Posts
Thursday, November 30, 2017
Wednesday, November 29, 2017
Most Fun States to Say
In his most recent NFL Jamboroo, the only NFL article I read in my new (and wonderful) abstention from that gridiron corporate cabal, specifically because it is so often not about the NFL at all, the legendary irascible Drew Magary ignored discussing the non-scintillating Jaguars v Cardinals match-up to instead discuss what state name was most fun to say. He chose Alabama, writing “Al-a-BAM!-a! I’ll order an Alabama slammer at the bar just so I can yell it.”
I see Magary’s point. I mean, listen to Gene Hackman or George Dzunda thunder “Alabama”, as in U.S.S. Alabama, in “Crimson Tide” and tell me your heart rate doesn’t pick up. But then, I might argue that Mississippi — MIH-sih-SIH-pee — is just as fun to say, though it oddly only clocks in at #9 on Magary’s list, as evinced by the southern-state soliloquy recited by Bruce McGill, who should be in everything, inserted into the midst of his unforgettable “The Insider” monologue. “This is not North Carolina, not South Carolina nor Kentucky!” he bellows. “This is the sovereign State of Mississippi’s proceeding!” You just wish he could have fit Alabama in there too, or even Tennessee, though the definitive Tennessee utterance takes place in Dolly Parton’s “A Smoky Mountain Christmas” which I feel safe saying even though I have not actually seen it.
However, it’s tough for me to say any state is more euphonious than California, whether it’s the delightfully lyrical manner in which it rolls off Stuart Wilson’s tongue in “The Mask of Zorro”, making California sound like the Pacific paradise of so many romantic odes, or even Bruce Willis’s snide dismissal of the Golden State ethos as “Die Hard” commences which still makes it sound better than, say, “Rhode Island.”
On the other hand, while I am famously no John Wayne fan, even I will come clean and admit that John Wayne’s deliberate drawl gave great life to Colorado throughout “Rio Bravo” even if he was referring to Ricky Nelson rather than the state, fashioning it, perhaps inevitably, as “Call-uh-rah-*duh*” rather than “Call-uh-rah-*doh*.” Nothing without providence is a decent state motto, I suppose, if you’re into providence anyway, but boy oh boy wouldn’t you go in for a little axiom re-branding in the form of Let’s make a little noise, Call-uh-rah-*duh*.
Of course, my status as a native and current Midwesterner makes it difficult for me to ignore just how underrated our states can be to say. Truly! Think of the English actor Kris Marshall, as the quasi-immortal Colin Frissell of “Love Actually”, who makes “Wisconsin” sound like a land flowing in milk and honey, or the personable sheepishness that Kevin Costner lends “Iowa” when telling the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson that this isn’t quite heaven.
Then again, think of “Unforgiven”, when English Bob observes that he thought Little Bill was dead, to which Little Bill unforgettably replies “Hell, I even thought I was dead, ’til it turned out I was just in Nebraska,” with the aforementioned Gene Hackman, merely re-cementing his immortality, twisting The Cornhusker State’s namesake into something akin to the Hoth system.
But whatever. This is all boilerplate, blogging meaningless, because obviously one more state is more fun to say than any other state — at least, if we are Cary Grant, that is, and don’t we all wish we were?
I see Magary’s point. I mean, listen to Gene Hackman or George Dzunda thunder “Alabama”, as in U.S.S. Alabama, in “Crimson Tide” and tell me your heart rate doesn’t pick up. But then, I might argue that Mississippi — MIH-sih-SIH-pee — is just as fun to say, though it oddly only clocks in at #9 on Magary’s list, as evinced by the southern-state soliloquy recited by Bruce McGill, who should be in everything, inserted into the midst of his unforgettable “The Insider” monologue. “This is not North Carolina, not South Carolina nor Kentucky!” he bellows. “This is the sovereign State of Mississippi’s proceeding!” You just wish he could have fit Alabama in there too, or even Tennessee, though the definitive Tennessee utterance takes place in Dolly Parton’s “A Smoky Mountain Christmas” which I feel safe saying even though I have not actually seen it.
However, it’s tough for me to say any state is more euphonious than California, whether it’s the delightfully lyrical manner in which it rolls off Stuart Wilson’s tongue in “The Mask of Zorro”, making California sound like the Pacific paradise of so many romantic odes, or even Bruce Willis’s snide dismissal of the Golden State ethos as “Die Hard” commences which still makes it sound better than, say, “Rhode Island.”
On the other hand, while I am famously no John Wayne fan, even I will come clean and admit that John Wayne’s deliberate drawl gave great life to Colorado throughout “Rio Bravo” even if he was referring to Ricky Nelson rather than the state, fashioning it, perhaps inevitably, as “Call-uh-rah-*duh*” rather than “Call-uh-rah-*doh*.” Nothing without providence is a decent state motto, I suppose, if you’re into providence anyway, but boy oh boy wouldn’t you go in for a little axiom re-branding in the form of Let’s make a little noise, Call-uh-rah-*duh*.
Of course, my status as a native and current Midwesterner makes it difficult for me to ignore just how underrated our states can be to say. Truly! Think of the English actor Kris Marshall, as the quasi-immortal Colin Frissell of “Love Actually”, who makes “Wisconsin” sound like a land flowing in milk and honey, or the personable sheepishness that Kevin Costner lends “Iowa” when telling the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson that this isn’t quite heaven.
Then again, think of “Unforgiven”, when English Bob observes that he thought Little Bill was dead, to which Little Bill unforgettably replies “Hell, I even thought I was dead, ’til it turned out I was just in Nebraska,” with the aforementioned Gene Hackman, merely re-cementing his immortality, twisting The Cornhusker State’s namesake into something akin to the Hoth system.
But whatever. This is all boilerplate, blogging meaningless, because obviously one more state is more fun to say than any other state — at least, if we are Cary Grant, that is, and don’t we all wish we were?
Tuesday, November 28, 2017
Columbus
“Columbus” elicits shades of “Before Sunrise” by virtue of turning on a young woman, Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), and man, Jin (John Cho), who meet by chance and engage in philosophical conversation while exploring a scenic city. Yet I kept thinking less of “Before Sunrise” and more of “Museum Hours”, which was one part character study, one part documentary, wherein director Jem Cohen asked us to look at real life much like we might look at a painting hung in a gallery. South Korean director Kogonada, however, goes even further with “Columbus”, set in a Midwestern mecca of architecture, Columbus, Indiana, by sort of metaphysically merging that architecture with his characters. You see this acutely in a sequence where the main characters stand at night outside the town’s idiosyncratically illuminated bank building. Casey says something about coming here for inspiration when life got rough, artificially sweetened dialogue if I ever heard it, but which Kogonada authenticates by allowing the building to hover in the shot, just above them, like some sort of deity, underlined by how Richardson has Casey steal glances of the building throughout their chat. The rhythms of her life, in other words, have always moved in time with the surrounding physical structures, as close as you will come to seeing actual life breathed into that standby phrase Dancing About Architecture.
Columbus doubles as Casey’s home, which she has never left, college-aged but not in college, working at the local library, and taking care of her mother (Michelle Forbes), a recovering meth addict. And the movie, ever patient, takes time introducing us to her daily routine, before she encounters the other crucial character, Jin, visiting from Korea because his father, never really seen, an architectural theorist, is on his deathbed. Their introduction, a conversation over a cigarette, is in indicative of how every shot is thought out, with a fence between the characters, and as they walk and talk, Jin, a character who feels less open and a little more out of view throughout, disappears for an instant behind a fencepost every few steps, as if slipping out of and returning to focus, before the fence ends and they are simply…together.
He hardly sees his father despite the old man’s precarious state. They haven’t spoken for a year. His father’s real love, Jin grudgingly explains, was the buildings, these in Columbus, and everywhere else. The emergent irony, even as a flicker of attraction develops between the two despite their age difference, is that Casey’s true love is the buildings too, so much so that she has a list of her favorites, which doesn’t feel like some sort of Top 5, “High Fidelity”-ish stab at self-definition but an affection that is as practical as it is lyrical. In one scene, she recites a building’s stats for Jin who teasingly calls her a tour guide, before he wonders how tour guides can stay in love with something so long, a statement bringing to mind Malcolm Miller, the English professor who moved to Chartes, Frances in 1958 to devote himself to its historic cathedral, a person more officially academic than Casey though she nevertheless evokes the idea of someone who has devoted herself to the place where she lives just the same.
When Jin asks Casey specifically what she loves about the buildings, it is a testament to Kogonada’s style that he refrains from giving her a monologue, instead cutting to a shot from inside the building itself, looking out at Casey through the window, bringing up music on the soundtrack and cutting off her dialogue completely, allowing her to sort of intermix with the edifice. Indeed, throughout the movie Kogonada sets the duo in long shots when they discuss architecture so that we can see the buildings they discuss, like a church spire rising up between them, giving the impression of an inanimate chaperone. Yet when matters turn personal, and occasionally they do, Kogonada cuts to the characters’ faces in much more traditional shot-reverse shot close-ups. Even there, however, his attention to detail remains distinct, like a conversation in a covered bridge where Jin mentions how his people believe that failing to be present at the death of a family member means your own spirit roams aimlessly and becomes a ghost. As he says this, the smoke from his cigarette drifts upward, framing his face, transforming him into something akin to a smoky specter.
It is commendable that throughout their talks Jin is not urging her to stay with him, respecting their age difference, but to go elsewhere, to expand her horizons. But the movie also knows that Jin telling her is not enough; she has to find that desire within herself. And if she has spent so much of her adolescence into young adulthood looking at everything around her, she gradually begins looking inwardly, seeing herself from another angle, realizing she might see the mother she has convinced herself she needs to stick around to care for from the wrong angle. And if Kogonada enlivens one idiom, he does the same for another, improbably literalizing the notion of Crossing the Bridge as the movie draws its curtain, and the image, taken together with the preceding emotions, render a mere cable-stayed bridge as something like a portal to another dimension.
Columbus doubles as Casey’s home, which she has never left, college-aged but not in college, working at the local library, and taking care of her mother (Michelle Forbes), a recovering meth addict. And the movie, ever patient, takes time introducing us to her daily routine, before she encounters the other crucial character, Jin, visiting from Korea because his father, never really seen, an architectural theorist, is on his deathbed. Their introduction, a conversation over a cigarette, is in indicative of how every shot is thought out, with a fence between the characters, and as they walk and talk, Jin, a character who feels less open and a little more out of view throughout, disappears for an instant behind a fencepost every few steps, as if slipping out of and returning to focus, before the fence ends and they are simply…together.
He hardly sees his father despite the old man’s precarious state. They haven’t spoken for a year. His father’s real love, Jin grudgingly explains, was the buildings, these in Columbus, and everywhere else. The emergent irony, even as a flicker of attraction develops between the two despite their age difference, is that Casey’s true love is the buildings too, so much so that she has a list of her favorites, which doesn’t feel like some sort of Top 5, “High Fidelity”-ish stab at self-definition but an affection that is as practical as it is lyrical. In one scene, she recites a building’s stats for Jin who teasingly calls her a tour guide, before he wonders how tour guides can stay in love with something so long, a statement bringing to mind Malcolm Miller, the English professor who moved to Chartes, Frances in 1958 to devote himself to its historic cathedral, a person more officially academic than Casey though she nevertheless evokes the idea of someone who has devoted herself to the place where she lives just the same.
