Gary Cooper, Bradley Cooper & Ryan Gosling

Movies are quick corrections for the fact that we exist in only one place at only one time. When I watch the older movies on TCM, I am struck by the beauty of gray, which makes up the bulk of black and white. How can the absence of color be so gorgeous? Black and white is so tonally unified, so tone-poetic. Shadows seem more natural, like structural elements of the composition. The dated look of the films is itself an image of time, like the varnish on old paintings that becomes inextricable from their visual resonance. There is something more that draws me to TCM’s old stuff. Those films have an integrity that most of today’s films almost always lack.

If watching old movies is a form of escapism, it is at least not an escape from the human world. It is, in fact, an escape to the human world. When your own corner of the universe is hard or grim, there is dignity in escape. Yet anything that enhances your sense of reality and renovates your sense of possibility cannot be denigrated as “mere” escapism. We watch movies because life must be faced. Source: www.nytimes.com

Romantic Comedies for People Who Hate Romantic Comedies # 1. Silver Linings Playbook (2012): Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence play deeply flawed yet sympathetic characters who are struggling to regain their sanity and rebuild their lives. Gay fave Lawrence won the Oscar — Cooper should have too. And watching him learn how to dance is worth the price of admission. Source: www.advocate.com

According to David O'Russell, Bradley Cooper may look "leading-man-ish in a little bit of a Gary Cooper way", and "weird" at other times. If you stood a blue-eyed, 6ft 1in, white American actor with a long nose and jutting jaw in front of a room full of admen, Bradley Cooper is probably the name they’d come up with for him. It’s a good, dependable, square-shouldered name – but with a hint of refinement: Bradley, rather than plain old monosyllabic Brad, followed by an echo of Hollywood’s past.

The first famous Cooper on film was the great Golden Age heart-throb Gary, who smouldered his way through films such as High Noon and Sergeant York as thickly and dependably as a fire log. It’s a fine legacy to hitch on to. But Bradley Cooper has never been rebranded. Cooper has been nominated for an Academy Award for the past three years on the trot: an achievement that puts him in select company. Only 20 others have managed it.

In Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, the films that yielded Cooper’s first and second Oscar nominations, he bounces around the screen, eyes shining and teeth bared – a chemically enlivened hybrid of screwball and pinball. In American Sniper, Chris Kyle, on the other hand, spends long sections of the film lying on rooftops, staring down his rifle’s telescopic sights. He’s a classic lone gunman in the grand Eastwood style, and the moments when we get to know him tend to be silent. His most effective weapon is that face: since it’s obviously too good to be true, it’s ideal for projecting a false front. Cooper can make a smile mean absolutely anything.

But it was just as important in the 2005 comedy Wedding Crashers, in which he plays a despicable social climber with the unimprovable name Sack Lodge. Though he’s a small fish in Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson’s tank, Cooper throws everything at the part. In a 22-second exchange with Rachel McAdams, his smile is by turn sarcastic, patronising and furious – all in a scene that he mostly spends with his head down the lavatory.

There was also a brief marriage to the actress Jennifer Esposito: they wed in December 2006 and she filed for divorce the following May. Newly single and sober, he kept busy. Cooper tried his hand at most things, including two horrors: one with Vinnie Jones called The Midnight Meat Train, and another called Case 39, on which he met Renée Zellweger and vomited wasps.

In early 2009, he played a supporting heartbreaker in the ensemble rom-com He’s Just Not That Into You, but it was later that summer, when audiences saw him in the stupefyingly successful comedy The Hangover, that he made the transition from actor to movie star.

If The Hangover established Cooper as a star, the next few years delivered proof: not only in blockbuster projects such as The A-Team and Hangover sequels, but also Limitless, an original science-fiction thriller whose poster didn’t promise much more than Cooper and a busy city, but was a respectable box-office hit.

This was also when David O Russell got in touch. Cooper’s performance in Wedding Crashers had stuck with the director of The Fighter, and when he needed an actor who could do manic funny, he got in touch. The result was Silver Linings Playbook, a screwball comedy in which a man with bipolar disorder finds a renewed zeal for life through his relationship with a young widow.

 Silver Linings Playbook secured Cooper his first Oscar nomination, and also established him as a great co-star, with an intuitive sense of when best to hang back and cede the spotlight. Jennifer Lawrence was also Oscar nominated for the film, and eventually won, but Cooper gave her enough space to do so.

Those instincts were even sharper in his next film with Russell, American Hustle, which yielded Oscar nomination two. Cooper plays a New Jersey FBI agent who becomes romantically involved with Amy Adams’s conwoman – and, while Adams shines as the slinky seductress, Cooper makes a perfect seducee.

That film seemed to make fresh things possible: not only American Sniper, but new films with Russell and Cameron Crowe, and also a Broadway revival of The Elephant Man that will transfer to London in May. Cooper obsessed over the role as a teenager when he discovered David Lynch’s film, and performed monologues from the Bernard Pomerance play as a drama student. He performs the part without prosthetics or special make-up – again, turning his face against itself.

But while Russell is often credited with turning Cooper into a credible actor, there’s a brilliant, undervalued film made just before Silver Linings Playbook in which you can see the transformation taking place in real time.

In Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond the Pines, Cooper plays a lawyer-turned-beat cop who has a confrontation with a bank robber played by Ryan Gosling: a meeting whose consequences reach out through time like tendrils.

The film opens on Gosling as a mythic outlaw figure, following him through a fairground in an unbroken, three-minute tracking shot. But Cooper’s introduced so straightforwardly, there’s no sign he’s going to matter. He turns up around 40 minutes into the film, and the first time we see him he’s driving a police car, via an unflattering shot from the passenger seat.

But as the film progresses it shifts its focus to Cooper’s character, who’s more calculating and determined than we first realised. Events leave him racked with remorse, but his political ambitions remain undimmed, and his blue-eyed, fresh-faced look turns from straightforward all-American wholesomeness into an unsettling advertisement for itself. For me, it’s the best performance Cooper has given to date: not because it plays to his strengths, but because it turns them into weaknesses, allowing him to portray a certain type of seemingly impregnable manhood in crisis. Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Bradley Cooper on his role in "The Place Beyond the Pines": It was about working with Ryan Gosling, who I'm a huge fan of, and Derek. That was the whole reason I did it. I had heard how Derek works -- this idea of making it as real as possible and doing extreme things in preparation. SPOILER ALERT I thought this would be a great learning experience, even though I was not crazy about playing this guy that kills Ryan. I'm so glad I did it though, because it wound up being an experience where I fell in love with playing this role -- which was not why I got into it in the first place. This is the most complicated guy I've played for sure. It felt like I was getting in the ring with a real motherfucker. He's generous and sweet and no-bullshit and he had no weird antics -- he just works the way I like to work, too. I thought, "This just feels like home." Source: www.huffingtonpost.com


Ryan Gosling ("Werewolf Heart") video, featuring pictures and stills of Ryan Gosling and co-stars Rachel McAdams, Michelle Williams, Emma Stone, Eva Mendes, Carey Mulligan, etc. Songs "Werewolf Heart" and "Dead Hearts" by Dead Man's Bones.