Friday's Old Fashioned: The Trigger Effect (1996)

In “The Trigger Effect,” the power goes out, the phones go down, and the radio doesn’t work. Why, David Koepp’s thriller never says, proving less interested in explaining the problem than in seeing how the problem causes the world at large to react. Not well, it turns out, yielding fear and paranoia in the vein of the old Twilight Zone episode The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, not so subtly alluded to in a close-up of a Maple Street sign. Yet society in “The Trigger Effect” already seems to be teetering before the lights go out. This was longtime screenwriter Koepp’s directorial debut, and he was determined to prove himself, beginning the movie by bringing the title to life with an unbroken four-minute Steadicam shot in a mall (holla, 1996!) conveying a chain reaction of minor annoyances fueling anger and resentment and ending in a movie theater where a couple patrons talking over the film on the screen would seem to set up our protagonist, Matthew Kay (Kyle MacLachlan), to go full George Costanza only for him to chicken out. Later that night, the grid fails and all hell breaks loose.

Apart from one wide shot of Los Angeles going dark, Koepp never zooms out for a wider view of what’s happening, sticking close to Matthew, his wife Annie (Elisabeth Shue), their infant child, and eventually, their friend Joe (Dermot Mulroney) who stays over with things getting sticky. We meet some of Matthew and Annie’s neighbors, including their neighbor across the street, Steph (Bill Smitrovich), who briefly becomes embroiled in the plot, but Koepp prefers seeing the action through this makeshift trio as their own foibles bubble to the surface under the extreme circumstances. Indeed, as that opening suggests, “The Trigger Effect” is almost more interested in various crises of masculinity as in the paranoia and panic of the mob.

In this way, MacLachlan and Mulroney are perfectly matched. The former does solid work as someone insecure in his manliness and, by extension, his marriage. Koepp can occasionally lay that on way too thick, like a child’s electronic game beeping the world “yellow” at him as provocation to get him to steal his child’s penicillin when the pharmacist won’t distribute it in lieu of a prescription, but you can also feel him in virtually every moment trying to fill the shoes of what might have been a typical sort of male lead. Joe’s sudden showing up almost feels too convenient, but Mulroney sells it by making the character get a kick out of being a fly in the ointment. As for Annie, an insinuation about her checkered past suggests a femme fatale, though there is no real follow through, and is less interesting than some intriguing notes in Shue’s performance of significant postpartum depression that, alas, has nowhere to go. (Richard Schiff’s one scene appearance as a shady gun shop owner also deserves special mention. Schiff was born to play a shady gun shop owner.)

The gaps in the character of Annie show up in other elements of Koepp’s screenplay. Though we are made to believe that the structure of society is wobbling, the two times when the story requires police, they appear quickly and effortlessly. Everything also fits together neatly in the end, evoked in the recurring appearances of a tertiary character, Raymond (Richard T. Jones). Then again, I wonder if that is merely the ultimate evocation of the title. Raymond is one of the characters in the movie theater in the opening scene that Matthew fails to confront and when that moment comes full circle, the deliberate lack of a physical payoff becomes the emotional release. And tidy though it may be, Koepp does at least make room for one final bit of moral ambiguity, ensuring that even if the power returns, we understand that things cannot quite ever return to normal.

Zero Out of Two Ain’t Bad

If I were to make a movie that revolved around one Nebraska football game, what game would I choose? I might choose the gridiron Gothic novel that was the 2009 Big 12 Championship Game; it has been 17 years and I’m still not sure I’ve fully recovered. Or I might choose the 2015 game at Illinois that I attended in person on a cold, dark, drizzly, dismal afternoon that Friend of the Blog Jaime deemed the worst day of her life and not really even because Nebraska lost in the last second in the most eggheaded fashion possible. (It’s a long story.) Both those games involved a crushing defeat, and that’s because crushing defeat makes for better drama and revelation. It’s why even if I understand the appeal of, say, making a movie about former Nebraska coach Tom Osborne winning his elusive national championship in the 1995 Orange Bowl, that one comes across a little too much like a traditional sports movie. No, I think if you were going to make a movie of one Nebraska football game, and it was a game not based on personal predilections, you would have to choose a different Orange Bowl.

