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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Thursday, March 18, 2004

La-dee-da, la-dee-da, la-la





From The New York Times...



In an interview ... Ms. Keaton was asked about the "la-dee-da" moment. You would think such an indelible piece of screen history would have a clear provenance, but that is not the case. "La-dee-da" was in the script, Ms. Keaton said, a surprise considering that Mr. Allen said Ms. Keaton had come up with it on her own.



"He thinks I came up with it?" she said. "I'm going to use that, then. If he said it, he's got to be right. How could I be right?"



This reaction, an amalgam of caginess and insecurity, is a clue to Ms. Keaton's gift as a screen comedian. Like, say, Yogi Berra, she has a naturally shrewd eccentricity. Her famously unique wardrobe (for the interview she wore a black business suit, jacket and skirt, over a pair of blue jeans) is the fashion equivalent of philosophical Berra one-liners.



Her life is a Hollywood anomaly. She has never married (though she has had her share of high-profile romances, with Mr. Allen, Al Pacino and Warren Beatty). She lives with her two adopted children, an 8-year-old girl and a 3-year-old boy. In any case, she has a personal and professional style that is difficult to explicate and impossible to duplicate.



"She's off the center, not a regular homogenized individual," said Jack Nicholson, her co-star in Something's Gotta Give, for which she earned a best-actress Oscar nomination. (Charlize Theron won the award.) "We were great together. She's got a funny slant on life to begin with, and it makes you want to be funny when you're around her. If you have trouble talking to her, that's your fault. But don't ask her to make a lot of lists."



As Harry and Erica, an ostensibly confirmed libertine and a professionally successful but romantically disappointed playwright, Mr. Nicholson and Ms. Keaton were great together. Reviewers were not only thrilled by a couple of senior pros working joyously in tandem — "We ham-and-egg it pretty good," was Mr. Nicholson's summary — but also aligned with A. O. Scott of The New York Times, who wrote of Ms. Keaton's "unparalleled comic skill."



At 58 Ms. Keaton is still distinctly pretty. She has disdained cosmetic surgery and looks her age; the lines in her face are well etched. In conversation, she is flighty, jittery, quick to laugh and smart: a lot like a grown-up Annie Hall, though she said she thought Annie would have been married by this time. Ask her to assess herself and her work, and she becomes a little flustered. Is she a comedy theoretician?


I've fallen in love with Diane Keaton again. What a wonderful -- funny and honest! -- performance in Nancy Meyer's Something's Gotta Give, a worthy addendum to Woody Allen's Annie Hall. You know you've seen a great movie when it won't get out of your mind even after you get out of the movie theater. And this was one viewing session where the movie was shown double-with Chasing Liberty with Mandy Moore, which came right after Something.



But even now I'm asking, Mandy-who?



What do you know... I got more worked up watching (and guffawing over!) two old foggies, Jack Nicholson and Diane, having sex, with all wrinkles intact -- than watching Mandy Moore strip and make out with Matthew Goode.



Dear God.


[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich





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