Forgotten (not so) Great Moments in Movie History

Near the conclusion of the 1980 comic cultural touchstone “Airplane!”, as the eponymous aircraft attempts to make an emergency landing, the scene momentarily cuts to a cityscape highlighted by a broadcast tower with the illuminated red letters bearing the station’s call sign: WZAZ. “WZAZ!” an offscreen dee jay hiply hollers. “Where disco lives forever!” In the instantaneous aftermath of this declaration, however, the airplane clips the broadcasting tower, knocking out the signal. Disco, in other words, is dead. Indeed, in the most recent episode of his podcast Hit Parade, where he performs illuminating, entertaining deep dives into Billboard Chart history, and which got me thinking about everything that led to this post, Chris Molanphy cites this scene as a symbolic representation of when disco faded from the public’s consciousness.

Except, of course, as Molanphy noted later in the episode, eventually, because everything is cyclical, because everything comes back around, the 70s made something of a comeback in the 90s. Fashion trends of the 1970s were revived, just like fashion trends of the 1990s are being revived now, and inevitably “That 70s Show”, which debuted in 1998, epitomized this resurgence. Why my girlfriend my senior year of high school and I rented “Saturday Night Fever” to show the German foreign exchange student in our class because we thought it held the cultural key to America, or something. Quentin Tarantino, 90s auteur wonderboy, took many of his cues from the 70s, and so many other movies of the decade, even those long since forgotten, like “Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult”, got in on the revival too.

“Airplane!”, of course, was written and directed by the triumvirate known as Team ZAZ (David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker), hence, ahem, WZAZ. The trio would go on to also write 1989’s stone cold comedy classic “The Naked Gun”, with David Zucker directing alone, and the latter Zucker also wrote and directed the 1991 “Naked Gun” sequel, “The Smell of Fear”, which this blog holds in just as high a regard as the original. Zucker gave up the directorial reigns for 1994’s “The Final Insult”, but he did co-write it, signaling at least one Team ZAZ holdover. That is important. And that is important because a flashback in “Naked Gun 33⅓” meant to fill in the backstory of femme fatale Tanya Peters (Anna Nicole Smith) is set in the 70s, triggered by the immortal Lt. Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) referencing “The big disco shootout” which allows for both Nielsen and George Kennedy as Captain Ed Hocken to don era-appropriate costumes and the soundtrack to make space for The Bee Gees.

The scene itself is funnier in theory than in practice, sort of emblemizing the overall staleness of the proceedings, though it effectively brings home the inadvertent point anyway. Here was Zucker’s “The Naked Gun 33 1/3” referencing disco’s kitschy resurgence fourteen years after Zucker’s “Airplane!” put WZAZ out of business, suggesting their disco is dead punchline was premature.

Summer of 84

“Summer of 84” is nothing if not an expository title. You know exactly where you are as the movie begins. And yet, you also don’t, and you never quite come to know either. The movie, as the opening voiceover spoken by fifteen year old Davey Armstrong (Graham Verchere) suggests, might well yearn to show us suburbia and then drill down to discover what lurks just beneath the suburban facade of Ipswich, Oregon when a serial killer terrorizes the town. Alas, we never really see suburbia, not even in the clubhouse Davey shares with his three pals where the directorial triumvirate of Anouk Whissell, François Simard, and Yoann-Karl Whissell forgoes establishing shots to just lock into the four boys’ faces. “Summer of 84” kicks up a few echoes of “The Goonies”, but the latter employed its wide-open Astoria, Oregon locations to bring home the action-adventure and allowed us time in the big old house the kids sought to save. Ipswitch is just a stage.

That might be fine if “Summer of 84” wanted to be a grimy, schlocky, straight-to-video-ish horror movie seeking to proffer killing after killing after killing. But it doesn’t. It takes its time. It wants to swim around in summer break’s languor, or it claims it wants to swim around in summer break’s languor. Indeed, The Cop Next Door Who Turns Out To Be The Killer (Rich Sommer), which is not a spoiler since a shot midway through where he hands out soda to the neighborhood kids so obviously positions him as the bad guy ahead of time it diffuses all theoretical suspense, says as much. Alas, even as “Summer of 84” unspools its story slowly, all its individual moments feel rushed, snuffing any sense of languor. When The Girl Next Door, Nikki (Tiera Skovbye), turns up in Davey’s bedroom and then escapes out the window, Davey falls back on his bed, as if in reverie, but the camera stays where it is, distant, refusing to revel in that reverie.

If anything, much of “Summer of 84” is an ode to the cacophony and vulgarity of boys. Much of the gang’s R-rated banter might make you cringe even as it provides an honest window into the terrifying mind of teenage boys. Topicality be damned, if you wanna know why America just went through what it went through, listen to these kids twist pop culture references into bad lewd jokes. And if you wanna know why our nation just went through what it went through, Nikki is never anything more than a boy’s fantasy come to life, emblemized in how she just mystically appears at Davey’s house and invites herself in. It only underlines what’s wrong in the first place. In fairness, at least, her character’s underwritten symptoms extend to the boys too. Little glimpses are provided of home life and who they are, but are not enough to lift them up into well-rounded people. The closest any character comes is faux-rebel Tommy (Judah Lewis), which is less about the writing than a moment in which Lewis virtually trembles with some mixture of fear and rage in the presence of his cruel older brother.

