Divergent

There is a moment in "Divergent" when our teenage protagonist, Tris (Shailene Woodley), formerly Beatrice, enters a cavernous mess hall with her pal, tentatively seeking out a place to sit down and eat. When they do, a character conspicuously referred to as Four (Theo James) labels them "transfers", and that's when it hits you. She may be a soldier in training, but really she's a high school student who just transferred from Shermer to Rancho Carne and she doesn't know at which lunch table she's supposed to sit.

Based on the youth adult novel by Veronica Roth, the world built by "Divergent" at first glance would appear no different from the other fictional futuristic societies where catastrophe of one sort or another has left the world at the mercy of Totalitarianism. If viewed this way, the film (and perhaps Roth's book) might be blandly realized, an apocalyptic version of Chicago in which its remnants are visually non-distinct and its various themes glaringly on-the-nose. But, "Divergent" is not intended as an allegory of any political or economic system, but of youth's social hierarchy.

Indeed, the world, as told to us in Tris Voiceover, has been divided into five factions of convenient names - Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless, Erudite. Each faction's costumes functions as hammered-home symbolism, not unlike the combat boots of the "criminal", the letter jacket of the "athlete", the khakis of the "brain", the pink blouse of the "princess", and the unkempt hair of the "basket case". Each person is born into a particular faction and then, at the age of sixteen, is forced to choose between retaining his or her current faction or joining another. Tris was born Abnegation, a faction in which her parents (Tony Goldwyn and Ashley Judd) play major roles, but she chooses Dauntless. So, she is forced to forgo selflessness for gung-ho bravery, resist passivity for aggressiveness, and learn to punch and kick and throw knives like Danny Trejo. Tris, however, as she quickly learns, does not truly belong to Dauntless or, for that matter, any faction. She is Divergent.

This is essentially a description of the high school. The Principal authority exercises centralized control over all aspects of student life. The students themselves, suppressed by the controlling authority, are separated into concrete factions - the sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads - and the system - in the film's own words - "removes the threat of anyone exercising their independent will." Except for Divergents.

Of course, we would all prefer to see ourselves as Divergents, apart from the innumerable cliques, able to exercise free will and exist independently of the prevailing structure. To do so, however, risks ridicule and exclusion, and that is precisely what happens to Tris. A rival Dauntless initiate (Miles Teller) may as well begin every scene in which he appears by cruising up in his dad's convertible. Chief villain Jeanine Matthews (Kate Winslet) is the homeroom teacher out to get the troublemaker.

Four, however, is the heartthrob, Jordan Catalano to Tris's Angela Chase, though he does not so much "save" her as see her for what she is (literally!) and aid her quest of self-discovery. Never is this more apparent than in a majestic sequence that finds her soaring across the city's burnt-out landscape aboard a zip line, a thrilling homage to "The Perks Of Being A Wallflower's" band of misfits flying through the Fort Pitt Tunnel. Amidst such an outsized moment, Woodley still lets you into the middle of it, feeling her release from society's endless spate of suppositions. Her whole performance, in fact, is the film's foremost asset, selling moment after moment without overselling, marking the transition from reticent to fiery by letting us sense that fieriness was actually her birthright.

That said, "Divergent" is still very much an action picture. Perhaps too much, bogging down in the final-third as it disappointingly becomes just as concerned with a societal uprising as with its hero's journey, and director Neil Burger's sequences of hand-to-hand combat and gun battles turn frustratingly repetitive and unimaginative. Yet, at the same time, it forces Tris to consider life apart from her parents, a coming-of-age rite, and specifically reminds us that even though cinema perpetuates the notion dystopias are close at hand, they have been in existence within high school hallways for lo so many years.

It also reminds us that factions have been around at least since the Capulets and the Montagues, never more adroitly than in a sequence between Tris and Four on a glimmering balcony where they share a kiss. They finish and Tris says: "I don't want to go too fast." It's cheesy. It's also perfect. It's exactly what Molly Ringwald would have said.

Recap Vomit: Trophy Wife (The Wedding Part Two)

Weddings on a sitcom are never easy. Then again, weddings in real life are never easy. You think it's your day but it's not really your day - it's everyone else's day. This is the refrain I continually hear from my married friends. And so even though Kate and Pete think their wedding day is their day, it's not really their day - it's everyone else's day. This is to say, it's Megan Mullally's day, because Megan Mullally plays Malin Akerman's unhinged, bad-kid-at-heart mom Cricket. From the moment she steps off the plane to the moment she ascends the roof of the Harrison pool house to have a cigarette, it becomes all about her.

But then that's the precise problem with these "event" sitcom episodes - it becomes all about the stunt casting. But then does anyone know half the people at their wedding? The Groom & Bride get top billing, sure, but they can easily become bit players in the biggest day of their lives. That's kinda what happens to Kate and Pete. Cricket dominates the proceedings with her bawdy ways, like hiring a couple male strippers for the intimate pre-wedding family dinner in a gag so exhausted it barely wheezes across the finish line.

Elsewhere, Pete's parents, played by Florence Henderson and Bob Gunton (sneakily great casting), show up too, revealing themselves as jaw-droppingly uncommunicative and trapped within the confines of mundane lovelessness. So, son and daughter try to appeal to their respective parents to change their ways, though Kate seems more determined to do this than Pete. Pete just seems exhausted. Best Line of the Episode, in fact, goes to Pete. "At least you try. I just sigh." *Nick nods furiously.*

Of course, the episode's title means that a wedding awaits even if the wedding as planned gets scrapped for partially dubious reasons. But the scrappage allows for a surprise which, let's be honest, cribs from "The Wedding Singer" (minus Billy Idol) and just seems a bit too sugary in the face of all that has come before. There's a niftier scene of Kate and Pete fleeing to the garage to be alone and I almost wish the episode had just ended right there - as in, they only need this, not all that other Surprise Wedding On A Sitcom nonsense.

In truth, not much changes here. The way things were more or less remain the way things are by episode's close. Which might actually be the most precise detail "The Wedding Part Two" reveals. A strong subplot involves Warren and precocious Bert announcing to their respective mothers - Dr. Diane Buckley and Jackie - that they no longer wish to be called "adorable." After all, they are now Best Men. Not Best Boys. And Best Men are not "adorable". Dr. Diane Buckley and Jackie pledge to honor their request. They do.....for about half-a-second. Then Warren and precocious Bert are right back to being adorable.

"The Wedding Part 2" might be meant as a kind of affirmation, but it just comes across like a placeholder.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Mélo (1986)

The title is a giveaway. “Mélo.” Melodrama. And the 1986 film of the late Alain Resnais is, beyond all else, melodramatic, resorting to, in no particular order, an affair, poison and suicide. That it never feels outlandish can likely be traced to its roots on the stage. The film is based quite specifically on Henry Bernstein’s 1929 play, and I say quite specifically because Bernstein himself is given the sole writing credit. Often plays adapted for the screen fall prey to the fallback criticism of “it was too stagy.” But Resnais seems intent on making his silver screen version of “Mélo” too stagy. He pours the intimacy on thick, pinning us down in very limited locales. Even during a trip to a dance club, the camera conspicuously stays attached to the characters at the table, as if the dancers and the dance floor and the dee jay are merely hypothetical. It’s like a stylistic exercise to remove the style and show that even the static can be dynamic.

The opening sequence, which seems to speed by in the bite of a desert streudel but actually takes up close to a quarter of the film, makes everything seem too good to be true. Not just in its setting, a picturesque French courtyard out back of Pierre (Pierre Arditi) and Romaine’s (Sabine Azéma) home, the moon looming in the nighttime sky, but in the way this married couple interacts with their violinist friend, Marcel (André Dussollier). Still, hints are dropped that not all is as it seems, particularly when the subject of children is broached. It seems Romaine wanted them and Pierre did not. They remain civil, mostly, but it tips the film’s hand. Then, it drops a bomb.

