COMING ATTRACTIONS (HAHAHAHAHAHA HE SAID "COMING....")

Oh man I cannot fucking WAIT. Joyeux Noel, motherfuckers!

IN WHICH I DISCUSS THE DUMBEST CASTING CHOICE IN THE HISTORY OF HOLLYWOOD, AND TRY NOT TO BLAME IT ON TOM CRUISE

One of the hardest things in life is not succumbing to all-encompassing cynicism. All too often people fucking suck, and make horribly short-sighted decisions, and basically make you want to grab them by the shoulders and shake them, screaming “ARE YOU FUCKING RETARDED?” Naturally, because the arts present an idealized and heightened version of reality, this bullshit is the most exasperating in that arena; the simultaneous lack of any real consequence and utter stupidity of the behavior of people in the arts—and particularly show biz—is perhaps the dumbest dumb known to man. And (totally blame this grandiose buildup on the fact that I've been bumping Watch The Throne on repeat the last couple days) even within showbiz, even compared to the legendarily stupid music industry, no one goes full retard like a movie executive.

While the history of stupid decisions in Hollywood is long enough and brimming with such robust idiocy that Ken Burns could do one of his zillion-part documentaries and not even get to any of the deep cuts, I would submit that we have recently borne witness to the high (low?) water mark of the art form. I speak of course of the recent announcement that Tom Cruise is set to play the lead in the screen adaptation of Lee Child's novel One Shot.

A bit of background is necessary here, so for the uninitiated, a brief history of Lee Child. Born Jim Grant, he was a television producer for many years in England (where he's from) before being laid off and deciding, “I'm going to write novels.” His first, Killing Floor, was released in 1997, a tale of a very-recently-ex-military policeman named Jack Reacher who decides, after leaving the military, to travel the United States, which country he's seen very little of, despite spending his entire life to date first as a son of a US military man and then as one himself. In short order, Reacher finds himself neck-deep in intrigue and in the schemes of bad men doing bad things (and, being a very tall man, being neck-deep in shit means there's a lot of it; note Reacher's height, he's described in every single book as being six-foot-five) and he has to kick fucking ass.

Since then, Child has written more than a dozen other novels, each featuring Reacher, a black-coffee-drinking Yankee fan in the fashion of yours truly, except that's where the similarities end. Reacher is the alpha badass of modern fiction. He's not a terribly naturalistic character, but that's the whole point of Reacher: he's smarter than everybody else, a better fighter, a better shot, blows shit up cooler than anyone else, and he gets laid just about every book because that's just the way things go (and lest one roll one's eyes and go “oh, more macho dude fantasy,” well over half of Child's regular readers are women, nearly all of whom would fuck Reacher in a heartbeat). He's a terrific character, abetted perfectly by Child's economical prose, brilliantly calibrated pacing, and meticulously researched, completely credible world-building. After Killing Floor, there were a handful of kind of shaky outings where Child found his footing and discovered what worked and didn't about Reacher, but around book six or seven he totally hit his stride and now, the publication of a new Reacher fills me with an excitement usually reserved for a new Radiohead album, fantasy football draft, or Steven Soderbergh picture. And Reacher lets me down way less than the last two.

I'd be lying out my ass if I tried to claim that I was objective about Reacher. I'm not remotely objective. When I heard that the movie rights to a number of Reacher books had been optioned, I immediately went, “Cool,” and then “Who in the sweet name of Jesus H. Fuck is going to play Reacher?” Since I enjoy the intellectual exercise casting movie versions of favorite books, and I like a good challenge, I started thinking. Several nosebleeds and sobbing fits later, I remembered that Google exists, and I came up with this.