Davey, meanwhile, is written as a conspiracy theorist, with all sorts of National Enquirer-ish headlines tacked to his bedroom wall. Why, exactly, he is prone to conspiracies, the movie never really says; he just is. And this wounds the languor of summer too. Rather than finding his way into conspiracies from believing his next-door neighbor is the killer, he is just predisposed too, his worldview already having taken shape. And that worldview is never challenged. Rather than any of this being a reaction to the world around him, like it was in “E.T.” with Elliot’s parents’ divorce, his worldview is already shaped, and every single thing that happens is merely a fulfillment of it, brought home in the predictability of how the serial killer plot plays out.

That, in the end, is the real issue. Nothing else much matters in a would-be horror movie if it can, you know, horrify you. But “Summer of 84” mostly doesn’t, less horror, really, than a kind of youthful procedural involving horrifying things. Only the conclusion, not to revealed, raises some genuine terror, particularly in dangling it as an open end rather than adding an exclamation point. That open end, more than anything else in the whole movie, gets across the feeling a kid in the 80s might have had when finding the face of a missing kid staring back at him/her from the side of a milk carton.

The Sisters Brothers

“The Sisters Brothers” opens in darkness. The eponymous old west assassins, Eli (John C. Reilly) and Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix) Sisters, having located whatever ruffians they are after, fearsomely announce their presence, which we hear and do not see because director Jacques Audiard sets the moment at night with the camera up high and looking down on the barest outline of a desolate 1851 landscape. Then, gunfire erupts, the flash of each bullet momentarily illuminating the darkened sky. It is visually striking; it is also emblematic of “The Sisters Brothers” itself which has a lot of plot, several characters, and a few themes, though it deliberately refrains from enlightening you as to what this all adds up to until the very end.

The Sisters Brothers are employed by their wealthy benefactor, The Commodore, frequently referenced, hardly seen, never heard from, to find a chemist, Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed), in possession of some secret formula set to blow the gold rush up. A mystery man named John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal) is tasked with making Warm’s acquaintance and keeping him in place until The Sisters Brothers can arrive to do the nasty work. If it sounds like a standard set-up, “The Sisters Brothers”, based on a novel by Patrick DeWitt, is never quite so invariable, the sturdy-sounding narrative revealed as metaphorically akin to Little Bill’s house in “Unforgiven”, less solidly built than delightfully askew, constantly zagging.

“Unforgiven”, of course, was a classic revisionist western, and “The Sisters Brothers”, as a scene where Charlie takes a leak before a breathtaking mountain vista goes to show, yearns to take a little piss out of the western too. The Brothers are antiheroes through and through, making you wonder who you’re rooting for, and whether such (archaic) concerns mattered in the first place, established straight away in the aftermath of that opening sequence when they accidentally set a barn ablaze, marveling afterward at their own ineptitude. Not that they are complete klutzes, proving their worth in gun battles, though just prior to one Charlie has to vomit up the night’s booze before drawing his pistol, sort of reimagining the charismatic drunkenness of Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday as Bluto Blutarsky’s obnoxiousness. That you are drawn to them anyway is a credit to Reilly and Phoenix giving the Brothers’ fractured but familiar relationship great life by making their relentless squabbling feel like second nature.

Morris and Warm, on the other hand, are bound not by blood but gold as the formula becomes less about the chemical than the spiritual. When Warm tries to talk his way out of being held hostage by explaining his visions of grandeur for a new democratic society funded by all the gold he’s certain his formula will help him to obtain, Gyllenhaal simply speeds up breathing, like this idea is working its way down into Morris’s bones. And Gyllenhaal’s erudite intonation, one at odds with his surroundings but in tune with Ahmed’s as Warm’s, makes it believable, then, what these two men see each other. How much they see each other is furtively left open in one particular unspoken look between the two men, which might well be something akin to love though it could just as easily be an emergent disciple under a spell.

If gold brings these two men together, it threatens to become the wedge between The Sisters Brothers, with Eli wanting to forget the job and make due with what they have and Charlie wondering why they would ever want to go anywhere, a predictable plot development that is nevertheless vividly rendered. Indeed, it comes to a head at dinner in San Francisco hotel, the stately setting and their fancy dress suggesting each one’s alternate vision of life, with Eli sitting up and looking proper and Charlie slumped back and cradling a cigar, a la The Commodore, whom he later admits to wanting to essentially become, a moment where Phoenix lets an astonishing smile play across his face that is not so much wicked intent as childlike naivety.

Reilly, on other hand, plays Eli not so much naïve as out of time earnest, glimpsed in an early moment where he ignores a saloon for a quiet supper, asking the woman who serves him “Is this dill?”, a line reading the actor infuses with an oddly heartrending incredulousness. It betrays a curiosity with the world around him, one illustrated throughout, where his encounters with toothbrushes and flush toilets are not jokes on a yokel but examples of understated wonder. Not that Eli is able to act on these inklings for something new, which Reilly also makes clear with the resigned protectiveness he exudes whenever his brother screws up. And it is that, one for both, both for one, that becomes the movie’s through-line. If that sounds like an obvious lesson, it is one conveyed through a string of anti-climaxes rather than banalities, not so much abandoning what it’s all been about as gradually honing it on it, and building to a twist concerning casting (don’t check IMDb!) that in an instant clarifies The Sister Brothers’ stock.

