Gone for a Bit

We are, as everyone in America of a certain disposition is these days, exhausted. As such, Cinema Romantico will be shuttered for the next couple weeks, or so, as we take a jump across the pond to the UK to take some time off and get our heads right. Until we blog again.....

Let Julia & George Read from the Phone Book

Talking about paying to see a favorite actor read from the phone book is as familiar a form of praise ruing plot holes you could drive a truck through or condemning dialogue by asking who talks like that in real life? are familiar forms of criticism. These are all things people just say without genuinely scrutinizing their inherent meaning, which is why one of the New Yorker’s film critics, Richard Brody, wondered recently on Twitter if anyone really had sat down on a screen and read from a phone book. Of course, as several people replied, this sort of apocryphal idiom has been tried.

Morgan Freeman and Charles Bernstein, the poet, have read from the yellow pages for amusement’s sake, and apparently the late Robin Williams impersonated John Houseman on SCTV doing that very thing. And after minimal digging on Google I discovered that PRX had an entire series where actors John Lithgow and F. Murray Abraham, among others, read from the Manhattan white pages. But all these are essentially glorified Funny or Die sketches, meant to check in and check out of, have a few laughs over, and then move on. I dare say, however, that Mr. Brody was thinking about seeing someone read from the phone book in a different sort of context, just as I too have always dreamed bout seeing someone read from the phone book in a different sort of context.

Just recently on this very blog I proffered my un-researched, un-verified belief that Steven Soderbergh makes bets either with himself or others to see if he can pull off certain arduous aesthetic tasks in his movies. Like finding a fresh way to implement “Take Me Home Country Roads” in “Logan Lucky”, or shooting a film on an iPhone, or, and this is my favorite urban legend that only I have posited and believe, that on the set of “Ocean’s Twelve” George Clooney bet Soderbergh that the director could not make a scene of the entire eponymous gang just sitting in a jail cell interesting.

That’s how we wound up with that scene where Soderbergh whip pans from actor to actor in the jail cell, each pan triggered by one actor looking at the actor sitting next to him after taking a moment to ruminate, by which I mean taking a moment to just sit there and, like, you know, actor-ize. It’s inane; it’s wonderful. What’s more, I also loved “Ocean’s Twelve” because Soderbergh is one of the few directors we have who has actually recognized and seized upon the explosive chemistry shared by Clooney and Julia Roberts, and that brings me to this post’s overriding point.

Years later, when tomes are written about this period in Hollywood, this age of brands and franchises and spandex, historians will read and rub their eyes, and re-read incredulously and then ask: “Wait, what? Julia Roberts and George Clooney were only in THREE movies together? What were these studio idiots thinking?” The old Star Machine had a lot of problems – A LOT OF PROBLEMS – but Mayer, Zukor, Zanuck, any of ‘em would have took one look at Jules and George and know exactly what to do. We would’ve had a spate of Jules & George movies, and if a few of ‘em would have undoubtedly been rushed and slapped together and awful, so many more of ‘em would have been brilliant fun, and a couple, if not a couple more, would have been A+ master classes of cheery entertainment. That none of these movies actually exist is an unfathomable artistic blight on our era; shame on all of us.

I appreciate experimental Steven Soderbergh, and understand that his experimentation is crucial to keeping his artistic battery charged, but I confess, the more genre-oriented, populist-ish Soderbergh has always been my favorite Steven. (This blog’s favorite 2017 movie, after all, was “Logan Lucky.”) And so I wish the latter Steven Soderbergh would find time to concoct a Jules & George trilogy leaning hard into Golden Age screwball, rom-com-ish machinations, not functioning so much as homages as the director’s own semi-avant garde recipe. And I wish one of those movies would be about, say, a pair of bickering but in love con artists. And I wish that during production, in some remote locale, Clooney and Soderbergh would he forced to make a dinner reservation by finding the restaurant’s phone number in the phone book. And I wish that upon doing this, Clooney would say to Soderbergh: “Bet you can’t make a scene reading from the phone book interesting.” And I wish Soderbergh would then take Clooney’s bet and concoct a scene where the characters played by Julia and George discover their lavish south of France home is bugged by Interpol. And I wish that upon discovering this, to occupy and/or have fun with the hapless Interpol lackeys, the characters played by Julia and George would spend infinite hours just reading the phone book aloud.

Pass Over

Antoinette Nwandu’s “Pass Over” is “a provocative riff on ‘Waiting for Godot’”, to quote the blurb proffered by Steppenwolf Theatre where the stage play debuted last summer. Of course, the principals of Samuel Beckett’s play were waiting for someone to show up, while the principals of “Pass Over”, Moses (Jon Michael Hill) and Kitch (Julian Parker), are seeking to get up and go somewhere else – that is, passing over to the promised land. That, taken in conjunction with the name Moses, evokes “Pass Over’s” Biblical overtones, essentially envisoning African-Americans as modern day Israelites wandering in an urban wilderness, a parallel the play draws by stranding these two characters on a street corner on which they are mystically imprisoned. Nwandu, however, unmasks Biblical parables as colorful, comforting but ultimately empty vessels of verbiage, summarized in her exaggerated conclusion, not to be revealed, that despite its larger than life sensation cuts so deep to the bone it still imbues pointed emotional truth.

Those exaggerations are most prominently embodied in the play’s two white characters – Mister, seersucker suit sporting good ol boy with a picnic basket who seems to have taken a wrong turn in Dixie, and Ossifer, who functions as the nightstick wielding warden of Moses and Kitch’s metaphorical sidewalk cell, both of whom were played in the theatrical production by Ryan Hallahan. Ossifer, with his conspicuous CPD uniform, was destined to engender blowback. And so he did, not that we need to rehash the finer points of the Chicago critics’ community, though that blowback was generally born of a willful refusal to do precisely what the play is asking and look at these broad stereotypes through the eyes of its two black characters and how each case of typecasting has come in its own way to signify an overarching American system of de facto segregation. (Ava DuVernay’s documentary “13th” might be a wise choice for companion viewing.) Nowhere is that system as prominent as Chicago, where segregation has essentially been baked in since its modern reconstruction.

That divide, I suspect, is why Spike Lee chose to bus in black people from the south and west side of Chicago to see a performance of “Pass Over” and then film it for Amazon Studios. (That filmed version was just digitally released on Friday. You can watch for free with Amazon Prime.) Lee’s version, aside from adding a musical score as well as a brief prologue and epilogue showing the people he bused in, leaves the play virtually unchanged. The single difference comes on the production side wherein Lee chose to have Hallahan play only Mister while casting a different actor – Blake DeLong – to play Ossifer. DeLong is fine, but it’s an odd change, one negating the original intention of the black characters viewing all whiteness through the same lens. Still, this casting change does not undermine the finished version, which still achieves the same effect as the play with the added benefit of Lee’s fiery close-ups.

Onstage, the impressively rendered, deliberately sparse set just sort of seems to hang in the ether, accentuated by the black-lit background. But onscreen, when Lee cuts close to either Moses or Kitch, that black background is all you can see. And in their caustic, comic interactions, brilliantly played by Hill and Parker like they are an invisible rope tugging the other one when it’s his turn to speak, Moses and Kitch come across as having been on this corner for a long time, an eternity perhaps, signifying the eternal struggle of African-Americans. In that light, Lee’s close-ups make it seem as Moses and Kitch are drifting in space, completely detached from whatever is around them, suspended in some cosmic purgatory. And while the stage version allowed for the creepy effect of Mister and Offiser to appear from behind the two black characters, as if always there keeping watch, onscreen Lee frequently sets shots behind Mister, and usually from a low angle, eliciting the sensation of this master towering over his two subjects. Even so, whatever visual flourishes Lee added, none can compete with those black faces in the audience.

It is not that Lee explicitly makes them the point. He only occasionally cuts to them. But the audience I saw the play with was predominantly white, and Hallahan’s comments at the Q&A after the screening I saw of Lee’s filmed version seemed to suggest most of the shows contained predominantly white faces too. And in that context, the closing monologue, not to be revealed, as spoken by Hallahan’s Mister directly to the audience plays like a repulsive inside jokes among oppressors. Those words in Lee’s version, however, assume a different context. At the Q&A, Hallahan mentioned his monologue in front of a black audience as playing more like domination, and that might be true. But the monologue is a bout of, shall we say, sinister reassurement, and onscreen in front of that audience this reassurement seemed to me as much an encapsulation of a certain kind of Caucasian telling Black America that racism no longer exists.

