Remembering John Candy

When I think of the late John Candy I think of the comedy, of course, and how my mom and my sister and I would rent his comedies, regardless of their critical acumen, and watch them over and over, laughing and laughing. But when I think of the late John Candy I also think of the sadness he let permeate those comic roles. Sometimes the director could sense that sadness and tap into it, sometimes Candy’s co-stars would sense it and play off it, but just as often Candy was left to bring that sadness on his own, to impart melancholic depth where there was none. I have written more about “Summer Rental” than anyone probably should, but I will cherish that 1985 movie to infinity for how Candy, after an initial half-hour of hit-or-miss hijinks, nimbly turns the part of a discouraged father into one whose spirit is quietly lifted. It’s just a dumb comedy, but Candy ensures that it’s not just a dumb comedy at all.

I wonder if John Candy’s now adult children, Jen and Chris, see the same thing in the role of “Summer Rental’s” Jack Chester. They don’t mention it in their recent interview with Ryan Parker for The Hollywood Reporter, timed to coincide with what would have been their father’s 66th birthday today, and which got me to thinking about Candy. But Jen and Chris do mention that for all the hilarity their father could espouse on screen, he was just as adept at conveying vulnerability. It never mattered how ridiculous or blandly conceived the role might have been – he could always extract extra layers. Consider Cinema Romantico’s beloved “Cool Runnings.” It was a Disney product about the Jamaican bobsled team, yet it introduced Candy’s disgraced coach Irv Blitzer alone at a bar hopelessly gambling on horse races and smashing a radio to bits when he loses. It’s played for laughs, as most of the movie is, but Candy lets real burned out disappointment and rage register in these moments and throughout. Indeed, twist his introductory sequence just one degree, add a bluesy piano instead of the up tempo steel drums, and could just as easily look like the beginnings of a Caribbean noir.

There is, I presume, a lot of psychological baggage to unpack about why Candy felt the need to make so many people laugh and why he subsequently took on less than stellar comic parts in less than stellar films rather than challenging himself to seek out true dark roles. The reasoning proffered in Martin Knelman’s unauthorized 1996 biography is as tepidly transparent as the book’s title: “Laughing on the Outside.” This theory has popped up in another places too, like the story Roger Ebert relayed in his Great Movies critique of “Planes, Trains and Automobiles”, where he happened upon Candy at a bar, alone and drinking and down on himself, for trying too hard to make people laugh, Ebert reckoned.

If you take that diagnosis as gospel, it becomes easy to let yourself see it in his roles, like the “The Great Outdoors” when, at the behest of family and friends, he imbibes The Old 96er, an entire 96 ounce beef steak. Was there a more evocative blurring of the lines in Candy’s canon than this, a man going all out to his absolute detriment just to ensure that everyone around him was pleased? Perhaps that’s too simplistic, or too much conjecturing, to assume that Candy enacted his own struggles in his acting. Then again, Jen does say in the interview that her dad “brought a little bit of himself to all his characters.”

So maybe the immortal Del Griffith of  “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” really was, as Ebert posited, founded on the essential nature of its actors, where Del was as much a Canadian comic as a shower ring salesman seeing as how (over) eager he was to please. Of course, Del could not help but wreck the friendship he makes with salesman Neal Page (Steve Martin) whereas Candy himself never did wreck any of his friendships with us at the movies. He did not even wreck that friendship in, say, the fairly woebegone “Canadian Bacon”, a really good idea just not executed right, but which I watched for the first time in my University of Iowa dorm room, where I often felt low, and where merely seeing John Candy do John Candy things brightened my mood.

That’s why today on Halloween I find myself thinking not of horror but of “Who’s Harry Crumb?” It’s the sort of movie that can easily be picked apart, either by crude means in saying it’s not that funny or more wannabe erudite means in saying something like the film is far too reliant on putting Candy in costumes and not really doing anything with them, or perhaps classifying it as Candy’s unsuccessful attempt at fashioning his own “Naked Gun.” Still, a la “Summer Rental”, Candy found something in the dodgy script and italicized it.

If “The Naked Gun’s” Frank Drebin was oblivious about everything, Candy’s Crumb remained oblivious to his own sleuthing limitations even as he was cognizant enough to know that the neglected daughter, Nikki (Shawnee Smith), of the affluent family he was helping was neglected. He welcomed her assistance as they developed into an unlikely duo, and their onscreen dynamic, as warm as it was comic, became the film’s defining feature and has always made me think of Candy himself. He reached out to his audiences the way Crumb reached out to Nikki and we were all always better for it.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Dave (1993)

In Ivan Reitman’s “Dave” Kevin Kline plays dual roles as the titular character, Dave Kovic, head of a temp agency in Washington D.C., and Bill Mitchell, President of the United States. The former, it just so happens, looks exactly like the latter, and so when the latter suffers a debilitating stroke, a series of convenient, devious shenanigans take place so that the former becomes temporary stand-in as POTUS. The binary opposition between the two men is blatant. Bill is your requisite fictional politician, unscrupulous, unfaithful and irredeemable. Dave is affable to the bone, so much so that if you looked up the definition of “good guy” in the dictionary you would find, well, obviously. In fact, you might even wonder why he resides in D.C., that den of governmental vipers. He seems more cut out for Pleasantville. He rides a bike, sings show tunes, and the closest he gets to vice is drinking a Budweiser™. If Bill Mitchell is all faults, Dave Kovic is entirely faultless, so picture-perfect he even gets a Hero Shot at the end complete with a mist he can walk off into. It’s almost too much.

Ah hell, that Hero Shot probably is too much, but so what? Look, “A Man Watches A Movie And He Must Admit He Is……yada, yada” and I re-watched “Dave” for the first time in a long time in advance of America’s second Presidential debate when a Vulgar Talking Yam (coinage: Charles Pierce) turned the proceedings into a shameless circus where the three rings were occupied by his narcissism, paranoia and crudeness. Therefore I was ripe for Ivan Reitman’s (over)dose of All-American sentimentality and conspicuous exercise in civics.

Reitman’s film could have been a simple comedy, an ordinary joe dave masquerading as President, using the White House bowling alley, placing absurd orders to 1600’s Pennsylvania chef, getting in all sorts of politically incorrect capers with visiting foreign dignitaries, like a democratic “King Ralph.” There was a time Reitman might’ve used this set-up to implement anarchy. After all, in his seminal “Ghostbusters” the Environmental Protection Agency was the bad guy. I cannot imagine even for a second the EPA being a bad guy in “Dave”. The chief villain, after all, is chief of staff Bob Alexander (Frank Langella), who is as one note as Dave, belittling homeless shelters, which Dave becomes desperate to rescue when he realizes they are the pet cause of the estranged first lady, Ellen (Sigourney Weaver).

So Dave becomes a polite warrior, battling Bob and outfoxing him, enlisting his accountant pal (Charles Grodin, whose harried dishevelment is hilarious) and the isolated first lady in his cause to oust the corrupt chief of staff and get the Vice President (Ben Kingsley) into the Oval Office instead. This battle is admittedly simplistic. I mean, if only a little addition and subtraction on a legal pad really could completely re-arrange the budget and turn this country around, and Dave’s promise to put into effect a vague plan that will provide a job for every American is less Hillary than Trump, a slogan told in buzzwords. The closest the film gets to any kind of complexity is in the performance of Kevin Dunn as Alan Reed, the communications director, who allays himself with Bob, even as Dunn allows hints of guilt to quietly emerge before his resistance blooms in full and he takes a stand, the most moving moment in the picture because it feels like the most earned.

Still, even for the hoariness of the themes, there is simultaneously a welcoming professionalism to the screenplay, penned by Gary Ross, in the way that it skillfully builds set-ups and payoffs and carves out personality for even minor characters, like Ving Rhames’s dutiful secret service agent, who, as it happens, gets perhaps the best set-up and payoff in the film. And I could not help but note the irony of that efficiency manifesting itself in a film about the inner-workings of Washington, where the political system can seem so gummed up, so broken down, so absent new parts. If “Dave” is totally telegraphed, you still can’t help but admire its solid construction.

