Blue Eyes and Ethics: Paul Newman, Matt Damon

Paul Newman, the fierce-faced guy at the Actors Studio in New York City in the early fifties, perched backward on a folding chair. The tough guy's wearing a tight white T-shirt, his smoke cupped in one hand, his jaws clamped so hard that the muscles in his cheek quiver. No one in a room of sixty people could look more lonely. He's rock-hard, ice-cool, gorgeous. The first time he goes up in front of the class to do a scene in workshop, the tough guy gets slammed. Not that he doesn't know a few things. He knows that James Dean is out in Hollywood already. He knows that he's not so quick a study, that he has neither their emotional equipment nor their savvy, that he can't explode like Brando or melt down glistening like Dean. He knows that he is out of other options. He has made aimless failure look easy, which it's not -- not if you're from Shaker Heights. And this -- the sum of his feckless boyhood -- this he can use. He will use it. He has nothing left to lose or to hide, nothing and no one to hide from -- himself least of all.

An epiphany of sorts, and a paradox, because, in fact, he gives a fuck. He does not want to be a lightweight. He remembers his father during the Depression, when the store was out of cash, taking the train to Chicago and returning with the promise of thousands of dollars' worth of sporting goods from Spalding and Wilson, because he was a man of integrity. His father was not a lightweight and traded newspapering for the cold hell of retail to secure a future for his family. When his father died in 1950, Newman went back to Cleveland and took his place behind the counter, and he felt a stone in his chest where his heart had been. Behind the counter and in the account book, the tough guy found more shadows and ghosts than he could bear. He didn't last a year before deciding he's going to be an actor. He's going to pay the price of seeming not to give a fuck -- about the future, about success, about what anybody else thinks of him. He's going to pretend to care deeply about nothing, to be past caring, especially about the things he cares deeply about. He's going to act as if he's not acting.

He's going to be Hud. Cool Hand Luke. He's going to be a beautiful loser, a self-made orphan, adrift and misjudged, as scornful as he is scorned. He's going to be the adolescent fantasy of a man's man, cocky, gritty, tough inside and out, all smirk and sinew, opposed -- not by choice but by the helpless purity of his nature -- to the laws that govern everyone else. Freedom... he has no other choice. No past -- his father's shade floats dark behind him, knowing that his pretty boy couldn't cut the mustard. No future -- he looks a little like Dean, but without the sullen anguish. Newman was just a tough guy hidden, alone behind the curtain. "I don't know what I've learned," the old Paul Newman growls. Then comes a long pause, a vintage Actors-Studio pause, a quiet billowing like fog, a hush falling like the dark. You want him to open and spill himself? He won't. He doesn't think of himself like that, as a subject. Long ago, he decided that his inner life would stay that way ("This is the great age of candor," he said in 1983. "Fuck candor"), that celebrity was another, lesser role, and not to be trusted.

Newman was named Best Actor at Cannes for his work in The Long, Hot Summer (1958) but it wasn't that year's box-office sensation that would've been Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, for which Newman got the first of his eight Best Actor Oscar nominations. By 1963, with twenty films and three Oscar nominations for Best Actor, Newman had become the most versatile and bankable movie star on planet Earth; for God's sake, Newman lost Oscars to, among others, David Niven and Tom Hanks. The women mocked at fanning themselves when he turned his head, not because they were warm, but because it was… him. "It is luck," admits Newman, "I didn't think very much about the future. I never felt like a leading man. I never had that kind of confidence." James Dean had died and bequeathed to Newman his first plum role, as Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me.

Meeting Joanne Woodward, a great actress who was willing to set aside the meat of her career to raise their kids --that was lucky too. In 1953, while walking around Manhattan street on a scorching August afternoon, the 25-year-old Newman decided to escape the heat in his agent’s air conditioned office. How could he know that he was about to meet the love of his life? In that fateful office sat Joanne Woodward, a young, pretty and very talented actress, also hiding from the hot sun. “We really liked each other,” Woodward said about the secret to their long marriage. “We could talk to each other, we could tell each other anything without fear of ridicule or rejection. There was trust.” "I was shy and a bit conservative. It took me a long time to persuade her that I wasn't as dull as I looked," Shawn Levy quotes Newman in his biography Paul Newman: A Life (2009). On January 29, 1958, Joanne and Paul married in Las Vegas and went on a honeymoon in Europe. 