Black Panther

Superhero movies tend to be defined by simple binaries, such as the old standard Good v Evil, so much so that even fascinating characters like “Iron Man’s” Tony Stark still find themselves subject to these easy to define two parts. In filtering questions of black identity and black culture through the machinations of a superhero movie, however, “Black Panther” manages to muddy up those binaries even if director Ryan Coogler frustratingly must also pay fealty to his Marvel Overlords, emblemized in an out of place Stan Lee cameo. As such, “Black Panther” is both exhilarating and uneven, brought home in its principal villain, Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), a character of such a morally complex binary that he, frankly, is too big even for the biggest movie in the world.

Black Panther is the nom de guerre of T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), who inherits the throne of the fictional African kingdom of Wakanda from his father T’Chaka (John Kani) who has perished in a sequence that while eventually glimpsed in flashback apparently actually took place at the conclusion of 2016’s “Captain America: Civil War.” That unfortunate bug of so many superhero movies, where stories bleed between one another, causes a choppy introduction. Still, “Black Panther” makes up for it with an impressive display of world building, even if you sometimes wish Coogler lingered more on the plentiful images of his Afrofuturistic spectacle like Denis Villeneuve did with his version of Los Angeles for “Blade Runner 2049.”

Landlocked in eastern Africa, Wakanda appears third world from the outside, employing elaborate holograms to disguise its technologically advanced reality created on the back of Vibranium, some sort of souped up metal expounded upon in a 007-ish sequence where T’Challa’s sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) walks him through an assortment of multifarious gadgetry. This mystical natural resource evokes an Africa untouched by the ravages of colonialism even if it simultaneously suggests both the strengths and weaknesses of the nation’s isolationist stance. If Wakanda’s refusal to share this resource has kept it free of blemish, it also demonstrates how the kingdom has turned its back on Africans exiled across the globe in bondage, one evoked in the movie’s Oakland-set prologue where a few Wakandians seek to go rebelliously rogue. And in several scenes, T’Challa wrestles with these contradictions, an external angst rather than the internal kind typically defining superheroes.

Yet despite such angst, T’Challa rarely seems torn, more subdued. He is described, simply, as a good man, and Boseman seems to take that as his cue, not only coming across less than conflicted but never really imbuing any regal awe that the part might suggest. Such awe is more present in Danai Gurira and Lupita Nyong’o as, respectively, Okoye and Nakia, sort of aide-de-camps to the King, each female actor holding the screen with a fiery presence that Boseman cannot match. And even if T’Challa’s ascension to the throne is simply taken from the comic, it’s still hard not to see the emphatic dignity of Angela Bassett as Ramonda, Queen Mother of Wakanda, and wonder why she isn’t fit for the throne.

Indeed, as forward thinking as Wakanda is, it hews close to its warrior-king monarchal mentality, glimpsed in the scene’s most riveting action sequences when T’Challa, as ritual allows, is twice challenged for his throne atop towering, thundering waterfalls. The drama of these scenes lies less in the actual action than in the cuts to the characters watching along, suggesting there is less at stake physically than civically and emotionally. That trickles down to the big concluding set piece too, which is merely aesthetically serviceable, CGI spectacle, paraphrasing Clausewitz, as continuation of politics by other means.

The second watefall challenge is delivered by Killmonger. In a feint to those of us unfamiliar with the comic, he initially comes across as mere accomplice to Klaue (Andy Serkis), an arms trader who has long been a thorn in the side of the Wakandians, and who steals a piece of Vibranium from a museum. If this sounds like the genesis of a basic supervillain scheme, the sequence begins with Killmonger jabbing at cultural theft by calling out the conspicuously British voiced curator on how her museum acquired the piece. And if so often black characters are mere pawns in a white man’s movie game, “Black Panther” indelibly switches those roles by mercilessly ripping Klaue of his chief villain status and handing it off to Killmonger.

Killmonger stands side-by-side with Liam Neeson’s Ra’s al Ghul of “Batman Begins” in the cinematic supervillain canon. If the latter sought order through chaos then Killmonger seeks something closer to justice – nay, liberation, seeking to reclaim the African motherland by claiming the throne of Wakanda and using its resources to liberate black people around the globe. It is revolution juxtaposed against T’Challa’s more conservative calls for diplomacy, bringing to mind the dueling quotes of MLK and Malcolm X advocating, respectively, peaceful protest and something a little less pacifistic.

Of course, those two quotes can and have resulted in sometimes simplifying each man, and in adhering to its blockbuster code, “Black Panther” ultimately simplifies too. If the film was mere escapism, perhaps such complaints would be overly critical, but in a movie where the word ‘reparations’ is floating, always, through the air without actually being uttered, such simplification feels insulting to the character of Killmonger. And even if his outrage helps brew T’Challa’s elixir, and even if we are led to believe that Killmonger was steeped in white culture through his service in the American military and studies at MIT, he is ultimately less an emancipator than a violent autocratic in service of his arc which imbues his denouement with extra unintentional tragedy. He might come to see Wakanda as more than a mere fairytale, but the movie itself, no matter how politically germane, is not anything more than one.

Required Black Panther Listening

Tomorrow you can (finally) read what I have to say about the box office thresher “Black Panther.” But before you read anything I have to say, you should listen to what Jenna Wortham, Wesley Morris, and Ta-Nehisi Coates have to say about “Black Panther” first.

Click here to listen.

We Name One Thing that Happened in Wag the Dog

The Ringer’s Press Box podcast, hosted by Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker, critiques all manner of media matters, and while those matters change week-to-week, one segment always remains the same  — that is, the overworked Twitter joke of the week. This bit stems from everyone rushing to Twitter in the wake of some minor to major event and making, consciously or not, a variation of the exact same joke. On this week’s episode, when the coverage of the recent bombing campaign of Syria was discussed, Curtis noted how many denizens of Twitter compared President Trump’s maneuver to the movie “Wag the Dog.” This was not featured in the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week segment, but its theme was nevertheless the same. And Curtis took things one step further by asserting that most everyone making the reference was unfamiliar with “Wag the Dog” itself. “Everybody remembers the title, everybody remembers the concept, nobody remembers the movie,” Curtis said. Then he comically, rhetorically asked Shoemaker: “Name one thing that happened in that movie.” Shoemaker could not name one thing that happened in that movie.

Of course, Curtis (whose work, I should parenthetically make clear before going any further, I like very much), and the Press Box, enjoy poking fun at writers, or newscasters, or sportscasters, or whole entities that deign to just paint with the broadest brush, which is what the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week is all about. And which is why Cinema Romantico could not just let Curtis’s painting with the broadest brush slide. This blog is an avowed fan of “Wag the Dog.” This blog considers it one of the best comedies of the last 25 years. This blog went to bat for Dustin Hoffman’s performance in a friend blog’s Essential Performances of the 90s Tournament several years ago for which we acted as part of the Selection Committee. This blog routinely thinks of Hoffman as Hollywood producer Stanley Motts sitting in the back of a combine harvester dismissing glum talk of their seemingly doomed task by declaring: “Try a ten A.M. pitch meeting, no sleep, coked-to-the-gills, and you haven’t even read the material. This? This is nothing.” This blog has written extensively on the “Wag the Dog” cameo of Kirsten Dunst, the first signal of that remarkable female actor’s inexorable comic genius.

As such, you want someone to name one thing that happened in that movie? You got it. Kirsten Dunst held a bag of Tostitos in front of a green screen in lieu of holding an actual calico kitten so that the kitten could be digitally “punched in” later. {Dusts off hands.}

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Edge of the World (1937)

Rarely has there been as apropos a movie title as Michael Powell’s “The Edge of the World.” Based on the 1930 evacuation of St. Kilda, a teensy archipelago west of Scotland in North Atlantic, when the few inhabitants living well off what would have then approximated the grid finally decided to evacuate the island, Powell and his crew filmed on Foula, a different archipelago Foula in the Shetland Islands, north of Scotland. There Powell and his crew were essentially were forced to live as those lonely inhabits of St. Kilda would have lived only a decade earlier. Granted, this undoubtedly arduous production does not seek to inform the onscreen product, not like “The Revenant”, but the photography still revels in Foula’s imposing cliffs. These myriad faces of rock are seen in imposing angles from far below and frightening angles straight down, and characters are often stuffed tightly into these frames so as to make it feel as if they really are on the edge of the world, forever on the verge of dropping off. That idea is foreshadowed in the movie’s prologue when a few yachtsmen happen upon the deserted fictional St. Kilda and check it out, finding a gravestone that reads, simply, “Peter Manson Gone Over” which triggers the film’s flashback.

