Pause for the Cause

As I do each and every year on this day, I would like to take a moment and give thanks and pay homage to the anniversary of the single greatest moviegoing experience of my life. You know the film.

Cinema Romantico Defines Movie Awesomeness

Yesterday in the Washington Post, the righteous Alyssa Rosenberg addressed, as she put it, "The tyranny of 'awesome'", an investgation into whether or not the modern-day fancypants catch-all "awesome" is overused. "(T)he way 'awesome' and various other adjectives connoting that something is either the absolute best or the utter worst are used today is even more unnerving," she writes. "Rather than helping us understand the difference between something truly awe-inspiring and something momentarily pleasurable, or between a true travesty and a social misstep, our tendency toward extremes is blurring these gradations and denying us the chance to feel a wider range of emotions."

So we here at Cinema Romantico took it upon ourselves to point out a few things that are truly awe-inspiring as opposed to momentarily pleasurable to allow everyone an ability to grasp precisely what constitues "awesomeness". Now, I understand that by simply spouting them off sans any sort of in-depth and/or convincing explanation as to what "makes" them "awesome" means that I am, as Rosenberg writes, "prevent(ing) inquiry". But inquiry is pointless, you dunderheads, BECAUSE THESE THINGS ARE AWESOME.

Keira Knightley's hat in "Love Actually" is awesome. 

Brock Landers & Chest Rockwell are awesome.

Peter Venkman getting hardly any marshmallow on him at the end of "Ghostbusters" is awesome. 

EVERYTHING in "Top Gun" is awesome.

Kim Gordon's hair in "Tuff Turf" is awesome. 

Otto is awesome. 

This is awesome.

This is also awesome. 

This is absolutely awesome.

OMG, this so obviously awesome why are we even having this conversation???

Why The World Needs A Snow Day

Do you remember “Snow Day”? Surely, you don’t. Who would?! Released in January 2000, “Snow Day” was one of those flavorless cinematic libations from the Dennis Duffy idea machine in the basement of the K-Mart on 38th and 6th when the studio desperately needs something (anything!!!) to dump into theaters during the calendar’s most frigid days when they know no one is going out to see movies anyway. You know, like yesterday in northeast America which became the twelve-thousandth time in the last quarter-century the ever-creative national media found reason to bust out the phrase SNOWMAGEDDON!!!!!! But while CNN was driving around in its blizzardmobile and assorted Manhattan Trader Joe's were assaulted by non-Midwesterners who don’t understand you’ll be able to get that box of Kleenex in 48 hours when its 52 degrees again, I thought of “Snow Day.”

When you grow up in Central Iowa, snow days aren’t exactly commonplace, but they definitely materialize every now and again. My senior year of high school, so impossibly long ago its backdrop was that carefree McRib era known as The First Clinton Administration, snow days repeatedly materialized. All that winter it seemed like once a week my Mom or Dad would tell my Sister and I that, yes, school had been cancelled again on account of a blizzard. And it would feel like all those snowflakes outside my window had transformed into granulated magic, and I would fall back asleep with a smile on my face and a glow in my heart and the sounds of TLC in my ears being piped through my discman. Of course, the issue with snow days and school is that if you get one, you have to make it up, usually in June when the snow is done gone and the humidity has arrived. Ah, all except for my senior year which meant that my school-going adventure concluded on the same day regardless of how many times the glorious white stuff kept me home. All these years later I still cackle with glee over the thought of not having to make up any of those 44 minute daily prison sentences with Mrs. Maxwell.

Yet sometimes I wonder if all the punishment for all those snow days never made up was simply adulthood. When you’re an adult in Central Iowa, it’s like they expect you to come to work in a blizzard simply because you’re a Midwesterner. When you’re an adult in Phoenix, Arizona they don’t have snow because Phoenix, Arizona is America’s anti-oasis of hell. When you’re an adult in Chicago you have don’t have snow days because there is public transportation and even though public transportation is guaranteed to let you down on a normal evening when you’re trying to book it to make that showing of “Two Days, One Night”, well, somehow on the snowiest of days it never ever fails. Well, all except for that glorious Groundhog Day in 2011, the wondrous day of the wonderful blizzard that dropped twenty inches of snow on this fair city and shut it down. I spent the duration of my morning, afternoon and night in pajama pants and watched “Groundhog Day”, because of course I did, and my hardened workaday soul felt nourished, my heart felt full. Every snow angel outside my window was a guardian spirit, every gust of wind a reminder that adulthood can occasionally be enchanted too.

This came to mind while reading Jesse Singal’s article for New York Magazine yesterday in which he proffers a whimsical lament for the Adult Snow Day, the way in which this technological-suffused society of ours means that we can all “work from home”, whether it’s sunny and 75 or snowy as hell and whiteout conditions. Don’t misunderstand, it’s an even-handed piece, one which takes care to point out that in reality “the adult snow day was part of a larger blip in the history of the workplace”, and that our forefathers never took off for snow and simply found “something else” to do. And he’s not wrong. In many ways the article is, as this article is, an exercise in nostalgia, a wish for the way things were when we were kids, and so in my wistful eyes the snow day has essentially gone the way of Dick Enberg and Merlin Olsen wearing corsages while calling The Rose Bowl for NBC.

Still, indulge Mr. Singal his thoughts when he writes “The grown-up world has a tendency to strip things of their magic a bit, but the snow day still served as a wonderful stop sign from the heavens for myopic, overworked adults. What else could grind to a halt, even temporarily, the exhausting, striving adult world of meetings and reports and office memos?” It’s true and it’s what made me realize how desperate this over-busied world of ours needs a new “Snow Day.”

It used to be that when so much snow fell, time would stop, and no one would go to CNN to see reporters showing you how things were outside your own window. No, you’d go to the window and peer through and see the front yard blanketed and more of those magnificent ice particles falling from the heavens no doubt on account of a just Divinity who knew that sometimes it’s best to have a day where you ain’t got shit to do. It’s an idea gradually getting phased out in the name of telecommuting, the antidote to the frosty elixir, and before long I can only assume that children won't have snow days because they will be telecommuting to class because no child will be left behind.

And so even though I'm not “supposed” to employ the term Magic of the Movies lest my fellow film critics label me sentimental (which I am), I call upon the movies to record the magic of the snow day. Perhaps it could be like “A Christmas Story”, the childhood memory of an adult, one told not through archaic contrivances, but bits and pieces of nostalgia fully formed. Perhaps it could be set in the now, featuring a weary grown-up re-connecting with the mythical snow day through his children when school is called off and the iPhones don't work. Whatever it is, we need it, and we need it now.

We must create a keepsake of the blessed snow day before it’s gone.

We Are The Best!

Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and Klara (Mira Grosin) are inseparable pals in 1982 Stockholm. Hanging out after school one day, a few boys pass by and call them names. Angered, they give chase and find the name-callers setting up for band practice in a music room they have reserved at school. Except they haven’t actually reserved it. The name-callers have forgotten to put their names on the sign-in sheet. So Bobo and Klara, thinking quick, put their names on the sign-up sheet and point this out to a teacher as their name-calling enemies are summarily dismissed from the room and the girls are ushered in. Never mind that Bobo and Klara have no idea how to play instruments. They've gotten one over on the name-calling pigs. This isn't about the clampdown so much as vindictiveness.

