12th Annual Not-at-TIFF Film Festival

The only thing that stayed with me from the otherwise unnecessary “Anchorman” sequel was Marion Cotillard and Jim Carrey as “the incredibly polite Canadian news team” concluding each sentence with a preemptive sorry. There was just something about those almost aggressive anticipatory apologies that tickled my funny bone. It’s one of the classic Canada jokes, right, a civility that a certain sort of American who will cut in line ahead of you at the supermarket and say that’s what freedom is would mock. And yet, considering that we, the United States of America, willingly gave the car keys back to a President with pudding where his brain should be and that now he has incited a trade war with our kindly neighbors to north in the manner of an imperious monarch who got indigestion from some pure Canadian maple syrup and decided to MAKE THEM PAY, I think it’s time we start being the ones to apologize upfront. Going forward, when talking to a Canadian, any and all Americans should be required to issue a preemptive “Sorry” of our own and Canadians should never have to say “Sorry” to us again until they have determined our national apology sufficient. On that note, here is the lineup for this year’s Not-at-TIFF, our annual alternative to the Toronto International Film Festival kicking off today in, well, obviously. Sorry.

All screenings theoretical.

12th Annual Not-at-TIFF Film Festival 

Tu dors, Nicole. Even by the standards of my least favorite season, this summer has been wretched, and there are few movies that capture the somnambulant, nigh unbearable suspended animation of summer with as much style and dry wit as Stephane Lafleur’s 2014 French-Canadian comedy-drama.

Straight Talk. I have seen “9 to 5,” and I have seen “Steel Magnolias,” and I have even seen “A Smoky Mountain Christmas,” but I have never seen the late Dolly Parton’s 1992 romantic comedy in which she plays a small-town Arkansan who comes to the big city of Chicago and through some sort of humorous mix-up finds herself on a radio show dispensing advice and wisdom to so many callers. The reviews seem to have been mixed, but what do snooty critics like me know about anything? Dolly Parton as an uncredentialed radio psychologist sounds like the greatest movie ever made! 

Twice as Nice. Women’s professional basketball in the United States has not merely had to fight for relevancy but its very existence since the beginning, as Jessie Maple’s 1989 drama demonstrates. It’s not just that “Twice as Nice” starred real-life twin USC basketball stars Pamela and Paula McGee as fictional twins battling to be the #1 draft pick in a fictional women’s basketball league almost a decade before the WNBA was inaugurated, but that the movie itself was nearly lost forever until a 2015 grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation ensured the literal film would be saved. Now, the WNBA has grown so much that specious forces have gone from outright ignoring it to co-opting it, exploiting the league to help foment a new version of the welfare queen and sucking all the joy from the Caitlin Clark Experience by using her as a cudgel in their never-ending culture wars. There was Russell and Wilt, and then Bird and Magic, but Clark’s foremost rival is shaping up to be The Discourse. If she can beat the formless, shapeshifting, malevolent Discourse, she really will be the GOAT.

Adaptation. I have no quarrel with Emily Wilson going scorched earth on Christopher Nolan’s “Odyssey.” As the French are fond of saying, if you pay for your seat to the show, you reserve the right to criticize it. (Then again, Wilson appears to have attended a press screening.) The whole kerfuffle that erupted, however, interested me less than the bigger question of whether an adaptation should pay fealty to the work it is adapting, or whether the only limitation should be a filmmaker’s imagination. And no movie has better captured the toil and tricky nature of modifying one artform for another quite like Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s 2002 screen adaptation of Susan Orlean’s “The Orchid Thief” that in its meta knottiness lives the adapting ideal as breaking free of the original pan and doing your own thing. 

The Swimmer. Speaking of The Odyssey, here is a perfect movie for our moment, the 1968 Frank Perry-directed adaptation of a John Cheever book combining an Odysseus-like quest via suburban swimming pools by a narcissistic, hollowed-out has-been still toiling under the impression that he’s the bees-knees without realizing that emotionally, intellectually, and mentally he’s underwater. You sometimes see people speculate that Burt Lancaster’s WASP version of Odysseus is dead but that’s just because “The Sixth Sense” ruined message boards for the rest of time. He is alive and everyone in his orbit is forced to suffer his delusions of grandeur along with him. 

