Elizabeth Taylor - RIP

Stars don't sell movies anymore – franchises like games and comic books do.

(Cruise discounted on batshittery, btw. Could make a case for diCaprio and Depp, would like to make a case for Blanchett on the glamour/star/interestingness front)

xp: that is not really true, not unless there is for example a "Limitless" videogame I don't know about

Shh! They'll hear you!

It's almost wholly true – the NYT published a story about Hollywood woes a couple of months ago in which studio execs made the same point. Of course a Sandra Bullock, Will Smith or DiCrapio film will draw their respective fans, but these films aren't automatic hits like they were even ten years ago.

ha actually that would be kind of an interesting game mechanic; your character is completely hopeless and useless unless you use these pills, of which you have a finite supply

how do you stretch the resource that makes you capable of playing the game long enough to actually beat the game...?

jolie comparison isn't bad and i'm not sure she could pull off some of liz taylor's epic performances but i think she's vv good at what she does, probably stemming from utter confidence w/what she can do in her particular (albeit limited) acting skill set.

friend of mine has some huge pic from the giant set

this one, no liz

http://www.jamesdean.com/images/photos/giant/pics/jd5.jpg

also, just for shakey

http://chzdailywhat.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/80e40d51-01cf-4396-b3e8-56c211eaedb3.jpg

Jolie *can* act - she won an Oscar
Jolie *can* act - she won an Oscar
Jolie *can* act - she won an Oscar
Jolie *can* act - she won an Oscar
Jolie *can* act - she won an Oscar

Roberto Begnini to thread.

He was actually a good film comedian before the Holocaust hit him.

really, you hadda be there (or immersed in the history) to understand why the Liz-Jolie comparison is laughable, I guess.

it's sort of like comparing Clint Eastwood (now The Last Movie Star) in the mid/late '60s to Jason Statham

I'm kinda with Morbz on this one...don't see the comparison AT all. Compared to what Liz could do, Jolie's best performance has all the intensity of a dim refridgerator bulb. There's no child that's going to be as attached to her stupid roles in Tomb Raider as I was, or my mother was, to National Velvet.

there are several adults who will be, though

I phrased that badly but you know what I mean, hopefully.
Sorry!

girls my age (20s) use jolie as a Style Touchstone/insist that they want to fuck her pretty frequently, but they never cite any actual movies. meanwhile i can't even remember if i've actually seen her in a movie.

oh, i saw sky captain and the world of tomorrow. she was a prop but it was kind of hard not to be.

I have likely seen an unhealthy number of Angelina Jolie movies and am trying to think of one that I actively disliked. I don't think there is one.

pretty sure I've only seen AJ in Pushing Tin and The Good Shepherd

i liked the bizarro sexy alien boy look

http://webtvdeluxe.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/angelina.jpg

she was good in gia. um....i mean i'll watch anything. she doesn't approach ashley judd though as far as my i'll watch anything and like it hall of fame goes.

anytime someone says jolie is a good actress in something i always feel like its just a way of saying hey she was good in that for such a glamour puss.

Jolie is good in the Daniel Pearl movie. Regardless, Jolie is 35. I have a hunch she'll make another dozen or so movies before she's dead. Anyway, the comparison is just that: a comparison. Holding Taylor up as unique Hollywood royalty with no match is a conversation killer, but I'd be hard pressed to think of a current star *more* like Liz Taylor than Jolie. How about that?

even her dirty fingernails roles aren't THAT dirty. liz went further as far as getting to the heart of things and not caring how she looked doing it.

way fewer people have seen an angelina jolie movie than an elizabeth taylor one. when she started out people still went every week. that's one big difference.

