This is a grimly prescient disaster pic from STX. Gerry Butler is an Orlando area husband and dad (I can totally see that.) who tries to get his family to safety.
When you name a comet “Clark,” who’s that going to scare?
Release dates are changing with the hour, so who knows when this one will hit…theaters.
My bucket list quest to see every road picture ever made brought me to this dry and dark comedy from 2008, a tale of a vintage car dealer and a junkie trekking across Belgium in a 1979 Caprice Classic station wagon.
No, the car’s not an “Eldorado.” That’s used in the ironic/metaphoric sense by writer-director-star Bouli Lanners. It’s the elusive “destination” his character, Yvan, thinks he’s driving the junkie (Fabrice Adde) to, AFTER he’s caught the guy breaking into the apartment he keeps over his garage and “dealership.”
Yvan is partial to “Yank Tanks,” oversized American gas guzzlers from the era motoring enthusiasts in the U.S. have labeled “Malaise Motors.” He’s just taken delivery of one. No, it’s not “competition ready,” or “prêt pour la compétition,” in his native French (with English subtitles). But he’s sure he can flip it.
Meanwhile, though, he’s got this nuisance junkie he rousted out of his apartment and left by the side of the road. The guy says his name is Elie. He bargained for the right to walk off with Yvan’s piggybank the night before. Denied that, he just wants to get “home,” to his parents’ place “near the French border.”
Along the way, they hit the Stations of the Road Trip Cross. There’s the weird fellow Chevy Caprice owner (Philippe Nahon) who offers, nay INSISTS on helping Yvan fix a busted radiator hose. In that guy’s garage is his “collection,” every car with a single dent. The cars hit and killed somebody.
“I have newspaper clippings, police reports,” he salivates, sensing a sale to a fellow “collector.” As if that’s not weird enough, he insists he can tell a person’s future by touching them. But where this encounter goes next is almost jaw-dropping.
Worried about falling asleep at the wheel? “Attach your hair to the roof (headliner in the car).
A drunk-driving near-accident (driving over an embankment) puts them in the company of nudists, led by an elderly fellow who goes by a fairly famous name. Every guy who deals with his has to look the other way.
It’s all rather daft and quite dark. Lanners, no one will be surprised to learn, has played other “Yvans” and directed other droll dramedies such as “The Giants” and “The First, The Last.”
Here, he’s a gruff and irritated presence, reluctant to trust this oddball he’s decided to take home to Momma. Yvan is stubborn, dogmatic, a bit put off by everything and everyone they run into, or runs into them. But his humanity shines through in little hints of generosity and compassion.
Adde’s Elie is every “user” you’ve ever been used by. But he’s clean enough to let some of his humanity through as well. Meeting his family provides some answers.
It’s not a great picture, and as road comedies go, it turns entirely too grim for most tastes. But “Eldorado” is an engrossing peek at a Belgium that lives, works and “collects” in ways that being a European punchline rarely let on.
MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity, alcohol abuse
Cast: Bouli Lanners, Fabrice Adde, Philippe Nahon
Credits: Written and directed by Bouli Lanners. A Film Movement Plus release.
Running time: 1:21
There are funny lines, hilarious scenes and the occasional blast of gleeful, Eurovision excess rolled into “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.”
Sure, it’s an old school “high concept” star vehicle — a lot like many an earlier Will Ferrell comedy, “Semi-Pro” and “Blades of Glory,” for instance. Nobody does those better than Ferrell, so there’s that.
But Judas Apatow Priest, who EDITED this hulk? Anything cute, funny or charming gets lost in that Netflix-indulged Apatowantiasis, a glorious “SNL” sketch gag stretched to true “saga” length, a bloated, leaden two hours-plus.
The hip kids were never into the annual “Eurovision Song Contest,” a televised cheese plate serving up generic pop in grandiose stage presentations, one performer or band per country every year (save this one, COVID-canceled) for the past 60 years.
But in one fairydust-sprinkled moment, ABBA won and spun that win into global fame. It’s that moment that launches “The Story of Fire Saga,” because little Lars Erickssong forgot about his dead mother for a moment and danced wildly in front of the TV, embarrassing the hell out of his gruff, fisherman dad (Pierce Brosnan).
And little silent Sigrit Ericksdottir fell into the same “Waterloo” rapture with Lars that night in 1974. That became their shared goal and their shared lives.
