If I Only Had One Line.....

In “Romeo & Juliet”, a stage play of some renown, William Shakespeare brings on an Apothecary to furnish Romeo the poison that he will take to kill himself and finally bring this romantic tragedy to its tragic conclusion. Now if the Bard of Avon had written this today, the Apothecary would have been a mere advancer of the plot is, a guy in a white lab coat who probably doesn’t even get a line. But because this was Shakespeare, the Apothecary gets not only a few lines that sing, but his own little arc within - he pays his poverty, see, and not his will. Respect.

I like that thinking of that way because that’s basically the way the Apothecary gets played by Hugh Fennyman. You remember Hugh Fennyman. He was “the money” in “Shakespeare in Love”, the guy who funded the Rose Theater to put on its various plays, for whom profits always came before art. Until he was granted a part in “Romeo & Juliet” by the Will Shakespeare and suddenly, delightfully becomes stricken with theatrical zeal. He memorizes his lines. He get himself a hat, just like one an Apothecary would wear. And when Fennyman takes the stage, he gives his lines everything he’s got. “Such mortal drugs I have, but Mantua’s law is DEATH to any he that utters them.” And those caps are not flippant; Tom Wilkinson, playing the Apothecary, hits that word like a guy trying to make his moment in the spotlight last.

I like thinking about that so often that I thought it about the other night when at the commercial of some Sports Event I was watching, I flipped over to “The Rock” at commercial. And as I watched “The Rock”, there was a character, in a suit, in a conference, looking solemn, in the midst of grave goings-on, who picked up a phone and punched in a number and said this: “Get me the pentagon.”

Do you ever think about what might happen if you were ever enlisted, Fennyman-style, for a single scene in a feature film? What movie would you want to be in? Who would you want to be in the movie? And what would you want to say? Well, just like I don’t think Fennyman ever would have guessed that a romantic tragedy centered around a pair of imprudent teenagers would have been his choice, I don’t think I ever thought a Michael Bay movie would be my choice – or, perhaps more accurately, a Michael Bay-ish movie, a summertime blockbuster, a tentpole, a popcorn flick, a box office striver, a big dumb action-y movie where the dialogue is even dumber.

I close my eyes and I can see it. I would be in a suit. I would be in a conference room with other people in suits. I would be solemn for the goings-on would be quite grave. I would pick up a phone. I would punch in a number. I would say: “Get me the Pentagon.”

That Old Feeling of Anticipation

In the run-up to “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” last year, I confess that I felt envious of the franchise’s most ardent fans. Once upon a time I might have looked forward to that inevitable blockbuster with significantly more passion, but changing tastes over the years, and significant trepidation post-prequel letdown, left me on the outside looking in. And that is not the only time in recent years that I have felt myself longing for that feeling of...... What is it? What’s the word I’m looking for?

There used to be a time when the summer movie season was my jam, when I would snag that Entertainment Weekly Summer Movie Preview issue of the newsstand at Barnes & Noble and devour it with relish, and then devour it again just to make sure I didn’t miss something of importance. I would mentally note which movies I wanted to see, and which movies I really wanted to see. But that was another era, of course, one before the unyielding Interweb mudslide of movie “news” sites where every scant bit of communication proferred by publicists is put forth, chewed up and spit out, and where trailers are no longer relegated to movie screenings but get plastered all over everywhere and often dissected like John Madden with the Coach’s Clicker (guilty!). This inundation of “Coming Attractions” has caused that once special phrase to be drained of all its once considerable distinctive glee, that giddy sense of......What is it? What’s the word I’m looking for?

But then, it’s not merely the tidal wave of coming soon communication that frustrates me; it’s the product. As the summer movie season has, Atlanta-style, annexed more of the surrounding territory, seemingly spreading from late April into August, its quality of content has not, to my eyes, kept up. Perhaps this is merely because of the Superhero takeover which simply does not resonate with a Superhero agnostic such as myself. Perhaps this is because First Weekend Box Office has come to trump Formal Concerns. Now don’t get me wrong, I can still like summer movies. Truly, I can. “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” was on my year-end Best Of list; “Salt” was on my year-end Best Of list in 2010; I think Johnny Depp’s first go-around with Capt. Jack Sparrow was better than any awards-y acting in all of the aughts. But those were different. I fell in love after the fact and that’s not what I’m talking about here; I’m talking about falling in love before the fact; I’m talking about……dammit, what’s the word???

“Independence Day” (or “ID4” for the marketing gurus) was a seminal movie in my life. I loved the hell out of that rich, calorie laden summer movie bonanza, and the way that it both hinged on its alien invasion narrative while still giving space for Jeff Goldblum to kvetch, Will Smith to crack wise and Randy Quaid to Quaid it up. Then, when I embraced Hollywood’s Golden Age a few years later, I rejected “Independence Day” on account of my faux-snobbery. Then, when I rejected by faux-snobbery a few years after that, I re-embraced Roland Emmerich’s retro-disaster flick with all my might. As no less an authority than Ta-Nehisi Coates so wonderfully said last year: “Independence Day haters are on the wrong side of history.” Truth. And this love I have of “ID4”, well, that’s what’s got me feelin’ different this summer.

An “Independence Day” sequel had been rumored for so long that I’d more or less surrendered hope it would ever arrive. Yet, it became a reality, and it’s here. Well, it’s almost here; it’ll be here June 24th. “Independence Day Resurgence.” And I haven’t felt this way in so long, like a movie release date in June could not possibly get here fast enough. And this isn’t hype I’m talking about here, because it’s not the ad campaign that’s making me feel this way. And this isn’t expectations I’m talking about here, because expectations are what you place on a movie which give you an excuse to say you didn’t like it when those expectations aren’t met. No, this is something else.

What is it? What do you call it? What am I trying to say? I’m trying to say that I love going to the movies because going to the movies is a very good thing to do. But there is a moment just before you go to the movies which is better than when you are at the movies. I love that feeling. Yes, I do. I always have and I honestly thought I’d lost it for every summer movie season of the rest of my life. But now, it’s returned. So thank you, Roland Emmerich, whatever may come, for blessing me with the opportunity to once again revel in that old feeling of anticipation. God, it feels good.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Air Force (1943)

“Air Force” was released in 1943 with WWII still raging, as the closing credits acknowledge, and it’s always difficult to watch movies like this in hindsight since they were, whether we like it or not, American-styled propaganda, primarily intended to bolster Yankee spirits and pitch new recruits to join the war effort. The movie itself opens on December 6th 1941, just a day, of course, before the day that would live in infamy, and certainly “Air Force” feels like a film commissioned in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, with constant asides about how Japanese pilots are talentless lily livers who lack the skills or chutzpah to take on their American counterparts in one on one aerial dogfights. The only time we really even see the Japanese, in fact, is a late battle scene where a bunch of their officers stand haplessly on an aircraft carrier deck looking up at American planes swirling all around them through binoculars before getting blown to bits, the straight men in a patriotic sketch. You can imagine members of a 1943 audience throwing their caps in the air, which I don’t mean as a disparagement but a sign o’ the times. After all, I lived in an era of “Zoolander’s” post-9/11 NYC skyline edit; in the moment, anything goes.

Still, the focus of “Air Force”, directed by Howard Hawks, is less on running down the enemy than talking up the heroes from the home front, specifically, in this case, the considerable crew of the United States Army Air Corps B-17D bomber Mary-Ann as they fly from the coast of California to Hawaii to the speck that is Wake Island and on to the Philippines and the opening stanza of the Pacific Theatre. In watching these men, all with their varying positions, from pilot on down, we see how the intricate hulking mammoth that were the Flying Fortresses needed a crew working in precise harmony, a team, if you will, which was a sentiment espoused in another war movie, “The Fighting 69th”, that Cinema Romantico reviewed in March and that is espoused again in “Air Force” by the pilot, Michael Aloysius Quincannon Sr. (John Ridgely). “We are all part of a team here; each of us depends on the other; we support and help one another.”

