Friday's Old Fashioned: Drunken Angel (1948)

The esteemed Roger Ebert once wrote that noir was “the most American film genre, because no society could have created a world so filled with doom, fate, fear and betrayal, unless it were essentially naïve and optimistic.” Akira Kurosawa’s “Drunken Angel” (1948), then, fits so perfectly into noir despite being made and set in Japan because it was released in 1948 during the American occupation post-WWII when social reforms inspired by the above-mentioned naïve and optimistic society were being introduced. No Americans are ever seen, however, because Kurosawa knew the real struggle was within the Japanese people itself. To that end, all the notions Ebert cites, the doom, fate, fear and betrayal, are given life in the acrid, disease-ridden pond at the center of the slums where the eponymous Drunken Angel, Dr. Sanada (Takashi Shimura), lives, and who often finds himself chasing kids away from the noxious water and staring into it like it’s the abyss. Maybe it is. No one ever comes to clean it up.

That sense of societal disease extends to Matsunaga (Toshiro Mifune), a Yakuza who shows up at Sanada’s practice in the dead of night as the movie opens, seeking treatment for a broken hand. It quickly becomes clear, however, that Matsunaga’s wound stems from a bullet, which Sanada extracts, though this unearths the revelation that the gangster also suffers from tuberculosis. This diagnosis is both dismissed and dreaded by Matsunaga, seeming to think that the TB, a la the acrid pond, might just go away if it’s ignored. Sanada knows better than this, and he also knows that if Matsunaga fails to deal with his afflictions, health or lifestyle, that he will end up in the same situation as the drunken doctor, a parallel the movie teases out and eventually makes explicit in a monologue. Sanada’s good deeds, in fact, reach beyond his attempts to save Matsunaga, as we come to learn that Miyo (Chieko Nakakita), the doctor’s assistant, was once involved with Okada (Reisaburo Yamamoto), a jailed Yakuza who once ruled Matsunaga’s territory. And when Okada is released, he seeks out his old flame, only to be repelled by the impervious doctor.

Famously, “Drunken Angel” was the first of sixteen collaborations between Kurosawa and Mifune, and the reason why is evident in how the latter commands the screen with a charismatic force even as his character is literally wasting away. In a sense, Matsunaga spiritually embodies the hubris of Imperial Japan and the Yakuza while physically embodying their rot, as even in scenes where he is at his most sickly, barely able to stand, swinging his arms wildly, he remains defiant against the obvious diagnosis, not necessarily as if he knows best but cockily, stupidly resistant to who knows best. In these moments he resembles someone not just drunk on power but actually drunk, linking him, in a way, with the doctor, who goes so far as to swill medicinal alcohol to attain his fix.

A habit can barely get nastier than that, and Shimura lets such nastiness inform his performance, one impressively indifferent to sympathy, though it is not liquid courage that makes his character stand up to this Yakuza so much as something like a moral breaking point, a mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore insistence. That is why he keeps trying to track down Matsunaga even while claiming not to care about the gangster’s fate, which, weirdly, you actually kind of believe since every skeptical gesture and line reading by Shimura suggests that his doctor is essentially just laughing in Matsunaga’s face.

If the push and pull is entirely between these two men, that changes mid-movie when Okada returns and, almost by default, Matsunaga falls back into Okada’s company, which Mifune plays like he is going through the gangster motions, quietly skewering the expressed notions of Yakuza honor, of always keeping one’s word, a lie laid bare when the character discovers his Yakuza overlords are just waiting around for him to die. If it is cliché to say someone is living a lie, in this moment, with his pitched forward stance and stunned expression, Mifune lives that bitter sentiment out, so spectacularly he stops the movie in its tracks so Kurosawa can just hold the shot. And while another movie might have built to a confrontation between Matsunaga and Sanada, “Drunken Angel” instead devolves into hostilities between Matsunaga and Okada. If Matsunaga is attempting, in his own way, to defend Miyo’s honor, it is nevertheless purposely portrayed as ridiculous, not a thrillingly choreographed duel but the two men writhing around in spilled paint.

If it embodies the film’s overriding hopelessness, Kurosawa adds a conclusion suggesting hope, with Sanada and a young patient who succeeds in beating in TB. It might well ring false when compared against the typical fatalism of the genre. Yet if the era into which “Drunken Angel” was released found Japan trying to remake itself then perhaps, cosmically, or just through the prism of time, we can read this conclusion as the epitome of the genesis of those reforms, a slight rewiring of noir not as grim determinsm but societal self-actualization.

Monrovia, Indiana

Louis Malle found Glencoe, Minnesota, the subject of his seminal 1985 documentary “God’s Country”, by accident, driving through in search of material for a different film and falling into conversation with a local that piqued his interest. Frederick Wiseman, on the other hand, chose Monrovia, Indiana for his 2018 documentary of the same name on purpose. If his preceding films, “In Jackson Heights” and “At Berkeley”, were comprehensive studies of liberal enclaves, here he immerses himself in a red state small town in the immediate aftermath of you-know-who’s victory. You-know-who, however, is never mentioned. The closest the movie comes to deliberately stoking liberal ire is a close-up on a “Home to a Million Concealed Carry Permits.” But Wiseman tempers even that by gradually creating a synthesis of local commerce where the daily operations of a pizza parlor, a liquor store and a gun store are presented as homogenous and even anagolous to the small businesses of “In Jackson Heights.” Of course, the latter were being squeezed out by big boxes and gentrification, and the ultimate picture Wiseman paints of Monrovia is also bleak. In fact, “Monrovia, Indiana” seems to spiritually be picking up where “God’s Country” left off so many years ago, the slow death rattle still echoing across the Midwestern landscape.

“God’s Country” was told through images, yes, but also through Malle’s own soul-searching narration and conversations with Glencoe residents, often between those residents and Malle himself, lingering just off camera, never seen but always present. That is not Wiseman’s style. He is not seen and never heard, and conversation, the look-into-your-own-heart kind, is generally absent from “Monrovia, Indiana.” When Wiseman does stop and listen, like with a few locals at the diner, he trains the camera on two of them as they try and remember who knows what, the exact subject matter immaterial, as eventually Wiseman cuts to their third companion on the other side of the table who looks as if he hasn’t been listening the whole time. Certainly conversations at the Hometown Café in my hometown always sounded about this enlightening, but there were other conversations behind closed doors digging deeper. I don’t meant to filter this all through my experience, but meaningful everyday dialogue is conspicuously absent. Images speaker louder than words, and all that, but in a doc that often holds an image for minutes at a time to just listen to words, you sometimes wish those words counted for more.

Then again, what’s not said can be just as powerful. Near the beginning Wiseman visits Monrovia High School and plunks his camera down in a classroom for a considerable spell, just watching and listening as a teacher expounds at length on the town’s proud basketball history, including the legacy of Branch McCracken, concluding by explaining how the once hallowed midnight practice has been discontinued. The way Wiseman positions the camera, however, includes not just the teacher in the frame but a young female student too, in the left hand corner, sitting at her desk throughout this oration, listening, sort of, as her eyes frequently stare off into space, and as she repeatedly shifts in her seat, betraying restlessness. It might well be inherent behavior but it nonetheless comes across profound, one of the town’s youth indifferent to her town’s history.

The sequences of youth in “Monrovia, Indiana” are conspicuously scant, mostly limited to the quick overview of the high school that the aforementioned sequence triggers, and we never hear from them directly. The most consistent conversation is heard in the documentary’s recurring city council meetings. This onscreen civic discourse sometimes includes ostensibly mundane subjects like fire hydrants which become the most important thing in the world to the person discussing them, particularly because in this case the hydrants in question don’t seem to work. These discharge pipes, we learn, are located in a development on the fringes of Monrovia called Homestead, one we never visit but frequently hear about it as becomes a symbol of progress, for good, for ill, for all in-between. Some see Homestead as necessary in relation to the need to entice new residents to keep the town alive while some think bringing in new residents gradually erodes the social foundation and will turn (is turning) the town into something it is not.