Now, 46 years later, they’re still chasing that dream with their small Icelandic town’s cover band, Fire Saga, and its aged accordionist and tween drummer. Romance? No, they can’t have that, no matter now much Sigrit (Rachel McAdams) wants it.
Because “You are brother-sister?”
“No. Probably not.”
It’s because love “tears bands apart — Fleetwood Mac, ABBA, Post Malone, Semen & Garfunkel…”
“Right. I forgot about de Semen.”
They may cover Pharrell Williams’ hit “Happy,” and submit to endless drunken requests for “Ya Ya Ding Dong” from the barflies. But they dream of donning Viking gear and singing their “Double Trouble” love song for all the civilized world on TV at Eurovision.
Shockingly, events conspire to send them to Eurovision in Edinburgh. Their partnership is tested, their back-country eyes opened to a world of big talents with omnivorous sexual appetites.
Ferrell, who co-wrote the script, and director David Dobkin make the most of Netflix’s travel money, capturing the glories of Iceland and the wonders of parking a bewigged Will and whiter-than-white Rachel in it.
Edinburgh, the Scottish Sin City where the film’s version of Eurovision is staged, gets some lovely travelogue moments.
The songs are broadly funny and BIG, in keeping with the character of the contest. None quite cross over into hilarious, although many provide a chuckle.
Demi Lovato plays the Icelandic favorite who doesn’t get to compete, but who “haunts” Lars as he goes more and more outlandish with a stage production that easily overwhelms their sweet little ditty.
Dan Stevens is a hoot as a closeted Russian pop idol who makes music the homoerotic way.
The one giddy scene is a tracking shot through a “sing around,” competitors partying and vamping up a medley of Cher, ABBA, Madonna et al hits.
But the best line is landed back home in Husevik, in the bar where the locals gather to watch the competition and — knowing the ineptitude of the hometown band — “take our medicine.”
Eurovision veterans pepper the bit players cast, including the transgender Austrian Conchita Wurst, presented as just a smidgen more than sight gag.
Little here surprises, although the way the first act skips through the preliminaries you might puzzle over “How’re they going to get another 90 minutes out of this?”
By the usual ways — overextending scenes, making Graham Norton the anchor of BBC coverage of the contest, leaving in jokes that don’t land and staggering toward one of two possible finales.
Ferrell is better than this at this stage of his career, and yet he still gives it his all. It’s good to see McAdams back at work after having a baby, even if she doesn’t do her own singing.
But the quickest, silliest and sunniest way to get your fill of Eurovision is hunting up performances on Youtube, none more delightfully primitive than ABBA’s breakout moment in 1974.
“The Fire Saga Story” has barely enough sparks for a sketch, much less a “saga.”
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for crude sexual material including full nude sculptures, some comic violent images, and language
Cast: Will Ferrell, Rachel McAdams, Pierce Brosnan, Demi Lovato, Dan Stevens
Credits: Directed by David Dobkin, script by Will Ferrell, Andrew Steele. A Netflix release.
Running time: 2:03
The disastrously disorganized American response to the COVID19 pandemic has me wondering if July is another write off month for the movies, sports, the works. Case numbers are skyrocketing in Florida and other states, a first wave that morphed into a second. LeBron needs to call off this Florida NBA nonsense, college football needs to take another time out. And the release of Christopher Nolan’s #Tenet has been delayed again from July 31 to Aug. 12 because of a surge in COVID-19 cases. Disney? Are you paying attention?
https://t.co/iStZYAQ9n3 https://twitter.com/THR/status/1276336901595828225?s=20
The sweeping title “Shanghai Triad” always promised a more epic film than the great Zhang Yimou gave us. But this intimate, ornate and melodramatic gangland tale has glories all its own. And while Zhang was the master of scale in such epics as “House of Flying Daggers” and “Hero,” it’s the smaller scale and more romantic films which burn into the memory — “Ju Dou,” “Raise the Red Lantern,” “The Road Home” and “Coming Home” among them.
Based on a novel by Li Xiao, it is a lovely if somewhat airless melodrama of competing mobsters, mob wealth, Western decadence and betrayal in the Shanghai just before the Japanese invaded.
Young Shuisheng (Xiaoxiao Wang) looks to be about 13 as he arrives in the city, summoned by his Uncle Liu (Xuejian Li) to join the household staff of “The Boss” (Baotian Li) and leader of their Tang clan.
Shuisheng is “bumpkin” enough to not know what a telephone is, to have never seen a cigarette lighter. He is our eyes and ears as Uncle Liu and others explains this strange new life to him, and to the audience.
