5 College Football Movies That Need To Be Made

And so another college football season has come to pass. As you may know that Cinema Romantico’s #1 favorite sport is college football, if only because occasionally Cinema Romantico enjoys force-feeding college football references which quite likely leave those who have no interest in college football or those who live in countries without college football (that is, every country that is not America) scratching their heads or rolling their eyes or both. So, I apologize – profusely – this is a list that required concocting, a list detailing five films about college football that should be made.

In the modern era, movies are light on decent college football opuses. (“College Coach” of 1933 and the Golden Age is my personal favorite.) Oh, some will point you toward “Rudy” and I will then point you toward Charles Pierce unforgettably calling it “a passel of unreconstructed mythopoeic bullpucky even by the standards of the university in question, which are considerable.” And when I Googled “College Football Movies”, like any strong-minded cinematic scholar of a certain genre might, I immediately came upon a Top 10 list at Bleacher Report (not linking cuz, like, really) which in keeping with its reputation as a bastion of well-researched, seriously-considered, liltingly-written prose kicked off its list with the following: “The Waterboy is definitely one of Adam Sandler's worst movies, but this movie still has its moments. And it is about college football.” Oh. Well. Sure. I mean, as long as it has its moments. (This list was composed by a “senior analyst.” God help us all.)

This, people, is what I’m talking about. I couldn’t even read the rest of the list. If it needs to include “The Waterboy”, even if it’s all the way down there at #10, we as a movie-producing, college football-obsessing nation have precipitously failed. And to me, this is unacceptable, and which is why I am here today in my official capacity as irrational college football devotee and movie loving whack job to propose five college football-centric films that should be made immediately.

5 College Football Movies That Need To Be Made

Disciples of St. Darrell. In 1963, Dan Jenkins of Sports Illustrated, whose phenomenal writing on the greatest sport continues to endure, traveled with a quartet of high-livin’ Texans as they attended four football games – three college, including the vaunted Red River Rivalry (Texas vs. Oklahoma), and one professional – over the course of 72 hours, eating, drinking, bulls****ing, and being oh so Texas-y. Describing it would take as long as it takes to actually read the article. So just read the article, and then be prepared to ask aloud, “Why isn’t that a movie?”

Plainfield Teacher’s College. Amongst the greatest sports hoaxes, I first came across this in one of those Incredibly True Sports Stories, or some such, books in my grade school library, though it was also recounted on an episode of Slate’s Hang Up and Listen sports podcast. In 1941, a Wall Street Stockbroker with the laudatory name of Morris Newburger invented a mythical football team known as Plainfield Teacher’s College. These were throwback days when newspapers printed scores of games called into them, so Newburger simply phoned in non-existent scores of non-existent games under an alias and presto! A make-believe juggernaut was conjured. I’m picturing a Charlie Kaufman-ish vibe, a film swinging riotously between reality and fantasy, the fictitious accounts mutating into something tangible, real life people becoming consumed by the fanciful ones, a crazified account of how the game is rooted in sentimentalized fantasy as much as reality. (One important note: Newburger also manufactured a star player named John Chung who – oh boy – gained power by eating rice on the sideline between quarters. Ah, America. We might have to eliminate that tidbit for the filmed version.)

1942 Rose Bowl. One of the go-to trivia questions for any CFB nut is this: what was the one Rose Bowl not contested in Pasadena, California? Answer: 1942, which was moved from the west coast in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor all the way across the country to Durham, North Carolina and Duke University where it was played in the rain. Last year Sports Illustrated had a fabulous recounting of the entire ordeal, the cross-country journey Oregon State would make and their Japanese-American teammate forced to stay behind, and opposing players that would later meet on the battlefield. There is a whole movie, I think, in chronicling this entire story, one that both gave a concerned nation something to focus on and simultaneously proved how much sports can mean and how little sports can mean in the grand scheme.

The Toilet Bowl. In 1983 Oregon and Oregon State played the last collegiate football game to conclude in a 0-0 tie (overtime has been added to prevent such a result, but it took 14 years) in the ancient sport’s most singular debacle, a game so infamously god-awful that colloquially it has come to be known as the Toilet Bowl. The glory of its misery is truly mind-boggling. The teams combined for eleven fumbles, five interceptions and four missed field goals and was contested in, as sportswriter Austin Murphy wondrously phrased it, “Old Testament rains.” This, along with another idea I have long pondered, is my dreamiest of dream movies, one that in its ballad of comical ineptness would still impress upon us the game’s absurd romanticism and how even in the worst of times and the foulest of conditions, the glory of sport and the human desire to succeed can shine through gray, gloomy clouds above soggy 1980’s Oregon astroturf.

The Vol Navy. The one original pitch on this list. The Vol Navy is a fleet of high-falutin’ Tennessee Volunteers fans in expensive yachts who tailgate on the Tennessee River, flowing alongside the banks where mammoth Neyland Stadium rests. And while offering this idea might give someone a bad idea, well, what about a comical thriller in which a crazed Alabama fan goes rogue on the Third Saturday In October, masquerades as a Tennessee fan, acquires a luxurious boat, infiltrates the Vol Navy, and attempts to……well, you see where this is going. Also, if you know SEC football, you know this idea isn’t as absurd as it sounds. Even if it was all made up it might be more fact based than “The Express.”

Friday's Old Fashioned: Romancing the Stone (1984)

The utterly incomparable Wesley Morris recently took stock of the twenty year old phenomenon of “Forrest Gump” for Grantland and wrote something that intrigued me amidst many, many things that intrigued me. He said “with Zemeckis it’s the gimmickry of his filmmaking that can thrill you.” That’s Robert Zemeckis, of course, director of “Forrest Gump” and a trove of other box office smashes, including 1984’s “Romancing the Stone”, which pulled nearly $77 million, placing it at #8 in the yearly box office rankings. And a film that I remembered as being playful and vibrant still very much is, but it also very much betrays its gimmickry. This, I must stress, is not a bad thing.

It is centered around Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner), an author of the romance lit variety who lives alone in the heart of New York City with her cat and her miniature airplane bottles of booze and the posters of her own books on the wall flaunting the man she created - Jesse - and whom she hopes will one day rescue her and love her forever and ever and ever. It is not, shall we say, a flattering portrayal, and reminds me of something else Morris said in that “Forrest Gump” piece. He said: “Zemeckis has no idea what to do with women.” You watch these opening sequences with their gloriously nostalgic mid-80’s soft FM saxophone as Joan finishes her latest book amidst tears and then realizes she never saw the Post-It note she left as a reminder buy Kleenex and you think, Yeah, he has no idea what to do with women. And maybe he doesn't, but maybe the film's screenwriter does.

