We watched “Postcards from the Edge” last night

We discussed this confused mish-mash a few months ago.

It didn't know if it was an unfunny brainless knockabout comedy or a shallow morality fable,

Great movie. Meryl and Shirley are wonderful.

endolphins

Debbie Reynolds should have starred in this movie.

That's definitely Streep's voice. Her (very handsome) accompanist for "You Don't Know Me" is none other than Scott Frankel, future composer of GREY GARDENS and WAR PAINT.

PFTE is an incredibly uneven film, although it is saved by the joyous on-screen chemistry between Shirley MacLaine and Meryl Streep. The very best moments in the movie are the scenes they share, and thankfully there are a lot of them. Beyond that, the movie suffers from choppy editing, under-developed secondary characters, some curious casting choices, and frustratingly bad dialogue in places. The only other character who has any realness to him is Gene Hackman’s Director, although he only appears at the very beginning and the very end. The movie feels like it was originally much longer and had to undergo significant edits to bring it down to a desired running time. What is left is a bit of a mess, and if not for MacLaine and Streep it would’ve been an utter disaster.

Miss Tick-tick Streep CANNOT play dumb.

Debbie Does Streep

Love this movie. Glad you enjoyed it. It holds up remarkably well.

Shirley steals it.

Her scene on the stairs, the vodka in the slimfast and the fur coat in the hospital are priceless.

She's not a great singer, but her "I'm Still Here" is a prime example of how a song can be sold as a performance with not so strong vocal talents.

Like Bea Arthur.

Streep is actually quite a good singer. I always think it's a bit of a shame she didn't do any Broadway musicals (I think she would have been a better Norma Desmond that Glenn Close was).

There's a lot I like in this film, although whenever I think of it, I always think of the moment I hated most of all in it: "I'm Still Here." It's stupid that they had Sondheim right lyrics for it more appropriate to the persona of Shirley Maclaine ("I'm feeling transcendental! / Am I here?") rather than to the character of Doris Mann, and it irritates the shit out of me when Maclaine obnoxiously slams her palm against the counter in time with the music.

Otherwise I find Maclaine well cast (I like her especially when she's without her wig or her makeup in the hospital), and I like Streep so much in it. And I don't always like either of them.

I agree with R6. It’s uneven but the parts that work are fantastic. You have to suspend belief that Meryl and Shirley are mother and daughter for age reasons but they have tons of chemistry. And I love the scenes between them. The script needed to be tighter and probably a few more rewrites but on the whole it’s pretty good.

Fine....I'll do it.

"It *twirled* up!"

[quote]I always think it's a bit of a shame she didn't do any Broadway musicals

She did.

In 1981 she did Alice in Concert at the Public. It was televised as Alice at the Palace NYT review:

[quote]Dressed in blue overalls and a white turtleneck, Miss Streep transforms herself into a dreamy Alice without any notable help from Miss Swados. When the actress falls into the rabbit hole, she seems to take leave of gravity -even though her undulating body never actually takes leave of the floor. There's a lovely moment a bit later when Miss Streep, waking from a nap, looks into a spotlight to brush her flowing mane of hair. Her eyes are so dewy and her face so pure that she truly appears to have been reborn as a young girl.

[quote](I think she would have been a better Norma Desmond that Glenn Close was).

Of course you're right but let Betelgeuse slumber or we'll never hear the end of it.

"Any more people in here and we're going to need a lubricant."

R11 I agree about the musicals, amd unironically find Mamma Mia to be one of her best latter year performances. I can't claim that it's a good or even objectively decent movie, but she seems more organic and lively than her other recent work. I really want her to pull off at least one more exceptional, unique performance, but I'm afraid she's become too set in her ways.

I don’t know why M insists on doing comedy. She has no comic timing. Shirley was fantastic in this and made up for all of M”s blandness.

Meryl's expert at comedy, r19.

Featuring Gary Morton! As the crooked business manager!

[quote]Why can’t they make this a musical?

Starring none other than Miss Beanie Feldstein* as Suzanne Vale!!!

*I just happen to have some insider information that Miss Feldstein might be free and available to star if we are very very lucky

Streep has such an amazing film catalog. She said that Shirley MacLaine was really amazing to her. I love their chemistry.

Feldstein is too fat to be a coke addict.

M A R Y

W I C K E S

Movie lovers have to see it for the scenes at the end with Gene Hackman and Richard Dreyfuss.

An early career Annette Bening in this as well.

