Theresa Basile

[The following is a guest post from abovethetitle.]

Simply and elegantly put by Walt Disney and Co, if she doesn’t scare you, no evil thing will.

You don’t need to be a genius to see that mothers get a bad rap in this world. The idea of motherhood is revered and romanticized to the point where mothers are trashed and vilified if they step out of line – often, by their own children.

I, like many ungrateful children, gave my mother a hard time if I felt she was being unfair. In turn, my mother would tell me that “life isn’t fair” (a phrase that makes me twitch with suppressed rage to this day). Other times, she would simply ignore my immature whining. And then there were the times that she would go all Lady Tremaine on me.

If I didn’t want to do chores, I would tell my mom that she was being mean to me – because in my childhood mind, “being mean” and “trying to get your daughter to be a helpful member of the family” were synonymous. Instead of directly challenging my ridiculous argument, she would simply quote the Wicked Stepmother from Cinderella: “And do the tapestries, and the draperies – and don’t forget to give Lucifer his bahhhhth.”

It was her way of saying, “Look, we both know that I’m not a terrible mother, and we both know that you’re full of shit, but I’m not going to directly say it because you’ll ignore it. I’m quoting Disney and you can figure out my intention.”

The technique was always effective. I had no comeback ready to that. How could I tell my mom she was being a Bad Mother if she provided me with such a perfect example of a mother who was really awful?

Lady Tremaine, or The Stepmother (as I called her when I was a kid), is truly awful and wicked and a real delight to watch. Ursula from The Little Mermaid and Scar from The Lion King are some of the most entertaining Disney villains, but Lady Tremaine is the scariest because of how human she is. She has no grandiose plans to take over the world. She lives only to spoil her entitled daughters, live through them, and punish her stepdaughter.

Cinderella herself gets criticized a lot for relying entirely on others to escape her lot in life, but I think this criticism is a little unfair. She’s clearly a victim of domestic abuse and she didn’t  have any options before she went to the ball and met the prince. Besides, if this woman was my stepmother, I would have a difficult time standing up to her, too. Her voice is measured and calm, the mask of rationality and good humor, until she turns on a time to become biting and cruel – and then she can switch back to her fake calmness without blinking.

And people say voice acting isn’t “real” acting. The animators certainly did their job with drawing Lady Tremaine, but she would have been an utter failure without the vocal talents of Eleanor Audley. Who else could create a mix of such delicious wickedness and scary delight just by uttering the words, “I said ‘if.'”

[The following is a guest post by abovethetitle.]

Lady T highlighted a kid so I’ll go with one too. One of my earliest childhood memories is watching the VHS of “Meet Me in St. Louis” with my female cousins when we had a sleepover at my grandparents’ house. It was our female bonding movie. Of course it goes without saying that Judy is at her very best, her eventual husband Vincente Minnelli giving her the most lovely lighting, hair and costumes to accentuate those famous songs she got to sing. But Judy didn’t want to take the movie again because she was tired of playing teenagers and because word on the street was that the character of Tootie would steal the entire picture. I wouldn’t say she upstaged Garland but Margaret O’Brien certainly left a lasting impression. I can’t really say what made me choose O’Brien over Garland, other than it’s a more unexpected choice. The truth is that I associate this film with my childhood more than any other except “The Sound of Music.” I have chosen to highlight a scene that has both of them.

[The following is a guest post from abovethetitle.]

The only things assured in life are death, taxes, and that I will miss a deadline. Not that this in any way reflects my adoration from my “coming of age” pick on the heels of Lady T’s write up for Anna Chlumsky. Au contraire. Carey Mulligan in “An Education” is one of my very favorite turns from the present century and the film is perhaps my very favorite of that subgenre. Mulligan’s star-making turn showed us all what it’s like to feel trapped by society and/or parental expectations and the very scary reality that our mistakes can define us. A minor spoiler alert ahead so reader beware:

A lot has been made of the somewhat tacked on ending for the film, which I do agree is somewhat at odds with the rest of the film stylistically, but it’s just that Mulligan’s Jenny was so inherently lovable that I so desperately wanted life to work out for her.

Continuing the theme of child actresses who inspired me, I have to talk about Christina Ricci.

When I was little, I always looked forward to having sleepovers with my younger cousin. Sleepovers meant eating more junk food than I was allowed at home, spending time with my favorite cousin and a super-cool aunt and uncle, and watching silly movies with them. Our favorite things to watch were stupid comedies like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Wayne’s World, and The Addams Family Values. Why we watched the sequel instead of the original, I don’t really know, but that’s the movie that got me interested in Christina Ricci.

Come on. How could I not become entranced by Wednesday Addams? She was the only little girl I’d seen in a movie that was as pale as I was. She was also weird and off-putting and lacked affect – I can relate to the weird and off-putting part, but not the lacking affect – and had a wicked, dark sense of humor. She was a weirdo. I loved her.

I also loved this scene, which is SO inappropriate, but also memorable for signs of baby David Krumholtz and Mercedes McNab (Harmony in Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

I was hooked. After that, Christina Ricci became part of the trifecta of actresses whose movies I always wanted to see, along with Winona Ryder and Kirsten Dunst. (And yet, I still haven’t seen Mermaids. Go figure.) At one point, Christina Ricci was at the top of the list, and I was super excited to see Casper and Now and Then just for her. You have no idea how excited I was when she made a movie with Anna Chlumsky, and how heartbroken I was when the movie turned out to be totally boring.

Christina Ricci then went on to star in a bunch of independent movies, and good for her. A part of me will always remember her as weird, pale little Wednesday.

The next performance I want to write about is one that’s close to my heart in a weird way.

