Friday's Old Fashioned: The Old Barn Dance (1938)

I watched Gene Autry’s 1938 “The Old Barn Dance” not long after learning that “The Fate and the Furious”, installment #8 of the venerable high-octane franchise, would have a run time of two hours and forty minutes. It’s a plague on all our summer movie houses, these obnoxious run times, wreaking of self-importance and questionable editing. Perhaps movies of now should take a page from director Joseph Kane who manages to incorporate nearly everything he needs into “The Old Barn Dance”, ranging from a stampede to a shootout to a chase to a pair of comic brawls, in less than sixty minutes. Granted, the romance between Gene Autry and Joan Valerie’s character is never given proper time to bloom just as Gene Autry’s character has no real backstory to speak of. But then, Gene Autry’s character is Gene Autry. That’s his name – Gene Autry! This is brilliant! Maybe Hollywood should cut it out with all the brooding backstory that is fashionable these days and simply give in to movie star wattage. Why does Angelina Jolie have to be anybody? Why can’t she just be Angelina Jolie as Angelina Jolie saving Earth from plunderous aliens? Lord, that’s a movie I’d watch.

“The Old Barn Dance” opens by reveling in Gene Autry’s movie star wattage as he and his cattle train roll into Grainville, with an uncovered wagon filled not with supplies but an actual orchestra, one lending Autry accompaniment as he waves and croons from the saddle, prompting the entire town to stop what it’s doing and just enjoy this free show. He plans to put on another free show later, announced by his requisite sidekick Frog Millhouse (Smiley Burnette) - who gets a scrumptious Ron Swanson-ish ditty as the movie opens about bacon - which will precede an auction of their horses. Why can’t entertainment and commerce go hand in hand?

Much of “The Old Barn Dance” does involve commerce, in fact, as Grainville, we quickly learn, is ruled by Mr. Thortnon (Ivan Miller), not so much with an iron fist as a manipulative grin. He owns the new-fangled tractor company, getting all the town’s farmers to give up their horses for his mechanical beasts instead, pitched at prices the farmers can’t possibly afford so that when they can no longer make the payments to the bank, the bank, naturally in cahoots with Mr. Thortnon, can re-possess those tractors and all that cold hard cash can flow relentlessly back toward he who owns it. This connects as well to the Joan Valeri character, Sally Dawson, running the town’s small radio station, which is struggling but sees an opportunity in Autry for a singing sensation. Thortnon will help keep the station afloat if Sally can snare Autry as entertainment, except Autry doesn’t do entertainment for money, see, which leads to schemes to get him on air.

Indeed, while “The Old Barn Dance”, as its title suggests, is principally fun and games, you can’t overlook the messages not so much tucked within its tidy plot as laying right there out in the open. Indeed, the tractor v horse subplot is pretty easy to read as a dislike, or at least unease, with the modern world, and the old ways eventually win out, quite literally when Mr. Thortnon and his chief thug attempt to flee Grainville by automobile and Gene Autry chases them down on a horse. It’s a nod toward a more pre-industrial society, not thought out in any great way, just sort of romanticized, as are Gene Autry’s songs which he is intent on singing for free, not signing a contract with Sally Dawson’s radio station, upset when he learns he’s been tricked into being an unintentional shill for Mr. Thortnon’s tractors, really upset when he learns a recording of one of his concerts is being passed off as the real thing. That authenticity is of overriding importance to Autry, an authenticity he sees in performing live and riding horses rather than driving cars.

Then again, in the wake of “The Old Barn Dance”, Gene Autry, the one in regular life, that is, found himself in a dispute with Republic Studios over his contract. They were paying him $5,000 a picture; he wanted $15,000 a picture; they balked and he walked. Eventually he returned, after one Roy Rogers was deemed his replacement, with his earnings upped, if not quite as much as he initially demanded. That’s not to cast complete dispersions on Mr. Autry, of course, since we all need to get paid. Still, I suppose it’s a reminder of what movies really are and what movie stars are really like. Gene Autry might be playing Gene Autry but that does not necessarily mean Gene Autry is Gene Autry.

Re-Appraising Keira Knightley's Hat in Love Actually

Last week, to coincide with Britain’s Red Nose Day, a biennial telethon, a quickie sequel to “Love Actually” was released. Naturally this left me, author of the definitive Keira Knightley’s Hat In “Love Actually” Could Engender World Peace If We’d Merely Let It piece, wondering if she would also be sporting a hat in this “Love Actually” Red Day sequel, especially since in these fraught times another headdress-styled plea for amity felt necessary. And while she is, based on images filling up “Love Acutal”-ist corners of the internet, sporting a sweatshirt touting LOVE, rendered in rainbow colors that one might connect to the LGBTQ movement, her head, sadly, remains sans hat.

Keira Knightley Does Not Wear A Hat in the “Love Actually” Sequel

But the story does not end there. No, for the “Love Actually” character, played by Andrew Lincoln, who famously pined for Knightley’s Juliet does return, apparently outside her door once again, though in the company of another woman. She is played by Kate Moss. Kate Moss is wearing a hat.

Kate Moss Wears A Hat in the “Love Actually” Sequel 

In her book “Magical Fashionista: Dress for the Life You Want”, Tess Whitehurst delineates between the “Confident Hat” and the “Incognito Hat.” The former, she explains, “Direct(s) the energy of (confident) thoughts and feelings into the hat” while with the latter, she writes, “People notice me when I wear it, but I don’t feel like they notice me exactly, at least not my innermost self.” And so while at first having Kate wear a hat but not Keira seemed a shot directly across the bow of all us Keira Knightley “Love Actually” hat-ologists, I found myself, upon considering the words of Ms. Whitehurst, re-evaluating. It got me to thinking that even if Keira Knightley’s hat in “Love Actually” could engender world peace if we’d merely let it, perhaps there was something else behind the hat, something artistic, a costume design choice that I failed to glean given all my inane Keira In Hat memes.

In “Pirates of the Caribbean”, for instance, Keira channeled all her confidence into the hat.

In “Love Actually”, however, given that the scene in which she wears the famed hat, arrives at a particularly delicate moment, when she is trying to make peace with the person she doesn’t think likes her, though she quickly realizes that is not the case, leaving her that much more vulnerable, the hat becomes a symbol of sudden desire to go incognito, to disappear.

In other words, it’s not simply that Keira wears hats; it’s how Keira wears hats.

In Order of Disappearance

“In Order of Disappearance” is something to akin to a Norwegian “John Wick”, a little less arty, a little more earthy, evoked in the myriad ways that director Hans Petter Moland implements the Scandinavian landscape, from traditional wide shots of snowy mountains to a dead man slung from a road sign in a snow to two brothers arguing in front of a giant outdoor holiday decoration. The hero, the unfortunately named Nils Dickman (Stellan Skarsgård), is spurred by revenge too, a la John Wick, but his principal sartorial choice is a parka rather than well-tailored suit, his weapons of choice are his fists and snowplow and Skarsgård evokes not a dour cool but a weary, even droll, countenance. He’s a man of simplicity, which he addresses straight away as he is named his little town’s Citizen of the Year, explaining he prefers minding his own business. If everyone thought like that, someone says, we wouldn’t have democracy. And though “In Order of Disappearance”, despite a hilarious dialogue dalliance on the welfare, is not political, it is democratic, in its assortment of characters and its insistence on not simply making its star the star of the show.

