13 thoughts on “MCM: Timothée Chalamet

  1. The French Dispatch looks like it’s based on three stories, one of which takes place in 1968, while another seems to take place in the earlier part of the 20th century, possibly the 1920s and/or 1930s. It looks like a fun movie.

  2. Besides the costumes (Micarah Tewers’ YouTube video nailed the issues), I loved the new Little Women. Timothée worked as Laurie for me I think because he looked so young. His whole proposal to Jo seemed lame and whiny and that made sense because he looked and sounded immature. I love the 90s Little Women, Christian Bale just looks much older, so it makes me sadder Jo didn’t marry him. Whereas in the new movie, my thought was, Laurie’s not ready to be married yet.

  3. I couldn’t bring myself to watch The King. Henry V a reluctant king and sensitive pacifist, luffed into making war on France by a deception? Beyond absurd.

    1. Well said. The filmmakers couldn’t have gone further afield with the character of Henry V, both by history and Shakespeare’s standards. All to push a story that hardly makes sense.

    2. So agree!!! (Was very briefly excited as a Shakespeare & Henry V fan). But that excitement dissipated very quickly. They really f#&@*d up the whole story. I know Shakespeare played fast & loose with History. Sadly the makers of ‘The King’ took that to another level.
      Though I love floppy hair & Timothée Chalamet….
      King Henry V really needs a 1415 “bowl” hair cut!!

  4. It was hard for me to believe in Timothee’s performance as Henry V – mainly because of his physical form. Not that he couldn’t believably be lean; but the real Prince Hal/Henry V had been hefting swords and fighting since he was a teenager (probably hefting swords in practice long before that) and his arms and shoulders didn’t seem to have much muscle or definition. I will be interested in seeing Dune, though…

    1. Chalamet’s Henry is rather frail and young – although Hotspur laughably even more so. The movie skips the decade that passed after the death of Hotspur; Henry V was pushing 30 during the Agincourt campaign. He was no young, inexperienced monarch.

      One chronicler commented that Henry V had “the countenance of a monk” (making allowances for translation choices). The chronicler was most likely commenting on Henry being stern and impersonal, or perhaps his religious zeal, both corroborated elsewhere. Modern people, especially online, somehow took that to mean the build of a monk, which is highly unlikely. As you said, he was trained to fight at a very young age and a seasoned warrior when venturing into France. The fact Chalamet’s Henry looks like he could be defeated by a good meal doesn’t wash historically.

      1. You’d think so – and yet, not only do the bones of Richard III, discovered in Leicester in 2012, show that he had a serious scoliosis, so much so that it would have compromised his lung and heart function, they are also so slender and ‘gracile’ (the technical term) that when the forensic archaeologists first unearthed them they took them for female, until they got to the pelvis. He really was ‘slight as a girl’, and short of puff too, and yet he was acknowledged by all his contemporaries – even his enemies – as a formidable fighter. It’s the wimpiness of Chalamet’s persona, rather than his physical build, that makes him unbelievable as a warrior king.

        1. I watched a YouTube video where a young man with almost exactly the same scoliosis as Richard mounted a horse in full armor and rode with a lance as if he were jousting. The scoliosis seemed not to interfere with his ability to ride, joust or use a sword. Looking at Richard’s skeleton, it’s easy to believe Shakespeare’s slanders about his appearance, but even such a severe curve didn’t really show when this young man was dressed, until he took his shirt off. (Such “living archaeology” had been difficult to produce because almost everyone in the Western world with scoliosis has it corrected at a young age.)

          1. The documentary you refer to is one of the episodes of Secrets of the Dead, Richard III the New Evidence. The young man is Dominic Smee. Dr. Tobias Capwell features heavily in it discussing the armour as they have it made to fit Dominic’s scoliosis curve. Truly worth seeking out to watch on Youtube for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet.

            As noted in comments above related to Henry V, Richard III would have been practicing with sword and lance from childhood.

            1. Yes, that programme was amazing. Not only the sheer fluke of young Smee having the exact same scoliosis plus other conditions which had precluded it being surgically corrected, but the programme makers had had the sense to recruit the great Toby Capwell and give him a blank cheque to take the lad to the finest armourer in Europe and craft a late 15th century English-style armour to fit him exactly (just as Richard would certainly have had bespoke fitted armour). And then finding that Smee was actually more comfortable riding in full armour than without it – it supported him like a kind of exoskeleton. Something nobody could possibly have known otherwise. And also it was just lovely to see this lad, who was actually a member of the Ricardian Society, who was so thrilled at being able to step into his hero’s shoes and help elucidate his life.

  5. I haven’t seen any of his FrockFlicks. I’ve only seen Call Me By Your Name, and he was excellent in that. In all the interviews and clips I’ve seen of him, he seems quite serious and excited about his craft. And he seems to have captured zeitgeist now. I look forward to seeing him in more roles–FrockFlicks or otherwise. Regarding his looks, I think he’s very cute and if I were a little girl, I’m sure I’d swoon. It will be interesting to see what he looks like as he matures. I think he has the potential over time to graduate from cute to handsome.

    That said, I want to say that I don’t think that you need to apologize for or justify featuring youthful guys on Man Candy Monday. I think this is something that we as women have been conditioned into. Can you imagine a man making an apology for finding a woman half is age attractive?

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