Otessa Moshfegh‘s Brad Pitt profile in the new GQ (“Brad Pitt’s Wildest Dreams“) is my idea of first-rate. Perceptive, well sculpted, pocket-drop prose, satisfactory, etc.

But the photos by Elizaveta Porodina convey…I don’t know what the hell they convey. Some kind of late David Bowie persona with hints or echoes of the Thin White Duke, and perhaps blended with an older version of Helmut Berger in Visconti’s The Damned.

Pitt’s thinking about the photos, I’m guessing, is something along the lines of “you have to experiment and try for something else…I can’t just be Cliff in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood for the rest of my life…that’s lazy…let’s try this Siegfried and Roy meets ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ thing on for size and see where it takes us.”

The article is an early promotional salvo for David Leitch‘s Bullet Train (Sony, 8.5), an ultra-violent cartoon aboard a Japanese bullet train travelling from Tokyo to Kyoto. To go by the trailers, pic is seemingly aimed at the ADD yokels who didn’t like Watcher. Pitt plays a “seasoned but unlucky” assassin named Ladybug.

The Tokyo-Kyoto trip itself takes around 160 minutes minutes; the film lasts 153 minutes.

Datalounge reacts to Pitt’s GQ cover photo:

1. “Omg. He looks amazing!! This is ART, darling. Why did he never do these weird and cool photo shoots while young? I guess he has nothing to prove now.”

2. “He should sue the stylist and photographer.”

3. “Jesus! He looks waxy, corpse-like.”

4. “Love this shot!!!!”

5. “He looks embalmed…embalmed chic. I don’t know if he’s had work done, or if it’s bad makeup or bad photoshop, or a combo.”

6. “I could have taken more flattering pictures with my phone, and I am not a photographer. Truly terrible work.”

7. “I had no idea he had tattoos on his legs. Overall, these are not good pics. He’s too old to pull off this avant-garde photoshoot. Leave [this stuff] to Harry Styles.”

8. “Didn’t they used to call him Jan Michael Vincent?”

9. “He’s too old for this. If this was him 20 years ago, yes!”