Cinema Romantico's Week Off

Hey, loyal readers, first-time readers and suspect readers wondering "who is this dufus and what is with his 'ShueRolling' obsession?" Once again, that time of the year has arrived. Today I'm off to unwind, relax, recharge and smile brightly and widely while consuming coffee in 40 degree temperatures on the north shore of Minnesota and Lake Superior while partaking in a roughly ten day Internet sabbatical.

But don't fret! Cinema Romantico will not be going dark in my absence. We have several posts set to go up automatically, posts we have refrained from posting for reasons I don't really know. Well, that's not entirely true. I didn't post my "Lone Survivor" review because I was terrified the pro-"Lone Survivor" supporters who become absurdly jingoist for daring to accuse "Lone Survivor" of being absurdly jingoist \would swoop down on this poor blog to verbally accost me for failing to declare that "Lone Survivor" WAS THE SINGLE GREATEST FILM IN THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION AND IF YOU SO MUCH AS CLAIM IT POSSESSESS EVEN HALF OF ONE FLAW YOU ARE A TREASONIST. But since I won't be here when the review goes up, hey, have at it! I'll catch up with the comments laterzville.

There will also be a traditionally served Friday's Old Fashioned, an obligatory wonked-out Top 5, a requisite anybody's-guess-what-in-the-world-this-is, and a post in which I pay homage to (rip off) my friend Alex at And So It Begins... and his incredible Things About Movies He Loves That No One Else Talks About. So keep stopping by! I'll catch back up with y'all just in time for my "Interstellar" review to have been rendered irrelevant due to the passage of (Internet) time.

Destination

The Beauty Way

In reviewing Wes Anderson's "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" (2003), Roger Ebert described Bill Murray's title character by referencing an epitaph he was immensely fond of, one of a teenaged girl entombed at London's Southwark Cathedral. He wrote: "Steve Zissou is very tired. I suggest for his epitaph: Life for him was but a dreary play; he came, saw, dislik'd, and passed away."

Zissou is a Jacques Costeau-esque oceanographer, and because he is Jacques Costeau-esque, we assume he is a man ensconced in an oceanic embrace, a lover of the sea's wonders and mysteries, its infinite depths and inestimable species. Yet even if the character is modeled on Jacques Costeau, he specifically possesses none of the same spirit, overcome instead by a "vague, wistful tristesse" in the words of A.O. Scott.

It's fair even to ask if Steve Zissou likes the sea. So much of the evidence suggests otherwise, whether it's wanting to kill the mystical Jaguar Shark in the name of revenge or Team Zissou's supposedly intelligent dolphins for whom he only professes extreme irritation. He often comes across more enchanted with his glock and his Campari on the rocks than marine biology. Slowly but surely, the joy this aquatic once held for his field has withered. And yet.....

At the premiere of his new film which is, shall we say, less than well received ("I just don't think they got it," he's told which is the surest sign you've got a cinematic neutron bomb on your hands) and which features his best friend and forever-and-then-some colleague, Esteban, being eaten alive he runs into his nemesis who is in a relationship with his ex-wife and then some old coot asks him to autograph pretty much every poster of every old (more successful) movie he's made and so his glorious past is literally flashing before his eyes and, I mean, my God, can it get any worse? And the sheer exhuastion with which Murray plays all this honestly makes you wonder if he's going to make to the end of the night without hopping into a submersible and eternally submerging himself. But then......

The nephew of Klaus, his right-hand man, bestows Zissou a gift. It is a Crayon Ponyfish. And in this instant, Zissou's nature barely but oh so perceptibly changes. "An interesting specimen," he says with a suddenly surprisingly sincere air. In that instant you can see who the old (young) Zissou must have been and wonder, sadly, where he went. And when some nameless yokel standing outside the theater, alongside the picturesque red carpet, not entirely convinced that Zissou's mourning for his friend Esteban is authentic, callously wonders "Who're you gonna kill in part two?", fisticuffs ensues, causing the tiny bag bearing the exotic Crayon Ponyfish springs a leak. Could this day get any worse? Thinking fast, Steve seizes a champagne glass to use as a makeshift fish tank.

All due respect to Mr. Ebert but that magnificent shot makes me think of a different line involving another teenaged girl. "I don't think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains."

First Glimpse of Interstellar

I was able to catch an earlybird showing of Christopher Nolan's six-and-a-half-hour saga "Interstellar", the first Hollywood product ever to be advertised on Jupiter and its surrounding moons. And although I was, of course, forced to sign 47 consent forms confirming that I would not reveal "pertinent nor non-pertinent" information prior to its offical release date while also handing over my iPhone to the armed guards at the door, I still managed to record a snippet of the film with my ankle iPhone to give you a sneak peek. Enjoy!

Rudderless

In the magnificent "All Is Lost" Robert Redford starred as unnamed man so determined to escape whatever mistakes he made in his previous life that he took to the open sea in a boat all on his lonesome and was made to lose everything he had before he could begin (whether for real or metaphorically) anew. In "Rudderless" Billy Crudup stars as Sam Manning, a man so determined to escape the unspeakable tragedy in his past that he also takes to a boat. The sly twist, however, as comical as it is sad, is that his boat remains firmly anchored to shore, a place for him merely to sleep, drink and urinate off the bow. And because he remains tethered to land, he remains tethered to the tragedy of his past, the death of his son, Josh (Miles Heizer). He is both unable to confront it and unwilling to let himself drift away from it.

That changes when Sam's ex-wife (Felicity Huffman) turns up one day with Josh's old guitar, his sketchbook of lyrics and a box full of homemade CD's. Reluctantly, he loses himself in the music of his lost flesh and blood, as comforting as it is traumatizing, playing one of his son's songs at a local open mic night without revealing its true author, and then even more reluctantly falling in with Quentin (Anton Yelchin), a would-be rock star if only he could past his ample nerves.

Clearly the relationship between Sam and Quentin is intended as a case of surrogate father/son, the emblematic opportunity for a dad to repair what went wrong. Crudup, however, never lets it fall into the trap of this banality, instead conveying it more as a prickly rapport between a closed-off mentor and an over-eager protege. He doesn't let Quentin all the way in, primarily because he knows that to let Quentin all the way in might just ruin the promising youth before he's blossomed. Yet, at the same time, he realizes their small-time rock 'n' roll dream is precisely what is allowing him to blossom, and so he forges ahead. Crudup simply excels at these sorts of contradictions, and his back and forth between dick and decent is effortless.

The problem, however, is that the script by director William H. Macy & Casey Twenter and Jeff Robison forces their leading man to act nearly three-fourths of the film with a secret, and one that is entirely pointless to keep hidden from the audience aside from theoretical shock and awe when it is inevitably spilled. It's as if Macy, a first-time film director, did not trust himself with dark-hearted material, and so rather than honestly asking if something as dispensible as music can ease or remedy legitimate psychological trauma, he opts for waters blue and unsullied, crafting a "Begin Again" that suddenlys pull the old switcheroo into (spoiler alert by clicking on link!) this.

"Rudderless" as a whole struggles with tone, putting Crudup through an eternal grind of behavioral paces, from bitter drunk to overgrown frat boy fronting a band to - in the film's most utterly misguided subplot - Rodney Dangerfield in "Caddyshack" taking a snot-nosed yachtsman down a peg or two. Yet even if the film itself can't handle the final shift, Crudup can, credibly evincing an emotionally wrecked man who doesn't find solace in his son's music so much as a necessary perspective. Still, there were so many more demons for him to wrestle, and oh to see the movie that might have let him.

St. Vincent

Parables are often associated with the Bible and the Bible is often associated with Bible Study and in an increasingly secular American society who wants to go to Bible Study to hear about Jesus and The Mustard Seed for the umpteenth time? So instead writer/director Theodore Melfi has invented a parable from the ground-up in "St. Vincent", a title that works as a dead giveaway to its religious overtones. The film tells a fairly obvious lesson via a fairly predictable formula but then people don't turn to parables to parse through them on account of their complex nature and hidden meanings. They turn to parables to cite them as obvious lessons.

