There is a special, profound place in my heart reserved solely for old movies. Christmas in my family has always been crazy, informal and filled with warmth—the tree, the village, our dogs eating the wrapping paper, my mom's delicate talent for decorating and ""It's a Wonderful Life."" My dad met Jimmy Stewart once when he was little. His family was on a train to San Francisco, and Jimmy got on in Denver. He showed my dad, aunt and uncle magic tricks, one of which my dad remembers to this day.
Things like this tug at my ribs and make me think of black and white movie stars. They are so often forgotten when people talk about film these days, fully replaced with silly gossip and overexposed celebrities. Think of the public's reaction to Reese Witherspoon's beautiful performance in ""Walk the Line."" It fades in comparison to reactions toward her recent split with actor Ryan Phillippe. People like Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson are allowed to be in movies simply because they're hot, rich and they can. Stars have become central sources of body image, beauty, masculinity, wealth and hardly anything more.
I saw a preview for ""Bobby"" last night while watching ""Heroes."" It looks great, but I feel that any movie is automatically cheapened the moment it stars Lindsay Lohan. Her career has been a series of tweenie movies, parties, moaning, groaning and drastic weight discrepancies, and I can no longer take her seriously as a professional actress. The same goes for Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt—performers who have sold themselves out to the media, throwing away such masterful talent to appear on the cover of US Magazine with startling frequency. What happened to the Donnas and the Jimmys? The performances that make us strangely aware of our own mortality simply because we relate so strongly to the actor on the screen?
Is it possible to relate to actors? Well, it's not if they're constantly in our faces with partying, drugs, weight loss and plastic surgery. What about Tom Hanks? He is easily the greatest movie star of our era. Like Jimmy Stewart, he has a knack for being both type-casted and fully individual. In movies like ""Sleepless in Seattle"" and ""You've Got Mail,"" we see the romcom Tom—the romantic, ideal man, often paired with our favorite long-lost love Meg Ryan, who in the '90s was her own kind of movie star. Yet, we know Tom can act. We all saw ""Forrest Gump,"" ""Philadelphia"" and ""Saving Private Ryan."" He's bloody brilliant, and he has that voice. If I could have anybody read me bedtime stories for the rest of my life, I'd ask for Tom Hanks.
Other movie stars like Johnny Depp, Steve Martin and Scarlett Johansson are true characters in a world of carbon copies and blah. Rachel McAdams has potential. Luke and Owen Wilson. Greg Kinnear, Kate Winslet, Annette Bening. Men and women we can picture standing behind us in the grocery line or see having coffee on the steps of the capitol, reading David Sedaris. I feel that the more we can relate to an actor, and the more we can picture learning magic tricks from him or her on a train to San Francisco, the more their performances will resonate with our own lives. That makes more than a celebrity. It makes a movie star.
