Please discuss Stephen Frears' "Cheri" here. I think this is the first thread.
The film has already premiered at this year's Berlin Film Festival and was released in France in April. The UK release was on May 8th, by Pathe (The Queen, Slumdog Millionaire). MIRAMAX distributes "Cheri" in limited release in the US starting on June 26th. While Berlin and France generally liked the film, the UK reviews generally have been mixed, almost similar to that of Frears' Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005) and 2004's Being Julia. However, most reviews have praised Pfeiffer's performance, as a return to form since the days of The Age of Innocence.
AVERAGE CINEMA-GOER MINI REVIEW: I saw the film while visiting London over the weekend. I have been a fan of Frears' work, since Dangerous Liaisons. and if you're a fan of that film you will enjoy "Cheri." The film could very well be of what Madame de Tourvel would have turned out to be had she some edge and learned from Malkovich's character had she lived in that film 20 years later. The film is similar in tone, but acts as a good conversational starter as it confronts issues of age, romance, and society. It's elegant, beautifully filmed, well-acted. Rupert Friend and Kathy Bates were well matched. However, I agree that this film solely belonged to Pfeiffer. The dramatic weight of the film seem to have been on her shoudlers. Her performance, in my opinion blends a perfect mixture of vulnerability, grace, and intelligence. I've long been a fan of hers, and strongly reminded me of her performance as Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence. The final scene at the end is a memorable one. She deserves all the kudos that may come her way.
ROOKIE DERBYTE: OSCAR PROSPECTS: "Cheri" and Best Picture. I don't think so. It's too light and airy for that. I like to think the best shots for the film if it holds up to the end of the year are Cinematography (Khondji), Original Score (Desplat), Costume Design (Consolata Boyle) and maybe adapted screenplay (Hampton). All very deserving. But Pfeiffer's performance (Lead Actress) is the first definite contender of the year. Yes, the June 26th release date may hurt her, but that didn't hurt stop Julie Christie (Away from Her), Diane Lane (Unfaithful), Catalina Sandino Moreno (Maria Full of Grace), Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose) and Melissa Leo (Frozen River) from getting noms with their early release dates.
Below are review excerpts (and links) to Pfeiffer's performance. She's off to a healthy start.
Michelle Pfeiffer has made this film her own. The role of Léa de Lonval, a high-class prostitute at the heart of Paris' turn-of-the-century demi-monde, demands that she be both irresistibly fascinating and desperately vulnerable - a delicate balancing act that in the wrong hands could have toppled into hysteria. But between them, Pfeiffer and director Stephen Frears have created a riveting portrait of a woman on the run from age and time.
While the cracks have started to show in Michelle Pfeiffer's famous porcelain visage, her acting is tighter than it's ever been. She casually pulls off a hair-raising balancing act as Lea De Lonval, a woman who makes a virtue of being shallow and yet conveys a profound depth at the same time. She is, after all, hiding a lifetime of fear and insecurity behind that powder-puffed mask.
Cheri reunites her with Dangerous Liaisons director Stephen Frears in a tale of pride, prejudice and heartbreak that features one of her best performances...Pfeiffer brings a delicate touch and vulnerability to the role of Lea de Lonval, a wealthy, middle-aged courtesan in the Paris of the early 1900s. .. The film just can’t match the elegance and wit that come so effortlessly to Pfeiffer.
Michelle Pfeiffer has been Oscar worthy before, notably in Frears's Dangerous Liaisons and Scorsese's The Age Of Innocence, but this is the performance of her life. Now in her 50s, she looks more stunning than ever, and her mesmerising characterisation combines comedic charm, tragic depth and that never-to-be-under-rated ingredient, sex appeal
Michelle Pfeiffer is a revelation as the hooker with a heart, stripping the character's soul bare as she frets over the ravages of time and clings to her young lover without ever allowing herself to clip his wings. The fragile and serene dignity with which she imbues Lea, despite her sordid profession, sets everything up for a heart-tugging finale.
Main reason to see the picture is the powerful performance from Michelle Pfeiffer….Pfeiffer, whose role bears slight resemblance to Glenn Close's in "Dangerous Liaisons" is terrific. It's a mystery why this gifted actress doesn't perform more often. Hopefully Pfeiffer's work will be remembered at year's end, when the critics judos and Oscar race begins
A pair of astute, well-attuned lead performances… most notably a stunning return to premier form for the long-languishing Michelle Pfeiffer… the actress offers a strikingly unguarded flipside to the character’s rigid, overly put-together façade…Her exquisite final scene, culminating in Léa recomposing herself in the mirror as her lover’s fate is articulated in voiceover could form the bedrock of what would be a well-deserved awards campaign later in the year.
