Ho! And also, ho-ho! Happy Festivus from all of us here at The Screengrab!
Last week, we shared some of our favorite cinematic comebacks of all time, but today the gifts we're really hoping to get are the following COMEBACKS WE'D MOST LIKE TO SEE IN 2009, starting with...
MARISA TOMEI
Is it generally accepted that Tomei is as good as she is? She won an Academy Award for her supporting performance in 1992's My Cousin Vinny, but, as also happened with Mira Sorvino (who was ridiculed for having won an Oscar for Mighty Aphrodite) and Jennifer Tilly (who was teased just for having been nominated for Bullets Over Broadway), that achievement inspired some snickering from people who don't understand why you'd waste an award on someone in a comedy. Never mind that Tomei's performance in that movie, which gave audiences as much sheer pleasure as anything run through a projector that year, couldn't have been easy to pull off, or that it summed up as well as anything else she's done what a remarkable combination of brains and adorability she has as an actress. Devoted to working in the theater, and not averse to doing TV when the role is right, she takes long breaks between movie jobs, though she keeps her hand in enough that nobody refers to The Wrestler as her comeback picture. But only for a brief time, in the wake of her Oscar win, did she inspire filmmakers to place her at the center of a few starring vehicles (Untamed Heart, Only You, The Family Perez). From Vinny to In the Bedroom to last year's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead to The Wrestler, the bulk of her most striking movie work has consisted of supporting roles in which her character was defined by her relationship to a man who had more lines and more screen time. And almost any time when Tomei is in a movie but not onscreen counts as wasted time.
MICHAEL KEATON
Does Keaton have issues? As an actor, he's come an incredibly long way from his screen debut in Night Shift, where he was still basically doing stand-up comedy in character -- but ever since hanging up his Bat cape and apparently losing Tim Burton's contact information, he's bounced from role to role, seldom betraying any sign that he cares about sustaining a viable career. He did reportedly beg for his role in Jackie Brown, though he left less impact on the finished film than he did when, as a gag, he reprised the character for a surprise cameo in Out of Sight. He gave a startling performance as a genius-level sociopathic criminal in Desperate Measures, but the downside is that he gave it in Desperate Measures. He may just be a man with more talent than taste, but given his background, it is suprising that he doesn't attempt more comedies; maybe he felt stung after the commercial failure of the 1996 Multiplicity, an underrated film in which he played multiple roles and worked like a saint to keep all the movie's balls in the air. Still,everything you'd guess about him from his acting seems designed to make you wonder why he'd want to appear in Herbie: Fully Loaded or be reincarnated as a snowman in Jack Frost: how hard up can he be for ways to impress his kids? Some of his recent films went all but unreleased (including The Merry Gentlemen, which he directed), but he gave one of his best performances last year on TV, in the cable miniseries The Company, where his legendary CIA brainmaster James Jesus Angleton gave you the feeling that decades of American history were decided by the icy paranoia of a few quietly deranged men in dark rooms. He also famously dropped out of the TV series Lost after learning that the producers had changed their minds about killing off his character in the pilot episode. The one thing that's plain and clear about Keaton is that he's a restless man whose reluctant to settle for the obvious, even if he'd rather star in White Noise than be idle while waiting for his next chance to shake up the Richter scale in a meaningful way. Some young hotshot director who's looking to make waves should plug himself into Keaton's aura and see what happens.
KELLY LYNCH
Lynch is regally beautiful enough, and capable of summoning up enough style and attitude, that you might be tempted to describe her as the sane equivalent of Sharon Stone, if that didn't undervalue her acting range: though she ought to be a movie star, Lynch is also actress enough to pass for a normal human being. For all practical purposes, her movie career really begin with Drugstore Cowboy, where as Diane, the drug-fiend housewife, she burned holes in the screen with her level gaze until exiting the picture with her vulnerabilities finally exposed, a thoroughbred on shaky legs. So far as good movies go, that was pretty much the end of her career, too, though she's continued to give solidly crafted, emotionally rich performances in all manner of dreck, from the "ooh, edgy!" 1993 romantic comedy Three of Hearts, in which she yearned for fellow M.I.A. Sherilyn Fenn, to the 2005 head trip The Jacket, where she gave Adrien Brody more reason than usual to have the shivers. Her chops are formidable and she clearly loves a challenge, and trying to keep her dignity and earn her paycheck in Mr. Magoo clearly counts as a challenge. But she probably deserves better. I know those of us who are her fans do.
SUZY AMIS
Amis has a face that, at least when it's filtered through the lenses of the cameras that love her unconditionally, could make you forget about everything else in the world if your hair was on fire. As an actress, she invariably communicates warmth and sweetness, but she can dredge up subterranean feelings of anger and pain when she needs to. Rolling Stone gave her its vote as the Next Big Thing actress back in the late 1980s, and in little seen indie fare such as Rocket Gibralter, Watch It, and Michael Almereyada's Twister and Nadja, as well as bigger-budget but well-hidden films such as John Boorman's Where the Heart Is and Bruce Beresford's Rich in Love, she delivered everything a movie "It girl" could deliver but the box office success. One of her rare starring vehicles, The Ballad of Little Jo, developed a small cult following after it was smuggled onto cable TV, though perhaps the most stunning evidence of how much she could give a movie came with the 1993 two-character filmed play Two Small Bodies, a weird take on the Alice Crimmins case kept on life support by Amis and her co-star Fred Ward, who probably deserves his own entry on this list. She finally got to be in a hit in 1995 when she was tapped to supply the token amount of estrogen to the cast of The Usual Suspects, a movie where the late-arriving news that her character has been murdered off-screen hits the viewer like a lead weight hitting one's foot. But then she took on a nothing role in James Cameron's Titanic, and she and Cameron (who at the time was married to his fourth wife and Terminator leading lady, Linda Hamilton) had an affair -- then the next thing you know, Cameron's divorce was final and the two of them were getting married, and she hasn't worked since, just as Hamilton was out of circulation while she and Cameron were married. I look forward to the day that James Cameron meets his future sixth wife the way some people look forward to getting their hands on their 401k.
ELIZABETH PENA
In the mid-1980s, in such movies as Down and Out in Beverly Hills, La Bamba, and Jacob's Ladder, Pena established herself as a pouty, steamy cuddlebug, but one whose pout concealed teeth that could bite: her expression of disgust when looking at the macho moron she married in La Bamba leaves a stronger visual memory than the happy romantic scenes of Lou Diamond Phillips' Richie Valens courting his unruffled blonde kewpie doll Donna. As a post-ingenue actress, Pena had her highest-profile role in John Sayles' Lone Star, sitting on a car hood with Chris Cooper, trying to process the information that their love was not meant to be, big time. She can currently be seen in the ensemble cast of the family comedy Nothing Like the Holidays, physically a little puffier-looking but with banked fires still smoldering behind her eyes. Someone needs to provide her with a canvass broad enough to let those fires flame out.
Click Here For Part Two, Three & Four
Contributor: Phil Nugent