Upon flashing back, we are introduced to rhythms on the fictional St. Kilda by a scene in which the archipelago inhabitants attend Sunday church service, suggesting an adherence to long-standing institutions. But then, notice how the attendees act. People nod off and have to be nudged awake. Andrew (Niall MacGinnis) and Ruth (Belle Chrystall), set to marry, flirt. The matriarch of one of the island’s families doesn’t even attend; she sits outside, like she already has or hasn’t gotten right with god and whatever will come will come. And so, this is the first glimpse that the order of the island might well be on its last legs, as if these people have already begun moving past what binds them together.

Those binding ties are seen in a meeting of the Parliament, a group of old fellows who comprise the place’s ruling class, of sorts. That they gather not inside but outside, not far from a high cliff overlooking the ocean, is telling, conveying a sense of how all their decisions are connected directly to the place, to the ground, to the roots, to the water. But their long standing values are being challenged, not least by Ruth’s brother Robbie (Eric Berry) who confesses to her and Andrew that in a brief time off the island he met a woman and became engaged, and that he not plans to leave, but plans to try and convince others to do the same. Even he is not successful in his twin efforts, for reasons to be addressed shortly, it signals that St. Kilda’s time is up, and by the end, when an infant needs modern medicine, it is a fishing trawler, the very sign of a progressive outside world that the Parliament fears, that will save the day.

When Robbie makes this known, Andrew tries to talk him down, and upon being unsuccessful, Andrew challenges his friend to racing up one of the island’s jagged cliffs without ropes to determine what’s what. It is ancient and not unfoolish, and if some slightly progressive members of the Parliament don’t wish to see it happen, others do, including Robbie’s father (John Laurie), which no doubt signals what happens to Robbie – that is, he dies in the race. Whatever the scene may seek to socially crystallize, it is, first and foremost, rendered with extraordinary skill, generating suspense with nothing more than astute cuts and framing. Close-ups of Robbie and Andrew on the rocks mix with those watching from below and above and are interspersed amidst long shots, mostly from below, to accentuate how these two men, no matter their rock-climbing skills, are at the mercy of the landscape. And if the editing is fast to begin with, it only quickens as Robbie’s fate closes in, making you squirm in the face of the inevitable, just like those characters onscreen watching along. It’s a sequence you could not improve upon now no matter how hard you tried.

It was peculiar, I thought as the sequence ended, how a movie that demonstrates the inevitability of progress also evinces how the moviemaking techniques of the Golden Age nevertheless got it just right.

Walking Through Doors

This past Sunday I was fortunate enough to attend the premiere of Steppenwolf Theatre’s “The Doppelgänger”, which is this improbable blend of broad farce and cutting geopolitical commentary that actually comes off. Because we were standby, however, there was fear before sitting down that our seats would be saddled with obstructed views, meaning we might not be able to see some action in the wings, including going in and out of doors. If that sounds menial, well, in a broad farce, going in and out of doors is often everything. In fact, going in and out of doors is so often more than just going in and out of doors, particularly at the movies.

Doors, of course, easily lend themselves to metaphors. Entire academic papers have been devoted to the meaning of doors in “The Godfather” and “The Searchers.” Doors frequently become obvious entry points to a new world – like “The Wizard of Oz” – or exit points from an old world – like “The Truman Show.” In last year’s masterful “The Lost City of Z”, the door at the end through which Sienna Miller’s Nina Fawcett exits suggests a character not so much entering a new world or exiting an old one as vanishing into some ineffable dimension in-between. Then there is “Ghostbusters”, where the door motif is conspicuously present throughout, brought home by Egan (Harold Ramis) in the rollicking prison cell exposition scene when he declares: “Something terrible is about to enter our world and this building is obviously the door.”

In “Pulp Fiction”, however, when Uma Thurman’s Mia Wallace walked through the bathroom door at Jack Rabbit Slim’s there wasn’t anything mystical waiting, just some, uh, adult powder. And yet it isn’t about what’s on the other side of the door or what going through the door means; it’s about how Thurman goes through the door. She goes through the door with the air of a cocksure gunslinger in the wild, wild west re-imagined as a cosmopolitan in reverie. She goes through the door like James Brown shrieks as “(I Got You) I Feel Good” begins.

“Pulp Fiction” was formative for this central Iowa teenager just starting to really get into film, but much of that influence correlated directly to its form. There was something else, though, that formed me. Last year when considering whether or not Chris Pratt is a movie star (he isn’t) I cited an old Tommy Craggs quote in which he lamented how film critics rarely ever anymore simply describe how actors move across the screen. And that’s a shame because the way actors move across the screen is as vital as the way they speak, react, or pretend to jump out of airplanes. And even as someone who used to mimic Errol Flynn’s movement during his initial escape from Nottingham Castle in “Adventures of Robin Hood” when I was kid, the paramount importance of physical movement in movie performances had never really occurred to me until I saw Uma, awesome, awesome Uma, walk through that door. So I guess, in a way, the mere physical act of her going through that door really was an entry point to a whole new world.

Some Drivel On...Moonrise Kingdom

Of Wes Anderson’s infinite visual motifs, perhaps his most prominent is the moving diorama, turning some locale, like the Belafonte boat at the heart of “The Life Aquatic”, into something akin to a dollhouse, moving his camera from left to right, or right to left, as he walks us through every facet of his finely honed vista. In the case of “Moonrise Kingdom”, he opens with two such moving dioramas. First, through the ramshackle home of Mr. and Mrs. Bishop (Bill Murray, Frances McDormand) located on fictional New Penzance Island, off the coast of New England, and then through the camp of the Khaki Scouts of North America, located on the same island, as Scoutmaster Ward (Edward Norton) moves from his tent to the outdoor mess hall, pausing for spot checks along the way. Each of these shots express, as they always do, Anderson’s preferred auteur-imposed order where he can show us exactly how things work in his invented worlds. Of course, look closer and you will see the encroaching sadness, whether it is Mr. and Mrs. Bishop reading the paper in different rooms right next to each other, or the lax safety standards of the Khaki Scouts, which hints at total control being just beyond Scoutmaster Ward’s reach.

What is also notable about this procession through camp is how it ends – that is, with Scoutmaster Ward discovering that 12 year Khaki Scout Sam Shutusky (Jared Gilman) has flown the coop. Sam flees, we learn, to meet up with the Bishops’ young daughter, Suzy (Kara Hayward), who we see in her own moving diorama scene where he mostly stares out the window, fitfully, through binoculars, as if yearning for what is beyond her immediate reach. They are running away, fleeing their respective natural orders where, as we have seen, not all is copacetic. That order, of course, will try to reel them back in, with the island policeman Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis) leading the chase, institutions bearing down. 

Sam and Suzy’s journey takes them to an isolated cove, where they hide out, talk and dance to old records. Whimsical might be a word that jumps to mind, but it’s notable for how Anderson repeatedly undercuts that whimsy, with Sam cruelly laughing at Suzy when she admits her parents think her troubled, only to apologize, and Sam bluntly correcting Suzy’s fanciful notions of what being an orphan is like. It’s not simply the institutions, in other words, that have driven them to leave, but the people in charge of them. But when Sam and Suzy are found, Mr. Bishop rips the tent off the top of them, he leaves them exposed, half-naked, to the world from which he, and Mrs. Bishop, were supposed to protect his daughter. Later, when lying in their conspicuously separate beds, Mrs. Bishop remarks of the two kids “We’re all they’ve got.” Mr. Bishop replies, infused with Murray’s patented droll darkness: “That’s not enough.” If they are not enough, who is?

