Friday's Old Fashioned: Armageddon (1998)

This blog and Michael Bay no longer speak. That is to say, I no longer go to see Michael Bay movies. After all, I have routinely cited Bay’s 1998 skunk spray opus “Armageddon” as the worst movie I have ever seen. This led Cinema Romantico to talk a lot of trash about the “Transformers” movies, none of which I have seen, and which a friend, Brad, rightly called me on – do I really have the right to deride movies I have not watched? So, I simply stopped seeing Michael Bay movies and talking about Michael Bay at all. It’s better for him; it’s better for you; it’s better for me. And yet. A couple months ago, I was listening to Slate’s Hit Parade podcast where host Chris Molanphy takes riveting monthly deep dives into Billboard Hot 100 history. And on that episode from April, Molanphy’s focus was Bon Jovi, a band he flatly copped to not liking. And though he came away still not liking them, he also gave them some credit, turning over, like, half a new leaf. As I listened to this, with the 20th anniversary of “Armageddon’s” release fast approaching, well, reader, I knew what I had to do; I had to re-watch “Armageddon.” In these divisive times, are we not frequently implored to hear the other side?

It’s become somewhat de rigueur in pop culture discourse to call Michael Bay an auteur (or, its wicked stepsister, a vulgar auteur) and then to call these auteurist citations on the carpet. Watching “Armageddon”, however, in which an oil drilling crew is recruited by NASA to land on an asteroid screaming toward Earth and bore a hole in the space rock to insert a nuclear bomb to save the world, made me think Bay is undoubtedly an auteur. Though occasionally a little acting can be glimpsed, Bay prefers planting stars stolidly in the frame and then sliding the camera past them, or spinning it around them, from his signature low angle, reducing all these no doubt well compensated performers to mere unmoving objects of his camera’s affection. They are all powerless props to his ultimate vision, and Bay is like the asteroid, which the movie occasionally cuts to, hurtling through space. It doesn’t actually hit Earth, of course, but why would it need to when Bay himself has already ground our retinas to dust?

Bay, of course, keeps his pedal to the metal, so much so that the two space shuttles re-fueling at a space station is just an excuse to blow that space station to smithereens. Why David Bordwell’s “The Way Hollywood Tells It” cites “Armageddon’s” Average Shot Length as 2.3 seconds, meaning that on average every shot in the movie changes within said timeframe. If this sounds intended to induce whiplash, it sometimes does, though Bay’s cuts are not unthinking, betraying his cultural vision. When the oil drilling crew gets a little R&R prior to takeoff, Bay shows us the scene of Will Patton’s Chick trying to say hi to the son he shares with his ex-wife. Bay then cuts directly to several other astronaut/drillers at a gentleman’s club, which does not in any way feel accidental but a summation of Bay’s Floridian binary. And at a dire moment late in the movie, when Armageddon really does seem near, Bay’s camera gazes out from between the Lincoln Memorial’s pillars toward the Washington Monument at which point he cuts directly, I swear, to a Coca-Cola® billboard, which was so hysterically apropos I paused Netflix to laugh. Commercialism piggy-backing on nationalism is our Michael Bay!

The asteroid is discovered by an amateur astronomer (John Mahon) who wants to name it for his wife, “a vicious, life-suckin’ bitch from which there’s no escape.” Because even as the Year 2000 dawned, Michael Bay’s worldview remained plopped down in the armchair of Archie Bunker. Bruce Willis’s principal hero Harry S. Stamper, meanwhile, is introduced launching golf balls from his oil rig at a Greenpeace boat, which might have been played for environmental irony if Bay had the ability to ever render anything with less than 180 decibels. And while the government has often lent a helping production hand to Bay, he is oddly disenchanted with them here, from NASA to the Pentagon and on up. Dr. Ronald Quincy (Jason Isaacs) is introduced as “pretty much the smartest man on the planet” simply to poke fun at the President’s chief scientific advisor, and then a few scenes later “pretty much the smartest man on the planet” is reduced to a confused, stammering yokel in the presence of Stamper, who obviously knows best about everything. Granted, Stamper has expertise in deep drilling that no one else does, but in contending with Quincy’s sudden turn into uselessness and, eventually, having to overcome the Deep State’s various attempts to sabotage his mission, he transforms into a libertarian rock star.

The common rebuttal to everything I’m opining, of course, is that a movie about an asteroid and explosions doesn’t have anything to do with politics. It’s tantamount to the sentiment that, say, a football game doesn’t having anything to do with politics, while the same people who espouse the game’s supposed apolitical nature stand up for the American flag before games and cheer military flyovers, two – surprise! Surprise! – recurring images in “Armageddon.” No, these are people who would rather a certain kind of politics not intrude in their games just as they would rather a certain kind of politics not intrude in “Armageddon.” And that’s not to say that I don’t think Mr. Bay should inject his politics into his movies. Movies should not be apolitical! If Mr. Bay wants to stick it to the state even as he utilizes its resources to help make his movie, he should go for it! And isn’t that the beauty of personal liberty, to consider something and then decide what to do about it for yourself? Upon watching “Armageddon” I have decided never to watch another Michael Bay movie ever again. Ah, freedom.

Michael Mann's Miami Vice as an Art Exhibition, part 1

The DVD version of Michael Mann’s “Miami Vice” (2006) opens with the camera emerging from beneath the water to catch up with a speedboat race already in progress, though its presentation is conspicuously stripped of adrenaline such a scenario might suggest, a prologue as a slow burn. This is in contrast to the theatrical version, which is less of a gradual entry than a chaotic airdrop right into a cacophonous club scene; it’s like forgoing Harold Faltermeyer’s “Top Gun” intro and going straight to Kenny Loggins. When I saw this scene in the theater a dozen years ago, it gobsmacked me, like the “Boogie Nights” “Best of my Love”-fueled intro nearly ten years prior. When I purchased the home video version of “Miami Vice”, I sat there and watched that 90 seconds over and over and over. And of all the shots, the one I most consistently found myself drawn to was this.....

I have thought a lot about that shot over the last dozen years. Why, however, it has frequently popped into my mind is something I have always found difficult to explain. And I thought of that image on a Saturday morning last month in London in attending an exhibition at the National Gallery titled “Monet & Architecture” upon finding myself face to face with Claude’s 1872 outpouring of impressionism The Wooden Bridge. The exhibition illustrated the way in which Claude frequently utilized buildings in his work not as a means to highlight them but to highlight the way they refracted light. He also, however, as the exhibition outlined, sought to juxtapose industry against landscapes, like his Train in the Countryside, which I saw last fall at the Musée d’Orsay, where steam roils from an unseen train engine obscured by a line of lush trees. And in The Wooden Bridge a carriage traverses a bridge built during the Franco Prussian War, signaling progress, though the carriage is simultaneously glimpsed in one of those patented heartstopping Monet reflections in the water below, making it seem as if the manmade and natural worlds are colliding, or perhaps fading almost indecipherably into one another.

And because I bring everything down to movies, what popped into my head as I let The Wooden Bridge wash over me was a shot from my all-time favorite movie, “Last of the Mohicans”, this shot.....

It had kind of occurred to me, I guess, and and has no doubt absolutely occurred to cineastes more advanced than myself, but standing there in the National Gallery in that moment I realized how Michael Mann is so often using cinema as his own canvas, composing frames that could double as paintings.