The idea in “The Fighting 69th” was that one lone wolf needed to find a way to fit into his regiment, and briefly it seems as if “Air Force” might go the same route with Aerial Gunner Joe Winocki (John Garfield), who shows up to specifically talk the Air Force down. In fact, he’s determined to drop out of the armed forces, until he sees the aftermath of Pearl Harbor from above, a starkly rendered scene, and suddenly changes his tune. This, however, is only a small portion of the film, and he quickly blends into the unit, evoking that need (demand?) for unity in a time of war.

At first, the title “Air Force”, seems sturdy if a little simple. Oh hey, let’s make a movie about the Air Force called “Air Force!” But a strategy behind that moniker gradually emerges. Because even as it centers on this sizable crew, they encounter so many others along the way, crewmen on the ground, commanding officers left injured and others who are hoping for a crack at the enemy. Why, there is even a dog. They pick up Lt. Tex Rader (James Brown) at Hawaii, a fighter pilot who tags along and can't help but express down-home disgust at these flying fortresses in comparison to his beloved single seat fighter planes. It's good natured, though, which defines the whole film, a film that was never better for me than the scene of Tex, Quincannon, co-pilot William Williams (Gig Young) and Bombardier Thomas McMartin (Arthur Kennedy) all crowded around the Mary-Ann's controls and giving each other the WWII-era silver screen version of shit. They don't get along, not exactly, but they're in this together and so they keep it friendly. I wouldn't say it made me want to run out and enlist, but then it's not 1943.

Five Potential Neighbors 3 Adversaries

Following on the heels of the successful “Neighbors” (2014), which racked up $150 million in domestic box office on a mere $18 million budget, the inevitable sequel was released last week and will no doubt propagate another sequel because even if the Almighty First Weekend box office haul left those who study such things feeling a little blue, well, it’s still Hollywood where sequels often correlate less to how much they make and more to suede bootlicking. And so we got to thinking about how if Mac and Kelly Radner (Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne) did battle with a frat next door in the first one and then waged war with a sorority in the second who the enemy would be in “Neighbors 3”? What a question! Apparently such a good question that Seth Rogen and Zac Efron already beat me to the punch (and I started this post before their spoof - I swear) by pitching “Neighbors 3: Zombies Rising.” To which I say......zombies? I think we can do a little better than that.

Five Potential Neighbors 3 Adversaries 

Graduates. Remember The Cougars, an ephemeral name bestowed upon a group of haughty graduates in Noah Baumbach’s esteemed “Kicking and Screaming” by their most vexatious member, a self-impressed lot sartorially adherent to suit jackets with leather elbow patches that spent most of their time drinking cheap beer and debating random nothings with righteous fury? So Mac and Kelly will move in next door to a few of these highbrow new alums, finding themselves engaged not so much in escalating violent warfare with young bros who won’t shut up but mind games of awe-inspiring pointless pomposity with a bunch of jerky faux-intellects.

Professor Glitterati. Mac and Kelly Radner move in next door to a seemingly uninhabited mansion, once idyllic but now drowned out by overgrowth. All is well, until they began hearing sounds late at night. Not loud sounds, mind you, but quiet sounds, yet still ominous, glasses clinking and cocktail chatter. Slag Glass lamps burn the midnight oil. One evening they see a massive accordion folder placed into the trunk of a car by a bearded man in rumpled khakis and corduroy blazer. Kelly convinces Mac to spy on these mysterious goings-on whereby they discover the house next door is actually The Lodge for a Fraternal Order of Professors who determine who and who does not earn tenure at the university. Armed with this information, Mac and Kelly set out to expose the truth, but the Fraternal Order of Professors will not go down without a fight.

Water Polo Team. Mac and Kelly Radner move in next door to the entire Silverado Canyon College men’s Water Polo team which means that 22 chiseled dudes are walking around half the movie in speedos which naturally prompts Mac to feel completely emasculated. In response, he re-enrolls in school all as a ploy to join the Water Polo team which leads to innumerable shots of a flabby chested Seth Rogen in a water polo helmet floundering in the water. COMEDY GOLD ENSUES!!!!!!!

Townies. Unable to find a new home that fits their budget, Mac and Kelly Radner are forced to temporarily re-locate to a small apartment situated above The Hilltop Tavern, an un-acclaimed townie bars. Alas, Mac and Kelly’s newborn baby wails so much that it enrages the townies below, all of whom prefer to drink while in silence, and prompts them to take drastic if casual action to ensure these upstairs interlopers leave them to wallow in their daytime PBR in peace.

Suburbanites. So desperate not to find themselves in a third situation involving college-aged hooligans, Mac and Kelly Radner decide to become those people (“I never thought we’d become those people!” cries Mac) and flee for the suburbs, Brightwood Meadows to be exact, only to wind up locked into a Homeowners Association lorded over Bonnie Nordgaard (Nicole Kidman), a ruthless stickler for the most egregious HOA bylaws. Small confrontations eventually yield all-out war waged via spectacularly barbed passive aggression.

30 For 30: Believeland

In recounting the Cleveland Browns professional football franchise re-locating, at the behest of owner Art Modell, from its home city of 49 years to Baltimore in 1996, the team’s beloved running back Earnest Byner says that it was, for Cleveland, like a losing a member of the family. That is the sort of phrase that will prompt a fuss from the intellectually haughty about how people take sports too seriously, and so be it, because that, as ESPN’s latest 30 for 30 documentary “Believeland” points out again and again, is the city of Cleveland’s relationship to sports; they take it too seriously. That’s why Scott Raab, the doc’s preeminent talking head, wrote a book titled “The Whore of Akron” which referred to Ohio basketball hero LeBron James when he departed the Cleve for South Beach so infamously in 2010. The Whore of Akron? Yeah, that’s taking sports too seriously.

People don’t come to Cleveland, we are told; no, they start in Cleveland and stay there, or leave and come back. It’s not a city of transplants, in other words, it’s a city of Clevelanders, where the city’s fierce connection to its three sports franchises – the Browns, the Indians (baseball) and the Cavaliers (basketball) – is inestimable and inherited. This latter fact is translated in Raab’s interview at some unnamed diner, where he sits with his teenage son who hardly talks, just listening as his dad spins yarns of Cleveland sports misery, how no team has won a championship since 1964, and how each failure to do so seems more gut-wrenching than the last. It’s as moving an image as it is terrifying, an assimilation of fandom heartbreak.

The first half-hour of Andy Billman's film is its best, and some of the best material of any of the 30 for 30 documentaries, focusing on connecting the trajectory of Cleveland's up and downs as a city to the successes and failures of its sports teams. Author Wright Thompson explains this in swift detail, how the city boomed during its postwar manufacturing period of the 50’s, mirroring the glorious rise of Paul Brown’s Browns (which were named for him) before Brown was forced out and the team’s fortunes begin to collapse in the 60’s and on into the 70’s, just like the city’s gradual industrial decline. This is an intriguing connection ripe for being “Believeland’s” central subject, but Billman is oddly content with this informational appetizer rather than continuing to track the economic ebbs and flows of Cleveland in conjunction with the city’s fragile sports psyche.

Instead “Believeland” forsakes the tantalizing possibilities of fusing civics with sports to simply go the way of so many 30 for 30 docs by devolving into a glorified highlight reel - or, I should say, a lowlight reel, since most of what's shown here chronicles all of Cleveland’s athletic failures so infamous they generally go by individual, capitalized names like The Drive, The Fumble and The Shot. This is little more than a rolodex of pain, one content to settle for mostly banal observations from its interviewees that all essentially boil down to the chestnut “I Couldn’t Believe It”.

The doc gets its mojo back, a little, near the end, when it returns to the famous subject of LeBron James spurning Cleveland (in a horrific television special that was produced by ESPN which conspicuously goes unmentioned cuz Bristol, CT ain’t about the introspective state, see) only to return several years later and how that idea relates, as Wright Thompson puts it, to the daughters and sons saddled with guilt for leaving Cleveland too. But this is not really scrutinized, just suggested, raised and then moved aside for more reminiscences that, specific details aside, could, frankly, be about any team in any city. Cleveland, we are told, who is resolutely itself, and yet, by the end, Believeland could be Anytown USA.

