Friday's Old Fashioned: Hold Your Man (1933)

“Hold Your Man” was the third film featuring Jean Harlow and Clark Gable, the follow-up to 1932’s “Red Dust”, an inconsistent yet nevertheless entirely memorable spate of pre-Hays Code ardor in which the Platinum Blonde spent most of the film aggressively flirting with her male co-star. That they wound up in each other’s arms at the end might have been a nod toward morals, but the overall movie is most remembered for its un-subtle salaciousness. And, for a little while, “Hold Your Man” suggests it might be going down the same road, what with the true enforcement of the Hays Code still a year or so away. Why director Sam Wood goes so far as to sort of re-create “Red Dust’s” most famous shot of Harlow in a tub by placing Gable in a tub instead, though it’s played more for comedy than for, ah, passion. That’s emblematic, however, of the confusion at the heart of “Hold Your Man.” Wood’s film is by far best in its early moments, when small-time thief Eddie Hall (Gable) infiltrates the apartment of Ruby Adams (Harlow) to evade the cops, which might technically be breaking and entering though it’s difficult to quibble on any real-world level in the face of the stars’ emergent magnetism, which appears onscreen like the click of a butane lighter, once Harlow and Gable get a look at one another, with her playing hard to get and him smiling back like he’s willing to play along for the rest of his life. Sigh. If only.

This apartment opening comes on the heels of a set-up with an air of authenticity. A wallet falls on the ground where Eddie and another fella pick it up and fight over the cash contained inside. The whole thing is a con, evoking “The Sting”, but that desire for cash, any cash, taken in conjunction with the conspicuously grim set design where For Rent signs dot the background buildings, is not turning a blind eye to the Depression, which even gets name-checked later. And both Eddie and Ruby, as we see her later working the angles with a guy that she doesn’t really love in an attempt to keep her financially afloat, are characters that have fallen through the cracks in the wake of economic disaster and are fighting to hang on. It might have been an interesting angle to see the whole way through, particularly because the movie does desire to get serious, just that it gets serious in a different way.

“Hold Your Man’s” real turn toward morals comes when Eddie and his partner in crime Slim (Garry Owen) decide to full a fast one on a married drunk with eyes for Ruby, blackmailing him into a payoff, though at the last minute Eddie decides to pull the plug because he can’t bear the thought of it. That leads to him proposing marriage to Ruby in one of those line readings that Gable strips of any romance for pure gruffness instead, which turns it deliriously, delightfully comical, and which Harlow has Ruby meet with that patented stuttering sentimental bamboozlement. But rather than explore these two lovebirds getting hitched, the script takes a turn for dark melodrama, forcing Ruby to take the fall when their would-be mark winds up dead. She is sent away to a woman’s reformatory, and when she is, the movie mostly moves Eddie out of the picture, leaving her on her own.

It might have been a really good idea, and you can see specks of it, where these many women in Ruby’s company seem to have suffered at the hands of men, men who have subsequently abandoned them and left them to rot, and where these no good men, intentionally or not, pit these women against one another as evinced by a past gal of Eddie’s who naturally winds up in the same reformatory as Ruby. This allows Harlow to employ her distinguished aptitude for self-pity, particularly when one of her pre-Eddie beaus turns up pledging to cut a deal to get her released if only she’ll marry him. Harlow lets her body virtually tremble as she listens to this pitch. It’s a moment when you think Ruby might well be about to take possession of herself. But, of course, this is a movie where the heroine can only achieve said status by conforming to the patriarchy, meaning she still has to marry anyway, just to Eddie, who, in essence, busts into prison while on the lam in order to say “I do” to the woman he loves. And even if my modern eyes might have liked to see this movie forge some excitingly unforeseen ending rather than a climactic marriage, well, sometimes the rote is still, on account of the players involved, resplendent.

Some Drivel On...He Got Game

Maybe the funniest part of Spike Lee’s hardwood opus “He Got Game” (1998) is the college basketball coach cameos. Even now you will recognize many of them, like Roy Williams, like Jim Boeheim, each one recently embroiled in real world scandal, in a fictional ESPN segment involving the film’s principal character, #1 high school basketball recruit Jesus Shuttlesworth (Ray Allen).The coaches, all made to cheekily say the film’s title, tend to have grins on their faces, perhaps not so much from the enjoyment of being in a movie but knowing this will likely be a boon to real-life recruiting. That mixes and matches fiction and reality in a delicious, disturbing way since that’s what “He Got Game” is all about – the sport’s seedy, black market underbelly, where talented high school basketball players are stricken by all manner of leeches looking to get theirs by way of someone else’s.

Lee opens the film with a basketball montage, showing various young players shooting hoops in big cities and small towns, all set to Aaron Copland’s “John Henry.” If the score’s mood seems to elevate these moments to myth, refashioning basketball as the national game, it’s hard not to connect the actual myth of John Henry to exploited African-American basketball players which certainly seems to be Lee’s aim. Everyone wants something from Jesus, from his girlfriend Lala (Rosario Dawson) to his Uncle (Bill Nunn) to coaches like Billy Sunday, played by John Turturro whose slickness and real-life Italian heritage suggest Rick Pitino, and whose emergent recruiting practices suggest Pitino too. The person who wants the most from Jesus, however, is his father, Jake (Denzel Washington), in prison for accidentally killing his wife, Jesus’s mom.

Jake is approached by the Warden (Ned Beatty) with an offer from the Governor for temporary release to try and convince Jesus to attend Big State, alma mater of the Governor. If successful, Jake will get early release. If this plot detail sounds like a gimmick, that’s only because you haven’t read in-depth on the wild wiles of college basketball recruiting. The only reason, I’m fairly certain, my state’s ex-Governor, Rod Blagojevich, never tried a similar stunt was because no elite high school recruit was going anywhere near Northwestern. This twist on recruiting turns, naturally, into a chance for Jake to try and atone for his sins, which is never made easy, by the script or by Jesus, who is, in the meantime, not only fending off leeches but simultaneously trying to raise his sister (Zelda Harris). It’s a busy movie, in other words, but it hangs together, even Jake’s subplot with Dakota (Milla Jovovich), a woman of the night staying next door in the fleabag motel where Jake is shacked up while on his bizarro recruiting trip.

Washington practically lets Jake boil not with resentment, resigned to his sins, but anger nonetheless, all of which comes home in his gait. If actors often play prisoners a step behind, Washington has Jake move with a purpose, a walk that seems like it only has so much time on the outside and wants to take it all in. In one brief section he cuts across the city in a series of swift cuts underlining that speed. And this hurry is born out in flashbacks with the younger Jesus where Dad’s mettle-testing one-man basketball boot camps where he distinctly comes across like a man who knows time is already running out on creating a #1 NBA draft pick. And yet, in his scenes with Jovovich, Washington exudes a palpable tenderness, which renders the bright neon light pouring through the motel windows feel less, makes it feel almost like the carnival of Coney Island transplanted indoors, Jake’s time might be borrowed, but in trying to help Dakota get out of a sticky spot, he does his best to right his violent wrong.

That sort of tenderness ebbs and flows all throughout “He Got Game” and becomes crucial. There is a lot of anger here. How could there not be? In the scenes between father and son, Jesus bristles with anger for the sins his father wrought, and Allen, who I have wrote about before in this role, adopts the tunnel vision of his character quite convincingly. In a volatile flashback to a scene where Jesus and Lala discuss a baby “they” chose to abort, riding a ferris wheel, a fine juxtaposition, Jesus essentially just shouts her opinion down, which is where Lee, never one to let anyone off the hook, makes clear that even if Jesus is a savior on the hardwood, his life has transgressions.

If basketball is the film’s prominent subject, we only see it in snippets, like an early sequence cutting between Jake shooting jump shots on the prison basketball court and Jesus shooting jump shots on the playground, a moment to simply revel in Ray Allen’s perfect, sumptuous shooting form. Later, when father and son stroll the boardwalk, Jake explains how Jesus got his name, not from the Bible but from Earl Monroe (“Black Jesus”), and Lee cues up a few grainy stock images of Monroe from his days with the Baltimore Bullets, which don’t feel standard issue but like little flickering memories that sear themselves into the minds of kids when they first find and fall in love with the game.