The French Revolution. It was only after Sam Neill died, I am ashamed to say, that I learned he had starred as America’s greatest friend in liberty, my dawg, the Marquis de Lafayette, in a 1989 two-part international television historical drama, “La Révolution Française.” And though I am as hesitant to watch Movie Lafayettes as much as I am Movie George Washingtons, which is one of several reasons I steered clear of “Young Washington,” a movie starring not only Sam Neill as Lafyette but Jane Seymour as Marie Antoinette piques my interest. I mean, not even Meryl Streep has played Marie Antoinette and Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman. If you can play Marie Antoinette and Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, then Karen Silkwood is a cakewalk.

Days of Thunder. Is Tom Cruise’s 1990 NASCAR movie good? Well, no. Did it require the sequel that was recently announced? God, no. But if I were rich and attending a benefit for an arts organization auctioning off a package to go see the “Days of Thunder 2” with Nicole Kidman (who will apparently and for understandable reasons not reprise her role from the original) and her girlfriends reviewing it aloud in real time and requiring me to sign a non-disclosure agreement to not repeat anything they say, buddy, I would break the bank. 

As always, on the eighth day we rest and watch a YouTube video. And at this year’s TIFF, Penélope Cruz will be receiving the Special Tribute Award for her “extraordinary and unique contribution to the world of film.” Oh, right, I apologize, Cruz will be receiving the Special Tribute Award, presented by CHANEL. Cruz, after all, has been a brand ambassador for CHANEL since 2018, just as she has been the brand ambassador for Emirates and its Fly Better campaign since 2023. And though it might speak poorly of the modern film industry, what’s true is true and what’s true is this: there is still no better Movie Star Moment from the 2020s than Penélope Cruz in the above Emirates ad. In that moment, she is not shilling for Emirates, no, she is remaking Emirates entirely in her image. 

Side Out. As a longtime Olympics devotee, attending one of those quadrennial sporting spectacles has always been high on my bucket list and I was recently able to procure tickets to four different events for LA28. One of my tickets is for beach volleyball. It felt appropriate given southern California being the spiritual home of the two-person version contested at the Games, and because the sport made its Olympic debut at the last American Summer Games in Atlanta in 1996. That was four years after it appeared as a demonstration sport in Barcelona and six years after C. Thomas Howell’s dramatic comedy “Side Out” which stands the test of time as the preeminent beach volleyball movie of our age by essentially being the only beach volleyball movie of our age. I also have tickets to handball and water polo, but those sports have even fewer movies than beach volleyball.

Independence Day. Sometimes I see the German-born dual citizen Roland Emmerich as cinema’s version of Roger Bennett, the dual British American citizen and soccer nut who in 2021 wrote a book as love letter to his chosen home. Emmerich had not yet obtained American citizenship in 1996, but you see the same sort of spirit in his magnum opus “Independence Day,” nevertheless, a corny, boisterous ode to American exceptionalism that even a partly cloudy patriot, to borrow the phrase of Sarah Vowell, such as myself yearns to believe in from time to time. Let’s close Not-at-TIFF by blowing this one up to 70mm and for two hours and twenty-six minutes believing with all our might.

