Dunkirk

“Dunkirk” begins with a moment of silence. A swarm of leaflets waft through the air of the titular coastal French town where British troops have been driven by German forces in the spring of 1940. Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), a British private, snags one of these leaflets, which warns him and his fellow compatriots that they are surrounded. Indeed, an instant later gunfire erupts as Tommy makes haste, escaping behind a British barricade and continuing to Dunkirk beach where the whole of Britain’s army is waiting for – praying for – escape. And as this unfolds, silence gives way to a prototypical bombastic Hans Zimmer score embedded with a relentless ticking, evoking Nolan’s preference for putting his movies on a clock. Typically, however, whether with “Inception” or “The Dark Knight” trilogy, Nolan has waited until the climax to start the clock; in “Dunkirk” he starts the clock almost immediately.

This is good. Though “Dunkirk” was filmed in a combination of 65mm IMAX and large format film stock, it is notable for its lack of ambition, as Nolan eschews his typical reliance on overheated narrative and ungainly exposition dumps to streamline the sensation. There is no discussion of what led to this or what comes next; there is no mention of Nazi ideology, no mention of Nazis at all; all that matters is what’s happening right now; all that matters is the moment. The stakes are simple: get the hell off this beach. Then again, this is Christopher Nolan, keen to let us know of his Auteurist bonafides, which is why he can’t help but needlessly trick up his otherwise spare narrative, adorning it with three different chapters – The Beach, The Sea, The Air – with each one taking place over a different timeframe – a week, a day, an hour, respectively – and then crisscrossing between them. In the air, Tom Hardy’s RAF pilot gives cover to the retreat by picking off German planes. On the water, Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance), his fishing boat commissioned by the English army, along with a host of others to serve as more nimble escape vessels, steers into harm’s way. And on the beach, Commander Bolton (Kenneth Branagh) directs the troubled retreat involving Tommy.

Tommy suggests an interesting character, one who in the early moments is quite consciously played as selfish, where a run with stretcher across the beach to a waiting ship is less about heroism than self-interest. Alas, he quickly recedes into the collective, underscored by the way Whitehead’s face just sort of mixes and matches with all the other actors playing all the other troops he falls in and out with as the evacuation haltingly progresses. He could be anyone; they are all everyone; they are all England; forget yourself for the cause. That’s not necessarily wrong if you’re fighting the Nazis, and Nolan likely assumes we all know they are fighting the Nazis, though there are times when the facelessness of the enemy evokes the sensation of the nameless British officer in “Last of the Mohicans” hollering “For King, For Country!” as a means to imply Go Along or Get Out.

Still, in forgoing the backstory that so often interests him to the detriment of all else, Nolan yields emotion through aesthetic and circumstance. On the beach, he stokes desperation and fear, never more so than repeated shots of German warplanes, initially just ominous specks in the sky and then screaming toward the swath of soldiers as sitting ducks. In the air, on the other hand, Nolan finds a more odd kind of serenity. When Hardy straps that oxygen mask over his face, it becomes a signifier of control, his stoicism a stark contrast not only to the chaos below but to the omnipresent rattle and creak of the cockpit.

Though the dialogue is often muffled, these aerial dogfights are rarely confusing, owed to editing patience that paradoxically renders the disorientation of battle with thrilling clarity. In one breathless moment, a German plane momentarily disappears from view only to glide back in, and the way the shots switch from a composed Hardy to his point-of-view as the enemy re-appears elicits the sensation of cool under fire. It speaks to how linear edits and the power of the image can, in a gargantuan action-laden movies such as this one, capture so much more wonder than words, a lesson Nolan has not always heeded, but which gives so much of “Dunkirk” its kick.

And even if Nolan’s devotion to this timeline trickery eventually causes him to quicken his edits, confusedly running images and characters right into one another, it is still difficult to shake off the verisimilitude in the moment, repeatedly conjuring an in-their-shoes sensation, like a shot of men desperately jumping from a sinking ship seen just over the shoulder of a helplessly frozen Commander Bolton. It’s as primal as it gets. It’s not unlike the opening of Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan.” That was an astonishingly visceral sequence, and though it was considerably bloodier than “Dunkirk” it is, on its own, apart from the rest of the film, simply a bravura display of filmmaking. Of course, the rest of the movie was Spielberg trying, successfully or not, to wrestle with it what that scene meant. “Dunkirk”, on the other hand, by deliberately eschewing the event’s complete context and forgoing any philosophical rumination, essentially just is the opening to “Saving Private Ryan.” It is pure spectacle.

Friday's Old Fashioned Flashes Back to the Eighties

It’s everyone’s favorite time of year! By which I mean, it’s this blog’s least favorite time of year. By which I mean, the dog days of summer (ugh) combined with the countdown to my dreaded another-year-has-passed-and-I-have-done-nothing-with-my-life-and-it’s-all-meaningless birthday at the dawn of September. And so I find myself, as I do every year at this time, nostalgically and cinematically returning to the decade of my youth – The 80s. Which is why this year once again Cinema Romantico’s “famed” Friday’s Old Fashioned column – the only classic film column on the internet named after bourbon, bitters, sugar, orange, and maraschino cherry – is going straight 80s for the next month (with a bonus September 1st edition), beginning a week from today, August 4th, with a quasi-special August 3rd kickoff. Hawks gets traded in for Hughes. Jean Harlow takes a momentary respite to allow face time for Jean(ie) Bueller. Harold Lloyd cedes the stage to Lloyd Dobler.

Ah, but this year, faithful frustrated readers, is no ordinary year. No, 2017 marks my 40th birthday. And that means I am feeling the whole another-year-has-passed-and-I-have-done-nothing-with-my-life-and-it’s-all-meaningless vibe even harder, especially since it seems to be coinciding with The Fall of the Republic. This birthday...this birthday is the worst one yet. That sucks for me, but it’s a bonus for you, faithful frustrated readers, because it means more 80s! That’s right! In addition to our traditional Friday’s Old Fashioneds there will also be Thursday freeze frames culled from 80s movies that I hold close to my heart. And that’s not all! There will be 80s-themed shout-outs to the extra, forgotten great moments in movie history, drivel, maybe more, who knows???!!! Maybe we will have an interview with Lea Thompson!!! (We will not.)

So strike up the Tiffany, crack a Capri Sun and climb into my blogging DeLorean. Onward.

Appraising Taffy Dale

Tim Burton’s “Mars Attacks!” was released 20 years ago this year. At the film’s conclusion, after Earth had fended off a martian invasion that nonetheless left much of the planet in tatters, the First Daughter, Taffy Dale (Natalie Portman), had been left as the American President by default. Because I am so chagrined these days with the state of America, I cheered myself up by composing a fake appraisal of her fake Presidency, the kind you see crop up in all manner of editorial pages at the end of any Presidency. 

An Uncandy Presidency

If no American can soon forget the genesis for Taffy Dale’s unprecedented ascension to President of the United States of America, we are nevertheless obligated to at least briefly re-visit it as no Presidential scholar can properly begin evaluation of her two terms as Commander in Chief without first establishing the causation of her swearing in. Eight years since its occurrence, Americans have come to call the planet Mars’ failed, if calamitous, assault of Earth as The Invasion. And the post-Invasion landscape found not only American President James Dale deceased, but incomprehensibly the entire line of succession, and any conceivable successors to the successors, deceased too. Ms. Dale was not consequently appointed President just as she did not seize the Presidency; rather she assumed the office much like a child might assume a family heirloom.