“He Got Game” climaxes on the court with a one on one showdown between father and son to decide whether or not Jesus will sign with Big State, which sounds as gimmicky as the inciting incident but becomes so much more, an emotional bloodletting of sorts. No, the only real-real basketball game occurs early in the form of a nighttime playground contest with nothing on the line but pride. Lee sets this pickup game to Aaron Copland’s “Hoedown”, making it feel like a sudden burst of joy, when all the surrounding noise falls away and all you see is the unadorned beauty of the game.

If I could go back and see one movie

Recently on Twitter, and then again on his own blog, the esteemed sportswriter Joe Posnanski threw out a question: “If you could go back and see one baseball game, anytime in history, what would you watch.” What sports fan doesn’t love these kinds of exercises, since it’s an opportunity to mine through the past, particularly of games near and dear to our respective hearts, which Posnanski noted was how most fans took it, as a dreamy possibility of re-living the greatest sports moment of their lives. But then, my favorite sport is college football, and if I could go back and see one college football game, anytime in history, I would not choose, say, my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers winning the national championship in the 1995 Orange Bowl, or even the sleet-ridden 1991 game against Oklahoma that sealed a Big 8 title (though I’d take the latter over the former, I swear). No, I’d probably say something like….Red Grange’s game against Michigan in 1924, or the 1902 Rose Bowl, or the 1926 Rose Bowl, or SMU/TCU in 1935, the list goes on, just so long as it’s anything pre-WWII, or at least long before the modern era. So, if I could go back and see one baseball game, anytime in history, I’d say: a Josh Gibson game, any Josh Gibson game, whenever, wherever. Lord, just let me see four Josh Gibson at bats.

That, as it absolutely had to, got me to thinking about movies. If I could go back and see one movie in the theater, anytime in history, what would I watch? Would I re-live one of the greatest movie theater experiences of my life? Would I go back and see “Million Dollar Baby”, or “Titanic”, or “Boogie Nights”? Would I go back and re-live that employees-only screening of “There’s Something About Mary” at the Wynnsong 16? No, these are not the movies I would choose, just as I would not choose “Last of the Mohicans”, my all-time favorite movie, even though I have never seen it on the big screen. You might say I’m simply being contrary. And while I will admit that simply choosing my all-time favorite movie is too easy an answer, preventing a whole blog post, I’d counter with this: I can go back to anytime in HISTORY. Why would I want to go back to 1992?

I could go back to 1895 and see the premiere of “The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station” to see if the urban legend of audiences overwhelmed by the image of a steam locomotive coming right at them on the big screen sent them running was really true. I could go back to 1927 and see the premiere of “The Jazz Singer” and feel flabbergasted right alongside everyone else when a person up there on the movie screen actually speaks.

I could go back to Atlanta in 1939 for the lavish “Gone With the Wind” premiere, or go back to the same year and Oconomowoc, Wisconsin for “The Wizard of Oz” premiere, feeling the true blue effect of that legendary switch from monochrome to color.

I could go back to see the premiere of “2001: A Space Odyssey” to get a true sense of the collective WTF?, or I could go back to the premiere of “The Heiress” at Cathay Circle in Hollywood and let the majesty of Olivia de Havilland wash over me in real time

I could go back to see the “The Blair Witch Project” premiere at Sundance and luxuriate in living through the lie of thinking this whole thing might, just might, be real, or I could go back to see “Marie Antoinette” at Cannes and then pick fights with all the snot-noses booing it.

That all sounds good, but that’s not what I’d want to do. No, if I could go back and see one movie in the theater, anytime in history, I’d go back to 1932 New York, grab a pre-movie highball at the Algonquin, and then go catch the late show of “Red Dust” at the Roxy.

Personal Shopper

Kristen Stewart has long specialized in charismatically rendering distraction. In “Certain Women” she used shoveling a diner plate full of food into her mouth to signal how she’d rather be anywhere than where she was, and all the way back to “Adventureland” she moved through a rundown amusement park, and her whole life really, with the attitude of someone waiting to be beamed up to wherever else she was supposed to be. And in “Personal Shopper”, writer/director Olivier Assayas harnesses that distraction for its greatest good yet, building around Stewart something like a ghost story that is at once literal and metaphorical. It is, however, neither Ghost Chasers nor intelligentsia slush, but something weirdly, wonderfully moving, particularly in how Stewart moves not so much through a fallen world as through a normal world that, through her eyes, may as well be fallen anyway. Indeed, when someone asks Stewart’s Maureen what she is doing in Paris, Maureen replies: “Waiting.” That’s what “Personal Shopper” feels like – like someone waiting for something to start.

In a genuine sense, Maureen is. Her brother Louis died not long before the movie opens, from a heart defect, the same one plaguing Maureen, meaning it’s possible she could go anytime too. And because Louis was a medium, brother and sister made a pact that if he died he would send a signal from beyond the grave to let her know there was, in fact, something in the great beyond. Her paranormality, however, is less professional than personal, and to make ends meet she works as a personal shopper for some vaguely defined celebrity named Katya (Nora Waldstätten) who sends lowly Maureen on errands all over Paris. And even if the camera can occasionally veer into voyeuristic territory during these missions of commerce, Maureen is nevertheless almost always is able to elude its grasp, falling in out and of shots, never allowing us to get a complete fix on her as she never seems to get anywhere except the next haven of designer garb, running in place. This idea is underscored in chats with her boyfriend (Ty Olwin), all of which are conducted by Skype, reinforcing the impersonal distance. We see her sketching in notebooks, but if that’s her passion, she does little with it.

All this might lead you to assume that the haunting in a “Personal Shopper” is of the allgeogrical kind, Maureen as a ghost in her own life, sort of “A Ghost Story” without the white bedsheet. But while that’s true, Assayas is also not being coy; we hear noises in the night, we see fleeting spectral images, something is there. The movie doesn’t just believe in ghosts; it shows us ghosts. Yet, it’s not the spookiness that spooks Maureen. If anything, she wants more of it, which she actually says, demanding from Louis, if it is indeed him, further signs of his presence. If these moments freak us out, they don’t seem to faze her, which have a profound means of settling us down and drawing us in.

Assays improbably brings all these threads together in a mid-movie text exchange that stretches across several scenes in which Maureen begins receiving messages from an unknown number, one teasing her, threatening her, testing her. With little more than a phone, the scroll sound and KStew, Assayas manages to render an extended sequence that, wrapped around Maureen’s voyage from Paris to the countryside, becomes as thrilling as Jason Bourne guiding the journalist through Waterloo Station in “The Bourne Ultimatum”, a chase scene, of sorts, down the information superhighway, equally tantalizing and terrifying. Who exactly is on the other end you never quite know even if you have an idea, but the answer never matches the question – never matches the moment. And that’s fine. This sequence, taken in tandem with others, where she watches iPhone videos, all underscore her sense of isolation and search for connection through the digital realm.

The voice on the other end tempts her to try on Katya’s clothes, which she does, as she occasionally does elsewhere, and if there are moments in the movie where Stewart lets Maureen’s distraction fall away, it’s here. In these sequences, she comes alive in a palpable way, slipping into someone else’s skin as a means to commune with the world in a way she can’t otherwise seem to achieve. Whether she ultimately finds the means to slip this fog, I’ll leave for you to discover, though the film’s unique parts might well tip its enigmatic concluding hand. And if this ending will elicit questions, it nevertheless feels emotionally, if not spiritually (secularly?), complete. If Assayas stresses Maureen’s loneliness throughout, this is still as lonely as she ever looks, sending a question out into the cosmos that only bounces right back.

Princess Cyd

“Princess Cyd” refers to the eponymous sixteen year old Cyd Loughlin (Jessie Pinnick) who is sent from her South Carolina home to Chicago to spend the summer with her Aunt Miranda (Rebecca Spence), but it also refers to a book written by Miranda, an acclaimed author, a title deliberately evoking a fairytale. Writer/Director Stephen Cone’s film is not explicitly a fairytale, yet sometimes comes across like one anyway, and not just in the tuxedo that Cyd sports to her aunt’s art-oriented get-together, a nifty and striking twist on the traditional ball gown. No, that make-believe air emerges in an odd reluctance to engage with the impetus for Cyd’s Chicago summer – that is, her mother’s murder. If this weighs heavily on Cyd, as one might assume, we rarely feel or see it, either in the script or in Pinnick’s performance, meaning this backstory never blends with the overall film. If not a fatal flaw, this bleak story detail is vexing nonetheless, an unnecessary addition in a film that otherwise resists such melodramatic overtures to make its point. That resistance, in fact, proves “Princess Cyd’s” greatest strength, equating coming of age with something more emotional and imprecise than the mere ascension of a few dramatic hurdles.