“Romancing the Stone” was written by Diane Thomas, a supernova who was working as a waitress in Malibu when she penned “Romancing the Stone”, sold it for some cold hard cash and watched its box office go loco. No less an authority than Steven Spielberg brought her into the fold to write “Always” and begin work on a “Indiana Jones” sequel. Then, she died in a fiery car crash in 1985. F***ing life, man. It’s difficult to track down definitive info on Ms. Thomas’s motives when considering her terribly unfortunate death happened pre-Intwerwebs, but this comprehensive piece at Romance University labels the late Ms. Thomas “an avid romance reader.” Indeed, as Thomas appeared to know this territory well, as the film can kind of be viewed as a far less existential precursor to “Adaptation” – the Donald Kaufman half of “Adaptation”, that is.

After finishing her latest manuscript, Joan is summoned to the wilds of Colombia by her sister who has gotten herself into a wee spot of derring-do over a treasure map that supposedly leads to a majestical green stone probably worth more than The Heart of the Ocean. So despite being - in the phrase of Garrison Keillor - a great indoorsman, Joan lights out for South America and promptly finds herself on the wrong bus and at the mercy of the film's chief heavy, General Zolo (Manuel Ojeda), who's maybe just a tad too evil when viewed in context of the film's overriding comic chicanery.

Enter: Jack T. Colton (Michael Douglas). The hero. The Jesse in the romance novel of Joan Wilder's life, and that's just the thing. Zemeckis's gimmickry is what thrills you in his filmmaking and “Romancing the Stone” is distinctly about Joan becoming ensnared in the gimmickry she has been penning all her life. This suggests a self-aware movie, one in which Joan can sense every twist of the plot and call it out before it happens, or adjust the plot on the fly by guessing ahead and preemptively adjusting, sort of a more swashbuckling “Delirious.” Yet, the script of Ms. Thomas has far too much reverence for the bounty of books from which it is cribbed to be so boorish.

And if The Hero's Journey is not complete until the Hero has Returned With The Elixir - a lesson of some sort, a metaphorical potion from the the Special World into which She has Crossed - than Joan Wilder's Elixir is realizing that, yes, her stories are true. The gimmick gives way to dreamy veracity.

Friday's Thursday's Old Fashioned Flashback to the Eighties Freeze Frame (With No Added Commentary)

The Cinema Romantico Fall/Winter Movie Power Rankings

At last. Fall approaches and just beyond Fall, sweet, glorious Winter. And with Fall and Winter we leave behind the preponderance of blockbusteria. I mean, mostly. I mean, you’ve got your Christopher Nolan Ginormously Hyped Mystery Meat movie and you’ve got your David Fincher Based On A Global Bestseller movie and you’ve got your Jennifer Lawrence Continues Her World Domination Tour movie and you’ve got your Inevitable Sequels to movies that didn’t really seem to warrant sequels and you’ve got your Middlebrow “Hey! Everybody’s In That!” thriller/drama thingamajig and you’ve got Brad Pitt In A Tank and you’ve got Johnny Depp playing dress up and you’ve got Sienna Miller Cameron Diaz playing Miss Hannigan and so on and so forth. But forget all that. Let's look at a few other offerings this forthcoming fall/winter. The offerings that the staff here at Cinema Romantico is most excited to see.

The Cinema Romantico Fall/Winter Movie Power Rankings

10. Red Army

Why I’m Excited To See It: It’s over-established that I am in irrefutable, uber-passionate, perhaps even annoying Olympics junkie, and this documentarian chronicling of the Soviet Union's uber-hockey power plays right to my Igor Ter-Ovanesyan loving heart. Also, it was directed by Gabe Polsky, who co-directed "The Motel Life", which you might recall me adoring.

9. The Better Angels

Why I’m Excited To See It: Cuz Brit-B-Brit plays Honest Abe's mom, yo. Woot-woot!

8. Laggies

Why I’m Excited To See It: Lynn Shelton, the director who helped coax the three best movie performances of 2012, takes flight with my beloved Keira Knightley.

7. St. Vincent

Why I’m Excited To See It: Because it's "Apt Pupil" meets "About a Boy" as re-imagined by Jim Jarmusch if he had a Luke Wilson accent and supported Sgt. Barnes in "Platoon" but still smoked pot.  Also, it stars Bill Murray.

6. Wild

Why I'm Excited To See It: Back when Reese Witherspoon, America’s Sweetheart, or so US Weekly would tell you, was arrested along with her husband and played the “Do you know who I am?” card and everyone had self-righteous fueled freak-outs, I wrote an open letter to her for the since extinct Anomalous Material in the hopes that she would use this moment to re-evaluate her career and motivation to take some risks. And here comes Reese in a mostly solo movie about a woman hiking the length of the Pacific Crest Trail all on her lonesome. Risk: taken. Here's to hoping it worked.

5. Foxcatcher

Why I’m Excited To See It: It’s over-established that I am in irrefutable, uber-passionate, perhaps even annoying Olympics junkie (wait, that sounds familiar), and in the run-up to the '96 summertime version in Atlanta I recall being consumed by the horrifying yet engrossing story of John du Pont murdering Dave Schultz, a freestyle wrestler under the millionaire's disturbingly eccentric wing. I can't say I ever considered that it might one day be a movie, but now that it's here...

4. Before I Go To Sleep

Why I'm Excited To See It: Little known fact - back in 2002 I pitched a thriller which I envisioned starring the impeccable Nicole Kidman as a woman who wakes up every morning remembering nothing of her past. Two years later, Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore turned up in “50 First Dates.” What can you do? I thought. Now, lo and behold, here's a thriller starring the impeccable Nicole Kidman as a woman who wakes up every morning remembering nothing of her past. I don't care if I'm not getting a cut off the profits! Let's do this thing!  

3. Rudderless

Why I’m Excited To See It: Billy Crudup, the best movie guitar player of all time, plays guitar in a movie again.

2. Zero Motivation

Why I'm Excited To See It: Because the trailer is an espresso shot of pure joy.

1. Birdman

Why I’m Excited To See It: Because the trailer is a goddamn religious experience.

Old Joy

“We’ll just have to find another rhythm.” This is what Mark (Daniel London) says to his longtime friend Kurt (Will Oldham) about life as he knows it and the baby he and his wife, Tanya (Tanya Smith), are expecting. But it also aptly describes the small but generally fabulous oeuvre of the film’s auteur, Kelly Reichardt, a woman who has found a different cinematic rhythm, one that can sometimes feel akin to the journey undertaken by Rachel Nuwer of the BBC in which she attempted to locate the last place on Earth without human noise. Reichardt is not afraid of silence and she often seems to be explicitly attempting to convey what silence can mean in a world infiltrated almost exclusively by noise. Her films often have political and social bents as well, yet “Old Joy”, from 2006, the barely 75 minute feature that seemingly started her recent run of creativity (“Wendy and Lucy”, “Meek’s Cutoff”, “Night Moves”), appears most intent on exploring what happens in our heads when everything goes quiet.

The film’s opening shots involve Mark meditating in the backyard of his Oregon home. This meditation quite unreservedly comes across futile, particularly when he fields a phone call from Kurt, whom he hasn’t seen in years, wondering if he might like to meet up for a hike to some supposedly mystical hot spring in the wilderness. He “runs it by” Tanya and she wonders about the point of running it by her since they both already know he’s going. It’s a conversation about how they don’t have conversations, and they both know it and neither seems to have any idea what to do about it, and this signals a communication breakdown, one which Reichardt seems quite content to hammer home in her laconic way.

