Friday's Old Fashioned Flashes Back To The Eighties

It's everyone's favorite time of year! By which I mean, it's my least favorite time of year. By which I mean, the dog days of August (ugh) combine with the countdown to my dreaded another-year-has-passed-and-I-have-done-nothing-with-my-life-and-it's-all-meaningless birthday at the dawn of September. And so I find myself, as I do every year at this time, nostalgically and cinematically returning to the decade of my youth – The 80’s. Which is why this year once again Cinema Romantico’s “famed” Friday’s Old Fashioned column - the only classic film column on the internet named after bourbon, bitters, sugar, orange, and maraschino cherry - is going straight 80’s. Hawks gets traded in for Hughes. Jean Harlow takes a momentary respite to allow face time for Jean(ie) Bueller. Harold Lloyd cedes the stage to Lloyd Dobler.

Four of the five films this coming month are new to me and one was a re-watch spurred by an episode of the Matineecast that involved “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, though that's the only clue you're getting. And of course, I must stress the selections are not always, shall we say, “quintessential”. Either way, I hope you don’t hold it against me. So strike up the New Order, crack a Capri Sun and climb into my blogging DeLorean.

30 for 30: Slaying the Badger

Recently I labeled Lance Armstrong, once a seven time Tour de France champion, now an excommunicated pariah of the sport (except in Iowa where, as always, my native state proves its willingness to turn the other cheek), an asshole, and I stand by that comment. Yet watching "Slaying the Badger", the most recent 30 for 30 documentary, directed by John Dower and based on a book by Richard Moore, which centers around the 1986 Tour de France and a friendship between American Greg LeMond and Frenchman Bernard “The Badger” Hinault turned rivalry, I sensed an understanding of Armstrong’s mindset. It happened around the time LeMond's wife, Kathy, interviewed on camera right alongside her husband, often providing assessments of the past we know must be accurate because her husband so forcefully bristles at them, recounts how the two of them and LeMond's father were forced to literally buy LeMond's food themselves ahead of the various racing stages and taste it. They did this for fear that members of Hinault’s team or perhaps even a deranged supporter of his might tamper with it. I thought: cycling is surreal. No, no, no, that's not it. I thought: cycling is batshit insane.

The film forgoes backstory aside from the most fundamental to focus exclusively on that ’86 Tour, though it also forgoes cycling specifics for any newcomers that might not immediately grasp terms like “peloton” or understand precisely how the world’s pre-eminent bike race is scored. Then again, I don’t know how the world’s pre-eminent bike race is scored, but I understand Winning and Losing and Heroes and Villains and that it’s always more complex than those capital letters would imply. “Slaying the Badger” portrays the Tour as a sort of asphalt-set soap opera where hubris and grudges duke it out amidst the majestic French Pyrenees.

Coming to Europe from America at a time when cycling was “counter-culture” in the States, Greg LeMond was a patriotic outlier, a prodigy, so damn good that cycling's pre-eminent figure, Hinault, shrewdly negated the necessity of defeating him by enlisting him and bringing him aboard his all-powerful Team Renault. And while they began as friends, their role as teammates was specifically what made their conflict flourish. The seeds of discontent were sewn at the 1985 Tour de France where Hinault was gunning for his fifth championship and LeMond was his second-in-command, expected to aid the general’s ascent. Yet when LeMond had a chance to go for the win, the team and its director, Paul Koechli, interviewed and seemingly so slippery I was surprised he didn’t slide out of his chair, shouted him down. His was not to win, his was to help Hinault win, and he reluctantly agreed, based on the verbal stipulation that in 1986 the racing cleat would be on the other foot.

Alas, at the 1986 Tour, Hinault, devious like Peter Lorre, aided LeMond until he stopped aiding LeMond to try and win himself until he couldn’t win himself and resorted to re-aiding LeMond even if he might not technically have been re-aiding him at all. He claims on camera today in interviews that are awesome for how little he really says even though you can sense him saying EVERYTHING with his impish grin that he helped LeMond because he legitimized the LeMond win by making him work for it. If you honestly believe that then have a Lance Armstrong Approved EPO Juicebox.

Yet Hinault’s reasoning intrigues me. He expected LeMond to help him in ’85 and LeMond expected Hinault to help him in ’86. You must adhere to unwritten cycling dogma, like Adam Wainwright grooving a pitch to The Captain. This is how they do. It also once and for all refutes that Dollar General philosophical hooey about there being no “I” in team. The doc's thesis essentially takes the words of sportswriter Sam Abt, that cycling “is an individual sport practiced by teams.” Indeed, their teammate, personable American Andrew Hampsten, is reduced to a grunt, doing heavy lifting for no glory, forever in the midst of these ten speed duels of machismo. It is not merely “not a sport for the weak” because it is a sport in which psychological warfare is waged while peddling the hell all over France. It is, in the words of Koechli, “a game”, a game he defines in a classic WTF? Ethos this way: “The enemy of the enemy is my friend.”

What’s that modern day urban slang? Hate the game, not the player. Should you/we hate Lance Armstrong for playing the game as the game is? Because the game in cycling, it seems to me, based upon the evidence submitted by “Slaying the Badger”, is lies and deception as much as feats of strength. It's espionage for the endurance-inclined.

Lucy

At roughly the halfway point of “Lucy”, Scarlett Johansson's face appears on a flat screen TV and being that her titular character has by the mercurial stroke of fate gained superhuman intelligence on account of additional cerebral capacity – we can only use 10% of it but she’s able to employ a whole lot more – which is made possible by a precise movie-esque thingamajig, she recites a monotone spew of facts and information at such jaw-dropping speed with such little effort that she leaves the one person in the room stammering and stumbling for the words to respond. And what is crucial is the person playing that stammering, stumbling person – Morgan Freeman. He is perhaps our most eloquent actor, his distinct baritone routinely employed for cinematic voiceover to automatically lend authentic gravitas no matter the words. He's been the voice of God, after all, and yet in this moment, the man who gave God a voice can hardly find his own. Finally he locates a few words and says something of sustenance, but that takes longer than it's ever taken Mr. Freeman before. He may be playing a Professor of significant esteem but he is hapless and tongue-tied in the face of ScarJo, and in that moment he is essentially (not) speaking for all us flabbergasted organisms in the theater seats. 

Johansson starts dumb, dressed like a Jersey Girl living in Taipei and dating an even dumber dude (Pilou Asbæk) in a faux-Stetson who heedlessly chains a briefcase to her wrist and sends her into a high-rise to deliver it to a gangster named Mr. Jang (Min-sik Choi). It seems death awaits but rather it’s servitude as a drug mule, whereby Mr. Jang removes a baggie of mysterious blue powder from inside the case and has it sewn into poor Lucy’s abdomen. The bag, however, breaks and leaks inside her, and soon she learns in one of the film's glorious bits of unabashed how-much-more-obvious-can-this-be exposition that the powder is CPH4, specifically a molecule carried by pregnant mothers when.....oh, who cares? It might as well be called the MacGuffin. Whether any of the film's “science” is credible is of no concern to me, and should be of no concern to you. Science belongs in this movie like ketchup belongs on a hot dog. CPH4 is the rocket fuel that provides Johansson liftoff into the cinematic stratosphere.

