An Early Autumn Siesta

Oops! My bad! Apologies, loyal frustrated followers! I mixed up screenshots! This is supposed to be a Going on Vacation post, not a Glowering and Drinking Scotch While America Burns post! But it’s so hard these days to keep a smiley face amidst 2018’s cruel, never-ending civic and political burlesque. Yes, yes, I know, as a lyrical scholar once observed, the fire’s always been burning since the world’s been turning. But damn, you’d think after 4.543 billion years that maybe we would have figured out how to douse the flames a little bit rather than just fan them, which I do not mean as a Flake-ish Call for Civility™but a furious lament at the mind-bending inability (unwillingness) of so many to simply acknowledge what’s right. In such an environment, day-to-day escape, which is so necessary, so valuable, has become so difficult. To get away you must go away. And we will.

We are getting the hell out, of America for a brief respite, and we are getting the hell out of our blogging interface for a little while too. We have been behind on our movie-watching all year, and we plan to catch up, for the most part, to the best of our ability, over the final few months of 2018. But that requires taking time away and getting our mind right. As such, Cinema Romantico will be shuttered for the first half of October to recharge the blogging batteries and gear up for the awards seasons crescendo, as well as the festive Hallmark Christmas Movie season, never mind the culmination to 2018 itself which will no doubt be the most thunderous conclusion of all.

keira knightley catches up on the news

The Wife

“The Wife” opens one morning with celebrated author Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce) taking a call at his Connecticut home from the Nobel Committee. But before receiving the expected, jubilant news, Joe asks if his wife (Glenn Close) can get on the other extension. She does, and as the Nobel Committee member explains that Joe has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, director Björn Runge cuts back and forth between Joe and Jean, husband and wife, as Joe bursts with false modesty and Joan seems to recede within herself. If these cuts come across pedestrian, they quietly evoke “The Wife’s” emergent question regarding the precise genesis of this literary goldmine, though it is reduced to a puzzle locking overtly into place rather than a peeling back of so many tantalizing psychological layers. They also evoke the movie’s preference for the close-up, usually of Close, whose facial expressions frequently, brilliantly embody so many conflicting emotions that you half-suspect the narrative obviousness stemmed from a fear that the actor’s stellar poker face would leave her character’s motivation a secret for the ages.

I should back up. “The Wife” does not quite begin with Joe getting a phone call from Stockholm. No, it begins with Joe worrying about whether he will get a call from Stockholm and, foreshadowing his gluttonous predilections, eating in bed, for which Joan scolds him. After winning, he and Joan hop up and down on the bed a la little kids before she climbs down and insists they get on with getting ready for a long day of ceremonial congratulations. She is, in other words, his caretaker, looking after him like a mother might look after a child, which Pryce plays straight to, evincing a distracted, irritable air even in his most composed moments, even if he is basically quoting his own performance in “Listen Up Philip.” Joe tramples over everyone, including his son David (Max Irons), a would-be writer who spends the whole movie dolefully trying to get notes on his latest story, less a character than the doleful trigger of a story bomb waiting to explode at just the right moment.

All this suggests a domestic drama, with Joan in the role of long suffering wife, which is not my term but hers, telling Joe in no uncertain terms that she does not want to be thanked in his acceptance speech because she does not want to be viewed as a victim. It’s a cliché, sure, but one that Joan understands, and that the movie does too, deliberately raising it at the beginning to turn it on its head, remonstrating against the myth of the blustery male ego automatically equating to male genius, laying him bare as a vainglorious old white guy in moment when he pitifully trots out a James Joyce line to lure a comely photographer (Karin Franz Körlof).

Rather, however, than confronting this myth head on, the movie comes at it through a mystery, one given rise by an unfortunately named author, Nathaniel Bone (Christian Slater). He essentially accosts Joe and Joan on their flight to Stockholm, an exquisite sequence in which, exhibiting the character’s comical disregard for personal space, he cuts the frame in half by pushing in so close to the married couple that he’s right in Joan’s face, prompting her to look anywhere but at him, Close’s scrunched lips practically exuding a “Can you believe this guy?” He is not so much interested in becoming Joe’s biographer, as Joe himself claims, as fishing for secret information on the Nobel winner, all of which will become evident when he takes Joan out for a drink in Stockholm.

Though the eventual blow-out between Joan and Joe is solid, these cocktails between Joan and Bone is the best scene in the movie. If Bone, like David, is merely a device, he nevertheless becomes something more via Slater’s performance, a pitch-perfect piece of casting, wielding his Cheshire grin of a voice and a churlish, raised eyebrow grin to feign empathy as a means to try and get her to admit that she, not Joe, wrote all those lauded books. The camera’s proximity here feels like its own invasion of privacy, trying to get her to cough something up, which she both does and doesn’t, her entire air a revelatory tease as if she takes delight in reeling this preening sucker in and then shutting him down.

The reality of this charge, meanwhile, is gradually laid out in flashbacks several decades earlier, showing how Joan and Joe met, the latter her literature instructor at a college. The movie might have command of the long-suffering wife cliché but has no such self-awareness when characters broach literary criticisms like heavy-handedness, as demonstrated by these flashbacks. They evoke a TV serial, not so much exposition dumps as thematically correlating so neatly to whatever present moment precipitates their recounting that they fail to work on their own dramatic level, just cookie crumbs on our way to a predetermined destination, rendered with such little flair that the supposed love affair between Joan and Joe plays like artifice rather than amour.

Then again, as young Joan, Annie Starke, Close’s daughter, mirrors her mother’s emotional withholding. As labored as these past events are portrayed in answering the central mystery of Who Wrote It?, Why Did She Do It? never feels as cut and dried as you might assume. And Close takes that baton in the present to keep us at arm’s remove, teasing but never confessing, not even at the end, though I’d swear, in the wake of one last big fat deus ex machina, her smile seems to suggest she has been set free.

Shout-Out to the Extra: Ronin 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.

The third and final car chase featured in John Frankenheimer’s “Ronin” is a ferocious affair in which the pursued and the pursuant zoom through the streets of Paris before eventually speeding against traffic. Frankenheimer toggles between close-ups of the characters’ reactions, point-of-view shots looking through the car windows at incoming traffic, and exterior shots of the cars’ evasive tactics and deft maneuvers. But Frankenheimer does not strictly limit this scene to the two cars in question. No, after the pursed and the pursuant have moved on, Frankenheimer frequently lingers over the damage left in their wake, cars crashing into each other, fireballs kicking up, even a car-carrying trailer getting slammed into and having one of its automobile hauls fly off the truck’s headrack and crash to the ground. There is, in other words, a world outside of “Ronin”, one not really explored, because it shouldn’t be, but glimpsed, felt.

It is also glimpsed in the beginning when most of the movie’s band of professional mercenaries first meet up in a Parisian bistro. Larry is already there, drinking and smoking, and Dierdre, the ringleader, arrives and then masquerades as a bartender, pouring an adult beverage for Vincent, who arrives not long after her. Sam arrives last, evoking his m.o. And so they all stand there, acting like they aren’t who they are, refraining from getting right down to the gritty-gritty because Frankenheimer has purposely placed a few patrons in the bistro that the Ronin are waiting on to clear out. A patron like this one…

If I had hundred and twenty-five thousand preeminent takeaways from my first trip to Paris last year, perhaps the pre-preeminent takeaway, aside from cheese, was café culture. Reader, I cherished café culture. Sitting at a café, sipping at my libation of choice, watching the world go by, letting time, worthless time, slip away, made my heart full. Nowhere, not even the movie theater, have I ever found a place that so impeccably matches my everyday air as every Parisian café I visited. The first time I sat at one, even though I did not necessarily know exactly where I was within the city’s geography, I felt right at home. Then again, I was on vacation. It is easy to bask when you are on holiday. I assume if I lived in Paris that I would not always bask in a café; sometimes, no doubt, I would lament. And that is why I love this extra so much. She could have just sat there, doing nothing more than clocking the hourly rate for a French extra. But she didn’t. She acted. She made a conscious choice to play this nameless patron a certain way. She lamented.