The 50th version of the venerated college football bowl game found 11-0 Nebraska trying to stake its claim as the greatest team of all time only to suffer a breathtaking 31-30 upset to Miami when Osborne famously eschewed settling for a tie that undoubtedly would have assured his team finishing #1 in the polls (this was the pre-overtime era) to go for the win on a two-point conversion that failed. “(T)he simple fact is that the Husker head coach played it the way sports are meant to be played,” Michael Kelley would write for the Omaha World Herald the next day. “And, perhaps, the way life should be played. Go for it.” Bob Smizik of The Pittsburgh Press saw it in more multi-dimensional terms, citing the coach’s decision as “a rare display of courage, arrogance and selfishness.” Aw yeah, that’s the good dramatic stuff. And so, it’s not a surprise that the Nebraska football movie slated to be released this Friday, “Going for Two,” is set against the backdrop of that 1984 Orange Bowl. 

IMDb explains: “Fall. 1983. While their beloved college football team vies for the National Championship, a fatherless 12-year-old boy (Jimmy) and his tomboy neighbor (Frankie) embark on a quest for his ‘manhood.’” Written and directed by Cornhusker state native Kathleen Welch Markel, she originally took the script to Hollywood only to be told by various so and sos that they would rather someone else direct. Instead, she filmed it in Nebraska through Omaha-based production company North Sea Films. She went for it, in other words, just as Osborne did in 1984. Indeed, in explaining all this to Kasey Mintz of Hastings, Nebraska’s KSNB, Markel called the coach a role model, marking “Going for Two” as autobiographical, just with a young boy as her own proxy. I’ll be honest, the trailer emits some serious “Stolen Summer” vibes, the saccharine coming-of-age movie that won the first season of Project Greenlight, but I don’t want to judge the movie by its trailer. I am rooting for this movie like I have rooted for the Cornhuskers every autumn Saturday for the last 40 years of my life.

Aside from conventional sports documentaries, there have not really been any movies that involve Nebraska football. (Unless you count the unexpected Jordan Westerkamp Hail Mary scene in Zoey Deutch’s 2018 romantic comedy “Set It Up.”) The only one I know of is “The Good Life.” Written and directed by Stepehen Berra, a professional skateboarder who partially grew up in Omaha, that 2007 coming-of-age indie drama was about young outsider (Mark Webber) in Lincoln, Nebraska enduring the cult of the state’s collegiate football team and its sainted coach. He takes refuge in an MPDG (Zooey Deschanel) and classic movies (the late Harry Dean Stanton played a theater owner). I do not begrudge Berra’s animosity toward Cornhusker culture. I’ve seen it up close and if it’s not something to which you relate, the ubiquity can be exhausting just as the expectation of conformity can be galling. But then, my own love of Nebraska football stems directly from non-conformity. And if Berra felt slighted by his community, I felt slighted by “The Good Life” given how it equates a love of Nebraska football and of old movies as being incompatible. I’m living, breathing proof that they’re not. If you want to do a double feature of the Judy Garland “A Star Is Born” and the 1985 Sugar Bowl on YouTube, I’m your guy. I don’t mean to demean Berra’s vision, I really don’t, he felt how he felt, that’s fair, but I’d just like to think that perhaps these two films can exist side-by-side in spirit, two sides of the Cornhusker football coin, what it takes and what it provides. Go Big Red.

Obsession

What’s old is always new. That even goes for a Gen Z coded comedy-horror hybrid like “Obsession” that dusts off the old Monkey’s Paw trope. In this case, the dangerous wish is granted to a twentysomething socially anxious nice guy who wants nothing more than the girl of his dreams to love him back. Writer/director Curry Barker emerged from the world of short form Internet comedy and his feature film debut has the feel of someone who watched, say, Richard Curtis’s “About Time,” realized there was something (more than) a little creepy about a man using his ability to time travel to win the girl of his dreams, and decided to make a romantic comedy by twisting the tonal dial one degree to the right. And yet, for all its ingenuity at toying with genre tropes, “Obsession” winds up in a blind alley not unlike the forebearers it would jab so often do. What’s old is always new.

