The Faculty (1998)

Film: The Faculty (1998)

Stars: Elijah Wood, Jordana Brewster, Clea DuVall, Laura Harris, Josh Hartnett, Shawn Hatosy, Salma Hayek, Famke Janssen, Piper Laurie, Bebe Neuwirth, Robert Patrick, Usher Raymond, Jon Stewart

Director: Robert Rodriguez

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

All October long, The Many Rantings of John is running a marathon dedicated to the Horror classics of the 1960's-00's that I'm seeing for the first time this month.  If you want to take a look at past titles from previous horror marathons (both this and other seasons) check out the links at the bottom of this article.

In the late 1990's, in the wake of Scream, horror movies hit a bit of a pattern.  You'd assemble a group of sexy, young actors (some of whom would grow up to be movie stars, others basically nobodies), maybe throw in a musician that could add in an additional fanbase, and from there you just start killing them off slowly in the picture and see what happens.  This was such a common trend in this era that it's actually going to be what our next three movies for our horror movie month are about.  The first we're going to get to is The Faculty, a 1998 thriller that initially promises to be more than that-a movie that will focus on the adults in addition to the teens in the movie...though the film as it unfolds really only cares about the young people crowding the poster.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie opens with Principal Drake (Neuwirth) telling a group of teachers that budget cuts are hurting all of their programs...except for the lucrative football program, much to their chagrin.  Drake is attacked by football Coach Willis (Patrick), and nearly escapes until Mrs. Olson (Laurie) also attacks her, and infects her.  You see, there's a group of alien pod people who are infecting everyone at the school, and working their way through the faculty.  The only group who can stop them is a crew of unlikely friends, led by Casey Connor (Wood), a nerdy guy who is in love with the resident pretty girl Delilah (Brewster) and Zeke (Hartnett), a drug dealer who is actually quite scientifically savvy.  Zeke has created a drug combination that can actually kill the infected, and they work to try and kill the mother alien, which it turns out is the sweet new girl Marybeth (Harris).  Once she's destroyed, everything returns to normal, with Casey now the hero of the country, and officially dating Delilah.

One of the things that I liked about The Faculty is they play around a bit with some of the tropes that Scream made sacrosanct.  The "final girl" here is not Brewster or DuVall, but instead Elijah Wood, fitting a lot of the tropes of this part (virginal, cute, sweet but over-his-head), except, of course, he's a boy.  This isn't the only time they do this.  Josh Hartnett's casting as the hot guy who is also really smart, and actually creates the way to kill the monster is something you'd never see-he was born to be a character that dies maybe third in the film, but instead lives through the picture & is generally not a jerk.

The problem with The Faculty is that it doesn't lean into the title character.  The teens can only do so much, but with a solid cast of actors for the teachers, I think it would've been more fun if we'd spent time focusing on the faculty themselves.  Piper Laurie is so campy, and has such strong horror movie bonafides from Carrie, you want her to be the big baddie rather than Marybeth.  Jon Stewart & Salma Hayek are at once marvelously cast (they play their tropes of nerdy science teacher & secretly sexy nurse) and silly choices (Stewart is not a good actor, and while Hayek is, she is so gorgeous that her playing someone that other people don't notice is far too attractive to be a normal human being is genuinely funny) that I wanted to hear more from them.  The film also has a really questionable relationship between Famke Janssen's nerdy teacher and Josh Hartnett's student (it's strongly implied they had a sexual relationship at some point, and this is condoned within the context of the film, which even in 1998 probably should've raised an eyebrow or too).  All-in-all, the faculty section is underwritten, even if the overall movie itself is pretty decent and a good spin on Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

1920's: The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera

1930's: The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, Dracula's Daughter, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Invisible Man, Mad Love, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Raven, Son of Frankenstein, Werewolf of London

1940's: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Cat People, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Invisible Woman, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Curse, The Mummy's Ghost, The Mummy's Hand, The Mummy's Tomb, Phantom of the Opera, She-Wolf of London, Son of Dracula, The Uninvited, The Wolf Man

1950's: Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, The Blob, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Creature Walks Among Us, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Came from Outer Space, Revenge of the Creature

1960's: The Devil Rides Out, The Innocents, The Masque of the Red Death, Night of the Living Dead,Village of the Damned

1970's: The Amityville Horror, Black Christmas, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Don't Look Now, Flatliners Halloween, The Hills Have Eyes, The Omen, Phantom of the Paradise, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, When a Stranger Calls, The Wicker Man