Watched on a Plane: How to Make a Killing

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

John Patton Ford’s “How to Make a Killing” was based on the 1907 novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal, as was the 1949 film “Kind Hearts and Coronets” in which Sir Alec Guinness played eight roles, all members of a wealthy family that a distant relative murders one-by-one to claim dukedom. The loose remake, then, would seem tailor-made for its star Glen Powell to follow in Guinness’s footsteps given that he convincingly played multiple roles in 2023’s “Hit Man.” Instead, Powell takes one role, starring as Beckett Redfellow, son of a teenage mother (Nell Williams) exiled from her affluent family for deigning to keep her baby and risk bringing shame to the family name. Despite her banishment, however, Beckett’s surname remains intact, and when his mom stresses that he should lead the life he deserves, he eventually takes that to mean murdering all his relatives in line for the massive Redfellow inheritance so he can claim it for his own. He is spurred to drastic action not only by his mother but by Julia Steinway (Margaret Qualley), his old childhood friend and “How to Make a Killing’s” resident femme fatale, in a sense laying a piece of Pule cheese at the end of an elaborate maze that Beckett cannot resist. And though Powell is only technically playing one part, in another sense, he assumes multiple personalities in so far as Ford’s screenplay requires him to cycle through different ones as the complicated plot plays out. Those personalities, alas, come across more like a matter of narrative convenience than they do a complicated sense of self, creating a fatal emotionally muddled tone. 

The story is framed as Beckett’s confession to a priest (Adrian Lukis) while awaiting his execution on death row in a few hours. Here, Powell deftly turns his own movie star features against themselves to fully inhabit the air of a charming psychopath. Problem is, in the flashback scenes, as Beckett hesitantly wades into his run of murders, egged on by Julia, the character and subsequently the performance feel altogether different, less psychotic than lucid. This is epitomized in how Beckett falls in love with Ruth (Jessica Henwick), girlfriend of his obnoxious cousin Noah (Zach Woods). Though the narrative speeds through their courtship, the chemistry that Powell and Henwick have is real, but overall, their genuine warmth never squares with the cold, calculating individual narrating the story. As the murders pile up and his choices close in on him, it’s as if “How to Make a Killing” wants to portray Beckett as a noir sap gradually ensnared in a web of his own deceit and lies even as the Beckett narrating the story suggests just the opposite. Ford’s camera, meanwhile, might salivate over Qualley, but Powell never does, never quite sure if he is supposed to, evocative of how his performance is compromised by the writing and direction as everything culminates in a scene that cannot decide between comedy and tragedy, a would-be punch to the face that whiffs.

My Favorite College Football Games: Game 5 redux

October 21, 1989: Alabama - 47 Tennessee - 30

In early 2011, someone professing to be Al from Dadeville called the long-running college football radio show of Paul Finebaum and claimed to have poisoned the historic oak trees at the intersection known as Toomer’s Corner on the campus of Auburn University. It did not take long for police to connect the caller’s nom-de-guerre to that of an Alabama football superfan named Harvey Updyke, arresting him on a charge of first-degree criminal mischief. He would eventually plead guilty, serving 180 days in jail and ordered to pay $796,731 in restitution, though he never came close to fulfilling that obligation prior to his death at the age of 71 in 2020. In the immediate aftermath of his arrest, Updyke provided various hedges, even fabrications, like claiming someone else had told him about poisoning the trees and he merely appropriated the story as his own. Whatever his shifting narratives, the phone call to Finebaum always made it clear to me that Updyke grasped from the outset the gravity of his deed. Because if we accept that Finebaum is something akin to the supreme pontiff of southern college football then, in effect, Updyke’s calling him was a confession in a religious sense as much as a criminal one. And though he would say he did it because of how much he hated Auburn, his beloved Crimson Tide’s archrival, in his 2011 ESPN profile of Updyke, Wright Thompson knew better when he wrote, “He loved a football team so much he ruined his life.”

