Rush

Too often the media and the public are prone to an emotional desire for our athletes and sports stars to neatly fit into ready-made narratives. Consider LeBron James, arguably America's most famous athlete. At first he was an Ohio kid playing for an Ohio team, prepared to bring long-suffering Cleveland a championship, The King. That was the narrative. Until "The Decision" when James unceremoniously left Cleveland for Miami and automatically became The Villain. Now that is the narrative, and anything said or written about him must revolve around villainous decision.

This is what makes Ron Howard's "Rush", his adrenaline-soused story of the 1970's Formula One rivalry between Niki Lauda and James Hunt, both a little smart and a little stale. At the movies we demand tangible change in our characters, for them to begin with one perspective but come around to another just in the nick of time for the closing credits. And while Lauda and Hunt do change in their attitude to one another, their overriding worldview very specifically remains the same. They maintain their own narratives.

Scripted by Peter Morgan, "Rush" opens with the apparent intention to hone in on James Hunt, played by a charismatic Chris Hemsworth with a mane of hair that all on its lonesome seems to emit Sexual Radioactive Frequencies. Before the movie is but a few minutes old he has already scored with the nurse charged to tend his wounds and then squired her to next his race. Quickly she is forgotten, as are most (all?) of the women in Hunt's life, such as the vixen Suzy Miller (Olivia Wilde). She waltzes into the garage in her swank fur coat, makes doe eyes at him and a scene later they're married. At first I thought this was weak writing, then I realized it to be a strength. Hunt doesn't dabble. He does.

His dream is to become Formula One champion, but that dream runs into a nearly immovable object in the form of Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl), an Austrian known as The Rat. Lauda is as calculating and cautious and austere as Hunt is spontaneous and rebellious and wild. He is uninterested in friends, unbothered by enemies, and clinically buys his way into Formula One by creating a souped-up racing car the specs of which he will only reveal for a spot on a specific team.

Eventually, of course, Lauda proves more than Hunt's match - he proves to be better. So Hunt, the perpetual skirt-chaser, is left to chase Lauda whose devotion to discipline keeps Hunt (and his own wife, played by Alexandra Maria Lara) at arm's length. As this happens, the film gradually becomes Ladua's - and Brühl's - as much as Hunt's. In that way, it sort of echoes their rivalry, one-upmanship. The two men circle each other, citing stock platitudes, condemning the way the other man lives and drives (or, is it drives and lives?), but finding a mutual respect despite the chasm.

Of course, there are also race scenes, a lot of 'em, and they are handled with a knowing va-voom (Anthony Dod Mantle did the film's cinematography). They are rip-roaring, to be sure, straight ahead and purely visceral, and indicative of "Rush" as a whole. It is very much the same thing for a full two hours, establishing two people as disparate personality types and then repeating the attributes of those personality types over and over and over, etc. Rather than dig a little deeper to see what molded these two men into those personality types, however, the screenplay is generally content with the established surface.

Consider the in-flight bout of coitus that Hunt shares with a striking Stewardess in the jetliner bathroom. We never see the Stewardess's face as it happens, instead we see Hunt admiring his own face in the mirror. This might suggest the zenith of solipsism but that sort of psychology is simply not what "Rush" wants to be about.

Thus, the ultimate payoff left me less than effusive if still admiring. That is because by the time the film begins these two men have already found themselves, and are now merely in the process of living out their respective lives in the way each one sees fit.

Re-Forecasting The Best Actress Oscar Race

The news broke this past week – The Weinstein Company is moving the Nicole Kidman Grace Kelly biopic “Grace of Monaco” to 2014. And with the move went Cinema Romantico’s meaningless prediction that the impeccable Ms. Kidman would win this year’s Best Actress Oscar. Thus, with Oscar season swiftly approaching, it is time for us to re-evaluate the field and predict a new victor.

The obvious choice would be Kate Winslet for “Labor Day.” She is 1.) Is gunning for her 2nd statue just like Ms. Kidman and 2.) My Favorite Actress. But #2 is precisely why I can’t pick her. I already jinxed Nicole and got her movie moved, I won’t dare cast the jinx on Kate The Great.

Once upon an English lawn Naomi Watts – Ms. Kidman’s consigliere – was seen as a surefire contender for her work as Diana (Princess, that is) in “Diana” but the reviews for that film would make Uwe Boll blush.

Berenice Bejo has been getting serious buzz for “The Past” but, come on, it’s French! Like the Academy’s going to see that one! (Reader: “But ‘The Artist’ won Best Picture!” Cinema Romantico: “That’s because it was silent and set in Hollywood! They didn’t know it was French!”)

There has been significant scuttlebutt surrounding Cate Blanchett for her sadistic turn in Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine” but that film was released in August. August!!! August is like the 1990’s to an Academy voter! By the time Oscar ballots roll around the voters will be up to their ears in “Last Vegas” DVD screeners. Speaking of which…

Mary Steenburgen – mark my words – is going to steal “Last Vegas” right out from under all those imposters. Not that the Academy will notice. And not that I will notice (since I probably won’t see it). 

The Academy may be unaware this performance actually exists. Our sources would neither confirm nor deny.

I’ve already started plastering Academy members doors with Rooney Mara In “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” flyers but most Academy members then just storm outside and tell me to get off their lawn and then mumble something about Judi Dench’s new movie.

Jennifer Lawrence is well on her way to being the Academy’s new Christoph Waltz but the new “Hunger Games” is too big budgetish.

Rose Byrne will probably cancel herself out between “The Internship” and “Insidious 2.”

Lake Bell in “In A World…” would be a game-changer but, uh, hey, isn’t, like, Meryl Streep in a movie again this fall?

Reader: “Hold it…”

Shailene Woodley was resplendent in “The Spectacular Now.” But, of course, the Academy has no idea who she is.

Reader: “Wait, wait, wait…”

Will Cameron Diaz's back tattoo in "The Counselor" have what it takes to score a Best Actress nod?

I personally feel like Cameron Diaz’s Back Tattoo in “The Counselor” should be in contention but feel those odds are long.

Reader: “Oh God…”

Malin Akerman is Debbie Harry in “CBGB” but that evokes Supporting Performance.

Reader: “Stop! I see what’s happening here! You’re going through the entire list, ruling out everybody, so that in the end you’re only left with……” 
Reader #2: “Left with who?” 
Reader: “Lady Gaga in ‘Machete Kills!’ This entire post was a set-up! WE'VE BEEN HAD!” 
Reader #2: “Run! Run outta the room! Shut your laptops and run! Everybody!!! There’s still time! If we don’t hear it, he didn’t say it!”

Friday's Old Fashioned: Thunder Road (1958)

Robert Mitchum’s face – the smile in particular, that smile of cocky yet indifferent bemusement, never getting overly worked up since he treats threats as fun ‘n’ games – lets us know that somehow he knows every detail of what is about to happen, fatalism written in the smoke that curls from his constant cigarettes. More than anything, he is the rugged, lackadaisical evocation of a Man That’s Gotta Do What A Man’s Gotta Do.

You never expect him to survive in “Thunder Road”, not from the moment he first appears as Lucas Doolin running moonshine on the country roads of Kentucky from Harlan down to Memphis, avoiding not only the requisite Feds but the requisite rural moonshine conglomerate out to either convert him to their side or put him outta business. But that you never expect him to survive is not so much a sign of story weakness (“you can see it coming from a mile away” as they say) as the sense that such a life is simply a curtain of criminality slowly being drawn all around you.

Naturally Mitchum is hardly bothered by this prospect. The film’s critical monologue involves him explaining how his past bootlegging life was, as one that pre-dated his involvement in WWII, a different idea, moonshine distilled of a much purer (metaphorical) variety. It is an existence he has essentially given up on re-creating, knowing its time has passed and, thus, HIS time has passed. Life moves pretty fast, and when you’re a bootlegger turned soldier turned bootlegger you don’t have much time to stop and look around. Pretty soon you’ve missed it. Thus, he keeps making those illegal runs to Memphis, counting on the inevitable to catch up with him. Which it does, of course, just in time to coincide with the film’s conclusion, echoing an earlier shot that practically comes casked in foreshadowing.

