'Finding Neverland' and 'Hamet'

'finding neverland' trailer



'hamlet' video



ratings:
'Hamlet': C+
'Finding Neverland': A

Julie's Filmography and My Favorites

my favorite julie films



julie christie filmography

'Afterglow' and 'Away from Her'

'afterglow' trailer




'away from her' trailer



ratings:
'Afterglow': A
'Away from Her': A

'The Go-Between' and 'Far from the Madding Crowd'

'far from the madding crowd' and 'the go-between' show julie at her radiant best. 1967 and 1970 respectively they gave julie cinema photographers who loved her. 'the go-between' is a classic. 'far from the madding crowd' based on the thomas hardy novel less so. it is based on dryer source material as are most hardy novels. the award winning combination of julie and director john schlessinger,straight off of 'darling' failed to save this at the box office. yet it is lush and boasts an attractive cast including peter finch, alan bates and a strikingly handsome terrence stamp.

oddly only 'far from the madding crowd is available on dvd.

'the go-between'




'far from the madding crowd'





ratings:
'the go-between B+
''far from the madding crowd' B-

Happy Birthday Jules

a new 'birthday' slideshow

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

'Shampoo' and 'Petulia'

both 'petulia' and 'shampoo' are a bit dated today. but when they were released, 1968 and 1975 respectively, they were a real microcosom of the mores of the day. julie was wonderful in both but it was lee grant who stole 'shampoo' with her oscar winning performance as felicia.


shampoo trailer



montage









'petulia' trailer






ratings:
'shampoo' B+, 'petulia' A

1965: 'Darling' , 'Doctor Zhivago'

julie was the self centered period defining diana in 'darling' her oscar winning performance:








in 'doctor zhivago' julie portrayed lara antipov. some feel this should have been the nominated role. what the hell is the difference? julie was the best actress of the year no matter how they sliced it.







'darling' A+
'doctor zhivago A

For Sandra: 'Smile"

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

dear sandra,

it's been a rough time since that oscar win right sandy? but there are a gazillion people on your side and pulling for you. people who may only love you from afar but love you we do for the joy you have given us and for the humanity you have shown for those in need. i ask you to smile. i only hope one day soon you can...smile again.

love,
josh

'The Blind Side' Today on DVD and BLU-RAY: ****stars

today's your lucky day. buy or rent 'the blind side' with the best of the BEST performances of 2009: sandra bullock!

Oscarbation: Sandra the Final Oscar Post for the Best of 2009

Miracles Do Happen

Another Jennifer Jones Tribute

Jennifer Jones: 1919-2009

The 'essential' Jennifer Jones films are The Song of Bernadette', 'Portrait of Jenny', 'Since You Went Away' and 'Love Is a Many Splendored Thing'. Her Best Actress Oscar was for 1943's 'The Song of Bernadette'.

R.I.P. Jennifer Jones

NY Times Obituary:

Jennifer Jones, who achieved Hollywood stardom in “The Song of Bernadette” and other films of the 1940s and ’50s while gaining almost as much attention for a tumultuous personal life, died Thursday at her home in Malibu, Calif. She was 90.




Ms. Jones, who was the chairwoman of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif., died of natural causes, said Leslie Denk, a museum spokeswoman. Ms. Jones was the widow of the industrialist and art patron Norton Simon.

After winning an Academy Award in 1944 for her performance in “The Song of Bernadette,” Ms. Jones went on to star in successful films like “Duel in the Sun” and “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing.” She was nominated for Oscars five times.

She was also known for an off-screen life that included bouts of emotional instability; a second marriage to the Svengali-like David O. Selznick, the producer of “Gone With the Wind”; the suicide of their daughter; and a later marriage to another larger-than-life figure, Mr. Simon.

It was Selznick who got Ms. Jones the role of Bernadette Soubirous, the young French peasant girl whose visions at Lourdes created a sensation in 1858. “The Song of Bernadette,” based on Franz Werfel’s best-selling novel, was a huge hit, and it brought the little-known Ms. Jones instant fame.

“After that first big role, there was a kind of stage fright,” Ms. Jones said in 1981. She told another interviewer: “When you’re young, you’re full of hope and dreams. Later you begin to wonder. I did ‘The Song of Bernadette’ without knowing what was going on half the time.”

When she made “Bernadette,” Ms. Jones was the wife of the young actor Robert Walker and the mother of two small boys. She and her husband had met as students at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York in 1938 and married a year later. They had struggled together until Selznick put Ms. Jones under personal contract in 1941. A year later, Mr. Walker was signed by MGM and had a star-making debut in 1943 as a young sailor in “Bataan.”

