Thursday's Flashback to the 80s Freeze-Frame

Commercialism always had a place at the movies, sure, but it really exploded in the go-go 1980s when product placement became the marketing scheme du jour. Charlie Jane Anders’s piece for Gizmodo in 2015 neatly outlined the assault of 80s-ish product placement in sci-fi, citing the Reese’s Pieces of “E.T.” and the omnipresent Pepsi of “Back to the Future”, two beloved, lovely movies that nevertheless put the pedal to the merchandising metal. These pieces of product placements made for good jokes, absolutely, but there is something even more striking in commercialism being rendered as comically integral to the plot, like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Of course, if you’re Christopher Walken in “At Close Range”, you simply transform a moment of product placement – “You want some Corn Flakes®?” – into sheer terror, deliberately mangling marketing in the process. Props.

No instance of product placement, however, warms my heart as much as its preeminent appearance in “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.” No, not the Michelob namedrop nor the McIntosh plug (which is a pretty good joke itself); I’m talking about Pacific Bell. I’m talking about this shot.

The first noticeable detail of this shot is the color. The sun falls, barely, down the alley off to the left, mixing impeccably with the faded yellow of the Pacific Bell ad, emitting a washed out feel that actually come across kinda guerilla, like director Leonard Nimoy was crouched between two parked cars across the street getting the shot on the fly without a permit. Of course, that’s a sentiment dripping in irony given that the moment is, as established, product placement. And the product placement might, in one way, be viewed as even more egregious than your usual product placement even if it is simultaneously crucial to the narrative. But then, it is that narrative relevance granting it weight.

The moment is born of McCoy, Scotty and Sulu in present day San Francisco (time travel!) on the prowl for some sort of twentieth century equivalent of transparent aluminum. But where oh where will they find it?! And as they wonder, this advertisement appears before them. In a way, it’s a precursor to the “Google” narrative trick, in which a character who needs to know anything can simply “Google” it, which is often dismissed, not wrongly, as storytelling laziness. You could call the Pacific Bell shot in "Star Trek IV" storytelling laziness. But while it is, through a modern lens, something like a throwback to a time when you could not just “Google” something, when you actually had to find a phonebook and then, ye gods, go through it, this shot is nevertheless a caustic shot across the bow. It is mystical product placement in which consumerism becomes the answer to their prayers. What’s more 80s than that?

Forgotten Characters: the Pizza Man in Ferris Bueller's Day Off

The above moment is one of many comic interludes in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” The butt of this interlude’s joke is Edward R. Rooney (Jeffrey Jones), Dean of Students, who is scoping out a suburban pizza joint for the three teens – the titular Ferris (Matthew Broderick), his paramour Sloane (Mia Sara), and his best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck) – on the lam. He stands near a small television set showing the Chicago Cubs game that the Pizza Man (Joey Vieira) is watching. And at the precise moment Rooney looks away, he misses the TV catch sight of none other than Ferris catching a foul ball. Curses! It’s funny all on its own, of course, but then John Hughes appends one more bit of funny.

Rooney: “What’s the score?”
Pizza Man: “Nothin’, nothin’.”
Rooney: “Who’s winning?”
Pizza Man: “The Bears.”

But here’s the thing I find myself wondering more and more: what if Edward R. Rooney, Dean of Students, isn’t the butt of this joke?

Once, many years ago, before moving to Chicago, I was working my desk job during a summer afternoon when I returned from some wholly unmemorable lunch to discover a voicemail waiting. I listened. It was not a client nor a customer but two friends of mine in Chicago at Wrigley Field where Max Weinberg, of my beloved Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, had just thrown out the first pitch. Cackling, hopped up on Budweiser I could imagine sloshing around in their plastic cups, “Glory Days” blaring in the background, they explained they just felt like they needed to let me know where they were and what had just happened. When the voicemail concluded, I seethed with envy. I seethed with more envy later in the kitchen when I caught sight of the very Cubs game my friends were at on the television. It looked nice there.

A perfect summer afternoon in Chicago, when the humidity is low, when a gentle breeze wafts in off the lake, when the sun is bright and accompanied by just a few picturesque, wispy clouds, when 80 degrees is entirely true to its number, Lord, that’s hard to beat. And while there are all manner of fine places to be in Chicago on such an afternoon, be it a porch, be it a beer garden, be it the lakefront, be it Parson’s Chicken and Fish (so long as you’re a hipster dufus), well, Wrigley Field, the Friendly Confines on Addison & Clark, even with all the bros gone rabid, might be peak Summer Afternoon Chicago. And that is naturally why Ferris, Sloane and Cameron have to end up there, at least briefly, during their infamous day off in 1985.

Movie literalists have determined this was a clash against the Atlanta Braves that the Cubs lost by a couple runs just as movie literalists have determined that there is no way Ferris, Sloane and Cameron could have visited all the places they did in the time allotted. What movie literalists incessantly miss, of course, is that the day is impossible to actually pull off because the day is an ideal, not unlike Ferris Bueller himself, living the dream and pulling the rest of us, we Cameron Fryes, along in his wake. And that’s why I always wondered what might happen if Ferris aged out of the ideal. Alas, the Honda CRV commercial for the 2012 Super Bowl in which Broderick reprised his famous role revealed that even in humdrum adulthood Ferris found a way to attain the unattainable.

And so, if we are all Cameron Frye when we are kids, the ongoing ideal of Ferris would suggest that we are all the Pizza Man when we are adults, trapped behind the counter, left to deal with never-ending orders and asinine Deans who don’t know how sports work, wistfully watching a faraway baseball game in a sunny paradise where some devil-may-care kid is catching a foul ball.

Free Fire

It’s tempting to deem Ben Wheatley’s “Free Fire” as derivative of or an homage to, or both, Quentin Tarantino, given how it revolves around a drawn-out gun battle, a la “Reservoir Dogs” or a la the conclusion of the Q.T.-penned “True Romance.” A Tarantino film, however, typically devotes just as much time to oddball characters and colorful dialogue. In fact, “Inglorious Basterds”, in its most prominent gun battle, staged in an underground bar, almost entirely dispensed with gunfire, setting aside about 15 seconds for its hail of bullets and devoting the rest of the scene’s formidable run time to dramatically escalating chit-chat. “Free Fire” has some build up, and it has a couple oddball characters, and a smattering of colorful dialogue, but mostly it has, as the title implies, gunfire. Running ninety minutes, roughly sixty of those are comprised of gunfire, or breaths and movements between gunfire, This, however, is not quite the operatic gun fu of John Woo, more like the sword fight of “Rob Roy” with guns, halting and often exhausting.

“Free Fire” opens with its swath of characters en route to an arms deal. It is the late 70s and two IRA members, Chris (Cillian Murphy) and Frank (Michael Smiley), yearn to purchase a smattering of weapons from Vernon (Sharlto Copley) and associates through two intermediaries, Ord (Armie Hammer) and Justine (Brie Larson). The movie mostly just lets these characters get by on whatever air the actors impart, though Vernon, by far the most vibrantly rendered (and played), does get a single solid descriptive line spoken by someone else – “He was misdiagnosed as a childhood prodigy and never got over it” – which you wish Wheatley and his co-writer Amy Jump thought to provide each character. That lack of personality inevitably yields substandard emotional attachments. True, Stevo (Sam Riley), something of a hired hand for the IRA, is established as having abused the female cousin of Harry (Jack Reynor), who is in league with Vernon and seeks justice for the abused when he sees Stevo, but both men prove equally unsympathetic, as does everyone else really, which isn’t a bad thing, per se, but means that Wheatley is asking us to take this ride simply on the merits of style.

For a while, for the most part, he succeeds. If these sorts of gun battles are often dripping in machismo, it’s pretty funny just how emptily Wheatley renders all that machismo, the lead-up to the gunfight in this abandoned warehouse filled with all sorts of preening and comically offset by a palpable air of desperate conflict avoidance. Why even when Harry recognizes Stevo and goes after him, everyone tries to calm everyone else down, both sides retreating to their corners, Chris and Frank even walloping Stevo themselves as a show of good faith. That Harry shoots at Stevo anyway goes without saying, though even then the gaggle comes across unenthusiastic as Wheatley nicely utilizes slow motion in this moment to capture the “We’re really doing this?” agony stretching across each participant’s face as they scramble for cover.

