The Ultimate Neil deGrasse Tyson Rebuttal

As devoted frustrated longtime readers know, this blog’s #1 nemesis is Neil deGrasse Tyson. Not because Neil deGrasse Tyson holds the feet of climate change deniers and various other troglodytes to the fire, qualities for which we significantly admire Mr. deGrasse Tyson, but because of his nincompoop-ish need to constantly nitpick movies not for aesthetic or thematic deficiencies but for failure to adhere to the most stringent (i.e. pointless) scientific realism. Lord, how this grinds Cinema Romantico’s gears. And we are not alone. We are not alone because last month at The AV Club Sean O’Neal winningly, simply decreed “It would be awesome if Neil deGrasse Tyson would shut it.”

This stemmed from Mr. deGrasse Tyson’s following Twitter declaration: “In my day, the word ‘Awesome’ was reserved for things like curing Polio and walking on the Moon, not for food or TV shows.” Oh, for God’s sake. Put me in a sack and throw me in the Hudson River. If you don’t think the banana pudding at Hattie B’s is awesome, if you don’t think Phil Hartman as David Brinkley on that old Saturday Night Live Bush/Dukakis debate sketch is awesome, then what the hell are we even doing on this stupid blue rock? This tweet, at least, was apart from the astrophysicist’s usual fixation on movie plot holes, but still…..he is, as ever, despite always and forever being light years smarter than this blog, a complete idiot.

Anyway. I have been reading Alexander Walker’s 1978 book, The Shattered Silents, about Hollywood’s fairly brisk transfer from silents to so-called talkies. In its rush to transition, studios became fearful of actors with tenuous voices, over-correcting by focusing on performers’ speaking voices, disregarding everything else, like all-important presence, reducing screen acting to mere elocution. To do so, studios consulted voice specialists and university professors, like Ray Immel, Dean of the School of Speech at USC, who, per Walker, expressed of those (un)willingly in his charge that their “vocal capacities should be determined by tests specially devised ‘to eliminate the human element’”, which is one of those advisories that can only be proferred by absolutely brilliant people that have no idea what’s going on.

A film director of the era, William C. deMille was so un-taken with this overthought school of thought that he unleashed a withering screed: “If David of the Old Testament had been obliged to figure out Newton’s law of gravitation and then laws of centrifugal force governing the stone he was about to hurl, as well as the relative density of the skull he was about to hurl it at, I wonder if he really would have hit Goliath.”

Needless to say, I stopped reading. I wanted to cut and paste that deMille quote right then and there use it to rebut every deGrasse Tyson bellyache about improper starfields in “Titanic” and how “Gattaca” wrongly cites Pluto as a planet even though everyone knows that “Gattaca” merely saw the future where grousers like deGrasse Tyson have been overruled on their Pluto-Is-Not-A-Planet horse hockey. After all, as The Shattered Silents goes to show, when Hollywood gave too much power to specialists in the wrong field, everything went to pits. And no doubt if deGrasse Tyson was put in charge of a movie production, the product rendered would no doubt wind up as “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” for the periodic table tie crowd, not to mention if the dude had been around during Biblical times he totally would have pulled a “Well, actually” on Samuel.

Battle of the Sexes

The famous Billie Jean King v Bobby Riggs tennis match at the Houston Astrodome in 1973 was billed as the Battle of the Sexes, the moniker which Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s 2017 chronicling the same event, inevitably, takes as its title. Indeed, the actual tennis match of it, the specifics of it, the how and why King routed Riggs in three straight sets took less precedence than the match’s social backdrop. As such, Dayton and Faris’s movie is more interested in the social backdrop too, allowing it to assume center stage, transforming nearly scene in “Battle of the Sexes” into a referendum on feminism and/or male chauvinism. That inevitably means much of the dialogue functions less like free-flowing exchanges of thoughts than principled statements, no character more egregiously than Ted Tinling (Alan Cumming), who might have been King’s fashion aide-de-camp in real life but here is more like a platitudinous observer. “Times change,” he says to King. “You should know you just changed them.” Tell that to Serena Williams, G.O.A.T., after John McEnroe said she’d be 700th best on the men’s circuit. Don’t you wish she could have sent a patented forearm missile straight into his receding hairline? I digress.

“Battle of the Sexes” builds its world through King (Emma Stone) and Gladys Heldman (Sarah Silverman) confronting tennis tournament chairman Jack Kramer (Bill Pullman) over his refusal to make the winning prize money equal for women and men. In the movie’s light, Kramer represents the sexist status quo, denoted by the rocks glass he almost always has in his hand, usually in a wood-paneled room. And while the character has virtually no dimension, I nevertheless liked how Pullman played the part, blinkingly with a halting way of speaking, like being in the presence of women truly brings him physical pain.

As such, King and Heldman in conjunction with several other women form their own non-dude league. They are poorly compensated, reduced to staying at fleabag motels and working hard on their own to promote the venture, all of which suggests its own movie, frankly, like an old school version of the NWSL or WNBA. But this storyline merely runs concurrently to that of King’s eventual opponent, Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell), introduced in a long shot through a window which emblemizes how he is presented throughout, all alone in wide frames, working to underscore what a sad-sack this self-proclaimed chauvinist really is.

Carell has often excelled at injecting blowhards with pathos, and whether or not you think Riggs is deserving of pity, he is given some by the actor anyway, the chuckle-infused big personality clearly masking woe. The movie never quite makes clear whether all of Riggs’s intolerant ramblings are marketing ploys or his real attitudes, and in Carell’s hands, the one-time tennis great often comes across more like an out of touch old man than someone weaponizing sexism. The closest the movie gets to demonstrating what his behavior has wrought is through Elisabeth Shue as Rigg’s wife Priscilla. Granted, her character has little to do, mostly just sitting on the couch and listening to her spouse hem and haw. But Shue invests those moments dignity by quietly letting us see just how much his act has worn her down and left her indifferent to his self-ascribed fate opposite King.

King’s own complicated love life is threaded through the narrative too, re-ordering and condensing some events. Her marriage to Larry (Austin Stowell), more professional than romantic, is compromised by an affair with her hairdresser, Marilyn Barnett (Andrea Riseborough), though the movie prefers watering down the oft-explosive complications of this triangle, punting on the opportunity to truly examinethe era’s LGBT persecution. These scenes are best when everything is left unspoken, like King meeting cute with Marilyn by way of just a few looks, attraction at its most elemental, or how Larry tenderly applies ice to his wife’s weary knees. The latter happens in a scene where both paramours appear at King’s hotel door at the same time, the stuff of thousands of bad rom coms. But the way this goes, with her husband acknowledging the truth simply from his air, and yet helping his wife anyway, conveys multitudes of truth about the complex, difficult, yet still loving nature of their relationship.

This sequence, however, doubles as one of the few moments also addressing the tangible effects of tennis. In most every other regard, tennis is less about the physicality required than the off the court emotions. This is most explicitly connected to King’s sexuality. Upon questioning it, her court on the play struggles, which we are shown less than told about, and in advance of her eventual defeat of the braying Riggs, when the chips are down, Marilyn’s re-appearance at Larry’s urging suggests that love helps Billie Jean win, reductions of King’s talent that feels insulting.

As King, Stone nails the social awkwardness but is never really allowed to revel in the character’s command of a tennis court. There’s a great line when Marilyn says it must be intoxicating to be inside King’s skin, hinting at how we all feel whenever we watch a top-tier athlete, making us wonder what it must be like to do the things they do. But we only get to see that once, really, in the actual Battle of the Sexes showdown, which Dayton and Faris thankfully linger over, showing it pretty much as it was. Grace Lichtenstein famously wrote off the actual match as “an inconsequential, made-for-television, silly matchup…it shouldn’t have been a landmark anything.” Ah, but sports has a way of laying everything bare. And whether it was merely made-for-television or not, to watch Bobby Riggs get throttled by Billie Jean King is to see time pass an old, hapless white guy by.

