‘It felt dangerous. You got naggy’: Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater on power, combovers and Blue Moon

Ahead of their 11th movie together, the actor and director discuss musicals, the legacy of Philip Seymour Hoffman and what being bald and 5ft tall does to your flirting skills ‘I like this, it’s good,” Ethan Hawke tells Richard Linklater, midway through a lively digression that has already hopped from politics to the Beatles to the late films of John Huston . “What’s good?” asks Linklater. “All of this,” says Hawke, by which he means the London hotel suite with its coffee table, couch and matching upholstered armchairs; the whole chilly machinery of the international press junket. “I like that we get to spend a couple of days in a room,” he says. “It feels like a continuation of the same conversation we’ve been having for the past 32 years.” It’s all about the conversation with Linklater and Hawke. The two men like to talk; often the talk sparks a film. The director and actor first met backstage at a play in 1993 (“Sophistry, by Jon Marc Sherman,” says Linklater) and wound up chattin...

November review replay of Bataclan terror response is good PR for French cops

Cédric Jiminez’s focus on police operations in the aftermath of the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks doesn’t give a real sense of who any of the agents involved are

Artistic responses to the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks – including You Will Not Have My Hate, Paris Memories and the excellent You Resemble Me – have rightly erred on the side of the contemplative, though even that couldn’t excuse last year’s soft-rock stage musical For You I’d Wait. With November, the director and co-writer Cédric Jiminez, who excavated the origins of The French Connection in his 2014 thriller The Connection, zeroes in on the police operation in the immediate aftermath of the attacks when the terrorists were still on the run. Jiminez’s Connection star Jean Dujardin oversees the hunt, calling his wife to say “Give the kids my love” before five solid days of barking at suspects and pointing at maps.

Deploying the standard Jason Bourne vocabulary of swish-pans, shaky-cam and jittery editing, the film mercifully avoids restaging the attacks themselves and instead catalogues the surveillance operations, false leads, interrogations and high-speed pursuits. Despite reliable work from a wiry-looking Jérémie Renier as a scowling cop and Anaïs Demoustier as a novice agent, we don’t get to know much about these (fictional) heroes who are pulling pizza-and-Alka-Seltzer all-nighters. A gun-runner (Hugo Dillon) with a colourful if dubious defence – “Don’t blame my Kalashnikovs, blame pussy politicians!” he fumes – comes more sharply into focus than anyone else here.

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