That precise lack of political ambition is prominent in Ms. Dale’s theme. (Her given name is Tamara; as President she still asked to be called Taffy.) While other first daughters have routinely found themselves in the limelight, Dale made a point to shun it, preferring to shut herself into the White House, listening to music for hours at a time (Juliana Hatfield was a favorite). That teenage dispassion, seen by some as a flaw in her assuming the Presidency, was cited elsewhere as a key strength, the cool remove from which she could view a broken earth at a time when cool heads were needed. “Whatever,” became her campaign slogan, but that was term two and term two never would have happened if term one had not achieved unlikely, unpredicted success, albeit mixed with the inevitable failures of a young adult who had merely hoped to major in French Literature at Barnard.

If her dispassionate attitude at first seemed an odd fit for post-Invasion America, it quickly proved a curiously potent tonic, at least for her contemporaries who were impassionedly enamored by Ms. Dale’s “s--- happens” attitude, the phrase she proffered in her first State of the Union, causing some to faint but others to cheer, before gradually transformed into a kind of inverted rallying cry. Rather than complain about what was, she just sort of casually pointed out what could be, and didn’t understand why, like, you know, it wasn’t.

She dispatched Vice President Shirley Manson to Mars to tell them everything was cool, unless Mars was going to decide it wasn’t in which case it wouldn’t be with Earth either. She engineered what she called the “What’s the Big Deal?”, a sort of modern twist on FDR’s fabled New Deal, in which she used the still simmering Invasion after-effects to create a government that worked for the people even as she still found creative ways to let the people work for themselves.

It was a malleable kind of political theory that the press tagged as Go-With-The-Flowism. Yet in going with the flow, Ms. Dale just as often opened herself up to political dead-ends from which she struggled to remove herself. So too was her pliability too often marked less by a taking it easy shrug than good old fashioned teenage contrarianism. After all, it was a barely kept secret within the White House that daughter was not on best terms with father and mother, and so when daughter was precipitously placed in father's position, it was perhaps inevitable that she would not merely seek to forge her own path but to consciously forge a path in opposition to her father’s.

Yet in Ms. Dale’s second term, which was chiefly spurred by the get out the vote efforts of her legions of political groupies, The Taffy Apples, her Go-With-The-Flowism reached unprecedented heights as she sought to move forward by looking backward, taking a page from the original Founding Fathers as something of an ode to Richie Norris, First ever First Husband. In Mr. Norris’s mumbly, only semi-memorable speech outside a crumbled U.S. Capitol post-Invasion, he called for a return to living in teepees, “because it’s better in a lot of ways.” This was ridiculed in most quarters at the time of its utterance, and President Dale did not give it much public credence, though she leaned on its inherent ethos anyway, borrowing heavily from indigenous Americans’ tribal government.

Indeed, Ms. Dale was the driving force behind a new global union that she modeled on the Iroquois Confederacy’s Great Law of Peace, bringing together a council of fifty nations, spurring post-Invasion Earth toward an ecumenical representative democracy, something of a stunning reversal from Ms. Dale’s first days in the East Bedroom of the White House, which was rather infamously littered with the then First Daughter’s books by Emma Goldman and other assorted anarchists. In that way, Ms. Dale’s own journey mimicked the journey undertaken by post-Invasion America; they came of age together.

keira knightley sits at the end of the steps and stares into the approaching abyss

Some Drivel On...The Patriot

Adam Gopnik went long on the American Revolution in a recent New Yorker piece by employing Justin du Rivage’s book “Revolution Against Empire” as a means to speculate how America could have become Canada. And while I did not necessarily agree with the overriding thesis, I was nonetheless enamored by some of its contentions, particularly how participants at the time viewed the war less as Rebellion v King and more as two political parties quarreling. But what really interested me was one of those infamous New Yorker parentheticals. It went: (Mel Gibson’s Revolutionary War movie, “The Patriot,” made this point, as his “The Passion of the Christ” did of Roman crucifixion; say what you will about his politics, Gibson is good at reminding us of the core violence in our favorite myths. Crosses and muskets really are lethal weapons.) The “point” to which Gopnik refers ties back to another book cited in the article, Holger Hoock’s “Scars of Independence”, which shows, Gopnik writes, that the war “was far more brutal than our usual memory of it allows.” I have not read Hoock’s book, but I have read John Buchanan’s “Road to Guilford Courthouse: The American Revolution in the Carolinas” which makes, amongst many others, the same point. “The Patriot” does indeed make space for this sort of violence, but, as it often is with Gibson, that violence is mostly just gruesome excess tangential to a hero’s preconceived coronation.

It is 1776. The revolution is piping hot. Gibson’s Benjamin Martin, however, has turned pacifist on account of his service in the French & Indian War, leaving him at odds with many of his fellow South Carolinians, including his own son Gabriel (Heath Ledger) who is raring to enlist. And while Gabriel is saddled with a woefully conceived and played love story, this character nevertheless is strikingly written as someone raring to join simply because it’s a war and that’s what you do, less patriotism and more proving your manhood and making a mark by picking off redcoats with a musket. This is what Benjamin has consciously rejected.

When he gives in, as he must, it is less by conscious choice than the frenzy of emotion. This happens when the redcoats turn up at his door, searching for Gabriel, an escaped prisoner, and Benjamin’s second son, Thomas (Gregory Smith), is shot trying to protect Gabriel by the requisitely sadistic chief villain Colonel William Tavington (Jason Isaacs, shooting off sparks in a stock role). The ensuing scene, when Benjamin enlists his third and fourth sons to help him stalk and then annihilate Tavington’s regiment, rendered with the absence of music to give it a wickedly visceral kick, capped by a shot of Benjamin hacking away with his hatchet at an already dead body while his trembling sons look on, truly and viciously illuminating the violence in our favorite myths that Gopnik mentions in his New Yorker piece, is the movie’s high point.

Alas, in the face of that backroad massacre, the movie itself recoils from such monstrous violence, where even a later cannonball beheading is designed more for banal shock value than any kind of grisly psychology. No, “The Patriot”, which was directed by Roland Emmerich, not Gibson, orders a retreat into more commercially comfortable confines, where Benjamin’s small band of swamp rats, loosely based on Francis Marion’s, stand up to their oppressors through a variety of confrontations that can, frankly, skew just as comic as heart-racing. But looming over all of it, driving the narrative, is the bad blood between Benjamin and Tavington, made even badder when, sure enough, Tavington offs Gabriel and Gabriel’s bride. In that way, the conclusion, set at Yorktown, where the Revolution was, for all intents and purposes won, becomes less about the cause than these two getting it on, brought home in Benjamin, on the battlefield, a coninental army of one, taking up the flag and essentially co-opting the cause in the name of a single man’s revenge.

Logan

James Mangold’s “Logan” is the conclusion to a trilogy centered on Wolverine, the bone claw spouting anti-hero of Marvel’s “X-Men” universe, and those films are part of an even more expansive “X-Men” movie universe that begin all the way back in 2000. This reviewer has not seen an “X-Men” movie since 2006, and did not see either film leading up to “Logan”, which is a necessary disclosure regarding my mostly ahistorical perspective of this franchise. In that same light, however, I can also state that not knowing anything much about what came before does not prevent enjoyment or understanding of Mangold’s film. It does not because Mangold builds backstory almost exclusively with mood, engineering a palpable pall, one hanging over the entire film through the weariness of its principal characters and the dreariness of its establishing locales. He is also helped immensely by Hugh Jackman’s star turn, one that admirably resists starriness every step of the way.

