“I never wanted to be this famous. I never imagined this life for myself.” — Kristen Stewart

Posted on April 9, 2026 by sheila

It’s her birthday today.

“Really, I’m incredibly disjointed and not candid. Just in general, my thoughts tend to come out in little spurts that don’t necessarily connect. If you hang around long enough, you can find the linear path. But it will take a second. That is why these interviews never go well for me.”

Some people have fame thrust upon them. This has been the case with Kristen Stewart, one of the most interesting and unique actresses to come along in a long long time. There are others who have more “range”. There are others who may are more skilled, technically. But nobody has what she has. It’s her own thing. It’s charisma. It’s movie-magic. This charisma movie-magic does not show up in interviews (as she is well aware of – see above quote) – but interviews are irrelevant. Put the camera on her and something happens. She understands the camera. And the camera understands her. She does not have to work at that part of it. It’s the ineffable weird thing that cannot be explained about her. She seems to have a good head on her shoulders and she picks interesting non-commercial projects.

She was launched into the public eye with the most commercial of products – a franchise geared towards teens – and she cringed her way through every interview and red carpet event. Those movies were sneered at. I know I am a broken record but let’s say it again for the cheap seats, as well as the mostly-straight mostly-male film critics who think they should be the ones to tell other people what is good or worthy: When you ignore the ecstatic screams of teenage girls, you basically announce “I want to be out of touch with the zeitgeist. I am okay with missing out on what will be the Next Big Thing.” By sneering at Twilight, by mocking Kristen Stewart’s awkwardness on red carpets, by expressing baffled surprise that anyone cares about this no-talent young actress (and actor – too – let’s not forget) … you show a dismaying lack of curiosity about WHY teenage girls were so ENRAPTURED. And when teenage girls get enraptured, the whole world can hear. They are often the first wave. They were the first wave with Elvis. With the Beatles. With Zac Efron. With so many others. Ignore the raptures of teenage girls at your peril – particularly if you are a film and/or cultural critic.

Who has the last laugh now. Look at what Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson have chosen to do with the fame that was thrust upon them before either of them even knew who they were or knew what they wanted to do. Look at what they have done with this amazing opportunity. They have worked steadily in odd-ball non-commercial high-art projects, and they have two of the most interesting careers in Hollywood.

The teenage girls knew. They usually do.

So. I’ve written a lot about Kristen Stewart. Here’s a link-dump:

I’ll start with the most recent: Stewart’s directed shorts before, but early this year she made her narrative feature debut as a director with The Chronology of Water, an adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir, and … it’s kind of a jaw-dropping piece of work, honestly. I reviewed it. I can’t say enough good things about it. I can see why she faced 8 years of “No”s about this film. She needed to do it her way. And so she did, but it took a lot. I reviewed.

I’ve been trying to get at the Kristen thing, and therefore I keep writing about her. This was my first attempt to write about the not easily explainable.

I elaborated further in my Film Comment column.

I didn’t think Lizzie was a particularly good movie but my Ebert review gave me a chance to discuss Stewart’s almost eerie gifts.

One of my favorite things I’ve ever written was one long in the making – since I was, say, 11 – a piece about the Tomboy Golden Era (1970s movies). In discussing where the tomboy “went” in pop culture, Kristen Stewart comes up.

I wrote about Personal Shopper for Ebert’s 10 Best Films of 2017 feature.

I wrote about the fascinating dream-like short film she directed, Come Swim.

I wrote about her performance in Clouds of Sils Maria for a feature on Ebert about the Best Performances of 2015.

And here, I wrote about Clouds of Sils Maria, a movie which affected me so much I haven’t gone back to watch it again.

Some years years back I interviewed one of my Actors Studio teachers – an amazing teacher named Sam Schacht. I wanted to hear his thoughts on the misunderstood “Method”. Out of the blue, he brought up Kristen Stewart.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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2026 Shakespeare Reading Project: Henry IV, Part 2

Posted on April 8, 2026 by sheila

My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Romeo & Juliet
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Richard II
King John
The Merchant of Venice
Henry IV, Part 1

Henry IV, Part 2

“We have heard the chimes at midnight” is prose in name only. For me, “chimes at midnight” is one of the peaks of literature, up there with “yes I said yes” (and equally as life-affirming.) The scene between Shallow and Falstaff is a fascinating example of how to play things on multiple levels simultaneously. You could take the scene on the surface and it works just fine. There’s charm, there’s humor and interesting characters. But the scene is a kaleidoscopic – a kaleidoscope maybe leading to a telescope? Does that metaphor work? The scene shifts and you don’t notice the shifts. The surface is engaging and then suddenly the bottom drops out. You don’t realize what’s happening until you’re there.

And of course I love Orson Welles for his love of Falstaff, and for making Chimes at Midnight.