1980's: Altered States, An American Werewolf in London, The Changeling, Child's Play, The Evil Dead, The Fly, The Fog, Friday the 13th, Gremlins, Hellraiser, The House on Sorority Row, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Pet Sematary, Poltergeist, Poltergeist II: The Other Side, Sleepaway Camp, The Thing

1990's-Present: Arachnophobia, The Blair Witch Project, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Candyman, Flatliners, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Interview with the Vampire, Paranormal Activity, Scary Movie, Scream

OVP: Actress (2002)

OVP: Best Actress (2002)

The Nominees Were...

Salma Hayek, Frida

Nicole Kidman, The Hours

Diane Lane, Unfaithful

Julianne Moore, Far from Heaven

Renee Zellweger, Chicago

My Thoughts: I've said repeatedly in the 2002 lineups that these are some of the best acting quintets that Oscar has assembled this century, and that holds true for Best Actress.  It wasn't just that 2002 was a good year for movies...Oscar had strong taste this year, and it came out in a variety of ways.  That being said, as you're going to notice in the precursors, Best Actress was kind of playing with the answer key for the nominations.  These five women totally dominated the awards season, and it was not a surprise at all when they were announced as the official ambassadors to the Kodak in early 2003.

At this point, Julianne Moore's acting in Far from Heaven is talked about in the way that cinephiles discuss Brando in On the Waterfront or Jane Fonda in Klute...it's so celebrated that it's hard to grasp that there was once a time that it was new.  The real genius in Moore's work (cause she is, true to reputation, wonderful) is that she's so fully-commited to this style of acting.  There are a lot of easy moments in Far from Heaven where she could break, where she could bust the ode to Douglas Sirk that Todd Haynes is crafting, and instead give herself a gigantic Oscar moment, but she doesn't.  That's what makes it so special, and keeps the film glued together even as others around her are faltering from her idealization.

Nicole Kidman's Oscar win has not aged well for reasons that are alien to me, because this might be my favorite performance of hers, confirmed by a recent rewatch of the movie.  In a movie as strong as The Hours, it's hard to single out a favorite and yet it's always Kidman's Virginia Woolf for this watcher.  I think it's the way that she's both (literally & figuratively) in charge of the story, bringing each new character in like a gleeful, sadistic narrator.  There's also the way that she embodies someone who is fed up with what's easy.  She knows that her old life is dangerous, and this new time in the country is where her health might recover, where she can last forever...but all she wants is to live.  "Richmond is death" is spit out like a bullet, her speaking aloud the truth that she knows every day but no one around her seems to understand.  I love her work here.

Renee Zellweger, not Moore, was Kidman's biggest rival for the Oscar, and this is a good performance from Zellweger in the brief time where she was one of the most exciting actresses in Hollywood (Tinseltown, not entirely sure what to do with a woman who was so good at a type of screwball comedy that had basically died by 2002, put her in dramas with diminishing results).  I think there's a fine line between "Roxie isn't a good singer" and Zellweger playing her (as Zellweger is not as good of a singer as, say, Catherine Zeta-Jones or Queen Latifah is), and it doesn't quite work for me with Gere, but that's really quibbling over the lobster...this is an excellent movie experience, and she's so good at pulling off Roxie's naked ambition (fame above all).

Unlike the first three women, Diane Lane does not get the benefit of being in a good movie...she's in, in fact, the worst movie of the five (also, it should be noted, opposite Richard Gere).  But Lane is sensational within this terrible picture.  She plays Connie as a complete woman, one that is difficult to pigeonhole even though it's our gut instinct to do so when given the cliche of a beautiful woman in a loveless marriage having an affair (an onscreen cliche if there ever was one).  She clearly feels alive in her affair, but understands that while her old life isn't something that she values, she knows that the handsome, easy life she's leaving for this man is of value, and can't part with it.  This is complicated, smart acting, and I'm so glad that Lane, who has yet to be nominated again in the years since, got her sole citation for such a terrific part.

All of this leads to Salma Hayek, an actress of talent & a celebrity who seems genuinely interesting (I love her in interviews), but who cannot make Frida work.  This was clearly a passion project for the likable Hayek, so I feel bad ragging on her too harshly, but this performance cannot compare to the four women with whom she's sharing this field.  She seems to simplify the complicated Frida too much, relying on Julie Taymor's visual hints about the artist rather than placing her own mark on Kahlo, and it shows nothing of the iconic Frida that the world would fall in love with in death.  There's not enough there.

Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes separate their nominations between Drama and Musical/Comedy, so we have ten women nominated for these awards.  For Drama we nearly went verbatim what Oscar said, only subbing out Zellweger for Meryl Streep (The Hours) with Kidman winning, while Zellweger won Comedy/Musical against Maggie Gyllenhaal (Secretary), Goldie Hawn (The Banger Sisters), Nia Vardalos (My Big Fat Greek Wedding), and Catherine Zeta-Jones (Chicago).  SAG went with Oscar's lineup exactly, but gave the statue to Zellweger and BAFTA gave theirs to Kidman, skipping both Lane & Moore in favor of Streep and Halle Berry (Monster's Ball, which she'd won for the year before-that used to happen with BAFTA back in the day before awards season became so lock-step).  In terms of sixth, it's Streep, and I'm not hearing any arguments here-one of the few times it was clear that Meryl just missed an Oscar nomination.

Actors I Would Have Nominated: Meryl deserved an inclusion here.  It's hard to be angry about it.  Streep was nominated for Adaptation in Best Supporting Actress, Hayek would never be nominated again & is an affable star...who cares, right?...even Meryl probably was fine with it turning out this way.  But if we're basing this solely on what everyone put forward, there's no debate-Streep deserved that nomination.

Oscar’s Choice: A tight race between Zellweger & Kidman led to the latter getting it (they had both been nominated the year before & both had lost).  Zellweger would help eliminate Nicole as competition the following year by starring with her, and getting the Oscar in the process.

My Choice: This is going to maybe shock some of my friends, but I'm going with Kidman, just barely over Moore.  This is one of those cases where an unreal connection with a performance makes it impossible for me to deny.  Lane, Zellweger, and then Hayek follow.

Those are my thoughts, but now I want to hear yours!  I know that we aren't all in agreement here even if Oscar & I are happy, so who do you want to give your love toward?  Is there another performance that Diane Lane or Salma Hayek should've been considered for other than these movies (Lonesome Dove wasn't eligible, and therefore doesn't count)?  And is this the only time that Meryl has ever been in sixth place?  Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Also in 2002: Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Original Screenplay, Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score, Original Song, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup, Previously in 2002

Past Best Actress Contests: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

Eternals (2021)

Film: Eternals (2021)

Stars: Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Lia McHugh, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Don Lee, Harish Patel, Kit Harington, Salma Hayek, Angelina Jolie

Director: Chloe Zhao

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

We are now 26 films into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and, well, we all kind of know the formula at this point, right?  After we spent 22 films leading up to the ultimate Avengers showcase in Avengers: Endgame (remember Thanos & his glowing hand), the story has continued and been a bit sprawling, if we can be honest.  Spider-Man: Far From Home was a disappointment (for yours truly), unable to get me all that interested in a world beyond Thanos, and Black Widow was an origin story that would've been more interesting five years ago.  Shang-Chi had me intrigued, as we had a film that, again, did the origin story thing but was so well-cast (particularly Awkafina & Tony Leung) that it felt elevated and like Marvel knew how to do a twist on a story that had become familiar.  And like every sentient being, I'll be seeing Spider-Man as soon as I can because you an only shove so much speculation into one movie without stoking my curiosity (I am confident this will become the first film to make $1 billion post the pandemic).  But I don't know that there's been a Marvel movie in a long time that had me genuinely as curious as Eternals did.  From the mind of Chloe Zhao, fresh off of her well-deserved Oscar for Nomadland, it'd been a longtime since we'd had a creative mind like this behind a Marvel film-would Zhao be able to put her distinctive, introspective spin on a movie so integral to the Disney machine's brand?  I was intrigued, and the divisive reviews had me even more curious.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place over literal centuries, as we learn about a group of protectors to the planet called the Eternals.  They are led by Ajak (Hayek), who gets her orders from a Celestial named Arishem.  They are asked to simply battle an invasive species known as Deviants, but not to stop or interfere with any other violence or war (i.e. this is why they didn't help in the battle for Thanos, a question that has been levied at this group since it was decided to introduce it into the Marvel Universe).  When the Deviants are defeated (or so they assume) in 1521, the group breaks up but they remain on the planet for centuries, never aging & taking their lives/powers in different directions.  When a Deviant shows up in modern day around Sersi (Chan) and Sprite (McHugh), it sets in course a chain-of-events that reunites all of the Eternals, who learn complicated truths about their existence and what their true role has been for thousands of years across the universe.

