Appraising, or thereabouts, the 88th Academy Awards

In writing for The Los Angeles Times about the 59th Academy Awards, Charles Champlin noted that “the Oscars, considered in the context of eternity, are supremely and serenely unimportant. But, like a successful vacation, they may nevertheless be amusing, diverting and restorative, and, in any context briefer than eternity, those are qualities not to be dismissed lightly.” And that’s how I have always viewed the Academy Awards – like a successful vacation, not exactly reality, just amusing, diverting and restorative, a chance to frivolously celebrate the cinema I love (or don’t love) with a heap of awards that in the, as they say, grand scheme of things, don’t matter all that much. And that’s why I’d like nothing more this morning, this post-Academy Awards morning, when the Interwebs traditionally fall all over themselves to see who can be outraged the absolute damn most, to recount my favorite parts of last night’s 88th ceremony like someone who just got back from a swell retreat and, suffering from post-vacation letdown, just wants to revel in the best parts before sucking it up and depressingly lumbering back to work.

Like 9 year old Jacob Tremblay’s reaction when C-3P0 and R2-D2 and BB-8 appeared on the Dolby Theater stage. The little dude hopped up out of his seat to catch a glimpse of his favorite robotic characters, a sensation of utter guilelessness that evoked how the Academy Awards make us (me?) feel at their best.

Like the small band of people somewhere in the nosebleeds that hooted and hollered when Saoirse Ronan’s name was recited among the nominees for Best Actress, boisterously declaring affection for their favorite because that's what watching the Oscars is really about - cheering for our favorites whether or not they are your favorites too.

Like Louis CK presenting the Best Documentary Short by saying this was an Oscar that would be “going home in a Honda Civic”, intimating that it ain’t always red carpets and gift bag swag.

Like Mark Rylance stunning Sylvester Stallone for Best Supporting Actor and briefly reminding us that we don’t necessarily know everything.

Like Ennio Morricone, who long ago composed the musical score for “Once Upon Time In The West”, my favorite film score of all time, earning his first Oscar for scoring “The Hateful Eight”, and then charmingly giving his speech in Italian, emblemizing the entire night's very global feeling.

Like the brief period when “Mad Max: Fury Road” essentially took over the ceremony, with awesome Aussie after awesome Aussie taking the stage to collect technical awards, highlighted by Jenny Beavan, who accepted the award for Costume Design in a skull & crossbones jacket while calling out anyone's blind eye to climate change.

Like Lady Gaga standing with survivors of sexual assault.

Like Kate and Leo and everything about them, including their embrace after he won his long-awaited Best Actor award (and gave an acceptance speech that was crafted and delivered with such passion and precision it made your head spin), which isn’t the sort of tear-jerking moment serious-minded film critics are supposed to allow to admit to, but screw that. Since when are the Oscars all that serious anyway?

Well, since the day the nominations dropped, of course, and they turned out to be, as the social media hashtag went, #SoWhite. Indeed, suddenly the Oscars got real serious, as they should have, because even if they are “supremely and serenely unimportant”, they have also been established, in a way, as the movie industry’s masthead. And that meant their awards show, which garnered roughly 36 million eyeballs, could also allow space for a conversation, which host Chris Rock had in his uneven if still successful opening monologue.

“Is Hollywood racist?” he rhetorically asked. He answered: “Hollywood is sorority racist. It’s like – ‘We like you, Rhonda, but you’re not a Kappa.’ That’s how Hollywood is.” It was the perfect dig, one that equated the Academy to an exclusive club, a predominantly white club of liberals whose professed altruism might not always be so genuine. And as Rock made this observation, the camera cut to a shot on the stage from behind the host, so that we could see swaths of white people looking up at him, a nice visual underlining of his point.

And Rock kept on it. If Oscar hosts tend to vanish the longer the ceremony drags on, Rock kept re-appearing to re-raise the #SoWhite point, never more so than a Man on the Street segment that found him interviewing black moviegoers outside a theater in Compton. He quizzed them on names of the Best Picture nominees. “Bridge of Spies”? No one had seen it. “Spotlight”? No one had seen it. You wonder what they would’ve thought of “Black Astronaut”, Rock’s spot-on spoof of “The Martian”, in which Jeff Daniels and Kristen Wiig appeared in variations of their roles in the latter, #SoWhite NASA operatives. “I’ll tell you what’s a PR problem,” Daniels says. “Spending twenty-five hundred white dollars to save one black astronaut. We’ll all be out of jobs.” Somewhere, at that line, thousands of people started chanting “Trump! Trump! Trump!”

But Rock’s monologue also addressed the inherent emptiness of boycotting the Academy Awards, which certain stars, like Will and Jada Pinkett Smith (who took the brunt of Rock’s lampoons) and Spike Lee did. Indeed, when Academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs took the stage to give her obligatory speech about the Academy’s already announced plans to change their direction on diversity, it left you wondering. After all, they’ve had 88 tries to get this ceremony right and they keep screwing it up, emblemized in the telecast itself which, year after year, simply cannot get out of its own way.

It's always overlong, sure, and it was overlong again, as the producers tried instilling a narrative, or some such, in the order of awards presented to convey how a movie is made. It never came together, and the often long-winded, purposeless intros cut into the winners’ acceptance speech times, which the producers tried to account for with a God-awful ticker on the bottom of the screen that listed thank-yous like they were stocks flying by on CNBC. It didn’t work. People got played off anyway, and listening to Alejandro González Iñárritu, winner of Best Director for “The Revenant”, talk about liberation “from all prejudice” and “tribal thinking”, and Sharmeen Obain-Chinoy, who won Best Documentary Short for “A Girl in the River: The Pride of Forgiveness,” explain that “the Pakistani prime minister has said that he will change the law on honor killings after watching this film” while music brayed over the top of them in an obnoxious attempt to make them shut up was an insult, and the sort of outrage that is so easily avoidable and into which the people who put this shin-dig on nevertheless are forever guaranteed to blunder right into like clockwork.

All of these age-old problems cultivate fodder for jokes, whether it was simply with your loved ones in the analogue era or these days on Twitter where absolutely everything and everyone is awful, which has always been part of the point, a coming-together to mutually tear all this down. This year, though, the Academy Awards became something else; they became a sin-eater for the entire industry, a way to drop every issue on Boone Isaacs’ doorstep and say “Their fault!” But no less authority than Academy member Michael Mann told Vulture: “It’s less an Academy issue than an employer issue. Employers have to hire with diversity for people to do content that can become choices for Academy members to nominate.” He was right. Still, you watched the Oscars last night, and you listened to Rock, and you heard politics seeping into speeches, and you hoped this could be a spark to instigate change where it is really needed.

The show ended with “Spotlight” winning Best Picture, which seemed, to me, a slight surprise since I was expecting “The Revenant.” Either way, I couldn’t help noting it was one of the movies those people back in Compton hadn’t seen, and that everyone on stage was white, except for Chris Rock, who nobly declared into the mic as a closing statement “Black Lives Matter.” And then everyone gallivanted off into the night. I wondered if they all went to the Vanity Fair party and did the Kappa Kappa Gamma handshake.

