Tilda Swinton

I just saw her in Teknolust, a film in which she plays replicant twins who make love to each other. Twice as nice (thrice if you count the scientist she also plays). Of course, all the American critics who thought Lost In Translation was a masterpiece were completely flummoxed by Teknolust.

As much as I admire Ms.Swinton, she is in absolutely no way comparable to the supernova that is Catherine Deneuve. You should be forced to eat a bowl of passed-its-prime poupourri for suggesting as much.

oh, she was in 'the war zone'.

Teknolust was a fun movie - now whenever I get a haircut I want to ask them to make me look like Bjork.

My favorite movie of hers is Orlando, as it is just one pretty scene after another.

Statement, The (2003) .... Anne-Marie Livi
Young Adam (2003) .... Ella Gault
Adaptation. (2002) .... Valerie Thomas
Teknolust (2002) .... Rosetta Stone/Ruby/Marinne/Olivia
Vanilla Sky (2001) .... Rebecca Dearborn
Deep End, The (2001) .... Margaret Hall
Possible Worlds (2000) .... Joyce
Beach, The (2000) .... Sal
War Zone, The (1999) .... Mum
Love Is the Devil (1998) .... Muriel Belcher
Conceiving Ada (1997) .... Ada Augusta Byron King, Countess of Lovelace
Female Perversions (1996) .... Evelyn 'Eve'/'Evie' Stephens
Remembrance of Things Fast: True Stories Visual Lies (1994)
Wittgenstein (1993) .... Lady Ottoline Morrell
Man to Man (1992) .... Ella/Max Gericke
Orlando (1992) .... Orlando
Edward II (1991) .... Isabella
Party: Nature Morte, The (1991) .... Queenie
Garden, The (1990/I) .... Madonna
War Requiem (1989) .... Nurse
Andere Ende der Welt (1988)
Degrees of Blindness (1988)
Ispirazione, L' (1988)
Last of England, The (1988)
Aria (1987) .... Young Girl (segment "Depuis le jour")
Friendship's Death (1987) .... Friendship
Egomania - Insel ohne Hoffnung (1986) .... Sally
Caravaggio (1986) .... Lena

That's Kerry Fox you're thinking of.

She's always in kind of annoying films.
-- N. (nickdastoor), Tuesday, March 16, 2004 7:37 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Link

haha I was just about to ask. has she ever been in a good film?
-- cozen (Cozen), Tuesday, March 16, 2004 7:39 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Link

what's really annoying is she's started getting roles in decent films.

i think she's kind of awful "as an icon", spokesperson, etc. it's bleedin' typical that momus would rep for her, same kind of bullshit art-world jet-set thang. (lol still smarting over shitty derek jarman doc.)

but i have a bad feeling about her being in the most promising-sounding coen brothers film in ten years and the new fincher.

i thought she was fine in 'adaptation', but the subtext (looooook icon of INDEPENDENT FILMMAKING {read: rich 'friends and relatives'/ability to draw down subsidies/or, in her case, actual establishment status} is playing an evil HOLLYWOOD AGENT) was the thing i have to ignore about the film to enjoy it. (because in the film, if not in kaufman's head, MCKEE IS RIGHT.)

also lol irony she'd taken roles in hollywood schlock before then ('vanilla sky'), and since ('narnia') anyway.

I love Tilda Swinton. She has a kind of unpindownableness that no other actress has.

I hated Orlando. The moral of its story: you can get by as a woman or man if you are pretty.

She was downright fantastic in the Narnia flick.

tbh i haven't seen it on the basis of... it's 'narnia'. bad assocations of public schoolboys, christianity, and, creepy oxonian dons.

How are there no pictures on this thread?

she was pretty good in the deep end even tho the movie was sort of so-so remake of reckless moment (joan bennett ftw). she is interesting but too many shitty art films on her resume. at least she's getting paid well these days.

I hereby apologize for all the nasty things I said about her on the Oscar and Michael Clayton threads. She's terrific in a blank of a role; now I'm actually rooting for her to win.

The moral of its story: you can get by as a woman or man if you are pretty.

This isn't true?

That's not the moral of Orlando at all!

well, the film did kinda suck, and I don't recall the moral of the book.

Maybe the poster meant Tony Orlando.