There is another adult in “Moonrise Kingdom” – namely, The Narrator (Bob Balaban). As the movie opens, he stands before the camera to proffer a brief history of New Penzance as well as foreshadow the so-called Black Beacon Storm, “the region’s most destructive meteorological event of the second half of the twentieth century.” That this event will conclude the film, the Narrator, who briefly inserts himself into the movie halfway through, becomes something like a prophet in high water pants. And I do not employ the term “prophet” lightly. There is a Biblical undertone to “Moonrise Kingdom”, one that is slathered quite plainly across the surface but occurred to me more forcefully on a third watch, perhaps because it was Easter week when I re-watched.

Even without the presence of his prophet, Anderson foreshadows what’s to come with Sam and Suzy’s Meet Cute, taking place at a children’s production of Noye’s Fludde, a one-act Benjamin Britten opera recounting the story of Noah’s Ark. In that light, you might assume that Sam and Suzy’s escape is informed by some higher power. That is not the case, however, and while most movies might make their running away and eventual retrieval the basis for the whole movie, here the runaways are found and brought back into the fold midway through so as to keep the spotlight firmly on the entire social system supporting, or not, these kids. There is a great wave that appears near movie’ end, destroying a dam, approximating a flood at a Khaki Scout camp on a neighboring island, and while it leaves significant damage, it does not wipe everyone out. If anything, it gives them a chance to shine, like Scoutmaster Ward re-proving his worth by Khaki Scout Commander Pierce, and by Captain Sharp, agreeing it at a dramatic moment, to become Sam’s guardian.

If Wes Anderson films are often thought of as superficial, beholden to their finicky dollhouse aesthetic and little else, characters as props to pose in a movie dollhouse, in “Moonrise Kingdom”, the people, in being pointedly spared by the great flood, become the point. The great flood does not wipe the earth to leave a few to rebuild; it leaves who is there still there. The Gal or Guy upstairs is simply reminding everyone below that the well-being of this whole damn place is very much up to us.

In Memoriam: R. Lee Ermey

R. Lee Ermey had a distinct voice. That voice was raspy, as if it had spent large swaths of time shouting over people and sneaking cigarettes between bouts of shouting, as if it was exhausted with what it had been made to shout through but nevertheless still not spent. That voice demanded attention, both on movie screens and in real life. Ermey was a drill instructor at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego before being deployed to Vietnam where he served for fourteen months, going on to become a staff sergeant on Okinawa. He broke into movies by playing a drill sergeant in “The Boys in Company C” (1978) and his most indelible role was as the drill sergeant in Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket.”

If he was initially hired by Kubrick to be a technical advisor, Ermey was quickly elevated to the role of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman and not just because of his real life past. No, Ermey auditioned, famously, by barking out lines in that raspy voice while being pelted with oranges and tennis balls. Ermey’s performance was so strong it overwhelmed the rest of the movie, causing the back half to suffer in comparison. But whatever else about that movie I forgot, I always remembered Ermey, and so did everyone else, signaling it as the role that cemented his screen immortality. If it led him to be typecast often, he nevertheless was still able to occasionally imbue his remarkable presence in slightly different ways, like his walk-off turn opposite Elisabeth Shue at the hotel bar in “Leaving Las Vegas.” When his character realizes what she is, Ermey’s transition from polite to livid is harsh. Shue virtually shrinks, and it is Ermey who makes her so small, an exquisite scene partner. Still, whatever else Ermy did, his legacy was always destined to circle back around to “Full Metal Jacket.”

That role was so pop culturally prevalent that I knew about it before I had even seen the movie, let alone have any inkling of who R. Lee Ermey was. I heard kids at my school wander around the hallway hollering “What’s your major malfunction?” all the time. Joe. E. Brown got “Nobody’s perfect”; R. Lee Ermey got “What’s your major malfunction?” But, like a certain sort of Springsteen fan knows that while “Born to Run” is worth every plaudit, the preceding “The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle” is secretly just a little bit better, so too does a certain sort of movie fan know that while “What is your major malfunction” is worth every hosanna, there is another Ermey line that is secretly just a little bit better.

As the simply named Police Captain in David Fincher’s “Seven”, R. Lee Ermey’s part was not big, mostly there as an authoritative presence overseeing Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt’s detectives. He provides that necessary presence, as you might imagine, with gruff aplomb, but one scene stands out. It finds Freeman’s Somerset conversing with Ermey’s Captain cowhen the phone at the desk where the Captain is temporarily sitting rings. He answers, barks into the phone “This is not even my desk”, and hangs up. There is no narrative based reason for this moment to exist. In searching the online versions of the movie’s script this line, near as I can tell, was not even written, suggesting it was, like much of Ermey’s “Full Metal Jacket” dialogue, dreamt up by the actor himself. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, but the moment feels offhand, and not even improvised with a purpose as much as ad-libbed.

The line is inerently comical but Ermey makes it funnier by investing it with so much irritation, like this unseen caller is showing such ingratitude by calling the right desk at the wrong time. And if in the grand scheme of the movie, the line is meaningless, that’s the trick. It’s not easy, of course, to render a movie moment as larger than life when you are front and center, as a litany of would-be Movie Stars that never broke can attest, but it’s that much more difficult to make a throwaway moment stick out. And here we are, over twenty years later, and when I saw the news that Ermey died this past weekend at the age of 74 from complications with pneumonia, I thought instantly of that line. After all, I have never attended basic training, but I have sat at desks where the phone, agitatingly, has rung and rung while wishing, with all my might, to have the chutzpah, just once, to pick up and tell that telephoning interloper “This is not even my desk.”

Gemini

“Gemini” is preceded by a showing of “Aspirational”, the 2014 short film in which Kirsten Dunst, playing herself, is comically, cuttingly reduced to a prop in the selfies of a pair of millennial fans who approach (semi-accost) her on the street. This pre-movie treat initially suggests something akin to a mission statement, considering that writer/director/editor Aaron Katz essentially lifts a few shots verbatim, where his own movie’s famous actress, Heather Anderson (Zoë Kravitz), is forced into a photo in a diner booth with an over-zealous fan. It suggests friendship in our confusing digital age as forged through nothing more than an Instagram page and a hashtag, which Jill LeBeau (Lola Kirke), the woman sitting opposite them, is there to refute. She might be Heather’s personal assistant, putting out her client’s fire as the movie begins, but she is also Heather’s friend, and that friendship is what the movie’s first twenty or so minutes coolly evokes. Rhythms of anxiety and chill alternate as Heather and Jill fend off a sneering paparazzi (an impeccably cast James Ransone), shoot the shit over Mello Yello and St. Germaine, a peculiar concoction heralding the movie’s own air, and sing karaoke, the latter sequence concluding on an astonishing neon-bathed close-up of Kravitz, where she effortlessly evinces both joy in the moment and a seemingly kind of cosmic knowing of what comes next.

What comes next is that Heather winds up dead on the floor of her own home with Jill fingered as the prime suspect. If this twist suggests an injection of gravity, the movie merely gets lighter, as if a warm breeze blows through to completely remove any sense of edge. In one scene, the detective assigned to the case, Ahn (John Cho), takes Jill to a diner, more or less forcing her to drink coffee and asking questions in a way that suggests he knows what’s up. As he does, however, the camera suddenly slides left to right revealing the sneering paparazzi one stool over, listening in. Ahn deals with him, but then the camera slides back right to left, revealing that Jill has run out the door. It’s an ancient trick of what is in the frame and what is out of the frame, but in this context it also evinces how Katz deliberately diffuses his own drama by cutting away to something else.

If the first twenty or so minutes of the movie suggest that anything can happen, the rest of the movie demonstrates that nothing really will, as even a late movie motorcycle/car chase minimizes the adrenaline by keeping the camera still, less concerned with thrills than angles, reveling in the sparkling nighttime Hollywood Hills scenery as the camera cranes up. Katz has worked mystery territory before with “Cold Weather” (this blog’s favorite 2011 movie), and while no one would have confused it with John le Carré, it was positively intricate compared to “Gemini”, which has A Ha moments so easily obvious that they feel pulled from “Scoop.” As such, Katz barely seems to care about the mystery, employing it merely as a means to proffer an exercise in tone. That tone, while occasionally nodding toward the icy-blue atmospherics of Michael Mann, ultimately feels more like an improbable blend of the drollness of “The Nice Guys” and the surreality of “Mulholland Drive”, where the indifferent air of a movie producer (Nelson Franklin) does not come to stand for anything more than his own indifference to compassion and a tendering of the voodoo juice to Jill at some tiki-themed bar does not come to mean anything more than the moment’s own delightful abnormality.

