Where did I read an observation about the odd-couple pairing of Donald Trump and Mike Pence that compared Trump to the Rat Pack-era Dean Martin and Pence to Hugh Beaumont‘s Ward Cleaver in Leave It To Beaver? While I work on running that down, consider the following from Jane Mayer‘s 10.23 New Yorker piece, “The Danger of President Pence”:
Two gay deserters are standing in front of Mike Pence‘s Tom Dunson in a climactic scene from Red River. Gay guy #1: “Why doncha get your Bible and read over us after you shoot us?” Pence (smug, sneering): “I’m gonna hang ya.” Montgomery Clift (as the closeted Matthew Garth): “No, no you’re not. You’re not gonna hang those men.” Pence: “Who’ll stop me?” Clift: “I will.”
Fandor has posted a video about Chris Nolan‘s favorite films, or those “which may have helped shape his unique directorial sensibility.” 2001: A Space Odyssey (fine), Koyaanisqatsi (potrzebie), The Thin Red Line (“Malick’s portrayal of mental states and memory”) and….wait, Lewis Gilbert‘s The Spy Who Loved Me? Nolan quote: “At a certain point the Bond films fixed in my head as a great example of scope and scale in large scale images.”
Maybe, but The Spy Who Loved Me was the first Bond film to (a) embrace flagrant fakeness, (b) an ironic air-quote attitude and (c) a kind of japey, self-mocking comedic tone. Goldfinger was the first Bond film to pass along a self-amused, partially self-satirizing approach to rugged secret-agent machismo — The Spy Who Loved Me was the first to look the audience in the eye and say, “You may have gathered or deduced that we were having fun with 007 before. Well, from here on we have absolutely no genuine investment in the classic Ian Fleming James Bond realm — it’s all a fucking joke.”
When has Chris Nolan ever come within 1000 miles of Gilbert’s sensibility in anything he’s ever directed?
“Ya home?…my son, this is your time…we own ya…I waited my entire life for this…the world’s gonna start over…what happens now?…the revolution will be live,” etc. Speaking as a dedicated hater of superhero films, as a sworn enemy of the DC/Marvel universes (except for Ant-Man and the first two Captain America films and maybe one or two others), I half-regret acknowledging that Black Panther feels like some kind of rejuvenation, and that even I feel revved about it. This isn’t just a superhero flick — it’s a major rattling of the Mike Pence cage. Yo bumblefucks…we own ya. Fred Hampton lives.
If you want a simian type with a look of beady-eyed menace….a guy who smokes and glares and wolfs his food and pounds the table…a lowlife with nothing on his mind except finding new ways to communicate the greasy, slimey, low-life mentality of a muscular, high-testosterone thug….Jon Bernthal is your man. Best known for portraying Shane Walsh in AMC’s The Walking Dead and for stand-out roles in Fury, The Wolf of Wall Street, Sicario, The Accountant, Baby Driver and Wind River. He will never, ever portray a nice suburban guy who’s been to college. Or a guy with a mellow attitude. He’ll never play a mild-mannered employee of an ad agency or a real-estate company, or a guy who teaches grade-school kids or works at a small-town hardware store. The man is a predator, an animal — he spits and slurps and chews food with his mouth half-open. He only conveys animal vibes.
If you leave aside the horrid issue of sexual assault and focus solely on matters of taste and aspiration, it is entirely fair to describe Bob Weinstein as a bottom feeder and Harvey, for all his detestable private behavior, as a guy who at least understood and respected smarthouse cinema. But not Bob. In their heyday Bob was Irwin Yablans to Harvey’s Frank Yablans. Bob has never given a shit about quality — he’s an exploitation guy who just wants to sell tickets.
So when I read yesterday that Bob is bumping Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s The Current War into 2018, I knew it was tantamount to a burial. It wouldn’t have done well commercially anyway, but now it’s “a cat in a bag with the bag in a river,” as Sidney Falco might’ve said.
And that’s really too bad. The Current War is weird and slow but an interesting film, and a highly unusual and eccentric one by visual standards alone. It’s a cerebral, vaguely boring Terrence Malick thing mixed with How The West Was Won. Every scene, line and frame tells you it was made by talented, forward-thinking cool cats trying to be different and distinctive, and now it’s probably going to be thrown into the bin. A shame.
The movie is basically an AC/DC thing — the battle between direct vs. alternating currents of electricity in the late 1880s and early 1890s, or a stab at creating compelling drama out of a battle of opposing modes and strategies for providing electricity to the public.
This in itself, especially in an era of increasingly downscale if not submental approaches to mass entertainment, is highly eccentric. But the tone of inspirational strangeness doesn’t end there.
The DC team was led by genius inventor Thomas A. Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) while the AC approach was steamrolled by engineer-businessman George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon) with a late-inning assist from genius Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Hoult).
This is fine as far as histrionic line readings, personality conflicts and eccentric facial-hair appearances are concerned, but an especially striking visual style from South Korean dp Chung Hoon-Chung (It, The Handmaiden, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) compounds the fascination.
