Archive | Feminist Matters

A True Siren: Illeana Douglas

Illeana Douglas may be best known for her work in such edgy fare as “The Larry Sanders Show” and  Allison Anders’s “Grace of My Heart” but she also is a true scion of Old Hollywood. Her grandfather was the multiple Oscar-winning actor Melvyn Douglas and she has counted among her friends such film luminaries as Marlon Brando and Martin Scorsese, with whom she had a relationship for ten years. Now she’s penned a memoir, I Blame Dennis Hopper: And Other Stories From a Life Lived In and Out of the Movies, that doubles as a series of profiles of some key Tinseltown figures.

LISA ROSMAN: Tell us about the title. “I Blame Dennis Hopper.” It’s so promising!

ILLEANA DOUGLAS: Well, it’s the running gag in my life. My parents saw “Easy Rider” and were so affected that they started a commune and began living off the land. As I grew up, I realized that not only did that movie directly change my life but it changed so many lives across America. Not just young people’s. Middle class, middle-aged people’s, too. To me, that’s the power of film. Later on, I got to meet Dennis Hopper and I said, “Thanks for ruining my life. You ruined a lot of people’s lives.” He was like, “Sorry.” It’s very sad he passed away because this was something I really wanted to explore in a documentary. He was talking about freedom, man, and a lot of people resonated with that. Continue Reading →

The Crap Factory of ‘Sisters’

Call me the Grinch Who Stole “Sisters,” but the new comedy starring the dream team of Amy Poehler and Tina Fey is just plain crap. I know some of you will see it anyway, and I kind of hope you do. A mainstream American comedy starring two fortysomething women deserves box-office support, and Poehler and Fey are my absolute favorite forces in American comedy. But the truth is that it’d be more fun to watch them clip their toenails for two hours than mug their way through this formulaic, retrogressive soap dish.

Poehler plays Maura Ellis, a divorced nurse held hostage by her own do-gooder impulses. (Read: She’s a poor woman’s Leslie Knope.) Rather than climb back on ye olde dating train, she prefers to Skype with her retired parents (James Brolin and Dianne Wiest, cursing like a scurvy-addled sailor) and craft motivational cards. (Without the dark night, we’d never see the bright stars.) Fey is big sister Kate, an oft-fired aesthetician who is living on the couch of her former “bug man.” Decked out in hot pants, ratty hair extensions, and an un-ironic fedora, Fey is in serious anti-Liz Lemon mode, though those audible italics are still in full effect: “I’m not a hot-head. I’m brassy,” she says, and you gotta love it – at least a little bit. Continue Reading →

Q&A: ‘Danish Girl’ Author David Ebershoff

I caught up with David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl, about Lili Elbe, one of the first known recipients of gender reassignment surgery. This 2000 historical novel won a Lambda Literary Award and has been adapted into a film starring Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander.

LISA ROSMAN: Let’s first establish your resume. In addition to being the author of The Danish Girl and other notable books, until recently you have been the vice president and executive editor at Random House. But now you’re just going to focus on writing.

DAVID EBERSHOFF: That’s right.

LR: Don’t you like the way I say just? Like that’s just all you’re going to do!

DE: [Laughs] Yes, for a long time I had two careers and I decided it was time to scale back to only one.

LR: I remember reading in Publisher’s Weekly a few years ago about how you couldn’t really imagine not having a day job. What was the shift there? Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy