Retroactive Best Movie Hair of 2014

Natalie Dormer. "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1." No explanation necessary.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1

“The Hunger Games” trilogy (plus one) is among the few film series I recall genuinely improving as it progresses. The first film was nothing more than the same kind of action-oriented reality show it was supposed to be satirizing. The second film, however, broadened its scope and deepened its ideology. The “Part 1” addendum to “Mockingjay” obviously betrays the third film's status as a set-up, but don't assume it’s a mere placeholder. If you’re willing to set aside justifiable anger over Hollywood’s need to wrangle two films outta one just to reel in those sweet, sweet bucks, this film is tough and smart, even if its conclusion has no choice but to be a cliffhanger.

“Mockingjay, Part 1” is more political intrigue than dystopian thriller. If you’re looking for a gaggle of flaming arrows and physical challenges, disappointment might ensue. As if sensing that ahead of time, director Francis Lawrence crams in a woeful Cat Rescue sequence and a couple other moments of machine gun fire and CGI explosions, perhaps because “machine gun fire” and “CGI explosions” were directorial contract conditions. Whatever, the true action here is conversational, behind the scenes, two opposing blocs trading bureaucratic bombast, almost as if we are watching an adaptation of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s “Game Change” for Panem, the North American world of this post-apocalyptic landscape.

If that sounds like heady stuff for a film based on a Young Adult novel, well, even Young Adults have to learn that in America – er, Panem – advocates of hope and change dabble in the same nefarious tactics as the vile keepers of the status quo. Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence, once again expertly providing this blockbuster a super solid sense of gravity), Hunger Games heroine, was propped up by venomous President Snow (Donald Sutherland) as the false beacon of his totalitarian society, the magic to distract the mob. She shattered that illusion, literally and figuratively, as the second film, “Catching Fire”, concluded and now she has been brought by a rebel faction to an underground hiding place where its leader, Alma Coin (Julianne Moore), and her right-hand man, Heavensbee (the late Philip Seymour Hoffman), yearn to turn the most beloved face of this totalitarian society into the face of their fledgling insurgency.

There is an endless assortment of talking heads seen on massive video screens spouting rhetoric that may or may not be based in truth but, either way, inspires the masses, transforming “Mockingjay, Part 1” into a straight-up contest of propaganda where neither side is unwilling to hit below the belt. Katniss is issued her small unit of protection cum documentary crew, following her into the field and filming her adventures for evangelistic purposes. One scene finds them resting on the shore of a serene lake where Katniss is goaded into singing a song, which she does, unabashedly and unironically, though the rebellion expediently transforms her hymn into a District 12 dust bowl ballad, Katniss Everdeen as Pete Seeger. Everything she does is exploited.

Perhaps this is why she clings so desperately to her past relationship with Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), her fellow “Hunger Games” hero and kinda, sorta love interest. He remains behind in the government-held capital city and her only interactions with him are not really interactions at all. Every time the rebels submit a Panem-wide communique, the capital city hits back with a communique of its own, and usually in the form of Peeta addressing Katniss directly, begging for his one-time ally to give up this insurrection. Naturally Katniss assumes he is being brainwashed but since we never see the story from his side we have no idea if that’s true, or if he assumes the same thing about her. I yearned for a dual movie set in the capital, one where the President is spinning Katniss Everdeen as Patty Hearst and Alma Coin as Donald DeFreeze.

It’s this relationship that gives a purposely talky movie an extra dose of oomph. In movies where the livelihood of an entire civilization is threatened are often criticized when a single love affair is somehow made out to be just as important. “The problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,” someone once said. But if everything you are is co-opted in the name of a cause, well, what’s left but loving the one you’re with? Or, in the case of Katniss, loving the one you want to be with. And that’s why even if the film’s end is wide, wide open in lieu of the wrap-up that will not arrive in theaters until November 20, 2015, there remains a detectable note of convincing melancholy as this first part concludes. What if even the only person you love isn't whom they appear to be?

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Breakfast Club (1985)

John Hughes’ seminal teenage film, “The Breakfast Club”, theoretically took place this week thirty-one years ago – March 24, 1984 – on a Saturday afternoon at Shermer High, on the outskirts of Chicago, its principal quintet stuck in all-day detention for various misdeeds. The imprisoned five: Claire (Molly Ringwald), Andrew (Emilio Estevez), Bender (Judd Nelson), Brian (Anthony Michael Hall), and Allison (Ally Sheedy). Or, to say it in terms of readymade high school labels, they are, respectively, a Princess, an Athlete, a Criminal, a Brain, and a Basket Case. And in light of those deliberate stereotypes children of “The Breakfast Club” era were regularly privy to this question: which one are you? My answer was always the same – I’m part Brian, though I have nowhere near as big of a brain, and I’m part Allison, though I’m not quite as much of a basket case. That sounds like a cop-out, I know, but in re-watching the film for its anniversary I was struck most noticeably by how these supposedly clear-cut demarcations functioned just as much like masks.

When you commute each morning in Chicago by train you often end up sharing it with kids on their way to school. There is one young man I see routinely. He has long hair, often sports a duster, not un-Bender-ish, and always carries a thermos and cooler. Yes, a cooler, an Igloo cooler, which I presume is his wacky spin on a lunchbox. It’s so adorable. I want to go up to him and pinch him on the cheek and say “You whippersnappers and your affectations.” That, however, would be a classic case of Forgetting What It Meant To Be Young. Pauline Kael criticized “The Breakfast Club” by pointing out how “it appeal(ed) to young audiences by blaming adults for the kids’ misery and enshrining the kids’ most banal and longings to be accepted and liked.” That statement contains some truth, both in ways Kael meant and did not mean because of course it blamed adults for the kids’ misery! That’s what kids do! And kids’ longings to be accepted and liked are banal…when viewed through the prism of adulthood. To kids, those longings are the pinnacle of compelling.

I’m sure in high school Ms. Kael had her own variation of that kid’s cooler, just as I did and you did too. High school is a battleground, and what do kids have to guide them when they are still trying to figure out who in God’s name they are? Thus, they adopt and discard personas and attitudes and mannerisms like burgeoning James Franco’s. Sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads, and an occasional righteous dude. It’s your junior high rolodex. And it’s why critics who didn’t see “Divergent” as a high school allegory still confound me. They mocked “factions” on Twitter, conveniently forgetting that high school is nothing but factions. If you make it into one, you cling like hell to stay in, because maybe they can help protect you against the onslaught of angst.

When our characters reluctantly enter the library at 7 AM to begin their punishment at the hands of villainous, vainglorious Principal Vernon (Paul Gleason, RIP) they are each clinging to their respective affectations. It’s why Andrew and Claire sit at the same table, because they run in the same social circle and the others don’t. It’s why Bender immediately establishes himself as the center of attention, because if he’s not, he’s confused. These early scenes, when the characters are still feeling one another out, find them routinely taking sides willy-nilly and ganging up. If one character says something or does something peculiar, Hughes favors reaction shots of the other characters’ confusion or disgust as they quickly turn on the sudden outcast. These pivots happen over and over, underlying the fraught nature teenage alliances and hostility. So much of a young adult’s existence is governed by defense mechanisms, not wanting to be singled out, and so you go with the flow. There is the extraordinary moment when Andrew cops to his reason for being in detention – that is, “tap(ing) Larry Lester’s buns together.” “That was you?” Brian asks. “Yeah, you know him?” Andrew replies. “Yeah, I know him,” Brian says, and Anthony Michael Hall gives the line a spin that clearly, brilliantly relays just how easily those buns could have been his. It’s a thin line between wallflower and butt of the joke.

Of course, as the film unfolds and plot uncoils, those fronts will be stripped away. Bender, in fact, becomes less forceful as the film progresses as his need to be the center of attention to make up for the lack of it at home becomes less important to him. Allison, often purposely forgotten amidst several cuts, or buried out of focus in the back of frames, at the beginning, becomes more and more prominent. The library becomes their nest in the tree of trust and understanding. Social barriers are not knocked down so much as they just imperceptibly give way, like they were invisible, or like they never existed in the first place. They begin to see one another for who they really are even if they all seem in touch enough to simultaneously admit that once 4:00 rolls around things will have to go back to being the way they were. “The Breakfast Club”, really, is like a high school version of “Joyeux Noel.”

