Out here in the wilds of North Carolina, I haven’t yet had a chance to see ”The Iron Lady,” but as someone who generally finds Meryl Streep’s acting self-conscious, over-affected, and showy — in other words, not acting at all — I’m rooting for “The Help’s” Viola Davis to win.

THAT was a performance, as opposed to what we’ve seen from Streep for the last two decades.

I have a very simple rule when it comes to acting: If I notice the acting, if I see the strings — you’re doing it wrong. If you break the spell and take me out of the film with all your “technique” — you’re doing it wrong. If I notice your accent — you’re doing it wrong.  Patrick Swayze’s performance in “Road House” was ten-times better than almost anything Streep’s done since 1998. That’s not a joke, either. Swayze was more convincing, and that’s what true acting is really about. The rest is nothing more than bait for foo-foo critics and shallow Academy voters.

Anyway, here’s a wrinkle in Streep’s march to another trophy:

A Weinstein Company email that appears to skirt AMPAS campaign rules by using a third party to reach Oscar voters has stirred up anger among Academy members and rival campaigners.

But the email does not violate Academy regulations, AMPAS COO Ric Robertson told TheWrap on Tuesday. One of the organization’s campaign rules, he said, “allows for media entities to send such things to valid subscribers who’ve opted into being a subscriber.”

The email in question, which went out on Tuesday morning, is not part of Weinstein’s aggressive Best Picture campaign on behalf of “The Artist,” but instead promotes Meryl Streep’s Best Actress candidacy for “The Iron Lady.”

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Hollywood has learned something effective about conservative women: If you play them convincingly enough to left-wing stereotypes, people will believe that the caricature is the real deal. We saw this with Tina Fey’s portrayal of Sarah Palin where so many young people actually seem to believe Palin said she could see Russia from her house.

Expect to see a similar nasty portrayal by Julianne Moore in HBO’s “Game Change.” Moore confesses that it was hard to find a good side to Palin, and the miniseries is candid that her ambition outstrips her capacity. Hollywood knows well that you only get one opportunity to introduce these figures of national or international import, and they intend to make it bad impression on their behalf.

So it is with Lady Thatcher in “The Iron Lady,” whose creators have ridiculously compared Meryl Streep’s Thatcher to a modern-day King Lear in their disgusting attempt to dance on Thatcherism’s memory.

“Iron Lady” producer Harvey Weinstein, director Phyllida Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan are engaged in a caricature of conservatism, through a caricature of Lady Thatcher and all those around her. Weinstein has even claimed that Thatcher is a “social progressive,” as if being pro-choice, pro-gay, and pro-national health service were all there were to Thatcherism.

Alas Weinstein and Streep never show us Thatcher’s considerable economic and political successes, preferring to spend two-thirds of the film luxuriating on her old age. This is as fictional as it is slanderous. We simply do not know how Lady Thatcher is doing because she has lived a life far removed from the press.

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If you, like me, think Meryl Streep is an incredibly gifted actress, “The Iron Lady” will not disappoint you. But if you have any rational recollection of Margaret Thatcher, well, I can’t recommend you watch this negative, extremely biased production. If you do, get ready for some invented, manipulative drama.

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Most of the film annoyingly examines Demented Thatcher in her later years. Oh, the lingering, gratuitous shots of Streep in her confused wanderings! Why should we gaze inside this (completely fabricated) frail, crazy character? It’s the only way to tear her down. The filmmakers, seemingly confused about her actual, incredible successes, focus on her dementia and femininity while categorically denying her capability.

The grand economic prosperity Britain experienced during her service is covered briefly as flashing newspaper headlines, which strangely look damning from the liberal viewpoint–“Maggie’s Millionaires” and the like (what the liberal philosophy fails to recognize is that when the rich get richer, the poor get richer, too). There is no Reagan, save for a brief hallucination of dancing with him. There is a passing shot of Gorbachev. And the Falklands incident is dealt with as a tragic piece of history that she somehow managed to emerge from well. Predictably, the Armed Service personnel were for a war, while everyone else, including the United States, advised her not to escalate.

