' ' Cinema Romantico: July 2018

Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Eighth Grade

“Eighth Grade” is bookended by both YouTube confessionals and time capsules. There is something of a then and now aspect in these dueling details, the former representing the social media prevalence of our present and the latter, buried in the ground with details meant to be found and interpreted in the future, evoking the past. And that is appropriate because even if writer/director Bo Burnham’s coming-of-age, of sorts, story feels indicative of the time in which it is set, with students forced through active shooter drills, it also feels wholly universal, which is why Kayla (Elsie Fisher) spends an active shooter drill chatting up a cute boy, which I can only imagine probably transpired during Cuban Missile Crisis drills too. Indeed, when Kayla hangs out with a few high schoolers one of them references their generational gap, which probably sounds ridiculous until you remember that everyone – EVERYONE – always feels, no matter their age, old.


The movie encompasses Kayla’s last week of eighth grade, though it is often less a triumphant processional than awkward ordeal. High school is a fertile ground for horror movies, from “Carrie” to “Prom Night”, and “Eighth Grade” is no less apt at demonstrating how the choppy navigation of adolescence is a machine for generating dread. Kayla describes her life experience as akin to the moment before you climb onto a rollercoaster with none of the joy that is supposed to come after you have ridden the ride and disembarked. And that is often how “Eighth Grade” feels, like you are climbing into a rollercoaster car already fearful for the moment when your stomach will drop. This is  most effectively conveyed in a sequence where Kayla musters up something approximating courage to attend a pool party she was grudgingly invited to, walking up the driveway as the camera follows, menacingly, over her shoulder and the piano keys tremble. In the next scene, the camera films from within an actual pool, but this unwilling march, while aqua-free, is straight outta “Jaws.”

That horror is frequently furthered in nothing more than Kayla’s posture, her shoulders slumped, her head down, and Fisher accentuates that awkwardness with deft line readings of variations of youthful slang that are cringingly hysterical in their soft-voiced half-heartedness. Eventually Kayla becomes more comfortable in her own skin and willing to stand up for herself, though even when she does, like confronting the cool girl in school, she cannot bring herself to make eye contact as she does and sort of cuts out before she truly putting a period on speech. If it is funny, it is also evocative of how Burnham resists writing Kayla’s change with obvious flourishes; it is much more halting and incremental, which is to say it is true to life.

Her change is also not tied to a boy. That’s not to say there are no boys, because there’s Aiden (Luke Prael), the piercingly eyed dreamboat. But the music that pulses on the soundtrack whenever he appears betrays that he is merely a fleeting fantasy, and he factors little into her arc. The worthy, winningly weird male opposite, Gabe (Jake Ryan), appears early and then vanishes again until much later, after Kayla actualizes. No handsome boy carries her across the threshold; she does it herself. No, the most pivotal scene involving a boy doubles as the movie’s most harrowing when an older guy gives her a ride home and tries goading her into something she does not want. If it does not plunge as deep into the darkness as you might fear, that’s only because it never becomes physical, instead transforming into an acute, terrifying evocation of mental abuse. “Sorry,” she keeps saying, shockingly earnestly, as if it’s her fault. In this moment, Fisher bodily seems to shrink, evincing how emotionally she is made to feel so small.

Though adults are present in “Eighth Grade”, they are seen exclusively through an adolescent prism, seen in an early shot of Kayla’s principal at the front of a classroom where he is viewed from a camera peering around the backs of the heads of students at their desks. The closest we get to an adult is Kayla’s father, Mark (Josh Hamilton), though we deliberately never spend any time with him on his own. There is a subplot dangled, momentarily, about another mother who seems to possibly be attracted to him, though that is immediately set aside, and, as such, might have been jettisoned altogether. No, Mark is better as an unwilling outsider in his own daughter’s life, brought home in Hamilton playing the part with the air of a soldier tip-toeing around land mines, never quite sure he has a hold on her needs. In fact, when Kayla asks if she can burn something in the backyard, Hamilton has his character comically, hesitantly reply like he knows he’s wading into a minefield.


The backyard sequence finds Mark momentarily opening up and essentially expressing that he loves his daughter for exactly who she is, which might not be a new sentiment but is given such remarkable life not so much in this speech as in the movie’s entire rendering. There’s a little “Lady Bird” here in so much as Kayla is presented as a normal kid. That’s why her YouTube confessionals attract no views; she does not have to become a star to matter. You see that at the birthday party she doesn’t want to attend when she forces herself to perform karaoke. Burnham does not shoot this from the point-of-view of the party guests but with the camera tightly at Kayla’s side, blurring out every background character, a moving visual encapsulation of how change from the inside-out feels.

Monday, July 30, 2018

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again

The prevailing theory when it comes to sequels is, simply, go bigger. But “Mamma Mia!” (2008), the ABBA jukebox musical, was plenty big, in aesthetic, box office, and star power (see: Dame Meryl Streep). So, for the just-released follow-up, “Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again”, writer/director Ol Miller makes a lateral move, forgoing bigger for lighter and frothier. The original was not particularly plot heavy, but it nevertheless posed a central question – namely, whether Bill (Stellan Skarsgård), Harry (Colin Firth), or Sam (Pierce Brosnan) was father to Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), daughter of Donna (Meryl Streep). A soap opera, perhaps, but a story point just the same. And though “Here We Go Again” is nominally tied to whether Sophie will get her mom’s Grecian hotel the Bella Donna ready in time for its grand re-launch, the bigger questions are more along the lines of, say, when and where will Cher appear? (It’s like waiting for Lady Gaga instead of Harry Lime.) And how blue is the Aegean Sea? Answer: so blue. That sparkling blue water is “Here We Go Again’s” aura color.


The one way in which “Here We Go Again” does amplify is its dueling storylines. In the present, with Donna having passed away, and who is represented by a sort of Dia de los Muertos portrait as Glamour Shot, Sophie works in concert with her hotel manager (Andy Garcia) to get the Bella Donna ready to go while simultaneously worrying that two of her three dads – Bill and Harry – might not make the ceremonial christening. In the past, events mentioned in the original are brought to life as the college graduate version of Donna, played by Lily James, treks from Oxford to Greece and encounters the younger versions of Bill, Harry, and Sam. And though the movie’s conclusion sort of literalizes the spiritual connection between mother and daughter despite now being eternally apart, the narrative toggling between then and now evinces the same sensation, as if mother and daughter are speaking to one another across space and time.

Music has always possessed that same sort of immutability, and so the sense of cosmic communication is organically furthered by the movie’s soundtrack. Granted, because the series’ foremost tenet requires all that music to be ABBA’s, Miller is mostly compelled to mine the Swedish band’s back catalogue since many of their most popular tunes were already deployed in the original. If that might well be an issue for viewers who are disappointed when they don’t find a band’s Greatest Hits on the jukebox, it is a blessing for any (raises hand) who thrive on deep cuts. And if I, faithful reviewer, might be a tad disappointed that “Here We Go Again” failed to work in that astonishing insistent synth bass in “What About Livingstone?”, well, hey, the movie’s first number, “When I Kissed the Teacher”, is no less gleefully kitschy. Sung at young Donna’s graduation it becomes both her post-graduate declaration of adventure and the movie’s edict to sail away on its sonic summer breeze.