The term “punk rock” often goes hand-in-hand with visions of rolling around in the gutter, of nihilistically renouncing everything, of Sid and Nancy. That’s not the punk rock ethos director Lukas Moodysson's “We Are The Best!” seeks to explore, however. Joey Ramone is not its paradigm so much as Adrien Brody in “Summer of Sam” when he spiked out his hair, pulled on the Union Jack t-shirt and affected a British accent. That’s the key word – affected. “We Are The Best!” is about teenagers and teenagers are all about affectations.

The lives of Bobo really aren’t screaming for rebellion. They are not so much persecuted outcasts as they are simply uncool. They have relatively normal families whom they view through their prism of sullen teenager-ness as incapable of understanding how they feel and who they are. If they’d made “We Are The Best!”, say, five years later they would have been laying on the floor listening to The Smiths and pondering buying a used synthesizer. It’s not so much punk rock itself that liberates them as they way in which they use punk rock to take a youthful stand.

Kids can also adapt quickly, and Bobo and Klara adapt pretty quickly to the DIY ethos of their chosen genre. They hate gym class. So they concoct a song about hating gym class. They have no idea how to actually play chords. So they employ Hedvig (Live LeMoyne), a classically trained guitarist classmate, to teach them a first, second and third chord, which is all they need. They form a band. They practice. They goof off. They get in fights. Plot is incidental. Tension is minimal. Stakes, that eternal critic buzzword, are marginal. And so fucking what? Stakes are for posers, man.

This film, conveyed with a frenetic camera that can’t keep still, like a kid hopped up on too many sodas from the school cafeteria vending machine, understands the rhythms of childhood – which is to say, there are no rhythms, only spastic stabs at the electric guitar. Some sounds are good, some sounds are bad, but you’re just trying to find your voice amid the din of all your peers, most of whom you probably don’t even like. There is no rise, no fall, no break-up, no reconciliation. There is no conventional arc because the tyranny of grade school resists arcs.

The exclamation point that brings home the film's title is conspicuous. It was no less an authority than Nick Hornby who advised “avoid those exclamation marks, kids, if you want a long career in music.” “We Are The Best!” isn't about a long-term movement or changing a life because “We Are The Best!” has the intelligence to know people so young can't change their lives because their lives - their real lives - are still waiting to begin. “We Are The Best!” is about three chords and a cloud of dust. *Middle finger.*

Blackhat

Late in “Blackhat”, Michael Mann, the Dexter Gordon of the digital camera, composes a glorious suite of shots. It starts with a wide frame of his principal characters, a pair of in-love and on-the-run hackers, Nicholas Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth) and Lien Dawai (Tang Wei), both of them scrolling their smartphones, him at a table and her in a cot, back to the camera. Then, Hathaway puts his phone down and joins her in bed. They lay together, Mann singling out an image of their intertwined arms. Then, it cuts to a close-up his phone buzzing, the computerized world always beckoning, always pulling us away from the physical. And that is the intersection where the glorious, ludicrous “Blackhat” resides.

Centered on cyber terrorism, the film’s roots are in reality, particularly in light of the recent Sony hack. Yet “Blackhat’s” attitude toward actual reality is best epitomized in its leading man, Hemsworth, he of the flowing mane, chiseled abs and button-down shirts opened to the chest at all times. The film’s auteur may be an infamous perfectionist, one who forced Mr. Hemsworth to read and write code, but no one would confuse this part-time cover model with a hacker in the real world. But that’s because in spite of the plot’s legitimacy issues, this isn’t the real world; this is Mann-Land, a wondrous place awash in synth music, machine gun fire, where even the simplest image is filled with as much grandeur as the Hong Kong Harbor at night. And in Mann-Land, Chris Hemsworth is the world’s best hacker.

A mysterious computer keyboard saboteur has set off an explosion in a Chinese nuclear power plant and triggered American stock market hysteria, and has apparently done so by employing a code that Hathaway created. China’s pre-eminent cyber security expert, Chen Dawai (Wang Leeholm), the man tasked to stabilize the threat, conveniently happens to be Hathaway’s old college roommate. Thus, he strikes a deal with American CIA agent Carol Barrett (Viola Davis) to spring Hathaway from the clink to aid the investigation. They greet each other with backslaps and salutations of “bro”, as if all that’s missing is the keg on the lawn, and you half-wonder if Chen’s ulterior motive was simply to get his old pal’s 15 year sentence commuted. And their friendship only garners additional oomph when Hathaway obligatorily falls for Lien, Chien's sister, an adept network programmer also brought into the fold.

Distinct aromas of the Colin Farrell/Gong Li relationship in Mann’s “Miami Vice” can be detected in Hathaway and Lien’s in-the-midst-of-possible-worldwide-catastrophe courtship, partially in the way it pairs off a blackhat and a whitehat, partially in the way Hemsworth seems to be affecting a Farrell-as-Sonny-Crockett whatever-that-was accent, but mostly in the way it is rendered almost exclusively in physical terms. In this film, love is something felt exclusively in your loins. Like Uncas looking at Alice for a split-second in “Last of the Mohicans” and us knowing all we need to know about the Olympic flame of his love, Lien putting a hand on Hathaway’s arm and pulling him out of a trance says more than a hundred thousand “He’s so fine” monologues.

There may be a significant amount of story happening but this relationship between hackers becomes the film’s crux and its grounding, specifically because it seeks to bridge that gap between virtual reality and the reality that’s right in front of us. Midway through the film it’s fair to wonder if we will ever see this rogue, unnamed hacker trotting around the globe by laptop because it seems symbolic to never get a look at his face, to never know our true enemy aside from the mayhem yielded online. Of course, eventually his face is revealed, and his moment of reckoning occurs in a sequence set amidst an Indonesian parade of ancient customs, one wherein Mann unfortunately falls back on the Hollywood trope of turning extras into collateral damage in the name of action. Still, its culmination packs a wallop, not so much from the mano-a-mano suspense as its distinct tangibility, two hackers brought out from behind their screens to swing knives.

“Blackhat” often teeters on the border of self-parody. It’s incessant Mann-erisms might leave those familiar with them thinking he’s plunged overboard and those unversed in his language, verbal and visual, wondering just what in the hell all these off-center frames and clichés posing as dialogue are supposed to be. This reviewer is an acknowledged devotee of the director and adores every trait to such a degree that in the sequence where yet another Michael Mann protagonist stares off at the distant horizon and sees something ineffable to everyone else it left me literally punching the arm of my fellow movie-goer in sheer ecstasy.

Mann is so entirely committed to his aesthetic that he fills every last ounce of every moment with relentless sincerity. When a certain character perishes, the film doesn’t keep galloping, it halts, if only for a moment - first, to present an intense close-up of that character's face and then to reverse the shot as a means to show the character's point-of view, looking up at a brightly lit skyscraper, one last look before one last breath, a singular detail of such awe-inspiring humanity contrasted so epically with the purposeful depersonalization of the plot that it brought tears to my eyes.