When Jin asks Casey specifically what she loves about the buildings, it is a testament to Kogonada’s style that he refrains from giving her a monologue, instead cutting to a shot from inside the building itself, looking out at Casey through the window, bringing up music on the soundtrack and cutting off her dialogue completely, allowing her to sort of intermix with the edifice. Indeed, throughout the movie Kogonada sets the duo in long shots when they discuss architecture so that we can see the buildings they discuss, like a church spire rising up between them, giving the impression of an inanimate chaperone. Yet when matters turn personal, and occasionally they do, Kogonada cuts to the characters’ faces in much more traditional shot-reverse shot close-ups. Even there, however, his attention to detail remains distinct, like a conversation in a covered bridge where Jin mentions how his people believe that failing to be present at the death of a family member means your own spirit roams aimlessly and becomes a ghost. As he says this, the smoke from his cigarette drifts upward, framing his face, transforming him into something akin to a smoky specter.
It is commendable that throughout their talks Jin is not urging her to stay with him, respecting their age difference, but to go elsewhere, to expand her horizons. But the movie also knows that Jin telling her is not enough; she has to find that desire within herself. And if she has spent so much of her adolescence into young adulthood looking at everything around her, she gradually begins looking inwardly, seeing herself from another angle, realizing she might see the mother she has convinced herself she needs to stick around to care for from the wrong angle. And if Kogonada enlivens one idiom, he does the same for another, improbably literalizing the notion of Crossing the Bridge as the movie draws its curtain, and the image, taken together with the preceding emotions, render a mere cable-stayed bridge as something like a portal to another dimension.
Monday, November 27, 2017
Last Flag Flying
Richard Linklater’s “Last Flag Flying” is a sorta-sequel to Hal Ashby’s “The Last Detail” (1973), each one based on a Daryl Ponsican book, and if the characters in Linklater’s film have different names and situations they are nevertheless spiritual kin, though obviously much older given time’s passage, and “Last Flag Flying”, for better, for worse, feels that age. Not just in their excursion to get cellphones, a comical contrast to the more off-color side trips that Ashby rendered, but how Ashby’s characters were prone more to reckless whims of the moment, if often dissatisfied with the present, while Linklater’s characters are more concerned with matters of the past. “Last Flag Flying”, after all, is set in 2003, employing the Iraq invasion as a means to retroactively consider the emotional quagmire of war. And if “The Last Detail” ended not simply by forgoing any Grand Lessons but sort of coldly chuckling at thought that any might exist, “Last Flag Flying” takes a more positive approach even as it mostly sidesteps sentimentality.
“Last Flag Flying” concerns Larry Shepherd (Steve Carell) enlisting his ex-military buddies, Sal Nealon (Bryan Cranston) and Richard Mueller (Laurence Fishburne), to help him bury his marine son, Larry Jr., who just died a hero in the Middle East, at Arlington. Alas, upon learning the military’s story of how Larry Jr. perished is fictive, Larry Sr. and his pals, in the company of Lance Corporal Charlie Washington (J. Quinton Johnson), forgo the national military cemetery to take Larry Jr. home to New Hampshire and bury him in civilian clothes. It’s a road movie, in other words, like its forefather, though Linklater’s confection is less nasty and satirical than “The Last Detail”, which underlined its off-color action jaunty military-themed tunes, like “American Patrol”, whereas “Last Flag Flying’s” soundtrack, composed by Graham Reynolds, is more conventionally heartfelt.
Sometimes you worry that conventionality will sink the film. Indeed, it opens with Larry Sr. re-introducing himself to Sal at the empty bar the latter owns. That the night devolves into them tying one on, and that the morning begins by Sal drinking stale beer and eating leftover pizza, felt so obvious I could only roll my eyes, and even if I did not know from previews that their mutual other Mueller the Mauler, was a preacher, I would have strongly suspected it anyway, because if characters are a hungover on a Sunday morning where else can they wind up but a church? And by the time Mueller is looking Sal up and down with admonishments of “Lord have mercy”, “Last Flag Flying” threatens Mitch Albom-ish molasses. Thankfully, however, once the characters hit the road, the movie settles into an episodic yet laid-back groove, more devoted to meaningful conversation than antics, and repeatedly diffusing the narrative bombs that seem set to go off, like meeting the mother of their old Vietnam pal in which possible conflict gives way to the harsh truth that sometimes telling a lie is the best policy.
The movie’s refusal to make a scene, however, doesn’t quite extend to Cranston’s performance, riffing too hard on Jack Nicholson’s ribald “Last Detail” ringleader. (In one shot, seen from a distance, of Cranston in a black jacket and stocking cap, a cigar in hand, he almost looks like Nicholson). But if Nicholson was willing to let himself be the butt of the joke, Cranston plays the part as if he already knows the joke and wants to laugh along with us, exerting too much Life of the Party effort. Better is Fishburne, never becoming an overbearing clerical scold even as he exudes a genuine, hard-won faith, while Carell dials up his wallflower tendencies in some movies to fine effect.
If Sal and Mueller get predominantly more dialogue than Larry Sr., Linklater makes sure we never forget him, keeping him in shots when the other two verbally spar, staring out the window or listening intently. If the Larry of “The Last Detail” was impressionable, so is Larry of “Last Flag Flying”, and is why Sal becomes a variation of Walter Sobchak to The Dude in “The Big Lebowski”, kind of pushing Larry Sr. forward with each less-than-traditional decision, made believable because Larry Sr. wants to do right by his son and isn’t quite sure he’s up to the task. And though the ending seems primed for a dramatic face-off over whether or not to bury Larry Jr. in his uniform, this possible clash delicately, smartly evaporates, while a concluding twist that could have played as irksome narrative predestination instead comes across like a father finding peace and the perfect thematic punctuation. A soldier’s story belongs to him or her, not me, not you, and not anyone else.
“Last Flag Flying” concerns Larry Shepherd (Steve Carell) enlisting his ex-military buddies, Sal Nealon (Bryan Cranston) and Richard Mueller (Laurence Fishburne), to help him bury his marine son, Larry Jr., who just died a hero in the Middle East, at Arlington. Alas, upon learning the military’s story of how Larry Jr. perished is fictive, Larry Sr. and his pals, in the company of Lance Corporal Charlie Washington (J. Quinton Johnson), forgo the national military cemetery to take Larry Jr. home to New Hampshire and bury him in civilian clothes. It’s a road movie, in other words, like its forefather, though Linklater’s confection is less nasty and satirical than “The Last Detail”, which underlined its off-color action jaunty military-themed tunes, like “American Patrol”, whereas “Last Flag Flying’s” soundtrack, composed by Graham Reynolds, is more conventionally heartfelt.
Sometimes you worry that conventionality will sink the film. Indeed, it opens with Larry Sr. re-introducing himself to Sal at the empty bar the latter owns. That the night devolves into them tying one on, and that the morning begins by Sal drinking stale beer and eating leftover pizza, felt so obvious I could only roll my eyes, and even if I did not know from previews that their mutual other Mueller the Mauler, was a preacher, I would have strongly suspected it anyway, because if characters are a hungover on a Sunday morning where else can they wind up but a church? And by the time Mueller is looking Sal up and down with admonishments of “Lord have mercy”, “Last Flag Flying” threatens Mitch Albom-ish molasses. Thankfully, however, once the characters hit the road, the movie settles into an episodic yet laid-back groove, more devoted to meaningful conversation than antics, and repeatedly diffusing the narrative bombs that seem set to go off, like meeting the mother of their old Vietnam pal in which possible conflict gives way to the harsh truth that sometimes telling a lie is the best policy.
The movie’s refusal to make a scene, however, doesn’t quite extend to Cranston’s performance, riffing too hard on Jack Nicholson’s ribald “Last Detail” ringleader. (In one shot, seen from a distance, of Cranston in a black jacket and stocking cap, a cigar in hand, he almost looks like Nicholson). But if Nicholson was willing to let himself be the butt of the joke, Cranston plays the part as if he already knows the joke and wants to laugh along with us, exerting too much Life of the Party effort. Better is Fishburne, never becoming an overbearing clerical scold even as he exudes a genuine, hard-won faith, while Carell dials up his wallflower tendencies in some movies to fine effect.
If Sal and Mueller get predominantly more dialogue than Larry Sr., Linklater makes sure we never forget him, keeping him in shots when the other two verbally spar, staring out the window or listening intently. If the Larry of “The Last Detail” was impressionable, so is Larry of “Last Flag Flying”, and is why Sal becomes a variation of Walter Sobchak to The Dude in “The Big Lebowski”, kind of pushing Larry Sr. forward with each less-than-traditional decision, made believable because Larry Sr. wants to do right by his son and isn’t quite sure he’s up to the task. And though the ending seems primed for a dramatic face-off over whether or not to bury Larry Jr. in his uniform, this possible clash delicately, smartly evaporates, while a concluding twist that could have played as irksome narrative predestination instead comes across like a father finding peace and the perfect thematic punctuation. A soldier’s story belongs to him or her, not me, not you, and not anyone else.
Friday, November 24, 2017
Friday's Old Fashioned: He Ran All the Way (1951)
“He Ran All the Way” opens with the camera pressing in tight on the sweat-strewn face of Nick Robey (John Garfield) in the midst of a nightmare. This bad dream is a premonition of the plot to come, of course, but it also foreshadows how so much of John Berry’s rock hard noir takes place within the space of Nick’s troubled mind, which he struggles to prevent from racing, particularly when the emotional heat gets turned up, resulting in numerous rash decisions. Frequently played by Garfield with a nasty sneer, Nick comes across ruinously entitled, and yet when he seems on the verge of getting what he thinks should be coming to him, he still can’t settle down long enough to accept it. No, he maliciously pushes it all away, brought home in a closing shot so fatalistically remarkable that it might just bring you to your knees just as it brings Nick to his.
As the movie opens, Nick is more or less pulled into a payroll robbery by Al (Norman Lloyd). It quickly goes wrong, however, and Al winds up dead, and Nick winds up killing a cop and going on the run. Blending it with the crowds, Nick finds himself pulled along to a public swimming pool, where he takes a dip to try and let the heat blow over, meeting Peg Dobbs (Shelley Winters) and falling for her, maybe, and her for him, kind of. She invites him to walk her home and then back up to her place. If this circumstance might arouse questions from the Plausibility Police, like why this woman might invite in and keep chatting up a guy who is so quick to boil, but his bursts of anger, tempered with bouts of actual kindness, make him seem more like a hard luck case than an armed fugitive, and Winters smartly plays straight to this throughout, like she can’t help but be drawn to that in spite of herself.
Alas, at home, where she lives with her Mom (Selena Royle) and Pop (Wallace Ford) and young brother Tommy (Bobby Hyatt), paranoia ensconces Nick, and no matter how sweetly Peg treats him, the more he seems to think she and her family are out to get him, convinced they are conspiring with the cops. They are not, but that doesn’t matter. Nick draws his gun and takes them hostage, determined to lay low in their place as a dragnet spreads out across the city to try and find him. The dynamic instantly becomes tense, with Nick thrusting himself into the household’s central role, evoked in a shot where Nick stands at the center of the kitchen amidst everyone else, at first blithely sipping coffee but then flipping a switch and lashing out when he realizes they are all concealing information from him.