“Cold Weather” was droll too yet ultimately revealed its mystery as the conduit to a re-conjuring of childhood innocence. And the ultimate twist, not to be revealed, in “Gemini” also suggests the opportunity to transform the film into something else, calling back to its “Aspirational” opening. That doesn’t happen. As the movie concludes and the camera gazes upon downtown Los Angeles from afar, the whole thing practically evaporates, like waking up from a dream.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1982)

“The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez” takes its title from the folk song that sprang up in the wake of the real-life eponymous character, a Mexican-American farmer who evaded a massive manhunt in turn of the century Texas after he was accused of killing a local lawman. If that gives this 1982 film the whiff of legend, director Robert M. Young mostly tries to see through it, often juxtaposing notes of The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez against the film’s more modern synth score. And while some of the opening sun-dappled images of Gregorio Cortez (Edward James Olmos) galloping through the countryside while lawmen give chase might tilt toward mythic, they blunt some of that myth with low angles and close-ups, emblematic of the film’s overall visual style, one that is often handheld and rooted to its characters, like a bystander to history. Even scenes that give rise to the notion of Cortez’s supposed mystical hold over his horse are conveyed in tight frames with no music, making us impartial observers, left to decide whether the outlaw does have some superpower or if he’s just a desperate dude trying to assuage his horse. And in no way does Young force the legend under the microscope more than his Rashomon storytelling device.

That Rashomon Effect is filtered through Bill Blakeley (Bruce McGill), a reporter for the San Antonio Express, who comes to the border on the Cortez beat and falls in with both the posse of Sheriff Frank Fly (James Gammon) and the Texas Rangers overseen by Captain Rogers (Brion James), sidling up to various men in each outfit to get their stories of what happened with Cortez. This might sound like an expositional gimmick, but it plays better and differently, not least because of the twinkle in Bruce McGill’s eye, where he seems to sense the shifting nature of the story in each encounter. At the same time, Young uses this storyline to show how not just fables but news stories themselves are shaped by sources, and how those sources can differ, and how both legend and public opinion can so easily take hold even if they are not accurate. In a later scene, while on the lam, Cortez, shoveling food into his mouth in some dusty little diner, overhears a few American men reading aloud about the manhunt from a newspaper, a literal evocation of his narrative being penned without his own input.

The confusing nature of these stories is underlined in the movie’s sporadic action scenes, usually gunfights where myriad bullets are fired though at whom is deliberately left unclear, the editing opting for obfuscation rather than clarity, getting across why all these men talking to Blake have differing impressions. And while the inciting incident itself, when Cortez shoots the Sheriff, is recounted from opposing viewpoints — Anglo and Mexican — neither one, brilliantly, is ever held up as right or wrong, merely differing interpretations based upon inherent fears and prejudices. Though Young places the recounting of the incident from Cortez’s point-of-view closer to the end than the beginning, slyly shading our sympathy toward him, he never portrays the American lawmen as outright evil, motivated more by a xenophobia that arises from misunderstanding, brilliantly emblemized in how the shooting stems not from anything sinister but from an American Spanish translator who cannot tell the difference between caballo (horse) and yegua (mare).

The final third of “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez” involves its main character’s trial, which is thankfully limited to closing arguments, though those principally just rehash in explicative form what the flashbacks have already suggested, followed by a thwarted lynching of Cortez. That it is thwarted is courtesy of Sheriff Fry, a fiery scene owned by Gammon whose growl goes a long way in convincing that he alone could stand out an armed, ravenous group. And doing so suggests something humane, yes, but also a societal change, one ceding vigilante justice for actual law and order, a slightly calmed down wild west. Then again, as the move winds up, Cortez is led away as the closing titles explain how the real Cortez’s fate went back and forth between guilty and not guilty for pretty much his whole life. If the wild west calmed, in other words, Anglo-Mexican relations never really did, and the movie’s open ending is, even now, right here, today, still waiting to be written.

Shout-Out to the Extra(s): Geostorm Version

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

Disaster movies are inherently obligated to spend large swaths of time simply filling the screen with their chosen calamities, whether it’s monsters or meteorological events or some mixture of the two. No matter how impressively rendered these disasters might be, however, they are often not enough to in and of themselves communicate the full weight of terror. No, that requires a human counterpoint, and so for ages directors have employed standby reaction shots, cutting from the disaster to some nameless, slack-jawed extra staring up at a green screen, or capturing some nimble-footed extra fleeing the impending doom wrecker. If so many of these stock scenes are forgettable even as they are happening, some occasionally, whether through intentional or unintentional inspiration, can achieve glory, like the Margarita Guy from “Jurassic World.”

Dean Devlin’s “Geostorm” is packed with these stock scenes. The scenic beaches of Rio de Janeiro, for instance, are swallowed whole by an icy tidal wave, blotting out the sunshine and sending scantily clad beachgoers scrambling, including one young — expositorily deemed Bikini Girl in the closing credits — the camera locks onto as she runs, and runs, and runs, somehow staying not only one step ahead of the looming tidal wave but evading a jetliner that ices over in the sky and crashes directly behind her. The latter happens directly behind her as she comes up against a no-way-out wall in some alley, which seems like far too small a space to accomodate such a theoretically smashing sequence, never mind allowing her to escape unharmed, which she apparently does, despite doing nothing more than covering her head as the plane smashes apart, though who knows because we never see her again. Once the tidal wave sequence is complete, the movie’s use for her ceases, as is the case with so many valiant disaster movie extras.

If it’s not the funniest scene in the movie, that’s only because there are so many to choose from, like the Democratic National Convention getting incinerated by lightning. To explain why our extra in that scene rules, we have to set up the scene fully, which requires us to explain the whole movie, which is to say that a global satellite system designed to control the weather has been hacked in order to unleash the eponymous Geostorm on an unsuspecting Earth. Only the President of the United States (Andy Garcia) has access to the codes that can kill the Geostorm, and to get to the President, the film’s co-hero (Jim Sturgess) and his secret service agent lady friend (Abbie Cornish) stage an assassination attempt at the Democratic National Convention by firing a few shots into the air. This naturally causes everyone to panic and flee, though the Secret Service, if you watch closely, is really, really slow on the draw in getting to POTUS in the aftermath of those shots, and, long story short, the President winds up in a car with the film’s co-hero and his secret service agent lady friend as the Geostorm is about to devour the arena where hosting the DNC where they just were.

Okay. So. While simply showing the arena from the outside as it is incinerated does allow for some prime LOOK CONCERNED WHILE LOOKING AT THE GREEN SCREEN! reaction shots from Andy Garcia and Jim Sturgess, that is nothing compared to the brief scene back inside the arena just before it gets blown to smithereens, a scene involving a nameless extra we will simply deem Dr. Phil Lookalike. This extra.....

If most everyone else has fled on account of, you know, an assassination attempt and an impending Geostorm, Dr. Phil Lookalike is still sitting there on his folding chair with this miniature American flag waiting for...who knows what. Obviously he is just planted there by the film’s director to proffer the aforementioned human counterpoint to the arena being incinerated a couple seconds later, but the make-believe backstory that emerges in one’s mind over Dr. Phil Lookalike waiting the Geostorm out is nonetheless pretty comical. And, of course, that comicality is brought home in his expression, which is brilliantly juxtaposed against the more conventional Oh No expression of the extra in the lower left hand corner of the frame. Dr. Phil Lookalike’s expression is more crabbily fatalistic, seeming to suggest a man who chose to shelter in place and now realizes, a split-second before he merges with the infinite that, hells bells, he choose wrong. Godspeed, Dr. Phil Lookalike, we hardly knew ye.

Pour one out for the extra(s).....