Its characters are not particularly complex, but then Mann isn't particularly interested in their psychological dimension. He has created something wholly visceral, a valorous attempt to reclaim the world from its mechanized overlords, to put skin to skin. “Blackhat” begins with a special effected dive into a computer's innards and ends with a shot of Hathaway and Lien clutching at one another's bodies. In today's world, you have to grab hold of someone and just hang the hell on.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Wife vs. Secretary (1936)

The stars, the concept, even the poster, all of it would seem readymade to mark Clarence Brown’s “Wife vs. Secretary” as a hijinks-laden love triangle or even an of-the-era advisory of a lasivicious working woman demonstrating that her place is really the hearth and home. And yet.....that "Vs." of the title is so terribly misleading. It's like the film's marketers wanted audiences to assume it was "Bride Wars" 73 years before "Bride Wars" was released. They wanted it to sound like a rom-com styled OK Corral Shootout. "Only ONE woman can wind up in Gable's arms. Who's it gonna be?!" They wanted to emit the air that it was another in an eternal supply of Hollywood confections that employ their brightest and best females as a means to be reductive to women, to put forth the antiquated idea that where there are two women there is bound to be claws and catfights.

Ah, but "Wife vs. Secretary", bless its forward-thinking soul, knows all this and subverts it, skillfully and successfully. Why it even goes one further and how asks how we look at others and what we see when we look at them and how quick we are to not only judge but to be influenced by scattershot opinions of the masses.

As the film opens, all seems tranquil with the principal trio. Van (Clark Gable) and Linda (Myrna Loy) are happily married and Van's magazine publishing company is running smoothly due in large part to the eternal efforts of his secretary, the unfortunately named Whitey (Jean Harlow). Really, truly, utterly, it's all hunky dory. But then "Wife vs. Secretary" conforms to the wicked stepmother stereotype as Van's mom (May Robson) points out to Linda, as if she hadn't noticed before, the natural effervescent attractiveness of her spouse's secretary. And later at a company party, so many wives of so many employees of Van tell Linda the same damn thing. They basically make Whitey out to be a strumpet because she's blonde and voluptuous and looks like Jean Harlow.

For the remainder of the film, Linda's viewpoint of Whitey is tainted by these baseless accusations. What she sees suggests nothing is amiss, but what she sees seems less than paramount to what she's been told, and so what she's been told becomes what she sees, not that a human being would ever fall prey to such an epistemological crisis. Ha! Take Whitey's boyfriend, this knucklehead named Dave (Jimmy Stewart). He doesn't think it's "natural" for a woman to be working. Natural! "Not made or caused by humankind." Like, on the ninth day God said, "The womenfolk don't work." And when Dave proposes to Whitey, partially out of love but partially out of "Because once you're wearing my ring I'll decree that you don't work no more", she rejects him.

Everything comes to a front at a conference in Havana that Van and Whitey attend as boss & secretary. Linda calls her husband's room only to have, sure enough, Whitey answer. Nothing was happening, but the instant Linda hears that nasally tart voice on the other end of the line every one of her misplaced suspicions comes true. And it's in the moments that follow when "Wife vs. Secretary" soars, putting Van and Whitey into the position where fulfilling carnal desire would be the obvious thing.

In my ongoing effort to watch every Harlow film, I dare say never has Harlean Carpenter been better. She sits on the end of Gable's bed, where his character sits drunkenly, with an impassive expression that still conveys a rolodex of emotion. It's as if every opinion everyone has ever formed of her, whether true or untrue, has been made to bear, dropped on her at once, and the toll the age-old weapon of innuendo can take is palpable. Yet in spite of the slander, she maintains her virtue, and perhaps "Wife vs. Secretary" would have done best to end right there even if various entanglements would have gone unresolved. Instead a little phony baloney is tossed on top, including Whitey getting back together with that tweedle-dum Dave and her awesome integrity is idiotically compromised. The film was smart enough to subvert sexual politics of the day, yet stupid enough to still fall prey to them.

Sniper Backlash Bears Down On Twitter

(AP) Los Angeles CA, January 22 – Based on forecast models, social media meteorologists are predicting an unprecedented outbreak of cultural backlash that could create a perfect storm come Oscar night February 22nd.

A significant cluster of backlash first developed post-Oscar nominations when Ava DuVernay’s “Selma” was passed over for nominations in several major categories, purportedly due to its lack of veracity for historical accuracy regarding the presentation of President Lyndon Baines Johnson. After a few days of heated conversation on the Internet, however, the backlash for “Selma” was downgraded from Trending On Twitter to Lameazoid Maureen Dowd Article. While dissipating, however, the moisture of the “Selma” backlash was still prominent, and “that’s the key,” says Myron Plotz, associate director at the National Backlash Research Institute (NBRI) in Oceanside, California.

“You had all the remnants of this backlash still floating above, for lack of a better term, the information super highway,” Plotz explained, “while a system of high pressure backlash for ‘American Sniper’ was, unbeknownst to most, just beginning to form.” That backlash centered around the complaints of so-called “yahoos in Oklahoma”, a term coined by Salon.com film critic Andrew O’Hehir to describe the same type of people who tore down LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson last year for failing to honor the heroes of Peter Berg’s “Lone Survivor” even though she referred to them as “heroes” in her review.

That high pressure system then collided with a low pressure system of backlash forming from those dismissing “American Sniper” as jingoist propaganda with stars & stripes crust. “Essentially,” explains Plotz, “it was a social media extratropical cyclone. And when the remaining backlash from ‘Selma’ became caught up in that ‘American Sniper’ extratropical cyclone, it exploded.”

Plotz sees the forthcoming 2015 Oscar season as perhaps the most hectic ever. “I don’t want to say it was a perfect storm,” Plotz notes, “because we’ve seen those sorts of levels of atmospheric Internet disturbance before. What we haven’t seen is a rupturing of the social networking crust.” You mean, like a volcano? “Exactly. Think if ‘American Sniper’ actually wins Best Picture. Twitter might literally erupt.” Here's to hoping.

The Interview

In “The Interview”, Seth Rogen (who co-directed with Evan Goldberg) stars as Aaron Rapoport, producer of a talk show called Skylark Tonight whose concept of journalism essentially mirrors any sensationalist grocery store aisle rag. Frankly, he seems okay with his place in the world until a former college classmate calls him on the carpet and he sinks into a mild depression, wondering where his ethics went wrong, determined to turn his cohort, spectacularly vacuous Dave Skylark (James Franco), into a Dan Cortes version of Mike Wallace. To do so, they will score the interview of the new century, one with Kim Jong Un (Randall Park), the supreme leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea since it just so happens his favorite show is Skylark Tonight. But in doing so, they will be recruited by the CIA, represented by a spirited Lizzy Caplan, to assassinate the dictator – er, President, who may or may not – in the parlance of the poetic screenplay by Dan Sterling – actually have a butthole.