The grave irony is that all this delineation is supposed to vanish once you grow up, but then the film already knows the truth. Or at least Allison does. “When you grow up, your heart dies.” Consider Principal Vernon. The adults in John Hughes’ films always get a bad rap, and while this isn’t entirely unfair, it’s also not totally deserved. “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’s” infamous Edward R. Rooney, Dean of Students, was, to quote the esteemed Roger Ebert, “dim-witted and one-dimensional.” But then, that was primarily an adventure story, and Rooney was simply the dastardly villain. At first glance, Vernon seems dim-witted and one-dimensional, but there is, however faint, a whiff of layering, of a man who’s grown up to find his heart has long since died. More than that, though, he embodies the ongoing search for self. “I make $31,000 a year and I have a home,” he barks at Bender. “I’m a man of respect around here. I’m a swell guy.” These are the labels (well, these and the leisure suit) by which he defines himself, yet watching him preen and yell it’s hard to take at face value. Even adults can fall prey to affectations.

The film’s real flaw, it always seemed to me, was the conclusion, one which felt rushed to reach the wrap-up after the big confessional sequence when they gather in a circle to trade secrets and tears. More than that, though, it came across like a betrayal. The film took stereotypes and humanized them, but when Claire gives Allison a quick third-act makeover and has the gumption to declare “You really do look a lot better without all that black shit on your eyes”, holy moly, was that an affront. Allison Reynolds isn't a Princess! Allison made Shirley Manson! ALLISON REYNOLDS ALWAYS LOOKS BETTER WITH THAT BLACK SHIT ON HER EYES!!!

Yet, the years have softened me. It’s not about Allison’s identity, I see now, it’s about Allison momentarily becoming somebody else. She is primped into a Princess just as the Princess morphs into a Criminal when she makes out with Bender, and even Brian, the one frightened of tampering with “school property”, becomes a Criminal when he smokes pot. They are slipping into different affectations, trying them on for size and, who knows, perhaps there are scenes in some alternate cinematic universe of Allison playing point guard for the Shermer Bulldogs and Andrew rocking Dee Snider-ish eyeshadow.

What’s still troubling, however, is the film’s sense that this truly is a resolution, and with the essay Brian concocts at behest of Principal Vernon that they have figured themselves out even if he – and everyone else, presumably – only still sees them in stereotypes. But then, that’s the ultimate truth of the film, isn’t it? The one that knows full well how a teenager can presume to have found the key to the universe in all-day detention?

Thirty years ago when Bender sauntered across the football field and thrust his fist in the air, I hollered, “Fuck yeah!” Thirty years later when I see the same thing, I smile. I know better. I say, with all the nostalgic respect I can muster, “Motherfucker, please.”

Final Scene of Mission: Impossible Space Vertigo

In all the hullabaloo regarding the 117,000 superhero movies greenlit over the course of the next 75 years what got lost was the announcement that Tom Cruise would be starring in another 5 “Mission: Impossible” movies over the next 20 years. The final film, slated to be titled “Mission: Impossible Space Vertigo” will be helmed by a Finnish director you haven't heard of because he hasn't made a movie yet.

One of Cinema Romantico's most trusted sources was able to get his hands on a copy of the “Space Vertigo” screenplay, and the last scene's twist is so delicious I was left with no choice but to share it. And while I hesitate to divulge this information for fear of reprisals from both the studio and the Cruise Camp, well, I think when you see the “twist” I’m talking about you will agree it was worth the risk. The final scene has been re-printed below with no embellishments…

EXT. SPACE ELEVATOR - 96,000 KM ABOVE EARTH

Ethan Hunt dangles from the tippy-top of the elevator, wearing a space helmet that, somehow, still allows his flowing locks to dangle to just below his neck, as Aarne Klaus, in a jet-black spacesuit, floating weightlessly, taunts him from just above.

Ethan looks down, Earth spinning just below him, its atmosphere ready and willing to incinerate him should be fall.

Klaus rears back with his pugilistic space gloves and slams into both of Ethan’s desperate hands. 

With a defiant yell, Ethan lets go and falls, falling and falling toward Earth. Nothing can stop his ultimate demise now.

INT. FLANAGAN'S COCKTAILS & DREAMS - MANHATTAN - PRESENT DAY

BRIAN FLANAGAN, leaning against the back counter of illuminated liquor with a mop in hand, is dozing while standing up. Seeing this, his wife, JORDAN MOONEY, smacks him with a wet dish towel.

JORDAN: Hey. Dufus. You were sleeping on the job again.

BRIAN: I just had the strangest dream. I dreamt that I was a special agent in the IMF.

JORDAN: IMF? You mean, like “Mission: Impossible”? The old TV show?

BRIAN: Yeah, exactly.

JORDAN: Was Peter Graves there?

BRIAN: I think so. But he looked more like Jon Voight.

JORDAN: Jon Voight?

BRIAN: And I was married to that girl we saw in “True Detective.”

JORDAN: Maggie Hart? You were married to Maggie Hart?

BRIAN: It was really weird. My personality kept changing. And the tone of the whole dream was just like......all over the place. Like, I was slipping in and out of different dreamscapes created by different people. They were so uneven in quality. It felt like I was at this dock in Sydney for, like, 127 hours. 

JORDAN: No more daiquiris for you before bed. By the way, one of the regulars threw up in the bathroom again. Too many whiskey sours.

BRIAN: (sighs) I’ll get to it.

JORDAN: Cocktails and dreams, eh, Bri’?

Brian shuffles off. In the distance, from the jukebox, or perhaps an old transistor radio, we hear “Aruba, Jamaica ooo I wanna take you / Bermuda, Bahama come on pretty mama”…

FADE OUT

John Wick

“John Wick” is like a John Woo film made by a very cerebral Team ZAZ, Le Samourai with a doctorate in Mel Brooks. It’s a stoic farce. It embraces every last trope of Gun-Fu genre to the hilt, right down to its mockingly serviceable title, a placeholder for any veteran of the action thriller crusades wishing to lampoon his image by being deadly serious about it. Enter: Keanu Reeves. He grimaces through the entire production like he doesn’t get the joke, which is apropos because he’s the straight man in a wildly stylized sketch.

As the film opens, his wife (Bridgit Moynihan) has just passed away from an unnamed disease, and all we see of her are fleeting images on John Wick’s smartphone where she floats in the technological ether, the place, I assume, we all go these days when we die. Her spirit, however, lives on in the form of a precious puppy she scheduled for delivery to her husband ahead of her passing. Alas, we get but a few scenes this adorable canine before it is unceremoniously stomped and killed by an arrogant son (Alfie Allen) of a Russian Mafioso who then steals Wick’s car and beats him up real good only because he has no idea his victim is John Wick. See, John Wick, we learn, isn’t The Boogeyman – he’s the dude you send to execute The Boogeyman. He’s a retired hitman of the highest order, once in cahoots with Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist), the arrogant son’s pops, convenient sort of plotting that “John Wick” turns with a good-natured guffaw.

The world here comes across wholly, intentionally insular, as if it’s only populated with bad men or bad men trying to be good. I half-suspect that Bridgit Moynihan was akin to Claire Forlani in “Mystery Men”, wherein you can’t help but wonder how in the hell she wound up in Champion City. When John Wick decides to re-enter the game he says it’s “personal”, not business, because he has to, but it feels as if he was simply chilling in his home with the plethora of open space and ginormous windows that’s just begging for a shootout and hoping, praying, that someone will stir something up so he could go on a rampage.