Once in the stratosphere, she wields epic brainpower and ass kicking survival skills like a Jason Bourne in Louboutin heels, if Jason Bourne could time travel and bend matter at will. Her main objective is to locate Samuel Norman (Freeman), the aforementioned Professor, not necessarily because his research can save her but because she wants to find someone to whom she can pass along this treasure trove of unexplainably radical knowledge. But the secondary objective is to survive the wrath of Mr. Jang because he wants his drugs back because this is a Luc Besson film and in every Luc Besson film there must be countless handguns outfitted with silencers. And there also must be the obligatory "slam-bang" sequence where an entire posse of bad dudes gather a plethora of automatic weapons and go after the heroine and discharge as many bullets as the budget ($40 million in this case) will allow. All these gun-firing, car-chasing, Scar-fu scenes, however, are essentially beneath Lucy, much like they would be beneath anyone possessing the power of telekinesis, but they are also beneath their leading lady, and that’s the whole damn point.

The film itself begins as dumb as the protagonist, contrasting images of a cheetah stalking its prey with Lucy herself being stalked. That would suggest its own capacity for intelligence intensifies along with the character, but all of Besson’s commentary on mankind’s aversion to growth and knowledge as well as stabs at “Tree of Life”-esque ruminations on existence come across blockheaded, less Plato’s Dialogues than a long form essay in Vanity Fair with lots of chic pictures. But then that’s all just window dressing for his central contention.

To call Ms. Johansson an actress in this context is simply not doing her justice. This is not suggest she isn't acting, which is ridiculous, because she understands that in this era of sensory cinematic overload it is smarter to downplay. Still, what she achieves here is something much more rarefied. “Lucy” opens with an image of a cell dividing into gigantic silvery, shimmery block lettering bearing our leading actress’s name. A Star Is Born, and she is a Movie Star whose charisma and presence render pyrotechnics and plot machinations pointless because the Movie Star is the main attraction. The thrill of the chase is simply to see Johansson in the midst of it, her persona coalescing with her characterization, and when she dispenses with a whole row of antagonists by lifting a finger it speaks directly to the spell a Movie Star can hold. Any time Jean Harlow appeared on screen in a movie the What, Where, When, Why and How all melted away because of the Who – that is to say, Her. And in "Lucy", Johansson, striding through the proceedings like an alien unfit for this asinine world, is truly Her. 

She is everything, and all the rest of Besson’s phantasm melts away.

Boyhood

Perhaps the most astonishing element of the astonishing “Boyhood”, a virtually unprecedented project in which director Richard Linklater filmed the same actors over a twelve year period in an effort to truly convey the rhythms and effects of an entire upbringing, is its utter conventionality. When such laudatory ambition is a film’s calling card, it typically signals an unheard of narrative slant or filmmaking innovation, but aside from a number of simply elegant frames intended to capture the fundamentally picturesque - like a sunset in Texas, or a camping trip pseudo-sing along – the visual style is unshowy, and the narrative is almost aggressively formulaic. Yet without saying much new at all, “Boyhood” manages to convey an enlightening cinematic experience that feels entirely original. 

The film essentially opens with our protagonist of the title, Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane), laying in the grass in his native Texas, staring up at the sky, his head, as he is quickly told afterwards, in the clouds. It is a poetical opening perfectly juxtaposing with the weight of quietly crushing reality to follow. He and his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the auteur’s daughter), a few years older, are the children of a struggling single mother (Patricia Arquette), who returns to school to carve out a better future and gets involved with a string of men whose quality seems beneath her true-to-life nobility. Their father, Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke), is requisitely absentee, beginning in Alaska (is that where all confused men flee?) and returning home to be with his kids, but without necessarily wanting responsibility's weight. This traditionally untraditional family’s ups and downs and middles are then chronicled, with little to no surprise. But surprises are not the point. “Boyhood”, observational without becoming a docudrama, is about existence. Not existence as in “why are we here?”, though that question is addressed with its own sort of everyman philosophy, but in existing, in how our lives are marked by the passage of time.

By its very nature, “Boyhood” is episodic. Beginning in the past – 2002 to be precise – and then moving forward, the film functions as a time capsule – indulging in the dated sites of oversized tabletop computers and Harry Potter book signings. Yet in spite of these elements and many others, the film resists an annoying overt and jokey insistence on them. They merely are. When Mason Sr. later in the film laments he learns about his kids’ life on Facebook, it’s incredible how natural it feels. At one point in time, it isn't; then, it is.

But by its very nature the film also requires time-jumping, not just in years but in months and days, and it yields one of the film's few flaws as crucial texture necessary for arc and characterization is jettisoned. In particular, Arquette’s post-Mason Sr. spouses both devolve into alcoholics, the first a monster and the second more inwardly enraged. These tangents wreak of cliché (and the Oscar-nominated French short from last year, “Just Before Losing Everything”, is a more affecting dramatization of a family fleeing an abusive spouse) but it’s difficult to gauge the characters’ precise metamorphoses into drunken louts when the majority of these transformations are required on account of running time to happen off screen. Then again, that lack of specifics – or, more appropriately, the loss of those specifics, is unwittingly a strength. So many specifics get lost in the accumulating dust of years gone by, and if the kids and their mother remember the alcoholic outbursts, maybe they don’t quite remember what brought them about.

Ellar Coltrane was six when filming started and eighteen when it ended, mirroring his role, and so we actually see Coltrane – er, Mason Jr. – navigate the pitfalls of going through puberty on camera. His youthful long hair is chopped away (reluctantly) for a buzz cut and then grown back out. He changes his style, his clothes, his attitude. His voice registers different octaves. And it’s not just Coltrane. It’s Linklater. “When you go through all of those awkward things that happen to us in adolescence and post-adolescence,” the singer/songwriter Jenny Lewis recently said in an interview, “to experience that in front of the camera and in front of other people is really uncomfortable.” And here are Coltrane and Linklater, having those experiences in front of the camera and in front of us. And it’s not just them. It’s Patricia Arquette, and her willingness to let her physical shifts be documented is the epitome of that word which is “supposed” to be avoided in film reviews at all costs – namely, brave. It’s brave because this is Hollywood and in Hollywood even the slightest sign of an actress aging can find her unceremoniously dumped into the “Not” column of a hideous “Hot or Not?” list.

And the though the film's title is “Boyhood”, the subtitle may well be Parenthood, because Linklater explores the maturation process not merely for children but for adults. Arquette’s mom struggles with insecurity even as she experiences professional success, and Hawke’s dad becomes a singular illustration of a life as a work in progress. Hawke, in fact, sneakily gives the best performance in the film, and one of the best performances I can recall of a semi-deadbeat dad, a man-child, to use the parlance of our movie times, but obliterating the archetype in the process, breaking off into something wholly authentic. It is subtly layered, deceptively complex, a man growing by feet and inches rather than leaps and bounds, but the change he makes by the end is real, and it is made all the more affecting because the actor conveys how difficult it was to come by and how far he still has to go – how far we (you, me, all of us) have to go.

