Friday's Old Fashioned: Night Train To Munich (1940)

When Nazis knock on the door at the Prague home of Anna Bomasch (Margaret Lockwood) negating her hopeful escape, she answers dressed in her best and carrying her dog, a paragon of rich pampering about to have her priorities re-ordered. I don’t mean to be flip. Well, maybe I do a little. “Night Train to Munich” clearly means to be flip. It has moments of well-handled genuine dread, to be sure, like an early scene of German bombers appearing in the sky above Prague and peppering the city with leaflets demanding submission. But it was directed by Carol Reed, eventually knighted by his native country of Britain, and released into theaters in the UK in August 1940 right in the midst of the Battle of Britain. And this is important because Reed’s film is not so much a statement of English superiority as a laugh track aimed squarely at Hitler and his Nazi thugs. If anything, “Night Train to Munich” is a comedy, albeit a very subtle, very British comedy, a chance to have an evening out ahead of The Blitz and chuckle at those dufuses in the swastikas.

Reed made no secret of the fact that he lifted much of the story from Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes.” In turn, Wes Anderson would lift bits of “Night Train to Munich” for “The Grand Budapest Hotel” seventy-four years later, but you can also see where Quentin Tarantino lifted inspiration for his “Inglorious Basterds” version of Der Führer. Ginormous portraits of Adolph in vainglorious repose dot every Nazi office and one German official has a framed picture on his office desk of the head of state in lieu of a family photo. It’s not laugh-out-loud, perhaps, but it’s hilarious, as are the early establishing shots of the film’s Hitler – never completely seen – smacking maps on tables and shouting like he’s conducting a game of Risk. At one point a German officer shouts "You are no longer living in a decadent democracy ruled by a pack of raving intellectuals! This is the Third Reich!" I mean, people.....that's funny.

The Nazis of the film yearn to take a noted Czech scientist, Axel (James Harcourt), Anna’s father, prisoner and use his knowledge for their gain. He escapes just ahead of the invasion. Anna is not so lucky, interred in a concentration camp, but quickly making an escape with another prisoner, Karl (Paul Henreid), for whom she feels affection. She shouldn’t. He’s a spy in a Czech get-up and Anna leads him straight to her father. But when he’s taken, the English agent assigned as his protector, Dickie Randall (Rex Harrison), goes undercover as a German spy to rescue Anna and Axel. And this is how everyone winds up on a night train bound for Munich, though before the film can conclude a stop at a ski chalet straddling the Swiss border will factor in.

With so many masquerading as someone else, only Anna and Axel appear interested in maintaining their real identity, though they, in fact, possess the least amount of character, functioning as humanistic MacGuffins, fueling the plot as it merrily bounds all over western Europe. Consequently, they also seem to be having the least fun, as if they are Slim Pickens in “Dr. Strangelove” and Kubrick forgot to tell them it was a {wink, wink} “drama”. Harrison, on the other hand, gives a genuine pleasure mongering performance, portraying a rather self-satisfied jovialist who regards this entire affair of derring-do as a lark. And purposely, once he slides into the S.S. uniform, he becomes only more self-impressed, sporting a monocle, pompously barking orders and decreeing hat he and Anna pose as ex-lovers who have re-found romance as a cover to make their flight to freedom. After all, why would she deny he, Ulrich Herzog, Third Reich VIP? It is Randall’s and, in turn, Harrison’s commentary on their country’s adversary.

Most emblematic of the film’s spirit, however, are Caldicott and Charters, two chattering Englishmen who essentially pop out of nowhere aboard the train, conveniently recognize Dickie Randall despite his disguise and aim to help. The characters are actually from another movie – “The Lady Vanishes”, as it happens, simply highlighting the two films’ similarities, and here their roles are reprised. This could have become a forced distraction, and while they do factor mightily into plot details, they ultimately function more as delightful stand ins for the whole of Great Britain, not wanting to be left out of the caper, everybody coming along for the ride, all for one and one for all. Their attitude, curious and concerned but good-humored, speaks to the whole project.

Nazism was most famously rendered in "Triumph of the Will", but "Night Train To Munich"  appropriately renders Britainism more like Triumph of the Insouciance.

Writing Other Places

As some of you may know, I have been dabbling in authoring film reviews for a few other sites out there on the world wide interwebs this year. I've kept it on a kind of theoretical down-low partially because I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about it (because sometimes I can sense the joy I have always found in writing getting strained out and that frightens me and makes me feel little a nauseous because if you can't sense your own voice in what you're writing then it's merely the rhetoric of 17,000 other movie reviews which.....gag) and partially because I haven't been able to write about much that has genuinely thrilled me. Until recently.

Recently I got to write about "Chinese Puzzle" (review here), which I loved, for Slant Magazine and about "Tanta Agua" (review here), which I really, really loved, for PopMatters. Please feel free to check out each review, but more crucially, feel free to watch each movie. They deserve your eyes. We need more like them.

The Ballad of Zoe Saldana

At the rehearsal dinner in advance of the spectacular wedding ceremony in the equally spectacular “Rachel Getting Married”, a friend, played by real life saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr., of the groom advises that he has crafted a song just for the occasion. It is called Rachel Loves Sidney. Well, that’s the A-side anyway. The B-Side, he says, is Sidney Loves Rachel. I love this moment, and I thought of it while watching Scott Cooper’s “Out of the Furnace.”

The 2013 film is a would-be Pennsylvanian epic, chronicling two brothers, one a war vet taken to bare knuckle fights, one who works at the local steel mill and has just been released from prison after serving a spell for vehicular manslaughter. The latter brother, Russell (Christian Bale), while behind bars, was forced to square with his girlfriend Lena (Zoe Saldana) leaving him. He understands her decision, but upon being set free, he seeks her out to make amends and hopefully start anew. In the scene, we see Lena from afar, over the shoulder of Russell as he gazes at her from across a park. Lena simply stands there, expressionless, forced to come to (too) quick terms with the person at whom she’s looking. And we wonder, what does she think? It’s a moment caked in more suspense than any of the macho fisticuffs and shootouts still to come. Then……she smiles. It’s not forced, it’s genuine, yet with genuine comes a price.

The ensuing scene is the best in the film, placing Russell and Lena on a small wooden bridge, hashing out all the years they’ve missed in each other’s company, and Russell not so much pleading with Lena for One More Chance as gracefully imploring his True Love. We believe him. More importantly, she believes him, but even more importantly than that is how Saldana plays the moment. Her smile’s been left at the park because now stuff’s real, and even if she believes Russell and even if she loves Russell, she knows responsibility outweighs that love. Which is to say, she's pregnant with her new boyfriend's baby.

I’m Pregnant Reveals are typically employed merely as a means to end. Here, even though it’s purpose on paper is to push Russell away once and for all, it does not wreak of its Reveal roots. It’s a moment of genuine happiness they both share and both regret because they are both responsible enough to understand that she needs to stay with the baby’s father. “You’re gonna make a good mother,” Russell says, choking back tears until he can’t. You leave the scene wishing all grown adults had such perspective. You leave the scene wishing Zoe Saldana had more moments like it.

In fact, the scene flashed me back to another scene of Zoe Saldana's at the movies in 2014. In “Blood Ties” she played Vanessa, a part not unlike Lena, the Love Interest to Billy Crudup’s protagonist, a character who existed solely in Crudup’s orbit. There she had a scene on a beach similar to the scene on the bridge, in so much as she sits and listens to Crudup confess his feelings. She reacts impeccably, but is eventually allowed to make her own confession, speaking of the unfortunate lowlife she took up with in place of Frank, wondering “Why he left me on the outside?”

Well, that’s what I keep thinking about Zoe Saldana. Here she is in two 2014 movies revolving around brothers on opposite sides of the law, more or less, and questions of how deep familial roots run. And there are women, because there have to be women, but the women are left on the outside. Or, more to the point, Lena and Vanessa are left on the outside. We are allowed to understand what has brought Russell to the bridge and Frank to the beach, but we are not allowed to understand what has brought Lena and Vanessa to the same place. And that is, in a way, understandable, because “Out of the Furnace” and “Blood Ties” are specifically stories of men and their manliness (or lack of it) and the dumb things men do and the way idiot men either prop women up as their saving grace or their downfall and yada yada. But it’s an insult to the movie gods to watch Zoe Saldana waste away on the sideline, to be defined by what these men do (or don’t do) for her and say about her.

Russell Loves Lena and Frank Loves Vanessa. Fine. Okay. I get it. But it’s not just about the dudes. Those are just the B-sides. Why the hell can’t we hear the A-sides? Why the hell can’t we hear about how Lena Loves Russell and how Vanessa Loves Frank?

