Friday's Old Fashioned: Mystery Date (1991)

As the title of Jonathan Wacks’s film implies, this is a Mystery Date, meaning that when Tom McHugh (Ethan Hawke) picks up the beautiful girl housesitting next door, Geena Matthews (Teri Polo), for a night on the town anything could happen. Four years later, of course, Ethan Hawke went on the greatest mystery date of ‘em all, walking and talking with Julie Delpy all night in Vienna. That, however, was a Best Case Mystery Date; “Mystery Date” is a Worst Case Mystery Date. That is to say, a seemingly light, little romantic comedy quickly devolves into blood, murder and mayhem, akin to another 1991 film that felt like 1980s cinematic surplus, Richard Grieco’s semi-star vehicle “If Looks Could Kill.” There, however, Grieco found himself mired in a case of mistaken identity where everyone presumed he was with the CIA whereas in “Mystery Date” Hawke finds himself mired in a case of mistaken identity where everyone think he’s a thief.

The real thief is actually Tom’s big brother Craig, who is played by Brian McNamara as if he were a kind of preppy Tom Kazansky. He turns up announced, quickly cajoles his little brother into asking out Geena by phone and goes about making over Tom in his own image, dressing him in nifty clothing, even getting him glasses. If this would seem to suggest a problematic case of Big Brother Envy, “Mystery Date” is not the kind of movie determined to even vaguely explore such angles. No, Craig remakes Tom as Craig, going so far as to hand over his wallet and ID to his little brother, to provide an alibi for the various bits of nefarious business he has actually to come to town to attend to. Hijinks ensue when a number of baddies mistake Tom for Craig.

Alas, writers Parker Bennett and Terry Runte are conspicuously unable to weave the date itself into these hijinks. No, they seem to have given more thought to the vengeful flower delivery driver (played by a game Fisher Stevens) who keeps turning up at all the wrong moments only to be consistently thwarted in his quest for reprisal than they have to Geena, who just sort of fades into the background even as she remains almost permanently fixed to Tom’s side. An annoying movie-watching realist, in fact, might be libel to argue that she should just walk out on this date when it starts going wrong. But to the immense credit of Teri Polo, she plays at something here, allowing an eagerness in her eyes to come through in spite of her non-existent backstory and dearth of opportunities to even minimally express who she is.

No, she’s having fun, by God. Why there was even a moment where I briefly thought she was going to play co-conspirator with him. Alas, Bennett and Runte’s screenplay predictably has her storm out on Tom at just the wrong moment so she can become a Damsel in Distress and I sunk back into my seat and mentally threw up my hands. Way to break the mold, fellas.

The only real attempts to break the mold here are in the performances. Like B.D. Wong, playing the requisite villain, in this case a Chinese gangster who often comes across less traditionally menacing than quirkily unhinged. He’s a worthy adversary, even if his various henchmen are obligatorily inept. Of course, the real adversary here is Craig. Or, at least, it should be Craig. The more Tom discovers about who his brother really is, the less he likes him, yet this fallout of brotherly admiration barely registers because, like so many other details, the screenplay really doesn’t care. Still, in those brief moments near the conclusion when Tom confronts Craig, the young Mr. Hawke convinces.

You, astute reader, are likely wondering why I, idiot reviewer, am critiquing a movie from 1991 for a series purporting to flash back to the 1980s. Well, as it turned out, this was not simply because “Mystery Date” was released right in that murky middle ground where the previous decade is still going on in the new one, but because in Mr. Hawke’s youthful face, conspicuously minus a goatee and absent any sense of brooding, the last vestiges of 1980s teen movies can be found. Those movies were often make-believe, not unlike that shining city on a hill, where nights with Chinese gangsters hot on your trail would still somehow always end up okay. Why you can almost see the Ethan Hawke of a few years later watching “Mystery Date”, taking a drag from his cigarette and remarking “What a bunch of bullshit.”