Countdown to the Oscars: To Leo on the eve of his inevitable academy award for best actor

Janet Maslin, in reviewing James Cameron's 1997 box office thresher “Titanic” at the time of its release for The New York Times, wrote of Leonardo DiCaprio’s turn as wayfaring artist Jack Dawson: “Mr. DiCaprio has made an inspired career move in so successfully meeting the biggest challenge for an actor of his generation: a traditional role.” The “traditional role” to which she refers is the Movie Star. The Movie Star was once created within the factories of Old Hollywood, the ones chronicled so fancifully in The Coen Brothers’ recent “Hail, Caesar!”, but when those factories closed down and the Method Actor took hold, Movie Stars became a rarer breed. Now Movie Stars are secondary to the product, to the brand, to Marvel and DC and old warhorses resurrected to make money. Still, they are out there, glimpsed in the space of a Jolie smile, a Clooney head bob, or ScarJo rendering Morgan Freeman speechless. In 1997 you could see it in Leo too.

Maslin called “Titanic” “gloriously retrograde”, and she was right, because Cameron’s cinematic conqueror harked back to the time of the Star Machine, and watching 23 year old Leo in the First Class Dinner scene, where he effortlessly charms a table of snobbish elitists, was vintage Hollywood Hokum. He enthralls that table the way he can enthrall an entire audience, a whole theater, a massive moment of repeat customer teenage girls. And what’s most incredible to consider about this is how he famously fought against Cameron’s admittedly simplistic portrait of this steerage dreamboat, and how Cameron, to his eternal credit, stood his ground. People can bash not-so-gentlemanly Jim for his bombast and clunky dialogue, but Cameron still coaxed DiCaprio’s purest performance to date, wherein an actor whose strain to be good is often spectacularly evident doesn’t even seem to be trying.

Jack Dawson easily could have become Leo’s “persona”, but a “persona” has never been of particular interest to DiCaprio. No, he has always viewed himself more as an heir to peak DeNiro, committed to the part, with whom Leo acted in “This Boy’s Life”, several years prior to the “Titanic” phenomenon. And that’s crucial, because Leo didn’t simply react to “Titanic” by becoming “serious”; no, he was always serious, whether playing a heroin addict in “The Basketball Diaries” or earning an Academy Award nomination for his quite serious turn in “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?” He earned an Academy Award nomination for the latter, and not for “Titanic”, which perhaps gave him an early inkling for what his peers preferred and correlates directly to his penchant for “Acting!” and his inevitable win this Sunday for Best Actor for “The Revenant.”

Still, even amidst so much Master Thespianism he could not help, here and there, when his star intrinsically lit up the silver screen, like in Steven Spielberg’s “Catch Me If You Can” (which suggests an alternate reality where Spielberg, not Scorsese, was Leo’s directorial muse and allowed for more whimsy) where he played real life con man Frank Abagnale, whose whole ruse necessitated charm, even if you could easily imagine DiCaprio more intrigued by the character's psychological dimensions than his simple charisma. Leo’s two halves, however, never met more majestically than “Blood Diamond” (2006), still, to my eye, his best overall performance, where he played a time-honored soldier of fortune with a mixture of intellectualism and allure. The movie itself, however, in trying to wrestle with genuinely vital issues worth exploring, bit off far more than it could chew, and I kept imagining a different movie. I imagined a movie more akin to the first scene Leo and Jennifer Connelly, as an American journalist, share at a Freetown bar, a movie shot not on location but on the backlot, an old world romance.

But real world issues, as documented in Stephen Rodrick’s recent Rolling Stone profile of the actor, have become Leo’s métier as much as the movies, notably his admirable dedication to environmental issues. He’s currently in the midst of making a documentary with Fisher Stevens about climate change and Rodrick writes of how “Stevens has occasionally had to remind DiCaprio not to wallow too much in hopelessness. ‘I’m more the light and he’s the dark,’ says Stevens with a grin. ‘I’m always saying, Don’t be so fucking pessimistic, man.’” I admire DiCaprio’s dedication to these very real concerns that many in America turn a blind eye to, and it's not a stretch to wonder that he wants to ensure he's seen taking acting seriously so that people will take his politicking seriously, but I desperately wish that more often on screen Leo would project the light rather than the dark

My friend Jaime likes to say that Tom Hardy is wasting his prime years of beauty and natural magnetism on incessant Method-ness. This is not to suggest that Mr. Hardy isn’t giving fine performances, mind you, but that too often he is choosing to bury all that beauty and magnetism beneath the tics of the trade. And I can’t help but think of DiCaprio in the same way, squandering so many chances to simply be a Movie Star in a vain attempt to win awards. In considering “The Revenant”, and a whole host of the other things in his typically glorious Thomsonian fashion, for The Guardian, film critic David Thomson wrote “At that primitive level, Tom Hardy gives the real performance. I believed he was a stinking, half-scalped beast driven mad and dangerous by the wilderness. I always felt DiCaprio was a movie star.” In other words, despite all of Leo’s crawling and growling and bleeding, Leo still can’t tamp down his innate Movie Star.

James Cameron once told the story of Leo’s “Titanic” audition. “He read it once, then started goofing around, and I could never get him to focus on it again. But for one split second, a shaft of light came down from the heavens and lit up the forest.” You wish someone could get him to focus on it again, so that the light could be let through, and so that his innate Movie Star could once again go full frontal.

Countdown to the Oscars: Totally Unreasonable, Completely Legitimate Oscar Predictions

Some people try SO HARD to get their Oscar picks just right; Cinema Romantico just picks whatever the hell it wants.

Totally Unreasonable, Completely Legitimate Oscar Predictions 

Best Picture: Mad Max: Fury Road. They say people don't believe in Best Pictures anymore. Well damn them! You and me, Max, we're gonna give them back their Best Pictures!

Best Actor: TBD. If Kate wins Best Supporting Actress then I want Leo to win for "The Revenant" so all the post-telecast acting winners photos will include Kate & Leo. If Kate does not win Best Supporting Actress then I want Matt Damon to win for "The Martian." And I realize none of these designations mean anything since Leo is going to win

Best Actress: Saoirse Ronan, Brooklyn. Because I said I was Team Saoirse from the get-go and I'm not backing down to the Brie Brigade now.

Best Supporting Actor: Mark Ruffalo, Spotlight. Stallone's a lock, yada yada, whatever, where you stand when your favorites have no chance is the ultimate demarcation of Oscar-style loyalty. And I'm not moving an inch, thank you.

Best Supporting Actress: Kate Winslet, Steve Jobs. Just let yourself imagine the most magical phrase in all Hollywoodland... "Two-time Academy Award winner Kate Winslet." {Faints.}

This film is not nominated.

Best Director: Adam McKay. But not for "The Big Short." No, this is his makeup Oscar for "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby", a seminal sports movie parody that embraces what it's parodying with all its heart while adroitly commentating on modern American values along the way.

Best Original Screenplay: I'm sitting this category out in protest of Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach not being nominated for "Mistress America." #principles

Best Adapted Screenplay: Drew Goddard, The Martian. Because I love how he sculpted a screenplay by finding drama without resorting to traditional stakes of Will He? or Won't He? and focused instead on How Will He? That's craft.

Best Cinematography: Roger Deakins, Sicario.

That tilt down to Josh Brolin's flip flops in SICARIO should earn Roger Deakins an Oscar, or there is no God.

— Andrew Droz Palermo (@DrozPalermo) September 26, 2015

Best Film Editing: Margaret Sixel, Mad Max: Fury Road. Because maintaining coherence when your movie achieves the speed of sound is a fairly substantial accomplishment.

Best Foreign Language Film: Mustang. Along with Kate the Great and Deakins the Magnificent and Greta & Noah, this is my biggest rooting interest of the night.

Best Animated Film: Inside Out. Because Bing Bong.

