WHERE ARE THEY NOW: MEG RYAN

Although not a classic star persay, Meg Ryan was at one time this generation's Jean Arthur. For awhile, Ryan was the highest paid female actress in Hollywood. It was about ten years ago that Meg Ryan was commanding about $15 million per picture. Then she kind of disappeared. Now, she attempted to make a comeback and took a few bit parts in low budget failures like in the 2007 movie Land of Women, or 2008's straight-to-video My Mom's New Boyfriend?

So, what happened? How does one of the biggest box-office stars of the 90's drop off the radar like this? Was it age discrimination? Was it a poor choice of roles? Was it the death of the kind of huge romantic comedies she starred in? Meg Ryan movies grossed over $1 billion from 1993 to 1998.

Ryan did take a three year hiatus after the big time bomb in 2004 of Against the Ropes, but she came back in some bigger failures like being a part of an ensemble cast for the movie, The Women in 2008 where she joined Annette Bening, Eva Mendes, Jada Pinkett Smith, Debra Messing, Bette Midler, and Candice Bergen in a remake of the 1939 classic.

In 2009, Ryan starred alongside Kristen Bell and Justin Long in the independent comedy film Serious Moonlight. In this film, directed by actress Cheryl Hines and based on a screenplay by late writer Adrienne Shelly, who was murdered a year prior to filming, Ryan portrayed a high-powered female attorney who learns that her husband, played by Timothy Hutton, is about to leave their troubled marriage, and decides to hold him captive by duct-taping him to a toilet. Picked up by Magnolia Pictures, the production received a limited release throughout North America only, and grossed less than $150,000 worldwide. In October 2010, she was cast in the ensemble drama Lives of The Saints alongside Kat Dennings, Kevin Zegers and John Lithgow. The drama, similar in style to Crash, interweaves the lives of a group of Los Angeles residents who are all struggling with past mistakes. In April 2011, it was announced that Meg Ryan would make her feature film directing debut with a film titled Into the Beautiful. In May 2011 she was cast in Long Time Gone, a film adaptation of the April Stevens novel Angel Angel. However, she dropped out of the cast before filming started. She was replaced by Virginia Madsen.

What caused this disappearance of Meg Ryan from the movies? Well it could be many things. She had an affair with Russell Crowe while still married to Dennis Quaid - but audiences usually have short term memories with those indiscretions. She has made a poor choice of movie roles, even appearing naked in the R-rated bomb In The Cut in 2003. Also, Hollywood is notoriuous for being unkind to aging actresses. Meg Ryan is now 52, and unless you are Meryl Streep I think good roles for older women are hard to come by.

Nevertheless, Ryan has not had a hit movie since 1998's You've Got Mail, and I think she would be wise to try to return to her roots in romantic comedies. At this time no new Meg Ryan movies are in production, but for many film lovers, she was America's sweetheart in countless movies of the 1990s. Where has the time gone...

RECENTLY VIEWED: HANGING UP

Lately it seems like I have been watching more cartoons for my son, and more "chick flicks" for my wife to keep them both happy. I was surprised when my wife had never seen the moving Hanging Up. I actually saw it years ago when I was home for some reason. The movie was on again on one of the cable channels, and we rewatched it.

Hanging Up is a 2000 American comedy-drama film about a trio of sisters who bond over their ambivalence toward the approaching death of their curmudgeonly father, to whom none of them were particularly close. This film features Diane Keaton (who also directed), Meg Ryan, and Lisa Kudrow as the three sisters, and Walter Matthau (in his final film appearance) as the father. In very poor health throughout filming, he was diagnosed with colon cancer for the second time in his life in November 1999 shortly after filming ended. He died over seven months later, four months after the film's release.

Georgia Mozell, Eve Marks and Maddy Mozell are adult sisters. Georgia is the editor of her own wildly successful self-titled women's magazine. She strives for publicity at any cost. Party planner Eve is the mother hen of the group, not only of her own family, but also of her siblings and father as their mother, Pat, not only emotionally left their father when they divorced, but her daughters as well. And Maddy is a vacuous soap opera actress who has always struggled for her own identity. Despite being as busy with her own life as the others, Eve is the only one of the three who deals with the long term hospitalization of their cantankerous seventy-nine year old father, Lou Mozell, when he enters the early stages of dementia, and the associated outcomes of that hospitalization. Eve's caring for Lou is despite an especially hurtful incident with him seven years earlier. As the emotional aspect of looking after Lou becomes more and more stressful, Eve has to figure out how to maintain her own sanity, while dealing with her sisters, who believe they too are part of their father's care while they don't lift a finger to help.

Hanging Up was released in United States on February 18, 2000, to relatively negative to average reviews. It made just over $15.7 million opening weekend, over the Presidents' Day weekend, opening at #2 behind The Whole Nine Yards. Hanging Up opened in 2,618 theatres at an average of exactly $6,000. It lasted eight weeks in domestic release before dropping out of the top 10 in its third week of release. Domestically grossing $36,050,230 with an extra $15,829,814 (from worldwide audiences) brought its international total to $51,880,044. Hanging Up ultimately fell $9 million short of recuperating its budget of $60 million.

If you want to see a better movie about children coming to grips with a dying parent I would recommend Nothing In Common (1986) and Big Fish (2003) much more than Hanging Up. However, the acting is great in Hanging Up, and as a fan of Walter Matthau I recommend seeing him in his last movie role. It's a tearjerker - just not the best terjerker...

MY RATING: 6 OUT OF 10