[quote] Featuring Gary Morton! As the crooked business manager!

*looks at IMDB*

holy fuck, you weren't kidding

Now I'm dying to rewatch the movie!!!

I had a good cry over it thinking of Debbie and Carrie, and how wonderful the cast is. It’s really a good mother-daughter film.

Right now it’s on HBO Max

r5

I fucked the pianist a few times in Provincetown in the aughts!

Meryl is passable, but it's Shirley's show, she's incredible in this.

Streep is fundamentally miscast as a Carrie Fisher type. Never at any point in this movie I believed her as an unhinged mess. Debra Winger or Jamie Lee Curtis would have worked better.

So disagree, r34! I think it's one of Streep's most effortless and certainly funniest performances. Just brilliant and such a great contrast to Shirley's style.

I wonder if Shirley’s mystical beliefs cost her a few Oscar nominations

What should she have been nominated for that she wasn't, r36?

Steel Magnolias or Postcards

Also, Madame Sousatzka won Shirley the Golden Globe and the Volpi Cup but no Oscar nomination

I agree Shirley may have seemed an oddball at the time, but her work here is great. I also like Streep in this. She is playing an insecure person who has always been in the shadow of her mother.

It's an interesting question, R36. Maybe the mystic nonsense put people off liking her. Sort of Glenn Close syndrome. Or maybe Glenn has Shirley Maclaine syndrome. But one never gets the feeling about either as being beloved or her canon of work being regarded as an exemplar.

Who’s “we?”

Her not getting nominations for those had little to nothing to do with Shirley's spiritual beliefs.

[quote]Streep is fundamentally miscast as a Carrie Fisher type. Never at any point in this movie I believed her as an unhinged mess.

You would be in the minority. Streep’s performance was hailed and she was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar.

R44 Yes, because the Oscars are such an undisputed and universal metric for great acting!

Also - I didn't say she was bad. I said she was miscast. She was fine in the movie but doesn't register as much to me as Shirley, Gene Hackman (who is consistently excellent and effortless in everything I've seen him in), even Annette Benning who's in it for about five minutes.

I rediscovered it a couple of weeks ago...it’s great..

Its a very short movie compared to the ones out now.....a good thing since I get antsy after 1 hr and 40 minutes

Postcards is the only feature film for which Carrie Fisher received sole writing credit, and I think the screenplay is one of the biggest factors that makes this movie so uneven. Fisher was a great comedy writer, but her writing style was better suited to her books and one-woman performance pieces where she could fill the space with her witty quips. For feature films she was supposedly in huge demand as a punch-up writer, and I think she was also perfectly suited for that.

It seems clear though that she didn’t quite have what it took to write comprehensive and full narratives for feature films, or else she would’ve probably had dozens to her credit. It’s a wonder of that PFTE was as successful as it was, given what a hot mess the writing was. That’s a credit to MacLaine and Streep making the absolute most of the material. When you think of their shared scenes that work so well, they feel more like stand-alone comedy shorts.

Streep was miscast in a lot of movies, but PFTE was not one of them.

Carrie may have been credited as the sole screenwriter of PFTE but do you really think some of Mike Nichols' brilliant friends like Elaine May and Nora Ephron didn't contribute something without a credit?

[quote] Feldstein is too fat to be a coke addict.

Coke addicts can be fat.

They probably did, R50, as it’s very common practice in the industry. Carrie Fisher did the same thing on countless other scripts that weren’t hers. But there is a reason punch up work usually doesn’t get you screen credit, as you usually don’t significantly change the narrative structure of the original writer.

It's a movie that I always watched when it ran on network TV.

IMO, Meryl was good in the role. Yes, kind of hard to believe her as some type of sad sack.

She and Shirley MacLaine simply don't look like mother and daughter. But it's more plausible than Shirley and Debra Winger (Terms of Endearment).

Shirley and Meryl are great but Shirley and Debra as mother/daughter is better

Every time a Streep movie nowdays I have this urge to pick up some pliers and get that nose in a straight position.

Ugh I’ve always despised Debra Winger, not sure why exactly. Never liked her in anything.

Has anyone read the original novel? Is it good? Is the film significantly different? Does the mother in the book seem even more closely patterned on Debbie Reynolds?

So, were we supposed to believe that Debbie Reynolds was essentially bald? She must have been more furious about that than any other comparisons in the film.

Debbie was quite the muff-diver.

