How Many Funny Lines Does Kristen Bell Get In The Boss?

The first couple months of this year, my girlfriend, an ardent “Veronica Mars” fan, on that bandwagon before it was a bandwagon, introduced me to the first season of the old CW show that ran from 2004-07. It was good, really reveling in its noirish flavors, like “Brick” before “Brick”, and without having to resort to such kooky dialogue to make a mark. What’s more, Kristen Bell was extraordinary as the title character, finding acerbic humor and genuine pathos over and over, often within seconds of each other, occasionally at the same time. I can only imagine watching it in the moment that you might assume A Star Was Being Born. But Hollywood, as Hollywood does, has more often than not failed to heed this bright star in the sky.

Yes, Jason Segel wrote some good lines for her in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and Bell dove into the role of a slight diva with relish, and yes, even if “The Lifeguard” had its issues, Bell still was allowed to demonstrate her chops. But too often she has been forced into pondwater scum rom coms, like “Couples Retreat”, where she and all the other ladies have to stand pat so the men can be “funny”, and “When in Rome”, which was poorly conceived and terribly executed. Even in “Hit & Run”, in which she co-starred with her husband, Dax Shepard, she finds herself playing second fiddle and with nowhere near as many comic lines as Dax, who, uh, wrote the screenplay. Well.

I had no intention of seeing “The Boss”, the latest Melissa McCarthy star vehicle. Not because Melissa McCarthy isn’t funny, because I generally think she is, but because I feared that Kristen Bell, who appeared from the trailer to be both McCarthy’s bland foil and eventual bland ally, would not be granted any funny lines. Yet when I relayed this fear to my friend Daryl, he offered a brilliant suggestion. He suggested, hey, why not watch the movie and keep a literal tally of how many funny lines Kristen Bell actually gets. So that’s exactly what I did. I Netflixed “The Boss” and got out my trusty notebook to record for myself just how many times Ms. Bell, in a film co-written by McCarthy and her husband, which did not bode well. Below are my official results.

Ouch, but true. And what increases the ouch is that Bell’s lone funny line is not really scripted as a funny line. You know? Like, McCarthy has a line about not naming your kids after gemstones because that foreshadows bottoming out which is specifically written as a line for laughs. Whether or not it does earn laughs is beside the point; its intent is to be funny. Bell gets, like, three, maybe four, lines in which the intent is to be funny. And even when the intent is to be funny, they are typically intended to be funny as a reaction to something theoretically hilariously outrageous that McCarthy has just said. Bell is just the straight woman. Not that straight women can’t be funny, of course, which is just what happens when extremely late in the movie she gets the one line that made me laugh out loud. It is this: “What is happening?”

This line happens so late in the game that it’s difficult to completely surmise the situation surrounding it, but let’s try. McCarthy is the titular boss, Michelle Darnell, an ultra-wealthy entrepreneur who was jailed and then sprung and has now found a new niche running a brownie empire with former girl scout-ish girls and the recipe of her former assistant, Bell’s Claire. This is all devolves into the obligatory narrative wilds so that, by the end, Michelle is leading some crazy break-in with Claire and Claire’s obligatory boyfriend (Some Actor), who gets more chances to be funny than Bell, that concludes with a swordfight atop a skyscraper. As the swordfight takes place, Claire stands off to the side and rhetorically asks: “What is happening?” And I laughed. And I laughed partly because Bell gives the line a nice ring of incredulity and because that ring of incredulity spoke to my own attitudes toward this sequence.

What is happening?

What was happening? Call me stupidly hopeful, but there were moments in “The Boss” bearing promise. When Michelle first gets these little daffodils to engage their inner fortune-hunter it comes on potentially empowering, and even if the screenplay suddenly forgets that angle, well, you can still take comfort in that it maintains a strictly lady-centric attitude. That gets forgotten too, of course. Indeed, both The Boss and her underling get paired off, as they must be, and everything ends in hugs, somehow, after a sword fight, when all I really wanted was for Kristen to grab a microphone that suddenly dropped from the ceiling and just do ten minutes of stand up. Because she’s really funny, you guys, even if “The Boss” has no idea.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

The most effective sequence in Ang Lee’s “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” also gives the film its title. Nineteen year old army specialist and Silver Star recipient Billy Lynn (Joe Alwyn), along with the rest of his Bravo Squad, home from Iraq for a media blitz, are shoehorned into the halftime extravaganza of a Thanksgiving Day football game in Dallas alongside Destiny’s Child. After all, this is 2004, the height of the Dubya Era; Mission Accomplished, and all that. So, Lee deliberately captures Beyoncé (played by Elizabeth Chestang) only from oblique angles, like she’s some kind of ethereal, cultural deity, while these tangible heroes in desert camo march in gravely serious lockstep amidst so much commercialized cacophony, ably, comically, scarily capturing the ever-expanding grey area where football and militarism collide.

That grey area very much interested Ben Fountain, who wrote the superb book of the same name on which the film is based, but it doesn’t interest Lee who, aside from Billy Lynn’s long walk, mostly scraps it to focus on Billy Lynn’s coming to grips with a hero’s place in present (past) America. And that’s fine. Fountain’s book did that too. But Fountain’s ferocious, pounding prose effectively mirrored his protagonist’s chaotic headspace whereas Lee, working in conjunction with screenwriter Jean- Christophe Castelli, dilutes so much of the aggression and tension that undulated within Billy’s mind on the page. If the book was fraught with emotional intensity, the film is totally tamped down, stripped of all its beer pounding, dry humping and anger at ordinary Americans co-opting military heroism as if it’s their own. It’s like Lee sought to turn Billy Lynn and Bravo Squad into the scrubbed up, glossy NFL halftime version of every American soldier.

Even worse, Lee’s sterile aesthetic robs his myriad performers of any liveliness. Chris Tucker, as a Hollywood agent trying to sell Bravo’s story, has never been so lethargic; Steve Martin, as a Texas tycoon, has never been so drowsy; Vin Diesel, playing a character meant to approximate an armed services Buddha, truly seems to have reached nirvana, so peaceable and un-energetic he’s practically asleep. Kristen Stewart, at least, manages to bring a little righteous indignation as Billy Lynn’s anti-war sister, while Garrett Hedlund, as Bravo Squad’s Sgt. Dime, is best in show, in everyone’s face even as he’s simultaneously abstracted from the increasingly absurd proceedings.

This might be the moment to obligatorily mention that Lee filmed “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” in high-frame rate digital video, forgoing the traditional 24 frames per second for a whopping 120 instead. The intended effect of that higher frame rate, to cut down to the absolute nitty gritty, is to make things look more real, like the soap opera effect on my friend’s brand new enormous LCD TV a few years ago that made it seem as if everyone was literally in the room with us, which hurt our eyes and freaked us out. Unfortunately only a handful of American theaters are actually equipped to show the film in this high frame rate, none near me, and so I was unable to see the film as Lee actually intended it, which, I concede, hamstrings me critically. Still, I press on.

I suspect that Lee’s strategy for getting us into Billy’s headspace was the relentless point-of-view shots in which we see action unfolding as Billy would be watching it, the camera swinging from person to person, or place to place. Often when another character is addressing Billy, Lee has the actor look directly into camera, putting us in his shoes, as they say, or it seems. I obviously cannot speak to how this actually plays at 120 fps, but at normal speeds it is most ruinously jarring. It doesn’t feel like the actors are looking at Billy; it feels like they are looking at us. And because Castelli’s script frustratingly drops so much of Fountain’s cheerfully ribald small talk to settle on thematically loaded sentences, it is like they are explicating lit professors lording over us, the students.

Then again, there are moments when even without the high frame rate that its objective still comes through, never more than an indelible, and indelibly upsetting, moment when Billy shoots an enemy at blank point range and that enemy just seems to dissolve in a splatter of blood, as if his soul has up and departed earth right before our eyes. These combat flashbacks taken in conjunction with the myriad events swirling on Thanksgiving are intended to arouse in Billy Lynn an epiphany, as he debates whether or not to ditch out on returning to his tour of duty at the behest of his sister. But, with Lee’s direction doing him no favors, Alwyn, for whom this marks his first acting credit, is an oddly passive protagonist, one who more often than not just feels like he’s along for the ride rather than figuring things out.

