Forgotten Characters: Tracy in Wag the Dog

My friend Andrew has a regular piece at his site, Encore's World of Film & TV, where he examines Forgotten Characters, those who made a significant impression despite minimal screen time. Today, I once again pay homage (rip him off).

Kirsten Dunst in "Wag the Dog"

as Tracy Lime

It’s the image we remember, which is the whole point since the characters in the film are specifically crafting a false image to provide evidence of a war that doesn’t actually exist. So we remember her as the phony Albanian refugee fleeing the phony reprisals with the phony Calico kitten in tow as the phony Anne Frank sirens wail. Do we remember that her name was Tracy? Do we remember that she was played by Kirsten Dunst? Do we remember in a film that has roughly 775 lines of pure comic gold she might have delivered the single best one?

There is a moment early in the film when White House Spin Doctors Conrad Brean (Robert DeNiro) and Winifred Ames (Anne Heche) have sought out Hollywood producer Stanley Motts (Dustin Hoffman, riffing on Robert Evans but still crafting a wholly original character) for aid in staging the phony war that will distract the American people from a Presidential scandal a couple weeks ahead of the ensuing Presidential election. To prove they have the White House’s ear, Conrad and Winifred dial up an aid in the midst of a televised West Wing press conference and Stanley feeds him lines. The aide repeats them word-for-word but Stanley is unimpressed. “He didn't phrase it right. He didn't sell the line.”

Well, how do you sell your walk-on/walk-off performance amidst Dustin freaking Hoffman and Robert freaking DeNiro? As Tracy Lime (lime, the critical garnish to the cocktail), Dunst plays her as a genial if in-over-her-head and pointedly young struggling L.A. wannabe starlet. She knows enough to know she shouldn’t be signing something without her agent’s consent, but she also knows she wants to pad that resume. And when she asks Conrad, smiling sweetly, about that very thing, he advises she can’t tell anyone that she ever did this. “Is it a guild thing?” she wonders earnestly. “They can come to your house and kill you,” he says, still smiling sweetly. She turns away while simultaneously being doused with makeup and Dunst’s expression says it all – not fear, not at all, but confusion.

That confusion is underscored by what she's carrying in her arms. Moments earlier, in lieu of the kitten she was told she’d be getting to hold, into her arms is plunked a bag of tortilla chips. Her response is matchless, possibly's the film's funniest three words, though the delivery of the words is specifically what makes them so funny. She says: “These are chips.” And she sells the line. She sells it. She sells it precisely because she isn’t selling it – she’s just saying it. She was told she would be holding a cat and well, hey, these? These are chips. So she asks about the cat. “We’ll punch it in later,” she’s told. “You’ll punch it in?” she asks, not entirely up to date on post-production lingo. And that's the last we hear from Tracy, aside from the souped-up news report casting her as a war refugee, just another actress nobody knows left to wander around haplessly in the green screen wilderness.

I imagine Daisy Ridley showing up for her first day of “Star Wars: Episode VII” filming and being told she will be wearing a sort of exotic traditional Alderaanian headdress only to have J.J. Abrams nix all headdress choices and then some intern plunks a pot roast on top of poor Daisy's head and tells her they'll just punch in the headdress later.

Top Gun Is The Awesomest, Part 224

When Tony Scott tragically jumped to his death in 2012, Todd Martens of the Los Angeles Times considered Mr. Scott’s distinct pop music sensibilities in conjunction with his filmmaking. He wrote that “Kenny Loggins' ‘Danger Zone’ may be used most often as a punch line today, and the video Scott directed, with Loggins kicking around a bed in the early morning hours, can now be viewed as camp. Yet don't hold time against it. ‘Top Gun’ was a film that celebrated mid-'80s military technology; why shouldn't it also celebrate mid-'80s rock 'n' roll, one of the dominant sounds of the period?” If there was ever a film that does not deserve to have time held against it, it is most assuredly “Top Gun.”

Matt Zoller Seitz, currently editor of Roger Ebert’s page at the Chicago Sun-Times, a fantastic critic, a Pulitzer nominated critic, whom I deeply respect, does not hold time against “Top Gun” because, in fact, he did not care for “Top Gun” at the time of its release. He made this clear in his answer to last week’s Criticwire question which wondered about cases wherein critical consensus was correct the first time around and resistant to re-evaluations. He said: “’Top Gun’ was terrible when it came out and it's still terrible. Every time somebody online tries to stick up for it as some sort of American pop classic, I just roll my eyes. It's a burp from the Reagan era, no more worthy of serious consideration than ‘Rambo: First Blood Part II.’”

So, here’s Nick, right, about to try and stick up for “Top Gun” as some sort of American pop classic? Eh, not quite. Not as an American pop classic. But as an 80’s American pop classic? Oh, most definitely. I think of Rob Sheffield's passage in his memoir “Talking To Girls About Duran Duran” in which he discusses “the truly loathsome opening shot of ‘Top Gun’ with the caption ‘Indian Ocean: Present Day.’ That totally sums up where Hollywood culture was at in 1986: the ruling principle was that the ‘Present Day’ would always look, sound and feel exactly like 1986.” Obviously, Mr. Sheffield meant this as a besmirching of “Top Gun’s” quality and ethos, and more power to him. I, however, read that passage as a backward compliment.

“(Tom) Cruise is Maverick,” wrote Chris Nashawaty on its 25th anniversary. “And Maverick is America, at least America back in the go-go 80’s.” In other words, “Top Gun” was not intended to transcend its time because it was so utterly rooted to its Reagan Era-ness. Consider the moment when Maverick wryly informs Slider he stinks. In that shot, perched on the desk, is Slider's can of Pepsi. It's product placement, sure, but it's definitively 80's product placement. That's what a can of Pepsi looked like in the 80's and that's how Rick Rossovich looked in the 80's and people wore those rickety foam Walkman headphones in the 80's that Rossovich is wearing and no one listened to Kenny Loggins ironically in the 80's. You don’t hold time against it.

Do the "Top Gun" dance. Don't be shy.

Clearly the "Present Day" does not look, sound and feel exactly like 1986, just as the "Present Day" of 2006 or 1996 did not look, sound and feel exactly like 1986. And that, I suspect, is precisely why Mr. Seitz dismisses "Top Gun" as a burp. It had nothing to say beyond the "Present Day". It lived for the moment, which made it so emblematic of the decade in which it was set. If “Top Gun” wasn’t the ultimate evocation of 80’s America, what in God’s name was?

Which I realize is not necessarily a defense of “Top Gun” in its official capacity as a film. Because if it’s not a good film, where does any of the rest get us? But it is good - nay, great. And Lord, spare me the “so bad it’s good” blasphemy. “Top Gun” is too pure in its Tony Scott Maximalism to be so reductively viewed. One term people like to hurl at me when I dismiss some numbing popcorn flick is this: "It's a movie that knows exactly what it is." I often take umbrage with this sentiment because a movie knowing exactly what it is would suggest tonal coherence, and far too few movies that I’m told know exactly what they are manage tonal coherence. They have to be everything to appeal to everyone to ensure first weekend box office. “Top Gun”, however, never loses sense of itself as an 80’s music video adrenaline rush in which action, drama and romance are all handled precisely the same way – with gloss, montages, machismo, and pop music.

In a comprehensive analysis of the film, Tim Brayton writes: “’Top Gun’ is basically perfect, even it is perfect at one of the worst sorts of things a movie can attempt.” I agree with the first part.

Only Lovers Left Alive

The best art, whether of a performance, literary or visual variety, is ageless. Certain vampires are also ageless, which is precisely what makes them the perfect vessel to express the preceding sentiment. Though the word vampire is never used and its exact definition within the film’s world is never established, the characters at the forefront of “Only Lovers Left Alive” demonstrate vampiric tendencies of the classical sense. Blood denotes life, wood denotes death; yet the finer points of these mythical nocturnal creatures’ folklore is merely the handsome contrivance by which the film becomes an intoxicating elegy for the artist as a purveyor of cultural truth. Perhaps that sounds elitist, but the tone is too marvelously dreamy to get bogged down in smarm. If ever a film could make a mere mortal comprehend the replenishing sensation of drinking blood, it’s this one.

Adam (Tom Hiddleston) is a reclusive musician on the outskirts of an apocalyptic Detroit, surrounded by vintage recording equipment and occasionally peeking through his rustic curtains at “rock ‘n’ rollers” ringing his doorbell who want to pay homage but whom he ignores. Born of another time in the truest sense, he has walled himself from the rest of America, partially by circumstance but partially by choice. To him, they (we) are zombies. Not the flesh-eating, slow-moving zombies of Romero, but the workaday drones for whom CBS TV is the creative pinnacle. It’s what might have happened had Marion Cotillard of “Midnight In Paris” time-traveled to now. How can you deal with art of the Aughts when you lived through the Belle Epoque?

