Even the snobbiest person who fancies themselves an intellectual has skeletons of doubtable taste in their proverbial closet.I enjoy whipping out a Fielding or Burney novel on the subway and impressing fellow (uninterested) riders with my literary ambitions (when I'm really out to please I bust out Cervantes), but to you readers, who have earned the truth with your devotion and geniality, I am here to admit something that I do not admit at cocktail parties between Susan Sontag quotes (you don't have to read her to quote her, thankfully):
I Love Melanie Griffith.
Griffith has given a whole slew of performances that I have always enjoyed for their warmth and genuine good humour.She has a way of making you believe that she cares, so that even while intoning that Minnie Mouse voice with its awkward inflections ("I am NOT STEAK; you can't just ORRder me" she tells Alec Baldwin in Working Girl), she comes off as truly committed and sincere.Milk Money is a forgettable Pretty Woman knockoff that is only worth watching for the real gentleness she brings to the story; trying to pull off a cop in A Stranger Among Us doesn't work quite as well, but there are moments worth savouring:her reaction to Hasidic Jew Eric Thal not knowing who Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are is a small consolation for an otherwise mediocre experience.
Mike Nichols' Working Girl might be my preferred of her films (it also earned her her first and, so far, only Academy Award nomination), but my favourite performance of hers has to be in the underrated and sadly ignored remake of Garson Kanin's Born Yesterday.Yes, the original George Cukor version with Judy Holliday is snappier, but Luis Mandoki's update does a fantastic job of opening up the story and giving Griffiths' Billie Dawn a chance to not only absorb the information she learns (as a gangster moll who is "smartened up" by a journalist, Don Johnson, in order to stop embarrassing her shady business boyfriend, John Goodman, at Washington dinner parties), she gets to do something that Holliday's version doesn't give her enough of: she gets to really enjoy the fruits of her studies.
It's hilarious when she asks Johnson, her then-real life husband with whom she shares some impressive on-screen chemistry, "What's a-na-chro-nis-tic", but it goes the route of inspiring when she begins to tell radio reporter Nora Dunn the parts of de Tocqueville that impressed her most.It even features that painful cliche in movies, characters having emotional revelations while viewing high art, but it pulls it off with ease; Griffith's generous honesty is terrific when she sees a Van Gogh Farmstead painting that provokes her to admit, "My mom died when I was little, and my dad raised us, and he loved us so much, but I never knew a life like that".My favourite sequence of the film has her teaching a table full of Washington bigwigs how to remember the Constitutional Amendments using her version of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" ("Don't Rat On Yourself/Where's Your Warrant Please/Here Is My Gun Freeze/Assemble and Be Nice/And Just Say Any Crazy Thing You Like").
By the time we get to the conclusion, we're overjoyed at the prospect of Griffith using everything she has learned towards a better life: "I can't marry you Harry…you're too dumb."I defy anyone who dislikes this unfortunately maligned actress, whose career has never recaptured these heights in the years since, to not be thrilled by her brief success.
I think it's also time for me to put away the pretentious books and finally admit to myself that, actually, I really do want to read Jackie Collins paperbacks on the subway; it's basically Fielding but new.
and impressing fellow (uninterested) riders with my literary ambitions (when I'm really out to please I bust out Cervantes), but to you readers, who have earned the truth with your devotion and geniality, I am here to admit something that I do not admit at cocktail parties between Susan Sontag quotes (you don't have to read her to quote her, thankfully):
inspiring when she begins to tell radio reporter Nora Dunn the parts of de Tocqueville that impressed her most.It even features that painful cliche in movies, characters having emotional revelations while viewing high art, but it pulls it off with ease; Griffith's generous honesty is terrific when she sees a Van Gogh Farmstead painting that provokes her to admit, "My mom died when I was little, and my dad raised us, and he loved us so much, but I never knew a life like that".My favourite sequence of the film has her teaching a table full of Washington bigwigs how to remember the Constitutional Amendments using her version of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" ("Don't Rat On Yourself/Where's Your Warrant Please/Here Is My Gun Freeze/Assemble and Be Nice/And Just Say Any Crazy Thing You Like").