Some Drivel On...Good Kill

The title of writer/director Andrew Niccol’s “Good Kill” (2013) refers to the prosaic confirmation issued by Air Force Major Tommy Egan (Ethan Hawke) each time he successfully terminates a confirmed target from above. He is not in a jetfighter when he does this, though, but piloting a drone from a desk chair in an air-conditioned cubicle outside Las Vegas thousands of miles away from America’s war on terror. Tommy pines for action in a real plane, asking his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Jack Johns (Bruce Greenwood), for reassignment despite being able to go home each night to his wife Molly (January Jones) and two kids. Whether dropping a bomb from an actual plane is more ethically justifiable than doing so via drone is glossed over, just as the absence of adrenaline in a desk chair as opposed to an ejector seat is never really addressed at all, illustrating “Good Kill’s” troubling blind spots. No, the core of “Good Kill” is drone warfare corroding Egan’s humanity and Hawke is up to the task. Normally such a lively, conversational actor, he reduces himself down to virtually nothing, echoing his own pale white skin to create something like a vampire who can be out in the bright Nevada sun.

As Egan and Johns integrate a new junior officer, Vera Suarez (Zoë Kravitz), into their team, so, too must they deal with increasingly morally ambiguous orders that are now being dispensed directly from the CIA (embodied in the voice of Peter Coyote), provoking Egan to emotionally shut down even more around his wife and drink heavily. These are familiar dramatic devices and, unfortunately, Niccol teases nothing new from them, the otherwise deliberately mechanical feel of his aesthetic trickling down in the worst way to his narrative. What’s more, his dialogue, especially between Egan and his colleagues, is never baked into that drama, tending more toward blatant point-counterpoint, as if we are watching a public affairs talk show discussing drone warfare. Greenwood, at least, in delivering a few monologues existing as much for our benefit as they do for those under the command of his character animates them with a kind of just-following-orders contempt that feels, at least, like something real rather than didactic points via the filmmaker.

It’s clear from several lines of dialogue that Niccol wants to demonstrate the muddle between drone warfare and video games, but then, that’s the problem, his script literally saying it only underlines how his filmmaking fails to evoke it. Tommy’s console, desk chair, and joystick look similar to a video game set-up, yes, but beyond that, “Good Kill” never approximates so-called game feel, it never blurs the lines between life in the room and the one on the screen. As if afraid of going too far or his message being misconstrued, Niccol refuses to reduce the onscreen killing to the point where we don’t feel anything at all.

Shelter

Unfortunately, the copious asses that Jason Statham kicks in his latest ass-kicking opus yield diminishing returns. “Shelter” starts well enough with Statham as a man of mystery who is not so mysterious because, of course, certain ass-kicking backstory is automatically baked into such a Statham character from the jump. In this case, his ersatz enigma Michael Mason is hiding out on an uninhabited island off the coast of Scotland and being delivered supplies that seem to consist entirely of bottles of liquor by a teenage girl named Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) and her uncle (Michael Shaeffer), a former associate of this strange hermit. If it might strain credulity that Jessie would take such an interest in the gruff, uncommunicative Mason, I kept thinking of the scene in “One Battle After Another” when teenage Willa asks Col. Steven Lockjaw in all oblivious earnestness why his muscles are so big. Teenagers are on a different wavelength, man. And so, when Jessie winds up injured and stranded on the island, she gradually breaks down his impersonal wall, which proves good and bad, especially when Mason’s ex-MI6 assassin background finally catches up with him and the semi-unwitting current MI6 chief Roberta (Naomi Ackie) sends a black ops squad across the sea to deal with him. 

