In Memoriam: Jonathan Demme

Jonathan Demme, who passed away on Wednesday at the age of 73 from complications with cancer, debuted with “Caged Heat” (1974), made under the umbrella of Roger Corman, and was a movie that I probably never would have seen had it not been for someone I worked with long ago at a movie theater who knew about movies liked “Caged Heat” and showed it to me. It is, I reckon, a movie readymade for declarations of It Is What Is except that it’s not what it is at all, it’s something else, an exploitation movie in which Demme exploited the movie itself by usurping the necessarily crude foundation with a liberal bent. Seeing it flashed me back to “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991), Demme’s multi-Oscar winner, which is still sort of astounding, a movie that in someone else’s hands probably would have been dumped in late August and with parts, frankly, that still feel late August-y even as Demme wrangled something melancholy and moving from the plight of FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) and generated serious tension with serious craft from her tete-a-tetes with Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins).

That Demme managed to inject so much fresh air in such scuzzy pictures foreshadowed an entire career, one where he could ably slide into just about any genre, perhaps making it difficult to pinpoint A Demme Film in that same way you can pinpoint, say, A Tarantino Film, unless, of course, you decided to deem A Demme Film as being simply humanist. Though “Rachel Getting Married”, this blog’s favorite movie of 2008, turned on the re-appearance of Kym (Anne Hathaway) for her sister Rachel’s (Rosemarie DeWitt) wedding, Demme never let Kym’s oft-self-centered, monstrous behavior turn you off, inviting you in anyway by balancing that thread reminiscent of so many real life families where frustration and forgiveness go hand-in-hand. Indeed, the film’s most ravishing moment was the wedding ceremony itself, running longer than most filmmakers would dare, a multi-cultural celebration that decidedly did not cure all Kym’s woes, not in the least, nor solve the rest of her family’s problems, but still found, as if it was the dance in “Grapes of Wrath” for a hipster nation, peace in the moment.

It was a movie, as Demme himself said, that drew more from his documentarian side and it shows, with a constantly roving camera and a narrative more than willing to get off track and go take a look at something else for a little bit. It was also infused with music, from Tunde Adebimpe’s showstopping acapella Neil Young cover in the name of love to dee jay Anita Sarko (who passed away in 2015) in one breathless shot reaching for the sky as she drops the beat, which was no coincidence because Demme was quite taken with music, making concert films and directing music videos. He concocted the celebrated Talking Heads doc “Stop Making Sense” (1984) and he helmed a video for New Order’s “The Perfect Kiss”, ten minutes of bliss, rendered predominantly in barebones close-ups, as if we are privy to the song’s concoction, before Demme goes a little wider for the frenzied conclusion, tagging it with band members looking right into camera, as if they saying “that’s how it’s done.” You’re telling me.

The beginning of “Philadelphia” (1993) set to Bruce Springsteen’s spiritual-sounding “Streets of Philadelphia” is no commonplace scene-setter but an evocative delineation of stakes – this is Philly, birthplace of America, this is us, all of this is all of us. And even if what followed, a stuffy courtroom drama which was, unfortunately, one of the genres that Demme could not quite rise above, that opening still packs as much of a wallop in today’s world. Maybe the preeminent moment of the considerable Demme musical canon, however, is the Jeff Daniels/Melanie Griffith high school reunion boogie, of sorts, to The Feelies in “Something Wild” (1986). It’s the crux of the film, really, before it takes turn toward the dark, in the form of wild-eyed Ray Liotta sidling in as the dance winds down, and everything that comes after is still tied back to the go for it attitude of this interlude. It is the extraneous made essential

Maybe no Demme film sounds as extraneous as “Married to the Mob”, the 1988 rom com in which mafia wife Angela de Marco (Michelle Pfeiffer) is forced to go it alone when her connected spouse is offed, a seemingly broad screwball comedy with big names and big costumes and big hair that doesn’t so much overcome all that as gleefully embrace it and then tunnel down to extract genuine character anyway, reveling equally in absurdity and real emotion to amplify how those two truly, and more often than not, go hand-in-hand.

I only saw “Married to the Mob” for the first time four years ago and it blindsided me, reminding me what a deft filmmaker Jonathan Demme was and how no movie, no matter what or who it was about, seemed beneath him because even though his movies where so often sheer pleasure they were never merely pointless escapism; they were life.

keira knightley gazes into the distance

Anyone wondering whether or not Keira Knightley would appear in the no doubt behemothic latest installment of the behemothic "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise, the latest trailer put to rest all rumors by revealing her. Granted, she's barely in it, perched below some mountainous terrain looming behind her, gazing at something we cannot see off in the distance. And naturally it prompts the question...WHAT IS SHE LOOKING AT? I want to know what she's looking at so much that I'm contemplating going to see this movie which I would have heretofore thought unthinkable.

The principles of Bruckeimer-y detection tell me what she is gazing at is a special effect and not really there, but hey, who's to say? Maybe it's just Orlando Bloom riding a horse over the horizon. There are SO MANY REASONS movie characters gaze into the distance.

Sometimes you gaze into the distance out of hope...

Sometimes you gaze into the distance out of fear...

Sometimes you gaze into the distance out of regret...

Sometimes you gaze into the distance on account of some existential urge...

Sometimes you gaze into the distance because it's the only thing you really want to see...

Sometimes you gaze into the distance because it's a plaintive moment dammit...

Sometimes you gaze into the distance because it makes for a splendid photo op...

Sometimes you gaze into the distance because it's a Malick movie and that's what you do...

And sometimes...well, sometimes you gaze into the distance because what you see is for your eyes only...

Because in the end, as I return to this still, I realize that I don't need to see "Pirates of the Caribbean" after all. Because whatever Keira is gazing at she is gazing at with an understanding of the cosmos that idiots like me could not hope to appreciate even if I saw it through a particularly pristine set of coin-operated binoculars.

