Friday's Old Fashioned: Trespass (1992)

“Trespass” takes place almost entirely in and around a massive, abandoned factory building in East St. Louis hiding a cache of gold. Two Arkansas firemen, Vince (Bill Paxton) and Don (William Sadler), learn of this priceless stash from the last words of a man dying in a blaze who hands them an honest to goodness treasure map. It’s an urban version of “The Treasure of Sierra Madre,” in other words, in which the indigenous people, in a sense, are Black Americans and the two White Americans are, in a sense, portrayed as looters. In fact, that was the original title of director Walter Hill’s movie, “Looters,” though that had to be changed in the wake of the L.A. Riots. The summer release date had to be pushed back too. Instead, “Trespass” was released on December 25th, 1992, which somehow seems worse? I’m trying to imagine middle America families who wanted to get out of the house on Christmas Day going out to the theater, seeing “Trespass,” and then returning home and having pointed conversations about race relations while sipping eggnog around the tree.

Indeed, the abandoned building becomes nothing less than a powder keg, both figuratively and literally, as Vince and Don find themselves not only hunting treasure but on the turf of a St. Louis gang spearheaded by King James (Ice-T). And when the two firefighters a long way from home become accidental witnesses to an execution, they must find a way to escape with their lives in addition to the loot. The screenplay by Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis, of all people, does a fine job of frequently reorienting the stakes and throwing the additional complications and characters into the pot, like Bradlee (Art Evans), a squatter in the building who comes to see the gold as his own territorial right. On the other hand, not all the set-ups seemingly planted by the script are paid off, making for a patchy garden, so to speak, and the penchant of one gangster filming everything with a camcorder that seems to suggest bloodthirsty Reality TV never amounts to anything of significance.

I confess, Ice-T’s acting has always been a little too rough-around-the-edges for me – you can see him acting – but also, in the role of King James, when he keeps kinda squinting at these two good old boys and asking with utterly honest incredulousness, “What are you doing here,” it’s funny, like this is a fish out of water comedy turned up to 11. Vince and Don just see him as a drug dealer, but he sees himself as a businessman and his men as business associates, a proto-Stringer Bell of “The Wire” with Ice Cube’s Savon, then, as a proto-Avon Barksdale. Their dueling approaches come to a head and are further complicated by Vince and Don taking King James’s heroin addicted brother Lucky (De'voreaux White) as a hostage. That fact coupled with their tying up Bradlee to keep him quiet renders the two firefighters as something far less than noble, even if the screenplay makes next to nothing of them being firefighters in the first place. Instead, “Trespass” settles for a pervasive immorality that avoids nihilism, if barely, through Paxton letting bits and bobs of humanity seep out in his performance, flailing as his character morally drowns right in front of us. Don does not really have an epiphany, determined to get what he perceives the cruel world as owing him. But when Lucky injects him with his heroin needle to try and make an escape, he is forced to confront a world he dismisses out of turn anyway. 

In Memoriam: Richard Riehle

The first movie I saw Richard Riehle in was “Glory” where he played a quartermaster with an oily insouciance that let you know his character had a penchant for greasing the wheels and that not all Union officers were steadfast abolitionists. It was a small but vital role and Riehle’s six-decade filmography, from “Fried Green Tomatoes” to “Casino,” from “Mysterious Skin” to “Bridesmaids,” was virtually all small but vital roles. In his unmistakable stocky build, substantial mustache, and Midwestern accent with hints of gravel, Riehle was always leaving indelible marks with minimal screen time. He was featured in so many roles in a movie career dating all the way back to 1977’s “Joyride” starring a not-quite-20-year-old Melanie Griffith that he was occasionally even cited for ones he did not play. Speaking to Will Harris for The AV Club’s invaluable Random Roles series in 2017, Riehle explained that IMDb credited him for “Wedding Crashers” even though he was not, in fact, in that 2005 romantic comedy. Sure enough, after dying on October 15th at the age of 78 from natural causes, Variety, Deadline, and others all mentioned his non-existent appearance in “Wedding Crashers.” To paraphrase his most famous performance, which we will get to momentarily, there are actors who don’t have to put up with this shit.

