Happy Presidents Day 2018 from all of us at The Hollywood Gossip, as we come together to honor a couple of true American heroes. The truest of heroes, really. The truest of the true. And the Winner is? Abraham Lincoln Click Here To Vote for Abe George Washington Click Here To Vote for G-Dubs They were both A-plus chief executives, but which U.S. President do you love more, Abraham Lincoln or George Washington? That’s what we wanna know! View Poll » It’s time we determined who among these United States legends is worthy of being called the greatest of all time. OF ALL TIME! In a Fashion Face-Off for the ages, that is! Yes, we realize that styles popularized by Abraham Lincoln and George Washington haven’t been popular with the mainstream in ages. Like, ages . Industrial Revolution style. By the same token, when you’re a titan of history, you never go out of style, are we right?! If you got you a national monument, ’nuff said. Take the first President of the U.S., George Washington. He led a rebellion over Great Britain, then oversaw the birth of a new nation. Four score and seven years later, Abraham Lincoln valiantly preserved and paved the way for a more perfect union against long odds. Overcoming similarly huge obstacles, redefining what was possible and then fighting to preserve it, both patriots delivered for America. In their respective eras and now, giants among men. Ones who make all of our lives seem more than a tad mundane and pointless all of a sudden. Kind of sad if you stop and think about it. Anyway, comparing achievements and legacies by people in such rarefied air is impossible … but we can at least pick a fashion winner. Would you rather rock George’s 18th Century Colonial garb or Abe’s 19th Century Civil War-era attire? Talk about the toughest of calls. Make it. It’s your duty as an American.
The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution was a long and contested legal battle between Union President Abraham Lincoln (pictured with pen) and the…
Here’s an easy formula to get attention for your Worst Movies of 2012 list. Take the unfathomable big-budget box-office failure that’s likely to top a lot of these year-end thumbsuckers — and make it number two. Next, single out an ambitious film by a trio of filmmakers with a passionate following. Put it at the top (or is it the bottom?) of your list and wait for their fans to scream. That’s what Time magazine , in the role of media Old Georgie, has done with its “Top 10 Worst Films” list for the year. Writer Mary Pols chose the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer’ s collaboration Cloud Atlas as the year’s stinkiest over Disney’s summer bomb John Carter. And I’m calling bullshit. Before I explain, take a look at Pols’ entire list: 10. One For The Money 9. T he Odd Life Of Timothy Green 8. What To Expect When You’re Expecting 7. Alex Cross 6. The Lorax 5. This Means War 4. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter 3. Hyde Park on Hudson 2. John Carter 1. Cloud Atlas Most of those movies are largely formulaic and, in some cases, cynical attempts to put asses in seats. They should be on the list, particularly the aptly named One For The Money and What to Expect When Your Expecting, which would have tied for worst movie had I been doing the ranking. (Even though Jennifer Lopez is the mother of twins in real life, I cannot summon the suspension of disbelief to buy her as a parent in the movies.) Yes, Cloud Atlas is an unwieldy, problematic movie that could have used a good streamlining in terms of the sheer number of stories that were adapted from David Mitchell’s novel, but a film this ambitious — and unabashedly spiritual at its core — does not deserve to be on a list of the year’s worst. Movieline’s chief critic Alison Willmore explained it beautifully in her review: Cloud Atlas strives continually for transcendence and only sometimes grasps it, but the sincerity with which it pursues the emotion and the very idea of the reverberating impact selfless actions can have is quite moving. It’s rare, these days, to see a movie declare its aims for greatness so openly and without a leaden sense of self-importance. And though the film doesn’t achieve all of its goals, it does offer an indelibly powerful vision of a throughline from the past to today and on through the end of things, that expresses faith in the ability of people to overcome animalism. It’s spiritual but entirely humanistic, and salvation, when it comes, arrives from within or from other people — an outrageous, silly and beautiful ode to the better nature of mankind. You won’t see anyone writing that about What to Expect When You’re Expecting. [Time] Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Here’s an easy formula to get attention for your Worst Movies of 2012 list. Take the unfathomable big-budget box-office failure that’s likely to top a lot of these year-end thumbsuckers — and make it number two. Next, single out an ambitious film by a trio of filmmakers with a passionate following. Put it at the top (or is it the bottom?) of your list and wait for their fans to scream. That’s what Time magazine , in the role of media Old Georgie, has done with its “Top 10 Worst Films” list for the year. Writer Mary Pols chose the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer’ s collaboration Cloud Atlas as the year’s stinkiest over Disney’s summer bomb John Carter. And I’m calling bullshit. Before I explain, take a look at Pols’ entire list: 10. One For The Money 9. T he Odd Life Of Timothy Green 8. What To Expect When You’re Expecting 7. Alex Cross 6. The Lorax 5. This Means War 4. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter 3. Hyde Park on Hudson 2. John Carter 1. Cloud Atlas Most of those movies are largely formulaic and, in some cases, cynical attempts to put asses in seats. They should be on the list, particularly the aptly named One For The Money and What to Expect When Your Expecting, which would have tied for worst movie had I been doing the ranking. (Even though Jennifer Lopez is the mother of twins in real life, I cannot summon the suspension of disbelief to buy her as a parent in the movies.) Yes, Cloud Atlas is an unwieldy, problematic movie that could have used a good streamlining in terms of the sheer number of stories that were adapted from David Mitchell’s novel, but a film this ambitious — and unabashedly spiritual at its core — does not deserve to be on a list of the year’s worst. Movieline’s chief critic Alison Willmore explained it beautifully in her review: Cloud Atlas strives continually for transcendence and only sometimes grasps it, but the sincerity with which it pursues the emotion and the very idea of the reverberating impact selfless actions can have is quite moving. It’s rare, these days, to see a movie declare its aims for greatness so openly and without a leaden sense of self-importance. And though the film doesn’t achieve all of its goals, it does offer an indelibly powerful vision of a throughline from the past to today and on through the end of things, that expresses faith in the ability of people to overcome animalism. It’s spiritual but entirely humanistic, and salvation, when it comes, arrives from within or from other people — an outrageous, silly and beautiful ode to the better nature of mankind. You won’t see anyone writing that about What to Expect When You’re Expecting. [Time] Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
It’s easy to draw parallels to President Obama in Steven Spielberg ’s historical Oscar hopeful Lincoln , a portrait of the 16th American President who stood tall, orated well, united a divided nation across color and party lines, and was re-elected to office for a second term. But Spielberg insists he had no specific political agenda in mind when the long-gestating Lincoln came to fruition. “I would have been very glad to have made Lincoln in the year 2000,” Spielberg explained recently in Los Angeles, “the year after I met [author Doris Kearns Goodwin, whose book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln was adapted by Lincoln scribe Tony Kushner]. It took her a couple years to write the book. It took us more than a couple years to get the screenplay written. So, I wasn’t waiting for a certain time.” The divided politics of Lincoln’s presidency, as explored at length in Spielberg’s film, find pointed parallels in President Obama’s tenure in the White House: A President with a humanistic streak tasked with bringing war to an end, Lincoln is depicted wrestling with military crises, huge wartime losses of life, moral questions of personal freedoms, Constitutional history-making, all-too eager rivals, and, notably, his own family issues at home. Still, Spielberg says the Obama-Lincoln parallels have nothing to do with it. “At one point I flirted with coming out on the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, but we weren’t ready to make the picture then,” said Spielberg, who spent years wooing star Daniel Day-Lewis and had even resigned himself to not making Lincoln without the actor. “People say ‘Oh, you made it because of what’s happening in politics today.’ No, we were ready to make it during the Bush administration. It had had nothing to do current politics.” That’s not to say no inference at all should be drawn into Lincoln ’s messaging as a reflection of modern politics; it’s just that, despite “tremendous similarities” between politics in the time of Lincoln and today, reading too much into the details might be confusing because of how much the intervening 14 decades have altered America’s political system. “There’s a lot of confusion about the political ideologies of both parties, [which] have switched 180 degrees in 150 years,” he explained. “It’s just too confusing. Everybody claims Lincoln as their own. And everybody should claim Lincoln as their own, because he represents all of us, and what he did basically provided the opportunities that, that all of us are enjoying today.” So while a theatrical release on Friday should bring President Lincoln and his legend to vivid life in the wake of Tuesday’s Obama re-election, those few extra buffer days allowed Spielberg to get some distance from the real-life Presidential race. “I just wanted people to talk about the film, not talk about the election cycle. So I thought it was safer to let people talk about film during the election cycle in this run-up with ads on TV and posters going up and all that, but the actual debut of the film should happen after the election’s been decided. That was my feeling.” Despite peeling the curtain back on Lincoln — the film reveals intimate glimpses of his home life and career, but leaves ambiguous the fringe theories of his sexuality, as hinted at by Kushner in an interview with Metro — Spielberg is happy to continue letting people talk and wonder at any deeper messages seeded within what he otherwise says was meant only to be a portrait of a great figure in American history. “I’m really excited to see how deeply people will reach to contemporize our film,” he said with a smile, “far beyond how it deserves to be contemporized.” Read more on Lincoln , in select theaters Friday . Lincoln closes the 2012 AFI Fest on Thursday. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