Phew. There's $15 I don't have to spend.

30 for 30: One and Not Done

Verily in the beginning collegiate sports were contradictory. In the first college football game ever contested on November 6, 1869 between Rutgers and Princeton the former earned victory with the aid of three players who were failing algebra, instantaneously rendering the relationship between students and athletics as volatile, a volatility that has never been quelled, with big time college sports always held up more as commercialized entertainment than an extension of a university’s academic intent, a rift that has only deepened over time, with enormous football and basketball stadiums towering over quaint academic halls and the recent NCAA Basketball Champion earning its crown while still mired in an academic imbroglio. We like to fashion sports into black/white narratives but more often they exist in murky moral middle grounds, and no one at present walks that middle ground with as much I-Don’t-Care-What-You-Think zeal as college basketball raconteur John Calipari, current head coach of Kentucky, former head coach of Massachusetts and Memphis.

Jonathan Hock’s documentary “One and Not Done”, the latest in ESPN’s never-ending 30 for 30 series, ably captures that middle ground, opening by establishing Calipari as the son of immigrants, tying the coach’s go-getter nature to his parents, and evoking its subject’s inherent contradiction in an early line in which Calipari says his family was “never embarrassed about where we came from because it was all about where you were going”, the latter seeming to be in direct opposition to the former. Hock just lets that lie there, but you sense in this line a mantra for Calipari as a coach, particularly as his star has risen and, on account of an NBA rule stipulating that prospective players can only declare for the league’s draft after one year in college or upon turning 19, he has turned his program into an NBA way station, bringing in many of the country’s top basketball recruits for a single season to win big and then send them to the pros to get paid. It’s all about where his kids are going.

That willingness to gleefully embrace a rule so frowned up on by so many of his peers sets Calipari apart even if, like any other coach, he yearns to win, a familiar sensation seen vividly during in-game moments where Hock has mic’d up Calipari to provide us a wonderful, unvarnished look at a coach’s sideline behavior, which I rather enjoyed because while many coaches like to play up their dignified air, these mic’d up scenes deliberately demonstrate no dignity whatsoever. He screams at referees and bellows at his own players, though in other moments we see the love he has for his players and the love they have for him, perhaps best epitomized in how Calipari brings a plethora of former players on stage with him for his Basketball Hall of Fame introduction ceremony.

If many coaches, like a certain faux General, often make it all about themselves, or while some, like Jim Calhoun, who is interviewed in “One and Not Done”, talk about the sanctity of “the game”, the Hall of Fame ceremony illustrates that Calipari, more than most, brings “the game” back to the reason it exists in the first place – the kids. The game is theirs. At the same time, Calipari is nothing if not a high-powered salesman, a fact repeated numerous times, often with variations of the old he could sell ice to eskimos line, and the documentary gives the distinct impression that Calipari is pitching us, the audience, trying to sell us on a more saintly vision of him.

Yet even if it skews sympathetic toward its subject, “One and Not Done” does not does not glide by the fact that both the Massachusetts and Memphis basketball programs were hit by NCAA sanctions retroactively under Calipari’s watch. Calipari, in fact does his best in the film, as he did in real life, to sort of deflect wrongdoing onto the kids, not so subtly calling into question his stance about it being all about the kids, also evoked in Calipari’s comments that his star-stacked Kentucky teams will only win championships when the kids decide they want to win championships badly enough, a pretty clever way of deflecting blame for his own losses. Even so, if any moment in Hock’s documentary most hit me, it was the revelation that Massachusetts star Marcus Camby, who accepted money and gifts from people outside the program, an NCAA no-no, which led to said sanctions, repaid Massachusetts what he took by donating money to the school. It left me thinking that even if Calipari is not necessarily the selfless mentor he might claim, he nonetheless seemed to have taught Camby right, a contradiction to the end.

The Fate of the Furious

Boy those crazy kids from “The Fast and the Furious” have come a long way in sixteen years. Where once they were mere thrill-seeking street-racers who only wanted to drive faster than someone else a quarter mile at a time and then unwind with a cold Corona, they have now apparently morphed into thrill-seeking James Bonds juniors, racing not just in the streets and not just for thrills but across icy tundras with nuclear submarines in hot pursuit to prevent WWIII. And it’s entirely possible you might read all that and say: Duh. This is common knowledge. Where have you been? Did you not see the six sequels to “The Fast and the Furious”? My answer: No. No, I did not see the six sequels to “The Fast and the Furious”. And so if you are hoping for a review in which the franchise's considerable history is used to place “The Fate of the Furious”, entry #8 in the apparently indestructible franchise, into complete context, well, by all means, and no hard feelings, look elsewhere. But if you are curious about what a “Fast and the Furious” neophyte might have to say about the new box office thresher, feel free to keep reading.

Please do not assume, however, this review will merely be head-scratching and rhetorical question-asking, like wondering why those characters I did not know and cannot name who appeared for, like, two seconds earned a round of applause from the audience. That was a tidbit for the real fans, obviously, good for them, and for fundamental newbies such as myself we thankfully don’t need much history to understand what’s happening or, more crucially, to glean the precise standing of various character relationships. “Fate of the Furious” principal Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) walks practically everywhere in the movie’s Havana opening with his arm around Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), visual shorthand for their romantic relationship. Roman (Tyreese Gibson) and Tej (Ludacris) crack jokes because they are comic relief. Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and Deckard (Jason Statham) talk trash so they are adversarial, which accounts for the movie’s single biggest letdown. This duo spend the film’s first half like two boxers in the run-up up to a showdown, issuing so many threats that it can only mean a third act fight waits. Alas, the third act fight never materializes because the movie needs to briefly move one of them aside on account of an obvious He’s Dead feint and because the movie decides they need to make up and be friends. Boo! Hiss!