She says something to that effect at the end. I haven't seen it for four years so I could be reconstructing the narrative in my memory somewhat. If nothing else it was boring. Definitely nowhere as good as "Knock Three Times."

Orlando is one of my favorite movies, which is not to say that I don't see why other people wouldn't like it.

Anyway I'm pretty sure the moral of the film, such as it is, is that gender is more important in a social setting than in a personal, individual setting, and that since the social setting is flexible and changing, the "meaning" of gender is changing too, and that it doesn't possess much in the way of inherent qualities. Which was more pointed when Woolf wrote the book than when Potter made the movie, but whatevs. The moral of the film is that it's very satisfying to watch Tilda Swinton go: "Ah."

That works for me.

Which was more pointed when Woolf wrote the book than when Potter made the movie, but whatevs.

don't think a single reader of woolf at the time read this into it but okay.

I suspect maybe Woolf's lover did?

Vita Sackville-West, for whom she wrote the book as a mash note.

maybe, maybe not; either way the woolf industry is a horrendous exercise in projection, generally.

...What?

even if that were true you could argue that it's one of the functions of fiction for the reader and the author.

I probably shouldn't post to this thread but as someone who likes a lot of "shitty art films", I've always been quite a fan of Tilda Swinton. But you know, who else here liked Yes? Probably nobody.

I didn't see Yes but she was great in that comic book movie w what's-his-face!

i've loved her since edward ii. she's kinda freaky. nice to see her win. even if it did pretty well tank my oscar pool ballot.

Yes one of the worst films of that year, along with Stealth and 5x2.

i like plenty of art films, just not shitty ones (every genre has 'em)

How are there no pictures on this thread?

-- forksclovetofu, Sunday, 24 February 2008 21:14 (Yesterday) Link

I loved Yes. Despite myself. And I guess other people too.

she wasn't, strictly speaking, in 'yes'.

bad assocations of public schoolboys, christianity, and, creepy oxonian dons.

yet you post on ILX?

Discerning people will put her on their year-end shortlist for he drunken improvisational kidnapper turn in Erick Zonca's Julia! Often hilarious and never any idea what she's gonna do next.

heR

It's hard to tell sometimes.

ws

Is this Zonca's first film since The Dream Life of Angels?

no, but it's pretty much the first to get released iirc

ie outside of frace

she is amazing.

Seriously, I can't believe someone finds this woman attractive. Good actress? OK, maybe. But attractive? Come on!

I enjoy her work as an actress, but uh, seriously... not particularly attractive.

cosign

she is such a good actress that she is sometimes attractive and sometimes not

she sort of transcends "attractive" at this point. she is tilda swinton. fear her!

OK maybe I just have seen her on very unattractive roles.

o i c u live in the universe where film actors must make you moist

Er, no, I'm saying I find her unattractive, not that I don't enjoy seeing her on movies (which I usually do).

wasnt she rumoured to play nico in the adaptation of 'songs they dont play on the radio'?

her voiceover on the bbc Galapagos series suuuuuuuucks

I guess i picked the wrong thread on which to discuss motherfucking Julia

maybe if JJ Abrams was involved

fwiw I am definitely looking forward to it - if only the damn thing would open in Mtl.

i like her as an actress, i should say. one of my good (male) friends also strongly resembles her which is hilarious to us.

i think she's awful, really. surprised at her turn in ccbb, which was good, but dreadful in most of her good films (eg michael clayton) and even worse in the bad ones (eg all of derek jarman's films). and as a reactionary figure in world cinema, the absolute pits. made it a whole lot easier for me not to bother with the last bela tarr.

apparently julia is good though.

<3 her

esp in "burn after reading"

She is really bad at accents and as an actress she is kindof unsubtle.

You just know that Jarman only hung out with her for Arts Council Funding.

as a reactionary figure in world cinema, nrq will hate Julia. People are calling it a riff on Cassavetes, but it's not that boring.