That's about all of the plot I'm going to get into, both because this article isn't a Wikipedia article (if you want to know more, go see the movie), and because it's hard to summarize Eternals, which plays well (like several films we've reviewed this week, length is never an obstacle in what we're sitting through), almost like a miniseries.  It is very, very hard to write a film like this where you have to introduce a dozen or so characters and not give some of their stories short shift, but Zhao pulls it off-the characters in this film feel distinctive, realized, & well-cast.  It's hard to pinpoint an exact person I liked the best (Richard Madden & Barry Koeghan probably rise to the top if I had to pick), but the actors feel exactly true to their star personas, and it never feels like we're lingering too long on one hero or staying away too far from another.

The film's best moments, though, are the way that Zhao introduces risk & consequence into a Marvel Cinematic Universe where increasingly that doesn't exist.  Eternals is not faultless (it relies too heavily on exposition, particularly in picking up some of the looser ends of the plot toward the back-half of the film), but it has genuine stakes.  Some of these characters will die, some of them big names that might have made sense for a future film.  It's messy-there are tangents that don't quite work-but it's also creative & fascinating.  It looks beautiful, it uses a terrific score from Ramin Djawadi (random aside, but having Djawadi score a film where Jon Snow & Robb Stark fight over a woman named Cersei...at what point did Marvel realize exactly what they were doing here for the Game of Thrones fanboys?), and its effects are glorious.  I loved the way that the costumes become their own special effect, and the golden fighting effects are elegant & distinct.  I genuinely liked it, not because it's a truly great film (Marvel has technically done better), but it's the most creative I've seen the MCU be in at least a decade.  Here's to hoping that MCU sees the benefits of having stories like this in the future.

OVP: Frida (2002)

Film: Frida (2002)

Stars: Salma Hayek, Alfred Molina, Geoffrey Rush, Mia Maestro, Ashley Judd, Antonio Banderas, Edward Norton, Diego Luna

Director: Julie Taymor

Oscar History: 6 nominations/2 wins (Best Actress-Salma Hayek, Art Direction, Costume Design, Makeup*, Original Score*, Original Song-"Burn It Blue")

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

In celebration of my brother's birthday today, we are doing not one Best Actress (his favorite category) review, but two!  This morning we talked about Greta Garbo's legendary turn in Camille, but this afternoon we're going to go with a more modern take.  My brother has seen pretty much every nominee for Best Actress since 1960, and his approach to the category has been reverse chronology, so I'm going to honor his strategy by picking the most recent film that I have not seen cited for the Best Actress field, which would be Frida.  In 2002, the Best Actress category was very uniform-the same five women kept showing up at virtually every precursor & predictions list.  The strange thing about this was that while there were several newcomers (including today's nominee, Salma Hayek, who in 2002 was best-known as Matthew Perry's love interest in Fools Rush In rather than the multi-hyphenate superstar she is today), this meant that Oscar was snubbing Meryl Streep, the reigning grand dame of this category.  This is the only time that Streep has had a lead role in a Best Picture nominee (The Hours) that she wasn't nominated for, despite her being superb in the film and having three of her costars be cited for it (so clearly the acting branch was watching the movie).  I was curious in coming into Frida what it was about Hayek's work here to mark one of the only disruptions the acting categories have had in the past 40 years in bucking Streep for a film that Academy loved.

(Real Life Doesn't Have Spoiler Alerts) The movie takes a look at the life of Frida Kahlo (Hayek), an artist who was not celebrated in her time & more so really just became famous starting in the 1970's (a much swifter path to painting icon than you'd assume), and while spreading across her whole life, largely focusing on her relationship with painter Diego Rivera (Molina), who was far better known during his lifetime as an artist of renown.  The movie looks at their marriages (not properly delineating exactly that there were two), Rivera's adultery, briefly Kahlo's bisexuality, and Frida's struggle to find her own voice through her work when everyone around her is focusing on Rivera.

