Friday's Old Fashioned: City Hall (1996)

“City Hall” is one of those movies that begins with just a title card, no other credits. And while it’s pure speculation, I wonder if this was done to prevent people from immediately detecting the 1996 film’s likely overrding flaw – that is, a grand total of four screenwriters. This movie stinks to high heaven of re-writes. Ken Lipper wasn’t even a screenwriter at all, a former deputy mayor of NYC to Ed Koch, and no doubt responsible for most of the script’s shop talk. But there are also familiar names like Paul Schrader, Bo Goldman, and Nicholas Pileggi, each of whom, I assume, were brought in not simply to iron things out but ornament the stakes. As such, a dramatization of civics gives way to something like a murder mystery with a clumsy romantic subplot. If city politics are often hampered by too many cooks in the kitchen, well, perhaps “City Hall” going haywire is ultimately appropriate.

The film opens with the voiceover of Deputy Mayor Kevin Calhoun (John Cusack), one evincing the feel of a political memoir, the kind where various “important” statements are in all caps or in snazzy colors to underline their “importance” – “no one should come here unless he’s willing to be lucky.” He is top assistant to the top dog, John Pappas (Al Pacino), the best mayor NYC ever had, per Calhoun, but whose tenure is put to the test when a little boy is inadvertently gunned down in a shootout between a cop and a mob lackey. It turns out the cop’s bullet got the kid, and it turns out the mob lackey should have been in the slammer, given probation for dubious reasons, which will inevitably wind their way back to Mayor Pappas to show that no hands are clean.

Marci Klein once remarked that in Alec Baldwin’s role as fictional NBC exec Jack Donaghy on Tina Fey’s masterful sitcom “30 Rock”, everything the actor was came out in the part. And in Pappas, everything Pacino is comes out in the part. If he is hammy in his inflections and mannerisms, he nevertheless projects a palpable sincerity in what he says and how he acts, even though he allows the mask to fall away on occasion so that we see not so much a metaphorical smirk underneath as a weary, resigned grin. When his character, against advice, speaks at the murdered boy’s funeral, Pacino orates to such grandiose but inspiring effect so that even if you shake your head you simultaneously feel him winning you over. But in the ensuing scene, Pacino conveys, simply in his air, the self-knowledge that what he just pulled was a political stunt. It is a deft trick to make you believe both; it is, making a 1996 specific reference, Clinton-esque.

His more menacing edges, meanwhile, while very much present are deliberately smoothed down by Pacino. In a scene with Frank Anselma (Danny Aiello), an old school Brooklyn political boss, where the two men convene in private at the opera, Pappas’s words are respectful yet laced with wicked intent. And for as close as they sit together, notice how infrequently Pacino has Pappas look at Anselma, a bit of physical business underlining his reminding Frank that “You’re only a boss, I’m the Mayor.”

Aiello shines in his own role, caring but cutting, glimpsed best in an early scene with Calhoun at a local diner where the two men and several other so and so’s go back and forth over the dueling prospects of a new subway stop in Brooklyn, which Frank wants, or a new bank exchange in Manhattan, which Calhoun’s bss wants. This sequence feels like a more urban version of John Sayles’s civic masterpiece “Sunshine State”, which might have been “City Hall’s” original intention, to show all the back-patting and ball-busting that goes into making a city go round.

But as if civics weren’t enough, Calhoun is forced into the role of amateur sleuth, trying to ferret out just why the mob lackey was given probation rather than sent away. It suggests noir but has none of the mood, winding up as just a rote quasi-procedural, and that’s to say nothing of Calhoun’s will they/won’t they relationship with Marybeth Cogan (Bridget Fonda), an attorney for the late cop whose bullet killed the kid. Calhoun and Cogan’s scene at a diner in upstate New York when snow impedes their train could have been lifted directly from the Hallmark Channel’s “The Christmas Train.”

“City Hall” wants to make the little boy’s death count but the meaning gets lost amidst the plot machinations, and the plot machinations themselves become not so much convoluted as something of a slog. As such, “City Hall” slowly winds its way to an obvious conclusion, stifling any sense of what might have been agreeable fatalistic tragedy. Alas. Even then, however, moments of beauty emerge, like Anselmo’s denouement, a beautifully shot scene where the shadows cast through the conspicuous blinds of his back room cast him an emblematic fading light. And Pappas’s concluding monologue opposite Calhoun is magnificently delivered by Pacino, acknowledging political reality makes the optimal impossible even as he somehow leaves you still hoping for the best. I have no doubt that John Pappas is President in an alternate universe.

OMG This Pacific Heights Promo

In considering possible options for our Flashback to the 90s series, we briefly thought about revisiting John Schlesinger’s 1990 thriller “Pacific Heights.” We thought about revisiting it because the film turns on the high price of San Francisco real estate, a very identifiable problem through a modern lens. “(Y)ou can’t make a good thriller,” wrote Owen Gleiberman in his original EW review, “when the most pressing issue is whether the protagonists will have to default on their mortgage payments.” I wondered if that statement would hold up in these salad days before the inevitable sequel to the 2008 Financial Crisis.

Alas, in the end I chose to stipulate that all my Flashback to the 90s entries needed to be first time watches. Still, in doing a little Internet digging on “Pacific Heights” just for old time’s sake, I stumbled across not only Gleiberman’s review but a “Pacific Heights” promotional photo that figuratively stopped me in my tracks and literally made me laugh out loud.

I mean, ye gods, man. Aside from some truly stellar promotional photo work for “Volcano” (1997), this might be my favorite movie promotional photo of all time. 

To start, Melanie Griffith is holding down the photo’s center with a smile that is not as bad as one you’d get at the DMV but confused nonetheless. She’s the star of a dark thriller, but she’s the heroine, and so I guess she thinks — or was instructed — to smile and is, but is not sure if that smile is supposed to hint at the sinister material or say Hi! I’m the star! So, in the end, she has a smile that seems to have recognized someone across the aisle on a transcontinental flight that she does not want to talk to.

Matthew Modine, on the other hand, seems to be taking the film’s tone as promotional gospel and refusing to smile, though his lack of a smile amounts to nothing much more than odd apathy. If you took Keaton out of this photo (and we will get to him shortly) you might think Griffith and Modine were starring in a relationship drama where their marriage was on the rocks. (Then again, if you leave Keaton in the photo and ask Modine to smile then you might think this was a wacky rom com where Keaton was Griffith’s ex trying to break her and Modine up.) He’s also, however, not quite looking in the same direction as Griffith so that even if they are in the same room, which they seem to be, it feels as if there is a metaphysical glass partition between them. 

Now, finally, we come to Michael Keaton.

1.) It seems quite possible this is merely the old promotional photo photoshop trick. Probably the powers-that-be initially wanted only Griffith and Modine in this promotional photo and then, upon getting a look at this awkward marketing stab, they decided, at the last minute, to insert Keaton too.