Best Production Design: Lisa Thompson, Colin Gibson, Mad Max: Fury Road. Because the vehicles of "Mad Max" are paramount and Gibson described the vehicles to Deadline as "three-fifths of fuck-all posing as a Swiss Army Knife" which is the kind of punk rock constitution I want in my production design.

Best Costume Design: Sandy Powell, Carol. I mean, I can't pick against Rooney Mara's beret. And yet I'm really picking the impeccable Ms. Powell because it was Ms. Powell who upon winning this award for "The Young Victoria" in 2009 dedicated it "to the costume designers that don't do movies about dead monarchs or glittery musicals. The designers that do the contemporary films and the low-budget ones actually don’t get as recognized as they should, and they work as hard." {Slow Clap.} Which is why the Best Costume Design Oscar of my heart goes to Wendy Chuck for "Spotlight" who naturally was not nominated.

Best Feature Documentary: Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom won my heart.

Best Short Documentary: My girlfriend's dad, a considerable Oscar enthusiast, has been much more on top of it with the nominated shorts than me this year, and he liked A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness. So that's the one I'll pick.

Best Live Action Short: Shok. I try to ensure that I see the best live action shorts each year, but in 2015 that did not pan out, and I regret it. In any event, "Shok" is the first Oscar nominee from Kosovo and that alone would be reason to celebrate a victory.

Best Animated Short: World of Tomorrow. This one I've actually seen, and while it might be wrong to simply all-others-sight-unseen, so be it, because it's really, really good, imagining a spiritually empty future we seem very much to be tilting toward and trying to warn us about it only to realize we are nothing more really than chattering children to focused on our own random inner thoughts to pay much attention.

Best Makeup/Hairstyling: Damian Martin, Lesley Vanderwalt, and Elka Wardega, Mad Max: Fury Road. There were few details of any kind in any movie as distinct as Furiosa's oil grease as war paint.

Best Sound Mixing: Jon Taylor, Frank A. Montaño, Randy Thom, and Chris Duesterdiek, The Revenant. While I have issues with "The Revenant", the naturalism it so clearly wanted so desperately to convey does come through in the way that the musical score never counteracts or outdoes Earth's own sounds.

Best Sound Editing: Alan Robert Murray, Sicario. The menace of confusion that Emily Blunt's Kate Macer feels throughout is perfectly underscored by the constant low rumbles that appear in the lead-up to the film's myriad dramatic confrontations.

Best Original Score: Carter Burwell, Carol. The Coen Brothers' longtime cohort has never earned an Oscar and he's overdue, yes, but he's also deserving for his impeccable work for Todd Haynes and the way he allows the repressed feelings so central to this fine film to......rise.

Best Original Song: Til It Happens To You - The Hunting Ground. Like I would ever pick against Lady Gaga. This blog rides with Her Gaganess until the day it dies.

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Song Re-imagined

Today Cinema Romantico re-imagines the slowly-becoming-irrelevant Oscar category of Best Song as if it was one combined category and the songs did not have to be “original” or fit some other antiquated piece of Academy criteria, and I and I alone was judge and jury in regards to the five nominees.



I Can't Go For That, Hall & Oates in “Aloha”. I wrote about this radiant moment in Cameron Crowe's otherwise unfortunately unsuccessful dramedy, or thereabouts, back in June. It's one of those movie moments that could be ruled out of order because it essentially stands outside the movie itself, where the invisible line between Character & Actor falls away, and you see Movie Stars on screen amusing themselves as much as us. And even if that's a mortal sin for some, there isn't much more I could possibly want. (Watch the scene here.)



You Could've Been A Lady, Hot Chocolate in “Mistress America.” The rare closing credit song so impeccably chosen and placed that it bumps a 10/10 movie up to 11.



Waterloo, ABBA in “The Martian.” In “Carol”, which I loved, its characters wind up in Waterloo (Iowa, that is) when they potentially reach their Waterloo. But in “The Martian ”, when its principal character potentially reaches his Waterloo, director Ridley Scott plays “Waterloo.” It's on the nose, yes, but so is disco, and disco is as vital to “The Martian ” as science.



American Girl, Tom Petty in “Ricki and the Flash.” “Someone once described Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as the ‘greatest bar band ever’” wrote Michael Nadeau for Boston.com in 2014. Who is this “someone”? I have no idea since Nadeau declines to cite a specific name. But maybe that is merely because the idea of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as the “greatest bar band ever” has simply become accepted apocrypha, which is why when Jonathan Demme has but a single song to immediately introduce the titular bar band of his latest semi-musical film he chooses “American Girl”.....as sung by Meryl Streep. {Devil Horns emoji.}



Racing in the Street, Bruce Springsteen in “Joy.” At a delicate moment in David O. Russell's film he turns to what is, on certain days, my favorite Springsteen song of all time. Except it's not the whole song; it's just the piano riff. And whether accidentally or deliberately, Russell underlines the argument I, an E Street Disciple have long made - that is, the single most essential instrument to the Bruce Springsteen sound is the piano. This is a biased inclusion, no doubt, one less connected to the film's overall intention than, say, The Rolling Stones' “Stray Cat Blues”, but it's my list, not yours.

Countdown to the Oscars: The Ruffalos

Back in the halcyon days of Bill Simmons’ late (best) web site (ever) Grantland, when I checked it as regularly as my Midwestern forefathers would check weather reports, and before it all went to pot in the name of ESPN giving its First Take ass clowns that much more money, my favorite podcast on the Interwebs was the aforementioned site’s liltingly titled Do You Like Prince Movies? It was hosted by Pulitzer Prize winning film critic Wesley Morris and ace culture scribe Alex Pappademas. And in the run-up to last year’s Academy Awards they bestowed their own set of acting prizes affectionately called The Ruffalos.

Mr. Morris and Mr. Pappademas did not define the criteria for their awards so much as just sort of shout out random guidelines in the discussion, but that was part of their charm. Ruffalos went to “People who aren’t getting nominated for anything.” To earn one “you gotta be playing the background a little bit,” or maybe not since some of the recipients were more in the spotlight rather than the background. And whatever, because The Ruffalos were more ineffable, something less stately and more tossed off, make-believe statues concerning a life-force that was more indelible than mere pomp. And because Grantland and, in turn, Do You Like Prince Movies? Has been shuttered, Cinema Romantico, this itty bitty blog that most people stop reading at the first sign of a ham-fisted Kate Middleton reference, has taken on the task of keeping them alive.

The Ruffalos were named, of course, for Mark Ruffalo, the charismatic character actor who, ironically, is nominated for an Oscar this year for his work in “Spotlight.” Therefore I briefly considered renaming The Ruffalos as The Crudups, or perhaps The Dunsts. But I don’t wish to dis-honor The Ruffalo founders and so The Ruffalos it shall be. To be sure, a few of the actors listed in my Best Performances of 2015 were likely also eligible for a Ruffalo, but as they have already been recognized, we will leave them off here to recognize others just as deserving. Onward!

Kyle Chandler, Carol. He's like a once chiseled, now crumbling edifice to the power and the glory of unrepentant masculinity.

Tessa Thompson, Creed. Befitting her character, one whose hearing loss will inevitably morph into permanence, Thompson gives her character of Bianca a no time for B.S. vibe that manifests itself in the form of tender empathy just as much as sturdy get-it-togetherness.

Andie MacDowell, Magic Mike XXL. Like a banana flambé that shows up in the middle of the meal rather than dessert, Ms. MacDowell, exerting a carnal attitude that could be the movie's emotive mission statement, turns a movie that's already burning with sexual desire to scorching.