As Mark drives to pick up Kurt, he listens to talk radio, pundits hollering about politics, but this feels less like rhetoric than aesthetic, the drone of background noise that follows everyone everywhere. Upon picking up his pal, in one of those anti-narrative decisions that many might resist, “Old Joy” follows them as they wind their way out of town, the camera insisting on the transition from the non-descript factories and hazy gray turnpikes and rote freeway signs to the evergreen forestry. This insistence lets us feel the fumes of the cityscape fall away. Still, the characters struggle to breathe in the replenishing oxygen. They get lost, not in that horror movie way but in that realistically meandering way. We see how time has subtly frayed their friendship – Kurt clinging to scraps of the past, Mark warily crawling toward the future. They came to clear their minds, yet the clouds won’t part.

The film’s finest shot is deceptively simple, placing the camera in back of the car and watching Mark field a phone call from his wife and exit the vehicle and walk up the road as we watch along with the Kurt through the windshield. This is it what it takes to be noise-free in present day America, for the other person to take his phone off into the woods. Yet when presented a moment of genuine silence, Kurt tokes up, as if the prevalence of our own thoughts is precisely what terrifies him about alone time.

Reichardt gradually builds “Old Joy” to a moment when both characters are left alone with their own thoughts, and what she does with it is brilliantly tricky. She plays on the audience’s own ideas of what happens absent human noise in a subverted Hitchcockian kind of way so that when a certain moment of behavior occurs between them, we, like Mark, think Kurt must be up to something nefariously bizarre. We can’t calm down. We can’t relax. We can’t shut off. And “Old Joy” makes clear how numbingly difficult it can be to get there. And when we do, we return to the sounds of talk radio and the noises of the street. Manohla Dargis of the esteemed New York Times saw hope in the final shots. I thought of when I return to the streets of the city from peaceful respites of seclusion and immediately, unintentionally and frustratingly drop right back into patterns of self-narration of exasperation, the urban sprawl re-consuming me. Joy, it's so hard to come by, so hard to sustain.

Calvary

"Calvary" serves in abundance staggering shots of the sweeping shorelines, rocky vistas, high definition greenery, and churning seas that define its small town Irish setting, yet none of these images count as the film's most memorable. Rather the face of its lead actor, Brendan Gleeson, as weathered and windswept as the Irish coast, framed consistently in close-up, comes to define the film. Owning the screen in every conceivable way without overpowering it, he is Father James Lavelle, head priest at a remote parish, and at times Gleeson's bushy beard completely shrouds his clerical collar, a nifty visual trick suggesting the comings and goings of faith, and rendering him in those moments as nothing more than A Man In A Black Cossack - a Johnny Cash character by way of County Sligo. After all, he’s not your prototypical priest. He’s a reformed alcoholic and long-ago widower with a daughter (Kelly Reilly) who has just attempted to commit suicide not so much as a Cry For Help as a Who Knows What.

The film opens with Father James in a confessional where a man, never seen, enters the booth, claims he was abused and raped by a priest when he was a teen and vows revenge - not against the party responsible since he is long since dead, but against Father James, because if the priesthood is merely a symbol than any symbol'll do. The stranger, however, promises his target one week to get his house in order – then, judgment day.

While this looming showdown ostensibly means that Father James becomes a kind of investigator, dealing with the colorful local lunatics and ferreting out clues as to just who might have made this threat, it is less about that than illustrating him as the shepherd of his unruly and decidedly un-holy flock. As an actor, Gleeson has perfected the facial expression of appearing simultaneously bemused and aggravated, and here he wields it with abandon. This unnamed town at the core of "Calvary" becomes an effective representation of the world at large, one in which genuine faith is dwindling, where the local priest is a therapeutic caretaker rather than a servant of God.

Early in the film, a dying writer (M. Emmet Walsh) on whom Father James routinely checks up laments that his whole life is an “affectation.” Father James replies “That's one of those lines that sounds witty but doesn't actually make any sense.” It’s a comical retort, sure, but the film itself argues that Father James is less configured in Christ than in affectation. Consider that in spite of his station we never see the clerical main character sermonizing nor quoting scripture. The only time he gives out Hail Mary's and Our Father's is in jest. The closest equivalent is a brief early scene wherein he gives the sacrament to parishioners, yet their faces and follow-up behavior suggest they merely crave penance without actually having to repent.

As both writer and director, John Michael McDonagh does not make the Catholic church’s clerical abuses and cover-ups the explicit point but nor does he deflect their role. One scene finds Father James having a polite chat with a young girl only to watch, stupefied, as her father rushes in and squires her away, fearful that a moment left alone in a priest’s stead will only tender trouble. As such, the main character, taken in conjunction with the film’s title, evoking Jesus taking on the sins of all mankind on the cross planted to Calvary Hill, shoulders the sins of the Vatican. Not that the film presumes to provide atonement for an entire organization.

This is a personal journey undertaken by Father James, one pointed not toward a reckoning with the mystery man but a man getting right with God. That the journey's end point is not the plunge into darkness its nature suggests but a manifestation of belief is due in no small part to McDonagh's screenplay, though the performance of Gleeson is ultimately what conveys it with such heartrending authenticity. This is award worthy work, potency growing out of his restraint. He finds reason to believe. He gives us reason to do the same.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Honkytonk Man (1982)

There is a remarkable Iris Dement song from 1993 called “Mama’s Opry.” Its narrative revolves around her as a young girl and her mother listening to Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry and her mother singing along, and how that version of the Opry in her living room and the memories it engendered were just as special as the real thing. It taps into the idea of dreaming, which may be broad and might be false, but is always eternal. The American Dream is a pollyannaish behemoth, and being a music star might be the most elemental of all American Dreams. It is a dream that "Honkytonk Man" skewers even as it professes utter devotion to it.

The film is categorically Eastwood. Clint directed and produced and starred as the primary character, country and western musician Red Stovall, who makes fast friends with his nephew Whit, who is played by Eastwood's son, Kyle. This could elicit nepotism charges but I would argue these charges to be false. After all, what is country music but a family affair, like Hank to Hank Jr. to Holly, which is but one of innumerable examples. As Stovall, Clint also does his own singing, which is admittedly rough but also lends a certain gravelly authenticity that behooves the genre in which his character exists.

When we first meet Red on the family farm in the midst of a vicious dust storm in the heart of The Great Depression in Oklahoma, he is passed out drunk, and so we assume another in a story of a one-time star burning out. Instead "Honkytonk Man" flips the script and presents the star in the midst of burning out on his way up, not done in by the American Dream but by reaching for it. He's traveling cross-country to Nashville to audition at the Grand Ole Opry where riches may await for both he and his relatives.