It’s not a stretch, in fact, to imagine the film’s auteur, Jim Jarmusch, an American independent mainstay since the 80’s, insulated in his editing bay and surrounded by old LP’s and bound copies of the titans of literature. When Adam’s better half, the predictably named Eve, played by a wildly evocative Tilda Swinton with a delirious white wig explosion that suggests she is trying out for the part of Lady Gaga, takes a transatlantic plane flight, she packs her suitcase with poetry of the Renaissance, amongst other selections, a quiet statement against the horrors of airport book racks. Still, she finds pleasure in the here and now, even if it’s out of the past, putting on a soul record and commanding her bloodthirsty partner of several hundred years to dance. “Only Lovers Left Alive” is Jim Jarmusch dancing alone but allowing everyone in to see.

Plot is minimal and atmosphere is extensive. The blood of today’s humans has become too dangerous, too infected with toxins and, I assume, high fructose corn syrup, to feast in the manner of Nosferatu, and so much detail is paid to the way in which Adam and Eve acquire precious supplies of O negative. (This allows for a two scene cameo by Jeffery Wright which is the subtlest form of high comedy you’ll ever see.) They are in love but they live continents apart, because after a century or two even true lovers need some alone time. But disillusioned, Adam summons Eve, and she finds herself hopping nighttime flights from the mazes of Morocco to the lyrical smokestacks of Motown.

Jarmusch has gone on record as referring to Detroit as the Paris of the Midwest, and he revels in its majesty as much as its ruin. Adam takes Eve for rides in his muscle car, cruising through landscapes of quashed American dreams, and here Jarmusch’s tone is less holier-than-thou than longingly romantic. They stand in the ruin of the Michigan Theater, remade as a parking garage, its faded beauty still somehow cutting through the degradation. Eve is more willing to revel in what was than Adam, who prefers to bemoan what everything has become, never more so than when Eve's precocious sister Ava (Mia Wasikowksa) suddenly appears.

If Adam and Eve are sunglasses-at-night, slow-motion-striding rock stars, Ava is an L.A. teenybopper, bound to adolescence forever, hungry for instant gratification and the theoretical lights, an embodiment in the mind of Adam of all that has gone wrong with the world. It is a brilliantly mischievous performance that would threaten to steal the film if the film weren't so good in every facet that it's unstealable. Ava's irresponsibility threatens to be the final wooden stake to Adam's heart.

One could read the film as Jarmusch's disgust with how art has sort of become interchangable with entertainment and thus, one might wonder if it symbolizes an opulent white flag. Except that Jarmusch fought for seven years to gain financing, never giving up, eventually winning out, Rotten Tomatoes scores and box office be damned. Which is why it's just as easy to read the film as its creator's own cinematic chalice of replenishing O negative. He's a survivor, baby.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Nobody Lives Forever (1946)

I mean, it's all right there in the title, isn’t it? Jean Negulesco's film “Nobody Lives Forever” was based on a book by W.R. Burnett, who also wrote the screenplay, titled "I Wasn't Born Yesterday." But the idiom I Wasn't Born Yesterday implies something entirely different from Nobody Lives Forever. I Wasn't Born Yesterday implies that you have sniffed out an attempt to pull the wool over your eyes whereas Nobody Lives Forever implies that as we all eventually meet our maker we have to recognize and embrace the opportunity to live 'til we die. And although Nick Blake (John Garfield) clearly conveys the fact he wasn't born yesterday, this film is all about his acting on the idea that nobody lives forever.

In fact, it’s a film where everybody, in one way or another, has come to learn that hard truth. Noir so often pivots on fate turning its grisly screws, characters placed in the universe’s vicious vice, but everyone here is self-aware. We enter the story after fate has already caught up with them, after the universe has already placed them in its vice and leveled threats. “You’re 34,” another character tells Nick, “and from there it’s downhill.” This was disturbing partially because I’m 36 and already two years past the cutoff, but also because, you know, I’m a Nick. It’s like the movie was momentarily talking to me. I had to pause the DVR and weep.

Not that Movie Nick needs any reminding. Being in WWII will probably teach a dude that nobody lives forever. That’s where Nick was, WWII, and as the film opens he has just returned home to New York City. First order of business, track down his gal, Toni (Faye Emerson), to whom he entrusted his dough before leaving. A problem instantly emerges – she used that dough to open a nightclub, the club foundered and well-to-do Chet King (Robert Shayne) bought it up. Now Chet and Nick’s gal are an item. A little revenge seems in order, but Nick keeps his mind on his money. He asks Chet for his money back, Chet obliges, and Nick and his right-hand man flee NYC for the west coast. It’s almost as if Nick has gone against noir grain and resisted the femme fatale. Ah, but fear not, she’ll re-appear, as she must.

The mythos states that The West is place of new beginnings, but here it’s an outpost of last chances – dreamers replaced by desperate schemers, “tramps” as one of the tramps puts it. One of these tramps is Doc Ganson, played by George Coulouris. His face almost becomes the film’s foremost symbol – a face that is eternally panicked, sweaty, beady eyes that dart every which way, as if he’s already got one leg in the wolf trap and he is going crazy trying to decide whether or not to gnaw off his own leg to escape. It might just come to that.

It’s his ruse that sets the remainder of the film in motion. A widowed dame, Gladys (Geraldine Fitzgerald), is flush with cash. If one of the tramps can wine and dine her, maybe they can make that cash theirs. Doc, though, knows he doesn’t have the pizazz to pull this off and enlists the aid of Pop Gruber (Walter Brennan), an aging man con man likely on his last con. He and Nick go back a ways. So when Nick arrives, he pitches the con and Nick accepts.

Well, you know the ropes, don’t you? ‘Course, you do. Nick’ll fall for the dame – and that’s the sorta language employed, “You’re not fallin’ for that dame, are ya?” – and have to decide whether to take her dough or follow through on his newfound love. But again, the film, slyly, makes it less Nick coming to terms with his Feelings, shall we say, than with the knowledge that Nobody Lives Forever. Maybe this con is his last chance to score big, but maybe this is his last chance to find love and make a life that does not depend upon swindling. And it’s the latter fact that Fitzgerald plays straight to – ably cutting right through the fact she has been manipulated to convey that she can tell he was being genuine.

The film’s sore spot, however, is resorting to a third-act crux that seems torn from the worn pages of the playbook of so many shabby thrillers. It involves guns and a hostage and a fog-shroud shack. On the other hand, the saving grace of the third-act crux is how the narrative subtly becomes Pop’s as much as Nick’s. Walter Brennan was a hard-working character actor, forever in support, best illustrated by having won three Best Supporting Actor Oscars, though in my heart he will always be Eddie, Bogart’s faux-consigliere in “To Have and Have Not.” Here, holding a crummy little version of court in his bar, where he claims two beers is his limit a night even though he always appears to drink more than two beers, he props himself up as defeated mentor of Nick.

He knows nobody lives forever and, in fact, he may well know his own end is night. Thus, his driving goal is not necessarily to make it through, but to get Nick set to live until forever is up.

30 for 30: Bad Boys

What’s always most struck me about the Detroit Pistons infamously walking off the court in the waning moments of their series-ending Game 4 loss to the Chicago Bulls in 1991 without shaking the hands of Michael Jordan and cronies was how it so perfectly fit the Bad Boys’ storyline. For all intents and purposes, that was the end of the Bad Boys era and thus, their final act – defiant, classless, giving a Motor City middle finger to His Airness.

It was indescribably appropriate and eternal ammunition for Bad Boys haters, and the thing is, the Bad Boys never minded offering that ammunition. They thrived on it. They were cheap shot artists but they were not frauds. A few years later, my favorite Bad Boy, my favorite basketball player ever, Dennis Rodman, playing for the San Antonio Spurs, laid a horrific cheap shot on John Stockton of the Utah Jazz. But he laid it openly, refusing to mask his intentions, and so the media labeled Rodman the ultimate villain (not incorrect) while holding up Stockton as a wronged paragon of virtue. A few years after that a poll was taken of those in the league regarding its dirtiest players. The Top Two? Dennis Rodman and John Stockton. Rodman was himself, for better or worse. Stockton played dumb and hid in the shadows.