Sometimes where you are going and where you have been are one and the same.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Far Country (1954)

Anthony Mann’s “The Far Country” is a workout of familiar western themes, with the notion of the individual pitted against the good of the community and the ideas of settling down and remaining rough glimpsed on the periphery. That it gets by is testament to both the stunning location work and nuanced psychology, even emitting palpable notions of masculine love, and topped off by a fine Jimmy Stewart performance. If he played against type so frequently it might be better to simply say he had no type, here the way Stewart, ruthless yet amused, has his cattle rustler, gunslinger Jeff Webster move through a tough frontier world is to believe that he has already charted every possible outcome. It’s as if to get caught up in the innumerable squabbles he comes across is to surrender authorship of your own fate, which he will not do, epitomized in an incredible mid-movie close-up where he is begged to take the marshal’s star of a small frontier town. Stewart does not smile so much as smirk, and then unleash a slight chuckle as scoff. And when he parries their request with a “Not interested”, it’s the shrugging way he says it that makes you believe he’s been turning down such requests all his life. And when the man who takes the job can’t live up to it, it’s a rare moment when you can almost see why such men might be right.

As “The Far Country” opens, Jeff and his coffee-addled partner Ben Tatum (Walter Brennan) have driven a herd of cattle from Wyoming to Seattle, planning to then catch a boat up north to the Yukon Territory where the promise of gold awaits. It’s emblematic of the film’s setting – that is, 1896 – where America has stretched so far that it has more or less stretched itself thin, forcing cowboys and other assorted adventurers to look for points elsewhere to grasp the formerly American Dream, like the lawless Yukon. That lawlessness is key. If once this was the wild west, it has been tamed, which we see in the opening scene where lawmen come for Jeff who has killed a couple trailhands for deigning to turn back. That’s it; they want to turn back to Wyoming and he shoots them. That’s hardly the sort of main character You Care About, but that’s sort of the point.

Jeff is no better, really, than Judge Gannon (John McEntire), sort of the Judge Roy Bean of Skagway, located in the Alaskan panhandle, a little ways down the trail on which Jeff and Ben and their herd inadvertently interfere with Judge Gannon’s hanging. This interference nearly leads to Judge Gannon hanging Jeff before backing off at his barroom court, where he liberally pours libations, and continues to do so throughout, drinking so much whiskey you assume he’s He’s also not so different from Jeff, which is not an observation the screenplay forces him to say loud, rather letting it rise in their behavior. If Jeff dispensed his own justice by blasting those two trailhands into oblivion, Judge Gammon does it by confiscating Jeff’s cattle, which is maybe why, like in other spots, Jeff gets that little grin, like this is a game being contested apart from ethics and morals.

If you need a character to care about, well, that becomes Ben, functioning as Jeff’s conscious, forcing him to turn and around and go save some folks injured in an avalanche. Their relationship goes even beyond that, however, not overly, though still noticeably, especially given the way that Ben constantly interjects about his and Jeff’s plan to retire to some ranch in Utah with a bell on the front door. Maybe that’s just the old west credo of pals on the trail, but Mann slyly plays it off the two women that enter the picture, both of whom who clearly have eyes for Jeff, and toward whom Stewart simply refuses to convey as much affection as he does for Ben. Things go wrong for Ben, alas, but the concluding shot, an unintentional, or perhaps not, twisting of the every time a bell rings bit from another Stewart movie, suggests I Love You, Man more than any modern day bromance would ever dare.

Tully

“Tully” opens by casting Marlo Moreau (Charlize Theron), mother of two, on the verge of being mother of three, in a golden light, equating her with an angel as she tries calming down the occasional violent outbursts of her son Jonah by brushing his skin. Not long after, however, director Jason Reitman cuts to the cold, grey, hard light of day inside Marlo’s SUV as Jonah kicks the back of her seat, screaming, sending Marlo into something like an adult timeout that gets interrupted anyway. This emblemizes not only the emotional tightrope that Marlo is forced to walk with her son, but the age-old dichotomy of fantasy and reality, each of which “Tully” dabbles in. If after that initial image the movie transforms into an unmasking of motherhood as something less than a gift and more like an endurance test, it eventually metamorphoses into what feels like a waking dream, one from which it never, despite seeming to think so, quite emerges.

You see Marlo’s precarious mental state straight away when her new daughter is born, a moment which Reitman recounts not by showing us mother jubilantly cradling newborn infant but mother exhaustedly leaning back, newborn infant unseen, only heard crying in the background, a swift evocation of her new reality. Her marriage to Drew (Ron Livingston), meanwhile, is not so much exhausting as just exhausted, as Livingston’s patented ability to sound like he’s asleep even when he’s awake has rarely been put to better use, even if you wish Diablo Cody’s script might have more attently scrutinized their marital strife. In this third child reality, Marlo’s brother (Mark Duplass) has the couple over for dinner and gives his sister a number to call for a night nanny, one to help ease the burden.

When the nanny, Tully (Mackenzie Davis), knocks on the door, the movie turns in an instant from nightmare to something more pleasantly ethereal, underscored by her arriving in the middle of the night with Marlo suspended in some sort of nighttime TV trance. Tully takes care of the kid, yes, but she is less a child rearer than a kind of cosmic life coach. If Reitman occasionally shows the physical dissimilarities between a childless twentysomething and a mother of three, he is not ogling the former so much as visually illustrating how they are both pieces of the same whole, like a shot where Tully rifles through the refrigerator on one side of the frame while Marlo slumps at the kitchen table on the other side. Indeed, Tully not so subtly possesses all the vim and useless, if breathless, knowledge that Marlo once did before so many sleepless nights seemed to warp her memory. And Marlo eventually rises from this stupor at the nanny’s prodding, not so much arduously or gradually as mystically, emphasized in too many montages set to an excessive selection of emo singer-songwriter tracks. (Someone needs to make Reitman a mixtape of other musical genres.) A sequence, on the other hand, where Tully encourages Marlo to get into costume and entice her husband suggests an intriguingly dark alternate path that, alas, is just a feint. All this feels, frankly, too good to be true.

