Midweek Update: No Country for Young Men

Denzel Washington had a good weekend. Sony Pictures basically paid for him to go to an idyllic town in Sicily, and the movie, The Equalizer 3, made back its budget over the holiday weekend. People wanted to see Denzel wreck some Eurotrash, and he delivered (I have more on my admiration for Washington on my TikTok). It’s not that Washington doesn’t do work outside the action genre (see The Tragedy of Macbeth and Fences for recent examples), but rather that people will show up to see him in his own franchise where he is the draw rather than the property itself.

Dustin Rowles over at Pajiba also made the excellent point that Denzel doesn’t even need to do anything other than act as opposed to Tom Cruise nearly killing himself in each Mission: Impossible movie. You could argue that Denzel isn’t aiming to make movies that gross over a billion worldwide, but as the underwhelming box office from Dead Reckoning, Part One showed, people won’t automatically turn out simply because you drive a motorcycle off a cliff.

But part of Denzel’s appeal (and for that matter, Cruise’s) is that they were able to build star power over the course of decades. Denzel and Cruise have been movie stars since the mid-1980s. They’ve had highs and lows, but they were given both time and properties to make a name for themselves where audiences would trust the actor.

Now look at this poor bastard:

I don’t know if Wonka will be good or not, but studios don’t trust audiences to show up for a Timotheé Chalamet movie based on his name alone. It doesn’t matter that he’s talented. It doesn’t matter that he’s charismatic. It doesn’t matter that he’s handsome. Studios no longer want to bank on stars. Stars are people. Can’t own those! But you can own Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and make a prequel to that, and then you can plug in the talented kid from Call Me By Your Name.

Stardom used to be fickle and transient, and I suppose for the older generation, there’s never been a better time to be famous because you no longer have to worry about Eve Harrington. If anything, our movies would love to keep the older stars forever young by digitally de-aging them. Conventional wisdom at the studio level is that it’s better to spend $300 million on a new Indiana Jones movie than spend $150 million seeing if you can build an exciting vehicle around a young star. Will that star want more money if the movie is successful? Probably! But even if they want a $20 million payday for a sequel, you’re still paying significantly less than hoping there’s still an audience for a decades-old franchise featuring its aged star.

We’re seeing an industry that’s become so notoriously risk-averse that it’s scared itself into a corner. IP can be inviting, but it can also be an albatross that people find off-putting. Also (and I can’t believe I have to say this), people like movie stars! Yes, people are fans of certain properties, but they also love celebrity. People are messy and complicated, but they can also be charismatic and winning. Will people always tune in for a star vehicle? Of course not! I’m not pretending that the Dwayne Johnson movie Skyscraper was a hit, but neither was Black Adam.

Part of Denzel’s success is that he gets to operate between expensive blockbusters and indie films. The Equalizer 3 is a modestly budgeted feature, and it is now a modest success. Everyone wins here, and it would be nice if that kind of film could be put on the shoulders of a younger generation of actors. Watching young and talented performers get gobbled up into franchise machines that overshadow them at almost every turn (seriously, what is Oscar-winner Ariana DeBose doing in a supporting role in a Kraven the Hunter movie?) is one of the ways we’re getting swindled.

Denzel Washington and Tom Cruise and every other actor who became a major star in the 1980s will one day no longer be with us. We need younger actors to be stars on their own terms and not just within the bounds of the IP the studio has set for them. While media CEOs would like to slap a computer-generated copy of Denzel or Cruise’s face on a younger body and have them dance around for decades to come, I want to see that even less than Kraven the Hunter.

Recommendations

The Mask of Zorro is only $15.50 on 4K. Is Zorro IP? Sure! But it’s a very simple one to understand (guy in a mask, uses a sword, likes to carve the letter “Z” into stuff) and relies more on the star power of Antonio Banderas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Anthony Hopkins. It’s a terrific adventure movie, and one of the final films that relied largely on practical effects before we moved into the age of CGI overload. I genuinely believe it’s one of the best movies of the 90s.

