Caught Butlering

The thing about Austin Butler is... it's complicated. On the one hand I'm not at all convinced he's the huge talent he's being sold as these days. I didn't think he was all that great in Baz Luhrmann's Elvis. He was fine, he did what was asked of him; unfortunately Baz didn't feel like digging beneath the surface. But even more annoying to me is I'm really finding the reaction to his performance in Dune 2 completely overblown -- Feyd-Rautha is a role that any actor could have managed to make an impression with, especially with that make-up job, and I didn't feel Butler went particularly beyond that. Having now seen the movie twice I can confirm that initial impression -- he felt yet again to me like a lightweight playing dress-up. I did not sense legitimate menace or threat from him for a second of that performance.

But there is another hand! The other hand is that I did like him a lot as Tex Watson in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. And having seen Jeff Nichols' upcoming movie The Bikeriders a very very long time ago I thought he was a stand-out in that as well. It's a character that's all surface cool and sexy while being kind of a dumb nothing underneath that, and hey whaddya know he pulls that off. So... it's complicated. Like I said. 

Which leads me to today's complicated news -- Deadline is reporting that he's teaming up with Darren Aronofsky for a crime thriller called Caught Stealing, based on a 2004 book by Charlie Huston (thx Mac). It's about "a burned-out former baseball player... unwittingly plunged into a wild fight for survival in the downtown criminal underworld of ‘90s NYC." The book cover says it's got a "wrong man plot worthy of Hitchcock" and lord knows I love me one of those -- so if Darren Aronofsky wasn't himself coming off of his worst movie (by leaps and bounds) I might be excited about this right now! 

Alas the stench of The Whale still lingers, and a big part of me worries that nobody involved in the making of that piece of shit really got what a piece of shit it was given that its lead still won Best Actor for it. Aronofsky, who's given me some of my favorite movies of ever, really has to win me back with this next one. A lot's on the line! And casting Austin Butler isn't exactly the homerun I want it to be. But fingers crossed anyway. I hope the boys do deliver a proper Hitchcockian wrong-man movie and we can all skip together hand in hand into the future like one big happy family. Let's keep the dream alive. Let's do it for this guy: