Day 1: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

Kelley 2017, Actor Spotlights, Classics, Reviews Leave a Comment

Welcome back for the second monthly Spotlight Series from ItsJustAwesome.com! This week, to honor his birthday on May 31st, we’ll be reviewing 7 essential films starring everybody’s favorite outlaw: the inimitable Clint Eastwood. Kicking things off in style, today we’ll be discussing one of Eastwood’s most iconic roles in the Sergio Leone classic, The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (1966). The Good, the Bad & the Ugly is the third, and arguably the most famous, installment in Leone’s “Man with No Name” trilogy. Throughout the trilogy, Eastwood’s character is never named– he is identified only by nicknames others have given him. In this film, he’s referred to simply as “Blondie” by his …

Day 4: On the Waterfront (1954)

Kelley 2017, Actor Spotlights, Classics, Reviews Leave a Comment

Welcome back for Day 4 of our Marlon Brando spotlight series! Today we’ll be talking about one of my favorite movies, the film that earned Brando his first Oscar win: Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954). I waxed on about the merits of A Streetcar Named Desire in Day 1 (another Kazan/Brando pairing–clearly they knew how to complement each other’s strengths) and Waterfront is just as good, albeit for different reasons. In a role completely different from the hot-headed Stanley Kowalski, Brando’s Terry Malloy is quiet, introspective, and only fights when he’s pushed to his limits. Malloy is a former boxer, and was largely “sponsored” in his short career by the shady dealings of …

Day 1: A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

Kelley 2017, Actor Spotlights, Classics, Reviews Leave a Comment

On this day in history, screen legend Marlon Brando was born. The world didn’t know it then, but here was a man (/baby) who would shake up Hollywood to such an extent that the “rules” for what constituted a performance would never be the same. Brando didn’t care two figs about what was expected socially or professionally– he wore dirty jeans instead of then-fashionable high-waisted trousers, had three children with his housekeeper, bought a South Pacific island (?!)…the list goes on. In other words, he charted his own path, and steamrolled through the studio system like the bull-in-a-china-shop that he was. In later years, his hubris and laissez-faire attitude about his health and professional relationships would cause …