Billy Dee's Commercialized Cry for Help

“The world moves fast, but change isn’t always a good thing when you got it right the first time around,” Billy Dee Williams says in a new 15-second spot for Colt 45, the malt liquor he hawked twenty five years ago, from 1986 to 1991, and which has just re-instituted him as spokesman. But you can’t tell me that in present day context this advertisement isn’t as much about Colt 45 itself as it is Billy Dee desperately trying to send a shot across the bow of Rian Johnson.

Two years ago this month, Wesley Morris, in writing about something else entirely, heartbreakingly termed Billy Dee an “emblem of an era that didn’t matter much beyond the moment [he was] in.” Oof. And Colt 45 and those glorious PG-13 commercials of yesteryear are emblems within an emblem. They call to mind a time when Billy Dee Williams, the most dapper man in 12 systems, could hawk a product and make it matter because he mattered. Now, he can’t get the call he so desperately wants to be in the new “Star Wars” movies, and because he can’t, he’s gone back to pitching Colt 45 in what plays less like a zesty endorsement of a once fruitful, now flailing and always shady product (peddled to inner cities rather than the suave clientele to whom these ads are supposedly pitched) and more like a courtly man’s cry for help.

“Because sometimes a true original doesn’t need to change a thing,” Billy Dee concludes as he cracks a Colt 45 in the new ad, issuing the semi-famous catchphrase in conclusion, “It works every time.” Oh Billy Dee, I fear that it in this case, no matter how much you want it to, it won’t.

Predestination

Though “Predestination” is all about time travel, the how’s-it, what’s-it of the process is hardly consequential. When the nameless main character, played by Ethan Hawke, tries explaining the device he implements to leap through eras creates a temporal wake, or some such, he notices the blank look on the person’s face to whom he’s describing this and just gives up. “It’s a time machine,” he says. Like, exactly. Totally. Amen, brother. What else do we need to know? It’s all wonderfully low-key, and that time-traveling device, a guitar case adorned with locking numbers allowing you to enter the date and time of your destination, is low-key too, befitting a movie that keeps things simple even as it makes your head spin, focusing its efforts on just a few characters. They may bounce around the century, changing locales, changing looks, changing styles, but “Predestination” remains surprisingly intimate. Even if you can jump through time, it’s a small world after all.

Hawke’s character is a Temporal Agent, enlisted by America’s Space Corp to travel through time and stop crimes before they happen. In that way, he’s a little like Tom Cruise of “Minority Report”. But whereas that film employed a dystopian future as something of meditation on guilt before innocence in a post-September 11th climate where if you saw anything you were expected to say something, “Predestination”, its budget much lower, its tone a lot grittier, primarily employs its premise to ruminate on the paradoxes of who we are. Look no further than Hawke’s protagonist who remains nameless throughout because as the film progresses the more difficult it becomes to grasp just who he is, his identity an amorphous blob that I had no more handle on by the end of the film then I did at the beginning. And that’s partly by design.

The varying twists and turns of the plot concern the nature of identity, and how for all our relationships with other people, it’s ourselves in whose company we end up the most, a fact which is terrifying yet strangely comforting. Although to dig too deep into just how this comes to be might be regaling you with a few too many spoilers, that old critical warhorse. So suffice it to say that Hawke’s character, for reasons that will eventually become clear, is tending bar one wintry New York night in 1975 when the city is under siege by some loose cannon called The Fizzle Bomber. Things turns when an ordinary joe named John walks in and claims he can tell Hawke’s barkeep the best story he’s ever heard.

He’s not kidding. John, the face behind a newspaper column called The Unmarried Mother, started out as Jane, it seems (played, it should be said, in a performance by Sarah Snook that convincingly goes two ways at once which makes total sense when you see it), a tough cookie of an orphan with “one of a kind” internal organs that suggest she/he is both simultaneously. After her/his baby is born, complications arise, and the doctor has to make her a him permanently. It’s complicated and the film relays the story in flashback, impressively taking a full forty minutes of screen time to unpack this wild tale. And once it ends, Hawke reveals he knows John/Jane even better than John/Jane knows him/herself.

It makes no sense, really, why he’d sit there and listen to this whole story he already knows, but then sometimes we like to listen to stories we already know, don’t we? And besides, applying “sense” and “logic” to a film like “Predestination” is where you’ll go wrong. Not because the narrative will fissure, necessarily, but because “Predestination’s” absurd assembly line of convolutions is an effortless evocation of how time beats logic to a bloody pulp and leaves us all quaking at the sight of the big hand and the little hand, moving, moving on, with or without us.

10 Cloverfield Lane

As “10 Cloverfield Lane” opens, we don’t know precisely what is happening. Even if Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is taking what appears to be a distraught phone call, we can’t tell the meaning of the conversation, because director Dan Trachtenberg doesn’t let us hear it, choosing instead to drown out the dialogue with music. Eventually, after Michelle packs a few boxes, climbs in her car and high-tails it into the countryside, we come to learn she is fleeing a boyfriend, though even then we don’t know precisely why. It’s emblematic of the whole movie, which generates suspense by withholding, both from us and from Michelle, who gets into a sudden car accident and then wakes up in an underground bunker chained to the wall where her captor, Howard (John Goodman), claims to be her savior from sort of “attack” that has just happened above ground and in all likelihood left the air above contaminated and lethal. The foremost question the becomes “What’s really up there?”, though Trachtenberg, working from a screenplay by Josh Campbell, Matt Stuecken and Damien Chazelle, is determined to delay the answer by asking all sorts of smaller questions first.

Like, is Howard nuts or just socially awkward? Like, is this guy Emmitt (John Gallagher Jr.) who’s also down here just gregariously clueless or does he know more than he lets on? Like, is that a car Michelle keeps hearing up above, or something else? “10 Cloverfield Lane” plants all these seeds and then uses them to string us along via one of those narratives where you can practically see every gear as it locks into place, sniff out every set-up as it’s happening and detect every fake-out before its reveal. Yet even if we can, and this is crucial, you never believe that Michelle can, because Winstead entirely sells her performance as a person in the moment, where she is seeing, sizing up, determining a course of action, and then acting. And her performance, and the others, go a long way in keeping a lid on the farcicality that this overly plotted movie could otherwise accidentally let pop out at any minute.

The premise, in fact, bears fewer hallmarks with the original “Cloverfield” (2007) than with 1998’s mediocre “Blast from the Past”, which was, in theory, a comedy, where a semi-crackers Christopher Walken oversaw a fallout shelter during the Cold War. Frankly, you could put Walken in “10 Cloverfield Lane” and Goodman in “Blast from the Past” and experience no disruptions. Still, Goodman never winks, never even blinks, just walks the line, and Winstead wonderfully, smartly plays right off it. There are moments when she looks at him how we are looking at him – as in, “No way? Really? … God, I don’t know. Maybe.”

Even so, Goodman and Winstead’s characters are never much more than agents of the plot. Howard has a daughter to whom he continuously refers, not out of love so much as Who Was She and What Does She Mean? Michelle is made a fashion designer simply to advance the plot at moments when there would be no other way forward. Emmitt, in fact, is the only character allowed to have any kind of lived-in backstory, almost entirely relayed in one monologue where he talks about deliberately living his life in a 40 mile radius. When he lists his regrets if this really is The End, you feel for him, partly because Gallagher Jr. sells it, partly because it’s the film’s only real attempt to foster humanity. And that makes his character’s trajectory most unfortunate; he is deserving of better than existing simply to allow for an O.M.G.

