Low Resolution: The Other Silkwood Shower

Sunday, June 28, 2009

The Other Silkwood Shower

So happy to have been able to take part in this month's Supporting Actress Smackdown over on Stinkylulu's site. If you don't already know, every month tackles a different Academy Award lineup for supporting actress and evaluates them, roundtable style. This month, our gaze turned to 1983, the year of Terms of Endearment ... and also the year of The Year of Living Dangerously, which brought diminutive Linda Hunt a diminutive little award statue. The other nominees that year? Alfre Woodard for Cross Creek, Amy Irving for Yentl (yes, friends, that's why I was cruising Facebook for copies of Yentl), Glenn Close in The Big Chill (an utterly obnoxious film I only just this month watched for the first time), and Cher in Silkwood.

Speaking of which, my first viewing of Silkwood proved to be eye-openingly wonderful. Instantly one of my favorite Mike Nichols movies; instantly one of my very favorite Meryl Streep performances. And it pretty easily slides into the very top echelon of 1980s movies, for me. It's also in posession of one of the finest collections of character actors and Hey! It's That Guy!s I've ever seen. Craig T. Nelson! Ron Silver! Diana Scarwid! Bruce McGill! David Strathairn! Fred Ward! The secretary of defense from Independence Day! Dr. Chilton from The Silence of the Lambs! It's amazing.

And let us not forget the gift that was 1980s Kurt Russell. Stinkylulu took a blessed moment to memorialize Kurt's least shirted moments in Silkwood. But he stopped just short of the finest, redneckiest moment in the whole movie.

(click to embiggen)

You're welcome. You can't tell from the images, but the beer he's dousing himself with is Coors original. God Bless America.

Anyway, click on over and read about those 1983 Supporting Actresses.

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The Week in TV:

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