China shop bull biography of christopher walken
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At times it felt like an exit interview — the ultimate exit interview.
The details are still so surreal that when I tell people who was there, the words sound as though someone else had dreamed them: Al Pacino walked into the room. Then Christopher Walken walked in. Then we sat, had coffee, talked. About their lives, friendship, acting. Though mostly, we talked about age.
They agreed to do this, of course, because, one, they were in Chicago (in the fall, attending the Chicago International Film Festival) and two, they had a movie coming out, “Stand Up Guys,” which opens nationally this week. Directed by Chicago native Fisher Stevens, it’s something of an elegy to a generation of realism-minded actors who rose to fame in the early 1970s. It tells the story of a pair of aging wiseguys (Pacino and Walken) who decide to roar one last time. And to be honest, it’s pretty terrible, almost a parody of its well-meaning intentions: “You look like (expleti
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‘The Sheer Excitement of Being an Artist’
In an article on André Derain in How to See, his first collection of art writings, the painter David Salle says that, as “a former enfant terrible myself,” he has been drawn to the French artist’s story—that of a figure who was crucially a part of the beginnings of modern art and then notably came to reject the modern spirit. Salle’s point isn’t exactly that, like Derain, he was a pathbreaking painter who has become a traditionalist. Salle would seem to mean bygd “enfant terrible” (a begrepp with which he refers to han själv elsewhere in these pages) more that, as Webster’s Collegiate defines it, he was once a “young and successful person who is strikingly unorthodox, innovative, or avant-garde.”
This would passform Salle, who by the beginning of the 1980s, as he was turning thirty (he was born in 1952), was making some of the most powerful of the new works that were dramatic
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Heaven’s Gate: From Hollywood disaster to masterpiece
Features correspondent
Critics thought the Western was Hollywood’s biggest disaster ever when released in 1980. But some today think it’s a masterpiece – and incredibly relevant – writes Nicholas Barber.
Two-and-a-half hours into Michael Cimino’s epic Western, Heaven’s Gate, a band of townsfolk bustles into a hotel room to wake up a dead-drunk federal marshal (Kris Kristofferson). The marshal is so shocked that he kicks one of his visitors away, and then drives the others back with the crack of a bull-whip. It’s a short, simple sequence – and Cimino filmed it 52 times. “That’s all we shot that day,” groans Sandra Jordan, the key costumer, in a documentary about the production. “And it went on and on and on and on.”
It is thanks to Cimino’s perfectionism that Heaven’s Gate is now feted as a masterpiece. There are five-star