Carolina Caroline

The funny thing about confidence game movies is that because they tend to rely on familiar narrative devices and patterns, they effectively become confidence games themselves, persuading the audience to believe what they are seeing no matter how clichéd and obvious. James Foley’s “Confidence” (2003) was not especially good at such persuasion, save for one sequence ripped directly from David Mamet’s superior “House of Games” (1987). As I watched it, I thought, “this is like ‘House of Games,’” and yet, Rachel Weisz still got me to sign on the figurative dotted line. Adam Carter Rehmier’s “Carolina Caroline” is the latest confidence game movie as confidence game itself, though in this case, screenwriter William Thomas Harper IV has melded a confidence game movie with a lovers on the lam movie. If that renders the task doubly difficult, it makes the result all the more remarkable; just like Caroline herself, you might well spot the emotional swindle and then give yourself over to it anyway.

If Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie Parker was a bored waitress in small town Texas than Samara Weaving’s Caroline Daniels is a bored gas station attendant in small town Texas. Her life is altered, however, when Oliver Anderson (Kyle Gallner) walks in and hoodwinks her owner with a shortchange con. Caroline calls him on it, but only because his charismatic chutzpah sweeps her off her feet, and because she sees an opportunity not so much to leave her small town as go find the mother who abandoned her in South Carolina. Before long, she has left her genial dad (Jon Gries) behind for a life on the road in which she learns the confidence game ropes before graduating to bank robberies, wielding a weapon and getting the cash while Oliver drives the getaway car. Rehmeier typically conveys these scenes in montages scored to pop songs and just as Oliver dismisses free will as an illusion, that we are guided by neurons firing in our brains, I confess, when Rehmeier cued up Margo Cilker, or Sarah Shook, or Chris Stapleton, or Emmylou freaking Harris covering Bruce freaking Springsteen, I had to confess that neurons were being fired in my brain over which I had no control.

“Carolina Caroline” does not merely get by on its soundtrack, however, but also Weaver and Gallner’s chemistry, which defies description, a real you have to experience it to understand it sort of situation. It not only carries the movie through the fallow first half, but makes the back half when events take a turn for the worse hurt for real. Yet, at the same time, there is an undercurrent of nihilism that “Carolina Caroline” can’t quite square; if anything, Caroline’s eventual meeting with her mother works as an overly neat excuse for it. Oliver seems to have a nihilistic streak too, though “Carolina Caroline” never peels back the character’s mask enough to let us know. If Caroline can’t help but see him through the haze of romantic projection, that’s how “Carolina Caroline” ultimately chooses to see him too, meaning that with the capping confidence game the character and the movie unite in pulling the wool over their own eyes. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Walker (1987)

Alex Cox’s fifth feature film “Walker” was beset by a rash of bad reviews, including two thumbs down from Siskel and Ebert with extreme prejudice. Even among the contemporary notices, though, there were occasional positive ones, like Vincent Canby of The New York Times complimenting Cox’s “nerve.” That’s a good way to put it. If hope is a dangerous thing to have in real life, then nerve is a dangerous thing to have in Hollywood, and after “Walker” was written off, so, too, was Cox, effectively blacklisted in La La Land for the rest of his career. He has intimated that it was a blessing in disguise, and I hope that was true, but boy, watching “Walker” for the first time almost 40 years later could not help but make me wonder what he might have been capable of had financial backing been easier to acquire. In telling the true story of one-time Nicaraguan president William Walker, Cox creates a truly hyper-surreal sort of aesthetic by not merely fudging the truth but often outright ignoring it, honoring the mid-19th century setting and not honoring it at all, commenting indirectly and unequivocally on President Reagan’s own Nicaraguan adventures, creating something that feels of its time, not of its time, and out of time, a Monte Hellman acid western reimagined as a historical biopic. Nerve is a good word but there’s another one: awesome. “Walker” is awesome.

“Walker” begins with its eponymous filibuster (Ed Harris), at least according to the 1850s version of the term, failing in his invasion attempt of Mexico, warning his men that they have no chance at an escape short of an act of God. At that, the wind picks up and a dust storm settles, allowing an avenue for escape, the very act of God Walker is hoping for, so funny as to be farcical even as it simultaneously invests in Walker a misplaced belief that God is on his side. In subsequent Sam Peckinpah-like scenes of gruesome violence, Walker walks through the bullets like someone walking between the raindrops, his imperviousness implying such ostensible divine favor. At the same time, Cox cuts that belief down to size in the most acerbic of manners. When Walker lectures his men on how to conduct themselves, he declares that cursing in public is forbidden, to which one of his men wonders in a deadpan line heard off camera, “Can we curse in private?” That’s how a lot of dialogue goes in “Walker”: so unexpectedly funny you take a beat to confirm in your mind what you just heard and then you laugh. 

