L'Officiel Armie

Yesterday I shared a snap shot of this but if I'd been patient, which, ha, I could've just shared it all this morning - Armie Hammer's latest magazine cover and photo-shoot have arrived, official like, and you can read the interview over at this link here. It's kind of the same stuff we've read a million times at this point, about the experience of working on Call Me By Your Name in Italy and how he didn't want to leave yadda yadda, but here's a nice little choice bit about the movie's well-regarded reception here in the US:

"I mean, at the end of the day—to be crass—we made a movie where a dude fucks a piece of fruit and then another guy eats it. So, I was like, ‘Maybe no one will see this. This might be something that American audiences will not accept.’ And that just hasn’t been the case, because people love to see a movie that’s just a celebration of love. And one thing Luca did, in all of his genius, was to boil all of this down to the most elemental human emotions, where anyone, regardless of their orientation or identification, can remember the first time they felt that way."

He does make me wish we could go back to the time when this was just a little movie nobody (nobody but me, anyway) was paying attention to - remember that this movie was made with very small (but obviously profound) intentions. They didn't think people were going to want to see this movie. That's why the conversation about them watering it down "for Oscars" or "for the mainstream" always strikes me as insane - this movie only got mainstream press because it ended up being good, and people love it.

When it went to Sundance nobody thought it was going to amount to what it has. When they made it Luca's movies weren't box office hits, and they weren't getting Oscar attention. Armie Hammer might have had a bit of a marquee name but nobody really took him seriously, and nobody knew who the fuck Timothee was. They made the movie they wanted to make, and we paid attention because it was a movie we needed.

There's been so much bizarre vitriol aimed at the film over the past few months that I don't understand. Even if one doesn't like the film, which is perfectly fine of course, some of the takes have just been so outlandish and misjudged and they always say more about the person freaking out than they do this little movie. And now that the movie's made just about what I always figured it would make, box-office-wise, in line with the other movies Luca's made, and it's definitely not winning Best Picture (fingers crossed for that Screenplay statue for James Ivory though!) let's get back to looking at the movie for what it is, not what you wanted it to be. Hit the jump for a couple more pictures...