The movie opens with Wolverine – née Logan (Hugh Jackman) – down and out and sleeping in the back of the limousine he now drives just to get by. He is woken by a few thieves trying to the lift tires. With a comically exhausted countenance, Logan confronts them and they promptly shoot him. He does not then so much roar back to life, on account of his unique accelerated healing process, as reluctantly rise. Rather than flee, the thieves push him and so Logan reveals the bone claws and has at it, ripping these guys to shreds, as Mangold delicately yet forcefully turns the tone of the scene from humor to terror. And while sympathy is not exactly elicited for the thieves, neither is there much empathy engendered for Logan, as Jackman works hard to actually put you off, transforming a rudimentary action scene into something more akin to psychological horror. Logan, you think watching this, is messed up.

Whereas violence in superhero movies is so often lyrically abstract, here, as it is elsewhere, it is grisly, something not to cheer for but to recoil from, which is also what Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), once Wolverine’s caretaker and the overseer of so many mutants, is doing with his own superpower, telepathic abilities that have become dangerous and uncontrollable without medication on account of seizures. While once they sought to help the world, now they hide out from it near the Mexican border, in an abandoned smelting plant that looks shot out, like something from a “Mad Max”-ish apocalyptic wasteland, mirroring the fact that mutants have been removed from the bloodstream, leaving Logan and Xavier as the last of their kind.

Or are they? Something, of course, is required to trigger the erosion of that stasis and it is a little girl, Laura (Dafne Keen), in the care of Gabriela (Elizabeth Rodriguez) who seeks out Logan to ask for his help in ferrying Laura to safety. That is because Laura is a mutant too, one created by the corporate villains that emerge as the film’s lone weak spot, a mysterious corporation acting out for all the usual reasons. They might have done better to remain faceless, existing as the frightening Other, like an early sequence when they descend on the smelting plant, their weaponry and tactical gear emitting the distinct air of a SWAT team descending on illegal immigrants.

It is no emblematic accident that “Logan” begins near the Mexican border. Even the early films in the franchise connected the plight of immigrants, legal or otherwise, with mutants, though “Logan” is less interested in spelling it out with speechifying, just letting it exist on the periphery, alluding to the idea of these actual Americans who want to get somewhere better. In “Logan” that somewhere better becomes Eden, some sort of vaguely defined mutant haven in North Dakota where Laura yearns to escape. Its on-the-nose name suggests make-believe, and that seems to be confirmed when Logan stumbles across this very Eden referenced in one of Laura’s X-Men comics. And while this is intended to arouse suspense in the road trip that the three of them undertake (is it really there?), it also speaks to how Mangold seeks to inject a comic with life.

To do so, Mangold samples George Stevens’s lauded 1953 western “Shane”, going so far as to include a middle passage where Logan, Laura and Xavier briefly hole up with the Munsons whose family owned farm is under constant threat from some corporate heavies, giving the impression that not much has changed since the days of the Wyoming Territory. And while Logan turns heavily on the dynamic between its titular character and the young mutant in his charge, eliciting obvious shades of Shane and the young boy who idolizes him, the most interesting tension exists between Logan and himself. This is emblemized in the film’s most pertinent twist, essentially forcing Logan to confront his own lost youth. In the end, his character’s deeds may be noble, but Jackman rarely evinces nobility, hardly allowing Logan to even warm up to Laura, and eyeing his own past with equal parts bitterness, confusion and rage. It’s not the sort of heroism we are accustomed to with our superheroes, but it’s definitely real.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Saboteur (1942)

There are times when Alfred Hitchcock’s “Saboteur” feels like a dry run for “North by Northwest”, given that it involves a wrongfully accused man attempting to prove his innocence by way of a cross-country chase with a blonde predominantly by his side. But “North by Northwest” found both humor and tension in a cocktail of screwball and suspense, all stirred together by the sublime Cary Grant who, in the company of Eva Marie Saint, rendered being the Mistaken Man as something of a gas. “Saboteur”, on the other hand, remains more serious, if not fairly hokey. It is telling that Hitchcock yearned for Gary Cooper to play the lead, before settling on Robert Cummings, suggesting the film’s inherent all-American attitude. The wrongly accused “Saboteur” is not simply out to prove his innocence; he is out to protect his country from harm.

That harm is swiftly established in the opening scene. The aircraft factory where Barry Kane (Cummings) works is blown up, presumably by the mystery man, Fry (Norman Lloyd), he runs into right before the explosion. Alas, no Fry works there he is told, meaning Barry becomes the prime suspect, forcing him to try and find Fry to prove his innocence, and trying to find Fry initiates a cross country chase in which the chase becomes something of a secondary concern. As one character says to Barry about his forced road trip, “I’ve always thought that was the best way to learn about this country, and the surest test of the American heart.”

Indeed, while there are several suspenseful set pieces, and while the action eventually concerns thwarting a nefarious plot to sabotage an American battleship in New York City, what Hitchcock really seems to be doing, in a movie that was released into a WWII world, is testing the American heart, taking his movie on a road trip to various American small towns, where so much apocrypha might lead one to believe that the heart is so much truer. That is not necessarily what Barry Kane finds, discovering so much treachery in plain sight, like that the home of Charles Tobin (Otto Kruger), whose omnipresent laugh and smile betray fascist leanings. “A man like you can’t last in a country like this,” declares Barry.

The question, however, becomes what is this country? You see remnants of what was, or the way it was thought to be, in a sequence like the kindly old blind composer, Phillip Martin (Vaughan Glaser), who briefly gives Barry a place to rest from the rain and get warm by the fire. And while Barry’s handcuffs, and the subsequent appearance of Phillip’s daughter Patricia (Priscilla Lane), allows for suspense, the sequence has much of its suspense strained out on account of Martin’s bemused dignity. He senses Barry’s handcuffs, and though he may be blind, he can see that presumed innocence is an American right.

Patricia does too, sent along with Barry at the request of her father to aid this presumed innocent man, though it takes her awhile to believe in his innocence, a crucial delienation; this is not a movie that forces motivation on characters but allows them to think for themselves, like the circus train where Barry and Patricia briefly hide out as the performers aboard have a debate and take a vote to determine whether to give them safe haven or turn them in. This sequence is democracy in action, people keeping people in check.

In these moments, and others, like Barry fleeing Tobin’s compound on a horse, which feels like a scene excised from some John Wayne western, Hitchcock presents American ideals with such straightforward sentimentality that it suggests parody, as if he finds the thought of virtue in the face of such evil as absurd, almost fanciful in comparison to Tobin’s argument for “the competence of totalitarian nations.” Hitch, after all, was rather famously something of an autocrat on set, one who reveled in directorial power, the sort of power that Tobin expresses his desire for, and so I can’t help but imagine Hitchcock kind of looking at Barry like the King George of “Hamilton” looked at his foremost American rival, not quite believing that President Washington would of his own volition resign his post. Hitchcock gives Barry Kane his due even if you can still sense him raising his eyebrows as he does so.

“Saboteur” quite famously concludes at the Statue of Liberty, a sequence that is still a stunner in the modern day, maybe more so because of the conspicuous absence of manipulative music, Hitchcock needing only his own dexterous moviemaking skills to play us like a piano, and taking our breath away even as he makes us gasp. Still, there is a moment that stuck with me more, when Barry and Patricia infiltrate a party of a high society woman in cahoots with the bad guys. Discovered, Barry and Patricia attempt to flee the mansion, only to find the exits blocked, and then drift to the dance floor in one another’s arms, disappearing amidst the upper crust with no idea what sinister forces lurk just behind closed doors and smiling faces. And Barry wonders aloud what that might be like, to allow all this pomp and circumstance to mask the myriad problems of the world, as if they didn’t matter. Momentarily, he does just that, but it is a self-indulgent realm where he nevertheless knows he cannot stay. Duty calls.