A Thing I Wrote About Stuff

This past weekend was a mournful one. Bill Nunn, the man who gave life to Radio Raheem, the iconic character of Spike Lee’s ferocious, seminal “Do the Right Thing”, who recited the majestic monologue about love ko’ing hate, which seems that much more massive in America 2016, died at age 63 from leukemia. Then an ascending Major League Baseball pitcher, Jose Fernandez, who made a hair-raising defection from Cuba to America, perished in a boating accident. I confess I am not a connoisseur of baseball and so I really only knew Mr. Fernandez’s name vaguely, but in reading about him afterwards and learning of his transcendent talent it was hard not to see this terribly untimely passing in the same light as Len Bias. Those two deaths were so wrenching it was easy to overlook Stanley Dural Jr., Buckwheat Zydeco himself, who passed away from lung cancer. In the New York Times Jon Pareles wrote that “Mr. Dural became the face of zydeco for many listeners far beyond the music’s Gulf Coast regional circuit” and that was certainly true for me. I had no idea what Zydeco was until a couple decades and a few years ago I stumbled upon a Mountain Stage recording of my dad’s that featured Buckwheat Zydeco and I thought “What is this? I like this.”

All this loss of life then was rattling around in my head as I went to see David Rabe’s new play “Visiting Edna” at Steppenwolf Theater here in Chicago on Sunday night. It centers on Edna (Debra Monk), ravaged by cancer, and her son Andrew (Ian Barford) who comes home to visit for what he does not necessarily know will be the last time. It can be a heavy play, with Edna’s cancer literalized in the form of an actor (Tim Hopper) who haunts the edges and inserts himself into the proceedings, a vicious evocation of how cancer gets personal. Yet Rabe does not overly wallow in the dire circumstances. Indeed, there emerges a kind of benign monotony in the conversations and interactions between mother and son as they attempt to find little ways to connect and as we come to realize that over the years these two missed so many attempts at these sorts of connections.

Memories hang over the entire play. There is a moment when mother and son take a day trip to another city to see a specialist and upon returning they explain how it went via a telephone call, the mother and son taking turns talking to a family friend, like it’s an old Bob Newhart Show bit. And what emerges is just how much mother and son enjoyed themselves. It hardly matters whether the specialist they saw can make any difference; the trip itself was the thing, this sudden flash, and how that is something the son realizes he will cling to, this sudden memory that is made. Will this memory be enough to sustain him? The play refrains from saying.

I thought about that when I came home and discovered that Arnold Palmer had died. Just as I am not a connoisseur of baseball, I am not an aficionado of golf, but you don’t have to be an aficionado of golf to know Arnold Palmer. How often do you have two Wikipedia entries bearing your name, one for yourself, one for the drink that borrowed your moniker? Heck, I’m pretty sure I knew Arnold Palmer first as the guy in the Hertz commercial opposite O.J. Simpson. That commercial inevitably popped up in Brett Morgen’s ESPN documentary “June 17, 1994”, a sensational rumination that forewent any kind of narration to instead chronicle the events of the titular day, which included, though were not limited to, the infamous O.J. Simpson bronco chase and Arnold Palmer’s final round at the U.S. Open. The latter is a solemnly melancholy affair, where the past-his-prime Palmer is left to chip haplessly over greens and putt way past holes. It is painful to witness because even if you don’t understand golf the emitted emotional torture is universal.

But there is a moment in “June 17, 1994”, in the midst of all this slow-moving heartbreak, when Morgen cuts from 1994 Palmer in mid-swing to 1953 in Palmer in mid-swing. It is a beautifully weird moment, this sudden flashing back to the past, where Palmer is so full of joy, overflowing with golfing genius. In that grainy black & white footage it looks so distant even as it feels so alive, the strange paradox of all memories, I suppose, where it is difficult to really know if What Happened Back Then is any consolation for What Is Going On Right Now. And then, as quickly as they drop in, those monochromatic memories dissipate, leaving us once again in the movie’s present with Palmer’s current struggle. By forgoing voiceover and, by extension, forgoing explanations of any kind Morgen leaves it up to us, just as Rabe leaves it to us, which feels less like a copout than the stone cold truth. They are either/or, perhaps, all the time. Good memories are worth so much, but somehow never quite enough.

