• Blog

• All

Mar 17, 2015 By Mackenzie Scott TORRES

My Favorite Thing is our recurring series when an artist tells us about one of their favorite things (favorite album, movie, book, TV show, comic book, food, etc.). Here, singer/songwriter/guitarist TORRES (aka Mackenzie Scott) tells us about her favorite actress, Julianne Moore, who just won the Oscar for Best Actress for her performance in Still Alice. TORRES’ sophomore album, Sprinter, is released on May 5 via Partisan.

TORRES is playing Under the Radar’s official nighttime SXSW showcase at Central Presbyterian Church this Saturday, March 21, at 1 AM. Look for an interview with her in Under the Radar’s forthcoming next print issue.

It took me until my 24th year to discover something about myself: I like Julianne Moore better than all the other actresses. The truth is that I’ve always liked her, since first seeing her portray a near-doomed Dr. Sarah Harding in The Lost World: Jurassic Park as a child. She’s one of perhaps six actresses who I believe could find the universality in any role and make it relevant, emphasizing humanity above all else in her delivery. I’ve also noticed that I gravitate to her most nuanced roles, the films in which her characters reveal, in action or words, only a minute portion of what’s actually happening in her brain. The performances, in these instances, rely exclusively on Moore’s ability to communicate with nothing more than a subtle purse of the lips, a hardening of the jaw, or perhaps a slight shift in posture. It’s the internal nature of these types of roles that began to hold my attention for days, even weeks, following my viewing of the films. The first time I saw The Hours I was in high school, and though I didn’t know (and still don’t know) firsthand what it’s like to be woman in the 1950s with a child and husband and a home to keep up, I did and do know depression. I remember watching her and believing that I knew how she felt, that stifled, sad woman on the screen, and that somehow she knew how I felt, a stifled, sad teenager in Georgia.

I find any amount of screen time in any of her roles to be engrossing, even when the role is minor or the film itself isn’t so good. There’s no “wrong” place to start. However, if your Julianne Moore obsession blossomed later in life, as mine did, you’re going to need a shortlist of introductory material. She’s on a lot of folks’ radar these days because of her Oscar-winning performance in Still Alice, which I recently saw in theatres (I sobbed profusely and still have yet to recover), but Julianne Moore has been around for a while. It’s my opinion that the bulk of her genius work has gone almost unrecognized, from what I can tell. Maybe people are finally starting to get it? Ugh. Everyone should actually go watch Don Jon on Netflix right now, because she’s truly mesmeric in that film.

Here are some of my favorite J. Moore movies, in no particular order. Some are obvious choices, but I like to think that at least one or two of them are deep cuts.

1. Chloe

2. Don Jon

3. The End of the Affair

4. Hannibal

5. The Hours

6. The Kids Are Alright

7. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

8. The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio

9. Savage Grace

10. A Single Man

www.torrestorrestorres.com