(Over) Speculating on Kylie Minogue's Role in Flammable Children

So many in the film blogosphere were once again recently set into an uproar by the latest “Rogue One” trailer, scouring the edge and background of every frame to pick out easter eggs, or pouring over what was in the center of the frame to speculate on how this connects to that and what this character is doing in relation to that character and whether x is still y after it has been obliterated by an Ion cannon, etc. This might be my cue to make fun, to lob insults, to fire off tweets about this dumbing down of movie discourse, or some such. But to do so would make a hypocrite. It would make me a hypocrite not because I have any interest in speculating on the deeper meaning of the “Rouge One” trailer; it would make me a hypocrite because I have a lot of interest in speculating on the deeper meaning of the recent photos snapped of universal empress Kylie Minogue on set of her latest film de cinema venture, Stephan Elliot’s “Flammable Children.”

A synopsis for “Flammable Children” at the site for the film’s distributor, WestEnd Films, explains: “Australia, 1975. The beach suburb of Dee Why is a place that revolves around surf mats, baby oil, boxed wine and the new miracle of Kentucky Fried Chicken. 14 year-old Jeff tries to find his feet in a world changing faster than his hormones, and deal with his crush on shy and sensitive girl-next-door Melly. When the beach town suddenly hits the spotlight after the body of a 200-ton whale is washed ashore, Jeff and Melly think it’s the biggest thing that ever happened in their lives.” That sounds all well and good, a little nostalgic, a little quirky, but promising. But then it gets really good. “Meanwhile, their eccentric parents are catching up with the sexual revolution that has also washed up on Australia’s beaches. And just like the decaying whale, it’s all about to go spectacularly wrong.” I mean, look at this photo that recently caught Kylie on set; that looks like everything going spectacularly wrong. That Kylie suggests Sigourney Weaver of “The Ice Storm” as Allison Janney of “The Way Way Back” wrapped up in the essence of Gena Rowlands of “A Woman Under the Influence” with subtle notes of Naomi Watts when she really dials up her peerless version of indignation.

I remember when my friend Daryl and I were talking about my theoretical Kylie roles for “San Andreas” and I realized that when I dream up parts for Kylie I unintentionally stifle any possibility of those parts possessing actual dimension because actual dimension suggests flaws and Kylie Minogue’s universal empressness suggests flawlessness. When I see Kylie I see angelic pop perfection, I do not see the doubts that must lurk inside, as they lurk inside all of us. Indeed, those doubts do lurk inside Kylie, as her brief indie period in the 90s showed, which was sandwiched between her more famous and prosperous bouts of unassailable disco pop positivism. And look, we Kylie-ites need that disco pop positivism. Her music washes the sins from our hands. Still, that does not mean we are unaware that she is human, that she puts on her gold hotpants one leg at a time just like the rest of us. We get it. We love to lose ourselves in her grooves so much that we cannot help but double over in pain when we hear her on the “Impossible Princess” opener “Too Far” when singing “Can I smash all of this open / Can I pass the hurt with a little pain / I wanna see all of it crumble.” I wanna see all of it crumble. Boy is that different from “Step Back In Time” Kylie expressing I want to funk.

Crumbling is what Kylie looks like she is doing in that photo. Aside from “Holy Motors”, where she was more Eliza Day than Impossible Princess, on screen Kylie has never been asked to do much of anything. This photo suggests less nothing and more something, and good for her, just so long as after she crumbles, she puts herself right back together again. We, the hapless, will always need Kylie of magical moonbeams and purifying exultation.

Why So Many Movies Get Fade Into You Wrong

I humbly submit that there is no sadder song than “Fade Into You” by Mazzy Star. Many people would disagree with this proclamation. My girlfriend would disagree with this proclamation. She has disagreed with this proclamation. This past March by girlfriend became consumed by a blogging alternative to March Madness basketball called March Sadness, a 64 song tournament created in order to determine the saddest song of The College Rock Years (1980-2001). And when she found out that I voted for “Fade Into You” over Joy Division’s “Atmosphere” in a 2nd round tilt, well, her disgust with me was palpable. Even so, I stand by my choice. Hope Sandoval’s voice is infused, as it always is, with that beautifully byzantine dreamy detachment and the guitar, as has been noted many times over, quotes Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”, which immediately gives away the game. You can’t homage “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” and sing praises to the wonder of love.

I thought about this when “Fade Into You” popped up in Andrea Arnold’s soundtrack heavy “American Honey.” Sure enough, it was used to compliment a love scene between the characters of Sasha Lane and Shia LaBeouf. And even if their romance is not exactly your typical rom com du jour, there were other melancholic points in the movie where Mazzy Star would have made a better sonic ally than the one Arnold chose. That’s usually the way of it. Go down the list, from “The To Do List” to “End of the Watch” and it’s underscoring love. That’s why when Vulture a couple years ago labeled “Fade Into You” as the most overused song in movies, I was confused. I don’t think it’s overused; I think it’s misused.

You know who understood “Fade Into You?” Paul Verhoeven understood “Fade Into You.” His “Starship Troopers” (1997), the adaptation of Robert Heinlen’s novel, was a raging war satire, but it was also, at points, a soap opera played so straight it burned like comic acid. Main character Johnny Rico has eyes for Carmen Ibanez. But Carmen Ibanez seems to have eyes for Zander Barcalow while Dizzy Flores seems to have eyes for Johnny Rico. Everyone’s in love with the wrong person. So, when this whole gang all meets up aboard some colossal spaceship somewhere deep in the cosmos and Johnny spies Carmen and everyone is making eyes at the one they love who does not love them back, feathers are bound to get ruffled.

This scene, with Mazzy Star quietly encroaching on the soundtrack, is just wonderful, something like a 1950s hop sock crossed with a Hallmark Channel romance but all slathered up with Paul Verhoeven’s patented vehement mania. You can watch it below.



And as the fists fly and the song is raised a few decibels on the soundtrack, it is hard not to think of Verhoeven once saying “I like putting certain aspects of American society under the magnifying glass and showing them for what they are.” Indeed. Here he takes “Fade Into You” and puts it under the magnifying class so that all the movie soundtrack artists can see the song for the infinite sorrow it contains, so that they can look at these people and see nothing, so that they can look at these people and see the truth, so that they can see this song for the sandcastles washing away into the sand by darkening sky of Hope Sandoval’s voice it is.

“Fade Into You” is not a song for loving; “Fade Into You” is a song for fighting.

Little Sister

Centered on a young nun, Colleen (Addison Timlin), about to take her vows only to suddenly be summoned to square with her family history, Zach Clark’s “Little Sister” suggests an infinitely quirkier “Ida”, just without the monochrome and squared off aspect ratio, and with a much sunnier disposition despite its Goth aesthetic. “Ida” was set in 1960s Poland, in the aftermath of its communist takeover, a country’s struggle with its past filtered through the prism of this one young woman’s journey. “Little Sister” sort of does this too, insistently, almost too insistently (ensuring an Obama/Biden bumper sticker is in the foreground of a frame might be overkill), set in the fall of 2008, in the run-up to the Hope that was Barack Obama’s election, meaning the film still lingers in and grapples with the residue of the Dubya era.

That era is emblemized in the presence of Jacob Lunsford (Keith Poulson), a soldier who has just returned from Iraq with his body and face horrifically scarred on account of an explosion. Struggling to re-adapt and locking himself away in the dark where he pounds out heavy metal beats on his drumset, Jacob’s mom Joni (Ally Sheedy), who prefers to lock herself away with booze and pills and weed, emails her semi-estranged 24 year old daughter Colleen, away at a Brooklyn convent, for help. In the midst of quietly questioning her own faith, Colleen asks her mother superior (Barbara Crampton) if she can take a brief leave. “It took God six days to create the universe,” says mother superior. “You should be able to get your act together in five.”

Jacob might be in an incredible pain but you wouldn’t necessarily know it on account of how Poulson approaches the role – that is, as someone completely withdrawn into his self. He’s never really angry; in fact, he’s exceedingly polite, just never able to communicate beyond a few basic words. This takes a toll on Tricia (Kristin Slaysman), his girlfriend, a small but vital character, who flirts with other men by light of the internet but only because the man she really loves, and willingly stays with, struggles to perform. It’s the doctrine of two movie truths, and it imbues most of “Little Sister”, including Timlin’s performance itself, where she is equally believable as a retired Goth and aspirant nun, conveying that for how superficially different these two lifestyles might appear there nonetheless is a similarity in how such lazy misconceptions can be attributed to either a nun’s habit or a Goth’s black.