He takes a shine to his nephew, teaching him to play guitar but also giving him his first glug of whiskey. Convincing the family to let him take Whit along to Nashville, as well as Grandpa (John McEntire), who's got old friends along the route, a road trip film breaks out, carving out room for all the standby pit stops. They visit a house of ill repute where Red pays for his nephew to have a brief encounter. A stopover at a blues club on Beale Street finds Whit getting high for the first time, if by accident. Red wields a shotgun to get a bundle of cash owed to him. None of this is new. In point of fact, it’s ancient, but then so much material for the best country and western music is ancient; it’s all in the telling. And “Honkytonk Man” is told with a languidness befitting of its rambling central character.

On a recent episode of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, John Oliver lampooned the American Dream, and how its ethos, defined by Marco Rubio as “haves and soon-to-haves, people who have made it and people who will make it”, instills a sense of false optimism that can just as easily yield disaster as it can a heroic Rocky Balboa freeze frame. The underlying viewpoint of the bracing, hilarious monologue, underlined by Oliver mimicking a roll of the dice, was that no matter how steep the odds, we hopeful Yanks just can’t stop betting that sun is gonna start shining down on us any day now. This idea is captured poetically by Eastwood in a sequence in a car at night on a lonely old highway that might well have been a dry run for the sequence in the car at night on a lonely old highway in his grand masterpiece “Million Dollar Baby”, except that there its star/director was doing the listening and here he is doing the talking.

It is a sequence that finds Red ruminating on the love of his life, the one who got away, not least because she was married, but mostly because he was a no good bastard (his words). He talks of their existence together as a couple poor wayfaring lovebirds, working harvests, living in flophouses and sharecropper shacks. They had nothing really, aside from each other, but it was the happiest he’d ever been. Of course, being the happiest you’ve ever been is never really enough. “Maybe if I get this break on the Opry,” he concludes, “we won’t have to stay in any flophouses or sharecropper shacks again.” Then the car vanishes into the darkness. Sometimes you don't realize your dream came true until it's long gone.

Friday's Thursday's Old Fashioned Flashback to the Eighties Freeze Frame (With No Added Commentary)

Top 5 Movies From My Era Of Cinematic Innocence That I Didn't Like

We’re in the midst of 80s month – well, 80s Friday – here at Cinema Romantico and, of course, the 80s remind me of a more innocent time, if you discount Reaganomics, Iran Contra, the AIDS crisis, and – okay. I get it. The 80s were awful. That’s because every decade is awful once you remove the rose-colored glasses of youth and get down to brass tacks. I once posted a Springsteen video on Facebook and lamented how much I missed The 80s and a friend said something to the effect of “Dude, you were twelve in The 80s” to which say, well, yeah, exactly. That’s why I miss The 80s. I had no idea what was going on. Once you realize what’s going on, everything is awful. Blue Pill or Red Pill? The 80s were the last time I took the Blue Pill, and got to wake up in my bed and believe. But were they?

The 80s and the early portions of The 90s that were like The 80s Minor were truly the last days of my Movie Innocence, when I would watch a movie and love it no matter what. “Crocodile Dundee” was on par with the entire Carole Lombard catalogue. “Young Guns II” was as good as anything John Ford ever made. “The Flamingo Kid” was basically “On the Waterfront” with Matt Dillon. “Summer Rental” was a paean to perfection, “The Secret Of My Success” was a stone cold masterpiece and “Cocktail” was “Citizen Kane”. Anything you put in front of me, I loved it, and I loved it true.

Of course, that’s all revisionist history, and I know it is because every once in a while someone will mention a movie from that period of time and it will trigger a repressed memory and I’ll think, “You know what? Even then I thought that movie was crap.” Perhaps I was always critic even as I was simultaneously always someone destined to defend “Serendipity” ‘til death do us part. This brings me to my overarching question – what are the movies from my era of innocence that I specifically recall as not having liked?

5 Movies From My Era Of Cinematic Innocence That I Didn't Like

The Golden Child (1986) / Coming To America (1988). These two Eddie Murphy films were both box office smashes, each one finishing in the Top 10 and “America” climbing all the way to #2, and yet I quite literally recall being bored stiff by “The Golden Child” (I remember virtually nothing about it) and thinking “Coming to America” was quite plainly unfunny. I have no idea where “The Golden Child” sits now in popular culture and don’t care to do the research to find out, but every now and then someone mentions “Coming to America” in a memorable light even as they acknowledge its awful stereotyping. Nope. Sorry. Even with rose-colored glasses, the stereotyping is as awful as the whole movie.

Dragnet (1987). In so many ways I feel this was my first understanding of a critical thesis I will argue to my dying day (and into the great beyond) – that is, The Theory Of Expectations Is Absolutely 100% Bogus. My expectations were so high for this movie and I didn’t care how high my expectations were for this movie, and do you know why I didn’t care how high my expectations were for this movie? Because I knew what I was watching and my expectations had nothing to do with its rocking the blasé to the extreme. Fact.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990). Almost twenty-five years later and I still feel like I’m cleaning sewer sludge off myself after this O.M.F.G soiree.

Space Camp (1986). When I was in third grade my family moved into a new house in a brand new development that only had three other houses. Other than us, it was wide open fields and one paved road down to 4th Street and the Pronto convenience store where you could rent a movie (this is one of the reasons why I didn't see, say, Antonioni for years and years - I didn't have the fancypants Netflix these kids do now, I had the Pronto) and I remember many Friday nights peddling down there excitedly on my bike to get a VHS tape we could crowd around. "Space Camp" is one of the times I remember being most excited to make that half-mile journey. This may have been post-Challenger, but the premise was still music to a kid's ears - a trip to Space Camp at Cape Canaveral turns into an ACTUAL trip into space. Sigh. The only detail I remember about watching the movie was a foreign feeling then which I know all too well now - that sensation that all my excitement had atrophied and I was simply left with moviegoing mush.

Spies Like Us (1985). New Year’s Day morning at the home of my parents’ friends in Red Wing, Minnesota. I watched this with their two sons. I may still have been at an age where I was naïve enough to think one day I’d marry Samantha Fox, but I wasn’t so naïve to not think, “God, this movie isn’t funny.” Nor to think, “Could we please turn on the Citrus Bowl now?”

The To Do List

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The Motel Life

Based on a novel by Willy Vlautin, “The Motel Life”, Alan and Gabe Polsky’s film from last year that fell off the radar as much as its fringe-dwelling main characters, intrinsically feels novelistic, skipping back and forth in time, siphoning out clues one by one as to how its characters got here and lingering on salient images the way a writer might linger on a description. Amidst a Sierra Nevada backdrop on the eastern edge of Nevada, this harshly phenomenal little film is set in the earliest days of the 90’s, yet evokes a weary timelessness, as if aside from certain social and technological advances it bears no difference to the American West where so many pioneers fled a couple centuries ago.

The Brothers Lee, Jerry and Frank (Emile Hirsch and Stephen Dorff, respectively), whose names purposely make them sound like a pair of idealistic bank robbers, are new wave pioneers with used Dodge Darts for covered wagons and seedy motels with neon signs as their encampments. Of course, as many aspiring settlers found, the promised land could render grim judgment, and in place of milk and honey the brothers have only found rot gut whiskey and convenience store burritos.