Chuck Klosterman has argued that everything in a male’s nature comes down to whether he rooted for the Boston Celtics or the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1980’s NBA. Well, I rooted for neither. I rooted for the Detroit Pistons. I was Divergent. After all, I hailed from the Midwest, and if one more coastal elite called us “flyover country”…… Wedged between the greatest rivalry in the league’s history, Magic vs. Bird, and Michael Jordan’s six-time dynasty were back-to-back championship banners raised by the Bad Boys. They might be the most unknown greatest team of all time, or the most ignominious greatest team of all time. They prided themselves on defense, which wasn’t exactly sexy in the offensive light show of the Me Decade, though they could certainly pile up points with anyone, and they played a physical and physically grotesque brand of basketball that hackneyed sports columnists would probably claim wasn’t “the right way” to play the game. They were also a team of characters – genuine characters, complex and fascinating, which is at odds with the force-fed black & white narratives of most sports journalism.

Director Zak Levitt yearns to give this team its due, and does, chronicling its rise from moribund franchise to upstart challenger to the league’s kings to eventual king itself, and all the pieces and personalities that went into it. The centerpiece of their turnaround was Isiah Thomas, a Chicago native who would become Chicago’s foremost enemy, a gleeful irony that perfectly complements Thomas’s high-watt smile. That smile was the ultimate emblem of the Bad Boys. It wasn’t necessarily masking the metaphorical knife in his hand as much as it was reveling at the metaphorical knife in his hand, and daring you to do something about it. You probably wouldn’t. And he knew it. In fact, listening to Thomas, and especially to Bill Laimbeer, Public Enemy #1, the guy who makes supposed “enforcers” of today’s NBA look like chess players at Caltech, you might find yourself incensed, but you might also find yourself refreshed by their candidness. Laimbeer may speak in monotone but he pulls no punches, akin to his attitude on the court. It’s a league anymore of yawn-inducing sound bites – “One game at a time”, “No ‘I’ in team”, “Get back to fundamentals” – but Laimbeer says what he means and means what he says. He always did. Most people didn’t like it. He loved that you didn’t like it. You can tell he still does.

One of the ideas that drove the Bad Boys and that drives “Bad Boys” is the idea of what a champion is a “supposed” to be. Because the Pistons openly wore the Black Hat (and in a couple shots Laimbeer literally wears a black hat, one of which finds him simultaneously embracing the Championship Trophy) and because they unabashedly used thuggish tactics and because their overall attitude was Us vs. Everyone Else, they were often seen as not being respectable titleholders. Look no further than the NBA's ultimate emissary, Michael Jordan, who still clearly, and not wrongly, harbors a grudge.

Yet, in a sport rife with egos and selfishness, the Bad Boys, viewed through a single prism likely more than any champion in league history, were also perhaps the ultimate manifestation of unselfish, loving team basketball. For instance, much is made of how the Pistons viewed themselves as a family. When the problematic Adrian Dantley, upset he was losing minutes to the more defensive-minded Rodman, refused to exit a game at coach Chuck Daly’s request, he was quickly traded. The trade, however, was for notoriously pouty Mark Aguirre, to whom Laimbeer says: “I don’t like you. But Isiah vouches for you.” Sentence one denotes utter honesty. Sentence two denotes an almost mafia-esque family atmosphere. And because Isiah vouched for Aguirre, he was accepted into the family, and the team went on to Title #2.

This is a diametric that almost defies belief, and one that the film, I think, only tangentially connects to the larger legacy of the Pistons, a legacy rarely given its due because it included thumbing their noses at the NBA fraternity. Much of the film is merely a traditional telling of an untraditional team's rise and fall, but it hints at and occasionally comments on the overridding truth - that the Bad Boys were a magnificent outlier, a team of mean-spirited straight-shooters, a united collective of rugged individualists.

Among the interviewed is the New York Knicks’ Patrick Ewing. He laments how dirty the Pistons played. Of course, a little more than a month ago, on another “30 for 30” installment, “Requiem For The Big East”, it was Patrick Ewing’s Georgetown teams who were accused by everyone else of being dirty. “We weren’t dirty,” Ewing said on camera in that film. Ah, athletes, the tall tales they tell and the lies they stifle in hopes of fine-tuning their public image. All except the Bad Boys. They didn’t care what anyone else thought. Right down to the Chicago Bulls walk-off, they were themselves. It’s why they are the only professional sports team I ever have and ever will love.

Michael Bay, Vintage 2014

A review of the teaser trailer for "Transformers: Age of Extinction" by Jacques Smelling in this month's Bon Appétit Magazine...

"Flabby notes of trench coats ominously flapping in the breeze."

"Tart tones of fast-moving SUV's kicking up dust." 

"A rather briery Slow Motion Explosion Flee."

"Frustratingly acidic contractually obligated 'OH MY GOD!!!!!' from respected actor."

"Quick pan of concerned, frenzied hair female with American flag in background. Unevolved. Undrinkable."

The Armstrong Lie

If we took all the dialogue from “The Armstrong Lie”, typed it up in a Word document and then performed a comprehensive search for the most-repeated phrase, it would have to be, hands down, “At the time”, a phrase spoken exclusively by its subject, seven-time Tour de France champion, cancer survivor and notorious liar and cheat Lance Armstrong. The story is beyond well-documented. For more than a decade, Armstrong vigorously denied all accusations that he utilized illegal means to win the most prestigious of all bike races more than anyone in history, until he finally reversed course in 2013 and confessed. “At the time,” he says, “it didn’t feel wrong.” “At the time,” he recounts, “I didn’t lose sleep over it.” “I know that now,” he advises relating to some spectacular fib. “I didn’t at the time.” In other words, he was so deep down the rabbit hole of lies, he could not – at the time – tell fact from fiction in his own mind. Now, he does. But does he?

At the time, however, is a phrase that could also be applied to director Alex Gibney’s overall project. He began the documentary in 2009 to chronicle Armstrong’s attempts to come back after a four-year layoff and win his eighth Tour de France. This was a point when Armstrong was often accused of wrongdoing but before he had admitted to it, and in advance of both the Federal and US Anti-Doping Agency Investigations in the ensuing years that led to his downfall. Gibney openly roots for an Armstrong win, as much in the capacity of a fan as a filmmaker, seeking the perfect capstone to his movie. Eventually, after Armstrong’s interview with Oprah in which he confessed (mostly) to his maelstrom of falsities, Gibney returned to the film, re-crafting it from the viewpoint of someone who had been duped.

In that way, Gibney, heard in voiceover throughout, questioning himself almost as much as his subject, comes to represent the general public and the way it (we?) bought into the lie. Gibney lays out the substantial amount of evidence against Armstrong, though ultimately the intent is not so much to prove Armstrong’s guilt as to portray him as dishonest. Again and again, Gibney and his editors cut from Armstrong in the past toeing the company line about how he has never once tested positive to Armstrong in the present discussing how he doped and got away with it. The Armstrong Lie was not a one-time deal, the film is saying, but perpetual……fiercely perpetual. He browbeat reporters, slandered teammates, shunned friends, leaving virtually no line uncrossed in ensuring his lie was furthered. He went so far as to falsely call his former masseuse Emma O’Reilly an “alcoholic” and a “prostitute” when she alleged he lied. He has since apologized but, of course, we are left to assume that “at the time” it seemed completely logical in his own mind to grossly slander an innocent woman.

His contrition is also undercut by the typical athlete copout, the same refrain you hear from petulant pre-schoolers, the one that goes “Everybody was doing it!” Well, to be fair, everybody was doing it. Sort of. Armstrong and his teammates were not doing it – at least, not at first, not in the early 90’s. And because they weren’t doing it, they weren’t winning, and in order to begin winning, they had to do it and they did. Go EPO or Go Home. Indeed, Gibney takes care in portraying the sport as one that breeds cheating on account of heads conveniently looking the other way and its necessity The nomenclature of the sport, as with so many sports, is often revolting, such as the Michele Ferrari, a doctor infamous for his ties to cheating who becomes Armstrong’s foremost ally. He refers unironically to Armstrong’s “engine”, how powerful it was and what was needed to increase that power even more, reducing the human cyclist to race car terminology, a commodity.

The gravest irony, of course, and the one that can so easily get lost, is that Armstrong is a cancer survivor. It’s incredible and commendable, and yet certain evidence points toward Armstrong’s doping being the actual cause of the cancer he defeated. Simultaneously, “The Armstrong Lie” makes clear that his Livestrong campaign was a roaring success in earning money for victims of cancer and cancer research. One shot finds Armstrong reclining in a private plane in a Panama hat perusing the “Marketplace” section of a newspaper. His tee shirt, though? It’s for Livestrong. It’s like a cinematic portrait of The Good Thief.