What’s more, in this particular frame, both she and Jean Reno’s Vincent seem to be lamenting, each of their gazes fixed downward in that way you do when some sort of existential question has left you  searching your soul for a doubtlessly non-existent answer. If extras are so often meant merely as, shall we say, bodily filler, existing simply to occupy space, forgotten even as they stand (sit) in plain sight, in this shot, the extra and the character rest, for one beautiful instant, on the same plain. In “Ronin”, may the movie gods bless it, everyone, line of dialogue or not, has something to lament.

Pour one out for the extra.

Some Drivel On...Ronin

John Frankenheimer’s “Ronin” was released into theaters 20 years ago this week, an anniversary nobody but Cinema Romantico is likely to celebrate. But then, likely nobody but me has forced his Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife to take pictures of himself on the staircase of the Rue Drevet in Paris, trying (failing) to re-create a shot from the film’s opening scene (see below). “Ronin” holds a special place in my heart. At the dawn of my cinephilia I still considered cinema predominantly in terms of narrative. I enjoyed films beyond their story aspects, absolutely, but I did not have the toolbox, to borrow a term employed by “Ronin’s” main character, to contextualize such enjoyment. And even if “Ronin” contains a narrative, it is deliberately enigmatic, an excuse not just to string together exemplary exercises in action but to provide a canvas demonstrating control of mood and tone, an aesthetic celebration held by a grim party-planner, where omnipresent yellow Gitanes become emblems of ennui, the imperceptible but impeccable costume design are all earth tones, and even a trip to the South of France is recounted in muted color.

The story, in which a group of professional mercenaries attempt to acquire a mysterious case, is just as unembellished, underlined by the crew’s ringleader Dierdre (Natascha McElhone) explaining the mission upon convening her Ronin in a drab Parisian warehouse. “There are some people who have something we require,” McElhone says in the manner of someone telling you she’s about to turn in for the night, “and we want you to get it from them.” It’s the best line reading in show, and illustrative of the oft-dry dialogue, including myriad pithy wisecracks proffered by Robert DeNiro, whose performance alternates between scowl and smirk.

Sure, there are myriad double and triple crosses to keep the whole thing spinning, but these are more about putting pressure on the worldview of the movie’s main character Sam (DeNiro), no doubt short for samurai, which the opening titles refer to, explaining that Samurais whose masters were killed wandered the land as swords-for-hire – “Such men were called: Ronin.” He might well be a sword for hire, but he’s got principals, or, perhaps more accurately, a code. He’s got a code of preparedness, outlined in the film’s sterling opening sequence, breathlessly relying on mere camera movement, editing, music, and DeNiro’s under-acting to evince a man scoping out the place where he’s supposed to meet the rest of his crew, accounting for every possibility that might go wrong before he enters.

Ah, but enter he does and all throughout there is a push and pull between his covering all the angles and a dash for cash. Consider the tunnel weapons-buying sequence where Sam refuses to go in the foreboding passage. What movie hero wouldn’t run in guns blazing? “I’m getting paid to go,” Vincent (Jean Reno). “It’s that simple.” Not to Sam, however, who hangs back, defying, in a sense, his contract. A later scene finds Jean-Pierre (Michael Lonsdale), a friend of Vincent’s called upon at a dire moment, telling the old story of the 47 Ronin as a (perhaps too blatant) means to try and put Sam’s motivation under the microscope. “There is something outside yourself that has to be served,” explains Jean-Pierre. “And when that need is gone, when belief has died, what are you?” Throughout Sam suggests he might well be something more, though this idea is often limited to the smallest behavioral flourishes, and when he finally gives words to his motivation, the line remains coy, and is recited off camera, maintaining the movie’s understated ethos.

In re-considering “Ronin” for its 20th, I kept thinking about its parallels to Melville’s “Le Samourai.” And in thinking about those parallels, I read as much about “Le Samourai” as I did about “Ronin.” And in reading about “Le Samourai”, I found myself pouring over Senses of Cinema’s citation heavy piece on Melville’s film. And one of the citations was taken from Simon Field’s book about Japanese filmmaker Suzuki Seijun and his influential Yakuza films. “The traditional yakuza hero,” went the citation, “was a critic of a kind, a critic of modern society, a rebel who preferred the ancient warrior code as adopted by gangsters to the cynicism of modern Progress. But he had to pay for his rebellion by dying.” That Sam does not die correlates less to him being the main character than ultimately being a character apart from the traditional yakuza hero, re-wiring his code not as rebellion but as serving something outside himself. If this idea failed to register with me in 1998, it resonates whole-heartedly in 2018. That might be a nod to topicality, but it also evokes how while film itself is finite, films remain alive through our eyes. For 20 years I have been inspired by the glorious cinephilic (sic) kick “Ronin” provides; watching it anew, I just found “Ronin” inspiring.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Harder They Fall (1956)

In the world of boxing, the word “bum” has long had an unfortunate connotation, usually employed to deride a pugilist’s in-ring skill or commitment to the fight game, much like Mickey Goldmill deemed Rocky Balboa a bum. In “The Harder They Fall”, however, the term “bum” acquires even more sinister meaning. Indeed, in the case of Argentine boxer Toro Moreno (Mike Lane) the term bum is more evocative of the boxer’s role less as any kind of actual boxer than a performer, one whose entire career is a fabrication invented by fight promoter Nick Benko (Rod Steiger) and sportswriter Eddie Willis (Humphrey Bogart), taking the desultory job merely because his newspaper has gone under and he needs money. They deem Moreno The Wild Man of the Andes, invent victories he never attained that no eyewitnesses can vouch for, and schedule him fights that are all fixed, determined to keep the ruse going until Toro is fighting for the heavyweight championship, making them all rich along the way. The slugger’s professional helplessness is best evinced in a shot where Toro is seated, just his head visible in the bottom corner of the left hand side of the frame, as Eddie and Nick and their various hangers-on argue and discuss Toro's future, what they want him to do and how they will go about having him do it. Toro has nothing to say; he is at their mercy; he is a bum.

The finer points of boxing are never discussed, and the violence in the ring is presented as being completely phony, totally real, and all part of the show. Huge and lumbering, Toro’s fights are laughable affairs where he doesn’t do much more than bop opponents on top of the head. Yet when a man who has already been knocked senseless by the heavyweight champ meets Toro in the ring, a few meaningless taps to the head trigger the man’s skull inadvertently trigger his ultimate demise. Still, Toro is given “credit” for the death in the press, which upsets the heavyweight champ, who seeks Eddie out to explain that he, not Toro, should be called the killer. It is evocative of Ron Howard’s “Cinderella Man” using the death Max Baer caused in the ring in real life, and in real life felt guilty about, simply as a means to paint the pugilist as some sort of man-killing monster. But if Howard used it un-ironically, in “Cinderella Man” director Mark Robson was cosmically calling Howard on the carpet 49 years in advance.