It is a breathtaking monologue, upwards of ten minutes, the camera seeking out Marcel above all else as he proceeds to tell the story that both defines his existence and will work to define “Mélo.” itself. At a public performance he was forced to watch from the stage as the woman he loved carried on in the audience with another man. Still, he played on, sumptuously, maintaining performance even in the face of this unspeakable event that shattered for him the illusion of love. Such faithlessness, such betrayal, he could not and cannot abide.

Ah, but what if Marcel is made to be the betrayer? Well, that’s the only way this can go, of course, and it will. Romaine schemes her way into Marcel’s life and makes eyes at him, which he rejects until he almost instantly re-considers. She seems spurred less by attraction than growing disinterest in her husband and a fun-filled self-destructive impulse. He seems less spurred by attraction than a psychological craving to know what it would have been like to be that man in the audience with his wife. It is just about the most miserable love affair ever. So miserable, in fact, that Romaine decides to compound her misery by poisoning Pierre. Why she wants to do this is never made specifically clear but then it never quite seems clear to her. This is the traditional descent into madness. She cannot abide her own faithlessness.

The cramped confines of her and Pierre’s living quarters (and juxtaposed against Marcel’s much more swanky digs) lends tangibility to her climbing the walls, and her fate is met in perhaps the film’s most sublime moment – a walk alongside a river, at which point Romaine and the water and their surroundings all just sort of merge in the shot, like a van Gogh, and then give way. Gone.

That leaves one more confrontation, Pierre seeking out Marcel, hoping to find out what happened, and Marcel essentially coming face-to-face within himself – that same man who delivered that same monologue seemingly so long ago is now Pierre. Thus, Resnais’s play-like approach here and all its claustrophobia renders “Mélo” as a French funhouse of mirrors where no one can escape his or her reflection.

In Memoriam: James Rebhorn

Last 4th of July Eve, I curled up on my couch and watched Roland Emmerich’s (and Dean Devlin’s!) “Independence Day” for the first time in a decade, perhaps more. It was a film that long ago, pre-film snob days, I held admitted fondness for, and then fell out of love with – or, pretended to fall out of love with – because I fell in love with Ingrid Bergman movies and you cannot be seen at the art house with your espresso watching “Journey to Italy” while simultaneously waxing poetically about the wondrous moment when “ID4’s” Judd Hirsch expresses astonishment at the presence of a personalized phone aboard the President’s helicopter five minutes before the world may very well be blown to kingdom come.

I had watched “White House Down” – which I absolutely loved – but a few days earlier and its hypnotic overuse* (*compliment) of set-ups in the first act prompted me to reminisce about “ID4”, a film (?) which in retrospect I enjoyed mostly because of its hypnotic overuse of set-ups in the first act. Amidst the free-flowing set-ups we are, of course, introduced to our primary trio – under-the-gun and subtly-named President Whitmore (Bill Pullman), zinging Air Force pilot Steven Hiller (Will Smith) and heroic cable repairman David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum). They are, in order, white, black and Jewish. #America

But there is another character. We are first introduced to him lounging on the Prez’s Oval Office couch where he’s arguing for “targeting some ICBM’s” to “blow” the approaching alien spacecraft “out of the sky”. This is President Whitmore’s Secretary of Defense, Albert Nimziki, and hey, let’s be really clear about this, Nimziki was spot on about the aliens being hostile. But he was spot on about the aliens being hostile because if Secretary Nimziki saw a few Finnish tourists in a hot air balloon in an upstate New York he’d probably want to target some ICBM’s to blow ‘em out of the sky.

Nimziki was drafted as Whitmore’s not-so-gallant antagonist, disagreeing with the Commander & Chief at every turn, espousing the virtues of nuclear retaliation, attempting to upgrade to “DEFCON 4” without the President’s official permission, and, of course, existing to confirm the existence of all-important Area 51. In MFA Screenwriting courses he is what is officially labeled A Trainwreck Of A Character, but on 4th of July Eve he’s just the Dude You Live To Root Against. He was played by James Rebhorn, who died this weekend at the age of 65.

Rebhorn, born in Philadelphia in 1948, made a long-winding career out of those roles. He was tasked to be the D.A. on the “Seinfeld” finale that improbably put Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer behind bars because, well, who else would have the fortitude to do it? He was the FBI expert witness in “My Cousin Vinny” who fingered our lovable suspects. He was Dr. Larry Banks in “Meet the Parents”, Robert DeNiro’s WASP accomplice, who in the midst of the water volleyball game gone wrong first chastises hapless Greg Focker for not trying hard enough and then, after Greg has tried too hard and spiked the ball right into Jack’s daughter’s face, flip flops and hollers, in my favorite Rebhorn line reading, “It’s only a GAME, Focker!” He was always out to bring you down.

Yet, for all the roles in all the movies, it’s his turn as Nimziki that remains at the forefront of my mind. In “The Day After Tomorrow”, Emmerich created a villainous Vice President who was a curmudgeon and short-sighted, but who also received a comeuppance and learned a lesson. He was also quite explicitly modeled on Dick Cheney, and so it was just sort of Roland Emmerich playing moralist and Kenneth Welsh playing impostor. Rebhorn, on the other hand, was simply Albert Nimziki, a man who received a comeuppance but learned no lesson, a creation unto his own. I think of a prospective Secretary of Peace and I think of what Nimziki’s reaction would be – probably targeting few ICBM’s to blow him out of the sky.

In the manner of modern-day politics, I doubt a consensus could ever form around our foremost film President. There have been so many played by so many different sorts of actors in so many different types of movies that the argument could stretch to eternity. But, our foremost film Secretary of Defense? Well, that’s another story.

James Rebhorn’s Albert Nimziki is our Movie Secretary of Defense Emeritus. R.I.P.

Omar

The first scene in “Omar” (Adam Bakri) finds the titular character scaling the mountainous security barrier cutting up various Palestinian towns in the West Bank. What’s most telling, however, is not the monstrosity of the wall itself but the way in which the scene itself is presented. No dramatic music accompanies Omar’s climb and even when a warning shot is fired, his demeanor refuses to noticeably change. And consider how he’s dressed – like a young man sprinting off to the movies. The casualness of the moment is the reveal.

He is scaling the wall to go and meet Tarek (Iyad Hoorani) and Amjad (Samer Bisherat). They are his friends but they are also his compatriots, fellow freedom fighters in the eternal holy war that pervades the region. These initial moments, however, are lightly played as they sit around telling jokes and take tea served by Tarek’s younger sister, Nadia (Leem Lubany). Yet, there is also a distinct tension, but a tension born of the romantically intimate rather than the political incendiary. This is a telling difference that tips “Omar’s” hand.

Nadia seems to pay extra attention to Omar and the way camera cuts between Omar and Tarek, looking at one another and looking away, smiles caving into uneasiness, clues us into the courtship. Indeed, Omar loves Nadia and yearns to propose. He initially views Tarek as the impediment to romance, but this dynamic becomes more complicated when the three men go in on an operation to kill an Israeli soldier and wind up fugitives. It is Omar who is eventually captured, taken prisoner, tortured, and told by an Israeli agent, Rami (Waleed Zuaiter), to talk, to turn coat and become their informant. Omar has other ideas.

Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2014 Academy Awards, written and directed by Hany Abu-Assad, the structure of “Omar” is very much like a maze – which is to say that just when you suspect its characters may have found their way out, they somehow wind up right back where they began. The script is packed with narrative stops and re-starts, the entire structure smartly underscoring the frustrating cyclical nature of the never-ending Israel-Palestine conflict. As the story tensely progresses and situations and allegiances adjust accordingly, the more conspicuous the absence of any political or religious rhetoric becomes.