I kept thinking of how Jane Campion might have approached one woman trapped in a bunker with two men during a possible apocalypse, and imagined all the psychological alleys she would have explored, because those are not alleys Trachtenberg considers, sticking entirely to the action-adventuring main road, not even really interested in the idea of Howard configuring Michelle in his daughter’s image beyond a means to ramp up the drama of the waiting game. And that’s mostly what “10 Cloverfield Lane” is – a waiting game, where you wait and wait for the obligatory Big Twist, which I won’t reveal and is where the movie finally, strangely gets a handle on what it wants to be and makes you wish it could have been all along.

The Big Twist, and what ensues, still feel strange, apart from everything that has preceded it, like a different movie, which sounds like a bad thing, though it actually isn’t. It’s difficult to discuss without referencing specifics, which I won’t, even though I want to drop, like, a couple full paragraphs on a single shot and how it plays off one from a different movie (this one, to be exact, though SPOILER ALERT! if you clink on the link). Yet this is where you begin to see what Winstead was up to, and why her characterization is jettisoned rather than built as the film goes along. What precedes the rousing climax isn’t tangential but essential; in a cosmic kinda way, it’s her boot camp.

Forgotten Characters: Otis Tucker in Cookie's Fortune

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).

Courtney B. Vance in Cookie’s Fortune

as Otis Tucker

“This is not the kind of movie where the characters are introduced. They are all already here. They have been here for a long time. They know all about one another.” This is what the late great Roger Ebert wrote about Robert Altman’s “McCabe & Mrs. Miller”, but he just as easily could have been talking about “Cookie’s Fortune”, my favorite Altman film, and my annual Easter weekend viewing. Set in a small Mississippi town, the film doesn’t begin so much as just sort of drift into view. Willis Richland (Charles Dutton) is already at his bar stool; Camille (Glenn Close) and Cora (Julianne Moore) are already in the midst of Easter play rehearsal; two of the town cops are mid-conversation. When the impressionable new policeman, Jason (Chris O'Donnell), learns his old gal, Emma (Liv Tyler), is back in town, he just marches right on up to her and into a make-out session. Then she goes back to doing what she was doing. Introductions here are unnecessary, even if you’ve been gone a long time. The only character who really gets introduced is Courtney B. Vance’s Otis Tucker, the detective in from the big city, arriving on account of a possible home invasion ending in the murder of local matriarch Cookie Alcott (Patricia Neal), even if we, the audience, know she wasn’t murdered at all.

Otis purposefully marches into his first shot of the film, outfit in an impeccably cut suit and straw hat pitched at a necessarily jaunty angle. And though Otis initially wonders why the jail cell door is hanging wide open, and though the Sheriff’s assistant continually ogles Otis, this initial take-charge, charismatic introduction is somewhat a sleight-of-hand. He maintains a cool air throughout, yes, peppering his witness inquiries with partly sweetened, partly satiric “Uh-huhs”, but it’s telling that he brings no partner with him. This mean there can be no implementations of Good Cop/Bad Cop; it’s just Good Cop all the time. The one brief instant when Eddie “The Expert”, local forensics specialist, tries desperately to play bad cop, Otis shuts him right down. Otis lets the people have their say, and what they say is what gets to the truth.

That’s what makes Vance’s performance both a standout and overlooked. Generally when an out-of-town detective shows up on the scene, he’s there to talk some sense in these people, to extrapolate the truth by any means necessary, to heroically harangue, to valiantly prowl, to get to the bottom of things dammit. Det. Otis Tucker doesn’t really get to the bottom of things; he incisively, but subtly probes, and then just lets things rise to the top. Look no further than the scene that puts the nail in the metaphorical coffin of Camille, the chief villain. When Cora enters the jail near the end, wondering where Camille is when Camille is convinced only Cora can get her off the hook, Otis doesn’t hold Cora back, he points toward Camille and says “Right over there” in a supremely, tellingly relaxed line reading, allowing her to go right on over and put the nail in the coffin herself.

For a while I thought Otis Tucker deserved his own FX show (Mississippi Nights w/Otis Tucker), but now I see that his own show would be contrary to the character’s spirit. He couldn’t hold his own show because he’s not the focal point and never wants to be. He is not the bourbon or the cognac or the dark rum or the black tea or the sugar or the lemon juice; he’s the straw that stirs the drink.

Keira Knightley In A Hat

It's Keira Knightley's birthday today. So obviously, here's her in a hat.

Superman v Batman Undercard

The heavyweight title fight the movie dweebies have been waiting for since at least the fourth time they saw "Age of Ultron" because it was "Age of Ultron" and they decided to see it four times before they saw it has finally arrived. Batman v Superman. Bruce Wayne v Clark Kent. Grunter/Growler v Golly Gee Whilicker. (Also, it features Ahman Green) And Batman v Superman, as it must, got me to thinking. It got me to thinking about Batman v Superman as if it were an actual heavyweight title fight, in the parking lot at Casear's Palace®, with an undercard. Because if there was superhero title fight undercard, who would it feature? You probably have opinions. That's fine. They won't be heard here, however, because this is Cinema Romantico and Cinema Romantico runs the show. So if I was promoter for Batman v Superman Live from Casear's Palace® who would I line up before the main event?

Superman vs Batman Live from Casear's Palace® Undercard

Birdman vs. (Edward Norton's) Incredible Hulk

Or: Riggan Thomson v Bruce Banner

The brood-off to end all brood-offs, with what I imagine will be more two superheroes as their ordinary selves than their alter egos, which will no doubt infuriate the people who actually show up for the first bout of the undercard and - fingers crossed! - lead to a Rocky Balboa v Spider Rico situation where the unhappy spectators pelt them with garbage. I think an ornery Keaton and Norton getting pelted with garbage would only lead to better times (for us).

(Anne Hathaway's) Catwoman vs. Tony Stark

Frankly, Christian Bale's Batman and/or Bruce Wayne was not the counterpart most befitting Ms. Hathaway's version of Selina Kyle, one that seemed to have been spirited in from a 30's drawing room comedy where she occasionally left the drawing room to go rob the people with whom she was gossiping and imbibing cocktails. But Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark? Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark is the Nick to her Nora. We would set up a lounge table at the center of the ring and two chairs, serve martinis and have them spar entirely via quips and double entendres.

The Strobe vs. The Shoveler

Both these men hail from superhero universes that are less than exemplary. The Strobe shoots lightning out of his fingers, but you never see him do it, so busy is he running his fellow superheroes' organization. The Shoveler, well, he just shovels. Both men seem more ready for a tete-a-tete, frankly, than a variation of Celebrity Boxing, but I'm sensing that when tossed in a ring and told to brawl that something lurking within will erupt, transforming this seeming center ring meet & greet into a "Lord of the Flies"-ish descent into madness. And if not, who really cares? Batman and Superman are next!

(Reader's Note: check virtually all other outlets for "Batman v Superman" reviews. There will not be one here. We do not apologize.)

In Memoriam: Phife Dawg

When Lou Reed passed away I heard a quite few fellow Springsteen fanatics explain that they found Lou through Bruce. My story’s a bit different – that is, I found Lou not through Bruce, but through Tribe. As in, A Tribe Called Quest who sampled Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” for their immortal “Can I Kick It?” (which will automatically win me over to any movie sharp enough to use it no matter how mediocre it otherwise might be), and the latter made me seek out the former, which is an anecdote I relay to convey just how much sway A Tribe Called Quest held at one time in my life. As a teenager, I had a few favorite pop artists, and a ton of favorite pop songs, but I was mostly into rap, and while I adored Chuck D so much that I often suspect my youthful political streak stemmed directly from his influence, and while I loved Public Enemy, I loved A Tribe Called Quest more when I found them a little later. They were my first “My Favorite Band”, which is a distinction that probably never means more than it does when you’re a teenager, which means that in a way Tribe is still my favorite band.

