I wanna wax rhapsodic about Jessica Lange

I don't.

How have I never seen this MTM / Lange hybrid!

I never knew I needed it.

Mizz Lange’s debut was probably the best of her generation though it nearly cost her her career.

Gorgeous, emotive, and brimming with [bold]STAH POWAH[/bold].

Her follow up, a cute if limp romp bellied her talents but in it, she displayed her beauty and finesse with aplomb.

Bob Fosse wrote the role in All That Jazz specifically for Mizz Lange. He was smitten.

The second of three roles Mizz Lange beat out Meryl Streep for (Lange was nice enough to salvage M’s career before it began by taking the hit for King Kong; her beauty could withstand it), The Postman Always Rings Twice put Mizz Lange and her pantied cunt on the map!

Frances. ‘Nuff said.

And of course - Go, TOOTSIE, go!

She is a great actress. She has strange mannerisms.

Generally considered the best, most realistic and unsentimental of the “farm films of the 80s,” Country showcases Lange, who executive produced, at her subtle and most understated very best. This would score her a third Oscar nomination in three years. The film is further enhanced by a gorgeous and melancholy score by Tori Amos’ favorite pianist, George Winston.

A pristine free copy has been provided via YouTube below; for your viewing pleasure, of course.

Sweet Dreams needs no introduction but what the hell. We’ll let M do the honors. M?

M: Why thank you. I will be reading this in the third person, of course; give it a little prestige:

[quote] At the close of 1985, she portrayed legendary country singer Patsy Cline in Karel Reisz's biopic Sweet Dreams, opposite Ed Harris, Ann Wedgeworth, and John Goodman. She was nominated a fourth time for an Oscar and came in second place for both the National Board of Review Award for Best Actress and the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress.[34][35] In several interviews, Meryl Streep has stated that she "begged" Reisz, who directed her in 1981's The French Lieutenant's Woman, for the role of Cline, but that his first choice had always been Lange. Streep has been quite vocal and adamant in her praise for Lange's performance,[36][37][38][39][40][41] calling her "beyond wonderful" in the film and saying, "I couldn't imagine doing it as well or even coming close to what Jessica did because she was so amazing in it."[37] In 2012, on an episode of Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, Streep once again praised Lange's work in the film, saying, "Nobody could do that better than [Lange]. I mean, it was divine."[38] In 2018, she further commented, "Jessica did it better than any human being could possibly have done it."[36] Streep has also said, "Every job I've ever taken, about three weeks before I begin, I call up my agent and say, 'I don't think I can do this. I don't think I'm right for it. They should call up Jessica Lange.'"[42]

M: It really is a marvelous film and Jessica is simply, as I stated above, DIVINE. I voted for her to win Best Actress for this, her fourth nomination. A copy of the full film has been provided below at the op’s expense.

I loved Country. What a great movie.

I honestly think her turn in Asylum was one of her greatest performances ever. How she could make you feel empathy for that monster at the end was a true testament to her ability.

I absolutely love her.

1986 would see three titans unite for a spunky, morbid, quirky, and touching adaptation of Beth Henley’s play Crimes of the Heart. Though Spacek deservedly earned an Oscar nomination for her work in the film, both Lange and Keaton were both underrated and snubbed for their equally compelling work. The film, too, holds up great.

Meg’s sad story below.

I remember in his review of King Kong, hack "film critic" Michael Medved called Jessica Lange "a former and future fashion model".

Who's laughing now, bitch?

Sam Shepard based the wistful and hilarious Far North (1988), which he both wrote and directed, on Mizz Lange’s family. A sort of precursor to Jodie Foster’s Home for the Holidays, the film examines, with gentle precision and a keen eye, the love, tragedies, and eccentricities of a Minnesotan family and the comic mayhem that ensues upon the return of Katherine (Lange), who comes to tend to her father (Charles Durning). The cast is rounded out by a sublime Ann Wedgeworth as Lange’s mother, and a riotous Tess Harper and Patricia Arquette as Lange’s eldest sister and niece respectively.