Then again, their eventual making up correlates directly to the movie’s overriding theme, one explicated several times just to ensure, I guess, that anyone like me with no real relationship to the franchise doesn’t miss it – namely, Family First. We see this in the movie’s standalone opening stanza, a nod, it seems, to the series’ roots, in which Dom settles a dispute involving his cousin by challenging Raldo (Celestino Cornielle) to a street race. The whole sequence speaks to the movie’s light tone, where one second Raldo is literally trying to kill Dom and the next second Raldo is all like “You’ve got my respect, you wacky guy”, and the innumerable extras function less as potential collateral damage than street race club goers just waiting for the checkered flag.

That tone goes hand-in-hand with the movie’s mononymous villain Cipher (Charlize Theron), cyber-terrorist extraordinaire, wherein her diabolical plan to acquire some nukes for all the usual reasons comes across as far less consequential than her blackmailing Dom into helping her acquire those nukes so that she can pit him against his brotherly and sisterly racers-in-arms. And this means that Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell), a wonderful character, a vaguely defined government operative who comes and goes at his leisure and who I kept imagining in an alternate “Four Rooms”-ish film waltzing from spy movie to spy movie with various instructions for various action heroes, will enlist Dom’s own cohorts to go after Dom, family against family.

Trouble is, because we know from the get-go that Dom has not really gone to the dark side of the fast & furious force, all the inherent suspense of this twist is sucked dry. This leaves the myriad set pieces to do the heavy lifting. They mostly do, equally comic and ornate, stretching from a zombie submarine to a car chase in which one of the cars isn’t a car but a heat-seeking missile, which I imagine will be a NASCAR event by 2020, even if, at certain points, this insistence on bigger and louder sometimes makes it seem like director F. Gary Gray and writer Chris Morgan inadvertently crafted a sequel to “xXx” rather than “The Fast and the Furious.”

If too often Diesel is forced to go through these gone-rogue motions with a gruff joylessness that mirrors the fauxness of his going rogue, where the thing that winds up driving him forward, not to be revealed, plays less like a true augmenting of the familial stakes than a we-need-something-here soap opera twist (notice how a potential love triangle lets Dom off the hook because the movie makes the decision for him, a cheat that really grinds my gears), there are nevertheless still moments when his real emotions buried deep beneath so much Hollywood pomp and circumstance emerge. You can’t completely tamp down Vin Diesel, or Michelle Rodriguez, and when they crackle together, like post-going rogue, when they find themselves in a staredown by way of a Mexican Standoff, franchise backstory is rendered as mute as all the pyrotechnics, speaking a universal cinematic language.

Cars are cute, but nothing on the silver screen stokes the engines like human faces.

Colossal

If nothing else, “Colossal” is something else, a movie apart from any other you are likely to see this year. That is not to suggest “Colossal” is entirely original or radical since it very much traffics in familiar genres and tropes, marrying a returning-to-your-hometown-with-your-tail-between-your-legs movie to a Godzilla vs. Whoever movie. “Colossal” is something like if Reese Witherspoon of “Sweet Home Alabama” was forced to reckon with the error of her ways by being pitted in an intimate yet enormous battle against a Kaiju. It’s as if writer/director Nacho Vilagondo took complaints directed at Gareth Edwards crack at “Godzilla” of monsters overshadowing humans and decided to turn them around by making the humans the monsters, “Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”, maybe, just more literal.

The movie opens with Gloria (Anne Hathaway) returning home after an all-night bender, which, we infer from the reaction of her boyfriend Tim (Dan Stevens), is not the first time this has happened. On his way out the door, Tim gives Gloria the afternoon to pack her things and go. She will, but first, as she sits on the sofa, gob-smacked about her sudden change in fortune, a few of her friends barrel into the apartment, kicking off some sort of mid-morning party, taking the scene out on a comic note rather than a sorrowful one, indicative of writer/director Nacho Vigalando’s preferred narrative maneuver of the Story Reversal. He loves the Story Reversal. The ensuing film, for whatever qualms may emerge, and there are a few, remains fully engaging by virtue of unremitting changes of direction.

Gloria’s move is to go home, moving onto an air mattress on the floor of her empty childhood home, and running into old friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis) who now owns a small townie bar and gives Gloria a job. Their relationship emits the air of the Road Not Taken, one which will be explored after hours in back of the bar over innumerable longneck bottles of beer. Their jokey, feeling-each-other-out behavior suggests a familiar rom com template. But Vigalondo is quick to turn that template against itself. These drunken powwows gradually grow darker and meaner as all those beers consumed, which usually just provide something for actors to do onscreen, become integral, a genuine rendering of the issues alcohol abuse can cause.

Granted, even if it seriously considers alcoholism, the reasons for Gloria’s dependency remain somewhat nebulous, emblemized in that empty home which functions as a blank spot of her past. She has a past with Oscar too, though it is evoked only in a few brief flashes, left to be cultivated more in their behavior which begins as flirtatious before metamorphosing into something much more ominous, grievances aired and then acted upon. As an actor, Sudeikis has generally just skidded by on his deadpan one-liners, but here he gradually re-purposes that deadpan for something more insidious as his character’s jealousy rises so that, by the end, and in what specific ways I will not reveal, Oscar becomes truly frightening. Hathaway, meanwhile, seems to be informing her role with notes of her real life personality, or at least the public’s interpretation of her real life personality, as she wields a charm that feels as genuine as it is exploitative, and which eventually collapses into anguish before she authors a redemption that is not pat since she refuses to sacrifice any manic edge.