You probably have your favorite Riehle performance. I have mine. In the more than middling thriller masterpiece “The Fugitive,” Riehle played the small but vital role of the unnamed prison guard who unwittingly facilitates the escape of Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford), tries to take credit for Kimble’s act of valor in saving the other prison guard while simultaneously trying to cover up that he let Kimble get away, only to be called out by Marshal Sam Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones) when the doctor’s empty leg irons are discovered. In that moment, Riehle looks for all the world like a kindergartner who just got caught pilfering another classmate’s crayons. It’s as good as Jones and Ford’s face-off several scenes later in the tunnel, just in a completely different way. For anyone else, that would have been a whole career. In the same year, 1993, Riehle appeared opposite cinema’s most famous orca (“Free Willy”) and Madonna (“Body of Evidence”) while also being responsible for Dr. Richard Kimble’s fugitive status. What else is there to do? That’s the triple crown! And yet, six years later, Mike Judge enlisted Riehle for a small but vital role in his cult classic comedy of white-collar dread and malaise, “Office Space.”

In a roundabout way, as Riehle explained to The AV Club, the Wisconsin native got his acting start on the stage, first at the University of Notre Dame, and then at the University of Minnesota where he earned an MFA, before moving on to work in regional theatre first in Michigan and then the Pacific Northwest as eventually one thing or another led to a career onscreen. That theatrical beginning is apropos given that in “Office Space,” in what probably could not even have been five minutes of screen time sprinkled over a handful of scenes, Riehle embodied what the film critic Sheila O’Malley has deemed the pulse of the playwright, “illuminat(ing) every single thematic element of the movie as a whole.” As middle manager Tom Smykowski, Riehle embodied the workaday life’s eternal paradox: the ennui of having a job and the absolute terror of losing it. He does, in fact, lose that job when efficiency experts deem him expendable, a hilarious scene as horror movie in which Riehle has his character come unglued while trying to justify nothing less, really, than his own existence. Smykowski also has the worst million-dollar idea of all time, one that yields no rewards, striking it rich instead through a lawsuit after being hit by a drunk driver. If in his initial scenes, he evinces anxiousness and outrage, in his scene in a full-body-cast after cashing in, Riehle evinces a carefree serenity that brings home Judge’s overriding view of the American Dream as pure luck.

Dead Souls

“Dead Souls” begins with the conspicuously named Strindler showing up in a border Arizona town in 1890 and offering to pay any and all well-heeled citizens handsomely to provide him with the names and birthdates of any Mexican laborers that might have died in their fields or on their lands. It’s a scheme similar to the one employed in Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 novel of the same name, a book on which the 71-year-old moviemaking maverick Alex Cox based his adaptation, conveying the eternal nature of such a plot as implicitly as Cox deploying an unexpected flash-forward does explicitly. When we first see Strindler, he does not so much appear as seem to materialize in the rugged southwestern landscape, less a person than some sort of mythological figure. If such figures exist to help us make sense of our worlds, then Strindler is here in part to help us make sense of ours, opening a cosmic line between the original Gilded Age and the second one that we are all enduring right now.

In addition to directing and co-adapting the script, Cox also plays Strindler, an appropriate DIY touch given that his longtime ostracization from Hollywood necessitated Kickstart funding to even get “Dead Souls” made in the first place. If it was, in fact, merely practical, it is also perfect, and not just because this might be shaping up as a swan song to the medium. His impassive air fits just right for the part of an unknowable person, one who alternately claims to be with the government, a census taker, and a priest. There is a wooden, even amateurish air to many of the actors surrounding him, which might also stem from budgetary constraints. That means they sometimes sell the quite funny deadpan dialogue short, but it also works in the same way that some of the obvious artificial mustaches and muttonchops work. The unnamed border town of “Dead Souls” is not literally fake in the way of the replica town in “Blazing Saddles,” but in the idea that Cox ultimately gets across, it might as well be.