Initially the gun battle barely is one, at least in terms of how we moviegoers are conditioned to think about them, with each person shielding his or her self behind some barrier and popping off a few shots here and there, as if not trying so hard might still allow for de-escalation. Eventually, of course, this multi-person semi-faceoff will have to get ramped up, and when it does the strain of shock value begins to show. It’s not necessarily that the respective prominence of names in the cast generally correlates to the live/die order because that can be offset with a little spit and polish, but that the payoffs are substandard, particularly the last shot which is less a twist than an incredibly pat “Well obviously.” Wheatley’s ideas for action, meanwhile, are typical action movie stock-in-trade, fireballs and brutal deaths scored to pop music, the latter seeking, I think, to turn something earnest into something nihilistic except that the film’s own inherent nihilism renders this attempt moot.

Wheatley and Jump’s editing tends toward the frenetic, as it typically does these days for action movies, with myriad quick cuts between characters, which isn’t so bad in the beginning, not merely as a means to drum up suspense but to give us plenty of time with each character to allow us to differentiate as the action escalates. Yet even as the editing gives us time with the people, it never gives us time with the space, forgoing so much as one wide shot to establish the warehouse’s layout to provide bearings. Perhaps this is intended to underscore the characters’ confusion, except that in the heat of battle everyone possesses awareness of just where they need to go, whether to find a ringing phone to try and summon backup, or just where to pop out from behind various barricades for shots at their adversaries. And by refusing to make the space plain, everything just sort of devolves into a non-logistical snarl, underlining the movie itself, one in which its attitude toward the gunfight seems to mirror its own characters – as in, do we have to?

Logan Lucky

Having made both “Out of Sight” and “Ocean’s Eleven”, Steven Soderbergh is no stranger to the heist picture. Yet if both films centered on robbers and the robberies they committed, they were underpinned by elements that equally intrigued their auteur, like “Out of Sight’s” emphasis on human behavior and “Oceans Eleven’s” devotion to style, not to mention the underrated, superior “Ocean’s Eleven” sequel’s fascination with modes of storytelling. The apparently un-retired director’s new film, meanwhile, “Logan Lucky”, concerns a heist of the Charlotte Motor Speedway during a massive Memorial Day race so comprehensive and convoluted that it requires one of those clarifying late-movie montages in which every detail of the caper is re-visited from a different perspective. And yet, this sequence is conspicuously scored to “Fortunate Son”, Credence Clearwater Revival’s anti-war screed against the upper class, marking this montage as the moment when the heist and the film’s social undercurrent gloriously merge to reveal “Logan Lucky” as less an exercise in genre than a comically ferocious parable in which a few semi-ordinary West Virginia joes get what’s theirs.

This is not to suggest that Soderbergh overdoes the grit. Far from it, as he forgoes any vérité for delightfully effective linear editing combined with images that are not grainy and washed out but bursting with color, underscoring both the colorfulness of the “Logan Lucky’s” characters and how the film forgoes romanticizing their hard times to provide the dignity of joy and purpose. Life may have been unlucky to Jimmy (Channing Tatum) and Clyde (Adam Driver) Logan with, respectively, a football career cut short by injury and an Iraq war injury that left him without his left hand, but they are not about to let this ill luck define them. When a smug British Energy Drink magnate and NASCAR sponsor, Max Chilblait, played by Seth MacFarlane, putting to maximum use his vaunted unlikableness, enters Clyde’s bar and orders a martini with the air of a man who assumes the redneck simpleton serving him doesn’t know how to make one, Driver has Clyde go about his business with an air of take-this professionalism.

Assumptions of these West Virginians are dangerous. Though Jimmy being laid off and in danger of losing part-time custody of his daughter Sadie (Farrah Mackenzie) might suggest impulsiveness, the scheme is far from reckless. Indeed, the characters’ thick accents, including Jimmy and Clyde’s hairdressing sister Mellie (Riley Keough), the getaway driver of sorts, and a character in need of more screen time, belie serious smarts, a deliberate squashing of a readymade stereotype. The broadest accent of all, in fact, belongs to Daniel Craig, playing the aptly named Joe Bang, an explosives expert the Logans bust out of prison just for a day to help, and Craig absolutely relishes this drawl, intoning the word “In-carc-e-rated” with such syllable-specific panache that he seems to preemptively sending up anyone who tries to make fun of it.

Craig, frankly, doesn’t have enough fun at the movies and here he truly cuts loose, though he never transforms into caricature, just as “Logan Lucky” never condescends to him, perhaps most hilariously emblemized when Joe Bang spells out a complicated chemical equation, delivered by Craig with a droll kinda “duh”, to a taken aback Jimmy and Clyde. This avoidance of arrogance trickles down to NASCAR, a culture ripe for parody that Soderbergh only honors, never more so than the cameo of LeAnn Rimes singing the national anthem at the race running concurrently with the heist.

Some of us might wonder in a broader sense about the mingling of nationalism with sports, but the movie is less interested in deconstructing that then simply presenting this world, this place, these people, as they are, and it takes them seriously. The one person who doesn’t, frankly, is the track’s general manager, seen post-heist reveling in his insurance payout, as if counteracting any notion of rural America Robin Hoods, which he does with a big screen TV looming over his shoulder replaying the pre-race festivities as a giant American flag is unfurled, underlining who he’s screwing.

This idea of administrative overlords almost always having the upper hand connects to the prison, from which Joe Bang has escaped and which will help in its own elaborate way to ensure the robbery goes off. This lockup is overseen by a warden (Dwight Yoakam) who is entirely indifferent to his inmates, as well as the only place we see black characters, which is not cruelly accidental but a deliberate nod to the state’s African-American incarceration rate, just as Joe Bang purposely drinking contaminated water to make him sick to engender the escape is a deliberate nod to state’s water crisis, just as Katherine Waterston’s brief appearance as a mobile medic is not a sad attempt at grafting on a love interest for Jimmy but a deliberate nod to the state’s opioid epidemic, all little details stitching together a fabric of contemporary America.

All these details taken as a whole might paint a pretty bleak portrait, which is why Sodergbergh's overall amusing aesthetic is so crucial to the proceedings, refusing to relent and wallow. Look no further than Joe Bang, on the lam and in the midst of pilfering $14 million but insistent on taking a few bucks to buy a couple beers. It’s a little thing, a throwaway, one another filmmaker might not think to include, and that Soderbergh does says everything. As LeeAnn Rimes belts out “The Star-Spangled Banner”, Joe Bang pauses to pay attention and toss back his cold ones, a crystallization of the America that “Logan Lucky” so impeccably captures, paying devout respect to where he comes from even as he steals a few moments for self-care.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Glory (1989)

“Glory”, the white Edward Zwick’s recounting of the all-black 54th Massachusetts Civil War regiment, concludes with the infantrymen’s fateful charge on Fort Wagner. It is a stirring, stunning, sad sequence, one capturing just how willing the 54th Massachusetts was to push forward against all odds, which was not an unimportant statement at the time, when many dismissed, absurdly, the notion that black soldiers would fight. “The 54th’s attack did more than prove that Fort Wagner was impregnable to infantry assault,” the historian James McPherson noted in a New Republic piece at the time of “Glory’s” release, “it disabused hundreds of thousands of Northerners of their stereotypes.”

The film opens amidst a different battle – namely, Antietam, the war’s bloodiest. There, a young idealistic captain, Robert Gould Shaw (Matthew Broderick), the tide turned against him and stricken by shell shock, passes out. Eventually he is rousted awake by a gravedigger, Rawlins (Morgan Freeman). For a moment, in that light, with Rawlins looking down from above, seeming to emerge from the mystic, you’d swear that Rawlins portends The Magical Negro, that terrible archetype in which black film characters are presented merely as quasi-mystical aide de camps to white protagonists. But once Shaw is up, Rawlins moves on because he has his own life and story to lead, one that will eventually loop back around to the 54th.

