Why James Gandolfini was more than just Tony Soprano, plus the week’s best films in L.A.
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Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
We try not get to hung up on box office around here, but last week’s opening of “A Minecraft Movie” to more than $150 million domestically (and passing $310 million worldwide) certainly grabbed our attention. An adaptation of the popular video game directed by Jared Hess and starring Jason Momoa, Jack Black and Jennifer Coolidge, the film had the biggest opening weekend of the year to date, a welcome shot in the arm for a Hollywood that has been struggling to find its footing in a changing entertainment landscape. (Which is also perhaps a way of saying “The Studio” is more of a documentary than we may be comfortable admitting.)
In reviewing the film, Amy Nicholson noted the importance of the film being called “A Minecraft Movie” as opposed to “The Minecraft Movie.”
“That humble title acknowledges the hubris of forcing one story onto a game that’s popular exactly because it doesn’t have characters or a plot,” Nicholson wrote. “It would be just as apropos to call this ‘Jared Hess’ Minecraft Movie.’ Hess, the director, combines the spirit of his 2004 hit “Napoleon Dynamite” with the game and thwack, he’s made a solid comedy constructed of his own touchstones: tater tots, ’80s kitsch and wannabe alpha males in a joystick-measuring contest.”
Nicholson also noted Black’s ongoing run as a star of children’s movies, adding, “As a child of the ’90s, I should be salty that the alt-comedy superstar now belongs to grade schoolers who only know him from the ‘Kung Fu Panda’ movies. But if Black hooks kids on the habit of going to the movies, I’m happy to let a younger generation play with my toys.”
Ryan Faughnder picked up on that last point this week as he wrote about how Hollywood has been trying ways to grab the attention of younger audiences for whom traditional film and television simply are not their primary sources of entertainment.
“There are still ways to entice young people to the movies and other traditional forms of entertainment,” wrote Faughnder. “There are Gen Zers who love to pack repertory screenings, storm Letterboxd with their film diaries and test the limits of their AMC Stubs A-List subscriptions. When they get behind something, it can go viral. But the entertainment industry needs to figure out more smart ways to make good movies and TV shows that are relevant to young people today, and market them strategically.”
James Gandolfini on film
Three upcoming events will spotlight the release of Jason Bailey’s new book “Gandolfini: Jim, Tony and the Life of a Legend” about the actor James Gandolfini, who died at age 51 in 2013. Though best known for his role as Tony Soprano on the groundbreaking TV series “The Sopranos,” Gandolfini also left behind a strong legacy of film work.
On Sunday there will be a screening of David Chase’s “Not Fade Away” at the Alamo Drafthouse DTLA, along with Tony Scott’s “Crimson Tide” at the Frida Cinema on Wednesday, April 16. Elsewhere, Andrew Dominik’s “Killing Them Softly” and Joel and Ethan Coen’s “The Man Who Wasn’t There” will play at the Los Feliz 3 on Saturday, April 19. Bailey will be present to introduce all three screening events and sign some books.
Taken together, these events are a strong overview of Gandolfini’s film work as the roles grew bigger and he made for a more confident and commanding screen presence. Via email, Bailey answered some questions about the actor’s work.
Can you separate out Gandolfini’s film roles from the TV role of Tony Soprano and the outsized impact it had on his career and legacy? Is it even possible to consider his film work on its own?
It’s tricky! I think it’s important to situate his film work within his own initial goals as an actor — he fancied himself a character actor, a supporting player, and never envisioned the level of fame or stardom, and the assumption of further leading roles, that “The Sopranos” brought him. (I was thinking about this recently and would pinpoint someone like Vincent D’Onofrio as having the kind of career Gandolfini was looking for.) And I think the short window of time between the end of “The Sopranos” and his passing makes it even more difficult; it feels, in late roles like “Enough Said” and “Not Fade Away,” like he was just finally starting to get a handle on what his post-“Sopranos” film career would look like. But I think there were enough good, meaty roles — before, during and after the show — that showcased both his skill and his range, so we can appreciate what the film career tells us about him as an actor.
“Killing Them Softly” and “Not Fade Away” each show different sides of Gandolfini as a performer. It is astonishing those films came out in the same year. Do you think his versatility is underappreciated?
