Rules Don't Apply (Warren Beatty, 2016)

[Professor Wagstaff]

Warren Beatty's Howard Hughes film

[Brian C]

Warren Beatty's Howard Hughes film

I'll believe it when I see a poster for it in the theater lobby - seems like it has very high potential to not actually happen.

[domino harvey]

Warren Beatty's 20+ years gestating Hughes film started filming today

[antnield]

Warren Beatty's Rules Don't Apply.

[domino harvey]

Looks surprisingly good-- thought we were getting a period drama, not a frothy romantic comedy that looks like it is in the spirit of countless studio projects from the era depicted

[Ribs]

Beatty looks great for 79 - I do hope this can maybe bring him back to the forefront as I feel he's been mostly forgotten about whilst his contemporaries like Nicholson, De Niro, and Pacino have maintained constant work (well, Nicholson's done now but it took him a lot longer) and are regarded as some of the greatest of all time.

[domino harvey]

It's too bad Tarantino wasn't able to convince him to take the titular role in Kill Bill, but at the very least thank God Town & Country won't go down as Beatty's last film!

[movielocke]

Looks excellent


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[Roger Ryan]

...Beatty looks great for 79...

If anyone can pull off playing a man thirty years his junior, it'll be Beatty! Also, good thing Ehrenreich got the Han Solo gig; otherwise, he might have been typecast playing in 50s-era comedies.

[Trees]

Looks great! I like the upbeat tone of the trailer. Hughes is always a juicy subject.

[domino harvey]

Awards-run opening of November 23rd

[bainbridgezu]

It's too bad Tarantino wasn't able to convince him to take the titular role in Kill Bill, but at the very least thank God Town & Country won't go down as Beatty's last film!

Agreed on both counts. The story behind his refusal of Kill Bill remains one of my favorite filmmaking anecdotes. For anyone who doesn't know: Tarantino finally convinced Beatty to take the part, only to have him balk upon learning that he was expected to attend early-morning martial arts lessons with the rest of the cast.

[flyonthewall2983]

For someone that usually doesn't go for period romantic comedies, this looks very good.

I like the new Regency logo, too.

[lacritfan]

That's a terrible poster, makes it look like a late-80's murder thriller where Beatty is the killer coming to get them.

[domino harvey]

Maybe that's the third act twist

[jwo17]

That's a terrible poster, makes it look like a late-80's murder thriller where Beatty is the killer coming to get them.

It's also reminiscent of the Weinstein logo.

[Ribs]

Full Trailer

[bearcuborg]

Beatty has generally worked with good cinematographers, and though this one has one of the best - yikes - apart the beauty that is Lily Collins, this trailer doesn't look like a good movie.

When I first heard of a Beatty film on Hughes, I was thinking much later in his life, where less is known about him. This newer trailer looks less like "IQ" from 1994, but not much better. Still, I'll see it because it's Beatty, and it'll be nice to see Dabney Coleman on screen again. I wonder if Baldwin is playing Juan Trippe.

[mfunk9786]

Discussion of Django Unchained moved here

[Moe Dickstein]

If this is in the vein of I.Q. I will love it.

But if it's more "Walk, Don't Run"...

[Ribs]

Much better final poster

[domino harvey]

Beatty's film has sixteen credited producers

[Ribs]

This is just wonderful, one of the absolute best of the year. Deschanel's camera here may be his best yet - it's a wonder to look at constantly. The cast is just phenomenal, especially the young leads, and though it's a big ensemble and I'm sure a lot was dropped most of them get a laugh or two of some kind. Basically everything it was supposed to be - I just wish the crowds had shown up for it (my viewing was the first time I've ever gone to an evening showing of a movie at a multiplex and literally had no one else show up). As Beatty's mentioned pretty consistently through his press tour (which I've been avidly following - highly recommend the New York Times' story about what exactly an interview with Warren Beatty entails), this is a film which is driven by a genuine motivation to explore an abstract thematic idea (American Puritanism) which sets it apart from pretty much all the other studio fare of the moment. Based on the box office results, this won't be triggering the late-career resurgence for him that I had hoped, but this is quite the send-off regardless to a frankly remarkable career.

[Brian C]

I don't think I can call it one of the year's best, but I enjoyed it.

It is, though, a rather spectacularly pointless film. Time and time again, stabs at some sort of theme are made before being dropped as if they never happened, like when you try to start a conversation with a group that no one else is interested in. Beatty's conception of Hughes is amusing, but adds little to the Hughes lore that's been passed down through the decades. The two lead characters are given an off-again, on-again romantic flirtation that has little to do with anything else happening in the movie, and even they forget they're a thing for most of the film's second half, when the focus abruptly shifts to Hughes's assorted mental breakdowns. Characters come and go as if the movie is a welfare project for Beatty's actor friends.

But still, it's all agreeable enough, because the last thing the movie is, is strident about any of it. It has a certain ramshackle charm that matches Beatty's work as an actor through the years, and it accomplishes at atmosphere that, if nothing else, is easy to spend a couple of hours in. It deserves better than what it got, but I can't say that it's surprising that a movie like this, especially in this day and age, had a hard time finding an audience.

[Emak-Bakia]

Since Beatty has gotten more attention as of late for the Oscar gaff than he did for Rules Don't Apply, I have to wonder what sort of impact, if any, Sunday's incident will have on the legacy of this film. We've seen so little of Beatty in the last two decades that my conception of him prior to the Oscars was shaped almost entirely by Rules Don't Apply. I found his performance as Howard Hughes in the film to be convincing, so my immediate reaction Sunday night upon witnessing the Best Picture goof was to assume that Beatty was not performing in Rules Don't Apply, but to instead interpret it as evidence that he really had gone off the deep end of senility. Of course, such a knee-jerk assumption was promptly refuted by Beatty's quick, rational explanation of the mistake, and by the subsequent reports of how the error occurred behind the scenes. But I can't help but think that Rules Don't Apply will often be linked with the 2017 Academy Awards, as if, just for a moment, Beatty's Hughes materialized on the Oscar stage.

At the very least, let's hope this brings Rules Don't Apply to more people's attention. I found it to be quite a fascinating film with some tantalizing, playful editing that effectively mirror Hughes' mental state. I suspect that my opinion of it will only improve with subsequent viewings, and I was pleasantly surprised to find when I looked up the blu-ray release that it came out this week. I'll certainly be revisiting it soon.