Almost from the beginning, college football has been compared to religion. John Tunis made the comparison in 1928 writing in Harper’s that college football seemed poised to become America’s national religion. He was criticizing, not praising, but in his negative assessment, he was, nevertheless, concurring that in its customs, fellowship, and belief in something akin to an unseen order, to paraphrase Columbia University Professor Emeritus of Religion Wayne Proudfoot, the sport did, in fact, function as a religion. If it was a problem to Tunis in the 1920s, it has only grown worse, and I wonder what he would make not only of declining church attendance and football’s increasing popularity but modern coaches like Dabo Swinney and the late Bill McCartney seeking to blur the lines between church and state. Yet, if the whole sport might be deemed a religion, no place in America remains more religious than the Bible Belt, and the Bible Belt loves college football more than anyone. There was a reason that the late Alcorn State coach Marino Kasem’s famous regional classification of college football saw fit to ascribe a holy purpose to one sector only: “in the South, football is a religion,” he said, “and Saturday is the holy day.” That’s merely a more lyrical version of the Southeastern college athletic conference’s highfalutin present-day slogan, It Just Means More, just as Wright Thompson’s poetic love letter to southern football, Pulled Pork & Pigskin, innately demonstrates how every southern football fan is but one more bourbon and cola solo cup away from metamorphosing into Harvey Updyke whether they know it or not. I am from, and live in, and root for a team affiliated with Big Ten country but I know it means more down there.

19th century anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor argued that “a minimum definition of religion” could be defined as “belief in Spiritual Beings.” The title of his treatise, Primitive Culture, mirrors the primitive cultures that Emile Durkheim examined in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life in which a belief in a god manifested itself in the form of a totem, symbolizing the deity, to paraphrase Michael Serazio, associate professor of communication at Boston College, writing for The Atlantic in 2013, while “also implicitly offer(ing) vessels for fellowship.” Ida Mae Kilgore Bryant, mother of Paul Bryant, nicknamed Bear, wanted her son to go into the ministry, though he opted for coaching college football instead, reasoning that they were virtually the same. Indeed, in coaching his alma mater the University of Alabama from 1958 to 1982, he resurrected it into the premier program of the sport, so worshiped in the Magnolia State that all kinds of unsanctioned art, from decals to postcards, proliferated in the 1960s of the ceremonial Bear walking on water while his signature houndstooth hat turned that two-tone pattern into a totem of team as much as its own school colors. In saving the football program, he also redeemed the Old South, the antebellum mystic referenced in the title card of “Gone with the Wind,” an eyebrow-raising idea advanced by both Warren St. John in his 2004 book about Alabama football fandom “Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer” and Frank Deford in his seminal profile of the coach for Sports Illustrated in 1981. Deford also noted that the Bear scoffed at such water-walking allusions, though that did not mean their prevalence was any less telling. When Deford dared humanize the Bear in that very same profile, he was besieged by letters from angry Alabama fans. Of course, Deford himself was not above religious allegory, deeming Bryant “football incarnate” in the state and noting how hard it would be for whomever was eventually tasked to succeed him.

That happened two years later in 1983 when Bryant retired and subsequently died at the age of 69 from a massive heart attack. Ray Perkins was first into the breach, getting so much flack for decent-enough success that still paled relative to the Bear, he jumped ship of his own volition by going to coach what was then the nadir NFL franchise, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. If Perkins was an alum of Alabama, at least, his successor Bill Curry was not, and if Bryant’s houndstooth hat was the totem of Crimson Tide football, then the brick that was thrown through Curry’s office window early on the morning of October 9, 1988, might have been its most cursed object. It was the day after Curry’s second Alabama team not only lost to the University of Mississippi for the first time at home but lost to them for the first time at home on homecoming. Appropriately, the brick comes with its own conspiracy theory intimating that Curry threw it through his own window in the manner of the speculation that tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand might have put a bullet in his own mailbox, which is just the crimson icing on the white cake, blaming the victim to try and mask the setting of unattainable standards. And yet, the next season in 1989, Curry seemed positioned to, if you will permit me, turn the tide by starting the season 5-0, including a revenge game against Mississippi in which his squad overcame a 21-point deficit by detonating for 62 unanswered points, and ascending to #10 in the country ahead of meeting 6th-ranked and also undefeated Tennessee on, as tradition once dictated, the third Saturday in October.