My Criterion Wishes Demands

The Criterion Collection, that hoity toity distribution inc. thankfully reveling in contributing to the power of a DVD shelf, a power that an archetypal cineaste still believes in, just announced the films it would be adding to its for-purchase library this October. This list was, as it usually is, impressive, ranging from newer films, like Cinema Romantico’s #3 film of last year, to sort of newer films, to a film meant to capitalize on current pop culture trends, to your obligatory Hitchcock, Kubrick and Welles, to The Boldest Experiment In Advertising History! This is all well and good. I have no complaints.

Still, I have some complaints. No list on the interwebs is complete without an asinine “What about...” riposte, so here’s mine...

What about... Stromboli?

Yes, yes, I am aware that “Stromboli” already is in The Criterion Collection. But. Criterion has only made “Stromboli” available as part of its 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini. And while I like “Journey to Italy”, absolutely, and while I am completely cool with “Europe ’51”, sure, “Stromboli” is, like, my neorealist jam, man, and my favorite Ingrid. And I don’t want to cough up $80 to get 3 Films when I just want 1, okay, though no disrespect, Roberto. So c’mon, Criterion. Even George Lucas, who never saw a few bucks he wouldn’t take, not even out of the tip jar at the Starbucks he had installed on Skywalker Ranch, made his “Star Wars” films available individually. So give this guy just a single order of “Stromboli”, why don’t you?

What about... Wife Vs. Secretary?

Yes, yes, Criterion is all about the auteur, fair enough, but Jean Harlow is Jean Harlow, son. Savvy? And if you’re gonna fudge your dumb rules that don’t really exist then fudge ’em for the Platinum Blonde. And there is no Jean Harlow in the Criterion Collection aside from “City Lights”, which only counts because she had an uncredited appearance as an extra which does not count at all. And though you could argue all day about peak Jean Harlow, I’ll go to bat for “Wife vs Secretary”, which is due for a cultural re-examination, and which has a solid rom com ethos that nevertheless quietly erupts into something else, something deeper, something sadder, which is brought home in the best few seconds, at the end of Clark Gable’s bed, that Harlean Carpenter put on film.

What about... Dick?

Andrew Fleming’s re-imagining of the Watergate scandal as teenybopper farce has re-entered the cultural conversation as of late, on account of obvious events, and it’s about damn time too. Cinema Romantico championed this movie since its 1999 release, which is to say before Cinema Romantico was a thing, and while we have fondness for “All the President’s Men”, we have always considered “Dick” to be the seminal Watergate film. (Kirsten Dunst is also still the Best Actress of 1999 in our hearts.) And because “All the President’s Men” is not in your collection, this is your chance, Criterion, to say the same thing. Betsy Jobs & Arlene Lorenzo 4-Ever.

What about... Cool Runnings?

Tell you what, Criterion, I will even write the introductory essay for you free of charge.

What about... My Cousin Vinny?

This. Above all others, past, present and future, a Criterion release of “My Cousin Vinny” is imperative for a proper home movie collection. For if Criterion is, as it claims, “a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films” and “the most significant archive of contemporary filmmaking available to the home viewer” then the lack of Marisa Tomei as Mona Lisa Vito in its archives is not only glaring but unacceptable. If her performance is the touchstone for all others (it is) and you are called Criterion (you are) then her performance must be in your collection or your moniker is illegitimate. I’ll expect to see this title in November. Good day.

Learning to Vlog

Last week, at Cinema Romantico’s bi-monthly weekly meeting, the powers that be (TPTB), along with the powers that are absolutely not (TPTAAN), assembled to analyze the future advertising value of our written content. TPTB and TPTAAN universally agreed this value was nil, likely lower. As such, a consultant firm was brought in to strategize a hybrid visual & written content strategy at Cinema Romantico going forward. This yielded a cross promotional opportunity when a local music club hosting a weekly gig for a punk band – Doctor Doom – comprised of three members dressed in costumes related to the Spiderman comic agreed to let Cinema Romantico #vlog a review of “Spider-Man: Homecoming” from a chair in front of the stage while Doctor Doom performed. This #vlog would feature a guest reviewer who agreed to disagree with everything Cinema Romantico said, even if he/she did not actually disagree with anything Cinema Romantico said because debate, even disingenuous debate, is, as content trends tell us, #WhatThePeopleWant.

Anyway, here is our first #vlog. We hope you enjoy it. Check back for more!

Tour de Pharmacy

Any Tour de France, the grande dame of multi-stage bicycle races, is rife with nefariousness we are told in “Tour de Pharmacy”, HBO’s recently premiered sports mockumentary chronicling a fictionalized version of the 1982 Tour de France in which farcical circumstances involving Finnish credit card debt lead to a race involving only five riders. We are told of this implicit nefariousness by Lance Armstrong, famous for winning the Tour de France seven times and just as famous for having those seven Tour de France victories voided on account of sanctions connected to doping. His presence on camera, in which he gives an anonymous interview where his identity is nonetheless revealed in a series of increasingly absurd ways, like sitting in a fur coat and cowboy hat to try and obscure his body shape, often feels queasily like an attempt by a confirmed asshole to save face by way of self-deprecation. It also speaks to how director Jake Szymanski is more content to lightly lampoon cycling’s culture of cheating than really try and satirically nail its ass to the wall.

Then again, someone else watching “Tour de Pharmacy” might find these Lance Armstrong bits hilarious. In fact, I’ve perused a couple other reviews that have cited them as highlights. Fair enough. That’s comedy, I guess, different strokes for different folks, and that is why Szymanski and writer Murray Miller are willing to do absolutely anything for a joke, going highbrow and lowbrow, obvious and obscure, getting cycling-specific and opting for tangents that have nothing at all to do with cycling. To explain blood doping, for instance, in which red blood cells are boosted to aid the cyclist’s performance, Szymanski and Miller create a spot-on middle school biology class-ish video before taking a hysterically bizarre turn that ends in a show-stopping cameo, which is a swift evocation of the whole mockumentary’s scene strategy. 1.) Cycling joke. 2.) Joke that deviates from cycling. 3.) Guest Star.

The guest stars are piled high, and, just like the jokes, will have to be graded on a viewer-by-viewer basis. It’s fun, sure, to see Kevin Bacon as the gleefully corrupt head of UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale) and Andy Samberg as one of the Tour de France competitors, idiot American, Marty Hass (Andy Samberg), representing Nigeria because he is the heir to a West African diamond mine, but I found myself rolling even more with Maya Rudolph as a former Cycling Enthusiast correspondent emitting the air of a historian who already knows these stories inside and out. Even better is Jon Hamm’s narration, which is best when it is less overtly funny and more Hamm giving droll gravitas to lines like “There is an honor among thieves code in cycling.” I’d like to hear Jon Hamm narrate a documentary about Merv Bodnarchuk.

Once, while watching college football with my friend Rory, I turned the TV to a showing of the ESPN documentary “Fab Five”, recounting the exploits of the five freshmen who lit a fire under the Michigan basketball program in the early 90s, which happened to be remembering the moment when Chris Webber infamously called a timeout his team did not have during the 1993 National Championship game. What was most noticeable, however, was the doc drawing this moment out to such histrionic length that it became comical, so comical that Rory commented on it. I thought of this while watching “Tour de Pharmacy”, not because it somehow manages to work in a pretty good joke about the Fab Five, though unbelievably it does, but because, in the end, the mockumentary perhaps best mocks the self-seriousness of so many sports documentaries.

This is evinced not only in Hamm’s stately voiceover but in the way the documentary sort of forgets about the bike race as it proceeds because its characters sort of forget about the bike race as it proceeds, the abrupt about-face at the race’s end capturing how the riders become pre-occupied with other matters, reducing the yellow jersey to the piece of clothing it is. Jeff Goldblum, playing the older version of Marty Hass, captures it best in his impeccable Goldblum-ese. He says: “The stakes were medium.”