That socially anxious male is Bear (Michael Johnson) and his crush on Nikki (Inde Navarrette) is not so much unrequited as unexpressed by him, evoked in an opening fake out where he practices spilling his guts. When given the chance, though, and even when she asks him point-blank if he likes her, he cannot summon the courage to confess. So, when Bear goes to purchase a replacement necklace for one Nikki has lost, he instead buys a One Wish Willow novelty stick. It is a selfless action manifesting instead as a selfish one, in other words, and with an air of desperation in his voice, he wishes that she would love him more than anyone else in the world. It’s “Big” metamorphosing into “Fatal Attraction” as Nikki becomes clingy, codependent, and crazy in a way that haunts the nightmares of men’s rights activists everywhere. And even as Bear seeks a way to reverse the process, he simultaneously remains reluctant to do so, wavering between each course of action. Indeed, if the ending evokes nothing less than Romeo and Juliet, Bear’s tragic flaw is not impetuousness but cowardice, the nice guy archetype rewired as the worst guy ever.

Horror movies often walk a fine line between macabre and humor, where what you are seeing becomes so horrifying that involuntarily, you almost can’t help but laugh. And maybe owing to his background, Barker demonstrates a penchant for walking that line throughout, like a sequence in which a steering wheel is remade into a battering ram, a gruesome visual reinterpretation of The Laughing Song. The casualty in that sequence is Sarah (Megan Lawless), who harbors her own unrequited crush on Bear, a character that the movie never really sees because Bear never really sees her either. No, Barker would yoke us to Bear’s point-of-view, to suffer along with him as he suffers his own lack of self-awareness and failure to act. The thing is, Barker intermittently violates this idea, such as in a comically frightening shot held of Nikki at home after Bear has departed, or in the camera moving independently of Bear when he and Nikki go out to dinner. It reminded me a little of “J*ker,” honestly, an ostensibly provocative movie that undermined its own provocations with a muddled point-of-view that it did not seem to understand as muddled. 

Nikki is intended to be seen through Bear’s point-of-view too. That’s why she remains something close to a cipher, a projection of his own desires as much a real person, and when she becomes supernaturally possessed on account of his wish, she in turn becomes a terrifying exaggeration of those desires. “Obsession” furthers that idea by rendering Nikki as being aware of her fate, lived in episodes where she snaps back and is present before essentially being reclaimed by the evil spirit inside her, creating a host of conflicting emotions and registers that Navarrette skillfully toggles between and melds together to create a breathless portrait of a person literally possessed. The real Nikki is there, in other words, not just the amplified projection, and asking Bear for help. Yet this imaginative touch effectively opens its own Pandora’s Box of moral complications. If Nikki is sentient, scenes of her and Bear sleeping together become nothing less than sexual assault, which “Obsession” does not gloss over so much as not even recognize in the first place, a revealing omission. What’s more, the headlong rush of a conclusion that brings Bear face to face with the outer limits of his own self-absorption turns the concluding shot into a punchline that simultaneously just writes Nikki off. It’s clear that she’s a victim, but of whom? Bear? Barker? Or both?

Friday's Old Fashioned: 36 Hours (1964)

The 1964 thriller “36 Hours” was based on Roald Dahl’s 1944 short story “Beware of the Dog” in which an RAF pilot seems to wake up in an English hospital only to gradually realize that, no, he’s in France and this is all a ruse by the Germans to have him divulge secret information. Carl K. Hittleman and Luis Vance’s adaptation changes the pilot to an American one for the purposes of Hollywood, I imagine, seemingly in a U.S. hospital several years after the conclusion of WWII only to realize he has been captured by Germans seeking to uncover information about D-Day. Though it was well reviewed in its time, star James Garner apparently said in his 2011 autobiography that “36 Hours” failed because the known outcome of June 6th, 1944, negated any real suspense. If I may, Mr. Garner seems too harsh a judge of his own work. Knowing how D-Day turned out does not prove an impediment to suspense so much as it helps create an external obstacle for the writers and filmmaker to creatively generate it.