To compensate for its obviousness, Melfi casts Bill Murray as the title character, a decision that is fairly obvious in its own right but nonetheless inspiring because even if Mr. Murray goes out for a round of golf he can turn those 18 holes into a work of comic genius. The first shot of "St. Vincent", in fact, sets Murray at a neighborhood bar, getting sloshed and telling a joke. And even if the joke isn't funny, because it isn't meant to be, it establishes the film's overriding intention to simply sit back and allow its charismatic star to hold court.

In a role suggesting Clint Eastwood's Walt Kowalski re-cast as Hugh Grant's Will Freeman, Murray is Vincent, a drunken habitual gambler, his debts expanding and his depression bordering on zero hour. His messy life is given untraditional semblance of structure when he becomes the babysitter for Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher), an eleven year old who has just moved to the neighborhood with his single mom (Melissa McCarthy), overworked and struggling. An untraditional (traditional) mentorship ensues: Vincent teaches him to throw a punch, takes him to the racetrack, bellys him up to the bar, etc., though he does not so much warm to Oliver as tolerate him, offering selfless guidance in tandem with spectacular self-absorption. Narcissistic pricks, in other words, can be saints too.

In spite of all this bawdiness, Vincent, like his lady-friend Daka (Naomi Watts), the brassy Russian lady of the night, has a heart of gold. We know this by the patient way in which he attends to his Alzheimer's-addled wife, sadly forced to live out her end of days at a nursing home he can barely afford. And his goodness only increases as the film progresses, revealing his past in increments as Oliver is tasked by his Catholic school teacher (Chris O'Dowd) to write about a living saint.

The Catholic church merely recognizes saints, it does not make them, and yet the pseudo-investigative journalism done by Oliver in the third act to track down Vincent's past does precisely the latter. It makes him into a saint rather than just letting the character exist beatifically on his own terms. The final moments when he ascends the stage to be annoited seem like too much pomp and circumstance for such a dickishly holy guy. I preferred the incredible shot near the beginning, in his corner watering hole, when he puts Jefferson Airplane on the jukebox as the camera watches him through one of those cheap plastic windows typical of low rent bars.

It's like a divey stained glass window, and through its prism Vincent truly resembles a Saint.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Memphis Belle: A Story Of A Flying Fortress (1943)

A favorite movegoing memory came in the winter of 1990 when a friend wanted to go see the box office bonanza "Home Alone" and enlisted me to go along. Honestly, I wasn't all that excited to see "Home Alone", but I loved going to the movie theater, and so why not? Yet I was delighted, even though I was forced to hide that delight, when we arrived to find "Home Alone" sold out. With limited alternatives, we chose "Memphis Belle", which I actually was excited to see. I loved the whole damn thing to pieces, right down to the gloriously cornball moment when Eric Stoltz stands up in front of his B-17 brothers and recites Yeats. "I know that I shall meet my fate / Somewhere among the clouds above." Sigh.

Of course, that "Memphis Belle" took its story (and stretched the heck out of it) from the real Memphis Belle, and the real Memphis Belle was chronicled in William Wyler's in-the-midst-of-WWII American propaganda documentary "Memphis Belle: A Story Of A Flying Fortress." Reading Mark Harris's wonderful "Five Came Back", which tells the story of American film directors who enlisted in the glorious cause to make movies in the name of the war effort, it shamed me to realize I had never watched Wyler's version. As Harris so thrillingly weaves it, Wyler went right up in the Belle with all the boys, even if daylight bombing was an incredibly risky concept, to garner his footage.

The footage is gripping and the stylistic touches only enhance the footage, so much that the 41 minutes (don't do it, Nick!!!) fly by. The film opens with idyllic shots of the English countryside before quickly pivoting to show that countryside overrun with ginormous B-17 bombers as the narrator, Eugene Kern, his voice reminiscent of a more schoolmasterish Orson Welles, making the word "bombers" as melifluous as it is portentous, intones about how England has become an "aircraft carrier", and how this is a new kind of war front. "THIS," and he truly bits with a deep baritone befitting all-caps, "is an air front," and this phrase is repeated at least twice more throughout.

Though Wyler incorporated footage of several different air runs, not that my novice eyes could ever tell, he has a convenient device around which he can sculpt a narrative - that is, the Memphis Belle is making its 25th bombing run into enemy territory. If it survives, its entire crew gets to go home. And so the film, in a wonderful bit of exposition madness imposed over a massive map, lays out the mission to Wilhelmshafen, Germany in precise detail. We meet the men of the Memphis Belle, though barely, and it really doesn't matter, because even the briefest detail when the real-life stakes are clearly so high resonates with thundering grandeur. "Tail gunner," Kern recites, "Sgt. John Quinlan of Yonkers, New York. Clerked for a carpet company but he quit December 8, 1941."

Can you follow all that?

The sequences set aboard the Belle are pulverizing, both in their moments of peace, such as the vapor trails streaking the sky like ones I'd see in my Iowa backyard on crisp fall nights, and in their moments of terror, like a fellow bomber that falls away as we watch parachutes of the crew members deploy. What becomes of these men we never know, and I thought of Harry Lime referring to the humans below as "dots", and how these nameless soldiers falling through the sky looked like anything but dots. Machine guns shake on screen and flak dots the skies, and at one point a burst of flak even drifts directly toward the camera, as if it might swallow us whole.

In "Five Came Back" Harris documents how Wyler had originally intended an ending decidedly grave in tone, only to be overrided by The War Department since, after all, the film's primary motive was to be used as propaganda wrapped in the Stars & Stripes. And so, the Memphis Belle makes it back safe, everyone smiles, and they get to meet the Queen. Every war is well that ends well. These concluding passages, however, stand in stark contrast to the preceding material, to the somber voice modulation of Kern who, I swear, is trying his damndest to scare us off from ever wanting to bomb anyone.

I remember when "Memphis Belle" rousingly wrapped up that I was filled with a rush of wartime evangelism, because I was 13 and I was naive and I assumed that going to war must be just like this movie. It must mean I'll pack up my lucky charm and my notebook of poetry and Harry Connick Jr. will sing "Danny Boy" and whimsy will fill the airfield. That seems so much more propagandistic than watching the B-17's launch in Wyler's documentary and listening to Kern declare "in a few hours when they come back...(pause)...IF they come back." Imagine going to enlist with that rattling around in your head.

Bill Murray Sings (More) Bob Dylan

In the latest Bill Murray cinematic venture, "St. Vincent", review to come (eventually), in which he stars as your traditional drunken lout who finds redemption and so on and so forth, Murray simply sits in a lawn char over the closing credits while listening to Bob Dylan's "Shelter From The Storm" on an old-school Walkman, singing along. It's wonderful. And it, as it had to, got me to thinking about what other Bill Murray movie characters could sing along to Bob Dylan songs.

7 More Bob Dylan Songs Bill Murray Could Sing

The Royal Tenenbaums - Dignity. Well, if there is one thing for which poor Raleigh St. Clair is searching... "Chilly wind sharp as a razor blade / House on fire, debts unpaid / Gonna stand at the window, gonna ask the maid / Have you seen dignity?"

Rushmore - One Too Many Mornings. Imagine Herman Blume by the pool in his Budweiser boxer shorts drinking coffee with bourbon and smoking a cigarette and singing along. "And I'm one too many mornings and a thousand miles behind."

Ghostbusters - I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Have Never Met). The mere mental image of Peter Venkman crooning this to a mortified Dana Barrett..... "I can't understand, she let go of my hand / And left me here facing the wall / I'd sure like to know, why she did go / But I can't get close to her at all."

Lost In Translation - From A Buick 6. An alternative karaoke moment in which Bob Harris sings the blues. "Well if I go down dyin' you know she's bound to put a blanket on my bed."

Wild Things - A Simple Twist Of Fate. Here's what I'm thinking - during the closing credits when the movie keeps flashing back to show us what REALLY happened, we see Ken Bowden putting on the neck brace, getting ready for court, singing this song. "He woke up, the room was bare, he didn't see her anywhere."