While containing a couple bonafide “what the fuck”s—Bob Saget is 6'4”? Holy shit—that list ultimately isn't all that helpful, as there isn't a single dude on that list who could play Reacher. After a bit more cogitation I came up with the perfect plan: build a time machine, go back to about 1985, track down the very tall and very awesome Clancy Brown—

—then convince the head of Paramount to cast him with the old “Dude, trust me, this guy's gonna be a fuckin huge star, oh and by the way if you ever want to see your family alive you'll do as I ask, yuppie plankton” gambit. Realizing the R&D necessary to build the time machine was a bit out of my grasp (Paramount's, too; Universal charges an arm and a leg in rental fees to use Doc Brown's DeLorean, greedy fucks) I went back to square one. Who the fuck was big enough, scary enough, between the ages of 35-45, and sufficiently bankable or the kind of guy a studio marketing department can convince the media is an up-and-coming star? Eventually, I resigned myself to it being a Kobayashi Maru and figured Paramount was just buying the options to have them, and figured well shit, at least Lee got paid.

Then, the (unfortunately not-so) surprising announcement that Tom Cruise had been cast in One Shot. I got pissed and used curse words and e-mailed my mom and we both used lots of curse words and said mean things about Tom Cruise, an essential part of any grieving process (many therapists say saying mean things about Tom Cruise helps any grieving process, not just one involving him being miscast). But after the initial venting, I decided to put my anger aside and objectively evaluate the situation. Since there's nothing I can do to prevent the movie from being made, eventually I'm going to have to come to grips with the fact that it exists. And because if anyone accuses me of being “that guy” who can't handle his sacred, untouchable book being besmirched by Hollywood I'm going to murder them with a sword, I figured the safest bet would be to achieve some kind of state of grace with Tom Cruise's casting, and come to the same way of thinking I eventually adopted—quite successfully—with the Harry Potter books: book canon is book canon, movie canon is movie canon, and if they overlap great, and if they don't, oh well. So I decided to re-read One Shot.

Set in a nameless small city a couple hours' drive from Indianapolis, One Shot opens with a man making careful preparations to murder several people coming out of the city's main office building with a scoped rifle from a parking garage. His plan goes off without a hitch, and the cops begin an urgent investigation, finding a perfect trail of evidence leading to an ex-Army sniper named James Barr, whom they arrest in a drugged stupor at his house. When he's able to speak, he tells his lawyer (hired by his sister) that the cops have the wrong man, and he asks for Jack Reacher. No one there knows who the hell Jack Reacher is, but they're about to find out, as Reacher's on his way there without their needing to summon him.

There's history between Reacher and Barr: when Reacher, about to get fucked silly in Miami by a Norwegian dancer, sees a report about Barr's sniper act, he drops her ass on the spot and hops a bus to Indiana. So right there we know something's up, because no sane man kicks Norwegian dancer chicks to the curb unless there's a really, really good reason. Reacher arrives on the scene only to find Barr in a coma because he looked at another inmate in the city jail wrong and got his ass handed to him, and informs Barr's sister—who's thoroughly convinced of her brother's innocence, of course—that he's not there to help Barr. Still, why the fuck would Barr ask for him, then?

Clearly, since this all happens in like the first thirty pages of the book, Something Is Up. I'll stop before spoiling stuff, but you can probably venture an educated guess or two about what happens from there. Suffice to say, a major plot point that complicates Reacher's ability to investigate What The Fuck Is Going On involves him being six-foot-five. The entire climax revolves around Reacher being strong enough to crush a guy to death with his bare hands. And, completely above and beyond the physical stuff, watching Reacher think is one of the coolest games in town, because he's really smart and sees things from unconventional perspectives. And he flirts with one of the heroines by swapping George Orwell quotes with her; they each get a little playfully aroused at the other's erudition and wit.

As currently written, One Shot is not filmable, because the role of Reacher is impossible to cast. Lee Child himself acknowledged this, talking about Tom Cruise being cast in the role, following that by hoping for the best, because really, what the hell can the guy say? No one wants to go all Clive Cussler on a motherfucker and whine about his authorial vision being violated by hack filmmakers, because then you sound like an asshole.