“Glory”, however, while sometimes trafficking more in two-dimensional than three-dimensional characters nonetheless takes care to try and shatter such stereotypes, emblemized, as McPherson notes, in a later scene where Shaw gallops along, hacking away at watermelons with his saber. Of course, it is still a white character doing the hacking, and it is a white character through whose eyes we principally see this story of the all-black regiment, which not did not sit well with everyone, like the esteemed Roger Ebert who wondered “(W)hy does the top billing in this movie go to a white actor? I ask, not to be perverse, but because I consider this primarily a story about a black experience and do not know why it has to be seen largely through white eyes.”

I have been thinking about “Glory” in the wake of this summer’s “Detroit”, recounting the city’s 1967 race riots, which has raised infinite questions about a movie’s ownership, who has the right to tell its story, considering it was directed not by an African-American but by a white woman, Kathryn Bigelow. Owen Gleiberman, a white critic, wrestled with this question for Variety, perhaps inevitably landing on the observation “That the only factor that should dictate who tells it is, ultimately, the power of the telling.” Perhaps, but many details factor into the telling, such as perspective, and it is perspective that troubled Angelica Jade Bastien so much in her impassioned “Detroit” critique, writing “I realized that I’m not interested in white perceptions of black pain.” This sort of mirrors what Wesley Morris spoke about on his and Jenna Wortham’s podcast Still Processing in a conversation centered on “Detroit” when he commended the all-white southern rock band Drive-By Truckers 2016 song “What It Means” as “a real attempt at looking at black people as a white person looking at black people.” What angered Jade Bastien, I think, was not Bigelow failing to consider black people as a white person but attempting to speak for black people as a white person.

“He wrote it,” Morgan Freeman said of Kevin Jarre, the white screenwriter of “Glory”, “from a place he could write a story from, the only place he could get a grip on it from.” That is why Gould Shaw becomes the protagonist. Kevin Jarre was not trying to speak for black people in “Glory.” The story was seen, as Ebert wrote, largely through a white person’s eyes because it was Kevin Jarre’s attempt as a white person to look at black people. That’s what Gould Shaw is doing, at one point writing home to his parents, “Try as I might, I do not know these men.” But he wants to, and it yields the film’s strongest sequence, when Gould Shaw approaches Pvt. Tripp (Denzel Washington) not long after the 54th’s first battlefield triumph on James Island.

Shaw wishes to award Tripp a commendation, which Tripp refuses by citing the whole conflict’s futility, which Shaw pushes back against with platitudes. In this moment, Shaw is essentially dictating to Tripp, telling him what a commendation means and explaining how you can’t win for losing. But then, he reconsiders. And rather than talking at Tripp, he decides to talk to him.

Shaw: “What do you want to do?” 
Tripp: “I don’t know, sir.” 
Shaw: “It stinks, I suppose.” 
Tripp: “Yeah, it stinks bad. And we all covered up in it. Ain’t nobody clean. Be nice to get clean though.” 
Shaw: “How do we do that?” 
Tripp: “We ante up and kick in, sir.”

That this scene precipitates the scene in which Shaw volunteers the 54th to lead the assault on Fort Wagner is no accident. He might be the one speaking in this scene but he is not speaking for the 54th. No, by essentially giving Tripp’s call a voice, he is letting Tripp, and by extension the 54th, speak for themselves, and Shaw equally commits to listening along, following his men unto the breach, militarily determined to see what it means.

Thursday's Flashback to the 80s Freeze-Frame(s)

In the wake of Bill Nunn’s death last September, many odes in his name mentioned Radio Raheem, the off-to-the-side central character of Spike Lee’s seminal “Do the Right Thing.” Radio Raheem may be best known for his eponymous boombox, forever challenging people to fight the power, in the words of Public Enemy, but just as fundamental were his brass knuckles, one espousing LOVE, the other declaring HATE. This is a nod to Charles Laughton’s 1955 “Night of the Hunter” where Robert Mitchum’s Reverend Harry Powell had Love tattooed on one knuckle and Hate tattooed on the other, intended to emblemize how the notions fought but love always won. Of course, the Reverend was a false prophet, and “Night of the Hunter”, as so many have opined over the years, placed these, and other, binary oppositions under the microscope to quash them. That’s why Lee has Radio Raheem recite something like a remix of Mitchum’s Love/Hate speech, as well as sport those knuckle rings, because his film, like Laughton’s, challenges and distorts that Love/Hate binary.

Lee goes so far as to allude to this binary before these rings and this speech are seen, glimpsed in Radio Raheem’s introduction, where he suddenly appears, filling the frame, boombox blaring, and then crossing the street, stopping outside the building for WE LOVE radio, 108 FM, where D.J. Señor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson) sits. Señor sees him and shouts him out and receives a fist in the air from Radio Raheem in return.

 

If Radio Raheem is something of a Greek Chorus, so is Señor Love Daddy, who sits behind a window overlooking the lone city block of Brooklyn where the entire movie takes place on the summer’s hottest day, observing, commenting, and whose soothing soul, jazz, and R&B stands in stark contrast to Radio Raheem’s preferred Public Enemy. You hear that in these opposing shots, with the rap booming outside the window and Señor’s more soothing selections undulating from within. But then, not for nothing does Señor speak principally in contrasts. To wit: “Here I am. Am I here? Ya know it. It ya know.” Indeed, he is introduced proclaiming “Wake up” into his microphone, a standard greeting that in this case contains a self-evident double meaning, just as Radio Raheem reveals himself not so much a Gentle Giant as a Giant with an occasionally gentle soul.

These are significant shades of gray, all of which are brought to bear in them seeing each other through that window, not so much agreeing to disagree as respectfully acknowledging their coexistence, which foreshadows “Do the Right Thing’s” conclusion, a fit of fury preluding something less like peace than a suspension of hostilities, which gives way to the dueling quotes of MLK and Malcolm X, two sides of the same coin. It’s the Love/Hate Continuum.

Shout-Out to the Extra: Top Gun Version

America First is the foremost policy slogan of the current President of the United States. And it is an interesting phrase. America First, as in “If you’re not first, you’re last,” which was the philosophy espoused by Reece Bobby (Gary Cole) to his son Ricky (Will Ferrell), NASCAR driver extraordinaire, in “Talladega Nights”, one of the finest film lines of the new century, so exact in its absurdness that NBA superstar Kevin Durant literally, un-ironically quoted in a written profile. And it seemed that much more prescient when Durant, not long after quoting it, ditched the Oklahoma City Thunder for superpower Golden State to get a ring because because, well, it’s all about winning, whether it’s the basketball court or, as we were reminded the other night, the battlefields of Afghanistan.

It’s a thin line between politics and sports. Why else would there have been an over/under on the Clinton/Trump debates or bars offering drink specials during the Comey Hearing? Partisan entrenchment is just like picking a team, throwing on a metaphorical t-shirt with a donkey or an elephant and following the party leader’s plea to MAKE SOME NOISE. “Scoreboard!” supersedes policy. Why else would President Trump refer more to the specifics of his electoral victory than the specifics of, say, his healthcare bill? This inherent insistence on filtering politics through a sports prism, however, often goes beyond party and to country. In the go-go 80s, for instance, when America was in the midst of a war served cold it was Us vs. Them, Red, White & Blue vs. Red.

This geopolitical competition was part and parcel to “Top Gun” (1986), the preeminent American movie of the 1980s. The infamous (or was it just famous?) volleyball scene was not superfluous; this was a sports movie in which everything boiled down to rivalries, on the volleyball sand, in the air as Navy fighter pilots competed for the Top Gun Trophy. “Remember boys,” says Slider (Rick Rossovich), “there’s no points for second place.” The actual Naval Fighter Weapons School on which the film was based did not have a trophy or a competition, both of which were added to the cinematic version as a means to add urgency, of course, but also to underscore America’s overarching competitive drive. And that comes home in the concluding sequence in which Americans duke it out with Russians over the Indian Ocean, Maverick and Iceman vanish the evil MIGs and our two adversarial aviators meet on the aircraft carrier afterwards and...wait.

What’s that I spy?

