250 Years Burning Down the Road

I remember the exact moment when it dawned on me for the first time that I would probably not live to see the United States of America’s Tricentennial. It was my sixth-grade class with Miss Carlson, and not my fourth-grade class with the same Miss Carlson, because it was fifth grade in-between when I formed my lifelong fascination with the American War of Independence and related Founding Fathers history. And when we touched on our country’s 200th anniversary of signing the Declaration of Independence, Miss Carlson humorously noted that because everyone in the classroom was born a year or two after July 4, 1976, we would need to live to be roughly 99 years old to see the tricentennial. Everyone laughed, but I was heartbroken. I could not even conceive of 2076 in my mind at that point, but I knew it was far away and my odds of getting there were long. No, the semiquincentennial was going to have to be it for me. Little did I know that 2026 would be the year the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of King George III would appear in the district named for George Washington to subtly remind the light-of-brain 47th American President of his being a chief executive of a constitutional democracy, not a king. The British army probably did not play The World Turned Upside Down at Yorktown, the 1781 battle sealing the whole American Revolution deal, just as nobody played it after King Charles III spoke to Congress, but you could hear its figurative echo.

Of course, the older I got and the more history I read, the more I realized that missing the American Bicentennial was no tragedy. Despite something approximating its best efforts, the celebration could never expunge the pungent fumes of Watergate and Vietnam; if anything, Gerald Ford pardoning his Presidential predecessor to move on, as they say, probably only made the stench worse. What’s more, in a real what’s old is new sort of situation, the Bicentennial being used to sell so much commemorative schlock echoes our current President hawking his own Freedom 250™ crap. Perhaps our country has always been about crass commercialism as much as constitutionalism. The big exposition of 1876 meant to celebrate the American Centennial, meanwhile, was as much a for-profit trade show as much as anything, and while the Civil War was technically in the rearview mirror, Jim Crow was just ramping up. (It might be ramping up again.) The sesquicentennial in 1926 was deemed America’s Greatest Flop. All this got me to thinking about my favorite July Fourths. I liked the one where my parents threw a party and my dad’s best friend brought his ice cream maker; I liked the one where a couple of my friends and I went and saw “Terminator 3” in lieu of fireworks; I liked the one where My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I went to a small carnitas place where the air conditioning barely worked and then we watched A Capitol Fourth on PBS and went to bed early. Maybe the less momentous the 4th of July, the more memorable.

Just as the founders erected so many figurative guardrails to hold the country together, I find myself wondering if the Divine Providence namechecked in our declaration incorporates bad feelings if not outright existential threats to ensure our biggest national celebratory milestones are mindful rather than mindless. Yet, even if we accept this premise, it seems like Divine Providence laid it on a little thick for 250. After all, our nation’s capital was specifically designed by Pierre L’Enfant to evoke constitutional democracy and yet our know-nothing President has spent the run-up to the semiquincentennial running roughshod over Washington D.C. He trashed the White House ellipse for a bloody spectacle as glorification of his massive ego and reduced its east wing to rubble to construct a ballroom less about security than blighting the people’s house for eternity. He has put his name and face on every building he can, trying to make the nation state synonymous with himself, and sought to plant 47 trees in Lafayette Park to remake the nationally protected public space named for America’s greatest friend in liberty in his own image. He has brayed endlessly about constructing a 250-foot arch which he undoubtedly believes will be his own gold-accented pyramid to earn his way to the afterlife while his attempts to transform the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool into the MGM Grand Pool Complex in Las Vegas by draining it and painting the bottom so-called American Flag Blue instead turned the whole thing Hi-C Ecto Cooler green and became the ultimate reflection of his T*ump-brand tyranny, self-perceived infallibility, blatant grift, and awe-inspiring incompetence colliding to manifest uproarious, infuriating, depressing unintentional comedy and conspiracy theories. He repeatedly claims to be a builder, but his greatest gift is for destruction. 

