Agreed. That was one of the best, and most nuanced, portrayals of a closeted gay character I've ever seen. I still feel aggrieved by how Don treated him (and wish they'd bought the character back later on). Perhaps, and it seems likely, the fact that Batt himself is gay would have helped inform his characterisation of Sal, to really tap into the nuances of what it was like being in the closet in a very straight environment. On top of that, he's a brilliant actor.
Coffee, why can actors drink beer, wine anything but not coffee or tea. I tend to judge actors on how well they can pretend to drink from an empty cup The empty card containers are the worst, hot but held in bare hands and so empty you can almost hear the hollow clunk as they are put down.
For dramatic effect, they almost always take the glasses off by puling at one side. Real people who wear glasses grip the glasses on BOTH sides and take them off their head so as not to damage the glasses.
I saw the movie Stonewall, and I disliked it not because it wasn't accurate, but because it was a bad movie. I don't think it had enough conflict, I think they had a lot of pat, easy answers for complicated situations, and I think the structure was all over the place. It didn't make a lot of sense. The whole ending where the guy comes home to discover his football player/boyfriend has gotten married and now rejects him didn't feel real to me. I don't have a problem when filmmakers take real-life events and then dramatize them to tell a more interesting story. Even when they cast more attractive actors in the lead roles, I don't think it's a problem provided the actors can really act. But it is a problem if the story doesn't follow the normal rules of good drama, and when you can't empathize with the characters enough. As one example, the HBO Normal Heart movie, directed by Ryan Murphy and starring several gay actors (and very fine straight actors as well), had much better-looking people in the parts than their real-life characters. But I thought the production worked fine. Even though some details were kind of simplified and swept under the rug, the basic story felt fairly real. And I have no problem with Mark Ruffalo playing a gay man. Normal Heart was another film that had a lot of shades of gray with the gay characters, and I thought they felt a lot more real than what we typically see on TV. But Stonewall seemed very heavy-handed and hokey to me. Apparently, audiences agreed: it cost about $20M to make and reportedly made well under $1 million. I think it did not help that you had a German director shooting a movie about a very specific place and time in America, but it was all shot in Vancouver. A lot of it did not look and feel like Greenwich Village in 1969 to me, and the characters felt scattered and unfocused. I have to agree with the audience and the critics on this one. I thought that Looking was dull to the point of being unwatchable. I also didn't like the way it looked (no pun intended), but that's a technical issue. I didn't give a crap about the characters, and I don't think the show creators delineated enough between the characters to create enough differences. This is a fairly standard requirement for TV: making each character stand out from each other.
It's rare to see the old fashioned pull-tabs on beer cans for films depicting the 1960s or 1970s. There are a lot of little props like that that often escape the prop person's eye. I'll tell you one very subtle thing that younger people won't appreciate: people born in America during the 1950s and 1960s were taught to hold a pen a certain way. Somewhere around the late 1970s, schools changed their way of instructing children, so from about 1980 on, people held their pens kind of in a circle, closer to their chest. I see this mistake all the time in shows about the 1960s -- Mad Men was one of them -- and trust me, people did not write this way 50 years ago. Another thing they often get wrong: pay phones. After you used a pay phone in the 1950s, 1960s, or 1970s, after you hung up the phone, the phone made a "clink-clink" noise. They always forget to add that sound effect in contemporary films made about those eras, and I suspect it's because the sound effects people are too young to know that. Any film actually shot in the 1960s or 1970s actually shows it as it was. Yep, I see that all the time. Very fake and bad. I have no idea why they don't fill the cup with water or tea or something just to give it some kind of weight.
Preserving, or not preserving, its past. I'm not talking about things like sets and costumes, but the actual finished films. It's better than it used to be, but it's shocking to learn how much of Hollywood's film heritage is lost forever or in seriously bad shape.
For me, this is a more of a general problem that has pulled me out of the suspension of disbelief on more than one occasion. Many Hollywood actors look so unlike normal people that many movies seem to be populated with the human equivalents of purebred dogs.
Rubbers & pencils and Ink pot/ feather quill till early sixties. First modern school pen I got was a BiC.
Doing movies with different actors in sequels & reboots. I'd like to see them hire unknown actors for five movies in the superhero roles & use famous established actors for the villains. This way there's more continuity. The superhero is accepted more too because we're not watching "_____________" (famous actor) playing the part. My opinion.
No problem with Ruffalo playing a gay man. None at all. But seriously, he was all in with that part (as was Sean Penn in Milk)and an acting job like that basically shoots down my whole argument. And yeah, Larry Kramer wishes he was that hot when he was younger.
Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. I see a lot of other bespectacled people gripping their glasses just on one side. But everytime we take off our glasses, we magically become irresistibly attractive.
The cars rarely have windshields in them while they are "driving". When a couple goes to bed and shuts off the light on the nightstand, the room brightens up with studio lights.
Yeah, I never understood why they don't just put water in the cup. The fake drinking is a dead giveaway.
Not quite the subject, but what happens to the mountains of food and drink that get served up in the movies? Do the extras or the local homeless shelters get any of it.
What? Fake smoke, too many people in the life boat, water too calm to be real? Okay, okay...I'm just being a smarty pants. I have looked through many binoculars. They look this way when you are using them incorrectly. However that effect does a great job of telling the viewer, without arbitration, that binoculars are being used.
The best and worst example of this was the TV show The Following. So much stupid, I'm surprised the real FBI didn't sue the makers.
That maybe why I like movies or TV programs from other parts of the world - people look more like people I actually see a lot.
The UK is very 'non-religious' in most cases, and 'going to church' on a Sunday is a long forgotten thing. In fact I have never known anyone in my 45 years that does. I haven't seen a vicar or clergy person in years. You might meet two in the average Brit lifetime. The vicer who marries you (becoming rare) and maybe at your funeral but you don't have to have one there either.
Another thing, maybe stupidity rather than fakeness, is all the folks tossing back a shot of straight whiskey or whatever. My wife got me into scotch, but the point is to enjoy it. Most people who toss a shot back would start coughing immediately. Of course, I know it's only colored water....