This past year, for reasons unnecessary to address in this review, I took a few collegiate correspondence courses, one of which was world religions. Much of the matter we focused on was, in fact, Israel and Palestine, and my ginormous course-concluding paper tasked me with not only writing about their conflict but proposing a "solution". I recall reading that and literally laughing out loud. Me?! They wanted me, some stupid American, to offer a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict?! Of course, to find a solution one must first fathom the problem, and the problem at the core of the conflict is never addressed in "Omar."

A particular moment finds Omar and Rami sharing a cigarette and chatting like regular folk. It is so simple. It is so far away.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

“He certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace.” This is how the protagonist of “Grand Budapest Hotel”, Monsieur Gustave H., dapper, detail-oriented concierge at the hotel of the title, played by Ralph Fiennes in a performance of remarkable layers, is summarily described in regards to his position. Yet, this phrase could just as aptly describe the film’s auteur, Wes Anderson. In one way, his seventh feature film is no different than his others, quirky, over-casted, inundated with heightened set design, and stuffed full frames. But in another way, this film is his most distinct, noticeably in the way some semblance of reality keeps trying to intrude in Wes’s Land of Make Believe. That reality never quite takes over can be attributed to Anderson’s dedication to sustaining his cinematic illusions with a marvelous grace.

Anderson’s films have often bore resemblance to novels, particularly “The Royal Tenenbaums”, but never quite so extravagantly as in “Grand Budapest Hotel.” The framing device features an aging author (Tom Wilkinson) in 1985 relaying the particulars of how a past work came to be at which point the film flashes back to a younger version of the author (Jude Law) in 1968 staying for a spell at the rusty relic the Grand Budapest Hotel has become where he meets Mr. Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), the eccentric owner of the faded palace. Mr. Moustafa then relays to the author how he came into ownership of the hotel at which point the film flashes back to a younger version of Moustafa in 1932, then called Zero (Tony Revelori), a Lobby Boy at the Grand Budapest in its heyday. He is the protégé of Gustave H. and the film pivots on their friendship and the forthcoming adventure.

In “Moonrise Kingdom” Anderson invented an island – New Penzance – but in “Grand Budapest Hotel” he invents a whole central European country, Zubrowka. That is also the name of a Polish vodka but Anderson shot the film throughout Germany, primarily in the state of Saxony, and most every shot here could double as a travel postcard on a rack at a ski chalet. By both referencing the disrepair into which the Grand Budapest eventually falls and setting the majority of the film in 1932 Europe on the eve of WWII, Anderson is pointedly serving up a decadent slice of nostalgia, a wishful reminder of the way things were before all means of military might tore through and ravaged the landscape.

Not that he denies the looming threats of terror. The approaching atrocities continually creep up around the edges of the film, insinuating themselves into the proceedings, such as in the undefined but S.S.-suggesting state police, only to be repelled by counter attacks of whimsy. This is the most violent film Anderson has made, which likely prompted the weird R rating, and while the violence is not exactly sickeningly gruesome and still artfully choreographed, it is nonetheless striking merely for existing. Willem Dafoe, in fact, stalks through the film like a European Anton Chigurh.

Ostensibly the film is a kind of comic caper, centered around Monsieur Gustave H.’s relationship with an aging tycoon (Tilda Swinton). When she dies, Gustave and Zero strike out for her estate, where they learn, much to the dismay of her villainous son, the autterly Anderson-ian named Dimitri Desgoffe-und-Taxis (Adrien Brody), that she has left Gustave a priceless portrait. Alas, Gustave is accused of poisoning her, which lands him in prison which leads to a breakout and a chase and all sorts of moments and set pieces in between and after. The plot is not necessarily beside the point but atmosphere and character become the focus, even if many characters go no further than the essence of the actors playing them. Gustave, however, is something else entirely, played perfectly by Fiennes not only with droll verbal dexterity but with a noble professionalism.

A significant portion of the film stretches out to other finely rendered locales and yet, the spirit of the titular establishment, as introduced and asserted by Gustave, who is literally seen at a pulpit giving sermons to his fellow hoteliers, is never left behind. Why even when he and Zero make their cross-country trek to Madam D.’s funeral, they remain outfitted in their regimental workplace uniforms. His conciliatory role as concierge is what Gustave clings to in any given situation, constantly dousing himself in L’Air de Panache, as if to ensure his appearance is always at its most pleasing. Still, Gustave is prone to excessively brief if curse-ridden hissy fits, losing his cool and instantly regaining composure, suggesting cracks in that finely-calibrated Panache-infused exterior. And this is also suggestive of the cracks manifesting in the world which both he and his dearly beloved Grand Budapest inhabit.

Ultimately the hotel is an old world, pre-war symbol, memories pressed between the pages of Zero’s mind. In one sense, the film ends happily, but in another sense it very much does not. This is why Anderson opens the film by showing us what the Grand Budapest Hotel has become before showing us what it once was – he pines for the past, much like Mr. Moustafa, willingly staying in the servant’s quarters, a demonstration of painful longing. Gustave may have been adept at sustaining the illusion, but his mentor lost that skill somewhere along the way. And just past the marvelous shots and gracefully blocked set pieces of “Grand Budapest Hotel”, the first glimmer of Wes Anderson recognizing the folly of his own illusion comes into view.

See The New Bond Trailer Here! (An Exclusive!)

Oops! That's not the new Bond trailer, is it?! Ah well. That Chris Parker was always cooler than what's-his-name anyway. 007 may be able to pilot an underwater car, but let's see him navigate the south side of Chicago...

30 for 30: Requiem For The Big East

“That was a little subway push,” says former St. John’s University basketball coach Lou Carnesecca. Ostensibly he’s referring to a push (shove) his player, Chris Mullin, gave a Georgetown player, Patrick Ewing, in the midst of a game, but the precise terminology refers to something deeper. A “subway push”. That’s a provincial phrase. To understand a legit subway push you have to be from the northeast, or, more accurately, New York, and the collegiate basketball conference at the heart of the latest 30 for 30 documentary, “Requiem For The Big East”, was founded and flourished on provinciality.

Oh, it was founded on and flourished because of a lot more than provinciality, sure, as director Ezra Edelman makes abundantly clear. This was a league founded so its charter members would not be left out in the cold and it was a league that flourished because of then untapped revenue stream that was sports cable television. All this brought the Big East to the top, and then to its knees. His film, bookended by the Georgetown/Syracuse semifinal game of the final Big East Tournament in 2013* is occasionally bulbous in its self-flattery and it is unquestionably over-sentimental, but sport – any sport – viewed through the prism of time tends toward sentimentality. Still, to its credit, “Requiem For The Big East” does not dwell overmuch on simply the good. In point of fact, it frequently goes to show how the good and the bad were mixed up together, often interchangeable.

*The Big East still technically exists - just in a different and inferior form - and, thus, The Big East Tournament is still technically a thing. But it isn't. The Big East lives. The Big East is dead.

As the vision of former Providence basketball coach Dave Gavitt, the Big East began in 1979 with the goal of binding together several basketball schools in the northeast that not only played the game well but assured strong television markets. Quality play was key, yes, but TV was crucial, the means of beaming that quality play to the rest of the world and earning the money to keep the league afloat. The conference’s rise, in fact, coincided with the rise of the now monolithic ESPN. They were complicit allies in its rise and fall.

The doc covers significant ground but focuses much attention on the conference’s glory period of the 1980’s when the talent and level of play was at its apex, and when in the year of 1985 it improbably sent three of its team to the Final Four (a feat not achieved by any other conference before or since). It gathers nearly its entire gaggle of outsized coaches – the irascible Jim Boeheim of Syracuse, the aforementioned Carnesecca who even at the age of 89 seems as colorful as ever, Jim Calhoun of Connecticut who comes across like a plain-speaking street poet, and intimidating John Thompson of Georgetown, towering over the film much like the 6'10 straight-talker towered over his peers. More than any, Thompson's teams - fearsome, dirty and/or physical and really, really good - embodied the Our Way philosophy of the whole conference.