Dissecting a Scene from L.A. Confidential

I am not a fan of the end of “L.A. Confidential.” I have made this well-known over the years, typically in lockstep with an argument about how “Titanic” did deserve the 1997 Best Picture Oscar, yes, absolutely, thank you very much, move along. The end of “L.A. Confidential”, and I’m talking about the post-Victory Motel shootout scenes here, is a near abomination, and one that oddly, or perhaps not, often goes unmentioned in discussions about the movie, like no one wants to acknowledge the damage it renders to all the wondrous material preceding it. William Goldman wrote the definitive takedown of the end, how it works both sides of the street, opting for cushy Hollywood-isms when everything preceding it told us that evil walked the earth. But I apologize. Here I am, in the wake of Curtis Hanson’s passing last week at the age of 71, going on about the end again. And that’s not what I want to do. Because as much I bellyache about the end I never talk about how much I love the beginning!

I am not, mind you, talking about the opening montage, which I also love, with a voiceover from Danny DeVito’s Sid Hudgens, publisher of a local gossip rag, and which Hanson puts together like a newsreel you might have been before a movie back in the day. No, I’m talking about the first scene after that montage, the introduction to Russell Crowe’s officer Bud White. I actually thought about these beginning scenes after “Independence Day Resurgence”, weird as that may sound, because “IDR”, like so many modern blockbusters that just pass out eye candy willy nilly, haven’t even the foggiest of basic storytelling, failing to even properly, let alone entertainingly, introduce main characters. “L.A. Confidential’s” introduction of Bud White is a master class.

Let’s break it down.

This is the first shot, a close-up of Bud White sitting in his squad car, and boy is it always gutsy to forgo a nice, easy establishing shot to open your movie for a close-up instead. And it is crucial that Hanson does this because he is making plain from frame one that while the movie will be rather narrative heavy, it is nonetheless principally about the people.

This is what is in Bud White’s line of vision. It is a domestic dispute. And the house, all lit up for Christmas, provides the perfect ironic framing.

Hanson cuts back to the squad car, a wider shot this time so we can see Bud’s partner, Dick Stensland (Graham Beckel), sitting in the backseat. And that he is in the backseat is a wonderful detail because it sort of evokes the idea that Stensland, who quickly turns out to be maybe be not so nice, is a perp.

(He is also drinking on the job.)

White calls in the dispute. “Have central send a prowler to 4216 Evergreen. Parole violation. Assault arising from a family dispute. We won’t be here. They’ll see him.”  

At this last line, Stensland laughs. He knows how his partner do.

Indeed, White gets outta the car with all kind of purpose and marches across the lawn.

As he does, something catches his eye.

That something is the Santa and his Reindeer display up on the roof.

White grabs the display’s electrical chord and yanks it with a righteous fury.

The display comes tumbling down...

...and lands with a rickety thud on the front walk.

The Wife Beater (Allan Graf), which is how he is billed in the script, inside hears this and literally tosses his wife aside like a rag doll.

White settles into wait and Crowe has him assume this look that is kinda like the look Craig Bierko as Max Baer gave Crowe when Crowe was James Braddock.

The guy on parole appears at the door. Hanson keeps White in the frame. A showdown looms.

And Stensland eagerly leans forward, like a spectator ringside on the edge of his seat.

“Who the hell are you?”

“The ghost of Christmas past.” And I love how Crowe has White pace to his right, winding up to throw down. 

Then White moves in, workmanlike, and slices half of the wife beater out of the frame, cutting him, shall we say, down to size.

Punches him.

Throws him into the bushes.

Cuffs him to the front stoop railing.

The violent frenzy in White’s eyes as he warns the Wife Beater of what will happen if he touches his wife again.

And then the wife and the wife beater get a moment alone, and you can see her shock transforming into “Yeah, you reap what you sow.” 

And for as much rage as he contained just instants ago, White calms right down, asks her if she has somewhere she can stay.