X Men: Days Of Future Past by Elmore Leonard

The film novelization of "X Men: Days Of Future Past" was written by Elmore Leonard. This is how it opens.....

"Logan didn’t remember how he came to get the bullet holes. Something to do with some hotshit wannabe at the bar in the four corner town he was holed up in, but that happened after he blacked out trying to forget what he was thinking about right now. He sat down to sweat."

Studio Logo Potion

My favorite film studio intro is Paramount’s. It is my favorite partly, of course, because of the intro itself, a snow-capped peak said to be based by original logo artist W.W. Hodkinson on Utah’s Ben Lomond Mountain and subsequently modeled after Peru’s Artesonraju for the live action version. And yes, the look of the logo itself is striking, not just the old-school version which stood fast dramatically, and which is preferable, but the new-school version which starts with the ribbon of stars dropping in from the sky and flying in and encircling the nameless mountain from the left. It seems a callback to the era when motion pictures were an infant concept stationed in that mysterious land known as Los Angeles, far, far away over some mystical alpine vista.

But, as is often the case with such things, I have a more personal connection to it, and that’s why it’s my favorite. It goes back to December 20, 1997, a date which lives in Cinema Romantico infamy, the Saturday I first encountered my hero, Rose DeWitt Bukater in “Titanic.” It was in the grand palace that was the River Hills (may she rest in peace) a two auditorium theater (emphasis on those italics), the screen was ginormous, wrapping around, the sort of screen in which you could become lost like Our Man in the Indian Ocean. Two trailers played. One was "Hard Rain", the other was "Firestorm." Then, silence. Then, the Paramount intro, but still silent. And it was like for but a moment time stopped and I considered where I was and what I was about to watch even if I didn't know what was going to happen and how much it was going to mean to me. Except, somewhere, in those places we don't talk about at parties, I did know. I felt it. Call me a pollyanna, because I am, but it was......spiritual.

I thought of this moment when I heard tigress Lake Bell on a recent B.S. Report talk about that same moment, that moment "in the beginning of the movie when there's the logo of the studio" and how that is the moment she "can look around and sort of experience being in a cinema." "That's the moment," she continued, "I take a breath." I nearly shed a tear in my cubicle. Because I always take a breath, too. Air high-five, Lake.

The studio logo can be a tone-setter, yes, like "Last of the Mohicans" dispensing with the infamous 20th Century Fox Studio Fanfare, conducted by Alfred Newman, to already kick in with its score, those drums - God, those drums - pulsing on the soundtrack and raising your heartbeat before you even realize it's been raised and surmising the entire movie you are about to see by saying with this strategic choice that is so urgent and so fierce and so important that it can't even wait for the opening credits to start. That's beautiful, but that's retrospection, and that's not what I'm talking about.

I hate "Armageddon." Lord, I've said mean things about "Armageddon", and I'm not here to take them back. But I remember watching it. I remember the moment it started. I remember seeing the Touchstone logo. And in that moment, I took a breath. Movies like "Armageddon" and the studios that make them threaten every summer to turn the movie business monstrosity craving the almighty dollar above all else while leading to incessant recitations of the woefully misleading pseudo-prophecy that they are merely providing "what the people want" since this statement implies that "the people" in the equation are also provided alternatives to make up their own minds which outside of the most major metropolitan areas they are not. Thus, quality cinema threatens to join the long gone dinos. Thus, the studio logo should theoretically be a symbol of fear. Yet.....

.....ironically, every time a studio logo appears onscreen, regardless of the film that follows, is always when I most believe.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)

Mervyn LeRoy's frank film takes its title from the infamous Doolittle Raid, captained by Lt. Col. Jimmy T., when sixteen American B-25 Bombers took off from the USS Hornet deep in the heart of the west Pacific to carry out the first retaliatory attack on Japan for Pearl Harbor some four months earlier. The individual bombings, as the title helpfully implies, did not last much more than thirty ticks of the clock, yet the film itself runs for nearly two hours and twenty minutes. This is because it documents how the super-secret raid was constructed, sure, and because it documents how the symbolically successful raid took so long to reach its conclusion, yes, but primarily it's because "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" ultimately chooses to quietly be about so much more than just what went into those specific thirty seconds. 16.1 million Americans served in WWII and while WWII, as its name betrays, had a global impact, its true and incalculable residual effect boils down to each individual man.

The cinematic Doolittle is played by Spencer Tracy purposely at a remove - respectful of his men but also necessarily secretive, parsing out information regarding what they are doing and where they are going bit by bit. And so even though the film opens with him calling to order the attack that will pit his country squarely against the evil Axis, it is not his story but the story of the men he gathers. We meet most of them, including Lt. Bob Gray, who is played by Robert Mitchum which seems to suggest the possibility of a whole other kind of WWII movie, one in which he laconically considers war’s existentialism over a cigarette from the deck of an aircraft carrier as if it were the last chance saloon in Acapulco while Jane Greer broods on the homefront before cracking up and going insane. John Wayne gives a John Wayne-ish speech and Mitchum grins. Wayne: “What’s so funny, pilot?” Mitchum: “Oh, nothing. Just waiting for the punchline. Or was that whole speech it?” Mitchum and Wayne are then made to brawl in the mess hall to prove that man’s real war is with himself. Except I’ve gone and gotten myself distracted in the middle of this “review.” Apologies. We continue.

We meet Lt. Ted Lawson (Van Johnson) and his crew. He is an amiable fellow with a loving wife (Phyllis Thaxter) who has just become pregnant. Of course, now America has declared war and he has been re-assigned. This might sound like prototypical War Movie Bluster, and it sort of is, but, while being based on a true story, it is also setting the groundwork for what will follow.

The thirty seconds in the sky above Tokyo when the bombs are dropped and explosions ripple the sky are unquestionably the production centerpiece. Deftly mixing old newsreel footage with re-creations on the studio lot, the bombing raid is no herky-jerky assemblage of quick cuts nor a rousing montage. It is almost documentarian in spirit, following Lawson’s B-25, The Ruptured Duck, off the runway and over the ocean and across Japan and above Tokyo and back out toward the water and on to China. But more crucially, it also when the film breaks radio contact with mostly every other major character already introduced.

Lawson and his crew, short on gas, as all the planes were that fateful day, are forced to ditch their aircraft and bail out just short of mainland China. With enemy Japanese patrols on the prowl, the Americans, injured badly, are found by Chinese and taken to shelter where their wounds are treated. It is in this elongated wind down from the Doolittle Raid where “Thirty Seconds From Tokyo” reveals itself, blotting out the more rah rah sis boom bah first half by reminding that even a war of altruistic intent can yield heavy burden.

The back half of “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo”, wherein the Chinese villagers aid in Lawson's recuperation, in fact, leaves any sort of war mongering back on the carrier from whence the raiders launched. Here, in its still sorta syrupy mid-40’s way, it becomes all about survival, and if survival has to involve an amputation, so be it. This is not to suggest that “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” suddenly morphs into an anti-military screed. Far from it. After all, Lawson faces each grim development with a general good cheer, free from any Ron Kovic fury. But it reminds us what a battle can cause and at the center of each battle and in the midst of every war there are people, and amongst all those millions of people there are specific persons, and each one of those people has a story. Wars are fought in the name of nations. Wars are fought by individuals.

In Memoriam: Gordon Willis

When I think New York, I think Woody Allen, and when I think of Woody Allen's New York, I think specifically of "Manhattan." That film famously opened with a Woody voiceover in the guise of an author attempting to forge the perfect first sentence for a book regarding the perfect city - New York, that is. And so he speaks of "romanticizing it all out of proportion", but decides that beginning is to corny, and so then he speaks of "a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture", but decides that prologue is too angry. Then, he hits it. He says: "He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved." Tough and romantic. So Woody figured he needed a shot to lead into this monologue and if the shot was leading into this monologue than the shot itself needed to be tough and romantic. Well, wowza. How do you go about encapsulating such a sentiment in a few seconds?

Woody decided he'd open with a shot of the New York Skyline. Well, gosh. That's pretty risky, yeah? I mean, the New York skyline? Who doesn't know the New York skyline? It’s the most photographed city in the world. Google "New York Skyline" and you have access to an untold number of images, all taken from different angles at different times of day or night with different types of exposures and lenses and god knows what else. Countless films have served up images of the New York Skyline, from up close and from a distance. Right now, at this very second, roughly 247,000 tourists from all manner of vantage points and with all manner of devices are snapping pictures of New York’s skyline. Art.com returns 29,379 items for sale featuring the New York Skyline. You can find it on postcards and coffee mugs and refrigerator magnets. So how on earth could he take the most cliched shot available and then proceed to make it tough and romantic, epitomizing in a few seconds the single most New York-y New York film that he - the most New York-y New York filmmaker of all time - planned to ever make?