Indeed, Hedlund as his commanding officer becomes the anchor, delivering a quietly strong performance of professional incredulousness (and occasional mockery) at those he encounters who seek to civilian-splain things to him. It’s an odd thing; Hedlund’s Sgt. Dime is a static character, one who enters the film with his worldview already formed and locked in, and everything he encounters on this Thanksgiving Day essentially affirms it – that is, normal citizens, for all their talk about supporting troops, don’t really have a clue what those troops go through or how they feel. I don’t doubt this for a second. Still, in a weird way, that essentially makes “Billy Lynn’s Longtime Halftime Walk” an exercise in pointlessness. If no one can hope to know how they really feel, how can a movie, even in high-frame rate, expect to capture it?

Nocturnal Animals

The opening credits of “Nocturnal Animals”, featuring more than a few women who are, uh, generously proportioned and undressed, might well be exploitative, but being that it is quickly revealed as part of a Los Angeles art show ambiguous in nature immediately connects it to the ancient question that Tom Ford’s film asks – “What does art mean?” Ford, frankly, does not have an answer any more compelling or original than anything else that has come down the cinematic pike, though I do not mean to suggest the movie is abominable or inert. For all its fairly predictable plotting and paper thin observations about, you know, life, “Nocturnal Animals” still manages myriad moments of individual beauty, like a Texas lawman introduced smoking beneath a Budget Motel sign. It’s the kind of shot that sensorily stops you and then leaves you wondering why you got stopped, like you’re perusing an art gallery. And even if the film sometimes feels like an art gallery, with paintings hung from so many walls and sculptures standing at attention on so many floors, this is still a movie, and at the movies no image is more powerful than the human face. And Ford has found in Amy Adams an unlikely subject. I mean, who would have thought ten years ago that the bubbly Amy Adams of “Junebug” would one day approximate the ghostly spirit of Monica Vitti?

Adams is Susan Morrow (Amy Adams), curator of the opening art show, who wanders through a crowd of bohemians so ludicrous (Andrea Riseborough looks like she’s the star of a retro if swanky alt girl grunge video) you’ll be forgiven for thinking you’ve accidentally wandered into a showing of “Zoolander 2”, a movie Susan would no doubt give zero stars. In Susan’s disinterested behavior, another ancient idea emerges - that is, sumptuousness always equates with soullessness. But then, this is Tom Ford and oh my what sumptuousness! Indeed, Adams’s hairdo is the best at the movies this year, a sort of Veronica Lake à la mode, swept to one side with one eye cloaked behind those blood red bangs, like her visage is a Half Moon partly shrouded by hair. I do not mean to reduce Adams, mind you, to wardrobe. No, her fashion meticulousness is key to the character’s chilly air. She maintains a surface so still you sometimes suspect she might break in half. This does not betray a roiling sea below, however, but rather clues us into the nothingness at her core. She’s like a left coast version of the girl Woody Allen meets at the art gallery in “Play It Again, Sam.”

So, her soul will have to be stirred, and it is when a manuscript from her ex-husband, Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal), a struggling, romantic writer, arrives in the mail. Their past relationship is glimpsed in flashbacks written in the kind of faux-soulful bilge that often plagues early-20s kind of work, where questions of paying fealty to The Man or staying true to your art reign supreme. Eventually Susan breaks Edward’s heart by leaving him for a handsome man named Hutton (Armie Hamer), though their marital bust up is tied just as much, as a vicious, slyly comic cameo by Laura Linney as Susan’s mom evinces, to an inherent weakness in Edward. It’s the old nice guy affliction, you might say, that he will simply never be able to run with the bulls.

As Susan dives into her ex’s manuscript, however, often reading in darkened rooms with nary a light, seeming to suggest she really does need those ginormous black frames she sometimes rocks, a story within a story emerges, as she envisions the novel unfolding in her head, casting Edward in the part of the book's protagonist’s, Tony Hastings, who is driving through the west Texas night with his wife (Isla Fisher) and daughter (Ellie Bamber). They run afoul of some southern roughnecks, captained by Ray (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who run the family off the road, taunt and tease them and then abscond with Tony’s two loved ones, leaving him behind, and causing him to enlist the aid of a local lawman, Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon).

For all the tension Ford manages to create in little bursts here and there, and for effective as Gyllenhaal can be at coming across pitifully helpless, this story never quite flies, feeling like a grisly, washed out, cheaply budgeted midnight thriller all done up to play for more hoity toity crowds of movie awards seasons rather than the insomniacs looking for something to watch at 2 AM. Why else would the ringleader look less like the hitchhiker in “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” than a GQ model displaced from Hollywood to the rural prairie? What’s worse, because it quickly becomes clear that the story’s entire purpose is for Edward to communicate with Susan by page, transforming the guilt he felt for not being strong enough to be her man into some sort of grindhouse paperback, the characters within the story feel inconsequential, figments of Susan and Edward’s imagination.

All, that is, except for Bobby Andes, who, against all the odds, the ever-dexterous Shannon manages to outfit with real individuality, communicated in eyes that observe Tony with more judgment than suspicion, and a few grunts and grimaces that quietly evoke his character’s backstory before it even emerges. And when the backstory does come to light, Shannon plays it not with any kind of melancholy but a surly craving to see matters of earthly justice through before it’s too late. He’s ticked off, but dedicated. It’s really quite wonderful, this performance, this character, almost threatening to eat “Nocturnal Animals” not whole like an animal on a National Geographic special, but like someone stealing bites at a formal dinner.

Alas, Bobby Andes must disappear so that Tony’s story can come full circle, and so, in turn, can Edward’s. The manuscript ends on a note of ambiguity, and so, in a sense, does the movie itself. Not in terms of narrative, really, which builds to a point “you can see coming”, with vengeance consumed, but with the concluding emotions of Susan. The final sequence in which she sits at a swank restaurant, sipping at her lavishly lit cocktail, is like a work of art hung in a museum, one which pointedly leaves us to wonder her exact state of mind, which Adams pointedly refuses to betray, as if she will remain there for an eternity, content to let us wonder.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Kansas City Confidential (1952)

Noir is so often about the grisly jaws of fate locking themselves around the main character and Joe Rolfe (John Payne) of Phil Karlson’s “Kansas City Confidential” is no different. Those jaws get ahold of him pretty good. The difference, however, is that when they do, he slips out of them and turns the tables on fate, perhaps plartly because for all his baggage and orneriness the cruel world realizes it owes him one. He’s a floral deliveryman glimpsed in the opening scene, unwittingly being watched by Tim Foster (Preston Foster), an ominous, intelligent thug who has plans to rob an armored car with three ex-cons he knows he can enlist because their respective situations make it virtually impossible for them to say no. But Foster’s master touch is marking Joe as the involuntary patsy, making it seem as if the latter's delivery truck is the getaway car. And as Foster goes about putting his plan into place, Joe disappears from screen, a nice touch that underscores how Joe isn’t even aware of the plans being drawn against him.

Sure enough, when the job gets pulled and Foster and his gang get away, making haste for Mexico, Joe is down to the police precinct where Payne gives his character the air of fatalistic menace, like he knew it was coming all along, acting not incredulous at his arrest but irate. He would rather fight the cops then prove his innocence. Still, his innocence is eventually determined and Joe is released. But rather than simply ease back into his old life and wait for the other shoe to fall again, Joe decides to get his, going after the four men responsible, following them to points south and killing and assuming the identity of Peter Harris, played wonderfully by Jack Elam with sweaty, strewn hair and a sweaty face, who is one of those guys who just doesn't stand a chance when it is time to pay the piper.

Joe then tracks Foster and the other two, Boyd Kane (Neville Brand) and Tony Romano (Lee Van Cleef, marvelous), to the resort town of Barados. Foster has planned it so that he knows the other men but they don’t know him, and yet when he sees Joe rather than Harris, he knows trouble will emerge. And so it does, as each of these four men are not about to sit back and let someone else double cross them, leading to all manner of advance double crosses. There are so many re-arrangements of the upper hand that you start to see the end coming from, as they say, a mile away, and that is just fine. Because the ultimate twist becomes less about surprise than the decision that Foster has to make.