Wiseman does not suggest who is right, even if he frequently casts “Monrovia, Indiana” in the light of an elegy. A town festival watches a bluegrass performance from the audience’s vantage point before Wiseman reverses the shot and we see the audience consists of a couple disinterested people sitting on small bales of hay. A ceremony at the Masonic Lodge honoring a Freemason for 50 years of membership is as lengthy as it is ritualistic as it is bungling and, given the median age in the room, emblematic of a way life that seems to be passing before our very eyes. To that point, one of the first scenes of the movie is a Bible Study in which New Testament scripture about life’s trials and tribulations are cited at length, all of which inevitably lead to the same end, a funeral, like those cows at the beginning with the tags on their ears. The person being buried is unknown, and seemingly to the Pastor too, whose eulogy comes across a little cut and paste, not that this drains the moment’s power. No, it adds power, reminding us that we need not know someone, or somewhere, intimately to be mindful of its circumstances. And the final shots of dirt being scooped onto the tomb in the town cemetery, while melancholic reminders of the end, perhaps in more ways than one, are also weirdly evocative of how life goes on; even burying the dead requires infrastructure.

Zama

“Zama” opens with its eponymous 18th century character, Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), magistrate of an Argentinian outpost of the Spanish Crown, standing on a beach in full regalia, tricorne hat, coat, and pantaloons. Director Lucrecia Martel, however, frames it so as to remove any triumph, keeping the camera at a distance so rather than Zama looming large it looks like the landscape looms large over him. Native kids run around in the background, interfering with his would-be over-the-mantle portrait, an idea Martel returns to visually throughout, always squeezing Zama out of his own frames, with animals and people popping up in the background, as if he is just passing through rather than standing firm. It is a witty tone-setter, a movie of scathing satire and remarkably dry humor equating colonialism with tourism, underlined by the occasional notes of slack-key guitar, like Zama is descending the stairs from a Honolulu plane. Indeed, “Zama” is less period adventure than vacation from hell comedy. And rather than having to prop up a dead body, like “Weekend at Bernie’s”, Zama may as well be trying to prop up his own disintegrating spirit.

The eponymous magistrate’s desire for a transfer to another South American outpost drives “Zama” in so much as its plot drives anywhere, more concerned with the effects of stasis than any sort of forward momentum, generally eschewing a traditional narrative for a series of episodes instead as a means to evince the effect of time both standing still and just wasting away. “Zama” stretches out over years and takes place in three different time periods, though Martel forgoes chapter headings, preferring to let these different eras just bleed into one another so the viewer just sort of suddenly realizes they have skipped ahead after it’s already happened, brilliantly eliciting the effect of life having slipped by. It is a boundless sensation encapsulated in an early scene when a native child being carried in a chair suddenly floats into the picture just behind Zama’s head, whispering that the Spanish representative is a “a god who was born old and can’t die.” The child continues: “His loneliness is atrocious.” You hardly know if this is real or hallucination, though the way Zama reacts, looking very much like the man this child has just described, suggests that even if he’s hearing voices, he knows they speak truth.

In a movie of myriad cruel, quiet jokes, perhaps the biggest is on Zama himself, a character easy to loathe and sympathize within the same moment, an 18th century middle manager who is neither at the top of the Crown’s food chain nor at the bottom, denied his precious transfer because of his superiors’ thoughtlessness even as he issues thoughtless orders in regards to those below him, feeding straight into an indeterminate loop that he remains oblivious to even as he simultaneously seeks to escape it, the result of the system and its arbiter. He is a man of incongruity, writing letters home to a wife who never answers even as he tries to make time with a local noblewoman, Luciana (Lola Dueñas), who openly flirts with him and then resists when he tries to act on her flirtations. In these scenes, as in a later one across from the daughter of a couple original settlers, Giménez Cacho does not look at these woman so much as unabashedly, ravenously undress them with his eyes, a desire so nakedly pitiful that it becomes comical.

The scenes with Luciana not only further Zama’s ineffectuality, metaphorically or otherwise, but evince how brilliantly Martel lays out the ecosystem of colonialism without necessarily calling attention to it, illuminating the way in which it was so effortlessly baked into the society. As Luciana and Zama banter, a slave stands dutifully, if tiredly, in the background, tugging the rope connected to the 18th century ceiling fan above, each pull yielding a squeak that becomes the deliberately annoying soundtrack to the entire sequence. These slaves are never glimpsed outside of being forced to perform their tasks, yet frequently in shots Martel allows them a kind of release anyway in the form of bemused facial expressions as they endure the evident idiocy of their oppressors. It is the darkest of comedy but also an improbable, instant sketch of something like emotional liberation, demonstrating that their souls remain intact.

Zama’s soul, on the other hand, is out to sea. If years pass and run together as the movie progresses, he seems to grow not only older but more sickly. In another indelible frame, sill and hardly able to move, he is stripped naked and washed as a mother stands in the upper right-hand corner of the shot holding her young, naked infant, equating this nominally important magistrate with a child. As his dream of getting out grows ever more elusive, he can hardly bring himself to go through the motions, and so when, in a cruel punchline, he is denied his transfer yet again, he volunteers to help track down a legendary native bandit named Vicuna Porot.

Though there are scenes of natives surprising the Spanish party, retribution is not the point, just as the party’s express mission of finding and killing Porto is not the point. Porto’s standing is just a mocking counterpoint to Zama’s own lack of status, and this entire sequence illuminates that mockery. After all, the famed 1956 novel by Antonio Di Benedetto on which “Zama” is based is dedicated “to the victims of expectation,” a concise summary of Zama himself. And though the eeriness of this slow burning denouement suggests “Aguirre, the Wrath of God”, the astonishing, brutal, droll concluding shot is like “Paradise, Hawaiian Style” turned inside out. It made me think of a Bruce Springsteen line: “they wind up wounded, not even dead.”

Hallmark Holiday Movie Male Lead Wish List

Hallmark Holiday movies sink or swim based on their female lead. So much of the action revolves around and stems from them, it becomes paramount that they are up for the game, turning their nose up at Christmas celebrations early only to whimsically, believably find themselves celebrating Christmas as the plot wraps up. And if your female lead can evince this requisite transition, like Alicia Witt, like Candace Cameron Bure, what then elevates a good Hallmark Holiday movie to a great one comes down to the male lead. Those are harder to come by. Cameron Mathison has carved out a career in these oft-paint-by-the-numbers productions, specializing in a nigh zany earnestness that makes you believe that he believes that reindeer really can fly. And Dean Cain, bless his heart, emits solid professionalism in every role. But Mathisons and Cains are not dimes a dozen at the Hallmark Channel; they are the outliers.

I thought about this other night when My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I caught part of a new Hallmark Holiday feature, “Christmas in Love”, featuring the return of “Miss Christmas” herself, Brooke D’Orsay. She’s not on the level of Witt or CCB, never mind the G.O.A.T, Melissa Joan Hart, granted, but D’Orsay effuses efficient pep nonetheless. Alas, her “Christmas in Love” co-star, Daniel Lissing, did not swim; he sunk. Lord, did he. He’s one of those actors who when trying to appear pensive just appears vacuous, leaving the pull of the push/pull hung out to dry, a fleece vest in place of a person. As we watched, I kept thinking about who could have taken Lissing’s place. And as I thought about who could have taken Lissing’s place, I started thinking about other actors who could pop up in a Hallmark Holiday movie to ensure the dude’s half of the requisite love story isn’t lagging. And as I thought about other actors, I started thinking about what female actors you could pair with those male actors.

In the aforementioned “Miss Christmas”, Marc Blucas was the perfect counter to Ms. D’Orsay’s good cheer, playing a holdout Grinch with a skeptical grin. And though I have heard since that what Blucas was doing there is what Blucas is always doing, suggesting it was less a performance, per se, than a Blucas-sing, so what? Blucas-ing still constitutes Hallmark Holiday male lead A-list. Let’s have him Blucas again, but this time with Kimberley Sustad, a semi-regular yet oft-misemployed or underused Hallmark Holiday lead with an appealing air of oomph that would not have to change Blucas’s tune so much as sing in the same key.