These coaches were tenacious and often unapologetic men whose egos and acumen helped build the Big East up. There is also quite clearly no love lost between them, specifically between Thompson and Boeheim whose teams formed the league’s most notorious rivalry, and that is fascinating – how the relationships in the league could be cooperative and acrimonious. These were almost entirely all men of the northeast and when Thompson won the national title in 1984, he rightly bristled at being labeled “the first black coach” to win a championship. Instead, as he makes clear, being the first school from the northeast in thirty years to win a championship is what meant something to him. “You felt that regionalism,” he says.

The beautiful, bitter irony is that the Big East was made by TV and ruined by TV. Television made it national and television money made it rich. Thus, by becoming national, it forewent its regional roots, and by becoming rich, it yearned for further riches. “You simply can’t tempt people with that much money,” says sportswriter Charles Pierce, “and not create a culture where they look for more.” Their charter schools – Syracuse and Boston College – that also played football needed conference unity within that sport to survive, and as soon as the Big East went searching for gridiron appeasement, its identity was lost. That loss was not officially overnight but emotionally it was, and Boeheim (the last of the founding fathers still coaching) knows that well. Ribbed gently by others in the doc for caving when his school agreed to go to the Atlantic Coast Conference, Boeheim observes that while he is nostalgic, his nostalgia is essentially for what the conference was in the 80’s.

As I get older, the more I realize my devotion to American college sports as opposed to professional, was born of out of their provincialism. Boeheim says that beating Georgetown in the last Big East Tournament meant more to him than winning the last Big East Tournament. God help me, I love that, a remembrance of the time when a regional rivalry meant more than “Who’s Number 1”? That time was beautiful. That time is gone.

Next Stop Wonderland: Sixteen Years Later

“It doesn’t matter how you meet Mr. or Mrs. Right. The real mystery is what keeps two people together after they meet?” At this, Hope Davis, playing lovelorn nurse Erin Castleton, appears momentarily dumbfounded, as if the universe’s whole code has just been cracked. But then she just sort of re-resumes the laid-back misery that has afflicted her most of the film. You might say she’s……saudade. That's the word the Brazilian gent our dear Erin encounters later in the film employs to describe her. It is a word, as NPR recounted less than a month ago, that Portuguese writer Manuel de Melo termed: "a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy." In the film it's just a bit more on the nose: "You are sad and happy at the same time."

In the story of me, it is generally accepted that my incalculable obsession with all things fate, particularly at the cinema, was born circa 2001, with the John Cusack – Kate Beckinsale rom com “Serendipity” that most of the world is indifferent to (or actively dislikes) but which I cherish like “Casablanca”. Cinematic scholars, however, upon more thorough inspection would deem this a mislabeling of my karmic headwater, pointing instead to the whimsical Sundance success story of 1998, “Next Stop Wonderland.” Oh, they’ll tell you 1998 was the year of two asteroid movies, but it was also the year of parallel movies involving parallel storylines about the eternal destiny of romance. “Sliding Doors” was released in April. “Next Stop Wonderland” was released in August.

“Sliding Doors” has a better pedigree, primarily due to the presence of then rising star Gwyneth Paltrow as its leading lady. “Next Stop Wonderland” had Hope Davis who up until then might have been best known (?) – outside of hardcore indie circles – as “French Ticket Agent” in “Home Alone.” I don’t mean to recast these films as rivals sixteen years after the fact, but merely to note the coincidental curiosity of two films focusing on divine will and how I saw them both at the same theater and how the latter spoke to me and the former did not. Perhaps, you see, because it was meant to be this way. “Next Stop Wonderland” made me love Hope Davis so much that I watched “The Daytrippers” and gave “The Myth of Fingerprints” a whirl when it came on the Sundance channel one night and I noticed she was in it. The latter is only, like, my third favorite movie ever. Who doesn’t believe in destiny?

I had not seen “Next Stop Wonderland” in at least a decade. I suppose I returned to it because Phillip Seymour Hoffman (billed as “Phil Hoffman” in Stephen Holden’s New York Times review) is featured in a bit part as Davis’s loutish activist boyfriend who breaks up with her at the film’s opening to send it galloping on its way. He’s funny and over-caffeinated, and a key cog despite his little screen time, but this is Hope’s film and – if you will please, please forgive me for a momentary bout of schlocky prose – a re-watch on a Sunday morning when the temperature was just beginning to rise and the snow was just beginning to melt (it has since snowed again, but never mind) reminded me of the hope I felt the first time I watched it in an era when you still came home to check your answering machine to find the girl you really, really dug hadn't called you back.

The plot hinges on her character navigating the Boston dating scene. Her mother (Holland Taylor) places a personal ad in the paper which leads to Davis’s Erin going on date after date after date. The parallel story involves Alan (Alan Gelfant), a plumber, following in the footsteps of his father, but both clinging to and charging after dreams of becoming a marine biologist. He’s a genuine guy in a noxious urban dating scene filled with posers and jackasses.

He and Erin continually come close to meeting, but never quite do, and that makes it sound like another in an extensive line of plots that are merely formal exercises in prevention, rigged so that our characters’ true love is close but not quite……until the end. When it is. And while there are a couple close encounters and a phone call that isn’t, “Next Stop Wonderland” actually comes across like the antithesis to such systematic plotting.

Director and Editor Brad Anderson chooses for the majority of his soundtrack not the hits of 1998 but an assortment of Brazilian bossa nova. It is perhaps his strongest managerial decision, providing "Next Stop Wonderland" the remarkable sensation of being alive, the story comically untangling itself as it progresses rather than certain things happening in a certain order to finish at a certain point. As such, the film becomes less about these two winding up in one another's arms then these two learning to be comfortable with themselves and assured in their own skin.

This is what makes the ending the happiest of all - it's not the universe conspiring for ninety minutes to bring these two together, but the universe waiting until it seems convinced these two have figured out their shit. Once they have, it draws back the curtain, points them to the sunset on the beach and lets them fall into an embrace. It says: karma is on our side. Sixteen years later, that's a message I still find reason to believe in.

Best Shot: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

---This is part of Nathaniel's Hit Me With Your Best Shot Series at The Film Experience.---

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is the rare film that in public consciousness may be more synonymous with its famously idiosyncratic screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman, then with its own director, Michel Gondry. Indeed, its non-linear narrative and circular structure in combination with its psychological probing is vintage Kaufman. Still, Gondry, a man who broke into film via groundbreaking music videos, implants the movie with an assortment of optical effects functioning as a literal journey into the mind and memory of its protagonist.

But then, as a filmgoer, the shots to which I'm usually most inclined favor elegantly simple frames working to convey meaning and emotion informed by the film as a whole. More acutely, though, my favorite shots at the cinema tend to be human faces.

Kate Winslet is my favorite actress - this readers of Cinema Romantico know all too well - and yet when considering "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" in terms of a single shot it is not Winslet's magnetically brilliant creation Clementine Kruczynski nor her ever-evolving hair color and lustrous orange hoodie and any of the multitude of frames involving her and those that jump to mind. Rather, it is Kirsten Dunst's Mary Svevo, receptionist at Lacuna Inc., a company in the film's hyper-reality that has perfected a procedure of memory erasure.

As someone who fancies himself a writer and is fond of (crippled by) nostalgia, I am wracked by the thought of one day losing my memory. Last week I read this stellar long form piece on former North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith and his slide into dementia and felt myself succumbing to a mild panic attack. All my favorite pictures in life are mental ones, all the memories of my collective life experiences are at my necessary disposal when I write and writing is my favorite thing and to write without them is unthinkable. Thus, to envision the idea of it all slipping away into nothingness.....