Whether the extra was told to do this or was caught up in the moment we will likely never know, but whatever the case may be, it was the right decision. After all, index fingers after sports victories had become all the rage, so much so that some scholars cite Georgetown’s Patrick Ewing holding aloft his index finger after losing in the NCAA Basketball Championship game to Villanova the previous year as the moment “We’re #1” jumped the shark. Not me. I pinpoint that moment as right here, when the deck of an aircraft carrier in the midst of the Cold War became like a gym floor at the end of the NCAA Basketball Championship game. Maverick returned to Miramar to become a Top Gun instructor, as everyone knows, but no doubt in-between he went to Disneyland and in a Rose Garden ceremony gave Reagan a Top Gun bomber jacket.

The Incredible Jessica James

When semi-hapless Boone (Chris O’Dowd) advises Jessica James (Jessica Williams), whom he is kinda, sorta seeing, that he really likes her, Jessica James doesn’t get a gleam in her eye; if anything, she frowns. She says: “Of course you do. Everyone does. I’m freaking dope.” That’s an assertive line. Not everyone could get away with it. In the mouths of some, it could yield an off-putting arrogance, but Williams lends it something more like enervation, refusing to subscribe to the antiquated notion of a rom com leading lady who can’t earn the necessary love because she isn’t sure she actually deserves it. Jessica Williams decides “The Incredible Jessica James” deserves it. That’s why she’s Incredible. That’s why the movie opens with a scene where she comically shuts down a Tinder date. Who’s got time for this crap? Not her.

That, though, is why it’s so odd to see writer/director James C. Strouse try so often to shoehorn this willful character into a traditional romantic comedy structure. The Netflix film’s most prominent relationship is the one between Jessica and Boone, engendered by her break-up with Damon (LaKeith Stanfield) that opens the film, and by the divorce that Boone is still struggling to get over, and their chemistry is something less than amorous, more affable, which isn’t actually a bad thing because when they are simply offering sympathy and support by way of humorous banter, their would-be relationship breezily excels. If there was ever a time to dismantle the notion of The Friend Zone, this would have been it, but Strouse has no interest in destruction, let alone deconstruction. Alas.

Her real primary relationship is with the theater, both as a dream of making a living as a playwright and making a living, sort of, teaching theater at a non-profit to kids. Though she effuses genuine joy for what the stage can provide, her struggles to find success prompt her to sort of project onto Shandra (Taliyah Whiaker), a student Jessica takes under her wing and encourages to attend a writing retreat with the real-life Sarah Jones, only to become disgruntled when Shandra would rather spend time with the father she rarely sees. The scene in which Jessica begs Shandra to attend the retreat, set in her young charge’s bedroom, underscores both her failings and how something went wrong in her chilhood that she is seeking to mend, which is communicated so much better here than a rote mid-movie return to her Midwestern home.

The real disappointment of “The Incredible Jessica James”, however, is how we little get to hear of her actual playwright voice, emblemized in the gigantic binder of apparent scripts that she gives to Boone to read. He does read them, but we never get to hear the material contained inside, and so when her work does eventually get noticed it not only makes little sense how or why but feels as if we were unintentionally robbed of the most important element of her life. Jessica Williams obviously has a voice but you keep wishing her alter ego’s voice was heard more, and heard better than dream sequences involving Damon that dig into her subconscious.

“This is theater,” Jessica tells Shandra. “We don’t have to do any of this. We do it simply because we must.” That itself is a terribly hackneyed line, one in which Williams embraces the staleness and then pushes right past it to find something fresh. That’s the voice in need of a better cinematic support system next time out.

Menashe

Set in the Hasidic enclave of Borough Park in Brooklyn, “Menashe” begins with myriad Jewish men, dressed in their black overcoats, sidelocks descending beneath their black hats, passing to and fro in a street level shot. So easily do these men of the faith mix, you do not necessarily know who you are supposed to be looking for, yet you seize on him instantly, the titular Menashe (Menashe Lustig), so emphatically does he stick out. He sticks out because he lacks the coat and hat, opting for just a kippah and tzitzit, and because of his roly-poly gait. And as he emerges from the crowd, the camera finally moves, tracking with Menashe, effectively emblemizing how he is at once among his people but also not quite like them. Joshua Z. Weinstein’s debut feature narrative film might take us inside a community so insular that the majority of the film is spoken in Yiddish, but he still engenders universality, something like a fish out of water concurrently in familiar water, because who among us hasn’t experienced a time where we’ve felt out of place?

Menashe is recently widowed. As such, his son Rieven (Ruben Niborski) has been sent to live with his uncle Eizik (Yoel Weisshaus) on account of their strict orthodoxy, decreeing that a child cannot live in a motherless home. This does not sit well with Menashe, a man whose faith is unmistakable, introduced at his supermarket job wondering why a head of lettuce is not suitably kosher, but also often questionable, which is why he more or less drags Rieven home with him in spite of orthodoxy. His Rabbi (Meyer Schwartz), however, grants permission for Rieven to remain with his father through his mother’s wake, a critical event which Menashe assumes the responsibility of hosting as a means to prove his worth. This is meant to lend urgency by way of a timeline, though, frankly, moment to moment is urgency enough for “Menashe.”

Weinstein, who comes from documentaries, films much of the movie in tight handheld close-ups, reinforcing not merely the sequestered Hasidic community but the smallness of Menashe’s own world, his living space in particular, a tiny apartment with a tiny kitchen and a tiny stove and a tiny bed. This lack of space lends a constant overcrowded sensation, underlining how there is too much for Menashe to do and remember, seen in the everyday tasks that he continually mucks up, like dad trying to get son to school. In moments like these, you can almost see a secular remake with Kevin James in the lead and bumbling hijinks as the point. But Menashe’s failures evoke less sad sack comedy than well-meaning desperation. And so even as his paternal love comes across genuine, you can’t help but empathize with Eizik’s pique exasperation and wonder if Rieven really would be better off under his Uncle’s roof, a wonderful polarity defining the entire film.

Though Weinstein passes no judgement on the community’s customs, he also takes care not to leave anything out, like a moment when Menashe goes next door to ask for a recipe and lets his gaze linger, sadly, not romantically, on a young pregnant woman who is demonstrably reticent and acutely sad, a swift illumination of how this small world considers women. Indeed, “Menashe’s” most blinding revelation is one plainly mentioned by Menashe as he shares drinks in the supermarket’s back room with a couple Hispanic co-workers. The scene’s context is like a momentary portal into another world, a world, you sense, in which the main character might like to stay, even as Lustig’s wearily steadfast demeanor and his Menashe’s reluctant acceptance that his revelation is merely the way it is makes clear that is not an option. Faith isn’t easy.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Slipstream (1989)

Bad movies can be entertaining, even ennobling, shooting the moon and missing completely. Alas, director Steven Lisberger’s would-be sci-fi opus “Slipstream” is simply a nigh unwatchable fiasco, blindly edited with seemingly huge swaths of story missing and an overall look to the picture that suggests it was recorded on a camcorder pilfered overnight from the high school audiovisual room. Perhaps this was inevitable. Producer Gary Kurtz, famous for overseeing the “Star Wars” saga, said the budget fell apart just prior to filming and the studio refused to let them film sequences that would necessarily fleshed out the story. Maybe this after the fact covering, maybe not, but the fact remains that the finished product leaves a solid cast and crew hung out to dry, like composer Elmer Bernstein, for instance, whose score seems to take cues from his own “The Magnificent Seven” theme, unintentionally evoking parody. The lead performance by the late Bill Paxton, meanwhile, much too inane for a part that needed gravity, might well seem to be in, as they say, “a different movie”, but that’s just because I suspect he yearned to be in any movie other than the one in which he was starring.

The “slipstream” is a “river of wind” that has been engendered at some point in Earth’s future on account of “the convergence”, an event described in the voiceover as has having imperiled the planet’s weather systems, marking it as something of a pre-climate change disaster pic. Yet the film has more on its mind than simply existing as a cautionary tale, seeking to build off this admittedly interesting idea to illustrate how an environmental re-ordering of Earth nevertheless brings about the same sort of class distinctions. This is glommed onto something like a road movie by air, “Mad Max” with planes, in which Paxton’s Matt Owens, a vagrant catch-all, absconds with Byron (Bob Peck), an android wanted for murder and being hauled to justice by lawman Will Tasker (Mark Hammill), to collect a hefty reward.