For all the talk of Mexican laborers, none are seen, because all are dead, their names and faces less a conduit to their identities than a means to an end. Strindler’s phony rolodex of identities, meanwhile, echoes the various townsfolk he encounters, all of whom might be who they say they are but in their dealings with this stranger many reveal themselves to be two-faced and no less eager to profit off the emergent scheme. No one seems to be an upstanding member of the community save for the also conspicuously named Boracho (Zander Schloss), the wagon master ferrying Strindler from place to place, and who inadvertently winds up taking a bullet for his nefarious client. Indeed, Strindler, who cannot ride a horse nor shoot a gun, keeps walking between the raindrops, a variation on the old holy fool archetype, and putting me in mind of John McCabe of “McCabe & Mrs. Miller.” That landmark western utilized the holy fool to ultimately make an argument for strength in community over individualistic capitalist pursuit whereas in “Dead Souls,” Cox elevates the selfish American swindler to the status of myth. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Paper (1994)

A few years ago, in the middle of one of my inane posts about Entertainment Weekly covers, I compiled a Top 5 ranking of the best Ron Howard movies. I slotted “The Paper” in at #3 behind “Ransom” and “Apollo 13” and having now rewatched all these movies in the last few years, reader, I am here to tell you that I was wrong, dead wrong: “The Paper” is #1 and it’s not close. It is Opie’s magnum opus. It should have been nominated for Best Picture. In telling the story of a fictional news tabloid called The New York Sun, “The Paper” is not only a throwback to a time before the news industry was gutted by specious forces but when mid-budget movies ruled the roost. In just an hour-and-fifty-two minutes, this comedy-drama juggles multiple characters, storylines, and tones, and brings them all to life with equal parts verisimilitude and sheer blinding entertainment. Nowadays, such a movie would be puffed out into a 10-part streaming series to ostensibly delve deeper into its characters and situations. But “The Paper demonstrates that just like a good newspaper writer, a little bit of craft goes a long way.

“The Paper” is set over the course of 24 hours and it essentially begins in the kitchen of Sun metro editor Henry Hackett (Michael Keaton) turning on the news and popping his first can of Coke for the day. This is one of “The Paper’s” most nimble feats, folding incessant product placement into character by making Henry a caffeine addict by way of Coca-Cola rather than coffee. He also has a job interview with the Sentinel, a more prestigious New York paper offering a less demanding role which is crucial given that his wife sitting at the breakfast table across from him, Martha (Marisa Tomei), currently on leave from the Sun, is pregnant. She is due in two weeks, but you know that baby will arrive in two hours instead, just as the gun that Sun columnist Michael McDougal (Randy Quaid) carries for protection against any of the human subjects he has cut down to size seeking retribution will undoubtedly go off. This means the screenplay by David and Stephen Koepp is brandishing two Chekov’s guns. Henry and Martha’s introductory sequence also illuminates “The Paper’s” foremost tension: life and work and how they overlap and get in the way of one another.

Indeed, it is a testament to the Brothers Koepp that their full but not overstuffed screenplay refuses to sideline Martha. She not only pines for the thrill of the reporting chase, but she also goes out and does it by helping ferret out a critical lead in the big story that will come to define the plot. At the same time, lunch with a friend (Catherine O’Hara) puts into perspective the harsh realities of balancing work and motherhood. This idea of women in the workplace is echoed in managing editor Alicia Clark (Glenn Close). Both the character and Close’s performance are icy, and that iciness correlates at least in part to how she is forced to carry herself while overseeing so many men, all of whom socially ostracize her, a casualty of sexism to which the script is not ignorant nor indifferent. Editor-in-chief Bernie White (Robert Duvall), meanwhile, has cancer and an estranged daughter (Jill Hennessy), seeking to right his wrongs before it’s too late. And as hackneyed as that sounds, well, if you don’t mind, I’m just going to let the esteemed Roger Ebert take the reins on this one: “Duvall plays the paper’s editor with such depth that he turns an essentially supporting role into the man’s life story.”

