2016 / 2017

In Memoriam: Carrie Fisher

Carrie Fisher passed away Tuesday at the age of 60, meaning her mother, Debbie Reynolds, whose own frail health Fisher talked about this year, as she did most everything, with great candor, out-lived her daughter, and only, in perhaps the most gut-wrenching twist yet of this gut-wrenching year, by a day, which makes this all that much more worse. And when Fisher passed, rather than leading with her drowning in the moonlight, strangled by her own bra, as was her long standing wish, she was, for the most part, deemed in the obits as Princess Leia. Fisher, of course, foresaw this as far back as 1980 in advance of the release of “The Empire Strikes Back”, telling Rolling Stone’s Timothy White that when she and Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford “kick off, we will be the princess and Luke and Han.” White inevitably asked how that made Fisher feel, causing, as White noted, all the color to drain from Fisher’s face. She replied: “Helpless.”

As a kid, I sought to memorize the names of Fisher and Hamill and Ford with greater gusto, I confess, than the Pledge of Allegiance. Knowing Carrie Fisher is Leia, Mark Hamill is Luke and Harrison Ford is Han were the real facts of life, man. Of course, the inherent notion of my memorizing of the principal “Star Wars” cast, when you really examine it, says something. It says how I knew Princess Leia before I knew Carrie Fisher. Fisher, who was born into showbiz, daughter of Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, a tempestuous union that foreshadowed the tempestuousness of Fisher’s own life, has said she never really sought to be an actor, a fairly ironic fate who was immortalized for a role she played. That role became her cross to bear, and while Hamill just sort of seemed to ride the waves of that cross, and while Ford always seemed to publically maintain a patented grumpy distance from that cross, Fisher, in the manner of the caustic, honest writer she very famously was, seemed to bear it with more introspection, which was what her famous line “George Lucas ruined my life and I mean that in the nicest way possible” evinced.

You can sometimes see that introspection in “Star Wars.” Ford famously chided George Lucas for his dialogue after the fact, but Fisher essentially commented on the dialogue in the movie, as she explained in a recent interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, deploying an English accent that came and went in accordance with the inherent ridiculousness of the line she was tasked to say. (“The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”) By “Empire Strikes Back”, Leia sounded more in lockstep with Fisher herself. “We don’t have time to discuss this in a committee!” Han shouted in the midst of a comic-suspenseful moment. “I am not a committee!” Leia parried. I watched that scene again for the zillionth time on Tuesday night, laughing so hard I had to rewind and watch again. I adored the bickering of Han and Leia, so much more than the solo quest of Luke, even as a kid, foreshadowing my eventual future where Jean Harlow rom coms would interest me so much more than samurai epics. It also suggested another career Fisher might have led as a romantic lead or just as a lead in general.

Sadly, that never happened for her, perhaps because her unvarnished demeanor and diarist sensibilities made her perfect for supporting parts where she could stand to the side, offering dry commentary on the central characters. Or perhaps her inability to get more leading roles simply tied back to Hollywood’s infinitely retrograde viewpoints of women. Fisher’s greatest parts were either written by other women, like Nora Ephron giving the actress a stellar part in “When Harry Met Sally” that was theoretically supporting even if it felt so much larger, or by Fisher herself, in “Postcards on the Edge”, which essentially was Fisher even if it was Fisher as played by Meryl Streep.

As Fisher aged, she was often tasked for cameos or guest appearances, which were routinely scorching even if they simultaneously left you wanting more. There was her brief turn in “Scream 3” where she not only got to share the screen with Parker Posey, a tantalizing glimpse of an alternate future where those two feisty ladies became a recurring duo, but got to call out Hollywood on some of its b.s. And in an episode of the masterful NBC sitcom “30 Rock” Fisher appeared as a legendary comic television writer. That appearance was funny, sure, but it also felt like Fisher opening a direct line to others in the business, imploring them, as Willa Paskin noted in Slate, “Whatever you do, you don’t opt out on behalf of the man.”

If to people such as myself Carrie Fisher was primarily an entertainer, to others she was something so much more, a hero, if I may be so bold, unmasking mental illness and depression as something that no one needed to be embarrassed or reticent about while continuing to advocate for feminism, going after Hollywood’s – hell, the world’s – proclivity for body-shaming and bringing that infamous gold metal bikini back into the conversation. In telling people that Leia strangled the disgusting space slug with the metal bikini it made her wear because she didn’t like the damn thing, she re-purposed a costume of male objectification in the name of her own cause.

Fisher seemed, frankly, to be everywhere this past year, appearing in “The Force Awakens” as General Leia, still fighting the good fight even as those requisite males around her stumbled and bumbled or vanished for the entire movie. She utilized the platform of “The Force Awakens” press tour as something not to be dreaded but enjoyed, turning dumb questions back around on interviewers and establishing herself as something like a no guff mentor to new “Star Wars” heroine Daisy Ridley. And meanwhile she continued championing mental health awareness, never more eloquently than a bout of advice giving for The Guardian less than a month ago, where a reader with bi-polar asked how Fisher had made peace with her struggles.

Fisher offered enlightenment by taking stock of her life’s trajectory. “Move through those feelings,” she wrote, “and meet me on the other side.” I’m sure there were still plenty of days when Carrie Fisher felt vulnerable to what ailed her, but still, it was comforting to know that ultimately she had made it to the other side, and rather than feeling helpless she was now the one offering so much help. It is help we will terribly miss.

The Invitation

“The Invitation” itself is to a swank dinner party in a remote section of the Hollywood Hills, so remote, in fact, that cell service goes in and out, though it is mostly out, because when making suspense movies in these technological days it is important to establish ahead of time that phones can’t work for fear of straining all credibility later on. And rest assured, “The Invitation” seeks to engender suspense, which we know straight away because as Will (Logan Marshall-Green) and Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi) drive the winding road to this swank dinner party, they hit a deer, severely wounding it, and Will is forced to put the poor animal out of its misery. That sounds like heavy foreshadowing and it is, and is mostly unnecessary because this movie is heavy on foreshadowing. The soundtrack is strictly discordant tones meant to unsettle and the air of the opulent pad of Eden (Tammy Blanchard) and David (Michiel Huisman), dinner party hosts, is chilly and peculiarly off putting, mirroring the unmistakable sensation that something about these hosts is.....off. There is not a single moment in “The Invitation” where you don’t think “something’s up.”

Director Karyn Kusama, however, working from a screenplay by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, covers for this fact. She covers for this fact snarkily with the casual attitude of most of the other party guests, who laugh off Will’s suspicious demeanor by saying things like “it’s L.A.” Ha! You bet it is! And I didn’t doubt that even in the face of the hosts putting on a video of some shaman named Dr. Joseph who soothingly coddles a woman as she passes into the great beyond for all their guests to see that most of these Los Angelenos would remain where they were just because a few bottles of exorbitant wine had been opened. Less flippantly, meanwhile, Kusama also ensures that “The Invitation’s” primary point of view is Will’s, which is important because Will is still trying to work through the death of his adolescent daughter which has left him less than reliable. And it just so happens that he used to raise his daughter in this house because this house used to be his house because he used to be married to Eden.

This means that Will wanders through his old digs, seeing flashes in his mind of the way things were, creating a possible dissonance in what he sees and what he thinks he sees, like David locking doors. Is everything really as off as he suspects or is it all just a product of his imagination? This is what initially generates suspense, but to maintain that suspense, Kusama also has to withhold information, only giving way just enough to keep Will, and us, wary without having a full grasp of the whole story. There are more than a handful of times when Will is just about to unravel what’s happening only to be stopped short by pesky chance. These are protractions to keep you on the edge of your seat, as they say, and that’s fine as far as suspenseful thrillers go. But it’s also precisely what keeps “The Invitation” from cracking through to another tier, like the superior “Coherence”, another dinner party gone wrong extravaganza, but one which used its claustrophobic setting and thriller-like intensity forced its principal character to confront her identity crisis.

