Red Nose Day Actually

The long awaited fifteen minute sequel to Richard Curtis’s cinematic sugar plum fairy “Love Actually” (2003), a made-for-TV special titled “Red Nose Day Actually” as a nod to Comic Relief Inc.’s  non-profit dedicated to helping poor children, opens with a variation on one of the original film’s most infamous sequences in which Mark (Andrew Lincoln) turned up on the porch of Juliet (Keira Knightley), for whom he pined despite her marriage to his best friend Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor), with a set of cue cards to secretly communicate his affection before then letting said affection go. For the short sequel, Mark is back on Juliet’s doorstep with another set of cue cards, not to re-pledge his love of Juliet, however, but to introduce his own bride, Kate Moss, who is, I guess, herself. Kate has her own set of cue cards, demonstrating how “Red Nose Day Actually” is content simply re-serving all the best-loved bits of “Love Actually” but with slight variations and skoshes of self-awareness, which is why Peter acknowledges Mark and Kate Moss’s presence from his couch. If in “Love Actually” Peter remained oblivious to the cue cards, here he is clued in, because “Red Nose Day Actually” is entirely sentient.

That sentience is ok, I suppose, even if the charm of the original partly stemmed from its full-fledged belief in the spiritual nourishment of its spun romantic sugar. It’s ok because, hey, if you re-gather the lovelorn troops for a sequel to support a good cause by so blatantly servicing its fans, well, who wants to be the grinch issuing red check marks? Still, while I have nothing against duplicating so long as it is expanded upon with gusts of creative fresh air, the duplications of “Red Nose Day Actually” were more reminiscent of Melissa McCarthy’s Sean Spicer sketches this past season of Saturday Night Live – you know, pretty strong that first time around and then nothing but a recycling of the jokes from that first time around with minimal augmentation.

So here’s Aurelia and Jamie back in the front seat of a car; so here’s Sarah (Laura Linney) working late; so here’s Billy Mack (Bill Nighy) being interviewed at Radio Watford; so here’s The Prime Minister (Hugh Grant) dancing. It is warm and fuzzy and familiar, like Jamie’s un-stylish turtleneck, which he is still wearing much to Aurelia’s chagrin, while also issuing little life updates, like Aurelia and Jamie’s kids and Sarah’s (oddly over-convivial) spouse and Billy Mack’s deceased manager. These are meant to tug on the heartstrings of true “Love Actually” believers, though perhaps because these days the world seems to be adorned with a black veil rather than a red nose, it made me think just as much about those who are MIA, like wacky raconteur Colin Frissell (Kris Marshall), who I fear must’ve been run out of Scott Walker’s Wisconsin, and Karen (Emma Thompson) and Harry (Alan Rickman), their marriage on the rocks when last we saw them and are not seen here which inevitably leads one to assume that they must have been divorced and still are not on speaking terms.

Even Daniel (Liam Neeson), who hints at being fairly rich, is introduced glumly sitting on that same bencha long the Thames, Claudia Schiffer nowhere in sight. He’s brightened when Sam (Thomas Sangster) shows up with Joanna (Olivia Olson) as they reveal their engagement which is totally wonderful! Even so, what stayed with me more was how haggard Daniel looked sitting on the bench, wondering what got him down, realizing I’d never know, realizing that in spite of its fan-friendly whimsy “Red Nose Day Actually” could not stop specks of some vague reality from intruding, evoked in the running-in-place nature of the repeated comic bits, or in the low-key tragedy of life’s relegations, like Rowan Atkinson’s Rufus, the jewelry salesman whose overwrought exhibition of gift-wrapping in the first one is re-visited here. Now, see, he’s gift-wrapping at a Walgreens, which ha ha, and he gift-wraps so long there is a line stretching out the door and down the street, which ha ha some more. But going from an upscale jewelry store to a Walgreens hints at a less than stellar career trajectory, which is not whimsical at all, something perhaps best left to square with another fourteen years from now in “Death Actually.”

Alien: Covenant

After the meaningless meaningfulness philosophical gobbledygook of “Prometheus”, less A Ridley Scott Film than Deep Thoughts by Damon Lindelof (co-writer), “Alien: Covenant” returns the series to its horror roots as a spaceship crew is picked off one-by-one by villainous extra-terrestrials. Still, there is a strand of philosophy that emerges from the human characters, many of whom are granted no shading outside of whatever the performer brings to the part, being portrayed as tangential not only to the aliens but to the synthetics, or androids, of which there are two, Walter (Michael Fassbender), aboard a colonization ship called the Covenant with thousands of colonists and embryos en route to a distant planet, and David (Fassbender again), lone holdover from “Prometheus”, whom the Covenant crew will eventually encounter and who proves to be a malevolent puppet master. Indeed, the philosophical statement of “Alien: Covenant” goes like this: humans, who needs ‘em?

The people’s superfluousness correlates to James Franco’s cameo, which is barely a cameo, playing the Covenant’s Captain who perishes in his sleeping pod when trying desperately to awake from cryogenic slumber as his ship’s progress is suddenly thwarted by a solar flare in the movie’s almost instantaneous inciting incident. Anyone is expendable, I suppose, but because you barely even realize it’s Franco before his character is gone his expendability is just sort of a throwaway. The captain’s death leaves First Mate Oram (Billy Crudup) in charge and upon receiving a transmission from a nearby planet that seems as inviting for colonization as their pre-programmed destination, Oram orders a detour. This is the planet, of course, where David is waiting, along with a host of alien spores, the set-up for a two-part haunted house, with part one unspooling on the planet and part one taking place back on the ship.

Because this is the CGI era, the aliens are often less like the aliens of yore than Gollum crossed with “Jurassic Park” velociraptors, which does not have to be a bad thing necessarily except that Scott’s camera often cannot keep up with the manic agility of these aliens, inevitably resorting to frenzied camera movements that, while occasionally mirroring the mood of hysteria, like the ferocious blood-splattered denouement of Faris (Amy Seimetz), too typically renders nothing but a boring, noisy blur as scares evoked through elegant shot composition mostly fall by the wayside.

Perhaps just as inelegant is a narrative built on the necessity of the characters’ head-scratching decision-making, from ignoring quarantine protocols to launching rescue missions that only have the interests of a few at heart, so poor that the viewer will instinctively align with Dany (Katherine Waterston), the original Captain’s wife, who objects to nearly every decision made by Oram, not forcibly but more with Waterston’s skeptical eyes, like the kid in the backseat who knows her parents are fighting even if they keep telling her they are not. But then, these repeated managerial fails are decidedly not simply of the You Wouldn’t Have A Movie Without Them variety.

For one thing, Crudup slyly oscillates between a palpable need to be liked and to demonstrate his character is in charge, illustrated by how he allows another crew member to effortlessly influence his order to check out this mysterious planet and then, moments later, gets indignant when Dany questions his order. He is not a very good Captain trying really hard to be a good Captain, an evocative desperation that adds legitimacy to every poor decision, including the decision that does him in, which is so obvious as it is happening yet so believable because Crudup has done such a masterful job laying the groundwork to make you believe that this dunce would do that. At the same time, such rampant idiocy is paramount to the film’s central thesis of android > human.