This is what happens to Mary and the memories of her love affair with her superior, Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson). They decide (he decides) it's best to cleanse her memory of this affair. Of course, that old feeling re-stirs, because that's partly what "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" wishes to convey, how particular romantic yearnings cannot be denied even in the face of their literal expunction. Even so, Mary has been stripped of that previous life experience - what it showed her about life and about the world and how it made it her feel. Even if the flame is re-kindled it can never be the same.

Her last scene is with Stan Fink (Mark Ruffalo), a "technician" at Lacuna Inc. who confesses that once - just once - long ago he saw Mary with Dr. Mierzwiak. She wants him to recount it.

Mary: "How did I look?"
Stan: "Happy. Happy with a secret."
Mary: "And after that?"
Stan: "I never saw you together like that again. So I figured I was imagining things."

He wasn't imagining things, of course, but now that's all Mary can do - imagine how she looked and how she felt when she was happy with a secret. But try as she might, she can't recall it. She never will. The memory is gone. Wanting to remember but being unable to......dear me, that seems the cruelest fate.

The Dozen Best Movie Drinks

"Couglin's diet: cocktails and dreams." - Bryan Brown, Cocktail

Yes. I know. Referencing Tom Cruise's critical stink bomb "Cocktail" and its drink-mixing mentor/maestro Brian Flanagan, he of the conspicuous Irish surname, in conjunction with an Irish-themed holiday is insulting. Except, not really. It's not really insulting because we all know that St. Patrick's Day in America has nothing to do with anything legitimately having to do with Ireland. It's an excuse for Americans to paint green on their faces and consume massive amounts of alcohol. Hell, most years they don't really even celebrate on St. Patrick's Day. They celebrate on the Saturday before St. Patrick's Day. It's like St. Patrick's Day observed. And any Irishman worth his whiskey knows you don't simply do your drinking on a day conveniently scheduled to avoid having a hangover on a weekday morning. Please.

Thus, in that spirit, today, on the real March 17th, Cinema Romantico offers the 12 Best Drinks Ever Drunk At The Movies.

(Disclaimer: no James Bond martinis will be included. This is because Cinema Romantico genuinely believes every drink listed below is more memorable than every single martini every single version of Bond has ever ordered and/or imbibed. Apologies.)

The Dozen Best Movie Drinks

12. The Big Lebowski

"Hey! Careful, man! There's a beverage here!"

11. The Thin Man

Nora: "Is that my drink over there?" 

Nick: "What are you drinking?" 

Nora: "Rye." 

Nick: (Picks up the glass and drinks it down.) "Yes. That's yours."

10. Titanic

"What, you think a first class girl can't drink?"

9. Out of Sight

Karen's tumbler of beloved bourbon becomes the epicenter of long-awaited physical contact between her and the handsome bank robber. 

8. Goodfellas

Paulie: "What'd you bring?"
Henry: "Bread. Peppers and onions. Salami. Prosciutto. A lot of cheese."
Paulie: "Come on, come on, what else."
Henry: (Revealing a bottle as if it were The Lost City of Z.) "...scotch."

7. Miami Vice

Go-fast boating off to Havana just to have mojitos. The life I'll never lead. Sigh...

6. Some Like It Hot

"I'm Sugar Kane. It used to be Sugar Kowalczyk."

5. Sideways

"You know, the day you open a '61 Cheval Blanc... that's the special occasion."

4. On the Waterfront

"One for the lady, one for the gent."

3. Raiders of the Lost Ark

Marion Ravenwood, 4-ever.

2. The Big Sleep

"It's raining pretty hard."
"Hey. That's right. It is, isn't it? You know, it just so happens I got a pretty good bottle of rye in my pocket. I'd rather get wet in here."
"Well....."

1. Inglourious Basterds

"There's a special rung in hell reserved for people who waste good scotch. Seeing as how I may be rapping on the door momentarily..."

Recap Vomit: Trophy Wife (The Wedding Part One)

As the part one preamble to Kate & Pete's wedding (not marriage, mind you, but an actual wedding), something crucial in regards to "Trophy Wife" and its surprising subtlety dawned on me for the first time - that is, I had never considered the legitimacy of Kate & Pete's marriage. Which is to say, I had never considered if they really were convincing as not only man & wife but as a couple in, for lack of a better term, love. I had not failed to consider this, however, because I simply accepted it per Sitcom Law. Nor did I fail to consider this per trusty Sitcom Denial. I had failed to consider this specifically because the relationship's believability was so subtly plausible and lovingly convincing that I just sort of mentally nodded the first time I saw them and moved on. You know, like when you see Jesse and Celine and you know that if these two were ever to wind up in, say, a pseudo-marriage with two daughters that everything would be hipstery keen and......whoops. NOTHING TO SEE HERE! PLEASE DISPERSE!

When Kate stumbles across Pete’s old wedding videos to Dr. Diane Buckley (Wife #1) and Jackie (Wife #2) and sees the extravagance of each ceremony, she naturally becomes despondent that her and Pete’s ceremony was merely of the civil variety. These old wedding videos also allow for the classic gag of WACKY HAIR! Because it was a DIFFERENT ERA! And in DIFFERENT ERAS people had WACKY HAIR! These are the sorts of jokes “Trophy Wife” is frequently above and yet occasionally still resorts to and which frustrates me but I will allow it if only because at Jackie’s wedding Pete recited his vows by going straight Bangle. We continue.

Sensing and believing in Kate’s desire, Pete re-proposes and the wedding planning begins. This leads to Pete and the Harrison boys wearing kilts because Pete wants to embrace his Scottish heritage which leads to Warren becoming obsessed with Scottish culture and painting his face like the Mel Gibson version of William Wallace which is simply perfect because as a dude who went through a “Braveheart”-obsessive phase too it elicited all sorts of wonderful nostalgia flashbacks, recalling the innocent era before I was made to realize that they can, in fact, take our lives and take our freedom. It also leads to the obligatory maid-of-honor tug-of-war between Meg and Hillary - the former's got the novelty penises, the latter's got the finger sandwiches. Meanwhile, Dr. Diane Buckley decides to go public with her relationship to fellow taskmaster Russ Bradley Morrison and Jackie is more or less forced to tell precocious Bert about her relationship with faux-bagel delivery man Sad Steve.

The real problem emerges when Kate decides to finally change her name in keeping with the wedding bell spirit. Alas, being a Canadian expatriate, a potential name change leads to an INS interview and Kate and Pete become so paranoid that the INS interviewer will take the sitcom’s ironic title to heart and deport her that they go ridiculously overboard in playing up American stereotypes to make it seem as if there is no possible way this could merely be a marriage of money and/or trophies. So Pete dons a fanny pack and the worst polo imaginable and Kate does laundry and references Pete’s “man cave”. They go even further overboard, of course, and eventually everyone in the family bursts into the living room in the midst of the INS interview and, thus, the interviewer deduces that in the face of such commotion and annoyance there is no way this is a marriage of convenience.

My rival re-capper at The AV Club faults this logic by actually employing that term – “seriously faulty logic”. But the point here, I would argue, is not the madcap nature of this everyone-on-the-stage-at-the-same-time conclusion, nor the incident in question swaying the INS interviewer being "logical" within the parameters of "the real world" (because come the eff on), but a gorgeously farcial reminder that Kate and Pete don’t need this sorta sitcom crap to prove they belong together.

