Maestroleon concept poster is, at the very least, an excellent start. Visual designer: “I couldn’t find a good high-rez Leonard Bernstein so I just enlarged Joaquin’s nose and gave him glasses.”
Daily
I Like It Like This
I know this expression. I’ve worn it myself a few times. It says “I’ve been practicing this hard-ass glare in my Bedminster bathroom since this morning.”
Borrowed from the N.Y. Post…thanks.
He clearly rehearsed and refined the glare and achieved a certain “don’t tread on me” theatricality.
He’s an animal but you have to give the devil his due — he’s been performing in front of cameras for decades and knows what works and what doesn’t in terms of conveying that tough mafia boss persona.
What wasn’t intended but came through anyway: the man looks cornered, like a defiant rat. James Cagney’s Cody Jarrett on top of that huge oil refinery tank — “Come and get me!”
A possibly wiser way to go would have been to flash that big, beaming, pasted-on smile that he uses when posing with fans and allies. That would have said “they can book me but they can’t deter me or quash my spirit.”
He’s well past “playing it smart”, of course. His basic psychology took over a long time ago.
“Dune: Part Two” Bumped Again
I’ve no intention of seeing Dune: Part Two no matter when it gets released. It had been slated to open on 11.17.63, and before that on 11.3.23, and prior to that on 10.20.23. It’s now scheduled to open on 3.15.24, or roughly seven months hence. Because of the SAG/AFTRA strike. Whatever.
When Ben Foster Was King-Shit Bad Guy
Posted on 8.22.07: It’s too early to get into James Mangold‘s 3:10 to Yuma (Lionsgate, 9.7) which has a lot of good things going for it and will probably, I’m guessing, be widely liked. But if this film was an interactive video game with plastic pistols, I would have spent my whole time firing at Ben Foster‘s nutball bad guy. I wanted him dead — morte — as soon as he came on-screen. I almost mean Foster himself rather than the villain he plays.
Okay, that’s putting a bit harshly. Foster is “good” as Russell Crowe‘s loyal lieutenant — intense, commanding, colorful — but I hated his performance as much as his $850 Nudies-on-Lankershim leather jacket and all the Hollywood gunk he has caked all over his face at the end. I despised Foster’s performance even more than Joseph Gordon Levitt‘s in The Lookout, and that’s saying something.
Foster is totally actor-ish and post-modern diseased in this thing. He’s delivering one of those performances that say “look at me, Hollywood — I bring a charismatic evil-ness and a 21st Century loony-tunes intensity to my parts every time.” That is, unless he’s playing Angel in the X-Men movies or doing a quality TV thing in Six Feet Under, in which case he may be into something else. But that won’t happen for a while because Foster has become Hollywood’s go-to guy for parts Michael Madsen was playing ten years ago.
To deliver a classic lunatic performance you have to out-nutbag previous movie wackos, and one way to do this (ask the ghosts of John Ford or Budd Boetticher or Howard Hawks for advice) is to burn a guy alive inside a flaming stagecoach. And Foster manages this feat (the performance, not the burning) with just two expressions — his frozen-eyed Alpha Dog wacko look, and a slightly calmer version of same in which he seems to be thinking about turning wacko in about two or three minutes.
An awful lot of people get drilled in 3:10 to Yuma. I’ll bet more people die in this film than all the guys killed in all the dime western novels ever written by Elmore Leonard, Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey combined, and frankly I got a little tired of this after a while.
But I kept wishing that Mangold would kill Foster’s psycho. Kill him for those ice-blue eyes, for that hat he wears, for those buttons on the back of his leather coat. Mangold is good at killing other guys you want to see die, but he lets Foster skate and that’s too bad.
If I saw Foster on a Los Angeles street I would smile and shake hands and act like a gentleman, but I’d give him a covert dirty look when his back is turned.
Haley and Ramaswamy
The candidates who helped themselves the most during last night’s Republican debate were Nikki Haley (the most sensible and presidential sounding) and Vivek Ramaswamy. Tbe best of them, Chris Christie, didn’t do as well as he should have, but he said some good things. Haley came off the best.
Coppola’s “Priscilla” Apparently Ignores Excellent Material
There’s a new Rebecca Keegan THR article about Sofia Coppola‘s Priscilla (A24), and the support she got from Priscilla Presley, whose life with Elvis Presley from age 14 to 24 (barely pubescent girlfriend to wife-mother) is the subject of the film.
