Celebrating Classic Masculinity in "Sully" (Tom Hanks) and "Bleed for This" (Miles Teller)

Are Sully’s views of masculine emotional intimacy outdated? Clint Eastwood’s just-released Sully clearly admires its titular character, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, played by Tom Hanks. It presents Sully as an icon of competence, integrity, and calm under pressure. Like most such movies lionizing competent men, it relegates the wife, here played by the thrice-Oscar-nominated Laura Linney, to a background role. The movie is set in the days after Sully successfully executed an emergency water landing of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River off Manhattan, after the aircraft was disabled by striking a flock of Canada geese during its initial climb out of LaGuardia Airport on January 15, 2009. All of the 155 passengers and crew aboard the aircraft survived.

Because of this framing device, Hanks and Linney never appear together. She remains ensconced in their generic suburban cul-de-sac with what appear to be two daughters, while he and his co-pilot, played by Aaron Eckhart, are housed in a Manhattan Marriott, celebrated by the media and public, but challenged by the NTSB for failing to attempt to land the plane at nearby airports. Spousal interactions are limited to phone conversations and their exchanges uniformly hit the same note: Sully calls his wife; she proceeds to bombard him with her worries; he assures her everything will be fine. His wife rarely asks how he’s handling the fear of almost dying, the pressure of being in the media spotlight, or the scrutiny of his decision to attempt a water landing. 

Meanwhile Sully does his (emotionally limited) best to assure her that he’s fine, and to empathize with her own media onslaught. There’s no indication she understands, or even acknowledges, the tremendous stress of his situation. Similarly, there’s no indication that Sully is annoyed by her clueless self-absorption. Rather than burden his wife with his fears, Sully saves such conversations for his (male) co-pilot, with whom he second guesses his decision and worries about his future. Perhaps, not ironically, it is the competence of Sully and his co-pilot that enabled the safe water landing and the rescue of all passengers and crew. In contrast, one senses that Sully obtains no emotional support from his wife, but sees his role in their marriage as being the stoic provider of safety–or, rather, the illusion of safety.

At the end of the movie, Sully demonstrates to the NTSB that his decision to attempt the water landing not only saved his passengers and crew but prevented the much greater disaster of a crash into densely populated areas. Eastwood is celebrating a notion of masculinity that combines competence, integrity, calmness under pressure, and a concern for the needs and fears of others. In the world of work, this notion of masculinity is extremely attractive–and no longer confined to members of the male gender. However, in the scenes of Sully’s marriage, Eastwood is expressing that same view of masculinity–one involving sublimation of one’s own needs and fears to assuage the needs and fears of others. 

As a pilot, Sully presents an image of masculinity that assures his passengers that everything will be okay–even as he understands there is always a possibility of a crash. As a husband, Sully provides similar comfort through the assurance and false promises of security. Although contemporary cosmopolitan culture pays lip service to a desire to have men be more emotionally open, doing so would require removing the illusion of safety such masculinity provides and that so many find comforting. Eastwood would appear to not find such change desirable. I’m unclear the culture-at-large would either.
Source: www.gregoryforman.com

More than ever, the boxing picture has proven to be a right of passage for young actors, allowing them to prove their macho bona-fides. More often than not they totally transform their bodies in an attempt to emulate De Niro in RAGING BULL or Stallone in ROCKY. Last year, Jake Gyllenhaal did it with SOUTHPAW and now Miles Teller’s having his turn with BLEED FOR THIS, which has the added cachet of counting Martin Scorsese as one of its executive producers.