This is tied back to our fifth and final main character - Helen Foster (Coleen Gray), the daughter of our gang leader himself. She is an aspiring lawyer who has flown down to Barados to surprise her dad, only to wind up traveling alongside Joe and becoming smitten. If the film has a flaw, it is that film forgoes this meeting sequence. We are simply meant to assume their love is a given, which robs it of immediacy and makes it feel more like a story device. Even so, Helen herself never quite feels like a story device because, to the credit of the George Bruce/Harry Essex screenplay, she is fairly fleshed out.

She is an aspiring lawyer, meaning she has wits, and she uses those wits to aid Joe when he needs it. She also is only briefly kept in the dark about the truth involving Joe, allowed to ferret out what’s up early on, and not simply giving in or walking out. No, because Joe is set up as an innocent man her affection for him in light of what she learns still manages to make some sense. And so her decision to help Joe, and to enlist her father to help Joe, not knowing who her father really is, becomes the most affecting part of the film.

If Preston Foster exudes menace in the early going, he convincingly dials it back for many of the scenes in Mexico, often coming across like the jovial fisherman he claims to be. And even if you know all his deepest, darkest secrets, you still believe the love for his daughter is true. And keeping his dirty secret hidden from his daughter becomes paramount, more so even than who gets the money, though that still matters, and Foster finds himself forced to beg Joe for help. And Joe’s decision to give that help stands out as something more than a requisite happy ending. The cruel world, after all, has finally shown favor and so he decides to pay it forward.

Like, Happy Thanksgiving, Or Whatever

It's Thanksgiving, which, as the name implies, is a time for giving thanks, if not also a time to remember that Thanksgiving helped, uh, usher in the extermination of Native Americans from the northeast. (Stand with Standing Rock here.) And I confess, I'm feeling a little more of that last one this year given obvious events on American shores earlier this month that would seem, in certain respects, to indicate parts of these here United States have not really advanced all that much in social attitudes since the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock.

Of course, as soon as you start talking that way, there are all manner of morons who emerge to tell you to stop being that guy because all these stories about the real Thanksgiving are just a conspiracy by The Media™ to ruin the taste of everyone's turkey. What's worse, there are also all manner of optimists who emerge to tell you that everything is going to be ok because the sun came up, and to tell you that hey, man, it's Thanksgiving so, like, give thanks! And hell, there are still beautiful things in the world. There's this Tribe Called Quest song; there's this Carly Rae Jepsen song; there's the banana pudding at Hattie B's; there's Laurence Laurentz; there's Olya Povlatsky; there's Tommy Armstrong Jr. scrambling out of the pocket and heaving the football downfield which makes me feel like, I imagine, Katy Perry flying above some gargantuan stadium in a harness. Still, you know, all the other stuff. Sigh.

That's why this Thanksgiving I find myself feeling a little like the immortal Del Griffith of "Planes, Trains and Automobiles", wanting to exude so much gladness amidst calamity even as I nonetheless find myself wracked by fear and sadness, straining to put a smile on my face but collapsing into tears when no one's looking. So, this Thanksgiving, I don't want to watch "Love Actually", frankly, which has been a longstanding tradition of my fellow Turkey Day orphans, because I'm not feeling like love actually is all around because I'm feeling like a good chunk of my American peeps who flaunt their evangelicism only want to issue love on the basis of this & that because they get off on hate so much more than they will ever realize.

So fuck it. I'll just be over here in this burned out car, in the snow, sitting by myself.

We Love You, Shelley Duvall

My introduction to Shelley Duvall was through my sister. That’s not to say that my sister introduced me to Shelley Duvall, not really, because she never sat me down to show me something Shelley Duvall was in. My sister was younger than me, and at some point she got into Faerie Tale Theater, the old school live action children’s show that Duvall hosted and narrated. And so once when we were on a family vacation, and my parents were in the front seat and my sister and I, both very young, were in the back seat, my sister spent half the time pretending to be Shelley Duvall hosting Faerie Tale Theater. “Hello,” she would say to a make-believe audience, “I’m Shelley Duvall.” She’d say a few things, then, being the jerk older brother I was, I’d ask a question and my sister, feigning, but not really, exasperation, would say exactly this: “Now I have to start all over again. …… Hello, I’m Shelley Duvall.” On and on this would go. It’s still an inside joke in my family, one that I have just publicized, and for several years all I knew of Shelley Duvall was my sister saying “Hello, I’m Shelley Duvall.”

I can still hear that line in my sister’s voice as clear as day, almost as clearly as I can hear Shelley Duvall herself in “Annie Hall” delivering the immortal line “The only word for this is transplendent – it’s transplendent!” which I am ashamed to say I did not include on my recent A Few Movie Lines That Matter More Than Most listicle because I think of that line all the time. In fact, when Usain Bolt skyrocketed to victory in the 200 meters at the 2015 World Championships I requisitely went off the deep end and went to Facebook and typed “The only word for what Usain Bolt just did is transplendent – it’s transplendent!”

“Annie Hall”, however, was not the first Duvall movie I watched. No, that would be “The Shining. You know, the one where she spends the majority of her time on screen being terrorized into a pile of jangly nerves by an overblown, if yet no less effectively vicious, Jack Nicholson. And while it is tempting here to devolve into a tangent on the brutal means by which director Stanley Kubrick is said to have extracted Duvall’s performance, I always think of her interview with the esteemed Roger Ebert where she said “After I made ‘The Shining,’ all that work, hardly anyone even criticized my performance in it, even to mention it, it seemed like. The reviews were all about Kubrick, like I wasn’t there.” But, of course, she was there, even if she did such a splendid of job of seeming to recede into terrified nothingness from Nicholson’s monstrosity, only to still convincingly evince that terror welling up into resistance by way of desperation. Without Duvall, it should go without saying, even if it sometimes does, all you’ve got is a more murderous Nixon roaming the White House hallways, talking to portraits.

Seven years later in “Roxanne”, a personal favorite, Duvall has less screen time, though she is no less vital. If Steve Martin’s C.D. Bales, a modern update on Cyrano de Bergerac, is the earnest spirit of the film’s ski town setting then Duvall’s diner owner Dixie is sort of its easygoing sage. Everyone around her, from C.D. to the titular rocket scientist, can’t quite seem to see the forest for the trees, but Dixie can, and rather than foist it upon people, Duvall lets Dixie gently point it out. There’s this wonderful shot when Dixie is wearing C.D.’s firemen’s cap which always seemed important to me; C.D. might have been the fire chief, but Dixie put out the fires.

It was in the company of maverick auteur Robert Altman, however, where Duvall really excelled, which was appropriate since it was Altman’s people who famously discovered her behind a cosmetics counter, with no acting ambitions, in Texas. Pauline Kael called Duvall “Bizarrely original,” and while the bizarre might have referred to either Duvall’s unconventional appearance or cadence, I also thought the bizarre referred to the simple idea of remaining true to her own spirit, which is so much more difficult than it sounds. Altman never tried to force her into some other box labeled “acting”; he simply let her be herself. My girlfriend thinks the epitome of Altman is “Nashville”, and I think the epitome of Altman is “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” though even if Duvall was in both I also think the epitome of Duvall with Altman was “Nashville” where Duvall’s not-quite-of-this-world air allowed her California hippie touched down in Nashville just the right tone, as if she existed in some alternate dimension even as she went about her business in the present dimension simultaneously.

I am writing all this, of course, as a kind of working through in the wake of that devastating Dr. Phil clip from last week (pointedly not linking) of the psychologist turned psychologist-lite TV personality interviewing a mentally ill Duvall. It’s just awful to watch, a grotesque exploitation, so much so that Stanley Kubrick’s daughter Vivian sent what basically amounted to a cease & desist letter to Dr. Phil. Whatever Ms. Duvall is obviously battling should, as far as I’m concerned, be battled privately, not publically, not for clips and clicks and all that shit. And frankly, I have nothing to add beyond that, because whatever she is going through is strictly her business, not mine, and I wish her well, even if those wishes feel pretty much helpless.

But seeing that clip made me think of The New Yorker’s irascible, if nevertheless oft-trenchant, Richard Brody, who in the wake of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s untimely passing, observed that it is just as important to commemorate the artists we love when they are still with us, not just when they are gone. And so I think of the last time I saw Duvall in a movie, long, long ago, so long ago that I put the reels of the movie together myself at the Wynnsong 16 in Des Moines, Iowa where I was a projectionist, and then sat down to watch it long after the theater had closed. It was called “Home Fries.” It was pretty ho hum, truth be told, and I wasn’t much engaged. But suddenly, Duvall appeared as Drew Barrymore’s - what else? - eccentric mother.