Geostorm

“Geostorm” begins and ends with references to the meteorological state of things, suggesting, at least in a broad sense, our impending peril if we refuse to take climate precautions. This is heart-warming and a little surprising because “Geostorm” was written and directed by Dean Devlin, old running mate of Roland Emmerich, who himself made an ecological disaster movie almost fifteen years ago, signaling how these men who once teamed up to cinematically destroy the earth now have an interest in trying to save it. But fear not, Movies Are Escapism absolutists, because between these bookends “Geostorm” exists purely as an aspirant action movie spectacle with nary an environmental lecture. Alas, even in that context “Geostorm”, if you will permit a weather metaphor, is like a snowmageddon that fizzles out, leaving us with less excitement than a few disappointing flakes, and without any good weathermen front and center to describe the action.

The Geostorm, it turns out, is not a natural event but a potentially catastrophic manmade one, brought about by a global network of satellites created to control Earth’s weather that is sabotaged. This system, designed by quasi-grizzled Jake Lawson, and now overseen by Jake’s less quasi-grizzled brother Max (Jim Sturgess), is deemed Dutch Boy as a reference to the fable in which the little dutch boy put his finger in the dam to prevent its bursting until the town’s adults could arrive to fix the leak. This could well evoke shades of Right Now, what with various Florida children calling certain adults on the carpet, suggesting that these kids can only hold their finger in the dam for so long and so, for God’s sake, Responsible Grown-Ups, do something. But “Geostorm” was, of course, made well in advance of Right Now, and anyway, as previously stated, this is all about Escapism, not Relevancy, so my apologies for even bringing it up (again). And that, perhaps, is why the Big Twist involving the sabotage of Dutch Boy connects not to, say, some eco-terror group determined to let Earth decide its own fate without manmade intervention, but a government operative gone rogue.

That’s an ancient reveal given more mustiness by the character responsible, a person whose identity you will see coming from a long way off given the Law of Names on the Movie Poster. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, just as the idea of the government being in on the Geostorm doesn’t have to feel rote. Indeed, the movie’s best line connects directly to this development, when the secret service agent in a relationship with Jake’s brother, Sarah Wilson (Abbie Cornish), whose lifeless name correlates directly to her lifeless character, is pressed for help in putting a stop to this diabolical ruse and quizzically remarks: “You’re soliciting a Secret Service agent to break into the White House server and illegally obtain files?” There’s your movie! That’s a movie conjuring up thoughts of Nicolas Cage stealing the Declaration of Independence to save it! Yet Dean Devlin, who so long ago demonstrated aptitude for whimsically rendering the hokey, proffers no such imagination here, never embellishing his absurd plot with any cornball flair, and never giving his action sequences any insouciant je ne sais quoi, emblemized in a car dodging Geostorm-induced lightning bolts like some foggy arcade game.

That leaves the performers, and performers can elevate these sorts of movies so long as they have that twinkle in their eye. If they don’t, however, the whole operation becomes a slog, with the difference between the twinkly joy of “Independence Day” and the dead eyes of “Independence Day Resurgence” functioning as primo evidence. And while Gerard Butler isn’t bad, per se, that twinkle is mostly MIA, evident in his very first scene where Jake is called to testify before a Senate panel. Butler doesn’t have the government testimony flippancy of Robert Downey Jr. in  “Iron Man” movies nor the I’m-Taking-This-Very-Seriously cheesy gravitas of Dennis Quaid in “The Day After Tomorrow.” As the President, Andy Garcia, who my girlfriend, half-listening from other rooms in the house as I watched, cited, cruelly, as C-List, does not always have that twinkle either, though he occasionally does, never more so than the moment when the in-house saboteur wonders how the President caught him red-handed to which Garcia growls: “How? Because I’m the goddamn President of the United States.”

In that line, for a second, “Geostorm” lives its most joyfully ludicrous life, making you wish they’d torn the whole production down and built it back up infused with the scent of that line reading’s agreeably stinky cheese.

The Mountain Between Us

If nothing else, “The Mountain Between Us” does not dilly dally. Most movies about two strangers banded together after a plane crash in the wilderness might take their sweet time with the set-up, ensuring we get to know these people before they get to know each other. But no, just like Ben Bass (Idris Elba) and Alex Martin (Kate Winslet) forgo any small talk in deciding to charter a plane to Denver when all flights out of the Boise airport are cancelled, we are plunged directly into chaos alongside them and forced to play catch up when that chartered plane crashes. Furthermore, Kate Winslet’s reaction as her character realizes the plane is about to plummet, is the reason why we Winslet devotees stick with her through thick and thin. She says “Oh my God” not as a panicked wail but as a sudden, semi-matter-of-fact realization, like that thing you always see on TV is about to happen and she is about to live through it. It’s a helluva line reading; it is also as close as “The Mountain Between Us” ever gets to verisimilitude.

That’s not so suggest the film, directed by Hany Abu-Assad, lacks authenticity. It was filmed on location in the Purcell Mountains of British Columbia and, boy, can you tell. Sweeping panoramas and snow-capped peaks loom in myriad shots, often accentuated in frames where cinematographer Mandy Walker repeatedly lets the vistas in the background dwarf the actors in the foreground. Even so, for the all peril into which Ben and Alex – really, just Alex – are often placed, it all feels oddly guarded. This is a movie where the happy golden retriever that comes along for the adventure not only never needs to eat but never has anything tragic befall it (spoiler!). “The Mountain Between Us” might have been better off, frankly, filmed on a backlot rather than on location, especially because the further the movie goes the less it is about the elements than supposedly steamy romance.

Romance of this sort is often generated by characters being at odds, and if initially Ben and Alex seem determined to work together, their life philosophies quickly reveal them as polar opposites. Alex, see, is a photojournalist with a propensity for wading into war zones, even on the doorstep of her own wedding, while Ben prefers level-headedly examining any given situation and then logically proceeding. This is to say, Alex thinks with her heart and Ben thinks with his head, the latter bludgeoned home by his profession as a, ahem, neurosurgeon. Naturally, this means Ben will have to open his heart to Alex, and so he does, though this seems to stem less from any kind of emotional or even physical attraction than a kind of doctor-patient relationship. She is injured in the plane crash so that Ben can tend to her, and when they decide, at her urging, to press forward, she suffers several close calls, less about the grueling reality of survival than Ben coming to her rescue.

When Alex falls through some ice, it occurs in the immediate aftermath of Ben having discovered an abandoned cabin, as if this homestead was divined to ensure her safety before possible death strikes. So he hauls her out of the ice and to the cabin, where glowing fires illuminate their faces and, eventually, they surrender to passion, or something like it, I guess, because, much like the danger of their wilderness is frequently muted, so too are their animalistic urges. Elba and Winslet, granted, struggle to emit any palpable chemistry, but watching them kept making me think of “The Revenant”, which was no great shakes but which nevertheless yearned to instill a primal urgency. “The Mountain Between Us” desperately needed some primal urgency, even if it would have rendered everything as extra-ridiculous, because even if a few helpings of ridiculousness might not have saved this movie, it at least might have made it watchable.

Double Feature of Faux Dreams

This blog, as loyal frustrated readers can painfully attest, is nothing if not an acolyte for 1996 box office champion “Independence Day.” As such, most any Roland Emmerich release is met with unrepentant gaiety, and is why last year’s “Geostorm”, written and directed by Emmerich’s ID4 cohort Dean Devlin, was must see for this blog too. It was not must see for everyone. It finished 75th in box office rankings and seemed to vanish from theaters right quick. The brevity of “Geostorm’s” theatrical run was made even more disappointing because it coincided with the equally swift run of “The Mountain Between Us”, which finished six places below “Geostorm” in the box office stakes, which I also wanted to see on account of Kate Winslet, of whom I am no longer a completist, and may never be again, but to whom I still feel a sense of loyalty. I figured, “Geostorm” and “The Mountain Between Us” would make a stellar — that is to say, intentionally terrible — double feature.

Each movie’s appearance on the big screen, however, coincided with my October trip to Paris where, for some mystifying reason, my beautiful, perspicacious girlfriend did not want to take time out from art-seeing and cheese-eating and café-sitting and all-around joyous life-living to see subtitled screenings of “The Mountain Between Us” and “Geostorm.” (Reader: “That’s why she’s perspicacious!”) But at long last, nearly five months later, the fates conspired to grant me an afternoon in which I had the opportunity for a home base double feature. I mention all this not just in case you were wondering why over the next two days you see back-to-back reviews of “The Mountain Between Us” and “Geostorm”, with a special Wednesday “Geostorm”-inspired kicker, but because this stellar — intentionally terrible — double feature is something to celebrate!