Alfre Woodard, Mississippi Grind. In a one-scene walk off opposite Ben Mendehlson's small-time gambling junkie, Woodard opens with a compassion that comes on like that of a true friend before doubling back at the scene's conclusion to level honest-to-God menace without even seeming to alter a muscle.

Ron Livingston, James White. Exuding an incredible mixture of sternness and warmth, Livingston extends a hand to the titular protagonist before realizing he needs to draw the hand back and give him a well-meaning kick in the ass.

Joan Cusack, The End of the Tour. In a movie where one dude is trying to figure out who the other dude really is, and both dudes seem to consistently have some sort of emotional deflector shield up, Joan's driver to David Foster Wallace when the famed author is in Minneapolis is all earnestly sunny Minnesotan disposition.

Josh Brolin, Sicario. If Emily Blunt's eyes mirror the drug war's confusion, and if Benicio del Toro's overall blankness mirrors the drug war's mystery, then Josh Brolin's jocularity mirrors the drug war's inevitability. He speaks in riddles, but his face, and that little smile, is transparent, an invitation to something that makes no sense and never will.

Viola Davis, Blackhat. With enough charisma to front her own movie, Davis plays the whole part like a pot that's boiling while somehow still set to simmer.

Countdown to the Oscars: 5 Moments That Made the Movies in 2015

A few years ago my favorite film critic, David Thomson, put out a book titled “Moments That Made the Movies”, a compilation that focused, as you might surmise, on specific moments from specific films. In keeping with its spirit, the venerable web site Indiewire asked the incredibly esteemed Mr. Thomson to digress on the five moments that made the movies in 2013. He did not, however, appear to take up the same task for 2014 or 2015, which is where Cinema Romantico comes in.

To be sure, taking this torch from Mr. Thomson is an act of pure idiocy. I am essentially Nicholas Sparks to his Leo Tolstoy, and yet, like the fool I am, I must forge ahead, even as I suspect he’d look at my moments, his eyebrows raised quizzically, and query: “Those?”

5 Moments That Made the Movies in 2015

The American Dream probably was never much more than a huckster’s slogan to begin with considering that F. Scott Fitzgerald was taking it apart way back in 1925. Yet its myth survives because for so much cynicism inundating culture we nonetheless remain inherently romantic, the dueling notions at play in Brooke Cardenas (Greta Gerwig), protagonist of Noah Baumbach's Mistress America. She is introduced descending the staircase at the TKTS stand in Times Square, arms spread wide to greet her soon-to-be sorta protégé , exclaiming in the manner of a New World tour guide “Welcome to the great white way!” Alas, she’s misjudged the number of stairs and with several still to go is forced to wobbly maintain her starlet facade. And she does. She never relents; she never gives up on the persona; she will grin and bear it in the face of all obstacles. And in that moment, in Gerwig’s immaculate visage, we see The American Dream itself laid bare. She’s wholly sincere; she’s also full of shit.

When Carol Aird finds herself with a hilariously incredulous facial expression in lieu of taking forced council with the asinine, eager beaver salesman Tommy Tucker, whose motives, it turn out, are tied directly back to an insecure male, I thought of Hillary Clinton at the Benghazi hearings. And I thought about how incremental change in America really is, and how even if we may well be on the verge of having a female President, we have not advanced all that far from 1952. In fact, the only detail missing from this moment in “Carol” is the titular character being told “to smile”. But then, that’s because she already is, with a spectacularly haughty derision I swear Hillary would have been copying if the movie had already been out.

When I left Colin Trevorrow's box office thresher Jurassic World in June I wondered if anyone else had noticed that moment when “Jurassic World's” titular theme park had fallen under attack and some nameless extra had made sure to save his two precious margaritas while fleeing the digitized terror. Sure enough, the next day while listening to Pultizer Prize winning film critic Wesley Morris discuss “Jurassic World” on a podcast he mentioned the Margarita Guy. Then I Googled “Margarita Guy” and learned not only that he was Jimmy Buffet, but that Margarita Guy was a social media sensation, shared by thousands in the form of GIFs and hashtags. And I realized that Margarita Guy beheld the future - one in which our most memorable movie moments are no longer organically built to or even emotionally palpable, but just deliberate little inserts designed less for the silver screen than social media afterwards. #WeAllLose

Throughout Frederick Wiseman’s astonishingly humane three hour documentary In Jackson Heights, about a New York neighborhood threatened by gentrification, two men go from small business to small business, explaining the big business threat and what their options are, which aren’t many or optimal. In one of these scenes, as a business owner details his helplessness, you become aware of a fashion magazine sitting on the desk in the foreground of the frame. Penelope Cruz is on the cover. It’s never mentioned; it’s just there. I have no idea if Wiseman put it there on purpose or just happened to wind up there as some sort of cosmic coincidence. I’d like to believe the latter because I’m a sentimental fool. But then, I’m also not, because the shot is a necessary reminder that for as much as we all love the movies and the stars who inhabit their fantastical worlds, often times those stars and their worlds are the furthest thing from anyone’s mind.

But movies are still movies and their power still holds sway, pulling us out of our respective mundane, miserable existences to allow communion with the Motion Picture Gods. Never was this more evident than in the most anticipated movie ever, Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Lord, this thing could’ve gone so wrong in so many ways. But it didn’t. And as I realized it wouldn’t, a kind of exultation peacefully erupted within me, and I realized where I was and what I was watching and that I had waited so long to be back here, right where I was, and that movie magic, contrary to what the grinches eating gruel (and Tweeting) might claim, was real. And I didn’t want to leave, not ever, because soon there would be another Star Wars and another one after that and spin-offs, and the whole thing could buckle. And when Rey, that feminist Jakku scavenger rock 'n roller, took flight in the Falcon (oh, old Friend, how I’d missed you) and suddenly put the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy into free-fall so her new friend Finn could squeeze off a shot from his gun turret at the dastardly TIE fighters.....that free-fall spoke to my heart, my heart which was about to burst. I just wanted to hang with Rey and Finn and the Falcon in that instant forever and ever. FADE OUT

Friday's Old Fashioned: Larceny Inc. (1942)

Though Woody Allen has never explicitly said so, it seems fairly evident that he borrowed the premise of his comic gem “Small Time Crooks” (1999) from 1942’s “Larceny Inc.” In each film a band of ex-cons convene and buy a small business as a means to tunnel into a bank just down the block and rob it blind, cavorting off to some form of paradise. In both cases, however, the business itself proves more successful than the robbery attempt. But while “Small Time Crooks” was a satirical examination of the lifestyles of the rich and famous, a reminder of how rewarding middle class life can be, “Larceny Inc.” comes across much more like a crook’s attempts to live on the straight and narrow, which manifests itself as a comical struggle in which the past keeps trying to rub out the future.

As “Larceny Inc.” opens Pressure Maxwell (Edward G. Robinson) is set to be released from the clink. A fellow jailbird proposes a heist but Pressure turns it down; he plans to go straight by purchasing a dog track with his fellow former accomplices. Alas, when they go to the bank for a loan, they are turned down flat, and here you can briefly see where a 2015 update of Lloyd Bacon’s film could take this angle and truly turn “Larceny Inc.” into a scathing indictment of the banking industry. The actual movie hints at that idea but never really follows through. Instead, Pressure Maxwell decides that to go straight they’ll have to re-go criminal by robbing a bank to fund the operation. The plan: strong-arming Homer Bigelow (Harry Davenport) into selling his luggage store which happens to be right next door to the requisite bank. There, Pressure, Jug and Weepy can maintain a salesmen façade while tunneling into the vault.

