Obvious Child

The opening sequence of Gillian Robespierre's uneven yet nevertheless fabulous ode to a confused Jewish twenty something on the mean streets of NYC Williamsburg is fairly astonishing. Donna Stern (Jenny Slate) is a comedian on stage at a small club, cracking laid-back, profanely funny one-liners, and initially it reads as that sort of lazy device wherein a naturally funny person is provided a transparent cinematic platform to merely be her or himself being funny. But then the humor turns toward her boyfriend and while it becomes clear something is rotten in the state of their relationship, she still expresses it in the form of jokes. Until the very end when it becomes genuinely sad, strangely poignant, a less heartrending version of Tig Notaro's infamous "I have cancer" set. It's an exemplary tone-setter, mixing funny and pathos and not really allowing one or the other to win out.

Donna's comedy career is promising but she's not necessarily blazing a trail to the top. She works at a bookstore but that's closing. Her boyfriend breaks up with her, partially because of her routine, partially because he's been cheating on her. She's closing in on 30 and her prospects are dim. So another night she goes on stage and abandons her routine and unloads all her issues on an audience that doesn't want to hear it and afterwards gets blinding drunk, as such situations entail, and meets a really nice guy and sleeps with him and then she misses her period and her boobs hurt and she takes a pregnancy test and I'll give you one guess as to the result. Obviously she was going to wind up mistakenly conceiving a child.

That remark may sound flippant but it's remarkable just how un-flip "Obvious Child" is about such a sensitive subject without forgoing comicality. Donna chooses, at risk of spoiling what was revealed in the trailer, to abort the unplanned child, a decision she makes straight away. After all, when advised of the procedure's cost, she laments "that's one month's rent." Financially and professionally, she's in dire straits. Emotionally, she's even worse, and yet she still has the common sense to recognize her situation and deduce that simply having a child will not only fail as a cure-all, but likely be detrimental to the child itself. Life's complicated, and the "Life Begins At Conception" billboard raisers might take note of how Donna's attitude toward the inadvertent father Max (Jake Lacy) changes over the film's ninety minutes the more she gets to know him. He begins, in the words of the primary character’s best pal Nellie (Gaby Hoffmann), as a “pee farter”, inadvertently letting go of a little intestinal gas right in front of Donna while urinating in the alley.

That may sound crass but hey, everybody farts, and a majority of the film’s material focuses on farting and pooping and peeing. But rather than simply working to cheat the laugh-o-meter, all these fart/poop/pee jokes underscore how the film rolls around with what's real and sweats the sincere stuff. Jenna Maroney said love is going downstairs to the Burger King to poop, but Donna Stern comes to learn that real love is being cool with your better half farting in your face.

It's a refreshingly honest viewpoint, and the couple is a believable match because Max proves himself capable of absorbing and exchanging one-liners with a person whose whole existence revolves around angling for one-liners in any social setting. Consequently, it becomes frustrating when they succumb to a derivative case of will they/won't they? The film is generally devoid of histrionic external conflict, choosing to focus on Donna's internal strife and how it manifests in her actions, and so its few forays into that kind of artificial conflict are rendered quite glaring. Like the distracting episode that finds our central character going back to the place of a fellow comedian (David Cross) without, per se, going home with him. It comes across as both a contrivance to keep Donna and Max apart for an extra length and an elaborate ruse to provide a David Cross cameo.

Yet perhaps most frustrating of all is how a progressive and feministic picture ultimately reduces itself to rom com lite. For even if Donna and Max earn our empathy, the most moving bond in “Obvious Child” is actually between Donna and Nellie. The movie Best Friend often fails to exist outside the role itself, afforded no individual life, hanging around solely to counsel the Protagonist. Hoffmann, however, in a performance that expresses equal doses of admirable patience and get-yourself-together encouragement, never makes it so simple. She and Slate, entirely and endearingly believable in her comedienne-ness and the way she's caught up inside her own head, form a bond of that feels wholly authentic despite limited screen time. It's not that I didn't want Donna to find happiness in every facet of her life. Of course, I did. It's just that I wanted these two non-sister Sisters to prove friends are as vital as significant others, that soulmates are not bound by traditional, antiquated law. If Jenny Slate is Lucille Ball then Gaby Hoffmann was meant to be her Vivian Vance.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

It is virtually impossible to discuss “The Magnificent Ambersons” without also discussing its turbulent backstory – that is, as boy genius Orson Welles’ follow-up to his eventual landmark “Citizen Kane”, “Ambersons”, based on a Booth Tarkington novel, was taken from its auteur in the editing room on account of some studio fine print and chopped up and pared down. A two-hour plus film became barely ninety minutes and a happy ending was shot and graphed on because no one likes sad face emoticons at the cinema (it’s not, as my notes say, “what the people want”). Welles’ personal instructions for how he wanted the film cut survive, the necessary footage to make that happen does not, and yet what remains is often cited by film scholars as being significantly valuable and of immense quality. And so with all this prior knowledge (expectation?) the viewer wades into “The Magnificent Ambersons” desperate to determine for him or herself what he or she thinks about what is there and not what isn’t there or could be there or how it compares to “Citizen Kane”.

As Kane, Welles was front and center for most of his trumpeted masterpiece and that’s not quite the case in “Ambersons.” He plays no role yet he does contribute the voiceover which is featured throughout, though most prominently in the opening as the opulent stage is set. To be sure, this narration is laced with exposition, often recounting precisely what we see happening on the screen, but then that’s one of the two details I adore most about it. “Every house still kept its bootjack, but high-top boots gave way to shoes and congress gaiters,” Welles explains as on screen boots give way to shoes and congress gaiters, “and these were played through fashions that shaped them now with toes like box ends, and now with toes like the prows of racing shells.” This, of course, belies Welles’ theatrical background, he not only gets to orate, he gets to show, and the decadent cinematography here and throughout reflect his glee at getting to show. But Orson’s Orson. Dude likes to talk. And that shows too. But while his voice could be self-impressed and disinterested, here it’s something else……it’s wistful. Listen to the way he says “In those days…” Oh, mercy. “The Magnificent Ambersons”, it turns out, is all about nostalgia and its mortal enemy…..progress.

It opens at the turn of the 20th Century and the passages here are idyllically reminiscent of days gone by, projected on the screen with noticeable soft focus along the frame’s edges, wondrously evoking the black matte background of an old-timey photo album. Isabel Amberson (Dolores Costello) is courted (“In those days,” the reviewer said aloud to himself in the middle of his own review, “they still said ‘courted’”) by Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotton), but he finds himself rebuffed on account of whimsical happenstance. Ah, and so it is. She marries Wilbur Manifer (Don Dillaway) instead and they have a son, George, whom Isobel spoils rotten, a choice she will learn to regret when we catch up with everyone twenty years later.

Twentysomething George (Tim Holt) is a stuck-up jerkwad richy-rich, a Billy Zabka in top hat and tails, and when his return home from college coincides with both his father’s death and Eugene’s return to Indianapolis to re-attempt a courting of his mother, he becomes righteously indignant and swears eternal hatred toward Eugene. Though, of course, he simultaneously swears eternal love toward Eugene’s daughter, Lucy, because this is how life works. Admittedly, placing a character as petulant and abrasive as George at the center of a film can be off-putting and subsequently lead to the age-old query “Why am I supposed to care about this person?” But I dare say Welles, whose presence is always felt even during the extended periods where his voiceover stops, is grinning like Harry Lime in the doorway just off camera. If Welles seems to revel in nostalgia at film’s open, the further it goes along, the further he plunges a shiv into nostalgia’s side.