Seth Rogen has long been a valuable contributor to Team Apatow and Team Apatow has long been comprised of males molded in the idea of the Manboy, immature dudes content to refrain from progressing, reveling in bong hits and Internet videos like every day is Saturday night. It’s clear, however, that Mr. Rogen has begun feeling affliction identical to that of Aaron Rapoport in terms of his cinematic output, and it’s clear because you can see his attempts to correct it. “Neighbors”, Rogen’s other 2014 film, featured him as a husband and new father navigating super-scary adulthood through the prism of an escalating war with the frat house next door, and now “The Interview” finds him coping with professional insecurity, a the craving to be taken seriously. The great irony obviously is what’s already so well known – that is, the brou-ha-ha of the hacking threat by North Korea (or not) that caused Sony to shelve the film until they rightfully caved and offered via Internet platforms and through On Demand.

Suddenly “The Interview” was a paragon of free speech. To download it was a download for liberty. Yet…it might have been better to have forever remained an unseen urban legend, the movie no one saw but everyone championed. And this is because upon actually viewing the film you realize political satire is barely the point. It’s only real stab at satire involves the flourishing egregious idiocy of talk shows and CNN. Really, though, it’s just another adventures in brotasticity, revolving around a myriad of inane jokes and set pieces (like Aaron getting into a scrap with a tiger – which leaves Lizzy Caplan, forced to remain on the sideline because this about bros, bro, in spite of its token nod to a North Korean female accomplice in the form of Diane Bang – to say things like “Do not fight the tiger!”) before erupting into a third act extravaganza of violence. It’s pretty much “Pineapple Express” with a political garnish.

Aaron and Dave have a bromance, certainly, but there is a second bromance as well, and if “The Interview” works in any capacity it is in the flirtations of Dave Skylark and Kim Jong Un. The character of Jong Un could have become a cartoon, a “Hotshots!” Saddam Hussein with more dialogue, and yet Randall Park, bless his heart, finds real layers in unexpected places. He is set up as a sort of Manboy Despot, what with his tank-as-cool-car and scantily clad (enforced) hangers-on and adoration of gangsta rap. Yet Park slowly chips away at that facade to reveal his character both as a victim of daddy issues and a master manipulator who wins Dave's approval, partially to use it against him, and partially because he acquires affection for his dufusy American pseudo ally. And when he goes down in a “Firework”-laden blaze of glory it's as if he's truly, astoundingly taken Katy Perry's lyrics to heart and that he has reached the crazed conclusion this is the only way he can show the world “what (he's) worth”. He makes all the Americans in this film look like one-dimensional stooges.

Leave it to “The Interview” to make the only interesting person the same one it was theoretically supposed to be sending up.

Selma

In the midst of the famous march giving “Selma” its title, the march that made it all the way to the Alabama state capital building in Montgomery, director Ava DuVernay suddenly cuts from her filmed version of the event to black & white footage of the real one in 1965. It is an audacious decision because it portends the possibility of backfiring. It could be the moment when the filmmaker brazenly advises that our thoughts and feelings on the film itself don’t really matter because, hey, this was real and if you grade the recounting of it an F+ or just say “eh, it was okay” then you’re a lousy human being. At the same time, by placing the actual and the fictional side by side it could be the moment granting allowance for a litany of “that’s not how it happened in real life” accusations (which is exactly what happened anyway because of course it did). But it’s none of these things. Instead it copies in spirit the marvelous decision of Spike Lee to conclude his marvelous “Malcolm X” with footage of Nelson Mandela reviving one of Brother Malcolm’s most famous orations. It blends what happened with what’s going on. It brings the movie into the now.

Of course, mixing the historical with the re-creation is not always enough to add that necessary air of immediacy. So many films recounting the stories of towering historical figures have been rendered with reams of such reverence the entire production feels like its set in a mausoleum, desperate to remind us at every turn THIS IS OF GREAT IMPORTANCE. But DuVernay makes “Selma” live and breathe, and she pumps oxygen into it from the get-go, right in the very first scene that finds Martin Luther King Jr. (David Oyelowo) and wife Coretta Scott (Carmen Ejogo) in a hotel room preparing so he can go accept the Nobel Prize. It’s not so much their conversation, their whimsical wonderings of an alternate life, a smaller life, a private life, as it is the weary pall cast over them. This is a film that only briefly addresses their home life not, and not from an indifference to it so much as a desire to show how his responsibilities as a leader of so many came to be such a heavy burden.

“Selma” follows the storytelling roadmap of “Lincoln”, meaning it’s about a particular event as much as it’s about a person. Then again, the respective titles betray a crucial difference, and if “Lincoln” was about Abraham Lincoln trying to repeal slavery than “Selma” is about the efforts by many to attain the right to vote. Though, to be certain, Dr. King is seen here as the organizing force, one who can verbally bend influence before stepping behind the pulpit to preach with all the nobility he can muster. And rather than trying to force references to all the real-life people who aided in the many protest maneuverings, DeVurnay simply lets them be, lets them exist, in or around the scenes. We feel their presence whether or not we “get to know them”. It allows us to feel the full weight of the movement rather than just the presence of any one individual.

That brings us to President Lyndon Baines Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) whose role in Selma as told by “Selma” has been poured over by the requisite legion of “What X Gets Wrong About Y” truthers. If facts can be disputed, and they can (correctly), and they have been, and they will be again, what “Selma” gets right about its movie-ized LBJ, I think, has less to do with the empirical than the emotional. He allays himself with MLK and opposes MLK, and has to finesse the ol’ Governor, George Wallace (Tim Roth), and all while trying to advance his own agenda. He is, in other words, a politician. What we know and what we don’t know, what has been spun, left out, added, embellished, manipulated, “forgotten”, only works to underscore this very idea, the film shaping itself to fit the very politicking that it illustrates. (And if you toil under the impression you know every last detail about a President's administration and what it did or didn't do, well, okay, fine, but I have 18 1/2 minutes of tape to play for you.)

All this scheming in the backrooms, of course, manifests itself on the front lines, most notoriously on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, looming on the route from Selma to the state capital. These sequences are captured by cinematographer Bradford Young in a manner that is sobering, not simply shocking, evoking how an interlocked and overwhelming mass of people can be reduced to a lonely if large island when marooned in front of a smaller armed force. And it is these moments, protestors vs. the police, when “Selma” pulses with urgency.

It’s reductive to simply anoint films as “important”, and “Selma” eclipses simple “importance” on account of being a good film in a genre that so often elicits middlebrow consommé. But movies also belong to their own era. “Selma” is set in the racially charged 60’s but belongs just as much to the racially charged now, speaking as much to modern day America as its just as screwed-up predecessor.. And when the police lower their riot masks and take up their clubs in the face of a large-scale though diplomatic and weaponless gathering, it puts a discernible lump in your throat. It does so because you think those people went through that and it does because you think people today are still going through this.

It’s been 47 years since Dr. King said his people would get to the promised land, yet his struggle has never felt closer, his vow never further away.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Back From Eternity (1956)

If "Gilligan's Island" had not premiered until 1964 I'd be of good mind to conclude that director John Farrow stumbled across an episode one night and decided to steal the premise and ratchet up the psychological stakes by crafting "Back From Eternity", a tidy thriller from 1956 that is actually based on a film from 1939 which I guess proves the idea of a plane crashing roundabout nowhere and forcing its survivors to either come together or split at the seams is unceasing. "I’ve got a bunch of characters but I don’t know what to do with them. Crash them on an island!"

