Runoff

Kimberly Levin's debut feature film, "Runoff", about a family under threat and featuring a marvel of an intense lead performance from Joanne Kelly opened last week. I adored it and whole-heartedly recommend it. It has a few third act problems but never mind those; its emotions are always full throttle and on point. I reviewed it for Slant Magazine. You can read that review here. Then try to catch the film by any means necessary.

Heaven Knows What

The prolonged pre-credits sequence of “Heaven Knows What”, directed by the Brothers Safdie (Ben & Joshua) tracks a distraught heroin addict, Harley (Arielle Holmes), as she threatens to commit suicide. She buys razor blades. She writes a goodbye note. Still, her junkie paramour, Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones), won’t take her seriously. It’s fairly obvious this suicidal threat is a regular occurrence. He tears up her goodbye note. She tries to pen another one. He actively taunts her, knowing she won’t do it. But then, she does. The camera, like a jittery NYC street refugee peering over Ilya’s shoulder, gets in there as close as can be, and she puts that razor blade to her wrist and she cuts. Blood spews. It’s horrific. In another film this might have elicited the “Five Days Earlier” flashback. Not here. This is happening right now, before our very eyes, no before and no after. This film is purely the present.

That’s why we enter the film already in progress. What has brought Harley and Ilya to this life of homelessness and heroin is never explicated; it’s never suggested. The notion of what their respective pasts have wrought is of no consideration. They are dependent on their drugs, yes, but they are also dependent on each other, and on so many others. In fact, they spend much of the film apart as “Heaven Knows What” introduces a community of self-sufficient – in their own way – vagrant addicts. They argue constantly and swear incessantly, they issue threats and feign violence, though occasionally it spills over into the real thing, yet a very genuine screwed-up sorta love emerges. After her suicide attempt, Harley falls in with Mike (Buddy Duress), a crap talker who could have been a Goldman Sachs bro in another life, I reckon. He and she are more like verbal sparring partners than friends, yet they nonetheless help each other along. It’s a commune, really, whose common life centers entirely around scoring smack.

If heroin addiction is all about getting that fix, then that’s all “Heaven Knows What” is about – getting that fix. That’s the narrative. There’s some waxing, briefly, about the meaning of “real love”, but their stoned voices intentionally make it sound more like kids talking about cartoons. These characters don’t exist to be high; they exist to get high, and “Heaven Knows What” damn well knows the difference. There are no moments here of that tripped up bliss you so often see in drug movies. The closest it gets happens early, and even that includes a shot of Harley angrily screaming about nothing in particular. Joy is in short supply. This is un-romanticized hard-living, underscored by the camera work, which is street level handheld, perhaps out of necessity, but queasy and uninviting. They don’t want to invite you. They seek to push you away. This life, kids, isn’t for you. The only character who seeks to try and help anyone out of this virtual gutter, a big bear of a ball cap wearing dude, is told so often to go away, he finally does. He just walks the other way and right out of the movie.

This isn’t the escapades of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” or even the stomach-churning theatrics of “Requiem for a Dream”; this is a twenty-tens indie version of Kitty Wynn’s character in “Panic in the Needle Park” strung out and wasting away. It’s primal, powerful and, frankly, almost unwatchable. Its incessant immediacy yields intense advocacy.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Fugitive Kind (1960)

---I wrote this piece for another site several years ago but upon stumbling into the movie one recent night and being re-blown away, and considering it's the anniversary of Marlon Brando's passing next Wednesday, I thought I'd re-offer it today here at Cinema Romantico.

Based on a play by that great southern purveyor of gothic over-emotion Tennessee Williams, "The Fugitive Kind" (1960) stars Marlon Brando as a guitar playing, snakeskin jacket wearing lothario named, uh, Snakeskin who after a brief stint behind bars for his faultless role in a fiasco down Orleans way rambles into a poe-dunk Louisiana town on a dark and stormy night (literally), takes shelter at the city's ramshackle jail and finds himself explaining to the Warden-ess (Maureen Stapleton) that, you know, he just wants to put the guitar down for awhile and make an honest living.

She promptly introduces him to the spectacularly named Lady Torrance (Anna Magnani), theatrical proprietor of a general store, who agrees to give him the steady job he so desperately seeks. Alas, the straight life won't come so easy and he will also encounter blonde-haired wild child Carol Cutrere (Joanne Woodward) - more on her in a minute, a lot more - who knows Snakeskin from his previous life and exists in an effort to lull Snakeskin back to the wiles of the strings of the guitar.

Because this is Tennessee Williams, melodrama drenches the entire film like humidity in east Texas in the middle of July. This was an early directorial effort from the late Sidney Lumet and as his visual style was often simply not to get in the way (though there is one sequence where he does a bit of nifty trickeration with lighting during an, ahem, melodramatic monologue), the sensation of Williams lingers over everything. This Louisiana town is a town filled and run by men, evil, rotten, no-good men, so no-good that the perpetually sweat-ridden husband of Lady Torrance (Victory Jory) admits to having been part of the mob that killed her father years ago and which still haunts her. And yet even upon this admission people in the town - men and women! - still don't seem to quite grasp why she has such a beef with her spouse.

Thus, into this town of testestrone rides a most feminine man (as already stated, he plays guitar) who not only warms to Carol - such an outcast she's been banned from the county - but begins to maybe sorta romance Lady Torrance with Mr. Torrance right there upstairs. Lady wants him to remain by her side and Carol wants to whisk him back to the bright lights of the Crescent City. Should Snakeskin stay or should he go?

The young Brando is often thought of as a powerful actor, and that's true, but here he re-proves just what a national treasure he truly was back in the day by doing a 180 and spending the entire two hours as a tender, restrained, thoughtful man, someone who perhaps had that streak of rage in him once upon a time and now has locked it away. There are several moments in "The Fugitive Kind" that merely reinforce how Brando was born to recite Tennessee's material. That light-shifting monologue in the general store about birds that sleep on the wind which eventually leads to him telling Carol, not at all ironically "Fly away, little bird. Fly away before you get broke" is, in theory, the latter moment is sheer lunacy, but when Marlon just leaves you marveled. Magnani often seems to be acting as if she's onstage doing the play, not the movie, but I confess that may merely be a major personal bias because, well, how 'bout if at last we discuss Carol Cutrere and Joanne Woodward?

The brilliant film historian David Thomson has written: "I apologize if this seems too candid, or mawkish, for upright citizens. I recognize that it is a level of consideration that serious film critics seldom admit to. And, in one obvious way, it is an admission that could rule the critic out of the order. Yet, I hold to the admission because it is central to film, and to what happens in the dark. Ever since the beginnings of this strange medium, men and women have been drawn to the screen by feeling 'in love with' some of the huge faces put up there." And I mention this epic quote as a way to indicate that I must now take a moment to apologize to the late, great Paul Newman and advise that, sorry, sir, but I'm in love with your wife. Well, in love with a character your wife played.

Oh, they'll tell you the sexiest moment in cinematic history is, say, Ursula Andress emerging from the sea in "Dr. No" or Marilyn Monroe standing over the subway grate in "The Seven Year Itch", or something of the sort. They're wrong. They're all wrong. The sexiest moment in cinematic history is clear and undisputed and it is this: Brando gets in Woodward's convertible to drive her out of the county from which she's been banned and says "Move your legs to the other side of the gear shift." She moves her right leg, not the left. He says: "Both of 'em." Then she moves the left leg and gives him a satisfied smile and a slight nod that essentially says "How do you like me now?!" that makes me laugh as hard Lloyd Bridges declaring he picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue and makes Sharon Stone's little hoo-rah in the interrogation room in "Basic Instinct" is like a sexless episode of Degrassi Junior High in comparison.

A self-proclaimed exhibitionest who wants to "be seen and noticed and heard and felt", Woodward's Carol Cutrere is an ex "Christ-bitten reformer" and someone who once put on nothing but a potato sack and set out on foot for the state capital as a form of protest. Against what? Eh, she says, but that's not the really the point. No, the point was that she made the march to, you know, be seen and noticed and heard and felt.

Look up most descriptions of Woodward's Cutrere and you will typically find one of two words (or both): Nymph and Alchoholic. Maybe she's bi-polar. Maybe she's just crazy. Whatever, perhaps these are accurate, perhaps these are not, I think they're just lazy shorthand. I think she's a hot-blooded sentimentalist, someone who feeeeeeels everything. I love people who feeeeeeel everything.

