For the weekend of October 20-21, YES 1 is showing a marathon of her most famous films.
By HANNAH BROWNMr. Robot(photo credit: PR)
The term “America’s sweetheart” sounds incredibly old fashioned, but Julia Roberts has been that for many years, and now YES 1 is celebrating her 50th birthday.For the weekend of October 20-21, YES 1 is showing a marathon of her most famous films. Some of them are terrific, others are forgettable, but Roberts always lights up the screen with her old-school movie-star presence.Most of us first noticed her nearly 30 years ago when she gave one of her best performances in one of her best movies, Mystic Pizza. Roberts portrayed Daisy, a small-town pizza-parlor waitress with no direction, and she was lovely and appealing and became a star.Pretty Woman will also be shown, which is moronic and even borderline offensive in its depiction of a pure-hearted call girl who walks the streets for years but has no pimp and manages to be lovely and radiant, no worse for the wear. But who cares about reality when you’ve got Roberts in evening dresses and thigh-high boots, smiling and clowning her way into Richard Gere’s heart? The scene where she tells off the snooty Beverly Hills saleswomen has become a classic.She was also radiant in the original Steel Magnolias, a drama about Southern women which may strike some as hokey but features an incredible bunch of actresses — in addition to Roberts, there’s Shirley MacLaine, Dolly Parton, Olympia Dukakis, Sally Field and Daryl Hannah — as well as a few good men, among them the late Sam Shepard.Notting Hill was a lot of fun when it first came out, but it hasn’t aged as well as some of Roberts’s other films. Closer is one of those movies where unhappy people spend a lot of time screaming at each other, but at least they’re all good looking: Roberts’s co-stars are Jude Law, Clive Owen and Natalie Portman.One of her more recent films, Eat, Pray, Love, will be included as well. Once again, it’s annoying to watch Roberts try to pretend to be an ordinary woman with all the usual problems, but it’s entertaining at the same time because she’s so likable.Téa Leoni is another actress who, like Roberts, often seems too charming to be real. This can be a problem in her role in Madam Secretary, where she plays the US secretary of state. This show still seems new somehow, but its fourth season is starting on YES Drama on October 11 at 10 p.m. It will also be available on YES VOD.Leoni comes off as a sweet, brainy soccer mom rather than one of the most powerful people in the world, although the show is entertaining in spite of that. In a typical episode, an innocent person is abducted, and foreign bad guys threaten to murder him or her unless they can extort money or prisoner releases from the US. Leoni’s Bess McCord counsels caution until the US can get a team on the ground to rescue the person, while her staff argues in cute ways until the situation is resolved. It has the niceness of The West Wing without that show’s more current-events focused humor.For fans of sci-fi/thrillers with a harder edge, Mr. Robot will be back for its third season on HOT HBO on October 15 at 10 p.m. and on HOT VOD. This Golden Globe-winning series stars Rami Malek as a mild-mannered computer programmer by day and vigilante hacker by night.Other returning sci-fi shows include The Walking Dead, which returns to YES Oh on October 23. The violence got to be too intense for me last season when the malevolent Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, whom you may remember from flashbacks on Weeds as Nancy’s husband, Judah; and Alicia’s investigator boyfriend on The Good Wife) beat to death all the remaining likable characters. But if you’re up for it, it’ll be here.Stranger Things, a wonderful Netflix series, will be back on that streaming service with its second season on October 27. Set in the 1980s, it’s about a kid who gets kidnapped into another dimension. Winona Ryder plays his working-class mother. It may not sound promising, but it’s terrific.
Related TagsNatalie Portman
if(catID != 151){
var cont = `Take Israel home with the new Jerusalem Post Store