The thing is, if One Shot turns out to be a good movie—something Tom Cruise has made quite a few of over the years—it will do so by being a very, very loose adaptation of the book. Director Christopher McQuarrie is working from an adaptation by Josh Olson (who wrote A History of Violence, which was a good fuckin movie). McQuarrie has done some good writing—The Usual Suspects was fucking tight, revisionist dickheads whining about the final twist rendering the whole rest of the movie moot be damned, and The Way of the Gun may not have gone anywhere, but it has the line “Shut that cunt's mouth or I'll come over there and fuckstart her head,” which is one of the five greatest lines of dialogue ever written, fo realz, it's just so crazy and wrong and meaningless it's fucking brilliant—but as for directing, well . . . everything after “Shut that cunt's mouth or I'll come over there and fuckstart her head” goes downhill in The Way of the Gun. And, lest we forget, McQuarrie and Tom Cruise worked together on that horseshit Nazi picture, which was, in case my choice of adjectives is ambiguous, a bunch of horseshit. So we'll see.

I'm still not happy about the Tom Cruise thing, though. The way I see it, if he wanted to be in a thriller playing an ex-military drifter who investigates a crime, he could have his agent pick up the phone and say to just about any writer in the known universe, “Hey, Tom Cruise wants you to write him a script,” and bam, there you go. Or, if it was Chris McQuarrie going, “I have a relationship with Tom Cruise” and the studio got all fluttery, first, nut up Chris. You know actors who are at least fucking five foot ten. Fuck, give Ryan Phillippe some steroids and bone up on your low-angle shots and you're at least doing better than fucking Tom Cruise. Second, if the studio had McQuarrie over the barrel and it wasn't really his fault and the only way they were going to make the movie was “you know, maybe with a . . . I don't know, like a . . .” in that “Unless you say the words 'Tom Cruise,' McQuarrie, you're gonna be shoveling dog shit in Kamchatka for your crimes against the Soviet state” passive-aggressive way, then fuck Hollywood, right in the ear.

Because really, this isn't Tom Cruise's fault, or Chris McQuarrie's, really. They didn't break the movie business, it was this way when they found it. The fault is with whichever coked-up, solipsistic, Entourage-watching, no-ironic-perspective-on-it-having, yuppie fuckface sat behind his desk, not having read the book, having the cognitive function of a fucking fossilized wooly mammoth turd, jerking off to himself in the mirror because he got to use the phrase “I'll greenlight this with a, like, Tom Cruise in the lead” for the first time. Whoever you are, I hope I never meet you, because I'm going to put my fucking fist through the back of your skull, you motherfucker. Reacher-style.

(drops the mic)

OH NO HE DI-IN'T!

Filmmakers can be assholes, and they can be competitive. For a fun read, check out this thing on Flavorpill about the bitchiest things one filmmaker ever said about another. Bathe in the schadenfreude.

ROLLIN WITH RICK

No, I'm not just Rickrolling you to get all misty and nostalgic about 2007 (or 1987 for that matter). This video is two things: 1) a coded message about what I was up to this afternoon, and 2) awesome. It didn't hurt that I'm replaying GTA IV for the zillionth time at the moment; that game is very special to me. But dig the choreography and editing in that joint, it'd be tight even if it wasn't machinima.

100 YEARS OF NICHOLAS RAY, AND HERE'S TO 100 MORE

Today is the 100th anniversary of Nicholas Ray's birth. You could make the argument that he was the best American film director of the 1950s, but rather than do that I'll just call him my favorite (the argument gets simpler when you consider Douglas Sirk was German and Hitchcock was English). I love the way his movies look, he got great performances out of his actors, and his eye for Otherness was unmatched in his time and rivaled only intermittently ever.

I've liked every Nicholas Ray picture I've ever seen—even his Jesus picture was pretty good—but three stand out as particular favorites:


1—In A Lonely Place (1950)

A noir picture that departs, per its director's habit, from a lot of the usual noir norms. Humphrey Bogart stars as a screenwriter with serious anger issues. He might have killed a guy, we're kept guessing about whether or not he did it until the end, but we're still totally compelled by him. I'd go as far as to call it Bogart's best performance ever. You feel the anger and danger, but also totally understand what Gloria Grahame sees in him (and her performance is top-notch). Their relationship is vivid, harrowing, all too real, leading to Gloria Grahame being both madly in love with and abjectly terrified of Bogart.

