#Damon Christian

[badmovieihave]

Bad movie I have Ms. Magnificent 1979 aka Superwoman

[watching-pictures-move]

Put On Your Raincoats | Titillation (Christian, 1982)

As a noir parody, you can guess at what level it’ll be pitched by the opening scene, in which Eric Edwards can be seen tripping in silhouette before entering his office. But what I will say is that Edwards, who I mostly associate with playing nice guys even if my favourite roles of his (Dracula Exotica, The Young Like it Hot) have him playing against type, is a lot of fun as a private dick as he sinks his teeth into his hardboiled dialogue. The opening narration gives a good idea of the movie’s pleasures in this regard:

“Dashiell Hammett I’m not, but I can wipe my chin like Bogart. Or hike up my pants like Cagney. As far as Sam Spade is concerned, my mother named me Spado. Spado Zappo’s usual specialty is untying marital knots for guys who finally realize they like the ball without the chain. Or the guy that finds he believes in life, liberty and the happiness of pursuit. As for my philosophy, I believe in wine, women and song. As a private dick, I can keep a clear conscience. Mainly because I have such a lousy memory.”

Most of the dialogue Edwards delivers in between huffs of his cigar, and there’s one scene where he and his partner Randy West are sitting around a table getting drunker and drunker and huffing on cigars and you can practically smell the cigar smoke coming through the screen. Neither is the straight man to the pair, but they have some comedic chemistry as they work their way through the relaxed, obvious but still pretty funny gags the movie trots out. There’s a sequence of events during the final reveal that I wouldn’t dare spoil but got a pretty good laugh out of me.

On top of that, this is a pretty nice looking movie. This is directed by Damon Christian, who I mostly know as a producer on a number of Bob Chinn movies, including the very nice looking Hard Soap, Hard Soap, so unless the cinematography was actually by somebody named “Guido Jewalucci”, I’m gonna give Christian credit here. There’s some handsome nighttime footage and sometimes striking use of shadows and frames within frames, like a sex scene captured in a mirror and another glimpsed through a window. And on a visual level, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the amazing décor of the office of the guy who hires Edwards: framed pictures of breasts, wood panelling, a hidden TV and a bear rug. So obviously this is a good movie.

And if you’re watching it for prurient reasons, the casting of Kitten Natividad and Angelique Pettyjohn certainly makes good on the title and poster, and Pettyjohn is especially forceful in her scenes.

[monarchteen]

fuck all romances except for whatever the brown/black girl got going on with her pasty ass white boyfriend

[mieczyslawn]

⠀⠀ ⠀⠀ ★ . . . my boyfriend’s pretty cool

[infamouslydorky]

Idk if he’s religious, let alone “Christian”, but I do squint very hard at that Jesus piece tie of his along with the massive tax funded pipe organ in his office

[squishywizardd]

So like can we all agree that Ian from KFoS is literally based off Ian Somerhalder and Vlad from DALS is based off Luke Evans?

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

I mean COME ON

[dumb-little-baby]

Me with my fictional men 🩷

[brysbeddixt]

If he doesn’t look like the twink loser from an early 2000s movie I don’t want him

[this-is-ali]

Same energy.

[viridian-pickle]

British GQ

[denimbex1986]

'Cillian Murphy had just spent the day filming what felt like 30 scenes on “Oppenheimer” with the desert sand kicking up and blasting into his eyes when his co-star Robert Downey Jr. greeted him, trying to boost his spirits. And — this is how Downey remembers it, and when the legend becomes fact, print the legend — Murphy launched into a lament about how, when he had returned to his “18-dollar-a-night hotel room” the previous evening, he found his bags in the hallway and thought, “F—! I haven’t checked out yet. I have to sleep!”

“Every indignity that could befall someone who’s trying to do something .... It was like the tears of Job,” Downey related after a recent screening of the Christopher Nolan blockbuster. “Forget the call sheet and the job. It was everything else. It was the most Irish experience I’ve ever witnessed.”

Nearly two years later, Murphy and I are talking on a late-autumn day in L.A. He’s removing his coat and pulling his chair into the sun because, yes, he’s Irish, and part of the Irish experience is to soak up as much sun as possible when the opportunity presents itself. As to what Downey is ascribing to his native land, Murphy can do nothing but laugh.

“I don’t know if that means that Irish people are more predisposed to suffering,” Murphy says, smiling. “I think he’s being very sweet and saying we were like a troupe, moving at quite a pace. We were just staying at motels by the freeway and moving around. It was not glamorous. The way Chris works is that everything is equitable. No one has trailers or personal makeup. Everyone gets in a bus. It feels like independent filmmaking, but on a f—ing grand scale. And that’s the way I enjoy working.”

Murphy, 47, also enjoys not working, and he’s had a successful enough career in the two decades since his film breakthrough in Danny Boyle’s 2002 classic zombie film “28 Days Later” that he can describe such periods as being “happily unemployed.” That was where he was at a couple of years ago. He’d finished shooting the sixth (and final) season of the entertaining BBC crime drama “Peaky Blinders” and was in the midst of a glorious six months enjoying the company of his wife, Irish visual artist Yvonne McGuinness, and their two teenage sons. Then Nolan called out of the blue.

Actually, it wasn’t Nolan, but his wife and producing partner, Emma Thomas. It couldn’t be Nolan, because Nolan doesn’t have a phone, an eccentricity that’s either endearing or infuriating depending on the context. Thomas handed the phone to her husband, who told Murphy — in what the actor calls an “unbelievably understated British way” — “I’m making a film about Oppenheimer.” Pause. “I’d like you to play Oppenheimer.”

And just like that, Murphy was no longer happily unemployed. He was playing the title character in Nolan’s sprawling drama about the physicist known as the “father of the atomic bomb.”