He’d better be a quick learner, because he’s to be the manservant to the boss’s mistress, the beguiling Bijou (Gong Li), chanteuse at the boss’s swank, Western style night nightclub. She’s a diva, an imperious bully and a manipulator.
“When she speaks to you,” he warns (in Chinese with English subtitles), “look at nothing but your shoes!”
She is jealous of “The Boss,” but stepping out on him with a much younger gangster from a rival mob (Chun Sun).
Over the course of an eventful week, the kid will catch her costumed, chorus-line-backed act in the club, endure her temper, get a glimpse of a mob execution and see the bloody aftermath of an attempted assassination.
He, like everybody else, deals with the caprices of “Miss,” and grows instantly devoted to her even as he suffers her wrath, and then is dragged to a hideaway island where she, The Boss and “The Boys” lay low waiting for the head man to recover from his dagger wounds and plot his revenge.
There’s a brittle quality to Gong’s performance here, perhaps reflecting the end of her seven-film-long romance with Zhang. They’d work together again, but even the scripted moments of warmth, Bijou softening as she sees the consequences of her callousness, come off chilly.
Zhang gives us lavish and dreamy night club scenes that rival the over-the-top decor and entertainment of big budget fantasies set in this era with similar scenes — “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and “Victor/Victoria.” Watching the rich clientele, the size of the jazz orchestra and long, leggy line of costume-changing chorines accompanying Bijou in this glittery ballroom, one can’t help but wonder at the cover charge it would take to make money off this.
The intrigues are intriguing enough, but the film makes us wait for its final act on that tiny, primitive island to trot them out. And the finale leaves more to be desired than it should.
Still, this is Zhang at his peak — twenty years before the horrors of “The Great Wall,” working with his muse (Gong Li will be seen next in Disney’s “Mulan”) and showing off a China that the Communist oligarchs would eventually come to emulate — of Western style luxury and opulence, and the casual, business-as-usual corruption that helps one acquire it.
MPAA Rating: R for some language and images of violence
Cast: Gong Li, Baotian Li, Xiaoxiao Wang, Chun Sun and Xuejian Li
Credits: Directed by Zhang Yimou, screenplay by Feiyu Bi, based on a novel by Li Xiao. A Film Movement virtual re-release.
Running time: 1:48
August 7 this little stroll down music’s memory lane rolls out, a doc about the “alternative” to Rolling Stone, a rowdy little rag full of misfits, rudeness and cheerleading for many a band eschewed by Jann Wenner’s army of taste-setters.
Kind of a ’70s white boy/white girl thing, it was. But if you were “in on it…”
For me, a key moment in “Disclosure” TRans Lives On Screen,” the new Netflix documentary about transgender progress and trans representations in film and media, comes when trans actor Brian Michael Smith breaks down the woman-pretending-to-be-a-man-pretending-to-be-a-woman business that drives the blockbuster 1982 comedy “Victor/Victoria.”
“It’s really a ‘women’s empowerment’ message packaged in a trans masculine experience,” Smith complains, “which is soooo invalidating!”
If you don’t like buzzwords or self-“actualization” jargon, “Disclosure” is going to be a hard pill to swallow. It’s a film awash in actresses, activists, models and historians (overwhelmingly trans female), almost all of them using this new nomenclature that the public at large is struggling to catch up with.
Or in the case of the German researcher who invented the clumsy, beaten-to-death “cisgender” (a person aligned with the gender he or she was born with) back in 1998, maybe “catch up” isn’t accurate. It sounds like a slur, and Volkmar Sigusch should have that explained to him.
But get past the jargon and you realize what you’re watching is one of those landmarks in queer cinema, a “Celluloid Closet” for the transgender community.
Filmmaker Sam Feder (“Boy I Am”) serves up a thorough, lively and enlightening history of transgender representations on film and TV. Through the scores of people interviewed here, we learn how Hollywood perpetuated ugly, hurtful and inaccurate stereotypes for over a century. And if you don’t think Alfred Hitchcock’s overt transphobia could leave scars and “Silence of the Lambs” could convince the relatives and close friends of transgender people that “transitioning” meant they’d be “the bad guy,” a “sick psychopathic serial killer,” here are successful and famous people like Laverne Cox (“Orange is the New Black”) to change your mind.
“Soooo, what’s going on, Alfred?” she purrs, and she’s not just talking about “Psycho,” either.
