Category: The Unsung

For a generation of Americans, Alan Alda was pretty much the standard bearer for the New Man. The sensitive soul, clad in a respectable sweater, offering not the usual toxicity and power plays, but understanding, warmth, and a gentle smile.

Mary Pickford saw the writing on the wall. Despite a legendary career as a silent film actress, the introduction of sound in the late Twenties brought about an unexpected end to life in the limelight.

Lenny (Ben Gazzara) has had enough. Faking it comes easy in a marriage, but even the strongest man has his limits. Only so many times you can hear the same tired stories, and shrug at the same lame jokes.

Rahad Jackson is a survivor. Of all the characters in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights – the doomed, the damned, the disturbingly well-endowed – he’s one of the few one can imagine emerging from the 1980’s intact.

Billy Curtis, God rest his soul, was a fucking legend. Not just a midget legend, mind you, but a legend in his own right, four-foot-two stature be damned.

In a movie that, like Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, accurately validates the idea that the best stories are not about the ascent, but rather the fall, the ultimate privilege is in the further realization that absent the broken, we’d have no real stories to tell.

We’ve all known someone like her. Perhaps even dated one or two. Dinner and a movie and an unending monologue. The chosen few, marriage and family, with the hours passing like centuries. Museum Girl.

In addition to ushering in the unchecked era of narcissistic self-regard, mushy, feminized therapeutic healing, and an undying cynicism about the Academy Awards, Robert Redford’s Ordinary People remains one of cinema’s undisputed heavyweights of dubious character loyalties and directorial sympathies

Sydney Pollack is, for my money, the greatest actor who just happened to be a world class director. In addition to helming Tootsie, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Three Days of the Condor, and Jeremiah Johnson, he also collected an Academy Award, even if it was for a film (Out of Africa) that didn’t quite…