Julia has a handful of peculiar comic interludes with Tom’s mother, Elena, a severely mentally ill Mexicana, a woman so far gone that she fails to notice what a nasty, mean-spirited, falling-down drunk her neighbor Julia is. Julia, for her part, exudes no awareness of Elena’s tenuous hold on real life. The two meet at an AA meeting, and Julia, in all likelihood, mistakes Elena’s perpetually in place wide smile as evidence of the woman’s sappy friendliness and not as the mask of insanity it so clearly is. Stretched out in hung-over haze on Elena’s sofa, Julia, who attends AA solely at her sponsor’s hectoring insistence, delights in informing Elena that she considers the meetings to be “obscene.” This might have been the first moment where the movie perked up for me; it was definitely the first (though not the last) instance in Zonca and Aude Py’s mordant dialogue at which I laughed out loud. Deriding the “prayers, women lamenting” as too creepy for her taste, Julia’s inflections conjure memories of Rowlands. Is Swinton’s performance a great one? It’s entertaining, it’s fun; she fully gripped my attention even in the movie’s scuzziest, most distasteful passages. Certainly, she borrows from the best sources. And the movie, which initially appears to be about two women of different races embroiling themselves in an illegal venture for some much-needed cash, at times resembles an extraordinarily perverse remake of Frozen River....

http://www.thehousenextdooronline.com/2009/06/julia.html

"wow u r tilda swinton! u hav a zombie face bt itz al good coz u r a serius ac-tress. u treazure thee avant-garde. u hav a weird living situashun wiv ur hott bf n ur oldman baybeedaddy n ur kidz. ur neighborz r liek 'wtf ur so bohemeian'. luv u!"

haha that was funny.

<3 Julia. Agree with M'DA that she is the movie. She is great, and thus the movie is great.

The creepy girl in the Palm Pre advertisements reminds me of ~Swinton.

http://i.usatoday.net/money/_photos/2009/06/04/palm_prex.jpg

She gave my favorite performance of the year.

Ditto. Only Nic Cage comes close.

and more fun than anything Gena Rowlands ever did.

More fun, yes. Better, I'm not convinced.

I don't think Rowlands ever had Swinton's control or poise. It's as much Rowlands fault as it is Cassavettes that her performances are wobbly. I'll fully admit that Swinton is often cast for her sheer weirdness, but when her role summons all her gifts she's impressive in ways that Rowlands never was.

The only Rowlands perf I've ever loved actually is in Another Woman.

I wonder if people who pay tribute to great artists get pissed off when critics appraise their work in a manner that denigrates the influence?

Rhetorical question alert!

The movie sort of has a nervous breakdown in the last hour, the way Cassavetes films often did after the opening titles.

I was hoping for a flat-out comedy after the first 30 mins -- it's hilarious.

The way Tilda screams "Mitch!" when she thinks he slept with her while she was drunk was hysterical!

I was amused by how the movie almost but not quite milked the ew-I-slept-with-Saul-Rubinek bit for laughs.

Anyone seen I Am Love?

i'm about to pop in the screener, wish me luck!

i did. i thought it was really silly and overwrought

terrible

i hate tilda swinton

wnes

I'd turn for Tilda. We've gone through this before, tho.

the twee flashmob bullshit she's apparently into is heartbreaking, like hearing sean penn speak. she is good at acting though.

ehh she's ok. got off to a rocky start by being in some of the worst films of all time (ie derek jarman's)

honestly tho, completely overrated. meanwhile where is the love for lindsay duncan?

i guess part of my h8 is for how she's become a thing

Really bad, but its the kind of bad that you are able to have a good laugh about it afterwards (I did anyway).

Its not really about Tilda: she took a risk, its just that it didn't come off at all (she has a bad record?). Same goes for most of the people involved. xp

Would she be such a lauded 'serious' actress if she wasn't so funny looking?

I don't think she's funny looking, I also don't she's much good either.

'think' that is

honestly tho, completely overrated. meanwhile where is the love for lindsay duncan?

you wanted to write elizabeth banks there i bet.

what a strange keyboard malfunction to imagine

well, while we're on it, yes elizabeth banks is a better screen performer than the tilds. but LD is a more 'like-for-like' comparison really. british middle-aged ladies with a certainly steeliness to them -- or something. coulda gone miranda richardson too.

Redheads, you mean

i did. i thought it was really silly and overwrought

So was Julia, which was terrific.

Lindsay Duncan is awesome but she's in the Lumley cohort agewise.