And so as I gazed at The Wooden Bridge and returned to that shot of “Last of the Mohicans” in my mind, so did my thoughts turn back to the aforementioned shot in “Miami Vice”, which we return to now.

I mean, it loses something, or maybe is just viewed differently, if not seen as a moving picture, the way it begins with the camera gliding right to left behind them and past Naomie Harris’s character and then flips to a shot in front of them just as Naomie Harris turns toward where the camera is set with this incredible, ineffable No Scrubs look on her face that is the whole reason why we should see movies on big screens and not at home. But then, the camera cuts to the above shot from the side.

The two men standing rock still are juxtaposed against the whirring everything-ness in the left of the frame. These are men certain in their worldview, indifferent to the noise, which they have put behind them. Ah, but there is ambiguity in the fact that we cannot see whatever it is they are so intently focused on, and that they are rooted to the frame’s darker section might suggest that whatever it is they are so intently focused on is worthy only of trepidation. Thinking of the shot this way makes me dizzy and giddy. I want to frame it and hang it in the Art Institute and go down there and look at it every day for twenty minutes.

And that is why the Cinema Romantico plan going forward is to return to “Miami Vice” every now and again, maybe monthly, maybe bi-monthly, who knows, whenver the spirit moves us, to call up frames from Mann’s movie and treat them as if they are painted compositions hung in a gallery, our first ever movie blogging art exhibition, Parsing Miami Vice: Screen Shots on the Figurative Wall. It does not even cost extra to get in.

Some Drivel On...The Boxer

Running just shy of two hours, Jim Sheridan’s “The Boxer” (1997) does not feel overlong, just overstuffed in so much as it is piled high with situations and themes. It might be titled “The Boxer”, and it might be about a boxer, but the boxing often takes a backseat to The Troubles, and all that those entail, which – in reflecting the times in which the movie is set – are potentially nearing an end. The resolutions, in a manner of speaking, are often messy, and bloody, yet narratively they tend to feel neat, and often adorned with almost astonishingly on the nose dialogue (“I’m not a killer, Maggie; but this place makes me want to kill”). They are also filtered through a handful of characters, several of them family, whether literally or figuratively, which tends to make the Northern Ireland conflict feel more like a violent familial squabble than a low-level war. Still, for all the criticisms levied here at the outset, “The Boxer” works, not least because of the performances, all of which are solid, some of which are spectacular, as well as other details sprinkled throughout.

“The Boxer” might take place in Belfast but it opens with the real life words of Bill Clinton, during his 1995 visit, about how the sun was shining, which he hoped was an omen for peace in Northern Ireland. The sun may well have been shining during Clinton’s speech but it is hardly, if ever, shining in “The Boxer” where icy blues and cold, hard grays dominate the visual palette. This has a wearying effect, one playing straight to the performance of Brian Cox as Joe Hamill, the district IRA commander who is trying to help broker peace with their tormenters. Cox plays his character’s mission with a grave air, as if he knows the rickety nature of his own olive branch. Indeed, Joe’s hot-headed lieutenant Harry (Gerard McSorley) still has a bone to pick with the Protestants and generally ignores orders to knock things off. This character is strict cliché, but McSorley’s turn is effective, his laugh so maniacal he practically sports fangs.

Into this mess comes Danny Flynn (Daniel Day-Lewis), who 14 years ago was involved with the IRA and went to the clink, and now is being set free. The movie opens on the day of his release, where he seems almost upset at the invasion of his routine when he’s told its time to go, allowing for one of movie’s many strands of obvious dialogue (“Is 14 years not long enough for you?”). He is the boxer of the title, once promising, now essentially disowned and still in a virtual prison, underscored in myriad vérité shots from the point of view of helicopters patrolling the area. One of those shots, seen early, shows a Catholic wedding spilling out onto the streets, effectively tinging the celebration of an everlasting union with grim fatalism. The wedding is also set up for the movie’s most important plot point – that is, the overriding importance of a prisoner’s wife. You do not get involved with one or else. And Danny’s ex, Maggie (Emily Watson), Joe’s daughter, is married to a prisoner.

We don’t really get to know Maggie’s husband, or precisely what she saw in him, other than the fact he was Danny’s best friend, which merely feels like fuel for the drama’s fire. Indeed, Danny and Maggie are still in love, and while their dialogue might eventually explicate that love, it is strictly unnecessary, communicated through these two fairly titanic performances as if invisible electromagnetic romantic waves are percolating between them. If we know that eventually Danny and Maggie will come together, the movie never makes it easy, keeping them apart for most of the early portions of the film, as they communicate simply in little looks, Day-Lewis politely demurring with his head down while Watson’s blue eyes twitch. Even when they do meet, incidentally or intentionally, the tension is wholly palpable, keeping their distance but in their very air wishing they didn’t have to. And when Danny finally expresses his love, it has been building for most of the movie, an implacable desire for peace combined with a genuine sorrow for what he has lost suddenly set off in the form of something like a last stand that mutates into verbal magma before erupting in an actorly monologue for the ages.

The dilemma, of course, is that if they do come together, they risk what Joe has been building toward, which Harry seizes on, the whole thing threatening to unravel, emblemized in the community center that Danny, with the aid of his ex-trainer Ike (Ken Stott), turns into a kind of makeshift, and decidedly non-sectarian, boxing academy. That Danny is a boxer is one of the few ideas the script does not hammer home, refreshingly allowing the argument that violence is better channeled through the ring than out in the streets to emerge intrinsically, best heard in Day-Lewis’s plaintive explanation that he wants to teach the kids something. Even so, from a narrative standpoint, the boxing matches themselves sometimes can feel superfluous to what is at stake both in personal relationships and the broader political arena. Something emerges anyway, though, in Danny’s pugilistic intensity, and which further emerges in the typically ferocious commitment of Day-Lewis to getting the boxing and the training methods just right. In this world where so little seems certain, where so little seems possible, he essentially cultivates his own ring as one might cultivate his/her own garden.

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

The image of Mr. Rogers – the cardigan, the sneakers, the precise part in the hair, the soothing voice – is so frozen in the mind that the danger in making a movie about him is pre-deification. You sit down already ready to cry because you know who he is and what he meant and what he did. You know what you are going to feel because you have probably already felt all these things at some point in the company of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”, the show that ran on PBS for 30 years, beginning in 1968. Director Morgan Neville solves this conundrum by forgoing a hagiographic Greatest Clips collection, as well as by resisting the impulse to do the opposite and try to unmask Fred Rogers the man as something provocatively apart from what we already know. No, Neville hones in on the message Mr. Rogers espoused. And while the movie might believe that message to be true, it is less interested in simply asserting that truth then wondering if the rest of the world, the one in which Rogers lived as well as our present-day, believed it to be true too.

If most television saw children as mere consumers, Rogers saw children, as he would eventually evangelize, just as they were, people with thoughts and feelings who needed to be talked to rather than pitched. This attitude, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” shows, came out of Rogers’s time in the seminary, though he forewent the ministry to instead minister through mass media. It was not only idealistic, it was radical, and he brought that radicalism to life with a conservative aesthetic. He used puppets and simple props, and he reveled in silence. One brief clip shows Rogers sitting at his kitchen table and stacking cups. If it felt out of step then imagine what it looks like now.