Born to a dying mother, she gives them explicit instructions as teenagers that if the state attempts to separate them, they should resist. Their fate, per parental decree, is to remain together, and they uphold this decree ‘til the bitter end, even after tragedy strikes in the early going when an effort to ride the rails goes awry, leaving Frank as a paraplegic. Yet they press on, side-by-side, and among the most moving moments in this extraordinarily moving film simply involve watching Jerry attend to the mundane rituals of caring for Frank. We are won to their side not on account of pity for their plight but because their selflessness shines through.

The story, as such, takes it cue from Frank hitting a kid with his car and fleeing the crime scene. It is intended to generate the requisite tension, just as Jerry’s long gone love affair with the beauty Annie James (Dakota Fanning) is intended to ask the additional questions of What Happened? and Will They Get Back Together? Unfortunately this comes across more like contrivance, a means to spur the story forward, and Annie is underwritten, an emblem more than a person. None of this matters. The vast richness of “The Motel Life” stems not from arbitrary plot pieces but in its finely honed observations of everyday survival, in the guilt that slowly impresses itself upon Frank more than the authorities and how the film’s atmosphere – cultivated through the photography of Roman Vasyanov and the music of Keefus Ciancia and David Holmes – sets a palpable mood of heartbreak and hope.

“Hope,” as Red Redding noted in “The Shawshank Redemption”, can be “a dangerous thing”, and yet the Polsky brothers assume an opposing stance. Kris Kristofferson turns up in a bit part, in fact, enunciating in his awesomely gravelly baritone to explicitly tell Jerry that his brother needs hope. That hope is delivered in stories he tells to Frank, illustrated on screen (by Mike Smith) as if they are a graphic novel, like a couple bums in the wild west glamorizing themselves in dime store books into something they are not. This is not, however, false hope.

The film's most exemplary shot finds Jerry on the frame’s right edge, head hung, bottle in hand, but still suffused in the light from the motel window behind him. There are elements of “The Motel Life” that might elicit accusations of fetishizing the poor but while these characters endure severe conditions, often born of their own suspect decision making, the film is not subject to wallowing and has faith in transformation. The Polsky brothers use the landscape to illustrate the good all around us even in the worst of times, and rather than dissolve into an ominous cloud of fatalism that would seem to track their every move, each of the characters, in their own ways, see the light.

Jolie Dominates Expendables Battle Royale

(AP) Hollywood CA, Aug. 14 — Angelina Jolie ran roughshod over the entire gaggle of Sylvester Stallone’s so-called “Expendables” yesterday, achieving easy victory by hurling Wesley Snipes over the rope and into the orchestra pit below at a Battle Royale in the sun-strewn Hollywood Bowl.

Jolie, who had challenged Stallone’s action hero legion to the Royale after he refused to cast her on account of what he vaguley termed "scheduling conflicts" and "logistical concerns", made short work of her 13 opponents.

The ultimate tenor of the everyone-in-the-ring-and-the-last-one-standing-wins match was defined midway through when Jolie ruptured the conspicuously bulging vein of Stallone’s forearm. Until that point, “The Expendables 3” auteur had been directing ring traffic and utilizing Randy Couture as a human shield to avoid the possibility of actually having to engage in a physical fight. But when Jolie employed a Stuart Weitzman Flying Heel Kick to the ribcage of Couture, he was down and out, revealing a clear path to Stallone.

Stallone refused comment after the match.

Jason Statham declared “revenge” in the aftermath of Stallone's dismissal but Jolie thwarted his attempts with a Mrs. Smith styled drop kick. Jet Li briefly gained the upper-hand with a wily bit of flying kung-fu but Jolie simply levitated and rendered him comatose with a variation of the Famke Janssen Thigh Strangle.

That left Jolie face to face with Rhonda Rousey who had gone rogue moments earlier and punched Antonio Banderas unconscious when he tried to flirt with her. Jolie, however, used her Angelina Aura to succumb Rousey. With only Snipes remaining, Jolie was treated to her most taxing combat of the afternoon, but took advantage of a Snipes-ian one-liner to position him in her Quod Me Nutrit Me Destruit Death Grip to fling him from the arena and earn victory.

Jolie entered the ring in a duster to the sounds of Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl."

The eventual winner got a head start when Harrison Ford declared via video that he would not be attending the Battle Royale because he “didn’t understand what any of this horses*** was.” Arnold Schwarzenegger spent the first five minutes arguing with a ringside judge why he wasn’t allowed to use the gatling gun he brought at which point Jolie snuck up behind him and put him in a Blood & Honey Bear Hug.

A simple Jolie-esque smile caused Dolph Lundgren to surrender without a fight. Stallone then ordered Terry Crews to sacrifice himself for the good of the cause. Jolie easily halted his advance with telepathy, turned him upside down, and employed him as a wheelbarrow to run both he and Mel Gibson out of the ring.

Kelsey Grammer pulled a hamstring in the first thirty seconds and withdrew.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Best of Times (1986)

A different Kurt Russell movie, “Swing Shift”, was pegged for this place in my series of August Flashbacks to the Eighties. Unfortunately, the most tragic of circumstances intervened and I re-watched one of my favorite Robin Williams movies, one that happened to co-star Kurt Russell. 

Robin Williams had such a sad smile. I don’t intend to retroactively diagnose the depression that would appear to have just caused him to take his life based on the curvature of his mouth in movies because that’s wholly reductive but the fact remains that even when he found something funny on screen, or was being funny himself, it so often came with a melancholic tinge. The smile is there in films long since made and released and reviewed. He had that smile in movies I did not like – “Dead Poets Society” – and in movies I mostly did like – “Good Will Hunting.” The park bench monologue in the latter is oft-cited as a peak moment in his extensive canon, and worthily so, but I always think of the moment that triggers it – Williams (as Sean Maguire) sitting alone in his house in front of his typewriter with the curtains open and taking a glug of the drink and……smiling. It was a smile that readily acknowledged the rotten, godforsaken past but did it with a good humor. “That's the way the world works,” its droopy features said, and that was the way the world also worked in “Best of Times.” 

That’s the 1986 footballing opus from the pen of noted sports movie savant Ron Shelton (it was directed by Roger Spottiswoode) which features Williams as Jack Dundee, a banker in Taft, California, born and raised, who has never lived down a single moment in high school, dropping what would have been the winning touchdown against their arch rival Bakersfield. This depression has only compounded in adulthood because he has, as he must, gotten married to the daughter of Bakersfield’s old coach (Donald Moffat). His wife Elly (Holly Palance) is lovely and loves him, and he knows it, and when he looks at her, he seems to emit waves of guilt that he can’t let go of the guilt already plaguing him over the dropped pass. That’s two layers of guilt. He locks himself in his office and re-watches the play over and over on an old reel to reel recorder. Then he gets a cockamamie idea – why live in the rotten, godforsaken past when he can re-write it? Why not re-play the game?