I will never ever forget how happy I was to see her.

Chevalier

Athina Rachel Tsangari’s “Chevalier” opens with a group of men in wetsuits emerging from the sea in front of a giant rock face. A few beats later they are cruising through the water in a motorboat, bound for a large luxury yacht, as the music, click clacking away, emits the air of suspense. If we had not seen these men tending to fish between these two sequences we might be forgiven for momentarily thinking of them as high tech assassins, or thereabouts, in the midst of a traditional action movie opening. But that semi-feint feels deliberate, setting these men up as something akin to action heroes in their own mind. After all, many of our finest action movies, and many more of our not so fine action movies, are essentially exercises in machismo, like Jason Statham in “Spy” taking himself super seriously to super hilarious effect. And all the guys in “Chevalier” are not entirely unlike Statham’s agent Rick Ford, not so much in their line of work as in their attitude. Because every guy here, even the one revealed as still living with his mother, is probably convinced he is the best in general.

That is a phrase they return to one night when the six principal dudes are sitting around a table playing a game they quickly lose interest in. So someone suggests another game, called Chevalier, where someone assigns someone else a challenge and the challenge is graded. A modification is then proposed – namely, what if they are graded on everything? As in, literally everything they do, the way they sleep, the way they eat, the way they fish, the way they exercise, the way they skip stones, the size of their what-have-ya, any of it, all of it. This way, see, they can determine which of these dudes really is the best in general.

There are echoes here of The Duplass Brothers’ 2012 comedy “The Do Deca Pentathlon”, in which two brothers see their lifelong rivalry through by finally finishing an incomplete pentathlon from their youth. But while that movie was partly about male preening, it was just as much about brotherly complications and deep resentment. Some of that is present in “Chevalier”, given that these men are portrayed as friends, and that two of them are also brothers, but personal identities and backstories, aside from glimmers here and there, often come across beside the point. We barely have any inkling of who these men are off the boat. No, to Tsangari these are often less individual men then one big blob of male ego bobbing on a boat in the Aegean Sea.

If sometimes these challenges come across like a means of passing judgment, or causing humiliation, the idea of winners and losers gradually falls by the wayside, no matter how many grades each man may scribble inside his little notebook. No one wants to lose, of course, but in the context of “Chevalier” even the losers are not strictly bound to losing because everyone here fancies himself incapable of such a fate. They are masters of their own domain. And even if their inherent insecurities seep out in the midst of competition anyway, each man simultaneously remains secure in his own mind of just how great he is, which is “Chevalier’s” niftiest trick and its ultimate point.

At the end, when they reach shore and bid farewell and climb in their cars to drive away, Tsangari holds the shot on the empty road a few beats longer than expected. Why you can practically imagine each man behind his respective wheel saying to his self out loud and with vigor “I’m the best in general.”

Moonlight

In the opening scene of Barry Jenkins’s “Moonlight”, Juan (Mahershala Ali, alternating deftly between intimidation and benevolence), a crack dealer, pulls his car up to the curb, climbs out and crosses over to where one of his flunkies is running the street. And as the two men converse, Jenkins’s camera circles them, around and around, before re-following Juan as he strolls back to his car, pausing to let a group of kids run by. The intent of this arc shot is not to show off, or to nauseate the audience, but to connect the circular nature of the life a man like Juan, or anyone else in the neighborhood, might lead. This is brought home in maybe the movie’s most powerful scene, when Juan confronts the mother Paula (Naomie Harris) of Chiron, the meek kid Juan has taken under his wing. Juan can’t believe Paula would smoke crack when she has a son to care for; Paula can’t believe Juan would sell her crack when he acts like he cares for her son. The scene ends at an intentional impasse.

Not that “Moonlight” is strictly a parable about drugs. Far from it, in fact, as the question of whether to sell or whether to use is predominantly tied up in Chiron’s sexuality. Jenkins tells his story in three different chapters, chronicling Chiron as a pre-teen (Alex Hibbert), a teenager (Ashton Sanders), and an adult (Trevante Rhodes). In the first act he is un-graciously nicknamed “Little”, picked on for his size, though his acute shyness stems just as much from a confusion and fear about who he is underneath that diminutive height and weight. You see that emerge in a scene where he and the only kid who doesn’t pick on him, Kevin (Jaden Piner), have a bit of fun roughhousing. As Chiron lies in the grass afterwards, the camera lingers on his big eyes for a couple extra beats, cluing us into the fact that he has undergone something incontrovertible. That he has, and when the film moves into his teenage life we see this even more, even if you can simultaneously sense the character wanting to show it less.

If the bullying as a little kid centered around his size, here it centers around suspicions of his being gay, revealed immediately by classmate Terrel (Patrick Decile) chiding Chiron for needing a tampon. The character of Terrel is decidedly one note, but “Moonlight” knows that in high school you have to fit into one box all the time, and to to exist outside of that box is something akin to a figurative death sentence. Chiron knows this too. And the performance of Sanders is a marvel of agonizing restraint – as in, he fights every minute of every day to restrain what he feels and who he is. You never see this more acutely than in a late night subway ride when he leans against a window and hugs his backpack against his body, seemingly about to explode from what he’s bottling up. And then, he does explode, in the next scene with Kevin (Jharrel Jerome), still his friend, on the beach where they get high and finally give in to the bubbling infatuation that was always there even if they didn’t understand it, and don’t understand still.

This teenage passage ends, however, not with that act of passion beneath the stars, but with Kevin enlisted by Terrel to, essentially, kick Chiron’s ass. It’s part peer pressure, part confusion of who Kevin knows he is, and it ends with Chiron going not after Kevin but Terrel, and finally standing up for himself, which, in one of those aggravating paradoxes of life, is exactly what takes him down.

That is the trigger for the concluding passage, where Chiron is now an ex-con and hardened creak dealer. If we lose sight of Juan after the first passage, we don’t really, because Juan re-emerges in this form of Chiron, where Rhodes exudes the same mixture of intimidation and benevolence, an unspoken acknowledgement of how Juan, for good and bad, influenced his young charge. And if Juan carried an air of regret about his line of work, so does Chiron, where the film has circled back around to the dangling first act fate you hoped he might avoid.

Still, something like hope beckons when he gets an unexpected phone call from adult Kevin (Andre Holland), who is living in Miami, running a little diner after getting out of prison on parole. The two men meet in a sequence that is wonderfully unhurried and absolutely resistant to easy epiphanies. In their interaction, as they tip-toe around what is clearly weighing most on their minds, you begin to see and feel how this has weighed Chiron down for so long, how that one moment with Kevin and its terrible aftermath shattered his burgeoning transformation, marooning him. And if there are a great many tragedies present in “Moonlight” none is more tragic than the societal pressures that push a person to be someone they are not. And if Chiron loses his compass early in life, the end offers at least a moonlit glimmer of finally finding his way home.

Another "Gritty" Robin Hood Movie Is What We Need Least Right Now So, Hey, Here It Is

In these unbelievably dark days, when half of America is steeped in all consuming doom and gloom, the half of America to which I disappointingly, zealously belong, you would hope for a few places to go where rays of sunlight might still peak through the trees. A place, like, say, Sherwood Forest, and its foremost hero, one Robin Hood, the fencing, guffawing bloke who took from the rich to give to the poor, and who always gets to stab the Sheriff of Nottingham in the heart because it, see, is a fairytale and he, see, is entirely mythical.

Alas. This is now, and now we are not allowed fairytales in fiction, because now fiction is all about being authentic, and being authentic means being real, and being real means being gritty. And nothing now says gritty more than origin story, because when you have an origin story you can get back to basics, and getting back to the basics means an aesthetic light on Technicolor and heavy on murk. And that is why, just when we need it the absolute least, we are about to get a gritty origin story of Robin Hood. Because – OH FOR GOD’S SAKE WHY DO WE HAVE TO KEEP AUTHENTICATING A GODDAM MYTH?