It is, though I would never dare revealing precisely why. The movie’s turn, however, doubles as the movie’s crossroads, one that, despite suggesting another genre, works well in conjunction with the preceding dreamy tone. The problem becomes how casually the movie brushes the turn aside, writing its apparent genesis out in one line, never really following up on what plays like a much more significant issue. It’s the strangest thing, particularly when considering the preceding Jason Reitman/Diablo Cody/Charlize Theron collaboration “Young Adult” concluded by deliberately, deliciously, disturbingly giving in to fantasy. “Tully” concludes without any idea it’s given in to fantasy at all.

Laying Our Cards on the Table

Cinema Romantico strives for intellectual honesty. Every review, or nearly every review, unless otherwise indicated, which will be addressed momentarily, on this blog is penned from a critical distance. I acknowledge, or hope to, the movie being reviewed on its terms, and then work through that movie to try and determine if it succeeds on those terms and if it breaks through to find some deeper truth and, if so, why. I am trying, in other words, to live in the image of that recent New York Times Magazine piece by Wesley Morris – Should Art Be a Battleground for Social Justice? – lamenting how so often these days critics start from an ideological point and work backwards rather than vice-versa. His piece mirrored a different piece written almost a whole year earlier by Michael Pattison at his site idFilm, who, throwing all kinds of agreeable shade, said, “Tired of form, we wanted meaning. The medium was no longer the message. ‘In fact, just give us the message.’” Cinema Romantico wants to extrapolate the message from the medium, see.

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Cinema Romantico seeks emotional honesty. A man goes to a movie, as they say, and he must admit he is that man. Biases, emotional or otherwise, are present in each of us. I try, however, to generally leave those biases outside the theater, or, perhaps more accurately, turn them off later when writing the movie’s analysis. And yet, my biases can occasionally override critical detachment and still seep in, if not gush right on through. If so, I recognize the infiltration of those biases and either 1.) Eliminate them or 2.) Acknowledge them and provide my analysis through their prism. I firmly believe the latter should not be ruled out of order so long as the critic is being honest with her/his self. And even if I have tried to siphon much of the emotionalism out of my reviews over the years, when it is time to review with my feelings, first, foremost, and maybe nothing else, I will.

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Ah, but Cinema Romantico contains multitudes, and sometimes our emotional honesty erupts into hyper-emotional honesty. You might say “hyper-emotional honesty? That’s just hyperbole.” But hyperbole is an exaggerated statement not meant to be taken literally, and while my hyper-emotional honesty is generally an exaggeration it is also absolutely meant to be taken literally. If, for instance, I say that Lady Gaga can breathe fire, a la a mythical dragon, I mean this figuratively, of course, obviously, but also literally, just not literally-literally, which is not metaphorically, understand, but a kind of mystical actuality. And I mean this literally, so to speak, because I am, full disclosure, a Little Monster. Now, that does not mean I am impossibly partial where Her Gaganess is concerned. I can tell you “Joanne”, much to my chagrin, was just eh. I gave a so-so review to “Gaga: Five Foot Two.” I was intellectually honest in my analysis of her turn in “A Star Is Born.” But.

While it is entirely possible – nay, probable – that Ms. Gaga’s “A Star Is Born” performance will not, at year’s end, be both the pragmatic “best” and my favorite, it will simultaneously and absolutely be both the pragmatic “best” and my favorite. Indeed, even if the Academy Awards are, as of today, precisely four long, long months away, the Best Actress Oscar race here at Cinema Romantico is, 100%, over. If someone else ultimately deserves the Oscar more, I will say so, while also saying that this speculative other person does not deserve the Oscar more at all. Both things, as the pundits make clear over and over and over these days, can be true.

Got it? Good. Go Gaga.

A Star Is Born, outtake

“Almost Famous.” You know the scene. Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup), guitarist for Stillwater, has walked out on his band, more or less, fled to a house party with some “real Topeka people” in the company of fledgling Rolling Stone scribe William Miller (Patrick Fugit). Things happen. Beers are drunk. Pills are popped. Russell winds up on a roof screaming about being a golden god. He jumps into a pool. He tells William the band is over, but it isn’t. The band’s bus shows up and the manager talks him onto it. Things are a little rough at first, a little quiet, but then Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” comes on. One by one, like one of those sports scenes where one guy claps and then another guy claps and then they all start clapping, etc., everyone begins singing along. All the bad stuff washes away. Music heals all wounds.

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Late in the recently released version of “A Star Is Born” country-western superstar Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) finds himself in a tailspin brought on by jealousy, a changing world, and, most of all, alcoholism. His diminishing status is made clear at the Grammy Awards where his part on a trio of Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” is nixed, reducing it to a duet, and stranding him as a sideman, playing guitar only. As such, he has taken to the drink. And when he takes the stage to perform, he is so inebriated that he drops his pick and slowly, pitifully, bends over to pick it up. For a second, you’d swear he’ll fall right over. He doesn’t, thankfully, yet after a singing-only intro, when the spotlight is thrust on him, again, for a second, you’d swear he will forget or be unable to play. He comes through, barely, and blasts into the familiar riff. The guitar, however, is ear-splitting, like you’re standing right in front of the amp, nearly bowling you over. And Cooper, the director, sets the shot from below, making it seem as if this drunken dude is teetering on the edge of cliff, about to go right over. A few seconds later, the same sort of thing happens again, and again he comes through, this time really laying into the riff, seasoning it without going overboard like Marty McFly on “Johnny B. Goode.”