There's a great many themes in "The Fugitive Kind", as there is with anything at the mercy of the pen of Tennessee Williams, but the theme perpetrated by Carol Cutrere was my favorite, and while it may be a theme as old as the hills, it is captured entirely through a hard-edged, perfectly melodramatic performance by Woodward. The Living and The Dead. Carol is re-banished from town at which point she promptly takes Snakeskin to a roadside honky tonk and delivers an exquisite, passionate, marching 'round the room monologue on the finer points of "jukin'" (Living) before then taking him to the "local bone orchard" and having a minor breakdown (Dead). And while it might be argued Snakeskin's ultimate fate was inevitable, I would argue the opposite.

Joanne Woodward tries to pull him toward the light of the living. He refuses. His loss.

Ardagh & Hartigan

Since no one else in Hollywood seems interested in so obviously putting Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts, friends-4-life, in their own buddy cop comedy we here at Cinema Romantico have decided to take it upon ourselves...

Fair Dinkum is a buddy cop comedy about two at-odds police detectives, a Sydneysider, Ardagh (Nicole Kidman), and a Melbournian, Hartigan (Naomi Watts), who must work through their contradictory attitudes and approaches to the job when they find themselves stranded in western Australia during The Wet and must siphon through an entire town's residency, Agatha Christie-style, to unmask a killer. 

In Memoriam: James Horner

The first time we see Rose DeWitt Bukater she is set to board the RMS Titanic, 882 feet of oceangoing hubris, and she is all done up befitting an engaged teenage girl in 1912. She’s got the shirt and the tie and the jacket and the skirt and the shoes and the wide-brimmed hat and the four-button off-white gloves and the umbrella. She’s a costumed representation of Victorian society, buttoned up, closed off, looking up at that big boat and haughtily dismissing it. But Rose wants out of this ornately stilted life. She’s threatening to burst. She doesn’t know who she is, not yet, but the real her is somewhere beneath all that fancy shmancy shit and she’s desperate to find it. She doesn’t know it but she’s building to the indelible moment when that carefree rogue Jack Dawson sketches her portrait, the one where she’s reclined san clothes, a tastefully nude embodiment of those Victorian shackles being cast aside. She’s undone. She’s alive.

That’s what makes the music during this sequence so celestially apropos. It’s Rose’s Theme, the motif accompanying her throughout, changing to fit the mood and situation and emerging arc of its namesake. In this moment, she’s unfettered, a free spirit with unspent passion to burn. And so, “Titanic’s” composer, James Horner, strips down Rose’s Theme to a single instrument – the piano, nothing more. And it’s wonderful, her essence in a melody. It’s melancholic but then pushing past it, like a musical version of that shot in “The Wizard of the Oz” when the sun lets through the gray clouds and illuminates the Midwestern sky. It’s elegant, risible and resilient. It’s her.

It’s a melody, of course, that was employed to concoct Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On”, the lamented, overplayed, jejune dentist office radio ballad that even Kate Winslet – Rose herself – confessed makes her want to throw up. And fair enough. But. I was in that theater on December 20, 1997 long before the song became the pre-viral version of viral. I heard the melody as just itself, au naturel. I felt it. I remember it. I know what it meant. I hear it, or I just think of it, and I see Rose, rocket queen, as herself, fuck those aristocratic pre-conceptions, and I well up. “My job,” Horner said in an interview with The Los Angeles Times, “is to make sure at every turn of the film it’s something the audience can feel with their heart.” To some that might sound purple, to me it sounds perfect. He knew that “Titanic”, for all its stunts and effects and budgetary concerns, was principally the story of one girl; he knew “Titanic” was Rose’s movie.

James Horner, who passed away Monday night in a plane crash, was an incredible and influential composer, and occasionally for films that mean a great deal to me. His score for “Field of Dreams” was, I can tell you as a native Iowan, exactly right, low-key but mindful of something more always lurking within. The mixture of hope and sadness for his work on “Glory” was so exquisitely befitting of the 54th Massachusetts. But Rose DeWitt Bukater, unabashedly and unashamedly, is my movie hero; then, now and forever. And James Horner composed her theme. Few movie scores will ever mean as much to me. R.I.P

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Love & Mercy

There’s a shot in Bill Pohlad’s “Love & Mercy” that finds middle-aged Brian Wilson (John Cusack) seated in a restaurant booth with Miranda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), his future wife. The camera gradually slides in behind Wilson’s head but the booth’s set-up, small mirrors embedded in its wooden back, allow us to see the character’s face in reflection, the echoes of who Brian Wilson was and what he accomplished watching over him, whether he knows it or not, a past from which he cannot escape. That, however, is precisely why Miranda becomes the most vital person in his existence. As the shot is set, she sees him not through that reflection, like we do, but straight on, seeing him for who he is in that exact moment and nothing else. That, “Love & Mercy” reckons, is the quality Wilson needed most in his life to expunge the demons that for so long held sway, and those demons and their release is what “Love & Mercy” recounts.

Pohlad’s film succeeds where so many biopics have failed by not telling the story of the Beach Boys’ visionary linearly, by graduating from child actor to main actor to main actor in old-person makeup, but by blending two critical eras of Wilson’s life. It skips back and forth and time, though it’s not really Past & Present; it’s one united chunk of time because each period comes across wholly integral to the other, as if these two versions of Wilson are communicating across the years. Cusack’s performance, in fact, piggybacks gracefully on the performance of Paul Dano, both ably evincing a childlike wonder that is sullied by psychological distress and an overwhelming yearning to be loved.

In the mid-60’s, Wilson conceives and records his masterpiece, “Pet Sounds”, and there is something more beatific to these artistically creative scenes than movies of this ilk usually contain. Pohlad isn’t consumed with tying each innovation to some real world circumstance. You know, like June Carter tells Johnny Cash he can’t “walk no line” and, well, you know what song is being cut in the studio next. Rather “Pet Sounds” seems as spontaneous as thought out, a “mistake” by the pianist turning out to be something transformative, a joyful accident, and you feel that joy emanating from both the songs and from Wilson himself. Yet, you just as aptly sense the encroaching melancholy. Though the film is often too set on showing each mental disconnect immediately in the wake of some crisis, be it familial, personal or professional, as if a person simply can’t be this way despite emotional baggage, it nonetheless deftly employs sound as a means to convey his brewing crack-up. Beach Boy songs are often faintly heard, like ambient noise that may or may not actually be present, impressing themselves upon Wilson’s psyche, for good or for bad. What he has wrought undoes him.

Brian sits out from touring to record, more or less making the recording studio his home where he dreams up sonic soundscapes that his more formal-minded bandmates struggle to grasp while his father hovers with disapproving barbs forever looming on the tip of his tongue. In this context, the recording studio very much arises as his sanctuary, the place where he can convert the escalating voices in his head into something beautiful, where people – like The Wrecking Crew – offer him acceptance. In the mid-80’s, however, where the film’s parallel narrative takes place, Brian has lost that sanctuary. Now his room is an otherwise spectacular beachfront home is like a prison, and its warden is his self-installed protective guardian, a therapist fancying himself a psychologist, Eugene Landy.

Played by Paul Giamatti with a wig so bad its part of the joke that is the character, this is one of the instances in which “Love & Mercy” can’t quite transcend its genre stipulations. He’s pure evil, and maybe he was, but in this context the character lacks any sort of dimension. The film never quite adequately connects the idea that Landy was merely Wilson’s mental replication of his own father; rather Landy simply exists as the jowly monster from whose clutches Wilson must flee. Still, in its own way, this simultaneously betrays the impressiveness of “Love & Mercy”, showing just how rarely it needs to make marks on its Biopic Blemish Bingo Card.

Banks’ Miranda, in fact, at first suggests another archetype, the tortured artist’s savior, the woman who redeems our wounded protagonist with love, the yin to Landy’s yang. It’s not love she exudes, however, as much as selflessness, a steady shoulder to lean on in a universe that for Brian Wilson seems a dominion over-populated with conniving hangers-on and people for whom his prodigious brilliance is somehow still never enough. She embraces him, flaws and all, none of which have necessarily been “cured” by the film’s conclusion. It's why the last sequence, though perhaps contrived, is nevertheless an exquisite capper, an emblematic acknowledgement that the scars of his past psychologically linger. You deal the best you can and put one foot forward.

Jurassic World

Perched in the lobby of the ornate Jurassic World theme park headquarters is a statue of John Hammond, the good-hearted if misguided philanthropist who gave birth to the original Jurassic Park. But it may as well be a statue of Steven Spielberg, so reverent is director Colin Trevorrow’s film to the series' original auteur. The initial thirty minutes of the fourth entry into the indomitable franchise make innumerable references to that first film, whether by year or by the park itself, like when two kids stumble into an abandoned storage facility and find old night vision goggles that may well be the same ones little Timmy wore. A computer dynamo, Lowery (Jake Johnston), back at HQ sports a vintage Jurassic Park t-shirt he copped for serious cash off eBay. When he’s mocked he can’t help but earnestly intone how the original park was so much better intentioned and far, far cooler than this current incarnation, a line that’s such a straight-forward slam dunk for critical analysis that I almost hesitate to use it. But hey, there it is, and Lowery knows the truth long before the film ends - such an homage will surely reach a breaking point, and when it does, the film will crack like those dinosaur eggs that provide our opening image.