This is a Mitchum project through and through. He concocted the story (James Atlee Phillips and Walter Wise received screenwriting credit), co-wrote the theme song and even co-directed much of the film if you choose to believe the post-picture legends. (That, or Arthur Ripley directed it.) “Thunder Road” props up his own legend as much as it carries him to his demise. He is provided a love interest in the form of a nightclub singer named Francie (real-life singer Keely Smith) who is woefully underwritten, a character without an interior, existing to shine a spotlight on Lucas and say wonderful things about him and how much she loves him and why she can’t bear to see him put his life on the line for a little grain alcohol. He loves her, sure, or says he does, because he knows he’s supposed to, but even in her elegant company he’s a lone wolf.

He receives not only a Reflective Character in Francie but a Rebellious Apprentice in the form of Robin, his younger brother, the ace mechanic who keeps Lucas’s automobile in tip-top shape. Robin dreams of running moonshine. Lucas aims not to let that happen by any means necessary. Robin is played by James Mitchum, son of Robert, which is a kind gesture by father, but I must report the facts and the facts are that while younger Mitchum is serviceable in most moments he cannot quite rise to the occasion for the pivotal scene when he calls out his big brother. And his kinda, sorta romance with Roxanna (Sandra Knight), meant as the movie’s gut-punch capstone, fizzles as a result.

Not that any of these problems are truly problematic. As stated, repeatedly, “Thunder Road” is a Mitchum film. You could have the young Eva Maria Saint begging Mitchum to set aside whiskey running and Kyle Reese trying to pull him off the ledge. Mitchum’d just smile that smile and smoke that cigarette and keep on truckin’.

Planet Earth Poet Laureate Bruce Springsteen, who famously ripped off the title of this film for a classic tune, once said: “I realized that after I put all those people in all those cars I was going to have to figure out someplace for them to go.” But in “Thunder Road” the movie the protagonist is never unaware of where he’s going.

Right off the cliff.

Recap Vomit: Trophy Wife (Pilot)

The mantra put forth near the end of the opening episode of “Trophy Wife” by the married couple at its forefront – Kate and Pete – goes like this: “I don’t know what I’m doing.” She says she doesn’t know what she’s doing and he says he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Often a show’s mantra can be turned around to poke holes in the show itself, but not this time. “Trophy Wife” establishes itself as a fairly evocative illustration of the struggle to raise kids, not knowing precisely how to go about doing it but doing it anyway because do it you must.

Struggling to raise kids, after all, is a staple of the American sitcom. The parents don’t know what they’re doing, the kids take advantage, hijinks ensue. If you went on a date with a Big Four Network exec and opened his/her medicine cabinet (which you ‘never would’) you would find a non-perishable bottle of this very formula. (And a vial of "Forest Rangering With The Stars".) And by no means am I claiming “Trophy Wife” does not heat and serve pre-packaged sitcom tropes. Does a child’s hamster die? Yes. Do the parents set forth on a suburban voyage to purchase a replace (or imposter) hamster? Of course. Yes, Malin Akerman, my Official Cinematic Crush, playing the role of Kate, bumbles into chairs and smacks ice queens on accident with her purse (and fondles her own “grapefruits”) and, sure, a lot of the one-liners feel as if they were found in the sofa cushions.

Yet the show has entirely in its favor this sort of supremely endearing chaotic quality. In a hospital waiting room right near the start it casts two tons of exposition on the audience to get us all caught up with the current situation and it’s never confusing and always entertaining. It just sorta powers through. Let me try to explain here……Kate is Pete’s (Bradley Whitford) wife, yes, but she’s his THIRD wife. Hence, “Trophy Wife.” But the term Trophy Wife is actually misleading (but it does look good on those promo shots accompanied by the hella comely Malin – am I right ABC, you marketing wizards, you). Pete’s not a smug jackanapes scouting for a status symbol. He likes Kate and Kate likes Pete and Kate likes Pete’s kids – a couple with Jackie (Michaela Watkins) and one with Dr. Diane Buckley (Marcia Gay Harden) – but the kids are suspicious of Kate because she’s just the next wife on the spousal assembly line. But Kate doesn’t just want to gossip and sleep and shop and chug vodka – though she does chug vodka, but hang on – and so she gets involved and makes an effort and wants to do right by her step-children and that’s how she ends up chugging vodka. (It all makes sense in its own context.)

Oh, and I’m sure that a stepmother chugging vodka to protect her stepdaughter will likely send some overprotective parents’ group into a hissy fit, but she does what she does for the kid. Everyone here is acting on behalf of the kids. That’s some noble shit, man, and it’s actually different from most sitcoms which prefer to employ the struggle to raise kids as the mere platform for crude jokes and wacky comedy that often comes at the kids' expense (which is ostensibly okay because it’s “not really about the kids"). “Trophy Wife” is intended as a comedy – and it is comedic, and I did laugh (The Diane Buckley Pool, anyone?) – but, more than anything, it’s loving, and I sort of loved this little pilot and this eclectic contemporary clan that clearly has differences that they can clearly put aside for the sake of the children even though the differences clearly remain intact. It’s a little bundle of enjoyable madness, this show.

I felt a like Kate Harrison, tossed into the middle of something, playing catching up, and wanting to play catch up and determined to play catch up, to stay the course. It’s sink or swim for this Trophy Wife, and for “Trophy Wife.” Kate swims. The show swims. I’m swimming. Buoyancy, baby.

Prisoners

There is an arresting visual moment in “Prisoners” when we literally see the gray raindrops that have been present essentially since the film’s grave inciting incident begin transform into wet snowflakes, fall giving way to winter right before our very eyes. It is not unlike an earlier moment when this thriller’s already unhinged premise seems to transform into something so sensationalist it jumps the shark. It would be nice if film could simply exist in a vacuum I suppose, but the recurring real world situation that kept populating my mind was Cleveland and the abduction of those three girls and the unspeakable horrors inflicted upon them. How can we know what anyone is truly capable of and what terror unknowingly lurks behind every door? This is the unsettling truth “Prisoners” grasps and throttles – for better or for worse – home.

A pair of families gather for Thanksgiving. All seems normal until the youngest daughter of each family suddenly goes missing. When they do, the rain begins to pour and Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), who has never not solved a case, shows up. Speculation on an abductor centers around a musty motor home where the two young girls were seen playing. The motor home belongs to Alex (Paul Dano), whose glasses, hair and complexion are like Thriller Suspect 101. Alas, Alex, possessing an IQ of 10, can hardly mumble a sentence. After the requisite holding period he is released and returns home with his Aunt (Melissa Leo). Loki has his doubts about Alex’s innocence and so does Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman), the blue collar father of the younger of the two missing girls.

Convinced Alex is responsible for the abduction and maddened by what he views as police inaction, Keller acts by abducting Alex, locking him up in an abandoned house and relentlessly torturing him in an effort to unearth the truth. This is not a spoiler if you have seen the preview nor is it really a spoiler if you haven’t, for this “twist” occurs fairly early and “Prisoners” is – to quote its own metaphor – a maze that far exceeds any single reveal. The film, in fact, is a good two-and-a-half hours. Overlong? It is, but I dare say director Denis Villeneuve’s intention is to actively impress upon us that length – just when we feel the road to whodunit? straightening out, we hit another curve.

“Prisoners” is the sort of the film that allows quality actors to delve deeply into the finer points of characterization. Jackman turns a sickly shade of pale and purposely plays at one note – thunderous. Gyllenhaal outfits his character with twitchy eyes, blinking repeatedly and rapidly in such a way that suggests they have been made to see more than they can believe (and says as much if not more than the stock introductory scene of his Thanksgiving dinner at a Chinese restaurant). So too does he come equipped with the teensiest tattoo of a cross on his thumb which plays directly off Keller’s own fascination with faith – the cross dangling around his neck and from his rearview mirror. Faith hangs over the whole film like its low skies, often fairly insistently, but often people of faith are very insistent in theirs.

