Tom Cruise does Hitchcock

Tom Cruise's hair gave the performance of its career in John Woo's Mission: Impossible-2.  That Tom Cruise action sequel is a flat-out remake of an Alfred Hitchcock classic.  But, it seemed like the movie studio was hoping we wouldn't notice.  Redoing Hitchcock classics is nothing new.  There was that flop remake of Psycho starring Anne Heche in the role that got Janet Leigh an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.  Disturbia was an entertaining suburban thriller starring that young actor whose name sounds like tonight's special in a French restaurant.  Shia LaBeouf took on the James Stewart role in this younger take on Hitchcock's Rear Window.

In its promotion, it was mentioned that it was new look at Rear Window.  Jodie Foster starred in a new version of a 1938 Hitchcock mystery/thriller starring Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave.  Flightplan was basically The Little Lady Vanishes.  In Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, an older woman disappears on a train en route from a Germanic location.  In Flightplan, a traveler's little girl vanishes while they're in flight from Berlin. In both films, passengers claim not to have seen the female who disappeared.  The Margaret Lockwood and Jodie Foster characters prove that something's wrong.

Now we come to that Tom Cruise workout video called Mission: Impossible-2.

He can dangle from your rocks. He can ride a motorcycle.  He can spin, kick, shoot.  But can he be as good as Cary Grant?  I saw this movie in a big Manhattan cineplex with a preview audience.  I'd be reviewing the movie on a New York City television show.  I sat next to a CBS entertainment journalist who'd be reviewing it on a network news program.  About 20 minutes into the movie, I said to myself "This is a remake of Notorious!"  But no reference to the Ben Hecht screenplay for the 1946 Hitchcock film was in the opening credits.  That was very curious to me.  In TV specials about the special Hitchcock filmmaking touch, you will definitely see clips of  Rear Window and from Notorious.  That thriller/love story, starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, contains some of the famed director's most iconic scenes.

If you've seen Notorious, follow me on this:  After the opening courthouse scene, we see Ingrid Bergman as sophisticated Alicia Huberman tossing a Miami cocktail party.  She's a "notorious" woman.  She likes to drink. She likes men.  Especially older men.  She's no virgin.  There's a bit of self-loathing in this free spirit.  She's known romantic disappointment.  As she says, "There's nothing like a love song to give you a good laugh."  Unlike her father, Alicia is a patriot.  He supported the swastika side.  That's why she was at court.  Mr. Huberman was on trial.  Alicia hated her father.  She loves America.  She wants to put this family darkness behind her, but she's soon to be approached to do some espionage work for Uncle Sam.  Cary Grant is the handsome stranger at her party.

Even though she's had a few too many, they go for a drive.  She's behind the wheel.  He watches her.  So does a motorcycle cop.  The cop gives chase because she's going over the speed limit.  He pulls her over. BUT...handsome Cary hands the cop identification from his pocket.  The cop salutes.  The handsome stranger is a federal agent.  The high speed chase leads Alicia to discover she's been trailed by the Feds.  She's angry.

Handsome hero. Notorious woman.  Speeding car.  Revelation.  Conflict.  Dig this scene with Tom Cruise and leading lady Thandie Newton in Mission: Impossible-2.

The CBS reporter whispered in my ear that Cruise's movie was exciting.  I whispered back, "Yeah.  I bet there's a racetrack scene coming up."  In Notorious, there's the famous scene in which Alicia, in love with the caustic federal agent, passes information to him at the racetrack.  They're being watched by the man the Feds hope to bring down.

There was, indeed, a racetrack scene with Tom Cruise and Thandie Newton while the bad guy watched.  Of course, the screenplay was tailored to suit Tom Cruise but it was basically Notorious.  The woman with a past is recruited to help smoke out a global villain by rekindling his romantic interest in her.  He loved her more than she loved him.  She falls for the hero (Tom) and, near the end, gets a poison in her system.  I like Robert Towne.  I interviewed him once on my old VH1 talk show.  He's an excellent screenwriter.  One of my Top 10 Favorite Movies of All-Time was written by him -- Chinatown.  But that action movie sequel script of his for director John Woo and Mr. Cruise was not an original idea.  Some screen credit should've also been given to Ben Hecht.