But Blucas is already part of the Hallmark universe and we need to get outside of it. So what about Josh Hartnett, a late 90s/early aughts up and comer who has just sort of fallen away. True, he could never do much more than handsomely tread water, but everything is relative and what looks like treading water in Hollywood might well look like floating on air in Hallmark land. Besides, his name could command serious Countdown to Christmas cachet. So, while we’re thinking along those lines, why not enlist Josh Hartnett’s “40 Days and 40 Nights” co-star Shannyn Sossamon? It’s a marketing bonanza! You play up their reunion by re-invoking the number theme! Josh Harnett & Shannyn Sossamon Together Again in “10 Lords A Leaping”!

Billy Zane could use a comeback too. He was the (former) biggest box office hit of all time! He was The Phantom! At this diner I used to go to all the time in Chicago (until it closed to make way for a Bancorp, or something) his autographed still from “Memphis Belle” hung on the wall, scout’s honor! Now ol’ Billy is consigned to the straight-to-DVD hinterlands. I have no idea why he hasn’t received a call from Hallmark. We college football bowl game aficionados have been desperately pining for “A Rose for Christmas” sequel and Billy Zane is not afraid of an accent. So why not install Zane as the malcontent chairman of the Sugar Bowl parade – “A Sugar Bowl for Christmas” – who has already made a behind closed doors promise to award Best Float to a member of his good ol’ boy network only to find himself at odds with and then pining for the builder of another float (Khrystyne Haje) instead who reminds him how a parade route is not about cashing in favors but a metaphorical road to one’s heart.

The culture just needs more Carlos Jacott in general, and Jacott has the jocular wit that not enough of these Hallmark Holiday zeroes do, which would all on its own give his own version of one of these a lot of extra life. Tiffani Thiessen, meanwhile, fronted one of these Christmas movies a few years ago but has not returned since, perhaps because the film in question failed to truly utilize her specific brand of vim, a brand that I think would bounce well off Jacott. So let them spar as members of an HOA over the brightness and size of Christmas decorations all the live long day.

If there was a truly relevant actor that might do one of these movies, it’s probably James Franco. But James Franco would ironically posture too much. No, Michael Shannon, of course, is the only other truly relevant actor we might be able to land. I could see him shrugging, saying “Yeah, why not?”, and squeezing in a two week shoot between some indie he’s filming a play he’s doing. And he’d sync with the tone too. He’d get it. He’d run with it. I mean, picture it...Michael Shannon in the requisite opening walk and talk scene, wearing a black topcoat and clutching a to-go coffee cup with his black Isotoners, where his assistant is telling him how some so and so for Shannon’s consulting firm went to Blitzen, Connecticut to lay off the whole reindeer farm only to get misty-eyed when he met the employees and failed to go through with it. So Shannon growls and says he will go upstate to put those useless nobodies out of their misery only to arrive at the reindeer farm and meet the woman in charge who will be played by Cynthia Gibb because she is a Hallmark vet who has never fronted one of of these films herself and who has enough spunky magnetism to somehow both stare down Michael Shannon and wear down his cynical deflector shields enough so that she catches him one starry evening having a private chat with a reindeer he knows is not the real Blitzen even though, maybe, gosh darn it, who knows, it could be before he pulls on an ugly reindeer sweater to sing and dance in the reindeer farm’s annual Christmas Eve Christmas pageant.

10 Made For TV Christmas Movies To Watch This Holiday Season (by synopsis)

It’s the holiday season and in movie-land that means it’s the time for the heaviest awards-hitters to finally be unveiled. For the public, yes, but mostly for the press, for the critics, for the people with access, while most everyone else will have to wait for those persnickety one-week late-December runs until mid-January. And while we here at Cinema Romantico take pride in spotlighting films of fine pedigrees, we also find just as much joy in other places, broader places, ludicrous places, don’t-judge-me places like the Hallmark Channel. After all, Hallmark is Counting Down to Christmas Day with its 24 hour buffet of holiday-themed movies about hard-charging event planners and vaguely defined consultants played by people like Yuletide TV Movie MVP-Emeritus Jennie Garth. I’m not saying I have watched a few of ‘em between bouts of foreign and indie screeners (and at commercials of college football games), but I’m also not saying I haven’t. (I have.)

In that spirit, I am here as I am every holiday season to offer the cream of the Hallmark Channel, with a couple Lifetime contributions mixed in, Countdown to Christmas crop…based on synopsis, of course. Because nothing is more fun on TV than reading the synopsis of a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie.

10 Made For TV Christmas Movies To Watch This Holiday Season (by synopsis)

10. Christmas at Grand Valley. “Artist Kelly Riley (Danica McKellar) returns home to the picturesque Grand Valley just in time for Christmas. It will take the spirit of the season to open her heart to the love around her.” Being an artist, as everyone knows, is not about technique or vision but learning how to say “Merry Christmas.”

9. A Shoe Addict’s Christmas. “Noelle (Candace Cameron Bure), a holiday hater, becomes locked in a department store on Christmas Eve. There, she meets a woman who identifies herself as Noelle’s guardian angel and introduces Noelle to several ghosts of Christmas past, present and future.” Cameron Bure, who My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife considers the Hallmark Christmas crème de la crème, has starred in years past as the woman at odds with a man on a road trip after their holiday flight is cancelled, as identical twins who swap lives for the holidays, and, of course, as the hard-charging career woman who has her holiday spirit renewed in a small town. As such, it was only a matter of time before CCB went Dickens.

8. Every Day is Christmas. “A self-proclaimed workaholic (Toni Braxton) embraces the Christmas spirit when her past, present and future collide, forcing her to risk the one thing money can’t buy: her heart. ” So I guess what we’re saying is: Toni Braxton needs to un-break her heart.

7. The Spirit of Christmas. “Kate, a workaholic lawyer, has three weeks to get a haunted bed and breakfast appraised and sold. The uncooperative manager claims a spirit who lives there will not approve.” Evoking “The Nightmare Before Christmas”, this throwback from 2015 suggests a blending of Christmas and Halloween with a vintage first sentence modifier to communicate you are definitely still in Hallmark land.

6. Return to Christmas Creek. “After being told her new holiday app lacked Christmas spirit, a young CEO returns to her hometown to rediscover the meaning of the holidays.” Having seen this one, I can advise the app subplot takes an odd pro-commercialization of Christmas stance, the town of Christmas Creek becomes, as these things do, a sort of holiday version of Gatsby’s mansion, and Steven Weber’s dead-eyed stare elicits more seasonal despondence than “Silent Night, Deadly Night.”

5. Northern Lights of Christmas. “Zoey Hathaway (Ashley Williams) has been working towards her lifelong goal of being a pilot for years, but everything is thrown off-course when she unexpectedly inherits a reindeer farm, along with the dangerously handsome ranch hand Alec Wynn (Corey Sevier).” So much in play here, people. First, “dangerously handsome” intimates a little extra Hallmark spice (will this one air only after 9 PM EST?) while Zoey’s occupation suggests she’ll take the reins of Santa’s sleigh before it’s all said and done, a potential special effects goldmine surpassed only by the how-will-Hallmark-pull-this-off promise of the Northern Lights.

4. The Thanksgiving House. “After inheriting a house, a lawyer (Emily Rose) finds herself in a legal battle with a historian (Justin Bruening) who tells her it was the site of the first Thanksgiving.” I am desperate to see what the literal First Thanksgiving house looks like on a Hallmark Channel budget; My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife is desperate to see how the Hallmark Channel thinks a historian looks. Either/or, this is must see.

3. Pride, Prejudice, and Mistletoe. “A career woman (Lacey Chabret) who hasn’t found love has her life turned upside down when she returns home to care for her sick mother.” All on its own this synopsis would be intrinsically Hallmark, instantly establishing its card-carrying Countdown to Christmas credentials straight away with “career woman.” But, obviously, the title, a riff on Jane Austen, takes this one a bit higher if only because the very ideas her Pride and Prejudice sought to subvert are ones the Hallmark Channel traditionally seeks to embody with all the milquetoast it can muster, teasing a push/pull of epic proportions.