For awhile it seems as if Trevorrow is really going for something here. Fairly inexperienced for assuming responsibility for such a box office colossus, a director of one prior feature film, Trevorrow is nowhere near the same sort of stylish craftsman as his Jurassic-era forefather. Yet, like so many auteurs of his era, he does have a grasp of irony. So sets his sights on meta, overtly addressing the elephant in the room – that is, “Jurassic World”, like the Jurassic World theme park of the film itself, is just an unabashed cash grab. “Every time we’ve added a new attraction,” says Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), the park’s operations manager, “attendance has sky-rocketed.” The film is as knowing as “Scream 2”, the idea that sequels need to add new attractions to increase audience size. So as Dearing’s park concocts a whole new dinosaur, the Indominus Rex, jerry-rigged from every conceivable source, desperate to up the ante, so does the movie. The Indominus Rex is a dinosauria representation of sequel-itis.

Really, the concept has some spark, trying to shoehorn a critique into a box office bazooka that feeds Hollywood's gluttony. If Trevorrow could have stayed on point, it might have become a pivotal moment in our current water park-ish cinematic climate, like a sleeper spy suddenly sprung to life who throws down a foul-smelling gas bomb in Universal City, California and cackles. Of course, that was never going to happen. “Jurassic World” was made with Steven Spielberg as executive producer, under the umbrella of his Amblin Entertainment, and so rather than pushing full bore into satire, Trevorrow retreats for legit monster movie. And everything falls apart.

The film turns on two kids (Ty Simpkins and Nick Robinson) sent away by their divorcing parents to Jurassic World where their aunt, Claire, is supposed to show them a good time. The kids, whose names I forget, are essentially screenwriting automatons, existing to get in peril so they can be saved and to allow the brittle Claire's motherly instincts to bloom. After all, her character can only advance a level in “likability” by embracing her matronly nurturing and by falling in love with the film’s hero, Owen Grady (Chris Pratt). With his vest and quips, he is intended as an Indiana Jones adventurer only to come across more like Matt LeBlanc's version of Major Don West. Claire, meanwhile, is less Karen Allen than Kate Capshaw, a damsel who indicates she’s “ready” for battle by unbuttoning her blouse to show off her cleavage-accentuated halter top. (Never mind the much lamented heels. Why you keep waiting for Pratt to take those things and hack off the heel a la Jack Colton.) Individually, they have no sizzle. Together, they have no chemistry. They are verve-less. Their kiss makes the Cage & Kruger kiss in “National Treasure” look like Day-Lewis and Stowe in “Last of the Mohicans.”

Maybe it’s merely because I suffer from debilitating anglophilia but the only character with even the pretense of pop is Zara (Katie McGrath), the woman whom Claire entrusts to watch her nephews. Don’t get me wrong, there isn’t much, but she demonstrates real world hysterics when the kids go missing, and telling off her fiancé's bachelor party on the phone has spunk that’s essentially non-existent elsewhere. I can actually see her life off screen while everyone else is just waiting for the dinos to run amok. And that makes it doubly odd that Zara's genuinely cruelly violent and super prolonged death is the only one that resonates, as if the film is illustrating it has no place for even halfway charismatic characters.

It is also the only action sequence assembled with any kind of know-how. Otherwise, the classical editing of Spielberg’s original is sorely lacking, sacrificing well-built suspense and palpable dread for hurling special effects at the screen and hoping their pizazz will yield oohs and aahhs. It does not. It’s aweless. When the famed T-Rex finally trots out it's supposed to be a heroic callback to the original, but mostly it's wonderful only because you know the film has at long last reached its wrap-up. One more cinematic blot of blah and we can all go home.

“Jurassic World” becomes the very product it initially suggested it sought to mock, an unimaginative, un-engaging blockbuster. It’s a two-hour Super Bowl™ commercial, posing as hiply relevant. Then you realize it's just smokescreen to sell the same soulless product.

Keira Knightley Talking About Vinyl

It's been a rough week out there in the world. A really, really rough week. You're pissed; I'm pissed; we're all pissed. So let's pause for a moment this Saturday morning to just, like, listen to Keira Knightley talk about vinyl records.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Bride Came C.O.D. (1941)

When Bette Davis, along with a myriad of others, failed to land the coveted role of Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone with the Wind”, she took the lead part in “Jezebel” instead, an unabashed “Gone with the Wind” ode that nonetheless had scads of its own quality to offer. Why Ms. Davis’s performance in the latter earned an Academy Award for Best Actress. “The Bride Came with C.O.D.” essentially seems like a response to another film in which Ms. Davis was not featured – namely, “It Happened One Night”, the famed travelogue comedy in which Claudette Colbert’s runaway heiress is brought home by and made to fall in love with Clark Gable’s newspaperman. “The Bride Came with C.O.D.” isn’t quite the same template. Davis is a wealthy heiress, yes, but she’s not a runaway. Instead, she’s kidnapped. She’s kidnapped by James Cagney.

If Gable was known for his coolly mirthful smile then Cagney was known for his tough guy persona, which means that as opposed to the elegant give and take of “It Happened One Night”, “The Bride Came C.O.D.” was seriously primed for a more heated affair. Especially if Cagney’s Colbert was the combative, candid Bette, a woman who didn’t suffer fools and sometimes wouldn’t even suffer geniuses. Imagine the Walls of Jericho between Bette & Cagney; they wouldn’t come tumbling down, they’d be torn to shreds. Yet despite having this potentially ferocious twosome as his cornerstones, director William Keighley never truly unleashes their power in combination, as if he’s Cameron Frye’s dad, keeping that 1961 Ferrari cooped up in the garage when it’s begging for an epic spin.

Davis is Joan Winfield, an heiress to the fortune of her father (Eugene Pallette) who desperately doesn’t want his daughter to marry self-impressed nightclub crooner Alan Brice (Jack Carson), so much so that when he learns they are on the verge of eloping to Las Vegas he convinces the debt-ridden pilot, Steve Collins (Cagney), set to squire them to Sin City to kidnap his daughter as a means of preventing the union. That seems a decent set-up, a means of putting of our stars at veritable odds, allowing for bickering that will give way to gushing when they realize their commonalities.

But that never really happens. I mean, they fall in love, sure, because they have to. The movie’s route to that point, however, is dreadfully unconvincing, a series of screwball delay tactics sprung from a plane crash that seems intent to hold out on the consummation of their courtship for as long as possible, though without actually conveying the courtship itself. They wind up in a ghost town, save for one man, Pop Tolliver (Harry Davenport), hanging on and waiting for a boom that will likely never come, who gives them food and shelter, and initially becomes an ally of Joan in thinking that she’s been kidnapped before becoming an ally of Steve when she realizes Joan’s father paid Steve to kidnap her. Why this would prompt him to turn on Joan, I have no idea, but I’m not sure the script does either. This keeps the two stars apart for significant chunks of the movie, and when they come back together in an abandoned mineshaft, where Steve acts as if they’re lost even though they aren’t, their interactions remain oddly un-spirited, an unconvincing impetus to sprout love everlasting.

You keep waiting for Bette Davis to come alive and take charge. Instead she’s reduced to quivering from coyote howls and getting pricked with cactus quills. It’s difficult to detect what might draw Cagney’s character to hers, and vice-versa. To say they have no chemistry would be wrong because the film never really tries to harness Davis’s best elements. She mostly stands by while he dallies about. When she first realizes his intent is to kidnap her, she straps on a parachute, intending to escape by jumping. That skydive never happens but by the end you wish it would have; it never occurred to anyone to kidnap her from the movie.

Wistfully '95: Braveheart

Since I could finally both drive and get into R-rated movies in 1995, it doubled as the year in which I fell head over heels in love for the experience of Going To The Movies. And so, here in the future in 2015, we will periodically re-visit a handful of the offerings to which I first paid homage in various multiplex cathedrals of Des Moines, Iowa.