That band had two disparate personalities at its forefront, two masters of ceremony who would spend songs trading verses, and occasionally trade lines within verses (“You on point, Phife?” “All the time, Tip”). Run-DMC did that too, of course, but while Run rapped a little faster and DMC rapped a little slower, the forceful nature of both their voices was harmonic. Q-Tip, on the other hand, was just about the smoothest rapper there ever was, a voice that went down like cognac beside a quietly crackling fire, while Phife’s was like a guy playing whack-a-mole (and winning). And even though each one had stellar solo tracks, the common rule was you couldn’t have one without the other, music history’s most immaculate yin & yang. This wasn’t Flavor Flav occasionally relieving Chuck D’s workload; lyrically, Tip and Phife were equals. Still, it’s like The Beatles; you gotta have yours, and my Tribe member was Phife Dawg.

Tip was cool, so cool he could be in a John Singleton movie with Janet Jackson, so cool he would date freaking Nicole Kidman(!). Phife Dawg…well, let him tell it: “Height of Mugsy Bogues/complexion of a hockey puck.” He wasn’t the leading man; he was “the five footer”, and he knew it, and was okay it, but wasn’t as okay with it existing in the minds of others, which was why his rhymes were always so much more bam-boom-splat than Tip’s love affair with the abstract. In “The Chase Part 2” Tip introduces his co-conspirator by marveling “Damn Phife, you got fat”, which woah. But Phife rolls with the punch. “Yeah I know it looks pathetic,” he raps. “Ali Shaheed Muhammad got me doing calisthenics.” He quickly moves on: “Needless to say boy I’m bad to the bone.” By the end, he’s back to tossing disses. “Sit back and learn, come now watch the birdie. Your style’s incomplete, same as Vinny Testaverde.” He didn’t get defensive; he just absorbed the hit and hit back. Still, he could do so much more, like in “Buggin Out”, which is, for my money, the greatest rap track of all time. Phife’s second verse opens like this:

“Yo when you bug out, you usually have a reason for the action
Sometimes you don't it's just for mere satisfaction
People be hounding, always surrounding
Pulsing, just like a migraine pounding

You don't really fret, you stay in your sense
Comafied your feeling, of absolute tense
You soar off to another world, deep in your mind
But people seem to take that, as being unkind.”

Those are still my two favorite stanzas in rap, and it’s not close. When you’re a kid, you want someone, more than at any other time in your life, to get you. Phife Dawg, née Malik Taylor, of Queens New York, somehow got this scrawny, socially awkward white dude from the middle-west. I tensed up around people as a teenager, but didn’t really understand why, and so I’d soar off to another world, deep in my mind, and sure enough, people would take that as being unkind. So often in those years Tribe was my refuge. “Hip-hop is living, can't yank the plug.” I knew what he meant.

“The Low End Theory” and “Midnight Marauders” were all-timers, and “The Peoples Instinctive Travels & the Paths of Rhythm” was brilliant when it wasn’t sprawling. Their fourth album, “Beats, Rhymes and Life”, was released in July of 1996, two months after I graduated high school, and I remember listening, and liking some of it, but feeling my mind wander, my attention having slowly going in other directions, like toward this girl named Gwen, which was perhaps a strange place to go after Tribe but then I have always followed musical whims that make no sense. Phife’s mind was wandering too. He said as much. He said “Beats, Rhymes and Life” was when he felt himself drifting away from the band and them from him. “The Love Movement”, the band’s last in 1998, had its moments too, but you could already feel everyone with one foot out the door. Phife’s best song there doesn’t involve trading lyrics with Tip at all; it's just Phife, which was appropriately symbolic. And he went out swinging: “I'm the captain of the ship, fuck a William Shatner.” Only Phife could diss James T. Kirk.

In the 2011 documentary “Beats, Rhymes and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest”, director Michael Rappaport sought to determine what splintered the group, honing in on the adversarial relationship between Tip and Phife that by the band’s end had stopped burbling and boiled over. Phife memorably termed it as “Q-Tip and A Tribe Called Quest, like Diana Ross and the Supremes.” He summarized: “I’m Florence Ballard!” No you are not, I wanted to say; Tip was Donna Summer, you were Grace Jones.

Yesterday Phife Dawg, née Malik Taylor, passed away due to complications from diabetes at the too-early age of 45. I first turned to Bruce Springsteen’s “Terry’s Song”, which he composed in the wake of his longtime friend and assistant, Terry Magovern, passing away. In it he sings: “They say you can’t take it with you / But I think that they’re wrong. All I know is I woke up this morning / and something big was gone.” Choosing a Bruce song as my go-to mourning might sound odd, but I think I know why. When I first saw the news of Phife’s passing, I felt, hand of God, an inexpressible whoosh in my stomach – not a knot, not a pit, a whoosh, like an essential ingredient to my makeup had just exited the universe stage left. 

Something big was gone.

When Movies Come True

The night before the (real) first day of the NCAA Tournament, as I do around this time every year, I re-watched “Hoosiers”, that sports movie masterpiece from 1986 in which the basketball court becomes a venue to exorcise demons and coronate ephemeral heroes. As grand as it is, it’s also easy to pick apart, for – retch – plot holes, like Buddy mysteriously re-joining the team mid-season. You can also nitpick to high heaven, like Bill Simmons lamenting that Norman Dale isn’t actually a good game coach, never mind some terrifyingly named entity of The Harvard Sports Analysis Collective doing an advanced statistyical analysis of Jimmy Chitwood’s on-court performance. I’m not a sports analytics opponent, but to quote Chelcie Ross’s character at a particularly delicate moment in the movie, give me a break.

Those are the sorts of people at parties that I actively flee from, the grinches that just want to hyper scrutinize rather than discuss. And yet... Maybe because I have seen the film so many times, and maybe because anymore I only see it at the same time I am consuming real basketball in excess, I cannot help but comically note to myself the fantastical way in which Cinderella Hickory High requisitely wins the Big Game against the mighty Bears of South Bend Central.

Hickory is down 40-36 and they make this up over the game’s final minute (which is more impressive than it sounds given the non-shot clock era setting) by employing a full court press that the mighty Bears of South Bend Central are conspicuously unable to break. They ignore every rule you learn from intramurals on up about how to attack a pressing defense, throwing the ball into the corner and, at the end, leisurely dribbling the ball up the left hand side of the court, snugly against the sideline and DIRECTLY INTO A TRAP. Or, as Bill Simmons himself summarized it: “After Hickory scores, the South Bend coach never calls timeout, leading to another turnover. After another Hickory basket, no timeout ... and they turn the ball over again! Tie game! Then they turn the turn the ball over again (no timeout).” It’s preposterous! That’s why it’s a movie! Because these are things, as they say, that could never happen in real life!

No, dude, where are you going?????

Ah yes, right into the trap, while the coach of the mighty Bears of South Bend Central looks on haplessly.

