Friday's Old Fashioned: Blind Date (1987)

The thing about a Blind Date, of course, is that you don’t know the other person, haven’t seen them, have no idea how they act, etc. That’s what can make a Blind Date such a torturous, potentially humorous, situation. What’s interesting about “Blind Date”, however, is that it gives away the reveal before the reveal happens. Everybody tells Walter Davis (Bruce Willis) not to let his Blind Date drink. And yet, he fails to abide, perhaps because this is an eighties screwball comedy and in the eighties Reagan ran things and because Reagan ran things everything was perfect and nothing bad could happen and so if someone tells you not to give your Blind Date a drink you do anyway because fate isn’t something to be tempted but ignored. We are masters of our fate.

This revealing of the reveal takes some air out of the whole premise, and that’s how much of “Blind Date” feels – airless. It’s directed by Blake Edwards, who in 1987 would have been considered a venerable professional of the sort of hijinks hilarity required by this screwball comedy. Though he also helmed sobering dramas like “Days of Wine and Roses”, he was perhaps best known for this “Pink Panther” movies, films in which he demonstrated his knack for staging pratfalls. They were, however, elevated to greatness on account of Peter Sellers immortal riotous turn as Inspector Clouseau. Edwards knew just where to put the camera for Clouseau’s practice tangles with Kato, sure, but it was Sellers’ body language that took it to the next level. Director and Actor sang in harmony. “Blind Date”, however, suffers from a lack of a comparable performers.

Willis is primarily the straight man, tasked with conveying alternating charmed and exasperated reactions to Nadia Gates, the woman who gives the film its title. She’s played by Kim Basinger in a performance that is simply too un-manic to be the heroine required of a screwball. When he first meet her, she seems perfect, as she must, sort of a live-action embodiment of Holli Would. With one drink, though, she becomes a destructive force, wasting no time in screwing up Walter’s big dinner for whom she goes as better half and then getting him fired. Yet the manner in which she levels destruction is so disappointingly low-key. She’s a far cry from Elaine Benes getting soused on Schnapps. It’s, like, 57 years too late but imagine Jean Harlow in the role and the alcohol-infused chaos would be electric. Or imagine modern day Parker Posey having a few cocktails and going mainstream. The best we get in “Blind Date” is the moment Walter pleads with a bouncer while Nadia subtly slides into his stool in the background and quietly knocks back his scotch and soda. Even worse, the script calls for her to swing from drunk to sober on a dime, again and again. Nit-picking isn’t my forte but even I know you can’t get a clear head without at least a couple gallons of water and a 2lb burrito.

The MVP of the cast, in fact, turns out to be its principal supporting player, John Larroquette. He plays David Bedford, a lawyer and Nadia’s former beau, still fancying himself her primo suitor, showing up an early scene, as nice as can be, before quickly devolving, threatening Walter, punching out anyone’s lights who gets in his way, ably embodying the sort of crazy we might have expected from Nadia. Throwing himself into each gag with abandon, a White Knight whose chivalry is communicated exclusively in hysteria, Larroquette comes across like the true spirit animal to Blake Edwards. The absolute best involves his stalking in the new happy/unhappy couple by automobile, turning up like it’s “Duel”, and then repeatedly crashing through storefront windows. He’ll do whatever it takes for the joke. This is a man with the mania required of a screwball comedy.

For a good awhile it appears “Blind Date” might be going the all-in-one-night route, like a more classically inclined “After Hours.” It runs out of steam, though, and tosses Walter in jail and saving his skin requires representation from David which requires Nadia to say yes to David’s marriage proposal. So a third act of Walter running in to break up a wedding ensues which is done professionally enough but without any real hectic glee as Larroquette is required to tone down his antics so Willis can take center stage. Alas. Larroquette’s character may not have deserved the heroine, but he deserved a better end than to stand aside and watch the movie pass him by.

Friday's Old Fashioned Flashes Back to the Eighties

It's everyone's favorite time of year! By which I mean, it's my least favorite time of year. By which I mean, the dog days of summer (ugh) combine with the countdown to my dreaded another-year-has-passed-and-I-have-done-nothing-with-my-life-and-it's-all-meaningless birthday at the dawn of September. And so I find myself, as I do every year at this time, nostalgically and cinematically returning to the decade of my youth – The 80’s. Which is why this year once again Cinema Romantico’s “famed” Friday’s Old Fashioned column - the only classic film column on the internet named after bourbon, bitters, sugar, orange, and maraschino cherry - is going straight 80’s for the next month (with a bonus July 31st edition). Hawks gets traded in for Hughes. Jean Harlow takes a momentary respite to allow face time for Jean(ie) Bueller. Harold Lloyd cedes the stage to Lloyd Dobler.

Four of the five films this year are new to me, though I must stress, as always, the selections are not, shall we say, “quintessential”. Either way, I hope you don’t hold it against me. So strike up the Taylor Dayne, crack a Capri Sun and climb into my blogging DeLorean.

Which Did It Better?

“Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation” is set to drop to drop in theaters this week and this got to us thinking, as each new “M:I” release gets us to thinking, about the not-really-immortal moment in “M:I-2” when Tom Cruise totally goes Daniel Day-Lewis and apes perhaps the most famous moment of my all-time favorite movie “Last of the Mohicans” and yells at Thandie Newton “Just stay alive!” And each time I think about Cruise yelling it at Thandie, I think about when Jerry yells “Just stay alive!” at Kramer in the 175th episode – “The Maid” – of “Seinfeld.”





It’s the hip thing these days on the Interwebs, you know, to take one thing and pit it against some other thing by positing the question “Which Did It Better?” and then proceed with a breakdown to determine the winner because this is America and in America you're either first or last. So, which did the “Just Stay Alive!” homage better – “M:I-2” or “Seinfeld”?

First things first, I haven't actually seen “MI:2” since seeing it in the theater all the way back in 2000 and so I totally forgot about this Tom Cruise expression.

Look at that! In retrospect it seems obvious he would grow up to jump up and down on Oprah’s couch and ruin his career, doesn’t it? Crazy-Eyes Tom Cruise is my favorite Tom Cruise after Maverick. Wait, wait, wait. Crazy-Eyes Tom Cruise is my third favorite Tom Cruise after Maverick and “Hippy Hippy Shake” Tom Cruise. No, no, no. Crazy-Eyes Tom Cruise is my fourth favorite Tom Cruise after Maverick, “Hippy Hippy Shake” Tom Cruise and “The goldfish are coming with me” Tom Cruise. Uh, well, actually Crazy-Eyes Tom Cruise is my fifth favorite Tom Cruise after Maverick, “Hippy Hippy Shake” Tom Cruise, “The goldfish are coming with me” Tom Cruise and the Tom Cruise that smacks his hands in “Eyes Wide Shut” (00:40 of this trailer).

Second, however, is that Tom Cruise doesn’t actually completely homage Day-Lewis. Day-Lewis, of course, yelled “Just stay alive! No matter what occurs, I will find you!” Cruise yells: “Just stay alive! I'm not going to lose you!” Jerry, on other hand, does the full Day-Lewis. I imagine Robert Towne, who admittedly cribbed from all over the annals of Hollywood for his “M:I-2” script, was afraid of getting hit with a Michael Mann right hook at some screenwriter's cocktail party. That, however, allows “Seinfeld” to score some massive bonus points.

I also like this idea of Jerry and Kramer at their most vulnerable just sort of inadvertently admitting to their 90’s-styled neighborly bromance.

“I'm infected with Chimeria.” God, does Thandie Newton sell that line. I like that line so much that I’m surprising myself and giving it a slight nod over Michael Richards’ patented and eternally hilarious through the phone Kramer-ish shriek.

Let’s be frank. It’s hard for me to say that my all-time favorite TV show paying homage to my all-time favorite movie could ever be topped by anything else paying homage to it. “Seinfeld” and “Last of the Mohicans” intersecting is an astonishing case of worlds colliding; it’s almost as good as this photo. Of course, “Seinfeld” did it better! And yet…

I didn’t really like “M:I-2” the first time around…or, at least that’s how I remember it. But was the whole movie’s tone equivalent to this scene? Because this scene has an operatic romance, so heightened in cinematic inflection, so merrily absurdist that I find myself to drawn it. Tom & Thandie are not Hawkeye & Cora because they can’t be because no one is. And so even if Mr. Cruise’s homage is still, like, a billion miles away from the impassioned yell of Mr. Day-Lewis, they nonetheless exist in the same solar system, one where the homage trends away from parody and more toward tribute. And yet...  