He's going to be another great good man -- the last of his kind -- gone.  Paul Newman had an odd sort of foul-mouthed dignity we simply don’t see in movies these days (if an actor is doing a blue routine, it’s always so damn obvious). "No complaints," Newman says. "I've had a pretty good run." Source: www.esquire.com

Matt Damon was surprised about being compared to such matinee idols like Paul Newman. Matt Damon joined Newman on stage to perform The World of Nick Adams during a November 2002 charity event. "The leading-man stuff doesn't come easily to me. I've always felt like a character actor,'' Damon said, telling of his unease when he found out that the role he was playing in Robert Redford's film The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000) was originally to have been played by the veteran star himself. Damon was the co-founder of Water.org to set up access to safe water and sanitation in the poorest parts of the world. His commitment to this and other more overtly political campaigns has caused Damon to be likened to ethically engaged stars of yesteryear, such as Paul Newman or Robert Redford.

Matt Damon famously had a 3 year relationship with Winona Ryder and even allegedly turned down Courtney Love's advances. Did Damon's marriage to Luciana develop from love at first sight? "I don't know if that's me revising the memory as I get older, imbuing it with all the subsequent emotion that I felt and all the experiences that we've had since then," Damon told Macleans Canada magazine in 2011. "I feel like if I'm honest, that there was a halo of light around her and I absolutely knew that moment had changed my life before I even spoke to her, but I don't know whether or not that's revisionism." However their relationship began, it's clear that they were meant to be together! Source: www.macleans.ca

According to the HD Room, Director Alexander Payne’s Downsizing starring Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig will get a simultaneous home video release on March 20th. Formats supported for the release include Blu-ray, 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, DVD and Digital HD. Downsizing had losses of over $20 million at the box office. The film’s star power combined with its premise about shrinking down to live in miniature communities should draw more interest on home video than it did theatrically. Despite tanking at the box office, Downsizing is getting some supplemental feature love from Paramount with a collection of bonus features. Here’s the breakdown of all the planned featurettes:

Working with Alexander
The cast
A visual journey
A matter of perspective
That smile
A global concern

Trustworthiness and altruism have a synergistic effect when combined with physical attractiveness. A new study, published in the British Journal of Psychology, has found that the combination of physical attractiveness and prosociality greatly boosts a person’s desirability as a romantic partner. “There has been some great research done by psychologists to help us understand human mating and in particular the individual traits that are valued by both men and women, however in reality these traits will be assessed as a whole when we make judgements of the desirability of a potential partner,” explained study author Daniel Farrelly, a senior lecturer at the University of Worcester. “Therefore we wanted to see how both men and women assess potential mates when the latter vary in levels of two characteristics that are well established in mate choice research; physical attractiveness and prosocial behaviours (e.g. altruism and trustworthiness).” 

The researchers found that both altruism and trustworthiness were preferred in long-term partners. But this was especially true for people who were already physically attractive. People with prosocial traits who were also physically attractive were preferred the most. But the effects of prosociality and physical attractiveness wasn’t simply additive. “In other words, as we found there were synergistic effects of being both physically attractive and prosocial, which meant that such individuals were viewed as more desirable than would be expected from just the sum of the two desirable traits,” Farrelly explained to PsyPost. “Also, this effect was most important for seeking long term partners, where having both traits will be much more valued and desired compared to short term partners for both men and women.”

“One of the intriguing findings of our study was how different forms of prosocial behaviours (altruism and trustworthiness) were valued in different ways by men and women that we predicted based on their potential adaptive value in mate choice,” Farrelly noted. The context had a much stronger impact for men than for women. For men, trustworthiness had very little influence in the context of short-term relationships, but a strong influence in the long-term context. “This research highlights how prosocial behaviours (such as fairness, heroism, and true altruism) may be viewed differently in human mate choice due to the different adaptive roles,” Farrelly added. The study, “The synergistic effect of prosociality and physical attractiveness on mate desirability“, was co-authored by Daniel Ehlebracht, Olga Stavrova, and Detlef Fetchenhauer.  Source: www.psypost.org

'Bad' Girls, Romantic Partners, Matt Damon

Perhaps the more astonishing thing of I, Tonya is that this movie is a black comedy about domestic violence, parental abuse, and low self-esteem… and it works. It works in a way that does not diminish the horrors of those things, and is funny about them — in a dark, bitter way — only in how people rely on lying in often ridiculous ways to themselves and others about the realities of their lives. And even then, it’s not that we’re intended to laugh so much as we’re meant to see the deployment of bleak humor by the narrators of their own stories as a way to distance oneself from things too terrible to consider full on. Margot Robbie’s Tonya Harding is a complicated, contradictory woman as well, oozing massive self-delusion that is a challenge to us, and to our acceptance of her side of the story — nothing is ever her fault, even when it clearly is — and yet also adds to our empathy for her. Source: www.flickfilosopher.com