Gyllenhaal and Jackman are, of course, not alone in the cast, joined by the adept Viola Davis as well as Terrence Howard – both of which comprise the couple of the second missing girl – and Maria Bello as Keller’s wife. Skilled as this trio is, they are primarily – interestingly (curiously?) – relegated to the sideline. Bello spends most of the movie zonked out on sleeping pills. Howard (sporting an excellent homage to the Cosby Sweater in his first scene) and Davis are meant to function as the conscience to Keller, but his conscience seems of little consequence and so they are more or less moved aside. The push and pull of Keller and Loki is the movie’s center.

The ethics at play in “Prisoners” are not convenient, and for that reason it is able to rise above its genre restrictions and requisite red herrings (particularly in the frustrating form of one character that just gets dropped in to distract the narrative). Ultimately its most fascinating theme is that of Keller’s absolutism. Faith, let’s face it, can be just as frightening as reassuring, and there is underlying commentary here about the modern day misappropriation of faith – I’m Right/You’re Wrong/No In Between.

That is what makes the end a puzzle. It's less ambiguous, I would argue, than a choose-your-own adventure, a modern-day Lady or the Tiger? Villeneuve is saying the question of what happens after the final cut is one not to be lightly considered, and not for him to presume to set himself up as the one person able to answer it. And so he leaves it with all of us: should one be made to pay for their sins or be left to wrestle with them in their own mind?

Blogging Trophy Wife

Some readers may recall Cinema Romantico's previous attempts at blogging a TV show - "New Girl" - ended in spectacular failure. Some readers may recall that I broke my vow to watch and blog the entire first season of "New Girl" partially on account of my Official Cinematic Crush Malin Akerman when the ratings success of "New Girl" caused TV execs to look toward more movie actresses to potentially fill half-hour sitcom roles. Movie actresses like......Malin Akerman. Knowing that my watching of "New Girl" could potentially aid and abet Ms. Akerman's presence in a crappy TV show, I could not in good conscience continue.

I quote myself: "Look, I know she's great and dry and funny on 'Children's Hospital' but this isn't what we want from Malin full time, is it? It can't be! Please! Tell me it isn't! She's a silver-screenster! If Ms. Akerman winds up on some TV show where she has to film an episode as noxious as 'The Landlord' that would be too much to bear! It would be one thing if she landed the lead on, say, a Showtime original with a no b.s., hard-charging role with a creator who played by no rules but his own, but this article makes it sound like we're talking Big Four Network and that is 'Sleepaway Camp' frightening."

Oh, but the fickle Gods of TV have a wicked sense of humor, for here comes Malin herself as the title character of the brand new Big Four (ABC) sitcom "Trophy Wife" - premiering tonight at 8:30 CST.

Imagine that instead of Malin and a bottle of water, that's me and a bottle of scotch.

I confess the thought of watching this show fills me with dread and anxiety in equal doses and yet......Malin is my Official Cinematic Crush. I must stand up for her. I will stand up for her. I will watch her TV show. So help me God, I will watch it right down to the end (maybe?) whenever that end may come to pass. And I will blog about it.

Having learned a few things from my last stab at this TV blogging business, however, I plan to go about it differently. In the case of "New Girl" I felt too aligned to pre-conceived notions (which is wildly unfair to any creative venture) and an ill-conceived need to extract extra meaning and submit advice to imaginary show-runners and publish the post in the airing's immediate aftermath.

This time I will merely watch and then write whatever the hell I feel like writing whenever the hell I feel like writing it. Call it: Recap Vomit. Join me, won't you, vomit bags in tow?

The Lifeguard

You know the trope: city-dwelling character is forced by circumstance to un-reluctantly come home only to eventually find the values at home do and always have superseded those in the big ol' mean city and decides to remain home forever and forever. The late, great Roger Ebert once wrote: "I await a movie where a New Yorker tries moving to a small town and finds that it just doesn't reflect his warm-hearted big city values." "The Lifeguard", the brainchild of writer/director Liz W. Garcia, seems for a time, boldly, ready to heed Ebert's advice. Alas, convictions in cinema are harder to maintain than come by, and eventually it whimpers across the finish line.

Kristen Bell is Leigh. Twenty-nine (and ten months) and a reporter in New York, and about to encounter a solid dose of Symbolism in the form of a story involving a tiger chained up in an apartment. She packs her things and flees for her hometown in Connecticut.

There, in a scarily easygoing manner, she reverts not merely to an old life but to childhood. She moves back in with her parents (Amy Madigan and Adam LeFevre). Mom is suspect but Leigh is Daddy's Little Girl, and Daddy treats her just like one. She reclaims her teenage job as a lifeguard, as if it was just there waiting all these years for her return. She re-groups with a couple old high school pals. Todd (Martin Starr) works at an art gallery and is still in the closet. Mel (Mamie Gummer), assistant principal at the high school, is married and trying to have a baby.

A character asks Leigh: "Are you having a nervous breakdown?" The brusque opening of quick cuts and character fragments suggests without specifically saying so that is, in fact, what Leigh is undergoing, but that people ask her without much genuine follow up suggests an authenticity. No one really thinks anyone is in the midst of a nervous breakdown. That's just a cocktail party term for depression. Right?

I think it's highly legitimate that Leigh is in the midst of a serious and troubling rift with reality and appreciate that "The Lifeguard" suggests this possibility without belaboring it. For instance, her relationship with a disgruntled sixteen year old, Little Jason (David Lambert), seeking to light out for Vermont, is presented with little depth or texture. It's not unlike a teenage romance, driven primarily by hormones and an insatiable desire of I-Don't-Know-What-I-Want. Watching Leigh slip into the fictitious warmth of childhood routines like a Liz Lemon Slanket is unsettling.

And creepy. The film brings levity to her relationship with Little Jason, specifically in the way that an increasingly (convincingly) frazzled Mel realizes she has to stop looking the other way, act her age and confront her friend and the student of whom she is ostensibly a caretaker. I, like many others, have grown tired of movies presenting age-inappropriate relationships without so much as a hint of consequence, and here is "The Lifeguard" anteing up and painting not in black and white but ashen gray.

If it could have seen that toughness through to the last gritty frame it might have been something truly special with a headlining performance from Bell that is long on the courage to be unsympathetic. Alas, the film, like the innumerable indie rock songs filling the soundtrack with emotional cues, opts for a shortcut to sentimentality - dousing the flotsam ridden pool with chlorine, if you will.

Leigh's ultimate decision is made not so much on her own as by another character's decision - the best friend of Little Jason in an act not to be revealed. This could have suggested further cowardice on the part of Leigh, paralysis in the art of thinking for herself, but instead comes across like a forced Turning Point.

All's well that ends well, and Leigh literally drives into a sunset that reflects off her tear-stained face. It seems we are made to believe she has re-found her sense of self and purpose and meaning. But then why does the film close with Leigh looking directly into the camera? Is that just a stab at flashy filmmaking? Or is Leigh asking us what we think?

I think she still might need some therapy.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1973)

"You've got your whole life ahead of you." Seriously. Seriously. When do people stop espousing this pseudo-philosophy? I heard it in my teens and I heard it in my twenties and I've heard it here in my thirties. I can only imagine I'll still hear it up into my forties and fifties for the simple fact that late in "Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams" middle-aged Harry Walden (Martin Balsam) recites those words to his middle-aged wife Rita (Joanne Woodward). Bless Rita's heart, however, because although she does not vocally tell off her spouse we can easily tell she is mentally calling shenanigans. This whole film, in fact, is about Rita standing at the dividing line......strike that!......reaching the realization that she has already long since passed the dividing line of the point when your whole life is ahead of you. Most of her life is now behind her - summer wishes have shriveled up, winter dreams have died. (And a Merry Christmas to you too!!!)