World-building is the film’s high point. Consider the hotel where Wick checks in, the Continental, sort of a B&B spin on The Facility of “Cabin in the Woods.” It is not so much a hideout for assassins and hit men as a known refuge, a luxuriously accommodated safe zone lorded over by a majestically suave Ian McShane where there are strict rules about no killing and leaving your business associates to themselves. Lance Reddick runs the front desk with a twinkle in his eye, a performance that is sitting on a two-hour backstory, and frankly, “John Wick” might have been absolutely stellar as its own version of “Casino” (“Continental”?) in following this palace’s rise and inner-workings.

Almost as good is the neon-lit bathhouse where John Wick begins his quest for retribution, a crisply concocted sequence scored majestically to Kaleida that evokes an other-worldly sensation the rest of the film’s unfortunate hard-rocking soundtrack does not. He dips and darts through the elaborate set, dispatching nefarious dudes with bullets and karate chops as blood splatters and limbs break, looking like a dancer in an electronica ballet. It’s freaking heaven, and if the main character’s invincibility is obvious, well, duh. Of course, it is! The film revels in that obviousness, underscored by the deadpan shot of Tarasov in front of a fire with a glass of cognac, awaiting the inevitable, more or less writing off his son’s life even though he knows he has to try and avenge him anyway. “John Wick” takes bad guy code to the extreme.

Then again, that’s also its downfall. After about an hour the film’s style and cheeky humor begins running on fumes, and just sort of gives way into the worse aspects of the product with which it’s been carousing. Oh, the obligatory finale in the rainstorm looks good, yes, but it’s devoid of the rambunctious spirit of the preceding hour. It’s just duplicating moves, not duplicating and expanding, and so it thuds to a disappointing conclusion. It’s one vacation you wish would have taken place entirely at the hotel.

71

Melding the politically charged docudrama style of Paul Greengrass's “Bloody Sunday” with the elegant commotion of his two entries into the “Bourne” series, Yann Demange's feature film debut “71” is a full-blown frenetic chase movie with political overtones. It lso bears much in common with Ridley Scott’s “Black Hawk Down”, a recounting of The Battle of Mogadishu, in as much as “71” follows a British Private, Gary Hook (Jack O’Connell), inadvertently left behind by his unit in the middle of an op gone bad. Yet “Black Hawk Down” took great pains to justify America's presence in Somalia in the first place – “that’s not war, that’s genocide,” Sam Shepard helpfully councils. There is no such explanation in “71”, not to us, and particularly not to Hook. Prior to his fateful mission, the plan of attack is hardly made clear, and is illustrated on a map with the dividing line in Belfast between areas of Protestants and Catholics and, well, what else does anyone need to know? And besides, in this context, what do those demarcations even mean? At a delicate moment, Hook is asked which one he is, Protestant or Catholic. He admits he has no idea.

The film’s introductory sequence include Hook’s time in boot camp, and all we see is him crawling through the mud and being yelled at by the drill sergeant. Ideology is immaterial. Do what you’re told. And they will, as the film quickly moves to the inciting incident, a troop deployment to a hostile area in which the tension is raised swiftly, piercingly, as locals beat to arms with garbage can lids against the cement. Within moments a mob has formed, spitting, cursing and cajoling the British army, a sequence in which Demange effectively documents how powerless a cluster of heavily armed men can sometimes feel. Suddenly, a young boy lifts a soldier’s machine gun and runs away with it, and Hook and another British Pvt. are dispatched to retrieve the weapon. In the ensuing confusion, Hook’s cohort is shot dead and the army is forced to hastily abandon its position. All alone, and with a pair of armed IRA sympathizers on his tail, Hook runs for his life.

The sequence owes a significant debt to Kathryn Bigelow’s back-alley “Point Break” foot chase, one which is more fluid and steady as well an unwitting reminder that at the movies, dependent upon a filmmaker’s acumen, the plight of a bank-robbing surfer in a Reagan mask can be rendered just as affecting as a British soldier on the run because of The Troubles. Still, Demange’s remix of that sequence is effectively gripping, the kind that draws you in so subtly and forcefully that you lean forward without even knowing it, hanging on every hairpin turn. And when it’s over, it only gets worse, as an Englishman finds himself essentially abandoned in a nighttime apocalyptic hellscape, one of burning fires and eerie voices and befuddling loyalties, like he’s Snake Plissken in “Escape From Belfast.”

What follows not only pointedly refuses to lionize its protagonist but resists brazenly demonizing those on his tail. Case-in-point: Sean (Barry Keogan), a teenager embedded in the posse hunting Hook, is afforded a crucial flourish of backstory in the form of an apparently peaceful home life where we see him helping his young sister with homework. It’s a slight but indelible stroke suggesting that in spite of all the turmoil there is still a choice to be made about the way one leads his or her life.

Historian Douglas Brinkley once wrote “the only way to understand D-Day fully is as a battle at its smallest: that is, one soldier and one reminiscence at a time.” In effect, that’s what “71” does, showing The Troubles at its smallest, one soldier and one (fictional) reminiscence. O’Connell never plays the part with the inevitability of an action hero, but with honest fear for his survival and confusion of the situation into which he’s been thrust. The people and places and shifting alliances his character are made to face become confusing, yet that’s precisely what makes them effective. That he's all alone isn't just a device to raise the dramatic stakes but a rendering of each individual's place in a war over which they have no control, tangled in a web of flummoxing politics. By the end we find ourselves rooting not simply for the protagonist to emerge with his life, which oddly begins to feel almost inconsequential run up against the machine of war, but with his virtue.

Friday's Old Fashioned: I Never Sang For My Father (1970)

“I Never Sang For My Father” believes in the myth of fingerprints. Gil Cates’ cinematic interpretation of Robert Anderson’s play has seen them all (people, that is) and, man, it knows they’re all the same. It plumbs the tricky psychological depths of fathers & sons, well-wrought territory that nonetheless transcends that familiarity with a story that knows every man is his father’s son, whether he wants to admit it or not. It centers on Gene Garrison (Gene Hackman), a fortysomething widowed playwright who no doubt crafts each of his stage productions around some sort of paterfamilias concept. His father, Tom (Melvyn Douglas), is a very accomplished, well-respected man of the community, but less accomplished, not-as-respected man within the walls of his own house. He’s the sort of man who gets a look at a copy of his son’s new play and immediately criticizes the author photo, wondering why his son is looking away when a real man looks you in the eye.

Well, Gene rarely looks his father in the eye. He harbors resentment toward an unhappy childhood, one that resulted in his father sending his sister (Estelle Parsons) away. He harbors fear of his father, illustrated in how he struggles to admit his plans to re-marry and move across the country to California. He harbors regret, about not forging common ground with his father, and about not feeling affection for his father. It’s like he’s a moon caught in the orbit of a patriarchal planet, spinning around and around against his will.

His father, meanwhile, pushes Gene away even as he manipulates him into always being around. These conflicting ideas are traced directly to his dad, a drinker, an irascible man whose affection Tom never earned, and now he has consequently thrown away the affection of Gene by being irascible in his own way. That’s the film’s remarkable through line – three men who could not be more different are somehow all the same, and none of them have ever found the means to square with it.

“I Never Sang For My Father” is obligated, of course, to bring this unadmitted standoff between The Old Man & His Son to the brink, and it does so through the death of Gene’s mother and Tom’s wife, Margaret (Dorothy Stickney). That piece of plot advancement might seem obvious, even a little insulting, what when considering it brings her onstage just so it can kick her right back off. But the script knows that Tom’s greatest fear and has him externalize when he admits to Gene he always thought he’d first. He thought that because that’s what he wanted. If he died first, he was off the hook, spared the agony of confronting the friction between him and his son, and the friction within himself. You half suspect that Margaret, that sly old fox, knew this too and decided to expire simply as a means to effectuate their inevitable showdown.

Confronting all this means confrontations, of course, and frankly, the direction of Cates works best when he simply embraces the theatricality of these confrontations and sets a couple shots and lets his actors have it. His occasional zoom-ins and zoom-outs feel like “uh, we need to do SOMETHING” artifice and a late game sequence in which Gene visits a nursing home as a possible place to move his father is composed like a horror film, an aesthetic device that feels like its intruding on something much more solemn. The dialogue, meanwhile, often recited in extended monologues or prickly back-and-forths occasionally gets too on-the-nose. “I hate him,” Gene says of his old man, “and I hate to hate him.” That type of explication permeates the film, lines already made evident in the performances, and so half the time you feel like you’re watching this film from the perch of a second couch in a therapist’s office. But, what a damn therapy session!

