Big shakeup at The Golden Globes last night.

I used to care. I used to minute-by-minute blog the whole show, but now I haven't seen any of the movies, and there's nothing that can't wait until the next morning. What used to take hours is now accomplished in a couple minutes of reading.

But I have one question. Why were "A Star Is Born" and "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the "Drama" category? The Golden Globes have a "Musical or Comedy" category, and these 2 movies seem awfully musical.

From the Daily Mail article: "No doubt many were surprised by the win as Bohemian Rhapsody was generally poorly reviewed with 62% on Tomatometer by Rotten Tomatoes with top critics giving it 48%."

As for not talking about Trump:

It definitely seemed to be a concerted effort as host Sandra Oh previously told The Hollywood Reporter: 'I'm not interested in [talking about Trump] at all. What I’m interested in is pointing to actual real change. I want to focus on that because people can pooh-pooh Hollywood all they want – and there is a lot to pooh-pooh, sure – but we also make culture. How many gazillions of people have seen Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians? That changes things.'

One moment did get political, however, as Christian Bale had one of the most memorable speeches of the night while accepting Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for his role portraying former US Vice President Dick Cheney in Vice. He blasted the former politician as he said: 'Thank you to Satan for giving me inspiration on how to play this role... I will be cornering the market on charisma-free a******s. What do you think, Mitch McConnell next? That could be good.'

"Why do I find Stephen Miller completely compelling and want to write a novel about him? Why do I not want to write a novel about Jim Acosta?"

Tweets "American Psycho" author Bret Easton Ellis.

Should you want to be the guy Bret Easton Ellis wants to write a novel about?

If you don't know what he's talking about, here's the hilarious/painful interchange between Miller (the Trump adviser) and Acosta (of CNN):



Selected quotes:

Acosta: “What the president is proposing here does not sound like it’s in keeping with American tradition when it comes to immigration. The Statue of Liberty says, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’”

Miller: “I don’t want to get off into a whole thing about history here, but the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of liberty and lighting the world. It’s a symbol of American liberty lighting the world. The poem that you’re referring to, that was added later, is not actually a part of the original Statue of Liberty.”

Aside from his suitability as a character in a novel, Miller is certainly right that Acosta is conflating the Emma Lazarus poem with the Statue and that the original historical meaning of the statue precedes and is not the same as those famous lines in the poem. WaPo points that out:

“New Colossus” was not part of the original statue built by the French and given to the American people as a gift to celebrate the country’s centennial. Poet Emma Lazarus was asked to compose the poem in 1883 as part of a fundraising effort to build the statue’s base.... In 1903, 16 years after Lazarus’ death, the poem was inscribed on the statue’s base, just as millions of immigrants were streaming into New York harbor....

Earlier this year Rush Limbaugh blamed Lazarus for the false connection. “The Statue of Liberty had absolutely nothing to do with immigration,” Limbaugh said on a January 31 broadcast. “So why do people think that it does? Well, there was a socialist poet.”...

From the Rush Limbaugh link:

It was originally intended to be delivered to celebrate the centennial of the Declaration, the American Revolution.... The statue was not intended to recognize immigration. It was intended to recognize liberty and freedom. If you think they’re intertwined, don’t be misled.

Rush proceeds to mock Madeleine Albright for saying that Trump's immigration policy is making the Statue of Liberty cry:

The statue doesn’t cry. The statue is a statue. It’s made out of bronze. It doesn’t cry. There aren’t any tears coming from the eyes of the Statue of Liberty ’cause there aren’t any eyes, and the Statue of Liberty is not welcoming immigrants. What it represents is the beacon of liberty and freedom!

Yeah, well, maybe, but it's not made out of bronze. It's pure copper. We're just all misreading everything. But there's a continuum from misreading to interpretation. I can say for a fact that the statue is made out of copper, but the meaning of the statue is cultural, and it means what it has come to mean in the hearts of Americans. What the French had specifically in mind when they sent it to us is relevant if that's what's in our hearts.