Broken Flowers - Not Dark Yet. Here I'm picturing a sort of "Magnolia"-ish moment in which Murray's Don Johnston forlornly sits on his sofa and sings this to the camera. "There's not even room enough to be anywhere / It's not dark yet but it's gettin' there."

What About Bob? - Subterranean Homesick Blues. This one is because I love the thought of Bob Wiley re-creating Bob Dylan's video. "Ah, get born, keep warm, short pants, romance, learn to dance / Get dressed, get blessed, try to be a success."

CIFF Review: 1001 Grams

"1001 Grams" centers around the Norwegian national kilo which is kept under scrupulous security at the nation's institute for weights and measures, a premise that blatantly belies its thematic intention to explore the balance a person tries to maintain in his or her life. Of course, as "Michael Clayton's" Karen Crowder once so ominously noted, that balance is "a shifting balance", one that is not so much a struggle to maintain as to find.

A film treating a kilogram with the reverency of "original, not rereleased - underlined - Frank Zappa albums" is clearly intended as an affair of the quirky, and director Bent Hamer gleefully obliges. He layers his films with smart cars and bird songs and cutesy shots like a gaggle of scientists walking single-file in the rain with matching umbrellas. Counteracting this quiet if insistent vibe of cutsiness, however, is matter-of-fact Marie (Ane Dahl Torp). An early shot finds her in a queen-sized bed but all wrapped up in a comforter and blanket straddling only one side, leaving the other empty. This is because, as we learn, her husband has left her. Yet more than that this bit of evidential characterization reveals her as someone so rigidly precise that if a portion of her mattress is rendered unoccupied, she will take painstaking care to ensure it remains spotless.

Her Nordic blonde hair often pulled back in tight ponytails, her demeanor rarely betraying emotion, Marie easily could have devolved into a brittle ice queen. But Dahl's performance matches the character's precision, her general air in tune with a home of sleek living room furniture that she ignores to sit on a bench along the wall, as if the arrangement is so faultless she cannot dare disturb its symmetry. Of course, her life balance, as it must be, is shifted when her father passes away. And seeing as how he was the institute's representative to squire Norway's kilo to the annual conference in Paris where it is inspected to ensure it has retained its official condition, the job is passed from father to daughter.

Naturally transporation of the kilo goes awry, further symbolizing an already symbolic descent into weightlessness of the soul, and it will all be rectified by The Frenchman In The Jaunty Hat, the male counterpart to The Manic Pixie Dream Girl (er, strike that!). She takes down her hair, literally, in his presence, as his birdsong-listening and tree-planting ways cause her to embrace the vitality of life. And all of this, to be honest, might be a tad unbearable if Torp didn't sell it by not really selling it at all - by which I mean she convincingly crafts a closed-off individual, one who isn't lurching so much as listing. If the quirky pieces of plot threaten to throw the scale out of whack, it is Torp who keeps it properly weighted.

CIFF Review: August Winds

Prior to my showing of "August Winds" at the Chicago Film Festival, its lead actress, Dandara de Morais, was introduced and made mention of it being not only her first film but the first non-documentary film of its director, Gabriel Mascaro. Even if she had not offered this informative tidbit, it would have been easy to surmise as the film is clearly less concerned with narrative than National Geographic-ism. Set in the Alagoas of Brazil, Mascaro effortlessly captures the sensation of a specific place on camera, of thunderstorms gathering on the precipice of the Pacific, occasionally allowing for cascades of rain to blot out the camera, as if we're watching in a poncho under a useless awning, and reveling repeatedly in towering palm fronds that its characters sometimes scale.

But then, it's not merely a travel brochure on celluloid. Those palm fronds are routinely the backdrop for hard labor, busting up coconuts and then hauling them on a tractor trailor, and with those rains come the tide and the wind, and with the wind comes a kindly mystery man (Mascaro) recording the wind for reasons that don't much exist beyond "Need More Story Here". He conveniently swoops in simply to wash up onshore not along after, dead. This is where the story, as it were, finds its (miniature trickle of coconut) juice in Jeison (Geova Manoel dos Santos) and Shirley (de Morais) attempting to care for the deceased when no one else appears much interested.

Many of Marasco's compositions evoke the haunting and beatific passages that open another Malick movie, "A Thin Red Line." But whereas that establishing passage documented Jim Caviezel's Pvt. Witt seeming to find a sort of mystical Eden, the prevalent air currents of "August Winds" would seem to find something more foreboding. At one point Jeison talks of how the rocks in the ocean have "lungs", suggesting they are ineffably alive, and which distinctly alludes to the overriding notion of nature reclaiming this rock.

Yet the film, in spite of its many shots showing the tide inching closer and closer, bit by bit, resists this notion. Its repeatedly decadent wide open frames of nature never come across terrifying, even when they are supposed to, only as reminders of its resplendence. And even if the wind recorder's dead body is shown without compromise, it is treated with a noticeable absence of pity, several local kids approaching it with whirling noisemakers as Jeison cleans it, their way of celebrating the life he must have led. We barely know him but we assume he must have gone out like Bodhi, dying doing what he loved, consumed by his meteorological environment.

CIFF Review: The Fool

In the frigid darkness of a Russian Night, Dima (Artem Bystrov), sort of a Eurasian version of Joe the Plumber, strikes out down the sidewalk while a pop anthem on the soundtrack rises, its rhythm matching the urgency of his every stride. He is not a man functioning on account of high-falutin' ideals but from a place of mere human decency, simply wanting to save the 800 souls unwittingly resting inside a decrepit tenement building tottering on the verge of collapse. It is a hero's moment but Dima, the film argues and betrays with its title, is not a hero. As the camera pans alongside him it eventually comes to a standstill with a red traffic light in the foreground of the frame. It's telling Dima to stop, of course. But he doesn't stop. He won't stop. He's a fool.

The chief of a maintenance crew in a bleak, unnamed Russian town, he is called to a housing complex on account of a burst bathroom pipe only to find the entire edifice fissuring from the ground to the top floor. Upon doing some quick calculations he reasons it has roughly 24 hours before it splits apart and crumbles - perhaps a narrative stretch but sometimes fierce allegories require a stretch - and so like the RMS Titanic functioning as a 46,000 ton metaphor for Victorian Society about to crack apart and go under, this building of mis-managed apathy and greed at the center of director Yuri Bykov's "The Fool" comes to resemble and, in turn, repudiate a society seemingly content to let anyone not on the top rung founder.

Dima's wife (Darya Moroz), and his mother and father who live with them, urge him to turn his back on the problem, arguing that to stir up shit will only effect a target on his back. He stirs up shit anyway - literally, in fact, by barging into the birthday celebration of the town's mayor and money-grubbing power-broker, Nina (Nataliya Surkova).

As Nina takes the stage to make a speech, Dima is glimpsed periodically in the background, appearing woefully out of place in his sweater and stocking cap, like he's time-traveling extra at an "Anna Karenina"-esque soiree. The contrast between these pompous, wine-swilling, back-patting chieftains and the poverty-stricken and hardscrabble addicts for whom Dima brazenly goes to bat would be crudely broad if it didn't ring with so much head-shaking truth.

Finally, upon being explained the situation, they adjourn to a conference room and debate what to do, only to realize their rampant mis-direction of funds that could have aided the dwelling's repair has left them with virtually no options. How do they evacuate 800 people when there is no place to put them? What happens when they are forced to explain themselves to higher-ups in the midst of the evacuation? This sequence, and ensuing ones like it, are filled with none-too-subtle, perhaps too much so, explaining and politicking to the point that one characer literally admonishes out loud their "beauracratic" bellyaching. It also betrays how the backstory and motivations of the rich get more face time than the those of the poor, but maybe that's intended. Who in Putin's Russia gets more face time than the rich and powerful? The poor's motivation is meaningless and hardly existent. The old man playing cards actively roots for a collapse.