Not that “Here We Go Again” completely foregoes hits. “Fernando”, which was left out of the original movie, appears, and while its showbiz choreography might be limited the sequence’s inherent theatricality still pushes right through the camp ceiling to access starry sentiment. The immortal “Dancing Queen”, meanwhile, does earn a reprise, and the at-sea sequence it adorns – suggesting the Kylie Minogue line “We’re in a place where heaven breathes” which is culled from a song called “Love Boat”, which, suffice to say, is not an accidental reference here – stops the movie in its tracks to just kick back and celebrate. That celebratory air evokes the entire movie, even when the tone is ostensibly melancholy. Sullen characters sail straight into the heart of heart-stopping sunsets; fishermen lamenting their economic downturn have a drink and cut loose; even the storm that briefly halts the Bella Donna’s progress barely registers as anything more than a passing shower.


All the actors, bless their heart, are tuned into this festive frequency, whether it’s Garcia fashioning gravelly-ness as pure uncut charisma or Jessica Keenan Wynn playing the part of Young Tanya and therefore reveling in the opportunity to live out playing a young Christine Baranski. Wynn is not doing an impression, mind you, just having the time of her life by locking into Baranski’s full-bodied mien. James isn’t really doing a Streep impression either, because how could she, and why would she want to anyway in the face of Streep’s oft-chronicled singularity, even as she embodies Streep’s original spirit, not just in the singing and semi-dancing but, crucially, in her non-singing reacting. Seriously, just watching James watch her fellow performers wrests as much joy as the joy emitted by her fellow performers, whether it’s Keenan Wynn or Panos Mouzourakis as the frontman of a highly questionable local island band.

That band’s spirit, which is self evident despite its lack of skill, speaks to the movie’s overriding Put on A Show vibe. That vibe was just as prevalent in the original where, fans might recall, Pierce Brosnan managed some wincing approximation of singing. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that he is generally forbidden from singing here, though I found that to be the film’s most significant flaw. After all, if you’re putting on a show then everyone deserves a part.

Friday, July 27, 2018

Friday's Old Fashioned Flashes Back to the 90s


It happens all the time these days. Me, 40 year old man, born in the late 70s, who spent half the 90s in middle and high school, will be on the train just minding my own business when, suddenly, apropos only of the so-called 20 year fashion cycle, will look right and see some young kid who was born post-Y2K wearing a Nirvana t-shirt and then will look right and see a young woman, probably just out of college, wearing a dress and shoes that are straight from the Jenny Calendar catalogue. It’s an old song, sure, I get it, but still, it never ceases to amaze each generation that suffers through it. The other night I watched an Ellen HBO stand-up special from 1990 with My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, one that I remember watching with my best friend nearly 30 years ago. Rest assured, when I would have watched with my best friend, I did not howl at Ellen’s hammer pants like I did with My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife because, well, in 1990, man, those pants, believe it or not, kids, would have just looked, like, normal. Life, it’s wild.

It's funny though, because even as I lament these fashion trends that I would have been fine never seeing again coming back around, I have found myself this summer, more than ever, pining for 90s movies. Well, not 90s movies, exactly, so much as 90s thrillers. You know, thrillers, exercises in suspense. And I’m not even talking about “The Fugitive” here. No, I’m talking about mid-level thrillers, airport rack versions of cinema, with above average pedigrees, preferably, in the form of solid actors who might well be there for paychecks but are nevertheless maintaining professional standards rather than Xeroxing their performances from past triumphs. I don’t want a movie like “The Net”, because in 2018 that would be ridiculous, I just want a movie with the air of “The Net.” Sandra Bullock had more fun in “The Net” than she did in “Ocean’s 8.” That ain’t right!

That’s what brings us to the Old Fashioned we plan to serve every Friday in August. Normally the eighth month of the year, the worst month of the year, is when we lessen the unrelenting wretchedness of summer’s dog days by returning to the cinema of our youth – that is, the 80s. Except, well, the 90s are part of our youth too. And between the sudden emergence of aspiring Chanel models sporting mom jeans on purpose and a summer movie season dearth of passable thrillers, it is time to re-set our August DeLorean date one decade later than usual. So dust off your Starter jacket, crank the Spin Doctors, and thank your lucky stars that Lisa Lopes (RIP) did not star in a mid-level, wrongfully accused thriller called “Kick Your Game” that finished 154th at the box office in 1995 because, rest assured, we would be reviewing the hell out of it. Beginning next Friday, August 3rd, and carrying through literally the last day of the worst month of the year, we will return to the 90s in search of suspense, turning our attention to a couple cult classics, or thereabouts, and a few other movies you probably thought you’d never hear from again only to wind up on the wrong blog at the wrong time.

Thursday, July 26, 2018

Shout-Out to the Extra: M:I - Rouge Nation Version

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

As the curtain on “Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation” (2015) raises, IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is trying to board a cargo plane in Belarus about to take off to prevent a gaggle of nerve gas from winding up in the wrong hands. But to get onboard he needs Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), who is on site, to hack into the plane’s operating system to get the door open. But to hack into the operating system Benji needs Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), who is patched in remotely from Malaysia, to hack a Russian satellite, a governmental no-no. In the midst of all this, instructions, in a manner of speaking, are relayed from William Brandt (Jeremy Renner), Operations Director, at IMF headquarters on the other side of the globe. And despite this hopping back and forth between different time zones, the moment still feels intimate, the camera cutting between the four mentioned characters as if no one else is even involved. But other people are involved. As all this transpires, the plane begins to taxi, which Brandt realizes. “The package,” Brandt says with the air of a Domino’s manager who just realized his deliveryman left one of his deliveries in the store, “is still on that plane.” As he says it, we suddenly see an extra in the bottom left hand corner of the frame.


As first she is looking forward, in the same direction as Brandt, presumably at the IMF’s version of The Big Board. But when Brandt advises the package is still on the plane, she glances at him out of the corner of her eye.


This extra could have merely turned her neck, nothing more, but expressively she goes for it, and good for her. Her face betrays worry, but it is not the kind of worry that is necessarily worried about how they are going to get the package off the plane. If it was that kind of worry her brow, no doubt, would be more furrowed, connoting insta-brainstorming. No, this worry resembles a passenger in a car when the driver decides to floor it in the middle of rush hour traffic. The whole scene, frankly, is played as much at a comic pitch as an action-adventure one, and this extra’s A+ expression is evidence.