Oh!  And who shows up in an unbilled cameo?  Anthony Hopkins as the big boss to Tom Cruise's character.  He has a slightly snarky attitude towards the woman helping the organization because of her sexual and legal past.  Sound familiar?

Anthony Hopkins is the 2000 version of the Louis Calhern character in Notorious.

I've seen this Hitchcock classic countless times.  Ingrid Bergman won three Oscars in her acting career -- two for Best Actress and one for Best Supporting Actress.  She wasn't even nominated for Notorious and it's one of the peaks of her Hollywood film career.  For sentimental reasons, my generation always swooned at her work in Casablanca and gave it legendary status.  She is luminous as Ilsa in the 1943 movie.  However, Alicia is a much more complicated role and a bold female lead character for a 1940s film.  This was made at a time when Hollywood portrayed virginity as being a key ingredient to a woman's worth.  It was major currency in her character.  Alicia Huberman wasn't a widow.  The single woman had lovers in her past.  A strong feminist core runs through Notorious.  The Boys' Club of Federal Agents doesn't regard her as "a lady," but she's doing the hardest and most physically dangerous work in this mission.  When only the men are in the office, Paul Prescott (Calhern) makes a snide remark about her reputation.  This irritates his employee, Devlin.  Dev calls them on their chauvinism.  The Feds want to infiltrate a nest of Nazis still in operation.  One, Alex Sebastian, had a major yen for Alicia.  It wasn't mutual.  But the Feds recruit Alicia to prove her patriotism by starting a fake romance with Alex that goes as far as and includes the bedroom.  Alex had great respect for Alicia's traitor father.  Her assignment is in South America.  One more thing -- when she's not busy bangin' a Nazi, she's got to memorize all the names of his Nazi buddies who come over for dinner and secretly relay all this information back to Devlin (Cary Grant).

Alicia Huberman, the young beauty who likes liquor and older men, does her duty for the U.S.A.  She has no gun.  No protection.  She's armed with just her keen intellect and her sexuality.  She is actively engaged in her mission.  The men give orders while seated in a comfortable and safe office.  At one point, the Louis Calhern character gives more instructions to Devlin for Alicia while he's lying down on a bed and eating cheese and crackers.  Alicia is smack-dab in the middle of that nest of Nazis.  She marries Alex.

Another brilliant touch -- while on duty for the Feds, Alicia cannot drink they way she used to because it would just be too dangerous in her work as an American agent.

We always think of coffee as being the antidote for a hangover.  In Hitchcock's hands, it's the coffee that puts her out of commission more so than any cocktails ever did.  Her coffee has been laced with poison.  Devlin initially assumes she's got a hangover.  Cary Grant is at his best as a bad-ass, by-the-book agent.  On the surface, he's not very likable but Grant expertly shows us there's something inside, some emotion, that Devlin tries hard to keep hidden.  We will see that he's "...a fat-headed guy, full of pain."  Alicia is a woman he cannot keep treating like a second-class citizen.  Hitchcock's Notorious is a thriller...and a love story.  Alicia and Devlin are redeemed by love.

If you've never seen Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains in Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, do yourself a favor and rent it.  It's hard to believe this film did not bring 3-time Oscar winner Bergman a Best Actress nomination.  She's outstanding here and it's a masterful screen performance.  For classic film fans ... and for new filmmakers...there's juicy production information in the DVD commentary from the Criterion Collection.

And I love the intelligent screenplay by Ben Hecht.  Obviously, so does Robert Towne.  Notorious brought Ben Hecht an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay of 1946.

Great Race Talk with Tina Fey

Ms. Norbury:  "Well, I don't know who wrote this book, but you all have got to stop calling each other sluts and and whores.  It just makes it ok for guys to call you sluts and whores."