Baby Driver

It was Jesse Wallace who once expressed his desire to write a novel taking place in the space of a pop song. And while “Baby Driver” may not fit into the space of a single pop song, writer/director Edgar Wright manages to squeeze it into the space of a playlist, an iPod playlist, that is, belonging to the titular character, the uniquely monikered Baby (Ansel Elgort), a youthful robbery getaway driver. Tinnitus in his ear means he listens to music almost constantly as a countermeasure to the non-stop hum. In the planning of a bank heist, the intimidating Bats (Jamie Foxx) demands to know if this apple faced wheelman, given his omnipresent earbuds, even heard the plan. Baby did and recites the scheme word for word, a comical moment but also a telling one – pop music is Baby’s pulse, like when he goes for coffee and the beat in his head (“Harlem Shuffle” by Bob & Earl) becomes indistinguishable from the world around him. And when music is fundamental to “Baby Driver” rather than ancillary is when the movie is best too.

The opening scene, in which Baby transports a triad of bank robbers to safety, sets the tone, a crazy car chase that is freshened up by how Wright and his editors, Jonathan Amos and Paul Machliss, cut to the rhythm of “Bellbottoms” by The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, where each swerve and skid feels in service to the song rather than the other way around, like the car chase itself is just providing harmony. In a later gun battle, the pop of each firearm syncopates with the song on the soundtrack. It is not only something akin to the bullet ballet of John Woo’s Hong Kong gun fu opuses taking place in the same universe as “La La Land”, but a rare moment, I suspect, when NRA members and liberal art lovers can come together.

Wright has made a career of not so much parodying genres he likes as inhabiting them to their core and then giving them, successfully or not, their own stylish spin. So in “Baby Driver” he hitches his wagon to the heist movie, with Baby indebted to a vaguely defined crime kingpin called Doc (Kevin Spacey) who pairs his driver with a revolving motley crew that sometimes includes Bats, but sometimes also includes Buddy (Jon Hamm) and Darling (Eiza González). Baby, of course, goes in for one last job, which turns out not to be a last job, which fuels his desire for escape with Debora (Lilly James), the idealized diner waitress with no backstory because she is a mere apparition, existing to give the principal male something to fight for.

Their relationship is intended as pivotal, and while it is crisply played by both James and Engort, the kinetic editing here does a disservice, chopping up potential character building moments into mere bursts of more moviemaking style. What’s worse, the situation into which Wright places them and the dialogue he gives them to recite never really gets at the idea of their age. They come across less like two kids in strangely adult situations desperate to recapture their lost youth than the two kids in “Airplane!” masquerading as adults, attempting to Escape Their Circumstances, just as the bank robbing storyline turns on a Big Job That Goes Wrong and The Bad Guy Who Cannot Be Killed. There is rarely any kind of enthusiastic amplification of these genre machinations for which Wright typically strives, like the moment in “Shaun of the Dead” when Lucy Davis gives the informative speech on How To Walk Like A Zombie, never mind the climactic blowup of “Hot Fuzz.”

The one performer here who truly transcends the material is Jamie Foxx. A conventional Loose Cannon, Foxx nevertheless injects gusts of life into the part, displaying an aptitude for sizing people up and exuding such convincing menace that Baby still comes across in genuine danger even in scenes where, per movie custom, we are conditioned to know he is not. In other words, Foxx inhabits the archetype and then deepens it, which is what “Baby Driver” itself only manages to do when music is at the forefront of the film, and the further the film goes, the less that applies. This is crystallized in the mixtapes Baby makes by recording everyday sounds and words on a vintage cassette recorder and then blending them into quotidian hip hop songs. It’s tempting to read this as a metaphor for “Baby Driver” as a remix of heist movies, but those mix tapes, so intriguing on their own, ultimately exist only as a means for blackmail later by Doc, emblemizing the way in which the longer the movie goes, the more Wright turns the story up in the mix and takes the music back. By the time it ended, I was ready to skip to the next track.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Valley of the Kings (1954)

“Valley of the Kings” opens with Ann Mercedes (Eleanor Parker), daughter of a renowned archaeologist, entering an archaeological excavation site overseen by dashing Mark Brandon (Robert Taylor), seeking his help in finishing her father’s lifelong quest to prove the Old Testament account of Joseph is true by finding an undiscovered tomb which connects to the pharaoh Ra-Hotep and antiquities in his name. That Mark acquiesces is initially due to Ann’s obligatory comeliness, though he and we learn fairly quick she is, in fact, married, to Philip played by Carlos Thompson from the get-go with a sinewy anti-charm that allows for Mark, and us, to distrust him instantly. Why Ann ever loved him in the first place, considering she is written and played by Parker with a hardy level-headedness, who knows, because the movie doesn’t really seem to and doesn’t care to know either. But whatever, Philip is out to get them, and so Ann and Mark will fall in love, though their love, despite the apparent real life off screen fling between Parker and Taylor, is conspicuously short on palpable ardor. What’s more, the film’s through line of Ann’s affirmation of faith continually gets lost along the way.

This narrative muddle can likely be traced back to “Valley of the Kings’” production which, based on several accounts, seems to have been a tad tumultuous. Parker laid blame at the feet of director Robert Pirosh, going so far as to say he didn’t know what he was doing. Pirosh, on the other hand, laid blame at the feet of the studio for operating on behalf of the movie’s stars, demanding changes that he didn’t want to make. With everyone feuding, it is tempting to speculate that legendary cinematographer Robert Sirtees, who shot “Ben Hur” amongst many others, became as much a director as Pirosh, and this speculation is enhanced by the film’s photography being the primary selling point.

In titling their movie MGM was not being flip; they up and went to the Valley of the Kings, the swath of tombs bearing ancient Egyptian Pharaohs. That wasn’t as easy over half a century ago, of course, and “Valley of the Kings” earned the distinction of being the first major Hollywood production to film in Egypt. They revel in it straight away, the opening shot an expansive one of innumerable extras set before the Pyramid of Giza. And while that might seem quaint now, what with Instagram inundated by shots of the most ancient of The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World as seen from inside the adjacent McDonald’s, back then seeing such exotic sights on the silver screen would have been novel. And Sirtees ensures that we see the landscape, no matter what may be going on in the foreground.

One of the film’s most spectacularly photographed scenes is the climactic tete-a-tete between Mark and Philip atop Ra-Hotep’s tomb, which is pieced together without music, accentuating the rawness of the legit locales, and it includes many wide angles to reinforce the idea that, yes, they are really there. That authenticiy is rendered just as acutely, if differently, in another fight scene in which Mark is made to battle with Salah, leader of a Tuareg tribe that rescues he and Ann from a brutal sandstorm, but who questions whether they are mere grave robbers or true believers. That is an interesting question and one the film really could have wrestled with, not only to make Ann’s ultimate affirmation of faith come home but to unpack its own intentions, whether the production was there for any higher purpose other than showing off the scenery to a public that might never get to see it. In the end, I am not sure it was.

Is Don Jr. Fredo, or Is He Someone Else?

The biggest plot twist so far of the bewildering, depressing soap opera currently engulfing the country where I live took place on Tuesday when President Donald Trump’s son, the appropriately named Donald Trump Jr., was discovered to have exchanged emails with a Russian lawyer in an attempt to dig up dirt on his father’s Presidential election rival Hillary Clinton. The emails contained a subject line so obviously incriminating (“Russia – Clinton – private and confidential”) that I actually was, for once, tempted to think it might really be FAKE NEWS™ since no one in his position could be dimwitted enough to so egregiously fail at covering his tracks. Except that Don Jr., in a moment that briefly threatened total protonic reversal, tweeted the emails out himself, seeming to mark him as so out of his depth that the internet practically exploded with innumerable comparisons of Don Jr. to Fredo Corleone, the infamously hapless and pitiful middle brother of “The Godfather.”