The book and movie have very little in common. The character's mother in the book gets very little mention, in fact. When Fisher started writing the screenplay, it was decided to focus on the mother-daughter relationship as the book element to be fleshed out and adapted for the big screen.

To me, one of the funniest scenes in the movie is when she wakes up from her drug overdose coma and the first person she sees is her doctor Richard Dreyfus (who, if anything, was a bigger druggie than Carrie Fisher).

Fact Check: When she wakes from her coma the first person she sees is CCH Pounder, the director of the drug clinic. She doesn't see Dreyfuss until near the end of the film when her mother is admitted to the hospital, and she doesn't recognize him (because her stomach was getting pumped when they "met") until he asks her if she got the flowers he sent.

No, she sees Dreyfuss early on in the movie.

The Gary Morton scene.

[quote]No, she sees Dreyfuss early on in the movie.

Nope, she doesn't. Describe the scene.

She goes under as he's about to pump her stomach when she's completely fucked up, she has the drug-induced nightmare about Nancy Reagan, wakes up in a drug clinic, then gets on with her life until she runs into him at the hospital when her mother is taken there.

[quote] When she wakes from her coma the first person she sees is CCH Pounder, the director of the drug clinic.

Was CCH Pounder the one who "talked in bumper stickers"?

Dennis Quaid played the player "boyfriend," IIRC. He was good at playing cheesy.

[quote]Was CCH Pounder the one who "talked in bumper stickers"?

Yep!

That's brilliant, r64.

This one is good too

“What's disappointing about the movie is that it never really delivers on the subject of recovery from addiction. There are some incomplete, dimly seen, unrealized scenes in the rehab center, and then desultory talk about offscreen AA meetings. But the film is preoccupied with gossip; we're encouraged to wonder how many parallels there are between the Streep and MacLaine characters and their originals, Fisher and Debbie Reynolds.

Suzanne, the young actress, has some bad moments and then comes through as a trouper, and the movie almost seems to think her real problem is an inability to communicate with her mother.

Half the people in Hollywood seem to have gone through recovery from drugs and alcohol by now. And yet no one seems able to make a movie that's really about the subject. Do they think it wouldn't be interesting? Any movie that cares deeply about itself - even a comedy - is interesting. It's the movies that lack the courage of their convictions, the ones that keep asking themselves what the audience wants, that go astray.

"Postcards from the Edge" contains too much good writing and too many good performances to be a failure, but its heart is not in the right place.“

It certainly lends itself to a musical more than Prada.

[Quote] Has anyone read the original novel? Is it good? Is the film significantly different? Does the mother in the book seem even more closely patterned on Debbie Reynolds?

I've read it. I can't remember much of it. I think most of it takes place in the rehab facility. Not a lot happens.

I think Michelle Pfeiffer would have been good as Suzanne. She would have made a little more sense as someone Dennis Quaid would fuck in 1989.

[Quote] Suzanne, the young actress, has some bad moments and then comes through as a trouper, and the movie almost seems to think her real problem is an inability to communicate with her mother.

Well, a big source of Carrie's issues was her mother. And maybe ever more so: her father.

If I recall correctly, the novel has a parallel story line -- one person who life is slowly falling apart while he does more and more drugs, eventually landing in rehab. Meanwhile the other storyline has a person in rehab slowly getting her life back together and learning to live without drugs.

[Quote] When you think of their shared scenes that work so well, they feel more like stand-alone comedy shorts.

I disagree. The Lana Turner/Joan Crawford for a mother scene isn't just a sketch type scene, for one.

“Hold it between your knees.”

[Quote] Why can’t they make this a musical?

Because Beth Leavel has had enough flops.

Can Mae Whitman sing? She reminds me a little of Carrie.

[quote] Shirley and Meryl are great but Shirley and Debra as mother/daughter is better

Terms is certainly a better movie but Shirley and Debra had to work hard to make us think they loved one another. Shirley and Meryl had a more natural and genuine chemistry which surprised me when I first saw the film.

Who is “we” OP? Are you Lunt and Fontanne? You sound frau-ish…”we tried the new place on West Broadway, but the Halibut was dry.”

I've always hated how Meryl gives Shirley a pissed off look the moment she stops singing and grabs her coat. Suzanne is still "on stage" in full view of the party guests. She wouldn't do that while everyon is still looking.

You missed the point. She was mad at her mother for making her sing for guests right after she got out of rehab.