And now, for a second, you think Jackson’ll right the ship; you think he’ll tear through this song and a smile will erupt to instantly transform him from sloshed to sober; you think he’ll find that thing he’s been looking for. Instead, right as all that flashes through your mind, Cooper cuts to the next scene, jarring you right out of your prospective fantasy. Music does not heal all wounds.

A Star Is Born

The title card of the 2018 version of “A Star Is Born” evokes the predecessors on which it is based with an opulent, Technicolor-ish red even as it offers something new, stretching across the whole screen, leaving a small space in the middle for the eponymous star, Ally, to fit right through, twirling, like all the world’s a stage and she was born to glide across it. That’s true of Ally but also of the woman playing her – iconic pop star Lady Gaga. If Gaga intended her 2017 Netflix documentary “Gaga: Five Foot Two” as revelatory, she still felt guarded, covered up, even when she was literally topless onscreen. In Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut, however, Gaga comes to life, playing Ally with an insecure exterior and a more forceful interior born of an Italian Catholic iron will. The latter is glimpsed in home scenes with her father (Andrew Dice Clay, moving, really) where she emotes with the loving exasperation of an entire upbringing, suggesting what has held her back and giving her strength to move forward. Even later in the film when Ally becomes a sensation and dons costumes and wigs, Gaga has so nimbly laid the groundwork in removing her character’s mask, that her real soul shines bright.

If Ally finds her way, Jackson Maine (Cooper), a country-western superstar, is losing his. Cooper’s croaked mumbles recall the Oscar-winning turn of Jeff Bridges as Bad Blake in “Crazy Heart”, yes, but his head-down, demurring attitude is just as evocative of Joaquin Phoenix’s more polite moments as Johnny Cash in “Walk the Line.” Indeed, even if Jackson pops pills, drinks too much, suffers from tinnitus, and feuds with his manger brother Bobby (Sam Elliot, who cocks his head with as much get off my lawn gusto as Gary Cooper wielded a six shooter), Cooper invests Jackson with enough haggard compassion to suggest he’s less trouble than flawed. But he’s spiritually underwater, which his physical sluggishness illustrates, and he needs a way up.

He finds one when, in search of a drink, he unwittingly enters a drag club and sees Ally perform. That the gaggle of kindly drag queens makes way for a straight woman is written off in one line, and may or may not be rooted to truth, but comes across like one of those Golden Age films where a boarding house have banded together to navigate a patriarchal word. And Ally slithering around the club singing “La Vie en Rose” feels born of the Golden Age too as Gaga channels the ghost of Rita Hayworth as much as Judy Garland, eventually splayed across the bar and looking right into Jackson’s eyes in an electric scene evoking how the right music show on the right night can see right through you.

When he approaches her afterward in the dressing room there is less an air of fantasy than anxious hesitation as Gaga plays the moment with with a convincing, halting suspicion about what he really wants, pulling away her hand when he takes hers, demonstrating an honesty within her character and about the whole world. No, he must prove his courtliness, and does in an extended sequence where he tends to her wound after a bar fight. It is familiar stuff played with a ring of truth, where her eyes betray an escalating enchantment and his eyes are not puppy-dog so much as dumbfounded. And while Jackson removing Ally’s false eyebrows might symbolically connote her character’s veneer crumbling, when she spontaneously breaks into a song in a parking lot she is not just signaling her immense talent but saying to him “I trust you.”

Visually the scene mirrors the whole movie, with big close-ups the preferred angle, not that Gaga frequently over-emotes in them. When Ally is about to surge onstage, Gaga’s choking back vomit is ephemeral rather than emphasized. And while the banter over Ally’s nose is properly playful, you sometimes wish Cooper more often just let that nose speak for itself. You also might wish for a few more master shots, whether to establish scene and situation or just let moments breathe, the few wide frames being less for our benefit than Ally and Jackson’s, giving them flickers of privacy. Still, the visual strategy correlates to the movie’s narrative intimacy, mimicking “Million Dollar Baby” in so much as a movie about someone going global deliberately refrains from showing us the masses.

Jackson functions less as Ally’s mentor than a conduit to the industry, which happens when she walks out on her job to attend one of his gigs. Gaga plays this moment not with devil-may-care defiance but giggling like she can’t believe it as she throws caution to the wind, with Cooper intelligently not ending the scene on Ally’s boss punctuating the scene with some dumb one-liner to ensure the moment is hers. And when, arriving at the show in a palpable moment of adrenalized delirium, Ally seeming to float, momentarily disappearing in the popping bright white of a spotlight, emblemizing the turn her life is about to take, the whole movie becomes hers. Jackson summons Ally to the stage, leading her in a duet of a song, “Shallow”, she’s written, the lyrics, a la “Once”, matching the moment, Ally having swum, so to speak, far out from the shallow end, a fear which Gaga’s eyes evince even as that full-throated sonic uppercut she eventually unleashes signifies a self-confidence that had been rumbling inside all along.