They came out in the same month — as did “Zero Dark Thirty,” which is another, entirely different kind of role. I think his range and versatility are vastly underrated, which mostly speaks to the huge shadow Tony cast over both his career and American popular culture in general. But Tony was very far from his own personality, and not just in terms of emotion and temperament; he even sounded different, taking on that working-class Jersey dialect when he was playing tough guys, while his own voice was much more clipped and nasal. I think he made a lot of smart decisions in terms of choosing roles that were in conversation with Tony Soprano, sometimes playing similar thug types but subverting them (as in “Killing Them Softly” or “The Mexican”), sometimes playing characters who were 180 degrees from Tony to showcase his versatility (like “The Last Castle” or “In the Loop”), and sometimes playing working-class guys whose surface similarity to Tony would help him smuggle in clever nuances and variations (“The Man Who Wasn’t There,” “Not Fade Away”).
What about Gandolfini, either as a performer or just as a person, did you most come to appreciate in the course of working on the book?
I really came to understand and appreciate his tremendous personal warmth and charm. Everyone I interviewed, to a person, still spoke of him with such love and affection — even as they might, for example, tell me a story about him doing something flaky or dangerous or inconsiderate. People just loved him and the stories I was told, of personal support, financial generosity and genuine loyalty, were really moving.
Do you have a personal favorite role of Gandolfini’s, even if it is one that isn’t showing around L.A.?
I think “Enough Said” is a revelatory performance, in that it was completely different from any role or any film he’d done before, but you buy him immediately. He’s a totally credible romantic lead and he shows a vulnerability and fragility in that film that he hints at elsewhere, but this time it’s front and center. I was told by so many of the people I interviewed that, of every role he played, that one was the closest to “the real Jim.” Yet it took his entire career to get to a point where he felt comfortable sharing that much of himself on-screen. I’m glad we have it — but it’s extra heartbreaking that he made it so close to his passing, because it hints at the direction his career might have taken, had he not left us too soon.
Robert Altman’s ‘Short Cuts’
Robert Altman’s 1993 film “Short Cuts” is currently not available on streaming (though it is on disc in a very fine set from the Criterion Collection) and so it has perhaps fallen a bit in its estimation as part of the filmmaker’s overall canon. Which is why any time it screens locally is worth a notice, with two shows coming up at the New Beverly on Thursday, April 17 and Friday, April 18. The film will be screening from a 35mm print from the Robert Altman Collection at the UCLA Film and Television Archive.
There is also something overwhelming and perhaps even a bit forbidding about the film, an adaptation of short stories by Raymond Carver woven together in Altman’s inimitable style to become an ensemble overview of life among a loosely interconnected group of people in Los Angeles. The cast includes Jack Lemmon, Julianne Moore, Tim Robbins, Lili Taylor, Tom Waits, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Robert Downey Jr. and many more. As great as the movie is, it must be noted how white the cast is, and so it functions as a lacerating, insightful portrait of certain enclaves of the city, but cannot be taken as a portrait of the city as a whole.
In his original review of the film, Kenneth Turan wrote, “The old lion can still roar. Though tradition holds that there are no second acts in American lives, writer-director Robert Altman, never much of a traditionalist, embarks with ‘Short Cuts’ on the fourth or possibly fifth act of a remarkable career. Both building on what has gone before and extending outward to new boundaries, he has made a rich, unnerving film, as comic as it is astringent, that in its own quiet way works up a considerable emotional charge. … Altman is 68 now, a survivor of successes like ‘M*A*S*H,’ ‘Nashville,’ ‘McCabe and Mrs. Miller’ and last year’s ‘The Player’ as well as failures best not mentioned. Yet he still wants it all, still pushes his vision of film as a medium capable of supplying the widest psychological canvas on which to illustrate the way we live now.”
Points of interest
‘After Hours’ and ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’
At the New Beverly tonight, Saturday and Sunday will be a double-bill of Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours” and Susan Seidelman’s “Desperately Seeking Susan,” both released in 1985 and surveying New York City’s downtown scene as a vital part of their storytelling. Both films also feature versatile turns by Rosanna Arquette.
In “After Hours,” Griffin Dunne plays a mild-mannered computer programmer who finds himself drawn into an extraordinary series of mishaps after he ventures downtown for a rendezvous with a mysterious woman he just met (Arquette), building to a manic, existential evening.
In her review of the film, Times critic Sheila Benson called it “sweetly ominous.” The film still stands out as something singular in Scorsese’s immense filmography, with a manic, go-for-broke energy that in part came from his own frustrations with Hollywood filmmaking at the time.
