She pretty much completely disappears into the background. Made at the very beginning of her career (it wouldn’t be released for several years), this is a far cry from the actress we’d get to know in later films. Roberts gets virtually no dialogue and precious little screen time in this hilariously over-the-top epic about Sicilian immigrants in America - starring her brother, Eric, who was a much bigger star at the time. What is interesting are the film’s many references to Pretty Woman – interesting, but also sad. Roberts gets one of the more interesting but less developed characters here, as a soldier on leave seated next to Bradley Cooper on an airplane. But soon it became clear that Marshall had a whole franchise in mind, with more of these holiday-romance cluster bombs on the way. At the time, Garry Marshall’s star-studded roundelay of couples and non-couples making their way through Valentine’s Day was compared to Love, Actually, which had a similarly intercutting, multicharacter structure. Either that, or he had some dirt on her … Presumably, Roberts made this one (and Valentine’s Day) as a favor to the late Marshall, who after all directed her in Pretty Woman, the film that made her a star. Outfitted with a gruesome pageboy wig, Roberts plays a famous Home Shopping Network guru seemingly admired by everyone in this remorselessly dumb ensemble comedy about a cross-section of Atlanta moms - a shallow, offensive follow-up to director Garry Marshall’s only marginally less shallow and offensive Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve films. Here are all of Julia Roberts’s performances, ranked. Hence, the awesome number of films in which she’s asked to riff on variations of her own persona - a subgenre (or is it a sub-subgenre?) we could call Julia Roberts Plays Herself.Īnyway, it’s a great filmography - better than many would have anticipated. Julia Roberts eventually proved to be one of the finest performers of her generation, but she never could quite escape being Julia Roberts. It’s a presence that encompasses her smile and her laugh (of course), but also her quick-witted delivery, and her warmth - the sense that there’s a real, caring human being up there on the screen.īut presence can be a double-edged sword, too. And Julia Roberts has ( has – she still does) more presence than most big actors combined. Movie stars might have talent and range, but that’s not what makes them stars what makes them stars is, ironically, a limitation: The one (or sometimes two) things everyone knows them for, the qualities that define their presence. The all-consuming totality of the Julia Roberts phenomenon was well-earned. Even when she failed - as in that brief period in the mid-1990s when she attempted more ostensibly serious fare - somehow we all felt embroiled in the fate of career. From her star-making turn in Pretty Woman in 1990 through the early 2000s (when she took a step back from her whirlwind career to start a family), she was a dominant cultural force. For many who came of age in the 1990s, Julia Roberts was more than a movie star she was an existential fact. But Wonder isn’t really a Julia Roberts Movie, and that’s still a weird concept to grasp for some us. Julia Roberts co-stars in Wonder, which opens this week.
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