Countdown to the Oscars: Best Song Reimagined

Today Cinema Romantico reimagines the slowly-becoming-irrelevant Oscar category of Best Song as if it was one combined category and the songs did not have to be “original” or fit some other antiquated piece of Academy criteria and I and I alone was judge and jury in regards to the five nominees. (Note: “Fortunate Son” by CCR in “Logan Lucky” should be on this list but is not only because I already wrote about it for my year-end Random Awards, as well as in my actual review of said film, citing it as the best use of a pop song in a 2017 movie, which it absolutely was. But since this category is fake, I wanted the chance to spotlight another pop song in “Logan Lucky”.)




Lovely Day by The Soul Rebels in Girls Trip. Heralding the principal quartet’s arrival in New Orleans for its eponymous Girls Trip, this cover of Bill Withers’s 1977 tune functions like a B12 shot of pure, soul feeling, the consummate sonic kickoff.



Crash Into Me by Dave Matthews Band in Lady Bird. Back in 1996, at the height of Dave Matthews Band, I remember the Parade Magazine in my family’s Sunday Des Moines Register having a survey about which of four (or maybe five) bands were most likely to someday be in the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame. Two of the bands? Hootie and the Blowfish and Dave Matthews Band. That is to say, Dave Matthews was a prisoner of his time, and so was his big song of that year, “Crash Into Me.” By 2002, “Crash Into Me” and that band had become, in certain circles, a pretty big punchline, which Greta Gerwig plays to the hilt by sort of turning the song into her main character’s inadvertent anthem. When her date to the prom she doesn’t even really like (and who doesn’t even really like her) wants to ditch the big event, it is “Crash Into Me” mystically appearing on the radio that inspires her to ditch her date instead and squire her best friend to prom, wonderfully evoking that “Almost Famous” Lester Bangs line: “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.” Dave Matthews never sounded so true.



Love My Way by The Psychedelic Furs in Call Me by Your Name. If the previous song evoked a line from “Almost Famous” then this song’s specific cinematic usage evoked Rufus Wainwright’s famous line about the truest pop diva: “Self-knowledge is a truly beautiful thing and Kylie (Minogue) knows herself inside out. She is what she is and there is no attempt to make quasi-intellectual statements to substantiate it. She is the gay shorthand for joy.” Indeed, whatever his character may struggle with elsewhere, Armie Hammer dancing to this 1982 new wave single in “Call Me by Your Name” becomes its own gay shorthand for joy.



Runaway by Del Shannon in Song to Song. The highlight of the brief montage summarizing the fly by night relationship of Ryan Gosling and Lykke Li’s characters occurs at Austin’s Long Center, beneath the night sky, allowing the bright colors of its city terrace ring beam to glow that much brighter, like the illuminated sidewalk of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” video, who, frankly, Li sort of resembles in her leather jacket and penny loafers. As a mere image, it is enough to make your spirit levitate, but the accompanying song takes it to the next level. Like a lot of those pop songs of the classic era, Shannon’s “Runaway” has a melodic joy that belies its lyrical edge, were a melancholy man walks alone in the rain trying to figure out where his relationship went wrong. He never figures it out, probably because he is far from introspective, and by utilizing the song here, Terrence Malick turns the scene into a wicked joke, alluding to Gosling’s character’s fate before he even meets it, an idiot who is going to run Lykke Li off and then walk in the rain wondering why she left him when, dude, we can tell you for sure.

Take Me Home Country Roads by John Denver in Logan Lucky. I often suspect Steven Soderbergh makes bets with himself to see if he can pull off particular movies, or moments within movies, like how Brian DePalma made a bet that his AD could not make an airplane landing shot feel fresh in The Bonfire of the Vanities. And so I wonder if Soderbergh bet himself that he could take John Denver’s overworked state anthem of West Virgina and still wring something true. Well, he won the bet. Boy, did he. He won it by perhaps winning another bet with himself in cleverly transforming the Oft-Absent Dad Showing Up Just In Time For His Daughter’s Big Moment into his alibi for the heist even as he simultaneously found something true in the Big Event, as the Daughter ditches her planned performance of Rihanna’s “Umbrella” for her Dad’s favorite tune instead, “Take Me Home Country Roads”. In doing so, she honors where she comes from and who she is, as Soderbergh transforms the Oft-Absent Dad Showing Up Just In Time For His Daughter’s Big Moment into a moment more evocative of coal country than 25,000 newspaper profiles combined.

Countdown to the Oscars: The Ruffalos

Back in the halcyon days of Bill Simmons’s late (best) web site (ever) Grantland, when I checked it as regularly as my Midwestern forefathers would check weather reports, my favorite podcast on the Interwebs was the aforementioned site’s liltingly titled Do You Like Prince Movies? It was hosted by Pulitzer Prize winning film critic Wesley Morris and ace culture scribe Alex Pappademas. And in the run-up to the Academy Awards of three years ago they bestowed their own set of acting prizes affectionately called The Ruffalos.

Mr. Morris and Mr. Pappademas did not define the criteria for their awards so much as just sort of shout out random guidelines in the discussion, but that was part of their charm. Ruffalos went to “People who aren’t getting nominated for anything.” To earn one “you gotta be playing the background a little bit,” or maybe not since some of the recipients were more in the spotlight rather than the background. And whatever, because The Ruffalos were more ineffable, something less stately and more tossed off, make-believe statues concerning a life-force that was more indelible than mere pomp. And because Grantland and, in turn, Do You Like Prince Movies? have been shuttered, Cinema Romantico, this itty bitty blog that most people stop reading at the first sign of a ham-fisted Keira Knightley reference, has taken on the task of keeping them alive. We did last year, and the year before that, and we do again this year.

The Ruffalos go to.....

Jennifer Jason Leigh, Good Time. Because this turn was just so damn good we cited her on our Favorite Performances of the Year List too, which might make her mention here redundant, but Leigh is, to me, the quintessential Ruffalo recipient. Her frayed performance exists sort of on the periphery, and appears in but a couple scenes, but nevertheless feels so entirely, indelibly lived in that you can practically feel her life still running concurrent to the rest of the movie. She gives her exit, head buried in her arms, the air of a student at her desk who doesn’t wanna do her homework, and it was so palpably pitiful that it haunted me as much as anything in a 2017 movie.

Sarah Paulson, The Post. Deliberately written as The Supportive Spouse, Paulson’s character is nevertheless allowed to transcend that archetype in one unforgettable, key mid-movie monologue which she plays not like, say, a butterfly emerging from its cocoon but like, and I apologize for the obscure reference, Mrs. Hernandez of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” suddenly speaking up and saying, hey, dummies, I was right here the whole damn time.

Tracy Letts, Lady Bird & The Post. As the father to the eponymous, self-monikered “Lady Bird”, a movie specifically about a mother and a daughter, Letts stays out of the way, even when he is in scenes, a fairly deft trick, and carries himself with this sort of regal dispassion as a man in the midst of literally watching the world pass him by. In “The Post”, meanwhile, as Meryl Streep’s foremost professional confidant, he exudes a plainspoken honesty, and in the ultimate moments has his character project, maybe in spite of himself, the unspoken knowledge that gender norms are being re-tooled right in front of him.

Stephen McKinley Henderson, Lady Bird. His Father Levitach, a Catholic school drama teacher, is a testament to how Greta Gerwig really writes everyone in her movie, but McKinley Henderson (who was a Ruffalo recipient last year for “Fences”) also fills that writing out, playing the part with the sort of earnest zeal reminiscent of any small town, starry eyed community theater player, and even utilizing a Method exercise to unmask a lurking sadness.