2. A Very Nutty Christmas. “Kate (Melissa Joan Hart), a workaholic baker, has given up on Christmas, especially this year, when her boyfriend dumps her and she's got to fill an order of 12,000 cookies before Christmas. However, the gift of a magic nutcracker who turns into a real man makes the once cynical Kate understand the magic and beauty of Christmas--and of love.” A nutcracker coming to life would have been enough to land this in the Top 10, obviously, but Melissa Joan Hart, as she re-proved in last holiday season’s “A Very Merry Toy Store”, where she threw so much convincing shade at Mario Lopez’s rival toy store despite their obligatory falling in love that he must have decided not to return for this one, is the G.O.A.T and drags it to #2.

1. Christmas at the Palace. “Katie, a former professional ice skater (Merritt Patterson), is hired by the king of San Senova, Alexander, to help his daughter in a Christmas ice skating performance. As Katie spends time in the castle, she and Alex begin to develop feelings for each other.” The movie combines the spirit of so many Sonja Henie ice skating spectaculars with right on topicality of an ordinary American turned Royal a la her unassailableness Meghan Markle (we’re not worthy!!!). It’s got everything.

3,000

As Baseball Hall of Famer Eddie Murray approached his 3,000th hit in 1995 he kept saying the milestone did not matter. He might have been right. Tris Speaker hit # 3,000 in 1925, and, much later, in 1958, told the Associated Press of his, quote-unquote, milestone, “I couldn’t tell you when I hit it, or where, or who the pitcher was.” No, much like the incomparable hitting maestro Ichiro Suzuki upon reaching 3,000 hits in 2016 explained contextualizing his achievement would only truly be possible after the passage of time, 3,000 hits acquired its marker status only once myriad baseball players came and went and a mere few managed to put that many balls in play, causing the number to Mean Something.

And it has come to mean something, certainly it has, given that every baseball player who has achieved 3,000 hits has entered the Hall of Fame on the first ballot. Joe Posnanski has argued, sort of, that the real accomplishment is not so much acquiring 3,000 hits as the number of at-bats it takes to get 3,000 hits. In other words, it is almost less about swinging the bat than simply practicing stubbornness. Give yourself enough chances, perhaps, and any yokel can do it, which might well stifle much of the statistic’s fanciful air though maybe that practicality is truer anyway.

That’s why the Iron Man himself, Cal Ripken Jr., managed to get there, and that’s why so many players you distinctly remember playing for certain teams hit #3,000 playing for teams you don’t remember them suiting up for at all – Wade Boggs for the Devil Rays, Rickey Henderson for the Padres, and Albert Pujols, most recent member, for the Los Angeles Angels which still doesn’t sound right to this old-timer on two levels.

In a different time, Pujols’s accomplishment might truly have stopped the national presses, or maybe not. Indeed, when the irascible Ty Cobb reached 4,000 hits (!) in 1927 the headline in the Detroit Free Press went like this: “Bengals In Third Place; Ty Cobb Gets 4,000th Hit.” The late Tony Gwynn got his 3,000th hit in 1999, at the nadir of Montreal baseball, where few were attendance and some of the few who were apparently didn’t even know what had transpired until they stopped the game to honor Gwynn, eliciting the distinct impression that perspective is what matters most about what matters.

Paul Waner reached 3,000 hits in June of 1942 when an opposing shortstop could only knock Waner’s ground ball down, failing to make the throw for an out. The press box ruled it a hit, but Waner literally insisted they change it to an error. “I wanted my 3,000 hit to be a clean one,” he said, and he got that hit two days later. That is my favorite 3,000 hit story because it seems to both embrace the overcooked theatricality of the milestone while also ensuring that he passed the milestone on his own terms.

In that spirit I tell you today is Cinema Romantico’s 3,002nd post. Cinema Romantico’s 3,000th post took place, unnoticed, on Tuesday. And for all our loyal frustrated followers who have endured the diatribes and dissertations, not to mention the no one knows what and don’t even ask, can undoubtedly attest, a “Destination Wedding” wedding review as our 3,000th post is right on our blogging brand along with an absence of letter grades and star ratings, refusal to run ads, and resistance to clickbait unless by cosmic coincidence. Onward and, well, if not Upward, at least in some minor to moderate northerly direction.

Book Club

The novel at the center of Bill Holderman’s 2018 comedy “Book Club” is E.L. James’s infamous “Fifty Shades” trilogy of trash. It suggests, as the trailer did, no doubt to try and lure the youngsters for whom movies about the elderly are, per marketing focus groups, an anathema, a senior citizen fronted gross-out comedy. Oh, there are plenty of double entendres and illicit metaphors, true, as well as an extended Viagra joke between Carol (Mary Steenburgen) and her oblivious husband Bruce (Craig T. Nelson, oblivious). But that Viagra joke improbably yields a genuine conversation, a la National Treasure Eugene Levy giving genuine council to the Jason Biggs character in the aftermath of his super glue incident in “American Pie 2.” Indeed, the book club of the title convened by Carol and her three longtime pals Diane (Diane Keaton), Vivian (Jane Fonda), and Sharon (Candice Bergen) is less about discussing the books in question than drinking white wine and employing those books as fuel to discuss their pleasures, or lack thereof, and as a window into broadening their outlooks on life and love. And really, isn’t that the point of art?

Those Viagra pills being given to Carol by Vivian evokes Samantha Jones, as My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife who was watching along with me noted, likening the quartet to the four icons of HBO’s “Sex and the City.” And much like that show disappointingly concluded on a note where all four women seemingly needed to be paired off rather than still gallantly single before the show could have a proper end, “Book Club” charts a similar path. The women casting off their spiritual shackles goes hand in hand with finding someone new or revitalizing the love they already had, though, to its credit, “Book Club” proves, on a plot by plot basis anyway, a bit more spry than this convention suggests.

These various male counterparts are hit or miss. Jane Fonda carries herself with a powerfully independent air, and Don Johnson, as a former lover re-introduced into her life, simply can’t match such energy. So he tries to downplay but to often feels like he's getting blown back anyway.
Andy Garcia, on the other hand, as Mitchell, an airline pilot who catches a flight in coach alongside Diane, evinces such a relaxed presence that he plays off Keaton’s comic discombobulation perfectly, letting his small smile do all the work, amused and entranced in equal measure; he makes it as good as a Meet Cute can get. Later, at a picturesque dinner at dusk alongside the Pacific, he sits with Keaton in a long shot, his legs crossed, attentively hanging on every word, belying the notion that he is just someone there for her to fall in love with but someone she is falling in love with because he’s interested in what she has to say.

Bergen, meanwhile, playing a divorced federal judge has abstained from dating in 18 years tentatively re-enters the dating game by going online (plug: Bumble). She meets one really nice man (Richard Dreyfuss) but the movie, thankfully, never pushes it, her dazed expression in a facial mask inadvertently becoming her profile pic functioning as a comical metaphor of how even as she agrees to something that is out of her hands it is nevertheless still on her terms. And so, Bergen is as Bergen does, tossing off acerbic one-liners like poison darts, swaggering into Book Club as the movie opens, throwing down her purse, and declaring her need for a drink. Later, at her son’s engagement party hosted by Sharon’s ex-husband, simply the way Bergen has her character take in some sort of modern art on the wall evokes a droll weariness with all of life’s nominally rich pageantry.

There is an inevitability to all these storylines, of course, because movies made in the vein of “Book Club” narratively never stray far from the beaten path even if their characters do. And no storyline has a more familiar arc than Carol and Bruce’s, hinging on dance lessons leading to a dance contest, a little like “Silver Linings Playbook” but without as much screwball liqueur and bitters. And yet. Even if they pull apart before only to re-convene in the midst of the dance itself, the movie waits a minute before Bruce joins in, allowing Carol the spotlight all to herself. She finds her happiness, in other words, without having it merely impressed upon her, just as he does too, which sounds a lot how love is actually supposed to work.