The Commuter

“The Commuter” is the latest in the newly bustling subgenre of Liam Neeson Finds People thrillers. The first entry, “Taken” (2008), was mostly mindless vigilantism in the name of a father’s love. “Non-Stop (2014), while narratively absurd, at least tried to forge something close to a self-loathing anti-hero. Jaume Collett-Serra’s “The Commuter” (2018), meanwhile, initially strains to – strike that! – succeeds at creating an atmosphere of dread, opening with more than passing nods to reality by explicitly referencing crooked cops, the financial crisis and exorbitant student loans. This is the mire in which Michael MacCauley (Neeson), an ex-cop now reduced to peddling life insurance, finds himself when a mysterious woman on his commuter train promises him $100k to find someone before the end of the line – find someone, that is, and kill him/her. And the further the ride goes, the more “The Commuter” loses touch with the tone of its effective opening, which makes you wonder why the opening exists as is in the first place. If you want to be “just a movie” then be one!

That opening is a whirling montage of innumerable mornings in which Michael wakes up, goes about his routine, and then takes the commuter train into the city. The swift edits contrast clothes and weather, demonstrating the change of days and seasons, time unstoppably rolling by in the literal blink of an eye, as news pours from the radio and TV, always there and on top of him, while conversations over coffee and breakfast with his wife and son exposit backstory, yes, but also elicit a feeling of how life’s most pressing moments are not necessarily given proper attention or weight, just brushed over in the post-dawn blur. It is the best passage in the movie; the second verse of Dylan’s “One Too Many Mornings” finding life, glorious life, inside a B-movie.

It frankly would have been enough all on its own to trigger the movie’s eventual mystery. Nevertheless, the backstory keeps coming, recounted in Michael’s life insurance pitch to a young couple where he blends sales tactics with his character’s history, blatant yet no less delightful dialogue, before – wait for it – he gets fired. That leads him to drown his sorrows at a bar with his old detective partner (Patrick Wilson), a scene where the two men lash out at any number of issues you might find in a quick scan of your morning newspaper. If Michael’s anger at his lot in life feels familiar, Collet-Sera also uses this moment to freshen up an old visual tactic – namely, the jerky, handheld camera. As Michael unloads, Collet-Sera cuts to shots from his side, jerking the camera so violently, even more so than later when the commuter train is out of control, to underscore a life, ahem, off the rails.

All this seems to be setting up Michael for a sort of neo-noir when Joanna (Vera Farmiga) sits down across from him on his train and makes an offer that she tells him he can refuse, if he wants, but if he doesn’t, then he’s in, all in. I kept imagining a world-weary Bogart, first with an incredulous smile than a gradual descent into darkness, so close to the edge and then willingly let himself be pushed right off it. Neeson, however, will not let himself be pushed, taking the cash Joanna offers, but only half-heartedly, less a character decision than a narrative trigger, sadly, that transforms “The Commuter” into a puzzle to be put together as Michael goes up and down the rows of the train trying to ferret out the person he needs to find lest bad things happen to his family.

At this point, every detail begins locking into place, with AC going out in one train car allowing for a space where Michael can confront people one on one without Collett-Sera and his assistant director needing to wrangle with extras, while even Michael’s established preference for reading literary classics is less a trait than a clue. It’s all clues as the guessing game overtakes any sense of Michael’s established emotional and financial straits, and nearly every relationship proves itself to be a fake out. The whole enterprise is diversionary, I suppose, and there is actually some nice humor mined from the escalating insanity, where passengers don’t necessarily just behave as if they are in a movie but truly on a train that appears to have been overrun by a lunatic. Still, as the movie progresses, the more the portentous atmosphere of the first reel turns out to the biggest fake of all.

This comes home in the final scene, a confrontation between Michael and Joanna that I will not explain in full, suggesting that she is orchestrator of this whole ordeal. If she is then everything in “The Commuter” is more or less the product of some grand conspiracy rather than any kind of societal reality, inadvertently reminding us that there is always – always – someone to blame.

A Toast to Kylie on Her 50th

This blog needs no excuse to write about Kylie Minogue. I mean, we are not shy about trying to find excuses to write about her, of course, concocting all manner of inane hypotheticals to work her way into this space. We have written less about all these “Star Wars” sequels and spinoffs combined than we did about Kylie Minogue’s 60 second appearance in “San Andreas.” Dwayne Johnson, after all, is like The Rock he is sometimes called, like a whole hulking planet, one you see right up close, whereas Kylie is like a star, so small yet so bright. And maybe that’s why the movies have never been able to contain her; the screen amplifies everyone, and if you amplify Kylie too much at one time, the sheer wattage would blind you.

Even so, in her scattershot silver screen appearances she has mostly always imbued them with her patented brand of je ne sais quoi. “Moulin Rouge” is high, believe you, me, before Kylie appears as The Absinthe Fairy for a walk-off sing-along, but, like when the Harlem Globetrotters used to bring out a ladder to extend themselves higher than the basket itself, she briefly takes Baz Luhrmann’s epic higher. “Bio-Dome” is pretty low, and while Kylie turning up might not be enough to save the proceedings – she isn’t a good enough actor if only because she really isn’t an actor at all – she still offers a brief pop diva redemption. She doesn’t necessarily need to offer her musical skillz because her glowing, figuratively gold flake dusted presence is enough, like an embodiment, say, of Elvis’s “Return to Sender” popping up amidst the dreck of “Girls! Girls! Girls!”

That infusion of her specially made angelicized (sic) electrolytes, however, just as ably describes her aura across the entire cultural, pop or otherwise, spectrum. Consider this Scissor Sisters performance at Glastonbury where Kylie emerges from the wings to sing along on “Any Which Way.” I mean, the Scissor Sisters could have handled this on their own, obviously, but Kylie becomes this kind of black-clad additive burst, a mini, in-set fireworks show of gyrations, sing-alongs and overall Kylie-ness. There is a remarkable Rufus Wainwright quote in The Guardian from a dozen years ago when he says Kylie is the gay shorthand for joy. I cannot comment on the gay part, but I do know that Kylie is my own shorthand for joy, and this Scissor Sisters’ cameo exemplifies it. Of course, she is shorthand for so much more.

I knew about Kylie for a long time, of course. I was listening to Casey Kasem when “Locomotion” was on the Hot 100; I watched the Sydney Olympic Closing Ceremonies when Australia’s real Queen turned up to sing. But I never really heard her until “Can’t Get You Outta My Head” and “Love at First Sight” invaded American airwaves in 2002. I had a serious earworm relationship with those two songs. But then, I have, like, 75 earworms a year; these songs had staying power. More than staying power, though, they had a deeper meaning that took years not so much to extract as simply…emerge. That meaning, in retrospect, took shape when I left a Jewel concert in the summer of 2002 at the Des Moines Civic Center and heard “Love at First Sight” emanating from some downtown after hours establishment.

It’s a little embarrassing out here in the iPhone-enhanced future to admit how much I once enjoyed Jewel, but these were the late 90s and the early aughts, and, as they say, it was a different time. And I was a different person. I was a twenty-something idiot, one emotionally, physically rambling about who kept screwing up the railroad switches of life. I didn’t know where I wanted to go, what I wanted to do, or who I was, which are all ancient, boring refrains, assuredly, particularly for us moronic white males, but then that’s why I heard Jewel singing “But your heart like grape gum on the ground” and nodded along while drinking Keystone Light from a can and being self-consciously sad.

I enjoyed the Jewel show that night in Des Moines (she was funny – like, acerbically funny in-between songs, whether you want that to be true or not), but I remember thinking as notes of “Love at First Sight” wafted through the summer air afterwards that I enjoyed them more than anything I’d just heard; I realized I enjoyed “Love at First Sight” more than any song I’d heard all year. So I dug up Kylie’s back catalogue, listening to “Light Years” (2000) and “Rhythm of Love” (1990), which had a lightness of being, one that agreed with some part of me I was struggling to access, and this effortless, glorious sense of being nothing more than what they were.

If she dabbles in genres and personas, what always cements her music as Kylie is, well, Kylie. Like on “One Boy Girl”, a funky number that goes so far as to include a mid-song rap to try and capitalize on the way rap had entered the mainstream in the 1980s. Kylie, however, thankfully, does not rap herself; she leaves that to The Poetess. Instead Kylie becomes something like a milquetoast hype woman, just responding to The Poetess’s rhymes. It’s wonderful, in its own way, with Ms. Minogue not trying to be something she’s not, which she never ever is, no matter what twists and turns her album production she takes, no matter what outlandish costumes she so wonderfully dresses up in. “Did I forget to mention that I found a new direction?” she rhetorically asks on her gold hot pants masterpiece “Spinning Around”. “And it leads back to me?”

I want to make something clear – Kylie was not the catalyst for personal change. That would be unfair, reductive, and, above all, ridiculous. But as I came into my own in the twenty-tens, with Kylie’s “Aphrodite” (along with the aforementioned “Light Years” and “Rhythm of Love” comprising my tri-headed Favorite Kylie Album) there in 2010 to melodically signal land ho!, I realized the spirit of Kylie’s music had always been there, improbably running parallel to my chicken-scratched journey, even though I could not always hear it, waiting for my mind to pick up the frequency of my self. It’s why I’ve never stopped listening to her.

I’ve had a lot of musical flings in my times, bands I fiercely cherish for months, even years, and then just sort of drift away from. Even ones I still love on an emotional level, the music doesn’t instinctively take hold. Not like the title track to “Light Years”, which I can go months, months and months, without hearing and then just fall right back into. That song, one of my 127 favorite Kylie songs, imagines some metaphorical, futuristic rocket ship – “Welcome to KM air” – with Kylie Minogue as the self-professed “purser”, one who promises to take good care of us. I always thought of her that way, as my spiritual caretaker. But now, here, today, on Kylie’s 50th birthday, I realize that’s not quite right.

Kylie’s music is not my purser; Kylie’s music is my pulse.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Seven Days in May (1964)

“Seven Days in May” is both a Constitutional and a conversational thriller. Its opening credits, after all, are superimposed over images of the Constitution, immediately cluing us into the fact that nothing short of the supreme law of the United States of America is at stake. That’s because a coup d’etat has been set in motion in the upper echelons of the military to wrest power away from the President, a plot that one man helpfully detects though he is not initially believed by the President’s top advisors. That seems like a storyline designed to bolster conspiracy theorists, but really this attempt at overthrow is just an excuse to re-underline our American values. Not that Frankenheimer is content to merely dabble in jingoism. This is a tense, eminently watchable thriller, made so not through any sort of traditional action but through chit-chat, though even then, ultimately, that chit-chat is no match for what one character does.

As the movie opens, President Jordan Lyman (Fredric March) has signed a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, causing his approval rating to plummet to a ghastly 29%. He learns this while being warned by the White House doctor about his stroke-level blood pressure, which POTUS shrugs off by citing the weight of the free world. And while that might be a plot point that another movie would loop back around to near the end, here it is just character building. In the aftermath, he goes for a swim rather than the two week vacation the doctor prescribes, though the movie doesn’t even let us see one stroke of this swim, just cutting to him after he’s exited the pool and is already in the midst of another politically charged conversation.

The movie waits for no talking. It is talking that is either tense or faux cordial, where jokes and pleasantries exchanged (sort of) mask the governmental tension running underneath, though occasionally the movie pauses for a big speech. No speech is better than the one President Lyman gives before a flag bearing the nation’s motto, E Pluribus Unum, which he delivers by looking to the heavens, not pleading to constituents for votes but begging on behalf of the American people for justice for all.

The plot behind Lyman’s back is engineered by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General James Mattoon Scott (Burt Lancaster), who not only naturally disagrees with the just-signed treaty, but envisions it engendering the end of the United States when the Soviet Union no doubt refuses to live up to its end of the bargain. That’s why Scott needs to seize control, and Lancaster plays the part as if John Wayne was asked to re-interpret Col. Bat Guano, giving derangement such as patriotic gleam that you can understand why so many would go along rather than cower. And while the movie initially plays coy about Scott is up to, it does not take long for the dots to start connecting, for us as well as for Colonel Jiggs Casey (Kirk Douglas), the director of the Joint Chiefs. He might lionize Scott, but as soon as Jiggs sniffs out what’s happening he goes straight to his Commander in Chief. In the company of a couple more of the President’s confidants, the men devise a plan to ward of Scott’s intended ambush, not all of which is any less un-virtuous than the Chairman’s proposed methods.

Indeed, if most of the conversations here involve men, the couple notable exceptions involve men essentially working women for information, like a drunken old Georgia senator getting a woman in a New Mexico bar to gossip about the secret army base he is trying to find. Then there is Eleanor Holbrook (Ava Gardner), the mistress of Scott, a character that, in the end, is essentially superfluous, though her existence demonstrates the nastiness of Beltway politics when the President enlists Jiggs to press her for blackmail material on the Joint Chiefs Chairman just in case. She’s barely a person. Still, Gardner’s introduction is worthy of the Movie Star she was, lounging in a wingback chair at some political insiders cocktail party If the character is barely allowed to a person that still sort of winds up feeling just right, as Gardner drifts through the movie, tumbler in hand, as the personification of the ghosts of those the political machine chews up and spits out.

Jigg’s seduction, more or less, of Eleanor is the one moment undercutting his otherwise impressive nobility. That might have been on purpose, though I suspect it is simply a sign of those times, though either way it fuzzes up his character a bit. In either event, Jigg’s nobility is born not so much of verbiage but of action. When he speaks, it is more often jokes made to ward off sensitive inquiries, or deliberate refusals to make partisan political statements. No, he is the one character whose motivation remains strictly interior, as if to him, all the conversation is just white noise compared to the words of the Constitution.

What's the Best Star Wars Line?

Earlier this month, Star Wars Day was observed. That’s May 4th, of course, because, like, you know – heavy sigh – May the Fourth Be With You. If you wonder why “Star Wars” deserves its own day, well, I suspect it’s for the same reason that there is an action figure of General Madine. But the holiday’s origin and reason for continuing to exist is not what we are here to discuss. No, we are here to discuss the actual line of dialogue that, obviously, May the Fourth Be With You is culled from – that is, “May the force be with you.”

This is a famous line. It is so famous that it checked in at #8 on the AFI (American Film Institute) Best 100 Movie Quotes list from 2005. Mike Pesca noted this too in a recent episode of his daily podcast The Gist. He argued, however, that an 8th place finish was far too generous because the line, like other lines on the list, like “Bond, James Bond”, are less examples of great writing than merely ubiquitous, whether within the movie itself or societally speaking. That ubiquitous quality was also cited in “Rosebud”, the famous explanation, so to speak, from “Citizen Kane.” And I have to say, Pesca is right. Is “Rosebud” a better written line than “I always gagged on the silver spoon?” No, it’s not. And “May the force be with you” is not a better written line than…..

Well, that’s the thing. What is a great “Star Wars” line? I mean, a “Star Wars” line that’s really written. The obvious answer here is Leia saying “I love you” and Han replying “I know.” But then, that line wasn’t written; it was improvised by Ford. And most of the great lines in “Star Wars”, the really great lines, are as much about Ford as the writing. Ford may have famously remarked “George, you can type this shit, but you can’t say it”, but Ford could say it. He could say it really, really well.

“I’ve run outrun Imperial starships. Not the local bulk cruisers mind you, I’m talking about the big Corellian ships now.” That Solo line is really just B-movie b.s., but Ford gave it the ring not of a weary actor in a b.s. B-movie but a space stock car driver over beers. He’s even better in “The Empire Strikes Back” quarreling with Carrie Fisher (rip). When Leia accuses Han of making things so difficult, Ford’s “I do, I really do” riposte is just something else, smug acknowledgement of his own smugness. (Smug Runner-up: “ Yes, your Highnessness?”) The best lines in “Star Wars”, in other words, are Harrison Ford line readings which isn’t really the same thing. (Parenthetical shout-out here to Graham Ashley as the immortal Gold Five whose “Stabilize your rear deflectors, watch for enemy fighters” is a righteous line reading steeped in regal theatricality.)