Growing up in Big Eight and Big Ten country meant those were the games I usually watched, but the Alabama versus Tennessee showdown was nationally televised by CBS, and I happened to be watching, praise be. It was not a dramatic contest, per se, but a fun, high-scoring one with Alabama forging a big lead and Tennessee futilely trying to play comeback. The Crimson Tide asserted itself with one big play early in the second quarter. Leading 10-7 and lined up 75 yards from pay dirt in the shotgun formation, string bean Tide quarterback Gary Hollingsworth received the snap and drifted back a couple steps to intentionally invite the Volunteer defensive line toward him before flipping the ball forward to running back Siran Stacy, previously lined up to his QB’s right. Stacy sliced through a hole opened by that little bit of misdirection and his offensive line, angling at first toward the left sideline before reading a block out wide by a receiver and gently slaloming back to the right. As he approached midfield with one Tennessee defender hurrying to try and catch him from behind and two converging on him from both the right and the left, Stacy accelerated, not so much shedding or even slipping the last desperate attempt at a tackle but surging beyond it, making it look for all the world like Tennessee was trying to catch the wind. He coasted alone into the sun-filled end zone, a 75-yard-touchdown as exultation, echoed in the overwhelming roar of the crowd and CBS announcer Brent Musburger, who no one would accuse of being a man of few words, tingling the spine by shutting up and laying out after just three of them: “Siran Stacy explodes!” By modern-day standards, this touchdown might appear prosaic, nothing more than a little shovel pass. Yet, that underlines its timelessness, living the apotheosis of football since the beginning by transforming the muddle of so much helmeted humanity into the divine.

I had never thought much about Alabama football, or the SEC, until this game, or until this play, really, though in the new century of the sport, I had to think about them a lot as Nick Saban fashioned an evil empire out of his cherished process. If you’re not from Alabama, or maybe just not from the south, you’re not supposed to like them, and I suppose I don’t, though I must confess that this Siran Stacy touchdown caused me to see the light. I have often wondered if in its aftermath, if Curry thought that Alabama fans had seen the light, if he had been redeemed. This victory would spur them toward winning the conference, after all, going to the Sugar Bowl, and inching as high as #2 in the national rankings. But they would lose the Sugar Bowl to Miami and worse than that, they would lose their last game of the season to archrival Auburn, unforgivable, conference title or not, evincing that strange college football version of math where a 10-2 season equals 0-2. In the offseason, like Perkins before him, Curry ditched, taking the Kentucky job and his career never recovered, though maybe it was unrecoverable the moment that brick went through his window.

Writing in 2021 for the most southern-coded magazine ever, Garden & Gun, Tommy Tomlinson surmised that college football in the south was not so much religion as it was spiritual, “the hunger for that rare and precious moment of transcendence.” I think Tomlinson is underselling how the religious-like structure of the sport can help stoke that transcendence, even as he hints at that idea throughout, but I take him at his larger point, ending on a note that might as well be describing Siran Stacy’s touchdown: “(O)ne Saturday night, late in the game, your man breaks into the clear. You rise and shout. Rapture.” Up until then, college football had hinged for me on victory and defeat for my chosen team, whether it was my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers, or my native state Iowa Hawkeyes before that. Stacy’s touchdown, however, made me realize that gridiron transcendence could exist independently of rooting interests, and that the momentary rapture could matter as much if not more than the result. College football has always been based on results, of course, though that sense of the bottom line has only been amplified in the new-fangled 12-team playoff era as athletic directors, commentators, and fans have taken What Have You Done for Me Lately to unprecedented extremes. It’s as if every college football team is fast becoming like 1989 Alabama, destined to suffer spiritually winless seasons no matter how many games they technically win if they don’t make the playoffs. It’s only natural. In sports we tend to overrate the outcome and undervalue the experience. It’s times like those when I want to sit down, bring up YouTube, find Siran Stacy’s touchdown run from that sunny day in October 1989, and get some of that good old-time religion.