It's not a spoiler to say that Eden and David have joined what’s a tantamount to a cult, because this is revealed fairly on, but that cult becomes less about its own inner-workings than this creepy plot device. This scary sect is supposed to be tied back to the grieving process, but that grieving process is never given enough room to breathe in the face of having to lay so many thriller traps for the subsequent payoff. That question of the crazy places one might go in the face of the unthinkable is really interesting, but isn’t as interesting to “The Invitation” as stringing us along to shock us.

The closing shot, not to be revealed, is undoubtedly cool, sure, but more in that way of a really cool magic trick than legit blood curdling, which is pretty much “The Invitation” in general.

Krisha

Thanksgiving, with its re-gathering of family, whether estranged or close-knit and full of foibles, is, frankly, as ripe for horror as Halloween. But Thanksgiving movies about families re-convened tend to revolve more around comic absurdity rather than violent nightmares, aside perhaps from Mark Waters’s “The House of Yes” where an on point Parker Posey thought herself Jackie Kennedy reincarnated. Still, that was predominantly a dark comedy, and Trey Edward Shults’s “Krisha”, his feature film debut, is a full descent into horror, something like a malevolently clever twist on the home invasion movie. Indeed, the home invader here, the titular Krisha (Krisha Fairchild), is willingly invited into the home of her sprawling family after an extended absences, where she proceeds to sabotage the holiday with a cover-your-eyes abrasiveness. Indeed, you almost want to cover your eyes during “Krisha’s” opening shot, which is of Krisha herself, glowering into the camera. It looks like a horror movie poster from the 80s.

Krisha shows up with a suitcase in tow, intending to stay for a few days, and an index finger she keeps wrapped up in gauze on account of some event that goes unmentioned, much like the hurt she caused her family goes unmentioned, merely alluded to in the uncomfortable behavior that permeates all her character’s encounters. That gauze, which unravels at inopportune moments, like a fairly grotesque instance as she stuffs the Thanksgiving turkey, also emblemizes the threadbare manner in which she keeps all that which ails her barely under her wraps. You see this too in the movie’s bravura opening sequence, an unbroken shot that follows her rolling her luggage through a community of McMansions, going to the wrong house first, stepping in mud, always threatening to erupt, but getting hold of herself by talking to herself, suggesting she is not really getting hold of herself at all. Inevitably she will completely lose hold of herself by film’s end, but Shults doesn’t so much string us along as convincingly, harshly chronicle Krisha’s desperate attempts to fend off this disintegration. Knowing the outcome only works to render its arrival that much more painful.

It’s a testament to Shults that he manages to introduce a sprawling family without really every introducing them at all. Instead he lets us get impressions of everyone through bits of conversation and behavior, like a kid loudly banging a rubber ball off the floor, or a father set to detonate every time technology foils him, or a husband (Bill Wise) who seems to consider his wife’s dogs he can’t stand as something like marital flagellation. And Shults moves his and camera in and out of this scrum, allowing their persistent noise to reverberate off the walls, a family gathering as swirling cacophony, underscored by Brian McComber’s deliberately staccato score, all of which gradually corrodes Krisha’s shoddily stitched together sanity. We see this in her repeated retreats to the bathroom where she harbors unnamed medicines and other unexplained secrets in a little pillbox. Clearly, however, these are nothing but temporary remedies, evoked in the way each time Krisha opens it, the more on the brink she seems.

Fairchild, who harbors a few acting credits, if nothing you will necessarily recall, strikingly evinces the sensation of being pitched right on the edge, as she fiercely clings to the cigarettes she smokes when in other people’s company like they are buoys keeping her afloat, talking to a family member about her “spiritual” journey in the sort of rising “I’m Being Serious” voice that lets you know she is trying to convince herself more than anyone else. Even more harrowing are the few interactions with her apparently disaffected son (Shults). Yearning for a private council with him while he’s at the table and engaged in conversation, she stands off to the side, waiting for a moment to interject, a moment that is as awkward as it is heartbreaking, a parent as interloper,

The backstory is so intentionally opaque that we don’t really know that Krisha is an alcoholic until she retreats to the bathroom with a bottle of wine and gulps it down, palpably transforming before our very eyes as the soundtrack gives way from McComber’s score to Nina Simone’s “Just In Time.” If Krisha senses her family trying to box her out even after inviting her back in, she will simply tear them all down, rendered in a nightmarish sequence when she takes the precious Thanksgiving bird down with her. The sequence is so heightened, yet Fairchild lays herself so operatically bare, it’s damn near unbearable. In the moments before she unleashes her wrath, she peers around the kitchen corner, like a frenzied Gena Rowlands in the jungle, her eyes practically on fire. It’s the most frightening movie image I saw all year.

Last Embers of the Yule Log

Christmas is over, yes, we know, but the warm, relaxing Christmas cocoon is never easy to exit, especially when it means you finally have to get up off the couch and go see “La La Land” so you can have an official opinion in the frothing “La La Land” Critic Wars. Ugh. So please, give us one more day and one more drink. We will return tomorrow......

My Year In Music (or: How My Christmas Letter Wound Up On My Blog)

2016 might well have been the most unique year for music I can recall. Although when I say “for music” I do not mean musically, not exactly, not like you usually do for some year-end treatise where you list a few favorite songs from the year past (“Sister” by Angel Olsen, “Higher” by Carly Rae Jepsen, “Sea Stories” by Sturgill Simpson, which you should listen to here rather than Youtube to appreciate fully) and a few favorite albums from the year past (“Dreamland” by Wild Belle, “American Band” by Drive-By Truckers, “Young in the All the Wrong Ways” by Sara Watkins). No, I mean it’s been a unique year for music because my favorite moments of music have gone beyond or, more accurately, outside the normal considerations of Best Songs and Best Albums.

For me, music in 2016 centered around the death of Phife Dawg, née Malik Taylor, co-M.C. of A Tribe Called Quest, my teenage idols, my first Favorite Band, which I found out about at work, which made me have to go to the work bathroom, lock myself in a stall and cry. It was properly poetical in a melancholy way, actually, that Phife’s death was sandwiched between the untimely, terrible passings of David Bowie and Prince. After all, Phife was never the biggest name in music, or even in his own band, even if he carried himself that way. And if music, for me, centered around the death of Phife Dawg then it also pivoted around the new Tribe album, first in nearly 20 years, a total surprise, announced after his passing and which was released while I was away on vacation in the Minnesota hinterlands. My vacation coincided with a Presidential election won by a braying nimrod. So, I returned, wallowing in post-vacation and post-election depression and I listened to the first Tribe single, “We the People”, my favorite song of the year, hands down, and, well, I sat there at my desk in front of my laptop with my headphones over my ears and cried again.



What am I even supposed to say? How does a man anticipate a song for twenty years and somehow have that song surpass his expectations? It’s not vintage Tribe; it is not nostalgic Tribe; it is Tribe; it’s Tribe right here, right now, respecting the present yet sounding utterly unto themselves, and political as all get out. Its hook throbs with the hurt of all minorities, propelled by the boom bap snare and a scrummy synth line that comes in at just the right places like a wordless “Amen.” The whole song has this kind of casual velocity where it’s smooth as hell yet mad as fuck, emblemized in that quintessential Q-Tip giggle as he raps “I know, my shit is cold.” Yes, it is. So’s Phife’s. But, also warm. He raps: “Dreaming of a world that’s equal for women with no division / Boy, I tell you that’s vision / Like Tony Romo when he hitting Whitten.” Gawd, that’s so Phife, employing a sports metaphor to bring home his plea for equality. And what’s more, he breathlessly punctuates the first line with a “Huh” that is like his own version of Joe Biden declaring “C’mon, we’re America!” That “Huh” is the whole world.