Tina Fey, a performer to whom I'd send valentines on a monthly basis, played high school teacher,  Ms. Norbury, in the 2004 comedy, Mean Girls.  Ms. Fey is the featured guest tonight on the opener for Season 19 of Inside the Actors Studio on Bravo.

Remember when Bravo TV would give major promotion to that Emmy and Peabody Award-winning show hosted by James Lipton?  I miss those days.

Now Bravo TV airs more promotion for reality shows featuring unknown housewives who seem to have more money and free time than they do social skills.

One of the best hours of my career when I lived in New York City was spent at the Directors Guild on West 57th Street.  I was asked to be the "James Lipton," if you will, for an Interview with Tina Fey.  I'd moderate questions from audience members too.  Mean Girls had just been released on DVD and Fey was eligible for a Best Screenplay Adaptation of 2004 Oscar nomination.  The actress also wrote the screenplay.  She didn't get a nomination but she was eligible.  And a smart adaptation it was.

The movie was about getting through that social and emotional minefield called "high school."  Lindsay Lohan starred in the movie.  Today, Lohan is known more for her courtroom dates than her film career.  However, when folks comment "she is talented," the performance in Mean Girls is an example of why folks say that.  It's a charming, witty, skilled performance in a comedy that makes a good point for teens.  Especially girls.

The film company representative made sure I had a copy of the DVD.  Of course, I watched it and took notes before my interview with Tina Fey.  After I watched Mean Girls, I watched it again playing the DVD commentary track.  Tina and, I believe, film director Mark Waters, did the lively commentary.  Some commentaries can be either informative but wooden or chatty and pretty hollow.  Not this one.  It's energetic and interesting.

There's a high school gym scene.  Students are seated in the stands.  Two Asian-American girls are speaking in a foreign language, so their dialogue is subtitled.  They use the "N-word" when engaged in slang-filled girl talk.  The commentary dialogue had been fabulous, non-stop banter going back and forth between Tina Fey and her partner.  When that scene with the N-word came, there was such a curious, noticeable gap of silence that I thought there was an audio glitch with the DVD or my DVD player.  I took the DVD out, wiped it off, and put it back in the machine.  Nothing was wrong.  The silence was in the commentary.

I asked Tina Fey about that during our interview at the Directors Guild.  I loved that she gave me a direct, honest answer.  The plentiful use of "nigga" in rap/hip hop music, some movies, comedy routines and in casual teen street talk pretty much made her, as a writer, feel that it was ok to use in her screenplay.  After one of her longtime best friends, an accomplished middle-aged black woman, saw the film, Fey had a change of heart.  Her friend disliked seeing the word, she dislikes the casual use of the word, she didn't find the scene funny and she told Tina why.  Tina got it.  She needed the honest feedback.  She apologized.  She truly didn't mean any disrespect and would not use that word in a light-hearted way again.  Where some white actor/screenwriters might have gotten uncomfortable and tried to avoid the racial issue, she was forthright and responsible.  She owned it in a refreshing, enlightening way.  A good example of rights and responsibilities and how artists can benefit from feedback.  Also, what Fey had to say was food-for-thought on casual use of the word in mass entertainment by us minorities.

Love me some Tina Fey.  I hope to interview her again one day.  I bet she turns out to be one of James Lipton's best guests on tonight's return of Inside the Actors Studio.

Did you know that Lipton is in his mid-80s?  Yes.  And still working on TV.  Bravo to him.

Come Back, Captain Kangaroo

It's a television performance art form that's pretty much disappeared today.  It's been reflected in films.  The last popular movie we saw it in was 1993's Mrs. Doubtfire starring Robin Williams.  Mrs. Doubtfire became...a weekday kiddie show host on local television.