Destination Wedding

Midway through “Destination Wedding”, Frank (Keanu Reeves) and Lindsay (Winona Ryder), the anti-social duo destined to fall in love, or something like it, have returned to their hotel after the eponymous ceremony. They are lying in bed. He explains how, borrowing the Greek Mythology’s Flaws of Aphrodite and revising it, Lindsay possesses “the folds of Aphrodite”, which he defines as the graceful way “the cheeks of beautiful women arrange themselves when they smile.” It is not objectification. Even if “Destination Wedding” attempts to turn these two into genuine characters through conversation in which they harangue each other about their wants and needs and what they hate and what they really hate, Keanu’s robotic intonations and Winona’s Emmy-Reacting-GIF of a performance make it virtually impossible to distinguish them as Frank and Lindsay. And that’s okay. That’s why we’re here, to get lost in their movie stardom, and Keanu is simply speaking for all of us when he compliments Winona’s cheekbones.

That makes it a little unfortunate, then, that director Victor Levin, who also wrote the screenplay, almost completely forgoes fawning close-ups. I mean, really? No, his preferred style is either medium or long shots of both actors, the camera peering at them from between rows of winery barrels or from afar as they sit side-by-side in massage chairs or through various wedding guests as they sit in the back row and cast judgment on all those around them. The only times Levin does cut closer is usually in the midst of one of Frank and Lindsay’s long-running conversations and only for a second, lingering not on the respective actor’s features but their instant reactions. It’s disappointing even if it makes sense. After all, this movie is just them, never allowing us to hear from any other characters, not the bride or the groom, not even the guy on the curb at the end when Frank asks him a question, the latter seeming to be Levin deliberately underlining at the last second his whole movie was just supposed to be Frank and Lindsay (Keanu and Winona).

It’s a good thing that it’s them, frankly, because Frank and Lindsay are fairly disagreeable if not downright irritating people. The movie is subtitled “A Narcissist Can’t Die Because Then the Entire World Would End” for a reason. They are self-involved and, per romantic comedy tradition, at odds immediately. But then, that self-involvement is, in its own way, what draws them together. Given that the entire movie is a running conversation between two people in a scenic locale, Cinema Romantico is obligated to drop a “Before Sunrise” comparison. And that is true, so long as you sub out Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy for, like, I dunno, Jack Nicholson in “As Good As It Gets” and Joan Allen in “The Upside of Anger.” These two are so insufferable that there is no one else on Earth, most likely, properly suited for them. Narcissists deserve love too, in other words, which is essentially what “Destination Wedding” boils down to, so long as you are lending credence to all the philosophical, or thereabouts, ideas they are espousing, which, honestly, you maybe don’t even need to do to accept their own version of love anyway.

At one point Frank chastises Lindsay for complaining about her lot in life, explaining that this is what the 99% detests about the 1%, even if Frank and Lindsay are not, technically, the 1%. He and she have problems, yes, and they are right to, that’s okay, but they should, he implores, suffer silently and get on with it. No one wants to hear, in other words, about the problems of beautiful people. True, though they don’t tend to mind looking at beautiful people just be beautiful which is why we have movies and movie stars in the first place. Silents are virtually extinct, but while “Destination Wedding” could use two dozen more close-ups, and it’s not really a movie about snappy editing, you could still watch with earplugs and come away content.

First Man

If there is irony in “First Man” it pertains less to a story concerning the first mission to the moon deliberately reduced to the scope of a character study, particularly because the space flight sequences are still so thrillingly rendered, than it does to that character study focusing on a character, Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling), who, aside from his lunar feat, was perhaps most famous for his privacy, shunning the public eye for a quiet life of lecturing and teaching. That’s not to suggest he was some enigmatic hermit, as James R. Hansen’s book, “First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong”, and upon which “First Man” was based, makes clear. And while Armstrong is not portrayed as such, he is still transformed into something more like a tormented soul suggestive of a modern indie loner given director Damien Chazelle’s jittery handheld aesthetic and Gosling’s repressed performance that never lets us all the way in no matter how close the camera gets.

“First Man” puts you on Armstrong’s level immediately by way of his 1962 X-15 test flight as Chazelle jarringly forgoes any establishing shots to simply drop us inside the jet’s almost indecipherable cacophony. Though there is dialogue between Armstrong and Mission Control, the latter of which we never see, it is virtually inaudible over the terrible racket, the sound itself communicating the flight’s distress until all that clamor cuts out completely when Armstrong’s flight breaks through the atmosphere and into the edge of space. It is sudden, if brief, peace above the earth, before he plummets.

It sets the template of Armstrong’s cool under pressure, yes, but also how Chazelle films the action – that is, intimately, viscerally, gut-churningly, and often obliquely. There are scenes of Armstrong and his Gemini recruits throwing up after getting turned every which way but loose on some sort of flight simulator and “First Man” brings you to the brink of feeling sick too, ensuring you understand that the Gemini Project and Apollo Missions were not experiences to enjoy so much as ordeals to survive. Astronauts are strapped into their tin can capsules upside down, emphasizing the cramped, claustrophobic nature of early space travel, and the windows barely seem conducive to seeing through, brought home in Apollo 11’s arrival at the moon where their destination dropping into view is not an awe-inspiring reveal but virtually out of focus, an immaculate evocation of how abstruse the awesome must have been to space flight’s pioneers.

If the latter fuzzes up the seeming inherent transcendence in walking on the moon, so does a mid-movie montage featuring Gil Scott-Herron (Leon Bridges), whom Chazelle cuts to throughout, reciting his poem “Whitey’s on the Moon”, a lyrical critique of the space race as a Patriotic dog and pony show ignoring so many earthly problems by wasting money. This is the most pointed rebuke to the mission, proving the movie is less interested in Who did what, as all that nonsensical pre-release consternation drummed up sight-unseen suggested, than a more philosophical Why it was done at all. Yet it is a question the movie cannot answer specifically because the characters, or, more accurately, character, is not interested in answering it.

If the space race is mentioned a couple times tangentially, “First Man’s” Armstrong has nothing to say on the matter. At a Washington D.C. schmooze session, when Armstrong learns by phone that the three Apollo I astronauts have died, Gosling refuses to betray if his character’s terse anger is from the senselessness of lives lost or how these lives lost might repudiate the Apollo missions altogether. Later, a sequence in which Armstrong’s wife Janet (Claire Foy) literally forces her husband to sit down and talk to his sons before embarking for the moon, perhaps never to return, Gosling does not settle on being purposely closed off or just too erudite for his own good (“Do you have any other questions?”).

There are moments when Armstrong’s lurking humanity is hinted at, like a dinner with several other astronaut families, where he haltingly acknowledges a musical he wrote in college. It gives you a sense of why Janet might have fallen for him in the first place, though even there, in Gosling’s comically dry explanation of “the Land of Egelloc”, he expresses a sheepishness that is politely standoffish. If it’s true to the person, it makes things tough for the character Chazelle is trying to create, which winds up tying all Armstrong’s motivation to the death of his two year old daughter Karen from a brain tumor. That terrible moment is re-visited throughout, whether in cryptic conversations, flashbacks, or hallucinations, explicitly tying the character’s reticence to this tragedy since Gosling gives nothing else away.

As such, the moon’s desolation, which Chazelle makes very clear with shots of the empty, gray vistas, becomes a metaphor for Armstrong’s own, until he casts it off through a totem of his daughter’s, ostensibly healing his wound, though the closing shot of a glass partition suggests there is still ground to cover. And though early in the movie Armstrong explains the meaning of going to the moon might only become clear upon reaching it, “First Man” is so intent on connecting that meaning to what precedes the moon landing, the concluding triumph is reduced to hoary catharsis.