Hackman was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar (Douglas was nominated for Best Actor) which is basically absurd, like an evocation of the roles themselves. This is Hackman’s film, through and through, and for no greater reason than his essentially playing two roles. With his father, he’s a passive pushover, mumbling, shuffling, looking down, around, here, there, anywhere but at his old man. Away from his father, steam practically billows from his ears as he says and does everything he can’t bring himself to do around his old man. The duality is depressing, and only made worse when, in the climactic scene, both roles are forced to run right into one another. It’s only taken four decades for Gene to finally call out his old man, and when he does, it’s all for naught, the film’s impressively dire admittance that making peace is not necessarily the same as having peace-of-mind.

30 for 30: I Hate Christian Laettner

Alexander Wolff, in recounting for Sports Illustrated perhaps the greatest college basketball game ever played, summarized the contest’s most important player, Duke’s Christian Laettner, this way: “the plot honored the cardinal rule of good storytelling – don't make the hero a one-dimensional character.” Laettner was the hero, yes, in so much as he sank the winning shot but he was also the villain, a designation earned by stomping on Kentucky’s Aminu Timberlake who was defenselessly sprawled on the floor. Laettner may have already been the most reviled player in the sport but this was the singular moment cementing his legendarily maleficent status, the stomp seen around the world. In the ensuing years, no matter what defense anyone raised for him, you could roll that clip and say “Yeah? So?”

In Rory Karpf’s inflammatorily titled “I Hate Christian Laettner”, the latest entry into ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary series, the titular subject says he stomped on Timberlake because he thought Timberlake had pushed him, only to realize later he’d singled out the wrong guy. That sounds like a roll-your-eyes justification. Except Karpf shows the moment to which Laettner is referring when, sure enough, a Kentucky player blindsides Laettner, shoving him out of bounds and to the floor. It is, if we’re all being honest with ourselves, more malicious than Laettner’s stomp. That’s not to excuse Laettner, of course. After all, it’s a classic case of Second Guy Gets Caught. Yet, it muddies the pictures, and it crystallizes the intent of “I Hate Christian Laettner”, which seeks not to exonerate the man for whom it’s named but add extra dimension to his story.

How did this one person come to carry so much of collective college basketball fandom’s animosity on his back? And while it might make sports stats geeks throw up in their mouths, Karpf ties it back to culture’s need to impose narrative on sports, to cast athletes as heroes and villains. It’s the populist viewpoint, and though Twitter autocrats like Jay Bilas view sports populism as “drivel”, well, his former pupil (Bilas was an assistant coach at Duke during that era) is proof positive that sports populism holds serious cultural cache. It’s why Karpf interviews wrestling heel Ric Flair and employs no less authority than Dr. Evil’s #2 as his narrator. And when interviewees speak of their Laettner hatred, they often resort to ancient storytelling archetypes, and the doc boils this eternal aversion down to “5 Points” – privilege, bullying, whiteness, looks, and plain greatness.

Some points Karpf backs up, like the bullying that was apparently born, in another storytelling archetype come true, from his big brother. Other points he is intent to refute, like the privilege, which went hand-in-hand more with Laettner’s scholarship to a prestigious university than his actual background. Michigan’s Jalen Rose smites Duke for recruiting players of affluence, yet Duke recruited Chris Webber, Rose's teammate, and Laettner's family life trends lower to middle class much more than hoity-toity. Yet the doc whiffs on more incendiary subject matter, like race. Rose and other black basketball players interviewed, such as UNLV’s Anderson Hunt, admit to pre-conceived suspicions about Laettner’s actual abilities before competing against him. It alludes to the origin of these doubts stemming from his “whiteness” but Karpf doesn’t have the cojones to press the matter. Nor does he follow up Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson’s theorizing that Laettner's style of aggressive, trash-talking play was “appropriating black styles of basketball projection but onto white bodies.” The film just lets this intriguing analysis lie there, feeling frustratingly incomplete, as if Karpf doesn’t want to wrestle with anything more significant than how Laettner kind of resembles Billy Zabka in “The Karate Kid.”

The real Christian Laettner, frankly, remains an enigma, and perhaps that’s the point. The doc’s overriding argument is less about the person than the person becoming the face of an institution viewed in general terms as “the establishment”. This effete school was already on its way to becoming the sport’s evil empire and Laettner turned out to be its timeless face. People still hate Christian Laettner because they still hate Duke, and vice-versa. Nevertheless, by portraying him as a symbol, the film shortchanges his psychological makeup. He claims only to care about what his friends and family think of him and comes across okay with his place as pop culture antihero, but it’s impossible not to be left with the sense of some motivational force left unearthed.

Early in the film we see home video of a game during Laettner’s prep school days when a fight between his team and another erupts. As it does, the camera catches Laettner evading harm’s way just as the event escalates to an out-and-out brawl, and you can’t help but wonder the question no one asks – did he incite it? Who knows? Like that fight, he spends the film in the open even as he’s subtly sliding right out of view.

If Star Wars Characters Could Smoke...

It was announced last week by Disney CEO Bob Iger that going forward they would ban all smoking in films made under their umbrella with a rating of PG-13 or lower, which would include Lucasfilm. And because it includes Lucasfilm, it would include the “Star Wars” films. I never really thought of the “Star Wars” universe as a smoking one, but quick research did remind me that Jabba the Hutt liked the inter-galactic hookah. Funny that seeing Jabba smoke at such a tender age didn’t turn me into a smoker but then maybe it’s because he was a villainous and fairly disgusting crime lord and that scared me away.

But that’s not the point here. The point here is that really, for the most part, nobody was smoking in “Star Wars” even before ol’ Iger said they couldn’t. Yet ol’ Iger saying they couldn’t naturally made me wonder if they could who would? LISTICLE!!!!!!! (A brief note: 1. There will be no Han Solo because Han Solo was a whiskey drinker and we all know it.)

“Star Wars” Characters That Probably Smoked

Lando Calrissean. This is so obvious that I’m retroactively angry at Irvin Kershner for not forcing its conclusion. You’re telling me Lando didn’t kick back after a long day of administrating Cloud City at his mahogany desk with velvet drapes drawn to look out at his mining colony and light up a fat stogie? OH MY GOD, OF COURSE HE DID!

Uncle Owen. He didn’t smoke around Beru, of course, because she’d never stand for it. But when he was out there on the south ridge and struggling to make those persnickety condensers, like, you know, condense there’s not a doubt in my mind he snuck in a couple Tatooine-esque Kools. I know you, Owen. I know you, man.

Porkins. As most diehard “Star Wars” fans know there is a deleted pre-Battle of Yavin scene in which Porkins, sitting in his cockpit and waiting for his X-Wing to get gassed up, is seen smoking a Marlboro and drinking a cup of Dunkin' Donuts coffee.

Gamorreans. I like to imagine these dudes sucking those cigs down on their fifteen minute break outside Jabba’s palace.

Princess Leia. Well, she doesn't smoke now, no. But back on Alderaan when she was just a rebellious teenage girl with dyed sky blue hair and Doc Martens and ripped fishnets? Hell yeah, she did. You know Kate Middleton used to smoke, right?

General Tagge. He’s stuck managing the Imperial Starfleet in the era of the Death Star, which is threatening to make his job obsolete, and all the while he’s got this menacing, mouth-breathing Sith Lord looking over his shoulder. Yeah, Tagge’s a two-packs-a-day kinda dude.

Boba Fett. Well, there's just no way Boba Fett didn't smoke. Am I right, fanboys? He was the baddest dude in the universe, right? By definition he was OBLIGATED to smoke. I'm sure he tilted that mask up after doing some badass thing and lit up the Mandalorian version of a Chesterfield. And I'm sure that when he did, it looked an awful lot like this.

