30 for 30: This Was the XFL

We here at Cinema Romantico have all manner of reviews that get written and then, for one vague reason or another, never actually get posted and simply sit in the drafts folder, waiting to get the call at either the right or most dire moment. Well, our review for ESPN’s “This Was the XFL” has been sitting in the drafts folder for going on near 12 months now, considering it aired nearly a year ago, and it may never have seen the light of day if the XFL’s preeminent huckster Vince McMahon had not just threatened to dust off the ex-football league’s cobwebs and give that old pile of bleached bones another ill-advised go. As such, we dusted the cobwebs off our “This Was the XFL” review for your quasi-pleasure.

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“This Was the XFL” — No. 14 in Vol. 3 of ESPN’s apparently never-ending 30 for 30 series — was directed by Charlie Ebersol who is the son of Dick Ebersol who was the President of NBC Sports when it joined forces with professional wrestling impresario Vince McMahon to concoct a springtime football league called the XFL boasting radical changes to the NFL template. Alas, the league combusted, more or less, on arrival and was sacked after a year. And while Charlie Ebersol does not ignore the league’s myriad shortcomings, nor pull punches with his talking heads, allowing much air time for NBC Sports’ vocal, haughty opponent of the XFL (and of McMahon himself) Bob Costas, the director still can’t help but skew a little hagiographic, not unlike 30 for 30 entry “Jordan Rides the Bus” in which director Ron Shelton simply could not help but defer to his mighty subject, transforming the minor league baseball odyssey of Michael Jordan, His Airness, into a fable of redemption rather than a kitchen sink chronicle of disappointment. And yet, through his rose colored glasses, I swear, Charlie Ebersol still comes away with some gleaming insight that kind of unintentionally raises Vince McMahon, slime-ridden salesman, to inadvertent oracle.

The XFL, as the doc swiftly recounts in its prologue, came together because NBC had lost its NFL rights in the preceding years and yearned for gridiron programming. Why exactly McMahon, on the other hand, took up this challenge remains less clear, likely nothing more than ego, and he is shot through with ego as is made quickly clear at the infamous press conference “This Was the XFL” captures in all its vainglory where McMahon brayed about how his league would be bigger, bolder, and much more brutal than the boring, staid NFL. Of course, as “This Was the XFL” shows, the league did not in any tangible way exist as McMahon made these pronouncements, selling an entire business enterprise with nothing more than bluster, a recklessness foreshadowing the ensuing folly.

The XFL’s downfall correlated to nothing more, really, than the quality of the product amounting to sludgy mediocrity causing viewers to turn away in droves. Oh, the film half-pitches some inane theory that a particularly compelling game in the second week of the season that NBC was forced to cut away from due to a sudden stadium blackout for a far less compelling contest all alone could have altered the league’s fate, but Charlie Ebersol offers zero evidence that this one game was not merely an outlier. From there, the movie is principally an exercise in schadenfreude as we watch McMahon’s desperate attempts to inject a little sizzle by way of professional wrestling machinations into his gridiron debacle that only hastens the league’s demise. By the end, McMahon is telling Bob Costas in an HBO interview about how his players are competing with so much heart, resorting to the very clichés he boldly proclaimed he would subvert.

Bob Costas becomes something like the principal antagonist of the league, laughing in the face of McMahon in that infamous 2001 interview and laughingly deriding it in the present. He does not in any way conceal his disgust that the XFL would so unabashedly sexually exploit its cheerleaders and accentuate the sport’s already inherent violence in the name of marketing with its so-called innovations like no fair catches and a “human coin toss” that found two players chasing after a loose football and that generally resulted in injuries. The end of “This Was the XFL” takes great pleasure in pointing out how a few production tricks, like on-field cameras, were eventually adopted by the NFL, proof of the upstart league’s savvy. And fine, but what Costas, and everyone else in the doc seems to overlook, is how the XFL was, in all its misplaced braggadocio, unwittingly un-hypocritical. The NFL strikes myriad phony poses to present itself as what it’s not and distract you from what it is. The XFL, on the other hand, struck no poses. If anything in American society has ever actually earned the bromide It Is What It Is, it was the XFL, a morally vacuous garbage barge and proud of it. If they had played decent football, who knows, the sky might have been the limit.

My Happy Family

If a wife and mother deciding to just up and leave her family with no real explanation would seem like the impetus for considerable conflict, Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Gross’s Georgian film festival darling “My Happy Family” is less interested in traditional drama than atmosphere. This is evinced almost immediately in our introduction to a sprawling Georgian family where the wife and mother in question, 52 year old Manana (Ia Shugliashvili), absorbs her mother’s (Berta Khapava) nagging while her husband Soso (Merab Ninidze) offers no assistance. Soon after, the movie cuts to the living room where the camera picks up Soso admonishing his son, who the camera tilts over to find working on his computer. Soso then crosses the frame, and as he does, the camera tilts further left, finding his daughter and her boyfriend Vakho (making out on the couch. As they do, we overhear Soso’s mother and father in law bickering, which the camera tilts up to see, before everyone is summoned to the dinner table, in the back of the room, which the camera, never cutting, picks up in a wide frame. It’s a nifty demonstration of the cramped, noisy quarters, how there are so many people in the home that they just appear whenever the camera moves, and what becomes most revealingly conspicuous as the scene ends is Manana’s absence from the table. It’s like she’s begging for a moment alone.

That Manana moves out not long after is sort of connected to her job as a schoolteacher, where a student’s confession about her home life spurs Manana to act, a device distressingly reducing her profession to nothing more than a narrative engine, which is made all the more distressing because in the wake of the aforementioned evocative atmosphere this engine is entirely unnecessary. Her living situation exudes a weight squeezing out all her life. For her birthday she repeatedly states her desire to her husband not have a party, including in a scene in the front of their car which Ninidze plays with the air of a man talking without listening. Indeed, he and Manana’s brother throw a party anyway, inviting their friends, all of whom raise a toast to Manana without even really acknowledging her, as if the toast is more about the idea of her, or more about their idea of her, than about, you know, her. This scene mimics one later, after she has moved out, at a dinner party where friends raise a toast to her newfound independence only to turn the conversation to their own petty thoughts as Manana wanders away, unnoticed.

Culling from the Romanian new wave playbook, with long takes and deep frames often chock full of people, “My Happy Family” smartly forgoes a traditional musical score to underline the real world cacophony. So the few moments that this cacophony drops out at Manana’s own place, like when a Mozart sonata drifts through the apartment, or when the wind is heard whipping through the trees just outside her window, the absence of clatter becomes restorative. Manana even takes her meals in front of the window to better hear the sound of the wind and nothing else, and while the camera settles down in these shots, dispensing with the herky jerky camera work of her former home, it also is positioned behind her, as she faces outside and away, granting her desperately needed privacy.

The movie that kept jumping to my mind was “Twice in a Lifetime” (1985). Though they are not exact parallels, as Bud Yorkin’s film involves a Washington husband leaving his wife for another woman, which the movie affords an impressive level of honesty and complicated understanding, I thought of it because “Twice in a Lifetime” still found a way to sort of close the book even if it understood its particular wounds would never completely be healed. In “My Happy Family”, however, where Manana is both given space by her husband and repeatedly pulled back into her family environment to help put out fires, those wounds are deliberately wide open. In fact, the movie ends not with an affirmation but a question. If no answer can be tendered, that’s just right. Sometimes things just are.

