Cinema Romantico's Week Off

Hey, loyal readers, first-time readers and suspect readers wondering "who is this dufus and what's his deal with Keira Knightley in hats?" Once again, that time of the year has arrived. Today I'm off to unwind, relax, recharge and smile brightly and widely while consuming coffee in 40 degree temperatures on the north shore of Minnesota and Lake Superior while partaking in a weeklong Internet sabbatical.

But don't fret! Cinema Romantico will not be going dark in my absence. We have several posts set to go up automatically, posts we have refrained from posting for reasons I don't really know. There will be a pair of reviews, a traditionally served Friday's Old Fashioned, an obligatory wonky list, and a long winded diatribe about Matt Damon's brilliance as a comic actor, a piece I'm not entirely sure I got right so, hey, why not just toss it up here while I'm far away? I'll catch back up with y'all just in time for my "Spectre" review to have been rendered irrelevant due to the passage of (Internet) time.

Destination

Forgotten Characters: SFC Cunningham in Signs

My friend Andrew has a regular piece at his site, Encore's World of Film & TV, where he examines Forgotten Characters, those who made a significant impression despite minimal screen time. Today, I once again pay homage (rip him off).

Ted Sutton in Signs

as SFC Cunningham

Typically when someone tells you a ghost story or claims to have seen a UFO or swears that one time they saw Champ, the Lake Champlain Monster, you smile and laugh and nod your head and play along. This person’s a crackpot obviously. Let ‘em have their make-believe moment and then go about your day. It was an amusing story anyway, fun to listen to, so no harm done. But every once in a while, someone tells a ghost story and…it’s not that it sounds real necessarily, but it sounds like it could be real. It sounds like the person telling the story isn’t just making things up or suffering from a screw being loose. Something in their tone, something in the telling, something in the details of the telling, makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. You feel it. You try not to admit it. You try to smile and laugh it off. You still dismiss the storyteller as a crackpot. But then you go home and lock the door and turn on all the lights.

“Signs” (2002) is a movie about an alien invasion. The title refers to crop signs. It’s a fine choice as a harbinger because crop circles have been debunked. So, when people see them in the movie, they can shrug it off, the work of local hooligans or copycats, and go about their day. But then, they wonder. The crop signs on the Hess Farm in “Signs” give way to weird noises and strange sightings. It seems like something’s going on. But why would something be going on? Then, a TV report shows crop signs cropping up all over. Something’s definitely going on. But why would something be going on?

The Hess Family escapes into town to try and get their minds on something else. Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) wanders into a local army recruiting branch. (Watch it here.) He’s looking at a poster on the wall. He hears a voice: “I’ve got it figured.” Then he turns to his right and drifts, just slightly, off to the side of the camera, revealing SFC Cunningham lurking in the shot’s background, seated at his standard-issue desk. He looks cut straight from an Uncle Sam catalogue. But notice the coffee cup in his hands. You can almost picture him downing mugs at that desk all day long, just waiting for someone to come in, someone to whom he can espouse the theory he’s devised and about to unleash on Merrill. He continues, halting between sentences, like we wants to ensure that he’s saying takes hold: “I’ve had two separate folk tell me that there have been strangers around. Can’t tell what they look like, ‘cause they’re staying the shadows... covert-like. Nobody's been hurt, mind you, and that’s the giveaway.”

At this point, Merrill humors him. He grins, kind of, offers an “I see.” It sounds like a fun story. Let the Sergeant tell it. The camera switches, behind Merrill again, still creeping forward, inching toward Cunningham, just as the music, flutes creepily tingling, subtly invades the soundtrack. “It’s called ‘probing,’” explains Cunningham. “It’s a military procedure. You send in a reconnaissance group, very small, to check things out. Not to engage, but to evaluate the situation, evaluate the level of danger. Make sure things are all clear.”

Now Merrill’s lost the grin. He’s not buying in to this theory, per se, but he’s listening, he’s definitely listening. “Clear for what?” he wonders.

And then the camera stops. A medium shot of Cunningham. The perfect pause. And then… “For the rest of them.”

Cunningham is played by Ted Sutton. He doesn’t have a lot of acting credits, and hasn’t had one since 2007. But he has a distinct voice. Boy, does he, and he utilizes it to exemplary effect in this scene, his only one. His voice sounds like there might be a bat or two in the belfry, yes, but its eeriness is pervasive. You can’t shake it. It scratches something. And the exactness of his annunciation… it haunts. It makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. You feel it. You try not to admit it. You try to smile and laugh it off. You dismiss the guy as a crackpot. That’s all he is. He’s just a crackpot. Right?

[Looking over shoulder. Turning on lights. Double-checking door is locked.]

He’s just a crackpot.

Who in The Big Short Wants the Oscar Most?

Adam McKay's "The Big Short" is based on Michael Lewis's 2010 book of the same chronicling a few fellas who detected the forthcoming financial crisis of the late aughts and bet against the market in order to reap a profit. The film, no doubt, will have much to "say" about "the world" in which we "live", and so forth. Most of all, though, it's a chance for heavy-hitting actors to try and win Oscars. And so, based on the trailer, we here at Cinema Romantico have attempted to determine who in this top-level cast wants the Oscar most.

Who in The Big Short Wants the Oscar Most?

NR. Marisa Tomei

Unfortunately this is the only shot we have of Ms. Tomei because nameless strippers are featured more prominently in the trailer than Marisa Tomei which goddammit, Hollywood, pull your heads out of your asses. But anyway, we do not necessarily believe Ms. Tomei wants an Oscar all that badly. First, she has an Oscar. Second, she should be in everything and I'm reasonably certain Mr. McKay knew that well enough to cast her.

4. Brad Pitt

Frankly, I expect more from going-for-an-Oscar Brad Pitt. This looks spur-of-the-moment. This looks like right before Brad left the house for the first day of filming Angie tousled his hair and gave him some glasses and said, "Don't forget...awards! Say it three times fast! AWARDS!AWARDS!AWARDS!" 

3. Christian Bale

He's got the accent and the deliberately bad hair cut but, really, for Bale, he's only operating here at about 40% of his full Method capabilities. I imagine he originally signed onto this movie under the agreement he would take all the principal roles, Peter Sellers-style, only to have that part of the contract written out at the last second. 

2. Steve Carell

His "I'm Doing An Accent!" game is on point and his wig really draws attention to itself. And yet, he still looks like Steve Carell. Unlike...

1. Ryan Reynolds - er, Ryan Gosling

First, Gosling dove headfirst into a bucket of bronzer. Then, he did one of those "Face/Off" face transplants with Ryan Reynolds. I assume somewhere out there Ryan Reynolds is trying to win an Oscar by looking like Ryan Gosling. Maybe next year?

30 For 30: Trojan War

Of all the talking heads in “Trojan War”, ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary chronicling the rise and semi-fall of the University of Southern California football dynasty of the aughts, none are as emblematic as Snoop Dogg, the venerable West Coast rapper and Trojan devotee. When he appears on camera, rhapsodizing about teams’ places in the pantheon, you want to put your hands on your head and shout “No!!! Can't you see what’s coming?! Didn't any of you see ‘The U?!’” “The U” was Billy Corben’s documentary chronicling the Miami Hurricanes of the mid-80’s to mid-90’s who dynastically ran roughshod over college football with an enticing mixture of impeccable talent and excessive illegalities. The latter was embodied in Luther Campbell, controversial front man of 2 Live Crew, who became something of a godfather to the program and an enabler of its players’ many misdeeds. Note to Media: rappers standing on sidelines with ID badges could indicate less “Isn’t That So Cool?” and more “Wait, Something Might Be Going On Here.”

Yet while “The U” was sprawling and imperfect, it was also much more willing to take a wide view, analyzing Miami’s wrongdoing, what they did and why, and what it wrought, for bad and for good. Aaron Rahsaan Thomas’s “Trojan War”, on the other hand, epitomizing Hollywood, which is represented by legendary producer Larry Turman who turns up as something of an all-purpose narrator, is much more content to declare “nothing to see here”, to focus on the good more than the bad, and stick to the field rather than the myriad of skeletons in the closet. “Trojan War” isn’t much more than a hagiographic highlight reel.

