Ah, Natalie…

Baseball is back, let us give thanks. The sermon today is from Annie Savoy:

“I believe in the Church of Baseball. I’ve tried all the major religions and most of the minor ones. I’ve worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I heard that I gave Jesus a chance. But it just didn’t work out between us. The Lord laid too much guilt on me. I prefer metaphysics to theology. You see, there’s no guilt in baseball and it’s never boring … which make it like sex. There’s never been a ballplayer slept with me who didn’t have the best year of his career. Making love is like hitting a baseball: you gotta relax and concentrate. Besides I’d never sleep with a player hitting under .250 … not unless he had a lot of RBI’s and was a great glove up the middle.

You see, there’s a certain amount of life wisdom I give these boys. I can expand their minds. Sometimes when I’ve got a ballplayer alone, I’ll just read Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman to him, and the guys are so sweet, they always stay and listen. ‘Course a guy’ll listen to anything if he thinks it’s foreplay. I make them feel confident and they make me feel safe and pretty. ‘Course, what I give them lasts a lifetime, what they give me lasts 142 games. Sometimes it seems like a bad trade. But bad trades are part of baseball – now who can forget Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas, for God’s sake? It’s a long season and you gotta trust. I’ve tried ’em all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul is the Church of Baseball.”

A-a-a-men!

Roger Ebert on Elizabeth Taylor:

Most of us choose our favorite movie stars before we turn 18. They take possession of our imaginations while we’re still trying on role models. By the time we’re out of high school, we’re essentially who we’ll be for the rest of our lives, and although new movie stars are created every year, they will never have the same resonance of someone we fixed on earlier.

For many people under the age of 50, Elizabeth Taylor was something of a punch line, known more for her multiple marriages, her perfume line and her friendship with Michael Jackson. But for me and others of my generation, the death of Ms. Taylor took away one of the last movie stars who really affected us in our youth. I have no doubt that Meryl Streep is a better actress, but Ms. Streep is younger, and I’ve met her, and besides, she’s just another human being, you know? She can take consolation in the fact that millions of younger moviegoers grew up on her movies, and for them she will forever be a goddess.

Movies enter our minds more directly when we’re young. They’re realistic in a different way. There’s a difference between empathizing with a character and identifying with a star. When we start going to the movies, stars are leading surrogate lives for us. At the risk of tasking you with my infantile fantasies, I was, for a period of hours, John Wayne or Robert Mitchum or James Stewart. I believed Doris Day was just about the nicest and sunniest person on earth. I was not only in lust with Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe, but in some way I absorbed their appeal and shared with them the knowledge that they were desired. They let me imagine how it felt to be longed for, and that was a knowledge sadly lacking in my real life.

Terrific piece. They don’t make stars like Taylor anymore.

Here’s Chad Jennings with all the latest Yankee news. Oh, and Mike Mussina will throw out the first pitch on opening day.

Check out this Vanity Fair piece on Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

[Drawings by Larry Roibal]

A Gay bar mourns the death of Liz Taylor. The Times has the story.

Death of a legend.

Liz Taylor is dead at 79.

She was one of the greatest, most famous stars to ever grace the silver screen.

Bow down.

The original “Mildred Pierce” is one of my wife’s favorite movies. If she’s ever feeling blue, that’s a go-to flick of cherce. I have to admit, it’s so stylish-looking and so juicy and melodramatic that it is hard to resist. Now, there is a new HBO mini-series based on James M. Cain’s novel. In the New Yorker, Hilton Als, breaks it all down:

By the late thirties, when Cain began to think about writing “Mildred Pierce,” his fourth novel—his third, the underappreciated “Serenade” (1937), was another first-person account of male alienation—life was dictating a new reality. (A five-part miniseries adapted from the book, and directed by Todd Haynes, will première on HBO on March 27th.) Cain had recently befriended a woman named Kate Cummings, who did perhaps more than anyone else to urge him toward a more sympathetic and complex view of women’s need for both conventionality and freedom. Cummings, the single mother of the actress Constance Cummings, had sacrificed her own prospects as a singer to get her daughter the training and the exposure she needed to become a star. What Cain saw of Kate’s life—and the nearly selfless love with which she made Constance’s career happen—may have jump-started his imagination. After creating two antiheroines, probably inspired by Hemingway’s view of woman-as-death, Cain paid homage to his friend’s indomitable spirit. He set out to explore what one of his characters would call “the great American institution that never gets mentioned on the Fourth of July, a grass widow with two small children to support.” As he was writing, employing the third person and creating a female protagonist for the first time, Cummings stood over him, prodding him to revise whenever she felt that his perceptions of a working mother did not ring true. When “Mildred Pierce” was finally published, in 1941, Cain’s alternately stilted and full-bodied portrait of a striving woman was well received, but few reviewers noted the fact that the novel was also a study of a woman who, time after time, subjugates her own needs to those of her child.