In her miasma, Demented Thatcher recollects her past as a series of political triumphs that simply serve to emphasize her failure as a human being. Maggie was reviled by most everyone who came into contact with her, including family and cabinet members. Her husband, (the love of her life), was affectionately civil to her – but only in her hallucinations. In real life he often called her “MT,” a not so veiled reference (by the filmmakers) to her presumed emotional state. How else could a woman break the backs of the unions in Britain but by reckless conceit and a complete absence of sympathy? Through all her accomplishments, her family is not depicted as being proud of her for a moment. Even her own daughter screams that everything is always about Mum’s political aspirations. Her husband leaves for South Africa, and the hallucination later asks how long it took her to notice he was missing. It is an extremely poignant scene when her son calls from South Africa to say he won’t be coming to visit. She seems only mildly fraught by his rejection. She’s the Iron Lady, after all. She must be a cold, heartless b*tch. (more…)

You’d think people who get paid to recite lines, hit their cues and say the right thing would do some, if not all, of the above during a gala ceremony honoring their peers.

Anyone who so much as channel surfed onto the 69th annual Golden Globes telecast last night spotted one bumble or another. Maybe more.

Meryl Streep dropped an “F” bomb during her acceptance speech for her work in “The Iron Lady.” Natalie Portman walked to the wrong podium. The teleprompter had a hiccup, leaving Rob Lowe to stare at the screen as if he had never ad libbed a second in his life. Johnny Depp looked like it was his first time speaking before a live audience.

“Modern Family” star Sofia Vergara had trouble with multiple names, but we’ll cut her some slack since one of them was “The Artist” director Michel Hazanavicius.

It’s a good thing Robert De Niro or Warren Beatty, two of the worst public speakers in Tinsel Town, weren’t in the building.

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For lefty movie reviewers already bitter that Margaret Thatcher even existed – and especially bitter because her three terms as Britain’s prime minister utterly repudiated their most sacred beliefs – the new Thatcher biography The Iron Lady offers them a chance for some quality ankle biting.  Of course, this living legend will survive both the film and the wailing of these liberal pipsqueaks.  The problem is that we still can’t be sure whether we ought to see it or not.

The arrival of a serious film about a serious conservative presents liberal reviewers with a quandary. When the film trashes the conservative, that’s great – the slander in and of itself is good for at least a star on its own, and if the boom mikes aren’t looming in the frame and the actors don’t forget their lines you’re guaranteed at least a three star review if only in the name of socialist solidarity.

But if the movie, as some say happened here, refuses to take a position on its subject, then there’s a problem for the liberal reviewer. As we shall see, they tend to handle it by simply inserting their own limousine liberal insights into the review. Somewhere, sometime, someone must have lied to them and told them that the world gives a damn about the political views of guys whose job it is to discourse upon movies that feature singing chipmunks, space robots and/or Ashton Kutcher.

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Meryl Streep doesn’t think President Barack Obama has a spine of steel like a certain British Prime Minister.

Then again, who could be a tough, decisive leader in these challenging times, Streep argues during a new interview with The Huffington Post.

Streep, all but guaranteed to pick up another Oscar nomination for her turn as Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady,” served up a lengthy excuse for Obama when asked what the president could learn from Thatcher’s political career:

It was a completely different world. The Huffington Post didn’t exist. [Today] you have to respond to the YouTube clip going over and over of the thing you said that morning … I think, in a way, that clarity was possible, that conviction politics were possible in a way that maybe they’re not. You’d hope to think they are.

I’ve heard people in government lament that cameras are everywhere because you can’t make those deals, you can’t as a conservative member of your district make a deal with somebody on the the liberal side because you’re dead. It’s photographed, it’s seen. We don’t get those Lyndon Johnson solutions anymore.

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The overrated Meryl Streep (whose acting meter broke decades ago) proves once again that this current crop of actors the world is saddled with is about as classless a bunch as we’ll ever see (hopefully). Not content to enjoy the the accolades she’s receiving for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher, the Academy Award-winner not only ripped the former prime minister’s actions as sub-human (monstrous!) but then propped herself up on a piece of non-existent moral high ground and sanctimoniously insulted an entire country.

The New York Times: [emphasis added]

Ms. Streep said, laughing: “We’re not interested in King Lear’s politics. We’re not saying we would have voted for him.” She added: “What interested me was the part of someone who does monstrous things maybe, or misguided things. Where do they come from? How do those formulations begin, how do they solidify, calcify, become deficits? How do a person’s strengths become weaknesses? Look at me. I tend to go on too long. I’m a little dogmatic, and that could get really awful over time. If you are self-aware, as actors are, you let these things go into your pores, including criticism. I hate being criticized.”

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Meryl Streep doesn’t simply play Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady,” she exudes her. With an intense concentration, Streep captures both the chipper intransigence of Britain’s first female prime minister (from 1979 to 1990), and—with the aid of uncannily realistic old-age makeup and prosthetics—the lonely dementia of her dotage, into which we are told she is sunk today, at the age of 86.