2.) That’s why it’s more fun to imagine Michael Keaton photo-bombing the promotional proceedings. Like, this was just supposed to be Griffith and Modine, and Keaton was supposed to get his own promo photo after Griffith and Modine were done. But, understandably bored, Keaton decided, all of a sudden, that wacky guy, to just sort of slip in there on the side and the person on the 20th Century Fox marketing team was either overworked and failed to notice or overworked and so overjoyed at this blip of joy that she/he signed off on it. 

3.) In all likelihood, however, Keaton had a prior commitment, could not attend the photo shoot, and the grand marketing solution was simply to insert a cardboard cutout of Michael Keaton in the background. “They’'ll never notice!”

4.) Unless that was The Ghost of Promotional Photos Past taking the form of Michael Keaton. 

Possible Movies About Movie Weddings That Possibly Could Have Been Real

Last week Winona Ryder, promoting her upcoming movie “Destination Wedding” in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, said of her co-star Keanu Reeves, “We actually got married in Dracula. No, I swear to god I think we’re married in real life.” Winona continued: “In that scene, Francis [Ford Coppola] used a real Romanian priest. We shot the master and he did the whole thing. So I think we’re married.” The Interwebs, as it will, figuratively anyway, blew up. What Gen X-er didn’t want to imagine two of our lodestars together forever?

That, however, is not what Cinema Romantico thought about when this (probably not really) news hit. No, what Cinema Romantico thought was: what if there was a movie where Winona and Keanu discovered that the real Romanian priest really had married them, and they had to spend 90 minutes coming to terms with it? I want to see “Destination Wedding” as much as the next Lydia Deetz groupie, granted, but I kind of want to see this movie about an inadvertent Winona/Keanu union more. And that, as it absolutely had to, got me to thinking. It got me to thinking about what other movies could be made based on the idea that weddings in preceding movies turned out to be inadvertently real and caused the actors involved them to have to come to terms.

Before we proceed any further, however, it should be stipulated that the only movie weddings eligible for this list were movie weddings involving actors still with us. So as much as you might want to see a movie about Kate Winslet and Alan Rickman discovering one night before they go on together in a play in the West End that, in fact, their wedding in “Sense and Sensibility” was legitimate, it is ineligible. That also means Cinema Romantico cannot make its ultimate dream come true and have Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift prove to be married post-“Raintree County.” But I digress. We continue.

5 Possible Movies About Movie Weddings That Possibly Could Have Been Real

Jewel of the Nile. If Kathleen Turner famously took umbrage with the poor quality of the screenplay to “Romancing the Stone’s” 1985 sequel then she gets an opportunity for a real life rewrite of her own upon discovering that the sequel’s fictional African nation of Kadir was, in fact, real and so was her movie ending marriage to the Michael Douglas character. Refusing to believe this is true, she and Douglas embark on an African adventure — “Divorcing the Marriage” — to find the mythical Kadir and debunk the news. Catherine Zeta-Jones plays herself as the wacky third wheel.

Honeymoon in Vegas. At a coffee shop in Burbank, Nicolas Cage runs into James Caan. The latter explains that he pulled a prank on the set of “Honeymoon in Vegas” by employing a real priest for the film’s climactic wedding between the Cage and Sarah Jessica Parker characters. Unbeknownst to anyone, they really are married. Though this eventually trickles down to Parker, Cage refuses to grant a divorce unless Parker agrees to purchase his Canadian Maritime Province mansion he cannot unload for the asking price of 22.7 million. Parker refuses, leading to a standoff, and leading Parker and Matthew Broderick to enlist the aid of celebrity friends, “Ocean’s” style, to infiltrate Cage’s mansion and obtain Cage’s signature on the divorce papers by any means necessary.

The Wedding Date. A cross-cutting thriller in which Amy Adams and Jack Davenport simultaneously discover, continents apart, that their marriage in the 2004 rom com “The Wedding Date” was inadvertently genuine. Upon learning that the unusual circumstances will allow for an official annulment, Davenport races against the clock to track down Adams to keep the union official in a desperate attempt to reinvigorate his career while Adams races against the clock to get the marriage annuled before Davenport can find her.

Romeo + Juliet. TMZ issues a report that on the set of “Romeo + Juliet”, the late Pete Postlethwaite, playing Friar Laurence, pulled a fast one at the behest of TigerBeat and married Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio for real. In the darkness of 2018, where the light of so much hope seems to have gone out, a desperate public swoons over Romeo + Juliet  actually being married in real life. But when the report turns out to be erroneous, Claire and Leo must decide whether to embrace love’s beautiful lie or admit the truth and let down a nation.

Rachel Getting Married. Set over one weekend at a press junket, Rosemarie DeWitt and Tunde Adebimpe discover they really were married in “Rachel Getting Married.” What ensues, set entirely within one room at the Four Seasons, is an improbably comical, psychological deep dive into functional role theory. Lynn Shelton directs.

Outside In

The first shot of “Outside In” is the camera looking down on Chris (Jay Duplass) as he looks up through a passenger side car window, giddily eating French fries, basking in the sunshine. It is his moment in the sun, literally and figuratively, because he is a 38 year old ex con just released from prison on his way home to a life that will prove vastly different. It is a common cinematic scenario, and while writer/director Lynn Shelton cannot transcend every trapping, she still, as this shot implies, wrings much truth from her timeworn premise, illustrating how beginning again can happen at any age.

He returns to the mess immediately courtesy of his semi-clueless brother (Ben Schwartz) who squires Chris to a coming home party where everyone wants to talk about what this new parolee is going to do now. The difficulty of transition is evident not just in hoary sight of Chris retreating to the bathroom to the vomit but in the movie’s pleasingly distinct sense of place, shot on location (the cinematography was by Nathan M. Miller) in Granite Falls, Washington, where the omnipresent gray skies and shabby locales where Chris peddles his bike to drop off job applications all suggest somewhere with its best days behind it.

That may or may not also be true of Carol Beasley (Edie Falco), Chris’s high school teacher who, we learn, is the person who fought for and helped attain his early release. We don’t learn much about the crime itself, a gas station robbery that just feels like a MacGuffin, limited to a brief flashback with a tone out of step with the rest of the film’s rhythm, nor Carol’s crusade, hinted at in the stacks of file boxes we briefly see being moved. No, that movie took place in a different universe, a non-Lynn Shelton universe. That movie deliberately comes in right after the heroics have taken place and the crusading ersatz lawyer is made to actually spend quality (or not) time with the person she helped free, revealing the whole host of complications you always wonder about post-Hollywood fadeout.

Those complications involve Carol’s family, including a husband (Charles Leggett) who is the kind of person that considers saying his piece and then shutting up to be the equivalent of “talking”. If the outline of their relationship might feel cut and pasted from so many movies before, Falco’s performance injects it with some melancholy heft, her incredulous eyes when her husband emotionally shuts down becoming a virtual window into a whole uncommunicative past. Carol’s daughter, Hildy (Kaitlyn Dever), meanwhile, is still in high school but forms a friendship with Chris anyway, a nifty evocation of the sort of stasis that you usually glimpse in cinematic parolees.

There is a scene where mother, daughter and ex-con have dinner and it is clear in the instant rapport between Hildy and Chris that they are keyed into a similar wavelength, one born of youth, more than Carol and Chris, going to show how 20 years really has passed without him. A tantalizing, if creepy, love triangle is suggested in this moment, one the movie teases without ever seeing it all the way through, perhaps because that creepiness was a bridge too far.