“Boyhood” runs for two hours and forty-four minutes, a seeming eternity when it starts, gone in the blink of an eye when it ends. It would appear to demand re-visitation, yet part of me feels that to re-visit it would compromise the film's very spirit for we merely re-visit the past in our mind. What’s gone is gone. We shed our skins. We forge ahead.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Americanization of Emily (1964)

Though he may be a Lt. Commander in the US Navy in the throes of World War II, Charlie Madison (James Garner) is more like a party-planner, an event coordinator with a military insignia. His role is not on the front lines but behind the scenes, quickly and expertly tending to the convivial needs of various Generals. He has no idea about barrage balloons, but he for sure knows how every high-ranking official in the Navy likes his eggs. And while his ability to keep the men deciding the world’s fate properly vetted with wine and women is vital to the (cough, cough) war effort, Charlie is less like the John Wayne of the movies than the John Wayne of real life, which is to say he prefers to avoid anything actually having to do with combat at all costs. He’s a coward, you see, self-professed and proud of it. Gallant men don’t fight wars, he explains, and the Generals he labors over would seem to back up that claim. No, war is what makes men gallant.

Paddy Chayefsky, screenwriter extraordinaire, who served in WWII, based his script on a novel by William Bradford Huie, himself a WWII vet and a civilly conscious author. And while “The Americanization of Emily” was released into theaters not long after the Gulf of Tonkin incident and could very much be described as one of those films set in the past but about the present, it is still infinitely bold in tackling the so-called Last Great War with such irreverence. To be certain, it’s not brazenly arguing against America’s involvement, but it’s also leaning toward pacifism. Was pacifism mute in the face of Hitler and his Nazi thugs? Yes, it probably was, and Chayefsky just sort of skirts that topic. Yet, “The Americanization of Emily”, I might argue, is less about war itself than the military machine – in particular, the American military machine, and how even in spite of a virtuous cause, bureaucracy and public relations reign supreme. Our true American instincts – consumerism, sex and Hershey bars – cannot be stifled just because we’re The Good Guys.

Those instincts are precisely what bother Emily (Julie Andrews), a driver in the motor pool and a war widow, an Englishwoman who sees her American allies as pleasure-seeking scoundrels stocking entire rooms with bourbon for the officers and perfume for the ladies with whom the officers frequent while London and half of Europe have been reduced to rubble. Charlie, in fact, suggests she be one of the Generals’ escorts, and this ruffles her feathers. It’s a classic ploy, putting them at each other’s throats before having them wind up in each other’s arms, and might be why it’s the film’s weakest element, overtly contrasting her activism with his pacifism and rushing them into a relationship and then the brink of marriage to elevate those pesky “stakes” for later in the proceedings when Charlie is shipped off on a Normandy landing craft.

“The Americanization of Emily” is set on the eve of D-Day, its grand strategic particulars being discussed over a game of bridge, a subtly brilliant evocation of how even when the future of the world is at stake different branches of the military would just as well sit around and try to score points against one another. And to Charlie’s superior, Admiral William Jessup (Melvyn Douglas) it quickly becomes clear – or perhaps we should say, - that the first man to perish on the beaches at Normandy should belong to the Navy. Why? Because the Army and the Marines don’t respect their compatriots in the white combination caps, and so Jessup devises a ploy whereby Charlie will be sent in with the first wave at Omaha Beach to make a movie of the first man to meet his Maker. Marketing doesn’t stop just because you’re liberating France, after all.

Naturally this runs counter to Charlie’s nonaggression. Remember the scene in “Saving Private Ryan” where the titular character played by Matt Damon gives the big speech about how we won’t leave his pseudo-brothers behind because it is his job to stay at Bastogne and defend the bridge? Yeah, imagine Charlie giving the exact opposite speech. It doesn’t matter. He’s going, his commanding officer citing “the essence of military structure and the inviolability of its command", and so the coward is roused to action. Eh, sort of. 

James Garner’s performance, routinely cited as one of his best, really is worthy of the acclaim, an astonishing and seemingly effortless achievement of duality. The actor’s caddish charm makes the character impossible to dislike despite all he does to avoid harm’s way, and when that cowardice inadvertently renders him the hero, it becomes the film’s ultimate joke, and one Garner is in on. “The Americanization of Emily” ultimate stance turns out to be not so much anti-war as a friendly, funny reminder that even the most altruistic of conflicts come equipped with self-interest.

5 Actresses To Play Jesse Wallace's Ex-Wife

I recently re-took the distressing “Before Midnight” plunge after avoiding it for a year and a couple months after having my ardent (pitiful) Jesse & Celine Idealism shattered. And. Well. Yeah. It still hurt. I came around to seeing the ending in a bit more of a positive light – not positive as in “good” but positive as in “happy” – but not entirely. I don’t think I’ll ever get there. And in other ways, it was an even more brutal emotional experience than the first go-around. So brutal, in fact, that I unleashed yet another essay regarding my relationship with these films. And. Well. Yeah. I couldn’t bring myself to publish it. I almost trashed the whole thing. Not because I wasn’t pleased with it but because it kinda freaked me out. Perhaps I’ll put the post up on my birthday because an emotionally terrifying post coinciding with my birthday totally seems Cinema Romantico-esque.

Anyway, in lieu of that post, I still got to thinking. Because I’m always getting to thinking, if not about interesting things, per se, at least about things that I find “interesting” at which point I subject my few loyal readers who haven’t already flown this cinematic coop on account of my Katy Perry references to ponderings about them. ANYWAY, I got to thinking about the character in “Before Midnight” who is never seen but still a major player – that is, The Other Woman. The one to whom Jesse was previously married and gave birth to his son and whom he left Celine for because Jesse was meant to be with Celine because the world is perfect and wonderful (it isn’t). She is a major player because, as we learn, she moved Jesse’s son out of New York under the cover of darkness to limit her ex-spouse’s visitation rights. Cold. About as cold as the ways in which she’s referenced. In order, she is referred to as being “drunk and abusive psychologically”, possessing “the mother instinct of Medea” and – oh boy, here we go – “a hateful cunt” (Celine’s words! CELINE’S WORDS!!!).

So let’s say in nine years when “After Noon” (it’s a play on words) is released that Linklater, based upon our above criteria, wants to cast the ex-Ms. Wallace. To whom does he turn?

5 Actresses To Play Jesse Wallace's Ex-Wife

Marisa Tomei

Well, obviously. I mean, she should be in everything after all.

Winona Ryder

I concede both the predictability of this choice and its blatant self-referentialism, that casting the woman who acted opposite Hawke in the angstiest of angst fests, “Reality Bites”, would be an in-joke of epic proportions in a film series that should have nothing to do with in-jokes. And yet. Set all past history aside and simply envision Ms. Ryder in a metaphorical vaccum as a woman with “the mother instinct of Medea.” Yeah, you did.

Amy Adams

If you thought “The Fighter” was against type, this would totally go against the “Enchanted”, Probably The Nicest Person In The Whole World grain, and she could do it. Beware all ye who doubt the versatile skillz of AA. (I’m also assuming that in nine years she’ll have six Oscars and can just get cast in whatever she wants.)

Rosemarie DeWitt

God. God, what I would give to see Rosemarie DeWitt bust out the scoff face as Jesse does his Verbal Scat thing and then just cut him off and lay a titanic DeWitt-ish “You're so full of shit” on him. “I know what you’re doing, Jesse, okay? You’re answering all my questions with questions. I mean, I know you think you’re being really cagey, but you’ve used this same evasive methodology since I met you. It’s pretty obvious. And by the way, shoehorning a Dostoevsky reference into the middle of an argument? There’s no peanut gallery. There aren’t judges awarding you literary style points.” GOD, what I’d give.