Nils’s warpath is triggered not by a dog but by the death of his son Ingvar who has inadvertently run afoul of some violent cocaine smugglers. In the immediate wake of this, “In Order of Disappearance” feints seriousness. But as Nils refuses to take for granted the official cause of death as overdose, and as he ventures out into the cold to become Dirty Harry of the Tundra, ambushing unsuspecting gangsters, killing them and hurling them over a waterfall, the film’s stoicism gradually morphs into deadpan, as the names of the deceased that pop up on the screen with an underlying cross become more and more comedic as the bodies keep piling up. It’s not so much that Moland is making fun of the dead as he is making fun of the absurd body counts in these sorts of movies.

In defiance of mere faceless henchmen, Moland and his screenwriter Kim Fupz Aakeson provide most of the supporting players a modicum of actual character to play, and if not character to play then at least a few lines of sharp dialogue to recite. This is most apparent in the film’s principal villain, the one Nils is most desperately seeking to kill, The Count (Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen). He’s not exactly imposing, not in a traditional way, passing himself as quite cultured even though he doesn’t know the difference between Albanians and Serbians, and he’s as easy to laugh at as he is to be scared off, which is sort of where his scariness stems from, an immature impetuousness tied directly to taking over the business from his father. Not that he can’t be fierce, like in one frightful moment where he punches his wife Marit (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen).

That’s something of a problem. The female characters here are not as thought through as the male characters, though Sørensen plays baked in disgust with her ex-husband pretty well. Nil’s wife disappears almost straight away, unable to come to terms with her son’s death and what her husband does about it. Then again, this is specifically a man’s movie, which is to say it’s a bunch of rash men who are, in a way, all stuck up their own arses, all hell bent on avenging this or that, which is perhaps why Nils’s wife exits stage left. She doesn’t need anything to do with all that macho posturing.

Indeed, the conclusion fails to bring any sense of vengeance home. This is partly by design as Nils sort of blends into the ensemble, remaining off screen not for long stretches, per se, but stretches longer than we are normally conditioned to expect for the ostensible hero. All of this also means, however, that rather than truly picking up steam as it goes along, the movie slows down, indulging itself rather than building momentum. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because the flights of fancies are often fun, but the finale, another in a long line of the many players gathered on one stage for a big showdown, conspicously lacks catharsis for the main character and lacks as a big action-packed set piece. “In Order of Disappearance” is that kind of action thriller that works better in the small moments rather than the big ones.

There is a moment on a treacherous, empty road when Nils beats one of the thugs to a bloody pulp, trying to get information, but the thug won’t talk. Nils, however, is tired out, breathing heavily, and has to lay down next to his soon-to-be victim, in the shadow of the snowplow. They both begin to laugh. It’s the old Belly Laughs Before The Guy Gets Shot In The Face routine, sure, but it’s not the payoff that’s so enjoyable; it’s the set-up.

The Dressmaker

“The Dressmaker” opens with Tilly Dunnage (Kate Winslet) re-arriving after a 25 year absence in her Australian outback hometown under cover of darkness where she promptly lights a cigarette, takes in the dusty surroundings and declares: “I’m back, you bastards.” That’s directed at the town folk, whom she later addresses directly, not with words but by going up to her mother’s (Judy Davis) dilapidated, rank home at the top of the hill, taking a golf club and hurtling golf balls toward sworn enemies below, each of whom we see recoiling in the aftermath of Tilly’s expert drives. If you changed out the club and balls for a shotgun and some shells Tilly could easily fit into a western, which is sort of what “The Dressmaker” resembles, especially given that Tinny’s reputation within the town has remained scandalous for the two decades-plus, accused of a murder she may not have actually committed, painting her in the light of an outlaw returned with scores to settle.

As this, “The Dressmaker” really excels, cooking up its vengeance with all sorts of rapid fire editing that elicits a crazy dream sensation and allows for Kate Winslet to channel the entirety of “The Wild Bunch” and then filter them through the icy cool of Miranda Priestly. Her Tilly employs the wicked haute couture skills picked up in Paris to grand put-everyone-in-their-place effect, like in a subsequent scene where Tully invades a local rugby game by shimmying around and coolly reclining in an impeccably cut gown. She stops the game and the town looking on it dead in its tracks, luxuriating in the power she holds, a power that she bestows on other members of a town where it too often seems that backward-thinking, insulated powers-that-be wield control. Indeed, though there is a local police sergeant (Hugo Weaving), a closeted cross-dresser who Tully will help gleefully come out of it, the town itself seems more indebted to a hunchback doctor who has long wielded his medicines to devious effect and the town councillor (Shane Bourne) who rules like Michael Gambon in “Open Range”.

Problem is, that’s not quite enough for “The Dressmaker”, as director Jocelyn Moorhouse, working from a book by Rosalie Ham, inundates her film with tonal shifts – nay, about-faces that come at us in unremitting waves, over and over and over. This is not a film for the tonally faint of heart, swerving from scene to scene, moment to moment, second to second, hanging hairpin turns from the caustically comic to the sweetly serious to the positively insidious, like a rape that is so sudden and cut away from so quick you’re not entirely sure if Moorhouse was just afraid of actually showing it or didn’t necessarily have the desire to wrestle with what something so monstrous means.

At other points, however, Moorhouse does go all in on solemnity, such as the flashbacks to Tilly’s quarter-century-ago past where we learn What Really Happened, and which are rendered with a gloomily washed out aesthetic as opposed to the bold, bright colors of the present, re-imagining Tilly’s upbringing as something more like a New England-y “Crucible” than the Outback, while a romance Tilly has with local Teddy McSwiney (Liam Hemsworth) is earnestly straight-faced and terribly tedious in comparison to her reprisals, tagged with Teddy’s fate that feels wholly unearned, just dropped in, an oddly not-as-meaningful-as-it-should-be drop in the bucket.

I’d like nothing more, being the Winslet devotee that I am, to report that Ms. Winslet skillfully holds this wackadoo what-have-ya together with her ferocious grace. And while she does, she also doesn’t, less convincing in the moments of Teddy’s courtship. That’s because she never really dials back her standoffish nature in these scenes. Moorhouse has compared her film to “Unforgiven”, and that isn’t wrong, and watching Tilly interact with Teddy I kept thinking of William Munny trying so hard to explain how he gave up wickedness. It didn’t fly with him and Tilly falling in love with Teddy does not fly either.