“The Paper” turns on a story involving two young Black men (Vincent D’Arbouze and Michael Michael) who are arrested and charged with the murders of two out-of-town white businessmen. And though the Koepps’ screenplay does not quite turn them into full-fledged characters, it imbues them with just enough human dimension, nevertheless. Nor does it play coy with their innocence, showing the audience that they are guiltless right up front. That’s an important narrative distinction. By making this clear from the outset, “The Paper” is less a crusade for justice than a dramatization of best journalistic practice. Henry must move heaven and earth to get a quote from an unnamed police source to ensure they have the story right even if getting the story in the first place turns on nothing less than an old-fashioned newspaper war while also mounting the case with a nifty self-aware twist on the “Stop the presses” cliche that when you have the truth in your hands, you can’t just sit on it when it best serves your needs but must get it out to the public. 

It’s true that the wrap-up to these various storylines skews melodramatic. But there can be veracity in melodramatic exaggeration, and it is noteworthy how despite so much swelling music and so many storylines sensationally converging that “The Paper” still conveys real truth. And though its wrap-up makes clear the cost of putting work over family, “The Paper” is not necessarily suggesting that this approach is wrong, merely two ideas opposing ideas that leave these various editors and reporters to decide for themselves what matters most. The concluding scene of Bernie spying on his daughter from afar as she steps outside to pick up her morning copy of the New York Sun feels syrupy on its face. But when she reads the triumphant, truth-telling headline with a satisfied smile, she never realizes her dad is there. That means their seemingly inevitable reconciliation never comes, rendering the moment as a flowery gut punch, daring to suggest that sometimes the cost of doing journalistic business might just be worth it. 

In Memoriam: Tom Skerritt

When Tom Skerritt was recruited to play the lead role in Ridley Scott’s seminal 1979 sci-fi horror movie “Alien,” he was already 46, firmly in middle age and far from heartthrob status. That was appropriate given Scott’s evocative description of his desired aesthetic: “truckers in space.” In his mustache and beard and unkempt hair, Skerritt was less, say, Han Solo than Kris Kristofferson in “Convoy” while his all-around wearied countenance evoked someone making long hauls for a living from one end of the galaxy to the other. My favorite horror movie scene has always been the one when Skerritt’s Captain Dallas is tasked with entering his space tug’s air duct to flush out the eponymous creature with a flamethrower, a task that goes about as well as you’d expect. It ends in a classic jump scare, but it’s how the whole sequence induces dread that makes it count, due in no small part to Skerritt intrinsically echoing the direction and editing to impress upon us a man gradually realizing he is in way over his head. The word “uh” has never sounded so gut-wrenching. 

That made it somewhat ironic when Skerritt was enlisted seven years later by Scott’s brother Tony to play the Top Gun instructor Viper in his 1986 box office bonanza. If “Alien’s” aesthetic was truckers in space, then “Top Gun’s” aesthetic was heartthrobs in the sky, a music video as recruiting ad. In the eventual 2022 sequel, no one was allowed to be bigger than Tom Cruise but in the original, Skerritt was. The way he peered through his horizontal office blinds while lecturing Cruise’s hotshot Maverick, or in how he tilted his head back while leaning one arm on the wing of his plane, he radiated a bravado and supreme authority that all these heavily styled young bucks could not quite match. And in the key scene when Viper tells Maverick the classified story of what happened to the latter’s father, Skerritt takes his character’s clarifying “I won’t blow sunshine up your ass” as gospel, mentoring by pulling no punches. 

Skerritt had much less screen time in 2017’s “Lucky” yet still left an indelible mark. That indie drama belonged to then 91-year-old Harry Dean Stanton in the last year of his life, drawing on the longtime character actor’s lengthy Hollywood history and real-life backstory as a Naval veteran to play the eponymous character, a Naval veteran managing an exacting daily routine in his twilight years. And though the movie was sculpted in Stanton’s image, so, too, did Skerrit’s one scene as an ex-Marine named Fred draw from his own history. Skerritt was a veteran, having served four years in the Air Force, and his character’s monologue recounting a harrowing experience at Okinawa during WWII opened a line all the way back to “Top Gun,” one a militarist fantasy, the other an emotional account of war’s brutal reality. In his air, Skerritt embodies not just a man shaped by experiences most people could not hope to grasp, but one finding solace in being allowed to unburden himself to one of the few he knows will understand.

