Generation X Actresses I Have Followed on Twitter--The Rundown

It isn't as many as I thought it might be at first, though it is still embarrassing that I ever followed any of them at all. They were the whims of a series of fleeting moments


1. Mira Sorvino (b. 1967)

I had forgotten about her, but then I saw her in a movie from 1999 and was reminded that I had thought she was cute and that she was supposed to be fairly smart too, so I thought why not catch up with what she is doing? She is mostly concerned with matters of great seriousness these days, women's rights, defending immigrants, hating Trump, etc. She's on the self-evidently right side of all of them, of course, and fiercely, as is called for (though her fierceness at least is more in support of the righteousness of her causes than in seeking the personal evisceration of her opponents). Even though their positions on everything and even their way of expressing them are utterly predictable, I have to admit I have always kind of loved girls like this. They are what I know, and they generally really do want to be good people and unlike the relentlessly militant types, they can be pleasant enough if they like you. The fierceness is regarded as a necessary attitude to adorn to demonstrate one's seriousness, but I don't think it is really their nature. My wife, as I have noted before, is more of a throwback to the 1940s, or even the 20s, in her manner of speaking and approach to political questions, and puts a more original spin on why she believes what she does than most people are able to muster, but I have only met a handful of women remotely like that in my life.


2. Meredith Salenger (b. 1970)


Meredith Salenger gave up acting at 18 to go to Harvard, so I guess we can assume she is fairly smart. She certainly regards herself as such. She too takes a fair amount of jabs at Trump, sexists, racists, and the usual objectionable suspects, though with less straining and earnestness, and more of an assured air of repulsed superiority. Otherwise her internet persona is more or less polite, though one suspects that she probably gets some good zings in at people, even those who are purportedly her friends, in her private life. I can't say that I am getting a lot either emotionally or intellectually from following her either though she is an attractive enough person.


3. Liane Balaban (b. 1980)

Liane Balaban has appeared mainly in Canadian indie-type movies, so she isn't very well-known (it also makes me wonder why it never occurred to me to follow Parker Posey [b. 1968]). I followed her after finding an attractive picture of her drinking wine on the internet and watching a YouTube clip from her movie The New Waterford Girl. When she does tweet, she is about half a regular person and half a public figure. Needless to say, she loves all of the progressive things that are happening in Canada and the rest of the West, and hates the troglodytes who want them all to go away and for life to be horrible and ugly again.


4. Zooey Deschanel (b. 1979)


Zooey doesn't tweet much anymore now that her TV show is no longer on the air. Being the closest of this group to the height of her career she comes off as having an especially vacuous-seeming Hollywood lifestyle, though she is the only one of these people who has ever written anything that I found remotely funny or endearing. Other than occasionally showing support for LGBT issues, she never mentions politics, and as her stage persona is rather retro in an implicitly 1960s white-bread manner, some male commentators on the evil fringes of the political right have expressed the hope that in some areas at least she may be sympatico with their views. However I would be surprised if she actually did not support the Democratic party.


5. Christina Applegate (b. 1971)

I not sure what possessed me to follow her. She is pretty sexy in a it's-hard-for-me-to-turn-the-channel-off-of-her kind of way, but she was so disturbingly stupid on Twitter that I just couldn't take it and had to stop following her, which takes a lot for me.


6. Winona Ryder (b. 1971)


In a fashion befitting her status as perhaps the quintessential Generation X person who is indifferent to everyone except selected cool personal friends who are never you, Winona Ryder never sent out a single tweet for years after I started following her, and eventually deleted her account altogether.




Nowhere in Africa (2001)

This is somewhat notable for my imagined readership for having won the Academy Award for best foreign film (it's from Germany). It is also directed by a woman (Caroline Link), which perhaps is worth something as well, since, unlike in literature and other artistic forms, there are still not a great number of really renowned movies that I notice having had female directors (My personal favorites off the top of my head are Lena Wertmuller and Vera Chytilova, if you to get an idea of what I would like). This has a World War II/Nazi theme, though in this case the story is about a Jewish family with a young daughter that left Germany to go live out the war in Kenya. They were cultured people, and the father was a lawyer/intellectual type, but they were not able to get out of Germany with much money, so they have to make a go of it in Africa by farming and living off the land, which did not suit his temperament/skill set, especially at first. The mother's happiness, not helped by her neurotic personality, was tested by this displacement both geographically and culturally and the sharp decline in social status, which she acted out by seeking and in at least one instance having extra-marital relations with European men more acclimated to the new environment. It is based on a memoir written by the daughter, who is from around aged 6 to 14 or so in the course of the movie. I don't usually explain so much of the plot outline, but I'm not quite sure what to say about this. It isn't bad, but it is kind of joyless in that stiff Germans-trying-to-interact-with-(well, anybody who isn't them) way, even if the characters in this instance are Jewish. Also, though it is set in wartime (albeit the war itself is remote), and the upheaval of the family because of it is the basis of the family, this circumstance does not create the sense of overwhelming societal drama that is what makes the best civilian-centered war movies so effective. The African natives of course have no real stake in the European war at all, and while the British do, the movie is not especially concerned with them. At the end of the war (and the film and in real life) the family actually returned to Germany and seem to have lived out their lives there--the author of the memoir, Stefanie Zweig (no relation to Stefan or Arnold) died in Frankurt in 2014 at the age of 82--which seems like it could be the subject of an interesting book or movie itself.