As Colleen tries to unburden Jacob, it gradually becomes clear that the pivotal relationship is not, in fact, sister and brother but daughter and mother. Sheedy’s performance as Joni cuts a couple ways too, offering strained happiness that clearly masks depression and the depression itself, which at times can erupt into hysterical rage. Joni’s similarities to Sheedy’s most famous role – basket case Allison Reynolds of “Breakfast Club” fame – are overt, and it is not hard to imagine where Joni dressed up an adolescent Colleen in black and encouraged her to stick to the dark side of the street.

As a result, Colleen’s religious rebellion makes that much more sense, and even as she flirts with the aesthetics of her younger self, briefly dyeing her hair pink, hissing at strangers and indulging in a few old tunes, the character never completely gives in to nostalgia. It’s that rare movie where going home isn’t in and of itself the answer but the means to unlocking the answer and Clark does a superb job of allowing this to gradually emerge over the course of the entire five days rather than simply trotting out an A Ha! Moment. And it makes the film’s third act family Halloween costume party a sly evocation of the holiday’s original Christian intent, where Colleen disguises herself to evade the demons that would pull her back into her past life.

That is a really clever idea, but one partially undone as Joni laces their Halloween treats with hallucinogens and the party gets out of control, purportedly yielding epiphanies. This last ten minutes, however, feels rushed, typified in how at one moment Colleen can be inadvertently tripping so badly that she visualizes her car passenger as a giant bird, only in the next moment to come across not high at all. Clark tries to tie all the story strands together rather than leaving space for ellipsis, even going so far as to proffer a “One Year Later” wrap-up where everything’s peachy keen. A movie so committed to the dichotomy of light and darkness gives itself over to the light completely. “Little Sister” suddenly stops being itself and dresses up as something else.

American Honey

At over two and half a hours in length and with a narrative that feels like a roadmap scribbled on the back of a gas station receipt, Andrea Arnold’s “American Honey” feels as long and aimless as the journey undertaken by its eighteen year old main character, Star (Sasha Lane). It’s not a journey to nowhere, but neither is it a journey with a true ending point, mirroring the Let’s See Where This Goes fecklessness of youth. And while Star becomes intertwined with a small community of sorts, “American Honey” consistently remains a story told from her point of view, relayed by a camera affixed to her throughout, and usually in Arnold’s preferred narrow frames, where the landscape, beautiful thought it may occasionally be, is frequently shunted aside to keep us in Star’s headspace.

This leaves Lane, a first time actor, to do a lot of lifting, and she is and is not up to the challenge. In moments where she is tasked with being appalled at where the road takes her, like a swanky McMansion where a Christian with a seemingly secular daughter is meant to instill outrage, Lane comes across more annoyed than outraged. No, Lane is better in moments of reckless courage, or wide-eyed eagerness which is rendered in how she meets Jake (Shia LaBeouf), who spies Star at a K-Mart and essentially says “come hither” with a dance party to the Calvin Harris/Rhianna electro-hoedown “We Found Love” when it appears on the store’s speakers, a sequence erased of its inherent cheese by the forceful earnestness. LaBeouf has always had a lunatic energy, on screen and off, and Arnold mostly harnesses it for good rather than evil.

Jake is part of a roving crew of youthful misfits that traverse the country, hustling door to door, selling magazines. And so Star, established as taking care of two kids who are not hers and dumpster diving on behalf of some gross, lecherous dude she lives with and calls “Daddy”, walks out on this seemingly dreary life to look for America, or thereabouts. In that search, Arnold tries to cram in some sort of commentary on this country’s economic crisis, and while too often it plays more like a veneer than subtext, you do feel where the middle class has just sort of dissolved into the ether between the affluent and the downtrodden. It’s everything or nothing and this good-time gang is willing to shill Popular Mechanics for something.

Most of what I have read about magazine crews has made it sound like deplorable, dehumanizing work. That sensation is occasionally glimpsed in “American Honey” via the crew’s ferocious, trashy chief Krystal (Riley Keough, ferocious) who talks of leaving former crew members in the desert with no food or water. We never see anything like this play out, though, and all her young, seemingly uneducated crew members generally come across oblivious to anything other than the moment. They pile into their jalopy, gleefully passing liquor bottles and joints back and forth, like itinerant hobos of the 1930s on the freeways instead of the rails. Arnold never really displays must interest in the individual personalities of these kids, preferring to let the rap songs constantly blaring from their shabby vehicle’s speakers speak for them in unison. “I’m stuck to this bread / Everybody got choices.” (Confession: I did not believe for one minute most of these kids would in any way like the Lady Antebellum track the movie takes for its title.)

In another movie, the “bread” might have been paramount. It might have focused heavily on the process of the magazine pitch, but Arnold almost completely dispenses with it after the first couple doors are opened. “American Honey” sticks closer to the road and its rites as Star initiates a messy process of figuring out who she is. That seems the purpose of her and Jake’s semi-relationship, one built almost exclusively on carnal lust, given how little she thinks of Jake’s ethics the more she gets to know him, not that this fails to feel true. She is an eighteen year old girl going on woman getting in touch with her body and her desires, and that is why Arnold’s decision to sort of transform this into a love triangle with Jake also existing as the boy toy of Krystal feels like a disappointing concession to normal narrative rules that never quite works.

Star doesn’t necessarily seem all that bothered by Krystal’s threats and she doesn’t come across all that connected to her group in the end. If anything, some of her decisions indicate a desire to cut loose of the group and strike out on her own, like when she hops in the backseat of a convertible hauling three Texans. The latter might be the film’s best passage. If the three men teeter on the brink of ten-gallon hat sporting cliché, something very tangible still gets carved out as they take her back to their fortress posing as a home and feed her beer and liquor even as they promise to buy magazines. Real possible menace hangs in the air, but it is never exploitative, because Lane lets us feel Star getting lost in the control she suddenly feels herself wielding. Her naivety puts you on edge even if you can’t help but admire her confidence.

If another passage later when she hops a ride with a trucker feels less substantial, and ends abruptly without addressing how Star re-connects with her crew, it is merely “American Honey’s” law of averages. It is Star’s law of averages too. If some moments never lift off, other moments soar, which meant I didn’t like the movie and I did, which is a compliment, mostly.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)

“The Taking of Pelham One Two Three”, predating the 2009 version, which I have not seen, by 35 years, is a thriller, yes, but its opening 10 minutes, or so, is not exactly thrilling. It is pragmatic. It simply sits back and watches as four men with topcoats and moustaches board, one by one, a New York subway train on different cars. Each man does not so much appear ominous as “up to something”. Slowly but surely their plan, coordinated by Mr. Blue (Robert Shaw), evincing the colored code names the hijackers take, a concept Quentin Tarantino pilfered for “Reservoir Dogs”, emerges. They draw guns and assume control of the train’s first car, detach the others and then isolate themselves further down the tracks, employing their hostages to demand a ransom of $1 million from the NYC Transit Authority. There is a calmness in the demeanor of these men and a precision in their actions. Even if Mr. Grey (Hector Elizondo) is revealed as having an itchy trigger finger, his aura is nonetheless relaxed. There is no grandeur to this takeover; it just happens, step by step. And that speaks to Joseph Sargent’s film as a whole, one that goes about its business without histrionics or explosive action.

In fact, the first time we see the movie’s ostensible hero, Zachary Garber (Walter Matthau), New York City Transit Authority police lieutenant, he’s asleep, underscoring the film’s whole low key vibe. And when he suddenly finds himself on duty, negotiating with Mr. Blue, Garber never comes across high strung or like a traditional action hero. Yes, there is a late scene, as there has to be, when he is skulking about with a gun, but when he pulls it Matthau doesn’t have his character play the moment for valor; he plays it as all part of the job. He comes across more like a having a sandwich while doing a little work. He’s not frightened by the situation so much as he is annoyed and confused. “Will ya?!” he barks at one underling when he’s interrupted while conversing with Mr. Blue. And that is what Matthau’s entire performance conveys – “Will ya?!” He can’t quite figure how this Mr. Blue plans to abscond with a million bucks from the depths of a subway. “They’re gonna get away by asking every man, woman and child in New York City to close their eyes and count to a hundred,” he says, and Matthau gives it the ring of a Catskills comic.