At the same time, while Aunt and Niece might be completely different people, “Princess Cyd” does not hammer away at these differences nor chart their eventual friendship via easy to define olive branches. If anything, Cone finds sly ways to employ the characters’ differing behavior as a means to illuminate their evolution. Cyd communicates bluntly, which Pinnick mirrors in her speech, often jumping on Spence’s lines before she has completely trailed off. Over lunch, Miranda tries explaining one of her books, and when she worries she might give away too much, Cyd comforts her by saying she’s not going to read it anyway. In Cyd’s mind, this is mere statement of fact, not an insult, and Spence, as she often does, lets you see Miranda adjusting to this unexpectedly blunt behavior in real time.

But Cone is smart not simply to let Cyd’s bluntness function for bad; it also functions for good. In discussions about sex and spirituality, the way in which Cyd simply puts questions to Miranda leaves her aunt almost taken aback from the candidness, which Spence plays like someone not used to being confronted by such brutally honest questions. Indeed, later at an author Q&A, Miranda searches for an honest response when asked some stock question, connecting back to how she is pulled out of her comfort zone in a way she never expected by Cyd, and vice-versa.

Not that Miranda simply sits there and takes it. When Cyd, without thinking, comments on her aunt’s lack of a sex life, Miranda politely, insightfully takes her to task. If people try to put other people in boxes, just like movies try to put people in boxes, Miranda here explains this isn’t the case, and “Princess Cyd” underlines that idea by initially seeming to put Miranda in a box, what with her Nathaniel Hawthorne inspired WiFi password, but then proving her less an archetypal shrew than someone stimulated as much through intellectual pursuits as sexual ones. Then again, if Miranda knows this to be true, her niece fuzzes that truth a little, briefly ditching her aunt’s artistic get-together to fool around with a dumb boy. To each her own.

This appeal to diverse ideas blooms in Cyd meeting Katie (Malic White) at a neighborhood coffee shop. Granted, this first encounter, like moments of slow-motion running on the beach to pop songs, banks hard toward conventionality, but ultimately their relationship is less about conventional progression to the point of saying “I love you” than something like lyrical exploration, particularly the first time they sleep together. It’s one of the most beautiful sleeping together scenes I’ve seen, where the camera lingers most prominently on Cyd’s face, which Pinnick imbues with joyful disbelief, like this is more than she ever expected. It is contrasted with the earlier scene where she fools around with the dumb boy. There is a stark difference, and she knows it, and you can see it.

Miranda is afforded something of a love interest too, in the form of an author, Anthony (James Vincent Meredith), she is giving notes. He is separated from his wife, but clearly has feelings for Miranda, which are not explicated in any kind of dialogue but mere behavior and the way Meredith delivers certain lines. If the camera generally favors more basic medium shots and close-ups, Cone switches to handheld for intimate scenes, not just between Cyd and Kate in bed but in a scene of Mirdana and Anthony chopping vegetables in the kitchen. The way the camera drifts from one to the another suggests a kind of spiritual connection, one Anthony might be more interested in acting on than Miranda, glimpsed in their closing conversation where Meredith allows a certain melancholy to creep in, not that it is overtly addressed by either party. Like so much else, what’s said is in what’s unspoken.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Drive, He Said (1970)

“Drive, He Said” (1970) opens with a collegiate basketball game being invaded by anti-war radicals who briefly stage a theatrical protest that no one in the crowd seems to take all that seriously. It’s a pretty blatant mixing of disparate Americas, sports’ safe space and the persnickety insurgents who refuse to stick to sports. Of course, look at the way Jack Nicholson, in his directorial debut, employs frenzied camerawork to render the basketball scenes, deliberately yielding a sensory overload with the roars of the crowd, the shouts of the cheerleaders, the sounds on the band, the shots on hoop shown from every conceivable angle. This is not a conventional Big Game but something else entirely; it feels like an earthquake rumbling beneath the floorboards, threatening to swallow the place whole.

There is certainly something rumbling within Hector Bloom (William Tepper), the squad’s star player but also the roommate of the principal anti-war radical, Gabriel (Michael Margotta), whose manic prodding spurs Hector to question his place on the team and his team’s role in campus life. Why this unlikely duo are roommates at this advanced stage of their collegiate careers is never explained and feels disingenuous, but then, “Drive, He Said” is not the sort of movie concerned with being nominally true, only emotionally, and it sometimes is, even if sometimes those emotions become so hysterical the movie feels like it’s out of control.

Hector’s rebellion, however, comes across less purposeful than meekly unplanned, walking out on the basketball team when his coach wants him to run laps, telling a professional basketball team that wants to sign him to a contract that he wants hot dogs to be sold to spectators for fifty cents cheaper. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad, which Tepper plays to, with an air of someone who doesn’t have enough inner-inspiration to be a radical, maybe because he knows he’s not smart enough. He says his major is Greek, but it may as well be Underwater Basket Weaving for as much time as we see him studying.

Even if his Coach, played by Bruce Dern with a believable tough love, actually comes across concerned for his star player’s well-being, the shoulder Hector chooses to lean on instead is Olive (Karen Black), wife of a school professor, Richard (Robert Towne), with whom the jock is having an affair. Not that it’s an affair long on traditional passion. When Hector says he loves her, Tepper lets you feel all the pitiful desperation this confession entails, which is made worse by the way Black barely has Olive engage with these sentiments. Indeed, in their sex scenes, Black evinces a woman who is closed off even in the most intimate of acts. That she has drifted so far from her husband seems inevitable.

Richard is played by Towne with an oddly, wonderfully disengaged air, seeming like a man who would have been all in the revolution of the 60s and now has mostly let it pass him by, hardly even bothered by his wife’s dalliance, at one point sitting down with both Hector and Olive at the dinner table to talk things through. This is one of the few scenes when Nicholson resorts to a more classical three camera style of editing, sort of twisting the screw on traditional domestic dramas, particularly when Black calls both men on the carpet as, more or less, big babies who deserve each other.

Running concurrent to all this is Gabriel, urging Hector to rebel even as he goes off the deep end, devolving into madness in the hopes of not getting drafted for Vietnam. Some of these scenes, like his campus streaking, feel more broad than scarily moving, yet there is still a powerful cumulative effect in his madness, particularly in how he gets further and further from whatever cause it was he sought to champion in the first place, sort of a mirror for the era, leaving radicalism for hedonism, emblemized in how he tries to rape Olive.

Only Olive finds her way out of this emotional mess, as Gabriel gives into madness and Hector simply falls back in line with the team, the comfort of the community re-opening his arms to him. The movie ends with Gabriel driven away to the insane asylum while we see Hector, through the back of the ambulance window, shout “Your mother called”, as if they are all just kids, waiting for this whole bad interlude to pass before everything is ok again.

To Go or Not to Go

In the summer of 2009 I went to a matinee of “Public Enemies” with a couple friends. Before the screening, we had gone to the BBQ place across the street and I’d consumed an early afternoon beer, which went along with the couple cups of coffee I’d had that morning and the typical couple glasses of water I like to have after my couple cups of coffee. And even if I used the theater’s restroom facilities prior to the movie, well, the movie was two and a half hours long, and midway through, I felt, you know, the urge. And it just kept getting worse. But, what was I going to do? LEAVE THE MOVIE AND GO TO THE BATHROOM? If that’s kooky talk under any circumstance, on par with taking out my smartphone and scrolling through it while the movie is happening, it is doubly kooky where Michael Mann is concerned. Any second of any Michael Mann movie, as we Michael Mann devotees can attest, is capable of sizzling your retinas. And that experience was nothing compared to later in the year when I went to see “Broken Embraces.” Whew, was that bathroom emergency bad. Whatever. I didn’t leave. I wouldn’t dream of it. “Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” was, as you likely remember, five hours and thirty-two minutes long and I didn’t go to the bathroom. When I watched “The Heiress” for the first time, I was at home but still so transfixed that when I had to go to the bathroom I nevertheless literally refused to stop the DVR to walk down my own hallway to go. I do not go to the bathroom during movies.