Which is why it’s not a stretch to believe the public might have forgiven Armstrong if he hadn’t been such a bully. The majority of the public and the media, Gibney seems to be saying, wanted to embrace Armstrong, which is why it let itself be strung along. It’s why Gibney intended to chronicle the 2009 comeback and why he found himself so swept up in rooting for his subject to win. The story is irresistible. It was so irresistible that Armstrong did everything in his power to maintain its fiction as reality. He may have acknowledged the truth but his ruthless tactics, willful defamation of those he once called friends and even his defiance today seem to leave him beyond forgiveness.

We like our heroes flawed. We don’t like our heroes to be assholes.

Joe

The name Joe denotes such a certain kind of American masculinity, the kind that drives GMC’s and has a hard labor job to do and beers to drink after it’s done and perhaps a punch or two to throw in between, that it has rendered a sizable idiom within the lexicon. And “Joe”, the seventh feature film of eclectic Texan filmmaker David Gordon Green, is awash in this masculinity, being as how it revolves almost exclusively around combustible males, in particular a father, a father figure and the young boy caught between two who is fighting to come of age in a place where hanging on seems the best for which one could possibly hope.

That young boy is Gary, a 15 year old with a home life so unstable he may as well be a vagrant. He is played by Tye Sheridan, and while the role may not sound like much of a departure from his work in another recent southern-fried film, the extraordinary “Mud” of 2013, upon closer inspection, he is playing this part with a whole different bent. Sheridan may be older here but he feels younger, less self-assured and less resourceful, purposely a product of his sketchy environment. Still, he’s smart enough to know he doesn’t want to end up like his driftless old man, and so when he stumbles upon a wooded job site one day, he clamors for a job on the crew.

So often work at the movies is mere window dressing, like the newspaper columnist without any deadlines, but the work in “Joe” is real, not just in the manual labor intensity of it but in the way it drives and lifts up and puts down these tough-talking men. The title character, a noble if complicated soul, played by a disheveled Nicolas Cage with a downhome goodwill that masks and eventually gives way to a hotheadedness that the actor makes clear he prefers, runs a ragtag company in Texas that is hired by lumber companies to poison trees past their prime to make them easier to chop down. These early scenes have a remarkable atmospheric rhythm, a fatigue the back-breaking work creates but also the dignity the mere notion of employment engenders.

These are prideful men, aware of their flaws, literally trying to work them out through the work, and it is almost exclusively men. Women hover, barely, in the background, reduced to browbeaten wives as well as whores whom Joe regularly visits as another means to exercise the demons within. A girl he’s seeing, sort of, suggests how proper it might be if they got dressed up one night and went to dinner. It smells like a payoff. It isn’t. His heart is gracious, it’s not gold.

The film is based on a 1991 novel by Larry Brown, yet its similarities to “Gran Torino” are noticeable. That was the 2008 Clint Eastwood opus tracking a grizzly man who becomes not only an unlikely mentor to a young protégé, but sacrifices himself to, in essence, protégé a way from a no-way-out situation. “Joe’s” plot shares a similar tract, and even works in a symbolic vehicle of its own, as Joe himself becomes untraditional mentor and while the ultimate catharsis feels genuine, the plotting is somewhat incongruous. For instance, the character of Willie-Russell (Ronnie Gene Blevins), is an apparition of antagonism, drifting in and out of the picture, only appearing if confrontation is required for story advancement. Joe himself, meanwhile, is bestowed a sense of fatalism that so neatly aligns with the film’s concluding turns, it becomes less fatalistic by the end than pre-ordained luxury.

The soul of the film, paradoxically, is its most despicable character, Wade, the father of Gary, played by Gary Poulter, a non-actor whom Green literally plucked off the street (and who has an incredible and incredibly sad real life tale). There is virtually nothing to redeem him. He is in poverty and willing to steal from his own son just to have a few bucks. He is an alcoholic and willing to beat a homeless man for a bottle. Cash and Liquor come before Blood and work of any sort – let alone hard work – are impenetrable concepts to him. The last one would appear “Joe’s” primary interest, a degenerate who retains an almost wicked sense of entitlement contrasted against a son desperate to prove self-worth.

It’s an ancient tale – sons paying for the sins of the father. Which might suggest story obviousness on the part of “Joe” but then part of its aim is to demonstrate how the cycle consumes – how the son claims he won’t follow in his father’s un-heroic footsteps, only to follow in them anyway. Overcoming where we come from by being who we are is no simple task, yet with a little help from Joe, it appears possible Gary might just succeed.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Gospel According To St. Matthew (1964)

Jesus of Nazareth was not unlike Uncle Tupelo. That might seem an obscure (misguided?) reference, comparing the son of God to a three-person band at the forefront of the so called alternative-country music movement of the early 90’s, but then Jesus was actually fairly obscure in his own era. It was what he preached, who he influenced and the legacy they and others engendered that we all remember. In their own era, Uncle Tupelo were also fairly obscure, but they came to be remembered more for their influence on the genre and their legacy. That legacy does not stretch quite as far as Christ’s, a statement which probably requires the most grandiose recitation of “but that goes without saying” in this blog’s history, but the point to which I’m building prevails – “The Gospel According To St. Matthew” is not necessarily interested in Jesus’s influence over the 2,000 years that followed, but what cultivated that staggering influence.

As an atheist, Pier Paolo Pasolini, ironically, turned out to be the perfect individual to helm a story about Christ. This is not to suggest Pasolini attempts to insert non-Christian ideology into his interpretation of a particular New Testament Gospel, far from it, but that he resisted preachy and point-making affectations. After all, this was 1964, in the midst of Italian Neo-Realism, and so Pasolini brings hardcore verisimilitude to the extravagant drama of the life and death and resurrection of the King of the Jews. Often it comes across in the vein of a documentary, a filmmaker on location in Galilee and Judea at the opportune moment when this man proclaiming the Kingdom of God was on its way turned up to minister.

Consider the angel who appears to Joseph in the earliest passages, advising the child conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. It is not a hovering, shimmering, harp-playing angel of the front-lawn nativity scenes to which many are accustomed, but a simple woman dressed in white, no different from anyone else, except that she suddenly pops up in Pasolini’s shots as if conjured by the snap of a finger. She says what she’s gotta say and then she’s gone. The heavenly hosts have never been so un-majestic. This goes for all the infamous miracles documented by St. Matthew, such as the walking on the water, a feat recorded by Pasolini’s camera with such pragmatism, it will likely make your jaw drop in the manner of the disciples, and drop further than if it had been ornamented with glossy special effects or a swelling score.

And while Pasolini does utilize classical pieces for a traditional accompanying score, he also serves Odette’s spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child” at regular intervals, a bold choice that both underscores the suffering of Jesus and the hope his message would be heard. It also brought home, for me, a fairly clear-cut comparison with Spike Lee’s behemoth of a biopic, “Malcolm X”, at least if you discount the first act. Churches and homes for Christians are often adorned with the stock portraits of Jesus with flowing locks and a peaceful air, a presentation which does not necessarily jibe with his presentation in scripture. He’s not just a prophet, he’s a rabble-rouser, a rebel, a fiery orator on the street, not at all unlike Brother Malcolm, and Enrique Irazoquoi, who had never acted, his hair chopped short, is not at all passive, just aggressive. And just like Lee’s Malcolm X, who turns fatalistic by the end, as if expecting his martyrdom, this Jesus seems to know that the harder he pushes, the more certain his death becomes, a death that will only work to spur his message to greater heights.

That death, nailed to the cross, is much more delicately handled than the incendiary “Passion of the Christ.” That it’s happening appears more than enough to convey what it means, that he is glimpsed afterwards by the believers appears more than enough to do the same. Yet that glimpse is not unlike the angel who appears to Joseph in the early going – a snippet of a shot, lickety split, perhaps leaving open the concept of the resurrection being a spiritual reality as opposed to a reality reality.

The reality of Pasolini is that while he was an atheist, he was also a Marxist, yet he went on record as saying “My film is a reaction against the conformity of Marxism. The mystery of life and death and suffering—and particularly of religion— is something which Marxists do not want to consider.” It’s not just that you have to commend him for venturing so far outside his wheelhouse, but that you have to admire him for not making that statement overt within the film. How could he have? All the dialogue is culled directly from Matthew’s text. Those who rejected the film on its anti-Marxist tone are also rejecting the scripture, which is fine, but those rejections go hand-in-hand.

One of the most telling passages is The Sermon on the Mount. It lasts for a full five minutes, quick-cutting from day to night to day to night, and the camera is pressed in on Christ’s face the entire time. His followers carried on the message and the writers of the gospels helped to spread and amplify it, and centuries passed and the message still moves and now Jesus is an institution, a savior and a Superstar. Once upon a time, however, he was merely an ornery man with a lot to say.