Rachelle LaFevre

I am not a movie casting director because if I was a movie casting director I would do things like cast Billy Dee Williams as Batman and cast Kate Beckinsale as a version of Guinevere that told that charlatan Arthur and that lip server Lancelot what to go do with themselves and ruled the kingdom her damn self, but still… I like to imagine casting directors having epiphanies like the one Eddie Adams from Torrance had in the hot tub in “Boogie Nights.” And that was exactly the kind of epiphany I had when considering who should play Jesse Wallace’s ex-wife. When I close my eyes, I see this thing, a sign, I see this name in bright blue neon lights with a purple outline. And this name is so bright and so sharp that the sign, it just blows up because the name is so powerful. Rachelle LaFevre.

Cloud City Twin Pod Revealed On Set Of Star Wars: Episode VII?

Recently I was sitting in front of my laptop, hard at work on yet another painstaking review, or possibly watching Katy Perry videos on Youtube, when I received an email from an anonymous tipster claiming to be an extra for the currently filming "Star Wars: Episode VII" and saying he had captured a covert image of the Twin Pod spaceship on set. This, of course, caught my attention because the Twin Pod was the primary mode of air travel at the Bespin mining colony in scenic Cloud City. And the administrator of the Cloud City facility was, of course, Lando Calrissian who was, of course, played by Billy Dee Williams. This led to the natural speculation: is Billy Dee Williams in "Episode VII"?

Visual proof "Star Wars: Episode VII" will return to Cloud City?

My curiosity piqued, I forwarded the photo to my friend, who shall remain nameless, a photograph authenticator in Guatemala who has sussed out many a phony image in his day but also verified some of the most historically astonishing images of the past decade. His reply, which has not been altered or embellished, is as follows...

"Jesus Christ, dude. What's wrong with you? That's a toy fucking spaceship. It's sitting on someone's kitchen floor. How could you not tell that's a toy? Are you fucking with me? Is that what you're doing? Is the whole world fucking with me? Seriously. I've had it up to here. Look, I love movies and you love movies and we all love movies, but this? This is just going too far. People have GOT to calm down. They have GOT to stop obsessing over it. You know when they can obsess over it? The day it gets released. That's when. Wait in line for it and freak out about it and wear your stupid costumes and LEAVE THE REST OF US ALONE BECAUSE WE CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE BECAUSE YOU'RE CAUSING US EXTREMELY LITERAL BRAIN DAMAGE! I'm becoming a monk."

The jury is still out.

The Age Of Reason

There is a time in the life of every teenage boy, often on the precipice of adulthood, particularly if social interaction is limited, when angst and rage consumes him, and his outlets for its necessary release are scarce. Thus, he drives around and listens to loud music and talks back to his parents and breaks shit. He wants out but there is nowhere to go. Maybe with a little luck and motivation, he’ll fashion the first draft of a life plan, or at the very least find a way to make peace with his duress and simply put one foot in front of other. Maybe he'll find the courage to seek his dream. “The Age Of Reason”, directed with notable assurance by Andrew Schrader and Jordan Harris (they also wrote the script), is about a pair of teenage boys caught in that ancient state of adolescent limbo, and who come across less like best friends than two loners trapped in cookie cutter suburbia recognizing something of himself in the other, clambering toward self-actualization.

Set over the course of seventy-two hours, Friday to Sunday, evoking the youthful sensation that a weekend can feel like forever, we follow Oz (Myles Tufts) and Freddy (Blake Sheldon), the former without a mother and the latter without a father. Freddy, his appearance unkempt and grungy, accentuated by the fact that he literally digs around in trash, as if he figures that’s where he belongs, is without a father and filled with pent-up rage, stuffing food in his face in a desperate attempt to quell it. Oz, with his shaggy hair and blistering fastball, yearns to be the next Tim Lincecum. That daydream, however, runs aground on the bullishness of his father, Robert (Tom Sizemore), self-medicating with a bottle, and determined to prevent his son from ditching home for what he perceives as a fairytale Major League tryout in Nashville. Besides, how can Oz run away and leave his little sister (Avi Lake), outfitted in nearly every scene with a leotard in a bit of spot-on costume design, who is at the wondrous age where teenage agony seems so far away.

There is a girl too, Ruby (Megan Devine), because there always is, but don’t presume that she comes between the boys in a simplistic teenage love triangle, as it turns more on mere connection than any kind of popcorn love. Saddled with parental problems of her own, like an ornery stepfather whose attempts at connection are ill-advised, she recognizes something of herself in them, and inadvertently they form a sort of therapy group where rather than talk out their feelings they are willing to let each person exist on his or her own terms.

The recurring motif in “The Age Of Reason” is destruction; destruction of both a physical variety, whether it’s the opening sequence of Oz and Freddy bashing up a car or Freddy, in a weirdly hysterical moment, trashing the bike of a neighborhood kid for no reason whatsoever, and an emotional variety and the torment it yields which is emblemized in Oz’s broken down father. Ultimately their relationship becomes the film’s most crucial. He deters his son’s dreams not from spite but from a genuine fear that Oz’s brashness will lead him down the same dead-end road, oppression as a form of protection, which in its own way is as oddly admirable as it is it deplorable. And Sizemore, carving out subtle notes amidst the endless hangovers, strikes that difficult balance with a withering dignity.

The concept of baseball as saving grace could have been rote, a more lo-fi version of “The Rookie”, but baseball is merely the vessel by which the film explores the age when reality has begun beckoning even if we are not yet ready to relinquish our dreams. They say youth is wasted on the young but “The Age Of Reason” is about characters finding the conviction not to waste it any longer, to get out, to leave the old world behind, to see what a new one may have to offer, and to reach for the stars. Whether they latch onto them is of no consequence.

They Came Together

One of the most memorable movie-watching experiences of my life happened on some nameless Iowa spring night in the early 80’s. It was a seemingly endless evening of thunder and lightning and tornado watches and even the occasional tornado siren, and with the siren always threatening to beckon, I was allowed to stay up and lay on the couch and watch a movie as we waited. The movie was “Airplane!”, the epic spoof movie of Team ZAZ. I had never laughed so hard. And here’s the thing, I did not – could not – get all the references. I had never seen “Zero Hour” nor “Airport” nor even my future beloved “From Here To Eternity.” And it didn’t matter. When Robert Hays parades into the disco club, it’s a nod to “Saturday Night Fever”, sure, which I had not seen, but the sequence also breaks free of the pan to do its own thing. “Airplane!” was a landmark not simply because it skewered something with such specificity, but because it invited everyone in to share the laughs.

David Wain’s “They Came Together” seeks to spoof the the romantic comedy, a once mighty genre which has lately devolved more or less into a minefield of clichés. To be fair, Wain is not simply cutting and pasting whole bits of other films with minor “comic” addendums like the Aaron Seltzer & Jason Friedburg Chop Shop. Instead he gathers up the bounty of nauseatingly familiar rom com tropes - your Meet Cutes, your etc. - and then insistently presents every last one of them in such a way as to make their obviousness the punchline.