Michelle Pfeiffer has been canny and brave in accepting the role of a beautiful woman whose looks are fading… confronts the subject of ageing, intelligently and sensitively.
a radiant Michelle Pfeiffer as his heroine, "Cheri" could well be another breakout hit….The chemistry between Pfeiffer and Friend is positively combustible. One feels the hunger in each, the rising physical passion and emotional vulnerability in two people who, if asked, would scorn love as a human weakness
This sophisticated romantic drama is wonderfully lush and witty, with Pfeiffer perfectly cast as a woman who falls for an idle 19-year-old against her better judgement. Beautifully directed by Stephen Frears, Cheri is funny, stylish - and made with class..
It also might be time for Pfeiffer to get her Academy Award. This is an actress who is never fancy, never calls attention to herself with showy theatrics, but who is always up to the emotional demands of her roles and often transcends them. Her work in "Cheri" finds her at the peak of her ability, able to suggest a range of complicated emotions with a glance. It's also to her credit that, unlike the beautiful actresses of an earlier generation, Pfeiffer is willing to play her age onscreen.
The 50-year-old Pfeiffer shows a good deal of pluck, playing a still-beautiful woman grappling with old age, eroding looks and the indifference of men. While Pfeiffer is still ravishing, she and Frears aren’t shy of unflattering close-ups of a wrinkling neck or hollowed cheek and the media will find particular fascination with this topic vis a vis aging actresses when the film goes on release…But the film belongs to Pfeiffer’s Lea as she struggles to hold onto dignity in the face of age and crumbling vanity.
Pfeiffer has that old Hollywood glamour and beauty, and with the character Lea gives her best performance since The Age of Innocence… Pfeiffer's composed yet emotional performance drips with old school class
It’s Pfeiffer who is the star and delivers the emotional core of ‘Chéri’, a film which threatens to float on the surface of emotions rather than fully ride them: she offers a brittle beauty and masks the vulnerability of her character with an outward strength that’s on the verge of crumbling. She brings a welcome tenderness and reality to the relationship between Lea and Fred - a relationship that begins by operating entirely on a superficial level and only later becomes deeper before either of them is even aware of it.
The opposite of her pained, devotional Madame de Tourvel, Pfeiffer sinks her teeth into Lea de Lonval, although she (and the audience) probably wishes there’d been more meat on the bone. Still, she’s a compulsive act to watch, swanning about in ridiculous hats and sharpening her talons on former sex-worker competitors. Where Chéri suffers is in its doomed central romance…Pfeiffer has magnetic moments as the older woman in lust with youth
Michelle Pfeiffer is terrific as Lea, perfectly conveying a mixture of pride and heartbreaking vulnerability.
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BEST PICTURE: 500 Days of Summer, The Hangover, Up, Inglorious Basterds BEST ACTOR, Joseph Gordon-Levitt "500 Days of Summer" BEST ACTRESS, Michelle Pfeiffer, "Cheri" BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS, Melanie Laurent, "Inglorious Basterds" BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR, Christoph Waltz, "Inglorious Basterds"
Posts: 72 | Location: Irvine, California | Registered: May 04, 2009
Originally posted by stevie: (And speaking of aliens...)
Help! We've been invaded by links!
Mmm, I wonder if Russ_Shigekuni is an anagram of Nathaniel Rodgers. Just kidding.
Seriously, I do hope that Michelle is nominated again and hopefully even a frontrunner at least for Nathaniel's sake. However, I did not predict her for TFE's annual Best Actress contest even though most of the ballots did which is good for her because I think at least two or three people who are collectively picked go on every year to actually be nominated. (For the record, the other collective predictions were Penelope Cruz, Carey Mulligan, Meryl Streep, and Hilary Swank.)
I just feel there wasn't really enough buzz around her for the Berlin Film Festival, and although it might help Pfeiffer that the film is getting released so early like it has helped Richard Jenkins, Julie Christie, Marion Cotillard, etc. in recent years, Cheri, I wonder if the role will be weighty enough for people to remember it. Compared to Carey Mulligan in An Education or Precious, which weren't released early but were screened at film festivals early, I don't think that Cheri will be remembered by Oscar season except for some technical categories.
Originally posted by stevie: (And speaking of aliens...)
Help! We've been invaded by links!