More than he could have realized, Pressure finds that façade becoming his reality, even if he keeps trying to suppress it, like in one hysterical sequence where Robinson demonstrates his considerable comic chops by trying to offload any piece luggage possible on an inquisitive customer and then performing the worst wrapping job imaginable. The disgust Robinson conveys in this moment at having to do his job becomes an anthem for any working man tired of the day-in, day-out drudgery, like a Bruce Springsteen song performed instead as a comedy routine. Pressure’s adopted daughter (Jane Wyman), meanwhile, is desperate for him to live a life free of crime, forcing him to put on airs to convince her that this luggage store is on the up and up, but the screenplay thankfully doesn’t make her dumber than doorknob. She ferrets out the ruse fairly early and goes to comical lengths to force legitimate business on Pressure. And the more actual business his faux-business receives, the more peeved he gets yet the more he’s forced to deal with it, pogoing back and forth between working man and thief.

If the film sometimes leaves you wanting for more fanciful and farcical repartee, it still does a nifty job of putting the real world squeeze on Pressure. His background as a man of utmost nefariousness is precisely what makes him such an unexpectedly successful man of commercial means. The owners of other businesses on the block come to him in their time of need, enlisting him against his will, and against his will, he turns out to be the perfect spokesman on their behalf. He’s like an unintentional Santa Claus, whom we see him dressed up as toward the end, when the thief gets out of prison and comes calling, wise to Pressure’s scheme to rob the bank.

My blogging cohorts over at Where Danger Lives went into a great detail a few years ago about who Edward G. Robinson really was, the way in which he strained so much to be liked and admired, and how he was saddled with regrets over many of the tough-talking noir parts that made him so famous. And while I’m writing through the prism of time, it’s difficult not to see “Larceny Inc.” through that lens, which retroactively renders it as less than fluff, and more as a man struggling so hard to break free how he’s been pigeon-holed. And when in the end he inadvertently becomes the good guy, you feel incredibly happy for him, and by “him” I mean Robinson as much as Pressure.

What Happened, Miss Simone?

As “What Happened, Miss Simone?” begins, the late jazz singing titan Nina Simone is asked by an interviewer to describe what makes her happy. Happiness, she explains, equates to being free, a life with no complications, and she explains the closest she has come to that uncomplicated freedom is performing on stage. And as she says it, she smacks her hand against her forehead, almost stupefied, like she didn’t realize she had experienced it until she said it aloud in this moment. Director Liz Garbus then cuts, predictably but no less aptly, to Simone performing “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free”, suggesting that Simone’s whole life was a fight to feel free.

“What Happened, Miss Simone?” is told linearly, charting Nina Simone’s life from its humble beginnings to the middle passages of musical success and civil rights activism to an ending of alternating tragedy and redemption. Many talking heads, including Simone’s daughter and ex-husband – her abusive ex-husband who spends most of his interviews focusing on his ex-wife’s faults – to musician allies and close friends, are featured to provide both exposition and emotional reminiscences. Even so, one voice towers over all of them... Nina’s.

That voice comes in two forms. First, her astonishing singing voice, one which Garbus repeatedly, gratefully gives the film over to by putting the narrative on hold in order to simply bestow glorious archival concert footage of Ms. Simone. These performances mesmerize, whether old jazz standards given an alternate existence in her rendering or gripping protestations such as her still striking “Mississippi Goddam”, momentarily blocking out whatever painful truth the rest of the doc might have raised, a testament to her music’s power and to the idea that the music itself is never enough. We know this because the other form Simone’s voice takes throughout is her voice, whether in recordings from old interviews or words she wrote in letters and diaries. Her admissions can be cutting, like the desire to be classical pianist rather than a jazz singer which was the category into which she was eternally placed. When she plays Carnegie Hall, she regrets it’s not to play Bach, a moment of immense honesty and complexity, where you can be both on top of the world and still frustrated, which speaks directly to her whole life.

Her own words, however, become more scant as the film progresses and she leaves America and her abusive ex-husband for Africa and then Europe. Though she initially proclaims her happiness, it was there that her undiagnosed mental illness took hold, instigating titanic struggles that would hound her until the end. You desperately wish she was still around to give an exact accounting of these tough times, especially when it is hinted at, if never outright expressed, that medication compromised her artistic ability, which seems to suggest the age-old notion of Madness = Genius, which cheapens Simone’s impact and ability.

The real answer to the question posed by the film’s title, however, is in the passages before these, when Simone’s musicianship eventually melded with civil rights activism, one that manifested itself in an almost militant manner, more Huey Newton than Martin Luther King Jr. You can see glimmers of it in the film’s early-going, like an incredible video of Simone performing on Hugh Hefner’s TV series, Playboy’s Penthouse. She sits at a piano, surrounded entirely by white folks, as the young Hef, unctuous as ever, introduces her. The look in her eye indubitably expresses: “What the fuck am I doing here?” A few years later she would have popped him in the eye, I suspect, and God what I would have given to see it.

It feels like a moment you can trace from Simone doing what she’s supposed to do to what she wants to do, and the most significant tragedy is that Simone’s attempts to be free via crusading are exactly what limited that freedom, and prompted a public shaming, and eventually the self-imposed exile. Radicalism has never looked so necessary and yet so helpless, summarized in a later interview when she’s asked about the current status of the civil rights movement and she angrily answers “There’s no civil rights movement. Everybody’s gone.” “Everybody” was all the others but she may as well have been speaking for herself.

The cruel irony is that Simone’s voice was given life by a woman filled with so much pain, which casts something of a pall in retrospect over the songs we see her croon on screen. And yet in watching them, when everything else falls away and it’s just her on the stage, you’ll swear that somewhere in there you’re hearing the sound of a woman who feels free.

Cartel Land

In Denis Villeneuve’s fictional “Sicario”, the drug war was not seen as something by the American side that could be “won”; it was seen as something that could merely be controlled. “Cartel Land”, on the other hand, a documentary, views the drug war as neither something can be “won” nor controlled. It’s a hopeless cause, so hopeless, in fact, that it is left to those operating outside the law – that is, “vigilantes”, to borrow the parlance of those featured in the film – to patrol lands that have essentially been surrendered to Mexican cartels running the drug war.

The film was directed by Matthew Heineman and his access here is something spectacular. He opens with Mexican meth cookers, their faces hidden by bandanas, who sound as matter-of-fact about their trade as white collar criminals gaming the system. They do what they do because it’s what they have to do because it’s what’s always been done and always will be done because no one can really stop them. And Heineman takes this as gospel. He never returns to the meth cookers, not until the very end, bookending the hopelessness of all that comes between. He has no interest in documenting the actual cartels – how they are put together; how their influence stretches so wide; how they cannot be stopped. That they cannot be stopped is merely assumed. This is their land and Heineman’s film is about that reaction to it.

The ensuing film then is un-equally divided between two groups, one headed up by Tim “Nailer” Foley, living in Arizona near an un-defended part of the border where he and a small band of militia have installed themselves as protectors. Meanwhile, deep down in Mexico, in the southern state of Michoacán, where cartels run rampant, a group of citizens commanded by the charismatic local doctor José Manuel Mireles Valverde take up arms, christening themselves the Autodefensas, and driving cartels out. Mireles becomes a folk hero, but just as quickly becomes an enemy, not just of the cartels but of the government who we glean is far from the up and up.