Yes, I know about Robin Williams and Edward Norton in Death to Smoochy.  But I wrote "popular movie."   A Ryan Seacrest paycheck for two weeks' work is probably more than what Death to Smoochy made its opening weekend at the box office.  On The Mary Tyler Moore Show, one of the best episodes of the truly classic sitcom centered on the untimely death of the local station's beloved kiddie show host during a personal appearance.  Remember "Chuckles Bites the Dust"?  In the late 1980s, comedian/actor Mario Cantone hosted one of the most delightfully subversive kiddie shows ever.  Back in the New York/New Jersey area, I knew lots of grown-ups who couldn't wait to see his Steampipe Alley on weekend mornings.

In 2011, I lived in San Francisco and tried to resurrect my TV career there after New York work opportunities vanished due to the dreaded Recession.  I got a meeting with the top executive of a local independent TV station and pitched ideas to him.  One was -- let me host a weekday kiddie show or be the weekend nighttime host of a sci-fi/monster movie show.  Local kiddie shows were always low budget and, for us young viewers, big fun.  They were comfort TV.  I was a latchkey kid.  I grew up watching the Godfather of Network TV Kiddie Show Hosts -- Captain Kangaroo on CBS.

He was part of my upbringing.  He presented groovy cartoons and totally cool characters on his show.  He and his characters -- Bunny Rabbit, Mr. Moose, Dancing Bear and Mr. GreenJeans, taught us valuable lessons ranging from social etiquette to personal hygiene.  Mom and Dad worked.  My father was a postal clerk at Los Angeles' main post office in the downtown area.  My mother was a registered nurse in hospitals.  They both had to leave for work before I walked to Catholic elementary school every weekday morning.  So they drilled me in how to make sure the stove was turned off, all lights were turned off, the back and front door would be locked and how I would leave for school at half-past Captain Kangaroo.  If I checked the house and walked out the front door thirty minutes into that one-hour CBS show, I'd have enough time to get from our cul-de-sac block to St. Leo's by 8 o'clock.

Last year, I shed a few tears reading that Sheriff John died at age 93.  He was my favorite weekday kiddie show host when I was growing up in the Southland (what native Los Angelenos call Southern California).  Slim, handsome John Rovick was the Fred Astaire, Cary Grant and Sandy Koufax of kiddie show hosts.  Classy, cool, he had style and he never gave a bad performance.  He was a good singer and sang every day on his KTTV/Channel 11 show.  A regular feature on Sheriff John's Lunch Brigade was his "Happy Birthday" greetings.  I'm positive there's a generation of us Southern Californians who feel that his "Birthday Polka" is much more festive than the traditional "Happy Birthday To You."  If I recall correctly, Sheriff John's "Birthday Polka" was even sung in one episode of Bosom Buddies, the 1980s ABC sitcom starring Tom Hanks.

Emmy-winner Sheriff John even posed with TV's Superman, George Reeves.

Other kids' programming hosts on local L.A. television were Channel 9's Engineer Bill...who had a "red light/green light" drinking game to make you drink your milk....

...and Skipper Frank who did magic tricks and ventriloquism on Channel 5.

Hobo Kelly was on KCOP/Channel 13.  She had an Irish brogue and "Mischief Makers."

Our ABC affiliate, KABC, had Chucko the Clown.  He was way cooler than Bozo.  Bozo was vaudeville. Chucko was more Ziegfeld Follies.  Here he is with Engineer Bill.

Tom Hatten dressed up like a sailor on KTLA/Channel 5 and presented Popeye cartoons.  Hatten was also handsome, had a warm and inviting TV persona and he was one terrific sketch artist.  He always sketched on his shows.  As I got older, I always felt that his viewership probably was not limited to just youngsters.  Tom Hatten was definite eye candy in a T-shirt and white pants.  He was one hot sailor.