I stopped appreciating AJ when she started Botoxing.

jolie has the regal thing and the tortuous private life thing, so, yeah, i get it. but liz was iconic royalty when she was, like, 18. that's a big difference.

i find the comparison almost insulting!

if only madonna could act we might have a better comparison. but madonna as singer/controversy/icon/etc works. kinda.

well thats a tribute to a bygone era though. nobody compares. and jolie didn't wait till she was older to start making forgettable movies. she's been doing it for years.

can't see pitt and jolie doing something as self-revealing as WAOVW

they might prove me wrong yet

I wasn't able to follow this thread today, so I'm sure this has been kicked around, but even though I think Taylor's death is deserving of all the coverage it's received, to me her period of greatest fame--the first half of the '60s, roughly speaking--runs parallel to a relatively uninteresting period in American film. Yes, there were some great films; but I'd say fewer than any other half-decade between 1940 and 1980. That was the half-decade where France and Italy and foreign films in general dominated. So I guess what I'm saying is I'm skeptical of the idea that films were so much more important then, at least as the statement applies to American films of the early '60s. In terms of glamour and celebrity, I'll endorse the idea that there is no equivalent that can match Taylor today.

FYI, Jolie's 35 is more or less Taylor's age for "Woolf," the role she is best remembered for. But another advantage Taylor had over Jolie is that she came of age in the gotta-hustle studio era, when movies were just churned out. Four movies in 1954 alone, followed in quick succession by Giant, Raintree County, Cat ..., Suddenly Last Summer and Butterfield 8. That's some hard working.

"That was the half-decade where France and Italy and foreign films in general dominated."

yeah, screw them.

id say the peak of her acting fame was the late 50s... or really just from the 40s till the end of the 60s, which is when hollywood really did change. and WAOVW was one of the films that changed it, i think. sure her personal fame went into a basically uncharted realm in the 1960s with burton.

did elizabeth taylor really break her back 5 times? how do you even do that? her body was seriously messed up for decades. how many near-death illnesses?

i need to watch some of those liz/burton movies again. stoned. there is craziness there. probably can't even get them all on video, can you?

she was good in gia

Still her best, I think.

The Mark Harris book Pictures at a Revolution posits WAOVW as an early New Hollywood touchstone.

id say the peak of her acting fame was the late 50s

Gotta disagree with that if you append the word "fame." (The peak of the quality of her acting, maybe--I'm not a big enough fan to judge.) Butterfield 8 is '60, Cleopatra '63, and Virgina Woolf '66; those three films are surely the peak of her fame as an actress.

Yes, there were some great films; but I'd say fewer than any other half-decade between 1940 and 1980. That was the half-decade where France and Italy and foreign films in general dominated.

I can get behind this. These were the years when studio films were so dreadful that non-American actors were needed to fill the nominations (and Tom Jones won BP).

I do agree about the importance of Virginia Woolf--in its own right, and as prelude to The Graduate.

As far as Jolie goes, I just...Liz was SO good that I think there *is* a place for just talking about how great Liz was...I feel like it cheapens who she was to try and compare her with current actresses. But thats me. Its not like it pisses me off or anything, it just seems sorta, pointless

If you're talking about Oscar-style 'fame,' she was nominated every year 1958-61. And she already had a husband dying in a plane crash by then.

Liz & Dick also did an episode of Here's Lucy circa 1971. I believe Liz's wedding ring went down Lucy's drain.

Is that same one Desi Arnaz Jr.'s career went down?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FntN7Tr_O0Y&feature=related

i do concur that the 1960s, especially the early 60s were not a great time for hollywood by comparison with the 50s or 70s. a lot of the action moved to england after 'tom jones', hence all the great joseph losey movies, 'spy who came in from the cold', etc. they key book on that is called 'hollywood, england' and you could see it as a logical development from the runaway productions of the 1950s. the big epic films were made in spain and italy iirc too. what im saying is, 60s hollywood was pretty dope if you include spaghetti westerns and beatles films as 'hollywood'.

If you accept '67-68 as the New/Old Hollywood turning point, Taylor's decline coincides almost perfectly.

I'd be tempted to argue that Hollywood still takes the careers of men more seriously as far as prestige goes and that it'd be difficult for a talented actress to cultivate a glamorous, social image while being taken seriously in this environment.