Heineman spends more time south of the border and it’s easy to see why. The footage here is often jolting, occasionally indistinguishable from “Sicario” save for the cinematography, and Heineman and is three other editors – Matthew Hamachek, Bradley J. Ross, Pax Wassermann – do a splendid job of presenting Mireles and the Autodefensas one way and then slowly peeling back layer after layer. What at first comes across like an implicitly noble if necessarily violent endeavor is eventually revealed as being no less morally dubious than the actions of the cartels they seek to rid from the landscape, as once-grateful locals question their methods and eventually force government intervention to which Mireles remains steadfastly opposed.

North of the border, however, “Cartel Land” routinely gets stuck, with seemingly no point or purpose Nailer’s exact strategy is vaguely defined, perhaps because it really is vaguely defined, and his view of the world is never challenged like Mireles, whether Mireles knows it or not. He makes a concession early on that his views on illegal immigrants, some of whom may in fact have been simply trying to escape a lawless land where cartels run rampant, is never really followed up on, and he never entirely seems to take it to heart, simply trying to force everyone to He dismisses everyone trying to come in as invaders, and some of them might be, but others are likely simply trying to flee, and he never seeks to delineate.

With a questionable compass and no destination, and with Mireles eventually going into hiding and then being captured by the Mexican government, there is no real logical end point for “Cartel Land”, much like there is no logical end point for the waron on drugs. And if you are left with a desire for a film with this sort of footage at its disposal to make a stronger statement than the “war can’t be won”, well, maybe we’ve reached the point where this is no other statement left to make.

Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom

So many revolutions throughout history have been chronicled by words, and words are inestimably powerful, yet what’s so striking about “Winter on Fire” is just how unremarkable the many after-the-fact on-camera interviews detailing the specifics of the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution play in context to the myriad of images captured by director Evgeny Afineevsky as the historic event played out. This is not to undervalue the people interviewed, honestly it’s not, but to denote the power of the footage itself. So often documentaries employ images to underscore what the talking heads are saying; here it’s the other way around. There is an incredible moment in the midst of a riot when one of the Berkut, Ukraine’s special police force, hammering at someone with his iron stick, pauses, raises his riot shield and looks directly at us, suddenly made to realize he’s being filmed, an unwitting testament to the camera’s awesome power.

Though “Winter on Fire” proffers a whippet-quick prologue, detailing Ukraine’s troubled history with neighboring Russia, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s pledge to join the European Union and then about-face to re-align with Russia, the considerable political context is hardly the film’s prevailing point. Instead it’s the crucial table-setter, like if a movie crammed all the events from 1764 to 1775 of the American Revolution into a thirty-second sound bite and then cut straight to the Lexington green. The specifics of what it means for Ukraine to join EU are never really addressed, and like how much to so much of America the concerns of England remain inconsequential to that story of our nation’s birth, so do the governmental players remain principally off stage. President Yanukovych is seen through TV screens and the Ukranian Parliament is never heard from, while the Berkut are essentially faceless brutes, beating and killing at will. One interview is provided with an ex-army member in the wake of the revolution but even he is a conspicuously a sympathizer to the everyday rebels.

This is not intended as a criticism. “Winter on Fire” makes no pretense about being even-handed. It is firmly on the side of the uprising. It is high voltage advocacy filmmaking, first, second, third, fourth, and fifth. It believes in the will of the people, and it spotlights the will of the people by spotlighting no individuals. Yes, certain people are interviewed, and several famous Ukranians are name-checked as they speak to the masses, but no one revolutionary is placed above any of the others. They are all at the same level, fighting the good fight.

As such, “Winter on Fire” effectively documents what a rebellion can do, how a group of unified people can come together and instigate change simply from the unshakable foundation of their belief, and how that belief can manifest itself in almost improbably physical determination not to be stopped. By the end, Afineevsky captures how the Berkut as walls of shielded human roadblocks gradually gives way and they instead become desperate individuals hiding and picking people off. Their numbers dwindle in the face of so many, bending to the power of the repressed.

Afineevsky is uninterested in examining the long-term consequences of what the rebellion has wrought; he is interested exclusively in the immediacy of the moment, the way in which it sweeps you up and carries you forward. This is revolution in real time.

Amy

The most prominent sound in “Amy”, Asif Kapadia’s Oscar-nominated documentary chronicling British R&B singer Amy Winehouse who died at age 27 in 2011 from alcohol poisoning, is not Winehouse’s iconic voice or the wonderfully retro chords that so often accompanied it; it is the sound of paparazzi flashes. They grow in number and frequency the further the film goes and the higher her star rises and the closer the inevitable fall comes, and they are terrifying, dozens and dozens and dozens of them all piled on top of one another, relentless, the flashes lighting up the night sky, usually right outside Winehouse’s own home, like tracer fire. I can’t imagine how blinding and disorienting so many of these flashes would be in such fiery succession, and neither can Winehouse, it would seem, from the way she reacts, which can be frightened spacey detachment, furious anger, or trembling fear.

“Amy” employs these images as a means to convey how over the course of her brief yet tempestuous career she became a victim of the camera’s gaze as much as of alcohol and bulimia, the two causes that directly related to her terrible demise. You can’t know that kind of fame until you actually experience it, we are told more than once, as we are often told with these types of stories, and yet the intimacy we are allowed with Winehouse through the plethora of home videos, whether shot by family and friends or members of her professional team, that comprise the backbone of “Amy” back up this assertion. We watch in terror as she falters and gets worse and worse and worse still, making terrible decisions that are more often enabled than discouraged, particularly in terms of people like her promoter turned manager who is all too eager to offload blame for what transpired on absolutely anyone else.

Though everyone in the documentary takes care to commend her voice, and to extol her seemingly limitless talent that never bore as much fruit as promised, both the voice and her music very much take a backseat to chronicling “Amy’s” downward spiral. So often films of this sort seek to leave us with the idea that a song like “Tears Dry On Their Own”, regardless of her tragic demise, was “enough”. Kapadia doesn’t seem to think it’s enough. Instead he uses the treasure trove of archival footage at his disposal to construct an impressionistic argument that those around Winehouse failed her as much as she failed herself. He never removes the blame from her shoulders, mind you, but he slowly lets the noose tighten around people like her ex-husband whose worse-for-wear off-camera voice sounds loaded with regret, and Winehouse’s own father, too-willingly hopping in the gravy train, emblemized in one horrifying late-film sequence when he forces his dire straits daughter to pose for photos with tourists when she desperately doesn’t want to.

Yet there are times when “Amy” almost inadvertently falls prey to this same gaze that it seeks to condemn. These behind the scenes videos are intended as intimate glimpses of who she was off camera, yes, but they can just as often play like voyeuristic leering, particularly later in the film when she’s clearly on a slippery slope. There is one moment in particular when Kapadia cuts directly from a worse-for-wear Winehouse to stock footage of her on posing on a magazine cover, unintentionally reminding how easy it is to forget the former in the face of the latter.

Yet, in another way, this is a tactical strategy. “Amy” wants us to feel complicit. At a Grammy nomination ceremony George Lopez goes straight moron and says that someone should wake Winehouse’s drunk ass up and tell her she’s been nominated, while Dave Grohl cackles in the background. It’s a moment designed to make you want to punch Lopez in the face and lash out at everyone that let her pass them by as she faded away, but it’s also designed to make you wonder what you might have thought of Winehouse in those moments. I couldn’t quite remember. Maybe I didn’t want to remember.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Heartbreak Kid (1972)

“Your eyes are more than enough.” This is what Lenny Cantrow (Charles Grodin) says to Kelly Corcoran (Cybill Shepherd), the L'Étoile du Nord blonde dreamboat, when he’s trying to make clear his intention to court and consequently marry her. She doesn’t respond one way or another and so Lenny plucks the answer from her eyes. Those eyes, mind you, don’t look any different than any do at any other point during the movie, but that doesn’t really matter. Lenny sees what he needs to see because Lenny wants what he wants in that moment and nothing, dammit, will stop him. It’s sort of like going to a restaurant specifically for the pecan pie, which Lenny does later, only to realize the restaurant is out of pecan pie. Who wants blueberry pie when you were pining for pecan? Go in back and get me some pecan. Do you hear me?! GET ME SOME PECAN PIE!