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There is a moment in Mel Gibson’s Academy Award behemoth “Braveheart” when Isabella (Sophie Marceau) is flouncing around the King’s Castle with her feudal version of Carrie Fisher in “When Harry Met Sally”, discussing the Scottish rogue, William Wallace (Gibson), instigating a rebellion against dastardly England. “Knowing his passion for his lost love,” Nicolette explains, “they next plotted to take him by desecrating the graves of his father and brother and setting an ambush at the grave of his wife. He fought his way through the trap and carried her body to a secret place.” Isabella swoons. “Now that is romance, oui?” wonders Nicolette. “I wouldn’t know,” replies Isabella like she’s Judy Garland in “Meet Me In St. Louis” talking about the boy next door. What strikes me most about this conversation isn’t the romantic absurdity, which I adore, so much as how we are simply left to take Nicolette at her word. We never see the story in question. As director, Gibson chooses not to lay it over the speech. For all we know, it’s made up, or a brewing folktale, passed down from person to person, like a game of medieval telephone.

That’s a significant part of “Braveheart.” Yes, we all remember the Gibson’s fiery speech in blue war paint but what’s also memorable is the pair of Scots who dismiss the notion that he is William Wallace. “William Wallace is seven feet tall,” says one. Wallace himself retorts: “Yes, I've heard. Kills men by the hundreds. And if he were here, he'd consume the English with fireballs from his eyes, and bolts of lightning from his arse.” Everyone has a good laugh. It’s a funny joke! He is William Wallace! Yet, he’s not really. He’s less the actual William Wallace, whoever the historians say that is, than the version of William Wallace that shoots bolts of lightning from his arse. Why I’m tempted to surmise that Randall Wallace’s original screenplay contained a scene where William Wallace shot bolts of lightning from his arse until Mel Gibson nicked it at the last second.

After all, “Braveheart” has been labeled one of the ten most historically inaccurate movies of all time. Or, to say it another way, as said Sharon Krossa said it: “The events aren't accurate, the dates aren't accurate, the characters aren't accurate, the names aren't accurate, the clothes aren't accurate -- in short, just about nothing is accurate.” Uff da. Here’s an article from Kathryn Warner that takes a deep dive into the historically inaccuracy in “Braveheart” surrounding Isabella and her baby - namely, that there is no way whatsoever that William Wallace could have fathered it. She points out, amongst a myriad of other damning details that are easy for anyone in the interwebs age to fact check on their own, that, uh, well, Isabella would have been a whopping nine years old at the time of real life William Wallace’s execution……and still in France. Alex von Tunzelmann offers a fairly concise roundup of the film’s fiction over at The Guardian, closing with the sort of line these kinds of lists usually employ, writing that “regardless of whether you read English or Scottish historians on the matter, Braveheart still serves up a great big steaming haggis of lies.” Sick burn.

It’s not like Randall Wallace went all high and mighty a la Ridley Scott and his “real” account of the very much mostly mythical Robin Hood. No, Wallace made it well known that his script was based predominantly on Blind Harry’s Wallace, an epic 11,877 stanza poem purported, per mostlymedevial.com, to be taken from “the writings of John Blair, a childhood friend of Wallace's who became a Benedictine monk.” The majority of it, however, seems rooted not in any kind of factual evidence, but in evidence of the heart. “Is Blind Harry true?” Wallace asked rhetorically in Lin Anderson’s book “Braveheart: From Hollywood to Hollyrood.” “I don't know. I know that it spoke to my heart and that's what matters to me, that it spoke to my heart.”

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” You’ve heard that line thousands of times. Literally (figuratively), thousands. It was recited in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”, John Ford’s film from 1964, one exploring the disconnect between real history and fanciful revisions of history. And at some point, fanciful revisions of history became antithetical to the movie-going experience. Print the legend instead of the fact and people flip. Twitter ignites.

And I get it. Honest, I do. There are valid points to be made about the fallout of a film’s intentions. Perhaps “Braveheart” thrust William Wallace directly into the spotlight, a place this long forgotten rebel never would have been again, but at what cost? Are misunderstandings about the real person on account of the film's messy remembrance of the facts a plague on real history? Do people watch “Braveheart” and simply assume the English are all hate mongers? I compared Wallace to Robin Hood earlier but Robin Hood, for all the modern day detective work, remains wholly a myth, a man in tights winning archery contests, Errol Flynn guffawing. Perhaps Wallace retained the right to be known as he really was just as it might be important for people to know that Emanuel Leutze’s rendering of Washington Crossing the Delaware is an oil canvas of poppycock. But then, Leutze wasn’t painting fact; he was painting the legend. So was Gibson.

I love that painting. It’s my favorite painting in the whole world. I’m a fanatic for Revolutionary War history but I’m also a fiend for romance, and why can’t the two co-exist? The Washington in Leutze’s painting is the most gallant motherfucker in the whole world, the G.W. more in line with the one that chopped down a cherry tree and hurled a silver dollar across the Potomac. And the Wallace of “Braveheart”, the one that gave an heir to Isabella and sacked York and wore belted plaid (scandal!), has more in common with that Washington. It’s not history; it’s histrionic. So what?

The Icing

Icing in hockey terminology denotes a penalty wherein a player launches an untouched puck past the center line and the opposing team’s goal line. It was concocted as a means to prevent teams ahead in the game from stalling. And so it’s apropos that this term gives “The Icing” its title. After all, Klara (Zuzana Stavná) has just been married to Stepan (Ondrej Sokol), but nothing comes across peachy keen in this brand new union. Instituting an old wedding tradition, Iveta (Hana Vagnerová), the female best man, has kidnapped the bride and taken her to a sports bar in the Czech countryside, empty because its owner, Vladana (Jana Stryková), cannot get the big hockey match to come up on TV. And rather than immediately commencing with the nirvana that society implies is foregone so long as you have a ring on your finger, these three ladies drink to forget what hasn’t even happened yet. Klara may have said “I do”, but she’s delaying the start of her marriage, trying to sort out what obviously still weighs on her mind.

Jan Hrebejk's “The Icing” is an examination of those tenuous “modern” concepts of marriage and monogamy as viewed through the lens of farce. Literally set on a dark and stormy night in an empty bar, each grand revelation being punctuated with a clap of thunder while also providing cutaways to the rain-soaked back roads which the groom and the male maid of honor desperately try to navigate, yielding a road kill punchline. The reversals are fast and furious, re-arranging everyone’s relationship with one another, re-leveling the playing field, again and again.

Klara seems unsettled from the very instant she sidles into the bar, eyeing Iveta as possible competition for the man she’s just married which, as it happens, is entirely true. Stepan, however, is eventually revealed as something of a low-key twat, high on himself and none too guilty about sleeping with two women at once. In his mind, fidelity is archaic, and consequently, Klara and Iveta simultaneously swooning and metaphorically clawing at one another over him becomes increasingly lamentable. Vladana’s hockey-playing beau, meanwhile, is long since gone, having left her the bar she now owns, an albatross which she's trying to discard by wagering a healthy chunk of her savings on the massive Czech-Slovakia hockey game she unfortunately cannot view. If she wins, she figures it will be enough to re-start. You can likely guess how that goes.

It’s all headed toward confessions and eruptions of emotion, of course, but as the storm lessens and the story deepens, it quietly trades in its absurdist comicality for something approaching authentically tragic. As this mismatched yet entirely deserving trio limps across “The Icing’s” finish line, the film draws a surprisingly graceful and sardonic parallel between a sports bet and a walk down the aisle. Lay down your bets and hope you don't bust.

Uncertain Terms

For wanting to escape the stresses of reality in Brooklyn and find a quiet space in the country where he can think and put his life into some sort of perspective, Robbie (David Dahlbom) sure has picked a strange place. That is, an isolated house run by Carla (Cindy Silver) where she provides room and board to teen moms-to-be whose for whom their family life is either tenuous or non-existent. Robbie takes a work as a handyman, which theoretically allows for mind-clearing manual labor even though his various chores slowly fade from view on screen the more he is pulled into the home’s one-of-a-kind ecosphere. “Uncertain Terms” emerges is something of a bizarrely beautiful marriage between Clint Eastwood’s schoolhouse psycho-sexual nightmare “The Beguiled” and the lo-fi modern melodrama of Joe Swanberg. It’s a slice-of-life served with a vial of poison.

Despite the seeming expanse of this rural setting, the film induces emotional and physical claustrophobia, sticking primarily to the confines of Carla's comfy if unostentatious home. Gradually the home's inhabitants ingratiate themselves into Robbie's psyche. Through the prism of their youthful unworldliness and mostly male-free environment this otherwise plain jane of a man comes across intrinsically cosmopolitan, like a GQ cover model. Despite himself, he plays the part they require, suddenly existing in a world where almost every female at once idolizes and yearns for him; eventually he comes to believe in it too.