A Ballad of Movie Whiskey

In the recent Best Picture winning “Birdman” there is a moment when at-odds actors Riggan Thompson (Michael Keaton) and Mike Shiner (Edward Norton) exit the St. James Theater under the auspices of taking a short stroll to get some coffee and hash out their differences. Instead, Mike veers into the bar right next door, explaining “They have coffee here.” Well they do, sure, but you think that's what two bellyaching actors are going to drink while they holler melodramatic bromides at one another? Ha! Without even putting in their order the bartender pours out a pair of shots, as if squabbling actors bellying up to the bar is a regular occurrence, and Riggan and Mike take them up without disagreement. They are, of course, shots of whiskey – Jameson Whiskey, that is, which is a blended Irish whiskey. That would seem to go hand-in-hand with St. Patrick’s Day, the Irish-themed holiday celebrating the patron saint of liquor distribution, as historian Lewis Black has noted. Of course, Jameson’s founder, John Jameson, was Scottish. And these United States have, over the years, become the largest market for Mr. Jameson’s finely-calibrated spirit. While I feel the need to apologize, once again, to Irish people everywhere for so much of the world’s need to co-opt their heritage once a year as an excuse to revel, whiskey is universal.

“The Angel’s Share”, Ken Loach’s heartfelt socio-fable of 2013, hit on this idea, imagining Scotland’s whiskey as collective of its nation’s people, something to which they all were entitled, whatever the price, whatever the quality. But it went one step further in the film’s title, a nod to the wondrous phrase employed to describe the alcohol that evaporates during whiskey’s aging process, suggesting the glorious brown liquor also has communion with the gods. And since the stars of motion pictures are often referred to as our modern day spin on gods, it’s only right that movies commune with whiskey too.

It is a natural tendency of the film de cinema to skew romantic, and so cinematic whiskey is often romanticized, be it Terry and Eadie gently making doe eyes over their boilermakers in “On the Waterfront” or the characters of “Waking Ned Devine” toasting to their deceased friend. It is served with chuckles in “Lost in Translation” when fading movie star Bob Harris (Bill Murray) films a commercial for Suntory Whiskey, making like Frank and Deano as he tries to epitomize cool.

Then again, that scene has a strong undercurrent of sadness. “Suntory time!” recites the commercial director like there's nothing anyone in the whole world would ever want more at any point in their lives more than Suntory. But it only seems to be making Bob miserable. Or maybe that's just because his glass has iced tea instead of whiskey. Yet, when he's drinking at the bar later, gettin' his misanthrope on, he's drinking Suntory. Suntory time looks like time spent in a misanthrope's own company. He’s a sad man in the midst of the traditional mid-life crisis, stuck in a place he doesn’t want to be, and so the whiskey becomes symbolic of his downturn, emotional and professional, shelling for a product he doesn’t even particularly like.

Quite often that’s the way cinematic whiskey is presented, as a misplaced respite. Big Whiskey, the frontier town at the center of Clint Eastwood’s unforgettable “Unforgiven”, embodies this notion, a place where people fled in the hope of something better only to find themselves under the rainy, moody skies and the iron fist of a lawless Sheriff. The residents of Big Whiskey repair to the saloon to drown their sorrows and worries in actual whiskey. What else is there to do?

There's a sequence in another western, Kevin Costner's “Open Range”, where he and free-grazing Robert Duvall come to the town where the disagreeable men who rule it with iron fists don’t want them. Never mind that, Costner and Duvall want some whiskey. The bartender won't serve them. So Costner takes up his shotgun and blows a hole in the wall. Then they get served. The moment that follows is subtle high comedy – a kindly local and his sons drinking with our principal duo right in front of the shot-up reflective glass. Costner presses the kindly local on why they won't do anything about the disagreeable men running the town with iron fists. “You're men, ain't you?” Westerns give off a macho aura, of course, and “Whiskey,” as Sinatra told us in "Some Came Running", “is a man's drink.”

T’is. In “The Getaway” when Ali McGraw asks Steve McQueen, perhaps film’s singular epitomizing of masculinity, what he wants to eat after he’s just been released from a stint in the slammer he replies “Whiskey, whiskey, whiskey, whiskey.” Sgt. Barnes Come At Me, I’m A Man, You’re Little Boys speech in “Platoon” is accompanied by his bottle of Jack Daniels, from which he takes swigs, macho drips of it falling from his chin. The tough lug in “Mad Dog and Glory” played by Mike Starr mixes Chivas into his beloved glasses of milk just to ensure there is no confusion about his credentials.

Not that whiskey is exclusively the domain of men. Sure, everyone knows Marion Ravenwood comes correct, but Nicole Kidman officially becomes one of the boys not so much when she helps a lead a cattle drive through the Never-Never in “Australia” as when she enters the wharf saloon post-cattle drive with Hugh Jackman and is blessed by the grizzled bartender with a shot of whiskey. And remember in “Beautiful Girls” when Uma Thurman wants to do a shot and all the dude dunces standing around drinking crappy beer stumble all over themselves trying to suggest what kind. “Woo-woo's? Melon balls? Num nums?” Uma, taken aback, disgusted and confused, replies: “Whiskey.” Straight up. She says it like she’s drank a lot of whiskey in her time and they agree with her proposal like guys who say they’ve drank a lot of whiskey in their time.

Here’s the point in the story, however, where we must admit that, as with so many vices, the seductiveness of silver screen whiskey can go too far. “It's all wonderfully romantic,” wrote Roger Ebert about the hard drinkers in “A Love Song For Bobby Long”, “especially in the movies, where a little groaning in the morning replaces nausea, headaches, killer hangovers and panic attacks. A realistic portrait of suicidal drinking would contain more terror and confusion. ‘Leaving Las Vegas’ that, and this is a different movie.” “Leaving Las Vegas” did do it. Heaven help me, did it. It painted a soul-crushing portrait of an alcoholic’s last days, and even as it made you care unreservedly about its misfit characters, it never disguised the true issue, never glamorized or softened the hole that an alcoholic is in. Billy Wilder, meanwhile, filmed all those whiskey bottles and shot glasses in his black & white “The Lost Weekend” in such a way as to strip them of any and all tragic beauty; no, those repositories of liquor are just tragic.

It is unfortunate that film often simplifies the sobering-up process, whether it's “28 Days” adding mounds of Hollywood varnish or “Crazy Heart” more or less reducing it to a montage or “Smashed” skipping it altogether. But then maybe that's because this is a subject where the conflicting notions of movies being “escapism” and “important” run head long into one another.  They want to address the most meaningful of subject matter but don't always want to spend their time in the darkest of dark places. Still, cinema knows the damage incurred from falling off the wagon. For my money Ben Affleck has never been a better director then the moment late in “Gone Baby Gone” when Titus Welliver’s character orders three shots of Cutty Sark and proceeds to let twenty-three years of sobriety go by the wayside. It is not frivolous; it counts. Affleck lingers on the moment, letting the toll weigh oh so heavily.

So maybe, as is so often said in terms of drinking, moderation is the key. “The Untouchables” understood this notion, convening to bust Prohibition-era violators because funneling whiskey across the Canadian border was illegal no matter how good it did (or didn’t) taste. Yet there was agent Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith), post-gunfight, a whizzing bullet having sprung a leak in a whiskey barrel, stealing a sip directly from the stream of the illegal good stuff. You can’t fault a man if he indulges his fancy here and there and within reason.

Of course, within reason isn’t how the movies do. “Gimme a whiskey, ginger ale on the side, and don’t be stingy, baby.” That’s how Greta Garbo introduced her voice to the cinema-going world eighty-five years ago, by utilizing “whiskey” as the third word most of the free world ever hear her say and then issuing the order not to be stingy. At the movies you can have as much of anything as you want, baby, and nowhere near enough, which is basically the same, and more or less everyone’s relationship with whiskey. In the words of James McMurtry: “I don't want another drink / I only want that last one again.”

