To See or Not to See

Re-enactments have become all the rage in documentaries. Rather than simply allowing talking heads to espouse details of past events, filmmakers stage them with lookalikes and settings that are approximations of actual locations and occurrences. Sometimes these re-enactments go too far, more intent to seem like works of fiction than documentaries, but sometimes they hit just the right notes and leave us with a deliberately heightened sensation of the ways thing were, not unlike how crucial events of our past become, if not larger than life, heightened to a greater degree than what took place in real time.

James Marsh’s “Man on Wire” (2008) is one such documentary. Involving Philippe Petit and a crew of several men that snuck into the World Trade Center in 1974 so he could famously walk on a tightrope between the two towers, the film imagines this as a heist and often produces fuzzy black and white images that elicit a wondrous kind of dreamy haze, as if the principal subjects are returning to these landmark moments in memories aboard an Amtrak bound for some faraway destination, as if this is all becoming communicated to us in a dream.

My favorite moment, taken to even greater heights by the momentous soundtrack, involves Petit’s accomplice, Jean-Francois Heckel, on Tower One who exclaimed with a not unnoticeable grin of the joyful that “the Statue of Liberty, the UN building, all looking so tiny. It was magnificent.” He continues: “And the sounds as well, the police sirens all night long. It was all so alive! And we were kings!” God, it’s grand, and in this moment, Marsh offers an opaque black & white shot of Lady Liberty in the distance, how she might have looked on August 7, 1974 from 102 stories up, through the darkness, in the midst of such marvelous real world drama. But that’s all we get. And I wonder, is that all we should get?

I mention this because director Robert Zemeckis is set to drop a dramatized version of these events on us this forthcoming fall in a film called “The Walk.” Now, before we go further, I want to make clear that I am not impugning “The Walk’s” quality sight unseen. That’s not my bag. Perhaps it’s an impeccably crafted motion picture, rendered with great artistry and acted with aplomb. If I saw “The Walk” I would judge it as a standalone piece, separate from “Man on Wire”. But that’s the thing, I’m not going to see the “The Walk.”

I’m reminded of the Bill Simmons piece on the 2008 Summer Olympics basketball gold medal game between the United States and Spain. He wrote: “And that’s why I hope neither NBA TV nor ESPN Classic ever replays this game. It belongs to me and the lucky few who watched it live and sweated it out.” I was one of the lucky few. I got up to watch it in the middle of the night. I remember the tension and the joy and the sheer breathlessness of the entire event. It’s selfish, sure, but I get where Simmons was coming from because to experience it as it happened was this treasure that belonged to those of us watching in real time and no one else. And for Zemeckis to grant us access to what Petit’s private moment...

I recognize the semi-absurdity of this stance. After all, movies are based on real events all the time. Should we have no movies based on real events? Should “Zero Dark Thirty” have its memory wiped? Should “Bonnie and Clyde” be put down the incinerator shaft? Well, no and no. In principle I have no objections to movies based on real life events. These movies can not only re-create, they can re-assess, examine, consider, and impart wisdom. And the majority of “The Walk”, no doubt, was already dramatized in “Man on Wire.” But I’m not talking about those things; I’m talking about the one detail “Man on Wire” did not dramatize, not truly – that is, The Walk itself. In “Man on Wire” we saw the walk from a distance; we saw it in still photographs; we saw it from above and below; it was real but it was not tangible, not to us.

“I looked all the way down,” Petit himself said of the moment in his walk when he sat down on the wire and gazed upon the expanse spread out below him, “to see something in my life that I would never see again.” We were not on that wire; we did not live it; it is not ours. He saw what he saw and we did not. And I don’t think we deserve to.

Wistfully '95: Devil in a Blue Dress

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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“It was December 1948 and I needed money.” This is how Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins (Denzel Washington) introduces himself. “Devil in the Blue Dress” might be noir and Easy might be its main character, but he’s no archetypal hard-boiled gumshoe; he’s just a working stiff gone unemployed, hard up for cash to keep his house. Heroes of noir are usually pulled in by the tentacles of fate, or the irresistible winsomeness of the femme fatale. Easy Rawlins, on the other hand, is pulled into the requisite web of criminal duplicitousness all on account of his mortgage.

In a sense, Easy’s house is the femme fatale of “Devil in a Blue Dress”; the abode fatale. “Man, did I like coming home to my house,” he says in voiceover, the joy in his voice palpable. To him, it’s the American Dream, the one he was promised when he came home from the war and left Texas for California to take a job in an aircraft plant. Throughout the film director Carl Franklin and his cinematographer, the as-ever impeccable Tak Fujimoto, mute the film’s color, rendering a sort of sepia-toned palette, a twist on noir’s traditional black and white. Yet the occasional frames of Easy’s house are spectacularly sun-kissed, an almost postcard paradise. When the villain turns up there unannounced it’s not just another Sudden Bad Guy Appearance; it counts for something because this is Easy’s castle and the walls have been breached.

The Bad Guy is DeWitt Albright (Tom Sizemore), a white guy with an Errol Flynn moustache, who hires Easy to find a girl with the mellifluous name of Daphne Monet (Jennifer Beals), the squeeze of the Los Angeles Mayor, Todd Carter (Terry Kinney), who’s up for re-election. Franklin has Easy sit on a bar stool while he accepts the job and keeps DeWitt on his feet. This is no accident. The White Man towering over the Black Man; the Black Man forced to accept the White Man’s faux-charity to pay the rent. This is the noticeable line of segregation throughout “Devil in a Blue Dress.” It’s a line Easy has to cross more than once, dealing with crooked police and corrupt politicians, though the film is careful never to portray him as a racial crusader, though it’s also careful to ensure we understand that the final shot of Easy and DeWitt is a reverse image of the first.

Politics is never much the point in “Devil in a Blue Dress”, at least not politics in terms of policy and genuine back and forth debate regarding issues. No, politics boils down to “dirt”, and each candidate has something nefarious on the other. Carter’s opponent, Matthew Terrell (Maury Chaykin), for whom DeWitt is actually working, is a pedophile and a smattering of photos everybody wants can prove it. Daphne Monet has these photos, or she did, until she gave them to someone else for safekeeping. DeWitt needs to find Daphne to find these photos. And Carter’s potential downfall is Daphne – namely, the secret she holds, the secret embodied in Beals’ performance.

The acting is uniformly top-notch in “Devil in a Blue Dress.” Washington’s world-weariness isn’t the sort of gravelly fatalism popularized by Bogey and Mitchum. “A chill running up the back of my neck,” he says like a man who’s saying it more literally than figuratively. He’s genuinely surprised the deeper he wades into things and overcome by resentment and anger. He’s so on the level, in fact, that he’s nearly over-shadowed by Don Cheadle as his back-in-Texas pal Mouse Alexander, sort of the Doc Holliday to his Wyatt Earp. That, I imagine, is why Mouse is hardly in the film; showing up when Easy is truly facing hard times and needs a little muscle (and a gun) and then moving on when his presence threatens to overwhelm Easy’s.