This radicalism extended to the show’s politics, which were not presented explicitly or authoritatively but in a graceful, kid-friendly manner indicative of the whole show. Neville lingers over the moment when Rogers invited the show’s African-American police officer played by Francois Clemmons to cool his feet in a kiddie pool, juxtaposing this easygoing intimacy with images of what inspired them – that is, African-Americans being chased out of whites-only swimming pools. Rogers isn’t scolding or even explaining, but simply demonstrating just how damn easy empathy is. This polite crusade culminates, in a way, with Rogers’s famous 1969 testimony before a Senate subcommittee about whether to eliminate federal funding for PBS where Senator John O. Pastore essentially becomes a viewer, lullabied by Rogers into benevolent agreement.

Yet if Rogers knew just what to say in 1969, as time went by, the greater the struggle for him to find the right words became, which we see when he is enlisted to offer reassurance in the wake of 9/11. Though he eventually does, it is the moment just before, visually uncomfortable as he struggles to think up comforting verbiage that resonates. It’s an image underscored by a voiceover suggesting that this sort of evil might have been beyond even the enlightened purview of Mr. Rogers. That sort of evil is also seen in obligatory Fox News windbags criticizing Rogers as well as the belligerent Westboro Baptist intolerants that picketed Rogers’s funeral. This gradual turn does not exactly override “Won’t You Be My Neighbor’s” sunny disposition, but it nevertheless still casts the documentary in a different light.

It is perhaps unfair to compare anyone to George Washington, even someone described, jokingly, as “the second coming of Christ” in his own documentary, but as “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” wound up, and various talking heads wrestled with what sense Fred Rogers might have made of our present-day situation, I could not help but flash back to the last years of Washington’s life. The Father of our Country had grown distant from and confused about the place he did so much to sculpt, as if he no longer recognized his image in it. And if Fred Rogers were here, I wonder what sort of kindly counter-attack he might muster, of if he would even want to.

If that might elicit accusations of topicality intruding into a movie review, well, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” invites that sort of ruminating and reckoning, asking its talking heads to consider the actual impact of Mr. Rogers’s legacy and by extension turning those questions back around on us. In its own way, the conclusion of Neville’s documentary reminded me of the end of “Malcolm X” wherein Spike Lee implemented a montage and voiceover as a means to leave the past behind and demonstrate that the eponymous character’s struggle was continuing into the present. Indeed, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” is no nostalgic time trip, but urgent of the moment advocacy, transforming the question its title poses into a cordial rallying cry of compassion.

Ocean's 8

The original “Ocean’s 11” (1960) had a plot in so far as it provided an excuse for its Rat Pack stars to congregate on screen and have boozy fun. Steven Soderbergh’s eventual remake (2001), and its superior sequel  “Ocean’s Twelve” (2004), took far more concern in the narrative particulars of their respective heists yet still ensured the stories functioned as a platform for their various charismatic stars to glow. In “Ocean’s 8”, however, director Gary Ross puts considerable thought into his story, and how his stars figure into that story, but not, exactly, what those stars do. And since “Ocean’s 8” is the first all-female crack at this heretofore mostly male series, this oversight comes to feel more akin to an insult; such an impressive octet of stars deserved their own opportunities to glow.

The trouble begins immediately. Sandra Bullock’s eventual heist ringleader Debbie Ocean is in jail but up for parole. She has to talk her way out, a la Red Redding, and so she does. But the monologue itself is oddly dis-engaging. Bullock excels at sort of tumbling comically through monologues in such a way that you are never quite sure she is going to find her way through to the other side. Here, however, the writing is cool and calculated, which does not play to the actor’s strength. It’s like asking Corin Tucker to sing a cover of “Justify My Love”; she could manage a spoken whisper, I’m sure, but why wouldn’t you call on her to scream?

In any event, once sprung Debbie seeks out of her old crime-loving cohort Lou (Cate Blanchett), and together they assemble a crew of six additional ne’er-do-wells to pilfer a necklace being worn by a narcissistic actress named Daphne Kluger (Anne Hathaway) at the Met Gala. If this is a money-making enterprise, it is also a larcenous homage to Debbie’s deceased gentleman thief brother, Danny, the George Clooney character of the Soderbergh films, a self-reference that “Ocean’s 8” never really invests it with much juice, rendering it superfluous branding. This scheme also works as a bit of score-settling with Debbie’s ex.

Her ex is such a zero that I failed to recall either his character’s name or the actor playing him without consulting IMDb (Claude Becker played by Richard Armitage) which makes you wonder why he is there in the first place. If it is commentary on female characters in similar cinematic situations typically being under-written arm candy, fair enough, but he just inadvertently runs interference on the film’s real slow burn love story. That’s the one between Debbie and Lou which, to be clear, is not really a love story, with a beginning, middle, and end, but occasional bouts of subtextual sexual tension glimpsed not just in their flirtatiously caustic banter but in physical interactions like Debbie playfully shoving a forkful of food into Lou’s mouth. That this just lingers in the air is perhaps Hollywood tent pole entertainment refusing to Go There, though it also might be a not unwelcome refusal to indulge in the Male Gaze. Either way, there is such a spark in these peripheral bits of behavioral business that you wish the movie had moved it more to the foreground.

“Ocean’s 8” at least finds little ways to skewer our male-centric Earthly model with Debbie explaining that no men are allowed in their crew because dudes, as she says, “get noticed” whereas women remain invisible. You never see this better than Rihanna’s hacker Nine Ball briefly going incognito as a janitor to infiltrate a boardroom to plant a bug. She gets a few odd looks from the whites-only conference table, where both her gender and race make for her disguise as much as her uniform. But then, while this might be socially astute, it is also accidentally emblematic of how the movie repeatedly dampens Rihanna’s singularity.

Whether Rihanna, Mindy Kaling, normally an unequaled verbal fount strangely reduced to mostly standing or sitting around, etc., the actors only matter in terms of what the script has them doing in any given frame in preparing for or carrying out the heist. In other words, too often anyone could be playing these parts. Blanchett might fare well in terms of costume design, sporting an array of suits that all on their own should garner an Oscar nomination, but not as well when it comes to dialogue. Why did no one think to write her any lines? In a scene at what appears to be a Subway sandwich shop, as Awkwafina’s Constance checks out the fixings bar, the camera looks up through the glass partition at Lou looking back at so much shredded lettuce and cucumbers, an expression that Blanchett laces with a kind of heightened curiosity, one seeming to wonder “What am I doing here exactly?”

Anne Hathaway is the only actor not boxed in by the material, specifically because her character is written as comically vainglorious with comically vainglorious lines, giving her something to play and something to play to. It’s an elementary world of difference. It’s as if somewhere in the space of Daphne Kluger is the movie “Ocean’s 8” wanted to be. Maybe it could have been; maybe “Ocean’s 8” should have taken place in Daphne Kluger’s alternate universe with her in the starring role.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Ashes and Diamonds (1958)

Andrzej Wajda’s “Ashes and Diamonds” takes its title from a 19th century Cyprian Norwid epic poem, one read aloud in a bombed out Polish church in the middle of the film, a poem wondering after some cataclysmic event if only ashes will remain, or if the ashes hold the glory of a diamond, a morning star of everlasting triumph. In a way, the posed query’s answer is the movie itself, because it was released in 1958 in the midst of Poland’s oppressive Stalin regime giving way. But then, if the movie, set in the immediate aftermath of WWII, was afforded the opportunity to truly stick it to its oppressors given the loosening of restrictions on art, Wajda chooses not to, evincing the gray area as ultimate truth. Indeed, “Ashes and Diamonds” is movie of contrasts, in characters, in narratives, in images; for every action, and all that.