“The Magnificent Ambersons” chronicles the crumbling façade of that magnificence and, by extension, chronicles how an older way of American life reluctantly ceded to the new. The most adroit parallel drawn between these two is in Eugene’s status as an automobile manufacturing titan, bridging the gap between the horse-drawn buggy and carbon emissions. In a dinner table sequence George works himself up into a lather over what he perceives as the uselessness of the automobile, and Eugene doesn’t necessarily disagree. “With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization,” he says. “May be that they won't add to the beauty of the world or the life of the men's souls, I'm not sure.” But it’s what he says next that is most critical. “But automobiles have come.” What they mean or don’t mean, what they will or won’t bring, what good or bad they will tender is of no consequence because we are all road kill beneath the steamroller of evolution. Lay down and die or try like hell to keep up. George is content to lie down.

Many of the changes and re-shoots in the film’s second half – as documented per TCM – involve attempts to soften George’s character to make him more sympathetic as opposed to an apoplectic madman quashing his family name in his attempts to save it, and this admittedly sticks out, standing at odds with the film’s first half. Even so, it’s still hard not to shake your head at his misplaced hubris, and the famous test audience-influenced re-done happy ending is so spectacularly (humorously, really) wrong-headed that to a modern day viewer well aware of its historical context it can't help but play as commentary. Orson Welles surely had more talent than George Amberson could dream of possessing, but there is still something of a parallel - a boy wonder fattened on the spoils of premature riches and then spending a lifetime frittering them away. It's an ancient story, yet a forever timely one. It's perhaps erroneous but simultaneously so tempting to observe that in the immediate aftermath of "Citizen Kane", its remarkable auteur might have already seen his future.

Occasional Anthemic Transcendence

When I think of my country’s national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner, in terms of the cinema, my mind drifts, I must admit, toward less than sterling renditions. I think of Leslie Nielsen as Lt. Frank Drebin masquerading as Italian opera star Enrico Palazzo making a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham of it in “The Naked Gun.” (Best Lyrical Revision: “Bunch of bombs in the air.”) I think of “Tora Tora Tora”, the almost documentarian re-telling of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the version of Francis Scott Key’s bit of tuneage the military band is performing on the deck of the USS Nevada as the Stars & Stripes are being raised until they note the Japanese bombers very much headed their way prompting the band to wrap up the anthem as quick as they can so they can run like hell. And that last bit is precisely why I always think of these two renditions – even though the JAPANESE ARE COMING TO BOMB THEM, they still play the whole damn song. For what is America’s National Anthem but an insistent obedience to regimental patriotic pageantry?

I have a complicated relationship with our anthem. I tend to figure that Major League Baseball players must despise that song. How could they not? One hundred and sixty-two games a year means one hundred and sixty-two recitations of The Star Spangled Banner. Plus, they play, what, thirty spring training games? That’s another thirty recitations! That’s almost two hundred recitations of The Star Spangled Banner in a calendar year! And what about the National Hockey League?! My God, the National Hockey League! The players on American teams have to put up with nearly four-hundred recitations of The Star Spangled Banner in a single season! (This, of course, is because the NHL season lasts 13 months out of the year.) I mean, all due respect to the choral quartet from Don Bosco High that earns the honors to sing the Anthem before the Rockies/Royals game on a humid Tuesday night in July but, for God’s sake, if I was a baseball player in the ninth year of my career and had heard that song, like, 1,700 times, it would take all my willpower not to tell Molly and Carly and Peter and Joel to just stuff a sock in it.

Now that I have likely turned half of America against me, let me double back and explain the origins of this post. I was watching the United States/Ghana game at the World Cup a couple weeks ago and, as obedient regimental pageantry required, the two teams marched on the field and lined up and Ghana’s National Anthem was played and then America’s National Anthem was played. I really wasn’t paying attention at first, because why would I? God help us all, another recitation of this song? Can I see one sporting event – just one – without it? Why are we eternally subjected to………and then in a way I could not and would have not have predicted, it got me. It really got me. I got emotional, man. And my emotion absolutely confounded me. And in trying to think about why it did what it did to me, I drifted off to another movie National Anthem. My favorite movie National Anthem.

No one would confuse “Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks!” with being either seminal or sentimental, and yet its ostensibly tongue-in-cheek conclusion provides both. The Martians who, as the title tells you, attack, have, as you might have guessed, lost in their war with earth, but not without leaving a wee bit of damage behind. Like the Capital Building, for instance, which is totally burnt out and which is where the President’s daughter (Natalie Portman) gathers with the hero of the hour (Lukas Haas) – and his grandmother (Sylvia Sidney) – to present him a Medal of Honor. To commemorate, The Star Spangled Banner is played…….by a Mexican mariachi band. Because presumably that was all they could find.

A couple days later I was taking a taxi and my cab driver and I wound up discussing the U.S. / Ghana game and how we both thought Ghana not only played better than the U.S. despite losing but was actually more fun to watch. That led into a discussion about Cameroon’s glorious run to the World Cup quarterfinals in 1990 (which made me a fan of the event) which prompted my cabbie to recall that Cameroon began its run by beating Diego Maradona and Argentina who had won the previous World Cup on account of the infamous Hand of God goal in Mexico which prompted a discussion about how Mexicans love soccer so much they had jam-packed Chicago’s Soldier Field when Mexico played a game there earlier this year. And I remember thinking in the moment and afterwards that the world felt both more intimate and more global.

That’s the secret the National Anthem in “Mars Attacks!” knew, and one the National Anthem before U.S./Ghana at the World Cup kinda knew too. That the Anthem, I think, is not meant as a narcissistic tribute to ourselves, which is how it always feels to me before baseball and basketball and football and hockey games, as both puffed up and mindless braggadocio, because we're all just a bunch of idiot Americans standing around about to gorge on soda and nachos and check our iPhones and bitch about how everyone at the office isn't as smart as us and forget all about the song the dude wrote on some ship in front of some fort during some war, but a celebration of our own way of life amidst so many others. The United States may be 3.79 million square miles but culturally that's just a drop in the bucket, and there is something beautiful in staking claim to what we are - awful and glorious and really, really awful and all-encompassing.

The National Anthem in "Mars Attacks!" is absurd, I suppose, but then America is absurd, and our devotion to (obsession with) regimental pageantry is absurd. And if you will, for a moment, allow the movie to segue with real life, look who’s at the foot of the capital paying homage to that regimental pageantry. An Israel-born actress. A Hollywood-born actor with a German-emigrated father. An old-world actress born in The Bronx to Russian and Romanian Jews. And oh yeah, a Mexican mariachi band. What could possibly be more American?

Sir Daniel Day-Lewis

"Now, once more, I must ride with my knights to defend what was, and the dream of what could be."

5 Insert Shots I Love

Recently on Vimeo, Josh Forrest compiled a super cut of all the insert shots employed by director David Fincher and his editors for the fantastic "Zodiac." This, as it had to, got me to thinking about my own favorite insert shots. Because insert shots, when utilized to the fullest extent of their function, can yield a kind of momentary poetry, an incision of of insight not merely into the film's mind but into the filmmaker's mind. This is because an insert shot - which are quite often those sudden close-ups you see in the midst of wider shots enveloping all the characters in their entire locale - can get right down to the true bizness in a way those Everything In The Frame shots can't.

The problem is that I have - and this is a rough estimate - 17,487 favorite insert shots. So I decided to engage in a blogging exercise. I decided to sit down with a pen and paper and scribble whatever five insert shots I love that first jumped into my head. The five that follow, I swear, came rattling right out before any others even threatened to worm their way in. Make of that what you will. Forward march.