As the President went about laying waste, Bruce Springsteen exercised his constitutional right to protest about it by taking to the road in April and May for the Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour (slogan: No Kings), including the United Center in Chicago in late April where I saw him. Wearing a black vest over a white button-town and black tie and indulging in several between-song monologues expressing his belief in core American values, he cut the image of a revivalist preacher whose text was the Constitution rather than the Bible. His air was less spirited than solemn, however, and frankly, the music and the way he structured his setlist said what needed to be said all on its own. He made his anti-ICE protest anthem “Streets of Minneapolis” a centerpiece, but objectively, it paled when put side-by-side with his earlier work, putting into perspective how his own songbook was already built for this moment. That howl of desperation for “The Promised Land” never hit so hard, the contradictions of “No Surrender” were never so poignant, and a full band “Ghost of Tom Joad” in which Bruce let co-star Tom Morello cook on guitar was electrifying, not so much summoning the specter of the eponymous “Grapes of Wrath” character as reminding us he was still there, in Minneapolis and in Memphis and in Chicago. He was probably at the reflecting pool, too, maybe played by Will Ferrell instead of Henry Fonda, incredulous, but there. “Wherever there’s a national guardsman, ma, yawning with nothing to do, I’ll be there.”

Nothing hit harder than “Wrecking Ball.” Springsteen has composed quite a few politically motivated songs in the new century, though none have proven more durable as a 21st century American national anthem than “Wrecking Ball.” Written in the fall of 2009 when he and The E Street Band played a five-night stand to close Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey ahead of its demolition the ensuing year, the eventual title track of his 2012 album anthropomorphizes an 80,000-seat concrete edifice as it defiantly stares down its own imminent destruction. It sounds impossible, such a song working at all, and even with a powerhouse performance by The E Street Band, the subject matter can make for some clunky lines. But Springsteen is a keen songwriter and he knows that the reverence Americans tend to feel for certain sports stadiums allows the song to work as a broader allegory of recalcitrant institutions and the implacable forces that would seek to destroy them, and that even if they succeed, a deeper and stronger spirit prevails. Indeed, “Wrecking Ball” is not elegiac but jubilant, evinced in its f major chord and in the climactic solo call and response of “hard times come and hard times go” five times fast giving life to that endless American ebb and flow, punctuated by taunting the wrecking ball to bring it on, suggesting that whatever you can destroy, we can rebuild, achieving something I am positive only Bruce Springsteen could: effecting Alexis de Tocqueville’s famed observation that American democracy’s special sauce is “being able to repair the faults (it) may commit” as a rock and roll anthem told from the perspective of a football stadium. 

“Wrecking Ball’s” message of “hold(ing) tight to your anger and (not falling) to your fear” can admittedly sound of its time, the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis and the early days of the Obama administration, when fanciful words like hope and change were in the air. Those eventually ran up against the hard but necessary realities of political compromise but more than that, the 44th President never seemed to see, or maybe just never could bring himself to believe the dark forces that were conspiring against his rosy vision. And yet, at the recent opening of his presidential library, he struck the same optimistic tone that first made him famous, in a way evoking why so many young people are obsessed these days with the twenty-tens. It felt better. Of course, such nostalgia can feel naive, and so did President Obama’s optimism, frankly, in advance of Freedom 250™. That sort of tension, though, between belief and a lack of it, animated our founding, and has been animating us ever since, and has animated Bruce Springsteen’s music too, whether or not people have allowed themselves to hear it. He has written constantly about the dark side of America, and at the same time, he has never stopped believing in it, the famed arc of justice always at a standstill, as it was on April 29th at the United Center. He said his piece about current affairs, but he structured his setlist to let a little light back in when things got dark. He held tight to his anger; he refused to fall to his fear. 

