Housekeepin’:
Matthew Macfadyen has been out and about promoting Deadpool & Wolverine lately, which has been a good reminder that few working actors are hotter. He is routinely asked to do humiliatingly unfunny bits or commentary related to overplayed jokes from Succession, but he takes them on the chin with truly unprecedented suavity. Unlike Robert Downey Jr., whose distaste for Marvel was always, obviously, been a performance, Macfadyen shows so little emphaticism about anything, at all, he politely participates in a Marvel-scale press tour at arm’s length. It should be disheartening to see Stiva Oblonsky and Mr. Darcy be introduced by Stephen Colbert as someone in “Deadpool & Wolverine,” but instead it is exhilarating. He is just like Mr. Darcy IRL!!!
I am not interested in “The Olympics.” Usually, if they are in an interesting city, I will care about them for 4-48 hours, but Paris is just about the least interesting place on Earth. I like that SJP, Matthew Broderick, and Tom Cruise stood together at the rainy Opening Ceremony. I would imagine it’s difficult for Matthew Broderick and Tom Cruise to converse.
Twisters had two of the best trailers in recent memory. The hot guy from Nope screams “we got twins” as loud as he can, referencing the titular plural twisters, fireworks get sucked up into a tornado, and Luke Combs wails over a track that sounds more like Jackson Maine than radio country or 2020s soundtrack music. Most importantly, Daisy Edgar-Jones smugly twirls her finger around like a twister.
I looked forward to seeing the finger tornado before every AMC movie for 5 months. Every time I saw my brother between the trailer and movie’s releases, I would ask him if he’s “ready” for Twisters and twirl my finger like a tornado. To me this is what movies are all about: making chronically offline adults say “what?” after telling them I have Zweig fever or that Power over spice is power over all.1 While there were a lot of 2023 releases to love, only one had enough blockbuster juice to squeeze into these kind of transportable one-liners (or one-fingerers).
Asking people if they've heard of The Entity was one of the greatest joys of last year. The Entity was, of course, according to Villains Wiki, “a mysterious artificial intelligence… that somehow developed sentience” serving as “the overarching antagonist” of Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One. I am always chasing the high of seeing a new Mission: Impossible, which is a franchise about a magic wizard who sprints at full speed through a variety of international landscapes, assisted by Ving Rhames in a hat. M:I movies are composed of only tension, or contain absolutely no tension, depending on how you look at it. Each is an avalanche of sticky situations that are so grandiose they are only solvable, but always destined to be solved, by the whimsical indestructibility of Tom Cruise. They incite little else but putting your hands up and saying “WEE!”.
When trailers as high-octane as Twisters come out, this is what I am being sold: you are telling me they are trying to out-think the tornados, which makes me think of weather like The Entity. I don’t want ideology, I don’t even want sex. I want sprinting and magic. The finger tornados indicated to me there was a slim chance the director of Minari understood these things when making Twisters, but I was apprehensive. Daisy Edgar-Jones is a scourge, and Glen Powell is an unruly mess of a hunk I didn’t trust the Minari director to understand. But I hoped. And come last week, that hope bore no fruit.
Twisters is boring. It is more of a remake than a sequel, with a story running on absolutely nothing but the fake science needed to collapse a tornado. Will they or won’t they crack this equation? They’re running out of time to figure out the right model to accurately plan shooting chemicals at the tornados. This, plus clunkily plotted lore about criminalizing weather, leaves no time for human interaction. Glen Powell is a woke YouTuber with a truck that shoots explosives into the sky and anchors into concrete, but he hardly speaks about anything but chemicals. The only parts of the movie that aren’t a slog are Brandon Perea, whose character not only screams but dresses incredibly well, and a Jackson-Maine-does-Target-commercial soundtrack. Both these things take the raw aestheticism of American conservatism and refine it into glossy storm (🌪️) of masculinity and denim.
I am upset. Not only because Twisters fails to harness even a fraction of kinesthetic action in M:I, but because the concept of Glen Powell playing a cowboy streamer who you think is an asshole but is secretly a woke scientist is awesome. He doesn’t do a bad job. He’s funny! But something is wrong. Why do his vehicles to movie stardom always collapse like tornados when you shoot chemicals at them at just the opportune moment? Looking at Brandon Perea in this outfit, listening to Luke Combs: I figured it out.
Chris Stapleton was the musical guest on the Ryan Gosling SNL episode this year. He sang the lead single off his most recent album and it was so beautiful I almost burst into tears: it sounds exactly like Jackson Maine if Bradley Cooper could sing. I’ve always appreciated Chris Stapleton, but I have to be reminded that he exists. When Twisters: The Album hit, I was reminded again that I like overwrought country music if it’s loud and a little ironic. I thought, this is twice in one year I’m being drawn to this aesthetic, so maybe it’s time to do a little more digging.
I’ve been curious about “Morgan Wallen” for a long time. A true party boy, a complete mess with a “Use of racial slur” section on Wikipedia, his incredibly manufactured celebrity and allergy to politely holding it together on behalf of everyone that made him famous reminds me of Justin Bieber. Except, Wallen’s music is far more specific, emptier, and funnier.
I cannot and will not deny that the words “I need something you proof,” sung by a guy that looks like anyone from my high school class brings me both ironic and unironic pleasure. Elsewhere I have explained that Taylor Swift’s music is fun because it is nursery rhymes: you learn the words and then sing them back while tapping your foot. Morgan Wallen, not unlike Taylor Swift, is not cool. But that in itself is, in a way, cool. I guess we’re just gonna let an idiot I went to high school sell-out the largest country music concert of all time in the UK. In 2024!
