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Time Comes for Groundhog Day, Others, on Latest AFI Top 10 List

Posted by Vogt
at June 18, 2008

Groundhog Day

If you’ve been waiting for Groundhog Day to get its due, your wait, like Bill Murray’s at the end of that film, is finally over.

The 1993 comedy about a weatherman’s very, very long day was one of 100 films honored by the American Film Institute with its latest best-of list.

AFI’s 10 Top 10, a list of lists, actually, covering genres from animation to Western, was revealed in a CBS special Tuesday.

The three-hour program was the least-watched show of the night on the big four networks, averaging an estimated 5.5 million viewers, per Nielsen Media Research.

Game 6 of the NBA Finals and the premiere of America’s Got Talent might have proved bigger draws, but Marty McFly wasn’t complaining.

Like Groundhog Day, 1985’s Back to the Future was an AFI first-timer, coming in at 10th on the list of Hollywood’s 10 best sci-fi movies of all time. (Groundhog Day was honored in the fantasy category, where it ranked eighth.)

Other newbies: The Lion King (4th, animation); Shrek (eighth, animation); Cinderella (ninth, animation); Finding Nemo (10th, animation); the 1924 silent version of The Thief of Bagdad (ninth, fantasy); Red River (fifth, Western); McCabe & Mrs. Miller (eighth, Western); and The Hustler (sixth, sports).

The courtroom drama category featured the most newcomers to an AFI list: sixKramer vs. Kramer (third), Witness for the Prosecution (sixth), Anatomy of a Murder (seventh), In Cold Blood (eighth), A Cry in the Dark (ninth) and Judgment at Nuremberg (10th).

The romantic comedy, mystery, gangster and epic genres did not welcome rookies. Every film honored in those categories was on at least one previous AFI list, if not several others. The Wizard of Oz, for example, made the cut on 10 other AFI lists, more than any other film honored as a 10 Top 10 film.

In all, the AFI has now issued 13 best-of lists since 1998, when it unveiled its picks for the 100 top U.S. movies of the 20th century.

Here’s a rundown of the top 10 genre categories:

ANIMATION

  1. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937
  2. Pinocchio, 1940
  3. Bambi, 1942
  4. The Lion King, 1994
  5. Fantasia, 1940
  6. Toy Story, 1995
  7. Beauty and the Beast, 1991
  8. Shrek, 2001
  9. Cinderella, 1950
  10. Finding Nemo, 2003

FANTASY

  1. The Wizard of Oz, 1939
  2. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, 2001
  3. It’s a Wonderful Life, 1946
  4. King Kong, 1933
  5. Miracle on 34th Street, 1947
  6. Field of Dreams, 1989
  7. Harvey, 1950
  8. Groundhog Day, 1993
  9. The Thief of Bagdad, 1924
  10. Big, 1988

GANGSTER

  1. The Godfather, 1972
  2. Goodfellas, 1990
  3. The Godfather Part II, 1974
  4. White Heat, 1949
  5. Bonnie and Clyde, 1967
  6. Scarface: The Shame of a Nation, 1932
  7. Pulp Fiction, 1994
  8. The Public Enemy, 1931
  9. Little Caesar, 1930
  10. Scarface, 1983

SCIENCE FICTION

  1. 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968
  2. Star Wars: Episode IVA New Hope, 1977
  3. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, 1982
  4. A Clockwork Orange, 1971
  5. The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951
  6. Blade Runner, 1982
  7. Alien, 1979
  8. Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 1991
  9. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956
  10. Back to the Future, 1985

WESTERN

  1. The Searchers, 1956
  2. High Noon, 1952
  3. Shane, 1953
  4. Unforgiven, 1992
  5. Red River, 1948
  6. The Wild Bunch, 1969
  7. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969
  8. McCabe & Mrs. Miller, 1971
  9. Stagecoach, 1939
  10. Cat Ballou, 1965

SPORTS

  1. Raging Bull, 1980
  2. Rocky, 1976
  3. The Pride of the Yankees, 1942
  4. Hoosiers, 1986
  5. Bull Durham, 1988
  6. The Hustler, 1961
  7. Caddyshack, 1980
  8. Breaking Away, 1979
  9. National Velvet, 1944
  10. Jerry Maguire, 1996

MYSTERY

  1. Vertigo, 1958
  2. Chinatown, 1974
  3. Rear Window, 1954
  4. Laura, 1944
  5. The Third Man, 1949
  6. The Maltese Falcon, 1941
  7. North By Northwest, 1959
  8. Blue Velvet, 1986
  9. Dial M for Murder, 1954
  10. The Usual Suspects, 1995