That’s a problem that doubles as a blessing, however, because Winslet’s refusal to play to these lighter moments keeps herself and her storyline cloaked in enough darkness to ensure that “The Dressmaker” never loses it edge, an edge that is the film’s best quality. Because if going home movies, particularly when home turns out to be of a Nowhere variety in relation to the big city where the main character honed his/her chops, a conservatism tends to slowly compromise his/her values. That doesn’t happen here, as Tilly pointedly refuses to compromise her attitude to help those hiding their true selves in town to open up, or find to something in themselves that they don’t know, to carry themselves with audacity and attitude. Tilly keeps carrying herself with attitude too, despite that whole romantic subplot slip-up. And if she teaches a few townfolk to be true to themselves, she stays true to herself too, just in a more vivaciously vicious way, which is what the conclusion is, really dark and really wonderful and sans copout. There are so many movies that play it safe; “The Dressmaker” plays with matches.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965)

There is the famous E.M. Forster line that goes: “If I were forced to choose between my country and my friend, I hope I would be brave enough to choose my friend.” The esteemed Roger Ebert employed this line when discussing “Casablanca” and how Rick forsook his love for Ilsa in the name of Laszlo’s fight against the Nazis. “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold”, Martin Ritt’s adaptation of a John le Carré novel, is like the bizarro wielding of that Forster line. If in Michael Curtiz’s language choosing country over friend is viewed as valorous then in the language of le Carré and Ritt it is seen as cowardly, a waste, orders fulfilled by a company man, nothing more. Indeed, the title is not lost. If coming in from the cold suggests retirement from the life of espionage then being out in the cold is espionage, and that is how Ritt makes the spy life look – cold.

Ritt, working with cinematographer Oswald Morris, shot “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” in monochrome at a time when more and more films were in color. But this movie in color would have been all wrong. This is a movie that belongs to the gray. This is a movie where every cup of coffee drunk is flavored with a little whiskey – and there are a lot of cups of coffee that get drunk. This is a movie that always feel overcast, in every frame, as if the forecast for every spy out in the cold is cloudy with a chance of rain.

That intelligence operative out in the cold is Alec Leamas (Richard Burton). In the film’s opening scene, set at the border between East and West Germany, where Ritt drums up myriad suspense not with the aid of emotionally cuing music but simply from the echoes of shoes and boots on the cobblestone streets, Lemas loses a man in the field. As he does, he is forced to stand there and simply watch, he and his men on orders not to fire unless fired upon, beholden to higher-ups, responsible yet unable to act. Leamas is subsequently summoned by the chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, the mysteriously monikered Control, played by Cyril Cusack in a splendid performance, telling you everything in a little curl of the lips or in a dry, all-knowing line reading, that befits his character’s name.

Leamas remains in the cold, though he’s tasked with acting like he’s come out of it, pretending to be a drunkard, which he basically is anyway, low on funds, all as a means to get recruited by East Germany as a possible defector. Sure enough, he is, squired to the Netherlands for questioning and then to the GDR itself for even more questioning, the spy game presented as escalating power games. The climatic sequence is something straight out a courtroom drama but many of the scenes building to it feel akin to courtroom interrogations too, with suspicious men locked in various forms of verbal combat.

The courtroom interrogation also hinges on the presence of Nan Perry (Claire Bloom), Leamas’s girlfriend, of sorts, who he is counseled to forget about the deeper his plight goes lest he bring her into danger. Sure enough, that’s just what happens, as she, an idealisist and a communist, though it’s possible (depending on your viewpoint) that I repeat myself. If narratively this romantic relationship feels born of plot necessity, Burton’s performance, so wearily at his wit’s end that you do believe he might be libel to simply latch onto whoever he finds.

This weariness also means that his character’s deliberate feint as a man lurching toward a life dead end feels entirely real, so much so that with each step along his deep cover path the more the viewer feels like the men interrogating Leamas, wondering if he really has turned coat, so tired with it all what does he really have to lose? After all, the deeper he goes, the more it becomes apparent that his own side has sold its soul as much as the enemy, a perhaps unorigional cynicism that is nonetheless convincingly evoked, brought home effectively in a sequence that momentarily strands Leamas literally atop the Berlin Wall, stranded in an ethical no man’s land, left with no choice really but the one he makes.

You can see that choice brewing in an earlier moment when Nan earnestly asks him “What do you believe in?” Leamas laughs, and Burton fuels that laugh with nothing but exhausted derision.

Robert Christgau Reviews Rooney Mara's Second Album

“If her first album was consumed by atmospheric portent that too often wound up portending nothing much, her second album, while still noodly in patches, forgoes the weirdly constricted gelationous improvisation for something more uniform without acquiescing to any kind of malnourished rigidity, preferring a tonally whole distortive idle that relieves if it doesn’t quite cure. And though her lyrics, if you are willing to put in the time to extract them from behind the oft-impenetrable scrap-metal-y reverb, too often dissolve as pixie dust, the substantially enigmatic soundscapes are so intriguing in their siren’s call that What It Means does not mean as much as what it is. It is sent from somewhere south of heaven, which is coarser than I would’ve thought, and good thing too.” ☆☆☆

Give Greg Gumbel an Emmy

One of the benefits of problems with watching the NCAA Basketball Tournament non-stop over a 48 hour period, Saturday to Sunday, from the cozy confines of your couch is that you see the same commercials over and over and over and over, etc. At a certain point, the ads stop simply washing over you and you become a commercial connoisseur, dissecting them, judging them, rating them. For instance, in 2017 we received another round of Capital One broadcast blurbs featuring Charles Barkley, Samuel L. Jackson and Spike Lee as compadres placed in supposed-to-be comic situations where Barkley is predominantly made to be the butt of the joke with Jackson and Lee existing as Shaking Their Head straight men. The problem, however, is that Barkley's comic skills blow a bunch of airplane-ish stale air; watching him disco dance just put me to sleep. The best 30 second skit, in fact, is when Jackson is the butt of a joke, victim of Barkley's terrible "Snakes on a Plane" pun ("steaks on a plane") which gets by entirely on Jackson's I'm-So-Weary-With-All-This reactions.

Over the weekend, I saw this sort of advertising narrative misapprehension elsewhere, like the commercials for AT&T and DIRECTV in which Dan Finnerty, famously of "Old School" and "The Hangover" as the noticeably terrible wedding singer, is made to terribly croon Aerosmith's "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" as the soundtrack to CBS sports commentator Greg Gumbel explaining to various bystanders how easy it is to stream the NCAA Tournament from your mobile devices. Now in these spots, Gumbel is mostly just there for expository purposes with Finnerty intended as the star of the show. Yet Gumbel nevertheless gives a performance, a good one, brilliantly (adverb is correct) fashioning himself as something like Finnerty's Hype Man.

Consider the "Sales Meeting" (watch here) spot in which Finnerty and Gumbel burst into a white collar conference room...

Here Finnerty is the principal in the frame, but notice Gumbel wheeling in the portable speaker in the background. In a still, sadly, you can't get the full scope of Gumbel's comically workmanlike manner in this moment. Gumbel isn't trying to be funny; he's just trying to get that speaker into the room. And it is the determined pragmatism with which Gumbel approaches this task that makes the shot funny.

Here, given a few quick seconds to explain the actual meat and potatoes of NCAA Tournament live streaming to an unsuspecting office worker, Gumbel does so crisply and succintly, like the professional he very much is, warmly rather than glibly, and with just a skosh of flair given the commercialized circumstances.

But then...back to the performance, as he watches Finnerty croon about not missing a thing.

At which point Gumbel turns back to the woman to whom he was just giving the plug with a look that is not self-impressed but more kindly "See What I Mean?"