My feelings on Phife, however, are not to suggest I was not also affected by the deaths of Bowie and Prince. In particular I felt Prince’s passing, remembering the glory days in which my best friend and I tore around in his indestructible Dodge Aires listening to “Starfish and Coffee.” It’s an oddity that in this year of such prominent American division, Prince’s death allowed for immense, if brief, unity. Everyone felt it. My beautiful, remarkable girlfriend wore purple tights the day after he died in commemoration. My hometown’s skyline glowed purple in his memory. I will never forget taking off my headphones piping in Prince at Starbucks the morning after he passed and immediately realizing that Starbucks was piping in Prince too. Prince transcended our petty differences, just as one might argue his spirit transcended rules, just as another might argue his music transcended genre, just as another might argue he himself transcended space and time. That makes it fairly hard to pull off a Prince musical tribute. He was so often playing all his own instruments on records because who else could do it? No one, obviously, but that never meant Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band weren’t going to try.

The Saturday after Prince passed away Springsteen paid tribute by opening his Brooklyn show with “Purple Rain.” I hastened to find an audience video of it because this is 2016 and that’s what you do. The video quality was a bit rough, yet that was just right, reflective of the world being out of focus and of Bruce’s raggedy, rustic version of The Purple One’s unassailable masterpiece. But Bruce was all in and he went all out, never more so than when he growled, “Honey, I know, I know, the times are changing.” That’s how it felt. Bowie had left; Phife had left; Prince had left; Bozo the Spray Tan Clown was running for President; what’s going on? And then…..Bruce called on Nils Lofgren for the guitar solo.

Look, I’m an avowed E Street Disciple, but while I’ve had a moment with pretty much every seminal member of The E Street Band, I’d never really had one with Nils. That’s not a knock against him. He’s always been the best guitarist in that band and I have always found my straight-ahead guitar pleasures in other places (see below). But this moment called for straight-ahead guitar. No one, of course, but Prince can play the “Purple Rain” solo, but, Lord, did Nils come as close as anyone else ever could. It was was a guitar solo as primal scream, a primal scream metamorphosing into an aural cleansing. And then it ended, and then Bruce came in with the concluding howls that in his grizzled, aged voice felt like a man crying out for what was lost and, in some Boss-ish premonition, everything that was still to be lost.



I selfishly hoped they wouldn’t play “Purple Rain” at any more shows. It seemed to me the ultimate embodiment of a one-off, of-the-moment cover, strictly for the departed and then gone into the mists of Youtube. Alas, it wasn’t to be. They kept playing it. That’s how it goes, I suppose. Of-the-moments in music anymore are hard. And yet, my sister and I happened to catch one of those ultra-rare “Did that really happen?” moments when we saw Damien Jurado at Lincoln Hall on Memorial Day weekend. I liked Jurado’s music and his music was really good live, but this show went beyond the music. For the first half, he never bantered, which is typically how I like my music shows. Unless you are a skilled ribald comedian like Neko Case, the best concert banterer who ever lived, or a rock 'n' roll pentecostal preacher, like Springsteen, I have no interest in between song banter. And so I loved it when Jurado said to some fan shouting who-knows-what, “I don’t have to talk to you.” But then a funny thing happened, he did talk. And I loved that too.

He talked a lot. He opened up. I have no idea what caused this conversational avalanche and, I dare say, he would’ve been hard-pressed to explain it too. He’d tell a story and then pause, like that story was triggering another story in the back of his mind, and then he’d tell that story too. One time, in the midst of this aching ballad, he started laughing. Really, he did, and when the song was over he explained that the song was so sad that when he performed it, he had to go to someplace funny in his mind to not let the music overwhelm him and so he told the funny thing he had been thinking of. The wide eyes and half-smile of the guitarist nearest to my sister and I during these monologues seemed to say: “I can’t believe this.” I couldn’t believe it either. It was lightning in a bottle. It was a performer caught in a truly singular moment. How often does that happen in this day and age? In 2016 I finally went to the Grand Ole Opry and I saw Jenny Lewis perform the entirety of Rabbit Fur Coat from the eighth freaking row, but Damien Jurado at Lincoln Hall was my favorite show.

That unlikely feeling was everywhere. Yes, “We the People” was my favorite song, but second place went not to any new tune but an old one, thirty-two years old to be exact, a Pat Benatar anthem you could put on at any Christmas party populated by people of a certain age after they’ve had one too many wassails and find them in a circle singing along and thrusting their fists in the air. “We Belong”, that’s the tune, which, I confess, in recent years Will Ferrell had re-cast for me in “Talladega Nights” as a psalm to comradeship on the battlefield. But then, in covering it for The AV Club, Jenn Wasner, my favorite guitarist in the world, and Andy Stack of Wye Oak took it back again.

The Benatar version always played like Drew Barrymore in “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” screaming Bon Jovi lyrics like they were the most important thing in the world, like she was full of pipe dreams that she did not recognize were pipe dreams. The Wye Oak version plays more to my advanced age, cognizant that pipe dreams are just that, yet not bitter, more wistfully defiant, wishful and hopeful but knowing, and all that is unbelievably encompassed in one of Jenn Wasner’s patented towering, wall of sound guitar solos, this one rising like a jetliner up above the gray clouds and into the sunshine for a brief moment before falling, falling back to earth.

Typically in years where I’m feeling weird, or disconnected, or adrift, or something, I send family and friends a highly untraditional Christmas letter, one harshly forgoing the medium’s conventional content for a digression on the state of my mind instead. I wanted to send out a highly untraditional Christmas letter this year. After all, 2016’s been a strange one, particularly to an American of a certain disposition. Here I am, ever more secure in the knowledge that I want to spend the rest of my life with my beautiful, remarkable girlfriend of three years even as I am simultaneously stricken for my future because of the politically and socially regressive turn my country took all year and finally took once and for all in early November. People tell me everything will be okay; people tell me to suck it up and go along; both of these statements feel so naïve that when I think about, you know, things, I just want to scream. In the face of all that, I struggled with what to say and how to say it. Then I realized what I wanted to say was Jenn Wasner’s guitar solo. So hey, everyone gets the Christmas letter this year.....

Shout-Out to the Extra: Serendipity 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.

Being that I'm about to turn 40, and being that I grew up in central Iowa where the mall was the center of consumer experience, I remember the old days when holiday shopping meant you had to go out among the living. Going out among the living meant driving to the mall and circling the parking lot for 25 minutes until you saw a space open up that was 2.5 miles away. That long non-funeral funeral procession to the mall, though, no matter how cold it might be, was a breeze compared to being inside the mall. Oh my God, a mall at Christmas. In his book "The Christmas Blizzard" Garrison Keillor captured it just right, writing of "The anguished jollity of store clerks living in the hell of holiday shopping."

"Serendipity", my beloved "Serendipity", damn the grinches or those merely looking for a well-made motion picture, actually contains an image that implicitly, excellently encaptures this anguished jollity. It is not among the more famous images usually broached by film professors, like the recurring NYC snowfall that is transformed into a winter wonderland so rivetingly old-timey that it approximates a visual Shakespeare sonnet (reader grabs Nick's keyboard away from him)

No, this image happens in the earlygoing, during the opening shot follows a pair of gloves that have apparently been placed in the wrong section of a Bloomingdales as a sales clerk takes them from the wrong place to the right place, and as she does so, she is forced to navigate a crowd of holiday shoppers, given the film's Christmas setting. In the frame below, you see her there to the right, with her back to us, and so in this shot, she momentarily gets lost, giving way to the guy to her left, the guy moving toward us, which is the guy we want to talk about.

There's this thing you start to realize when your primary mode of getting around is public transportation - you start to realize, particularly at rush hour, that people don't let you off the train before they want to get on. The train stops, the doors open and as you go to get off, people are already piling on, advertently styming your progress to further theirs. I confess...I did this once. As the train pulled in to the station, I noticed more open space than usual at rush hour and so when the doors opened, absent-mindedly, idiotically, I made my move onto the train. I ran right into this guy who was simply trying to exit. He gave me a look that unmistakably said: "You dumbass." And you know what? I was a dumbass. I felt awful the whole train ride home. I wanted to track that guy down apologize. I wanted to tell him he was in the right and I was in the wrong. Now I will stand aside and let everyone off a train even if it means I get stuck with a crappy spot because other people are shoving their way past people trying to exit.