And then - and this is my favorite part - as she turns to go, he lifts up the electrical chord to the lighted display so she can pass below it, like he’s laying his topcoat over a puddle, this prop that was just implemented to provoke hostility now utilized in a moment of tenderness.

“Merry Christmas,” she says to White.

“Merry Christmas, ma’am,” he says, earnestly, foretellng a character whose monotone bursts of aggression come from a place of  kindly concern.  

High Rise

The titular “High Rise” of Ben Wheatley’s film is some sort of gleaming futuristic skyscraper, forty stories high, but jutting out at the top, like an inverted 55 Central Park West (“Spook central”) if it occupied an eerily empty space akin to Nakatomi Plaza and was populated with a gaggle of Swinging 60s Londoners at a massive 70s Key Party. If that sounds like a batshit descriptor, well, “High Rise” is something of a batshit movie, one that makes its apocalyptic overtones clear from the first frames which find its main character, Dr. Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston), covered in blood and roasting dead husky on a spit on an otherwise pristine balcony. The movie then flashes back five days, chronicling just how the High Rise devolves into this chaos. Well, “chronicling” is too strong a word. “High Rise” might be based on J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel, which I have not read, but there is not a sturdy structure here to the narrative so much as a jarring submersion, ready or not, into the movie’s extremely macabre world. And once you are submersed, rest assured, there is no coming back up for air; this is an unrelenting deep dive into the worst the world has to offer.

Laing arrives as a new tenant on the middle floor, a floor below beguiling Charlotte Melville (Sienna Miller), and several floors above the manically intense Richard Wilder (Luke Evans) and his pregnant wife Helen (Elisabeth Moss). There is something of a hierarchy here, as one might suspect, with the higher floors belonging to the rich & famous and the lower floors belonging to the commoners. As clear as the delineations in “High Rise” sound, however, Wheatley has no interest in providing a formal floor plan presentation, just as he forgoes a convenient breakdown of the myriad rules and regulations apparently pertaining to different levels. Instead we get our bearings through the disparities by way of images, where barely illuminated lower-level hallways in which a fed-up janitor ceaselessly roams comes to resemble the furnace rooms of the S.S. Titanic while an 18th century costume party on some higher floor is only missing a scene where someone tells everyone on the first floor to eat cake.

Similarly the express purpose for the separation of classes is never really explained. Laing is called to a meeting with the building’s Architect (Jeremy Irons), who keeps a penthouse on the top floor with a garden so spacious it has room for his wife’s horse, but the Architect never explains his motivations beyond broad generalizations. He intends it as “a crucible for change” but never defines the “change” he hopes for or how the “crucible” will bring it about. Laing’s reasons for moving into the building are even more unclear. “An investment for the future,” he says, whatever that means, and the future becomes of little consequence once the present disintegrates into unholy chaos.

There are parallels here to Bong Joon-ho’s 2014 film “Snowpiercer”, set on a supertrain, where the poor were huddled near the caboose while the rich gallivanted up near the engine. But “Snowpiercer” centered around an uprising of sorts and there is not so much an uprising in “High Rise” as a collapse into a complete anarchy, and the film willingly gives itself over to that anarchy too. Any commentary on class warfare that it was only half-heartedly peddled to begin with, or insight into how the heartz of men, rich or poor, is pretty much the same when the lights go out, falls by the wayside in the name of unremitting lewd, morbid montages of the High Rise unhinghed, imagining Armageddon as something akin to a “Wolf of Wall Street”-ish coke-fueled pool party. It’s orgiastic if stylistic nihilism. I did not exactly enjoy it; I also could not bring myself to look away.