[quote] Half the people in Hollywood seem to have gone through recovery from drugs and alcohol by now. And yet no one seems able to make a movie that's really about the subject.

You must be joking.

I didn't miss the point. Of course she was mad, but she wouldn't show that to the other party guests. Look how she removes her jacket meekly when Doris tells her to do so. There's a disconnect when she throws her mother an evil look in front of company. Not that she throws her an evil look period.

[quote]Half the people in Hollywood seem to have gone through recovery from drugs and alcohol by now. And yet no one seems able to make a movie that's really about the subject.

1994 is after Ebert's review.

[quote] Half the people in Hollywood seem to have gone through recovery from drugs and alcohol by now. And yet no one seems able to make a movie that's really about the subject.

[quote]I didn't miss the point. Of course she was mad, but she wouldn't show that to the other party guests. Look how she removes her jacket meekly when Doris tells her to do so. There's a disconnect when she throws her mother an evil look in front of company. Not that she throws her an evil look period.

This movie is FILLED with disconnects. As I've stated upthread, it's Carrie Fisher's inexperience with screenwriting, but also combined with a surprisingly lazy turn at the helm by Mike Nichols. If it weren't for the joyous chemistry between Streep and MacLaine this movie would have been a frontrunner for all the Razzies.

[quote]Richard Dreyfus (who, if anything, was a bigger druggie than Carrie Fisher).

Dennis Quaid too. A lot of former addicts! The year it was released, 1990, was the year Quaid went into rehab for a 2-gram-a-day coke habit. His peak period as one of the in-demand leading men and grown-up heartthrobs (Innerspace, The Big Easy, Suspect, the DOA remake, Everybody's All-American, Great Balls of Fire) coincided with that.

About Postcards: Lucas Hedges admitted that when he was going to play Streep's nephew in that Soderbergh film, he realized he really didn't know many of her movies. He asked his friend (and Lady Bird director) Greta Gerwig for recommendations of things to watch, and she sent him to Postcards first. Then he was raving about it in interviews. He thought it was just the greatest movie ever.

R88, that beat has always seemed off to me as well -- especially since, seconds later, Suzanne is more than glad to encourage her mother to sing, and she cheers her head off at the end of the number.

I liked Meryl's big closing number. It could've been a country hit.

Can someone please explain what the fuck she is doing at about the 2:00 mark in the video at R95? What is up with those few odd notes she pushes through her lips before singing "I found a new love...." ??

She's pretending to be a brass instrument, probably a trombone.

It’s amazing the endless capacity gay men have to talk about Meryl Streep all the time. It’s cute.

Carrie performing in real life at Debbie's behest.

Carrie performing in real life at Debbie's behest.

"Today is tomorrow if you do too much blow."

Carrie sang better in old age than she did in her youth.

It TWIRRRLED UP!!!

"Meryl Streep just about always seems miscast. (She makes a career out of seeming to overcome being miscast.) In Postcards from the Edge, she's witty and resourceful, yet every expression is eerily off, not quite human. When she sings in a country-and-Western style, she's note-perfect, but it's like a diva singing jazz — you don't believe it. Streep has a genius for mimicry: she's imitating a country-and-Western singer singing. These were my musings to a friend, who put it more simply: 'She's an android.'"

But Carrie was rather off.

Pauline Kael was so jealous of Meryl - to almost comical levels. The character of Mary Louise in BLL2 was based on Pauline.

[quote]Carrie may have been credited as the sole screenwriter of PFTE but do you really think some of Mike Nichols' brilliant friends like Elaine May and Nora Ephron didn't contribute something without a credit?

Maybe, but Carrie was the go-to person in Hollywood in that period when a script needed punching up or stronger rewriting. She did it for Sister Act, Hook, Soapdish, Wedding Singer to name a few. Plus if you've read her books, the dialogue in the movie sounds exactly like stuff Carrie would write.

[quote]Pauline Kael was so jealous of Meryl - to almost comical levels.

That was Streep's excuse as to why Kael kept panning her work, and it's a rather lazy, common and trite one.

Kael was one of several big critics of the late 70's, early 80's who weren't taken with Meryl and they all had similar reasons. That she put so much research into her characters that she stifled herself on screen and didn't really allow them to come alive. And if you look at some of her work, you'll realize they had a point. But I think in a way it was those critics that made her work hard to prove herself on screen and helped give her those great performances that she ultimately gave.

Once she started being treated as a deity by the critics (post Prada) is when the quality plummeted.