Streep is brilliant, fully validating the decision by director Phyllidia Lloyd (Mamma Mia!) to go with an American actress in portraying an Englishwoman of such long familiarity. So it’s odd to find this technically complex and naturalistic performance encased in such a resolutely old-fashioned, Hollywood-style biopic. I half expected to see Thatcher bumping into Greer Garson’s Madame Curie in one of the film’s many dream-world reveries.

The movie dutifully ticks off the highlights of Thatcher’s career: the rise of the provincial grocer’s daughter through the Conservative Party ranks to the top of the political order; her facing down of the powerful trade unions whose strikes were threatening to paralyze the country in the early 1980s; her condemnations of socialism and unflinching defense of free markets in the face of hooting derision in the House of Commons; her handling of the 1982 Falklands war, in which Britain controversially prevailed; and her unyielding condemnation of bomb-planting IRA terrorism. (“We have always lived alongside evil,” the PM says. “But it has never been so impatient, so avid for carnage, so eager to carry innocence along with it into oblivion.”)

Read the full review at Reason.com

The upcoming biopic “The Iron Lady” depicts former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as a doddering old woman looking back on her life. That’s hardly the kind of image her admirers imagined when the notion of a biopic first hit the news.

Yet a historian says the film is already causing Brits to reconsider Thatcher’s legacy – both as a feminist icon and a ruler of consequence – weeks before its U.S. release. Could it do the same stateside?

Historian Amanda Foreman has already seen Meryl Streep’s work as Thatcher in “The Iron Lady,” and Foreman wrote a Newsweek article about the film’s potential impact. She shared her thoughts with C-SPAN host Peter Slen earlier this week:

SLEN: What’s the current opinion of Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain? What’s the current mood about her?
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Isn’t it just grand when self-proclaimed Hollywood feminists gang up on conservative female heavyweights? As entry #5,849,948 in my Profiles of Liberal Hypocrisy we have Ellen Barkin, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep: three award-winning actresses who fancy themselves feminists with a love of strong, powerful women.

Yet, not surprisingly, these three gals conveniently chuck feminism aside in regards to three others gals (Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin and Margaret Thatcher, respectively) whose political views differ from their own. Somehow, I must’ve missed the asterisk providing an exception to the feminist cause:  ‘Thou must support thy sisters – unless, of course, said sisters disagree with you politically.”

Barkin v. Bachmann: Barkin’s Twitter feed (which rivals that of Alec Baldwin’s in its unrestrained slamming of the right) repeatedly attacks conservative female figures. During the December 15th GOP debate, her vicious tweets revealed this actress is a feminist in name only. Blasting even Fox News’ gorgeous Megyn Kelly, a superstar network anchor and successful working mom (“This Megyn Kelley has more Botox in her f*ckin face than a 57 year old actress, Just sayin.”), Barkin saved her best sneer for Bachmann: “Don’t u just love when Bachmann says “When I am president…”? That’s like me saying… “When I am performing my next heart transplant….”  Odd, one would think Ms. Barkin, political-views aside, would have more respect for a woman who:  is a sitting member of Congress and presidential candidate, successfully raised 5 children and fostered a whopping 23 children. If Bachmann isn’t a poster girl for strong female women, I don’t know who is.

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Actress Alexandra Roach plays the formidable Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the upcoming biopic “The Iron Lady.”

Roach’s Thatcher is the awkward but determined young woman who first enters the political system, while Oscar-winner Meryl Streep conveys Thatcher as the leader who rattled England’s political system during the 1980s.

Neither Streep nor Roach appear to be fans of Thatcher’s political career, but Roach says starring in the movie opened her eyes to a part of Thatcher’s legacy she can’t help but admire.

Asked whether she sympathized with Thatcher, Roach said, “I’m an actress so I wanted to play her as truthfully and as fully as possible. I was definitely not judging her. We don’t agree on a lot of things, but when I was filming at the Houses of Parliament and I had all these older men around me in dark suits, it kind of struck me what she did for women, what she did as a woman. She came from a humble background. To come from that and have ambition and drive, just knowing what she wanted out of life, you cant help but admire that.”

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Would Henry Fonda have volunteered his name and faultless reputation to “The Deranged Mr. Lincoln”?

Nicholas Wasphott in Reuters:

Streep plays Thatcher in her lonely dotage, suffering from crippling dementia, patronized by her carers and her daughter Carol, slipping in and out of a living nightmare where her dead husband Denis appears then disappears before her eyes. In flashbacks she recalls the heady days of her premiership, when she championed the removal of trade union privileges, sold off state assets to reduce the size of government, brought to a temporary end the grip the landed aristocrats held over the Conservative Party leadership, and restored British national pride by retaking by force the distant sheep-ridden Falkland Islands from the Argentines.