Their relationship becomes central to what initially seems like an oddly peripheral story in which a giant monster is on the loose in Seoul, eventually squaring off against a robot adversary, primarily shown through television news reports that people gather at Oscar’s bar to watch with bated breath. How this connects to Gloria and Oscar is best left unsaid, though there are assuredly some gaps in logic relating to its precise explanation while the movie also has no interest in seeing any of this from the Seoul’s perspective, reducing its people to mere narrative collateral damage. These are not idle complaints. Then again, there is a selfishness inherent in Gloria and Oscar that underscores the movie’s limited viewpoint, a selfishness that Gloria eventually finds the wherewithal to deal with and that Oscar lets percolate until it erupts.

The precise specifics of the eruption and their resolution shall remain unmentioned, and though their effect might have been even more sensational with additional backstory, perhaps bringing the idea of inherent rage within all of us truly home, there is nonetheless something intensely visceral about the way it plays out. The conclusion is sort of a reimagining of “King Kong” with Ann Darrow in the position of the titular ape and the titular ape in the position of Ann Darrow. And while that might make no sense with the full context, all I can tell you is the weirdly lyrical beauty it conjures and how in those moments all the aforementioned flaws dissolved into dust.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Secret Honor (1984)

The tagline for Robert Altman’s “Secret Honor” advises that “Anyone Can Be President.” The anyone in this case is Richard M. Nixon (Philip Baker Hall), who, judging from this one man film, based on a one man play, suggests that not only can a common crook be President but so can a vain, venomous, terrifying drunkard. Indeed, Altman locks us in a room with the 37th President, played by Philip Baker Hall less an a Dan Hedaya-ish impersonation than an inhabitation of a ferociously tormented soul, and then will not let us out, as if imagining the ex-President’s last days in his own self-imposed bunker, where the camerawork, even from the beginning where it wanders the fairly elaborate study rather than pulling back, refuses to give us a full sense of the room’s scope, or even if it’s night or day, though it certainly feels like night, at least for Nixon given the first shot of a grandfather clock as the bell tolls for our lone character about to go mad.

This Nixon, though he is explicitly advised as being a fictional version of a real person in an opening title card, sure seems like the guy we’ve heard about as he sits down at his desk in his wood paneled office with portraits of Presidents surrounding him and fiddles with a tape recorder that he initially struggles to make work, a tape recorder through which he apparently plans to try out some sort of impassioned plea for his right to be pardoned in the aftermath of his resignation. Throughout he addresses the “judge”, seemingly working as his own defense, and whether this is a trial run, some sort of tape he plans to send to who knows who, or something else, it doesn’t really matter. It might be a suicide note. After all, one shot ominously lingers on a revolver and, you know, Chekov’s Gun and all that, though never presume someone like Altman will adhere to those sorts of rigid rules.

Whoever he think he is speaking to, Nixon’s real nemesis here seems to be the Record and setting it straight, leaving him determined to get a few things off his chest. Or perhaps I should say, to get everything off his chest. The near 90 minute oration that follows veers wildly from the political to the personal and back again, a virtual life history in which Nixon recounts a childhood in which he seemed to be squarely under the thumb of his mother, who he loves and cannot stand, and which ties back to an ordinary upbringing which he seems convinced was the true genesis of his undoing, marking him an anti-elite to Kennedy and Eisenhower and all the rest, even the Founding Fathers, snotty English shits, and reproaching the electorate that kept putting him in office and the shadowy deep state to which he had no choice but to acquiesce even as they sought at every turn to undermine him. If he occasionally, briefly, gets introspective and flirts with pointing the thumb, he quickly reverts and wags his finger, screaming vitriol so that by movie’s end his forehead, face and probably bathrobe are adorned in sweat.

The performance by Hall achieves a unique sort of dichotomy. On one hand, for a part that Hall also played theatrically, suggesting an extremely lived in role, where the rantings and ravings and accompanying physical motions might play rehearsed, everything still comes across spontaneous. Hall evinces a kind of rageful absent-mindedness, where one memory suddenly triggers another, and where every time he comes into physical contact with something, whether a piano or a book, he momentarily snaps out of his furious paranoid delusions for a momentary peace before inevitably thinking of something else and going right back down the rabbit hole. At the same time, that absent-mindedness also elicits the sensation of familiarity, like a senile old man rehashing old arguments, and you can imagine that is why he has placed all these Presidential paintings in his home study, to continue these same conversations with silent portraits that he had from January 20, 1969 – August 9, 1974.

Even if some the conspiracy theories peddled by this Nixon come across pretty darn deranged there nevertheless emerges the sensation of myriad forces beyond a President’s control, as well as the inherent exhausting impossibilities of the executive position itself, destined to run you ragged if your mental fortitude is not fine-tuned. If some Presidents are perhaps more equipped to handle the untoward places the office takes you, others, as “Secret Honor” scarily uggests, are decidedly not.

What Is Charlize Listening To?

There is a moment in "The Fate of the Furious" when Charlize Theron's character, the mononymous Cipher, chief villain, is chilling at a conference table aboard her luxury jet, holding an iPhone, I think, with one earbud in. It is a shot I have tried desperately to source but cannot. Still, the obvious question, and perhaps the preeminent cinematic question thus far of 2017, remains: What music is she listening to?

Astute viewers will note she is glimpsed wearing a Metallica tee shirt which would naturally suggest that she has cued up the legendary metal band, probably, given the setting and situation, this song...



But that seems too predictable. Why does she have to be listening to Metallica just because she's wearing a Metallica tee shirt? And besides, would this song really be her World Domination Anthem? So, maybe it's Lita Ford?



But then, even if the above song is her World Domination Anthem, consider the after hours situation in which she is listening to music. Is she really sitting there listening to Lita Ford? Even megalomaniacal villains gotta unwind, you know? So, maybe she's listening to this...



But maybe that's just a little too mournful to unwind to. So maybe she's unwinding to this...



Then again, what if Charlize doesn't unwind so much as escape. And if you are escaping you probably want to get away from the ambient for the more coolly energetic. So what if she's listening to this...



Damn man, you could almost talk me into it. You really could. But you can't. You know why? Because she's listening to Sade. She is absolutely listening to Sade.



