Just two acting powerhouses exercising their go-to skillsets: Joaquin Phoenix is an animalistic, wounded manchild. Philip Seymour Hoffman is a Wellesian, tightly-controlled powderkeg who may be so deeply closeted even he doesn’t know it. Watching them circle each other for 2:17 of period drama is genuinely thrilling.
Random thoughts:
—This was so good I didn’t hate Amy Adams
—“Jesse Plemons is too young to be PSH’s son” I thought, but then I looked it up, and the math mathed. Horrors…
Frank Capra directs Barbara again. This time, she’s an Aimee Semple McPherson type who falls in love with a blind man.
David Manners plays the blind man. There is a scene in which Florence goes to his apartment, and he brings out first a racist puppet, then a ventriloquist dummy, and begins to talk for him. Not even Gary Cooper would have been hot enough to keep me from running out the door if this had happened to me, David Manners, no fucking way, God rest his soul, I’m sure he was a nice man.
Since this is my umpteenth Jonestown documentary (and that’s not even counting books read as well), I feel I have authority to tell you that this one is pretty flimsy. There is virtually no time spent on the history of Jim Jones, or on what the original ideology of the People’s Temple was and why it may have entranced so many believers. We aren’t even 15 minutes in before Congressman Ryan is getting on an airplane to Guyana. Without the…
In which Marc Bolan and his lupine teeth and Ringo Starr and his prodigious mullet caper about.
I will not go down one of my favorite rabbit holes of “what would Marc Bolan’s career have made of itself had he lived,” I will just remind you as always to keep a little Marc in your heart. 💜