Mmm, I wonder if Russ_Shigekuni is an anagram of Nathaniel Rodgers. Just kidding.
Seriously, I do hope that Michelle is nominated again and hopefully even a frontrunner at least for Nathaniel's sake. However, I did not predict her for TFE's annual Best Actress contest even though most of the ballots did which is good for her because I think at least two or three people who are collectively picked go on every year to actually be nominated. (For the record, the other collective predictions were Penelope Cruz, Carey Mulligan, Meryl Streep, and Hilary Swank.)
I just feel there wasn't really enough buzz around her for the Berlin Film Festival, and although it might help Pfeiffer that the film is getting released so early like it has helped Richard Jenkins, Julie Christie, Marion Cotillard, etc. in recent years, Cheri, I wonder if the role will be weighty enough for people to remember it. Compared to Carey Mulligan in An Education or Precious, which weren't released early but were screened at film festivals early, I don't think that Cheri will be remembered by Oscar season except for some technical categories.
we shall see. I'm really curious to see how the American film critics will respond. we'll find out this week!
BEST PICTURE: 500 Days of Summer, The Hangover, Up, Inglorious Basterds BEST ACTOR, Joseph Gordon-Levitt "500 Days of Summer" BEST ACTRESS, Michelle Pfeiffer, "Cheri" BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS, Melanie Laurent, "Inglorious Basterds" BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR, Christoph Waltz, "Inglorious Basterds"
Posts: 72 | Location: Irvine, California | Registered: May 04, 2009
The one thing Michelle has going for her is this year could be the weakest on paper so far for good roles for women. I mean coming down the line who looks that promising? The ones who jump out that appear to be in baity projects are all actresses who have won recently and no one is in exactly a hurry to award them again (Hilary Swank, Penelope Cruz, and Helen Mirren).
And I love how people think this Carey Mulligan chick is gonna be some unstoppable force. Carey Who? Her film will be lucky to do enough to be seen in a couple of arthouses in NYC and LA.
The girl from Precious may become a feel good story of the year though and win ala Marlee Matlin.
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If both Michelle Pfeiffer and unknown Carey Mulligan are as good as early reviews suggest my very early prediction is that Mulligan will pick up most of the major critics' prizes while Pfeiffer picks up awards from the National Board of Review, smaller film critics organizations, SAG and Golden Globe. I believe Michelle Pfeiffer will ultimately win best actress over Mulligan based on a mixture of merit, sentiment and respect for her overall body of work.
And that is a guess so early it may not count for anything but I do not see anyone as unknown as Carey Mulligan getting very close to Oscar when Sally Hawkins could not even be nominated for a performance that swept the major awards. The thinner competition this year makes me think she can at least get the nomination though.
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Posts: 27186 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Anemic Adaptation of Chéri Could Have Put Colette to Sleep By Melissa Anderson Tuesday, June 23rd 2009 at 2:11pm
Details: Chéri Directed by Stephen Frears Miramax Opens June 26 'For the first time in my life, I felt morally certain of having written a novel for which I need neither blush nor doubt," Colette said of Chéri, her 1920 novel of the Belle Époque Parisian demimonde. Stephen Frears's anemic adaptation, written by Christopher Hampton (who also folds in 1926's The Last of Chéri), would most likely make the author nod off or plug her ears. Chéri, the most celebrated of Colette's male characters, is a louche 19-year-old millionaire played by Rupert Friend, acting opposite Michelle Pfeiffer as Lea, a courtesan d'un certain âge who has a six-year affair with the insolent androgyne until he's married off. Frears and Hampton's missteps begin immediately, with the director providing pinched narration as he recounts, over so many cartes de visite, the histories of other famous ladies who made a handsome living on their backs. It's the first of innumerable auditory assaults, continuing with Alexandre Desplat's frantic score and the clash of English and American accents (especially puzzling in the scenes with Brit Friend and Kathy Bates as his retired-prostie mother). Pfeiffer, uncertain how to convey the older, wiser erotomane, resorts to sounding like Samantha Jones auditioning for Masterpiece Theater, her décolletage the only part of this movie getting any air.
AV Club by Tasha Robinson
Chéri is less like a film than like the experience of sitting in on a picture-book reading in the children’s room of the local library. Granted, the subject matter—sex, doomed love, and the gradual death of the body and soul—isn’t appropriate children’s literature. (It’d probably win a Newbery, though.) But nothing about Stephen Frears’ first film since 2006’s stellar The Queen has the dynamism of cinema. The characters—a circle of fabulously wealthy courtesans and companions in Belle Époque Paris and environs—lounge, preen, banter, and pose in a succession of airless tableaux. Meanwhile, a warmly paternal narrator fills in their backstories and explains their every action.