So while the masses prattle over recent releases, this blog will turn the clock aaaaaaaaaaall the way back to late 2017 for a couple movies you had already forgotten and wish you still forgot if not for our bringing it up. Join us, won’t you? (Or don’t.)

Flip Phone Follies starring Daniel Day-Lewis

A couple nights ago I got a text from my friend Rory which came on the heels of a news alert on my phone which promptly followed the carrier pigeon that arrived at my window which was preceded only by sirens wailing all over Earth – that is to say, did you see? Sir Daniel Day-Lewis was spotted on the New York subway, by Daily Beast writer Karen Han, using a, ahem, cough, cough, flip phone. First, Han simply stated this information before providing actual photographic evidence, which one might argue was an invasion of privacy though another could mount a counter-argument that this photo was simply in the interest of the public good and therefore not invasive at all.

Either way, if the Internet has often swooned over the eccentricities of our formerly greatest working actor, this sent them into jokey overkill, perhaps best emblemized in Vanity Fair’s Katey Rich comically speculating that “Daniel Day-Lewis built that flip phone from scratch after a three-year Samsung internship”, which is a play, of course, on Day-Lewis’s infamously intense methodology, the go-to joke for any situation involving him, and one riffed on this past Thursday evening ad nauseam.

But, there were other takes. “(W)hat should we make of this new information?” wondered Hannah Gold at Jezebel. “Maybe it will finally give us, as a culture, permission to ditch our ‘smart’ phones that track us and shrink our attention spans.” Others, like The Evening Standard, cited his flip phone ownership as heroic, writing that Day-Lewis “has defied peer pressure and shunned modern technology.” But has he?

I take the train twice a day pretty much every day. All I see are zombie impressions of people looking at their phones. And before Thursday night, if you’d ask me how I might picture Daniel Day-Lewis, most interesting man in the world, riding on the train, God knows I wouldn’t have said he’d be looking at his phone. I would have imagined Daniel Day-Lewis riding the subway by simply watching the world go by, drinking it in and no doubt storing up its infinite substance in his legendary memory banks; I would have imagined him looking like that other photo of him just sitting on a park bench. (Four years ago, when “Batman v Superman” was being filmed in Chicago, I was, like, 45-55% sure I saw Amy Adams on the El. She – if she was her – wasn’t looking at her phone. Point, Speculative Adams.)

I mean, Daniel Day-Lewis is the dude who twelve years ago told The Independent that he “can spend upwards of a week, ‘just staring out of the window, watching the wind whip across the Wicklow hills. Some people will consider this shamefully neglectful when one considers that there are always more pressing matters at hand, but for me, I have to tell you, it is time very well spent.’” Now you’re telling me that Daniel Day-Lewis is, like, looking at the grocery list, or texting with his wife (my God, what do you think Rebecca Miller texts are like?), or accepting a LinkedIn request (probably from Vicky Krieps)? THIS IS THE WORLD WHERE YOU WANT TO LIVE???

It might be tempting to argue that all this proves he, Daniel Day-Lewis, is just like the rest of us, idling by looking at his phone, whether that phone is his preferred Motorola Razr or an iPhone Codswallop. But while it might be unfair, and while it might be symptomatic of how we confer god status to mere humans, the myth surrounding Daniel Day-Lewis always stood for something more, suggesting a life of cordial rejection of our exhausting collective norms. There is that tale Bruce Springsteen wove on his episode of VH1 Storytellers about being spotted outside a, uh, adult establishment by two people who exclaimed that he, Bruce Springsteen, wasn’t supposed to be there. To which Bruce replied something to the effect of not really being Bruce but a different Bruce, and that the other Bruce, the real one, was off attending to many Springsteen-ian good deeds. That’s what I thought of when I saw Daniel Day-Lewis on the subway looking at his phone.

That wasn’t really DDL, that was a different DDL, and the real DDL was off studying the effects of chemical contamination on Ohio River communities, or apprenticing at Area 51, or just staring out of the window, watching the wind whip across the Wicklow hills.

Jared Leto Hitchhiking Across America

Jared Leto, Oscar winner and part-time resident of Centaurus A, recently told Ryan Seacrest that he plans to hitchhike across America in support of the new album – predictably titled “America” – by his band 30 Seconds to Mars. “I may jump on a donkey in the Grand Canyon or take a hot air balloon,” he explained. And then he concluded, twice for good measure: “I got the gear. I got the gear.” Perhaps, but how much gear? After all, minimal follow-up indicates his quest is only scheduled to last a week, which really undercuts any notion of authenticity, not that such a notion existed in the first place. I imagine this is mostly an Instagram stunt.

Still, when this blog sees a headline like Jared Leto is hitchhiking across America, how on Earth are we not supposed to take it and run with it and imagine the Jared Leo Hitchhikes Across America movie? The question, of course, then becomes who does Jared Leto encounter in this movie while hitchhiking? We have some thoughts.

Jared Leto Hitchhiking Across America Prospective Cast

Matthew McConaughey. In first considering this post, I thought of This American Life’s Hit the Road episode from 2013, which led off with the real-life Andrew Forsthoefel recounting his experience walking across America. In the mere first few hours of his trek, Forsthoefel encountered some men who dispensed advice and gave him a knife. So. I imagine Leto’s first ride will come via a space cadet played, requisitely, by Matthew McConaughey, who quotes some Emerson, Lake & Palmer, explains the healing powers of Novia Scotian blueberries, and hands Leto a machete, explaining, “Hitchhike with both eyes wide open, hombre.”

Tiffany Haddish. I have no idea what to pitch here. I just want to put Haddish in a car, have her pick up Leto, and then let her improvise everything else.

Charles Grodin. If Leto really wants to take a hot air balloon ride then why not make Grodin the curmudgeonly hot air balloon pilot who reluctantly gives Leto a ride and then, upon realizing his drastic error mid-flight as his lone passenger espouses about the finer points of celebrity astrology, deliberately tries to crash the hot air balloon simply to escape.

Richard Jenkins. Somewhere in rural America, Leto happens upon a once successful business executive, played by Richard Jenkins, who was laid off and has since gone broke, living out of his car. Eventually, the business executive stops for the night at a shantytown, where the two men sit around a campfire with other newly homeless ex-business execs. Leto explains he once killed a snake with his bare hands to fashion his snakeskin jacket from scratch. Jenkins’s ex-business exec asks Leto to leave.

Forest Whitaker. Upon discovering that Leto fronts a band, Whitaker’s character, a retired session guitarist, squires Leto to a Chicago blues club. The house band explains Leto can’t leave unless he sings the blues. Leto, it turns out, cannot sing the blues. Finally, at 4 AM, after several hours of trying to sing them and failing, Leto escapes through a bathroom window.

Tilda Swinton. Like the eponymous John L. Sullivan of “Sullivan’s Travels”, Swinton, playing herself, has taken to the road to see how it feels to be in trouble. When she picks up Leto, she steers the two of them headlong into danger, the kind they both only thought existed in movies. She loves it; he hates it. Desperate, he sends out an SOS via Instagram.

Jennifer Jason Leigh, Connie Britton, Rashida Jones, Kirsten Dunst, Tessa Thompson, Marcia Gay Harden, Téa Leoni, Debi Mazar, Gillian Jacobs, Lake Bell, Anna Kendrick, Eva Mendes, Mary Steenburgen. At various intervals, each of these actresses, playing nameless characters, pass Leto on the highway and decline to pick him up.

The Winner of Cinema Romantico's (Non-Existent) Pop Culture Bracket Is...

This month is April, which means last month was March, and because it was March, a month dominated by March Madness™ wherein college basketball teams are slotted into a big bracket and made to square off until a champion emerges at month’s end, every content farm on the Internet was stricken with the need to create its own kind of bracket, usually pop culture related, and usually while stipulating that they, like, totally wouldn’t be doing a bracket, man, if culture did not, you know, demand it. These brackets ran the gamut from weirdly arcane (Best Fake Drive-By Truckers song titles, won by “The Summer of Gin & Fried Chicken”) to distressingly banal (Best Brands, won by Häagen-Dazs) to shockingly specific (Best Non-US Capitals Everyone Thinks Are Capitals, won, in a mild upset, by Birmingham, Alabama) to predictably ironic (Definitive Bracket of Pop Culture Brackets, over at Vox, which we are not linking to because c’mon).