The sequence in which Mason dispatches this death squad one-by-one with minimal fuss is promising. It subverts expectations by forgoing full-throated Schwarzenegger “Commando” mode for something else as Mason effortlessly pilfers and uses their own weapons against them, not quite taking them all out with his own bare hands but coming close. What’s more, Statham’s air, a small gleam in his eyes, suggests a thrill of the hunt, a thread too sinister for writer/director Ric Woman Waugh to pull. Indeed, as Mason and Jessie are forced ashore, bit by “Shelter” peters out. True, there is something refreshing in Statham allowing his character’s actions to convey his burgeoning affection for Jessie rather than laying the emotions on thick, but nothing is ever really made of the Jason Bourne-like black ops program (underlined in how Bill Nighy never gets to truly cut loose as the bad guy) and the action gradually loses all sense of creative sizzle. The climactic showdown in a dance club denotes how Waugh just starts pulling locations off the action-thriller rack. By the end, when Mason is dispatching the one pesky assassin that just won’t quit, that original gleam in his eye is conspicuously gone and he looked the way I felt: ready for it be over. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: JFK (1991)

Things in America have only gotten truthier in the decade since I originally posted this drivel on JFK and so, after the events of last weekend, I dusted the review off, revised it, and am reposting it.

In the 2002 review of “JFK” (1991) for his Great Movies series, Roger Ebert recounted that not long after Oliver Stone’s ultra-incendiary three-hour epic was released, he was excoriated by Walter Cronkite for extolling a movie without “a shred of truth in it.” That’s one way to put it. The invaluable Adam Nayman was a bit blunter in his assessment on Letterboxd in 2023: “this film was full of shit.” (Nayman’s review is much more nuanced than that.) I can understand Cronkite’s frustration. After all, “(t)he shadow of suspicion became a way of reading our history,” film critic David Thomson told The Wrap in 2013 regarding the ostensible conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. “Once the mood set in, it became all too easy for any horrible event to just get fed into the hopper.” Huh. You don’t say? Of course, Cronkite admonishing Ebert and his colleagues for giving positives notices to a motion picture about the conspiracy is not the same as admonishing the conspiracy itself.  “I believe films are the wrong medium for fact,” Ebert wrote. “Fact belongs in print. Films are about emotions.” Post-truth was not declared the word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries until 2016, a quarter-century after the release of “JFK,” but few films have embodied the thorny, troubling emotions of our post-truth society quite like “JFK.”

Whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing John F. Kennedy, for the last sixty-odd years, the majority of Americans, by varying percentages, have believed that in some way, shape, or for, he did not. That, as Ebert wrote, has been “our national state of mind since Nov. 22, 1963,” and with “JFK,” Stone reflected that mood by concocting “a thick gumbo of truths, half-truths, unverifiable hypotheses, and pure rant...(ladled) out indiscriminately.” In writing those words for The New Yorker in January 1992, Terrence Rafferty meant to critique but I read them as a compliment, effectively summarizing the figurative stew in which we have been splashing around for the last decade-plus of exhausting American life. Rafferty might have argued that the movie’s “hysterical manner and slipshod handling of the facts actually have the effect of diminishing the credibility of the case for conspiracy,” but that is to suggest Stone is mounting a case in the first place. As Stone said repeatedly at the time and in the years since, he was not crafting a bootleg legal case nor reporting a story; he was presenting a counter myth. 

It is the counter myth that Matt Zoller Seitz and Kevin Lee considered when writing about “JFK” in 2008. “From the opening newsreel Stone presents a myth,” they explain, “one that pervades this stage of his career: government as oppressive patriarch, motivated largely by military and capitalistic interests and operating largely out of view of a public blinkered by patriotic propaganda.” Indeed, Stone seizes on the conspiracy theories peddled by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (played by Kevin Costner in what is either a devious way to launder a real-life tinfoil hatter or to subvert the notion of a cinematic hero, depending on how you, the viewer, feel about it all) to incite propaganda of his own, promoting the idea that a coup d’etat within the utmost reaches of the government sought to bring Kennedy down.

Stone promotes this plot by injecting brief black & white flashback sequences, like Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Howard) telling a room of conspirators that if they get him into the Oval Office then he’ll give them their damn war (as in, Vietnam). These invented flashbacks are often placed around actual archival footage, deliberately intended to muddy the viewing waters. In writing about Stone’s “seamless blend(ing) (of) documentary footage and re-creations” for Reverse Shot, Michael Joshua Rowin pegged it as a “smoke and mirrors act”, and that is true.