The chase consists of several in-flight sequences, though these, like so many others, are jerkily edited, with movements of the craft in aerial footage not necessarily matching up to how the craft is moving when seen from inside, which elicits the odd impression of Owens or Tasker, who are typically at the controls, playing an arcade game. This amateur sensation is only amplified by the shoddy sound design, where the wind, this all-encompassing wind, which strangely only seems to become relevant when necessary for the action, rarely comes across as ferocious as intended, undermining the film’s most crucial element.

The emotional foundation of the film is meant to be Byron’s human urges, a la “Blade Runner”, which is not so much built to as just sort of suddenly dropped in, as the script’s multitude of stops and starts to make way for various on the ground vignettes render any momentum for the android’s arc non-existent. These in-between episodes make room for heavy-hitting guest stars, like Ben Kingsley as the leader of some cave-dwelling sect that worships the wind, and F. Murray Abraham ruling a group of hedonists hiding out in an underground museum. The third act revolves almost entirely around this latter pleasure-seeking cabal, deliberately indifferent to everyone else digging in the dirt, evoking 2015’s “High Rise.”

It’s more than a little funny, however, that the shoddy costumes and sets fail to underscore this group’s affluence, putting them more in line with the cave-dwellers, an accidental rendering that would be funny if the movie knew it was funny. What’s worse, the script never really condemns these hedonists, employing their lifestyle as a means for for Owens to acquire a Wait, How Did This Happen? love interest and for Byron to get a hold on how he feels, which is less philosophical than physical, demonstrated in a song and dance that no one will confuse for Broadway. It’s more than a little ironic, I suppose, that a movie which seemingly fell apart because it didn’t have any money ultimately sides with with the moneyed class. To paraphrase Reggie and Vincent from the same year of “Slipstream’s” release, don’t we all just wanna be rich?

Thursday's Flashback to the 80s Freeze-Frame(s)

Steven Spielberg’s Cinema Romantico-certified masterpiece, “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, was based on the old pulp magazines and adventure serials that he, and his collaborator George Lucas, loved so much, which is why the movie pleasingly skedaddles from one reverie of action to another with the bare minimum of exposition. It’s fun! Still, not so much tucked within this rip-roaring framework as standing quite openly right on top of it is something more brutal, evoked not merely in the immortal Marion Ravenwood’s introduction, tossing back whiskeys, but in her and Indy’s backstory, which the screenplay treads both lightly and loudly, involving a romantic affair that, from all available evidence, seemingly occurred while Marion was something close to, if not lawfully, underage. Yikes.

What’s more, Spielberg’s remarkable use of light and shadows suggest a film less like a cheap serial and more like a dark-hearted noir, such as the sequence in Marion’s Nepal bar, a photographic tour de force, as good as the medium gets, never more so than the indelible moment when Indy and the big Sherpa are engaged in a tussle and Ronald Lacey’s gestapo madman orders the dude in all black with the submachine gun to “shoot them both.” The dude in all black steps forward to do just that, except Indy and the big Sherpa work together by lifting Indy’s handgun to blast the dude in all black, a death unforgettably depicted in silhouette. The actor who portrayed the dude in black, Matthew Scurfield, is billed per IMDb as “2nd Nazi.” That’s important. He could have been billed as anything. He doesn’t even get a line! He could have been “The Dude In Black”, or he could have been “Man With Submachine Gun”, or he could have been “Gerhard”. But no, he is explicitly “2nd Nazi.”

“In ‘Raiders,’” wrote the esteemed Roger Ebert for his Great Movies entry on the film, “(Spielberg) wants to do two things: make a great entertainment, and stick it to the Nazis.” Spielberg, after all, is Jewish, and, as has been recounted in many places, spent his early life often being ashamed of and bullied for that heritage. An idea has emerged that he did not truly begin grappling with that heritage until his later, more “adult” films, to cite a cliché, like the remarkable “Schindler’s List.” Ebert played into this idea somewhat, writing that “Raiders” was “the work of Spielberg’s recaptured adolescence, I think; it contains the kind of stuff teenage boys like, and it also perhaps contains the daydreams of a young Jewish kid who imagines blowing up Nazis real good.”

In a 2008 review for Deep Focus, however, Brian Eggert went further, writing that “Spielberg’s passion in the project is felt so potently because the story, even on its pure escapist level, weighs on the filmmaker’s Jewish heritage. After all, the Nazis’ ultimate “solution” of wiping the Jews from the planet was Hitler’s sadistic design. He continues: “At stake then is not only the fate of an archeological landmark, but the entire Jewish people.” The American Jewish magazine Tablet, meanwhile, wondered three years ago if “Raiders” was actually more audacious than Quentin Tarantino’s Jewish avengers fable “Inglorious Basterds.” “And here, it’s not the Jews who foil the Nazis’ plans,” notes Gabriel Sherman, “it’s the spirit of God Himself.”

Indeed, Indy and Marion are tied to the stake when God gets, as God will, the last word, and the most ferocious shot in “Raiders” is the one above, the Ark stashed in a crate bearing the Nazis’ co-opted version of the swastika, and that swastika getting incinerated by You Know Who. Generally when we think of God speaking to us – if you think God speaks to us – it is through Scripture, or it is through someone who interprets Scripture for us, or it is through His/Her/Whoever's creation or miracles, though those creations and miracles are generally up to our own respective interpretations. Spielberg, however, by placing no one else in the scene, just us and the Ark, deliberately removes any possibility of interpretation. There is no mistaking what this is and Who is doing it. This is the wrath of God buttressing His/Her/Whoever’s unconditional love by expressing in no uncertain terms that this evil will not stand.

Power Ranking This Is Spinal Tap Names

“What's in a name?” wondered one Romeo Montague so many centuries ago. “That which we call a rose / by any other name would smell as sweet.” Eh, would it? I don’t mean to quibble there, Romeo, though I guess I do, because you mean to tell me that if you changed the word “rose” to, say, gillnet, that it would still smell as sweet? Yeah, I don't think so. This, I suspect, is proven most emphatically by the famed 1984 helmed mockumentary “This Is Spinal Tap.” That Rob Reiner film is chock full of striking names. These names are so striking that to dismiss them by wondering “What's in a name?” is identification blasphemy. Them who we call...well, I can’t spoil it, can I? Nah. Let’s count ’em down.

The Ten Best Names in This Is Spinal Tap

10. Derek Smalls. This is a good place to begin because it is evocative of how “This Is Spinal Tap” comes up with solid names – gotta love that “s” concluding a singular name – even when the names do not possess wackadoo chutzpah.

9. Lt. Bob Hookstratten. Wackadoo chutzpah like this name, for instance, a surname that sonically possesses a certain blustery quality that Fred Willard was born to embody.

8. Ronnie Pudding. Who doesn’t wish their last name was Pudding?!

7. Ian Faith. A name too good to be true, it fits just right for a band manager who is espousing something like false conviction.

6. Artie Fufkin. I cannot imagine a better name for a hapless promotions rep. There is something about the way it pops – FUF-kin – that makes you think you’re dealing with a guy who is not merely out of his element but never actually even in it.

5. David St. Hubbins. The surname seems to have been an ode to Derek St. Holmes, sideman for Ted Nugent, a gig that made me consider dropping St. Hubbins behind Artie Fufkin. Then again, I genuinely like any name with a St. prefix, and I really like it for St. Hubbins because it lends a phony regality that every frontman worth his ego should wholly believe in.

4. Nigel Tufnel. Like Derek Smalls, it fails to catch the eye in that same Whoa There way as St. Hubbins. Yet it nevertheless has that sort of plausible Robert Fripp-ish ring without existing as an homage.

3. Sir Denis Eton-Hogg. This, as my girlfriend likes to say, is the quintessential British name, especially because it leads with a “Sir”.

2. Bobbi Flekman. It’s perfect. It’s a perfect name. But it is not, mind you, an aptronym. It is not Usain Bolt or William Wordsworth or Amy Freeze, the meteorologist. No, like Burt Reynolds is absolutely a Burt, or like John Kruk is definitely a John Kruk, or like Kate Middleton is irrefutably a Catherine Elizabeth Middleton, there can be no doubt that Fran Drescher is a Bobbi Flekman.