It’s certainly an impressive achievement for Teller, who seems to be trying to change his image as the brash Paz, with his physical transformation as impressive as any in recent memory. Bulked-up in a way that will shock those who know him mostly as seemingly mild indie lead, it’s the kind of performance that proves Teller’s the real deal, despite some dodgy press and vehicles like FANTASTIC FOUR. A loud, impossibly confident figure, Paz is different than the kind of boxer we usually see in movies like this. He’s neither a self-destructive freight-train nor is he an underdog in the mold of Rocky Balboa. He’s more of an average guy, being far from the dumb mug you might expect. Teller, Eckhart and Hinds are all excellent and Younger has a good handle on the material, making this a solid fight flick in the vein of THE FIGHTER. Source: www.joblo.com

Bleed for This is unremitting in its toxic masculinity. Miles Teller plays Vinny Pazienza, who held world championship titles at three different weights in the late '80s and early '90s. His story is a classic example of the triumph of the human spirit. After suffering a car crash, he endured a halo, a rack that screwed into his skull, for six months in order to heal. Against all odds, as they say, he eventually recovered and went on to win more championships. Bleed for This is macho taken to the point of existential absurdity. It ends with an interview Pazienza gives when a reporter asks him what the biggest lie in boxing is. His answer is ,"It's not that simple." That's the biggest lie. Because it is that simple. Get it? You just have to want it. Grit is all it takes? 

In On the Waterfront, Terry Malloy, a failed boxer, comes to realize that the masculinity by which he has lived his entire life—the brotherhood of the Union and the boxing ring—is a sham, that he has been destroyed by the toughness he allowed to define him. The point of Bleed for This is: "Guys gotta be tough, you know?" We are going backwards in a hurry. Source: www.esquire.com

Men might want to ditch the pickup lines and polish their punchlines in their quest to attract women, new research at the University of Kansas suggests. Jeffrey Hall, associate professor of communication studies, found that the more times a man tries to be funny and the more a woman laughs at those attempts, the more likely it is for the woman to be interested in dating. Those findings were among the discoveries Hall made in his search for a link between humor and intelligence. For the past decade, research has debated whether women appreciate men’s humor, which is often cited as one of the most valued traits in a partner, because it allows them to suss out the smarts of potential mates.

In the article “Sexual Selection and Humor in Courtship: A Case for Warmth and Extroversion,” which was published online in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, Hall discusses three studies he performed that didn’t find a connection between humor and intelligence. The results did suggest the more times a man tried to be funny and the more times a woman laughed at his jokes, the more likely she was romantically interested. The reverse was not true for women who attempted humor.

Men use humor to gauge if women are interested in them. “Men are trying to get women to show their cards,” Hall said. “For some men it is a conscious strategy.” When men make jokes and women laugh, they may be performing a script in courtship. Men acting like jokers and women laughing along may be part of it. Humor is valuable for humor's sake. “Shared laughter might be a pathway toward developing a more long-lasting relationship,” Hall said. Source: news.ku.edu

Mr. Robot's fractured realities, Coney Island Baby's extended coda

“Pyth0n-pt1.p7z” begins the process of pushing Mr. Robot into bold new territory, and that transition might be too much for those who thought the show took place in our world. Much like the confusing whirlwind of events surrounding Angela Moss, the show is lurching out of the accepted reality that has anchored it to a universe recognizably our own. It’s threatening to blow open the gates of logic and rationality, and introduce a mysterious sci-fi conceit that would place it firmly in an otherworldly domain. All season, the show has teased the idea of alternate realities, or different understandings of time than our own linear one, and most of these strange proposals have come from Whiterose.

Kidnapping Angela, they drove her out of the city, out of any symbols or signifiers of comfort or familiarity. And they placed her in a room straight out of a David Lynch movie. From the pitch-black shadows saturating the room (after passing by a row of family photos in which the faces have been blotted out with red and yellow squares), to the simple table with old-school equipment, it conjured up images of Mulholland Drive’s red room, or something from Twin Peaks, or Lost Highway. All of which showcase fractured identities, and playing with time. We hope for something more. But there are men beyond our reach, men like Phillip Price, who pull levers and manipulate people, and get their way, even at the cost of the world itself. “This was always the future,” Price tells his hapless government associate. But Whiterose—and now, Angela—have a different story to tell. And it has a very simple, and utterly unbelievable, beginning: What if Price’s inevitable future wasn’t? Source: www.avclub.com

Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail credits consulting with a psychologist in order to accurately portray Elliot’s dissociative identity disorder (DID), as well as personal experiences with anxiety and addiction. From the beginning, viewers with experience with depression, social anxiety, addiction, and even autism have praised the show’s sensation of authenticity. Mr. Robot places the viewer almost entirely in Elliot’s reality. Major psychology and psychiatry associations agree that DID cannot be cured in such a straightforward sense and therapy should focus on the integration of alters, or increased coping and cooperation between personalties, rather than one “defeating” the other, as in Fight Club. Source: www.inverse.com

Lou Reed was a self-sabotaging, widely disliked man who gave voice to the unwanted and despised. Like Danny Fields said "poor Lou - his act worked too well." Humanity brought out the worst in him, and he returned the favor. Reed had been tormented in elementary school and suffered from anxiety and panic attacks. After high school, Reed eventually made his way to Syracuse and and reinvented himself in an outlandish subculture.

For the rest of his life Reed made much of his relationship there with Delmore Schwartz, who had been a celebrated American poet (at the time when that meant something.) At Syracuse, Schwartz was already in the throes of a death spiral of alcoholism and schizophrenia that would destroy his life.

Coney Island Baby is one of Reed's most interesting works. It's all built on a single strummed two-chord riff, here delivered almost absentmindedly, but with a relentless track of quiet lead guitar filigrees behind it. The song starts out as a sentimental high-school tale ("I wanted to play football for the coach"), but then widens its view to include a somewhat melodramatic gritty urban portrait ("Something like a circus or a sewer"), and refocuses back into something sincere ("The glory of love might see you through"). "Different people," Reed tells us in a ferocious utterance, "have peculiar tastes." He struggled to articulate this passion throughout his career, never more passionately and believably than here. 

Reed's achievements: The towering guitar change-up on "Sweet Jane," heroic nearly a half-century later; the filigreed melody of a song like "Femme Fatale"; the three-note riff, dropping off an emotional cliff, that undergirds "The Bells"; "Walk on the Wild Side," arguably the most subversive hit single of all time. Take No Prisoners, a 1978 two-disc live album, is more revealing than any other of his records.

And yet nothing can compare with the lovely, cathartic version of "Coney Island Baby" here. It's a coursing workout with crushing dynamics and lyrical interludes. At the end, Reed drops the murmured dedication to Lou and the lost Rachel and replaces it with an extended coda. That coda consists of that single hopeful phrase, "The glory of love might see you through," roared over and over, and over again. You can hear Reed babbling himself almost into incoherence. Blaring horns and some game backup singers wail, with almost Springsteenian grandeur, behind him. This closing maelstrom, his insistence that love can and must redeem us in the face of hate, goes on for minutes; let yourself get caught up in it and you believe it. The music finally stops. "Sorry it took a while," Reed snaps to the crowd. Clearly, he'd gotten off. -"Lou Reed: Untransformed" by Bill Wyman

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Shailene Woodley in Oliver Stone's cyberspace thriller "Snowden"

Stone’s exile in the desert of overheated irrelevance has now ended. “Snowden” isn’t just the director’s most exciting work since “Nixon” (1995) — it’s the most important and galvanizing political drama by an American filmmaker in years. It helps that Snowden, played with crisp magnetism by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is the furthest thing from a crusader. When we meet him, in 2004, he’s in basic training in the United States Army Reserve, but he’s not really the athletic military type. So he goes for the next best thing: a slot in the CIA, where the fight for U.S. security is already playing out on the battleground of the future — namely, cyberspace.

The movie doesn’t have the kaleidoscopic dazzle of Stone’s great ’90s films (“JFK,” “Natural Born Killers”), but it has his heady propulsive fever. You get the feeling, more than you did watching “Citizenfour,” that there was an honest terror beneath the proceedings — that given the subject of surveillance, the CIA might have burst in at any moment. But it’s not just about their safety. The stakes are so high because the theme of the interview, and the issue of whether they can publish it in the London-based newspaper The Guardian, is momentous. This is their one and only chance to expose the truth before Snowden disappears.