She does see what he means as in the concluding long shot she happily watches the NCAA Tournament on her device while Gumbel stands there, keeping watch, not, mind you, in a domineering way but in a satisifed-to-see-a-satisfied-customer way. This is good shit.

Even better, however, is the "Parking Booth" (watch here) spot in which Finnerty and Gumbel pull to a stop in front of the parking attendant, ostensibly so Finnerty can get his ticket validated but really so they can espouse to the parking attendant the virtues of live streaming March Madness. Now Finnerty, of course, is supposed to be the point of this frame, but notice the way Gumbel, knowing his role as the Hype Man is to be at the beck and call of Finnerty, remains focused on Finnerty rather than the parking attendant.

And when Finnerty breaks into song, as he must, Gumbel sort of shifts into his seat, almost impercetible in the still, emanating this "Aw yeah, now we're cooking" vibe.

And when Finnerty puts out his hand, Gumbel, like the hype man giving the M.C. the mic, smacks a mobile device into Finnerty's hand with a dutiful yet confident force.

And as Finnerty hands the device over to the parking attendant, Gumbel opts for this repose, which is just mind-blowing, a man buried so deep in the part that he completely overshadows all the nonsense happening at the front of the frame.

Then Gumbel again gives his plug, and notice the change in his face, where he re-assumes the typical Gumbel-ian air we know so well, effectively working as the pitchman he was employed to be.

But once the plug is over...right back to hype man.

And then the capper...when Finnerty takes it up a notch, so does Gumbel, reacting like he just heard Judy Garland live at Carnegie Hall.

That? That is a man who momentarily is so moved by the song that he has forgotten all about live streaming and March Madness.

Ixcanul

Set in a small Guatemalan village, isolated from the modern world and in the shadow of the titular volcano, Jayro Bustamante’s debut feature film opens with an impassive teenager, María (María Mercedes Coroy), being insistently dressed in bridal garb by her mother Juana (María Telón), a shot that recalls the critic’s beloved “Titanic” in which Rose is being dressed, unwilling and exhaustedly, by her insistent mother, reminding daughter of her looming marriage to a wealthy tycoon she does not love or even like being a necessity for their family’s survival. Of course, Rose was able to free herself of these constraints. María, on the other hand, who sees the volcano and dreams of what paradise might wait behind it, is not so lucky. Indeed, the opening shot is followed by a sequence in which Juana forcefully takes a sow into a pen to be impregnated by a pig. A woman’s place in this secluded society, in other words, is no different than the pig’s; get married and get pregnant.

This is brought home in another sequence where we are introduced to María’s to-be groom, Ignacio (Justo Lorenzo), older, decidedly not charismatic and the coffee plantation’s foreman, as they hold court at a table, drinking and laughing, discussing María’s fertility. It takes several shots, in fact, before we are even allowed to see María, sitting at the end of the table, forcing a smile. It’s no wonder then that she has been seeing a local boy, Pepe (Marvin Coroy), on the sly, one who talks of whisking her away to America. María wants to go not so much out of illicit love, because she might not even love Pepe at all, which Coroy evinces in the weary way she has María act around him, like her affection toward him is mere obligation, a means to escape. That escape becomes problematic, however, when she becomes pregnant with his child.

Bustamante’s preferred visual scheme for “Ixcanul” is one of wide angles and long takes where he simply allows this mundane, repetitive lifestyle to go on before our eyes, such as when María and Pepe are made to indulge their future fantasies aloud from opposite sides of a mountainside trail where workers, guiding pack mules, pass between them, a nifty evocation of how life’s harsh realities often intrude in our whimsical plans. Yet despite this very of the earth lifestyle, the movie is also steeped in elements of magic, as groups of people away from the contemporary world might, with offerings made to the volcanoes, consultations with spiritual guides and magical remedies when a snake infestation in the coffee fields erupts. When the modern remedy fails, María attempts to conjure up the supposed mysticism that lurks within her pregnant state to rid the snakes.

It does not go well, precipitating a hasty trip to the closest town, taken in the bed of a pickup truck as the camera, so stationary for such long stretches, suddenly gets shaken up, mirroring the modernity into which these isolated people are suddenly thrust as they are forced to deal with doctors and nurses communicating in a language they do not understand. Ignacio is inevitably there to save the day...or is he, revealing what lies in the hearts of men as his bride-to-be’s secret is finally spilled. Precisely what transpires is not for me to say, but even if the society presented in “Ixcanul” is antiquated, it conspicously evokes how the society exisiting outside of it probably hasn’t changed as much as it might like to think.

Toni Erdmann

“Toni Erdmann” is hell of a movie. In an era when so many blockbusters are obsessed with stretching their run times to emit the air of Importance, a movie with a synopsis as swift as “Toni Erdmann” – father tries to reconnect with daughter and hijinks ensue – seems readymade for a lickety split ninety minutes; instead writer/director Maren Ade blows it out to two hours and forty-two minutes. You might check your watch while it’s happening, or while, more accurately, nothing much is happening, yes, so committed is the film to corporate drudgery, the way in which capitalism and its emotional trickledown effect squeezes mounds of humanity and joy out of a person, rendering even swank nightclubs and sexual liaisons as grim non-escapades. At the same time, however, Ade pokes and prods at this stodgy, sexist culture, not until it gives way but until something animated and unpredictable emerges from all around it. You see this in the handheld camera work, which is not lifelike, per se, but, given its principal Bucharest setting, melds long takes of the Romanian New Wave with that sort of deliberately intrusive, follow-them-everywhere aesthetic of “The Office”, waiting and waiting for something to happen. And when it does, what transpires is often so raw, funny and beautiful, usually all at once, that it will make time stop.

The movie turns on Ines (Sandra Hüller), a consultant who has come on business from her native Germany to Bucharest to help an oil company mercilessly outsource its employment. The corporate life’s strain is evident in the ferociously buttoned-up air Hüller emits, evinced in a massage that leaves her additionally stressed out, griping about the masseuse’s technical flaws. It is a life her father, Winifred (Peter Simonischek) a retired hippie, of sorts, with a penchant for pranks, knows nothing about. So, he pulls his biggest prank, traveling to Bucharest and literally invading his daughter’s space by inventing a whole new persona in which he dons a black wig and false teeth and re-christens himself Toni Erdmann, a “life coach”, which would be an obvious allegory if he didn’t also sometimes masquerade as the “German ambassador.”

One scene finds Winifried pulling a gag on Ines by handcuffing himself to her before an important meeting. Alas, he can’t, as you might expect, find the key. Though it momentarily literalizes the attempts by Winifred to connect with his daughter, it’s also indicative of the film’s humor, as the expected payoff, father and daughter coming handcuffed to the meeting, never materializes. Ade has no intention of making the humor so funny or obvious, often allowing Winifred's absurd antics to play out in the back of wide frames, like a moment with a fart cushion where the badness of the joke itself is sort of the point; if “Toni Erdmann” had a laugh track it would be predominantly groans and stony silences.

