Friday's Old Fashioned: The Split (1968)

1968’s “The Split” is a heist movie in which the heist comes to feel perfunctory. It might be elaborate, pulling down a half-mil from the LA Coliseum while an LA Rams game is in progress, but it goes off without a hitch, and is conveyed in such a way by director Gordon Flemyng to accentuate that cool-eyed execution as opposed to ratcheting up suspense. No, the heist is more about happens after, when the money goes missing and the participants suspect the ringleader McClain (Jim Brown) is seeking to keep it all for himself, though even these games of cat and mouse, as well as the climactic shootout, don’t really rise to much. Neither do the interpersonal relationships, as the intriguing nature of McClain’s relationship with his older white partner (Julie Harris) goes unexplored, and his desire to start over with his ex-wife Ellie (Diahann Carroll) comes across like screenwriter motivation than anything real. And yet “The Split” still leaves mark, and not just because Donald Sutherland in an early role leaves one. The “Parker” novel on which it was based, “The Seventh,” was by all accounts, dark and tough, and though the overall tone of the movie never mirrors it, there are these incredible jolts, not exactly of grim reality but reflections of it, rendering a movie that is not quite more than the sum of its parts, per se, but rememberable for the parts that stand out, nevertheless.

Though the specific narrative ingredients of “The Split” do not necessarily concern race, released in the racially tumultuous year of 1968, it is notable just how much Flemying still finds ways to effectively inject race into the proceedings. Indeed, “In the Heat of the Night” had made waves a year earlier for Sidney Poitier’s black detective slapping Rod Steiger’s white southern sheriff and in “The Split,” McClain slaps one of his white colleagues, too, though it is at once much less sobering and much more intense even if it is conveyed in a manner approaching slapstick: in other words, anyone can come get it now. It is surpassed by an earlier moment when McClain seeks to test potential members of his crew by secretly turning the screws on them, like he does by showing up at Bert’s (Ernest Borgnine) place of work and punching him without a word, just to see how he will react. Never mind that Ernest Borgnine could never credibly contend in a fight with Jim Brown and just revel at the raw impact of this moment, Jim Brown, costumed not unlike a Black Panther, socking a white dude straight in the face with nary a warning.

And even if “The Split” fails to render Ellie as true character, setting her up just to sacrifice her life, the manner in which her life is sacrificed still manages to make her matter. Confronted by her jittery white, underline, landlord (James Whitmore), who recognizes McClain as being wanted for the LA Coliseum heist, he first demands money to keep quiet, and then he demands something more. Eventually he stumbles upon a hidden cache of automatic weapons, taking a machine gun and pointing it right at Ellie, the scene ending the way you might assume, a metaphor for racial and sexual violence so wrenching, it virtually stops “The Split” right in its tracks.

Some Drivel On...June 17th, 1994

June 17th, 1994 began with a ticker tape parade for the Stanley Cup-winning New York Rangers hockey team in Manhattan and golf trailblazer Arnold Palmer teeing off for his final round in a U.S. Open at the Oakmont Country Club in Oakmont, Pennsylvania and the day concluded with Game 5 of the NBA Finals between the Houston Rockets and New York Knicks being preempted on TV to instead show celebrity and ex-NFL star Orenthal James Simpson, wanted for the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, being chased down a Los Angeles freeway in a white Ford Bronco in what became tantamount to a twisted Hollywood version of a New Orleans Funeral. In other words, historic celebrations of athletes gave way to the infamous fall of one. In his astonishing 2010 documentary chronicling that bizarrely jam-packed day, director Brett Morgen eschewed narration and traditional talking heads to instead cultivate it almost exclusively from TV footage, creating the effect of a story told through channel-flipping fragments and sensations. After all, O.J. Simpson, as James Poniewozik essentially reckoned for The New York Times in the wake of the former’s death last week at 76, was as much media personality as man. The World Cup might have kicked off in America, too, on June 17th, 1994, but the hunt for a fugitive Simpson and the subsequent freeway chase managed to supersede the planet’s biggest event, at least for a day, with a vintage American-style spectacle.

