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Thursday, November 18, 2021

... copy-and-pasted from... from... kevrocksicehouse.tumblr.com/post .... sob sob sob sob.... monica bellucci.... ?...

KevRock's Icehouse I have been observing your planet for a millennium. Here is what I think about some of your movies POSTS ASK ME ANYTHING ARCHIVE Dylan Baker, who plays people you can’t look away from (no matter how much you want to), turns 61 today. A few of his squirmiest roles:• Bill Maplewood in Happiness. D: Todd Solondz (1998). In Solondz’s black comedy about the awfulness of the human... Dylan Baker, who plays people you can’t look away from (no matter how much you want to), turns 61 today. A few of his squirmiest roles: Bill Maplewood in Happiness. D: Todd Solondz (1998). In Solondz’s black comedy about the awfulness of the human race, Baker plays a successful psychiatrist who is also an incurable pedophile with such a mixture of despicable guile and naked self-hatred that he tinges our disgust with pity. Baker walked that tightrope expertly especially in a scene where he had to admit to his son that he was an irredeemable monster. Jack Ordway in Revolutionary Road. D: Sam Mendes (2008). As the co-worker of Frank Wheeler, a grey-flanneled executive trying to save his marriage by chasing his youthful dreams of a life in Paris, Baker had just a few scenes, but in every one of them he drops a little bit of poisoned cold water on those dreams (“Assuming there is this true vocation waiting for you, wouldn’t you be just as likely to discover it here as there?”). Baker invest those lines with such slithery “good sense” that I wondered if he ever played Iago. J. Edgar Hoover in Selma. D: Ava DuVernay (2014). Duvernay wanted to show how Martin Luther King’s (David Oyelowo) movement drove Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) to push through the Civil Rights act and Voting Rights act without portraying Johnson as a “white savior.” One of her solutions was to have Baker as Hoover call for the FBI investigation of MLK’s infidelities and use them for leverage (actions that Hoover had started on his own with or without Johnson’s approval). Baker captures all of Hoover’s paranoid sliminess as he suggests the equivalent of presidential blackmail or worse (“Mister President, you know we can shut men with power down, permanently and unequivocally.”) and once again, a small part by a great actor almost invisibly enhanced a great movie.

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