No, “Outside In” maintains focus on the halting relationship between Chris and Carol, which refuses to progress quite the way you are conditioned to expect. If it does briefly include the time-honored fleabag motel rendezvous, Shelton shoots the sequence in a kind of close-up that drains it of any amour, and Falco, ever the professional, plays the moment less like consummation than desperation. Indeed, the great revelation is that for all these two put into each other over the years, they do not really know one another at all, perhaps having been stronger in small bursts than in person and all the time.

That’s hard for Chris to take, given how much stock he’d put into their connection over the years, and the most searing, insightful moment in the film is when he is made to endure Carol’s confession that their relationship might have existed as her impetus for a personal and professional restart. And even if Chris is never really moved out of the film it sort of becomes Carol’s anyway, brought home forcefully in the performance of Falco, one where her passion dips but never dims.

The Spy Who Dumped Me

Susanna Fogel’s “The Spy Who Dumped Me” begins by pogoing back and forth between secret agent Drew Thayer (Justin Theroux) going through the gritty action movie motions in Lithuania and Drew’s ex-girlfriend, Audrey (Mila Kunis), having just been dumped by Drew via text, at home in a bar forlornly celebrating her birthday and encouraged in no uncertain screwball terms by B.F.F. Morgan (Kate McKinnon) to burn all Drew’s stuff. The film is a hybrid, in other words, of action and comedy that despite its occasional tonal inconsistency is nevertheless always emotionally unified because of its two stars. If “Ocean’s 8” hung its stars out to dry, “The Spy Who Dumped Me” rightfully gives its stars center stage and crafts umpteen scenarios to let them shine as Kunis effects affable straight-woman to McKinnon’s energetic, irrepressible, one-of-a-kind insanity, epitomized in a headshot of the character that intermittently pops up on newscasts when she becomes a fugitive which looks like the cover to her ill-fated disco album. There are obvious parallels between “The Spy Who Dumped Me” and “Spy”, and the former is like if the latter had been all about Melissa McCarthy and Miranda Hart’s characters, just sans training. Uh, no training, that is, unless you count the New Jersey Circus School.

Even if Audrey and Morgan eventually wind up in the thick of so much action-adventure, the movie never plays coy with them as the CIA’s Sebastian Henshaw (Sam Heughan), who eventually metamorpheses into their foremost ally, tells Audrey straight away about Drew’s secret identity. Not long after, Drew tracks Audrey down too, explaining that his fantasy football trophy is the MacGuffin desired by the bad guys. He also tells her where to go and what to do with that trophy, in case he doesn’t make it out alive, which he doesn’t, sending Audrey and Morgan to Vienna and then points beyond in the name of they-slowly-figure-out-what.

If Audrey initially suggests going to the American intelligence higher-ups, Morgan argues against this, not least because in saving her B.F.F. she has sent a man careening through a window to his death, a funnier-than-it-sounds moment which emblemizes how Morgan throws herself into this new action hero role with headlong gusto. And if Audrey’s job as a checker at some Trader’s Joe-ish supermarket, where the standard issue Hawaiian shirt underscores the adventures not taken, this becomes her chance to finish something she starts, the narrative through-line, which comes full circle in a moment, perhaps greedily, I wished went a little further. After all, this is not a movie that hides its violent urges.

Why Morgan spends a solid part of the movie running around with a conspicuously visible blood stain across her white top, symbolizing “The Spy Who Dumped Me’s” gruesome reality, that gruesomeness working in a unique way to ground the implausibility. This is not “The Man Who Knew Too Little”, where the character moved through so much espionage mayhem with glee because he thought it was phony, but two characters encountering espionage mayhem and finding, against all odds, and despite themselves, that they relish it. Others, it turns out, do too, as our heroines catching a cab to make an escape transforms into a car chase allowing the driver who dreams of being a club dee jay to briefly become a legend to the backdrop of his own beats.

A lot of what does and does not work might well connect back to your tolerance of McKinnon. She can be a bit much, which isn’t me speaking but a character in the film. Still, her patented verbal drollness combined with heightened physicality works like gangbusters in “The Spy Who Dumped Me” as she barrels through so much chaos with uproarious grace, even if you wish her climactic trapeze tête-à-tête was worthy of her precipitating one-liner. She essentially installs herself as the movie’s heroine despite other characters’ objections, like the CIA overlord, the mononymous Wendy. She is played by Gillian Anderson with a hysterical icy incredulousness that you wish was utilized more often, not just for comedy’s sake but to truly bring home the movie’s peripheral feminism.

Anderson’s character is so great that Morgan develops a crush on her – “I have so much respect for you that it’s circled around to objectification!” – that, honestly, might be the movie’s best love story, even though it’s barely there and one-sided. Indeed, there is something a little disappointing in Fogel’s film falling back on a Heroine Loses Guy / Heroine Gets New Guy arc, one basically refuted by her friendship with Morgan anyway. Even so, if “The Spy Who Dumped Me” is best as a duo, it also occasionally takes flight as a trio, particularly in a wonderful sequence where Audrey, Morgan, and Sebastian, trying to maintain a low profile, stay in a hostel. Even if the scene can’t stop from indulging in the scatological, though it’s got a solid setup and payoff sandwiched around that joke, it intrinsically becomes this interpretation of a soul-searching sojourn across Europe, the kind undertaken by the two female backpackers Audrey and Morgan briefly, comically encounter.

When all hell breaks loose, Morgan rhetorically asks her B.F.F., “You wanna die having never been to Europe? Or do you wanna go to Europe and die, having been to Europe?” It’s a great line, maybe, possibly, the year’s best, hilariously embodying what the quick post-credit sequence brings home – a globe-trotting spy adventure across the old continent becoming a means for these two pals to find themselves.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Red Rock West (1993)

The beginning of John Dahl’s superb 1993 neo-noir “Red Rock West” finds ex-marine Michael Williams (Nicolas Cage) climbing out of his car, where he has apparently slept, on a deserted stretch of highway somewhere in Wyoming, crystallizing his transient lifestyle. It pairs well with the closing image where he has, for necessary reasons, forsaken his car to ride the rails instead. The only difference between the two, other than the modes of transport, is that at the end, Michael has a little bit of money. Ah, and isn’t that what it’s always about? “And for what?” Sheriff Marge Gunderson once rhetorically wondered. “A little bit of money.” Everybody in “Red Rock West” wants a little bit of money, as characters in these sorts of crime thrillers do, but the agreeably delightful twist on Michael’s predicament is how frequently his troubles stem not from any kind of misplaced greed but economic desperation and, even more, injudicious honesty.