Framing the film as a dinner table tall tale of "How did you two meet?", Joel (Paul Rudd) and Molly (Amy Poehler) tell the story of their kinda, sorta true love over dinner with friends. A synopsis should go here, of course, but a synopsis is virtually pointless if you've seen any Katherine Heigl or Kate Hudson film of the last decade, or "The Shop Around The Corner" for the classics majors. They begin in the midst of faux conflict. The conflict cedes as they fall for one another. The false crisis intrudes. The happy ending arrives on schedule. Well known actors keep turning up for cameos. So on and so forth, but with jokes that go from tame to lame to clever to medium raunchy to raunchy to utter ridiculous. And while a few of the jokes are wholly original, like a Halloween costume gone wrong, the majority of them simply involve demonstrating a particular rom com cliche and then acknowledging out loud the cliche being demonstrated. This phenomenon becomes "They Came Together's" most prominent motif, and it's not that these moments wreak of being self-impressed, though they do, but that pointing out an absurdity is not the same as being absurd. It's like watching a screenwriting manual that tells you what not to do being acted out in front of you.

As a deconstruction of a genre, "They Came Together" really doesn't go far enough. It assumes that by simply identifying the genre deficiencies, it's done its job; and that would it be okay if it provided comic analysis or took the deficiencies and then spun them off into something new - a la "Airplane!" Instead they just lay there while the actors smirk. It's not a critique and it's not a spoof. It's just smug.

Friday's Old Fashioned(s): Up the Junction (1968) & Bang! Bang! You're Dead! (1966)

Oh! Well, hello there! I thought I might be extra generous this festive Friday morning and serve your regular Old Fashioned with a second Old Fashioned at no extra charge, compliments of the house. What do ya say?! I wrote about a couple sorta passed-by older films for PopMatters recently and figured I'd direct you over to them at your leisure.

"Up the Junction", starring Suzy Kendall, is definitely worth a look. I dug it. It's about Then, but it's also about Now. Review Here.

"Bang! Bang! You're Dead!", starring Tony Randall, eh......not so much. But still. Read the review. If you want. No pressure.

Cheers!

5 Potential Cinematic Butter Sculptures

Well, you probably heard, the Iowa State Fair this year will feature a Field of Dreams made out of butter. Wait, on second thought, why on earth would you have heard that? Never mind. Doesn’t matter. The point is, the Iowa State Fair, famous and frustratingly known for its Butter Cow (which is, unfortunately, exactly what it sounds like – a cow sculpted out of butter), will feature a replica of the baseball diamond Ray Kinsella built just for Shoeless Joe carved out of butter alongside the dairy-based ol’ Bessie.

It’s no secret I despise the Butter Cow. Iowa has an acreage of great things, and I’m not just talking about Donna Reed’s Oscar (though I have – many, many, many times). Chicago’s great and all but Zanzibar’s Coffee makes Intelligentsia – fine, though it may be – taste like the dispensed swill from Dennis Duffy’s Coffee Vending Machine. Even so, what people do people in Iowa want to talk about? The State Fair. And what at the State Fair do they most want to talk about? The Butter Cow. They talk about that damn thing like it’s the Pietà. And it drives me loony. To quote Rob Corddry in “Butter”: “Oh, and newsflash, butter’s bad for you!” Still, if this is the road, State Fair “taste”makers, that you wish to go down, creating Iowa-based film items out of butter, who is better qualified to submit other future ideas than Cinema Romantico, a film-obsessed native Iowan? No one, that’s who. So I’m gonna help here. Because I feel it’s my civic duty.

5 Potential Cinematic Butter Sculptures

Butter Deansie & The O Fox, “Cedar Rapids” 

“Cedar Rapids” centers around an innocent insurance salesman played by Ed Helms, but what stands out is the failing-to-act-your-age antics of his cohorts Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly) and Joan Ostrowski-Fox (Anne Heche), better known as Deansie and The O Fox. I mean, is that not the best duo name of all time? Would you not join their wild west posse? Sure, sure, Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid is pretty good, but it’s Malone & Stockton when compared to the Jordan & Pippen that is Deansie & The O Fox. In fact, I am desperate to see this butter sculpture. I would legitimately be excited to see a Butter Deansie & The O Fox. This needs to happen. (Note: It will not happen.)

Butter Patrick Bergin Moustache, “Sleeping With The Enemy” 

Yes, yes, yes, Madam Julia Roberts starred in “Sleeping With The Enemy”, wherein she moves to scenic Cedar Falls to escape the titular enemy, played by Patrick Bergin. But what do people really remember? Madam Julia? Or Patrick Bergin’s Moustache? The defense rests, your Honor.

Butter Kat Araujo, “Mystic Pizza”

Annabeth Gish, as I have noted before, was born in Albuquerque but moved to Cedar Falls when she was all of two years old and spent all her formative years there. Why she was still officially a Cedar Falls resident when she filmed “Mystic Pizza” with what’s-her-face, and that’s why there should be a Butter Kat Araujo. Because Iowa is not Daisy. Iowa is Kat. *Thumps chest.*

Butter Spring Break Massacre Sorority House 

Portions of 2008's “Spring Break Massacre”, of which IMDB reviewer innocuous wonders “I'm a bit unsure about why exactly this movie was made” were filmed in scenic Dubuque, Iowa, and featured……hold on, what’s that? My apologies. Iowa Governor Terry Branstad is telling me to tell you “this movie does not actually exist in terms of ‘Iowaness’. The state of Iowa is formally rejecting claims that any parts of it were filmed within its borders. Please remove it from your list.’” So, uh, never mind! Nothing to see here!

Butter 76 Trombones, “The Music Man”

I’m sort of surprised to learn this particular butter sculpture has yet to happen. Granted, it’s gonna take a lot of butter but hey, it’s Iowa! It’ll be epic! It’ll take up a quarter of the fairgrounds! It’ll be the Synochdoche, New York of butter sculptures!

Butter Sugar Santos, “Sugar”

Admittedly, most people, Iowans and others, will probably look suspiciously at a Butter Sugar Santos like it’s the high-falutin’ Des Moinesean who just walked into the one bar in all of some 500 person town in the northwest corner of the state, but so be it. Because look, Iowa already has the Best Baseball Movie Of All Time (“Field of Dreams”) but it also has the Second Best Baseball Movie Of All Time, which is “Sugar” (not all of which but a good and crucial portion of are set in Iowa). Yes. “Sugar.” If you blanch at such a proclamation, you haven’t seen it. If you accuse me of Iowan bias, you’re not necessarily wrong, but you are wrong, because “Sugar” is just that freaking good. And different. If there was ever a movie that deserved to be called “a breath of fresh air”, it’s this one, because it doesn’t merely turn baseball movie clichés on their head, it takes baseball movie clichés and runs them through the wood chipper. It’s magical but also unsparing, and utterly brilliant. And really, be honest now, what’s more Iowan than Sugar made out of Butter?

Saying Goodbye To [redacted]

"Dragon clouds so high above 

I’ve only known careless love 

It’s always hit me from below 

This time around it’s more correct 

Right on target, so direct 

You're gonna make me lonesome when you go."

Life Itself

“The movie lyrically and brutally challenges us to break out of the illusion that everyday mundane concerns are what must preoccupy us. It argues that surely man did not learn to think and dream, only to deaden himself with provincialism and selfishness.” This is what the late Roger Ebert wrote admiringly about “2001: A Space Odyssey”, Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film that has inspired much divisiveness, not least because it so acutely resists the trappings of a traditional movie. But Ebert, as he so often could, saw outside those trappings, and saw not simply a movie but an experience, a sort of cinematic treatise on life and all that gargantuan, stupefying, beautiful subject entails. “Life Itself” is not “2001: A Space Odyssey”, of course, but while its subject is Ebert himself, perhaps America’s most well-known and beloved film critic, it is determined to peer outside the box of that groundbreaking criticism to – as the title implies – examine a man’s entire existence, and how that existence shaped and continued to shape the way in which he went to the movies.