Let’s not forget the guy who threw the perfect pass that Jack dropped. He’s Reno Hightower, once the best quarterback in the county, now a broken-down “van specialist” with a marriage of his own that’s on the rocks. This is also the story of his miserable past and his shot at redemption. He is played by Kurt Russell who develops an easygoing chemistry with his co-star. There is a theory that Williams muddled around as an actor for the most of the 80's, tamping down his frantic style because the movies didn't know how to harness it, until “Good Morning, Vietnam” broke the code. There's truth to this but I also think it undersells his ability to modulate. He occasionally falls into voices here (including an utterly eerie McConaughey-esque “All right, all right, all right”) but mostly plays a timidly nice man enveloped in a morose metaphorical cloud of sadness, like Charlie Brown if he'd been a wide receiver instead of a placekicker.

“Best of Times” has always been my favorite football film because it captures something essential and problematic about the sport, how its glory is fleeting yet its memories persist. John Ed Bradley, a one-time LSU Tiger, wrote an entire book exploring this idea, how he became determined not to be one of those guys who can’t let go of the past and then became one of those guys who couldn’t let go of the past. “I’ve seen them, the real sad ones,” said Myrna Fleener to Coach Norman Dale in “Hoosiers.” “They sit around the rest of their lives talking about the glory days when they were seventeen years old.” Of course, what adds the extra layer of substance to “Best of Times” is that, to Jack Dundee, there really were no glory days, no Best of Times. His dropped pass was the worst of times, and it still is. 

The film has a substantially sentimental air, yet it also – perhaps unintentionally – evinces the terrifying influence a mere sport can hold. It is not just in the main plot but in a side story set up with Williams’ opening monologue wherein the film connects the economy, the livelihood, the self-worth of Taft directly to sports, and so Taft vs. Bakersfield 2.0 becomes a way for the town as much as Jack himself to pull itself out of the doldrums. If football can hold such sway, perhaps it’s time to examine our relationship with it? And “Best of Times” almost does, if not quite.

At halftime of re-staged game, Bakersfield leading Taft by the seemingly insurmountable score of 27-0, Jack and Reno have a fairly fierce locker room tete-a-tete, and in that moment you can see the scars football leaves behind. If you everything you are is based on who you once were, as is the case with Reno, then who the hell is he? It’s an intense question and Shelton’s script, almost unbelievably, brings the film right to the precipice of answering it. Instead a comeback is spurred and Reno throws another last second pass and this time Jack catches it and Taft wins and Bakersfield loses (and only then does Jack’s father-in-law seem to respect him which……O.M.G.) because as Jay Gatsby once opined of course you can re-write the past, old sport. Of course you can. (Can’t you?)

Sports is very much about the moment. We know it’s about the moment because it’s those moments – for better or worse or much worse – that linger. I fear the revised moment will linger just as much for Jack because, seriously, having caught the pass, what now? (WHAT NOW???) So it goes. Still, on the night Robin Williams passed, it was nice to see him carried off the field, a smile on his face that for a blessed few seconds wasn't so sad.

In Memoriam: Lauren Bacall

Only when she passed away at the age of 89 in New York from complications of a stroke on Tuesday did I realize I always assumed that Lauren Bacall was indestructible. The movie screen makes those projected onto it larger than life, and Lauren Bacall was larger than most – nay, all. Death would never become her, I figured, because, well, wasn’t she immortal?

In hindsight it seems like she arrived already ensconced in immortality, born of the Greek god of motion pictures, fully-formed and primed for stardom. Jean Harlow foundered as an extra and in the periphery of shorts for years. So did Marilyn Monroe. Bacall was all of a sudden there. Most actresses have to wait their entire careers to get a line as good as “Anybody got a match?” and that was the first one she ever spoke, and she spoke it in that unmistakably sultry voice that was so absolutely her you could imagine little Lauren Bacall on the playgrounds of The Bronx freaking out the other kids when she asked if anybody had a juicebox. She took the match, lit her cigarette, tossed it behind her with stylishly purposeful indifference, and then walked away. It’s not so much her declaration of intent to be a star as her saying “I was a star before I walked in this room.”

Of course, none of that was really her. She was born a Betty in 1924, studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, dabbled in modeling and landed a cover on Harper’s Bazaar which was where Slim Keith saw her. She was the wife of Howard Hawks, director of such classics as “His Girl Friday”and “Bringing Up Baby”. He hired Betty, changed her name to Lauren, coached her to lower the voice to the huskily lascivious levels the whole world knows so well. She has confessed to, in fact, being scared out of her mind on set, trembling with such tension that The Look – the patented Bacall facial expression that I continue to contend should actually enter the lexicon as a verb, “Bacall” – was designed as a means to help keep her wits. Head down, eyes up, mischievous but deliberate, attitudinal to the max. It’s a little like what George Clooney was always doing early in his career, but whereas his was natural, hers was intentional. There’s a reason Clooney didn’t blossom into a true blue Movie Star until he ditched that expression just as Bacall likely wouldn’t have been one if she hadn’t acquired it. They were each creating a persona.

Richard Brody once wrote, “What makes a movie star is the inability to subordinate oneself to a character—the charismatic force of personality that renders the star more fascinating than any scripted role.” While I might argue Bacall could subordinate herself to character as she aged and grew her skill set, particularly late in the game when she turned up in “Birth” and for select films of Lars von Trier, and even earlier in “Written on the Wind”, I would not term her unwillingness to subordinate herself to the character an inability so much as a power. Her singular power. In her earliest and finest films she essentially overwhelmed her roles with charismatic force. We remember them – “To Have and Have Not”, “The Big Sleep”, “Key Largo” – and we remember her in them but the specifics of who she was playing and what she was doing were often rendered immaterial once she spoke or Looked. What part could any screenwriter possibly devise to equal her persona?

At the same time, that persona might have been what prompted such an oddly erratic career. She could not only overwhelm the scripted role, she could overwhelm the film itself, as Sophie Gilbert outlined in a marvelous obituary, poetically conveying how Bacall commandeered “How To Marry A Millionaire” from the titan likes of Monroe and Betty Grable. For if the persona was an invention of voice and expression, it was also fixed in her own personality, one that off camera could be outspoken and combative. If she felt ownership of a film, she’d take it, ensemble be damned. And maybe that’s why even as grand an actor as Gregory Peck couldn’t quite stand up to her torrent of magnetism. In “Designing Women” they are opposites that attract even if they never quite seem to transform into a match. In his review for The New York Times, Bosley Crowther called her “chilly and forbidding” which seems unfair. Perhaps Gregory, all due respect, just couldn’t cut it with such an awe-inspiring dame? And that brings me to the one guy who could cut it.