Lies giving way to truth, that’s the crux of “The Wedding Part 1.” Because once Warren’s obsession with all things Scottish leads him to over-analyzing the family tree, he learns they are, in fact, not Scottish at all. They are Flemish. Wracked with guilt, he spills the beans to his dad. Pete decides he doesn’t care. He wants to wear a kilt at his wedding. That’s the truth, just like Dr. Diane Buckley & Russ Bradley Morrison's mutual desiccation is the truth and Jackie making Sad Steve Happy is the truth and Kate not being a Trophy Wife but the Woman Pete Loves is the truth. And the truth is that even as Marcia Gay Harden and Michaela Watkins remain so routinely comically brilliant on the periphery, it is Malin Akerman and Bradley Whitford that cannily give us something to believe in.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Two for the Seesaw (1962)

In the midst of yet another interminable argument between Jerry Ryan (Robert Mitchum) and Gittel Mosca (Shirley MacLaine), eventual live-in lovers, he makes an empty physical threat which understandably still prompts Gittel to scream. "Stop it," he says. "Somebody might come." "Nobody will come," she replies. "It's New York." That's partly a New York Joke, sure, but it also speaks to the higher truth of "Two for the Seesaw" - that is, these two characters often feel separated from the rest of the world and painfully self-involved.

That it feels this way can likely be attributed to its roots in the stage. Directed by Robert Wise, it was adapted from a Broadway play written by William Gibson by Gibson himself and Isobel Lennart. There are a couple quality sequences, particularly an early one, when our two characters evoke punchers in the ring, sizing each other up before truly beginning to connect. Jerry, we learn, was a lawyer from Omaha who came to New York City following a painful separation from his wife (as Mr. McAllister of "Election" presciently put it: "For centuries people have come to New York seeking refuge from their troubled lives"). All alone, echoed in opening credit shots of him wandering an uninviting city, he turns to the first woman that speaks to him at a freethinking party where he does not belong.

This Gittel is a wannabe dancer with an ulcer, too trusting of suspect men and too whimsically self-destructive. She would seem an odd match for the suit-and-tie favoring Jerry, and this is what they hash out in the film's best scene as what amounts to their "first date", each one pecking at the other to see if he or she will scratch back. The cross-examining lawyer in Jerry is on full-display but Gittel, neurosis aside, gives as good as she gets. She has a cynic's streak, yes, and this is precisely what allows her to sense Jerry is telling himself a few little white lies.

Not that Jerry would ever admit it. Mitchum's vocal timbre has always suggested a charismatic know-it-all, which is perfect for a harsh noir but less appealing for a straight-laced romance. Here, he is less charismatic than merely a know-it-all. Seriously, "Two for the Seesaw"is intended as a love story, except that Jerry comes across much more as a parental figure or self-appointed mentor to Gittel. "Stop rushing to my rescue," she declares, but he pretends not to hear. He wants to fix her up, refine her, put her on a diet, sort out her life goals, as if she's a Greenwich Village Pygmalion minus the satirical notes.

You can sense the possibility of satire. Being released in 1962 you can sense the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations running right up against each other in these characters, one on loan from 1950's Suburbia and the other representing 1960's Bohemia. To a degree, these two ideals do battle it out, particularly in the aforementioned "boxing" sequence, but somewhere along the line that gets entangled in an underlit courtship and scenes so stagy with dialogue so repetitive that you will begin clawing at the walls in a hopeless effort to go AWOL and run giddily through the city streets.

If Jerry pushes Gittel to get a handle on her wayward existence then Gittel pushes Jerry to confront his past. He caves, rejecting her offhand marriage proposal, suggesting he knows what's best for her while finally figuring out what's best for himself. Maybe. Or maybe he just ultimately proved he couldn't hack it in the urban jungle. If you can't make it there.....wait, is that how it goes?

Kate Winslet's Star

You may have heard that Kate Winslet, Oscar winner, hero, space traveler, is receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It seems slightly overdue, wouldn’t you say? If Hollywood is mecca to the movies and if its walk of fame is meant to honor its mecca’s most consequential stars then, for God’s sake, how has it taken Kate Winslet – The World’s Greatest Movie Actress – until 2014 to get her very own star?

Except then you realize that for every Lauren Bacall and Joanne Woodward Star on the Walk of Fame, there is a Christina Aguilera and Leeza Gibbons star on the Walk of Fame. And look, Xtina and Leeza can have their Stars, fine, no problem, but are these really the Stars with which we want the Star of Kate the Great to be mingling? This is Kate Winslet, son. Savvy? Thus, I stand before you today, dear readers, with a proposition. I propose that we scrap Ms. Winslet’s star on the ground and instead turn to a star in the sky.

In the 19th Century, Italian astronomer Angelo Secchi first laid eyes on an evocative red star in the Canes Venatici constellation, a carbon based supergiant considered to be very rare on account of its high amounts of the Carbon 13 isotope. He termed the star La Superba (or, superb) on account of its astonishing glow as seen through his telescope. It is one of the coolest (as in, 2200 Kelvin) stars visible to the naked eye and was described in 1905 by astronomer Agnes Clarke for the “extraordinary vivacity of its prismatic rays.”

Rare. Superb. Cool. Extraordinarily Vivacious. Who does this remind you of? So cancel that Star on the Hollywood Walk of the Fame and turn to the illustrious red glimmer this evening in the northern sky – let’s re-name Y Canum Venaticorum simply……Winslet.

10 Items or Less and Stardom's Burden

A Famous Hollywood Actor With No Name (Morgan Freeman) has been dropped off by a spacy member of a ragtag independent film crew at a sleepy supermarket far, far from the red carpets in order to "research" a role. He happens upon a display case of DVDs. One of the DVDs is his own, something called "Double Down", co-starring, ahem, Ashley Judd. He hides his own forgettable DVD behind several other forgettable DVDs. Sometimes you just don't want to be you, not even if you are a multi-millions reaping celebrity.

We are alternately envious and fed up with celebrities. They earn too much money. They travel the globe. They have really nice clothes. Why should luminaries with enough cultural cache to have Oscars and US Weekly covers deserve our sympathy? Why should any of us ever feel even a smidgen of pity for, say, Nicole Kidman and her Chanel-scented poshness? Perhaps because every now and then a paparazzo tries to bug her home or drive his goddam motorbike right at her. Personally, personal space and privacy are notions I cherish, and in a Hollywood-tinted spotlight they quickly become lofty ideals that literally must be fought for (lost, regained, lost, etc.). And I wonder if Ms. Kidman, so busy so recently in so many challenging roles, sees the chance for being so busy in so many challenging roles as a respite, a chance to disappear to a place where no one is (pointlessly) questioning the validity of her forehead.

You can sense The Famous Hollywood Actor With No Name in "10 Items or Less" seeking a challenge. We learn he hasn’t worked in several years. He keeps claiming this role he’s researching is “nothing I’ve committed to.” But then why did he come all the way out to who-knows-where to glean insight into re-stocking fruit and Cheerios? This, it would appear, is a cry for help, an aching for a performance to give, a role into which he can disappear, damn the prospective budget. We learn very little of his home life, yet the very fact that he is reluctant to speak of it would seem to suggest a desire to leave it behind for the day. Thus, when he encounters the requisite feisty cashier, Scarlet (Paz Vega), working the 10 Items or Less lane and holding steadfast to what that title implies, he finds himself drawn to both her feistiness and her frank duty to a job she clearly cannot stand. What, he wonders, would make someone behave in such a way? Because hey, like he says, “That's all character is. Behavior."

He charms his way into her existence and tags along with her for the rest of day. This is partly because the spacy member of the ragtag independent film crew never turns back up to give him a ride home and partly because he does not know his own phone number (actors!) and his agent and manager and everyone else are out of the office because it's a Jewish holiday. But maybe it’s neither of those things. Maybe The Famous Hollywood Actor With No Name is merely acting, playing dumb because he wants to research Scarlet, or because he’s found a part to play (Scarlet’s Sidekick! Her very own Ashley Judd!).

She has a job interview, which he keeps calling an "audition", and becomes adamant in aiding her preparation. A trip to Target for new clothing and makeup. A little protein in the form of Arby's roast beef. A car wash. Conversation during and in-between. That’s the whole movie. “But the bare-boned simplicity," as Stephanie Zacharek noted in her original Salon review, "is more a strength than a liability." Truth. And something true emerges from that simplicity.

