| You have no idea how many times I’ve said the words ‘chaotic twink’ in a professional setting this week. —Alex Pappademas, culture editor |
| |
|
It’s Friday, and like everybody else out here in Hollywood we’ve got Oscar fever—but we’re also thinking about the god Gene Hackman, who was found dead on Thursday at the age of 95. Hackman got his start in 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, which means he was present at the bloody birth of the American New Wave cinema. And we’ll put his ‘70s run up against just about anybody’s—hits like The French Connection and Superman, Coppola’s The Conversation, Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, plus if-you-know-you-know classics like Prime Cut, Night Moves, Scarecrow and Cisco Pike. And he kept on bringing that hard-bitten ex-Marine gravitas to everything he did after that. He made a string of exemplary thrillers in the ‘80s and ‘90s (if you’ve never watched him square off with Denzel Washington in Crimson Tide, do something about that) and left the business on a high note, with a perfect farewell performance in The Royal Tenenbaums, which recently topped Jesse Hassenger’s GQ.com ranking of the best Wes Anderson movies. He was supposedly hard on Wes Anderson while making that one—if Bill Murray remembers you as tough to work with, you definitely were—but Anderson got what’s probably his best film out of it, so he probably did the right thing there.
If you’re just digging into Hackman’s oeuvre or looking for a place to start running his catalog back, we’ve got five movie suggestions for you that span mean Gene’s forty-year career. Jesse Hassenger extolls the greatness of Heist, a late-career masterpiece in which Hackman makes the subtle most of a script composed entirely of gnomic David Mamet-isms. And if you want to hear Hackman sum up that estimable run in his own tersely-chosen words, check out this 2011 Q&A with the man himself by GQ’s Michael Hainey, in which Hackman describes Hoosiers as a money gig whose longevity he never anticipated, confirms that he punched a guy in traffic ten years earlier (when he was 71!), and generally comes off as one of the least self-impressed actors you could ever meet, as in this classic exchange:
|
GQ: Where do you keep your Oscars? Gene Hackman: You know, I'm not sure; I don't have any memorabilia around the house. There isn't any movie stuff except a poster downstairs next to the pool table of Errol Flynn from Dawn Patrol. I'm not a sentimental guy. So you just move through life and shed? Yeah. It all just kind of peels off.... Sum up your life in a phrase. "He tried." I think that'd be fairly accurate. |
In a past life, this writer sold jeans by the dozen—but he struggled to find the right pair for himself. A fateful encounter with OrSlow's masterful dungarees led him to denim zen. |
|
|
Mikey Madison Breaks Down Anora, Scream & more. |
|
|
|