Why he enlisted Gordon Willis as his cinematographer of course.

Superhero Movie Update

With “The Amazing Spider Man” series, not to be confused with the “Spider Man” series, set to conclude with “The Amazing Spider Man 3” in 2016, Columbia and Marvel chose to get a jump on the Spiderman Reboot to the Reboot by announcing pre-production plans for a new trilogy called “Spidey.” Director, Writer and Actors have yet to be named but the release date of Memorial Day 2018 has been locked in as a means to box out “Mission: Impossible 6”, the already-announced follow-up to “Mission: Impossible 5” which will not be released until 2015. “Mission: Impossible 6” is tentatively scheduled to be directed by Derek Cianfrance who announced these plans after previously announcing his decision to drop out of directing “Peter Parker”, a “Spider Man” prequel also set to be released by Columbia and Marvel, with a release date of May 2019. Cianfrance had hoped to lure Ryan Gosling for the part of Peter Parker but Gosling has instead announced intentions to star in “The Green Lantern”, set for a July 2017 release, the reboot to the 2011 “Green Lantern” which starred Ryan Reynolds who will star as “Hawkeye”, an entirely separate entity from Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye of the forthcoming “The Avengers 2: Age of Ultron”, which will be released in the spring of 2016.

Meanwhile, James Cameron announced his intention to film a Justice League Trilogy – post Zack Snyder-Justice League Trilogy – but with a twist. It will be a Justice League meets Avengers Trilogy as both bodies of crime fighters team up to eradicate evil. In order to properly sculpt his desired Justice League meets Avengers universe, Cameron simultaneously announced his intention to write and direct his own “Batman”, “Superman”, “Wonder Woman”, “Green Lantern”, “Aquaman”, “Iron Man”, “Captain America”, “Incredible Hulk”, “Thor”, and “Black Widow” movies prior to filming his Justice League Trilogy. Therefore the tentative release date of his first Justice League meets The Avengers installment has been tentatively set as 2035, pushed back from 2034 to avoid a conflicting release date with the “Black Canary” (tentatively scheduled to star Lily Mo Sheen in the title role).

Godzilla

“Let them fight.” So says Dr. Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) of the monster clique standing firmly at the forefront of director Gareth Edwards’ variant on the apocalyptic fable of Godzilla. It is apropos because, as is often the case with such things, human beings, so self-satisfied with the gaudy array of weapons they have amassed, so huffy when having their technological superiority questioned, have found all their fancy-schmancy warheads and whatnot no match for a fire-breathing lizard gone loco. But it is also apropos because after the obligatory build-up, human beings take a decided backseat to the monsters and their mayhem. The offense of many disaster-laden Hollywood blockbusters is their lack of character development, which is to say they attempt to develop character, half-heartedly, and typically fail. Thus, Edwards essentially forgoes character development altogether. Most of the people, particularly its "leading man" (Aaron Taylor-Johnson?), are ciphers, existing at ground level to give us bearings. Then they get outta the way to let the monsters fight, and ultimately that human interest insignificance becomes emblematic of the film’s overriding idea.

It opens in 1999, a year after the release of Roland Emmerich’s critically reviled version of “Godzilla”, as if Edwards is returning to the scene of the cinematic crime to wipe it away and begin anew, where we meet an overworked American scientist named Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) stationed at a nuclear reactor plant in Tokyo who, in one of Edwards’ innumerable wry twists, has forgotten his own birthday rather than his son’s. Drawing an uncomfortable parallel to the recent Fukushima Disaster, the plant melts down for reasons not as straight-forward as they seem, and so Joe spends the next fifteen years going full conspiracy theorist, finding him estranged from his grown son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson?) who now has a wife (Elizabeth Olson) and son of his own. Max Borenstein’s screenplay feints in the direction of exploring the toll a dad’s absence takes, and whether that rift can be repaired, but eventually forgets about it because, well, everything gets forgotten about when Honolulu gets stomped and San Francisco gets smashed.

Amongst the humans, Watanabe and Sally Hawkins as his scientific cohort, Vivienne Graham, tasked by a secretive conglomerate to study and then track the chaos-creating beasts driving the plot, are the only two who manage to stare down the special effects. They do this by subtly playing themselves as a Disaster Movie Comedy Duo, understanding full well their responsibilities are simply to show up when exposition is required, deliver it expediently but authoritatively (Hawkins’ English accent garners a notable assist in this regard because backstory blather, as Science has proven, always sounds better when spoken in the King's) and then stand slack-jawed in front of countless green screens. Truly, their facial expressions, fear and astonishment drawn out to absurd lengths, are a master class in drollery, and their breathless dialogue recitations evoke a summer matinee soap opera. Godzilla’s roar shakes the walls, but Watanabe’s confounded squint steals “Godzilla.”

This is also speaks to how Edwards and his editor Bob Ducsay routinely find humor in their $160 million production and then deftly and almost disbelievingly juxtapose it with moments of genuine horror. “Monsters” is Edwards only previous credit, a film cultivated on a low budget that necessitated a genuine understanding of how to utilize set-ups and silence, and while the enormity of his latest project’s budget is on display, he still manufactures suspense without resorting to an assault of noise and fits of look-at-all-my-shit. This “Godzilla” runs for a considerable chunk of time before finally revealing its title character, a bold choice in an instant gratification climate, and then doesn’t skimp when it does appear, presenting him in clear, intensive shots that are awesome to behold while simultaneously working as an ode to old-school man-in-a-suit. And upon his arrival, the whole stage is ceded.

People run and people die and it feels immediate even if empathy for any of them is virtually non-existent because no one has been established beyond the most rudimentary detail. But then that pointed absence of empathy is Edwards most deliberate and impressive choice. “Nature,” says Serizawa, “restores the balance”, and that is what “Godzilla” of 2014 does. Man isn't the center of the universe and man isn't the center of this film. Over the years the sight of nameless extras fleeing through traffic-choked streets in disaster movies have become an easy punchline, but here they become the point. All the humans onscreen are reduced to hapless spectators. We don't care about them because nature doesn't much care for them either.

Neighbors

It’s a thin line between youth and middle-age, and the line becomes literal in “Neighbors” when a married couple with an infant daughter wake one morning to find a fraternity moving in next door. Yet it does not simply become a variation of old people yelling at young people to get off their lawn, but rather a raunch-prone illumination of the adage that youth is wasted on the young, and that only too late do adults realize this adage isn’t stock-in-trade but sheer blinding truth. Well, at least in theory. Because there is also a thin line between subversive and stupid, between making a statement and setting up gags, and “Neighbors” straddles that line throughout, if not expertly as least sufficiently. It can be dumb but never as dumb as its premise implies, often becoming a sharp and even unsettling story of what happens when the springtime of our lives becomes a withered summer.

The opening ten minutes of “Neighbors” is a salvo of first-time parent struggle as Mac (Seth Rogen) and Kelly (Rose Byrne) cope with responsibility and repetition. So when Delta Psi materializes one house over and puts tapper to keg, their child-rearing instincts assume the worst while another part of them cannot help but be aroused at the idea of youthful reinvigoration. The frat’s President is Teddy, played by Zac Efron as if Stan Gable were Achilles, who is not smart enough to have any future plans but is wily enough to entrap the couple next door by using their longing for days gone by against them. Mac and Kelly want these supposed students to behave but don’t want to appear uncool. So they try a peace offering and when that fails they try calling the cops, and that fails too. They take their case to the Dean (Lisa Kudrow), and while once upon a time Deans were only out to curb the kids' enthusiasm, it appears they've also turned on the grown-ups who will soon be paying to send their kids to college.

Teddy and the boys issue a declaration of war and Mac and Kelly quickly follow suit. Hijinks ensue. They are quite often of an expectant shock and awe variety, but every now and then a moment rises to prove that R-rated comedy can yield brutal honesty. Consider Rose Byrne’s bout with nudity. This isn’t mud wrestling, this is motherhood, up front and out loud. Still, it’s not hard to detect the Teddys of the multiplex texting their bros in its aftermath: “Rose Byrne’s boobs!”

Rogen has long subscribed to a silver screen persona of the Man Boy, sort of a Peter Pan slacker – grown up, but not really, still choosing to put – in the parlance of our times and of the film – bros before hos. Rogen and others of Judd Apatow Delta Phi have been taken to task for this seeming refusal to mature, and while “Neighbors” was directed by Nicholas Stoller and written by Andrew J. Cohen and Brendan O'Brien, a reactionary tone via Rogen is detectable. His character isn’t just about to have a kid, he has a kid, and a square job to support it. That, and as an actor Rogen finally shows the willingness to cede center stage to the lady, the incredibly talented and terribly underrated comedienne Byrne, who earns a priceless monologue explaining that she doesn’t simply want to be the Supportive Spouse of so many god-awful rom-coms come before. He disagrees, crying: “We can’t both be Kevin James!” But they can. They can, Hollywood. They are co-conspirators, fellow agents of their own awakening, and their domestic strife emerges as the film's heart.