I went to the bathroom during “The Hurricane Heist.” The situation wasn’t even as dire as “Public Enemies” or “Broken Embraces”, but as soon as I had to go, the need weeded its way into the back of my mind. “Hey. I have to go to the bathroom.” The sweet, awful irony was that sitting a few chairs down from me was an older woman who spent half the movie rifling through her bag and sucking on her soda cup as if trying to suck up someone’s soul and the other half of the movie getting up to go to the bathroom. Every time she got up to go, I’d think, “See? It’s easy. Just get up and go.” Then, midway through the movie, some dude came into the theater, using his smartphone as a flashlight to sit down almost directly behind me. He probably just snuck in after the movie he actually paid to see ended, which seemed to be confirmed when a couple minutes later a couple theater employees entered, scanned the crowd, and then left, but still. Anymore these days, with, shall we say, The State of Things, anytime someone enters a theater midway through the showing, I am simply conditioned to get nervous. And Jesus do I resent being conditioned to get nervous. But that’s a subject for another sermon. The point is, this dude took me out of a movie I was only halfway in to begin with, and so, I though “the hell with it.”

And I have to say, the act of leaving a movie in the middle of it with the express intent of simply dashing to the bathroom and then hustling back to the movie felt…weird. As a longtime glasses wearer, it felt like the few times I’ve been in the shower with my glasses on, where everything looks so weirdly clear that it looks completely different. Ineffably, the theater hallway, the theater bathroom, all of which I’ve been in hundreds of times, looked…different. After all, I wasn’t walking out on a movie. That’s a whole other feeling. Walking out on a movie is like turning off a game midway through because it’s a blowout; you have consciously stopped caring about the result. Leaving a movie to run to the bathroom, on the other hand, is like not being able to watch a game you really want to watch while it’s happening. And even if I didn’t really care what I was missing in “The Hurricane Heist”, especially since I left in the middle of some sludgy action scene, the sensation of being out of a movie I was watching was so foreign that it threw me for a loop. I was walking normal but I felt like I was staggering.

It felt so strange that I tried to remember the last time it happened. And in wracking my brain, I think, I swear, the last time prior to “The Hurricane Heist” I left a movie to go to the bathroom was…“The Phantom Menace.” (I don’t remember the precise moment I left. My guess would be around the time Pernilla August forced out the line “You can’t stop change any more than you can stop the sun from setting.”) Whatever that says about “The Phantom Menace”, the primary point here is that the last time I left a movie to go to the bathroom was the 90s! The last gasp of the Clinton Administration! “The Hurricane Heist” marks the first time I’ve left a movie to go to the bathroom since the turn of the century!

I know, I know, I could have just walked out. And while I, dutiful film blogger, was bound, as we both know, to finish “The Hurricane Heist” to write a true review to tell you, potential ticket buyer, to stay the hell away, in reality, I feel like saying I left to go to the bathroom says more than if I walked out. Walking out on a movie means that the movie has nonetheless stirred something up in me something so palpable that I am choosing to actively reject it. I will not give up on the movies like this movie has so clearly given up on itself. Leaving a movie to go to the bathroom, however, means the movie has given up and I have given up too. And since I had given up, I figured I might as well be comfortable.

5 More Actors to Say “If they had held onto the plutonium, we wouldn’t be having this conversation”

I am excited for the new “Mission: Impossible” movie, “Fallout”, not least because I was an avowed fan of the previous installment, “Rogue Nation”, both of which were written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie. But even if you removed McQuarrie from the equation, as well as the immense quality of McQuarrie’s crack at the M:I franchise, I would still be excited for “Fallout” and I will explain why. In the “Fallout” trailer I recently caught, for all the nifty looking derring-do packed within, what most caught my eye was what most caught my ear – that is, Angela Bassett appearing on screen to say this: “If they had held onto the plutonium, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

If who hadn’t held onto the plutonium exactly? The IMF, I assume, but who cares?! What does it matter in the face of a line as good as that?! I have myriad qualms with Hollywood these days, sure, but why was Hollywood invented if not to provide a safe space for lines like “If they had held onto the plutonium, we wouldn’t be having this conversation”? Of course, as movie-y as the line is, you still need a quality actor to sell it, an actor like the magnificent Bassett, whose downshifting gravitas gives “plutonium” as much credence as Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd’s wide-eyed farce in  “Back to the Future.” Still, because my mind works a certain way, when I heard Bassett say it, I immediately begin wondering what other actors could properly sell the same line.

A few possibilities.....

Nicole Kidman. Few actors have as comprehensive a verbal playbook at their disposal as her eminence, Ms. Kidman, and here I think she’d be best served giving the line her patented schoolmarm ring. You know, not necessarily emphasizing the ludicrous drama of the line but instead dialing that drama back and scolding the line’s recipient with a vocal sort of sigh, like she is mentally issuing a red checkmark.

Bob Balaban. The precise, quiet voice of Balaban has a unique knack for making the funny sound serious and the serious sound funny, a trait ripe for one crack, just one, at the word “plutonium.”

Tom Hanks. You know how Hanks does that thing where he speaks in semi-flustered, halting sentences evoking a kind of comic incredulousness? It would give “plutonium” the ring of a desperate white collar middle manager, one who knows it’s ridiculous asking his employees to acquire plutonium, and isn’t really surprised they didn’t get the plutonium, but now is hearing about this lack of plutonium from upper management.

Holly Hunter. Few do venomously sly as well as Hunter, and that’s why if she said this line, she could make it sound like the cruel reprimand it is even while suggesting the tantalizing possibilities of what’s in store when she finally does get her hands on that plutonium.

Nick Searcy. I like to imagine Searcy would add a “nincompoops” to his reading. He’d say something like, “If you nincompoops had held onto the plutonium we wouldn’t be having this conversation”, as if plutonium was the side of mac & cheese his subordinate forgot to pick up with Searcy’s character’s fried chicken lunch.

On Body and Soul

Set principally in a Budapest slaughterhouse, an early shot in “On Body and Soul” finds a cow penned into a corral in close-up. If this is generally how most of us think of cattle, waiting around to be turned into beef, that assumption is immediately challenged as the shot reverses so that we sort of see the cow’s point-of-view, looking over its shoulder, as the animal looks out a nearby window and toward the sun, which is pushing through the gray clouds. Then the movie cuts to one of its two principal characters, Endre (Géza Morcsányi), the slaughterhouse’s financial manager, gazing out his office window and soaking up that same sun. In that moment, humankind is linked with the cattle, evincing the idea that our souls are no different than theirs, challenging our proclivity to view them as nothing more than our meat, a challenge made even more explicit during a lengthy scene shortly after that spares none of the grisly slaughterhouse details.

Director Ildikó Enyedi, however, is not content to merely let the parallels lie there. No, her opening images are of a stag and a doe in the snowy wilderness. And while these scenes, returned to throughout and juxtaposing nature’s majesty against nature re-ordered by man in the slaughterhouse, are eventually revealed as something apart from what we initially think, they also evoke a National Geographic special, a live look at these deer in their habitat. And though Enyedi’s vision is far more formalist than, say, the hidden cameras of “Planet Earth: Blue Planet”, that is still sort of what “On Body and Soul” comes to resemble, a National Geographic special for people, at least until its back half when the narrative gives itself completely over to its central romance involving kindred misfits and sacrifices much of its edge for quirky romance.

Up until that point, the film focuses on the day to day of the slaughterhouse, where Mária (Alexandra Borbély), the new quality inspector, initially makes life difficult for Endre with her exacting standards. Enyedi, however, shows little interest in the specifics of the business’s inner-workings, preferring to equate the office environment with those cattle corrals. Fewer scenes take place in offices than in the lunchroom, where Endre typically eats Jenö, played by Zoltán Schneider in a comically droll performance that almost entirely involves him shoveling food into his mouth as he grunts observations between bites, as if fattening himself up to continue with such drudgery. His observations frequently involve, shall we say, political incorrectness, whether it is about his own wife, whom Endre once dated, or Mária, who Endre can’t help but ogle in spite of himself.