The film opens on the day WWII ends with Polish resistance soldiers Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) and Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski) lazing in the grass outside a rural chapel. The sun shines and birds chirp conspicuously. That post-war idyll is shattered, however, when we learn they are waiting to ambush a Communist Commissar and assassinate him. The plan unknowingly goes awry when they kill two innocent men instead, a frightening scene in which bullets and birdsongs go hand-in-hand on the soundtrack, an early indicator of the treasure trove of juxtapositions. It is only later, in town, at the hotel where they are staying, that Maciek and Andrzej realize Commissar Szczuka (Wacław Zastrzeżyński) is still alive and staying at the very same hotel. It’s a narrative coincidence emblematic of how close they are to their goal which, in turn, is emblematic of how close Poland was to freedom as WWII wound down.

This one hotel becomes a symbol for all of Poland, where conflicting ideologies run right up against one another. The Commissar’s son is eventually revealed as a right-wing revolutionary while the town mayor organizes a grand fête without knowing his assistant Drewnowski (Bogumił Kobiela) is a status-hungry double agent. An old journalist, Pieniazek (Stanisław Milski), meanwhile, whose drunken flippancy seems to  , choosing to get drunk and then goading Drewnowski into invading the fête by way of stumbling into it, making a noisy, soused mess, eventually grabbing a fire extinguisher and spraying the guests, a kind of ghoulish mockery of freedom fighters.

The waning resistance is further glimpsed in a scene where a Polish national song is sung while Maciek extinguishes the flame of alcohol ignited in cocktail glasses in honor of deceased revolutionaries, a perhaps obvious allusion that is no less striking for its presentation, both visually and emotionally. Cybulski plays the scene not sadly, exactly, but wistfully, as if nostalgic for the war’s fever pitch.

If the flame of his passions is dying, he finds them re-ignited in a different way by the beautiful barmaid Krystyna (Ewa Krzyżewska), with whom he shamelessly flirts at first before being drawn to her more deeply. If you wish her character might have been afforded more narrative depth, there is still something about her presentation that stays with you, like a Polish approximation of the woman in Édouard Manet’s painting “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.” If Poland’s chilly future waits on the other side of the bar, either in the form of the Commissar and his cronies or the fête bootlickers, she icily resists. No, only Maciek is able to get through to her, and that is because they are kindred souls, each one stuck between a rock and a hard place.

This is what draws them together, and in a walk they take through the nighttime streets and various nearby locales, their conversation does not so much hint at a possible alternate future as pine for its impossible possibility. Here is when they see an upside-down crucifix in a famous sho , but the sequence ends with Maciek comically trying to repair her shoe and then happening upon the very bodies of the two men he killed earlier in the day, a light moment flipped into darkness, underscoring how the overriding situation’s reality cannot be escaped.

That becomes more evident when Maciek tries to wiggle his way out of seeing through assassination. He quietly unravels, his charisma mutating into twitchy panic as he follows the Commissar through the streets, waiting to strike. When he does, the moment is unforgettable, the Commissar falling into Maciek’s arms as fireworks erupt from above. This shot is framed looking up, the two men dwarfed by the explosions, suddenly rendering this moment the whole movie has been building to as meaningless. Indeed, a few scenes later, Maciek, shot in his attempts to escape after the assassination, dies in a dump amidst garbage piles strewn as far as the eye can see, a shot cribbed, as many critics have noted, from Luis Buñuel 1950 film “The Young and the Damned.” Fair enough, but it made me think of a 2018 Neko Case line. If to so many God is Love, or some equivalent, to her “God is a lusty tire fire.”

Parallelism vis-à-vis Cinema Romantico-ism

“Hey...” 

“What?”  

“I just wanted to take another look at ya.”

---------------

“What are you looking at, sir?” 

“Why I’m looking at you, miss.” 

Potential Movie Trailer Genres for T*ump's America

Last week I was listening to Slate’s Political Gabfest, a weekly roundup of particularly crucial, as you no doubt surmised, political topics, which often still feels a day behind given our current every-single-second American insanity, but nevertheless. One of their topics was the North Korean Summit, and one of their sub-topics of the North Korean Summit was the so-called movie trailer that President Trump’s team crafted to show Kim Jong-un a possible “new world” and how “the doors of opportunity” are ready to be opened if North Korea denuclearizes. The film stank fairly heavily of Gavin Volure’s Sunstream ads – “INNOVATION – TOMORROW – AMERICA” – as so comically chronicled in a memorable episode of “30 Rock” but then, as many analysts argued, Trump’s video was a perfect exhilarant for the likes of NK’s Supreme Leader. John Dickerson, co-host of Slate’s Political Gabfest, agreed with that line of thinking on the grounds that Kim Jong-un is an avid consumer of American culture, a certain kind of American culture, a “Big Jerry Bruckheimer consumer”, in his words. Stop the tape.

A Jerry Bruckheimer-esque trailer concocted to sell North Korea a glittering future? What if, and I’m just speculating here, leaders of others nations did the same thing to Trump? What sort of movie trailers would they show him as a means to imagine the “new world” promised by MAGA? Boy did that get us to thinking.

Potential Movie Trailer Genres for T*ump's America

Sci-Fi. I know a lot of people would argue we are living through the early stages of dystopia, but you can’t show dystopia to Trump. You can’t show him the overcrowded cityscapes of “Blade Runner”. No, you would have to show him something like the Fhloston Paradise Luxury Space Liner of “The Fifth Element”, because I imagine an America set entirely on a cruise ship would be right up Trump’s alley. Then again, maybe all you would have to pitch him is a “Demolition Man”-ish future where Taco Bell is the sole restaurant choice. That is totally Trumpian; that is totally, totally Trumpian.

Sports Movie. Sports movie are inspirational, underdog stories, and Presidents who deal solely in winners and losers do not tend to see the world through an underdog prism. An underdog suggests you were once a loser, or that your overall air is loser-y enough to make one think you are up not to snuff. President Trump is always up to snuff, even if he, say, loses the popular vote, which is why he has no sense of humor about anything and why if he stepped on a rake would explain, with rake scars across his face, that he “meant to do that, okay, it was intentional, very, very intentional”, and then send his Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda out there to both confirm the act’s intentionality and refer everyone to “the White House Groundskeeper for any further questions about the intentional incident.” That’s why a nation might show President Trump a highly edited trailer of “Kicking & Screaming” betraying only the parts where Will Ferrell’s mild-mannered suburban dad as an authoritarian commander of a youth soccer team bellowing “Losers!” through an orange traffic cone at innocent adolescents correlates directly to winning.