For a comprehensive personal, political, social, and cultural examination of Simpson, “June 17th, 1994” is not it. That’s Ezra Edelman’s sensational five-part “O.J.: Made in America” (2016), and if you don’t have time to watch all eight hours then reading Ray Ratto’s evaluation of O.J. for Defector with Joel Anderson’s assessment at Slate as the necessary chaser will do. But that isn’t to say Morgen’s movie is uninterested in or unaware of these ideas. Far from it, he just manifests them in different ways. As an earlier sequence in which “June 17th, 1994” cuts from the elder Arnold Palmer hitting a tee shot at Oakmont to monochrome archival footage of the younger Palmer rocketing a golf ball down the fairway, Morgen tends to see history in eerie echoes and rhymes. During the freeway chase, a cut to archival footage of Simpson in an old Hertz commercial dashing through the airport echoes becomes a macabre joke, holding up these two sides of Simpson at once and then splitting them right down the middle with a figurative axe. Images of people cheering the Ford Bronco alongside the freeway and from overpasses reverberate with footage of the erstwhile football star being cheered on at L.A. Coliseum during a touchdown run in 1969 in USC’s Game of the Century versus UCLA, portending the Trial of the Century. Perhaps Morgen’s most cutting supplement is adding the recordings of an LAPD detective trying to talk down a possibly suicidal Simpson in the back of that Ford Bronco, underlining the grisly nature of the whole ostensible carnival, a man wanted for murder threatening to kill himself to the primetime entertainment of millions, reality and a distorted, disturbing funhouse reflection of reality blending until you can’t tell them apart.

By never zooming out, “June 17th, 1994” takes a Where Were You? moment and puts us right back in the middle of it, but with accumulated knowledge over time to put into perspective what it always was, a twilight drive through this country’s own splintered, media-addled psyche.

Dune: Part Two

“Dune” is set in the year 10191, which is 191 years after the year ten thousand, which is where the Zager and Evans song “In the Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus)” concludes, a long, long ways out there, in other words, past the point, really, that our feeble 21st Century minds could grasp. It suggests a movie both narratively and visually abstruse, but that isn’t director Denis Villeneuve’s method, and so just like its Part One predecessor, “Dune: Part Two” is not looking forward but back. Whatever Frank Herbert’s original intentions with his 1965 sci fi source material (friendly reminder: I haven’t read it), Villeneuve and his co-writer Jon Spaights are honoring old fashioned Hollywood storytelling by bringing vengeance and destiny up in the mix, crossing “Gladiator” with a more dystopian version of “Roman Holiday.” And even if this 166-minute behemoth does not so much run out of steam about midway through as get bogged down via a filmmaker who has publicly gone on record as not giving a flip about dialogue suddenly becoming overly dependent on it, a paradox weirdly proving his ostensible point, it also does not entirely matter. When “Dune: Part Two” fully engages with its own sense of spectacle, the sandworm will definitely turn for you, my friend.

When last we left Paul (Timothée Chalamet), last duke of the House Altreides, his father (Oscar Isaac) had been slain by order of the evil Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) and Paul and his mother Jessica (Rebecca Fergusion) were holed up on the unforgiving desert planet of Arrakis with its rugged inhabitants the Fremen, some believing Paul to be their deliverer. Stilgar (Javier Bardem), leader of the Fremen thinks he is, though others, like young Fremen warrior Chani (Zendaya) are not so sure. Paul isn’t so sure, either, struggling to wrap his youthful mind around such a far-reaching destiny, having ominous visions as “Part Two” begins of a coming holy war. Heavy lies the crown, and all that. Yet, if heavy tends to be Villeneuve’s preferred tone, “Part Two” surprises for frequently being so light on its feet. Aesthetically, Villeneuve toggles between intimacy and enormity, never letting the scale overwhelm his sense of visual clarity and space, and in a sense, his storyline, at least at first, follows suit. 

Chalamet might come cloaked in the visage of a teenage heartthrob, but he also imbues his performance with the uneasy sense of being the new kid at school. The sequence in which he rides a mammoth sandworm through the desert, a feat of special effects intimating what it might be like to ride a wave at Bells Beach during a 50 Year Storm, might be evidence of the prophecy, but Chalamet gives it the air of a kid proving his self-worth, if not also seeking to impress the girl he likes. That’s Chani, of course, and though Villeneuve can lay the puppy dog love on thick, I’m also not made of stone, and one of the dialogue-centric scenes that works best is the two crazy kids having an intimate conversation alone amid the dunes because Chalamet seems to be pulling Zendaya toward him with his eyes. The scene in which the two of them arrhythmically walk side-by-side through the sand so as not to disturb those pesky worms lasts longer than the general 2.5 second edits honored by most modern movies but I found myself wishing Villeneuve would have held it even longer.