 

Song of the Summer

Unlike last year, in which no clear-cut song of the summer emerged, the 2026 song of the summer appears cut and dried. As of me writing this, Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” has tied the record as the second-longest number one song on the Billboard Hot 100 at 19 weeks, a distinction of which it is more than worthy. Its indelible but easygoing hook rewards repeated listens and would sound as appropriate wafting out of a car window, drifting across a beach, or floating above a backyard deck on a warm night at dusk as it would leading a legion of two-steppers at a Lone Star honkytonk. Its lyrics exploit the innate infectiousness in getting to sing the names of places – Tennessee, Abilene, the Smoky Mountains, Memphis, Amarillo, and, of course, the titular capper that is accentuated with the preceding word that honors the regional dialect by dispensing with the g and flattening it. It’s a neat songwriting trick that Langley pulls because, in effect, “Choosin’ Texas” is a sad song, saying goodbye to a cowboy who is choosin’ Texas by choosin’ another gal even as you can sense 80,000 people in Cowboys Stadium singing along at a Langley show ratifying that choice. Who wouldn’t choose Texas? Even Langley’s wistful vocal is fessing up to that fact. It’s a helluva song, maybe even the song of the year, but it’s not the song of the summer.

I mean, the song of this summer, the summer of 2026? Hello, earth to human inhabitant. 2026 has been the summer of apocalyptic skies and smoky air, of torrential rain, melting glaciers, flash floods, insane heat waves, and the hottest month in U.S. history for the contiguous lower 48 states. It has been the summer of ICE and of VAR, of poisoned lettuce and Lake America. It has been the summer of the first-ever Forever War that has Already Been Won and of a reflecting pool as the improbable, indelible emblem of the shape of the United States on its 250th anniversary. Through that lens, I can understand why people would covet a timeless song of the summer more than a timely one, a song into which they can escape four minutes at a time. But then, looking reality in the eye and denying it is becoming America’s métier. “I don’t wanna know,” Wild Pink wryly sings in another song from this summer, “I keep my head down.” And though Charli XCX is a British citizen, not an American one, she does maintain a home in Los Angeles, and anyway, by this point, the pop star is nothing less than a true Global Citizen. And though the cover of her new album might feature Martin Scorsese, and though David Cronenberg might have a crucial cameo on the record’s closer, her song SS26 makes me think of John Carpenter’s “They Live”: it’s summer 2026 and Charli XCX is making us put on the sunglasses. 

More than any other season, the sensation associated with summer is a fleeting one, which Shakespeare wrote about in Sonnet 18, shall I compare thee to a summer’s day and all that, and in SS26, XCX twists that fleetingness into something else. The title is short for Spring Summer 2026, establishing the context as utterly present tense, a pop song as IMF message from “Mission: Impossible” designed to self-destruct once we reach late September. Her verses and pre-chorus are a patchwork of familiar denials, deflections, and excuses that evoke a modern propensity for saying whatever one must to make it through whatever moment they are in and once they have, wiping their hands clean of it: “No, it’s not my fault / I wasn’t there.” And though Sonnet 18 argued that art is the only way to make something last, XCX is dubious of what that might mean to the people experiencing that art in the moment. SS26 itself is a testament to the value and pleasure of art even as it simultaneously ridicules music, fashion, and film as being unable to save us.

Indeed, in her video for 1999, she recreated the movie “Titanic,” but in the video for SS26, she virtually turns a fashion runway into the Titanic, dressed in her best and prepared to go down blinkered and beautiful. It might suggest a kind of release, yet in the song’s minimalist production and the way it repeatedly teases at shifting into a higher gear only to decline at the last minute, tapering out at the end, XCX impudently denies us the very catharsis we crave. Summer’s over! Now what?