"Back From Eternity" spends a solid thirty minutes establishing its premise, introducing an obligatory motley crew that converge on a Pan American plane bound for Boca Grande that just happens to be flying over an infamously isolated stretch from jungle populated by a legendary headhunting tribe. Of course, the weather gets rough, the plane gets tossed and is forced to land in this dangerously uncharted thicket. With the Pilot, Bill Lonagan, (Robert Ryan) and his co-pilot, Joe Brooks, (Keith Andes), the Professor and his Wife (Cameron Prud'Homme and Beulah Bondi), the political assassin being escorted in shackles by his capturer (Rod Steiger & Fred Clark), the aw-shucks, gee-whiz kid traveling in the stead of a mobster guardian (Jon Provost & Jesse White), the happy-but-about-to-become-unhappy lovebirds, Jud and Louise (Gene Barry & Phyllis Kirk), and the blonde bombshell (Anita Ekberg).

Not everyone can survive, and the screenplay cleverly (expectantly) structures it so the ones who die are revealed as wearing Black Hats and the ones who live are revealed as wearing White Hats. When their plane is repaired, they discover it can only carry a certain number of passengers, rendering this Gilligan’s Island a game of picking straws, and so the rooting interests are purposely made plum easy. "Back From Eternity" came around just as the classic era of film noir was beginning to wind down, and so even as it hints at dark secrets and brutal pain dancing in the shadows, its attitude is less fatalistic than rose-colored in black and white.

Consider Anita Ekberg. The film opens with a suck-all-the-air-out-of-the-room shot of her and her monumental eyebrows. She is banished by her apparent Sugar Daddy to Boca Grande where we quickly surmise she will apparently take work in a brothel. She's a burgeoning sultry femme fatale, vamping around sweaty South American airports in dresses intended more for craps tables than the confines of a DC-7 while asking any male she encounters to light her cigarette. Yet if you think her character is bound to cause trouble in the jungle, think again, as her clingy gown gives way to a homely sundress which eventually is accentuated by an even more homely sweater draped over her shoulders as she establishes herself as the aw-shucks, gee-whiz kid's caretaker.

By the end, the woman who's front and center on the poster (which coos "Ooh that Ekberg!") is barely in the film. (She also apparently quits smoking cold turkey without a problem in, like, 32 hours.) Probably because she's a Good Woman now, as opposed to a Bad One, and Good Women know their place as opposed to Bad Women who weasel in wherever they damn please. A film, after all, that actually includes the line "I suppose we'll let the women take care of the cooking" isn't exactly progressive in its sexual politics. Ah.....the greatest generation.

On the other hand, Louise quickly ascertains Jud is a no-good scoundrel weakling and seeks to throw off the shackles of their future wedding the more he melts down. Then again, even as she breaks away from her no-good scoundrel weakling of a fiancé, she simply shifts all her love and affection to the handsome co-pilot because I guess she couldn't even be alone for, like, 1.1 seconds. No woman's nothin' if she ain't got a man or a child, amiright?

The only character with any genuine gristle on his bones is Lonagan, the faux-steadfast pilot, the one who dispenses wisdom but also has a drinking problem. The screenplay doesn't really have time to delve into his backstory the way it does with the others, like the political assassin who predictably professes remorse and obligatorily turns out to be more pure of heart than the FBI agent shuffling him around. About all we get from Lonagan is a fireside admission of "I’ve had it." Had it with what exactly? Hell, everything, I assume. And Robert Ryan, who could always so succinctly summarize bitterness, subtly expresses the notion that he should stay behind to die even though he has to fly that old junkpile. You half-fear that if the movie ran two minutes longer, we’d see a scene where he sets that plane right down in the bottom of the ocean.

Oscar Nomination Q&A

Now that the nominations for the 87th Academy Awards have been announced it is time for Cinema Romantico to answer a few of the most pertinent questions. (A full list of nominees can be found here.)

Q: Mark Harris recently wrote the following on Grantland: “But the miasma of ill feeling in which the nomination season has drawn to a close now seems to be a semipermanent feature of the landscape: historians complaining that historical fiction contains fiction as well as history, film critics wearily caviling that the Oscars shouldn’t “matter” (which never really translates to more than “Listen to me instead”), and a whole lot of blahblahblah about how there’s way too much blahblahblah and not nearly enough blahblahblah.” Thoughts?

A: (Slow clap. Stands. Speeds up clapping. Looks around. Sees everyone is too busy bickering to join in. Stops clapping. Sits back down.)

Q: “Boyhood” took the Golden Globe for Best Picture and seems positioned as front-runner for the same award at the Oscars. It’s been holding steady as a front-runner since its release this summer and yet the backlash against it has yet to swell into a genuine movement.

A: I spoke with Myron Plotz, associate director at the National Backlash Research Institute (NBRI) in Oceanside, CA and he too expressed mild shock at the low levels of backlash they have been monitoring this awards season for “Boyhood”. He indicated that while traditional backlash might have targeted “Boyhood” for its “white male perspective” or it merely being “a gimmick” or how it's a story that “I've already seen”, the “Selma” issue with “historical” “inaccuracy” and the notion of “Birdman” merely being “a stunt” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel” being a story that “I've already seen” because it's Wes Anderson and anti-Andersonians simply assume they've already “seen” it likely consumed much of the backlash intended for "Boyhood." On the other hand, the Academy is a known fan of films with huge production crews that create jobs for Academy members and “Boyhood’s” indie, fly-by-night-every-year operation might hinder it. You know what the synoptic gospels of Oscar prognostication say – films that rack up a lot of technical awards have a better chance at the big enchilada.

Q: So are you rooting for “Boyhood”?

A: No, I’m rooting for “The Imitation Game.”

Q: Really?

A: If it wins, the ensuing critics’ meltdown will be Twitter’s Tunguska Incident. Do your thang, Harvey.

Q: Best Actor is shaping up as potentially our most, if not only, hearty race.

A: Sure is. Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing. Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking. Steve Carrell as John DuPont. Bradley Cooper as Chris Kyle. And, of course, Michael Keaton as Michael Keaton.

Q: Who’s the favorite?

A: I don’t know. But I do know every time you use a phone, or a computer, you use the ideas that Alan Turing invented. Alan discovered intelligence in computers, and today he surrounds us. A true hero of mankind. 

Q: What does that have to do with Cumberbatch’s acting?

A: (Chuckling) Such a sweet kid.

A vote against Alan Turing - er, Benedict Cumberbatch is a vote against a true hero of mankind, and that makes you no better than the gum on the mollusk's shoe.

Q: Julianne Moore earned her fifth nomination and seems the front-runner for her work in “Still Alice”.

A: Seems like it. Though I hear that movie is terrible.

Q: Would it disappoint you if she won for a terrible movie?

A: Let’s get something straight right now – Julianne should have won an Oscar 17 years ago for playing Amber Waves. These are the facts of the case. And they are undisputed. It is well past time for Julianne’s “It’s Her Time” Oscar.