Dahl’s introduction impressively takes its time. Widescreen shots of windswept Wyoming pair with close-ups of Michael pulling a dime store novel version of Superman changing in the phonebooth, as he rolls out of his car looking worse for wear but credibly cleaning up, shaving underneath a windmill and pulling on a bright white snap shirt before smiling at himself in the reflection of his car window and play-acting meeting some important-sound mister. It just feels like the set-up to a heist, or something similarly nefarious. It’s not. He’s getting ready for a job interview on a drilling crew, which doesn’t go so well when he admits his leg is busted. Not long after, his car running on fumes, he finds himself in a desolate gas station and face to face with wads of cash that he could so easily swipe. He resists, however, and these two moments taken in tandem are cunning configuration of a man who might be down on his luck but still has integrity.

That integrity is important to understand so that when Michael gets to Red Rock, is mistaken for another man (“Lyle from Dallas”), gets offered a lot of money to murder Suzanne (Lara Flynn Boyle), the wife of Wayne (J.T. Walsh), who promptly offers him more money to instead murder Wayne we understand what he is forgoing by seemingly agreeing to each of their terms. Not that he is necessarily acting out of turn even as he proceeds to play Suzanne and Wayne against each other. Why he even takes the time to write a letter to the Red Rock Sheriff explaining this murder for hire plot, asking if the law can consult with these faux lovebirds, as if he is an eccentric, ersatz marriage counselor. Still, since it has been made clear that ethics matter more than money, by taking their cash and then fleeing town, Michael becomes not a victim of Murphy’s Law but a violator of his own established code.

Granted, Dahl lets Michael have a little fun being in the money. If so often movies convey instant riches by way of party scenes, cash being thrown in the air, jetskiing, girls in bikinis, here sudden wealth is merely a couple brown bags of convenience store groceries, a six-pack of Bud and gassing up the car. My favorite shot in the whole movie was a simple one, a camera looking up from beside the gas nozzle as Michael looks toward it with a smile. It is not a self-satisfied smirk, mind you, for what he has pulled; it is satisfaction at finally having a full tank of gas. So naturally when he hits the road, Texas swing dialed up on the radio, and the rain starts to fall in sheets, like he’s suddenly Marion Crane in “Psycho”, the turn you know is coming is extra terrible.

From there, “Red Rock West” becomes a series of narrative switchbacks as Michael’s repeated thwarted attempts to flee town are dryly, comically punctuated by him passing the Red Rock town sign on the way back in. Michael must fend off Wayne, which he partially does by teaming up with Suzanne, though all of them will have to deal at one point or another with the actual “Lyle from Dallas.” The latter is played by a menacingly convivial Dennis Hopper who manages, moment to moment, to come off both unhinged and totally in control. Walsh, on the other hand, comes across in control until that control is threatened at which point he loses it like a guy in bad traffic. And Flynn Boyle is exemplary at speaking in a way to make you not believe her but want to believe her. Then there’s Nic Cage.

The kids today know Cage predominantly from “Wicker Man” memes, and things of that nature, indicative of his late career slide (or is it ascent?) into unabashed hammy orchestrations. The Cage of “Red Rock West”, however, is cut more from the “Honeymoon in Vegas” mold, a bug-eyed everyman in too deep. He moves through the various twists and turns with the air of a man who wishes he could take back his one bad decision but knows he can’t. Yet if the movie plays like the universe conspiring against Michael for his singular sin, it also brings him to the precipice of atonement, which he latches onto by sending so many stacks of cash blowing away in the wind. Sorry to spoil it, but it’s a quarter-century old, people, and I want to linger over that wonderful moment, one intrinsically encapsulating the great Dwight Yoakam tune accompanying it. So often people want to get rich quick and get somewhere else, somewhere - cough, cough - better. As “Red Rock West” ends, Michael Williams is a thousand miles from nowhere, and there is nowhere, bless his heart, he would rather be. And even if he does keep a little bit of money for himself, well, hey now, that’s just for expenses.

Elegy for Free Bird

Last week Bob Boilen, Robin Hilton and Stephen Thompson convened on NPR’s All Songs Considered to deliberate what familiar songs need to be retired. “They are often beloved classics, or works of pure genius,” Boilen wrote in the accompanying post. “And you never, ever need to hear them again.” You might be able to guess which ones made the cut of needing to be cut. Among them was Alabama poet laureate emeritus Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird”, the 1973 power ballad which, regrettably, as Thompson pointed out, is perhaps the most mockingly requested tune at concerts, a joke anymore as bad as telling someone “See you next year” on New Year’s Eve. The argument as presented by All Things Considered was not, mind you, that “Free Bird” itself was bad. No, like Boilen wrote, it is a classic, perhaps pure genius. The song, as Thompson noted, means a lot to a lot of people. The case for retiring “Free Bird” added up to the song becoming, as Hilton said, “A parody of itself. It’s been so used that nobody takes it seriously anymore.”

“Elizabethtown” (2005) is not a movie most people took/take seriously, except for this blog as so many loyal frustrated followers can loyally frustratingly attest. And much like Usain Bolt should have retired after Rio, and much like Muhammad Ali should have retired after beating Leon Spinks, “Free Bird” should have been retired after “Elizabethtown.” As Hilton said on All Songs Considered, “Any time there’s some big goodbye on TV, or films, I don’t what it is, ‘Free Bird’ is what they call up.” Indeed, he referenced (and played a snippet of) Will Ferrell channeling Ronnie Van Zant on the final episode of Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show in early 2010. That moment seemed a winking acknowledgement of the choice’s banality, and Hilton suggested as much too, saying “They’re making a joke out of it because they know it’s become this cliché.” It was – and this was classic Conan – a serious moment not taking itself seriously. In “Elizabethtown”, however, “Free Bird” is called up with rightful earnestness.

During the film’s pivotal sequence at the funeral of Mitch Baylor, father to Drew (Orlando Bloom), protagonist, Cousin Jessie (Paul Schneider) re-unites his coulda-been band Ruckus for a one-night-only performance, a scenario which tinges death with something like a tease of rebirth, or just one more moment to live. Naturally Ruckus plays perhaps Skynyrd’s greatest Innyrd.

When they do, the scene briefly cuts outside the room where Drew and and Claire (Kirsten Dunst) – The [redacted] – hear the time-honored intro. As they do, Claire smirks, not so much skeptically as wearily, and remarks “‘Free Bird’, huh?”, a sly concession to the power ballad’s inevitability in the chosen context. But Crowe is not placing “Free Bird” here to make fun of it. No, the people in the audience are the people Thompson was talking about, the ones for whom the song truly means something; young and old alike, they all rise to their feet and put their hands together when that riff gets played.

True, the sequence eventually devolves into comical mishap when the giant papier-mâché bird that Cousin Jessie has crafted to go sailing over the crowd on a wire as the song reaches its pinnacle goes awry, the ersatz phoenix not rising from the ashes but inadvertently catching on fire, crash landing, setting off the sprinklers, unleashing mayhem. It is, I have written before, Crowe seeming to dream up an elaborate sequence as a shrewd means to have an Indoor Goodbye in the Rain. But now I wonder if an Indoor Goodbye in the Rain was merely a byproduct.