In this elongated middle act, Dima also appropriately kind of becomes lost amidst the movers and shakers, as his attitude bears no significance to the choices being made by those who really run the show. He is at their mercy, as everyone is, and yet when he makes his inevitable choice in the impassioned conclusion to take a stand, Bykov takes care to illustrate his protagonist's ethics as being both righteous and irresponsible, clinging to humanity even as he surrenders his soul.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Angels in the Outfield (1951)

Oh, I've done it. Sure, I've done it. My beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers are in a crucial spot and I will, often without even realizing it, fold my hands. And even if I'm not technically saying a prayer, well, I'm still praying. Yes, yes, yes. For the love of......obviously. I've heard it before. God, they'll tell you, doesn't have time to care about sports. That painfully played out sentiment, however, seems to miss the idea - that those same people will often spout off to you - of prayer not so much as communication with God (whomever you think God to be) as a means of comfort. I don't expect God to answer in the middle of a Nebraska game when I pray. That's insanity! If He did, Terrence Nunn would have caught that ball. Nebraska games arouse emotional agony within me, and so I pray to assuage that agony, and in that assaugement, God or no God, I find a sense of......faith.

This lengthy wind-up then functions as a way to suggest the inherent danger in the premise of Clarence Brown's 1951's celestially-inclined baseball opus "Angels in the Outfield". Here's a film suggesting that if you do pray to God in regards to your favorite sports team that He might just assign a few angels as athletic emissaries to assist in the cause. Perhaps this is why it was, according to TCM, the favorite film of one President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Perhaps he sat in the Oval Office and conversed with charitable, if busy, attendants of God. Perhaps he imagined invisible angels - like the film - helping to manipulate the goings-on in the Sentate Chamber, helping to push through bills he supported. Do we have an interstate system because of angels?!

If you, like me, came of age in the 90's, chances are you remember the 1994 remake more than the original, even if you haven't seen either one. That "Angels in the Outfield", however, updated the baseball team in question from the Pittsburgh Pirates to the then California Angels (because subtlety) and made it so the audience could actually see the angels (because subtlety) and then turned those angels into comical plot devices. It also chose tell its story primarily from the viewpoint of a young foster child (a young Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who prays for his favorite father's team to win the pennant because he naively sees it as his one hope to be re-united with his pops.

The original focuses on the viewpoint of Pirates' manager Guffy McGovern (Paul Douglas), whose team is almost as bad as it was in the Aughts. This immense awfulness causes him to be a mean old son of a bitch, sort of a Leo Durocher, a man whose own opinion on the Supreme Being boiled down to His watching over drunks and third basemen. Ol' Guffy seems about the same - until, that is, an angel (voiced by James Whitmore) from on high begins speaking to him, explaining that his spectacularly terrible team has been receiving an inordinate number of prayers to get better and now he's been ordered by You-Know-Who to aid the cause.

These prayers, it turns out, are being offered by a precocious orphan, Bridget (Donna Corcoran), who simply feels bad for the Pirates. And as it turns out she can actually see the angels on the field of play, which renders her as one heck of a story for burgeoning sportswriter Jennifer Paige (Janet Leigh). That's a nifty little subplot in "Angels in the Outfield", the typically tempestuous relationship between coaches and sportswriters. Yet here the coach and sportswriter eventually becomes allies, and Jennifer helps Guffy to find inner peace as much as the fellas with harps and wings. Together they form the obligatory ersatz family with Bridget as she and Guffy bond over their similarly unbelievable experience.

That experience leads to an improbable if wonderful "Miracle on 34th St."-ish subplot in which Guffy is essentially put on trial before the commissioner of baseball (Lewis Stone) since he might be off his rocker and unfit for duty by claiming to be in contact with celestial beings. (I couldn't stop imagining the extravagant PR travesty that would unfold should Roger Goddell attempt to chair the same inquisition.) In the end, however, "Angels in the Outfield" is not particularly interested in making others believe in God's messengers.

In the climactic winner-takes-the-pennant contest, the angels leave the Pirates and Guffy on their own because Guffy has broken the rules established by his heaven-sent guardians when he momentarily returns to his rubish ways. This puts the onus on the Pirates themselves, and on the washed-up pitcher Saul (Bruce Bennett). Initially, he does well. Then, he struggles. The fans boo, even the assistant coach begs his manager to take him out, but Guffy sticks with him. He's found faith, within himself and in those surrounding him.

The Real Slugs of Pulp Fiction

"Pulp Fiction" was released twenty years ago this month. I think this means I'm supposed to post some sort of comprehensive retrospective breaking down, in order, its genesis, its violence, its structure, its influence and its legacy. I think I'm supposed to talk about how its existence as postmodern pastiche correlates directly to its moral emptiness and how that moral emptiness coorelates directly to the 666 briefcase which likely (?) contains Marsellus Wallace's soul and how Marsellus Wallace's soul correlates directly to the film's circular structure which correlates directly to the film's Vanilla Coke™-infused nostalgia trip which, I think, brings me back to it being a postmodern pastiche. But there is something each rehash of the rehash of the rehash of the rehash of the rehash, etc., doesn't mention. I'm talking, of course, about Sammy the Slug.

"The Banana Slug, a bright yellow, slimy, shell-less mollusk commonly found on the redwood forest floor," says the UC Santa Cruz web site, "was the unofficial mascot for UC Santa Cruz coed teams since the university's early years. The students' embrace of such a lowly creature was their response to the fierce athletic competition fostered at most American universities." Why Q.T. chose to give an onscreen shout-out to the Banana Slug seems to boil down to an ex-girlfriend, as Andrea Pyka of City On A Hill Press reported eight years ago. Or maybe Tarantino just likes slugs like he likes Uma Thurman's feet. 

Whatever the case may be, the UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs Women's Volleyball team, currently 11-5, takes on Redlands tonight, and we here at Cinema Romantico would like to wish them the best.

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A Coppola Christmas

One of the more famous moments of Sofia Coppola's stone-cold gem "Lost In Translation" finds our principal duo, Bob (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johannson), with a few friends in a private karaoke room because it's Tokyo and that's what you do. There is sake, of course, and delightfully bad versions of songs, naturally, and then Bob sits down and effects a rendition of "More Than This" by Roxy Music. It's a moment of minor absurdity mixed impeccably with genuine pathos, Nick Winters crossed with Lou Reed.

Anymore the Christmas season elicits that same sort of emotional mixture within me. I've always called it my favorite time of year, and it is, because when I think of Christmas I think of F. Scott Fitzgerald talking (writing) about "the real snow, our snow", the Midwestern snow cuz he's a Midwestern mo-fo like me, and "the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow." Oh Jesus how that end-of-the-book passage warms my winter-adoring soul, insulating it against the crass commercialization, credit card debt, endless airplay of "Do You Hear What I Hear?", and enforced merriment.

But, of course, it also speaks to why the Christmas season makes me so profoundly sad, because that beautiful end-of-the-book passage is all about the most beautiful of all femme fatales - nostalgia. And the Christmas season is soused in nostalgia, conjuring up fond thoughts of holidays gone-by, of innocence, of advent calendars, of watching bowl games with my Grandpa Mercati which immediately - to paraphrase Kathleen Kelly - makes me miss him so much that I almost can't breathe. These thoughts make me sad. These thoughts make me happy.

No holiday special can do this strange melancholic joy that I feel every December justice and is why if you had asked me 72 hours ago what one filmmaker I would most want to see try his/her hand at attempting to right the wrong of so many holiday specials of yore, there is an 87.3% chance I would said, seriously, Sofia Coppola. Who mingles melancholy with joy like her, and where has she ever brought them together better than in "Lost In Translation"?

So imagine my reaction when Ramin Setoodeh of Variety exclusively reported that Sofia would be re-uniting with her once upon a time wistful leading man for a holiday special - it was jaw on floor followed by "Kylie Tickets Just Went On Sale!!!" screams of ecstasy. "We’re going to do it like a little movie," Murray explained to Variety. "It won’t have a format, but it’s going to have music. It will have texture. It will have threads through it that are writing. There will be prose. It will have a patina style and wit to it. It will be nice." Variety then confirmed that Coppola herself confirmed the project, explaining "Not sure when it will air, but my motivation is to hear him singing my song requests." I don't mean to offer suggestions to Ms. Coppola for songs because her taste is fabulous, though I very much look forward to a Bill Murray interpretation of "Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella".