5 Insert Shots I Love

Pulp Fiction

Well, duh.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off

John Hughes' unforgettable ode to teenage rebellion is chock full of memorable insert shots, but the hilarious non-forebodeingness of who and what this one signifies has always been the first that involuntarily leaps to mind. Before you even see his face you know his cheese is about to get left out in the wind.

 Out Of Sight

Jack sits down opposite Karen at the Motor City hotel bar. He sets his beloved Zippo beside her glass of beloved bourbon. Nick passes out.

United 93

There is a simply remarkable moment in Paul Greengrass's simply remarkable "United 93" when the first jet has crashed into the World Trade Center and it is then relayed to the Chief of Air Traffic Control Operations at the FAA that the tapes having caught the hijackers' voices on tape are heard to say: "We have some planes." "We have some planes?" the Chief repeats, emphasizing the plural. And as he does, the film cuts to the above shot, a display of every flight currently in United States airspace, every goddamn one of them another potential hijack to the FAA. It's a split-second that effortlessly embodies the terror and confusion of that horrific day.

Die Hard

Per CigarettesInCinema.com there have been 7.8 million cigarettes smoked in the cinema. And of those 7.8 cigarettes, roughly 500,000 of them have been stubbed out. But no cigarette stubbed out on the silver screen has echoed with such charismatically haughty evilness as Hans Gruber in "Die Hard", the exceptional thief's exceptional designer shoes contrasting with John McClane's ravaged bare feet in the background.

Ida

It’s a thin line between believer and skeptic, which is why it’s easy to wonder if that’s why believers are always so insistently trying to convert skeptics and skeptics are always telling believers what to go do with themselves. Do they recognize the no man’s land between their respective trenches of faith and faithlessness? Are they frightened that one creeping doubt could plunge them into the middle of nowhere where anything and nothing could be true, leaving them to wrestle with unknowns rather than absolutes? I’m asking for a friend. Her name’s Anna (Agata Trzebokowska), and she is the central character of Pawel Pawlikowski impressively contemplative, profoundly placid black & white examination of a sudden time that frightfully tries her soul.

She is an 18 year old orphan, raised in a rural Polish Catholic convent in 1962. Preparing to take vows, her Mother Superior suggests that beforehand she meet her only known living relative, Aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza), a high ranking judge who comes to embody the trajectory of communist Poland, her powerful status post-WWII having slowly eroded. We never see her inside a courtroom, only at bars, drinking and carousing, numbing obvious internal pain. And when Anna arrives, perhaps sensing an opportunity to expunge the guilt gnawing at her, she tells her niece the truth – that is, she was born an Ida at the height of WWII to Jewish parents. Their fate seems clear but is still unknown, and so Aunt and Niece strike out to settle it, political and social undertones effortlessly interweaving within the narrative as their journey becomes one into Poland’s murky past, Catholicism and Judaism and Communism colliding.

Ultimately, however, the film turns just as much on Anna’s personal journey. In a way, “Ida”, a distinctly European film, is All-American, in as much as her road trip quietly evolves into a religious rumspringa. She and Wanda pick up a laconic saxophonist, playing at the same hotel where they are staying. The late-night sounds of John Coltrane are an intoxicant, marking not just a subtle shift in Polish cultural attitude but a stirring in Anna’s heart that she struggles to understand. This struggle, however, while charting a predicatable course is never ever simplistic. Yes, the lines drawn appear explicit, the Hard Partying Aunt and a Nun, but those lines quietly blur, the two women so far apart and so close. Wanda seems humored by her niece’s devotion to the Almighty, yet never quite calls her on it. Anna seems discontent with her Aunt’s hedonism, yet willingly lets herself be drawn into it. 

Pawlikowski’s visual scheme, shooting the film in a squared-off 1.37:1 ratio, allows him to fill nearly every frame with substantial headspace, as if evoking God’s eternal presence above, or perhaps evoking His absence where we think He should be. The monochrome only adds to that idea of absence, providing a muted chill that is impossible to shake. Only one shot cast in the moment just after a stoic visit to a graveyard finds the sun shining through, set in the upper left hand of the frame. For a moment it feels like a reminder that things will be all right. But it’s quick dismissal from the picture argues against that assertion instantly.

Most telling, though, is Pawlikowski’s almost utter resistance to camera movement. For nearly the full 80 minutes, every shot is set up and left alone. It underlines the stillness any nun-in-training must aspire to, except, of course, Anna’s plans and ideas become susceptible to significant change as she sees the world beyond the scope of her convent. She wavers, not sensationally but introspectively, between the obvious alternate routes, but in admirable resistance to the usual either/or rhetoric of religious and social ideology, she never quite manages to choose. Instead the film asks us to consider what Anna wants, and what she wants should be good enough for us. But what does she want?

Late in the film, the camera finally moves, and it's jarring. It tracks with Anna as she walks in the late day dusk. We are not sure where she is going. We are not sure she is sure where she is going either.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Macao (1952)

Telling Robert Mitchum that he's alone and sad and tired and must regret something in his past seems a bit redundant. It seems a bit like Miss Moneypenny observing that 007 enjoys martinis and a roll in the hay. He’s Robert Mitchum! That’s why you cast him! Because he comes to set with the cigarette clutching his lower lip for dear life and loneliness and sadness and sleep deprivation and regrets clinging to his being like condensation to his bourbon glass. So Jane Russell telling him in “Macao” that he's alone and sad and tired and must regret something in his past takes redundancy to a whole new level. Hell, ol’ cantankerous pants himself, Bosley Crowther of the wayback New York Times, says as much in the first paragraph of his original 1952 review: “All the other ingredients, including Miss Russell's famed physique, are pretty much the same as have been tumbled into previous cheesecakes with Jane and Bob.” But……what if we go to the five and dime diner and specifically ask for the Jane and Bob Cheesecake? What if the redundancy is precisely what lends the film its charm?

“Macao” was the last Hollywood film of Josef von Sternberg, the great Austrian-American director who made Marlene Dietrich his muse, and perhaps von Sternberg emulated a thirty-year man at the office mentally checking out by launching a pre-emptive in-office vacation ahead of retirement. Visually it’s just a trifle, taking its actors and putting them in the frame and standing back and letting us imbibe. Here again we quote Crowther: “’Macao’ is a flimflam and no more—a flimflam designed for but one purpose and that is to mesh the two stars.”

Its purpose is to mesh the two stars, no argument, but I object to the term “flimflam.” I object because Merriam-Webster tells us that flimflam is “deceptive nonsense” and while “Macao” might be nonsense, it is not deceptive. It is, in fact, forthright about its nonsense. Take the establishing sequence aboard a steamship bound for Hong Kong. Julie Benson (Jane Russell) - a nightclub singer if for no other reason than it gives Jane Russell a couple crooning scenes and without them the film would probably be sixty minutes - is in a cabin with a guy who mistreats her. Luckily Nick Cochran (Mitchum) happens by. Seeing the goings-on, he interjects, knocks out the abusing non-gentleman, exchanges a few bon mots with Julie, and then kisses her. Just like that. No warning. No real build-up. Plants one right on her sultry lips without asking. This might sound presumptuous on his part, sure, but is really just maximum screenplay efficiency. If these two are gonna be lovers why waste time trying to throw us off that scent? Thus, it ain’t flimflam. It's frank. And that’s the whole film.