More Bowl Games That Could Be Movies

“The Mosquito Bowl” was released over the weekend to, eh, well, less than rapturous reviews. Not that reviews matter with such a movie. No, in my experience, “The Mosquito Bowl” is the kind of movie where viewers who accuse critics of having already made up their minds before watching it have, in fact, themselves already made up their minds before watching it. Based on the 2022 book by Buzz Bissinger, the two-hour war film tells the true story of two regiments of American Marines at Guadalcanal in 1944 that played a football game on Christmas Eve dubbed The Mosquito Bowl. It was directed by Peter Berg, our go-to filmmaker for noisy nationalism, and so I understand why in making a movie about a football bowl game he chose The Mosquito Bowl rather than the so-called Atomic Bowl played by two Marine units at Nagasaki six weeks after it was obliterated by an atom bomb. That would have required tact and a multidimensional viewpoint that is not typically part and parcel to the Berg arsenal. Nevertheless. 

Movies and college football bowl games are my two foremost interests, of course, and just as they intersected a couple weeks ago, now they have again. And even if I will likely not see “The Mosquito Bowl,” I am grateful for its existence. Because it’s Election Day in America, after all, and everybody is angry, exhausted, and tense, and I was able to distract myself the last few days by imagining a few real bowl games as fake movie pitches.

More Bowl Games That Could Be Movies

1933 Festival of Palms Bowl. Before the Orange Bowl became a south Florida institution, there was the ramshackle beginning in which principal organizer Earnie Sieler lured Manhattan University to play a middling hometown Miami team for $3,000. Yet, when he couldn’t make the guarantee, Sieler cut a deal with some local bookmakers to make up the rest with the understanding that Miami keep the score relatively close so those bookies, no doubt, could make back their money, a reminder of when gambling in college sports was under the table rather than out in the open and right in your face. Yet, perhaps owing to a combination of Manhattan’s arduous trip and a field in rough shape, Miami did not just keep the inaugural Festival of Palms Bowl close, they won 7-0. And good for them. But in our Festival of Palms Bowl movie, with local bookmakers making not-so-subtle threats, the desperate bowl game organizers must ensure Miami does not beat Manhattan, or else, forcing them to slip Manhattan a teamwide mickey, deliberately sodden the field, deploy a wind machine, steal signals, and send a dog running onto the field at a crucial moment to try and prevent a handicapping calamity. 

1912 Bacardi Bowl. This strange but true version of a bowl game that existed in Havana, Cuba at different points during the first half of the previous century in different iterations was so strange, in fact, that The New York Times filed a report on how Florida football coach George E. Pyle was taken into custody by the police after having some manner of disagreement with the officiating. (The contemporary Times dispatch erroneously calls him “Pyles.”) The one-time Florida sports information director Norm Carlson elaborates: “a Cuban judge...ordered (Pyle) to take his team and get out of town before he put them all in jail.” Ah, but this is a movie, and in our 1912 Bacardi Bowl movie, the Cuban judge will put Pyle in jail, forcing his team to draw up a scheme without the ol’ ball coach’s help to break him out, fleeing the island and justice.  

2003 Hawaii Bowl. This wild-assed affair that ended in overtime with hometown Hawaii winning 54-48 over Houston did not, in fact, end there, but rather with the two teams brawling and throwing punches on the field to such a lengthy and inflamed degree that police had to intervene to break it up. This was more ironic because the game was contested on Christmas Day – and a happy New Year! “The Mosquito Bowl” took place during war, but “The Hawaii Bowl” will demonstrate the price of treating football like war.

1990 Independence Bowl. When the 15th edition of the Shreveport, Louisiana bowl game christened in the year of the United States Bicentennial found itself on the verge of folding, it was resuscitated by virtue of a corporate sponsorship with the since bought out Poulan/Weed Eater, thereby creating the infamous, glorious, ridiculous Poulan/Weed Eater Independence Bowl. Our two-hour drama will not recount the bowl game itself, per se, but the Independence Bowl chairman’s frantic rush to secure corporate sponsorship before the clock runs out. The movie ends with Maryland and Louisiana Tech players looking askance at their Weed Eater gift bags.