"The holly green, the ivy green, the prettiest picture you've ever seen," go the words to one of my mom's favorite christmas carols, "Christmas In Killarney." Holly's nice. Ivy's fine. It does make for a pretty picture. But a Christmas in Coppola-ville......in dulci jubilo.

Go For Sisters

"Go For Sisters" opens with a parole officer, Bernice (Lisa Gay Hamilton), listening to a client tell a sob story with a fair amount of resonance as to why she violated the terms of her prison release. Bernice waits until she's finished and then, even-keeled, gives no quarter, advising her parolee that she did what she did and that it was a breach of the rules, end of story. She tells the trainee listening in how each day is filled with these stories, these desperate attempts to be let off the hook, and how you have to tamp down your emotions and do your job.

Then Fontayne (Yolonda Ross) enters and sits down and tells a sob story with a fair amount of resonance as to why she violated the terms of her prison release. It's a mirror image of the preceding moment aside from one crucial detail: Fontayne was Bernice's best friend in a previous life. They were so close they were essentially sisters. In the years since they have drifted apart, but here they are, all of a sudden, back together. Bernice cuts her a break.

You never take sides against the family as another generally known film once taught us, and "Go For Sisters" is all about the way in which family, blood or by choice, affects the characters' decision-making. When the cops come calling for Bernice's son and he disappears, apparently south of the nearby border where he has possibly become involved in the smuggling of illegal Chinese aliens into the states, she will have to set aside the morally rigorous attitude her job has cultivated to find him. And to find him, she needs the help of her once-lost, now-found faux-sibling, Fontayne, and her criminal contacts.

That's a scenario tinged in contrivance, Bernice's chance reunion with the person who can help her most, yet "Go For Sisters" is much more concentrated on behavior in spite of its substantial plotting. For such an imperative mission the film's pace is noticably non-urgent, John Sayles, who wrote, directed and edited, being far more content to let the relationship between the two women work as the film's true heartbeat. And the gregarious Hamilton and laid-back Ross forge a credible dynamic, one in which their friendship is slowly re-kindled.

There is, however, an eventual (and welcome) interloper in this buddy "cop" dynamic. Needing someone more familiar with the finer points of investigative work, Bernice and Fontayne are directed to a retired cop, Freddy Suarez, played by Edward James Olmos in a superb performance of supreme gravelly authenticity, magnetically low-key. He is a man with a degenerative eye disease and debt brought on not by foolish choices but by the ways of the world. He accepts the work because he needs the cash, and in the film's funniest moment, he rips up the "For Rent" sign on his lawn when he gets paid and casts it aside.

These three form your traditional un-traditional family, and observing them as they press forward makes for an engagingly low-key experience. The driving story point of Bernice's son sort of strangely falls out of focus, even it's wrapped up, and curiously Sayles, often a supremely socially conscious filmmaker, seems less interested here in the socio-politics of the region, and also not quite as invested in milieu. But maybe that's on purpose. "This isn’t Mexico," Suarez says dismissively of Tijuana. "This is like a theme park for bad behavior."

To see the way it all works is to understand why so many might try such foolhardy ventures to flee it. As such, our trio, all fueled by different forms of desperation, come to symbolize all those would-be immigrants trying to make it into America from points south, fueled by desperation of their own.

Gone Girl

“Gone Girl” opens with Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) advising in voiceover how he frequently dreams of taking the head of his lilting wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) and cracking it open in the figurative hope of seeing what psychological remnants come spilling out. This restrained reading of gruesome dialogue helpfully establishes Nick as someone with a possible motive for having murdered his spouse if she were to, say, go missing, which she will. It is also helpful, however, because it puts forth the film’s foremost question – what is going on inside Amy’s head?

The same could be asked of Nick, but Nick is a guy and guys are so simple to read, whereas women, to quote master of observation Jerry Seinfeld, “are working on a whole other level.” Amy’s working on a whole other level, so much so, in fact, that by the time this two-and-a-half hour pulp-plus extravaganza concludes, the philosophical contents of her cerebellum remain inaccessible, possibly because they were non-existent outside the motives of the film's dueling creators.

Point of View is everything in “Gone Girl”. For the first-third of the film, in fact, it’s two separate films running concurrently, one seen through the eyes of Nick and one told explicitly by Amy. In the present, Nick wakes one morning in North Carthage, Missouri, a place fresh off the subdivision cookie cutter, standing by the garbage at the end of his driveway, as if his sense of self-worth has been put out with the trash bags. After an afternoon of beer and board games at the bar he runs with his twin sister (Carrie Coon), he returns home to find the front door ajar, the glass coffee table smashed and his wife missing. He summons the authorities, Detective Boney (Kim Dickens) and Officer Gilpin (Patrick Fugit). They detect something amiss. Nick seems a little too at ease. He emits too chipper an air in public and the media, represented by Missi Pyle doing a barely not-at-all veiled Nancy Grace impression, seize on this liveliness to paint him, in their sensationalist opinion, as a heartless bastard with something to hide.

Meanwhile, the other movie, told in flashbacks building toward the now, something feels even more amiss. Speaking in voiceovers supposedly culled from a journal she authors with a pink fluffy pen, Amy chronicles the romantic rise of her marriage to Nick and its subsequent fallout. As a trust fund baby on account of a bestselling line of kids book – “The Amazing Amy” – written by her parents, she is the bread-winner, until an economic downturn that causes this storybook story to morph into a beautifully shot Lifetime Movie with her as the Battered Spouse and he as the Potentially Violent Husband. But these sequences, perfectly worded, softly lit, and scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross in an awesomely caustic lampoon of a stock Love Theme are purposely too polished to be true.

It is here when the film’s mystery assumes a different shape, and also when it enters that rich, sprawling territory of Spoilervania and so, as your faithful reviewer, I am required by hazily defined critical “law” to refrain from specifics. Thus, I proceed cautiously, if a bit recklessly, and suggest that at this point the two interlocking stories converge with a lion’s roar and a fairly compelling whodunit? emerges momentarily as a transcendent Sleater Kinney cinematic anthem of female empowerment, Amy Dunne metamorphosing into Fay Forrester by way of Ellen Berent. It is also, however, the moment when the story Amy Dunne has been telling is co-opted, a la “The Amazing Amy”, by David Fincher, the director, and Gillian Flynn, the screenwriter, and also the writer of the novel on which the film is based.

The book, which I have not read, has elicited accusations of principally being trash, and while the film is most assuredly full of trashy elements, it also strives for something topical. It's a meme generator in movie form, the film that will (has) launched a thousand op-eds, a morality play as told by sociopaths, outside of the high-priced blood-sucking defense attorney (Tyler Perry) who, in the film's biggest joke, comes across pretty darn decent. It is attempting to re-fashion marriage as a sadistic battle of the sexes by filtering it through the framework of a standard-issue thriller replete with insane twists and re-boots of the playing field. It repeatedly tilts the winds of favor back and forth between Mr. and Mrs., thereby alternating between anti-feminism and feminism, deliberately offering ammunition to each faction.

Tucked within its girth is an intriguing idea of how all humans suffer a sort of break from reality, how a person's point of view is created and distorted by his or her wants and needs, and how every person is an unreliable narrator of his or her life. Amy might be an unreliable narrator, but Fincher and Flynn eventually are proven unreliable too. They make the missing woman of their film's title jump through so many hoops and undergo so many personality shifts that she ceases to be a real person, and the answer of what is knocking around inside her head is never answered.