Lane’s performance as Toro is serviceable in just the right ways, out of his element and in over his head without ever realizing it, as if he’s a professional wrestler who even in the ring fails to grasp that the whole thing is fake. That’s why when Toro realizes everything is rigged and enters the ring in the climactic bout against the heavyweight champ, the moment is absent any kind of heroism because you know he’s getting his clock cleaned. It’s not Ali leaning on the ropes against Foreman; it’s Ali taking a battering against Holmes for no other reason than misplaced pride. It hurts. It hurts Eddie too, who only takes this desultory job because his newspaper has gone under and he needs a little financial security.

That fatalistic air was nothing new to Bogey and he gives that unrivaled weary cynicism another exemplary workout here. In his introductory scene, where the plan is pitched to his character, Bogey does that thing he often did, that sort of faux-pacing, a couple steps this way, a couple steps that way, all while rubbing his ear and getting the look of a man who has encountered a flooded road and is deciding whether or not to try and drive through it even though he already knows he will. And sure enough, when the car winds up stuck in the water, he doesn’t panic nor bemoan his misfortune but examine his options for cutting his losses. As such, even when Eddie knows Toro is doomed, he cannot help but council the boxer to get in there anyway, as if getting paid will remedy everything. Yet when he learns Toro is not getting paid, at least not as much as he should, Eddie boils over in an exquisitely framed scene where Nick and his yes-men wine and dine, indifferent to the raging humanity of Eddie behind them.

In his own way, the character becomes a kind of pugilist, forced into the corner, fighting for his life. Even as he is, however, one punch remains. He might be a writer, but all throughout “The Harder They Fall” we never see him write, not until the end. Forced into the corner, he rears back and with a typewriter and a front page, evoking his “Deadline — USA” (1952), pulls himself off the metaphorical ropes and throws one last knockout.

First Man: Flag Quotient

You might recall that a few weeks back, after its premiere at the Venice Film Festival, the forthcoming Damien Chazelle film “First Man”, chronicling the fairly familiar tale of Neil Armstrong becoming, ahem, the first man to walk on the moon, The Saturday Evening Post’s chief film critic Marco Rubio took said film to task, sight unseen, mind you, for its refusal to show the moment in which Mr. Armstrong planted an American flag on the lunar surface. Rubio tweeted the following: “This is total lunacy.” (Pun?!) “And a disservice at a time when our people need reminders of what we can achieve when we work together. The American people paid for that mission,on rockets built by Americans, with American technology & carrying American astronauts. It wasn’t a UN mission.”

And yet, this past weekend I happened to catch the new TV spot for “First Man”, which conspicuously hit airwaves not long after the aforementioned brou-ha-ha, and proceeded to count not one-

-not two-

-but three American flags.

Three American flags in a 30 second spot! That is one American flag every 10 seconds! That is an American flag ratio one normally associates with Michael Bay, the salt of the earth’s own! And while I would like nothing more than to imply these three American flags rebut Mr. Rubio’s argument, well, it is merely a TV spot, and I have yet to see the movie, meaning I cannot place any of these flags, accounted for or not, in proper context. I would like to think someone holding as prestigious a postion as The Saturday Evening Post’s chief film critic might agree, but apparently not. And if upon seeing the movie, he chooses to reverse course, well, this wouldn’t be the first time Mr. Rubio made a proclamation only to actually discover the evidence ruled his original proclamation out of order.

Parsing Miami Vice: Screen Shots on the Figurative Wall, Part 3

Parsing Miami Vice: Screen Shots on the Figurative Wall is Cinema Romantico’s sporadic pseudo art exhibition in which we peruse frames from Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (2006) like the paintings they pretty much are.

Back in July, My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I attended the Chicago Art Institute’s John Singer Sargent exhibition, appropriately titled John Singer Sargent and Chicago’s Gilded Age. Sargent was a painter known predominantly for his portraits, though this exhibition encompassed other aspects of his work, and he was often hired by those for whom the Gilded Age was particularly beneficial As such, many of the portraits, I learned, emphasized clothing and accoutrement as much as the sitting person’s expression or visage.

Michael Mann got his start writing the pilot episode for Aaron Spelling’s “Vega$”, a city Mann praised in Lynn Hirschberg’s excellent New York Times 2004 profile of the director, offering it the sort of compliments one might have bestwoed upon Gilded Age Chicago. And the Reagan Years were nothing if not their own sort of Gilded Age, and Mann’s small screen version of “Miami Vice” took flight in the 80s, a show where Mann, as Hirschberg noted, banned earth tones. “He can spot the wrong tie in a sea of extras,” Hirschberg wrote, “and will park a boring white car next to a snazzier baby blue model to enhance the mood. ‘Adding white always makes color burn a little,’ (Mann) has said. '’I got that idea from a 20th-century British painter.’”

Mann’s movie version of “Miami Vice”, shot in high def, was grainier and moodier than the TV show, though Mann still lingered over the benefits, if accompanying dangers, of a different kind of privilege. When the movie’s detectives working deep undercover find themselves face to face with Arcangel de Jesus Montoya (Luis Tosar), kingpin of a vertically integrated multinational drug cartel, and his accountant Isabella (Gong Li), in the back of an SUV, Mann briefly lingers over shots of each character’s wristwatch, a timekeeping emblem of power and wealth. Later, in a sequence at his compound near Iguazu Falls, we glimpse Montoya in his master suite, relaxed in bed, wearing just a pajama top and boxer shorts, smoking a cigar, supremely looking the part of a big shot, which Mann shows in long and medium shots to ensure we get the full picture. Eventually, however, in conversation with Isabella, Mann cuts to a close-up.

My favorite Sargent portrait in the exhibition was that of ‘Miss Priestley’ (c. 1889). The placard indicated that Sargent was as taken with Miss Flora Priestley’s dress, as well as the flowers she was holding, as he was her actual visage. And yet the visage is what struck me. The arched eyebrows, the superciliousness with which she is looking away, the slightly opened lips, as if she is about to say something snide; it’s as if the face is telling you that she could not care less what she is wearing or holding in her hand. As I looked at ‘Miss Priestley’, I kept thinking that if I was in the editing room, I would have been imploring for a cut to a close-up. 

As I looked at ‘Miss Priestley’, I kept thinking of this close-up in “Miami Vice”, and how Montoya is looking away, a la Miss Priestley, though in this case you can feel the fire of his eyes, as if the red-hued backdrop is smoldering coal feeding into his optic furnace, directed at someone rather than dismissing everyone. Tosar was a Spanish actor with whom I was unfamiliar going in, but casting your gaze over this close-up for a good long awhile, it’s not hard not to think he must have been handpicked by Mann simply because of his formidable eyebrows and coronal mass ejection eyes, readymade for a cinematic portrait remodeling gilded as ravenous sin.

Preparing for the Possibility of a Lady Gaga Oscar Nomination

Hi, friends. It is merely mid-September and so most of you, if not all of you, have no interest in a State of the Oscar Race missive. The Academy Awards, after all, are but a faraway Alpha Centauri-ish glimmer in the sky, and so there are still hundreds, if not thousands, of films striving for critical and peer praise that have yet to be released. But there have been significant developments in the last couple weeks. “A Star Is Born”, Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut and remake, of sorts, of the 1978 movie which was a remake, of sorts, of the 1954 movie which was a remake, of sorts, of the 1937 movie which was a remake, of sorts, of 1932’s “What Price Hollywood?” screened at the Venice Film Festival and then at the Toronto International Film Festival and was met with critical rapture, believe the hype tweets, and standing ovations. “A Star Is Born Looks Like An Oscar Contender”, brayed The Atlantic. “Oscar Voters Are Sure to Go Gaga for Bradley Cooper’s ‘A Star Is Born,’”, declared Variety in what sounds like a headline straight outta Tronc-approved journalism school. The latter is what interests us. Is it true? Might one Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta earn an Oscar nomination?

We are not here to say yay or nay. And we are definitely not here to say whether or not she will win if she is nominated. No, Cinema Romantico is merely here to prepare you for the possibility that Lady Gaga will be nominated for an Oscar. What, you might be wondering, will the pop culture landscape look like in the wake of such an event? Awards Backlashologists are already predicting the adverse response might be beyond the the damage assessment measuring capabilities of The Hathaway Scale. However, this blog is in a unique position to answer the most pertinent questions in the face of this suddenly very real possibility – that position being a person with a picture of Lady Gaga and Bruce Springsteen stuck to his refrigerator (which his Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife lovingly tolerates). We feel like any worries you might have should the name Lady Gaga be called the morning of January 22, 2019 are worries we can talk you through.

You Are Worried That….. Lady Gaga Will Wear A Meat Dress To The Oscars. Hey, you’ve lived through Barbra’s mauve cape, and Bjork’s swan, and Juliette Binoche draping herself in velvet, okay, so you’ll be fine wehther Gaga quotes Mitzi Del Bra, or shows up in a Gaultier sack-back gown, or, evoking her 60 Minutes interview, shows up sans makeup and drinking whiskey.

You Are Worried That..... Lady Gaga Will Make Some Sort Of Overdramatic Entrance. This is a problem? Give me a choice of Jimmy Kimmel dropping candy from the sky for the third straight Oscars or Gaga channeling her Venice entrance where she perched on the edge of a taxi boat wearing black stilettos and blowing kisses, her hair up in victory rolls like she was Betty Grable on her way to the premiere of “Song of the Islands”, and I’m taking the latter in a heartbeat. I hope she shows up to the Oscars riding a giant mechanical dragon puppet breathing foam fire. Try and ask the dragon a question before it eats you, Seacrest.

You Are Worried That….. Lady Gaga’s Acceptance Speech Would Be Over-Earnest, Cringe-Worthy Dreck. I was at Lollapalooza 2010 when Ms. Gaga had but one and a half albums at her disposal was forced to significantly banter between songs to fill time, though her banter was less Neko Case-y comical than counting her blessings, over and over, which struggled to blend with declarations of taking a ride on other people’s disco sticks, and such. It didn’t really work, even for me, person with Lady Gaga on his refrigerator, and I can only assume if she did somehow win the Oscar that her speech would last way too long and get way too emotional. She already went Sally Field at TIFF. But Sally Field went Sally Field at the Oscars and the world’s still turning.

You Are Worried That..... Lady Gaga’s Oscar Nomination Will Complete Her Mainstream Ascension. Ah, I see you original Gaga fan! You, Little Monster, before Little Monsters became as trendy as Hufflepuffs. And you should know better than anyone that Gaga is neither Mainstream nor Punk Rock; she is Artpop. An Oscar nomination will merely make her more powerful.

You Are Worried That..... Lady Gaga’s Oscar Nomination Would Inevitably Lead To A Lady Gaga Jukebox Musical. Too late! I am already shopping my “Highway Unicorn” script around Hollywood!

You Are Worried That….. Lady Gaga Will Get An Oscar Nominaton Before Kirsten Dunst. This is a very real fear, and it is a very real fear that I understand. I am, after all, a Dunst Completist, a Kiki Enthusiast. That she has not received an Oscar nomination is a literal crime in the kangaroo court of Hollywood. And yet, if in the wake of a Gaga Oscar nod I was called to testify on behalf of Ms. Dunst, given my long-standing love of her acting and steadfast belief she gave the best performance of 1998, I would raise my right hand, swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and then tell everyone clamoring for Stefani’s head, in my official capacity as a Dunst Devotee, to just, like, chill out, okay?

You Are Worried That...... Lady Gaga Can’t Act. That’s probably only because you think Lady Gaga can’t sing.

You Are Worried That….. Lady Gaga’s Nomination Will Push Out A More Deserving Performance. For the love of god, this happens every year. Remember when Cinema Romantico was convinced two years ago that it was Annette Bening’s “time”?

You Are Worried That….. It’s Supposed To Be Glenn Close’s “Time”. If it’s her “time”, it will be. A Gaga nod will not impede Close.  It’s not Gaga’s “time”; it’s Gaga Time. It’s always Gaga Time, at least in Little Monster Land, perched beneath the big rainbow between Mountain and Pacific. And if she gets that Oscar nod, whether you like it or not, all time in the United States, from coast to coast, will be governed according to Gaga too.

Crazy Rich Asians

Though Jon M. Chu’s “Crazy Rich Asians”, based on Kevin Kwan’s 2013 book of the same name, is decidedly a rom-com, heavy on the com, a little too ineffectual in the rom, it often feels just as much like some old-fashioned Hollywood melodrama in its exploration of class and identity. The latter is what makes it so profound, then, that “Crazy Rich Asians” is the first Hollywood production since “The Joy Luck Club” 25 long years ago to feature an entirely Asian cast. Inserting this cast into a movie that easily could existed in the Golden Age, when an all-white cast would have been a foregone conclusion, merely illuminates the ease of representation. And in a way, the film’s resolute predictability is enhanced by that representation, a demonstration of anything you can do we can do just as well. And if “Crazy Rich Asians” leaves you wanting more as much as feeling satisfied, well, hey now, doesn’t every rom com?

As “Crazy Rich Asians” opens, Nick Young (Henry Golding) asks his girlfriend Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) if she will come home with him to Singapore, not just to attend his best friend’s wedding but to meet his parents. If this sounds straightforward, it grows complicated as the aristocratic realities of Nick’s family gradually make themselves apparent to an increasingly overwhelmed Rachel. Those realities are intensified by Nick’s mother Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh), yearning not simply for her son to move home and assume control of the family business but to marry right, which means not marrying Rachel.

If this generates tension, it is rarely felt between Rachel and Nick, not least because Golding’s overly polite performance fails to evince any internal anguish this position as unwilling heir would seem to suggest. Of course, ten million movie rom coms have left the female character out in the cold, and so perhaps this is poetic justice, since the real tension is within Rachel, and between Rachel and Eleanor. The latter is glimpsed straight away in mom and significant other meeting in the kitchen at a lavish family party where Eleanor continually interrupts their getting-to-know-you chit-chat, tending to a plate of food or consulting with a cook without so much as an “excuse me”, signaling her role as party host comes first, before labeling Rachel’s pursuing of her passion as “American.” It’s a wicked line reading by Yeoh, one verbally putting an icepick in the age-old notion of having it all, and it lays bare the dividing line between Asian and Asian-American values.

That dividing line was apparently examined in greater detail in Kwan’s book, and you wish the movie delved it into more deeply. A comical moment in which a character scolds a child for not finishing his meal by saying “There are starving children in America” seems ripe for all sorts of societal unpacking but is merely left as a punchline. Indeed, there is so much opulence left unscrutinized that the film might have just floated away into excess, like Baz Luhrmann’s version of “The Great Gatsby”, if not for Yeoh, who evokes less cutout villainy than resiliency in a cultural belief that familial obligations supersede independence. You see this, too, in Astrid (Gemma Chan), the Youngs’ oldest daughter, who is introduced hiding purchases from her husband for fear of financially emasculating him, setting the tone for a subplot in which she suffers through him projecting all his insecurities onto her. Maybe I was just yearning for her to wield a nine iron, Elin Nordegren style, but the sadness of her subplot seemed for more than a Prince Charming-ish wrap-up.