It can be argued that this smoke and mirrors act is intended to confuse the audience, to make it difficult to discern what’s real from what isn’t, which leaves everything in question. But while that it is an act of flagrant irresponsibility for some, to others, like me, it is, strictly from a filmmaking standpoint, propagandist or not, a commendation. As Randy Laist, an associate professor of English at Goodwin College, put it for a seriously academic treatise on the film: “More so than any particular theory about who shot JFK, the thesis of Stone’s film is that reality itself has been assassinated, under circumstances that we can only reconstruct out of a montage of images, ambivalently real and/or unreal – the fragments of a hyperreal mediascape.”

Hyperreal is a term credited to French theorist Jean Baudrillard, inevitably name-checked in Laist’s piece, who ascribed the difference between a modern and postmodern society as a “mode of representation in which ideas represent reality and truth.” In a postmodern society, he reckoned, “subjects lose contact with the real and fragment and dissolve.” That’s what happens as you watch “JFK.” If Stone’s previous films, as Laist notes, were born more a narrative realism, in “JFK”, he battered such realism to bits, primarily through ferociously kinetic, Oscar-winning editing by Pietro Scalia and Joe Hutshing, and via John Williams’s relentless harangue of brass and strings, a leitmotif for our national paranoia, an aesthetic so overpowering that it sweeps you up and pulls you into its myriad obfuscations and embellishments in spite of yourself. What’s real and what isn’t ceases to be the point; all you have left is the emotion that Stone deliberately engenders. You feel angry; you feel mistrustful; you feel like you have not been told everything; you feel like the government, that convenient catch-all, wants to keep you in the dark. “On that level,” wrote Ebert, “it is completely factual.”

Pitch Meeting: The Mall Detective

On a March episode of the invaluable Pressbox podcast, co-hosts Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker found themselves on a brief tangent about shoplifting and what they deemed store detectives even if they realized in the moment that they seemed to mean mall cops or mall security. Still, for one humorous moment, they imagined store detectives as an occupation and, reader, I was already one step ahead of them, imagining my latest ersatz movie production. “The Mall Detective” will be less “Paul Blart: Mall Cop,” more “The Kid Detective,” set during the peak of American malls in the early 90s, at the Southland Shopping Mall in Northfield, Ohio where we open with grizzled mall detective Gene Greim (Kevin Corrigan) interviewing Gadzooks clerk Rayanne (Olivia Rodrigo) about her possibly pilfering an Anthrax cassette from Musicland in his office which is not an office but a table in the food court when he is summoned to the Radio Shack. 

Radio Shack has been hit by a spate of recent thefts and store manager Doug (Burl Moseley), under pressure from the brass, needs Gene to get answers. Cody (Aaron Heffernan), the clerk coming undone in trying to meet impossible sales goals, becomes an obvious suspect, too obvious, declares Orange Julius manager Michelle (Jessica Williams), self-installing herself as his unlikely co-detective. She helps Gene navigate the various fiefdoms of the mall run by Barb (Abbi Jacobson), the big cheese of a vigilant band of mall walkers, the not-as-timid-as-she-seems manager of the B. Dalton Books, Chris (Hope Davis), and haughty Amber (Odessa D’Azion), in charge of the teen clique that congregates by the fountain in the atrium. All of them are left to their devices by property manager Gord (Alfred Molina), who seems most concerned about shepherding a deal for a new anchor store in the form of an electronics superstore that might just put a dent in Radio Shack sales. Meanwhile, Rayanne tells Gene that the Spencer Gifts run by Ted Klutts (Michael Shannon) that all the kids claim is a front for the occult has started peddling what seems like Radio Shack merchandise retrofit for nefarious purposes.