Famously, the 555-foot Washington Monument was designed by Robert Mills not to instill a sense of triumph but uplift, the emphasis of its verticality carrying your eyes up toward the sky as if appealing to our better angels. In recent times, however, with the apathy, obsequiousness, and whole-hearted shamelessness that has settled over not just our politics but civic life, it has been hard not to feel as if our better angels have taken their harps and gone home. If I have not always believed in the country itself, I have always believed in the idea of this country, though after so much of the citizenry’s collective shrugging off of January 6th as no big deal, I confess, I have never struggled to maintain belief so much. Does an idea cease to be enough when the ensuing course of action drifts so far from it? A funny thing happened, though, when My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I recently returned her hometown of Washington D.C. We were coming back from dinner in Alexandria in a car and I realized that from certain vantage points, all the construction, cranes, and fencing that currently blot the capital’s landscape disappeared and left only a view of the Washington Monument, an impervious, immovable testament to its namesake’s intrinsic example that no one man is greater than the country. And for those few moments I did not hear the echoes of The World Turned Upside Down but of Bruce Springsteen, daring our wannabe fascist of a President to bring on his wrecking ball.

 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Getting Even (1986)

The 1986 action-thriller “Getting Even” is a moving picture testament to that moment in time when Dallas, Texas captured the imagination of and evoked a swaggering attitude endemic of Me Decade America. It was co-produced by Mike Liddle and Al Hill Jr., the latter the grandson of H.L. Hunt and heir to the Hunt Oil Company, meaning “Getting Even” was infused with oil money and something like an opportunity to transform Big D into a movie town. Indeed, it was filmed not only on location in Dallas but by utilizing Dallas equipment and locations to which the producers had access, as director Dwight H. Little explained in an interview with The Flashback Files. What’s more, Little has said he was hired as director specifically because he was non-union. That’s hilarious, evoking a certain kind of wildcatting spirit and goes a long way toward describing what “Getting Even” is: effectively a B-movie made with an A-movie attitude. And though I can’t speak to how it looked or played in a theater on February 28, 1986, alongside “Pretty in Pink,” of course, just how it came across 40 years later on VHS rip uploaded to YouTube, I gotta say, I was smitten, and which is why I give it my full-throated endorsement. Get even with modern Hollywood by skipping the theater this summer to stay home and watch “Getting Even” on YouTube! 

In keeping with its era-specificity, “Getting Even” opens in Afghanistan where a one-time soldier turned soldier of fortune, Tag Taggar (Edward Albert), is pilfering lethal Russian nerve gas to transport back to Big D for analysis. It does not take long, however, for a wealthy rancher with a grudge against Yankees, King Kenderson (Joe Don Baker), to pilfer the nerve gas for himself, threatening to unleash it unless Tag coughs up an exorbitant ransom. Though the poster makes Tag look like Remo Williams, the characterization and Albert’s performance are anything but, more like a suave Robert Goulet filtered through Timothy Dalton’s James Bond. This is ironic given that Baker played the villain Timothy Dalton’s 1987 Bond movie “The Living Daylights,” though in “Getting Even” he lays his Lone Star heritage on thick, even as that heritage simultaneously makes for another of the movie’s weird ironies. Kenderson’s mission statement might literally be explicated as not messing with Texas, yet by threatening Dallas with the stolen gas, is he not, himself, in fact, messing with Texas?

Meh, who cares. The plot is but a thread on which to hang “Getting Even’s” myriad action scenes and running but a brisk 90 minutes, Little keeps those scenes coming at a good pace while utilizing so many action-thriller sound effects of grunts, screams, and machine gun fire to make for a hog-killin’ time. A car chase concludes on the Texas State Fairgrounds and involves a bad guy climbing the old Comet rollercoaster with the Dallas skyline as a backdrop, a delightful manifestation of Roger Ebert’s Climbing Killer theory, just as Tag deactivating a bomb at the top of Reunion Tower while King blasts away at him from a nearby hovering helicopter makes for a merry embodiment of Roger Ebert’s digital readout on the ticking time bomb cliché while also encapsulating the daredevil nature of 80s action moviemaking. “They were flying that (helicopter) thirty feet away from the tower,” Little told Flashback Files. “You could never shoot something like that today, not in a million years.” Yet, even as it frequently goes big, “Getting Even” is equally good at thinking small, like a sequence in which Tag is roped by some evil rodeo henchmen; I laughed out loud during that scene and I mean that as a compliment. Even better is the moment when Tag’s team runs a simulation of estimated casualties should the nerve gas be released. A helicopter hovering next to Reunion Tower is a whimsical reminder of the era, but so, too, are the dread-inducing graphics on a 1986 desktop computer. 