In an attempt to reflect the unusual, headstrong mentalities of Edison and Westinghouse, Gomez-Rejon and Chung have gone with a kind of early ‘60s Cinerama approach to visual composition — widescreen images, wide-angle lenses and a frequent decision to avoid conventional close-ups and medium shots in favor of what has to be called striking if not bizarre avant-garde framings in which the actors are presented as smallish figures against dynamically broad images and vast painterly landscapes.
The look of The Current War, in short, closely resembles the extreme wide-angle compositions in 1962’s How The West Was Won.
I usually have a quibble or two with any Kyle BuchananOscar Futures column, but I’m almost 100% on board with his latest, which is mainly an expression of profound disappointment with Woody Allen‘s Wonder Wheel. I do, however, believe that Kate Winslet will snag the fifth Best Actress nomination slot. Winning is out of the question — it’s a McDormand vs. Ronan vs. Streep thing with Sally Hawkins snagging slot #4. Battle of the Sexes‘ Emma Stone is not happening.
If you were to levitate five or six miles and then hover and look down at the human race and all its troubles — millions of angry, fearful ants throwing spears and lobbing Twitter grenades, crippled by the viruses of fear, cruelty, ignorance, selfishness, aggression and hostility — you might be moved to say “wow, things are really sad down there…a lotta people hurtin’ and it really scares me.” But if you say the same words to the BBC from your Manhattan apartment, you’re a Harvey Weinstein apologist. Warning: You’re probably still allowed to think such things, but vocal expression is not a good idea in the current climate.
Woody clarifies: “When I said I felt sad for Harvey Weinstein I thought it was clear the meaning was because he is a sad, sick man. I was surprised it was treated differently. Lest there be any ambiguity, this statement clarifies my intention and feelings.”
What else could the Academy have done? Issue a statement saying “Harvey’s a bad guy but let’s let byones be bygones”? Of course he got kicked out.
If I were Harvey (the thought!) I would do everything I could to cleanse my soul and body and try to start anew. Maybe I could never succeed, but at least I could try — at least that. I would remove my clothing and lash myself with birch branches. I would grow a white beard and become a devout Buddhist. I would pray and meditate. I would enter a mountain monastery and take a vow of abstinence and silence for 365 days. I would wear robes and sandals and eat nothing but fruit and wheat grass and steamed vegetables, and drink nothing but purified water and green tea.
Then I would move to Vietnam, buy a first-rate Harley Davidson and become Lord Jim. I would live in modest abodes and do volunteer work at hospitals, or better yet at hospices. I would work for free for rice farmers, seeking only rice bowls and a place to sleep. I would get on the bike and rumble across Asia and into India and Pakistan, and then join the fight against ISIS. I would become a Zen poet warrior, dressed in black Viet-Cong pajamas with an AK-47 strapped across my back. I would continue to pray and meditate. And if I get killed by ISIS, I would at least die clean.
“Giving Trump a pass is…well, it’s not what I do but on the other hand I don’t feel comfortable giving him shit about his crazy, loose-cannon behavior. It’s not what I do as a rule. I love pop culture more than politics. Colbert can take shots at Trump…he’s good at that. You have to understand that I’m more popular with rural dumbshits than Colbert or Kimmel. I’m not exactly a conservative guy but they have it in their heads that I am. Why would I want to dissuade them of that opinion?”
Hanks is one of the best-liked guys in this business, in part because he’s always been delicate and diplomatic in airing opinions about this or that. But he ignored this social discipline when Brockes asked him about career limitations or hindrances.
Tom Hanks, the blunt-spoken author of “Uncommon Type.”
Brockes: “What’s the male equivalent of the Hollywood actress considered too old for a lead?” Hanks: “Unfairly, I don’t think there is one.” Brockes: “You don’t age out of some genres?” Hanks: “No. But here’s what you can do: you can fat yourself out. If you’re fat, you can’t play an astronaut. Take a look at the guys who are still working; they’re in really good shape. Otherwise, they become character guys. So that’s possible.”
First of all, you’re not allowed to say “fat” any more. Hanks surely understands that anyone who uses this word is a fat-shamer. In today’s p.c. realm there are no fat people — just cool people of different shapes and sizes. (Unless you’re talking about Donald Trump.) So right away Hanks has violated a major p.c. no-no.
Secondly (and I’m sure Hanks gets this also), fat actors might not be able to play an astronaut but they can definitely play a thinner person’s lover or fiancee. It used to be that corpulent actors were used only as comic relief types or the second-best friend of the handsome lead. Nowadays fat actors actually get laid in features and TV series, which never would have even occured to directors and screenwriters 25 years ago.
Within the last five years we’ve seen (a) the Santa Claus-sized Michael Chernus play the lover of a hot married woman in People, Places, Things, (b) the girthy Mel Rodriguez play a guy with an active love life in Will Forte‘s The Last Man on Earth series, (c) Forte’s character in Nebraska looking to keep a sexual relationship going with Missy Doty (who was described by Thomas Haden Church‘s character in Sideways as “the grateful type”), (d) the bulky, nearly bald Steve Zissis connecting with Amanda Peet on HBO’s Togetherness, and (e) the rail-thin Mamoudou Athie do the deed with Danielle McDonald in Patti Cake$.