Technically there are “surprises” but they’re the sort where you nod and think, “Well, of course.” The story itself revolves around an American gangster, Vince Halloran (Brad Dexter), laying low in Macao frightened of being drawn into international waters. He suspects this is precisely what Nick Cochran (Mitchum) has come here to do, an NYC detective posing as a down-on-his-luck. Show of hands if you actually thought Nick Cochran was an NYC detective when he’s fingered for being one? No one? Well, of course not. So the Bad Guy gets mixed up with Julie and Julie gets mixed up with Cochran and Cochran gets mixed up with Trumble (William Bendix), a traveling salesman whose mug sure does look less like a traveling salesman than an NYC detective's (whoops! spoiler alert!), and Margie (Gloria Grahame) is content to just stand off to the side and sigh.

So the villain’s yada-yada, the final fisticuffs are blah, and the plot charts a course as worn as an old trading route in the South China Sea. So what? All that crap doesn’t matter. Here, all that crap’s just the tin holding in the cheesecake. The cheesecake is Mitchum's performance, the embodiment of a man in a hammock. The cheesecake is Jane Russell being, you know, Jane Russell. The cheesecake is Gloria Grahame acting all glamorously discontent. The cheesecake is lines like: “You remind me of an old Egyptian girlfriend of mine. The Sphinx.” Maybe it's not a White Chocolate Raspberry Chocolate Chip cheesecake from Reuschelle's. Maybe it's just frozen New York Style cheesecake from Trader Joe's. It's still good.

The Scarlett Johansson Pose Off

Black Widow

vs.

Lucy

5 Roles Kylie Minogue Could Play In San Andreas

Last week it was announced that Kylie Minogue, baddest of the bad asses, will be in starring in the forthcoming thriller "San Andreas." It stars Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as a firefighter and his obligatory ex-wife (Carla Gugino) traveling from Los Angeles to San Francisco in the wake of a no-dobut ginormous earthquake to rescue their daughter. What role Ms. Minogue will play, according to The Hollywood Reporter, "is being kept under wraps." Which is no fun at all. Which is why Cinema Romantico is here to help.

5 Roles Kylie Minogue Could Play In San Andreas

1. She stars as the housewife of a San Jose software magnate who accompanies her husband to L.A. where he has business so she can indulge in a spa weekend. When the earthquake hits, however, her chamomile scrub is interrupted and her husband becomes panicked when all electricity has been brought down. She snaps into action, hitches them a ride with The Rock & Carla, fends for herself, makes a fire, kills a coyote and fixes it for supper, and at film’s end asks her spouse who has spent the whole movie clamoring for a generator to re-charge his iPhone Nome 7.7 for a divorce so she can go on a Californicated walkabout.

2.  She stars as the First Lady of California, sort of The Golden State’s Carla Bruni, serenading foreign dignitaries with a cover of Natalie Merchant’s “San Andreas Fault” (obviously) at a Hollywood Bowl benefit when the quake strikes. The Governor falls into a trench and the Lt. Governor (Jason Sudeikis) proves himself an obligatory bumbling buffoon which causes Kylie to take the state’s reins. In "Volcano" terms, she plays Don Cheadle to The Rock's Tommy Lee Jones and Carla Gugino's Anne Heche.....just with a better hat.

3. En route to San Francisco, The Rock and Carla Gugino stop at a Costco for supplies only to find that upon going through the automatic doors they have entered a last chance saloon cut straight from the turn of the century – the turn of the 20th century, that is. Upon meeting the saloon proprietor (Kylie Minogue), they are made to realize they have time-traveled to 1906, a mere twenty-four hours ahead of The Great Earthquake. If they warn people of that earthquake will they be able to alter the future and stop this earthquake? Or would altering the future lead to consequences so dire they are beyond human comprehension? And will Kylie perform a cabaret number that sounds suspiciously more like 2014 than 1906 in an outfit made to look like a cross between Jeanette McDonald and the Fever2002 Tour?

4. With The Rock and Carla Gugino’s daughter stranded post-quake on the fractured and now in-escapable Golden Gate Bridge, they have no alternative but to turn to – quoting the film’s prospective dialogue exactly – “the best bridge climber in the country.” That’s Taryn Higginbotham (Kylie Minogue), currently sitting in a Marin County jail after her latest attempt to scale the Golden Gate was foiled. The Rock and Carla Gugino bust her out - the villainous Marin County Sheriff ignoring earthquake relief to go after her - as she proceeds to lead them on an epic climb of the Golden Gate.

5. The Rock and Carla Gugino strike out for San Francisco only to find it having devolved into a town of post-quake lawlessness where their daughter has been taken prisoner by the Alcatraz Queen (Katy Perry). Desperate to a stage a rescue attempt, The Rock and Carla Gugino hire the only person crazy enough to ferry them across the bay, a mysterious stranger known simply as The Yachtswoman (Kylie Minogue). Alas, it seems The Yachtswoman and the Alcatraz Queen have unfinished business. Mayhem of a most diva-esque variety ensues. The movie forgets about The Rock and Carla Gugino and their daughter and no one complains. And "objective" critic Nick Prigge is heard to say: "I've seen it twenty-five times in the theater and I'm going again tomorrow."

Reader: "Did this post just jump the shark?"

June 17, 1994

I can't say what God was thinking when he awoke twenty years ago and flipped his joke-a-day calendar ("Jesus and Moses are playing golf...") to June 17, 1994, but clearly something athletically cosmic was in the air. It was a day brimming with monumental sports stories. Legendary golfer Arnold Palmer played his last round at the U.S. Open. The United States-hosted World Cup kicked off in Chicago. The New York Rangers Stanley Cup victory parade wound through the streets of Manhattan while the New York Knicks tipped off against the Houston Rockets in pivotal Game 5 of the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden. These events and their accompanying story lines were etched in stone, the headlines for June 18th dependent on but a few results. Then NFL Hall of Fame running back O.J. Simpson, wanted for the murders of his wife, Nicole Simpson, and Ronald Goldman, fled from justice in a white Ford Bronco on prime time TV and the whole damn script got torn up.

“June 17, 1994”, the absolute class of ESPN’s ongoing 30 for 30 documentary series, is the antithesis of modern sports journalism which shapes events to fit the pre-packaged storyline, not unlike an old commercial glimpsed in the film which finds Arnold Palmer and O.J. playing pals and all-around All-Americans. It's an ad that hardly hawks its product (which I forget) and instead informs its audience's expectations of these two men. Sports, however, are about philosophical perception, which might give Stat Wonks an aneurism except that, well, Stat Wonks perceive sports as empirical and fanatics (like me) perceive sports as observational. As Colin McGowan wrote a couple weeks back for Sports on Earth: “(Sports’) ultimate pointlessness frees us to make anything out of them we want.”

That sensation is one director Brett Morgen marvelously illustrates by simply letting the innumerable images beamed to televisions twenty years ago speak for themselves, cross-cutting between the day’s events to render the viewer a channel-surfing voyeur. There is no narration and no after-the-fact interviews. The only outside intrusions are brief screen captions – mostly weighted toward the beginning – to provide our necessary bearings. This is not to suggest that Morgen has merely constructed some random collage - far from it, in fact, as he routinely pairs similar moments from one event with another. And by providing no commentary when he does this, we are left to wonder for ourselves: is this arbitrary coincidence or the pull of fate?

As the film and, by extension, the day continue, the further and further the narrative gets away from those who would fancy themselves its creator. No doubt ESPN, broadcasting the US Open, wants to send Arnold Palmer off in grand style, and instead it is forced to endure a depressing meltdown of missed shots, over and over, one of the game’s greatest reduced to a pleading amateur. “Get in there, you rascal,” a commentator says to Arnie’s golf ball as it rolls past the hole and off the green and into the rough. Listen, ball! This isn’t the way it’s supposed to happen! Ah, but what does a Titlist care about a production truck back in Bristol? So too is the re-shaping of a storyline found in behind-the-scenes footage of NBC anchor Bob Costas as his network must delicately balance covering Game 5 and the ongoing O.J. Simpson situation, real life intruding on our games, unless - as the film subtly hints - there is not difference. Costas’ face in these sequences is pure anguish, and they unwittingly foreshadow an age (now) when essentially everything would be captured by the camera.