Gordon-Levitt does a meticulous impersonation of the Snowden manner: clipped and impeccable, his articulate, logical voice always trying to touch the reality of whatever he’s talking about. He’s certainly a geek, but with an important qualifier: He’s cool as a cucumber — free of any visible anxiety (or anger). At times, he’s like a very friendly automaton, but it’s not like he doesn’t have passion; as we’ll see, it just takes a lot to get him riled.

He also thinks he’s got everything figured out. On a dating site called Geek-Mate, Edward meets Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley), a local girl who’s sweet-natured and hot-tempered at the same time. They connect from their first date, but they’ve got major differences. Lindsay, a little aimless but shrewd and informed, thinks the Iraq War is a corrupt disaster, whereas Edward believes he grasps the bigger picture: the defense of the United States, and the things that go into that, which liberals shield themselves from knowing (even though they want the benefits of protection, too). 

Edward and Lindsay’s political differences have a touch of screwball-comedy friction. When she figures out that he’s working for the Agency after having traced where his message came from, he says, “You know how to run an IP trace?” For him, that’s practically a love lyric. Woodley gives a performance of breathtaking dimension: As the movie goes on, she makes Lindsay supportive and selfish, loving and stricken. Edward is assigned to the National Security Agency, the division of U.S. intelligence devoted, essentially, to data-gathering. He’s dispatched to different locales (Geneva, Tokyo, Hawaii), and Lindsay goes to live with him in each one. 

At home, Edward puts a piece of tape over his webcam, because he realizes that someone could be looking at him (or Lindsay). He’s not paranoid; he’s just enlightened. He knows there’s something wrong with that; it’s spying evolving into Big Brother. Stone stages a fantastic scene in which Edward talks to Corbin, his boss and mentor, on a giant screen, and Rhys Ifans’ face looms up like some CIA version of the Wizard of Oz. He’s terrifying, especially when he reveals that he heard that conversation between Edward and his colleagues. He knows whether or not Lindsay is having an affair; he knows everything. By the time Edward decides to act, it’s because he can’t not act. Stone creates a powerful wake-up call. The real message of “Snowden” is that surveillance is a Pandora’s Box. You may leave the movie grateful for everything that Edward Snowden brought to light, but also wondering if that box can ever be closed. Source: variety.com

Shailene Woodley not keen on Ascendant TV show, Ostracism in contemporary America

Lionsgate cut the budget for the fourth film, Ascendant, and announced plans to complete the franchise with a TV movie – leaving room for a spinoff series to continue telling stories within the world of Divergent. But, the cast of the Divergent films have not been confirmed to return for the TV movie, and the franchise’s star, Shailene Woodley previously said she hadn’t been warned about the change from film to television prior to its announcement. 

In an interview with Screen Rant while promoting Snowden, Woodley was asked whether there’s been an update on Ascendant and whether she’s on board with the final Divergent film. She said: "Last I heard they were trying to make it into a television show. I didn’t sign up to be in a television show. Out of respect to the studio and everyone in involved, they may have changed their mind and may be doing something different, but I’m not necessarily interested in doing a television show." When Woodley previously commented on the news that Divergent: Ascendant would be released on TV, the actress didn’t give an answer either way about whether she’d be up to return. 