Cold Storage

“Pay attention,” a cheeky title card for “Cold Storage” declares, “this shit is real.” Well, it is and isn’t. In adapting the screenplay from his own 2019 novel, writer David Koepp has utilized the real-life 1979 incident in which the abandoned U.S. space station Skylab re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, burned up, broke apart, and scattered debris across Western Australia. Though all the remains were eventually collected, what “Cold Storage” presupposes is, what if it wasn’t? Written by middling thriller hall of famer David Koepp, adapted from his own 2019 novel, and directed by Jonny Campbell, this jovial horror/thriller/comedy hybrid begins with a biochemist (Sosie Bacons) and a pair of black biochemical op agents, Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson) and Trini Romano (Lesley Manville), investigating a leftover Skylab oxygen tank that has been transformed into a makeshift Australian museum and is now oozing some type of mutated green fungus. It’s a snappy opening defined by a dexterous camera that is always pulling back or craning up to both elicit surprise and dispense information. And because mankind can’t leave well enough alone, the group takes a fungus sample for study, subsequently transporting it to a federal cold storage facility in Kansas that via time lapse photography we see sealed off and mutated, itself, into an unsuspecting self-storage company.

That’s where “Cold Storage” mostly takes place, at the self-storage company, picking up 18 years later as security guards Travis (Joe Keery) Naomi (Georgina Campbell) settle in for the night shift. They are not slackers, exactly, just two people trying to get things together, and bonding from both desire and necessity when a faint beeping drives them crazy, sending them hacking through drywall to find the source and into a situation that spirals quickly out of control as the green fungus oozes amok. When it does, Quinn is summoned from retirement by Abigail (Ellora Torchia), a deskbound military bureaucrat ignoring the nothing to see here admonishment of her commanding officer (Richard Brake), a storyline that neatly splits the difference between big government proactivity and paranoia. Eventually, Quinn re-teams with the also-retired Trini to make haste for Kansas to help Travis and Naomi prevent an impending global calamity.

Neeson finds a sweet spot between Frank Drebin Jr. and all his characters through the years with names like Bill Marks and Mike McCann while Manville is wry in a way that is baked into the character rather than a wink at the audience. If anything, “Cold Storage” might have used more Neeson and Manville, though on other hand, just as the story ultimately turns on Travis and Naomi so does the movie turn on Keery and Campbell. They are going concerns on account of two popular TV shows, “Stranger Things” and “Black Mirror,” respectively, though I have seen neither, making this my first experience with them, and I have to say, I quite enjoyed their warm and amusing performances as two people having the time of their lives while having to stay alive. They find the perfect middle ground of never taking it all too seriously but never devolving into full-throated send-up, evoking the same B-movie spirit as “Cold Storage” itself, summarized in the climactic show-stopping moment when Quinn dispatches Travis and Naomi on a mission to, like, you know, save civilization: “You two may have started the night minimum wage guards,” he says, “but you’re a green light team now.” I was watching alone in my living room, but I stood up and cheered. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: A Week's Vacation (1980)

Four-time César Award winner Nathalie Baye died on April 17th at the age of 77 from Lewy body dementia. She worked with a who’s-who of French directors, including Godard and Truffaut, and in 1980 she starred in Bertrand Tavernier’s “A Week’s Vacation,” a movie I watched for the first time in April 2025 on The Criterion Channel. As I did, I must have thought to myself at least five times, “Is this my new favorite movie?” I wrote a review but was not entirely happy with it and in her honor, I tried again. RIP. 

Laurence (Nathalie Baye) is being ferried to her job as a secondary school teacher in Lyon, France by her boyfriend Pierre (Gérard Lanvin) when suddenly stricken, unable to face another day, she jumps out of the car and leaves him idling to walk along the river. He hops out of the vehicle and chases her down, just as the handheld camera does too, though both ultimately relent, hanging back and helplessly watching from afar as she walks away into a sudden downpour: offering support is futile. The reasons she eventually gives for this breakdown are specific, though the feeling of wanting to forgo facing another day and renounce shining it on is universal, nevertheless. Her doctor prescribes a week off to rest and spiritually recuperate, which is much less universal, at least to an American, given that over here hard work is peddled as the answer to everything. Not that Laurence’s holiday proves a complete panacea. If the episodic nature of director Bertrand Tavernier’s film seems readymade for a journey of self-discovery, the existential underpinnings quietly suggest something more like a French version of a classic Onion article: Plan To Straighten Out Entire Life During Weeklong Vacation Yields Mixed Results. 