I met Mr. Hatten when I was a high school junior.  You'd have thought I was meeting a Motown star or one of The Beatles.  He was extremely flattered.  My mother and I were at the old Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood.  I'd been picked to be one of the first teen contestants on a syndicated game shot being shot there.  Before my appearance, I was asked to come watch one show.  Mom and I were backstage when the shooting finished.  Two of the celebrities on that edition -- Pinky, A Letter To Three Wives and Leave Her To Heaven movie star Jeanne Crain and Ben-Hur star Stephen Boyd  -- came through the doors and casually walked over to where Mom and I were standing.  They were close to us...but then I noticed that so was...Tom Hatten!  He was doing some Hollywood stand-in work.  Not only was he touched that I was a fan of his KTLA show, he said to my mother "How did he know that?" when I gushed, "..and you had a line in the movie Sweet Charity!"  I'd recently seen the movie and recognized him in an opening scene right after Shirley MacLaine sings and then gets pushed into Central Park lake.

That game show marked my first featured and speaking appearance on television.  But the first time I ever got my face on camera was when my sister and I were in the KTTV/Channel 11 audience for Billy Barty's Big Top.  Mom went with us.  She loved Billy Barty because he always gave attention to  the few minority kids who'd be in the mock-circus audience and he'd make sure they got their faces on camera.  That was the case with my sister.  She got a close-up that was about as long as Greta Garbo's final shot in Queen Christina.  Yes, I was jealous of my sister that afternoon in Hollywood.

All of these local L.A. kiddie show hosts made a great impression on me and influenced my style of performance decades later when I became a VH1 veejay in New York City.  Some of those hosts were even funnier to grown-ups than they were to us kids.  I'd notice when they'd do or say stuff that would make the camera crew laugh -- just the way Soupy Sales did on his screamingly funny syndicated show.  In San Francisco, I had the notion that an "old school" kind of kiddie show could have a retro appeal to baby boomer parents and grandparents.  And kids would dig it too.  It would also be cheap to produce and could promote community events.  I never got a response to that pitch -- and I no longer live in San Francisco.

Did you watch kids' show hosts on local TV when you were growing up?  Who were they?  Did you ever get to meet any of them?

My pitch to be a nighttime "Creature Feature" weekend host was a bit edgier because more teens and grown-ups might be watching.  I'd be a cemetery character with a team of politically-correct spirit sidekicks called My Boos.  They'd say things like "Don't call us 'Spooks'!  We're 'Ghost-Americans'!"  I thought that would play with the San Francisco crowd.  But...no.  I never got a response to that pitch either.

From Captain Kangaroo to Sheriff John and Engineer Bill and cute Hobo Kelly...I still have a special place in my heart for the kiddie show hosts -- especially my local ones.  The work was always entertaining and always appreciated.  They made kids feel safe, they made kids laugh, they taught kids the importance of good manners and respect for other cultures.  And they gave prizes!  I miss that kind of TV programming.  There's an art to that kind of children's programming entertainment.  I loved watching those local TV artists.  They were fine performers.  They made so many of my young days brighter.

Jessica Lange and TOOTSIE

"That is one nutty hospital."  ~Bill Murray as Jeff, Michael Dorsey's best friend & roommate, watching Michael as "Dorothy" improvise on live TV in TOOTSIE

This 1982 holds a special place in my heart.  I was a freshman in my professional TV career, new at the ABC affiliate in Milwaukee when it came out.  I flew to New York City to participate in the promotional junket for the film.  Junkets are usually a busy weekend of back-to-back press interviews with movie cast members.  If the movies are really big with stars to match, domestic and foreign press are sitting in hotel hallways, waiting to enter suites and chat with the stars for a certain number of minutes.  Junkets are a great boon to entertainment reporters not located in showbiz hotspots like NYC, LA and Chicago.  My interview of Jessica Lange was one of the first celebrity interviews I did to air nationally.  It played on a popular 1980s show called PM Magazine.  Jessica would make Oscar history with her performance as Julie, the actress who grows from basically being a lovely daytime TV sex object into strong, confident actress and an independent woman.