Buddy Movie. Things move fast in Trump’s America, and whereas once the Supreme Leader and Mr. Brexit were headed for some sort of “King Kong vs Godzilla” situation – “Rocket Man vs the Dotard” – we have instead wound up in Buddy Movie territory. Who knew?! The archives show us that one of President Trump’s favorite movies – “Bloodsport” – is a Jean-Claude Van Damme joint. And we all know that Kim Jong-un is buddy-buddy with The Worm, Dennis Rodman, who remains, forever and always, my favorite American professional athlete so don’t you dare tell me that I can’t see Both Sides. Thus, a specially touched up “Double Team” trailer could metaphorically propose a future where Trump and Kim Jong-un exist as a kind of FDR & Churchill, just with more awkwardly staged comedy. Trump: “Offense wins the glory.” Kim: “But defense wins the game.”

Innocent Man on the Run. Imagine Harrison Ford’s immortal barking “I didn’t kill my wife!” being reframed as “There was no collusion!” Of course, our President does not really do much running. He has a finite amount of energy, after all, and it cannot be wasted on things such as desperate scurrying. Therefore we might have to scrap the “on the run” part of the pitch. It might just be “Innocent Man”, an Innocent Man movie about an Innocent Man who is very, very innocent and waits for his Innocence to be confirmed rather than runing around and thinking fast to prove it. Much of the movie involves the President watching cable news waiting for/expecting to hear this confirmation.

Pygmalion. John Barron (Donald Trump) is the big man on campus at his Barron International Golf Club Cocoa Beach. But his Barron Colosseum Hotel & Casino has gone under. Although bitter over the closure, John consoles himself by claiming that the Barron Colosseum is replaceable by any other property. John’s friend, Jimmy (James Woods), disagrees and challenges him to a bet on whether John can turn any random property into The Eighth Wonder of the World within 18 months. Jimmy picks out America, a federal republic composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions, as his choice for John who is then forced to run for President. Dystopian hijinks ensue!

keira knightley drowned out by the darkness

First Reformed

Ethan Hawke’s forehead is among the most impressive visages in contemporary cinema. You can track its coming of age, so to speak, through Richard Linklater’s “Before” series. If in 1995’s “Before Sunset” Hawke is a mere baby-faced Gen X’er, nearly a decade later, in “Before Sunset”, his face had weathered to the point where Julie Delpy’s character referred to a particularly deep line in his forehead as a “scar”. Indeed, deep creases appear whenever he furrowed his brow, and he furrows his brow frequently in Paul Schrader’s remarkable “First Reformed” as the anguished Ernst Toller, a reverend at tiny Dutch Reformed clapboard church in upstate New York. His character comes equipped with tragic backstory, and that “scar” functions as visual representation of the baggage he carries. None of this is to suggest Hawke simply lets his forehead do all the acting. If you sometimes wish he might more acutely convey the physical duress his character is said to be under, he still deftly toggles between caring minister and broken man. His is a Pastor who has lost the ability to pray, which is why he is writing his thoughts in a diary, a la “Diary of a Country Priest”, which he plans to burn after one year. Perhaps those flames can be his salvation.

Toller’s inability to pray, however, does not necessarily given up on God or come to doubt His existence, but, like any hardcore Protestant, seen the signs from the Man Above as trending in a bad direction. The film’s opening shot looks up at Toller’s church in the early autumn light, the camera gradually moving in toward the edifice, conspicuously leaving everything else out of the frame. It could be 250 years ago, when the church was first built, and when its spire would have deliberately dominated the landscape. Now, however, First Reformed, with its middling congregation, is less a church than a tourist attraction, where Toller’s job is as much about pointing sightseers to the gift shop as explaining, say, sanctification. No, the church is a virtual museum to the way things were, brought into sharper focus by the parent congregation down the road, megachurch Abundant Life, where the Reverend Jeffers (Cedric “the Entertainer” Kyles) is always glimpsed in his office, never at the pulpit, more like a CEO, and one answering to a board of businessmen rather than the Lord.

Michael (Phillip Ettinger), in fact, casually dismisses Abundant Life as a business when he talks with Toller, a meeting arranged by Michael’s wife Mary (Amanda Seyfried) who is concerned about her husband’s mental state. That is because Mary is pregnant and Michael, a staunch environmentalist, cannot fathom bringing a child into a world that, per his calculations, has already crossed the threshold of its own ecological demise. If Michael recites a litany of talking points, he never comes across conspiratorial and the scene never devolves into political finger-wagging, as Ettinger’s heartbreaking performance fills the sequence with melancholy life, playing the moment like Michael has long since taken the red pill and now cannot unsee the truth. And if Toller contends bringing life into the world supersedes losing that same life, Schrader writes this reasoning into Toller’s backstory, giving it dramatic heft, just as Michael’s fears of having a child are born not of his own selfishness but a worry the act itself is selfish. And that Mary wants to keep her kid is not rendered as a political statement but an expression of the hope lost to her numb husband,  and one which Toller councils as being life’s preeminent struggle – balancing hope and despair, not letting one eclipse the other.

This is the struggle of Mary and Michael and it emerges as Toller’s struggle too, particularly in light of his church’s re-consecration which is being bankrolled by a wealthy Abundant Life donor, Balq (Michael Gaston), whose corporation possesses a dismal environmental record. If Balq tells the Reverend to make the re-consecration a safe space free of politics, Toller sees the church as both a civic and religious institution, glimpsed in a scene where he explains to a group of schoolkids the chapel’s historic role in the Underground Railroad. And the pleasantness with which Hawke plays the scene doubles as a demonstration of his character’s duality. You would never know to look at him that his health is failing, which he only furthers by refusing to care for his body, spending nights drowning in whiskey, mirroring humankind’s own indifference to the planet’s fate. It’s a fate that comes to concern Toller as much as Michael, the Reverend spending nights by the light of a laptop, looking into the environmental crimes of his church’s benefactor.

It is not difficult to draw a jagged line from Toller to Schrader’s most infamous creation, the furtive lone wolf Travis Bickle, which is sort of what Reverend Jeffers does when he admonishes Toller for spending too much time in the garden and not enough time among his people. And if “First Reformed” seems to be charting a similar course as “Taxi Driver”, with its various narrative elements neatly linking up, a little too neatly, to engender a violent reckoning, it sort of swerves into something else as the decidedly modest aesthetic suddenly opts for rapture and romance. That is not to suggest the movie has a happy ending or is intended to convey divine intervention because that would be to suggest it is un-ambiguous. It is not. Rather it is the movie taking up joy and despair movingly, simultaneously in the palm of its hand.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Victory (1981)

“Victory” in John Huston’s 1981 semi-epic teases two different forms. There is potential victory in a soccer – nay, football – match between an assortment of WWII allied POWs and the German National Team, waged for propaganda purposes. But there is also potential victory in the form of escape for the POWs from the stadium in Paris where the match will be held. If I told you both things turned out to possibly be true, well, you would probably believe me, because even if this is 1943 it is still Hollywood, always and forever. “Victory” is so Hollywood, in fact, that the prison camp, while impressively outlined in a series of opening aerial shots that make it clear Huston and his team did not skimp on location details, feels less ominous than jolly, underlined in Bill Conti’s jaunty, wonderful score.  I swear, it felt like there was more at stake in “Rocky”, and only a mid-movie moment where real soccer – nay, football – stars are recruited from other prison camps only to discover they are exhausted and malnourished is the real weight of war felt. Indeed, “Victory” assumes the air of a fan who doesn’t want the real world intruding on his/her fun and games.