As the dragnet tightens and the longer Nick stays inside, the more he seems to break from reality, and as he does, so does Peg, told by her father to stay away from this madman yet emotionally towed along in his wake anyway, only to have an indelible snapback in the final minutes when push comes to shove. Even Nick occasionally snap backs, never more effectively than a dinner table scene in which he, having prepared a turkey, like a member of the family he isn’t, wants everyone to eat and then forces everyone to eat when they won’t, determined to the point of nuttery to turn these family into the family he so desperately craves. Yet as Pop starts carving the turkey, Nick, as if momentarily coming to grips with the emptiness of his own desires, takes up a liquor bottle instead and walks out of the frame, sitting down by himself in the next room. Emotionally, it mirrors the wrenching closing shot, reminding him, and us, that his own worst impulses will always ensure that he is all alone.
As the movie opens, Nick is more or less pulled into a payroll robbery by Al (Norman Lloyd). It quickly goes wrong, however, and Al winds up dead, and Nick winds up killing a cop and going on the run. Blending it with the crowds, Nick finds himself pulled along to a public swimming pool, where he takes a dip to try and let the heat blow over, meeting Peg Dobbs (Shelley Winters) and falling for her, maybe, and her for him, kind of. She invites him to walk her home and then back up to her place. If this circumstance might arouse questions from the Plausibility Police, like why this woman might invite in and keep chatting up a guy who is so quick to boil, but his bursts of anger, tempered with bouts of actual kindness, make him seem more like a hard luck case than an armed fugitive, and Winters smartly plays straight to this throughout, like she can’t help but be drawn to that in spite of herself.
Alas, at home, where she lives with her Mom (Selena Royle) and Pop (Wallace Ford) and young brother Tommy (Bobby Hyatt), paranoia ensconces Nick, and no matter how sweetly Peg treats him, the more he seems to think she and her family are out to get him, convinced they are conspiring with the cops. They are not, but that doesn’t matter. Nick draws his gun and takes them hostage, determined to lay low in their place as a dragnet spreads out across the city to try and find him. The dynamic instantly becomes tense, with Nick thrusting himself into the household’s central role, evoked in a shot where Nick stands at the center of the kitchen amidst everyone else, at first blithely sipping coffee but then flipping a switch and lashing out when he realizes they are all concealing information from him.
As the dragnet tightens and the longer Nick stays inside, the more he seems to break from reality, and as he does, so does Peg, told by her father to stay away from this madman yet emotionally towed along in his wake anyway, only to have an indelible snapback in the final minutes when push comes to shove. Even Nick occasionally snap backs, never more effectively than a dinner table scene in which he, having prepared a turkey, like a member of the family he isn’t, wants everyone to eat and then forces everyone to eat when they won’t, determined to the point of nuttery to turn these family into the family he so desperately craves. Yet as Pop starts carving the turkey, Nick, as if momentarily coming to grips with the emptiness of his own desires, takes up a liquor bottle instead and walks out of the frame, sitting down by himself in the next room. Emotionally, it mirrors the wrenching closing shot, reminding him, and us, that his own worst impulses will always ensure that he is all alone.
Thursday, November 23, 2017
Giving Thanks
It’s Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving is the time here in these quasi-United States when we are not so much happily willing to give thanks for our many blessings as OBLIGATED to give thanks for our many blessings dammit, as our nation’s Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda cheerily reminded us on Monday. And Cinema Romantico can think of fewer blessings more exultant than reaction shots and Nicole Kidman. Each of these blessings is exultant on its own, of course, but they are that much better when rolled into one, like they were earlier in 2017 on an episode of Ellen when Giada De Laurentiis, Food Network’s own, was enlisted to show the titular host and her most prominent guest that episode, Kidman, how to concoct fennel and clementine pizza.
It, uh, did not go well. And on a day where everyone sits down to give thanks just before stuffing themselves with scrumptious food, well, we here at Cinema Romantico would like to give thanks for a bout of food that wasn’t so scrumptious, as Ms. Kidman, her eminence, memorably demonstrated with the greatest reaction shot of 2017, perhaps of the new century.
In a year where so much of everything to a person of a certain disposition has been awful, and so many seem totally fine with everything being awful — and getting more awful still by the day, hour, minute, tweet — just so long as they get to laugh and point at people of a certain disposition feeling sorrow toward this unfolding calamity, your as-ever astonishing artistry, Ms. Kidman, in communicating to the whole wide world how that bite of food you just ate was awful to the extreme became nothing short of the ultimate blessing. Thank you.
It, uh, did not go well. And on a day where everyone sits down to give thanks just before stuffing themselves with scrumptious food, well, we here at Cinema Romantico would like to give thanks for a bout of food that wasn’t so scrumptious, as Ms. Kidman, her eminence, memorably demonstrated with the greatest reaction shot of 2017, perhaps of the new century.
In a year where so much of everything to a person of a certain disposition has been awful, and so many seem totally fine with everything being awful — and getting more awful still by the day, hour, minute, tweet — just so long as they get to laugh and point at people of a certain disposition feeling sorrow toward this unfolding calamity, your as-ever astonishing artistry, Ms. Kidman, in communicating to the whole wide world how that bite of food you just ate was awful to the extreme became nothing short of the ultimate blessing. Thank you.
Wednesday, November 22, 2017
Dissecting a Scene from Brooklyn
I mostly, not completely, liked “Brooklyn”, John Crowley’s 2015 film, though you can read about my misgivings elsewhere because I am here today specifically to discuss a sequence I adored. It is early in the film, right after Eilis (Saoirse Ronan), living in a small village in Ireland in 1951, has announced she will leave her native country for America — namely, Brooklyn. In the lead-up to this, she attends a local dance with her best friend Nancy (Eileen O’Higgins) who is hoping to see George (Peter Campion). And the subsequent scene becomes an evocative of illustration of how the best moments in “Brooklyn” repeatedly take place not so much in the titular locale as on the face of its indelible lead actress.
Crowley establishes the scene with a shot of the band, underscoring how music will be the scene’s backdrop.
Then Crowley switches to a wide shot of the dance itself, establishing both location and situation.
Here is George, on the edge of the dance floor, taking a drag on his cigarette and checking out Nancy, thinking about asking her to dance.
And here is Nancy, wondering if George, seen there over her shoulder in a deep frame, is checking her out and wondering if he is wondering if he should ask her to dance.
And here is Eilis, checking and confirming for Nancy that George is checking her out and probably thinking about asking her dance. And notice how in the shots of Eilis the background characters are not afforded quite as much weight as in the shots of Nancy.
Now George notices that they notice that he is checking Nancy out.
And now here is Eilis relaying to Nancy that he notices that they notice that he is checking Nancy out.
Nancy refuses to believe it...
...not even when Eilis announces that George is on his way over...
...which he absolutely is...
...which Nancy also refuses to believe...
...which gets on the nerves of Eilis. And this whole sequence, as they frames demonstrate, are cut for maximum comic effect, and that effect is ably sold by Ronan’s performance, a performance in which she toggles so effortlessly from humorous to heartfelt to places in-between throughout.
I like that upon George’s arrival he first looks to Eilis, almost as if she has assumed a motherly position and he wants to non-verbally communicate good intentions.
But now, as if getting getting the implied permission of Eilis, he turns to Nancy and asks her to dance.
And the movie allows Eilis her own reaction to this moment, which is not one of jealousy but joy for her friend.
And her friend reciprocates as George leads her to the dance floor.
And this...this is where Ronan takes over. In the enusing frame, which Crowley simply holds to allow Ronan to fill it and own it, every movement her eyes make, every movement her face makes, every movement her head makes, quietly, simply conveys exactly what her character is thinking.
First, Ronan lets the pure joy dissolve into something more like wistfulness, not for her friend, of course, but for herself, for how all of this is something she is about to leave behind.
And as if grasping she is about to leave all this behind, she turns toward everyone and everything else, to let it all wash over, scanning the whole room, bit-by-bit, before her eyes tilt to the left and toward the door.
Then she looks down in the act of gathering herself...
...and purposely strides toward the door.
Crowley cuts back to Nancy and George in the midst of their dance, lost unto their burgeoning love.
And then Eilis appears in the back of the frame, between them, one last fare-thee-well look toward her best friend, happy for their moment.
But in terms of the movie, this moment still belongs to Eilis, which Crowley reminds us by jump cutting much closer to Eilis, rendering Nancy and George as blurs on either edge of the frame.
And then Eilis is gone, out the door, bound for America.
Tuesday, November 21, 2017
Wind River
Taylor Sheridan’s “Wind River” takes its title from the American Indian reservation in Wyoming where the frozen body of a young Native American woman, Natalie Hanson (Kelsey Chow), is discovered by Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner), a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agent. And if the film’s concluding title card, citing the epidemic of Native American women who go missing and remain missing, would suggest a film that unravels this woman’s identity, allowing her to be reclaimed as the person she was, that never really happens. In fact, “Wind River” reveals who she is almost immediately, and then spends little time on who she was, more often concerned with mood and employing it to bring home a point that, frankly, never quite connects with what that aforementioned title card evokes, muddling “Wind River’s” meaning.
The mood is cast by the danger of the place, where a blizzard can whip up seemingly within minutes, where going outdoors free of heavy winter clothing puts your life in peril within seconds, where a life led, we are told more than once, correlates directly to survival. Sheridan portrays that survival in both dramatic and comic terms, the latter seen when Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen), a Floridian FBI agent stationed in Las Vegas who is summoned in the wake of the frozen body, arrives without nary a hint of winter weather gear only to learn the body is five miles away in the snowy wilderness. She’s out of her element, yes, but not in over her head, which is a crucial delineation and one that Olsen successfully plays to. She is a fish out of water, but Olsen still comports herself in the manner of someone familiar with hacking through red tape, whether in the sun & warmth or in the ice & snow, and therefore sizing up a situation and acting accordingly, which is why Jane is willing to ask Cory for help.
As such, Cory never really looks at Jane with the same sort of derision or suspicion as Ben (Graham Green), the tribal cop, or the father (Gil Birmingham) of Natalie. After all, Cory is a white man in Native America, which is explicated more often than it really needs to be in the dialogue itself, accepted if occasionally chastised, but nevertheless a person who has learned how to exist in a world regulated apart from typical bureaucracy. This is especially evoked in the movie’s big set piece, a massive stand-off, with nearly a dozen characters standing in the snow with guns aimed in all different directions, everyone hollering about who and who does not have authority as Jane steps to the forefront and says that because she is FBI and where they are is federal land she has authority. I will not say how all this ends but, rest assured she doesn’t have authority, not like she thinks, brought home in the subsequent scene where an eerily calm Cory essentially defers all authority to the land.