I love her journey as an actor.  It's inspirational to me.  I remember movie critics practically making a joke of Lange because of her film debut in the first remake of King Kong (1976).  That movie was a bomb but it certainly wasn't her fault.  Fay Wray had better material.  But critics like Gene Shalit and Michael Medved dismissed Jessica Lange as merely being another fashion model who thought she could act.  Ms. Lange won the 1982 Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for Tootsie.  Not only that.  She was the first woman since  1942's Teresa Wright, to be nominated in two acting categories in the same year.  Lange was also a 1982 Best Actress contender for her riveting work as the late, turbulent actress Frances Farmer in Frances.  She went on to win a second Academy Award.  The other was a Best Actress victory for playing the free-spirited, loving and emotionally unstable Army wife opposite Tommy Lee Jones in 1994's Blue Sky.

To these accomplishments, we say "Work it, Diva!!!"

Jessica Lange definitely got the last laugh.

In Tootsie, Julie has a bumpy encounter with Michael Dorsey at a party.  She's been putting up with lot of macho bullshit from her director boyfriend.  Dorsey makes an innocent but ill-timed pass at her.  She is so not in the mood for any male hormones.

Julie throws her drink in his face.

Jessica Lange did that in real-life to an actor who was making a not-so-innocent pass at her.  She threw a drink in the face of actor/director/choreographer Bob Fosse.  Fosse directed Lange in 1979's All That Jazz.  I got that item out of her during my interview that aired on national TV.  Here's another tidbit for you that wasn't in the interview.  You know who seriously wanted the role that Lange got in Tootsie?  Suzanne Somers.  She was fresh off years of Three's Company and felt that playing Julie in Sydney Pollack's comedy would distance her from that sitcom image.

When Tootsie was made, daytime dramas (soap operas) were really hot at the time.  Hot the way reality shows are now.  I worked for WISN and, being an ABC affiliate, the station benefitted greatly from airing that daytime ratings champion, General Hospital.  Also, sexual attitudes, roles and images were changing.  You saw this social evolution reflected in other films of that year -- Victor/Victoria with Julie Andrews, The World According to Garp with John Lithgow's character and Michael Ontkean as the suburban husband coming out of the closet in Making Love.  Pollack's comedy had its finger on the pulse of the moment.  Another Tootsie cast member would go on to accept a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award.  Geena Davis has a bit part as one of the soap opera regulars.

She'd win Best Supporting Actress for 1988's The Accidental Tourist.  Ten years after being a bit player opposite Hoffman in Tootsie, Geena was his leading lady in Hero.

Tootsie has a handful of good actors handling the supporting role and bit parts.  There's Teri Garr, Charles Durning,  Lynne Thigpen before kids knew her as The Chief on PBS' Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, future Broadway star Christine Ebersole is in the opening birthday party scene and Estelle Getty is a dancing extra in a nightclub scene.  George Gaynes, as the clueless older soap star, thinks he's fallen in love with "Dorothy."  He serenades her outside her apartment building one night.  If you've heard the original Broadway cast album of Wonderful Town, starring Rosalind Russell in the hit musical version of her 1942 hit comedy movie, My Sister Eileen, you've heard him sing before Tootsie.  George Gaynes was Rosalind Russell's leading man in Wonderful Town.  He sang Comden & Green's "What A Waste," "A Quiet Girl" and "It's Love."

If you're a 20 or early 30s-something actress and seeking a good monologue to do in class or maybe auditions, here's a suggestion:  Julie and "Dorothy" are having girl talk as they share a room at her dad's country house for the weekend.  Julie talks about her late mother and about flowers on the wallpaper she picked out when she was a little girl.  It's about disappointments in life -- and about trying to have hope even though it often seems as though none of your innermost dreams will ever come true.

It's a very poignant, revealing monologue.  Beautifully written and delivered.

There's a touch of the Marilyn Monroe in Jessica Lange's Blue Sky turn.  The Monroe at the stage when she gave the then-unappreciated, solid dramatic performance in The Misfits.  During her lifetime, Marilyn Monroe was a superstar but Hollywood and critics never really gave her respect for her acting skills.  She was one of the screen's best comic actresses.  Brilliant timing.  She mostly made headlines for being a sex symbol.  The raves for Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot went to the men -- director Billy Wilder, actors Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis.  Lemmon got a Best Actor Oscar nomination for it.  Watch Some Like It Hot and try to imagine it without Marilyn Monroe as Sugar Kane.