Q: But I thought you were vehemently opposed to all “It’s Her/His Time” Oscars?

A: In my younger, more brash, foolhardy days, yes, I regretfully admit that I was. But I’ve grown. I’ve matured. I’ve come to view the Oscars not as some grand This Is How It Is edict that should result in fire and pitchforks if “they get it wrong” so much as a televised pageant of glorious pomp and absurd circumstance that means actors and actresses can have the words “Academy Award winner” attached to their name in every trailer where they appear. The Oscars are about career achievement in the guise of best performances of the year and about making things right. They are about Al Pacino winning for “Scent of a Woman” but really winning for Michael Corleone and Frank Serpico and Sonny Wortzik and us all knowing it. They are about undefinable Academy whims declaring it someone's “time” and not someone's else's because that someone else will have it be his/her “time” some other “time”. So just let yourself go. Embrace it. This is right. This is good. This is Ms. Moore's “time” and you cannot conquer “time”.

It's her "time". Deal with it. 

Q: Marion Cotillard, who gave your favorite female performance of the year in "Two Days, One Night", landed a Best Actress nod. Surprised?

A: It's an Oscar nomination day miracle! We whine, we kvetch, but when one of your actual favorites gets the call...well, suddenly you're on the sunny side of the street without even having to cross.

Q: Patricia Arquette appears locked in as Best Supporting Actress for “Boyhood.”

A: And you know what? While I often get bored with Foregone Conclusion Races (see: Best Supporting Actor), I’m okay with this one. I am. The utter lack of drama when the envelope is opened to reveal Ms. Arquette’s name will be completely made up for by the overwhelming amount of awesome. The only thing that could make it any better is if Christian Slater is the one opening the envelope.

Q: Oh my God! Yes! Yes, yes!!! YES!!!

A: “Hello, Mrs. Worley.”

Q: “How do you do, Mr. Worley?”

A: “Top of the morning to you, Mrs. Worley.”

Q: “Oh, by the way, Mr. Worley, have you seen your lovely wife today?”

A: “Oh, you’re speaking of my charming Academy Award winning wife, Alabama Worley?”

Q: “Of course, are there others, Mr. Worley?”

A: “Not to me.”

Alabama & Clarence 4Ever.

Q: Oh, and Meryl Streep, of course, landed her record-breaking 217th Oscar nomination for “Into the Woods.”

A: That wasn’t Meryl Streep.

Q: What are you talking about?

A: That was actually Hope Davis in Meryl Streep makeup. They conspired to see if Hope Davis could finally get nominated if she pretended to be Meryl Streep. And she did! Joke’s on you, Academy!!!

Q: Is J.K. Simmons the lockiest lock in the history of Best Supporting Actor?

A: J.K. Simmons seems like a really good guy and so I kind of want him to concoct a faux-scandal between now and the Oscars just to see if it would actually hurt his chances and/or prevent him from winning. Like, he pretends to beat up a bellboy at the Beverly Hilton. Or announces his intentions to star in “Norbit 2.”

Q: Wait, wait, wait…you want that happen just so Ethan Hawke can win for “Boyhood”!

A: All I know is, Mr. Hawke better hone his annunciation of “It’s just an honor to be nominated.

Q: So, Best Director? Seriously. What’s up that that Tyldum nomination for the professional if decidedly un-spectacular “Imitation Game”?

A: Woe is Tyldum if he actually wins and is forever resigned to the Island Of Misfit Oscar Winning Directors with Tom Hooper and John G. Avildsen where mean film critics pee in his soda bottles.

The man no one knew they hated until today.

Q: Linklater is the favorite for “Boyhood”, yes?

A: For “Boyhood”, yes, though I’d like to think of it as a makeup Oscar for the Jesse & Celine Trilogy.

A: So...should we discuss Ava DuVernay's snub for "Selma" in this category? And the general apathy toward "Selma" in all categories aside from its Best Picture lip service?

Q: Was it a snub or just a terrible Oscar campaign by Paramount? Remember, "Dr. Dolittle" got a Best Picture nod in 1967 basically because 20th Century Fox bought off the Academy by wining and dining them. A person, to paraphrase Tommy Lee Jones in "Men in Black", is smart. The Academy are dumb, panicky dangerous animals who like free caviar and frilly ads, and you know it.

A: But doesn't that mean there's a systemic problem within the Academy? 

Q: Well, sure. When hasn't there been?! 

A: But with decisions like this, aren't the Oscars coming closer and closer to irrelevancy?

A: Uh, we're talking about them. Twitter's tweeting about them. Everyone's whining about them. They'll do the same damn thing next year. What is that if not "relevancy". Look, the immortal Roger Ebert-

Q: Whose documentary, "Life Itself", was shockingly snubbed.

A: Sure. He gave some bad notices to Academy members over the years. Not that they'd be so petty!!!

(Laughter.)

A: Ebert said the Oscars are really nothing more than a big show. And it's true. Oscar Nomination Day isn't just a day, it's a frame of mind. And that's what's been changing. People complain over snubs rather than rejoice for what I can only assume are the Academy's happy little accidents. Like Marion. That makes me rejoice. Fuck all the rest. See you Oscar night.

The Grand Wes Anderson Golden Globes Speech

It’s a film awards season and the most important thing to remember, you, avid-watcher of awards season television programs, is that no one who wins can thank people properly. Don’t misunderstand – I’m not saying they can’t thank people right, because they often do, but that our nation, as purveyors of social media, is under the impression that no one (I repeat, NO ONE) can thank anyone right. To whomever you say “thanks”, potential award winner, and whatever manner in which you say it and however long it takes you to say it, you’re wrong. And Twitter gonna let you know.

This is why I thought Jared Leto’s acceptance speech at last year’s Independent Spirit Awards in winning Best Supporting Actor for “Dallas Buyers Club” was so brilliant. He had been taken to task numerous times in the weeks leading up to that victory for not thanking people right in other acceptance speeches. So, he took that criticism to heart and then flipped it on its smelly, stupid face. He thanked “the seven billion human beings on the planet, and all of the planets and animals.” He thanked “the makers of vegan butter and baby Jesus.” He thanked “homemade burritos.” He thanked “Whitcomb L. Judson – the inventor of the zipper.” He thanked “Marisa Tomei”, but then everybody should thank Marisa Tomei. (Thanks, Marisa Tomei.) People, of course, got mad at him yet again for not thanking people right without realizing that what he had done was essentially troll everyone who had been criticizing him for not thanking people right. I thought it was certifiably brilliant.

At The Golden Globes this past Sunday, however, Wes Anderson, in accepting the award for Best Comedy/Musical for his outstanding “Grand Budapest Hotel”, went one better. He trolled the idea of not thanking people right in acceptance speeches and then he trolled the very people – the enigmatic Hollywood Foreign Press Association – who bestowed him the award, which also means he successfully trolled all the people who just reflexively thank the HFPA even if they have no idea who they are.