Swiftly, marking the nature of Our Times, she becomes a star, culminating in a shot onstage playing piano alongside Jackson where her face appears on the giant video board hanging above. Cooper sets the shot so that essentially she’s singing to herself, visually demarcating the moment when the apprentice surpasses the master, and when the narrative hands itself off from Ally & Jackson to Jackson and his tailspin. The latter stems from jealousy over his her sudden success, though that jealously is born more from his increasingly alcoholic fog and an emergent dissatisfaction with, to quote “Shallow” itself, the modern world. All this tracks along a predictable line and to a predictable conclusion, whether or not you have seen the previous versions, which is not so much the problem as how many story beats need to be hit at precise intervals to get us there, sadly letting so much atmospheric air out as it opts for more basic and expedient narrative filmmaking.

It also suffers from a lack of Gaga. But then, her character has found herself, and this back half is not about Jackson losing himself so much as realizing he is obstructing her ascendant superstardom. That point is conveyed by Cooper’s sheepish smiles throughout, as if he’s almost embarrassed to still be the camera’s point, a fascinating, vexing paradox wherein the leading man seems to know he’s in the way even as the director – who, of course, is the leading man – makes him the focus anyway. You admire it more than embrace it with arms outstretched, this backslide into tragedy, which, inadvertently or otherwise, makes a solid case for the rock star fantasy of burning out rather than fading away.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Man with One Red Shoe (1986)

Despite being billed as a comedy, director Stan Dragoti’s American remake of a 1972 French film starts mostly seriously, with a series of government men in mirrored sunglasses up to nefarious tricks, suggesting that all one need to do in Washington D.C. to pick out the nefarious people is look for the ones in mirrored sunglasses. See, CIA Deputy Director Cooper (Dabney Coleman) is trying to take down CIA Director Ross (Charles Durning) by linking him to a drug scandal that is, in fact, Cooper’s doing. Ross, knowing that Cooper is trying to take him down, leaks #FakeNews that a mystery man is arriving by plane who will clear the Director’s good name and dispatches underlings to the airport to pick up someone, anyone, doesn’t matter who, because the whole end game is too divert all of Cooper’s attention onto this patsy. That patsy becomes Richard Drew (Tom Hanks), a concert violinist who is wearing mismatched shoes, explained less by the plot than Hanks’s aw-shucks obliviousness. The latter is crucial. Richard Drew is merely the straight man in a sketch gone wrong; the sketch is written by the CIA.

If this sounds like enough to generate a whole movie, “The Man with One Red Shoe” is oddly insistent on shoehorning in a subplot involving Richard’s friend Morris (Jim Belushi), percussionist in the orchestra for whom Richard plays, or his supposed friend, since Morris suspects that Richard is having an affair with his wife Paula (Carrie Fisher). In a pseudo-twist, Richard is! And this is weird. This is weird because the intrinsic gregarious personality of Hanks is entirely at odds with his character choosing to sleep with his pal’s wife, and Carrie Fisher, written more shrill than funny, is hung out to dry. It’s a mostly woeful subplot that only finds its footing when Morris is made to accidentally discover the CIA is on Richard’s tail, not that Morris completely realizes it, which Belushi plays with a kind of confused comicality resembling someone convinced he has just seen Elvis and not sure whether to believe his own eyes.

That might mark Richard as akin to “The Man Who Knew Too Little” (1997) where Bill Murray acted like the secret agent that he was only because he thought it was all interactive improv. But then, Bill Murray still got to be Bill Murray while “The Man with One Red Shoe” never really lets Tom Hanks cut loose. Even in keeping the spotlight trained specifically on Richard, the movie becomes more about the people keeping him in the spotlight. And as wheezy as the movie’s comedy mostly is, there is something of a kick to be had in the CIA’s frenzied insistence on overthinking everything. That kick stems from how the more obvious it becomes that Drew is merely a patsy, the easier it becomes for Cooper to convince himself that he is not, concocting fanciful scenarios that push well past plausibility. Drew’s cello notes, in the eyes of Cooper, cannot simply be music but musical code, and he assigns his underlings to pour through this non-existent code, government resources held hostage by the whims of one man gone around the bend.

Maybe this sounds like the reviewer projecting, but it’s there, all of it, not so much on the surface, which is more interested in standard-issue hijinks, but just below it, glimpsed in the increasingly frazzled air of Coleman and in the quizzical expressions of Lori Singer as Cooper’s right-hand woman suggesting she knows they are on the wrong tack but obliged to follow misplaced orders anyway. She can’t stop it even if she wants to. When Cooper trundles into the trap that’s been sprung for him as the movie ends, you see it coming, absolutely, but you absolutely can see how and why he doesn’t. He already “knows” everything, until he is made, in a moment, brought home in Coleman’s moment-of-clarity reaction, to realize he “knows” nothing at all.

Dissecting a Scene: Walk the Line

You might have heard about “A Star is Born.” It’s doing pretty well at the box office. People seem to like it. We will discuss that movie, certainly, but that’s for next week. This is this week. And seeing “A Star is Born” got me to thinking about “Walk the Line.” The former is better than the latter, not least because it does not have to stick to a straight, t-crossing biopic outline, though that is neither nor there. The former’s best scene is probably an onstage duet between its female and male singers and the latter’s best scene is an onstage duet between its male and female singers. Let’s discuss the latter.

Johnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) is married with three kids but blue. June Carter (Reese Witherspoon) is married to a stock car driver but she is blue too. June misses Johnny, but won’t really say it. Johnny misses June, and he will say it. He does say it, tracking her down and asking her to go out on tour with him. She acquiesces. And the next scene opens with June opening for Johnny before announcing the name of the guy everyone has come to see and stepping away from the microphone. Johnny enters from downstage, which is where the camera is positioned.

