Aristocratic dickhead typecasting

My wife and I are two episodes into The Great, the TV show about Catherine the Great that seems like an attempt to give us The Favourite: The Series. Both this series and Yorgos Lanthimos' best picture nominee are about 18th century aristocracies where the aristocrats are cruel, crass and lascivious.

It also helps that they both feature Nicholas Hoult.

It almost seems like they cast him just to be sure to cement the comparison for us. But it's not like there aren't other signs that Hoult has been trending in the direction of this sort of typecasting. In fact, the guy you once knew primarily as one of the X-men is more commonly found in much different type of material nowadays.

Not only is there The Great and The Favourite, but Hoult can be seen as a dickhead of antiquity in this year's True History of the Kelly Gang as well -- though the antiquity in this case is not qute as ancient, only late 19th century Australia, and the constables of that period only act like aristocrats.

I say, let's keep it going.

I have long appreciated Hoult as an actor, dating back to the year (2013) I named him as one of my three who had a good year in my year-end wrap-up post. He was in two genre movies that I liked rather more than I probably should have, in retrospect, those being Warm Bodies and Jack the Giant Slayer (which both made my top 20 of the year). Those performances were clearly just scratching the surface of what he can do.

The reason he is so good at malicious aristocratic twits is that he has an effortless supercilious quality to him. He'd just as soon dismiss somebody, both literally and figuratively, as breathe. His characters ooze cruelty.

Although The Great, a TV show, is prompting this post -- scandalous on a movie blog -- I do think this could be his crowning achievement in that regard. Now granted, we are just two episodes in, but almost every time Hoult opens his mouth as Peter III, I laugh -- sometimes even when it is awful to do so. It's not that I always think the things he says are funny, though I frequently do. It's that it's funny that someone would say the things he says in the first place, because they're just so damn wrong.

In fact, I'm sure I would have included an image from The Great rather than this still from The Favourite, except I couldn't find an image from The Great that encapsulates what I wanted to talk about today as well as this.

Although I am specifically not going back and checking my history to find out what happens to Peter III -- though I know it can't be good -- I am kind of hoping he sticks around long enough to entertain me for a while longer.

Nicholas Hoult has been entertaining me throughout his career. As he is only 30 years old, I look forward to all the great aristocratic dickheads he will play in the future.

No mad rush to the cinema

With a spate of new releases opening in Australia on Boxing Day, and then every Thursday throughout the month of January, I’m usually racing to the cinema to keep up with awards nominees that had their American debuts in November and December.

Not this year. In fact, after last night’s viewing of The Favourite, I may only have one more must-see theatrical viewing before I publish my 2018 year-end list on January 22^nd.

And that doesn’t open for ten more days. And given that it is has made very few critics year-end lists, it’s debatable whether Mary Queen of Scots qualifies as “must-see viewing” anyway.

I’ll be going to the theater at least twice more, but that’s only because I’m going to an advanced critics screening of Green Book this Thursday morning, when I’m working only the second half of the day. Green Book doesn’t open here until two days after my deadline, so that’s a good get. However, it also has not made many year-end lists despite some early buzz.

A couple well-received films (such as If Beale Street Could Talk) will elude me as they usually do, but not as many as in most years.

In fact, the only movies opening this Thursday, one of two new release dates before my deadline, are the Mark Wahlberg comedy Instant Family, which doesn’t feel like essential viewing, and two documentaries, one about the musician M.I.A. and one about … dogs.

A few movies that once seemed like they had awards ambitions, but have gone largely unmentioned in critics list, open in late January or early February, like The Hate U Give, The Frontrunner, The Mule and On the Basis of Sex. But they won’t be difficult losses, and I’m already ranking a documentary about Ruth Bader Ginsburg this year anyway.

So … good?

I suppose, though I do kind of enjoy increasing my theatrical viewings to approximately every three nights at this time of year, from approximately every five. Given how I was falling asleep by the end of The Favourite last night, despite caffeine and sugar stimulants, maybe all I can handle at the moment is home viewings anyway.

And of course this does give me the time to catch up with some movies I need to see at home. But they aren’t feeling quite as urgent this year either. I also have a couple movies I’d like to re-watch, but they are also feeling sort of optional.

Maybe year-end exhaustion has set in earlier this year than in the past. Who knows.

I can credit part of it to having seen three movies while I was on vacation last week, rather than the usual one. Where in the past I might have only caught Ralph Breaks the Internet on that trip, this year we also saw Holmes & Watson and Mary Poppins Returns. I was fully satisfied with having gotten in the first two on our New Year’s Eve trip to the drive-in, and it was actually my wife’s suggestion to take the kids to the third on our transition day Thursday, when we went from the beach house we’d been renting for the previous five nights to staying with friends for two more.

If you read my previous post, which vowed to start producing more interesting content following the tenth anniversary of the blog, and are wondering why I’m now writing this post, the kind of “filler post” I swore off … well, let’s just say that old habits die hard. Also, I did want to put up some new comment so I didn’t leave my “I’m struggling for content” post as the one out there dying on the vine.

Maybe without the mad rush I can start brainstorming this new blog content I keep talking about?