Anyway, long story much shorter, this guy in "Serendipity" is like the guy trying to get off the subway car at rush hour. In the audio he keeps saying "Excuse me...excuse me." It's not an angry "excuse me", though, it's a weary one; it's the ten-thousand and one "excuse me" of ten thousand others on an awful day of holiday shopping. Holiday shopping, in other words, is trying to get off a subway car, just in a department store setting, over and over and over again. And in the forthcoming narrative of transplendent, or thereabouts, romantic destiny, well, I nevertheless also love imagining this exhausted holiday shopper still out there somewhere in perpetual anguished jollity. If the cosmic needs a counterweight, it's him.

Pour one out for the extra...

Broadcasting Christmas

If, per unfortunate Hallmark Channel tradition, Peter Sullivan’s “Broadcasting Christmas” gives a bit too much credence to the notion that a woman can only find career success once she’s also found love, it at least dispenses (mostly) with the cliche that being at odds is the most dependable formula for falling in love. Not, of course, that Emily Morgan (Melissa Joan Hart) and Charlie Fisher (Dean Cain) are not completely not at odds. Ha! They were once co-news reporters at some fly by night TV station in Vermont (Editor: double check that it’s Vermont) before Charlie got a gig in the Big City, leaving Emily behind even though they had been an Item. Aw shucks. Now a Big City TV host played by Jackée Harry, who we will call Jackée because whatever dreary name the movie conjured up for her character cannot compete with Jackée, is looking for a new co-host and it might be Charlie. Or, it might be Emily after she makes a not-at-all tear-stained, much to the chagrin of men’s rights activists, on-air plea to be considered too.

You gotta hand it to “Broadcasting Christmas” because Hallmark Channel Christmas movies tend to exist in their own vacuum. Their worlds are often less than contemporary, everyone places an almost maniacal premium on Christmas and the settings are pretty much all the same looking little town, be it New England, be it the upper Midwest, be it Alaska, be it the North Pole. “Broadcasting Christmas”, however, actually seems informed by current events, not simply with an offhand reference to Imperator Furiosa, mind you, but in this hunt for a co-host, which emits distinct notes of Kelly Ripa’s current version of Star Search. And what’s more, rather than being set in some sort of Anytown USA, “Broadcasting Christmas” is set in the wilds of Manhattan. Granted, it often conveys this setting with the most stock footage imaginable, but still......sometimes it is really nice to see a passé shot of the Brooklyn Bridge rather than another shot of that carbon copy Hallmark Channel main street.

Indeed, we see Charlie and Emily and their former producer (Cynthia Gibb, game) from Vermot, now Jackée’s producer, adding to the intimate intrigue, walking and talking on the New York Streets. These sequences are made that much better, in fact, by having Charlie and Patrice always dressed in black coats, offsetting the holly jolly red and green appealing outerwear that Emily sports, an obvious yet no less festive window into her personality that should undoubtedly nab costume designer Jennifer Garnet Filo a nomination come Made For TV Holiday Movie awards time.

Upon learning that they are rivals for the same job, Emily and Charlie might initially engage in adversarial tactics, but the screenplay retires that expected nonsense pretty quick and actually settles on fostering a sense of genuine amaraderie between the former lovebirds. Melissa Joan Hart has spunk because she's always got spunk because she’s Melissa Joan Hart, yo, but the spunk doesn’t manifest in the manner of shrewish careerism, or something of the sort, that often plagues the lesser Hallmark offerings. She, you might say, strikes a balance between work and individual life that is just positively scrumptious. And Cain, while no Melissa Joan Hart, is nevertheless A list compared to a lot of the feckless Ken dolls customary for these cheaply budgeted enterprises, and his smile is all kinds of sincere. He’s just a good guy, and not merely deep down but up top.

That means the concluding twist, while absolutely foregone, is nevertheless winning in the way that you want a movie you are watching on your couch in the middle of a December afternoon when it is 3 °F and you don’t want to go outside to be - that is, corny, not phony, a crucial demarcation. This holiday season, if you’re bloated on chocolates from the Advent calendar or just want to escape the hustle and bustle of your own family for a couple hours, give “Broadcasting Christmas” the digital cable green light.

Manchester by the Sea

Though Kenneth Lonergan’s “Manchester by the Sea” predominantly takes place in a provincial seaside Massachusetts community, the film is nonetheless universal, given how its main character, Lee (Casey Affleck), is coping with the death of his brother Joe (Kyle Chandler). That passing of a loved one, the memories it dredges up, the future it blurs, the present it turns haywire, is a familiar feeling to anyone. Then again, “Manchester by the Sea” is not entirely universal, because Lee’s ultimate grief, beyond his brother’s death, is so specific and so inconceivably awful that it strands Lee on an emotional island. In assuming that no one can know how he feels, or that no one wants to know how he feels, Lee has withdrawn utterly into himself. That sounds like one helluva distant main character, yet Affleck and Lonergan still manage to give us a glimpse behind that steel curtain, no mean feat.

Lee is numb on the outside, full of agony on the inside, an emotional conflict that is tricky to play. But Affleck excels, like in the hospital scene where he’s told of his brother’s death, where he stands rock still but with an expression suggesting that if he so much as moves, he might erupt. The only outlet he seems to feel he has for his pent-up agony is to be an asshole, which Affleck plays convincingly, no doubt informed by a personal life as documented in many outlets suggesting he really is an asshole. Hey, play what you are, right? We see his asshole tendencies in the tone-setting, table-setting sequences where Lee goes about his day job as a janitor at some Boston apartment building, un-clogging pipes, trying not to blow up at the tenants, which he finally does, not reluctantly or even furiously, just wearily, like whatever, who cares, fuck you. But he is forced to care in a hurry when he arrives in Manchester and is confronted by his late brother’s will. Lee, it turns out, has been named guardian of Joe’s sixteen year old son Patrick (Lucas Hedges).

If Lonergan’s previous film “Margaret” was teeming with literate intellectuals, “Manchester by the Sea” is populated primarily by people for whom giving shit is a first language. That’s not to say these people cannot be warm. They can, and are, usually within moments of all the B.S. Look no further than the scene in which Patrick sits around with his girlfriend and a couple pals just after getting the news about his dad, conversations ping ponging wildly but convincingly from melancholy to humor to weird, patchy spaces in-between.

The character of Patrick, in fact, is one of the more credible teenagers I can recall being captured on screen. When asked how his nephew is doing, Lee observes that he thinks Patrick is doing ok, but he can’t quite tell, because teenagers don’t really allow you tell, which is exactly how Patrick is written and Hedges plays the part. He seems almost oddly jovial in spite of the heavy loss he has sustained, with a life as messy as any teenager, where he seems to still be processing simply how to live in general, which sort of overrides processing the loss he’s sustained. He’s so casual so often that you can almost see Lee looking at him in the manner Bad Santa looked at Thurman Merman so many years ago. “Are you f***in with me?”

The inevitable relationship that emerges between Lee and Patrick, the film’s crux, never becomes the mentor/protégé we are conditioned to expect. It is something far more natural, which is to say it is something far more confusing, with Lee actively resisting the role of mentor even as his own resistant nature to the idea of being a mentor paradoxically gives Patrick additional space to organically figure things out and even as he councils Patrick in no uncertain terms on certain matters, like Patrick’s potentially re-kindling his relationship with his estranged mom (Gretchen Mol), which manifests itself in a single scene evincing Lonergan’s peerless ability to conjure the sensation of a whole messy life off screen in a few brushes. (The words string beans have never felt so loaded.)

If it’s difficult for Patrick to understand why Lee would be so hesitant to stepping up as guardian, it’s just as difficult for us, that much more of an indicator of Lee’s jerk tendencies. Another movie might have this a slow move toward redemption, but Lonergan forges an alternate path, employing the flashbacks to Lee’s past with ex-wife Randi (Michelle Williams) and three kids, going off like firecrackers of the consciousness, as a peeling back toward the tragedy that prompts Lee’s resistance. The tragedy will not be revealed, but is unspeakable, if accidental, if not necessarily entirely accidental, emblematic of those gray areas in which Lonergan specializes. But suffice it to say, that it’s revelation offers a clearer picture of Lee’s dour motivations, a place where forgiveness just sounds like some cheap noun.

