- Forest Whitaker and Liev Schreiber in The Butler
It’s been roughly a year since Lee Daniels last snuck into the mainstream with The Butler, his overstuffed pageant of modern African-American history. I was surprised by how few mainstream critics acknowledged what a weird and angry movie it is (though I tried in my essay on the film). Indeed, with a year’s distance from The Butler, the details that most stand out in my memory are those that seem to have been created in explicit defiance of good taste. There’s Liev Schreiber, playing LBJ as an irascible Muppet, barking orders to his staff while sitting on the toilet; Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey in matching wind suits and unconvincing old-age makeup, visiting the site of a former plantation; or Winfrey, in even less convincing old-age makeup, doddering on about how ugly she considers a baby in a family photograph.
The Grandmaster Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love is a key stylistic reference point in both Shadowboxer and Precious. I imagine that if Daniels were to direct an out-and-out pastiche of Wong’s films, it probably would be livelier than this one that Wong himself directed.
- John Cusack in The Paperboy
The Bridge When my wife and I belatedly caught up with Eric Steel’s 2006 documentary about people who have committed or attempted suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, my wife said, “If Lee Daniels had directed this, Mariah would be up there, talking all those people down.”
- Mariah Carey as a New York social worker in Precious
