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Filtering by Tag: Matt Damon
Viola Davis was Michael Jordan’s handpicked choice to play his mother in Ben Affleck’s Air. (Amazon)
My review of Air, Ben Affleck’s movie from first-timer Alex Convery’s screenplay, is here.
Julianne Moore and Oscar Isaac exchange unpleasantries. (Paramount)
I'm an admirer of all the principals involved, so it brings me no joy to report to you that Suburbicon—cowriter/director George Clooney's deeply misguided retread of a Coen Bros. script from 30 years ago—is the biggest embarrassment to Hollywood's liberal piety since Crash. At least Oscar Issac is having a good time.
Beloved Pop Culture Happy Hour host Linda Holmes is at the Television Critics Association gathering in Los Angeles this week, so Tanya Ballard Brown and I joined regular panelists Stephen Thompson and Glen Weldon for an uncharacteristically reserved episode. By which I mean, neither of the big summer movies we autopsied, Jason Bourne and Suicide Squad, is very good, though the latter is much worse. I had hopes for both of them, because I admire their directors, Paul Greengrass and David Ayer, very much, and I've tended to like their work. You know what late-summer release was not a big letdown? Star Trek Beyond. I endorse it.
Read MoreMatt Damon, gouing through the moutions in a fifth Bourne. (Universal)
Look, I enjoyed the circa 2002-7 Bourne trilogy, and it's surprising to me that I've never gotten around to 2012's Damonless, Greengrassless The Bourne Legacy given how much I liked writer/director Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton. But as I aver in my NPR review, Jason Bourne isn't just the least of the Damon-starring Bournes—it's not even as good as SPECTRE, which suffered an acute surfeit of goodness. And Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. are both far more imaginative and colorful diversions, spywise and otherwise.
It gives me no joy to deliver unto you this disappointing news.
The Nice Guys, which I expect history shall remember as my favorite film of the summer of 2016, came out last week; Captain America: Civil War, probably the best of the Marvel bunch, is old news. But Memorial Day weekend is still the traditional start of the summer movie season. Here, for the third consecutive Memorial Day weekend, is my Village Voice list of summer movies I want to see. Light up a phone in any of these and you'll hear from me.
Enjoy those X-Men, everybody! I'll be observing the holiday at the AFI, taking in Spartacus in its 212-minute entirety.
...wherein I join PCHH host Linda Holmes and regular panelists Stephen Thompson and Glen Weldon to talk about where the beloved hit movie fits into director Ridley Scott's oeuvre and its fidelity to Andy Weir's novel.
I suggested How-To Stories as a companion topic, since The Martian — in both its incarnations, albeit moreso in prose than onscreen — goes into unusual detail about the stuff its stranded-astronaut hero Mark Watney must do to survive on a planet that (so far we know) does not sustain life. We all struggled to come up with suitable examples of favorite stories in this genre, and to thread the needle between a How-To and a Procedural. I could've talked about several different Michael Mann films, but particularly Thief, Manhunter, Heat, or even The Insider. As is often the case, I didn't think of that until later.
Read MoreGood Matt Damon in The Martian. (Aidan Monaghan/20th Century Fox)
"There are a bunch of severe psychological effects that would happen to someone being isolated for almost two years. And also the anxiety and stress of being on the verge of death from various problems for so long—most people would not be able to handle that. The loneliness, the isolation, the anxiety, and stress—I mean, it would take an enormous psychological toll. And I didn’t deal with any of that. I just said like, 'Nope, that’s not how Mark Watney rolls.' So he has almost superhuman ability to deal with stress and solitude.
"And the reason I did that was because I didn’t want the book to be a deep character study of crippling loneliness and depression—that’s not what I wanted! So the biggest challenge were the psychological aspects, and I just didn’t address them and I hope the reader doesn’t notice."
— Novelist Andy Weir, to Ars Technica's Lee Hutchinson, last year.
"Let the children lose it
Let the children use it
Let all the children boogie."
— David Bowie, "Starman," 1972.
My review of The Martian, screenwriter Drew Goddard and director Ridley Scott's inspiring and so-good-I'm-mad-it's-not-great adaptation of Andy Weir's superb novel, is up at NPR now. Further Reading: My interview with Martian star Matt Damon for Air & Space / Smithsonian.
I'm a big fan of Andy Weir's debut novel The Martian. I was actually listening to the audiobook on the day in April when I visited NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where the book is partially set. (It's also set in space and on Mars.) I was out there doing some reporting for my day job wit Air & Space / Smithsonian, and it was in that capacity that I got on the phone this week with Matt Damon, who plays the story's protagonist, stranded astronaut Mark Watney, in Ridley Scott's film adaptation, due out Oct. 2. The film hasn't screened for critics yet, but the fact its release date was moved up by nearly two months suggests the studio is convinced it works.
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