The match is set in motion by Major Karl von Steiner (Max von Sydow) who spies English Captain John Colby (Michael Caine), a professional footballer in his pre-war life, overseeing a junky prison yard game. In shades of “The Longest Yard”, von Steiner, after dribbling the football a bit to demonstrate his bonafides, glimpsed in a bit of editing trickery that made me suspect von Sydow soccer skills are not on the up and up, proposes a game between Colby’s ragtags and a German team from a nearby army base. After a subsequent scene in an ornate command room where deep frames show off one of those never not funny murals of der Führer in all his pompousness (wait a second...), the game has been upgraded to the Allied POWS v the German National Team, which seems unfair, not that you would expect anything less from the Third Reich. Then again, Colby has a ringer in the form of Trinidadian Corporal Luis Fernandez, who is Pelé in disguise, not that the bloviating Nazis know this. Ha!

Ah, but if soccer – nay, football – is a team game, the irrepressible Yank, Captain Robert Hatch (Sylvester Stallone), is there to do it his way. If the movie sort of suggests those sprawling 60s movies with all-star casts, Stallone, with an air one might confuse for disinterest if they did not know it was merely Sly’s general countenance, sort of hijacks “Victory” for himself in conjunction with his character. Hatch, something of an escape artist, at first wants on the team and then wants off it when Colby tells him to take a hike only to want right back on when it might allow cover for him to bust out. So, in the end, he’s on the team, but only on his terms, eventually ascending to the position of goalkeeper, perfectly emblematic of his there but not there attitude. How, exactly, he is so good at that specific position is never really explained, just conveyed in a scene where one minute he’s about to get chased off the practice field because he stinks so bad only to accidentally wind up in goal where he blocks a few of Pelé’s shots. Sylvester Stallone stopping Pelé’s attempts on goal – Lord, don’t ever let them tell you the movies ain’t magic.

The magic of the movies extends to Hatch’s brief time outside the prison when he breaks out to rendezvous with the French Resistance to try and facilitate an escape for his teammates. This sequence at a French farmhouse finds the Resistance leaders discussing matters with Hatch and then leaving him there to go and inspect the sewer system they plan to use for POWs’ escape. “What am I supposed to do?” Hatch asks incredulously. “You will stay with Renee,” they say. That’s Carol Laure, who is on hand to fall in love with Sly, though how and why is anyone’s guess. The dialogue is strictly howlers, and the scene gives us a chance to imagine Sly Stallone opposite, say, Jeanne Moreau in some old WWII movie in monochrome.

It’s the movie’s high point, really, in its own stinky cheese kind of way, at least for a viewer of a certain disposition. For years Bill Simmons has cited Pelé’s bicycle kick as a seminal movie moment, yet he never saw fit to mention Carol Laure. Weird. But anyway, Pelé. Bicycle kick. That happens at the Big Game, which takes all the expected turns, leaving the Germans up on the Allied team 4-3 when an injured Pelé – eh, Luis Fernandez – valiantly re-enters the game. If Huston keeps much of the movie on a fairly gritty aesthetic level, here, at a time when instant replay was still in its adolescence, he revels in Pelé scoring the winning goal by showing it once, twice, three times, in resplendent slow motion, cutting a little closer each time. It’s so good it gets von Steiner off his feet to applaud, much to the chagrin of his Third Reich cronies. If humanizing Nazis might feel, particularly in our current time and place, more than a bit distasteful, well, for a split second, I confess, I found poetic fruitlessness in the earlier words of Von Steiner. “If nations could settle their differences on the football pitch...wouldn’t that be a challenge? Yes, Karl, yes it would.

Forgotten Great Moments in Movie History

Loyal frustrated readers know well the fondness this blog retains in its heart for Jan de Bont’s “Twister.” That softness stems not from the CGI tornadoes nor the ostensible thrill of those chasing all those twisters, but from the peripheral Midwestern atmospherics. You see these in the movie’s opening, which we have written about before, as well as in the truly remarkable shot where Bill Paxton stands beneath a stormy Midwestern sky and runs some dirt through his fingers, like so many idiot men in the central Iowa neighborhood where I grew up who would defiantly go outside whenever a tornado siren wailed on some glorious June evening to gaze at the threatening sky. The film’s atmospherics, however, were not simply limited to the outdoors; they were also felt indoors.

Midway through the movie, after a close call with death and an impressive brushing off of this glimpse of the pearly gates, the whole storm chasing gaggle, captained by Jo (Helen Hunt) and Bill Paxton’s Bill, retires to the nearby home of Jo’s Aunt Meg, played by the legend Lois Smith. “Red meat!” declares Dusty played by pre-immortal Philip Seymour Hoffman in a performance that packs as much glorious wind as any of those fake tornadoes. “We crave sustenance!” That they do, and once at Meg’s, steaks fry in the pan, right alongside eggs, and eventually wind up on ginormous plates alongside glorious mounds of mashed potatoes (with Hoffman getting his pronunciation of potatoes just right, saying “po-ta-TUHS” not, “po-TAH-oes”) slathered in gravy, images that suggest Cézanne Still Life by way of a truck stop diner.

As a character, Aunt Meg mostly exists to be placed in peril, which is why we have to be introduced to her in some sort of friendly scene to ensure we want to see her saved. As such, the steak and eggs and potatoes might merely have been edible background noise. And, in a way, they are, though also, like the movie’s best parts, the food sort of thrusts itself to the forefront anyway, like an oversized Midwestern plate of food should, Whatever else de Bont wants you to be paying attention to, it’s nigh impossible not to have your eyes drawn back to the food.

Food has an illustrious history at the movies for appearing as metaphors when it comes to love, from Luca Guadagnino’s atply titled “I Am Love” to “Like Water For Chocolate.” And one might be tempted to extract metaphorical sustenance from the steak and eggs and mashed potatoes of “Twister.” That is because Dr. Melissa Reeves (Jami Gertz), the fiancé of Bill, does not seem all that eager to eat the steak and eggs and mashed potatoes when placed in front of her. Her character, of course, might be engaged to Bill but she is nevertheless still The Other Woman because Bill and Jo, once married, now about to officially get divorced, have, as they must, re-kindled their affection. And Dr. Melissa Reeves’s refusal to eat this food might well have worked to indicate that she does not have the, uh, shall we say, necessary emblematic appetite.

But then, we already knew that. And for a movie that is all on the surface, so, thankfully, is the steaks and the eggs and the potatoes. As any hearty Midwesterner will tell you, food is food.

Theorizing Iceman's Role in Top Gun 2

The staff at Cinema Romantico is a little uneasy about this “Top Gun” sequel, much like, say, any Rolling Stones devotee might be a little uneasy about a “Satisfaction” sequel in which Mick and Keith have, in fact, achieved satisfaction and are now explaining to some hapless young lad – think James Corden – about how he too can acquire satisfaction. Ew. But if this sequel had to be, which it did because it’s Hollywood, well then the least they could do was include Val Kilmer. How could you have a “Top Gun 2” without Tom “Iceman” Kazansky? He, not Maverick, won the damn Top Gun trophy! What, are you gonna have a reunion for the 1968 American Winter Olympic Team and not invite Peggy Fleming? So that’s why even if we are not wholly quelled over the forthcoming “Top Gun 2”, we are at least pleased in the face of our powerlessness to stop its existence that those in charge have finally, long after “Top Gun 2’s” production was first reported, seen fit to, yes, per The Wrap, include Val Kilmer in the predestined boondoggle.