The opening scene is not in space but in a spaceship-ish looking home, not unlike Tony Stark's bachelor pad, where Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), whose corporation gave birth, so to speak, to David, converses with his creation. What stands out, however, is not the traditional prattle about What It Means so much as the distinct air of disdain between Man and Synthetic that slowly rises, emblemized in conversational close-ups that repeatedly cut to wide angles to show just how far apart they actually are. Weyland considers David beneath him, and vice-versa, and “Alien: Covenant”, in the end, comes away siding with David, which is, intentionally or not, underlined by the transparency of the Big Twist. It is not a twist that drops your jaw; it is a twist that makes you shake your head and think “Boy, did you deserve it.”

Friday's Old Fashioned: 1941 (1979)

Steven Spielberg’s pseudo-comic colossus and infamous critical stink bomb “1941”, which has since been re-claimed by some critics as a cult classic, or thereabouts, as a badge of consensus-breaking faux-honor, or something, is not, shall we say, entirely un-interesting. After all, Spielberg would go on to become perhaps the pre-eminent chronicler of The Greatest Generation of our time, winning Oscars for “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan”, executive producing the HBO “Band of Brothers” mini-series, and here he is with “1941”, your archetypal Blank Check movie, made on the heels of “Jaws” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, when Spielberg could essentially ask for a blank check to send a ferris wheel running away and get it, transforming WWII into something less reverent and grandiose and more ripped from the pages of Mad Magazine.

The movie is set in the immediate aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, in various places along the California coastline, taking real life stories, so to speak, of a Japanese submarine sighting in the Pacific and FAKE NEWS of Imperial landing strips erected in Pomona alfalfa fields to render an extravaganza of far-reaching American panic. It opens with Spielberg parodying his own opening to “Jaws”, as the same actress, Susan Backlinie, who went skinny dipping in the Atlantic goes skinny dipping in the Pacific only to find herself clinging to the periscope pole of a Japanese submarine as it surfaces. It is nigh impossible not to read this as a sort of sexual fetishization of militarism, just as explicitly conveyed in a subplot where a female reporter gets turned on aboard big military bombers, naturally leading to a desperate military pilot getting up by taking flight with her aboard. It feels strange for the guy who wanted to get penis breath removed from “E.T.” Still, he is inherently Steven Spielberg, and while these bits suggest satire, the tantalizing possibility of “1941” as commentary quickly dissipates.

It is mostly just a mess, with myriad storylines all mixed together and no through line, and a jumble of characters, none of whom stand out, except for John Belushi, as Air Force Captain “Wild” Bill Kelso, something of a skewering of the John Wayne archetype, which has potential, except that he just blunders his way in and then right back out of the patchwork plot. Not that anyone is going to a mammoth production like “1941” to see characters, I suppose, except that Spielberg’s comedy has always worked best as an extension of character rather than of circumstance, which is why, say, the whole of “The Terminal” can’t compete with the folksy funniness of Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln wandering into a soliloquy his subordinates don’t necessarily want to hear, or compete with Jeff Goldblum walking between the raindrops dinosaurs.

Pauline Kael has argued that Spielberg’s best side was his mischievously humorous side, as evinced by some of the crueler jokes of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, and that the critical and commercial failure of “1941” turned him off to such ribald comicality. Except the only real ribald jokes in “1941” are the couple aforementioned ones while the rest of this $35 million comedy is predominantly broad and noisy. It isn’t Indy pulling the gun on the big dude wielding the sword nor is it Marcus Brody haplessly wandering around Iskenderun; it’s the malt shop fisticuffs of “Crystal Skull.” There aren’t jokes, not really, just something like a repeated infusion of bedlam where falling down, fist fights and objects hurling through the air are repeatedly passed off as punchlines. And while it might be tempting to proffer an argument that the bedlam of the movie is meant to emblemize the bedlam that gripped America post-Pearl Harbor, well, that would necessitate ignoring the viewing experience of a movie that despite fancying itself, above all else, a comedy yields comedy that merely yields stony silence. At a certain point, the bedlam just bleeds into boredom.

Let's Remember Some Movies

Hey. How's it going? It's the precipice of a long weekend and things are as they are and I just don't have it in me to maintain this blog's non-existent high standards. So that got me to thinking. It got me to thinking about how the mostly anhedonic Deadspin occasionally, gloriously does manage to experience a little bit of joy by simply remembering some guys. Like, literally that's all they do, they remember some guys by just listing some guys, maybe some running backs or maybe some basketball players. I love it when they remember some guys. So I thought, hey, let's remember some movies. 

Man. Remember those movies? Those were definitely all movies.

Who Could Be the Next Obligatory Pirates of the Caribbean Guest Star?

Ever since the first “Pirates of the Caribbean”, way back when, which was overlong and overly lugubrious, yet still in possession of a performance so unexpectedly and genuinely magical that the movie rode said performance’s coattails and became beloved despite being overlong and overly lugubrious, turned into an elephantine box office smash, sequels were guaranteed. And in keeping with traditional sequel strategy, additional heavy-hitting guest stars have been called upon, like Chow Yun-fat, Penelope Cruz, Ian McShane, Bill Nighy, even Keith Richards, and now, in the about to be released “Dead Men Tell No Tales”, Javier Bardem. No doubt another sequel looms in the wake of “Dead Men Tell No Tales” which naturally prompts the question.....

Who Could Be the Next Obligatory Pirates of the Caribbean Guest Star?

Freddie Prinze Jr. Why not utilize the “Pirates of the Caribbean” Movie Guest Star to resurrect, a la Quentin Tarantino, certain Hollywood players who got lost along the way?

Val Kilmer. Ian McShane played Blackbeard so why not let Kilmer re-engage his Mark Twain sensibilities and breathe, say, Calico Jack to life? (Also: see above.)

Lady Gaga. This is obvious, isn’t it? If some of the series’ guest stars, like Nighy, like Bardem, are accentuated by makeup and special effects, the glory of Gaga is that she’d just handle all that what-have-you herself. You wouldn’t have to waste extra money to CGI her because she’d just wear some elaborate Gaga-ish ensemble that would make her into something like a human sea anemone and you’d be set.

Nick Nolte. For being supposed summertime extravaganzas, the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, as suggested up above, are often oddly joyless exercises that take themselves waaaaaaay too seriously. So, fine. You wanna take yourself waaaaaaay too seriously then let’s take it up a notch. Let’s cast Nolte as the “Pirates of the Caribbean” Movie Guest Star and the thing would get so damn serious that maybe they would finally stop taking it all so seriously and make the next one into an 85 minute B-ish trifle like they all should have been in the first place.

Emily Mortimer. It is high time, don’t you reckon, that we meet Capt. Jack Sparrow’s sister? Of course it is! So this is her! Emily Mortimer as Capt. Janice Sparrow! Then, when Disney decides they would rather not deal with Johnny Depp anymore and cut him loose, they can just make Mortimer the face of the franchise.