Even as the faux rain falls, Ruckus keeps right on playing, right through its homage to the real thing’s guitar solo, seeing the song to its dramatic end. It might be Ruckus’s last stand, but it just as easily could have been the song’s last stand too. In sending that bird up in flames, Crowe visually encapsulated exactly what the All Songs Considered crew was lobbying for, putting “Free Bird” out to pasture by burning it down.

keira knightley wears a hat, but remains skeptical

tfw you’re keira knightley trying to cheer yourself up by wearing a hat but it’s not quite working

The Many Faces of Stellan Skarsgård

This is an image of, left to right, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgård and Pierce Brosnan from the blue skied ABBA jukebox musical “Mamma Mia” (2008). All three men are smiling. This is not necessarily news where Firth and Brosnan are concerned, but one of the preeminent takeaways from “Mamma Mia”, as well as its recently released sequel “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again”, is the smile of Skarsgård as Greatest Living Swede Bill Anderson. That is because it is so new and unusual to see Skarsgård smile! Because when I think of Skarsgård I think of, say, his omnipresent glower in the original “Insomnia” (1997) which is totally emblematic of a man stricken with, well, obviously.

Or I think of him in “Zero Kelvin” (1995) where his being stuck in scenic Greenland for the winter expectedly fuels his omnipresent glower.

Or I think of him in “Ronin” (1998) where he maintains such a frequent glower that even when he’s sitting in the front seat during the climactic car chase against traffic his face is still fixed in the same sort of glower he has when he expresses a desire to do something and is told by Robert DeNiro’s also glower-y Sam that working is doing something. (Skarsgård’s scoff noise in that moment is something to behold too; it is the scoff noise of a man who knows how to glower.)

There is a reason why, after all, Skarsgård was cast as Bootstrap Bill Turner in the 73rd Pirates of the Caribbean movie, “Dead Man’s Chest”. A ghostly pirate tied to a cannon and hurled overboard to live forever under the sea is not the kind of guy prone to cheer.

But then a funny thing happened. As I watched “Borg vs. McEnroe”, not long after seeing “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again”, I was taken aback when Skarsgård, as the taciturn but effective coach of Swedish tennis legend Bjorn Borg, in sussing out the young Borg, smiled.

I had to think long and hard. Did I have Skarsgård all wrong? This is Skarsgård in “Thor” looking very Skarsgård-y.

But wait! Here he is in “Thor” not looking so Skarsgård-y at all!

And the more I re-visited the immense, quality canon of Mr. Skarsgård in my mind, the more I realized that, yes, Skarsgård does smile. He has one of the most effective smiles in the business! Here he is smiling as Professor Gerald Lambeau in “Good Will Hunting”, that “arrogant,” as Sean Maguire puts it, “fucking prick.”

Here he is smiling in the heartwarming “The Glass House” as a diabolical foster father who sees his foster daughter strictly in terms of cold hard cash.

Here he is smiling in Lars von Trier’s heartwarming “Nymphomaniac” where he finds self-diagnosed nymphomaniac Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) beaten up and lying in the alleyway behind his apartment.

Here he is smiling in Lars von Trier’s heartwarming “Breaking the Waves” as a husband who becomes immobilized and asks his wife to have sex with other men.

Here he is smiling in the heartwarming “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” as he prepares to go about torturing Mikael Blomkvist in his cozy basement torture chamber.

Here he is smiling in “In Order of Disappearance” right before he shoots that guy next to him in the face.

Sigh. Stellan Skarsgård, what a happy guy. 

Borg vs. McEnroe

Between points, the old surly Czech tennis legend Ivan Lendl would inspect the strings of his racket. It was as familiar as Maria Sharapova shrieking or Rafael Nadal dealing with his wedgie. Tomes were frequently composed regarding Lendl’s inspections, because even if it was nothing more than an athlete dependent upon a piece of equipment ensuring his piece of equipment was still okay, it looked, well, like a man searching for something beyond those strings. And while director Janus Metz Pedersen places the celebrated 1980 Wimbledon Final that gives “Borg vs. McEnroe” its title at the beginning before flashing back, the actual first shot is of Swedish tennis star Björn Borg (Sverrir Gudnason) inspecting his racket Lendl-style. The camera is on the opposite side of the strings, looking up through them at Borg looking back with something that might be determination, but might also be desolation. Because even if the film gradually winds its way back to the 1980 Final, it is as much about psychology as feats of strength.

“Borg vs. McEnroe” wastes little time in illuminating the former’s unyielding mental pressure. In an opening scene he is swarmed by fans on the streets of Monaco and ducks into a cafe. There he bonds briefly with the waiter behind the counter who asks what Borg does. “Electrician,” says Borg in trying to disappear into another life if only for a moment. “If you are an electrician,” says the waiter, “I’m the King of Monaco.” It is an early sign of the film’s unfortunate tendency to try and distill its psychological examination down to fortune cookie wisdom. It is better forgoing behaviorism jingles for visual expression, like the preceding scene where we see Borg on a Monaco hotel balcony. At first, he looks over the edge, and the point-of-view shot seeing the pool far below makes us wonder, for an instant, if he’s considering jumping. Then a shot from the side shows him as he transitions into push-ups using the balcony railing as a base, before the angle switches again to directly behind him, allowing us to see the Mediterranean spread out before him, to which his laser focus leaves him indifferent.

If this moment shows us his despair, it also shows us his ability to push that despair away in the name of preparation. This ability is further evinced in the movie’s frequent flashbacks to his past where a coach, Lennart Bergelin (Stellan Skarsgård), seeing potential where others only see a headache, takes the volatile young Borg under his wing and then gradually molds him in such a way as to eradicate his on court emotional outbursts by channeling them into his play. In that light, Borg’s eventual Wimbledon Final opponent, John McEnroe (Shia LaBeouf), the so-called Superbrat, becomes something less than a mere tennis antagonist and more an unwanted reflection in the mirror.

McEnroe’s introduction, sitting in the green room of a talk show as AC DC throttles on the soundtrack and highlights (lowlights) of McEnroe’s greatest tantrums rolls, is as hysterically effective as it obvious. The curtness of the cuts between McEnroe muttering to himself on the couch and McEnroe screaming on the tennis court is a quick window into his turbulent psyche. Yet this, more or less, serves as the script’s entire window into McEnroe’s personality, aside from a couple cursory flashbacks of his own. Much of whoever and whatever McEnroe might be is left to LaBeouf, which is A+ casting as the actor’s famously explosive temperament sings in note-perfect harmony with the actual McEnroe’s. Not that LaBeouf is just doing an impersonation. No, in every swear word, in every glare, in every exasperated wiping of sweat from his brow, he looks like a man truly convinced the whole wide world and everything and everyone within it is conspiring against him.

Putting two such disparate personalities, then, across the net from each other for the climactic Wimbledon Final would seem to suggest, say, the chance to bring the air of so many Louisa Thomas tennis pieces, where she deftly employs a match as a means to explore the emotional and stylistic contrasts of its opponents, to cinematic life. That, however, is a visual feat Pedersen cannot turn. Nor can he turn the climactic Wimbledon Final into, perhaps, a visual approximation of David Foster Wallace’s renowned New York Times piece Roger Federer as Religious Experience. That would have required a deep dive into the elemental, and this is a movie that stops to simply explain what a tiebreak is. Alas, the Wimbledon Final is treated more like the Miracle on Ice in “Miracle”, a rapid-cut montage with announcers filling in the narrative blanks. And given that Pedersen devotes so much time to the match, this unimaginative rendering of it winds up as an egregious letdown.