1. Marty DiBergi. Are there “better” names in “Spinal Tap”? Maybe. But Marty DiBergi is the moniker that ties the whole movie together.

The Big Sick

Though “The Big Sick” is based on the real life courtship of Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon, who co-wrote the script for director Michael Showalter, it was made under the umbrella of producer Judd Apatow, whose own films, while often centered on romance, spring just as much from the world of standup comedy, where characters, even when speaking scripted dialogue, so often feel as if they are riffing in real time, with scenes frequently elasticized to the breaking point, where mining for the right joke often feels paramount to whatever the scene itself is meant to mean. And while Nanjiani and Gordon’s script does turn rather serious, it is considerably jokey too, though with much more of a purpose than a typical Apatow film, where even as the film documents an unconventional courtship, it also deconstructs the way in which we use jokes, to flirt, to disport, to discuss, to diffuse, to deflect.

Nanjiani plays a semi-fictionalized version of himself, also named Kumail, a Pakistani-American navigating the waters of the Chicago comedy scene. As the film opens, he is faux-heckled at a gig by the semi-fictionalized version of Emily, re-named Emily Gardner (Zoe Kazan), and when he approaches her after the show, the give and take continues, and continues on their dates after that, their burgeoning relationship consciously, effectively evoking the idea of two comics riffing. Though they are clearly compatible, Kumail keeps secret his devout Muslim family’s yearning for him to settle down with a Pakistani women, the latter conveyed in a series of a family dinners which could use a touch more dimension but nevertheless allow for Kumail’s mom’s (Zenobia Shroff) reaction to the doorbell – “I wonder who that could be” – to become a pretty funny running joke infused with familial pressure.

The prospective brides paraded before Kumail are the stars of brief comic bits too, though in the case of Khadjia (Vella Lovell) that comedy eventually gives way to piercing clarity. She calls Kumail on the carpet when he confesses to just going along with these dates for the sake of his mother, a denial of the circumstances that induces more pain for others than himself, like Khadjia, and like his family, and like Emily who breaks up with him when she discovers he has been withholding this crucial detail, with Kumail’s standard issue cry of “I was going to tell you” ringing properly hollow. And this would have been enough for the film, sort of a rom com version of Ken Loach’s wonderful “A Fond Kiss”, but “The Big Sick”, as the title implies, throws us for another loop when Emily is rushed to the hospital with a mysterious but major illness and placed in a medically induced coma, signed off on by Kumail who, through happenstance and then devotion, finds himself as Emily’s caretaker and then Emily’s family orbit when her parents, Beth (Holly Hunter) and Terry (Ray Romano), arrive.

Through witticisms and non-deeds (like watching Youtube videos instead of praying), we sense Kumail’s alienation from Pakistani culture, more in tune with the heterogeneousness of America, which is emblemized in the marriage of Beth, who hails from North Carolina, and Terry, originally from New York, a deliberate mixture of regionality representing Emily’s inherent cultural diversity. And that diversity opens up even more as Kumail enters the fold, essentially becoming the suitor, not unlike all the prospective Pakastani brides he turned his nose up at, though this is not overtly played with Kumail actively trying to sell himself but just sort of intrinsically rising from the whole twisty process. No one would confuse “The Big Sick” for being visually inventive, but Showalter still manages to wrest real emotions from moments with this unlikely trio, like a meal in a hospital cafeteria that emits the air of an awkward family dinner, one where Terry cannot help but proffer the wrong joke at the wrong time.

The casting of Romano, not exactly a versatile actor, is fairly ingenious, impeccably utilizing his specific skill set. His character is as jokey as Kumail, allowing for Terry to become something of a reflection for his daughter’s ex-boyfriend, to put Kumail’s penchant for wisecracking when self-reflection might be in order under the microscope. He sees what Terry’s attitude does to Beth, which Hunter plays off perfectly, alternating between a weariness for life and a fondness for it, caustic and compassionate, a yin and a yang that defines her entire lived-in performance, one in which she does not allow her character to compartmentalize anything but to spew forth, for better or worse.

Still, even as they all warm up to one another, the movie never sidesteps the fact that Emily is, like, in a coma, and that when – er, if – she wakes, she will have not been privy to any of this and will have to go through her own process of discovery. So many films made of these sorts of storylines step so wrong with conclusions that frustrating simplify, but “The Big Sick” never does, allowing all its characters to maintain an honest dialogue with one another and chart their way to a conclusion that feels satisfying without ringing patently false by making everything perfect. Indeed, if the whole thing seems to be building toward a kind of “I Have Cancer” Tig Notaro moment for Kumail, where he employs real life for comical philosophy, that doesn’t actually happen. It stops short, as if knowing that there actually are some things you can’t bring yourself to joke about.

keira knightley gradually dissolves into the darkness

Friday's Old Fashioned: Brotherhood of Justice (1986)

Despite several names in the cast that would come to prominence not long after its debut, “Brotherhood of Justice” was a TV movie that aired on ABC, first in 1986 and then again in 1991. Indeed, myriad cliffhangers fading to black suggesting spaces for commercial drops, odd handheld camera work like tracking with a waitress carrying a pan of pizza where the actress seems to be going to great pains not to look at the camera, and the script’s determination to package Lessons to the youth of America all give it that distinct made-for-TV smell. The plot concerns a prestigious California high school beset by a crimewave so troubling that the local police pay a visit to the school’s principal (Joe Spano), a principal that brays about his school’s academic standing while simultaneously shooting Nerf hoops, a comical contrast I am not entirely certain was actually intentional. Rather than submit to private security, however, he gives a speech to the senior class that is, frankly, a thinly veiled call to arms, evoking Sam Adams telling the Sons of Liberty pre-Tea Party there was nothing else to be done. Sure enough, post-speech a vigilante unit of student council members and celebrated athletes emerges deemed the Brotherhood of Justice.

They are captained by Derek (Keanu Reeves) and co-captained by Les (Billy Zane), though the gang also includes Scottie who is played by Darren Dalton who also starred in 1984’s “Red Dawn” which I note because the “Brotherhood of Justice” suggests what might happen if The Wolverines of “Red Dawn” morphed into something like the malcontents of “Over the Edge”. This is because the Brotherhood begins with earnest intentions, if questionable tactics, going after drug dealers, even as the vandals of the film’s introductory passage seem to mysteriously vanish from the proceedings. Nevertheless, the Brotherhood gets results, though we see these results less than just hearing about them third-hand, either an emblem of the film’s paltry budget or of its director – Charles Braverman – taking the easy way out. Alas, the Brotherhood’s noble intentions quickly turn deplorable as they turn more and more violent and turn their attention less to legit troublemakers then to people they personally don’t like, settling scores, as the Brotherhood of Justice transforms into that which they set out to eradicate.

As you might expect, “Brotherhood of Justice” has innumerable poorly rendered passages, a slow motion knife attack and a hapless extra with a pointless control panel prop in particular, yielding high unintentional hilarity. Still, a cheap movie doesn’t have to be thoughtless, as countless modern indies and old school sci-fi goes to show, and Braverman’s film tries. Setting the film in California rather than Texas was probably a production necessity, but it still gives the film a chance to consider anti-Hispanic sentiment. Alas, this mostly goes nowhere, summarized in a sequence where the hapless gringos get a talking to from some surprisingly gracious Mexican gangbangers, a case of painting with the very clichés it seeks to subvert. What sticks out, however, is a sense of entitlement, evinced in Derek, who dresses like Steff McKee, dating Christie (Lori Loughlin), who works two jobs to get by, and her eventually drifting more toward proletarian Victor (Keifer Sutherland), whom Derek naturally eyes with suspicion.