Stay merry, man, stay merry forever.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Pitfall (1948)

The oft-ominous vibe of late 1940s noir is typically connected to post-WWII America, where a lingering sense of dread pervaded, whether from atomic-related concerns or lingering Nazis still scuttling about. At the same time, however, post-WWII America is noted for the baby boom, which was a result of the uptick in marriage, both of which begat the 1950s idyll, an idyll that has been challenged in the years since as not necessarily being as idyllic as its surface might show. Andre de Both’s “Pitfall” was released in 1948, when the aforementioned anxiety was still in the air, and yet it almost seems to predict the moralizing that would become rampant during the baby boom in Eisenhower-land, when having and maintaining a picture perfect family was paramount. “Pitfall” feels like a marriage PSA by way of noir, a movie that was made to scare people into settling down and walking the straight and narrow because, mister, if you don’t......

The mister in question is Dick Powell’s John Forbes. Everyone calls him “Johnny” but he sure doesn’t look like a Johnny; he looks like a John, a plain ol’ John. Why even when he wears his fedora at a jaunty angle he still looks as dull as an employee of Olympic Mutual Insurance might. That’s where he works, and he doesn’t seem pleased about it because the movie opens with one of those scenes of domestic terror masquerading as domestic bliss. “Your breakfast’s on the kitchen table,” says his wife Sue (Jane Wyatt). “Where else would it be?” he retorts and you can just feel the frustration in the same ol’, same ol’ seeping out, even if he didn’t then launch into the obligatory soliloquy about how everything’s the same ol’, same ol’, and hey, what if they just hopped a boat and cruised to south America?

This is his doubting the hearth and home, the foundation that sustains America, and by simply questioning it, he must be punished, not merely tempted, and rest assured he is, the latter leading directly to the former, and leaving plain ol’ John Forbes down and out and with his head in his hands for so much as entertaining the possibility of something else. That something else, as one might presume given the genre, is a dame, in this case, Mona Stevens (Lizbeth Scott), who was given gifts by her lover Smiley (Byron Barr), who is now behind bars because he embezzled money to get those gifts, amongst other items. John is tipped off by the firm’s P.I., Mac McDonald (a suitably menacing Raymond Burr), who has eyes for Mona and wants to stay on the case to put the moves on her.

John is entranced by Mona before they even meet, entering her home when she’s not there, as you do, and flipping through her modeling portfolio, where she is all primed and posed and ready to seduce him. That seduction, however, is less of a sexual variety than an emotional one, never more so than in a scene where they take a speedboat for a spin. It’s “Miami Vice-ish”, really, but with the woman at the wheel and turning the controls over to the man. He takes them and his eyes burn not so much with lust for her as lust for anything or anywhere else, wherever this boat can take him.

John never even strays all the way across the line, but to have thoughts of disloyalty to his wedding vows is more than enough in “Pitfall.” Why he even realizes the error of his ways midway through, re-pledging himself to his wife and son, both of whom mostly just exist as symbols of domesticity, but by then it’s too late. Once he simply lets his thoughts roam beyond the bushes of cozy suburbia, his fate is already sealed. And a movie that ostensibly ends happy, with all the right people being dead and all the right people being alive, does not feel happy at all. Sue pledges to give John another chance, but that feels precarious, as if the cracks that have already appeared in their marital foundation have rendered their marriage unsalvageable. A lotta people spout the phrase thou shalt not covet; “Pitfall”, baby, believes it.

Shout-Out to the Extra: Hoosiers 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. 

 “Hoosiers” was released thirty years ago this week. A lot has been written about this movie – a lot has been written about this movie by me – and by now you have probably heard the story that for the climactic state basketball tournament clash between itty bitty Hickory and mighty South Bend Central, the filmmakers could not find enough extras to fill all of Butler Fieldhouse, forcing them to move the extras around from shot to shot so that it always appeared as if the gymnasium was full. Boy, that’ll earn the little money of your lower-rung production crew. But there is more to the story of extras in “Hoosiers” than this one.

There is an extra, in fact, one tasked with portraying a mighty South Bend Central player, that the esteemed Bill Simmons wrote about many years ago – “My favorite part of the ensuing chaos: As Jimmy is carried around the court, the cameras cut to the losing bench, where one of the big guys on South Bend is hugging a distraught cheerleader, finally glancing out to the court at Jimmy, pointing, and saying something that was undoubtedly the 1951 equivalent of ‘That’s one bad mother------.’” Truth. Watch the scene and you will see the moment described and you will nod and think “Yup.” That extra always caught my fancy too, but there is another extra that has always struck my fancy even more.

This extra is glimpsed a few times throughout, usually sporting a pair of overalls, and he’s always right down front in whatever auditorium the Hickory Huskers happen to be playing, like a more agriculturally competent version of L.A. Lakers fan #1 Jack Nicholson. A guy who always sits this close must clearly hold the team close to his heart, and while the extra is never allowed to speak, he still communicates that love in his few brief moments, the kind of love that I dare say is familiar to many fans.

This is never more apparent than at Regional Finals in Jasper. In the midst of a tense contest to determine whether itty bitty Hickory will reach the hallowed State Championship game, Hickory’s Everett Flatch is chagrined to find the injury he suffered in the previous game has flared back up. Normally this would send him to the bench. But these are delicate times. Two Hickory players have fouled out and so removing Everett from the game would mean hapless Ollie would have to go in. At first, Coach Norman Dale sends Everett back to the court. But upon doing so, he trudges toward bench, hand to brow, clearly still working this decision through. And as he does, you see our valiant extra down front, hands folded, leaning in, as if he, the fan, is about to hold a private council with the coach, and about to be pissed if the coach gets this decision wrong.

It’s a fan who wants to be privy to the coach’s decision making. Hell, it’s a fan who thinks he is privy to the coach’s decision making. It’s a fan filled with a possessive kind of love for his favorite team, a fan who considers himself part of the team, whether or not he suits up every game and practices every day between 3 and 5. It’s a fan who intrinsically embodies that one word so many self-righteous scribes tell fans never to use, only to be ignored, again and again, because it’s not a fan that says “Hickory.” Ha! Never. It’s a fan that says “We.”

Pour one out for the extra.

Jack Ryan: A Shadow Recruit, a non review

“Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit” (2014) is non-canonical Tom Clancy. Unlike the previous Jack Ryan films, which featured, respectively, Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck as the character, director Kenneth Branagh’s “Shadow Recruit” was not based on a Tom Clancy novel. It instead borrowed Clancy’s character and dreamt up a story from scratch, penned by Adam Cozad and the old screenwriting stalwart David Koepp. Perhaps this is why the movie opens with Chris Pine’s Jack Ryan as an apple-faced college lad seeing the Twin Towers attack on TV, borrowing the inciting incident of innumerable Hollywood films of the last fifteen years, though Cozad and Koepp still homage Clancy by making the Russians, not Middle Eastern terrorists, the chief villains. This happens because Ryan, spurred by 9/11 to work undercover for the CIA on Wall Street, ferrets out a scheme where the Russian Federation plans to sink the global economy. “Within about six weeks they’re gonna start calling it what it is: the Second Great Depression.”

Prevention of the second great depression comes about by employment of familiar means, be it a car chase, be it an assassin thwarted, be it a break-in to download some files, be it a fiancé who becomes a damsel in distress. That last one is the one I really want to talk about. By now, here in the second paragraph, you, faithful reader, are probably asking yourself why in the world I am reviewing a two year old movie that seems outside of my general wheelhouse. It’s a fair question. The answer is that one Keira Knightley, this blog’s official Cinematic Crush, plays Jack Ryan’s fiancé, Cathy, which is right, because even if Keira is spelled with a “K” Keira looks like a Cathy with a “C”, and I am slowly winding my way toward becoming a Keira Completist because this is how I do. And so I recorded the film off FX and watched it in bursts over a few nights while my beautiful girlfriend, who is completely (or, mostly) cool with me crushing on Keira, was away in Italy.

And I confess that as I watched “Shadow Recruit” I became much more compelled by Cathy’s plight, partially because Keira played the part, yes, but also because Keira’s playing the part made me focus on the part she was playing more than I otherwise would have, and as I did, my mind wandered. My mind wandered to wondering what her home life looked like. Cuz, like, look, we’ve seen this “Shadow Recruit” movie before. And while Branagh handles it with an admirable professionalism, well, how many more times can we see the husband who is really with the CIA but can’t tell his spouse he is with the CIA even though his spouse is slowly becoming suspicious that something suspicious is going on, like her husband being with the CIA. We sort of saw a pushing back against this played out tedium in “Knocked Up”, if you’ll remember, where Leslie Mann’s character, suspicious her spouse was up to something, possibly even having an affair, follows him to some out of the way locale only to discover – egads! – that he is playing fantasy baseball. I enjoyed seeing the secret from the other point of view as opposed to the point of view of the person with the secret.