If Astrid is evocative of what comes with old money, Rachel’s best friend Peik Lin Goh is evocative of the insecurities of the new. She is played by the Asian-American Awkwafina, who only fails to steal the movie outright because of Yeoh. Compared to the asinine narrative constrictions of the misguided “Ocean’s 8”, here Awkwafina is unleashed, giving the interloping nature of the nouveau riche a wry self-effacement but also a distance from the real thing affording acerbic observation of how the system works; she is the living embodiment of the old Chris Rock bit about the difference between rich and wealthy. She is not just comic relief, however, but the conscious, pushing Rachel toward a better self, particularly in prompting her friend to get done up for Nick’s best friend’s wedding which doesn’t play like Pygmalion but Rachel reveling in her own power. The film’s climactic moment, in fact, is not the airplane proposal torn from a thousand rom coms but Rachel pinning Eleanor to a spot between a rock and a hard place over a game of Mahjong. You almost wish the movie could have ended there.

Then again, in the wake of the airplane proposal torn from a thousand rom coms, Yeoh gets one more moment, seen from a distance, a respectful look in Rachel’s direction, that is not unlike the one the athlete gives the other athlete in a sports movie upon being competitively vanquished though Yeoh, brilliantly, withholds in such a way that she isn’t tipping the cap so much as waving a variation of a white flag. She’s been bested. The game’s changed. Watching that, I wondered if maybe one day the same expression would apply to Hollywood’s white-centric casting agents.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Saturday's Hero (1951)

“Saturday’s Hero” was released in 1951 and into the midst of the Army Football academic scandal, a fact which makes one wish for a present-day film to really challenge college football rather than re-issue standard sentimental underdog claptrap. Because even if the term “student-athlete”, one born less of noble deeds than clever, if dastardly, means to prevent college football players from getting theirs, was 13 years away when “Saturday’s Hero” was being screened in theaters, David Miller’s film, based on Millard Lampell’s 1949 novel, already knew that term was bunk. And the eponymous hero of autumn Saturdays, Steve Novak (John Derek), finds that academics and athletics do not mix, not when his Coach and his benefactor don’t want them to, that is, and rest assured it is to them that Steve belongs. And though Steve eventually finds the means to live his life his way, this is where the film’s parable falls apart, at least on an aesthetic level.

We are introduced to Steve through his dexterity on the gridiron, which is celebrated by the Polish-American immigrant inhabitants of his New Jersey hometown, one where every male’s fate seems to be working in the local mill. Not Steve, however, and as he, his brother, and father (Sandro Giglio) stroll past the mill in an early scene, Poppa Novak wags his finger at the grimy place of industry, taunting it, saying it won’t get Steve. If a certain pride is typically attached to the notion of working towns and the entities sustaining them, this moment exposes that inherent lie. And after Steve leaves, occasional cuts back to his hometown show the residents discussing Steve like a savior, portraying football as deliverance for them as much as him.

If the college football stars of so many honest cinematic evaluations of the sport were portrayed as clueless yokels or smugly superior, Steve is deliberately written as an All-American, or yearning to be. He spurns tried and true football schools for Jackson, a southern university touting its credo of a Jackson Man, a well-rounded sort of lad who excels equally in the classroom and on the football field. Living up to that lofty ideal, Steve surprises his English teacher, Professor Megroth (Alexander Knox), in wanting to learn, though there becomes something brutally ironic about Megroth, sensing a soul under Steve’s football jersey, giving his young charge Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to read. Steve contains multitudes, which, while theoretically defining a Jackson Man, reveals itself as less an attribute than an issue.

This comes through in Steve’s benefactor, T.C. McCabe (Sydney Blackmer), required to pay Saturday’s Hero’s way since Jackson offers no athletic scholarships. Introduced in basically every other scene by pouring brown liquor from a decanter, the universal symbol of fat cat, McCabe is an evocative illustration of the modern day booster, defined, per NCAA.com, as “representatives of the institution’s athletic interests.” Indeed, in financially sponsoring the young, ahem, student-athlete, he more or less takes, ahem, ownership of Steve, just as he demonstrates ownership of his daughter, Melissa (Donna Reed), telling her in no uncertain terms to keep away from the athlete under his quote-unquote care. And rather than act as a check against the oft-overwhelming demands imparted by the game, McCabe eagerly consorts with the hard-driving coach, Preacher Tennant (Otto Hulett).

The football scenes were shot on location in both The Rose Bowl and the Los Angeles Coliseum, and while there is some solid ground-level in-game camera work that is much more than the from on-high newsreel sort of footage you often find in these movies, the gridiron action is most effective in a twilight sequence when the stadium is empty and Tennant forces the team to practice the same play, over and over, deep into the night. It is, essentially, the scene from “Miracle” where Herb Brooks drove the US hockey team to skate from one end of the rink to the other again and again, endlessly, even after the stadium lights were turned off. But if that was presented as necessary back-breaking work to construct a Team, the scene in “Saturday’s Hero” demonstrates how a similar cinematic scenario can be twisted into something else, less necessary than hotheaded irresponsibility. Besides, the football squad of Jackson is not representing America; it is representing its employers.

As the film goes on, Steve finds himself torn between honoring his employers’ orders and living up to the faux ideal of being a Jackson Man, the latter eventually tied up in his courtship of Melissa, much to his benefactor’s chagrin. She is played by Reed less as Alma Burke and more as Lorene, for all you fellow “From Here to Eternity” acolytes, which is to say a little more like a rebel. Both characters are under the thumb of institutional control – a football factory and the patriarchy. Together they find the wherewithal to bust loose and take charge of their own lives, which sounds inspiring but is mostly limp. That is because while Derek’s dim star power is credible in sequences where he is essentially a rag doll between politics, it is much less successful in the already under-developed scenes between he and Melissa. The romantic tension is minimal; his going against the grain barely registers. It is a disappointing denouement, one draining a fairly damning movie of a good chunk of its righteous fury, going to a show that a message is only as effective as the movie peddling it.

Picturing Actors Doing Things

“Step Brothers” (2008) did not overwhelm nor underwhelm me; I was just kind of whelmed. Even so, a lot of people seem to love it, as evinced by The Ringer’s recent Oral History of it, gathering most everyone to discuss its making, from leads Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly to the Queen Steen herself. And even if I was not particularly passionate about the movie itself, I still found this inside look enjoyable, particularly director Adam McKay more or less boiling the movie’s conception down to this astonishing remembrance: “I do remember saying to Will and John, ‘I just picture you guys in bunk beds.’ And I was like, ‘Is there a way to have that?’” STOP THE TAPE!

Is there any way to have that? Movies, I dare say, have been made for far less than “Is there a way to have that?” If anything, movies should be based less on formulating accurate cinematic alignments through core competencies and functionalities and more through people on filmmakers on barstools wondering aloud if there is any way to have some such thing. In that spirit...

Is there any way to have...Jeff Bridges with a hot dog gun?

Is there any way to have...Sam Elliott at a Putt-Putt?

Is there any way to have...Christine Baranski doing yoga in a neck brace?

Is there any way to have...Kevin Corrigan explaining the Townshend Acts?

Is there any way to have...Peter Stormare giving air traffic instructions?

Is there any way to have...Matt Malloy as a soda jerk?

Is there any way to have...Michael Shannon in an IKEA?

Is there any way to have...Parker Posey drinking a hipster cocktail out of a vintage Edison Light Bulb?

Is there any way to have...Tiffany Haddish just, like, hanging out in the middle of a renaissance fair?

Is there any way to have...Keira Knightley reading a book in the fire escape of the Libreria Alta Acqua?

Is there any way to have...George Clooney pacing in front of the Jet d’Eau and arguing on a cellphone?

Is there any way to have...Angelina Jolie breaking into a submarine while it’s submerged?