Wallen bucks up against the way culture works now so overtly I can’t help but look away. While learning about him and listening to Twisters, another canceled man has been on my mind, due to his sudden public reemergence from Grand Cayman.
I have lots to say about Armie Hammer, but I’ll start here: 7 years ago, Buzzfeed published an article titled “Ten Long Years of Trying to Make Armie Hammer Happen,” which I think about every 3-7 days. Its thesis is that, for a decade, Armie Hammer was repeatedly reinvited to the helm of failing blockbusters, a courtesy Hollywood would never extend to, say, a woman. It is marginally curious that Armie Hammer was in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. after the gratuitously embarrassing The Lone Ranger, even moreso considering he was part of one of the early, canned DC movies. But is it, really?
Author Anne Helen Petersen answers this question: no, it isn’t. And that’s a problem. In the early years of discussions about nepotism, at height of #OscarsSoWhite, she argues Hammer is a “beautiful, pedigreed white man,” regurgitating Mirror Mirror director Tarsem Singh’s description of him as “a prince… with undertones.” She has all the evidence: his first magazine appearance was alongside Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in a 2009 Vanity Fair article about heirs, because Hammer, an oil heir, was also a Gossip Girl heartthrob. Then he was in a racist Disney movie, flippant about promoting Man from U.N.C.L.E. because Tom Cruise dropped out and the film did badly, then he was in Birth of a Nation. Finally: Hammer’s turn in Call Me By Your Name is “indie martyrdom” for his failed career as a front-man, which is problematic because “A post-Weinstein Hollywood isn’t just about naming and removing abusers. It’s about illuminating the processes that have, for decades, allowed Hollywood’s interior logic…to endure and execute itself.”
In the same breath, Petersen, like many at the time–myself included–calls both for an aggressive takedown of Hollywood & everything that makes it run, and a revival of it that somehow affords different kinds of people the same successes it had so long given to bad men. What she can’t anticipate is that, 2 years after Call Me By Your Name, Timothée Chalamet, who she frames as the better, safer part of the film (Armie Hammer is “less remarkable”) would have his own chance at birthing the nation in Woody Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York. Neither does she address that, while in 2017 it was crazy to be an oil heir “with undertones,” in 2009 it was the coolest possible thing for a guy to be.
Retrospectively, this individualist approach to “badness” was a canary in the coal mine of desperation to go back to not thinking about badness at all. But it also so clearly laid the groundwork for our ecosystem of hunks to be so milquetoast (Paul Mescal is allegedly dating Gracie Abrams). Armie Hammer was a bro-y, wasp-y, scary rich guy, which, yes, is how he ended up in The Social Network. It was a cultural archetype he was a swing for: when a movie or year called for more than one Justin Timberlake, he was there. When sloppy douchebags like Colin Farrell checked into rehab, differently scary guys with a little more oil money to prop them up had to step in. When Justin Bieber gets too domesticated, here comes Morgan Wallen.
Well, you win. Armie Hammer is over. The answer? Miles Teller! He was reportedly an anti-vaxxer, he proposed to his girlfriend on a safari in South Africa, he’s from the suburbs of PA and went to Tisch! This guy would call you a butterface to your friends but “gorgeous” in private. He’s perfect!2
Not to Tom Cruise, he isn’t! Of the rising stars (Miles Teller is 37 years old) in Top Gun: Maverick, Mr. Cruise has chosen Glen Powell over Miles Teller. This is charmingly puzzling to some because Teller is so obviously the star of the film: narratively and in terms of “it.” Yet it makes so much sense, because Miles Teller is a straight guy with “butterface” in his vocabulary and Glen Powell, like Tom Cruise, is a sexless wizard.
I do not hate Glen Powell. He is a serviceable action star and he is funny. He has that Cruisian quality of indestructible perfection. But Tom Cruise is bringing Glen Powell up not to have a personality. This worked for Cruise–was necessary–as management of clinical insanity and wickedness. Glen Powell does not seem crazy or evil, however, so the lack of oomph is making him, and me, limp.
Neither Miles Teller nor Armie Hammer have a place in our culture anymore, but, because those are individuals and not the vernacular of mainstream audiences for whom an unchanged Hollywood machine still produces movies for, their roles have not gone away. Thus we are left with Winklevoss-sized holes that a yapping guy who “doesn’t date” is attempting to fill. This is not fair to him or to us.
A whole subplot of Twisters is about an evil real estate company that is exploiting people devastated by tornados by buying up their land for not enough money, or displacing them, or something. If this were trimmed down to be more legible, e.g. the tornados are devastating and some people are making salacious content about the devastation (bad) when our heroes just want to help the devastated people (good), there would have been more room to make the role of a cowboy streamer more easily playable by Powell. Don’t just make the streamer Miles-Teller-but-woke! That is so lazy!
I guess it doesn’t matter, because Twisters made a ton of money. Maybe Petersen was right, and we now live in a utopia where ideologically bad movies with bad people don’t make as much money as safe ones with safe guys in them. Though, given the simultaneity of Twisters’ and Morgan Wallen’s successes, I don’t think that’s the case.
Another classic iteration of this was asking people to “throw on Boletus Felleus.”
Now deleted tweet, screenshot from r/TaylorSwift:
a different but similar case: I will always sort of half-heartedly defend the clearly insane Paul Walter Hauser for being a celeb that is not media trained to the point of being a wheaten terrier... who cares if he had a meltdown on Twitter because Drive My Car got too many Oscars? more guys should melt down on Twitter
Bieber-Wallen comparison is so apt, I'm shocked no one has ever made it before.