Old Fashioned: The Story of the Wisconsin Supper Club

Outside the Midwest, the neon glow near a highway typically translates to a diminutive nondescript motel, the kind that looks left over from the Eisenhower Administration and still advertises “Cable TV” like that’s a big deal. In the Midwest, however, and especially in Wisconsin, that roadside neon glow is just as likely to indicate a Supper Club. It's a term you think nothing of in these parts where I’m from and continue to reside, until you get outside of these parts where “Supper Club” becomes a term of perplexing inscrutableness. As my girlfriend’s father, a lifelong east-coaster, put it when she texted him to say that we were going to see a documentary centered on Wisconsin Supper Clubs: “Huh?”

Well, if “Huh?” is your stock response to supper clubs too, rest assured, Director/Producer/Editor Holly De Ruyter is here to grant some perspective with her 51 minute documentary “Old Fashioned: The Story of the Wisconsin Supper Club.” De Ruyter grew up just outside Green Bay, Wisconsin and therefore has an intimate history with the establishments in question, and delightfully takes the long way around in explaining what a Supper Club is, who it's for and why it endures.

The Old Fashioned of the title refers to three things. It refers to the Old Fashioned itself, a cocktail, always made with brandy, not bourbon or whiskey, which traditionally begins the meal and ends the meal. It refers to the history of the supper club itself, one that goes all the way back to Prohibition, which explains their predominance along rural highways and back roads, places you wouldn’t even think to look. And it refers to the dining experience itself, one of a more, to quote Ben Kenobi, civilized age, when a meal was not simply What You Ate but an Experience Shared. That latter point is the film’s central one.

De Rutyer visits numerous supper clubs, most with appealingly kitschy names and varying décor meant to approximate the individual owners’ respective tastes, and interviews myriad Supper Club proprietors and patrons, all of whom hone in on one detail more than any other – namely, to what degree the Supper Club fosters community. I lost count of how many times the phrase “Chain Restaurant” was employed in a politely derogatory way, meant to approximate the modern dining experience in the Midwest where convenience and speed take precedence over settling in and hanging out.

And that’s why “Old Fashioned” itself was sometimes at odds with the expressed mission statement of Supper Clubs. De Ruyter keeps the documentary moving at such a swift pace that you almost wish she abided more by that code of decelerating life’s wearying advance to really hunker down and take your time. Though many people get a turn to speak, you sometimes wish there fewer interviews and more eavesdropping, opting for a fly on the wall approach, allowing the Supper Club ethos to simply wash over us rather than being explicated by a series of occasionally repetitive talking heads. Even so, the primary initiative of “Old Fashioned” is Supper Club outreach, and at this De Ruyter succeeds by espousing those virtues with so much Midwestern mirth, never more so than with the starmaking couple of William & Judy. He never talks, she talks a lot, and together they illustrate a folksy comfort in their relationship that resembles the kind of folksy comfort inherent to the Supper Club itself.

It might seem like little more than a niche film, specifically catered toward the audience like the one I saw it with at the Gene Siskel Center here in Chicago, only 50 miles south of the Wisconsin border, where a good chunk of the audience seemed to already have personal relationships with places seen on the screen. Still, the film’s sermonizing is so breezily heartfelt, so earnestly welcoming, that I half-suspect that even if it was screened in, say, New York City, half the audience might be tempted to rent a car and cruise upstate, scouring the Catskills for a goyish place to get a brandy old fashioned.

Big Stone Gap

“Big Stone Gap”, which was written and directed by Adriana Trigiani, based on her book of the same name, opens with a voiceover by Ave Maria Mulligan (Ashley Judd) enlightening us to the particular qualities and quirks of the titular coal mining town in the mountains of Virginia where she grew up. And though she’s referring to her childhood in the 50’s, when the movie flashes forward twenty years a few moments later, hardly anything seems to have changed from what Ave Maria has just described, as if here in Big Stone Gap the 50’s just kind of blended with the 60’s which just kind of mixed with the 70’s. Why they continue putting on the very same play, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, they have always put on, as if any modification of the past by send the populace reeling. I mean, would it kill these people to try “Our Town”? Just once?! This lends a frozen-in-time feel, one that could easily come on like nostalgia, the a syrupy sensation that there is no place like home, and while that is there in doses, it is tempered by Ave Maria herself, a character who mostly defies the sugary confection by fearing that in all those years that passed from the voiceover to now, life itself has passed her by.

Ashley Judd is incredibly equipped to play these sorts of roles, vacillating between genuine joy and understated melancholy with the greatest of ease, often within the same scene, occasionally within the same moment, like the instance when she’s eating cake while standing up, listening and half trying to ignore another person spouting twaddle while taking great comfort in just snacking on that chocolate dessert. It’s sort of her entire state of being in capsule; having to shut out so much nonsense swirling around her, finding resolve from within, or in a plate of calories, of which there seem to be an awful lot. After all, she’s forty year olds and – egads! – not married. This, however, is more a concern of the town folk than the screenplay itself, which gives Ave Maria the willingness to fight back against that sort of Hallmark Channel hogwash. At one point, in fact, Ave Maria is referred to as Mount Vesuvius, standing there placidly, yet waiting to erupt, that eruption spurred by all the gossip pertaining to her relationship status. Often in Judd’s eyes you can see that eruption brewing. The question is, will it come?

Eh, yes and no. Much of the plot hinges on her friendship with Jack (Patrick Wilson), the local coal-mining hunk with solid sideburns, who clearly loves her, but hitches himself to Sweet Sue (Jane Krakowski) instead even though she’s clearly wrong for him and knows it, while Ave Maria hitches herself to Theodore Tipton (John Benjamin Hickey) even though he’s wrong for her and she knows it. Still, this isn’t a case of simple Idiot Plot, the characters having to wear invisible blinders to the truth, He wants the simple life that Big Stone Gap offers, which he sees in Sweet Sue and not Ave Maria, because Ave Maria is clearly itching for something else, and has been for a long time. Home Is Where The Heart Is, and All That Jazz, but sometimes you still have to Go Walkabout, and “Big Stone Gap”, for all its easy-bake storytelling, still has the gumption to know that Ave Maria is not the kind of character who would fall into the conventional narrative trap of sticking to the path rather than wandering into the deep, dark forest.

At least, it seems like it does, which is where “Big Stone Gap” goes off the rails. Though the film is set in coalmine country, you never really the soot on the faces of the miners, just as the one mine “incident” is less about the inherent dangers of that perilous industry than a drawn out excuse to put Ave Maria and Jack together. And this is fine, of course, because “Big Stone Gap” isn’t “North Country”; it’s a warm-hearted romance, one made with so much granulated sugar, food coloring and flavor extract, but still. And yet, this setting, which emits a sense of “place” in the early-going, begins to feel more and more staged as the film progresses, especially as all the characters around Ave Maria suddenly begin pulling strings in order to prevent what she seems to so desperately want. By the end, when everyone gathers in the town ampitheater, determined to keep Ave Maria right where she is, Big Stone Gap felt more like Seahaven, and I began to fear that Ave Maria was simply starring in her own version of The Truman Show.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Ipcress File (1965)

As “The Ipcress File” opens, British Intelligence Agent Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) is in some nondescript London flat keeping some unnamed person across the street under surveillance. It’s not glamorous. He looks more like a properly groomed shut-in then a secret agent, which is how the film’s producers, Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli, wanted it. They were the team responsible for the James Bond franchise that had only recently achieved liftoff, and so Mr. Saltzman and Mr. Broccoli sought Len Deighton’s novel to make “The Ipcress File” as antithesis to the idealized exploits of Agent 007. They employed director Sidney J. Furie to craft a spy caper less sexy than tedious, comprised not of exotic locales and charming bad guys and beautiful ladies but dreary London locales and interchangeable stuffy British intel agents.