Phantom Thread

As is typical with latter day Paul Thomas Anderson Events, there are vast depths to purge in his latest opus “Phantom Thread”, a wholly original creation rather than an adaptation, even if it liberally quotes all manner of Hitchcock. Those depths, however, are not merely weighted more toward the end but brought down in the mix. “Phantom Thread” is not as joyously wispy a creation as his previous “Inherent Vice”, though it has more stiff comedy coursing through its veins than you might expect, but nevertheless an enticing ode to exacting craftsmanship. That artistry is evoked in ornately monikered main character Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), a meticulous fashion designer, yes, but just as much in Anderson’s own auteurist majesty. If “Phantom Thread” ultimately reveals itself as something like a romance with scant traditional ardor, the movie’s aesthetic is so audiovisually intoxicating that simply watching this movie is to fall head over heels in love. But then, that cinematic ravishment also functions as something akin to misdirection before Anderson as metaphorical dressmaker reveals the figurative gown he has fitted us for is so slender in the neck that all the life in us is being choked out.

If previous Anderson movie environs have been all-encompassing metaphorical dirges for certain ways of American life, “Phantom Thread” goes the other way, a surprisingly intimate chamber drama that gets right up close, emblemized in Woodcock’s morning routine where he shines his shoes, styles his hair, and snips away the hairs in his nose. If the latter often suggests vanity, it seems to go further here, suggesting the old phrase cleanliness is next to godliness, which is sort of how Woodcock sees himself, as god of the House of Woodcock. That’s the figure he cuts as the movie begins sitting at the end of his dining table, physically with his significant other yet still utterly unto himself, and when she deigns to serve him fattening sweet rolls, he kicks her out. Well, he does not kick her out so much as silently delegate his dressmaking deputy Cyril (Lesley Manville) to do it for him.

Though Cyril is his sister, she suggests Madame Anna Sebastian, the Machiavellian mother of Claude Rains’s character in Hitchcock’s “Notorious”, as much in charge as him whether or not he knows it, which he probably doesn’t. Indeed, Manville has Cyril receive Reynolds’s dictums and tongue-lashings so coolly that the idea of him being wrapped around her finger just intrinsically emerges. And Day-Lewis does not so much temper his tantrums by letting all the hot air out as allowing the hot air to build to a point of almost weird burlesque, like the sure be be iconic scene in which his emergent love interest scrapes butter across toast so loudly that he throws a fit. It’s not the buttering that is funny so much as his petulance drolly being raised; it’s like Day-Lewis is playing The Cowardly Lion without removing his mask.

His turn is not unlike Anderson’s photography, almost seeming to reshape its mood within frames, from domineering to defeated to delicate and back again. He is never more delicate than when Reynolds meets his match in the form of Alma (Vicky Krieps) who is waitressing at some seaside café, with flushed cheeks suggesting an innocence waiting to be corrupted, where he shows up to unwind, and where Day-Lewis transforms placing a breakfast order into a kind of courtlier version of Michael Fassbender staring at the woman on the subway in “Shame.” Woodcock is working up an emotional appetite, of course, one that takes form not so much in lovemaking as dressmaking, as he concludes their first date not by squiring her to the boudoir but his workshop.

In effect, Reynolds reduces Alma to a mannequin, propping her up and taking her measurements while Cyril records them. When Alma laments the size of her breasts, Reynolds remarks that it’s his job to give her some, if he chooses to, a line Day-Lewis gives an air of less control than doing-his-job fact. If it sounds off-putting, well, it is and isn’t, as Krieps plays Alma with a sense of at once being taken aback and turned on, underlined in the sequence’s searing Christopher Scarabosio sound design – the smack of the tape measure, the scribble of the pencil, the way shoes slide across the wood floor – that is so piercing it can make you cringe even if you simultaneously, improbably sense yourself getting aurally high, like one might aromatically from the smells of a kitchen.

That we never quite know where Alma came from never feels like a flaw but just right, emblemized in how she goes on to become Woodcock’s muse, sculpted into what he wants her to be. But if most movies might have let matters lie there, “Phantom Thread” then charts Alma’s esoteric journey to twisted self-actualization, which Krieps plays not by sitting in the middle of the boxing ring and slugging it out with Day-Lewis but deftly coming in from the side. Impressively, only once the movie is all over do you see the way in which Anderson’s turn laid in wait all along. It’s not something you put together like a puzzle post-screening, though, because the movie isn’t a riddle to be solved, so much as seek to wrap your bent mind around. I’m being coy here, I understand, and I apologize, but it’s delicate to discuss just how “Phantom Thread” upends its basic blueprint for something else instead, which, in essence, is what Alma does, not allowing herself to simply be talked to but talking back in ways you would not believe.

But if that makes it sound feel-good, that’s not quite right either, achieving some other plain that suggests peace, love and understanding in almost brutish, otherworldly form. That ethereal sensation, however, does not completely separate them from our current world, even if Anderson’s movie makes no overtures of timeliness. Maybe that’s because “Phantom Thread’s” détente is rooted in something ageless, one, weird as it may sound, that sort of reminded me of “The Princess Bride’s” Westley building up immunity to iocane power, and how humanity’s toxins might best be combatted by simply embracing them.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Wonderful Country (1959)

If Robert Mitchum’s Mexican-American accent in “The Wonderful Country” (1959) comes and goes, well, that’s less any kind of flaw than emblematically appropriate considering his character, gunslinger Martin Brady, was born in America and then fled to Mexico when he was but 14 after avenging his father’s killer. That left him stranded south of the border, re-christened as Martín Bredi, a man with two identities and none it all, left to hire himself out as a pistolero to the dastardly Castro Brothers. And though ensuing events find his identity at stake, Brady is content going with the flow, allowing the situation to dictate his movements, which might be a weird quality in a main character though a nonetheless perfect one for Robert Mitchum, where the actor’s peerless ability to make passiveness so charismatic is on full display. When his character is finally made to take a stand it is not about some grand overarching statement in the name or this or that as a gunslinger wearied out with having to always be so quick on the draw. The idea that one man can make a difference isn’t explicitly laughed at, but you suspect that Brady would roll his eyes at it over a cold one.

No, while the ever-incendiary border politics dot “The Wonderful Country” throughout, Brady’s journey is far less political than personal, beginning when he crosses the Rio Grande to run some guns and finds himself hung up in the little border town of Puerto with a broken leg. If most people with his past might be in a hurry to get out, Brady plays it pretty cool, magnified, of course, by Mitchum himself, who makes being propped up with a giant cast look like a card player kicking his feet up at the poker table. And the movie allows Brady to revel in the people around him, like Dr. Stovall, a scene-stealing turn from Charles McGraw who plays the part, his character stealing glugs of whiskey intended for his patient, like the doctor in “Hot Shots!” who issues himself 15cc of morphine, as well as youthful Ludwig (Max Slaten), a German immigrant and nephew of the gun runner, Sterner (John Banner), with whom Brady is dealing. Sterner warns Ludwig away from Brady, a warning he does not always heed, and Ludwig’s chance at a new life in America both mirrors and becomes tied up in Brady’s same attempts.

Eventually Brady gets a shave and a new suit, looking like a new man, and is presented dueling opportunities to truly become a new man, first by the US Army and then by the Texas Rangers. Army Major Colton (Gary Merrill) seeks Brady’s services as something of a spy to report on the movements of the Castro Brothers to help the US government eradicate the threat of violent Apaches preventing their expansion of a railroad. If American/Mexican political relations are presented as murkily true to life, the Indians are, expectedly, simple savages, glimpsed for only one action sequence in which they play the archetypal Indians of Cowboys vs. Indians. Still, that Brady does not simply give them up points not necessarily to some strict personal code but an understanding that things are not so simple.

This gray area is exemplified in Captain Rucker (Albert Dekker) who knows Brady’s past and promises him the U.S. will turn a blind eye if he’s willing to help his native country, which Dekker alternately plays for forgiving kindness and harsh leverage, never quite letting Brady know what he really thinks, maybe because he thinks both things at once. Mitchum was always such a great actor when his characters were backed into a corner, and so Brady’s relationship with Rucker, where he is left more or less at the Captain’s mercy, is the best one in the movie even if the movie seeks to render Colton’s wife Ellen (Julie London) his primary partner.