Philip Delves Broughton wrote this for The Evening Standard and George Takei tweeted it and The American Conservative wrote “Fredo Trump Futzes Up”, though some reports indicated that actual Trump aides were already calling Don Jr. Fredo, though probably not to his face. In writing for Vanity Fair, Yohana Desta works through this Fredo theory, writing that Don Jr. “believes himself to be the canny, ruthlessly efficient Michael—or at least a brash, manly Sonny” which, Desta, reckons “makes Junior the truest Fredo”, before reaching the theory that all the Trump kids probably fancy themselves Michael which makes them all Fredo. That’s a theory falling in line with The Daily Beast’s Erin Gloria Ryan who tweeted “I’ve long wondered who the Fredo of the Trump family is and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just a family of Fredos.” In grappling with the Fredo theory for Slate, however, Sam Adams sees calling Don Jr. Fredo as an insult to Fredo. And that is to say, it’s an insult to the late actor who portrayed Fredo, John Cazale, who may have been playing a character that was, as no less an authority than Wikipedia says so succinctly, “not very bright”, but wrung empathy anyway, a sad sack just looking for respect, raised to the level of tragedy rather than dunderheadedry (sic).

And so I think that to find Don Jr.’s true equivalent we have to turn away from “The Godfather” and to another mob movie – no, not “Goodfellas”, though if you told me that Don Jr. bought a fur coat for his wife after explicitly being told not to, a la Frankie Carbone, I would definitely not say you were wrong. I am thinking of another Martin Scorsese mob film, 1995’s “Casino.” There Robert DeNiro’s Sam “Ace” Rothstein is sent to Las Vegas on behalf of the Chicago Mob, building the Tangiers Casino up into something formidable, only to discover the frustrating necessity of having to keep, as he says in voiceover, “a few juiced-in local cowboys working.”

That includes Don Ward, “just another dumb fucking white man”, who only gets his job on the floor of Sam’s casino because he’s the county commissioner’s cousin. Later, when Sam is forced to fire Don Ward, the aforementioned county commissioner, Pat Webb (L.Q. Jones), pays Sam a visit to ask for Don’s job back. And not necessarily because he likes Don or because he thinks Don is a good employee, mind you. As Webb says himself with a chuckle, “Old Don is as useless a tits on a boar.” It’s simply that Don is family and because Don is family he deserves a job, even if his spectacular incompetence, as Sam says, jeopardizes the whole place.

Don Ward is not empathetic nor a tragic figure in a romanticized mafia opera. Don Ward is just a dumb lug who is where he is because of who he is, nothing more, so easily expendable yet utterly and exasperatingly indispensable. That is our Don Jr.

Then again, maybe Don Jr. is merely “Jackie Brown’s” Beaumont Livingston, dumb enough to climb into that trunk and seal his own fate, and already gone by the end of the first reel.

Mea Culpa (What’s In A Name?)

Earlier today Cinema Romantico published a post in which we speculated that Ansel Elgort’s jacket in “Baby Driver” was specifically designed to look like Han Solo’s jacket in the (real) “Star Wars” trilogy because Elgort is set to portray Han Solo in an upcoming origin movie. One fairly enormous flaw in this theory was promptly brought to our attention – that is, Alden Ehrenreich is playing Han Solo in the upcoming origin movie, not Ansel Elgort.

Did Cinema Romantico not know this, or forget this, or confuse one AE actor for another, or simply become so taken with Ansel Elgort’s jacket in “Baby Driver” that we were lulled into thinking he was going to be young Han Solo? I have no idea. And neither does our famously terrible team of editors which probably should have double-checked this yet were so secure in their Elgort-as-Solo knowledge that they just rolled with it like like so many Sabé-as-Amidala suckers, like that one time I emphatically kept telling my confounded friend Matt that Annette Bening was absolutely not in “The Great Outdoors” and that I would not entertain his foolhardy assertions to the contrary.

I’d like to say that we (I) simply got it wrong because we (I) go to great lengths to tune out most of the noise around these “Star Wars” films, or because Elgort was in the running for the role along with Ehrenreich and we (I) merely got them mixed up. But we (I) have no idea if that’s true or we are (I am) just making it up as a means to try and save face.

If I was the current American President I’d probably just say everyone else was wrong and stick to my original take of Elgort as Solo in the hopes that my devout frustrated followers would accept my lies as facts, so much so that we would all be arguing Ehrenreich was Elgort even when the opening credits of the actual Han Solo origin movie said Ehrenreich and even when Ehrenreich literally appeared on screen and was clearly Ehrenreich, not Elgort, because, hey, that’s exactly what Lucasfilm would want you to think. But Cinema Romantico cannot abide. So, we took down the post and have put up this mea culpa in its place. We got it wrong, we got it spectacularly wrong, and we are idiots, though we have never not, and never will not, own our idiocy. Apologies all around.

And before anyone rightfully screams at us “Stick to Keira Knightley in hats, moron!”, well, we are already one step head of you…

Whoops! I mean…

Mommy Dead and Dearest

In watching Erin Lee Carr’s HBO documentary “Mommy Dead and Dearest”, which recounts the 2015 murder of Dee Dee Blancharde of which her teenage daughter Gypsy Rose emerged as the prime suspect, my mind kept flashing back to Peter Jackson’s “Heavenly Creatures” (1994). Partially that was because the latter centered on the true life story of Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker, two 1950s New Zealand teenage girls who murdered Parker’s mother. Jackson, however, narrativized their story by honing in on the alternate reality that the girls constructed, plunging us so deep into these fantasies alongside the girls that you were terrifyingly able to grasp why they were driven to such madness. Carr’s documentarian approach, on the other hand, ensures that we stand outside the story of Gypsy Rose, rendering the scarily absurd turns her story takes in the starkest terms imaginable rather than the most fantastical, leaving us with less understanding than incomprehension.

“Mommy Dead and Dearest” opens with footage of Gypsy Rose being interrogated by a detective. He asks if she killed her mother. “No sir,” says Gypsy Rose. And for a moment, the documentary suggests the recent rush of true crime episodic investigative journalism, a lengthy working through with various sides weighed to try and get to the bottom of Who Did It? as Carr occasionally ruminates on What It All Means. But while Carr’s voice is occasionally heard on the other end of interviews asking questions, she is generally at a remove, because the actual content of the documentary, so distressing and difficult to believe, is enough. And Carr does not string out the answer of Who Did It? No, it does not take long to incriminate Gypsy Rose and her boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn because they so easily incriminated themselves. Still, in the aftermath of their guilt even more polarizing questions emerge, such as the possibility of homicide being justifiable.

Gypsy Rose quite plainly appeared to be a victim of Munchausen by proxy, which both Gypsy Rose’s public defender and doctors interviewed cite. That is to say, Dee Dee kept her daughter drugged which she indicated was necessary because of a laundry list of physical ailments from which Gypsy Rose suffered, though all these ailments turned out to be make-believe, a fantasy concocted by a mother to keep her child trapped in what amounted to never-ending infancy, holding Gypsy Rose hostage as a means to foster a semi-celebrity lifestyle, glimpsed in home videos. That Dee Dee was able to pull this off, carting her to different doctors and changing her stories, which medical records seen on camera bear out, speaks to a stunning failure of the medical system. A pediatric neurologist interviewed actually seems to have seen through the ruse, but states that he failed to follow up because he knew the fiscal and promotional gain from too many in the medical community would nevertheless overrule the little girl’s well-being. You might wish that Carr pressed some of these ignorers on camera, but the proof of their negligence is in where it all went wrong anyway, which was Gypsy Rose deciding her only way out was by turning to murder.