Jerry was never earnest. Jerry was always a horse’s ass. For a moment, though, even if it was a couple lines explicitly referencing something else, Jerry afforded himself an actual heartfelt moment. Yes, there was the episode earlier in the 9th season that found Jerry becoming briefly emotional when a girlfriend encourages him to get mad, but this is something else. This isn’t just Serious Jerry; this is Selfless Jerry. And the fact that “Last of the Mohicans” triggered it, warms my heart. Even Jerry Seinfeld, sitcomland’s pre-eminent tin man, found himself moved by Hawkeye & Cora. How can we not say “Seinfeld” did it just a little bit better?

Wistfully '95: Waterworld

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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“Waterworld” has always been discussed in terms of hugeness. It was, after all, as the title suggests, a film set predominantly on the water. That’s a mammoth undertaking since water is often less cooperative than lowly crew members at whom directors can holler through a bullhorn. The movie’s budget, which excessively exceeded estimates, was $175 million, probably the cost of a hammer and a few nails on a modern day Marvel production but the largest ever in 1995. Its shooting schedule ran over by 54 days. Its shoot primarily took place in a vast artificial seawater enclosure. Colloquially it’s still known as a floppiest of flops even if stats prove that unfounded. Its production was so extreme that director Kevin Reynolds either walked off the set before shooting completed or was fired by star Kevin Costner who took up the auteur chair, whichever you want to believe, though either one works fine for the purposes of our thesis. This is because for all its immensity, “Waterworld” itself is really quite small, the story of one man – make that manfish – who is played by Costner and just seems to wish everyone around him would go the hell away.

At one time, of course, Costner was a box office magnet. He was something of an American Everyman, so much so that even when he played England’s seminal mythic son, Robin Hood, he did so with an American Everyman accent. Yet if you look at his roles from this Costner Era just a bit closer, you’ll see emergent dabs of peculiarities. Ray Kinsella of “Field of Dreams” was a wholesome Midwesterner but he also heard voices. His Jim Garrison of “JFK” was portrayed as a hero, yet the real life man was also often termed eccentric, and Costner isn’t afraid to let that seep out of the performance too, like in the shot when he literally bounds from the staircase after kissing his wife goodnight to his study. Even his Eliot Ness, an eternal emblem of truth & justice, could, in the right light, come across less like a white-hatted winner than an odd duck teetotaler. Eventually the Costner we all know now, the seemingly apathetic introverted Costner, the one who showed up to the Emmy’s as if he would have rather been anywhere else, the daffy and disinterested Costner who spent much of “The Upside of Anger” just chilling on the couch, would have to emerge. He did, and it just happened to coincide with a $175 million behemoth.

“Waterworld’s” story turns on the polar ice caps having melted, flooding the entirety of earth and rendering the planet as one singular ocean. Yet its most memorable – er, rememberable – liquid-based image stands apart from this colossal sea. The film opens with Costner’s character, the Mariner, drinking his own urine. Well, not exactly; it’s his urine run through a rudimentary filtration system, but still. A character’s introduction is crucial and the Mariner’s introduction works less as an invitation than a repellent. And his character does repel. “It could have made me care about the characters,” the late great Roger Ebert wrote of the film, and that’s true, it could have. But it doesn’t want to. Costner, it seems, doesn’t want to. When the whole world’s a sea, you’re out to it pretty much all the time, and when you’re out to it pretty much all the time, you’re gonna be a little standoffish. You don’t get eager at the sight of people, you get suspicious, and so it’s like the instant the movie-watching audience gets settled in its seats, the Mariner’s suspicions of us arise and he pushes us away with his pee.

Not long after, the Mariner winds up at an atoll, a kind of floating city, where the local lawman solemnly explains this lone visitor has “two hours” to get what he needs and hit the watery road. “I’ll only need one,” the Mariner replies. Here’s a guy so untaken with people that when he finally encounters a whole mess of ‘em he actively wants less time around them. And as quick as the Mariner wants off the atoll, you sense the movie wants the same. From this point forward, it never feels comfortable. In the lead-up, a sequence in which the Mariner encounters a few shady characters and fends them off, the film is content to unspool its action exposition-free, letting us glean the world and the way it works by just watching it happen. And the Mariner’s almost balletic movements about his 60 foot trimaran are visually intoxicating, quite likely the film’s strongest element, to the point that when others are on his boat they just seem to be in the way, to him and to us.

If it’s a movie called “Waterworld”, though, then there has to be a Dryland, and if there’s a Dryland there has to be a map to find it, and if there’s map to find it then, hey, why not make it a tattoo on a little girl’s back because then the Mariner can encounter the little girl (Tina Majorino) who can help cheer him up (because he needs to be cheered up) and the little girl can have a mom (Jeanne Tripplehorn) with whom the Mariner can fall in love (because the Mariner needs to fall in love).

None of this especially noteworthy, just a series of passable to decently entertaining action sequences also involving a villain played by Dennis Hopper who might be partially amusing but feels like he’s still running on “Speed” fumes. For such extravagant expense, “Waterworld” never feels awe-inspiring, perhaps because deep down in the places it didn’t talk about at budget meetings it wanted to primarily be a movie about a solo sailor that couldn’t be because you can’t spend that much money on a movie that’s just about an introverted mutant manfish. And so what we’re left with feels un-involving and as glum as the costumes.

Even when the Mariner is meant to be smitten with the mother and charmed by the daughter, Costner never makes it feel convincing, like he’s play-acting, like this is what the script calls for, nothing else. It’s not accurate to say that this is when Costner stopped wanting to be a movie star because he never really wanted to stop being a movie star (see: the messianic complex of “The Postman” two years later). But maybe it’s when he stopped caring if he was Everybody’s Everyman and decided to start being a prickly ass who would demonstrate empathy only at his time and place of choosing. I can’t quite decide if that’s commendable or reckless.

Trainwreck

The oeuvre of Judd Apatow has frequently been dedicated to the Man-Boy – weed-smoking, video-game playing Peter Pans. These sorts of characters lend themselves to raunchy one-liners and gross-out gags, and because Apatow’s preferred method is to cast comics and/or comic actors and give them space to simply stand on camera and riff, his films are often drawn-out exercises in outrageous joke-telling. Yet for so much slack narration and offensive comicalness, Apatow remains distinctly old-fashioned, committed to familiarly structured late movie redemption, all that ad-libbing meant to approximate an incongruous finding of the maturity ladder’s first rung. If on the surface his romantic comedies have edge, just below they are warm glasses of milk.

And so into this pre-determined Apatow-ian universe marches the redoubtable Amy Schumer, a comic with a critically acclaimed sketch comedy TV show who not only stars in “Trainwreck” but possesses sole screenwriting credit. This may be another Apatow movie overflowing with jokes but they’re her jokes, dammit, and those jokes are often as gleefully jarring as they are funny. “I hope this love montage ends like Jonestown,” she says in voiceover during a quick romantic comedy medley between her and her beau that begins with “Rhapsody in Blue” and homages the famed shot in “Manhattan” beneath the Brooklyn Bridge that promptly twists the screw with Amy wondering if this is where “Woody and Soon Yi met.” Yup. The montage ends like Jonestown, and you can’t help but think maybe with Schumer driving things the movie itself will end like Jonestown too.

Amy works at a gossip rag called S’Nuff where she is supposedly the best writer on staff though the film never goes to any real pains to demonstrate her skills. It’s more concerned, frankly, in simply using S’Nuff as a platform to showcase Amy’s boss, Dianna, played by Tilda Swinton as a space cadet version of Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly, The Devil Wears Spray-Tan. The job also provides the device to introduce Amy to her requisite rom-com partner-in-crime, Aaron Connors (Bill Hader), a noted sports doctor to the stars. The star, in fact, as LeBron James plays himself, the Bruno Kirby to Connors’ Billy Crystal. I fail to believe this wasn’t simply a way for Apatow to become on-set pals with LeBron, and so what? If I was Judd I’d be writing scripts that said things like: “Gwen Stefani enters room as herself.” And even if LeBron isn’t quite Ray Allen he’s as funny as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and less stilted too, even if his overwhelming presence sometimes feels like a distraction.