A few years back Bruce Springsteen, Planet Earth's Poet Laureate, infamously made an appearance in a couple's wedding engagement photo on the boardwalk in Manasquan, NJ. It was all happenstance. Jennifer Smith and Ed Dwyer just happened to be there with their photographer at the same moment as Bruce. So, guitar in hands, he sat down beside them on a bench and strummed as the photographer snapped away. I love the photo because it’s one of those times when the line between Bruce and his Fans is completely blurred – we’re him, he’s us. Don't misunderstand, he’s not REALLY us and I don’t think he necessarily wants to be us even if he sometimes plays up that notion (image-conscious, I believe, is the term). But I'm sure he wonders about it. I'm sure he'd like to be an ordinary person for a day or two, maybe more, just to see, just to know, just to have that experience, just to find out what it’s like to be on the left side of that photo rather than the right.

In essence that is what happens to our Famous Hollywood Actor With No Name. Most everyone he encounters seems to know who he is but, even so, he blends in and becomes ordinary. And even as he becomes ordinary, he gazes around with a genuine glint in his eyes, finding the extraordinary in everything – be it a mop, ridiculously cheap designer tee shirts or a certain superstore. “This place is unbelievable.” “It’s Target.” 

God help me, that sounds simplistic, like an insipid motivational speaker by way of a famous movie actor. Freeman, to his everlasting credit, never plays the part simply, or cynically, instead conveying a warm curiosity. That curiosity is the film’s sole means of commentary – a member of Hollywood’s Elysium coming down to Earth to blend and behave. It offers no remedy for matters of class in America, content with simply saying: “See? We can co-exist.”

As Scarlet's car undergoes a thorough washing, The Famous Hollywood Actor With No Name improbably makes fast friends with the employees. So as "La Receta" plays on the soundtrack, he takes a washcloth and takes the lead, guiding them from car to car, smiling and sashaying. For a moment, you can practically see him walking on air. He’s lost himself in the part.

The Lone Ranger

Opening in 1933 San Francisco, a boy in a Lone Ranger costume enters a carnival booth to see “the way the wild west really was.” He happens upon an all-too lifelike wax figure of The Noble Savage, a Native American Indian in the clichéd pose of tomahawk above head, ready to strike, probably at fair-minded white men with only pure thoughts. The figure is too lifelike, however, because it is literally alive. This is Tonto (Johnny Depp), years after the fact, reduced to playing a version of himself, because at that point in American history where else could he go but the reservation or a traveling tent show? He proceeds to tell the boy the real story of the Lone Ranger, sort of Sheriff Little Bill Daggett of “Unforgiven” telling dime novelist W.W. Beauchamp the real story of English Bob. Just, you know, for Disney.

Well, clearly that’s a considerable portion of the problem – the problem being that this ultra-expensive supposed-to-be summer blockbuster was a thunderous disappointment, financially and critically, pulling down a cool 30% at the numbers-obsessed Rotten Tomatoes. Its marketing and release date, Fourth of July weekend, America's birthday, however, would suggest a movie for kids, an innocent and adventurous yarn, and that’s not entirely what Gore Verbinski’s two-and-a-half-hour behemoth is. Characters in this movie die. They die die, if you know what I mean. Deaths in Jerry Bruckheimer productions are often superfluous, and not every death here rings palpably, but many of them do. Indians are massacred, and not because some cockamamie John Wayne speech reassures us they are merely evil injuns, but because, well, America screwed them. In other words, when that boy goes behind that curtain in the fair booth, he is getting a peek behind the ornamented curtain of American history.

It’s difficult to believe, actually, that a popcorn movie, to use the parlance of our times, would be so brutally forthright. That’s an admirable gamble with a $250 million film and I suppose by evaluating in terms of ticket receipts and Peter Travers quotes, it’s a loser. And hell, maybe if you spend that much you should be catering to everyone, not just those of us who want to see how the west was really won. Except, that’s precisely where “The Lone Ranger” gets itself into trouble, trying to cater to everyone. 

Verbinski and his writers – Justin Haythe, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio – are, in spirit, aiming less for and more for “Once Upon A Time In The West”. The Buster Keaton train sequence of “The General” has been name checked repeatedly as a direct inspiration for a sequence in “The Lone Ranger”, but there are also sequences lifted verbatim from Sergio Leone’s 1969 epic. But whereas Leone let those scenes breathe, drawing them out to their fullest, Verbinksi makes the reference and then gallops on. Partly, this is his kinetic style, yes, but he’s also in an understandable rush to fill his film with action and comedy and a ho-hum and incomplete romance that simply meets a mandate. And it yields an age-old juxtaposition, a film roaring at such high speed ultimately finds itself stuck in sleepy valleys.

It’s no coincidence that I have written four paragraphs without mentioning Armie Hammer as the title character, a D.A., John Reid (an early scene shows him countering Presbeteryians’ pleas to pray by holding aloft his law book and terming it his version of the Bible, religiosity giving way to litigiousness), on the trail of the requisite villain (William Fichtner) who kills Reid’s brother whom Reid must avenge. That’s classic wild-west hokum and perhaps the least interesting bit of the film, and while Hammer is serviceable, he is not necessarily a star here, but then he’s not really meant to be the star. The Star, I think, is the production.

Photographed by Bojan Bazelli and with Visual Effects by Tim Alexander, Gary Brozenich, Edson Williams and John Frazier, “The Lone Ranger” is as optically sumptuous as “The Great Beauty”, more so to my eyes, if I might be so bold, if only because I’m an idiot American rather than a Roman. I’ve lamented CGI, no doubt, but I have never seen it serviced to more beautiful effect than this film’s heart-stopping opening shot of The Golden Gate Bridge under construction. It's not merely a marvel to see but foreshadowing, a suggestion of the nation having truly expanded from coast to coast, swallowing all that came before.

The film’s primary setting as it flashes back is Texas but often The Monument Valley, where so many of the classic westerns were helmed, substitutes, and so maybe I just like Texas more when it’s Arizona. And the effects blend perfectly with the film for two joyous action sequences aboard a steam engine train to open and close the film. The latter is naturally scored to “The William Tell Overture” and this only underscores its symphonic filmmaking, done less as the trendy herky-jerky throttling than as old-fashioned screwball comedy. The concise shots are pieced together so our bearings are always straight, reactions and interactions are as paid close attention to as the colossally swooping money shots.

Railroads are often the starting point for western plots and “The Lone Ranger” is no different. Latham Cole (Tom Wilkinson) is the tycoon intent on making the railroad transcontinental, carving up Native American territory in the process, which he ensures is allowed to happen by ordering outlaws to dress as Comanches and stage raids. These raids will force the U.S. Calvary’s hand with attacks and extermination to follow. This is to say, the subject of genocide is at the film’s forefront, and ultimately one of the reasons The Lone Ranger seems overwhelmed by his own movie is specifically because he and the country for which he supposedly stands is being overwhelmed by greedy capitalism in the guise of progress. Tonto becomes the symbol of the victim of that progress, even as the character, to appeal to the kiddos, I guess, who are probably began cowering under their seats when the villain literally carves out a dead guy’s heart.

Depp in this makeup is problematic, there is no way around it, and it was problematic from the moment he was cast and turned up on posters. Native American culture in the plot is often reduced to a deus ex machine or a means for laughter, and often both, and the Neil Simon-ish bickering between he and The Lone Ranger amidst such real-world atrocities is downright uncomfortable. But then, part of that discomfort is on purpose, putting two men of disparate cultures in proximity for much of the running time. It is pointedly not a Buddy Comedy, but a white man and a red man wholly suspicious of the other and his beliefs, repeatedly forced by circumstance to work in tandem. And Hammer, I think, slyly, plays the part in such a way to reveal that in spite of his confusion with Native American customs, he believes they are getting the raw end of the deal, but that a lone ranger – never mind a legion of them – can make little difference in the grand scheme.