Granted, there are a number of incredible highlights from this period of USC Football. The program had three players take home Heisman Trophies while the team earned a cavalcade of conference titles and a couple national championships. The doc spends a good chunk of its time re-living these moments through footage of so many games and talking heads waking up the echoes. Nearly everyone is accounted for, from quarterback Matt Leinart to running back Lendale White to coach Pete Carroll. Everyone, that is, except for running back Reggie Bush, the man who won college football’s highest honor in 2005 and whose extra-curricular activities involving gifts worth a shitload of money that the NCAA frowns upon because it prefers no one earns money but itself unleashed the program’s downfall.

Perhaps his being MIA from the doc is poetically apropos; after all, in lieu of these NCAA violations wins during the Bush era have been “vacated” and his Heisman Trophy given back, officially suggesting he did not “win it” (even though he still very much officially did this). Others, though, were very much at fault, including Carroll, whose wide open practices, fawned over by the media then and now, very much created a culture where the people who approached Reggie Bush could approach Reggie Bush. This is pointed out, sort of, but hardly scrutinized, and even though Carroll is on camera repeatedly, he is never pressed about it, dodging the fray yet again just as he did when he got out of town ahead of the NCAA posse for the NFL.

The majority of what led to NCAA sanction-era football at USC, however, is back-loaded, tagged on at the ending as if for no other reason then it’s required. And yet...in this deliberate narrative oversight emerges the film’s most polarizing contention. It becomes clear in the “So What?” tone players and coaches and program ambassadors and fans take toward the wrongs done that they would not do nor wish anything would be done differently; that they would not go back in time and spruce up their reputation; that they would continue flouting the rules to maintain their memorable reign. It’s admirable in its honesty. This is college football. Winning really is all that matters.

Steve Jobs

“Steve Jobs” might be a Danny Boyle film but it’s an Aaron Sorkin joint. “Because we have forty-five seconds,” says John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), Apple CEO, to Jobs (Michael Fassbender), the technological messiah, “I’ll use it to ask a question.” That might as well be Sorkin’s mission statement. He abhors dead air, adores loquaciousness and therefore transforms Steve Jobs, played full steam by ahead by Fassbender, into a foul-mouthed egotist who will not shut up, and “Steve Jobs” into a cinematic locomotive running on verbiage rather than coal. Though Boyle tricks up the presentation, switching from 16mm to 35mm to digital to track the movie’s changing eras, all that feels like window dressing weighed against the writing. Even so, for all the screenplay’s entertainingly florid language and blow-your-hair-back screeds, it is never actually revelatory, failing to unearth the inner self of its titular character. We may never leave his orbit, yet he still seems remote, the guru and god we see in hagiographic adverts, nothing more.

That might have been fine had Sorkin’s intent been to wrestle with our own ideas of regular, screwed-up, asshole-ish men viewed as gods and the trouble this elicits. But then, the general public is left out of “Steve Jobs”. This is his story, though not a from-the-ground-up linear telling of it, as Sorkin forgoes elementary exposition and trite A Ha! Moments (Jobs bites apple; gets that faraway look in his eyes). Instead he imagines his – er, Boyle’s – movie in three acts, focusing on a triad of product launches spread across fourteen years. This makes “Steve Jobs” less a biopic and more like “Birdman”, a backstage drama, and that suggests an examination of the private person rather than the public one, and how the two differ. After all, we never see the product launches; we merely see Jobs sniping with a rotating cast of cohorts in the wings.

The film begins in 1984 where Jobs will introduce the Macintosh computer at a community college in Cupertino, CA before skipping ahead to 1988 when a floundering Jobs, post-Mac failure, is set to introduce the NeXT Cube, doomed to fail, in San Francisco. It concludes in 1998 with Jobs set to launch the iMac as stage one of a worldwide takeover. His closest confidant, Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), who seems alternately enamored with his intelligence and repulsed by his seemingly non-existent human emotion, is never far from his side, trying to keep him from metaphorically running off the rails. And in each act, Jobs’ respective Ghosts of Christmas Past surface to haunt his psyche. Steve Wozniak, played with a wounded gregariousness by Seth Rogen, just wants some credit for helping achieve Apple liftoff, but Jobs is reluctant to give it. John Sculley appears as a platform for Jobs’ Daddy Issues. And then there is Lisa, the daughter Jobs refuses to admit he had with Chrisann (Katherine Waterston), an unfortunate character who Sorkin sketches less like a functioning human being than Fantine of Les Misérables.

Lisa is intended as his salvation. (She is also made to recite Sorkin-speak too, and is why all three actresses playing her at different ages - Perla Haney-Jardine, Ripley Sobo, and Makenzie Moss – deserve shout-outs, because they somehow make this finite dialogue believable that isn’t appropriate to their age still sound age-appropriate.) If Jobs can admit she’s his, he can be a Good Person, or thereabouts. But that’s where Sorkin really steps wrong. If anything, Jobs is portrayed as Lisa’s savior. They first connect via MacPaint, meaning his first foray into her world is actually her first foray into his world; she meets him on his terms, and that never fundamentally changes, as he pledges to her near the end that he will create a device to put a thousand songs in her pocket. Even in these moments of supposed father/daughter connection, the screenplay can’t help but bring it back down to the things Jobs made.

“What you make isn't supposed to be the best part of you,” says Joanna. “When you're a father, that’s what’s supposed to be the best part of you.” Winslet delivers that line with maximum earnestness but the movie, never mind Jobs himself, doesn’t really believe it. Heck, in the end, Joanna might not even believe it. Ahead of the concluding sequence she tells him to go make “a dent in the universe”, meaning even the only person willing to stand up to him finally comes around and bows down to the aura of his eminence.

The film might be based on Walter Isaacson’s book but Sorkin has gone on record as saying the majority of this material sprung from his own imagination, which is fine. I strongly believe that films about real people don't necessarily need to stick to the facts to capture their essence anyway. The issue, however, is that Sorkin’s mind’s eye does not really stretch beyond the synoptic gospels of Steve Jobs. He co-founded Apple, he invented that phone you turned off right before the movie started and he was both an asshole and a genius.

Except in “Steve Jobs” he comes fully formed as a genius and stays that way. There is no building to his genius; there is no declaring him a genius and then unpacking what made him one; he just is. Sorkin doesn’t elevate him to myth so much as merely confirm his pre-movie mythical status. For all its posturing as a backstage drama it remains firmly center stage, beholden to an ideal. The closing shot finds Steve Jobs outfit in that familiar ensemble of black turtleneck and dad jeans, which, given the white light in which Boyle bathes him, might as well be his holy tunic.

Bridge of Spies

Over the years, Tom Hanks has cultivated an unofficial status as cinema’s spokesman for The Greatest Generation. First, with his Oscar nominated turn as Capt. John Miller in the celebrated “Saving Private Ryan” and then in producing the seminal HBO serial “Band of Brothers”. And so while his casting in Steven Spielberg’s Cold War era tale “Bridge of Spies” might have been inevitable, it is nonetheless impeccable, because all that past Hanks history perfectly informs his role as the real-life Jim Donovan, a WWII vet turned insurance lawyer who agrees to represent a Soviet spy, Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance). Donovan is enlisted to provide the appearance of a fair trial but Donovan wants to do this because he truly believes that even a man everyone wants to see hanged is afforded the right to a fair trial.

Hanks can downplay with the best of ‘em, and that modulation is extremely crucial to the all-around success of “Bridge of Spies.” This easily could have devolved into sentimental mush with Donovan flailing his arms and pounding his fists, crying “…And Justice For All!” Instead Hanks outfits his Donovan with an almost incredulous air about the one-sided bureaucracy he repeatedly encounters, as well as a quiet disbelief at so many informal hanging judges surrounding him, from cops to a painfully on-the-nose sequence aboard public transit where everyone stares at Donovan like he’s fugitive Richard Kimble on the el in the Windy City. But Hanks never goes all-in on this public crucible nor does he go all in on playing a crusader. He evinces a genuine attorney, a man who knows politicking is the only way to get things done. The scene when Donovan visits the Judge’s home for a “narrowly legal” discussion finds him using his lawyerly charm to sly effect, rolling around in the mud without disturbing his cufflinks.