Make no mistake, despite The King, this is Amy’s movie. She is more or less introduced to us with the wicked funny edict “Don’t judge me, fuckers!” At first blush it comes across like a battle cry. Yet all evidence indicates she’s not finding empowerment in ceaseless drinking, smoking and fucking as much unsatisfying denial. Her character has deliberately shied away from commitment for reasons of insecurity and scars from the past, particularly a father (Colin Quinn) who preached the perils of monogamy. Both these ideas are well played by Schumer, particularly in scenes with her sister Kim (Brie Larson, quite good in essentially the film’s lone performance that relies on more reacting than wisecracks), but the film still can’t help but find her solution to this personal crisis in the form of typical Apatow conservatism. Kim, in fact, upset that her sister isn’t following the tried and true path of suburbanites everywhere hollers “This is what people do!”, that age-old assumption that obtusely excludes any number of people who don’t know what she does and negate a few of the whole nine yards.

There is a faint tug of war within this script, one between Amy remaking herself simply for the sake of herself and Amy remaking herself in the name of Mr. Right in order to do what people do. It never really gets resolved; it just kind of collapses in on itself in the form of an overproduced rom com conclusion consisting of a gigantic set-piece marked by theatrical implausibility. And the entire sequence finds the movie and its primary performer singing in different keys – it at the pitch of Happily Ever After and her exuding much more Manic Desperation. Even if “Trainwreck” seems to think its main character has come all the way around, the main character herself resists that viewpoint. It’s not quite Kool-Aid; it’s also not homogenized milk.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Rancho Notorious (1952)

“It began, they say, one summer’s day / When the sun was blazing down / ‘Twas back in the early Seventies / In a little Wyoming town.” This are a few of the lines from the balladeer who appears at a couple of intervals over Fritz Lang’s “Rancho Notorious”, sounding much less like Tex Ritter in “High Noon” than Jonathan Richman in “There’s Something About Mary.” In other words, the film never quite feels like an authentic western; it feels like a put-on of a western. The obviously studio-bound sets contribute mightily to this artificiality. Perhaps the phoniness of the production was mandated by producers rather than Lang, but even if that’s true it would seem Lang found a way to employ the shoddy stages as a means to illuminate the shoddiness of the myths so prevalent in the western genre.

Consider the lovey-dovey passage that opens the film wherein Vern Haskell gifts his darlin’ a brooch from Paris. This is so overtly sentimentalized it can only be a feint. It is. His darlin’ is promptly killed. Not just killed, in fact, but raped. It’s brutal. And the outlaw responsible, Kinch, steals the brooch and high-tails it out of town. When Vern gets word, his eyes narrow and he forms a posse. They ride off, the others quickly bail, and Vern winds up going it alone, a vigilante. And so it would seem “Rancho Notorious” is intent on setting itself up as another western where it’s men in a man’s world, women left to cower in doorframes ahead of the big shootout or on stages singing songs to the delight of catcalling jackanapses with six-shooters. That, however, is merely another feint.

The clue on which Vern’s quest turns is the name Altar Keane (Marlene Dietrich), a one-time saloon girl and now proprietor of a strange-sounding place called Chuck-a-Luck, the titular Rancho Notorious. To find Hinch, Vern has to find Chuck-a-Luck. To find Chuck-a-Luck, Vern has to find Altar Keane. Chuck-a-Luck turns out to be a akin to an old west version of the Hotel Continental in “John Wick.” That, you might recall, was an upscale resort catering exclusively to assassins, a place where no business was allowed, where killers simply hobknobbed over cocktails and laid low. Rancho Notorious – or Chuck-a-Luck, if you prefer – is a ranch near the Mexico border populated entirely by western movie-ish villains on the run and hiding out. It’s a place where the one rule is “no questions.” It’s like the Bizarro version of Tunstall’s Ranch in “Young Guns”, where rather than reading literature after dinner, they sit around the gaming table and place bets while having drinks.

To gain access to this bad guy Shangri-La, Vern poses as a bad guy himself. As you might suspect, he takes to the part almost too well. So affable in that opening scene, he becomes increasingly hardened, even frenzied, practically frothing at the mouth in certain shots with unholy rage at this pack of god-awful rascals. But it’s not just their cold-bloodedness. After all, he firmly intends to cold-bloodedly kill Kinch. No, something more sinister emerges.

There’s an extraordinarily discomforting sequence in which we watch Vern watch the bevy of males watch Altar. It’s two levels of the male gaze. At first, it seems evident that Vern is disgusted by their lecherousness. But then it becomes reasonable to suspect that some twisted sense of jealously plays a part. Finally, whiffs of self-loathing are detected. Vern, after all, has transformed into the very sort of person he has come to kill, and to kill that person he gains the trust of Altar by demonstrating false affection. Is it false? Well, probably not as much as he tells himself, and when he comes clean, he erupts into a rage, slapping her around, telling her she's no good in not such nice terms.

Per TCM, the grand German dame Dietrich was at such blistering odds with Lang that by the end of production they were no longer communicating. He saw her character as a fading, aged starlet; Dietrich saw no such thing. Thus, the leading lady went behind her director’s back to communicate with the lighting and wardrobe departments, crafting her character in her own image. It might have made for a hellish atmosphere on set, yet it’s entirely apropos to her character. A one-time saloon girl, we see in flashback where she is fired by the establishment’s proprietor, apparently for not smiling enough. It’s like an earlier version of the moronic men’s right activists who berate women on the street for not smiling when they are ogled and cat-called. And so at Chuck-a-Luck, she’s in charge of her destiny. Or so she thinks.

No, in the end, her destiny is decided by the men all around her, a two-layered slice of male control in which Altar is eventually forced to submit to Vern's forcible rage and Dietrich is forced to submit to Lang's story orchestration. As an actress, the charismatic German-American could fight for the visuals all she wanted, but her character's fate nonetheless remained sealed. She dies, and that should not be a spoiler, because this is a western, and even in a western principally centered on a woman, the guys get to have all the fun.

Reviewing Vacation By Watching the Trailer

The Twitters have been ablaze just recently with film critics scolding content providers – er, other film critics(?) – about forming and unveiling full-stop opinions about movies they haven’t even seen. I mostly agree with these scoldings, of course, because it’s really no different than the prevalent yahoos who told me for years that Lady Gaga “couldn’t sing” despite having no empirical evidence to support this assertion other than the fact she, like, wore lobsters on her head and then they heard her at the Oscars and said “well golly gee, she can sing” even though she always could and...OH MY GOD MY BRAIN IS FREEZING UP. And so I understand the inherent danger in reviewing the totality of “Vacation” by simply watching the trailer. But seriously, it’s “Vacation.” It’s begging to be judged by its trailer. It wants to be judged by its trailer. Also, I refuse to spend the cash to see it. So if the “Vacation” people really think it’s more than that trailer...hey, feel free to send me a screener. I'll re-evaluate. Until then, the following is my review.

“This vacation started it all,” a title card says in the “Vacation” trailer over dusted off clips from the original “Vacation” (while playing the “Chariots of Fire” theme BECAUSE THAT'S NOT PLAYED OUT) released in the hinterland of 1983. Then it flashes forward to the future where Ed Helms has assumed the grown-up role of Clark Griswold’s semi-precocious son, Rusty. A title card tells us: “This vacation changes it all.” Well, yes and no. Because you don’t just change the formula of formulaic movies. That’s like changing the recipe of the Big Mac! That’s a marketing sin! And no sin, with all due respect to God, stings like those in marketing departments worldwide. So Rusty, like his father before him, sets off on a cross-country road trip to the theme park Walley World with his family.

Now you might be thinking, why would grown-up Rusty embark on the exact same road trip of yore when he knows full well it will only yield excruciating hijinks? Has he learned nothing? Well of course he hasn’t. We remember these things, sure, and claim to learn from them, absolutely, and sometimes we do, but we employ that knowledge not to avert disaster but to prove to disaster that it has no mastery over us. We are man, see, and we are superior. What befell my father before can certainly not befall me too. It can, of course, and it will, as it must, because otherwise what would “Vacation” be?

Still, even as Christina Applegate is forced to wade in Beverly D’Angelo’s Supportive Spouse shoes, sacrificing all the best moments to leading man, which, sadly, isn’t so much Retro as Eternal, “Vacation” is updated for its era. We couldn’t possibly allow someone as goofy and gangly as Randy Quaid have so much screen time in a 2015 major motion picture so his part is handed off to a preening Chris Hemsworth instead. Simply allowing The Girl In The Ferrari – played by Christie Brinkley in the original and by Hannah Davis in the update – to tease and torment the leading man without receiving a comeuppance isn’t allowable, so Ms. Davis gets run over and, presumably, killed straight away, because we are a temperate culture these days that does not believe in any way that violence is an answer for attempting a little roadside seduction of a married man. And Rusty and his obligatorily-less-funny half can’t have a son and a daughter. Heavens no! They must have two sons because this is the twenty-tens and we have come a long, long way since 1983 in gender politics, people. (You expect the two dudes that wrote “Horrible Bosses” to have even the vaguest notion of how to write for an adolescent girl?! HA HA HA!!! JOKE’S ON YOU!!!)