You know, it wasn't even green when it arrived. Being copper, it was copper-colored. Do original meaning fans deny that it's green?

IN THE COMMENTS: Fernandinande wrote:

"American Psycho"/I tried reading that a few months ago, and speaking of run-on sentences and that silly "grade" metric, I stopped reading after a two-page sentence which painfully detailed all the products and actions the guy used in his morning routine.

And yet, it you gave me 2 pages right now of Bret Easton Ellis's description of what he imagines Stephen Miller does and uses in his morning routine, I'd eagerly, happily read every word of it. I assume it would be... completely compelling.

Does anyone want to see a biopic about Dick Cheney? And can you picture Christian Bale in the role?

Apparently, this is something Hollywood is attempting to do.

Mr. Bale, 43, is a three-time Oscar nominee and a one-time winner (for his crack-addled boxer in “The Fighter”), but he is best known for playing Batman in Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy.

And Dick Cheney has been called "The Dark Knight":

1. "Cheney is the Dark Knight." ("I loved The Dark Knight.... And Christian Bale plays an excellent Batman.... But its message was deeply statist, and the movie really reflects the sort of fear that scares Americans most, post-9/11.... This fantasy is precisely the Cheney/Bush approach to fighting the war on terror. The Bush administration couldn't find better cultural-ideological support for this approach than The Dark Knight and its chaos-driven bad guy and its omnipotent hero.")

2. "Dick Cheney is the Dark Knight." ("The Dark Knight, however, is conservative fantasy – someone who cuts through the red tape and throws bad guys off of balconies.")

3. "The Dark Knight: An Allegory of America in the Age of Bush?" ("Batman is a vigilante who works outside the law in order to combat crime; operating in the dark policy corridors to which Vice-President Dick Cheney alluded in speeches following 9/11.")

4. "Dark Knight: Former Vice President Cheney in the Global War on Terror." ("In a world of suicide bombers, weapons of mass destruction (WMD), covert financial sponsors, and enemies unconstrained by the laws of armed conflict, Cheney emerged as the man in the shadows who would do whatever he deemed necessary to address these threats. The power he acquired, however, and its implications for the future of a democratic society, caused many Americans to fear a greater potential threat from within.")

5. "The Dark Knight Turns Out to Be a Dick Cheney Fantasy." ("But as the film reached its climactic denouement, I found myself getting more and more perturbed at its underlying message, which seemed straight from the office of the Vice President.")

Quite aside from the specific connection to Batman/The Dark Knight, Cheney has been relentlessly characterized as "dark":

1. A NYRB review of 3 books about Cheney is titled "In the Darkness of Dick Cheney." ("[S]ecret power. Untrammeled power. Hard power. The power behind POTUS. The Dark Side.")

2. Just last November, Steve Bannon said: "Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That's power. It only helps us when they (liberals) get it wrong. When they're blind to who we are and what we're doing."

And I don't know what Dick Cheney thinks of the comparison to The Dark Knight, but "Dick Cheney embraces the Darth Vader meme":

While attending his granddaughter’s high school rodeo in Casper, Wyoming, Cheney showed reporters a trailer-hitch cover in the shape of the infamous “Star Wars” villain. “I’m rather proud of that,” he told them with a smile....

President George W. Bush also cracked a joke about it during Halloween season in 2007 while he was still in office. ”This morning I was with the vice president... I was asking him what costume he was planning. He said, ‘Well, I’m already wearing it.’ Then he mumbled something about the dark side of the force.” That same year Cheney said, “I’ve been asked if that nickname bothers me, and the answer is, no. After all, Darth Vader is one of the nicer things I’ve been called recently.”

"Naomi Watts says she had to paralyse the right-side of her face to play Princess Diana in a new biopic."

"The 44-year-old actress was so determined to perfect the late Princess of Wales’ mannerisms that she changed the way her mouth moved."

“I didn’t just want to appear like her, it’s also about the tone of her voice and the way she moved her face,” Naomi explains.

“It’s completely the opposite of how I move my face. I move my face on the right-hand side and she moved hers on the left. I had to walk around with a cocktail stick in my mouth to paralyse the right-hand side of my face for weeks.”