Hilary Swank, Logan Lucky. Much like Daniel Craig, an actor who never gets to have enough fun in movies, was allowed to cut loose in “Logan Lucky”, so too was Swank, another actor always being forced to be cinematically serious. But as an FBI agent on the case of the film’s narratively paramount heist, Swank plays the part with an omnipresent smirk that seems as much about the character reveling in the chase as knowing when she is being fed b.s. And when she occasionally tilts up her chin while listening, she’s like a hound that’s just caught a delightful scent.

Vella Lovell, The Big Sick. Her character is brought in for a couple scenes to expose Kumail Nanjiani’s character’s doofy cowardice at going through arranged dates for potential arranged marriages, forever leaving the woman on the other end of the date hung out to dry. She exits stage left by essentially calling Nanjiani on the carpet with a Really, Dude? righteous honesty born not of indignation but exhaustion.

Lucy Davis, Wonder Woman. If Gal Gadot’s Diana Prince moves through a patriarchal world with guileless determination, like she just assumes she belongs because why wouldn’t she, Lucy Davis as Etta Candy moves through a patriarchal world that she is both mindful of and indifferent to. This is best evinced when Etta is briefly made to squire Diana’s sword through a crowded London street, a moment Davis lends a Get-Out-Of-My-Way comicality, one suggesting she does not necessarily need a bladed weapon to show that she belongs.

What Wrong Best Picture Joke Will Jimmy Kimmel Make at the Oscars?

When last we left off, Jimmy Kimmel was standing onstage at the Dolby Theater apologizing and trying to place the blame on himself for the envelope fiasco that briefly found “La La Land” named as winner of the Best Picture Academy Award before it was revealed that, no, presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway had the wrong envelope and the real Best Picture winner was “Moonlight.” Even now it’s a little hard to wrap your mind around any of this actually happening, but trying to place it into proper context one year later is not what Kimmel, reprising his role this coming Sunday as Oscar host, was hired to do. No, he was hired to make jokes. And the surest thing in show business in 2018 is that Jimmy Kimmel will make a joke about the envelope fiasco at the Academy Awards. The question then becomes: what joke will he make? So, I convened my think tank, and on the strength of myself and my friends Brad, Daryl, and Jay, we have settled on several tantalizing possibilities.

What Wrong Best Picture Joke Will Jimmy Kimmel Make at the Oscars?

1.  A recurring bit in which Jimmy Kimmel continually happens upon Matt Damon backstage attempting to mess with the envelopes. Odds: 4-1

2. The “Oscar host” is introduced at which point Sarah Silverman, or Matt Damon, or Adam Carolla, walks onstage and launches right into a joke like they are supposed to be there. Moments later, a harried “producer” scurries onstage and explains there has been a hosting mix-up and, well, you see where this is going. Odds: 10 - 1

3. When Jimmy Kimmel makes the traditional mid-show announcement for the PricewaterhouseCoopers Accountants responsible for safeguarding the Oscar results to step into the spotlight and bask in brief applause, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway take the stage. Odds: 15-1

4. As the curtain comes up, Steve Harvey is announced as host and, well, you see were this is going. Odds: 25-1

5. A Billy Crystal-ish number to open show in which Jimmy Kimmel inserts himself into each Best Picture nominee where he proceeds to make a bad Wrong Envelope joke. The number concludes with dancing envelopes, a la left shark and right shark. Odds: 45-1

6. A pre-recorded bit relaying the Oral History of the Wrong Envelope featuring interviews with all the major players (and Matt Damon), including Faye Dunaway who spends her entire interview talking about her recent role as Dr. Roberta Waters in “The Case for Christ.” Odds: 80-1

7. The show opens with Warren Beatty getting picked up in an SUV limo. He believes he is being taken to the Oscars, only to find himself taken inside a giant warehouse. Once inside, he exits the vehicle and finds Faye Dunaway, Marisa Tomei, and John Travolta are already there, being kept sequestered. The limo door opens and out steps Jimmy Kimmel, explaining he has imprisoned everyone who might step on all the “wrong announcement/name” jokes he has planned. A TV in the corner turned to the Oscars then shows Steve Harvey take the stage as host. Jimmy Kimmel is tremendously flummoxed! Odds: 900 to 1

8. Jimmy Kimmel walks onstage and launches right into a joke like he is supposed to be there. Moments later, a harried “producer” scurries onstage and explains there has been a hosting mix-up and that, in fact, Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer were named as hosts but that the wrong memo was sent out to the powers-that-be. A baffled Jimmy Kimmel is escorted into the wings. Abbi Jacobson & Ilana Glazer enter from the wings on the opposite side. They literally proceed to host the Oscars. Odds: 1,000,000,000,000 to 1

From the Couch: the 2018 Winter Olympics In Review

My jam for the 2018 Winter PyeongChang Olympics was biathlon. That’s the sport, culled from an old Nordic military exercise, where you ski a good long ways and then stop to take five shots with a small-bore air rifle, skiing a penalty lap for each missed shot. The skiing, it seemed to me, was somehow both essential and superfluous. The races were won and lost at the shooting range, where a few shots gone awry could doom you, leaving you too far behind to catch up, yet those shots were deliberately made so difficult by all the arduous locomotion across snow. And while natural elements, like wind, sometimes played a factor in missed shots, more often it was mental rather than technical, something akin to less artificial soccer penalty kicks. In the 12.5k Mass Start, Slovakia’s Anastasiya Kuzmina calmly hit her first 19 of 20 targets, and then on the last one...froze. She stood there for ten seconds, staring dead ahead, unable to pull the trigger. The biathlon was in her head. Finally, she shot, and missed. She won Gold anyway and good for her, but oh, the terrifying thrill of those ten seconds.

Martin Fourcade, French biathlete extraordinaire, owner of the most immaculate five o’clock shadow in PyeongChang, won perhaps the best race at these Olympics, the 15k Mass Start in a photo finish literally decided by less than the length of this boot. I, however, was just as taken with his first and second races. In the former, he, perhaps the best shooter in biathlete history, as NBC explained, missed several shots, finishing a disappointing eighth. But in the latter, he found his rhythm, and upon reaching the last targets all alone and well ahead of everyone else, he took aim and rattled off five successful shots. He turned and pumped his fist, exorcising demons, maybe, but also finally living up to his own immense biathlon ideal. He skied off to Gold.

Though the Winter Olympics has traditional races where it’s you against others, it is just as consumed by races against the clock and the mountain, as well as judged, subjective competitions. If it sounds abstract, I have always found these events metaphysically true, where an athlete knows what he or she is capable of and seeks to achieve, if not occasionally transcend, his or her ideal. Even this blog’s beloved curling, where two teams square off, is littered with simple shots that, like biathlon target shooting, pits the curler against his or her own mind more than any person or thing. And framing the Games in a Nationalistic or Medal Count context betrays the spirit of this notion, as do whiny op-eds about America having a lousy Olympics. Impeccable American skier Mikaela Shiffrin was unfairly hyped for three Gold Medals a la Jean-Claude Killy in 1968 before she’d won one. As if channeling all that pressure, she threw up before her best race, the Slalom, and finished fourth. When the on-course NBC reporter, as if only prepped on questions in the afterglow of victory, asked how she overcame her nerves, Shiffrin’s response was positively Popovich-ian in its pragmatism: “Not very well.”

Shiffrin’s slalom fate reminded me of the legendary Dutch long track speed skater Ireen Wust, who, in the live stream I saw of her 3,000 race, circled the track while the Australian commentator whose name I never caught spent the entire time braying about Wust’s legend and how her crossing the finish line with the fastest time was a mere formality…until she did not cross the finish line with the fastest time. The announcer never bothered to analyze where she technically went wrong in the race because emotionally he could yet comprehend that it happened at all. It’s hard to square with our athletic gods proven mortal.