Some Drivel On...Trapped

It was sheer coincidence that I happened to watch “Trapped” (2002) not long after watching “Apex” (reviewed Monday), two one-word titled Charlize Theron thrillers 24 years apart, providing an inadvertent if revealing window into the ebb and flow of the Hollywood middling thriller. In the former, Theron and Stuart Townsend star as Karen and Will Jennings, mother and father to young Abigail (Dakota Fanning) who is abducted by a trio of kidnappers (Kevin Bacon, Courtney Love, and Pruitt Taylor Vince) that holds her for ransom. It suggests Joel Schumacher’s “Trespass” (2011) not just in its overtones of a home invasion thriller but more crucially, in its totally bonkers energy, epitomized in director Luis Mandoki’s overheated aesthetic and screenwriter Greg Iles’s commitment to kooky sensationalism much more than convincing characters. The kidnappers are set up as shrewd and thorough, only to come across as anything but, not that gaps in logic mean much. “You are here for the smoked meat,” the server said to My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife when we went to Schwarz’s Deli in Montreal and if you watch “Trapped,” you are here for Courtney Love’s screw-is-loose performance, the You-Cannot-Be-Serious twist, and Will being introduced flying a seaplane all so he can land a seaplane on a highway during the car chase climax. I did not believe this climax, of course, but I did not believe it in the way one cannot believe, say, a Knicks 29-point comeback in Game 4 of the NBA Finals. And so, while “Apex” was made in the indifference-inducing house style of Netflix, “Trapped” at least piques a perverse sense of curiosity that makes you want to watch if for no other reason than to wonder, “What’s this movie on about then?”  

Apex

“Apex” begins with an adrenaline junkie couple, Sasha (Charlize Theron) and Tommy (Eric Bana), at a risk-taking crossroads inside a tent suspended in mid-air alongside a sheer vertical rock face. She wants to keep climbing despite the bad weather while he is starting to wonder if maybe she needs to stop seeking quite so many thrills and frankly, it’s remarkable just how much these two wily acting vets sell this scene. Yet, even if its purpose is partly to induce terrifying vertigo with a shot looking out the tent, these introductory narrative moves of Baltasar Kormákur’s straight-to-Netflix-streaming action-thriller are so cozy and reassuring that it’s like slipping into a warm bath. Do I need to tell you that Sasha is riddled with guilt when Tommy perishes on the rock face? Flash ahead five months and Sasha is traversing a remote Australian National Park where, a ranger warns, numerous people have gone missing. Sure enough, the genial local Ben (Taron Egerton) who helps her fend off a few loutish red herrings turns out to be a cannibalistic psycho. Game on! What ensues suggests an outback horror-thriller, like “Wake in Fright,” crossed with “Surviving the Game,” as Ben gives Sasha a head start in the wilderness and then gives chase. For his part, Egerton plays Ben like a simmering kettle, really letting his insanity escalate before unleashing. Theron, on the other hand, while evincing as much resolve as desperation, is done a disservice by a script that does not explore nor even so much as just momentarily wonder whether this diabolical version of the most dangerous game reactivates in her a macabre rush of adrenaline. It speaks to a lack of deeper emotional layer or even a true sense of surprise, no matter how intense the stunts might be, meaning “Apex” ultimately is a thriller that just regresses to the middling mean.

Friday's Old Fashioned: When Time Ran Out... (1980)

Paul Newman and Jacqueline Bisset react to special effects.