So, why not that movie in an action movie? Why the insistence on seeing movies about CIA agents from the CIA agent’s point of view? Why can’t we ever see the CIA agent movie from the point of view of the CIA agent’s in-the-dark spouse? Why not “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit” as a kind of “Klute”, where the titular male character reveals himself as less important than the primary female character in his orbit? Why not Keira – er, Cathy – at home, suspicious and stuck in a rut but with all these strange warning bells going off in impressionistic bursts, a melding of Keira’s “Last Night” and “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit”? (Hollywood producers just blacklisted me.)

And if there is an interesting angle in “Shadow Recruit” it’s that when Keira – er, Cathy – shows up in Moscow to surprise her husband who is actually C.I.A.-ing, she stumbles upon a gun in his bag, calls him out, and he confesses the whole truth. And when he confesses, and this is where it gets good (ludicrous), her husband and her husband’s handler actively recruit Keira – er, Cathy – to aid them in a C.I.A.-ing ruse. This is amazing! How on earth is this in any way proper protocol?! An agent’s wife, with no field training, suddenly enlisted to go on a mission to help save the world! It’s like “The Man Who Knew Too Little” but re-imagined as “The Woman Who Knew Too Much.” THAT’S A GODDAM MOVIE! Alas, as quickly as she becomes a fun loving participant, she is reduced to the role of Damsel in Distress, damn it all to hell.

This whole post is wishful thinking, I know, and fair enough. So if we can’t get “The Woman Who Knew Too Much” then maybe, at the very least, we could get a movie about the never-seen cleaning crew that is apparently enlisted midway through “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit” to completely wipe any evidence of a bloody fight in a hotel room and dead body. I’m picturing the crew as Michael Shannon, Kevin Corrigan and Abbi Jacobson.

30 for 30: Phi Slama Jama

“Phi Slama Jama” was the frat-like moniker coined by sportswriter Thomas Bonk to describe the Guy Lewis coached Houston college basketball teams of the early 1980s, squads that helped usher in the sport’s sped-up, shot clock era by running relentlessly up and down the court and making their infinitely entertaining dunks the point rather than a mere byproduct. But despite the title, director Chip Rives frames his story not through the team itself but through the search for one of its players – fabled eccentric Benny Anders, who we are introduced to through a daguerreotype-ish portrait, in which he wears a suit and stares semi-irreverently into the distance.

After the rise of Anders as slam-dunking savant off the Houston bench, however, he fell quick, literally vanishing. Literally literally. People penned odes to trying to find Anders, though even his closest family seemed unsure of his whereabouts. That search jumps in and out of an otherwise fairly standard sports documentary telling of those grand Cougar teams which reached three consecutive Final Fours but never won the championship, most famously falling short in 1983 when they were stunned in the last second by the heavy underdog North Carolina State Wolfpack.

Game clips and newspaper headlines alternate with a slew of rather uninformative talking heads, ranging from various sportscasters to the team members themselves, unbelievably managing to the mute the astonishing impact of all those dunks. “Phi Slama Jama” never puts into context what those dunks meant, other than people like the milquetoast Jim Nantz offering milquetoast observations like “they were a cultural phenomenon.” Okay, but why? We never see this from the culture’s perspective and we never see the old guard “critics” who lamented fancypants slams and jams that are so often referred to. Everyone tells us how revolutionary this team was and those simple statements of fact are supposed to suffice.

As a coach, Lewis was famous, or notorious, depending on whom you talk to, for allowing his players myriad individual freedom on the court. In other words, while basketball is theoretically a team game, Phi Slama Jama was composed of individuals, and so rather than trying to fit all these individuals into some rigid system, Lewis simply let those individuals be themselves, for a lot of good but for occasional bad. Yet we rarely get to see this movie from individual perspectives. A player’s nickname is often about all we get to try and comprehend his uniqueness. Even Hakeem (then Akeem) Olajuwon, a Nigerian immigrant with an incredible backstory, is limited to a few anecdotes and not much more. All except Benny, that is, whose legacy the doc returns to throughout.

Former Cougar captains Eric Davis and Lynden Rose follow Anders’s trail from Houston to Louisiana to Michigan. As they do, they discuss that championship game of 1983 and how Anders came but a fingertip away from engineering a steal in the last seconds that undoubtedly would have led to a dunk and to victory and to Anders being a hero. Davis and Rose postulate that had this played out, Anders life would have been completely different, a terribly depressing realization, that only sports heroes can succeed, not goats, though no one here, including the director, seems to really grasp that depression, which is extra depressing.

No one grasps it, that is, except Anders, who when he is finally found at film’s end and interviewed offers next to nothing in the way of explaining where he went and why he went there. I don’t owe anybody an explanation he says, and it’s true. He doesn’t. Still, in that explanation, I suspect, is the real story of Phi Slama Jama.

Certain Women

“Certain Women”, based on short stories by Maile Meloy, features three different vignettes with three different women. Characters from each vignette occasionally cross paths with others, but director Kelly Reichardt, who adapted the screenplay, mostly ties these tales together via the main characters’ similarly stifled emotions and lives they struggle to wrest joy and meaning from. You see that immediately in the first scene, where Laura (Laura Dern) and Ryan (James Legros) are currently in the midst of an illicit rendezvous, given the mid-afternoon motel location, as she rubs her socked foot against Ryan’s back. This act, however, exudes less passion than quiet pay-attention-to-me desperation. He doesn’t pay much attention. They talk about the color of her sweater. God, that’s so Reichardt.

Another movie might have employed this affair as an inciting incident, but it’s quickly brushed past as Ryan breaks their relationship off in barely so many words before Laura’s own narrative is essentially co-opted by a different male, Fuller (Jared Harris), a client who keeps showing up at Laura’s law firm. Nominally he yearns to sue for workplace injury, but just as much he is looking for someone to talk to, though he never really listens to what she has to say in return. Indeed, though she has repeatedly told him he can’t sue because he accepted a settlement, Fuller only takes this as a gospel upon hearing it from a male judge.

Eventually, Fuller returns to his old workplace and takes a hostage, and Laura is enlisted to try and talk him down. These moments are played less for tension, however, than drollness, like Laura is a mother forced to clean up an angry adult toddler’s mess. And the seeming confrontation ends limply, and this story intentionally ends without any real sense of who Laura is because she is forced for the duration of the episode to set herself aside, to keep everything she feels in, to give this guy a shoulder to cry on, which she does, nearly literally, in a scene as comical as it is sad when he breaks down sobbing in her car that is set to a Guy Clark song about usurping the sameness of things which you sense in Laura’s quiet weariness is what she so terribly yearns to do.

In the second story we return to Ryan, though the tale truly belongs to Gina (Michelle Williams), his wife. Ryan does not co-opt his spouse’s story, however, so much as exist outside of it, emblemized in the opening moments where she has a covert cigarette on a walk in the woods, and then walks in on Ryan sharing a joke with their daughter (Sara Rodier) that Gina doesn’t get. These moments demonstrate a fissure in this family, as does a simple if nevertheless striking image where Gina and Ryan sit vacantly in the front seat of their truck while their daughter sits in back, tuned out to her iPod.

Gina has apparently decided the solution to this family crisis is to symbolically rebuild their familial foundation by erecting a new family home in a pristine spot of wilderness. To do so, however, she wants to acquire a pile of sandstone that an old man they know, Albert (René Auberjonois), has sitting unused in his yard, and so Gina and Ryan stop by Albert’s for a folksy negotiation. This scene, in which the senile Albert can’t quite stay on topic, drifts from his ingrained attitude toward addressing the male more than the female to his lament that he and his brother intended to use that sandstone to build a deck. The latter never happened, so sure, Gina and Ryan can have it, but in the ensuing sequence where they come to pick the sandstone up, the old man watching from a window leaves you wondering if he’s heartbroken to see it go, heartbroken to see it go to a woman, or if he knows that it can’t fill the void like she hopes. It’s classic Reichardt Ambiguity, or maybe it’s just all three at once.