Joe, in fact, seems to be trying to offer that forgiveness from beyond the grave, just as Randi tries to offer it in a late film sequence where she and Lee have a brief encounter on the street. It’s heart-wrenching scene, where Lee simply cannot accept the olive branch Randi is so gently trying to offer, partially because he can’t allow himself to. Look at the way the actress as Randi’s friend (Danae Nason) plays this scene, with covert, side-eyed, suspicious glances of Lee. It’s the way everyone looks at Lee; it’s the way we look at Lee; it’s the way Lee has come to look at himself. And if it is cruel to admit that Lonergan offers his protagonist no path to redemption, it is no less true. A movie so fiercely honest would be so much less so if it tried to tell us otherwise.

Jackie

Several times in “Jackie”, director Pablo Larraín re-creates famous images of the suddenly, tragically widowed Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, played here by Natalie Portman, such as her stricken beside Lyndon Baines Johnson aboard Air Force One as he is sworn in as President of the United States in the immediate aftermath of JFK’s assassination. Often when you such real life events re-staged for the silver screen, it is meant to be a backstage glimpse, to see the way it really was, to get past the public persona for the private persona instead. We want to know who these people really are! But “Jackie” has little interest in who “Jackie” really was, which is not a criticism but a mere statement of the film’s intent. Larraín, in a way, takes the conclusion of Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln”, with the 16th President being carried away and into legend, as its doctrine. This is not a peeling back of the Camelot myth but a fantastical, arty rendering of that myth’s creation. “Jackie” makes poetically explicit, for the most part, that even if the First Lady did not carry the casket in that famed processional, she did some of the heaviest lifting.

This attempt to draw out the real Jackie Kennedy is literalized in Noah Oppenheimer’s screenplay by The Journalist (Billy Crudup) who has come to Hyannis Port in the immediate aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s death to interview the President’s widow. Larraín almost exclusively stages these scenes in straight on shots, like The Journalist is trying to prevent Jackie from merely looking past him, though that is figuratively what she does anyway, remaining captivatingly evasive as she sucks down cigarettes and finishes The Journalist’s sentences, always one step ahead. Indeed, Portman often plays these moments with a deliciously sly smile. It made me think, strange as it may sound, of that time when David Letterman was coyly trying to get Julia Roberts to open up about her divorce and Jules just played him perfect. The most famous are often most famous for a reason.

The scenes with The Journalist are given their own framing in the form of a real life television special where Jackie – or, Mrs. John F. Kennedy – gave a tour of the White House, which was the first glimpse the American public got of the massive restoration that Jackie had undertaken. This plays quite distinctly in the movie’s language as an offering of intimacy from Jackie, though it was as staged as anything, which the movie makes quite clear in the way the rigid, rehearsed tone of Jackie’s speech, and right down to the “spontaneous” appearance of her husband. In this latter moment, the CBS reporter speaks to President Kennedy, offering canned observations, while Jackie, the brains behind the walk and talk, stands off to the side, like she’s supposed to know her place. She does, even as “Jackie” allows her to re-claim it by demonstrating how she re-claimed her husband’s legacy before it was too far gone.

There are only the briefest political ruminations, usually put forth by Bobby Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard, whose sad, sloping eyes makes up for his mostly non-existent Bostonian accent), who worries over his brother’s hardly existent legacy, of their inability to accomplish much at all outside of getting out of a crisis they got into. The causes of Kennedy’s less than impressive list of accomplishments, however, are not addressed. What’s done is done. And as she is forced to go about the agonizingly pragmatic task of moving out of what has become her home, she also finds herself with taking steps to ensure that her former home, and the city where it resided, and the country where it resided, do not allow her husband’s legacy to go untended.

This is never explicated any clearer than in the funeral procession, which Jackie demands to be as opulent as that of Lincoln’s, the whole world watching as she marches behind her husband’s casket down Pennsylvania Avenue. Several times Larraín positions his camera directly below Jackie, looking up at her and at her black veil blowing in the breeze, shots from which, despite the grim circumstances, no splendor is strained. Indeed, these are Movie Shots, in all that those capital letters are meant to impart, undisguised and unabashed.  And if we also must acknowledge that is also a sequence which a comes fairly close to co-opting the reality of sorrow, it is nevertheless as true an evocation of transforming a public moment into purposeful spectacle as you will see, the latter causing you to consider the former, and vice-versa, and how they can so easily become intertwined.

“Jackie’s” weakest moments are when it tries for a little human shading, which only feel puffed up and put upon, if partially because the whole point of Portman’s performance seems to be holding us at a glassy remove, like she is the star for a twenty-tens re-make of A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy. You see this most acutely in a few sequences where Jackie is briefly to left to her own devices in 1600 Pennsylvania, eating dinner, and then getting dressed in a black nightgown for bed while sipping at a glass of vodka, intended as some kind of behind closed doors divulgence. Yet Portman plays it like the camera is still there. Perhaps that’s sounds like a criticism, but I mean it as a compliment, maybe paradoxically, where the movie asks her to comment on how Jackie Kennedy feels and Portman channels the elegant aloofness of Jackie Kennedy instead. Even in its most intimate moment, Portman chooses to grant her subject privacy.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

In the last few decades, Santa Claus at the movies has acquired either a tone of cynicism, like Billy Bob Thornton as a drunken, fornicating, swearing mall Santa who only takes the gig to rob the whole place blind and whose light at the end of the tunnel epiphany always played to me like a dryer rendering of Travis Bickle’s “Taxi Driver” Is-It-A-Dream? conclusion, in “Bad Santa” or of revisionism, like Tim Allen as an ordinary skeptic becoming Santa to make way for comic elucidation about the more gaping inconsistencies in Santa logic. These Santas are well and good, but they are a long way from Edmund Gwenn winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar as Kris Kringle in “Miracle on 34th Street” so many years ago. And I suppose that in this current American climate, I didn’t want Billy Bob Thornton throwing up in the alley or an exact explanation of how Santa slides down a chimney; I yearned for the magic twinkle in Edmund Gwenn’s eye. Then again, in that twinkle lies a short fuse. When some quack tries to claim Santa ain’t real, he gets thwacked on the head by the cane of Gwenn’s Kringle. I’d forgotten that part of George Seaton’s holiday - er, Christmas - classic.

I had to laugh last year when the whole war on the War on Christmas erupted (again), particularly in light of Starbucks removing a greeting of “Merry Christmas” from their cups. I read about this and was at a Starbucks the next and day there were, like, 47 other places in the store where the word “Christmas” appeared. If they were waging a war, they were doing a terrible job. President Elect Trump hopped on the bandwagon, as is his wont, promising us that we would be saying “Merry Christmas” again, all part of his campaign to Make America Great Again, a campaign to take us back to those days of The Greatest Generation, when America was kicking ass, taking names and saying Merry Christmas. Of course, “Miracle on 34th Street” was released into The Greatest Generation’s era and “Miracle on 34th Street” was conceived and co-written by Valentine Davies who had become disgusted by the commercialization of Christmas, by a time when Santa Claus was less a dude who put presents under the tree than an advertising pitchman.  (“There is a lot of bad ism’s floating around this world and one of the worst is commercialism,” says the movie’s little Alfred like a Truman-era Ferris Bueller.)

Of course, Santa Claus, not St. Nicholas, not the original and not the one of Clement C. Moore’s renowned poem, was essentially dreamt up by none other than Rowland H. Macy, founder of Macy’s, who turned the “jolly old elf” into the roly-poly dude we all know so well in order to draw more people to his department store and bolster sales. In other words, the Santa Claus of modern America was always commercialized. If Davies knew this, however, he had an odd way of expressing it because he was not, as Turner Classic Movies notes, forced by Macy’s or any other department store to make his movie’s Santa a Macy’s Santa; he did it entirely of his own volition.