Yet those groans and stony silences become slightly heroic in a way, given the staidness of the repeated corporate settings, airless conferences rooms and offices, where you can still feel the pent-up rage of this workaday life settling over the characters. In his own clumsy way, Winifried is trying to wake up Ines to the light of the living, to stop sinking into the consulting quagmire and give in to her own impulses, which never comes home for brilliantly then in a late film sequence where Ines plans, as she does throughout, to wed business with pleasure by having clients and co-workers over for her birthday. What transpires, triggered by a dress mishap, run humiliation and self-assurance smack dab into one another by virtue of a much more caustic variation of Inspector Closeau inadvertently visiting the nudist colony in “A Shot in the Dark.”

For as uproarious, as Are You Serious? as this scene is, it is melancholy too in the way that Ines and even a few others are forced to the edge whether they like it or not, and yet Winifred shows up still costumed and closed off, prodding at his daughter but not opening himself up to her. And just as Ade opts out of traditional punchlines, she has little interest in zeroing in on a traditional character arc for either Ines or Winifred, which is precisely what lends the film's lengthy, shapeless vibe so much credence. Both of these characters, so long out of touch, are feeling their way forward in the dark.

Two hours and forty-two minutes might seem ample time for traditional cinematic arc that takes characters from Sad to Happy but Ade is only all too happy to laugh at such a trite notion, just as she is not about to simplistically concede that Winifried’s omnipresent comicality, if you will, is a complete and total tonic. Consider the closing shot, an intimate stunner, where Ines indulges her father’s wish to copy his moves and put on a funny hat. But then, she removes the hat and all she’s left with (gulp) is herself.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Top Hat (1935)

A lot of “Top Hat” requires suspension of disbelief, from the wide-ranging Idiot Plot to the version of Venice that looks less like Venice than a Vegas-y re-creation of Venice in the bowels of Trump Tower. But perhaps nothing is more ridiculous than the opening little bit about Fred Astaire’s Jerry Travers ignoring the advice of his friend and the financier of his show, Horace Hardwick (Edward Everett Horton), to find a nice lady and settle down. It’s ridiculous because, hey, you just saw the opening credits, right? And the opening credits told you “Top Hat” starred Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. And if the movie stars Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers then they have to end up together. But that’s ok! Suspending disbelief is why we love movies so much, right, or at least why we love certain movies so much, right, like “Top Hat”, a movie that might require suspension of disbelief but still, at times, in parts, provokes such disbelief at its silver screen magic you will smile, sigh and slump all at once.

The characters of Astaire and Rogers begin at odds, which they must, as Jerry’s tap dancing upstairs from where Dale (Rogers) is staying wakes her in the middle night, leading to an introductory shot, where she is lying in bed and looking as lavish as most people do when they are awake and at the ball, sitting up at the sound of his feet on the floor with a Jean Harlow-ish “Why I Oughta…” eye crook. She hustles upstairs to confront him, mistaking him for Horace, deciding she doesn’t like him, though he decides he likes her, which begins a game of back and forth despite the mistaken identity. It doesn’t take her long to fall for him, however, when she goes out riding only to be caught in a thunderstorm. She repairs to a gazebo and, sure enough, Jerry rides up to the rescue, though she initially declines with one of those 1930s ripostes “I prefer being distress.” Even so, he begins to sing “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (to be Caught in the Rain)” and they begin to dance and...

It’s one of those scenes where the movie just sort of seems to stop, where you are essentially lifted out of the movie itself and into a secondary escapist realm beyond the cinema, which might sound absurd because it’s sort of incommunicable. There’s this sequence in “La La Land” where the Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling characters are at the Hollywood Planetarium and find themselves lifted up and into the stars, a literalization of sorts of what they are feeling. And yet this dance scene in “Top Hat” actually captures that feeling more acutely, figuratively airlifting you into the stars. Movie reviews are supposed to be filled with How’s (how did they do that?) and Why’s (why did they decide to do that and why was it successful or unsuccessful?), of course, but I don’t care to know how they did that. Why? Because it felt like magic and understanding magic tricks is awful.

Much of that magic, it goes without saying, is in the dancing. The dancing, of course, is what we are desperate for, what we have come to see. It’s no different than, say, explosions in a Michael Bay joint. But Michael Bay is a buffet style filmmaker, plopping slabs of explosions onto our plates with his ginormous cinematic serving spoons, until our plate is weighed down and we feel bloated before we even eat. “Top Hat”, on the other hand, knows how it to play it cool, to parse out the dancing, to give us just enough but to leave us wanting more.

It parses out the dancing, of course, by virtue of its Idiot Plot, which easily could have become a problem, a series of running time-stretching hijinks with no redeeming value other than to give us time to recuperate from the glory of “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (to be Caught in the Rain)” before the next big production number. Thankfully that’s not the case. Director Mark Sandrich peddles this needs-to-be here fluff of Dale being in love with Jerry even though she thinks Jerry is Horace and therefore married with great aplomb, breathing his supporting characters to life rather than simply having them function as pawns of the plot, allowing Horace’s wife Madge (Helen Broderick) to not simply know about his being cad but look at it with detached amusement, like she always knows she’s got the upper hand, which she does, and allowing Horace’s butler Bates (Eric Blore) to operate on some kind of laid-back plane beyond everyone else. You feel for these people as much as you do for Fred and Ginger – er, whatever their characters’ names are.

Naturally they wind up together for the culminating dance number, which given the lavish setting feels something like a big reunion show at Caesar’s Palace, which is all well and good, and probably much more than that, but, I confess, did not lift me to that rarefied point even beyond the cinematic stratosphere like their dance in the rain. Then again, isn’t that why they invented Youtube?

5 College Basketball Movies That Need to Be Made

Though basketball movies tend not to elicit faux-breathess lists as often as baseball movies, hardwood-set films nevertheless have more than a few solid offerings. There is “Hoosiers”, of course, which is beloved by many, perhaps the linchpin of the genre, and the highly enjoyable “White Men Can’t Jump” and the positively delightful “Love & Basketball”, not to mention the timeless documentary “Hoop Dreams” as well as “He Got Game”, which is not so much underrated as still not appreciated anywhere near enough, and hey, who can forget that one dynamite scene in “Semipro” where Will Ferrell keeps passing the ball out to the perimeter from the post and then demanding the ball be passed right back into him. But then, none of these movies are college basketball-centric. And college basketball centric movies are too often either middlebrow mush like “Glory Road” or half-effective attempts to Say Something like “Blue Chips”. We can do better; we should do better; let’s do better. To coincide with the (real) start of the NCAA Basketball Tournament here are five college basketball centric movies that need to be made. (They will never be made.)

5 College Basketball Movies That Need to Be Made

Whatever it Takes. It’s the greatest college basketball story that not enough people know, a story that truly has it all, at least in a CBB sense. It would meld the maniacal devotion that so often goes hand in hand with college basketball coaching to the strange, fanatical world that is college athletics recruiting. It goes like this: twenty-six years ago, Tennessee Women’s Basketball Coach Pat Summitt, despite being very much pregnant with her first son and due any moment, refused to cancel a visit to Allentown, Pennsylvania to meet with a desperately coveted recruit. The plane landed and, as if dictated by the story gods, had her water break, only to press on with the recruiting visit, all with the help of a little (big) white lie to her doctor, and then still somehow make it back to Tennessee to give birth. So even though she famously bleeds Kentucky blue, we will enlist Ashley Judd as our Coach Summitt, so able is Ms. Judd at evincing drama and farce in equal measure and in the same moment, which is precisely the quality we need for a story to undoubtedly make people go “Did that really happen?”