The Fits

When movie characters come of age cinematically it is typically in clear-cut narrative terms, with a stand that must be taken, or a quest that must be fulfilled, accompanied by a scene of obvious triumph that leaves no doubt of the protagonist’s emergence into adulthood. And in a way, Anna Rose Holmer’s directorial debut “The Fits” is no different. This is a coming of age in film, in which 11 year old Toni (Royalty Hightower), a tomboy pitched between the world of guys and girls, departs childhood and crosses the threshold of adolescence. But then, those are just story checkpoints, and “The Fits” is so much more than them. After all, when you look back at adolescence from afar, you know full well that it’s never so easy or obvious. The narrative of real life often feels less real than otherworldly, like some mysterious force has conscripted your body for purposes beyond your comprehension, reluctantly carrying you along in its unstoppable drift. Holmer, almost unbelievably, captures that sensation in this movie that barely runs 70 minutes yet still feels enormous.

Virtually all the action takes place in a Cincinnati community center that appears to essentially be governed by the many kids that inhabit its multiple levels. No adults are seen in “The Fits” and that’s crucial; this community center is a little society that the kids, unbeknownst perhaps even to them, have created for themselves. And Toni is forced to navigate it without adult guidance. Yes, her older brother works at the center, and yes, he is cordial and caring to his little sister, and even occasionally dispenses small doses of advice, but growing boys can’t fully grasp what it means to be a growing girl. And so even as Toni begins the movie almost exclusively in the presence of boys, shadow boxing and sparring in boxing ring, she flirts with another level, literally and figuratively.

Upstairs from the boxing ring Toni catches a glimpse of a few older girls performing in a dance troupe, the Lionesses. Toni joins the troupe, along with a few friends, enduring their training rigors, . These older girls, who gossip and run through the halls screaming, don’t seem like Toni, and Toni often seems wary of them, but she also seems curious about their world. Hightower is a first time performer and so she might not have the finer points of emoting down pat, but her tentative glances at the Lionesses are for real. She is not, however, as tentative in trying to get down the dance moves of the troupe, which she does incessantly, slowly getting better, even if the precise moves themselves ultimately become of less importance than the mere act of moving. Toni is frequently moving, often in harmony with cinematographer Paul Yee’s camera, which explores the seeming vastness of this community center, and even trails Toni outside, where she still cannot stop moving as she runs stairs on a freeway overpass.

In moments when Ton is not moving, the camera settles down to examine her in close-up, straight-on shots, as if burrowing into her conscious. It is unsettling, a feeling underscored by the pervasive music score, deep and droning, feeling more akin to a horror movie. And the turn “The Fits” takes as it progresses feels like something cribbed from a horror movie, as so many girls around Toni suffer seizures and fainting spells. It is attributed to tainted water, but only obliquely, and is never really followed up on. The why and the how, as the movie’s almost impenetrable structure alludes to, are of little interest to Holmer. She is interested in something more lyrical, and despite the forebodingness that creeps into this movie as it progresses, that’s what she achieves – something lyrical. This is particularly true in the movie’s closing passages, where The Fits reveal themselves as something like a rite of passage. And as such, their innate terror, the “What Is Happening?” sensation parallels the idea of them as a rite of passage perfectly. Because what is passage into the realm of adolescence if not terrifying?

Friday's Old Fashioned: Into the Night (1985)

Ed Okin (Jeff Goldlbum) hates his job, his marriage is stagnant and he can’t sleep. Of course, the requisite irony is that while he can’t literally get to sleep, he can’t figuratively wake up, spiritually unable to arouse himself from the soul-crushing slumber into which he has apparently unintentionally fallen, and so if he catches a few z’s then perhaps he can rise and shine. The other irony, however, is a movie that yearns to spur its main character to life is oddly, relentlessly, agonizingly lifeless, assuming the zombie-ish air of its main character. Given that “Into the Night” stretches out across two surreal Los Angeles nights and includes all manner of outlandish encounters, it is tempting to compare John Landis’s film to the operatically madcap “After Hours.” But “Into the Night” is not operatic; it is opera as filtered through a white noise machine.

Counseled by a co-worker, played by Dan Aykroyd, foreshadowing a spate of cameos we will address momentarily, to go to Las Vegas to blow off some steam, Ed finds himself driving to LAX in the dead of the night where, as the fates dictate, a jewel smuggler named Diana (Michelle Pfeiffer) winds up in his car. She is being pursued by four Iranians who want the six necessarily precious emeralds she has in her possession. It’s obvious to say that hijinks ensue, of course, but the hijinks here are as uncreative as they are strangely real, as throats are graphically slashed and walls are inundated with blood when brains are blown out for no other reason, it seems, than shock value.