Lange’s work here is surprisingly funny, always touching, and insightful. Her scene with Durning about wanting to be friends is just 😭 (I relate all too well, of course.) I would’ve nominated her.

Full and pristine copy below:

I consider he the offbeat version of Meryl Streep, and for that, I greatly appreciate her.

One of her most underrated films - and an underrated film in general, especially as far as “sports flicks” go - Everybody’s All-American (also released in 1988), chronicles the career and marriage of Gavin “The Grey Ghost” Grey (an excellent Dennis Quaid) and his high school sweetheart Babs Rogers (Lange) throughout the course of 30-40 years. John Goodman gives a charming and heartbreaking performance as Gavin’s best friend Ed Lawrence. Timothy Hutton also costars.

This film is so moving, so engrossing, so true to life, I often forget it’s about sports, which I can care less about. Beautifully and sensitively directed by Taylor Hackford, who got Oscar nomination worthy performances from both Quaid and Lange.

The only films of Jessica I can recommend are All That Jazz and Tootsie. You seem to be digging through the trash Matt but have fun.

Where is ops gif from?

One of Costa-Gavras’ very best, Music Box (1989) is an understated and ultimately riveting film about the ties that bind and the secrets that break us. Lange, who earned her fifth Oscar nomination for her masterful performance here, and Armin Mueller-Stahl are both Oscar-worthy. In fact, Lange should have won for this.

R19 Blue Sky.

Hackford didn't get an Oscar nomination for "Everybody's All-American".

Another one of Mizz Lange’s severely underrated and timeless films and only the second entry by the mysterious and uber talented Paul Brickman, Men Don’t Leave tells the story of a mother and her two sons, and how they come to grips with life and with one another after fate deals them an unexpected blow. The film is enhanced by a quirky and transcendent score by Thomas Newman.

Lange, again, is Oscar-worthy and is supported by a stellar cast which includes a heartbreaking Chris O’Donnell, a riotous Joan Cusack, and a delicious Kathy Bates. Lange should have been nominated and maybe even won for her luminous and touching work in this.

I will post a few clips and a fuzzy full copy just because I love this one so.

Clip between Lange and Cusack.

O’Donnell is BEYOND.

Full (and fuzzy) film.

Martin Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear is a pulpy, fully charged, and electrifying homage to the original and an excellent psychological thriller in its own right. Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte, Juliette Lewis, and Lange are firing on all four cylinders here, and they should have all been nominated for their work.

Lange gives a complex study of a still vitally attractive woman in her mid-forties grappling with familial resentment, estrangement and ultimately survival.

It’s one of several of Lange’s Oscar worthy performances. Scorsese and Schoonmaker film and edit Lange’s work here like they are both in love. Schoonmaker admitted in an interview that both she and Scorsese found Lange to be “a perfect combination of intellectual and emotional”. Watching the film, their shared sentiment shines through.

Lange’s bored, betrayed and beleaguered part-time housewife, part-time graphic designer is as perplexing as she is compelling. She is both repressed and enraged, fearful yet lustful. Many credit the success of the movie to the undeniable chemistry between DeNiro and Lewis - both excellent - but Lange and Nolte are equally brilliant, providing a living, well-worn portrait of a family unraveling.

Lange, in particular, becomes the quiet emotional core of the film. As a middle-age woman bearing the weight of marital infidelity and a dwindling, ever elusive relevancy, we come to see, feel and understand the horror through her fragility and eventual resilience.

Posting a few clips cause it’s a fave.

High-pitched howls.

Leigh offers herself (below).

I wish I could find a clip of Lange’s reaction to De Niro telling them to strip. Her crying in that scene is [italic]so[/italic] intense and guttural.

Next up, the 1992 remake of Night in the City, which reunites De Niro and Lange, who are both too good for the film surrounding them, but the force and conviction of their performances makes it work (barely).

And now :::drum roll::: BLUE SKY. This film contains my favorite performance by Lange, who manages to be sexy, ebullient, terrifying, riveting, heartbreaking, and uplifting - all at once!