It’s a weird paradox that might have been on purpose if I knew it wasn’t. For all the digging it does into Borg, and McEnroe, off the court, what they do on the court is still above us mere mortals.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Deep Cover (1992)

In playing a cop going under undercover to infiltrate an L.A. drug cartel, Laurence Fishburne describes events taking place in “Deep Cover” with a voiceover that is less stricken or sad than unsentimental. It evokes the film’s neo-noir tones, but it also underlines the emotional tightrope his character, Russell Stevens, is forced to walk throughout, where anger and sorrow roiling underneath must be kept at bay. You see the genesis of these emotions in the film’s lone flashback, set in 1972 Cleveland, where young Russell Stevens is in the car with his dad (Glynn Turman) on Christmas Eve night. Between snorts of coke and getting shot in the back during a liquor store robbery, Russell Stevens Sr. keeps commanding his son “Don’t you ever be like me!” If the dichotomy is obvious, Turman, in his lone scene, makes it count with jittery fright, playing a livewire in tune with his terrible impulses who nevertheless cannot or will not tamp them down. And director Bill Duke in concert with cinematographer Bojan Bazelli wrings maximum terror from Russell Sr.’s death by juxtaposing twinkling red Christmas lights with the red of Russell Stevens Sr.’s blood streaked on the car window in front of his son. It’s an image you believe would leave a lasting imprint in a terrified kid’s mind; it’s an image that left a lasting imprint in my mind.

This sets up the ferment within Russell that is precisely what stands out to his DEA superior Gerald Carver, played by Charles Martin Smith in a performance dressing up the abject in an amiability that only works to make his metaphorical slime that much more oozy and gross. The only moment in which “Deep Cover” truly speechifies is when Carver lectures a hesitant Russell about the cause of effect of crack babies. Smith, brilliantly, nauseatingly, drains this monologue of any empathy to let us see it as the manipulation it is, preying on Russell’s sense of guilt, pinning his charge in the corner. Which way is up? is a question that often gets posed, whether literally or figuratively, in movies chronicling deep cover perils, but, as this moment shows, the angles at which Russell finds himself in too deep are more askew.

Indeed, if it is typical in these sorts of movies for the clandestine cop to eventually become smitten with the way of life he is trying to bring down, that never quite happens in “Deep Cover.” Yes, Russell eventually goes rogue, made to say the line in voiceover “I liked being a big shot. Wouldn’t you?” But Fishburne deftly drains that standard-issue observation of all vitality so that you don’t really believe that he believes what he’s shoveling. What’s more, his turn is tied less to the lifestyle than outrage for the duplicitousness of his nominally law-abiding superiors, the ancient reveal that the good guys are not always so good. That is not to say, however, that “Deep Cover” drowns in nihilism. It offers something of an optimistic end, true, but also a single mother ridden by crack who might well make spectacularly bad decisions where her daughter is concerned but is also carefully painted as a victim of the drug trade’s unrelenting and indifferent cycle. That she disappears for a good chunk of the movie, in fact, merely underlines that point.

If there are myriad characters that leave a mark, none leave one as indelible as David Jason (Jeff Goldblum), a trafficker in the cartel’s ring who becomes Russell’s closest confidant in the underworld. He is introduced in his tony home with his white wife and white child, but launders his drug money through an African art dealership, a blatant if no less effective metaphor for white tourism, which is further underlined by Goldblum doing something like the Dance of the White Jackass in an African mask for Russell’s non-amusement. If the cultural appropriation is blunt and brutal, however, David is ultimately revealed as operating equally from a place of traditional, moronic machismo.

Seriously, what graphic word do you think an R-rated 1992 thriller like “Deep Cover" might employ most frequently? Fuck? Shit? Nope. It’s balls. As in, “You got the balls for this, or what?” Or, “He finally grew some balls.” Or, “A man has two things in this world — his word and his balls.” And though David eventually sports a black leather duster, slicked back hair, and tosses off a few one-liners while firing a gun, he only gets there by virtue of the ball busting brigade, never in a more comically macabre (pitiful) manner than a game of bloody knuckles. If Goldblum would go on the next year in “Jurassic Park” to define a kind of twitchy self-confidence, here he epitomizes the sort of white male insecurity that inevitably leads to power mad ruin.

Some Drivel On...The Broken Hearts Club

In “The Broken Hearts Club” (2000) — beg your pardon, that’s “The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy” — there is a moment when Dennis (Timothy Olyphant) and a couple of his pals are strolling through West Hollywood, where they reside, and past an expansive mural of Hollywood greats — Bacall, Bogie, Marilyn Monroe, etc. The movie is not equating the likes of Olyphant, and Zach Braff and Andrew Keegan, etc., with cinema royalty, more just cashing in on the opportunity for a nifty vérité visual, just as I am not equating the likes of Olyphant, as well as Zach Braff and Andrew Keegan, etc., with cinema royalty. No, the shot struck me because whereas once these movies were very much of the present through which I was living, they are now very much of the past, long gone and weirdly retro, reminiscent of someone from ten years ago watching an explicit 80s movie, or someone from the 80s watching a movie with a 50s sock hop.

The late 90s were a boom time for teen comedies, as The Ringer’s oral history of “Can’t Hardly Wait” (1997) recently outlined. But it was also a time for young adult rom coms, whether they were weirdly beloved (“Never Been Kissed”), rightly forgotten (“Boys and Girls”), or destined to be remembered by this blog forever (“Kicking & Screaming”). “The Broken Hearts Club” fits firmly in the latter camp, where the world seems comprised of endless conversation, and where there are several central characters rather than one or two because they lean on each other even as they try to steel themselves for going it alone. There was just one difference with “The Broken Hearts Club”: its characters were gay.

Then again, despite their orientation, in falling back on conventional narrative structure and tropes, “The Broken Hearts Club” hardly feels singular. Each character is given a crisis ripped from the pages of a thousand crises before them. Those crises are not really presented as all that challenging while their resolutions, per the sitcom tradition from which writer/director Greg Berlanti emerged, are laughably un-arduous, highlighted by the after-school special detour Braff’s Benji takes into drug addiction. Such an easygoing vibe yields equal victory and defeat. Victory in so much as rather than chocking the proceedings full of stereotypical gay jokes these characters could, sort of, be any characters in any movie; defeat in so much as making them any characters in any movie does a disservice to their own individuality. Either way, this familiarity is sort of what I liked about “The Broken Hearts Club” at least in so much as I was someone watching the movie for the first time 18 years after it was released. And if from here on out I, as a critic, rule myself out of order, well, dammit, that’s just a risk I’ll have to take.