Flirtations ensue with Jean (Tallie Medel) and Nina (India Menuez), whose boyfriend (Casey Drogin), accented with a piercing between his eyes that betrays his desperation to be hard, turns up, a reminder of the real world looming just beyond. He grows jealous of Robbie. Cringingly, Robbie grows jealous of him. At times the film seems primed for horror, like an excursion in a rowboat out on a lake where you keep waiting for one paddle to drop and a cover-up to ensue. It's admirable, though, how Silver proposes these typical avenues only to opt for an alternate route. He's not interested in sensationalizing a story that almost seems to be begging for it.

Suffering from a slow-burning disconnect, Robbie mostly ignores cellphone calls from his fiancé, and when he does talk to her he alludes to her cheating on him as the cause of this sorta split; but it’s telling that we only hear their from his perspective. It’s a he-said/she-said but we only hear what he has to say. Out here, he can formulate a whole new narrative, one that makes nothing but sense, even if that narrative is pure fantasy. And Nathan Silver’s filmmaking is notable for how ably he filters that fantasy through the lens of everyday. Robbie and Nina flint away for an evening and he teaches her to drive, this palpably disturbing moment when an event typically associated with father/daughter acquires twisted sexual charge. Later, at Nina’s birthday party, the two of them dance in the midst of having just concocted some delirious scheme to run away together. It could never happen. It shouldn’t happen. But for a moment, it feels like it will, and the camera captures that blissed out phantasm with an unaffected poetry. Then, it collapses.

Pregnancy at the movies often is more about metaphorical rebirth than actual childbirth, and Silver quietly picks away at that emblem, illustrating its emptiness. It’s past lives and repeated behaviors that continually threaten to undermine the characters. Escape from them is illusory.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Fastest Gun Alive (1956)

Set in the frontier town of Cross Creek, “The Fastest Gun Alive” exists in a universe where Big Whiskey of “Unforgiven” must at least appear on the map. Russell’s Rouse film arrived in 1956, right on the cusp of the revisionist western boom in the 1960’s, even though directors like Anthony Mann were already exploring a more cynical tone in the genre so long predicated on John Wayne’s (pseudo) heroic baritone. Yet 1956 would have also meant that “The Fastest Gun Alive” was still hanging an Aw Shucks, Gee Whiz air freshener from its cinematic rearview mirror, a mirror in which Roy Rogers remained visible. That leaves “The Fastest Gun Alive” to negotiate a fairly tricky high wire.

The film opens with its principal bad guy, Vinnie Harold (Broderick Crawford), riding into town with his pair of requisite yes-men seeking to find and shoot the man who fancies himself the fastest gun in the west. That’s it. That’s the whole reason. Vinnie has sworn no blood oath. The man hasn’t killed his father or his brother or his nephew or his cousin or his former roommate. He just supposedly pulls his pistol from his holster faster than Vinnie and Vinnie’s “gotta know.” This right away signals a different sort of western. Oh, Vinnie and his yes-men rob banks, sure, but that’s tangential. Yes, the Sheriff tasked with finding Vinnie and his yes-men post-robbery declares that Vinnie killed his brother, but that’s even more tangential. This is the film implementing common western movie scenarios in order to deliberately disregard them. This isn’t about anything other than who’s the fastest gun alive.

It takes almost thirty minutes of screen time before we are officially told that George Kelby (Glenn Ford) is, in fact, the fastest gun alive. Yet even if the film takes that long to make this pronouncement out loud, we know. And we know just like one of George’s fellow townfolk in a remote outpost out there on the frontier seems to know, saying that something doesn’t seem quite right about George. And something doesn’t seem quite right because Glenn Ford plays him as not quite right. Oh, he’s a nice enough fellow as evinced by the ride he gives to the young’n aboard his wagon right near the film’s start, but there’s still something not quite right. Townfolk comment about there’s something not quite right. George speaks in low-wattage mumbles. When pressed, even a little, just a teensy-weensy bit, he’ll put his hands in his pockets and stammer and look at the ground. His brow is constantly coated with sweat. Something’s gnawing at him and Ford lets us see it, plainly, until one day it erupts. Well, it doesn’t quite erupt. There may be a final reel showdown but when it comes, it’s lightning quick, and almost beside the point.

“The Fastest Gun Alive” expresses impressive cynicism for the notion of the noble outlaw, and for the ways in which a life-taker could be seen as a peacemaker. At the same time, it wants to let its hero live happily ever after, and so it negotiates both these ideas with a little bit of pine box trickery. It buries the myth and it lets the man live, a bitter brew with a sweetly sentimental aftertaste.

5 Favorite Jurassic Park Characters/Performances

The fourth installment of “Jurassic Park” opens this weekend twenty-two years after the first, proving no Hollywood well is ever dry and that mankind’s hubris is unstoppable. It’s fashionable, of course, to crack jokes about how the people in the “Jurassic Park” movies don’t learn their lessons and just keep on setting themselves up to be eaten by more dinosaurs, and, frankly, this is all nonsense. Do these people not exist in the world? This world? The one we’re all existing in right now? Once they figure out how to clone dinosaur DNA there’ll be a real Jurassic World setting up shop right next door to Sea World in fifteen minutes. Parents will take their kids to see velociraptors through plexiglass while simultaneously warning them about nitrates in hotdogs. You know it. I know it. We all know it. 

Anyway, despite their obvious focus on dinosaurs, what intrigued me most about the “Jurassic” films were their characters. Or, perhaps I should say, their performances. Or, perhaps I should say, the characters and performances working in harmony. Because for all their effects, it’s the distinct little bits of characterization filtered through actorly tics that intrigue me the most. You can have the ripple in the water glass, I’ll have the…well, you’ll see.

Honorable Mentions: Laura Dern as Ellie Sattler in “Jurassic Park”: not a great character, but a performance the typically quirky Dern still outfits with interesting bits of body language and reactions. Sam Neill in “Jurassic Park III”, a performance that nicely exuded the same weary professionalism of the movie itself.

5 Favorite Jurassic Park Characters/Performances

5. Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm, The Lost World

I might like THE LOST WORLD slightly better than JURASSIC PARK because of Goldblum's performance, a running commentary on how dumb it is.

— Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) May 2, 2015

4. Pete Postlethwaite as Roland Tembo, The Lost World

A big game hunter who lends out his services solely for the once-in-ten-thousand lifetimes chance to bag a T-Rex, Tembo easily could have starred in his own “Jurassic Park” spinoff, a psychological “White Hunter/Black Heart” with dinosaurs. Indeed, among all the scientific, or thereabouts, characters parading through “Jurassic Park” premises, he’s apparently the only one raised with a philosophical background. We know this because he recites speeches about the “chap” that climbed Everest, and so forth. He’s also the only one who seems to genuinely grasp the actual situation. If Goldblum plays as if it's all dumb, the late great Postlethwaite plays as if it's all real, and that's just a little bit harder of an achievement.

3. Samuel L. Jackson as Ray Arnold, Jurassic Park

Jackson would, only a year later, begin his rise to acting’s foremost foul-mouthed yeller, a man who chewed up monologues and spit them out, an entertaining over-actor with outside voice to spare. Yet as Jurassic Park’s chain-smoking chief engineer, he’s merely an over-worked, stressed-out employee who mostly just grumbles and mumbles, turning lines like “We have all the problems of a major theme park and a major zoo and the computer's not even on its feet yet” into exhausted art. He’s the one “Jurassic Park” character that could have fit right into “Office Space.”

2. Bob Peck as Robert Muldoon, Jurassic Park

The first time I saw this movie as a precocious teen, I think the park’s game warden barely made an impression. Years later, soured by age, my idealism extinguished, I adored the dude. “They were testing the fences for weaknesses, systematically,” he says of the dinos in an early sequence. “They remember.” And the spin Peck puts on those words, man oh man, you know that he knows they’re all gonna get it. He’s not Jurassic Park’s resident game warden; he’s its resident fatalist. 

1. Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

It’s so nice to know that such an idiosyncratic performance could exist in a movie that roped in so much bank. In some ways, his chaotician, cracking wise while simultaneously pointing out mankind’s hubristic folly all while being “on the lookout for a future ex-Mrs. Malcolm” in the midst of taking swigs from his flask, was a Jurassic-era precursor to Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark. The dinosaurs are rad, man, but years-later re-watches of Spielberg’s blockbuster reveal that once Goldblum’s character is moved aside, the movie stops being as interesting. He’s not just there to call these men playing god on the carpet; he’s there to M.C. between rounds of exposition and action set pieces. In 1993, my favorite moment was the glass of water. In 2015, my favorite moment is Ian Malcolm sitting by himself talking to himself. “That’s chaos theory.”