Victor is never fully-formed, more just a red herring, but that also makes him emblematic of the lower class, fingered for all the community’s problems in this movie but never given a voice, and not having necessarily done anything. Derek’s journey, of course, means having to figure this out for himself, an archetypal journey not exactly sold by Reeves who, frankly, seems most at ease when there is less at stake. Billy Zane, on other hand, who in recent years has sadly fallen off the radar, is coolly hypnotic in his embrace of heinousness, introduced by eyeing a couple Mexicans like they are to blame for all the ills of the world. “What’d you want me to do, Derek?” he asks after the aforementioned knifing. “Pants him?” It’s less funny than stone cold, as if he fancies himself too cool for a burnout’s trite gags.

“Brotherhood of Justice” was made in the wake of the real life Legion of Doom, a gang comprised of well to do students from Fort Worth’s Paschal High in 1985. After watching the movie, I read Jan Jarvis’s 1985 article for Dallas’s D Magazine examining the Legion of Doom. Her comprehensive piece suggested the wholesome image these boys cut belied something more sinister, taking furious umbrage with non-conformity, even dabbling in Nazism. “Brotherhood of Justice” doesn’t dare get that dark, all except Billy Zane, who in his refusal to hint at a lurking humanity is the one actor getting across the idea that elitism as arrogance breeds evil. Put him on your high school guidance poster.

Thursday's Flashback to the 80s Freeze-Frame

While “La La Land” rightfully took some shots for its tenuous grasp of jazz history, and while its main male character was perhaps not as endearing as its creator might have suspected, there was still plenty to dig, preeminently its colors, harkening back to the wondrous era of Cinemascope, when a movie need not look like Real Life. This was never more true than the rocket propelled “Someone in the Crowd” when Emma Stone’s dreamer and schemer is pulled from her apartment by her trio of friends – a pink apartment, that is, a nifty implantation of a lesser known Los Angeles locale that mixed impeccably with one of those peerless magic hour California skies, all of it brought home by the quartet’s not-matching primary color crayon-ed dresses as they sauntered down the street and (I’m quoting myself) march directly into your damn heart. Seeing that scene made me think of other moments at the cinema in which color spoke to me, like the boiling orange of the latrine scene in “Platoon”, or the Sherwood Forest of “Adventures of Robin Hood” erupting in eye-popping Technicolor. But like any dude born in 1977, “Star Wars” taught me so much, and I’m not talking about “A New Hope” in this case but “Empire Strikes Back.”

The “Star Wars” universe, with storytelling akin to the Millennium Falcon’s hyperdrive, is very accelerated and noisy, leaping from one of action-oriented confrontation to the next. Even its more intimate moments, like those between Luke and Yoda on Dagobah, still feel fraught with emotional weight, and its brief downtime can even be infiltrated, like that game of holographic chess while chilling out in hyperspace in the (real) first “Star Wars” ending with a threat of arms being torn out of sockets. No, the closest the series ever got to an actual respite occurred during the late stages of “The Empire Strikes Back.”

In a way, it should not be a respite at all. After all, it is right after Han and Leia and Chewie and 3-PO have evaded the Imperial Starfleet for about the 47th time in the movie by powering down the fabled Corellian frigate mid-flight and hiding on the back of a star destroyer, which puts them right there in the midst of the entire Imperial Starfleet seen moving to and fro just outside the cockpit window. One eagle-eyed Imperial lookout spots them and it’s all over for our rebel heroes. Never mind that 3-PO is, as 3-PO will, wailing non-stop. But Leia switches off 3-PO and Han dispatches Chewie to the rear of the ship and suddenly the Princess and the Smuggle have the cockpit all to themselves. He says they need to find someplace to port and calls up some sort of undefined sci-fi-y map screen on the Falcon’s control panel, a sci-fi-y map screen that bathes their faces in blue.

That blue completely flips the switch. It shuts down the engines on the movie just as the Falcon’s own engines have been shut down to evade detection. Throughout “Empire Strikes Back”, the colors emanating from the massive control panel at the rear of the cockpit cast the characters and the chairs the characters occupy in an orangeish glow. Orange, if you consult your local color aural expert, and why wouldn’t you if you are already a “Star Wars” nerd who believes in The Force, tends to represent confidence, a healthy ego, a daredevil attitude, passion, even sexual energy, which is not at all out of place in the verbal bickering of Han and Leia. But this blue softens the proceedings, communicating to them and to us, sitting in the eye of an Imperial hurricane, just after a movie-and-a-half of buildup, before another movie-and-a-half of wrap-up, that it’s finally time to take our legally mandated twenty second fifteen minute break.

Forgotten Great Moments in Movie History

Perhaps stemming from my general exhaustion with people whose biggest movie-watching kicks come from picking out plot holes and whining about them, forgoing ruminations on aesthetics and theme, I have a soft spot for moments in movies that, intentionally or unintentionally, derive humor from poking holes in real world logic. Like, the moment in “The Naked Gun 2 1/2” where villainous Quentin Hapsburg (Robert Goulet) is on the very specific lookout for two aging white men, a dude in a wheelchair, and O.J. Simpson, and yet upon encountering a four-person mariachi band consisting of two aging white men, a dude in a wheelchair, and O.J. Simpson cannot quite detect that his desired targets are right in front of him.

This sort of moment was just as ably captured in 2011’s “The Muppets” where Miss Piggy’s Parisian secretary, a sterling Emily Blunt, shoos The Muppets from the office only to be fooled by Muppet Man, wherein all The Muppets stand on one another’s shoulders while hidden in a trenchcoat to give the impression of being a lone individual. I have written this before but the way Blunt plays the moment just slays me; she knows something is amiss but she cannot quite put her finger on what it is. Man, I love when logic gets mocked.

“The Princess Bride” (1987) mocked logic a lot. The book on which it was based, in fact, mocked it even more, with memorable lines like “He was ashamed of his attire, worn boots and tore blue jeans (blue jeans were invented considerably before most people suppose).” I dug the whole Man in Black concept, honest I did, but I’d be lying if I said part of me didn’t wish Westley was wearing tore blue jeans. But I digress. The point is that logic has no place in “The Princess Bride” and the place where logic is least welcome occurs during the infamous of battle of wits.

This battle, as you might recall, involves our dear Westley (Cary Elwes), still masquerading as the Man in Black at this juncture even though the audience obviously knows it’s him (logic!), and Vizzini (Wallace Shawn), he of the self-professed big brain. The battle is wonderful, of course, this goes without saying, full of dialogue as comical as it is snappy as it is witty delivered with great flair. The scene concerns Westley placing iocane powder, “one of the deadlier poisons known to man”, in one of the two goblets before the men and then forcing Vizzini to guess which goblet was iocane-free, making the battle of wits a battle to the death.

But wait. The goblets. See, that is sort of what I want to talk about here. Because the battle of wits takes place at a conveniently table-ish boulder, with a blindfolded Princess Buttercup (Robin Wright), currently at the mercy of Vizzini, just off to the side. The conveniently table-ish boulder, however, is not merely occupied by two goblets; it is occupied by two goblets and three apples and a hunk of bread and a hunk of a cheese and a cheese knife all of which is situated on top of a tablecloth. Now, in the run-up to this scene, we have seen Vizzini carrying a medieval knapsack, nothing more, which naturally prompts the question: wait, where did all that crap come from?

I know. Believe me, I know. I sound like Neil deGrasse Tyson here. But then, that is precisely why I love this scene! No mention is made of how this extravagant spread came to be; no mention is made of this extravagant spread at all; Westley, when deciding what tack to take to thwart Vizzini, simply says “Pour the wine” as if it is the most natural thing in the world for this extravagant spread to be where it is. After all, Vizzini is, as he says, smarter than Plato and Socrates, and since Westley ultimately wins the battle of wits that means he is smarter than Vizzini and Plato and Socrates. This is to say, such men are above plot holes.

Why Him?

