"At the start of filming Law said he made sure 'very subtly' to use a dab or two of the stomach-turning scent. However, when he found that the smell aided his performance, 'it became a spray-fest.' "When Jude walked in on set,” the director, Karim Aïnouz, said, 'it was just horrible.' [Alicia] Vikander, who performed sex scenes with Law, gave a look of disgust as the actor [said] 'Even the camera operators were gagging. My memory is that we were laughing a lot.... [I'd] read several interesting accounts that you could smell Henry three rooms away. His leg was rotting so badly. He hid it with rose oil. I thought it would have a great impact if I smelt awful.'"
I asked ChatGPT, "Can you tell me about other actors who have used smelliness to enhance their performance?" In classic ChatGPT form, I got a list of 5 items:
I never saw the movie — meant to, just didn't — but I realize this plays on something in "There Will Be Blood." Know Your Meme gets me the details:
I Drink Your Milkshakeis a catchphrase originating from There Will Be Blood.... It tells the story of a silver-miner-turned-oil-man on a ruthless quest for wealth during Southern California’s oil boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In the film, the phrase was intentionally used as a metaphor: sucking milkshake from someone else to demonstrate not only oil drainage from prized land, but the harsh nature of how cruelty often trumps meekness. In its original context, the scene is meant to evoke contempt for the character of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis) and pity for his adopted son H.W. (Russel Harvard).
Interesting happenstance, the appearance of the verb "trumps."
The video at Know Your Memes is not available, but I've found it. Here:
Okay. I had never seen that before. Very intense. I get it. Here's the text (which you won't fully appreciate without hearing the performance):
That land has been had. Nothing you can do about it. It's gone. It's had... You lose.... Drainage! Drainage, Eli, you boy. Drained dry. I'm so sorry. Here, if you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw. There it is, that's a straw, you see? Watch it. Now, my straw reaches acroooooooss the room and starts to drink your milkshake. I... drink... your... milkshake!
Back to the cartoon. Is the other man — the little man with his back to us — supposed to be Putin? I assumed so. It was the cartoon of the day when Trump first encountered Putin in the flesh. But the setting is the Oval Office, and that's not where Putin and Trump met. And I don't think a world leader in the Oval Office is ever seated on the other side of the President's desk. But maybe the cartoonist resorted to the simplest indication that this is the Oval Office. And yet, come on, cartoonist (Farley Katz), you don't even have Trump's hair swooping in the right direction.
And why the distracting extra-long tie? I know it's stock humor about Trump — he wears his ties very long. We can veer into phallic symbology. Or are we supposed to focus on the tie? Is it the equivalent of the straw that reaches across the room? Are we to picture the drinking of Putin's (or whoever's) country as accomplished with the tie?
I like the idea of Daniel Day-Lewis playing Trump. He played Abraham Lincoln in a movie — another movie I haven't seen. Maybe there's some reference to that movie that might make the cartoon click into place for me. But I'm a little confused. I do think the little guy in the movie looks a bit Putinish, and it's funny to think of Trump towering over him, yelling at him, humiliating him, and reducing him to a quivering mass of jelly. But that doesn't seem anti-Trump enough for New Yorker cartoon-of-the-day purposes. So... maybe back to the tie. It's long but limp....
IN THE COMMENTS: I'm prodded to see the little man in the chair as Obama. David Smith points to "the big ears... the half-tone shading on the face." Laslo Spatula observes the "Vaguely tight, smooth afro (no hair lines drawn to indicate wavy, straight, etc; Trump has line detail in his hair). Big ears. Skin tone darker than Trump."
I realize this idea did cross my mind, but I was so stuck on Putin when it was cartoon of the day on that day. To see the other man as Obama answers my problem of a world leader seated on the other side of the President's desk. And now I notice the door behind "Trump." When the President is seated at his desk in the Oval Office, there are windows behind him. The Trump character there is pre-presidency Trump, looming over President Obama and threatening him.
But why would he say "I drink up your country"? The United States is Trump's country too! In The New Yorker's view, perhaps, there are 2 Americas. Red America and Blue America, like 2 milkshakes, and Blue America might have been happy with its own milkshake, ignoring Red America over there. But Red America is cruel and greedy. It will drink up Blue America.
AND: Yet it doesn't make sense — or it makes only horrible sense — for Americans to picture political power in terms of draining the country, with the Democratic Party having its share and the Republican Party the other share. It might make sense — but I don't think this would be The New Yorker's sense — for Trump to be talking about getting votes that Democrats think belong to them. A politician is doing a fine job if he wins votes that have traditionally gone to the opposing party. But when people cast votes, they aren't drained. They've simply participated in the most recent election and they fully retain their vote, to be cast in the next election. I guess there might be some kind of insinuation that these voters, duped into voting for Trump, will have their interests drained... or maybe that a Trump presidency will destroy democracy and their vote really will be lost.