The Best Eggs In Movie History

Eggs ‘round about this time of the year tend to be less about how you want them done and more about symbolizing that one Fella’s resurrection from way back when, and the idea of eggs connoting Christness has a small if storied cinematic tradition. Luke Jackson, or “Cool Hand Luke”, may have merely been an inmate, but he also willingly suffered through eating a grand total of fifty eggs and in the wake of doing so was laid out on a table like Christ on the crucifixion. Rocky Balboa waking up at an ungodly hour in North Philly, cracking eggs and eating them raw was amusing, but it also signaled his rebirth into the Italian Stallion, the man who nearly wrests the heavyweight title from Apollo Creed. Still, I would contend these cinematic eggs don’t have quite the same significant scope as others divvied up at the movies. Remember, not all of America – not to mention, you know, the world – practices Christianity, and so the egg whites and their trusty yolks probably mean something more universal to most. I’m talking about that to which so many patrons of so many churches will adjourn posthaste following conclusion of their forthcoming Sunday morning services. I’m talking about breakfast.

You know how in sitcoms characters are always sitting around a pristinely clean table, reading the paper, eating a full meal of toast, sausage links and perfectly scrambled eggs, sipping coffee and juice, and then inevitably looking at their watch and blithely noting “I’m going to be late”? Yeah, they’re never going to be late. Unless the plot dictates it, because it’s a sitcom and everything is perfect. But breakfast is never this perfect.

There are several notable motifs throughout the Coen Brothers memorable “Fargo” but among the most notable is Food. Over and over we see our lovable central couple, Marge and Norm Gunderson (Frances McDormand and John Carroll Lynch), helping themselves to heaps of Midwestern culinary delights. After all, Marge is pregnant and Norm must show solidarity, by which I mean he’s kind of a minor glutton. If there is a pre-eminent comestible moment, it involves Marge, police chief of the small Minnesota town where they reside, being summoned one very early morning by phone. As she rises from bed, Norm, still mostly in his slumber, mumbles, “I’ll fix ya some eggs.” She tells him he can go back to sleep. “Ya gotta eat a breakfast,” he says as a means to decline. “I’ll fix ya some eggs.” Again, she politely reminds him he can keep sleeping. Again, he replies “I’ll fix ya some eggs.” So he fixes her some eggs and they sit at their kitchen table, eating those eggs in silence, apart from the flat rhythms of their chewing.

What follows has become famous – that is, Marge departs and in a lone extended take we watch her in the background as she goes outside, climbs in her car, tries to start it, fails on account of the significant cold, walks back inside and advises Norm that she needs a jump. Just as intriguing, though, is Norm throughout the same shot, continuing to eat his eggs in the foreground, a Midwesterner just going about the most important meal of the day. And this is breakfast. This is how it looks. A little nook alongside a window. Two people sharing a comfortable and ongoing silence at the crack of dawn over some eggs. No jokes. No monologues. Heck, the coffee hasn’t kicked in yet.

Frank and April Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet) of “Revolutionary Road” are a bit different. Johnnie Walker Red is a motif more prominent than food, and they prefer emphatic arguments as opposed to silence. They have, in fact, just the previous evening, had their most significant row yet. It would seem their marriage, their dream of fleeing to Paris, their everything has reached a tipping point.

Frank is dressed for work. April, newly pregnant, is in a maternity dress, smiling, content, the embodiment, one might say, of the Eisenhower-era suburban housewife. She says: “Would you like scrambled eggs or fried?” He smiles, almost taken aback at the calm. He decides scrambled. She says she’ll have scrambled too. They sit at the table and placidly eat their scrambled eggs, and she starts asking him questions. Questions about his “important day” and his “conference” at work and then she starts asking him about just what he’ll be “doing” in lieu of this “important” “conference”. And he explains. And she listens. And golly gee willickers, it just seems so swell. That's the word he actually uses. Swell. It’s the breakfast of sitcoms and happy pappy films. And it’s a lie, an utter lie, a smiley-face that's purposely bitch-slapping everyone in sight (April's line "It's really quite interesting, isn't it?" has got to be just about the most maniacal skewering of everyday America ever uttered). We'll save the specifics for those who have not seen it nor read the book, but suffice it to say that things take a turn toward negative town.

This is the dueling nature, the false ideal and the humdrum reality, of the Great American Breakfast. We yearn for the eggs to be done up in a perfect Monaco Omelet (tomatoes, red peppers and flakes of gold), a representation of our perfect life underscored by our perfect day which will kick off with the perfect breakfast. Instead, we are standard issue, sitting at a standard issue table, eating eggs to get our standard issue protein and face yet another standard issue day (and find out the Prowler needs a jump).

Han Shot

In “Veronica Decides To Die” Paulo Coelho wrote that “there is always a gap between intention and action.” If, however, anyone were capable of taking, say, a Navicomputer keyboard and wedging it between the intention and the action, thereby rendering that gap obsolete, it would definitely be the irascible spice smuggler Han Solo, which was what popped into my head when I read about Harrison Ford’s recent Reddit Q&A. He was inevitably asked for his thoughts on whether or not Han shot at Greedo first in “Star Wars: Episode IV.” Ever curmudgeonly, Ford replied (and you could hear the growl from Corellia), “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

To a certain breed of cinema devotees, the story is not merely familiar but probably played out – still, some may need context, and so we will provide it. In the original “Star Wars” of 1977, before “A New Hope” was woefully tacked on, we were essentially introduced to Ford’s Han Solo at the cantina in Mos Eisley where a bounty hunter named Greedo, his laser blaster drawn, sits down across from Solo to collect the mark on his head. Solo, coolly, draws his own laser blaster out of sight beneath the table and blasts Greedo down. Han not only shoots first, he’s the only one who shoots, most likely – as scholars note in their scholarly language – because he’s, like, a total badass, man. Unfortunately, upon the “Special Edition” release of 1997, Grand Chancellor George Lucas chose to make a notable change – that is, Greedo shoots first, somehow splaying his laser blast badly to the side of Han’s head and clearing the way for Han to get off his own shot. Or, to say it another way, Han Shot Second.

Aside from Lucas, grievous Lucas apologists and Skywalker Ranch Yes Men, no one cared for this revision, though some expressed their dislike for it more extravagantly than others. The creators of a website, for instance, with the expository name of HanShootsFirst.org went so far as to enact a petition officially calling for Greedo’s first shot to be revoked. The revision has been referenced with extreme distaste in Kevin Smith films and on the just shuttered “How I Met Your Mother.” Timothy Olyphant as Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens (a man who knows a thing or two about drawing first) knew that Han shot first. Go to a comic con, bellow through a megaphone that Greedo shot first, sit back, and watch the righteous spittle fly. And hey, I’ve long been pro-Han Shot First, thinking that it crucially underscored his character’s laconic cool. Except that hearing the man who brought Han to life growl that not only didn’t he know who shot first but that he didn’t care who shot first, I realized that I too didn’t care who shot first.

Lucas has gone on record in the years since with some sort of marble-mouthed blarney about how even in 1977 he intended for Greedo to shoot first, but no one’s buying it and it doesn’t matter anyway. In spite of the laser blast addendum, what Lucas could not change in his “Special Edition” was Ford’s demeanor. That was baked in and it was everything, because ultimately what this scene comes down to is not its mechanics but its philosophical underpinnings. The only way in which Lucas could have altered the philosophy of this moment would have been to somehow CGI it so that Han kept his blaster holstered and Greedo’s laser magically ricocheted off the wall and hit himself in the face. (I fear I may have just given Lucas an idea for the “Star Wars Maxima Cum Laude Edition”.)

In other words, the point isn’t that Han shot first. Han’s intention and subsequent action, minus the gap that he brazenly rejects, was to shoot, and he would tell you in no uncertain terms that in the same situation he shoot again. Or as the green dude from Dagobah might have put it: shoot or shoot not, there is no shoot first.

Museum Hours

“How do you know Cradle of Filth?” This is what Johann (Bobby Sommer), a gentlemanly security guard at a Vienna art museum, asks Anne (Mary Margaret O'Hara), a Canadian visiting an ill relative in the Austrian capital, over coffee. A one-time band manager, he has revealed his adoration of heavy metal. She, in turn, has referenced AC/DC, Judas Priest and Cradle of Filth, though she wonders if that last one is really more like “death metal”. We would likely not confuse either of them for having even rudimentary knowledge of metal music, let alone being genuine fans of it, but then a first look or cursory glance does not yield full understanding of the complete picture. This is the lesson which "Museum Hours" imparts again and again in a myriad of stimulating ways.