“Bad Girls” Say No and “Good Girls” Say Yes: Sexual Subjectivity and Participation in Undesired Sex During Heterosexual College Hookups. Young people’s sexuality is often discursively constructed within the confines of a masculine/feminine binary. Accordingly, young women who acknowledge themselves as sexual subjects are constructed as “bad girls” who incite males’ purportedly uncontrollable desire and, thus, invite undesired sexual attention. However, there is reason to hypothesize that young women who view themselves as sexual subjects may be less likely than other women to engage in undesired sexual activity. Logistic regression analyses suggest that pleasure prioritization and sexual agency are associated with lower odds of performing undesired sexual acts to please a partner—and sexual agency is associated with lower odds of succumbing to verbal pressure for intercourse. These findings point to the importance of sexuality education that includes discussions of women’s sexual subjectivity. This research was made possible by financial support from the Vanderbilt University College of Arts and Science Social Science Dissertation Fellowship. Source: link.springer.com

In an interview with Deadline, Matt Damon talked about the Harvey Weinstein's sexual misconduct allegations: "I just feel absolutely sick to my stomach. If Harvey was doing this kind of thing and I didn't see it, then I am so deeply sorry, because I would have stopped it." Emphatically, Damon stressed: "And I will peel my eyes back now, farther than I ever have, to look for this type of behavior. I feel horrible for these women and it's wonderful they have this incredible courage and are standing up now. We can all feel this change that’s happening, which is necessary and overdue. Men are a huge part of that change, and we have to be vigilant and we have to help protect and call this stuff out because we have our daughters, our sisters and mothers. This kind of stuff can’t happen." Source: deadline.com

At its core, Downsizing grapples head-on with the long-term viability of humanity's existence on this planet, but with no pretension or preachiness at all. It's also a science-fiction film that not for a second looks or feels like one. As such, this is a unique undertaking centered on an unexceptional Everyman character who unwittingly embarks upon an exceptional life journey; in that sense, Matt Damon's Paul Safranek is like the hero of a Frank Capra or Preston Sturges film of 75 years ago, an ordinary man who has a certain sort of greatness thrust upon him. Ngoc Lan is Paul’s tart-tongued angel of mercy. Her “what kind of fuck you give me?” monologue is some kind of cinematic nadir. Ngoc Lan sees her contribution to humanity not in helping to build a post-apocalyptic society of the small, but in helping others right now, even if humanity is doomed. Paul’s dilemma becomes the choice represented to Ngoc Lan—to stay in a dying world and alleviate suffering, however insignificant that impact might seem, or retreat from messy humanity, chasing a perfect future?

University of Alberta research states that the more your partner is depressed, the more love you should give. This study was published in Developmental Psychology. Matthew Johnson, a relationships researcher, states: “Efforts from a partner to help alleviate stress may prevent the development or worsening of mental health problems and, in fact, could help keep the relationship healthy.” Johnson, a professor in Faculty of Agricultural, Life and Environmental Sciences, said: “When we experience high levels of stress, we are particularly vulnerable and perhaps that’s why partner support in those times is so impactful and long-lasting.” Researchers have found that future feelings of self-worth and depression are linked with the support given when a mate was feeling stressed. Johnson said: “Giving to their partner made them feel better about themselves.” For example, men’s feelings of self-esteem got a boost from supporting a depressed partner. Women have increased self-esteem and reduced depression in the future if they are receiving support from their partner. Johnson added that supporting a partner who needs it most can be difficult. He added: “When someone is depressed or has low-self-worth, they may lash out.” Johnson suggested to give invisible support in the face of negative reaction. Studies revealed that helping your partner without getting her know can also be a helpful gesture like taking care of a sink full of dirty dishes they haven’t seen yet. You can offer support, just don’t draw attention to it. Source: cnbcmag.com

Soderbergh's Unsane, The Informant!

Unsane (2018), shot entirely on an iPhone 7 Plus, is Steven Soderbergh’s unnerving portrait of a young woman who thinks she’s being held against her will at a mental institution. Part Shutter Island, part Get Out, Unsane stars Claire Foy as a mentally unravelling woman who reports the re-appearance of her stalker, only to be placed in a mental institution against her will. The authorities refuse to listen to her frantic story, leading her to question her own reality. The film also stars The Blair Witch Project‘s Joshua Leonard, Killer Joe‘s Juno Temple, and Traffic‘s Amy Irving. “I think this is the future,” Soderbergh said at the Sundance Film Festival. “Anybody going to see [Unsane] who has no idea of the backstory to the production will have no idea this was shot on the phone. That’s not part of the conceit.” The nightmare of being held in an institution because people think you’re crazy comes to life in palettes of yellow and blue. Source: www.slashfilm.com