Mystery solved.

If I'm a Movie Driver, Who Am I?

Dudes all think they're Steve McQueen behind the wheel of a car, and nearly all of them are actually Jerry Lewis.

— Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) April 13, 2017

I see the point, obviously, that Mr. Zoller Seitz is making. And yet, for this blog, it is nevertheless not quite right. Steve McQueen is, well, Steve McQueen and all that. I wish I was Steve McQueen zipping around in that “Thomas Crown” Ferrari but that’s still too fantastical for me. When I climb behind the wheel of a car I do not imagine myself as Steve McQueen because I cannot imagine myself as Steve McQueen because even my admittedly far-out imagination has its limits. No, when I get behind the wheel of a car, I picture myself as Skipp Sudduth in “Ronin.”

That might seem absurd too. If I’m going to picture myself as a driver in “Ronin” should it not be Robert DeNiro, considering he is at the wheel of the most daring and expansive of the film’s myriad car chases, going against traffic, briefly, and managing some sort of derring-do with the aid of the handbrake that is beyond my elementary mechanical expertise to properly explain. But as much as I love DeNiro in “Ronin”, Sudduth’s wonderfully ordinarily named Larry is my preferred automobile pilot. Like, you know how Ryan Gosling in “Drive” said “I drive”? That’s Larry except that Larry doesn’t even need to say “I drive.” He just...drives. He’s there because he drives. Everyone knows this. Plus, in a crew that includes DeNiro, Jean Reno and Natascha McElhone, Skipp Sudduth does not look like nor sound like be belongs. That is totally un-McQueen-ish; that is me.

But then, Skipp Sudduth in “Ronin” is my McQueen for a reason – I could never drive like that. “Something that can shovel a bit,” Sudduth’s character says of the car he needs. That is not what I say to the car salesman when I’m trying to buy a car. So, who am I really behind the wheel of a car? Me, a person who, in the unlikely event of a car chase, would wind up like Ricky Bobby post-comeback, piddling down the track at 26 mph...



Post comeback Ricky, in fact, is an intriguing choice. But even post-comeback Ricky Bobby is still Ricky Bobby, simply buying time until he becomes the requisite phoenix rising from the racetrack ashes. And so I feel uncomfortable going that route, just as I feel uncomfortable pegging myself as, say, Stephanie from “The Naked Gun”, the hapless driving school student who turns the Women Are Terrible Drivers cliche on its head when she unleashes her inner-Popeye Doyle. I could never unleash my inner-Popeye Doyle because I don’t have an inner-Popeye Doyle.

And that’s why maybe as a driver I’m most like Del Griffith in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” for whom driving is less the point than rocking out to “Mess Around” by Ray Charles while driving. I am, after all, not much of a driver, kind of like Del, who ends up going the wrong way in the worst situation possible, but I am really, really good at playing car dashboard piano.



The thing is, however, I don’t even own a car. I haven’t owned a car going on six years now. And I love it, I absolutely adore not owning a car. Becoming car-less was one of the best decisions I ever made even if it also means that the few times I do drive, usually in an unfamiliar rental car, I discover I am a more fearful and worse driver than ever. Who in their right mind would want to be in a car with me? No one! Ask my girlfriend! Ask me, for God’s sake! I don’t want to be in a car with me!

So maybe, in the end, I’m not a driver at all. Maybe I’ve become the guy at the end of “The Pink Panther” in the zebra costume, the one running after the car chase, post-costume party, that is in progress, just trying to catch up.

Frank & Lola

“Frank & Lola” opens by airdropping us directly into the midst of a sex scene between the titular characters. Well, make that a just-about-to-be sex scene, since Frank (Michael Shannon) stops them one thrust short, wondering if maybe he and Lola (Imogen Poots), who he barely knows, should wait. This has nothing to do with abstinence, mind you, because hey, the whole swath of Las Vegas is situated just outside the window of where they are laying and what is Las Vegas if not Sin City? No, it’s more that writer/director Matthew Ross’s film seeks to unmask the way in which such all-consuming passion inevitably yields jealousy and rage, an ancient tale, sure, but a story’s familiarity does not necessarily need to impede its execution because fresh execution can make the ancient feel brand new. Alas, Ross can only manage a few huffs and puffs of freshness before he’s all out of breath, leaving the back half of “Frank & Lola”, and a lot of what leads up to it, feeling mired in a plot that not only feels stale but sadly un-empowering for its principal female character.

There is something to these sorts of stories where romance blooms and then jealousy encroaches on said romance that typically requires a pulling back on the curtain of its characters, setting them up This Way so that they earn our empathy, or thereabouts, before they suddenly careen That Way, everything falling apart. That, however, admirably does not seem of particular interest to Ross, which is partly why he opens the movie when he does. The meet cute, the movie’s most tender moment, arrives in flashback, with Frank, a chef, concocting a culinary thrilling omelet for Lola, with Frank reciting the ingredients within, one of the most un-fraught line readings of Shannon’s career. This moment suggests a desire on Ross’s part to do for food what Luca Guadagnino did for edible delights in “I Am Love” but that sort of sensual parallel never quite emerges. If anything, what is eventually revealed as Frank’s my-way-or-the-highway attitude in the kitchen mimics his my-way-or-the-highway attitude in love.

It’s telling that this omelet-conjuring meet cute happens on Halloween as if it’s all just make believe. Or maybe it’s telling that on Halloween in his restaurant Frank is sporting a chef’s jacket covered in fake blood. As his and Lola’s relationship progresses, he exudes anger and suspicion at anyone he comes across, from Lola’s mother (Rosanna Arquette), whom he observes with a vicious side-eye, to the talkative, connected Keith (Justin Long) who gets Lola a fashion designer gig and who probably does, at least a little, have the hots for her. This, in fact, doubles as the movie’s best and funniest moment, in which Ross renders arguably History’s Greatest Staredown, with a semi-shot reverse shot in which Long’s character disappears from the frame when Shannon is staring at him, as if the stare has rendered him so weak he’s invisible, and then when it flips keeps Shannon in the frame so that he we still see him looming.