Even O.J.’s chase shape-shifts, not simply from the media’s reaction to the escalating crisis - its resignation as it is forced to conclude the O.J. they had been pitching for decades might be a lie, crystallized in an Al Michaels interview - but in the 911 tapes Morgan serves on the soundtrack as we listen to Simpson talking to the negotiator, refusing to toss the gun he’s carrying, clearly conveying suicidal thoughts. It’s as if this drive down the freeway is also a drive to his resting place. Except, of course, post-chase it would be revealed passports and disguises were in the car, a clear signal that he intended to flee, an impugnation of guilt. In other words, he was spinning his story in the midst of his story.

Each time I’ve watched the film, I settle on a single moment as being most profound. It’s a snippet of the Seattle Mariners’ Ken Griffey Jr. rocketing a baseball out of Kansas City’s stadium and into its picturesque outfield fountains, which in and of itself might not be such a big deal except that it ties Griffey Jr. with one Babe Ruth for most home runs prior to June 30th. (What a day, eh?) Of course, little does the film, set almost entirely within the present, know what’s coming in but a couple months – that is, Major League Baseball will go on strike and Griffey Jr.’s assault on Roger Maris’s mythical home run record will have a forced premature end and so McGwire & Sosa will have to do it a few years later and so the Steroid Era will commence and on and on and on goes the story, changing, re-forming, etc. But……does that knowledge possessed by the viewer alter this home run? Does O.J. Simpson running from the law simultaneously on a different channel alter this home run? Does O.J. Simpson running from the law alter his majestic 64 yard touchdown run against UCLA 27 years earlier (shown in flashback)? Is a feat a feat in any language?

That, to quote Mark Strong in “Zero Dark Thirty”, is a fascinating question, and one that “June 17, 1994” purposely leaves each viewer to debate with him or herself. Twenty years on, I still don't think I have an answer.

Future Weather

Those who deny climate change can be a bit, shall we say, prickly on the subject. It is not simply that the evidence, as they have gathered it, and the resolution, as they see it, is dismissing climate change as a crock but that those preaching climate change is coming to destroy us are anti-creationist heathens whose “science” must be stopped or God help us all. I don’t necessarily mean this introduction to be a screed against the Global Warming Is Propaganda crowd but as a way to illustrate how the protagonist of Jenny Deller’s “Future Weather”, a thirteen year old named Lauduree (Perla Haney-Jardine), an uber-passionate environmentalist, comes to embody a form of denial not unlike the anti-climate changers she so despises. We are what we hate, or something.

Trailer trash in the literal sense of the term, friendless and okay with it, clinging to the two-member afterschool science club taught by Ms. Markovi (Lili Taylor), Lauduree is bottled up in and consumed by neurosis and insecurity. It’s not hard to understand why. Her mother, Tanya (Marin Ireland), is a flake, a vaguely defined wannabe makeup artist who seems more like a big sister to her daughter than an actual mother. One morning Lauduree wakes to find her only parent has packed a bag and split for the left coast. Self-dependent to a fault, she perseveres without telling anyone, walking the two miles to school and the store, until her circumstances are revealed and Greta (Amy Madigan), a caustic, alcoholic aunt, who dreams of fleeing the opposite direction – for Florida – takes in her niece.

Niece and Aunt struggle to co-exist and eventually Lauduree seeks out Ms. Markovi in the improbable hope that her teacher can somehow become her guardian. It’s painful to watch, and the young girl’s subsequent snap from reality is realistically frightening. She has withdrawn so deep into herself that this one cause she clings to is the only way she can communicate, and the only way she can communicate is with anger. As such, “Future Weather” becomes about the necessity of releasing that anger, or at least re-channeling it in a healthier fashion.

It’s a coming-of-age tale and while it follows familiar beats of the genre, it is refreshingly never rote. Neither is Lauduree’s meteorological fixation simple window dressing nor the filmmaker haphazardly inserting a personal cause into her project. Rather climate change and the idea of how easy it is to turn a blind eye toward it in the here and now, thereby leaving future generations to suffer, comes to crystallize the fragile family at “Future Weather’s” core. Tanya, too young and too irresponsible, has utterly no grasp on the consequences of her actions. Lauduree is smart enough to recognize the crumbling state of her existence but would prefer to deny it, instead pouring herself into an ecological crusade, desperate for the future and ready to ditch the present. Greta, played exquisitely by Madigan with gruff complication, is the one person capable of setting herself aside, however bitterly, for the sake of her child. She’s the hero without being the Hero, because this is one film that knows subject matter so weighted was never meant to be viewed as black or white.

Friday's {New} Old Fashioned: The Straight Story (1999)

A little over ten years ago I got a call from my best friend in Brooklyn. I was living in Des Moines, Iowa at the time, and my best friend had a friend driving cross-country with two others to attend the fabled Burning Man Festival in California. These three needed a place to crash for the night so my best friend asked if I might provide shelter and without a moment’s hesitation I said sure. I told friends about this after the fact, how I let three people I’d never met and would never see again (and only one of whom my best friend could officially vouch for) into my home to have the run of my living room for an entire evening, and my friends often seemed weirded out and confused. I was confused by their confusion. Why wouldn’t I give these people a place to stay for the night? Am I not an Iowan? (Spoiler Alert: the bunkers were very nice and very gracious, and even folded up the blankets that I’d provided the next morning.)

“The Straight Story” (or: David Lynch’s G-rated Film) is a film from 1999 about a legally blind farmer from Laurens, Iowa who hops aboard a John Deere tractor and motors it all the way to Wisconsin to visit his ill brother (Harry Dean Stanton). It would seem a fable if it wasn’t true, and it is. The farmer, Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), concocts a rudimentary bunk that he hitches up to the tractor and off he goes, off into the green loping hills and past the amber waves of grain that decorate the back country of my home state. There are setbacks, sure, and semi trucks laying on the horn and blowing up dust as they roar by, but the majority of hardships that Alvin encounters merely work to illuminate the kindness of strangers. And to eventually unearth Alvin’s own story at a pace akin to his journey.

You may recall that Farnsworth was nominated for an Oscar, and it is truly a marvelous performance, so perfectly effortless. You may also recall that it emerged post-picture that Farnsworth was in great pain for the duration of the shoot, suffering from bone cancer that would cause him to take his own life. Apparently, however, he kept this to himself on set. He didn’t want to trouble anyone and didn’t want anyone to make a fuss. It’s so true to his character, and so true to an undemonstrative spirit prevalent in the Midwest. Which is why his character’s gregarious reluctance to assistance on the open road, until he has no choice but to accept it, come across wholly authentic. That reminded me of the Grandfather on my Dad’s side – a Minnesotan, not an Iowan, but still a Midwesterner, and a man of immense individual resource who I often remember sticking to his stoic guns of self-reliance.

No matter how much toll the journey and his health and his emotional well-being may take, Farnsworth’s weathered face appears content. Oh, but that contentment masks a sadness, what with the mentally ill daughter he cares for back at home, his simmering memories of days in the trenches during WWII and, of course, the estranged relationship with his brother he is striking off to see. He reveals, bit by bit, the totality of his story to the various strangers he encounters, a wonderfully natural – the way that getting a clammed up Iowan to spill the beans of the past is like, as they say, pulling teeth, except that once the teeth have been pulled then we are more than willing to talk to whomever is willing to listen. But listen to the way he talks. It is simple recitation of facts, a person who mentally has already made peace with his lot in life. The script by John Roach and Mary Sweeney is not so numb-skulled as to have him say "Every day is a blessing", but this is the sentiment sublty conveyed by Farnsworth throughout.