But it is the chilling image of a once dominant leader reduced to a fumbling, mumbling old crone that is the movie’s main theme and, while it may pass muster as a sly piece of brutal political theater, as a record of Thatcher and her many achievements, both for good and ill, it is a pitiless, poisonous travesty. Streep has lent her extraordinary acting skills to perhaps the most shameful and cruel piece of political revenge ever to have made it to the screen.

Would Henry Fonda have volunteered his name and faultless reputation to “The Deranged Mr. Lincoln”? Anthony Hopkins dignified Oliver Stone’s somber “Nixon” by trying to get beneath the skin of the paranoid president brought down by his private demons. Even Josh Brolin in Stone’s hilarious “W” made America’s most contentious president in recent times a likeable, surprisingly complex eldest son yearning to show his father he was worthy of winning the White House.

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There must have been some ferocious re-writing going on behind the scenes of “The Iron Lady.”

The upcoming biopic of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher seemed like yet another liberal Hollywood hatchet job, according to an early script review done here earlier this year.

Now, the film is being shown to select film critics, and right-of-center scribe Kyle Smith is weighing in with a glowing assessment of the movie.

Meryl Streep is terrific and should win an Oscar for a deeply engaged, highly sympathetic portrayal of Margaret Thatcher as a strong-willed leader and an icon of womanhood who cracked the ultimate Old Boy Network, got the British economy booming again, made a series of tough decisions in the Falkland Islands war that resulted in total victory together with a restoration of British patriotic pride and enjoyed a long and loving marriage with Denis (an impish Jim Broadbent) that unfortunately ended with his death by cancer. There is not much politics in the film (and still less economics) and issues such as the miners’ strike and the IRA hunger strike are barely alluded to. But this is an admiring look at an indomitable figure and forceful politico (who is shown not only acting with great courage and decisiveness in the Falklands War but also personally hand-writing agonized letters to the families of fallen British troops).

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Will Reiser beat the odds to triumph over a rare but potentially fatal form of cancer.

Now, can the movie inspired by his brush with death pull off an Oscar upset?

“50/50,” the serio-comedy starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the role inspired by Reiser, didn’t obliterate the box office competition following its Sept. 2011 debut. To date, it’s rake in a modest $34 million, not too shabby for a film revolving around cancer but hardly blockbuster material. And the film’s 93 percent “fresh” rating at RottenTomatoes.com also bodes well for its awards season chances.

But the movie doesn’t have that Oscar feel, and while that’s no critique on the film itself it could matter when it comes time to tally up votes.

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So, because you all enjoyed that list so much, and because I apparently have a death wish, it’s time for another: The Top 10 Most Overrated Actors/Actresses of All Time.

Unlike last time, I will claim that these are objective facts, not subjective opinions, so that all my critics may have full liberty to attack me (To those same critics who claimed last time that I phrased my opinions in an “objective” manner, this is called being facetious. That means I’m kidding. Also, seriously? That was your criticism?).

Here are my criteria: are they considered great actors/actresses? If not, they can’t make the list (sorry, Rob Schneider). Are they actually great actors? If so, they can’t make the list (sorry, Laurence Olivier). Only those who are considered great actors but are not, in fact, great actors can make this list. Even then, I’m not claiming that these are bad actors unless I explicitly say that I am.

So, here we go. In the words of Han Solo, I’ve got a bad feeling about this …

10. George Clooney: Not a great actor. Not a good actor. Not really an actor. If you’ve ever seen a movie with Clooney where you didn’t say to yourself, “Hey, I’m watching George Clooney” every thirty seconds or so, you haven’t seen a George Clooney movie. You’re mixing him up with Kate Winslet. He’s a D actor. Dull in “Michael Clayton.” Dreary in “Up In The Air.” Dreadful in “Syriana.” Dismal in “Batman and Robin.” He’s not a low-rent Cary Grant. He’s an affordable-housing Robert Wagner.