Neil deGrasse Tyson. This blog’s official nemesis on account of his annoying proclivity for pointing out how mythical flickering images on a screen fail to resemble reality, it would only make sense that deGrasse Tyson might turn up as a time-traveling maritime historian who becomes increasingly vexed as all his views on 17th century pirates are proven erroneus, concluding with him being made to walk the plank as he shouts “But all my research indicates pirates never made anyone actually do this!”

Girl on the Train

Justin Theroux did it. As in, at the end of “Girl on the Train’s” murder mystery maze, Justin Theroux’s character, a two-timing husband who we know is up to no good from the moment he enters with a bouquet as a floral means to fool us into thinking he’s a good guy, is revealed as the man responsible for the disappearance and subsequent death of a young woman who goes missing. If you think this review has now ruined the viewing experience for you, rest assured that “Girl on the Train” will so swiftly and soundly put you to sleep that you will still be comatose by the time of Theroux’s character’s comeuppance when a corkscrew is twisted into his neck. Not merely stuck in his neck, mind you, but stuck and then twisted, like his head is a bottle of burgundy. (Come to think of it, Theroux’s head would probably be a bottle of cheap merlot.) And if it sounds grisly, it’s actually rather restrained, an odd stylistic choice akin to the stylistic choices hampering the film throughout, where director Tate Taylor doesn’t want to make you stand up and cheer “Yeah, kill the bastard!” but sit there quietly and ruminate. What?! This, for reasons that make no sense, is a movie (I’m leaving the book by Paula Hawkins, which I have not read, on which the film is based out of it) comprised of trash from the compactor in “Star Wars” that Taylor strains to dress up in “Gone Girl”-ish art house sheen, just without the Trent Reznor score to let you know the whole thing is a joke.

“Girl on the Train” initially suggests a deep dive into voyeurism, with Rachel Wilson (Emily Blunt), the titular character, peeping from the railcar windows at the house where she used to live with Tom (Theroux), who now lives there with Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), with whom he cheated while still married to Rachel, and at the house down the block where Tom and Anna’s nanny, Megan (Haley Bennett), resides. Megan eventually goes missing the same night she seems to have encountered Rachel, and when Megan turns up dead, Rachel is fingered as the suspect by Detective Riley (Allison Janney). The problem, however, is that Blunt shades her performance with more sympathy than suspicion.

There is an early moment, in fact, when Rachel drunkenly spills her sob story to some random acquaintance (Cleta Elaine Ellington) at an oyster bar and then the two of them wind up in a bathroom smearing lipstick on the mirror. This should be, a la the aforementioned twisting corkscrew, a moment of high camp, making us take a step back and think, “Damn, this woman is capable of anything.” But Blunt wrings so much sadness out of the sequence that, frankly, you just want to give her a hug. By playing the part this way, she never comes across capable of murder, which wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if this was a character piece, trying to truly get to the bottom of what ails Rachel, which is I think what Blunt thought she was supposed to be doing, instead of a thriller wrapped up in a whodunit that flashes backward and flashes forward and alternates points-of-view in a woebegone attempt to throw us off the trail. Alas, we can tell she didn’t do it, and we can tell who did, and so then, like, what are we doing here, man?

The only person who genuinely grasps what movie she’s in, or should be in, is Allison Janney. She’s actually less stern here than she was in “Spy”, which was a comedy, playing virtually every moment with just the smallest of smiles and an amusedly puzzled voice. In her inquiries with Blunt, Janney exudes the air of someone who doesn’t merely know that Blunt’s character is lying, but as someone who already knows everything that’s happened, like a principal already firmly aware of a student’s guilt that is just waiting for the student to stop trying to evade and come clean. Janney’s read this book; she’s seen this movie; she knows how it ends. You keep waiting for her to break the fourth wall and say “Seriously, you don’t have to finish this.” I wish she would have because I might have listened.

Chuck

Though “Chuck” is based on a real life story it begins with a quote from Rocky Balboa, which might seem contradictory, except, of course, that “Chuck” is Chuck Wepner (Liev Schreiber), the Bayonne Bleeder, so-called because he hailed from Bayonne, New Jersey, concluding every other sentence with a “ya know”, and because in the ring his face bled constantly and profusely, and who earned infamy for going fifteen rounds with Muhammad Ali in 1975. Sylvester Stallone was so taken with Wepner’s story that he modeled “Rocky” on it, which we see in “Chuck” even if director Philippe Falardeau would simultaneously have us believe that Wepner modeled his life on Mountain McClintock, played by Anthony Quinn, the hero of 1962’s “Requiem for a Heavyweight.” One scene finds Chuck, lying in bed with his wife Phyllis (Elisabeth Moss), reciting the latter’s most memorable monologue word-for-word, maybe “Chuck’s” most moving moment and for sure the most emblematic. Because Schreiber cannily plays Wepner as the star of his own movie, not so much delusional as a palooka who just doesn’t know any better and thinks every time he wakes up in the morning it’s another clap on the clapperboard, Act I, Scene II, take three.

Though Chuck’s rise and fall pivoted around his fight with Ali, where Wepner improbably knocked The Greatest to the canvas before suffering a final round technical knockout, this showdown, of sorts, turns up fairly early in the proceedings, highlighted, or not, as it were, by a strangely un-charismatic Ali (Pooch Hall), which is not so much a disappointment as merely a reminder of how the real former Cassius Clay was unlike absolutely anyone else. And Wepner v Ali is relayed in a less momentous, more casual manner akin to the entire film, most of which is underscored by continual voiceovers, all of which Schreiber gives an irreverent ring, like he knows he has no real wisdom to impart. These monologues exist for expository purposes, sure, but that’s okay, because it’s like Chuck is just telling us his story from the corner barstool, editing as he goes along, which is why significant moments are not necessarily afforded their proper weight and other bits of not-as-imperative business are lingered over more than you might expect. Late in the film, in fact, Chuck gets busted for selling cocaine, a whole side story that just sort of appears, and Chuck’s reaction is nothing more than a “hey, whatever” shrug.

Indeed, for a story with big highs and many lows, the movie remains on a fairly even keel, rounded out by this character who can’t quite seem to grasp his circumstances and commit to change, garrulously blundering down the same blind alleys again and again. Those alleys are ones we have been down in movies before, to be sure, with a lot of “Chuck”, its soundtrack heavy on 70s hits and shots of bumps of coke turning up aplenty, feeling like low-rent Scorsese, which, in a way, is kind of what Chuck is. When he’s invited to read for a part in “Rocky 2” with Sylvester Stallone himself, played by Morgan Spector in a performance that deftly differentiates between Sly and Rocky Balboa, Chuck brings along his pal John (Jim Gaffigan) and two nameless female hangers-on. It is a moment not so much traditionally comical as evocative of how they are all completely out of their depth.

Meanwhile, of course, there is Phyllis, the thankless part of The Thankless Wife, holding down the home front while the husband keeps screwing up. She is played heroically by Moss, evincing equal parts exasperation with this lout at her side and determination to make it work for the sake of their child. Phyllis’s story, of course, would be just as much worth telling, and yet in moments like John coming to the post office where she works to plead on behalf of Chuck there is also the distinct sensation that Phyllis would be fine with a life of privacy. And while Chuck’s estranged brother (Michael Rapaport, showing absolutely no vanity by way of lots of paunch) is a formulaic character on paper he is still convincingly conveyed in conversations between the two men that are all wonderful Jersey shorthand where words that seem like filler speak volumes.