Jem Cohen's modest and intimate film might be described as a unique amalgamation of fiction and documentary. The foremost setting is the Kunsthistorisches Museum and Cohen is not shy about filling the frame with its assortment of famous and stylized paintings and sculptures - often literally filling the frame with them, as if the viewer him or herself is a museum patron, standing on the opposite side of the velvet ropes and taking it all in. This might make it sound like "Cave of Forgotten Dreams”, in which Werner Herzog more or less used a film as a wondrous excuse to show us something we might not otherwise get to see, but that under sells the central relationship.

Cohen connects the artistic dots with the simple story of Johann and Anne's easygoing friendship, their expression of ideas and desires and secrets becoming as integral as the art. Sommer, a non-actor, possesses a voice that sonically resembles a museum’s soothing tones and often the film simply stops to grant him his inner thoughts. He confesses to us, and to Anne, a life of growing solitude, online poker and stillness, a tourist not only in his own city but in his own life. Likewise, as Anne sits solemnly at the side of her friend’s hospital bed, companionship is shown to be as vital of love.

Eventually the characters depart the city for the countryside where the camera remains fixed for an extended shot, gazing out across an amber field. From a distance, Johann and Anne enter the frame, walking to their right, before exiting the screen, then re-appearing, meandering back to the left, and evaporating from view once again. The shot has, in essence, become a portrait, presenting a broad and beautiful canvas, effortlessly illustrating how the view can change.

At another point Johann discusses a painting of Christ, except that what has stayed with him is not Christ’s image but the color blue. The blueness of the sky. The blueness of the river. It made me think of a Lissie concert I attended last year, the way it rejuvenated and cleansed me, and how when I expressed this sentiment, an old friend, now a Lutheran minister, remarked that this was my own way of having fellowship with God. Maybe that thought seems absurd, but while the frame of a painting can seem so finite, not unlike the world itself, it never truly is. We see it from our own angle.

Noah

The ark has been erected. The animals have been loaded. The rain starts to fall. Thus, Noah (Russell Crowe) looks to the sky, and as he does, the camera pulls straight up above him. And it keeps going, up through the troposphere and the stratosphere and the mesosphere and the thermosphere and the exosphere and then, finally, into space, where the whole of Earth is revealed as covered in a colossal storm. It's a remarkable moment because we are more or less seeing The Great Flood as detailed in Genesis in the form of a satellite image that might be consulted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. It's creationism seen through the prism of science.

When I think of Biblical Epics, I think of the school of Cecil B. DeMille, the overt pageantry, uber-blocked scenes and VistaVision. That approach has been maligned, but, to me, it's always felt appropriate, apropos of the Bible's blocky writing. Then again, the Bible can be a pretty intense place and Darren Aronofsky's "Noah" is not the whimsical doves and rainbows version of youth Sunday School lessons. Instead it is a genuine glimpse into the dark heart of the Old Testament, "real wrath of God type stuff", to quote Ray Stantz. DeMille is left in the dust.

The landscapes, as photographed by Aronofsky's usual accomplice Matthew Libatique, are rocky, burnt-out and apocalyptic. It's almost "Mad Max"-ish, an unexpected if appropriate comparison because "Mad Max" may well have opened with a title card that declared "And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt." As the film opens, Noah and his wife (Jennifer Connelly, who mostly stands by but occasionally is allowed to show gumption) and his sons, are essentially in hiding, holdouts of severe piety in a world gone wicked. Plagued by visions that he can't quite make sense of, though able to sense they foretell doom, Noah packs up the family and travels to see his aging grandfather Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins). It is then that he receives clarity - the Great Flood is on its way to wipe the whole world clean of its impurity. He will pack an enormous ark full of animals two by two - all of whom curiously, if conveniently, spend most of the film asleep - and re-begin the world when the water recedes.

Noah's story as told in the Bible is surprisingly short on specifics, and while this film is true to some of those specifics, it is less apt to pay heed to others. It creates rock monsters, christened as "searchers", evoking more ornery Ents of "The Two Towers", BC-era "Transformers" that seem out of place, as if demanded by producers who needed toy figure tie-ins. And while Tubal Cain (Ray Winstone) is mentioned briefly in Genesis, "Noah" transforms him into William Fichtner of "The Perfect Storm", existing solely to add extra conflict aboard the wooden vessel and provide an explicit villain in human form.

So too does Aronofsky's script, co-written with Ari Handel, appropriate the story of Abraham and Isaac, re-purposing it through an invented granddaughter (Emma Watson) for Noah who becomes pregnant while at sea (snuffing out that whole 40 days and 40 nights thing). This invention, however, ultimately works to underscore the film's foremost and most interesting relationship - that is, God and Noah.

God Himself is never heard from in this movie. "Why won't you talk to me?" demands Tubal Cain. "Why won't you answer me?" cries Noah. In the Genesis passages that give birth to the film, God is a main character, speaking plainly ("So God said...") and issuing direct commands. In Aronofsky's film, both the audience and Noah's family are left to take Noah at his word. In this way, the character could easily (controversially?) be read as a self-declared prophet, an ancient twist on Harold Camping, one who claims to be in contact with The Creator and asking those around him to have faith.

That faith becomes more difficult to follow the longer the rains fall and the waves crash. Noah literally turns his back on humanity, ignoring screaming innocents who cling to rocks in the distance because he believes their sins have deservedly engendered their deaths. Yet, as the ark remains afloat and the less likely "Land Ho!" becomes, the more Noah cracks, becoming convinced God's intention was to kill off man entirely and give Earth back to the animals. Crowe plays this frightfully to the hilt, willingly alienating his family, convincingly demonstrating a prophet's emotional toll and illustrating how a prophet might seem demented to all those who can't comprehend what he claims to know.

Regardless of whether or not a film should be judged on the basis of itself alone, each audience member, Christian or not, is likely to bring pre-conceived notions to "Noah", not apart from how a reader of a novel adapted for screen might bring a certain amount of bias for and preexistent knowledge of the source material. If we grow up hearing this Bible story, as I did, we might assume that Noah is in direct contact with The Creator. But Aronofsky presents the material so as to leave that question open to interpretation.

Aboard the ark in the midst of the crushing, cleansing deluge of rain, Noah gathers his family together and recounts The Creation, a means to calm them much like an "Arrested Development" re-run might calm us in the face of a CNN-touted weather apocalypse. As he tells it, however, Aronofsky employs an incredible bout of time-lapse photography to illustrate it, the light and the darkness, the heaven and the earth, the water and the dry land, the creatures and man. It's akin to Terrence Malick's work in "Tree of Life", but more than that it's "Noah" combining legitimate Biblical passages with the sort of camera work that a proponent of The Big Bang Theory might utilize in a slide show. Evolution or Creationism? That's not the point. We're all invited into this $125 million ark and made to wonder whether such a catastrophic downpour is the work of meteorology or the divine.

The story of Noah is doubtlessly rooted in religion, but Darren Aronofsky's "Noah", spectacular, bloated and bold, is not so much ecumenical as it is universal.

Recap Vomit: Trophy Wife (The Minutes)

I confess, I may not have been the intended demographic for the latest episode of “Trophy Wife.” This is because “The Minutes” turns into a half-“Scandal” homage and I have not seen a single second of a single “Scandal” episode (unless Tina Fey and Amy Poehler dramatically saying “Scandal” at the Golden Globes counts). So, when the episode inevitably deviates from its “Trophy Wife”-ness to go straight “Scandal”, I had nothing to go on, nothing to gauge it against. For all I know, it was exactly like “Scandal”, though the attempts a rat-a-tat-tat dialogue seemed a little less potent than might be required. For me, it evoked memories of Harry Crumb and Nikki Downing, and I’m not certain whether that’s good or bad. Should it matter that I haven’t seen “Scandal”?

For instance, I never saw (and still haven’t seen) a single second of a single “Melrose Place” episode and yet one of my 127 favorite “Seinfeld” episodes is the legendary “Melrose Place” episode. I remember hearing about the latter all the time, and I remember it always being referred to as a “guilty pleasure”. It was something people loved to watch but didn’t necessarily admit they loved to watch because it seemed so trashy. And that’s what “Seinfeld” played to, and they played to because it was universal. We all have things we love but don’t want to admit to, don’t we? So rather than act as a straight homage, it featured Jerry denying that he watched “Melrose Place” – even though he loved it – and being forced to take a lie detector test by his policewoman girlfriend to determine the truth. It’s incredible. It’s hilarious. And it didn’t matter one iota if you didn’t know what “Melrose Place” was or who was in it because “Seinfeld” effortlessly made it relatable to everyone. That’s why “Seinfeld” was and still is the greatest.

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INT. POLICE HEADQUARTERS – DAY 

NICK PRIGGE, infamous anti-Reality TV activist has been hooked up to a lie detector. A grizzly DETECTIVE stands above him. 