Hollywood, we’re told, “has taught us how to react to trans people.” In movies predating “The Crying Game” and running well past “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” that reaction — at the “reveal” — is revulsion. A few dozen scenes of shocked men vomiting at realizing they’re attracted to a trans woman ends that argument in a flash.
Positive representations of real-life stories (“Boys Don’t Cry”) are dissected for their “problematic” elements. The violent end facing the hero is bad enough. But even fans of the film might not realize that the filmmakers erased a black man — also murdered in the real-life hate crime — from the story.
But it’s touching to hear Chaz Bono talk about “faking my own death” so that he could transition out of the public eye, and not as the daughter of Sonny & Cher. Even he has to marvel at how quickly the culture was shifting its attitudes towards the tiny minority (.6 percent of the population) he’s in. “Dancing with the Stars” is both representative of that change, and a part of why it happened.
From early drag to Milton Berle and Flip Wilson, “Dressed to Kill” to “Transamerica,” “Disclosure” gives historic representations summoned up by media scholars and the horrified or warm memories of the scores of trans actresses and occasional actor, filmmaker or critic the same weight. Billy Crystal’s transitioning character on “Soap” is important, but so was a single trans woman on a single episode of “The Jeffersons” to a confused black child growing up in the ’70s.
“Disclosure” bites off a bit more than it can chew, wandering off course here and there — a pointless sidebar on racist director D.W. Griffith, an overdose of clips of clumsy, offensive talk show host or hostess questions showing the obsession with non-trans people with “the cutting” (surgery), the barest mention of transgender rejection by the gay community (men, mostly) for decades.
The many digressions about “progress” in society and not just in media suggest another film. This one more than does justice to “representations.” But as it dodges non-trans interview subjects in general and psychologists in particular in discussing the exaggerated affectations of the community, the institutionalized narcissism of “ballroom” and its accoutrements, we get a hint that there’s a lot more ground to cover.
Still, if you aren’t moved by “Matrix” co-director Lilly Waschowski, and others, singing the praises of the first “positive representation” of a transgender character many of them recall, you should be.
Like “The Matrix” movies, it was a Warner Brothers production. It came out in 1957, and was repeated on TV for decades, during the formative years of almost everybody who appears in “Disclosure.”
Yes, Bugs Bunny in convincing, “powerful, seductive” drag in “What’s Opera, Doc?” was the first clue many a transgender person had that maybe, they weren’t alone, that they deserved respect and that they, too, could find their Siegfried — or Elmer Fudd — and have a “happy ending.”
MPAA Rating: TV-MA, nudity, sexuality, adult subject matter
Cast: Laverne Cox, Rain Valdez, Alexandra Billings, Chaz Bono, Brian Michael Smith, Candis Cayne, Sandra Caldwell and Lilly Wachowski.
Credits: Directed by Sam Feder. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:40
Today’s entrée from our “Around the World with Netflix” buffet is a polished jewel from Chile that gives Jorge Garcia the rare shot at a starring role.
Garcia is still best known for being on TV’s “Lost.” In the years since, he’s turned up in bit parts, too often as little more than a sight gag in, say, an Adam Sandler “comedy.” Because he’s huge.
“Nobody Knows I’m Here (Nadie Sber que Estoy Aqui)” gives Garcia the chance to play a soulful, fragile lead, a morbidly obese man hiding out from a world that rejected him.
Memo lives on an island near Llanquihue, in lush southern Chile. His uncle (Luis Gnecco) may encourage him to talk (he virtually never does) or urge him to “go to town” (in Spanish with English subtitles) to socialize a little.
Memo avoids even those rare visitors who come to buy the sheepskins that they make their living from.
And Memo only cranks up their skiff to slip into empty houses, wandering through them when those unknowing neighbors aren’t at home. He’ll never be caught, he assures the uncle, because he’s as fleet as “a gazelle.”
Something happened to Memo in his childhood. We start getting hints of that early on. Back then he was a cherub (Lukas Vergara) with an angelic voice. Back then he had a shot at a recording career in Miami. But a producer and Memo’s mercenary dad (Alejandro Goic) made a deal of the Milli Vanilli variety. Memo never got over it.
The first hint that he might is the arrival of Marta (Millaray Lobos), an inquisitive, friendly replacement filling in for the man who normally drops off their mail and supplies. Shy Memo picks his spot, and finally starts answering her many questions.
“I don’t talk because I don’t want to.”