As our infinite loyal frustrated followers must surely know, in the face of this news drop, Cinema Romantico was cosmically bound to speculate what Iceman, glorious Iceman, could be up to come “Top Gun 2.” A few theories:

Jester. The sequel, it has been reported, will feature Tom Cruise’s Maverick as a Top Gun instructor, meaning he has essentially become Viper (i.e. Commander Mike Metcalf). And if Maverick is Viper then that means he needs a Jester, and who better to be his Jester than Iceman? Unless, of course, the role of Jester will go to Whip Hubley reprising his role as Hollywood, which would be good too, if not better, since Iceman is too cool for Jester. No, Iceman definitely wouldn’t still be lurking around Top Gun. He’d something like…

The Kansas City Barbecue owner. That was the rollicking joint, of course, where Goose sang “Great Balls of Fire” and Maverick and Charlie re-connected at the conclusion over the jukebox. And rather than become a Top Gun instructor, Iceman bought the place, installing himself as a less tragic heir to Bryan Brown in “Cocktail.” Iceman’s Law: the only thing better than buzzing the tower are the burnt ends.

Top Chef. In this era of Reality TV it would only make sense to bring the Top Gun competition to television, perhaps to SPIKE since it was recently renovated into the Paramount Network and “Top Gun” is a Paramount production. A dozen hotshot pilots compete over 12 weeks to hoist the Top Gun trophy and after each hop the pilots repair to the judge’s flight deck to see which pilot is told to turn his/her flight helmet and aviator sunglasses. Maverick is Tom Colicchio. Charlie is Padma Lakshmi. And, of course, Iceman is Gail Simmons, because Gail Simmons should be on every episode, dammit, and for some reason known only to the oracles of idiocy isn’t.

Olympic volleyball team coach. After winning the Top Gun Trophy and helping to save the free world (even though the other side denied the incident), Tom Kazansky is seeking a profession a little less casual if nevertheless still rife with competition. So Kazansky, on the strength of his beach volleyballing bonafides, takes a job as head coach of the Los Alamos Canyon Creek Community College Men’s Volleyball team, gradually working his way up the ranks before assuming command of the U.S. Men’s Olympic Volleyball Team. But with an Olympics in the Pacific Rim looming, the Russians have developed a MiG-Galaxy S9+ they are threatening to unleash on the unsuspecting host country. Maverick is there to stop the threat, but he needs a little help, a little help from an old friend. Thus, Coach Kazansky must decide whether he will take up his whistle for the Gold Medal match or return to the cockpit one last time.

Apocalypse Now. Iceman has gone off the grid and, in advance of a big Pacific Rim summit, taken with him crucial Naval Intelligence. Maverick is summoned by the aging Viper to go up the California coastline and to Big Sur to find Iceman and re-acquire said intelligence. Eventually, Maverick finds Kazansky hiding out at the Esalen Institute where the erstwhile pilot has taken up residence as a transcendental meditation instructor. His mantra, Iceman explains, is the Naval Intelligence, and no meditator is allowed to reveal his mantra. As such, Maverick must enter Iceman’s world to uncover the information, only to get, as is traditional, more than he bargained for.

Laughter is Something Akin to to a Fairly Decent Medicine

These are two janitors as Danny Boyle’s “A Life Less Ordinary” opens as they involuntarily hear out the pitch of their fellow custodial technician, hapless Robert Lewis (Ewan McGregor), for his Great American Trash Novel, something to do with the secret daughter of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe and a stash of Nazi gold. The dude on the right, leaning forward with bugged out eyes, is strictly faux-enthusiasm, pretending to hang on every word, while the dude on the left is too exhausted to feign enthusiasm, receiving Robert’s spiel with the air of a non-college football fan forced to listen to a college football fan espouse about the hokey majesty of certain defunct bowl games.

Somewhere in-between the reaction of these two men is the reaction of Reverend Toller (Ethan Hawke) in Paul Schrader’s recently released “First Reformed” (which we will delve into more deeply next week) when he is made to negotiate a moment in which the Pastor of his parent church, Joel Jeffers (Cedric the Entertainer — nay, Cedric Kyles) makes a PG-13-ish joke about A Mighty Fortress is our God. At first, Hawke has his Protestant Reverand emit a pained smile, not a laugh, one obligated to engage with his superior’s nominal joke-making but clearly struggling to. After Jeffers keeps hammering away at the weakly brewed punchline, Toller’s defiance finally gives way as Hawke lets loose with a vociferous “Ha!”, like he has been trying to summon the wherewithal the entire conversation to give the guffaw he knew he was supposed to muster in the first place, and had to try so hard to make it happen that now he has gone over the top.

Toller’s laugh suggests a willingness, however arduous, to continue engagement with polite society’s rules; Max Cady’s movie theater laughter, cutting through his cigar smoke, in “Cape Fear”, on the other hand, has ceased all engagement. There is something noble in putting on a brave face, after all, though there is also a thin line between putting on a brave face and surrendering your soul by way of surrendering your sanity. And while Max Cady is a wickedly immoral character whose murderous impulses bear no comparison to mere social manners, there is still, simply in the space of that movie theater laughter, an evocation of a man who has likely been put through the same social ringer as Reverend Toller one too many times. And rather than stick to the norms, he has willfully gone crazy.

If there is truth in laughter, and there is, it is found in John McNaughton’s underrated 1992 opus “Mad Dog and Glory.” That’s another DeNiro movie, and there he plays meekly-mannered cop Wayne Dobie – nickname: Mad Dog – who kinda, sorta inadvertently falls in with a Mafioso named Frank Milo (Bill Murray), getting invited to Milo’s club where the mob boss can force his standup comedy on the crowd since, hey, as he says, he owns the place.

Wayne is forced to endure Milo’s set amidst the crime boss’s lackeys, all of whom roar with laughter at everything their dear leader says, whether it’s funny or not, not unlike Reverend Toller, just a little less Protestant, a little more pasta-sauced Catholic. Wayne, however, can’t fake it.

But then a funny thing happens – that is, Milo tells a joke that makes Wayne laugh. He can’t hold it in, even if he might want to, which is the best kind of laugh, the sort that emerges instinctively.

It feels good to laugh, for real, especially in times when it seems like the last thing you would ever want to do.

Game Night

A long time ago, in a Hollywood far, far away, when John McClane, in “Die Hard”, needing an alias to protect his identity in the moment, called himself “Roy Rogers”, it was a designation born of the character’s own pithiness more than any kind of wink-wink at the audience. That’s because “Die Hard” did a stellar job of world-building and then making that world feel lived in, so that you could imagine McClane watching Roy Rogers on TV as a boy. Late in “Game Night”, however, when Max Davis (Jason Bateman) references “Taken 3” at a crucial moment, you don’t believe that he’s a “Taken” fan, or even that he caught “Taken 3” on the red-eye from L.A. to Newark, so much as a character in an action movie simulation, plugging into a pre-existing action movie to help him advance to the next level. By the time “Game Night” concluded, except that it might not really have, I felt like that dude at the end of “eXistenZ” (1999). “Hey, tell me the truth,” I wanted to say, “are we still in the game?”