Way Up! In the mid-80s, three-time Big 8 player of the year and scoring savant, the late Wayman Tisdale, was at the forefront of the high-octane, freewheeling offensive carnivals lorded by irascible Coach Billy Tubbs, one of college basketball’s greatest all-time quotes, and who would be a worthy supporting character. But Tisdale was also an impeccable jazz bassist, one who would not only go on to record eight albums (the title of one giving our make-believe movie its name), but who convinced Tubbs to schedule practice around his bass playing in the church band. And because Tubbs, unlike so many modern, control freak coaches, gave his players, including, if not especially, Tisdale, so much individual freedom within his offensive system, I imagine “Way Up!” as a rendering of hooping like so many funkadelic bass lines, a lyrical blending of the athletic and the musical. How will this work? I have no idea. We would need a helluva director. But in an era when college basketball, despite increasing athleticism and a shortened shot clock, has improbably become more boring and slow-moving, we need an antidote. “Way Up!” could be it.

Legacy, Wrecked. Last week Hall of Fame basketball coach Bobby Knight, most famously of Indiana where he won three national championships, and infamous grumpy gus, went on The Dan Patrick Show and vehemently trashed his former employers at Indiana, wishing death (literally) upon all of them. Whatta guy. This “increasing bizarre and sad legacy” was written about by Sports Illustrated’s Jon Wertheim in a piece that was not dissimilar to, if a bit less purple than, a piece for SB Nation from two years ago by Jeremy Collins evocatively titled “The General Who Never Was.” “But this always struck me as the biggest irony of all: Knight was enthralled by history,” wrote Wertheim. “Yet when he began to assume a starring role in that most classic of historical narratives—the centuries-old, cautionary tale of hubris and absolute power corrupting absolutely—he was either blind or helpless to stop it.” So here I'm imagining a one-man movie, a la Robert Altman's “Secret Honor”, in which a once brilliant, now disgraced, habitually angry former basketball coach, all alone in his man cave, is left to waste away in his own narcissism, railing against his perceived enemies, unwittingly deconstructing his own myth even as that myth figuratively buries him right before our very eyes.

Over the River (and through the Woods). The one original idea on this list was concocted after I read about South Florida’s Troy Holston and Geno Thorpe inadvertently being left behind at the airport after a road trip to Tulsa. So, when the University of Lower Pennsylvania’s star player and spunky walk on who have never gotten along find themselves stranded in the wake of a freak spring snowstorm in advance of the game that could clinch them their first conference championship in fifty years, they have to find a way to get themselves there in time for tipoff by any means necessary. It’s Jesus Shuttlesworth & Booger Sykes crossed with Jimmy Chitwood & Ollie in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” meets “White Men Can’t Jump” meets that scene in “Blades of Glory” when Will Arnett chases Will Ferrell across Montreal in ice skates.

Jobe. Ben Jobe, the reason this list came to be, passed away last week at the age of 84. He was known, but perhaps not well known, not a member of the college basketball hall of fame and fine with that as he made emphatic in a fiery interview with John Pruett nearly ten years ago. Indeed, Jobe, son of a sharecropper, longtime coach at historically black Southern University, was an advocate for black basketball coaches, who he felt never got their necessary due, as well as for civil rights, which he was there for, even if he refused, as he memorably said in that Pruett interview, to turn the other cheek as so many freedom fighters did. I always wondered if that attitude at least partially tied back to his desire to employ such a frenetic, don't-wait-just-shoot, pile-on-the-points style on the basketball court. We could explore that in “Jobe”, which would become a wonderfully ironic title, an irony that Scott Rabalais noted in his Jobe obit for The Advocate. Rabalais also quoted former Southern athletic director Marino Casem who said: “(Jobe) never reached the pinnacle. He was always looking for something else.” Biopics are tough to get right, but I like the idea of a biopic about a basketball coach not trying to summit some expected third act pinnacle but looking for something else instead, something loftier, more formidable and much more meaningful.

WHAT IS HAPPENING?

Is this.....

An impromptu meeting of two Class III Dignitaries of the Hollywood Glitterati?

An Auramoji wielded by social media users to express an aura of luxurious luminescence?

The moment right before Amy Adams slips away after having slipped a mickey into the glass of champagne in her right hand that Vin Diesel takes and tosses back?

Cover of the new Peter Mayle book in which a pair of mixologist grifters roam up and down the California coastline? 

A promo photo for a remake of “The King and I” called “The Queen and I”?

A promo photo for “American Hustle 2”? In which Amy Adams plays an actual English aristocrat rather than a make-believe one who, along with an unlikely salami-making safecracker (Diesel), hatches a plot to steal the Crown Jewels?

A promo photo for “XXXy”? A sequel to “xXx: Return of Xander Cage” in which Xander Cage becomes embroiled in some Himalayan what-have-ya, gets locked up in a remote, high-tech prison and has to be rescued by Yvonne Wyre, sort of the Ilsa Faust to Xander Cage’s Ethan Hunt?

A promo photo for a crossover between the “Fast and Furious” franchise and “Talladega Nights” in which Susan somehow, improbably, finds her way into the high-stakes world of street racing and both talks Dom Toretto out of retiring to open a California Pizza Kitchen and wins a street race in an Acura?

Promo for the new Diesel-Adams Talk Show, which is like a variation on the Hathaway/Franco Oscars in which Amy Adams is extremely accommodating and working really hard and Vin Diesel is all like “Do you even cliff dive, bro?” and if they say no he just turns his back.

The first ad in a re-launch of Proper Penguin Frozen Gourmet Dinners?

Amy Adams: “The Oscars ran long, surprise, surprise, and traffic getting home was awful. How am I supposed to put together an after-after party for 8 important friends in 20 minutes?” 
Vin Diesel: “What about Proper Penguin?” 
Amy Adams: “Oh my gosh. I totally forgot.” 
Vin Diesel: “An entire gourmet spread right in your freezer. Hamachi crudo. Maine scallops. Foie Gras with burgundy truffles. Artisinal cheeses. Even a mini-bottle of King Louis Cognac.”

Julieta

As “Julieta” opens, the titular character (Emma Suárez) encounters a young woman, Bea (Michelle Jenner), on the street whose eyes widen at the sight of Julieta. As it happens, Bea is an old friend of Juliea’s daughter, Antía, whom Bea has just seen. Upon learning this, the entire visage of Julieta, who has seemed so plainly happy in the initial moments, changes. Life drains from her face and the tone in her voice turns emotionally fraught as she grills Bea about where Antía is and what she is up to. Writer/director Pedro Almodóvar is intent not to tip his hand right away but to draw the exact nature of this emotional shift out, tendering clues, like the sliced-up photo that Julieta promptly dumps from an envelope onto her desk in the wake of seeing Bea. Later, after the photo has been taped back together, we realize it is of Antía, emblemizing “Julieta” as a two hour piecing together of where this mother/daughter relationship went wrong.