Stakes in movies like this are always high. If it’s not America, then it’s the world; if it’s not the world, then it’s the universe. The stakes are definitely high in “Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation.” Still, even as the story trots the globe and encompasses geopolitics, this extra functions as a droll ode to the flunkey’s plight. As Brandt makes clear in the moment, his agency is under investigation, and hacking into a Russian satellite un-approved will no doubt cause additional consternation. Maybe hacking into it and preventing that nerve gas from getting where it should not go can be attributed to national security, sure, but in that extra’s expression you see how sometimes national security, and all that it entails, goes hand in hand with job security. “Am I,” she seems to be thinking, “about to get fired?”

Pour one out for the extra.


Wednesday, July 25, 2018

Set It Up

I confess, I was rooting for “Set It Up.” As Claire Scanlon’s Netflix distributed romantic comedy entered its second act downturn, where so many promising rom coms before it have crashed against the rocks and capsized, I was so taken with “Set It Up’s” sprightly telling and energetic performances that I was actively rooting for it not to spring a leak. And though a couple coincidences do emerge to help spur the narrative along to its conclusion, the film, refreshingly, never betrays the intelligence of its characters. That’s not to suggest “Set It Up” resists coloring within fairly rigid rom com lines. Nothing here is really new, a fact which the movie essentially acknowledges by way of various references to rom coms of yore. And if that might suggest what “Weird Al” Yankovich recently rightly criticized as unimaginative Reference Comedy, “Set It Up”, bless its heart, is never so shallow. It acknowledges its debts to its ancestors and then employs those familiar tropes to yield its own entertaining rewards.


“Set It Up” sort of blends the puppet-master romantic routine of “The Parent Trap”, which is cited, with the boss from hell comedy of “The Devil Wears Prada”, which is not cited. Harper (Zoey Deutch) and Charlie (Glen Powell) are overtaxed personal assistants to, respectively, a powerful sports reporter, Kirsten (Lucy Liu), and a venture capitalist, Rick (Taye Diggs). The assistants’ stress levels are effectively demonstrated, particularly in the early-going, by a camera refusing to stay still, rendering moments like Harper’s attempts to anticipate her boss’s needs by coming out from around her desk and into her boss’s office, and then making haste backwards as her boss angrily strides forward as something like a tango, where her boss leads by forcing her assistant to guess which way she is going to go.

After Harper and Charlie cross paths, they scheme to dial down their hectic lifestyles by manipulating their boss’s daily schedules in a wily effort to hook them up. If you suspect this will lead to Harper and Charlie falling in love instead, you would be right, though it is commendable just how un-obvious "Set It Up" is despite such a pre-ordained arc. If you might wish Harper and Charlie’s other love interests, whose names I forget because their characters are so uninspiring, were ditched altogether, it is nevertheless welcome that we spend so little time with these two nobodies anyway. And while moments like conspiring to get Kirsten and Rick on the Kiss Cam at Yankee Stadium seem readymade for Harper and Charlie to then be found by the camera too, it thankfully does not.

Charlie is written as something approaching a bro, but Powell’s natural twinkly demeanor, so ably displayed in both “Everybody Wants Some!!” and “Hidden Figures”, still emerges so that you can see precisely what it is that draws Harper to him in the first place. And together Detuch and Powell emit wattage in the convincing, flirtatious way they give each other shit, the cornerstone of any beginning relationship, before gradually allowing it to transform into something more. The latter is best seen in a late-night sequence that is an acute evocation, as any one who has ever been in their twenties can attest, to the majesty of drunk pizza. It, like so many others, is a scene that refuses to end the way you think it will.


The film’s flaw, as it were, lies in its attempts to intertwine career aspirations with the love story. Though Charlie's yearning to become sort of vaguely defined business analyst are insignificant, it is nevertheless at least tied back to his ultimate, if obvious, realization that he isn't even certainly what he actually wants to be or do. Harper, on the other hand, really does yearn to break into the sports journalism industry, an idea worthy of exploration that the screenplay reduces to nothing more than her repeatedly trying and failing to write a single story.....until she succeeds, and all is well, as frustrating a trope as the mildewy closing shot of the Central Park skyline. C’mon.

More incisiveness into the journalism world would have been beneficial, particularly because the screenplay does give the characters space to settle their professional and personal conundrums before officially bringing them together. Whatever its other deficiencies, that space is nothing less than a triumph, an acknowledgment that Love does not Cure All, but that Love goes hand in hand with Everything Else.

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

The Catcher Was a Spy

Moe Berg, professional baseball player, spy in the OSS, was an odd duck, the strangest man ever to play baseball, as longtime New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel once observed, all of which can be found in Nicholas Dawdioff’s book “The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg”, or at least by combing through Berg’s Wikipedia page. Ben Lewin’s film version, however, leaves you wondering how much of Dawdioff’s book both the director and screenwriter, Robert Rodat, ingested. The movie Berg (Paul Rudd) is flattened out of nearly all eccentricity, leaving only the hollow shell of a bland would-be Hero. It’s as if “The Catcher Was a Spy” didn’t want us to get to know Moe Berg at all.


That might have been a compelling angle since narrative impenetrability is often an effective means to underscore the vagaries of the spy game. Except that even as “The Catcher Was a Spy” renders Moe Berg as a blank picture frame, it tells its story with oddly misplaced directness. You see this straight away. The movie opens with a title card explaining that Moe Berg was tasked by the OSS to track down Werner Heisenberg, German physicist, at the height of WWII and assassinate him. The ensuing scene is Moe Berg in the midst of this task. And while the dialogue is fairly cryptic, such ambiguity is entirely counteracted by the preceding title card which has already placed us one step ahead rather than one step behind, holding our hand, parceling out information where a little narrative cloak and dagger might have aided atmosphere.

From there, “The Catcher Was a Spy” flashes back eight years to Moe Berg on the field at Fenway Park, rendered in fine period detail, as most of the movie is. Commendable production design, however, cannot make up for beginner’s exposition, a criticism as old as the hills yet no less apt, where a few Red Sox just sort of stand to the side and helpfully explain for our benefit who Berg is rather than the movie shrewdly showing us. What’s worse, if the diamond is where Berg is happiest, as we are also told, Lewin hardly revels in this fact, just as he hardly revels in the fact that Berg – as we are also expressly told – loves libraries almost as much as the diamond. These traits are relayed to us through dialogue but never visually or behaviorally reveled in, a frequent aesthetic symptom.

The only real tension, as it were, relates to Berg’s sexual orientation, introduced when a Red Sox rookie, wondering whether or not his teammate is gay, follows Berg home. The rookie, however, gets beaten to a pulp when Berg realizes he is being followed, a sequence segueing directly into a pointedly lascivious scene involving Berg and his girlfriend, Estrella (Sienna Miller). Taken in tandem, these explicit moments seem to exist for no other reason than to reassure any wary audience members that the movie they are will not refrain entirely from manly pursuits. Indeed, later, when Berg goes to Japan on a barnstorming tour, he seems to have a fling with a Japanese delegate, Kawabata (Hiroyuki Sanada), another man, though, sure enough, Levin cuts directly to Berg in an empty bed the morning after, a cautious cop-out.