Sometimes, however, our mortals summon the strength of the gods. Look no further than Czech snowboarder cum skier Ester Ledecká who earned one of the most shocking Gold medals in Olympic annals. In the Super-G – lesser than a downhill but swifter than a slalom – her chances at medaling seemed so unlikely that NBC commentator Dan Hicks literally told us Austria’s Anna Veith had won Gold even as he simultaneously confessed there were more skiers, including Ledecká, left to compete. This was because even in finally modernizing their Olympics broadcast to show us live events, NBC still often operates from a tape delay ethos, and they needed to ship us off to an American figure skater’s routine rather than let the current race play out. If their decision was admittedly based on sound logic, it nevertheless underlined the folly of trying to impose a narrative that should dictate itself.

Ledecká, of course, would not have had NBC on her mind as she skied to an improbable Gold Medal, beating Veith by one one-hundredth of a second, but she toppled their telecasting hubris nonetheless. For the rest of the Games, NBC inevitably relived this moment in a neat little package befitting a short movie, one that made her victory feel destined, which was completely wrong. Ledecká’s stupefied reaction (see above) at the bottom of the course, as well as the manner in which she shook her head, once, then twice, on the medal stand, proved this was not destiny. No, this was an athlete ineffably finding the wherewithal to eclipse her own ideal.

The United States Women’s Cross-Country Sprint Relay team certainly eclipsed its ideal. No one representing the Stars & Stripes had ever won Gold in the sport, and only one dude, forty years ago, had earned a medal at all. Still, America’s two-woman team of Jessie Diggins and Kikkan Randall found itself in the thick of it with cross-country titans Norway and Sweden. Even if I knew the U.S. won as I watched, the intensity of the race was so palpable — the lead repeatedly switching, no one able to claim the upper hand — that I found myself swept along on this unbelievable wave of emotion anyway, actually asking myself as Diggins made the turn for home, “How did she pull this off?” And while I don’t wish to reduce such a monumental feat of strength to the announcers, well, NBC’s Chad Salmela’s call as Diggins surged across the finish line met the moment in such a way beffiting its ludicrous improbability. Al Michaels exclaiming “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!” was melodramatic but composed; Salmela’s call was completely cut loose of all emotional moorings. He didn’t so much scream as emit this guttural sound that sonically approximated a person involuntarily falling on the floor in the wake of inordinate drama, which might well have spoken for everyone in America who saw that race.

The sound Salmela discharged also, in retrospect, seemed to be embodied in Norwegian ski jumper Robert Johansson’s final leap in the Normal Hill competition a week and a half earlier that elevated him from 10th place to 3rd place, a ski jump as frenzied roar. I’d be lying if I told you I grasped the finger points of the sport. To my untrained eye most of the jumps looked similar, though something about Johansson’s was nevertheless strikingly different. Even now I’d be hard pressed to describe it, but if ski jumpers are so balanced and calm in the air, Johansson’s body almost seem to come unglued right at the end, as if he was sailing past some invisible boundary of his own perceived limits, which was victory unto itself, a Bronze as good as Gold. His formidable handlebar moustache may well have been what made him a star, but even such facial hair was no match for that jump.

In the ballyhooed women’s figure skating showdown between two Russians — beg your pardon, that’s two Olympic Athletes From Russia — Evgenia Medvedeva and Alina Zagitova both lived up to their ideal. If so many of these skating showdowns I’ve seen over the years have turned on flaws, these two were flawless. Still, there could only be one Gold Medalist, and so it was Zagitova, a choice, it seemed, placing athleticism over artistry. I confess I preferred artistry; I preferred Medvedeva. “I did everything,” she said. “I did my best.” I’d desperately like to claim her best was enough, theoretically or otherwise, but her face in the wake of losing by what may as well have amounted to a breath betrayed that it was not. She kept looking up with big searching eyes at the scoreboard like her score might, just might, change. She skated to music from Anna Karenina, which reminds us that if you look for perfection you will never be satisfied, and I suppose in living her ideal, Medvedeva gloriously, terribly, lived that truth too.

But then, I might argue that truth was flouted by an American snowboarder. No, not high voltage stars Chloe Kim and Shaun White, but the magisterially named Maddie Mastro. She had three runs in the halfpipe and began the first two by attempting some audacious move where she caught so much air that in the slow motion replays, as she twisted around, it looked like she was dancing with herself. But, the level of difficulty was so high that she crashed each time. And on the third and final attempt, when she needed to stay upright just to put down a score to stay in the competition, she forewent playing it safe and opted once more for that risky mid-air dance move. That she crashed again was beside the point. She was searching for something beyond a score, beyond a medal, beyond mathematically gaming the system; she was searching for her ideal. Faster. Higher. Stronger. Citius. Altius. Fortius. Godspeed, you valiant Californian, you won the Gold Medal of this sentimental fool’s heart.

That brings me to Aljona Savchenko. She’s a German pairs figure skater, one who stole my heart four years ago in Sochi with her previous partner Robin Szolkowy, so much so that I wrote about her and her commitment to artistic truth in the face of long odds. If she lived her truth, however, she did not live her ideal, crashing out to a Bronze medal. Perhaps her skate in PyeongChang, in the company of her new pairs partner Bruno Massot, was about redemption, yet when they took the ice for the long program standing in fourth place, not out of it but nevertheless up against it, redemption felt and looked like an afterthought.

The Silver Medal winning French Ice Dancing couple Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron became infamous later for dumbly puritanical reasons, but I was most taken with their expressed intent to put artistry before the podium, which made me think of Savchekno & Massot. No doubt the German pair had the podium on its mind, but still…in their long program they seemed to surpass the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, where every jump and throw appeared so effortless, where the music did not seem to accompany them but ineffably flow from them, that you just sort of stopped feeling the moment’s pressure and vanished into its astonishing artistry. And when they concluded, Savchenko literally collapsed on the ice, an indelible image which reminded me of Bob Beamon winning Long Jump Gold in Mexico City in 1968 by so thoroughly obliterating the world record that he fell to his knees and sobbed, as if he’d somehow summoned superhuman strength and couldn’t comprehend it.

Savchenko & Massot won Gold. They earned a world record score. That’s not to be downplayed or dismissed, and yet, to see that routine was to see them transcend their ideal to such an extent that for six minutes they left not only the podium but the rest of this blabbering, boring earthly plain behind. As they skated into a death spiral late in the program, the television camera angle switched so that we saw it from straight above. I’d swear that was Zeus’s point of view, looking down from his Mount Olympus throne, wistfully nodding approval.

Friday's Old Fashioned: White Rock (1977)

“White Rock”, British director Tony Maylam’s official film for the 1976 Innsbruck, Austria Winter Olympics, is like NFL Films as scored by Rick Wakeman instead of Sam Spence crossed with a 1970s winter athletics instructional film as narrated by James Coburn. Indeed, as the film opens Coburn stands before us, and before a bobsled track, intoning about the Winter Olympics being the most exciting championship “in the whole spectrum of sport.” As he concludes this monologue, almost as if he expects the audience not to believe his grandiloquent tone, he dismissively waves his arm toward the camera, as if to say, “Ah, you’re useless.” Then, he turns and walks back toward the bobsled track, like he is lost in the spectrum he has just summarized, momentarily unconcerned we are even there.

Granted, Coburn’s role can sometimes seem to be running more interference even as he invites us in. He is here, nominally, to tell us how everything works, like the ski jump, which his indelible baritone lends the sport the serious drama it deserves. His explanation of the so-called point of no return, when a ski jumper sets sail down the ramp meaning it’s fly or die, will send shivers down your spine. But these little theatrical explainers, recounted with no musical score, can, frankly, verge on the melodramatic, a melodrama often accentuated by the Rick Wakeman score, which is at once era-appropriate and, sometimes, weirdly timeless, with spacey synthesizers, stately choirs, and pan flute that takes us into the mystic.