Oh, she did it with a stick in her mouth. The headline made me think she used injections.

And isn't it a shame? After all that effort, the movie has putrid reviews. These body modification hijinks get attention from the awards-giving community, but not when the movie is terrible.

Stick in your mouth for weeks, eh? Not quite Christian Bale and "The Machinist," but thanks for playing Win an Oscar.

Christian Bale Freakout + "Newsies."

This remix, as you might imagine, has some spoken obscenities:



(HD version.)

That Christian Bale freakout is now the "Bale Out" remix.

You know about the original, horrible rant. So then there's this (audio completely NSFW):



IN THE COMMENTS: I and others defend Bale.

AND: slhamlet, in the comments, points us to Ain't It Cool News, where Henry Knowles is giving the background to the story:

The DP on TERMINATOR SALVATION, Shane Hurlbut, is a apparently a light tweaker. He's a fairly young DP and likes to fiddle with his lights on set during action, which is a big "NO NO" on most productions unless worked out in advance with performers. But apparently Shane was a pretty unrepentant light tweaker.

The scene in question, was a very emotional and tough scene between Christian Bale and Bryce Howard. A scene that required soul bearing and a deep level of immersive concentration. The sort of scene where everyone on set knows not to get in anyone's eye lines, and definitely not to move lights around while FILMING. You lock that shit down before the scene starts.

Bale had indeed warned the DP on multiple occasions about messing with lights while the cameras were rolling, and Bale was in the midst of a painful scene with Bryce, what was described to me as being the emotional center of the film and his character for the film.

Now, the reason I know all of this is because the person that was there, felt that it should be made perfectly clear that Christian Bale was the utmost gentleman and cool guy on set. And the DP really was doing something that professional DPs with experience just don't do. Not during a performance.

We love you, Christian!

AND: Knowles isn't really a Henry. He's just a Harry. I know that. I knowl that.

Two movies.

I have so many DVDs on my shelf that I haven't watched that I've practically forbidden myself to order any more, but I just ordered two things that I wanted to see based on other works recently consumed:

1. "Marjoe." A documentary about a boy evangelist who grows up to expose the tricks he used (with his parents' guidance). This movie is the subject of interesting discussion in the Christopher Hitchens book "God Is Not Great" (which I've immensely enjoyed in audiobook form, read by the author with fascinating emotion).

2. "Little Dieter Needs to Fly." This is a documentay by Werner Herzog about Dieter Dengler, who appears in person in this film and is portrayed by Christian Bale in the current film "Rescue Dawn." I saw "Rescue Dawn" a couple days ago and found the story quite absorbing. Dengler was shot down flying over Laos and imprisoned by the North Vietnamese and -- with the help of a single nail -- he figures out how to escape. In this recent episode of "Fresh Air," Herzog explains why he made a second movie about Dengler.

Film fakery.

I went looking for some reviews that expressed what I thought of "Batman Begins" and found this, from David Denby:

This is an overly methodical and heavy-spirited movie—pop without rapture. Bruce comes back to Gotham and slowly assembles the elements of his costume, his vehicle, and his mode of operation—the kind of equipment fetishism that used to be tossed off in a few barbed exchanges between Sean Connery and Desmond Llewelyn’s Q in the old Bond films. And I miss Anton Furst’s urban-grotesque production design from the first movie—the curious, malign details pulled out of the night. Most of this movie is just dark, and the familiar trope of a high-flying passage through Gotham’s bunched skyscrapers isn’t as thrilling as it was years ago. The young Welsh-born actor Christian Bale is a serious fellow, but the most interesting thing about him—a glinting sense of superiority—gets erased by the dull earnestness of the screenplay, and the filmmakers haven’t developed an adequate villain for him to go up against. The return of Liam Neeson late in the movie is a bust, and the action climax, in which the water supply threatens to combine with a vicious white powder floating around the city (the mixture will drive everyone crazy, or at least make them sneeze), is cheesy and unexciting.