This was Michael Caine’s first starring role and it’s fairly impressive how un-determined he is to make it star-making. Indeed, if James Bond’s omnipresent grin is playful, the omnipresent grin of Harry Palmer is mischievous, occasionally even lurid, like a brief moment where he checks out his female co-worker. TCM indicates that Christopher Plummer was the original choice for the role, which I find ironic because throughout “The Ipcress File” I kept thinking of Plummer as a bank robbing psychopath in “The Silent Partner.” That’s not to say that Caine’s Palmer is a psychopath because he’s not; but the imperious tone they both project is eerily similar. The character of Palmer, after all, is only here on account of orders, a checkered past, and Caine plays straight to that idea, evoking a cocky indifference to all this administrative intelligence humdrum. And oh, is there a lot of humdrum.

Palmer gets transferred to a civil intelligence unit under the command of Dalby (Nigel Green), a smarmy bureaucrat. If everyone else in the unit is used to his obnoxious officiousness, Palmer, the fussy raconteur, is not. He does things his own way, as he must, which gets into him escalating amounts of trouble, with Dalby and pretty much everyone else, as he finds himself waist-deep in determining who has been draining the brains of several highly intelligent, highly important English doctors. This brain drain concept, however, subtly emerges as the same condition of all the agents in Dalby’s charge, transformed into mindless order-following drones on account of filing so many secret agent TPS Reports.

But don’t let all this talk of reconnoitering ennui fool you into thinking its some formally bland enterprise. It’s quite the contrary as Furie does up “The Ipcress File” with all kinds of photographic chicanery, so much that I’m dying to see its shot list because I can’t imagine the plethora of shot descriptions that Furie cooked up with his cinematographer Otto Heller. These descriptions would say things like: “From behind Harry Palmer” and “From behind an easy chair” and “From behind a plush couch” and “From behind a wooden pew” and “From behind a lampshade” and “From behind a tape recording reel”. It seems as if nearly every single shot in this movie is from behind something, or off to the side of something. There are many tilted camera angles, a la “The Third Man”, and often the camera is set far below or high above its character, but usually it is stationed behind something, evoking bugs or surveillance cameras or whatever other technical doo-hickeys well above my pay grade that intelligence organizations employ to keep watch. Everyone here is being watched, like Big Brother, and in his own way, Harry Palmer emerges as the UK’s answer to Winston Smith.

Because the film is 50 years old, we will throw caution to the wind and refrain from issuing a persnickety spoiler alert in advising that British Intelligence is – egads – brainwashing its own, attempting to transform them all into variations of Reggie Jackson in “The Naked Gun.” Palmer determines the ruse, yet becomes ensnared it anyway, literally fighting back against the brainwashing, although he’s figuratively fighting back against it every step of the way with his deadpan insolence, winning on both counts, a hero if there was over one. This is a one spy movie that has less to do with figuring out Who Did It than Hacking Through Red Tape.

Cinema Romantico's Cannes Brûlé Palme

As always, Cinema Romantico was unable to attend the Cannes Film Festival on account of scheduling conflicts pertaining to the Big 10 Track & Field Championships and the fact that the only outlet willing to grant us accreditation was Horse & Hound. But, of course, this inability to walk the red carpet be chased off the red carpet will not prevent us from officially bestowing the un-exalted Brûlé Palme, this blog's variation on Cannes' prestigious Palme d'Or, awarded each year to Cinema Romantico's favorite Cannes Film Festival attendee.

And so, following in the footsteps of past winners such as Kylie Minogue and Bill Murray, this year's recipient of Cinema Romantico's non-notable Brûlé Palme is.....

Kristen Stewart's Eyeshadow

Faux Review of Money Monster

During my junior year of high school, my English teacher forced us to keep daily diaries. The friend sitting next to me in class took this as the cue not to pen confessionals but as an opportunity to explore the virtues of criticism. This to say, he would take whatever book we might be reading for class, randomly open it to a page, select a sentence, any sentence, and then construct a review of the book itself solely on the basis of that single sentence. I thought of this the other day when I clicked on A.O. Scott’s review of Jodie Foster’s “Money Monster” for The New York Times. Because there to greet me was a still from the film, this still……

I had no plans to see “Money Monster”, as I kinda, sorta documented, because I kinda, sorta feel like putting Julia Roberts and George Clooney in a movie together and then not having them be in the same room most of the time is like having a bottle of Vodka and a bottle of Kahlua on your liquor shelf and keeping them apart and away from the cream. And after seeing this still…I really didn’t want to see it. I wanted to imagine this still is the movie. I wanted to write a review based entirely on this still. So I did.

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As Lee Gates, a financial guru who hosts his own Wall Street business news cable show, and has been plagued by guilt ever since 2008 for steering so many loyal viewers directly into the effects of the financial crisis, George Clooney is surprisingly short of gravitas and all in on gaiety. Indeed, while the set-up for “Money Monster” seems ripe for an ode to 1970’s stalwart “Network”, with Gates as a kind of CNBC-ish Howard Beale, descending into revealing mania as he shouts at his audience, the “The Big Short” as brutish parable, director Jodie Foster forges an oddly opposite path. It forgoes solemn sermonizing for something saccharine instead, as if Squawk Box was hosted at a 1950’s soda fountain. Foster turns the title “Money Monster” into something of a joke as Lee Gates and his loyal assistant Patty Fenn (Julia Roberts), who might just like him, and who might just like her, are faced with budget cuts and then layoffs and then the rumor that, yes, their beloved television show is going to have its plug pulled. What to do? Well, to save one show, Lee and Patty decide to put on another show!

In other words, “Money Monster” re-imagines George Clooney & Julia Roberts as Mickey Rooney & Judy Garland. Of course, when the latter put on a show, circumstances intrinsically never felt all that dire, no matter the specific problem they were trying to solve, deliberately and blissfully remaining ignorant to any genuine societal context. And as Lee and Patty assemble a ragtag band of minor business cable news personalities to star in their telethon to save Money Monster, they are merely expending so much effort to continue a broadcast that will continue to feed viewers information that will continue contributing to another escalating crisis that will no doubt eventually implode, the film remains deliberately, blissfully, strangely ignorant to this societal context, an inadvertent capitalist revue. Songs like Anything Can Happen at the Bank of New York and Chin Up! Portfolio! Carry On! strive for sincerity rather than mocking irony, and the concluding shots of loyal viewers at home pulling money out of their mutual funds to ensure Lee and Patty hit their fundraising goal are treated with blatant heroism, the orchestra swelling, Lee and Patty hugging, crying and, finally, yes, kissing, beneath the sight of Monopoly money falling from the ceiling like confetti.

It came across like such a sick joke I could only stare and wonder, is this real?

The Measure of a Man

There is a moment in Stephane Brize’s “The Measure of a Man” when Thierry (Vincent Lindon), a laid off factory employee is attending some sort of training session at a workforce center where he is videotaped giving a fake job interview so his performance can be graded by his classmates. It does not go swimmingly. His expression, his posture, his voice, all of it is unflatteringly dissected in excruciatingly matter of fact terms, a moment from which the perpetually understated Lindon effortlessly wrings so much pathos, taking it all personally because how can his character not? One unemployed peer reckons that Thierry’s whole nature exudes an attitude of having already given up. Maybe he has.

This is “The Measure of a Man” through and through, where seemingly every scene, filmed in long, unbroken takes so similar to those social filmmaking crusaders The Dardenne Brothers, becomes a referendum not simply on Thierry’s place in a wrecked economy, where his age and experience have somehow left him both overqualified and underqualified, but who he is as a man in choosing how he deals with it. This causes every moment to feel fraught with tension, not just real world job interviews, Kafkaesque nightmares instilled with false hope, but even moments that should exist as respites, like interludes at the dinner table where he chomps his food, breathing through his nose, where you can practically feel him about to explode.

His family is what keeps him going, and the shame he feels from struggling to support his evelopmentally disabled son Mathieu (Matthieu Schaller), thankfully portrayed as a real person rather than an ideal. The character of Katherine (Karine de Mirbeck), however, Thierry’s wife, is left wanting. Certainly she bears part of this financial trauma too, yet the narrative’s tunnel vision keeps her as nothing more than a cipher rather than an equally intimate player in this crisis.