This sort of sexually charged talk is further invoked in the theft of powder from the slaughterhouse that is employed to make the animals mate. The police are summoned, but so is a psychologist, Klára (Réka Tenki), enlisted to review each employee in such a manner as to uncover who might have committed the crime. If this seems a narrative stretch it hardly matters because of the film’s overall surrealist streak, one prominent in these interrogation sequences, distinctly evoked in the moments when Klára’s hair becomes noticeably frazzled, sort of a tonsorial emblem of the palpable tension permeating on account of the taboo questions and answer, a tension that feels ready to explode. Yet, as if sensing the topicality of questions surrounding romance in the workplace, the movie diffuses that tension, revealing these interrogations as a mere device to bring Endre and Mária together as the characters are made to realize that they are sharing the same dreams.

Those dreams are of them as deer in the woods, re-casting the meaning of these preceding sequences, and if at first these two unconventional lovebirds are keenly content to continue their atypical courtship in the dream state, it becomes obvious that their arc will involve having to wake up, ahem, to reality, though their real lives never feel that thought out, or as poetically rendered as the sequences involving those deer. Instead Endre is given a limp left arm as a means to connote how he no longer wishes to you know what, while Mária seems suspended in some sort of perpetual adolescence, still seeing a child psychiatrist and re-enacting events of the day with dolls, which was better illustrated, honestly, in “Spaceballs”, but which is never really explored in any detail beyond the surface, reducing her to an unfortunate pile of quirks.

Their romance climaxes with a conspicuously dispassionate sex scene, like two people who are just figuring out how this works, animal instincts taking over. And if the characters had fully come into their own, this might have played not merely as a corporeal exercise but an eruption of the soul.

The Hurricane Heist

(Reader’s Note: “The Hurricane Heist” was so visually unappealing we have foregone including stills with this review. They are all awful.)

There are two moments in “The Hurricane Heist” when reality wonderfully intrudes. These occur when circumstantial allies Casey Corbyn (Maggie Grace), US Treasury Agent, and Will Rutledge (Toby Kebbell), meteorological ace, in the midst of trying to fend off a US Mint robbery, stop to pee, and then later when they pause for peanut butter and jelly. Rest breaks and protein injections suggest a gleam in director Rob Cohen’s eye, gleefully giving time to actual physical concerns a movie with a title like “The Hurricane Heist” would normally ignore. Alas, this is about as much fun as the movie ever allows itself, never reveling in its character archetypes like a Roland Emmerich joint might while mostly forgoing thinking outside the action box to just re-heat leftovers from so many movies before it. When you plant a set-up in the first two minutes involving a football hook & ladder and don’t find a way to literally engineer it during your climactic tri-semi truck chase, really, what good are you?

Maggie Grace, bless her heart, tries to have fun as she credibly guffaws at the bad jokes her character tells or is made to endure, or as her character takes the wheel of her flatbed truck carrying $600 million in cash that needs to be removed from circulation and plows through tobacco fields to avoid the traffic trying to evacuate coastal Gulfport, Alabama on the account of an approaching Category 5 hurricane. This move is meant to demonstrate Casey’s dogged ingenuity that will so frustrate her gruff partner Perkins (Ralph Ineson) when he turns coat to steal the cash they are carrying. That’s a spoiler, perhaps, but it happens very early in the proceedings. Plus, double crosses, and even half a triple cross, abound, and you will find yourself wishing that villainous hacker Sasha (Melissa Bolona), dressed like she’s going to the club rather than the center of a CAT5, was the chief villain anyway since she at least breaks the bad guy mold. Casey, as fate would have it, winds up off the premises when things go wrong and in the company of Will, and eventually his brother Breeze (Ryan Kwanten), the trio forming a makeshift resistance.

The hurricane effects do not inspire awe. Jan de Bont’s decades-old “Twister” contained some dull computer generated tornadoes not unlike Cohen’s computer-generated hurricane, but de Bont mixed his with real images of fabulously threatening black and green and purple Midwestern skies. Cohen has no such desire, making you wish he’d add some sharks to all that violent wind for a little variety. He drenches everything in a dismal grey, and I mean everything. If that makes sense in the pouring rain, even inside the US Mint all green of the cash is washed out, not to mention the green of Sasha’s cocktail dress. Even during the eye of the storm climax when the sun comes out, the film barely brightens, unintentionally underscoring its sleepiness despite so much noise. Noise is also a product of the action scenes, where lots of bullets are fired in the rain, while the aforementioned semi truck chase down an endless freeway is repetitive and as short on practical effects as the hurricane.

The thieves, meanwhile, are short on motivation, though writers Jeff Dixon and Scott Windhauser dangle a couple tantalizing southern Robin Hood threads they oddly have no real intention of exploring, rendering all of Cohen’s artfully placed American flags in the background as nothing more than a kind of patriotic product placement. If anything, because of Casey’s virtually non-existent backstory, all this red, white and blue might have spoken to her staring down these robbers as a sense of simple duty, though this is more inferred than conveyed. No, the intended emotional through-line here is that of Will and Breeze, evinced in the movie’s opening scene, one in which the adolescent brothers are forced to watch their father die in Hurricane Andrew, a scene that literalizes something like a groaning skull in the clouds, suggesting, I guess, mother nature as the grim reaper, though this plays less philosophical than like an inadvertent punchline.

This traumatic event spurs Breeze to become a heavy drinker and Will to become a weatherman in the hopes of fighting back against hurricanes. That plot point also evokes “Twister” and its characters’ desire to develop better warning signs for tornadoes, and there are further hints of “The Day After Tomorrow” as Will is allowed one speech about the hell Earth inflicts on its own climate. But as soon as Will mentions climate science, “The Hurricane Heist” drops it. It’s a real missed opportunity. After all, at a crucial moment late in the proceedings, when Breeze reveals his hidden home armory to help in the heist prevention while proudly citing his Alabama residency, you can practically hear liberals groan, not unlike how I heard (literally!) an audience member at my screening yawn when Will mentions climate change to Casey.

“The Hurricane Heist”, of all movies, teases merging blue state priorities with red ones, only to quickly let its glimmer of bipartisanship fly away in the wind.

The Barrier is Broken (Coming to Terms)

My favorite college basketball game is the 1989 NCAA Tournament first round tilt when 16th seeded Ivy League upstart Princeton came within a single precious point of usurping top seeded, then-hardwood colossus Georgetown. What I remember most is how the seemingly impossible gradually became possible and then suddenly seemed so probable that I felt as if I was holding my breath the entire second half. Even watching it now, knowing the outcome, I feel tingles, not least because of the crowd, how it collectively gasps at every Princeton make and moans at every Princeton miss, and how you can sense them sensing they might be witnessing history, and which Georgetown’s Alonzo Mourning seems to sense too as he gallantly raises his level of play. That Princeton lost, 50-49, is what made it, in retrospect, mythic. Had Princeton won, the What If? would have never been a question at all, and we would have been deprived the tantalizing possibility of every ensuing NCAA Tournament being the one where the impossible dream might come true.

That game is what made me realize March Madness, as it was colloquially called until the NCAA trademarked the term into wretched oblivion, was all about the underdog. The NCAA has tried to write the underdog out of the script, which Princeton’s non-win helped to prevent as has been recalled many times over in the years since, but for all the NCAA’s stodgy regulations nevertheless favoring the CBB oligarchs, the tournament itself has remained refreshingly, gloriously egalitarian. I am liable to forget Final Fours and National Championships, but I will never forget staying up late when I was supposed to be asleep to listen on the radio as the Richmond Spiders became the first 15 seed in NCAA Tournament history to defeat a 2 seed (Syracuse). A couple years later I ditched out on an event at my Lutheran church because, for the love of God, it was the first day of the tournament, and thank God too, because I saw Santa Clara and some scrawny freshman named Steve Nash become the second 15 seed to beat a 2 (Arizona). That particular upset equation has happened more frequently over the years while so-called mid-majors like George Mason and Virginia Commonwealth have begun penetrating the deepest reaches of March Madness, and yet, the 16 over 1 remained ever elusive.