Eschewing a chronological tale following its subject from birth to the end, the film grounds itself in the present. Steve James, the auteur of “Hoop Dreams which Ebert lauded, was tasked to craft a movie not simply looking back on its subject’s past, but looking at him as he lived now. He had suffered, of course, for several years from cancer, having his lower jaw removed, losing the ability to eat, drink and speak, and would be hospitalized for a fractured hip not long after James began filming. Five months later, Ebert would be dead. So while “Life Itself” works as a marvelous elegy and testament to a wide-reaching legacy, it is not simple sentimentalizing. It shows Ebert deep in the throes of sickness, and while it is comforting to think of him writing and watching movies up ‘til the tragic end, the film lets us know better. One of the toughest passages involves James recounting how near the end Ebert, his pain getting worse and worse, essentially went Email Silent. “I can’t,” is all one message says. Yet “Life Itself” is not just about the ravages of disease, but an honest account of human complexity.

Ebert’s alcoholism is addressed. His penchant for stubbornness and selfishness if he struggled to get his way is remarked upon. The dueling notions of his TV review show, Siskel & Ebert, and its Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down slogan becomes a crucial theme. While in real life Chaz Hammelsmith, who became Ebert’s wife, was likely the most vital supporting character, on film and in the public consciousness it was Gene Siskel, the Chicago Tribune film critic who passed away in 1999. The two were authentic foils, sharing intense dislike of the other, if not also a certain reluctant admiration, trading punches and trying to score points. Their relationship is not candy-coated but presented as it was – a stealth rock fight that unfolded on syndicated TV. And that rock fight gave birth to many questions about the validity of its format. Jonathan Rosenbaum, in particular, film critic at The Chicago Reader laments how it reduced the scope of his field to Good or Bad. This is true, though it is also pointed out how the format of television inherently resists nuanced approach. Which itself begs the question as to why they would do it, and the answer is that it allowed them to preach the cinematic gospel to so many more people and champion the causes of littler films.

One of those films was Ramin Bahrani’s “Man Push Cart”, a severe indie its maker begged Ebert to see. The critic did and gave it a rave and subsequently befriended Bahrani. This begets other movie business relationships, such as those with Martin Scorsese and Werner Herzog, and illustrates how in spite of his stance as a critic, he fostered relationships with those whose art he was made to judge. That is another tricky issue from which “Life Itself” refreshingly does not shy away. Didn’t Lester Bangs say you can’t make friends with the rock stars? He did, and perhaps he was right. Perhaps Ebert’s critical eye waned a bit as he got older. The New York Times brilliant film critic A.O. Scott admits as much, pledging the opinion that Ebert was a tougher critic when he was younger.

I'm inclined to agree with that viewpoint, yet I'm just as inclined to suggest that as he got older, Ebert transformed into less of a critic than an ambassador, a notion that “Life Itself” quietly captures. He was an ambassador for cinema, absolutely, standing up for various films and filmmakers, but he was also an ambassador for aspiring film critics and for recovering alcoholics and for people coping with illness and for people who just dug putting pen to paper (fingers to keyboard). Everything he seemed to see in those last few years, and every word that came tumbling out, was reflected through the prism of his collective experiences.

At some point he stopped writing solely about movies and just started writing about life. Then again, isn't that what he was always doing? Aren't those two ideas interchangeable? “Life Itself” persuasively argues yes.

Snowpiercer

Is it coincidence that in the year of our Lord 2014, two films chronicling all of mankind stuck aboard an ark, one based on Scripture, one based on a graphic novel, would be released, or is it kismet? Well, this is Cinema Romantico, of course, and so you know full well what I think. It’s quite clearly kismet, not merely a matter of “these things come in twos” (read: “Deep Impact” and “Armageddon”) but a reckoning at the film de cinema. Look no further than your current box office behemoth, “Transformers”, which heralds the “Age of Extinction” on the theater marquee. Has cinema chosen to punish man for the hubris of its collective sins, to openly opine whether God or Whomever has forsaken us, or to ask if we have been begging for this end of days for some time now? Perhaps, and yet Darren Aronofsky's “Noah”, released in March, in spite of its Old Testamentness, still retains that pre-ordained White Dove Optimism, which is why “Snowpiercer”, the English language debut of acclaimed Korean director Bong Joon-ho, in spite of being an action-adventure exercise as much as a socio-allegory, might actually, improbably, appropriately be even darker. Which makes it the perfect summer movie!!! (Wait, I might have just dredged up the wrong catchphrase. Nevertheless.)

Of course, as Genesis recounts, Noah's ark was commissioned by the Lord because the Lord was fed up with mankind's wicked, wicked ways and so He wished to flood the earth but keep a few people and a smattering of animals to re-populate the species once the waters subsided. In "Snowpiercer", the Lord is nowhere to be found. He apparently realized mankind had reached a self-annihilation point on its own; kick back on the celestial veranda and shake Your head while those you have created muck it all up. An attempt to snuff out global warming in the not-too-distant future before it takes us down for good (and oh to see the mockumentary about the election of the President who convinced enough of Congress to believe in climate change to fund this scientific endeavor) has obligatorily gone horrendously awry, triggering another Ice Age.

All of humanity has been killed off, save those who made it aboard a colossal train (“the rattling ark”), ensuring their survival, but doomed to ride in a perpetual circle on a track to nowhere expect for where they’ve already been for the rest of their lives. And that perpetual circle also reveals itself in the train's class system because what is the world if not a perpetual circle of the Haves vs. The Have Nots? Strand a dozen people on an elevator and a class system would emerge within ninety minutes.

To maximize empathy, "Snowpiercer" starts us in the rear with the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free, dressed like more modern "Mad Max" extras and penned in like cattle, and fed about as well too. Curtis (Chris Evans, smartly downplaying) emerges as their General Washington-esque wrangler, understanding that the uprising against their fancy pants oppressors must be perfectly timed. And when they finally go, they continue to go, battling their way through locomotive car after locomotive car, a clever conceit that allows for an eternally evolving landscape. The further they progress, the more hedonistic the reverie, the more distant their own world becomes, and a scene in which they breach the compartment of a Berlin-esque techno club of debauchery is a modern day twist on the sequence in “A Night To Remember” when the steerage passengers aboard the Titanic breach the first class dining room.

Ah yes, the Titanic, everything in storytelling comes back to her. What was the Titanic, really, but the 1% vs. the 99%? (While we’re here, can’t you see Bernie Madoff dressing up as a woman and carrying his portfolio aboard a lifeboat?) And so much how the Titanic forevermore became a White Star Line metaphor regarding the classes, “Snowpiercer” yearns to turn its train into a metaphor for modern times.

