Liars and Saints

 I'm thrilled about Anthony Hopkins's second Oscar--I thought he was really a genius in "The Father"--but the news does mean that my guy, Christopher Plummer, is no longer the Oldest Actor-Win in history. I can accept this, but....coming so soon after Plummer's death.....it's a lot..... To tip a hat one more time, to Mr. Plummer, I just re-watched one of his last performances, in "Knives Out." This is among the best movies in recent years.  Christopher Plummer gets one big scene, and it's the realization that his beloved nurse has accidentally (maybe) given him a wrong injection. Plummer knows that he has just a few minutes to live. The nurse--the saintly Marta--flips her shit. But Plummer's character--Harlan Thrombey--is old and subversive and wise, and he knows that the important thing is to make intelligent use of the little time he has. Thrombey is a writer of brilliant crime novels, so he has many ideas for ensuring that Marta won't ...

 A few thoughts on Christopher Plummer (for fans): *My favorite thing about the movie "Sound of Music" is Christopher Plummer, not just because he is astonishingly handsome. (Marc jokes that he can breathe easy, now that Plummer is no longer in the world.) *Plummer--trained to do Shakespeare--seems to have some ambivalence toward his movie-musical material, and he channels that ambivalence into his performance. In his first scene, he seems to feel superior to everything around him. (He called the movie "The Sound of Mucus," and sometimes, "S and M.") *Watch the little details in that first scene. Before speaking, Plummer grabs a book from one child, adjusts the tie of another, and wordlessly corrects the posture of a third. He has half-concealed disgust toward Maria; he can't explicitly say that he finds Maria ridiculous, so he takes out his irritation on the little whistle he is holding. (He really abuses that whistle.) Then--at the climax, when Maria...