And then there is Linda (Naomi Watts). She tends bar at a dive Chuck frequents because there he can feel like The Champ he never officially was. If so many others enable Chuck, she does not, fending off his advances and calling him out for his sins. She’s a stock character too, of course, even if she’s real and really still with Chuck as the closing credits explain, the supportive woman with no inner life because whatever life she leads must be set aside to help put the principal male’s life in order. Watts does not transcend this banal characterization, per se, but the chemistry she shares with Schreiber is so astonishingly visceral that it, in the end, it doesn’t really matter. It’s Johnny and June-ish, emitting an air of Meant to Be, which, in a movie that blurs the lines between what’s real and what’s fantasy might just yield “Chuck’s” grandest fantasy of all – a land of make believe where Liev Schreiber and Naomi Watts stayed together forever.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery (1959)

“The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery” takes its title from the real life bank robbery gone wrong in April 1953. And while directors Charles Guggenheim and John Stix take a documentarian approach, filming on location in St. Louis and even, as the opening credits indicate, employing the actual police officers involved in the actual robbery in the cast, it is ultimately less interested in the robbery itself, the particulars of which are quickly laid out by ringleader John Egan (Crahan Denton) and then moved aside. In fact, the robbery, naturally placed at the end, plays less like a climax than a denouement. And while the scent of fatalism, as it often is in noir, is strong, it principally focuses not on Egan, the hard-boiled old timer with a longstanding grudge against the world who runs aground on fate’s obligatory cruelty, but on a fresh-faced kid straight out of college who doesn’t so much run afoul of fate as simply make the worst decision of his young life.

The kid is George Fowler, played by a pre-stardom Steve McQueen who in his introduction, repeatedly saying “sir” and sporting a letter jacket, comes across less like the magnetic action star he would become than Anthony Michael Hall in “The Breakfast Club.” He is brought into the mix by Gino (David Clarke), an old family friend, the requisite convict who isn't going back to the slammer, and while Gino does say that, the movie does better showing it in one frightful sequence in a bathroom shot in concurrent close-ups that makes it momentarily feel like a cell. He collapses in a terrible fright. In that moment, you already know how it’s going to end for him.

It’s a great sequence, but not quite as great as the sequence illuminating George as a former college football star still longing for the gridiron’s glory, clichéd to say the least but nevertheless rivetingly conveyed when he wanders his old college football field alone and late at night in the dark shadows of the looming goal posts. Discordant chords on the soundtrack initially emit the vibe of a horror movie, but rather than end with a bang, the moment ends with an elegiac whimper, the fretful score giving way and re-imagining a college fight song as something like a mournful dirge, like this gridiron is George’s burial ground.

His past and his alternate future are evoked in Ann (Mollie McCarthy), his ex-girlfriend and Gino’s sister, a character initially existing on the edge of the film, one that has gone the opposite way of George, opting for the adult life, emblemized in the martinis she drinks and the practical advice she gives George when he asks, whether directly or indirectly, for it. She is not granted much of an off screen life, but that's because the character allows herself to be pulled back into his orbit. For whatever unspeakable sin George may have committed, there is an affection that remains, and McCarthy plays at the sense that Ann can feel him drifting off course and wants to get him back on track.

That marks Ann as apart from the femme fatale, though Egan sees it differently, convinced women are not only not worth the trouble but a corroding force, brought home in a drunken monologue that Denton wrings for maximum effect. If for most of the movie he maintains a straight, hard face, here he lets it crack, coming completely undone, his own resentments boiling over. It is moments like this that suggest their robbery doesn’t have a prayer, and sure enough, for all Egan’s grand planning, he cannot keep the robbery itself on course when it finally comes, though its falling apart is played less as a traditional shoot ‘em up, though shots are fired, than a ferocious evocation of the walls closing in.

They close in on everyone, and in different ways, but most particularly on George, a character that gradually develops a hardened shell the further he plunges into the criminal life, only to see it mercilessly shatter in this conclusion. We are so use to thinking of McQueen as a tough guy, but here, at the end, he is nothing more than a frightened little kid in over his head, tossing away his gun like an infant who demanded a toy to play with and then didn’t want it anymore. And the final shot, looking through metal bars out the back of a paddy wagon, is like looking back on his short life, everything he had, everything he was, anything he could have been, receding from view.

Which Movie Used Katy Perry's "Firework" Best?

Here in Chicago, where late winter typically bleeds into early May, it seemed, up until this week, as if the sun had not shined in months, and yet a Katy Perry song – a good one – makes it feel like the sun is always shining anyway, which is extremely, perhaps excessively, pollyannish. But in these dark days for the country where I call home, well, I give zero fucks; I could use some pollyannishness. Indeed, even if some things in this world have only worsened, my life nevertheless got infinitely better a few years back when I came clean on my love for Katy Perry’s sweet, soluble carbohydrate pop. I remember going to a wedding once in those dark ages before I admitted the truth and when “Teenage Dream” thundered across the dance floor I sat there in my chair pretending like it didn’t affect me when, Lord, all I wanted to do was get up and cut a poorly woven rug. I don’t necessarily try and spread the gospel of Katy Perry because I know her sugary confections aren’t for everyone, but I won’t deny my belief.

But my belief is not really tied to any messages she might seek to espouse; my belief is tied to the meaning in her emptiness. There should be no means by which the wholly artificial and entirely pure can possibly, nevertheless pleasingly, intersect and yet Katy Perry’s best songs improbably occupy that exotic, ineffable junction. To give yourself so whole-heartedly to “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)” is a sin; to listen to it is to be absolved of your sins. And so while I admired Katy for getting #woke, her more recent forays into full-on earnestness, like many of the less than stellar selections on “Prism” and her Olympic anthem “Rise”, which was so serious and such a slog when it should have been Christ the Redeemer decorated in a feathery headdress, tank top and leggings, its arms outstretched to gather up a tray of raspberry margaritas, have left me underwhelmed. Perhaps the only true dose of Katy earnestness that gets me is “Firework.” And I confess I only learned to appreciate it because of its double shot of transcendent cinematic application.

It was implemented at a couple key points in Jacques Audiard’s uber-dark yet strangely hopeful “Rust and Bone” (2012) which chronicled Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard), a seaquarium trainer who loses her legs when the killer whale under her tutelage in a show goes rogue/rises up (depending on your viewpoint). Plunged into depression, she connects with Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), weighed down by his own problems that he tries to unburden with bare knuckle brawls for cash. It’s a movie in which people who have lost so much find ways of getting it back – it as in the corporeality of life, feeling, touching, loving, fucking, fighting, swimming, dancing, feeling you in you, or something like that. It is not easy; it is a tormenting, depressing slog. “Rust and Bone” spends a lot of time amidst the torment and depression. There is not always light at the end of the tunnel. Still, that doesn’t mean light will not eventually emerge, which it does, and if the first time “Firework” is served up, as Stéphanie goes through the exuberant motions of her killer whale show, the song feels like mere fruit extract, by the time it re-emerges in service of Stéphanie getting her groove back, it plays like a hymn of exultation.