It almost happened several times, of course, and Tournament devotees can recite them all by heart, like favorite albums, each one a little jewel of almost, whether it was Murray State and the immortal Popeye Jones pushing Michigan State to overtime in 1990 or less heralded cracks at the summit, like the Fairfield Stags, replete with a losing record, nearly preventing North Carolina coach Dean Smith from tying the record for most college basketball victories in 1997, a personal favorite, which did not go down to the wire but where the agony of potential blue blood ruin was still so palpable for so long. Every time the upset of the ages seemed close to happening, however, like Florida A&M legitimately running with vaunted Kentucky for 30 minutes in 2004, the top dog would pull away, leaving me to wistfully smile and remark, “Maybe next year.”

Maybe next year was a phrase often attached to Tony Bennett, head coach of the Virginia Cavaliers, one of the best in his profession not to reach the Final 4. That he had not was often connected, or so it is routinely said, to his playing system, a brand of slow-tempo offense and suffocating defense that in an era of so-called pace and play comes across antiquated, more Princeton, in fact, than Georgetown. Even so, it only seemed like a matter of time, and their 2017-18 season, in which they finished with a record of 31-2 and ranked #1, suggested it would be, a chance to re-write Virginia basketball history, one that has always ignominiously been attached not to a win but a loss — that is, Chaminade, a Roman Catholic Marianist university in Honolulu, then an NAIA school, legendarily toppling the top-ranked Cavaliers in a tiny Hawaii gymnasium in a game that was not televised in 1982.

In a wonderful Sports Illustrated piece commemorating that fabled upset’s 25th Anniversary, Alexander Wolff wrote about Virginia’s star player, 7’4 Ralph Sampson, who was great, a future Hall of Famer, but somehow never great enough, carrying the burden of that defeat for the rest of his life. It was a reminder how a historic victor goes hand-in-hand with a historic loser, and as a native Iowan who had invested far too much of himself in an Iowa State basketball team in 2001 that became the fourth 2 seed to fall prey to a 15 (Hampton) I can speak candidly about how brutal it is to be on the receiving end of a defeat that brings most everyone else exaltation.

When the bracket for the 2018 NCAA Tournament was unveiled, it did not go unnoticed that the Pennsylvania Quakers were the first Ivy League team to earn the lowest possible seed since.....Princeton in 1989. That Penn appeared perhaps under-seeded ignited bullish thoughts of their springing the 16 over 1 upset, except that those of us specializing in the cosmic sector of athletics knew straight away that this meant the Quakers were doomed. Indeed, Kansas took Penn’s early shots and won. That seemed to settle the question for this year, and one could be forgiven for already wondering “Maybe next year” when University of Maryland, Baltimore County tipped off against Virginia late Friday night. If at first the wonderfully named Retrievers went toe-to-toe with Tony Bennett’s Cavaliers, entering halftime tied at 21, history felt more like a fun probability than a serious threat.

But in the second half, UMBC turned and burned. If NCAA Cinderellas often being made on the backs of buzzer beaters have conditioned us to think these games will be close, the Retrievers re-wrote the fairytale, surging to a 14 point lead in the second half's first four minutes. The upset suddenly felt inevitable even if every person who marveled at UMBC on Twitter was countered by an order not to jinx it, just as my beautiful, perspicacious girlfriend, a Washington D.C. native and so basically a Maryland native too, kept telling me not to jinx it as I espoused a bewildered OMG at every Retriever swish. But, it was over. I knew it was over not because UMBC was clearly in the mystical zone, and not just because Virginia’s pace of play is inadvertently designed not to mount comebacks, but because of the look on Tony Bennett’s face. It was one of those little smiles that isn’t really a smile (see below), the kind a character in a noir gets right at the end when the web of his own making has entangled him. Because the game played out this way, it meant that I had time to come to grips with Maryland, Baltimore County becoming the first 16 seed to beat a 1 seed, 74-54, as it happened, and my feelings, despite years of preparation, took me by surprise.

When Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first two men to summit Mount Everest in 1953, the highest peak on Earth was one of the last great physical barriers. From there, more people climbed Everest, and then more and more, finally reaching the unfathomable point where people pay absurd prices for guided expeditions to the top and literally wait in line to attain the summit. Something that once was so special is now taken for awful granted. That is not to downplay Maryland, Baltimore County’s achievement or suggest I am not happy for their team and university, and that is not to suggest that in coming NCAA Tournaments #1 seeds will start dropping like flies in the first round. Maybe it will never happen again. Still, As UMBC’s lead grew larger and as the minutes on the clock grew shorter, the more I felt the splendid prominence of that Georgetown/Princeton game shrink. There are so few barriers left anymore in sports and the 16 seed beating the 1 seed was one of the last and most formidable.

I felt joy as the barrier was broken, but I also felt sadness, such sadness, such strange, terrible sadness, to see it go.

Friday's Old Fashioned: One on One (1977)

If “Hoosiers”, another basketball movie, opened with world-wearied Norman Dale (Gene Hackman) driving through rural Indiana for one last chance in nowheresville, “One on One” opens with apple-faced Henry Steele (Robby Benson) cruising the L.A. freeway for his first chance at the Big Time. Norman Dale’s one last chance works out, not simply because it is narratively pre-ordained but because he has Seen Some Things, things like what Henry Steele is about to go through, coming to grips with the pressure cooker of big time college athletics and employing lessons learned in the name of teaching young kids right. Indeed, Henry Steele probably could have used a Norman Dale in his life. As the movie opens, fans in his small Colorado gymnasium chant his name as he hogs the ball and shoots to win. And though Henry is portrayed as something of a hick, he is not so dumb as to not get exactly what he wants from the college of his choice, including a brand new ride. If this movie was made in 2018 then Henry would have called an ESPN conference to decide between Western University and Faber College.

That edge is what makes “One on One” surprisingly agreeable, the unintentionally hilarious detour into an After School Drug Special notwithstanding. There are fewer scenes on the basketball court than you might realize, even if Benson really was, it turns out, a pretty decent basketball player in real life. No, Lamont Johnson’s film is just as interested in the entire athletic ecosystem, where Henry is summoned first not to the classroom but the office of his coach, Moreland Smith (G.D. Spradlin), whose secretary functions as something like his caretaker and academic advisor, getting him out of tests if it interferes with practice, lining him up with a paying job where he doesn’t do work. One of the best scenes involves Henry going to his job and quickly learning that he is expressly forbidden from actually doing work from the incensed, overworked Latino landscaper (Hector Morales). If this was “Rudy”, no doubt these two men would become fast friends. Here, Henry is more or less told to eff off, and the racial and economic dynamic here is striking for the way it is not played up. Indeed, Benson just allows Henry to take this in like it’s the nautral order.

Benson’s voice, which is barely pitched above whisper, makes him sound more like John-Boy Walton, though you can easily hear him giving all thanks to God in some post-game interview, often exudes an apple-faced innocence that is quite deceiving. When he tells his tutor Janet (Annette O’Toole) that he never had to study because he played sports you can’t quite tell if, a la Thurman Merman, he’s messing with you, so guilelessly does he say it. Maybe that’s why Janet warms to him, at least after first dismissing him as just some dumb jock.

Alas, Henry and Janet’s eventual relationship barely flies, with the movie essentially arguing that Janet falls for him on the strength of his reading “Moby Dick”, not least because we are meant to believe this book-averse jock has read the totality of “Moby Dick” when he cites a single quote. They had Bartlett’s in 1977! C’mon, Janet! You’re smarter than that! What’s worse, Benson and O’Toole emit next to no chemistry, polite or otherwise. There is more tension in Henry’s brief standoff with his Janet’s teaching paramour, a haughty academic who doesn’t like jocks and vice-versa. That the movie doesn’t really allow either one of them to be a good guy in this moment suggests a surprising depth that Henry and Janet’s relationship could have used.