As the film opens we find Rita and Harry sleeping in the same room but in separate beds. I shook my head and thought, “Oh, cinema, you and your whimsical innocence.” But then I remembered this wasn’t the Thirties. This was the Seventies. The Swinging Sixties had already happened. “Last Tango In Paris” had been released a year earlier. They’re sleeping in those separate beds for a reason! Even so, if ever a movie was meant for the Seventies it was “Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams.” That washed out look that seems to strangle out sunlight, prevalent in so many films of the era, provides a perfect undertone to the film’s purposeful oppressiveness. Their home, so spacious and ornate is nonetheless made to look like a dank, if well-designed, dungeon. “When did it get so dark in here?” Rita wonders aloud.

Woodward would have merely been 43 at the time of the film’s release but manages to play at least 10 years older, skillfully creating an advancing spinster with a whiny voice that often seeks to nag even in the most gentle of situations. (Listening to her pick away at her spouse when he’s in the midst of a mini-breakdown at Bastogne is cringe-inducing.) We see this is hereditary when her mother comes to visit. Her mother is played by Silvia Sidney in a performance that evokes Elaine Stritch on “30 Rock” – just less comedic and more harsh. Mother and Daughter attend a showing of Ingmar Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries.” Mother has a heart attack and dies. Having a heart attack at a showing of “Wild Strawberries” threatens to make the Symbolicometer go haywire, but despite this and a few sensationalist dream sequences the film still manages to keep its wits.

Her mother’s death, of course, prompts a life re-evaluation, but that evaluation is more a downward spiral than a victory march. She clings to an old farmhouse as a means to cling to her past. She has long since lost contact with her son who apparently went gay and lives with a man. The film never quite goes so far as to say Rita not only disapproves but is disgusted by her son’s life choice, but the ever-fearless Woodward quietly hints in that direction. We initially suspect her husband is the standard uninspiring cipher who only exists to provide our female protagonist a reason for being so wrapped up in herself. Ah, but the script slowly unearths a sweet, patient man more in love with his wife than she is with him.

The film, in fact, sort of becomes as much as his as hers late in the second act when they take that aforementioned trip to Bastogne where he fought in WWII. There he re-connects with his past, and his re-connection aids in her kinda, sorta enlightenment. Decisions are made, steps taken, perhaps “you can see them coming”, but perhaps there are all sorts of decisions we can see coming in old age that we desperately try to stave off making because to make them means we have to cut significant emotional chords to which we have long clung. And maybe that’s why Harry tells Rita she has her whole life ahead of her, and why people keep telling me I have my whole life ahead of me even though I see so much of my life in a rearview mirror I sometimes wish I could just blend into.

Days get shorter. Years go faster. The world closes in. Rita's closing line - "I want to moved into a smaller apartment" - is, I reckon, meant as a rejection of the dark, empty representation of her current living space. I wondered if maybe it signaled she was ready to just slip into a Manhattan cocoon and hibernate in old age.

Over-Analyzing The Machete Kills Trailer Part 3

We're back! The third trailer (version: red band) for Robert Rodriguez's forthcoming "Machete Kills" just dropped via IGN. The previous installments of over-analyzing these previews have involved much speculation regarding the specifc role being played by fair devious maiden Lady Gaga. This latest trailer, however, officially ceases all speculation. Her specific role is now clear.

Lady Gaga is playing the baddest mama jama since Beatrix Kiddo sheathed her Hanzo sword.

How do we know this to be true? We know this to be true for two reasons.

1.) Lady Gaga is apparently driving a Volkswagen Bus.

2.) Lady Gaga, while smoking a cigarette, thrusts a gun out the window of her Volkswagen Bus and melodiously declares "Hola, motherfucker."

I already know she will be defeated by Machete, but I also know that her defeat will simply be one of those sweet-scented lies told on the silver screen to appease patrons yet to find true belief in Our Lady Of Perpetual Gaga.

David Thomson & Living In Dream

David Thomson is by far my favorite non-everyday film critic. No one sees the cinema nor writes about the cinema in quite the same way as him, which is among the highest compliments one can bestow upon a writer of any format. I had long held the impression his ostensible biography of Nicole Kidman was mere trash, a mash note, a love letter extended over nearly 300 pages. This notion, as I should have known all along, was utterly mis-held.

It is not a true biography at all. Rather it is a fascinating, hilarious and really, really strange look not simply at the exemplary career of Ms. Kidman as an actress but as her place in the culture as a celebrity. I won't even tell you where he goes with his chapter on Nicole's Chanel No. 5 ad. Only Thomson, man.

Thomson's prose never fails to routinely leave me joyfully reeling, looking up from the page for a minute or two to ruminate on some sentence (or series of them). One passage in particular from "Nicole Kidman" that was not even about Nicole Kidman knocked off my proverbial reading glasses. I loved it. I loved every word of it. I have included the passage verbatim below and will offer no context nor commentary. I simply offer it for you to read and consider.

"And here we come to a remarkable and distressing paradox in the American or the mainstream movie: that while the medium is founded on fantasy involvement, still so much of its material is held up to to short-sighted and depleting schemes of what is plausible. The audience, the customers, have always gone to see movies to make an imaginative journey - that of rising from their seats in the dark and going up to exist on the bright screen, in the sublimity of heightened behavior. But as if we're ashamed of yielding so much to the fanciful in America, we then go to great neurotic lengths to persuade ourselves that the action of movies is 'plausible.' And so the medium is innately dreamlike, while the content is ostensibly photographic and lifelike. Thus, we hope, we keep faith with our existence as a hardworking, rational, scientifically minded, capitalist culture - as opposed to people living in dream."

Crystal Fairy

If you are not a Michael Cera fan going in, "Crystal Fairy" is unlikely to turn the tide. This is not to suggest that Cera is playing another in his long line of herky-jerky, romantically-confused teenage hipster doofuses. His character in the low-budget, shot-on-the-fly "Crystal Fairy" is, however, by far the single most irritating character he has yet to portray. He is irritating by design, but that does not necessarily make it any easier to foster a Cera Conversion. Ultimately what might win you to his side is the way in which he nobly and subtly cedes what seems to be his very own film to his wholly committed female co-star.

Cera is Jamie, a prattling, self-absorbed American living in Chile on a quest consisting of nothing much more than getting high and having a good time doing it. Exactly how he funds this quest is never addressed but then his self-absorption probably precludes him from needing to explain himself. He oversleeps when his friend needs him to be up early and later gets peeved when others won't hurry up and keep to his own schedule. He wants what he wants, he wants it now, and human decency, by God, will not stop him. Nor make him shut up.

His latest psychedelic crusade involves the fabled San Pedro cactus whose juice can be drunk as a means to ingest mescaline. He recruits his pal and roommate Champa (Juan Andrés Silva) as well as Champa's two brothers to locate one of these cacti and partake in its hallucinogenic riches. Silva is, in fact, the brother of the film's writer and director, Sebastián Silva, and IMDB indicates "Crystal Fairy" is his lone credit any of kind. This suggests he may have nabbed the role because of genes. Nevertheless, he does a strongly understated job of portraying someone who has spent enough time with the motormouth Jamie to understand how best to deal with him and block him out while still consistently finding himself annoyed and worn down.

He finds himself even more annoyed when Jamie becomes convinced their entire operation will fall apart on account of the unexpected presence of the title character, Crystal Fairy (Gaby Hoffmann). Never mind that Jamie, in the midst of a cocaine fit, is the one who invited her and gave her his phone number. That was yesterday. This is today, and today Jamie doesn't want her here.

Crystal Fairy seeks to spread peace and love wherever she goes and probably starred in Vassar's production of "Hair." As self-absorbed as Jamie is, she is open to the karma of the universe, shedding all her clothes not in a moment of "look at me!" vanity but because nakedness likely brings woman closer to her truest self. The first time we (and Jamie) meet her is at a house party where she is unashamedly dancing on her own.

The point-counterpoint is clear - a tightly wound American drug freak and go-with-the-flow American free thinker on the cusp of doing mescaline together. Will his barbarous kvetching turn her against them? Will she lead this jaded addict into the mystic?

