MO’NIQUE, MO’PROBLEMS
Generally speaking, an Oscar win does good things for your career. The phrase “Academy Award winner” looks well on a poster and it’s a handy way of adding a little prestige to a picture, Nicolas Cage films notwithstanding. It’s not always the boost it should be though. Five years ago, Mo’nique won Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Lee Daniels’ Precious. She hasn’t appeared in a film since. In a recent interview, Mo’Nique claimed that she has been blackballed after refusing to play the political game in the run up to that Oscar win. Mo’nique told the Hollywood Reporter that Lee Daniels himself told her she was blackballed from several of his projects.
“I said, ‘I’ve been blackballed? Why have I been blackballed?’ And he said, ‘Because you didn’t play the game.’ And I said, ‘Well, what game is that?’ And he gave me no response. The next thing he said to me was, ‘Your husband is outbidding you.’ But he never asked me what [salary] we were asking for.”
By not playing the game Daniels means not participating properly in the campaign during awards season, since back in 2010 Mo’Nique wouldn’t attend awards-season parties and make nice with voters. Since “The Academy” are about on the same level of shadowy malicious figures as the Illuminati or the Council of Robot Elders, it’s reasonably credible that they would take offense to not being sucked up to and would exclude someone on that basis. Maybe they think that if Mo’Nique’s part in Precious was done by a 60 year old male then people wouldn’t have been “carrying on about it to the level that they were.”
FIRST LOOK AT AQUAMAN
The release of Superman V Batman: Dawn of Justice is slowly starting to appear on the horizon, and we’ve all seen how Warner Bros desire to get some of that Avengers love from the public has seen the film spiral from a Superman movie to a Superman and Batman movie to Warner Bros bumping right into you and-oh goodness-just dropping all their DC superheroes on the ground, my goodness they’re going everywhere, and Warner Bros hopes that you and they will both bend down to pick them up at the same time and bump heads. Having already initiated that meet-cute with washed out pictures of Batman and Wonder Woman, now they have unveiled a picture of Jason Mamoa decked out as the new Aquaman, looking appropriately like he’s been slapped with a wet fish.
The Visionary Director Zack Snyder DC movies get flak for being so grim and serious, and with the guy who talks to fish glaring miserably at you like this, you can see why. I mean, the Avengers movies are serious too, but at least they have primary colours.
FINISHING MI:5 TURNS INTO THRILLING RACE AGAINST TIME
So a while back Paramount moved the release date of the next Mission Impossible movie forward from December to July, possibly because production was ahead of schedule but more likely so that it wouldn’t have to compete with Star Wars. Either way it seemed like a good idea at the time. Now though, there’s a rush to get the film finished, after Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie had production halted so that the ending could be rewritten, to get it “from a good place to a perfect place.”
While it can be interpreted as a bad sign that a film’s ending needs to be changed so close to its release, especially because it needs to be written, then a crew has to be assembled all over again to shoot, but this seems more like a display of perfectionism than panic. MI: 4 was better than it had any right to be and Cruise’s approach to the franchise in general is better than you would expect for a dumb action movie with oodles of sequels. Here’s hoping Cruise, McQuarrie and the script doctors get the job done just in the nick of time, leaping out of the writer’s room as it explodes.
If you’d like to discuss anything I’ve written here or chastise me for this article going up late, you can find me on Twitter. I will see you again on Tuesday. Definitely.