Frida is hard to judge based on some of the stories surrounding its production.  Hayek was reportedly repeatedly harassed by producer Harvey Weinstein, who according to a recent piece she did in the New York Times, during production constantly sexually harassed her & pressured her for sex, and when she declined, he threw up huge roadblocks to stall the production, the biggest of which was getting four name-brand stars (Rush, Judd, Banderas, & Norton) to play small parts in the movie to give it more marketability.  Hayek achieved this, and it's impossible not to respect the film for existing under those conditions.

But as it is, it's not impressive.  Hayek's performance is middling-she doesn't bring a lot of dimensionality into her work as Frida Kahlo, with us always seeing her simply as a connection to Diego Rivera's work, but rarely as a woman of her own right.  This feels like a simplification of a woman who would not only become a prominent painter (admittedly in death), but celebrated as a global icon.  It's a paint-by-numbers biopic, even with Taymor adding her own flare to the conversation, and something that I felt less than impressed by as it went on.  The film's other nominations all feel cheap as well.  The Oscar-winning score is definitely prominent, but it frequently distracts from the story & becomes its own character, and the costumes & art directions, while borrowing from Kahlo's paintings, don't jaw-drop in the way that later attempts to do this in Loving Vincent and Mr. Turner would do.  It's a neat trick (especially with the art direction), but it's not consistent enough for us to really get into it, and the rest of the work feels too much like a film set, not enough authenticity like it's actually existing onscreen.  The Makeup work is really just the eyebrow (which, while iconic, doesn't make up for the fact that Hayek is dying the way that a heroine in the 1930's would be dying onscreen-a little bit of powdered makeup, but still unabashedly glamorous).  The only nomination I can kind of get onboard with is "Burn it Blue"-it's not a grand song, but it is catchy & it fits like a glove over the film...though it is sadly not one of the many musical moments of the piece, but instead just something they slapped onto the end credits.

Are We Still Searching for Debra Winger?

Debra Winger

Occasionally destiny takes a hand, especially with the movies, and by fate I am given a Netflix DVD that has been lounging about on my queue for years that pops up just when I want to discuss something.  This happened recently with Rosanna Arquette's now-over-a-decade-old documentary Searching for Debra Winger, a 2002 film that took a look into the way that actresses over the age of forty are treated in Hollywood, particularly in the cinema.

The film on its merits is not particularly good, I'm disappointed to say.  It's occasionally fascinating as hell (when you have interviews with people like Jane Fonda, Alfre Woodard, and Holly Hunter, gold is bound to spout at some point), but Arquette is either too involved or too inexperienced as an interviewer to really get a movement going (Oprah Winfrey did an outstanding episode of Oprah's Next Chapter a few months ago with Woodard, Phyllicia Rashad, Viola Davis, and Gabrielle Union that did a far better job with similar material-a must see if you haven't).  While watching Arquette's film, I was reminded very much of another recent film I saw, A Place at the Table, where the film was all about sharing an issue that we know too well. Granted, this may not have been as publicly discussed at the time as it is now (documentaries being so much about their specific place-and-time), but anyone with a brain can see that women have lost out with the globalization of the movie market more than men.  Effects films and franchise pictures rarely cast women in lead roles, and when they do, it's frequently in the course of a love interest to the main character.  I mean, look at the insanely talented women who have to play second banana to a man in tights: Gwyneth Paltrow, Amy Adams, and Natalie Portman are all Oscar-blessed actors, but they have to stand back and say "get 'em tiger" rather than donning the capes themselves.

Arquette's film simply states the problem, but doesn't take the ballsier step of addressing the solution.  Perhaps out of self-preservation or lack of guts from the "powers-that-be" we don't see Arquette embark on any Michael Moore style interviews with actual studio executives, causing an echo chamber of problems and no solutions.  You frequently get abstract situations coming from the women that she interviews, but with only one exception (the title character of Winger herself) no one actually names a name.  We are left with a vague sense of a problem that we all know exists, but no plan-of-action.

Salma Hayek

The questions it raises, though, are thought-provoking and a few of them stuck out to me in particular.  The first was a quote from Salma Hayek regarding that she thinks that men can't have it all, but women might be able to do so.  I found this fascinating not only because it's something I haven't heard very often, but because it calls into question whether anyone can truly "have it all."  I have a few friends and family members that in my opinion I would say "have it all:" great spouse, great career, great friends, great health.  A fine balance between a job you love, a partner you adore, and a full and rich social and professional life.  And yet (if I had more time I would have asked all of them, but it's Saturday and I have a sneaking suspicion they're out enjoying these fabulous lives and not typing their fourth blog post of the day...please comment, oh internet friends) my gut tells me that if I asked them if they "had it all" they would say no, or it would be a yes with an asterisk.