The Speech: “I’m not going to spend many of my few seconds up here thanking people like Steven Rales and Scott Rudin and Jim Gianopulos and Nancy Utley and Steve Gilula, Jane and Owen, Ralph and Hugo, Jeremy, Bill, Rowan and Jason, Randy and Edward, and Adrian and Jason, Jeff and Tilda, Jim and Rick, and especially James L. Brooks and Polly Platt. Instead, I’m going to focus on the membership of the Hollywood Foreign Press: Yorum and Dagmar and Yukiko and Munawar and Lorenzo, Armando, Husam, Jean-Paul, Hans, Helmut – these are the people I want to thank tonight, and many others with names nothing like theirs, but equally captivating – Kirpi, Erkki, Anke, and so on. I thank you for this Golden Globe.”

Here's to hoping Wes lands a Best Director nod with the Academy and the statue too, if only to hear what his Oscar speech might sound like.

Listen Up Philip

It's really quite astounding that after nearly two hours in his relentlessly off-putting company we are not entirely put off by the insanely appropriately named Philip Lewis Friedman. Wait. That's the wrong lede. Apologies. Let me try this again. It's really quite astounding that after nearly two hours in the relentlessly off-putting company of its title character we are not entirely put off by "Listen Up Philip." Because we are most decidedly put off by the insanely appropriately named Philip Lewis Friedman himself, a Manhattan-based author whose Category 5 Hurricane of venom initially seems designed to regale us with just another philosophically violent anti-fable of so-called Tortured Genius. In the end, though, genius, real or imagined, is beside the point. This film isn't about a genius, it's about a jackass. A pair of them, in fact, and one noble soul who does not redeem the jackasses but gives reason for an otherwise exhausted audience to at last rejoice in the decency of humanity.

Philip's instinct isn't to threaten when attacked, and it isn't even to threaten in case of being attacked - no, it's just to threaten. No, not even threaten. Threaten would suggest a reason to be scared of Philip and no one's scared of him, they're only tired. His instinct is to bloviate, and bloviate immediately upon entrance into any given room. He pin-pricks everyone else in order to prop himself up. He is narcissistic, yes, obviously, but that doesn't go far enough. He's almost a vessel for a modern-day re-telling of the Narkissos Myth. That Philip does not fall in love with his own reflection in the Central Park Pond and ultimately drown is probably only because that end would actually bring audience members to applause, and director/writer Alex Ross Perry is more intent to induce lameazoid laments of "But I just didn't care about this person" so he can laugh at them.

The off-putting protagonist is played by Jason Schwartzman, an actor who has never possessed the need to be "liked". Even in the "Big Eyes" trailer, the few seconds he appears on screen come with his patented disenchanted annunciation and perpetually miffed expression. He's not trying to sell you on this movie because he'd rather you just went the hell away. It's a litmus test of disdain. We are taught to demonstrate empathy, even toward hipster brutes, but "Listen Up Philip" strips us of all empathetic desire. We are left with disdain and, as such, the film cleverly, frighteningly puts us directly in the headspace of our protagonist by making us feel toward him the way he feels toward everyone else.

His new novel is on the verge of being slammed by The New York Times, essentially a death knell, and so he retreats, taking up the invitation of novelist giant Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce) to come up to his country estate to write. "You'll need a country retreat if you want to get anything done," Ike explains. Except nothing much seems to get done at the country retreat except drinking and self-loathing. The manner in which these two feed each other's worst impulses threatens to turn "Listen Up Philip" into a full-blown literary horror movie. A sequence when Ike brings two women home and then banishes them when he becomes bored is excruciating. You half expect Ike's daughter (Krysten Ritter) who requisitely shows up to try and cut these two bloviators down a peg to lose her mind and pick up an axe as if Shelley Duvall turned the tables on Jack.

So what prevents Philip Lewis Friedman's solipsism from symbolically strangling us? It is Perry's majestical decision to take a story of a selfish creative monster, one that would clearly lend itself to a solitary viewpoint that its main character would refuse to relinquish, and occasionally hand the narrative off instead to his persecuted significant other, Ashley Kane (Elisabeth Moss), an artist herself whose abilities her boyfriend ignores because, well, how many damn adjectives can I employ to describe his cavernous self-interest? Suddenly, however, just when it seems Philip might be pushing us too turn off the Blu Ray player or walk out of the theater, the point-of-view switches to Ashley, and rather than being forced to simply wallow on the sidelines and react to the blithering idiot of her life, she re-asserts her individuality and re-claims her own happiness.

Then world is chock full of Philip Lewis Friedmans, sapping our sanity, unwittingly assailing our happiness, beating us down 'til all that remains is a carcass of emotion. Hell, he might as well be a more verbally dexterous metaphor for Twitter. And when Ashley casts him off into the musky dungeon of his own dialogue, we don't cheer the demise to which he doesn't even seem to grasp he's resigned, we cheer her self-recognition.

A Most Violent Year

The title "A Most Violent Year" is something of a misnomer. Yes, the film is set in 1981, New York City's most statistically violent until that time, but violence on screen is kept by writer/director J.C. Candor to a strict minimum. Rather it is about violence gathering like low-hanging clouds just off the side of every frame and gradually infecting the existence of Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac). He is a wonder of polite fastidiousness, a man who dresses not to kill but to impress, desperate to continually convey a cultured disposition, speaking with emphasis on the civilized nature of his voice. After all, he's merely a business man, or so he would have you believe. "You must take the path that is most right," he lectures, and you can tell he believes it. He really believes it.

He runs an oil delivery business with his wife Anna (Jessica Chastain), and with their lawyer, Walsh (Albert Brooks), as consigliere. They are doing fine, making more than enough to purchase a suburban home as citadel, dressing with panache, asking for the wine list at dinner. But if "A Most Violent Year" revolves around that age-old marketing pitch of The American Dream, well, it's a commercialized ethos that goes hand-in-hand with avarice. Abel is not content to run a successful enterprise - no, he wants to be top dog, but being top dog means more problems. He takes out a massive loan on a piece of property along the East River intended to expand his fiefdom that must be paid back in thirty days. Bad dudes are hijacking his company trucks. The local D.A. is digging around in his past.

In so many ways there is nothing new about "A Most Violent Year." It's got the crime film playbook and runs it, step by step, right down to the hoary sequence where the law comes calling for Abel at his kid's birthday party. Hell, it’s even got a car chase. Yet that car chase, shown from Abel's point-of-view, feels different, like a refined man with a driver suddenly finding himself driving in a scene straight out of "The French Connection." It's like Abel has wound up in a yellowy seventies crime film, one of the ones he's probably seen and of which he's likely said, "It's just a movie. That has no basis in reality. Can't happen to me." But it has. And Chandor invests such low-pitched fervor into every detail, every foregone twist, every overcast frame, that the same old-same old still comes across stacked with slow-burning significance. The deer who helpfully blunders in front of Abel and Anna's so it can be put out of its misery is an absurdly convenient illustration of his distaste for violence and her lingering thirst for it, yes, but the manner in which she takes the gun her hubby didn't know she had and puts that mammal down is spine-tingling.