 
Of course, whenever the script gets stuck, and it does, it simply resorts to improv or more neighborly pranks. Eventually those pranks escalate into somewhat violent and ethically questionable territory, and perhaps that is why the film just sort of forgets about the baby’s existence as it builds to the outrageous climax. The baby tethers these parents to reality and, in turn, the parents tether us to reality and at a certain point "Neighbors", which admittedly is catering to future frat pledges as much as the we-have-a-mortgage crowd, must jettison reality to exist as a suitable box-office earner for its studio overlords. "Growth is good but never overrides buffoonery in a certain type of film," states Hollywood Code Section 612.117 4(c).

At one point Teddy provides an overview of his frat's history, from the fortuitous invention of beer pong on down to the Toga Party which, of course, was born from the "Animal House", a film that inspired Judd Apatow and all his cinematic offspring, including those that helmed "Neighbors". They grow up, they move on, but they are brothers for life, bound in spirit to Bluto and Delta Tau Chi.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Naked Kiss (1964)

There is a remarkable moment in “The Naked Kiss” when ex-prostitute Kelly (Constance Towers) is having a romantic moment with J.L. Grant (Michael Dante), a handsome and sophisticated heir to a fortune who will soon become her fiancé. He asks if she’s seen Venice. She confesses she has not. He says he’ll take her there right now. So he projects film he shot of the canals aboard a gondola and they inevitably fall into one another’s arms, making that silver screen sorta love where no love is actually being made but you know they are and the censors just won’t let you see it. And as they make silver screen sorta love, the imagined images of Venice morph with the present day setting of Grant’s living room and become inseparable, they are in Italy and Italy is the living room. This is director Samuel Fuller’s m.o. throughout “The Naked Kiss”, a 1964 neo-noir, repeatedly mixing the real and the imagined, what we see and what we think we see – or, what we want to believe we see. Fuller was unsparing and unsentimental as a filmmaker, which makes it all the more jarring that he allows sentiment to stick its flowery nose into “The Naked Kiss.” But then, that’s his aim, to demonstrate how the sentiment is but ostentatious window dressing for the malice lurking within.

It doesn’t start so sentimentally. It starts with Kelly beating up her pimp and taking the $75 owed her, and not a penny more, signifying rough and ready scruples, before rolling into Grantville – Anywhere U.S.A. – in the guise of traveling champagne saleswoman. Griff (Anthony Eisley), a local cop, helps her pop a cork (and drink the bubbly) and then advises in no uncertain terms to take her business across the river to where the scofflaws roam. Why he even points her toward a club where she can peddle her merchandise, out of the sexual desire of his own heart, except when he shows up to have a look he learns from the maître d, if you will, that Kelly never arrived. This is because she’s through with hooking, see, intending to remake herself as an upstanding citizen, and accepted a job as a lilywhite nurse instead. Griff, however, is suspicious, convinced it’s all part of a diabolical ruse.

Throughout the film, Fuller overlays scenes of dialogue chock full of double entendres and maximum hard-boiledness with soothing sounds on the soundtrack, such as Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”, but this is never more pointed than when “The Naked Kiss” momentarily turns into “Bells of St. Mary’s” and has Kelly serenade in an actual musical number with a few kiddos at the hospital. It's so saccharine it's off-putting, which is the point, sticking way the hell out, mocking the denizens of Grantville for the saintly light in which they see themselves. It also alludes to a crucial story detail that will not be revealed in this review. It will not be revealed because to see it unknowingly is to be left almost violently unsettled; and it leads to a moment of violence as shocking as it is understandable, whereby Fuller is inviting us not to be voyeurs as much as accomplices.

In light of this reveal and its aftermath, Kelly winds up behind bars and the town quickly turns on her. She scored her job as a nurse and found an apartment in which to live not because of resumes or background checks but because she looked so pretty, complete with an angel's face, judged wholly by the surface, which is how they prefer it, until her history is brought to bear. Fuller essentially takes the Hooker With The Heart Of Gold storyline, the one that so comfortably fits in the headlines because it so easily fulfills that Sin & Forgiveness storyline we crave, and skewers it.

Kelly may be playing nice and making amends but a Fuller’s point seems to be that playing nice and making amends is folly in a society conditioned to lock in on the scars of your past and dredge them back up no matter what. America believes in forgiveness, sure, so long as it’s willing to forgive, which it most often isn’t. “That diabolical, hell-conceived principle of persecution rages among some,” wrote James Madison to William Bradford two years before America was America, and Fuller may well take that as his motto. The conclusion offers Kelly vindication, but consider the last shot, walking off all alone, nothing nipping at her heels except her past.

Top 5 Most Personal Rooting Interests In Disaster Movies

Tomorrow Gareth Edwards' version of “Godzilla” opens and as I noted in my Un-Summery Summer Movie Preview, it's always nice to have a rooting interest in disaster movies. You know, we are introduced to a disparate group of characters forced together and attempting to survive/overcome the obligatory “disaster” and/or creature responsible for said “disaster” and, if the movie gods are on your side, one of the characters calls out to you and you latch onto them for cheering purposes.

Rarely, however, do you latch onto him or her because of the actual character. No, it’s typically something more superficial and shallow but, nevertheless, crucial, because without that rooting interest, hey, you're probably going to fall asleep.

 Top 5 Personal Rooting Interests In Disaster Movies 

Hanover (Wes Studi), Deep Rising (1998).

I rooted for him cuz he was, like, you know, Magua, man.

Preacher (LL Cool J), Deep Blue Sea (1999)

As a manager at the Wynnsong 16, I constructed "Deep Blue Sea" reel-by-reel and threw it onto the projector so my friend and fellow manager Dan and I could partake in a midnight screening of it, just the two of us. He brought along a 12 pack of the King of Beers. And as we knocked back cans of Bud, characters kept getting knocked off, and as each character got knocked off, the more exuberantly (drunkenly) we rooted for James T. Smith to emerge unscathed.

Monique Aubertine (Izabella Scorupco), The Vertical Limit (2000)

I've written about it before but it bears repeating - "The Vertical Limit" is one of the most wonderfully awful moviegoing experiences of my life. A Friday afternoon in Phoenix, where I had just moved, and all I wanted was a matinee of a movie I could watch mindlessly but emotionally. And from the moment Izabella punched one of the rascally Bench Brothers (and eventually flipped one of them off), I was on her side and rooting for her to make it to the top of K2 with a can of nitroglycerin strapped to her shapely back (don't ask) and then back down again alive. Bless her soul and striking red cap, she made it. Monique Aubertine, my Mountaineering Disaster Movie Crush 4Ever.

Philippe Roaché (Jean Reno), Godzilla (1998)

I get that the American-Coffee-Is-Really-Bad jokes are kinda hackey, but I'll let it slide simply for Mr. Reno's reaction shots whenever he does sip that bad American coffee. Unwittingly, he mimicked America's collective reaction to the film itself. For that, he deserved to live 'til the end.

April Wexler (Tara Reid), Sharknado (2013)

Everyone's already ballyhooing the "Sharknado" sequel simply because of its onslaught of recognizable B-celebrity names and as much as one can become riled up by a purposely atrocious Sci-Fi Channel movie that hasn't even aired yet, well, this blogger's riled up. It's not egregious stunt casting in the form of Billy Ray Cyrus and Andy Dick nor nabbing two "ID4" holdovers that can transform a direct-to-TV piece-of-crap into appointment camp viewing but someone like Tara Reid agreeing to a role to put vodka on the liquor shelf and then eclipsing all the ersatz special effects by......look, what Tara Reid is doing in "Sharknado" simply defies acting in terms of Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg and Constantin Stanislavski. It defies acting in terms of the Eldora, Iowa Playhouse production of "Don Quixote." This is not because Tara Reid isn't acting in "Sharknado" because we can't be certain that Tara Reid wasn't acting in "Sharknado." Each hypothesis is scientifically unprovable. Peter Geyl said history is an argument without an end, but Cinema Romantico says that Tara Reid's acting intent in "Sharknado" is an argument without end. It's a corn maze of logic. You can never be sure what choices she's making, possibly because she isn't making acting choices but possibly because she is making acting choices on a level only someone who starred in her own reality show called "Taradise" could possibly comprehend. I desperately wanted to see her survive until the end just in the hopes that I could figure it all out. I couldn't. She lived and, in doing so, broke my brain.