Berg’s relationship with Estrella, while apparently pivotal since the movie keeps going back to it, is emotionally sanitized too. She, in the manner of so many Supportive Spouses, real, faux, or otherwise, is mostly just on hand to be blue as she continually realizes he will not commit. Miller has cornered the market on these sorts of roles as of late, and though she engenders less screen time here than last year’s “Lost City of Z”, she still manages to stand out. In the face of her character being told she cannot go along to Japan with Berg because they are not married, Miller, in the mere way she stands up and walks away, evinces moving, disbelieving self-actualization.


Japan, where war is foreshadowed, sets up the movie’s WWII spy adventure, occupying most of the film’s second half. Alas, just as the film fails to convey any of the singularity of its otherwise singular character, so does it fail in infusing these action-adventure passages with anything that is not off the shelf, right down to the obvious recurring shots of the lurking Gestapo agent, telegraphing a theoretical twist so hard that you actively root to be proven wrong. Rudd, meanwhile, no doubt yearned to capture his character’s enigmatic nature through emotional restraint, but this actorly choice inadvertently has the opposite effect by transforming Berg into something more akin to many stone-faced All-American heroes of so many other war movies. He could be anyone in any movie.

In his little screen time, Strong, as Heisenberg, leaves a more indelible mark, his glares of irritated perplexity directed at Berg conferring more inscrutability onto the baseball player turned spy than Rudd manages to convey himself. And Heisenberg’s motivations, which as a closing title card reminds us remain unknowable to this day, emerge as a more preeminent enigma, really, than Berg, which is such an incredible flaw that you wish this whole production had ripped itself up midway through and started again.

Monday, July 23, 2018

Tending My Garden


Late last July, when the attempt at ACA’s repeal and replace was in its hellraising eleventh hour, my Beautiful, Perspicacious Girlfriend (now Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife) and I fled north from Chicago to Milwaukee. This had already been planned, but given the state of things this trip felt less like mere r&r than sanity saving. One of our stops was the Milwaukee Art Museum. Alas, the special exhibition we had specifically come to see was shut down to prop up a Foxconn soiree hosted by Scott Walker; it was a twist worthy of Lynch. Nevertheless, we were able to peruse the regular collection, including Pierre Bonnard’s View from the Artist’s Studio, wherein, the accompanying placard explained, as WWII’s European Theatre ground its grisly conclusion, Bonnard, from the vantage point of his studio in southeastern France, simply looked out the window and painted what he saw, not isolating himself from the globe’s turmoil but briefly finding solace in what was right in front of him.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that painting in relation to Voltaire and his garden, and I have been thinking a lot about Voltaire and his garden in relation to blogging. After all, the eponymous Candide of Voltaire’s legendary 1759 satire was moved, after deliberately experiencing society’s infinite ills, to see the routine cultivation of his garden as the only sane response to a world gone mad. In present-day America, however, you needn’t go out to find all the ills of the world. No, each atrocity is delivered straight to you, every week, every day, every hour, with every refresh of the page. Those atrocities extend to this blog’s nominal theme – that is, Hollywood, where the bill for an industry steeped in sexual and racial malpractice dating back to its infancy is finally, rightfully coming due. And even if I still love movies and find them to be of significant value, I wonder if carrying even a flimsy 4 oz. paper cone cup of water for Hollywood is wrong. Sometimes I think putting this blog on ice until Ashley Judd is put in charge of a major movie studio even if me doing so would not necessarily amount to much more than this blog blowing its own horn.

It is not, however, merely Hollywood itself that has made me evaluate my relationship to blogging; it is blogs too. I sometimes think about my Swedish blogging friend Jessica, proprietor of the Velvet Café, a site that has not posted in over three years. Granted, even when she was online, Jessica found time for many unplugged adventures, and I figure she has only been MIA as a means to be permanently adventuring offline which is hardly something I can fault. Still, her absence is evocative of a once thriving movie blogging community that has, like so much of the blogging platform itself, wilted. This unfortunate happening is tied to many reasons, and I am not blameless, sort of ceasing to regularly check in with my community members’ gardens as my life has become busier, merely taking the time I do have to focus on cultivating my own.

Reviews are this blogging garden’s principal crop, because I enjoy them as a means to really work through what I’ve seen, even if I also enjoy utilizing this platform, as most loyal frustrated followers can attest, to indulge my notably peculiar fancy with other postings about God-knows-what. But in the Rotten Tomatoes age, reviews function less as opportunities to truly consider a movie than as fodder for numerical worth, suggesting an emerging post-criticism age, or something, where Good/Bad trumps What/How. My former editor at a different site once confessed that movie reviews were not getting anywhere near the amount of pageviews they once did. This turn toward empty calorie clickbait often makes me wonder why I bother to keep up this blog.

I have sometimes wondered if I keep it up only as compulsion. Yet in taking more time away from Cinema Romantico in the last year, I have discovered that my eventual return never stems from grudging obligation, only honest desire. This might be an itty-bitty ad-free .org, but I take pride and find joy in it. This is my garden to tend, and I am free to tend it any way I damn please, which, considering the state of increasingly corporatized online writing, is worth something. As time only moves faster, as my life gets shorter even as it accrues more responsibility, and as the world, by the second, only grows crazier, I can still open up my blog interface and, like Bonnard at his easel (uh, kind of), write.

Thursday, July 12, 2018

Summer Break

(Optional Musical Accompaniment To This Post.)

Hello, loyal frustrated followers. Cinema Romantico has a fairly momentous occasion on the horizon, one you might be able to deduce from recent blog content. Let’s just say that this blog’s favorite recurring character — My Beautiful, Perspicacious Girlfriend — is set for an upgrade to, shall we say, a more permanent blogging sobriquet. As such, we had planned to take a few days off before and a day or two after to just sort of luxuriate in our life event. But hey, it’s a life event transpiring in the middle of summer, and summer is typically when people take some time off, and so we felt like a bout of slightly extended summer blogging vacation might be in order.

Not to worry, of course, because we will be back soon enough, probably in a week and a half. We would never dream of ceasing to inflict our asinine opinions on you! Ha! Besides, this will give us time to catch up on some of the 2018 movies we have missed, which is a lot of them, and indulge in our preferred methodology of rumination before review. And as a teaser, let me also say that August is right around the corner, and our Friday’s Old Fashioned, while traditionally 80s-oriented for the eighth month of the year, is slated for a slightly different flavored bourbon this time around. But I can’t give the whole recipe away just yet. So hang tight, and soon, after some celebration, we will be back on blogging time.