In fact, there is more than a little of "The Master" dynamic here as we come to view Abel as the face of the franchise and Anna as its tough-minded brains, the gangster's daughter, the one cooking the books and smoking the cigarettes and talking tough. When their trucks are being stolen, he yearns to resist arming their drivers while she whole-heartedly endorses it. At times, you almost wish Chastain might hijack the movie in the manner of those vehicles, but the story Chandor wants to tell is of a man who has come to believe so heartily in his own high-class persona that he seems virtually incapable of acknowledging the mud in which he's stepped. "This is what it's come to?" he asks his lawyer upon being told they should confer outdoors. "We have to walk around outside like we're mobsters?" Abel doesn't get it but Walsh does. It's that kind of film, one where the lawyer isn't so much the main character's conscious as the pragmatic truth-teller.

In his previous films, the solid "Margin Call" and the superb "All Is Lost", Chandor told exceptionally tight stories of cataclysmic events impressing themselves upon their male protagonists. "A Most Violent Year" follows an identical blueprint but its plentiful atmosphere elicits less urgency than melancholy, like an elegy appropriate to a funeral home. This is about a man straining for upward mobilization only to find himself in a downward spiral, regressing to the mean of every criminal enterprise where shots are fired and people die and you learn that rules aren’t made to be broken, per se, but must be broken simply to stay ahead and stay alive.

"The result is never a question for me. Just the path that you take to get there. You must take the path that is most right." And by the end, whether he knows it or not, Abel has come to learn that sometimes, to maintain a kingdom, the path that is most right, is actually most wrong.

A 2014 Scene (Sequence) To Go Home With You

Manifest Destiny. That's the marvelously mellifluous term that was coined to express fledgling America's attitude that it was entitled to stretch from coast to coast, and the Fairfield Hotel of 1850’s Iowa in “The Homesman” may as well be a blue emblem of Manifest Destiny. It is isolated, set atop a small hill with street signs set just below that are absent any actual streets and actual buildings to occupy those streets and actual pedestrians to occupy those actual buildings. It's not lonely so much as it is sorta pompous, like it's simply expecting businesses and people to pop up like capitalist germination from its handsomely constructed seed.

Of course, the only thing that seems to have manifested itself within the context of this film is insanity, whether full-fledged or slow-burning. This is where George Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones) deserted the army and started squatting on land that wasn't his. It's where Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) felt compelled to propose to some dimwitted clodhopper with smelly cheese in his pocket cuz, shit, any woman's destiny anywhere for all time involves gettin' hitched to a man, don't it? It's where these three women George Briggs is hauling to a church to look after them all went genuinely off their respective rockers.

“We are entering on its untrodden space, with the truths of God in our minds, beneficent objects in our hearts, and with a clear conscience unsullied by the past. We are the nation of human progress, and who will, what can, set limits to our onward march? Providence is with us, and no earthly power can,” wrote John L. O’Sullivan in The United States Democratic Review in 1939 when coining Manifest Destiny as a term. But no truths of God are in the minds of these people, no beneficent objects are in their hearts, and their conscience is sullied by their past, present and future. What future? If Providence is with these people then Providence is a pissant son of a bitch, to borrow the phrasing of Mr. Briggs.

And so when George sidles up to the front desk at the Fairfield Hotel, “beacon of the west”, like the incredibly irascible old codger he is, desperate for a room for himself and for the women traveling with him, and for a warm meal and a hot bath, it’s like he’s coming face to face with America’s own inflated ego. That ego is personified in the establishment’s proprietor, Aloysius Duffy, played by a regally imperious James Spader with an Irish accent which I like to imagine is the film reminding flag-waving, chest-beating Americans that everyone in this country more or less came from somewhere else.

There is no room at the inn even though there is all kinds of room at the inn because it only has room for investors because investors will grease the wheel of this “beacon” to American capitalism. It is not interested in merely offering “the milk of human kindness”. Ask not what I can do for you, but what you can do for me. And a dude from NEBRASKA in IOWA* (*inside joke) who may have money but doesn’t own real estate can’t do much but trundle on to the next campsite. He's dismissed from the lobby of the Fairfield at gunpoint and unleashes an oration suggesting a divine plague will sweep down upon its proprietors for their turning a blind eye to those in need.

Except George Briggs knows damn well there will be no divine intervention. Providence, as we established, has long done left this continent. So he returns in the middle of the night, allegedly to steal food for himself and those in his charge, but really to burn the place down and shoot those high-falutin’ “gentlemen of means” when they try and escape. It’s terribly unsettling. The look Jones lets play on his face as he goes about his business, which isn't much of a look at all beyond acute detachment, is chilling. And, strangely, affecting. Glorious, even. This isn't vengeance. He's not even in a hurry to escape, moving his horse at a trot as the hotel burns behind him. Where does he have to escape to? Manifest Destiny has ensured there's nowhere else to go. His eyes have seen there will be no glory of the coming of the Lord, only railroads and robber barons and Civil War.

It's a man who walked into a hotel, saw the future and to the future said “fuck you”.

A Few Other 2014 Movie Shots I Love

I always write a lengthy diatribe about my favorite movie shot of the year (see: yesterday) but thought I might go one further this time around and pay homage to (rip off) my friend Ryan McNeil at The Matinee who annually puts up a hella awesome post in which he submits a few of his favorite movie shots of the year with no additional commentary. So here are a few of my favorite movie shots of the year with no additional commentary.

My Favorite Shot Of 2014

Mitch (Earl Lynn Nelson) has retired to the roof of his Reykjavik hotel at the dawn of the evening for a little R&R with a rolled cigarette in his hand containing a substance a little more, shall we say, potent than mere tobacco. The sky spread out before him and the city skyline below sparkle and though "Land Ho!" does not possess texture-o-vision, directors Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens and cinematographer Andrew Reed nonetheless elicit the sensation of stepping into the freezing cold after breathing the same dead air all day and letting the chill rehabilitate your physical being and state of mind. Then, elegantly, the shot dissolves, and as it does, Mitch dissolves into his surroundings.

This is my favorite shot of the year.

When I was a kid I loved vacations and, yet, I could never wait to get home. Not home as in "Iowa" so much as the actual physical edifice of my home. Look, family vacations were often wonderful. Thunderstorms in Colorado Springs and staged melodramas in Dodge City and BBQ in Arkansas, etc., but as a kid you’re like Dorothy Gale and to Dorothy Gale, of course, there was no place like home. And so every single family vacation I remember those final stretches of I-80 and/or I-35 and craving my room and my Tribe Called Quest and Debbie Gibson cassette tapes. This feeling has faded in adulthood. It’s not that I don’t like my home in Chicago, I do, but that my world is so much bigger than my little Nebraska Football-paraphernalia-ensconced bedroom and my problems run deeper and and so I want these emotional and spiritual retreats to count.

This is what Mitch and his fellow road-trip companion, Colin (Paul Eenhoorn), are attempting to do throughout "Land Ho!" They are, to quote the immortal Jack Dawson, making it count. They are trying to dissuade themselves of that dreaded "sunday morning attitude." They are trying to dig beneath the layer of the drudgery of real life and find that divine spirit pulsating just beneath. They are trying to nourish their wounded souls and weary bodies with the restorative, cleansing power of the physical trek as Analēptikós, the greek god of vacation, originally intended.

In that moment, in that shot, the transient nature of the get-away gives way, and Mitch and the place become one.