After Major Jefferson Pike (Garner) receives a final briefing on the Normandy invasion, he high-tails it to Lisbon to meet an informant, only to be drugged and kidnapped by the Third Reich. It’s an impressive sequence in which the musical score metamorphoses midway through a jauntier one in the vein of a light-hearted spy thriller to something far more dangerous and foreboding, underlining the dueling tones of the movie itself. The phony American hospital where Pike is unknowingly imprisoned becomes a big soundstage, essentially, with all manner of extras in one enormous show featuring Major Walter Gerber (Rod Taylor) as director, and Anna Hedler (Eva Marie Saint) as leading lady in the role of both Pike’s nurse and wife, and SS agent Schack (Werner Peters) as the megalomaniacal producer. Indeed, Schack is dubious of Gerber’s methods from the get-go, giving the Major a 36-hour window to extract the information they need before he will intervene and employ more traditional methods of torture. When Pike discovers the truth, however, he must quickly strategize to mislead his captors to ensure the invasion of Normandy goes forward without a hitch.

Gerber does not buy his prisoner’s subterfuge, though Schack does, and so “36 Hours” also utilizes the foregone conclusion of D-Day and Schack’s cocksure insistence that Normandy can’t possibly be the landing place to portray the Germans as hard-headed, oblivious idiots. That goes even further when Pike eventually makes his escape in the company of Anna, helped along the way by Ernst Furzen (John Banner), a border guard in the German national militia. Accepting a bribe to help them cross the border into Switzerland, Furzen is as corrupt as he is laughingly disenchanted with those ostensibly in charge of him, mocking the Fuhrer and plugging Schack in the back when he comes after the escapees before spitting on the dead body. It’s a character that cuts the whole regime down to size, more so than Gerber anyway, who initially comes across insidious in the way he ingratiates himself with Pike to acquire information before the truth is revealed and both men evince grudging respect for one another as men merely doing their jobs. A N*zi doing his job is still, like, you know, a N*zi. 

Indeed, it’s a bit telling that Pike shrugs off Gerber’s betrayal but seethes at Anna’s. She, however, has more reason to be angry than anyone, forcibly drafted from a concentration camp and told she will go back if she does not aid their cause. And that brings us Eva Marie Saint, who recently died at the age of 102, and was the reason I watched “36 Hours” in the first place. When her character is initially excoriated by Pike, Saint has Anna remain utterly neutral, like the pain she has endured has not only numbed her but is beyond anything he can possibly comprehend. If “36 Hours” portrays its N*zis as idiots and evilly banal bureaucrats, Anna’s monologue in the middle of their escape reminds you just how abominable they really are. Saint’s delivery of it is cold, clinical, and through the prism of time, comes across like an Old Hollywood moment hinting at the New. What really stayed with me, though, was an earlier moment before Pike has gleaned his reality, still under the impression she is his wife. As he and Anna converse, Seaton films it so that she is in the foreground with her back to him, glancing at him over her shoulder, trying to detect if he detects anything amiss, playing the part while simultaneously let the toll of doing so seep through.

Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo)

Rico (Juan Collado) is 19 years old, lives with his Dominican mom and sister (Yohanna Florentino and Nathaly Navarro, respectively) in their Bronx apartment and has no grand plan beyond shilling bootleg cocktails on local beaches, and then getting drunk himself, and then waking and baking the next morning and doing it all over again. But when his 16-year-old girlfriend Destiny (Destiny Checo) tells him she’s pregnant, he is forced to grow up in a hurry. Well, let’s say it requires him to grow up in a hurry as writer/director Joel Alfonso Vargas’s low-budget indie takes place in that liminal space between realizing you need to grow up and, in fact, doing it. Rico wants to keep the baby if only to prove he’s not the man his father was, even if he keeps slipping into his father’s old habits, lurching between talking a big game about personal responsibility and then getting fired and coming home drunk, brought home in Collado’s oft-exasperated and occasionally exasperating performance demonstrating the supreme difficulty of metaphorically just managing to walk with one foot in front of the other. Those oscillating emotions are enhanced by the portrayal of Rico and his family, introduced screaming at one another before a quick cut shows them sharing a sweet moment, like the previous one never happened, illustrating in equal measure the pressures that go with living and very real love. 