The trailers fills out its patchy parts with wacky cameos and is sure to indulge in an extended human excrement joke which necessarily placates that pubescent desire to joke around about such things because it was forbidden at the dinner table. By the end, you feel almost certain you’ve seen the whole movie, even if you quite clearly haven’t because feature films aren’t two-and-a-half minutes long. Even so, there are jokes, there is Chevy Chase turning up, and even if I don’t know precisely how it ends, I don’t really need to. And that, of course, is because while we all recite some variation at the end of vacations about how all vacations must end eventually, this is one vacation that obviously will not. It will play in perpetuity with (a young actor) playing Rusty’s grown-up son taking his kids to Walley World even if it’s been flooded off the face of the earth due to melting glaciers on account of climate change. He won’t care, of course, because he can’t, because the show must go on, and it will, forever and ever. And no matter who winds up playing the grown-up version of Rusty’s son thirty-two years from now, someone like Seraphina Rose Elizabeth Affleck will be chilling in the passenger’s seat, rolling her eyes, ceding all the funny lines and humorous gags, because even as Earth marches on, Hollywood make no progress.

No...? (The BBC Top 100)

Yesterday the BBC dropped a list in which they “polled film critics from around the world to determine” the 100 greatest American films. Oh, did that get snarkbirds to sing, as you knew it would, often by dredging up that responses beginning with the most famed word in relation to any list of the greatest anything. That word: “No…” And Cinema Romantico couldn’t get left out of all the fun! So here goes. Regarding your obviously egregious, destructively absent-minded list, BBC, we ask…

No... “Viva Las Vegas”? Your haughtiness is sooooooo transparent.

No… “Bonnie and Clyde”? It’s Everything for Everyone about the Entirety of Every Part of The Whole Enchilada.

No… “Out of the Past”? Somewhere Robert Mitchum is drunk in a bar in Acapulco and telling the bartender how “Detour” is probably the only genuinely good film ever made while simply assuming BBC stands for “Bourbon, Brandy, Coganc” (“and in that order, bartender, don’t screw it up”).

No… “Detour”? Surprise, surprise.

No… “The Last Detail”? I infer a Randy Quaid bias, BBC.

No… “China Seas”? When Jean Harlow wants you to sound off, BBC, she’ll pull your rope.

No… “My Cousin Vinny”? Seems to Me, BBC, your list is far from balls on accurate.

No… “Barcelona”? It’s Consummate Eigeman, you goddam list-making cockatoos.

No… “Streets of Fire”? What, are Rock ‘n’ Roll Fables too déclassé for you, you pretentious snot-nosed arbiters?

No… “A Fish Called Wanda”? I DON’T CARE IF IT’S NOT ACTUALLY AN AMERICAN MOVIE, YOU HORSE’S ASSES!!!

No… “Clueless”? YOU’RE ALL TRAITORS TO YOUR GENERATION!!!

No… “Cocktail”? Coughlin’s Law: Rosebud is 1 ounce gin, 1 ounce dry vermouth, 3/4 ounce fresh lemon juice, 1/2 ounce St. Germain and 1/8 teaspoon rose water.

No… “Romancing the Stone”? I’ll just leave this here, you automated, authoritarian tastemakers.

Danny Collins

Although “Danny Collins” is a fictional musical biopic, rooted in many of the genre’s customary clichés, it emits real-life autobiographical context in the form of its leading man. Al Pacino, after all, is a once-great acting titan now often reduced to wandering (hollering) in film star winter. That’s a fairly apt description of Danny Collins himself, a formerly great singer-songwriter who hasn’t penned a tune in thirty years and now plays the same Neil Diamond-ish hit over and over. The first time we see him, in fact, he’s putting on a helluva show, even if it’s obviously hollowed out, which is sort of like any latter day Pacino grandstanding performance. You half wonder if Al sits in his dressing room between takes with a tumbler of scotch, staring forlornly into the void, a la Danny Collins. Eventually, though, Danny gathers the seeds of a potential rebirth, and in doing so, you see Pacino himself truly take the reins of this turn.

“Danny Collins” is sort of like the easy listening version of “Crazy Heart.” The latter was the predictable rise, fall and semi-resurrection of a singer-songwriter, but there its character – the more ominously named Bad Blake – was truly washed up, playing bowling alleys and getting from gig-to-gig in a beat-up pickup truck, having to buy off-brand whiskey, ye gods. His redemption, of sorts, was triggered by bottoming out and going to rehab. Overall, the film was cuddlier than its rough & tumble synopsis suggests, but nevertheless its character knew truly hard times. The hard times of Danny Collins are more like the hard times of the 1%. Maybe he’s a sellout but his selling out has yielded grand extravagance; a chic home, an attractive (and really young) wife, souped-up sports car, the whole nine yards and just a bit further. And his come-to-Jesus moment isn’t really about touching bottom; it’s about being touched from on high. It seems John Lennon himself wrote a short letter to Danny Collins back when the latter was on top of the charts, advising (warning) him to stay true to his art. That letter, however, never made it to Danny – until now, that is, in the form of a birthday present from Danny’s manager (Christopher Plummer).

Deeming his career a colossal waste, Danny Collins cancels his tour and re-locates to a New Jersey Hilton where he promptly moves a grand piano into his room, purportedly to compose actual fresh material. There’s more to it than that, of course, as there must be, specifically in the familial troubles dogging him. And so, he seeks out the son (Bobby Cannavale) and daughter-in-law (Jennifer Garner) and granddaughter (Giselle Eisenberg) he has never seen, claiming he can’t buy his way to redemption even though that is more or less what he does. Still, it doesn’t strain credulity because Danny Collins is quite clearly a man used to hurling money at problems to fix them, and he can’t fully fashion his reclamation until realizing that simply being there for people is the necessary tonic. The sight of the shrunken man in suits only really suitable for ostentatious stage shows in tacky Vegas casinos patiently sitting in a hospital waiting room is a wonderful merging of the real world and the world Danny has always inhabited.

He’s made to sit in a hospital waiting room because his son, it turns out, has cancer, a twist which takes the film one crisis too far. It’s best when it play lighter, such as in its sequences at the New Jersey hotel where Danny Collins practically floats in on a billowy cloud, all smile and “patter”, playing matchmaker to the shy valet and bubbly front desk clerk. Danny also finds new love in the form of Mary Sinclair, the hotel manager. Her character is a predictable part nonetheless played to stone cold perfection by Annette Bening with a mixture of coyness, cordial toughness and the ever-present inkling of  genuine affection for the good intentions that lurk behind the over-the-top lapels of this in-your-face lothario.

If Danny Collins initially comes across like a caricature, it is the down-to-earth Mary that lends crucial aid in seeing through the pizzazz for the person. She’s there, of course, for him to lean on, to listen to his new song and provide encouragement as well as notes, not much else, but there is such delightful vivacity to their “patter”, such authenticity in their chemistry that it hardly matters. And the film, refreshingly, never forces them to fall in love, but rather just revel in the presence of the other. Mary helps Danny remember what it was like to just have fun and not phone it in, and “Danny Collins”, bless its soul, helps Al Pacino do the same.

Slow West

There is an incredibly indelible shot in “Slow West” in which a “Ho! For The West!!” guidebook, a kind of traveler’s manual to frontier America, winds up floating in a small creek that has sprung up in the midst of a flash flood. It’s an instantly emblematic illustration of the many misty-eyed hopes every immigrant would have brought to old world America, to strike out for the land of milk and honey and then have their grand intentions washed away. Back east there is “violence and suffering.” To the west there are “dreams and toil.” And here in the middle, where our characters slowly inch their way forward, where the only homes glimpsed feel positively Lilliputian contrasted against the endless spate of snow-capped peaks, where white men seemingly hunt native Americans for sport, it can feel like a netherworld. You’re tempted to think this isn’t Manifest Destiny so much as the remnants of the apocalypse, but the film stops just short of such all-encompassing misery. Rather it’s a film at marvelous odds, one in which a host of desperate and despicable characters move to and fro in a landscape so panoramically striking that it seems at times born more of a Peter Jackson fantasy film (indeed, it was shot in New Zealand) than a terse western tracking toward a bloody shootout.