Second Image Of Ben Affleck As Batman Released

"Because Chris Parker is the hero Gotham deserves and needs right now." #ShueRoll'd

Afternoon Delight

“How do I complain,” Rachel (Kathryn Hahn), a reluctant housewife asks her therapist, “when women in Darfur walk fifteen miles to get water and are raped along the way?” It’s a variation of a query that would likely be tagged on Twitter with the somewhat disingenuous hashtag #firstworldproblems. She is a trim mom in a lovely house in a tony neighborhood. So why bring up Darfur within the context of her own neurotic existence? To lessen her sense of guilt? To prove that she cares? Or is she actually in touch enough to note the inanity of her existential crisis compared to the, as they say, grand scheme of things?

It’s definitely not the last one. Why else would she invite a stripper to live with she and her app-inventing husband Jeff (Josh Radnor) and their young son? This is what happens when in a potentially misguided effort to solve their six month sex drought they go to a strip club to reinvigorate eroticism, or something. There Rachel gets a private dance from McKenna (Juno Temple) and before long Rachel has staked out a coffee truck outside the club all in an effort to be besties with this adult dancer. And when McKenna winds up homeless, Rachel offers their spare bedroom as a place to crash.

Clearly McKenna is destined to become the convenient bomb that inevitably blows up the non-storybook life of Rachel and Jeff. As the film progresses we realize their marriage has not only broken down sexually but also communicatively. They are two people unable to articulate where things went wrong and apparently unwilling to try and patch them back up. It’s more than a little reminiscent of “Little Children” and its suburban marital stagnation, although that film’s protagonist, Kate Winslet’s Sarah Pierce, was more cognizant of her stasis and failure to motivate her own way out of it. Rachel remains in a form of denial, lying to her therapist and installing a stripper as her nanny.

Hahn is best known as a comic actress and Temple, as I have noted before, has the market cornered on naïve waifs, though McKenna is a far less naïve here. She has a grasp of her place in the world, in spite of what that place may be, and is both more honest with herself and open with her sexuality. Still, Temple is playing more of a symbol than a fully-realized individual, and saddled with a resolution that more or less leaves her tossing in the wind. Considering her occupation, the film trends toward an obvious tipping point and it arrives in a rather sensationalistic manner via parallel stories – the wives getting together to drink and gossip, the husbands getting together to drink and play poker. Each event devolves rapidly and then they combine to combust melodramatically, leaving Rachel as the martyr of Silver Lake.

At this point, it’s as if Jill Soloway, the writer/director who has had a clear vision, does not know quite what to do. She runs Rachel right off the rails and I can’t help but wonder if she might have liked to leave her there, figuratively tossing in the wind along with McKenna. Instead, Rachel rebounds, normalcy returns, sex resumes, and everyone goes back to forgetting about the plight of Darfur.

Labor Day

If Nicholas Sparks wrote a novel about an agoraphobic, he might have dreamed up Jason Reitman’s “Labor Day”, an often excruciatingly schmaltzy gaze into the heart of a woman, what ails it and its inevitable masculine remedy. Set over Labor Day weekend in a 1987 more reminiscent of 1955 Hill Valley, a prison escapee serving 18 years for murder, Frank Chambers (Josh Brolin), approaches Adele Wheeler (Kate Winslet) and her 13 year old son Henry (Gattlin Griffith) with a bloody gash asking for a ride. Frightened, they comply, and he directs them back home where he intends to rest and then catch a train out of town. Instead he becomes ensconced in their insulated family dynamic, almost straight away assuming household tasks - a little car repair, a little ironing, waxing and mopping floors, and in spite of being an outlaw whose face covers flyers plastered to telephone poles he takes Henry out in the backyard for a game of catch. He’s a Man and a Father Figure.

To be fair to both director Jason Reitman and his cast, they select a tone of outright earnestness and entirely maintain it to the end. Reitman opens the dispenser pouring spot and unabashedly drowns the entire project in syrup, filling every frame with visual sentiment, letting momentary cracks of sunlight dance in and out to symbolize the rays of hope the expectedly misunderstood Frank provides. (The truth of his story is sprinkled throughout in flashback snippets.) Winslet and Brolin remain committed, never resorting to parody, even as story developments threaten to (and sometimes do). One scene in particular that finds this makeshift family constructing a homemade pie has become a popular target of detractors, and not wrongly. Its symbolism is garish and its rendering is mawkish. On those grounds, it can be argued as awful, but it also acknowledges what it is and owns it.

Not that this is a good thing. “Labor Day” might have done better as a chamber piece with primarily two people rather than three. Henry gets a sorta girlfriend (Brighid Fleming), a new girl in town, the only person in the film, actually, that is has likely heard “Who's That Girl”, who exists just to lend advice and spur him forward. Come to think of it, she is never seen with anyone else, including the parents she alludes to, and only materializes when needed. It’s possible she’s make-believe. The character of Adele, closed-off and virtually shut-down since her divorce to Henry’s father, has the potential to be interesting. Henry’s father (Clark Gregg), in fact, delivers a brief monologue explaining that her passion, her hunger for life, was her downfall, that such sheer blinding emotion left her without any. It is an idea talked about more than it is expressed but still, the notion of this woman and her son on their own coming to grips with the peaks and valleys of emotional anxiety is compelling. Winslet is ready to go there. The material is not.

Cameron Crowe’s “Elizabethtown” was another film derided by some for schmaltz, yet when Susan Sarandon’s character loses her husband to death, she refuses to mope, repairs her car, teaches herself to cook, learns to dance, takes stand-up comedy courses. She’s sad for the loss of her husband, as she makes clear, but the character also demonstrates that she get back up and exist on her own. This is the polar opposite of Adele Wheeler, who, as it turns out, isn’t so much an agoraphobic in the clinical sense as a lonely ol’ woman waitin’ ‘round for another manly man to stride in and change her oil. Her character demonstrates that she can’t get back up and live on her own. She’s co-dependent on a Harlequin hero. The closing voiceover made me throw up in my mouth a little.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Angel Face (1952)

Diane Tremayne certainly has the face of an angel. Perhaps it’s my Iowa bias showing but in Otto Preminger’s seriously hard-boiled 1952 noir, Jean Simmons often evokes Donna Reed at her most gregarious, if Donna Reed had been born in Lower Holloway. That face, however, belies a sinister interior. The only message this angel seeks to spread is narcissistic mayhem. Still, what hope does Frank Jessup (Robert Mitchum) have? He’s an ambulance driver called to Diane’s house because her stepmother, Catherine (Barbara O’Neil), has suffered gas inhalation. She suspects Diane may have be the culprit, a suspicion which should immediately provide Frank pause. Alas, when he meets Diane tickling the ivories of the family grand piano, the femme fatale’s song, as it so often does, proves irresistible.

Quickly, slyly and beguilingly Diane insinuates herself into Frank’s orbit. They go to dinner and then dancing, and the next day she asks Frank’s gal, Mary, to lunch to tell the truth and purposely drive a stake right through the heart of their relationship. She pledges to have her stepmother help fund Frank’s dream of opening his own mechanic shop, but when Catherine relents, Diane portrays it as an evil attempt to keep them apart. Diane convinces her father to hire Frank as chauffeur, and soon enough Frank is living on the Tremayne grounds, making it all the easier for her to saunter into his room and work her wiles.

The rest of the story, involving death and an ensuing arrest and trial that put the pseudo-lovebirds on the spot, are rife with melodrama, yet Preminger minimizes it with a no-frills approach, an atmosphere of slowly accumulating dread and shots underpinning its psychology. When Diane delivers a monologue regarding both her real mother and stepmother, Preminger films it as a single take, but has Simmons start in the background and then walk into the foreground and then into the background and then into the foreground, which is where it concludes. As in, Frank tries to brush her off and she forces her way right back in.

Early on Frank refers to himself as not wanting to be an “innocent bystander”, an apt comment because isn’t that how a movie audience often feels? Like innocent bystanders? The events on the screen are a place apart, seen, maybe even felt, but disconnected from the reality we inhabit. But with “Angel Face” I never felt innocent or as if I were merely standing by. I felt involved. More than that, I felt tempted, seduced and ensnared by Diane Tremayne. (Or, was it Jean Simmons?) But I did not feel betrayed. One shot finds Diane slipping into Frank’s trench coat and sleeping through the night, all wrapped up in her own psychosis, yet I confess to becoming wrapped up it in too.