That marks “Julieta”, which Almodóvar adapted from short stories by Alice Munro, as something akin to a murder mystery without the murder. The twists and turns here, even when inherently melodramatic, are often presented in a more muted fashion, like a pair of grisly, narrative altering deaths that happen off screen, completely removing their visceral impact to instead focus on how they linger with and affect Julieta. The answers at the end of the maze, meanwhile, are inward looking, not outwardly explosive, foreshadowed in the movie’s opening shot, a close-up of a red satin blouse of the titular character, her chest subtly heaving, suggesting something built up within her begging to erupt. By the end, however, it will not have erupted so much as just sort of seeped out and evaporated, at least a little.

This close-up of her chest gives way to shots of her packing in advance of leaving her native Spain for Portugal with dour if dashing Lorenzo (Darío Grandinetti). But once the thought of her daughter has been brought to re-bear, Julieta immediately reneges on her future to re-engage with her past, moving back into the apartment she once shared with Antía and composing a letter to her offspring, which means the majority of the story is told in flashback and is why so much of what happens is colored less with full-throated immediacy than quiet rumination.

It also means that because the story spans decades. Julieta is played by two different actresses, Suárez as the older version and Adriana Ugarte as the younger, and if they never quite feel like the same person that is by design – young “Julieta” is living this story but older Julieta is living with it, a product of all that his happened. What happened, we learn, is a moment of passion with Xoan (Daniel Grao) aboard a train, which yields Antía and which prompts Julieta to set aside a life of academia for simple domesticity with Xoan instead, living to raise Antía, a single-minded devotion with which she struggles.

The emergent irony in Julieta’s relationship with Xoan is that he is already married, to a very sick woman, who he and everyone else is simply, harshly but honestly waiting on to die, which mirrors the relationship of Julieta’s own mother and father, the latter taking comfort in the arms of another woman even as he tends to dying wife. It’s a pointed parallel, evoking the idea that we are all fated to fall prey to the same life choices we saw in our parents that left us aghast.

The story’s real thrust is Antía gradually pulling away from her mother, never more so than a spiritual retreat high in the mountains. When Julieta comes to pick up her daughter, she learns that Antía has already departed on her own with strict orders for no one to tell her mother where she has gone. In other words, she takes the opposite tack as her mother, spurning domestic responsibilities for some vaguely defined finding herself odyssey. It leaves her mother wandering in a cloud of depression, one that she denies only to have re-consume her, and that lifts in a strange kind of way at the conclusion, which will not be revealed. Suffice to say it is no “A Ha!” moment except that, maybe, in its own way, it is. one in which guilt & regret and motherhood going hand in hand becomes a bloodless twist.

Get Out

Much like the American sci-fi movies of the 1950s often employed alien invasions as political allegories, writer/director Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” employs the framework of a horror movie to pick apart the racial divide in America. He does this by essentially lampooning the plot of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” as Rose Armitage (Allison Williams) brings her boyfriend of five months, Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya), home to meet her folks, Dean (Bradley Whitford) and Missy (Catherine Keener). “Do they know I’m black?” Chris asks Rose. What transpires will no doubt upset a certain sort strident pro-Caucasian, especially given the amount of white carnage at the hands of black folks. But then, Peele is not interested in simply picking off easy targets like red-blooded racists; he is more astute and insidious. Instead he takes dead aim not only at the fantasy of a post-racial bliss but at the self-impressed white liberals, the kind that would’ve voted for Obama three times if they could have (guilty!). If you’re one of the latter and post-movie you immediately turn on your iPhone to check the NFL combine goings-on, I dare say you may have missed the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” parasitical-ish point.

Not that Peele pushes the horror into the background. No, “Get Out” contains nearly everything a horror movie traditionalist might expect, from the table-setting opening sequence, wonderfully filmed with a roving camera that disorients us just as the situation disorients the character on screen, to requisite shrieks on the soundtrack that mechanically make us jump to an explanatory set of photos perfectly stacked and left out for Chris to find them just when he needs them. Though this might make it sound like Peele is sending up the genre, he instead implements so many horror movie tropes to evince his ultimate argument.

At the sprawlingly fancy Armitage house, for instance, Chris almost immediately is made to feel that requisite Something Is Not Quite Right sensation by the groundskeeper Walter (Marcus Henderson) and the housekeeper Georgina (Betty Gabriel), their demeanor bizarrely robotically polite, like they are pod people. Their presentation is not subtle. It’s so off, in fact, that you might wonder how Rose can’t help but notice it, especially when Chris continually brings it up. But Peele, bless his heart, isn’t interested in plausibility. He forgoes satirizing the obviousness of Something’s Not Right to use this Something’s Not Right to show us what’s really not right, like how Chris presses the issue and then backs off, afraid to rock the boat, made to doubt what his eyes tell him by Rose who simply dismisses what he’s saying as paranoia. It’s pretty ingenious, this, the way a conversation typical to horror movies instead becomes a satirizing of a white person telling a black person to not simply assume racist goings-on.

Rose’s parents, on the other hand, raise their own red flags, with Dean, desperate to pass himself off as a colorblind paragon of virtue making so many overtures of tolerance that Chris can only humor him with a cocked head amusement, a look Kaluuya deftly employs throughout, like he always only has one toe in the pool trying decide whether to take the plunge or turn and run. And Dean’s soliloquy on Jesse Owens smiting Hitler’s Aryan race, as well as a friend of Dean’s who shows up later and cites his love of Tiger Woods when introducing himself to Chris, is prophetic of a sort of literal appropriation to come, Peele improbably, incredibly melding “The Stepford Wives” with “Manderlay” which is about as far as I will go without tipping over into the netherworld of spoilers.

In the run-up to the more caustic twists and turns, Chris converses by phone with his friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery), tasked with caring for Chris’s dog, reporting the evolving oddities he counters at the Armitage house. Rod issues oft-foul-mouthed warnings which initially play like comic relief only to assume more biting context the further Chris’s plight progresses, revealing the inherent dangers in black and white cultures mingling. No matter how we might like to think that no differences or prejudices remain, they do.

Indeed, anyone hoping for climactic détente between black and white will be sorely disappointed. Oh, it momentarily feints in that direction, quite brilliantly, as Peele plants a set-up very early on that suddenly seems destined to pay off in a late movie shot on a darkened road, tailor made for a come-full-circle White Savior payoff. I will say no more except to say that what I expected most utterly did not happen. Post-racial? Get out of here.

Friday's Old Fashioned: All the President's Men (1976)

There is a moment in Alan J. Pakula’s journalistic thriller “All the President’s Men” when the Washington Post’s infamous swashbuckling reporters Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman), the ones who helped bring down President Richard Nixon in the wake of Watergate, are knocking on doors of people from the Committee to Re-Elect the President, trying to get someone to talk. Finally, miracle of miracles, they do, as the kindly Carolyn Abbott (Allyn Ann McLerie) invites them in for coffee. Yet as they talk it quickly becomes clear that Ms. Abbott is not the Ms. Abbott they think she is. “Oh, I don’t work at the Committee to Re-Elect the President,” she says. “I work at Garfinkel’s, in the accounting department.” It’s a humorous moment, of course, but more than that it doubles as the one moment in “All the President’s Men” when Woodward and Bernstein are not in contact with either a fellow journalist or someone functioning as a cog, whether high up or far down, in the giant political machine. And their unveiled disappointment in discovering that they are in the presence of a boring ol’ regular person is telling.