Still, the picture-book treatment is faithful to the source material, an airy, dry 1920 comic novel by celebrated French writer Colette. The book’s action is just as minimal and obsessed with surfaces as Frears presents it: An aging courtesan (Michelle Pfeiffer) launches a lengthy affair with a petulant, selfish, beautiful 19-year-old (Rupert Friend). Then his duplicitous mother (an oddly cast but agreeably lively Kathy Bates) arranges his marriage to a suitable girl, and the lovers dutifully part ways, but continue to pine for each other. Their relationship seems based more on convenience and novelty than love, but once forced apart, they examine their lives for the first time, with devastating consequences. There’s a little love and a lot of lust in this scenario, but the only real action comes when fleeting regrets and resolves chase each other across the leads’ expressive faces, or when someone lets selfish pique erupt into a brief tantrum.
And yet Chéri is far from dull, thanks in particular to Pfeiffer’s languorously nuanced performance as a striking beauty whose dalliance with a boy first flatters her, then makes her feel her age and the emptiness of her fiercely independent life. The film’s tacked-on ending is taken from Colette’s 1926 Chéri sequel, but otherwise, it contains none of the sequel’s eventual vindication of her character’s choices; instead, the film is a sumptuous, handsome portrait of a woman poised fearfully on the brink of decline, yet too proud to grab at rescue. The Queen was a similarly staid analysis of a woman coming to terms with endings, but it dealt with weighty affairs of state; Chéri instead is a minor story about romance among the spoiled rich. But it also harkens back to an earlier Frears success: 1998’s Dangerous Liaisons, another film about shallow idlers who dabble in relationships and wind up in over their heads.
‘Chéri’ should be titled ‘Preposterous Liaisons’ Unconvincing romance brings the plot down like a house of cards Léa de Lonval (Michelle Pfeiffer) falls for a younger man in "Chéri." View related photos Bruno Calvo / AP
REVIEW By Alonso Duralde Film critic msnbc.com contributor updated 6:39 p.m. ET, Tues., June 23, 2009
Remember that parable about the kingdom lost because of the war, because of the battle, because of the message, because of the rider, because of the horse, because of the shoe, because of the nail? There’s a similar hierarchy of disaster in “Chéri,” by which the chemistry-free and inexplicable romantic relationship between the two lead characters causes a ripple effect that dooms the entire movie.
Fans of “Dangerous Liaisons” were no doubt hoping to sink their teeth into something similarly racy and gut-wrenching — since “Chéri” reunites actress Michelle Pfeiffer, director Stephen Frears and screenwriter Christopher Hampton from that earlier hit — but the result is a collapsed soufflé made from ingredients that never should have been mixed together in the first place.
In this adaptation of two novels by Colette, Pfeiffer stars as Léa de Lonval, one of the leading courtesans of belle époque Paris. She’s just concluded the latest in a string of affairs and is looking forward to sleeping alone for awhile when she becomes reacquainted with Chéri (Rupert Friend), a young man she’s known his entire life. Chéri’s mother Charlotte (Kathy Bates) — a former rival of Léa’s who married well — can’t cope with the lazy wastrel her 20-something son has become and hopes that Léa can teach the boy a thing or two about life at Léa’s country estate.
MSNBC
Much to Léa’s surprise, she winds up falling in love with the boy, mainly because his youth distracts her from her impending age. And this is where “Chéri” takes its fatal turn, because Léa has been presented as a character who is ruthlessly intelligent and efficient regarding matters of the heart; whether her obsession with the lad comes from his own magnetism — unlikely, since Friend insipidly plays the character as a pouty brat from start to finish — or is merely an outgrowth of her terror about getting old, the movie fails to get us over that hump.
What should have been a character study of a smart woman making foolish choices becomes a masochistic exercise in which Léa and Chéri break up, see other people, take turns getting obsessed with each other, come close to reconciliation, and so on.
Pfeiffer, at least, seems to be having a ball playing a scandalous woman in this anti-“Gigi” (also based on the writings of Colette); whether she’s fishing for gossip at a tea party or seducing a muscular young virgin at the seashore, she makes more of the character than Hampton generally offers in his bloodless script. (But did we have to have a scene where Léa picks an autumn flower, only to have it collapse in her hand? Jeez, Stephen Frears, why not just have a deafeningly loud ticking clock to remind us of the passage of time?)