And that brings me to Rick Blaine sitting in his own gin joint in the night’s wee hours with a glass and a bottle of whiskey simultaneously drowning his sorrows and keeping hope alive that his long-gone beloved, Ilsa Lund, might just return. It’s the quintessential cinematic whiskey scene, of course, and it is because it captures cinema's remarkable duality, that place where allure and melancholy collide with immense finesse. It goes down smooth. It goes down harsh.

Life's A Breeze

“Life’s A Breeze” revolves around a box spring turned security deposit box, a mattress that aging matriarch Nan (Fionnula Flanagan) has apparently stuffed full of one million in euros only to learn in horror that her sons and daughters have thrown it away to surprise her with a brand new bed. Considering the majority of her offspring are unemployed or suffering from some kind of financial stumbling block, this leads to a frantic search for the misplaced fortune without benefit of a treasure map, a whole family combing the Dublin landfills in desperation. What emerges, however, is less a financial fable than a low-key fairy tale in which Nan is made to realize her legacy rests not with her own children but with her granddaughter.

This is one of those Big Family movies, the ones where everyone can’t quite stand each other yet can’t seem to not spend time in each other’s company. Director Lance Daly, who also did the cinematography, repeatedly fills the frames with a multitude of characters, eliciting the air of always being unable to escape the presence of your loved ones. No one has room to indulge their own thoughts which marks them as one unintentionally united victim of group think. When Mom tells them of her hidden nest egg, they altogether scoff. When evidence begins to suggest otherwise, they altogether decide she must be telling the truth. When some straggler claims to have unearthed a mattress but that it bears only a measly six hundred bucks, they altogether figure Mom is loopy. Then they all decide she needs to go to a home.

The only one who seems oblivious to the unrelenting noise and closeness is Emma (Kelly Thornton), the daughter of Colm (Pat Shortt), the son who still lives under mom’s roof. While Daly favors group shots for most of the family, he chooses frames for Emma that underscore her solitude. It’s not just when she’s riding the bus with only her earbuds for accompaniment but at the lunch table where she is surrounded by her peers, none of whom are her friends, isolated, left to fold up her single slice of bread like a faux sandwich and eat with only her thoughts for conversation. It might be the first time that Thornton has acted but she effectively conveys that desire to go away when someone’s always there.

It’s why she bristles when she’s tasked with checking in on Nan while the grown-ups scheme and cajole. Eventually, obligatorily, however, Emma and Nan become friendly, so much that Grandma enlists Granddaughter to keep looking for the missing mattress even after all her kids have declared it a lost cause. And even if this whole Irish scavenger hunt is resolved via a fairly glaring coincidence, well, it hardly matters because the scavenger hunt, as is so often the case in films like this, is simply the means to an end. Oh, the money still means a lot to the squabbling children but we realize by the time the end credits roll that, money or no money, they will go on squabbling, forever and ever.

Nan is not disappointed in her kids, per se, but she also clearly doesn’t want her granddaughter turning into them. She wants her to think for herself, and she employs this money-seeking adventure as the device to elicit just such an awakening. That’s why the last shot is perfect. Emma steps outside and into the silence.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Scarecrow (1973)

Although Jerry Schatzberg’s “Scarecrow” is firmly in the tradition of 70’s road movies, it often feels apart from its era, as if its pair of hobos could have existed just as easily during The Great Depression as Vietnam. That is underscored by the film’s astounding introductory shot, one that may as well be John Cox’s glorious Grey & Gold, a painting dated to 1942, come to life, heavy storm clouds assembling on the horizon as a few trees cower in the foreground. It’s Anytime, USA, and Max (Gene Hackman) wanders out of the frame, out of whimsical Americana and into the real world, two places that have long shared an uneasy alliance.

As with any road movie, the destination is both completely the point and not the point at all. The mythical journey’s end is Pittsburgh, the Steel City as Emerald City, where our principal duo intends to open a carwash, a venture Max has got figured down to the penny in a little Moleskin notebook that he waves around with the authority of any cocky CEO. “For every car, there’s dirt,” he proclaims in a platitude that is awe-inspiring for its utter worthlessness. He says this to Francis (Al Pacino), a polite, semi-knucklehead whom he ropes into being his business partner. Francis buys Max’s pitch not exactly hook, line and sinker but because, well, what else has he got going on? He says he’s been at sea the last few years, an explanation that might suggest a Naval stint, but just as easily suggests an itinerant. His only other aim is to deliver a lamp to the child he’s never seen in Detroit, the child of the mom he ran out on five years ago, and he clutches that gift like the hopeless chunk of symbolism it is.

You half-wonder how Francis has survived this long and you can tell Max half-wonders the same thing. Consider the mid-movie vignette inside a working prison where the duo gets sentenced for thirty days on account of some churlish behavior. Convinced it’s all the fault of Francis, which it isn’t, Max decrees that he doesn’t want to speak to his ally for the whole month. Francis obliges, more or less left to his own devices, becoming friendly with a fellow inmate who seems like a good guy until he isn’t, physically assaulting Francis. When Max finds about this, he sets the record straight with his fists, as he’s prone to do, demonstrating himself as a kind of self-imposed volatile guardian angel of Francis.

This entire sequence also speaks to the film’s vibe, one that routinely stops being what it’s “about” to be “about” something else for awhile instead. It also speaks to the characters and their supposed intentions, for as much as Max goes on and on about his foolproof scheme to clean cars, to get where he wants to be and do what he wants to do, all he really wants to do is prattle on about his own perceived genius and get in fights. It’s a film set on the road but it’s not about two people not really getting anywhere. It’s about two people, as we come to realize with each delay and each impulsive setback, that don’t want to get anywhere, that would rather be left to wandering.

And that’s why it’s so awful when they do get somewhere, back to Detroit to deliver the lamp, that absurd totem. And with a life’s worth of aimlessness brought to bear, Francis goes bonkers and then catatonic, a moment played perfectly by Pacino with escalating tension and then what’s less a release than a rapid deterioration. It speaks to Now as much as Then, and probably even Before, probably even For All Time. It’s the moment when the yellow brick road ends not in the promised land but pretty much where you knew it was going to end up the whole time.

The closing scenes are emotionally linked to the remarkable shot in Schatzberg’s previous film, the stunning “Panic in Needle Park”, that finds Kitty Wynn’s character strung out, all alone, on a park bench. Sometimes filling yourself with heroin doesn’t look any different from sweetly wrapping up a lamp and going out to find the American Dream.

The One Time My Favorite Running Back Was In The Batman v. Superman Movie

Of the 992 superhero films that have already been greenlit over the course of the next 75 years, some of which YOUR children might not live to see, there is one generating perhaps more buzz than most. I’m talking, of course, about next year’s “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.” The reasons are obvious. It’s not just Batman. It’s not just Superman. It’s Batman AND Superman. Except it’s NOT just Batman AND Superman. It’s Batman and Superman AND Wonder Woman. Except it’s NOT just Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman. It’s Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman AND Aquaman. Ye gods!!!

To which I say……so honkin’ what? Go to the “Batman and Superman” IMDB page. It’s right here. Scroll down that list. Go past your superheroes and Jesse Eisenberg and Diane Lane and Holly Hunter and future Oscar winner Amy Adams. Go past Laurence Fishburne and Scoot McNairy. Go past Demi Kazanis and Marko Caka. What name do you see? You see this name: Ahman Green.

Me and Ahman, well, we go way back. All the way back to the mid-90’s when my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers were jeweled kings of the college football mountain and Ahman Green was their conquering hero in the backfield, the Earnest Shackleton of running backs. Social media sports fanatics like to make fun of the Peyton Manning Face but do you know the first documented instance of The Peyton Manning Face? That’s the 1998 Orange Bowl when Ahman Green was ripping up chunks of yardage on every play, killing clock, padding stats, swelling the score all on the strength of his glass-stained cleats while Peyton Manning stood on the sideline, helmet in hand, making The Peyton Manning Face, powerless to stem the monumental Ahman tide. A Nebraska native I befriended last year told me she went to that Orange Bowl. “You mean,” I said as my eyes leapt from their sockets, “the Ahman Green Game?” That’s what I call it. No football player who has ever lived has played better.

