What is it With You Blondes?

I’m stealing the title idea for this post from this post on the ever great Media Funhouse blog. Ed Grant wrote about the death of character actor Val Avery more than four years ago, and he linked to a clip on YouTube featuring Avery opposite Gena Rowlands in John Cassavetes’s 1971 film Minnie and Moskowitz. I always remembered the scene he included in the celebration of Avery’s career, and given the link is now dead on his blog I figured I would continue the tradition. If you want to see an awesome bit of brilliant acting characterized by some tried and true Cassavettes discomfort, watch the following clip, all ten minutes of it!

It’s funny how almost five year later I remembered that post and sought out Minnie and Moskowitz. What’s more, I am really glad I did. Cassavettes is painful, difficult, frustrating, and as real as cinema gets—this film exposes all of this and more in some truly brilliant ways. I’m gonna have to write a much longer post to even begin to do it justice, but in the meantime here’s to hoping this preview pushes you, dear reader, to give it a shot sometime in the future. And, just so you know, as of yesteray it was available on Netflix for instant streaming.

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