Directed by the legendary Tony Richardson, who would succumb to AIDS before its release, the film tells centers on the film is based on Rama Stagner-Blum's real life and the relationship between her parents, Clyde and Gloria Lee Moore-Stagner, during the 1960s while her father was in the army. They later divorced and Gloria remarried before dying in 1982.

In 1994, Lange was lauded and would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Actress for this performance, along with the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress, the Utah Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress, and the Sant Jordi Award for Best Actress. She also came in second place for the National Board of Review Award for Best Actress, the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress, and the Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress. She became the second actress, after Streep, to follow a Best Supporting Actress Oscar with a Best Actress Oscar; an achievement not repeated until nearly 20 years later by Cate Blanchett.

The film is such a great throwback to the “women’s pictures” of yore and is so playful and uplifting, yet deep and moving, it has remained my favorite of her leading films since I first saw it at the tender age of thirteen.

Wonderful montage below.

And now, a short intermission.

But before that, I would like to honor Blue Sky further by posting my favorite review of it from the Los Angeles Times:

A Glamorous Hothouse Violet : Commentary: Jessica Lange’s striking performance in “Blue Sky” is belatedly released. How come this superb actress isn’t working more?

BY PETER RAINER

SEP. 21, 1994 12 AM

Jessica Lange’s acting in “Blue Sky” leaves you awe-struck. It’s a great performance. Because the film, which was shot in 1990, is just now being released--it’s yet another foundling from the pre-bankrupt Orion Pictures era--its appearance is like a gift.

It’s an especially welcome gift because Lange hasn’t been acting much in the movies lately. (She’ll appear in “Losing Isaiah” in November.) She starred on TV in 1992 in “O Pioneers!” and, later that year, on Broadway as Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” But her two most recent movies are “Cape Fear” (1991) and “Night and the City” (1992).

You have to wonder how it is that Lange could give the performance she gave in “Blue Sky"--it’s probably her best, even better than her Frances Farmer in “Frances” or her Patsy Cline in “Sweet Dreams"--and keep away from the cameras for so long. The lack of good roles for actresses is no excuse. Lange is the kind of actress film artists write great roles for.

Lange’s role in “Blue Sky” as Carly, a manic-depressive Army wife, is, at least superficially, one of those life-force sexpot vamps who periodically turn up in the movies in order to reduce stalwart men to foaming fumblers. She’s conceived as a sort of cross between a Tennessee Williams hothouse violet--a deranged, damaged maiden--and a late ‘50s/early ‘60s glamorpuss in the Marilyn Monroe style. (The action is set in 1962.)

Part of what Lange accomplishes with Carly is to demonstrate how close in neurotic temperament these two female incarnations really are. They both rise and fall on the fragilities of beauty. The loss of beauty--or at least its illusion--becomes the loss of self.

Carly knows she is still beautiful, and she exults in her own good fortune. She sashays with the humor of a woman who believes herself blessed--the gods must want her to entertain them too. Carly models her look on the reigning movie queens: Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Bardot. She has seized on movie-star glamour for its power to transpose her life into a swoony, scandalous fantasy. The irony is that Carly is an original--the more she mimics her fanzine idols the more she emerges in all her ravaged singularity. When she’s manic she’s too much for herself--too ferociously pent-up and passionate--and that’s exactly the state she craves. She needs the fix of delirium.

cont’d

What IS that GIF from, OP?

cont’d

She’s a trial to her two daughters, who indulge her episodes with a mixture of horror and annoyance. (They’re like abused seraphim.) She’s a trial to her husband, Hank, an Army radiation scientist, played by Tommy Lee Jones, who decided a long time ago just to love her unconditionally. (The felt, underplayed graciousness of his performance helps make Lange’s possible. And, of course, few directors could work more wonders with actors than Tony Richardson--this was his last film.)

But, on some essential level, Carly’s deliriums have so much more romantic feeling, so much more danger, than anything else in her family’s life that she has become indispensable to their will. She’s a maddening creature in full swoon but, when she’s in a generous mood, she transforms their dullsville life into a high-spirited casbah. (The black comedy of the piece is that Carly makes her husband and children miserable so she can commiserate with them in their misery and make them whole.)