Director John Hamburg’s “Why Him?” suggests a narratively inverted “Meet the Parents”, which Hamburg wrote, told from the perspective of the father-in-law, Ned Fleming (Bryan Cranston), though in this case the prospective son-in-law is not a hapless nurse but an eccentric dot com millionaire, Laird Mayhew, played by James Franco, which is nimble casting considering how so many have turned on the straining-to-be-eccentric Franco, and how most everyone long ago turned on dot com millionaires. And so Franco welcoming that hate, rather than trying to ward it off, with a persistent, occasionally irritating, gleam in his eye puts you in Ned’s shoes from the start. Laird is dating Ned’s daughter Stephanie (Zoey Deutch), a few semesters shy of graduating from Stanford, and not so much Daddy’s Little Girl as an Independent Woman Who Daddy Thinks Is Still His Little Girl. She doesn’t exactly have agency because she spends much of the film on the sideline as Ned and Laird tango over whether or not she should be proposed to, but she is allowed to reclaim her agency in the end, thank God, as if everything that came before was superfluous. Indeed, there is another scene where Stephanie and her mother Barb (Megan Mullally, given a fair amount to do if you nevertheless wish she got to do more) advise Ned they kept a secret from him for his own emotional safety. And in that instant you sense a whole movie where these two women observe the predictable hijinks from afar, shaking their heads, calling out the clockwork twists before they happen.

You might wonder, couldn’t we watch that movie instead of another in a long line of wacky, or pseudo-wacky, comedies about buttoned up fathers forced to confront their prospective anything-goes sons-in-law that must faithfully observe the time-honored Chekhov’s Moose Tank, stipulating that if a glass tank filled with moose urine is seen in the beginning then it must shatter before the end? I am receptive to that argument. Still, I confess to enjoying Cranston’s performance as not merely a tightly wound man but a tightly wound Midwesterner, a crucial distinction, introduced as owner of a printer company in Michigan barely getting by that is suddenly thrown out of balance when he arrives in a Left Coast environment existing entirely outside the box, where dinners are not so amply proportioned and comprised partially of edible paper and the people, to paraphrase an old Garrison Keillor line, are looking for a lot more eye contact than Ned is used to.

Sure, you have seen such fish out of water shenanigans before, but Cranston nevertheless invests them with comical urgency, particularly through facial contortions evoking the facial putty of George C. Scott in “Dr. Strangelove”, a comparison I do not employ lightly selling nearly every single bit with squints and sighs and double takes. His stiff body language, meanwhile, consistently mirrors the blazer, sweater, tie ensemble he sports to Laird’s big Christmas soiree, and underlines an attitudinal inflexibility that his surroundings are trying really hard to bend, never more so than an unfortunate voyage to the bathroom where, uh, simple manual sanitation has been phased out in the name of technological efficiency, which eventually yields to an invasion of Ned’s privacy in the most prominent place that no reserved Midwestern male, I assure you, wants his privacy compromised.

That is not the only thing compromised in “Why Him?” as Ned is also forced to grapple with his beloved business’s death rattle in age where the tangibility of printing paper has given way to abstruse smart home monitoring systems with a voice where there is no person. Ned cannot quite wrap his mind around these details, an aging man who suddenly finds himself discomfited by the modern world, hanging on by a thread that Cranston lends great comic desperation. You only wish the script surrounding him had done the same, relying more and more on rote hijinks the further the movie goes, like Ned awkwardly, unintentionally finding himself in the same room as his daughter and her boyfriend at a particularly delicate moment or the hopelessly stale subplot of Ned trying to hack Laird to get compromising information to bust up the relationship.

Laird and Stephanie’s relationship, really, is just the hoary convention Hamburg utilizes as a means to put a middle-aged man in present day America through the wringer of impending irrelevance, which is a tantalizingly idea, given the surrounding cultural landscape, to really extract Ned’s fear and resentment, both of which you catch in glimpses. Alas, this was a Christmas release and so all manner of plot pyrotechnics are summoned to ensure that forgiveness and goodwill ultimately trump fear and resentment. Still, in the machinated wrap-up there emerges the notion of Ned willingly relinquishing his self-appointed wise elder position to the youth movement. Maybe kids know best.

A Ghost Story

“A Ghost Story”, made on the cheap by director David Lowery for $150,000, is a testament to what movies can do, a reverie of DIY, taking nothing more than a bare bones child’s Halloween costume, a white bed sheet with two cut out eyeholes, and wresting all manner of meaning and aesthetic magic from it. The film opens with the unnamed central couple, played by Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck, wrapped up in each other’s arms on the couch, a stolen moment between lovers, and segues not much long after to a moment of the two discussing a move that she wants and he doesn’t. Lowery sets this shot with Affleck, a vaguely defined musician, wearing headphones at his computer, in the foreground with Mara out of focus in the background, not only conveying the emergent dissonance in their relationship but speaking to how Lowery moves forward in time and evinces huge chunks of emotion in the simplest of frames. Soon after, Affleck’s character is seen slumped over the wheel of his car, dead, involved in a car crash we never see, because, after all, this A Ghost Story and ghost stories are always most concerned about what comes after.

We see his ascension to the afterlife, or the in-between, which is where the movie gets a little ambiguous, which is not to its detriment because Affleck’s character himself seems not to quite know where he is, in a long take at the morgue where he has been laid out on a gurney beneath a white sheet. Mara’s character confirms it’s him, is left alone and then leaves. Time passes in an unbroken shot. Suddenly, the sheet sits up, mirroring a moment in “The Mummy” where Tom Cruise does the same. That moment was played for laughs, and this moment feels kinda funny too, especially when Affleck’s character climbs off the gurney and strolls out of the frame. It feels kinda funny because it is rendered without music so as not to cue your emotions, allowing for the inherent awkwardness to burble up. Moments later music does appear, tipping you more toward an eerie poignancy, but it’s a helluva thing getting there.

The ghost wanders through the living, unseen, and then returns home, where he is apparently confined. This is when Mara’s character returns to find a pie left by a friend for comfort. She eats it; she eats the whole thing; she eats the whole thing in two shots that last four minutes with no music; she eats the whole thing in two shots that last four minutes with no music while the Ghost stands in the corner of the frame just watching. Lowery is sort of daring you to stay with the movie, sure, but he is doing so much more.

He is defining how the apparition can only observe, not interfere, at least not in any useful way, forced to see the person he caused harm hurting and left with no recourse to help, a specter in his own life, looking at it from the outside, left merely to observe, not participate. This is just as acutely brought home in a later scene of her listening to a song he wrote. Though Lowery places she and the Ghost in the frame together, by also flashing back to the first time she heard the song in the midst of this moment Lowery makes clear the chasm that still exists; she feels her deceased spouse in the past, not the present, though he is there and can see her, which simply makes the pain of what he misses that much greater.

Lowery also uses this moment to define the film’s sense of time. Days, years, decades, perhaps even centuries will pass by as “A Ghost Story” progresses, which, for obvious reasons, have to be conveyed in jump cuts, which are not explicitly explained though details in each new scene evoke where we are and how far we have moved. And so Lowery uses this scene to make you feel the unbearable weight of time, and the way that its passage will essentially render us ghosts in the places we once inhabited.

What might be most remarkable, however, is how Lowery, who also edited, makes you feel the emotion of this sheeted specter. Despite the eyeholes, you can’t see Affleck’s eyes, preventing his emoting, and while he moves his body this way or that, and sometimes goes for short strolls, his varying emotions are evinced through directorial choices – angles, tilts, zooms. You see the immovable ghost at a distance, simply looking on, in the pie scene and the melancholy is palpable, while a later moment, when he listens to a speech, a purposeful zoom in on the ghost from a low angle as he moves forward conveys the rising fury. This speech, delivered in a walk off cameo by Will Oldham, who is wearing overalls so as to communicate his existence as a Blowhard as much as the bedsheet communicates Ghost, concerns the meaningless of making art, of doing anything in a universe where time eventually renders all people and things as forgotten, sort of a hipster’s interpretation of Alvy Singer refusing to do his homework because the universe is expanding.

Lowery could be out to rebut this notion, seeing as how he scores the scene to Beethoven’s ninth symphony, suggesting some things do transcend time. And the film itself could also be argued as the refutation given its quality. But ultimately the meaningless seems less overcome through artistic intent than emotional peace, which is not easy to find as “A Ghost Story” illustrates, which, without spoiling too much, suggests something more like its own ethereal imagining of cyclical time, an endlessly looping journey to achieve understanding, an understanding of and a peace with the fact that no matter what we do, no matter what we accomplish, no matter what we leave behind, one day, in more ways than just the physical, we will simply be…..gone.