“A Week’s Vacation” begins with Laurence drawing back a curtain on her window to reveal an elderly woman in the apartment across the way and wondering who she is and where she came from. Tavernier turns this image of Laurence spying on her lonely neighbor into a recurring one, giving life to what she says in voiceover, “I’d like to be an animal to watch others without speaking.” It’s not a quite a National Geographic special for people, “A Week’s Vacation,” but Tavernier and his co-writers Marie-Françoise Hans and Colo Tavernier stitch it all together with scenes of Laurence quietly observing the world around her and listening to old friends and new acquaintances, students and parents of her pupils, express their own feelings and recount stories of their own lives. These scenes take on different tenors and tones, but they are all unified by Baye, giving a surprisingly airy performance despite the air of melancholia that otherwise hangs over her character. In Laurence’s solitary moments, Baye evinces a bemused skepticism, as if she is the process of appraising the value of life itself, and in scenes opposite other actors, she radiates genuine joy at listening to their characters’ typically droll stories of woe, smiling and laughing in a way that seems to let us in on the grand cosmic joke of the whole human condition.

If there is a specific reason for Laurence’s emotional exhaustion, it ties back to her career. She believes in the mission of teaching, though its effectiveness is conveyed as debatable, glimpsed in flashbacks with students apathetic to learning and incapable of listening, evoking how despite doctor’s orders, her problems cannot help but intrude on her thoughts. At the same time, her father is wasting away in the French countryside, seen briefly in one scene where she pays him a visit and finds him unable to do much with his hands after a lifetime of working with them, sitting there with a sad smile on his face, happy to see her but having reached the point where living has given way to subsisting. Taken in tandem, these narrative threads suggest the poles of life, as if one’s existence is navigating from youth to the figurative infirmary, leaving the journey in-between as the time afforded to make sense of life’s significance. The pressure to do so feels amplified in Laurence’s case given that she’s 31 and is hesitant not only about continuing her career but about having children, the latter decision complicated on account of Pierre, a genially deft characterization of that most archetypal of dudes: oblivious. 

Laurence is not a static character, by any means, but neither does she experience a Hollywood-like climactic epiphany showing her the light. This is underlined in how she never meets, never talks to, never even learns the name of the elderly neighbor across the way. The woman is there when Laurence’s holiday begins and gone by the time it ends as if life and all that it entails is but a week’s vacation between whatever precedes it and whatever comes after.

In Memoriam: Jackie Burch

It only took a century, but this year the Academy of Motion Picture and Sciences finally added an award for Best Achievement in Casting. To commemorate the occasion, the Oscar ceremony did not simply enlist a couple big names to banter while presenting the inaugural award but brought out a cast member from each nominated movie to say a few words on behalf of his or her casting director. The idea’s heart was in the right place, but the words did not match the moment, too many of them to not say much of anything at all, at least not much of anything until Delroy Lindo brought it home on behalf of “Sinners.” “In ‘Sinners,’” Lindo said, “every character feels universal, distinct, fully lived in. Yet together they form something much larger: a living, breathing world. That didn’t happen by accident.” That, I literally said while pointing at the TV, was all you needed to say! Engrave that on the award! Still, on some level I understand so many futile attempts to sum it up with words because when it comes to casting, it’s right there on the screen.

The first-ever casting Oscar went to Cassandra Kulukundis for “One Battle After Another,” and in her speech, she noted her long working relationship with director Paul Thomas Anderson, serving as the casting director for all his movies dating back to 1999’s “Magnolia.” She was a casting associate on PTA’s second feature film, “Boogie Nights,” on which Christine Sheaks was credited as Casting Director. That is the movie I have always considered an exemplar of modern movie casting. Sheaks epitomized Lindo’s observation that a casting director helps to create a living, breathing world by fashioning a makeshift family of intentionally disparate personalities that all fit together. Even more, while “Boogie Nights” was filled with unconventional casting choices, those choices do not feel unconventional in retrospect as each actor so indubitably inhabits his or her role that ultimately you can’t imagine anyone else. Sheaks saw, in other words, what nobody else saw, until they saw it, which, it seems to me, is exactly the kind of visionary quality you want in a casting director.