Elsewhere, however, mere explanations are not enough as Coburn invites himself along for the ride, whether it is sitting on the bench amidst a gaggle of hockey players or going for a ride in a bobsled – which he drives himself, finishing by removing his goggles and wistfully remarking “That was a good run.” Later, he is seen in medium shot applying wax to skis, and as he begins to explain how each skier has his/her own secret waxy potion, the camera drifts closer, inviting us in on the secret. He does not, it should be noted, get anywhere near the ice during pairs figure skating. If that sounds expected, I found it a little disappointing. Could he not have enlisted Susannah York to help demonstrate a twist lift?

At the same time, “White Rock” remains a bit spare on the actual Olympic particulars. It does not simply refuse to exist as a comprehensive recounting, completely sidelining, say, American figure skating heroine Dorothy Hamill, but offering only bare bones digressions on Austrian skier Franz Klammer winning the Men’s Downhill. Individual personalities are not uncovered or examined, eliciting the sensation that the athletes are merely extensions of their sports, and in that context, with such tight focus, Maylam is able to extract profundity on a more universal basis. Like Klammer’s Austrian skiing rival, for instance, who we see crash out in the Men’s Downhill. As he does, the camera observes this in slow motion, prolonging the agony, an agony as emotional as physical, underlined by Coburn plaintively remarking “The next Olympics are in four years.” Uff da.

Maybe that pain is why Maylam forgoes a scene of the closing ceremonies since the closing ceremonies, for Olympics enthusiasts anyway, are always so painful, reminding us how long until the next one. Instead we see Coburn sidle up to the extinguished Olympic cauldron, presumably after the Innsbruck games have concluded, and gazing out over the mountainous terrain, sad but satisfied. It recalls an earlier shot, after a luge run, where the editing momentarily tricks us into suspecting that the luger is, in fact, Coburn. It is not, which we see as he walks in from the right, expressing his admiration and astonishment for the luger. The luger then gets up from his sled and walks right past Coburn and out of the frame as our faithful narrator crosses to the luge track, removes a cigar, lights it, sits down, and casts his eyes back up from whence the luger roared, like a man who can’t bear to let go the thought of what he just saw.

Trailer Battle: Hurricane Heist v Hard Rain

I awoke one morning last week to a text from my friend Rory which merely included a Youtube link fashioned with a “You’re welcome.” Indeed, I was thankful, because what awaited me on the other end of that link was a trailer for a forthcoming film called – [assumes Dave Barry voice] I’m not making this up – “The Hurricane Heist.” It’s a bank heist, see, in a……hurricane! Ai-yee! And upon seeing the trailer for “The Hurricane Heist”, my mind immediately flashed back 20 years to “Hard Rain”, a thriller about a bank heist in a flood that is only memorable for the worst Bruce Springsteen reference in cinematic history (I’m not giving it away for free – you will have to slog through that scrap heap the same as I did lo so many years ago) and the classic 2003 Onion piece in which a woman comes to wholly regret a one night stand when she wakes up to discover her temporary paramour’s DVD collection is littered with “banal choices” like “Bedazzled”, “Narrow Margin”, and, yes, “Hard Rain.” “Don’t you buy a movie because you’re somehow passionate about it and want to watch it again and again?” she wonders. “Does this guy feel that way about ‘Hard Rain?’” That’s good stuff.

As such, almost immediately upon concluding “The Hurricane Heist” trailer, I checked “The Hurricane Heist’s” release date to make a mental note (must see!) and then watched the trailer for “Hard Rain”, which made me nostalgic because that trailer adorned my first theatrical showing of “Titanic.” (So did Howie Long’s “Firestorm.” 1998, man.) And I have to say, the “Hard Rain” trailer is pretty damn good in that It-Looks-So-Bad-It-Could-Be-Good way. It wasn’t, of course, as established, but still, we are not talking about the finished product. We are talking about a two minute burst, and if trailers have become, in their own viral, attention span-less way, a kind of art, I could not help but compare “Hard Rain’s” trailer to “The Hurricane Heist’s.” You know what that means…trailer battle!!!

Trailer Battle: Hurricane Heist v Hard Rain

The trailer for “The Hurricane Heist”, alas, starts out behind the eight ball. That is because the guiding voice of the “Hard Rain” trailer is the immortal Don LaFontaine, meaning that when he says “you have the perfect recipe for the perfect crime”, you don’t snicker, you nod along and think, “You know, he’s right.” The trailer for “The Hurricane Heist”, on the other hand, in these tragic LaFontaine-less times (he died in 2008) forgoes any kind of overwrought narration to just slap the words “the perfect heist” on the screen.

Of course, it’s a bit unfair to ding “The Hurricane Heist” when LaFontaine was simply not available. But, even if we remove LaFontaine from the equation, the manner in which “The Hurricane Heist” trailer parcels out information is suspect. Let me explain.

“The Hurricane Heist” trailer opens with this rather standard-issue CGI shot of a hurricane followed by a character declaring, as if we didn’t already know, “Hurricane’s coming.” That’s the best you got?

Compare this to the “Hard Rain” trailer, which, before LaFontaine even speaks, communicates to us its movie’s environment with a Bible pull. Respect.

And then accentuates that with a shot that pushes in on Randy Quaid in pouring rain on a CB asking “Are we all gonna die?” in this sort of dialed down deranged voice that almost knows it’s in the movie’s trailer.

Quaid points to another way in which “The Hurricane Heist” is positioned behind the eight ball from the beginning. That is, “Hard Rain” star power, or a version of it, with Quaid, with Christian Slater, with Minnie Driver (who would have been on her way to a Best Supporting Actress nomination for “Good Will Hunting” round about this time), and with, yes, Morgan Freeman. “The Hurricane Heist”, on the other hand, has Maggie Grace, which, no offense to Maggie Grace but she can’t hang with Freeman-y gravitas. But then, the trailer does Grace little favors with lines like “This is not good.” That’s not the sort of line that pops, not like Freeman’s resplendent “He’s a slippery one”, which the impeccably-voiced actor turns into cornball poetry. Almost as good is Quaid’s indulging in a Bush I joke: “Read my lips: three million dollars.” That joke, of course, would have been ten years old in 1998, marking it as dated then though it feels that much more dated now, and that passé quality brings us to the trailers’ most stark difference — that is, editing.

“The Hurricane Heist” trailer cuts with that trendy alacrity while the “Hard Rain” trailer not only draws its cuts out a beat or two longer, but goes so far as to just sort of plunk a whole scene, if condensed, down right at the beginning. And so rather than merely mixing a ton of blinding images Bay-style together to fry our eyes, the “Hard Rain” trailer finds surprising cheesy, old-fashioned joy in its edits, like Christian Slater’s saying he buried the money in a cemetery because he doesn’t like to carry around that much cash followed by a cut to a smiling Minnie Driver, that age-old device of cuing us to chuckle at a joke that is not funny.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: man, “Hard Rain” is running away with this thing. Not so fast! I haven’t mentioned “The Hurricane Heist” trailer’s secret weapon — namely, The Scorpions’ “Rock You Like A Hurricane.” Indeed, even if the “Hard Rain” trailer indulges in some jokes, like the one above, it takes itself very seriously, whereas “The Hurricane Heist” wants you to know this is not merely escapism; this is platinum level escapism. If you spend the first chunk of that trailer wondering if it wants you to laugh, “Rock You Like A Hurricane” tells you that it does, communicating its unabashed non-commitment to actual quality.

Then again, the “Hard Rain” trailer has its own secret weapon.

This isn’t a show at the State Fair grandstand, son, this is a movie. And Betty White marching out on her stoop and calling Quaid’s character on the carpet might as well be “Hard Rain” dunking on “The Hurricane Heist.” In fact, if I hadn’t already seen “Hard Rain” and known it was supremely awful and awfully boring, I’d probably go watch it.