Vargas accentuates such emotional fluctuation with a visual strategy of static frames and long takes, evoking the movie as one carved from slice of life observation more than any kind of electric plotting, and just sort of letting moments both big and small play themselves out in what feels like real time. The basic elements are familiar, and Rico can even sometimes be a bear to hang around, though that makes you feel like everyone else in his orbit, wanting to shake him and tell him to get it together because just enough sweetness emerges to make you want to believe in him. And though the focus is on Rico, “Mad Bills” never loses sight of Destiny, who moves in with his family and then moves out, coming into her own even as Rico struggles to do the same. The end sneaks up on you. It’s neither happy nor sad, pitched in that uncertain space between, Rico and Destiny clutching one another’s hand in a way that made me think of, well, who else but Bruce Springsteen: “Well, cuddle up, angel, cuddle up, my little dove, and we’ll ride down, baby, into this tunnel of love.”

One Night Only

Will Gluck’s would-be dystopian romantic comedy “One Night Only” takes place in a fictional version of America on the lone evening each year when outlawed premarital sex is officially legal for 12 hours. This means it comes across like a copycat version of The Purge series in which all crime is made legal for one 24-hour-period a year, as if some Universal executive yearned to get a piece of the Blumhouse horror pie. Travis Braun’s screenplay, however, was already on the so-called black list, promising scripts not yet produced, and plucked from there. I wonder, though, if everyone who read it and deemed it so promising was merely engaging with the overriding premise and not the nuts and bolts. Because romantic comedies are as much about plotting as they are about premise and despite the outrageous concept of “One Night Only,” the only thing outrageous about it is just how banal and prudish it proves to be. It’s as if John Carpenter envisioned the prison of “Escape from New York” as a white-collar, minimum-security resort, to quote “Office Space.” If not for the sequin minidress that Monica Barbaro spends most of the movie wearing, this would be the perfect sex comedy for your church lock-in. 

The central couple of “One Night Only” is aspiring singer Allie (Barbaro) and pizza place owner Owen (Callum Turner). She seeks an emotional connection as much as a 12-hour-fling while he seems to have already emotionally connected with Malika (Maya Hawke) to whom he plans to propose the night of the sex purge only for her to ditch him to try and sew some oats. In the aftermath of this heartbreak, Owen encounters Allie, they get to talking and forge a possible connection only for it go awry when Owen, uh, regurgitates his sushi dinner right in front of her. Relationships based on projectile vomit never work, I think is what Sandra Bullock said in “Speed.” As far as meet cutes go, this one isn’t much, causing as much gross discomfort as romantic tension. That lack of tension is underscored in their similar frames of mind. Even when they encounter other characters with whom they intend to sleep, Allie and Owen are portrayed as romantically chaste, meaning that the attendant plot complication of them scouring the city for a condom has no juice. Their need to fornicate is not dire. It says something that the hottest sequence in the whole movie turns out to be imaginary.

Like so much in “One Night Only,” their quest raises more questions than the movie is willing to answer. When Allie and Owen try to purchase the last remaining piece of protection at a convenience store, they become the victims of price-gouging, and though eventually Allie resorts to pilfering it, this is played for broad comedy rather than satire. The ideas that such price gouging intrinsically suggest, remain unexplored if not avoided altogether throughout. When Owen seems to stumble across a sexual assault on the street, it is revealed as nothing more than a movie being filmed, allowing for a couple brief celebrity cameos, shiny distractions from the complications to which the fake-out inherently alludes. That’s the thing, on some level “One Night Only” is aware of the dark side lingering just out of sight, but actively puts on blinkers, never curious about all the repeal signs in windows just as it is incurious about the looming specter of violence. For the most part, everyone on the streets just looks like the happy extra in a musical, content to play along with this one night only, I guess. When one character says, “I guess the fascists were right,” it’s a dumb joke that might have exposed the “One Night Only’s” point of view except it goes to such lengths to render its two characters as virtuous that I’m not even sure why we needed the fascism in the first place.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Branded to Kill (1967)