That her marriage is loveless is believably sketched in the way Colton asks her to dance – “it’s the first dance, Ellen,” he says with the air of a tired man reporting for guard duty – but the screenplay, for all its indulgence, seems to be missing a connecting scene between Brady and Ellen as antagonists and Brady and Ellen as burgeoning romantic partners. It just never comes all the way together and essentially undermines what might have been a superb ending, one that comes around after Brady has been forced back into Mexico and made to cut his nefarious ties before crossing the Rio Grande once again, under a billowy sky, to re-unite with Ellen, movingly obfuscating the difference between expat and immigrant.

Who Am I in the Bank-Robbery Movie Scene?

Shea Serrano, who is something like the Interwebs master at quasi-alternate fiction and delightfully oblique variations on listicles, recently posited over at The Ringer the very straight-forward question “Who Are You in the Bank-Robbery Movie Scene?” by outlining the various possibilities. The post is actually pretty conventional by Serrano standards, and the options he offers are all the traditional archetypes from “The Leader” to “the customer who decides he wants to be a hero.” Serrano’s piece nevertheless absolutely got us to thinking, as it had to, about who we are in the bank-robbery movie scene, though, as always, in situations like these we tend to take those archetypes and then drill down, examining who inhabited a particular archetype and how they inhabited it.

Anyone who knows me knows well knows instantaneously that I am not The Leader. Ha! No one has ever looked at me or hung around me and thought, “You know who you remind me of? Neil McCauley.” No, that’s why the obvious corollary here is Jesse Eisenberg in “30 Minutes or Less” who robs a bank only because he has a bomb strapped to him and is ordered to rob the bank by the real bank robbers. His subsequent harried comicality seems the sort of air I might possess. His character name is Nick, for God’s sake, which is no spiritual coincidence!

I couldn’t be The Getaway Driver. We have already covered who I would be as a driver at the movies and, rest assured, I am no Steve McQueen. If I was the getaway driver I’d be something like Michael J. Pollard’s hapless C.W. Moss in that scene when, as Bonnie and Clyde scurry into the bank with their bags and guns, he rather idiotically tries to parallel park rather than waiting right outside the bank.

It’s tempting to call myself The Jumpy One. Indeed, I feel kinship for Bokeem Woodbine in “Dead Presidents” who doesn’t want to rob the bank and yet, against his better judgment, shows up to participate anyway and then completely falls down on the job as a simple lookout. But, I suspect no one would ever even think to employ me as the lookout in the first place on account of seeing how jumpy I am and so it would never even get to this point.

There is no way I would be the customer who decides he wants to be a hero. I always think of the bank manager in “Heat” who gets himself socked in the jaw by saying “What key?” and then gives up the key half-a-second later anyway. I’m giving up the key. I’m giving up the key as they walk in the door. There is, however, a unique variation on the customer who decides he wants to be a hero that might be more fitting.

I’m talking about Ewan McGregor’s hapless Robert Lewis of “A Life Less Ordinary” who, for reasons far too complicated to explain, reluctantly finds himself an accomplice to the very un-reluctant Celine (Cameron Diaz) as she leads them on a spur-of-the-moment heist. He is so reluctant, in fact, that as she pulls her gun in the middle of the job and threatens to blow a girl’s brains all over the wall, Robert assures the girl and everyone else that Celine most assuredly will not actually blow the girl’s brains all over the wall, a moment of comical, detrimental honesty that prompts Celine to point the gun at Robert’s head, sort of inadvertently turning him inot the customer who decides he wants to be a hero. That seems like where I might end up — as the bank robber so bad at bank robbing that he winds up getting squeezed out mid-robbery.

Of course, that still implies a certain air of heroism, however accidental, which still, frankly, seems stretch. So. Do you remember “Out of Sight”? Do you remember at the beginning when George Clooney’s bank-robbing Jack Foley goes up to the teller and explains that his partner is sitting at the desk just behind him with a gun in his open briefcase? And then Foley gets his cash and goes, and as he goes, he stops to point out the teller to his “partner”? And his “partner” looks at the bank representative with whom he’s conversing and says, confused, “Who was that?” That. That’s me during the bank-robbery movie scene. I’m so clueless I don’t even know the robbery’s going on.

Girls Trip

It’s more than a little ironic that Malcolm D. Lee’s “Girls Trip” turns on the mantra You Can Have It All being revealed as phony since the movie itself is sort of trying to have it all by giving would-be gravity to an otherwise uproariously irreverent comedy. And even if there is something ennobling about “Girls Trip’s” trying to rehabilitate the antiquated movie notion that women can only find happiness in the arms of a man, you nevertheless wish an editor had left red checkmarks all over the overlong last half hour. But, whatever. If Lee’s film wheezes in the stretch run, so much of it still pulses with an awesome life force as its four main characters – the self-proclaimed Flossy Posse – take New Orleans by storm for the Essence Festival. Upon arrival, in fact, Lee unleashes a montage that, despite hitting a few Crescent City hotspots, is less about establishing locale, or even connecting one scene to another, then its simple buoyant spirit, one representative of “Girls Trip” at its best, emblemized in the song The Soul Rebels’ cover of Bill Withers’s “Lovely Day” laid out over it.

“Girls Trip” begins with a flashback as a means to introduce us to the Flossy Posse before entering the present day for the Where Are They Now? introductions. Ryan (Regina Hall) has successfully turned her and her husband Stewart’s (Mike Colter) lifestyle into a brand. Sasha (Queen Latifah) is a gossip columnist fallen on hard times as predictably evinced by the litany of late bills spread across her counter while Lisa (Jada Pinkett Smith) is a single mom with a pitiful dating life as predictably evinced by the scrubs she plans to wear on the plane to New Orleans. This is all standard operating procedure. But leave it to the film’s breakout star, Tiffany Haddish as Dina, to rip procedure to shreds, introduced by deliberately failing to pay attention as she gets fired, walking out of the room like she’s still got the job, essentially turning her back a conventional character introduction with such breezy defiance you wish the other three women had been allowed to do the same. It foreshadows how often Dina grants vitality to familiar situations.

When the movie’s main twist is unveiled early on – that is, Stewart is cheating on Ryan because their marriage is a sham – Dina race-walks across a hotel lobby to confront Stewart where he chats up a lady. The lady, of course, turns out to merely be Stewart’s aunt, but rather than play this for traditional egg on your face comedy, Dina rips into the aunt too, a hurricane refusing that downgrade to tropical storm. This mirrors the movie’s foremost scatological joke which Dina gives a double exclamation point free of I-Couldn’t-Help-It embarrassment and full of Just-For-The-Hell-Of-It bravado. Later, when the Flossy Posse attends Sean “Diddy” Combs’s Superdome concert and he pulls Dina up onstage, you believe it’s really happening because she makes you believe she’s capable of anything.

Lisa, in fact, has some of Dina in her, which Pinkett Smith smartly plays to, often letting shades of rambunctiousness shine through her semi-shrewish exterior even before she takes the plunge and has a fling with a much younger man (Kofi Siriboe) that thankfully keeps it kinkily casual, a la “Magic Mike XXL” and its the freeing nature of love. It makes you wish that Ryan had been given more to play than a simple case of Will She? Or Won’t She? when it comes to her lifestyle, or “lifestyle”, with Stewart, while you also wish Sasha’s plight turned on more than whether or not she will use Ryan’s relationship drama to re-invigorate her gossip column and save her job.

Then again, while Ryan does meet Another Guy, in the form a kindly Julian (Larenz Tate), the script does not necessarily push her into another relationship in the midst of her current one disintegrating, keeping it more loose and expressive, never more than a moment at the House of Blues where she watches Julian play in his band as his bass notes become someting like a come on. That musical undercurrent is also seen in a scene where the Flossy Posse meets Stewart’s paramour on the dance floor. And if what follows might be culled from a dozen or so dance-off films, this one remains refreshingly absent the need to resolve anything, just pulsing in the liberation of its groove. It might devolve into a fight but damn, it’s still a lovely day.