It’s a fascinating, maddening picture, boldly intentioned but tone deaf, beautiful to breathe in but an exercise in excess, one where myth and reality often disastrously collide. Come to think of it, can you think of a more appropriate film to open on America's birthday weekend?

Non-Stop

Chronicling a hijacked jet bound for London by way of New York, "Non-Stop" starts out essentially absurd and generally entertaining. A committed Liam Neeson stoically stands at the film's center and almost single-handedly holds the fuselage together, but the film's callbacks to a horrific September morning in 2001 and its eventual attempts to tack meaning onto the tail-end of its outlandishness leave it feeling vaguely insulting.

Neeson is Bill Marks, a down-on-his-luck federal marshal who we meet in the opening scene that deploys onscreen clues like index cards. He pours liquor into a coffee cup. The radio is tuned to public radio chatter about airport security. (It must have been set to a frequency from "Killing Them Softly.") A glimmer of a daughter's photograph. But Neeson is experienced in these taciturn roles of a failed man down to his last less-than-best chance. A mere turning of his head to lock eyes with a passenger for whom he does not care provides a rush of insight, not to mention a solid belly laugh.

In the early moments, as passengers board and find their seats, director Jaume Collet-Serra's camera functions almost as a plane voyeur, the person peering out from behind his/her seat, scoping out everyone and recording mental notes. And because the audience expects something bad to happen from the get-go, we do the same, like "Scream 2" where ANYONE and EVERYONE could be the killer and, thus, we play the mental guessing game. Which one, we wonder, will be Marks' mark?

This is the twenty-tens, though, and the bad guy makes himself know via cellphone. Initially we literally see Marks texting replies back and forth, but before long those texts appear in onscreen bubbles. The bad guy claims to be aboard. He claims he will kill a passenger every twenty minutes if he does not receive $150 million. Marks points out it's a federal offense to hack into the air marshal network. The bad guy points out it's a federal offense for Marks to smoke an airline bathroom. Uh oh. This time it's personal.

For all the obvious space limitations, "Non-Stop" never feels as if it runs out of of places to go and never grows inordinately claustrophobic. Which could theoretically be argued as a weakness, I suppose, but then the intent is not to be "Das Boot." It's more like Murder on a 747, an Agatha Christie thriller in the air, as Marks wades through all the leads established in the opening scenes.

Another film about this same story might have been wise to tell it from the point-of-view of a passenger. I suspect that someone living and breathing in the film, unaware this is Neeson playing one of those parts, might have alternately viewed the situation with disbelieving horror and comedy. To us, he's Neeson, and because he is, we know he's never in the wrong. To a passenger, as he disobeys direct orders, calls for unauthorized searches of passengers in the middle of the night, waves his gun around, and, in one truly hilarious moment, advises everyone will receive a year's worth of free international flight despite having no authority to do so, he's a probable nutcase.

The film kind of utilizes the passengers' fears, but also exploits them, wading a little too deeply into United 93 territory as they (with "help" from the on-the-ground media) decide they are being hijacked and fight back. The only one who stands with Marks through thick and thin is the woman sitting beside him at the flight's outset, Jen, played by the illustrious Julianne Moore who nobly resists her sidekickedness. "Ma'am?" she says to Marks in one delightfully disarming moment. "Did you just call me ma'am?"

The conclusion is really where "Non-Stop" runs aground. There are gaps in logic, sure, and plot holes, no doubt, and red herrings aplenty, the real world left comfortably back on the airstrip, but that all goes without saying and is not in any way a problem for a film cheeky enough to have a character say of a possible onboard bomb, "Isn't there a wire we can cut?" That last line suggests "Non-Stop" is on the joke. Except the ultimate motivation of the obligatory villain (villains?) seems like an utterly pitiful stab to say......something.

If you want to be a thriller of the pulse-pounding, time-ticking variety, by all means, be one. Co-opting a great American tragedy to make a post 9/11 "Passenger 57", however, rubs this reviewer the wrong way.

Recap Vomit: Trophy Wife (Happy Bert Day)

“What are friends for?” No. Seriously. What are they for? That’s the question posed by “Happy Bert Day”, the newest “Trophy Wife” episode. The episode may theoretically revolved around precocious Bert’s birthday and his right to have whatever kind of party he wants on the basis of reading 100 books but it’s really about friends – making them, not having them, retaining them, craving them, insulting them, not understanding their importance and coming to understand that importance quite well. The episode is also about Malin Akerman’s pants – in this case, a so fetch pair of black leather lightning strikes bracketed to each leg. If those pants challenged Usain Bolt to a 100 meter dash…..well, I’m not saying they’d win, but they’d make him earn it. They’d probably clock a 9.86.

She is wearing those pants at Bert’s soccer game when she chooses to try and make friends with a few fellow soccer moms who “purse check her” and leave her out in the cold. This sticks in her craw and so she decides that volunteering to coordinate Bert’s birthday will give her an excuse to invite the soccer moms to prove her self-worth and earn their friendship. Ask not what you can do for your stepson, ask what you can do for yourself. Well, she sort of asks what she can do for her stepson. Bert just wants ice cream (and napkins) and so Kate suggests an “Aladdin” theme which leads to a magic carpet and a horse and firewalker on stilts, though strangely not as many hijinks as such a set-up might imply.

Well, the firewalker on stilts gets run into and falls over. Sure. Of course, he does. Twice! If any network exec attending a pitch meeting was told a firewalker on stilts was NOT going to be run into and fall down, he/she would have a luxury suite-styled meltdown. But I like that each time the firewalker on stilts gets run to – by, respectively Warren and Kate – it is the not the actual firewalker on stilts the camera is paying attention to. Rather, the joke hinges on Warren and Kate professing they are okay while the firewalker on stilts writhes in pain, a nice nod to the show being all about how each character makes it all about them.

Hillary has eyes for a comely young dude. Warren volunteers to talk to the comely young dude and see if he’s dating-worthy. But when Warren finds out the comely young dude is a dancer AND a surfer, Warren wants to “purse check” Hillary right out of the picture and have the dude be his friend. Meanwhile Dr. Diane Buckley, tasked with returning the wrong birthday cake for the right birthday cake, accompanied reluctantly by Pete, cuts in line at the bakery, runs red lights, cuts off cars and finagles her way out of a traffic ticket with bald-faced lies. In other words, the rest of these measly humans surrounding her are not to be treated with friendliness but as if they are pawns that Dr. Diane Buckley can rearrange on a whim. (She gets her comeuppance when the cake inevitably splatters all over her, but that’s less a comeuppance than a sugary irritant.)

And that brings us back to Kate’s woebegone quest to befriend the soccer moms whom Kate overhears referring to her as a stripper. Egads. “Legs for days. You always have singles for the vending machine. I could see it,” says Jackie. Kate quickly ascertains, however, that it was Jackie who told the soccer moms that Kate was a stripper all in her own woebegone effort to befriend them.

This is a Michaela Watkins episode through and through. She’s not only funny (her massively ill-fated attempt to hypnotize Kate at a delicate moment – “Two, one, and you’re under” – is the episode’s singular moment), she conveys the utter out-of-her-element desperation Jackie must feel every second of every hour of every day. (With each episode, the more I'm convinced Jackie belongs in northern California as opposed to southern California.) She wants a few new friends so bad that she's willing to sell out one of the few friends she really has (even though Kate's status a friend is open for debate). It's not that she wants to be mean to Kate, far from it, but rather that she fails to think ahead. She's a left coast Jimmy the Gent, her mind going in eight different directions at once.

But Kate and Jackie both realize the soccer moms are judgmental bee-yotches, square up and re-unite to watch Bert cap off his special day with his very own song and dance number. Usually that's a pretty trite conclusion but here it feels just right - everyone ignores themselves for a precious moment to let the birthday boy have his.