When fellow Divergent star Miles Teller was asked about his intention to reprise his role as Peter, he had a similar answer of holding off any decision until he found out the details of the changed project. The actors involved in the Divergent franchise signed on for a final film that would be released in theaters, but since Lionsgate changed that plan, the actors may choose to part ways with the series. If that happens the studio would likely need to recast many of the major roles, perhaps with stars that would be up to return for the potential spinoff series. Given Woodley’s comment it seems likely she won’t return for the TV movie – though that may not be final. With so little known about what form Ascendant will take going forward it remains to be seen how exactly the studio wraps up the Divergent franchise, and/or continues it on television. Source: screenrant.com

There is a focus in the world of Divergent upon a community in which being alone, or “factionless,” would be worse than death, for factionlessness means homelessness, poverty, and ostracism – to avoid this fate, people must choose and subscribe to the identities of the five factions. In Divergent, uniforms work more conventionally, with each faction wearing clothing fitting for their virtue, yet these uniforms perpetuate the theme of physical appearance coding for identity. Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley) is warned she is Divergent and will never fit into any one group. When she discovers a conspiracy by a faction leader (Kate Winslet) to destroy all Divergents, Tris must learn to trust in the mysterious Four (Theo James) and together they must find out what makes being Divergent so dangerous before it's too late. Source: scholarship.claremont.edu

Some people have to deal with being ostracized on a daily basis. For any of several reasons, they are shunned by those near them and isolated from social circles that would otherwise be available. Being excluded and ignored has a negative effect on many aspects of social, physiological and psychological functioning. For example, people may become dishonest, cognitive abilities may decline over time, negative affect increases and harmful behaviors become more common. Ostracism appears to be linked with risky decision-making behaviors, but there is still much to learn about the nature of the relationship. Source: www.psypost.org

According to some industry rumor gossip (Crazy Days and Nights Blind Item #11 July 2016), Shailene Woodley being seen holding hands with 'gal pal' actress Isidora Goreshter on Valentine's Day lead Lionsgate to panick and they threatened to ostracize her if she didn't deny their relationship. These insiders felt that "She cracked open the door in her closet and the studio basically shamed her and accused of trying to sabotage the Divergent franchise." 

Tris has to leave an Eden of some sort behind. Life isn’t the same for her after she leaves Abnegation. But the bulk of the movie is a very socially-charged statement that makes parallels to contemporary America. It tells us we’re a country deeply divided into factions. And who’s winning? The technocrats and the military who form an alliance and use surveillance and military might to rule. The ideas of humility and modesty represented by the Abnegation are being overrun. As in America now, there’s a near worship of technology while at the same time a feeling that more selfless virtues are vanishing.  It may not be as well-paced as “The Hunger Games,” or cover as much territory, but "Divergent" is a powerful story that tells us how we’re losing our soul and mojo now in contemporary America.
Source: spiritualpopculture.com

Shia Labeouf and Miles Teller: back to their roots

In Damien Chazelle’s new musical La La Land, which just earned rave reviews at the Venice Film Festival, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling sing, dance, and fall in love. It’s the actors’ third film together, after Crazy Stupid Love and Gangster Squad, but when Chazelle first got the project off the ground, neither actor was involved: Instead, he’d cast his Whiplash star Miles Teller opposite Harry Potter actress Emma Watson. That Gosling and Stone came to lead the film feels preordained, but it’s another example of the tenuous art of casting: Many movies almost get made with totally different actors starring, while sometimes the performers who nearly missed the cut for a big role present an intriguing notion of what might have been.

Warren Beatty works at his own deliberate pace, so when he first put together his Howard Hughes comedy Rules Don’t Apply, in 2011, Felicity Jones was cast as the female lead and Beatty met with actors like Shia LaBeouf and Andrew Garfield to play her paramour. After production delays and a studio shuffle, though, Beatty finally shot the film in 2014 with Lily Collins and Alden Ehrenreich (your new Han Solo) as the leads. Source: www.vulture.com

“American Honey” director Andrea Arnold, who generally works with unknown actors, brushed off warnings not to cast LaBeouf in her low-budget film. Drawn to his earlier performance in “Transformers,” she met the actor for the first time several years ago in a café near her home outside London. The next time she saw him was in New York, on the morning after his “Cabaret” arrest, coming from jail and carrying his shoelaces in his hands. “I can never forget his face,” Arnold says. “He was hurting. He was very quiet.”  Arnold never gave LaBeouf a script, just a black and white picture of a forest for inspiration.