No, I think Pauline was in love with her. Her writing on her is like a crazy stalker who has been rejected. It’s an oddity.

Or maybe she just had good taste R109?

Another example of a baffling disconnect with Fisher's writing (and by extension, Nichols' lazy directing) in Postcards was the famous stairway scene.

In that scene, Doris acknowledges her drinking problem to Suzanne no fewer than five times within the span of about two minutes:

"Well maybe I was an alcoholic when you were a teenager, but...."

followed by

"And now I just drink like an Irish person."

followed by

"You are jealous because I CAN drink and you can't take drugs any longer because I can handle it and you can't."

followed by

"My drinking does not interfere with my work!"

followed by

"Don't blame me for your drug taking! I don't blame my mother for my misfortunes or my drinking."

Then immediately after that last line, Suzanne responds by saying

"You don't even acknowledge that you drink! How could you possibly blame your mother for something you don't even DO?"

It's a clever line in and of itself, but it's completely non-sensical in the scene, given the dialogue that immediately precedes it. It felt like Fisher unnecessarily punched up her own script with non-sequiturs for no other reason than to show how witty she could be with her quips.

Fisher says on the commentary for the movie that she doesn’t even really like that scene, because drug addicts/alcoholics don’t tend to confront people in that kind of way.

Kael could go overboard in her takedowns of Streep, but I think she was essentially right when she said, “Nothing escapes her conception of a performance.” Everything has to mean something with Meryl. No doubt she had a reason for that cutting look in the first scene where she sings.

Telegraph Interview with Meryl from 2008: “There is one scene in the film that led me to that conclusion. It is a scene that is not in the play, and which I shall forbear from describing for anyone who sees the film. It is also a scene that Streep says she had 'knock-down, drag-out fights' with the producer, Scott Rudin, to have cut. 'To me it destroys part of Sister Aloysius's doubt about what she has done. And that was hard for me.'

How ferociously did she argue the point?

'Well, short of saying I wouldn't do any interviews…' Streep arches her eyebrow meaningfully. 'And I almost went there. That, by the way, is the only thing they pay attention to. Me screaming, "But I think this, I feel very strongly about that…" – that's just noise. But I didn't have a prayer. 'I wasn't angry. I was speechless, because I really don't think that doubt in increments should be removed from this at all. Doubt is our friend. And once you tip the scales in one direction or another it's very, very dangerous. The thing is calibrated like a tuning fork: it's either A, or it's not A.'

When I tell Shanley that Streep has voiced her concerns about the scene to me, he laughs good-naturedly: 'I'm sure she did. But she is an actor. And she's inside the story. And no matter how she protests and how she struggles she is going to inhabit a point of view that is not the point of view of the film but of a character in the film. It's my job to stand back from an individual point of view within the film and see the story as an animal unto itself that must be served.”

I don’t understand what your point is, other than people for years - including Pauline - have used talking about Meryl Streep to get attention. She gets more attention than any other actress.

More than Monroe?

[quote]including Pauline - have used talking about Meryl Streep to get attention.

Uhh, Pauline was a well established, famous film critic years before Streep did her first movie.

You sound like an unhinged Streep fangurl who has no clue as to what they're talking about.

I know exactly what Pauline was doing. It was for attention.

It’s not possible that Meryl is sometimes too married to her own ideas of how things should be? Is she infallible?

She had her faves and then she had people she tried to discredit. I sometimes liked her writing but she occasionally went way overboard with her rants. She really didn’t want Meryl to be popular and it came off as … strange.

Meryl playing Pauline would be really funny.

Quaid is hot af in this movie. Those abs. Those jeans

I watched this on HBO Max. I hadn't seen it since the '90s. A detail I'd missed before is that the film Suzanne is making at the start, in which she flubs a line while arguing with a corrupt South American policeman, is called "Evil Angels" (judging by the logo on the jacket of a crew member). That was the Australian title of Meryl's 1988 film about the dingo/baby case, better known internationally as A Cry in the Dark.

I think this is a perfect example of a script and a film that was could have been brilliant but suits at the studio got involved and tried to make into a big picture. Too many cooks in the kitchen as they say. It has all the parts to make it a great film and yet it never quite comes together. It’s brilliant in certain parts. That fucking it twirled up line makes my skin crawl but that’s the line everyone remembers. Too many notes. Too many execs in the editing room. I would say the original version was lost somewhere.

can't argue with a movie that has this scene

and this isn't from this movie but from the same time I think

r111, all those things you took as acknowledgements that she drinks are actually deflections. "I may have been alcoholic then but not now" and "you're just jealous because I can handle my drink" and "drinking doesn't interfere with my work" are NOT what alcoholics say when they're admitting they're alcoholic.

