Month: March 2017

Audiences decide very quickly if a certain actor is an acceptable, believable choice for a certain character. Or not. We’re all familiar with pre-2010 casting decisions that were instantly derided by the planet earth as unpalatable but what are some of the more glaring casting mistakes of the last, oh, six or seven years?

All-Time Classics: (1) Patricia Arquette as an actress pretending to be a doctor in John Boorman‘s Beyond Rangoon (’95); (2) Jack Black as Carl Denham in Peter Jackson‘s King Kong (’05); (3) Seth Rogen as Britt Reid in The Green Hornet (’11); (4) Hayden Christensen as New Republic feature writer Stephen Glass (his college preppie voice and mock-vulnerable social manner were so grating that it was impossible to accept that seasoned journalists would have bought his schtick) in Shattered Glass; (5) Warren Beatty as a thin Oliver Hardy in The Fortune (’75); (6) Gregory Peck as Josef Mengele in The Boys From Brazil (’78); (7) Jamie Dornan in Fifty Shades of Gray (lacking in studly intensity); (8) Denise Richards as an idiotically grinning pilot in Starship Troopers; (9) John Wayne as a Roman Centurion in George Stevens‘ The Greatest Story Ever Told (’65); and (10) Frank Sinatra as a soft-spoken priest in Miracle of the Bells (’48).

If Hollywood was run like Russia and a Vladimir Putin-like figure was the big cheese, PricewaterhouseCoopers partner Brian Cullinan — the guy who fucked up by slipping Warren Beatty the wrong envelope (Best Actress instead of Best Picture) — would already be gone. I don’t know if Cullinan and Academy bigwigs met on Monday to assess the damage, but if they had two ape-sized goons would have stormed in and thrown a bag over Cullinan’s head and dragged him out of the room.

Obviously we don’t live under a Russian strongman and yet Cullinan was harshly dealt with this morning by a smoking-gun Variety article — a Moscow Central timeline piece with exclusive photos and reported/written by Lawrence Yee, Stuart Oldham and Jacob Bryant.

The long-haired person hugging Warren Beatty is Manchester By The Sea‘s Casey Affleck.

The photos and a corresponding timeline show that Cullinan had two envelopes in his hand (along with his cell phone) just prior to handing Beatty what Cullinan thought was the envelope containing the winner of the Best Picture Oscar but which was actually an envelope containing the winner of the Best Actress Oscar (i.e., La La Land‘s Emma Stone), which had been handed out moments earlier.

From the Variety article: “The newly uncovered photographs not only show Cullinan engaged on his phone shortly before the La La Land miscommunication — he’s also photographed mixing two red envelopes backstage alongside Beatty and Best Actor winner Casey Affleck, who had just exited the stage.

“This would dispute PWC’s official explanation that Cullinan grabbed the wrong envelope from a ‘backup pile,’ and shows he was likely always in possession of both the Best Actress envelope (which was given to Beatty) and the Best Picture envelope, the night’s two final awards.

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Bill Maher: “I don’t know who writes these speeches…the problem isn’t so much the policy as the personality…Teleprompter Trump doesn’t really match off-the-cuff Trump…you can’t have somebody who is diagnosable as a narcissist and all the rest and think that it’s going to come out well for us…we’re living in Cuckoo Cloudland and this is what he believes…you can see he doesn’t know anything…it’s all well and good to elect this guy who’s going to be the bull in the china shop, but the china being broken is your china…the disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality…his fans don’t believe in facts, mostly, and certainly not fact-checking…all this talk about the forgotten little man…tell me one thing he’s done for [that guy].” Or has even announced intentions along these lines.

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It was revealed last August that David Michod and Brad Pitt‘s War Machine (Netflix, 5.26), a comedy-drama about the Afghanistan conflict and Gen. Stanley McChrystal (renamed Gen. Dan McMahon in the film), would not get a 2016 award-season release.

Apparently Pitt, who’s also producing War Machine, didn’t want attention divided between Allied, the World War II shortfaller that opened on 11.23, and War Machine. This, at least, was one of the considerations. Another may have been that War Machine just isn’t an award-season type of film…who knows?

The news disappointed me as War Machine, which is based on Michael Hastings‘ “The Operators“, seemed (and still seems) like it might be an edgier, more interesting film than Allied.

War Machine costars Anthony Michael Hall, Topher Grace, Will Poulter, Tilda Swinton, Jonathan Ing and Ben Kingsley.

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