Carly’s high spirits lift her way off the ground, but she can’t stay up there forever. It’s when she comes down with a crash that she terrifies. When Hank--partly because of Carly’s take-it-all-off high jinks--is transferred at the start of the film from Hawaii to a military base in Alabama, Carly’s sensual, dolled-up funniness inflames to a full-scale rage. Her baby talk and sweet smiles, so transparently protective, burn away, and she flees her run-down new home until Hank tracks her down in a supply store like a cornered animal.

“I can see that radiation just coming off you,” she wails at Hank, who talks her down with an infinitely comforting patience. He rescues her again, and, yet again, she will betray him. But as she approaches her in this scene, Carly’s eyes shine in admiration for her rescuer. The harridan has turned into a supplicant.

Carly’s rages are scary because they don’t have the self-dramatizing play-act quality of her swoony, rapt episodes. When she’s dancing her flamenco for a bunch of wide-eyed soldiers at the base in Hawaii, or even when she’s just dancing sinuously by herself, she has a dreamy, comic quality that lets us know she’s in on her own self-delusion. She plays to an audience even if that audience is herself. (In a sense, the role is all about the illusionary, crazy-making art of acting.)

But, when she feels trapped and cornered, her voice drops from a hushed Southern breathiness to a hard, low-slung rasp. (The vocal shifts are reminiscent of Vivien Leigh’s Blanche in the movie version of “Streetcar.”) Her movements becomes jagged. She’s not self-dramatizing in these moments; there’s no bravura, no studied self-awareness, nothing to distance her (or us) from her pain.

You can see why she avoids the pain--it strips away her camouflage and leaves her ragged and illusionless. When she’s high, she’s hellbent to stay that way. She has a split-second sensuality; she can turn it on in an instant--before the despair crowds in. When she thinks Hank is losing his love for her, she sits up at night while he sleeps; when he wakes up and sees her, she asks him if he still loves her and then, before he can answer, advances upon him like an uncoiled dream walker.

cont’d

As the distressed Frances Farmer in “Frances,” Lange sometimes had the lurid, scary, powder-burned look of a figure in a Weegee photograph. In “Blue Sky,” Lange’s Carly, at low ebb, sometimes has the bereft, denuded look of a woman in an Edward Hopper painting. Carly can appear so languorously sad--it’s not the way we want to see her. (Sadness doesn’t make her soulful; it saps her.)

You can almost forgive her hurtful sprees--like the way she carries on with the base commander in full view of everybody--because it’s her way of murdering despair. Carly’s seductions hurt everyone around her, but, for her, they’re not quite real. She doesn’t want to be “real.” She wants to retreat into her own movie-glamour authenticity, and the men she seduces are just play-actors in her pageant.

Carly ends up a heroine by rescuing Hank from a nasty military double-cross. After saving her so many times, she saves him. It’s a supreme act of love, and Lange has prepared us for Carly’s strength by already showing us, in flashes, the depth of that love and the mettle in her mania. Without this last-inning righteousness, Carly might seem too overpoweringly deluded, too neurotically “womanly” for modern audiences. But she’d be a great character even without this final triumph. Her greatness is in not holding anything back.

All That Jazz and Tootsie = the only two Lange films r18's seen

Okay, I shall return in a spell. We will be covering Mizz Lange’s remaining films and then winding back around to cover her exemplary television work.

xoxo

:Ahem: Okay, where were we?

1995’s Losing Isaiah is a surprisingly effective and moving film that chronicles the adoption of a black baby by a white social worker who encounters him after he is abandoned by his crack-addicted mother. A court trial ensues after the natural mother decides to fight for custody.

Lange and Berry are phenomenal in this and should’ve both scored nominations. The trailer itself should’ve scored a nod!

Confrontation.

Berry killing it like never!

Reunion 😭😭😭😭😭😭

Also released in 1995, Rob Roy is without a doubt the better of the “Scottish films.” Liam, Neeson, Tim Roth, Brian Cox, John Hurt, and Lange are excellent and should have all been nominated. The score is sublime. Lange is fiery perfection (see scene below).