That crucial innocence can be traced directly to Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a Scottish teenager on a continental search for his one true love, the mellifluously named Rose Ross (Caren Pistorius). Our narrator, Silas (Michael Fassbender), an Irish bounty hunter who views the whole wide world with a wary eye, can’t figure how the utterly guileless Cavendish has lasted so long in such a brutal land. But then, naivety comes across as Cavendish’s foremost weapon. Everyone around him is broken, driven to extremes, forced to survive rather than live, and still Cavendish maintains a dignified air. He dismisses Silas as a “brute”. He puts far too much trust in a seemingly kindly author. He truly believes that Rose is his personal Willamette Valley. It’s head-shaking but simultaneously endearing.

If Cavendish is heroically, foolishly static, Silas is the wild card, a character whose motivation continually re-aligns as the story progresses. Though it’s John MacLean’s directorial debut, he never feels rushed. Rather he lets “Slow West” unfold at a pace befitting both its title and its setting, a time when getting anywhere was an arduous haul. As it opens, Silas rescues Cavendish from danger and installs himself as the youngster’s guide through the unforgiving wilds. Something more must be lurking, but it takes a good twenty minutes before the reveal, which allows the entirety of the stakes to fall into place – that is, Rose and her father are wanted, a $2000 reward, alive or dead, and Silas intends to collect, using Cavendish as his map to the treasure.

Throughout, “Slow West” emits a heightened vibe, almost to the point where you question the validity of what you’re seeing. One of its very first shots is Cavendish laying on his back beneath the night sky, pretending to shoot out the stars, each star taken out with a soft “ping” on the movie’s soundtrack. It’s like he’s laying down to lull himself to sleep with his favorite storybook story. The relentless National Geographic-ism of MacLean’s direction only accentuates this sensation as it gleefully indulges in the jaw-dropping rugged landscapes even in amidst so much bloodshed and sadness. When Cavendish briefly finds himself all alone, with nothing but a blanket and his long underwear, the cold bearing down on him, the wind whipping, the scenery is still staggering, the shot itself still mesmerizing. It’s strangely difficult to sense his fear because of the aesthetic beauty, and yet it’s because MacLean intentionally wants to strain out that fear.

As the film progresses, the more it becomes reasonable to wonder if Silas is protecting his young charge from the truth rather than concealing it simply to collect on the bounty, as if trying to maintain Cavendish’s innocence. The latter is a character from a fairytale plopped into a goddam tragedy and it becomes a question of which one will win out. It’s not that the film wants it both ways, precisely, but that romanticism runs smack dab into realism and forces its youthful main character to decide. And even if “Slow West” itself might view his ultimate idealistic stance with a dose of skepticism, it nonetheless has the good grace to allow him space to still believe.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Odd Man Out (1947)

The “Odd Man Out” bestowing Carol Reed’s 1947 film its title is Jimmy McQueen (James Mason). Though he’s not specifically a member of the IRA and though he’s not specifically located in Belfast and though he isn’t specifically caught up in The Troubles, well, quite obviously he’s all three things. He’s escaped the clink and holed up in the home of Kathleen Sullivan (Kathleen Ryan) for six months, plotting a bank heist to help fund his nameless organization’s various politically incendiary activities. Kathleen begs him not to go. He’s been house-ridden. He’s not ready. He talks her down, but then proves her right. At the tail-end of the robbery, he freezes up, and finds himself in a tussle with a man that finds the man dead and Jimmy severely wounded. He falls out of the getaway car which, in confusion, leaves him behind, leaving Jimmy all alone in a city where not only the law but those opposed to his organization are out to get him.

The recent “71” was kind of a reverse peephole version of “Odd Man Out.” There a solider in the national army was stranded behind enemy lines and hunted by the IRA. Though it carried psychological dimension, it was primarily rooted in the concept of a thriller, a question of Will He or Won’t He emerge alive? That’s fine, and it was well done, and its fine handling of the eternal question What Does It All Mean? emerged adroitly from that structure. “Odd Man Out”, however, is something very different. Though it begins as a sort of thriller, it eventually opts out of suspense for marching toward the inevitable, a psychological deep dive into the hearts of people. That’s the film’s phrase, not mine. The film “is not concerned with the struggle between the law and an illegal organisation,” an opening title card tells us, “but only with the conflict in the hearts of the people when they become unexpectedly involved.” By deliberately obfuscating its politics, its overriding concern is what’s in the hearts of people. What seems set up as a straightforward narrative – Man Lost, Man Must Find Way Home – eventually thrusts that narrative aside, and partially thrusts its protagonist aside, to take a wider view of a fraught situation. It’s an examination of a community and that community’s reaction to this injured man in front of him. Is he the Enemy or just, like, you know, a human?

“Odd Man Out” was several years in advance of Reed’s legit masterpiece, “The Third Man”, and you can feel the director applying the same sort of visual flourishes he would to such grand effect for a burnt out Vienna. Long shadows are constantly cast against brick walls. Johnny’s own reflection follows him everywhere he goes, illuminating the conflict the within himself, the consequences of taking a man’s life versus fighting to save his own, and staying alive when around every corner everything seems so bleak. He very much becomes a Christ figure, metaphorically carrying the cross throughout a day that gradually gives way from sun to rain to snow. Reed goes all in on this metaphor, repeatedly stuffing frames with cross-like images, and having Johnny encounter a gallery of fourteen men and women, his stations. It’s almost too much. At times, it is. The love story falters because Kathleen seems to view Johnny less with passion than reverence. (I’m definitely in the club that believes Jesus & Mary Magdalene were less Charles & Caroline Ingalls and more Sting & Trudie Styler.)

But there is also something wonderfully wicked about viewing a Biblical-like parable through the prism of noir. It’s virtually impossible not to consider the crucifixion in lockstep with the rebirth. Here, however, Johnny’s inevitable demise never feels like a signifier of Something Big, just another case of stone cold fatalism. And that’s why, frankly, I wish the film might have pushed its political agenda just a bit more. Though the character of Johnny McQueen is clearly meant to represent the IRA, there is a crucial difference between representing and being. And to draw an IRA leader as a modern day Christ.....well, then we might have truly seen what’s in the hearts of some people.

Kevin Corrigan: Even As a Star, Still In Support

Of the 1997 film “Kicked in the Head” the late great Roger Ebert wrote it’s “one of those movies where you wish the story was about the supporting characters.” That in and of itself isn’t necessarily noteworthy. There are a lot of films you wish were about the supporting characters, as the quote implies. Why it’s of particular interest to us, however, is because of “Kicked in the Head’s” leading man – namely, Kevin Corrigan. If Ebert wanted the story to be solely about the supporting characters then that would imply they had more affability than Corrigan’s main character. But then, that’s the whole deal with Corrigan, his lack of affability. He’s the oddball, the unconventional duckling, less Johnny Cash than Luther Perkins with a Fender Esquire that doesn’t really work right.

I’ve said many times before that if I ran Hollywood then Kevin Corrigan would be Brad Pitt. It’s to suggest that in a Hollywood under my no doubt ludicrous command someone as eccentric as Mr. Corrigan could be both a heartthrob and a top-billed star. But then, as Ebert seemed to suggest, Corrigan wasn’t built to be a leading man. And really, neither was Brad Pitt. Oh, Brad Pitt was born to be a leading man; yes, of course, obviously. But despite his obligatory Movie Star Roles, he’s found a truer niche for himself as a wonky supporting guy, like the fitness wackadoo in “Burn After Reading” or the Stetson-wearing philosophizer in “The Counselor” or even all the way back to “12 Monkeys” where his mental case is just a red herring. He so often gets top billing and a prominent place on the poster, yet he functions more effectively on the periphery, even in something like as gargantuan as the “Ocean’s” movies, letting Clooney sit in the throne while consuming meatball sandwiches off to the side.

Kevin Corrigan is all off to the side. That’s why he could never be the Leo part in “The Departed”; he could only ever be “the jerk off fucking cousin.” In “The Slums of Beverly Hills” he’s his own idiosyncratic version of The Boy Next Door, the slacker John Truett to Natasha Lyonne’s Esther Smith. That’s why there was something so grandly poetic in “Scotland, PA”, the modern day re-telling of Macbeth, in which he was tasked with playing modernized Banquo. “Whatever your highness commands me to do, it is always my duty to do it.” He takes instructions from the leading man and then takes the shiv.