“American Honey” offers another milestone for the actor. It’s a performance that started generating Oscar buzz out of Cannes. But he scoffs at the awards chatter. “Nah, dude, not me,” says LaBeouf, who still hasn’t been invited into the Academy, despite having appeared in 30 movies. “The Oscars are about politics. It’s not about who is the best.” The career trajectory he was on as an A-list leading man doesn’t really exist anymore. Instead, he has joined a generation of actors —Jake Gyllenhaal, Kristen Stewart— who have bypassed studio movies for indies. LaBeouf admits that he’s no longer on Hollywood’s wish list for major blockbusters. David Ayer approached him for “Suicide Squad,” for a role that eventually went to Scott Eastwood. LaBeouf says the studio vetoed his casting. “I don’t think Warner Bros. wanted me. I went in to meet and they were like, ‘Nah, you’re crazy.’ It was a big investment for them.”

Labeouf thought Spielberg would be his ticket to a big-screen legacy. “You get there, and you realize you’re not meeting the Spielberg you dream of,” LaBeouf says. “You’re meeting a different Spielberg, who is in a different stage in his career. He’s less a director than he is a f–king company.” (Spielberg declined to comment). LaBeouf felt like there was no room to grow as an actor, and that he was stuck. “Spielberg’s sets are very different,” he says. “Everything has been so meticulously planned. You do that for five years, you start to feel like not knowing what you’re doing for a living.”

It was around this time that he started drinking heavily. “Part of it was posturing,” LaBeouf says. “I never knew how to drink. I never liked to drink. It was a weird post-modern fascination with the f–k-ups.” LaBeouf says that his latest adventure gave him the chance to feel what he’s been chasing—human connection. “You float with people,” he says. “You’ve got to stay malleable.” Source: variety.com

Here’s a brief synopsis of a dye job gone horribly wrong. The person of interest: Miles Teller. The time of incident: Spotted at the ESPYs in July. The embarrassing crime: Botching a blonde dye job. The public reaction: Sheer mockery. Thankfully, Teller’s unfortunate dye job from earlier this summer is now officially a thing of the past. The hair hue change was done in part to help transform Teller into a role for Joseph Kosinski’s movie about the Granite Mountain Hotshots. The film covers the story of 20 firefighters who fought the Yarnell Hill Fire in 2013 and Teller plays the sole survivor who has — you guessed it — blonde hair, according to Entertainment Weekly.

Now with filming wrapped up, though, Miles Teller has gone back to his roots (his brunette hair). He recognizes, too, the wrong he did in switching up his hair and has offered an apology to the public: “Dear Internet, I’m sorry I dyed my hair blonde,” he wrote on Twitter. “I never meant to hurt you. Please accept this apology.” All is forgiven, Teller. Source: nymag.com

Bleed for This (Miles Teller) - Telluride Reviews

“Bleed for This” stars Miles Teller as the boxer who simply wouldn’t quit — the “Pazmanian Devil” who agreed to wear a painful halo brace for six months in hopes that he might heal enough to defend his world-champion title. Teller is terrific, which should come as no surprise to “Whiplash” fans. Ben Younger here finds a piece of material that’s a great fit for his macho, high-energy style — and could soon be the biggest hit of his career. Still, all eyes are on Teller in a role that powerfully reinforces what a charismatic performer he is, whether pummeling an opponent in the ring or flirting with any woman who crosses his path.Teller takes us there, past the bruises and facial scars (makeup mixed with his own), to reveal the fire behind the fighter. Source: variety.com

Miles Teller and Aaron Eckhart attend the Telluride Film Festival on September 3, 2016, in Colorado.