A clue as to what troubles him is his enraged reaction to a new autobiography by the pretty poseur who got to use his voice to become a teen Latin pop idol in the ’80s. He forces himself to sing to a fleeing Marta to reveal the depths of his anguish.
“Nobody Knows I’m Here” was the hit that launched his — or rather Angelo’s — career.
Writer director Gaspar Antillo peels the cover off this mystery with the patience of an art cinema veteran, limiting his dramatic “incidents” to amplify their impact.
The scenic setting is contrasted with the grim circumstances Memo chooses to live in — a tumbledown old house, a barn where he slaughters sheep.
Through it all, Garcia shines as a man trapped by his past, reliving it in the way it should have turned out, broken at the chance that was snatched away from him. Memo sews a stage costume for himself. And perhaps his skulking through other people’s homes is a way of sampling the “normal” life he never had.
Lobos and her character Marta have a plucky, open-hearted Sally Hawkins vibe about them, and Lobos even looks a little like the British Oscar winner.
The many melodramatic turns the story takes break the cryptic code Antillo, a first-time feature director, sets up.
But “Nobody Knows I’m Here” proves Garcia, too, could have a better career that’s been offered. He’s much more than a sight gag or set dressing in an Adam Sandler comedy.
MPAA Rating: unrated, violence
Cast: Jorge Garcia, Luis Gnecco, Millaray Lobos, Lukas Vergara and Alejandro Goic
Credits: Written and directed by Gaspar Antillo. A Netflix release.
Running time:
Lucy Hale stars, and Mindy Cohn (Remember her?) plays the grownup in this July 17 college sex comedy/rom-com release.
It seems like only yesterday that Ron Perlman was just a “Hellboy” twinkle in his director/pal Guillermo del Toro’s eye.
Hell, it was only the day BEFORE yesterday that he was the soulful “Beast” on TV’s “Beauty and the Beast.” The day before that? He was making his first splash on the big screen in the prehistoric epic “Quest for Fire.”
But “The Perl” just turned 70. “Hellboy” is a piece of comic book movie legend, the iconic biker Clay from “Sons of Anarchy” but a TV memory, archived on Netflix.
It’s just you’d never know that from the man’s omnipresence on the screen. A month doesn’t go by without a Perlman pearl — some major studio feature or gritty B-movie — popping up on the big screen, some new series launching on this network or that streamer.
“Clover” came out in April, his birthday month. “The Big Ugly,” an action picture with Vinnie Jones, streams in July. “Monster Hunter” and “The Jesuit” are in the can, four Perlman pictures are in post-production.
This weekend’s Perlman pic is the Tulsa-set underworld saga, “Run with the Hunted,” where he plays a crime boss who “owns” runaway kids, from their pickpocket youth to their armed robber adulthood.
“I like all these guys that have these appetites that are...pronounced. Huge appetites for leverage and power, with this morality that is sort of ‘liberal’ in nature, where one plays by a set of rules that don’t really exist, that are created by their creator,” he says of “Birdie” in “Hunted.” “That’s kind of a delicious recipe for an actor to sink his teeth into.”
The COVID 19 pandemic hit just as he was sinking his teeth into Oscar winner del Toro’s latest, “Nightmare Alley,” a remake of a 1947 Tyrone Power film noir based on a seedy William Lindsay Gresham novel. That halted production “with about 40% of it in the can,” he says. But in his enforced down time, the Devil finds work for Hellboy, especially on Twitter.
Follow Perlman (@perlmutations) and treat yourself to some of the most scalding political commentary online, and some of the funniest feuds.
“I’m not playing a character on Twitter,” he says with a chuckle. “That’s as close to the real me as you’re gonna get. What I find there is because you have that (Twitter authentication as “real” Ron Perlman) checkmark, because you have a body of work behind you, that because of what you do for a living, that some assume you’re some sort of bleeding heart liberal who’s part of this thing that they can categorize and attack as “Hollywood Elite.”
“Give me a break.”
“When you show them, ‘No no no, mother-f—–r. You’ve got it all wrong. That ‘job description?’ Wrong. I had this exchange with that Matt Gaetz (“white nationalist” Florida Congressman). That f—–g tool, decides to use ‘Hollywood’ as some sort of derogatory dog whistle for his followers.
“I said ‘What is this dog-whistle ‘Hollywood’ thing? (Perlman is Jewish) Is CULTURE the thing that’s holding your fans down? And not all the greed and corruption of people like you?'”