“Firework” also turned up, perhaps more famously, in “The Interview” where Seth Rogen and James Franco played, respectively, frazzled TV producer Aaron Rapaport and dingbat talk show host Dave Skylark who, for reasons too pointless to explain, are recruited to assassinate North Korea boy wonder Kim Jong-un (Randall Park). This Kim Jong-un, however, has a weak spot, a supposed weak spot, shall we say, and it is Katy Perry. Indeed, when Dave discovers Kim Jong-un’s love of Katy Perry, the dictatorial boy wonder comes clean, cheerful to be free of this secretive burden, joyous to publicly indulge his inner-Katy Cat. But later, when confessing to his requisite daddy issues, bringing him to tears, he pointedly turns his back on Katy Perry when Dave tries to lead the dictatorial boy wonder in a “Firework” sing-along, a moment that literally triggers the supreme leader’s downfall, culminating in an explosion aboard a helicopter set to, that’s right, “Firework.” Alas, it is merely a cover of “Firework” because at this point, denying who he really is, Jong-un does not deserve the real thing.

Deciding which film best employs “Firework” ain’t easy. “Rust and Bone” might ultimately prove itself a better movie than “The Interview”, but while “Firework” is no doubt integral to “Rust and Bone”, the song is, in a way, everything to “The Interview.” Kim Jong-un, frankly, is not so much the antagonist of “The Interview” as the reflective character to Dave Sklylark, the character against which Dave is made to measure himself, and while Kim Jong-un ultimately turns his back on “Firework”, Dave does not, the emblem, truly as much as anything, that opening ourselves up to Katy Perry, yes indeed, might well be the best hope we have left to save this world from itself.

Some Drivel On...Dick

Andrew Fleming’s “Dick”, a spoof of “All the President’s Men” in which Deep Throat is re-imagined as a pair of bubbly fifteen year old girls, was generally well received upon its release, such as Stephanie Zacharek’s review for Salon, but it did not possess much staying power, finishing just behind David Spade’s un-immortal “Lost and Found” at the box office, nor leave much of cultural imprint. Perhaps that was because it was buried by “The Sixth Sense” avalanche (released the same week), or perhaps it was because in the wake of President Clinton’s sexual malfeasance people were simply tired of political scandals. Still, six years later, when Mark Felt was finally revealed as Deep Throat, “Dick” briefly experienced a renaissance, highlighted by Sasha Issenberg’s piece for Slate in which he argued that Fleming’s film underscored how the ultimate answer to our great national mystery could never be as good as we hoped. Yet now, here in the midst of All This, with words like Nixon and Truth and Gate and Tapes re-entering our lexicon, or getting tossed around willy-nilly, whichever you prefer, “Dick” has yet again been resurrected, perhaps because, in its own way, “Dick” knows that people are, as Mr. X once opined, suckers for the truth. (Aren’t they?)

The teenyboppers in question, Betsy Jobs (Kirsten Dunst) and Arlene Lorenzo (Michelle Williams), are mostly goodhearted if utterly oblivious, acutely exemplified in an early sequence after they have become official, so to speak, White House dog walkers. This happens when they are spotted on a White House class trip by G. Gordon Liddy (Harry Shearer, underused but hilariously unctuous), who remembers them from the Watergate complex, where Arlene lives, the night of the infamous break-in, leading Nixon himself (Dan Hedaya) to put out a fire that may not exist by inviting the girls to walk his not-so-beloved, as we see, cocker spaniel Checkers. This makes Betsy and Arlene late to the bus, ruining a class trip to McDonald’s, for which they admonished, by teacher and fellow students, which they despondently accept for but a moment before collapsing into a fit of giggles. Whatever! That’s so three seconds ago! This, as odd is it might sound, makes them the perfect surrogates, entering the Watergate Crisis fray with no preconceived notions of absolutely anything.

As they do most everything, Dunst and Williams play their Meet Cute, of sorts, with President Nixon perfectly, as if they have just been allowed backstage at a Bobby Sherman concert, with Williams bashfully avoiding eye contact and Dunst unleashing a grin so huge her cheeks nearly burst. “Call me Dick,” Nixon says and they do. Hedaya’s performance, while occasionally menacing, is often like a square dad trying to evince charm he doesn’t have, not that it matters. He’s the President! The President of the United States! Betsy and Arlene have been taught to respect the office by their elders, whether their parents or their obligatorily curmudgeon teacher, and so they do. It’s just that their respect takes the form of something more like star worship, bringing to mind Charlie Pierce’s terming Politico as Tiger Beat on the Potomac, particularly Arlene who finds herself in the throes of a schoolgirl crush, niftily evoking any Cult of the President, be it the MAGA sect, be it the disciples of Barry slow-jamming the news, be it dopes (read: me) who have George Washington For President buttons on their wall.

It does not take long, however, for Nixon’s untowardness to surface and Betsy and Arlene to turn against him, though to Fleming’s credit he does not portray the girls’ turn as simple crazed teenage jealousy. No, they see the President for who he is, which is not so much a variation on the old standard about a President you can have beer with as it is a rendering of the façade of the office itself making the President above reproach crumbling. Betsy and Arlene might not grasp the finer points of the Paris Peace Accords, but they know an insincere horse’s ass when they see one, and they know the difference between right and wrong. And while their covert communication with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein might begin as a mere prank, by the end the two girls are made to realize that country comes over faux-king.

This is a comedy, of course, and so the intrepid reporters of the Washington Post are less heroic and more bickering and vainglorious, with Ferrell playing the self-important straight man to Bruce McCulloch’s, getting great mileage just from his feathery mane, side-splitting burlesque. They are willing to listen to the girls because of their craven careerism, but that they listen is still something of an outlier in comparison to the movie’s other adults. Betsy and Arlene’s teacher orders the sycophancy of the institution of the President; Betsy’s parents dismiss Woodward and Bernstein as “muckraking bastards”; Arlene’s mother, played by Teri Garr in a too-little-screen-time supporting performance, says “There is something very strange going on here. And I don’t want to know what it is.” In other words, they are ostriches burying their heads in the sand.

“We the People of the United States” kicks off the Constitution because We the People, as so many have noted over the last 200+ years, give power to the Government. The President is not our boss, we are his, which, while something everyone learns in high school civics, is not something everybody seems to remember, as All This re-proves, as you get older. And sometimes what it takes to remind us of our civic – nay, patriotic, in the actual sense of the word – obligation is a couple teenage girls who might not have actually read their civics lesson for the week but live it out anyway.

