Over at the Telegraph, David Gritten pins a "Class of '99" article onto a "success of Sideways" hook. You know, these folks:
They range in age from 33 to 45 (Payne is 43), and often make character-driven movies about Americans past the first flush of youth who have somehow lost their way.
Too bad the article, like the movies its subjects direct, seems somewhat slight.
Speaking of losing one's way, the cinetrix has nothing for you nice people today. Apparently some nominations were announced?
Oh, OK. Here's an idea. Try and figure out whether any of the nominated thespians match the following descriptions, all drawn from Manohla Dargis's recent, coy "Guess who? Don't sue" piece about the effect of plastic surgery on the movies.
- a legendary European beauty... fresh surgical scars alongside her ear
- the character actor with misaligned ears
- the actress who looks permanently stuck in a wind tunnel
- beautiful actress - again, someone I can't name - who when filmed in close-up barely seems able to move her face. Her forehead and cheeks are lustrously polished, almost glazed, like a pebble smoothed by centuries of pounding surf. When she cries on camera sound pours from her mouth - and yet something is missing, a crinkle of pain around the eyes, a furrow of worry grooved between her manicured eyebrows. She looks like an exotic aristocrat, a porcelain figurine, a creature from another planet (think Hollywood)
- not in possession of classic good looks
- had the guts to let the camera come in for an intimate appraisal, lines and all
- wins awards with a face crosshatched with lines
Name your poison in the comments, please.
It's not that the cinetrix doesn't agree with Dargis's assertion: "What is undeniable and increasingly unavoidable is that plastic surgery is altering one of the greatest landscapes in cinema: the human face." Oh, she does [even if she is disappointed that Dargis failed to mention the "bravery" of the luminous Julie Delpy and the lupine Ethan Hawke "courageously" playing against their younger selves. Or work in a timely allusion to the unsettling visage of ol' Sundance on the mountain top]. Think of all the marvelous faces we'll never see the likes of again.
Fellow moviegoers: Why worry about George Lucas's army of CGI actors taking over Hollywood when the flesh-and-blood ones are busily embracing their own obsolescence, one shot at a time?
*Do be sure to read one-month-younger-than-the-cinetrix Lisa at The Broad View's take on Dargis, which has the advantage over anything I might write on the subject, thanks to that anecdote about a well-meaning someone once offering to botox her forehead, at cost.