Some Drivel On...the Oscar Nominations

(You can find a full list of Oscar nominations here.)

Nominations for the 90th Academy Awards were announced in Los Angeles Tuesday morning by Andy Serkis and Tiffany Haddish, star of “Girls Trip”, whose forceful comic turn teased thoughts of a Best Supporting Actress nomination. Perhaps that is why she was enlisted as a presenter, to capture her reaction in real time, especially since her NYFCC victory speech was so social media-y infamous, except that in the end, no, Ms. Haddish was not nominated. Maybe this was just miscalculated overconfidence by the powers-that-be, or maybe just the powers-that-be realizing they needed a person of color up there announcing nominations too, but a couple years out from #OscarsSoWhite it could have been a bad look had the Best Supporting Actress category not wound up populated by two black women anyway – Octavia Spencer in “The Shape of Water” and Mary J. Blige in “Mudbound.” Of course, those are more traditional sort of roles than Haddish’s, suggesting that Oscars progress still has something like a traditionalist bent. I mean, didn’t Melissa McCarthy get a nod for “Bridesmaids”? Maybe McCarthy’s painful pooping is just more Day Lewis-y than Haddish’s ecstatic urinating, who’s to say? Anyway.

Two years out now from the #OscarsSoWhite fiasco, the 2018 nominations appear a trend in the right direction, not just with Spencer and Blige but with African-American Jordan Peele earning both Best Directing and Best Screenplay nominations for “Get Out” while the film itself landed a Best Picture nomination to go along with Daniel Kaluuya’s Best Actor nod. What a haul. Dee Rees & Virgil Williams earned a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for “Mudbound” while the Netflix documentary “Strong Island” – which made this blog’s Top 10 – found itself as one of the five nominees for Best Documentary which damn right. (The director, Yance Ford, may also be, as Mark Harris noted via Twitter, the first Transgender director ever recognized.)

Time’s Up made itself heard too. Rachel Morrison became the first woman nominated for Best Cinematography, which hopefully starts a new trend for film photography, though I half-suspect even Morrison would be the first to tell you that the nomination is enough and, hey, how about we give that Oscar to Roger Deakins (i.e. “Blade Runner 2049”) now? Anyway. James Franco was nowhere to be found in the Best Actor category, which even those who don’t believe in snubs would have to find pointedly curious, while giving a Best Supporting actor nod to Christopher Plummer for “All the Money in the World” might well have knocked Armie Hammer out for “Call Me By Your Name” but also functions as another middle finger to Kevin Spacey which isn’t the worst thing that has ever happened with the Oscars.

Then again, Gary Oldman landed a Best Actor nod for “Darkest Hour”, and while he is a tremendous actor and past due for this award, his past where women are concerned is, uh, less than savory and with a long time between now and envelope opening that past could still be his foil. I wouldn’t necessarily bet on it since the old guard of the Academy taking self-satisfaction in wagging its finger at Franco while clapping Oldman on the back seems about right. But then, Daniel Day-Lewis is retiring and might be owed a royal send-off for his superb work in “Phantom Thread”. Or maybe, just maybe, if you will allow me to dream, Daniel Kaluuya sneaks in there for “Get Out” and shouts out fellow nominee Denzel Washington (“Roman J. Israel, Esq.”) from the stage who points back and everyone has all the feels.

And for all the worries after the as-ever suspect Hollywood Foreign Press Association went all-male with its Golden Globes Best Director category, look who picked up a Best Director nomination – that is, Greta Gerwig for “Lady Bird.” If I had a vote in that category it’d probably go to Paul Thomas Anderson for “Phantom Thread”, and I suspect its Guillermo del Toro’s to lose for “The Shape of Water”, but whatever. Her presence is joy enough. (*Puts On Rose-Colored Glasses* This blog has loved Greta since she was making movies with Swanberg on the floor of her friend’s apartments, and watching her star rise has been a decade-plus of jubilee. She’s one of a kind. We love her. Long may she run.) And anyway, I’d rather she won for Best Original Screenplay, which I fear is Martin McDonagh’s to lose for “Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri” which is why he was not nominated as Best Director, because they believe that movie to be a product of its script, which, all biases accounted for, would be a monumental travesty of justice considering McDonagh’s script exudes obvious moral chicanery, nowhere near Gerwig’s thought-through naturalism.

“Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri” was one of nine nominees for Best Picture and might be the front-runner but also might not be because of the perceived backlash, though the awards cognoscenti can drone on about that in more detail for you. What most interests me about Best Picture is how the nominees are a mix of conventional and fresh, and how the fresh nominees actually seem more poised for glory. Indeed, the traditional awards season “narrative”, as quaint as it is laughable as it is real as it is semi-enjoyable, truly has some relish this year considering the foremost Best Picture contenders are all so, shall we say, of the moment. “Get Out” reckons with America’s racist past (present) while “The Shape of Water” puts that time when Make America Was Great under the microscope to sort of say, nah, it wasn’t so great, while “Lady Bird” offers a testament to female empowerment while “Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri”, for however much this blog might not have liked it, is certainly trying to push all manner of timely buttons.

Still, the Academy Awards have always been more about the movie industry itself and how the films it chooses to award is how it wants its industry to be perceived. And if all these nominations suggest the Academy wants to be perceived as an industry that favors diversity and inclusivity, well, perception, naturally, is not enough. The awards season “narrative” should not end there. The industry’s feet should still be held to the fire for the next month. Nominations are one thing, but equal opportunities at the point of entry are another, and the point of entry is where real change has to occur.

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A few other observations:

We here at Cinema Romantico like to make fun of The Courtesy Meryl Streep Nomination (she earned her 21st for “The Post”!) but you know what? She was really, really, really, really, really good in “The Post.” I don’t think she’ll win, but if she did, well, I’d doff my cap.

The Supporting Actress category was so stacked going in that I suppose it doesn’t really surprise me that not only Haddish but Holly Hunter for “The Big Sick” got bumped. Still, it’s enough to make one wish they had just clipped one Best Actor nod and one Best Supporting Actor nod and given Best Supporting Actress seven nominees. Why not?

“Phantom Thread” being shut out of the sound categories is lunacy on par with Björk never winning a Grammy.

Sam Rockwell for “Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri”, per all the awards cognoscenti, shapes up as front-runner for Best Supporting Actor and fair enough, but God help me…I so desperately wanted this to be Willem Dafoe’s “time” for “The Florida Project.” Maybe his “time” is still to come.

The Shape of Water

Though “The Shape of Water” begins with a sequence intended to elicit the sensation of being a dream by cutting from some shimmering underwater-scape that nevertheless seems to exist indoors, to its main character, Elisa (Sally Hawkins), asleep and then rousted awake, in the end, after it’s all said and done, this might actually more likely connote reality intruding on fantasy, which is one of the movie’s main features. “The Shape of Water” is set in 1962, at the height of the Cold War, but also of an America still waiting to emerge from its Eisenhower-induced coma, and if director Guillermo del Toro dares to imagine what the future might hold, he knows in the there and then some of his characters do not necessarily belong. The subsequent movie becomes about a certain sort of attempt to break free, almost as if the cruelness of the reality presented is too much for them to take, and that becomes more the movie’s fantasy than its Amphibian Man.