He adjusts his mic.

He makes his patented plainspoken introduction: “Hello. I’m Johnny Cash.”

And then he turns to his right, visually beckoning June, though the look is less master of ceremonies than a come on.

So June saunters in, her arms flapping.

She takes the mic right next to Johnny’s. Not behind or off to the side, mind you, but right next to his. This is not his song; this is their song.

And then James Mangold cuts to a wide shot from in front of the stage to show the full band. And I suppose the rules of cinema might dictate an establishing shot, showing us the complete lay of the land. But this is the only shot in the whole scene from within the crowd. And this scene is not about the crowd. It is about them — Johnny and June.

A shot looking up at Johnny from the foot of the stage as he kicks off the first verse.

As he does, Witherspoon, as she does throughout, has June meet Johnny’s eyes with an indelible expression, one that seems to be saying, “Ok, boy, show me watcha you got.” Like every performance of this song on each stop of the tour is another chance for him to show her.

So he does. That’s not just a duet face; that’s a face of challenge-accepting provocation.

And that, of course, comes through in the song’s lyrics, which their performance turns inside out. “I’m not the one you want,” he sings. “I’m not the one you need.” When, in fact, he means precisely the opposite, which he makes clear with that flirtatious smirk.

She knows it too. And that is why Witherspoon has June receive it with a smile-

-that explodes into a laugh. He met her challenge.

And because he did, her chiming in on the second part of the first verse comes across like a harmonizing acknowledgment of the challenge being met.

And Phoenix throws his head back, reveling in the back and forth.

He re-meets her eyes.

And then the camera cuts back to June as she sings along on “Whether you are right or wrong.” And while Cinema Romantico did not have Random Awards back in those days, if it had, the facial expression of the year would have gone to Witherspoon with this double expressive punch on “Wrong.”

And Phoenix receives that expression with one that is basically sex with his eyes, as fierce a juxtaposition as you’re ever gonna get since he’s roaring the chorus. “It ain’t me babe.”

That’s so hot they’ve gotta cool it down, breaking for the musical interlude, stepping back from the microphones.

But then quickly returning.

They tear into the second verse.

Still looking at each other like they were.

But in the space of just a second or two, Phoenix noticeably lets that suggestive smirk dissolve.

It dissolves because the camera switches to his point-of-view, looking out toward the crowd, where his family sits. And notice how Mangold frames this shot — with June fuzzily but conspicuously on the right edge, unintentionally inserting herself into the family dynamic.

Now Johnny looking’s real hard at them, the weight of what he’s singing — “You say you’re looking for someone / who will promise never to part” — reverberating within.

And Johnny’s dad (Robert Patrick), never his son’s biggest fan, sensing that his son is looking toward his wife (Ginnifer Goodwin), looks toward her too, as if adding his own disapproval to his son’s sudden self-doubt will drive the nail in his punk kid’s coffin.

Which is why as that same shot plays out, Johnny’s right shoulder suddenly blurs his pops from the frame, like he’s telling his pops to take a hike and selfishly ignoring his own pangs of what he knows to be true.

Which is why, when the movie cuts back to Johnny, as he sings the line “someone to close his eyes for you”, he does just that, literally. Except, of course, that he is no longer looking at his wife, as these two parts of the frame in lockstep go to show. He is looking at June. He is closing his eyes on his own wife for June. Yikes.

And June and Johnny bellow it again: “It ain’t me babe. No, no, no, it ain’t me babe.”

Which, of course, means, as Johnny’s wife assuredly knows, watching in the shot that ends the scene, with June right there, blurry but lurking, threatening to take her place, really means the opposite. It’s you, babe. Oh, it’s defintely you.

Imagining Post-Show Sitcom Characters in Movies

Esteemed New York Times film critic A.O. Scott would, based on the above Tweet, appear to have seen “Beautiful Boy”, the new film co-starring Steve Carell and Amy Ryan, former co-stars of NBC’s “The Office.” What Mr. Scott thought of the movie is, in the context of this post, irrelevant. No, we are merely interested in the thought that crossed his so-called shallow mind. We say “so-called” because, well, that thought would have crossed Cinema Romantico’s mind too. This blog loves Amy Ryan; this blog loved Amy Ryan on “The Office”; this blog loved Amy Ryan and Steve Carell together on “The Office”; this blog sometimes wonders what happened to their “Office” characters. In fact, that’s what I told my friend Rory when he texted me Scott’s Tweet early one morning last week. And Rory, one of Cinema Romantico’s most loyal frustrated followers, knowing full well this blog’s predilection for the inane, immediately made a fabulous pitch – that is, a blog post about the lives of sitcom people post-show. Hold the phone.

In concocting this post, however, we have decided to honor the spirit of both “Beautiful Boy” and Scott’s tweet. That is to say, we will not simply be positing movie ideas based on actual sitcom characters. No, we will be positing movies featuring actors that played certain sitcom characters, eliciting the sensation that these characters we love do still exist in some sort of artistic, mystical in-between.

A few ideas:

Steve Hytner. While Bryan Cranston’s turn as Tim Whatley, “dentist to the stars”, presaged his leap to stardom, and while even Debra Messing parlayed her two episode stint as the immortal Beth Lookner into “Will & Grace”, Hytner, as hack comic, thorn-in-Jerry’s-side Kenny Bania, had no such luck post-“Seinfeld.” In the show’s ersatz reunion on “Curb Your Enthusiasm”, Bania briefly appeared, lamenting that he could not find work in the post-2008 economy, to which Jerry replied “You weren’t working in the good economy”, which seemed to emblemize both Bania and Hytner. But now it’s an era where Netflix is giving every other comic a special. So what if Hytner got a special? Even if he wasn’t Bania we would all detect Bania in the special’s ether anyway, raising the deeper questions, so to speak, about “stuff you don’t have to think about” when everybody else is Woke.