Speaking of Orson Welles and Falstaff, here he is on the Dean Martin Show, transforming into Falstaff, and basically monologuing on the character. Where on earth would anything like this happen today? Something so earnest being given so much time? Like: ‘here, Orson, we have six minutes, what would you like to do with it?” Watching this feels like time stopping. So much has been lost. Thank God we have evidence of how things used to be.

Parts 1 and 2 are basically all the same work. Hotspur’s absence is felt in Part 2, and a couple of different characters pay tribute to him, in vivid language. The same thing happens in Henry V where we get to hear about Falstaff’s death. Shakespeare knew we needed to finish off those arcs, knew we were invested: Hotspur can’t just die and we never talk about him again. The audience needs a moment to grieve. Or, to put a better way, the characters are so alive they deserve a proper sendoff.

Part 2 has the same structure as part 1, juxtaposing the “high” with the “low”. The way Shakespeare handles this is so elegant and perfect. Everything flows. The scenes at the tavern with Falstaff, his pals, the prostitutes, etc., aren’t “comic relief”, not in the way they might be in another play. The low balances the high, the laughter flows into the politics the tension and back. The comedy is “wit” – mentioned a bunch of times, and wit is more philosophical, more of a world view, than “comedy”. Because of how the play is built, with these scenes placed back to back – what’s going on in the “low” world is reflected in the “high”, and vice versa. Mirror images. You also can see how Falstaff et al are not quite understanding what has happened, and they don’t quite see what’s about to happen. There will not be a place for them at the table like they thought there would be. Many of them are like, “Look, Ma, we finally MADE it!” They will not be movers-shakers in the new regime. They will be disposed of. There’s a certain amount of pathos as you see which way things are going.

Hal has already shown his steeliness. “For worms, brave Percy.” But we honestly saw it from the very start, with the “I know you all” soliloquy in part 1. Not everyone would be able to play a double game the way Hal does. Not everyone would be able to maintain two separate selves with no crossover. But Hal can. You know who else can? Psychopaths. Hal has a couple more romps with his friends but … time’s up.

We really can see this in the shocking scene where Prince Hal sits by his father’s death bed, and, believing his dad to be already dead, he picks up the crown lying on the pillow, puts it on his head and walks out of the room. Uneasy is the head that wears the crown, UNLESS you’re Prince Hal. The King wakes up and his crown is gone. The King’s men all rush into the room, looking for Henry … Henry eventually comes back, apologetic, like “I’m sorry, I know it looks bad but I didn’t mean it …” Oh ho but he DID mean it. This is the part of him Falstaff either misunderstands, misinterprets, or misses entirely. Falstaff assumed power would not change his Hal. Or … he assumed that power wouldn’t look all that different from the rabble-rousing they got up to as friends.

The rejection, the public rejection, is devastating. Hal says “I know thee not old man” and then continues on for 25 lines, each one meaner than the last. He says he “despises” his “dream”, and then banishes Falstaff and all his ilk, basically saying “If you come within 10 miles of me, you will be put to death.” Falstaff has all this time to absorb what is happening. Hal stops speaking and Falstaff turns to Shallow and says, “Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound.” Which is so perfect.

Falstaff thinks the rejection is part of Hal’s camouflage. Hal will surely reach out to him in private. Falstaff is like a desperate side piece. But of course Hal will not reach out to him privately. Maybe Falstaff isn’t in denial. Trying to “save face” doesn’t really seem Falstaff’s style. When your heart is broken, you don’t always cry.

Not all plays read well. Some plays only come alive when they’re up on their feet in front of an audience. They’re dead, “on the page”. The Henry plays, though, read so so well. Of course there’s nothing like seeing a great production, but just as scripts they are dazzling. You can’t put it down. There’s such variety in the different worlds and tones and characters – Shakespeare seems at home in them all. The early history plays – the Henry VIs, etc. – are a little monotonous in terms of their language (however beautiful much of it is). There are occasionally spikily interesting moments like Joan of Arc or Cade’s rebellion … Joan and Jack Cade are side characters, sideshows even. The main characters don’t speak, they declaim, there’s no getting around it.

The Henrys are such a leap forward it’s hard to even comprehend.

Quotes on the play

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“I never was good at sightseeing yet it must be done.” — William Wordsworth

Posted on April 7, 2026 by sheila

“I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity; the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins.” — William Wordsworth’s famous preface to Lyrical Ballads

Wordsworth was born on this day in 1770.

People argue about Wordsworth’s above statement to this day. (Lee Strasberg’s emotional memory exercise was based on a similar concept. Powerful feelings need time to percolate in order for you to enter into them in order to “use” them artistically.) I love Saul Bellow’s comment on this “tranquillity” concept listed below.

More – a lot more – beneath the jump.

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“It sounds like something from a Woody Guthrie song, but it’s true; I was raised in a freight car.” — Merle Haggard

Posted on April 6, 2026 by sheila

Merle_Haggard_F35tif2

It’s his birthday today.