Except the other night I was watching the NCAA Basketball Tournament, see, where a squad of over-achieving hoopsters from my home state, the purple and gold clad Northern Iowa Panthers of Cedar Falls, having already downed Texas were now on the verge of eliminating Texas’s arch-rival Texas A&M. I was giddy. I was ready to tweet “Can #NorthernIowa play Houston next?” No really – I was. In fact, I was about to Tweet that and Tweet a picture of the Iowa State Flag with two basketball emojis (representing Northern Iowa and Iowa State, which had already qualified for the Sweet 16, and which would have meant the only second time, and first in 46 years, that two Iowa teams had been among the tournament’s last 16 standing) which would have been my first ever Tweet emojis. I had both these Tweets locked and loaded and ready to go, and I did because there were 34 seconds left and Northern Iowa was ahead by 12 points and according to the Bill James’ Lead Calculator this lead was 100% safe. I had already moved ahead in my mind to how Wes Washpun and his immaculate flat top were going to corral Oklahoma’s incinverative {sic} Buddy Hield.

Then, a strange thing happened. Texas A&M, a la Hickory, applied full court pressure and Northern Iowa, a la the mighty Bears of South Bend Central, started throwing the ball to the corner and dribbling directly into traps. It was like a screenwriter turned off Northern Iowa’s Basketball IQ to engender the ending he/she wanted. It was as if Northern Iowa was playing straight man to Texas A&M, deliberately throwing the game away to serve a storyline. The poor Panthers somehow surrendered 12 points in 34 seconds. It was, say the people who know these things, a 1-in-3,000 comeback. And they would eventually lose in double overtime. It all happened so fast, and in the moment was so improbable, that it took me at least a day to fully process, and when I finally did, I realized that, slight variations aside, Northern Iowa had made that “There Is No Way This Would Actually Happen In Real Life” ending in “Hoosiers” happen.

It’s weird, when you watch “Hoosiers”, you root for Hickory, and there is comfort in that because sports are otherwise so unpredictable and in this context you always know your team will win. I had never considered what it might feel like when the team I was rooting for turned out to be South Bend Central.

30 for 30: Fantastic Lies

The images of the idyllic Duke University campus in Durham, North Carolina that flint across "Fantastic Lies" as it opens, come, in the light that follows, to resemble the New England woods of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, a sixty-three year old play which nonetheless retains great relevancy today, never more so than in the case of Duke Lacrosse players accused – strike that! – falsely accused of gang rape in 2006. It was a story sensationalized in the media that is smartly, necessarily told mostly without sensationalism in "Fantasic Lies", an especially pointed entry to ESPN's ongoing 30 for 30 documentary series.

On the night of March 13, 2006, the Duke Lacrosse team, several members shared a house, hired two female strippers. The next morning, one of the women would report a rape, and what ensued was essentially a trial and conviction that played out not in the courtroom but in public, one proffered by the District Attorney, Mike Nifong, who transformed himself into a crusader for justice even if behind the scenes his actions were so deplorable he would eventually be disbarred. Director Marina Zenovich was unable to interview either the accuser, Crystal Mangum, or Nifong, as well as the three players accused, and yet the absence of these prominent participants enhances – or perhaps directly influences – how she chooses to present this documentary.

One of the accused players' mothers is interviewed and she indicates that no one talked to her son then and no one has talked to her son since, which becomes a kind of damning confession of a public that was so desperate to say "You did it!" before they had even heard every side to the story. And in re-examining the case, one that was never actually brought to trial, Zenovich doesn’t so much seek the truth, since that’s already known, as re-prosecute those who rendered a verdict before all the facts were in. Its aim, in other words, is to indict a culture moving at warp speed, where judgment is rendered swiftly and harshly, in which events are too often politicized before they are even examined.

"Fantastic Lies" recounts the entire ordeal linearly, laying out the story with accompanying archival footage of then and innumerable talking heads now, eliciting the sensation of looking back on what happened rather than telling it anew. This tinges the entire story with an air of regret, never more so than with former newspaper columnist Ruth Sheehan who wrote an article in the aftermath of the initial accusation essentially ordering the Duke players to come forward and confess what they knew. In the end, of course, all they knew is that they were innocent, and as Zenovich has Sheehan re-read parts of that article on camera, the columnist’s shame seeps out. It wasn't just Sheehan, of course, as the doc makes clear, also interviewing a journalist Newsweek, referencing the New York Times and offering footage of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, as well as campus protesters, instantly decrying the incident. Essentially everyone was jumping to the same conclusion, a fuel that was fired by Nifong.

If there is a principal villain, Zenovich paints it less as Crystal Mangum, whose history of mental illness is mentioned if never really explored, and more as Mr. Nifong, who plunged ahead with the case even when it seemed to become apparent that Magnum's story in no way added up. We see him do interview after interview, transforming himself into a media star, seemingly to further his career and guarantee victory in his up-coming re-election. But that is primarily speculation. The most telling shot of Nifong is in the courtroom, from behind, showing only the back of his head, which seems to emblemize just how desperately we all wish we could probe his mind and figure out what a human acting so recklessly with other human lives could possibly be thinking.

If the evidence made obvious that the accuser's story was false, this has a way of framing the film as something of an underdog story, which, frankly, feels wrong-handed, one of the defense lawyers even going so far as to reference their case in terms of a sports movie. This is the biggest lacrosse game of your life, one of the fathers says he told his son, which, while I see the analogy he's attempting to draw, doesn't quite fly. The film's overriding argument is to view these matters from a cold-eyed vantage point, and such syrupy add-ons actually hinder that argument, if never near enough to harm the overall message.

Zenovich does not shy away from addressing the lacrosse's team culture of hard-partying and alienation of others on campus. There were, as is pointed out, racial taunts directed at the strippers, and even if the ghastly email regarding the incident that was leaked after the fact was, to those who got the reference, simply text taken from "American Psycho", well, the guy still chose to use those words. Most humor is underlaid with some modicum of truth. But these distinctions are important because it's a reminder that we have to put them away in the case of criminal accusations, that it is our duty to base our verdict solely upon the evidence, without prejudice or sympathy, a civic obligation that too often anymore, as "Fantastic Lies" makes clear, falls by the wayside.

The Wave

As “The Wave” opens, the camera soars with an SUV gliding through the majestic valleys of western Norway, alongside the Geiranger Fjord, a swath of scenery superseding all others. It would be enough to make you book a ticket to the Sunnmøre on Expedia if you had not seen the film’s opening archival footage in which it cautions that any moment an avalanche on the nearby mountain of Åkerneset could yield a destructive tsunami, an extra scary proposition given its setting. The S.S. Poseidon, after all, was just a rust bucket; Dante’s Peak was, well, obviously; the Glass Tower was a testament to mankind’s hubris – plus, O.J. Simpson worked security. But the Geiranger Fjord is merely lying wait in all its natural splendor to unleash hell, and it is, as the film cautions, just a matter of time.

But then, it is a film, and so the time must be now, conveniently coinciding with the Tsunami Warning Center’s principal geologist Kristian (Kristoffer Joner) decision to up and leave quaint Geiranger for the bigger city and a better job (translation: more money). In his preparations for departure, however, he cannot help but note some groundwater irregularities, all of which go unheeded, as they must, his colleagues at the Warning Center assuming he is just searching for some excuse not to uproot his family. Because our intrepid geologist must have a family, of course, in this case a cute-as-a-button daughter, Julia (Edith Haagenrud-Sande), a semi-angsty teenage son, Sondre (Jonas Hoff Oftebro) and a wife, Idun, introduced taking care of kitchen plumbing repair to demonstrate that she though in one of the film’s wiser moves that familial dynamic does not turn on estrangement. Rather they are presented from the get-go as loving and in this together. That might not bow at the altar of screenwriting gurus’ haranguing of traditional Dramatic Conflict, but in a genre where estrangement is too often the go to, it feels refreshing.