She achieved this goal with help from Godejohn, whom she meets online and who suffers from his own mental ailments, seen principally in police interrogation where he sounds perfectly calm. Their online relationship delved into role-playing and while being questioned he almost comes across like he’s playing another role. And if initially “Mommy Dead and Dearest” hints at Godejohn as something more than a mere accomplice, Carr doubles back to raise the possibility that Gypsy Rose, raised in environment where her mother’s manipulation was all she knew, may have manipulated Godejohn.

That’s almost impossible to pin down, where no matter how reflective and polite Gypsy Rose might come across in jailhouse interviews you are still left wondering about the purity of her motives, if this is all an opportunity to save some sort of face. Perhaps it’s not and Carr, frankly, doesn’t claim to know and, as per her un-intrusive presence, leaves it up in the air, underlining the unfathomable psychology lingering behind the whole affair. Though that’s not to say that “Mommy Dead and Dearest” is without any semblance of hard-won hope as Gypsy Rose’s father Rod, who married Dee Dee when he got her pregnant and then divorced her early on because it clearly was not meant to be, emerges as the film’s sympathetic through-line. Re-married, he has a sad smile as he and his wife talk through where his daughter wrong, what they might have done different and whether it would have mattered. It’s hard to know honestly, just as it’s hard to know with Gypsy Rose what’s true and what’s not. Still, the not knowing is what makes it so moving that Rod strives to form a new bond despite so much sordid history.

In a film that features the worst of humanity, it is moving to see someone wanting to believe the best.

The Beguiled

If Don Siegel’s 1971 film “The Beguiled”, the rare Clint Eastwood foray into erotica, where he lusted after an entire boarding school of girls and they lusted after him was seen from the perspective of its masculine star, then Sofia Coppola’s “The Beguiled” remake turns Siegel’s film inside out, rooting its point of view to the women. It also scrubs away much of the original’s vulgarity and violence for a prim, proper, almost fairytale aesthetic underlining the seminary setting where Miss Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman) tutors the young girls in her charge in the ways of being “good Christian women”, which is how the repressive era preferred their women be seen and is consequently the same lens through which Coppola shows us these seven girls. And while Coppola does eventually smear that lens, she never devolves into overheated hysteria like the 1971 film, likely because, as you can almost hear a seemly southern gentleman saying, such hysteria is unbecoming of a lady.

The story turns on eleven year old Amy (Oona Laurence) finding an injured Union soldier, Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell), and helping him back to her boarding school so his wounds can be mended. When he asks after the slaves, Amy explains they all left, a fairly conspicuous evasion of the era’s most incendiary sin. Indeed, violence and vulgarity is not all that Coppola scrubs from this version. Though not seeing these women engaged in the no doubt hard work – cleaning, cooking, tilling – that went with maintaining such an opulent residence comes across like a conscious stylistic choice to further underline the overriding importance of appearances, it also evokes the absence of those on which these white Confederate women would have relied. And while the war itself is present, with low rumbles of cannon fire on the soundtrack and smoke on the horizon, it remains distinctly, deliberately abstract as “The Beguiled” purposely jettisons politics of the War Between the States to exclusively scrutinize the War Between the Sexes. In recounting that war, Coppola is frequently successful.

McBurney, frankly, often comes across less like a soldier than a male odalisque, framed to ogle as he is propped up in bed where his leg mends. When he initially arrives, passed out cold, Miss Martha washes the dirt off his body, pausing to wring out her scrub like she might pass out, a moment which Kidman plays at a more comical pitch than sensual, like she, beacon of piety, has run up against an immovable erotic object. He, quite aware of the spell he casts, indulges in it, though with far less of the naked aggression in Siegel’s version, with Farrell cutting a courtly figure as he goes about whispering sweet nothings in each one’s individual company, making promises he never intends to keep, particularly with Edwina, who projects her desire to escape these stuffy surroundings onto this interloper. This, however, is an underwritten subplot that strangely gets the shrift in the film’s denouement, though Dunst still provides her character a credible melancholy ache and a closeted carnal desire.

His manipulations eventually give way, and when they do so does his fragile physical state which suddenly turns perilous, transforming him from manipulator into monster, though, like so many monsters, he ultimately proves more make believe. When Marie (Addison Riecke) makes the fateful suggestion for how they might be rid of their guest it is astonishing to see how it easy it comes to her, like it was hovering in the air all the while just waiting for someone to grasp it, and when Miss Martha gives it her blessing, Kidman delicately but demonically allows her character to revel in this sudden acquisition of power. And though McBurney’s comeuppance takes place in a traditionally suspenseful context, Coppola, as she does elsewhere, deliberately strips away that suspense, the capper hinging on McBurney’s own oblivious doltishness with Miss Martha’s wicked smile as the laugh track, the latter revealing the movie’s inclination to laugh at McBurney rather than be frightened by him. To that point, when McBurney gets hold of a gun and waves it around, it is born as much from desperate impotence as menace, evinced in how quickly he discards that gun when Edwina lets herself into his room and more or less throws herself at him.

Just as Coppola eliminates so much suspense, she also does away with the majority of the material’s inherent grisliness, most acutely emblemized in a shot when Miss Martha’s nightgown is streaked with blood, which elicits the air of an oil painting hanging in some musty museum where the tastefulness of the gore yearns to illustrate how the macabre and the femine are not meant to mix. The concluding shot, with the seven women gathered on the front porch, resembles a painting too, as if they are sitting for a portrait, though the portrait begins in a wide angle with the women in the distant background and McBurney in the foreground. Then the camera closes in on the women, slowly removing McBurney from the frame, and you can almost hear a seemly southern gentleman saying to himself as he passes by, “My, my, what good Christian women.”

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (1966)

“The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!” was released in 1966, smack in the middle of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, rendering the film extremely topical which no doubt aided in its reaping of six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director for Norman Jewison. It comes on like a farce, opening with a frenzy aboard a Soviet submarine that inadvertently runs aground just off the coast of a New England vacation island and leading to a panic amongst the inhabitants about an invasion they increasingly think is underway that really isn’t. Yet the further it goes, “The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!” stops serving the Cold War to us as a spoof and slowly turns more serious, proffering a solution, of sorts, to the Stars & Stripes/Hammer & Sickle standoff by reminding us that (gasp!) we are all The Same.

Amidst a sprawling ensemble, the emergent principal character is Walt Whittaker (Carl Reiner), a writer on something like a working vacation with his family of four in a scenic home set all on its lonesome on the tip of the island, quietly underscoring America’s isolation still vulnerable to the Russian attack, which happens when a small crew from the stranded sub led by Lieutenant Rozanov (Alan Arkin) semi-politely infiltrates the Whitaker home. Walt becomes something less than the resistance, more like a reluctant cooperator willing to believe Rozanov when he says that the Russians merely want to jostle their sub free and make haste for friendlier waters. And the film’s omniscient viewpoint makes clear that this is true, though Walt is a bit more prone to emotional whims than is his Russian counterpart, underscored by the performances, with Reiner playing at a broader comical pitch and Arkin, who was nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award, finding humor in his character’s increasing exasperation even as he deftly manages to exhibit a believable threat to the characters onscreen while simultaneously communicating to the audience that he means no harm.

