Cricket Actors

There are only two performances by film critics (i.e.,in which they play characters and not themselves) that I’ve really liked — Leonard Harris as Sen. Palantine in Taxi Driver, and Some Came Running‘s Glenn Kenny as a predatory porn website manager in Steven Soderbergh ‘s The Girlfriend Experience, which screens tonight at the Tribeca Film Festival. (It just hit me that I forgot to attend the round-table interviews for this earlier today — brilliant! The story of my life.)

14 thoughts on “Cricket Actors

  1. What? No props for Rex Reed in Myra Breckenridge?

    I still remember seeing Judith Crist on Dick Cavett’s show, doing her Reed-in-Breckenridge imitation, and ABC bleeped the word “tits”. Ah, those were the days.

  2. my first thought was of reed in ‘myra breckinridge’…he really was so bad it was kind of entertaining….

    peter bogdanovich has turned in some solid work both behind and in front of the camera…

    and hedda hopper made several films that she was quite good in before becoming a writer…and a few that weren’t so great but interesting after….

  3. @Rothchild: Depends on who you ask. My wife and my mom seem to think I’m okay. Others, maybe not so much. If it’s any help, I had an extremely agreeable lunch with GFE’s wonderful leading lady Ms. Grey today.

    @ Jeff: Many thanks for the kudos. It’s high praise indeed to be rated with Harris. But you should absolutely check out the late Eugene Archer in Rohmer’s “La Collectionneuse.” He’s fantastic. (And kind of creepy as well.)

  4. Jeff: Dangit, how do you do it? I can’t stop myself from showing up and saying “James Agee, ‘Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.’”

    You got me roped in again, goldarnit.

  5. Glenn Kenny – is a bit weird having lunch with Sasha Grey knowing that you can go home afterwards and download hundreds of videos of her being sexed up to the eyeballs by myriad massive knobs? It’s certainly be at the back of my mind to say the least, I’d expect.

  6. @BBWD: It’s a little weird, sure, but not so weird as you think, particularly because there’s nothing coy or denying in her attitude about what she does. I actually did watch a couple of her recent adult films in preparation for the interview (there are actually some unusual correspondences between “GFE” and a recent Vivid picture she did, a loose remake of “Deep Throat”), and we talked about some of them, and it was all totally comfortable. She knows what she’s about in a way that I’ve never encountered with any other porn performer I’ve met, going back to Ron Jeremy back in 1980, when I was a production assistant on “A Girl’s Best Friend” starring him, Juliet Anderson, and Veronica Hart. Come to think of it, Juliet Anderson was a pretty sharp cookie, too.

  7. Peter Bogdanovich was terrific in The Sopranos. His were just about the only humorous moments of the series. I hope he gets his mojo back a la Demme and cooks up a nice feature (maybe with a dark noirish cameo from Cybill Shepherd).

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