[quote]It has all the parts to make it a great film and yet it never quite comes together. It’s brilliant in certain parts.

I think that's fair. I've always liked Postcards from the Edge, but watching it again, I could see that it never reaches the higher gear that seems within reach. It riffs on several big themes (substance abuse and recovery, parent/child conflict, showbiz shallowness and hypocrisy, celebrity worship), but it doesn't quite jell. It's an entertaining star-studded doodle, best appreciated for the wit of the dialogue and for a great cast from the period. Everyone is good too. Not just the headliners, but people in smaller roles: Robin Bartlett, CCH Pounder, Mary Wickes, Oliver Platt, Annette Bening, Michael Ontkean.

The looping scene near the end with Gene Hackman ("Look at that. See what you can do? You weren't even conscious then, for chrissake. Imagine what you could do now") feels as though it should climax a more substantial film on the recovering-actress topic. He and Streep are both really strong there.

I'd give it a 7.

Streep deserved the Oscar nomination. She can be quite the adept comedienne when she wants to. I don’t think the intention was to be a hard hitting even drama comedy about the perils of drug addiction in the movie business. The film kind of meanders to an end with her talk with Hackman and her country song and we’re supposed to think she’s over her drug problem and conflict with her mother. Typical Hollywood ending. But there are some brilliant and funny scenes in this film.

I love this film while being aware of its limitations. Streep really isn't right for the part, she's a decade too old and as been said previously, never presents as vulnerable. However, she's a great comedienne and understands timing and delivery and I love her interactions with MacLaiine. I've always wondered what Melanie Griffith would have done with the part as it was in her wheel house as an actor, but I understand she burned her bridges with Nichols on Working Girl, so she wasn't cast.

One of the saddest things about Carrie Fisher's addiction is that she never developed as a writer after showing a lot of promise. As she herself said in the past, she loved words and that is evident in Postcards (both novel and film), however she never moved past writing wittily. Not only did her writing never move past where it was in Postcards but it regressed and that is evident in her last book, which was clearly a money grab. I say this only because I think that Carrie had at one point aspirations to be a great writer and had the potential to at least be a ver good one, but that never happened.

[quote]I've always wondered what Melanie Griffith would have done with the part

You mean, besides fuck it up royally because she's one of the worst actresses ever?

Did she? I thought her aspirations mostly centred around being a provider. And bringing herself up to zero.

R129 I think she had enough to deal with in terms of staying sober and mentally healthy. The last few years of her life seemed to have been very rough.

Watching the documentary Debbie and her did before they passed was a little depressing. Debbie's financial issues and shit taste in men and Carrie's issues took a toll on both of them, and despite their outward appearances, you can tell they struggled.

The film lacks a decent narrative arc, that's the thing everyone is picking up on that makes the experience unsatisfying.

What? Most people like the movie.

You can't like it and still find it somewhat unsatisfying?

The opening sequence, with Suzanne doing drugs on the set, etc., was very likely modeled closely on Melanie Griffith's antics during the WORKING GIRL shoot.

I don't agree that Streep is a decade too old, really. She and MacLaine had 15 years between them. Streep was 40 when this was in production; MacLaine was 55. The "How many 120-year-old women do you know?" line suggests Doris is supposed to be sixtyish. I just assumed MacLaine was playing five years older than her age, and Streep was playing five years younger (at least) than hers. I can buy that level of artifice. It isn't a perfect film, but the casting isn't one of its problems.

I love how Meryl says "these are the options?" during the Gary Morton scene.

That’s a comedy RULE?

That’s actually when the mom says how would you like Joan Crawford or Lana Turner as a mother, and Suzanne says, “these are the options, Lana or Joan?”

Best line from the book, not in the movie:

"The worst thing about immediate gratification is it doesn't come soon enough!"

It's almost there.

Doris: "Careers need planning. Your big problem is, you're too impatient. You only want instant gratification." Suzanne: "Instant gratification takes too long."

And the line about instant gratification was in fact in the movie.

[quote]Best line from the book, not in the movie: "The worst thing about immediate gratification is it doesn't come soon enough!"