I’m also recommending another 4K on sale to add to your collection: Looper. Rian Johnson’s time traveling sci-fi film features Bruce Willis’ final great performance. He’s very good in Moonrise Kingdom, but that’s an ensemble affair, and Looper really lets him shine in a way that not every film did. You can see Willis sparking to the material, and watching him play out a tragic arc where he’s fighting for survival against his younger self makes for a rich performance.

As for Substacks, I enjoyed this one by Jason O. Gilbert about the parade of Silicon Valley doofuses who think they’re going to stroll into the Presidency because they made a lot of money in the tech industry. Honestly, the only thing these guys (and it’s always guys because Silicon Valley loves its vainglorious men) have going for them is that they’re young, which would be an asset if they had anything of value to say. They don’t, they won’t get the big prize they’re after, but they’ll be a canker on the body politic for years to come.

What I’m Watching

Frasier is our comfort show right now, and it’s a show that holds up well because while not every joke still lands, the central premise of mocking snobs does not get old. Watching Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) and Niles (David Hyde Pierce) repeatedly get their comeuppance is so rewarding, and while I think trying to reboot the show for Paramount+ is a fool’s errand, I suppose the same could have been said about trying to do a spinoff of a show as successful as Cheers.

What I’m Reading

I finally finished Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. I knew I had to finish it one sitting because I reached a point that was so sad that I started crying, and I desperately needed the book to give me a different emotion.

It’s an excellent novel, and reading it I knew it would become one of my favorites. It covers the intersection of love, death, and finding meaning in your relationships, but does so in a way that feels skillful and unique. The way it weaves in video games is particularly deft as it feels like the work of someone who really did the work in appreciating how games are made, and also seeing how they connect people. It’s a beautiful book, and I’m in awe of what author Gabrielle Zevin accomplished.

I have now moved on to Station Eleven because I guess I’m just on a kick of stories about people using the power of art to get them through dark times.

In other reads:

‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ Pauline Kael, and the Essay That Changed Film Criticism by Jason Bailey [Flavorwire] - I really appreciated the essay not only because of the mythology that built up around the essay itself, but also because it does a good job of contextualizing contemporary film criticism, the flair of Kael’s writing, and showcasing why an understanding of larger contexts is essential to any piece of criticism. This is great criticism not because it gets the movie “wrong” or “right”, but because it’s thoughtfully engaging with the material and feeling that an in-depth piece was worthy of publishing to a large audience.

The Decomposition of Rotten Tomatoes by Lane Brown (with reporting by Luke Winkie) [Vulture] - I’ll have more on Rotten Tomatoes on Sunday’s issue, but for now I’ll say this article is a good primer on just some of the myriad of flaws with the popular site, which turned 25 last August. There’s a system that can be easily gamed, and for all its protestations, Rotten Tomatoes (which is owned by Comcast and Fandango) is an active player. While Rotten Tomatoes does produce original content, their core model is still built around the “Tomatometer” and that’s a metric that benefits neither audiences nor critics.

Hollywood’s Slo-Mo Self-Sabotage by Inkoo Kang [The New Yorker] - Kang comes to the same conclusion regarding the tyranny of IP, but she also casts her net wider into all the ways the industry is coming apart at the seams. I try to take a step back and ask, “Do I dislike the changes that are happening, or do I simply dislike change because it makes me uncomfortable?” Kang’s arguments confirm that the former is underway, and that for people who love movies, this is a dark time for the industry that is meeting the moment in the most self-destructive way possible.

What I’m Hearing

New Hozier album! It’s good!

What I’m Playing

I finally finished Hitman! It was pretty fun! It’s not a perfect game, and some levels are better than others, but I like its cheeky sense of humor, forgiving gameplay (once you figure out the rules of the game), and attention to detail in the level design. I also have to shout out YouTuber MrFreeze2244 whose videos were invaluable in guiding me through countless challenges.

Should I have dumped 157 hours into playing all three games and the expansion pack? I’ll let you be the judge as I make my way over to Spider-Man: Miles Morales.