But the marriage didn’t last; they separated in the fall of 1943, and by then Ms. Jones was deeply involved with Selznick. Seventeen years her senior, he would be the mastermind of her career.

Selznick’s wife, Irene, the daughter of the movie mogul Louis B. Mayer, left him in 1945, in part over his affair with Ms. Jones, who divorced Mr. Walker that year. David Thomson, in his biography of Selznick, “Showman,” said Selznick had found something special in Ms. Jones. “She was so meek, so young, so lovely, so entirely ready to be David’s creation that she left all the responsibility with him,” Mr. Thomson wrote.

Ms. Jones and Selznick were married in 1949 on a yacht off the coast of Italy. Until his death in 1965, he made virtually all the decisions in his wife’s career. He supervised her dramatic training and produced many of her early movies, including “Since You Went Away” (1944), “Duel in the Sun” (1946), “Portrait of Jennie” (1948) and a lavish version, the second, of Ernest Hemingway’s “Farewell to Arms” (1957). The film, which also starred Rock Hudson, was a critical and box-office failure and the last movie Selznick made.

When Selznick lent his wife out to other producers, he often chose badly — turning down the classic film noir “Laura,” for example, or insisting that she star as the mentally ill Nicole Diver in the film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night” when she was both too old for the role and in precarious mental health herself.

Ms. Jones never set her own course. Though her roles expanded — from the country girl Bernadette to the passionate half-caste young woman lusting after Gregory Peck in “Duel in the Sun” to the wealthy adulteress of Vittorio De Sica’s “Indiscretion of an American Wife” (1954) — the screen image was always as molded by Selznick.

But her acting was admired. She received Oscar nominations as best actress for her performances as an amnesiac cured by Joseph Cotten’s love in “Love Letters” (1945), as the wanton Pearl Chavez in “Duel in the Sun” and as a Eurasian doctor in love with a Korean War correspondent (William Holden) in “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” (1955).

Ms. Jones was born Phylis Lee Isley in Tulsa, Okla., on March 2, 1919, the only child of Philip and Flora Mae Isley. Her parents owned and starred in the Isley Stock Company, a tent-show theatrical troupe that toured the rural Midwest. As a child she spent her summers taking tickets, selling candy and acting in the company.

After a year at Northwestern University, she moved to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she was cast as Elizabeth Barrett opposite Robert Walker’s Robert Browning in “The Barretts of Wimpole Street.” The two soon married, and on their honeymoon in 1939 they went to Hollywood, where they found bit roles.

Retreating to New York, the couple had a son, Robert Jr., in 1940, and another, Michael, less than a year later. Michael died in 2007. Robert survives her, as do eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Ms. Jones met Selznick in New York when she went to his office there to read for the lead in “Claudia,” Rose Franken’s hit stage play, which Selznick was turning into a movie. The title role went to Dorothy McGuire, who had starred in the play, but Selznick was taken by the lithe, dark-haired Ms. Jones and saw a future for her in Hollywood. (He came up with the name Jennifer Jones during that first encounter.)

Ambitious but emotionally fragile, Ms. Jones placed herself in Selznick’s hands. He cast her in a William Saroyan play, “Hello Out There,” in a theater season he was presenting in Santa Barbara, Calif., and she received rave reviews. He was already planning to lend her to his brother-in-law, the producer Bill Goetz, at 20th Century Fox, for “Song of Bernadette.”

After “Bernadette,” Selznick cast her as Claudette Colbert’s daughter in “Since You Went Away,” his bid to make a “Gone With the Wind” about the World War II home front. Ms. Jones was nominated for a supporting actress Oscar as the girl whose first love is a young soldier.

Though Ms. Jones and Mr. Walker were by then estranged, Selznick cast Mr. Walker as the soldier who is strengthened by Ms. Jones’s love. Mr. Walker, who later scored a success as the villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train,” died at 32 in 1951 after years of emotional problems and drinking, which he attributed to his loss of Ms. Jones.

Among Ms. Jones’s other movies were the comedy “Cluny Brown” (1946), directed by Ernst Lubisch; “Carrie” (1952), a film version of Theodore Dreiser’s novel “Sister Carrie” co-starring Laurence Olivier; John Huston’s “Beat the Devil” (1954) co-starring Humphrey Bogart; “Madame Bovary” (1949), co-starring James Mason; and “Ruby Gentry” (1952), a King Vidor film with Charlton Heston about destructive passions reminiscent of “Duel in the Sun.”

After Selznick’s death in 1965, Ms. Jones’s film career petered out in “The Idol” (1966), about a young man sleeping with the mother of his girlfriend; the low- budget “Angel, Angel, Down We Go” (1969); and the ensemble disaster movie “The Towering Inferno” (1974). In 1966 she made a rare stage appearance, in a revival of Clifford Odets’s “Country Girl” at New York City Center.