Is there any way to have...Nicole Kidman as a mermaid? (And I’m not talking about “Splash”, man, I’m talking about some real arty song of the siren stuff here.)

Is there any way to have...Colin Firth & Jesse Eisenberg in a city where they’ve never been trying to decide where to go for dinner?

Is there any way to have...Ashley Judd & Mira Sorvino on a movie poster in patterned jumpsuits standing back-to-back with their arms crossed?

Is there any way to have...Penelope Cruz & Javier Bardem wearing designer sunglasses and jaunty hats drinking red wine & lemon Fanta in an outdoor plaza since every fifth movie each of them make should feature them together wearing designer sunglasses and jaunty hats drinking red wine & lemon Fanta in an outdoor plaza.

Imagining More Film Director/Pop Star Friendships

This past weekend my friend Jaime directed me to the Alex Pappademas (friend of the blog who doesn’t know he’s a friend of the blog) piece in The New York Times on former Journey frontman Steve Perry winding his way back to the spotlight. The piece was excellent, but the most righteous takeaway, as Jaime noted, was the revelation that Perry was good pals with Patty Jenkins, director of “Wonder Woman.” “He’d become acquainted with Patty Jenkins,” Pappademas wrote, “who’d befriended Mr. Perry after contacting him for permission to use ‘Don’t Stop Believin’ in her 2003 film ‘Monster.’ (When he literally showed up on the mixing stage the next day and pulled up a chair next to me, saying, ‘Hey I really love your movie. How can I help you?’ it was the beginning of one of the greatest friendships of my life, Ms. Jenkins wrote in an email.)” Immediately Jaime, along with My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, begin lobbying for the sort of blogging hypothetical in which Cinema Romantico specializes, speculating about what other film directors and pop stars might have become fast friends.

When I read the article, it was the revelation that Jenkins and Perry became friends after she asked him for permission to use “Don’t Stop Believin’” that led my mind to the only place it could possibly go – that is, what other directors might have contacted pop stars about using their songs leading to eternal friendships. A few ideas:

Kathryn Bigelow + Tracii Guns. L.A. Guns is not the band even the most generous critic would credit for anything approaching introspection, but I imagine Kathryn Bigelow telephoning Tracii Guns sometime in 1991 anyway and explaining that his band’s “Over the Edge” was the only song that would do in metaphorically connecting her “Point Break” protagonist’s transition from agnostic detective to spiritual surfer. And perhaps, impressed, Guns might have struck up a friendship with Bigelow, one that blossomed in all manner of underground L.A. rock clubs, all of which went unseen in those halcyon pre-social media days. So unseen, in fact, that years later, during a Q&A, jaws drop when Bigelow cites “Hollywood Vampires” as her prime inspiration for “Strange Days.”

Nancy Meyers + Brandon Flowers. Flowers doesn’t strike me as the sort of chap who would give a director a hard time for wanting to use a piece of his music, and so I imagine that if Meyers had contacted him to use “Mr. Brightside” for “The Holiday” that he not only agreed but that he asked Meyers if they could become pen pals. And that awhile after becoming pen pals, Flowers invited Meyers to a Killers show at Madison Square Garden, and that at some point in the night Flowers pulled Meyers onstage to help sing a duet of “Mr. Brightside.” And that through their penning of letters Meyers was inspired to write a movie called “The Intern” which did not star Anne Hathaway as an E-commerce CEO and Robert DeNiro as her retired intern but Flowers as a successful pop star and Roland Gift (whom Meyers befriended upon calling to ask if she could use Fine Young Cannibals’ “Good Thing” for “It’s Complicated”) as his out of the limelight intern.

Amy Heckerling + Thom Yorke. One day a grainy smartphone photo begins making rounds that seems to show Heckerling and Yorke having coffee. Eventually, through their reps, Heckerling and Yorke issue separate statments confirming that, yes, they are friends, and that they have been friends for 23 years since Heckerling checked in with Yorke about using Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” for “Clueless.” “You know that story about me randomly putting lyrics together on ‘Kid A?’” Yorke rhetorically asks in his statement. “Amy actually wrote those lyrics.”

Rebecca Miller + Bruce Springsteen. I like to think that the current version of The Boss, the version of The Boss getting acquainted with philosophy, would not just reply “Yeah, sure” if Rebecca Miller dialed him up for permission to use “Dancing in the Dark” for “Maggie’s Plan.” No, I like to think The Boss would be interested in picking the brain of such a celebrated writer. And since Kathleen Hanna was actually employed to the sing a cover of Bruce’s song for “Maggie’s Plan” then perhaps Miller, Hanna, and Bruce formed a version of the Algonquin Round Table. Can there be any doubt of that being the brightest timeline?

Barbra Streisand + Richard Marx. THEY’RE ALREADY FRIENDS!!!!!

Summer of Dreams

Debbie Gibson is giving it her all in the Hallmark Channel’s “Summer of Dreams” (2016), that’s for sure, and in giving it her all she is, frankly, giving almost too much. This is maximum over-acting. And that is not an insult. For every Hallmark Channel movie featuring a present, considered Alicia Witt performance there are 22 more with fly-by-night-leading turns, so many unremembered acting cars whooshing past you on the interstate, never mind the feckless Ken Dolls from office furniture catalogues meant to approximate co-stars. But Gibson, bless her heart, is here for director Mike Rohl, punctuating every one-liner she is made to utter with an over-eager laugh and refusing to remain wooden by outfitting performance with all sorts of eager bits of physical business that might’ve made a Billy Wilder tsk-tsk but probably only brightened Rohl’s day. I once listened to Brian Koppelman interview Gibson and she kept peppering her sentences with high notes and breaking into bits of songs throughout, as if what she wanted to explain she could not do so by simply speaking. For the better, she brings that air to “Summer of Dreams.”

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A pop singer who struck it rich young in the 80s has failed to musically progress with the times and is ditched by her record label. That is how “Summer of Dreams” starts, though in this case it is not Debbie Gibson who is ditched but Debbie, ahem, Taylor (Gibson) in a scene where the record label exec telling her to hit the road looks like he’s about nineteen years old which is one of the movie’s most wonderful bits, evincing an industry where the (really) young is ousting the old. In no time, Debbie’s romantic relationship with some dull so & so has gone under and she is forced to move out of her apartment and flee the city, leaving her with nowhere to turn but her hometown of Youngstown, Ohio.

That’s where Debbie’s sister Denise (Pascale Hutton) still resides, with her husband and young daughter, and some of the best stuff, in a manner of speaking, in “Summer of Dreams” is the standoffish way that Denise greets her sister upon coming home, seeming to try to usher her out the door before she’s even walked through it. This behavior stems, we learn, from Debbie’s self-absorption, one that no doubt led to and was furthered by pop stardom, and which Gibson’s actorly over-eagerness plays straight into, talking and moving so fast when she first arrives that it evinces an obliviousness to the lack of welcoming warmth. This character defect will have to be corrected, of course, and the device through which it is (or, is intended to be) is Denise, a teacher at the local high school, getting her sister the job as choir teacher. It is contrivance, to which the critic can only say, yeah, so?

This means Debbie plays the role of Dewey Finn (Jack Black) in “School of Rock”, faltering and then picking herself back up again as she molds this gang of singing youths, though she also falls in love with the guidance counselor (Robert Gant). The latter actually puts into context how nice it was that “School of Rock” did not force a love interest onto Dewey; his love was only for the kids. And there emerges the preeminent paradox of “Summer of Dreams” — that is, even as Debbie is supposed to realize that everything is not about her, it sort of still is all about her. “Lose the hand gestures, Mariah,” she instructs one young burgeoning diva, which is far and away the best line in show, and the ultimate Maybe You Should Look In The Mirror moment.