Yet, at the same time, the film is very much about Thierry becoming isolated in his own mind on account of professional failings. In one sequence he attends a dance class with Katherine, and the instructor forces Thierry to repeatedly perform the same dance move until he gets it down, which Lindon conveys with a quietly tense self-imposed pressure, as if even here his character is attempting to offset all occupational setbacks with personal triumph. And when “The Measure of a Man” pivots and Thierry finally lands a job, his isolation merely increases.

Working as a security guard in a supermarket, he and his associates are forced to detain thieves. None of these burglars are masterminds, just elderly people on tight budgets trying to bend the law to get by. If that slants the story to dial up Thierry’s internal dilemma, so be it, and no encounter is more excruciating than the older man who, along with a pile of products he paid for, pockets a few slabs of meat. When offered the chance to call someone to come down and pay for the meat to avoid involving the authorities, the older man says he has no family and friends; he’s all alone. The camera, as it always is in these “interrogation” scenes, is at Thierry’s back, like he’s looking in the mirror.

In a way, Thierry’s role as a security guard becomes a wry twist on the stock role of Good Cop, one who stands for virtue in the face of corruption. Because while Thierry, eventually made to bust co-workers circumventing rules, is abiding by what’s right, it still comes across, to him, as morally dubious, knowing that he and those he’s ratting out are essentially standing at financial eye-level. And so when he inevitably takes a stand, it still feels impotent, heightened by the way he does it, giving up and walking away rather than passionately calling it out, suggesting that the true measure of a man is where he stands at times of challenge and controversy is a vacuous slogan best left to coffee mugs in the airport gift shop.

A Bigger Splash

“A Bigger Splash” opens in the midst of an idyllic interlude, on the island of Pantelleria, off the Italian coast, where Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton), an arena-level rock star, New Romantic David Bowie with Chrissie Hynde hair, has come with her ruggedly handsome paramour Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts) for some r&r. It is bliss, all scenery and sex, topped off by mud baths and lazing on the beach, where their paradise is suddenly invaded by a big old jetliner roaring just overhead, artificially clouding their sunny skies. The plane carries Harry Hawkes (Ralph Fiennes), Marianne’s former producer and flame. Though there is much talk throughout the film of a Sirocco wind kicking up on the island, the real wind is Harry, a Hall of Fame motor-mouth, sans an off switch, who rambles into this movie already in the midst of spewing sentences, and gets himself invited along to Marianne and Paul’s pad despite the latter’s clear aversion to his idea. Harry is best emblemized in a later close-up of his bright white teeth, glittering in terror as they prattle on at 180 beats per minute, which they consistently do. In real life, this guy might drive you to jump off a cliff; in “A Bigger Splash”, he is an unstoppable life force, the straw that stirs this drink.

Harry brings with him twenty-something-ish Penelope (Dakota Johnson), whom he has only just learned is his daughter. She is something of a nymphet, striding around almost exclusively in short shorts, but also a paper-thin blank space, the kind invented, customarily by wanton males, for the sole purpose of exuding erotic temptation. She entices Paul, yes, but also Harry, who alternates between being thrilled that she’s his and wishing she wasn’t; not because he wants to ignore her, mind you, but because, well, she’s a nymphet in short shorts. If that sounds a tad tawdry for your tastes, perhaps “A Bigger Splash” is not the cinematic experience for you.

It is also not the cinematic experience for you if you enjoy hearing Tilda Swinton, who can be so deliberately precise in her pronunciation (see: “Michael Clayton”), talk. That is because her character cannot speak, on account of surgery to repair her blown out vocal cords, forcing her to communicate non-verbally, with askance glances and tilts of the head. Swinton is up for it, of course, not simply because she’s a grand thespian, which she re-clarifies by conveying an orgasm without making a single sound, but because she instilled this challenge herself, specifically asking that her character be written without a voice. That means her inability to converse is partly for show, but it also means that Harry becomes the principal aggressor of the murky plot, especially because Paul is simply a stand-off-to-the-side-and-brood sorta guy.

For a good hour, hour and a half, director Luca Guadagnino is content to allow Marianne, and Paul, and Penelope to be dragged along in Harry’s choppy if boisterous wake, never more so than a delicious sequence in which Harry expounds upon a recording session he helmed with The Rolling Stones that emerges as front-runner for Monologue of the Year and paves the way for a musical number, of sorts, in which he goes gleefully berserk in singing along to the aforementioned band’s “Emotional Rescue”, a Fred Astaire dance number as re-imagined by Andrew Loog Oldham. As Harry cavorts, he tears out of the villa, toward the pool, up onto a ledge, a man devouring life whole, which Fiennes plays with an uninhibited exhilaration, though at other points he makes clear this exhilaration masks plenty of melancholy and regret.

Harry is a character that doesn’t really think beyond Now, like when he crashes his convertible and simply abandons it. The movie forgets about the car, which isn’t a narrative flaw but emblematic of how “A Bigger Splash”, which is based on the 1969 French film “La Piscine” (which I have not seen), is best when it plays like a lascivious shaggy dog story. Alas, each of these characters is strapped to a bomb, whether it is Harry and Marianne’s former love that might still simmer, Paul’s checkered past or those short shorts of Penelope begging to come off for the sake of titillation. Each bomb is required to detonate, and as they do, “A Bigger Splash” devolves into a strange brew of Italian soap opera by way of Wife Swap by way of Lifetime crime drama. It’s only worsened by attempting to connect the plight of migrant refugees, which are merely glimpsed once in the form of a TV news report, to this quartet’s white privilege.

If Guadagnino agrees they are stricken by white privilege, he also doesn’t care, evinced by the Inspector Closeau-level of investigation that goes on in the concluding sequences revolving around a death at Marianne’s villa, a We Know Who Did It Whodunit? in which the tone oddly wavers between sarcasm and seriousness. None of the actors here seem to be singing in precise harmony, not like they were earlier, which can perhaps be attributed to the character of Harry being moved out of the picture too early, which might legally constitute a spoiler but so what? Even if you know he dies, which he does, triggering “A Bigger Splash’s” collapse, that will make it more important to remember as you are watching to embrace Ralph Fiennes’ majestically frenzied performance while it is allowed to live.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Swarm (1978)

The first time we see the big black swarm buzzing over the California countryside, we have the same reaction as the poor helicopter pilot who has been dispatched to encounter them. “Bees!” he cries. “Bees?” the military commanders back at the missile base want to know. “Bees!” they are told again. “Oh my God, bees! Millions of bees!” He can’t believe it and the men back at base can’t believe and we can’t believe it either. This is a disaster movie in which the enemy is not aliens or a looming volcano; it is bees. “We’ve been fighting a losing battle against the insects for fifteen years,” says top entomologist Bradford Crane (Michael Caine), “but I never thought I'd see the final face-off in my lifetime. And I never dreamed that it would turn out to be the bees.” You and me both, pal.

Don’t confuse bees with birds. “The Birds” was Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense, who took the seemingly absurd premise of rogue birds attacking a coastal town and transformed into something – if not revealing, really, really scary. “The Swarm” was Irwin Allen, the master of disaster, who took the seemingly absurd premise of rogue bees attacking a coastal town, and eventually America the Beautiful, and transformed into something long, ludicrous and nowhere near as fun as it should be. If anything, it’s serious, almost intensely serious. If “The Towering Inferno”, Allen’s skyrise calamity, had Paul Newman playing at a bemused remove throughout, “The Swarm” has Caine shouting, convinced to high heaven that everyone in America is about to be stung to death. This, his furrowed brow suggests, is no laughing matter.

Like so many other Allen vehicles, he somehow coaxed an all-star A-list cast, giving this high-class trash a little sparkle, $6 wine retailed for $27.50. I kept imagining how the immortal Olivia de Havilland felt stranded in a supporting role as Maureen, the schoolteacher, who gets marriage proposals from two different old-timers (Fred MacMurray and Ben Johnson) in a subplot that never fails to feel patently absurd, existing so a few big-time actors can get come on and get killed off. I kept imagining that MacMurray talked DeHavilland into taking part in this bomb. “C’mon, O! It’ll be fun! Everybody’s doing it! Even Henry Fonda!” And then I imagined de Havilland at the craft services table during production throwing deviled eggs at MacMurray while shouting “THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!”