The Amphibian Man (Doug Jones), unwillingly plucked from South American jungles where he was worshipped as a god, is something like del Toro’s less vengeful variation of The Creature from the Black Lagoon, imprisoned in a grimy, slimy tank in some top secret Baltimore government lab for nefarious purposes to which the humanist Dr. Hoffstelter (Michael Stuhlbarg) objects. That we never exactly get to know The Amphibian Man seems inevitable absent any asinine flashback but also a little disappointing, never quite bringing us as close to him as he becomes to the lab’s janitor, Elisa. Because if movie beasts normally fall for women in their grasp, like King Kong and Ann Darrow, here the roles are reversed, with Elisa falling for The Amphibian Man. That Elisa is also mute gives Hawkins a chance to stretch her acting legs, sure, and she complies, turning trembles of the mouth or flickers of the eyes into grand statements of romantic purpose. But it also levels the playing field between Elisa and the creature, and their relationship blossoms almost subliminally, through music and behavior, evoked by del Toro with a distinct fairytale vibe even if the spirit of the relationship nevertheless comes across simply carnal, not the only bout of dissonance in “The Shape of Water.”

If this is a monster movie, however, and it is, the monster is not The Amphibian Man, even if the American and Soviets see him that way, but Colonel Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon). He’s rotten from the inside-out, emblemized in the blackened, rotted fingers re-attached to his hand after an off screen encounter with the creature. And while Shannon, as Shannon will, lets his fearsome furnace burn hot, his character’s life is filled out with little touches connecting his evil to society’s ills. The bright, almost blinding, beiges and yellows of his postwar home deliberately contrast with the otherwise omnipresent green, which is not merely an obvious allusion to environmentalism but explicitly referenced as the color of the future, one which feels a long way off to its band of misfit main characters. Indeed, at the diner Elisa frequents with her next-door neighbor and friend Giles (Richard Jenkins), the key lime pie he favors practically glimmers like so much pie in the sky.

Giles, played with a kind of warmhearted sorrow by Jenkins, is both stuck in the past and out of the future, a closeted gay man whose commercial artistry is being blotted out by photographs. Elisa’s co-worker, meanwhile, Zelda (Octavia Spencer) is a black woman told in a thinly veiled threat by Strickland that the Lord undoubtedly looks less like her and more like him. Even Dr. Hoffstetler is more than meets the eye, revealed as a Soviet spy, suggesting that, yes, those commie bastards have beating hearts. Together, they scheme to free The Amphibian Man, and if Elisa is doing it for love, she is also doing it out of good old fashioned decency, as are the others, which strikes back at Strickland and his brethren, his commanding officer (Nick Searcy) barking that America only exports and sells decency, it doesn’t use it. Del Toro seems to regard that as an epitaph for America, one that he is pointedly traveling back in time to tear down.

To tear it down, however, del Toro overdoes it, virtually ennobling his characters despite their occasional pangs of sadness, more or less rendering them as flawless opposites of their antagonists. This stands in contrast to the movie’s frank portrayals of violence and sex, the latter best glimpsed in an early scene where Elisa necessarily pleasures herself. It’s a delightfully candid tone-setter, and one that makes you wish del Toro peeked behind a few more closed doors of the era to see the way it really was rather than keeping certain doors closed to maintain his fanciful air. Why in one scene he literally has Giles close the door on Elisa and The Amphibian Man when they are about to go all the way. It’s as if del Toro does not want to completely invade the safe space he creates for his characters, considering them better off without this mean old world, which is sort of what the conclusion, not to be revealed, suggests, and so he goes about prescribing a resolution without quite letting them earn it on their own.

Friday's Old Fashioned: ...And the Pursuit of Happiness (1986)

For his 1985 documentary “God’s Country”, French filmmaker Louis Malle settled in a single American town (Glencoe, Minnesota). For his follow-up, 1986’s “…And the Pursuit of Happiness”, on the other hand, he went out to look for all of America – all of immigrant America, that is. The broader points of what he finds are not necessarily new, though the finer details shine much brighter, which only illuminates how immigration is an eternal subject in a nation essentially founded on it. And while the subject of illegal immigration is absolutely raised and in considerable, considered detail, Malle remains, as he is everywhere else, content to lean on talking heads, whether they are Mexicans fleeing their country’s economic crisis in the hopes of earning money for their families or an American border patrol guard shaking his head at his country’s inability to pass any meaningful immigration reform. That last one might sound familiar, and is why Malle knows the issue cannot be diagnosed nor solved, only presented as is, emblemized in a sequence where a Mexican man caught illegally crossing the border smiles and tells his captor, who smiles right back, that he will see him again tomorrow, rendering the entire issue in paradoxical terms. That paradox is what Malle hones in on, though he hones in less through the politics of immigration and more through the plights of the immigrants themselves.

Malle opens the film by chronicling the arrival of several Cambodian refugees at JFK airport — the new Ellis Island — and then attending English language classes where they are taught the phrase “Let’s go to Wendy’s and have a hamburger.” There is something alternately loving and satirical about this sequence, just as there is later when a few Pakistani refugees are glimpsed watching “Love Connection” and “Transformers” as if this – junk food and trash TV – is the best America has to offer. That’s not completely true, of course, and we see the many opportunities foreigners do have, from a Costa Rican who became the first immigrant NASA astronaut to a West African building his own cab company from the ground up, but these nevertheless Americanized details stand out amidst various immigrants talking about the need to preserve their own culture when America’s is obviously so pervasive.

Indeed, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Derek Walcott, who immigrated from St. Lucia, talks about how the United States emphasizes the individual, and the individual’s rebirth, over the state, which is, innately and uniquely American, though also something like a contradiction, which he suggests by deeming the U.S. as “an aggressive democracy”, forcing equality to accentuate differences. It’s a hell of an insight, suggesting that in America’s rush to promote all our differences, a kind of conformity settles anyway, and preservation of immigrants’ varying cultures becomes more and more difficult. A former brigadier general from Laos, who escaped his country and its unrest in 1975, talks about how his kids were gradually indoctrinated to the culture, and how his grandchildren, who live in Connecticut only speak English. “They are already American,” the general says of his granchildren in a voice that sounds a lot less happy than sad.

If that is a case of merely absorbing your surroundings, however, Malle shows the flip side to that coin through the prism of Arab-Americans, whose unease in America in the mid-80s is not all that different from today. Where a lingering shot of a woman in a hijab standing outside an American school reminds us how easy it is for them to stand out, a Lebanese graphic designer, on the other hand, discusses how problems in the middle east establishes the false narrative that all Arabs are Muslim, forcing them to blend in, to “deny their roots.” It’s a balancing act, in other words, to adapt to new lives in America without rejecting their old ones, a blending of cultures which, for all the difficulties of the immigrant experience that Malle captures, I found quite moving.

Malle ends the movie amidst a New York enclave of Russian Jews, and a party where an American singer performs in the guise of a Russian Jew, a native adopting a foreign persona, which flashed me back to an earlier moment where Malle finds a formerly Catholic Hispanic pastor having gone full-throated Evangelical, ministering to his Houston congegration like it’s garish megachurch, looking like a Spanish Jimmy Swaggart. In those dueling images you would be hard-pressed to delineate exactly where America begins and where it ends.

Forgotten Great Moments in Movie History

The other night I was fortunate enough to catch Aziza Barnes’s “BLKS” at Steppenwolf Theatre, which was fantastic and which anyone in the Chicago area should really consider getting out and seeing (it runs until January 28th). One throwaway detail, however, that particularly caught my eye involved Namir Smallwood’s character Justin, who, for reasons too complicated to explain, is about to go to sleep on someone else’s sofa when, before tucking himself in, he sets his glasses – egads! – on the floor. My stomach dropped when I saw this, just as it dropped later when he draped the glasses over the sofa’s arm, as if he was hanging a towel over a flimsy towel rack. Oh, the humanity. This emotionally perturbed me not simply because I am glasses wearer but because I am a glasses wearer who becomes supremely paranoid regarding the condition of his glasses upon removal from his face. I need to know they are in a safe space when I turn in for the evening because if they are not I will not be able to sleep. I will have bad dreams about bad things happening to my glasses, and I will likely wake three, four, five, six, seven, eight times during the course of the night just to confirm that my glasses are where I put them and okay. I mean, I’m practically blind without my glasses, which means the stakes are high when it comes to seeing my glasses through the night, and so to see someone so casually consider his nighttime eyewear safety sent shivers down my spine.