Wednesday, July 11, 2018

At the Movies: A Walk Through Cinematic Weddings


Years ago, during a casual discussion about “The Deer Hunter”, a friend of mine said that his first go with Michael Cimino’s magnum opus left him wondering why the wedding scene was so long until it gradually dawned on him that the wedding scene’s duration essentially encapsulated every wedding he had ever attended. I agreed. But then, the “movies is magic”, as Gregory Hines memorably observed in “History of the World Part 1”, and so even if I do not object to the wedding scene in “The Deer Hunter” on its own terms, I wonder if authenticity is exactly what we want from our movie weddings. Wouldn’t we want something bigger and bolder? Wouldn’t we want something to channel the preposterousness that wedding planners and relatives cum wedding planners would never allow? Wouldn’t we want something like the ending of “Blue Hawaii”, with the King floating down Wailua River aboard a tropical flower adorned canoe and serenading Joan Blackman with the Hawaiian Wedding Song? (And which you, prospective movie-obsessed bride and groom, can sort of re-create for the low, low price of $2,495 to $3,795!)


Maybe you wouldn’t want something like the end of “Blue Hawaii”, and that’s okay, but this is my blog, not yours. And I might want something like the end of “Blue Hawaii”, or at least like the end of “Honeymoon in Vegas”, because if you can’t get real Elvis then several Elvis impersonators keeping watch like a heavenly host is the next best thing. But then again, that is probably not what I would want. No, I would probably want something more like the wedding in “Rachel Getting Married”, apart from all the pre-familial drama, of course, though that, it goes without saying, is part and parcel, in varying amounts, to any rite of nuptials. That wedding was a multicultural celebration with big hunks of meat on plates passed around the backyard, Anita Sarko (RIP) as the D.J., and the groomsmen opting out of matching attire to instead don clothes as a reflection of their own individual souls; take your tux fittings out to the wedding planning trash.


I would be remiss, however, if I failed to mention my favorite Will Smith wedding. No, not the impromptu ceremony at Area 51 – just like every little girl’s dream – in “Independence Day” between his Air Force Captain and Vivica A. Fox’s, uh, adult dancer (but very nice person), which sort of doubles as a two-for-one wedding since ace cable repairman David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) and Press Secretary Constance Spano (Margaret Colin), acting as witnesses, sort of rekindle their own defunct marriage in the background at the same time. That is a wonderful movie wedding, undoubtedly, and yet I, avowed cinema fan, constantly, annoyingly blathering about how I only watch a couple TV shows and absolutely no more, dammit, have long considered Peak Dream Wedding to have taken place on episode 117 of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Aire.”

You know, when Will (Smith) and Lisa (Nia Long) elope to Las Vegas against the wishes of their parents and find themselves on the precipice of getting hitched in a “Shaft”-themed wedding featuring, per sweeps month criteria, a stellar guest turn in the form of Isaac Hayes as the officiant. At that point in my life, I had not even seen “Shaft” nor attended a wedding, but I clearly remember thinking to myself in this scene’s aftermath, “That. That’s what I want my wedding to be.” Google wasn’t around in 1995 but if it had been I probably would have Googled: Las Vegas Last of the Mohicans Themed Weddings.



Of course, the “Shaft” wedding goes awry on account of Isaac Hayes’s relentless interruptions and backup singers that keep trampling the groom’s attempts to recite his vows with their vocal flourishes, prompting Will and Lisa to flee with the would-be groom giving the officiant a piece of his mind on the way out (“Your Isaac Hayes impression STINKS!”). It’s funny stuff, sure, but it also inherently exposes a fundamental truth — that is, the ceremonial pomp and circumstance is weightless if you don’t speak the words, and if the words spoken are not filled with love and meaning.

That was addressed in a very Wes Andersonian way in the finicky auteur’s “Moonrise Kingdom” by Cousin Ben (Jason Schwartzman), the Falcon Scout Legionnaire running Supply & Resources, who is enlisted to oversee the wedding of the teenage protagonists, Suzy (Kara Hayward) and Sam (Jared Gilman). Says Ben to the aspiring newlyweds: “I can’t offer you a legally binding union. It won’t hold up in the state, the county, or, frankly, any courtroom in the world due to your age, lack of a license, and failure to get parental consent – but the ritual does carry a very important moral weight within yourselves.” He then tells them to go off to the side and consider what it is they are about to do.


Anderson sets this shot beside a trampoline, which is nominally quirky but deceptively deep, childhood ceding to something akin to young adulthood. Suzy and Sam do have a ceremony not long after, but it feels deliberately perfunctory to what comes before, the direct result of consideration rather than an ill-considered flight of faux-marital fancy.

You sort of see this harsh truth in the light of “Jerry Maguire.” The film cuts straight from the eponymous sports agent’s (Tom Cruise) spur of the moment proposal to Dorothy Boyd (Renee Zellweger) to their wedding, but director Cameron Crowe films the actual ceremony by keeping the camera entirely affixed to Dorothy’s six year old son, Ray (Jonathan Lipnicki), the ring-bearer, standing down below Jerry and Dorothy, betraying that the little dude is the whole reason they are getting hitched in the first place. And so even if their small-time backyard wedding earns its keep, a little less Isaac Hayes, a little more Marvin Gaye, seen in a comically exemplary shot sliding from left to right and past a mariachi band to find Jerry’s best man (and only client) Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.) belting out “What’s Going On”, the union is doomed because of the bride and groom’s refusal to consider the ritual’s moral weight.


In another Cameron Crowe joint, the legendary “Elizabethtown”, the moral weight of the wedding is not conveyed but implied. In a movie filled with obvious juxtapositions, the most obvious might be that Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom), in Louisville for his father’s funeral, is staying at the Brown Hotel right next door to Chuck Hasboro (Jed Rees), who is there for his wedding to Cindy. Though this might suggest a parallel romantic crisis to Drew’s own romantic and personal and romantic crises, Chuck and Cindy are copacetic. Indeed, Chuck is really just Buddha in a bathrobe, offering Drew encouragement and enlightenment, free of any dramatic mountain to scale because he has already achieved contentment.

That notion comes home in Crowe’s deliberate refusal to show us Chuck and Cindy’s wedding even though it looms so large. In that way, their wedding evokes the apartment of Cosmo Kramer in so much as it was never shown because its awesomenimity was unmeasurable and therefore impossible to properly visually express. At the same time, however, keeping the ceremony off screen works as an intrinsic reminder that a wedding, ornate or uncomplicated or points in-between, is only as festive and indelible as the love and meaning of the union itself. We don’t need to see the wedding to know it will rock its guests like a hurricane.