The best written Han Solo line is maybe the smuggler cum rebel General barking at slow-moving C-3PO when quickness would suffice: “Hurry up, goldenrod! You’re gonna be a permanent resident!” I like it because at least you could picture Humphrey Bogart brusquely saying this to some supporting blowhard. Non-Solo speaking, “It’s a trap” might well be a solid choice, an effective, panicked come to Jesus cry. Yet if it is only said once in the movie, it has been repeated ad nauseum in pop culture, repetition in the manner of  “Rosebud”, and not line a where you admire the craftsmanship anyway. I am tempted to cite “That’s no moon...it’s a space station.” Except that line too seems a little less about the words and a little more about the immaculate portentous spin Guinness puts on them.

“Do or do not, there is no try,” as Yoda advises, might be ubiquitous, but it’s also infused with actual wisdom, though it skews a little too much toward classroom inspirational poster for my dialogue tastes. “But I was going into Tosche station to pick up some power converters!” gets laughed at a lot, but it is remembered. Does it not accurately capture a whiny adolescence? Even so, I think we can do better.

Pesca tossed out some options, including “I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home” and “Only a master of evil, Darth.” Those are solid. And yet, it is not “Only a master of evil, Darth” that leaps to mind when I consider Ben Kenobi observations so much as this: “You can’t win, Darth. If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

Obi-Wan, of course, would re-appear in the ensuing two films by way of ghostly hologram, most problematically, sadly in the “Return of the Jedi” where he is made to utter that “certain point of view” line which is one of the worst bits of dialogue in the series, less a punchy observation than narrative evasion. These re-appearances of old Ben Kenobi, in fact, merely undermine his cautioning that “If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

Redundancy, Pesca said in quoting an old observation that he tied back to may the force be with you, should not be mistaken for profundity. And that is sort of the whole problem with the recurring ghost of Ben Kenobi. Had the films honored his declaration that being struck down would merely make him more powerful than that sinister Sith Lord could possibly imagine and subsequently allowed the wise Jedi to exit stage left, thereby maintaining his dignity, this line would have resonated so much more, a parting shot echoing across the eons.

Cinema Romantico's Cannes Brûlé Palme is Cancelled

The 71st Cannes Film Festival wrapped last week. As such, this is the week when Cinema Romantico would traditionally bestow its famously not-renowned Brûlé Palme, this blog’s variation on Cannes’ prestigious Palme d’Or, awarded each year to our favorite Cannes Film Festival attendee. This year, however, we have chosen not to bestow our un-exalted Brûlé Palme. I mean, we would bestow it, we absolutely would, to Asia Argento, but we know Ms. Argento, rightfully, respectfully, would smash our admittedly pointless Brûlé Palme into a thousand pieces.

This blog has no problem with film festivals. We really don’t. We don’t even mind the critics covering them who author 140 character 280 character reviews by Tweet 90 seconds after the screening so long as those critics admit up front that they are writing their reviews entirely within the Cannes champagne bubble atmosphere where proclamation trumps rumination. And we will never not love the inherent frivolousness that film festivals of the ornate Cannes variety provide. They are silly, star-laden, red carpeted affairs, and because this blog is more than capable of allowing multiple thoughts to co-exist in our mind at any one time, we refuse to engage with the flimflammery claiming that you can't care about something like Cannes when X, Y, or Z is happening. Please.

Still. Cannes, as Asia Argento emphatically stated when she took the stage at the festival’s awards ceremony this past weekend, was where she was raped at the age of 21 by Harvey Weinstein. “This festival,” she said, “was his hunting ground.” She continued:  “I want to make a prediction: Harvey Weinstein will never be welcomed here ever again. He will live in disgrace, shunned by a film community that once embraced him and covered up for his crimes.” Then, the turn. “Even tonight,” she said, “sitting among you, there are those who still have to be held accountable for their conduct against women, for behavior that does not belong in this industry, does not belong in any industry. You know who you are. But most importantly, we know who you are. And we’re not going to allow you to get away with it any longer.”

Shunning Weinstein, in other words, alters nothing. It make the industry feel better about itself, and it might allow proprietors of the asinine A Few Bad Apples theory to wash their hands of the mess and move on, but it does not cleanse the movie industry of all its myriad sins. Argento, however, bravely stepped up to call all the sinners still in prominent places of power within the industry out. Not by name, perhaps, but nevertheless right to their face, and in the brightest spotlight imaginable. If you don’t think she’s right, if you don’t think she was taking a risk, keep tabs on her IMDb credits in the coming years and see how things go for her.

The red carpet should not, literally or figuratively, be rolled up and stowed away as festival season rolls on. Because to roll up the red carpet and stow it away is a means to try and ward off the conversation by acting as if cheap symbolism means something. So, for the rest of festival season and awards season after that, I hope the red carpet stays right where it is, and I hope more women and men in Hollywood follow Argento’s lead. Step into the spotlight, walk the red carpet, turn around, douse the red carpet in gasoline, and toss a match. Change, real change, will have taken place only when the industry has been fumigated not only of Weinstein but of every person like him.

Paddington 2

“Paddington” (2014) was not dark, not exactly, but it did feel a little more sinister, given Nicole Kidman’s comically menacing turn as well as allusions to Jews fleeing the Nazis. “Paddington 2”, however, while overtly nodding to the reactionary attitudes prevalent in many parts of the world these days, including, obviously, Britain, remains firmly on the sunny side of the street, not so much ignoring the narrative infiltrating sadness as heroically overcoming it. That victory for happiness is connected to Paddington himself, the storybook bear (voiced by Ben Whishaw with maximum earnestness) who, when last we saw him, had become spiritual caretaker to the Brown family, and they to him. Paddington might hail from the Darkest Peru, but his worldview feels born as much from Seattle – that is to say, from Lloyd Dobler, who once memorably asked “How hard is it to decide to be in a good mood and be in a good mood?” Not that hard if you’re Paddington.

Not even when things go awry, which they do often, like a madcap window-washing stint, an impeccable comic set piece evoking Buster Keaton. Such an evocation might well be a nod toward the adults watching, but also works as an important tutorial to kids that movie action can be wrung from precise choreography and editing as much as overwhelming special effects and loud noises. That Paddington finds himself window washing is connected to his yearning for a paycheck to purchase an expensive, precious pop-up book for his beloved Aunt about to turn 100. The pop-up book, however, does not merely lie on the table, brought to life in a sequence where Paddington imagines showing his aunt the sights of central London, one occupying the thin melancholy line between mere dream and a manifestation of making your dreams come true.

That manifestation becomes more difficult when it turns out the pop-up book doubles, as these things do, as a treasure map, a treasure lusted after by chief villain Phoenix Buchanan (Hugh Grant). No role, I dare say, in Grant’s canon has so exactly matched his aptitude for mixing charm, comedy, and imperiousness quite like Buchanan, a washed-up theatre actor who nevertheless oozes vainglory. Grant evinces this throughout, most hilariously in a television commercial where he dresses in a man-sized canine costume to pitch dog food, imfusing the sequence with hilarious misplaced confidence as opposed to tail between legs shame. A later moment in which the character rues forgetting his cravat might be a narrative trigger for a subsequent scene, but Grant emits a droll, believable air of self-absorption, as if he meanders down the street entirely within the confines of his own head. This narcissism is deliberately contrasted against Paddington’s selflessness, stressed in the egotistical actor framing Paddington for the book’s theft and then leaving the bear to rot in jail.

If this twist sounds harsh, it both is and isn’t. If there is a genuine melancholy that comes with Paddington being separated from the ones he loves, his intrinsic personality gradually infuses his fellow prisoners. That infusion is literally and figuratively tied to the sweetness of his preferred marmalade, which becomes something like an inadvertent statement of purpose, helping to win over even the hard-nosed prison chef Knuckles, played by Brendan Gleeson with a humored gruffness that is not so much a grizzly bear with teddy bear tendencies as a grizzly bear who gives respect where it’s due. And when Paddington messes up the prison laundry by way of a single red sock, causing the standard black and white uniforms to emerge pink, this color change evokes the clink’s eventual attitude change, one given voice by the movie’s Calypso band Greek Chorus espousing for everyone to love their neighbor, a contemporary, Caribbean update of Sesame Street’s immortal “Co-operation Makes It Happen”.