ROMANTIC COMEDY

  1. City Lights, 1931
  2. Annie Hall, 1977
  3. It Happened One Night, 1934
  4. Roman Holiday, 1953
  5. The Philadelphia Story, 1940
  6. When Harry Met Sally…, 1989
  7. Adam’s Rib, 1949
  8. Moonstruck, 1987
  9. Harold and Maude, 1971
  10. Sleepless in Seattle, 1993

COURTROOM DRAMA

  1. To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962
  2. 12 Angry Men, 1957
  3. Kramer vs. Kramer, 1979
  4. The Verdict, 1982
  5. A Few Good Men, 1992
  6. Witness for the Prosecution, 1957
  7. Anatomy of a Murder, 1959
  8. In Cold Blood, 1967
  9. A Cry in the Dark, 1988
  10. Judgment at Nuremberg, 1961

EPIC

  1. Lawrence of Arabia, 1962
  2. Ben-Hur, 1959
  3. Schindler’s List, 1993
  4. Gone With the Wind, 1939
  5. Spartacus, 1960
  6. Titanic, 1997
  7. All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930
  8. Saving Private Ryan, 1998
  9. Reds, 1981
  10. The Ten Commandments, 1956

Celebrity Stories
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Felicity Huffman Biography

Posted by Vogt
at May 9, 2008

Felicity Huffman.jpg

Often lauded for her stage work, Felicity Huffman won a new round of fans as the smart, competent producer Dana Whitaker on the ABC series “Sports Night” (1998-2000). Although born in Westchester County, New York, she was raised in Colorado. Returning east to attend NYU, Huffman joined the Atlantic Theater Company, co-founded by David Mamet and William H Macy. Mamet offered the actress her first screen role, a bit part in “Things Change” (1988), and she was also tapped as Madonna’s understudy and successor in Mamet’s Broadway play “Speed-the-Plow” (also 1988).

Over the course of the next ten years, Huffman alternated between acclaimed stage roles (most often with the Atlantic Theater Company) and TV roles. She made her small screen debut as a series regular portraying the government security officer who aids an elderly man who seems to be growing younger in “Stephen King’s ‘Golden Years’” (CBS, 1991). Guest roles on series like “Law & Order” and “The X-Files” followed. Huffman was tapped to play Edward Asner’s daughter in the ABC sitcom “Thunder Alley” but was replaced after the pilot. She bounced back from that disappointment with a stage success in Mamet’s “The Cryptogram” (1995) and in a supporting turn in the playwright’s film “The Spanish Prisoner” (1998) before landing “Sports Night,” the Aaron Sorkin-penned sit-com that made her a well-known name.

Her real-life husband Macy, whom she married in 1997, joined the series in its second season, sparking an on-screen partnership that would endure through many projects: they also co-starred in the cable telepic “A Case of Murder” (1999), a comedy-mystery Macy adapted from the Donald Westlake novel; they both appeared in director Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” (1999); she had an uncredited turn in Macy’s award-winning TNT telepic “Door To Door,” which he also co-wrote; they reunited in the Showtime mini-series “Out of Order” (2003); and co-starred in the legal potboiler telepic “Reversible Errors” (2004).

After “Sports Night” and away from Macy, Huffman also kept busy solo on the small screen with parts in the telepics “The Heart Department” (2001), “Snap Decision” (2001) and, most impressively, in director John Frankenheimer’s acclaimed HBO drama “The Path to War” (2002), playing First Lady “Lady Bird” Johnson. She also scored a pair of high-profile recurring roles, playing Julia Wilcox, Frasier Crane’s caustic co-worker and eventual love interest on the hit sit-com “Frasier” from 2003-2004, and Charlotte Ellis in the legal drama “The D.A.” After a stint on the big screen as Kate Hudson’s late older sister in the comedy “Raising Helen” (2004), Huffman returned to series drama in the offbeat serial drama “Desperate Housewives” (ABC, 2004 - ), playing Lynette Scavo, a former corporate ladder-climber turned stay-at-home mom who struggles with her insecurities when she can’t control her wild children and gets little support from her husband. The show’s mega-popularity provided Huffman’s career with fresh energy–she scored an Emmy as Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for the series’ debut season, as well as a 2006 Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series–though she continued to remain the most private and low-profile of her co-stars.

Later that same year Huffman had an astonishing turn on the big screen in the indie “Transamerica” (2005) playing a pre-operative transsexual who, on the brink of her transforming surgery, discovered that in her youth she had fathered a son, who contacts her as a troubled teen hustler on the run. Despite the gender-bending premise, the film followed a traditional road movie dynamic, and Huffman won widespread praise for her nearly unrecognizable, fully formed performance. All the attention she received resulted in a Golden Globe award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, which almost guaranteed the actress a nomination from the Academy Awards. And she was indeed one of the nominees for Best Actress in a Leading Role when they were announced the morning of January 31, 2006.

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