Reverse Angle: Peter O’Toole’s final film.
O’Toole’s final film
One of the screen’s greatest actors, Peter O’Toole, died in 2013. His final film role, as Tugboat in the action movie “Diamond Cartel” (starring Armand Assante and Michael Madsen), is finally rolling out.
The film was once called “The Whole World at Our Feet,” but has since had its audio track refurbished and score replaced. It’s getting a limited release and then will be on VOD; it also stars CaryHiroyuki Tagawa and martial-arts stars Bolo Yeung and Don “The Dragon” Wilson.
To see a clip of O’Toole in “Diamond Cartel”: https:// tinyurl.com/j6f4q63
Trivia question
For what role was O’Toole twice Oscar-nominated?
About that moment in ‘Logan’
Major spoilers in this item; if you haven’t seen “Logan,” you may want to skip this one.
Hugh Jackman’s Logan/Wolverine dies in “Logan.” There has been some online retconning (“ret”roactive fitting into “con”-tinuity) that has gone viral in which some very observant Twitter users asked writer-director James Mangold if the precise circumstances of the death were foreshadowed in Mangold’s previous entry, “The Wolverine” (2013).
In that film, mutant death-predictor Yukio (played by Rila Fukushima) says she has seen Wolverine’s demise: “I see you on your back, there’s blood everywhere. You’re holding your own heart in your hand.” The quote sets up a scene in “The Wolverine” in which he cuts himself open to remove a device from his heart with his bare hand. He survives. So was Yukio wrong?
The tweeters suggested “your heart” might refer to Wolverine’s daughter, Laura/X-23, whose hand he is holding as he dies in a forest in “Logan.” Mangold’s responses to tweeter “MauriceTheChosenOne”: “Well done, Maurice,” and “And the prize goes to Maurice!”
One problem: Yukio has a second quote about Wolverine’s death, as she pleads with him not to perform open-heart surgery on himself: “I saw you die in a room like this with your heart in your hand!”
That scene occurs in a futuristic med lab, not in a forest. So … really nice, creative theory, but no.
It can still be enjoyed as a nice bit of irony, but the circumstances of his death were not foreshadowed in “The Wolverine.”
One of the tweets theorizing the foreshadowing (and answered by Mangold) is at https://tinyurl.com/ hrktned
L’amour LeFou
So there was a tempest in a teapot, so to speak, over director Bill Condon’s inclusion of an “exclusively gay moment” in the new, live-action “Beauty and the Beast.” A few things are clear, now that the movie’s out: (1) Emma Watson (Belle) gives the strong impression of not having to work to play “intelligent”; (2) Ewan McGregor (Lumière) has a beautiful speaking voice; and (3) not everyone is freaked out by the whole LeFou situation.
At a preview in Hollywood, packed with kids as well as dusty old grown-ups, Josh Gad’s moments as what we’ll call GQ (Gay/ Questioning) character LeFou consistently drew the most robust laughs and applause.
The multifaceted performer Gad makes LeFou one of the most sympathetic characters in the new film. No wonder his scenes were so well-received by grown-ups and kids. And that includes the dreaded instant of “exclusive gayness,” whatever that is.
By the way, Disney has pulled “Beauty” from distribution in Malaysia after that government demanded trims: “We have approved it, but there is a minor cut involving a gay moment,” Film Censorship Board chairman Abdul Halim Abdul Hamid told the Associated Press. Disney pulled it anyway.
To see a clip of McGregor describing his struggles with Lumière’s French accent (and how it bled into a Mexican one) on the “Graham Norton Show”: https://tinyurl.com/gnlnrej
In honor of a real movie buff
Most film-history buffs knew Robert Osborne from his decades as a host for the Movie Channel and Turner Classic Movies. The onetime actor was also a longtime film journalist for the Hollywood Reporter and even wrote the official history of the Academy Awards.
Osborne, who died earlier this month at the age of 84, had an encyclopedic knowledge of cinema. And he was a real gentleman who seemed to truly love sharing his love of film.
To see an example of how Osborne could apply his depth and breadth of film knowledge to the real world: https://tinyurl.com/ hrkf3wt
Trivia answer
King Henry II. He played it in “Becket” (1964) and delivered one of screen’s great performances in “The Lion in Winter” (1968).
To see O’Toole in a scene from “The Lion in Winter”: https:// tinyurl.com/gq29ska