9. Dustin Hoffman: He turned in some tremendous performances in his early days (most notably “Papillon,” “Kramer vs. Kramer,” and “Tootsie”), then became a caricature of himself. He has not done anything worthwhile since “Tootsie,” in fact. Even in his better performances, he is a bit too mannered for my taste, perhaps an effect of his method acting. Laurence Olivier thought the same thing. When they were working on “Marathon Man” together, Hoffman showed up on set after having not slept for several days in order to get “in character.” Olivier took one look at him and said, “Dear boy, it’s called acting.” (more…)

NEW LINE CINEMA AND ICE CUBE WANT TO MAKE ANOTHER ‘FRIDAY’ FILM

If this comes together we will have four “Friday” films and while I’m not advocating for a return to the well after almost a decade, I am a huge fan of the original trilogy: “Friday” (1995), “Next Friday” (2000), and “Friday After Next” (2002). What all three accomplish beautifully is aiming for a target and hitting it.

One of the things I most appreciate about producer/star Ice Cube’s brainchild is how he wisely sets each chapter in a new location, which went a long way to help the concept from getting tired. The first is in Compton, the second in the suburbs, and the third mostly takes place at a Los Angeles strip mall during the Christmas season. Another decision that saved the franchise was replacing the hilarious Chris Tucker — who chose not to do the sequels — with Mike Epps, who stepped up beautifully. And John Witherspoon slays me every time he opens his mouth.

There’s an easygoing vibe to these films, a surprisingly old-fashioned theme and moral, and like too many comedies today, they’re not over-the-top with all that raunchy, disgusting non-humor. Don’t get me wrong, they’re R-rated and not for kids, but there are worse ways to spend a Sunday afternoon than with a “Friday” marathon.

FOR NO PARTICULAR REASON, A LOOK BACK AT THE JOE PISCOPO/TREAT WILLIAMS ZOMBIE FLICK ‘DEAD HEAT‘

I was really hoping to forget this movie ever existed; this and ‘Beastmaster 2.’

FIVE ONCE-PROMISING ACTORS AND THE FRANCHISES THAT RUINED THEM

Intelligent list.

BRETT BUTLER WAS HOMELESS AFTER ‘GRACE UNDER FIRE’

I remember liking that show:

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How can an actress from England who doesn’t appeal to me at all in interviews as her very British self — how can she so mesmerize me as a Canadian shiksa goddess of marital perfection in the film “Barney’s Version”?

Only an exceptional actress could ever pull that off.

Unadulterated goodness is, I feel, the hardest and most challenging thing for any actor or actress to play. No one really believes you can be that sainted, least of all yourself.

Having worked with a few of the female greats, Katherine Hepburn and Meryl Streep, and met a few others such as Bette Davis, I found the unadulterated health and blistering sanity of Rosamund Pike’s Miriam in “Barney’s Version” most astounding.

Everyone in the audience just has to fall in love with her during our first glimpse of this vision of her Miriam’s low key, Canadian nobility.

We actually drop off a cliff in the same way alcoholic, eternally Boychick Barney does. She is, of course, strikingly beautiful but eloquently frank and irresistibly unselfconscious. How does Barney win her and keep her for as long as he does? That is the major flaw in the script.
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Conservatives have been mighty suspicious of the upcoming Margaret Thatcher biopic ‘The Iron Lady.’

The film stars liberal actress Meryl Streep as the iconic British Prime Minister, and it’s coming from an industry which regularly wears its disdain for the right on its cinematic sleeve. Big Hollywood’s peek at the film’s script did nothing to quell fears the film would diminish Thatcher’s accomplishments. And associates of the now-ailing ex-leader who have seen the film have called it “insulting.”

Now, ‘The Iron Lady’ screenwriter Abi Morgan is speaking out about the film to IndieWire – sight unseen.

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Below is the recently released teaser-trailer for the Margaret Thatcher biopic, “The Iron Lady.”  The Weinstein Co’s film comes out in January 2012 and has Oscar-bait written all over it.

We don’t see Meryl Streep (as Thatcher) for over half of this minute-long clip, but when we do, we learn that Streep’s Thatcher will be funny and good-natured but capable of having the upper hand in a confrontation with men who are trying to coach (manipulate?) her.  Based on this teaser, we can assume Streep will be portraying the former U.K. Prime Minister as an amiable leader, but potentially an intellectual light-weight.

Streep does a bit of her signature over-acting here, even employing the canine head tilt that reminds me of Michael Myers in “Halloween,” but she certainly looks the part.

Nonetheless, the trailer is intriguing.  Now if only the fact that the script smells like a hit job didn’t ruin it.

The write-up from YouTube got me thinkin’…

The Iron Lady: Tells the story of a woman who smashed through the barriers of gender and class to be heard in a male-dominated world. The story concerns power and the price that is paid for power, and is a surprising and insightful portrait of an extraordinary and complex woman.

Can you think of an American politician who might one day fit this description...? Can you…? (more…)