“There were so many things I loved about the thirties. I could find many reasons for wanting to live back there. Such as trains was the main method of travel, the glamour of trains always appealed to me. And America was at the dawn of an industrial age. Coming out of a Depression into a war. Then again the music was young. So many things were being done in music, it was wide open back then, electronics had not yet been involved, and basically it was REAL. Sure, I’d have liked to have visited those days and at least seen it happen. For musicians of that generations such as Eldon Shamblin and Joe Venuti it was an unbelievable period to live in, they saw it all.”
— Merle Haggard

In this great Rolling Stone interview, Merle Haggard describes being in prison in San Quentin in the 50s when Cash came to play there. Very emotional:

“I heard [Johnny Cash] when he first came out in ’55. I heard them all. I was two years younger than Elvis, and I was in a lot of trouble then. I was going to jail a lot. I went to jail and did a year, ’54 to ’55, and Elvis came out. Elvis got my attention first and I liked Jerry Lee Lewis a lot and Carl Perkins. I was a fan of all of those Memphis guys. I worked in the nightclubs quite a while before I got lucky with records and I did all of their songs and identified a lot closer with them than Hank Williams or somebody. They were more my age and it was a little more modern. And it was rockabilly. That’s sort of what I was. Both Elvis and Johnny were widely accepted by people in jail. They were both rebellious against the system, and we read that clearly. That’s what they saw in Cash, that he didn’t like the system and he didn’t like the people in charge and didn’t like being told what to do.”

Excerpt from the chapter on Merle Haggard in Peter Guralnick’s wonderful book Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians:

His whole career has been founded upon … paradox. As a young man barely out of prison, he crooned love songs, sounding very much like Marty Robbins, who was hot at the time. It was not even his own compositions that few drew upon the prison experience for him; instead he virtually stumbled upon the song, ‘I’m a Lonesome Fugitive.’ “Liz Anderson [the writer] came to a show we were doing in Sacramento. She said she had some songs, but I wouldn’t have listened if it hadn’t been for my brother Lowell. It turned out she had six hits in her pocket. Well, that kind of opened up a whole trend of songs, such as ‘Branded Man’ and ‘Sing Me Back Home.’ It gave me thought for writing. It gave me a direction for writing. You see, what it was, with that song I was really and finally some way or another come together – musically and image-wise. I mean, it was a true song. I wasn’t trying to shit nobody, because long ago I had made the decision not to try to hide my past, but then I found out it was one of the most interesting things about me.”

Nonetheless, when it looked as if the prison songs were becoming a trap, Merle neatly sidestepped that issue by embarking upon the first in his series of historical albums. And when ‘Okie from Muskogee’ hit in 1969, bringing undreamt-of fame and presidential invitations, Merle’s first inclination (thwarted by his record company) was to release ‘Irma Jackson,’ a tale of interracial love, as the follow-up. His whole career in fact can be looked upon as a series of deliberate avoidances (walking out on the Ed Sullivan show, quitting a network production of Oklahoma), instinctive retreats from the obvious, and restatements of his central role as an outsider (remaining in Bakersfield, rather than moving to Nashville, was one very key element of his alienation; even his blues singing, a major component of his music, stresses over and over that ‘I’m a White Boy,’ a ‘White Man Singin’ the Blues’).

Perhaps this is what has enabled him to create the astonishing body of work that represents the ‘career’ of Merle Haggard. There is no one in contemporary popular music who has created a more impressive legacy, or one that spans a wider variety of styles. In a genre that has always relied upon filler to round out the album coming off a country hit, Merle has written the vast preponderance of his material (“Without writing, you have nothing,” says Merle, meaning both the royalties and the satisfaction) and has used each album as a vehicle for personal expression, sometimes not even leaving the room to include the hit. He has written blues and folk songs, social commentary and classic love songs, protest and anti-protest, gospels and ballads, prison and train songs, drinking songs, and updates of Jimmie Rodgers’ blue yodels. He has written just about every kind of song there is, in fact, except a convincing rock number, and while such prolificness is not without its price (some of the rhymes are less than fresh, some of the metaphors could have been worked out a little more fully, and sometimes you wish an idea had been left to simmer rather than having been incorporated immediately into a song), taken as a whole the body of work that he has created is absolutely staggering.

Here’s Eric Church: “Pledge Allegiance to the Hag.”

“I sometimes feel like I’m standing up for the people that don’t have the nerve to stand up for themselves. I just enjoyed winning for the loser. I’d never been around anything except losers my whole life.”
–Merle Haggard

He also was … how you say … not hard to look at.

Haggard pays tribute to Elvis in “From Graceland to the Promised Land.”

Haggard said to Peter Guralnick in the 70s:

[Elvis was] a prisoner of success. I’m positive he was. I didn’t know Elvis well, but I met him and I knew a lot of people who were close to him. Elvis, I believe, was just plain simply tired of it. He didn’t want to live any longer. I don’t know how you feel about these things, but the celestial life – if such a thing exists – I think that was what he was seeking. I think it released him. Either that or he didn’t die at all. Had a face-lift and a fingerprint job – if you think about it, it isn’t that far-fetched. A lot of people who were there swear it wasn’t him in the coffin.