Paddington’s sentencing, meanwhile, also allows the Brown family to bond over attempting to prove their beloved bear’s innocence. If Sally Hawkins was not afforded the opportunity to do much in the original other than offer encouragement, here she gets to step it up, as Mrs. Brown becomes a sort of Sherlock, declaring her intent to “sniff out anything suspicious”, a line reading that Hawkins invests with so much in the moment glee that the sheer vocal elan will make you laugh out loud. Mr. Brown (Hugh Bonneville, rigid comedy gold), on the other hand, initially comes across like a more hesitant Watson.

Indeed, if the first “Paddington” centered on Mr. Brown’s transformation from risk-averse to gallant risk-taker, here his being passed over for a work promotion triggers mid-life crisis. His corrective is community, embodied in his and Mrs. Brown’s quest to unmask Phoenix Buchanan as the real thief. And if you couldn’t really have a Paddington movie without Paddington (and why would you want to?), the rock solid chemistry between Hawkins and Bonneville nevertheless suggests the Browns are their cuddly co-star’s equal. A scene where they break into Buchanan’s home to prowl for clues might be based in timeworn tropes, but the byplay, timing and all-around enthusiasm of the two actors (and Grant) gives it a farcical kick that involuntarily will curl your lips into a joyous grin.

Still, prison is where “Paddington 2” truly shines. Our bear might be betrayed a few times throughout, but, in a Ferris Bueller-ish sort of way, he is a character not so much about change as he is about just sort of innately imbuing everyone around him with his own spirit. And if community is essential to “Paddington 2’s” makeup, so ultimately is rehabilitation, not just when it comes to Knuckles and company but Phoenix too. Closing credits sequences, particularly those passing on relevant information, have never been my bag, since if you have something to say you should simply be able to say it before the movie officially ends. Yet the post-conclusion sequences of “Paddington 2”, not to be revealed, is truly (and sonically) righteous, its after-the-fact narrative position emblemizing how everyone has the chance to write a second act so long as they seize the opportunity.

Avengers: Infinity War

“Avengers: Infinity War” builds to perhaps the most lyrical denouement in comic book movie annals. We will proceed in delicately in our description, so don’t run away, but suffice to say that the inherent invincibility of the film’s countless superheroes is suddenly compromised. You don’t know precisely what is happening as it does, only that it is momentous, underscored by how the blustery Alan Silvestri score mostly falls away, intrinsically zeroing you in on the characters and their fate. The pragmatic particulars of that fate matter less than the images, enigmatically imagining the keepers of Marvel’s bank account as nothing more than, in the words of Steve Walsh, dust in the wind.

Ah, but this is the last scene of a two hour and forty minute movie, meaning it takes a long time to reach, and “Avengers: Infinity War” both does and does not need all that time. It does not because the weight of so many moving parts often makes the movie as laborious as the conclusion is lyrical. But it does because so many moving parts necessitate so much running time to simply gather and disperse these various comic book clans. The first, I dunno, twenty, thirty, forty minutes involve getting the gang back together; it’s the longest getting-the-gang-back together cinematic sequence I can recall. And if you have not seen every Marvel movie, which I have not, half the time you are thinking, “Wait, who are these people now?”

In my original “Avengers” review, I compared the smattering of superheroes to a band, though back then these Avengers were like The Allman Brothers, big enough to require a pair of lead guitarists but not excessive. Now they’re like Bruce Springsteen’s pre-E Street Band, the ill-fated Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom, which surrounded its ample musicians onstage with copious people just doing random stuff, like a dude playing Monopoly. “Avengers: Infinity War” has so many characters that Black Panther, King of freaking Wakanda, is basically reduced to the dude playing Monopoly. Characters often exist less as characters than callbacks to other movies, delivery devices for audience applause. That’s why we get a Stan Lee cameo, a la “Black Panther”, a self-referential tear in the hermetic seal that works against the sober culmination.

All these characters are required to oppose Thanos (voiced by Josh Brolin), oversized, ogre-ish, who once ruled Titan, but in opting for murder to prevent overpopulation found himself on the wrong side of intergalactic ethics. All this, I think, happened in some other Marvel-sanctioned movie, as it is not organically part of the narrative here but glimpsed in clipped flashbacks. No, the integral part is his attempts to acquire all five infinity stones, rocks precious for explicated reasons that Thanos attaches to some sort of sci-fi contraption on his fist that will essentially render him invincible. As such, he must be stopped.

In charting these arduous efforts to stop him, “Infinity War” mines fine individual moments, as most of these superhero movies, whether good or bad, do. Joe and Anthony Russo’s script (they also directed) is funny, if not as often as the Joss Whedon-penned versions, with a few too many one liners that are less delightfully satirical than disappointingly conventional, like a late moment where Scarlett Johannson’s Black Widow, seeing something unpleasant, mutters “gross.” Still, an intertitle that simply says “Space” is classic, and the chemistry between Robert Downey Jr. (as Tony Stark, from a Marvel movie I have seen) and Chris Pratt (as Star-Lord, from a Marvel movie I have not seen), emitting notes of a hipster Newman & Redford, demands follow-up. We don’t get much of it, though, because we don’t get much of anything, whether it is that, or Tony Stark’s atypical mentorship to Peter Parker (Tom Holland) or Thanos’s relationship to Gamora (Zoe Saldana), originally from Titan, for whom he deeply cares even if she does not for him.

Josh Brolin is best in show, playing Thanos as a fanatic wholly committed to his cause but also contemplative, two dueling notions that come through in his deep voice. And Brolin’s own expressions, transposed onto the CGI creation he gives life to, match that air perfectly. It’s quite a performance, and the one around which the entire movie orbits. The character is nigh unstoppable, never more than a late film showdown in which the otherwise larger than life good guys are made to seem so small as they one-by-one come up empty-handed in trying to slay Thanos, rendered in slow motion illustrating how easy everything comes to an infinity stone-juiced villain. But it is a sequence carrying, frankly, more weight than the usual gargantuan ones, where so much CGI is hurled on the screen amidst whirling cameras that do not allow us to see much of anything, sound and fury signifying, etc.

The latter is all the more disappointing because they are mere retreads of an eternal truth – that is, the immortality of our superheroes. It is this truth that “Infinity War” seeks to muddy by forcing its innumerable characters to confront the idea that Thanos cannot be defeated, and that they, icons, might have to sacrifice themselves to save the universe, an idea pushing back against the emotional aloofness that inadvertently cropped up in the preceding “Age of Ultron.” It is an interesting notion the end is meant to embody. But then, the end is not really the end; it can’t be the end. After all, “Avengers 4” is slated for 2019. And that this is already known counteracts the character frailty “Infinity War” yearns to make its whole point, not so much sacrificing any of its characters so much as sacrificing a true artistic statement, merely teasing impermanence in the name of continuing the brand.

Friday's Pimm's Cup: Dater's Handbook (2016)

Even if the Hallmark non-seasonal romance “Dater’s Handbook” is principally about one women, Cass (Meghan Markle), it is nevertheless a story that comes in twos, as Cass is made to date two guys at once, trying to decide between both, while two family members, her mother and her sister, give counsel and keep score. And director James Head underscores this idea, so to speak, with emphatic, if emphatically artless, cuts between dates and situations. Like, if Cass is getting ready for one date in a white dress, then suddenly we see her getting ready for another date in a green dress.. Do not presume, however, that all these twos are “Sliding Doors”-esque. This is not a movie about parallel dimensions, or even about What Could Be? as much as What Is. Then again, even as it all takes place in the here and now, “Dater’s Handbook” finds duality in both accepting the conventions of these sorts of movies and moving a few inches past them. If these movies typically refuse to let women have it all, “Dater’s Handbook”, while nevertheless still sometimes dated (peddling cringe-worthy Jewish jokes), never exactly forces Cass to give up who she is for what she wants. She does, in a sense, get to have it all, even if she has to navigate a minefield of bad advice that nearly undermines so much goodwill.

