Word: leigh
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Wait a minute. This is a Pixar cartoon? Instead of toys, bugs, monsters or funny fish, we get a midlife crisis and, in the first half-hour, enough domestic strife to fill a Mike Leigh film. But yes, this is Pixar, the studio that pretty much invented and perfected computer-animation entertainment, with such spectacular success that it wiped out the traditional approach that its distribution partner, Disney, had virtually patented. (The two animation titans have fallen into a rancorous dispute that's likely to end with Pixar's boss, Steve Jobs, taking the company elsewhere...
This is, to put it mildly, unlikely material from which to fashion a near great movie. But writer-director Mike Leigh's Vera Drake is just such a film. He's famously a realist (Life Is Sweet, Naked, Secrets & Lies) and never more so than in this film. He simply recounts the story with unblinking objectivity. The almost comic cluelessness of Vera's family, the phlegmatic spirit of the policemen processing her case, the attitudes of her patients, ranging from the hysterical to the cool--they are all there. Yet there's nothing forced or movieish in Leigh's treatment...
...Broadway, and will replace Dreyfuss for three months. (The good news: based on the first preview, Lane's fabulously manic, archly knowing interpretation is intact.) After his stint, Lane will leave to shoot the movie version of The Producers. The cast has already felt the difference. Says leading lady Leigh Zimmerman, "We've all been ready to move up a gear for a couple of weeks but couldn't. Now with the fire Nathan brings to the role, at last we can." So far, no replacement candidates have materialized to play Max after Lane moves on. British actor Henry Goodman...
DIED. JANET LEIGH, 77, coolly seductive Hollywood star, who earned immortality as the cinema's prime slasher victim in Hitchcock's Psycho; of vasculitis; in Beverly Hills, Calif. She could have settled for being Tony Curtis' wife (for 11 years) and Jamie Lee's mother. But Leigh had a gaze as alert and sexy as any in movies. It bored into Frank Sinatra's frazzled psyche in The Manchurian Candidate; mixed fear and fire as a captive in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil. Even after she'd been killed in the Psycho shower (a model doubled her in some shots...
DIED. JANET LEIGH, 77, coolly seductive Hollywood star, who earned immortality as the cinema's prime slasher victim in Hitchcock's Psycho; of vasculitis; in Beverly Hills, California. She could have settled for being Tony Curtis' wife (for 11 years) and Jamie Lee's mother. But Leigh had a gaze as alert and sexy as any in movies. It bored into Frank Sinatra's frazzled psyche in The Manchurian Candidate; mixed fear and fire as a captive in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil. Even after she'd been killed in the Psycho shower (a model doubled her in some shots...