You’d think going after brand name department stores using the season to turn extra bucks would be a good way to skewer Christmas’s commercialism, but despite a nifty little subplot where rival department stores are forced to resist business in order to drum it up, the real villain becomes the wannabe psychiatrist (Porter Hall) at Macy’s who is convinced Gwenn’s Kris Kringle, claiming to be the Kris Kringle, the one from the North Pole, despite living at a home for old folks on Long Island, is simply off his rocker.

But that makes room for the concluding court case sequence, of course, where John Payne’s lawyer Fred Gailey, who is courting Maureen O’Hara’s Doris Walker, who is raising Natalie Wood’s Susan Walker, who finds her life changed by Kris, must argue that Santa truly is Santa. In court, Davies and Seaton really turn the satiric screws, evincing the Judge (Gene Lockhart) as driven by the political winds. If he rules that Santa is not real, imagine all the votes he’ll lose in his upcoming election.

This balance is the brilliance of Seaton’s film, dexterously able to evince the profit and political motivations driving the Judge and Mr. Macy even as a belief in the mystical gradually emerges. That belief emerges most prominently in Susan, a character played superbly by Wood as a kind of alternate version of “Meet Me in St. Louis’s” Tootie, less frighteningly fantastical and more coolly realistic. She is taught by her mother from the get-go that Santa is not real, that make-believe will merely yield a mountain of misfortune. Kris challenges that idea, of course, as does Fred, all of which, frankly, openly invites a reading of mansplaining. But Wood makes her transformation ring true.

It is not that she allows herself to believe that Santa Clause really does come down the chimney after she goes to bed; she allows herself to believe that just believing in the idea of Santa Claus is worthwhile. That’s a key demarcation. And perhaps the concluding “Inception”-ish shot goes a little too far in the wrong direction, but I shrugged it off in spite of myself. The good and bad of lying about Santa to your kids gets raised often in this day and age, and that’s okay, a reminder that raising every child is different. Because Susan? Well, she’s been raised with both feet firmly on the ground, leaving her more than judicious enough to know there is no harm in keeping an eye on the NORAD Santa tracker.

30 for 30: Catholics vs. Convicts

“Catholics vs. Convicts”, the latest ESPN 30 for 30 documentary extravaganza, takes its name from the racially suggestive, socially oblivious colloquial term that sprang up in advance and hung around in the wake of the fabled 1988 college football contest between Notre Dame (catholics) and Miami (convicts), a tilt that concluded 31-30 in favor of the former and that I, an amateur college football semi-historian, would hyperbolically deem the best played during my lifetime. That’s a lot to live up to for a movie and “Catholics vs. Convicts” partially does, though not completely because while every stone does not necessarily lie unturned in the recalling of this seismic gridiron event, you sometimes wish director Patrick Creadon would have dug deeper, poked his subjects a lot harder and gone in for a bit more complexity rather than falling back on obvious, timeworn contrasts. If Creadon does not completely portray the Hurricanes as un-sympathetic hooligans and does push back on the Catholics ideal a little, well, rest assured any controversy of the Lou Holtz era at Notre Dame is brushed aside. The film takes place firmly in the shadow of Touchdown Jesus, not Under the Tarnished Dome.

This want for deeper insight makes it ironic that one of the documentary’s strongest aspects relates directly to an item of seeming frivolousness – namely, a tee shirt. Indeed, the unfortunate moniker “Catholics vs. Convicts” sprung directly from an underground tee shirt sold on the South Bend campus by Joe Frederick, a Notre Dame Basketball player, and Patrick Walsh, an undergraduate who was friends with the director. In one way, this tee shirt, given the NCAA’s ongoing insistence on profiting off its so-called student athletes, was a kookily radical act, an entirely rogue business model peddling tee shirts chock full of copyright infringement sticking it to the venerable Notre Dame bookstore.

At the same, however, the shirt was and is emblematic of the social connotations that fairly or unfairly permeated the game. That desire to cast things in black and white, often literally, was as relevant then as it is now, where continual acts of campus racism are often misguidedly shrugged off as acts of immaturity. Creadon has an exquisite set-up to unpack all this, but opts for only lightly pressing his interview subjects on subtext of the shirt they spawned and mostly leaving it at that. Catholics vs. Convicts was more than a tee shirt, but “Catholics vs. Convicts” might leave you wondering.

Then again, what ultimately most interests Creadon is the game itself, and in the back half of his doc he goes so far as to turn “Catholics vs. Convicts” into a mini “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29.” The latter devoted what essentially amounted to its entire run time to the titular game, and while Creadon does not go that far, he does give the game itself plenty of due, foreshadowing the key players to come throughout in talking head interviews and then returning to them at their various moments of triumph or anguish, and allowing for myriad digressions on strategy, lingering in-game controversies and player reminiscences.

And as Creadon turns his film wholly over to the game, “Catholics vs. Convicts” becomes a wonderful anachronistic opportunity to time travel back to 1988, an era when you didn’t need a playoff because this game was the playoff and the national championship all rolled into one, decided not in some made-for-TV event but on a random October afternoon. It gladly re-lives all the game’s biggest moments on a micro level, so micro, in fact, that almost thirty years later, well, a few surprises might still be in store.

Creadon captures several people on camera stunned to realize, and I was stunned too, that the pass Miami’s Andre Brown caught to pull his team within a single point in the final minute before the do-or-die two conversion attempt…..might not have actually been a catch. I went a little haywire. I jumped up from the couch, kinda like I remember doing almost 30 years ago. For a second, it was real all over again.

Loving

In “Loving”, based on Loving v. Virginia, the monumental 1967 civil rights case that overturned the prohibition of interracial marriage, writer/director Jeff Nichols becomes one of the precious few to find a way to render a historical drama without any of the obviousness and pomp that traditionally plagues the genre. “Loving” is not merely resistant to big speechifying, it is resistant to aesthetic bombast, forgoing swelling strings, fancy orations and white light streaming in windows that bathes characters so as to render them divine. Instead it adopts a refreshing matter of fact process akin to the workmanlike brick laying that one of its two main characters, Richard Loving (Joel Edgerton), does for a living. I don’t know if “Loving” is a Great Movie, per se, but it’s about as well done as this kind of movie can be.

Nichols conspicuously forgoes a traditional introduction to Richard and Mildred’s (Ruth Negga) relationship. In the first scene, we learn she is pregnant, which prompts their marriage, but this is not a marriage of circumstance. They really do love each other, which the companionable performances of Edgerton and Negga, who so fluently interact in one another’s presence, evinces with such grace. We don’t see how they got together just as we don’t see them wrestling with what it means in a broader social context for them to be together; “Loving” merely introduces them as they are. That’s not to suggest they don’t feel the societal repercussions as they catch stares from black and whites alike, because they do, but that to them this seems beside the point. Until, that is, they go up to Washington to wed, return to Virginia and get thrown in jail.

They are told by the Judge (David Jensen), a character that Nichols shrewdly writes not as some exaggerated villain but an exhaustible man set in his ways, that to stay married and avoid jail means they must leave Virginia for a period of 25 years. They do, moving in with Mildred’s relatives, occasionally daring to make an undercover of night foray back home, getting by, until an ACLU lawyer named Bernie Cohen (Nick Kroll) gives them a call about taking their case up the chain to the Supreme Court. It’s about doing right by the Lovings, absolutely, but it’s also about getting a horrible bit of racist policy off the books, which you suspect could have been done a tad earlier than 100 years since the conclusion of the Civil War except that American-styled progress is really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really slow.

In another movie, Cohen would have been just as crucial to the plot as Richard and Mildred. When Bernie says he’s not really that familiar with constitutional law, it would have been cue for a law book reading montage, or something, but Nichols has no real interest in the finer points of the lawyerly crusade. Instead, in a story born of Loving v. Virginia, Loving v. Virginia becomes a mere subplot, an ineffable reminder that Nichols feels no annoying need to hammer home the stakes, other than the marriage license that Richard nails to the wall, that even a landmark civil rights case spawns from someplace small, like Lake Itasca sending the Mississippi on its winding journey.