The movie opens on a legitimately suspenseful note, in which a group of soldiers outfit in protective orange suits, as if there has been some sort of leak, infiltrate a military base that turns out to be a missile silo, and find everyone within it slumped at their mammoth 1978-styled computers, dead. In this moment, the characters don’t precisely know what’s happened. And it’s interesting to consider how “The Swarm” might have played if we were 1.) Strung along further and 2.) The bees themselves were rarely seen.

Alas, they are constantly seen, over and over, mostly in swarm-form, but occasionally in smaller ranks, like when they go after a picnicking family of three that looks like the family of three from “Airplane!” two years later. In this scene, we even get a Bee Point-of-View shot. It’s some sort of half-hearted attempt at the psychological, insects as voyeurs into our pedestrian lives, which is only half as bad as as a later scene when the traumatized kid is in a hospital and convinced a bee is in the room with him. We see the bee he thinks he sees, in fact, a giant bee, like Lou Ferrigno has dressed up in a bee costume and is standing there. It is astonishing how bad these moments of hallucinated big bees are, and I can only imagine what the editors thought when they were forced to see these scenes.

The film’s principal antagonistic relationship, more so than the bees, is between Bradford Crane and General Thaddeus Slater (Richard Widmark), who is forced, per the President, to relinquish all control of this eliminate-the-bees campaign. The military man wants to douse all the bees with chemicals, naturally, while Crane is forced to explain, over and over, just how vital the bee actually is to the environment. There’s a kernel of something there, almost “Avatar”-esque, as if Allen had wanted to push this wannabe blockbuster into a pro-environmental realm. That’s wishful thinking. Instead it falls back on all the usual ways out of the maze, not limited to flamethrowers, and with a tiny little twist that made me think of the martians in “Mars Attacks!” ultimately being undone by Slim Whitman’s “Indian Love Call”......just, you know, not as funny. Where’s Tom Jones when you need him?

Twister's Opening Scene

Jan de Bont’s “Twister” finished second in the considerable 1996 box office sweepstakes, and congratulations to it, for being a weather-driven rollercoaster ride. Any references to the fatal mayhem that twisters can wreak is merely in the service of “stakes”, not much else, as most of the characters’ orations on the value of accurate meteorology ring hollow, intending to drum up tension that doesn’t exist anyway between two factions of tornado chasers. No, our principal heroes, briskly named Jo (Helen Hunt) and Bill (Bill Paxton), come across more desperate to see the inside of a funnel for the thrill of it than for the data they might collect, which might have been an interesting angle to play but isn’t going to happen when a $92 million budget is in play. And whatever; I don’t mean to give “Twister” a bad review to commemorate its incredibly unimportant 20th anniversary.

No, I come bearing praise. People might term “Twister” an atmospheric film because, like, you know, funnel clouds form when the atmosphere is unstable. But I think of “Twister” as a kind of unintentional atmospheric film, one that in its best moments, when there are no special effects and no calculated rushes of adrenaline and no Jami Gertz talking on a mid-90’s cellphone, is intrinsically Midwestern, whether it’s a shot of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman spooning lumps of decadent mashed potatoes onto a plate next to steak and eggs or the mesmerizing frame in which Bill Paxton stands beneath a gloriously darkened sky.

For all its lame attempts at generating a love triangle, and for all its asinine comic release valves like cows flying through the air, this fast-moving movie is often at its best when it just settles down, reveling in its second unit photography or tendering tiny mood-building moments. There is just such a moment at the beginning. Not, mind you, the full prologue of the film’s Helen Hunt played heroine watching her dad scarily fly away the night the F-5 tornado hit her hometown; no, I’m talking about the five successive shots that immediately open the movie. They are wonderful; they are perfect; they are where I’m from.

This shot immediately follows the opening title card, setting the stage, any evening in Midwestern May when the sky is all simple, scenic innocence.

In the next shot, however, the clouds have assumed an ominous gray, the kind that causes the men down at the co-op who have seen a storm or two in their time to remark “something’s brewing.”

In the third shot, the sky is getting black, and it is this point when you feel the thrilling, terrifying tingle in your spine.

By the fourth shot, the prelude to the tempest is in full swing; this is Tornado Watch weather.

And because it is Tornado Watch weather, you settle in to keep apprised of the situation by watching the local weatherman, sipping coffee to keep awake because you never know when it might go wrong even if you are continually hoping that it does not go wrong.

Then, it does go wrong. “Tornado Warning.” The two most terrifying words in the Midwest. There is more to come, of course, but in a way, this is more than enough. 

Shout-Out to the Extra: ID4 Version

This is the first installment of our new sporadic series in which Cinema Romantico shouts out the extras, the background actors, the bit part players, the almost out of your sight line performers who expertly round out our movies with epic blink & you’ll miss it care. 

For Slant Magazine, I recently watched and reviewed “Elstree 1976”, a crowdfunded movie focusing on ten bit-part players, extras and actors in support, in the original “Star Wars” movies. These genial people warranted their own documentary, of course, because it was “Star Wars”, which is partly what the movie is about. But there were also threads, if not necessarily enough, in regards to the semi-dreary life of a working actor, and that is what got me to thinking. It got me to thinking about all those people on the edges of frames, lurking in the background, doing, like, stuff, probably in take after take, while the real stars stand in the foreground, swallowing up nearly the entire view of the camera. All extras deserve praise, really, not just the ones who were temple guards at the rebel base on the moon of Yavin.

I like to over-indulge on reaction shots in “Independence Day”, and even its follow-up’s trailers, as my longtime and very frustrated readers know too well, and often those reaction shots involve extras. But there is another extra in “Independence Day” that has always caught my eye, one who is reacting, but to someone else in the frame as opposed to special effects on the blue screen. She appears near the beginning, right after the approaching alien ship has become aware to Space Command at The Pentagon. General Grey, played by a gruff Robert Loggia, enters and gets briefed and is told the ship is “slowing down.” And if it’s slowing down.....

He walks to a nearby desk to pick up a phone. As he picks up the phone, however, notice the seated woman just to the left of where Loggia is standing. She’s at a computer bank. She’s wearing a headset. She’s talking to someone on the headset. The actress, though, isn’t content to just sit there and not act like she isn’t really there being the nameless Space Command employee. She notes Loggia picking up this phone, like it’s her phone, like she doesn’t care how many stars this General Dude’s got, whatever, hey, why don’t you ask if you can use my phone next time. Then she goes back to work cuz she’s at work, man, and she’s got work to do. Then Loggia’s General asks for the President. A pause. Loggia barks: “Then WAKE him!” And that actress, she turns, quick, put out - like, why is this General Dude making such a racket? I’m working here, can’t he see that, what’s wrong with him? So rude.

And I love it. I love this extra. She’s there; she’s working; she’s playing something.

Pour one out for the extra.

State of the Superhero Displacement

“Hi, thanks for waiting.” This is what Monica says the first time we meet her in “Mystery Men” (1999). She has no last name, just Monica, easily affixed to a nametag, like a server at a greasy spoon, which is where Monica works, and is why you might not think anything is out of place if you just saw her. But, of course, you don’t just see her; you see the people on whom she’s waiting. They are all dressed in absurd costumes and call themselves nutso things like The Blue Raja and The Shoveler and Mr. Furious. This is because it’s Champion City and Champion City is home to all manner of superheroes, like if Metropolis was the Olympic Village rather than a bustling New York-ish city. In that way, Monica is the one who stands out; Monica is the one who doesn’t seem to be in the right place; Monica is the anomaly.

When I was first introduced to the superhero movie way back when with “Superman: The Movie”, there was really only one superhero, the Man of Steel himself, Kal-El. He had the stage all to himself. When I became re-familiarized with the superhero movie in 1989 with Tim Burton’s “Batman” there was still only one superhero and one super villain, no one else. I could really get a handle on those dudes. It was with “Batman Forever”, which I loathed, that I noticed the soundstages were getting a little more crowded; someone could have been sacrificed to give that much more face time to the main dude, and Chase Meridian too (biased). But that was nothing compared to now.