He died on his birthday in 2016.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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2026 Shakespeare Reading Project: Henry IV, Part 1

Posted on April 5, 2026 by sheila

My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Romeo & Juliet
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Richard II
King John
The Merchant of Venice

Henry IV, Part 1

If we’re talking pure structure, Henry IV Part 1 is one of Shakespeare’s best. Setting the structure up and keeping things moving, juggling all of the characters and locations and tones is a dazzling accomplishment. The play jumps from court to tavern and back. The characters are interesting, and there are a couple of “star” turns – Prince Hal, Falstaff, Hotspur. We’re never left alone with someone who’s a bore. Everyone speaks in a different voice. They all feel like real people and real personalities. The action moves from low to high and back, the class system breaking down – maybe Falstaff who is, after all, a knight – is the bridge – so that when finally low and high are together at the battle of Shrewsbury, there’s a sense of shock. They have been separate discrete worlds, and now, Falstaff stands there next to the King as though he’s an equal. Society – or at least the hierarchy – is destabilized. The destabilization has been necessary thing but it spells Falstaff’s doom. There won’t be room for his type of free-wheeling life-accepting mobility in the next play, Henry V.

Hamlet spends his entire play “acting” a variety of roles. He tries to go incognito, while he stalls. There isn’t just one Hamlet. There are many Hamlets. The same is true not just for Prince Hal (aka Harry, aka Henry V) but for Falstaff as well. Prince Hal is “acting” through most of Part 1, putting on a role, to stick it to dear old Dad. The big scene where he and Falstaff role play a confrontation between Hal and his father the King – to basically practice the inevitable confrontation – becomes even more interesting when they switch “roles”, and Falstaff plays Hal and Hal plays his own father. SUCH good writing, insightful psychology and character, while also serving a real purpose, laying out all the issues swirling beneath the surface.

Hal is “on vacation” from his life. His “low” companions are mentioned at the end of Richard II, basically setting the stage for the next play in the cycle, where he pals around with Falstaff, the thieves and the whores. However, the first time he is left alone on stage, in Act I, sc ii, he has a soliloquy starting with “I know you all” (the “you all” is ambiguous) where he lets us know HE knows he is pretending, HE knows he’s on a spree and of COURSE he will return to his role as heir-apparent. Hal knows he’s not going to STAY in the tavern. Everyone else might think he is “torn” between the two worlds but he’s not “torn” at all. Hamlet is the definition of “torn”. Shakespeare doesn’t allow ambiguity here: with the “I know you all” soliloquy, right up front, the second scene in the first act, Hal reveals his chilly detached interior: we are the privileged few allowed in. Hal might look like he is lost in the act, but he is not lost at all. Not perceiving this is Falstaff’s tragedy. Henry rejects Falstaff in Part 2, and the moment is shattering, particularly because Hal is so blunt and cold. Falstaff didn’t see it coming.

The whole play is about this dichotomy of pretense, self-knowledge, hypocrisy. There’s a lot of talk about “double men”. There are basically three Harrys/Henrys: Henry IV, Prince Harry, and Harry Percy (Hotspur). Much is made of this. King Henry IV wishes he had the OTHER Harry, the warrior Harry, as a son. Hal kills Hotspur: Harry kills Harry. Falstaff participates in the role play with Hal but he is NOT a “double man”. Falstaff is a liar at times – a fabulist, a tall-tale-teller – but he does not lie to be malicious, he does not lie to cover anything up. He is transparent. He knows why he’s doing what he’s doing.

I think what I am trying to say is that here Shakespeare is starting to play around with something which reaches its absolute apex – not just for him as writer, but for all of us ever since – in Hamlet, and that is: portraying people who don’t know what’s going on with themselves, people who aren’t sure why they are doing what they are doing. This is very difficult to do! Shakespeare knew that a lot of times people’s behavior comes from what we now would call unconscious motivations. Freudian before Freud: The subconscious in the driver’s seat. I mean, Oedipus is all about this, right? Oedipus thinks he’s acting one way for one reason, but he has no idea what is REALLY going on (through no fault of his own). Shakespeare did not INVENT this psychic-split, but he perceived its dramatic possibilities in ways other dramatists at the time – focused on crafting plots and twists and characters – didn’t. Hal’s INTERIOR world is different from his outer world. We all experience this. Shakespeare uses soliloquies to explain the plot but also as a quick access to the interior.

When motives are unconscious, people act like hypocrites. One can smile and smile and be a villain, know what I mean? One need only point to the religious right, who proclaim they’re doing one thing, but what they’re REALLY doing is pointing people away from their OWN sins. It’s a cliche at this point. If you are a religious leader shouting homophobic things on any given Sunday, I just set an alarm for the inevitable headline revealing you’ve been hiring massage boys off of Craig’s List. Those who proclaim loudest how virtuous they are … keep a very close eye on them. And don’t trust them with your children.