Not to worry, though, because Mr. Blue has a plan, yes he does, and he will not stop at nothing to achieve. Wait, that sounds pretty voracious, doesn’t it? “Stop at nothing”? Mr. Blue is not that kind of voracious. As played by an immaculate Shaw, Mr. Blue is cool and calm and his very real menace exudes from that cool and calm. Look at that way to tends to crossword puzzles as he issues orders to Garber about how he will execute hostages if he doesn’t get what he wants. With most movie characters issuing those kinds of proclamations, you’ll know they’ll bend, at least a little, but you never think Mr. Blue will bend. You think Mr. Blue will off an hostage and go right back to 12 across. The viewer starts to feel like Mr. Green (Martin Balsam), who keeps wishing that Mr. Blue would bend and not be so ruthless.

Mr. Green is supposed to be, in a way, the audience surrogate, the wronged former transit worker who just wants to get his. He’s also got the seasonal cold with the cough that you know – you just know – is the tell that will come back to get him in the end. It does, making for an almost drolly elliptical ending, and fair enough. There is something, however, more oddly moving in the comeuppance of Mr. Blue. I hope I’m not telling tales out of school to reveal that Mr. Blue doesn’t get away in the end. He doesn’t. And it’s the way he doesn’t that is weirdly, scarily effective. He might be a madman, but he never goes mad. He remains hyper-calm, even in the face of defeat, out-foxed, albeit barely, and has the good manner to accept his defeat rather than lash out. And as he puts his foot on the rail and electrocutes himself, it’s hard not to kinda admire the guy for a plan so tight he has even afforded himself a foolproof out if he cannot get away.

Ode to a Movie Tree

The other day at the venerable New York Times, James Bannon penned a piece chronicling the quiet tragedy of a 600 year old oak tree in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, a tree under whose branches George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette, my dawgs, are said to have cooled their top boots, a tree considered one of the oldest in North America. Every one of those 600 years, however, finally caught up with the old oak, causing it to be officially deemed unsaveable as it now merely waits to meet its maker.

I admit this article choked me up, and it got me to thinking, much like most anything does, about movies and trees in movies and the trees in movies to be remembered most fondly. Indeed, there are more Best Trees In Movies lists out there then you likely imagine, but these lists tend toward spectacular trees - like, magical, supernatural trees. Like, trees in fantasy movies, like the evil tree in “Poltergeist” or that tree that walked and talked in that “Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” zzzzzzzzzzfest. But those tree do not interest me anywhere near as much as another tree interests me.

In Robin Hood lore there is the Major Oak, located in Sherwood Forest, near the town of Edwinstowe, where it is said the real Robin Hood hid from the Sheriff of Nottingham. And in 1938’s “The Adventures of Robin Hood”, the definitive Robin Hood movie, all other Robin Hood movies, there is the Gallows Oak, where the jovial Errol Flynn version of Robin Hood and his most merry of men congregate.

That Gallows Oak was actually Hooker Oak in Bidwell Park in Chico, California which stood in for Sherwood Forest. And almost forty year after the film was released, Hooker Oak fell. Maybe that doesn’t really matter. Maybe I should be happy I could still go get some shade under Major Oak, but then I’m the guy who upon visiting Washington D.C. was disappointed he saw the real Gil Stuart portrait of George Washington and not the replica Gil Stuart portrait of George Washington because the replica was the one Dolley Madison hauled out of the White House before the British burned it down which is, like, you know, one of my favorite stories of all time. That is to say, I would rather see the faux-Sherwood Forest oak where the Flynn Robin Hood chilled than the actual Sherwood Forest oak where the real, so to speak, Robin Hood took refuge. Alas, I can’t.

Still, that’s kind of an underrated aspect of movies, isn’t it? That ability to preserve. There are versions of “San Francisco” (1936) that include The Golden Gate Bridge under construction, freezing the image of America’s greatest architectural achievement at a unique moment in its history, and so too does “The Adventures of Robin Hood” ensure that Hooker Oak will never be lost to the annals of time.

Shout-Out to the Extra: The Naked Gun Version

Shout-Out to the Extra is a 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.

Before we get to the extra we have to first discuss what happens in the lead-up to the extra's appearance. That is to say, the California Angels (1988, y'all) and Seattle Mariners are contesting a do-or-die one game playoff to see who gets into the playoffs. And that do-or-die one game playoff just so happens to be attended by the Queen of England. And it just so happens that chief villain Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalban) plans to have one of the baseball players unwittingly* (*it's complicated) assassinate the Queen of England. And it just so happens that Detective Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielson) catches wind of this nefarious plot and goes undercover as head umpire at the game to try and deduce the assassin's identity. And it just so happens that this leads, as it must, to a massive brawl between both teams when Drebin gets a little too big for britches. But it just so happens that Drebin still manages to stop the assassin in the nick of time. And it just so happens that Ludwig then absconds with Drebin's girlfriend up the aisle, hoping to make a getaway. So. All of this has just happened. A brawl. An assassination attempt. The assassination attempt being thwarted. The Queen of freaking England saved. And now a guy with a gun is fleeing up the aisle with a hostage in tow. And as he does, he charges past a spectator, bumps into the spectator and sends the spectator's popcorn bag tumbling to the ground. It is the popcorn bag of this specator.....

"Hey! Where'd all my popcorn go?!"

It's a bit tough to see, I know, and I apologize for the low grade quality of the still, but still, there it is, our faithful extra with the popcorn bag his character, so to speak, has picked up after having it knocked from his hands, and intensely studying the bag's innards only to realize that, alas, it is now sans popcorn. You would be forgiven for suspecting that a man who has just seen an assassination attempt of the Queen of England thwarted a few seats over and has a madman with a gun and a hostage in tow rush right past him and bump into him might suddenly himself an unconcerned with his popcorn, but that's just not how this extra decided this guy would roll. This guy paid for his popcorn, dammit, probably paid a lot, and now this gun-wielding hostage-taker has gone and sent all his precious popped corn tumbling to the disgusting cement? That's a bummer, man, whatever the context. 

Pour one out for the extra.

Weiner

In the documentary that bears his name Anthony Weiner’s smartphone is virtually omnipresent in his hand. Whether he’s at home, in the office, in the car, walking the baby stroller down the sidewalk, you generally see him checking, well, something on his mobile device. Partly this is a product of our time and place; who doesn’t have a smartphone in their hands at all times? But it suggests something else, especially given the former representative’s noted proclivity for sexts, and especially given that we, and no one else on camera really, is privy to what he’s doing on that phone. Maybe he’s attending to political strategizing; maybe he’s just playing Candy Crush. But I watched “Weiner” directly in the aftermath of another Anthony Weiner sexting scandal and it seems to me that we can’t really know for sure. Intimacy is “Weiner’s” most notable aspect and yet, for as close as we get to him, in the end, he still seems so far away.

Initially it seems like Elyse Steinberg and Josh Kriegman’s documentary will be a comeback story. After Weiner’s first scandal involving explicit what-have-you sent by cellphone prompts his resignation from Congress in 2011 he decides to run for Mayor of New York in 2013, initially with sweeping success, surging to first place in the polls. These early scenes, shot in a street-level handheld style and scored to 70s staples like “Theme from S.W.A.T.” and Ace Frehley’s “New York Groove” evoke a kind of 70s drama sensation, where a horribly flawed character digs deep into his soul for another shot. We already know the outcome, however, even if the documentary did not betray it in the prologue – that is, another sexting scandal erupts, sinking Weiner’s campaign, not that he’s about to abandon ship.

That not abandoning ship seems partly principled, partly vain. If it can be difficult to separate those two with politicians, well, “Weiner” becomes considerable evidence of just how aptly they go together. When you see Weiner take part in a Gay Pride parade, spewing passion through a megaphone, waving the rainbow flag, it is hard not to feel a liberal quiver in your heart. At the same time, it’s hard not to see the frenzied look in his eye, the zealous insistence on good-intentioned self-promotion. You smile and you cringe. He seems to crave attention even as the unrelenting microscope is exactly what threatens to bring him down. You see this in a moment in the back of his car, when the filmmakers are heard posing a question behind the camera and Weiner expresses annoyance by citing the definition of a Fly on the Wall documentary, how you are supposed to observe, not interfere. He does not want them there, but he totally wants them there.