The latter scene also allows for a modicum of vengeance, which is more or less what this murder investigation becomes about, which is where “Wind River” goes wrong. Cory is given backstory in the form of a young daughter who died for reasons not to be disclosed. This means his attempts to help solve Natalie’s murder becomes something of an attempt for emblematic healing, which is dispiriting, not because Renner plays these moments poorly but because it cheapens Natalie’s death by turning it into something else, and by leaving Natalie as an enigma. All we get to know of her is how Sheridan solves the murder mystery, an ungainly inserted flashback wherein she is still sort of just beside the point, not exactly collateral damage but not far from it, first becoming the means of one man to defend his honor and then a rag doll to the gruesome misdeeds of other men. And if everyone here is supposed to defer to the whims of the land, well, every character in a movie defers to his/her maker, and Sheridan sadly leaves Natalie hung out to dry.
The mood is cast by the danger of the place, where a blizzard can whip up seemingly within minutes, where going outdoors free of heavy winter clothing puts your life in peril within seconds, where a life led, we are told more than once, correlates directly to survival. Sheridan portrays that survival in both dramatic and comic terms, the latter seen when Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen), a Floridian FBI agent stationed in Las Vegas who is summoned in the wake of the frozen body, arrives without nary a hint of winter weather gear only to learn the body is five miles away in the snowy wilderness. She’s out of her element, yes, but not in over her head, which is a crucial delineation and one that Olsen successfully plays to. She is a fish out of water, but Olsen still comports herself in the manner of someone familiar with hacking through red tape, whether in the sun & warmth or in the ice & snow, and therefore sizing up a situation and acting accordingly, which is why Jane is willing to ask Cory for help.
As such, Cory never really looks at Jane with the same sort of derision or suspicion as Ben (Graham Green), the tribal cop, or the father (Gil Birmingham) of Natalie. After all, Cory is a white man in Native America, which is explicated more often than it really needs to be in the dialogue itself, accepted if occasionally chastised, but nevertheless a person who has learned how to exist in a world regulated apart from typical bureaucracy. This is especially evoked in the movie’s big set piece, a massive stand-off, with nearly a dozen characters standing in the snow with guns aimed in all different directions, everyone hollering about who and who does not have authority as Jane steps to the forefront and says that because she is FBI and where they are is federal land she has authority. I will not say how all this ends but, rest assured she doesn’t have authority, not like she thinks, brought home in the subsequent scene where an eerily calm Cory essentially defers all authority to the land.
The latter scene also allows for a modicum of vengeance, which is more or less what this murder investigation becomes about, which is where “Wind River” goes wrong. Cory is given backstory in the form of a young daughter who died for reasons not to be disclosed. This means his attempts to help solve Natalie’s murder becomes something of an attempt for emblematic healing, which is dispiriting, not because Renner plays these moments poorly but because it cheapens Natalie’s death by turning it into something else, and by leaving Natalie as an enigma. All we get to know of her is how Sheridan solves the murder mystery, an ungainly inserted flashback wherein she is still sort of just beside the point, not exactly collateral damage but not far from it, first becoming the means of one man to defend his honor and then a rag doll to the gruesome misdeeds of other men. And if everyone here is supposed to defer to the whims of the land, well, every character in a movie defers to his/her maker, and Sheridan sadly leaves Natalie hung out to dry.
Monday, November 20, 2017
Lady Bird
“Lady Bird” takes its title from the nickname that Christine McPherson (Saoirse Ronan), a 17 year old living in Sacramento, gives herself. There is no real meaning to this nickname beyond the nickname itself; it is a means to assert her individuality. Of course, claiming your uniqueness through a moniker that has no real meaning is pretty funny. If her parents wanted her to be called Christine then, dammit, she will go by Lady Bird, end of story. It’s youthful rebellion, in other words, driving the action of “Lady Bird” forward while indelibly embodied in Ronan’s performance, her astonishing verisimilitude underscored by the very real acne she allows to adorn her cheeks, playing every scene with a simultaneous confidence and insecurity, convinced she knows everything, terrified she knows nothing. And Ronan is matched every step of the way by Laurie Metcalf who outfits the role of Marion, Christine’s mother, with a wearied warmth and candid irritability befitting the elder trapped inside a teenager’s tempest.
This tempest is evoked straight away in the opening scene where mother and daughter return from a college visit in the car. If at first they are bonding, weeping while wrapping up a book on tape of “The Grapes of Wrath”, they quickly pivot to an argument about Christine’s desire to attend an out of state school. To Marion, this is out of the question, and the argument escalates so quickly and fiercely that Christine hurls herself from the car while it’s moving, portrayed as equally funny and frightful. And if the subsequent cast on her arm is no doubt courtesy of Marion, Lady Bird still scrawls “fuck you, mom” on the plaster, illustrating the idea of her mother as protector and antagonist, though too often Christine remains blind to the former. Later, when she announces plans to spend Thanksgiving at her boyfriend’s, the scene concludes by lingering on a shot of Marion which Metcalf invests with the melancholy of a mother getting left behind.
This cut is evidence of just how much thought director Greta Gerwig invests in the film. Only her second directorial credit, she is not all the way there visually, sometimes imbuing less a sense of exact place than the conclusion’s hymn to Sacramento would suggest. Then again, Gerwig, who also wrote the script, has considered these characters, all of them, from the McPhersons on down to the smallest supporting parts, writing them real lives that are often illustrated in just one line, and so in some sense this kaleidoscope of people emerges as the place more than any actual locales. What’s more, even if Gerwig sets the film in 2003, she thankfully forgoes a nostalgia trip, employing The Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash” not as some bout of retro snootiness but a lighthouse of cheerful uncoolness and utilizing the invasion of Iraq as a backdrop to a teen’s self-centered disinterest in global events.
The McPherson family is something like lower middle class, but Gerwig does not romanticize their semi-grubby conditions nor blithely present this fact and then pass over it. Instead it informs every aspect of the McPhersons’ lives, from Marion and Christine browsing clothing clearance racks to mother admonishing her daughter for using two towels when one will do. This economic quandary is an outgrowth of Christine’s father, Larry (Tracy Letts), losing his job, which Letts plays, particularly in a scene where he goes for a job interview, with a reluctant dignity, almost as if he is letting us see how his character knows the 21st century is already beginning to pass him by. And when Marion tries to explain Larry’s subsequent depression to Christine, the comical, revealing dialogue emblemizes much of Gerwig’s writing, where a bunch of bromides become like ping pong balls in a verbiage machine, desperately bouncing around until Christine, in a side-splitting line recited with pitch-perfect guilelessness by Ronan, sees right through the b.s. of mom’s pitch.
If we are conditioned for a monetized elixir to appear, that never happens, unless you count financial aid, though even that is a rigmarole, with father and daughter sneaking around behind mother’s back to apply, underlining a familial rift that never really gets closed, wrenchingly captured in the closing scenes where we see Marion pull away in the car from the curb. As she does, we just make out Christine and Larry over her shoulder and out of focus. The camera remains on Marion as she drives away, only to realize too late that she’s made a mistake, the agony of which Metcalf beautifully lets fill her face. And if so often movies allow emotional reparations to be healed just in time for the climax, here “Lady Bird” brilliantly and boldly barrels right past that little cinematic white lie as it does so many others.
Indeed, what is most remarkable about Christine is her distinct lack of remarkableness. She’s in the school play, but only in some background part. She wants to be on the math team, but her grades are not good enough. That is not to suggest “Lady Bird” sees her as un-special. To the contrary, she is a teenage girl in Sacramento in 2003; that in and of itself is special. This, however, is knowledge that Christine struggles to grasp, which is how she alienates her best friend and briefly winds up part of the wrong clique, moving through her senior year seemingly in search of an identity, her coming of age authentically rendered not as a fairytale but a wobbly ride.
And though the film is packed with the trappings of coming-of-age movies, Gerwig does not skewer or dissect those trappings so much as willfully embrace them to uncover their multitudes of truth. If so often movies place outsized expectations on life events, “Lady Bird” is reclaiming their meaning, how moments like prom, graduation and the first time you have sex are not always revelatory in the ways you expect nor the pinnacles of adolescence. They are merely way stations of a whole journey, one that “Lady Bird” captures with resounding clarity in its denouement, where Christine kind of ascends one hill to find another one waiting, if nevertheless now equipped with enough newfound wisdom to go try and climb it.
This tempest is evoked straight away in the opening scene where mother and daughter return from a college visit in the car. If at first they are bonding, weeping while wrapping up a book on tape of “The Grapes of Wrath”, they quickly pivot to an argument about Christine’s desire to attend an out of state school. To Marion, this is out of the question, and the argument escalates so quickly and fiercely that Christine hurls herself from the car while it’s moving, portrayed as equally funny and frightful. And if the subsequent cast on her arm is no doubt courtesy of Marion, Lady Bird still scrawls “fuck you, mom” on the plaster, illustrating the idea of her mother as protector and antagonist, though too often Christine remains blind to the former. Later, when she announces plans to spend Thanksgiving at her boyfriend’s, the scene concludes by lingering on a shot of Marion which Metcalf invests with the melancholy of a mother getting left behind.
This cut is evidence of just how much thought director Greta Gerwig invests in the film. Only her second directorial credit, she is not all the way there visually, sometimes imbuing less a sense of exact place than the conclusion’s hymn to Sacramento would suggest. Then again, Gerwig, who also wrote the script, has considered these characters, all of them, from the McPhersons on down to the smallest supporting parts, writing them real lives that are often illustrated in just one line, and so in some sense this kaleidoscope of people emerges as the place more than any actual locales. What’s more, even if Gerwig sets the film in 2003, she thankfully forgoes a nostalgia trip, employing The Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash” not as some bout of retro snootiness but a lighthouse of cheerful uncoolness and utilizing the invasion of Iraq as a backdrop to a teen’s self-centered disinterest in global events.
The McPherson family is something like lower middle class, but Gerwig does not romanticize their semi-grubby conditions nor blithely present this fact and then pass over it. Instead it informs every aspect of the McPhersons’ lives, from Marion and Christine browsing clothing clearance racks to mother admonishing her daughter for using two towels when one will do. This economic quandary is an outgrowth of Christine’s father, Larry (Tracy Letts), losing his job, which Letts plays, particularly in a scene where he goes for a job interview, with a reluctant dignity, almost as if he is letting us see how his character knows the 21st century is already beginning to pass him by. And when Marion tries to explain Larry’s subsequent depression to Christine, the comical, revealing dialogue emblemizes much of Gerwig’s writing, where a bunch of bromides become like ping pong balls in a verbiage machine, desperately bouncing around until Christine, in a side-splitting line recited with pitch-perfect guilelessness by Ronan, sees right through the b.s. of mom’s pitch.
If we are conditioned for a monetized elixir to appear, that never happens, unless you count financial aid, though even that is a rigmarole, with father and daughter sneaking around behind mother’s back to apply, underlining a familial rift that never really gets closed, wrenchingly captured in the closing scenes where we see Marion pull away in the car from the curb. As she does, we just make out Christine and Larry over her shoulder and out of focus. The camera remains on Marion as she drives away, only to realize too late that she’s made a mistake, the agony of which Metcalf beautifully lets fill her face. And if so often movies allow emotional reparations to be healed just in time for the climax, here “Lady Bird” brilliantly and boldly barrels right past that little cinematic white lie as it does so many others.