The ultimate passage is less abstruse, if even more minimalist, where an isolated rancher (Lily Gladstone) is so lonely she wanders one night into a class about school law, a topic which bears no meaning for her, just because it promises a little company. That company winds up being the instructor, Beth Travis (Kristen Stewart), a put out, stressed out lawyer from Livingston who makes the 4 hour trek, each way. After class they visit the local diner, where Beth orders food she never seems to finish while the rancher, who is never named, mostly just sits on the other side with a glass of water, replying to whatever question Beth absent-mindedly thinks to pose. This story is comprised of three classes and three meals, until Beth doesn’t show and the Rancher gets in her car with nary a word and drives to Livingston.

This is something like Big Sky neorealism, where Gladstone gives a humongous performance in the smallest of ways, simply allowing her shy manner, whether by smiles that come across as sad as polite, or a vocal delivery evoking someone who hasn’t been around anyone for long stretches of time, to pull you in. Stewart, meanwhile, is the perfect partner, not cold but so distracted that she remains oblivious to the romantic pull she has on her new sorta friend, even to the end, when suddenly the Rancher is there in the parking lot of her law firm.

This, like everything else, is a passage Reichardt handles with a wrenching undemonstrativeness. If it is impulsive, even passionate move, it plays more of muted innocence, like in the night before the Rancher tracks down Beth where she wanders the streets of Livingston, reminiscent of a big kid who has unexpectedly wound up at Disneyland. And when she does see Beth, a lifetime of not really having any words to say, which is what Gladstone’s entire performance delicately sculpts, comes to bear, and she doesn’t know how to communicate the way she feels. It’s not that Beth rejects her, because Stewart doesn’t even really let Beth reject her, just standing there more in early morning, confusedly squinting, uncaffeinated mystification more than anything. Gladstone lets the Rancher feel rejection anyway, like she expected it, and when she gets back in her truck to commence the long drive back all we are left with is Gladstone’s face.

Gladstone’s face becomes the biggest thing in the movie. With each successive story, the more Reichardt chips away at narrative conventions, until, by these last frames, all that’s really left are emotions splayed across one person’s face.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Glory Alley (1952)

“Glory Alley’s” a weird one. It frames its story through an old newspaperman, Gabe Jordan, telling a young charge about the greatest story he ever told, which laces the ensuing movie with mounds of irony because if “Glory Alley” is the greatest story he ever told then, damn, he wouldn’t have been my go-to columnist. The story begins with a boxer, the immortally named Socks Barbarossa (Ralph Meeker), about to tangle for the title only to suddenly hop off his stool and bolt from the ring. Why? He won’t say, and so the movie becomes a journey to unwinding that secret, which would suggest something of a dark, mysterious tone, except that director Raoul Walsh packs the film with song & dance numbers that seem copy & pasted from some other film entirely. In fact, none other than Louis Armstrong plays Socks’s trainer, Shadow Johnson, if for no other reason than to. It’s like Walsh realized the secret that Socks was holding onto was a dud and so he called on Armstrong, and on Leslie Caron too, to sort of stall time until the secret revealed.

That the secret takes so long to be revealed can essentially be attributed to the astounding stubbornness of Socks and the equally astounding stubbornness of The Judge, Gus Evans (Kurt Kasznar), the possible father in law of Socks considering that he’s dating The Judge’s daughter, Angela (Caron). But if Angela can at least find it in her heart to forgive Socks, even if Socks won’t cop to why he ran out of the ring, The Judge cannot and will not. In a heated disagreement after the bout, in fact, Socks knocks The Judge down. It isn’t deliberate, but it adds fuel to the fire, and The Judge can only look at Socks as a rageful quitter, refusing to give him the benefit of the doubt, refusing to let bygones be bygones, calling him out as a cowardly quitter at every turn

Heck, even when Socks winds up drafted and going overseas to fight in the Korean War, a sudden interlude that between the singing & dancing and skulking seems like a third movie entirely where he becomes a hero in the process, recipient of the Medal of the Honor, it’s still not enough for The Judge to come around. And it’s not enough for Socks to come around either. When his hero status quickly wears off, he gives the medal up. Why does he need it if it won’t give him anything in return? And so it goes, back and forth, on and on, these two men stubbornly refusing to get along. And as they

This is not to say that Angela is any kind of complex character. She mainly exists to be pitted between Father and Fiancé, unsuccessfully trying to broker a truce. You cannot help but feel empathy for her, having to deal with these two inflexible idiots who would have it so easy if the requisite secret could just be unearthed. God, it’s a drag. And it’s the reason why her song & dance numbers still manage to fit despite being apart from the rest of “Glory Alley’s” tone. Because her stage performances become her escape from this pair of feuding numskulls. It becomes our only escape too.

Camp X-Ray

Set in the infamous detainee camp of Guantanamo Bay, “Camp X Ray” is designed as something of a monotonous slog. New to the joint, Pvt. Amy Cole (Kristen Stewart) is immediately indoctrinated to its grimly repetitive procedures, and watching as she buzzes her way through a series of same-looking security doors is like going down the rabbit hole of mindless procedure. True, some of the detainees are often riled up, screaming, psycho-screwing with the MP’s and even hurling bags of you-don’t-want-to-know-what; yet just as often the film deliberately rubs our faces in the mundane. Its closing credits sequence features simple footage of Guantanamo guards making their endless, circular rounds, over and over, on and on into infinity. It’s a drab, unloving environment where the MP’s can’t wear name tags, stripping them of personal identity, and purposely refraining from niceties with those in their charge. This works to allow those few occasional pockets of humanistic sunshine that inevitably shine on down to feel like a legit hallelujahs. 

The story turns on Amy’s relationship with Ali (Peyman Moaadi). Encountering him on her rounds, he forces conversation on her, provokes her, tests her, and eventually senses a glimmer of compassion, causing him to engage her on an emotional level that nonetheless remains tinged with suspicion. And even if an obligatorily tentative mutual respect emerges between them, in many ways, they remain at odds, and how could they not? No one particularly wants to be here, not the detainees, not the MP’s, not the commanding officers. Amy’s superior sullenly declares he hates Guantanamo and is only there because he was ordered, just as Amy was ordered, and on down the line. The detainees, of course, have been ordered here too, against their will, and now everyone is forced is forced to play what essentially amounts to a waiting game where they aren’t really waiting for anything.

They are all prisoners, in other words, and occasionally the film gets too aggressive in its evincing of this fact, like the on-the-nose back-to-back shots that show Amy first, then Ali, sitting on their bunks, eating and reading. And it also goes to expected lengths to question who “the real enemy” is by transforming Amy’s supervisor into someone of questionable moral merit, coming onto Amy, then turning on her when she rejects him.

“Camp X Ray” mostly evades politics, and the few times it does deign to raise them, it does so with an almost ridiculously simple temperament, prompting Amy to say things like “It’s just not as black and white as they said it was gonna be.” What brought Ali here is never discussed. Though the opening scene in which he is nabbed shows him with a table full of mobile phones suggests something is up, there is no follow through. Ali claims his innocence, but we are given no evidence of exactly why this would be and neither is Amy.

Though the rushed conclusion is too determined to traffic in sentimentality, something real is forged between these characters regardless, and that something subtly comes alive in the performance of Stewart who, between bouts of order-giving terseness, skillfully lets her character’s curiosity peek out. She isn’t concerned with his guilt or innocence and this doesn’t become a quest for justice; this is a quest for empathy.

Choose Your Own Post Election Post

Greetings! The Worst American Presidential Election In History is over! Maybe. Maybe not. I hesitate, of course, because we here at Cinema Romantico are on retreat, far, far away in the northern reaches of Minnesota and away from the Interwebs. And because we are away from the Interwebs we cannot tailor this post to account for exact election results. Still, we did not want to leave you, faithful readers, without some sort of soothing tonic if all went well or rot gut whiskey if everything got blown up, and so we hit on the idea of you providing you both options! Apply as necessary.

BEST CASE

Ah. The election is over. The air smells better, the breeze feels cooler, that headache you simply could not shake for 18 months has finally dissipated, the relentless drone of political punditry has gratefully been switched off and now the lilting nothingness of no polling data can be the metaphorical relaxation CD that lets us lay down for our long overdue national nap.........

WORST CASE 

Welp, they finally did it. They killed the republic of George fucking Washington. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.

Election Day in America

“Listen, sug, don’t forget to say your prayers!”