Have I thought about this more than The New Yorker did? Maybe it simply hit the editors as surreal and bizarre, and — because of a solid assumption of Trump hate — it seemed to just work.
ALSO IN THE COMMENTS: I think pacwest sums up the New Yorker's thinking:
That is Obama behind the desk in the oval office. He created an America greater than any other. The evil fat monster Donald Trump has just been elected and is going to suck all the juices out of his divine creation. Bwaa ha ha! The horror!
The special word for the female actor began disappearing a while back, as if "-ess" is demeaning. We don't say "poetess" anymore.
But does that mean different categories are bad? The roles — other than very minor roles — are almost always written in gendered terms. If a requirement of equal numbers of male and female nominees and an award for both a female and a male were to end, what would happen? Given the kinds of roles that male actors play, I think it's quite likely that they would dominate — not as much as males would dominate in sports if gender separation ended — because they tend to get bigger roles, with a wider range of things they get to show off their powers doing.
Here's the full list of actors who've been nominated for Oscars for leading roles (with the winners identified), and here's the corresponding list for actresses. Try to imagine different years with the categories merged. In 2012, poor Jennifer Lawrence as Tiffany Maxwell in "Silver Linings Playbook," would have had to duke it out with Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln.
And think of the fights we'd have to have. We've seen the #OscarsSoWhite criticisms of the unequal treatment of black performers. Obviously, we don't have separate racial categories for the awards, so the disparities show, though they are complicated by the unequal numbers of people of different races in the United States (and the UK). The merging of the gender categories would put disparities in a stark light, given the equal numbers of males and females in the population. There's an expectation of numerical equality, but I don't think that's what we'd see. It might be good to see that disparity and have more conversation about it.
But I think the separate gender categories for the awards are better for women, mostly because movies tell stories and the stories involve gender roles in endlessly complicated ways. We'd be distracted and confused trying to talk about what kind of equality we want, and I think the stories would suffer. Movies are bad enough already. It might be even worse than merging men and women in sports contests. At least in sports it might be possible to measure the competitors in some scientific way and assign them to different classes — weight, muscle mass, etc. etc. You can never do something like that in art.
"I’m a fight fan, and when you watch a referee in a match, even if the fighters are tangled up, if they’ve each got a free arm and are still punching, the ref will let them keep fighting. It’s only when they get completely tangled up that he makes them break the clinch and start again. That’s my feeling about it."
And, referring to the last debate: "I thought that if you could see someone acting like a president on the stage, you have better eyesight than I do. Having said that, in the end, if the candidates want to act like damn fools, I’m not going to stop them."
It should be noted that Megyn Kelly is back, and Trump seems ready to take questions from the woman he may have accused of menstruating.
I wanted to link to my old post discussing Trump's enigmatic old wisecrack "blood coming out of her wherever" — at the time, I just said "He went menstrual on her" — and my search of the archive, using the terms "megyn" and "blood," caused me to discover something that perhaps no one has yet noticed. Trump's mind went to "blood" the day after the debate, but during the debate itself, the word "blood" appeared in a very vivid context.
I'm certainly an imperfect man. And it's only by the blood of Jesus Christ that I've been redeemed from my sins. So I know that God doesn't call me to do a specific thing, God hasn't given me a list, a Ten Commandments, if you will, of things to act on the first day. What God calls us to do is follow his will. And ultimately that's what I'm going to try to do.
At the time, I said:
Nicely done, I think. Sincerely religious, complete with "the blood of Jesus Christ," but manifested in public life in ways that are not noticeably different from being a kind, decent person in a way that works for people of any religion or no religion.
Words stick in your mind and recirculate into new contexts. It occurs to me now that Trump's striking use of "blood" the next day came not from thoughts of women on their period but the dramatic image of blood that was Scott Walker's go-to reaction when asked about religion. I wonder what Trump thought about the man who stood right next to him that night last August and spoke so directly and openly in the kind of stark religious words that Trump — for all his blunt speech — decorously eschews.
But Scott Walker is long gone and we're many debates down the road from that night last August...
... and there will be far fewer men on the stage tonight. We're not down to 2, so it's not quite the boxing match that the metaphorical mind of Chris Wallace envisioned, but there will be blood.
And by the way, what is the origin of the phrase "there will be blood"? Who said it first? Was it Daniel Day-Lewis?
Then the LORD said to Moses, "Say to Aaron, 'Take your staff and stretch out your hand over the waters of Egypt, over their rivers, over their streams, and over their pools, and over all their reservoirs of water, that they may become blood; and there will be bloodthroughout all the land of Egypt, both in vessels of wood and in vessels of stone.'"