 

New Adventures in Modern Slang

As a middle-aged movie blogger who eschews Letterboxd and artificially intelligent writing assistants, I do try to maintain contact with elements of pop culture geared toward younger generations. At least where movies are concerned, I feel dutybound on some level to do so. More than that, though, the desire stems from my genuine interest in art and, by extension, a genuine interest in what (some) younger artists are up to and because I have always promised myself that as I age, I will not forget what it was like to be young. I will not fall into the Boomer vs. Millennial and/or Gen Z trap. Still, there are plenty of moments when I must admit to my brewing inner-old fogey. Like the phrase low key for instance. I started hearing the yutes say this all the time a while ago and was pretty sure I understood it to mean something niche. If, say, there was a really good taco place in your neighborhood that only a few people knew about then you’d say, “low-key, they make the best tacos in the city.” Except then Friend of the Blog Christy explained that her children had begun saying high key in addition to low key and that high key and low key appeared to be interchangeable. Wouldn’t this suggest that low key or high key as a modifying adjective is superfluous? Isn’t this just like the President applying excess adverbs to everything?

My notions of modern slang only grew more confused this week when I read Marie Solis’s piece at The New York Times examining the phrase “kinda chic” proliferating on Instagram and TikTok. This phrase, as Solis noted, was essentially in opposition. “Chic,” Solis wrote, “is a high bar,” and dug up an 1877 definition on the Times’ own site to prove it: “What is chic may, in a sense, be fashionable, but what is fashionable cannot be chic.” “(T)he deliberately lowbrow use of ‘kinda,’” Solis explains, “undercuts the less attainable state of ‘chic.’” The BBC spoke to a psychologist from Durham University, Dr. Niklas Ihssen, who summarized utilizing the phrase kinda chic as “allow(ing) you to be special while being normal,” which echoes how the ever helpful Know Your Meme describes it. Chic had always seemed to me an either/or proposition, either you are chic or you are not chic. To be kinda chic sounds like being, I dunno, kinda rock ‘n’ roll. Is being kinda rock ‘n’ roll, in fact, being rock ‘n’ roll in this brave new world? Is everything a half-caf from Starbucks now? 

Yet, in being confronted with such revisions in terminology, I did not simply want to sigh, throw my hands in the air, and theoretically scream, “Get off my lawn!” by logging off. I wanted to know. And so, being a movie blog, after all, I decided to try and contextualize high key, and low key, and chic, and kinda chic on my terms. 

Let me see if I understand this...

High key, Nicole Kidman is our greatest working actor.

Low key, Nicole Kidman is our greatest working actor.

Chic is Audrey Hepburn wearing all black in “Charade.” 

Kinda chic is Jennifer Love Hewitt in “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer” after several introductory fakeout jump scares to communicate that her character is still in the throes of TRAUMA taking a bag of potato chips to bed.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Strange Victory (1948)

In watching the recently reviewed “Pressure” about the D-Day invasion, I was reminded of Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower’s in-advance speech to his troops in which he declared that “nothing less than full victory” would be acceptable. But what, exactly, constituted full victory in WWII? That’s the question director Leo Hurwitz puts forth in his aptly named “Strange Victory,” finished all of three years after the second world war, by demonstrating with blunt style that the United States of America could not claim to honor all the ideals it had ostensibly fought and died for in the name of liberal democracy. Stitching together archival footage and dramatic re-enactments to underscore the various points of the archival footage, “Strange Victory” was deemed a documentary but comes across more akin to a visual essay. That sensation is brought home in the voiceover by co-writer Saul Levitt which is not dispassionate but barely concealed rage at what is being conveyed onscreen. An introductory overview of WWII’s conclusion is constructed out of graphic imagery that cuts the heart right out of any nostalgia and evokes a collective trauma that has been repressed rather than dealt with and fuels the anger and fear in the form of antisemitism, anti-communism, and racism coursing the post-war America, as Levitt asks, again and again, “If we won, what did we win?”

If it’s freedom, “Strange Victory” illustrates, we have a funny way of showing it. In Hurwitz’s most daring conceptualization, he blends a brutal rundown of the effects Jim Crow laws with a montage outlining the insidious rise of the Third Reich and in effect, links our own post-war fearmongering with theirs, providing a different spin on that old standby line of scriptural reassurance: if God is for us, who could be against us? He even mixes and matches images of newborn babies, black and white, and their black and white mothers, with images of whites only signs and colored entrances, living the idea that while all men might be created equal, as the declaration says, the society we have constructed once newborns leave the hospital proves just the opposite. In demonstrating oppression of the era, predictably “Strange Victory” was suppressed itself, with a lack of major distribution making it difficult to see. It calls to mind what is currently transpiring with the suppression of history by the current Presidential administration at the Smithsonian, as if embodying “Strange Victory’s” own conclusion, that there is a war still going on at home, waiting to be won. 