As “Dater’s Handbook” opens, Cass’s life doesn’t look half-bad, taking her dog Duke (great dog performance) for a hike in the scenic Denver mountains, which is lingered over with a little too much rear projection. Quickly, however, we ascertain that she is Married to Her Job because we see her purposely striding through a work hallway with a to-go cup of coffee, the universal emblem of Hard-Charging Career Gal. Thing is, though, while a lot of Hallmark leading ladies play these moments with an air of I-Want-Something-More-I-Just-Don’t-Know-It, Markle does not; she lets her character like this life. It reminded me a little of Jennifer Aniston in “Wanderlust” explaining she dug her Blackberry, sleeping pill and latte to Malin Akerman’s nouveau hippie. And so even if Cass’s beau is obviously a lunkhead who does not deserve her, taking her to the batting cages for a date, there is an air of credibility to the idea that she would be in a relationship that does not require her true emotional presence.

The plot instigator here, frankly, is less Cass than her sister, Nadia (Christine Chatelain), as obnoxious a movie character as I have encountered though I am unconvinced the movie creators were mindful of this obnoxiousness. It is Nadia who urges her sister utilize the coaching of Dr. Susie (Teryl Rothery), author of self-help romance books that gives the film its title, in the hopes that this self-proclaimed guru’s belief that it is generally you, not him, at fault for relationships going bust will help flip a switch in Cass. And so, after Cass splits with her lunkhead and then meets cute at a wedding with Robert (Kristoffer Polaha), rather than letting fate chart her course, Cass lets Nadia, with the aid of Dr. Susie, guide her instead.

This is the only reason why Cass even starts seeing George (Jonathan Scarfe), a client, at the same time she is seeing Robert, meaning that each time she has a date with one, she reports back to Nadia and her mom Gloria (Lynda Boyd), with the latter taking Robert’s side and the former taking George’s. Nadia likes George because he seems to check key un-amorous boxes on Dr. Susie’s checklist regardless of Cass’s clear hesitation, and despite Cass’s clear-cut chemistry with Robert. Markle lends great credibility to that chemistry, flirtatiously giving shit with great aplomb, effusing a detectable glow in his presence. (Markle could have played the Cody Horn part in “Magic Mike.”) And in scenes with George, quietly, she mutes that glow by aiming to please rather than being herself, as if she is tip-toeing around that one room in the house your parents forbade you from entering.

Granted, George is not as blatant a dolt as you usually get in these situations. If nothing else, he is entirely respectful of Cass even if he does not seem to be all that interested in what she’s like as a person. And even if Markle evinces the idea that cosmically she is just blundering into the wrong relationship all over again, the obvious strings that Nadia, anti-matchmaker, pulls are enough to make you (that is to say, me), utterly partial viewer, Meghan Markle fan, want to scream at the television. Seriously, Nadia seems to operate from a place of knowing next to nothing about Cass’s actual wants and emotional failings which is ridiculous because, obviously, this should not be about what Nadia wants.

It made me think a little about Harry – you know, Harry, Prince of Wales. Monarchies, of course, are insider-exclusive, but Harry, bless his heart, chose an outsider to wed, one Meghan Markle. Why you can practically imagine the Queen consulting her own Dr. Susie and being inspired to point the young Prince toward a more suitable George-ish Duchess. Ah, but like Markle’s Cass eventually allowed herself to see the light, so did Prince Harry, adhering not to some Royals-Only Search Committee but to the desires of his own heart. Perhaps it’s not an exact match, but still. Hallmark Channel movies are, rightfully, respectfully, televised clotted cream; they are also, occasionally, rarely, really rarely, emotionally true.

Solo: A Star Wars Story, Best Case Scenario

Han Solo was not really always my favorite “Star Wars” character. When I was first falling in love with George Lucas’s space opera, Luke Skywalker was my favorite character. It was easier as a precocious adolescent to identify with a kid who hadn’t been further than Anchorhead than a grouchmaster gruff who had seen it all. Over time, however, Han Solo’s charms worked on me, which is to say that Harrison Ford’s I-Wish-I-Was-A-Carpenter anti-charm worked on me. If as a little kid I understood on some non-cognitive level that there was something innately cool about the spice smuggler propping his feet up on the table shooting Greedo first, it didn’t really begin to hit home until reality begin intruding as I tried, desperately, to come of age, striking MTV-influenced disaffected poses while on vacation with my parents to make it seem like I wasn’t with my parents. I was trying to leave Luke Skywalker behind, in other words, to become Han Solo, which is impossible but the compulsory De-Leon-ish teenage quest nonetheless. All that is to say, if you had told me in the early 90s that there was going to be a Han Solo standalone movie, oh my God, I would have flipped my lid. Back then we only had three “Star Wars” movies, after all, and at that time maybe Harrison Ford still would have been spinoff Solo, even if he would have sabotaged all his lines like the “Blade Runner” voiceover, which would have been just right. A Han Solo spinoff anchored by a disinterested Ford would have been the tops.

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Once upon a time a Steven Seagal thriller was as commonplace during the movie season as a superhero movie is in the present. Seagal’s movies were interchangeable entertainment, reflected not merely in their gunplay and kung-fu but in titles like “Out for Justice” and “Marked for Death” that seemed to come straight from some Hollywood brainstorming session overseen by risk management experts who prefer Bud Light at the bar and their fish served very plain. The quasi-snappy three words, in fact, are a hallmark of Seagal movie titles, where even the ones that are not three words sound like they are, whether it’s “Under Siege” blowing two words out to three syllables or “Fire Down Below” sounding less like four syllables than roughly 3.5. The essential sameness of these names correlates directly to their analogous adventures. I have seen some of these movies, but I could not necessarily tell you which ones I have seen and which ones I have not. I have seen “Hard to Kill”, I think, and not “Above the Law”, but it could be, I suspect, that I have seen “Above the Law” and not “Hard to Kill.” This is entirely appropriate. Steven Seagal Three Word Title Movies are not intended for rumination, which is why I always found it funny that he tried to jam environmental issues into “On Deadly Ground” (which I have seen…maybe). This blog supports protecting the environment, sure, but A Steven Seagal Three Word Title Movie is designed to go in one ear and out the other and left with your empty Junior Mints box on the theater floor, experienced in the moment, enjoyed in a mindless sort of way, and never thought of again.

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“Solo: A Star Wars Story” doesn’t sound like a Steven Seagal Three Word Movie Title. It sounds more like “The Path Beyond Thought”, a documentary about Steven Seagal’s time as a sensei in Japan, which I have not seen and which might be really, really good, but is nevertheless a title a few leagues apart from, say, the expository glory of “Half Past Dead.” “The Hutt Gambit”, which was the second book in a series concering Han Solo written by A.C. Crisp, is more indicative of the eponymous ring I wish Ron Howard’s movie was going for, less a Memorial Day weekend event than a late April or late September release. “Solo: A Star Wars Story” makes it sound determined to fit squarely into the franchise, meaning it will become fodder for endless conversations about its place in the canon. And whereas long ago, in a lifetime far, far away, I would have been ripe for those conversations, these days I find myself exhausted with them, a little burned out on this franchise that once meant so much to me. I have, I realize, become, finally, all these years later, in a way, Han Solo, just as I always dreamed, meeting his own movie on his level, less excited than indifferent, wishing that “Solo: A Star Wars Story” was nothing more than a Steven Seagal Three Word Movie, watched and forgotten, destined to be followed a little while later by an eminently forgettable movie too.

5 More Musicals Based on Movies Absolutely No One Needs

I saw a lot of theatre on my recent jaunt to London, but what I did not see was any musical based on a movie. And, near as I could tell, there were numerous musicals based on movies from which to choose. Every tube stop was adorned with multitudinous posters for “School of Rock” the musical and “Strictly Ballroom” the musical and “Young Frankenstein” the musical and “Aladdin” the musical, and soon England’s capital will have “Bring it On” and “Heathers” musicals on the docket too.

This, frankly, is just as true of my city, Chicago, where a quick scan of upcoming musicals finds such names as “Pretty Woman”, “Dirty Dancing”, “Waitress”, “The Color Purple”, and “Tootsie.” If interest in going to the movies is on the wane then perhaps this spate of movies cum musicals suggests that the movies’ future is, paradoxically, on the stage. That, however, is a theory that probably is not true and that I am not inclined to follow up on anyway. No, what interests this blog, as you no doubt expect, is what other musicals based on movies should (not) exist? Do we have ideas? You better believe we have ideas.

5 More Musicals Based on Movies Absolutely No One Needs

The Avengers. Triple dog duh. Sure, “Spider-Man” flopped on Broadway, but our “Avengers” musical will not. This is because we will forgo complicated staging derring-do for ironic posturing. Robert Downey Jr. has sung and danced before, of course, in “The Singing Detective” as well as an episode of “Ally McBeal.” Except we do not want Downey Jr. to sing and dance. As comically disagreeable Tony Stark, he will spend all of “The Avengers Follies” trying not to sing and dance as his various Avenging cohorts melodically exhort him to join in the fun.

Runaway Jury. My friend Daryl long ago dreamt up the seemingly ludicrous idea of a musical based on “Runaway Jury.” Daryl can pitch ideas like the rain falls and yet, for reasons I struggle to explain, this one always stuck with me more than many of the others. Maybe this is just because picturing John Grisham Comes To Broadway! subway advertisements sounds hilarious. Whatever the case, the idea was just tossed off, not really fleshed out, and so what I propose is this: a “Mamma Mia!” inspired adventure in which our dueling lawyers try to select a jury all while singing, in a nod to the movie’s News Orleans setting, the hits of Fats Domino.

Jurassic World. The resurgent “Jurassic” franchise is ripe for cashing in via the stage. So, for the musical let’s turn Jurassic World into a sort of Sleepaway Camp where paleontologists double as chaperones and feud with their charges against the backdrop of dino mayhem. A T-Rex named Doug plays the King George III of “Hamilton” role as intermittent comic relief.

Cocktail. I’m actually a little insulted that Roger Donaldson’s 1988 box office bonanza, non-masterpiece has yet to receive the musical treatment. Its soundtrack, after all, was a Billboard powerhouse, fueled by The Beach Boys’ (Mike Love version) “Kokomo.” And whether the musical version embodies the trivial all-inclusive Caribbean resort atmosphere of the song’s surface or evokes the tune’s melancholy undercurrent that Molly Lambert latched onto several years ago in a piece at Grantland (rip) to render it euphonic revisionism, I don’t particularly care. Let’s just do this thing and start brainstorming how to get a waterfall on the stage.

Streets of Fire. Like “Cocktail”, Walter Hill’s cult(ish) classic, billed as A Rock ’n Roll Fable, is readymade for the stage. Why two of its songs were written by Jim Steinman whose “Bat Out of Hell” musical is running in London too! So let’s cast Carly Rae Jepsen as Ellen Aim and put on a show.

Kodachrome

“Kodachrome” takes its name from the Eastman Kodak color reversal film beloved by photographers, professional or otherwise, all the way up until it went bust in 2010. Paul Simon explained Kodachrome by verse in the 70s, singing how it “Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day.” True, but director Mark Raso’s movie is mostly cloudy given that it turns on a son, Matt Ryder (Jason Sudeikis), estranged from a father, Ben (Ed Harris), who is, as he must be, on death’s doorstep. His impending demise from cancer coordinates with the demise of Kodachrome itself, meaning that Ben, a renowned professional photographer, and his live-in nurse, Zooey (Elizabeth Olsen), enlist Matt to briefly squelch his anger to squire them from New York to Kansas to get Ben’s final rolls of old school Eastman Kodak developed at the last Kodachrome lab standing.

The movie was based on a jaunty 2010 New York Times piece by A.G. Sulzberger suggesting something like that scene in “Contact” when Jodie Foster's character encounters an endless parade of E.T.-adoring eccentrics camped outside Cape Canaveral. Alas, “Kodachrome” prefers to mope, which doesn’t have to be bad thing except the movie fails to extract any genuine revelation from all its despondency. Given that the movie centers on a road trip, and given that Kodachrome’s heyday was the 60s and 70s, and given that several conversations revolve around the authenticity and tangibility of actual film as opposed to the data & dust of our present day digital landscape (and which is nominally tied into Matt’s career as a music agent), it is tempting to think that “Kodachrome” might harken back to the American New Wave road trip movies. It does not. It forgoes breaking any rules, or even teasing narrative disobedience, to paint by numbers, right down to Ben’s Magical Negro manager (Dennis Haysbert).

What’s more, for a movie in which photography plays a pivotal part, the cinematography fails to inspire, opting for standard issue country-passing shots out of car windows and shots of Matt standing forlornly at windows of various places he stays. The exception is a shot of Ben in the backseat of the trio’s convertible seeing a young girl at the window of a passing Amtrak train and snapping her photo. As he does, he beams a smile ultimately revealed as the character’s most earnest moment in the whole movie, briefly unlocking a world in which his photographic subjects bring him more joy than his own kid at the wheel of the car.

That moment informs Harris’s agreeably prickly performance. He has a little Royal Tenenbaum about him, not that the movie explores it any real way. When Matt briefly catches sight of his father looking at him through a bathroom door, Ben quickly slams the door shot, a moment evoking a well of fatherly resentment that, like the scene itself, the movie keeps locked away. Instead Ben’s arc builds to a deathbed confessional. The dialogue, alas, illuminates little, though Harris gives the moment all he’s got, purposely refusing to look at Sudeikis’s character throughout, keeping his eyes closed.

Sudeikis, meanwhile, is as Sudeikis does, falling flat in dramatic moments and excelling when comically riffing with his counterparts, particularly Olsen. Oh, Zooey is a woefully written character, less any kind of actual nurse than a female who is there not to do much more than help change the male protagonist. That she does, exiting at the end of the 2nd act to give him space to figure things out, and then, when he has, re-appearing to embrace him. For God’s sake.

Still, Olsen, like Harris, musters up a little dimension on her own. When Matt pointedly begs to differ at her pleas to give his Dad a chance, Olsen lets the anger just roll right off, like his language is rain moving through a gutter and out the spout. Even better is a late night hang scene at some nameless bar where Zooey sings along to Live. Ostensibly this is nothing more than the trigger to Matt and Zooey’s Will They / Won’t They Moment, though Olsen makes it something more. It is, I suppose, glorified karaoke, but sometimes in karaoke the performer channels the artist being covered. And in channeling Ed Kowalczyk, Olsen makes it electrifying, comically electrifying and electrifying electrifying.

I know. I get it. It’s hard to explain. But then, Norman Maine once opined of Esther Blodgett, “She’s got a little something extra.” And people, I’m telling you, Olsen, in that moment, had a little something extra. It’s the one image in the whole movie you actually see — mystically, that is — in Kodachrome.

You Were Never Really Here

The world is polluted by noise, whether it’s the omnipresent industrial sounds of the city or the perpetual din of our various electronic devices. As such, movies take great pains to remove that noise. A scene filmed under train tracks siphons the rattle from the soundtrack while a joy ride in a convertible with the top down eliminates the rushing wind so we can actually hear the characters communicating. In “You Were Never Really Here”, however, director Lynne Ramsey, in concert with her sound designer and supervising sound editor Paul Davies, works hard to put all that sound in, concocting a cacophony of a whole city that seems to bring about the slouch of the movie’s protagonist, Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), as if he is pinned beneath this unremitting racket. On a stroll through the city, the sound of cars and construction is raised to almost deafening levels. And when the movie ends, Ramsey lets a gaggle of indecipherable voices float over the closing credits. And because the movie has ended, and because the movie has ended the way it has, this conversational low hum pointedly evokes the sensation of so much noise going on long after we have left this rock.