“The Heartbreak Kid”, which was directed by Elaine May and written by Neil Simon, was loosely based on Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel “An American Tragedy” which was also the source material for 1951’s “A Place In the Sun” which was, like, the most tragic movie ever, man. “The Heartbreak Kid” is a comedy, of course, but then tragedy, as the esteemed wiseacre Mel Brooks famously opined, is always comical when it’s happening to someone else. Like Lenny, for instance, who is getting married to Lisa Kolodny (Jeannie Berlin) as “The Heartbreak Kid” begins in a wedding that is hardly built to with a relationship that is hardly defined which suggests that happiness is simply implied upon saying “I do.” If only.

They strike out from New York for a Miami Beach honeymoon, but Lenny already has doubts by Virginia, and full on regret by Georgia. Grodin can play exasperated with the best of them and here, as he sits in motel beds, anxiety enveloping him with every little thing Lisa does, his desperate comicality is pure gold. She keeps wondering why he won’t really talk. “I’m quiet in the mornings,” he explains. What about at night? “I’m quiet in the evenings,” he claims. “I’ve never seen you be so quiet,” she says. And while Lisa’s habits are peculiar, no doubt, they are not the exaggerated obnoxiousness this character was saddled with in the atrocious 2007 remake when she was played by Malin Akerman. In May’s version they become exaggerated in Lenny’s mind, the invisible guillotine of commitment constantly hovering just over head. He’s walking blind, emblemized in the shot in Miami Beach when he leaves the hotel and the serious sunshine is blotted out by his sunglasses.

Not long after, though, he has a revelation, per se, when he’s lounging on the beach and Kelly appears like an angelic specter, dancing in and out of the sunlight directly above him, claiming that he has taken her spot in the sand, establishing herself from the get-go as having the upper hand, which he instantaneously acquiesces, stricken by her you-gotta-be-kidding comeliness, suddenly indifferent to his own spouse who, as luck would have it, fails to apply sun tan lotion and winds up with a legendary sunburn and marooned on the hotel bed in pain and unable to go out, a sitcom contrivance, sure, but screw it, I’m gonna play my Get Out Of Jail Free card. That overcooked tan gives Lenny the opportunity to run off and pursue the Minnesota grown apple of his eye.

Shepherd’s performance is critical. She is only a Jewish American Princess in the eyes of Lenny, and because she knows she’s a Jewish American Princess in the eyes of Lenny she uses his infatuation to have fun, ensnaring this sap in her Shiksa appeal and luring him right into the trap where her humorless father (Eddie Albert) represents the cast iron jaws. This is brought home in the film’s most incredible sequence, a dinner table conversation in which Lenny explains to Mr. and Mrs. Corcoran that he plans to ask Kelly for his hand in marriage despite, like, you know, currently already being married.

May shoots this in a single take, with Lenny and Mr. Corcoran in the foreground while Mrs. Corcoran and Kelly are planted in the background. Lenny’s plea is quietly impassioned and improbably candid, even as he seems to making up his first wife exit strategy on the fly. Mr. Corcoran stews all the while Mrs. Corcoran seems genuinely happy until she realizes this schmuck talking marriage is already hitched at which point her smile dissolves into a frozen “whaaaaaa?” Kelly, meanwhile, is like the peanut gallery, hardly bothered, her eyes gauging her father’s reaction as much as watching Lenny founder. Well, not founder, not exactly, because he’s punch drunk, because he doesn’t realize he’s foundering.

This leads directly into a second dinner sequence in which Lenny asks, in a roundabout, bewildering manner, for his new wife on their honeymoon that he wants to get divorced. It’s an uncomfortable riot and ends with an in-context howler. “Maybe,” Lenny plea bargains, “we should get dinner sometime.”

The final act finds Lenny trying to make nice with Mr. Corcoran by setting out for the frigid temperatures of Minneapolis and pontificating with the vacuous zealot of a religious convert, zanily braying at the dinner table about how there is no deceit in the cauliflower, while Mr. Corcoran cannot help but wonder WTF? This entire final act is a hysterical unraveling of the concept of True Love, or the Perfect Person, or a Soulmate, the ideals in which “The Heartbreak Kid’s” woeful remake willingly trafficked. May and Simon have no time for such hogwash and act accordingly, bringing it around so that Lenny gets right back to where he started from, in an exemplary closing sequence that finds him peddling his lovelorn crap to people who don’t really understand and eventually won’t even listen. He barely wants to listen. He’s already moved on in his mind, probably to his third wife he hasn’t met yet. The male gaze never stays settled for long.

5 More Incredible Instances of #PenelopeCruzHair

Because Cinema Romantico’s most popular post in months involves Penelope Cruz’s hair thereby re-proving the fallacy that my analysis actually counts for anything, and because the abundance of Every Coen Brothers Movie Ranked listicles in the lead-up to “Hail, Caesar!” caused the anti-listicle factions to throw social media hissy fits, and because Cinema Romantico suffers from a debilitating need to always give the people “what they want” (wait, what?), and because Penelope Cruz’s hair is set to overwhelm what’s-his-face and who’s-he-again? tomorrow on the silver screen in “Zoolander 2”, today we present a few more cinematic instances of #PenelopeCruzHair that are certified #unforgettable.

Note: Cinema Romantico is not a licensed stylist and so instead these hair assessments will be piles of unbridled blogging emotionalism that might not make sense. We do not apologize.

5 More Incredible Instances of #PenelopeCruzHair

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Her Oscar winning turn as Maria Elena is like a tropical cyclone running on rum, fruit juice and grenadine which is why it’s appropriate that her hair always looks like it just came in from the 157 MPH winds outside.

Blow

If you are paramour to El Americano of the Medellín Cartel you need hair with a net worth of $10 million. Therefore you have Ms. Cruz.

Manolete

I confess, I’ve never seen this movie about Adrien Brody as the famed titular bullfighter and Ms. Cruz as Lupe Sino, if only because the buzz on it was south of the critical equator. But mostly I haven’t seen it because despite its based on a true story genesis I just want to imagine it as a Technicolor telenova with Brody doing his Salvador Dali voice and falling in love with Cruz’s character when he spots her magical coiffure and renounces bullfighting in honor of its resplendence.

Vanilla Sky

As the antithesis of Cameron Diaz’s rococo character, Cruz functions as a respite with her impeccable bangs framing a sea of tranquility face.

Volver

Though “Volver” was based on writer/director Pedro Almodovar’s own upbringing in La Mancha, he shed keen insight on where you’re from through soap-opera-ish story devices like ghosts and murder. It was real yet elevated, existing on a plain that was at once familiar and just beyond our grasp, kinda like Penelope’s hair, which might be hair as we know it and comb it in the mirror every morning, but is also beyond our capacity for rational cosmetology thought.

