Oh, the things I miss not having a TV. On Good Morning America this morning to promote the unwatchably bad-looking chick heist flick Mad Money, Diane Keaton snuck “the f word” into a tossed-off, backhanded comment directed at GMA host Diane Sawyer. You can watch the relevant segment here, but here’s the money quote:
Keaton: (gesturing) Those lips! I love ‘em. I’d like to have lips like that.
Sawyer: (laughs uncomfortably at the complement–what’s she gonna do, offer the number of her Botox dealer?)
Keaton: Then I wouldn’t have worked on my fucking personality!
(Whole studio erupts into nervous, shocked laughter)
Keaton: Or my — excuse me — my personality! If I had lips like yours, I’d be better off! My life would be better. I’d be married!
As if we needed another reason to love Diane Keaton, not only does she casually curse like a sailor on morning TV, she does so whilst basically accusing Diane Sawyer–who, it should be noted, is a year older than Keaton–of coasting on her looks like a bimbo. Keaton grumbles about having had to “work on her personality,” but it seems like it worked for her––didn’t she famously date every eligible bachelor in Hollywood between, like, 1975 and 1983? And that line about how if she had Sawyer’s lips, she would be married––is she jealous that the other Diane nabbed Mike Nichols? Was he considered a catch in the 80s?
Sigh. It doesn’t really matter. No one does unaccountably crazy like you, Diane Keaton, and for that, I salute you.
We haven’t done an installment of The Micro Five in a couple of weeks, so let me give you a refresher: the basic idea is not to create a definitive (read: totally subjective) Top Five list, but to pick a super-specific topic and examine how five films handled it differently. You can read previous installments here, here, here and here.
This time out, we’re looking at musical numbers of the 80s. The Hollywood musical is thought in some quarters to have lost its way in the late 70s/early 80s (although recent reappraisals have been kinder to the era that produced curiosities like One From the Heart.) Still, the influence of MTV on all aspects of 80s culture (but especially youth culture) by the end of the decade led to an normalization of song and dance scenes (but especially dance scenes) in non-musicals. See my take on five numbers involving John Hughes, Spike Lee and Christopher Walken, after the jump.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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