Still, Donovan’s worldview is altered, and this is because of his working relationship with Abel. Where everyone else sees a stone cold enemy, Donovan sees a guy. Granted, that guy is written a bit too platitudinous, but Abel’s humanity nonetheless comes through in Rylance’s incredibly restrained performance that gracefully conveys how he views himself not as a hero of his homeland but a man simply enlisted to do a job. In that way, Abel is not unlike Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell), an American U2 spy plane pilot shot down over the Soviet Union and taken prisoner in a subplot that comes across a bit rushed and broad, as does the side story of Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers), a Yale economics student in East Germany who winds up in the hands of the Stasi when they presume his American accent means he’s a spy. Neither Powers nor Pryor have any texture. They are basically just instruments of the plot, existing to provide counterweight to Abel’s plight and to be put in harm’s way so they can be saved. And yet…their very cipher-ish nature is also makes them resonate.

As the story turns, Donovan becomes less a lawyer and more an agent of American espionage, enlisted by the United States government to travel to volatile Berlin, shimmying between West and East, brokering a prisoner exchange, Abel for Powers. And once Donovan discovers that Pryor is also being held, he goes rogue, trying to include this hapless student in the prisoner swap as well. Donovan doesn’t know these men and doesn’t need to know them or who they are to act on their behalf; he just knows it’s the right thing to do.

Taken as a whole, “Bride of Spies” becomes less about the nature of this spy game then this ordinary man turned hero standing up for what’s good about his country even as his country seems to misplace its own principals in the name of keeping itself safe against terrorism. You might wish Spielberg pushed harder at the notion that America was just as mixed up in all this nefariousness as the “bad guys”. But that’s not Spielberg’s style; cinematographic Americana, however, is. Which is why even as Donovan makes his appeal to the Supreme Court, where we all know he doesn’t stand a chance, because this is all a dog & pony show to make it appear as if it isn’t propaganda when it is so obviously is, Spielberg and his cinematographer of usual choice can’t help but illuminate those hallowed halls with beatific lighting, those white floors gleaming, as if it’s all just saints, no sinners.

If the American sequences are often bathed in a radiant, occasionally autumnal, light, scenes set inside East Berlin are more gray and unsparing. A sequence of Donovan making his way alone through the streets to facilitate secret meetings turns an otherwise picturesque snowfall ominous, being robbed of his Saks Fifth Ave overcoat, left to facilitate secret meetings on the other side of that big beautiful wall with a nasty cold. He tells everyone he meets he just wants to go home and get into bed.

He does, sure enough, in a scene that briefly seems like a paean to tranquil domesticity, a reminder that order has been re-sorted, and it seems, briefly, the movie might end there, snug as a blanket. One more shot awaits, however, and Hanks’ reaction, swiftly transforming from contentedness to distress, re-configures everything, tempering a happy ending. The Cold War rages on.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Red-Headed Woman (1932)

- This week Karina Longworth, proprietor of the fabulous You Must Remember This podcast, a wonderful social media gateway to old world Hollywood, released the Jean Harlow episode for which I'd been pining since its inception. I had a new (old) movie originally planned for today's post but have decided to audible in favor of a particular Harlow favorite instead, re-posting a review from two years ago in the Platinum Blonde's honor.

Lil (Jean Harlow) is in the midst of of attempting to entice married Bill Legendre Jr. (Chester Morris, who, like so many male actors of the early eras, is outfitted with too much makeup). He ain't having it. He smacks her. Woah. But...she smiles. She asks him to do it again. She tries to get him to do it again. Wowza. Meanwhile Lil's friend and confidante Sally (Una Merkel) listens to the action with her ear pressed up against a door in another room. At first, she seems aghast. But then...she smiles. She speaks, I suspect, for the entire audience for the duration of the brief but kicky run time of "Red-Headed Woman" - the experience is more than a little unsettling but we remain enraptured anyway.

"Red-Headed Woman" was released in 1932, two years after the dastardly Will Hays put into effect his nicey-nice Production Code but two years before it really began being enforced with an America & Apple Pie-scented fist. This is why you can hear the word "Sex" said at least twice in "Red-Headed Woman"! No! Really! "S.e.x." Ai-yeeeeeeee! Heck, there's a sequence where we see Harlow undress......well, sorta. In a single take the camera focuses on her bare feet and then her face as it is made insistently clear she is briefly going pantsless and then topless to slip into evening wear. That sounds passé but back in the day there were probably upstanding women who saw this in the theater and fainted.

The film opens with Lil as but a poor stenographer with designs on glitz and glamour and high fashion and society. This is why she targets Bill Legendre with such insistence. She will not be denied. And she isn't, not even when it appears Bill's wife Irene (Leila Hyams) adores him so much and seems so convinced that his one-time foul-up is anomaly. No, instead Bill ends up divorced from Irene and married to Lil who indulges in her newfound upper crust status for all its worth until she realizes the rest of the upper crust will forever shun her for her adulterous dalliance.

Ha! says Lil. With the rich and famous Charles Gaerste (Henry Stephenson) in town to meet with the Legendre family, Lil merely re-sets her plan. A seduction of Gaerste, higher up the social ladder and with even more prominent moneybags than her current husband, would engender the societal reciprocation that Lil cannot get on the arm of Legendre.

Eventually she finds herself separating from her husband to move in with Gaerste while having an affair with Gaerste's French chauffeur (Charles Boyer) on the side.

Per TMC, a certain dude named F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a draft that legendary producer Irving Thalberg deemed too serious and which was completely re-written by Anita Loos to be more whimsical. Remnants of this screenwriting war are littered throughout the film, particularly in the way Lil's incessant blackmailing and cold, cold heart are so often presented in the manner of simple rom com propellents. Truly, you are often left to wonder if director Jack Conway has any idea just how dark the underlying nature of his film is, and this is made more apparent by a "happy ending" that looks and sounds happy but isn't really happy at all if you give it a half-second of thought.

Perhaps the trickiest element of the whole film is Harlow's performance. This is not to suggest she overwhelms the screen with complexity but that she kind of plays the part of this home wrecking status seeker as if to appease Thalberg's desire for a more breezy escapade. Yet, by playing the part this way her character is made even more sinister.

Her Lil shares much in common with later era "Fatal Attraction" Glenn Close and "Body of Evidence" Madonna but in a non-Will Hays world those actresses very much played up the psychotic. Harlow, however, by maintaining such a bubbly air even as she screws (literally and figuratively) every guy around her to get what she wants just seems.......crazy. Like, super crazy. It's a less realistic performance which is precisely what makes it seem so much more realistic than the unhinged red-headed woman of the modern day.

In a movie today if Lil pulled a gun when she pulls a gun you think, "Oh. Plot mechanics." But in 1932 when Lil pulls the gun when she pulls the gun you think, "Yup. That red-headed woman's done lost her mind."

5 Times Amy Ryan Tore the Roof Off the Sucker

Amy Ryan. To certain cinephiles that name is certifiably cherished, indicative of an actress capable of anything, a straight-up original, the thespian of whom Keats once wrote "She is always new." She was born Amy Beth Dziewiontkowski, and while she changed that last name for obvious reasons, well, the takeaway is clear - she is a Dziewiontkowski and you're not. It's not that she's underrated because to be underrated would imply the ability of her acting is somehow undervalued. She is not undervalued; she is underused, again and again, over and over, repeatedly, foolishly, excuse-me-while-I-go-punch-walls. Look no further than the just-released "Bridge of Spies" where she plays, to quote critic Brian Tallerico, "the concerned wife in a slightly underwritten role." Slightly? SLIGHTLY??? Oh, Mr. Tallerico, you Spielbergian diplomat. Amy Ryan spends her few scenes like she's a few doors down on The Donna Reed Show. (Though, in fairness to her, she nails that Drop-Your-Jaw-And-Look-Astonished Reaction Shot because of course she does.)

Michael Keaton's role in "Birdman" hued oh so close to his off screen personality, true, and so did Edward Norton's, and yet Amy Ryan's likeness to her own real life plight went more or less unmentioned by think piece miners. As an actress, she is underused, so often made to wait in the wings, yet effusing rays of light whenever the fates allow her to appear. In "Birdman", she is underused, made to wait in the wings, yet effusing rays of light whenever the fates allow her to appear. So let's shine a spotlight on five of her rays of light in particular, what do ya say?