Beals was often dismissed in evaluations of the film, dismissals I’ve never understood. She plays the part with a perpetual tremble, her lips incessantly teeter-tottering between a seductive smile and quivering panic. You half expect her omnipresent cigarette smoke would be enough to knock her over. She is a woman sitting on a secret she’s desperate to conceal. And in Carter’s case she very much is the requisite femme fatale, given that the obligatory twist involves her heritage, born to a white father and a Creole mother. A relationship with a half African-American in 1948 can mean Carter’s election end and is why she walks even as she waits around to see if he’ll change his mind. He doesn’t, of course, because he can’t. This also marks Daphne more as Easy’s ally than his siren. They don’t have a sexual charge so much as a mutually righteous furor, two people wronged by a wrong-headed society.

The film never truly plunges into the abyss. By the end, the right people are alive and the right people are dead. But then, that doesn’t always equate to a happy ending. WWII certainly vanquished the Nazis and the Axis of Evil but then blacks, many of them vets just like Easy, returned home to discover segregation in terms of skin color was still alive and well. Ah, the greatest generation. This is why Daphne has to skulk off into the night and this is why the white cops driving by Easy’s house still cast a wary eye his way. The closing voiceover is tinged with a kind of pleasant defiance, Easy advising that he “sat with my friend…on my porch…at my house.” He remains the king of his castle, but the idyll has been tempered. A home’s value fluctuates.

Fort Tilden

To trek from Williamsburg to the beach at Fort Tilden, Allie (Claire McNulty) asks her upstairs neighbor (Neil Casey) if she can borrow his bike. In doing so, however, she issues the mandatory askance: “How are you?” He replies earnestly: health problems besieging his family begat financial problems, etc. Life is really happening to this guy. With little common ground and an aversion to empathy, Allie helplessly blurts out, “It’s so hot outside!” And the delineation between the two blooms. Even if Allie is twenty-five and on the verge of going to Liberia with the Peace Corps, she can hardly wrap her head around grown adult problems. It’s evocative of the self-contained ecosphere of hipster millennial Brooklyn where the hilarious and mortifying “Fort Tilden” is set. But on their journey to the Queens historic district that gives Sarah Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers’ remarkable indie film its name, she and her best pal Harper (Bridey Elliot) will come face to face with the frowny face emoji of the real world.

Allie and Harper live together in a loft that with its separate bedrooms reached by separate staircases is like a quirky modernistic update of a Laurel & Hardy arrangement. They are apart yet always together, conjoined by text messages. We first meet them at a smallish rooftop concert hosted by twin-sister singer/songwriters Naomi and Leia (Pheobe and Claire Tyers), a more bohemian version of the Indigo Girls. And this sequence sets the film’s template, one that quickly turns its satirical claws inward. Sitting side by side, Allie and Harper sit in the small audience, smugly mocking the Naomi and Leia. The jokes are funny, yes, but Allie and Harper are eventually revealed as the punchline. Their haughtiness stands in stark contrast to the earnestness of the twin-sisters. Harper, an artist too, has nothing but thinly veiled contempt, yet no real artistic conviction her own. Allie, meanwhile, repeatedly takes pride in pointing out she’s going to Liberia with the Peace Corps, even if it quickly becomes clear this nothing more than a faux-noble non-starter.

At the party they meet a couple fellas who inadvertently invite them to a day at the beach out at Fort Tilden the following day, this bidding becoming their urban call to adventure as they cross the threshold, departing their familiar neighborhood for the urban wilds, forced to confront various crises seemingly as a cosmic means to spur them, however reluctantly, toward adulthood…maybe. Formally “Fort Tilden” comes to resemble Adam Leon’s wonderful “Gimme the Loot” in its portrayal of one seemingly endless New York day, a lo-fi screwball spirit where everything that can go wrong does go wrong. Yet despite its petty crime and crude language, “Gimme the Loot” was ultimately warm of heart and generous of spirit whereas “Fort Tilden” is more acidic and cruel.

Allie opts for the beach over filing out important paperwork for her Peace Corp trip, feigning sickness, a clear signal to everyone but her that she’s hardly taking this Liberia proposal seriously. Harper, meanwhile, is exposed as almost entirely dependent on daddy, placing increasingly desperate phone calls to him the further their journey gets off course. Eventually he cuts her off, so to speak, not to take a stand, it seems, but simply because he’s indifferent and distracted. Like father, like daughter.

Even as their problems mount, they never seem to grasp the tenuous nature of their journey. Neighborhoods through which they pass become increasingly sketchy, yet even as they notice this change they simultaneously remain unaware, childishly flitting through danger zones, wrapped in a cocoon of myopia. They excel at ribbing the other's flaw but struggle at identifying their own. It would be unbearable if the performers didn't outfit their characters with just enough real world naivety that you believe they can eventually see the light.

The conclusion, of course, is intended as the correction to their self-involvement. They get lost once reaching their destination, taking path after path, trying to find the right one, symbolism that isn’t shoved down our throat but allowed to breathe. And upon reaching the beach and discovering the two guys and the two girls the two guys have unexpectedly brought along are mere teenagers, Allie and Harper are forced to confront the fact they’re the people who stayed at the party too long, aged out of the lifestyle they were leading without even realizing it.

Yet even if they find the elixir, it remains buried in the sand. Though the film’s epilogue is fitting, leaving an ellipsis rather than a period, “Fort Tilden” it is best summarized in the shot of Allie and Harper in the cold, uninviting Atlantic surf, bobbing up and down, forlorn. They’ve come to Fort Tilden to make their last stand, but all it really looks like is surrender.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Fear (1954)

“Fear” opens as an unfaithful wife, Irene Wagner (Ingrid Bergman), decides to maybe re-find her faith, shunning her lover-on-the-side (Kurt Kreuger) only to immediately be blackmailed by the former lover, Luisa (Renate Mannhardt) of the lothario she just ditched. Escalating demands for money and then for a priceless ring yield increased desperation for Irene as she tries to prevent her husband, Albert (Mathias Wieman), a scientist with whom she runs a pharmaceutical plant, from learning the truth. That all sounds fairly straight-forward but this was one of Bergman’s four collaborations with her second husband, Roberto Rossellini, and nothing in their films was ever quite so simple.

The twist is that Irene’s husband is actually something of a mad scientist, pulling the strings behind the scenes, hiring the woman blackmailing her wife to do that blackmailing, a means to induce hysteria, to deliberately instill fear. His grand experiment, it turns out, is to see if he can drive his wife to the brink of suicide. Why is never precisely explicated, the cynicism in which the film itself is shrouded essentially acting as its own explanation. This is human nature in the context of “Fear”.

Bergman, of course, was no stranger to extra-marital affairs. She had one with Rossellini, who would become her second husband but not after she saw him on the sly while still wed to her first husband. That became something of a Puritanical American scandal when Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado took to the Senate floor, that bastion of upstanding chivalry, and called for the licensing of Hollywood’s finest in order to morally police them, denouncing Bergman as a “powerful influence of evil.” He was trying to browbeat Bergman with fear, of course. Unlike Irene Wagner, however, Ingrid wasn’t having it. She renounced Hollywood and then they gave her an Oscar in 1956 anyway, like penance. Edwin C. Johnson may have the Eastbound Bore of the Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnel named after him but please; Academy Award covers Tunnel.

“Fear” comes across as a stringent reaction to this insidious witchhunt. After all, there is a sequence in which Irene’s son and daughter have an adolescent dispute when it turns out the latter has absconded with the former’s toy rifle and hidden it. The young girl gets a talking-to and fesses up to the misdemeanor. This little side story ostensibly works as a device to illuminate in Irene’s mind what she’s done wrong, to prod at her soul for a confession. Yet it’s also a mocking of the main story, equating it to an adolescent dispute of pouting and foot-stomping.

