{"id":4424,"date":"2013-10-14T00:58:13","date_gmt":"2013-10-14T04:58:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/?p=4424"},"modified":"2013-10-26T08:51:39","modified_gmt":"2013-10-26T12:51:39","slug":"i-have-a-strange-aversion-to-the-crushingly-obvious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/?p=4424","title":{"rendered":"i have a strange aversion to the crushingly obvious"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I've watched some of <em>Hemingway & Gellhorn<\/em> \u2013 I guess about half. It was okay. I may or may not watch the rest. I sometimes think I know more than enough about Hemingway's life anyway. <\/p>\n<p>Nicole Kidman was excellent (of course) as Gellhorn (wife #3, if you're keeping track). At the beginning, she addresses the camera, as Gellhorn much older (attention, Ridley Scott: this is how you do old age makeup).<\/p>\n<p>But this intro ends with her (referring to love), saying, \"I'm a war correspondent.\" Kidman paused, and I said, \"But of course, there are wars and there are wars.\" And then she said, \"Of course, there are wars and there are wars.\"<\/p>\n<p>This is usually a bad sign. This level of predictability can work in some situations, but mostly it doesn't. <\/p>\n<p>Also, Clive Owen is not a good fit as Hemingway. My mental image of Hemingway was set by Stacy Keach, who played him in a TV miniseries a long time ago. Owen is a very good actor (he's great in <em><a href=\"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/?p=1103\">Gosford Park<\/a><\/em>), but I'm not buying him as Hemingway.<\/p>\n<p>An example of when predictability does work? The movie <em>LA Confidential<\/em>, where Exley (Guy Pearce) and Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) are talking, and Exley tells the story of why he became a cop, and then he asks Vincennes the same question. <\/p>\n<p>We've seen that Vincennes is corrupt, and a cop celebrity, and a guy who floats through life without working very hard because he's smarter than everybody else, and his only possible (honest) response to the question of why he became a cop is: \"I don't remember.\" The entire movie has been leading up to him saying those three words.<\/p>\n<p>But Spacey, working at his absolute best, shows us every slow step of Vincennes realizing this, and it's magnificent.<\/p>\n<p><em>Hemingway & Gellhorn<\/em> is not operating at anywhere near that level, so the predictability is the other kind, the kind you don't want.<\/p>\n<p>Have you ever had that happen \u2013 that one clunky moment early on made you wary of an entire novel or movie?<\/p>\n<div class=\"pdfprnt-buttons pdfprnt-buttons-post pdfprnt-bottom-left\"><a href=\"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fposts%2F4424&print=pdf\" class=\"pdfprnt-button pdfprnt-button-pdf\" target=\"_blank\" ><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/wp-content\/plugins\/pdf-print\/images\/pdf.png\" alt=\"image_pdf\" title=\"View PDF\" \/><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fposts%2F4424&print=print\" class=\"pdfprnt-button pdfprnt-button-print\" target=\"_blank\" ><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/wp-content\/plugins\/pdf-print\/images\/print.png\" alt=\"image_print\" title=\"Print Content\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve watched some of Hemingway &#038; Gellhorn \u2013 I guess about half. It was okay. I may or may not watch the rest. I sometimes think I know more than enough about Hemingway&#8217;s life anyway. Nicole Kidman was excellent (of course) as Gellhorn (wife #3, if you&#8217;re keeping track). At the beginning, she addresses the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-4424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies-2","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4424"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4426,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4424\/revisions\/4426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}