Tu Dors Nicole

The title of writer/director Stéphane Lafleur’s sleepily incisive “Tu Dors Nicole” translates in English to “You’re Sleeping Nicole” which is a late film comment made to our titular protagonist (Julianne Côté) but hangs over the entire film nonetheless. She always feels asleep, even when she’s awake, emblemized in the sterling opening shot that finds Nicole in some nameless guy’s room after a one night stand, shot like a hazy dream in the film’s pristine 35mm black & white, with a tall photograph of a waterfall on the nightstand, the sound of its flow echoing throughout the room, as if Nicole is standing right before it. When the guy asks if he can call her again she asks in all earnestness “What for?” What for indeed.

She’s just graduated college and we all know how that goes, both in real life and at the movies. It’s not merely that it’s not easy, but that you feel lazy, not particularly ready to engage with life, as the wise elders call it, because why would you when you have so, so, so much of it still to live? “You’re still young, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you,” the walking fortune cookies will say before doubling back twenty-two seconds later and wondering “So what are you going to do with the rest of your life?” That’s Nicole; caught between that ancient tug of war and content to let the ropes fall away while housesitting for her parents in Quebec over the summer with her best friend, Véronique (Catherine St-Laurent). Not long after, however, her brother Rémi (Marc-André Grondin) turns up with his band, transforming the house into a makeshift recording studio as the omnipresent hum of guitar, bass and drums replaces the whisper of wind in the trees and the relaxing chirping of birds as her summer soundtrack. Her brother’s perfectionism stands in contrast to her aimlessness.

The summer dawdles forward. Teensy dramas arise, whether issues at work, disagreements with her best friend or a romantic affectation for her brother’s band’s drummer, J.F. (Francis La Haye). Another movie might have pressed this last one much more, making it some sort of threshold that Nicole must cross in order to find out who she is, or some such, but Lafleur’s film thankfully never goes all in for “answers”, because “Tu Dors Nicole” knows answers at that age all fill in the blank questions are meant to have no answers. And so instead Nicole and J.F. dance around the idea, such as in a wistful and mischievous late night sequence inside a bedroom where their mutual flirtation hangs in the air, Rémi’s guitar provides the melodious soundtrack through the walls, before it dissolves like mist.

While coming-of-age films are often reliant on voiceovers to explain its main character’s headspace or a quest the main character must complete in order to achieve the key to the front door of adulthood, “Tu Dors Nicole” is refreshingly absent either of these. Yes, Nicole and Véronique book a trip to Iceland, on a credit card that magically appears to the lilting sounds of harp, but that is talked about theoretically – even with the tickets – more than tangentially. And with no inner monologues whatsoever, we are left to wonder about Nicole, much like Nicole is left wonder about herself, stricken with insomnia wandering the eerily empty town in the middle of the night, eerie passages that impeccably capture the sensation of being you, when every night feels like forever, like the sun will never rise again.

On one after-hours stroll she passes a house and sees an old man son a step-ladder dusting a ceiling fan. This, you can practically feel exuding from Nicole’s furrowed brow, is the adulthood of which everyone speaks? Who in their right mind is any hurry to get there? That paradox is underscored in the form of Martin (Godefroy Reding), a pre-teen whom Nicole once babysat who the film, in a bit of heightened delirium (?), outfits with a suave adult voice, comically illustrating his desperation to grow up while Nicole, of course, merely wishes she could stave off adulthood forever and ever. And it’s somewhere there in the middle where “Tu Dors Nicole” lurks, never completely committing to the idea of adulthood’s greener pastures, never totally surrounding adolescent desire to just let existence drift by, its unresolved issues building and building until it finally erupts in a metaphorical conclusion that wonderfully, turbulently lets it all just figuratively hang in the Quebec sky, as if perpetually suspended rather than eventually resolved, which the older I get the more I begin to suspect is less an affliction of youthful malaise than of life in general.

Swing Vote (2008)

This is a re-posting of a review I first offered four years ago, feeling chagrined in the midst of the election cycle. The election cycle here in these United States is re-rearing its ugly head, of course, for another interminable slog into November and I’ve been feeling chagrined all over again.

When I was younger, much younger, I was enraptured by politics. I voraciously read biographies of Washington and Jefferson and Madison. I probably knew more about the nuts and bolts of the Continental Congress than anyone my age had any right to. I engendered verbal arguments with Mr. Calvert, my history teacher in high school, who would always open class with discussions of current events, and I happened to take his class at the same time Clinton was attempting to oust the First Bush. Mr. Calvert was a conservative and I was a liberal and I was all in on Bill. (To this day I still think 1992 is the most excited I’ve ever been for an election, and I couldn’t even vote!) Granted, I was a liberal mostly because I grew up in an exclusively liberal household and only knew the basic generalities of what I was talking about, but the point remains......I had a passion for politics. That passion, however, has long since festered.

We’re all friends here, right? I can admit something to you, can’t I? I can? Good. Here it is: I didn’t vote in the infamous 2000 election. I would have voted for Gore if I had, but I found the whole process, the whole campaign, the whole election, the divisiveness of it and of the nation, so nauseating and depressing that I simply couldn’t take it. I lost all interest. I genuinely stopped caring. In the wake of what that election wrought I felt profoundly guilty, and not voting (even if Gore did carry my state) remains one of my greatest regrets, and I have never missed the voting booth since, though my trips there still too often feel born more of civic duty than fervent optimism.

“Swing Vote” is a decidedly necessarily absurd story about a New Mexican yokel named Bud – played by Kevin Costner in such a way to suggest what Gardner Barnes might very well have become long after the “Fandango” credits rolled – whose 12 year old daughter Molly (Madeline Carroll), dismayed by her father’s routine drunkenness and failure to vote in the day’s Presidential election, attempts to cast her father’s vote for him only to have it go electronically awry. As it happens and as it must, the election is a dead heat. And that dead heat all comes down to New Mexico’s electoral votes. And New Mexico’s electoral votes hinge entirely on that single vote that went awry. In other words, Bud will decide the nation’s President.

The national media and, in turn, chaos descend upon Bud and Milly’s trailer, and both candidates, incumbent Boone (Kelsey Grammar) and challenger Greenleaf (Dennis Hopper), arrive to court his vote. Their campaign managers, played by Stanley Tucci and Nathan Lane, have, respectively, never lost and never won, thus they will do whatever it takes to make their boss’s do whatever it takes to earn that vote. So we find Boone, the conservative, winning the hearts of the EPA and Greenleaf, the liberal, threatening to clamp down on the Mexican border, though the film remains notably even-handed, never tipping into conservative screed or liberal fantasy. The Presidents are revealed as generally good guys, having been led astray by their hyper-controlling managers. Bud is at first amused by the process before taking the slope downward to a pit of nicey-nice depression at the tail end of the second act when America and the town turn on him so he can rise back up to recite the obligatory speech to the Presidents as the music swells, ditching his political apathy for patriotism.

It’s all handled well enough, maybe even a little better than you think, with often predictable humor that still can induce chuckles simply on account of its goodwill, and Costner (and Costner’s amused giggle) are surprisingly solid. But even if Bud is the principal character, I really saw “Swing Vote” through the eyes of young Molly.

She opens the film full of ideals. She embraces the right to vote, so much more because she still does not have this right herself, and she is sad that her father does not merely refuse to embrace it in the same way but that he does not embrace it at all. And as the film’s story grows larger and larger, as she meets the President and TV reporters and others, as she sees the Political Machine for what it really is, a place where ideals go to die and victory overrides principals, her passion for the process threatens to wane.

Her father, I think, senses this too and goes to bat. Costner, smartly, never plays the part all that differently, he just slightly adjusts his attitude. Sometimes that’s all it takes. And his daughter’s ideals in the end are able to remain intact. Hopefully they stay that way, though I have my doubts.