In Memoriam: William Goldman

William Goldman died yesterday. He was 87. He was a Hollywood writing titan, winning the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar in 1977 for “All the President’s Men” and winning the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for “Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid” in 1970. He skipped out on attending the latter ceremony to watch his beloved New York Knicks instead, an acute window into Goldman’s psychology. He was part of Hollywood, obviously, but he also stood outside of it. (He was, I think, like an R-rated version of Eli Wallach in “The Holiday.” What I have would have given for him to rewrite that movie.) A lot of industry types tiptoe around saying what they mean; Goldman just said it, as his books “Adventures in the Screen Trade” and “The Big Picture: Who Killed Hollywood? and Other Essays” go to show. The latter, in fact, culled one of his essays from the greatest movie magazine of ‘em all, Premiere (RIP), in which, ahead of the 1998 Oscars, he let loose with a comprehensive trashing of (quite a bit of) Spielberg’s pseudo-sacred “Saving Private Ryan.” I adored that essay. It made as big an impression on me as anything from official film critics of the era.

And trying to memorialize a wordsmith like William Goldman with anything but his own words feels wrong. He wrote for himself well enough. So, here, in full, from, again, “The Big Picture: Who Killed Hollywood? and Other Essays”, is his essay on “Saving Private Ryan.” Rest well, Mr. Goldman. If there’s a heaven, I hope you’re already critiquing the latest production at Paradise’s Playhouse.

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The bullshit started early with this baby. I remember these remarkable interviews being given on the talk shows during the standard pre-opening hype. Sort of like this:

RYAN HYPIST I have to tell you the most important thing of all.
GENERIC KATIE Please.
RYAN HYPIST (Pause) Well this movie, it's . . . UM . . . violent.
GENERIC KATIE (Nodding—fascinated) You mean . . . bloody?
RYAN HYPIST Oh yes, oh God yes, bloody, so much blood, people getting blown up, killed—I have to tell you all this Generic Katie because I would never want to mislead the audience: this movie is a blood bath. Just so your audience knows that before they go—this movie is filled with battle scenes and gore and explosions and young men dying.
GENERIC KATIE (moved) Thank you for being so . . . brave and honest with us. I know it must have been hard for you.

And I am staring at the tube thinking, what is everybody smoking? Let me put it another way. Let's say I am hyping a re-make of How To Marry A Millionaire. But instead of a frothy comedy with Bacall and Grable and Monroe, I have made a hard R version. Starring Cameron Diaz and Heather Graham and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

MILLIONAIRE HYPIST I have to tell you the most important thing of all.
GENERIC KATIE Please.
MILLIONAIRE HYPIST (Pause) Well, this movie, it's .. . um . . . sexual.
GENERIC KATIE (nodding, fascinated) You mean .. . with nudity?
MILLIONAIRE HYPIST Oh yes, oh God yes, passion, so much nakedness, people having orgasms—I have to tell you all this Generic Katie because I would never want to mislead the audience: this movie is carnal. Just so your audience knows be¬fore they go—this movie is filled with rapes and lesbianism and nipples and young women screaming with sexual pleasure.
GENERIC KATIE (moved) Thank you so for being so . . . brave and honest with us. I know it must have been hard for you.

Sex and violence are the twin items Hollywood wants most desperately to sell these awful days. That's why the Ryan hype was so fraudulent. Here is the kind of brave and honest hype you will never live to see.

HYPIST I have to tell you the most important thing of all.
GENERIC KATIE Please.
HYPIST (Pause) Well this movie, it's . . . um . . . philo-sophical.
GENERIC KATIE (Nodding, fascinated) You mean . . . with talk?
HYPIST Oh, yes, oh God, yes, tons of conversation, all of it dealing with pain and suffering and how to live on earth without doing harm. I would never want to mislead your audience: This movie is intelligent. Just so your audience knows before they go—this movie is thought-provoking and deep and filled with the kind of wisdom we so need on earth these days.
GENERIC KATIE (To herself) Didn't believe one word.

Saving Private Ryan begins, as I'm sure everyone has told you, with an incredible battle sequence. Maybe that was true for them, but the version I saw sure began differently: a fif-teen-second shot of Old Glory a-wavin' in the wind. With Copland-like music in the background. Even John Wayne would have been embarrassed to start a movie that way. Hearts and flowers, God bless America, all that awful stuff. Today, only the Farrellys could get away with something like that.

Then there follows a weird sequence which I have sub-titled "The Man With the Big-Boobed Girls." And I am not being facetious. This old guy lumbers around someplace, we don't know where, and behind him are a bunch of Norman Rockwell types, but all I can concentrate on are these big¬boobed girls who are tagging along. Then we find that we're in a cemetery, and a shot of a flag tells us France. Lots of crosses. He kneels, at a particular cross, weeps, some of the family run to him, the big-boobed ones hanging back.

Then a long shot of his moist eyes and as the camera moves slowly into a close up of those eyes, we know this much: we are going into flashback now.

The story that has moved this old man is about to be told.

And now we are into the battle sequence.

What to say about it? Fabulous, brilliant, extraordinary, whatever you want. And do you know why? The length: twenty four minutes. The stuff itself is absolute as good and no better than Francis Coppola's war stuff or Oliver Stone's war stuff. But here it just goes pulverizingly on and on. It was brave of writer Robert Rodat to write it that way and brave of director Steven Spielberg to direct it with that incredible relentless tension.

What to say about Spielberg? For me, as great a shooter as anyone in movie history. Clearly the most important American director of the last thirty years, and on occasion, the most brilliant.

When he is in his wheel house. More of that presently.

As anybody reading this must know, Robert Rodat's story is about a squad of soldiers sent on a rescue mission—to find a Private Ryan, a young soldier who has lost three broth¬ers in action. Ryan, once located, is to be sent back home be¬fore another tragedy totally destroys the remains of his family.

The last shot of the great battle sequence is a shot of a dead soldier named Ryan. OK, so what the movie has to do is simple: get the rescue squad going after the kid. The Spielberg of Raider's of the Lost Ark would have taken maybe a minute to set that up. Tom Hanks, the squad leader would have been called into a commander's presence, told to find a Private Ryan. Hanks would ask why and the Commander would say what you know: to make sure he does not die like his brothers. Get him home now and get him home safely. Those are your orders. Go!

That is not a hard premise to set up. In this movie it takes Spielberg thirteen pretentious, operatic minutes. (An amazing length of movie time.) Climaxed when a General reads a letter Honest Abe Lincoln wrote which is soooo moving, sports fans, it brings tears to the other high officers who are listening to the General.

Sure.

Then, after more uninteresting stuff, forty minutes into the movie, Hanks' squad finally sets off on their odyssey to find Private Ryan. And the hunt for him is just terrific. (A word here—he will not win the Oscar but Tom Sanders sure should—great production design.)

Sequence after sequence. The village with the French girl and the sudden Nazi's and the wrong Ryan. The church. The wounded area with the haunted pilot where they fmd out where Ryan might be. The bunker fight with the Nazi who Hanks releases and wonderful work between Tom Sizemore and Ed Burns and Hanks. Then the fight with the tank and off¬handedly, surprisingly, they find Private Ryan.

We are an hour and forty five minutes into the movie now. We have just had an hour plus of sensational storytelling. And I am so excited because I know what is going to happen now: they are going to take Ryan back only it is going to be so much harder than finding him was. Maybe they would revisit some of the places—would the pilot have killed himself, would the French girl be killed by sniper madness, would the madness of the entire enterprise come crashing down around them? The story was going to be like a great snowball, accumulating as it roared toward climax, gathering weight and size and emotional power as Hanks desperately tried to get the kid home to his shattered mother.

And guess what: the rest of the movie is a disgrace. Fifty plus minutes of phony manipulative shit.

Things start going south immediately. We are in a bombed French village which has a valuable bridge. Hanks tells Ryan to get ready. And Ryan—Matt Damon—says this: he doesn't want to go. Sure his mom has suffered, sure it's awful what's happened to his family, but these guys are his brothers now and he will not leave them.

Do you believe that? Do you believe that a young man who has just been informed his family has been devastated, that his mother has had grief overpowering poured on her, would say, hey, I'm sure mom'll understand but I want to stay here in the mud with my buddies.

Barely.