When Dancing is Everything

One of the problems with latter day Cameron Crowe has become his bizarre inability to effectively communicate a story. And I’m talking about the most rudimentary of the straightforward screenwriting basics here. Motivation, backstory, who a character is, why a character is doing something, fundamentals that usually are just inherent in a screenplay have vanished. On his recent podcast for Grantland, film critic Wesley Morris in speaking about Crowe’s much derided “Aloha” gave a monologue regarding “movie magic.” Then he caught himself. He changed “movie magic” to “competent.” As in, making a movie make sense, making a story simply graspable in what the eff it’s about, isn’t “magic”, it’s mere “competence”, and somehow, somewhere, some way Crowe’s storytelling became incompetent. The reasons for this happening perhaps only he can answer and are not our topic today. No, our topic is how Crowe’s recent films, for all their flaws, can still render moments, beautiful, engaging, heart-stopping moments. I will enter Thunderdome to fight anyone who claims “Elizabethtown’s” Walk of Shame isn't the bomb diggity. Another moment occurs in “Aloha.”

In “Aloha”, Bill Murray plays a screwball billionaire with designs on sending his own rocket into orbit, single-handedly winning the space race. His sorta, kinda sidekick is teamed up with a bubbly yet by-the-book captain named Allison, played by Emma Stone. At a Christmas gala, or something or other, they come together for a dance. There is hardly a logical reason for these characters who possess opposing viewpoints about mostly everything to be cavorting together. That’s how Stephanie Merry of The Washington Post surely feels. Of the moment she writes, “Crowe also commits a cardinal sin by wasting the greatness of ‘I Can’t Go For That’ by Hall & Oates on a bizarre and pointless dance sequence.” Bizarre? Pointless? Oh, maybe in plot terms, but whoop-dee-freaking-do. This sequence is not really about plot, and it’s not about Carson and Allison. It’s about the actors playing Carson and Allison – that is, Bill Murray and Emma Stone.

When rumors of an all-female “Ghostbusters” reboot spewed across the Internets and vigilante Twitter groups spewed righteous venom, Bill Murray hand-picked his own cast for the potential project – Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Linda Cardellini, and Emma Stone. That wound up not being the cast, of course, because Murray didn’t have final say. Yet, when “Aloha” was filming, Murray wouldn’t have known this, and so when Murray and Stone take to the dance floor, her potentially being a sort of, shall we say, Paulette Venkman was still a possibility.

Initially, Murray’s eyes register curiosity, as if he wants to see not what sorta groove this lady has but what sort of attitude she’s convey while grooving. Stone reciprocates with that patented grin of hers that’s one part amusement and one part “I got this.”  She doesn’t have anything to prove. And that, of course, is precisely what wins over her dance partner. He gives in. He goes for it. And they, to quote Kylie Minogue, “lose it in the music.” Stone’s got possession of herself, and whether or not she’s in the female “Ghostbusters”, well, in that instant, Murray still provides his blessing.

Antarctica: A Year on Ice

“Antarctica: A Year on Ice” doesn’t quite contain the hymnal transcendence of Werner Herzog’s “Encounters at the End of the World” but then, you know, it wasn’t directed by Werner Herzog, an eccentric genius who’s always going into every documentary on the prowl for some sort of portal into another spiritual dimension that the laymen may or not be able to see through too. “Antarctica: A Year on Ice”, on the other hand, was directed by Anthony Powell, a genial New Zealander with an accent less portentous than ingratiating. In fact, his film has close to a replica of Herzog’s sequence involving the infamous lone penguin marching off to certain doom, shown here instead with a single seal, faraway from sea. And rather than freezing your soul with existential dread, Powell thoughtfully offers you a metaphorical blanket. It may be the coldest place on Earth, but this film wants to warm you up to Antarctica.

Powell is a semi-permanent resident of Earth’s southernmost continent, where the temperatures plunge amidst spectacular scenery. That scenery is very much front and center, as it always is in films centered around these remote five million square miles, but is ultimately less crucial to the story Powell is telling than the people in the story. He is someone who has not only summered in Antarctica – from October to February – but has wintered there – from February to October – a much less welcoming time when the sun slips below the horizon for months and severe winds howl. He reckons, however, that to truly see this place, to acquire a full understanding of it, you have to see it over the course of one year, and his own Year(s) on Ice become a testament to the people who have chosen to experience those 365 days with him.

Leaning strongly on talking heads and voiceovers of people in the midst of their daily routines, we are introduced to a gaggle of men and women who, according to one, came to Antarctica to refreshingly find themselves for the first time in their respective lives as the “majority” rather than the “minority”. We learn little of the lives they lead on their respective home continents or specifically what brought them here, and yet that comes across right, innately evoking the sensation of people who are all in on their present situation, who are here because they want to be here.

Life in Antarctica, it is made plain, is not all jaw-dropping hikes and mystical encounters with haunting southern lights. We’re here to work, is a variation on a familiar refrain cited by many of Powell’s interviewees, and, sure enough, we see them hard at work on mundane tasks, many of which appear no different than anywhere else in the world. A woman mans a desk beneath fluorescent lights. Another woman runs an Antarctic variation of the corner bodega. There are firefighters and mechanics and administrators. It’s like, say, Rosemont, IL, just a lot closer to the south pole. It’s not all penguins and snowscapes, emphasized to the point where you almost wonder if they are discouraging you to come.

Yet discouragement is not the point. Though it makes clear that life on the continent’s base camps cum towns can be horse latitudes of tedium, it never lingers in these potentially dark haunts. At times you almost wish it would linger. In the wintry months when the landscape is swathed in midnight twenty-four hours a day and delirium sets in, people recount their problems with a retrospective wistfulness, yet you can’t help but wonder if in the moment it amounts to something more......distressing. Powell simply won’t go there.

“Antarctica: A Year on Ice” is about the people but it’s also about the place affecting the people, and affecting them primarily for the best. It shapes them. There is some appendaged talk at the end reverting to ecological matters about how all this natural beauty will all be gone if we’re not careful, and so forth, which is not a wrong message, of course, but doesn’t feel quite convincing in this context. This isn’t a film about Antarctica just as “The Wizard of Oz” isn’t as much a film about Oz as it is about Kansas. It’s about being home.

Spy

Although “Spy” emanates from the mind of Paul Feig its opening scenes evoke Nancy Meyers. Susan Cooper (Melissa McCarthy), CIA bureaucrat in the vermin-infested offices of Langley, her desk covered in post-its like she’s an insurance adjustor at Allied, talks a suave Americanized version of 007, expositorily named Bradley Fine (Jude Law), through the paces at a glamorous locale. As he offs the bad guys of whom she keeps him expertly abreast, their dynamic falls into place. He ribs, she swoons, and when the mission ends and they have dinner, it becomes clear that she lusts for him though these feelings will never be reciprocated. It’s like she's Kate Winslet in “The Holiday” and he’s Rufus Sewell. But rather than house swapping and meeting a new man to unburden her emotions, Cooper’s vacation takes the form of a black-op, as she graduates from analyst to agent.

“Spy” turns on Cooper’s beloved Fine being murdered at the devious hands of Rayna Boyanov (Rose Byrne), a Bulgarian villain with a beehive of hair and an icy superiority complex who knows the location of a superbad nuke that another superbad dude wants. Since Rayna knows the identity of all CIA operatives, Cooper is put in the field under increasingly stereotypical secret identities, like a companionless loser with ten cats. Rather than stick to the personas the CIA has engendered for her, however, Susan rebels, dressing how she wants, acting and saying what she wants, putting a brush to the easel of her self in the midst of a Spy Game and painting with abandon. Her BFF, Nancy, back at basecamp, played by Miranda Hart with miraculous comic timing, distills all of “Spy” down to its essence when she cries “I cannot condone your sexy but reckless actions!” They can’t, maybe, but we can.

The hook in these movies is typically that an agent has gone rogue or is playing by his/her own rules. Cooper, however, isn’t playing by her own rules so much as writing a whole new set of them as she goes. You might recall McCarthy’s previous vehicle “The Heat”, a film in which she and Sandra Bullock are a pair of star crossed cops made to prove themselves professionally to doubtful fellow officers. There is no such proving ground in “Spy.” Ridiculing such cinematic sexism are Cooper’s fellow male undercover cohorts, Aldo (Peter Serafinowicz), an Italian operative who seemingly treats every female’s body as his personal playground, and, even better, Rick Ford, a chauvinist blowhard played with gleeful relish by Jason Statham as a kind of funhouse mirror version of every other character he’s ever played. He’s vigilantly insistent on hanging around against orders to save the day, only to continually make a mess that Cooper has to clean up.

