Let Them Eat ‘Cake’
Jennifer Aniston is a terrific comic television actress. This is not to damn her with faint praise – since the 1970s, comedians have done their best work in that medium – but it does mean she’s a less appealing movie star. With her predilection for double takes, cocked eyebrows, and talking from one side of the mouth, her shtick (like Sarah Jessica Parker’s and Tina Fey’s) has never successfully translated to the big screen. Magnified to that scale, she seems more like Ethel Merman on the Paleo Diet than a true screwball siren. Yet she soldiers on in film, even as most of her “Friends” costars have found their footing in the brave new world of premium TV.
So it’s no surprise that Aniston occasionally tries her hand at serious roles: She played a cleaning woman in “Friends With Money” (2006) and an unhappy clerk in “The Good Girl” (2002). But in both those films – as in “Cake,” which is now playing in wide release – she merely eliminated her shtick without replacing it with other colors. The resulting characters are Debbie Downers: flatliners from a woman capable of sizzling one-liners. “Cake” is a particular disappointment, though the blame cannot entirely be assigned to Aniston. It’s tough to warm up to another entry in the growing genre that Grantland’s Wesley Morris has called the “dead-child movies.” Continue Reading →
I, an Alarm
Ever since I moved my bed next to the window, the first thing I do upon waking is open the curtain. Then, settled against the pillows, I join the sun as she slowly rises, drifting back from the heavens where we’ve both been traveling all night. After decades of living in New York, I’ve become so attuned to my environs that my mood shifts right along with the indigo streaking into violet into rose into orange across the sky. Outside is inside, and on most mornings I find that fact beautiful.
I’ve had a melancholy week. My birthday was a disappointment and that was mostly my fault, which only makes me more melancholy. But each day brings a new sun, and I’m just easy enough to let her magic work on me. Tonight helped, too. I was crowded into a rush-hour subway, ogling a woman’s mermaid afro and fuming over a man standing too close, when I spotted a Poetry In Motion sign that was like another glimpse from my predawn bedroom window. The poem nailed the aloneliness* that develops when you are unwilling to mingle your sourness with others’, and reading it among so many strangers’ private smells and worries made me feel grasped by something better than my past. As did the quiet blue rooms to which I was gliding and which I’d built myself. It was the sweet knowledge I could begin again. Continue Reading →
Hollywood Regression: #OscarsSoWhite
Within minutes of the announcement of the Academy Award nominations January 15, the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite began to sweep social media. It was an understandable response: For only the second time in nearly twenty years, no person of color was nominated in either a performance or director category. (No woman was nominated in either the screenwriter or director category, either.) In a year in which racial inequities have seized the nation, the exclusions were especially tone-deaf.
For many, this is a sad confirmation of how unreflective the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, the voting body of the Academy Awards, is of the United States overall. “The Academy is about ninety percent white and seventy percent male and we’re seeing the sad result of that in voting,” said Tom O’Neil, founder of awards tracker site Gold Derby.
“On one hand, it’s not surprising … The Academy Awards have been historically whitewashed and male-dominated. On the other … as a beautifully crafted period piece about real-life events, ‘Selma’ feels like prime Oscar bait,” said Bust’s Holly Trantham. Continue Reading →