Youth in Oregon

“Youth in Oregon” opens by cutting back and forth between 80 year old Ray Engersol (Frank Langella) in a bathroom, shirtless, miserable and in the company of pills, and Ray’s son-in-law, Brian Gleason (Billy Crudup) lying in bed with his wife, Ray’s daughter, Kate (Christina Applegate). Ostensibly this is to show how the former’s presence has put a crimp in the latter’s sex life, but it also goes to show this family’s splintering, where as close as everyone is, with Ray and his wife Estelle (Mary Kay Place) forced to move in with their daughter and son-in-law and granddaughter Annie (Nicola Peltz), they hardly communicate, each person walled off in a separate rom with his/her own secrets as palpable tension forever lingers in the air. Crudup’s performance, faux-polite resentment, his overtures in lockstep with an oily smile, is an embodiment of this tension. His patience is a put-on, nearly every line he speaks angling to see if he can shed extended family responsibility he does not want. That probably makes him sound unlikable, and he is, because most everyone here is. This is an oversized family in too close a proximity for too long crumbling before our eyes. Is it any wonder Ray wants to depart this blue rock?

That’s the inciting incident of “Youth in Oregon”, titular wordplay on euthanasia which Ray decides he wants when he learns the disease he has is inoperable. Not that he’s about to tell his family, of course. It’s one of those kinds of movies, where secrets are stored only so they can come barreling out at the appropriately scripted moment. For all life’s messiness that the opening nimbly entails, much of the rest of the movie is oddly uniform, hinging, as these things often do, on a road trip, one Ray demands cross-country to Oregon where suicide is legal, which is taken without Kate - tending to a delicate if woefully non thought-out subplot involving Annie - and that eventually picks up both Ray’s estranged son Danny (Josh Lucas) and Brian’s estranged son Nick (Alex Shafffer).

Though the road trip is intended to yield enlightenment it hardly comes across illuminating, comprised mostly of recycled hijinks, like sharing a hotel room or a bout of maniacal all-night driving by virtue of pills, the sort of stuff that “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” did not only more comically but more affectingly. Director Joel David Moore favors a soundtrack heavy on Sufjan Stevens-ish indie pop or mournful soundtrack dirges that sound sort of like Sufjan Stevens-ish indie pop which does not sound part and parcel to the journey of an 80 year old curmudgeon. What’s worse, the majestic scenery that David Moore’s camera revels in throughout is no way connected to Ray’s journey or obligatory epiphany; it’s just a bunch of travel postcards.

As far as the touchy subject of euthanasia itself, Brian spends so much time convinced Ray won’t end his life that no philosophical conversation, literal or figurative, emerges. As presented in “Youth in Oregon”, whether in Brian and Kate’s staunch opposition, or Danny and Nick’s just-go-with-it support, euthanasia is drawn strictly in black and white rather than with shades of gray. The closest it gets is a moment near the end when Ray is actually made to witness an old friend being euthanized where Maryann Plunkett, in a deft walk-off performance as the old friend’s daughter, charts the considerable emotional terrain that accompanies such a decision.

In a way, though, this lack of philosophy on matters of life and death does effectively underscore Langella’s shockinly brittle performance. Though you wish the stagnant relationship of Ray and Estelle, brought about by such torturous circumstance, might be more explored, you believe her when she talks of the pain that goes hand-in-hand with having a partner who just wants to die. And while the road trip itself expresses none of the ardor that Ray claims it involves, Langella’s performance conveys that ardor all on its own, less when he throws a fit and more when he is simply still, whether riding in a car or just sitting in a chair, exuding exhaustion, where every one of his eighty years and all the baggage, physical and emotional, are brought haggardly to bear. That exhaustion is so convincing, in fact, that when it comes time for him the inevitable emotional pivot, it barely seems believable.

13th

D.W. Griffith’s 1915 silent film “Birth of a Nation” is eternally infamous not so much for its considerable technical achievements of the time but for its subject matter, appallingly portraying America’s reconstruction in the wake of the Civil War as a horrific era in which terrifying black men preyed on innocent white people, leaving only the noble heroes of the Ku Klux Klan to save the day. Ava DuVernay covers this bout of white supremacist mythmaking in her documentary “13th”, partially to demonstrate how the “Birth of a Nation’s” roaring success not only established a certain viewpoint of reconstruction but let certain white Americans see the narrative they preferred, but also to reject its argument and build a counter-narrative of American society. DuVernay does by doing precisely what President Woodrow Wilson claimed “Birth of a Nation” did – she writes history with lightning.

Indeed, “13th” brazenly pile-drives through 150 years of considerable history, so frenzied that it effectively underscores the frenzied anger so many decades of institutional injustice have rightfully whipped up, marshaling all manner of historical footage, often contrasting it with footage of today, like when DuVernay cuts back and forth between a Jim Crow-era protestor being pushed and shoved by white people with a modern protestor at a Trump rally being pushed and shoved by white people. Occasionally DuVernay drops her images completely, leaving the screen black and then laying the words of protest songs, whether old spirituals or modern rap songs, over the black screen. DuVernay’s bag of auteur tricks is so deep that DuVernay probably lays it on a little too thick, resembling Oliver Stone’s “JFK”, just with less concern for conspiracies and more concern for impartiality, highlighted by Newt Gingrich’s refreshingly candid appearance.

Gingrich is but one of DuVernay’s talking head legion, comprised of historians, politicians and activists, to relay how the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, in fact created a loophole within its abolishment, writing that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist…except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. With a society that was in so many ways built on the backs of slaves, those slaves were still needed to rebuild after the civil war and that loophole provided the means to lock up black people and, in essence, re-draft them into slavery. And while the Civil Rights moment may have won them a temporary reprieve, politicians have nonetheless been exploiting that loophole ever since, from Richard Nixon employing the coded term “Law and Order” to the Reagan Era’s just as coded War on Drugs to the sweeping crime bill of the Bill Clinton era. The names change, the policies change, but the business stays the same.

The business, in this case, is quite literal, spurred along by the infamous ALEC, the American Legislative Executive Council that lobbies for and helps enact right wing causes like mandatory minimum sentences and the three strikes law, instruments to reap profits off prison privatization. It means that prisoners have become the engine for an economic force and that engine must be sustained, whatever it takes, and once you have created such a viable stream of money, as journalist Bob Sloan explains, it becomes nearly impossible to do away with because there is simply too much money at stake for those in the positions of power to take preventative action.

Michael Hough, a Maryland State Senator and member of ALEC, appears on screen in “13th” to testify in defense his Executive Council. DuVernay might not be on his side but she is also not deliberately casting him in a bad light; she just puts him on camera in the blandest setting imaginable and lets him dig his own grave. “Right now,” he says with an omnipresent smile, “our position is we don’t want more people in prison”, a position he defends with nothing but vacuous corporate platitudes, calling his party the “party of innovation” and citing “wholesale reform” which ties to letting more people out on parole...but with GPS monitors funneling more money to private corporations which means turning a profit always take precedence over actual rehabilitation.

As Hough speaks, DuVernay cuts away from him and to people like Glenn E. Martin, President of Just Leadership USA, who speaks to the durability of oppression, how it re-invents itself and how entities such as ALEC continue to oppress right under our noses, and then deliberately cuts back to Hough, still droning on in monotone, still smiling. In these moments you realize they are not just doing it under our noses; they are doing it right to our faces.