Superhero movies are fastly and furiously becoming victims of overcrowding. In my review of “The Avengers” (2012) I noted the gang’s resembling a rock group. And not a power trio, mind you, but a sprawling multi-part ensemble like The E Street Band. But that, as A.O. Scott notes in his review for the new “Captain America” movie, was nothing. He writes that the whole affair is “like the last number at a big benefit concert, when a mob of pop stars squeezes onto the stage to sing ‘This Land Is Your Land,’ or whatever. Some performers sing a whole verse. Others shake maracas for the cause and stare off into the middle distance.” All that’s left is a Cecil B. DeMille-ish superhero movie with a cast of a thousand superheroes, all jockeying for close-ups in a five hour box office bonanza.

There are so many superheroes these days overrunning so many different movies, often with parallel movie universes, and sometimes not, that the state of superhero cinema is beginning to resemble Champion City, where there are so many costumed crusaders and heavies running to and fro that when you actually see a regular person, it’s shocking. I always wondered what brought Monica to Champion City. How did that work? How an ordinary josephine becomes drawn to a place where everyone is fronting so superhero hard? I thought that perhaps she moved there with dreams of becoming a superhero, only to have those dreams go bust, or that maybe she moved there with a boyfriend to support his superhero dreams only for the relationship to fall apart. But I’m not sure that’s right anymore.

I think maybe she’s been there all her life. I think maybe Champion City wasn’t Champion City. I think maybe it was Rockville or Rosedale or Rutland before it was overrun by superheroes, and the villains that followed. I think it’s an exemplar of the destinies of Gotham City and Metropolis, and every other movie city too, places where everyone will become a Monica, off to the side, paying fealty to their superhero overlords.

Sing Street

As “Sing Street” opens, 15 year old Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) slumps on his bed with an acoustic guitar, taking insults being exchanged between his mother (Maria Doyle Kennedy) and father (Aidan Gillen) arguing on the opposite side of his wall and instantaneously transforming them into song lyrics. It’s a swift evocation of how Conor makes music to cope with the adolescent pains of his Dublin teenage experience. And he will really need to make music when his mom and dad explain that to necessarily cut family costs, Conor is being transferred to a cheaper Christian Brothers school, where he promptly runs afoul of both the requisite bully (Ben Carolan) and the autocratic principal (Don Wycherley). But he also makes good by meeting cute with Raphina (Lucy Boynton), an aspiring 16 year old model, whose number he scores by asking her if she wants to star in his band’s music video. Of course, he doesn’t have a band, but this will engender the perfect excuse to start one, christened Sing Street in (non) tribute to their school, Synge Street.

The film is set in 1985, the height of MTV and the music video, and it is in the image of the music video that writer/director John Carney fashions his sentimental opus. If Carney opted for vérité in his intimate semi-musical “Once” (2007) to mirror its lo-fi, busker ethos, he renders “Sing Street” in the fantastical, commercially slick aesthetic of the music video. And not just in the fantasy sequences where the idea of what Conor wants for his videos improbably comes to life, but the full scope of the film’s narrative, where the band leader imagines everyone as being support to his own main story.

That includes Raphina, who is merely Conor’s muse and then the girl he wants to save from her obligatory overbearing boyfriend and dashed dreams, though, to be fair, Carney’s screenplay, while not giving her dimension, per se, still affords her decision making rights. It also includes Conor’s band, most of which remains explicitly on the periphery, like his guitarist without mystique. That’s Eamon (Mark McKenna), who mostly exists as a conspirator whenever Conor feels the blues and wants to pen another song, never mind the Token Black Keyboardist (Percy Chamburuka), who gets one funny line and then recedes from he limelight. All these people are here chiefly to aid Conor’s journey, which is not about overcoming grand dramatic obstacles so much as becoming more rooted in his sense of self. While a climactic showdown with the bully might have been inevitable in another movie, here it just deliberately evaporates as Conor assumes a force field of confidence.

If Carney truly drills down on any character, it is Conor’s older brother Brendan (Jack Reynor), a college dropout still living at home, directionless aside from his self-appointed position as mentor to his little bro. He lectures Conor on musical theory and dispenses romantic advice on how to get the girl, and both these ideas – music and love – dovetail nicely with the movie’s hoary if nevertheless affecting message of staying true to one’s self. When Conor plays his band’s first recording, a Duran Duran cover, Brendan can barely mask his rage, arguing that to win Raphina’s heart, Conor needs to be who he is and that he will never be who he is by playing someone else’s songs. So, Conor concocts his own tunes, none of which, despite being generally era-appropriate, come anywhere near the melodic mountaintop of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova’s work in “Once”, though still effectively underline their main character’s evolving emotions.

That idea of staying true one’s self is also revealed as Brendan’s foremost failure, evinced in a monologue that Reynor brings to a fiery pitch, roaring “I was a lion!” with such ferocity it momentarily stops the movie in its tracks. He was a lion, until he let the life he wanted slip away. It’s a hallmark of the film, where pangs of melancholy suddenly crop up, almost as if these are moments of reality that even Conor can’t prevent from interfering in his musical daydream. And it’s also these moments where Conor is made to see a potential life path - Adolescence to Rootless Young Adulthood to Adulthood Misery - that he wishes to avoid.

When he’s asked what kind of music he likes, Conor replies: “I’m a futurist. No nostalgia.” He says this not because the film is poking fun at its own nostalgic underpinnings, but because that’s what Conor is looking toward as he sculpts his band – the future. And that idea is brought home in a pragmatically absurd but emotionally spot on conclusion that reminds us we simply have to cross the next horizon in front of us regardless of what may or may not wait on the other side. It feels just like the end to an inspirational music video.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Underwater! (1955)

Though “Underwater!” was directed by John Sturges, it was produced by Howard Hughes, and so we all know it was really A Howard Hughes Film. And you know how Howard Hughes loved Jane Russell. And she’s there, sure enough, as Theresa, the buxom wife of Johnny (Richard Egan) – which allows for myriad moments of Jane Russell saying “Johnny” and there is no better name to siren-ishly say than Johnny. And there is a moment aboard a yacht lilting in the Caribbean when Johnny is in repose and Theresa sexily walks right at him. I imagine Hughes – er, Sturges – had Russell shoot this a thousand and forty-seven times. It looks as natural as that asinine exclamation point dangling at the end of “Underwater!” And so what? It’s Jane Russell strutting…in the Caribbean…like a Bemidji-born Sheena Easton. Say whatever you want about “Underwater!”, and I will, but that moment, that look and that walk, as a glorious testament to staged melodramatic nothingness, work.

The rest of it doesn’t work. And that’s why I devoted an entire paragraph to the strut. Because otherwise I’d have to talk about everything else. I’d have to talk about the cut and paste story, which is fine, because cut and paste stories can work; you just have to embellish on what you’ve cut and pasted. There is no embellishment. The only real embellishment are Jane Russell’s swimsuits, Richard Egan’s tan and Gilbert Roland’s scarves. Otherwise it’s about some friends who want to find treasure in a sunken ship, run into some pirates, yada yada, the end. Watching this movie is like listening to one of those soundscape CD’s – Relaxing Sound of the Sea, or some such, that you put on when you want to fall asleep. I watched this movie in the morning while drinking coffee – two cups! – and I was almost falling asleep. Its underwater(!) scenes, which are supposed to be its selling point, is like looking through a cloudy aquarium.

To be fair, the technology that Hughes – er, Sturges – employed to garner these underwater(!) scenes was no doubt primitive, compared, at least, to what we have today. Scuba diving in 1955 was still a brand new concept, and as TCM notes, this might have interested Hughes more than making an actual movie. As in, making a movie gave him a stage on which to have fun with so much scuba (and to put Jane Russell in a swimsuit). You know how the exorbitantly rich do. In fact, Hughes was so in love with the underwater(!) concept that he extended it to the movie’s premiere.