We don’t see the wedding in “True Romance” either. Maybe that’s because Alabama (Patricia Arquette) and Clarence (Christian Slater) tie the knot in a Detroit marriage court, or maybe because their delightful, calypso-assisted post-wedding walk down the aisle, in a manner of speaking, is more than enough. Whatever wish fulfillment flaws that romance might have as written by Quentin Tarantino, as played and presented by director Tony Scott in this moment, it pops, literally, with the pink of Clarence’s sport coat and Alabama’s dress and purse contrasting against the gray of the courthouse and the ickiness of the leftover snow, like phosphorescence in the depths of the ocean.


I always think of this wedding because Clarence’s hero is Elvis, and whereas Elvis’s wedding in “Blue Hawaii” is as lavish as they come, here it is as small as can be, and yet the amorous infusion is no less or different. So many movie weddings are so basic in their opulence, production designers copying and pasting from paint by the numbers wedding mags rather than thinking outside the box. But then, maybe so many weddings at the movies are merely flavorless rituals because the movies themselves too often proffer mere ersatz love, failing to make us believe in forever after.

Clarence’s hero might be Elvis but I suddenly find myself thinking of Paul McCartney: in the end, the love you take, is equal to the wedding you make.

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

Paul Giamatti Will Play Your Chicken

I think often of William Goldman’s anecdote in his memoir “Adventures in the Screen Trade” when he recounts during filming on “Marathon Man” a moment in which Dustin Hoffman halted, more or less, production to hound the director as to why, at a suspenseful moment, his character would have a flashlight on his bed table. “In my opinion,” wrote Goldman, “(Hoffman) didn’t want the flashlight because his fans would think him chicken.” Maybe that’s true, maybe that isn’t, but what I know is this…Paul Giamatti is never worried about his fans thinking him chicken. I thought of this while watching the recently released “The Catcher Was a Spy” (review to come…eventually).

Giamatti plays Samuel Goudsmit, the Dutch-American physicist, one who was involved in the Manhattan Project, though “The Catcher Was a Spy” details his attempts, along with main character Moe Berg (Paul Rudd), to track down German physicist Werner Heisenberg (Mark Strong) and gauge the validity and/or progress of his attempts to create an atomic bomb for the Third Reich. Doing so involves trekking from the background to the battlefront, including a scene where Berg and intelligence officer Robert Furman (Guy Pearce) find themselves in the midst of a shootout as the Allies try to take a German-held town. It is a moment glimpsed in the following still:


In the silhouetted images of Pearce and Rudd you see the traditional sort of action hero, smartly moving forward, determined, unafraid, valorous. As Goudsmit, however, Giamatti is conspicuously a step or two behind, and in a pose suggesting he is holding on for dear life, just as he is holding onto his helmet as if it is about to topple of his head. Granted, his character is, as stated, a physicist, quite decidedly not a soldier, but this commitment to playing the moment, shall we say, well out of his element still got me to thinking about another turn of Giamatti’s in wartime conditions.

That would be “Saving Private Ryan”, Steven Spielberg’s WWII opus of 20 years ago, where Giamatti turned up briefly as Hill, Staff Sergeant in the 101st Airborne at Neuville who greets the squad headed up by Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) that has coming looking for the eponymous Private Ryan. In that film Giamatti actually is, as his title implies, a soldier, and one in charge, and yet Giamatti gives his performance the very discernible ring of a man in ove rhis head.

Indeed, his character moans about having a bug in his boot, and when he tries to lead Miller’s squad where they need to go, through a hail of sniper fire, Hill trips, briefly. That stumble is everything; that stumble would be the equivalent of Dustin Hoffman in “Marathon Man” yellow-bellying around with his flashlight. Giamatti included that trip, I suppose, to set up a later moment when, complaining of bad ankles, he sits down at an inopportune moment and initiates a semi-pratfall as a means to expose a group of Nazi soldiers leading to a tense standoff. Still, someone had to play the part and someone had to play the part that way, and that Giamatti was the person is because he is a person willing to do so which is more than you can say for a lot of people in a profession that skews vain.


That small performance is why I found Giamatti’s turn in “The Catcher Was a Spy” so extraordinary. Twenty years on, bless his soul, he is still willing to haplessly dash rather than coolly swagger into battle. A great many actors might not mind moral gray areas, even emotional insecurities, but playing chicken? Hoo boy, that is something else. But Paul Giamatti? Paul Giamatti, filmmakers, will play your chicken.

Monday, July 09, 2018

Possible Names of Skyscraper Sequels


This week is the release of Dwyane Johnson’s aspirant blockbuster “Skyscraper.” It chronicles, per IMDB, an FBI Hostage Rescue Team Leader and U.S. war veteran turned skyscraper security expert (Johnson) who finds the tallest, safest building in the world suddenly ablaze and- oh, the hell with this. It’s “Die Hard”, okay? It’s “Die Hard” in a Skyscraper, but I repeat myself. And that’s okay. We are not opposed to such out-and-out cinematic lifting. After all, “Once Upon a Time in the West” lifted pretty heavily from “Johnny Guitar” and all we got there was one of The Greatest Movies Ever Made.

I’m sure “Skyscraper” will be one of The Greatest Movies Ever Made too. But that’s not what concerns us. What concerns us is the obvious “Skyscraper” sequel; what do you call the obvious “Skyscraper” sequel? Aren’t you glad we asked?

Possible Names of Skyscraper Sequels


Tower. Not be confused with “Tower” (2016), “Tower Heist” (2011), or “The Towering Inferno” (1974).



Water Tower. If “Tower” is not sufficiently high concept.



Superstructure. If Tower/Water Tower is too much of a lateral move from Skyscraper.



Space Elevator. If Superstructure is too lo-fi for your marketing department.



Atrium. If you want to keep things inside and synergize with the Hyatt® brand.



Monument. Pencil it in for a 4th of July release and figure out the rest later.



Lighthouse. Like “Annihilation” but with fewer enigmas and more explosions.



Center for the Performing Arts. I’m always hearing that only Liberal Elites care about Hollywood, yet Big, Dumb Hollywood Action Movies rarely cater to Liberal Elites.

Friday, July 06, 2018

Friday's Old Fashioned: Across the Pacific (1942)

As I watched “Across the Pacific”, John Huston’s 1942 joint, I kept thinking about how its plot, in which a disgraced army captain gets back in the cosmos’ good graces by thwarting a Japanese plot to destroy the Panama Canal, must have functioned to movie-goers a few months removed from December 7, 1941 as a kind of catharsis, or a chance to re-write Pearl Harbor as a happy ending. After finishing the movie, however, in doing a little light research, I learned, per Turner Classic Movies, that, in fact, “Across the Pacific” had been written as a thwarting of a fictional Japanese plot at Pearl Harbor. Then, when Pearl Harbor really happened, “Across the Pacific” was hastily re-written, which no doubt contributed to the movie’s ultimate slapdash quality, switching awkwardly between genres before concluding with Humphrey Bogart at a machine gun, firing away, like Brian Donlevy in “Wake Island”, just, you know, happier. Bogie could do a lot of things, and he could do some things better than anyone else before or after him…but not heroically firing a machine gun. Cool Repose was his default mode, and Cool Repose does not quite work while holding down a machine gun. There was a reason, after all, that Stefan Kanfer titled his Bogart book “Tough Without a Gun.”