McFarland USA

As the coach of an all-Latino cross country team in a predominantly Latino California town, Jim White is a name not so much too good to be true as scarily indicative of an old screenwriting go-to – that is, the White Savior. The White Savior is named White? So the characters can nickname him Blanco? That sounds like something only a terribly conservative and just plain terrible sports movie could conjure. Yet Jim White was a real person and that his young Latino charges apparently really did nickname him Blanco and Blanco really did coach these kids to a state title in 1987 (and eight more after). It’s a fine story all on its own, one hardly in need of embellishment or increased “conflict” to heighten the “stakes.” And yet “McFarland USA” goes searching for ways to ramp up the drama anyway, which it makes for a befuddling film, one that is actually quite good when it’s not getting in its own damn way.

 Kevin Costner’s Jim White is introduced as a sort of volatile football coach, dismissed because of that sort of volatility, volatility that they can’t make too volatile because it’s still Disney. So he throws a cleat that cuts a player’s chin. That’s enough to get him disgraced and dismissed. But Costner seems less than dedicated to this idea of volatility just as he seems less than dedicated to the idea of his character being a national emblem for his own last name. When he moves his family to McFarland, taking a last ditch job as PE teacher and assistant football coach, he takes his family out to dinner and seems genuinely confused by the word “tacos”. “Do you have burgers?” he asks incredulously, like if he’s not ordering at Chili’s he’s essentially trying to conduct impossible chemistry experiments. Not long after, a fleet of cars appear, made in the film’s cinematic language to look like gangbangers, and as Costner hustles his family to the car, Costner looks like a man less frightened than embarrassed by the scene he’s in. “Can’t we do better than this?” you imagine him asking director Niki Caro just after she’s yelled cut.
 
And that’s the thing, Caro can, and does. Her movie settles in as White and his family settle into the community. Once the clichés needed to set the tone for his emotional turnaround are dispensed with, she provides a clear-eyed view of this story. She presents the conception of the cross country team idea not with the traditional “A Ha!” Moment but with a moment that’s more just like “Oh, Hey.” Eating a sandwich in the bleachers, White recognizes how fast some of the kids in his class run and seems like a pretty decent idea to have them run competitively. Costner plays the moment so perfectly, so matter of fact, that he doesn’t even stop eating his sandwich.
 
Each of his young charges is given at least a little time in his own world, so we see them for them, who they really are, and what this cross country team might mean to each one. They are so fast, we learn, because they are made to run everywhere, from home to picking in the fields in the morning to school and then back to the fields. For the most part, they don’t lash out at this life, they accept it with equal parts admirable grace and understandable frustration. This is how they live, and the real drama in the film is simply in watching the effortless empathy that develops between the coach and his athletes. When White takes them to the beach for the first time, apparently a moment that really did happen, it should by all rights be Disneyfied bombast. But it’s not. It’s a moving evocation of the world outside McFarland, an evocation of where they can go
 
The concluding sequences get mucked up a bit in false conflict of whether or not White will accept a job at a more prestigious school coaching their track team, yet the catharsis when the inevitable victory happens is never blunted and very real. It’s imbued with a selflessness, the way a team teaches you to be a part of something bigger than yourself, and how that team allows White to become part of a bigger community, and how a welcoming community can allow individuals the space to be themselves. Occasionally the film also gets a bit too pointed in painting its competitors This isn’t about Us vs. Them; it’s just Us. And they are more than good enough.

Cinema Romantico's Week Off

Hey, loyal readers, first-time readers and suspect readers wondering “who is this dufus and what’s his predilection for Keira Knightley in hats?” Once again, that time of the year has arrived. Today I am off to unwind, relax, recharge and smile brightly and widely while consuming coffee in 50 degree temperatures on the north shore of Minnesota and Lake Superior while partaking in a weeklong Internet sabbatical. I always take an Internet sabbatical this time of year during this particular getaway, but this year the getaway/sabbatical just happened to coincide with the feverish wind down of The Worst Presidential Election In History. I will be the hell off social media as everything, more or less, goes to social media hell. How’s that for timing?!

But don’t fret! Unlike this past June when we also took a few days off, Cinema Romantico will not be going dark during this absence. We have several posts set to go up automatically, including a couple reviews that were never published for reasons I don’t really know, as well as a traditionally served Friday’s Old Fashioned, and a couple short but sweet election themed posts to try and cheer you up as this interminable process finally (hopefully?) drags itself across the finish line. (Try to) stay sane, y’all, and we will catch back up in real time. Ha det bra!

Destination

A Few Movie Lines That Matter More Than Most

So the Chicago Cubs won The World Series. Did you hear? Yeah, you probably did, and lots of scribes penned resplendently, deservedly purple odes to the series and to the team. But we are a movie blog. And we here at Cinema Romantico could not help noticing that Cubs first baseman Anthony Rizzo, in the middle of the hyper-tense, glorious Game Seven on Wednesday, literally said, at a dramatic moment, to a teammate: “I’m in a glass case of emotion!” I loved this. I loved this because “I’m in a glass case of emotion!” is the line Will Ferrell shouted, baritone-style as Ron Burgundy in “Anchorman.” And whenever my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers are in a tight spot and my emotions inevitably go over the edge, well, I will sometimes think to myself, or actually holler out loud, or enter on the Facebook as a status update when I need to take all my stress somewhere.  “I’m in a glass case of emotion!”

This is why during the World Series, when the Cubs’ Kyle Schwarber, back from injury, was improbably playing to great heights and thereby helping take the Cubs to greater heights, I quoted Coach Norman Dale aloud to myself. “With Jimmy, all the pistons are firing.” I am not entirely certain my girlfriend even realized what I was saying aloud to myself, or why, but rest assured, that’s what I was doing. And when events in Game 7 seemed to be spiraling toward that nefarious place you don’t walk to talk about at parties (I just did it again!) I thought, as I often do in those moments of encroaching, seemingly inevitable agony, “I saw the iceberg and I see it in your eyes”, which is what Rose DeWitt Bukater said to Thomas Andrews in “Titanic”, and which is just a god awful line, yes, but dammit, this is Rose DeWitt Bukater we’re talking about, my Movie Hero for all time, and so its god awfulness is nevertheless lifted up in my out of control mind to the realm of spiritual truth.

This is how I do. I can’t help it. I think of things in terms of movie quotes. I will not apologize. No, sir, I won’t. And while I simply do not have the time or the space to list every movie quote I say to myself and why - like “You are an idiot, only a fresh faced novice would come up with a conclusion like that!” - here are a few of the most common and most important.

A Few Movie Lines That Matter More Than Most

“My mother used to make coffee this way – hot, strong, and good.” 

Any time I have a really good cup of coffee it instantly flashes me back to Jason Robard saying this, poetically haltingly, to Claudia Cardinale in “Once Upon a Time in the West.”

“It’s an X K Red 27 technique.” 

When I’m bumfuzzled by something someone has said, or, more likely, have made someone else bumfuzzled by some nonsensical bullpucky I have uttered, my mind immediately flashes to Kevin Kline as Otto in the most ill-conceived CIA agent impersonation in history, and more than any lunatic line he delivers, it is this one, chock full of pompous desperation, that captures the mood completely. 

“I believe they set aside their law as and when they wish. Their law no longer has rightful authority over us. All they have over us then is tyranny. And I will not live under that yoke. So I will stay here no longer.” 

In the event of any political bullshit, or similarly themed bullshit, I turn to colonial militiaman Jack Winthrop of “Last of the Mohicans” getting gallantly riled up. (Alternate: Corey Glover’s righteous line reading in “Platoon” of “Politics, man, politics. We always getting fucked around here.”)

“I use that fan all the time. All the time.” 

Anytime I hear anything of confounding stupidity I immediately imagine Skippy of Noah Baumbach's “Kicking and Screaming” giving his long-winded harange about how every college student brings a fan that they never use as a means to let Parker Posey reach Mach 5 Deadpan with this Hall of Fame reply.

“You up for this one, Maverick?” 

“Just a walk in the park, Kazansky.” 

When I’m bubbling with excitement and I know even the cruel intentioned universe can’t bring me down.

“And so it is.” 

Lisa Bonet as the immortal Marie de Salle offering these four simple words with a line reading that will melt your goddam heart is my all-time all-purpose go-to for bittersweet acceptance.