I do remember renting it back in the day, and as a big fan of old-time swashbucklery type movies … I couldn’t even finish it, it was just that leaden.
I’m surprised that the Long Kiss Goodnight was considered a flop – it wasn’t Shakespeare, but by the standards of a Die Hard-type invincible action-hero blockbuster, it was pretty good.
I liked her as an easy Earth girl…
Not to mention one of the best monologues about a dog licking its butt ever recorded.
[QUOTE=LawMonkey]
Before would’ve been worse, I think. There you are, having a good time and… well, I know what that day did to my mood.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah. Judging by the mood round here after 22/7-11, a great big wedding would have been just the thing to cheer people up. Way better than the people who had been married the day before, and had to wake up to that (or even worse, that very morning). And there must have been a lot of them, too (July weekend, prime wedding season).
And I love Cutthroat Island. Great campy fun. Much the same tone as Pirates of the Caribbean, come to think of it.
She is six feet tall, which probably works against her in romantic roles.
And she’s not living with Jeff Goldblum any more, which works against her finding a compatible screen partner.
When I Googled images for Davis, I was surprised to see that she had posed for cheesecake photos, one of which had her bare-breasted.
Where’d everybody go?
It’s worth watching knowing she did all of her own stunts, including the absolutely spectacular Indiana Jones one from the carriage through the brothel(?) and back into the carriage.
I’ve never seen The Long Kiss Goodnight so I don’t have any opinion about it’s quality.* I called it a flop because, regardless of its merits as a movie, it wasn’t successful at the box office.
“Flop” may have been an overstatement, though. I didn’t look at the box office figures on the IMDb very carefully last night, and only noticed that The Long Kiss Goodnight’s domestic gross was only about half its budget (est. $65 million). But I see now that the worldwide gross was close to $90 million. The figure you see for a movie’s budget generally does not include marketing costs, so The Long Kiss Goodnight might still have cost the studio money, but it didn’t do as badly as I’d thought.
Again though, this movie came right after Cutthroat Island, which had a budget of $98 million and only brought in about $10 million domestically. The IMDb doesn’t list a worldwide gross, but Wikipedia’s List of box office bombs indicated that it only brought in about another $8 million internationally. As you can see from the list, it was the biggest flop of all time for a number of years and has only recently been pushed out of the top ten (it’s still at #11) by big budget box office disasters from the past couple of years. It remains either the #1 or #2 biggest flop of all time when the figures are adjusted for inflation. So Geena Davis needed a pretty big hit after that to avoid looking like bad luck at the box office, and The Long Kiss Goodnight wasn’t a hit.
*It’s my recollection that it got decent reviews. I see it’s 67% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, which isn’t great but not awful or anything.
Despite a drama degree, she basically started as a model. This included lingerie work and the story goes she got her big break because Sydney Pollack liked one of her Victoria Secret shoots ( he basically was looking for an attractive bit player to prance around a cross-dressing Dustin Hoffman in her bra and panties in Tootsie ). So she was pretty much hired for her looks and only through sheer serendipity.
Plus it included a spirited exchange about the classic mondegreen “I’m not talkin’ 'bout the linen, and I don’t want to change your life…”
I see she has five IMDB entries since Commander in Chief folded, and that’s five more than I have, so she’s doing pretty good in my book. Particularly if she’s a mother of three with over $30 million in the bank.
So, just to get it out there, is anybody thinking the speech impediment is a problem?
If you’re thinking “What speech impediment?” then the answer’s probably “no.”
The most important thing is that the career of nearly every actress slows down when they turn 40. Hollywood is very prejudiced against older actresses (and even non-American films tend to be like that somewhat). For that matter, the career of nearly every actor slows down around 40, if not quite to the same extent. A few actresses will be the ones who get the rare big roles for middle-aged actresses. A larger group will get the roles like being the mother of the teenager who’s the lead in a movie or TV show. Most of them will slowly disappear from view, either giving up acting entirely or stuck with small roles for the rest of their life.
Geena Davis wasn’t affected by this as badly as some actresses. She didn’t become a model until she was 23, which in the world of female models is known as “late middle age.” She didn’t become an actress until she was 26, which in the world of actresses is known as “late middle age.” She made it to the try-outs for the American Olympic archery team at 43, which in the world of archery is known as “late middle age.” She finally got her married life straightened out at 45 and had a daughter at 46 and twin sons at 48. She continues to get some acting roles, including the lead in a TV show and some voice roles in animated films. Oh, and she’s pretty smart. She plays the flute, the organ, and the piano, she learned to speak Swedish in high school, and she’s a Mensa member:
You can only hope you do as well after you turn 40 as her.
Yeah, oddly enough she did things exactly the way a well-adjusted person outside of the entertainment world would suggest you do it - went and got a college degree first, then started looking for acting work. Of course the well-adjusted way very rarely works out all that well, but Geena Davis is a notable exception to the rule.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the Institute she fronts, surprisingly called The Geena Davis Institute on gender in Media.
She came to Australia a few years back in support of its work. I heard one excellent interview about the issue that she gave. Certainly made her sound smarter than some of your real-life presidents stapled together.
Hopefully that’s keeping her busy.
She’ll always be Fletch’s assistant to me.
Good thread. Twins, Mensa, archery…wow. She’d have a right to feel she’s enjoyed (and enjoys) a full and satisfying life even had she never acted at all.
Tamerlane writes:
> . . . a well-adjusted person . . .
Exactly. Geena Davis has nothing to be ashamed of.
I heard her speak about women in film on NPR and was very impressed. I will always love her because of A League of Their Own and Beetlejuice, but with this she impressed me even more. I also connected with her as a mother, like I did it with Demi Moore for little while.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think that Geena Davis is a descendant of an ancient race of immortals?
If you’re asking if she’s a goddess, yes, yes she is.