Some Drivel On...Inside Man

Released 20 years ago, Spike Lee’s rare foray into something approximating genre filmmaking suggested Sidney Lumet’s own New York bank robbery classic “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975) played at a different tempo. The latter’s bank robber, Sonny Wortzik, was not only based on a real person but animated, high-strung, and forced to improvise when his plans go awry. The bank robber of “Inside Man,” on the other hand, Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), is a cool cucumber. “Don’t I sound relaxed to you?” he asks the hostage negotiator at one point in the voice of a man who has mapped out every possible contingency. Indeed, the meta structure of Russell Gerwitz’s elaborate screenplay is established with Dalton breaking the fourth wall as the movie begins by explaining directly to the camera who he is and what he plans to do, that is, “execute the perfect bank robbery.” So, he does. The remaining two-hours-and-nine-minutes is showing how he executes it, though without giving away the most crucial elements until the very end, giving “Inside Man” the feel of a deconstructed magic trick, like David Copperfield telling you he is going to make the Statue of Liberty disappear and then showing you exactly how he makes the Statue of Liberty disappear.

Dalton Russell is the perfect role for Clive Owen. The part requires outsized self-confidence, and Owen has always excelled at imbuing outsized self-confidence without appearing to exert any effort at all. His face is hidden behind a mask and sunglasses virtually the entire movie, yet the baritone of his voice and his presence make the person unmistakable even if the screenplay by design is never really infusing a sense of personality to keep him a mystery. Denzel Washington, then, makes for the perfect counterpart as boisterous Detective Keith Frazier who is enlisted as lead hostage negotiator when Russell and his small team take 50 hostages inside the Manhattan Trust Bank and put their exacting plan in motion. Even when Frazier is forced into a bout of introductory exposition, Washington sells it with genuine crackle, just as when he walks, he struts in the manner of his Detroit Red version of Malcolm X. Frazier’s boss is throwing him a bone, so to speak, after a run of bad luck and Washington seizes on that bit of backstory, moving through the movie like his character is seizing the day. Yet, if Frazier is smart enough to know Dalton is frying bigger fish, he is too much a small fry in the pecking order to do something about it. That is reflected in the harsh light of the third key character, Madeleine White (Jodie Foster), a nebulous if high-powered fixer who has to broker the robbery for the bank owner (Christopher Plummer) hiding a crucial secret. Palpably relishing the opportunity to play against type, Foster’s own enthusiasm deliciously melds with the character’s enthusiasm for virtually eating the lunch of everyone in her orbit. And though White is shorter than all the surrounding characters in height, in her tall stilettoes, not to mention Foster’s imposing aura, she seems no less towering, a gargoyle on the edge of a building come to life.

And so, these three characters circle one another as events play out, Dalton seeming to deliberately stall for time, and Frazier sensing that he seems to be deliberately stalling for time. Lee interrupts this straight-forward structure throughout with scenes in the aftermath of the robbery as Frazier and his partner, Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor), interview the hostages, all of whom are suspects given the sly diversionary tactics that Russell employs not only to confuse the police but to throw them off the real scent. It’s an ingenious device that not only heightens the tension but evokes how Lee is deconstructing the nature of the bank robbery movie itself just as a sequence later in which the police prepare to storm the bank, we see imagined scenes of how it might unfold, as if Lee is showing us how such a movie might typically stage its conclusion and then pulling the rug out from under us just as Dalton pulls the rug out from under Frazier and White and everyone else. The ending relies on a striking bit of coincidence, I grant you that, but I also can’t say that I mind. Dalton had already made the Statue of Liberty disappear, after all, so why couldn’t he perform one last miracle?