Mitchum excelled in this genre specifically because his laconic cool melded so acutely with its fatalistic air. “How big a chump can you be?” he asked rhetorically in “Out of the Past” voiceover. “I was finding out.” Which is to say, he knew his string was being pulled as it was happening. He always drove himself off the cliff, never the other way around. But for once, in “Angel Face”, Mitchum finds himself getting driven off the cliff. An early moment is telling. Diane becomes hysterical and in keeping with the times, Frank slaps her. Diane slaps right him back. He thinks he’s in control. He’s not. Neither was I.

My 5 Favorite Star Wars "Special" Effects

The special effects of "Star Wars" (all right, okay, fine, "Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope") were groundbreaking. And Grand Chancellor George Lucas continued breaking more ground with them. And tampering with them. But I'm not here to complain nor demean those special effects. Because not only were they groundbreaking, they were integral to the story. Yet, just as integral to the story, and perhaps even more so in a way, were the less special of effects. The mere effects, the regular effects, the prosaic effects. "Star Wars" was sci-fi, to be sure, but it was also old-fashioned guerrilla filmmaking and just plain old-fashioned, and those old-fashioned effects are the ones we here at Cinema Romantico prefer.

  My 5 Favorite Star Wars "Special" Effects

1. Rebel Uniforms

The vests look like they came from K-Mart. The pants look like they came from Walmart. The helmets look like they came out of a dollar bin at Walgreens. Could there have been a more appropriate contrast to the badass Stormtroopers about to come barreling through the airlock?

2. Plastic Cookware

If there is a brightest spot to the center of the universe, and if you are on the planet farthest from, then it probably takes awhile, right, for new cookware to trickle its way down. So it would only make sense that poor Aunt Beru is still stuck with that same damn plastic cookware she probably got as a wedding gift from Owen's super cheap second cousin.

3. Mos Eisley Matte Painting

I'll never forget the first time I saw the Emerald City glimmering in the distance of the frame of "The Wizard of Oz." I can't quite remember any other image so utterly illuminating my family's RCA tube TV from the 80's. Did my youthful mind register that it wasn't real, merely a supreme optical illusion? Probably not. Maybe it did. Who knows? But that Emerald City matte painting remains at the forefront of my Cinematic Effects list and the Mos Eisley matte painting of "Star Wars" is not far behind. The actual view is in California's Death Valley, looking out toward Furnace Creek, but it always makes me think of a Tatooine-esque Mulholland Drive. From above L.A., all those far-reaching lights twinkle so romantically. Down below amongst them, sin and vice lurk down every highway and under every neon sign. From above Mos Eisley, invoked by John Williams' heralding score in that moment, it's the first outpost of a new world to which young Luke Skywalker is venturing. Down below, it is a hive of scum and villainy. And much like the Emerald City itself could never - in my fanciful mind anyway - live up to how it looks from a distance, there will be always be something just a touch more magical about seeing Mos Eisley from the ridge and merely imagining what awaits.

4. Rebel Base, Yavin Moon

Do you know what's so much cooler than some computer-generated Jedi Temple? An ACTUAL Mayan Temple standing in for the rebel base in "Star Wars", that's what.

5. X Wing Marshall Wands

Yesterday at The Atlantic, Noah Berlatsky had a fine article detailing what he termed the "scum-caked brilliance" of "Star Wars", a spot-on label of its "visual scruffiness." And that's sort of what this entire Top 5 (that I swear I had begun crafting before reading that article) boils down to. The X-Wing fighters carrying out the infamous attack on the Death Star are most definitely visually scruffy. They are worn and scarred, as if slapped together out of used parts from Big Al's Scrap Yard on Yavin 8. These were the details that not only grounded "Star Wars" but so fantastically enhanced the all-important "long time ago" in the "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away" preamble. It's why when I contemplate "Star Wars", I don't contemplate X-Wing fighters hurtling through space. I contemplate the Rebel Marshall Wands guiding them toward the runway to lift off for space.

As High As The Sky

"As High As The Sky" opens with its protagonist, Margaret (Caroline Fogarty), re-arranging furniture, making certain every nook and cranny is utterly anti-clutter. Her fiancé has recently jilted her, but this cleanliness is less a coping mechanism than an actual obsessive compulsive disorder. The inevitable irony, of course, is that all this organization is upended upon the arrival of her older sister Josephine (Bonnie McNeil). Even with advance warning of this visit, it still seems to catch Margaret, a detail-oriented party planner, off guard, not least because Josephine's precocious daughter Hannah (Laurel Porter) is in tow.

Their Sister Code is not nearly as honed as Carol and Dani of "In A World..." and this is because in spite of having the same mom and dad, Margaret and Josephine were born thirteen years apart. The former was planned, the latter was a surprise. This would suggest their introduction to the world also established their future personalities, but just as crucial was their parents' tragic death when Margaret was but four years old. Thus, she was raised in an aunt-centric environment while Josephine, brought up by mom and dad, essentially abandoned her flesh and blood to go straight Full Spirit. Now she is seeking out her sibling to make amends. Clearly change is in the air, and while those changes might be foreseeable, it is their execution within the story and overall effect that count.

Aside from the film being set almost entirely within the grounds of the protagonist's spacious home, the most notable element of "As High As The Sky" is that it's exclusively female. The only players in the film, from its featured trio to the only-heard, never-seen aunts of Margaret who function as her personal Phone Call Greek Chorus, reminding us and her from whence her many insecurities sprang, are women. Doubly, the majority of the crew, from writer/director Nikki Brandelein on down, are women too. This collective feminist spirit is not simply a press note, however, but the film's excellently rendered rallying cry.

Not only has Margaret's fiancé spurned her, Hannah has never even met her own father, a man who was already married with another family when he and Josephine got together. This is not to say that men are presented as the "enemy", but rather that the women are portrayed as self-reliant. As Josephine and Hannah's visit goes on, the more Margaret is made to realize the fiancé wasn't the be-all, end-all, and the more she takes possession of herself. Part of that admittedly stems from Josephine briefly exiting mid-picture and then re-appearing, which might come across too convenient, except that I suspect she was pulling a Coach Norman Dale - you know, when he purposely got himself kicked out of the game in "Hoosiers" so Shooter could coach? I suspect Josephine forced her sister to toughen up, especially in light of a late-game reveal, one that dovetails nicely with the sisters' pasts and is smartly not so much about the reveal itself as the various reactions to it.

One passage sans Josephine finds Margaret inviting a client, a pop star named Kay-Tee-P (Lainee Gram), outfitted with a fetching Debbie Gibson-era fedora, to discuss party specifics. Instead the conversation turns to Hannah and her father, and Gram does an exquisite job in that moment by subverting the caricature she easily could have become. She plays Hannah her new song and they bust a move. Before long, Margaret busts a few moves too.

These women don't need to stand by their man. They're dancing on their own.

Draft Day

When a film literally opens with the notoriously halting, bombastic voice of ESPN anchorman Chris Berman intoning about the “National Football League” as if its importance rivals a United Nations Peace Summit, as “Draft Day” does, well, the film could go one of two ways. It could be exactly what everyone expects, a conservative, brand beating bit of NFL agitprop. Or it could be a prickly satire, using the Berman voice to underscore the NFL’s bloated sense of self-importance, and, in turn, to show how the NFL draft itself is really nothing much more than a stock board on Wall Street, buying, selling and trading commodities. Alas, if Roger Goodell, the actual NFL commissioner, is featured in the film, and he is, the second option goes out the window.

“Draft Day” is directed by Ivan Reitman at his most middle-of-the-road, aside from bouts of split-screen emitting whiffs of a desperate uncle conversing with his nephew about phone apps, and no doubt to elicit the league’s cooperation and gain access to archival footage, he was forced to pull every possible punch. Admittedly, the screenplay, not so much hammy (which would have been refreshing) as conspicuously colorless, and perhaps a bit too much of inside baseball for those who don't know football, does him few favors, lacking in entertaining byplay and riveting drama. If the players in the draft are mere chess pieces, and despite their beating hearts and outrageous salaries, they are, so too are the characters of “Draft Day." What could have been caustically relevant is instead a narrative yawn. Its biggest plot development has to do with a quarterback’s birthday party and its attendees. To quote Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler......really?

Sonny Weaver Jr. (Kevin Costner) is General Manager of the Cleveland Browns. His team’s down the dumper, fans want him fired, his Dad – the one-time Browns coach – died six days earlier, he just learned his co-worker lady friend (Jennifer Garner, comporting herself with ten-tons of grace amidst this ode to masculinity even if she and Costner have virtually no chemistry) is pregnant, it’s Draft Day, and the ticking clock on screen shows it is but 12 hours until he makes his all-or-nothing pick. (“Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time,” says Robert McKee.) Ordered by team owner (Frank Langella) to make a “splash”, as opposed to merely choosing the player that best fits the team’s needs, Sonny makes a spectacularly ill-advised trade for the exalted number one pick. Now they can enlist the services of vaunted quarterback Bo Callahan. Unless Bo isn’t all he’s cracked up to be. Or unless wily Sonny has another trick up his dress shirt sleeve.