As refreshing is impeccably named director Roar Uthaugh’s consideration of the film’s smallest moments. While the titular natural disaster that eventually comes plunging through the fjord is rip-roaring enough, what’s even better is lead-up to this mid-movie climax in which the town’s residents have only ten minutes to flee in the face of impending doom, automatically ratcheting up the tension of every moment and every decision. And Uthaug renders each moment and decision with minimal fuss, such as when fleeing traffic snarls and Kristian has to improvise to get he and Julia to higher ground. Uthaug merely proffers a shot of Kristian’s wristwatch counting down and then cutting to the father’s desperate yet determined I-Gotta-Figure-This-Out eyes, a brilliant reinforcement of how a couple basic edits can wield so much emotional power. The attention paid to these few seconds is emblematic of the attention Uthaug pays to all the movie’s moments of intimacy, from Kristian’s assistance of an injured woman in the moments before the wave hits, to an earlier non-action sequence when Sondre and a young girl make eyes in a hotel hallway (which is unfortunately forgotten about afterwards), crisply edited to make a moment influenced by so many listless other ones sing.

Alas, Uthaugh doubles down on the drama, separating the family, and making it so that wife and son remain stranded in town through a series of perhaps too-convenient events when the water pours in, leaving them trapped. You’d think, after that plumbing repair intro, that Idun would have the know-how to get them out herself, but instead “The Wave” metamorphoses into “The Impossible” by way of “The Poseidon Adventure” as Kristian must play the holding-his-breath hero. It’s conveyed professionally but with nominal pizazz, just another underwater rescue in a natural disaster movie, a Scandinavian cover version of an Irwin Allen 1970’s box office hit, and so what should be a rousing climax just sort of wilts.

And that’s a shame, because there is actually something wonderful in his going back to save them. Because this is one disaster movie family that is not, God bless it, built on the creaky foundation of estrangement. They may be nervous, as the movie opens, about leaving the only home they have known behind, but they are nevertheless affectionate and in this together, meaning that Kristian is not rescuing them to ascend a dramatic narrative mountain and prove his worth, but simply rescuing them on account of love. On that score, maybe America needn’t only look to Scandinavia for health care concepts, but for disaster movie characterization too.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Fighting 69th (1940)

The Fighting 69th was a real infantry regiment in the United States Army, part of the New York National Guard, an Irish Heritage unit that fought throughout WWI, and part of the Rainbow Division, one, as its commanding officer, Major Wild Bill Donovan (George Brent) explains in the film, has no room "for sectional feuds. Because we're all one nation now, one team, an All-American team, pulling together." (That veers fairly close to the sports-military complex that's all the rage these days, suggesting things are the same as they ever were.) The 69th numerous battles throughout that war, any one of which, or all of them together, would have been enough to sustain a full motion picture narrative. Ah, but this is Hollywood, one where the forests of 20th century France look suspiciously like the forests of California. And because this was 1940's Hollywood and the height of the Star Machine, "The Fighting 69th" concocts Pvt. Jerry Plunkett, a tough-talking, no-crap taking, my way or the highway New Yorker who runs up against just about every single person in the regiment at one time or another.

Plunkett is played by James Cagney. And from the first moment we lay eyes on him, ordered to take off his cap as he and the rest of the new recruits pledge allegiance to the United States Army, you can tell he'll be one of those guys, the manner in which he checks out everyone and everything around him, disinterested with the army's authoritarian nature, poking fun and talking trash, and ceaselessly waiting for when they get to battle since, hey, ain't that what the army's all about? Kicking ass and taking names?

He's got a little Robert E. Lee Prewitt him, for sure, though Pvt. Prewitt also had friends, and would stand by those friends come hell or Biblical floods, and was one hell of a soldier and a top notch fighter to boot. He did it his way, but he could, as he'd tell you, soldier with any man. Plunkett, on the other hand, merely thinks he can soldier with any man, and Cagney sells that cocky self-centered nature with all he's got. No one likes him and he doesn't much care, and he expresses that lack of care with that classic Cagney hotheaded grin.

The film seems to be setting itself up as a kind of contrast because the all in nationalistic nature of the army that made America so great in the time of World Wars and the individualist streak that made so many Americans great too. How can two such disparate attitudes co-exist, a question we are still, in one way or another, asking today. Ah, but if this is Hollywood it is also still America, and as the slogan says, for God and Country. God first; Country second.

The most critical supporting character in "The Fighting 69th" turns out not to be Major Wild Bill Donovan, but Francis P. Duffy. That is, Father Francis P. Duffy, the 69th's chaplain, a man of great faith played by Pat O'Brien in a moving performance, one where he uses his own grin, less hotheaded and much more amiable, to grand effect, letting us know that he knows these men and what they're up against better than they know it themselves. And with Plunkett drifting, Duffy tries to break through to him.

There is a wonderful sequence set on Christmas Eve when Father Duffy holds mass and Keighley cuts from a filled up chaplain where soldiers sing hymns to a shot outside the chapel where Plunkett kicks around all on his own. He enters to see what it's all about, sticking to the back, though Father Duffy sees him. Plunkett pretty quick chooses not to stick around, but Duffy offers up a prayer, one cutting through the carol-singing in the background,

Christian cinema is all the rage these days. Why just the other day at the big AMC theater downtown I walked past two Christian movie standees right in a row before seeing a couple trailers for two different Christian movies a few minutes later. And watching "The Fighting 69th" I couldn't help but think of how so many modern day followers of Christian cinema might really dig this one. Yes, it develops into a wartime story, one where Plunkett fails to live up to all that cockiness he has projected, getting scared on the front lines and really turning everyone against him. But after that it becomes less about Plunkett manning up and blowing some bad dudes away and more about finding the fortitude to forgive himself, and for his fellow soldiers finding the fortitude to forgive him too.

That they do, and that he does, probably goes without saying. Still, "The Fighting 69th" never becomes schmaltzy, like a cinematic Jesus fish thrust in your face, telling you to believe, goddammit, or else. The film's most indelible shot finds a sorta reformed Plunkett looking up, as if not quite sure God is actually up there, but wanting to believe He really is nonetheless. I could relate.

A 1960's Indiana Jones...

And so it will come to pass in the year of our Lord 2019 that a fifth “Indiana Jones” movie will be released, 11 years after the last one, “Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”, a Steven Spielberg joint we all remember being met with a universal roar of derision until we realize it’s pulling down 78% on the never-not-inaccurate Rotten Tomatoes and that its reviews were more “Eh, okay, whatever” than “A Plague On All Your Houses!” Look, I wasn’t the most ardent fan of “Crystal Skull”, but the passage of time, as it’s wont to do, has allowed most of the film to fall away in my mind’s eye, leaving only fond thoughts of the Nuking the Fridge sequence (which apparently Steven Spielberg was forced to apologize for because no one bought that scene even if “Indiana Jones” movies aren’t, for the love of God, about “buying stuff”) and the glory of Indy finally acknowledging what will we all knew to be true - that is, Marion Ravenwood was always the only woman in these movies that mattered.

But then, our thoughts about “Crystal Skull” don’t matter just as our thoughts about the forthcoming new adventure don’t matter. As “No Country For Old Men’s” Uncle Ellis so aptly noted, “You can’t stop what’s coming.” And we can’t stop “Indy V” so best just to get right with the motion picture gods. And since it’s coming, it got me to thinking. It got me to thinking about how “Crystal Skull” bumped its timeframe up to the 1950’s, meaning that the Nazis were traded in for more Cold War appropriate villains and the big to-do revolved around extra-terrestrials. And so if we are to assume that this fifth installment will adhere to that same timeline advancement and bring our fine fedora-ed friend into the 1960’s then what oh what could “Indy V” be?