Guilt impresses itself upon Irene which, in turn, is supposed to yield her confession by way of taking her own life. And she almost does...before her husband swoops in to save her. He seems genuinely torn up about his actions, apologizing, and the whole thing plays absurdly strange, a happy ending so sudden that you can’t comprehend it. But that happiness seems almost like a kiss off.

There is something of suspense blended with horror in “Fear” akin to Bergman’s “Gaslight”, yes, but this conclusion comes across so satirical it completely counteracts every real “ooh” and “ah” you unleash while Irene goes about deciding to end it all. When it’s prevented, it’s like the gods of machine have intervened if only to save these characters from such morally righteous stupidity.

INT. PHARMACEUTICAL LAB – NIGHT

GODS OF MACHINE descend from the rafters, waving their arms frantically with looks of disbelieving disdain.

GODS OF MACHINE: Really? You were gonna end it all because of this? The fuck is wrong with you people?

Sources: The Dressmaker Emerges as Oscar Best Picture Favorite

Cinema Romantico has it on good authority, and by “authority” I, of course, mean myself, that “The Dressmaker” has emerged as front-runner to earn top podium status at next year’s Academy Awards. 

Our empirical evidence is this: Kate Winslet is, like, a badass. What else do you need to know?

Happy Birthday, Boss

Tangerine

A film shot principally on an iPhone, as the deliriously energetic “Tangerine” was, sounds from a distance like a grand gimmick, a product-based means to drum up off screen conversation or to allow a first-time or less-than-experienced filmmaker an inexpensive means to make like a latter day Robert Rodriguez and turn his 3.95 ounces of stainless steel into a hipster’s substitute for Ultra Panavision. It probably goes without saying, however, to any open-minded cineaste, or otherwise, that “Tangerine” is no gimmick, but a full-blooded motion picture that just happened to be recorded through a smartphone anamorphic lens adapter. Anyone who caught Sean Baker’s previous feature film, the astonishing “Starlet”, would know full well that he and cinematographic ally Radium Cheung have a keen eye for classical frames that illuminate Los Angeles as a place of alternating regularity and transcendence. That film brought a sumptuous dose of levity and warmth to the adult entertainment industry much like how “Tangerine” casts a welcome spotlight on a particular subset of culture standing outside the mainstream.

That subset involves a pair of transgender prostitutes, Alex and Sin-Dee, each of whom is played by a first-time actor – respectively, Mya Taylor and Kiki Kitana-Rodriguez, whose energy inundates the screen, Movie Stars by charisma. Sin-Dee has just been released from a quick stint in jail and is now on the prowl for a “fish” – that is, the woman, Dinah (Mickey O'Hagan) who has been sleeping with her pimp and/or boyfriend Chester (James Ransone) – while Alex chaotically bides her time for a singing showcase at a local club that night. The opening scenes laying out all this information are jam-packed with quick cuts, swirling music and yelling, so much yelling, and the film simply drops us into this world, expecting us to catch up on the fly because these aren’t the kinds of characters that will stop what they’re doing and where they’re going to explain things. You’re in their world now.

The hustle and bustle is underscored by the guerrilla filmmaking. In this way, the iPhone is exceptionally apropos to the story, one that is often confined to the street, and moves right along with them, down sidewalks, across streets and into cars. Always there is life pulsating in the background, people going about their day, reminding us that Alex and Sin-Dee are just a couple people in a humongous city with a myriad of unfolding stories and that their story is as consequential as the story of anyone else.

A parallel narrative emerges in the form of Razmik (Karren Karagulian), a cab driver. Between fares, he scours the streets for prostitutes. In particular, he has an eye for Alex; he also has a wife and child at home. He can’t bring himself to admit who he really is or what he really wants, merely masquerading as a patriarch, dooming his wife and child to a life of emptiness, the same kind that he unsuccessfully seeks to quell with his addiction. Even the makeshift brothel that Sin-Dee invades in order to catch the “fish” and drag her outside by the hair is filled with people more readily in touch with themselves and their plights than Razmik.

“Tangerine” is set over the course of December 24th, a time of togetherness, and in its own manic, delightful, comically caustic way, Baker’s film is all about the family dynamic. Not just Razmik’s threatening to be torn apart, but this bickering congregation of streetwalkers and their clients and pimps for whom Los Angeles locale Donut Town becomes the stage of a kind of screwball-styled Christmas Eve Mass, a hyperactive sequence bringing all the main players onto the same stage so they can hash out their various feelings as everyone argues and spills out into the night.

The film's conclusion, however, stretches beyond humor and becomes something genuinely humanistic, though without the desperation of a more wannabe high-minded film desperate to “say something”. And even if it turns on Alex and Sin-Dee being targeted, briefly, for transgender hate, the film does not make this act of hate the overriding point. Instead it is the impetus to a tender moment of intrinsic goodwill, evoking the film's entire viewpoint of its characters, one refraining from either martyrization or passing judgment. It’s an idea indelibly captured in an earlier shot, improbably set inside a nightclub bathroom, colored like it’s an acid trap at rave, fueled at least in part by a hit of crack, yet utterly imbued with an eclectic if radiant spirituality in which Sin-Dee momentarily quiets as she applies lipstick to Dinah. As it happens, I could hardly believe the tears welling up in my eyes, but there they were nonetheless.

It’s trendy these days to accuse iPhones of negating reality; that we can’t see actually see life happening because we’re too busy recording it, watching it through this little screen what’s actually happening right in front of us. Soul-sucking, you might say. These arguments probably contain some truth, sure, but “Tangerine” looks at these people through its iPhone and sees them. It sees their souls. It seems them for exactly who they are.

Queen of Earth

“Queen of Earth” opens with an extended close-up of Catherine (Elisabeth Moss) in the midst of a break-up with her none-too-broken-up-about-it boyfriend. Occasionally director Alex Ross Perry cuts to the boyfriend, but primarily he keeps on Catherine, up close, her cheeks stained from mascara where the tears have run. If she’s a queen, she’s just been deposed and she doesn’t like it. We’ve seen a million break-ups at the movies but none laced with such an air of portent. And Perry needs nothing else to signal the forthcoming emotional calamity than Moss’s face; it scorches the earth.

Call it kismet that I saw the documentary “Listen to Me Marlon” merely a day before I saw Alex Ross Perry’s second feature film. There its principal subject, Marlon Brando, who knew a few things about acting, called the actor’s face the stage upon which a movie unfolds, considering its size when projected onto the screen before us and our closeness to that image. I don’t know if Ross Perry saw a rough cut of “Listen to Me Marlon” but he takes the pre-eminent actor’s theory to heart. This is a claustrophobic film, not simply because it’s almost exclusively set in one locale, but because the predominant visual strategy is close-ups; more than anywhere else, “Queen of Earth” plays out on the faces of its principal actresses, Ms. Moss and Katherine Waterston.

