MaryMcdonnell Tagged Articles at Cinematical

This is one of those bits of news that I believe to be premature: a sequel to Dances with Wolves is being produced, titled The Holy Road. Based on the novel by Dances author/screenwriter Michael Blake (who is again adapting his own work here), the movie will focus on Lt. John Dunbar, aka Dances with Wolves, and family 11 years after the original story takes place. Interesting announcement, but the reason it's too soon to report is that we can't appropriately care about the project without mention of Kevin Costner. Variety somehow avoids even naming the actor-director, who won Best Director and Best Picture Oscars for the first movie. Never mind that The Holy Road replaces Costner as director -- that should have been a point to address at least -- but there's not even a comment about how the production would love to cast the guy in the role. This could simply be a sore subject, or simply an attempt to distance this project from the original, especially considering Variety mentions Comanche, the Native American tribe portrayed in Blake's novels, rather than Sioux-Lakota, which are represented in the 1990 movie. Aside from Blake, it doesn't appear that anyone involved the first time around is back for the sequel.

Costner's replacement at the helm is Simon Wincer, director of the McMurty miniseries Lonesome Dove and its prequel, Comanche Moon, which hits your television at the end of the year. He also did other TV westerns, including the recent Spielberg-produced Into the West and the L'Amour adaptation Crossfire Trail, as well as the Australian western Quigley Down Under. So, he certainly knows the genre. But none of that really matters to The Holy Road if Costner isn't Dunbar/Dances. And of course, Mary McDonnell needs to reprise her role as Stands With a Fist, who is still married to Dances and has three children with him. The main plot of The Holy Road follows her being kidnapped, along with her youngest, by white rangers. Hopefully we get to watch Costner as the husband who runs to her rescue, and not some poor substitute. By the look of things, though, I'd say we'll have to settle for a double replacement.

According to the trailer for the documentary Stephen Tobolowsky's Birthday Party, the scene-stealing actor Stephen Tobolowsky, "has been in more movies than Tom Cruise," and, "is linked to more movie stars than Kevin Bacon." His name isn't all that familiar, but his face and voice are both distinctly recognizable. Not so much for being the lead singer in an early band featuring Stevie Ray Vaughn or for co-writing True Stories, but for his stand out appearances in a number of films, most of which he hardly features in more than one scene. Most people would probably place him first in Groundhog Day or Single White Female, where he played the similar-sounding characters Ned Ryerson and Mitch Myerson, respectively. He also features prominently in Memento, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, Thelma and Louise, and many other films.

His best part, though, has to be Dr. Werner Brandes in Sneakers. In the film, which stars heavyweights Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, Dan Aykroyd, David Strathairn, River Phoenix, Mary McDonnell and Ben Kingsley, his character is not only significant to the story, but the actor's voice is even more vital to the plot; in my opinion, it's one of the best purely vocal pieces of scene-stealing in the history of cinema. In an attempt to enter a high-security office, which requires voice-identification, Robert Redford's crew sends in McDonnell on a date with Tobolowsky, where she must get the man to say the following words: "Hi, my name is Werner Brandes. My voice is my passport. Verify me." Only she has to get the words through casual conversation, so he doesn't catch on to her reason for needing them -- Redford's crew can stitch the out-of-order individual words into the pass-phrase; the way McConnell gets Toblowsky to say "passport" is the best part. Later, when the edited recording of these words are played to gain entry into an office, Tobolowsky's voice is immortalized forever. More than any other scene in the film -- and there are some great ones in there -- I always remember Tobolowsky's and McConnell's scene together the best.