And then was there a tussle with Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who manfully invited Perlman to fight scandalized Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan.
“I had guys in my neighborhood that would challenge you to fight their friend,” Perlman laughs. “Those guys were the first guys to get ‘disappeared’ where I grew up. Never worked out for them. ‘Let’s you and him fight? What’s THAT about?'”
You see, he doesn’t just play a lot of tough guys on the screen. The big, square-jawed Perlman likes to model himself on his screen heroes — WWII vets-turned-movie-stars Robert Mitchum and Lee Marvin, “guys where you can’t tell where their toughness ends and the character’s begins.
“But, you know, I’m a NEW YORKER. C’mon! I’m a lower middle class New Yorker. No private school, a lot of growing up on the streets, understanding that there’s a certain kind of a code that one embraces in order to move through life with the greatest New York swagger you can manage.
“Swagger, and dignity, or our version of it. A lot of that is the bull—t meter you develop. New Yorkers seem to know that moral and ethical corruption are part of every single person, down to their sinews.
“If you’re talking, you’re usually bull-sh—ing. And you recognize it in others, and you’re tired of it the minute you hear it. Call it out when you see it, keep everybody a little bit honest.”
“That’s the root of ALL these badass characters I play.” And he isn’t mellowing with age. “Now that I’m an old fart, technically past the age of retirement, I feel like the good thing about growing old is you can shit your pants and not give a s–.”
He’s navigated a career that’s taken him from TV romantic lead (“Beauty and the Beast”) to cult hero, comic book movie icon to screen heavy in scores of sometimes impressive B-movies. Perlman’s done with it with what director Marc Forster (“World War Z”), who cast Perlman as a casually corrupt judge who has a “come to Jesus” experience in TV’s “Hand to God,” describes as “a face that’s unmistakable, a career that’s indisputable, and a charm that’s irresistible.”
Guillermo del Toro was one of the scores of young, unheralded filmmakers Perlman’s lent his formidable presence to, early on. They’ve become so close that del Toro summed up his friend in writing the forward to Perlman’s memoir, “Easy Street (The Hard Way).”
“The Perl” is “the most unlikely of leading men,” reason enough for the the horror and sci-fi favorite (“The Shape of Water”) to hang onto as “my constant partner in crime,” del Toro says.
And Perlman can’t gush enough about their new project, which has him taking on a classic role once played by the hulking screen heavy Mike Mazurki. The movie has an all-star cast, with Oscar winners Cate Blanchett and Mary Steenburgen, along with Bradley.
It’s “so f—–g good,” he says, “that I can’t WAIT for this pandemic to let up, let us finish it and get it into theaters. That’s gonna be a honey, man — the greatest dessert you’ve ever sunk your teeth into.
“This is a piece of writing you do not want to improve on or alter in any way. It reads like a Chopin sonata or Mozart concerto — note for note PERFECT.”
After that, there’s a British TV series coming to the US via The Peacock Network — “The Capture” — which will premiere here just as he’s heading back to London for season two.
This week’s “Run with the Hunted” is of a piece with a lot of his recent work — a heavy with a poetic, self-aware twist.
“Since I’ve been in a position where I’ve gotten all these roles, not by laboring for them, but by coincidence or accident (or physique) or whatever, it’s been fun to explore every variation of that sort of character. I’m fascinated with the intersection of reality and art, that way. In Birdie’s case, he’s taken a whole swath the human race that’s desperate — homeless kids for whom there is no sanctuary. They’re just here for him to take advantage of, to be the his soldiers, plundering on his behalf while he doesn’t get his hands dirty. Where’s that guy, deep inside of you?
“With Birdie and especially with the ultimate tough guy, Clay on ‘Sons of Anarchy,’ you begin to become obsessed with that exploration. What part of you is this little s— actor, and what dark part of your own psyche informs this guy?”
A lot of that comes through in his book, an amusing, self-effacing autobiography which he wrote as himself, “this slightly tipsy raconteur with a few friends sitting around me, in rapt attention, as I was, you know, raconteuring.”
But should we worry? With all this down time, too much “time for tweeting,” if there’s a risk that the “Everybody wants Ron” moment, with all the work lining up ahead of him, will create a logjam he’ll never work his way out of? I mean, 260+ credits, and counting. Who SCHEDULES this workaholic, anyway?
“You watch ‘Better Call Saul?’ I live behind a manicurist, and she does all my scheduling for me. It works for Jimmy (Bob Oedenkirk), I figured it’d work for me.”