All this is why the recently released “Results” suggests something of a Corrigan-ish coronation, like it’s the role to which the litany of IMDb stepping stones has been building. He is, in essence, finally a leading man. That’s the tack taken by Mark Olsen in his piece for the L.A. Times, writing “Kevin Corrigan gets ‘Results’ with a winning lead rom-com role.” And, yes, in some ways, he is the leading man. His character, Danny, incites the action. Wheezy and red-faced, he enters a gym on something of a whim in order to get in shape. He develops eyes for his comely personal trainer (Cobie Smulders). But the personal trainer might actually like her boss (Guy Pearce). And while it comes on like a rom-com, angled like a love triangle, it resists that neat packaging, much like Danny ultimately resists the ethos of exercise. “You and I have different ideas of what constitutes healthy,” he says.

That line might also aptly summarize Corrigan’s own viewpoint of what constitutes a leading man. After all, “Results”, as Olsen writes, “reveals itself to be a rom-com almost like a magic trick, handing off its focus from Corrigan's Danny to Pearce's Trevor somewhere along the way.” In other words, a piece centered around Corrigan finally earning and running with a leading role admits that eventually that leading role cedes center stage to the real leading role – the leading role played by Guy Pearce at his physical peak, chiseled and aerobicized to perfection. Corrigan just kinda stays sorta flabby.

And at film’s end, Pearce gets a dance with Smulders while Corrigan dances by himself off to the side.

When the Unknown Becomes Known

Today the New Horizons probe is set to make its fly-by of Pluto and give us our very first up close and personal look at our solar system’s most distant planet* (*suck it, IAU). Pluto has always been my favorite planet, and not because of the Disney dog, as my arch-nemesis Neil deGrasse Tyson might claim. No, it was my favorite because it was so far away, because by being so far away it was utterly unknown. I remember doing a “science” project in grade school in which we were tasked to choose our favorite planet and present a report. There was so little information on Pluto. Everyone knew about Jupiter’s spot. Everyone had seen that shot of Mars from Viking 1. Everyone knew the 411 on Saturn’s rings. But Pluto? Ah, ‘twas a mystery. No one really knew what it looked like, we could merely imagine, and to imagine it was simply the best. I still daydream about the sun’s remote, barely-there glimmer from Pluto’s surface, a surface which I always imagined was similar to the picture employed by the Encyclopedia Brittanica of my youth to illustrate the Greek underworld ruled by the god Pluto. I guess that’s why I feel so strange today. I’m absolutely euphoric to see Pluto up close yet completely heartbroken to cede the mystery.

The real secret weapon to the original “Star Wars” movie was its setting in the midst of an ongoing conflict. It was a period of civil war and we just happened to be catching up. The scuzzy X-Wing fighters were physical evidence. Those things looked like they’d been broken down and re-built, like, two-dozen times. Those things had mileage. The movie’s opening crawl was akin to reading a history textbook several decades after the fact. “Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon.” You could imagine that hidden base and battle and the secret plans’ thievery any way you wanted.

Well, as you know, there are going to be a series of new “Star Wars” spinoff movies, filling in the blanks between the god-awful prequels and the seminal trilogy of yore. The risk these movies run is not simply in their quality. Perhaps they will be finely made. But there is something to having all those wondrous places our imaginations have carried us rendered null and void. In the original “Star Wars” there are small references to seemingly enormous pieces of the puzzle – the Old Republic, the Academy, the Imperial Senate, The Clone Wars. I loved those allusions. I loved conjuring up the mental image of the Imperial Senate floor while the spooky connotations that something like “Clone Wars” elicited let the darker aspects of my mind’s eye go haywire. Alas, when finally we were introduced to the Imperial Senate and the Clone Wars……well, it was like getting to the Alamo and discovering there is no basement. God, I’ve never experienced such cinematic letdowns.

There is part of me, I suppose, that is excited for the possibility of these stories, just like part of me is excited to see Pluto as Pluto really is. But part of me, the hopeless romantic, the hipster Walter Mitty, is genuinely crushed. There is going to be a movie detailing the origin of Han Solo, even though Han Solo, as far as I’m concerned, exists on the same sorta plain as William Kidd. Who wants to be told unequivocally that Captain Kidd didn’t leave buried treasure? How on earth is that any fun? Those damn scientists get in the damn Loch to harness foolproof evidence that Nessie is just a fanciful Scottish saga and everybody loses.

Well, maybe not everybody. I suppose to more scholarly minds than my own the truth of Captain Kidd and the reality of Loch Ness is exciting and insightful, not unlike how finally seeing Pluto up close and personal and in vibrant color will be breathtaking. And I confess to being riveted by every Pluto image beamed back by New Horizons thus far. Still, with captivation comes a significant dose of sadness, a putting to bed of all my whimsical Plutonian daydreams. I will be heartbroken to know Pluto does not quite exist as I thought I did. And even if this Han Solo origin story winds up to be a phenomenally crafted film with impressive insights into the mind of our favorite Corellian smuggler, I for one will nevertheless be grief-stricken to see precisely how he made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.

Results

Trevor (Guy Pearce), a tanned, muscled proprietor of a startup gym, has coined his own personal fitness mantra, Power4Life, stipulating an improvement of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being. It doesn’t sound so much like a crock as over-earnest cluelessness. Still, Trevor really believes it. He’s prone to “actualizing.” He can stand in the facility that will house his dream gym and “actualize” how it will all look, right down to the smoothie bar. He stresses selecting a specific goal and working hard to attain it. Yet if Andrew Bujalski’s snappy little film illustrates anything, it’s that the “Results” achieved aren’t always identical to those intended. It’s one of those films where it truly feels as if the characters are dictating the story rather than vice-versa, and that’s to suggest that life itself is shaping and re-arranging the characters. Power4Life is powerless in the face of Shit Happening.

“Results” begins with Danny (Kevin Corrigan), a flabby, moody oddball of a man, newly rich and just divorced, entering the office of Trevor and expressing in a peculiarly roundabout way that he wants to get in shape. So Trevor dispatches Kat (Cobie Smulders), an intense to the extreme personal trainer. Trevor and Kat once had a fling but called it off, ostensibly because it was “unprofessional”, but maybe more because Trevor simply prefers the solitude of his own statuesque physique. (He has a daughter. She’s never seen and only referred to twice.) Or maybe it’s because Kat is too uncompromising to handle, like a Trump-ish trainer who only sees the world in terms of successes and total losers. Really, though, she doesn’t seem to work out to stay in shape so much as burn off excessive torrents of stress and anger, and so it never feels like a stretch when Danny, his work ethic already apparently dubious, asks if she wants to smoke a little pot. She agrees, and this sends the trio spinning through the revolving door of romance.

It’s a love triangle, but one viewed from an oblique angle. Everyone’s feelings for other the person are never quite explicit, not even to themselves, specifically because these characters emotions and attitudes tread such shaky ground. Though its rom com formula, it’s not based on the usual misunderstandings and idiot plots but on the characters various anxieties and foolish certainties. Even though you know the film is tracking toward a happy ending, you’re never quite certain how the screenplay is going about reaching it, as if it’s taking an unfamiliar alternate route. And what begins as a love triangle eventually gives way to something else, professional complications that yield emotional awakenings. Nothing is all terribly surprising but you believe the characters have, in their respective ways, surprised themselves. Trevor, Kat and Danny repeatedly push each other way, yet come to realize that in strange ways they are entirely dependent upon one another.

A film so centered on behavior is keyed by its performance and each actor here is great. Pierce goes all in on positivity. A character like this could have been a lunkhead, but Pierce turns him into a ray of light, while Smulders constant fury is never overbearing, just an acute case of confusion expressed through excessive temper. Corrigan, though, long an under-the-radar if gloriously, entertainingly eccentric character actor, is a revelation. 100% vanity free, he’s flabby, sweaty, creepy, and his hair is constantly askew. He’s repugnant yet endearing because his character turns out to be the most comfortable in his own skin, illustrated by the wonderful closing-credits sequence that finds a red-faced Corrigan blissfully and unashamedly cutting a rug, seemingly to the beat inside his own head, which is the same plain on which the whole off-kilter performance rests.

This last scene feels exactly right, suggesting a change from within rather than on the outside, a man settling into his own body. Trevor and Kat, meanwhile, give themselves over to impulses as opposed to “actualized” plans in a glorious rejection of absolutes and an embracing of the unknown. The conclusion feels more like a way station, one part of a longer evolution, as if you could check in with them again in five, ten years and realize they have wound up somewhere completely different. Results are always pending.