“Counterfeit” and counterfeiting is a constant theme in the play, and it underscores the tension of Prince Hal’s “I know you all” and Prince Hal in general. He knows what he is doing. But what is the mask and what is the man? When is he play-acting and when is it real? What does he want? We have three full plays to get to know him. (We had three Henry VI plays too but Henry VI isn’t exactly a thrilling character.) Hal is sexy, wild, rebellious! He’s mesmerizing and charismatic. (I haven’t seen Branagh’s Henry V in a long time, but I think the first time we see Henry V, he’s sitting on the throne, this little blonde man, glamorous but strong, power in his stillness. Very effective.) Ambivalence towards power undid both Henry VI and Richard II. Neither of them were “fit” for the role. You don’t get the sense Prince Hal is this way, even though he’s avoiding his responsibilities and carousing around town with a bunch of low-lifes. When he goes back to claim his crown, he’s ready. He was ready at the start of the play, as the “I know you all” soliloquy shows.

When we see Prince Hal in action as the actual king in Henry V, we shouldn’t be surprised at his radical moves, aggressive stances, his willingness to be bold and surprising. We already saw his willingness to be all of those things in Parts 1 and 2. Agincourt is a huge victory but let’s not get things twisted: the entire campaign was a rapacious land grab, not exactly storming the beaches at Normandy. Hal’s lack of compassion is startling and upsetting but essential to understanding him. One could say that this quality – or lack – is why he was a born king. Hal is able to reject his mentor Falstaff. And the WAY he does it is almost worse than the actual doing. Similar to the truly frightening moment when he kills Hotspur, and finishes the dying Hotspur’s sentence with “For worms, brave Percy.” Cold as ice.

There’s a lot of talk about honor in the play. For Hotspur, honor is a creed, a word to live by (or die by). Hotspur has a death wish (“die merrily”) because when he dies he will die with honor. Falstaff recognizes the falsity of this. Honor is just a word, a “scutcheon” (a shield). He sees through all the lofty abstractions. Falstaff fights on the battlefield, with a bottle of “sack” in his pocket, and then plays dead. Which is so relatable. Later, he “rises” from the dead, sees the dead Hotspur, and then stabs Hotspur’s dead body – so he can take the credit! So yeah, “honor” doesn’t concern Falstaff.

I’m sure a bunch of different commentators have made this observation but I’ll just leave this here:

Fall-staff
Shake-Spear

To sum up, the experience of reading this play is a continuously surprising one. I know the scenes, I know the order, I look forward to certain moments, they always deliver. Falstaff rewards repeat “viewings”. You can’t get him on the first go-round. It’s dangerous to under-estimate Falstaff, and if you write him off as a charming bumbling drunk – a “scene stealer” – you’ve missed the point. Perhaps you wish Henry IV Part 1 was more straightforward. Perhaps you get irritated at the “comic relief” scenes, since they are “interruptions” to what you feel is the main action.

There is such a thing as a wrong opinion.

Falstaff is not “comic relief”. He is the whole shebang.

Quotes on the play

Continue reading →

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“There won’t be another Bette Davis. There can’t be.” Mitchell and I discuss Bette Davis

Posted on April 5, 2026 by sheila

From the audio files: Mitchell and I discuss one of our favorite topics: acting, and how the “old” style of acting – let’s call it before what’s loosely known as the Method- is not only under-appreciated in certain circles (most dishearteningly, in ACTOR circles, where it should be celebrated) but – worse – dismissed, as “phony” or “over the top” or “weird.” Someone like Bette Davis, whose mannerisms are so distinct, whose lines are parroted parody-like across the land … is seen as somehow LESS real than other more “modern” actresses. Or that her gestures are somehow “funny” or “campy” – as opposed to CONNECTED to her deep understanding of the characters she played. I don’t have to fight this so much in “cinephile” circles, but I definitely had these fights with other actors sometimes. (Pity the poor dumbbell who made the mistake of saying to me in an acting class that “Spencer Tracy was okay, he just played himself all the time, though.” I thought to myself, “You WISH you could be HALF as real as Spencer Tracy was EVER in ANY moment of ANY scene you EVER attempt.” I didn’t say that to his face. I just gave him a lecture on the history of acting, and also reminded him that Marlon Brando said the only actor he ever “studied” was Spencer Tracy. There is such a thing as a WRONG opinion.

MF: Barbra and Bette are weirdos. So, I’m sorry that every moment every actor has has to feel like your version of reality – you, being the viewer. But with Barbra and Bette Davis, specifically – they’re so weird, they have weird facial tics, they have weird gestures, but all of it is real to them. I’ll give you a perfect example: Barbra swallowing aspirin in The Way We Were. People are like, “It’s so phony, the way she does that.” How about – that’s just how she swallows aspirin? Stop making everyone having to be like you. These actors are being truthful on a theatrical level. That’s why I call them weirdo actors. Bette Davis was a weirdo. [perfect Bette imitation] “With aaallllll my heart, I still love the man I killt!” It’s such a weird line reading but it is real to HER. Stop trying to make it real to YOU and see that it’s real for HER. It’s also why it’s impossible to take your eyes off Bette Davis.


