Nicolas Cage has entered the chat.
I thought about him when I wrote that! Watching recent Nicholas Cage movies is my guilty pleasure. Most of them are pretty terrible, but I’m just so curious to see what he’ll do.
I think what I appreciate about Nic Cage is his sense of adventure more than his acting. He does carry movies, but I don’t think he is as convincing. I think he’s pretty aware of when he’s doing terrible stuff, and sometimes that’s part of the fun.
I like watching him grimace through some of the stuff he has to say in Prisoners of the Ghostland, for example.
I don’t get that sense with Kurt Russell. I think the worst Kurt Russell movie I saw recently was Tango & Cash, and he was still rock solid in that. He’s just unflappable.
Maybe I’m forgetting some terrible performance of his, but that’s the feeling I have. Even playing an NSA guy in Fast and Furious. It’s such a stupid role, and it’s difficult to play anyone half-way serious in that universe, but he does not flinch. He is 100% in it.
I cannot imagine anyone but Kurt Russell delivering these lines without giggling, at least on the inside, in a way that you notice:
Apparently le Carré’s kids hate good spy movies.
Well that article was incredibly tedious to parse, but one of Le Carré’s kids wrote The Gone-Away World?!
Yep, that’s why my radar went up. Surely Harkaway/Truhan isn’t a douche!
That’s one way to look at it.
Another way to look at it is that he is seemingly not in favor of a sequel to the extremely good spy movie Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which in my opinion is more than enough to make him a villain.
I haven’t read his book, but I don’t think even writing a good one necessarily makes you a good person. Just look at Wagner.
I think my more general position is that if you were to tally the reasons why we can’t have nice things, “inheritance” and “money” would feature pretty highly on that list.
Well the article gives a 3rd-hand report that a reporter heard from Gary Oldman’s people that when they approached the Le Carre estate with a proposal that Oldman reprise his role as Smiley, they declined for unspecified reasons. It’s hard to draw any conclusions from that. (Personally, I think TTTS is possibly and on purpose the most boring spy movie ever made. I think its (probably correct) thesis was that spycraft is mostly boring.)
Nick Harkaway (i.e. Nicholas Cornwall) is a well-established author who has written many well-regarded novels, which are mostly a kind of idiosyncratic magical realism sci-fi. His other pseudonym Aiden Truhan has written two of the best pedal-to-the-metal, Elmore-Leonard-tripping-balls-on-speed crime novels that exist.
Yeah, I don’t think we can draw any conclusions from the actual facts presented in the article other than there probably won’t be another Gary Oldman as George Smiley movie. Which is okay by me. TTTS was a fine enough movie but I like the old BBC miniseries better, and they did three books worth of those.
Having not read the TTTS books or watched the movies, and being a HUGE Oldman fan, I’m perfectly content with Slow Horses. It’s a spy series with season 5 just being renewed and you can’t get much more grizzled than his character in Slow Horses. lol.
I wonder if Slow Horses was done b/c he couldn’t get TTTS? Slow Horses premiered in 2022. When did they approach the estate for TTTS?
I feel like there was talk of adapting one of the other Smiley books shortly after TTTS came out. Maybe 2012 or so? But that could’ve been a different project that fizzled out for other reasons.
But the 2011 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is outstanding, and well worth watching. It’s easily my favorite Oldman performance, and I’m not sure I’ve seen another actor achieve so much through so little.
The Honourable Schoolboy, Le Carré’s follow-up to TTTS is his most “cinematic” book of the ones I’ve read, and was never adapted to TV of film, but really, there’s no need to see it on screen. If Oldman and Alfredson want to make another spy film, I’m sure there are plenty of screenwriters around who would be happy to provide an original story.
So how is Le Carre as an author? I desperately love his son’s writing, I always assumed the father was just cranking out typical 80s thrillers.
I’ve only read a couple of his works (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and A Perfect Spy), but they’ve all been excellent. And definitely not your standard 80s thrillers. There’s a heavy, heavy focus on the mundane drudgery of spy work. Very much the opposite of James Bond.
Nice, I get to have an entire catalog to read!