Fictional retellings of the unsinkable ship often illustrate social castes obviously and clumsily. Even James Cameron’s version, which I love as much as anyone, is guilty, transitioning from the unlovable rich in the smoking room to the charming poor dancing below deck. And the well-heeled villains of “Snowpiercer” are not afforded much dimension, though perhaps Joon-ho believes their excess doesn’t leave much room for dimension. The 99ers, however, originally trumpeted as saints are slowly revealed as having sins of their own, partially in the security expert (Song Kang-ho) who craves drugs but especially in a bracing monologue deep into the film delivered by Curtis that seems to out our whole species, for richer or poorer, as nothing more than selfish survivors.

This idea is crystallized in the man known merely as Wilford, responsible for maintaining the train’s engine and, by extension, all of civilization. His eventual reveal both problematically grinds the movie to a halt, as exposition blooms in an elongated sequence recalling “The Matrix Reloaded”, and lets its message flower in full. This barreling locomotive is Wilford’s kingom and he is its god, and so maybe god is present throughout “Snowpiercer”, just in the way that men themselves like to play him. The Titanic has become the go-to allegory for mankind’s hubris and how the world that hubris has created will go under, leaving everyone regardless of class to thrash and freeze in its wake. That is why “Snowpiercer” turns out to be as much an oceanliner as an ark, a new century parable, if not potentially a foreteller of the beginning of the end – mankind’s hubris leaving us all to thrash and freeze in its wake.

Or maybe just be eaten by polar bears. God did create them first.

Friday's Old Fashioned: A Hard Day's Night (1964)

Late in “A Hard Day’s Night”, Richard Lester’s glee-infused ode to Beatlemania that moves as fasts its titular quartet moves to get away from the screaming, crying, fawning harems chasing after them everywhere they go, the camera presents John Lennon’s face in extreme close-up. And the close-up is made extreme by looking beyond just the contours of his face and focusing quite tightly on just his smile as he sings. And each time the camera catches sight of his compatriots, Paul, George, and Ringo, they are smiling too. So often the movies lead us to believe in Stardom’s Burden, and while many burdens came with The Beatles' stardom, “A Hard Day’s Night” prefers to imagine it as joyful. On stage, at the club, messing with the mind of their eternally stressed out manager (Norman Rossington), even when they’re dashing to and fro to evade the star-mongering female throngs, The Beatles can’t stop smiling.

Just re-released into theaters to coincide with its fiftieth anniversary and a Criterion re-issue, “A Hard’s Day Night” originally descended in the immediate wake of the British Invasion but ahead of the group becoming more popular than Jesus and their eventually tumultuous breakup. Thus, it’s a timeless snapshot of a revolutionary band at the almost utopian point between the Rise and the Fall, when they genuinely appeared to enjoy each other’s company, the days of Lennon demanding that his songs appear on the opposite of the album than McCartney’s songs since, you know, McCartney’s songs might have, like, cooties or something in the seemingly distant future. In the midst of a late-film performance there is a moment of absurd delight when George, situated on stage between John and Paul, does a little shimmy while strumming his Rickenbacker, and it’s enough to make you swoon like one of the innumerable teenage girls the camera routinely captures in various stages of About-To-Pass-Outedness. You think, Why couldn’t they have been this happy forever?

The screenplay was written by Alun Owen and for his contribution he received an Oscar nomination, a fact which seems to contradict the old babble at $2200 afternoon guru seminars about screenplays revolving around structure and conflict. Here the structure is but a flimsy clothesline whipping in the wind, but oh how those black suits look while drying! The driving – or perhaps we should say, careening – plot point is The Beatles needing to get to Liverpool for some sort of show, but the tenets of this show are not established to much effect and it doesn’t much matter. The show just provides the movie a wrap-upand everything in between is the juice. While staying at a hotel, the band’s manager assigns them “homework” in the form of reading and replying to their boundless stacks of fan letters. Naturally they can’t be bothered with such restrictions and light out for a local club. It effortlessly illustrates how this specific film portrays them as nothing much more than super-famous schoolboys, a few kids who view fame as lark and their manager as the dreaded schoolmaster trying to curb their enthusiasm. His attempts are foiled at every turn, of course, setting the template for Edward R. Rooney, Dean of Students, twenty-one years later. After all, what were Ferris, Sloane and Cameron but John, Paul and George, with The Parking Lot Attendant as Ringo.

The closest our boys from Liverpool come to being thwarted in their efforts to have a good time is through Paul’s fictional grandfather, John (Wilfred Brambell), a character who appears to have been invented not simply to increase hijinks, but to provide an entry point into the film for the gaggle of older folks who viewed those mopheads in matching black suits as troublemaking whippersnappers. Yet he doesn’t threaten thwartation because he’s a whiny old crank but because he keeps trying to re-capture his youth, sneaking off to have his own good time, forcing everyone to deal with his antics. John McCartney proves that even notably clean old men can enjoy jangly Brit pop. He's like a comical version of Ed Sullivan when Ed told America that it was okay to like Elvis.

He also provides the convenient means by which Ringo, near the end, is made to (kind of) question his place in the universe, gallivanting away from the band to indulge in an identity crisis only a few hours ahead of the big Liverpool show, sending everyone into a tizzy. Everything that can wrong does go wrong, as it must, yet even though it does and he winds up in jail, it all still turns out fine, which I sincerely hope is not a spoiler, and even if it is, well, how can you be sad?

In retrospect, “A Hard Day’s Night” is the happy ending The Beatles never got.

10 Best Reaction Shots In Independence Day

Gareth Edwards version of “Godzilla”, which was released in early May which in modern-day Hollywood Years means it was released nearly twenty-five hundred days ago, contained what might just go down as my favorite duo at the movies in 2012. No, not the ‘zilla and Mothra – or whomever that was supposed to be – but Drs. Ishiro Serizawa and Vivienne Graham played by, respectively, Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins. This is not in any way meant to suggest they possessed deep characterization because they didn’t, but to say these two did not create characters is woefully out of order. These two knew what time it was. These two knew what movie they were in. These two played like Sherlock & Watson if Sherlock & Watson had nothing to do but stand off to the side of the crime scene and gape. Reaction shots, kid, that’s where Ken & Sally made their money! “There’s crap, you two, on a blue screen and you can’t see it but ACT like you can see it!” And they did. Lord have mercy, did they. 

I thought about Dr. Serizawa and Dr. Graham as I watched Roland Emmerich’s “Independence Day” this past weekend. I had so much fun re-watching “ID4” last year over 4th of July and re-embracing by pre-film snobness, that I decided to do it again. And as I did, I realized what was more prevalent than even aliens and fireballs and Jeff Goldblum “Umms” and “Aahs” – that is, reaction shots. It’s the Golden Corral of reaction shots! They’re everywhere! The first 45 minutes of the film is one part exposition, one part special effects, one part reaction shots. Alien spaceships are pretty cool, I suppose, but do you know what’s cooler? A bunch of slack-jawed humans staring up at those alien spaceships! “There’s crap, you guys, on a blue screen and you can’t see it but ACT like you can see it!” And they do. Lord have mercy, do they. 

So I got to thinking. What are the best reaction shots in “Independence Day”? 

10 Best Reaction Shots In Independence Day

Well, this one’s the tone-setter. This one gets the party started. We’re hardly into the thing and the two dudes at S.E.T.I. are staring at the black speaker emanating strange sounds like that wonky equation Stellan Skarsgård puts on the blackboard in “Good Will Hunting”.