Reeling from her break-up and the death of her famous artist father, Catherine is invited to an idyllic cabin in the woods by her best friend Ginny (Waterston), where much to Catherine’s chagrin a next-door neighbor, Rich (Patrick Fugit), with a permanent smug smile, as if the whole world exists for his own amusement, keeps showing up to make time with her BFF. And what’s supposed to be emotionally replenishing instead becomes enervating. Though these two women are shown to be close, their friendship exists almost entirely around picking at one another’s emotional scabs until metaphorical blood is let. The film’s occasional flashbacks, which cut in at random moments, like the film’s synapses are suddenly firing, demonstrate a foundation between the two of jealousy and resentment. And as this lakeside retreat unfolds, it’s as if the senior technicians from The Facility have pumped acrimony-generating gas into the air. Because what ensues is a batshit intense horror movie, as if “Mean Girls” was re-set at the Overlook Hotel.

But then, “Queen of Earth” is never as physically violent as “The Shining.” In fact, it’s never physically violent at all. Ross Perry occasionally hints that he might be moving things in that direction, but that’s a deliberate tease. When Catherine happens upon a passed out stranger and invites him in, she giggles, observing “If I murdered you right now no one would notice.” It’s the funniest thing in the movie, because of the giggly way she says it, because of the amused expression on her face. The idea that this movie could go that way is laughable. In fact, this sequence might not even be real. It’s tough to know. It’s suggested but never investigated. No one really investigates anything. As Catherine crumbles before their very eyes, Ginny is quietly satisfied and then bewildered while Rich is essentially amused. He harbors a grudge, apparently because she’s rich. “You don’t know me,” she says. And he doesn’t. We don’t.

Seeking to be an artist, like her famous father, she has the ability to capture the essence of the other person, though apparently not herself. Self-scrutiny is the enemy here, an inability of introspection. Co-dependency looms large. It is suggested that she has long survived by being daddy’s little princess and by hanging on the arm of her significant other. At one point, Catherine tells Rich off, an obscenely riveting moment that leaves Ginny with the literal shakes. Yet the takeaway is clear; even if Catherine can see through Rich, she can’t see herself. Maybe no one’s there.

The film’s most indelible sequence finds Ginny sitting for a portrait as painted by Catherine. But notice the way Ross Perry frames each woman. The youthfully winsome face of Ginny is bathed in a peaceful sunlight reflecting off the water while Catherine is ghostly white, as if that same sunlight does not even know she’s there. Throughout, moments hint at each woman being a piece of one another, interchangeable, like the shot that finds them merged in the reflection of a window. Yet in this sequence you can tangibly sense their disconnection. In her squinty, confused eyes, Ginny can hardly see Catherine, and Catherine looks like she’s long gone. She complains of not being able to feel the bones in her face. Later this is discounted as a psychosomatic but Moss’s increasingly deranged detachment pointedly refutes that diagnosis.

This emotional horror movie becomes a ghost story and if Catherine got up, floated right through the wall and disappeared, you’d hardly be surprised.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Over the Goal (1937)

Each autumnal Saturday afternoon, college football as a game takes center stage. Nothing is more glorious. And yet, the lead-up to that game is often fraught with misadventure. That misadventure comes in all shapes and sizes. It can be related to a star athlete’s recruitment or to the wooing of a particular coach or to an entire university and state governor run amok. (It can also have to do with entities like your friendly neighborhood Tallahassee Police Department. “We’re ready to believe you.”) There can be so many antics, in fact, that they are often worthy of a screwball movie. Yet modern day college football movies often prefer being solemn to points beyond all reason, whether it’s the sanctimonious golden domed flimflam of “Rudy” or the Sports Movie revisionist history of “The Express.” So perhaps it makes sense that to find a college football film truly doing before-game misadventure justice we must harken back to the Golden Age and director Noel M. Smith’s “Over the Goal.”

At barely over an hour, “Over the Goal” is rapid fire ridiculousness. It moves so quick it covers three years in about three minutes to open the film. Carlton College is down in the dumps, road kill for its mighty rival State, much to the chagrin of a loyal alumnus, sort of the T. Boone Pickens of ol’ Carlton who has an expensive wager with a State alum he keeps losing year after year. But through some backroom schemes, he gets an instant superstar, Ken Thomas (William Hopper), enrolled at his alma mater and voila! Carlton rips off two wins in two years. That third year, though, the loyal alumnus kicks the bucket and when he does it turns out that he’s left his entire fortune to Carlton provided they vanquish State three years in a row. And that’s where “Over the Goal” makes the jump to light speed, in advance of Game 3 with one heir’s fortune all on the line.

It’s no secret, of course, that boosters essentially run college football programs, feeding them money, sending them recruits and consequently getting their say. And so there is something particularly refreshing about this extremely old fashioned movie admitting that victory in the Big Game revolves not around any kind of athletic valor but in claiming monetary compensation. Carlton itself, it turns out, has fallen on hard times and to survive needs this cash infusion or else.

Of course, victory isn’t quite so assured. Ken Thomas, we learn, has sustained a significant injury and his doctor advises him not play. Ken’s on the fence, so the doctor convinces his daughter Lucille, who just happens to be dating Ken, to convince the gridiron hero to sit out the State game. Women-Be-Trippin’! But Ken won’t tell his coach that Lucille’s the reason why he’s sitting out and so the coach naturally assumes that Ken wants the alum’s fortune to go back to the family since Ken and the alum share a distant relative. And so coach enlists Ken’s roommate and the team’s water boy, a prankster named Tiny, to convince Ken otherwise.

I’m just describing plot, I know, but that’s what this movie is, yards and yards of plot, going, going, going. Its foremost subplot, adding music and pigskin-less comedy for the less gridiron-obsessed members of the audience, involves Tiny’s comical plight to steal State’s mascot, a real life bear. Hilarity ensues! And singing! After all, Johnnie Davis, who played Tiny, was a scat singer and you don’t cast a scat singer without letting him scat, even if is scat leaves a little something to be desired. You know Cab Calloway could’ve out-scatted him on a half-hour’s rest. Not unlike how you can tell that Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, portraying the bear’s handler, and his pre-“Gone with the Wind” Hattie McDaniel, playing his put-upon wife, clearly possess better comic timing than Davis or Hopper or any of the rest of ‘em and are nonetheless relegated to smaller and far more insulting roles.

That was the time, and all that rubbish, and their presence reminds us that even as baseball was clouded by an infamous color war, college football was less famously beset with the same plague. Jay Berwanger won the Heisman Trophy, sure, but Otis Troupe was at least his equal if not his better. Troupe was probably better than Ken Thomas too. And as for Thomas’s injury, well hell, what’s that got to do with the price of stadium parking? The player’s the thing, see, and “Over the Goal” reckons that so long as you get your star athlete in the game by any means necessary, you’ve done your job. He takes the field, wins the game and dear old Carlton gets the moolah to keep on keeping on. Whether or not he sees any of it, the movie never says. He probably doesn’t. He’s done his non-paying job, after all, and the booster, from beyond the grave, becomes the savior. Somewhere, Sherwood Blount smiles.

A Movie Frozen in Time: Garden State

I fear time, that green-eyed goblin of the lowlands, is the single greatest enemy of Zach Braff. Like Kerri Green will forever exist in the mind’s eye as a teenager, Zach Braff will forever subsist in pop culture as a wackily whimsical (whimsically wacky?) twenty-something, eternally ingrained as a self-involved sentimentalist with a pillow girlfriend prone to being picked on by world-weary cynics because he’s so goddam precious. That’s why “The Last Kiss” didn’t work; he belonged with Rachel Bilson more than Jacinda Barrett, and I still wish Jacinda would have left his ass sitting on the porch.