Seeing Anthony Weiner in moments like these, whatever your opinion of the man’s morals or politics, is excruciating. We’ve all seen the defiance and meltdowns on camera, many of which are re-visited here, but this peek behind the curtain is more quietly stomach-curdling. Here it is not outside forces, like Lawrence O’Dell or angry citizens that feel let down by their representative, it is the people closest to him. In the wake of the latest allegation, his director of communications, Barbara Morgan, delicately inquires as to whether there will be more accusers, and if so, how many. You can feel her quietly judging him. But that’s nothing. If the image of the wife standing by her scandalous politician husband is commonplace, in “Weiner” we see that picture come to life as the wannabe Mayor’s spouse Huma Abedin emerges as the documentary’s most compelling figure. And damn if it ain’t some irony that an attention-hungry fella like Anthony Weiner gets usurped in a documentary named for him.

Abedin professes a preference for privacy, and while that might seem contradictory to her presence here, this is just an up close account, not a personal one, as we watch her wilt in real time. How precisely she feels about all this we never really know because she never really says. Instead we are left to glean her despondency from the incendiary incredulousness etched on her face, rendered in livid side-eye glances and the incredible moment when she sits eating a slice of pizza with disgust radiating from her body and toward her husband in waves. It’s like having restricted backstage access. You get just enough to know how she feels even if you can’t help but pine for Huma’s internal monologue.

Even better (much, much worse) is a sequence in the aftermath of the second scandal coming to light. Anthony and Huma are in his campaign office dealing with the fallout. He has taken a phone call to discuss their strategy with how to manage it. Huma listens on another line, pacing back and forth, shaking her head with a holy fury. When the call ends, she towers over him, arms crossed, staring down, while he appears to look past her out the window, at something, who knows what. You wonder if this will finally be the moment they verbally hash this crisis out. Then, he looks to the camera and asks if they can have a minute alone.

Blue Jay

Amanda (Sarah Paulson) and Jim (Mark Duplass), the central couple of Alex Lehmann’s “Blue Jay”, first meet in a grocery store aisle. They know each other. We know that they know each other because of the way each one steals a glance of the other and then looks away, and then looks back, and then looks away, as if trying to determine whether to speak or to flee. They speak, tentatively, and that tentativeness is indicative not just of the years passed between them but the emotional baggage that they carry, baggage you can sense continuing to accrue over the course of the film’s eighty minutes, where every time Jim strokes his beard and stammers an “Uh” or “Ah” as he looks away, where every time Amanda steals a knowing yet wondering look of Jim, it hints at the narrative bomb waiting to go off. And so even as these two high school sweethearts eventually fall back into the rhythm of the way things were, they inexorably march toward having to (try and) square with why the way things were went wrong.

Duplass wrote the screenplay and it is impressive for how it withholds information, not to string us along but to communicate the awkwardness of communicating with decades apart and the fear of saying too much, opting for elliptical mentions of the present and references to the past. When Jim claims he likes being married to his work rather than being actually married, Paulson has Amanda respond with a perfect pregnant pause followed by an incredulous “Really? No? Really?” smile before asking if he’s okay. He says he is, but quickly changes the subject, complaining about the coffee at the Blue Jay diner where they are, mentioning that their youthful hangout has really gone downhill, a returning to their shared history to avoid his reality.

If Amanda is also apprehensive about reality, she never completely evades it. As the duo eventually repairs to Jim’s childhood home which he has come back to attend to in the wake of his mother’s death, the ex-sweethearts sit on the deck, under the stars, staring at their hometown in the distance. She confesses that her marriage to an older man and children is good, if not quite what she thought it would be, and Paulson does not spin these words with anger or regret but a kind of bittersweet recognition for how life can simply settle into a groove so familiar it starts to feel like a rut.

Inevitably, with so many totems of the past stocked all over those, from old love letters in boxes to mix tapes they made when they were kids, Amanda and Jim re-engage with their past, slipping back into the rhythms of adolescence. When Jim expresses comic frustration at Amanda rifling through his belongings she ripostes: “Listen, man, you don’t have a lock on your shit.” And Paulson gives the line the truthful, hilarious, cringe-inducing ring of a teenager posturing, which is what she wonderfully does throughout all these scenes, slipping into the attitude and mannerisms of youth, just see what it feels like again for a few hours.

Apparently, however, it is not enough, because Amanda and Jim do not simply re-live the past within the walls of his old house; they envision an alternate future. They envision it literally, masquerading as a married couple, sitting down to dinner after a “long day”, like an indie Jim & Marcia Brady. It would be a little sweet and a little sad if it didn’t also feel a little desperate, reminiscent of another lo-fi indie, “The Dish & the Spoon”, where a break from reality threatens to leave the main character unmoored. Eventually, of course, the narrative bomb planted in that space between in the grocery store will have to go off, and it does, not that this review will give away precisely what occurs. Suffice it to say that a one-sided screaming match occurs, and for a moment “Blue Jay” threatens to sink on account of tedious melodrama, only to stop short.  

Amanda has an early monologue about being on the plane with little boy who screamed and stomped his feet in lieu of expressing himself and how eventually people eventually age out of such petulance. But in the wake of the reveal Amanda realizes that Jim has not aged out of such inexpressive petulance. If Duplass always had a little manchild in him, here he lets it bloom in full, as Paulson almost ineffably lets her character’s turn toward adolescence fall away as she returns to nurturer. If in every preceding moment they really looked like former lovers, here Paulson allows Amanda to look like a wounded mother to a little kid. It’s crushing. If movies about Going Home often provide epiphanies for moving forward, the real epiphany of “Blue Jay” is that the decision these characters made and have regretted was definitely the right one.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Sea Wolf (1941)

The first time we see the Ghost, the sailing ship where most of Michael Curtiz’s 1941 screen version of the Jack London turn of the century novel “The Sea Wolf” is set, emerging from the fog, just off the coast of California, it sure likes a ghost ship. It is not, of course, because this is not a supernatural story. No, the Ghost is a ghost ship in so much as it follows no traditional shipping lanes and stops at no ports. This might elicit the question as to exactly how the ship’s captain and crew turn a profit to keep their vessel going, and there is some goo goo gah gah about hunting seals, but we never see any seals hunted and besides, that is neither here nor there. No, the Ghost and its cold-hearted, crazed captain Wolf Larsen (Edward G. Robinson) made me think of Matthew Broderick saying how his bank manager in “You Can Count On Me” (2000) fancied himself the dictator of his itty bitty little regional bank. Captain Larsen has essentially turned the Ghost into his own little nation, bound only to “the laws of the sea”, laws that he seems to have re-drafted to fit his own authoritarian urges and psychotic amusement.

“The Sea Wolf” opens with a few new Ghost crewmembers being recruited, both willingly and unwillingly, to accidentally get mired in this sea-faring dictatorship. Wanted man George Leach (John Garfield) boards willingly while an escaped con, Ruth Webster (Ida Lupino), and a writer, Humphrey van Weyden (Alexander Knox), wind up aboard when they are rescued from the water after their ferry has sunk. In no time these three find themselves trapped under the scurrilous clutches of Larsen who stalks the decks like a well-composted lunatic. You might wonder why these men would sail for such a vile man who clearly has no interest in anything other than playing mind games, but it is made readily apparent that he maintains control, and finds his own glee, by feeding their hate.

Take the ship’s doctor Louis Prescott (Gene Lockhart). He has a spotty record of care, given his drunkenness, given his shaky hands on account of his drunkenness, which has made him a mockery aboard the Ghost. But now Prescott has cleaned himself up and pulled on his impressive old ornate clothes and fixed up Ruth and he wants to be taken seriously; he wants the ship’s men to call him doctor; he wants Larsen to tell the ship’s men to call him doctor. Larsen agrees. Alas, when Larsen and Prescott emerge on the deck, the scurrilous captain kicks Prescott down the stairs and laughs at him. Everyone laughs at him. And in this moment you see Wolf Larsen for the bully he is, roaming his ship like the bully might have roamed the school hallways.

That’s why I never quite bought the film’s incessant determination to employ literature as a means to psycho-analyze Larsen. This is broached when van Weyden enters the captain’s quarters and finds, naturally, a copy of Paradise Lost turned to a page where, obviously, the line “Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven” is underlined. It’s that kind of analysis, and made even more explicit when van Weyden makes a study case of Larsen and then explains out loud why he thinks the way the captain is the way he is, more for our benefit than Larsen’s, and pales in comparison to the primal emotion of Edward G. Robinson’s performance apart from all this dime store psychology.

