In the last few years (ever since “Top Gun: Maverick”), Tom Cruise has often been hailed as The Last Movie Star. He’s certainly the gold standard, though it might be appropriate to add Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts to that category too. All three feel like The Last Movie Stars — though what I’m really saying, of course, is that they’re the last movie stars to come out of the monoculture.
That’s why all three are monostars. You still feel that any of them, in the right light, can own the screen and own the world. That’s baked into the karma of their presence.
It’s what drives their larger-than-life quality. At the same time, it would be silly and backward to look at Tom and Brad and Julia and declare that the movie-star thing ends with them. Something ends with them.
A certain kind of stardom. But that doesn’t mean that the movie star has gone away. They’re still being minted as we speak.
Movie stars will probably never be as big as they used to be, but a new kind of star is rising from the ashes of our fragmented, niche-driven, post-romantic, postmodern world. And there is no more perfect an incarnation of the new stardom than Robert Pattinson. Just watch him in “Primetime,” where he plays Chris Hansen, the host of “To Catch a Predator,” as a scoundrel and a sleaze, a man obsessed with ratings but also obsessed with seeing — and selling — himself as an arbiter of “virtue.” The way Pattinson plays him, the Hansen of “Primetime” is like a come-hither fusion of Geraldo Rivera and Dracula; bathed in garish neon color, he looks even more like a vampire than Pattinson’s Edward Cullen did; he practically has fangs.
You might say, “Chris Hansen doesn’t look like that,” but what’s uncanny about “Primetime” is that Pattinson seems to be playing the inner Hansen, the anxious opportunistic reptile who turned “To Catch a Predator” into a depraved form of squirm theater. The show pretended to be “capturing” men who solicited sex with children, but its true agenda was to humiliate them in public. It was really a voyeuristic revenge fantasy.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