Shannon’s overwhelmingly magnetic menace was, I suppose, always bound to eventually go too far, though to be fair, once the jealously kicks in, his character doesn’t have much else going on regarding his relationship with Lola. He’s just…steamed. So Shannon plays him…steamed. And he’s never more steamed at anyone than he is at Alan (Michael Nyqvist), a French lothario who shares a potentially sordid past with Lola.

This leads Frank to finding him, ostensibly to beat his brains in, though it grows both more complicated and not complicated at all, at least for Lola, who is thrust into the background as these two men have long, faux-searching conversations about Lola and squabble and scrap over her, reducing her to an object of lust, which is something that Frank either doesn’t realize or that the movie doesn’t realize in order to make Frank wrestle with. It’s so frustrating that you don’t even want the asinine ambiguity of the final shot – you just want Lola to say “Later” and walk.

Wolves

Although “Wolves”, writer/director Bart Freundlich’s sixth feature film, is decidedly not great, it is nevertheless still compelling, or at the very least “watchable”, given its generally professional direction, most notably in some crackling scenes of domestic bliss and tension between a father and mother played by its two biggest names, Michael Shannon and Carla Gugino, succeeding in spite of the screenplay. Because that screenplay…oof, it’s an odd amalgam of “The Gambler” (1974), but one sapped of any insight, and “He Got Game”, though re-told as a white kid’s fantasy with a magical negro that would rightfully make Spike Lee go apoplectic. And while on a base level it grasps Conflict, tossing some in from every angle, it does not always grasp what engenders its Conflict or how to revealingly spur all this Conflict to convincing Resolution.

“Wolves” centers on high school basketball star Anthony Keller (Taylor John Smith), inevitably nicknamed St. Anthony for his sweet three point shot, one that has brought his team to the precipice of a state title and recruiters to Cornell from his doorstep, though the recruiters, like others who know Anthony well, sniff out the kid’s kryptonite, a distaste for brute physicality and a fear of the Big Moment. I might argue that Cornell, which went 8-21 last year, would be lucky to have St. Anthony Keller sniping from behind the arc, and hey, if they don’t want you then just take your talents over to Staten Island and Wagner since I’m sure they’d give you a full ride. But, I pick nits. The point is Anthony’s on court angst derives from his questionable at home environment, which, frankly, despite all the hardwood rigors, is where “Wolves” is best.

Anthony’s father Lee (Shannon) is a New York college literature professor doubling as a degenerate gambler, which makes him sound like a retread of James Caan’s Axel Freed in the aforementioned “The Gambler”, although, to be fair, Freed was Harvard educated and, as Lee says of where he instructs in the movie’s best line, “this isn’t even a good college.” (That’s an obvious metaphor for the movie itself and we will leave it alone.) “The Gambler”, however, tenaciously unpacked its character’s addiction while “Wolves” seems to think gambling and debt revolves almost entirely around ominous men in suits coming to collect debts.

Still, Shannon, ever committed, whose hair perpetually suggests he was just fiercely tousling it while watching whatever team he picked to win lose, invests his part with a convincing mania, never more so than opposite Gugino as Lee’s wife Jenny, a mostly thankless part that Gugino still fills out. Their marriage may be teetering because of her husband’s addiction, but Gugino does not simply push back against it. She plays at an attraction to Lee, just as Shannon plays at one to her, and one moment finds their characters downing cocktails in the immediate aftermath of Lee winning a bet, seeming to suggest that she too gets off on this action, and the way that these parents so brazenly flaunt their attraction and their problems right there in front of their kid suggests the road not taken that maybe should have been. These scenes are sharply played and sharply observed.

But that is of less interest to “Wolves” than the basketball, filled out, somewhat, by Lee’s past as a once promising baseball prospect, suggesting Lavar Ball-ish origins as a man trying to live out his failed dreams through his son. That cannot be easy for Anthony, sure, but it’s worth noting, given all the parallels to “He Got Game’s” own basketball recruiting saga, that the latter’s coveted player, Jesus Shuttlesworth (Ray Allen), was dealing with a dad in prison, on account of inadvertently killing Jesus’s mom, raising his sister and fending off hangers-on though his basketball skills never once suffered as as result. I imagine Jesus scoffing at little St. Anthony.

Then again, “Wolves” does kind of scoff at little St. Anthony in the form of (I’m not making this up) Socrates (John Douglas Thompson), the aforementioned magical negro, an ex-basketball legend haunting the playgrounds, who in a better movie might have suggested Lloyd Daniels, mentors St. Anthony, going so far as to show up at the Big Game to belt out inspiration like Charles S. Dutton in “Rudy.” Lord, it’s insulting and taken in conjunction with St. Anthony’s teammate, a stereotypical broadly comical Asian, someone needed to throw cold water on Freundlich’s face and ask him what the hell he thought he was doing?

These are just a couple other dramatic balls that Freundlich hurls into the air, along with an entire romantic subplot for St. Anthony that includes a teen pregnancy digression that lasts all of a montage, that, as if realizing is too much to wrap up in a regular run time, all get settled in a positively bonkers concluding scene at the Big Game ripped straight from the high school play strategy of get everyone on stage at the end. Prior to his requisite climactic free throw, Anthony looks to his dad in the stands and Lee’s reaction is bashful, almost embarrassed, which Shannon, perhaps unwittingly, plays more to the audience than Anthony, as if to say “Yeah, I can’t believe this either.” And when he gets squired away by those ominous men in suits coming to collect debts, it looks less like sadness than sweet relief.

