Salon.com > Denzel Washington

Straight stars protest too much

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 16:24:00 +0000

Perhaps the most revolutionary thing a straight actor can do is play gay.

While gay actors like Zachary Quinto, Ian McKellen and Neil Patrick Harris are compelled to play heterosexual roles as a matter of course -- that's the bulk of what's out there -- straight actors get Oscars and praise for bravery.

The latest actors to join the fraternity of the courageous are Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, who respectively play Liberace and his lover in the HBO film "Behind the Candelabra." Damon told Entertainment Weekly that the film's revealing costumes embarrassed his wife: "I really wish she didn’t see that. That’s too much." As for the sex scene between Douglas and Damon, "The scene where I’m behind him and going at him, we did that in one take," said the younger actor.

"We do it. Cut. There’s a long pause. And then you just hear Steven [Soderbergh, the director] go, 'Well … I have no notes.'"

The Oscars’ least exciting moment

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 17:54:00 +0000

It's the moment the entire night has been building toward -- the envelope denoting which film has been voted best picture is about to be opened. And the voice asking for a drumroll, please, belongs to one of the same four or five people.

The best picture presenter, the marquee spot of the evening, is a low-pressure, high-reward job -- and it used to reward rarely seen legends of Hollywood (Lillian Gish in 1981, Loretta Young in 1982, Laurence Olivier in 1985), or exciting, ascendant stars (Eddie Murphy in 1988, Cher in 1989, Jack Nicholson in 1972 -- before he'd won an Oscar). Given to the right person, it can honor a new star or pay homage to a star who isn't so familiar as to be unremarkable.

But these days, it's more likely to be a present-day Jack Nicholson than either a hot young thing or an intriguing recluse; the actor has presented seven times, and was one of the two final presenters announced by the academy today. (The other one? Dustin Hoffman, who's presented the trophy twice.)

“Wreck-It Ralph” tops weekend box office

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 20:04:00 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) — The weekend box office was not only undeterred by aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, it was buoyed by it.

Disney's "Wreck-It Ralph" opened strongly with $49.1 million and Robert Zemeckis' "Flight," starring Denzel Washington, soared to a $25 million debut. Both opened above expectations, capitalizing on East Coast audiences looking for distraction amid the recovery from the storm.

"Wreck-It Ralph," a 3-D animated family film about a video game villain who tries to break free of his role, is the largest box-office opening ever for Walt Disney Animation, which has produced countless cartoon classics (though doesn't include Disney's lucrative Pixar Animation).

Though the hurricane had forced the closure of hundreds of movie theaters in the New York, New Jersey area, most were open for business by the weekend. As many as 100 theaters were still closed on Friday, but many of those were restored during the weekend.

"We didn't really have a playbook for this," said Hollywood.com box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian. "But the numbers show that audiences across the country, and particularly in the Northeast, wanted to go to the movies and they did."

“Flight”: Denzel’s coked-up twist on the Sully saga

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 00:01:00 +0000

At this point it’s a total cliché to describe Denzel Washington as one of our greatest screen actors. I’m not disputing the point, but the problem with Washington is in fact the atmosphere of Great-Actorliness around him, which sometimes ennobles his movies but can just as often diminish them. With his impressive physical presence, ladykilling charm and stern, sarcastic demeanor, Washington strikes me as a movie star from a different era, perhaps the age of Clark Gable and Laurence Olivier. That overlooks the obvious fact that a man of Washington’s background and color could never have been a major star in an earlier day, but that too – that sense of belonging both to the present and the past – is part of his appeal.

Tony Scott: Better than Ridley

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 15:25:00 +0000

For a long time, Tony Scott has been my favorite movie-directing Scott brother. I believe quite strongly that he is also the better movie-directing Scott brother, an opinion that everyone finds ridiculous until they stop and think about how many films by each Scott they've actually loved.

Ridley Scott directed two unquestionable, no-bullshit masterpieces -- both about as amazing as films get -- at the very beginning of his career, and then a load of missteps, half-baked ideas, endless pompous historical epics, and OK genre exercises with heavy dollops of artistic pretension. (And, sure, "Thelma and Louise," which is obviously great.) Tellingly, he keeps returning to his masterpieces, releasing the zillionth iteration of "Blade Runner" on the zillionth home media format and providing "Alien" with a dull and insultingly stupid prequel.

Tony Scott, though. Tony Scott begins his career on the top of his game and ends it working at basically the same level. (OK, "Top Gun" isn't his first movie. "The Hunger" is a bit of camp '80s goth brilliance, and I love it, but it bears little relation to the rest of Scott's oeuvre.) If filmmaking is a craft, Tony Scott was the better craftsman. His most ridiculous movies (say, "The Last Boy Scout") are still hugely entertaining. There's no unwatchable Tony Scott movie. (Well, I never saw "Domino.")