Braff’s 2004 feature film debut “Garden State” goes a long way in cementing this perspective. It’s a moment frozen in time, capturing him in the eternal posturing of a “sensitive, emotionally vulnerable twenty-something who had a hard time feeling feelings because being in your twenties is so hard, so very hard.” That’s a summary taken directly from Dan Ozzi’s article at Vice the other day with the extremely explicative title of “It’s The Ten Year Anniversary Of Realizing ‘Garden State’ Sucked.” He splits the full frontal essay assault into two halves – writing as someone who fell in love with the movie in 2004 and fell way the hell out of love with the movie in 2005.

“Garden State” was about a twenty-six year old man named Andrew Largeman (Braff) who returns to his New Jersey hometown for his mom’s funeral. He’s clinically depressed, or so his father (Ian Holm), Gideon, would have him believe. A psychiatrist, Gideon has prescribed his son lithium and anti-depressants for most of his adult life in some spectacularly imprudent attempt to engender his family’s happiness. And so the film charts Andrew exiting this pharmaceutical fog, to find that happiness is within reach if only he can set aside his induced moping, and that wakeup call arrives in the form of Sam (Natalie Portman). “(She) is one of those creatures you sometimes find in the movies, a girl who is completely available, absolutely desirable and really likes you,” wrote the late great Roger Ebert in his original review, basically describing {redacted} a few years before Nathan Rabin did.

Coincidentally, I was twenty-six when I watched the film. I was pretty shallow and full of clichéd cultural observations, two criticisms put forth by Josh Levin for Slate in a scathing explanation of why he hates Zach Braff. I also truly believed a song could change my life. That’s not easy to admit but then I’m not into emotional revisionism. I was very much of the movie’s demographic, “those of us,” as Ozzi writes, “who didn’t have life figured out, thought a lot about how we didn’t have life figured out, and sat around talking with our fellow non-life-figuring-outers about how we didn’t have life figured out.” I did not have dad issues and I was not chemically dependent, but I felt like I was sitting in deep water and trying to bail myself out with a straw. (That’s a Jewel lyric. Whose music I liked at the Largeman-like time of my life. I WAS CONFUSED BACK OFF.)

Now Me is not a fan of That Me. In hindsight, I was unhappy, yes, but also unwilling to buck up and do anything about it, preferring to wallow away hours, days, years. That’s why the extraneous sight gags and incessant sitcom-y bits of “Garden State” can occasionally be a narrative hindrance yet emotionally right (and often amusing); that’s how life feels to someone like Largeman. And to watch “Garden State” once that period in your life has been tossed in a barrel and burned like so many dead leaves is an eerie sensation. The film, Carrie Rickey wrote in a lengthy appraisal of both the product itself and its making, “documents the tectonic shift between generations.” And those tectonic shifts are just as detectable when you watch it. Watching it at twenty-six is different from watching it at twenty-seven, or thirty, or thirty-eight. I changed, I grew up and I slayed the horse with a sword on its head that protected my hopes and dreams. 

“Garden State” reminds me of a person I used to be, and I didn’t particularly care for that person and for that reason it’s difficult for me to enjoy the film much anymore. But that’s not the same thing as saying the movie “sucked”.

Wistfully '95: Se7en

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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This isn’t going to have a happy ending.” This is Detective William Somerset’s (Morgan Freeman) extremely early and exceedingly apt appraisal of the police investigation that gives David Fincher’s “Seven” its story. It’s a line steeped in fatalism so familiar to noir, as is the rest of the film’s set-up involving Somerset, an obligatory week away from retirement, tasked with mentoring a young detective, David Mills (Brad Pitt), as they struggle to solve a particularly macabre murder case with a nameless villain who seems only interested in taunting the investigators.

Eventually Somerset and Mills reach the conclusion a serial killer is at work, basing his actions on The Seven Deadly Sins, a potentially pretentious gimmick bundled with moderate torture porn. (There are people who tell you this movie is graphic without being graphic. That’s true of the harrowing conclusion, yes, but not the early scenes which are quite graphic even if they often come cloaked in darkness.) Yet it works by never resigning itself to a mere procedural. “Who Did It?” eventually gives way to “Why Is He Doing It?”, a much more fascinating query that is conveyed with escalating dread.

That dread is effectively captured in the film’s look, one in which Fincher and his cinematographer Darius Khondji transform New York City into a brownish cesspool of urban decay. It evokes a less futuristic “Blade Runner” as seen through a mid-90’s Instagram filter called “Septic Tank”. Rain throttles the screen in scene after scene; at one point the downpour seems to completely engulf the windshield of Mills’ and Somerset’s car. In another scene Mills stands beneath yet another deluge with two cups of coffee, helpless, which might as well be an emblem for the brewing storm that he and his partner cannot avoid.

For all the harshness of this world, however, both in its plotting and its atmospherics, a certain level of hope thrives in its principal characters, all of whom might be cut from cardboard but are nonetheless sprinkled with fairy dust bringing them to life. Freeman outfits Somerset with a reluctant gravitas, accrued over the years of seeing the worst the world has to give. Even so, even as he waits for the worst yet again, there is an occasional flicker in those eyes. When he enters the library late at night to conduct research into the man they are tracking, Somerset gives a smile and a “hello” to the guard on duty; Somerset’s in his happy place. And it speaks volumes that the movie pauses from its festival of grime to give him a happy place, one awash in the almost saintly light cast by the rows and rows of green lamps. Mills, meanwhile, convinced they can “win” this case right up until the very end, has a naïvety that’s as moving as it is terrible. One shot finds him rolling around on newspaper in his apartment with his dogs, just an overgrown kid, and the way in which Somerset takes in his young charge in this moment is heartbreaking.

So is the moment Somerset shares at a greasy spoon diner with David’s wife, Tracy, brought to glorious life by the these-days much maligned Gwyneth Paltrow. Initially her character might seem a contrivance, existing to get offed to spur the film to its end point, yet she’s so much more. She has love in her heart but has lost it in the dense thicket of this foul city; she’s caught between the weary-eyed cynicism of Somerset and the righteousness of her spouse. She is us.

You know what happens to her if you’ve seen the movie, of course, and if you haven’t, you don’t deserve a spoiler, not even twenty years later. You should see it with fresh eyes. And even to see it for the umpteenth time is to see it with fresh eyes. It’s like getting pulled back in all over again, back to the point where Tracy is in that scene at the coffee shop with Somerset, hopeful but hopeless, looking not merely for guidance, but for a spark, for someone to tell her not that everything is going to be all right (motherfucker, please) but that life is still worth fighting for.

That’s the idea that Somerset returns to in the closing voiceover in the aftermath of the investigation in the form of an Ernest Hemingway line. “The world is a fine place and worth fighting for,” he recites. Then he reckons: “I agree with the second part.” Maybe he does, but as the years go on the less sure I am that the movie around him agrees. What begins as fatalism is eventually washed away in the unseen blood of nihilism. Perhaps a song from Tupac Shakur’s album of the same year summarizes better? “Fuck the World.”