This isn't just about modesty, though.  I think that while obviously "having it all" means different things to different people, human nature leaves you restless and wondering what's next.  For example, we all have had moments in our lives where everything was working: career, love, family, friends, it was all sublime.  But I think when we think of "having it all," we think about having it all indefinitely, which simply doesn't happen.  Literally every career or relationship has its downfalls, frequently when you expect or deserve them the most.  Things are outside of our control, and I love that Hayek makes this point because perhaps we should retire the concept of "having it all," because certainly your average man doesn't get to have it all either.  Very few people do, and no one gets to have it all forever.

Madeleine Stowe

Getting back to the more cinematic-specific points of Arquette's argument, the question becomes has Hollywood become a better place for actresses over forty in the past ten years?  Samantha Mathis and Martha Plimpton point out in the film that television and theater have far less hang-ups than the cinema (due to a variety of factors, principally the target audience and the budgets involved), and that has remained decidedly true.  In fact, in the case of television, it's increased dramatically.  Several women in the documentary, including Holly Hunter, Robin Wright, and Patricia Arquette, found great success in the years since on TV, and while cable networks hog most of the praise in this department, it's worth noting that network television has become a fairly strong center for women over 35: Jane Lynch, Melissa McCarthy, Kerry Washington, Julianna Margulies, Connie Britton, and Madeleine Stowe all headline major network television shows (it's worth noting that ABC is far, FAR better at supporting women in leading roles than any other major network, or quite frankly almost any major cable network).

The theater has also been a huge blessing for women over forty.  Movie stars such as Kathleen Turner have reinvented themselves on the stage after Hollywood stopped calling.  Broadway also has great roles for women of all ages-can you imagine a Hollywood picture, for example, giving a headlining role to 86-year-old Estelle Parsons, and yet she'll be back on the boards again this spring.  In fact, if you list some of the top Broadway musical actresses of the moment, you'd list almost entirely women over the age of 35 (save Laura Osnes and Patina Miller): Audra McDonald, Kelli O'Hara, Patti LuPone, Sutton Foster, and Donna Murphy are the biggest names on Broadway right now, and each one basically guarantees a successful run.

Meryl Streep

Film has made some strides since 2002-Meryl Streep was frequently cited in the film as an example of a woman who still worked in interesting films regularly at the time of this documentary, and for Streep, at least, she's now in critically-acclaimed films that moonlight as box office bonanzas.  Streep has headlined three $100 million movies since then, and won a third Oscar.  Actresses like Melissa McCarthy, Sandra Bullock, Helen Mirren, and Judi Dench also regularly open major motion pictures and demand box office clout.

That being said, the documentary is still dead-on when it says that there aren't enough interesting roles for women of a certain age.  It wouldn't be so bad if it were specific actors that couldn't find work, but as a collective group, Hollywood doesn't take chances on roles for women still, which is such a shame. Every time a Sex and the City or Bridesmaids or The Help makes a fortune, Hollywood chalks it up as a fluke and we don't get another one until some studio takes another "risk."  We just need to keep supporting these films when they come out, even if they're rare, and eventually the money will follow (similar to what I said recently about gay cinema).

And like what I said about gay cinema, I have to put a little bit of chiding into those of us who want to see the films.  If there's a large enough demand for certain movies, Hollywood responds.  Melissa McCarthy, an actress with almost no previous incarnation to use as a reference point, is probably the best example-the recent knockout hits of Bridesmaids, Identity Thief, and The Heat have made her a box office powerhouse, and Hollywood will probably hire her in anything she wants for the time being.  If we want more like her, though, we have to support actresses when they do land those roles to give Hollywood a boost.  If your local theater is playing an Enough Said or a Before Midnight and you're waiting until Netflix, what sort of message is that sending to Hollywood?  And if your local theater isn't playing these films, insist that they do-business is always supply-and-demand, and does a theater really need three screens for The Smurfs 2?

Those are my long-winded thoughts about a documentary with a lot of ambition and not enough courage.  What are your thoughts?  Which actors do you wish the film industry would rediscover?  What actresses are you surprised have retired since this documentary (anyone know what's up with Renee Zellweger?)?  And what's your favorite Debra Winger role?