It’s hard to find a genre more cliché-festooned than the boxing film. Ben Younger knows that, and doesn’t so much avoid those clichés as try to artfully re-arrange them the best that he can. But Miles Teller delivers something better than the sum of the film’s clichés. With his bulked-up physique, wispy pencil-thin mustache, and slightly dim reckless intensity, he turns what could have been a cartoon into a real person. Aaron Eckhart, as his hangover-prone trainer, also turns a familiar archetype into a character with three full dimensions. Source: www.ew.com

With executive producer Martin Scorsese figuratively looking over his shoulder, Ben Younger injects the action with as much visual and performance juice as he can muster, stirring interest in a crude, emotionally imprudent and severely flawed man (much as Scorsese often has) and serving up a thick slice of specific ethnic family ways—Rhode Island working class Catholics the likes of which haven’t been much seen onscreen since David O. Russell’s The Fighter six years ago.

As maniacally as he took drum playing to the limit in ‘Whiplash,’ Teller fights ‘til he wins or drops here. His intensity and determination levels are extreme, his proclivity for reckless, unthinking behavior just a bit less so, and the actor cuts a convincing boxer’s figure in the many scenes of training and combat.” Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

Whiplash feels like young Scorsese—hungry, ambitious, well disciplined, superbly cut. Chazelle understands that good filmmaking means showing command and locking into in the groove—tempo, timing, spirit, pulse. It’s a brash but out-there film that’s necessarily mad and manic. Teller's Andrew is vulnerable, anguished, charismatic, thoughtful. He really doesn’t want to be like his kindly, failed-writer dad (Paul Reiser), and he can’t find peace with a pretty girl (Melissa Benoist) because she isn’t as consumed as he is. Andrew just wants to wail like a champ, and this is how almost all great musicians are. Young Brian Wilson became a self-taught pianist in Hawthorne by playing every day like a crazy man, and ignoring the usual high-school stuff. Source: www.hollywood-elsewhere.com

I was heading down the escalator inside the Chinese/Dolby complex, heading for the orange level in the parking garage. I noticed this shapely ginger-haired girl with some big-shouldered, dark-haired guy standing behind her. Then I realized the guy, who was wearing a powder-blue shirt of some kind, was Miles Teller…. Then ginger girl dropped something and bent over to pick it up just as she and Teller were passing me, and I couldn’t resist checking out. She wasn’t looking so what the hell… right? Except Teller was looking at me. And then the humiliation: “Don’t be a pervert, man.” And he kind of bellowed it. Shamed, I tried a little “oh, no, man… I was just… you know, you and Damien Chazelle… I’m on the team!” But Teller wouldn’t back off, he kept looking at me like I was scum. Typical guy thing: “Hey man, she might be hot but I’m with her so avert your fucking eyes, and keep them averted!” Just another over-protective boyfriend flashing his alpha dominance. The irony is that I never gape at women shamelessly. Teller’s girlfriend Keleigh Sperry was the one I was subtly eyeballing. (Not subtly enough, I mean.)  Teller is cool enough, a serious actor. He is Mitchum, in a way. —Jeffrey Wells in Hollywood Elsewhere 

“I was excited to play the straight guy who actually has more of a moral compass,” Miles Teller recently told IndieWire of his role as David Packouz in War Dogs. “Those aren’t always the parts you’re getting. It’s rare to get a script for [roles for] guys in their young twenties that are actually doing things with big responsibility or a more mature tone.”

“For a lot of the projects I’ve done, it’s taken some foresight and some faith by the director,” Teller said. “When Ben cast me in ‘Bleed For This,’ I think I was just coming off ‘That Awkward Moment’ or something where I’m literally the pale, goofy friend. I don’t think many people had me on a short list to play a five-time world champion Italian boxer.”

