Russell Crowe is sick of talking about Gladiator 2, a movie he is not in
Russell Crowe says he's at a point in his career where he'll either do a lot of smart and interesting stuff or just go away forever
Aux News Gladiator
Russell Crowe is not in Gladiator 2. He’s handed off the sandals and the MF DOOM mask (R.I.P.) to a younger generation of handsome men—specifically Paul Mescal—and yet people insist on asking him about it, to the point where he told reporters at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival (via Variety) that he’s fucking over it.
Alright, he didn’t literally say that. What he literally said was, “They should be fucking paying me for the amount of questions I am asked about a film I am not even in.” And you know what? He’s right! He’s doing free PR for that movie when he should be doing free PR for Kraven The Hunter! We’ve got more questions about that one than we do about Gladiator 2. “It has nothing to do with me,” he added, “In that world, I am dead. Six feet under.”
Crowe’s character in Ridley Scott’s original Gladiator, a betrayed general named Maximus who goes on a quest for vengeance in the film, dies at the end after killing Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus and advocating for political reforms (it’s a cool movie). So he’s definitely not in the new one, and he would be happy if everyone stopped checking in with him about it. “I know that if Ridley has decided to do a second part of the story, over 20 years later,” he noted, “he must have very strong reasons. I can’t think of this movie being anything other than spectacular.”
But that’s not the only thing Crowe is going off on at the Czech festival. He also complained about reporters asking him too many questions about beer, saying, “You people are obsessed. No more questions about beer, I don’t give a shit” before noting that he’d rather drink Guinness than anything else. He also teased that he’s sitting on some unreleased documentary films that he won’t put out until they’re “legally comfortable,” which is to say that he has to “wait for some people to die” before he can do it.
Crowe also once again sang the praises of Master And Commander, a movie that he will heroically defend for as long as he lives, citing the fact that it unfortunately opened after Pirates Of The Caribbean, which made the studio think they had to market it as “Gladiator goes to sea,” which turned off director Peter Weir’s regular audience and instead tired to attract what Crowe calls “the dumb kids.”
Regarding his future, Crowe said that the’s been looking at Ridley Scott’s career, where he keeps working and finding new things to say, and Crowe says he’ll either do that or just give up and “you will never hear from me again.” He figures those are “two very valid choices.”
37 Comments
Are you not indifferent?
I’m ambivalent on the answer.
Well I didn’t ask him about it! I wanted to talk beard maintenance!
The distinguished gentleman uses only half his bottle of Just For Men.
“a movie that he will heroically defend for as long as he lives”
… yeah? Because it’s a great fucking movie?
Amen. It’s an amazing piece of filmmaking, all the better because the source material is… not. (Sorry to anyone who loves those books. I tried the first one and could not remotely get into it).
Well, Horatio Hornblower isn’t to everyone’s taste.
Saw the Horatio Hornblower movies with Ioan Gruffudd, and I kinda loved them.I was surprised. It’s not my normal thing.
You are joking, I assume. That’s a different series about the Age of Sail, but far less literary.
The books are a little different in feel, definitely slower and more thoughtful, with a focus on a very wry style of humor between the main characters, and EXTREME accuracy in nautical details, terminology, etc.This is an exaggeration, but the books were written more for bookish college professors and history buffs – the sort of people who wore elbow patches on tweed jackets and enjoyed sitting up all night in a smoking lounge discussing Napoleon’s campaigns in excruciating detail.The first book is probably the biggest hurdle in the series, since it starts a bit slow. If you can get to the second half of the book, where all the most entertaining action and character interactions happen, it might click for you, and then the rest of the series should be enjoyable. But if not, then hey – they’re not for everyone, and that’s okay.
People who can’t get into the Aubrey-Maturin are like people who can’t get into reading Tolkien. The books in both cases are just way deeper and more complex than the simplified versions in the movies. And the books get better as you go along (in both LOTR and Aubrey-Maturin).
I liked the movie of M&C, but what the movie misses is how complex Stephen Maturin is. Yes, he’s a physician, musician, and naturalist, as the movie depicts, but he is also a intelligence agent for the British Empire (which the movie completely ignores), despite being a Catholic half-Irish/half-Catalonian with objectives that don’t completely map onto what Britain wants.
He doesn’t get the chance to be funny or assholish enough to be proper Steven, and while I love Crowe’s Jack, the Jack in the film is the idealized hero that Jack inhabits only occasionally in the books: it’s hard to see Crowe’s Jack leaving you screaming at the screen “YOU FUCKING IDIOT NO” as he blithely gives away his fortune to 18th century crypotobros.(Listen to Sophie, Jack. For fuck’s sake she’s the smartest person in the series and you don’t ever fucking listen)
Yeah, and Crowe’s Jack isn’t the greedy one from the books (which also as you mention leads him to invest in stupid schemes at home), who is motivated as much by getting “prize money” for capturing enemy ships (a real thing at the time) as by patriotism or sense of duty.Also, while he does fight Frenchmen like he does in the movie, a lot of the books take place during the war of 1812 (which seems to go on for quite a bit longer than the actual war if you add up the length of his voyages) so a lot of his enemies are Americans, which probably wouldn’t play well in Hollywood.