I must know 20 men with impeccable taste who have TS on their Unfaithful Shag list, and my friend the director is using her for a cool part in her next film. I've always thought she was good value. However, I'm not down with all the Derek Jarman hatred. If you are watching his films expecting linear narrative then LOL U, a few seconds of arresting imagery in a short film is all I ask, and dude delivers, plus Blue is awesome (listen out specially for the Cocksucking Lesbian Man). I'm especially not down with the idea that he used anyone to get Arts Council funding - it's actually a shitty thing to toss off sans backup - since I've read all his memoirs where he bitches about not getting money from Arts Council and BFI, etc. OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

tilda is a great actress and she seems like a cool person. what's this about flashmob bullshit?

but yea the personal reactions i've heard re: I Am Love have been moderately disappointed

If you are watching his films expecting linear narrative then LOL U, a few seconds of arresting imagery in a short film is all I ask, and dude delivers

Don't think anyone who has problems with Jarman zone in on the lack of narrative in his films. From my recollection Jarman was going for images that someone like Tarkovsky (and a couple of other Soviet directors) effotlessly pulled off.

Didn't know she was on Bela Tarr's Man from London. Any good?

I really like Jarman's early short films set in Bankside; appeals to psychogeographer in me.

i liked "i am love" -- though maybe a little overwrought, i was rather moved by tilda's performance tbh

The music was bombastic and in spots incongruous, but I'm a sucker for this kind of neo-Visconti melodrama.

Those boys are the most beautiful Italians this side of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.

I've never really seen Tilda act before. Where should I start? The Orlando re-release?

I Am Love, out now, is def. work a peak if you love melodrama. If you like what you see, seek The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe and Michael Clayton. Sometimes Hollywood trash uncorks her weirdness better than her "art" films.

Yeah, and in Julia, she hoists the trashiness of the movie up fully on her shoulders.

Can't believe I omitted Julia and misspelled "peek."

Saw "I Am Love" - ultimately was kind of disappointed. I can't really complain about the "overwrought"ness because that was so what the movie was going for. Liked the cinematography and the acting and thought there were some great nuances and nice bits of classic symbolism and chekhovian foreshadowing. But there was so much cliche too (a liberating affair IN NATURE with a CHEF!) and the ending was completely WTF. I didn't like any of the characters -- Swinton started to seem sympathetic for a bit when you hear her back story but then dashes it. I found the story completely uninteresting and dumb, and the whole bit about "globalism" sounded like it was written by a 15 year old.

Plus I read this when I got home and thought it was kind of o_0 in the same way as the movie ending, only moreso:

Personal life

Swinton lives in Nairn, in the Highland area of Scotland, with Scottish painter John Byrne and their twin children: a son, Xavier, and a daughter, Honor. She travels with her partner Sandro Kopp, a German/New Zealand painter.[20] She has been with Kopp since 2004 and the relationship has Byrne's blessing.[21] In an interview, Swinton commented on her domestic situation: "It’s the way we have been for nearly four years. I’m very fortunate. It takes some extraordinary men to make a situation like that work."

I mean, like, are her children "extraordinary" enough to "make that work"?

o no an unconventional relationship THINK OF THE CHILDREN

not unconventional enough for our tastes

Bullshit. If a man with two kids at home "travelled" with his girlfriend while his wife stayed home with the kids he'd just be some deadbeat asshole, and if the woman were ok with it people would call her a doormat. If people without children want to do that sort of thing it's fine, but once you have children you are beholden to them.

children are not special. "childhood" is a fairly recent invention of capitalism. while we applaud artificial constructions, as well as any other mastery over nature, including arbitrary social arrangements, we condemn ones conducive to the current way things are.

down with childhood.

up with Tilda, in this instance

yeah 'i am love' was boring and the characters were unsympathetic and the romance seemed hollow.

as romance is. like childhood, another useless and outmoded concept.

kind of like sophomoric deconstruction of "conventions"

your moralism would be touching and humorous, if we had not already transcended such piffle.

fwiw i imagine tilda's children will grow up with a fairly unconventional sense of what a family is, but as to whether they're being traumatized and having their childhood ruined, that's anyone's guess. and probably no business of ours.

your stilted writing style is touching and humorous

x-post

indeed. it is heartening to see a generation grow up with an altered sense of "family".

but privacy is another virtue that must be destroyed.

x-post

we do not need your approval or compliments, even if they come from the back of your hand.

fluid, smooth writing is inherently reactionary.

ok, your flame just got really good, I admit

i hope you are not implying that the flame that burns brightest burns fastest, because we are the sun not a candle

we are not perfect or immortal--yet--but we are here to stay esse

Ian I agree it's probably not fair of me to assume anything about the effect on her kids.

good to see you have admitted your faults as have we

man i kind of wanted to talk about that julia movie

mainly 'cuz i feel like i've seen ten minutes of tilda drugging a kid, maybe she had a gun, there was duct tape involved - is that what that's from? when the hell did i see that?

i'm no great fan of her but her living arrangement seems perfectly reasonable and sensible. i'm always surprised these set ups aren't more common. i'm pretty sure her kids won't care a jot and i don't think it matters if they do, it's not really their concern past a certain point.

Swinton lives in Nairn, in the Highland area of Scotland, with Scottish painter John Byrne

John Byrne? Never knew that. Still, there's this:

"Byrne has denied being in a polyamorus relationship with Swinton and her companion, artist Sandro Kopp. He himself is currently seeing Janine Davies, a stage lighting designer."

i think Byrne and Tilda have been together for a good twenty years or so. In fact it must have been since "You're Cheating Heart", that thing he wrote after "Tutti Frutti".

which was 1990.

Byrne:

“The thing is,” he says, “I have been miscast as living under the same roof as Tilda and Sandro. I’ve been painted as a benign eccentric who’s living there while some guy’s shagging his sweetheart. Why would I do that? Let me put the record straight. No way is it a ménage à trois. Neither of us would have had any truck with anything remotely like that. People would like to think that wouldn’t they? Bizarre.”

xxxp but it is the concern of the internet

what didn't you like about the ending, hurting? that's when this film made me swoon. it was so confident, relying on wordless exchanges between the characters.

I just didn't find her final action in the film believable at all. I could have seen it happen at a later point maybe, but not when it happened. I also didn't find it believable that the result would be happy ever after or even happy for more than maybe a few months. Sorry, trying to talk without blatant spoilers.

I also found the chef character to be sort of a device rather than a fleshed-out character and that irked me. I suppose there are enough male-protagonist films with female characters like that that they deserve a pass on this.

I did like how the movie played with sexual ambiguity, hinting at undiscovered possibilities. For about half an hour I expected her son and the chef to hook up.

Oh yeah, totally.

I couldn't figure out if that had something to do with the son's sadness. Did it make sense to you why he was crying to the servant?

TBF there were a lot of moments I liked - e.g. when the chef first shows up with the box there's a great tension to the whole thing and he looks sort of simultaneously dangerous and vulnerable, and the moment foreshadows the rest. Or in the church after the funeral, when Tancredi helps her back into her high heels, or all the sort of frenzied shots of servants getting things ready. Everything about the family's life is a performance and she loses the will to keep performing.

i also did not find Tilda's final scene with her husband believable at all. Also the wordlessness of the romance irked me, seemed like not much more than lust? I dunno.

I Am Love is a pretty bore; maybe Sirk coulda done better with it.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Gdt6SgFdNNw/TP_xr9Nm07I/AAAAAAAAUVM/vBCGyNsHbFQ/s400/tilda_falconetti.jpg

http://news.scotsman.com/entertainment/Cut-Tilda-Swinton-and-Edinburgh.6746001.jp

hmmmmm

i saw t-swint at edinburgh one time, bit of a ninny really

that is weird

actually programming a festival is a real job. have a hard time imagining tilda swinton managing people and so forth.

well yeah. if they're hiring and firing with 2 months to go it should be lol. what happened to the swinton/cousins tweefest in the highlands and islands?

Amped to watch T-Swint in We Need To Talk About Kevin in a couple of months

http://www.wmagazine.com/celebrities/2011/08/tilda-swinton-tim-walker-cover-story-ss#slide=6

she's named after that fucked up character

solid in a bigger splash, playing a female bowie w laryngitis basically

ralph finnes gives an oscarworthy perf imo, kinda recollects the physique/pysicality of lancaster in the swimmer & the brash overbearing vibe of ray winstone in sexy beast

not sure why you haven't mentioned the should-be-illegal Matthias Schoenaerts

yea hes in the mix
his best scenes are w the 50 shades girl