In an interview with Patrick Goldstein published in September 1985, Scorsese put forth ideas he has been speaking about ever since, saying, “The problem is that since ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Close Encounters’ — which are films that I love — too much talent has gone into making those same kinds of movies. It’s the whole phenomena of Hollywood knowing its audience and continually feeding it what it thinks it wants. What I’m saying is, what about the rest of us?”
“Desperately Seeking Susan” stars Arquette as a New Jersey housewife who, bored with her life, starts following a series of personal ads that appear to be a series of communications between a woman named Susan and her lover. When she goes to see Susan (Madonna, in her film debut), a bonk on the head and series of misunderstandings leads Arquette’s character to believe she is Susan. Untangling their twinned identities takes over the movie.
As Kevin Thomas put it in his original review, “Leora Barish’s blithe, wryly satirical script liberates Seidelman, allowing her to combine the street-wise grit of ‘Smithereens’ with a glorious, cockamamie sense of humor. ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’ couldn’t be more right now, and in being so — and being itself — it’s actually a lot closer to the hallowed ’30s screwball comedies than films nakedly striving to emulate them. Everything about it is fresh: its wit, its people, its sound (a knockout rock score by Thomas Newman) and its look (cinematographer Edward Lachman’s exterior images are so clear that they seem to have been shot just after a cleansing rain).”
Madonna fans — along with Warren Beatty fans, Antonio Banderas fans and ’90s aficionados, maybe less so Kevin Costner fans — should also note that Alek Keshishian’s 1991 tour documentary “Madonna: Truth or Dare” is showing at the Egyptian tonight.
‘Dune’ and ‘The Flintstones’
On Saturday, Vidiots will have two screenings with appearances by Kyle MacLachlan: first, David Lynch’s 1984 “Dune” with a post-screening Q&A, followed by Brian Levant’s 1994 “The Flintstones,” with an introduction by MacLachlan.
“Dune” was MacLachlan’s feature film debut at age 25. As opposed to Denis Villeneuve’s recent pair of blockbusters, Lynch told the saga of Paul Atreides in a single film, creating something dizzying in its ambitions and genuine otherworldliness.
In his original review of the film, Michael Wilmington called it “one of the year’s most peculiar films,” adding that it was “packed with sometimes spellbinding, sometimes splendiferous, always bizarre imagery. If it fails — and certainly it fails as the ‘Star Wars’-style comic-book extravaganza those only vaguely familiar with the novel may expect — it’s at least one of those memorable, spectacular failures that stick in your mind obsessively.”
In a December 1984 Times interview with Dale Pollack, Lynch himself echoed that sentiment when he said, “I thought at first ‘Dune’ was more adult than ‘Star Wars.’ But kids roll with the film. They really dig this picture because it’s a new experience. I think it’s a picture for a wider audience, which is contrary to what I though when I first started.”
In the adaptation of the popular cartoon series, “The Flintstones,” MacLachlan played the story’s villain, Cliff Vandercave, who ensnares Fred Flintstone (John Goodman) as a stooge in a plot to purposefully tank a company.
In his review of the movie, Kenneth Turan wrote, “Whatever else people say about ‘The Flintstones,’ no one will claim that a chance to make a truly great motion picture was frittered away here. A live-action cartoon in every sense of the word, this re-creation of the long-running television series about suburban life in 2,000,000 B.C. has been carefully designed to be as bright and insubstantial as a child’s toy balloon.”
In other news
A new Oscar for stunts
This week the academy announced a new category for the 100th Oscars ceremony, celebrating films released in 2027: achievement in stunt design. This brings to fruition the longstanding hope of action fans to see stunt work recognized at the Academy Awards.
Over the past decade, the number of stunt professionals within the academy has tripled to more than 100, a factor that also helped create momentum for the new award. In 2023, stunt coordinators were made part of a newly created production and technology branch of AMPAS, alongside script supervisors, music supervisors and choreographers.
David Leitch, who directed last year’s stunt-centric “The Fall Guy,” has been a primary force behind the campaign for the new award, along with stunt coordinator and designer Chris O’Hara.
In a statement following the academy’s announcement, Leitch said, “Stunts are essential to every genre of film and rooted deep in our industry’s history — from the groundbreaking work of early pioneers like Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin, to the inspiring artistry of today’s stunt designers, coordinators, performers and choreographers. This has been a long journey for so many of us. Chris O’Hara and I have spent years working to bring this moment to life, standing on the shoulders of the stunt professionals who’ve fought tirelessly for recognition over the decades. We are incredibly grateful.”
As announced last year, the academy will also introduce a new award for casting directors, beginning with the ceremony in 2026.
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