Percolating alongside our (possible) messiah’s road of trials are Baron Harkonnen’s ongoing attempts to harvest the spice of Arrakis and rid the planet of its Fremen. If Skarsgård is once again improbably cosplaying Pizza the Hutt then in reprising his role as Harkonnen’s villainous nephew, Dave Bautista has gone from cosplaying Darth Vader to cosplaying Dark Helmet, yelling, stomping comic relief. No, the emergent “Part Two” antagonist is Harkonnen’s other nephew Feyd-Rautha, played by Austin Butler in makeup making the erstwhile Elvis Presley look like Midnight Oil frontman Peter Garrett as a bloodsucking vampire, a sneering murderous psychopath speaking in a malevolent whisper. He receives a helluva introduction, demonstrating his skill in a gladiatorial arena as the warm colors of the desert give way to so much Brutalism in brutal black and white, as if Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympia” has been reduced purely to its most primitive urges. As soon as you see this sequence, you know where it’s heading, to a duel between our (maybe) messiah and our mercenary. That, however, is when this “Dune” gets stuck in the mud.

If Villeneuve and his editor Joe Walker hardly crosscut at all for the first half, as “Dune: Part Two” moves into its back half, the scenes switch between the good guys and the bad guys and Jessica, too, who takes a worm ride to the south of Arrakis to peddle her son’s prophecy, transforming a movie of sensation and spectacle into one all about moving the plot forward even as it assumes the air of running in place, epitomized both in huge chunks of expository dialogue and in the character of Feyd-Rautha, who after that electrifying introduction is just sort of reduced to figuratively tossing cards into a hat, waiting to go mano-a-mano with Paul. And if Villeneuve proves too literal minded for the more fantastical elements that gradually infuse the plot, like Jessica sipping the so-called Water of Life, he simultaneously proves too evasive to do much with all the political and religious subtext, none of which amounts to much more, really, than whatever the masses watching choose to project onto it.

All that might not even have mattered so much had the movie stuck the landing, but where Chalamet’s youthful air works to his advantage early, it hampers his turn in the back half, as he winds up coming across more reluctantly committed to his fate than twisting into the kind of believer of his own hype the plot would otherwise suggest. And if Chani is meant as the counterweight to Paul’s turn, Villeneuve hangs Zendaya out to dry by mostly just communicating it through unimaginative reaction shots that cruelly leave her looking passive and winsome. The ultimate showdown, meanwhile, between Paul and Feyd-Rautha as well as the emergent cliffhanger pointing toward Part 3 all move with a clinical stateliness that is impressive logically though, unlike the best moments, you never quite feel in your bones. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Kill Me Again (1989)

Time is fickle. When I first saw John Dahl’s “Kill Me Again” (1989) sometime in the mid-90s, probably rented from Hollywood Video, my knowledge of noir would have been scant, if not entirely non-existent. So, maybe it’s no wonder that I remembered loving it, having nothing, really, to compare it to, or having no real sense of how it drew from myriad predecessors. Seeing it again years later, after feasting on American noir for decades, it’s difficult to not see it for what it really is, or mostly is, anyway. Like Fay Forrester (Joanne Whalley) standing in the entryway of a semi-hapless private eye’s office as the camera ogles her by tilting up, “Kill Me Again” is striking a pose. 

Conveyed as an escalating series of double crosses, Fay and her psycho boyfriend Vince (Michael Madsen) rob a pair of mobsters of a briefcase full of money before Fay robs Vince and then hires cash-strapped Reno private detective Jack Andrews (Val Kilmer) to help stage her death. But after ‘dying,’ she absconds with half the money she owes Jack, making it two lovelorn dudes trying to track down Fay to get what they are owed. (Don’t rewrite in a review, yada yada, so it’s in a parenthetical, but I couldn’t help imagining an alternate movie in the vein of “There’s Something About Mary” in which Jack and Vince team up to go after Fay, and then maybe end up in the company of, say, Jonathan Silverman as, say, Paul, a third guy who gets duped by Fay and joins the team.) And this is to say nothing of the hoodlums seeking to collect $10,000 from Jack in gambling debts. 