The pregnancy, of course, is meant to underscore the fresh start this precious draft pick can provide, a metaphor which feels both like an afterthought and an insult, though I don’t doubt most GM’s in the National Football League genuinely believe draft picks are more vital than newborn babies. Which would have been a bold idea for “Draft Day” to explore but then “Draft Day” believes in truth, justice and the Goodell Way. The Father’s death is meant to highlight Sonny Jr.’s come-to-Jesus moment, making him ask “who am I really?” and “for what do I really stand?” The Father’s death also, however, negates the obvious opportunity to have him stand stoically on the football field against the backdrop of a gray spring sky. So instead it serves that shot with the Mother right after she has spread the Father’s ashes. It’s NFL Films with Ellen Burstyn. Linda Blair is unaccounted for and, dammit, we really needed her in this one, vomiting all over the gridiron piety.

Costner is solid in the lead role, nicely playing against the archetype of a hard-charging, over-stressed workaholic, and instead evincing a restrained world-weariness, a man who maybe does not have the temperament for such a position. Naturally when the draft itself arrives, he begins making moves; and while the moves are overtly calculated in screenwriting terms, Costner is believable, acting not on foregone knowledge but out of wildcard desperation. He’s also ultimately acting out of the goodness of his heart, sort of, and this is where “Draft Day” truly runs aground. Not unlike the NFL’s Crunch Course and Concussion Problem, the film wants it both ways. It wants the draft pick to double as an ethical stand, but instantly undercuts it with power-hungry finagling. It’s terribly ironic, but (Berman voice!) the National Football League doesn’t do irony.

Early in the film, on the TV, over the shoulder of a character, we hear the real-life Jon Gruden make mention of a potential draftee who has been arrested for assault and battery. These sorts of real-world problems plague the NFL at every turn. Of course, in the film, the character merely made a mistake. “That's not who he is,” says Gruden in a moment of scarily accurate inadvertent hilarity, and which points to the overall problem of “Draft Day”. Everyone is either good or misunderstood (which, of course, means they’re still good). All the real-world issues are covered up. The Draft Room is just another Potemkin Village.

Recap Vomit: Trophy Wife (There's No Guy In Team)

The season finale of NBC’s ever-marvelous “Parks and Recreation” – and fear not, no spoilers shall be revealed – was essentially everything we expect from a sitcom season finale. It was an hour-long as opposed to a mere half-hour. It was packed with guest stars. It presented a looming life decision to its protagonist(s). It offered a ginormous Reveal that provided closure while also leaving everything open. There is nothing wrong with this approach. It was a fantastic episode. Yet, I wonder. I wonder why sitcoms are bound by Sitcom Law to conclude seasons this way, and I wondered about this as I watched the most recent episode of “Trophy Wife.”

Now understand, I don’t really wonder why Sitcom Law stipulates seasons wrap up with these cannonading episodes because I know why. It’s because of Network Execs and Ratings and Human Propensity To Gasp When Confronted With A Cliffhanger and because I’m someone who genuinely thinks “A Fish Called Wanda” is the funniest movie of all-time who recently told people this only to be met by confusion and disagreement whereupon I explained that it doesn’t have the most laughs per capita of other funny movies but that its quality of laughs outweighs all other films’ quantity of laughs and, seriously, when did we become a Quantity over Quality society even though I know full well when (i.e. When God Created The Heaven And The Earth) and…..well……uh……it’s a smoke screen?

Where was I? Right. Sitcom season finales. I thought a lot about this need to Go Big Home & Then Go Home (until next season) during “There Is No Guy In Team”, and this is because “Trophy Wife” has shown itself to be superior with its non-event episodes. I was talking with a friend recently who told me that since having kids he has found sports to be so un-suspenseful because how does it matter whether or not Kevin Durant makes a shot at the buzzer to win when just wanting your own flesh and blood to get to school okay can terrorize your thoughts. And that’s the truth “Trophy Wife” knows and explores so well (albeit comically) – that the family is the event. It’s very much a sitcom in the entanglements it offers week-to-week, yet at the same time it never needs (even if it sometimes resorts to) sitcom fireworks. The day-to-day is enough.

And that’s why I found myself wishing that “There Is No Guy In Team” had been the season finale (series finale?) of “Trophy Wife.” Which isn’t to say that the final two episodes won’t be good or that the season finale (series finale?) won’t be riveting and moving, but still. This episode was perfect. Not perfect so much in that it was as good as an episode of television could possibly be, but perfect in that it had all the quintessential characteristics of what makes “Trophy Wife” what it is and what it’s best at being. It was funny. It was really funny. Scout’s honor. (I feel like I have to convince people that show is actually funny, which is ridiculous. This episode was effing funny.) It was warm without being fuzzy, clever without being impressed with itself, a perfect piece of pecan pie without having to lather it in whipped cream and drown it in chocolate fondue and have some superstar make a cameo to serve it to you.

“Trophy Wife” may not be renewed by the ABC Mothership and if it isn't, that's okay. Sitcoms end, but the Harrison family has been so well-crafted by its writers and actors that it will continue to exist in the artistic firmament long after its plug is pulled.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Leave Her To Heaven (1945)

Though it was made 15 years earlier than “Psycho”, and though “Psycho” was based in part on a real-life story, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic of 1960 shares much in common with John M. Stahl’s “Leave Her To Heaven.” If Norman Bates was a deranged mama’s boy gone rogue then Ellen Berent is a lunatic daddy’s girl gone off the deep end. Which is why even if “Leave Her To Heaven” arrived in an era for film noir, it’s more reminiscent of pure horror, right down to the Monster That Cannot Be Killed, reaching out even from the grave and threatening to haunt forever.

Ellen’s emotional balance seems off the moment we and novelist Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde) first meet her aboard a train. This is not a Meet Cute. This is a Wait A Second. After introducing himself, she stares at him. It is less a Hawkeye “Why I’m looking at you, miss” stare from “Last of the Mohicans” than a creepy, obsessive, through-the-“Rear Window” stare, particularly when she explains just how much he resembles her father. Later, upon meeting Ellen’s sister and mother, the chill between them is obvious. Then she jilts her fiancé (Vincent Price) and declares her intention to marry Richard. That’s after knowing him for roughly 48 hours. Alarm bells should have sounded. Storm flags should have been raised. But, to be fair, Ellen is played by Gene Tierney and Richard is a man and, well, whatareyougonnado? Wild’s fine in the part but the part is purposely no match for Tierney. Consider the poster, re-casting the traditional male-dominant pose of cinema with the woman instead towering over the man.

It’s her marriage and it’s her movie. Stahl and his cinematographer wield their lavish Technicolor as a weapon, serving varying glamorous locales like celluloid neopolitan ice cream, a perfect contrast to the brewing horror. It could be argued these vivid colors are meant to symbolize the tempestuousness of Ellen, except she seems much more cold-blooded than warm. If location and color scheme was truly meant to summarize her character – or lack of it – the production would have needed to move to Superman’s Fortress of Solitude at the North Pole. Which would have been doubly appropriate, in fact, since solitude is what Ellen craves.

Frighteningly possessive, she wants Richard all to herself, so much so that she actively wants to take on the roles of the traditional housewife. She wants to cook and clean. She wants to be subservient and be in control. It’s 1945, it’s a few months after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and she wants a pre-war life post-war. Or maybe she just wants everything to be like it was with Daddy, re-casting her own spouse in the fatherly role, a startling idea to say the least, but one which the film suggests without necessarily fully exploring. It is more content to simply watch how far her warped idea of civility will be maintained, damn the familial obligations.

She shuns her mother and sister and comes to hate Danny, the paralyzed young brother of Richard who is sent to stay with them. His fate is the film’s singular moment, terrifying not just for what transpires but how it is presented, ignoring not only a-bad-thing-is-about-to-come score (even though you know a bad thing is about to come) but ignoring a music score altogether. The production is pure Hollywood but the moment is straight realism, and Tierney’s matter-of-factness, her expression hidden away behind a pair of sunglasses she dons but a moment before, as if polite society could not bear what it would have seen in her eyes, is what renders it so monstrous.

Ellen’s mother says that her daughter’s flaw is “loving too much.” That could be argued up to a point, until the film’s third act, that is, when she finally realizes her husband is giving up on wedded bliss (he’s got his reasons) and so she gives up on wedded bliss and decides to take her vengeful psychosis to the next level. It’s a bold move to take your Oscar nominee – Tierney, that is – and move her out of the picture before it’s ended, except that she doesn’t actually going anywhere. You feel her presence right up until the credits roll.