Small Town Crime

Typically “private investigator” in noir is shorthand for bitter drunk down to his last chance. That’s true of Mike Kendall (John Hawkes), burgeoning private investigator at the center of “Small Town Crime”, save for the bitter part. He is a drunk for sure, cleaning his car dashboard of empty beer cans most mornings, and down to his last chance absolutely, which has come about because of his drunkenness, but he does not, frankly, seem all that bitter. Consider the movie’s opening, which catches sight of Mike as his garage door opens, pounding his morning beer, before the shot flips and we see his car parked in his lawn, having left a shattered white fence post (I had a hard time Mike kept maintained in the first place) in its wake. That might’ve been enough. Except, then he sits down and bench presses weights, pausing to slurp more beer, then pausing to puke, then bench pressing again, a guy devoted to physical health even as he wrecks it. If you are a drunk with the wherewithal to stick to your morning weight lifting routine you can’t be all that bitter.

This is how Hawkes plays the part too, forgoing, say, Paul Newman’s drearily droll countenance in “Harper” or Michael Shannon’s exhausted whateverism in “The Missing Person.” Hawkes has Mike bop down to the unemployment office each week to collect his check, which he does by cheerily employing his alcoholism as a safeguard against ever landing a job. Oh, he makes stabs at getting on the wagon, like the standard issue shot of ignoring the beer cans in the fridge for the milk carton instead, but there is something in the way that Hawkes desperately glugs that white liquid that makes you think, like Ron Burgundy, milk was a bad choice. Why the sound design makes beer guzzling down his gullet resonate with less dread than boys will be boys whimsy. His oddly ebullient air is finally compromised when he comes upon a young woman, bruised and bloodied, lying on the side of the road, and then becomes determined to solve her murder, hiring himself out as a P.I. to the dead girl’s father (Robert Forster). Yet even here Hawkes rarely strikes a sour tone, playing it more with a frenzied itch to crack the case.

That’s an odd tone to strike, particularly when every death on screen is presented so macabrely, and brothers Eshom and Ian Nelms, who wrote and directed, cannot always manage it. There might have been something Coen-ish here, except their atmosphere of desert and darkened bars is never heightened, betraying a more formal tone. And they write none of their supporting characters with any sense of panache, save for Dale Dickey’s bartender who gets one hellacious speech and then is shunted inside. Everyone else is treated with a surprising sort of earnestness, at least in relation to Hawkes’s drunken bundle of joy, like Octavia Spencer playing his sister, whose character never really goes beyond steadfast yet exasperated, or Anthony Anderson playing Spencer’s husband, a good-natured character who seems readymade to exist as Watson to Hawkes’s Sherlock but mostly just turns up to get placed in peril.

Maybe that constitutes a spoiler, but probably not. “Small Town Crime” is nothing if not predictably plotted, and, more troublingly, rarely finds ways to illuminatingly color within its obvious lines. It seems to want Mike’s damn the torpedoes intent to inadvertently put all those he cares about in danger, a callback, to what went wrong in his previous life as a policeman, seen in solemn flashback. It’s Jake Gittes going back to Chinatown, in other words, though this one ends in a western-styled shootout, less notable for its serviceably portrayed gunplay than a brief moment when the girl’s father is called on the carpet for how his treatment might have spurred her toward her terrible demise. It’s the only time the movie sort of stops to even consider the girl herself. That, I dare say, might be deliberate, who she is and what she means being trampled by Mike’s own determination to re-make his place in the world, though the movie never makes clear whether or not that’s true. On the other hand, Mike’s inevitable lesson learned isn’t so inevitable, evoked in an ending that doesn’t seem to completely let him off the hook. The closing credits go for an obvious joke with other characters, but I kept wondering if Mike had made his way back to a bar.

The Humans (a theatre review)

The stage for Joe Mantello’s Broadway touring production of Stephen Karam’s “The Humans”, which I caught at Chicago’s Cadillac Theater Palace where it recently wound up its run, is virtually two stages. It is a shabby NYC duplex in the shadow of where the Twin Towers collapsed, and in a flood zone where Hurricane Sandy recently wreaked havoc, a fact that does not pass unmentioned several times for prickly comic effect. And because the six characters go up and down the spiral staircase from one level to another and back again, it kept reminding me of the British series “Upstairs Downstairs.” Not in any kind of exact way, mind you, but how that British television series sought to examine both the economically prosperous and economically squeezed. In “The Humans”, however, that space between the two has evaporated. Downstairs is a windowless basement pressed up against a noisy laundry room while Upstairs has bars over the window and a noisy upstairs neighbor making an unholy racket. You keep expecting something to crash right through the ceiling. Eventually, essentially, something does.

Karam’s dramatic device is age-old yet no less effective – that is, a family Thanksgiving dinner. It does not so much allow for grievances to be aired or even old wounds to be re-opened as ever-present anxieties of the re-convening Blake family to be stoked. They do give thanks, in a ritual involving the smashing of a peppermint pig, though their thanks tend toward the banal, all except for the matriarch, of sorts, Momo (Lauren Klein), though she is terribly ill and out of it, mostly sequestered to a wheelchair, in her last days. Her blessing, however, feels like sunny optimism of a bygone era, about to pass on with her, regarded by her heirs with as much amusement as belief.

Brigid (Daisy Eagan), hosting dinner for her family along with her boyfriend Richard (Luis Vega), is an aspiring composer riddled by student debt and tending bar, while big sister Aimee (Therese Plaehn) is a lawyer who has been denied partner for taking too much time off in the wake of a health complication, lives suggesting promises that have gone bust. Their parents, meanwhile, Erik (Richard Thomas) and Dierdre (Pamela Reed), financially and occupationally embody the vanishing middle class. If the adage of becoming your parents used to elicit dread for emotional reasons, “The Humans” evokes how modern times have re-fashioned that into a more practical dread, where the term comfortable retirement has become an oxymoron, end-of-life living reduced to nothing more than suffering through omnipresent financial stress. “Don’t you think it should cost less to be alive?” Erik rhetorically asks with a pang that momentarily made me think he was at a Paul Ryan townhall.

As Dierdre, Pamela Reed seems to carry the full weight of this burden in her very being, and when her character mentions going back on Weight Watchers, Reed gives it the ring of in advance futility, an inefficacy that might as well connote retirement planning. And Richard Thomas stands at the middle of “The Humans” even if Erik stands just off to the side, sitting at the end of the dinner table with the air of a man who isn’t sure what’s left for him. He occasionally positions himself at that barred upstairs window as if watching guard, trying to play protector, brought home in his constant admonishments of ensuring safety in an un-safe neighborhood. And again and again he implores the importance of family, that when all else fails that is all you have left, except, as we shall see, emblematic of Karam’s screw-turning dialogue, even these battered of bromides are not fit to be buried but to diabolically come back around and bury him. No eternal truth is safe.

If the play’s conversation is nearly constant, the clever stage set-up also  carves out myriad moments of silence, with Richard spending the play’s opening apart from everyone else on the bottom floor, emblemizing his outsider status, while later in the play characters continually flee upstairs, to use the bathroom, to check the score of the game, as if seeking respite from wearying familial proximity. That we are able to simultaneously hear and see what they are deliberately fleeing makes their respites doubly moving, particularly because conversation often focuses on those out of the room, deftly implying what and why they are escaping, and how it eternally lingers in the air.

That silence, however, grows more sinister as the play winds to an unexpected, overwhelming conclusion, one in which the recurring joke of burned out light bulbs ingeniously lays the groundwork for the sensation of the whole world getting smaller, closing in, until it is right on top of them, which is what that repetitive upstairs noise finally comes to symbolize as it stops being funny and seems to almost emblemize some sort of fissure in the Earth opening up to claim Erik. It’s cinematic, almost, risen to a David Lynchian level, in ways that I don’t wish to spoil but also perhaps could not satisfactorily explain to you if I tried. Maybe it’s enough to say I caught myself holding my breath. And as the play ended, I could not help but mentally equate Erik with that most desperate, twitchy of all Springsteen protagonists, the one in a stolen car, riding by night, traveling in fear.