Indeed, what is most remarkable about Christine is her distinct lack of remarkableness. She’s in the school play, but only in some background part. She wants to be on the math team, but her grades are not good enough. That is not to suggest “Lady Bird” sees her as un-special. To the contrary, she is a teenage girl in Sacramento in 2003; that in and of itself is special. This, however, is knowledge that Christine struggles to grasp, which is how she alienates her best friend and briefly winds up part of the wrong clique, moving through her senior year seemingly in search of an identity, her coming of age authentically rendered not as a fairytale but a wobbly ride.
And though the film is packed with the trappings of coming-of-age movies, Gerwig does not skewer or dissect those trappings so much as willfully embrace them to uncover their multitudes of truth. If so often movies place outsized expectations on life events, “Lady Bird” is reclaiming their meaning, how moments like prom, graduation and the first time you have sex are not always revelatory in the ways you expect nor the pinnacles of adolescence. They are merely way stations of a whole journey, one that “Lady Bird” captures with resounding clarity in its denouement, where Christine kind of ascends one hill to find another one waiting, if nevertheless now equipped with enough newfound wisdom to go try and climb it.
Friday, November 17, 2017
Friday's Old Fashioned: Deadline – U.S.A. (1952)
“Deadline – U.S.A.” is, first and foremost, a Humphrey Bogart picture, what when considering that his immortal caustic yet cool countenance so firmly inhabits its spotlight. And yet, writer/director Richard Brooks spends several opening scenes keeping his peerless leading man waiting in the wings. After all, throughout the film Bogart’s Ed Hutcheson, editor of fictional New York newspaper The Day, keeps referencing the “fifteen-hundred people” that work for him, and so it’s only right to show them and what they do before bringing their leading man onscreen. That’s why in these introductory minutes we hear the tuneful thwack of the printing press and see editors putting out fires and cleaning up messes. These scenes are Brooks laying out the stakes – which are, this, the paper itself, the news, that it gets told, and that all this is what stands to be lost in the wake of what is to come in “Deadline U.S.A.”
To those of us lamenting the newspaper’s gradual decline and seemingly imminent demise, “Deadline U.S.A.” comes across quaint and urgent all at once. Newspapers were always under threat, if just for different reasons, in the case of Brooks’s film being that there were too many of them. A rival paper wants to buy up The Day and bury it, and has the chance when the paper’s storied owner dies and his heirs want nothing to do with holding aloft the beacon of journalism. Bogart’s Ed finds this out at the same time that a young reporter (Warren Stevens), trying to ferret out a scoop on a gangland murder, gets beaten to within an inch of his life, causing Ed to take out a front page editorial, call the mob out and then go all in on some hardcore reporting to get to the bottom. This puts him straight in the crosshairs of losing his job and maybe his life, enough for any man, except he’s also dealing with his ex-wife (Kim Hunter), whom he still loves, and who is about to get married to some joker we know is a joker all because he isn’t Bogart.
See, that’s why it’s a Bogart movie, allowing him to deftly navigate this myriad of minefields, and even if you know each mine will be diffused, even the one involving his ex-wife, where her you sort of wish her understanding that he is truly married to the newspaper business (which he understands too) would allow her to exit the picture stage left, that Bogey ability to hold a scene, hold a room, hold a frame, makes it extraordinarily exciting anyway. Indeed, he does not merely get to sit in the back of a gangster’s limousine and coolly handle thinly veiled threats, he is allowed to stand up in a courtroom and give a big speech. If the latter seems patently absurd, how his character essentially gets into a shouting match with lawyers while the judge’s gavel remains silent, the outcome nevertheless subscribes to the letter of the law even if the Judge confesses to subscribing to The Day. Yet even in the face of this, Ed pulls off a coup, able to both save the paper and get the goods on the mob man he’s after, a storyline that, frankly, connects with dots with little narrative verve, just a means to hang the point of the print paper on, though damn, man, what a point.
That point comes through much better earlier on when a key witness, turning up at The Day to go on the record, is escorted to safety by a few cops summoned by Ed, though one of these cops is revealed as a hitman in disguise, leading to a showdown in the printing room where the notion of stop the presses get all twisted up. The witness falls to his death, jamming up the printing press itself, a fairly obvious symbol that is no less effective, crime trying to deter the reporting that is trying to take it down. If you never see how this ghastly mess gets cleaned up, well, you don’t need to, because emblematically this mess gets cleaned up by keeping the journalistic light trained squarely on those who would snuff it out. Stop the presses? Please. Not on Humphrey Bogart’s watch.
To those of us lamenting the newspaper’s gradual decline and seemingly imminent demise, “Deadline U.S.A.” comes across quaint and urgent all at once. Newspapers were always under threat, if just for different reasons, in the case of Brooks’s film being that there were too many of them. A rival paper wants to buy up The Day and bury it, and has the chance when the paper’s storied owner dies and his heirs want nothing to do with holding aloft the beacon of journalism. Bogart’s Ed finds this out at the same time that a young reporter (Warren Stevens), trying to ferret out a scoop on a gangland murder, gets beaten to within an inch of his life, causing Ed to take out a front page editorial, call the mob out and then go all in on some hardcore reporting to get to the bottom. This puts him straight in the crosshairs of losing his job and maybe his life, enough for any man, except he’s also dealing with his ex-wife (Kim Hunter), whom he still loves, and who is about to get married to some joker we know is a joker all because he isn’t Bogart.
See, that’s why it’s a Bogart movie, allowing him to deftly navigate this myriad of minefields, and even if you know each mine will be diffused, even the one involving his ex-wife, where her you sort of wish her understanding that he is truly married to the newspaper business (which he understands too) would allow her to exit the picture stage left, that Bogey ability to hold a scene, hold a room, hold a frame, makes it extraordinarily exciting anyway. Indeed, he does not merely get to sit in the back of a gangster’s limousine and coolly handle thinly veiled threats, he is allowed to stand up in a courtroom and give a big speech. If the latter seems patently absurd, how his character essentially gets into a shouting match with lawyers while the judge’s gavel remains silent, the outcome nevertheless subscribes to the letter of the law even if the Judge confesses to subscribing to The Day. Yet even in the face of this, Ed pulls off a coup, able to both save the paper and get the goods on the mob man he’s after, a storyline that, frankly, connects with dots with little narrative verve, just a means to hang the point of the print paper on, though damn, man, what a point.
That point comes through much better earlier on when a key witness, turning up at The Day to go on the record, is escorted to safety by a few cops summoned by Ed, though one of these cops is revealed as a hitman in disguise, leading to a showdown in the printing room where the notion of stop the presses get all twisted up. The witness falls to his death, jamming up the printing press itself, a fairly obvious symbol that is no less effective, crime trying to deter the reporting that is trying to take it down. If you never see how this ghastly mess gets cleaned up, well, you don’t need to, because emblematically this mess gets cleaned up by keeping the journalistic light trained squarely on those who would snuff it out. Stop the presses? Please. Not on Humphrey Bogart’s watch.
Thursday, November 16, 2017
A Few of My Movie Lufthansa Moments
So the other day I was listening to Hang Up & Listen, the Slate sports podcast hosted by the inimitable Josh Levin and Stefan Fatsis, and when they went to an ad break I was expecting the same products they usually hawk. Instead I found myself ear to ear with an ad for the largest German airline, Lufthansa. And when the company name was dropped, my mind immediately soared away, not to some jetliner high in the sky over Europe, mind you, but to a bathroom with green tile where Ray Liotta as Henry Hill was going nuts after hearing the radio prounounce that his pal Jimmy Conway had successfully pulled off The Lufthansa Heist. (“It looks like a big one. Maybe the biggest this town has ever seen.”) My mind soared away to Ray Liotta happily hitting his bathroom tile because that’s where my mind goes any time I hear the word “Lufthansa.” If I ever fly Lufthansa, rest assured I will spend the entire flight giddily thinking about Tommy and Carbone and Frenchy and Joe Buddha and Johnny Roastbeef and Stacks Edwards. I can’t help it. This is how my mind works.
And because this is how my mind works with Lufthansa, we can only assume my mind works that way with other products and places and, you know, things, mentioned in a movies in such an indelible manner that any time they are referenced in real life my mind involuntarily flashes back to their cinematic citation, the make-believe and the genuine article forever inextricably linked in my abnormal mind. Things like these...
Cappuccino Maker. We start here because, in a sense, this is where it all started. As a small-town Midwesterner I was first introduced to cappuccino not through cappuccino itself but through the cappuccino maker that George Banks is brought by his future son-in-law. “Makes great foam.” To this day, if I pass by a cappuccino maker at, say, Bed, Bath & Beyond, I see it through the motion picture gauze of Charles Shyer’s 1991 “Father of the Bride”.
Prague. Even if someday I get to Prague, and I would like to get to Prague, I will spend my entire time in Prague, and leading up to Prague, and post-Prague answering questions about Prague, by responding to every utterance of the word “Prague” by snidely declaring, a la Grover, “Well, I haven’t ‘been to Prague’ been to Prague.”
Troy, Michigan. It is not the eleventh largest city in The Great Lakes State; it is home of of the 1970s rock band Stillwater.
Arugula.
Mojitos. As good as Steve Martin’s line reading is above, I confess I love Colin Farrell’s line reading of “I’m a fiend for mojitos” in “Miami Vice” in all its gravelly anti-lyricism even more, so much so that any time — any.time — my girlfriend suggests a round of mojitos I reply, much to her dismay, in a pitiful Farrell impression, “I’m a fiend for mojitos.” I will continue to do this for the rest of my life.
Petty Cash. If someone at your office makes mention of the petty cash and your mind does not immediately drift to Drs. Venkman, Stantz and Spengler eating Chinese food then I’m not entirely sure we can be friends.
Merv Griffin. Merv Griffin? You mean, The Elevator Killer? [See Also: Michael Bolton.]
Raw Sewage. Granted, the words “raw sewage” rarely come up in my life, and I hope it remains that way, but if and when they do, rest assured, from here to eternity, I will look the speaker of said words square in the eye and say “I love it.”
Wollman Rink. President Trump may have his name self-lovingly affixed to the ice skating rink picturesquely plopped down in Central Park, but Wollman will nevertheless always belong to Kate Beckinsale & John Cusack. DO YOU HEAR ME, TRUMP?! IT BELONGS TO THEM!!!!!!
Wednesday, November 15, 2017
The House
“The House”, not so much a movie as a comedy sketch that ran aground and still managed to ooze remnants of its un-funny onto whatever movie screens would have it, takes its name from the illegal casino opened by Scott (Will Ferrell) and Kate (Amy Poehler) Johansen, along with their friend Frank (Jason Mantzoukas), feeling blue because of his divorce from Raina (Michaela Watkins, as extraordinary a comedienne as you will find who is blasphemously given nothing funny to do). Scott and Kate hope this gambling den will allow them to afford college for their daughter, whose scholarship has just been lost, an equally absurd and tantalizing premise that never comically follows up on its inherent of-the-moment desperation, becoming something like an R-rated “Mafia!” as staged by The Groundlings on an off night, trying to imagine “Casino” re-set on South Padre Island.