Antonymic Shueroll

The purpose of a Shueroll, as it is with the Shueroll’s forefather the Rickroll, is it to deliberately lead you down the blogging primrose path. For instance, I say on some social media platform, or such, that I am going to be showing you the latest trailer for “The Last Jedi”, the new “Star Wars” movie (don’t see it here!). So you click on the link only to – gasp! – find that what Cinema Romantico is proferring is not “The Last Jedi” trailer but the opening sequence of “Adventures in Babysitting” (1987) in which Elisabeth Shue, alternate dimension Oscar winner, is essentially doing private room karaoke by herself to the sweet, sweet sounds of The Crystals. This, you see, is because there are eleventy jillion other places on the interwebs you can, and probably have, already seen the trailer for “The Last Jedi” and Cinema Romantico likes to have a little fun with trailer culture even though Cinema Romantico would never ever be one of those people that would say something jaw-droppingly stupid like “It’s just a trailer” as if we fancy ourselves Copernicus for making such a banal observation.

Well, “The Last Jedi” trailer did premiere yesterday and so this would be the opportune time for our latest Shueroll. But these are strange days, readers. These are days when our America First President is maybe going to lead America into global nuclear war, maybe depending on nebulous criteria that he has yet to define, perhaps because its definition is subject to what the next Fox & Friends tells him, or subject to whether POTUS got his chocolate cake before bed, or dependent upon whether Ivanka just got a big order from Pyongyang for some Floral Print Flare dresses. I sure hope the worst doesn’t happen, but if it does, well, Cinema Romantico wants to go out on the highest, most blissful note possible. And there are no notes higher and no notes more blissful than these…

Friday's Old Fashioned: Blade Runner (1982)

Ridley Scott’s landmark sci-fi opus “Blade Runner” (1982) imagines two years from now (that is, 2019) as a 1940s noir with a 1980s music video gauze in a schizophrenic urban hellscape eternally beset by pounding rain or wearying drizzle that is eerily contrasted by an unremitting swath of bright lights. That’s why even if the future “Blade Runner” proposes seems much farther than two years off, those bright lights, generally rendered as eye-beating advertisements projected onto buildings and into the sky, seemingly everywhere you look, still sort of evoke our screens-everywhere-there’s-screens present day. It is a terrifying portrait of a place where the industrial has won out over the environmental, leaving us to rot, reminding of the couple times I’ve taken the Pedway from State/Lake to Washington Park with air so grimy and unnatural that I truly sometimes feel like I can’t breathe. It makes you wish for a flying car, to get up and above the steady beat of gloom.

In such a place, where it is so easy to feel so small, it becomes all the more reasonable that people would want to escape, except that in “Blade Runner’s” 2019 I doubt there are online articles titled things like “12 Waterfalls Just Outside Los Angeles That You Never Knew Existed.” So, how to escape? Well, I think of Philipe Petit’s line in “Man on Wire”, huddled under a blanket at the top of the World Trade Center to avoid detection by a security guard, saying: “To ease the torment, I return to my memories.” Ah yes, memories. When the world around you stretches out into boundless darkness, and when floodlights from passing law enforcement outside fill your home at all hours of the day, probing, watching, where else can you go but inside yourself. But what if what’s there really isn’t there at all?

That question becomes paramount in the movie’s plot as Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a kind neo-noir private eye, is tasked with tracking down and “retiring” (that is, killing) replicants, androids built by humans and implanted with fake memories. Of course, as Deckard’s quest progresses, going after a quartet of replicants, captained by the charismatic Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), that have gone rogue and banded together rather than drifting apart, as so much of this 2019 earthling gaggle seems to have done, questions intrinsically emerge, not least of which becomes whether or not Deckard himself might be a replicant. And if Deckard is a replicant then his memories can’t be real either.

That’s the long-running sci-fi fan parlor game - is Deckard a replicant or isn’t he? It’s been fueled not just from the film itself but by the myriad versions of “Blade Runner” that exist, like the “Final Cut” which hints much more than other versions, on account of its Unicorn Dream, that Deckard is a replicant, while Ridley Scott himself has said he thinks Deckard is a replicant and Ford himself has said he thinks Deckard is not a replicant. Watching the movie start to finish for the first time in a long time I came away, despite the fact I was watching said Unicorn Dream-ed “Final Cut”, siding with Ford.

If Ford is deploying his patented gruff disinterest to fine effect, making him perfect for this sci-fi interpretation of Raymond Chandler, Hauer practically gleams, animately existent in a way at odds with most humans going through the drudgery by going through the motions, a man, or thereabouts, who knows he’s living on borrowed time already and is determined, if not desperate, to alter his own pre-programmed fate, to live, which he most remarkably expresses on the precipice of death, reciting those lines that thirty-five years on still shimmer: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhuser Gate.”

It is in this moment, the rooftop tete-a-tete between Batty and Deckard that their incredible dichotomy truly becomes clear, the way in which Batty, a make-believe human, for all intents and purposes, has an appreciation for his existence that Deckard, an actual human, if you will permit me for sake of argument, does not. And while I suppose one might contend that in this moment Batty provides Deckard the keys to unlocking his own inner replicant, maybe it’s the fatalist in me that cannot quite come around to that line of thinking, just as I cannot come around to the idea that Deckard as human has potentially in this moment suddenly converted to YOLO altruism.

As I left the theater after seeing “The Final Cut” on a cold, rainy Chicago night, I turned my phone back on, as you do, though I wish I wouldn’t, and soon found myself scrolling various social media apps, like the Facebook where it cued up an old “On This Day” memory. I remembered it, or I thought I did, and I wondered if the Facebook had slipped a fake memory in there if I would even know. Who knows? I put my phone back in my pocket and thought for sure “Blade Runner” would be less tragic if Rick Deckard was a replicant. I also thought that maybe we were closer to 2019 than I ever would have thought possible.