In this romantic crusade, the film winds up falling, more or less, on the side of Nick, even if it portrays him as inattentive, hot-headed and obtuse, primarily because it transforms his bride into a psychotic android made to do whatever the narrative requires to check another item off the Issue Rolodex. Yet, paradoxically, even if Amy comes across as fictive, she is still the character with the most life, as if she's the automation in “Hugo” in need of her own twisted variation on that heart-shaped key. I yearned for her to find that key. I yearned for a breach of protagonist protocol, for Amy Dunne to throw off the shackles of the Auteur Theory, unlock the restraints of the Schreiber Theory, reclaim the story, open a vein in her forehead, and bleed all over the screen.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Notorious (1946)

Alicia (Ingrid Bergman) and Devlin (Cary Grant), two American government agents working undercover in Rio in the wake of WWII, are at a racetrack, out in the open, exchanging information. Thus, to avoid arousing suspicion they affect the manner of a smiley jovial lovebirds. And their plastered-on grins stand in hilariously stark contrast to a conversation that quickly devolves from secret agent X’s and O’s into Alicia's job-required philanderings. They are, in other words, the evocation of any couple faking a perfect life for the sake of the public.

In seeing and attempting to process David Fincher's ballyhooed "Gone Girl", a film very much about the, shall we say, disaffection of marital unions, I kept returning to "Notorious", my favorite film from the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. It is not unlike so many of his works, an elegantly, elaborately crafted political thriller involving Nazis, MacGuffins and his requisite cameo. Yet its suspense, which is as genuine as it is diabolical, is manufactured less from its traditional thriller elements than a love triangle so sophisticated and cruel in its intention and execution that it belies said term. The espionage of "Notorious" is less of the governmental variety than the romantic.

The film opens with Alicia's father is convicted in a Miami courtroom of being a Nazi spy. She promptly throws a party as a means to get drunkenly obliterated and this sequence is conveyed in a single shot, the camera positioned in back of Devlin's rakish head. As such, we can't see his expression as he watches Alicia make a fool of herself, we can only see Alicia's expression in attempting to size up this mystery man. Who is he? Why is he here? She doesn't even seem to know him, yet throws herself at him anyway, and he obliges. It's painful to watch, her neediness frightfully palpable and augmented by her intoxication, and Devlin proceeds to prey on that very neediness.

He and his superiors are attempting to infiltrate a ring of Nazi expats in Brazil headed up by Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains), who long ago loved Alicia, and still does. Thus, she is called upon to enter a relationship with their target, using his affection for her against him, the ultimate betrayal of loving trust, and that relationship begets marriage.

The plot, however, thickens, as it must, when Alicia falls for Devlin. Does he fall for her? Yes, if not exactly. He's "in love," to quote Alicia, "with a no good gal", with "some little drunk...who isn't even worth wasting words on." That's how she sees herself and that's how he sees her, wanting her to be a Madonna, yet convinced she's a whore, even if she exists, truthfully, between those extremes. So when Devlin is ordered to order her into another man's bed, he promptly becomes enraged at her, and even if he's the one ordering her to do it, she does it not so much out of duty bound obligation, but as a way to exact some sort of twisted romantic retribution on him and emotional flagellation on herself. Ah, love - ain't it grand?

The trickiest and perhaps most brilliant aspect of "Notorious" is how Sebastian, the Nazi, emerges as more deserving of sympathy than Devlin. His love for Alicia is pure. Devlin's is not, driven by jealousy and his own emotional failings. One of the film's curious details is Devlin letting himself be seen with his operative in front of Sebastian. Admittedly my formal training in government undercover tactics is strictly cinematic, but it seems somewhat odd for the handler to present himself with his charge in front of the target. This, of course, matters not, specifically because Devlin vs. Sebastian is not Spy vs. Spy but Suitor vs. Suitor.

The elongated party sequence that finds Alicia taking her husband's key to get into the off-limits wine cellar to find a fake bottle of vino that contains uranium, or some such plot-advancing nonsense, comes across not like action-adventure derring-do but a man and woman trying to get away with infidelity. And in the moment they are about to be caught red-handed, Devlin forces Alicia to kiss him, meaning they are caught......red-handed. It's an ingenious ruse, of course, to obfuscate what they were really doing. Except that in spite of what they were really doing, what Devlin is actually doing is attempting to score points in a devious contest for Alicia's affection.

The spy story is summed up when Sebastian learns the truth and covertly feeds his bride arsenic. Ostensibly this is because her true identity will compromise his Nationalsozialismus, but much more than that he is a mere embittered husband exacting relationship revenge. If I can't have her, he won't have her - he being Devlin, except that Devlin will have her, because he shows up to rescue her in the nick of time. And as he escorts her down the staircase in that unforgettable concluding sequence, he seems less knight in figurative shining armor than Will Hunting telling Ponytail Guy "How do you like them apples?"

Sebastian is then summoned by his evildoing cohorts to meet his doom, though funnily enough, I suspect that even as she makes her "escape", Alicia is on the way to her doom too.

5 Best 'TNT Movies'

"The Judge" opens this Friday. I have heard mixed reactions. Some have been filled with vitriol, some have been mixed, some have been blah, a couple have been positive. Unfortunately it will take me at least a couple years to weigh in with a reaction of my own, specifically because "The Judge" appears to be the epitome of a TNT Movie.

I'm not talking about original movies made by TNT. No, I'm talking about theatrical films that have left the theater, been released on DVD, had their bow on HBO or Starz or whatever, and now found their Sun City-ish retirement home on cable TV.

A TNT Movie is not only shown on Turner Network Television. A TNT movie can, in actuality, be seen on TBS, USA, BRAVO, SPIKE, so on, so forth. You may have seen a particular TNT Movie, you may have not, but crucially you never watch a TNT Movie from start to finish. You jump in, you jump out, you flip over during commericals of the Olympics (well, I do). You watch ten minutes one Saturday afternoon, you watch twelve minutes one Wednesday night, a little here, a little there. A TNT Movie is not meant to be experienced, it is meant to be a casually amusing distraction from something else. The TNT Movie, as the digital age advances with sheer abandon, will one day, rather soon, be extinct, and so we must pay it homage.

5 Best 'TNT Movies'  

5. Ocean's Eleven

This is, frankly, almost too high in, shall we say, quality to make the list. Yet, it is a TNT Movie because you can so swiftly and pleasingly fall into its classically transitory elements.

 4. National Treasure

As a whole, I didn't much care for "National Treasure" turning history into a game of cloak and dagger. Yet, I confess, there is something semi-magical about Nicolas Cage's wide-eyed innocence and total belief in cockamamie cartography that comes through so much better in three to four minutes at a time.

3. Cocktail

Coughlin's Law: Anything Is Better Than "Cocktail" On TNT Except For Everything On An Absurdly Lazy Saturday Afternoon.

2. Runaway Jury

As a Movie, it is ephemeral. As a TNT Movie, it is quintessential. It is stacked to the rafters with quality actors, all of whom may not be, shall we say, Day-Lewis-ing but who are nonetheless phoning it in with professional pizazz. It is, to paraphrase Gene Hackman's character himself, the (almost) ultimate movie to sit in your Barcalounger and let wash over you for two minutes between the sixth and seventh innings.

1. A Few Good Men

You know that archaic saying "It's Five O'Clock Somewhere"? We here at Cinema Romantico prefer "'A Few Good Men' Is On TV Somewhere." This is the Washington and Lincoln of TNT Movies. To prove it, I will simply advise that I have never, in fact, seen "A Few Good Men" from beginning to end but that I have seen all of "A Few Good Men." And I have seen it all because I have, over the years, bit by bit, watched the entire film in increments on TNT.

Locke

"I have a list of things to do tonight while I'm driving." This is what Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy) says to his son via hands-free phone as his swank BMW rolls along the motorway between Birmingham and London, and it's one of the more dryly hilarious movie lines of the year. He refers to "list" as if it consists of eggs and milk and toilet paper and Double AA batteries. In reality it involves talking a cider-soused subordinate through the supervision of erecting "the biggest single concrete wall ever made in Europe outside of nuclear military projects" and confessing to his wife that he's not only cheated on her - he's on his way to the birth of the son his affair has wrought.