DETECTIVE: “Nick, have you ever watched Reality TV?” 
NICK: “No.” 
DETECTIVE: “Nick? (Clears throat.) Have you ever watched Reality TV?” 
NICK: (sweating) “No.” 
DETECTIVE: “Nick. (Dramatic pause.) Have you ever watched…… (Even more dramatic pause) ……‘Temptation Island?’” 
NICK: (Breaks down crying.) “Fine! FINE!!! I watched the first season of ‘Temptation Island!’ You wanna know why?! Because Reality TV is lewd and disgusting and EVERYTHING THAT’S WRONG WITH SOCIETY and ‘Temptation Island’ was the lewdest and most disgusting and EVERYTHING THAT’S WRONG WITH SOCIETY reality show of 'em all! And I loved it! Okay?! Are you happy?! I! Loved! It!" 
DETECTIVE: "And who was your favorite?" 
NICK: "Mandy! Mandy was totally my favorite! Yes, I remember her name!" (Falls to floor, writhing in a pool of his own tears.) 

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This isn’t to suggest “The Minutes” is an eyesore for any non-“Scandal” fanatic. Marcia Gay Harden is too good, first playing up the part of a binge-watching “Scandal” fanatic and then showing Kate how to play dirty when Kate runs afoul of the PTA and finds that her inflammatory comments about Harden’s Dr. Diane Buckley behind Dr. Diane Buckley’s back have officially been entered into The Minutes. (Scandal!!!). The idea of a PTA-related Scandal!!! is simply irresistible, but the means by which the Scandal!!! erupts – Person A saying things about Person B without Person B present only for Person A to realize Person B might hear them after all – and the follow-up – having to do with a PTA mom’s devotion to the sport of squash – come across so much less than juicy. And I suppose that’s partly the point – that in the world of the PTA, a Scandal!!! would be less than juicy. But shouldn’t it still feel juicy in spite of its non-juiciness? Like, to a bunch of PTA moms this Scandal!!! is as skandalouz as the Scandal!!! shown during the commercial for “Scandal” in the midst of “Trophy Wife” where some dude puts his hand around Kerry Washington’s throat and says “You killed the President” (Scandal!!!). I dunno. It just seems to me that aside from Marcia Gay Harden, everyone is playing Kerry Washington dress-up. It’s a cutesy homage, an aw-shucks, gee-whiz, “we’re family friendly!” scandal, and it doesn’t do much to invite non-“Scandal” watchers into the proceedings.

And the episode’s biggest problem is that the “Scandal” homage runs counter to the tale of Hillary wanting to go to the semi-formal dance with a boy who is the son of the neighbors with whom Pete and Jackie have a long-running feud involving a garden hose. There is a hint of potential Scandal!!! here involving the feud but that mostly gets ignored to instead build to a moment of fatherly heroism on account of Pete. It’s rather sweet but at odds with the other half of the episode. So too is Warren’s woebegone quest to get in on the Ask-A-Celebrity-To-The-Dance-Via-The-Internet craze by asking Vanessa Hudgens to the semi-formal by pretending to be gravely ill a misfire on a potential Scandal!!! I mean, if you’re gonna go for the fellow-ABC-drama gusto then, you know, go for it. “Trophy Wife” doesn’t quite go for it. So let’s all just watch this instead.....

 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Wild River (1960)

Both literally and metaphorically, a small island stands at the center of the “Wild River.” The island and its aging matriarch is the lone piece of land the TVA – Tennessee Valley Authority – has failed to clear in advance of flooding that will be wrought by a new and necessary dam along the Tennessee River. It also becomes the symbol of progress, what is being left behind and all that is to come. It was directed by Elia Kazan, a noted cinematic social crusader, and while Kazan’s leanings are in no way unclear, the film itself never quite becomes a full-on rally cry for one side or the other. Everyone is wrong. Everyone is right. Taking a stand is brave and foolhardy, meaningful and pointless. It’s a film set in the 1930’s, made at the tail-end of the 1950’s, but it still feels topical and urgent, as necessary now in this pick-a-side America as ever.

Shot in majestic Technicolor, the Tennessee River seems to cut through the background of nearly every shot, always suggesting the battle lines, always reminding of the imminent flood that will tear through to bring about (force) change. Montgomery Clift, out-of-place from his first entrance into the frame in a stodgy three-piece suit, is the requisite idealist sent by the TVA to convince eighty-year old Ella Garth (Jo Van Fleet) to sell her land and evacuate. His stance will be swayed, of course, but Clift was far too clever an actor to ever make an arc so dramatically obvious – that, and the writing paints him as a man of morals and realism. It’s not simply that he yearns to save Ella from certain death, but to help re-vitalize a dying region. Notice how in his first moments Chuck is already asking locals what they think he should do, not simply trying to enlist their approval but to demonstrate a willingness to listen.

Perhaps politicking over-consumes “Wild River’s” opening stanza, but then what else happens when a Government Man turns up? Ordinary conversation over a cup of coffee? Please. Policy debate is all they know. Ah, but the riverside beauty awaits, and here she is Ella’s granddaughter, Carol, played by Lee Remick in a grand performance of quiet desperation. Her husband has passed and the little house where they lived on the other side of the river, across from the island, sits empty and alone. She now tends to her grandmother and, as such, becomes the demarcation line between the past and progress. That is not to say she is simply an emblem. In one splendid moment she literally says each line of Chuck’s before he says it – a step ahead. A love interest, an adversary, an ally, a human being. She doesn’t save him, and he doesn’t save her. Rather, they help each other grow, as painful as that growth is.

As she inevitably falls for the TVA man and their relationship gradually goes public, the public turns against her, in one frightful scene forming a kind of lynch mob, reminding us this is the 1930’s south. “For a moment there,” says Chuck, “I forgot where I was.” That is, a place where whites are hired to clear away the land in advance of the flood, not blacks, because if blacks are hired, the whites will walk off the job. Chuck eventually hires blacks anyway, and it is just another evocation of Clift’s acting dexterity – a man maintaining efficiency while also acting ethically. Thus, the flood, just like the great one that sent Noah scrambling to construct his Ark, breeds progress of the social order, coming to wipe away outdated mores.

Then again, that’s not all the water is coming to wipe away. “Maybe in the days of the pioneers a man could go his own way,” declared Burt Lancaster in another Montgomery Clift production, “From Here to Eternity”, “but today you gotta play ball.” Ella is caught between those notions – a pioneer who wants to maintain their ethos of individualism and being forced (literally in the end) to play ball.

Anymore if you lament progress, just a little, you are instantly branded a Luddite who simply REFUSES TO GET WITH THE TIMES. Watching Ella dig in her heels and espouse her roots even as it all fades away, it’s not hard to detect echoes of the futuristic stunted factory towns and technological advances that are slowly eroding the middle class. Ella Garth’s no dummy. She knows she can’t stop what’s coming. She cut her teeth in a world that has left her ill-equipped to face the new one. And perhaps it’s technically a spoiler to say she is moved off the land and the dam goes up and the water rises and the island floods, but how on earth is that a spoiler? It’s what’s been going on since the beginning of time. Sink or swim. Adapt or die. Black or white. It’s never really that simple. But somehow, by the time the check comes, it always is.

Star Wars VII Filming Update!!! Leaked Hoth Footage!!!

Reader: "Blast it, Biggs! We've been ShueRoll'd!"

Dream On...

Round about 1999 I began toying with the idea of taking a road trip to see the sites where my all-time favorite movie, “Last of the Mohicans”, was filmed. Thus, I noodled around the Internet, attempting to glean just where filming occurred and how one might go about mapping out such a pilgrimage. One of my more unsettling finds involved a triad of waterfalls, each one essential to the movie in its own way. A certain chunk of filming took place in the Blue Ridge forests just outside Asheville, North Carolina but these three waterfalls were not originally part of the State-owned Forest and despite North Carolina’s attempt to purchase the land from its owner, it was sold to a private developer. For a time, these falls were thought to be in danger – in danger of having public access completely denied by instead incorporating them into some sort of Rich Man’s gated community. Long, winding story short, the developer lost, the falls were saved and made part of the State Forest.

My Mohicanland pilgrimage finally, thankfully came to fruition in 2006, and I can report the falls themselves are handsome, particularly in the throes of autumn, and worth the trip and/or hike. Still, to a “Mohicans” devotee, all that rushing water would hold nowhere near the same sentimental sway independent of the fact Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe stood in front of them and walked alongside them as Hawkeye and Cora. And I remember considering this when I sat on a rock in front of Triple Falls as if it were a pew at the synagogue. In an area rich with them, I could have easily found another one to behold, but to an honorary Mohican, these falls were it. These were the falls we/I needed to see, and without them one of the most memorable weeks of my life would have been a lot less eventful.