The real failing is Nolan’s. There’s very little sense of Batman’s awesome surveillance of the city from the heights; he just drops out of nowhere, thrashes all the bad guys in a whirl of movement that is shot too close, and edited too rapidly, for us to see much of anything, and then elevates out of the frame. In “Memento,” Nolan and his editor, Dody Dorn, created a new syntax for movies. It’s depressing to see Nolan now relying on the same fakery as everyone else.

Yes, exactly.

And about that crazy-making steam... Wouldn't that have been a great choice for the threat in an extremely low budget movie? Blow in some steam and have the actors act crazy.

Two posts on movie trailers? Althouse, have you finally gone to the movies again?

Why, yes, I have. Yes, I have. Impulsively, I darted out to see "Batman Begins," as you might have guessed from my first post today.

And? How was it?

Well, it was a big messy melange of things. No opening credits, so I had to wait to the end to go, oh, so that's Katie Holmes. Not that I had never read that she was in this movie. Just that I forgot. I knew it was Christian Bale, looking baleful. Looking a bit like Tom Cruise actually. Holmes looked a lot like Drew Barrymore. The School of Crooked Smiles acting. Morgan Freeman, I recognized him. He's always someone who's boringly solid and good. Does that piss him off? Oh, I have to be that guy again. Liam Neeson, Michael Caine -- I recognized them -- pouring great ladlefuls of talent on undersized roles.

Lots of shadowy black-and-grey sets with smoggy mists and glinting puddles. You could play a game of counting all the hidden bat-shaped images in various shots.

The Batmobile was the ugliest Batmobile ever. More like a super-clunky SUV than a great sports car. It seemed to handle really badly. But, implausibly, it could fly. The flying car in the trailer for "The Dukes of Hazzard" was more convincing.

I noticed a right-wing edge to some key statements: "Criminals thrive on the indulgence of society's understanding." Take that, you Gitmo critics! And it was quite clear that we were supposed to think about the criminals as al-Qaeda. Here was this "League of Shadows," based in Asia, bent on destroying "Gotham." We were nudged constantly to make this connection.

The beginning of the movie was interestingly scenic in a "Lord of the Rings" way, and involved a lot of learning how to fight, Asian-style, in a "Kill Bill: Volume 2" way. But why did Bruce Wayne learn all about swordplay, and then concoct a Batman persona who has nothing to do with swordfighting? And what was Christian Bale holding onto at the end of that ice slide that kept him from falling over the precipice? Somebody conveniently installed a handle, apparently.

And why was the speech on the soundtrack all muddled? Whenever Batman had his costume on, his voice was altered in a supposed-to-be scary way that seemed to belong in a children's movie. And when they identified one of the villains early on as "Ra's al Ghul," I was all, what did he say? Al Gore?

Desperate film ad.

A two inch square on page B4 of today's NY: "Christian Bale Lost 63 pounds" and then some almost invisible writing ("It's one of the reasons the film works so well"), the name of the film, the fact that it's now playing, and a grungy little photo of said emaciated actor. The things one has to do to get attention.

Fall movie preview.

The big Fall movie preview issue of Entertainment Weekly arrived in the mail today, and on the cover is my personal favorite actor, Johnny Depp. Not only is he clean shaven now, but he's got his hair combed back quite elegantly and he's wearing a suit. He looks quite like my father in the pencil drawing that I keep on the mantel. I'm having a bit of trouble getting past the cover! Hmm… the cover folds out and there are sixteen small pictures of various Fall movie stars. One of them is Maggie Gyllenhall, who looks uncannily like my own mother as a young girl. Okay, I'm finished with the cover. On to the magazine. Here's what caught my eye:

1. "Seinfeld" is coming out on DVD with "deleted scenes, blooper reels, an alternate version of the pilot, and cast commentaries."

2. Ereka Vetrini, Omarosa's nemesis from "The Apprentice," will be Tony Danza's sidekick on the new "Tony Danza Show." It's a talk show. Yeah, Ereka can talk.