Cold War Thriller

Indiana Jones & the Sunken City. A search for an underwater city of the coast of Cuba leads our fearless archaeologist into the crosshairs of the Cuban Revolution and the ensuing Missile Crisis where submerged pyramids are revealed not as the archaeological discovery of a lifetime but subaquatic missile silos. Only Indiana Jones and American Olympic Gold Medal winning swimmer Lynn Burke (Amanda Seyfried) can save the world from catastrophe.

Swinging 60’s

Indiana Jones & the Queen of Mod. A late-life foray into aesthetic archaeology leads Our Man Indy to London of the Swinging 60’s where he finds himself very much not acting his age as he becomes embroiled in a Bond-ish spy caper as he attempts to rescue the original Mary Quant mini-skirt (“It belongs in a museum!”) from vile British gangsters.

Italian Auteurist

Indiana Jones & the Ancient Roman Jar. The discovery of an ancient Roman jar riddled with holes leads Indy to the capital of Italy where his search yields only questions, not answers, as he comes to see the unanswerable riddle of the holes as proof of the meaningless of existence and the uselessness of studying prehistory in the hopes of understanding it when nothing is understandable except for our inability to understand.

New Hollywood

Indiana Jones & the Quest for Gold Lake. When an archaeological dig suggests the myth of the Gold Rush-era Gold Lake might be true, Indy high-tails it to San Francisco, where he finds himself, grizzled growler, drawn into the counter-culture moment, and ultimately a violent New Left group that radicalizes him and consequently convinces him to find the gold to fund their operations to off the pigs. (No gold is found. No pigs are offed. Indy goes off the grid.)

British Kitchen Sink

Indiana Jones & the Drab Apartment. After being brought up on charges of crimes against antiquities and fired from the University of Chicago, Indy takes a position at MOLA in London which basically consists of just sitting in a basement office, reading National Geographic and staying out of the way. Disillusioned with life, as his marriage struggles and money becomes tight, the silver screen's most daring adventurer is relegated to deadbeat status on the corner stool at the pub drunkenly telling people about that one time he found a priceless golden idol.

Stuck in a Dr. Strangelove Phone Booth

“Look at those hands, are they small hands?” a potential GOP nominee for President of the United States of America rhetorically asked at a recent campaign debate. He was referring to hands in the context of something else, what tactful commenters might call his manhood and not-as-tactful commenters might term his junk. As in, the precise scope of his manhood and/or junk had been questioned by others and how dare they. “I guarantee you there’s no problem,” he guaranteed, before re-clarifying, “I guarantee.” And as he did so, I thought of Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove”, the still-relevant, still-astonishing Cold War satire that turns nuclear annihilation into a dick-measuring contest between blowhard dudes. There is the immortal image of Slim Pickens aboard, to quote Tim Brayton, “the biggest piece of manhood ever devised”, of course, but there is also the omnipresent cigar of General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden). A good Cuban cigar typically measures about seven inches, which isn’t too shabby in the realm of manhood and/or junk, and I imagine General Ripper likes to guarantee people that he and the cigar have quite a bit in common.

General Ripper is “Dr. Strangelove’s” principal villain, a man who orders an un-authorized nuclear strike on the Soviet Union to stop “the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face.” That plot boils down to “the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids” through the scourge of water fluoridation. If his precious bodily fluids are compromised by fluoride, how he can perform in the sack? His theory, which was based on a very real theory of the time, is absurdist nonsense, naturally, that sounds no different than, say, claiming that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” But then, as Ripper’s executive officer, RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, discovers, you can’t reason with a lunatic.

Mandrake was one of Peter Sellers’ three performances in the film, along with the unhinged titular character and United States President Merkin Muffley, who is essentially a straight man, though less of a straight man than Mandrake. Indeed, while Sellers wrings untold amounts of deadpan humor from Muffley, he almost entirely dispenses with comicality when it comes to Mandrake; his RAF Group Captain is instead a mere mustachioed pile of quivers. David Denby captured it when he wrote of the film that it “is a kind of awed testimonial to the power of madness and an expression of contempt for sweet reason, which comes off as hapless.” Seller’s Mandrake is all sweat reason, and the powerlessness that it exudes in the face of Ripper, while funny, comes across, in present day context, awe-inspiringly terrifying.

Eventually, of course, Mandrake is able to deduce the recall codes for Ripper’s planes while Ripper blows his brains out when Col. Bat Guano (Keenan Wynn) comes calling. Even then, however, victory is unassured, because the element of fear that Ripper peddled is still so pervasive within Guano that Mandrake isn’t sure he will be allowed to manage the recall. He eventually reaches a phone booth, trying to call the White House collect, getting hung up on, and demanding Guano shoot the nearby Coca-Cola machine which Guano initially refuses to do. “It’s private property,” he declares. Only by the grace of eminent domain is Mandrake momentarily saved.

As I saw Mandrake in this moment the other night when I happened upon “Dr. Strangelove” on TV, I suddenly felt like I couldn’t breathe, stricken by all the modern day parallels, a Commie-hating madman with a very profound junk inferiority complex unleashing that junk inferiority complex on an entire nation to prove he’s got the biggest. I felt like Mandrake. I still feel like Mandrake, a hapless straight man stuck in some horrible sketch, probably titled the Mutiny of Preverts, and alas, I don’t have the recall codes because no one does because the recall codes don’t exist.

Race

The first time we see Jesse Owens (Stephan James) running on the track, he tosses off a world class time, causing his coach at Ohio State University, Larry Snyder (Jason Sudeikis), to bewilderingly remark that his young charge has the kind of talent to win Gold Medals in Berlin. And that swiftly our society’s relationship to Jesse Owens, the same relationship director Stephen Hopkins’ “Race” has with him  – that is, for all of Owens’ magnificent accomplishments, like the time he set three world records in under an hour, bouncily recounted in “Race”, everything comes back to the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics and Owens’ feats of strength in sticking it to the Nazis.

Indeed, “Race” limits its viewpoint to the three years of Owens’ life that led up to those Olympics, marking Hopkins’ film as something apart from your standard biopic, but also marking it as something less than an actual examination of its main character, who he was and what drove him, notwithstanding his impoverished upbringing and wife and child which are presented in a few distressingly syrupy passages plump with platitudes. There is a feeble attempt to invest the Owens character with some shading in the manner of a relationship with another woman, but this is forced, padding an already stretched run time, and Stephan James’ performance of immense modesty renders it almost unbelievable. This guy’s too good to fall prey to such mish-mash of the heart.

From essentially his first moment on the Columbus, Ohio campus, Owens encounters prejudice, and will continue to, as his running exists principally in the context of “Race” not to win races but to refute racism. Sprinting is barely the point. If other films about runners, like “Without Limits”, are about the push & pull of Coach and Runner, here the Runner arrives, more or less, fully formed as a world class athlete. Hopkins gives the occasional racing passages a little oomph with a from-the-ground vantage point, but everything on the track is tied back to Owens place in society.