McCarthy's characters typically come intact from moment one going eighty-five in a sixty-five. Here, however, her character morphs from a decided timidity to her characteristic ferocity. That awakening is tied, wonderfully, weirdly, to her relationship with Rayna. The latter, surrounded by a gaggle of obligatorily incompetent henchmen, winds up employing the deep cover Cooper as her personal bodyguard, a plot twist that generally makes no sense schematically but works like gangbusters emotionally. Repartee in spy movies often is packed with debonair double entendres, yet the dialogue here is an avalanche of obscene insults, as if the two of them are bonding strictly by giving one another shit. They’re like a wicked feminist spin on the buddy cops who somehow get along even though they don’t, and their antagonistic give-and-take is how Cooper finds her secret agent woman sea legs. Her and Rayna's final moment on screen contains a couple curse words but also a couple smiles, like they both know they’ll never quite encounter such an impeccable foil again.

Rose Byrne effortlessly embodies drolly hilarious haughtiness, and Miranda Hart deftly accentuates every scene in which she appears, but the film is undoubtedly McCarthy’s. The stable of remarkable performers in “Spy” orbit entirely around her, and her performance carves out authenticity from absolute absurdity. “Spy” is a violent film, perhaps surprisingly so given its caricatural nature; yet, in a way, “Spy” treats violence more knowingly than any standard issue frowning somber action drama. When a knife goes through a hand, and it does, it’s not nothing-to-see-here, it’s holy-gods-I-can’t-believe-that-just-happened. Neither can Cooper, and that brings her down to our level.

One death is so grisly that Cooper instantly combusts into projectile vomit, the finest use of an otherwise outmoded gag I can recall. She barfs and then she gets right back to beating in people’s skulls and cracking wise. The film is exaggerated, she’s palpable, and together they sing in beautiful foulmouthed harmony.

Jean Harlow, Always

Gable: "Anything you want?"   

Harlow: "Anything I... ? Toots, I got everything."

Jean Harlow. March 3, 1911 - June 7, 1937.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Went the Day Well? (1942)

“Went the Day Well?” opens with a scene in which our gentlemanly narrator (Mervyn Johns) explains to the camera that Nazi Germany has already been vanquished in WWII, which, considering this is 1942, three years before V-E Day, marks it as something of a self-confident bit of British wartime agitprop. But director Alberto Cavalcanti is employing that chest-puffing against itself, creating a film that looks like conventional propaganda before coolly twisting into something much more insidious.

The narrator also advises us that the unit of English soldiers arriving in Bramley-End, a fictitious village, as the film opens are Nazis. Though this revelation removes suspense, it unnerves the otherwise genteel tone of these establishing scenes all to hell, witnessing the ease with which Hitler’s thugs blend in with its idyll. They so succinctly slip into the mannerly attitude of the locals with whom they converse, like the Vicar (C.V. France) and his daughter, Nora (Valerie Taylor), you can’t help but wonder what the locals might be hiding. You can’t help but wonder what we all might be hiding.

Naturally, of course, the enemy betrays itself, both with penmanship and chocolate bars. This doesn’t mean all of Bramley-End immediately deciphers the ruse, partly due to the treacherous efforts of the town’s squire, Wilsford (Leslie Banks), like a Nazi sleeper spy, who has the trust of the town but is actually working for the other side. Even so, upon realizing they’ve been compromised, if only by a few, they act, rounding up the villagers and imprisoning them in the church. Escape attempts are made. People are killed. No one is safe. Yet the tone still feels feathery and polite until Mrs. Collins (Marie Lohr), the kindly, portly manager of the post, the sort you picture with pies sitting on the windowsill to cool, puts a hatchet into a Nazi.

It’s a thunderbolt unlike any I can recall in cinema. And it’s made so much more prominent in hindsight, considering the conversation that builds to the killing, with Mrs. Collins offering her captor some food and making mention of the infamous bit of at-the-time propaganda that Germans were putting babies on the ends of bayonets. Her captor rebuts: “Babies on bayonets? What would be the advantage?” It’s remarkable because the film is essentially countering that wartime hype with a stunning dose of level-headedness from a supposedly all-evil, all-the-time Nazi. He knows that it’s just inflated poppycock to scare people. She doesn’t care. Fuck this guy.

From there, “Went the Day Well?” comes to resemble “Red Dawn”, John Milius's 1984 Cold War pseudo-epic in which Colorado teenagers form a makeshift militia behind enemy lines to counter a communist invasion. That film, however, was deadly serious and tenaciously nationalistic. That was straight-up propaganda with little subtext, preferring to wear its jingoist pride on its sleeve. “Went the Day Well?” is as essentially violent as “Red Dawn”, which is saying something for a 1942 film, but it’s more devious and much more terrifying. When Lea Thompson and Jennifer Grey are firing machine guns, they're inviting everyone at home, young and old, to wrap themselves in the flag and make-believe take up arms with them; when land girls Ivy (Thora Hird) and Peggy (Elizabeth Allan) in “Went the Day Well?” take up rifles it is surreally comic. They’re gunning dudes down and literally keeping score. They may as well as be Frederick Zoller.

After its release, the film wasn’t so much lost as kind of forgotten, until a restoration in 2011 where it was re-evaluated to significant fanfare. And that seems right. It seems like a movie made less for reflection in a moment when the whole world was galvanized then looking back after the fact to note what such galvanization yields. It makes me wonder how people might view “Red Dawn” 60, 70 years from now. Perhaps it will look like Reagan-era ridicule when, in the moment, it felt, as Janet Maslin wrote for The New York Times in 1984, “incorrigibly gung-ho.” Take Nora, who transforms from a stereotypical spinster, like Anne Elliot in Bramley-End, into a ruthless assassin. When she discovers Wilsford is a traitor, she grabs a gun and, cool as a cucumber, marches right up to the bastard and puts a bullet in his head. You wonder how such a brutally violent moment got past stuffy British censors of the era and then it dawns on you – they were probably applauding Nora. After all, Wilsford’s just a kraut.

War movies so often want to spend significant time ruminating on what lies in - to quote 2Pac - the heartz of men. “Went the Day Well?” never ruminates. When it's on, it's on. At war, whatever the cause, all our blood runs cold.

Julie Harris. Julie Christie. Darling. Modish Operandi.

The first time I saw “Darling” was after I’d seen “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.” So the fashion made prolific fun of by the latter was intended as ultra-modish by the former. In that light, I’m supposed to say that I couldn’t take John Schlesinger’s 1965 film seriously; that the fashion was “dated”; that “Austin Powers” made such a mockery of the garb that all its original eye-blazing style had been squandered by the persnickety sands of time; that it was like seeing 80’s fashion now. But I was there in the 80’s. I know how posh 80’s fashion looked in the 80’s. And film is a time capsule, and if the time capsule in “Austin Powers” took its titular character into the future then “Darling” was a time capsule that took me back to the past, and, for a couple hours, I felt like it was the present.

Admittedly, a significant part of my virtual and total inhabiting of the Now of Then in “Darling” stems from Julie Christie. “Beauty is central to the cinema,” David Thomson has written. That’s why he’s my favorite film critic; because he, more than any other, has the nerve to confess that what and whom we see on screen can sway our emotions which can sway our judgments. This happened for a long time before I watched “Darling” but I never realized it was happening before “Darling.” As a gawky, moronic teen watching “Cocktail” I didn’t realize how much Elisabeth Shue was pulling me in; she just was. In “Darling”, Julie Christie was pulling me in, and I grasped it.

Funny thing about that Thomson quote, however, is that isn’t the whole quote. The whole quote is part of his response to “Darling”, found in his indispensable New Biographical Dictionary of Film, and it goes like this: “Beauty is central to the cinema and Schlesinger seems an unreliable judge of it, over-rating Christie.” Damn, that’s harsh, and proof that we can disagree with even our favorite film critics, and that beauty is subjective. All due respect to Mr. Thomson, but as if. I’m still not sure I’ve ever seen a more flawless representation of ocular beauty captured on screen than Julie Christie in “Darling.”

Thomson dismisses “Darling” by giving it backhanded praise, writing that it “deserves a place in every archive to show how rapidly modishness withers.” That’s not inaccurate. The further I got (get) from the film, the more it feels like an indictment of the Swinging Sixties, whether intended or not. The film can feel purposeless, not unlike Christie’s Diana Scott, a character who just sorts of...drifts, selfishly, greedily. She can come across like a tin woman. She’s not inherently likable. Yet, watching the film, watching Christie, watching Christie wear shit, it’s electric. Modishness may wither on the clothesline, but until it does, it’s still, like, you know, modish.