Strangerland

Set in the intimidating Australian outback, where heat pulverizes and dust storms beckon, “Strangerland’s” title would seem to emblemize the plight of the Parker family, who as the film opens have moved to a nowhere hamlet for vague reasons that become clear when Catherine (Nicole Kidman) and Matthew’s (Joseph Fiennes) two children, fifteen year old Lily (Maddison Brown) and her younger brother Tommy (Nicholas Hamilton), disappear. What follows is a curious hybrid of an elemental procedural in the vein of “Prisoners” and the esoteric atmospherics of “Picnic at Hanging Rock.” If it leans toward the latter as it reaches the conclusion, it tends more toward the former throughout, which makes for a curious experience where a deliberate pace is at odds with the urgency of the quest. Still, it works, if only because the search eventually comes beside the point as “Strangerland” transforms into a compelling nightmare where a mother tries following her daughter into the same ineffable void.

The film is rife with red herrings in the form of otherwise well-acted supporting characters, mere pieces in an Agatha Christie-ish puzzle meant to drum up drama and draw out suspense. Once we get the obligatory bad vibes of the Parker household out of the way, we are introduced to a strapping lothario at a skate park with an ominous tattoo who is sweet on Lily. We meet the Parkers’ aboriginal house painter, Burtie (Meyne Wyatt), who is also sweet on Lily. He doubles as the son of the woman dating Detective Rae (Hugo Weaving) who is tasked with leading the search to find the missing kids, a conflict of interest that is addressed without any genuine follow-through. There is also Lily’s former teacher in another town with whom she had an illicit relationship, the same guy Matthew beat to within an inch of his life, and this streak of anger in Lily’s father even seems to peg dad as suspicious. It could be anyone!

Who knows, and I’m not entirely sure director Kim Farrant even cares. After all, the movie shows us Lily and Tommy striking out of their own volition, a moment seen from the vantage point of Matthew who merely stands back and lets it happen. Why is never precisely explicated, at least not until the end, a dishonest withholding of information intended to make us go “hmmmmm.” Yet in and of itself the moment seems to suggest something more. Tommy is shown “walking” as the movie opens, at night, all alone, and though his parents scold him they also seem lax in doing much to stop him, as if admitting whatever their children need to walk the straight and narrow isn’t something they can provide.

Frankly, Tommy isn’t much more than a plot device, made to vanish and then used at another point in the film to theoretically kick up the suspense an extra notch. And the character of Matthew disappears down the rabbit hole of rage, as if the movie doesn’t know quite what to do with hm. Catherine, however, is “Strangerland’s” spirit animal, and Kidman, as Kidman will, goes for broke in a wildly affecting performance of an unnerved mother made to square with the fact that she may well have passed onto Lily the very genes that would have prompted her daughter to just up and walk out.

While Lily gets little screen time, defined by a bit of conveniently backstory-laden dialogue and a mouth-breather on the phone who calls her a naughty word, we still get to know her quite well, and that’s because Farrant draws Catherine as Lily. More than once, daughter is referenced as being a chip off her mom’s apparently promiscuous block. As she unravels, Catherine indulges in seemingly emotion-free physical cravings, with her husband and other people, an evocation of that naughty word Lily is called.

In one scene, Catherine desperately ransacks Lily’s room for clues, coming upon a diary. She sits down on her daughter’s bed and combs through it, and the way Kidman positions herself, legs curled up, sitting in a bed that’s too small for her in that colorfully decorated room, she is essentially reverting to childlike behavior. Later, she puts on Lily’s shirt, turns up her music, and when Burtie turns up at the door, an extremely discomforting sequence of sorta-seduction follows. It’s like she's trying to will her daughter back to life in the form of herself, and even if its conveyance in this sequence is almost too literal, Kidman evinces it with such a bonkers emotionalism that it’s difficult not to feel the very real pain bubbling beneath her breakdown. Wherever she went, Lily’s not coming back. In her own way, neither is Catherine.

10,000 Saints

When teenage Jude (Asa Butterfield) is sent by his mother Harriett (Julianne Nicholson) from sleepy Vermont to stay with his father, Les (Ethan Hawke), in big city New York, the decision as viewed through a conventional lens might raise eyes. After all, Les lives in a ramshackle rent control apartment in the 1980’s version of the East Village where the homeless duke it out with encroaching yuppies, allows his son to forgo school and gives him no curfew so long as, like, you know, he gets himself to bed somewhere around the crack of dawn. Also, Les deals pot. But then, “10,000 Saints” isn’t your conventional coming-of-age opus; it’s like if Judy Blume wrote an R-rated movie.

Then again, it very much is your conventional coming-of-age opus. It’s a story populated with Types: a pair of bored teenage boys; too-cool-for-school girl (that beret!) who kinda comes between them and unwittingly becomes pregnant; a mom and dad who are like the leftover-sixties New England version of “Boyhood’s” mom and dad; the bad boy rocker you don’t take home to meet the folks. But it isn’t all so foregone in Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini’s film, one based off a novel by Eleanor Henderson. If it doesn’t necessarily turn these Types on their heads it nonetheless views them with an affection and genuineness that offsets their familiarity.

That deference to the norm is echoed in the character of Les. There is no question he’s too loose with the parenting reigns and offers bad advice, yet “10,000 Saints” is nonetheless refreshing for the grown-up way in which he lets his son feel his own way through life. This is emblemized in their very first scene together, in which Les reveals that Jude was adopted. It’s a bombshell dropped like name-checking your favorite band, so casual you’re not heard you heard it right. It’s indicative not only of Les’s slacker parenting style, but the film’s style, supremely laid-back in spite of so much drama, not seeking to shock, content to just let it happen and then let these youthful characters absorb the world’s punches.

Consider the film’s turning point. This happens in the wake of Jude’s best pal Teddy (Avan Jogia) freezing to death after huffing Freon in the midst of a winter’s night. As it happens, Teddy has also unwittingly just impregnated Eliza (Hailee Seinfeld), the daughter of Les’s girlfriend Di (Emily Mortimer) in New York, who has come up to visit Jude for New Year’s Eve. Neither of these events feels cosmically inclined, intended to yield tragedy and subsequent life lessons; no, they just play as accidents, youthful idiocy with far greater ramifications then could be foreseen.

Of course, these events are not necessarily presented with the kind of solemnity they might otherwise engender either. Rather the whole of “10,000 Saints” is outfit with a sweet-scented pathos, one emblemized in the “straight-edge” lifestyle of the post-punk musical landscape which is reflected in the character of Johnny (Emile Hirsch), Teddy’s older brother. Though he’s a tattoo artist squatting in Alphabet City and fronting a rhythm less hardcore band, he opts for a clean living lifestyle of abstinence and no drugs or alcohol. He’s so pure, in fact, that he steps in for his deceased brother, emulating the code of Yibbum, to become the father of Eliza’s baby.

If you wish the film would do more right by its female characters, giving them more of a chance to speak for their selves than simply reacting to the whims of these men, and if you wish Johnny’s storyline was not resolved through an inane Reveal betraying the character’s integrity, the film still works as a poignant snapshot of a makeshift family, one that eventually branches from Eliza and two dads to even encompass Harriet and Di. Though the film encompasses the Tomkins Square Park riots, they somehow still feel distant; the film’s tone loving, not angry, and this joyously complicated clan unencumbered by typical cultural mores truly bands together.

“10,000 Saints” is based in straight edge culture, but its mantra might have been taken from a counter-culture song that embraced a druggie's life, the kind of juxtaposition on which this film thrives...I get by with a little help from my friends.

Staring Out the Window: A Beautiful Cinematic Trope

---I originally wrote this piece for another site four years ago on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. I re-offer it today on Cinema Romantico.

Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith), a lawyer, is in the back of Max’s (Jamie Foxx) taxi. They have gone through the My Directions Are Better Than Your Directions routine and segued into more pleasant Gettin’ To Know You chit-chat and are on the verge of a More Somber talk, but that will not arrive until the cab reaches its destination. Which it hasn’t. No, right now it is still on the L.A. Freeway and all is quiet, save for the wondrous “Hands of Time” (“Can't turn back the hands of time” and how desperately we all wish we could) on the soundtrack, and Michael Mann’s ever insightful camera of “Collateral” catches Annie staring out the window.

She has that classical expression that is almost a smile but not quite. It is that pre-game moment in so much as she is about to pull – in her own words – an “all nighter”, prepping her big prosecution case, and it’s as if she’s shoring up her energy, or re-considering the wording of her opening statement, or reflecting on just what in the world has brought her here to this point in her life, or wondering why she didn’t become a veterinarian instead, or re-visiting that vacation to Aruba with the dashing Washington policy-writer in her mind, or just drinking in the skyscrapers twinkling in the twilight before she has to pour over papers and legal briefs until dawn. Who’s to say? Her thoughts are her own.

Charlotte (Scarlett Johannson) has come to Tokyo with her newish husband (Giovanni Ribisi), a fashion photographer who flits away to various locales to snap handsome pictures of (I assume) dazzling ladies in clingy outfits. His work distracts him, to be sure, and Ribisi leaves us wondering if maybe this guy’s mental capacity simply can’t accommodate both work and wife. That’s how Charlotte appears to take it, anyway, left off to the side, offering occasional zingers to try and re-gain her own husband’s attention. Why does he pay such reverence to such a ditzy actress (Anna Faris) and treat his own spouse like she’s the OnStar system of his new Acura Integra? And that is how director Sofia Coppola’s camera of her masterful “Lost in Translation” comes to catch Charlotte staring out a window.

Sofia isolates her in front of a broad pane of glass somewhere near the peak of the Park Hyatt Tokyo with the sweep of the whole frenzied city below. Her expression suggests she is adrift in a calm yet expansively empty emotional ocean, as if she wondered who she married, or as if she knows who she married and wonders why she did, or as if she knows who she married and wonders where he went, or as if she wonders how a life that can take her to Tokyo can be as plain as Minute Rice, or as if she has April Skies stuck in her head, or as if she wonders, “Hey, is it too early for a Sapporo and a shot of Suntory?” Who’s to say? Her thoughts are her own.

Onboard United 93 on the morning of September 11, 2001 the airline attendants are acting out safety instructions in time with the accompanying video as the plane taxis as they no doubt have done hundreds of times. Paul Greengrass’s camera catches passengers, as passengers are wont to do, ignoring these instructions. They sleep, listen to music, read, study crossword puzzles. Then the camera lingers just above a seat in the upright position, looking down on a woman staring out the window. The shot is brief, so brief it barely has time register, and yet it registers completely if partly because we know the indescribable terror to come.

And because the film chooses to relay hardly any background information regarding these passengers, we do not possess even the slightest glimpse into this woman’s psyche as she gazes. Is she leaving New York to fly back home to California? Is New York her home and she is flying to California for business? Or pleasure? Is she a wife? Is she thinking about her husband? Is she a mom? Is she thinking about her kid? Is she single? Is she thinking about her own loneliness? Or is she thinking about how thankful she is that she’s single? Or is she not thinking about ANY of those things? Is she thinking about the book just she read? How she wish she got more sleep? How she hasn’t seen her college roommate in years? How she digs the New York Philharmonic? How she TOTALLY is not going to Fisherman’s Wharf when she gets to San Fran because it’s WAY too touristy? Who’s to say? Her thoughts are her own.


In an interview with The Independent in 2006 the mercurial Daniel Day Lewis said he often spends time “just staring out of the window, watching the wind whip across the Wicklow hills. Some people will consider this shamefully neglectful when one considers that there are always more pressing matters at hand, but for me, I have to tell you, it is time very well spent.” The majority of us, I suspect, do not consider spending time just staring out the window, we do not consider setting aside minutes or hours to do so and we do not consider the fact that we are doing it when we are doing it. It is, I also suspect, almost involuntary, and something that occurs – as these movie shots show us – in those spaces between the drone of everyday life.

We stare out the window when we are stuck in a cab. We stare out the window when we are on vacation because we have more time to ourselves. We stare out the window when we are on a plane and stuck on the damn runway. This may sound like a call to arms to take more time to stare out windows but that is not necessarily the case. The romanticism of these shots I have described stem in no small part from the sensation they are stolen moments, that they are graceful breaks on the maddening path of life that somehow runs both unbroken and herky jerky. Interludes of our thoughts and our thoughts alone and the utter lack of endless white noise must be preserved and also not worn out.

And I think it’s why of all the shots Greengrass employs in his very good re-telling of such a tragic event, the one of this woman staring out the window hits me the hardest – harder than any of the still unthinkable real-life footage sprinkled throughout and harder than any of the careful, thoughtful re-creations of what may have happened just prior to 10:03 AM in the sky above rural Pennsylvania fourteen years ago. I guess I like to imagine that as United Flight 93 sat on that runway in Newark waiting its turn for takeoff, all those passengers got the chance to stare out the window and lose themselves in their own thoughts and no one else’s one last time. Because in a strange sort of way we should all be so fortunate to have that opportunity before it’s time to breathe one’s last.

Casting the Rest of the Ronda Rousey Road House

It was announced yesterday by Variety that Ronda Rousey, mixed martial arts superstar, perhaps the finest female athlete alive, heralded conqueror of Floyd Mayweather once Floyd Mayweather gets some metaphorical cojones and gets in the ring with her, will be featured in a remake of 1989’s cultish “Road House” by assuming the lead role made famous by Patrick Swayze. His Dalton was the coolest cooler, a bouncer with a PhD in philosophy from NYU who can also win a fight against anyone under any conditions even though his PhD has enlightened him to the fact that “no one ever wins a fight.” He is lured to a rat hole called the Double Deuce in a Missouri small town lorded over by a local gangster unforgettably named Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara). Dalton cleans up the Double Deuce and he cleans up the town.

But rather than sitting back and allowing Hollywood to screw up the rest of this casting, which you know they will, Cinema Romantico has taken it upon itself to fill in the blanks.

Brad Wesley = Marion Cotillard

There are ten million reasons this needs to happen but, first and foremost, imagine the Cotillard-ization of this immortal Wesley line: “I see you’ve found my trophy room, Dalton. The only thing that’s missing is... your ass!”

Wade Garrett = Mary Steenburgen

Not for nothing was Queen Steen cast opposite Sam Elliot in the last and most recent season of “Justified”; she could toe-to-toe, eye-to-eye, laconic-line-reading for laconic-line-reading. She’d be a different Wade Garrett, granted, but no less effective, a delegating kind of cooler who could shut you down with her charismatic command. That, and her casting could transform into commentary on the aging woman’s plight in Hollywood. “Wilma Garrett’s the best.” “Wilma Garrett’s getting old.” “She’s still the best.”

Doc = Nathan Fillion

Nathan Fillion probably doesn’t belong in Jasper, Missouri but then neither did Kelly Lynch. And those Fillion stammers in response to awesome amounts of Rousey-ness will provide ample comicality.