If Jessica Lange won Best Supporting Actress for Tootsie, Marilyn should've gotten a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for Some Like It Hot.  That's my opinion.

I wonder if any of those male movie critics who considered Jessica Lange a no-talent in their reviews of 1976's King Kong ever wrote or said "I was wrong" after she won her Oscar for Best Supporting Actress of 1982?  Six Oscar nominations and two Oscar wins to her credit.  Today she's the Emmy-winning star of TV's anthology series, American Horror Story.  The new season of that weekly fright night will have a coven theme.  Fellow Oscar-winner and longtime friend Kathy Bates will play an absolute witch of a character.  Jessica Lange will be a "glamour cat" in Season 3.  Said Lange at a Paley Center media event last night saluting the show, "I don't know what a 'glamour cat' is, but I'm excited."

The fashion model is now a show biz role model for women and men. Enjoy Tootsie.

Halle Berry: Women in Film

Sometimes winning an Oscar can be a hard act to follow.  Artistically, a few actresses seemed to go into the Witness Protection Program after they got Hollywood Gold.  After Kim Basinger won Best Supporting Actress for L.A. Confidential, after Mira Sorvino won Best Supporting Actress for Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite and after Gwyneth Paltrow took the Best Actress Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, where did they go?  Did they get another good script or give another film performance as good since?  Halle Berry, as you know, made Oscar history.  On HBO, she got raves for playing Dorothy Dandridge, the late actress who made Oscar history as the first black woman to get an Oscar nomination in the Best Actress category.  That was for the 1954 musical, Carmen Jones.  Ms. Berry made future Oscar history as the first black woman to win in that category.  She was Best Actress for her performance in the 2001 Southern racial drama, Monster's Ball.

Halle Berry followed her Oscar victory with a performance I feel is just as good as the one she gave in Monster's Ball.  Again, she plays a mother but this character has a happy marriage and a nice life in the suburbs.  Unfortunately, press attention on the film was diverted its opening weekend because of a devastating wildfire in Southern California that caused mass evacuations.  The disaster also affected West Coast box office that weekend.  Ironically, the new Halle Berry film was called Things We Lost in the Fire.  If you're a Berry fan looking for something to rent one weekend, I recommend this movie.  I also highly recommend it if you're a Benicio Del Toro fan.  Wow.  He is so moving here.

This is a story about love, forgiveness, redemption and letting go.  David Duchovney plays Brian, the love of Audrey's life.  She's the love of his.  Berry plays Audrey, the wife and mother who will suddenly and unexpectedly become a widow.

I connected to this couple, not just because I'm the member of an inter-racial family, but because I'm lucky enough to know men like Brian.  He's a good man.  He's a regular guy and a loyal friend.  He has that gift for seeing a buddy's inner scars and going out of his way to provide some emotional comfort.  He can help you spiritually heal.  Brian's friendship is a safe place to fall.  That's why Jerry, in recovery from drugs, loved him.  During Audrey's grief, Jerry re-enters her life.  He shows up for the funeral.

He meets Brian's children.

Eventually, the disenfranchised Jerry is given a place to stay.  The kids like him.  Audrey remains understandably guarded and somewhat unforgiving for his junkie past.

Can Audrey let go of anger the way Jerry needed to let go of drugs?  That's the emotional journey you'll see.  Halle Berry is strong and honest in this performance.  It may look a bit glossy, like a Lifetime TV movie, but there are some raw and complicated emotions in this very well-played story.  Helping Halle deliver some of her finest work was director Susanne Bier. This Danish filmmaker won an Oscar for directing In a Better World.

Her movie was voted Oscar's Best Foreign Language Film of 2010.