The game in “Game Night” is a murder mystery party in which the mystery becomes real and the potential of murder genuine. This is connected to Brooks (Kyle Chandler), Max’s faux-charismatic brother, host of the murder mystery party, not necessarily being on the up and up. Max and his wife Annie (Rachel McAdams), as well as the other quartet of game night participants, gradually unravel that the ersatz is authentic leading to a desperate search and rescue mission. No matter how real the situation gets, however, the movie never takes it completely seriously, diffusing every macabre turn with a pop culture reference. A lot of movies play that sort of inside baseball just to earn cheap laughs, but “Game Night” makes these references the point, nearly every allusion to a celebrity or a movie sort of existing as the key to unlocking the jam in which they find themselves, ironical video game cheat codes.

It sounds like a simple send-up of summer entertainment, and it sort of is, but also, to directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein’s credit, many of “Game Night’s” action sequences forgo the scourge of shaky cam. Granted, neither a mid-movie car chase nor a later foot chase, of sorts, involving a fabergé egg exactly re-invent the action movie wheel, but they nevertheless pop on account of their visual clarity. You can see stuff! On the other hand, the movie’s attempts at actual drama are far less edifying.

Darkness worth exploring lurks in “Game Night”, glimpsed in the counterpoint of Cliff Martinez’s synth score over an aerial shot of sprawling suburban tract and in the comically moody performance of Jessie Plemmons. As a cop living next door to the Davis’s who is obsessed with an ex, Plemmons wields a monotone drawl and unblinking eyes to fine effect, intimating a melancholy well beyond the normal parameters. Not that the movie knows what to do with his shifty aura, unfortunately, as the character’s heartbreak ultimately proves emotionally expendable to further the film’s overall What’s Next?! sensation.

“Game Night” strains to make things personal through Max and Annie’s unsuccessful attempts to have a baby, outlined in the prologue, as well as the fellow murder mystery participants’ respective relationship crises. These, however, come across like role-playing game statistics as opposed to anything of actual emotional value. What’s more, Max’s struggles at conceiving with Annie are suggested as being tied to a crisis of confidence in relation to his brother, though in the movie’s language what allows him to finally cross this hurdle is not so much coming to terms with Brooks as getting wild and crazy in his life.

The movie doesn’t seem to know this, and neither, frankly, does Bateman, who does his straight-man comic thing pretty well, as he often does, but never really becomes unwound. Rachel McAdams does, making you wish the movie was a little more about her, a little less about him, but what else is new? She has long excelled at grounding absurdity, as her wonderful, underrated “Red Eye” performance can attest, and in a sequence where she is tasked with excavating a bullet from her beau’s arm, guided by instructions on her smartphone, she comes across both in over her head and getting a kick out it anyway, a delicate balance for which all of “Game Night” strives but cannot always manage.

McAdams, however, is even better before that, in the moments when she thinks nothing is real. It’s something akin to Bill Murray’s “The Man Who Knew Too Little”, but with more of an edge. Indeed, when she is made to quote Rosanna Arquette’s iconic opening commands in “Pulp Fiction”, McAdams does not so much quote the sequence as ineffably get inside its skin. Not long after, as Annie plays Third Eye Blind on the jukebox and dances with a pistol waving near her lips, it is both funny and frightening, someone so deep in the game that, for a second, you’re not sure she’ll ever find her way out. I sort of wish she hadn’t.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Battle of Britain (1969)

The 1960s was the era of “The Great Escape” and “The Dirty Dozen”, WWII epics consisting of big plots and populated by big personalities. Guy Hamilton’s “The Battle of Britain” (1969) certainly possesses an all-star cast, ranging from Sir Laurence Olivier to a young Michael Caine and Christopher Plummer to Susannah York, the token female, though, frankly, every character here feels as superfluous as her, less people than variations of humans pushed around like pieces on the movie’s own battle map. They are in service to the plot, which, as the title implies, is big too, revolving around the RAF holding off the Lutwaffe and preventing Nazi Germany’s invasion of England. But while the movie’s production design aims for and achieves realism, employing so many actual planes at extravagant cost, the documentarian feeling does not extend to the storytelling particulars. If there is little human drama added, the details of the three month long battle are mostly just glossed over. No, this is a movie that went to great production pains, acquiring so many planes, IMDb tells us, that at the time of filming “The Battle of Britain” air force was the 35th largest in the world, and so much effort is exerted to show that air force off.

“The Battle of Britain” opens with the last few remaining RAF pilots in France evacuating, or deliberately ruining their own aircraft, as the German army approaches. And while not long after we see the German Ambassador, Baron von Richter (Curd Jürgens), trying to convince his British counterpart, Sir David Kelly (Ralph Richardson), that staying in the fight is futile, the British ambassador shows Churchill-ish chutzpah in explaining “Don’t threaten or dictate to us until you’re marching up Whitehall, and even then we won’t listen.” Sure, Kelly privately confides after von Richter has left that the German emissary is probably right, but that is not the tone “Battle of Britain” strikes. For every lament that the RAF doesn’t have enough pilots, Hamilton counters it by striking up “Aces High”, Ron Goodwin’s military march orchestration

The climactic air battle is one of the few sequences forgoing this defiant merriment, and, not incidentally, is when the movie is best, letting dialogue fall away to present something more akin to “Wings”. For the most part, however, the British, while occasionally allowed moments of gloom opposite the cocky, grinning Third Reich, like the self-impressed knaves of some ski slope comedy, remain generally plucky, like a scene when a parachuting RAF pilot lands in the backyard of the home of the family of a young boy who smilingly scurries out and offers the British hero a cigarette.

No matter how few pilots they have, the British are still able to get planes in the sky, and seeing both the real-life aircraft mixed with models reminded me of how much I prefer tangible visuals to CGI-created ones. Tomato-Tomahto. Even so, there is something as distancing about much of “Battle of Britain’s” very real aerial footage as there is with the digital fake-outs of the modern era. The shots here are unimaginatively repetitive, whether they are dogfights seen from a distance, planes billowing smoke and going down, or explosions on the ground. Many years ago I attended a model plane re-enactment of Pearl Harbor in Ida Grove, Iowa with my Dad and a friend of his, and that is what Hamilton’s movie frequently looks like – a re-enactment from afar.

As I watched “The Battle of Britain” my mind kept flashing back to another re-telling of storied British war history — that is, “Dunkirk”, directed by Christopher Nolan and released last summer. Like Hamilton’s film, “Dunkirk” was criticized in some quarters for not really having characters, just interchangeable people. And that is not necessarily inaccurate. No one is really fleshed out. But Nolan's intent was not to flesh anyone out, just to put the events on screen, which, despite muddying up with one of his patented dipsy-do timelines, he lent a palpable urgency. The scenes of Tom Hardy’s RAF pilot providing air cover are cleanly edited and amplified with immaculate sound design, rendering them thrilling in the moment, but then given added weight by being juxtaposed with the scenes on the ground, reminding you of the bigger picture. It is, you might say, artistic vision. The artistic vision for “The Battle of Britain” did not seem to advance much beyond the admittedly impressive production design. The eponymous event was titanic in human history, but on screen, it barely registers.

Mood