Nostalgia is, as it is any setting, a potential trap. But “The Broken Hearts Club” isn’t a movie made now set then trying to conjure up false nostalgia; it is (was) a late 90s movie. And seeing the fashion, the music, the scenes of parties set in sparsely decorated homes with plain white refrigerators filled only with beer took me back to when movies like these were the norm, when everything on screen would have been as it was – at least, that is, for me. “The Broken Hearts Club” isn’t so much a flashback to an era as a time, a time in your life when your problems don’t run as deep and what problems you do have feel as if they can be conquered with minimal effort. This time is not a lie, per se, more like a mirage, one that eventually just vanishes from sight. But on a night in 2018, when Present Day America was Present Day America-ing, while watching this movie, for a brief instant, that mirage re-appeared. I knew it was merely a cinematic illusion, but I looked long and hard and happily for as long as it lasted.

What Makes an Explosion *Oscar* Worthy?

In inevitably making a crack on his NPR quiz show Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me about the recent announcement of a new Oscar category for Best Achievement in so-called Popular Film, host Peter Sagal said “film critics are going to be asking, yeah, it’s got explosions, but are they *Oscar* explosions?” Stop the tape. *Oscar* explosions, you say? You’re speaking our language, Sagal. What, we wondered upon hearing this, might constitute an *Oscar* worthy explosion?

As the Guinness World Records site reports, the largest film stunt explosion of all time took place in the 24th James Bond film “Spectre.” Guinness explains: “Taking place in Erfoud, Morocco, the blast had a total yield of 68.47 tonnes of TNT equivalent and was the result of detonating 8,418 litres of kerosene with 33 kg of powder explosives - and it lasted for over 7.5 seconds.” Is that it? Does the largest film stunt explosion of all time automatically equate to *Oscar* worthy explosion? Please. As a person with a blog who sees movies, I think I know the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences a little better than that.

The Academy is not just looking for the largest explosions. They are not looking for Christopher Nolan leveling the old Brach’s Candy building on the west side of Chicago for “The Dark Knight” nor are they looking for every Michael Bay explosion ever. These, after all, are the [assumes the Jon Lovitz “ACTING!” voice] Oscars. The Best Achievement in Popular Film might be intended to cater to the Common Man but that the Academy found it necessary to create a category to cater to the Common Man is all the proof you need of their disinterest in catering to the Common Man. No, if you want an *Oscar* explosion then you need to take it up an expressive level.

Explosions outside of the box are tempting to consider, like Wolfgang Petersen finding a way to work some explosions into “Troy” despite the film taking place in 12th Century BC, or Wes Anderson working explosions into his “Rushmore” protagonist’s Vietnam stage play (“You’ll find a pair of safety glasses and some earplugs underneath your seats”), or the collecting of shells in “One Crazy Summer”, never mind the exploding drummer of “This Is Spinal Tap” fame. I love all these explosions. But is ingenuity *Oscar* worthy? That’s dubious.

You know what else is dubious? The claims that John Huston’s War Department funded “The Battle of San Pietro” was actually filmed in the midst of The Battle of San Pietro, fought in 1943 during the Italian Campaign of WWII. That was the argument proffered by Mark Harris in his book Five Came Back where he convincingly laid out the case that the battle presented on screen was actually a series of reenactments. And I can totally see facsimile explosions pawned off as the real thing inadvertently ending up as *Oscar* worthy, leading to pre-ceremony controversy and a subsequent redaction of *Oscar* worthiness.

I would love nothing more than to cite, say, the explosion in “Groundhog Day” arriving right after Chris Elliot’s expertly timed “He might be okay” or Michael Caine in the (real) “Italian Job” admonishing his cohort “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off” or, of course, The Sundance Kid lamenting “Think you used enough dynamite there, Butch?” But this is the Oscars, people, and we all know the Oscars don’t reward comedy.

The explosions at the end of “Fight Club” are bold and, given the presentation, weirdly beautiful. They are, however, also replete with nihilism. That, friends, is not *Oscar* worthy. Neither are The Pixies, at least not when compared to, say, John Williams. Everyone knows this.

This blog’s favorite movie explosion of all time undoubtedly takes place in “Die Hard.” Not the one at the end, of course, but the one where John McClane ties the C4 to the computer monitor and straps the computer monitor to the office chair and then sends it hurtling down the elevator shaft which essentially encapsulates, to borrow the phrasing of Lord Dark Helmet, firing a warning shot up someone’s nose rather than across it. This explosion yields quite a visual spectacle, so much so that it sends the TV cameras outside the building into a tizzy (“Eat your heart out channel five”). It also ticks off Hans Gruber, resident villain, which is the whole point, though it also ticks off Deputy Chief of Police Dwayne T. Robinson who struggles to tolerate such brazen destruction of property. And I feel as if Deputy Chief of Police Dwayne T. Robinson’s attitude would mimic the Academy’s.

This brings us to David Lean’s “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” The explosion there was expensive and immense, yes, but it was also what the movie turned on as well as a ferocious metaphor for the madness of war. And much like the immortal Mickey Abbot of “Seinfeld” once proclaimed Bacterial Meningitis to be the Hamlet of Diseases, I think the explosion in “The Bridge on the River Kwai” earns similar distinction. Expense, enormity, meaning, this explosion’s got everything; that’s *Oscar* worthy.

This Shot in A Quiet Place

If  yesterday we levied some critcisms at John Krasinski’s “A Quiet Place”, none of which we are here to take back, we also espoused his ocassional painterly images, like the one you see up above. Indeed, the rural upstate New York setting, with colors that pop a lot more than this piddly screen shot might connote, is nothing if not pastoral, though do not confuse that for some Thomas Kinkade swallop. If Kransinski struggles to satisfactorily intertwine a familial metaphor with his horror-infused narrative, he paradoxically makes that familial metaphor look so easy with this single frame.

In the background, at the end of the path toward the cornfield and a bit difficult to pick out on account of, again, this screen shot’s lacking quality is the family’s daughter, Reagan. That she is so far away implies the distance Reagan, rightly or wrongly, very much has come to feel from her elders, though particularly her father. The father, naturally then, is headed in the opposite direction, on the far left hand side of the frame, his back turned, suggesting distance, and trudging uphill, a bit of symbolic topography. He is also on the same side of the frame as his son, a subliminal assertion of standard gender roles, though the son is the only one looking at Evelyn, the mother, as if not wanting to turn and follow his father. Her posture, however, with arms crossed suggests that he has to turn and follow anyway. And she, of course, is conspicuously placed at the source of these divergent sandy paths, each one leading back to her.

If you see this moment on screen, it is, as you might assume, filled out with more dramatic intent. But you see this frame apart from its action and you realize all the backstory contained within the scene has already been laid out visually, which suggests, as much as any of his admittedly solid exercises in suspense, a promising directorial future for Mr. Krasinski if he keeps thinking along the above lines.

A Quiet Place

A horror movie’s scariest sound is typically no sound at all. Any hack can quiet things down, bang a piano chord on the soundtrack, and make you jump in your seat. “A Quiet Place”, however, does not make you jump in your seat so much as burrow deep into it, because director John Krasinski and his impeccable sound design team have made a movie that is, essentially, all about silence, amplifying it to spotlight it then terrifyingly undercut it. “A Quiet Place” does this by building a slightly future world overrun by monsters that are blind but strong of hearing and ready to swoop in and rip anyone or anything from limb to limb at the slightest sonic provocation. If we don’t know really know the genesis of these creatures that is no less a concern than how Krasinski’s narrative sometimes seems to circumvent its own rules. This is all just a plot to engineer consistent dread and suspense.