Still, even apart from this frustrating need to tell us what we can glean from the movie itself, “The Sea Wolf” works in the end, primarily in the way that Larsen maintains the delusion of his own power even as that power crumbles, even as everyone flees, even as a mutiny by way of escape is led by George and Ruth, even as his ship begins to sink. His ship sinking, however, proves of less consequence than besting van Weyden in one last verbal tete-a-tete. In other words, as long as Larsen believes in his own mind that he came out on top even as his ship goes down, well, he’ll go out a winner. It reminded me of someone else.

77 Thoughts on the New Rogue One Trailer

Some Drivel On...Talladega Nights

In 2006, fresh off his soccer movie, and in advance of his figure skating and basketball movies, Will Ferrell made his NASCAR movie, the loquaciously titled “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby”, directed and co-written by his frequent cohort Adam McKay. And in such close proximity to Ferrell’s other athletic-endeavored efforts, it was easy, and remains so, to lump “Ricky Bobby” in with their inconsistent bits of low-pressure comedy. And while it is fair to say that “Ricky Bobby”, like the others, often feels, in moments, indulgent, like a scene of saying grace that is as protracted as it is amusing, it would be wrong to say that “Ricky Bobby” is low-pressure. It has ideas on its mind, yes it does, and communicates them with a comical force.

“Ricky Bobby” lashes its culture commentary to the structure of a run-of-mill athletic biopic, which, despite its lapses, for better and for worse into riffing comedy, it inhabits all the way through, “not,” as Jim Emerson wrote, simply “stand(ing) outside and making references to other movies.” Instead, Emerson notes that McKay and Ferrell’s movie “inhabits the biopic formula all the way through -- even down to the slightly draggy stretch in the second act, before the big comeback.” That biopic takes root in an early scene when Ricky Bobby learns his life’s mantra from his father, Reece Bobby (played by Gary Cole with an impressive droll hilarity) – “If you’re not first, your last.” It’s a sentiment that has, over time, become so relevant to reality Kevin Durant unironically said it. But Ricky Bobby’s inevitable journey is learning that this mantra is not true, taking the top perch as a narcissistic NASCAR top dog, falling from the perch when he’s challenged by a driver from a different world, Jean Girard (Sacha Baron Cohen), other customs invading his own, losing his wife and his kids, bottoming out, and then rising back up.

As vain as Ricky Bobby might initially be, Ferrell is not, allowing ample room for his skilled co-stars to maneuver. In another movie Amy Adams’s emergent love interest would be there simply to support the hero with googly eyes rather than comedic lines, but Adams gets great lines and sells them gusto, and then adds an almost unbridled ecstasy on top of the gusto. Adams, in fact, is afforded the end-of-second-act speech in which she presents the Hero’s Elixir in the form of a motivational speech. “’Me’ is you because it’s just you out there. We don’t have any corporate sponsors. We don’t have any fancy team owners. We have you and this car.” America, as complicated and paradoxical a country as there is, often touts an individualist ethos even as the necessity of being part of a team, or the importance of family, is routinely stressed, seemingly in contradiction of the first idea. But “Talladega Nights” effortlessly embodies the idea that in messed-up ol’ America both are true. Ricky Bobby eradicates his narcissism even as he drives alone.

That journey to inner peace, meanwhile, is sandwiched within a comical commentary on cultural sensitivity, which is, by far, the most memorable through line of “Talladega Nights”. NASCAR is nothing if not a subculture. America, this vast nation, is rife with subcultures, and those subcultures are often born of regionalism, and NASCAR is no different. The supposed invader of this regionalistic subculture then becomes Jean Girard, introduced at The Pit Stop, the bar which so many NASCAR drivers frequent, and Girard announces his presence by playing jazz on the jukebox. When the music is cut off, Girard asks why it’s on the jukebox in the first place, leading the bartender to gruffly remark “We keep it on there for profiling purposes.” It's funny, yes, but also revealing, indicative not just of NASCAR but so much of the U.S.A where outsiders are immediately suspect and regulations are put in place to keep an eye out for them.

Jean Girard’s ensuing confrontation of Ricky Bobby leads to one of the most spectacular sequences of the last movie decade, in which he demands Ricky Bobby say “I like crepes.” Ricky Bobby will not. “These colors don't run.” Even when it is explained to him what crepes are, and even when he admits that he actually likes them, and when his best friend says he actually had crepes that very morning, Ricky Bobby still will not say it, the sort of ridiculous American defiance that is so currently in vogue. This prompts Girard to injure him, not fatally but to the extent that Ricky Bobby is forced off the track, ceding his #1 spot to the scurrilous Frenchman.

If it is American hubris that does Ricky Bobby in then it is a good dose of humility that prompts his rebirth, eventually allowing him to find acceptance of this crepe-loving Other, emblemized in the moment at the end when he refuses to shake Girard’s hand yet openly kisses him anyway. “You taste,” says Girard, “of America.” It is one of my favorite lines of the new cinematic century. It is the best evidence I have seen yet that maybe, one day, we really can all get along. {Laughs.}

Amanda Knox

The murder trial, and preceding investigation, of American Amanda Knox and her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito who were charged, convicted and eventually acquitted of the 2007 murder of Knox’s Perugia, Italy roommate Meredith Kercher was relentlessly salacious, playing out in the press less as a dutiful march of fact gathering than splashy scoops, facts be damned. The media is represented on screen by Daily Mail journalist, so to speak, Nick Pisa who unremorsefully remarks that he had no time to fact check to meet deadlines to get scoops so he could conjure up juicy headlines. And because of the sensationalist nature of the murder’s coverage, Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn’s Netflix documentary “Amanda Knox” deliberately takes a different tack, straining all the sensationalism out, placing its series of talking heads in front of drab backdrops and opting for a flat aesthetic. The result is far more solemn than salacious.

Blackhurst and McGinn have said in interviews that they yearned to be objective, and for the most part they are, though it also quickly becomes clear, as the title implies, that their chief goal here to exonerate Amanda Knox rather than to explicitly deduce who killed Meredith a la Sarah Koenig’s Serial podcast. Kercher’s family apparently declined to be interviewed, and I don’t blame them, but with her being less than present the foremost victim here almost unintentionally comes to feel like an afterthought. The drifter, Rudy Guede, who was found guilty of the murder is someone that Pisa says no one covering the story was really interested in, a remark the documentary, oddly, takes as gospel, content to raise a Rudy as a subject very briefly and then forget about him.

No, as the title implies, “Amanda Knox” is all about Amanda. It lays out her entire ordeal from beginning to end and while it does not necessarily do a deep dive into why the stories of Knox and Sollecito kept changing, spurred, as they tell us, by pressure from the authorities, its explanation of the incredibly flimsy DNA evidence pretty much makes clear this case never really was one. All of this information, however, is not necessarily new, most of it already accounted for in the dozens of reports penned long before this movie, like the comprehensive work of Judy Bacharach for Vanity Fair, and re-assembled here in one place for everyone to see.

What is new, however, is the presence on camera of Giuliano Mignini, the Italian prosecutor who was most convinced of Knox and Sollecito’s guilt. It is genuinely stunning to see this wannabe Sherlock Holmes claim, on camera, out loud, that he prefers to stick to the facts even as he openly admits that much of his investigation seemed to be based on nothing more than absurdly theatrical intuition that comes across ripped from pages of detective novels, probably not unlike the ones he purports to read. Watching him toss out outlandish theories about who and what Amanda was really like based on her eyes, or some such, to is see a man seemingly carried away by a myth that he has cultivated entirely in his own mind of who he is.

Amanda, on the other hand, often comes across like someone yearning to get away from who she is – no, strike that! She comes across like someone yearning to get away from who everyone thinks she is. Her presence is Blackhurst and McGinn’s biggest get for the documentary and yet when it ends we still feel as if we have no exact impression of her, perhaps because after years of being relentlessly scrutinized she just wants to maintain privacy. And if so, God bless her. She is interviewed throughout this ninety minute film while sitting in front of the same drab backdrop as everyone else, its drabness harmonizing with her drained face as she re-lives her eight year nightmare again, constantly looking at us and then looking away, as if searching search for what to say, like all these years after the fact she still can’t find the right words to express how she feels, even if a few of the lines she does eventually utter sound precise and rehearsed because I assume she has had a long time to think of them.

