#see also: supposedly naturally redheaded characters not being cast with redheaded actors

[sootyships]

the fact that yankee movies and shows consistently use not-even-light-haired people to play blonds and, like, targaryens, just honestly genuinely gets on my nerves.

like i love orlando bloom as legolas as much as the next person but for fuck's sake you'd have such an easier time if you actually used blonds???? it's not like blonds are cryptids?!?!?!?!?!?!

[eddie-redmayne-italian-blog]

Eddie Redmayne to Play Serial Killer Charles Cullen in ‘The Good Nurse’

Sheryl OhAugust 8, 2018

Jessica Chastain will also star as the opposing force to Redmayne’s “Angel of Death.”

Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain will soon be working together, and although I would naturally hope for a more charming offering involving two of my favorite redheaded actors, the actual details of their latest project are of a much gorier nature. As reported by Deadline, Redmayne and Chastain will headline the truth-based movie The Good Nurse, a thriller that will track the abominably lengthy career of one of the most notorious American serial killers, Charles Cullen.

Frequent Thomas Vinterberg collaborator Tobias Lindholm will make his English language feature directing debut with the film, having previously dipped his toes into the true crime adaptation field with Netflix’s superbly chilling crime series Mindhunter. Krysty Wilson-Cairns of Penny Dreadful fame rounds out this exceptional creative quartet, bringing her scriptwriting talents to The Good Nurse.

Based on Charles Graeber’s book “The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder,” the movie unpacks Cullen’s exploits. He was a nurse who was implicated in the deaths of hundreds of patients who were in his care, from the late 1980s through the early 2000s, thus being dubbed the “Angel of Death.”

On the surface, Cullen (who will be played by Redmayne) was not only a family man but a celebrated caregiver wherever he worked. However, he also participated in a killing spree across nine hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania which went on over the course of 16 years. Furthermore, a flawed healthcare system lacking in transparent accountability failed to subdue Cullen, allowing him to easily move from hospital to hospital each time he was suspected of wrongdoing. Finally, two former Newark detectives caught up with his murderous habits with the help of Cullen’s co-worker (Chastain).

Ultimately, what makes Graeber’s account of Cullen’s murders so compelling is its simultaneous indictment of the inexcusable practices at the hospitals where his heinous crimes took place. At the time, there was an egregious lack of responsibility to report suspicious deaths in these facilities due to the fact that any possible penalty for not reporting them was relatively small. Hospital employers also resisted giving bad referrals to terminated workers in a bid to avoid being slapped with lawsuits. Even when Cullen eventually developed a creepy reputation in the workplace, individual employees had to speak to other members of staff – informally or in private – to prevent his hiring.

Of course, Cullen’s presence is far from absent in Graeber’s book — it wouldn’t be a classic true crime story if those details were left out. Admittedly, this is likely the toughest thing to get right in a film adaptation. The book leans a hair too close towards empathizing with its reprehensible subject in an attempt to discern his motivations. Cullen is described as “a surprisingly intelligent and complicated young man whose promising career was overwhelmed by his compulsion to kill” in the synopsis of the book, which is absolutely inappropriate given what he actually did.

Whether or not these issues will translate into any kind of onscreen glorification of Cullen at least makes me wary about The Good Nurse to a certain degree. The Hollywood machine totally endorses fixating on and pathologizing serial killers on screen, whether they’re fictional like Hannibal Lecter or based in reality like any number of Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer portrayals.

These are supposedly larger-than-life characters that any actor would jump at the opportunity for, and so making movies about them is certainly understandable. Such unnerving anecdotes and reports make for confrontational and distressing cinema at the most basal level. There is even an added layer of discomfort in the Cullen story — the fact that his job description dictates that he helps others. Depicting that kind of cognitive disconnect is definitely a worthy challenge to undertake.

And as long as The Good Nurse sticks with a concurrent focus on a failing healthcare system and the quest to bring Cullen to justice, the film could still tell a fascinating story without indulging in overt veneration. Crime movies that lack explicit empathy for their subjects can still be extremely gripping, after all.

A good example of this is David Fincher’s Zodiac. That film focuses so doggedly on the chase for the truth and relishes in the fear of the unknown that the eponymous killer’s motivations never become the inordinate focal point of the storyline. Well, it does for one protagonist who takes a vested interest in the ordeal. However, Zodiac posits that justice can be — and should be — just as gripping as the myths surrounding a serial killer.

Adapting The Good Nurse in such a way wouldn’t rob Redmayne of a chance to embody such a disconcerting character either, and it would be a win-win situation. With his recent big-screen efforts, we have become more accustomed to watching him earnestly wield a magic wand against evil in the Wizarding World or transform into an admirable historical figure like Stephen Hawking. Hence, the choice to take on the Cullen role is a notable shift for him. Still, Redmayne’s career isn’t only filled with shining examples of morality, and that’s what’s exciting about this casting choice.