Who is Mark Whitacre? A bumbling dimwit struggling with a crisis of conscience? A misguided upstart fueled by greed? A lonely loser desperately searching for a sense of purpose? A simple man scrambling to survive in a world of cutthroats and cheats? A devoted husband and father? Compulsive liar? Scorned everyman? Lost soul? Criminal? All those things, and more? That's exactly what director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Burns wanted to know after reading former-New York Times journalist Kurt Eichenwald's book, The Informant, a sharply written farce that proves to be as funny and infectious as it is tragic and disarming. Damon’s work in “The Informant!” extends his interest in performance and self-delusion, but in the withdrawn nebbish mode. Mark Whitacre is literally coming apart at the seams physically before he does it psychologically. 

Damon is superb as a demonically smart guy who comes across as rather dim. Is Whitacre a knight in shining armor, a compulsive liar, playing secret agent or plagued by mental illness? Or is he all of the above? With his earnest demeanor and straightforward delivery, Damon convincingly obfuscates Whitacre's motives. We don't question his veracity as much as try to muddle through it. Soderbergh emphasizes the man’s duality through his use of voiceover, which features Whitacre’s perplexing digressions, constantly veering away from personal revelations to ponder the weather, food prices and polar bears. In a strange but fascinating touch, Damon voices his inner monologue. Often, his thoughts — an inane stream of consciousness — seem wholly unrelated to what's going on around him, which adds an intriguing absurdist quality to an already quirky tale. Damon’s performance is the lone element handed a wisp of depth within the entire film, while also supplying the only substantial laughs. Under an itchy wig and behind a mustache, Damon interprets Whitacre as a good-natured gentleman caught in the middle of a various schemes only he can solve; a pure soul stuck in a Grishamesque scheme of 360 degree corruption. Source: www.ifc.com

'Know thyself’ is one of philosophy’s most ancient aphorisms. But can the self be empirically investigated? Antirealists deny the existence of the self – for them it is an illusion, a fiction of the mind, a useful conceptual tool for organising human experience. Daniel Dennett, a cognitive scientist at Tufts University in Massachusetts, defends the antirealist view. For Dennett, each ‘normal’ individual creates a self by spinning stories through language. It is both intrinsic and unconscious, argued Dennett in Consciousness Explained (1991). Because the self is constructed and abstracted out of narratives, it is permeable and flexible, and because of its permeability, the self eludes scientific scrutiny. Some individuals with schizophrenia report a deep sense of disintegration between themselves and their actions. They feel that they are automatons – their bodies can feel to them like alien objects. Changes in the private dimension of the self can be at least partially tracked by analysing how behaviour changes. The subjective and transient aspects of the self that antirealists delineate are actually the private and conceptual dimensions of the self. Mental disorders do not influence or change exclusively one dimension of the individual but multiple aspects simultaneously. Studying only one fractured aspect of their self (i.e. autobiographical memory) will not yield the rich results that will come from engaging with the self in its complexity. An integrated understanding of the different parts of the self is necessary to fathom the complexity of mental disorders. Source: aeon.co

Humanistic Dissertations: Downsizing snubbed, The Shape of Water 13 Oscar nominations

Viacom’s Paramount emerged with no Oscar nominations on Tuesday for the first time since 2003. What’s worse, it’s the first time in 15 years that any of the major Hollywood studios (or their indie divisions, including the now-dormant Paramount Vantage) has gotten blanked by the Academy. Paramount came into this Oscar season with high hopes for a trio of high-profile and starry films, including Alexander Payne’s high-concept “Downsizing” with Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig, director George Clooney’s ’50-set drama “Suburbicon” (also starring Damon) and Darren Aronofsky’s genre-defying Jennifer Lawrence film “mother!” A rep for Paramount declined to comment. Source: www.thewrap.com

In Suburbicon Matt Damon delivers a wonderfully dry, slyly vicious performance. Julianne Moore’s perma-grinning housewife could be one of the nasty friends of her character in Far From Heaven.  Why Suburbicon has been so poorly received by US critics and audiences is a mystery. Sure, its politics are painted in broad strokes, but then the dominant ideology it targets is hardly a paragon of nuance. Clooney’s balancing act is between heightened style and seriousness of theme, and it works, lending the film a consistent clarity.