I can kind of make a case that Ryan is young and in such shock and feels so guilty at his good/bad fortune, he really at that moment wants to stay. OK. I go with that. Then the first nail in the coffin: Hanks goes along with it—hey, what a neat idea, I'll stay too.

Inconceivable, as Vizzini would say.

Before I get to how it's done in the movie, let me make a parallel. Let's say you and I were given a sworn task by our father. To make sure little Matt next store gets to school that day. Our most important task on earth is to make sure that happens. OK. We go to little Matt's house, tell him to come along. And he says this: "My best friend in the world is visiting me today. I won't go."

And you and I think about it and decide we have only two choices.
(1) To let him stay home.
(2) To stay home with him.
Take a second. That make sense? Are those the only two choices available? How about adding a third: bringing the little fucker to school. In an awful awful scene, after Matt has stamped his foot in anger, Hanks and Tom Sizemore, the tough Sergeant have a talk.

Sizemore asks what Hanks' orders are and Hanks replies thusly: "Sergeant, we have crossed some strange boundary here. The world has taken a turn for the surreal."

And I am sitting there thinking no, nothing surreal about it. A simple request has been made that needs a simple answer.

Sizemore tells Hanks this. "Some part of me thinks the kid's right. What's he done to deserve this? If he wants to stay here fine. Let's leave him and go home."

And Hanks says "yeah."

And I say, where did the notion of leaving him and going home come from? Surely it has never been breathed on planet Earth before. What are you talking about? Then Sizemore hits him with the clincher: "But another part of me thinks what if by some miracle we stay and actually make it out of here? Some day we might look back on this and decide that saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we were able to pull out of this whole God awful shitty mess . . . . We do that, Captain, we all earn the right to go home."

So they stay. (Sizemore's speech might have made sense earlier—when they were having the fight about staying or going home, earlier in the flick, before they had found Ryan.)

You know the worst thing? It would have been easy to have them stay and not be phony about it. How? Try this:

Matt makes his pitch. Hanks says I understand your emotions, but we're out of here right now.
Next cut, they are leaving the village. Next cut they are crossing the bridge. Next cut, walking in the countryside
-and then a close up of Hanks and he stares and guess what?—
—The Germans are coming, They're here, it's too late to leave.
Next cut, exactly what we have now, and go on as be¬fore, only with more urgency. And without the awful manipulation.

The Ugly Tree

The most damaging speech of the movie comes next. Hanks and Matt Damon are waiting for the attack. Damon says he cannot summon up his dead brothers faces and Hanks says, think of something specific. Hanks, when he thinks of home, thinks of his hammock or his wife pruning the roses wearing his gloves.

And Matt Damon starts into this long—two minutes, folks—remembrance of the last time he and his brothers were together. A sexual escapade when one of his brothers was trying to fuck this girl, a girl who "took a nose dive out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down."

The speech—ad libbed by Matt Damon is the only time we get to spend any private time with Ryan. And the speech does not exactly endear him to us. It also rips a lot of the emotional fabric of the film to pieces. I would love to know what the real script said at this point. And I wonder only this: how could Spielberg allow something this atrocious to happen?

The Shooting of Tom Hanks

A bunch of Germans come running toward camera. They get into prone position, start to fire. We are drawn to¬ward one particular German bad guy. Want to know why? He's the only one without a helmet. And, gasp, we realize he is that very same Nodzi who Hanks let live in the earlier sequence. (Spielberg has just discovered irony.) And, shock of shocks, he is the very one who plugs poor Tom.

Now of course, this is manipulation to the nth power. But that's ok, lots of movies do that. But it is not ok here. And why?

Because it gives the lie to the great part of the film.

That wonderful twenty-four minute sequence? What did that tell us about war? That it is awful, yes, of course that. But it also told us this: war is non-sensical, illogical, totally beyond human comprehension.

But here it is all totally understandable. Let a bad guy go, guess what, he will return, relentless and helmetless to kill you. (And hang around conveniently so the cowardly lion of the flick, the translator, can become a man by killing the very man who shot his captain.) In order for this sequence to be in balance with the entire film, that opening battle sequence would have to be altered so that it was about John Wayne fighting his way to glory and saving all his raw recruits around him. Then this bullshit with the German soldier is in keeping with the film.

But it doesn't fucking matter who kills Tom Hanks. His death is what matters. His death is the tragedy.

The Death of Tom Hanks

Hanks is dying, Ed Burns runs for a medic, Matt Damon is alone with Hanks. And do you know what Hanks' last words were? Of course you don't, no one does, not the first time they see the movie. Because not only are they whispered so softly, they have never before been spoken on this or any planet. "Earn this . . . earn it." Those are the words.

I have zero idea what that can possibly mean. My only explanation is this: Spielberg was up half the night before reading Philosophy for Dummies and he wanted to inject that nugget into his flick.

Ed Burns at the Cemetery

Hanks is dead, the awful pretentious voice of the actor playing General Marshall is treackling away, we hear ole Honest Abe's letter again and I am now waiting for the shot of Ed Burns with the big boobed girls back at the cemetery. Why do I know that is coming? Well, only two members of the squad are left, Burns and the cowardly translator and I know it can't be him because he was not with Hanks and the squad during the twenty-four minutes of glory at the start of the film. So it has to be Burns standing there among the graves.

Now the morphing shot comes -and I am looking at the old face of Matt Damon at the cemetery. Well, you can't do that. Don't you see, he wasn't fucking there. He knew nothing of the attack on the beach, knew nothing of the odyssey that followed, and he never had a chance to hear about it. The only spare moment he had was when he was telling us all about his brothers and the ugly girl and setting the barn on fire.

When he was great, and he was great, Spielberg was a phenomenal storyteller. All gone. That, or he doesn't care.

How's about Spielberg's version of Moby Dick: "Call me Ishmael. I'm going to tell you a story of this ship and this one legged captain and this whale. Actually, I don't know if the guy was one legged. Never saw him, never saw the ship, never saw the whale, never talked to anybody who ever saw anything."

"Who better than I to tell you what happened?"

The other disgrace of this storytelling is this: there is no pregnant moment to the story. (I'm not going all intellectual on you—remember, the Zipper scene and Matt Dillon trying to electrocute the dog back to life were my happiest moments this year in a theatre.) But all stories do and must have them. They are the reason the story is being told. The pregnant moment of Shakespeare in Love is this: Will has a block. We do not tell of Joe and Gwyneth after he's written King Lear—the whole point is the guy can't write anything. Armageddon happens when it happens because the meteor is on its way.

There is absolutely no reason for this story being told now since Matt has no specific reason for visiting the cemetery.

Didn't have to be phony. Say it was Ed Burns. Who has the flashback legitimately. Say he had a reason for coming pick any one you want. Try this: Ryan has just done something splendid. Or Ryan has just died but had a good life.

"Remember that little shit you died for?" Burns might say. "Guess what? He turned out okay. Not worth your dying, Captain, but at least it's something. Thought you'd like to know."

The Ending

Just when you think Spielberg has stooped as low as even he can, new thresholds are reached. Four agonizing minutes of pretentious syrup, climaxing when Matt asks his wife has he been a good man? What is she going to answer? Her husband is clearly having a breakdown. She says yes and Matt—wait for it—he salutes!

Then Old Glory returns, waving at us for half a minute. I guess reminding us that God and Steven Spielberg are on the same side.

Medicinal Level—A.

Can't get much higher. Patriotism and the flag and easy answers galore. Phony and manipulative, all in the sense of Country.

What to say about Spielberg at this stage of his career? He will win his second Oscar for this work, and probably a third when he finds another 'importante' subject to hide be¬hind. (Religious persecution, racial injustice, patriotism.)

I have never met him, never been in a room with him, but no person can come so far in such a killingly competitive business without having a reservoir of anger and rage and dark-ness hiding in there somewhere. I just wish once he would let it show.

There is no reason for him to do anything else than what he has been doing. The movies are wildly successful at the box-office, the critics bow.

And if he had directed Bambi, guess what? Bambi's mother would never have died .. .