“In this darkness,” he concludes, “I will disappear.”

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Cutting Edge (1992)

Although “The Cutting Edge” is very much of its time – that is, the early 90s – in terms of its clothing, strict devotion to grimy lighting and anomalous slow motion to make the whole thing come across like a feature length music video, it is also narratively timeless. Its screenwriter was Tony Gilroy, who has gone on to bigger and better things, and for “The Cutting Edge” he culls from two dependable genres, the underdog sports story and the rom com, and melds them, like if William Powell and Carole Lombard had made a movie about bickering figure skaters trying to qualify for Garmisch-Partenkirchen which, oh my God, would that have been something. Instead we get Moira Kelly as Kate Moseley, so off-puttingly uppity that she can’t keep a figure skating pairs partner, forcing her semi-domineering father (Terry O’Quinn, finding more layers than I remembered) to pair her with a down on his luck ex-hockey player, Doug Dorsey (D.B. Sweeney). They bicker and cajole their way to the Olympics in Albertville, with director Paul M. Glaser rarely easing off the gas and Gilroy wielding his beloved story reversal to the hilt.

Gilroy is so dedicated to the reversal, in fact, that the movie opens in the midst of one, with American Olympic hockey player Doug Dorsey waking up late in the bed of some foreign competitor, late for his hockey game. It is suggestive of the Olympic Village we always hear about, but no doubt actually showing the Village wasn’t in the budget so we don’t see it, and anyway, we don’t have time to breathe anything in because “The Cutting Edge” barely lets us breathe at all. This Action Already In Progress beginning is emblematic of the movie’s overriding mania, narratively and aesthetically, with close-ups the favored camera angle, for conversations and ice skating, and pop music all over the soundtrack, reaching back to the 80s but also moving forward to the 90s. Watching this movie, frankly, made me feel like the guy in “Back to the Future” listening to Marty McFly’s band audition. “You’re just too darn loud.” This movie is so loud. I can’t help but think this was part of the plan, amplfication as a means to spruce up figure skating. Long before Margot Robbie’s Tonya Harding was hollering at judges in “I, Tonya”, Doug Dorsey was convincing Kate Moseley (Moira Kelly) to ditch the woodwinds and get funky.

Of course, Doug will have to meet Kate in the middle, or close to it, and Kate will have to meet Doug in the middle, or close to it, which becomes caught up in her impending marriage to some paint by numbers dolt that crumbles when she and Doug fall in love. Sweeney, however, works better when they are at odds then he does feeling lovelorn, and he never quite makes his turn toward wanting to figure skate feel more than compulsory. Kelly, on the other hand, who gives as good as she gets too in their quarrelsome scenes, actually gives her Falling In Love bits a more truthful ring by not playing them lovelorn at all and going instead for something closer to shock, with wide eyes and curt replies, like she cannot quite believe she has Fallen In Love. That wide-eyed air also aids Kelly as her character is made to realize she has been entirely molded by her father in the name of this Olympics quest. In that air you can sort of see her snapping back into reality, and suddenly coming to terms with a life that is not her own.

This figure skating movie’s great failing in the end, however, is, uh, its figure skating. It perhaps goes without saying that neither Kelly nor Sweeney were figure skaters of any repute, learning how to do it just for the movie, and it shows. The skating scenes, of which there are necessarily many, alternate between quick cut close-ups of skates slashing across ice and the determined faces of its characters before then cutting to wide shots of the two doused in shadows to obscure the skating doubles. There was no real way around this, of course, and in her re-assessment of the movie for Vulture in 2012, Amanda Dobbins offers the standard rebuttal of just going and watching the effulgent, immortal Gordeeva & Grinkov on Youtube if you want real figure skating.

But that is a critical cop out. If you want to make a movie about figure skating, sorry, but find a way to better blend the actual skating with the illusory or you’re going to get dinged. That’s the contract you enter into as a moviemaker. And a scene at the Olympics gives away “The Cutting Edge’s” game when we see a nameless pairs skating couple in long shot and you remember the sport is best seen like this, in wide frames and continuous takes, like Rogers and Astaire when they danced, and it was Astaire that the great Norwegian figure skater Sonja Henie referenced when she came to Hollywood. Off the ice, “The Cutting Edge” sort of gets by, but on the ice, nothing can compare to Henie’s concluding ice capades in “Sun Valley Serenade” (1941). There are some things even the movies can’t fake.

Shout-Out to the Extra: Under the Tuscan Sun Version

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR: “Extra?! Extra in back?! When I said act cool, I did not mean act too cool for school! Can you take it down a notch, please?”

EXTRA: “..........”  

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR: “Oh, ok. Never mind. Picture’s up!” 

Some Drivel On...Under the Tuscan Sun

*My beautiful girlfriend is a Diane Lane devotee, particular when it comes to that famous cinematic genre, Diane Lane Gets Her Groove Back, as well as that genre’s prominent subgenre, Diane Lane Going to Pretty Places. And as I often do in cases where I watch movies with no intent of actually writing anything about them, when I watched “Under the Tuscan Sun” with my beautiful girlfriend recently for mere enjoyment, I still felt compelled to offload a little drivel about it, with a bonus “Under the Tuscan Sun” track coming tomorrow. 

“Under the Tuscan Sun” opens with the perfect life of writer Frances Mayes (Diane Lane) being thrown out of whack when she discovers her husband is having an affair. So Frances’s pregnant pal Patti (Sandra Oh) offers her Tuscany vacation package which Frances rejects before she reconsiders in the face of gloomy life moments and goes. In Italy she seems ready to simply unwind until she goes all in on by purchasing a rundown ramshackle villa on a whim. That is how “Under the Tuscan Sun” goes. Say anything you want about it but do not say that writer/director Audrey Wells, who adapted the film from the bestselling book, is not committed to the story reversal, transitioning from Sad Diane Lane – usually accentuated with drab sweaters and a messy ponytail – to Happy Diane Lane – usually accentuated with elegant dresses and her hair up and in curls – and vice-versa so frequently that you are surprised Diane Lane doesn’t wind up with whiplash. But then, this commitment to reversals scene to scene seems to cause Wells to miss the prominent through-line of the villa itself.

When Frances purchases the house and hires a motley crew that mostly cannot speak English to rehab it, this comes on readymade as the preeminent plot point. That Frances’s former life was perfect is not so much illustrated as simply assumed, and that it is then instantly thrown out of whack, while a necessary narrative device, sure, also suggests that a Perfect Life is only tenable with some Hard Work. And this house renovation would seem to suggest said Hard Work. Yet after initially devoting time to it, like when a fairly massive mishap leaves a gaping hole in a wall, the refurbishment mostly falls by the wayside, just sort of commented upon and glimpsed in passing before, suddenly, without quite understanding how they got there, the house is postcard worthy. I’m sure that somewhere lurks a more cinéma vérité version of “Under the Tuscan Sun”, perhaps with Trieste Kelly Dunn as Frances Mayes, where the focus is almost strictly on house rehab and the director visually connects home restoration with the restoration of the soul. That might be a great movie! It is not this movie, which glosses over considerable real world details to embrace fantasy.

Indeed, when Frances meets an extravagantly romantic Italian and he says something extravagantly romantic things to her she incredulously declares “It’s just that’s exactly what American women think Italian men say.” That perhaps speaks to the American proclivity for placing absurd romantic projections on anything, which is also worthy of exploration, sure, though Wells prefers to merely raise that objection and then overrule the objection itself. No, if “Under the Tuscan Sun” is about Frances sort of finding herself in the midst of a fantasy come true then it also becomes about Diane Lane trying to will this fantasy to life.

