Daily Archives: July 4, 2007

Happy Birthday, Connie Nielsen

Birthdays, Musings

It’s a happy birthday to leggy Dane Connie Nielsen, who turns 42 today. We’ll celebrate with some shots of her in her birthday suit, though it’s not mere prurience, I assure you. Whenever I think of Nielsen, I think chiefly of her temptress’ work in 1997’s The Devil’s Advocate (above), I suppose because I randomly stopped in Albuquerque during a solo cross-country drive and caught the movie, which proved the perfect trashy-delight diversion for a heat-addled mind. I look at that screen-cap now, though, and think, “Sweet Jesus, she looks skinny.” I mean, I know a thing of two about sucking in one’s stomach, but what’s up with that middle shot?

Nielsen is interesting as an actress because, like Juliette Lewis, she can look alternately stunning or a bit haggard and run-down — va-voomish and dangerous (The Ice Harvest), casually attractive in a foreign-correspondent kind of way (The Situation), something a bit more severe (Basic) or even a little more suburban (One Hour Photo). Without dipping into a bag of prosthetic tricks, there’s a subtle range to her mere physicality that not many actresses possess. While she doesn’t necessarily elicit heaps of sympathy (a function of the roles she’s offered, really), check out some of her Danish work if you’re not convinced of her talents.

Fox Searchlight Nabs Young @ Heart

Ephemera

Fox Searchlight Pictures Chief Operating Officer Nancy Utley
announced Tuesday that the company acquired the Northern American rights to the
inspiring nonfiction movie Young @ Heart,
which picked up the Audience Award for the Best International Feature at the
recently concluded 2007 Los Angeles Film Festival.

“Young @ Heart is
everything one could want in a movie-going experience: surprising, moving,
enlightening and entertaining,” said Utley. “The audience becomes a community
as they laugh, applaud, and shed some tears. We couldn’t be more honored to
have this film as Searchlight’s first documentary in over a decade.”

Directed by Stephen Walker, the movie stars a New
England senior citizens chorus that has delighted audiences
worldwide with their covers of songs by everyone from The Clash to Coldplay. Produced
by Sally George and funded by Channel 4 in the UK,
the film is scheduled to be released in the spring of 2008. “I am absolutely
thrilled,” said Walker. “This is
the first film for our new company, Walker George Films, and my producer and I
are incredibly excited to be working with the wonderfully talented and
enthusiastic team at Fox Searchlight.”

Walker should be stoked — this is exactly the sort of small picture that Fox Searchlight excels in marketing, and squeezing its full potential from.

Michael Moore: Hated, Debated

Interviews

Michael Moore first made his name as the director and namesake star of 1989’s critically touted Roger & Me,
about the effects of General Motors’ plant shutdown in Moore’s hometown
of Flint, Mich. He then parlayed that to-scale success into two
television series and a flourishing life as an author and guest
lecturer. After the turn of the century, Moore would further hone his
own particular brand of “shanghai journalism” in the Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine and the all-time box office documentary champ, Fahrenheit 9/11.
For years fairly consistently lampooned by the Rush Limbaugh set because of the left-leaning nature of his political views, it was around this time — in 2002, leading up to the Academy Awards in the spring of 2003 — that the level and volume of vitriol directed
Moore’s way became downright deafening. If we were a nation in the
midst of a cultural war, 2004’s Fahrenheit 9/11 was regarded outright as a weapon by the Republican right, and all sorts of measures were taken to blunt its impact.

This cottage industry of politicized “response” (read: retaliation) is
nothing new, really, and despite the level of chatter, Moore was only
the latest in a long line of public figures to feel the sting of
righteous reaction — novel, perhaps, merely because he was a successful
filmmaker. But if teenage crushes burn bright and long, the same could
be said of political grudges. So as things got worse and worse in Iraq,
Moore — and his pointy-headed reasoning — became a point-of-comparison
whipping boy for those who would assail the decisions or policies of
the Bush administration. With no Democrats of note in positions of
significant power (until the midterms of 2006), if you wanted to either
insult a dissenter or (more likely) rally the base, you dragged out Moore’s name.

What does that do, though, moving forward, for Moore’s viability and
stature as a filmmaker? Regardless of the message in his latest film, the health care documentary Sicko, he’s
the main story wherever he goes, and his high negatives — while almost
certainly topping Bush’s numbers — aren’t exactly the foundation on
which to build a populist progressive agenda. It’s so bad that
otherwise perfectly reasonable adults I know — both folks who’ve voted
for Bush twice but now consider him adrift, those who voted against him
in 2004, and those who never voted for him at all — speak of Moore with
conspicuous malice in their voices, and talk, sight unseen, of not
going to see “movies like that.” For more on Moore, in the form of a feature from FilmStew, click here.