Bette Davis in “The Letter”

SOM: The Letter.

MF: I mean, can we talk about her fucking hand in The Letter.

SOM: I’m obsessed with her hand in The Letter.

MF: Watch that movie, and watch her hand, the one that shot the gun. In every scene, track that hand. Because I’m telling you, BETTE tracked that hand. Through the whole movie, she tracked that hand. This is next-level acting shit that nobody even talks about. I’ve never even read an article about The Letter where they talk about it, but it’s so clear she’s doing it. The tension in the hand that shot the gun … it’s there in every scene, she keeps it going in every single moment in every single scene.

SOM: And then of course there’s the back-ting she does in The Letter.


Bette Davis in “The Letter”

MF: Bette Davis was the best back-tress in the business.

SOM: The whole movie is her back!

MF: Nobody does it better. Or Barbra – the way she holds her mouth, her gestures, certain words: “Hubbell – people aaaare their principulllls!” Like, if you were to tell somebody you were going to do the line the way she does it, people might say, “Uhm … you sure about that?” But it’s totally real for her.

SOM: And then you can’t imagine it any other way.

MF: And also let’s remember this, it’s shit like that that becomes iconic. You can imitate them, sure, but you won’t even come close. Immortality means: there’s nobody else like you. There won’t be another Bette Davis. There can’t be. She came out of a time and place – Massachusetts – and an era of women’s pictures – there can’t be an equivalent. She already did it. She already opened a door – and she didn’t close it behind her – but you can’t go back through the door. You’ve gotta open another door. And speaking of opening doors, can we talk for a second about Bette in Of Human Bondage. That character … What a HORRIBLE woman. She was a rising star at that point and she plays THAT absolutely wretched character?

SOM: She was so fearless that way.

MF: It’s insane!! Even watching it now, I still cannot believe she had the balls to do it. I cannot believe she chose to play that part and I cannot believe she played it as fearlessly as she played it. Who in recent memory has given a performance that truly ugly? I can’t think of anyone!

SOM: And you can’t compare that character to, say, femme fatales, who at least get to be sexy, even though they are evil.

MF: Every actress worth their salt has to play some version of the evil queen. Anjelica Huston, Michelle Pfeiffer, Angelina Jolie – but to be truly AWFUL like that woman? “I wipe my MOUTH” … So ugly. She was 26 years old! Just unbelievable.

SOM: Think about her in Three On a Match – which is really a Joan Blondell and Ann Dvorak movie, and she’s the cute little blonde support staff tossing a beach ball around with the little kid on the beach. But Three On a Match was only a year or so before Of Human Bondage. Look at that leap she took. She had to take it and boy, she TOOK it.

MF: To give a performance like she did in Of Human Bondage – I still don’t think it’s fully appreciated what that meant to Hollywood at that time. Or – oh God, you know I go back and forth on this because I’m such a huge fan of hers I can never pick a favorite role – but Mr. Skeffington. Talk about fearless, about exposing the vanity of her character and yet you have empathy for her because she’s so trapped in it. She’s trapped in it and goes insane from it.

MF: It’s like finding out my grandmother was depressed because she didn’t have a successful marriage. Meanwhile, my grandmother seemed like such a rock to us. She kept generations of people safe and fed and housed but she saw herself as a failure because of what was expected of women – and that’s what that movie was ultimately about. And then when you compare Mr. Skeffington to Now Voyager, Dark Victory, Little Foxes. I mean, that’s a definitive performance. Has anyone ever played that role better? But then look at how lovely and quiet she is in The Man Who Came to Dinner. She’s so contemporary and subtle and she lets everybody else do the “acting”. It shows you that there were all sorts of people inside Bette Davis and she was just more fucking creative than everybody else. Why not be Fanny Skeffington? Why not be Regina? Or Mildred? Bette Davis plays these harridans but then she’s the sweet one in The Great Lie, with Mary Astor.

SOM: And you buy it.

MF: You totally buy it. Mary Astor’s a bitch and she’s brilliant at it. “Can’t we do something about that lamp?”

SOM: I love Mary Astor.

MF: She won the Oscar.

SOM: How about Bette Davis in The Star? So meta. Her character is trying to make a comeback, she’s ruined her marriage, her husband has custody, and so one night she gets wasted, grabs her Oscar statue, and drives around Beverly Hills, drunk and talking to her statue. And she MEANS it. It comes from such a raw place. Same with All About Eve. She was able to play actresses dealing with aging in a way that is still somewhat definitive.

MF: And it’s still a problem in Hollywood. She called it out and that bullshit is still with us. She also has that gorgeous speech – which is kind of anti-feminist but whatever – in the car in All About Eve: “That’s one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman. Unless there’s a man to come home to, you’re not really a woman.” It’s a little sexist but there’s honesty in it.