Walker might seek to spread his ideology abroad but his financial backer, Cornelius Vanderbilt (Peter Boyle), has other ideas on his mind. He enlists Walker to invade Nicaragua to open a land route between oceans to spur trade and, of course, line his own coffers. Boyle plays Vanderbilt not as a captain of industry, nor even quite as a robber baron, but something else, like, say, a backwater version of Dom DeLuise as Emperor Nero in “History of the World, Part One,” evinced in what is undoubtedly among cinema’s greatest fart jokes. In another way, Boyle’s portrayal feels almost modern, like a 1980s tycoon has slipped the surly bonds of time, an anachronistic sensation that Cox makes more explicit with amusing little touches like the glimpse of a People Magazine where Walker is billed as Nicaragua’s “Gray-Eyed Man of Destiny” or the saxophone that sounds cut from “Jewel of the Nile” occasionally appearing on the soundtrack. History is not repeating itself, Cox seems to be saying, so much as such ideological urges are simply in our blood, brought home in a climactic speech in which Walker may as well be laying out the United States of America’s foreign policy for the next 200 years. 

If Walker has any kind of moral counterweight, it’s his deaf fiancé Ellen Martin (Marlee Matlin), who in keeping with the rest of the movie’s tone is not some patient saint but palpably repulsed by the company her husband to-be keeps. In one hysterical sequence, Walker translates her radical opinions for those who don’t know sign language by softening their tone, nothing less, really, than a literal evocation of the mealy-mouthed kind of centrism. She dies, though, not long after from cholera, leaving Walker with no one to temper his certitude, and as he invades Nicaragua and installs himself as President, it all goes to his head, eventually referring to himself in the third person just as he does in the recurring voiceovers that in Harris’s plainspoken tone juxtaposed against often blackly comic scenes suggest, I swear, Ted Striker’s narration in “Airplane!” Indeed, Ebert might have hated “Walker,” but his old adage about a performer being funniest when they don’t know they are wearing a funny hate proves true here – Harris plays Walker as someone wearing a funny hat who doesn’t realize it. He also plays him with little dimension or nuance, reducing the character to utter zealotry, in himself and his mission so that they are virtually one and the same, a terrifying living embodiment of manifest destiny.

In Memoriam: Sam Neill

Sam Neill’s name came first on the poster for “Jurassic Park” (1993), but he wasn’t really the star. No, the stars were the dinosaurs, and to a lesser extent, Jeff Goldblum and his off-kilter charisma, and so, even though he was at the center of the biggest blockbuster up ‘til then, Neill was the fulcrum, not the lever, to borrow a phrase of the esteemed Roger Ebert. Everybody remembers the scene where Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm takes Richard Attenborough’s dino resurrector John Hammond to task for scientific, if not philosophical, recklessness, but in that same scene, when Neill’s Dr. Alan Grant is asked for his thoughts, the actor assumes the air of a true scientist, cautious skeptic, like he’s waiting for Jurassic Park to be peer-reviewed. It was befitting of the Ireland-born, New Zealand-raised actor’s gentlemanly air and his steady career progression from stage to screen to Hollywood. After all, he auditioned for no less a role than James Bond post-Roger Moore and later admitted that he did not really want the part and was happy not to get it and starred in one of the preeminent dudes rock movies of all time, “The Hunt for Red October” (1990), as the most stoical sort of dude of all – the loyal lieutenant. Even in the (more than middling) hall of fame thriller “Dead Calm” (1989), in carrying his non-Nicole Kidman half of the movie almost entirely on his own, Neill gives a delicate internal performance that does not call all that much attention to itself. He always prioritized the movie. 

Not that Neill was just one thing. “I like playing villains and bad guys,” he told The Los Angeles Times during the press tour for “Jurassic Park,” “characters with moral ambiguity, because, in a way, they are easier to play.” His breakout role as the aptly named Smith in Roger Donaldson’s “Sleeping Dogs” (1977) was not a villain, per se, but in playing a character dropping out of a society on the brink only to be unwillingly pulled back in, Neill evinced something like ferocious indifference to the whole world around him. He brought great intensity to the lead role in John Carpenter’s “In the Mouth of Madness” (1995) and in his other 1993 movie, Jane Campion’s Best Picture-nominated “The Piano,” he served as a convincing antagonist. He got to play the bad guy in “Event Horizon” (1997), possessed by the eponymous evil spaceship, delivering the money line as God intended, a perversion of “Back to the Future’s” money line, like he was Doc Brown gone bye-bye. That movie was, uh, not nominated for Best Picture, critically reviled, as its mid-August release date suggests, but it made for one of the great movie-going experiences of my life, an employee-only midnight sneak at the multiplex where I worked that summer that felt as much like watching a college football game as a movie. It’s too bad we didn’t have air horns for Neill’s line.