In an interview with Vanity Fair in 2011, Bacall said “My obit is going to be full of Bogart, I’m sure. I’ll never know if that’s true. If that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is.”That’s the way it is, Betty, and how could it not be? They were married for twelve years, until Bogart died from cancer, had two children, and in spite of their age difference, were by all accounts – hers, his, what you see unmistakably blossoming on screen in their eyes and demeanor – was true goddam love. And although she would go on to marry Jason Robards and have his son, and although she acted in a great many movies without him, it is the pairing of Bogey & Bacall that will forever be mentioned because it is utterly indelible, existing on a plain that makes the term “chemistry” seem laughably inadequate.

If it’s not the most famous, perhaps the most telling moment of their canon is “The Big Sleep” when they are seated at a gaming table. Hawks starts the scene in a wide shot, giving us our bearings, everyone else schmoozing and bustling all around our dear Bogey & Bacall. Then the camera, suddenly, presses in on our primary couple, shoving everyone else out of the frame and leaving them alone. In their movies it was them, no one and nothing else, the whole world existing as a platform for smoldering expressions and caustic banter.

The first time I visited my best friend in New York we went to the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. One of the exhibits involved cuing up movie sequences in a sound booth and re-recording the dialogue of one character in your own voice. The “whistle” scene from “To Have and Have Not” was an option. I didn’t need to see the others. So I pitifully took the place of Bogart and for a few glorious moments I exchanged bon mots with Lauren fucking Bacall. Film is about fantasy and in my ongoing movie fandom I have never found a film more fantastical, and I’m certain I never will, because it’s a film of old Hollywood and Lauren Bacall, that roaring force of inalienable charisma, was in so many ways the last guard of its wondrous remnants, a Movie Star from an age when Movie Stars were all that equated to box office formula. And while friends know that Jean Harlow mania has gripped me in the last year and a half, it is an affliction tied directly to Lauren Bacall, my favorite Movie Star, now and forever.

In one of those eerie cosmic coincidences, she died the day after Robin Williams. This immediately and predictably led to online propagations of The Rule Of Three – stipulating that celebrity deaths come in threes. Who would be next, they wondered. I can only imagine Ms. Bacall would have rolled her eyes and offered a couple coarse words. All due respect to Mr. Williams, but slotting her into some Rule Of Three flow chart is sheer buffoonery. The title of her autobiography was “By Myself” for a reason.

Lauren Bacall stood alone.

...Lauren Bacall...

Happy Christmas

“I don’t just want to do the same stuff.” This is what Jenny (Anna Kendrick) unconvincingly says to a small batch of partygoers in someone’s apartment. She then promptly proceeds to do the same stuff – getting blackout drunk, refusing to awaken when stirred, needing her brother Jeff (Joe Swanberg) to literally carry her home. We know it’s the same stuff because Jeff and his wife Kelly (Melanie Lynskey) express frustration that Jenny is repeating ancient behavioral patterns even though they have graciously opened their Chicago home to her when she has nowhere else to go. And so “Happy Christmas” documents an age-old refrain, one in which a semi-adult struggles to become full-fledged, advancing forward and scoring small victories in the name of maturation only to foul up and withdrawal, but it sort of phenomenally chronicles this refrain without judgment, and ultimately with a goodwill indicative of the season in which it’s set.

As auteur, Swanberg sticks to his modus operandi of low budget locations (the primary house in the film is his) and casting people he knows (his own son plays the movie son). Yet the ultra-prolific director, like Jenny, doesn’t just want to do the same stuff, and so you can sense a shifting away from the angsty twenty-something themes of previous films toward those that come with pediatrician appointments. You can see it too. The sequence in which Jenny pledges her non-mantra is set in a non-descript apartment with bare white walls and a lamp on the floor, a holdover of dorm days. Yet when the film switches to Jeff and Kelly’s we find something outfitted with more lived-in character, a home, which sounds vague but is actually specific. Then again, their home has a Tiki bar in the basement, a sort of Hipster man cave, and this is where Jenny crashes, giving her readymade access to everything she doesn’t need.

Not that Jenny is some Midwestern variation of a Hamptons Party Girl. She is self-centered and self-destructive but never unhinged, still a good person with a benign soul, as if her bad decisions spring from youthfully misplaced idealism. And when she makes those bad decisions, rather than confront them to engender growth, she hides out, most memorably in a shot sunk in the couch in the Tiki bar basement where she callows away behind her Mac laptop like it’s an impenetrable shield of invisibility. And just as rooted in truthfulness is the way Jenny’s brother and sister-in-law react to her presence. They love Jenny but they love their little son just a little more because they have to, and so when Jenny’s irresponsibility threatens to upset the delicate balance of a child-rearing household, they have to put their foot down.

The baby, refreshingly, is not simply presented as a plot point, a device to force a wedge between the trio, but a living, breathing, babbling little dude who requires around-the-clock attention. His presence ultimately renders Kelly just as central to the story as Jenny, for as the latter struggles with responsibility, so does the former, just in her own way. She is responsible – very much so – and that eternal responsibility of staying home with and caring for their child is subtly wearing at her. She is a novelist, yearning for some time to write. This could have been the genesis for faux-tension between hubby and spouse, but Swanberg allows his character to let Kelly have the time which, in turn, allows the film to explore the relationship between these two women.

By employing improvised dialogue, we get to hear Kendrick and Lynskey riff in attempting to craft a theoretically moneymaking erotica novel, and while it feels very off the cuff it also allows for moments of curious insight. There is a marvelous exchange, in fact, when Jenny expresses surprise, sort of seriously, sort of pseudo-seriously, that the book is not already completed. She figured it would take all of ten days. “A whole book?” Kelly asks, laughing. It’s a sly dig at the gaggle of Hollywood movies which purport to reconcile all issues in a manner of a few days.

The end of “Happy Christmas” might seem brusque. Stephen Holden at The New York Times certainly did, lamenting “The movie’s piddling, perfunctory ending — its only major weakness — lets Jenny off the hook after another lapse.” Ah, but then the season of Christmas is the season of reconciling sins. The end doesn’t let Jenny off the hook – it lets her be forgiven. That's bold, not perfunctory.

Happy Resignation Day!

Friday's Old Fashioned: Oxford Blues (1984)

There is picturesque sequence in “Oxford Blues”, the epic teenage rowing movie of 1984, that finds our theoretical hero, Nick DeAngelo (Rob Lowe), in a boat with his various British nemeses as they practice. It is not so much what they are doing as what they are wearing. The Brits are all outfitted in regal athletic sweatsuits bearing the word “England.” Nick, on the other hand, has strayed, done up in a more gaudy sweatsuit emblazoned with the word “Las Vegas.”

I have no idea if rowers really dress this way for practice. I doubt they do. Still, in a single costuming flourish it illustrates the film’s ethos, one that casts British and American relations as not being any less adversarial than they were in 1775. The English have rules. Americans live to break rules. And so a rule-breaking Ugly American will saunter across the hallowed halls of Oxford University in his cowboy boots like John Wayne, if John Wayne had hair mousse, dreamy eyes and reddish-hued lips. It’s the sort of movie that would have preferred “Prince of Thieves” to “Adventures of Robin Hood” because it’s the sort of movie that believes only an American with an American accent could have conquered England.

