Continuing the trend of biopics with A-list actors that perhaps aren’t interesting or important enough to warrant such a big-budget production, the Timothée Chalamet-led Marty Supreme (Dune, Beautiful Boy) is among them. The story is based loosely on a period of American table tennis player Marty Reisman’s life. If you’ve never heard of Marty Reisman, you aren’t alone. He lived a very unremarkable life, one that is far from the kind of role that would require one of the best working actors to spend time on during the peak of his career. This wasn’t a story about the Marty Supreme. This was about creating a character that Chalamet could lead to his first Best Actor Oscar win, which I believe will happen.
Category Archives: Timothée Chalamet
A Complete Unknown (2024)
Entertaining, engrossing, and educational, it’s hard not to leave James Mangold’s (3:10 to Yuma, Ford v Ferrari) A Complete Unknown disappointed. While many will call it a paint-by-numbers musical biopic (which is completely justified), it does three things that recent films, such as Bob Marley: One Love, Rocketman (Elton John), Back to Black (Amy Winehouse), Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody, and Elvis couldn’t do. It held my interest throughout its 140-minute runtime. It implored me to read Bob Dylan’s Wikipedia page. It led to an interest in looking up the songs performed in the film that I had not heard before. The musical biopic genre has been bad for nearly 20 years (Bohemian Rhapsody and Straight Outta Compton are outliers). A Complete Unknown feels like a companion piece to two fabulous turn-of-the-century musical biopics with terrific lead performances in 2004’s Ray (Jaime Foxx as Ray Charles) and Walk the Line (Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash). Each film landed the lead performer an Oscar nomination, including a win for Foxx.
Bones and All (2022)
If a story about a pair of two young, hungry lovers devouring the flesh from a still-warm body that one of them has just killed sounds like your cup of tea, Luca Guadagnino’s (Call Me by Your Name, I Am Love) Bones and All is the movie for you. If a plot line that revolves around cannibalism revolts you, this would be a hard pass. In either case, if there’s one December. 2022 release to skip the concessions on, that film is Bones and All.
Don’t Look Up (2021)
Best Picture nominee? Don’t Look Up? Really? This movie had a wide December release. It earned less than one million dollars at the box office and was out of the theaters in under two weeks. Its 56% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes further suggests that this is different from a film one would deem to be selected by the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences as one of its ten best films of 2021. Yet (sigh), here we are. The biggest tragedy might be that this isn’t a bad film but is unfairly getting bashed for its affiliation with the other nine movies up for Best Picture in arguably the worst collection of films for any year.
Beautiful Boy (2018)
I love a good story about drug or alcohol addiction. And I love great actors who constantly bring it into their roles. So I had super high expectations for Felix Van Groeningen’s Beautiful Boy, the true story of the relationship between an 18-year-old son (Timothée Chalamet – Call Me By Your Name, Hostiles) battling drugs and his father (Steve Carell – Foxcatcher, Battle of the Sexes) who is willing to do anything to fix the problem, but is unsuccessful in all of his attempts. The trailer made it seem like my type of movie. I should have been wary of the 67% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes, but I was encouraged by the 77% audience score. But as I watched this from the lens of a critic, I kept circling back to the same question. If you had these actors in place, you could have done hundreds, even thousands, of different stories about addiction. So why did they pick this story? It wasn’t anything special. It lacked vision. Van Groeningen, as a novice director, was completely in over his head, and he wasted the performance of both of its leads by telling a story of a story that wasn’t unique, was stale in its delivery, and left us feeling unattached to its characters. In a word, Beautiful Boy felt underwhelming.