There is a Randy Quaid-specific joke to be made here but I will not be the one to make it. Instead I will observe that Mr. Quaid is called upon to react to a forthcoming spaceship as a character who has pronounced for years that he was once abducted by aliens, and that is what makes this reaction shot so exquisite. He is dumbstruck but not dumbstruck because he is in the midst of realizing the human race is not alone in the universe. He has always known the human race is not alone in the universe. He’s dumbstruck more in that way of “Well, well, well, the prodigal aliens return.” (Also, who’s thirsty for some Coors?)

When you're a character actor like Bill Smitrovich called upon for about 57 seconds of screen time, what do you do? You nail that reaction shot.

Classic Emmerich. From left to right we've got a cab driver, a young kid who was just shooting hoops and listening to rap and, I assume, an IBM salesman. #RedWhiteBlue

I love the little girl to the left. She makes it. She knows these aliens are up to some nefarious shit.

Whoops! Wrong movie!

You will notice the gentleman to the left with the as-expected mouth-agape face at the sight of a spaceship engulfing the sky above the biggest city in the world. You will then notice the gentleman to the right registering the presence of a spaceship engulfing the sky above the biggest city in the world by quizzically raising his eyebrows. Gentleman To The Left < Gentleman To The Right

One detail I adore about “Independence Day” and that had not so forcefully occurred to me previously, is how often sequences conclude with reaction shots, like a soap opera. You know, one character says something foreboding and then the film cuts to the other character listening to this foreboding pronouncement as the camera gauges his/her melodramatic reaction just before transitioning to the next scene. This happens several times with Bill Pullman’s President Whitmore, and this is my favorite. It happens the instant after POTUS has been told the alien spacecraft are twenty-five minutes away from entering Earth’s atmosphere. I like to imagine James Madison being told the British are twenty-five minutes away from breaching the White House and looking at John Armstrong Jr. just like this.

Admittedly Harvey Fierstein’s casting and subsequent performance as Jeff Goldblum’s cable company superior might well be the broadest element of an exceptionally broad film. And Harvey Fierstein stuck in Midtown traffic and lamenting “Oh crap” as he watches the fireball from the just-exploded Empire State Building roar down the street toward where he sits in his car might well be the single broadest moment of the broadest element of an exceptionally broad film. Yet as I have matured over the years from a crotchety twenty-something to a romantic thirty-something I have come to view this moment with much more fondness. If (when?) I am staring down a fireball from the just-exploded Willis Sears Tower courtesy of an enemy alien spacecraft, I hope I have the efficacy to wryly say to myself "Oh crap."

Well, Goldblum obviously wins the Reaction-Off here.

Begin Again

There is a scene in "Begin Again" in which an unknown British singer/songwriter, Greta (Keira Knightley) is being wooed to make an album by a down-to-his-dying-embers record producer, Dan (Mark Ruffalo), and he exclaims that with just a few tweaks to her sound and some fine-tuning of her look she'll go straight to the top. And that's the actual phrase he employs! "Straight to the top." And I thought, do record producers still talk like that? Did they ever talk like that? Why he even keeps employing the word "babe" as a descriptive noun. It is hokeyness of the highest order and I mean this as a compliment.

On Vulture, rock critic Jody Rosen recently wrote about Schlock Music, describing it thusly: "Schlock is extravagant, grandiose, sentimental, with an unshakable faith in the crudest melodrama, the biggest statements, the most timeworn tropes and most overwrought gestures." He may as well have been summarizing "Begin Again", a schlock movie for people who enjoy "Two Princes" as much as "Queen Jane Approximately".

Writer/Director John Carney's previous feature film was the the kitchen sink rock 'n' roll musical "Once", a teensy-tiny indie that miraculously found a devoted audience and, in turn, success it could have never predicted. His long-gestating follow-up inevitably subscribes to the rules of sequelism, even though it's not technically a sequel, bigger budget and bigger stars (Adam Levine and Cee Lo both appear leaving us but one Xtina karaoke scene short of the fabled "Voice" Trifecta) and bigger ideas. Therefore, "Begin Again's" arguing in favor of spirited individualism in a modern music industry based on saleability rings disingenuous, a film curiously unaware of the commercial means by which it's peddling its anti-commercial message. Yet this thematic failure fails to negate the final product because the film also knows that while consumers may be researched and marketed to ad nauseam, they are still, as the cliché goes, humans with two ears and a heart.

It is very consciously a film for the iTunes age, wherein artists merely need a few instruments and a laptop and they can cut a record and ignore the studio as middleman and release it themselves and rely on word of mouth (read: Twitter) to build an audience. So when Dan gets Greta in his corner, he convinces her, partly out of financial desperation, partly out of his soul-gazing, that they record not in a studio but across the romantic expanse of New York. The sounds of her singing and backing band will mingle with the noises of the city to generate a naturalistically colorful collection of songs.

One fairly significant issue of the film is the music itself. Whereas "Once" was built upon the foundation of Glen Hansard (of The Frames) and Marketa Irglova's marvelous songwriting, "Begin Again" relies primarily on Gregg Alexander of The New Radicals and, well, that's the thing with music, isn't it? It's dancing about architecture, as they say, and what hits you, hits you, and might not hit someone else. And the music of "Begin Again", despite being dutifully performed, simply does not hit me. And yet. The film still ably embodies the idea of what happens when a person is hit by music in that way. I didn't need to love the music to understand what the music was doing to its characters.

The film opens in the present at an out of the way New York club for singer/songwriters, sort of a Gaslight For Hipsters, where we see Greta take the stage and a croon a ditty to a wholly indifferent crowd.....save for one patron. Dan, of course, who in the space of that solo performance envisions how it might be brought to life with a full band, a wondrous moment capturing the almost un-earthly pull of live music. And then the film flashes back in two directions to show us what brought these two sonic acolytes to this fork in the road.

Greta has come to America with her boyfriend and music-making partner Dave Kohl (Levine) only to find herself getting left behind as the label to which he is signed gently nudges her out of the picture while simultaneously glossing up his sound and image for maximum commercial appeal. He admits he's been cheating on her and Greta walks. Dan was once an uber-successful co-founder of his own independent record label but now finds himself a drunken wreck, on the outs with his daughter and wife, and tossed away from the studio he helped found when he quarrels with his partner (Mos Def) over its artistic direction.

These relationships feel surface level, under-sketched and over-reliant on tropes, like Dan's alcoholism, less a problem than a "problem", magically resolved when near the end he picks up a can of Pepsi (another symptom of sequelism - product placement - although at least he remarks on its awful taste). Once Greta plugs in, meanwhile, it's all peaches and cream, a serendipitously easy road to success, absent of real setbacks and conflicts (her brief reunion with her ex is the falsest of fake climaxes).

The film's original title was "Can A Song Save Your Life?", likely changed because that doesn't fit on a poster and even if the film is about do-it-yourself marketing, the film itself still has to get marketed and marketers don't like a wordage cluster. Even so, the question the original epithet poses remains, and "Begin Again" definitely answers it. As in, yes. A song can save your life. Which is an argument so unbelievably earnest that it will likely cause many appraisers of its quality to recoil since, as Jody Rosen writes, "We recoil from schlock even as we lust for it, because it hits us where it counts, revealing us at our most wretchedly vulnerable and human."

For all its purporting to comment on the record industry it has far less to do with the truth of what it takes to both make music and get it released than what it emotionally engenders. In other words, "Begin Again" hits us where it counts.