“When Time Ran Out…” is an appropriate title given that it effectively marked the end of producer Irwin Allen’s brief run in the 1970s as Hollywood’s master of disaster with “The Poseidon Adventure” and “The Towering Inferno.” Neither were any great shakes, but they were virtual barnburners next to this low-energy abomination that Leonard Matlin cheekily termed When Ideas Run Out. Maybe, but director James Goldstone’s bomb started as a re-telling of the 1902 Mount Pelée disaster, only for Allen somewhere along the line to call off a dramatization of real events, perhaps deeming them too real. He opted instead for a fictional narrative about a pair of luxury hotel owners, Shelby Gilmore (William Holden) and Bob Spangler (James Franciscus), on a Pacific island who ignore the impending threat of a long-dormant volcano that erupts and threatens to wipe out everything with slow-moving lava that sort of melds the future 1997 volcano movie double shot of “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano” together. 

Shelby also wants to marry his secretary, Kay (Jacqueline Bisset), but Kay is still in love with Hank (Paul Newman), an oil rigger on the same island who in the course of drilling uncovers the volcano’s resuscitation. This is one of many soap opera threads inserted by screenwriters Carl Foreman and Sterling Silliphant that are not only half-baked but barely there, just coming and going, likely owing to the different cuts of the movie, no doubt the studio desperately trying to hack this turkey down. You can occasionally see glimmers of how “When Time Ran Out…” might have worked as a big piece of stinky cheese. The moment when Hank and Kay rekindle their love doubles as the moment when the volcano erupts. What should be waggish melodrama, however, is undermined by the shoddy special effects, stranding Newman and Bisset in laughable effects-less reaction shots. Such bad effects apparently stemmed from the movie’s budget being slashed in the middle of production when costs ran too high, leaving them with matte paintings and models that must have looked ludicrous on the big screen. What’s worse, despite slashing the run time, “When Time Ran Out…” feels endless, owing to a peculiar lack of urgency in the scenes that do remain.

That Newman ended up in “When Time Ran Out…” owed to his deciding to fulfill his contract to Warner Bros. despite earned skepticism over the script. As Matt Zoller Seitz once noted, Jeff Goldblum’s performance in “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” was something like a running commentary on the dumbness of the movie itself. Newman, however, did not have that kind of meta gear, and so he’s left to helplessly look out the side of helicopters and jeeps at the lava to be added later. As such, he innately merges with his character, two men at the mercy of corporate bigwigs, just trying to survive.

Watched on a Plane: Titanic

This is another in Cinema Romantico’s sporadic series of reviews of movies watched on planes.

In our current era, the big screen has ceded the stage to the small screen, a point brought home with great clarity on a recent flight when I noticed a woman one row ahead me was watching “Titanic” on her seatback screen. More than that, though, occasionally, she would take a picture with her phone of “Titanic” on her seatback screen. It was awe-inspiring. It would be like taking a picture of Mount Everest through the spotting scope. Then again, there is something to be said for watching “Titanic” on a 10-inch screen rather than a 52x20 one, at least, if you are watching it over someone’s shoulder. After all, what has been the preeminent the critique of “Titanic” lo these 29 years? The dialogue, of course, the clunky, sappy, wretched dialogue. And fair enough. Even I, staunch “Titanic” defender and lover, will cede that point. Yet, watching it sans dialogue only put into perspective the visual nature of James Cameron’s storytelling, the expert composition of Cameron and his co-editors Conrad Buff IV and Richard A. Harris, eliciting emotion and conveying information in equal measure. When I broke down my favorite scene some years ago shot-by-shot, I came away thinking that with some tailoring and tweaking, Cameron might have made “Titanic” as a silent movie, and after watching it over someone’s shoulder on a plane, I believe it even more. I mean, Billy Zane was acting like he was in a silent movie anyway. 