That, as it would, because it’s me, took my mind to Joe Carnahan’s “The Grey”, the 2011 action-adventure film that most people know because it’s the one where Liam Neeson fights a wolf. Of course, his reasons for fighting the wolf, and how the film presents him fighting the wolf, if it even presents it at all (wink, wink), goes beyond what trailers suggest, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is, wolves are the foremost nemesis of “The Grey”, haunting a group of plane crash survivors as they try to reach safety in harsh, remote Alaska, and yet, as scary as those wolves are, something else, to me, was even scarier. I’ll explain.

One of the survivors is Talget (Dermot Mulroney), a friendly guy with a slightly more erudite air than his compatriots, an air evoked in his semi-coke bottle black frame glasses. And Mulroney doesn’t just let those glasses sit there on his face. No, he fidgets with them throughout, much like a glasses wearer might, because even if there are moments when glasses wearers are not at all conscious of their eyewear, there are just as many moments when we absolutely are, constantly adjusting our glasses because when glasses feel weird on your face then your whole face feels weird, your whole body feels weird, your whole mind feels weird. Take this shot, for instance, where you can see how his glasses have sort of slipped down to the edge of his nose, which, oh my God. When it’s hot, or when you’re really working and so your face gets sweaty and your glasses won’t stay up on your nose and they keep slipping down, there are few things more vexing, man. But do not get me started.

As scary as glasses are slipping down on your nose, however, that is not the scary moment I was referencing. The scariest moment occurs when the group happens upon a ravine, which leads them to construct a makeshift rope, of sorts, tie it to a mammoth tree on the other side after one of them improbably jumps across, and then ferry over the chasm one-by-one. Talget volunteers to go last, afraid of heights and worrying that if he freezes up he might doom Liam Neeson’s Ottway too, which might communicate Talget’s inevitable death but also communicates his kindness. And even here Mulroney commits to actorly business, playing a glasses wearer to the end by taking those black frames off his face and blowing on them to clear them up, because smudged glasses are a deathknell even when it isn’t literally life and death.

And as Talget finally gets out onto that line, Carnahan’s camera momentarily forgets about everyone else, lingering on just him, up close and tight, getting right in there.

And, perhaps against his better judgment, perhaps already resigned to his fate, he looks down.

And as he does, his glasses slip off his face.

He instinctively reaches out for them, of course, but they are already long gone.

And Carnahan then, and only then, cuts to a wide shot, evoking The Loneliness of The Glasses Wearer Without His Glasses.

And then Carnahan cuts back up close, implicitly capturing the look of a glasses wearer who, sans frames, not only doesn’t know what to do, knows full well he is already done for.

To Benicio del Toro, My Favorite Last Jedi-er

I knew Benicio del Toro was in “The Last Jedi”, or I did at one time, whenever his name was featured in a press release, but by the time he actually appeared in the movie when I was watching, I had forgotten. And I was glad I had forgotten because when del Toro turned up mid-movie he injected the proceedings with…..well, I was going to stay life. But “life” in this context usually conveys something along the lines of invigoration and del Toro was providing life by sort of dialing it down, which the visual language of his introduction underlines. Playing the idiosyncratically named, at least for the “Star Wars” universe, DJ, he is in the same prison cell where a couple of our heroes show up for reasons not to be disclosed, and he first appears by rolling over on his cot, not barging into the movie and clamoring for center stage but waking up from a nap. You half suspect he could have just slept through the whole movie, stirring at the closing credits and wondering where everybody went. And when he busts out of the cell moments later he does it not by cutting the figure of, say, Houdini but one of a guy who just figured out how to use a waterpik.

Actors in these movies, as I outlined yesterday in my review, too often are not merely beholden to the plot but steamrolled by it, left with no room to truly exercise their actorly intentions. Del Toro, on the other hand, even as his character becomes embroiled for a time in the quest of the heroes that turn up in his cell, refuses to be steamrolled, going so far as to prop up his character with something like an accent and a stutter. You might wonder the point and purpose of these bits of vocal business. Me, I thought of Eddie Izzard many years ago, in the wake of the release of the mostly forgettable “The Avengers” explaining that his villainous henchman was always chewing gum because the gum was his Method. The accent and stutter are del Toro’s Method. Whether it’s true or not, I will always believe that del Toro had it written into his contract that he got to have an accent and a stutter.

He needs those, dammit, because he needs to play something. Rarely in “The Last Jedi” is anyone playing something other than what they have already done or what they assume a person in a “Star Wars” movie would do. And in seemingly subscribing to his own whims, del Toro renders the otherwise predictability of his character’s turn behaviorally true, like he really is making this all up on the spot, exiting “The Last Jedi” with what may as well be a shrug. And in a movie that is Stakes or Nothing virtually all the time, that impassivity became the ultimate tonic.

The Last Jedi

Pauline Kael notoriously derided “Star Wars” as being “exhausting”, a sentiment with which I never agreed. Not because I was a kid when I first saw it but because George Lucas’s space opera was streamlined, the context of Rebellion v Empire strictly limited to Good v Evil, and the mystical Force breezily explained in a couple sentences. In “The Last Jedi”, alas, writer/director Rian Johnson is tasked with honoring the comprehensive mythology that Lucas’s film spawned, never mind paying fealty to his Disney overlords, dealing a fatal blow to efficiency. If Johnson infuses a little more lyricism, which was another of Kael’s complaints, that feels less the point than an addendum to the relentless plot, which emerges as a weird paradox because so much of the movie is spinning its wheels, making it feel, well, exhausting. And if Johnson does deepen the principal relationship between good Jedi Rey (Daisy Ridley) and bad Jedi Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), while even managing to dress up the Force as something more, he nevertheless ultimately becomes pinned down by the franchise’s apparently indestructible repetition.

That repetition is seen where we last left off, in the struggle between Resistance v First Order, which is just Rebellion v Empire re-dressed for a new generation. They are in the midst of a gigantic space battle as the traditional opening scrawl concludes, and though the broad strokes are business as usual, Johnson still adds his own flourishes rather than mere J.J. Abrams-ish callbacks, and concludes the sequence by stretching one instant into a few instants, giving it some feeling as opposed to simple sensation. Though these sorts of stolen moments are sprinkled all throughout “The Last Jedi”, they are merely stranded along the film’s edges, and Johnson’s determination to keep the plot churning not only offsets his sometimes expressive images but removes any sense of emotional grounding at the center, particularly where his non-Jedi characters are concerned.

If Oscar Isaac’s Resistance pilot Poe Dameron is supposed to be the new Han Solo, he never comes close. It’s not even that Poe remains noticeably underwritten because Isaac is a good enough actor to individually evince character, but that Isaac is given no space to stretch his acting legs, shuttled from story point to story point. The one scene teasing potential involves Dameron and newcomer Holdo (Laura Dern), purple-haired Resistance Vice Admiral, even if they are forced to communicate in recycled Han & Leia barbs (“flyboy”). Yet rather than giving these fine actors room to maneuver, they are instantly moved apart, snuffing the spark before it can catch. John Boyega, meanwhile, back as heroically treasonous Stormtrooper Finn, finds a nice comic chemistry with Kelly Marie Tran’s maintenance worker Rose Tirico in their initial scene playing a little on “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” But that chemistry is trampled by the ludicrous speed twists of their B-plot to try and do in a star destroyer and blahs out their semi-burgeoning romance.