Chris Pratt is Not a Movie Star, But Maybe He Could Be (Or: don't just show me the receipts)

Last week at The Ringer, K. Austin Collins wrote that “Chris Pratt Is Not a Movie Star”, a conclusion I agree with, though not entirely. The response to the piece in the usual corners of the Interwebs (that is, the comments section and Twitter) was, as you might surmise, less than enthusiastic, which is not necessarily wrong even if I could only roll my eyes at the manner in which so many took offense.

“I reject this (utterly random and pulled from your ass) definition of movie star. A movie star doesn’t have to be someone that audiences will be willing to watch do nothing. A movie star is someone whose name brings people to the theater. That’s it,” went one rebuttal. “you know what a movie star is..one that can deliver a box office hit,” went another. And then there was the dude who helpfully pulled the definition of movie star from Google...

mov·ie star
nounNORTH AMERICAN
an actor or actress who is famous for playing leading roles in movies.
”she is one of the world’s biggest movie stars” synonyms: (movie/film) actor/actress, film star, leading man, leading lady, lead

That? That’s a movie star? “an actor or actress who is famous for playing leading roles in movies”? Could anything possibly cheapen the term movie star more than a definition culled from melted vanilla ice cream? I would like to think if some nincompoop pitched that definition to Bogart that Bogart would’ve taken a drag off his cigarette and said something like “Gee, I’d like to think I’m a little more than that but then I haven’t updated my copy of Webster’s in a long time.” In fact, the Dictionary.com definition of “definition” says this...

the act of defining, or of making something definite, distinct, or clear: We need a better definition of her responsibilities.

Yeah. Sorry. But we need a better definition of movie star than “an actor or actress who is famous for playing leading roles in movies.” Ye gods, do we.

Defining a movie star is so much more complicated than Dictionary.com or Box Office Mojo that Jeanine Basinger spent 553 pages wrestling with it ten years ago in her book “The Star Machine”, which I encourage anyone who has any interest in the Movie Star™ to read. Then again, defining a movie star, as Basinger paradoxically notes, is not really that complicated at all. “The truth is that nobody — either then or now — can define what a movie star is,” Basinger wrote in her opening, “except by specific example, but the workaday world of moviemaking never gave up trying to figure it out.” Yet by the end of the same paragraph she was espousing about “the highly self-confident version of ‘something you can’t define’ that is a variation of Justice Potter Stuart’s famous remark about pornography: ‘I know it when I see it.’”

So sure, Chris Pratt can be a movie star if that’s what you see. But what you see has to go beyond box office receipts and or the literal act of starring in a movie. “(W)hat they responded to in movie stars really was something that seemed physical,” wrote Basinger. “Great movie stars were ‘alive’ inside the frame. It was their home, their owned space. They were utterly at ease up there.” That is a detail often lost these days in movie star conversations. In an unrelated piece for Vulture, Tommy Craggs mentions how, in a changing industry, “sportswriters rarely bother to describe the action on the floor”, comparing it to “the same way that film critics no longer describe how actors move across the screen.” But how the actor moves across the screen is often paramount in terms of Movie Star or Not A Movie Star.

In “Salt”, Angelina Jolie, playing the titular CIA operative Evelyn Salt cum Something Else, moved across the screen like a ballerina going after a blocking sled. If the director, Philip Noyce, does a nifty job of drawing out sequences, like Salt’s opening escape from a CIA office or her later infiltration of the Vice President’s funeral, so that we do not know precisely what she is up to, Jolie plays the moments with such rhythmic determination that you simply become lost in watching her, momentarily rendering whatever it is she is about to do immaterial, her bodily motion, her mere physical presence surpassing plot. A mid-movie moment, on the other hand, finds Jolie slowed down and standing still, on a boat in New York Harbor, gazing at the Statue of Liberty, so small on the horizon, the 150 feet copper statue dwarfed by “Salt’s” leading lady, which I don’t mean to sound crass but merely an evocation of who gets top billing at the movies. It’s the most indelible Movie Star Moment of the last few years and it comes off because Jolie has mastered the art, whether going hard or playing it cool, of charismatic on screen ease.

George Clooney has mastered it too. In cinematic soufflés, sure, like “Ocean’s Eleven” where even if his character is under fire Clooney feels so rested and relaxed, but also in more solemn affairs such as the remarkable “Michael Clayton” where he moves across the screen hurriedly yet gracefully, like a man with a sixth sense about the brass tacks of a fallen world. And in the moments when he settles down, like his titular character watching from the front seat of the car as his kid goes to school, he remains completely still, allowing his seductive bind with the camera to do all the work. Angie and George, to paraphrase Basinger, belong up there.

Pratt, on the other hand, does not always look so at ease in movies, not, to my eye, even in ensembles which is where Collins contends he strictly excels. Because even in something such as “Jurassic World”, where Pratt might be the foremost character yet still part of a team, he seems like he is trying to effect a proper Leading Man, too much laconic gravitas, too beholden to the edict that a movie performance is better smaller rather than bigger, which might be a solid rule of thumb except that certain actors most flourish when giving rules the heave-ho. Pratt, of course, became famous on the NBC sitcom “Parks and Recreation” where he fit snugly into an immense, awesome ensemble, playing Andy Dwyer. Initially Andy Dwyer was scripted as something of a smug mooch, but the further the show went, the more Pratt everted the part, transforming him into a profoundly endearing, gregarious dim bulb.

His air was a frenzied going-with-the-flow and Pratt’s body language, a kind of humanistic embodiment of Vincent D’Onofrio’s all-over-the-place alien antics in “Men in Black”, hilariously underlined that idea. Indeed, his character’s comical alter ego, FBI Agent Burt Macklin, which was like Pratt’s own commentary on movie stars, would, upon cracking a “case”, gaze into the distance and remark “Macklin, you son of a bitch”, as if he was amazed by rather than impressed with his own genius. Even if this was the product of much behind the scenes thought, Pratt really came across like an actor inventing in the moment, not just getting outside the box but then using the box to, like, improbably build a damn balloon animal. Subsequent interviews and public appearances, on his own or with his wife Anna Faris, made it seem as if Chris Pratt and Andy Dwyer were one and the same. They weren’t, of course, just as Lauren Bacall’s voice was devised, just as Jean Harlow’s hair was colored. Still, what Pratt was doing, whether he knew it or not, was creating, as Basinger might put it, his “type.”

“The product was not any individual movie. It was the actor,” Ricardo Montalaban is cited as saying in Basinger’s book. And by “actor” what Montalban meant was an actor’s “type.” That echoes the irascible Richard Brody’s contention that “(w)hat makes a movie star is the inability to subordinate oneself to a character – the charismatic force of personality that renders the star more fascinating than any scripted role.” To Brody that is a negative, but I personally don’t mind the times when Angelina refuses to subordinate herself to a character, dialing up her magnetic Jolie-ness instead, or when Robert Downey Jr.’s charismatic force of personality renders him more fascinating than the scripted role.