Rozanov stands in stark contrast to Fendall Hawkins (Paul Ford), a Gloucester local and veteran who, swinging around his vintage sword, is a caricature of a war hawk, more than ready to lead his amateur troops, beer-guzzling, nameless lackeys, into what he’s absolutely certain is the onset of WWIII. They are not inconspicuously more gung-ho about going to war than the Russians, and their noisy presence seems to indicate a movie barreling toward a comic reckoning, though the way Jewison gets there and what actually happens once he does are not necessarily part and parcel to the set-up.

Indeed, many of the film’s funny bits, like Walt’s semi-heroic bike ride from his cottage into town, like the town drunk trying to make like Paul Revere and failing, are conveyed in long and wide takes, the editing rather restrained than rapid fire, straining the momentum on the ride to the inevitable showdown. What’s more, an odd romance blooms between Alison (Andrea Dromm), the Whittakers’ neighbor, and Alexei Kolchin (John Phillip Law), tasked with standing guard at the Whittakers’. There is a shot, in fact, of them walking hand-in-hand on the beach, and if you twist that just one degree you might have Lt. Frank Drebin and Jane Spencer walking hand-in-hand on the beach in “The Naked Gun”, but Jewison is oddly intent on playing this little subplot straight, which means every time it pops up it drains precious fuel from the farce.

This occasional earnestness means that the film’s climactic showdown, Americans and Russians standing across from one another in raggedy battle lines with guns drawn and frowns on their faces, does not exactly emerge from nowhere, though its solemnity is nevertheless still rather jarring. “The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!” spends most of the lead-up to this moment lampooning the idea of war, only to stop dead in its tracks and turn the other way, asking us to take it very, very seriously. It’s made worse because the film itself doesn’t seem to know how to resolve this tonal twist, evoked in the way the scene goes on and on, like it is trying desperately to think its way out of this narrative jam in which it finds itself. It escapes, sure enough, with a nameless child tagging in for the god of the machine, a less than graceful wrap-up, true, though still one that fanned the flame of humanity and left me, because I was watching this movie 51 years after its release and specifically because of America’s recent reinvigoration of the Cold War, wondering how it might play today.

Modern critiques of “The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!” often deem it “dated”, which likely is directed at the film’s aesthetic though I half-suspect it also targets this Pollyannish resolution, as if the thought that we really all could get along with just a little push in the rightful direction is so laughable these days as to seem obsolete.

Shout-Out to the Extra: Jurassic Park Version

Shout-Out to the Extra is a sporadic series in which Cinema Romantico shouts out the extras, the background actors, the bit part players, the almost out of your sight line performers who expertly round out our movies with epic blink & you’ll miss it care.

“Jurassic Park”, 1993’s blockbuster box office champ, was notable for its dinosaur special effects, obviously, as well as Jeff Goldblum’s scene-stealing, kooky supporting performance. Yet there was another performance just as memorable as Goldblum’s. No, not Sam Neill, though he was efficiently taciturn, and not Samuel L. Jackson, who chainsmoked with fine verve, but Laura Dern as Dr. Ellie Satler, an underwritten part compared to her male brethren that Dern nonetheless gave so many little bits of actorly flourish, both in scenes and moments where she is featured and on the edge of frames where if you watch close you see she is never not up to something.

I think of when we are introduced to both her and Neill’s Dr. Alan Grant on a paleontological dig in the Badlands of Wyoming, which allows space for us to simultaneously see Grant’s expertise and his dislike for kids when he lectures a particularly precocious young boy on the attack methods of velociraptors. As Neill’s character is about to launch into his soliloquy, Dern, standing at his side, busts out this incredulous grin and says, mostly to herself, “Uh oh, here we go.” Perhaps I’m wrong, but it strikes me as a moment Dern improvised given how its dialed back a little bit on the audio and sort of off to the side of the principal action. And yet it speaks volumes, evoking how this forthcoming lecture is typical for Dr. Grant, and something Dr. Sattler has learned to live with.

Though Dern is a principal cast member, this moment also speaks to the extra’s plight, forced to populate scenes where they are never ever the focal point and yet round them out anyway by always appearing to be engaged with what’s happening in front of them. Like, say, this extra…

She is simply there to provide an audience for Dr. Grant, of course, a homo sapien filling in the frame. And given that this scene was filmed at Red Rock Canyon in the Mojave Desert, which could have been the comfiest day of shooting, it would be easy to forgive an extra for just coasting. This extra does not coast. She is listening to Dr. Grant, by God, even if it might be the 29th take in a row for Neill, hanging on every word and then reacting to whatever those words, like these...

Here in the wake of Dr. Grant explaining just how easily a velociraptor can spill your intestines, the extra exudes less horror than “Golly gee willikers”, a choice I admire. Just like Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler cannot undertake an excavation without a few trusted underlings, a director like Steven Spielberg cannot film a scene of an excavation without a few trusted extras to make it all seem real. When the actual velociraptors show up later they are predominantly at the mercy of animatronics, but this extra is at the mercy of no one’s decisions but her own. Respect.

Pour one out for the extra...

Chin Up, Cheer Up

The republic’s been a little frothy, America, and if you’re feeling blue about it, fear not. Because hey, in a mere 12 years, which gives us at least enough time to send another probe to Pluto* (*planet), Summer Hathaway will be eligible to run for President meaning she can become President in 2032. Hold holy this last hope, dear reader.

Summer Hathaway: Likely President in 2032 

A Brief Rumination on a Strange 4th of July

There are innumerable beautiful images in “Man on Wire”(2008), James Marsh’s documentary recounting of Philippe Petit’s wire walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center, seeing as how numerous photographs, black & white and color, exist of the storied event. One image, however, that is just as incisive, though a bit less picturesque, is one that Marsh dreamed up, capturing it in one of his documentarian re-enactments, conjuring up a moment that existed in a way he thinks it might have gone down. The scene in question arrives early, with re-enactors as the principals involved in the wire walk, shrouded in darkness that I suppose obscures their actual identity but also, intentionally or unintentionally, underscores the images that Marsh puts on a small television set in the background. Those images are President Richard Nixon at a press conference intoning that he did not obstruct justice. After all, Petit walked the wire on August 7, 1974; President Nixon resigned the office of the Presidency on August 8, 1974.

“Man on Wire”, mind you, is not a political film, not even a little bit. The eventual destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11 is not mentioned, not even hinted at, and this lone image of Nixon at the very beginning is all we get, shown and then never followed up on. Still, it’s a choice; Marsh chose to put that image there. And because he did, it cannot simply be glossed over. It’s not that Marsh, who is British, is getting in a dig at Tricky Dick or casting dispersions on the complete spectrum of politicians, contrasting their enervating machinations against the spirited accomplishments of artists. No, this (Nixon) is simply the backdrop to that (Petit’s wire walk). And by never broaching the President’s legal troubles again, we are merely meant to remember that they are ongoing even as the wire walk is going on.

I’ve been thinking about these images a lot lately. America is currently in throes of its President once again being under investigation, or about to be, though it may be a witch hunt, though Nixon called his own investigation a witch hunt, and so who knows, though I do know how uncertain and terrifying this all feels, making it difficult to concentrate on anything that isn’t the sensation the republic may be disintegrating all around us. And though it is not something to turn a blind eye to, it is also not something to let prevent everything else, not that everything else needs to be a direct response to our overwhelming governmental ails. Petit’s response could have been that, and when American reporters are seen in “Man on Wire” asking him “why” he did what he did, you can sense their desire for him to place his wire walk in a social context. He can hardly stand the question, dismissing it as inherently “American”, which is true.

Why? Because. He did what he did. And we all have to keep doing what we do.