That “The House” fails so miserably is because director Andrew Jay Cohen, and his co-writer Brendan O’Brien, exhibit minimal thought, less committed to character, never mind structure or actual though-through comic setpieces, than simply throwing their actors on screen, giving them a couple instructions and letting them riff in the hopes that they somehow stumble their way into a scene’s conclusion. This makes for a movie that does not so much move along as bumble around, crumbling to the dust in the end, emblemized by a startlingly confused Jeremy Renner cameo where he shows up to play would-be comic moments distressingly straight, like he was told this was a different movie, maybe because its makers didn’t know what movie they were making.
Ferrell, meanwhile, is just re-purposing his part from “Kicking and Screaming” (2005) in which his mild-mannered suburban dad became nothing short of an unhinged autocrat overseeing a youth soccer team, as his mild-mannered suburban Scott becomes nothing short of a mafia enforcer wielding an axe. Amy Poehler, talented comic actress, doesn’t seem to have any idea what to do, underscored by one frame, appearing during a variation of “Fight Club”, where she is just stuck on the right hand side of the frame, drink in hand, awkwardly frozen, like she doesn’t really know what she is supposed to be doing. Because she doesn’t, she mostly just follows Ferrell’s lead and drops f-bombs. That’s the movie’s fallback mode – gratuitous vulgarity, best glimpsed when Scott, Kate and Frank, forced to confront a card-counter, bounce around like boxers before the big fight, egging one another on to bigger, bawdier words, a scene that feels as if it had no idea where it was going when the cameras began rolling.
A.O. Scott took some guff for penning a New York Times review that dared suggest “The House” was a “dark, startlingly bloody journey into the bitter, empty, broken heart of the American middle class, a blend of farce and satire built on a foundation of social despair.” I think that’s what Scott wanted to see, and maybe convinced himself he was seeing, because the tools are there for a farcical satire, like a modern spin on “Lost in America.” Indeed, if the baby boomers of Albert Brooks lost their “nest egg” and were forced to struggle, they still had a nest egg to begin with, a luxury post-2008 eluding the Johansens. It’s scholarship or bust, and when that falls away, they have nothing to fall back on except transforming into desperate outlaws. But Brooks gave real thought to his children of baby boomers attempting to demonstrate passé 60s values in the go-go 80s, where they sought to dispel themselves of their creature comforts only to realize how much they needed them. That, alas, is a level of irony beyond “The House”, which is so pathetically innoxious in its rendering of economic desperation that the movie itself, more than any of the sad attempts at suburban bacchanal, is sinful.
That “The House” fails so miserably is because director Andrew Jay Cohen, and his co-writer Brendan O’Brien, exhibit minimal thought, less committed to character, never mind structure or actual though-through comic setpieces, than simply throwing their actors on screen, giving them a couple instructions and letting them riff in the hopes that they somehow stumble their way into a scene’s conclusion. This makes for a movie that does not so much move along as bumble around, crumbling to the dust in the end, emblemized by a startlingly confused Jeremy Renner cameo where he shows up to play would-be comic moments distressingly straight, like he was told this was a different movie, maybe because its makers didn’t know what movie they were making.
Ferrell, meanwhile, is just re-purposing his part from “Kicking and Screaming” (2005) in which his mild-mannered suburban dad became nothing short of an unhinged autocrat overseeing a youth soccer team, as his mild-mannered suburban Scott becomes nothing short of a mafia enforcer wielding an axe. Amy Poehler, talented comic actress, doesn’t seem to have any idea what to do, underscored by one frame, appearing during a variation of “Fight Club”, where she is just stuck on the right hand side of the frame, drink in hand, awkwardly frozen, like she doesn’t really know what she is supposed to be doing. Because she doesn’t, she mostly just follows Ferrell’s lead and drops f-bombs. That’s the movie’s fallback mode – gratuitous vulgarity, best glimpsed when Scott, Kate and Frank, forced to confront a card-counter, bounce around like boxers before the big fight, egging one another on to bigger, bawdier words, a scene that feels as if it had no idea where it was going when the cameras began rolling.
A.O. Scott took some guff for penning a New York Times review that dared suggest “The House” was a “dark, startlingly bloody journey into the bitter, empty, broken heart of the American middle class, a blend of farce and satire built on a foundation of social despair.” I think that’s what Scott wanted to see, and maybe convinced himself he was seeing, because the tools are there for a farcical satire, like a modern spin on “Lost in America.” Indeed, if the baby boomers of Albert Brooks lost their “nest egg” and were forced to struggle, they still had a nest egg to begin with, a luxury post-2008 eluding the Johansens. It’s scholarship or bust, and when that falls away, they have nothing to fall back on except transforming into desperate outlaws. But Brooks gave real thought to his children of baby boomers attempting to demonstrate passé 60s values in the go-go 80s, where they sought to dispel themselves of their creature comforts only to realize how much they needed them. That, alas, is a level of irony beyond “The House”, which is so pathetically innoxious in its rendering of economic desperation that the movie itself, more than any of the sad attempts at suburban bacchanal, is sinful.
Tuesday, November 14, 2017
The Unknown Girl
To doctors, patients are not people, not exactly, not as Jenny Davin (Adèle Haenel) explains it to her young colleague Julien (Olivier Bonnaud) in an early scene of “The Unknown Girl”, because allowing your emotions to take over in the examination room or in the midst of medical emergency might yield a wrong diagnosis or a grave mistake. Maybe that sounds obvious, but The Dardenne Brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, writers and directors, are not merely content with observing this reality, choosing instead to take this reality and then run it aground. This happens when Jenny, tired and yearning for a brief respite of something like privacy, deliberately ignores an after-hours call at her medical practice, only to learn this was not a call from a pesky patient but an unknown girl being chased by an assailant, an unknown girl who has been found dead, a police detective explains, not far from Jenny’s door. And so Jenny undertakes a mission to uncover the unknown girl’s identity, hoping to ensure she does not become lost to the world. It is a mission on which Jenny exudes the same weary resolve as the examination room, the professional bleeding into the personal as she finds herself re-writing her spoken code in real time.
Though in the wake of this development “The Unknown Girl” turns into something of a procedural, with Jenny playing an amateur sleuth and the titular character’s backstory emerging in little bits and pieces, the plotting will not be confused for Agatha Christie. Indeed, the murder mystery contains fewer I-Didn’t-See-That-Coming swerves than conspicuous contrivances, never mind non-existent thrills, to keep the story narrative percolating. That doesn’t have to be bad thing. The Dardenne Brothers’ previous film, “Two Days, One Night”, also turned on contrivances, though there the particulars of the plot were of less concern than the emotions and themes that plot engendered. And though it is gradually revealed that the unknown girl is an illegal immigrant, and that the cops on the case seem less interested in actually identifying this illegal immigrant than how she tangentially relates to a drugs case, the film comes across less determined to pass judgment on society as a whole than in simply focusing on Jenny’s own guilt and desire for absolution.
That’s why even as she goes about interrogating strangers Jenny never strays far from her practice, continuing to see patients. Though many of these brief scenes stand apart from everything else, existing merely unto themselves, in connection with her playing detective to right her wrong they come to resemble something more like penance. Indeed, while a subplot finds her given the chance to take a more prestigious job, she turns it down to remain at her medical practice in a poor neighborhood. In other words, she intrinsically finds herself drawn to these patients as people, which becomes only more pronounced when her investigation, as it were, connects back to patients she knows from her practice.
As all this unfolds, The Brothers Dardenne typical unflashy, handheld camera remains affixed to Jenny, suggesting a kind of intimacy between audience and character, though, oddly, even as the movie progresses and we remain firmly in her company, who she is as a person never quite comes into view. In fact, midway through the movie she essentially moves into her medical practice, eating and sleeping there, as if deliberately refuting the vérité camera by closing off her personal life. And the coat she often sports, always outdoors, but even sometimes indoors, allows for her to blend into the bleary beige and white backgrounds, and one scene, with Julien, in a wooded outdoors setting, she almost vanishes completely. At first blush the illegal immigrant would seem to be the subject of the film’s title, and I half-suspect The Dardenne Brothers agree, but the further the movie progresses, the more Jenny surrenders so completely to what she does that whoever she is, whatever she was, is sacrificed.
Though in the wake of this development “The Unknown Girl” turns into something of a procedural, with Jenny playing an amateur sleuth and the titular character’s backstory emerging in little bits and pieces, the plotting will not be confused for Agatha Christie. Indeed, the murder mystery contains fewer I-Didn’t-See-That-Coming swerves than conspicuous contrivances, never mind non-existent thrills, to keep the story narrative percolating. That doesn’t have to be bad thing. The Dardenne Brothers’ previous film, “Two Days, One Night”, also turned on contrivances, though there the particulars of the plot were of less concern than the emotions and themes that plot engendered. And though it is gradually revealed that the unknown girl is an illegal immigrant, and that the cops on the case seem less interested in actually identifying this illegal immigrant than how she tangentially relates to a drugs case, the film comes across less determined to pass judgment on society as a whole than in simply focusing on Jenny’s own guilt and desire for absolution.
That’s why even as she goes about interrogating strangers Jenny never strays far from her practice, continuing to see patients. Though many of these brief scenes stand apart from everything else, existing merely unto themselves, in connection with her playing detective to right her wrong they come to resemble something more like penance. Indeed, while a subplot finds her given the chance to take a more prestigious job, she turns it down to remain at her medical practice in a poor neighborhood. In other words, she intrinsically finds herself drawn to these patients as people, which becomes only more pronounced when her investigation, as it were, connects back to patients she knows from her practice.
As all this unfolds, The Brothers Dardenne typical unflashy, handheld camera remains affixed to Jenny, suggesting a kind of intimacy between audience and character, though, oddly, even as the movie progresses and we remain firmly in her company, who she is as a person never quite comes into view. In fact, midway through the movie she essentially moves into her medical practice, eating and sleeping there, as if deliberately refuting the vérité camera by closing off her personal life. And the coat she often sports, always outdoors, but even sometimes indoors, allows for her to blend into the bleary beige and white backgrounds, and one scene, with Julien, in a wooded outdoors setting, she almost vanishes completely. At first blush the illegal immigrant would seem to be the subject of the film’s title, and I half-suspect The Dardenne Brothers agree, but the further the movie progresses, the more Jenny surrenders so completely to what she does that whoever she is, whatever she was, is sacrificed.
Monday, November 13, 2017
Blade Runner 2049
Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi opus “Blade Runner”, adapted from a Philip K. Dick novel, turned on replicants, androids, non-human humans implanted with false memories that some came to believe were real, blurring the line between human and automations, a line the film was content to leave distorted even as it concluded. This future was underscored by the celebrated, grim art design, where the skyline of 2019 Los Angeles seemed to stretch on into forever, the bright lights and flying cars drowning out the human beings scampering below as much as the omnipresent rain. Denis Villeneuve’s sequel, “Blade Runner 2049”, builds out that world. Shimmery and sterile interiors are contrasted against more dour exteriors with snow just as likely to fall as rain, evoking the ash of a fallen world, a fallen world laid out in the movie’s title cards. And the high rise holographic pleasure models don’t stay out of reach 30 years on, it seems, but emerge from their video screen to titillate right up close, a remarkable visual blurring that line between what is and isn’t real even more. And the further fuzziness of that distinction is also where “2049” sort of pushes itself to the brink. This is anything but a stale imitation, mind you, forgoing fan service for its own enigmas, dropping enough Biblical references to lead pseudo philosophers down the rabbit hole post-screening, but struggling to reach the emotional crescendos achieved by its predecessor, though that faint pulse doubles as its revelation.
