Jeanette Basinger, for one, has discussed how difficult it is for actresses in their later careers to play ordinary women. Instead, they play Exaggerated Women. She notes that even Ginger Rogers and Lana Turner, less exaggerated than, say, the later Bette Davis performances, tend to be cast as actr...

So sorry I missed this. I love Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. I must not have checked the tv schedule that night. :( Even if you had remembered you would not have been able to see it. There was a glitch in the video on TCM that evening so it was replaced with another showing of Carnival Story . TCM has...

"What if twenty or thirty million women started rationing lipstick?" "But I can't return my 127 tubes of rouge! The Health Department won't let me!" "But do we want to keep hoarding?" "Let's pool our resources -- that's democracy!" Uh-oh, lol. The war turned ...

Sean Connery was one of those actors who really improved the more he aged. ... hes really at his best later on in Robin and Marian and The Russia House. Agree about Sean (although I haven't seen THE RUSSIA HOUSE or ROBIN AND MARIAN). Agree about Sean getting better with age. Wasn't excited about Ro...

My favorite movie mother:

I guess I'm a little out of step, but my favorite Robert Ryan movie is About Mrs. Leslie (1954) with Shirley Booth, in which he played a married but lonely industrialist who befriended in a mostly platonic way a kindred spirit (Booth) and vacationed with her once a year, the only time he felt he cou...

BOOM! (1968), based on a lesser Tennessee Williams play. As Burton's character described it to Liz's as waves crash against the cliffs below her home in a movie swarming with metaphors: "Boom. The shock of each moment, of still being alive." OK. Got it.

State Fair (1933) is down for Janet Gaynor but, as in the case of Thelma Ritter / Jeanne Crain, the real star attraction is Will Rogers as the head of the farm family. A young Lew Ayers is in it too. I think TCM showed it way back but I still have my copy from AMC days and that was a terrible print...

The Grammys also featured one of the "sources of light" of my generation, Joni Mitchell. Brandi Carlile mentioned in her intro that she's had to learn to walk three times in her life, as a child, after she had polio and after a crippling aneurism. Yikes. What a life and what a career. Peop...