This is augmented by the film’s parallel story involving the efforts by American Olympic Committee President Avery Brundage (Jeremy Irons, hammy but effective) to try and prevent his organization from boycotting the 1936 Olympics on account of the host country’s rampant Nazism. In Berlin, Brundage finds Goebbels (Barnaby Metschurat) who, as he always is, a dogged cartoon of absolute evil. He spends the entire film either making threats in German or sitting with a soured White Power facial expression. There is also Leni Riefenstahl (Carice van Houten), the German filmmaker, tasked with documenting the Games, a shrewd manipulator who is portrayed with great sympathy, as if she is under Hitler’s thumb rather than vice-versa, a portrayal which recalls Amos Vogel’s famous line about her, how she could “inspire impressionable men to smooth her into an innocent, apolitical artist.”

Owens was rather famously apolitical too, which, of course, made him such a convenient cipher in the brewing war between Allies and Axis, and that has allowed him to endure as a symbol long after. In a way, Brundage, in spite of his over-written dialogue, emerges as a more intriguing character, one who so committed to the Olympic ideal that he was willing to let himself be manipulated by those opposed to it in order to ensure its survival. And that, I don't think, is because the writers intended to neglect their black protagonist, but because they didn't quite know how to dramatize their black protagonist's un-politicized struggle.

They never go searching for Owens' emotional grounding. When he is prodded by a member of the NAACP to boycott Berlin on his own and send a message, he gives a brief speech about how on the track, ten seconds at a time, he feels free, which sounds suspiciously like Dom Toretto, and equating Dom Toretto with Jesse freaking Owens is nothing short of an abomination. The closest the film gets to an understanding of Owens' emotional makeup is in his famous Olympic broad jump duel with German Luz Long, where two men bound to opposing ideologies by nationality found themselves joined by the spirit competition. Here, it soars, while elsewhere it too often founders.

“Race's” high point is the first time Owens enters the Olympic stadium, a moment which Hopkins captures in a glorious special-effected shot as the camera circles the runner, taking in the seemingly endless roaring crowed, the Zeppelin above, Riefenstahl's cameras following his every move. It's as if in this moment Owens the Runner was co-opted forever by factions of opposing political forces and whatever he did going forward would be tied back to who won in that political war, and that one day they would go on to make movies about him just like this one.

Triple 9

My first thought when the credits rolled on “Triple 9” was simply “That’s it?” There had to be more. There wasn’t. How did this movie go so…… Bad isn’t the right word. “Triple 9” is not bad. Its cast is too committed and director John Hillcoat carries too much auteurist swagger for it to be bad. No, what’s noticeable about “Triple 9” is the insistent averageness of the narrative. This is Matt Cook’s first feature length screenplay and it draws from hundreds of other crime thrillers far less pedigreed, duplicating plot points but rarely expanding, content to ignore exploration of its myriad characters’ potentially fascinating nooks and crannies to instead wheezily wind its way through telegraphed twists to a conclusion so uninspired that all the blood by this point looks like nothing more than the few ounces of red food coloring it probably is.

Red is the color du jour of “Triple 9”, whether it’s a dye pack that explodes in the rousing heist that essentially kicks off the movie or the New Orleans-y red of a lewd club a few characters visit that suggests a whole other world undulating just out of sight. The most spectacular red, however, belongs to the enflamed crimson boots Kate Winslet wears as Irina Vlaslov, a Russian/Israeli mob boss and a triumph of wardrobe, with her hair blown back and her eye shadow reaching Lady Gaga At The Super Bowl levels. Her character’s wardrobe is so garish that Winslet smartly takes her attitude and mannerisms in the opposite direction, lording over everyone like a sartorially explosive PTA mom who knows just what buttons to push to manage her bidding. “I believe that woman would eat her young,” Charlton Heston said of Cameron Diaz in “Any Given Sunday.” But no – she wouldn’t. Irina? She would, with some nice malabi and kosher wine.

Alas, “Triple 9” is too much a man’s world, and even Irina must report back to the bigger boss, which is her husband who is locked up and requires a couple MacGuffins – a bank lockbox and a batch of Homeland Security files – to get out. To acquire them, Irina hires a tight-knit crew comprised of an ex-military man, Michael, two brothers and a pair of crooked cops, Franco (Clifton Collins Jr.) and Marcus (Anthony Mackie). The latter winds up saddled with a do-gooder of a partner, Chris (Casey Affleck), who just so happens to be the son of the eccentric detective Jeffrey (Woody Harrelson) who’s tracking this band of robbers.

It would be intriguing to know why these once good men turned bad, if the institutions of military and law enforcement correlated directly to their heel turns, but such ideas are merely hinted at as Hillcoat rarely seeks to ground his characters’ motivations in anything other than orthodox pulp. Who they are is never as important as what they are, and what they are primarily boils down to how can we advance the plot. Like, if you have a family in “Triple 9”, rest assured, it’s not so they can be loved and cared for but so they can hang around to be employed as leverage.

Throughout Hillcoat teases larger questions, such as a sequence amidst a police raid in which a cop car is doused in colorful paint out of protest, a shot paired almost immediately with an officer of the law covered head-to-toe in that same paint, a striking evocation of the tenuous relationship police and those supposedly under their jurisdiction have. The film, however, never pushes it, never seeks to explore its potentially intriguing Atlanta canvas, one rife with Latino gang culture, preferring to take cover in a mechanized plot that ultimately finds one bad dude going around eliminating other bad dudes, the ten millionth milquetoast variation of Jimmy the Gent cleaning house in “Goodfellas.”

While most of the cast is gravely serious, determined to see this genre exercise through to the end, Harrelson, going all in on peculiarity with slurred line readings and wobbly footsteps, like he’s stoned all the time, which his character pretty much is, seems to be the one actor existing in the same universe as Winslet, as if they are two who detected the script’s breakdown from afar and went about adding necessary flavor on their own. While she sports a Star of David, he wears a Stars & Stripes tie, and these taken in conjunction with the omnipresent cross of Affleck’s character would seem to symbolize…..something. Who knows?

“Triple 9” is the sort of movie that goes heavy on symbols without seeking in any meaningful way to append the “ism”; it’s symbols are just vacuous trinkets. The only symbol that really winds up amounting to much of anything in “Triple 9” is the leftover joint Harrelson’s Jeffrey digs out of the trash and lights up to get his fix. How else in a movie like this are you gonna have any fun?

Friday's Old Fashioned: Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)

There is a moment when Eddie Coyle (Robert Mitchum), or Eddie Fingers depending on whom you're talking to, stops at a diner and orders a piece of pie and a cup of coffee, and you think that for all this guy has been through and will go through that he has earned a nice little moment for himself. He never gets it. Instead he immediately falls into conversation with a low life. "Friends of Eddie Coyle" is all business all the time. Every conversation here, save for the occasional word or two, centers around vocation, and who they are merely becomes an extension of what they do. They are career criminals, professional hoodlums, and if other movies are often intent on glamorizing this life, "Friends of Eddie Coyle", making great use of its Boston locations, which come across everyday and lived in, makes you feel how being a career criminal can feel no different than Jerry Maguire's dad working for decades in the same chair at the United Way.

Robert Mitchum emblemizes this lifestyle in a wonderfully weary performance, one where his hair constantly looks like he just tried to comb it in the rearview mirror of his car. His every mannerism, every gesture, every conversation with his loving if understandably testy Irish wife reveals a man worn to the nub by a game that never ends. He's a gun-runner, supplying pistols to a gang pulling bank jobs across the city that are well thought-out and rendered by director Peter Yates with a quiet intensity more than spine-tingling suspense. The one instant where something does go wrong, it becomes truly jarring.