Rather than standing back and letting the kids take center stage, the kids, upon discovering who their teacher is, push Debbie to the center and let her take over as a means to re-ignite her career, a mixed message that the movie either does not realize or does not care is happening. Not that you care either. Why would you? You come to “Summer of Dreams” for Debbie Gibson, and for a cover of “Only in my Dreams.” All kids are special, yes, but Gibson remains the youngest female artist to write, produce and perform a Hot 100 chart-topper. Can any of the kids in the choir say the same? Didn’t think so.

BlacKkKlansman

Is it any wonder that Spike Lee would be drawn to the true-life tale of “BlacKkKlansman”, in which Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) became, in 1972, the first black Colorado Springs police officer? Stallworth sought to elicit change from within an institution that Black America has long viewed with suspicion; Lee has never shied away from laying the oft un-inclusive Hollywood industry bare. The first image of “BlacKkKlansman”, in fact, is not an image from “BlacKkKlansman” at all but one from Hollywood’s famous ode to the Old South, “Gone with the Wind”, followed directly by clips from “Birth of a Nation” (original title: The Clansman). Lee deliberately connects, as Ava DuVernay did in her documentary “13th”, the institutional rot of Hollywood with America, which denotes Lee’s intentions as larger than simply re-telling Stallworth’s admittedly scintillating story of infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan. And that is why Lee mostly employs Stallworth’s memoir as an outline, eschewing narrative cinema for a movie of ideas and images, and employing the movie’s oft-exaggerated tone to intensify its reality.

Precisely what drives Ron to be a cop is something of an oversight, his backstory a big fat blank, just showing up at the CSPD to apply, a scene where those interviewing him are seen first, underscoring the inevitable forthcoming scrutiny. In that way, Ron is not unlike James Meredith enrolling at Ole Miss, who saw himself less an individual seeking an education than a symbol making a point. Granted, this lack of dimension somewhat counteracts the philosophical quandary of Ron’s belief in the role of policing despite so many African-American attitudes to the contrary, but the follow through in which the bad apples theory of policing is first embraced and then rejected still rings true. Washington’s performance sells the character anyway, evincing affliction but also allowing a distinct joyfulness to filter through that anguish, a juxtaposition in tune with the movie’s alternating drama and comicality.

To that last point, his undercover scheme is both presented and played as something of a lark, with Ron flipping through a local newspaper and coming across a Klan recruiting ad. So, he dials them up, not even bothering to conceal his identity, a true fact forcing him to enlist fellow detective Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), white and Jewish, to assume the identity of Ron Stallworth to go undercover. If the obvious dramatic connotations this might elicit are occasionally present, Lee mostly dispenses with those to hone in on notions of identity and voice. Indeed, even as Flip plays the part of Ron, the real Ron keeps taking phone calls from the Klan, including Grand Wizard David Duke (Topher Grace), a sly flouting of the oft-touted, always unbelievable idea that people don’t see color.

“BlacKkKlansman” sees color. That’s why Ron’s superior, Chief Bridges, a deft turn by Robert John Burke of grudging empathy, assigns his young charge to covertly patrol a local Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins) rally where the film momentarily gives itself over to the pulpit. If Ture’s oration touches multiple bases, it is highlighted by him imploring the audience to chant “Black is beautiful”, which Lee accentuates with shots of black faces against a blacked-out backdrop staring directly into the camera, reveling in the beauty of their dark skin, cinematic evocations of a Charles White portrait. Later, after Ture and the Black Student Union activists who have helped put on the rally are pulled over and threatened, Lee allows the characters a brief reprieve through a jubilant dance sequence. If his tableau of black faces pushes back against the notion of blackness being ugly, this semi-sing-along to the Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose pushes back against daft Angry Black Man stereotype to which Lee himself has so often been subjected.

At the rally is where Ron meets Patrice (Laura Harrier), an activist in the local chapter of the Black Student Union. Though she dismisses police as “pigs”, which unsettles him despite keeping his identity secret, their relationship never really crackles with tension, sexual or otherwise. It is more like a conduit for political thought, which makes them feel like a couple students working more on an intellectual level than an amorous one, like differing opinions about the worth of Blaxplotiation movies leading Patrice to cite DuBois’s theory of double consciousness, of African-Americans only seeing themselves through the lens of an oppressive society, both sides of which Ron deliberately inhabits.

That sort of dimension is conspicuously lacking in the film’s presentation of the Klan, not all of whom are caricatures necessarily but are fairly one-note in their hatred nonetheless, leaving a little too much space for cheap liberal laughs. Though these Klansman hatch a bomb plot, the capper is not the eventual explosion so much as a sequence cribbed from The Jerky Boys with a long shot punchline where the Grand Wizard of the KKK is made to look like Edward R. Rooney, Dean of Students, his cheese left out in the wind, signaling what Lee thinks of them. Then again, this Klan chapter is dismissed several times as a clownish fringe organization unable to manage the terror they seek to unleash even as they come close to pulling it off anyway. Ignore them, in other words, and they will not merely melt away but hang around, which is why the concluding clips of the tragic 2017 events in Charlottesville, Virginia are not auteurist indulgence but evidence.

“BlacKkKlansman’s” most powerful passage involves a KKK initiation where members munch on popcorn while screening “Birth of a Nation”, hooting and hollering, as Lee mimics Griffith’s famous cross-cutting technique by switching back and forth between this white supremacist spectacle and a Black Student Union event where an activist, Jerome Turner, speaks. If at first this seems like a counter-myth being raised to combat “Birth of a Nation’s”, it is notable that Turner is played by Harry Belafonte, a real-life black activist, and that the lynching he recounts is the one of Jesse Washington in 1916. This is not myth; this is real; this is Spike Lee ramming the two together until all that we can see, so long as we choose to look, is what’s right in front of us.

In Memoriam: Burt Reynolds

My favorite story about Burt Reynolds, who died yesterday at the age of 82 from cardiac arrest, was that in 1977, alongside late, legendary play-by-play man Pat Summerall, he called the Sun Bowl. That will never cease to amaze me. Yes, the actor had a gridiron pedigree, earning a football scholarship to Florida State in the mid-50s and having some success before knee injuries forced him to hang it up. But an actor announcing a college football bowl game the same year he has the #4 movie at the box office, “Smokey and the Bandit”, has to be unprecedented. That would have been like Gal Gadot calling the Camping World Bowl last year with Brad Nessler. We talk a lot about movie stars here at Cinema Romantico, and how much we love and often miss them, and how what makes a movie star is not about numbers but qualities more abstract. And I am not sure anything qualifies as ineffable movie star criteria more than Burt Reynolds providing college football color commentary for CBS.

Of course, I didn’t watch the 1977 Sun Bowl. I would have only been a few months old. And I confess, I did not see movies like “Deliverance” and “The Longest Yard” until much later on. When I got around to reading William Goldman’s “Adventures in the Screen Trade (which was published in 1983) I was sort of taken aback by all the references to Burt, having only vaguely remembered him from iffy cinematic propositions like “Cannonball Run II.” No, I arrived at the tail-end of the Burt Reynolds comet streaking over Hollywood’s skies, when he was appearing as himself in Robert Altman’s “The Player” and on TV in “Cybill”, as sure a sign as any that you have settled into the professional period where you can just sort of coast by on your self-made mien. That’s basically what he was doing when he announced the 1991 Orange Bowl parade along with then-wife Loni Anderson. And when I heard he was appearing in “Boogie Nights” in 1997 at the dawn of my quasi-cinephilia, I just unfairly assumed he was going to be a punchline for the sake of Paul Thomas Anderson.