Frank Tilghman = Lori Loughlin

This goes without saying.

Jimmy = Jason Statham

I considered opting for Gina Carano here, or perhaps Zoe Bell, but this goes back to Floyd Mayweather. Let’s put Rousey in the climactic one on one showdown with Statham so she can rip out his heart (literally, of course) while all those men's rights activists in the audience clutch theirs.

Ernie the Bartender = Carli Lloyd

If you’re Ronda Rousey, there are very few who can hold their own opposite you. And that means finding a serviceable bartender is nigh impossible. Unless, of course, the bartender you hire is Carli Lloyd. This also means the film can feature a sequence where Lloyd drop kicks a Jim Beam bottle sixty feet right into an obnoxious customer's stupid face.

Polar Bear Guy = Kaitlin Olson

Just imagine her doing this.

Jeff Healey Band = Those Darlins

10 Not-At-TIFF Movies to See

The Toronto International Film Festival is set to kick off tomorrow. It’s the George Clooney of the multitude of fall film festivals, the movie Eden where just about any film dreaming of reaping that all-important cultural cache this awards season will be screening, where Oscar contenders will be born or discarded which will prompt many critics to angrily shake their fists at such instantaneous proclamations before instantaneously composing 140 character reviews on Twitter THAT CAME BEFORE YOUR 140 CHARACTER REVIEW ON TWITTER BECAUSE I WAS FIRST SO THERE. My head already hurts.

And so while you can expect to be inundated with a spate of The Ten Films To See At TIFF lists we here at Cinema Romantico are helping out you unlucky blokes stuck anywhere but Toronto with a list of Ten Films Not At TIFF To See. After all, if you watch a movie not at TIFF during TIFF, does it still make a sound? TBD.

10 Not-At-TIFF Movies to See

David and Bathsheba. As TIFF gets under way, Turner Classic Movies is showing this Daryl Zanuck produced Biblical epic. And frankly, I can’t believe I’ve never seen Susan Hayward as Bathsheba in Technicolor.

To Die For. Because this screened at TIFF in 1995 and when in doubt you should always go Kidman.

Broken Arrow. Didn’t “The End of the Tour” really make you want to watch “Broken Arrow” again? Of course it did.

Roustabout. If you haven’t, it’s time you see an Elvis movie. I don’t want to start you with the best and there is no need to go anywhere near the worst and “Blue Hawaii” is best saved for those long winter days when you’re dreaming of paradise so we’ll turn to Elvis as a “Roustabout” instead. Some might say the best actor Elvis ever worked with was Walter Matthau in “King Creole”; I say it was Barbara Stanwyck in “Roustabout.”

In the Cut. My girlfriend got me David Thomson’s “Moments That Made the Movies” for my birthday and Mr. Thomson, my favorite non-everyday film critic, ever the conjurer of unique perspectives, in addressing a particular moment from Jane Campion’s much-derided Meg Ryan-starring vehicle, writes: “It is one of the great films of the twenty-first century, and of the hundred years of film that preceded it.” Maybe that makes you scoff, but it makes me really, really, really want to see it.

Chain Reaction. The other night I had a weird dream that I can’t quite recall but that I know involved an Ice Boat which naturally (?) made me think of “Chain Reaction” and, anyway, I’ve long wanted to do a deep dive into just how in the hell Rachel Weisz ended up in this movie.

A Good Day To Die Hard. I mean, I suppose I need to see this at some point.

Jackie Q. Videos. With every film festival you inevitably hit a wall when you just need to chill out and re-charge. This will even be the case with our faux-film festival, no doubt, and so let's take the eighth day to simply sit back and watch fake Jackie Q. videos on Youtube.

The Longest Week. Because at some point we Billy Crudup Completists are going to have to acknowledge this dead seal in the living room.

L’Avventura. As TIFF closes shop on September 20th, the Gene Siskel Center here in Chicago will be screening Antonioni's immortal melancholic cinematic dreamsicle. While the TIFFsters are waiting in line, I’ll be getting stone cold lost in the haunted big screen eyes of Monica Vitti. Suckas!

Before We Go

This critic admits his biases. I remind you of this because the directorial debut of Chris Evans (who also stars), “Before We Go”, is firmly in the tradition of one of my all-time Top 5 favorite movies, “Before Sunrise”, Richard Linklater’s strangers-meet-for-one-night-only valentine to the indelibility of young love and the sonic pleasure of cinematic conversation mixed with the visual splendor of an architecturally sumptuous city. That film itself is firmly in the tradition of Judy Garland’s classic “The Clock”. I love that movie too, and I love a good many of their followers, and so if you put one of them in front of me it becomes extremely difficult for my “Before Sunrise”-ish bias not to rear its quixotic head.

So when Pete (Evans), an aspiring musician in the Big Apple for a Big Audition the following day, busking on his trusty trumpet in Grand Central Station, that picturesque haven of inadvertent romantic rendezvouses, has an inadvertent romantic rendezvous with Abby (Alice Eve), I said to Mr. Evans' film in all earnestness, “take me where you want to go.” Unfortunately, for all the shallow focus city lights that make it seem as if New York City is one big Christkindlmarket, “Before We Go” remains devoid of the spontaneity this sort of film requires to render the evening as a sudden and miraculous blessing from on high.

The closest it gets is a nice moment when Pete and Abby masquerade as a jazz duo at some corporate party where they are not supposed to be, making it seem as if they have momentarily stepped into the lives of someone else. Otherwise the script (tellingly credited to four people) is packed with contrivances to keep Pete and Abby together, like maxed out credit cards and dead cell phone batteries, and it is noticeably devoid of authentically reflective conversation. In spite of all this, “Before We Go” comes close to a saving grace.

Films of this kind often have a ticking clock, like a plane that must be caught, but what’s notable about “Before We Go” is how the bomb to which its pre-eminent ticking clock is strapped detonates rather early. It turns out that Abby has left her husband a letter asking for divorce given to his apparently obvious philandering. Now she’s re-thought things, because she really does love him, or so she says, and she needs to get home to get that letter. When she can’t, and when other avenues of preventing its reading come up bust, she’s stuck, literally and figuratively. But maybe she’s not because maybe Pete really is the one for her. Unless Pete's ex who is deciding whether or not to go see is still the one for him.

That’s the thing. Though we’re conditioned to expect that Pete and Abby will wind up in one another’s arms, or will at least exchange phone numbers, “Before We Go” wants to push them apart in the admirable name of loyalty. It yearns to lend legitimacy to leads’ significant others, characters often abandoned in these sorts of movies as nothing more than off screen interlopers, an emotional blockade to what our heroes really want, obstructions easily surmounted when the end rolls around and happiness abides. “Before We Go”, however, wants Abby’s husband to register as authentic, as not merely an impediment to consummating true love with Pete but her actual soulmate. It’s the film’s primary asset; it’s also the film’s most significant flaw.

See, the light in which Abby’s husband is painted remains highly unflattering, portraying him as an uncaring philanderer. She’s supposed to be sympathetic but just seems stupid, sticking out a failing marriage because…conservative values, I guess, or maybe just to render an ending of lovelorn tragedy. And it’s tragic, all right, especially when the sequel comes around – “Before We Go Again” – and Abby runs into Pete at O’Hare International Airport and confesses that going back to her spouse was a huge mistake.