Note: While she's stone cold superb as effervescent dork Holly Flax ("wicka wicka wicka what?") and while she is straight-up brilliantly un-assuming on the second season of "The Wire", this list will pertain directly to her performances at the film de cinema.

5 Times Amy Ryan Tore the Roof Off the Sucker

Jack Goes Boating. "I’m not ready yet for penis penetration." That's an indelicate line, yes, and I apologize for proffering it here, but Ms. Ryan's line reading is so righteously delicate. She makes it resound with historical context you can't see, a backstory we are not privy to, an uncomfortable humor that's funny but really isn't because it's tinged with some sort of tragedy we won't have to know in detail to believe in .

Gone Baby Gone. "I know I fucked up. I just want my daughter back," she says. "I swear to God, I won't use no drugs no more. I won't even go out. I'll be fucking straight. Cross my heart." Thing is, Ryan says this in that way where you know that in the moment she's absolutely telling the truth but that once the moment ends...

Win Win. Here, Ryan & Paul Giamatti's husband and wife take in the troubled, if sweet, teenage grandson of the old man of whom Giamatti's character has just become legal guardian. And when the grandson asks Ryan's character if he should smoke outside, she replies: "You shouldn't smoke." He admits he knows. She says: "But if you need to, yes, smoke outside." It's an incredible line reading. It's curtness fused with compassion, refusing to pass judgment even as she actively effuses concern. If parenting is about adjusting on the fly...well...that.

The Missing Person. It takes genuine skillz to hold the screen opposite Michael Shannon, and so when Shannon, a modernish update on Philip Marlowe, enters the back of a limousine, smoking where he shouldn't be and yukking it up, Amy Ryan, as his kindaish boss sitting across from him, doesn't even try. An actress who excels at being uncool plays it ultra-cool. And when Shannon says to the annoying limo driver "Please stop calling me boss because I am not Bruce Springsteen", Ryan's reaction, turned away, smiling, not laughing, curling her tongue up in her cheek, lets you know that she knows...yeah, this dude isn't Bruce Springsteen.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. The look she gives the ex-husband she pretty much cannot stand when he's done screwed up again is the stone cold quintessential "Fuck you, buddy boy" look. It makes my knees go weak.

Mississippi Grind

Liberally lifting from Robert Altman’s classic gambling character study, “California Split”, writer/directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s “Mississippi Grind” is familiar, right down to the archetypal leading characters, a schlubby sad-eyed gambler, Gerry (Ben Mendelsohn), with emotional and financial debts littered in his wake and a young hotshot huckster, Curtis (Ryan Reynolds), with as much money as magnetism to burn. Together they road trip from Iowa to New Orleans to enter a prestigious poker tournament in the hopes of inhabiting a mountainous fortune. It’s a proverbial tale with well-worn stopping points that are nonetheless evinced with authenticity, both in the film’s uniformly stellar acting and locales believable for these drifting kind of lifestyles. The late film payoffs, however, are where “Mississippi Grind” really shines as Boden and Fleck, in the manner of their miraculous baseball movie “Sugar,” wrangle a last third of fairly impressive and unspectacular unexpectedness. On second thought, maybe its conclusion of ambiguous hope is to be expected with a film whose opening shot is a rainbow.

The two men meet at a smalltime poker game in Dubuque and become fast friends. Each one sees something in the other. Gerry, a failing real estate agent who owes big to a local loan shark (Alfre Woodard, stunning in a single scene walk off, cordial…until, suddenly, she’s not), needs something to pin hope on, even if that hope is destined to come up bust, and the charismatic positivity of Curtis, who claims only to bet for the action, provides it. In Gerry, Curtis sees something like a reclamation project, a venture he must have taken on before, which is what we gather in scenes he shares with his faux-significant other, a hostess (Sienna Miller, so good that even though I knew she was in this movie and saw her name in the opening credits I still forgot it was her when she appeared), who’s a hostess, you know, in that Donna Reed “From Here To Eternity” sorta way. They speak periodically throughout the film, whispering sweet lovelies that seem based more on what could be than what is. She, at least, has the self-awareness to admit her lot in life; Curtis, the more we get to know him, might not.

“Mississippi Grind” is not about the poker games, which are actually few and far between, and rendered virtually the same way over and over, with big pots and big hands and a victory or a defeat. Playing poker is so much about behavior, reading and acting on it; Gerry, in fact, religiously listens to audio tapes instructing how to ferret out opposing players’ telltale signs and those tells are applicable less at the card table then in scenes of the two men interacting. Slowly, bit by bit, along this journey down the interstate, as if Gerry’s beater is Huck Finn’s raft, each guy pulls back layers of the other, allowing the whole person to bloom.

A litany of card-playing movies conditions you to expect that this story can’t be on the up and up, that some terrible moment of reckoning, some fatal blow, either for Gerry or Curtis, or both, awaits. But Boden and Fleck have more humanity in them than that. They infuse this story and these characters with a strange, almost ridiculous, amount of hope, every crazed bet not coming to resemble another stepping stone to darkness but one more shot at redemption. If that sounds naïve, or even irresponsible, well, it kind of is, and the film doesn’t exactly skimp on it. “I’m not a good person,” Gerry says in the wake of something truly awful. You believe him. But you also believe that with just one stroke of luck maybe, just maybe, he could turn it around. That’s why Curtis can’t cut loose of him.

There is an impeccable shot of the two men at dusk, sharply dressed, imbibing cocktails, about to hop a riverboat, as if momentarily they are stepping back in time, with St. Louis’s Arch looming in the background, that architectural symbol of a gateway to something better. Maybe something better waits for these two new friends. Maybe not. Not that it matters. This shot is the best version of Gerry and Curtis, a version which surfaces, then recedes, surfaces, then recedes, over and over. The end, which comes across both improbable and entirely earned, cuts both ways. It believes in the pot of gold at end of the rainbow. That doesn’t mean it’s really there.

The Five Types of Force Awakens Trailer Reaction

The latest trailer for "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" dropped during Monday Night Football last night. We here at Cinema Romantico could provide a link to it and we could provide a full breakdown of it and we could offer our personal reaction to it...but what's the point? You've seen it. Or heard about it. And formed your own reaction to it or to the reaction of it. There was a lot of reaction to it out there last night on the Twitters. Yet despite so much reaction, the majority of it is really just the same. Let us explain.

Reaction One: "I don't give a fuck about 'Star Wars.'"
Translation: I don't give a fuck about "Star Wars" and I'm letting you know I don't give a fuck about "Star Wars." Because I don't. I don't fucking care about "Star Wars." Do you hear me? DO YOU HEAR ME??? I DON'T CARE ABOUT STAR WARS. THAT'S WHY I'M NOT TALKING ABOUT IT. AT ALL. BECAUSE I DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT STAR WARS. I'M BETTER THAN YOU.

Reaction Two: "It's just a trailer."
Translation: You're taking something seriously that I don't take seriously and because I don't take it seriously I refuse to accept the fact that anyone else takes it seriously. (Reader's Note: This is the same sorta person fancying him or herself a modern day Copernicus for proffering the most reductive phrase in the English language - "It's just a game".)

Reaction Three: "Boycott 'Star Wars.'"
Translation: I can only find faux-pleasure in belittling the joy of others.

Reaction Four: "What's 'Star Wars?'"
Translation: Psssst. I actually do know what "Star Wars" is and I'm merely masquerading as if I don't know in order to cleverly convey my disinterest it. But it's humorous, see, because I'm acting as if I don't know what this very, very famous film franchise is. Ha ha! Right? Funny!

Reaction Five: "I was probably gonna see it anyway."
Translation: "I was probably gonna see it anyway."