Get Shorty (1995)

As I have often stated here, I am not much of a fan of 90s Hollywood. I have a soft spot for early 90s European cinema, and I suppose I like some of the American "indie" stuff from that era (though I haven't seen any of it in a long time), but the work of The Industry through most of this era seems to me regrettable to say the least.


Get Shorty is based on one of the best-known novels by the pretty highly regarded author Elmore Leonard, so I am assuming it is better than this movie (I haven't read it). If I remember correctly this was John Travolta's first big starring role after his comeback in Pulp Fiction (which I actually have never seen). It has a lot of famous Hollywood-insider type people of that era in it hamming it up for the camera and making annoying name-dropping movie and Industry references--Bette Midler is in this, Danny DeVito, Gene Hackman who was in every other movie in this period, Penny Marshall. Billy Crystal oddly is not in it, though I kept expecting him to turn up. Rene Russo, who probably would have annoyed me at the time, is also in it, but now that I'm nearly 50 her look in this is the kind most men my current age would find attractive in a 40 year-old.


I really did not like this.


Daylight (1996)

This movie concerns a group of people who get trapped in the Holland Tunnel due to an explosion of nitroglycerine or something like that and have to be rescued by Sylvester Stallone. I adopted a new system a few years back that was supposed to generate different kinds of movies which are sometimes of interest because they are better than their reputations, or they provide an interesting window into a time that is now past. This one, alas, was not any of those things.

Idle Movie Post

De-Lovely (2004)

I had seen this before, back when I was going through a phase where I was especially into Cole Porter songs. It hadn't come up on the "official" record yet so when it did I felt obligated to see it again. If you like the music and the time period it is fun enough to see once--at least I found it to be so when I was ten years or so younger than I am now. I didn't find this second viewing of it to add anything to the initial experience. This modern movie naturally puts a lot of emphasis on Porter's luxurious lifestyle as well as his homosexual inclinations and the strain it put on his marriage, which don't hold much interest for me. In the absence of genius filmmaking, I honestly would have preferred to have seen scenes set at Yale, his more youthful years in Paris, his musical upbringing. While I didn't pay much attention to it the first time, I wasn't enthralled by the modern pop stars performing their versions of the famous songs. Elvis Costello was all right, I like him as an act himself, besides that I think he has a more visceral feeling for the traditions in which those songs were composed and are meant to be presented. The other singers seemed to be doing the songs in their own styles, which is what they naturally would do--I just don't happen to be a fan of these particular artists, as they are called.


Will Penny (1968)


Late stage classic period western starring Charlton Heston as an illiterate cowhand approaching middle age who can see his life options beginning to narrow. Perhaps it is a metaphor for the genre as a whole. It is pretty well-regarded, especially the script, though I found it to be kind of strange in many ways--the antagonists are a sadistic, almost proto-Manson family (without the orgies) led by a father who speaks in the language of a 17th century religious fanatic. I was hoping it would grab me, but it never did, really. The female lead was played by Joan Hackett, a woman of the type I am often interested in without any noteworthy reciprocation, whom I had never seen before. She reminded me of someone I knew who died of cancer when she was 41. Joan Hackett herself died of cancer when she was 49, which I found out in looking her up for this article, which is kind of a downer.

This is notable in my personal history as the first time I've had to turn on the subtitles in a movie made in English because I couldn't make out the spoken dialogue. This was in part because I watched this on a very hot night during the summer when I had on a window air conditioner that was difficult to hear over. But still.


I guess the most interesting aspect of this was the consideration of its aforementioned place in the timeline of the old style Western in film history, as well as that of Charlton Heston's run as a star leading man, which was also kind of at the end of the line here. It has a subdued, pensive atmosphere about it, not emitting a great amount of energy.


I'm clearly in a part of my life where movies are not speaking to me very much, at least not the ones I am seeing. I'm not putting in a lot of time on them, being down to about one or two a month now, but as I formerly got some enjoyment from the habit and there are still a lot of the types of classics that I like that I have never seen, I don't want to give it up entirely. I might be looking into re-tweaking my method of choosing films to get the kind of stuff I like to pop up more frequently however.


Edge of the City (1957)

Another one that I saw a few years back which finally became available via the Netflix CD service. Here's what I wrote about it 3 years ago. It's a stripped down, basic movie, but poignant, saturated with that quality of yearning that was peculiar to the 1950s and comes across today, to me at least, as appealing. I know there is some ambivalence, especially from more fiery or progressive observers, with regard to the career and film persona of Sidney Poitier, but it seems to me he is pretty dynamic in this, and is in general one of the major presences of the 50s and 60s. The objections to him, I gather, are that he is too watered down and therefore acceptable to white people, such as me, such that even when he is angry or decrying some injustice he is not threatening or existentially terrifying to the mainstream Caucasian ego in the manner that one might wish it to be. His character in this, as well as in numerous of his other movies, is something of a mensch, the only man to consistently display much in the way of what are thought of as admirable qualities (the John Cassavetes character is sympathetic, but is a weak and confused young man), so it is hard to dislike him.


I have a few more but I will put those in a second post.