One could argue that all of Alexander Payne’s major works – Election, Sideways, The Descendants– are about man’s search for meaning. And Downsizing, his most expansive and high concept film to date, is no different. It’s a movie about small people, but has a very big heart. We have the driest opening imaginable: a science lecture. Dr Jorgen Asbjørnsen presents a solution to humankind’s growing population crisis: shrink everyone to five inches tall so that they use a fraction of the resources of the “big” people. Jump forward a decade and 3% have made the transition. The enterprise has become commercialised. It’s a tempting offer: plough your meagre savings into this irreversible process, and watch as your hundred grand becomes ten million. A life of luxury in Leisureland, North America’s foremost “micrommunity”.

Paul (Matt Damon) and his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) are struggling to upsize. They’re still living in the apartment of his late mother. Paul’s done the math and he can’t give her the life she desires. So they choose to make the journey to Leisureland. But then Paul wakes up small, only to find out Audrey never went through with it. Paul is alone in this startling utopia. Payne throws in a wonderful curveball in the form of Ngoc Lan Tran and the realisation that the same human problems exist down here. The same inequalities and lack of social cohesion. Wealth and comfort are relative at all scales. 

Ngoc is a woman living off leftovers. She unlocks the potential in Paul. “You know things,” she says. She’s looking beyond status – beyond the vanity of Paul’s failed medical ambitions – to the core of who he truly is. Ngoc, perfectly played by Hong Chau, is an explosion of pure feeling. Confrontational and unfiltered, and often downright rude, she’s not so much a pixie dream girl as a pixie nightmare girl. Payne embraces the sociological and philosophical questions of his creation. A distant commune, hidden in a tiny fjord, looks like a pastel painting from a religious pamphlet. Going small, says Paul’s old buddy Dave (Jason Sudeikis), isn’t about saving the planet, it’s about saving yourself. He’s not right, but neither is Dr Asbjørnsen, who is trying to save the human race with grand cultural gestures. 

These conflicting outlooks instil Paul with a sense of self-importance, a balloon which only Ngoc can prick. Downsizing isn’t a very funny film, and this is where it may come unstuck at the box office. Just because the trailer insists it’s a whacky, life-affirming comedy doesn’t make it so. Its comedy is a guaranteeing grins rather than belly-laughs. First and foremost this is science fiction. Are the tonal shifts too much? What a pity if it doesn’t find an audience. It is intelligent and heartfelt; fantastical and true. It’s the first great film of 2018. Source: www.nerdly.co.uk

Hong Chau, who has been nominated for Critics Choice, Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild Awards for her scene-stealing role in Alexander Payne's social satire Downsizing, said her relationship with Damon was "effortless" while making the film. Speaking to RTÉ Entertainment she said: "I met him on our very first day of shooting. I didn’t have time to go get a coffee with him or anything beforehand. I felt like he’s not some highfalutin Hollywood star. He’s a person who has worked a lot in his life but he’s also very happy to be working still and it’s very apparent when he shows up on set it’s a joy for him to come in to work every morning." "He doesn’t take it for granted", she added. Source: www.rte.ie

Perhaps the greatest of The Shape of Water’s many surprises is how extravagantly romantic it is, driven throughout by an all-conquering belief in soulmates as lifelines. The Shape of Water is Guillermo del Toro at the top of his craft — if he were a PhD student, this would be his dissertation. Themes that have resonated disparately in his work are brought together here — the power of popular culture to soothe and support; the strength and value of the unique, weird (or queer); monsters defeated by embracing monstrosity; a united, loving diversity pushing back against a destructive, violent homogeneity; the lesser but insidious evil of allowing evil to flourish through nonaction. Del Toro takes risks that shouldn’t work — a particular sequence in homage to old Hollywood musicals comes to mind — but do.

But overridingly you feel lucky — lucky that something so sincerely sweet, sorrowfully scary and surpassingly strange can exist in this un-wonderful world, and desirous of hanging on to as much of its magic for as long as you can after you reemerge back onto dry land. The Shape of Water is indelible proof that it is not the concepts within popular art — or so-called lowbrow entertainment — that restrict the genre’s emotional resonance, but the complexity of storytelling we use to support those concepts. And, above all, the sincerity we are willing to invest in them. Source: www.polygon.com

Oscar Nominations 2018: Could The Shape of Water break a record for Science Fiction? Stanley Kubrick's major disappointment was the beginning of a long Oscar dry spell for sci-fi. Some of the most influential films of the 20th century—2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, E.T. The Extraterrestrial, Blade Runner, Cocoon, Back to the Future, Aliens, Jurassic Park—were nominated, but none of them won. The game-changer was the increase from five to ten Best Picture nominees in 2009. Since then, District 9, Avatar, Inception, Her, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian and Arrival have placed within the Best Picture category. Source: www.newsweek.com