The plot might be convoluted, and the characters might get the short end of the stick, but Dahl at least connects the myriad dots with some stylish kick, like an early cut from Jack looking at a broken photo of his wife to Fay peering through the broken window of his office. And in these weird days when a Tubi stream becomes more picturesque than digital film on a big screen, the way the late afternoon light reflected off the red rocks falls on Kilmer and Whalley’s face on Lake Mead makes it look like an old noir poster come to life. But then, this is the hottest moment, really, in a movie that never quite takes full advantage of just how hot Kilmer and then-Whalley-Kilmer were together. There’s a lot of talk these days about how movies used to be hotter, and broadly speaking, that’s true, but boy, even back then, they never fully took advantage of this couple comet blazing across the sky.

The character of Jack Andrews melds two noir archetypes into one, the private investigator and the sap, and Kilmer really leans into the latter, making him overly polite, too nice, just an absolute sucker. Its strangely effective, playing against the public persona he would have possessed in 1989 even as he occasionally evokes nothing less than his Nick Rivers character of the spoof “Top Secret!,” like when the moment when Jack phones for his bank balance (!) and pitifully realizes it’s $7.89, not $789, by forlornly adding the decimal point on a piece of paper. When Jack keeps getting roped in by Fay, you can’t help but want to pat this loser on the head, even as Kilmer’s convincing sheepishness cuts against the romance, not to mention his character’s ostensible gambling addiction and anguish over his wife’s death.

Whalley, meanwhile, winds up just as hampered by the twists and turns of the screenplay as the movie itself. There are so many double crosses, that we don’t so much come to wonder if she is who she says she is as we gradually discover we have no real idea of she is in the first place; she’s not a person, just a function of the plot. All those twists and turns, which come fast and furious as “Kill Me Again” wraps up, have the odd effect of working so hard to make it seem like you never know what’s coming that instead everything winds up being paradoxically obvious while the craft in engineering a climactic title drop – “Kill me, kill me again” – is admirable even if it can’t help but fall flat. 

The Bricklayer

“This type of scandal could destroy the U.S.!” This is the resplendent line of exposition some nameless journalist exclaims as Renny Harlin’s “The Bricklayer” begins, suggesting not just a rollicking good time but a modern conspiracy thriller in so much as the scheme to which the nameless journalist refers involves many of her own being killed in such a way to make it appear as if the CIA is responsible. Alas, neither really proves true. The tantalizing angle of present-day palace intrigue proves merely an engine for the plot, never explored in an interesting, forget about meaningful, way, and though in playing the eponymous Bricklayer, Steve Vail, a one-time Central Intelligence go-between for the Greek and Russian mafia, Aaron Eckhart wears a perpetual smirk, what ensues isn’t much fun. When Vail literally drives through a brick wall during a car chase, “The Bricklayer” doesn’t recognize the irony, allowing the punchline to sail right over its own head. No, Harlin’s movie is as by the book as Vail’s CIA babysitter Kate Bannon (Nina Dobrev) as evinced in how the director dutifully though unexcitedly lays every action movie brick, moving from a rooftop in the rain to a neon club to a dark apartment to a café. The fight in the neon club left less of a mark, in fact, than the song that played during it. By Victoria Celestine. I looked it up after. It’s good. I’ve been enjoying it. 

American Star

Even before Wilson (Ian McShane) removes a gun and dossier from the trunk of his rental car, you know he’s an assassin the minute he shows up in the subtropical Fuerteventura of the Canary Islands all alone and wearing all black. That might immediately mark “American Star” as something familiar, and worn, a lone wolf hitman in a beautiful place. It’s not so much that director Gonzalo López-Gallego, working from a script by Nacho Faerna, reinvents or even reimagines the hoary tale as it is he strips it down to virtually nothing and then builds it out of the essence of its main character, or more accurately, its lead actor. Though the screenplay withholds information about Wilson’s background, offering little teases, about fighting in the Falklands and such, it’s never trying to solve the mystery, exactly, so much as luxuriate in this enigmatic man’s presence much as he luxuriates in Fuerteventura’s. And who better to spend a whole movie luxuriating than Ian McShane. Imagine “John Wick,” except rather than following the eponymous hitman as he goes about the Continental Hotel offing various bad guys, you stayed in the secure room with Winston as he sat on the sofa and drank bourbon.