On the big screen Pratt comes across inhibited, unable to follow his inexplicable impulses, like he did as Andy Dwyer, where they want to go, too stiff in behavior and movement, shrinking within the wide frames of the screen rather than exuberantly allowing himself to expand. It’s possible, of course, that Pratt is merely trying to do something else, which is commendable, to get away from rather than re-subscribe to his “type”, or perhaps he is merely pledging loyalty to the scripted role. And it is not, mind you, that I wish Pratt would merely re-be Andy Dwyer. No, it’s that I wish Pratt would do what he did when he became Andy Dwyer. I wish he would switch off his targeting computer, trust his instincts, refuse to subordinate himself to the character, and let himself go wild.

Why Isn't This Still A Movie? James Bond At Blades

Why Isn’t This Still A Movie? is a non-existent series in which Cinema Romantico spies a particular movie’s still and thinks that should have been/should be the movie instead...

Last week the Interwebs were alive with the sounds of Pierce Brosnan, ex-Agent 007, explaining in the latest issue of Total Film that even if he went all in on what his version of James Bond was meant to be he nonetheless came away lamenting that his version of James Bond was not allowed to go, as Daniel Craig’s version of James Bond has, “gritty.” {Insert sound of artillery shells hitting the beach at mention of “gritty”.} I was all set to use this as a springboard to a blog-ish dissertation, something like “Grittiness In Modern Cinema: Why People Who Think ‘It’s Just A Movie’ Want Every Movie To Be ‘Real’”, until I got a look at the “Die Another Day” still that Digital Spy, where I first read about the Total Film article, employed as visual accompaniment. It was this still……

To tell the truth, I hardly remember “Die Another Day”, not even The Invisible Car which is cited in the article and which should be pretty memorable. I did remember Madonna’s cameo, seen in the still, but that’s likely because I’m a pop diva devotee. I had forgotten that Ms. Ciccone played a fencing instructor aptly named Verity and I had forgotten this sequence at a fencing club nimbly called Blades where 007 gets in a swordfight with chief villain Gustav Graves. But never mind all that and just look at this still. That still? That still is a movie unto itself.

That still is not so much a James Bond movie as “Grand Hotel” re-imagined in a fencing club, a crisscrossing story of Gustav Graves, a cocky entrepreneur hiding the fact that he is broke, his assistant, Miranda Frost, seeking to strike out on her own as she gradually uncovers the truth about her boss’s financial predicament, and who falls for this mysterious James Bond, who never talks about work because he doesn’t “talk about work on the weekend” even if he seems oddly able to bypass any security system, and, of course, Verity, the fencing instructor, suicidal and thinking about sticking an épée in her heart, who falls for Bond even as he falls for Miranda, as they all fence, cajole, scheme, and occasionally retire to the veranda glimpsed through the window in the background for cocktails.

If we have to have “Star Wars” spinoffs why not toss off a few James Bond spinoffs too? Who wouldn’t have gone in for a Roger Moore Bond movie set entirely on Bond’s weekend off at ski chalet in St. Moritz since Roger Moore always played Bond like he was on vacation anyway? Who wouldn’t go in for a Daniel Craig Bond movie as “24 Hour Party People” re-imagined in the present day Berlin music club scene? Like George Costanza telling George Wendt “It’s enough with the bar already”, hey, Barbara Broccoli, it’s enough with stunt-laden secret intelligence already. It is time high time the martini stops being a mere interlude in Bond and starts being the overriding point. Bond always made time for play between his globe-trotting, of course, but perhaps it is time to stop trotting, just once, and stay put. It’s...James Bond At Blades.

Prototype James Bond At Blades poster

keira knightley standing forlornly in the rain

Just another Wednesday in present-day America...

Win It All

Gambling is consistently a dramatic go to because of its inherent dramatic stakes. Money is on the line and someone is going to win and someone is going to lose. That’s what makes director Joe Swanberg’s decision to examine gambling in “Win It All” so unique. Strictly indie, he is not a director typically associated with the usual sorts of pesky stakes everyone’s always prattling on about. Sure, his movies have big emotions, but those emotions typically arise from much more small scale narratives. And his often admirable refusal to indulge in obvious endings runs completely counter to the gambling movie’s favored denouement of one last Big Card Game. Yet “Win It All” does feature one last Big Card Game, marking the film as a curious experience, one where the stakes keep intruding themselves even if Swanberg nevertheless seems determined to cast off those stakes-y shackles.

“Win It All” is spurred forward by Eddie Garrett (Jake Johnson), a degenerate gambler who can’t afford a cup of coffee, being given a duffel bag by an ominous accomplice about to be squired to the slammer. Upon the accomplice’s return, Eddie is guaranteed $10,000. Ah, but what if the duffel bears more than $10,000? The bag, of course, is the narrative bomb and Eddie, frankly, held out longer zipping open that duffel than I would have bet. The bag contains, as it must, swaths of cash, of which Eddie takes a little, gambling it and winning, prompting him to a gamble a little more and lose, gamble a lot more to win back what he lost, lose all of that, etc. That seems tailor made for crazy schemes to get out of the red but “Win It All” mostly remains low key, approaching this crisis pragmatically rather than with all manner of comical complications.

The middle passages, in fact, center on the emergence of a support system for Eddie. Eddie’s brother Ron (Joe Lo Truglio) owns a small business and brings Eddie on as an employee, driving him firmly but lovingly, while Eddie also begins a relationship with Eva (Aislinn Derbez), a less than thought-out character, mostly existing to suggest something to which Eddie can root himself. And while Derbez and Johnson work charmingly enough together they, frankly, have less chemistry than Johnson does with Keegan-Michael Key playing Gene, a fellow gambling addict in recovery who Eddie calls his “sponsor”, a term to which Gene remains resistant in their scenes together where humorous give and take is laced with lots and lots of skittishness. Indeed, in his little time on screen, Key, with a semi-manic don’t-push-me temperament makes clear how precarious the straight life is.

Often the getting-it-together portions of movies like this are less than earnest, limited to a montage, a means of building up the character so he/she can come crashing back down. And while there is a montage, Swanberg goes beyond that, making Eddie’s rehabilitation, grudgingly doing the Day-by-Day, the true focal point. There is nothing much new here, yet it still mostly comes off and that can be attributed to Jake Johnson. He partially came up through improv, forming his own comedy troupe, and was also the inspiration for the web series Drunk History in which celebrities, uh, drunkenly recount history. I don’t mean to be flip. Johnson has an ability to make lackadaisical, off the cuff sounding monologues rather charismatic, an ability that matches this character, always begging, always assuaging, always assuring, sound incredibly genuine, trying to convince himself in the moment as much as he’s trying to convince whoever he’s speaking to.

Yet as “Win It All” becomes more concerned with Eddie’s bit-by-bit growth, the more it writes itself into a hole, needing to return to the duffel bag subplot, which theoretically should only add to the urgency but starts to feel more like a plot point that should have been jettisoned on a rewrite. Because as “Win It All” gradually proves itself a movie better without drummed up suspense, when the suspense gets dutifully drummed up, the trap the movie has set for itself is sprung and, sure enough, Eddie, metaphorically speaking, gets caught in a little left field melodrama. It might have been better if he just went up in a puff of smoke.