame them? Post 9/11 New York and Post World War II Paris are vastly different, yet with some delicious recipes to lose themselves in, Julie and Julia proved that like any man, a woman can be just as determined, passionate and steadfast in their goals especially in achieving success, whether it be domestic or literary.

Julia Child’s original kitchen

Obliquely the film, also comments subtly on the rise of celebrity cult status and how historical references shape a characters lives so distinctly. Most notable are the wonderful shots of Paris and the diplomatic parties that Julia Child attends and eventually cooks for contrasting with a replica of her Cambridge, Massachusetts kitchen built especially for the tall woman she was, so elegantly displayed at the Smithsonian in Washington DC, where Julie eventually, like a worshiper at a sacred site, leaves a pound of butter as a fitting tribute to her gastronomic inspiration.

Julie & Julia is by far means not a brilliant film, but it will evoke an appetite for some superb, tangy and tantalizing gourmet dishes and give the audience a new appreciation of de-boning a duck, whilst wearing pearls in the kitchen and appearing relatively calm.

See it and enjoy the meals, yet its far from a cinematic feast, flawed with shoddy editing and uneven directing, whilst saved by a eclectic score by Alexandre Desplat who excelled in The Queen and of course by the ever versatile and brilliant Meryl Streep.