You wish she got more movie star moments, like the one her English friend gets when she’s dancing in the fountain like it’s “La Dolce Vita”, even if you wish that moment would be tailored strictly for Diane Lane, wholly original unto herself. Then again, maybe Lane doesn’t need nor want a movie star moment. She does well in comical moments, usually opposite Sandra Oh, a wonderful scene partner for her whose “What’s Happening?” face is firmly on point, but she does even better selling typical rom com bunk, like when her character’s relationship with the aforementioned extravagantly romantic Italian lightly combusts, a moment she plays like someone who can’t quite come to grips with this happening because she’s not quite sure she deserves love in the first place. She does deserve of it, of course, just as everyone does, and the way she brightens in the company of an untraditional family of house laborers and new friends and old friends makes you realize that she has realized this truth.

That makes it somewhat disappointing that the script adds unnecessary punctuation in the form of some nondescript new guy that turns right up at the end for Frances to fall in love with, underlining the myth that true happiness only arrives in the arms of another. But, whatever. This was just icing on the cake, not the point, because by the time it happened, Diane Lane had already convinced me that Frances Mayes was going to be ok.

That One Scene in Sicario

“There she is. The beast. Juárez.” That’s what DEA Steve Forsing (Jeffrey Caravan) says in “Sicario” (2015) as his black SUV caravan, armed to the hilt, snakes its way across the Mexican border to grab hold of an important so & so and then drag him back to El Paso. Forsing doesn’t really need to say it, of course, except for expository purposes, but then, he is also trying to scare the wits out of newbie Kate Macy (Emily Blunt) sitting in the SUV backseat. He does. He scares the wits out of us too. Of course, by the time we get to this point, we really have no wits left to scare.

If there is a better single cinematic sequence in the twenty-tens than this one, I have yet to see it. I guess you could call it an action sequence, though the gunplay is mostly just limited to the end, and is rapid-fire fast, less about thrills than the surgical precision of those doing the shooting and the damned-if-we-do-damned-if-we-don’t fatalism of those who get shot. But really, it’s a sequence in which mood is paramount, and that mood is dread. You feel this dread for a lot of reasons. You feel it in the way director Denis Villeneuve tilts the camera from the submachine gun being cradled by Benicio del Toro’s engimatic Alejandro to the eyes of Kate. You feel it because of Kate’s eyes, which are the bellwether throughout this scene (and the movie), and so you feel it from the way Villeneuve and his editor Joe Walker keep returning to her eyes at crucial moments. And you also feel it because of the music of Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson.

His music for the scene first appears in the scene’s couple quick triggers. First, after Kate has painfully, reluctantly agreed to go along on this heavily armed jaunt into Juárez, her character is left standing alone, at which point Jóhannsson’s first indelible, per the more expert language of Thomas Goss, “downward-glissandoing low strings from C to A”, evoking the sensation of your stomach dropping, like you really are being pulled down, down into the belly of the beast.

Jóhannsson repeats this downward movement as Alejandro removes and folds up his suit jacket, like a boxer disrobing to go meet his opponent in center ring, making it clear trouble is on the horizon.

Jóhannsson keeps that downward movement going over a series of aerial shot drifting over the Rio Grande and into Mexico. Lord, we’re on our way now, on a roller-coaster called The Beast in those terrifying instants when it’s making its slow climb up the first hill before you plummet.

And as those aerial shots continue, Jóhannsson both intensifies those downward movements while adding a kind of crunching percussion, growing louder and louder until it becomes so cacophonous that it seems to become indistinguishable from the whirring blades of a black helicopter overlooking the scene and vice-versa. And it’s the kind of moment you re-visit after seeing it for the first time and realize that not only was the dread raised to a level where you can hardly stand it so much that you feel like just giving up and crashing through a window like a glued-up Steve McCroskey, but that the dread was raised to such a level without, really, anything dramatic even happening. That? That’s the magic of the movies.

Jóhann Jóhannsson died on Friday. He was 48.

The Florida Project

There comes a point for every child when the meanness of the world is unmasked. This is not graduating from adolescence to adulthood. No, it’s an almost ineffable sensation when your warm, protective cocoon just suddenly melts and your innocence gives way to sentience. Six year old Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) stands on this precipice of this unmasking in “The Florida Project.” And writer/director Sean Baker undergirds this sensation with his setting in the shabby shadow of Walt Disney World®, the Magic Castle Inn and Suites, painted a purple stucco that one moment appears tacky and the next moment takes your breath away, not unlike the Florida sky itself which sometimes stretches into a hopeful infinity and other times turns dark and dumps rain. One moment finds Moonee and her mom dancing in the rain just as the clouds break and sunshine peeks through, emblemizing how “The Florida Project” exists in dichotomy, performing an intricate dance between realism and fantasy.

“The Florida Project” opens with a shot of Moonee and her pal Scooty (Christopher Rivera) sitting against a Magic Castle wall. The camera is not looking down but straight at them, meeting them at their level, a crucial delineation, and it remains there for much of the movie, often following along just behind them as they traipse through their world of central Florida interconnected parking lots. The kid actors never feel coached, mostly allowed to exist on their own terms, rambunctious bordering on obnoxious. When Bobby (Willem Dafoe), the Magic Castle manager tells them to stay off a picnic table, the camera makes sure to catch sight of the kids over his shoulder, still on the picnic table. They do as they please.

Moonee and her small circle of little rascals are presented less with inner lives than attitudes and behaviors impressed upon them by their immediate surroundings. Indeed, if Scooty is initially just as hell-raising as Moonee, he is eventually moved out of the picture when he crosses a line and his mother (Mela Murder) decides to remove him full-stop from Moonee’s orbit. Moonee, on the other hand, is shaped entirely by her own mom, Halley (Bria Vinaite), who is unemployed, affording the weekly rent by shilling wholesale perfume to idiot tourists, and, in myriad scenes swerving from full-throated love to frightening neglect, treats her little girl more like a little sister.

An early scene finds Halley arguing with an unemployment officer, a shot that Baker sets with mom in the foreground and daughter in the background, where you can essentially see Halley’s bad language and resistance to authority sort of intrinsically washing over Moonee, even as Moonee, playing with her dolls, tries to blot it out. You see that even more acutely later, when Halley has turned to more nefarious means to make rent, as Moonee plays in the bath. When she is interrupted, she closes the bathtub curtain without even looking up, almost as if she is throwing the mask back on when the world tries to pull it back, refusing to have her fantasy encroached upon, one of the many moments when the movie’s fantastical overtones suggest something more ominous.

The movie might have tilted too far into the fantastical had it shut itself off completely to its environment’s realities, but Baker balances the illusory with Bobby, an omnipresent walkie talkie jutting out of the back pocket of his paint-splattered jeans and cheap chord sunglasses dangling around his deck, a triumph of costume design merging with a finely calibrated performance by Dafoe. The character has virtually no explicated backstory, but Dafoe fills him out anyway, never more than a little moment he shares with the motel’s owner (Karren Karagulian) who gives instructions about writing and posting a note regarding rugs and towels slung over railings. As he does, Dafoe has Bobby sort of quicken his pace to keep up, and clarify where he wants the note in an eager to please kind of voice. He, unlike Halley, might have a steady job, but in that flash, you see how he has to hustle to keep it.

Though one spectacular shot finds the camera looking up at him positioned beneath a seemingly never-ending sky in the aftermath of turning the tenets’ power back on, framing him like the Magic Castle’s king, basking in half-sincere, half-mock applause, his presence also affords a peek behind the curtain, at bed bugs and rundown washers and dryers. “I’ll fix those,” he says at one point, before affixing it with a half-hearted, “at the end of the week.” The cursory shot where he smokes a cigarette at night exudes meaning because it feels like a restorative stolen moment. And yet, Dafoe modulates. He is tired but he isn’t worn out, and not an antagonist to the kids, like an indie Mr. Wilson, but a kind of inadvertent and willing caretaker, letting them horse around in his office and chasing away an obvious lecherous adult when he comes prowling around, a scene that feels less about the threat than the response.