The 98th Academy Awards not only introduced a casting award, they also finally got out of their way and put together an appropriately honorific in-memoriam montage, occasionally stopping to remember out loud Hollywood icons who had passed the previous year. They could not honor everyone aloud, of course, and when one of the names and faces that flashed up was a casting director, well, maybe the casting award was still on my mind, I found myself wanting to know more. To be honest, I am deeply ashamed that I did not know Jackie Burch’s name given her massive imprint on the movies and by extension, how many times I must have seen it throughout my life. Because if you first started watching movies in the 80s as I did and have not just one but a few favorite movies from that decade, the odds are good that Burch, who died in September at the age of 74 from endometrial cancer, was its casting director.

Burch cast “The Breakfast Club,” for God’s sake, meaning she had to cast a brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel, and a recluse, casting to fit a mold and to break a mold at the same time, and she did it. And though you might think the same person that cast “The Breakfast Club” could not possibly have also cast “Predator” (1987), Burch did, putting together a paramilitary rescue team by intuitively understanding that she was casting a music video filtered through a beer commercial as much as a Sci-Fi/Action epic. “Road House” (1989) became a cult classic for many reasons, not least of which was Burch’s impeccably curated cast, top to bottom, from Patrick Swayze all the way down to the hapless henchman tucked under the CAT cap (John William Young), turning Jasper, MO into an R-rated, movies-for-guys-who-like movies Honalee. Burch cast “Sixteen Candles,” “Mask,” “Three Amigos!,” “Coming to America,” and “Dick Tracy.” Burch cast “Oscar,” the unfortunate Sylvester Stallone attempt at comedy in 1991. Ah, but as Burch would tell the story to the podcast Ghost of Hollywood in 2023, when director Jonathan Lynn was struggling to cast “My Cousin Vinny” a couple years later, Burch suggested Marisa Tomei whom she had cast in “Oscar”: ergo, Jackie Burch is no small way partly responsible for the greatest movie performance in history. Oh, also, Burch cast “Die Hard.”

If I might argue that “Boogie Nights” was the best cast movie of the 90s then I might argue that “Die Hard” was the best cast movie of the 80s. Rather than spend every December rehashing lame, tired arguments about whether the latter is a Christmas movie, people should dispense “Die Hard” calendars a la advent. Each day we open a door to remember all the roles that Burch got just right in ways both large and small, whether it was the 80s asshole central casting pinnacle of Hart Bochner, enlisting her “Breakfast Club” Principal Paul Gleason to play the Deputy Chief of Police as sly commentary on the LAPD, cementing in my mind forevermore the make-believe aesthetic of German terrorists by giving Hans Buhringer his only screen credit, or calling on Kip Waldo to indelibly manifest the air of a convenience store clerk made to work on Christmas Eve. Waldo’s one scene with Reginald VelJohnson as Sgt. Al Powell, in fact, goes to show that the casting was not only about getting each individual role right but ensuring the whole cast worked together. Indeed, as much as “Die Hard” might look like a star vehicle in the rearview mirror, it’s a true ensemble piece with so many performers complimenting and counterpointing one another in so many ways. More than that, “Die Hard” is a case where key performers frequently do not even share the scene or screen together, rendering the necessary chemistry as an even more dicey proposition than usual, an extra testament to Burch’s intuition.  

As distinct and vital as every casting choice was, though, none were as distinct and vital as the top line choices of Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman. Both set a template for hero and villain, respectively, that spawned a thousand pale imitators, such culturally indelible turns that it can be hard to remember just how out-of-the-box it was to choose the guy from “Moonlighting” and a stage-trained thespian who had never acted in a movie in the first place. To that point, Burch has said that director John McTiernan wanted to cast Robert Duvall as Sgt. Al Powell. If it sounds like the most natural choice in the world, casting someone like Robert Duvall in the part of a police sergeant in a movie like “Die Hard,” it also sounds inconceivable, if only because we have seen the movie and consequently seen VelJohnson in the role. That, it goes without saying, was not a luxury Burch was afforded when she was casting it. She had the foresight to see what the rest of could only see in hindsight.