The ending is one of the greatest ever, even if it's pretty damn far from happy. It turns out that Bogart didn't actually kill the guy . . . but he still totally fucked up his relationship with Gloria Grahame, and the last absolutely stunning shot is Bogart walking away, tiny and alone, into the darkness. It's an ending where you exhale for the first time in like half an hour, saying “wow.”

In A Lonely Place is just a really good fucking movie. There's no way you can watch it and not go “That was a really good fucking movie.” You all gotta realize, me saying it's Bogart's best performance, I really like Humphrey Bogart. I think he's the greatest movie star in the history of America, and I give him more credit than most as an actor, too. The fact that this was Nicholas Ray's second feature—his first, They Live By Night, is pretty great too—is unreal. It's a completely assured, confident movie that goes nowhere you expect it to. I mean . . . it's just a really fucking good movie.


2—Johnny Guitar (1954)

Okay, Joan Crawford in a Western is a high concept that I'd greenlight with my zipper down. That alone is the greatest fucking idea of all time (I'll sacrifice all that stupid verisimilitude shit to have Joan Crawford in a Western, fuck y'all) but the fact that we got Mercedes McCambridge up in this too, as the villain, that's just icing on the cake.

Also, Sergio Leone copped the plot and everything else about this he could carry for Once Upon A Time In The West and that's very, very important. Like Keith Richards appropriating a Chuck Berry riff. But even more than that, a Western in the 50s (before John Ford ended the era with The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, because there ain't really shit new to say about the genre after a picture that good) where both protagonist and antagonist are women is notable. A movie that isn't romance-based where the hero and villain are both women and the guy is the love interest (even if he does get the movie named after him) today would be an outlier, but back then? Revolutionary. Again, there's that eye for Otherness.

This one doesn't quite hold up to the scrutiny of In A Lonely Place, but there's a wide expanse of gray area between “not as good as In A Lonely Place” and “not good.” Johnny Guitar is more for those moods when you're like “I want to see Joan Crawford in a Western, and I want to see some hawt 50s color cinematography.” Those moods are valid, make no mistake, and luckily for them there's Johnny Guitar.


3—Rebel Without A Cause (1955)

The first time I saw this was on TV when I was about 10 or 11 or something and my mom said “You need to learn about James Dean” or something along those lines. I watched it and learned all about James Dean (and, it must be said, all about Natalie Wood, too . . . meowwww; yes, I was a little precocious in that regard).

The second time I saw this was in a film appreciation class in high school that was a bit of a misnomer, as we watched everything on VHS and the class was only an hour long so we had to break every movie up over at least two classes and if too many of the hair-gelled “ey, fuck you, arright” guys and equally hair-gelled “ewwww, that's retaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarded” girls evinced any degree of boredom we'd abandon the picture at the hour mark and watch something else next class. The fact that we finished Rebel Without a Cause and then spent a third hour talking about it is a testament to the power of that movie, even if the discussion was peppered with “I didn't get it” or “that was old, that doesn't got nothin to do with nothin, people don't tawwk that way.”

Look, that's just the way teenagers are. Jesus Christ could do the Dougie across a swimming pool and turn tax forms into tits and at least one teenager would go, “Pssh, that's lame, the Dougie was so 2010.” And it's not because teenagers are shitheads, even though they are. The reason teenagers are shitheads is simple. You may remember how it went: there you were, little kid, short, squeaky voice, less than optimal cognitive abilities, when all of a sudden BOOM! Some mad scientist shot you in the ass with something that was part Viagra (which must have been doubly frustrating if you were a girl), part HGH, part evil mad scientist serum that caused bipolar disorder and whose side effects included horrible things happening to your skin. That shit would turn Gandhi into a shithead (and it probably did, too). Being a teenager sucks. It's no wonder they all turn into shitheads.