The 1997 A Thousand Acres is one of those films that’s both a failed adaptation of a fantastic novel, and a moving film that works as something else. Of course, the reason for this are the luminous performances by Lange and Pfeiffer, who are perfect together as traumatized, beleaguered, and ostracized sisters. Both should’ve been nominated.

Amazing.

When Lange won the leading lady part in "King Kong," she was a minor model signed with Wilhelmina Models. But the Dino De Laurentiis PR machine hyped her up as a top fashion model turned actress. After the movie came and went and Lange's performance was critically derided (mostly), she was lumped together with the other model-turned-actress flop debut performance earlier that year, Margaux Hemingway's in the sleazy, exploitation thriller, "Lipstick. Henceforth, Lange distanced herself from the "model turned actress" label and downplayed her model roots.

R45 Funny thing is, Dino derided Lange for her looks too. It was an assistant director who caught her spark, decided to shoot some tests, and then rushed to show the director who took it to Dino, who was convinced.

Even still, Dino ordered Lange to “lose the braces and gain 15 lbs.”

[quote] Producer Dino De Laurentis took one look at her '70s blonde 'fro and decided they shouldn't even test her, but an Assistant Director, noting she'd come such a distance, managed to put her before a camera. As she did her scene, the A.D., then others—and finally the legendary Italian—came in to watch. Over many actresses, Lange got her first film, a featured part as "Dwan," cast opposite Jeff Bridges and Charles Grodin in John Guillermin’s remake of the 1933 classic.

I've always found this haunting and sad. She should of won the Oscar for this.

R48 Stunning.

I will continue my retrospective of Mizz Lange’s work later.

That guy that wrote and directed HBO's Grey Gardens is gonna die when he sees this thread. He doesn't understand why his film isn't a cult classic. No one cares, really. AHS relaunched her, not him. And what's he done since, really?

R50 Michael Suscy is a sweetheart and he did a fantastic job directing “Grey Gardens,” which more than holds up 10+ years later; it’s brilliant. In 2012, he directed the hit “The Vow” starring Channing Tatum and Rachel McAdams (and with Lange in a small but emotionally effective role). He did one more film (“Every Day”) that came and went, and directed two episodes of “13 Reasons Why.” He’s set to direct “Every Note Played” with Angelina Jolie and Christopher Waltz attached.

Make no mistake, “Grey Gardens” was certainly responsible for Lange’s comeback and reemergence before the public eye, though “American Horror Story” is definitely responsible for sustaining that comeback for the better part of a decade, and for making her an icon to the younger generation. One could say that Lange was responsible for the latter’s success, especially considering the fact that the show never truly recovered nor again experienced the peak popularity it had when Lange was still front and center.

In 1998, Lange gave a wonderfully sardonic performance in the criminally underrated adaptation of Honoré de Balzac’s comedy of errors, “Cousin Bette,” opposite Elisabeth Shue, Hugh Laurie, Bob Hoskins, and Geraldine Chaplin.

The the biting and central irony of the film - making Lange, whose beauty is retained and at times highlighted, the ugly duckling, while presenting Chaplin, a handsome if odd-looking woman, as the beauty - does much to sway our sympathies toward Bette, who wreaks quiet-turned-combustible havoc on a bunch of ne'er-do-wellers who have spurned, scorned, and taken her for granted. She should’ve received another nomination for her subtle, funny, and biting turn. Siskel and Ebert both loved her performance and I do too.

Siskel and Ebert review:

Hi, Mr. Suscy at r50!

R2. Thank you for posting! It's great! Mary Tyler Moore is my favorite television actress, and Jessica Lange is my favorite movie actress.