The great villains you least expected

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:01:00 +0000

Three-time Emmy winner Bryan Cranston is finally going bad. No, not "bad" as in Walter White, Cranston's meth-making chemistry teacher from "Breaking Bad." Like bad bad. Evil bad. Last week, the news broke that Cranston had snagged the role of Vilos Cohaagen, the greedy, murderous dictator of Mars in the "Total Recall" remake. Vilos was played in the original by Ronnie Cox, director Paul Verhoeven's go-to corporate slimeball.

Cranston seemed an unlikely casting choice for a villain; while actors like Cox can get away with playing a certain kind of corporate tough guy, Cranston has always struck me as too vulnerable to ever be amoral. Or maybe it's just that I will forever associate his face with the goofy dad in "Malcolm in the Middle."

“Unstoppable”: Denzel wrestles runaway train, saves American manhood

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 01:30:00 +0000

If a movie can be both exciting and boring at the same time, that movie would be "Unstoppable," an adrenaline-infused runaway-train flick that perfectly distills director Tony Scott's talents and limitations. It's got all the ADHD camerawork, aerial photography, compulsive jump cuts and smeary, digitally enhanced colors that Scott relies on to make his Hollywood hackwork seem fresh and contemporary. It pays only the most cursory attention to old-fashioned stuff like plot and characters, and who needs those when you've got "a missile the size of the Chrysler Building," as someone helpfully explains, threatening to wipe out an entire Pennsylvania city?

If you want to argue that "Unstoppable" is about anything beyond provoking a Pavlovian drug-addict response from the audience, then it's about men and their machines, both portrayed at least as lovingly as in those Soviet boy-meets-locomotive movies that Scott probably saw in film school in London, 130 years ago. Like so many American movies these days, "Unstoppable" is a semi-conscious nostalgic fantasy, set in an imaginary version of Middle America where the Industrial Age never ended and the immigrants (or at least the non-white ones) never showed up. The fictional Pennsylvania towns endangered by the runaway train loaded with toxic chemicals appear to be entirely Caucasian, except of course for Frank, the grumpy-charismatic train engineer played by Denzel Washington, who has a pair of hawt teenage daughters working their shift at Hooters on the day he faces death. (It wouldn't be a Tony Scott film without lecherous background details.)

Box office report: “Dear John” takes down “Avatar”

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:09:00 +0000

"Dear John" opened at No. 1 this weekend, with a stellar $32.4 million debut weekend. That gives the picture a mediocre 2.3x weekend multiplier, but the first three days alone puts the picture well ahead of its $25 million budget. More importantly, this is the biggest weekend in Super Bowl weekend history, as well as the biggest opening weekend of all-time for a pure romantic drama. The film played to an 84 percent female crowd, and 64 percent of the audience was under 21. This is the first real test of opening weekend mettle for Amanda Seyfried and Channing Tatum, and both passed with flying colors. Of course, this number raises new questions about how much credit Tatum deserved for the $54.7 million debut of "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra." Conversely, as I mentioned last September, one wonders how much better "Jennifer's Body" could have opened had the marketing focused even a little on co-star Seyfried and not just Megan Fox. This also makes Nicholas Sparks the first brand-name author since the mid-'90s heyday of Michael Crichton, Stephen King and John Grisham. Regardless, this is a smashing debut and should weather the storm of "Valentine's Day: The Movie" as this far more serious love story will prove solid counter-programming to the overtly comedic all-star mush-fest (or as I've heard the film called: "Garry Marshall Calls in All His Favors Before He Dies: The Movie").

“The Book of Eli”: Read it and weep

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 01:20:00 +0000

"The Book of Eli" is one of those post-apocalyptic action movies that nimbly straddles the line between being dour and ridiculous: It's the first movie the Hughes Brothers (Albert and Allen) have directed since 2001, when they adapted Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's Jack the Ripper fantasy "From Hell," and in theory, at least, it's not such a vast leap away. The filmmakers are once again going for atmosphere here, working hard to build a sense of place and mood. Denzel Washington is Eli, the principled survivor of a catastrophic war, one that has made some citizens marauding, plundering cannibals, turned others into blind, cowering weaklings and has inspired an enterprising few -- like Gary Oldman's Carnegie -- to become dictators-in-training. Eli, you see, is carrying the very last Bible in existence; he reads it faithfully every night and guards it with his life -- his aim is to keep heading "west," where he somehow believes the Good Word may actually be able to do some good. Meanwhile, the evil Carnegie, who's taken over a godforsaken town that looks like an abandoned set from a Sam Peckinpah movie, has been desperately trying to get his hands on one of them-thar Bible things, believing the humble words contained therein will be his key to complete control of the human beings in his dominion. In other words, he plans to twist the word of God so it can be used for evil, not good, and we all know that never happens in real life.