Rather than train his focus on rendering the various escapades themselves as humorous, Landis is oddly committed to cameos. While I am unwilling to do the research to know for sure, it is possible that “Into the Night” has the most cameos in movie history. There are so many you quickly become inured to them. I have no idea what they are meant to convey other than, hey, John Landis got to hang out with some friends on the set. Which is completely cool, of course, because I have long championed “Ocean’s Twelve” as an example of a bunch of stars getting together on a movie set to have a good time, except that those stars genuinely look like they are having a good time. No one in “Into the Night” looks as if they are having a particularly good time. Jim Henson shows up in “Into the Night” to field a phone call and Amy Heckerling serves ice cream at a diner and David Cronenberg is Ed’s boss and so what? Are we supposed to be awed because they are Jim Henson and Amy Heckerling and David Cronenberg? What else? Anything? Nothing? Nothing.

Jeff Goldblum, of course, is best when he is allowed to operate amidst so much craziness and react to it, whether dinosaurs have run amok or aliens have invaded earth. Theoretically that’s what should be happening in “Into the Night” except that Goldblum has nothing much to react to. All the craziness around him is tamped down and un-realized. Diana’s emeralds, it turns out, come from a Persian king’s scepter but never has such a plot point been rendered so run of the mill. It’s a bad sign when the movie’s many transitional scenes, often taking place in ever changing vehicles, as Goldblum and Pfeiffer go from place to place are filled with more oomph than the sequences actually meant as the heart of the thing. The soundtrack, conjured up by Ira Newborn, unexpectedly brilliantly melds the sort of 80s smoky neon synth with the B.B. King’s Lucille, and so scenes that are basically filler become unexpectedly compelling.

The only element of “Into the Night” that can match the soundtrack is David Bowie, though, sadly, he merely turns up for two scenes as a British hitman. His devious grin alone packs more punch than all of the other cameos combined, and the little moment where he gleefully puts a gun in Ed’s mouth and then lifts the gun, prompting Ed to raise his head in unison, is just a little bit of actorly business, yes, but the kind with a purpose, giving Goldblum something to play to, that is lacking pretty much everywhere else. Bowie adds so much spice that I kept expecting his character to turn up at the refresh-the-clock-on-my-phone conclusion, hoping he would drop in from an air duct, or rise through a trap door in the floor. It’s possible that his character had been killed off in an earlier scene but I realized, frankly, I couldn’t remember. It’s also possible the movie just glossed over that plot point, and it’s also possible my eyes were just glazed over and I missed it.

“Into the Night” is so utterly hapless, and so strangely not beholden to its originating plot point of Ed needing to spiritually wake up, that I at some point I also became convinced this whole slapdash cinematic nonentity would end with Ed waking up in bed, realizing it was All Just A Dream. No such luck. If anything, Ed is probably still asleep, even now, thirty-one years later, his alarm clock failing to go off, still dreaming in 80s neon, still wishing he could be having a more lively dream.

5 Almost Famous Roles Michael Shannon Could Have Auditioned For

In a recent interview with Vanity Fair Michael Shannon explained that he was anti-acting coach on account of a less than stellar experience he underwent with an acting coach in advance of auditioning for Cameron Crowe's seminal rock 'n' roll opus "Almost Famous." What interests me there is not the anti-acting coach stance since nearly all evidence Mr. Shannon has so far submitted would heartily suggest he does not need one, but the fact that he auditioned for a role in "Almost Famous." This got me to thinking, because of my God of course it did, about what role could Michael Shannon have auditioned for in "Almost Famous." A few possibilities:

Russell Hammond

I'm pretty sure that Michael Shannon did not audition for Russell Hammond. 2000-era Michael Shannon did not have the spot in the public eye afforded to 2016-era Michael Shannon. Nevertheless, I find it fascinating to think about Shannon taking the role of self-professed "golden god" guitar hero Russell Hammond, and not, actually, because envisioning Michael Shannon give the "I am a golden god!" speech from a fan's Wichita rooftop sorta blows my mind. No, it's because I imagine Shannon going in a different direction altogether. It's been said that Russell Hammond was based on Glenn Frey, but I imagine Michael Shannon playing Russell Hammond more like Buckethead.