The Martian

“The Martian” opens in the midst of a NASA mission on Mars that aborts and heads for home aboard their ship, the Ares III, when a storm hits, save for astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon), presumed dead. He is not, of course, and wakes up to find he’s been left behind, forced to square with a decided lack of food and the precariousness of the equipment necessary to keep him alive. His odds of surviving given the remote possibility of communicating with earth and the time it would take to mount a rescue mission are astronomical. It suggests a red planet “All Is Lost”, the 2013 film in which Robert Redford was stranded at sea. But that was a matter-of-fact survival movie giving way to a symbolism-infused parable, one man losing everything before he can spiritually begin anew, whereas “The Martian” remains strictly literal. In the aftermath of finding himself marooned, Mark sits in silence, the wind howling outside his window, weighing the options, as if reaching the decisive moment in a Choose Your Own Adventure book. The next morning he declares aloud: “I’m not going to die here.” It’s just that simple; time to get to work.

Director Ridley Scott takes no steps to establish Mark as a character before he’s seemingly left for dead, and though that suggests a film where Mark spends this cornucopia of alone time to find himself, this is an external movie. Damon doesn’t play the part haunted or fatalistic but practically ebullient in the way he goes about crafting solutions, colonizing Mars, so to speak, by employing his botanist background to extravagant creative effect by harvesting potatoes. He’s not a pessimist or a philosopher; he’s a problem solver. What, you think NASA teaches these people to brood when faced with Mission: Impossible? The entire movie comes coated in that can-do spirit, underlined by the film’s preponderance of disco music on the soundtrack. Choosing “Rock the Boat” over “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” is positively revelatory.

That can do spirit comes through just as loud and clear back on earth. Sure, the director of NASA, Teddy Sanders (Jeff Daniels), upon learning of Mark’s improbable survival, must weigh cost and the probability of failure, but Daniels does a sly job evincing a man outwardly maintaining bureaucratic appearances while deep down inside scrounging for any possibility to bring home his missing man. And working with his mission directors, Vincent Kapoor (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Mitch Henderson (Sean Bean), and a whole host of others, they are eventually able to forge rudimentary contact with their astronaut, formulating plans for a rescue, one that eventually involves Mark’s crew members aboard the Ares III going faux-rogue to lend a hand.

Drew Goddard’s screenplay, frankly, has no interest in legitimately posing the question Will He or Won't He Get Home? Although it tosses roadblocks into the narrative, those feel more like a matter of seeing how Mark and NASA will overcome them rather than if they will. And while this approach eliminates tension, it allows for a pervasive bounce in the film's step. This is an enjoyable jaunt, not a titanic struggle. At two hours and twenty-two minutes, “The Martian” never feels that along. If it’s Sci-Fi, it’s more like an old-fashioned Sci-Fi serial woven together into a single piece, one where an appreciation of ingenuity is more crucial than conflict.

The further “The Martian” goes, the more it opens up into a true ensemble, even if that ensemble is spread across billions and billions of miles, from the red dirt of Mars to the Johnson Space Center of Houston, Texas on Earth and to the Ares spaceship halfway between both. There is a moment when Daniels, Bean, Kristin Wiig (as NASA’s PR director) and Donald Glover (as an intelligent if social indelicate mathematician) share a scene, even though they are four actors you would never really expect to share a scene. And that abnormality only underscores the film’s intrinsic message of how everyone must come together in the face of a crisis to find a resolution. And if the all these characters, including Mark, are noticeably lacking in any kind of development or off screen life, that only enhances the message – they set themselves aside for the greater good.

“The Martian” could have been NASA agitprop, especially given a couple wholly unnecessary closing sequences, one of Mark speechifying to a room of new recruits and then a closing credits scene that feels like watching a post-Super Bowl celebration. Heck, some have gone so far as to seriously, or not-so-seriously, or both, suggest a conspiratorial tie-in between the film’s release and the real NASA’s announcement of water on Mars. Yet the film itself rarely offers pointed arguments on behalf of NASA. Its reasons for going to Mars in the first place deliberately remain vague; this is expressly a rescue mission. And as so many different entities (even China!) unite to rescue Mark, “The Martian’s” insistence that in the tortured, fractured climate of this country and the world around, we can, when called upon, stand together and get shit done doesn’t come across so alien. It comes across…inspiring.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Red Desert (1964)

The opening credits are a harbinger of doom, the smokestacks of an Italian factory wasteland, gray and out of focus, suggesting an existence of labor so menial no one can quite see its point. Even when they do finally come into view, they don’t really, emitting strange noises and plumes of smoke that look an awful lot like the fog rolling in off the nearby sea, as if you can be lost at sea on land. What these factories produce and what its denizens of enterprise do is never explicated. Why would it be? It’s entirely beside the point. There’s a scene in which a young boy’s toy robot repeatedly smashes against a wall and it the context of a film that hurls metaphors around with wondrous abandon, it’s hard not to view that robot as the whole lot of us, programmed automatons, helplessly banging our heads against the wall, unaware of an alternative to these same old existences.

The plant is overseen by Ugo (Carlo Chionetti) who is married to Giuliana (Monica Vitti). The first time we see her she is wandering in the midst of this ashen landscape, her bright green coat standing in stark contrast to the bleakness all around, barely cognizant of her young son’s presence, more or less confronting some nameless man and demanding his sandwich. She scarfs it down with abandon. Eating has never seemed so eerie. It’s not that she can’t afford to eat; she gives him money for it! It’s as if she requires sustenance of any kind in the face of such mammoth technological meaningless.

Giuliana’s mental state exists on a slippery slope. She has recently been in a car accident that Ugo assumes has left her a little loopy. Eventually, however, we learn the truth; Giuliana was trying to commit suicide. She was trying to leave this sterile existence behind. She admits this to Corrado (Richard Harris), a friend of Ugo. Corrado is dashing and clearly enamored with Giuliana. She seems at least partially enamored with him. This is a set-up for a tumultuous, tempestuous affair, yet “Red Desert” is never much interested in charting that path, just as it’s never much interested in charting any narrative path. She is drawn to Carrado not so much sexually as for the simple reason that he represents something else. In that way, he’s no different than the shop she wants to open in town, the shop that will sell a product she hasn’t even chosen because it probably wouldn’t even matter if she did. In that way, he’s no different than so many images of ships setting out to sea, at which Giuliana stares longingly, like she’s a mariner who’s been landlocked all this time and wants to put out from port.

Though it came thirty-one years before, “Red Desert” evokes “Safe”, the Todd Haynes film in which Julianne Moore played a woman who was seemingly, unexplained, poisoned by the environment all around her, left in a state so weakened she can barely exist. The same thing is happening to Giuliana. Of course, she’s Italian and her disconnect from reality is more histrionic. The results, however, are not dissimilar, a woman tracking toward a symbolically ruinous end.

Certainly the idea of society’s infection is raised. At some strange party in a fishing house along the coast a giant tanker of a ship docked just outside the window raises a polio flag. The party guests hustle to safety. Yet back in the cozy confines of their home it seems as Giuliana’s son has developed polio; until the polio vanishes; unless the polio was just a figment of his imagination or of Giuliana’s. It’s hard to say, frankly, and it’s hard to say whether her apparent crisis is born of something truly physical or just emotional. Like so much else, Antonioni has no interest in specifics. The whole film is more like a mood, a perilous state of mind.

That’s why it hinges on a dreamscape. In caring for her son, Giuliana is stirred to recite a fable, one about a young girl living alone on a pink-beached island. It’s like something out of a Terrence Malick film, the Eden that Pvt. Witt finds in “The Thin Red Line”, but whereas that Eden was real, the Eden of “Red Desert” is illusory, a fantasyland where a person does not stand apart from the place they inhabit but becomes a part of it, melded together. In the real world, Giuliana stands apart from her landscape, crystallized in the concluding sequence (still sporting the striking green coat that makes her stand out in a sea of blah) where a flock of birds deliberately avoids the toxic smoke emitted by the dour factories.

You either evade the societal poison while watching in horror what it does to everyone else or you shrug, walk straight into it and breathe those fumes in.

Christmas Comes Early

I saw some scuttlebutt from the Twitter autocrats recently in the wake of a few amounts of copious praise for the latest PT Anderson opus that some critics, if you want to use that word, are too un-judicious in their hyperbolic praising of auteurs for which they possess immense fondness. And while the autocrats weren’t aiming their social media bellyaching at me and my devout adoration for Sofia Coppola, well, they may as well have been because I don’t hide my Sofia zealotry. I go tell it on the mountain. She’s the awesomest, bro, and you can take your polite reservations and journalistic objectivity and drown it in my leftover Sofia Blanc de Blanc. Real talk: we all have biases and I do not hide mine.