This is why the final sequence and the inevitable confrontation with his brother, which turns out not to be a confrontation at all, astonishes in its genuine simplicity. These people and this place is not where you come for dramatic confrontations. Midwesterners are not about Big Scenes and Teary Monologues. That stays inside. Mere acknowledgment is all the moment requires, and a chance to sit together once more in silence and look at the stars.

The Damned United

The Cult of the Coach holds powerful sway in the sporting arena. Coaches are paid lordly sums. Their clichéd spew is figuratively bronzed as incisive philosophy. Statues are erected in their honor. Stadiums and streets are named for them, often while they still walk the earth. Typically coach-centric sports films cast the protagonist as a leader of men, a playing field variation of a military commander who decrees he is not the players’ friend (Coach Herb Brooks) and that he will break ‘em down and build ‘em back up (Coach Norman Dale) all as a means for a singular third act triumph. “The Damned United”, however, Tom Hooper’s 2009 generally fact-based tale, is something different, a character study of a coach less a metaphorical General than a cocksure CEO and forced to square with what his egomania has wrought in spite of all the success.

The film jumps around in time, chronicling how Coach Brian Clough (Michael Sheen) scraps through the finicky ranks of English League Football, but its epicenter is his hiring and stormy tenure as head man at Leeds United, an ultra-successful club under Don Revie (Colm Meany) until he agrees to coach England’s national team. The opening sequence is telling as Clough, in his first day on the job, speeds his car right past the Leeds' Stadium, frivolously singing along to Tom Jones on the radio, and to a TV studio to do an interview. That he would prefer talking to a reporter before he even talks to his team betrays his belief that image is everything. So too does Sheen’s manner in these scenes betray the way he plays the whole part, humorously cocky and drunk on his own genius, wringing an incredible amount of smarm just from his smile.

At Derby County, an outpost in the Second Division, sort of the Conference USA of the English League Football League, the low class clawers and scratchers fighting to move up to the First Division, Clough initiates a run of unprecedented success which culminates in winning the 1972 championship, the squad’s first ever. His achievements, as Peter Morgan’s screenplay makes clear, are rooted more to force of personality, going over the club owner’s (Jim Broadbent, a sneaky performance that morphs from folksy to wannabe baller) head to get what he wants to rack up victories. It is also, however, rooted to imported talent, and that talent is scouted and lured by Clough’s faithful assistant coach, Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall). Yet with Derby’s prosperity, the more hot air gets pumped into Clough, the closer he gets to dousing his most vital bridge in gasoline and taking a blowtorch to it.

The players may bring about the victories but the players, none of whom we get to know at all, are beside the point. No, what drives Clough above all is the vicious spite he feels toward his predecessor. It is a spite rooted in a snub told at the film's start and in Revie’s preferred tactics of brutality that Clough feels are mucking up the beautiful game, and in taking the job at Leeds he seems more committed to not doing things the Revie Way than in earning victory. Hooper routinely sets in-game shots so that little of the game itself is actually seen, rather turning them into staring matches between Clough from the coach’s box and Revie from the stands. Their rivalry pulses through so much of the film, in fact, it’s easy to wonder if Clough is purposely running Leeds right into the ground.

He isn’t, of course, because the real-life Clough didn’t, and so we arrive at the inevitable point in the review where mention must be made of the real-life Clough’s family declining participation in “The Damned United.” They also spoke out against the book on which the film is based, written by Pat Murphy, because it painted the coach in too harsh of terms. In an effort to enlist the family, the filmmakers chose to lighten the tone, with producer Andy Harries on the record as saying: “In quite tough times, we wanted to make a film with an upbeat ending - you come out of the cinema thinking it was an enjoyable experience and that Clough was a good guy.” Eh. Well.

This reviewer is an idiot Yank, which is to say I knew next to nothing about Clough going into the film and which is to also say I did brief research on Clough and the “facts” upon watching the film. In that undersized capacity, it would appear that “The Damned United” attempted to shoehorn a rather complicated fellow into a more easy-to-digest narrative, whereby he is made to learn a “lesson” by film’s end and what and whom is most important in The Game Of Life. Yet Sheen’s performance resists that can o’ corn arc and, more importantly, his ultimate groveling (literally) at the feet of Peter Taylor and admission that he needs his old assistant as much as his own massive wit reinforces (unintentionally?) the very conception it seems to be trying to refute……the cult of the coach.

The Long Sad Look

Sports. They're just the damnedest thing, aren't they? The Nebraska Cornhuskers - long before they became "my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers" - loss to Missouri in 1978 was a game that stayed with then head coach Tom Osborne forever. He once remarked: "It's kind of strange, but sometimes you tend to remember the losses, the really hard losses, more than the national championships." But maybe it's not strange at all. Take Steve Prefontaine, arguably the greatest American distance runner of all time. The dude hardly ever lost. He never lost a race longer than a mile in his four year career at the University of Oregon. He was a mustachioed train. Yet the race that in so many ways defined his entire cut-short career on account of his terrible death at age 24, the race that I reckon Pre fanatics remember and reference most was his dramatic, awful, glorious defeat in the 5,000 meters in the Munich Olympics. I thought about this, as I do every year, a couple weekends ago when I yet again threw "Without Limits" into the DVD player to coincide with the Prefontaine Classic.

Donald Sutherland. Great actor. No, no, no. The word "great" is too simple-minded here. Let's consult the Emotional Thesaurus. Let's say Donald Sutherland is a meritorious actor. Meritorious, of course, implies deserving of reward, except that Donald Sutherland has never won an Oscar. That's seems a little strange, though maybe not crazy, but what is crazy is that Mr. Sutherland, as my friend Alex at And So It Begins documented last month, has never even been nominated for an Oscar. Yeesh. Maybe it sticks in his craw, maybe it doesn't, but still. And while I have often heaped deserved praise on the incomparable Billy Crudup for his work in "Without Limits" as Pre himself, Sutherland is his equal as Oregon's ex-track coach (and Nike Founder) Bill Bowerman.

It's a tempestuous relationship between those two. They're ornery dudes, after all, men of Oregon - born and raised - both. And as Bowerman once remarked about his ancestors who made the perilous Oregon Trail trek: "The cowards never started, and the weak died along the way. That just leaves us, doesn't it?" Sutherland encapsulates that sentiment in his gruff speaking voice and his towering posture. Pre may be a rock star but Bowerman is the coach. The two men consistently state their intentions and exchange fire. No one waves a white flag. This is never more evident than in the first scene they share after Pre has lost that race in Munich.

Pre: "If I'd gone out faster, I might not have gotten boxed."
Bowerman: "And you blame me?"
Pre: "Do you blame yourself?"

And it's there that Sutherland begins a master class in acting. He chuckles, and it's the crustiest chuckle you've ever heard, a chuckle that finds a twenty something's idea of emotional pain amusing because he has decades on his emotional pain odometer. And he says this: "That's a constant, Pre." And as he says it, he looks away to his right.

Well, you can see it all in there, can't you? You can see every loss and failure and embarrassment and what's more you can see Bowerman blaming himself for every single one of them. It's a whole life's memory of defeat summoned in a split-second, and then he re-gathers and moves on and continues the conversational skirmish.

But those defeats have merely been brought to bear once again. They won't go anywhere. They have not been purged. They never are.