Gaby Hoffmann has had one of the more interesting careers in Hollywood. A child actress in stalwarts such as "Field of Dreams" and "Sleepless In Seattle", she lived for a time in the infamous Chelsea Hotel and appeared primed for a transition into adult stardom. That never really happened, and that sorta seemed to be her own choice. Instead she went to college to earn a degree in literature, worked on the stage in New York and per Taffy Brodesser-Akner's piece for The New York Times Magazine she interned for a chef in Italy and lived in a trailer in the Catskills. To me that signals a welcome comfort in her own skin, and no doubt influenced her exotic, enchanting work as this aptly named Crystal Fairy.

The film, smartly, saves its most crucial insight and ultimate Reveal (though not a Reveal in the traditional sense) for damn near the very end. It belongs not to Jamie but to Crystal Fairy, and when she offers it around a beach campfire Hoffmann's voice momentarily loses the whimsy it has possessed throughout. It shifts Crystal Fairy the person and "Crystal Fairy" the film into something else.

Maybe Crystal Fairy isn't as self-possessed as we thought, maybe Jamie isn't as much of a jackass as we suspected, and maybe we turn to narcotics not to reach metaphysical plains but to forget the reality all around us.

Twixt

Our protagonist, Hall Baltimore, your typical alcoholic witchcraft murder mystery writer, is attempting to summon the words for the opening sentence to his new novel and, in doing so, mimics Marlon Brando. It is a telling moment for a couple reasons. It is telling because Hall Baltimore is played by the portly, puffy latter day version of Val Kilmer as opposed to the Julliard-trained heartthrob of the 80's, and it is a reminder of how much Kilmer has become like Brando. Reclusive and disinterested…..unless he chooses not to be.

It is telling because "Twixt" is a film written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, a legend famous for many endeavors but particularly for guiding Brando to a pair of towering performances several decades ago. He has returned as an independently financed filmmaker seeking to tell personal stories. Indeed, while "Twixt" is a film about many things, it is foremost a film about a broken-down storyteller desperately searching for a proper end to his story.

Baltimore rolls into the town of Swann Valley - less sleepy than foreboding - for a book signing at a hardware store (one of many moments that sounds funny in theory but just does not quite visually pull off the intended laugh). Tom Waits croaks out a voiceover involving a clock tower with seven clocks that all tell different times and a pack of goth teenagers on a shore across the lake led by a creepy outcast named Flamingo. It all feels distinctly of a different era, and is why I was so disappointed to see Baltimore Skyping with his ex-wife (played by Joanne Whalley in a brilliant coup of casting) as opposed to conversing with them via pay phone. Then again, these contrasts underscore the confusion of the clock tower. Yes, you could just get the time from your iPhone, but it's still disconcerting when the noon chimes go off at 6:37.

Approached by the kooky town sheriff Bobby LaGrange (Bruce Dern) about co-authoring a novel set around the long-ago murders of a dozen young girls. Baltimore is reluctantly intrigued. It's been awhile since he's had an in-print hit. He forges ahead, but his publisher (David Paymer, properly existing in a totally different universe) wants an outline and an end.

From that point Baltimore is repeatedly suspended in dreamlike states where he goes back in time, sees the young girls, watches the murders and encounters the wise apparition of Edgar Allen Poe (Ben Chaplin). It seems Poe once stayed at a hotel in town, the same hotel beneath which the murdered girls were buried. Now he plays ghostly mentor to Baltimore, offering advice on endings and why murdered young girls make the best main characters, suggesting Coppola may have been influenced by a colleague's fanciful ideas as much as his own.

Coppola, it seems, concocted this story in league with a weird dream he had one night. "But as I was having it I realized perhaps it was a gift,” he explained in an interview, “as I could make it as a story, perhaps a scary film, I thought even as I was dreaming. But then some loud noise outside woke me up, and I wanted to go back to the dream and get an ending. But I couldn’t fall back asleep so I recorded what I remembered right there and then on my phone."

Truer words have never been spoken for "Twixt" very, very much evokes the sensation of a wild, wooly dream being recorded on a phone in the middle of the night. Intriguing ideas are raised, sketched, considered, and afforded unsatisfactory see-throughs - if, in fact, they are seen through at all.

The clock tower, looming over the story like it looms over Swann Valley, said to house the devil himself, receives a visit from Baltimore that may or may not be real and then is heard from no more. Ultimately it's just eerie, useless symbolism. Baltimore's requisite backstory involves a young daughter that perished under mysterious circumstances and in many ways the story exists to get her father to point of a catharsis - I'm just not sure the story gets actually gets him there, let alone gets him there coherently.

Yet, I would be remiss in labeling "Twixt" a traditional misfire. The innumerable effects are often shoddy and the sound mixing is oddly echoey, but this also enhances the individuality of the project. Coppola shot much of the film on his sizable California estate as if he was a young filmmaker just starting out and shooting a movie in the places available to him. Also in the manner of a young filmmaker, he seems unable to contain his narrative, too in love with certain images and concepts to cut them. He wants to include everything, and I’m kinda glad he does, like a moonlit motorcycle rescue which looks as staged as a high school play which makes it so wonderful. Alas, evoking his own protagonist, Coppola comes armed without an ending.

So suddenly he just shrugs and skips ahead to one.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Johnny Eager (1941)

Stanley Tucci's old-fashioned screwball comedy set in the 1930's, "The Imposters" (1998), hits and misses but the hits are fairly amusing. One of the hits involves a couple of con-artists, Richard Jenkins and Allison Janney, who don't really get that much to do but are still allotted enough screen time for Janney to repeatedly annunciate Jenkins' character's name: "Johnny." There is just something about the way the name Johnny exudes from a lady's lips when she is at her most desperate or flummoxed or eroticized. 'Course it doesn't quite work in the modern day, not in the way it once did, which is why everyone now is a 'John' rather than a 'Johnny' and which is why time-traveling in "The Imposters" to routinely hear Janney implore "Oh, Johnny" is so delightful.

To quote Marvin Gaye and Tami Terrell, however, there ain't nothin' like the real thing. Nothin', baby. All due respect to Janney - a fine actress - but her recitations of "Johnny" are amateur hour compared to the immortal Lana Turner. Co-star of Mervyn LeRoy's striking 1941 noir, "Johnny Eager", the title affords Ms. Turner the opportunity to toss off mellifluous renderings of Johnny-centric sentences all over the place. "Oh, Johnny." "You love me, don't you, Johnny?" "Hold me, Johnny." "What's wrong, Johnny?" "I had to do it, Johnny." Am I alone in wanting a CD compiling all of Lana's Johnny remarks to drift off to sleep to? (Is that weird?)

Turner's character, the delectably named Lisbeth Bard, is not the main character, per se, and not featured on screen for scenes at a time. Yet, it is difficult to deny her place as the most vital character, the one that causes the wheels of our anti-hero Johnny Eager to spin and eventually get stuck somewhere in the swamps of A-Man's-Gotta-Do-What-A-Man's-Gotta-Do.

Johnny Eager, played by Robert Taylor with his impeccable pencil-thin mustache, opens the film as a jocular taxi driver visiting his kindly parole officer, Mr. Verne. (Does this suggest Tony Gilroy is a fan of "Johnny Eager"?) It is a credit to Taylor that he is so convincing in this sequence, so apparently on point for living the straight and narrow, because in the ensuing sequence he parks his cab outside a shabby dog track and saunters through about fourteen doors (including one with the requisite command "Do Not Enter") and slips out of his cabby uni and into a sleek suit and tie and assumes position behind a desk with a cigarette in hand and issues hard-bitten orders into the phone as several underlings perform tasks around him. He's no taxi driver, see, but still leading the high life, running a gambling syndicate, but with a well-placed member of the parole office in his pocket to warn of any forthcoming visits. His dream: turn this rundown dog track into a money-wagering destination.

Scene by scene, moment by moment, Johnny Eager's charming veneer is stripped away and by the time he stands ready to off his age-old best friend he has basically traded in the label of Anti-Hero for Straight-Up Scoundrel. That is precisely what makes Lisbeth Bard's role as the Femme Fatale so intriguing.