When I was a wee lass, I was obsessed with My Girl. I don’t even remember when and where I saw it. All I know is that the main character, Vada Sultenfuss, immediately became a personal hero of mine. She was a hypochondriac with a boy for a best friend, a mortician for a father, and a crush on her young-ish English teacher. She wanted to look more grown-up and feminine but also be one of the boys. She was terrified of death and fascinated with it at the same time. She loved having a woman in the house until that woman became interested in her father.

She was passionate, bratty, angry, imaginative, curious, scared, funny, and determined. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. I wanted to be Vada with her ridiculous name and her gutsiness in taking an adult writing class when she was eleven years old. For a period of time, this girl was my hero. I owned the novelization of the book, for crying out loud, and read it over and over again until the pages turned brown at the edges and fell out of the binding.

I haven’t seen the whole movie in a decade, and I can’t say with any objectivity if the film is as good as I remember it. I don’t care. Anna Chlumsky, thank you for inhabiting a girl like Vada and showing me that little girls could be as weird and complicated and stupid as little boys. Thank you for this, and as a return for the favor, I’ll pretend that My Girl 2 never existed.

[The following is a guest post from abovethetitle.]

I try to feed off Lady T’s lead when possible and since she went with one of this year’s unnominated gems, I will do the same. I mentioned in my “Black Swan” post that I usually get obsessed with one performance per year and this was my 2011 pick.

Let me preface this by saying that as a child of the ’80s, the Olsen twins were a fixture of my pre-pre-adolescence. I remember being in their fan club. I remember having Velcro sneakers with the “Full House” sisters on them. I remember the very first item I ever saved for with my very own allowance money was the talking Michelle doll. I think it was something like $30 but considering I was saving $1 at a time, my frame of reference might be completely off. But as we all know, the appeal of the Olsens to little girls of a certain demographic had nothing to do with acting ability. As I get older (and they did too obviously), I admired them for their business acumen. Their Wal-Mart line is said to sell over $1 billion in the US alone.

When I heard that their younger sister (known as Lizzie for those who watched the Olsen and Olsen detective agency VHS series – VHS!) was the darling of Sundance, I could not wait to see her film debut. There seemed something so anti-establishment about the younger sister of famous pre-teen Hollywood tycoons being the talented one. And talented she is. In fact, I just did her a great disservice by doing an entire intro paragraph on her sisters when I should be focusing on her but this is a blog entry meant to illustrate what her performance in “Martha Marcy May Marlene” meant to me. I was rooting for her so hard to come into her own and discover her own destiny. Her performance in “Martha” is touching and brave. With a face that’s a cross between, well, her sisters’ and Vera Farmiga and eyes that pierce through the screen, she made me feel so much for her character, a  woman lost after escaping from a cult that left her brainwashed and gave her difficulty assimilating back into normal life. She is at times both simultaneously strong and vulnerable, making Martha sympathetic despite being so flawed. That Elizabeth Olsen herself is known as somewhat of a Chekhov fanatic only adds to my belief she is one of the next well-spoken younger actresses who will continue to play interesting characters. Luckily for us, we have her very first one here:

2011 was a great year for women in film, with respected, established actresses and exciting newcomers getting chances to stretch themselves and play different kinds of characters. Of the many strong lead female performances I watched last year, my favorite was Charlize Theron in Young Adult, a performance that was unfortunately overlooked by most of the major awards.

Theron’s character, Mavis Gary, is different from most female characters I get the opportunity to see in film. She’s a professional writer, but she’s neither a dedicated artist suffering for her craft nor an over-the-top caricature of a hack whose writing is comically awful – her prose (that we hear in narration) is boring, yet competent and appropriate for the Sweet Valley High-esque novels that she ghost-writes. She’s an alcoholic and lives off of diet soda and junk food, and scenes of her guzzling an entire bottle of soda are played to an uncomfortable, darkly comic effect. Her apartment is large and luxurious but empty, a sea of blank white space.

The set design and the direction perfectly set up the kind of person that Mavis is, and Theron doesn’t fail to deliver when she takes the reigns of this role. She plays a woman who is both desperately pursuing a last-ditch attempt to be happy, and secretly thinking that happy people are bubbly, uncool losers. Both sides of her character come through in every scene. Watch the one below.

It’s not one of the biggest or best scenes in the movie, but it’s a good example of Theron’s subtle work in this movie – the barely noticeable desperation in the way she greets her ex, the way her smile changes from genuine to tense and slightly forced when she greets her ex’s wife, the fakeness in her voice when she describes the baby as “adorable,” and the fleeting look of rage, pain, and disgust when she looks at said baby.

I would be remiss if I didn’t give credit to Diablo Cody for writing the character of Mavis; I’ve seen Juno and United States of Tara, and while I liked both, I think Mavis as written is the most emotionally honest of her leading women. But I also think the character would have fallen completely flat without the right actress in the role. When Theron plays Mavis, you’re horrified at her lack of empathy and understanding for other people, but the selfish side of you envies her for being able to say that babies are boring without a trace of shame. You despise her, sympathize with her, and want to be her in equal measure, and that’s why hers was my favorite lead performance of last year.

[The following is a guest post from abovethetitle.]

I felt in the mood for a distinctively comedic performance this time around. “Singin’ in the Rain” is somewhat retro right now, being one of the two films attributed with inspiring the plot of “The Artist” (“A Star is Born” being the other). Indeed, Gene Kelly tap dancing in his yellow raincoat is one of the most iconic scenes in film history. But where would this story be without Lina Lamont, a silent film star whose rather distinctive voice seems to hinder her transition into talkies? The blonde ditz is a stereotype wrapped within a cliche nowadays but Jean Hagen imbued Lina with so much heart beneath the screwball that despite “Singin'” getting summarily ignored by the Academy (FOR SHAME!), Hagen still scored a nom for Best Supporting Actress.