Tag Archives: Meryl Streep

June 25, 2020 · 1:17 pm

The Set of 400: #50 – My Favorite Spectral Comedy Club

Today! Because if you really wanna make this place feel like Earth, you should open a few of those mini-malls –

Defending Your Life (1991)

Directed by Albert Brooks (x2)

Starring Albert Brooks (x5), Meryl Streep (x3), Rip Torn (x4), Lee Grant, Buck Henry (x4), George D. Wallace, Lillian Lehman, Susan Walters, Shirley MacLaine (x2), Ethan Embry (x2), James Eckhouse (x2), Gary Beach, Mary Pat Gleason, Nurit Koppel

Why aren’t there more movies set in the afterlife? This seems like a setting rife with possibilities, given the complete lack of agreement what the hell is sitting out there waiting for us, if anything. Seriously, we’ve got the hyper complexity of NBC’s The Good Place, a bunch of movies dealing with some manner of reincarnation – Heaven Can Wait/Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Down to Earth, Oh! Heavenly Dog – or ghost visitations – Beetlejuice, Topper – but very few actually set in a heaven/hell/purgatory. Is this too troubling for audiences? Was a survey conducted discovering people don’t mind tales of trying to right your life’s wrongs and winning heaven as a prize, but not the actual heaven part?

Defending Your Life, in fairness, doesn’t cover this either – but it also isn’t set on Earth. I guess heaven has no conflicts inherent in it. The Good Place bends over backwards coming up with twists to prolong the story – and to marvelous effect, I might add – but couldn’t we just get a movie set in the great beyond with a parade of CGI guest stars from eons past? You know what, forget I mentioned it – I’ve got whole sections of my long-unfinished Choose Your Own Adventure style book dealing with this very thing. Maybe it’s time to break that out onto its own.

Available for pre-sale now, coming in 2026 (still editing)

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Tagged as Albert Brooks, Beetlejuice, Buck Henry, Defending Your Life, Down to Earth, Ethan Embry, Favorite Movies Ever, Heaven Can Wait, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Lee Grant, Meryl Streep, Rip Torn, Shirley MacLaine, The Good Place, Topper

May 5, 2020 · 1:20 pm

The Set of 400: #87 – My Favorite Planetarium Date

Today! Because not everybody gets corrupted. You have to have a little faith in people –

Manhattan (1979)

Directed by Woody Allen (x11)

Starring Woody Allen (x8), Diane Keaton (x3), Michael Murphy (x6), Mariel Hemingway (x2), Meryl Streep (x2), Anne Byrne, Michael O’Donoghue, Wallace Shawn (x6), Karen Allen (x3), David Rasche (x3), Mark Linn-Baker (x2), Frances Conroy, Charles Levin, Karen Ludwig

Well, here we are again, folks. The 11th – eleventh! – Woody Allen movie on the list. When I was first putting this thing together, compiling a long list to select from, I didn’t really pay attention to things like how many movies from so-and-so made it, how many movies from what year, etc. That shouldn’t matter when just straight evaluating what your favorites are – but the fact that this is the second-to-last Allen film here at #87 leads me to believe that I probably packed too many of his films in the far reaches of this list. Not only is he far and away the most frequent director as of today, he also is now tied for the most frequent actor, hitting number eight today. And, while I firmly believe this is one of his two or three best movies, it’s also the creepiest, by way of foreshadowing his real life.

This isn’t something that is overly prevalent in Woody’s films as time went on. Sure, there are a lot of films where older men are romantically involved with far younger women, but come on, this is Hollywood! It’s hardly an exclusive problem to this filmmaker. But considering the first round of scandalous issues Woody ran into, this movie stands out as the stark example of his perhaps icky predilections. Mariel Hemingway is, like, really young in this movie – her character is still in high school and all of seventeen, as they are quick to repeat throughout. And it all works for the movie – this isn’t just an indictment of this version of Woody’s writer character – but in retrospect, well, it’s a little glaring.

Sure, she’s seventeen, but she looks fucking twelve

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Tagged as Anne Byrne, David Rasche, Diane Keaton, Favorite Movies Ever, Karen Allen, Manhattan, Mariel Hemingway, Meryl Streep, Michael Murphy, Michael O'Donoghue, Wallace Shawn, Woody Allen

April 20, 2020 · 1:21 pm

The Set of 400: #98 – My Favorite Spinach Eating Robot

Today! Because they made us too smart, too quick and too many. We are suffering for the mistakes they made because when the end comes, all that will be left is us –

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

Directed by Steven Spielberg (x6)

Starring Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law (x3), William Hurt, Frances O’Connor, Sam Robards, Jake Thomas, Brendan Gleeson (x2), Robin Williams (x6), Meryl Streep, Chris Rock (x4), Ben Kingsley (x4), Jack Angel, Ken Leung (x2), Clark Gregg (x4), Kevin Sussman, Ashley Scott, Enrico Colantoni (x2), Paula Malcomson (x3), Adrian Grenier, Michael Fishman

Not often mentioned in the same breath as Spielberg’s best, most iconic films, A.I. Artificial Intelligence holds a weird distinction for me, as the hybrid Frankenstein of a movie that it is. When Stanley Kubrick died in 1999, he left unfinished a number of projects, including his proposed epic biography of Napoleon, some (i.e. me) would argue the final edit of Eyes Wide Shut, and his debatably in pre-production sci-fi epic A.I. Now, Kubrick was taking a helluva long time between movies at this point, so “pre-production” is a pretty relative term, but by all indications this was next up, having started and stopped a number of times, including doing some casting and allegedly recording Robin Williams voice role as it exists in the film. Rumors also persist that Kubrick had discussed with Spielberg the possibility of him directing the film instead. So, when Kubrick died, Spielberg was able to pick up and run with what was largely in place already, cranking the whole film out in just over two years.

Oh those Spielberg silhouettes!

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Tagged as A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Ben Kingsley, Brendan Gleeson, Chris Rock, Favorite Movies Ever, Frances O'Connor, Haley Joel Osment, Jack Angel, Jude Law, Meryl Streep, Robin Williams, Sam Robards, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, William Hurt

July 2, 2008 · 4:39 am

The Movie Event of Our Time Arrives July 18th, 2008

A perfect storm of a media blitz, incessant buzz, A-list filmmakers and cast, and being centered around one of the most beloved institutions of popular culture the world has ever known has created what will likely go down as the seminal entertainment event in the lives of everyone currently sucking oxygen on July the 18^th. In a summer that has already born witness to smash critical and commercials hits the like of Iron Man, Kung Fu Panda, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Sex and the City, the granddaddy of them all is about to be unleashed on a ravenous public, and cinema, humanity, the concept of enjoyment, and the sublimity of being are about to be changed forever.

Space Chimps blasts off in theaters on July 18th. Continue reading →