Redmayne has definitely played villains in the past, with the most obvious one being his ludicrous whispery baddie in the Wachowskis’ high-concept sci-fi extravaganza Jupiter Ascending. More often than not, though, Redmayne doesn’t treat antagonism blandly. Despite having depicted deeply questionable or sometimes repugnant characters in films like Savage Grace and Hick, Redmayne is anything but two-dimensional. I wouldn’t say he makes the characters likable, but he understands how to translate their emotional turmoil for the camera.On Chastain’s part, she will be filling the shoes of a wonderfully resilient character partially responsible for the downfall of corruption, and that is completely in her wheelhouse. Miss Sloane, The Zookeeper’s Wife, and Molly’s Game have all demonstrated that institutions ought to quake when one of her characters decides that enough is enough. These roles have given Chastain the chance to build her brand on portraying determined and proactive women. It’s easy to see how Chastain will fit into the fabric of The Good Nurse. And as an aside, I’m more inclined to look out for this project than a certain other that she signed on for recently.Clearly, The Good Nurse has all the right ingredients for a gripping crime thriller. With no reason to distrust Redmayne and Chastain’s star power, we may very well have a hit on our hands.

https://filmschoolrejects.com/eddie-redmayne-to-play-serial-killer-charles-cullen-in-the-good-nurse/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

[mst3kproject]

1108: The Loves of Hercules

I kinda miss the shorts and the black and white films in the new series, but I was happy to see a Hercules movie in the lineup! It feels like MST3K getting back to its roots.  This is a particularly awful Hercules movie, too, short on feats of strength and long on romantic melodrama – and never once does Herc bend prison bars or pretend to drink a love potion!  Get with the program, movie.  Along with napping, those are his defining acts!

An encampment of some sort is attacked by the Ecalian army, who proceed to slaughter everybody there including Hercules' wife Megara.  Hercules naturally goes looking to have a few words with the King of Ecalia about this, but when he arrives at the city he learns that the man is already dead.  If he wants vengeance, it will have to be against the king's daughter, Deianira.  Obviously Herc's not gonna take revenge against a girl for something she didn't even do – instead, he immediately falls in love with her, only to learn a few days later that she's already promised to a man named Achillo.

Herc leaves Ecalia in a huff, and after slaying a hydra even cheaper than the dragon in The Magic Sword, he arrives in the land of the Amazons.  Their queen, Hippolyta, drinks a potion that makes her look like Deianira in order to win Hercules' heart.  He is surprisingly okay with this, and fully prepared to stay with her until she gets sick of him and turns him into a tree... but then he learns that the real Deianira is about to be forced to marry her father's killer.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting here going, “Megara?  The redhead who died in the opening scene?  Remember her? ��Anybody?”  Apparently not.

When a female character is killed off so that her death can spur a male character to action, this is colloquially known as 'fridging', after the time Alexandra DeWitt was killed and stuffed into a fridge just to piss off her boyfriend, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner.  Among non-hack writers it is generally frowned upon as both sexist (implying that women's lives are important only insofar as they matter to men) and lazy (there are better, less cliché ways to motivate your character).  This movie's treatment of Megara is one of the purest examples I've ever seen.  She is introduced only so that she can be killed, and killed only to make Hercules go to Ecalia, where he promptly forgets all about her when he meets Deianira.  Megara has served her entire purpose in the first couple of minutes, and is never mentioned again.  One wonders why they bothered paying an actress to play the part.  If she's gonna be that irrelevant, why even show her on screen?

This movie claims be be about The Loves of Hercules, but the fact that it forgets about Megara the moment Hercules meets Deianira makes it seem doubtful that he actually loves either of them. If Megara were so dear to him, surely he would grieve for her a while, rather than immediately wanting to run off with her killer's daughter.  And if he didn't love Megara, to whom he had apparently been married for some time, why should we believe he loves Deianira? He barely knows Deianira... it seems like there's a lot more lust going on there than love, especially when he's so willing to accept Deianira's double in Hippolyta.  We get a Hercules who seems to blunder from woman to woman without a lasting attachment to any of them.

This is the biggest problem with The Loves of Hercules, but it's a long way from the only one.  There's also Mickey Hargitay. I've seen Mickey Hargitay in a couple of films before – besides this one, he was the detective in Lady Frankenstein and Anderson in Bloody Pit of Horror (god, I've seen a lot of terrible movies).  I kind of want to say he was better in those, but now that I think about it I'm pretty sure he was dubbed in both so it's actually quite hard to gague his performance. It's better than in the non-MST3K Loves of Hercules I watched, which was a re-dub in which all the characters were stoic and British.  He does a lot of Dull Surprise™ and postures like he's in a silent film.  His 'feats of strength' do not communicate impressive power – he just looks like a guy struggling to balance a prop tree.