I was having a day. Just, you know, a day; a regular ol’ day. I mean, I live in Chicago and the Cubs beat the Cardinals in the playoffs last night and their four games from [redacted for fear of jinxing it] and the city’s alive with sounds “Cubs Win! Cubs Win!” And I’m cheering for the Cubs, sure, and I’m happy for Cubs fans, obviously, but I’m not a Cubs fan and I can’t (and shouldn’t) own their enthusiasm like they do and I really, really wanted access to that same unbridled exultation. Who wouldn’t?! Then, as if by fate above, yesterday afternoon, it was announced that Sofia Coppola/Bill Murray joint Christmas venture percolating for a year is going to be a reality come December and I cued up the 30 second blip and a tuxedo-ed Bill Murray declared “Tonight will go down as the greatest night in history” and I felt myself swept away to a fantasyland I only permit myself to believe in on unbearably overcrowded el train rides. It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as A Sofia Coppola Film Starring Bill Murray.

Netflix, where it will be released this December, advises that Mr. Murray plays himself, concerned that no one will arrive for his big holiday special at The Carlyle Hotel, that ancient upper east side stronghold, on account of a New York snowstorm, only to have the magic of the season prove his fears unfounded as famous guests arrive to help put on a show. It’s an homage to the classic variety hours gone by, and God bless it. In this era where our talk show hosts are more determined than ever to turn their programs into hour long Youtube videos and even The Muppets, variety show purveying pioneers, are determined to stop being polite and start getting “real”, Monsieur Murray, he who can wink at the camera with such awe-inspiring earnestness and lavish entertainment with the deftest of touches, is here, it seems, to restore the faded title Master of Ceremonies its old world joie de vivre. I’m projecting, perhaps, wishing, hoping, pining, and yet…watch the clip. Tell me I’m wrong.



I haven’t had such a burst of {champagne cork popping emoji) from a teensy weensy trailer since, well, that itty bitty “Bling Ring” spot. A Very Murray Christmas looks like Nick the Lounge Singer crossed with Billy Mack but with a touch of class, an air of dignity, perhaps afforded by that apparent walk and talk with George Clooney, who I kinda want to pretend is something like a Sofia-imagined Dickens ghost. And maybe you think that Miley Cyrus should be the apparition, appearing to appear but not really, except that I’m so in the tank for Sofia that even the world’s foremost twerker merely made me contemplatively scratch my chin and think “I could totally see that working.” Granted, I’m a little heartbroken there was no sign of Kiki. But maybe Kiki had to film “Fargo.” Or maybe Kiki’s appearance will be a surprise. What’s Christmas without a surprise? Wait. What did you say? Jenny Lewis is going to be in this? *Nick faints.*

Over there. To the left. That's the coolest person alive. With Bill Murray. Totes Mcgoats.

Listen to Me Marlon

To hear Marlon Brando tell it on audiotape, he was the sole force in transforming the character he played in “Apocalypse Now”, Col. Kurtz, into a creation of legendary status, re-imagining the part, re-writing the lines, even setting up the lighting. Of course, Francis Ford Coppola might beg to differ, and we do see a clip in which a news anchor suggests that Coppola does, but that’s tangential – the only voice we truly hear in “Listen to Me Marlon” is Marlon Brando’s; hence the title.  He’s in conversation with himself as much as he is with us. Documentaries are prone to employing talking heads but the only talking head “Listen to Me Marlon” employs is a 3D animation of its principal subject's head (looking like outtakes from “Superman: The Movie”), an emblematic conceit if there ever was one.

Steven Riley’s documentary is born from an untraditional device – that is, hundreds of hours of personal audio tapes recorded by Brando himself. Although the film also draws from clips of his performances, revolutionary, incendiary and otherwise, and more formal interviews, it is these rambling monologues that give “Listen to Me Marlon” its backbone. He called these recordings “self hypnosis.” He was trained, as the movie recounts, in the school of Stella Adler, the famed Method tutee who preached that actors should draw significantly from their own past to inform their present performances. In a way, that’s what these pseudo self-help messages come across – as Brando drawing on his past to consider how he got where he is and who he has become and where he might be going.

When these were recorded is never conveyed. Brando’s voice shifts throughout the film from younger to older, poetic and weary, and we never know quite where we are in his own personal accounts. This imbues the film with a stream-of-consciousness sensation, opening a page to Marlon Brando’s personal diary and leaping in. And for a man so spontaneously combustible in his best performances, this matches up to the documentary’s atmosphere, one that just sort of comes at you in undulating waves, where even if you can’t quite grasp what he’s saying or why he’s saying it, you remain compelled to listen.

So many documentaries take sides and you would expect a documentary about a particular man narrated, in a sense, by that particular man to be nothing but one-sided. Yet it’s not. Brando comes across almost gravely in touch with his failings as a father and clearly stricken with what he viewed as a meaningless to his professional trade. That he yearned to make some sort of a difference beyond art’s escapism is clear and this is tied back to decisions like sending a faux-native American to accept his second Oscar for “The Godfather.” Riley is sure to indulge in shots of a skeptical audience but he never treats Brando’s ardor for the issues with condescension. Brando expresses a genuine guilt about America’s role in more or less exterminating the natives who came before and, more than anything, guilt is what you get from his recordings. He was an emotionally torn-apart man and the emotions that he so ably captured on the big screen come across as being of little consequence to him.

There are a few moments near the beginning when Brando seems genuinely smitten by acting. “You want to stop that movement of popcorn to the mouth,” he remarks. “You do that with the truth.” But as his career progresses and his star rises, he more or less turns his back on the trade, dismissing acting as nothing more than lying, a disheartening admission from one of the profession's true titans. Still, the footage Riley employs makes it hard for Brando’s prowess not to be seen, and whether its conjurer believed in its emotional truth or not, it’s still there, forever and ever, for the rest of us to behold. Brando may not have thought much of his “I coulda been a contender” speech, but when you see it yet again in “Listen to Me Marlon”, you stop that movement of popcorn to your mouth.

Everest

If the real Mount Everest, both in 1996 and today, is plagued by overcrowding, so, perhaps inevitably, is Baltasar Kormákur’s “Everest”, based on the real life climb in May of 1996 that wrought so much tragedy. Rob Hall’s (Jason Clarke) commercial outfit, Adventure Consultants, designed to get amateur hikers to the summit of Mount Everest for a hefty fee has been copied by other mountaineering entrepreneurs, like Scott Fischer, played by Jake Gyllenhaal almost as if he belongs more on a Pacific beach than in the wilds between Nepal and Tibet, coming and going from “Everest’s” overstuffed narrative at his leisure. There are other groups too, and they are all on Everest to reach the top at roughly the same time, and they all get in one another’s way, which leads to to a logjam of characters (though don’t expect the heavy-lifting Sherpas to get much play; I mean, it’s only 2015!).

If you’ve read Jon Krakauer’s controversial best-seller chronicling the event, “Into Thin Air”, you will have a laid a base to keep all these people straight; if you haven’t, god speed. Kormákur tries alleviating this problem by casting a plethora of well-known faces in prominent roles so that you can simply pick them out on account of their off screen famousness. A few actors even manage to overcome their underwritten parts to find occasional flares of honest to goodness characterization. John Hawkes plays Doug Hansen, a divorcee working three jobs to fund his trip, and though he gets a speech about making the climb to inspire school kids, Hawkes’ sad-eyed demeanor hints less at inspiration than some kind of hole he can’t fill, a regret the film itself never seeks to explore. The part of Beck Weathers, meanwhile, could have been cliché – “one hundred percent Texan” – but Josh Brolin cuts through the broad exterior to evince a hubris that is inevitably smacked down.

If “Everest” has a true main character it is Rob Hall, portrayed with warmth by Clarke as a professional who seems somewhat overwhelmed by Everest as a tourist trap and quietly concerned so many competing expeditions will yield grave consequences. But the film as a whole never quite commits to the notion of itself as a cautionary tale. There are references to the perilousness of this undertaking as well as to the snarl of climbers that contributed directly to the loss of too much life, but Kormákur is decidedly reluctant to truly point fingers. And so it pogoes back and forth between being a mournful dirge and a triumph of the human spirit, one filmed in 3D IMAX. Its stunts are robust, of course, and its cinematography is striking, no doubt, and it’s often quite exciting, but it never really adopts a viewpoint. Unless, that is, you want to believe the real point-of-view in “Everest” is, well, Everest.