Friday's {Mildly} Old Fashioned: Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Pretty much every Tom, Dick and Harry superhero movie that comes down the pike these days centers around the end of the world. It’s so prevalent, in fact, that movie-going Armageddon has more or less been stripped of its inherent horror, counteracted by men and women in crime-fighting costumes discussing it over what amounts to quip-filled high tea. In “Terminator 2”, however, the subtitle is “Judgment Day”, and its end of the world story feels immediate. It doesn’t skimp on the Armageddon-ish sensation, at one point indulging in a shot of a body being incinerated, a nuclear explosion as the culprit. That’s saying something. Despite a mammoth budget, despite groundbreaking special effects, despite a 4th of July weekend opening, despite taking the title as 1991 Box Office Champion, “Judgment Day” never shies away from conveying the terror of its namesake. It’s action-packed but grounded in that old apocalyptic feeling.

The first “Terminator”, released in 1984, was dark, no doubt. It was centered on the idea that in 1997 machines would become self-aware and engender the beginning of the end of mankind, prompting a human resistance. Thus, a futuristic assassin cyborg, a Terminator, was sent back in time to kill the mother, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), who would give birth to the resistance’s leader. There was a low-watt pulse-pounding ominousness that went with the whole film but the horror of Judgment Day itself still somehow felt far off. The instant when you’re delivered the most tragic news you often struggle to comprehend its full weight, and that’s what elevates “T2”; its characters have processed humanity’s impending doom. They’ve had years to wrestle with it and this has inevitably left them scarred.

In the sequel, another Terminator, a super-sleek, liquid metal-y T-1000 (Robert Patrick), is sent back in time to kill teenaged John Connor. And as played by the young Edward Furlong with a 90’s bowl cut and an omnipresent Public Enemy t-shirt, he knows he’ll grow up to lead the resistance in a world laid to waste, and if you know that, why would you clean your room? Why wouldn’t you steal money from the ATM? Why would you do anything other than play video games? He’s something of a brat, but you can’t blame him. His mom’s even worse. In the first film Hamilton played Sarah with a mixture of disbelief and do-it-yourself action heroism. Here she’s not she just buffed up and ripped; she’s off her rocker. Her character is labeled delusional, of course, for speaking up about humanity’s impending demise and locked up in an asylum, but the knowledge that we’re all screwed has left her as someone actively awaiting her own reckoning.

Mankind’s hubris hovers over these movies since they (we) are the ones who construct the machines that will eventually take over, a grave lesson that makes for all kinds of cracks about the robopocalypse even as it draws ever nearer. Yet the neatest bit of irony that writer/director/producer James Cameron employs is how a robot has the most essential arc and the most emergent humanity of all the film’s characters. That’s the T-800 sent back in time to protect John, and eventually, Sarah. It’s played by Arnold Schwarzenegger at the height of his powers, a perfect role in which he’s asked to be expressionless, often silent, and issue monotone one-liners. His best scene finds him matter-of-factly repairing an automobile while John unloads emotional baggage. It works so well because his non-reactions are simultaneously punchlines and pathos.

Their relationship escalates as John instructs his protector in the ethos of non-violence – well, sort of. John repeatedly pleads for the Terminator not to kill anyone, allowing for scads of morbid humor in which the Terminator blasts cops in the kneecaps and then says things like “He’ll live.” In one way, it’s a case of Cameron having his cake and eating it too, veering perilously close to the boundary of Guns Don’t Kill People; People Kill People. Yet in watching these scenes with the benefit of hindsight something even more macabre emerges. The machines that come back to get us we’re our own undoing and we made those guns too.

I’m not saying James Cameron knew when he was shooting “T2” that things were about to take a turn for the worse in the L.A., but the city’s riots in the wake of the Rodney King verdict were right around the corner, as was the notorious Rampart scandal. There are eerie harbingers all over the movie, from those all-consuming flames in Sarah's visions to the T-1000 taking the form of an LAPD cop. And Cameron doesn’t seem particularly adoring of early 90’s L.A. as a whole. The story is intimate, restricted to only a few characters, but those who pop up around the side are often unpleasant and clueless, like John Connor’s seemingly indifferent stepdad and an absolutely lecherous security guard. Humanity here doesn’t look like much worth saving.

Myles Dyson (Joe Morten), the man who would create the technology that dooms us all, is eventually held up as a hero, and rightly so, but that’s only after he’s threatened, nearly killed, bloodied, mortally wounded. So often only at the point of dyin’ does man cop to the error of his ways. Cameron shot an alternate ending in which in which the future was bright and dewy and the nuclear catastrophe at the hands of machines becoming self-aware never took place. This ending was scrapped, wisely, for a hesitantly open ending, a wish that humans learn from their mistakes. As if.

In his positive review for “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” the late great Roger Ebert couldn’t help but examine the film’s varying paradoxes on account of its convoluted future/past time-traveling storyline. “If indeed,” he asks, “in the last scene of the film, the computer chips necessary to invent Terminators are all destroyed, then there couldn't have been any Terminators – so how come they exist in the first place?” Well, that’s a legit query, sure, but one that fails to take into account that post “Terminator 2” there would be more “Terminator” movies - “Rise of the Machines”, “Salvation”, and now “Genisys.” No doubt there will be more, even if they claim there won’t be, who knows how high they will go, and with each further addition, the more ability they have to utterly undo everything that was done in “Judgment Day.” “It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves,” the T-800 Terminator explains to young John Connor in regards to humanity itself.

He may as well have been talking about movie producers, but those sequels may as well be talking about us. We can’t leave well enough really good alone. In Hollywood that just means a spate of bad reviews; in the real world, that can mean a whole lot more.

ID4 Speech As Delivered By Other Living Presidents

This past weekend was 4th of July. That meant a lot of things here in America, of course, but in movie fanatic land it meant a heap of social media references to President Thomas J. Whitmore’s (Bill Pullman) pre-battle speech in Roland Emmerich’s grandiloquent “ID4.” In one way, it’s sort of astounded me that there isn’t more blowback against a speech that declares that “the 4th of July will no longer be known as an American holiday.” But then, it probably gets a pass just because America took the lead on repelling the alien invasion. If, say, France had taken the lead……oh boy. Those Freedom Fries devotees on Fox News would’ve been metaphorically nailing poor Whitmore to the stake. But I digress.

Re-hearing the speech over the weekend (see the speech here) made me wonder how a real President would have handled it. Well wouldn’t ya know, someone went and assembled a plethora of Barack Obama soundbites from various speeches, piecing them together on the Youtube to re-create Whitmore’s speech as given by our current Commander and Chief. And yet, it doesn’t really do Mr. Obama justice. By necessity, it doesn’t sound like a real speech would sound. And in wondering what Obama’s real “ID4” speech would sound like, I found myself wondering about what the other living presidents’ “ID4” speeches might sound like.

Jimmy Carter

All due respect to the well-intentioned, kind-hearted Georgian, but Carter is simply not the one to rally the ragtag troops before “the largest aerial battle in the history of mankind.” I imagine his speech would have meandered into post-invasion policy, like how he would address the dangerous fallout via the ill-fated attempt to nuke the aliens and how his administration would go about re-building America’s infrastructure.

George H.W. Bush

Writing for Slate, Jacob Rubin described H.W. this way: “Bookended by the looming, world-historical charisma of Reagan and Clinton, Bush so often seemed flustered, irritated, a man who felt himself losing a popularity contest.” And so imagine that President giving the “ID4” speech. Not the galvanizing rally cry of Whitmore but the rattled scolding of a POTUS who doesn’t simply see the current situation so much as The End Of The World As We Know It as I’m Not Gonna Stand Up Here And Let You Blame This Whole Thing On Me. “It’s a shame Cheney never advised me of the original alien craft. Might have made a difference. We’ll never know. But I know this, we will never lose to these aliens again. Never, ever, ever, ever.. never, ever again! And I mean never, ever, ever, ever, never ever.”

Bill Clinton

Let’s be honest, William Jefferson’s version of the “ID4” speech would have gone on a lot longer than Whitmore’s, likely to the point that Emmerich would have had to leave a healthy chunk of it on the cutting room floor. But still, it’s my personal opinion that a Clintonian anti-alien screed would have been the best. It wouldn’t have merely been rousing; it would have been deft, cutting and funny. He wouldn’t have just talked up the humans, he would’ve talked down the aliens, exposing loopholes in their battle plans and fundamental flaws in their extermination philosophy. But it wouldn’t have been boring. No, it would’ve been entertainingly verbose and left you wanting to both kick ass and shout “four more years!”