That which eventually withers is captured in the costuming. And what Christie wears was designed by Julie Harris, who won an Oscar for designing it, rightfully, respectfully, and who passed away last week at the age of 93. She said in a 2011 interview that “when we made it, ‘Darling’ was just another contemporary film. I had no idea that it would become such an iconic portrayal of that time.” And that’s as it should be. Ultimately “Darling” is transitory, but as it happens, its forever.

Dissecting Kylie Minogue's Cameo in San Andreas

Astute readers of Cinema Romantico may have noted that in our review of “San Andreas” we failed to mention the appearance of our beloved pop siren Kylie Minogue, whose role we had speculated over, much to the chagrin of loyal & frustrated followers, for months and months. That’s because we didn’t want our devotion to Ms. Minogue to cloud our judgment of the film’s merit, which we ultimately found considerable. Still, we felt our loyal & frustrated followers were owed some insight into Ms. Minogue’s place in the “San Andreas” universe.

This is not Kylie Minogue in San Andreas. But it is Kylie Minogue. Isn't she the greatest?

We considered a deep dive into her, roughly, 65 second appearance, but Joey Nolfi at Serving Cinema has already got you covered in this “Heartfelt Account of Kylie Minogue’s ‘San Andreas’ Role.” I encourage you to read it, if for no other reason than Mr. Nolfi calls her “Universal Empress Minogue” which, like, hell yeah. But he also gets to the heart of the role. As Susan Riddick, the sister of Ioan Gruffurd’s character, who essentially passes for the film’s human version of a villain, she is lunching with Carla Gugino’s Emma, who is on the verge of marrying Gruffurd, maybe. Of Kylie's character Nolfi writes that it’s a “one-note characterization that sees her insulting Emma’s deceased daughter (‘didn’t your daughter, like, drown or something?’) with the air of one thousand yachts and elevendy-million dollar bills fanning the flames of her verbal breath of bitchery, all while physically channeling the aura of Deborah Norville circa 1998.” Not inaccurate. In fact, Wesley Morris at Grantland also employs bitch to describe the turn – as in, “an icy bitch played by Kylie Minogue, who’s having a good time giving a terrible performance.” Terrible? Well yeah, but in that “Nurse Betty” kind of way, like she’s Rachel Dennis in “Central Park West.” It’s to Kylie’s credit that she makes an impression when she’s barely there.

Because it’s Andrew O’Hehir writing at Salon who’s really got Universal Empress Minogue figured. He writes: “…and I’m sorry we don’t see more of Kylie Minogue in a teensy, bitchy cameo that threatens to eat the whole movie.” Yes. It does. It suggests a whole different film. It suggests a film where a Jackie Q-ish diva is made to ride along in the back of Bill & Jo’s pickup truck in “Twister” rather than Jami Gertz. And O.M.F.G. I want to see that movie more than “The Force Awakens.” “San Andreas” really only gets tongue-in-cheeky in Paul Giamatti's performance and Kylie could have drowned the entire movie in tongue-in-cheek grown-up mean girl salad dressing. Yet, Brad Peyton understood that wasn’t the movie he wanted to make. He wanted a lean, mean delivery device for action adrenaline. To create it, he needed to offload Susan Riddick whose frigidly hoity-toity vixen simply would have overburdened the nimble narrative. And so, Susan, panicked, shoves Emma aside and runs like a hell for a door, screaming “Get Outta My Way!”, that she apparently falls out of because when Emma opens that same door moments later, well, it looks out at where the rest of the building used to be. “(It’s) nothing more than a cameo that’ll likely end in pain and misery for those who love her,” Nolfi writes.

I see his point. I mean, I walked to the theater blasting “Light Years” through my headphones to get myself pumped up. And then, as soon I saw her, she was gone, and my heart drooped. Enjoying the film probably helped my recovery but there’s something to be said for her not tagging along and potentially turning into, say, Lucky Larry. That would have been grotesque. Instead, we could revel in her instantaneous ice princess gone through the door and wonder, “Who was she? Where did she come from?” And imagine a prequel spin-off series, Real Housewives of San Francisco, starring Susan Riddick.

Aloha

“Tell me you don’t believe in the sky.” This is what Captain Allison Ng (Emma Stone) demands of her superior, and eventual suitor, a military contractor, Brian Gilchrist (Bradley Cooper), pleading for him to see the atmosphere for the heavens, a place that is the playground of Hawaiian gods rather than the jurisdiction of the SDMC. It may as well be the same demand writer/director Cameron Crowe, the once heralded Oscar winner, now unofficial master of the rom com disaster, but evermore sentimental fool is making of us. Though “Aloha” is filled with real world concerns it nonetheless comes equipped with devout belief in the ineffable magic of the scenic landscape and indigenous culture of the archipelago in the Central Pacific. A young boy, Mitchell (Jaden Lieberher), a character who’s all traits rather than a whole person, a plague emblemizing the entire movie, is in love with Hawaiian myths, and you can tell Crowe is too. You can tell Crowe wanted “Aloha” to be his own Hawaiian myth – “Brian Gilchrist & the Space Rocket.”

Gilchrist is the liaison between the American military stationed on Oahu and an eccentric billionaire, Carson Welch, Bill Murray imagining himself as Richard Branson, who wants to a launch some uber-super-duper doohickey into space. The launch site, however, doubles as a sacred burial ground watched over by a fervent Hawaiian independence activist, Dennis “Bumpy” Kanahele (as himself). Thus, Gilchrist, in tandem with Captain Ng, is dispatched to mediate terms. It’s a storyline completely counteracting the media’s pre-release allegation of no Hawaiians because, in fact, the film is primarily about America’s imperialism run amok over the islands. Well, not primarily; perhaps we should say…partially. And that’s a serious part of the problem.

Dubiously revealed as one-fourth Hawaiian, Ng is like Crowe’s attempt to appease in advance the people upset by a lack of native protagonists. Crowe’s heart is in the right place – I swear it is – but he’s standing smack dab in the middle of the forest, writing about the trees without, somehow, still being able to see them. General Dixon, played by Alec Baldwin, laments near the end “We never should have let civilians into space”, a truly odd takeaway in a film generally stressing free-thinking. You can’t figure out why in the hell there’s not a Bumpy Kanahele line countering it – “We never should have let white people into Hawaii.” The sky is one battle ground, Oahu is the other, yet politically the film keeps to the shallow end. When Gilchrist’s and Ng’s meeting with Kanahele grows terse, it suddenly shifts to a sing-along as Ng acquires an acoustic guitar and strums along like Joan Baez in fatigues. It’s classic Crowe, of course, that unshakable faith in music as a conciliator of all things. But in this case he’s unable to square his prominent earnest perspective with a film whose foremost twist involves a nuclear warhead.

All that could and should be enough plot but alas, that old Crowe fail-safe, the love triangle, appears too, pitting Gilchrist between his ex-flame, Tracy (Rachel McAdams), who is now married to a decidedly non-garrulous pilot, Woody (John Krasinski), with two kids, and Captain Ng, with whom Gilchrist must obligatorily pine despite being put off by her aggressively outgoing personality. In a way, Ng is just an over-produced cover version of Kirsten Dunst’s much maligned character in “Elizabethtown”*, imposing her P.O.S.I.T.I.V.I.T.Y onto a broken down male until his cynical exterior cracks and gives way. (*Disclaimer: I stand by Claire Colburn, forever and ever.) Except the cynicism from which Gilchrist supposedly suffers after a tour of duty in Afghanistan is woefully undercooked. It's not backstory, it's a parenthetical. It's made worse because Cooper, while aptly turning on the charm when required, barely plays to this supposed battlefield paralysis. Whatever angst the character is carrying never shows up in the performance.

Amidst this romantic quagmire, a truly sublime turn by McAdams is left to rot. She has, as she so often does, a consummate effervescence that all on its lonesome embodies the enchantment of the islands, a mainlander who has been swept up in their mana. Yet her character is conspicuously un-evolved, trapped between This Man and That Man, left to their whims rather than her own, as though, echoing so much of “Aloha”, a serious chunk of something seems to have been left behind on the cutting room floor. Even worse is the ultimate complication of her marriage – that is, her daughter, Grace (Danielle Rose Russell), not being Woody’s but Gilchrist’s. This is a significant situation but one for which the film has virtually no adult nuance. It is presented blithely, like it’s a hiccup rather than a really big freaking deal, and the way it’s handled by all parties involved suggests a forthcoming lifetime of emotional scar tissue for the little girl who barely gets her own say in any of this.

The last scene, involving the daughter, is the film’s best. You’ll want to shake the movie screen and wonder why the whole film couldn’t strike this tone, sincere but also willing to finally acknowledge the confusedly elaborate nature of their dynamic. It’s the one moment when the film looks to the sky and believes, even with both its feet planted firmly on the ground.