Per IMDB, Mr. Green will be portraying a character in “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” named “Thug #2”. If we can, let’s set aside the uncomfortable connotations such a make-believe moniker might elicit and instead focus on the fact such a title would seem to indicate he’s set to portray a bad guy, one of those people who glowers in the background behind the film’s chief heavy. And if that’s what he is, that means he’s expendable, because that’s their entire point – to show up so the superhero or heroes can dispatch of him. And for Ahman Green to show up just to be dispatched is ab-freaking-surd.

Now I admit there are few things in movie discourse that exasperate me more or more quickly than the mention of “plot holes.” Movies are so much more wonderful and interesting than a few measly “plot holes.” Spare me your mildewed protest that you could “drive a truck” through all those “plot holes”. But, having said that, if ever a feature film were, in fact, to feature a “plot hole”, well, rest assured, none would be bigger than some DC Comics lily-livers thinking they could go toe-to-toe, eye-to-eye, human-battering-ram for human-battering-ram with Ahman Green. Are you kidding me?! Get that stanky wet junk mail outta here. Superman’s stronger than a locomotive? Puh-leeze.

Superman’s never tried to tackle Ahman Green in the open field and Batman's Batsuit would crumble like a poorly made blueberry muffin at the first jab from an Ahman Green stiff arm. And besides, have either of those poseurs ever been on the cover of Sports Illustrated?

Harrison Ford: Grouchmaster Gruff

“Kid, I've flown from one side of this galaxy to the other, and I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen anything to make me believe that there's one all-powerful Force controlling everything. No mystical energy field controls my destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.” That’s Han Solo’s line in the first (fourth) “Star Wars” film, and because it’s Han Solo’s line it is, of course, said by Harrison Ford. And it’s important to take note of three things – the “kid”, the “simple tricks and nonsense” and the delivery. By calling Luke Skywalker “kid”, Solo establishes himself specifically as not a kid; Ford may be the heartthrob but he’s an adult, and the way he delivers the line marks him not as a young adult but an adult with a bunch of clicks already on the odometer. He’s, like, a pre-old man, which is what the “simple tricks and nonsense” illustrates, as if he’s the old-timer at the Coruscant Tap complaining about how Smashball used to be so much better in the old days. And the line delivery is tired, it’s so tired. That dude wants to lie down in the Millenium Falcon’s nap room.

At some point, the broad narrative of Harrison Ford, as detailed in pieces like this one for Esquire, determined that Early Ford was “carefree” and “cool” before he eventually transformed into Late Ford – “Harrison the Grouch”, the grumpy raconteur that social media and other pop culture forums enjoy making fun of so much these days. But I suspect those people were not or are not paying attention to just how much crankiness pops up in Ford’s early roles. Han Solo had a roguish twinkle in his eye, sure, but he was irritable, and occasionally comically hostile, at every turn. It’s so sudden when he re-appears at the end to save the day because he’s spent the whole movie trying his hardest to weasel out of it, get his reward and go home.

I was thinking about all this even before news broke of Harrison Ford’s “critical” (per your more nuanced, less sensationalist news outlets) plane crash, and I was thinking about it because a Will Smith movie was just released and every time a Will Smith movie is released it seems to spawn a cavalcade of think pieces regarding the livelihood of the entity known as the Movie Star. And because the few films Harrison Ford deigns to do these days rarely lay down the serious box office smack, it is therefore deemed that he is past his so-called prime, that he is no longer a Movie Star, but one who burned out sometime in the mid-90’s and only appears afire to those of us back here on Earth and away from the otherworldly planet of Hollywood.

Movie Stars in Cinema Romantico Land, however, are defined not in terms of Box Office Mojo but in terms of actual mojo. Movie Stars are about an aura, certain stylistic specifics bestowed at birth by the Greek God of Motion Pictures (and when I say birth, I don’t mean birth, but “birth”, because, of course, Jean Harlow’s name was Harlean and she wasn’t blonde). Movie Stars are defined not simply by commanding the screen but by the way in which they command the screen, and Ford always commanded the screen with a different flair – or, should I say, a lack thereof. His most successful films were typically built on concepts that could have yielded giant monetary returns even without him. What he did, though, was impress his testily idiosyncratic personality onto those projects, and so something like “Indiana Jones” always felt more Ford-ish than Spielberg-ish, exemplified by the famous moment in the first film when Indy pulls the gun to avoid the swordfight. That was a Ford suggestion, because he had the flu, even though he often looked like he had the flu in films even if he didn’t, and when Spielberg changed around the moment in “Temple of Doom” it inevitably played all wrong.

Pauline Kael once said she preferred Ford’s work as Indiana Jones for its “spontaneity” and “easy-going quality” but that he struggled when he played “men they think are serious.” “These spy thrillers in which he plays a diplomat or an army officer,” she said, “you can hardly wait to escape.” Except that in every part Harrison Ford played, you could always sense him wanting to escape. Like, he never wanted to be there in the first place, an idea that Alex Pappademas put forth in his Career Arc Ford retrospective for Grantland, writing “you have to wonder if (Ford) wishes he’d stayed a carpenter.” Indeed, he’s the kind of Movie Star that can't quite figure out the point of stardom, the kind let behind the velvet ropes only to immediately disappear out the rear exit. Most people did not care for “Hollywood Homicide”, and I didn’t much care for it either, but Ford’s performance I fancied. His character is exhausted, with life, with juggling two careers, and Ford’s seemingly gruff disinterest with the movie itself and its hopelessly corroded plot actually works in blissful harmony with the character. It’s multi-layered “I want out.”

It’s why he worked so well in “Witness” as a cop on the run who disappears into an Amish community. It’s why he worked so well at the title character in “The Fugitive”, because he excels at blending in and vanishing in his own film, wholly content to leave the star-making, award-winning work to his co-star. It’s why he worked so well in “The Mosquito Coast.” There he strove to create a utopia away from the rest of the world and, frankly, isn’t that where Harrison Ford would always rather be, away from you and me and the whole lot of us and holed up in his Jackson Hole, Wyoming Fortress of Solitude?

Indiana Jones is more serious than I suspect Kael lets on, which is underlined in that makeout sequence with Allison Doody in “The Last Crusade” where, frankly, Dr. Jones doesn’t seem to be having quite as much spontaneous fun as the situation might normally, uh, arouse. It’s part screwball, yes, but his demeanor was definitely still that of a starch archaeology professor than expert in amour. Ford, of course, was well into his thirties before stardom befell, and he always came across like a weary old guy on school lunchroom detail. “It’s not the years,” he tells Karen Allen in “Raiders”, “it’s the mileage.” It’s a funny line, sure, but also telling, as if just a handful of years being put through the press junket and award show wringer for two blockbuster franchises merely accentuated his underlying gruffness. That Solo-ish and Falfa-ian twinkle was already beginning to erode. His interview with David Letterman in 1982 is a prime example. He’s as ticked off at the celebrity game as he is in his notorious GQ interview from two years ago. He’s on Letterman’s NBC show to promote “Blade Runner”, and while the urban legend is that the voiceover demanded by studio nitwits on said film was purposely sabotaged by a clearly disinterested Ford. But what if, you know, that’s merely the way Ford talks?

When Philip Seymour Hoffman died, the New Yorker film critic Richard Brody said on Twitter something to the effect of, it’s a reminder not only to write about performers we admire when they pass, but while they’re still here too. Harrison Ford didn’t die, thank God, when his plane crash-landed last Thursday but it made me think about him and his career and it made me want to write about him. And I guess it wasn’t until then that I realized how I actually was kind of excited for this new “Star Wars” film, despite all my ironic poses to the contrary. I’m excited if for no other reason than seeing Han Solo fulfill the arc you could see readily see lo so many years ago. Yes, J.J. Abrams “Star Wars” may be titled “The Force Awakens” but I feel safe in predicting that for Old Man Solo there will have been no awakening. He will still see it as simple tricks and nonsense. And then he will tell those rascally neighborhood Corellian kids to get off his goddam lawn.