Eddie, however, is in trouble, about to go away for a couple years in New Hampshire on account of something that he says wasn't his fault because that's what everyone says. An ATF agent (Richard Jordan) says if Eddie turns informant maybe they can commute his sentence. So Eddie goes along, first leading them to wayward Jackie Brown (Steven Keats) and then to the bank robbing trio. This gets Eddie in trouble with The Man, who, as his name implies, oversees everything. To ensure Eddie does no further damage, The Man summons Dillon (Peter Boyle) a bartender cum hitman who is also an informant to the ATF which Eddie doesn't know, and why would he?

One thing "Friends of Eddie Coyle" most subtly, brilliantly illustrates is how the delineation of cops and criminals, criminals and cops, bleeds into one another; they need each other, as a character in a Michael Mann movie might say. They are all wrapped up in one another's world. The difference is, a cop, with the law on his side, still has a way back out, while a criminal has no place to go when the walls close in, which is what happens throughout to the haggard Eddie Coyle, and Mitchum lets us feel those symbolic walls, as he becomes less and less interested in trying to wedge something between them to stop their advance.

The conclusion, when Dillon lures Eddie out for a night out on the town to rub him out, is terrifying, but understatedly so, particularly because the film never goes the action-oriented route by turning it into a chase and escape. Whether or not Eddie knows the actual circumstances of his situation, I don't know, because Mitchum doesn't let you know, but what Mitchum does let you know in his slightly drunk mannerisms is that he's just tired of it all either way. He's already mentally checked out.

At a hockey game, where Dillon takes him, Eddie looks down at the ice and at Bobby Orr. "Bobby Orr!" Mitchum declares with all the Mitchum-ness he can muster. "Twenty-four! The greatest hockey player in the world!" And Mitchum incredibly, beautifully, twists those words into the lament of an old man who is looking down upon a renowned youth and wondering what his life might have been.

JJ Abrams Admits To (Other) Massive Mistakes in The Force Awakens

News lit up the Interwebs yesterday like a volcanic eruption on Mustafar that JJ Abrams, auteur of the most anticipated movie in history, "Star Wars: The Force Awakens", had copped in an interview with Peter Sciretta of Slashfilm to having made a mistake in regard to Princess General Leia Organa's hug near the movie's end. Slashfilm issued a spoiler alert which was essentially rendered moot 22 seconds later when every other site in the solar system picked up on this story and spilled the beans in the headlines but whatevs.

Anyway, the "mistake" to which Abrams confessed was Leia hugging Rey, Taylor Swift of the Western Reaches, rather than Chewbacca in the wake of, uh, something, uh, considerable, uh, taking place. I honestly had no idea this hug had become all the rage in the fashionable circles of Interwebs vitriol. I confess to not even remembering the moment described.

Buried, however, by the lede was Abrams' confession of "That was probably one of the mistakes I made in that." "One of"????? What were the other mistakes he made in that????? Luckily Cinema Romantico was able to pilfer a full transcript of the interview from sources who will not be named.

In it, Abrams also expressed regret for calling Tatooine Jakku ("It was Tatooine. I don't know why we did that. You got me there.") and for turning the TIE Fighter into a two-seater ("I was trying to homage the snowspeeder. That wasn't canonical. I apologize.") and for the little inside joke where the Millennium Falcon's holographic game table briefly springs to life ("No way it would have still been functioning after so many years. I sacrificed plausibility for comedy. My fault.") and for styling Kylo Ren's lightsaber on a Crusader sword rather than a Two Handed Claymore as intended ("The props department argued that Adam Driver never could have lifted a Two Handed Claymore. I should've listened to my gut.") and for failing to include Lando Calrissian ("You could tell from the first cut we showed the studio that a certain - what's the term? - irreproachable suaveness was missing") and for cutting C-3PO's love interest at the last second ("She was voiced by Dolly Wells. It would've been amazing.").

Abrams, however, did not apologize for ignoring George Lucas's advice. "George suggested centering the narrative around establishing the Bank of the New Republic. I thanked him for his two cents but politely declined."

Mississippi Damned

“Mississippi Damned”, Tina Mabry’s scorching 2009 film that was denied distribution but has been streaming on Netflix since last fall, would seem to take its name from Nina Simone’s anthem of the sixties, “Mississippi God Damn.” But then, that was a protest song, an exclamation, reacting against something else, calling out with a righteous anger, whereas “Mississippi Damned” is more suggestive of a cause and effect, of the roots of Mississippi heritage being cursed, of how the people born into the families Mabry’s film chronicles are cursed right from the get-go, bound to a terrible ancestral burden whether they like it or not.

Split into two sections, the first takes place in 1986, opening in the midst of a house party progress, one swathed in the tempestuous kinda red akin to back alley blues clubs, like Theo’s Place in “Cookie’s Fortune” but without as much goodwill. It’s deliberately difficult in the film’s beginning passages to get hold of who’s who, mirroring the sprawling nature of this family, the way they interconnect and collide and then bounce off one another. There are husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, aunts and uncles, all saddled with various problems ranging from alcoholism to miscarried pregnancies. Several of the men are portrayed as unreliable and unlovable, incapable of merely holding down a job and violently domineering, yet the women struggle too. No one is spared here, everyone is saddled with problems, and those problems threaten the entire time to be passed directly down to the children. And it is the children on whom Mabry focuses as the narrative gradually builds steam.

Leigh (Chasity Kershal Hammitte), a closeted lesbian, dreams of lighting out for the big city with Paula (Jasmine Burke) while Sammy (Malcolm David Kelley), Leigh’s cousin, is a skilled basketball player, one who might just go to college and on to the pros, if only he score the necessary cash to get to a place where recruiters can see him. The former’s dreams die quickly as Paula is pressured into conforming into a more traditional female/male relationship while Sammy endures mental, physical and sexual abuse. As he does, it’s virtually impossible not to feel empathy, as he nonetheless tries to subsist, like in the moment when he takes cash from his mother’s boyfriend’s wallet, using it to buy the whole family groceries, before he’s kicked and bullied. You root for him to get out, but the physical and sexual abuse takes its toll, and as the 1986 passages end, he does something so reprehensible in contrast to his seeming innate nature that it’s jaw-dropping.

The film then flashes ahead 12 years where we learn Leigh is still stuck in the same place and is still hung up on the same girl. Sammy (played by Malcolm Goodwin as an adult) did break out, going pro, but then he got injured, and now he’s back, trying to just hang on with a wife and son in tow even as the weight of his past threatens to suffocate him. And as this happens, the narrative shifts to Kari (Tessa Thompson), Leigh’s sister and Sammy’s cousin. A piano prodigy she is hoping to be accepted to NYU, but the thorny issue of money and its often direct ties to family obligations threaten to derail her dreams and leave her smoldering in the hometown ruins alongside her sister and cousin.

An aunt sits down and gives Kari a speech about how she’s the one who needs to get out and do what the rest couldn’t do, which in such a morose context plays less like a issuance of hope than further pressure. No twenty-year old should be saddled with such expectations, and yet Thompson’s performance, with stakes out a moving middle ground between fury at the myriad of issues weighing her down and a benevolence in the face of so many obstacles that builds her back up, makes you believe that her character can handle such pressure.

It also fuels the dramatic consequences, imposing a sense of now or never, though without, thankfully, ever turning maudlin or melodramatic. There is a late film shot in the arm to Kari’s plight that in another film simply could have been a matter of story convenience; in “Mississippi Damned”, however, it plays like something far-reaching, an excusing of the burden we fear Kari will never be rid, releasing her of history’s tentacles. The end is not an escape; it’s an absolution.