Joe is a traumatized Afghan vet caring for his mentally, physically diminished mother (Judith Roberts) while making money by playing hero, or a version of it, rescuing little girls who have been kidnapped and placed into sex trafficking rings. If his actions at least place Joe on the right side of good and evil, it does not necessarily mean he holds the moral high ground entirely as his methods of salvation are never presented as anything other than brutal. In a scene where he acquires job supplies, Joe lingers over a ballpeen hammer, which Phoenix underlines by grinning, as if search and rescues go hand in hand with grisly kicks. It is a little moment offering a world of insight, which is the standard m.o. of “You Were Never Really Here”, a movie building outwardly in, like a thousand scattered puzzle pieces, all of which fit together by the end though not necessarily in the way that picture on the box might have led you to believe.

“You Were Never Really Here” opens not with any kind of establishing shot but a series of quick close-ups, so jumbled and discursive that it takes you some time to not only piece together what’s happening but that they are not all happening at the same time. What’s more, we don’t even get a real good look at Joe until much later, and even then he seems to be hiding from the camera. This is a movie that makes you work to put it all together, disassembling flashbacks to Joe’s past without ever really settling down to explain what’s what and where he is. This fragmentation, frankly, is a more effective device at putting us in his throbbing headspace, as is Jonny Greenwood’s ferocious score, rather than a brief reference to Joe’s pill-popping.

This abstraction extends to the movie’s violence. As Joe is tasked by a Senator (Alex Manette) to recover his daughter, Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), bodies pile up. Even as they do, Ramsey evades the most ghastly details, preferring to artfully elicit an uneasy feeling through atmosphere. As Joe infiltrates the house of horrors where Nina is kept, the scene is scored to Rosie & the Originals’ “Angel Baby” which might have suggested the kind of kicky gratuitousness that Quentin Tarantino loves. Except that Ramsey shoots the scene primarily in obtuse angles from the viewpoint of black and white security cameras, all of which add up to an otherworldly sensation, almost as if the ghost from “The Ring” is starring in a macabre music video.

From there, Joe finds himself ensnared in a web reaching higher than he expected. That it does seems to suggest the movie building toward a traditional sort of climax, particularly as Joe storms a scenic mansion, like a peasant invading Versailles. Yet at the moment of truth, the movie takes a turn, evoked in Joe’s reaction to an unexpected development which Phoenix has the character meet with an incredulous sort of chuckle that is at least as good as Josh Brolin’s fatalistic grunt when finding that case of cash in “No Country For Old Men.” And what seemed to be trending toward superhero territory opts for the surreal, with an ending that simultaneously illuminates and mystifies.

It’s a dangerous game being played by “You Were Never Really Here”, not so much in its anti-narrative as in threatening to dissolve into a cloud of negativist acceptance or tipping into child exploitation. That it dodges these traps is because of the sunshine Ramsey lets in, and the unexpected ways she does, like the bizarre delight Joe finds in picking a lone green jelly bean out of a bowl of all the wrong colors, or, most particularly, the comfort he tenders to a nameless, dying bad guy. It’s a shot recalling the denouement of “Heat”, though that shot was deliberately built to for three hours and this one is just all of a sudden dropped in which is what makes it special. As the dying guy lies there, he and Joe begin singing along with a song on the radio. If they seem to do this in spite of themselves, the tug on your heart might well be in spite of yourself too, and for a moment, all the rest of the noise falls away, leaving you only bizarre, beautiful lyricism.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Local Hero (1983)

The fictional Scottish town Ferness at the center of “Local Hero”, while thankfully not stereotypically presented as a pocket of backward thinking rubes like these sorts of movies are wont to do, still feels out of time. And that is appropriate because “Local Hero” itself feels out of time too. It is not simply that the film often feels apart from its 1980s setting, but that it feels apart from the various genres it seems to inhabit. The film is not as supine as a simple fantasy nor as obvious as a fish out of water comedy or as grave as a drama. No, it swims along its own wavelength. If that wavelength is not exactly magical realism, because it never gives itself over to make believe and never even passes itself off as a parable despite environmental urges on the periphery, it nevertheless comes across a little fantastical. And that, I think, is because no movie so astutely, effortlessly captures the, shall we say, spirituality that goes hand-in-hand with traveling, where a place intrinsically surrounds and then overwhelms you, until you find yourself standing in the middle of it, wishing you could remain there forever.

“Local Hero” turns on a business trip undertaken by Houston’s Knox Oil and Gas exec MacIntyre (Peter Riegert) at the behest of his overlord, Felix Happer (Burt Lancaster), to acquire Ferness in order to erect an oil refinery on their beach. MacIntyre is chosen on account of his ostensibly Scottish surname, which isn’t really the case since his family changed its name, an early signifier of the lie that our emergently heroic, in his own leisurely way, exec is living. MacIntyre is introduced calling co-workers on the phone even though they can see one another from across the office, eating lunch at the vending machine, and more connected to his Porsche than any human being. We see him in the Porsche in the very first scene, cruising the freeway amidst so many skyscrapers, talk radio blasting. This moment works as a wonderful contrast against a later shot across the pond of he and local Knox rep Danny (Peter Capaldi) stopping progress on account of fog and sleeping in their car for the night. When they awake, the fog has lifted. Eventually, metaphorically, the fog will lift from MacIntyre too.

It is a testament to Forsythe’s direction that MacIntyre’s character shift is not simply explicated in dialogue or virtue of any kind of clear-cut inciting incident. Rather the place itself just sort of seems to wash over him, evoked in the way he eventually ditches his suit for a cable-knit sweater and lets a beard grow in, as if his change has bubbled up from the inside-out. That place, meanwhile, is not presented as a mere postcard. Even if the aurora borealis and a few comets illuminate the night sky, in the morning that same sky is dotted by practicing fighter jets, a paradise compromised. These warplanes play directly into the townfolk not only not being opposed to the sale but actively rooting for it, represented by Urquhart (Denis Lawson), the innkeeper but also the town accountant, a reveal in which the comedy is deliberately undercut by the straightforward way MacIntyre receives it.

If this American might initally leave Urquhart a little skeptical, he is never exactly cold, and by the end the two have become something akin to friends. This is best seen in a mid-movie sequence where the town gathers for a dance. Here, through music and character interaction, you glean the sadness and sweetness at the center of Ferness, where custom might bind them together but also suggests why time is running out. Still, like any hardened traveler who suddenly feels his heart lifted, MacIntyre cannot help but be moved. And he confesses a desire at switching places with Urquhart, which Lawson has his character meet with a good-natured nod, like he has heard it all before. For an instant, you wonder if the scotch they are drinking might be a smokey elixir to making MacIntyre’s wish come true.

If we are conditioned from so many movies before to expect the sale to be called off in the end, particularly when it turns out the beach is owned by an old man who refuses to sell, “Local Hero” actually finds a way around this without compromising its narrative integrity. Oh, Happer might swoop in to the save the day at the end, but his character is more than a deus ex machina. He is introduced not in any grand manner but sound asleep, snoring through a meeting outlining the acquisition, as if he has already checked out from the business he ostensibly oversees. If he has, he nevertheless cannot rid himself of it, which is what the aversion therapist following him around seems intended to help correct, by repeatedly invading Happer’s space to call him unkind names in the movie’s most obvious nod toward broad comedy. But what really saves Happer is the sky, where he is constantly looking, even if it is more often a make-believe one in something like a faux observatory he has installed in his office. And when he arrives in Ferness, the solution he fashions is agreeably casual in its obviousness rather than making a big fuss about how it all works out.

It all works out for everyone except for MacIntyre, which is “Local Hero’s” real twist, if you want to call it that. Because as the movie winds down, Happer asks MacIntyre to head back to Houston, deliberately rendered as the one moment in a slow burn movie that feels brusque. MacIntyre does not want to leave, of course, but he is duty bound. And the concluding juxtaposition of the glittering but impersonal Houston skyline with the red phone booth of Ferness evokes the spell travel casts so quietly but so searingly that it’s enough to make anyone who has ever fallen for some faraway place weep.