What interested me most about “Underwater!” was learning about its premiere, in which Hughes screened it for select invites in Silver Springs, Florida……underwater. The Underwater Premiere of “Underwater!” Hughes had attendees outfit in bathing suits and scuba diving equipment in order to watch the film – all 99 minutes of it – 20 meet below the water, swimming all the while, which seems like a lot of work for a Hollywood soiree. Meanwhile, those who did not wish to be all wet while watching could view the movie through portholes of a submersible. This is so Hughes-ian it hurts. This is the greatest movie premiere story I've ever heard. Not even Jerry Bruckheimer could pull that stunt and get away with it! I loved this story so much I kept thinking of the infinite possibilities a movie about this premiere might have made, like a fictional "Burden of Dreams." You could have enlisted Leslie Nielsen, say, to play the producer, Harrison Hathaway, and all sorts of comic complications would ensue, like a starlet’s bikini deliberately coming off to drum up her brand, which apparently really happened courtesy of Jayne Mansfield.

How, you might wonder, did the real thing not go genuinely wrong? Wait! It kind of did! In an article from the Milwaukee Journal wondrously titled “Writer is Blue, Fish Bored at Underwater Premiere”, Bob Thomas recounted the entire event. “What did we see?” he rhetorically asked. “Darn little. A bunch of jokers thrashing around in the water. Some weeds floating by. A bored catfish staring at crazy humans.” He continues: “And you couldn’t hear the dialogue. RKO technicians had carried on about installing speakers above and below the water. But all you could hear was glug, glug.” Don’t feel bad, Bob. Sitting in my living room, above water, watching on TV, with the volume turned way up, all I could hear was glug, glug.

Small Potatoes: Who Killed The USFL? – A Non Review

There’s a moment from this ESPN 30 for 30 documentary that I can’t stop thinking about. It was one of the first 30 for 30’s, way back in 2009, directed by Mike Tollin, chronicling the rise and fall of the 1980’s springtime professional football league, the USFL (United States Football League). It posed its central question in the title “Who Killed the USFL?” So, who did kill it? Well, the killer, Tollin reckons, was the megalomaniacal owner of the New Jersey Generals franchise – namely, one Donald Trump.

The present day Trump is interviewed on camera throughout, pressed on his innumerable egotistical antics, his desire to force a merger between the USFL and the NFL (National Football League), a merger that never happened and correlated directly to the USFL going bust. But the more questions asked, the more uncomfortable The Donald becomes, because being asked actual questions that demand specific answers as opposed to colorfully vacuous rhetoric is not The Donald’s style. Finally, Mr. Trump removes his mic and walks out of the room, but not without ensuring that he gets the last word because getting the last word is The Donald’s style. To Tollin he sums up the entire USFL experience thusly: “It was small potatoes.”

The documentary, of course, yearns to prove that the USFL wasn’t small potatoes, that it had a quaint je nei sais quoi, that it could have survived had the brand of Trump not swept in and started throwing around bronzed muscle. Indeed, even before Trump arrived the little league that possibly could showed some swagger all on its own. It played games in the spring, yes, but it established franchises in major cities, scored television contracts with both ABC and a then little britches ESPN and, most noteworthy of all, it signed primo players, like three consecutive Heisman Trophy winners right out of college, not to mention high quality talent such as quarterback Jim Kelly, who turned down the Buffalo Bills to sign with the Memphis Showboats (probably because Showboats is a better name than 85% of NFL monikers).

Tollin was sorta the Ed Sabol of the USFL, hired to document it, and at times he comes across too close to the material as well as armed with an agenda. Rather than explore the question of whether or not pro football was really designed to survive for the long haul in the spring and was therefore always destined to crash and burn, Tollin instead dumps the entire league’s undoing on Trump. That’s easy to do, and a whole host of others have done it in the ensuing years, and it’s virtually impossible to dispute ABC broadcaster Keith Jackson noting that Mr. Trump was merely interested in benefiting himself rather than the whole league. What else would you expect? Still, in seeking to determine who killed the USFL, Tollin also seems to try and assassinate the character of Donald Trump.

In spite of this obvious slant, however, it’s inarguable that He, Trump (coinage: Charles Pierce) did not swagger into the New Jersey Generals’ owner’s box absent the ancient idea of Go Big Or Go Home. It’s inarguable because Trump pretty much says it. And whether or not Going Big could potentially also bring about the league’s downfall as much as its coronation mattered little. All other interests were subordinate to the issues of The Donald. So he pushed hard to go right at the National Football League; to play a fall schedule; to even bring a lawsuit against the NFL for monopolization. Trump saw himself as a more charismatic Lamar Hunt, the man who founded the AFL, the upstart pro football league of the 1960’s that did eventually merge with the NFL.

There is a Sports Illustrated article by Robert H. Boyle from 1984 profiling Trump that opens with a bit of information so incredible I can’t even begin to fathom why the documentary failed to include it – namely, Trump wanted to christen the Galaxy Bowl. This Galaxy Bowl, in The Donald’s estimation, would have become the new Super Bowl, pitting NFL champion against USFL champion. In other words, Trump yearned to take the biggest sporting event on Earth and make it bigger. This is awe-inspiring; it’s as Trump-ian as it gets. Of course, you’ve never heard of the Galaxy Bowl because it didn’t happen, which runs counter to the article’s closing line which are Trump’s own words and go like this: “When I want something, I want victory, completeness, results.” In the USFL, he never got victory, completeness or results. The closest he got was the infamous $1 the league won in its anti-trust lawsuit. (“We had a great lawsuit,” Trump says.)

Maybe he really did kill the USFL with his impatient ego, but Trump clearly doesn’t see it that way. He sees a league that, in the end, couldn’t do what it needed to do to be the biggest and the best and the most beautiful, and so it was optimal for all involved that it just went belly-up. And that brings me back to the scene of an aggravated He, Trump getting up and walking out of the interview room.

What happens if Donald J. Trump, presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, really becomes President of the United States? What if he is made to realize that he can’t just throw up the wall overnight, that he can’t just get Congress together in a room and hash out deals, that he bans every Muslim from entering the country but a born and bred American blows something up anyway, that he cannot magically will his way with words? What does he do then? If “Who Killed The USFL?” proves anything, it proves that Trump wants what he wants now, and if he can’t have it, he’ll help run it into the ground and move onto something else.

Can’t you see him increasingly expressing frustration that America is bureaucracy rather than autocracy? Can’t you see him pointing fingers at the Founding Fathers for creating an “awful Head of State position, just the absolute worst”? Can’t you see him in early 2018 resigning the Presidency effective noon tomorrow and making a beeline for the door as a member of the White House Press calls after him “But what about America?”

Can’t you see Trump in the instant before disappearing beneath the exit sign replying “It was small potatoes”?

The Best Comic Book Hero of All-Time

While we could debate favorite comic book heroes all day, I've always been partial, as many know, to Hōkūlani, of Oceanic Comics fame. You might remember her origin story..... born June 20th 1967, the same night as the once-in-a-world colossus moon, big sister to the super moon, which pulled the tides and caused flooding in the hospital where Hōkūlani was born, momentarily ensconcing her in the rushing waters before she was rushed to safety. Her family retreated with the newborn baby up nearby Kilohana Hill, named for the Hawaiian goddess of expression and ingenuity, where a shift in tectonic plates, also brought about by the colossus moon, caused the long dormant volcano of Kilohana Hill to seep lava. That lava infused Hōkūlani with heat that mixed with the chill of the Pacific's water, meaning that Hōkūlani, when able to hone her skills in full, could flip from immense passion to coolest of the cool in an instant, faster than any before her, and with great conviction. And many years later, after Hōkūlani had defeated the evil megalomaniacal villain Thetan, who tried to appropriate her superpowers for his own selfish gain, she reclaimed them as her own, allowing them to shine, to shine as brightly as the Heavenly Star for which she was named. She had no peer. She has no peer. She is invincible in her expressiveness, awe-inspiring in her radiance and wears a cape with silver moons to honor the colossus which bequeathed upon her such immense power.

You probably know her best, however, as her alter ego.....Nicole Kidman.