Among the most jarring, poignant moments of the film then becomes contrasting images of this Amanda Knox with the younger Amanda Knox, one seen through snippets of old video, like Amanda on the verge of moving to Perugia, Italy so long ago and being asked by the friend filming if she’s excited. “Fucking yeeeeah, biiiiiitch!” Amanda shouts. If that might rub some people the wrong way, I found it rather endearing. I doubt that’s who she really was either. She appears more like a twenty year old doing as twenty years old do. Still, it was one of the moments where her guard isn’t up, and you realize after all she’s been through that her guard will never be down again.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Good News (1947)

“Good News”, a 1947 musical helmed by Charles Walters, opens with a few title cards that merrily explain that even though it is 1947, the film is returning to 1927, when kids were doing the Charleston and such. Partially this stems from the fact that the original stage production of “Good News” was put on in 1927, but this also stems from giving it a Remember When? Sensation, which is ironic to us modern viewers because, hey, it’s 2016, and here we are watching a 1947 movie set in 1927. It’s like three filters of nostalgia. It also, however, goes to show how some things never change. Like, say, the college football team’s star player needing to pass an exam to be able to play in the big game. Remember last year when Oregon quarterback Vernon Adams Jr. needed to pass a math exam in late August to suit up? I remember thinking how that sounded like a movie and here was “Good News” all along, just waiting for me to find it, mining that story idea not so much with searing insight as goofy joy so prevalent with all the campus comedies of the era.

One of the film’s best scenes involves the moments around that French exam that star quarterback Tommy Marlowe (Peter Lawford) has to ace as students of Tait College gather outside the French building's window, hanging on the result. You'd think those students would have their own classes to attend but hey, what’s more important than the football team? Nothing, really, as the opening scene goes to show where a bunch of kids crowd around the steps of a campus building to belt out a ditty in honor of their team. It’s a good song, too, with Joan McCracken, as a student, appearing disinterested and then interested, stepping in and then sitting down, the modern day college football fan’s plight, where every time we think we’ve decided to turn our back on this gladiatorial slave labor, we get roped back in anyway.

But I’m projecting, somewhat. And “Good News” has far less action on the gridiron than it does on the dance floor – or, I should say, on everyday sets, like a soda fountain, that become dance floors. Because first and foremost “Good News” belongs to the spate of college comedies that sprung up during and just after cinema’s so-called Golden Age, where rather than the pseudo-outrageous hijinks of so many modern day frat house so-called comedies the joyous hijinks-ish-ness of college life is instead rendered in so many song and dance numbers. Like, say, “Varsity Drag”, where it seems as if the entire campus has descended to have a blow out after the big game, choreography and lip-synching substituting for the keg stands and wanton mischief such a victory in the big game would actually elicit. Or “Pass the Peace Pipe”, which is one of those strange moments where you can hardly believe what you’re watching, the dancers mimicking an “Indian style” sitdown mid-dance and indulging in no doubt highly inaccurate Native American chants. It would never ever fly today, and should not, but it’s difficult not to note the number’s energy amidst so much political incorrectness.

It’s not just songs and dancing, however, there is also the requisite love triangle between Tommy and Connie (June Allyson), the librarian who tutors Tommy toward victory on the French exam, and comely new student Pat (Patricia Marshall) who is turned off by Tommy only to be turned on by him when she discovers he is heir to a fortune. Tommy bounces back and forth and Connie does too. At first she can’t stand football but comes to embrace it when she finds herself falling for the star quarterback who is not quite the jock oaf she first might have thought. The scene when Connie, almost in spite of herself, is caught cheering on Tommy from the library window is a moment meant to set her up for heartbreak later when Tommy gets back together with Pat, yes, but Allyson effuses such earnest joy in that moment is so earnest that the “Awwwwwww” just washes over you anyway.

It’s amazing how college football can so easily lull you in, and how it can so easily turn right around and break your heart, which is precisely what happens in the ensuing scenes when Tommy decides to go to the dance with Pat anyway, leaving Connie hung out in brand new dress to dry and sinking a song where she can merely imagine what that date would have been like. Everything ends up okay in the end, as it must, but the hurt Allyson evokes in that moment as she imagines through song what their courtship might be like is the one moment when this delibeartely inane movie feels unfeigned. Peter Lawford plays the football star, but June Allyson wins MVP.

When Exactly Did Donald Trump Think They Stopped Making Movies Like They Used To?

This past weekend one Donald J. Trump, The Great Orator of Mar-a-Lago, unleashed a sermon that registered at least 9.5 on the Batshit Scale, in which, amongst other things, he became the first Presidential nominee in American history to attempt to prove himself fit for office by imitating his opponent with pneumonia. It was fodder for comedians and historians alike. Of more interest, however, to we cinephiles was a statement, of sorts, that came further down the line. It’s so what’s-it-how’s-that? that it’s best if we simply quote the passage in full.

“Right now, you say to your wife: ‘Let’s go to a movie after Trump.’ But you won’t do that because you’ll be so high and so excited that no movie is going to satisfy you. Okay? No movie. You know why? Honestly? Because they don’t make movies like they used to — is that right?”

Well. Let’s set aside, if we can, the latent erotic connotations of this passage and simply examine the key declaration – that is, “…they don’t make movies like they used to — is that right?” So, is that right? People had thoughts, believe me, as Comandante Trump would say, as the Sharks and the Jets of Film Twitter quickly raised their blades and dug in their heels, with many defending the honor of the Movies, often by employing the old Movies Aren’t Just McDonald’s analogy, and a few defending Trump himself, backing up the assertion that the Movies aren’t what they used to be, and that those of us who think they are must be cinematic sheeple, I guess, that only read biased mainstream film criticism, or something.

Do I think they don’t make movies like they used to? I mean, in a way, yeah. Like, if Trump is arguing that they don’t make movies like they did during the studio-system’d Golden Age, when figureheads such as Zukor and Zanuck and their Big Five cronies ruled with an iron fist, and when they kept stars on contract and had writers locked away cranking out rigid if effective formula, then he’s right. But who knows if that’s what Trump means. His statement – “Because they don’t make movies like they used to” – is basically just a Tweet spoken out loud, a thought, in a manner of speaking, off the top of his head, which he hasn’t really been considered and for which he has no corresponding notes than other the purple dreams of his own cuckoo consciousness.

And so we here at Cinema Romantico became intrigued. We were curious to know precisely when he thought they stopped making ‘em like they used to. The problem, however, is the lack of Trump’s clarifying statements. There is no money quote where he explains that the New Hollywood revolution forever saddled us with auteurist dopes who don’t have a clue, or a tangent on how that loser Barry Sonnenfeld forever ruined the modern blockbuster with “Wild Wild West”. We are forced instead to glean Trump’s attitudes through his favorite movies. (Find a list of his favorite movies here.)

It’s been pretty well documented, of course, that Trump’s favorite movie is “Citizen Kane”, and he has also mentioned adoration for “Gone with the Wind”, even if I find myself skeptical that Trump has actually sat through this entire movie in one sitting, and so we can imagine based on these selections that Trump at least liked movies up through 1948 went the Big Five got brought down.

Trump’s thoughts on 1950s cinema eludes us, which is unfortunate because I’m really keen to know if he considers Dana “Dynamite” Holmes a misunderstood hero, but cites Sergio Leone’s 1966 spaghetti western “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” as a favorite, which suggests Trump, noted philistine, might have a revisionist sensibility after all. And he also likes “The Godfather” and “Goodfellas”, which suggests he’s a fan of the auteurs, or perhaps suggests he just wishes he had been a mafia don, or even suggests he abides by the Joe Fox Theory that “’The Godfather’ is the answer to any question.”