“Boogie Nights” did not cause me to change my opinion of Reynolds, because my opinion was woefully uninformed, but it did cause me to really see Reynolds for the first time. That movie could have so easily stepped wrong and never did, just as Reynolds, playing adult film director Jack Horner, could have so easily stepped wrong and never did, forgoing a predictable unctuousness for an unexpected honesty that came across not just when the character was made to cite the honesty of his work but in the air he emitted in each and every scene. His character was a professional, not striving for recognition so much as demanding credibility, which is what made it so poetic that Reynolds, famously, hated “Boogie Nights” upon seeing it and fired his agent. Of course, he would go on to an Oscar nomination, losing out to Robin Williams, undeservedly per this blog, and that he did seemed poetic in the context too.

It never quite got that professionally good again for Reynolds. He pulled the trick of expanding his IMDb profile considerably in the new century even as he receded from view, his health declining along the way. But then, it wasn’t like he had anything left to prove. I think of him in “Boogie Nights” when that sprawling, astonishing party scene finally winds down and he takes a seat in his hot tub with Eddie (Mark Wahlberg) and Reed (John C. Reilly) and lights a cigar. He has the countenance of a man who has been to the mountaintop and peered down on the kingdom of which he is the ruler emeritus. He virtually shrinks Wahlberg and Reilly. That’s something only a movie star can do. That, and call the Sun Bowl.

10 Not-at-TIFF Movies to See

“The starting gun for awards season”, as the esteemed pages of Vanity Fair once called the Toronto International Film Festival, is being fired again today for the 43rd time. Any film yearning for an end-of-year prize will be screening, each one yielding a torrent of 140 280 character Twitter reviews, and those 140 280 character Twitter reviews yielding all manner of instant Oscar buzz, and that instant Oscar buzz yielding instant denouncements of the instant Oscar buzz as an unfortunate byproduct of our everything now culture, and so the circle will go, onto into forever, looping back around to meet at that point where I get a headache. And I can save everyone else headaches, frankly, by simply telling you what’s going to win Best Picture come next February — that is, Lady Gaga’s “A Star Is Born.” Duh. So put a sock in it, prognosticators. It’s all over but what kind of legendary ensemble from the Cleopatra VII Philopator Collection Her Gaganess is gonna sport to the Oscars. Deal with it, why don’t you.

And anyway, it’s not like I’ll be in Toronto, and so I won’t really have any frame of reference for any of this, and neither will most of you, faithful frustrated readers. And so what good are those 10 Movies to See at TIFF lists to us? That is why, once again, for the fourth year in a row, Cinema Romantico will curate our own film festival to run concurrently with TIFF.

10 Films Not at TIFF to See

1. Macbeth (1948). TIFF’s opening night film is the Chris Pine fronted “Outlaw King”, chronicling the rise, fall and re-rise of 14th century Scottish King Robert the Bruce. Fair enough. But this is 2018, son, where we are in the midst of a slow-burning apocalypse, or threabouts, savvy? These are the days for a different Scottish King, and I think you know which one I mean. So let’s dial up the Orson Welles version of my favorite Shakespeare play, a movie with which the prodigy was not satisfied, two layers of tragedy baked in which feels just right.

2. Dodge City. I was tempted to pick a different de Havilland/Flynn joint, “Adventures of Robin Hood”, since, hey, we are on the verge of yet another “Robin Hood” movie that will go undoubtedly go to show that absolutely no further Robin Hood movies were necessary after “Adventures of Robin Hood.” But this is 2018, people. And so I thought, no, “Dodge City” where, amongst other details, Olivia’s character is in a fight to defend the freedom of the press, was more appropriate.

3. Magic Mike XXL. Gees. We started off this theoretical fest dark, didn’t we? I apologize, kind of. After all, movies, I am sometimes told in the wake of penning a negative review, are just movies, man. People go to them to escape, man. Right you are. So let’s escape down south to to Rome’s place, where love trumps hate and dance-offs come true.

4. Christmas in Conway. With all due respect to all the excellent line readings in “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again”, the film’s most striking line reading, by far, is Andy Garcia’s gravelly warning that a storm is coming. Ask My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife who has suffered this summer through my myriad pitiful attempts to mimic this line reading whenever so much as a semi-threatening single cloud appears on the horizon. This has left me desperate for more Garcia verbal gravel. And because Cinema Romantico traditionally likes to include a Hallmark Channel offering in its Not-at-TIFF slate we will include “Christmas in Conway” where Garcia, as a “very cranky guy” (per IMDb), is miraculously allowed to issue all manner of gravelly instructions as he crankily goes about erecting a ferris wheel for his terminally ill wife (Mary-Louise Parker) in their backyard.

5. Malice. It is, of course, the 25th anniversary of this much beloved casually forgotten Nicole Kidman/Alec Baldwin thriller. In celebrating, I returned to the review of the late great Roger Ebert who, in commenting on the fact Baldwin’s hotshot surgeon would need to rent an upstairs room as opposed to just, like, buying his own home, wrote this: “Now hold on a moment. We already know that Jed is one of the best surgeons in the country, a medical school star with a sterling reputation. I don't care what plans Hillary Rodham Clinton has for the nation’s health care, the day will never come when ace surgeons live as boarders in rented rooms in other people’s houses.” Boy, little did ol’ Rog know that very fear would one day drive the entire GOP healthcare agenda.

6. The Pelican Brief. Let’s stay in 1993. After all, this blog spent August delving into 1990s thrillers and so what’s one more? Plus, it will give us a chance to reminisce about that one time Julia & Denzel, both of whom will earn rightful stars on the (never to be built) New Hollywood Walk of Fame, were actually in a movie together. Did you know that in all the years since they have not appeared together in a movie again? Hollywood is run by goddam imbeciles.

7. The Finest Hour. One of the perks of still subscribing to cable is having things like the MGM channel at your disposal so you can scroll their listings and stumble across cinematic entities such as “The Finest Hour” which stars a mustachioed Rob Lowe as someone called Lawrence Hammer in one of those 1991 attempts to cinematically capitalize on the Gulf War. I have no proof, but I bet this movie was not screened for critics.

8. Maddy/Archer Bar Scene in Blood Diamond. With every film festival you inevitably hit a wall when you just need to chill out and re-charge. This will even be the case with our faux-film festival, no doubt, and so let’s take the eighth day to just re-visit a movie scene that has grown larger in my mind even as the movie from which it is culled has only receded. It’s not that the issue of blood diamonds isn’t significant, of course, but that strictly cinematically speaking I would give anything for a “To Have and Have Not”-ish adventure film where Jennifer Connelly and Leonardo DiCaprio spend the whole time trading bon mots like they do in that Freetown bar.

9. Blue Streak. Let’s say Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” wins the Best Picture Oscar. Because if it did, the Best Picture winner would therefore contain brief footage of our current POTUS in all his ignorant non-glory. And that would in all likelihood lead to a Presidential tweet in response, something where the President would call Spike Lee totally overrated or third-rate. And if he did, and he absolutely would, then let’s imagine some reporter actually asking the President, who apparently would know enough about Lee’s oeuvre to make a judgment on it, to name one, just one, Spike Lee movie other than “BlacKkKlansman.” What do you think the President would give as an answer? My guess: the wacky Martin Lawrence comedy “Blue Streak.”

10. Sudden Death. Can you believe that in re-visiting the 1990s by way of thrillers I never saw I forgot to include the Jean-Claude Van Damme 1995 epic where he thwarts a terrorist plot at the Stanley Cup Finals? I can hardly live with myself. We’ll pencil it in for closing night.