R55 Have a thing for Mary (MTM is in constant rotation and Ordinary People is one of my favorite films and her performance in it one of my favorite EVER) and Lange, of course, is my favorite actress too. 😘

Julie Taymor’s debut film “Titus” - a 1999 adaptation of William Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus” - has to be one of the most underrated of all time. Starring Anthony Hopkins as the titular character and Lange as Tamora, Queen of the Goths, it is an era-bending, bloody revenge tale on speed, with poetic and transcendent flashes of hope and insight. Hopkins, Lange, and Harry Lennix should have been nominated for Oscars, with the latter two winning in Supporting.

At the time, Entertainment Weekly critic Lisa Schwarzbaum included Lange in a "for your consideration" article directed at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, writing, "Jessica Lange already has two Oscars and six nominations to her credit, so her appearance near the words 'Academy Awards' should never be a surprise. But everything about her daring performance in Titus as Tamora, the Queen of the Goths, is an astonishment. Donning breastplates, vowing vengeance, tearing into Shakespeare for the first time as if nothing could be more fun, Lange steals the show—and when the star of the show is Anthony Hopkins, that's grand theft."

I couldn’t have said it better. Also, the trailer gives me goosebumps.

Full movie.

Amazing scene.

Amazing monologue.

Fascinating making of doc..

I forgot to mention 1998’s Hush, aka Kilronan, which was butchered into a flaccid if still fun psychodrama. “Kilronan” was originally darker, more violent and thrilling. Goop’s ambitions got in the way.

I pray for a director’s cut release.

Based on Elizabeth Wurtzel’s bestselling and genre defining memoir on manic depression, Prozac Nation is as dreary and moving as depression can be. Both Ricci and Lange are aces as a mother and daughter stuck with each other and together pinned under the weight of chronic mania and despondency. Lange gives a tour de force as a mother who feels trapped and strangled by her daughter’s perpetual ups and downs. Ebert and Roeper, as evidenced in the trailer, opined:

[quote]“It is hard to imagine Christina Ricci and Jessica Lange not getting Oscar nominations for their roles.”

I agree. Lange should’ve received a supporting nod here for her fiery work here.

Sharing a few scenes for this one.

Amazing sequence. Lange is beyond.

(This started out playfully but the more I go through her work, the more I’m considering conducting a more thorough and critical review of her career, replete with fun and little-known facts about her films, performances, and process.)

All she needs is a Grammy.

R67 All she needs to do is a spoken word album, too.

Jessica Tandy >>>>>> Jessica Lange

R69 Chile bye!

"Knotty pine!"

I recently rewatched CRIMES OF THE HEART . Wow, is it terrible. Keaton was especially horrid, and has Lange ever looked worse on screen?

That said, I love Jessica Lange. MEN DON'T LEAVE, SWEET DREAMS , & FRANCES are my favorites.

And i guess I haven't realized that I've been on a Lange kick these past few months. In addition to the films I mentioned above, I have also watched TOOTSIE, CAPE FEAR, and THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE .

And of course, a lot of AHS.

R72 Don’t you DARE! She and Keaton and Spacek were perfection in Crimes, which is also underrated and captures that humid, southern malaise so perfectly. (She did look like a muppet though, but this is why I love her: she ain’t afraid to go there for a role.)

R73 Have a favorite season?

Happy birthday, Miss Lange!

I could watch BLUE SKY endlessly. She’s sexy and cray cray all at the same time.

Her Blanche DuBois wasn’t too bad either.

Whoever said CRIMES OF THE HART holds up is crazy.

I watched a bit of it again recently and - OY!!! The performances are all trying too hard and the script? There's a reason Beth Henley fizzled.

Lange like many well know actors Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt and Meryl made a few good films but most of their credits are for films I have no interest in watching. Lange's recent triumphs in American Horror Story, The Politician and Feud show what a talent she is and that was evident in Sweet Dreams, Crimes of the Heart, Tootsie and Grey Gardens. Her performance in Frances is a series of showdowns designed to get an Oscar which it didn't and the over-the-top scenes in the mental institution rank with The Snake Pit, Suddenly, Last Summer and The Caretakers.

R75 I totally forgot! I’m a bad fan.

Happy Birthday, Queen!

It’s WHAX, bitch.