That slapdash quality might also have connected to the movie’s genesis, which was less about patriotism than marketing, a chance to re-team the stars of 1941’s “The Maltese Falcon”, Bogart along with Mary Astor and Sydney Greenstreet. And where the “Falcon’s” plot, culled from a book, was sharp, “Across the Pacific’s” is not, lurching from espionage to romance and back again, sort of deciding on espionage, but not completely, and then never completely committing to the darkness that the espionage plot suggests. After all, Bogie’s Captain Rick Leland is court martialed and kicked out of the army without honors, for stealing, we eventually learn, and the story as it sets up gives him a chance to turn coat on a steamer bound for China by way of the Panama Canal in the name of money.

That money is offered by Dr. Lorenz (Greenstreet), a Japanese sympathizer, who wants to use Leland for information vital to his mission to blow the Canal sky high. Leland seems to waver, but not really. A sharper-edged Bogart, a la “In a Lonely Place”  really could have sold his notion of betraying America once and for all. He was an actor never afraid to play unlikable, but the script seems oddly intent on us liking him, and so his character’s edge is blunted in the romance scenes with Astor’s Alberta Marlow, a fellow steamer passenger who may or may not be a spy though the script takes few pains to try and paint her as a spy in any real way.

What’s more, the movie, as you might expect in such a precarious wartime America, contains no shortage of uncomfortable Japanese jokes, all of which I’m sure were met with riotous laughter. That’s not a knock on The Greatest Generation. Hearing these jokes made me think of Khandi Alexander’s cameo in “Patriots Day” telling the wife of one of the Marathon Bombers, who protests that she has “rights”, she “ain’t got shit, sweetheart” which led to cacophonous cheers at the screening attended, a democracy gone haywire. War does funny things to Americans. Then again, there are also occasional insights presented into Japanese culture, like a scene that lingers over the very real philosophy of judo, and then goes so far as to make Bogie the butt of the joke.


If in so many of his movies Bogie was in cool control, where the joy was in watching him command a room, in “Across the Pacific” he is often a few more steps behind than usual. That is not a bad thing, per se, because against type can work, though Bogie was the sort of star who often needed to adhere to his type to be effective. That comes home in the conclusion, which feels perfunctory, like the filmmakers did not quite know what to do, which turns out to be true. Returning to the film’s production history, TCM also recounts how Huston, set to depart for service in WWII, devised a concluding sequence wherein Rick Leland would be trapped in a house, tied to a chair, surrounded by soldiers, with more soldiers waiting outside. Per TCM: “There was no way in God's green world that Bogart could logically escape,” said Huston. “I shot the scene, then called Jack Warner and said, Jack, I’m on my way. I’m in the army. Bogie will know how to get out.” Bogie would have known how, absolutely, but this Rick Leland fella? Not so much.

Thursday, July 05, 2018

Downsizing

“Downsizing” is a peculiar movie that manages to both intentionally and inadvertently live up to its title. Imagining a future where human beings, through a scientific process introduced in the movie’s prologue, can be miniaturized to but a few inches, director Alexander Payne builds out this world with great ingenuity and imagination for a while before eventually leaving that world’s specifics behind to explore nominally bigger themes. Those bigger themes, however, are merely used to make its main character, the mellifluously named Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) wake up and smell the coffee. Perhaps, but the coffee “Downsizing” brews feel more like a half-caff, a far-reaching journey that makes points, sure, but never cuts loose in doing so. Paul might wake up, but I felt like I was falling asleep.


Paul and his wife Audrey (Kristin Wiig) first get the inclination to downsize after encountering an old friend, Dave (Jason Sudeikis), who has gone through the procedure and come out of it raving. As the Safraneks explore the option, Payne very deliberately paints it less as an act of philosophical daring or scientific wonder, as the prologue suggests, than a pair of schmoes getting pitched a timeshare. Indeed, the downsizing community is called Leisure Land and its McMansions and chain restaurants paint an obvious picture of suburbia. Miniaturized, a middle class family instantly becomes millionaires. Who wouldn’t want to do it? If April and Frank Wheeler had lived in the era of Trump rather than Eisenhower, no doubt Leisure Land would have replaced their Paris pipe dream.

Rather than explore the disintegration of their marriage through the context of downsizing, however, the movie removes Audrey early when she opts out of the procedure at the last second and strands Paul in the land of the small on his own. He settles into a monotonous life without his spouse, only to be taken under the wing of the party animal, Dusan (Christoph Waltz), living upstairs, kicking off a run of the mill variation of one man’s search for meaning. The issues do not necessarily stem from the two scoops of vanilla ice cream that is another white man’s soul search as they do from the film’s inability to evince that soul search with any sizzles. This is emblemized in a Dusan hosted bacchanal where Paul pops a pill and then immediately tries puking it up. He fails, but the intent is what matters - never has a movie so ambitious seemed so square. “Downsizing” is like Terry Gilliam for the bake sale crowd.

Indeed, once the procedure is complete and the first few come-to-terms moments are out of the way, “Downsizing” virtually loses interest in the idea of being miniature. Instead, as Paul meets a Vietnamese dissident, Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau), who was downsized against her will, the movie becomes a fairly blatant allegory for how the more things change the more they stay the same. Not necessarily a false lesson, mind you, but also not necessarily one that Payne finds way to spruce up despite his appealing premise. You could approximate the experience of watching this movie by watching a re-run of “The One That Could Have Been” two part “Friends” episode.


Paul’s quest continues in the presence of Ngoc, with whose down on her luck existence he willingly becomes entangled. Her character, as per frustrating tradition, is rarely allowed her own thoughts and feelings, existing to be his agent of change, though Chau’s fiery personality gives the character life anyway. Her every gesture and utterance seems to express exasperation with this stupid man in her presence, and both inadvertently and intentionally she urges him to stop feeling sorry for himself. She’s a bit like Ferris Bueller in that way, less complex than the person she is shepherding, but only because she seems to already know so much more. And she essentially implores Paul to stop and take a look around because he seems to be missing everything. But then, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” heeded its own advice, taking in the world around its characters even as its characters navigated it. Despite its premise, “Downsizing” rarely does the same, not until the end, and by then, well, the movie has already passed you by.

Wednesday, July 04, 2018

keira knightley as an american

It’s the Fourth of July, Independence Day here in the States, yada yada, and so here’s a picture of this blog’s British beloved in “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit” (2014) playing an American character since we would not want to offend any delicate sensibilities by posting a picture of this blog’s British beloved playing a British character since, hey, did you know, we won the war, not them, it’s true, not a lot of people know that.