I’m curious to see the HBO show but it’s not likely to replace the original in my heart.

Starting this Friday, BAM is hosting a major Catherine Deneuve retrospective. Don’t sleep.

Deneuve will also be at the Paris Theater tomorrow night to talk about her recent movie, “Potiche.”

I was taken with Mark Ruffalo’s performance in “The Kids Are All Right” last year and friends said, “If you think he was good in that, you have got to see ‘You Can Count on Me.'” I finally got around to watching “You Can Count on Me” over the weekend and they were right. Laura Linney and Ruffalo are both wonderful and give the kind of performances that are so believable you forget they are acting.

The movie, released in 2000, was written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan. It is tender without being sentimental. Lonergan shows the kind of restraint that I cherish–he never hits us over the head, never goes for the obvious, over-the-top emotion. He lets uncomfortable feelings hang and is confident enough to leave matters unresolved. It is so expertly directed that watching it, I was reminded that great directing is not just about technical wizardry, it is about serving the story, understanding pace and rhythm, and respecting the audience enough to fill in the blanks. This movie proves that you can be modest without being precious. I’d like to watch it again soon.

“Holiday” is playing this afternoon at 1:30 at the Modern.

Over at NYRB, Larry McMurty reviews a trio of new books on Marilyn Monroe:

In film Marilyn’s talent shows most strongly in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire, Some Like It Hot, Bus Stop, and The Misfits. The director Billy Wilder quarreled with her on Some Like It Hot—but Wilder was no dummy and had this to say about her: “I think she was the best light comedienne we have in films today, and anyone will tell you that the toughest of acting styles is light comedy.”

She was almost always photographed smiling, her lips slightly parted, her skin aglow with an aura all its own, and yet there was usually a curl of sadness in her smile: sadness that just managed to fight through; sadness that was always considerable and sometimes intense.

In a review of “Marilyn,” by Norman Mailer, Pauline Kael wrote:

Monroe used her lack of an actress’s skills to amuse the public. She had the wit or crassness or desperation to turn cheesecake into acting–and vice versa; she did what others had the “good taste” not to do, like Mailer, who puts in what other writers have been educated to leave out. She would bat her Bambi eyelashes, lick her messy suggestive open mouth, wiggle that pert and tempting bottom, and use her hushed voice to caress us with dizzying innuendos.

…Her mixture of wide-eyed wonder and cuddly drugged sexiness seemed to get to just about every male; she turned on even homosexual men. And women couldn’t take her seriously enough to be indignant; she was funny and impulsive in a way that made people feel protective. She was a little knocked out; her face looked as if, when nobody was paying attention to her, it would go utterly slack–as if she died between wolf calls.

She seemed to have become a camp siren out of confusion and ineptitude; her comedy was self-satire, and apologetic–conscious parody that had begun unconsciously…The mystique of Monroe–which accounts for the book Marilyn–is that she became spiritual as she fell apart. But as an actress she had no way of expressing what was deeper in her except moodiness and weakness. When she was “sensitive” she was drab.

I freely admit I am so starved for baseball happenings that I actually did a news search just now for “baseball” –as if I wouldn’t have read about it already, on a blog or Twitter, if anything big went down. Aside from the Matt Garza trade (good news for the Yanks this season, probably, but nothing I can get too excited about) there ain’t nothing going on today. Except Brian Cashman is talking more and more like some kinda internet zealot. Adam LaRoche is finalizing his deal with the Nationals. Okay.

Unfortunately what I did turn up, like some gross bug under a rock, is the story over at Radar Online that a new reality show about baseball groupies is being developed. Baseball Annies are now being cast, with the idea of filming in Arizona during spring training. I’m not much of a reality TV fan — I’m too easily embarrassed on behalf of other people — and doubt I will watch this, unless I have to write about it. Anyone with half a brain realized many, many years ago that the vast majority of baseball players sleep around, and I really couldn’t care less since I am not married to, nor dating, a baseball player; that’s between them and their significant others and as long as everyone’s a consenting adult, hey, not my concern. The entire subculture has always seemed deeply depressing, though, and this newest cringe-inducing exploitation-fest is doing nothing to change that impression:

“The girls will go to any lengths to go to games and practices with the goal of sleeping with and getting material things from athletes as a notch under their belt,” the source told RadarOnline.com exclusively.