Ostensibly the fim ends on a happy note but I'm not buying it. Leave Her To Heaven? Ha! You can't tell me she didn't slip the angel at the pearly gates a mickey and start turning lights on and off in the middle of the night from the ether.

10 Most Un-Summery Summer Movies To See This Summer

The Summer Movie Season Of 2013 was, to this fan of the artsy-fartsy, hipstery doo-dah, the greatest Summer Movie Season Of All-Time, and I’m not exaggerating. It was the Summer Movie Season of Sofia and Greta and Brit-B-Brit and Jesse & Celine and Sarah Polley’s Family and the ladies of “20 Feet From Stardom” and the righteous tentpole majesty of “White House Down” – #notashamed – and Lake Bell getting hers. It was The Summer Movie Season that literally concluded on the last weekend of August by granting me My Favorite Film Of The Year. I genuinely had no idea summer movies could be so grand.

Alas, ‘tis now the Summer Movie Season Of 2014, and circumstances have swung considerably. Consulting the releases over the course of the next few months leaves me despondent with a forecast of further melancholy. Superheroes and more superheroes and more superheroes and giant robots and ninja turtles and Adam Sandler (but I repeat myself) and extra “Expendables” on top of the original “Expendables” who seem to completely contradict their own name by CONTINUALLY SHOWING UP FOR MORE MOVIES and refusing to extend an invite to Angelina Jolie because they TOTALLY KNOW SHE'D SHOW THEM UP and Lake Bell being rewarded for writing, directing and starring in one of the 2013’s best films by being arm candy for Jon Hamm in “Million Dollar Arm” because HOLLYWOOD LITERALLY HAS NO IDEA WHAT TO DO WITH WOMEN UNLESS THEY JUST DO IT THEIR DAMN SELVES. (Breathing into a bag.)

Lake Bell: "Okay. So. I had this idea for a really intense chamber piece where three women-"  Hollywood: "Woah. Hold yer horses there, Lake. We were thinking, what if instead you were the Love Interest in 'Million Dollar Arm' and we put you in a Sari?"

This is what we do, right? We moan. We groan. We gripe. Movies suck. They don’t make ‘em like they used to. Hollywood is awful. Earth is evil. The Universe is just a big fat poopy head. I’m playing right into the stereotype of the jaded film critic. Like those fussy dudes at The New Yorker, right? Everyone hates those guys cuz they hate everything. Except Richard Brody wrote the following: “The year 2013 has been an amazing one for movies, though maybe every year is an amazing year for movies if one is ready to be amazed by movies.” And it’s amazing how many people who probably think the film critics at The New Yorker hate everything are more than likely never ready to be amazed by the movies. They are more than likely ready to point out how that ketchup bottle wasn’t in the previous shot and now it is and this movie is LIES!!!!!!!!!!

Well, I want to be amazed. I do. And so I stopped with the woe-is-me and then I started looking around, and I started finding all sorts of potential diamonds in the sweaty, humidified, summery rough. Here then is the most un-summery summer movie preview on the Internet. Though I should advise, the majority of these films might not make to your town right away, if they make it to your own (heck, my town) at all. Nevertheless. (Release dates and release areas are noted in parentheses to give you a better understanding of what you’re not going to be able to see in which case you may have to go see “X Men: Days Of Future Past In The Present Indicative Tense”.)

10 Most Un-Summery Summer Movies To See This Summer 

God’s Pocket (May 9, limited release)

Even if this hadn't turned out to be one of Philip Seymour Hoffman's last efforts, I'd still have been gung-ho to see it. 

The Immigrant (May 16 in NY and LA)

In certain circles, this is as big as “The Dark Knight Rises.” Perhaps you’re not in those circles, perhaps you’re not even aware those circles exist, and that’s fine. But I’m in those circles. And I’m FREAKING OUT! 

The Love Punch (May 23, limited)

Pierce Brosnan and Emma Thompson are a retired couple out to get what’s owed them. “Jonathan! Bring me my green light!” 

Night Moves (May 30, limited)

It’s the latest from the hella realist Kelly Reichardt, an eco-thriller, and the buzz on the festival circuit last year was considerable if not deafening. Also, it provides me the perfect excuse to offer two "30 Rock" hyperlinks in a row (with a Katy Perry hyperlink tossed in just because). #ThisIsHowWeDo 

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 We interrupt this listicle to bring you The Godzilla Reboot (Reboot) Cast Power Rankings! Because This Godzilla Cast Is SO COOL! 

The Godzilla Reboot (Reboot) Cast Power Rankings

10. Ken Watanabe. I like Watanabe but I feel like this is the one place where they didn't get off the beaten path.

9. Aaron Taylor-Johnson. From Kick Ass to Vronsky to one-third of Blake Lively's ménage à trios to screaming and running away from Godzilla. Dude keeps you guessing. Respect.

8. Sean Bean. Whoops! Sorry! I'm confusing "Godzilla" with "Jupiter Ascending"! But don't you agree that Sean Bean should have been in this as a big game hunter gone rogue trying to tag the beast?

7. David Straithairn. This reminds me, I'd like to see a John Sayles-scripted "Godzilla." I imagine it would focus less on Godzilla itself and more on frustrated Tokyo building contractors. 

6. Victor Rasuk. I do recall watching "Raising Victor Vargas" and wondering: "Hmmm. How would Victor Vargas react to a Godzilla attack?" 

5. Elizabeth Olsen. The most unlikely female lead in a gargantuan summer blockbuster since Sienna Miller starred as Black Mascara, the winsome shit-talking villain of the old Confound Comics whose costume was skinny jeans and runny black mascara and whose superpower was a combination of cigarette-smoke and scotch breath that could paralyze a person. (Or did I dream that?) 

4. Richard T. Jones. Cuz this dude's the starting two-guard on the Oh! I Know That Guy I Just Don't Know His Name! All-Stars. 

3. Juliette Binoche. She's only # 3 because, really, once you act opposite Dane Cook, holding your own against Godzilla seems less like a sell-out than a relief. 

2. Bryan Cranston. If I had one wish this summer movie season it would be that "Godzilla's" ultimate reveal is that Cranston's character is actually Tim Whatley.

1. Sally Hawkins. It's always nice to have a rooting interest in a disaster movie and I am totally hitching my star to Sally's wagon. Survive, Sally. Survive. 

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The Fault In Our Stars (June 6)

It stars the Shailene-ster. What else do you need to know? It’s a mainstream release. It’ll be in your city. Just go. 

Life’s A Breeze (June 13, limited)

This modern-day Irish treasure hunt had a showing at the Siskel Center in March and I had to miss it. I won't miss it this time. By which I mean, I'll wait for it to be released on Netflix and watch it then.

Can A Song Save Your Life? (July 4)

This film, John Carney’s much anticipated follow-up to the stellar “Once”, has been re-titled “Begin Again” because, of course, all summer movie titles are required per Hollywood Law to possess no more than five words lest confused patrons think they’re stumbling into an art film. Cinema Romantico, however, refuses to honor the title “Begin Again” and will continue calling it “Can A Song Save Your Life?”, kind of like how a certain sect of Chicagoans stubbornly refuse to refer to the Sears Tower as the Willis Tower Because bitch, please. Wait. Where was I? Right. “Can A Song Save Your Life?” The reviews have been mixed, but this worries me not. After all, I can verify with 100% clarity that a song can save your life. And not a single person on this earth nor a single alien in the night sky can tell me any different. 

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We interrupt this listicle to ask the most pertinent single question of the Summer Movie Season. That is: How Many Funny Lines Will Rose Byrne Actually Be Allowed To Deliver In "Neighbors"? 

 My guess? One. Well, like, half of one. Maybe. Because maybe they cut her half of one funny line in post. Because they had to make room for Seth Rogen's nineteenth "Hey, everybody! I smoke pot!" joke.

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Land Ho! (July 11, NY and LA)

Aaron Katz’s follow-up to Cinema Romantico’s #1 Movie Of 2011 that earned a few jaw-dropping raves outta Sundance. I will hitchhike to Manhattan to see this if that’s what it comes to. 

Mood Indigo (July 18, limited)

A Michel Gondry film in which Audrey Tatou becomes the literal living embodiment of a Duke Ellington song. Which perfectly fits with my recurring dream where I meet a woman who becomes a literal living embodiment of Kathleen Edwards' "12 Bellevue." 

The Two Faces of January (August 8, limited)

Kirsten Dunst stars. And as a Dunst Completist, I have to see it. To quote Coach Norman Dale, "I apologize for nothing."