LOL. This would be like saying Rhett Butler’s final words in Gone With The Wind are: “I’ve got to be honest with you, sweetheart, this is not something I really care about.“

Streep is good in that late scene with Hackman, but it's just hard to buy her as somebody who "can't feel their life." She's one of the most self possessed people ever. Oddly enough, that line apparently was what really made her want to do the role.

[quote] About Postcards: Lucas Hedges admitted that when he was going to play Streep's nephew in that Soderbergh film, he realized he really didn't know many of her movies. He asked his friend (and Lady Bird director) Greta Gerwig for recommendations of things to watch, and she sent him to Postcards first. Then he was raving about it in interviews. He thought it was just the greatest movie ever.

It wasn’t Oscar nom worthy or anything but I quite liked M in “Let Them All Talk”. Candace Bergen, Dianne Wiest and Gemma Chan were excellent too. Lucas, on the other hand, was pretty awful.

I think “Postcards from the Edge” is a modern classic like "Sister Act".

I had NO IDEA people had all these quibbles with it! The reviews were great, it was a financial success and I recall everyone loving it at the time. It's a very well made film.

Meryl is excellent as the slightly whining foil to the over the top movie star mother played by Shirley MacLaine. The scene in the hospital where Streep fashions a head scarf and applies the false eyelashes (as I recall) to her mother so she can leave "A STAR!" is the best in the film. The fact that the audience is well aware she's playing the real Debbie Reynolds gives it a magical layer of craziness as of course Debbie would be among the first to see the film. Genius.

Sister Act was a MASSIVE hit that is still constantly viewed and referred to in pop culture. Though a hit, Postcards was much smaller in scale and isn’t referred to much outside of Streep fans.

And they both had Mary Wickes.

Besides its being bigger at the box office, another reason Sister Act gets talked about more today is that it played to young people. Kids who were under ten in the '90s watched the tape or watched it on television over and over. It was a pretty tame PG, notwithstanding the mob-murder plot that gets it going.

Postcards was aimed at adults with an interest in the Carrie Fisher/Debbie Reynolds relationship and Hollywood insider stuff generally.

Carrie praises Shirley

[quote]The fact that the audience is well aware she's playing the real Debbie Reynolds gives it a magical layer of craziness

Not really, though. The screenplay for PFTE is [italic]significantly[/italic] different from the book it's loosely based on -- a novel loosely based on events from Carrie Fisher's life. The book barely touches on the mother-daughter relationship at all, but for the screenplay it was decided to focus on that one aspect of the book and create a whole movie from it. So the film is even more fictionalized than the book was, in terms of being based on Carrie Fisher's life. Debbie Reynolds was not a drinker, for one thing, but Doris Mann was an alcoholic.

Supposedly Liza Minnelli told Fisher that the film reminded her of her own relationship with her mother Judy Garland, and that actually seems like a more accurate comparison.

I seem to remember Carrie talking about Debbie drinking in an interview at one point. She was talking about her father’s drug use and then said something like, “My mother drank, but to a much lesser extent.”

[Quote] Debbie Reynolds was not a drinker, for one thing

I remmeber Matt Rettenmund (sp?) went to Debbie's Cafe Carlyle show. He filmed some brief excerpts. She seemed drunk to me. She also called into a Carrie interview on Joy Behar. That would have been the latter part of the 2000s. Oh... and there's a public, outdoor interview on Youtube of Debbie at a book fair or something where she's clearly under the influence. Funny. Alpha. And drunk.

Here it is. She goes into a diversion about homosexuals at one point.

I was just saying PFtE is a modern comedy classic in that it remains popular and enjoyable. I'm not saying it made more money than Sister Act, or that children enjoy it!

You people assume so much. It, like Sister Act is a funny movie. That was all I said!

The character of Doris IS BASED ON DEBBIE REYNOLDS! Period. I didn't even mention the book at all, I'm aware they're very different, I read it. The movie wisely focuses on just a corner of the book to tell the story. I would be very surprised if Carrie Fisher would agree it was written about anyone else's mother. Especially since she is now dead.

In the clip in r150, Carrie actually says that Shirley was playing her mother in the film.

11 minutes into the interview:

“I have a pedigree for it. My father does it, and my mother to a far lesser extent. My mother enjoys drinking when she’s having some problems.”

The original novel is quite amateurish. It’s mostly an internal monologue that goes on and on. I was surprised they were able to make a movie out of it.

I’ll just say: Dennis Quaid’s ass. Should’ve been more of it.