Kathy Bates, on the other hand, gives the kind of terrible performance that only a great actress can deliver, arching her eyebrows to the ceiling and making the goosiest exclamations of surprise and horror. It’s the kind of turn that would make even a drag queen suggest that she dial it down.
The film has certainly divided people. I still think it has still has chance for Pfeiffer in LEAD. But I think it has a really good chance for Cinematography, Costume Design, and Original Score.
BEST PICTURE: 500 Days of Summer, The Hangover, Up, Inglorious Basterds BEST ACTOR, Joseph Gordon-Levitt "500 Days of Summer" BEST ACTRESS, Michelle Pfeiffer, "Cheri" BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS, Melanie Laurent, "Inglorious Basterds" BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR, Christoph Waltz, "Inglorious Basterds"
Posts: 72 | Location: Irvine, California | Registered: May 04, 2009
As a cougar chasing a teen twink: That's a crass précis for the elegant, witty pleasures that Pfeiffer, director Stephen Frears and writer Christopher Hampton — who last collaborated on 1988's Dangerous Liaisons — carve out of this tale by the French novelist Colette. Set in Paris in the early 1900s, the film begins as retired courtesan Léa (Pfeiffer) enters into a six-year affair with Cheri (the excellent Rupert Friend), 19, the son of her colleague Charlotte (a wickedly frisky Kathy Bates). Léa and Cheri will pretend there is no such thing as love, and ultimately be scarred by it. With Pfeiffer, 50, radiating uncommon beauty, grace and feeling, Frears uncovers a fragile story's grieving heart.
Michelle Pfeiffer is back, and her appearance in "Cheri" underlines not only how much she has been missed but also how much the world of film has lost by her absence.
But Lea reckons without the machinations of her frenemy and fellow courtesan Charlotte Peloux (Kathy Bates). Charlotte's 19-year-old wastrel son Fred (Rupert Friend), familiarly known as Cheri, is spending his life in nonstop debauchery, and his scheming mother would like nothing better than to have Lea, who has known Cheri since he was a child, romantically take him off her hands. This comes to pass, and to the astonishment of all involved, especially Lea and Cheri, this supposed brief affair lasts six years.....Pfeiffer and Friend also have excellent onscreen chemistry
...The resulting schemes and intrigues and the emotional dynamics that follow in their wake bring "Cheri" to life.
They also add a deeper, more moving level to Pfeiffer's performance. Especially effective are the wordless scenes that catch Lea unawares, with the camera alone seeing the despair and regret she hides from the world. It's the kind of refined, delicate acting Pfeiffer does so well, and it's a further reminder of how much we've missed her since she's been away.
BEST PICTURE: 500 Days of Summer, The Hangover, Up, Inglorious Basterds BEST ACTOR, Joseph Gordon-Levitt "500 Days of Summer" BEST ACTRESS, Michelle Pfeiffer, "Cheri" BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS, Melanie Laurent, "Inglorious Basterds" BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR, Christoph Waltz, "Inglorious Basterds"
Posts: 72 | Location: Irvine, California | Registered: May 04, 2009
Now that she's past 50, can we all stop holding Michelle Pfeiffer's looks against her and just admit that she's a great actress? I know she doesn't look like one or carry on like one, and her way of speaking is just plain, middle-class American, of a kind you might hear in any shopping mall from coast to coast.
But since "Married to the Mob" (1988), Pfeiffer, in her own unfussy way, has been chalking up a series of rich performances, full of intuition, subtlety and psychological insight. And her latest film, "Cheri," finds her at the height of her ability, in a role worthy of her maturity and emotional intelligence.
Pfeiffer's particular talent is a capacity to express emotion without showing it, to play someone in the midst of turmoil who knows she cannot allow others to read what she's feeling - yet she shows those feelings to us. In "Cheri," based on a pair of novels by Colette, she plays Lea, a courtesan coming to the end of a successful and lucrative career, a woman who has spent decades working within the constraints of public ritual. She's a master of self-presentation who is flawless in her style and dress and knows never to show a sign of weakness.
... Yet Pfeiffer has worn period gowns before, in “Liaisons’’ and 1993’s “The Age of Innocence,’’ and she has worn them well. If her voice remains flatly American, as an actress she’s alive to the genre’s diplomatic nuances - the way a woman in a corseted society can say one thing while meaning the exact opposite.