Director Robert Boris is, shall we say, slightly less than subtle in his presentation of a fuddy duddy society across the Atlantic where students sport robes and speak proper and take tea and resolutely offer no second chances (until the plot dictates that they do). Oh, there is talk of Great Britain being the original home of rogues and scoundrels, and this is not inaccurate, but “Oxford Blues” presents a society more in debt to the Royal Family than The Sex Pistols.

Nick's dorm room wall comes equipped with a James Dean poster but he is not a Rebel Without A Cause because his Cause is made explicit. He wants to meet the requisitely beguiling Lady Victoria (Amanda Pays), alternately presented as hella awesome as Princess Kate and as clueless as Britt Eklund in “The Man With The Golden Gun”, and woo her. His plan consists of scheming his way into Oxford University and joining the rowing team thereby allowing his oaring talents to demonstrate his irresistible manliness. Of course, his All-American attitude will make this task difficult. He’s a rule-breaker who rows better alone, and so he not only runs afoul of an opposing rower, Colin Gilchrist Fisher, played by Julian Sands with verve, but angers his own rowing team, including his fellow American Rona (Ally Sheedy), by flouting convention.

“Energy and strength doesn't win races,” Nick is told, “character does.” And so ostensibly “Oxford Blues” becomes Nick's journey to finding character, to work alongside others, to follow rules and to row with a team, to embrace the Union Jack as much as the Stars and Stripes. Except that the film alternately argues on behalf of entitlement, an idea encapsulated in the attitude of its leading man.

As the film opens, Nick is a valet in Vegas when a woman (Gail Strickland) – a cougar, to use the parlance of our times – drives up in a super sleek ride and not only sleeps with him but gives him the keys to her car and lets him drive off on it. That’s Rob Lowe in capsule. Whatever he wants, he gets...instantly. He’s sort of the male version of Angela Hayes in “American Beauty” – you know, when she expresses confusion that Ricky Fitts didn’t even look at her, like, once. If a woman didn’t want to sleep with his character, Rob Lowe would probably express identical confusion, probably because his contract stipulated: “Mr. Lowe must be allowed to have relations with all primary females without repercussions.”

He sleeps with the cougar and later he sleeps with Lady Victoria and then he winds up with Rona in the end and presumably goes off to sleep with her with too, and without any of them being angry at him because in spite of all the cinematic tutoring on the importance of learning it's not all about you, the film is all about him.

Casting Ghostbusters 3...

You probably heard the news. Paul Feig, auteur of "Bridesmaids", the enjoyable if overrated bit of sketch comedy-ness from 2011 is rumored as potentially helping a "Ghostbusters" re-boot since Bill Murray continues to be everyone but Dan Aykroyd's hero and refuse to commit (stay strong, Bill). And Feig, it seems, plans for it to be a female re-boot of "Ghostbusters." Naturally every other movie site on the interwebs (and several on Titan) already submitted their casting choices about 72 hours ago which makes this post horribly irrelevant because 72 hours in Movie News Terminology may as well be as long ago as the Clinton Administration, but we forge ahead.

So here's my totally subjective but absolutely correct idea. Your new Venkman, Stanz & Spengler.....

Or wait. Have I seen this movie before? I think I have. Yes! Of course I have! And it was entirely and originally female-centric because females don't actually need to take leftovers out of the refrigerator to make a movie! They can actually just make their OWN movies and they can be REALLY good! GREAT, even! Crazy, isn't it?! Hollywood, are you listening? Are you still there? Hello?

I think they hung up.

Magic in the Moonlight

The opening images of “Magic in the Moonlight” involve an English magician, Stanley Crawford (Colin Firth), in the guise of a Chinese illusionist, Wei Ling Soo, making an elephant onstage disappear. Yet, while such fantastical industriousness would seem ripe for astonished gasps, the audience is notably reserved, polite but not wowed, as if they have seen this show before and the disappearing elephant is simply old hat for its illusionist, just another a variation on the same trick from the same bag.

The themes of Woody Allen’s 44th or 55th or 67th or 78th (I have no idea anymore) feature film are the same ones that have been of concern his whole career, best summarized in the perhaps the film’s best line when Stanley reduces the expanse of the nighttime sky and the pull of the entire universe as “menacing.” What else could it be if we don’t know what’s truly out there, whatever there constitutes in the narrative of your own existence (if your own existence is real, that is). The ideas explored in “Magic in the Moonlight” most resemble, to my eye, “Shadows and Fog” (1992), Allen’s ode to German Expressionism for which I have immense fondness. It melded ideas of religion and philosophy and magic in a way that allowed for its auteur’s trademark funny business while also providing an arresting eeriness. It also knew that such matters went beyond a mere love triangle, which is the plot point on which “Magic in the Moonlight” creakily turns.

Insistently presented as a skeptic of the surreal and champion of pragmatism to such a degree that I would not be surprised to learn he handed out instructions at the end of each magic show detailing how each trick was executed, Stanley is summoned by his fellow, if not quite as renowned, illusionist Howard Burkan (Simon McBurney) to debunk a young American woman from Kalamazoo, Sophie Baker (Emma Stone), claiming to be a mystic in contact with the spirit world. She is engaged to a serenading richy rich (Hamish Linklater), who is, as is The Woodman’s writing custom anymore, presented as such a dufus all the air in the purported “triangle” is dead from the get-go. In but a few sequences Stanley goes from staunch opponent of spiritualism to devout believer, though his investigative work into discrediting her seems virtually non-existent. He mostly just pontificates about she’s a fraud because he knows she’s a fraud. Until he decides she isn’t a fraud because the screenplay wants them to fall in love. (I sense Neil deGrasse Tyson would have exposed her in about 14 seconds. But I digress.) And so they do, as Stanley suddenly pivots in the face her spiritual profundity and embraces the beauty of life before a crude god of machine upends his newfound joy.

Watching “Magic in the Moonlight” is like reading the first draft of a screenplay before it’s been refined. Everyone speaks in endless declarative sentences that demonstrate no love of language. Emma Stone struggles with it, though she is afforded no favors by the stagnant direction, which generally sets her amidst admittedly swoony 1920’s frames and then just has her awkwardly, helplessly stand in them, leaving her to mentally scream “WILL SOMEONE GIVE ME SOME DIRECTION?!” Firth, however, combats the stilted dialogue, and even manages against all odds to transform his character’s jarring transitions into something plausible, like he’s a man entirely made up of mood swings.

Alas, his nobility is countered by unconquerable odds, as the film ignores truly exploring the Bigger Questions at the center of the story. They are merely romantic roadblocks in the disguise of metaphysics. And the romance fails to rise not necessarily because the third member of the triangle is a schmuck (though that doesn’t help) but because Stone and Firth's chemistry seems oddly (or not) like a lecturing teacher and a churlish pupil.

One scene finds them admiring a stunning seaside view. Firth is unimpressed. “It’s transient,” he says. You’re telling me.