Elizabeth Taylor - RIP

okay not tons but she went right from ironweed and a cry in the dark to she-devil and postcards from the edge and defending your life.

i love postcards. she was always funny.

Streep's (subtle) big change came c. 1990, with "She-Devil" and "Postcards from the Edge" (the latter courtesy Woolf director Mike Nichols, speak of the devil). Then "Defending Your Life" and "Death Becomes Her." She's done tons of serious stuff since then, of course, but around then the good will just started flowing her way. She practically radiated with it. And still does.

Pre-"Postcards" and (um) "She-Devil," not a lot of LOLs in the Streep catalog.

and meryl did tons of drama in the 2000's. its just that the hits were probably the comedies. they usually are.

right, pre-she devil. but that was decades ago. just saying she's been doing comedy for a while.

From Prada on, Streep *primarily* does comedies rather than mixing it up, of the Ephron-Meyers-ABBA ilk. Even her role in the Nichols HBO Angels in America was largely comedic.

can you tell i love meryl streep. love elizabeth taylor too. i actually got mad when i saw facebook lolz about her death. i never get mad about that stuff.

since prada, she has done lots of feature-length dramas. nobody saw them.

She still bores us with stuff like Doubt.

dark matter, rendition, evening, lions for lambs, doubt. i guess julie and julia is a bit of both.

i didn't see half of those. i will eventually. no hurry.

Julie and Julia is light comedy (and another hit).

I love her in Adaptation.

Same sort of parallel story role as J&J, come to think of it.

man, I have no memory of what Dark Matter or Evening were.

Anyway, Streep is an artiste w/ Juilliard cred, Taylor never really tried to convince anyone she was even when doing TennWms or Albee.

Search cackling audio outtakes of Liz's "General Hospital" guest shot.

i kinda mean more her public persona got kindof looser and adaptation was a really good role for someone aging gracefully but staying sexy and dangerous

scenes from the elizabeth taylor story starring sherilyn fenn
YOWZA

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_3-HNW9t7bnA/TUf5dsuRbxI/AAAAAAAAByU/puy-P3shnFw/s1600/S%2B9.jpg
http://content8.flixster.com/photo/10/61/54/10615478_gal.jpg

and still, it's hard to be as smoldering and proportional as the real liz

http://img.ezinemark.com/imagemanager2/files/30004252/2010/12/2010-12-06-17-20-19-2-elizabeth-taylor-was-the-american-dream-and-americ.jpeg

hmmm

http://www.vanityfair.com/images/hollywood/2011/03/taylor-ascending-large.jpg

Liz was so damn breathtaking, and it was almost like a Brando thing, where she knew what she had but played it like she didnt care..or something

Child star that went credible - Jodie Foster? Private life not the same, obvs.

I don't think we're discussing the child performances enough. She's bracing and direct in National Velvet, isn't she?

on last week's 'at the movies' ebert (as read by bill kurtis) discussed the adaptation of jane eyre from 1943 w/orson welles and joan fontaine and showed a clip from the scene where she makes her first screen appearance.

I was going to post that! But I haven't seen the movie in years. I confuse her with Mary Nash.

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-KSJEvkth-Kc/TXmLQBX2sWI/AAAAAAAAETY/JFakfftOhP8/s1600/JaneEyre.jpg

more like jane eerie, that face at that age

it's a relief to see someone in hollywood who has gone from very young to (relatively) old and basically kept the same face

more like jane eerie, that face at that age

― omar little, Thursday, March 24, 2011 6:33 PM (35 minutes ago) Bookmark

lmao... i wouldn't have even thought about it, but now im weirded out by it too

that vanity fair thing i swear MUST be done by sometimes ILX resident dan lacey

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wa-aKhOqX8g

thanks for posting Morbz!

that moment when she snorts when she laughs at 1:21 is excellent

"I'm sorry folks, I'm not used to acting" LOL

goddammit she's just so darn CUTE

"Did you see the Tony Awards?"

i think what she's mumbling after "Did you see the Tony Awards?" is something like "i screwed up my lines on that too."

yeah, she tells him how she got all the people's names wrong there too.

David Carr in the NY Times:

“I know I’m vulgar,” she once said, “but would you have me any other way?” In that respect, she was very much like Dolly Parton, another durable American star who turned sartorial trashiness into a virtue by claiming it as her own. No one invented Dolly Parton or Elizabeth Taylor, although many have claimed to, and their connection to their fans was, and has been, a visceral, living thing based on an honesty and directness.

But that is not the same as saying that she was not a lady. She was every inch a lady. It’s trite to say, but think of the biggest-wattage stars, like, say, Angelina Jolie. Ms. Jolie is remarkably beautiful and very talented, and, like Ms. Taylor, in control of her own career. But there is certain masculinity to Ms. Jolie’s appeal, a willingness to kick some tail on screen and go after whatever she wants off-screen. And before you dismiss the argument as the product of a diseased, sexist mind, a little thought experiment: Before there was Brangelina, there was Dickenliz. In the instance of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who is the alpha? It’s not really even much of a question. Yet even though Ms. Taylor’s fans adored her with far more ferocity than Richard Burton’s talents ever engendered, she deferred to him.

That may be why, apart from her manifest beauty, she remained, as the director George Stevens said, the girl every American boy “thinks he can marry.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/weekinreview/27carr.html

I get what he's saying but it feels like a condescending way to say it. Pitting Jolie's "masculinity" against Taylor's "demureness" off screen just seems like an incredibly dated and boring way to talk about those two women, if he must talk about them in the same article...though everyone seems intent on doing it.
It's like the Jackie O and Marilyn archetype, the virgin and the whore...that whole line of conversation just annoys the hell out of me.

TAKE THAT LOHAN

http://www.vulture.com/2013/06/see-helena-bonham-carter-as-elizabeth-taylor.html

http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/vulture/2013/06/05/05-burton-taylor.o.jpg/a_560x0.jpg

They both look so good/similar to Taylor and Burton. However, I'm still not sure we really need a movie about them whether it has good actors or not.

omg @ dominic west

wow

Anyone ever seen X, Y and Zee, aka Zee and Co.? Domestic fights w/ Michael Caine AND a love scene w/ Susannah York!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zee_and_Co.

Kael loves her in it. I saw it once when I had a local video store but rented The Sandpiper instead.

It's showing in 35mm at Lincoln Center tomw night.

http://filmlinc.com/page/-/uploads/films/Zee3.jpg

Liz is very funny in it, mostly intentionally and especially in the first half. There's a weird lesbophobic early '70s ending, no wonder Kael loved it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8GdEYIzP2k

NYC retro, lots on 35mm... i have still never seen Secret Ceremony and Ash Wednesday.

https://quadcinema.com/program/essential-liz/

Secret Ceremony is weird, good-bad but worthwhile. Only thing I remember about Ash Wednesday is plastic surgery.

The one I look forward to is The Driver's Seat, which I've seen a couple of times but on poor prints.

i don't remember even hearing of that one.

Liz was one of the many inspirations for my new name.

John Simon called Secret Ceremony "worse than bad, militantly loathsome," Pauline Kael called it "truly terrible" and Rex Reed called it "a piece of garbage." So definitely go see that one.

But I have seen all of Joseph Losey's 1962-71 films except for it! Also, there's the presence of Mitchum and Mia, and Fernando Croce finds it intentionally funny:

http://www.cinepassion.org/Reviews/s/SecretCeremony.html

Kael loved Ash Wednesday for her lurid performance