Tuesday, July 03, 2018

Andre the Giant

Throughout HBO’s original documentary “Andre the Giant”, the one person we never hear from is Andre the Giant himself – that is, Andre Roussimoff, the professional wrestling superstar. That, of course, is because Roussimoff, 7’4 and suffering from acromegaly, died tragically at the age of 43. I mean, we do hear from him, in old interviews as well as in the myriad recorded spots he did for the WWF (World Wrestling Federation), but these are all filtered through the gaze of time or, in the case of the latter, deliberate theatrical fabrication. As such, Roussimoff himself remains sort of shrouded in myth, as he generally was throughout his life, very much present and real yet still somehow towering over anyone, seen, heard, even touched, but somehow still out of view. A stock photo in the early-going captures it best, of a young child standing down here Andre the Giant’s ankles, looking up in awe with a smile that can’t quite believe what he’s seeing. Imagine, the doc seems to be saying with this clip, that everyone looked at you like that all the time.


“Andre the Giant” spends minimal time on Roussimoff’s childhood, more or less reducing it to siblings’ bewilderment when, as a teenager, their brother just kept growing. I kept yearning for a glimpse at Roussimoff’s diary, literally or theoretically, to have some grasp about how someone feels at that tender age when his body is going through changes no one can quite process. Still, in its own way this dearth of pre-mythology is sort of beneficial to director Jason Hehir’s tone, reminiscent of the opening minutes of “Man on Wire” where tightrope walker extraordinaire Philippe Petit just sort of brushes past those being-brought-up details by re-calibrating his own childhood as a kind of origin story. For Roussimoff, it all really began when he began growing.

As Hehir makes clear, the rise of Andre the Giant and nascent professional wrestling itself were intertwined. To novices like me who really only know the sport through the sleazy braggadocio of its overseer, Vince McMahon, it is interesting to note that pro wrestling came up like so many American athletic enterprises – that is, as a regional entity first before eventually going national. And in showing how Andre the Giant spent time across the whole swath of provincial wrestling leagues, his rise is not only tied to the sport’s ultimate unification under a massive umbrella but shown to essentially be the catalyst. At Wrestlemania III, in the Main Event, Andre the Giant retained the power to put, so to speak, the now-famous mustachioed Hulk Hogan over the top. Roussimoff did, though Hogan suggests he was made to sweat it out behind the scenes, which was proof of both Andre the Giant’s edgy playfulness and big heart.

Both those details emerge best in multiple talking heads simply regaling us with Andre the Giant stories, whether demonstrating how the unthinkable size of Roussimoff’s hands could dwarf a whole human being’s head or ruminate at length on the impressive amount of alcohol he was able to imbibe in a single setting. After so many of these stories, however, the tone turns more melancholy as those same talking heads note how his alcohol intake was obviously the signal of deeper emotional trouble and how the size of his hands connoted his overall otherworldly size that rendered acts the rest of us take for granted, like riding in a car or flying in an airplane, as agony. (An archival photo of his sitting in a cramped airplane seat, drenched in sweat, is a swift evocation of his everyday hardship.) The former directly informed the latter, and the documentary lets that take shape bit by bit until, like everyone interviewed, you feel as if it’s too late to stop the slide.

Early in the film we hear Roussimoff voice his desire “to be somebody.” In a certain context that age-old line imbues sadness about one who really is, though in Andre the Giant’s case that desire seemed less an active choice than a conscription by fate. There is another old adage, one proffering that you can do anything you put your mind to, and maybe Roussimoff could have, because as the documentary points out he was well ahead of the curve in seeing what marrying sports and entertainment could elicit. But it’s hard to look at Andre the Giant and not think his body just sort of decided for him.

Monday, July 02, 2018

How Will Tom Cruise Push the Envelope Next?

In the run-up to the 67th “Mission: Impossible” film, to be released July 27th, nearly every incisive article cobbled together from press junket quotes makes sure to cite Tom Cruise’s affinity for, shall we say, death-defying stunts. In “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol”, he literally scaled the world’s tallest building. In “Mission: Impossible – Rouge Nation” (maybe the best pure action movie of the decade), he literally hung from the side of a plane as it took off and leapt from a 120 foot ledge. Now, in “Mission: Impossible – Fallout”, he performs a so-called HALO (High Altitude-Low Opening) jump, “usually done,” Reuters reports, “only by highly-trained military professionals.” (To be fair, Cruise is a former Naval Fighter Pilot.) Reuters explains that Cruise “leaps from the cargo door of a plane at 25,000 feet – almost five miles – opening the parachute less than 2,000 feet from the ground.” Yikes. He took a year to prepare for the stunt, he explained to Entertainment Tonight, practicing in a tunnel. Cruise summarized: “We were pushing the envelope, I know it.”

And if there is one thing I know about Tom Cruise, other than his steadfast commitment to The Eight Dynamics, it’s that he will push the envelope again. As such, our question here at Cinema Romantico is obvious: how will Tom Cruise push the envelope in the next “Mission: Impossible” movie? Aren’t you glad we asked?


How Will Tom Cruise Push the Envelope Next?

Canyon Jump Across Snake River Canyon in a Skycycle X-2. Prospective director Christopher McQuarrie explains: “Evel Knievel couldn’t do it, Tom.” And as Tom Cruise himself once opined in the quasi-immortal “Cocktail”, when a guy lays down a dare, you gotta take it.

BASE jumping from the Burj Khalifa. Cruise climbed it, so why not one-up himself and jump off of it? Granted, this would be illegal, but he could film it on the sly and then dare the United Arab Emirates to do something about it. Tom Cruise vs. the UAE Government will be his greatest feat of strength yet!

Dance Marathon. Ethan Hunt and cronies are always going undercover at lavish affairs for intelligence purposes, so why not make the lavish affair in “Mission: Impossible – Overton Window” one in which Ethan Hunt and cronies must infiltrate a dance marathon? Naturally Tom Cruise demands that they film this infiltration during an actual dance marathon in which they actually compete. Rebecca Ferguson, Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames bow out. Tilda Swinton, John Turturro and Joaquin Phoenix step in. Tom Cruise wins the Dance Marathon. At the press junket, he keeps declaring between energy drink-ed cackles “I haven’t slept since we filmed it, jack!”

Climbing Everest Without Oxygen. Midway through “Mission: Impossible – Breakout Capability”, Ethan Hunt is tasked with acquiring the McGuffin which he must do, through a series of exorbitant calamities and coincidences, by summiting Mount Everest solo and without oxygen. Though the sequence only accounts for seven minutes of screen time, Cruise still trains himself into shape to film the sequence by literally summiting Everest solo and without oxygen.

Mission: Impossible – Mars. M:I7 will be set on Mars, meaning Tom Cruise will GoPro his own literal voyage to Mars, the first ever 5,112 hour one man action-adventure movie!