“I remember the first project that I was legitimately bummed about. The first thing that I thought I was going to get and I didn’t and I was bummed out was ‘The Descendants.'” Teller read for the role of Sid, the stoner boyfriend of Shailene Woodley’s character, going so far as auditioning for director Alexander Payne, before being beat out by Nick Krause. Even though the memory still stings, Teller has a relaxed attitude towards how things panned out. After all, for Teller, it all comes down to one simple aim: “I just always wanted to be versatile.” Source: www.indiewire.com

David and Efraim are not friends. It’s not friendship. It’s just business. Teller then punches Hill in the face — and one gets the sense here that his David might as well be Todd Phillips himself. One senses that, after a career of playing the cool kid, and of celebrating his jerks as his heroes, Todd Phillips is finally ready to focus on the straight man and the moral center. That, in ostensibly making his Drama About Business, Todd Phillips has finally managed to make his Comedy About Friendship. And that, after all of these years, and all of those movies, Todd Phillips has finally figured out just what it is about friendship he has to say: ‘Don’t be a fucking dick.’ Source: theringer.com

"La La Land" Trailer, "Thank You For Your Service" documentary

La La Land is not only is a love letter to movies, to movie musicals, to romance, and to Los Angeles, but it is also an ode to people with a dream. It is a movie that has roots in Hollywood’s storied past and the golden era of such MGM musicals as Singin’ In The Rain and The Bandwagon, but also as a valentine to the French musicals of Jacques Demy and Michel LeGrand — specifically The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg and The Young Girls Of Rochefort. 

The last purely original musical written for the screen to take Best Picture was Vincente Minnelli’s Gigi in 1958. Minnelli’s films, along with Demy’s and others, were pure inspiration for Chazelle. 

“I remember when I saw The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg for the first time,” he said. “I had never seen a musical that was just as kind of high-flying as the sort of MGM style that it was borrowing from, but dealing with both the highs and lows. There’s something  just so beautiful  and poetic about it, and it’s still probably my favorite movie ever. So I feel like La La Land kind of started there.”

Ryan Gosling plays Sebastian, an aspiring jazz pianist who meets Emma Stone’s character Mia, a waitress working on the Warner Bros lot who aspires to be an actress. Both are superb, showing great musical skills, with Gosling even learning how to play excellent jazz riffs on the piano. The film details the ups and downs of their relationship as each pursues their dreams in the not-always-kind town of Los Angeles. 

Whiplash (starring Miles Teller as Andrew Neiman) worked out nicely, winning big at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and eventually receiving six Oscar nominations including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. It won three Oscars and launched Chazelle’s film career into the stratosphere. 

Chazelle added that his dad’s side of the family is all French, like Demy, and he kind of sees what L.A. is like to them. “It’s almost the embodiment of the romantic idea of America, you know, the freeways that go on to infinity, the big horizon, the big sky, the beach, Hollywood, you know the whole thing is so larger than life and so kind of iconic America in their mind. There’s a lot to play with there.” Source: deadline.com

"An American in Paris" (1952) directed by Vincente Minnelli, starring Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron.

"La La Land" (2016) directed by Damien Chazelle, starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone.

La La Land (One of the Most Anticipated New Films of the 2016-17 Oscar Season): With his sophomore effort “Whiplash,” Damien Chazelle proved to be a formidable talent. All eyes are on his follow-up, a musical love letter to Los Angeles set to open this year’s Venice Film Festival. It’s an ambitious genre to tackle these days, but if he handles it with half the aplomb of his 2014 Oscar winner, expect fireworks. Source: variety.com

The Union County Board of Chosen Freeholders will co-sponsor a special screening of "Thank You for Your Service," an award-winning documentary that explores the nation's superficial understanding of war trauma, including PTSD, and the flawed policies surrounding it. The movie will be shown on Wednesday, September 7th beginning 6:30 p.m. at the Hamilton Stage Theatre, 360 Hamilton Street, in Rahway.

The film is being presented as part of Chairman Bergen's UC HERO initiative for 2016, which assists Veterans. The movie has been called "gripping, wrenching, and persuasive" by the Village Voice and "a film every American should see" by the Star Ledger. The Military Times said it is "generating Oscar buzz." The documentary is currently being shown at film festivals around the country, and is scheduled for theatrical release in early October. It won "Best Documentary at the GI Film Festival in DC, and the "Impact Award" at the Illuminate Festival. Source: www.nj.com

Miles Teller as Adam Schumann in "Thank You For Your Service" (2017) directed by Jason Hall.