Upon arriving in the Canary Islands, Wilson proceeds straight away to a lavish home in the middle of nowhere, though the way he takes care not to leave fingerprints denotes it’s not a rental. He’s there to deliver a package, in a manner of speaking, by rubbing someone out, but that someone isn’t there and someone else shows up instead, prompting him to leave and wait until the target returns. The camera’s fluidity in this sequence, elegantly dipping and darting down halls, forward and to the side, evokes the movie to come, and how sometimes the camera represents Wilson’s point-of-view, in complete control, and others, departs from his point-of-view, a mind of its own, eliciting surprise, the two sides of Wilson’s faux getaway. And that’s sort of how “American Star” proceeds, as a faux getaway, improbably merging George Clooney of “The American” with Margo Martindale of “Paris Je T’aime.” He makes unexpected friends with a young boy named Max (Oscar Coleman), searching for a haven from his arguing parents, and Gloria (Nora Arnezeder), the woman he glimpses inside the home at the start and then runs into at a bar. She takes him to see the American Star, the luxury ship from the 1940s that wrecked near the shore in 1994. 

If it sounds dubious that the younger Nora might take an interest in the older, weirder Wilson, this is smoothed out by McShane’s presence, as courtly as it is mysterious, which makes us drawn to him just as it makes her drawn to him. Yet, the reasons for their relationship deepen as the story progresses, and in ways that that I won’t reveal, but that do not evade the age difference but essentially build off it. And though Wilson’s friendship with Max strains credulity a bit more, there is nevertheless something refreshingly startling is his advice to the boy that honesty is not always the best policy, an observation that equally informs his fatalistic relationship with Nora. That fatalism manifests itself as it tends to in noir through a burst of gruesome violence as sudden as it is expected, as if nothing can really ready you for the end. And that’s what makes the otherwise obvious metaphor of the American Star work too. McShane might play his character’s own mortality with a sense of grave dignity, like a man walking unperturbed into the ocean to drown, but upon standing in front of the shipwreck, moving him to remark that he and the American Star, they’re about the same age, I swear, those 26,454 tons feel like they all land right on top of you. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Diary of a Young Comic (1979)

In appraising Richard Lewis in the wake of his death for The New York Times, Jason Zinoman noted the celebrated comic’s “frenetic, jazzy style…making misery a full-body experience, slumping, pacing, and most of all, gesticulating. To say he talked with his hands seems insufficient. His whole body never shut up.” That makes it interesting, it not also disappointing, to revisit Lewis’s first feature film “Diary of a Young Comic” 45 years later. Because what Zinoman is writing about there, the very specific presence of Lewis, aside from a few isolated moments, like an early one in which Lewis’s character ribs and riffs with another comedian at a bar, is not really found in director Gary Weis’s movie. No, the script that Lewis and Weis co-wrote with Bennett Tramer weirdly zaps Lewis’s character, comedian Billy Gondola née Gondolstein, of the comic’s patented energy by turning him into an observer more than an instigator and opting for an overall laid-back vibe mirroring the character’s geographical trajectory from New York to Los Angeles. 

Essentially, “Diary of a Young Comic” is the Left Coast scenes of “Annie Hall” mixed with Steve Martin’s “L.A. Story,” meaning that rather than looking inward, as Lewis’s comedy on the stage tended to do, it was taking in the absurdity of the world around him and its virtual conveyor belt of eccentrics. When Billy arrives at the residence of the cousin, Shirley, with whom he’s going to stay, he discovers she has literally nothing in her apartment. “It’s the essence of the apartment,” she says. When Billy goes to therapy, it doesn’t unlock anything within himself, it just builds to a pretty good Flipper joke. He is not really a full-fledged character just as Shirley and the therapist never really become full-fledged characters, just as no one else does, more like characters as excuses to shuffle comics and comic actors on screen. Sometimes, the pretense dissolves completely, like when Dom DeLuise appears as himself. 

It’s all as funny as it would have needed to be, I imagine, given the movie was made-for-TV and was specifically made to occupy the time slot of Saturday Night Live when that venerable sketch show went on hiatus in February of 1975. On that score, and in a three-channel universe, I don’t think “Diary of a Young Comic” would have made me change the channel. And even if it’s short on revelation, it ends with Billy telling jokes onstage, as if somewhere in the middle of filming Lewis really did realize that was the best vessel for his material.