This is befitting the central couple. Richard is almost exclusively inward, not particularly excited about all the media fuss that goes along with their court case, happiest when he’s at the dinner table or laying bricks, and Edgerton embodies this character’s demure mannerisms with all his silent might. Mildred, on the other hand, is more aware of the significance of what’s coming them from their challenge, intrinsically reminding us that the plight of Black Americans has always been different and so much harder than that of White America, which Negga only allows to come out in the smallest ways, in the politely excited manner that she repeatedly tells her lawyers “We appreciate you” or in the bashful way she lets a Life photographer snap her photo at the kitchen sink. And when the big moment comes at the end and the case is tried for the Supreme Court justices, Negga makes clear that her character stays behind with Richard who has no intention of going, not because she’s some dutiful Stepford Wife but because she loves him and believes they go together.

That moment precipitating the Supreme Court showdown, which is only seen obliquely, is also seen in the trailer. It is Richard saying: “You tell the judge, I love my wife.” Even in the trailer Edgerton’s restraint on this line is admirable, but it packs even more of a wallop in the full context, of everything that has come before and everything that is still at stake. He loves his wife. She loves him. It’s never really supposed to be that simple, certainly not in 1960s America, and yet in Nichols’s telling, it absolutely is.

Who Was The Golden Globes-iest Golden Globes Nominee?

Nominations for the 243rd Golden Globes, a ceremony dreamt up by Queen Marie Antoinette and held at the Palace of Versailles where she would bestow awards to theatre players with whom she most wanted to eat chocolate and drink champagne, a foundation emblemizing their frivolousness (the Hollywood Foreign Press Association took control of the Golden Globes, of course, during the Paris Peace Treaties of 1947), were announced on Monday. "La La Land" got a bunch and so did "Moonlight", which was expected and could be argued as a harbinger for a forthcoming Academy tussle, with critics lining up behind the latter and Jayden Schmadens lining up behind the former.

But, of course, the Globes are not about that! The Globes are about hobknobbing! Like I say every time this year, if I was a member of the HFPA and I had the opportunity to put Nicole Kidman's name on the ballot as Best Supporting Actress so I could schmooze with her, I'd do it. And if you say you wouldn't, well, good for you and for your vigilance in wanting to keep a glorified cocktail party on the up and up which will no doubt prevent you from suffering vengeance in eternal hellfire.

Yet while some wring their hands over what a glorified cocktail party got "right" and what a glorified cocktail party got "wrong", we here at Cinema Romantico are far more interesed in determining the most Golden Globes-y Golden Globe nomination of this year, the nomination that most blatantly re-exposes the HFPA's desire to rub elbows with the A-listers. It is a pre-awards show award we like to the call The Honorary Meryl Streep HFPA Award, so named for Meryl Streep having been nominated for 87 consecutive Golden Globes because the HFPA always wants her at the party. (Ms. Streep was nominated this year for "Florence Foster Jenkins." By rule, Ms. Streep is no longer eligible for her own award.)

That's why the biggest snub, per HFPA tendencies, did not seem, to these eyes, to be Tom Hanks or Martin Scorsese but Warren Beatty for "Rules Don't Apply." I was flabbergasted the ol' Hollywood coot didn't get a nod. Then again, Annette Bening, Beatty's spouse, was nominated for "20th Century Women" and the HFPA probably figured that by nominating her, he'd still show up and then they could give a nomination to Ryan Reynolds for "Deadpool" too so he and Blake Lively could be at the party. The HFPA's savvy. And while I have no doubt that the HFPA would have done absolutely anything to extend an invite to as dapper a dude as Tom Ford so he can have a spot reserved at the highest ranking Beautiful People table, and while there is some documented evidence of aromatic bribery on Ford's behalf, well I saw the shot of Michael Shannon smoking a cigarette beneath a Budget Motel sign in "Nocturnal Animals." I'm not saying one shot alone should earn anyone a Best Director nod, but the standards of a glorified cocktail party should not have to be higher than anyone else's.

In the end, however, The 2016 Honorary Meryl Streep HFPA Award recipient was pretty cut & dried, going to Jonah Hill for "War Dogs", who was nominated for Best Actor, Comedy. Is he deserving on actorly merit? I have no idea. I have not seen the movie. But I know that per Vulture, Warner Bros. has recently mounted a campaign on Hill's behalf, which included "an intimate party for voters at the Chateau Marmont, hosted by Hill’s pal Leonardo DiCaprio", which sounds like a pretty open and shut case of nomination entrapment if you ask me. And I know that that the HFPA knows that Jonah Hill is the life of the party, not to mention that Jonah Hill is surefire awards presenter gold. And so while I have no insider knowledge telling me that Mr. Hill might have skipped out on the festivities if he wasn't nominated, it's reasonable to unfairly presume that the HFPA wanted to take necessary precautions and just officially invite Hill anyway. What, you think Scorsese was going to dress up like a bear?

Arrival

When the aliens touch down in Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival”, they don’t quite touch down all the way, which is to say their semi-oblong slab-of-granite looking spaceships are hovering just off the ground at various places around Earth, captured most prominently in a breathtaking shot framing one of these spaceships in a picturesque Montana valley before circling around to reveal a significant military encampment, like you can’t have one without the other. Indeed, ten million alien invasion movies have conditioned us to expect the worse and when we finally see our visitors from another world up close, several feet high and tentacled, like octopi transplanted to land, heptapods as they are labeled, a moniker hueing a little too closely to the tripods of “War of the Worlds” fame, we might jump to that conclusion. Aside, however, from an itty bitty, undercooked subplot involving a few soldiers with a few bad thoughts bubbling and a few foreign powers who decide to fear the worst, “Arrival” is less concerned with initiating attack than stopping to listen.

This is where Louise Banks (Amy Adams) comes in. Rather than some sort of space jockey enlisted to combat these E.T.’s, she is a professor of linguistics summoned to try and make sense of exactly what these E.T.’s want. This is the second consecutive film where Villeneuve’s main character has been a female without much fuss or muss; she just is. Louise is simply the best person for the job, emblemized in her more or less calling the bluff of Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) when he shows up looking for her help while declaring an ultimatum. We’ve come a long way, even since “Contact” (1997), which bears resemblance to “Arrival” in terms of plot but featured its principal female (Jodie Foster) having to deal with the political machinations of a smug male (Tom Skerritt). The other male in “Arrival”, a theoretical physicist named Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), quickly falls in line as a second in command. Of course, he’s a white male, which means America’s first contact with the aliens is chiefly handled by a couple Caucasians, which suggests there is still some work to do.

Still, Louise is a woman, our chief American ambassador, and one suffering through what seem to be flashbacks to a previous life with a young daughter lost. Yet despite such melancholy, and even in the face of having to enter an otherworldly craft while wearing an orange hazmat suit and try to make sense of aliens conversing via something like squid ink manifested as something like smoke signals, she is never fearful or overwhelmed. This is a testament to the performance of Adams, who exudes not just a winning pragmatism but a joyful humanitarianism (her line reading of “Joe Alien” is casually revealing). Her character is a professor and a peacemaker, and she takes the latter as seriously as the former, particularly as the stakes heighten when other nations begin acting scurrilous, issuing threats to the extra-terrestrials and engendering a countdown. Yet even as this happens, Villeneuve keeps his focus firmly on Louise and her quest to unravel the extra-terrestrial’s intentions, rendering a global event as an intimate one instead.

This intimacy is most strikingly conveyed in a few shots where Louise sits by herself, or in the company of Ian, a fair distance from the alien craft, gazing up at it. And Villeneuve frames these moments so that the spaceship is looming just over Louise’s shoulder, sometimes out of focus. Here, we are not seeing the ship through some militarized computer mainframe or through the screen of a television. Here, the din of innumerable news cable anchors, confused citizens, blowhard conspiracy theorists, and concerned military personnel that we hear throughout “Arrival” are long gone. Here, we are seeing a global event through the eyes of one woman, a woman open to the mysteries of the universe rather than closed to them. Here, all you feel is wonder, not terror. It feels pretty good.