Ping Pong Summer

“Ping Pong Summer” is an exercise in rampant nostalgia, the Me Decade seen through rose colored slot glasses, a trip down memory lane in a DeLorean, set in 1985 and starring Lea Thompson as the main character’s mom, an actress who portrayed a fairly famous cinematic mom in a fairly famous movie from......1985. At one point the film settles in to simply watch its characters settle in and listen to the Casey Kasem Long Distance Dedication. It has nothing to do with anything, existing as a silver screen time capsule, transporting men and women of a certain age to a certain place and time, winning us to its side not with cinematic craft but slanted sentimentality. Those unfamiliar with or suspicious of the Long Distance Dedication might consider this the basement bar of pandering, and they would not necessarily be wrong. This critic, however, admits flashing back to the summer of 1987 and the omnipresent disappointment of “Only In My Dreams” failing to ascend the American Top 40 Summit. Film is about emotion, above all else, and emotion got the best of this critic, and this critic will not apologize.

The story, as such, involves a summer family getaway to the shambling resort town of Ocean City, Maryland, a town I remember repeatedly seeing on the ginormous United States Map thumb-tacked to the wall above my flimsy childhood desk (in the 80's!) and always thinking "Ocean City! How romantic sounding! A city on the ocean!" Alas, “Ping Pong Summer” demonstrates Ocean City is nothing much more than a less-hyped Jersey Boardwalk. And while there are echoes of Savage Steve Holland’s (“One Crazy Summer”,“Better Off Dead”) brand of out-of-left-fieldness, writer/director Michael Tully really takes his cues from music videos of the era, specifically videos that combined whacked-out semi-narratives with outrageous atmospherics and costumes and props around the songs. The film's Art Director could have been Bonnie Tyler if Bonnie Tyler had been raised in Park City, Utah.

A trip to Paul Revere’s Buffet, for instance, finds the camera panning the entire spread - the entire spread - of heat-lamped hors d'oeuvres and the only symbolism in this elongated shot has to do with the film’s tone, quirky tending toward strange and stranger. Our hero Rad Miracle (Marcello Conte) goes to a youth dance and orders a "suicide" - you know, every kind of soda from the fountain mixed together, and in the film's funky context this is meant to personify his first name. Speaking of funky, Rad's requisite love interest Stacy Summers (Emmi Shockley) harbors an addiction to “funk punch”, some sort of “illicit” drink involving crushed pixie sticks and pop rocks, as if alluding to the cocaine craze of the decade without officially having to address it. After all, a kid in the 80's had heard of cocaine, but that substance was as far away as Libya.

The plot turns on Rad running afoul of snobby rich kids Lyle (Joseph McCaughtry) and Dale (Andy Riddle), giving off serious Iceman/Slider sparks. Lyle humiliates Rad at ping pong who promptly demands a rematch. Theoretically the film builds toward that climactic showdown as our radical combatant becomes the protégé of the weirdo next-door neighbor, Randi Jammer (Susan Sarandon), Mr. Miyagi by way of Miss Havisham. But that would suggest urgency and summer vacations are never urgent, until six hours before they end, which is why it’s roughly six hours before his match that Rad becomes concerned. He takes up his paddle and Randi dispenses wisdom that, as it turns out, is as much about attitude as table tennis.

The film's opening shot finds Rad break-dancing to the beat in his head. We know it’s a beat in his head because eventually the shot switches and we see his shaky dance moves from the vantage point of a lawn-mowing neighbor and there is no music. Thus, the Hero's Journey of “Ping Pong Summer” becomes less about whether Rad wins or loses the Big Match than about him learning to unashamedly break dance when everyone is looking. Do that, grasshopper, and you will have mastered your fear. Nostalgia or not, that lesson is ubiquitous.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936)

There is a moment in Michael Curtiz’s telling of the infamous “Charge of the Light Brigade” that is positively “Last of the Mohicans”-esque. England's 27th Lancers have fallen under surprise attack after a negotiated retreat, and that attack eventually gives way to massacre. As the massacre unfurls, Major Geoffrey Vickers (Errol Flynn) notices his love, his wife, Elsa (Olivia de Havilland), struggling across the way. He heroically dashes to her, taking a bullet, and makes a gallant rescue. It’s akin to Hawkeye rescuing Cora in the midst of that film's own middle-of-retreat massacre. I make this comparison not merely because “Last of the Mohicans” is my favorite film and because I like to think of the Flynn/De Havilland dynamic as akin to Hawkeye/Cora but because “Charge of the Light Brigade” is, like “Last of the Mohicans”, based on fact……rather, shall we say, loosely.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem is the romanticized version of the Charge and perhaps the version with which the majority is most familiar. It is also placed in front of the film’s opening credits, citing it as foremost inspiration, crucially preceding the requisite nonsense about being based on historical fact and how some of the facts have been changed and blah blah blah. This would seem to cast this “Charge of the Light Brigade” as something more akin to action-adventure yarn than historical epic, and that’s true, yet……something deeper and more serious shines through in spite of its loose playing with the facts.

In their many films together, Errol and Olivia were routinely at odds to start, all the better when they could cut through their ornery byplay to True Love. Here, however, they open the film as husband and wife, and while he is very much in love with her, she is not so much in love with him. In fact, she’s in love with his brother, Captain Perry Vickers (Patric Knowles), and they plan to tell Geoffrey the truth. That, however, won’t prove so simple.

The actual Charge of the Light Brigade, which took place during the Battle of Balaclava of 1854 in the midst of the Crimean War, was a calamity brought about by miscommunication and bluster. "The Charge of the Light Brigade" maintains the bluster but alters the miscommunication into misappropriation. It also cribs from the Siege of Cawnpore, an Indian rebellion of 1857 in which besieged British forces were forced to surrender their garrison in turn for safe passage out. Instead the withdrawal turned into a massacre at the hands of Indian forces. "The Charge of the Light Brigade" turns that massacre into a deliberate order from its chief villain, and that in turn spurs the aforementioned bluster toward revenge.

The chief villain is a local rajah, Surat Khan (C. Henry Gordon), promised funding by England, and when he is told those funds have dried up, he turns devious. Geoffrey senses this deviousness from the get-go and continually advises his superior officers to re-consider their strategy, obligatorily all to no avail. When a considerable chunk of the garrison's forces is deployed elsewhere, leaving it woefully under-manned, Surat Khan and his army strike, the fort surrenders and agrees to depart the fort unarmed. As they evacuate, Khan orders a massacre, though Geoffrey and Elsa escape.

Initially it appears that Geoffrey is Right About Everything and his commanders are Always Wrong, but that's just the set-up. It's not unlike how we expect Elsa to fall back in love with Geoffrey because she is De Havilland and he is Flynn and that's how they do. But they don't. She spills the beans of her love for his brother and he is made to watch her go. And when, after some passage of time, Geoffrey realizes he can garner revenge against Khan by forging his commander's orders, he does.

Flynn was never better a actor than in the scene precipitating the forgery. Realizing Khan is near, he literally quakes before our eyes with bloodlust, and is why this Charge of the Light Brigade suffers from no miscommunication, merely macho pretense. Vickers leads so many of his men and himself straight into death's vicious vice, a stunning evocation of what lies in - to quote 2Pac - the heartz of men. And that's why despite being historically inaccurate, Curtiz's film is emotionally authentic.

The charge is technically unsuccessful, though thrillingly filmed, yet Geoffrey is also allowed to kill Khan at the very end because Geoffrey is the hero and the hero must kill the chief villain because this is Hollywood. Except it does not feel as valorous as Warner Bros. likely intended. Of the real-life charge, French Marshal Pierre Bosquet famously remarked, "It is magnificent but it is not war. It is madness." But what is madness if not war?

