richard gere – This Had Oscar Buzz

This episode, we’re returning to the career of Robert Altman for one of the most bizarre films we’ve ever discussed. With a stacked female cast surrounding Richard Gere as a beloved Texan gynecologist, 2000′s Dr. T and The Women baffled audiences straight to its well-earned F CinemaScore. Erased from our memories one year later by the Oscar success of Gosford Park, this film lacks Altman’s distinct touch and interesting characters before it (literally) drives into a bizarre conclusion.

With a cast that also includes Helen Hunt, Kate Hudson, Tara Reid, Laura Dern, and a nude Farrah Fawcett frollicking in a mall fountain, Dr. T makes good on little of its promise. We look at Richard Gere’s screen persona prior to his near-nomination for Chicago, Altman’s stint in director jail post-Popeye, and how this film factored into the year’s narratives for Hunt and Hudson.

Topics also include the brief life of Artisan Entertainment, rich lady mall culture, and assassination tours.

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It’s time for some failed harlequin romance Oscar buzz and that means we are talking 1993′s Sommersby. A post-Civil War era love story of overtaken identity and languorous beard shaving, the presence of a post-Silence of the Lambs Jodie Foster had us thinking this weepy could be Oscar-bound. But as the dueling elements of Richard Gere’s non-accent and Foster’s scream-whisper will attest, we were so wrong.

As if the gaslighting by oil lamp wasn’t enough to warn us, the movie is fairly cringeworthy in its plot mechanics and ripping off of the third act of The Crucible. We get into Sommersby’s mishaps this episode as well as Gere’s Oscar shutout vs. Foster as one of Oscar’s golden children, making out while protecting expensive seeds, and the Great Cuckold of 1993, Bill Pullman. We never loved not this movie as much as we loved this movie.

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Tag: richard gere

106 – Dr. T and the Women

018 – Sommersby