Femme Fatales exist, of course, to lure the Anti-Hero into a web of desire and danger and dishonesty against his better judgement. Typically, though, that danger is that much more dangerous than the danger to which the Anti-Hero had already submitted himself. In "Johnny Eager", however, written by James Edward Grant and John Lee Mahin, the Anti-Hero, upon using and abusing the Femme Fatale for his own wily purpose, finds himself being led less into a web of dishonesty than of virtue. It turns out the Femme Fatale is simply too upstanding and when he comes face-to-face with that fact he essentially retreats into his self-made cocoon of scum & villainy and (literally) pushes her away when she might just be his saving grace.

The film does an exemplary job of bringing all its main characters together in such a way as to entrap them all within the same metaphorical vice. Aside for one character, that is, and he is Jeff Hartnett (Van Heflin, who earned the Best Supporting Actor Oscar), the near-omnipresent trembling alcoholic chum of Johnny Eager who gets more good lines in single scenes than characters these days get in whole movies. His reasons for being kept around are never quite made explicit, though his explanation that he is "meticulously recording for posterity the doings of a unique individual" is rather poetic. And that poetry is what brilliantly obscures the fact that he mostly exists to shine a psychological light upon Johnny Eager and offer advice that he knows his pal won't heed.

That he's a writer, though, is spot-on because he is the one character who despite consistently being on the screen still remains off to the side, un-entangled in the whole sordid mess of an end to which everyone else (knowingly or not) is driving. Not that it prevents him from getting caught up in it emotionally. He does, but he also seems to the only one from that understands from the get-go the fatalism encompassing the world of stories like that of "Johnny Eager." There's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, there's only shit and piss.

10 New Career Moves For James Franco

You may have heard that James Franco, new-fangled Renaissance Man, painted a mural awhile back in the hipster New York hive of Williamsburg. This, of course, is merely the tip of the vegan meatloaf when it comes to the all-around artisan that is James Franco. Actor. Acting Coach. Director. Author. Drag Queen. Artist.

This, as it must, got me to thinking: what other avenues could Hollywood's requisite cavalier pursue.

Note: This list does not include Becoming A Trappist Monk or Joining Greenpeace because, come on, those are just too obvious.

10 New Career Moves For James Franco

1. Films a documentary in which he waits in line at the post office. Titles it……”James Franco Waits In Line At The Post Office.”

2. Becomes the official "personal incense burner" for Dogstar.

3. Fashions an alter-ego named Ricky Lefevre, leader of a Lower East Side singing street gang called The Coral Catsharks.

4. Writes, directs and stars in a film along with Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson and Jonah Hill chronicling a cattle drive from Montana to Texas. In an inspired bit of Herzoginess he decides to lead an ACTUAL cattle drive with Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson and Jonah Hill from Montana to Texas and film it.

5. Opens an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in which he drinks gas station coffee. Titles it……”James Franco Drinking Gas Station Coffee.”

6. Apprentices to Daft Punk.

7. Creates a line of "Franco Print" shirts, button-ups adorned with patterns of festive James Franco images. (He uses the proceeds of this venture along with a Kickstarter campaign to fund his remake of "Captain Ron.")

8. Becomes spokesman for Bartles & Jaymes and films ads with him in the role of Ed Jaymes & Seth Rogen in the role of Frank Bartles.

9. Legally changes his name to Bob Marley’s “Jamming.” The WHOLE song. “Yes, I had a reservation for Jamming, I want to jam it with you. We’re jamming, jamming, and I hope you like jamming too. Ain’t no rules, ain’t no vow, we can do it anyhow…” etc.

10. Calls a press conference and officially establishes himself as "America's Concierge."

The Good & The Bad Of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

The Good and The Bad of David Fincher's hyper-glossy The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo that has for a heartbeat the leading performance of Rooney Mara can be broken down into a split sequence that occurs close to the end of the film. Journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) and his research assistant/hacker/ass kicker/piercing enthusiast/raging introvert Lisbeth Salander (Mara) have just been given access to all the files of Sweden's Vanger Corp, the company they are investigating in the hopes of solving a 40 year old disappearance and/or murder.

And at this point it is as if Fincher and his editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall momentarily decide to craft two entirely separate movies. In the first movie, Mikael, working out of his cottage, stumbles upon a crucial piece of evidence, possibly implicating a member of the Vanger family living nearby. Thus, he makes his way to a sleek, avant garde home on a windswept hill housing this family member. He sneaks inside. He tip-toes down hallways, peers around corners, inspects rooms, tries to open locked doors. He even......wait for it......unsheathes a knife. Eventually the family member returns home. Mikael makes an escape by the hair of his chinny-chin-chin. (Or does he?)

In the second movie, Lisbeth feverishly scrounges around the book-lined walls of the archives of Vanger Corp. She is exhausted. She boards an elevator. She disembarks. She buys a cup of coffee and a chocolate bar from a vending machine. She walks back to the archives. She bites into her chocolate. She sips at her coffee. She goes back to work.

Fincher and his editors cut, cleverly, from the first movie to the second movie, back and forth, over and over. As the first movie unfolds we continually expect "something" to happen, and eventually it does. As the second movie unfolds we continually expect "something" to happen, and it does not.

Therein lies the conundrum. The murder mystery is theoretically the engine that drives "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" but that element is handled for the duration of the two-and-half hours just like the first movie. It hits all the overdone beats, goes precisely where you expect it to go and goes there without illuminating our understanding of anything. It's the crap of a million and one airport rack novels.

The engine that TRULY drives "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" is Lisbeth, which is to say it is also Rooney Mara. The film's mighty allure is in the social ineptness of Lisbeth as she continually dismisses the archives employee without so much as looking at her. It's in the way she is fueled by sugar and caffeine and in the way she pulls her hood over her head as she buys that sugar and caffeine as if she does not want the guard on duty to see her face, as if she is internally lamenting the fact she can't seem to be alone no matter where the hell she goes.

There is nothing there in the second movie but, of course, simultaneously, EVERYTHING is there. The character and the performance uniting in a sequence that seems to exist for no purpose other than to try and throw us off the scent. The first movie is so obvious. The second movie isn't obvious at all. Rather it is deeper and more subtle and more mysterious. Oh, what I'd give to have at the no doubt reels and reels and reels of footage that Fincher and Baxter and Wall had at their disposal. We'd make "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" a latter "Annie Hall" - which is to say we'd ditch the murder mystery and make Daniel Craig a high-rent supporting character.

Why couldn't "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" be all about The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo?

Last Life In The Universe

If upon entering your apartment and noticing a noose conspicuously dangling from the ceiling all your brother can muster is a casual “Suicide again?” right before deeming he needs to hop in the shower as a way to beat the heat, you might have a problem. Kenji (Tadanobu Asano), the prospective consumer of that noose, has a problem, though he is hesitant to advise in voiceover of just what his problem consists.

His suicide is not one of the standard-issue reasons: hopelessness, romantic failure, money problems. His suicide note that isn’t one may reveal a clue. It says: This Is Bliss. Does he find it, whether in life or in death? That’s the poetical sensory journey undertaken. The film seems headed for an answer until a final whomper of a shot that re-defines everything and renders any and all participation in the movie-watching Guess Ahead Game mute.

Kenji’s life seems less blissful than strictly regimented. His sparking clean, just-so apartment resembles a fluorescent-lit library, which happens to be where he works for a day job. He rejects conversation and friends. All that interests him is bliss, but his demeanor suggests bliss cannot be attained in this earthly realm. Things change when his brother, a lout and a Yakuza who has fled his homeland, shows up unannounced with a friend. Before long the friend has murdered the brother and Kenji has murdered the friend.