SOM: It’s truthful.

MF: Even the funny lines she makes desperately true. “Bill’s thirty-two. He looks thirty-two. He looked it five years ago, he’ll look it twenty years from now. I hate men.” Genius. Mankiewicz frames it to make it a little showpiece for her – but when she says those lines, Bette Davis is not fucking kidding. I just want people to get how connected people like Bette Davis and Barbra Streisand are to their own weird choices. I want people to stop judging them for not being normal people with normal behavior. [suddenly screaming] THEY’RE BARBRA STREISAND AND BETTE DAVIS, FOR GOD’S SAKE. They are both weird women and they are both irreplaceable. There is nobody like either of them on earth. They are fascinating to talk about but difficult to explain to people who don’t just immediately get that, who are like “They seem phony to me.” Phony to you, but Bette Davis believed every goddamn word she said, and if you look at it that way, then it’s the most real acting you’re ever gonna see.

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“I’d marry again if I found a man who had fifteen million dollars, would sign over half to me and guarantee that he’d be dead within a year.” — Bette Davis

Posted on April 5, 2026 by sheila

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“I was thought to be ‘stuck up’. I wasn’t. I was just sure of myself. This is and always has been an unforgivable quality to the unsure.”

It’s her birthday today.

First up: For Film Comment, I wrote a piece about “back-ting” – acting with your back to the camera and/or audience. Bette Davis HEAVILY figures in it. Because she was a Back-tress of the highest order.

From James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work, an indispensable work of not only film criticism but cultural commentary and observation.

Here is Baldwin on the effect that seeing Bette Davis on the screen for the first time had on him as a small boy. A white schoolteacher (female, although everyone called her “Bill”) befriended young James and introduced him to cinema, theatre, and literature. She took him to see a Bette Davis movie.

My father said, during all the years I lived with him, that I was the ugliest boy he had ever seen, and I had absolutely no reason to doubt him. But it was not my father’s hatred of my frog-eyes which hurt me, this hatred proving, in time, to be rather more resounding than real: I have my mother’s eyes. When my father called me ugly, he was not attacking me so much as he was attacking my mother. (No doubt, he was also attacking my real, and unknown, father.) And I loved my mother. I knew that she loved me, and I sensed that she was paying an enormous price for me. I was a boy, and so I didn’t really too much care that my father thought me hideous. (So I said to myself – this judgment, nevertheless, was to have a decidedly terrifying effect on my life.) But I thought that he must have been stricken blind (or was as mysteriously wicked as white people, a paralyzing thought) if he was unable to see that my mother was absolutely beyond any question the most beautiful woman in the world.

So, here, now, was Bette Davis, on that Saturday afternoon, in close-up, over a champagne glass, pop-eyes popping. I was astounded. I had caught my father, not in a lie, but in an infirmity. For, here, before me, after all, was a movie star: white: and if she was white and a movie star, she was rich: and she was ugly…Out of bewilderment, out of loyalty to my mother, probably, and also because I sensed something menacing and unhealthy (for me, certainly) in the face on the screen, I gave Davis’s skin the dead-white greenish cast of something crawling from under a rock, but I was held, just the same, by the tense intelligence of the forehead…Eventually, from a hospital bed, she murders someone, and [Spencer] Tracy takes the weight, to Sing Sing. In his arms, Davis cries and cries, and the movie ends. “What’s going to happen to her now?” I asked Bill Miller. “We don’t know,” said Bill, conveying to me, nevertheless, that she would probably never get over it, that people pay for what they do.

I had not yet heard Bessie Smith’s “why they call this place the Sing Sing?/Come stand here by this rock pile, and listen to these hammers ring,” and it would be seven years before I would begin working on the railroad. It was to take a longer time than that before I would cry; a longer time than that before I would cry in anyone’s arms; and a long long long long time before I would begin to realize what I myself was doing with my enormous eyes – or vice versa. This had nothing to do with Davis, the actress, or with all those hang-ups I didn’t yet know I had: I had discovered that my infirmity might not be my doom; my infirmity, or infirmities, might be forged into weapons.

That’s one of my favorite things ever written about Davis.

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And speaking of the “ugly” thing, which gets a lot of traction still: I do want to point you to my friend Farran Nehme’s gorgeous essay on Bette Davis’ face. The Face of Bette Davis.

There are so many unforgettable roles of such astonishing diversity she makes Meryl Streep look like a slacker: Of Human Bondage, Petrified Forest, All About Eve, The Letter, Now, Voyager, Jezebel, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Marked Woman, The Star, Dark Victory, Strangers (the TV movie she did with Gena Rowlands in the 70s – the whole thing is on Youtube, people) … more, more, more. I love her in her early pre-Code cheese-cake phase too, before she became a star (Three on a Match where she is golden and pale and adorable).

She paved the way for other serious actresses who wanted to do quality films, and wanted to guide their own careers. Her fights with studios are still legendary.

She didn’t break the mould. She created it. It’s still hers.

