Amy Adams’ Print Powder Puff
by Andre Soares
Donna Freydkin’s "Rising star Amy Adams’ career seems enchanted" in USA Today:
"Amy Adams [right, with Jack Davenport in The Wedding Date (2005)] is having one of those enchanted Manhattan moments.
"’Look, it’s snowing!’ she cries, looking out of the window of an Upper West Side cafe to the snowflakes gently settling on the cabs and buildings outside. ‘It’s sticking!’
"Adams has an ability to make whatever she’s focusing on seem irresistible. There’s a sparkle to her, a glimmer that hasn’t escaped the notice of a certain co-star of hers, Meryl Streep, who just wrapped the drama Doubt with Adams.
"’Amy has a little light on inside her that burns — sometimes a soft light, sometimes a hot little blue flame, but you are aware always of the light,’ Streep says via e-mail. ‘It is her immediacy as an actress, that present quality that makes her special.’
"Kevin Lima, who directed Adams in last year’s hit Enchanted, says: ‘Her soul is joyful. She’s a big laugher.’
"And even as her career soars, Adams, 33, relishes small pleasures. Sure, she just sang live at the Oscars, but she is equally besotted with the mushroom soup she’s having for lunch, offering up a taste of the murky substance she swears is amazing."
***
What I find curious about this USA Today article is that it shows how what amounts to p.r. disguised as news hasn’t changed at all in the past 90 years. Just compare this puff piece on Amy Adams — and I do like her — to something on Gloria Swanson or Mary Pickford or Sessue Hayakawa that some Motion Picture or Photoplay scribe (apart from the witty Herbert Howe, who’s more modern than nearly all current journalists) wrote back in 1918. (Note: In the very near future, I’ll be posting Howe’s pieces on the Alternative Film Guide.)
Now the good news: John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, about a nun who suspects that her school’s most popular priest-cum-teacher likes little boys, is a remarkable play. Here’s hoping that the movie will be even better (Shanley directed from his own adaptation), though I find Philip Seymour Hoffman’s casting as the youthful, athletic, handsome priest problematic. In fact, Brian F. O’Byrne, who played the role on Broadway, would have been ideal. (Chris McGarry capably played the accused priest onstage in Los Angeles.)
And I must add that however much I admire Meryl Streep, it’s more than a little saddening that the outstanding Cherry Jones wasn’t able to reprise her stage role on film.
Also missing from the film version is another excellent performer, Adriane Lenox, as the mother of the allegedly molested boy, who has been replaced by Viola Davis.
Anyhow, we shall see.
By the way, Amy Adams’ latest, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, in which Adams co-stars with Frances McDormand, opens in the US tomorrow. And Adams will be paired up with Meryl Streep once again in 2009, in Julie & Julia, currently in pre-production.
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Amy Adams should’ve been mominated for an Oscar for Enchanted. She was wonderful. I saw that flm about a dozen times. It was just like those old Hollywood movies so romantic, magical.
I agree. She should have.