In 1967, Ms. Jones made headlines when she swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills and was discovered, near death, lying in the surf at Malibu. In 1976, Ms. Jones’s 21- year-old daughter, Mary Jennifer Selznick, jumped to her death from a building in West Los Angeles.

Ms. Jones married Norton Simon, in 1971, in a ceremony on a yacht in the English Channel after a courtship of three weeks. Mr. Simon, a multimillionaire industrialist who had turned a bankrupt orange juice bottling plant into a conglomerate that included Hunt Foods and Canada Dry, had retired in 1969 at 62 to concentrate on collecting art.

He spent more than $100 million on his collection, one of the country’s greatest private art collections, housed at the Norton Simon Museum.

After being stricken by the paralyzing neurological disorder Guillain-Barré syndrome, Mr. Simon resigned as president of the museum and was succeeded by Ms. Jones, who also took the title of chairwoman. She oversaw a gallery renovation by the architect Frank Gehry. Mr. Simon died in 1993 at age 86.

Throughout her life Ms. Jones appeared shy and aloof in public, and she rarely gave interviews. She explained why in one of the few she did give, in 1957.

“Most interviewers probe and pry into your personal life, and I just don’t like it,” she said. “I respect everyone’s right to privacy, and I feel mine should be respected, too.”

Kate the Great

kate seems to be taking her well deserved 'vacation' from film.
we can only hope she is reading scripts. please be reading scripts kate!

but i can't have too long a period between postings on kate. so i made this little video to tide us kate fans over.
the soundtrack is the gone to soon brilliant georgia brown. the song is 'i'm a woman' from the musical 'carmelina.
a bit of triva: 'carmelina' is the original 'mamma mia'. this is true. it was based on the movie 'buena sera mrs. campbell'. same stories revolving around a wedding, three possible dads and the outcomes are the same. you must trust me on this. my mind is full of this kind of stuff. why? wish i knew. no really, i'm a music, musical, film and theater buff. well the word fanatic may be a better fit!

I Love Bebe and 'All that Jazz' 'Nowadays' and Everyday.

at the 51st tony awards and bebe won beat actress in a musical:

someone got this in the theatre. i'd guess a rehearsal.

and what's better than a rousing end to a rousing show? bebe and karen ziemba doing the finale of 'chicago' at 'my favorite broadway: the leading ladies'. 'nowadays' and ' hot honey rag':

'The Revolutionary Costume of the Day'

Christine Ebersole's 2007 Tony win Best Musical Actress:

Julie Christie turned 67 This Past April. How the HELL Did This Happen!

the ravishing julie christie





Julie Christie is simply amazing - and she always has been. From her early roles in 'Billy Liar', 'Darling',' Doctor Zhivago', 'Fahrenheit 451' and 'McCabe & Mrs. Miller' to her most recent performance in 'Away from Her', she captivates her audience and so clearly relays the truth of her characters.

She won her Best Actress Oscar for 'Darling' and has been nominated for an Oscar 4 times.

And it just doesn't get any better than Al Pacino calling you “the most poetic of all actresses.”

some career highlights:

Back To 2008

I thought i was finished with 2008.
Now two films came across my desk. They are both significant enough to make me revisit last year.
One could make a person think never ever to go to a movie again.
The other shows one why going or seeing films is a wondrous experience.

Let's start with the film that is truly a film masterpiece. 'I've Loved You So Long'. A powerful performance by the truly gifted Kristin Scott Thomas. How the hell was she not nominated for an Oscar after getting a SAG and BAFTA nomination? It again begs the question 'how the hell did anne hathaway get the nomination?'. This actress is at the top of her game here. I hope in time she gets her Oscar due.







Let's continue...in a word 'Australia'. Good god what a mess. What happened to Nicole Kidman? Between 2001 and 2002 she gave three terrific performances in 'Moulin Rouge', 'The Others' and her Oscar winning 'The Hours'. It has been a steady downhill slide since then. Nicole get with the program or give your Oscar back.
So now the WORST OF 2008 must be updated. No Anne Hathaway you are not off the hook. But you do get to tie for worst actress with Ms. Kidman. May the gods save both of your souls.



So now what about the worst film of '08?
For the talent, so called talent, and money involved this distinction now goes to 'Australia'. Somebody stop this madness. Yet I guess with all the great films produced in '08 I should stop carping. Carp? Yup a good word as 'Rachel yaya' and Australia are two dead fish!

A Last Look At Oscar 2009

(click volume on to hear josh grobin and lara fabian)