1902 Rose Bowl. In the nascent era of the college football playoff, bowl games have wound up on the endangered list. Indeed, Bowl Season executive Nick Carparelli gave the whole extravaganza the vote of confidence just last month and in this business, a vote of confidence is typically the kiss of death. (I honestly did not know that Bowl Season was an official organization. That not only feels inane, like trademarking March Madness, but at odds with the dodgy local hucksterism that bowl games were all about in the first place.) So, let’s make a movie of the first bowl game, the Tournament East-West football game, in which Michigan routed Stanford so badly that as dust swirled and darkness descended, Stanford opted to concede. That is how our 1902 Rose Bowl movie will end, in the dust and darkness, a lyrical eulogy to bowl season itself, one of my absolute favorite things in this world and one that has been rendered archaic gradually, to quote Hemingway, then suddenly.

It Ends

Tyler (Mitchell Cole), James (Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson), and Fisher (Noah Toth) pile into a car for a late-night drive. All four have just graduated college and have different plans, or lack thereof, and are all gripped in their own way by dreaded post-grad malaise. Writer/director/editor Alexander Ullom brings that malaise to life when it becomes apparent that this quartet is stuck on a supernatural two-lane road to nowhere. It’s a little bit “No Exit,” a little bit “Groundhog Day,” a little bit “Gerry,” but really, what I most kept thinking of was Noah Baumbach’s indie comedy “Kicking and Screaming.” There, facing his own post-grad malaise, the surly quasi-sage Max (Chris Eigeman) wishes he could just skip past all of it and right to the end, observing, “I wish I was just retiring after a lifetime of hard labor.” It’s such a 90s sentiment, thinking of retirement as something plausible. When James makes his own observation about the future in “It Ends” it goes a little different: “I think I’d like to be put into some sort of medically induced coma hooked up to serotonin-oxy cocktails.” It brought to mind Chinese youth opting out of their country’s all-consuming rat race by lying flat.

As the drive begins, James and Fisher are having an argument fueled by a meme, less an old-fashioned brain teaser than a new-fangled conundrum, no right or wrong, which not only encapsulates their place in life but also foreshadows the ensuing journey. That journey begins in earnest when Tyler, who is at the wheel, realizes that they did not miss their turn but that their turn was never there in the first place. Bit by bit, they decipher their predicament, propelled by a bottomless gas tank they are stuck on a never-ending country road that is otherwise empty save for hordes of screaming people that descend on them within 30 seconds if they get out of the car and other vehicles that seem to have been abandoned during the course of their own unceasing journeys. The quartet cycles through all the same questions that the audience, no doubt, is asking, gaming out the possibilities. It sounds meta, and on some level, it is, but unlike, say, the ironic detachment of the Gen X “Scream” series, “It Ends” is infused with a Gen Z earnestness. When James wonders if they are, in fact, dead and if this might be some white-lined purgatory, he is not being flip. Neither, though, does that portend a philosophical talkfest like the situation might suggest. The characters proffer a few confessions, but Ullom prefers to let the circumstances and his characters reactions to them impart deeper meaning.

As they first set out on their unwittingly endless voyage, Ullom does not just keep the camera inside of the car, he eschews showing the world outside of it. This does not induce claustrophobia so much as it imparts the unmistakable sense of the characters’ small, constricted world. It is only once the situation reveals itself to them that the camera in turns reveals the outside the world – nothing more, really, than asphalt, trees, and sky. There is a monotony that sets in and if the horror initially starts out more in a traditional sort of register, that gradually falls away, as the car eventually travels so far that the screaming hordes are no longer heard from, and the monotony turns to enervation and then a struggle for acceptance. No one struggles to accept their new reality more than James, who often feels most illustrative of Ullom’s point-of-view, fueled by a desperation to understand, to have this inexplicable situation pay off. It culminates, in a manner of speaking, with an undermining of narrative expectations that is less shaggy dog Sartre than a transcendental version of Topper Harley reading Dickens in “Hot Shots! Part Deux.”