...Like her character, Pfeiffer is a celebrated beauty on the far side of the curve, doomed by a Hollywood that, to quote “The First Wives Club,’’ thinks the three ages of women are babe, district attorney, and Miss Daisy.
The actress knows this. The proof’s in her performance, a surprisingly layered work of confidence, panic, acceptance, and vanity (both Pfeiffer’s and her character’s). Lea keeps looking at her hands as if expecting her skin to betray her; at times, Frears and his cinematographer Darius Khondji cruelly turn up the lights to accentuate the pallor and sag of Pfeiffer’s face. There’s an awareness, too, of the ways civilized society turns beauty into a commodity. “What am I worth to you?’’ Lea scornfully asks Cheri, and the question ripples right out past the screen.
... Yes, Pfeiffer’s still one of the most beautiful women in the business, but what does that get you in a business addicted to youth? In the movie’s most harrowing image, she stares through the mirror of the camera lens into the audience itself. Does she want us to reflect back what she once was or what she will be? I’m not sure even Pfeiffer knows.
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Posts: 478 | Location: Philippines | Registered: July 07, 2002
Credits Limited Release: Jun 26, 2009; Genre: Romance; With: Kathy Bates and Michelle Pfeiffer
By Owen Gleiberman Owen Gleiberman is a film critic for EW
The whole Paleolithic movie universe, in which a leading man like Harrison Ford trudges through action films into his 60s while actresses like Michelle Pfeiffer and Jessica Lange are ''washed up'' by the time they reach their mid-40s, might straighten itself out pronto if everyone were to go see Chéri. At 51, Pfeiffer has never — I mean it, never — looked more ravishing then she does as Léa, the fancy-free Paris courtesan of Colette's 1920 novel and its sequel. The actress is twinkly and creamy-skinned; she makes Léa a glowing, knowing, temperamentally ageless coquette. But the real freshness of her performance is that, in a movie that has Léa involve herself with a much younger man — the louche, gullible Chéri (Rupert Friend), who's the wealthy son of one of her courtesan colleagues (Kathy Bates) — Pfeiffer transcends any hint of cliché ''cougar'' voraciousness.
These two lovebirds are playfully mismatched, and that's just why they fall for each other. So when Chéri chooses, unwisely, to exit their romance for an arranged marriage, Léa plots to woo him back — by feigning merry indifference. And that, more or less, is the entire movie. Directed by Stephen Frears from a script by Christopher Hampton, Chéri is like Dangerous Liaisons (which Frears also directed) reduced to a tasty morsel, an anecdote of wily and deceptive love. It is, if anything, an overly slender movie, yet its images of Belle Epoque high life are delectably lush, and if there were more to the story, it might not have such a delicate charm. Pfeiffer makes Léa that rare thing, an angelic schemer, and Friend, who was one of the supporting weasels in the 2005 Pride and Prejudice, proves a leading man of perverse fascination. As Chéri, he's like a decadent cross between Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom, with a puckish dimple of a mouth and a pose of snobbery that never quite conceals the heartache beneath it. He's the entitled aristocrat next door. B+
Posts: 5425 | Location: "Stay Classy San Diego!" | Registered: June 15, 2006
Sure, both Winslet and Cotillard's movies recieved mixed reviews, but the reviews for their performances were far from it. There are some reviewers that just aren't clicking with Pfeiffer's acting. Plus, the academy seems so over the petticoat-twirling period pieces that one would have to get some pretty strong reviews across the board to get in. And unlike most here, I don't think the academy feels like they own her anything.
I saw it and was pretty disappointed with it. Michelle Pfeiffer is ravishingly beautiful and does all that she can with the silly material but while I would not mind if she were nominated I would not really want someone to win for such a trifle. It reminds me of Annette Bening in "Being Julia" or Judi Dench in "Mrs. Henderson Presents". Kathy Bates is not as bad as many reviews have suggested, I believe it was the NY TIMES that said she was awful in a way only a great actor can be awful, but I wouldn't want her to win or even be nominated for the over-the-top work she does. Her broad acting style though was suitable for this kind of theatrical film... just not award worthy. The performance that sinks the film though is Rupert Friend, he's always been Orlando Bloom-lite in my opinion, who except for his being oddly effeminate is completely dull so Michelle Pfeiffer's obsession with him is not shared by the audience.
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Posts: 27186 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
If Jessica Lange won her last Oscar with one of the worst movie of that year...why not Michelle now ? She deserved the award more than other oscar winner.