Ooh, an EXCLUSIVE about soul-suckingly shallow groupies! Great job, RadarOnline.com. Also:

The show will focus on the women and their ‘cleat-chasing’ lifestyle more than the players and their participation, added the source.

Well, of course. Why deal with the legal and societal repercussions of showcasing popular men behaving badly when you can just vilify the less wealthy and famous women who, inexplicably, are volunteering for this? Not that they won’t deserve vilifying, most likely, and no one can go on a show like “Cleat Chasers” and not expect to come out looking horrible.

I’m not someone who bemoans the decline of humanity, because I think humanity has always been pretty messed up, and even a show as tasteless as this is still better than say burning a bunch of people at the stake every time you get freaked out by an eclipse, but still.

There’s always time to dip away on Thanksgiving. Watch the game, go online, sleep. Here’s some sticky You Tube treats, for the one you love.

Michael Keaton’s big screen debut:

Don Juan DiMarco:

The great Selma Diamond:

Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner and Howard Morris lay it on the only the way they knew how: thick.

I Spy:

Two pals…

Mark Harris wrote a long feature on Deborah Winger for the Times Magazine this past weekend.

Dig:

When Debra Winger, the actor who is now as famous for walking away from her chosen profession as for excelling within it, first met with the producers of HBO’s psychotherapy drama “In Treatment,” it was because they were hoping to entice her to take on the role of Frances, a complicated, unhappy and sometimes evasive leading lady whom Winger wryly describes as “just another in a long line of women I hope never to become.” Early meetings between actresses and producers are an odd Hollywood ritual. They’re not quite mating dances; they’re more like strenuously casual preinterviews for a first date, full of mutual courtesies designed to prevent any hurt feelings. Accordingly, Winger arrived prepared — not only with a list of questions and ideas about the role, but also with the names of several other performers the producers might want to pursue instead of her if she wasn’t the right fit. “I had in my head the names of five other actresses,” she said, “all of whom I thought would, in a way, be better. It’s pretty amazing who’s out there, not working.

“So I told them those names. And when I said one of the names, this little look went across their faces.” She paused. “And I suddenly thought, Oh — I have a feeling that maybe they already asked that one.”

The first part of that story — the gesture of suggesting others for a role you want — could have been told by any actress of Winger’s stature; it’s a nice way of expressing both your own generosity and, by implication, the fact that yes, they truly wanted you and you alone. The punch line, however, in the way it identified a wordless, awkward millisecond of actual ego-deflating embarrassment, struck me as something only Winger would share. That kind of candor, predicated on an awareness that a single moment can house its share of paradoxes, is what makes Winger special. She’s a performer who has always possessed what Pauline Kael, writing about her breakthrough role in “Urban Cowboy” 30 years ago, called her “quality of flushed transparency.” That unsparing emotional honesty makes moviegoers believe that they are seeing through her skin, past any layer of self-protection or self-deception, and into her heart and mind. She had it in her 20s, when audiences first met her; at 55, she can still count it among her most remarkable assets, and her ability to deploy it has only become richer and more fully controlled.

Main Course: In Cucina Con Amore…

And for dessert…(I couldn’t resist…)

Today’s local NFL action begins with thoughts of Jill Clayburgh.

Rest in Peace, Jill Clayburgh. She was two weeks younger than my mother.

On a fishing trip in 1939, film director Howard Hawks told Ernest Hemingway:

“Ernest, you’re a damn fool. You need money, you know. You can’t do all the things you’d like to do. If I make three dollars in a picture, you get one of them. I can make a picture out of your worst story.”

“What’s my worst story?”

“That god damned bunch of junk called To Have and To Have Not [sic.].”

“You can’t make anything out of that.”

“Yes I can. You’ve got the character of Harry Morgan; I think I can give you the wife. All you have to do is make a story about how they met.”

It’s not a great movie but it is good entertainment (and the screenplay was co-written by William Faulkner of all people). Walter Brennan and Hoagy Carmichael are winning in supporting roles and Lauren Bacall practically burns a hole in the screen. Man, what poise, what a kitten:

A talk with Catherine Deneuve.