George W. Bush

There’s that moment at the beginning of Whitmore’s speech when he first says “Good morning” into the PA, realizes it’s not on, turns it on, and then says “Good morning” again. Well, you can imagine this immediately rendering the undoing of Dubya, can’t you? It would take him, like, two minutes to figure 1.) The PA wasn’t on and 2.) How to turn the PA on. Then he’d grin, trying to offset the inanity of what just happened, crack some jokes that totally wouldn’t fit the edge-of-apocalypse occasion and then blunder his way through the speech, getting totally tongue-twisted on “tyranny, oppression, or persecution.” “These un-earthly evil-doers have crossed our space borders in attempt to incapacitate our American freedoms.” It wouldn’t do much for anybody, but then he’d pull on the fighter pilot suit and go up into battle with them and give all the other pilots nicknames (like the guy in the Harley Davidson ball cap that he’d call “The Marlboro Man” because he’d mix up his references) and they would win and then he would get re-elected.

Barack Obama

Dude would go to town on the anaphoras. “These aliens picked the wrong planet to pick on. These aliens picked the wrong weekend to pick on it. These aliens only have hate in their telepathic tentacles. These aliens are interested only in extermination. But these aliens didn’t count on our immovable resolve for earthly independence.”

Wistfully '95: Party Girl

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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One thing I notice the older I get is how people in my age bracket and above can demonstrate a dismissive attitude toward the young. I want to be clear: I’m not talking about older people rolling their eyes at adolescent nostalgia. I’m talking about a profound inability to remember what it meant, and even more specifically, what it felt like to be young. If a young person is heedless and aimless and hell bent on sarcasm deflecting their own heedlessness and aimlessness it often seems as if adults critical of this heedlessness and aimlessness and sarcasm conveniently forget their own youthful heedlessness and aimlessness and sarcasm; like when you age it adds wisdom and subtracts confusion and suddenly they’re all Confucius and “tsk-tsk.” In other words, it’s the antithesis of empathy. If one cliché is that youth is wasted on the young then perhaps wisdom is wasted on the aged who know better than you do.

“Party Girl” is the one film in my 1995 series that I did not actually see in 1995. (I caught up with the film three years later during a time when I was heavy into Parker Posey’s filmography.) That would have been difficult. Even if I knew of it at the time, which I didn’t, it was a hardcore indie, and in 1995, Des Moines, Iowa was not a bastion of indie cinema. Released on June 9, 1995, it actually premiered via the Internet six days earlier, the first official full-length Internet film premiere – like, two months before Sandra Bullock explained “The Net” to those of us who didn’t really understand it. That, of course, can make “Party Girl” feel dated, and being dated is actually its ally. This is a film that takes us back, not just to an era but to a specific time in life when Personal Fulfillment seems both idiotic and just a hair's breadth away.

I’ve had people younger than me express confusion about how so many of us carry a torch for Parker Posey and perhaps that is because you had to be there - which is to say, you had be to be around in the 90’s. Panning the film at the time for the San Francisco Chronicle, Edward Guthmann wrote that Posey was “long on chutzpah and sarcasm and short on charm.” Uh, hell-o. Earth to Guthmann. It was the n.i.n.e.t.i.e.s. Get your wack-ass charm outta here cuz we ain’t having it. Chutzpah and sarcasm was what we wanted, like Alicia Silverstone in the “Cryin’” video, like Winona Ryder, like Parker effing Posey as Mary the Party Girl. The movie was set in the 80’s but I would have recognized that mid-90’s sass anywhere. She was the protagonist of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” but played with the brassy Whatever-ism of D’Arcy.

The late great Roger Ebert wasn’t a fan. “As for Mary,” he writes, “her life is disorganized, yes, but the script could nevertheless organize its approach to her, so that the audience wouldn't feel as confused as she is most of the time.” These are not criticisms with which I can quibble, yet these criticisms, in their own way, enhance the film. I was confused when I finally caught up with it, marooned in my early twenties, confused beyond all get-out. And watching a character mirroring my confusion and venting in the bliss of late-night parties and moderate to occasionally extreme immaturities brought not so much a sense of comfort as relief.

Ebert contends that ultimately “the movie never pulls itself together.” Perhaps. Perhaps it never wants to pull itself together. It’s episodic; some episodes are like a more rave oriented “Caroline in the City” and others are like an after school special gone hella wrong. It flits from here to there, and sometimes back again, and sometimes somewhere else altogether. There’s an arc here, but it’s the arc of a twenty something who doesn't have it together and doesn't want to get it together but kinda does want to get it together. Maybe. And so the screenplay gives her an escape hatch in the form of her librarian job. She gets, loses it, but then decides she'll get it back again, studying to be one, to making something with her life that goes beyond parties.

Seventeen or eighteen years out here in the future her crusade for self-identity feels a little.....lacking. Like, the movie never quite takes her on the necessary journey to that point of true enlightenment. Yet true enlightenment, as anyone in their thirties and beyond can tell you, so rarely happens that early in your life. You're still scrounging, still carving out your identity, still thinking you can simply quit the party scene and then everything'll be hunky dory.

That's why an older person might look at Mary and shake his or her head. “She has no idea,” they might scoff. And she probably doesn't. And so what? “Party Girl” is all about those innocent days when you believe merely grasping something like The Dewey Decimal System can automatically engender true happiness. It can’t, of course, but I sure remember when I thought it could.

Buzzard

“Buzzard” is like a modern update of Mike Judge’s cult classic white collar satire “Office Space”, though more idiosyncratically hilarious than dry and much more disturbing. In the latter film “doing nothing” was seen as the ideal; in the former “doing nothing” is the lifestyle. And while “Office Space” might have been bleak, it still managed to carve out a happy ending, believing a kind of untraditional circumvention of a cubicle farm life could still yield solitude, whereas “Buzzard” simply descends into misanthropic madness. Here, the white collar renders nihilism.

As a temp at First Financial Bank, Marty Jackistanski (Joshua Burge) spends less time actually working than working to screw over the company for whom he temps. An early scene unfolding in one long take finds him visiting a First Financial Branch where he closes his checking account and then immediately re-opens it as a means to score the $50 being offered for new business. When asked by the personal banker where he works, Marty replies: “First Financial Bank.” If this was it, his character might be some sort of low wage hero, an exemplar of the peon sticking it to the man. He operates less from a moral code, however, than a wily self-centeredness. In conversations by phone with his mom, who forgets his birthday (“It’s ok, I forget it every year too”), he claims to have all sorts of friends. Really, he has none, unless you count co-worker Derek (Potrykus), whom Marty uses and abuses, stealing the sycophant’s Hot Pockets and even occasionally beating him up.

There are no real attempts to imbue Marty with empathy, and yet he engenders a pittance of it anyway because, as Jerry Seinfeld once observed of his own show’s characters, “There's nothing really likable about them except that they remind you of yourself.” And if we’re not all just like Marty, most of us have, at one time or another, been a cog in this commerce machine, burned out, disenfranchised, perhaps allowing ourselves to daydream about snapping. We don’t, of course, but Marty does, and that allows our daydream to come true. And to frighteningly realize that it’s a thin line between cog and crack-up.

That crack-up happens after Marty, taking his scams too far, steals a batch of refund checks for minimal amounts from the office and signs them over to himself. His ruse exposed, he goes underground, and as he goes underground, he disappears more and more into an alternate reality. This reality manifests itself in his lo-fi invention: a Nintendo glove re-purposed as a Freddy Krueger glove, the villain of “Nightmare on Elm Street” who apparently exists as Marty’s idol. This odd fixation, however, is crucial, not tangential, especially considering that Krueger only appeared to his hapless foils in those endless spates of films in their dreams. In the real world, his powers were useless. Indeed, in Marty's own mind, he fancies himself both repressed by the whole world and unassailable for the ways in which he lashes out at this supposed repression. It’s why in the third act, when he winds up in Detroit with no plan and incapable of thinking ahead, the film feels scarily alive, like anything could happen.

Many reviewers have compared lead actor Joshua Burge to Buster Keaton, and indeed, the hangdog face is as similar as the impeccable comic timing. The attitude between the two men, however, differs in a crucial way. If Keaton’s characters were often flummoxed by the world, they still typically possessed an unswerving faith in it. Burge’s Marty, on the other hand, is both flummoxed by the world and so apathetic toward it as to feel that it owes him.

Late in the film, while on the run, Marty checks into a luxury hotel, apparently unbothered by blowing whatever little money he has, and then ordering a plate of room service spaghetti. An incredible unbroken shot ensues, wherein we watch as Marty imbibes the entire meal. It’s gluttonous; it’s also apropos. It’s a man who’s made a complete mess of his life, yet remains richly self-satisfied. No matter what he does, he can do no wrong. What could be more terrifying?