Ethan and Maya Hawke are going to “Come Together” for an upcoming movie that will make you want to crave more “Twist and Shout” until you have to say “I’m So Tired.”
The four-time Oscar nominee tells the partly true story of abolitionist John Brown: “If we ignore these stories, we don’t know ourselves as a country and as people.”
The Good Lord Bird is set over 160 years ago, but creator and protagonist Ethan Hawke believes his story has never been more striking and relevant to his experiences.
Adapted from the 2013 National Book Award winner by James McBride, the Showtime limited series (premiering Sunday) is based on real events but viewed from a fictional slave boy named Onion (Joshua Caleb Johnson). It is known that Onion, who is forced to act like a girl to be cast into the orbit of the fiercely passionate abolitionist John Brown (Hawke) and, as you are about to learn in a comic twist, eloquent but ribald activist Frederick Douglass (Daveed Diggs).
For Hawke, the past few months have turned his passion creations into a timely and relevant reflection on America’s “great wound”.
The father-daughter duo will be the biggest star together (as father and daughter) in the coming-of-age romantic comedy Revolver. Set in 1966 in Anchorage, Alaska, the film follows a teenage girl named Jane (young Hawke) after the Beatles are forced to make an unexpected stop in the Alaskan town on a flight to Japan. As Beatlemania descends to Anchorage and the band takes shelter in a hotel, Jane hatches a plan to lose her virginity with George Harrison, and a comical setback goes on.
Andrew Stanton, who is best known for directing Pixar classics such as Finding Nemo and WALL-E, and directed episodes of Stranger Things, will lead the film, starring Kate Trefry (another Stranger Things alum) who writes the screenplay. The project has no release date or distributor yet.
The news also means there’s now a mini-trend of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood actresses teaming up with their on-screen parents, as Andie MacDowell will star alongside her daughter Margaret Qualley in the forthcoming Netflix series Maid. However, this isn’t the first time the Hawkes have worked together; Maya will appear alongside her father in the new episode of Showtime’s The Good Lord Bird, which the elder Hawke also co-created.
“Let the future tell the truth,” Nikola Tesla once said. And perhaps only such a resolutely forward-looking man could appreciate a film like Tesla, a portrayal of the 19th-century pioneering scientist staged less like a traditional biopic than a piece of theatrical fantasy: a genuinely surreal story. Golden with iPhones, roller skates, and pop tubes from the 80s.
In many walrus vests and mustaches, Ethan Hawke plays the role of the absent-minded genius, an inventor, engineer, and pivotal player in discovering the brilliant current which came to the United States of America. From the country now known as Croatia and was fortunate enough to end up almost immediately in Thomas Edison’s lively laboratory (a pleasantly pompous Kyle MacLachlan).
But when ego and misunderstandings and any intellectual disagreement quickly turn them from collaborators into rivals, it is driven out, mostly unknown and without funding. The only few who seem to have confidence in young Nikola’s vision – aside from the imaginary Greek refrain that populates his inner world – are famous entrepreneur George Westinghouse, also the daughter of J. Pierrepont Morgan, one of the richest men in the world.
What Anne cannot do is turn Nikola into romanticism; For most of the movie, Hawke’s Tesla remains something of a frightening figure, a man who was so driven to see his electric dreams realize he can’t see the forest – or really, most basic human needs. – for trees.
There is a kind of heartfelt despair, almost madness, in Hawke’s version that is worth exploring. But Almereyda, a fixture in avant-garde cinema that the actor previously directed in his stylized 2000 update of Hamlet, clearly isn’t interested in something as serious as simple fiction. Amid all of its meta-tricks – the flashy Wikipedia captions, the deliberately kitschy settings, and the odd soundtrack – Tesla’s own story finally fades, a bright little light that is lost in the more extraordinary spectacle.