Dissecting a Scene from Sunshine State

Typically our scene dissections here at Cinema Romantico center on visuals, a series of screenshots employed as a means to scrutinize the chosen scene to its core. John Sayles, however, is not the most visually progressive director around, championed more as a screenwriter and a storyteller, made great by his ability to draw on history, politics and psychology to implement multitudes of characters and weave extraordinary tapestries that are at once emotionally and socially revealing, like his signature, to our eye, film, 2002’s “Sunshine State.”

That is not to say “Sunshine State” is simply of the point and shoot variety. Sayles can and does employ visuals to enhance his narrative, such as the opening shot of a pirate ship on fire, one blurring past and present so that you don’t quite know where you are, which effectively suggests the film to come, one where the past always informs the present and the present will inevitably suggest the future. That last point is evinced in the closing shot, not to be revealed, but which for all of the grand Sayles-ian dialogue, which we will get to momentarily and which can sometimes suggest the stage more than the screen, could only have worked on that screen.

Still, the words in “Sunshine State” bear so much color and weight. That goes for all the characters in and around the white enclave of Delrona Beach and the black enclave of Lincoln Beach, each of which is being threatened by the ominously named Exley Plantation Estates, blatantly evoking a particularly sordid chapter of America’s past, which wants to re-brand the shoreline, and whose principals speak in war room-ish patter (that dialogue!). They employ a landscape architect named Jack Meadows (Timothy Hutton) who is confronted one morning by Marly Temple (Edie Falco), proprietor of a shabby motel and restaurant which Exley yearns to buy and tear down. Later, after this confrontation, Marly re-encounters Jack at a watering hole and they have a back and forth, which is glorious, quintessential Sayles, one of my favorite bits of writing in any movie ever. And while I could break this whole thing down line by line, well, for the most part, I'd simply like to let those words speak for themselves.

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Marly, tossing back shots at the bar in the middle of the afternoon, notices Jack drinking across the way.

So she gets up from her bar stool and walks right over to him.

Marly: "Trying to imagine what it'd be like without all us crackers here?"

Jack: "You're everywhere."

Marly: "Small island."

Then, mirroring her no b.s. personality, she takes a chair and sits down right across from him without asking permission.

Jack: "Listen, I didn't mean to be intrusive the other morning. I thought they'd already contacted you about it."

Marly: "Don't worry about it. There are days when I imagine the whole thing blown away in a hurricane."

That "thing" being her motel and restaurant, where she theoretically should be even though she's here instead, downing shots and making small-cum-big talk in the middle of the day.

Jack: "Must be a lot of work being a hotelier."

Marly: "Motelier. And we got the restaurant. Lord, I hated working there when I was a kid."

Jack: "And now?"

Marly: "I've got three girls working for me who hate it as much as I do."

Jack: "So why do you keep-"

Marly: "Poetic justice."

Her reply is an example of the actor, Falco, putting her own stamp on the material, running roughshod right over the end of Hutton's line and giving "poetic justice" the air of a former punchline that now is too true, and has been too true for too long, to be funny anymore.

Marly: "What are you drinking?"

Jack: "Draft. How about you?"

Marly: "Shots. Tequila."

Jack: "Woah."

Marly: "I figure, you're gonna drink, why fuck around?"

This always make me think of the time Bill Murray told David Letterman that a person drank moonshine when they wanted to get drunk but didn't want to put in the effort.

Marly: "You're from up north?"

Jack: "Mmmmm. They tell me, everybody on this coast is from somewhere else."

Marly: "Not me. Six generations on this sandpile. At least."

Jack: "That's impressive."
Marly: "You go back that far your people were either planters, slaves or fugitives."
Jack: "And yours were?"
Marly: "I don't know what they were running from but this is where they stopped."
Jack: "I'm from Newport. Rhode Island."
Marly: "With the yachts and the big estates?"
Jack: "My dad took care of the lawns."

On that line, Hutton effuses pride and Falco effuses satisfaction at his pride.

Jack: "So you never left the island?"
Marly: "Sure, I left. You're looking at a former Weeki Watchi Girl."
Jack: "A what?
Marly: "Over near Homosassa there's this show, been running since the late forties."
Jack: "You acted?"
Marly: "Performed. You do it underwater. Here, let's have a contest."

And here, Sayles does show rather than tell, in a sense, by having Marly scoot forward in her chair and, again without asking permission, put her hand to Jack's nose to force him to hold his breath as a demonstration of what a Weeki Watchi Girl has to do.

Then she takes his hand and puts it on her nose, forcing him to force her to hold her breath.

In unspoken terms, a hold-your-breath contest emerges, one which Jack quickly loses.

Jack: "You win."
Marly: "I could hold it twice as long even I hadn't been drinking."
Jack: "I'm impressed."
Marly: "The important thing is to keep that smile on your face."

And though you don't know it at the time, that line is foreshadowing the movie's most affecting moment a little bit later, when Marly, drunker than she is now, on a golf course with Jack undercover of night, lays back in the grass and repeats what she just said, "the important thing is to keep that smile on your face", with the fatalistic augmentation of "even if you're drowning", a heartbreaking summation of her whole life.

Jack: "How long did you work there?"
Marly: "Three years. And then I met my ex. He had this band. Skeeter Meter."
Jack: "Like a rock band?"
Marly: "They were big around Tampa. You ever heard The Allman Brothers? Lynyrd Skynyrd? Then you've heard Skeeter Meter. He was Greek. And good looking. His daddy was a sponge diver before all the sponges died out."
Jack: "What did they die of?"

As he asks this, she picks up her shot.

Marly: "Boredom. Laying under some rocks, soaking up whatever rolls over you. It's almost as bad as Delrona Beach."
Jack: "There's a lot of changes happening."

Jack: "Things might pick up." And as he says this, she tosses back the shot.

Marly: "Don't hold your breath."