You may or may not know the current brou-ha-ha unfolding in regards to the Field of Dreams – that is, the baseball diamond in the cornfield in Dyersville, Iowa that made for the main setting of Kevin Costner’s 1989 baseball fable about fathers and sons and the 1919 Chicago White Sox. It was, for many years post-film, a tourist attraction run by the owners of the two farms where it was built, down-home, plain-spoken. I was there once, when I was much younger and much more awkward and not yet a real fan of the film. I didn’t fall (deeply) in love with it until I left Iowa. After all, it’s very much a film about nostalgia, and I had become nostalgic for all that I loved and missed (and still love and still miss) about Iowa and watching it in that light cracked it open for me. But on my lone trip there, I recall it being scenic and lovely and less like a state fair and more like a county carnival. (I am not nostalgic for the Iowa State Fair. I still hate the Iowa State Fair. I am, however, nostalgic for the Adel Sweet Corn Festival.)

In 2010, however, after years of internal squabbling, the property was put up for sale. Lo and behold, a couple suburban Chicagoans, Mike and Denise Stillman, bought up the acres and, as Adam Doster recounts in his Atlantic article chronicling the entire ordeal, intended to turn it into what they term an “All-Star Ballpark Heaven.” Iowa may be home to The World’s Biggest Truck Stop but ostentation is not typically the state’s style. Thus, this plan has met significant resistance within the community and, on one hand, I cannot argue with this resistance. The All-Star Ballpark Heaven is meant to resemble the Cooperstown Dreams Park, site of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Of course, Shoeless Joe Jackson was banned from the Baseball Hall of Fame, and as the Field of Dreams was meant as Shoeless Joe’s sanctuary, it would seem wrong to model the latter after the former.

That, of course, is not the kind of metaphorical connection I would expect someone with an MBA to make or care about, and besides, I can see the new owners’ viewpoints too. The previous owners, as the Stillmans note, had no mortgage. They do. They have to generate revenue somehow and, as it turns out, you can build it and they can come, but you can’t maintain it unless “they” cough up the clams.

I haven’t the foggiest how to resolve this situation and that is between the Stillmans and the citizens of Dyersville anyway. Still, I feel I bring a unique perspective, being a nutjob who – as established – traveled halfway across the country to see where his favorite movie was filmed. Those waterfalls in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina are the backdrop of a few of my most cherished memories and to think that they were almost made inaccessible to the public and, even more, to people who value them – however ridiculous it might sound – as something so much more than just dazzlingly rushing water, is something I can express with all my melodramatic heart that I’m ecstatic did not happen.

Those falls are not quite the same as an All-Star Ballpark Heaven. With the teensiest bit of off-the-beaten-path hiking, I had Triple Falls all to myself. Then again, the last twenty minutes of the movie, its most powerful part, was filmed at Chimney Rock State Park. It’s easily accessible and even when you’re high above on the trail where the most meaningful moments of my cinematic life were shot, there is a highway below with the sound of passing cars (and on the morning I paid homage, there was even the distant racket of construction).

Yet, you stand where Alice – or Jodhi May, they’re inseperable to me – stood and all the noise and all the rest of the real world just……give way. A place can be powerful apart from the setting, if that makes sense, and I can’t help but wonder if no matter how circus-like they attempt to make the Field of Dreams, it will always feel as if the people have dipped themselves in magic waters.

In other words, perhaps keeping the Field, however it has to be done and in whatever form it needs to be to do it, is what matters most.

Homefront

While “Homefront” may have been directed by Gary Fleder, it was written by Sylvester Stallone, and this shows in the way it feels leftover and freeze-dried from the 1980’s, born of such rough & tumble Me Decade rural action opuses like “Next of Kin” and “Road House.” Don’t presume it coincidence that the main character’s undercover code name is……Dalton. In fact, there was often talk of a Stallone/Schwarzenegger vehicle, which came never to fruition, but which is apropos because often “Homefront” feels like the belated sequel to Schwarzenegger’s “Commando” (1985). That’s a film that finds Arnie as John Matrix, retired Army colonel, living in isolation with his precocious daughter Jenny to protect himself from rabid enemies. Those rabid enemies kidnap his daughter and, thus, he travels to South America to get her back. “Homefront” acts in reverse, with Jason Statham as retired DEA agent Phil Broker, living in isolation in Louisiana with his precocious daughter Maddy to protect himself from rabid enemies. Those rabid enemies eventually ferret him out and attack and, thus, he stands up to defend his Homefront.

Fleder, however, more recently a middle-of-the-road professional (“The Express”, “Runaway Jury”) insistently attempts to dress up the film as Bayou Tony Scott, handheld camera and overeager cutting, overburdening its reflective moments with heaps of style, when an approach more reminiscent of its 1980’s forefathers would have gone a long way in strengthening its tone. Even so, Fleder, unintentional or not, pulls out two spectacular shots that underline the deviously tongue-in-cheek undercurrent of portions of the film. First, is a crate piled high with bags of precious meth offset by a Mountain Dew can in the forefront. Second, is the main character and chief heavy having a face-to-face, heart-to-heart in a local café with a wild west, Monument Valley-esque mural in the background that momentarily re-casts them as the White Hat and the Black Hat. If the whole film had been this way, “Homefront” might have had a long life on TNT Saturday afternoons. Instead it will have to make do with being generally blasé and sporadically joyous.

“Homefront’s” problem and blessing, in fact, is the heavies often seem more interesting – well, more loony, which makes them more interesting – than the off-the-rack father/daughter relationship meant as the focal point. Statham’s awkwardness is intended, raising his daughter all alone, but too often his performance strikes the wrong note of awkward. There are also occasional hints of a Big Daddy/Hit Girl relationship here, such as when Maddy makes like Daddy at school, employing a bit of Statham-Fu on a bully, but they never quite take flight beyond that bit of plot-instigation.

Much more fascinating is this backwoods family that becomes Broker’s adversaries. The classmate Maddy injures is the son of the sister, Cassie (Kate Bosworth), of the town’s meth king, Gator Bodine (James Franco), and so sister begs brother to teach out-of-towner a lesson. Franco, playing a meth cooker named Gator the same year he played a drug dealer named Alien, was but a stock-broker named Ryan away from playing the tri-headed monster of American Capitalism over the course of twelve months. File it under missed opportunities. Nevertheless, he brings a comic glint to his eye, as he often does, the whole performance feeling like a put-on because the character itself is a put-on, a small-timer who wants to be big. He desires statewide distribution for his operation, and that’s why he comes to view his sister’s pleas to confront Broker as more than just a nuisance. Through a little cinematic snooping (i.e. Happen Upon A Box Of Files In The Basement And Find The File Revealing A Character’s Entire Backstory), he learns Broker’s dirty little secret and intends to use it against him.

The scheme, which allows for Statham to do as Statham does, involves threats and intimidation – “Country payback” as the Token Black Guy (Omar Benson Miller) puts it – and an old Gator ally, Sheryl Mott. She is played by Winona Ryder. No one does the Panic Eyes like Winona and she imbues her eyes in nearly every scene with the twitchy panic of a methhead – in over her head but swept up in Gator’s laconic fury nonetheless. There is a righteous moment near the end when a character’s cellphone becomes a beacon which might seem a screenwriting convenience, except that Ryder has laid the groundwork throughout to make you fully believe she would forget to confiscate the cellphone. Her character is also referenced as having been busted for trying to smuggle drugs into Angola, which seems like fodder for a comic movie offshoot. To paraphrase Bridget Fonda talking to Robert DeNiro in “Jackie Brown”...“If you aren't the biggest fuck-up I've ever met in my entire life. How did you ever smuggle drugs into Angola?”

Statham’s character is an interloper in this back country and, really, he becomes an interloper in the movie. The obligatory action-packed climax almost – almost!!! – turns on a different character, the local sheriff (Clancy Brown), making amends, only to cop out at the last second because, of course, Clancy Brown doesn’t have top billing. So it goes. These meth addicts, stomping, squabbling, are more intriguing to watch than the hero, and, as such, the most intriguing character of them all sort of gets forgotten.

Kate Bosworth is not becoming in this movie. She is frightening to look at, a long-gone junkie, rail thin and consumed by the desperation of another fix. The family business has made her into this racing-mind monster and essentially abandons her when her problem gets too deep. Somewhere in there, amidst all the mechanized plotting and handheld camera work, however, Cassie cries out for help. No one listens. Why would they when there’s meth to make and skulls to crack and “Road House” is on TNT again?