Still. The dialogue. There is no scene as poorly written as the one in which Rose and Jack first meet at the back of the ship where she is threatening to jump. The verbiage there is so woebegone and wooden that you can virtually see Winslet and DiCaprio stiffening in real time, trying to find ways to say it, not quite being able to. As fate would have it, however, while watching over the other passenger’s shoulder, I was simultaneously listening on my headphones to Bruce Springsteen’s 1993 MTV Plugged album and almost the instant that scene started, so did The Boss’s “If I Should Fall Behind.” It wasn’t Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” while watching “The Wizard of Oz,” or anything, an eerie synchronization of the events onscreen, but the words did echo the visual cues that Cameron is setting up for later. Indeed, just as the visual cues foreshadow later events, so does Springsteen’s key observation – “If as we’re walking a hand should slip free / I’ll wait for you / And should I fall behind / wait for me” – eerily foreshadow “Titanic’s” heartrending conclusion. I realized this because due to a lot of taxiing, a lot of sitting on the tarmac, and a lot of the pilot trying to line up the door with the jet bridge, our flight literally took the 3 hours and 15 minutes of James Cameron’s movie. As I finally deplaned, I was already wondering what “Avatar” might look like scored to “Human Touch.”

Send Help

Send help is a phrase colloquially associated with castaways, or movie castaways, at least, but in Sam Raimi’s horror-comedy “Send Help,” the phrase may as well be stamped on the forehead of his hilarious, hapless, resourceful, unexpectedly complicated anti-hero Linda Liddell (Rachel McAdams). Perpetually unkempt and smelling of tuna, Linda is the office pariah even if she doubles as its dynamo, working overtime to compose a report for the frat brother (Xavier Samuel) of her new CEO, Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), who subsequently gets the promotion that she had been promised. The opening 20 minutes is fast-paced and flashy, but it is also oddly predictable. When we see Linda at home talking to someone, it doesn’t take a clairvoyant to know that when the camera finishes pulling back, it will reveal that she’s been talking to her pet. That this extended opening works so well anyway is a testament to McAdams creating a character out of what could have become a caricature by brilliantly jibing with Raimi’s frenetic aesthetic to evince the air of someone so awkward and oblivious that she can’t help but step on social rakes over and over with a well-meaning smile on her face. Even if I always knew the cringe that was coming, McAdams made it so that I could hardly stand to look. Truly, it’s easier to watch her repeatedly projectile vomit on someone’s face than unwittingly talk to someone with tuna on her chin.

Linda does not so much find the wherewithal to confront Brantley about being passed over as she does suffer something like a temporary bout of insanity, marching into his office in lieu of breaking down. He does not recant his decision but instead invites her on his private plane to a meeting in Thailand to prove herself. Little does he know! Aboard the plane, however, the other executives make fun of her behind her back by watching her Survivor audition tape, apparently angering the gods so much that the plane’s engine fails and sends them hurtling into the sea, a sort of diabolical version of a corporate retreat challenge in which seeing what everyone is made of mixes with showing their true colors, and turns out, Linda is made of the stiffest stuff. It also foreshadows how nimbly Raimi turns blood and gore into unexpected personal growth. Only Linda and Bradley survive, washing up on a seemingly deserted island, though at first the latter is infirm due to a nasty gash on his leg, foreshadowing a shift in the balance of power.

I am reluctant to delve too deep into spoilers. It’s not that “Send Help” becomes less predictable, per see, but that it deviously remixes deserted island cliches and wields them in an order you are not necessarily always anticipating. It also ditches any sense of practical realism, speeding through all bits and bobs that it took Tom Hanks’s character forever to sort out in “Cast Away,” for an effective emotional realism that essentially recasts their setting as a beachside boardroom. Honestly, at times “Send Help” evokes an R-rated “Gilligan’s Island,” like the makeshift desk that Linda fashions out of sticks to manifest the undergoing power shift between she and her boss. If it’s clear that Raimi sides with Linda in the emergent struggle for control, it’s just as true that writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift infuse her with contradictory traits that pleasingly muddy our attachment to her, adding dimension that gives “Send Help” some real juice. It carries that juice all the way through a conclusion that is literally ambiguous but figuratively clear as day, stretching the corporate retreat as horror movie allegory as far as it will go. She has visualized success.