Coach Smith isn’t really a good guy either. He can’t stand Henry’s “hotdogging”, an in-game showboating tendency that is at-odds with Henry’s otherwise soft-voiced personality, a contradiction the movie shows no interest in, and lashes out at his star recruit. Before long, Henry is riding pine and Coach Smith wants him to renege his scholarship. Henry, though, feeling emboldened with his academic standing strengething and a sense of self emerging, refuses, which means he has to take “the treatment”, to borrow Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt’s term. This emerges as the heart of the movie, and part of me almost yearned for it to be remade as a Will Ferrell sports movie, with the comic actor holding strong, like if Nick Saban was the Dean Wormer, trying to prevent some young punk from lousing up his finely tuned Process. Still, his standing fast and refusing to tuck tail and run is inspiring.

You could say it is reminiscent of modern college basketball, where coaches are athletic autocrats and kids get no slice of the pie that they are directly responsible for baking, except that college basketball has, more or less, always been that way. I wished there’d been a post-credits scene where Henry spilled the beans about getting paid to the L.A. Times.

Forgotten Characters: George in Hoosiers

Chelcie Ross in Hoosiers

as George Walker

Five years ago this month I was fortunate enough to attend a screening of “Hoosiers” (1986), the mostly beloved basketball movie, at my then-neighborhood’s Music Box theater. It was followed by a discussion and Q&A hosted by the Chicago Tribune’s film critic, Michael Phillips, and sports columnist, David Haugh. The featured guest was Chelcie Ross, who played George Walker, principal “Hoosiers” antagonist. Ross is a true That Guy – “Hey! That guy!” Seriously, scan his IMDb credits and you will know almost all the movies even if you don’t straight away remember him in them, though if you give it a little thought, his face and who he played will start to come back to you. He’s a character actor if there ever was one, and one who has excelled equally at the movies, on the stage, and in TV. He’s been everywhere, man.

In the Q&A, Ross could not have been warmer, which I found funny because in “Hoosiers” he is often so cold. You see it when George is running a basketball practice for little Hickory High that new coach Norman Dale (Gene Hackman) politely, yet insistently, commandeers. That leads to George making a thinly veiled threat, and as he does so, Ross truly evinces a small town guy who dislikes change, which is one of the currents undulating just below the heartwarming underdog story. You see this dislike even more acutely in a scene finding Norm summoned to the town’s barbershop where all the local men gather to grill the new Coach, even the man of cloth, who very seriously queries about Dale’s preferred on-court defense. Throughout this, George sits in the barber’s chair, which may as well be the small town throne, putting him on a pedestal above the coach, which Ross plays to the sneering hilt.

Behind the scenes, George gradually engineers it so that Coach Dale, whose team finds little success with star player Jimmy Chitwood refusing to play, is on the verge of being run out of town, brought to a head at a town meeting where a vote is set to be taken to decide Norm’s stay or go fate. But that meeting is where the fabled Jimmy Chitwood turns up to say he’ll play, but only if Coach Dale stays, which naturally means Coach Dale will stay no matter what. And when George realizes this, Ross is given one shot to make it count, which he does by assuming an expression of a man who just ate some bad fish.

From there, Hickory High start its march to the championship game, and because it does, George takes a backseat, though he fails to completely fall out of the picture. He is still occasionally glimpsed, and as he is, both Ross and director David Anspaugh continue slyly cultivating the character’s arc. Because if initially every time we see George in the crowd, he is peeved or looking Americana Machiavellian, his demeanor noticeably brightens. When hapless assistant coach Shooter (Dennis Hopper) briefly takes the team’s reigns and runs the picket fence to improbably win a last second game, the camera catches sight of George patting Shooter on the back whereas in earlier moments George could hardly stand to breathe the same air as the trying-to-stay-sober drunk. Winning cures all ills, they say, and George proves it, because as Hickory becomes an unstoppable basketballing force, all George’s objections with Coach Dale fall by the wayside.

And if many shots from “Hoosiers” have stayed with me over the years, one has stayed with me even more than most. It occurs at the championship game where Hickory triumphs over mighty South Bend Central. In the wake of Jimmy’s winning jump shot, the camera shows us the reactions of almost all the characters we have come to know, including George, who looks like this…

Has there ever been a more succinct image of the lunacy that winning engenders? That is not merely a man espousing joy over the positive outcome achieved by a few good-hearted, hard-working teenagers; that’s a man unleashing psychotic relief over mastery of the terrible alternative. And all us sports fans have been there, don’t try and deny it. That, like it or not, admit it or don’t, is the face of winning.

At the Q&A, Ross mentioned that his character was supposed to be the father of one of the team’s players, gum-chewing, defensive specialist Buddy, though, as Ross pointed out, in the editing room, that connection entirely fell away. And this editing decision was right. By having no personal attachments to the team, the team was his all he had, meaning he funneled his self-worth entirely through their wins and losses. There was no “Hoosiers” sequel, of course, and we don’t know if Coach Dale stayed on or if he moved away, though in the last scene, all we see is one framed Championship Team photo, not two, meaning there was no repeat. I wonder if the team’s record fell off. I wonder what George looked like then.

Annihilation

As “Annihilation” opens, a meteor streaks through the sky and tears through a Florida lighthouse, leaving in its wake some sort of nebulous extra-terrestrial force field called The Shimmer that is threatening to gradually overrun Earth. Several military units have, we learn, ventured through this unexplainable phenomenon in the hopes of finding answers, never to return. No one, that is, except Kane (Oscar Isaac), who seeks out his wife Lena (Natalie Portman), an army vet cum biologist who long ago assumed her spouse was dead. If we have only just met him, we nevertheless know he’s not right, and maybe not who he says he is, on account of Isaac’s vacant-eyed dissonance. That or the blood he soon coughs up, which finds him transplanted to a military hospital where Lena is soon answering questions to Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Before long, Lena volunteers to venture into the Shimmer along with Dr. Ventress and three other heavily armed women. If it suggests a sort of scientific spin on “Aliens’”, writer/director Alex Garland, who adapted his screenplay from Jeff VanderMeer’s novel I have not read, is aiming for something more cerebral, a la James Ward Byrkit’s “Coherence.” The latter, however, forged a sense of twisted self-discovery, while “Annihilation” ultimately still feels like it’s hiding something.

The Shimmer itself is reminiscent of rainbow plasma seemingly suspended in the air, though it is generally seen from afar and rarely lingered over, just as likely to be glimpsed on a computer monitor as by the characters’ naked eyes. It’s not that Garland’s effects aren’t strong but that he often forgoes a sense of wonder, making the eventual passing of the characters through the Shimmer a footnote rather than a moment. And while much of what they do encounter upon entry into the shimmery zone is impressively, even gorgeously rendered, “Annihilation”, perhaps in service to the title, is more concerned with dread and shock, though even that skews oddly conventional given the un-conventional setting, as Garland often writes himself into corners and then quickly fashions contrived means to get himself out. At the same time, disorientation supposedly overcomes these women the further they hike, though that disorientation is rarely felt, mostly just commented upon, like Ventress explicating: “We’re disintegrating.” Are they? You sure wouldn’t know it unless she said it.

They are disintegrating by way of sort of being subsumed, along with the DNA of everything else in this mystical zone, whatever this mystical zone might be. And there is a certain sense of mysticism, which the group’s physicist Josie (Tessa Thompson) latches onto, though her fate comes across perfunctory as opposed to lyrical, never part of the primary point for which “Annihilation” seems to be striving. The same goes for Ventress, who I sometimes wished was the main character. When Garland proffers a point-of-view shot through an albino alligator’s mouth this is theoretically so we can see how the animal has, on account of the Shimmer, been re-made with shark’s teeth, though that is less gripping than Leigh’s stoicism in the back of the frame.

Indeed, if Leigh cannot manage to evince her character’s actual physical disintegration (who could? Daniel Day-Lewis? Vincent D’Onofrio in “Men in Black”?), she still conveys a moving sense of fatalism. Upon entry into the Shimmer, when the group discovers its communications don’t work, Ventress remarks that they could not really have expected their coms to work, a line Leigh recites with a placidity that is darkly comic. Eventually we learn Ventress has cancer, which is why she has volunteered for what amounts to a suicide mission in the first place, though the film is never interested in really following up that detail and Leigh is essentially operating on a plain apart from some mere story point anyway. She is like a wearier Cliff Curtis in “Sunshine”, as if she has already looked past the pragmatic end game in the hopes of uncovering the ineffable.