“A big moment,” Murphy calls it, no stranger to restraint himself. Pause. “A biggie.”

In conversation, Murphy is pleasant and reflective when talking about his native country (he could and should write a book on the Ring of Kerry or at least narrate a self-guided tour) and the arts. I’d read that Nolan sent him photos of David Bowie wearing high-waisted, voluminous trousers from the singer’s Thin White Duke era as a visual reference for the gaunt silhouette he imagined for Oppenheimer, a man who possessed such a manic work ethic that he forgot to eat, subsisting on martinis and Chesterfield cigarettes. I pull up a photo of Bowie taken shortly before his death, wearing a sharp suit, black fedora and beaming smile.

“He looks a little alien, which is what we were going for with Oppenheimer, I think,” Murphy says. He holds onto my phone, looking at Bowie. “One of the greats. That last album [“Blackstar”] was f—ing extraordinary. What a gift to leave us with. Nobody else could have gone out like that.”

Murphy’s most striking feature — his piercing blue eyes — have been noted at length, for good reason. “Oppenheimer” co-star Matt Damon notes how he’d find himself distracted working with Murphy. “It’s a real problem when you’re doing scene work with Cillian [because] sometimes you find yourself just swimming in his eyes,” he told People.

Those eyes are what first attracted Nolan to him. The filmmaker was leafing through a newspaper while writing “Batman Begins” and came across a photo of Murphy from “28 Days Later.” He couldn’t shake the image of this actor with a shaved head and “crazy eyes” and made a note to meet with Murphy for Batman, a role that eventually went to Christian Bale.

They’ve now made six movies together, with Murphy playing the menacing Scarecrow in the “Dark Knight” trilogy, a petulant business heir in “Inception” and a character known simply — and quite accurately — as “Shivering Soldier” in “Dunkirk.” They share a mutual interest in conveying a character’s emotional conflict through close-ups that linger on an actor’s face and allow the audience to feel inner turmoil. In Oppenheimer’s case, it was the searing anguish of a man a bit late to realize and appreciate the consequences of what he’d created.

“To me, great screen acting is all about ‘show, don’t tell,’” Murphy says, “and being able to transmit emotion and energy just by force or presence or charisma.”

I ask him about influences in that regard, but Murphy demurs, saying that if he starts listing actors, he’ll wake up in the middle of the night, thinking, “F—, I left that person out.” He reiterates that his favorite movie moments aren’t big set pieces but watching actors in reflection, inactive, doing nothing, but revealing everything. “I find that compelling in the highest order,” he says.

Murphy had ample opportunity to do just that in “Oppenheimer,” portraying a character caught in a moral dilemma of his own making.

“I knew it would have to be a quiet, small performance, because the themes are f—ing huge,” Murphy says. “What’s happening inside his heart and his mind can’t be painted big, particularly when it’s captured on an Imax camera and it’s going to be shown on a f—ing 80-foot screen. I knew it would have to be delicate and tiny, most of it.”

Murphy doesn’t like to dwell on what he did once call the “monastic experience” of the film’s 57-day shoot or on the months it took to decompress afterward. Such talk would be a little too close to the “Irish experience” Downey had mentioned. But all of these efforts did make me think about something that Emily Blunt, who plays Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, in the film and worked with Murphy in “A Quiet Place Part II,” noted about him.

“She said that off set, you’re a hoot,” I tell him, fishing for an example or two. Murphy does not oblige, but he does express how his friendship with Blunt created a trust that informed their portrayal of lifelong partners.

“She’s also one of the funniest people, and I have a rule that I can’t work unless there’s a lightness around the set,” Murphy says. “There has to be some levity. A lot of the films I do are quite heavy and go to some dark, challenging places, and you have to be relaxed to do that. So I don’t walk around in a state of f—ing angst. I need to feel at ease. I can’t be in that dark place all the time. I don’t have the stamina for it.”

Murphy saw “Oppenheimer” at the film’s July world premiere in Paris. Two days later, he and the rest of the cast left the London premiere to show their support for the impending SAG-AFTRA strike. By the time he returned home to Dublin, his wife and sons had already seen “Barbie,” so Murphy went to the cinema by himself to complete the “Barbenheimer” experience.

How do you go incognito to the multiplex, I ask.

“I time going to movies very well now,” Murphy says. “With the ads and trailers, I always arrive a half hour late, slip in and then slip out.”

I grouse how that half hour feels like it’s getting longer by the year. Murphy agrees. And yet ...

“The greatest democratic collective art form is sitting in a darkened space with strangers,” he says. “To be part of a movie that people went to see multiple times and part of a great moment for cinema, that frenzy for those two films, was just lovely. I don’t know if we’ll ever see it again, but I’d like to hope so.”

[pricelesscinemas]

[missbangtangirl]

Happy 28 Birthday 🥳 to Cody Christian

[fieldsofwax]

Will never understand the needless morality logic Stefan stans place around their love for Stefan (which only ever seems to exist to hate on Damon). I will always prefer a man that kills for an emotional reason over a man that kills just due to the lust to kill. Bloodlust is a desire just as much as “I killed him because I wanted to”-Damon always kills for humanity/emotional reasons. It’s just that stefan denies that bloodlust is a desire, while Damon admits his desire. Will always prefer a man that owns his flaws instead of denies them. I guess it’s my personal emotional bias, that denial of flaws imo is less redeemable than reveling in one’s flaws (Damon). Denial of flaws (and looking down on other’s) is the whole basis of the Christian white supremacist b.s. I’ve lived under my whole life.

[wxrldinmyeyes]

Compelled by Damon:

Sired by Klaus:

Dominated by Christian:

Invited to The Dreaming by Morpheus:

[filmjet]

Behind the scenes of Ford v Ferrari (2019)