The anti-sensationalist manner in which director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang shoots this sequence suggests that even homicide is not enough to wake Kenji from his slumber. That awakening arrives later when another flirtation with a suicide at a bridge is cut short by the materialization of Nid (Laila Boonyasak), the same comely angel he spied but for a moment in his library. This suggests destiny – also, random chance, good and bad. Bad for her because she gets sideswiped by a truck and killed. Good for him because he does not jump and meets Nid’s sister, Noi (Sinitta Boonyasak), the Paula Abdul to his M.C. Skat Cat – that is, opposites attract.

She is as slovenly as he is neat, which he learns when she invites him over to her place after they spend the night at the hospital in the ill-fated hope Nid might survive. From that point the film morphs into one of those Tentative Turning Intimate Connection films in which proximity breeds familiarity, though not much else. They eat – several times – and he attempts to spic & span her pad – several times – which she alternately rebuffs and welcomes. They have some fun. She gains some sympathy for him and he for her, beyond the context of the accident and death, though I would hesitate to label it “an understanding of”.

The other key element at play is fantasy. On several occasions Ratanaruang serves up sequences that quite purposely strike an illusory tone, as if they are figments of the characters' imaginations. And that brings us back to the last shot. It re-defines all that we've seen and sends us hurtling back through all of it, re-adjusting our entire attitude. So often these sorts of ends are mere parlor tricks (see: "The Sixth Sense") but in this one, I think, lies the entire concept of "Last Life In The Universe."

You don't necessarily have to off yourself to achieve bliss when you can just play make believe.

Small Beautifully Moving Parts

Sarah Sparks (Anna Margaret Hollyman) is at the Grand Canyon on a western road trip and she gets out of her rental minivan to use her electric toothbrush. She flips it on. We hear the familiar whirring. Then the familiar whirring begins to die. It dies completely. Sarah Sparks is forced to brush her teeth……manually. Egads.

Technology, however tiny and day-to-day, is at the root of the aptly named “Small Beautifully Moving Parts”, a 72 minute severe indie. And even if the title did not clue us into the topic, we would understand straight away when Sarah, who apparently earns a living as a “researcher”, interviews random people on the street about the presence of technology of our lives. Three times the film returns to this device which assists us each time in understanding Sarah’s mental state and the movie’s aim. It is frustratingly inorganic and while I would like to chalk it up to co-directors/writers Annie Howell and Lisa Robinson underscoring how inorganic our technology-charged lives are, well, I know better.

Annie and her husband Leon (Andre Holland) have just learned she is pregnant. Her reaction is not exactly, shall we say, joyous, but nor is it depression. Perhaps the word for which we are looking is confusion. After all, technology is her field, not anthropology. And yet, all around her technological problems yield human freak-outs. Her sister’s (Sarah Rafferty) attempt to potty train her daughter goes awry when their potty-training doll suffers a mechanical breakdown. (How did people in the colonial era potty-train their children without the luxury of potty-training dolls?). Her father’s skype conversation with his lady friend whom he’s never met in person goes awry when his microphone cuts out. And Sarah’s journey to find her estranged mother takes a few detours when the GPS in her rental van cuts out.

Did I mention Sarah was estranged from her mother? Well, of course she is. And before the birth of her own daughter Sarah wants the chance not to re-connect with her mother, per se, but just to see her mother and ask “Why?” for any number of reasons. Her mother, however, has gone off the grid, somewhere in the desert of Nevada where they have no phones or email.

You see what’s going on here. I’m not referring to Sarah and her mother’s inevitable tete-a-tete. You expect the inevitable tete-a-tete to be enlightening and instead it is just brutally, if politely, honest. Answers? You want answers? There are no stinkin’ answers. You ask the question and then make a guess based on your own hypothesis, that’s your answer. No, I’m referring to the film’s examination of our over-reliance on technology.

This is a worthy topic of cinematic exploration and even if “Small Beautifully Moving Parts” is often too on the nose about it (witness the sequence that leads to Sarah and her mother’s inevitable tete-a-tete), well, hey, it gets the ball rolling.

Friday's Old Fashioned: College Coach (1933)

To get things off to a low key start I will simply say that "College Coach" is the best film about college football I have ever seen. And it is important to note that I say this as a devout patron of collegiate football, someone who believes it to be the single greatest sport on this here Earth. Is it "dated"? Well, sure. It was made eighty years ago. It's got that rat-a-tat-tat dialogue favored by the times in spades. The action on the gridiron is filmed via hand crank camera which gives it that in-fast-forward sensation.

It also possesses more bite and satire than the majority of jejune mush posing as lampoonery in this day and age. The final scene, scored to the sounds of the film's fictional college's fight song, is as strong a shot across the bow as anything the famed irritant Charles Pierce has ever written about the grandest game.

College, after all, is nothing more than a business, and business at Calvert University is on the verge of bankruptcy. Thus, the President and his faithful board hatch a scheme. They will bring in the best college football coach in the country, James Gore (Pat O'Brien), to punch up their hapless squad, turn them into champions and thereby draw massive crowds that will help fund a new stadium that will draw even more massive crowds and go from spiraling debt to soaring profit.

Gore, however, is sort of like a Depression-era Urban Meyer. He plays the part for the press really well and says all the right things. "It's not the score that counts, but the spirt in which you play the game." Heck, he seems so upstanding he is named Grand Woodcraft Chief of the Campfire Boys Of America. Not even Pop Warner earned that honor, one of his sycophants tells him.

But Gore is less a football strategist than a strong-armed, button-pushing con artist. He imports several players from his previous squad, like Buck Weaver (Lyle Talbot), who plays the football real, real good but can't make the grade. It doesn't matter if he can't make the grade, naturally, because Gore simply ensures everyone makes the grade by assigning them majors like "Aesthetics" (the Underwater Basket Weaving of '33) and forcing powerless Professors to present passing grades even if the players hand in completely blank sheets of paper. (Ah, college. Don't change, you.)

This doesn't sit well with the team's captain, Phil Sargeant (Dick Powell), son of the University President, who came to school to play football and learn Chemistry. If football is to be his overlord, he won't play. This is apparently problematic for the squad's chances, though I have no idea why since it is explicitly referenced that the three previous Calvert teams - for whom Sargeant would have played - did not win a game. But no matter.

"College Coach" is the perfect college football movie because it does not compromise. College football coaches merely compromise their public recitations of playing the right way all the time while not really compromising their true core values at all - core values which boil down to the word winning.

And that's the only lesson that "College Coach" imparts in the end - winning cures all ills. Oh, the lesson is presented in that classic aw-shucks manner of the Golden Age, but read between the lines and this movie is wicked through and through. The coach's wife (Ann Dvorak) wants her husband home more regularly, away from the game more often, acting like a real husband. Until poor play threatens job loss and financial trouble at which point she is willing to roll up her sleeves and get just as nefarious as the next guy. Sargeant's chemistry professor stands for all that is good and righteous with the University. Until he is on the verge of losing his job at which point he'll willingly pass a dunce with a zero IQ and root, root for dear old Calvert.

Why an opposing player even dies on account of an injury sustained via Coach Gore's mean-spirited (if admittedly successful) halftime order. That might seem melodramatic until you consider that deaths from football injuries in the 1930's was still very much a real thing. The film just sort of glosses over it without so much as a staged apology from the Coach.

You keep expecting the movie to finally cop out, to finally concede to a mandated lessons, right up 'til the very end when it comes so damn close to doing just that and then.....doesn't.

Tom Osborne, former head coach of my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers, titled his first autobiography "More Than Winning." And it's not inaccurate. There is totally more than winning. Like, you know, money and greener pastures.

Cinema Romantico's Week Off

It's that time of year again! As of tomorrow night I am off to the mountain time zone and Colorado for a little R&R and a roughly ten day internet sabbatical (by choice) deep in the heart of Rocky Mountain National Park. (Though also, by the grace of the music gods, I get to see my favorite band to see live in Denver this Monday. Air high five.)

But don't presume Cinema Romantico will be going dark in my absence. Ha! Far from it. We have several posts set to go up automatically, posts we have refrained from posting for reasons I don't really know. A couple reviews (foreign & domestic), a brief essay on the good and the bad of "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" (the Rooney one), a post centered around renaissance man James Franco and, of course, the requisite Friday's Old Fashioned.