“He might as well be on the moon.” This is what Jan Hall (a gallant Keira Knightley, forced to phone in – literally – her entire performance ) says of her spouse, Rob, when she learns he’s stranded near the summit with no way down, penned in by a storm. If the line has a faint whiff of cheese it’s no less apt. At 29,029 feet, Chomolungma (and it’s really time we co-opting English speakers change Everest’s name back to Chomolungma, Denali style) might be on Earth, but its peak, settled in a death zone, where you’re dying even as you’re climbing, is basically as treacherous a journey as those manned flights to Earth’s satellite. And when the film invokes this faraway sensation, it soars.

An immaculate shot of a hiker line in the wee hours of dawn, their way lit by helmet lamps, makes them momentarily appear like anyone from any era, no different than mortal souls of George Leigh Mallory’s time. “The mountain makes its own weather,” we are told. In other words, it’s alive, it’s calling the shots, and if all these people trying to scale its towering heights seem insignificant, it’s because The Goddess Mother of Mountains reduces them all to specks in its shadow.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Passenger (1975)

A couple years ago during my ill-fated return to higher learning, when homework and misery went hand-in-hand, I kept having recurring fantasies of driving away. That’s it. Just getting in a car and driving…away. I would listen to Little Boots’ “Motorway” and drift off to images of mindlessly cruising the Trans-Canada Highway, all 5,000 miles of it, just cutting out and going. Going where exactly? Well, that’s where the fantasy ended. I had no destination; just the white lines of the highway rolling on and on. I always figured there was no end point in the dream because once you reached Wherever it would be exactly like Everywhere Else.

As Michelangelo Antonioni’s “The Passenger” opens, journalist David Locke (Jack Nicholson) is in North Africa, trying to make contact with rebel fighters who are reputedly in the desert hills. He has no luck. Few words are spoken as he stumbles around a mostly empty town, offering cigarettes to anyone who’ll have who tell him nothing. When he finally seems to have made inroads, he hasn’t, getting stranded in the Saharan desert when his jeep gets stuck in the sand. He gets out by walking out, tired, sweaty, sunburned, disgusted, done. What kind of life is this? Apparently none it all. Once back at his primitive hotel, he finds the establishment’s other guest, David Robertson (Charles Mulvehill), an Englishman with whom Locke got drunk the previous evening, lying on his bed, dead.

Without explanation or even the slightest inkling of contemplation, Locke goes about assuming Robertson’s identity, changing out ID and telling the hotel that David Locke is dead. He insinuates himself into Robertson’s loner life by leaning on a planner filled with names and times on specific dates. Eventually it is revealed that Robertson’s business involved gun-running, which seems readymade for action and suspense, but this is primarily tangential, as is the story back home in London where Locke’s wife (Jenny Runacre) wonders what really happened and sends their mutual friend Martin (Ian Hendry) to find out. This leads to Locke evading both the authorities and the people from his previous life.

Locke’s co-conspirator becomes a girl played by Maria Schneider. She helps him out of a jam and then tags along. She is never given a name. She is as rootless as Locke wants to be. He keeps asking her why she’s along for the ride and she never really answers. The life she has walked out on is never made clear, perhaps because she would rather let it lie there. Like this stranger who intrigues her, she presses forward toward something, though who knows what. When she asks him what he’s running away from, he answers by telling her to turn her back to the front seat. She does. She sees the road receding. That’s good enough. What they’re moving toward is of no interest to camera. Maybe it’s of no interest to them.

There is a strange detachment throughout to Nicholson’s performance. Not just in the early sequences cluing us into his emotional malaise, but once we assumes Robertson’s identity. This swapping of selves would at first seem born of a desperation for something new, something different, something exciting. After all, in brief flashback to his conversation with Robertson, Locke notes the gloom that comes with a person’s formation of habits, live lived out in the same manner day after day, year after year. Yet even as someone else, even as someone caught up in illegalities and clandestine meetings, like something straight out of a spy novel, Nicholson gives the part no jolt and Antonioni keeps the film’s energy muted. Whatever Locke hoped to get from this ID switch, he doesn’t, life still drags on, and the past he wanted to toss in the incinerator is still snapping at his heels.

We’re all just passengers in our own lives, I suppose, gazing out the window as the scenery rolls by. And that is the most affecting visual motif in “The Passenger”, peering through the window. Over and over we see characters peering through the window or the camera itself, which often feels like a secondary character, the documentarian documenting this journo’s gradual untethering from the world. At one point, Robertson (Locke?) and the Girl sit in a seaside restaurant, chatting, drinking, eating, and he notices a woman out the window sitting in the sun. It’s as if he’s imagining who she is, what her life encompasses. Even here, in this idyll setting, he’s looking out the window, fantasizing about something else.

These recurring shots build gracefully to the film’s conclusion, as intoxicating a wrap-up in the medium as I’ve seen, unveiled in a seemingly unbroken take that begins in Locke/Robertson’s hotel room and then pushes out a window, a window lined with bars, evoking the prison cell to which he’s confined himself, and then drifts through those bars and into the piazza where the police and the people looking for Robertson/Locke descend upon his hotel room. As they do, the camera subtly pivots and floats back toward the room from which just exited, now looking into the window rather than out of it, the promise of what’s out there no longer beckoning, nothing left but what’s already in here.

Fact or Fiction? Fact-Checking Pan

On December 27, 1904 an apple-faced adolescent named Peter Pan invited Wendy Darling to join him in a place called Neverland along with his good-hearted gang, The Lost Boys. Famous adventures followed, involving an infamous showdown with an infamous privateer, Captain Hook. Director Joe Wright has fashioned a motion picture based on the exploits of Mr. Pan – titled, appropriately, “Pan” – and we here at Cinema Romantico have investigated the pertinent facts to determine where Mr. Wright sticks close to the truth and where he deviates.

Peter Pan. The real life Peter Pan quite famously dressed in “autumn leaves and cobwebs.” Does this look like autumn leaves and cobwebs to you? No, he just looks like Oliver Twist. That’s an entirely different kind of story altogether. Grade: F

Blackbeard. In “Pan”, Hugh Jackman’s Blackbeard kidnaps children and forces them to work in the mines of Neverland to harvest Pixum. Blackbeard, of course, was actually Edward Teach, a privateer turned pirate who caused mayhem in the West Indies and along the Atlantic coastline of the Americas after the War of Spanish Succession. While Blackbeard plundered many merchant ships, there are no verified accounts of his kidnapping children and it’s a historical absolute that he oversaw no Pixum mines. Grade: F

Jolly Roger. The Jolly Roger, of course, is the black flag adorned with a menacing skull and crossbones, flown by pirates to signal their nefariousness. And while the origin of the Jolly Roger is up for debate, we can authoritatively confirm the Jolly Roger was specifically a flag, never a ship. The Jolly Roger being presented as a ship in “Pan”, let alone a ship that can fly (ships, as is known, are specifically watercrafts), is monumental absurdity. Grade: F

Neverland. Neverland, as documented in many historical texts, was found in the minds of children. Neverland of “Pan” takes place in the mind of Joe Wright. He is 43 years old. He is not a child. Grade: F

Tick Tock the Crocodile. The infamous croc, his name bestowed upon him by Henry C. Mann, who first recounted the story in which the reptile bit off the hand of Captain for the Annapolis Herald, was “no bigger than an average croc.” Tick Tock the Crocodile in “Pan”, on the other hand, is the size of a dragon from feudal England. Grade: F

Pixum. In “Pan,” pixie dust is the street name for Pixum, a crystalline substance mined from deep within the earth that can restore youth. In reality, Pixum is a photo shop in Köln, Germany. Grade: F

Catching Hell

Principally 2011’s “Catching Hell” is a re-telling of the Steve Bartman story. You know the guy – Cubs ball cap, green turtleneck, glasses, rickety old headphones, interfering with a foul ball that Cubs outfielder Moises Alou might’ve caught when his perennially cursed franchise was an improbable five outs from reaching the World Series in 2003. When Alou turned on Bartman in the immediate aftermath, so did Wrigley Field, so did the city of Chicago, so did the world. The Cubs lost that game not because of the comedy of playing errors that followed, they’d tell you, but because of Bartman’s intrusion. Director Alex Gibney, however, is not content simply to limit his story to the Friendly Confines and this event’s prelude and aftermath. No, he welcomingly broadens his scope, transforming his film into a ruminating on the meaning and need of sports scapegoats.