The movie seems to be moving in a tragic direction, one way or another, and you sense that Bobby is in some way going to stand up as a savior. He has a son (Caleb Landry Jones), in fact, whom we see in a couple scenes of miserable manual labor, and when the kid explains he simply can’t do this kind of work anymore, Bobby understands as much as he doesn’t want to, seeming to suggest that Bobby also knows Moonee must move on from Halley. And he becomes not so much the facilitator as the peacemaker of this move, at least briefly, until the film’s dizzy, disturbing denouement. It will not be spoiled, but it’s the moment the movie stops counterbalancing its fairytale and yields fully to make-believe, looking through a child’s eyes and seeing nothing but frenzy and terror.

My Favorite Performance of 2017 (delayed)

Any movie that makes your breath come up short always requires a critical unpacking, or at least a layman's after the fact working through, to truly grasp how and why it elicits that sensation. Even so, I simultaneously remain a devout believer in the ambiguous non-theory of You Know When You Know — that is, when you see your favorite movie of the year you just, like, know, and when you see your favorite movie performance of the year you just, like, know. And while I knew my favorite movie of the year, even if I might have tried to talk myself out of it a little when I composed my inessential year-end Top 10, the one detail I knew about my favorite movie performance of the year was that I did not know at all.

Oh, I love all the performances on my year-end list, absolutely, and when someone would ask me to name my favorite performance of 2017 I would generally reply Cynthia Nixon in “A Quiet Passion.” And she was phenomenal. But. I knew that wasn’t it. And, as is usually the way of such things, the only reason I didn’t know was simply because I hadn’t seen it yet.

Though I will get into it more deeply in my actual review being posted tomorrow, I still wanted to make an official proclamation because this is my blog and, hey, what is a blog if not an avenue for making official pronouncements that no one is paying attention to? So. Willem Dafoe in “The Florida Project” was my favorite movie performance of 2017. For a lot of reasons, surely, like how he chooses to have his character, manager of a shabby central Florida motel, deal with some irksome cranes in the manner of a teacher at recess, but another one I could not fit into my review that I will therefore offer here in the form of an in-advance outtake is this — the way he has his character hunt-and-peck at the computer keyboard. His turn is so evocatively lived-in, and those sorts of little bits of actorly behavior are why.

Friday's Old Fashioned: 13 Days in France (1968)

In “Crimson Tide” Capt. Ramsey (Gene Hackman) applauds Lt. Commander Hunter (Denzel Washington) for not speaking as they enjoy the sunrise and some cigars in the moment before their nuclear submarine submerges. “Most eggheads,” Ramsey explains, “want to talk it away.” That line kept jumping into my head while watching “13 Days in France”, Claude Lelouch and François Reichenbach’s documentary chronicling the 1968 Grenoble Winter Olympics. As an American accustomed to NBC’s stable of talking heads trying to impose a narrative, where Tom Hammond would say “we’ll say very little” in the moments before dramatic figure skating routines only to have his announcing cohorts still say a whole lot, I am accustomed to eggheads who want to talk the Olympics away rather than simply kicking back and marveling at the feats of strength. Lelouch and Reichenbach, bless their souls, do not talk it away, rejecting narration.

Their crackling film is very much made in the style of the French New Wave, also rejecting any kind of classical narrative for a sort of fragmented subjective realism instead, which is just right. The Olympics should never be about having meaning imposed on them by some random arbiter but by the spectator or viewer. At one point, Lelouch and Reichenbach’s focuses on an ABC cameraman – looking through his viewfinder so intently that the cigarette he is smoking winds up ashing itself – which seems to suggest a flipped perspective, us imposing the narrative rather than them.

As a title card makes clear, “13 Days in France” is not an official Olympics film. It was not specifically commissioned by anyone other than the filmmakers themselves, and it does not strictly limit itself to the Olympics, often cutting away from the competition for snippets of the celebration that go hand-in-hand with the Games. And while myriad athletes are repeatedly seen at the height of their powers, Lelouch and Reichenbach also indulge in moments of various sportspersons in something like competitive repose – a hockey player yawning, a skier waddling across the snow to retrieve a lost ski – reminding us that even do-or-die sporting events involve downtime.

French athletes might be central, but “13 Days in France” forgoes nationalist notions. Indeed, if the torch relay, as any amateur Olympics historian will tell you, was originally conceived not by the Greeks but by, yes, Hitler and his Third Reich for the 1936 games, Lelouch and Reichenbach do not employ the relay to intone “Vive la France!” Rather their wordless poetry reclaims the torch relay as a kids’ playground, not just in so many youths carrying the flame but in moments of children and parents horsing around in the snow as the torch passes, evoking a celebration of innocence. A longhaired dachshund frolicking in the snow might have been a nod to Germany, I have no idea, but I preferred to imagine it merely as a cosmic accident.

The torch relay follows the New Wave’s lead by opting out of pesky establishing shots to simply establish mood with close-ups of cold faces instead, a technique copied elsewhere, such as in the smiling faces of young girls in the lead-up to figure skating or setting the stage for luge with ominous close-ups of faces in shadowy shots, getting themselves together before hurtling down chutes of ice at ridiculous speeds on tiny sleds. And if TV coverage often limits luge, as well as bobsled, to the same angles, causing it to unfairly feel repetitive, here Lelouch and Reichenbach change the angle in nearly every shot, each one coming a split-second after the other, enlivening the perspective and making every whoosh of the sleds feel overpoweringly fresh. At the ski jump hill, meanwhile, they find new and exciting means to convey the sport’s majesty, never more so than shots from behind the point of takeoff so that we literally see the jumpers disappearing over the hill, reminding you how these men and women are essentially jumping into nothing.

Most of the athletes here remain anonymous, save for the high voltage stars, like Jean-Claude Killy who is not even ushered in with a subtitle or some such, so obvious is his importance, as he introduced amidst others clamoring for his attention. And that is how “13 Days in France” mostly frames the French skiing hero, as an object of affection, with TV cameras reveling in his visage and fans demanding autographs. His races, presented as mere blips in-between, feel almost beside the point, which the snowy fog he skis in during his Gold Medal slalom run seems to illuminate, as if on the course he is a ghost, just another skier, until he crosses the finish line first, at which point he is elevated to immortality.

Then again, the athletic ability of Grenoble’s other star, American figure skater Peggy Fleming, is lingered over, dispensing with the sport’s inscrutable scoring by setting the camera at ground level and watching her skate, spin, and soar. (It also reminded me that once upon a time figure skating was contested outdoors which just feels more aesthetically enchanting.) The film, however, scores her triumph to a song by Frances Lai with melancholy lyrics by Pierre Barouh in which he laments a consumerist American society inevitably commercializing this iconic moment rather than simply savoring it, a contrast that makes her astonishing tear-stained close-ups of wide, blinking eyes in the aftermath of winning as sorrowful as beautiful, improbably transforming All-American Peggy Fleming into a New Wave ingénue.

Barouh also composes an in-movie song for Killy, which begins with a line about the skiing star conquering time. Conquering time on the course, sure, though it also got me to thinking about a time in more universal sense, and how for a fortnight, the Olympics and their stars can kind of conquer time on our behalf, like we are suspended in a captivating athletic dream. And a dream state is what the film’s montage style and rapid-fire editing suggests, until the conclusion, which creeps up because of the film’s anti-narrative structure and then suddenly is just there, rousting us from our dream, leaving us with nothing to hold onto but those abundant little flashes, so many remarkable instants seared into the memory.