GQ is one of my favorite magazines.
Tucked in and around the glossy fashion and food spreads are some of the best columnists and journalism to be found in the monthlies (GQ had one of the first reports on the links between cell phones and cancer).
The high quality of much of the magazine makes some of the recent celebrity cover stories all the more baffling.
A few months ago, a female reporter seemed to get way too chummy with cover boy Channing Tatum — the story included her account of a presumably platonic overnight stay with the actor in a remote cabin — but the July cover piece on “Captain America” star Chris Evans takes the cake for a reporter going native in Tinsel Town.
We’ve come a long way from Gay Talese’s classic Esquire piece — “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” — in which the ace writer did one of the best profiles ever written on a show business figure, despite the fact that Talese never got to interview the celebrity in question.
Instead Talese talked to everyone around Sinatra and he came back with a great story.
The Chris Evans piece in the July GQ starts with reporter Edith Zimmerman writing about how she turned up in a New York Daily News gossip column as the “mystery maiden” Evans introduced to his mother at a movie premiere.
The same gossip column, Zimmerman tells us, noted that “we held hands…’in a flirty manner’ and he even placed ‘one of them on his chest.’”
In her second graph, Zimmerman explains that “since my first interview with Chris Evans, I’d drunk myself under the table, snuck out of his house at five thirty in the morning, bummed a ride off a transsexual, been teased mercilessly in front of his mother…(but) I don’t remember touching his chest, which is too bad.”
Zimmerman keeps the flaky seductress act going for the rest of a story which seems to be about her rather than Mr. Evans:
“I couldn’t quite figure out if he was a goofy, warm, regular dude or just playing the character of goofy, warm, regular dude in order to charm a female reporter.”
Later, Evans invites Edith to join him for a cigarette outside a bar where they’ve been drinking:
“And although no, I don’t smoke, yes, I absolutely would join him outside, and can I actually have a drag? Maybe they make cigarettes differently in L.A., but when you share one with a movie star they’re amazing. Everyone should try it.”
Later that same night:
“In the vast backseat (of the star’s limo), Chris was even more flirtatious than before, touching my arm and my knee. At this point, which was a…number of drinks in, it was easy to forget that it really was an interview, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t cross my mind that something might happen…But there was always the question of how much of it was truly Chris Evans, and whom I should pretend to be in response.”
Perhaps she should have pretended to be a professional journalist?
‘Buck’: the movie that is making grown men cry
There is probably nothing tougher in this ultra-cynical age than selling a competely straightforward PG-rated movie about a middle-age white man who exudes old-fashioned niceness.
Like everyone else, I had read great things about “Buck” going all the way back to its debut at the Sundance Film Festival, but was I eager to see a picture about a gentle Westerner who travels the country giving clinics on how to raise horses without “breaking” them? Not really.
In the current Film Comment, Woody Allen talks about his preference for urban films over stories set in the country and this lifelong city dweller tends to agree with the creator of “Manhattan” and “Midnight in Paris.”
I can appreciate classic Westerns like “The Searchers” and “Ride the High Country” but they don’t hit me where I live the way that a movie like “The Godfather” or “Annie Hall” does.
So, I was very surprised to be blown away by “Buck” when I saw it a few days ago. The movie is, technically, about a man who has devoted much of his life advocating humane training for horses, but just beneath the surface,
director Cindy Meehl (below) delivers one of the most moving tales of survival that you are ever likely to see.
Buck Brannaman has created an ever-growing group of admirers from the four-day clinics he has been conducting around the country for decades. Buck works with the horses and their riders, showing how his gentle approach can produce small miracles in disciplining and training.
As the movie proceeds, however, we see that his way of treating horses can be applied to people, too. Indeed, unless a person changes his or her relationship to the horse, the animal won’t change either.
Meehl draws us into Buck and his clinics — which are as much about helping people as helping horses — before we get into his backstory as a terribly abused child.
Brannaman and his brother were rodeo performers from early childhood, but their “act” was the result of physically punishing training conducted by their brutal dad. The father was counterbalanced by Buck’s loving mother, but she died when the boy was just about to enter his teens, leaving him and his brother feeling hopelessly defenseless when it came to their father’s rages.
The miracle of Buck Brannaman’s life is that his own mistreatment didn’t make him bitter and violent. Instead, it made him determined to be kind and gentle to people and animals — and in the course of finding that peaceful path, Buck made a career and a name for himself.
The craftsmanship of “Buck” is subtle, so that the film casts its spell over a viewer before you know what’s hit you. And Meehl found a heart-wrenching climax for her movie with a woman who brings a wild (and possibly brain-damaged) horse to Buck that is simply too far gone to be helped in any significant way.
You don’t need to have any interest in cowboys or horses to find “Buck” one of the most powerful moviegoing experiences so far this year.
(“Buck” opened at the Bow Tie Criterion in New Haven on Friday and will debut July 8 at the Garden Cinemas in Norwalk and the Bethel Cinema.)