As fun as it was, that wasn’t my favorite movie-going experience involving Neill. No, that one doubled as my favorite movie-going experience during my brief interlude of living in Phoenix. One Friday night, hot and unhappy as I generally was, I went and saw an Australian movie called “The Dish” (2000) based on nothing, really, but the poster and exited a couple hours later beaming from ear to ear. A comedy telling the true story of the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales that wound up broadcasting the famed images of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Neill starred as the observatory’s chief, Cliff Buxton, giving a performance as warm as the cardigan sweater he is always sporting. It is an ensemble and he both blends in and binds it together, quietly carrying the weight of the death of his character’s wife and never raising his voice, until the one time he does, making it count. It occurs when the stiff-necked NASA man and one of Cliff’s Aussie colleagues butt heads in that way dudes do. “We are in the middle of the greatest feat ever attempted,” Cliff tells his colleague in calling him out. “What are you doing? Standing around bitching.” “The Dish” is a movie of so much goodwill and such little anger, and this lone angry moment, delivered by Neill in such a way to make it clear that he is angry about having to get angry at all, is a breathtaking rebuke not only of his colleague’s lack of goodwill but in a larger way, the cynicism and even nihilism that often feels so pervasive. Twenty-five years on, it still takes my breath away. 

Sam Neill died on Monday July 13th, 2026. He was 78. 

Omaha

“Omaha” begins with an unnamed dad (John Magaro) waking his nine-year-old daughter Ella (Molly Belle Wright) and her younger brother Charlie (Wyatt Solis) early one morning, asking them to round up the family dog, gather a few of their favorite things, and set off on a vaguely defined road trip. The title gives away the destination, of course, even if at the same time the title doesn’t explain half of it. This is evocative of director Cole Webley’s withholding approach, conveying information less through obvious exposition than behavior, context clues, and even camera placement. It’s often effective, and generally lets us understand what’s happening, even occasionally what the characters are feeling, though not, necessarily, what the characters feel once this journey comes to a head, an evasion that can’t help but drag otherwise good movie down.

Their beater of a family car frequently requires a push start, a la “Little Miss Sunshine,” though unlike the kind of comical valor of that movie’s recurring bit, the one in “Omaha” is more wearily matter of fact. Money is tight, evoked not just in the mention of food stamps but in Magaro’s air every time his character goes into his wallet; you feel the weight of what each dollar means. That is not to suggest “Omaha” is merely one more exercise in indie miserabilism. Though their road trip is not exactly a vacation, it is made to feel like a vacation, nevertheless. Sing-alongs to songs on the car radio, a visit to McDonald’s Playland, and a stop for gas station ice cream all evoke the kind of specific car-centric getaway that any middle-to-lower class kid might recognize and might recognize as being so much fun in that way of fun being what you make it no matter the financial constraints. The dad might be recently widowed, eliciting a sense of mourning, but the joy of these scenes still evokes a happy family. 

Throughout these road trip scenes, Webley also honors Ella and Charlie’s point of view without ever doing that thing that some filmmakers do with preadolescent characters and render them too much like little adults. What’s more, in straight-on shots of Ella in the front seat, Webley quietly communicates how Ella is aware their dad is not telling them everything just as shots of their dad from behind the headrest of his car seat communicate that he is, in fact, concealing something just as “Omaha” is concealing something from us. A movie does not necessarily owe us an explanation; often, deeper emotional power stems from such ambiguity. But the problem is less “Omaha” lacking an explanation, because its denouement suggests that such extreme measures might make one impossible anyway, than it is a refusal to let its characters express themselves about what happens. And in that refusal, Webley betrays the characters he clearly loves and ultimately renders “Omaha” incomplete rather than ambiguous. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Baron of Arizona (1950)