But even the shithead deserves empathy, up to a certain point, and that brings us to Rebel Without A Cause. The aftermath of World War II, which found America frantically trying to build a utopia as a means of dealing with how fucking horrible the war was (make no mistake, we got off easy, but that didn't mean the war didn't abjectly fucking suck), but not succeeding all the time. The kids were the ones who bore the brunt of their parents' freaking out, and so some movies were starting to be made about the troubled youth. Nicholas Ray sensed this trend, and was like “*sniffsniff* . . . I smell existential alienation . . . Otherness . . . there's only one man for the job! Get me a script, a camera, and some really pretty, emotionally damaged young people, and get me that shit five fucking minutes ago!”

The title Rebel Without A Cause sums the movie up perfectly. Outwardly, one can be excused for looking at James Dean and going “Fuck's his problem? He's growing up prosperous, in Los Angeles so we can't even write his gloominess off to the weather. Nut up, fucko.” But that's the thing. Being a teenager sucks sufficiently that even under relatively ideal circumstances like this one—like, seriously, his biggest problem is that his dad's henpecked, and that shit happens when you get in relationships with strong women, it doesn't mean strong women are bad and shouldn't be that way, it's just one of those things—the mere fact of being a teenager sucks balls.

Even though things turn out all right for James Dean (if a night or two with Natalie Wood doesn't take the edge off, you're beyond being worth saving), they end tragically for Sal Mineo. This is Nicholas Ray (widely said to be bisexual), clearing his throat pointedly and being as obvious as he was allowed to by the censors that sure, being a teenager is a headache, but being a gay teenager is a migraine.

Of course, Rebel Without A Cause is primarily remembered today for the whole James Dean thing. He died a month before the movie premiered, and it's been hard if not impossible to separate Rebel Without A Cause (or Giant or East of Eden for that matter) from the James Dean cult. (Eerie coincidence: I typed “James Dead” and had to correct it like 90 kajillion fucking times writing this.) I maintain that if he hadn't died, James Dean would have ended up being competition for Marlon Brando in the weird, annoying genius Method actor sweepstakes, flaming out in the mid 60s in some hushed-up scandal Kenneth Anger wrote about in Hollywood Babylon II before showing up in a few Paul Morrissey movies in the early 70s with his dick out fucking Joe D'Allessandro in the ass, then ending up bombed out of his goddamn mind on Hollywood Squares for a few years before croaking in 1981 or so with prostitutes of both genders trying in vain to flush the rest of the coke down the toilet before the cops arrive.

Had that seedy if highly lulzy series of events transpired, Rebel Without A Cause would probably be remembered today in much the same way as Nicholas Ray's earlier pictures were: as a really well-directed, well-acted tale of the Other, and maybe even his most multi-faceted look at the Other, because you've got James Dean, the handsome heteronormative (hahahahahahahaha oh that's funny because it's James Dean) white dude who's an Other because he's a teenager in the 50s, then Natalie Wood, who's the Other because she's a girl, with that subtle edge that she's olive-skinned (shit, people in the 50s were so racist Irish people were still barely white), and Sal Mineo is an Other because he puts the boldface and italics in the word “gay.” The pacing is much like it is in In A Lonely Place, not fast, but steady enough that it enchants, bringing the audience along with it into a world they probably wouldn't think to explore. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Nicholas Ray is fucking awesome.

So, happy 100th to the man, and may his contributions to cinema not be forgotten. I may have only talked about three of his movies here, but if you look up anything that says “directed by Nicholas Ray,” watch the shit out of it. Nicholas Ray is the truth.

TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, OWNAGE

Oh, HELL yes. Everybody British is in this, espionage (from a novel by John le Carre, the best of the best at that), and cool 70s clothes? Sign me up. In my own blood.

By the way, while we're at it, the fact that Gary Oldman is starting to look like Bill Nighy is fun and everything, but give him a fucking Oscar already. You hear me, Academy? Gary Oldman not having an Oscar is proof that something is dreadfully, horribly wrong. You shall taste the wrath of the righteous should this apostate heathenry go on any longer.

PLOT DEVICE

Plot Device from Red Giant on Vimeo.

Just watch it. This thing is awesome.