That sets it apart from last year’s Oscar-winning Best Picture “Spotlight”, for which Pakula’s film was often and not wrongly cited as a comparison. Yes, both movies effectively mined drama from the minutiae of the journalistic process, but “Spotlight” allowed brief spaces for its characters to express their true feelings toward the Catholic criminals they were pursuing. That never really happens in “All the President’s Men”, which sticks closely to the paper trail, reveling in dates, figures and names, repeatedly contrasting the shadows of the night and dark offices and silent homes where all the truth-digging takes place with the bright, almost painful white lights, of the newsroom where sense has to be made of this information overload. The human interest angle that exists somewhere in-between, where the crookedness of Tricky Dick might trickle down to the unsuspecting American populace he governs, is nowhere to be found.

The human interest is never played up in the two leading performances either. Although Redford can’t help but cut the figure of a movie star, he nevertheless never goes all in on Heroic. Indeed, he simply craves the story, the desire to break the big headline and the same goes for Bernstein, played by Hoffman with a wry smile that gets turned up to 11 whenever he is in the presence of the lady, whether she likes him or not. They are two men with their nose to the grind, emblemized in their introductions, with Woodward trying to catch up on sleep on a Saturday morning only to get a call about the Watergate break-in while Bernstein just sort of appears in the background of his introductory shot, always listening, always desperate to worm his way in to whatever The Next Big Thing could be. Neither man ever really stops pushing forward to get to the bottom of the Watergate break-in to analyze just what they are doing and what it could mean, or what havoc they might be wreaking on the people they talk to, the ones who ominously explain “They’re watching.” Who’s watching? And what happens if they are? Who knows? That’s not the film’s purview.

Any big picture ideas are left to Woodward and Bernstein’s editor, Ben Bradlee, a sly performance by Jason Robards that rightfully won him an Oscar, who generally has his feet up on the table, wielding authority by hanging back, talking tough but acting cool, laughing off challenges even as he gravely assesses the reality of each one. A key sequence happens in a meeting where Bradlee’s Foreign Editor (John McMartin) calls the story, if there is one, “dangerous.” Although Bradlee seems to casually ignore this comment, once everyone else is out of the room, he asks “How dangerous?” The Foreign Editor gives an explanation summarized in his final two lines: “I don’t believe the story. It doesn’t make sense.”

I’d be lying if I said my decision to rewatch “All the President’s Men” was not made wholly in the wake of America’s most prominent figurehead declaring the press “is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people.” But, of course, that’s not really true. If the press is anyone’s enemy, it’s the President’s and that is because so often a disconnect exists between the President and the press, with the former trying to use the latter to shape his message and the latter trying to see through the spin of the message to deliver it unvarnished to the American people.

This battle is not new with Trump; it has been waged by numerous past Presidents. The danger in the press, however, especially if the President grows confronfational, is to try and shape truth rather than simply get to the truth. As no less an authority than Walter Lippmann once explained, “The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other and make a picture of reality.” That, in essence, is what Woodward and Bernstein do in “All the President’s Men.” They are obligated, as each hidden fact is brought to light, to follow their story all the way to the end in order to make a picture of reality so the public, to whom the President, any President, must answer, can step back and study it and decide for themselves what they think. The movie ends with Nixon being sworn in once again as Woodward and Bernstein put the finishing touches on their story in advance of setting it free. Whatever’s gonna be will be.

The best shot in the movie doubles, oddly enough, as product placement. In the background, a small television is turned to the Republican National Convention where Nixon is renominated. In the foreground is an Olympian typewriter where Woodward frenetically hacks away. There is no sign of the public, only the press and the politicians locked in their cage. The war rages on.

Some Drivel On...Frailty

The beginning of director Bill Paxton’s “Frailty” (2001), once, that is, you get past the first of the movie’s bookend scenes in which, in the present, Fenton Meiks (Matthew McConaughey) explains that his younger brother Adam is the so-called God’s Hand killer to an FBI agent (Powers Boothe), is a swift evocation of domestic bliss. It’s a flashback to Fenton and Adam’s childhood with their Dad (Paxton also), who simply goes by said moniker – Dad. The home’s production design feels spot on, radiating warmth in its lived-in, modest trappings. That warmth is precisely what makes the subsequent scene so jarring – that is, Dad entering his sons’ bedroom in the middle of the night and explaining that he was just visited by an angel telling him that his role on Earth is now to destroy demons disguised as human beings.

Paxton’s demeanor in this moment hardly changes. “The angel says…” he keeps saying in such an earnest tone that it sounds no different than any Dad explaining household chores. And Paxton incredibly maintains this air throughout, never breaking, refusing to resort to serial killer oddities or histrionics. Even when his character is lifting an axe to bring down on some trembling, gagged human being, Paxton emits of grief and guilelessness. He is, simply, a family man who has received a sign and is, like a good shepherd, committed to now shepherding his kids along on this new mission.

Adam (Jeremy Sumpter), younger and more impressionable, is easily seduced by the power his father commands simply from being his father. Fenton (Matt O’Leary), on the other hand, older, able to think for himself, is fearful, reluctant and eventually defiant. McConaughey provides voiceover throughout these passages, and while it is not intrusive, per se, it is also not entirely necessary given that O’Leary’s performance virtually on its own, an assortment of facial expressions that communicates his different levels of thought, gets across what McConaughey is telling us. This was Paxton’s first feature film as director and you wonder if, with more experience, he might have jettisoned the monologue. (Or maybe had to keep it because it was McConaughey and McConaughey’s voice sells tickets.) No matter.

As director, Paxton never entirely tips the scales toward This Is Happening or This Is Not Happening. In the moments of Dad’s visions, Paxton lets us see what Dad sees without visually overplaying the moment but never concedes on whether what Dad sees is really there or a product of his imagination. And in the moments before the dispatching of the demons, when Dad puts his hands to his to-be victims’ heads and holds on, purportedly so he can see their sins, the camera shakes violently, perhaps because seeing these sins makes Dad shake. Ah, but look closely at a later killing, with the camera behind Dad and victim, where the camera does not shake, and you almost come away thinking that nothing is happening, that Dad is play-acting or play-acting without necessarily realizing that he is play-acting.

“Frailty” also refuses, for the most part, until later, when the film kind of comes apart, which we will get to momentarily, to give any kind of deep dive into these supposed demons as humans, who they are, where they come from, who might miss them. It adds to the idea of Dad’s acceptance of the mission. Who they are is irrelevant because God is telling Dad who they really are and Dad is merely tasked with abiding by his beliefs.

The ambiguity of these flashback scenes, however, is eventually compromised by the bookended tale of older Fenton and the FBI agent. Here is where everything falls into place, where you realize all sorts of little moments preceding it were merely planted seeds waiting to sprout, a concession to the more conventional aspects of the tale, an abandonment of its exploration of the fraut nature of belief. It’s not uninteresting to make us wonder if “hey, what if all this really is real”, though it is always much less interesting to make us think “wait, all this really is real?” And the more forceful “Frailty” became in its presentation of the latter, the less I was inclined to be believe that any of it was true.