Posted in Actors, Movies, On This Day | Tagged , | 37 Comments

In the Criterion Closet

Posted on April 4, 2026 by sheila

This one’s been a long time coming! My friend, the great Kim Morgan, goes into the Criterion Closet. (If you’re not aware of what this is, “Closet Picks” is a series hosted by the Criterion Collection where celebrities, directors, artists, are invited to enter the “closet” lined with Criterion releases, where they pick out a bunch of movies from the collection, providing commentary. One of my favorite ongoing little web series. I love to see what people choose to pick, how they talk about the work that inspired them. Kim still writes regularly on her site Sunset Gun, with all of the other great writing she does at other outlets.

I could listen to Kim talk about movies all day, and I’m not just saying that because she includes a shout-out to me (very touched). She just knows her shit! Dorothy Arzner, Robert Aldrich, Jack Garfein … and of course Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, which Kim co-wrote with Del Toro – was brought out by Criterion.

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In Memory of Roger Ebert: Michael, Roger & Me

Posted on April 4, 2026 by sheila

Roger Ebert died 13 years ago today.

I wrote about him and how he reached out to me a couple of months before he died and how it coincided exactly with the other Great Event in my life in the late winter of 2013.

One of the early series the Rogerebert.com writers participated in was something called “My Favorite Roger.” Each writer wrote an essay discussing their favorite review written by Roger. I chose his review of Kwik Stop, a little-seen never-even-distributed indie movie, directed by Michael Gilio (who also wrote it, and starred in it). Here is Roger’s 3-1/2 star review of Kwik Stop.

The reason this matters is not just that Kwik Stop is a wonderful movie people should see (it is now – finally – on streaming platforms) – but that Michael and I have been friends for forever, basically. And our lives both intersected with Roger’s, independently, on separate tracks.

Michael was writing the script for Kwik Stop, or at least talking about it, the autumn we dated. We were a couple of kids, basically. Years after we split up (I moved to New York, I think he was in Los Angeles): boom, somehow the pre-social-media grapevine provided the information that Michael’s film was completed. He did it!

And then came Roger Ebert’s review. Ebert reviewed the film at a time when you could not even SEE it, even if you wanted to. This was major. There was no online community of critics to spread the word. Roger Ebert was the most famous film critic in the country. And the review was a rave. Chicago friends reported back on the screening at Facets, with QA moderated by Roger (you see how much Roger involved himself in getting the word out. He meant business.) And THIS is why I picked Roger’s review of Kwik Stop as “My Favorite Roger.” If you are in a powerful position, like Roger was, it’s meaningful when you use your power for good, when you point your vast audience towards something small, off-the-beaten path, not-mainstream, under the radar. (Steve James has said repeatedly that Roger Ebert basically MADE Hoop Dreams. Roger reviewed it in print, he reviewed it on television, he included the film in his Best-of-the-Year roundups. He beat the drum for Hoop Dreams for a YEAR. THAT’S using your power.) This is what Roger did for Michael’s film.

And here’s where it gets cosmic: It all just seems too weird to be a coincidence. Way back in 2001, Roger reached his hand out to Michael to acknowledge Michael’s work … and then over a decade later, in 2013 – two months before he died – Roger did the same thing to me, reaching out to me via email, asking me if I would start writing reviews for him.

He had no idea I was connected with Michael. How would he?

And THEN … to bring it even FURTHER … that I would eventually be in a position to write a tribute to both Roger AND Michael, on Roger’s site for the “My Favorite Roger” series … I’m not a New Age woo-woo, but this whole thing gives even me pause. Something cosmic MUST be at work here.

But there’s still more: In 2002, Roger screened Kwik Stop at Ebertfest (which was then known as the Overlooked Film Festival. Kwik Stop played in the 2nd year of its existence). 15 years later, in 2017, MY short film, July and Half of August played at Ebertfest. I have the Golden Thumb to prove it.

What are the odds of all of these coincidences intersecting three separate people being coincidental?

Here is what I wrote about Roger Ebert’s review of Kwik Stop, my favorite Roger because he wanted people to KNOW about this beautiful film that was being unfairly ignored.

My Favorite Roger: Kwik Stop

Here are some screen-grabs from Kwik Stop. Hopefully you will be intrigued enough to check out the film. It’s finally streaming!

UPDATE: Michael wrote Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, released last year. So proud of this guy!

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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Review: Living the Land (2026)

Posted on April 3, 2026 by sheila

What a beautiful movie. Living the Land takes place in a small village in the Henan province. Although the year is 1991, modernity has not touched the place. There’s intermittent electricity but the people still harvest the wheat by hand, make bricks by hand … life is difficult. 10-year-old Chuang lives in a crowded noisy world of grandmothers, great-grandmothers, cousins and aunts … his parents live far far away, they’ve left to find work. They also need to keep Chuang’s entire existence a secret, due to the one-child policy. Living the Land is clearly a very personal film for director Hou Meng. Gorgeously shot. I reviewed for Ebert.

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