“The Baron of Arizona” does not technically begin on a dark and stormy night but it essentially begins on a dark and stormy night, a comically sly detail underlined in a magnificent close-up of Vincent Price in the rain emitting the distinct sense of a tall tale. Then again, Sam Fuller’s 1950 movie is based on the true story of James Reavis (Price) who in the late 1800s really did deploy a massive and massively detailed scheme involving fraudulent land claims to try and claim the Arizona Territory as his own. And sort of in the spirit of its main character, and despite a meager budget, “The Baron of Arizona” convinces as it moves the action from the American Southwest to Spain and back again, though its limited sense of action and substantial talky nature can sometimes weigh it down. Price plays this cruel manipulator with great panache, though he is less successful at convincing us of the character’s burgeoning love for the faux-Baroness (Ellen Drew) as the scheme gradually unravels. No, the real affection here is Fuller’s for his unlikely subject. A director famous for intense realism, this independently financed film feels like a sincere melodrama rather than a subversive one. By the end, and by taking liberties with the story, it’s as if the unlikely appreciation evinced by forgery expert Griff (Reed Hadley) toward his target mirrors the iconoclastic Fuller’s. Foreshadowing, or maybe just epitomizing, our national gift for greed and grift, the would-be baron tried to steal a whole freaking territory and for that, in the parlance of our times, you’ve gotta hand it to him. 

Pitching 90s Movies as Broadway Musicals

Linguist and Columbia professor John McWhorter noting in the run-up to America’s 250th anniversary for The New York Times that one of this country’s greatest inventions was the musical felt unfortunately ironic given that Michael Paulson reported the same month for the paper record that the musical was in trouble, just as he had reported the same thing in September of last year. The high cost of production and theater rental are just a couple of the reasons cited by Paulson for Broadway’s struggles, and this iffy status in the grand scheme goes a long way toward suggesting why there are fewer original musicals and more musicals based on movies; pre-existing intellectual property can provide a built-in audience. As such, an adaptation of 1987’s “The Lost Boys” was nominated at the most recent Tonys for Best Musical just as an adaptation of 1992’s “Death Becomes Her” was nominated the year before that; the musical adaptation of 2001’s “Moulin Rouge!” won in 2020/21 and is set to close at the end of this summer which no doubt will not help box office statistics. Adaptations of “La La Land” (2016) and “The Princess Bride” (1987) are reportedly in the works as is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s of Walter Hill’s 1979 thriller “The Warriors.” Whether this is good or bad, I can’t say; it seems more like sheer necessity. And if it is, I thought, well, why not try to help? What am I here for in my (un)official capacity as pretend producer if not to proffer fake pitches? And since the 90s are back, I also thought, well there is our intellectual property – the decade itself! Here then are a smattering of possible 90s movies to transform into surefire Broadway musical hits! You’re welcome. (I apologize.)

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael. I think this comedy-drama failed because it wasn’t a musical in the first place; that title just sounds like a musical.

Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead. Ditto. They remade this 1991 comedy in 2024 to no great effect and that’s because it was always supposed to be a musical: just imagine the title song.

There’s Something About Mary. I mean, this is set up for music and lyrics by Jonathan Richman, right?

Quick Change. And if Jonathan Richman would prefer something completely (relatively) new, then let’s pitch him a musical of “Quick Change” because Richman writing music and lyrics for a sort of stuck-in-place musical about three bank robbers who can’t get out of New York sounds up his alley too.

Bowfinger. This 1999 comedy should have been a bigger hit and maybe we can make it one on stage by reimagining a motley crew of Hollywood outsiders filming a movie around an unwitting movie star as a motley crew of Broadway outsiders staging a musical around a star of the stage. How would such a thing even be possible? Eh, we’ll work that out later. And while I am tempted to say the unwitting Broadway star could be Brian Stokes Mitchell as himself, let’s instead finally give David Alan Grier his role of a lifetime.

The Pelican Brief. It’s high time we bring John Grisham to The Great White Way. 

Pacific Heights. A thriller in which a psychotic tenant who won’t leave is transformed into an uproarious comedy, as it was always meant to be, about how nobody can afford to buy a home.

The Fugitive. A “Miss Saigon”-ish tragedy in which Dr. Richard Kimble and U.S. Marshal Sam Gerard realize they are soulmates. 

Enemy of the State. A “Jersey Boys”-like romp told from the perspective of so many youthful NSA agents as they begin to question the nature of the surveillance state.

Clear and Present Danger. A “Camelot”-inspired retelling of the Jack Ryan legend and his utopian Central Intelligence Agency. 

A Simple Plan. “As sure as the night is long / a simple plan goes wrong.”

Empire Records. Is it possible to make an anti-jukebox musical jukebox musical? Let’s find out!