Repeating for emphasis, the article says that the Tinkerbell-sized (4’11”) Cailee Spaeny plays Priscilla “from age 14 to age 24.”
In other words Coppola’s film omits the last three years of Elvis and Priscilla’s strained and occasionally tempestuous relationship (they separated in February 1972 and divorced the following year), not to mention Presley’s untimely death in August ’77.
Priscilla wasn’t around at the time, of course, but c’mon…it’s about her long relationship with Presley and Coppola ignores his death, which happened only four years after their 1973 divorce?
To go by Keegan, the film’s 14-year saga happens between Priscilla’s first meeting with Elvis in 1959 at a party in Germany (she was born in May 1945) and sometime in mid 1969, or roughly two years after their Las Vegas wedding on 5.1.67. Exactly nine months later the now-deceased Lisa Marie Presley was born (2.1.68).
A few weeks or months later Priscilla “began taking private dance lessons” while the constantly-catting-around Elvis was filming Live a Little, Love a Little (released on 10.23.68), and she fell heavily for the instructor, identified only as “Mark” in Priscilla’s “Elvis and Me.” They did the nasty but not for long.
Priscilla had another, longer-lasting affair with Afro-haired karate instructor Mike Stone in ’72, but that, apparently, was after her separation from Elvis. There was apparently some back-and-forth, some push-pull variance of feeling. Presley forcefully had sex with Priscilla after he got wind of the Stone affair, or something like that. They did, however, divorce the following year. And yet they were seen holding hands after it was finalized.
The forceful-sex story seems to contradict reports that Elvis declined to have sex with Priscilla after Lisa Marie’s birth. (He apparently had some kind of bizarre hangup about mothers being used goods.) As many Presley biographers have reported, Elvis was totally into jailbait, or young teens starting around the age of 14.
All in all, Coppola’s film bypasses a lot of dramatic potential. It doesn’t even include their separation and divorce…c’mon.
Keegan’s story ends with this paragraoh: “[Last] May, Coppola screened the film for Priscilla. ‘When I saw the movie, I tried to separate myself and live it as if I was just a fan or just someone that’s wanting to see the movie,’ she says. ‘At the end, I actually…I was quite emotional. Only being 14. You look back and you go, ‘Why me? Why am I here? Why am I driving in a limo, going through the gates of Graceland with Elvis?’”
She meant that? Priscilla, 78, knew who Elvis was as well as his many biographers, and she was actually wondering why she was being driven through the gates of Graceland at age 14 or 15 or whenever it was?
It goes without saying that Keegan never mentions the bizarre 18-inch height disparity between Spaeny and Jacob Elordi, who plays Elvis in Coppola’s film.
The real-life Elvis and Priscilla were separated by eight inches of height — Elvis was 6’0″ and Priscilla was (and presumably still is) 5’4″. But in the film, the former Priscilla Beaulieu (later Presley) is played by the 59-inch-tall Spaeny (roughly the size of a ten-year-old) and Elvis is played by the 77-inch-tall Elordi.
Forget Mescal In Any Role or Film
Any film starring or costarring Paul Mescal gets an HE demerit. I really, really don’t like this guy, and I’ll repeat what I said yesterday, which is that if I were gay I wouldn’t “do” him on a bet. (Somebody replied that Mescal wouldn’t “do” me either…fine.) I’ve only seen Mescal in Aftersun and I’m already sick of him.
This aside, Garth Davis‘s Foe looks and feels like a bummer. Mescal’s character is “informed by a stranger that he’ll be sent to live on a large space station, and his wife (Saoirse Ronan) will be left in the company of someone else”?…eff that jazz. I know this film is going to put me into a very bad place. Saoirse Ronan clearly gives another first-rate performance…sorry.
Defiant Dog Has His Day
Rudy Giuliani’s Fulton County Jail booking was just a warm-up act. For sometime Thursday afternoon (8.24) the just-like-any-other-ne’er-do-well processing of Lex Luthor (275 pounds and counting) will be at hand…same mug shot, same everything.
HE Sides with Nikita3553
..,in the matter of Netflix’s basic strategy when it comes to theatrical vs. streaming. This dispute appears of a World of Reel post about David Fincher’s The Killer, which I won’t be seeing for some time as I won’t be in Venice.
Whupass Splendor
Next Monday evening (8.28) all-media invitees in New York City and Los Angeles will revel in some good Denzel whupass. I for one would love to see those gangsta flash-mob store thieves receive a little Denzel discipline, but that’s me.
