Wednesday, May 12, 2004
SIX DEGREES OF UMA THURMAN:
Now that we've viewed the final part of Kill Bill, let's just see if this actor linking stuff really works. Uma Thurman's role in that movie is very similar to [#1] Jeanne Moreau's in La Mariée était en noir. That classic by Francois Truffaut was based on Cornell Woolrich's novel. Trauffaut filmed another of Woolrich's noir thrillers, Waltz Into Darkness, as La Sirène du Mississipi, with [#2] Catherine Deneuve. That actress adopted her mother's maiden name for the screen because her sister, [#3] Françoise Dorléac, was already an actress. The two of them starred together in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (the answer to the trivia question, did George Chakiris ever do anything worth mentioning after West Side Story?), but that film was hardly noted here. Most Americans who noticed Dorléac at all saw only her last movie, The Billion Dollar Brain. That was a terrible misadaptation of a pretty good spy novel by Len Deighton, by producers misled by the popularity of James Bond films. It was not alone. An even better spy novel of that day was also mismade as The Quiller Memorandum, which miscast [#4] George Segal as the hero. Like Leslie Nielsen, he showed later he was best at comedy, not drama. Segal's skittish animal expressions did work as the brain implant victim in The Terminal Man. That was another film of a sci-fi novel by Michael Crichton, whose biggest hit was the misnamed Jurassic Park. (It should have been "Cretaceous"). In that movie, Dr. Ellie Sattler was played by [#5] Laura Dern. That actress later played the catalyst in the notorious "coming out" episode of the TV sitcom starring [#6] Ellen DeGeneres. That Sapphic comedienne later went on to host her own talk show, where one of her guests in December, there promoting Part 1 of Kill Bill, was its star, Uma Thurman. Sounds good enough for government work to me.
Now that we've viewed the final part of Kill Bill, let's just see if this actor linking stuff really works. Uma Thurman's role in that movie is very similar to [#1] Jeanne Moreau's in La Mariée était en noir. That classic by Francois Truffaut was based on Cornell Woolrich's novel. Trauffaut filmed another of Woolrich's noir thrillers, Waltz Into Darkness, as La Sirène du Mississipi, with [#2] Catherine Deneuve. That actress adopted her mother's maiden name for the screen because her sister, [#3] Françoise Dorléac, was already an actress. The two of them starred together in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (the answer to the trivia question, did George Chakiris ever do anything worth mentioning after West Side Story?), but that film was hardly noted here. Most Americans who noticed Dorléac at all saw only her last movie, The Billion Dollar Brain. That was a terrible misadaptation of a pretty good spy novel by Len Deighton, by producers misled by the popularity of James Bond films. It was not alone. An even better spy novel of that day was also mismade as The Quiller Memorandum, which miscast [#4] George Segal as the hero. Like Leslie Nielsen, he showed later he was best at comedy, not drama. Segal's skittish animal expressions did work as the brain implant victim in The Terminal Man. That was another film of a sci-fi novel by Michael Crichton, whose biggest hit was the misnamed Jurassic Park. (It should have been "Cretaceous"). In that movie, Dr. Ellie Sattler was played by [#5] Laura Dern. That actress later played the catalyst in the notorious "coming out" episode of the TV sitcom starring [#6] Ellen DeGeneres. That Sapphic comedienne later went on to host her own talk show, where one of her guests in December, there promoting Part 1 of Kill Bill, was its star, Uma Thurman. Sounds good enough for government work to me.