Astute readers may notice that Cinema Romantico did not participate in all this bracket madness. This was not necessarily because our blog is above such content bandwagon jumping, not at all, but because, well, like the Villanova Wildcats of the New Big East dispatched teams with such ease throughout real March Madness™ that they essentially rendered the massive bracket as immaterial to their spectacular sharpshooting conquest, this blog’s pop culture bracket had such a foregone victor that pitting others against her was a waste of everyone’s time. Some might say, “Doesn’t that mean your pop culture tournament was rigged?” To which we say, “The universe rigged our pop culture tournament for us.” Even we are not above the universe’s decrees.

So, we congratulate the winner of our pop culture tournament that was never contested because it was over before it was, Nicole Kidman of “How to Talk to Girls at Parties.” They say the Queen’s Birthday is April 21st, but Cinema Romantico toasts its Queen today.

Forgotten Great Moments in Movie History

In Michael Mann’s 1999 masterpiece “The Insider” there comes a crucial moment late in the proceedings when it seems the tide has irrevocably turned against 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) in his efforts to air a segment in which Dr. Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) fingers Big Tobacco for knowing that cigarettes are addictive. This is partly because of an article set to detonate in The Wall Street Journal that will tear Wigand’s cred limb from limb. Lowell, however, knows it’s a smear campaign, and so he calls up Charlie Phillips (the late Paul Butler) at the WSJ and asks to get together to hash this out. “Sure,” Charlie says. “Where?” “P.J.’s,” replies Lowell. “I’ll be there,” says Charlie. And while his simply saying he will be there seems to overlook the all-important question of “When?”, well, the absence of that follow-up question beautifully, intrinsically suggests how P.J.’s – that is, P.J. Clarke’s – is simply the epicenter of journalists. When? Whenever. Him, Her, Whoever, Everyone will be there eventually.

That’s true, of course. P.J. Clarke’s was often the epicenter, whether it was Madison Avenue (m)ad men or the “soused sportswriters”, as Michael Weinreb once put it, who voted for college national champions. It’s a world that Michael Mann and Eric Roth, befitting a solid newsperson’s terse prose, succinctly summarized in their “The Insider” screenplay:

INT. BAR - NIGHT 

CLOSE on Lowell entering, moving through the crowd of sports writers, feature writers, sub-editors, etc. He comes upon a rugged-featured man, JIM COOPER from The New York Times, sitting next to Charlie.

It’s an intro that Mann, naturally, not improbably, captures in the film’s language, where Lowell moves, sure enough, through the crowd, before the crowd half-parts and there are the two men.

And as Lowell moves through the crowd, the sound design is spot-on, ensuring we hear the murmurs of infinite conversations emanating from all angles, where you suspect everyone is dishing on what sort of news everyone else around them is trying to break, an interconnected world evoked in Cooper whispering to Lowell “I hear you guys are sitting on something sensational over there.” Not that everyone knows everything. Because upon getting Charlie alone, Lowell tries to convince him to push the deadline on the WSJ’s Wigand story, decrying it as a mere smear campaign. “If I’m right,” Lowell says, “are you going to put the Journal’s reputation behind a story that’s going to blow up in your face.” “I’ll take a lot at what you got,” says Charlie.

If to many, this room represents The Enemy, purveyors of Fake News, that nebulous catch-all, this scene is here to demonstrate the rigorousness of corroboration and fact-checking that goes into these stories. Still, if “The Insider” was a compelling ode to newsgathering, the news it captured was ultimately compromised by corporate interests, the meaning of veracity becoming twisted for unseemly purposes, foreshadowing a future I failed to consider. And if twenty years ago I regretfully took this scene for granted, now I think of it often, seeing P.J. Clarke’s less as a dark toned nerve center of truth than the remains of a fort from a lost war.

Mohawk

“Mohawk” might be a historical movie with a distinctly ahistorical vibe, given its synth score and costume design that doesn’t exactly feel lived in, and yet, writer/director Ted Geoghegan’s indie is a testament to how exploring the brutal truth of Native American genocide might be better assigned to low budget horror than big budget prestige. In watching “Mohawk” my mind kept flashing back to “Hostiles”, the more impressively pedigreed western that in seeking to convey America’s cyclical nature of violence remained too beholden to absolution and the nagging need to ensure its stars made it to the end. Geoghegan, however, freed from studio shackles, can see his horror all the way through, and even if the production limitations are often evident, there is nevertheless urgency in the DIY filmmaking that transcends its limitations and breathes life into its very obvious re-enactments.

Set in 1814, “Mohawk” opens with Joshua (Eamon Farren), a British agent, urging members of a Mohawk tribe to forgo neutrality and enter his nation’s war against America. One is hard pressed not to notice the wooden acting, and the occasionally overwritten dialogue is only made more conspicuous by that wooden acting. As such, Geoghegan picks up speed, mostly opting out of long dialogue passages for the thrill of a chase incited by Calvin Two Rivers (Justin Rain) ignoring the wishes of his elders and sneaking off into the night to massacre an American militia camp. Soon after, the surviving America militiamen, led by Hezekiah Holt (Ezra Buzzington), are tracking Calvin Two Rains as well as Oak (Kaniehtiio Horn) who shares a polyamorous relationship with Calvin and Joshua, a detail that is wonderfully not lingered over or exploited, just presented as is, a fact of life.

If the most of the perfomances are just sort of virtual zeroes, Buzzington at least has a little verve, suggesting Ben Mendelsohn as his most down and dirty. And while mostly forgoes the aristocratic air that often imbues these sorts of period roles for something more backwoods, as if it’s an Early Republic version of The Holler, he also exhibits an attitude of impressive entitlement that goes hand in hand with his character. Indeed, though Holt intones something about being the devil, he also dismisses the Indians as unworthy of God. And while he mourns the death of his son, he has no qualms about trying to kill Oak even when it’s revealed that she is with a child, which seems a little less than Christian.

In the wake of Calvin Two Rains’s reckless act, the Mohawks go into hiding. This might have merely been a device for the production to avoid having to hire extras, though it makes it seem as if the tribe is being erased right before our very eyes even if it simultaneously undercuts the notion of the Americans being in danger from moving through Mohawk land. Despite the latter, Geoghegan still makes these woods feel claustrophobic and ominous, forgoing establishing shots to keep the camera close to its characters, so close that if often elicits the sensation of not knowing who may be lurking nearby. In this way, his horror movie shock cuts gain some credence, even if you can’t help but think these characters might be better trackers and detect people before they slip into the frame unannounced. And even if the cast is deliberately limited, Geoghegan makes the one scene involving a peripheral character count, a nameless French trapper having his canoe taken by Oak and Joshua. Like, if that stock scene in action movies where a cop or criminal commandeers a car never lingers on the beleagured owner of said car, here it does, and the French trapper’s distress at having his whole existence upended is palpable.

The conclusion trucks in a supernatural element that never comes off if only because “Mohawk” isn’t willing to go all the way with it, falling back on a conventional action movie climax instead. Not that the movie’s spell is fully broken. If anything, “Mohawk” itself is sort of supernatural, which might sound like a jejune thing to say, but seriously, even if you never ever feel like the movie is in 1814, like these are mere re-enactors shooting a student film in the woods, an authenticity still percolates. It’s one horror movie where all that splattered blood doesn’t feel gratuitous but a part of the point. “The blood soaks into the ground,” explains Oak at one point. “It seeps into the roots.” Against all odds, it does. You feel it.

In one death scene that Geoghegan shoots from ground level, we see a Mohawk, already brutally injured, crawling through the mud, a futile escape from the militia behind him, before Holt orders the Indian shot dead. The elegiac synth laid over this is strictly modern, but rather than working to take you out of the moment, it pulls you in, merging the past with now, as if to say this nation, still trudging ahead and screwing up, is carrying the weight of all those sins.