Admittedly their quest finds room to re-consider the Resistance, a little like “Rogue One”, as something closer to terroristic insurgents rather than clear-cut heroes, though “Last Jedi” mimics that spinoff in never firmly committing to this idea. Still, it hints at something deeper and darker, and this manifests itself on the island hideaway where Rey found Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) as “The Force Awakens” concluded. If Rey seeks Luke’s help both for herself and the Resistance, Luke is uninterested, played by Hamill with great relish. If he never quite settled into his role as cleanly as Harrison Ford, here he finds a grizzle countenance that is as slyly humorous, improbably emitting notes of his turn in “Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back”, as it is gravely serious. More than ever, that oft-cited pull of the dark side of the Force feels paramount which is underlined in the island caretakers, CGI creatures that come across culled less from Lucas’s points of origin than “Stromboli” or “Black Narcissus”.

The allure of the dark side extends to Rey, particularly in scenes where she and Kylo Ren share the screen even though they are not technically together, sequences intended to crackle with the most genuine sexual tension this saga has ever allowed. But while Johnson goes so far as to indulge in shots of a shirtless Driver (who never stops acting even if you can sense the memes unspooling as this happens) Ridley, so strong playing jaw-clenched grittiness, can’t quite convey the perverse rumblings in her soul. Still, their climactic light saber duel, which turns into so much more than a mere duel, does have a charismatic pull on account of Johnson forgoing the Empire spirit color of gunmetal grey for a blood red backdrop, signifying the lifeblood pulsing through the characters in this violently balletic clash. It also teases transforming the whole saga into something else.

One of the most arresting images in “The Last Jedi” concerns a Sequoia of sorts on Luke’s island hideaway, one bearing all pertinent Jedi texts, where Luke tries to disabuse Rey of her ideals. Johnson sets this shot with the roots of the trees directly behind Luke, eliciting the impression that they are exploding out of him, visually conveying how the saga’s entire history is tied directly back to him. Rey, on the other hand, has an exit just over her shoulder, a chance for a clean start. She doesn’t take it, half-circling him, coming to rest in the same place he was, assuming her place within that sizable history. And even if this tree goes up in smoke later, it’s ultimately a fake out.

Oh, “The Last Jedi” plays like it wants to rip up “Star Wars” up and start again, but it never does, no matter how many new characters it introduces, because these characters are simply outgrowths of previous characters, new conscripts in Good v Evil and for all the delightful newness crammed in, there are nevertheless traditions that must be upheld. The movie ends with a semi-recycling of the Hoth attack from “The Empire Strikes Back” where the aerial crafts employed by the Resistance are so old and worn out they fall apart mid-flight. The inadvertent symbolism is hard to miss.

keira knightley feels sick to her stomach

This blog had hoped — I mean, this blog had really hoped — we would not have to turn to our favorite (your least favorite) meme a mere 12 days into the New Year. But, it’s present-day America, people, where 2018 has already qualified as godforsaken, and that’s how the 12 Diet Cokes a day dribble. Deal with it. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Berlin Express (1948)

Jacques Tourneur’s “Berlin Express” takes place post in post-WWII Europe, where even if the war was over, uneasiness nonetheless remained, evoked in an opening that transitions from an idyllic, almost travelogue-ish narration of the sights and sounds of Europe with an ominous note tied to a dead pigeon. “The dove of peace was a pigeon,” grouses the narrator, “a dead pigeon.” That fits the mood, one enhanced by the film’s on-location techniques, so prevalent in the 1940s in all manner of countries, including Germany, though the country’s famed “rubble films” are not ones I have caught up with. As an opening title card makes clear, “Berlin Express” was filmed in Germany, particularly Frankfurt, with cooperation of the occupying authorities. And in an era where information was not passed along so quickly along the information super highway, to see the true after-effects of a brutal, lengthy war on the big screen must have been a potent image, and they still retain their brutal majesty, even in small-screen, a terribly evocative reminder of what happens when war comes home.

Indeed, these early moments of “Berlin Express” suggest something akin to a docudrama, like Rossellini’s “Rome, Open City.” And while Tourneur’s previous film, “Out of the Past”, the greatest noir, was straight drama, it was a movie very much about mood. But if “Berlin Express” seems readymade to roll with the mood its locations engender, the narrative fails to conform, hitched not to one ruing what was or what is nor any kind of fatalistic future. Instead it takes its cue from a German professor (Paul Lukas) seeking to bring about unity to a country divided up into differing zones, not wallowing in what was but dreaming of what could be, of how all this rubble presents the opportunity for rebirth, somewhat dimming the harshness of the after-effects that Tourneur’s camera records.

Still, that dark hearts committed to unrest continue to lurk about the German capital goes without saying, and the plot’s impetus is the professor’s apparent murder aboard a Berlin-bound train, causing it to be halted and the passengers interrogated. Myriad twists abound, none of which have much juice, nor do the set pieces, aside from the final dying moments of a vaudeville clown amidst a crowd that doesn’t notice at first what exactly is happening, which might not necessarily feel apiece of the narrative parlor game but achieves a morbidly comic profundity anyway.

The characters in “Berlin Express” are deliberately of different nationalities, all of whom eventually must set aside their inherent distrust to work together, fueling the promise of a better tomorrow, a new global order, a world without borders, which sounds, to my admittedly modern eyes, pretty appealing. These potentially pertinent themes, alas, never really get tied into the screenplay. The villains, meanwhile, feel surprisingly feckless considering they are supposed to represent the last of the Nazi scourge, and the guns blazing conclusion is a pat case of Saved Just In The Nick Of Time, the script unable to find a more natural, convincing way to get its character out of a jam. Even if the movie wants to leave you with some sort of hope for the future, well, these plot developments never quite seem to mingle with the air evinced by the locations, leaving the whole thing feeling aloof and confused. Maybe that’s how Germany really felt back then.

Shout-Out to the Extra: Moving Target Version

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

Last July I spent a throwback weekend hanging out with my friends Daryl and Rory, and I say throwback because it was the first time in eons when we got together to simply sit down, watch a bad movie and crack wise over a couple cold ones. The DVD Daryl brought along just for the occasion was not of some landmark movie, or semi-landmark movie, or cult classic. No, that it was a DVD as opposed to a blu ray should tell you everything; it was 1995’s “Moving Target”, a title straight from the rejected pile of Steven Seagal movie titles, starring Michael Dudikoff as a bounty hunter who runs afoul of the Russian mob and gains the aid and trust of Detective Don Racine, played by Billy Dee Williams who is immortal but was nevertheless well into the melancholy point of his career where every character he played was affixed with a rank – Detective, Admiral, Captain, Commander, etc.

Per custom, the point wasn’t to watch so much as watch and comment, kind of a “Mystery Science Theater 3000” situation, which is not a program I have ever really ever enjoyed all that much, because riffing is funny when you’re part of it but not so much when you’re outside of it, kind of a Talking About My Fantasy Football League situation. And that is why I will refrain from submitting any of the inside jokes the three of us cultivated that afternoon. Still, from this viewing there emerged something beyond inside baseball, something that could provide enlightenment into the mind of the extra, where the job to act like you are in the world the movie is presenting and not in a movie and on camera is often more difficult than you might presume, and can be futzed up in post-production by an editor who is likely overworked and underpaid and in rush and not in tune to every little detail outside of the foreground.

There is a scene midway through “Moving Target”, or maybe the scene was early on, or perhaps it was quite late, I have no idea, in which Michael Dudikoff’s character is purchasing a hot dog from a street vendor. The camera is street level, appearing to peer through the crowd, almost as if it was captured on the fly, and perhaps it was, but also trying to lend this spotty little thriller some authenticity. Alas, that authenticity goes up in flames when the woman playing the hot dog vendor looks right into the camera.

What’s most funny is that you can sense this coming. All three of us, Daryl, Rory, me, were on the edges of our seats, so to speak, waiting for it to happen because the extra, as you can sort of see, is playing the moment with this small smile, which does not suggest overtaxed street vendor to me so much as person too excited to be in a crappy movie. In that smile you can sense the internal strife in not wanting to look, in knowing she shouldn’t look, but being overcome with the unstoppable desire to look anyway.