James Avery. The late, indelible Avery was the MVP of NBC’s “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”, as comical as he was commanding, as exasperated at the eponymous Fresh Prince’s antics as he was earnest in giving The Fresh Prince guidance. He loomed large in my childhood. And earlier this summer, stumbling upon a “Fresh Prince” re-run on some channel some night, there was a passing reference to Avery’s Philip Banks, appointed to the bench in Season 3, perhaps one day winding up on the Supreme Court. It stopped my heart. I could not stop envisioning a Supreme Court where Philip Banks sat next to Sonia Sotomayor. Oh, what a wonderful world it would be. And if, in that wonderful world, Avery were still with us, we would craft a movie where a brief scene visiting the (once) hallowed halls of the Supreme Court would catch a glimpse of Avery in the black robe, coolly, fairly, firmly laying down the law.

Chris Eigeman/A.J. Langer. There are infinite reasons My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife is the only one for me. Mid-chief amongst these is the two of us being among the roughly 77 people total who watched ABC’s late-90s sitcom “It’s Like, You Know” before it was shuttered after a year and a half. That it was my second favorite sitcom of all-time pertains to its creator, Peter Mehlman, being a “Seinfeld” scribe, yes, but also to Chris Eigeman, who would be George Clooney in Cinema Romantico’s Hollywood, starring, giving him a weekly vehicle to act incomparably dry as a starchy New Yorker re-located against his will to Los Angeles. What was more, his Will They/Won’t They was carried out with A.J. Langer, playing Lauren Woods, the masseuse/process server, whose askew cadence and purposeful aloofness improbably played off Eigeman’s patented pithiness in such a way as to give their Will They/Won’t They truth because she always seemed to dance around his wavelength rather than totally tune into it. That the series was axed just as their relationship seemed on the brink of a big turn seemed poetic, leaving them to float in the un-televised ether. Neither Eigeman nor Langer has acted a ton since, which saddens me because two impeccable talents deserve more. And so I dream of a dom-com (domestic comedy) where Eigeman and Langer play married characters just, like, you know, living life, but in Ohio, from whence Lauren Woods came, suggesting that she and Arthur found happy-ish ever after.

Jane Curtin/Susan Saint James. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, I don’t want this to be a “Book Club”-ish comedy, even though “Book Club” is in my Netflix queue and I really want to see it. I want this to be a movie with two parallel tracks, Curtin like Patricia Clarkson in “Cairo Time” and Saint James like Margo Martindale in “Paris, je t'aime”, going through the motions even as they spiritually sense something is amiss. Because sometimes, when you think you're all by yourself, you are.

Mark Linn-Baker. Larry Appleton of “Perfect Strangers” landed a job at the fictional Chicago Chronicle in Season 3. And though his hours, per sitcom contrivance, never really matched up to a journalist’s, and though, per sitcom contrivance, you never saw him ferreting out leads outside the office, you knew he took his job seriously. But what if Linn-Baker turned up in some current Hollywood director’s ode to the power of the news in a bit part, down there in the T*ump rally press pen, dutifully taking notes, reporting exactly what he sees and not what Bozo the Spray Tan Clown tweets? Couldn’t we think, if only for a moment, that after the Chicago Chronicle, like the Chicago Tribune, was gobbled up by Tronc and Appleton was subsequently pressured into taking an early buyout, he persevered. And if he failed to become Bob Woodward, so what? He became someone whose name you don’t know but whose work you intrinsically appreciate nonetheless. (Bronson Pinchot will appear in the next Harmony Korine film as a natty captain of a Garbage Barge.)

Robia Scott. As a mere recent “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” bandwagon jumper, having only watched the first three seasons this year, at the rightful behest of My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife who was a stone cold original Buffy fan, I was extremely late to the Jenny Calendar party. And like any favorite TV show leaves you wanting more of certain characters (Alton Benes?), I always wanted more Jenny Calendar. Scott (billed then as Robia LaMorte) gave a performance that initially exuded such lightness only to then exude such desperation, born of the desire to hold onto the joy which we realize was not necessarily innate but earned, and intrinsically evokes the idea that our teachers contain, to quote the god-awful line of Rose DeWitt Bukater, “an ocean of secrets.” Scott’s IMDb profile over the last decade is, sadly, pretty sparse, and so I imagine her appearing in some indie, in the role of, say, a social studies teacher, just for a few scenes, a la Alicia Silverstone in “Terri”, giving all us Buffy loyalists and latecomers, a reason to distrust what we already know to be true and just believe our eyes.

Rachel Bloom / Vella Lovell / Gabrielle Ruiz. “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”, part comedy, part musical, is still on the air, granted, with one season remaining. But one of my absolute favorite developments of the past season was the unlikely troika of Rebecca, Heather, and Valencia becoming fast gal pals, conveyed in their aces, modish, Spice Girls-ish ditty “Friendtopia.” I’d like to imagine Bloom, Lovell, and Ruiz riffing on “Spice World” after the show ends but then, Rachel Bloom is smarter than me. I have no pitch. Give her some cash, Hollywood, and let her figure out the rest.