My critical blurbs of her nods and wins:

[bold]Tootsie[/bold]: Lange is effervescent here, displaying an aching subtlety and bittersweet melancholy that grounds the film, giving a rare poignancy to what is essentially a slapstick, though extremely witty, comedy. Her performance elicits autonomous sensory meridian responses to the max. I love that she won the Oscar for her brilliantly understated work in this, which compliments and highlights her win for her brilliant performance in Blue Sky quite nicely.

[bold]Frances[/bold]: In one of the best performances in cinema history, Lange reaches Olympian heights as a troubled star would-be serious thespian, her mercurial visage flickering from quiet melancholy and sardonic contempt to white-hot fury and, finally, pained, darkened hope trapped in a void. A shattering performance.

[bold]Country[/bold]: Lange's work here, in arguably the superior and grittiest of the "80s farm films," carries all of the weight of an Andrew Wyeth painting: she is both graceful and severe; luminous and haunting; tender and brittle; fragile and steadfast. She exhibits a simplicity and naturalness that is effortless, beguiling and, ultimately, galvanizing.

[bold]Sweet Dreams[/bold]: From spitfire beginning to explosive - literally - end, Lange's performance is infused with an infectious exuberance and joie de vivre that is measured and composed by Patsy Cline's own peerless voice rather than by a valiant attempt at imitation or interpretation; this is perhaps the greatest honor one could pay Cline, who no one could sing like. Lange, with the help of the equally brilliant Ed Harris and Ann Wedgeworth, who both, dare I say, make her work possible, channels Cline's ephemeral electric essence like a live wire. As Pauline Kael, wrote, “When Lange's Patsy slings her strong young body around she gives off a charge. Lange has real authority here, and the performance holds you emotionally. This is one of the few times I've seen people cry at a movie that wasn't sentimental--it's an honest tearjerker. People can cry without feeling they've been had.”

[bold]Music Box[/bold]: One of my favorite performances of Lange's and one of Costa Gavras’ most underrated films. Both the film and her performance leave me dumbstruck and speechless. Kael said it best when she wrote of Lange's work here: "What counts is the Old World, New World texture that Jessica Lange brings to toughness. Her beautiful throatiness counts. She has the will and the technique to take a role that's really no more than a function of melodrama and turn this movie into a cello concerto." Her descent into the embodiment of Dieric Bouts's Weeping Madonna painting is both profound and cathartic.

[bold]Blue Sky[/bold]: What Lange does with what is, perhaps, my favorite of her performances is utterly riveting, transcendent, and nearly peerless. You would have to go back to the stars and thespians of a bygone era - a few of which she purposefully emulates in the film - like Monroe, Taylor, Bardot, and Leigh, to get a performance as simultaneously sexy, vital, potent, beguiling, authentic, melodramatic, volatile, and succulent as Lange’s is in this film. It still astonishes me that she managed to go from the drab, dowdy, albeit genius, work of something like Men Don't Leave to this: something so iridescent, intoxicating, and brilliant. It thrills me that she won not only the Oscar but LAFCA for this. It's a performance that is equal parts depressing, heartbreaking, infuriating, and uplifting.

I would have also nominated her for Best Actress in [bold]Men Don't Leave[/bold], [bold]Everybody's All-American[/bold], and [bold]Losing Isaiah[/bold], and Best Supporting Actress for [bold]Crimes of the Heart[/bold], [bold]Cape Fear[/bold], [bold]Rob Roy[/bold], given her the win in this category for [bold]Titus[/bold], and nominated her again for [bold]Prozac Nation[/bold], [bold]Big Fish[/bold] [bold]Don't Come Knocking[/bold].

LMAO!

Just watched Grey Gardens again the other day; Lange really became Big Edie. It's a beautiful film that fills in some of the gaps in the documentary.

R83 She and Drew were so perfect together. They lived together throughout filming and became close. It shows.

R81, I would write “MARY”, but I’m in total agreement with you...

Go back to the "special care" unit at the looney bin and enjoy your thoughts in peace.

R86 Aren’t there anymore pedophiles for you to defend, or racism and transphobia for you to spew, Matt?