There is nothing deep or complex about Tolkien.
Tolkien isn’t perhaps emotionally complex with characters that have deep inner lives the way “literary fiction” does, but the fact is Middle Earth is incredibly deep and complex as a setting, with cultures with fully worked out histories and languages. Basically every fantasy author since has tried to come up with settings as complex and detailed as Middle Earth and have failed (probably because the average fantasy author isn’t an Oxford professor of philology).
There’s a bit of a movement lately to decry any kind of worldbuilding as extraneous fluff.
Oh, he’s deep. Tediously so. You know. Like how a septic tank is deep. Fantasy authors have spent a century trying to ape him – “proper” fantasy writers see Tolkien as the standard that must be attained. The thing is…Tolkien is a shit writer. What Tolkien did was basically apply 1920s Oxbridge academic style and methods to a fantasy realm he made up, and lord knows that shit ain’t digestible, unless you’re the direst of left-brainers. So you get dry, academic, passive-voice proses, masses of info-dumping and exposition (or “lore and backstory” – the two things fantasy fans cream their pantaloons over). You’ll get three pages of Tolk describing a fucking a doorknob that has no bearing on the narrative, is never mentioned again, but by golly-gosh-darn-it, isn’t it fascinating as to why doorknobs in this village are octagonal instead of round, and made not from brass, but of bronze…He also has a jerky way of describing shit by not describing what it is, but by what it isn’t.“The plate was large, but not so large as to be a platter, but nor so small as to be a side plate, a bread-and-butter plate. Nor was it a saucer, but nor was it a large dish as one might present a whole roasted fowl, perhaps, or or a joint of venison or beef, if anyone in this village could afford such a joint, which they couldn’t but wished they did. It could have comfortably held a medium-sized small trout, but not a small medium-sized pike. Not the fine porcelain of a king’s court, or the earthy earthenware of the plains villages, but metal. Not tin, for the village was not that poor, but nothing so fine as silver or pewter…” AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH. Meanwhile, fantasy readers lament that no one else likes fantasy.
I never had a problem with Tolkien, though to be fair I haven’t read LotR in at least 20 years. (Re-read the Hobbit not too long ago, and that’s still a delight).
The first one is inarguable the most difficult to get into: people who bounce hard off the jargony first one can still fall in love with the loving Jane Austen homage of Post Captain, the seoncd book, and it’s clear from book two-on that an editor came in with a remit to make the books somewhat more accessible to he average layperson.
And I should add that as a book fan, as much as I adore the movie, Paul Bettany is greatly miscast and his Stephen is very Hollywood.
Honestly, it wasn’t the jargon, it was the haphazard writing. It’s hard to follow a story when it randomly jumps weeks ahead from one paragraph to another without so much as a line break.
You’re also not doing it any favors with me by comparing it to Jane Austen. I read voraciously in high school (and still do, to a lesser extent), but Jane Austen was always a sleep aid to me.
But the movie is so damn good, maybe I’ll give the second book a shot somewhere down the line.
I think I got as far as the third. I just got tired of the reset button being pushed on Aubrey. He’s rich, he loses it. He’s rich, he loses it again and again.
Granted. But to be fair, that sort of thing (blowing their wealth) is why captains kept going back to the sea and not retiring. As I mentioned earlier, the books stress how motivated 19th naval captains were motivated by becoming wealthy through prize money, despite being, like many modern athletes and actors, terrible at actually managing wealth once they have it.
It was the first time realized they’d just throw pretty much anything in a cannon. Just send heavy shit at the other boat at high velocity.
DISCLAIMER: Never saw the movie. Just read about it and thought it was cool.
That side quest where they go to that island and have to battle Charles Darwin’s mutated creatures and then fend off an attack from a steampunk upgraded version of The Beagle (piloted by a young Captain Nemo himself!) has to be one of the most astonishing pieces of cinema ever set to 35mm film. Supposedly the Snyder cut of this sequence is even more groundbreaking.
ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED? Honestly, yeah I am!
It’s also the fifth-best Star Trek movie, after Wrath of Khan, Undiscovered Country, Galaxy Quest, and First Contact.
Fair.
pour one out for poor Tugger…
Perhaps instead he’d like to revisit the time he threw a phone at hotel employee because he couldn’t make a call from his room?
Another from the ‘triggered generation’ who never, ever get over any offense, real or imagined. What a perfect world they inhabit.
Well then, you probably shouldn’t have appeared in the first one then. Didn’t think of that, did you Russell?
As if dying in the first episode of the Gladiator multiverse means you’re actually dead.
You joke, but there was a planned Gladiator 2 before that would have had him Forrest-Gump-ing his way through history as some kind of immortal ghost.
Written by Nick Cave, no less. The world would be a far weirder (yet better) place if Nick Cave’s script was used for Gladiator 2 and William Gibson’s for Alien 3. Both are floating out there on the Internet if people are interested.
I think Gibson’s Alien 3 got made into a comic, I should probably check it out.
He’s also sick of not looking like John Goodman, and he’s going to put a stop to it right now.