The original blade runner, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), was human, tasked with tracking down replicants who had gone rogue and “retiring” them. If questions emerged about whether Deckard himself might have been replicant, that was thankfully left open-ended, and Villenevue gratefully honors that ellipsis. In 2049, however, suggesting technology’s eternally unremitting advance, replicants are now tracked by replicants, like K (Ryan Gosling), which only works because he is a newer model, built by Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), re-engineering these androids to be even better and more obedient. But a miraculous birth involving a replicant — shades of, well, obviously — becomes a possible game-changer, prompting Wallace to dispatch his right-hand replicant Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) to see if the story is true, while K is dispatched by his superior Joshi (Robin Wright) to ensure the story remains under wraps. The specifics of this storyline, while plentiful, ultimately matter less than the metaphysics surrounding it, which is not unlike the original, though there Vangelis’s atmospheric score better underlined these philosophical musings than Han Zimmer’s typical bombast.
Both K and Luv might be entrusted by actual humans to do their bidding, but they are still slaves, brought home in one of Leto’s monotonous monologues but better glimpsed in sequences between K and Joshi, in which a splendid Wright both exudes the obvious dependence she has on K and an above-him haughtiness. His chance at freedom, meanwhile, becomes part and parcel to the miracle birth mystery, one bringing him to the doorstep of Rick Deckard, imposed in self-exile in Las Vegas where Villeneuve exhumes great mileage from the remnants of a hedonistic society gone belly-up. If Ford played the original with something like his early career impassivity, here he dials up his late career gruff disinterest, which is not to suggest he is parodying himself. He functions as a deliberate jolt of presence, making it ever more clear, at least in this reviewer’s mind, that he’s a person.
Those attempts are most obvious in K’s relationship with Joi (Ana de Armas), something like a holographic romantic companion, a subplot borrowing heavily from Spike Jonze’s “Her.” Then again, while the titular Her was an artificially operating system not unlike Joi, the Him (Joaquin Phoenix) was a Human, as the film sought to push the boundaries of physical relationships in a high-tech world to their breaking point. In “2049’s” relationship, each person, so to speak, is A.I., and their tendency to sort of role play Married Life, which could have been hellacious satire, like a sci-fi send-up of The Donna Reed Show, eventually falls flat because Villeneuve treats it genuinely without giving it enough time to bloom beyond its introductory phony parameters.
Of course, the original’s central relationship, between Deckard and Rachael (Sean Young), a replicant, was also underdeveloped, merely a means to an end, though the film’s saving emotional grace became Best in Show Rutger Hauer as feeling, living replicant Roy Batty. Gosling, on the other hand, while often charismatically charming in comedies, typically relies on a placidity where his muscles don’t even seem to be twitching in drama, like “Place Beyond the Pines”, which is why he is so impeccably able to interpret an android. And while K’s journey takes him to the point where he makes decisions intended to render him as more human than human, Gosling makes the conscious decision to still play these closing moments not with Hauer’s romantic sentience but with robotic detachment, like his watery confrontation with Luv.
Exactly where these two were when they went one-on-one, I was never quite clear, not that it mattered, because as Villeneuve cut between close-ups of the duo, the immovable contours of Gosling’s face became edifying in their emotionless. The conclusion is intended to offset this, but the conclusion comes across merely as a narrative prerequisite, less forceful than the translucent emptiness of K and Luv’s parting glances, and while watching them, I nearly wept because I felt humanity floating further and further out to sea.
The original blade runner, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), was human, tasked with tracking down replicants who had gone rogue and “retiring” them. If questions emerged about whether Deckard himself might have been replicant, that was thankfully left open-ended, and Villenevue gratefully honors that ellipsis. In 2049, however, suggesting technology’s eternally unremitting advance, replicants are now tracked by replicants, like K (Ryan Gosling), which only works because he is a newer model, built by Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), re-engineering these androids to be even better and more obedient. But a miraculous birth involving a replicant — shades of, well, obviously — becomes a possible game-changer, prompting Wallace to dispatch his right-hand replicant Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) to see if the story is true, while K is dispatched by his superior Joshi (Robin Wright) to ensure the story remains under wraps. The specifics of this storyline, while plentiful, ultimately matter less than the metaphysics surrounding it, which is not unlike the original, though there Vangelis’s atmospheric score better underlined these philosophical musings than Han Zimmer’s typical bombast.
Both K and Luv might be entrusted by actual humans to do their bidding, but they are still slaves, brought home in one of Leto’s monotonous monologues but better glimpsed in sequences between K and Joshi, in which a splendid Wright both exudes the obvious dependence she has on K and an above-him haughtiness. His chance at freedom, meanwhile, becomes part and parcel to the miracle birth mystery, one bringing him to the doorstep of Rick Deckard, imposed in self-exile in Las Vegas where Villeneuve exhumes great mileage from the remnants of a hedonistic society gone belly-up. If Ford played the original with something like his early career impassivity, here he dials up his late career gruff disinterest, which is not to suggest he is parodying himself. He functions as a deliberate jolt of presence, making it ever more clear, at least in this reviewer’s mind, that he’s a person.
Those attempts are most obvious in K’s relationship with Joi (Ana de Armas), something like a holographic romantic companion, a subplot borrowing heavily from Spike Jonze’s “Her.” Then again, while the titular Her was an artificially operating system not unlike Joi, the Him (Joaquin Phoenix) was a Human, as the film sought to push the boundaries of physical relationships in a high-tech world to their breaking point. In “2049’s” relationship, each person, so to speak, is A.I., and their tendency to sort of role play Married Life, which could have been hellacious satire, like a sci-fi send-up of The Donna Reed Show, eventually falls flat because Villeneuve treats it genuinely without giving it enough time to bloom beyond its introductory phony parameters.
Of course, the original’s central relationship, between Deckard and Rachael (Sean Young), a replicant, was also underdeveloped, merely a means to an end, though the film’s saving emotional grace became Best in Show Rutger Hauer as feeling, living replicant Roy Batty. Gosling, on the other hand, while often charismatically charming in comedies, typically relies on a placidity where his muscles don’t even seem to be twitching in drama, like “Place Beyond the Pines”, which is why he is so impeccably able to interpret an android. And while K’s journey takes him to the point where he makes decisions intended to render him as more human than human, Gosling makes the conscious decision to still play these closing moments not with Hauer’s romantic sentience but with robotic detachment, like his watery confrontation with Luv.
Exactly where these two were when they went one-on-one, I was never quite clear, not that it mattered, because as Villeneuve cut between close-ups of the duo, the immovable contours of Gosling’s face became edifying in their emotionless. The conclusion is intended to offset this, but the conclusion comes across merely as a narrative prerequisite, less forceful than the translucent emptiness of K and Luv’s parting glances, and while watching them, I nearly wept because I felt humanity floating further and further out to sea.
Friday, November 10, 2017
Friday's Old Fashioned: Raw Deal (1948)
If so often film noir protagonists fatalistically tie themselves to metaphorical tracks, insistent on riding all the way to a tragic conclusion, “Raw Deal’s” (1948) Joe Sullivan (Dennis O’Keefe), stuck inside the slammer on account of taking the fall for vicious mobster Rick Coyle (Raymond Burr) and still owed his share, is given the option to hop off, and the question becomes whether or not he will take it. These dueling decisions present themselves in the form of two different women in his life, each one glimpsed in the movie’s opening, where they have brief prison visitations with Joe. First, Ann (Marsha Hunt), a kindly social worker who sees the good in Joe, if she also sees what a dashing figure he can cut in the right light and when he lets his sneering guard down, and seeks to free him from jail on the level. Second, Pat (Claire Trevor), Joe’s squeeze, who loves him as the nasty, tough-talking gangster he mostly seems to be, and wants to help Joe make an escape so they can rendezvous with Rick, get Joe’s share and then make a by-sea beeline for Brazil. It is, in other words, another rendering of the ancient Angel/Devil conundrum, though director Anthony Mann, pulling no punches, makes it count with a furious vengeance.
He underlines this Angel/Devil idea with several shots of the trio lined up one-by-one in the front seat of a car, bound together in Joe’s breakout after he flees jail on unwitting account of Rick pulling behind-the-scenes strings in hopes that his fall guy will get killed in the escape attempt. That doesn’t happen, with Pat serving as his getaway driver, even after their car breaks down and gives the cops time to throw up a sizable dragnet, as they briefly hide out with Ann, who finds herself repulsed upon realizing Joe has no desire to be an honest man. She then becomes something like a hostage, though occasionally an unwilling accomplice, acting out of the best interest of the innocents they encounter that Joe threatens, while Pat looks at her with all the hate in the world.
The devil on the shoulder trope comes complete with cruel misogyny as Joe emotionally abuses and manipulates both women. Though Ann mostly pushes back, Pat can’t help but fall victim, almost willingly, evinced by her voiceover flowing in and out of the whole film, where she tells this story at some point in the future, tinged with fatalism even if she can't help but still exude an affection revealing the psychological stranglehold he had, and still does, over her. That misogyny extends further, frightfully to Rick, introduced with some nameless blonde sitting in the back of the room, passively reading, though later, at a club, he rejects that same blonde’s overtures. Mann shoots this rejection by looking down on Rick, at a gaming table, underscoring his brewing insecurity on account of losing at cards. And then, when Rick stands, Mann switches the camera angle, looking up at the gangster as he demonstrates the power he so desperately wants to believe he has by seizing a tray of fire, ignited by Curvoisier, and tossing it in the face of his nameless blonde, her bone-chilling screams kept off screen because they barely register to their perpetrator.
Fire plays an integral role in the climax too, foreshadowed by a story from Joe’s childhood in which he saved numerous children from a fire, which Ann brings up when trying to appeal to his inner-good. He gets that chance again when he goes to save Ann after she’s kidnapped by Rick in an attempt to hold her as leverage. Initially it seems like this won’t work, as Rick’s call to Joe is taken by Pat, who hangs up, determined not to let this interfering Other Woman perish, a moment of reckoning that Mann shoots in close-up, reveling in Pat’s black veil, like she is announcing Ann’s funeral. And a funeral is evoked in the ensuing shot, Joe gazing out a window at foggy bay, saying sweet nothings about their future that his voice doesn’t really believe, with Ann in the lower left-hand corner of the frame, frozen. Finally, she stands and tells Joe the truth, which she couldn’t initially bear to tell because of what he immediately does, toss her aside to go help Ann.
He rescues her, true, in a showdown with Rick that ends with a house going up in flames, into which the vicious gangster is sent, sentenced to hell. Joe, wounded, dies too, though away from the fire, suggesting redemption and something like passage through the pearly gates. And Pat, her voiceover closing the film, is stranded between in something like purgatory, in what, frankly, comes across less like a raw deal than her own mordant doing.