The film opens not with Bartman but with Buckner, as in Bill, as in the former Boston Red Sox first baseman who infamously had the ball go between his legs in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series when his squad was but one out away from breaking The Curse of the Bambino and winning the World Series. Even after suffering defeat, a Game 7 remained, sure, but that was beside the point and Buckner was metaphorically strung up in effigy, the Goat of Goats, a man remembered not for a batting title and Gold Gloves but for one single play. For nearly twenty years he and his family were forced to endure abuse from a public mob that put the onus squarely on him for an entire team’s familiar and, frankly, for their own failings as human beings. Gibney sees Buckner’s tale as tantamount to Bartman’s. “I hope you rot in hell!” an amateur camera catches some unnamed Cubs fan hollering at Bartman. “Bill Buckner can rot in hell,” says an unnamed irate caller to some radio show in the aftermath of 1986’s Game 6. Bartman and Buckner, bless their put upon souls, were one in the same, unintentionally exposing the dark side of fandom.

Gibney scores a number of interviews, with players, reporters and fans (but not Bartman who has, rightfully, respectfully, wonderfully, turned down every single interview and public appearance and moneymaking scheme since that fateful night); but his biggest coup might be the fan who hurled a beer at Bartman and was ejected from the stadium. On camera, he appears a mild-mannered regular joe, but also, oddly (or not), unapologetic. His face is twisted into a smile the entire interview, and while it might be tinged with a teensy bit of embarrassment, mostly it’s without contrition. It’s actually kind of terrifying. And more than anything, “Catching Hell” captures the terror of a place where fans can go when they unite in the common interest of vengeance.

“Catching Hell” is about us, about fans, and our need for scapegoats; it’s about the incredible dangers of mass and instantaneous hysteria. Reams of amateur footage showing Bartman attempting to flee Wrigley Field with security elicit not simply sickness for the fate of humanity but deserved pangs of guilt for your own despicable moments as a fan. (I have a few.) A freeze-frame of Bartman that captures him in the moment when he’s suddenly made to realize the ferocious Cub-blue colossus he’s up against, is a split-second that should echo for an eternity, the fear a flash mob enraged members of a flash mob screaming and threatening to attack from all angles. A freeze-frame of Bartman that captures him in the moment when he’s suddenly made to realize the ferocious Cub-blue colossus he’s up against, is a split-second that should echo for an eternity, the fear a flash mob enraged members of a flash mob screaming and threatening to attack from all angles. I don’t mean to belittle police and military members who truly put their lives on the line day in and day out when I say the following, but the look in Bartman’s eyes in that instant is unmistakable – it is the look of a man internally thinking, “Oh my God, these people might actually kill me.”

Late in the film Gibney interviews Kathleen Rolenz, a Unitarian minister, one who knew nothing of the Cubs’ curse or of Bartman but came upon the story in researching a sermon on the nature of scapegoats. She eloquently describes the term in a religious context, how on the day of atonement a goat was chosen, and a priest took the goat into the temple in order to confer the sins of the people onto that animal.

Gibney offers a visual aid in the form of a historical painting rendering this ritual, but the truth is that we don’t really need it. He’s already caught this ritual in action, served up in the terror of that freeze frame, the most infamous baseball fan in the sport’s long history. He’s the scapegoat and you can see – literally see – incredibly sad human beings conferring their sins onto Bartman.

Who Is the MVP of Kicking and Screaming?

Twenty years ago this week “Kicking and Screaming” was released to great fanfare. Well, “great” might be a Trump-ian exaggeration. It was released, per Box Office Mojo, into a single theater. It pulled down $28,000. “Batman Forever”, which had been out 17 weeks already, pulled down $142,000 more. “Assassins”, which I remember going to see in the theater, made $12 million. The Times They Aren’t A Changin’. Still, “Kicking and Screaming” has lived on via a moderate cult of which I am totally part. My dear friends Jacob and Ashley both pushed me in the direction of this film way back when. I watched it. I loved it. I cherish it. To this day Ashley and I will often sign off on emails to one another not with our name but with a “Kicking and Screaming” quote. Like… “Who the hell bought black eyed peas”? Or: “There’s also that dark side to the nose ring.”

But I have addressed my affection for “Kicking and Screaming’s” dialogue and for the film itself years ago. And the truth is that Noah Baumbach’s film is defined just as much by its great characters and the exemplary performances that bring them life. It’s an ensemble filled to the brim, so much so that it begs indifferently asks the question... Who is “Kicking and Screaming’s” MVP? You (didn’t) ask, we deliver.

Who Is the MVP of Kicking and Screaming?

10. Jason Wiles. Even if Parker Posey (and we’ll get to her shortly) is supposed to be dating someone not quite right for her, her natural state of Posey-ness is nonetheless too much for Wiles to keep up with. And in comparison to the rest of his fellow “Cougars!”, sorry, but Wiles is breathing underwater.

9. Cara Buono. As a teenager tutee of Josh Hamilton’s Grover, it’s not so much that she infiltrates the group by displaying a wisdom beyond her years as she earns their respect by demonstrating a self-confidence by way of a confrontational attitude that these neurotic knuckleheads can’t help but admire.

8. Josh Hamilton. Remember when Winston Wolf said “Just because you are a character doesn’t mean that you have character”? Hamilton’s Grover might be the most fully developed character in “Kicking and Screaming”, but compared to his fellow actors Hamilton doesn’t create as much of a character.

7. Christopher Reed. His European student, the immortal Friedrich, is hardly in the film yet utterly indelible, egregiously pretentious and somehow still totally self-effacing. It’s a trick they should teach at the Actors Studio. “Two grapes!”

6. Olivia d’Abo. She affects a similar dialect to all the boys around her while simultaneously emitting an aura that suggests she is just slightly more emotional advanced if still struggling in her own way. Still, she never quite stands out, as it were. She’s good, yes, undoubtedly, but in terms of MVP, well, you’re left thinking that someone such as Jennifer Connelly could gotten this same job done.

5. Eric Stoltz. Implicitly captures a twenty-something elder statesman.

4. Parker Posey. Posey’s famed Face of Mock Bemusement is at supersonic; her patented “what the hell is wrong with you?” disinterest is at DEFCON 1. I have seven thousand favorite Parker Posey moments but “I use that fan all the time…all the time” is in the Top 2. She is younger than these doofuses but wise enough to know they’re full of shit.

3. Elliot Gould. As the main character’s Dad, one in the midst of a divorce, Gould has essentially only one scene and makes it count. He’s sad-eyed and reserved, the embodiment of what so many years can render, tired out and all too accepting of Cheez Whiz instead of cheese, the surest sign a man is worn to the nub.

2. Chris Eigeman. It’s quintessential Eigeman, an exemplary, exhausting accounting of a young adult fancying himself a sophisticated old man who knows full well his own faults yet tries to cover for it with erudite hauteur. When he gazes into the non-existent distance and remarks “I wish I was retiring after a lifetime of hard labor,” you know it’s the one thing he really, truly means.

1. Carlos Jacott. In the interviews Noah Baumbach conducted with the principal cast members on the “Kicking and Screaming” Criterion edition, both Eigeman and Hamilton concede that throughout filming they were convinced Jacott was walking away with the movie. His character is described as having two moods, “testy and antsy”, though Jacott plays him much more antsy than testy. And that antsiness is crucial tonic to the considerable churlishness of his friends. Jacott is funny, sure, in a brilliantly neurotic way, but through his neurosis he also communicates something distinctly humane. When he fails to read “All the Pretty Horses” (twice!) for his two-man book club, he’s not devious in trying to cover it up, he’s apologetic; he’s a slacker with the noblest of intentions.