I'm thinking about why I don't want to see the movie "Selma" and why the only movie from last year that I took the time to watch was "The Grand Budapest Hotel." I also don't want to see "American Sniper," and I avoided the movie "Lincoln," even when it was staring me in the face on television and even though I love Daniel Day-Lewis. Maybe I just don't like to watch actors pretending to be particular historical figures. It's too much of an impersonation, and invention and originality is problematic. And maybe it's the distraction of the distortions done for dramatic effect, which seems to be the case with the character of LBJ in "Selma." I'm fully interested in history and am, right now, thoroughly immersed in the series of Robert A. Caro books about LBJ. I want to get as close to understanding the great historical character as I can, and any 2 hours immersed in those books serves that interest better than watching dramatic scenes in "Selma."
Here's the earlier blog post where I talk about the Maureen Dowd column criticizing the movie for making a "faux" "villain" out of LBJ. And here's a new piece in The New Yorker by Amy Davidson saying "Why 'Selma' Is More Than Fair to L.B.J." I dislike LBJ and regard him as a great villain (even if his particular form of villainy put him on the good side of some issues), and I don't really care whether the film is "fair" to him or not. If I saw the movie, it would be to pursue my own interest in the way media massages the story. I'd write a blog post. The post would quote the line: "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
That's the end of "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," a great, great movie with a historical setting and a fictional story. Jimmy Stewart plays the part of a made-up U.S. Senator, Ransom "Ranse" Stoddard. The West, of course, was a real place, not a fictional place, and so it doesn't fit the category I really want to talk about in connection with "The Grand Budapest Hotel."
"The Grand Budapest Hotel" has a fictional historical story, set in a fictional Eastern European country, Zubrowka. (The name Zubrowka comes from the traditional Polish bison-grass flavored vodka.) Here's Wikipedia's plot summary for the movie — a lot about a vaguely explained war in the 1930s and its impact on a posh hotel. It is completely weird and fantastical and yet it conveys quite deep emotions about love and loss, and the resonance with history feels profound and comical. One feels history without needing to fuss over the accuracy. There can be no accuracy. I love that.
Zubrowka is the last country named on Wikipedia's "List of fictional countries," which I found because I was thinking about how great it was to have a fictional country in "The Grand Budapest Hotel" and wanted to think of other movies with a strong feeling of history in a particular place, where the place is fictional. Before looking, I thought of the great comedies "The Great Dictator" (Tomania) and "Duck Soup" (Freedonia and Sylvania). Wikipedia's list of fictional countries doesn't have "The Great Dictator," and not everything on the list has a fictional country used to tell a historical story. So I'm not looking for things like Florin (in "The Princess Bride") or Oz, because these are fantasy lands, not any kind of stand-in for a real geographical place on Earth, or Eastasia and Oceania in "1984" or Gilead in "The Handmaid's Tale" because these stories are not set in historical time but in the future.
So there's a category of movie that I want to say I love, that I want to put above the usual historical movies, but I haven't found enough examples to make a proper category. Perhaps "The Grand Budapest Hotel" is too original to define a category. In that case: grand!
What does "palpable" add? Is it just verbiage — meaningless padding — or is it a way to say that he feels it — he senses it? (It's his truth.) Or does it mean there's some substantial bitchery?
And what's with "bitchery" and "element... of bitchery"? That seems like a way to avoid saying that the woman is a bitch. There's some bitchery in the letter she wrote.
Once you know it's real, you can't admire the acting. You could admire the nerve of the performers to go through the ordeal, but only if they chose to do it that way. Were they paid enough? Did they willingly submit to whatever surprises the filmmaker had in store for them? Did they know there were limits to what would be imposed on them? What power did they have to draw the line?
What if you knew that the actress in a rape scene had no idea what the scene would be and a willing actor was directed to rape her on the set? Assume that afterwards, she was convinced that it worked to produce what looks like a great acting performance, for which she might receive an Oscar, and she was persuaded to keep the director's methodology secret. But the truth slipped out somehow. Would you refuse to see the movie because of the way it was made? If others chose to see it, would you denounce them as moral cretins? Related questions:
It's not "my job... to somehow get [Congress] to behave," said Obama at yesterday's news conference, quoted by Maureen Dowd, who says:
Actually, it is his job to get them to behave. The job of the former community organizer and self-styled uniter is to somehow get this dunderheaded Congress, which is mind-bendingly awful, to do the stuff he wants them to do. It’s called leadership.
He still thinks he’ll do his thing from the balcony and everyone else will follow along below. That’s not how it works.
How can the president star in a White House Correspondents’ Association dinner satirical film pretending to be Daniel Day-Lewis playing Barack Obama in Steven Spielberg’s movie “Obama,” and not have absorbed the lessons of “Lincoln”?