Beyond the favorites list, however, Donald Trump also cited Jean Claude Van Damme’s “Bloodsport” (1988) as a favorite in Mark Singer’s 1997 New Yorker profile on The Great Orator of Mar-a-Lago and at Trump’s campaign stops this year his “Air Force One” entrance music prompted him to name Harrison Ford’s 1997 action thriller as a personal favorite because Ford “stood for America.” And after this, Trump’s cinematic preferences dry up on the Interwebs, which sort of confuses me because, well, hey, if likes ‘em, he likes ‘em. But you’re telling me they don’t make ‘em like “Bloodsport” and “Air Force One” anymore? Don, dude, cue up any Wesley Snipes direct-to-video opus and you’ll find “Bloodsport” part deux, believe me.

Is Trump anti-shaky cam?

But, I thought, wouldn’t all this suggest that Trump still loves movies? Like, say, The Bourne movies, what with their macho bursts of ass-kicking, or any part of Michael Bay’s oeuvre, given his fervent militarism, or even Christopher Nolan, since Trump fancies himself a populist. Yet Trump’s opinions on these movies appear non-existent, aside from his boasting about how the garish Trump Tower was featured in “Transformers 3.” And so I found myself wondering, did multiplex cinema’s shift toward rapid-fire editing and shaky cam alienate Donald Trump? In The New Yorker article he decries exposition but perhaps, without even knowing it, he was tired of getting motion sickness on his beloved Trump Plane not from flying but from movie-watching.

There is no way of knowing, of course, and I am merely speculating here, tossing out theories the way Trump tweets under the cover of the night. And so as long as we’re here and irresponsibly speculating it is also crucial to note that near as we can tell Donald Trump’s last favorite movie was released in the same year that one Barack Obama first served in elected office as an Illinois State Senator for the 13th District. And so a theory emerges. Mr. Trump has laid blame for pretty much everything else at the feet of our current President and so what if The Donald thinks America’s failure to produce good movies is Obama’s fault too?

Sisters

There is a moment in “Sisters”, near the end, when an in-full-swing party graduates to completely-out-of-hand as a car crashes into a tree and the tree falls into the house and from somewhere an alarm clock flies through the air and crash lands, shattering, locking the second and minute hands in place. Rachel Dratch’s character sees this clock and in that immaculate Dratch-ness, where hysterical and hysteria merge flawlessly, wails: “We did it! We finally stopped time!” It’s the movie’s single best line, one that Dratch furnishes with a great deal of darkness, cutting to the heart of a movie where adults’ dissatisfaction is threatening so strenuously to eat them alive that they just want to get lost in the spaces between the hours and minutes and seconds. It is in those spaces that “Sisters” conveys considerable promise. That this promise never bears fruit is because director Jason Moore and writer Paula Pell often feel afraid of exploring their movie’s own worst (best) impulses.

The titular “Sisters” are Kate (Tina Fey), crude, lewd, unemployable, though with a teenage daughter (Madison Davenport) in tow, while Maura (Amy Poehler), recently divorced, is sunnier and more sympathetic. Fey, frankly, for all her gifts, is just not made to play slightly sinister woo girls. This part might have done better with, say, Elizabeth Banks. Even when Fey is unhinged she still comes across buttoned-up. There is, in fact, a significant portion of the film where she is “designated mom”, meaning she can’t drink in order to play shepherd to a massive flock of adults acting like kids, and there, with an irritant gleam in her eye, she feels more at home. Maura, on the other hand, always feels like a “designated mom”, even when she winds up smoking pot and cutting loose.

These sisters are not estranged, they are allies, and always have been, just separated as they have gotten older and now re-united. There is a glimmer of an idea there about co-dependency but that goes unmentioned and unexplored. After all, there is a party to throw. Ah yes, the party. “Sisters” turns predominantly on the party When Kate and Maura learn their parents (Dianne Wiest and James Brolin) have sold their childhood Orlando home. That home intrinsically comes to represent everything they were and everything they hoped to be, the last vestige of their childhood, of which they struggle to let go even two decades later, emblemized in their instructions to clean out their old bedrooms by the end of the weekend only to throw a party instead.

The party is something like “Can’t Hardly Wait’s” rager re-staged at Jack Horner’s place. If so many teen movies turn on big blowouts where kegs are tapped and self-realizations are made, the get-together in “Sisters” at least briefly suggests something more anarchic, where parents and couples and single adults turn their backs on wearying existences, so many characters effusing the same desperation by way of despair as Dratch’s character, living it up because they can’t stand the way they live, telling self-realization what to go do with itself. It’s tantalizing, but “Sisters” never pushes it beyond isolated comic moments, retreating for the safe haven of standard-issue proctology jokes, a cipher-ish new beau (Ike Barinholtz) for Maura, a moment of enlightenment for Kate, and a rushed third act of wannabe coming-to-Jesus uplift.

There is a moment near the party’s end when a sinkhole opens beneath an in-ground pool. This functions as Kate’s Call to Action, as she must climb into the sinkhole to save her daughter who has requisitely fallen in, spurring her inevitable third act transformation. I confess, I wish that sinkhole had not been a Call to Action but something else entirely. I wish it had been the moment when “Sisters” spurned its impetus for a mechanical resolution, peered over that precipice into the darkness below and gone right over the edge.

Joshy

Yes, “Joshy” is about a bachelor party. And yes, that bachelor party involves too much alcohol, and too many drugs, and a few strippers, and some gambling, and several unintended guests showing up at the bachelor party at just the wrong time, and even the requisite female temptation for a married man. And yet. Writer/director Jeff Baena’s “Joshy” resists the temptation to simply devolve into a raunchy, witless comedy we have seen so many times before. It contains all the aforementioned elements and threatens debauchery only to repeatedly refrain from dumbing itself into stupid sleaze. That is not to suggest that “Joshy” becomes a philosophical rumination, or anything close to it, but in its refusal to merely be either a bacchanal or a meditation it improbably finds a middle ground that speaks some truth even if it also allows for one glaring oversight.

Maybe this adherence to the genuine amidst so many potential land mines of lunacy can be traced to the fact that the bachelor party of “Joshy” is not a bachelor party. It is a bachelor party that was supposed to be a bachelor party. Joshy (Thomas Middleditch) intended to marry Rachel (Alison Brie) but that did not happen. And it did not happen because Joshy left Rachel or because Rachel left Joshy; it did not happen because Rachel committed suicide. This is not a Spoiler. This happens before the opening credits. And this casts a deliberate pall over the bachelor party that isn’t, a bachelor party that theoretically goes forward because the deposit they put down on a party pad in Ojai, California turns out to be non-refundable but that really goes forward because everyone attending wants to blow off some steam.

In a way, the title “Joshy” is something of a feint. Yes, this party is his, and everyone attending claims to be there on his behalf, but it rather readily becomes apparent how all the attendees have their own problems, most notably Ari (Adam Pally), who might be married and with a newborn baby but still finds himself in a sorta-fling with another Ojai vacationer, Jodi (Jenny Slate). Though this wreaks of the problematic Enlightenment By The Way Of Affair Baena never allows the subplot to yield to that temptation, stopping his characters short of going all the way, and letting real confusion and guilt emerge as the idea that this brief relationship will not solve anything intrinsically surfaces. That, however, is also why their concluding kiss feels like the subplot’s lone concession to the typical and really should have been cut.

Nobody’s issues, of course, are really addressed, not directly, as evinced by Joshy’s two seemingly happier married friends (Joe & Kris Swanberg) that turn up on Saturday morning with their kid in tow, demand why no one is actually addressing Joshy's real problems, become incensed when they realize all anyone wants to do is get drunk and high, and flee, never to be seen again. And this is where“Joshy” is spot-on. Even a broad, dumb movie like “The Hangover”, defended by those who like it as being inconsequential, wants its characters to reach some sort of ultimate truth, which rings false because the movie itself is too asinine to make that truth believable.“Joshy” is just a hangout movie, albeit a fairly entertaining one, where the hijinks are not meant to eventually engender a standard-issue epiphany.

That also speaks to the film’s significant flaw – the fiancé. Rachel is the character that triggers all the action yet we have no clear sense of who she was or why she did what she did. True, Rachel’s parents (Paul Reiser and Lisa Edelstein) turn up briefly to fight for their daughter’s memory, but their scene is played as comic absurdity as they accuse Joshy of killing Rachel. We know this isn’t true, but this confrontation is what pushes him to finally espouse a monologue about Rachel, one that concludes with him essentially dismissing her as unworthy of him anyway. It’s a massive copout.

 In the end, Joshy is not ready to square with what she did and neither is “Joshy” itself.