Nor does it help that in comparison with Steve Reeves and Alan Steele, he makes for a relatively skinny and baby-faced Hercules.  Hargitay was 1955's Mr. Universe, and he's certainly in admirable shape, but he's just not up to 'demigod' levels.  He looks like the Hercules Ryan Gosling would have grown up into.  Apparently Hargitay got the role because the studio wanted Jayne Mansfield, and she would only agree to be in the movie if Hargitay, her husband, played Hercules.

Then there's the monsters.  Amusingly crummy monsters are stock-in-trade for a Hercules movie, usually realized by people in ridiculous costumes.  The Loves of Hercules is rather ambitious here.  Rather than giving us a distinctly un-threatening lion or a guy in a lizard-man suit who clearly can't see anything, we get a full-scale three-headed dragon standing in for the Lernaean Hydra!  It is significantly uglier and less mobile than its Russian cousin in The Sword and the Dragon, and looks kind of like one of the animatronics from Disney's Jungle Cruise ride.  It's laugh-out-loud obvious how careful the actors are being not to damage it.

These movies are never very faithful to the source material, so it shouldn't bother me that their 'hydra' bears only the faintest resemblance to its mythological inspiration... but it does.  The hydra is my favourite of Hercules' twelve labors – it's some kind of reptilian monster that Hercules tried to defeat by cutting off its head, only to find that multiple (usually three) heads grew back from each stump.  This makes it an excellent metaphor for a problem that needs to be addressed at its source rather than just having its symptoms brushed under the rug, but it also serves to make a point that most of these movies ignore: Hercules isn't stupid.

The hydra was a monster Hercules could not defeat by brute strength alone – he had to use his strength in a smart way.  In the myth, he burned the neck stumps so that they couldn't heal, then dipped his arrows in the hydra's venom to make them extra-deadly to all the monsters he'd have to fight later.  The Disney version actually kept the spirit of this idea even as they changed the ending.  Without a torch on hand, Hercules instead brings down a cliff on top of the hydra, trapping it under tons of rock that he can escape from, but it can't.  This is sort of the inverse of my point from a few reviews back about brains and hands: brains aren't much good without strength to do the work, but strength also isn't much good without a brain to direct it.  By making the hydra a creature Hercules can just stab to death, the episode loses all its meaning.

A lot is also lost from our impression of Hercules' intelligence, which wasn't exactly riding high anyway after he seems unable to remember more than one woman at a time.

Finally, of course, there's The Loves of Hercules' other monster and supreme What The Fuck moment, the Totally Random Sasquatch.  It was only on the second viewing that I realized this was supposed to be the 'monster Alcyone' the peasants mentioned rustling their cattle.  When describing him to Hercules and Deianira before the stampede, they call Alcyone a thief before they call him a monster, and use the word 'monster' in such a way that it seems like a metaphorical description of a human thug, rather than a literal one of Bigfoot.  With the cattle stampede and everything that follows to distract me, I'd forgotten all about Alcyone by the time we actually met him, and the sudden arrival of an ape-man seemed to come completely out of the blue.

In fact, even after realizing the connection, this is a weird, weird moment.  What is Alcyone even supposed to be?  The closest thing I can come up with to Bigfoot in standard Greek mythology is a satyr, but Alcyone is even less satyr-like than Torgo.  The writer Hanno the Navigator referred to a tribe of savage ape-men who supposedly lived around Sierra Leone, which he says the natives called gorillai (yes, this is where we get the word), but that's a long way from Greece and the story is fairly obscure.  As far as I can tell, Alcyone is exactly what Jonah and the bots first took him for: a totally random Sasquatch.  Between him, Cry Wilderness, Om the Caveman, and Gulfax the Poodle-Wookiee, I think we can officially dub Season 11 the Bigfoot Season.

As long as I'm here, 'Alcyone' is a girl's name in Greek.  It refers to a type of bird.

The Loves of Hercules is pretty competently made in most respects.  Even with some of the shortcomings in the casting, acting, and effects, it could have fallen into the 'hokey but charming' category, if only it hadn't forgotten about Megara.  The way she simply ceases to exist, as if women are like shirts and you can just pick a new one when you lose the old (or something similar if the one you originally wanted is no longer available), gives a very poor impression of both Hercules and the writers and makes it difficult to really get into the romances that follow.  In a film about the loves of Hercules, that's a fatal mistake.