The hook of the film is that it's set entirely within the confines of the car, his only interactions handled via phone. It sounds gimmicky, sure, yet there is an undercoating of truth in the premise. Take "Phone Booth", a thriller that concocted a storyline solely to keep its protagonist squeezed into the titular object for ninety minutes, whatever the cost. "Locke", for all its intended claustrophobia, never feels phony. After all, ours is a world spent primarily on the phone, walking, talking, scrolling, conducting meetings on an earpiece in the bathroom. Time waits for no mobile device!

That said, there is no doubt in my mind that Tom Hardy took up director Steven Knight's offer for the singular role as a challenge. He's that kind of actor, and he's also an actor who delights in tricking out his voice. Whether it was "Warrior", where he spoke with a bowlful of Pennsylvanian mush, or "The Dark Knight Rises", where he seemed to have undergone some sort of space-aged auto tune, he's clearly taken with the concept of vocalization as an actorly tool. In this film, however, he simply employs his own charming English lilt, and it's incredibly effective.

On the phone, he's consistently calm, reasoned, clearly skilled at delegating. When he talks to the nurse at the hospital, he twice coolly corrects her that he's simply the "father", nothing more, nothing less. When he confesses his awe-inspiring unfaithful idiocy to his wife, his follow-up involves "a practical next step". But when he's off the phone......he lets it all go. He screams, he pounds the steering wheel, he has invective dialogue with himself.

Those external monologues are convincing in as much as so many of us have conversations with ourselves in the car, and they helpfully explain the Ivan Locke backstory that would have been impossible to receive otherwise. And that backstory, concerning his own absentee father, is meant to illuminate why he might apparently turn away his current family for a new one.

That age-old analysis, however, is less interesting than examining the metaphorical parallel the screenplay (also by Knight) manfactures quite broadly via this concrete wall that will form the foundation of a new building. If the concrete is not poured right then the wall won't be structurally sound and the if the wall is not structurally sound than the whole building, eventually, will come tumbling down. You know, like his marriage, and Hardy's best bit of acting involves expressing the belief that in making his one colossal mistake he has wiped out any chance of making amends. He believes in building, not re-building. At the same time, he also wants to give his new son a proper start to life, one he was not afforded and that perhaps led directly to this end. And so, pradoxically, his motives are as noble as they are selfish.

Of course, for all the talk of cement, the whole film, as stated, is set in a car, and the automobile has long been a mechanized emblem of escapes and fresh starts. And Ivan Locke, his face so often framed in swirling street side reflections that seem to make the car momentarily vanish and suspend him in a neon nowhere, disappears into the void between them.

The Two Faces Of January

If nothing else, "Two Face Of January" is an exemplary Greek travelogue, opening at the beatific ruins of the Acropolis and exploring Athens before crossing the blue water of the Mediterranean for Crete where it meanders up the coastline. Even a scene that finds our desperate trio forced to sleep outdoors on stone benches seems like a warmer night's sleep than the warmth of our own beds. That warmth purposely stands in stark contrast to the characters operating within it. They are con-men, well-heeled and completely cool, but also motivationally suspect and inherently unlikable.

Rydal (Oscar Isaac) is an American tour guide in Athens in 1962. His occupation, of course, is a convenient conduit to pontifications on ancient gods to draw parallels to his forthcoming plight, but it's also believable in that it provides the perfect platform to bilk comely female tourists of their drachma. He has just lost his father but actively chosen to avoid the funeral, and when he sees an American, Chester McFarland (Viggo Mortensen), who inexplicably resembles his old man, it provides an excuse to be drawn into an inevitably nefarious orbit.

Indeed, the manner in which Chester and his trophy wife Colette (Kirsten Dunst) reconnoiter Rydal before invoking his accord betrays their status as no mere couple on a honeymoon. He is a swindler, big-time, having defrauded massively moneyed peoples back in the States. And when a P.I. tracks them down, things happen, the P.I. winds up dead and Rydal comes to their aid, helping them to hide out while they wait for fake passports.

While the film has bothersome elements archetypal to the thriller – walking into a hallway at EXACTLY the wrong moment to see the guy propping up a dead body, news reports telling a character EXACTLY what he needs to know – "Two Face Of January", which is based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, is more interested in the psychological than the pulse-pounding. In a deft performance, Mortensen opens with the air of a card shark setting you up for the big steal only to slowly morph into a rich man as basket case, and his crack up becomes the film’s focus as opposed to any gotcha! twist.

The film is set in 1962 but it might as well be 2008 with Chester in a Bear Stearns windbreaker rather than a swag tweed suit, refusing penance and attempting to avoid punishment. He’s not a man running from his past, he’s running from his present. He’s running from who he is, and not getting far, no matter how remote the locales. He, however, seems less equipped to deal with his self-made fate than Colette. Her character may be problematically reduced to an object metaphorically dueled over by the two males, as well as a narrative excuse for Rydal to stay in their company even when their secrets are exposed, but Dunst wrings quiet humanity out of willful acceptance. She’s not so much standing by her man as standing with him, aware of the choice she’s made and the consequences that come with it, a captain who understands she must go down with the ship because her mistakes led directly to the sinking.

The wild card is Rydal. Although the idea of Chester being a non-traditional father figure to him is only sporadic, it still feels overdone, not rising organically from the narrative but dropped in with a heavy hand, desperate to trigger his catharsis. Simultaneously, it is canceled out by the implied notion that he is also attracted to Colette. In the end, he simply seems attracted to the high life. There is no confidence trick in "The Two Faces Of January", only beautiful people in beautiful clothes in beautiful places. Who among us can resist?

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1974)

In ranking the best venues and events at the recent Sochi Winter Olympics (because this is AMERICA and in AMERICA you HAVE to rank EVERYTHING), Will Leitch wrote "(t)he ski jumping itself, while staggering to comprehend (the height and distance they fly is ludicrous), can become a bit monotonous after about 50 jumpers." This idea seemed to be confirmed when I watched the varying ski jumping events through the prism of NBC. I could not help but note how the venue was pumping in bootylicious music between competitors, like the fans required a little something something extra to hold their attention. All I could think was, how spoiled are we? Here, before our very eyes, men and women are literally flying through the air and we view it as so monotonous we need tub thumping beats to keep our minds from wandering. God save all our souls.

God bless Werner Herzog. In 1974, the notoriously eccentric German documentarian, his fancy struck by everything from Russian traffic cops passing themselves off as Jesus to fellow eccentrics deep in the heart of Antarctica, found himself smitten with a Swiss ski jumper and crafted a forty-five minute (shaved down from an hour) made-for-TV film chronicling his impressive athletic leaps from ski chutes high into the sky and to the snowy terrain below.

Well, ski "jumper" is not the right term. Walter Steiner was, in fact, a ski flyer, and I confess that prior to watching this documentary I did not know ski flying was a sporting counterpoint to ski jumping. When I heard Mr. Herzog employ the term ski flying I simply assumed he was, as he will, expressing a mystic reverence for Steiner's abilities, and that a prosaic word such as jump simply did not pay proper homage to a dude who was flying through the goddam air. And yet, even if sky flying really is a sport - it has its own events and world championships but is not part of the Olympics - you still find yourself believing in your heart of hearts that all ski jumping is ski flying. How could it not be?

Herzog and his band of filmmakers employed revolutionary slow motion cameras to capture Steiner's in-air transit down to the most microscopic detail. Nowadays these sorts of cameras are employed by every network televising any sport and so we sit in the comfort of our own homes and watch the tiniest details in the tiniest increments on the biggest televisions in the sharpest high definition. Yet despite Herzog's technological achievements being rendered mute by the passing of time, the images he captures of Steiner in mid-flight are far less ho-hum than holy shit. This is because of the aesthetics - the way in which he paints this not as some sort of athletic endeavor but as a man flying. I mean, I cannot italicize that enough.