It’s hard being an extra. You’re on set all day, often with scads of humdrum downtime while the camera is set and the star is primped, stuck with meager rations from the craft table, and continually forced to act in the moment when you generally know that what shows up onscreen will, more or less, or completely, remove you from that moment. And so for these extras to stay in the moment, take after take after take after take after take after take, is not something that we should take lightly, though we often do, and we often never realize how lightly we take until a comical moment like “Moving Target”.

Pour one out for the extra...no, no, no, no, no. Pour one out for all the extras, all the ones who didn’t look. Respect.

Lucky

“Lucky” opens with a tortoise crawling across the desert, an image director John Carroll Lynch strains to mirror his titular protagonist (Harry Dean Stanton), a 90 year old loner who, wonder of wonders, is still going. But Lucky’s gait, which we see not long after, is less slow and steady than aggressive and brisk, as much as it can be for a man of his age, which is evocative of his all-important daily routine – yoga, cigarettes, coffee, more coffee at the local diner while dueling with the crossword, errands, a Bloody Mary and conversation at his preferred watering hole. That routine will have to be futzed up, of course, and so it is, though the film never really reflects this in its tone or narrative, still coming across pretty neat and orderly, where the screenplay by Drago Sumonja and Logan Sparks lines up a series of encounters so convenient they feel cosmically underwritten. Then again, the script is admirable its refusal to truck in conventional reveals. There are no secrets lurking, no big epiphanies waiting. When Lucky meets a former fellow marine at the diner (Tom Skerritt) who has a war story to tell, the scene is not any kind of narrative trigger, just a pause for reflection.

The movie’s inciting incident, if you can call it that, is a fainting spell that sends Lucky to a jocular doctor (Ed Begley Jr.) who actually confirm his patient’s unhealthy habits might karmically do more good than harm, intrinsically suggesting that his patient has lived a life free from regret. Ultimately the fainting spell has no explanation, another cosmic underwriting, a means to try and make Lucky take stock before he inevitably merges with the infinite. This is underlined by an insurance salesman, played by Ron Livingston with a mustache that comes on a little too sleazily archetypal, trying to convince Lucky to get his end of life affairs in order. Lucky is not interested in this, reasoning that when you’re dead you’re dead.

“Lucky” challenges that viewpoint, a bit too forcefully at times, such as a montage set to Johnny Cash’s “I See Darkness” that feels like a music video suddenly decided to set up shop in the midst of a movie. Befitting most of “Lucky”, it finds this questioning more in Stanton’s countenance, like his laconically authoritative speaking voice, where rather than adding a period to statements of act he just trails off, that deliberate dead air leaving a little space to wonder about the certainty of his knowledge. He often makes these pronouncements amidst his drinking buddies, paradoxical given his stance as a loner, including Paulie (James Darren), introduced by explaining how he met the bar’s owner (Beth Grant), the love of his life. This, it is made clear, is not his first re-telling of the story, which he is lightly ridiculed for, though not too much, because the scene is intended to elicit something more akin to contentment.

That’s where Lucky seems to end up too. Granted, it’s a sensation difficult to capture, particularly when there really are not any rivers to cross, though Lynch seems to try to get a little mystical with it at the end, pairing Lucky with the image of cactuses standing tall and proud in the desert. It is seen better in an earlier moment when he attends the birthday party of the son of the woman running the five and dime. Suddenly, Lucky stands up and joins the mariachi band in song. If heretofore we had no inkling that Lucky could even sing, well, that is what makes it so powerful, evoking the fullness of a life lived, where so many skills can sometimes be made to lay dormant, until the moment so blindingly presents itself, and Lucky, like Harry Dean Stanton, who died a couple weeks before this movie’s release, gets a chance to shine.

Coco

The author Terry McMillan once reasoned that the Land of Oz in the seminal 1939 film about The Wizard somewhere over the rainbow looked a lot better than the farm in Kansas. That no doubt stemmed at least partially from the film’s decision to render Kansas in hardscrabble monochrome and the Land of Oz in glorious Technicolor. “Coco”, on the other hand, Pixar’s latest animated opus, might be prominently set within the Land of the Dead, which looks from afar like an alluring amusement park through the eyes of a child, but it is never any more beautiful than Santa Cecilia, the small Mexican town of its young hero Miguel (voiced by Anthony Gonzalez), where the cempasuchils laid out for the deceased combined with the orange glow of so many candles lit in their memories imbue an eye-popping warmth. What’s more, director Lee Unkrich and his animators decision to style their Land of the Dead on actual Mexican architecture makes it come across like a fabulous extension of the Land of the Living, which only underscores the film’s overriding examination of familial roots, how they tunnel down into forever and kin, for better or worse, are obligated to maintain them.

Those roots connect to the movie’s other principal subject – that is, music, which Miguel loves, yearning to follow in the footsteps of Ernesto de la Cruz (voiced by Benjamin Bratt), the late but beloved Mexican singer/songwriter whose tune “Remember Me” becomes the movie’s most prominent leitmotif, though its precise meaning shape-shifts as the story unspools. Miguel, however, must cover up his six string affection given his great-great-grandmother’s fiercely upheld ban on music after Miguel’s great-great-grandfather walked out on his wife and daughter – Miguel’s grandmother Coco – for a life strumming guitar, causing him to be conspicuously absent from the family’s Day of the Dead Altar. As such, Miguel is tapped to follow in his family’s footsteps as a shoemaker, a plot point that could have had been shown just an itty bitty more love than a kind of comical shrug. Then again, to a kid whose sole passion is being parentally thwarted, the alternate would seem so dire.

It is Miguel’s desire to play music anyway that sets him forth on his journey, one born of his polite pilfering of Ernesto de la Cruz’s guitar, strummed at just the wrong instant to magically send him from the Land of the Living to the Land of the Dead, the latter reached by a flowered bridge, with the border between the two overseen by patrol stations, which are festively presented though there double meaning sits right there in plain view. Miguel winding up in the wrong time and place evokes “Back to the Future”, of course, a sensation augmented by Miguel’s discovery that if he fails to find his way home by sun-up, he will become dead himself, sending him on a frantic quest to escape, one aided by his hairless dog ally and a new friend Héctor (Gael García Bernal) who is desperate to cross the border.

“Coco” never goes truly dark, though it easily could, considering the movie hinges losing loved ones forever. If no one in the land of living is left to remember you, then you vanish from the land of the dead, a fate to which Hector seems bound, as if your soul, your self, is simply…extinguished. It’s confronting the finality of the death, in other words, though Miguel never really wrestles with it even though it’s staring him straight in the face. If that’s a little disappointing, I nevertheless also understand its narrative elimination, as Dia de Muertos, after all, is not a solemn affair but a celebration, one which the movie’s buoyant tone, colorful visuals and attention to detail evoke. Characters in the Land of the Dead are designed to look like the Calacas and Calaveras that ornament so many Day of the Dead festivities, and Pixar’s fabled commitment to detail is everywhere, from the goatee that dots Héctor’s visage to the club D.J. Miguel briefly encounters, merely a background character but one that expressly enriches the entire milieu.

The Day of the Dead as a holiday to honor loved ones’ memories correlates to the movie’s post pertinent twist, one I will not spoil, though it is fairly easy to predict, though that predictability is offset in how it becomes connected not simply to familial revelations but to the shattering of false idols. Indeed, an early shot finds Miguel paying homage to a homemade Ernesto de la Cruz shrine, copying the late star’s guitar chords, which “Coco” renders in a close-up of Miguel’s fingers, each one vibrantly bending as he plays. Here, however, he is merely a mimic, and eventually he will grow into himself, never more than an impromptu performance at the Land of the Dead’s Battle of the Bands, where the animation allows him to bound about the stage in a way live action could never allow, where performing becomes an eruption of the soul.