That, however, does not stop Krasinski, and his two co-writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, from trying, not altogether successfully, to wrap a metaphor in the form of parental duty and familial grief around its otherwise lean, mean plot. This strategy is seen immediately in the film’s prologue where the Abbot family of five rummages through an empty pharmacy store in an empty upstate New York town with escalating disturbances of the conspicuous quiet engendering increasing panic in the ranks.This compulsion for quiet is brought home in the pre-credits capper where the family’s youngest son inadvertently draws noisy attention to himself and is devoured by a creature. This is not a spoiler; this is the inciting incident, one that both saddles the film with melancholy and works as the monsters’ introduction.

The film then flashes ahead almost 400 days with the Abbots still reeling from their youngest’s death and hiding out on its farm. If occasionally Krasinski proffers painterly images subtly underlining how traditional gender roles install themselves even in a post-apocalyptic landscape he is just as prone to blunt images ensuring the relay of relevant information, like newspapers taped to walls (“IT’S SOUND!” brays one which plays like the movie’s poster tagline if this was 1950s monochrome). That bluntness affects the film elsewhere. If such scant dialogue suggests spoken words will count, the dialogue winds up as nothing more than verbal slogans taped to a metaphorical wall. The deafness of older daughter Reagan (Millicent Simmonds), meanwhile, is glaringly utilized as a mere plot cohesive.

That she can’t hear lends credence to the sign language employed by the Abbots for communication while her hearing aids are revealed as story seeds waiting to sprout. And while Krasinski niftily evokes the soundlessness of Reagan’s life, he fails to transform this into anything like an actual point-of-view, particularly where emotional spats with her father, Lee (Krasinski), are concerned. In those scenes, alas, Krasinski the actor mistakes, as he does most everywhere else, dull for dour. It feels like a performance waiting for a voiceover to fill it in. As mother Evelyn, Emily Blunt is better. Her facial expressions defined “Sicario”, and they define “A Quiet Place” too, as in various moments she allows exasperation, fear, love, and tough love to dart across her face, and sometimes evinces all four at once. That is to say nothing of her closing shot where, in a remarkably loving yet nasty grin, she sort of becomes Ellen Ripley.

Ripley was a beacon of motherhood. Evelyn is nominally set up as one too seeing as how after the flash forward she has become pregnant. But the impending newborn is ultimately less evocative of a new beginning or tendering of an old wound than a narrative timebomb, one waiting to go off until just the right moment, and which Krasinski booby-traps with additional complications along the way. A nail that appears on a cellar staircase, the camera lingering to let you know in no uncertain terms that this nail will return, made me laugh harder than when Daniel Stern stepped on that nail on the staircase in “Home Alone.” This is not a criticism; this is a compliment. If the sequence is officially dramatic, it also a gloriously entertaining (fun-filled!) actorly showcase in which Blunt makes credible giving birth — birth! — without making a sound.

She is forbidden from making a sound, but the movie is not. If “A Quiet Place”, given the specificities of its world, is ripe for picking through incongruities (or: plot holes), those can predominantly be written off because they are necessary in the name of suspense. The lone incongruity that cannot be dismissed, however, is the aesthetic decision to include a traditional music soundtrack which oddly undermines a movie that cultivates so much of its success by an absence of sound and then sudden intrusion of it. Indeed, unlike the musical score, Krasinski sees fit to include only one pop tune, heard not on the soundtrack, per se, but, in a tender scene, through the earbuds of Evelyn and Lee.

Here the correspondent must confess he failed to watch “A Quiet Place” in the theater, where the impeccable sound designers intended for it to be seen. No doubt there were aural nuances I missed, not to mention the experience of a clattering movie audience being compelled to unanimously shut its trap. But as someone who listens to so much music in any given week that, sadly, I’m too often numb to the inherent wonder of piping remarkable music through my ears, when Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” appeared, reader, for that moment, I was reminded of music’s God-given miracle.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Company Business (1991)

Nicholas Meyer’s “Company Business” is set in the year of its release – 1991 – meaning it is set amidst the new world order, with the Berlin Wall having fallen and Soviets having become Russians. It is a foreign world to Sam Boyd (Gene Hackman), former CIA operative now reduced to spying on behalf of captains of industry, like Maxine Gray Cosmetics, glimpsed in the movie’s opening. Though Sam is later made to exhort that he’s “too old for this shit”, a line heard from far away and with the character’s back to the camera, suggesting it was added in post-production, he looks too old for this shit as he sits in a plush red couch amidst gunmetal gray walls at the Maxine Gray offices next to a nerdy looking young guy who explains how he simply hacked a computer system to get the same information that we see Sam go to extravagant, adventurous lengths to obtain. The patented Hackman chuckle in this moment conveys having aged out more than any recitation of Detective Murtaugh’s famous lament.

Sam is a dinosaur, another comparison made explicit in a line of dialogue, and so is KGB spy Pyotr Grushenko (Mikhail Baryshnikov), currently rotting away in a Fargo jail though now the CIA is looking to use him in a prisoner exchange. Sam is reactivated to act as Pyotr’s escort, which smells like a set-up not only to every wary audience member but to the two men as well. Pyotr’s senses remains heightened while Hackman, ever warily jolly, sort of plays it as a guy who knows all along something is off but forges ahead because his whole life has been fording intimidating rivers of espionage. Sure enough, the deal goes wrong, revealed as a cover for buying back a downed U-2 pilot with Colombian drug money. Now the Americans and the Russians both want Sam and Pyotr dead meaning they must team up to stay alive.

From there the movie becomes an odd amalgam of a spy adventure, a buddy comedy, and a leisurely travelogue. Meyer, who also wrote the script, comes across rather uninterested in the adventuring part, with a shootout atop the Eiffel Tower that is conspicuously blasé while the suspense of the prisoner exchange gone wrong is not sucked dry because we know it will go wrong but because Meyer invests it with so little urgency. That un-urgent feeling is better in the buddy-buddy moments, like when Sam and Pyor briefly ride bicycles through the red-light district of Berlin, or when the two men sit down for dinner and a few steins at some place in the same city, where the atmosphere briefly teases the more conversational “In Bruges.”

That confused air trickles down to the performances of Hackman and Baryshnikov. They are not electric, more easygoing, or maybe more like lackadaisacal because they are disoriented, unable to determine if they are playing to the tone of an old world, Cold War throwback or to some slightly grittier reboot of one. Meyer must have been disoriented too. Late in the proceedings one character remarks that eventually Europe will be nothing more than one big corporation, an idea evoked all the way back at the movie’s beginning, but then mostly just a thread that the movie spends the rest of its time dangling right there in the open without getting pulled. But perhaps “Company Business” knew this global corporatization better than it even knew. Maybe the movie itself was done in by board room strategists, arguing for some whiteboard box office formula, insistent on synergizing styles, hanging their characters out to dry.