Laggies

In Lynn Shelton’s previous film, “Your Sister’s Sister”, she coaxed forth the three best performances of 2012. She did this partly by giving her trio of principal actors – Mark Duplass, Emily Blunt, Rosemarie DeWitt – a solid screwball situation, something off which they could really play. More so, however, she did this by adhering to her Mumblecore roots and not forcing the issue with filmmaking affectations and fancy edits. She merely let them naturalistically rip it. And while that specific genre is known for improvisation, this never felt made up on the fly. No, it felt as if lives were being lived right there on the screen. “Laggies” might not be a better film than “Your Sister’s Sister”, but it might be a more impressive accomplishment. If I didn’t know any better, and it’s possible that I don’t, I would strongly suspect that Shelton set out to challenge herself with “Laggies” to see if she could incorporate all manner of treasured Hollywood pedanticisms (sic) and still yield great performances. She succeeds, and she does so particularly on the strength of her leading lady, Keira Knightley.

Knightley’s Megan is raised from well-worn character stock. She’s a twenty-something with a degree but no direction and an engagement ring from a fiancé (Mark Webber) on whom she seems fairly mixed. At a childhood friend’s wedding, this daddy’s little girl stumbles across her Dad (Jeff Garlin) cheating on her Mom, and she instantly turns her back on the pressures of adulthood by reverting to childhood, like Kristen Bell in “The Lifeguard.” She befriends a teenager Annika (Chloe Grace Moretz) by buying her alcohol, ditches the wedding reception to party with high-schoolers and winds up taking asylum by indulging in a weeklong sleepover at Annika’s house where she meets and falls for her underage BFF’s single dad, Craig (Sam Rockwell).

The scenario is both inherently implausible and pure Hollywood, and it gets better (worse). To cover her escape from the real world, Megan informs her family, friends and fiancé that she’s out of town at a “professional seminar”, no doubt one of those places with name tags where overly talkative business professionals help synergize your career goals, or some such. And even though she’s not really there, she kind of is anyway, as her ridiculously conventional week of R&R becomes a highly unusual professional seminar in its own way. Yeah, it’s that kind of screenplay, yet the screenplay simultaneously has the cojones to call itself out on its own absurdity. Explaining her dilemma to another character, Megan realizes mid-sentence the symbolism of the whole situation and comments on it. And even if it is merely an attempt to cut off criticisms at the pass, Knightley utterly sells that sudden moment of recognition, expressing the sentiment as if she just pulled it out of thin air.

Knightley, a marvelous actress who has made her reel on period pieces, a fact which has worked against her in some critical circles, is wholly modern, right down to the Peter Pan complex, and convincingly assumes an American accent with a rasp that seems to begin in the back of her throat. An early scene at her friend’s wedding finds all the girls with their hands to their hearts during the “first dance”. Knightley stands off to the side with her jaw in her hand. That’s the attitude the entire turn emits – jaw in hand. Her life is just floating on by, and in one scene, where she poses as Annika’s mother for a meeting with a guidance counselor that naturally works as her meeting with a guidance counselor, she literally looks at her figurative life floating by. It’s amazing.

And it’s dozens of little gestures and reactions that repeatedly evince every clockwork piece of plotting. When Craig pulls Megan to aside to understandably grill her about who she is and why, for the love of God, she’s hanging out with his daughter, she speaks extemporaneously and essentially admits she doesn’t know. The whole performance exudes extemporaneousness. She has no plan and isn’t making things up on the fly as much as she’s just sort of reacting to whatever’s thrown in front of her, and more often than not her reactions make no sense. And for every predictable plot development, every reveal, every I-Turned-The-Corner-At-PRECISELY-The-Wrong-Time-To-See-What-I-Shouldn’t-See, every inept metaphor like a pet turtle that shows...how......slowly.........we............evolve, Knightley lends a smorgasbord of Oh my God, what am I doing?! ballast.

One of the film’s early sequences finds Megan going to a bachelorette party with these childhood pals of hers from whom she’s clearly grown apart. The place they’re at sports a statue of Buddha, a statue that conspicuously renders him with nipples, a fact she can’t help but addressing in a light-hearted condescending manner. She’s chastised, demonstrating the friction with her supposed friends, but the moment quietly suggests more, as if her ragged journey to come will kind of transform into an indie version of the eightfold path.

Focus (A Non-Review)

What if instead of these two...

...it had been these two?

Friday's Old Fashioned: Night Moves (1975)

Throughout “Night Moves” Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman), private eye, is told by others of his almost pathological need to “solve” the case. The case involves a young girl, Delly (Melanie Griffith), who has gone missing. Harry is hired by Arlene (Janet Ward), her mother, a fading (faded) Hollywood starlet to find the gone girl. He does a little digging and, in not much time at all, tracks her to a fairly foregone location – that is, her stepfather’s Oceanside ramshackle stead in the Florida Keys. It’s such a simple job that there can only be twists and turns and looming turmoil, and there is, of course, just as there is also the marriage of Harry’s that is on the rocks. “The movie,” wrote the late great Roger Ebert, “is about the process of a criminal investigation, not its results.” That was referring to “The Big Sleep” which was about Bogey’s Philip Marlowe, not Bogey’s Sam Spade, which is the P.I. to whom Harry Moseby is jokingly compared, but the sentiment half-describes “Night Moves”. It is overly concerned with the investigational process as much as the results, but it is concerned with results too; it’s simply that the “results” have nothing to do with anything being “solved”.

This film, directed by Arthur Penn, is one that gets and appreciates a classic film reference. Early on Harry visits his wife at her office and she wonders if he might like to join her and her boss that evening for a showing of an Eric Rohmer film. “I saw Rohmer once.” Harry replies. “It was kind of like watching paint dry.” Buuuuuuurn. And that’s because he sees himself as a Sam Spade, a tough-talking, no-nonsense-taking hard-boiled gumshoe in a black & white noir made on the cheap, where issues are resolved not with philosophical discussions but with brawls and guns.

Mosbey’s backstory involves his position as a one-time NFL player with the Oakland Raiders (which means that because the film is set in 1975 he must have played at least a season or two with the rough & tumble 70’s incarnation of that swashbuckling franchise which no doubt indicates why he’s so darn good in fight), and I think that’s crucial. The character on paper and in the demeanor crafted so ably by Hackman comes across very much like an ex-professional athlete forced to the sideline and, consequently, his own version of twiddling his thumbs. He’s often seen playing chess by himself. It’s tossing cards in a hat as a one man private investigating firm. He needs a way to matter.

His marriage apparently stopped mattering at some point, or at least being a way to actively engage in life. He only seems enlivened by the thought of his wife (Susan Clark) when he can tail her, discover the man with whom she’s been cheating, and knock on the man’s door, not really even to confront him, since he doesn’t seem that angry, but have a conversation. The man tries to get him to have that conversation with, you know, his wife, but Harry is nonplussed. She’s basically trying to goad him into a reaction, like Justine did with Vincent in “Heat”, yet Harry’s reaction is just to bury himself in his case and take off for Florida. In another film, a lesser film, when Harry starts flirting with Paula (Jennifer Warren) down in the Sunshine State, and eventually sleeping with her, we might assume the marital problems were merely an excuse to forgive his adulterous transgressions. Except we already kind of think he’s a (what-have-ya). He and Susan have already crossed the rubicon.

All this marks “Night Moves” less as a traditional thriller than a character study – “My Night At Maud’s” as an American thriller. After all, Rohmer’s film, the one Harry dismisses, revolves around the idea of making choices that apply meaning to life, for if you don’t make the proper choices to apply that meaning then life is merely an existential wasteland. He chooses to get involved in this case of the missing girl and to push that case to and then past its limits to apply meaning to the life he feels himself incrementally drifting away from. Alas, by the conclusion of “Night Moves” he’s more or less wound up in one of those art films he so despises, utterly adrift, all alone, forced into an answerless predicament, a barren, Godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing. He’ll probably spend the rest of his life watching paint dry.