Yes, yes, yes, the film is framed around a specific competition taking place at Planica it was then Yugoslavia, and yes, yes, yes, Herzog breathlessly recites the world records Steiner achieves but the exact meters that he reaches are so much less important than when Herzog says his: "it's at this point where ski flying starts to be inhuman."

Steiner is pushing himself right to the boundary of what is humanly possible. He is competing less against competitors and even less against himself than he is competing against - feel free to assume a Herzog-ian accent as you read the ensuing passage - the wind, the mountain, the ground, the non-existent Norse god of ski flying. And while this might make him sound like a romantic daredevil, he is not. Much of the film results around fears of his own safety. The distances he is going are too dangerous and are only achievable because of the point at which sky flying officials set the point from which he begins his descent down the ramp toward takeoff. As such, he willingly moves his launch point down. He still goes further than anyone. Everyone else is going for second place but "place" is irrelevant to Steiner because what does "place" mean when you can fly?

You might be asking: "Wait, isn't the title of the film 'The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner'? When does he carve wood?" He barely does. In the opening minutes we see him displaying his work, and that's it. Never again. Of course, woodcarving is what he does to make a living.

But is it?

Vive Ellen Aim

It was the damndest thing. As the Internet collectively freaked out over the new "Interstellar" trailer (see it here), I immediately planned, as long-time (frustrated) readers of Cinema Romantico know so well, to NOT be the 774,323rd media outlet providing the latest biggest trailer in the history of motion pictures by instead providing the trailer for Walter Hill's thirty-year old, not very beloved "Streets of Fire". It's a joke that never gets old got old a long time ago.

Except plans changed when later in the day I made a daily pit stop over at Roger Ebert's site and, lo and behold, found an Odie Henderson penned "Streets of Fire" retrospective. Kismet, you might say. And I enjoyed it, because while I enjoy forcing my "Streets of Fire" fascination on everyone else, it's a film I rarely "consider". Possibly because a film "from another time, another place" that looks suspiciously like Chicago in the 80's re-imagined as if 2020 was the 50's chronicling a rock 'n' roll diva named Ellen Aim (Diane Lane) being kidnapped by Willem Dafoe - presaging his roles in "To Live and Die In L.A." and "Speed 2: Cruise Control" as if they were rolled into one in an Anne Rice novel - who must then be rescued by the obligatory leather jacketed swashbuckler (Michael Pare) and his accomplice played by Amy Madigan who is almost - almost - as tenacious as an Iowan doesn't deserve "consideration". Yet, Henderson's piece made me consider why I love it.

The title, of course, is taken from a Bruce Springsteen song, but Springsteen, as Springsteen often does, refused to grant the rights for the song to the movie. Which worked out harmoniously because, frankly, that Springsteen song was in no way apropos to the rock 'n' roll fable that director Walter Hill was making. He was making something garish and bombastic, and so Jim Steinman's original tuneage in the form of "Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young" and especially "Nowhere Fast" (see below), which I would in all seriousness name as one of my Top 10 All-Time Movie Soundtrack songs, was exquisitely apt. And that I love these songs so much probably wouldn't surprise you upon advising that on said songs Roy Bittan played piano and Max Weinberg played drums. It's not Springsteen but it's nonetheless infused with the sound of E Street. Of course, I love them!

It wasn't just the music I loved, however, it was the movie too. Why, I wonder? Well, because I saw it when I was an impressionable teenager, I think, and as Henderson writes, "teenaged boys and men who find something in the film to evoke nostalgic feelings for their youth will like it enough to forgive the film its trespasses." One of those trespasses, no doubt, is an attitude toward women, which Henderson fairly addresses. "Her tough-as-nails stage persona hints that she’s strong enough to go on with her life after being dumped by the hero," Henderson writes of Ellen Aim, "yet she becomes completely helpless and victimized as soon as she’s taken hostage." It's an ancient melody. Of course, Thirties Me recognizes these sorts of issues more readily than Teenage Me. So why then, I wonder, does "Streets of Fire" still endure in my mind?

Because of a campy kinda nostalgia, sure, but then there other films I watched in the heyday of my youth that I have long since set out to compost. Like, say, "Commando", the grandiose Schwarzenegger exercise in machismo that I watched near about the same time as "Streets of Fire" and loved just as much. But then while "Commando" did feature Alyssa Milano, the heartthrob of every teenage boy in the 80's, it did not have a pop diva. And my affection for pop divas, we know too well, remains. So maybe it's not "Streets of Fire" that I remember so whimsically. Maybe it's just "Nowhere Fast." Maybe it's just The Attackers. Maybe it's just Ellen Aim.

Most Potentially Retroactive Awkward Oscar Presentation

I have just begun reading Mark Harris's "Five Came Back", a book chronicling five famed Hollywood directors - John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens - and their involvement as filmmakers in WWII. But there was a particular passage in the earlygoing revolving around the 1941 Academy Awards that struck me. I'll let Harris tell it: "When the time came to announce the winner of the award for Best Director, (Frank Capra) decided to break form and, instead of reading the list of nominees, called them all to the stage and instructed them to shake one another's hands in front of the audience."

That sounds bad enough. That sounds like the "sharing of the peace" at my old Lutheran church, which was, like, the worst, man. But then Harris recounts how William Wyler ("The Letter"), Alfred Hitchcock ("Rebecca"), Sam Wood ("Kitty Foyle"), and George Cukor ("The Philadelphia Story") ascended the stage and shook hands only to, of course, have Capra read the name of John Ford ("The Grapes Of Wrath") who was not present. Awk-ward.

This, as it must, got me to thinking. Not thinking about how the 1941 Academy Awards were held at the Biltmore Hotel nor how the 1940 Academy Awards were held at the Coconut Grove and that maybe this is what the Oscars should do to liven things up - host them at the Hollywood Roosevelt and watch stars get blasted on gin gimlets. No, it got me thinking about recent Best Director races, and which ones would have suffered (benefited) the most from being called onstage.

There are obvious choices, like Tarantino being onstage in 1994 when Zemeckis won for "Forrest Gump" (while Krzysztof Kieślowski stands in the background, all like "WTF?") or Polanski not being onstage (for obvious reasons) in 2002 when he won for "The Piano" which would have left poor Marty Scorsese to fake a smile and Pedro Almodovar to likely commandeer the mic and perform some sort of impromptu monologue or Costner "dropping the bomb" in front of Scorsese and Coppola (Francis Ford) in 1990. Benigni being up there for "Life is Beautiful" would have been better if he'd had someone like David Fincher to bop him in the head when he started Benigni-ing. A lot of folks might cite the infamous Bigelow/Cameron showdown in 2009 on account of their shared history but Cameron, for all his Cameron-ness, seemed fairly deferential to his ex-wife on that particular campaign trail.

Some might find 2007 intriguing when The Coen Brothers won for "No Country For Old Men" which would have left the notoriously surly Tony Gilroy ("Michael Clayton") and Paul Thomas Anderson ("There Will Be Blood"), who's got at least a little of the iconoclast in him. Or by 2010, when, in a much mocked decision, Tom Hooper won for "The King's Speech" by beating out David Fincher ("The Social Network"), Darren Aronofsky ("Black Swan") and David O. Russell ("The Fighter"). I imagine Fincher would have just shook his head and probably mumbled "F*** this s***" while Aronofsky probably would have just flipped Tom off and, well, only God knows what Russell would have done.

But I prefer 2001. Imagine the scene. Mel Gibson comes out to present and I mean, really, can't you see Mel Gibson being crazy enough to call all the nominees to the stage to shake hands? He cites stalwart Robert Altman ("Gosford Park") and iconoclast David Lynch ("Mulholland Drive") and ornery Ridley Scott ("Black Hawk Down") and Peter Jackson who, you know, spent a trillion jillion dollars and eleventy bazillion feet of film to make that movie about rings and elves and what-have-ya and, oh yeah. Right. Ron Howard for "A Beautiful Mind." And Ron wins. And then, one by one, Altman and Lynch and Scott and Jackson pass Opie on their way off the stage, sending him a glower that would make him/us shiver. Yup. That's the one.