1. It's silly to think that because Obama played the role of himself (playing Day-Lewis playing himself) that Obama is all about Lincoln. It made Obama look like he's about Obama, and putting Obama on the same level as Lincoln, with the mock-historical grandeur and the direction by Steven Spielberg, seems likely only to inflate Obama's egocentrism.
2. Why would this Hollywood-in-Washington adoration make him deferential to some other historical figure, one who had to accomplish great things to achieve his high place in history? Quite the opposite! It should make Obama feel that it's always been enough for him simply to be Obama, the screen onto which a nation projects its hopes and dreams. Why should Obama "absorb lessons" from the movie about "Lincoln"? Obama created his own mode of arriving at greatness, and it's not much like Lincoln's at all.
3. A "community organizer" doesn't really "organize" a community, but even if one does, Congress isn't like the communities Obama supposedly organized. The idea that Obama could "organize" Congress is silly. Congress has its own organization, and it's full of powerful individuals who are currently actively pursuing political goals, not a bunch of citizens going about their private lives who might be induced to back some political project run by somebody else.
4. Yesterday's performance at the press conference was — I would presume — theater. It was the Theater of the Ineffectual President. It was not the Theater of the Lame Duck. (Dowd's piece is titled "Bottoms Up, Lame Duck." The "Bottoms Up" refers to her suggestion that Obama "have a drink with Mitch McConnell.") Obama likes to say he'll never face another election, but he's facing the 2014 elections. His performance yesterday was — I presume — a scene in the script for winning the midterms. I can't accomplish anything without Congress. Congress is the problem. He needs his Congress. Will we not give this beautiful man — upon whom we've projected our hopes and dreams — the Congress that will bring his presidency to a successful end? He is the central character in this movie "Obama" that we've all got to sit through. If we stay in character as members of the audience — passively taking in whatever we see on the screen — we'll merge our desires with the main character in the big spectacle. Identification with the protagonist. In the scene that ran yesterday, we saw our protagonist suffering his doubts and his weaknesses. He is beset with adversaries. Oh, no!
5. So, now we can see that Obama is doing his "job," as described by Maureen Dowd: "to somehow get this dunderheaded Congress, which is mind-bendingly awful, to do the stuff he wants them to do." Somehow. I'm telling you how I think he's going about getting Congress — Congress 2015 — to do the stuff he wants them to do. Keep sitting on your bottom as he leads from behind. Or: Bottoms up! And I don't mean drinking. I mean, get your ass out of your theater seat and stop watching the "Obama" movie. The lameness is not in our President but in ourselves.
Lincoln learned from experience and grew while in office. Born and raised in a white supremacist society, he believed as late as the fall of 1862 that whites and blacks could not live together as equals and that, if freed en masse, blacks would have to depart the United States. But by the end of his life he came to understand the wartime struggles of slaves and free blacks as morally equivalent to those of the American Revolution, and to imagine a place for African-Americans as equal citizens of the republic. He did not confuse clarity of purpose with rigidity of outlook.
Also at the link, UW film prof Jeff Smith talks about movies about Presidents. What other films about Presidents should there be?
The big surprise is that there has been no biopic about George Washington. If Lincoln does well, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Jon Meacham’s book, “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House,” get optioned. Jackson’s persona lends itself to screen treatment. And I have no doubt that Barack Obama will someday be profiled — he has made history, after all.
What's the best portrayal of a President in the movies? Smith says Henry Fonda in "Young Mr. Lincoln," but, as Smith notes, that film doesn't depict Lincoln as President.
The old film, directed by John Ford, has a murder trial at its center: Lincoln’s first real case as a lawyer in Springfield, Ill.
So you can put that film on your list of best depictions of lawyers. Smith notes that like "Young Mr. Lincoln," the new Lincoln movie concentrates on a brief slice of Lincoln's life. But the slice in Spielberg's movie is a grand achievement: the 13th Amendment. The choice of a grand or a little-know incident is going to make a big difference in the type of movie it is, and also Spielberg isn't John Ford. Nevertheless, both Henry Fonda and Daniel Day-Lewis are dreamy.
Harold Holzer, a Lincoln scholar, told CBS News: “Lincoln died long before audio recording was possible so we have no hints about what he really sounded like, except the reminiscences of his contemporaries. The most frequent things we read are that he had a nasal, high voice that somehow miraculously floated over large crowds.”
Day-Lewis said "said the voice materialised 'in my mind’s ear'" and "If I hear a voice, I tend to believe that I hear it for good reason.”
Here's a new trailer, including some of Day-Lewis's vocalizations. I don't have a problem with the presumably historically grounded high-pitched voice. But what's the point of going realistic about the sound of Lincoln's voice when everything else about the movie seems all theatrical and pretentious, including the lines Day-Lewis must speak with that voice? "I am the President of the United States clothed with enormous power!"
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