He underlines this Angel/Devil idea with several shots of the trio lined up one-by-one in the front seat of a car, bound together in Joe’s breakout after he flees jail on unwitting account of Rick pulling behind-the-scenes strings in hopes that his fall guy will get killed in the escape attempt. That doesn’t happen, with Pat serving as his getaway driver, even after their car breaks down and gives the cops time to throw up a sizable dragnet, as they briefly hide out with Ann, who finds herself repulsed upon realizing Joe has no desire to be an honest man. She then becomes something like a hostage, though occasionally an unwilling accomplice, acting out of the best interest of the innocents they encounter that Joe threatens, while Pat looks at her with all the hate in the world.
The devil on the shoulder trope comes complete with cruel misogyny as Joe emotionally abuses and manipulates both women. Though Ann mostly pushes back, Pat can’t help but fall victim, almost willingly, evinced by her voiceover flowing in and out of the whole film, where she tells this story at some point in the future, tinged with fatalism even if she can't help but still exude an affection revealing the psychological stranglehold he had, and still does, over her. That misogyny extends further, frightfully to Rick, introduced with some nameless blonde sitting in the back of the room, passively reading, though later, at a club, he rejects that same blonde’s overtures. Mann shoots this rejection by looking down on Rick, at a gaming table, underscoring his brewing insecurity on account of losing at cards. And then, when Rick stands, Mann switches the camera angle, looking up at the gangster as he demonstrates the power he so desperately wants to believe he has by seizing a tray of fire, ignited by Curvoisier, and tossing it in the face of his nameless blonde, her bone-chilling screams kept off screen because they barely register to their perpetrator.
Fire plays an integral role in the climax too, foreshadowed by a story from Joe’s childhood in which he saved numerous children from a fire, which Ann brings up when trying to appeal to his inner-good. He gets that chance again when he goes to save Ann after she’s kidnapped by Rick in an attempt to hold her as leverage. Initially it seems like this won’t work, as Rick’s call to Joe is taken by Pat, who hangs up, determined not to let this interfering Other Woman perish, a moment of reckoning that Mann shoots in close-up, reveling in Pat’s black veil, like she is announcing Ann’s funeral. And a funeral is evoked in the ensuing shot, Joe gazing out a window at foggy bay, saying sweet nothings about their future that his voice doesn’t really believe, with Ann in the lower left-hand corner of the frame, frozen. Finally, she stands and tells Joe the truth, which she couldn’t initially bear to tell because of what he immediately does, toss her aside to go help Ann.
He rescues her, true, in a showdown with Rick that ends with a house going up in flames, into which the vicious gangster is sent, sentenced to hell. Joe, wounded, dies too, though away from the fire, suggesting redemption and something like passage through the pearly gates. And Pat, her voiceover closing the film, is stranded between in something like purgatory, in what, frankly, comes across less like a raw deal than her own mordant doing.
Thursday, November 09, 2017
Notes on Wonder Woman's Ending
“Wow them in the end,” declared Brian Cox’s stone cold version of screenwriting guru Robert McKee in “Adaptation”, “and you’ve got a hit.” That might not be an exact quote of the real-life McKee but it is close enough, and it re-proves that Robert McKee doesn’t always know what he’s talking about. I submit Patty Jenkins’s 2017 summertime blockbuster “Wonder Woman” as evidence. If there were dissenters, as there healthily should be, “Wonder Woman” was nevertheless mostly loved, whether you consult that infamous fruit-named website, note the film’s 2nd place 2017 box office position or simply listen to word of mouth, on the street or across the Interwebs. This critical harmony scanned even more impressive because it seemed like an additional element of the movie achieved something as close to consensus as is possible anymore – that is, even if “Wonder Woman” was good, its finish was a letdown.
Search the Interwebs and you will find all manner of “Wonder Woman” conclusion laments. “Why Wonder Woman’s Ending Doesn’t Work,” went one. “The Biggest Problem With Wonder Woman’s Ending,” goes another. “What was your least favorite part of the movie?” wondered The Ringer’s Exit Survey. “The final battle between Ares and Wonder Woman,” replied Chris Ryan. “It feels like every DC title fight takes place inside of a pottery kiln in another dimension: Everything is on fire, physics are totally abandoned, points of reference are lost, and plausibility — even the comic book kind — goes up in smoke.” Amanda Dobbins was more concise, saying “The last 20 minutes, lol.” I, however, was less compelled to laugh out loud than raise my fist.
To thoroughly examine this subject obviously means spoilers of the most top secret nature are in order, and so if you have yet to see “Wonder Woman”, I ask that you please excuse yourself from the conversation, go see it and check back upon completion of viewing. For the rest of you still on the blog, we know that Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) – Wonder Woman – suspects vile German General Ludendorff (Danny Huston) to be Ares, the God of War, in human form. If she slays him, she will end WWI. Alas, when she does slay him, nothing changes, the war rages on, mankind remains evil.
There is an argument to be made, and some have made it, that the movie might have done well to end right there. Forget for a moment that Hollywood would never sign off on such a downer for a potential blockbuster, it’s an interesting idea to consider, “to have it be that Ares hasn’t actually been pulling the strings all along,” as Eric Eisenberg writes for CinemaBlend, “and reveal it’s just the inherent violent nature of man that has led to worldwide war.” But then, this is a superhero movie and a traditional showdown rather than a pointed rejection of that showdown is required. As such, the movie’s pivotal reveal is that Diana’s war cabinet benefactor, Sir Patrick Morgan (David Thewlis), is Ares.
At first brush, this twist seems weak, not so much in its obviousness as in how it simply reinforces Diana’s worldview rather than challenging it. If Ares does exist, and if he has made mankind evil, then she’s more a precog than a multi-dimensional superhero, able to see the future rather than simply battle through the present. Eh, except that’s not quite right. After all, Ares, in his big speech, explains he is not so much the author of The Great War as the instigator, appealing to people’s worst impulses, allowing mankind’s inherent violent nature to rise up and fuel armed conflict.
Diana, however, in the run-up to this showdown, has been afforded the opportunity to see mankind through each end of the looking glass, both in her relationship with crack pilot Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), an earnest aura hanging over him despite his inecessant mansplaining, and in their subsequent little ragtag crew, where the drunkard and the cad prove themselves to be of more genuine heart than their outward appearances might imply. She sees the men for their worst and their best, shaping a worldview that emerges not so much as black & white nor even gray but, mostly sunny, which is why when Ares encourages Diana to give up on mankind too, bringing her eye-to-eye with Doctor Poison, daring her to look at someone so venomous and still extract the good, Diana does just that, meeting Doctor Poison’s eyes and clacking her bracelets together as a means to turn the other cheek.
You might argue that Ares’s speech goes on too long, blunting the movie’s otherwise impressive pacing, and you might argue that the ensuing action sequence in which Diana learns she has the power to slay the God of War is uninspiring. But then, if Wonder Woman has a cinematic soul sister, it is Danny Boyle’s “Sunshine”, which get a little too hung up on haunted house theatrics in its climax but still ultimately effects a metaphysical hymn.
Indeed, if the aforementioned Ryan’s critiques that physics and points of reference fall by the wayside ring true, the thematic through-line is strong enough to compensate for the CGI slush, sort of spiritual truth superseding formal truth, which might make the more orthodox film critics harumph, and fair enough & so be it. But when Diana sends all of Ares’s computer-generated imagery right back at his hate-mongering ass, I could only see “Wonder Woman” the same way she sees us.
Search the Interwebs and you will find all manner of “Wonder Woman” conclusion laments. “Why Wonder Woman’s Ending Doesn’t Work,” went one. “The Biggest Problem With Wonder Woman’s Ending,” goes another. “What was your least favorite part of the movie?” wondered The Ringer’s Exit Survey. “The final battle between Ares and Wonder Woman,” replied Chris Ryan. “It feels like every DC title fight takes place inside of a pottery kiln in another dimension: Everything is on fire, physics are totally abandoned, points of reference are lost, and plausibility — even the comic book kind — goes up in smoke.” Amanda Dobbins was more concise, saying “The last 20 minutes, lol.” I, however, was less compelled to laugh out loud than raise my fist.
To thoroughly examine this subject obviously means spoilers of the most top secret nature are in order, and so if you have yet to see “Wonder Woman”, I ask that you please excuse yourself from the conversation, go see it and check back upon completion of viewing. For the rest of you still on the blog, we know that Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) – Wonder Woman – suspects vile German General Ludendorff (Danny Huston) to be Ares, the God of War, in human form. If she slays him, she will end WWI. Alas, when she does slay him, nothing changes, the war rages on, mankind remains evil.
There is an argument to be made, and some have made it, that the movie might have done well to end right there. Forget for a moment that Hollywood would never sign off on such a downer for a potential blockbuster, it’s an interesting idea to consider, “to have it be that Ares hasn’t actually been pulling the strings all along,” as Eric Eisenberg writes for CinemaBlend, “and reveal it’s just the inherent violent nature of man that has led to worldwide war.” But then, this is a superhero movie and a traditional showdown rather than a pointed rejection of that showdown is required. As such, the movie’s pivotal reveal is that Diana’s war cabinet benefactor, Sir Patrick Morgan (David Thewlis), is Ares.
At first brush, this twist seems weak, not so much in its obviousness as in how it simply reinforces Diana’s worldview rather than challenging it. If Ares does exist, and if he has made mankind evil, then she’s more a precog than a multi-dimensional superhero, able to see the future rather than simply battle through the present. Eh, except that’s not quite right. After all, Ares, in his big speech, explains he is not so much the author of The Great War as the instigator, appealing to people’s worst impulses, allowing mankind’s inherent violent nature to rise up and fuel armed conflict.
Diana, however, in the run-up to this showdown, has been afforded the opportunity to see mankind through each end of the looking glass, both in her relationship with crack pilot Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), an earnest aura hanging over him despite his inecessant mansplaining, and in their subsequent little ragtag crew, where the drunkard and the cad prove themselves to be of more genuine heart than their outward appearances might imply. She sees the men for their worst and their best, shaping a worldview that emerges not so much as black & white nor even gray but, mostly sunny, which is why when Ares encourages Diana to give up on mankind too, bringing her eye-to-eye with Doctor Poison, daring her to look at someone so venomous and still extract the good, Diana does just that, meeting Doctor Poison’s eyes and clacking her bracelets together as a means to turn the other cheek.
You might argue that Ares’s speech goes on too long, blunting the movie’s otherwise impressive pacing, and you might argue that the ensuing action sequence in which Diana learns she has the power to slay the God of War is uninspiring. But then, if Wonder Woman has a cinematic soul sister, it is Danny Boyle’s “Sunshine”, which get a little too hung up on haunted house theatrics in its climax but still ultimately effects a metaphysical hymn.
Indeed, if the aforementioned Ryan’s critiques that physics and points of reference fall by the wayside ring true, the thematic through-line is strong enough to compensate for the CGI slush, sort of spiritual truth superseding formal truth, which might make the more orthodox film critics harumph, and fair enough & so be it. But when Diana sends all of Ares’s computer-generated imagery right back at his hate-mongering ass, I could only see “Wonder Woman” the same way she sees us.
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