The two best movies I have seen so far in 2026 are not new movies but new-to-me movies. The first, 1987’s historical phantasm “Walker,” was so reviled in its time that it got writer/director Alex Cox blacklisted from Hollywood. (Cox, in fact, just released a new Kickstarter-funded movie this year and I really need to catch up with it.) The second, 1967’s surrealist Yakuza crime drama “Branded to Kill,” was so confounding to audiences and bigwigs that writer/director Seijun Suzuki was blacklisted by the Japanese film industry for a decade. What is this, what’s going on here, why are my two favorite films so far this year ones that left their filmmakers ostracized? Is this pure coincidence, or in this destabilizing moment in time, when AI is threatening to reorient the whole idea of art, am I subconsciously seeking genuine, full-throated artists that aren’t just feeding prompts into some app to do all the creative legwork but following their own emotions, instincts, predilections, and tastes right over the waterfall.

As “Branded to Kill” opens, the Japanese underworld’s third-ranked contract killer, Goro Hanada (Joe Shishido), arrives in Tokyo to do a job, greeted by a taxi driver, Kasuga (Hiroshi Minami), who was once a high-ranking hitman but now a shell of himself, bemoaning his old dream of being #1. This is truly hilarious dialogue equating Yakuza assassins with NFL or NBA power rankings, constantly being revised by some keyboard drone after the latest killing. Indeed, there is not much to the character of Hanada beyond his occupation. Through that light, the title assumes an almost deadpan air, as if hitmen are just livestock electrically branded by their employers. All that defines him are the jobs he does and his preeminent sexual fetish of sniffing rice. His own wife, Mami (Mariko Ogawa), who cavorts with the man who has hired Hanada out in the open, deems the two of them beasts, demonstrated in how their relationship is nothing more, really, than an endless series of primal urges, two figurative pigs raised to slaughter.

In its jump cuts and playful attitude toward gangster tropes, “Branded to Kill” suggests a Yakuza movie by way of the French New Wave, and it was one of the latter movement’s most famous figures, Jean-Luc Godard, who noted that all you needed to make a movie was a girl and a gun. As if honoring and elaborating on that sentiment, Suzuki includes a gun and two girls. In addition, to his wife, Hanada becomes smitten with the mysterious, mesmerizing Misako (Annu Mari). She enlists him to perform a superhuman job, one requiring a single shot so precise it is nigh impossible, and when it goes wrong, he is marked for death, told in no uncertain terms that the #1 ranked hitman will now have to take his life. Misako is introduced standing in the rain, and frequently posed in frames between fountains, and so if water emblemizes the unconscious, so does Misako emblemize Hanada’s. Her obsession with death, suggesting a noir version of the suicidal woman in the art gallery in “Play It Again, Sam,” echoes Hanada’s own. During one hallucinatory sequence where he gets drunk and wanders the streets, the hitman seems to be taking the end of life out for virtual spin. 

Yet, if that makes “Branded to Kill” sound like some arduous dark night of the soul, I cannot stress enough how despite such subject matter, it is also an absolute blast to watch on account of Suzuki’s almost euphoric formalist kick. In an interview with The Criterion Channel in 2011, Suzuki indicated his motivations did not really extend much beyond making the most entertaining movie possible and in one mid-movie sequence where Hanada knocks off three men right in a row, he brings that manifesto to life by dreaming up increasingly unorthodox hits. This rapid-fire sequence begins with a rifle emerging from the moving lips of a cigarette billboard and concludes on a getaway via advertising balloon. The last shot is a gas and is extra fascinating to compare against one earlier in the movie when another assassin runs out of a building on fire, demonstrating how Suzuki mixes blood curdling chills with boisterous comedy just as much as he mixes intense close-ups with thoughtful long shots and coats so much of it in a dissonant jazz score, the whole mélange epitomizing the absurdity of life itself. That absurdity is never more paramount than in the droll, winding denouement that finds the #1 ranked hitman animating his observation that killers cannot be human by endlessly tormenting Hanada before they finally come to face to face in a boxing ring in something akin to an existential sports movie ending on a note of irony so grim that it might as well be the most mirthless chuckle you’ve ever heard.