The Big Lebowski. Boy, would I love to see Donny’s version of “Mister Cellophane.”

Clerks. A musical set entirely in the Quick Stop sung by amateurs with improvised choreography.

Disclosure Day

“Disclosure Day” begins in media res with a point-of-view shot of a professional wrestler in the ring getting a boot to the face. It’s quite the wakeup call, dropping us directly into 79-year-old director Steven Spielberg’s 37th feature film with nary a warning and foreshadowing a sci fi-thriller that never takes a moment to let us get our bearings, just as some of its key characters never really have time to get their bearings, and then never really stops going, virtually two hours and twenty-five minutes of rising action in which the concluding line functions as the climax. That line, though, taken in tandem with the opening shot also suggests a wakeup call as a sort of Spielbergian version of Wake Up, Sheeple! There’s an alien conspiracy theory at the heart of David Koepp’s screenplay, true, but Spielberg has never really been about rolling in the mud where most conspiracy theories reside and more about lifting us up. “Disclosure Day” does not suggest that the truth is out there so much as the truth in here, in you and me, in all of us, and has been for a long time, as if he has ineffably transmuted the long-buried alien tripods of H.G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds” into dormant machines, to quote the esteemed Roger Ebert, for generating empathy. 

The truth is inside Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a cybersecurity expert for a nefarious corporation in cahoots with the department of defense called Wardex, who absconds with numerous computer files demonstrating not just the existence of extra-terrestrial life but a 79-year cover-up. He’s a whistleblower, in other words, aiming to get the files to several other Wardex defectors, including Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), who is adamant about broadcasting the images rather than uploading them. Kellner, however, is doggedly pursued by Wardex’s CEO Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), a creepier version of Tommy Lee Jones’s Agent K in “Men in Black” in so much as he contends that mankind can only get on with their happy lives if they don’t know the whole truth. It’s as fascinating question as the one posed by Kellner’s semi-inadvertent co-conspirator and pious girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) about whether the revelation will trigger a societal crisis of faith. “Disclosure Day,” however, is not interested in truly debating these points but rather paying them lip service by lining them up as a few philosophical bowling pins to just knock them right back down.

Like Kellner, Spielberg has already made up his mind, and the filmmaker has always believed in some larger force, not God, necessarily, but a higher belief that something in the cosmos is meant to unify us in the face of our earthly strife. That strife is evoked in “Disclosure Day” through an impending nuclear strike involving North Korea, an idea that Spielberg is content to let linger on the periphery rather than truly foregrounding it. The larger cosmic mystery, meanwhile, takes root both in Daniel’s emergent backstory and how it ties to the emergent backstory of the other main character, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a Kansas City meteorologist who suddenly finds herself endowed with psychic abilities and unwittingly speaking what proves to be alien dialect on live television, drawing the attention of both Wardex and its defectors as Hugo sees her as nothing less than a sign he has been waiting for to tell the world that we are not alone.

Blunt’s performance is a marvel. As written, her character skews broad, a perky weather girl who wants to be taken seriously becoming a spokesperson for the whole universe. In a sense, all the moving parts of Koepp’s screenplay bloom in Margaret and Blunt binds them all together without going over the top, evincing in equal measure fear and a sense of innate responsibility as someone swept along by forces they don’t understand. In that way, she’s an impeccable surrogate for the audience. Her character is trusting that all this will lock into place just as we are trusting that all this will lock into place, and that is how “Disclosure Day” engenders suspense as much as its expertly staged chase sequences. Every time we see Hugo he appears to be on a soundstage with some sort of set being put into place behind him, quietly implanting the idea in the back of our mind that once this set is ready, the final piece of the narrative puzzle will click. 

Hugo’s soundstage and what it ultimately engenders comes with a deeper meaning. “Disclosure Day” does not render its own artifice as explicitly as, say, Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City” but in gathering all his characters at a soundstage where Hugo functions as nothing less than a director nods at his artifice, nevertheless, while also illustrating his six-decade career as an artist who has always believed in the power of the moving image to unite us. Spielberg might be pulling bits from so many previous movies, from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to “Minority Report,” from “E.T.” to “War of the Worlds,” but the movie that his 37th one most echoes turns out to be the 36th: “The Fabelmans.” “Disclosure Day” is not just Spielberg replaying the hits but drawing together all the themes that have fascinated him his whole career. If the aliens feel almost beside the point by the time the movie ends, it is because they are the vehicle not only for Spielberg’s plea for empathy but a full-fledged act of self-expression.