Leaked Star Wars Episode VII Photos

"Star Wars: Episode VII" is currently filming and photos from the set have begun to trickle out. The first few are shown below with brief additional commentary to provide potential context.....

Sources advise a possibility that rights to use the Millennium Falcon™were not secured.

Uh oh! Has J.J. Abrams opted for time-travel AND alternate reality?

Seeming to confirm rumors that "Episode VII" will be returning to Hoth...

Seeming to confirm rumors that Penelope Cruz will appear as Adam Driver's ally in a cilona-extract death stick ring...

Seeming to confirm rumors that Jon Voight will appear as crusty bounty hunter Exeter Ampoule...

The new Cantina Band?

Richard Burton hologram?

Mara Jade?

Under The Skin

“Under the Skin” stars Scarlett Johansson, but it’s a different Scarlett Johansson than the cinema is used to seeing. Director Jonathan Glazer relies on his leading lady’s movie star essence (her technical name is "Laura" but that's mere IMDB arbitariness), the voluptuousness so often caught in repose on the covers of grocery aisle rags, and then employs those expectations against the audience. She’s still beautiful, sure, but her hair is covered in a messy black wig and she ambles everywhere in acid washed jeans, as if she just went through someone’s rummage sale from the 80’s. She’s an alien Scarlett Johansson – quite literally, in fact, portraying a sort of intergalactic succubus. But she’s also metaphorically an alien, a stranger in a world she struggles to comprehend, alternately intrigued and repulsed, blindly feeling her way, ultimately an extra-terrestrial standing in for all us terrestrials.

The opening sets the tone, a purposely disorienting series of allusive shots eventually building to a human eyeball staring out from the screen. That’s Scarlett’s eye. She’s staring out at us and we’re staring back at her. After all, her foremost role in the film is coquettishly coaxing random Scottish males to a safe house that isn’t safe, leaving them suspended in a mood-lit hereafter that is never amply explained. That it isn’t is fine, because what it precisely is probably doesn't matter as much as the fact that many men (and women?) would willingly follow Ms. Johansson into the blackened quicksand the same as any of these saps on screen. And so “Under the Skin” sets up as an observance of what’s on the outside – precisely, the allure and inalienable sexuality of its primary actress. We look at her as an object of affection – and beyond, into that uncomfortable territory fantasy object – and, thus, the film presses us on our need to objectify while simultaneously demonstrating there can be more to mere allure.

Frankly, that would be enough thematic context for any film, but “Under the Skin” is far from any film, its ambition reaching for the stars from which its exotic alien fell. As means to fetter her prey, she drives around the cities and the countryside of a gray, rainy, Scotland, the soundtrack either disconcertingly screeching or thumping like a more hostile version of the aliens in "Contact", stopping to ask for directions. This, however, is also a clear evocation of her as a tourist. Glazer’s camera repeatedly captures her people-watching, and so the audience is made to watch the people too, men and women with infinite complacency moving to and fro about their little affairs. “Under the Skin” initially seeks to put us at a remove and is successful, building a world of cruel and often casual indifference, but as this happens, the film subtly draws us into its repetitive rhythm.

Eventually one of her pickup attempts goes awry with the best intentions, specifically because his situation rouses sympathy within her, a sensation on which she chooses to act even if she can’t quite process her reason for doing so. But she wants to, and so her character from a galaxy far, far away takes tentative stabs at humanizing her(it?)self. Upon doing so, the film turns and so rather than watching Scarlett watch us, we begin to watch with her.

It is to Glazer's credit that he can make a film of such gender specificity while still rendering an ultimately universal product by inviting the audience to re-experience its own humanness through his character’s eyes. She eats chocolate cake, she makes love (has sex), she feels the rain fall against her face, she lopes through a castle that has stood for hundreds of years and feels the immense weight of a planet’s past. In the back of the film, however, she essentially comes face to face with her own sins and screw-ups, a point at which every human – real or vessel – eventually finds him or herself. It’s nerve-wracking, the dark heart of humanity made to bear and our belief in the goodness of this world goes where it always goes.........up in smoke.

The Immigrant

“(The Statue of Liberty) was never built for immigrants. It was built to pay tribute to the United States of America.” This sentiment was expressed by Barry Moreno, a National Park Service Historian, and also summarized by the opening shot of “The Immigrant”, focusing on Lady Liberty in the distance of a gray morning and the camera pulling back and onto the boat bearing weary travelers just out of its reach. The Statue is the beacon signaling their arrival to the promised land. Except, of course, the monument is on Liberty Island and they must first check in at Ellis Island, which in James Gray’s breathtakingly photographed film - green screen trickery not spackling over narrative faults but properly setting mood and place - is presented more like The Rock for refugees, a place as quick to deport or quarantine you as welcome you with open arms. And earning American citizenship, as “The Immigrant” forcibly demonstrates, goes far beyond 29 questions.

Ewa (Marion Cotillard) has come from Poland with her sister Magda (Angela Sarafyan) to start a new life in the United States. This plan immediately goes awry when her sister is ascribed lung disease and locked away in the infirmary for six months, and questions arise regarding Ewa’s supposed “low morals.” With expulsion imminent, a Knight in a Bowler, Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix), appears, confers with a guard, slips him some cash, and spirits Ewa away. He provides a place to stay and a job at his theater as a seamstress which begets a job in his peep show and……you can see where this is going. And so can Ewa.

Cotillard is remarkable in the primary role, effortlessly suggesting a pride that is severely wounded but to which she still fiercely clings. To call her character naïve would be foolish, considering she has the wherewithal her first night in her makeshift home to sleep with a knife under her pillow. She’s ready for the fight the Land of Opportunity provokes and, on account of Magda, the dream of starting a new life quickly crumbles into the desperation of saving her sister. Bruno has “contacts” that can get her out but to get her out requires money and to get money requires ethical compromise. Ewa is willing to surrender her morals but the guilt with which she is impaired for doing so is effectively communicated by the actress.

Bruno, meanwhile, has his own complications, dressing the part of an up-and-up proprietor, fancying himself not so much a pimp as a savior, the reason “his” girls have clothes and food and beds, never mind from whom he might take cash as a means to share those beds. He does not simply see himself as Ewa’s protector but as her provider, placing her in the position to earn what she needs to get what she wants, and, by extension, as her possessor. Played by Phoenix with an almost eerie childishness sanctimony, like his mom raised him to believe he was flawless in God’s eye, his love for Ewa, which is there in its own way, gets disturbingly gnarled up in the same sort of love a man has for his property. Bruno can’t see the difference.

The requisite wrench is thrown into their problematic relationship when Bruno’s brother, Orlando, a charismatic Jeremy Renner, appears, and becomes smitten with Ewa. While “The Immigrant” leans heavily throughout on melodrama, its emotions still feel wholly authentic, until Orlando’s miraculous appearance, that is, which engenders plot complications and spurs the story toward its conclusion. Still, Orlando’s occupation as a magician, or, more to the point, an illusionist, is crucial, specifically because he is meant as a means for redemption and the possibility of redemption becomes very much illusory to Ewa.

That Ewa is made to dress up like Lady Liberty in Bruno’s revue becomes the ultimate twisted irony, an embodiment of the cornucopia of conflicted ideals of the nation to which she has fled. She enters the golden door beside the lifted lamp to find necessity of survival weighed against the wages of sin, and while Ewa begs for absolution and is admirably able to turn the other cheek toward those who treat her callously, she still reveals herself as willing to roll around in the ungodly mud of The Roaring Twenties and get what's hers. The Immigrant becomes an American.