Debbie Reynolds farted in my face quite often. I didn’t see one occurrence of that in the film, so I’m guessing it wasn’t really based on her.

Melanie Griffith would’ve been great as Suzanne.

I can’t stand when Streep sings in films. She’s a very mediocre singer.

Carrie was, too.

R162 hello Glenn!

This was one of those Streep performances that the Academy should’ve passed over. She’s all right but it always feels like she’s playing down to the character.

Disagree.

I only really like Meryl in comedies.

[quote]I can’t stand when Streep sings in films. She’s a very mediocre singer.

I disagree. She could easily make an enormous amount of money if she'd only sing. She has a God-given talent and she just throws it away. She could be much bigger than that Madonna. She hasn't got half Meryl's voice.

[quote]Melanie Griffith would’ve been great as Suzanne.

That's fucking hysterical. Melanie Griffith is one of the worst actors of all time.

Actually, Carrie was a good singer. Her problem was that she didn't develop her "own voice", she imitated others. If you watch Bright Lights where she sings Bridge Over Troubled Water, she's doing Cher.

Seeing Carrie Fisher live in WISHFUL DRINKING's Broadway run, I was pleasantly surprised when she sang at the end, not least because she sounded terrific. Did anyone ever approach her about playing Joanne in COMPANY? Even then she was a million times closer to my idea of the part than, say, Patti LuPone.

No one would seek out Carrie Fisher for a stage production, not after "Agnes of God."

Was Carrie a mess during her Agnes of God run?

Yes. She missed many performances.

Fair point, R172! My knee-jerk response would be that decades passed between AGNES OF GOD and her age-appropriateness for Joanne, but I suppose that there were enough ups and downs in those years too to trouble the powers that would have been. Then again, I don't remember hearing that she missed (m)any dates in her WISHFUL DRINKING schedule, and Joanne's not an exhausting role . . .

Melanie Griffith is fine given she stayes within her very limited range. Suzanne would have been very much within her range. My biggest problem with Streep's performance is that I never once buy for a minute that she is in troube or a fuck-up, yet her character is just supposed to have survived a drug overdose. I think Griffith, who if nothing else, can present as a vulnerable fuck up would have done well as the drug-addicted movie star daughter of a former movie star.

I don’t dislike Melanie, but her only really solid performance was in Body Double. She was adequate in Something Wild.

Her performance in Working Girl isn’t awful but it’s pretty low energy for somebody who was doing coke during the shoot. And all of that goddamn throat clearing!

Now that's someone who's career went down the shitter.

Melanie was at the Laguna Playhouse playing Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate a few years ago.

Dennis Quaid was sexy in this, but I was thinking that Jeff Bridges also might have been hawt cast against type.

There’s one person who could’ve played this part excellently who nobody ever mentions:

Kirstie Alley.

Yes, she is a terrific comic actress, but she’s also a terrific actress period. She was lauded for her Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Mark Taper forum in L.A. in 1983 and she was very compelling in North & South as an abolitionist.

Who is the cutie at the piano?

The pianist is Scott Frankel, who would later go on to write the scores for the Broadway musicals Grey Gardens and War Paint.

R70: This is not meant to be a documentary

R80: Terms is overrated, at best. A cliche-ridden script (esp. the ending) and some weak casting (Daniels)

Kale was thoroughly incoherent by the 90s. Her proteges were the ones with influence and the taste by that point.

Parkinson's and the medications for it did take a toll on Kael's mind through the '90s, but she could still be sharp close to the end of her life, as shown in a long interview in which she discussed movies from 1999. But I think in those last few years reviewing for the New Yorker, her passion was gone. It was clear she was finding less she wanted to write about, and less to say. Probably this was a combination of a not-great period for movies and Kael just having done the same thing for so long, now doing it with diminished energy. Movie Love (covering 1988-91) is the shortest and the least interesting of her collections.

The movie that finished her off was Paul Mazursky's Scenes from a Mall, with Bette Midler and Woody Allen as a squabbling couple. She had been mulling retirement anyway, and seeing that movie got her off the ledge. She had always liked Mazursky and Midler, and sometimes Allen, and she thought it was a godawful movie.

She was a rambling mess well before the 90s. Her real contributions were making it ok to hate films just because they were foreign, arty or "serious". She also made it ok to praise violence and genre films. Her output declined because The New Yorker switched to having alternating film critics rather than just having one primary critic.