Angry Promoter

Marc Maron's one scene walk off as a concert promoter who gets into a heated argument with Stillwater's manager (Noah Taylor) is pretty memorable in its own right. But even when Maron is cursing and hollering at Taylor, his voice maintains its innate level of comicality, and so it is entertaining (hugely so) more than menacing. But think if Michael Shannon was the Angry Promoter. Suddenly this scene becomes something else. Suddenly the humor is replaced by tension. Suddenly Shannon, in the middle of the scene, ditches the golf cart his character is supposed to be riding and just runs, runs like a Frankenstein monster would, and probably catches the bus, and rips it to shreds with his bare hands.

Dennis Hope

I cannot really imagine Michael Shannon playing Dennis Hope, the band's professional, money-making manager who comes aboard halfway through, if only because it's sort of impossible to imagine Michael Shannon playing a Jimmy Fallon role. And I'm not sure that Dennis Hope would have been right for someone who was not a Jimmy Fallon type since Dennis Hope is a very specific type. And so I like imagining Michael Shannon, in forced accordance with this acting coach he apparently hated, trying to squeeze a Jimmy Fallon-ish energy out of himself in that audition and failing miserably.

Darryl

Darryl is the boyfriend of William's sister, Anita, who is only glimpsed briefly near the beginning as he ferries her off to become a stewardess. But there is a famous deleted scene, one that Cameron Crowe says only failed to make the movie because he could not secure the rights to the song, and it involves William sitting his Mom, and a few of his teachers who want to encourage his Mom to let him go on the road with Stillwater, and Darryl, who is there for "moral support", to play "Stairway to Heaven" in its literal entirety to demonstrate "blazing intellectual pursuits." As they listen, Darryl struggles to restrain his inner musical spirit, lightly air drumming, and then really air drumming, and then air guitaring, induling his inner rock 'n' roller right there for all to see. And look, Jesse Caron is just fine here. But..... Imagine Michael Shannon playing a game of Guitar Hero. I imagine something close to Marty McFly going berserk at the end of his "Johnny B. Goode" cover, but more unnerving, and Cameron Crowe and Casting Director Gail Levin sitting there with their hands over their ears.

Larry Fellows

Larry Fellows, bassist of Stillwater, really does not have much to do, though he at least gets to occasionally speak, unlike the drummer, and so it retroactively would have been something else for Stillwater to have Billy Crudup, Jason Lee and Michael Shannon. But that non-existent trivia interests me less than imagining what Shannon could have done with the line "I'm just hungry, man. Let's just go out and find some barbecue or something."

A Celebration of Headphones in the Movies

There was an article (pointedly not linking) a little while back that blew up the Interwebs in which a mid-level Men’s Rights Activists explained in great detail how a Man should communicate with a Woman with whom he finds himself smitten when that Woman is in public but, alas, wearing headphones. Women, rightly, were incensed since a fleet of Romeo-less goobers telling them to take off their headphones to talk about doing the Wiota Stampede, “which is probably the toughest 10K Obstacle Course in the Midwest, though I don’t really like to brag, I just like to stay in shape”, as a means to impart their rank Alpha Dog musk is, if not the very last thing women need, among the last things women need. And while every woman in the world wearing headphones should absolutely, unquestionably be left alone, this written word garbage barge spoke to the broader Headphone Culture too. Because there is also the anti-P.C. contingent constantly whining on Twitter about how political correctness is more dangerous than nuclear fission and how safe spaces will probably, in the end, kill us all. But let me tell you, the area between your ears and your headphones is a safe space that no Men’s Right Activist, anti-P.C. chest-beater or human being period should violate.

