By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
Candid Cuba and Other Good Signs of The Times
Obviously, I’ve been a little bit out of the loop today, but I thought that before I choke to death on other work, I should at least point belatedly to Lewis Beale’s piece about Cuba Gooding Jr. in yesterday’s Times. In evaluating Gooding’s rise, plunge and makings of another rise, Beale captures a fairly stunning candor from a number of sources–not the least of whom is the subject himself:
“The studios don’t see me now,” said Mr. Gooding, speaking by telephone from the Los Angeles set of his latest film, What Love Is, an independently financed romantic comedy in which he co-stars with Anne Heche and Sean Astin.
“As a commercial entity, I know my stock is low,” added the actor, who is now 38. Recalling his heyday, Mr. Gooding said, “I was where Don Cheadle is now, where Terrence Howard is now. I was those guys three or four years ago.”
And then there is Gooding’s Shadowboxer director Lee Daniels–who calls the actor’s 1997 Oscar-acceptance speech “a Stepin Fechit performance”–and a little more generous Chris Fisher, who directed Gooding in the upcoming Dirty and said his star “saw himself as an actor who wanted to play characters, despite the fact the script wasn’t up to par, or the project wasn’t up to par.”
Wow. No pressure for Dirty, I guess. Gooding is not the only selling point of the Sunday movie section, either; although one would think Robert Altman would be kind of sore from that all that Terrence Rafferty hand-job action, Christian Moerk offers some long-awaited perspective on the making of the Edie Sedgwick biopic Factory Girl.
All of this pales in comparison to the Magazine, of course, where it appears that Tom Ford’s unavailability to design the now-annual “Great Performers” issue meant falling back to Plan B: Drawing on Jeff Daniels (right). Or sticking cat-eye contact lenses on George Clooney. I mean, nothing says “I had a good 2005” like Charlize Theron spray-painted gold. But hey–she was naked. You knew the Vanity Fair touch had to sneak in there somewhere.
(Photo: Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin for The New York Times)