Lena, on the other hand, has a more definable goal in trying to uncover what happened to her husband, an investigation which theoretically should open a window to her soul. Her romantic connection, however, is played up more for eventual tension with the group in the midst of their quest while never opening up the intended window to her soul. Flashbacks to Lena and Kane’s past remain coldly remote and oddly vague, never getting to who Lena is, or who she thinks she is, and which Portman, unlike Leigh, cannot manage to fill out through her performance. As such, the big concluding set piece bringing the idea of looking in the mirror to life, while effective in and of itself, weirdly balletic and raised to a piercing, thrilling aesthetic pitch, fails to fully come off without the proper emotional build-up. What’s worse, this whole sequence is distressingly re-calibrated by the film’s final shots, not to be revealed, into something less spiritually sinister than akin to a two-person shell game. “Annihilation’s” potential mindfuck, in other words, metamorphoses into a mere magician’s trick.

I have been to the center of the Shimmer, friends; it’s just a big bunch of hot air.

Forgotten Great Moments in Movie History

A couple weekends ago I found myself thinking a lot about Bon Jovi. Not because I saw a cover band, or because I stumbled into “Bad Medicine” while listening to my Arena Rock Pandora station, but because of March Shredness, which is, for those not sitting at the cool kids’ lunch table, “a 64-team, March Madness-style tournament of songs.” It was inaugurated in 2016 with March Sadness, pitting the most melancholy college rock songs against one another, and followed last year by March Fadness, in which 90s one-hit wonders squared off. This year, it’s a bracket full of hair metal. My beautiful, perspicacious girlfriend is at into March Shredness as she was into March Fadness as she was into March Sadness. (Loyal frustrated readers might recall we had a big fight about March Sadness. She’s still wrong.) And over the weekend, we spent our mornings drinking coffee and listening to, pontificating over, and reading about hair metal, including the big Bon Jovi v Bon Jovi first-round showdown between “Livin’ on a Prayer” and “Wanted Dead or Alive.”*



I confess, I have always viewed “Livin’ on a Prayer” a little snidely from on high. If I know using Springsteen as a reference point to bludgeon Bon Jovi isn’t exactly fair, as a Bruce fanatic I nevertheless struggle to hear “Tommy used to work on the docks” without thinking of it as Jon’s musty attempts to muster up his own “My name is Joe Roberts / I work for the state.” Such an admittedly snobbish sentiment, I assumed, put me on par with rock critics of era, and, sure enough, in Jimmy Guterman’s original Rolling Stone review he laments Bon Jovi “reducing every emotional statement to a barefaced cliché.” I mean, it’s difficult to disagree, even if you like Bon Jovi and “Livin’ on a Prayer”, but……does reducing every emotional statement to a barefaced cliché have to be a bad thing? Let us now consider the self-proclaimed Dean of Rock Critics, Robert Christgau, often thought of as a crank who doesn’t like anything. And yes, he argues that Bon Jovi goes to show “youth rebellion is toothless enough to simulate and market.” But he continues: “who the hell thought youth was dangerous in the current vacuum? Would you have preferred the band market patriotism?” He concludes: “And are you really immune to ‘Livin’ on a Prayer?’”

Leave it to Xgau to summarize “Livin’ on a Prayer” in a single sentence without really saying anything about “Livin’ on a Prayer” itself. Yes, Lisa M. O’Neill’s righteous accompanying March Shredness essay gets Bon Jovi’s anthem just right, not least because that is precisely what she deems it — an anthem. And not so much the band’s anthem as ours, one the New Jersey rockers created to grant us catharsis night after night after night in arenas across America. That catharsis, however, is not really something you really feel when standing back, looking at the song from afar, analyzing it; that catharsis can only be felt when you are inside of the song and living it.

You probably haven’t given a thought to “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” in, well, fifteen years (it was released in 2003), if ever. Why would you? It wasn’t really a movie so much as a kind of frivolous grab bag, isolated moments strung together to be patched into a sequel to throw into theaters to try and make some money. And though the movie thankfully is never smirking, it’s definitely winking at you, perhaps best emblemized by Jaclyn Smith’s cameo where she appears in a halo of light and dispenses advice to Drew Barrymore’s Dylan by way of every platitude in the book. That sort of sentience makes it difficult to anything seriously, including the flashback scene to young Dylan and young Seamus O’Grady (Justin Theroux) – chief villain – to happier times as they burn rubber while singing along screaming along to “Livin’ on a Prayer.”

We are meant to laugh, and I would cite the Tom Cruise/Kelly McGillis-ish tongue kiss that Dylan and Seamus share midway through as evidence of this theoretical cringe-inducing comedy. Yet even if we are laughing, or staring emptily in place of laughter, the characters are not laughing. More importantly, the characters are not winking. This is a Drew Barrymore specialty. She did this in “The Wedding Singer” where even if nearly every detail was meant to communicate to the audience “Can you BELIEVE the 80s?!”, Barrymore still seemed to organically inhabit the space. And she seems to be organically inhabiting that front car seat in “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle”, not standing outside of it, as performers sometimes do, essentially commenting on the moment they are supposed to be in. No, she is living the catharsis the song elicits. Boy, is she, never more so than when she screams “I would die for you, Seamus!”

There are so many deaths in “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle”, all of them rudimentary movie masquerade, but if in that moment Drew Barrymore had thrown herself in front of oncoming traffic, I would have believed.

*I voted for “Livin’ on a Prayer”, btw 

What Was Michael Shannon Drinking/Listening To on Oscar Night?

When “The Shape of Water” won the Best Picture Oscar a couple weeks ago, director Guillermo del Toro ascended the stage along with other principal members of his production, including stars Sally Hawkins and Richard Jenkins. Michael Shannon, who played the film’s chief heavy, was not present, unsurprisingly considering he, unlike Hawkins and Jenkins, was not nominated for an acting award. And so it was, or so it seemed, until post-Oscars a picture popped up on social media.

If my first reaction was to gasp, my second reaction was to wonder about Mr. Shannon’s reaction to this moment going viral. Not because the actor is not willing to engage with social media virality, because he has proven time and again that he is, but that a seeming private moment had become very much public. This isn’t Bill Murray deliberately inserting himself into a moment to further his anything goes brand; this is Michael Shannon’s personal chill time. But then I figured, Michael Shannon probably doesn’t care. Michael Shannon has probably already moved on. Michael Shannon probably forgot any of this even happened until one of his friends mentioned that he saw a friend of friend retweet the original tweet. And so having determined all that, we can then get down to the real nitty-gritty.

If Michael Shannon was drinking beer and listening to the juke while watching the movie in which he starred win Best Picture, what beer was he drinking and what song he was listening to? We have a few prospective combinations.

Spaten Optimator / Castles Made of Sand, Jimi Hendrix. Like one München Doppelbock can so easily become two, or three, or even four or five München Doppelbocks, quickly transforming a night of joy into a morning of bleary regret, so too does an Academy Award often work to merely remind us that these castles made of sand fall in the sea, eventually. Verdict: Unlikely

Anti-Hero / Art of Almost, Wilco. I have it on good authority that Michael Shannon once wore a ratty Wilco t-shirt, so hey, if, as Chris Jones says, the acting titan is already espousing Chicago values just by sitting there, why not take it step further with a pristine local brew and some Jeff Tweedy? And while I initially wondered if Shannon might be an old school Wilco guy, I ultimately decided that he would be an all-Wilco Wilco guy, reminding us that inherent values can still sometimes be modified. Verdict: Too Fanciful

High Life / Act Naturally, The Beatles. Michael Shannon has a sense of humor. So maybe he celebrated his picture’s win not with champagne but the Champagne of Beers and Ringo jestingly speculating about winning an Oscar. Verdict: Conceivable, But Still Dubious

Rolling Rock / Achin’ to Be, The Replacements. Michael Shannon hasn’t needed a new beer since the mid-90s, and there hasn’t been a good band since The Replacements. Verdict: Very Possible

Sam Adams / Shakin’, Eddie Money. Look, if you think Michael Shannon didn’t just roll in there, ask what the special was, get told it was $4 Sam Adams, order one and toss it back while some drunk imbecile played Eddie Money, you’re probably overthinking this whole thing. Verdict: Highly Probable