Headphones, after all, provide oft-needed solace, from the world around you, from the world within you. Like Psalm 40:3 said, “He put a new song in my headphones.” Okay, all right, please, stop yelling at me, Psalm 40:3 did not say that, I know, and I apologize for re-arranging words in the Bible but that’s only because in Biblical times they didn’t have headphones, see. Man, if Paul had headphones he would’ve put down his quill and handed over some headphones to someone who needed some consolation and said “You gotta hear this one song – it’ll change your life, I swear” and then played “Sea Stories” by Sturgill Simpson.

I was thinking about this when Apple, those philanthropic crusaders, chose to radicalize their vaunted iPhone 7 by removing the headphone jack. When asked why they did this, Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller, who sort of resembles a dude who back in the day might have asked a comely female to take off her headphones cuz he had some truth bombs to espouse, replied “Courage”, which made me think of Nadia Comaneci wondering “if courage is just another word for desperation”, not that Apple is desperate for your bucks because they made their wireless earbuds available for $1,999 a pop in lieu of headphones. And yes, you can still use headphones with your iPhone 7 so long as you buy an adaptor which connects to a connector which attaches to an attachment which plugs into a plug-in that’s portable and costs another $450. In other words, I sense the beginning of the end of headphones, which makes me sad, so sad. But rather than stay sad, let’s celebrate by remembering the good times.

A Celebration of Headphones in the Movies

It is difficult to begin our cinematic headphones reminiscence anywhere else but “Dazed and Confused” when, after the most eventful day of his young life, Mitch Kramer lays down, slips on his headphones, cranks Foghat, closes his eyes, and uses music to drift into memories.

No director is better equipped to capture beautiful melancholy on camera than Sofia Coppola and in “Lost in Translation” she does just that with a few shots of ScarJo retreating into over-the-ear soundscapes. (See also: this blog’s banner.)

Headphones are, of course, integral to the existence of Rob Gordon in “High Fidelity”, tethering him to the music spirit world where he prefers to exist. Which is what makes the opening moments so powerful when his girlfriend Laura, about to walk out on him, unplugs his headphones with a flourish, severing that connection.

“Oh, you know, strikes and gutters, ups and downs.”

The Power of Headphones, even those rickety numbers from the Golden Age of Radio Shack, is so aptly displayed in Marty McFly suddenly becoming totally unconcerned about being late for school while filling his ears with “The Power of Love.”

My beloved electropop diva Little Boots has this fantastic track where she spins the virtues of wearing headphones to the club and it is what I thought of when I saw this blessed shot from “Begin Again”, where the headphones provide connection even as they push the rest of the mean old world away.

One of the 2.2 million reasons “Summer Rental” continues to endure in my mind is Kerri Green wearing those elephantine headphones throughout, as kids do on vacations, where even if they are having a good time, they are still convinced their parents are being a drag, and try to melodically get away from their getaway.

You can barely see it, but there, in the back of the frame, Omar Epps has his headphones plastered to his ears and is completely lost in the rhythm, oblivious to the rest of his blithering pals.  

“Music can be such a revelation / Dancing around you feel the sweet sensation”

that feeling when some moron woke you up on a Transatlantic flight while you were blissfully zoned out to Thievery Corporation

Even our elders with deadly diseases gotta close off for a little while and get their groove on. Otherwise, what’s the point?

When first we meet “A Serious Man’s” Danny in Hebrew school, he is having his earphones, piping in Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love” confiscated. Later, when he finally confronts imposing Senior Rabbi Marshak, the Rabbi returns Danny’s radio, and does so by quoting “Somebody to Love.” “When the truth is found to be lies. And all the hope within you dies. Then what?” What indeed? “A Serious Man” has a lot of thoughts on the matter. Maybe you do too. I’ll just be like my boy Danny and meet this “Then what?” impending storm by just putting on my earphones. Whattup, existensial crisis?

    

You didn’t think I’d forget, did you? This one is dedicated to all the anti-emotionalists fronting so hard in their Twitter profile pics.