Bier's excellent After the Wedding, which she also co-wrote and directed, was an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film of 2006.  Put that one on your "must-see" list.  What a fine film!  After the Wedding stars Mads Mikkelsen.  Come April, American television audiences will see him as Dr. Hannibal Lecter in the new NBC series, Hannibal.

Bier drew a beautiful performance out of Benicio Del Toro as the flawed man trying to a help a friend's family move through its grief.  To me, this was an Oscar-nomination worthy performance.  Those Southern California wildfires in October 2007 took a toll this good movie getting a West Coast audience.  Del Toro's exceptional work was overlooked.

You feel Jerry's fragility and inner scars.  Also good is the always reliable John Carroll Lynch as the kind of next door neighbor you wish you had.

His name may not be instantly recognizable, but you've seen his work.  He played Norm, Margie's loving big bear of a Midwest husband in Fargo, directed by the Coen Brothers.

He gave a textbook performance as a suspect in David Fincher's Zodiac.  I booked acting work in two national TV commercials in the same year and I played a recurring character for webisodes on The Onion website.  I booked those roles after the great lessons I learned in classes taught by acting coach Dani Super back in New York.  Her coaching helped me transition from TV host to acting work.  Dani, a noted casting director, taught us how to audition -- how to break down a script for an audition and how to make better, more specific acting choices.  You do not just sit in the chair (if you're seated) and say your lines. Physicality and vocal tone are very important elements to keep in mind during your audition.  That brings me to John Carroll Lynch in Zodiac.  The Zodiac murders have put San Francisco in a state of fear.  Cryptic letters and the killings have become a national headline.  Lynch plays a big guy who is brought in for police questioning.

Watch the actor's body language during the police interrogation scene.  He's trying to put up a tough, non-guilty front.  He's a large, physically imposing man.  But he also realizes the cops suspect that the Zodiac killer could be a homosexual.  So, in addition to trying to be the tough guy under questioning, he's also self-conscious about his movements.  He does not want to move in a way that may make him seem like he's a closeted gay man in San Francisco.  John Carroll Lynch does brilliant physical work in this scene.

His character is in conflict with the cops and in conflict with himself.  It's the quality of work that Dani Super taught us to do in class.  Lynch plays a much sweeter man in Things We Lost in the Fire.  Once again, I feel Susanne Bier directed Halle Berry in her strongest, best performance following her historic Best Actress Oscar win for Monster's Ball.  Berry and Benicio Del Toro are a mighty fine pair in this little-seen 2007 drama.

I'd like to see those two actors team up again.  Full disclosure:  I once auditioned to be in a comedy movie with Halle Berry.  If you read my previous two blogs, one on actor Michael Caine and the other with info on a television feature I taped recently for RLTV, you saw clips of my VH1 celebrity talk shows.  In the early 1990s, after my VH1 years, I signed with my first agent.  He was with a big agency in New York City.  I won't say which one.  I told him I was interested in acting auditions.  I wanted to test for supporting comedy roles -- like the wise-cracking playwright best friend and roommate Bill Murray played in Tootsie.  My agent submitted me to audition for Strictly Business.

I was submitted to play "Bobby," the home-boy mailroom employee in a white-collar firm.

First of all, I went into the audition knowing full well that I was ten years too old for the part.  Comedian Tommy Davidson got the role.   Second, well...let's just say that I wondered if my blond agent had even looked at my demo reel.  He and I parted company a little over a year later after he got me an audition to play one of the two voodoo-performing black crooks in the sequel to the corpse comedy, Weekend at Bernie's.

I'm just not the voodoo thug type.

Check out Susanne Bier's Things We Lost in the Fire.  And her foreign film, After the Wedding.  In that, too, worlds collide and come together.  There's a Danish man who helps poor children in India and a rich father who offers him a $4 million donation to help the Bombay orphans if he attends his daughter's ritzy wedding in Denmark.  If you're in the New York City area and need a coach to help you with your acting, consider Dani.  Here's her link:
www.danisuper.com

Tell her that I sent you.