3. Jamie Foxx, playing the role of Ray Charles in the biopic "Ray, " "wore prosthetics (modeled on Charles' actual eyes) to simulate the singer's blindness." He asserts that this was needed to avoid "cheating" as he moved around. It would be unaesthetic without prosthetics. But acting is faking it in all sorts of ways. Among the great actors who played blind sans eye prosthetics are: Audrey Hepburn and Bette Davis and Gabrielle Anwar and Patty Duke and Virginia Cherrill. The movies seem to prefer blind women to blind men, but I note the great Mr. Muckle in my all-time favorite comedy "It's a Gift." And the guy in "Butterflies Are Free." Ah! The best performance by a male actor as a blind character was Al Pacino. Hmm… and there was good old Gabrielle Anwar as his love interest. What has become of of Gabrielle anyway? Oh, and another fine performance by a male as a blind character was Gene Hackman. It seems blind men are funny and blind women are dramatic. You can think about why, and think about whether Foxx's film will be a hit. He sure looks like Ray Charles in the photograph. He's also, according to EW, a fine pianist--he went to college on a piano scholarship. So he'll be doing all the piano playing as Ray. Nice fact to know: Ray Charles, who died in June, was able to witness the final cut of the film.

4. John Travolta and Joaquin Phoenix play firefighters in "Ladder 49," which is supposed to be better than "Backdraft," which real firefighters hate (because it's unrealistic). The filmmakers want you to think "Black Hawk Down."

5. They remade "Alfie," with Jude Law as Michael Caine. I've never bothered to watch the Michael Caine one, so why should I care? Well, Law is much cuter than Caine.

6. So what's the Christian Bale diet? "I just didn't eat." He got down to 120 pounds (he's 6'2"). He also only slept 2 hours a night. What role required all that? Some paranoid guy in "The Machinist." He's bulked back up for "Batman."

7. New Alexander Payne movie. "Sideways." I loved "Election" and "After Schmidt" was pretty good. Good lord, this new film is set in a wine-tasting milieu!

8. "The Grudge"—they've hired the director of the original Japanese film ("Ju-on") to do the Hollywood version. Takashi Shimizu. It stars Sarah Michelle Gellar, who looks just like Gwyneth Paltrow in this picture.

9. Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet together at last! "Finding Neverland." A biopic of J.M. Barrie. I hope it's good, because this is one I'd like to see.

10. Kevin Spacey directs himself in a biopic of Bobby Darin. "Beyond the Sea." How could that possibly be good? Spacey is eight years older than Darin was when he died. And who is interested in the life of Bobby Darin? That's just crazy! It seems the only reason for this is that Spacey has always looked a bit like Bobby Darin. What's next for Kevin? A biopic of Lee Harvey Oswald?

11. It's biopic year for the Oscar-craving actors as Leonardo DiCaprio plays Howard Hughes (with Martin Scorsese directing) in "The Aviator." There really is some fascination in seeing Cate Blanchett impersonate Katharine Hepburn and Kate Beckinsale impersonate Ava Gardner.

12. Jim Carey as Lemony Snickett. He rides a Segway. Okay.

13. "Proof," "Closer" … I guess I'm supposed to care about these Oscar-y productions. I'll wait for the reviews. And even if they are good, I'll probably resist, because I still remember getting hoodwinked into seeing "The Hours." Prestige movies for women: leave me alone!

14. Then there's the question: What Don Cheadle movies can I see in December? There's "Hotel Rwanda," in which Cheadle plays the role of Paul Rusesabagina, who saved the lives of 1200 Tutsis in 1994 (a great story). And there's "The Assassination of Richard Nixon," a political thriller that also stars Sean Penn and Naomi Watts.

15. They're making a film of "Get Smart," with perfect casting: Steve Carell.

16. A current film I'd buy right now if it were on DVD: "Los Angeles Plays Itself." It's a documentary about L.A. as it appears in the movies.

17. Ah! Finally, a decent DVD of "Purple Rain." Make sure you get the 20th Anniversary version. Don't buy this one.