So does most of the movie. Occasionally, Villeneuve gets off point, pausing to overly explicate information, like a montage in the middle accompanied by a Renner voiceover that gives us the nuts and bolts of everything that has happened, like a What Happened Last Week at the beginning of a two part television episode. It’s the one moment when the movie refuses to place trust in its audience and it tellingly blunts the impact.

The rest of “Arrival” is all about trust. Indeed, Villeneuve is essentially asking for our trust, asking for viewers not to play the guess ahead game and see if they can figure out the end while the narrative is still in progress, and simply engage with the present. And our engagement with the present, in a wonderful twist that will not be revealed, not exactly, is precisely what holds the key to the mystery for Louise establishing communication, and for Louise to settle the emergent mysteries in her own life. It’s a beautiful thing, the way that “Arrival’s” own answers amalgamate with our viewing experience. And if, like Louise, you are willing to simply listen, oh the things you’ll hear.

Some Drivel On...JFK

No one has ever claimed that Oliver Stone’s ultra-incendiary “JFK” (1991) was strictly factual; in fact, a great many claimed that it was entirely devoid of fact, that it contained not one single shred of truth. Not one shred of truth is the phrase the esteemed Roger Ebert employed when he wrote about the film for his Great Movie series and established one of his general principles about the medium of film. He wrote: “I believe films are the wrong medium for fact. Fact belongs in print. Films are about emotions.” I have always thought of those lines too and I have thought about them even more as we approach the 25th anniversary of “JFK’s” release in the wake of lunatics showing up at pizza joints because of mind-bendingly bizarre, dim conspiracy theories fostered by raving gasbags during an election that forced the phrase “post-truth” into the discourse. Indeed, post-truth was so prevalent that Oxford Dictionary deemed it the word of the year. “Post-Truth: Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Oh. You don't say?

Kinda like I don’t really ever remember learning the Pledge of Allegiance because I just knew it, I never really remember learning about the conspiracy to assassinate JFK because it was just always was. Whether or not a conspiracy to kill JFK that terrible day in Dallas in 1963 actually existed, the point was and remains that so many, no matter if the alternative histories they espouse might be debunked, or compellingly argued against, still can’t help but feel there is more to the story, whether it was the Warren Commission’s general idiocy or something more insidious. Stone, for sure, never completely bought the official explanation of events, but he also knew he could not truly prove otherwise. “Too much weird stuff went on,” Stone told Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia Center for Politics five years ago. “We can only present a counter myth.”

It is the counter myth that Matt Zoller Seitz and Kevin Lee considered when writing about “JFK.” “From the opening newsreel Stone presents a myth,” they explain, “one that pervades this stage of his career: government as oppressive patriarch, motivated largely by military and capitalistic interests and operating largely out of view of a public blinkered by patriotic propaganda.” Indeed, Stone seizes on the conspiracy theories peddled by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, the movie’s protagonist, played by Kevin Costner with a famously bad accent, to incite propaganda of his own, promoting the idea that a coup d’etat within the utmost reaches of the government sought to bring Kennedy down.

Stone promotes this idea by injecting brief black & white flashback sequences, like Lyndon B. Johnson telling a room of conspirators that if they get him into the Oval Office then he’ll give them their damn war (as in, Vietnam), which are often placed around actual archival footage, deliberately intended to muddy the viewing waters. In writing about this “seamless blend(ing) (of) documentary footage and re-creations” for Reverse Shot, Michael Joshua Rowin pegged it as a “smoke and mirrors act”, and that is true.

It can be argued that this smoke and mirrors act is intended to confuse the audience, to make it difficult to discern what’s real from what isn’t, which leaves everything in question. But while that it is a criticism for some, an act of flagrant irresponsiblity, to others, like myself, it is, strictly from a filmmaking standpoint, propangadist or not, a commendation. As Randy Laist, an associate professor of English at Goodwin College, put it for a seriously academic treatise on the film: “More so than any particular theory about who shot JFK, the thesis of Stone’s film is that reality itself has been assassinated, under circumstances that we can only reconstruct out of a montage of images, ambivalently real and/or unreal – the fragments of a hyperreal mediascape.”

Hyperreal is a term credited to French theorist Jean Baudrillard, inevitably name-checked in Laist’s piece, who ascribed the difference between a modern and postmodern society as a “mode of representation in which ideas represent reality and truth.” In a postmodern society, he reckoned, “subjects lose contact with the real and fragment and dissolve.” That’s what happens as you watch “JFK.” If his previous films, as Laist notes, were born more a narrative realism, in “JFK”, Stone batters that realism to bits, primarily through ferociously kinetic, Oscar-winning editing by Pietro Scalia and Joe Hutshing that is so overpowering it sweeps you up and rushes you along, right past the narrative’s obfuscations and embellishments. What’s real and what isn’t ceases to be the point; all you have left is the emotion that Stone’s aesthetic deliberately engenders. You feel angry; you feel mistrustful; you feel like you have not been told everything; you feel like the government, that convenient catch-all, wants to keep you in the dark. “On that level,” wrote Ebert, “it is completely factual.”

Reviewing 5 Minutes, or so, of Collateral Beauty

Earlier this week it was reported by several outlets, including Uproxx, that LucasFilm screened 28 minutes of the forthcoming blockbuster to-be "Rogue One", the "Star Wars" Death-Star-Plans-Stealing spinoff, at Skywalker Ranch. If it seems sort of shocking that they would do such a thing given how information surrounding a new "Stars War" movie is kept more clandestine than the top secret information our President Elect receives in the few security briefings he actually deigns to attend before Tweeting about it, well, rest assured that nothing particularly spoiler-rific was shown, depending upon your definition of spoiler-rific. This 28 minutes, it seems, was chiefly a way to get "people talking", and to get people to say nice things about what they saw, which sort of seems pointless since most "Star Wars" fans who are going to see this have already decided they are going to love it and most film critics who are chastising "Star Wars" for having already decided they are going to love it have already decided they are not going to love it as much as those "Star Wars" fans who have already decided they are going to love it. 

Anyway, this got me to thinking about "Collateral Beauty", the new film from Richard Curtis. Er, right, sorry, not Richard Curtis. It only seems like it would be the new film from Richard Curtis. I don't really want to see "Collateral Beauty", but I also kind of do, and so I thought, hey, if people could pen semi-reviews of "Rogue One" off sporadic footage, why I couldn't I do the same for "Collateral Beauty"? What a brave new world!!!

So, where is "Collateral Beauty" set? Oh. Right. Of course. New York. It's set in New York. Thanks, obligatory shot of the Brooklyn Bridge!

So, when is "Collateral Beauty" set? Oh. Right. Of course. Christmas. It's set at Christmas. Because Christmas, see, is magical!!!

We know it's magical, see, because the main character played by Will Smith, a character who has suffered heartbreak, is writing literal letters to "Death" and "Time" and "Love."

And boy oh boy, say what you will about that premise, but when Will Smith comes face to face with "Death", he really does look like a guy who's just come face to face with "Death." Point, Smith.

By the way, kudos to Will Smith, in an industry where vanity is valued, for letting himself go gray.

Boy does Will Smith peddle that bike with ferocity! (Point, Smith.) Do you think this is a climactic bike ride in advance of a dramatic confessional? I bet it's a climactic ride in advance of a dramatic confessional. 

I don't know precisely what's going on with these dominoes, but I'm willing to bet it is a case of hardcore symbolism.

Keira Knightley plays "Love", and I love how "Love" seems so Sad in every shot in each trailer.

Oh. Hey. Did you also know this movie stars Kate Winslet? Excuse me. Let me start over. (Pause.) Oh. Hey. Did you know this movie stars Academy Award™ Winner Kate Winslet? God, I love getting to see that phrase in trailers - Academy Award™ Winner Kate Winslet. That's just the bee's knees.

Wait. This movie stars Keira and Kate. Crap. I am going to have to see this for real. Dammit. Fine. I'll catch it when it shows up on TNT. We will reconvene then.