So don't run and hide! Stick around! Go you Huskies!

Destination

Drinking Buddies

"Drinking Buddies", while character and dialogue-centric, is a film dictated almost exclusively by its environment and beverage accoutrement - pint glasses and tulip glasses and plain old plastic cups. The primary setting is a thriving brewery in Chicago, though the story is less interested in the brewery's inner-workings and the brewing process than in the perks of being an employee.

By perks I mean beer. A lot of it. Characters drink it with their lunch and drink it when they punch out for the day and drink it when they go out after work and then they return home and usually crack open another bottle or two. Occasionally they even make like the dock workers in the second season of "The Wire" and substitute it for coffee. They often appear unkempt, possibly un-showered, as if in the midst of an eternal hangover, which may well be the case. The subject of alcoholism is never raised, a detail which feels right because no one in this insular world would see alcohol as a problem. It's their living, monetarily and socially.

Kate (Olivia Wilde) and Luke (Jake Johnson) work together at the brewery. She is a harried event coordinator, schmoozing clientele and setting up tastings, while he mans the front lines, preparing the ales and lagers that he proceeds to prodigiously down. They are friends, teetering on the brink of being more, but never quite getting there. She is dating Chris (Ron Livingston). He is dating Jill (Anna Kendrick). Before long this quartet invades a Michigan beachside cabin and "Drinking Buddies" threatens to become "Your Sister's Sister" with one extra person. Especially when on a hiking excursion that Kate and Luke avoid, Chris and Jill make out.

Instead the story moves back to Chicago where Chris proceeds to break it off with Kate who does not so much spiral out of control as merely imbibe adult beverages at a slightly higher rate than she already did while Jill passively-aggressively presses Luke on the marriage they often discuss but never plan. All signs involving Kate and Luke point toward Will They/Won't They? And while that question looms, Joe Swanberg, the writer and director and editor, admirably refuses to play the situation for its manufactured suspense. Behavior is what interests him.

Behavior is what has always interested him. His previous cinematic outings have never gone much for conventional story, opting instead for throwing people together, allowing them to air their grievances and seeing what happens. And while "Drinking Buddies" possesses that same sort of lax structure, it is so much more precise in saying what it wants to say. That is, the fact that its characters are unable to say what they want to say.

The film was supposedly mostly improvised, and feels like it, but the improvisation is nicely in tune with the rhythms of real life. Wilde and Johnson in the primary roles create an entertaining rapport that effectively communicates just how little they actually communicate beyond giving each other crap. These two really need to deal with how they feel about one another, except they are specifically portrayed and played as two people who would rather down another drink and smear lunch meat on each other’s faces than face a friends without benefits reckoning.

Which is why in the end it comes across less about Will They/Won't They then How Can They Not? As in, how can two flirtatious people working together in such tight, alcohol-infused proximity day after day after day not eventually cave to the carnal? In other words, their environment threatens to make the decisions for them. The film does not even reach a real conclusion, instead cutting out what feels like a few chapters early and leaving numerous future blanks to be filled in.

One thing’s for sure – a lot of those blanks will get filled with malted barley drawn from a tap.

Life Goals

One of my many, many favorite moments in "Roxanne", one of my all-time favorite movies, involves Steve Martin's Cyrano-esque Fire Chief C.D. Bales attempting to teach his hapless firefighting charges how to properly put into effect a fire hose. To do this he strikes up Strauss's "Blue Danube Waltz" on a record player and has them move in time to the music with the full-force hose in hand. "A one, a two, a three!" he implores. "A one, a two, a three!" Then the spirit moves him. "I can't stand it!" he cries as he waltzes in time by himself.

I thought of this moment just the other day. I was on the El platform waiting for a train that, as trains in Chicago will, wouldn't come. As I did, a young man, twenties, sporting a well-coiffed faux hawk, ascended the platform and found a waiting spot a couple feet down from me. He was wearing headphones. He scrolled through his iPod. He found a song to his liking. He liked it so much, in fact, that he began dancing. Right there. On the train platform.

Several people moved away and re-positioned themselves farther back down. I stayed where I was, admittedly fascinated by this public display of dancing and even, well, a bit jealous. I remember the time I was on the train and I had just uploaded the new Gwen Stefani album on my iPod and I was so overcome with the groove that mentally I was screaming "I can't stand it! Just get up, Nick! Just get up and DANCE!" I, of course, didn't.

Days like today are a time for both reflection and looking ahead, a time to take stock of the man I am and the man I want to be, and what goals I can set in the hopes of eventually being me to the best of my ability. This probably should involve things that are health-related and finance-related and career-related.

Alas, I merely want to become the sort of man who dances in public. If I can become that man then I think I will have done all right in this life.

Ain't Them Bodies Saints

With its 1950's-era characters playing pen pal via romanticized voiceover and any number of painterly shots of the Texas plains, writer/director David Lowery's "Ain't Them Bodies Saints" will invite obvious and not necessarily incorrect comparisons to Terrence Malick. Even so, Lowery's film forges its own path, utilizing an elemental story that gracefully allows its underlying themes and larger points to emerge on their own sweet time. The story is so simple, but its substance is ultimately never-ending.

Opening with an I'm Pregnant Reveal the script quickly, purposely turns the Reveal on its head, pulling the curtain all the way back to show our lovebirds, Bob (Casey Affleck) and Ruth (Rooney Mara), as vaguely defined Bonnie and Clyde-esque bandits. Alas, a job goes awry, Ruth shoots a local deputy, Bob takes the fall, and is squired, shackled and drawn, off to prison.

This unleashes the first of the film's many impressive achievements, specifically in how it rolls through a handful of years and an abundance of character details without leaving us behind. In only a few scene snippets the entire relationship of Ruth and her daughter Sylvie is convincingly crafted, while in the meantime she and Bob keep the flame burning by exchanging aching letters. Eventually Bob busts out of prison and heads due south, intent on meeting his little girl and re-uniting with his one true love.

This has all the makings of a heightened, yearning fable, a Dust Bowl Inman trying with all his might to get back to Ada and Cold Mountain. And while love is very much on the mind of "Ain't Them Bodies Saints" it's a different exploration of that lasting theme. Does true love outweigh responsibility? Mustn't a mother's love all be given to the child? Is compromised love necessary in the name of familial welfare?

The deputy, the same one Ruth plugged with a bullet way back when, Patrick, harbors a consuming if reticent affection for Ruth and little Sylvie. He comes around the house, checks up on them, spends time with them, buys Sylvie gifts. Played by Ben Foster in a brilliant slow burn of a performance, he makes it clear that he thinks and knows more than he says. The focal issue between the two is raised but not addressed. He has his reasons. So does she.

And so too does Affleck convey a character who understands that his presence as an outlaw in the lives of his wife and daughter would inevitably be problematic, a fact he is explicitly reminded of by the low-rent local crime magnate (Keith Carradine) who makes threats should he fail to heed that reminder. In spite this knowledge, Bob cannot stay away. Love, in this case, may not conquer all, done in by its long odds.

Mara is magnetic in the primary role, a young woman forced to grow old beyond her years, settled down for the sake of her child but still with a glimmer in her sorrowful eyes for the way things were. One scene finds her scolding and shooing neighborhood children from the street for fooling around with a BB gun. As punishment she takes away the gun, only to pause and fire a single shot at no one and nothing. A smile creeps across her face. That old criminal spirt remains intact.

Which is what makes Ruth's Choice so difficult, a pining for her fugitive soulmate and a devotion to her role as mother and caretaker. Patrick may be the right man to help raise his daughter but he may not be the man she loves.

These warring ideas come to a head when she reads a letter secretly delivered to her from Patrick in which he advises of his intention to seek her and his daughter out. Mara's reaction will momentarily still your beating heart. She looks to her right, away from the camera, for it is her decision and hers alone, and perhaps she wishes not to share it.

Nevertheless, her wistful smile tells us all we need to know.