Friday's Old Fashioned: Repeat Performance (1947)

One of the defining elements of noir is, of course, fate, whether real or imagined. Characters lash out at fate, convinced it’s out to get them, no matter what they do, or characters are bound to fate, determined to overcome it, only to find themselves as boats beating against fate’s current. And if fate often works as an agent of plot, it also becomes an effective means of placing human agency squarely under the microscope, asking how much pull our own decisions have, and whether the course of our own lives is written by us and our own impulses, whether best or worst, or by supernatural forces beyond our control. “Repeat Performance” (1947) takes the notion of supernatural forces literally, utilizing the mystic to explore the influence we have in the shaping of our lives, re-imagining “It’s a Wonderful Life” not as a chance to see what life would like without you but getting a chance to go through part of your life all over again.

“Repeat Performance” opens on New Year’s Eve 1947 with Sheila Page (Joan Leslie) having just shot dead her alcoholic husband Barney (Louis Hayward) and fleeing the scene. She finds her friend, a poet, William Williams (Richard Basehart), who leads her to the apartment of theater producing pal, John Friday (Tom Conway), a sequence embellished with an overwrought score foreshadowing the movie’s melodrama, as well as equally melodramatic, even un-noirish, narration, spoken not by Sheila from, say, some place in the future looking back, but an omniscient narrator explaining precisely what’s about to happen – that is, Sheila, wishing she hadn’t pulled the trigger, wishing she could get another crack at it, and suddenly finding herself whisked back to New Year’s Eve 1946.

She makes this realization upon turning around to find William has vanished from the stairs, and in subsequent conversations with Tom, and in returning to home to discover, yes, Barney, is still alive and kicking, not yet on a never-ending bender. The movie itself does not give Sheila much time to adjust to this sudden cosmic alteration, but it doesn’t need to; it has Leslie’s eyes. They become big, round, searching, first in a confused, even terrified manner, like someone who’s spent a long time in the dark and now is trying to adjust to a whole new place, though eventually they seem to betray a kind of round the bend recognition of what has happened. And as she initially settles into her 1946 redux, Leslie emits an air of politeness almost to the extreme, akin to her friend William when he winds up later in a mental institution. Whether it’s real or not, and the movie seems to suggest it is, Sheila has reached some level of acceptance.

This crazy-eyed acceptance, in fact, gives great rise to the rest of her performance for even as her character warns William of his impending placement in a mental institution, tries to curb her husband’s drinking problem and fend off his forthcoming affair with a devious playwright named Paula (Virginia Field), she also resettles right into the script. In that way, the movie’s taking place in the theater world, with Sheila once again assuming a role written for her Paula even as she allows Paula right back in to Barney’s orbit, evokes the idea of our respective lives as roles we play, beholden to the cosmos’s script. Yet at the last minute, the characters find a way around the fatalism, which might not have been so bad if it came across more like life’s actors going off script in the middle of the performance than the actual movie’s screenplay writing off the very real problems of William as a plot necessity.

In the end, Destiny’s Loophole might have proved a better title than “Repeat Performance.”

Of Course! the Ballad of Shea Whigham

“All the Real Girls” (2003) was the first time I saw Shea Whigham. That was David Gordon Green’s second feature film, though it was the first one I’d seen, and it was predominantly a showcase for his demonstration of mood, Zooey Deschanel’s verbal idiosyncrasies, and the western North Carolina locations. All that made an impression, absolutely, but so did Whigham in playing Tip, best friend of the main character Paul (Paul Schneider). Whigham’s performance was as physically expressive as Deschanel’s was verbally. Indeed, though his character initially comes across like a cocky kind of good ol’ boy, the dainty way Whigham has Tip hold his omnipresent tall boys and suspiciously side-eye Paul whenever they talk about his sister, or about any girls in general, elicits the idea that he is not being entirely honest within himself about who he is without ever actually having to say so. And if it’s true that any part Deschanel plays instantly becomes hers because of her singular aura, just as its true of her and Whigham’s “All the Real Girls” co-star Danny McBride, it is true of Whigham too.

This all occurred to me in the space of, like, seven seconds, I swear, during “First Man” (review to come). That’s wonderboy Damien Chazelle’s flick about Neil Armstrong, who is played by Ryan Gosling, though I was even more taken by Kyle Chandler’s casting as Deke Slayton because, between this and “Carol”, I really find myself compelled by Chandler’s ability to embody a certain kind of mid-20th century American Male archetype. And as I thought about that, I thought about whether or not Chandler might be in the running for Cinema Romantico’s end-of-the-year Random Award for casting. But then I thought, “Nah, that’s still Shea Whigham for playing Joe Cronin in ‘The Catcher Was a Spy’” for the way Whigham so effortlessly embodies the gruffness typically inherent in the Baseball Manager. And just as I thought that, hand of Lauren Bacall, who should turn up onscreen in “First Man” but, yes, Shea Whigham as Gus Grissom. Of course! I thought as I figuratively smacked my forehead. “Of course Shea Whigham is Gus Grissom!”

Whigham, I realized, is an Of Course! guy. That, to paraphrase, Daniel Day-Lewis’s Hawkeye is a breed apart from your That Guy!, or your Oh, Him, or your Hushed Tone “It’s [so and so]” – like, the time in “Big Fish” when I literally heard the audience around me murmur in hushed tones “It’s Steve Buscemi.” No, with Whigham it’s this immediate recognition of part and actor, like the way in “Man on Wire” when Philippe Petit just sent the postcard of the World Trade Center to his pal Jean-Louis who simply remarked “Of course” – as in, of course, they built those two towers so Philippe could tightrope walk between them. Why else would they have constructed the tallest buildings in the world?

Of course Whigham is the snitch in “The Lincoln Lawyer.” One wrinkle of his nose and Whigham’s got snitch written all over his face.

Of course Whigham is the brother in “Silver Linings Playbook” who failed to visit his brother in the mental hospital because mental hospitals really creep him out. Another actor would have made this line too obviously a lie or too much of a jittery truth. But Whigham makes it sound like a truth told by someone who would have gladly lied anyway.

Of course Whigham is the guy who turns out to be in the trunk of the eponymous automobile the two kids steal to take for a joyride in “Cop Car.” When the trunk opens and it’s Whigham it’s like the moment in “Seinfeld” when Jerry, George, and Elaine all nonchalantly shrug when the news announces Kramer is the one helping Steve Gendason flee in the White Ford Bronco because that went without saying.

Of course Whigham is the Captain of Jordan Belfort’s yacht in “The Wolf of Wall Street” who is forced to navigate the boat through a storm from Italy to Monaco so his employer can avoid crossing the border. You would not look at Whigham, granted, and think “The Love Boat” or Captain Jack Sparrow. But to hear Whigham reluctantly roll with an order he seems to know he can’t refuse by quietly trying to convince himself it’s no big whoop even though you can tell he knows it’s a huge deal is like realizing right after Bob Dylan sings “Just then the whole kitchen exploded from boilin’ fat” that it was the most obvious thing in the whole world.

2020 Cinematic Endorsement Straw Poll

Loyal frustrated followers might recall that in early 2016, this blog, as it does every quadrennial, combed through the various Presidential candidates ahead of the Iowa Caucus to determine which one we cinematically endorsed. We stress that again: cinematically endorse, not politically endorse. As in, we reviewed each candidate’s favorite movie(s) and decided which one, based upon non-existent and generally ludicrous criteria, you should support simply on the grounds of the film de cinema. After careful consideration, our endorsement went to Texas Senator Ted Cruz who cited Rob Reiner’s beloved 1987 fairytale “The Princess Bride” as his favorite movie. After all, as we said at the time, Mr. Cruz and Cinema Romantico agree on pretty much nothing, but we liked to think that even if we argued at a cocktail party over his blatant cherry-picking of scientific results to suit his climate change denying needs, there might still be a moment when we could wistfully find some common ground on the absurdity of going in against a Sicilian when death was on the line. In some quarters, our endorsement caused controversy (note: that’s not true), but this blog stood firmly behind it. Movies are movies.

Alas, a few months later, at an event in Indiana, Senator Cruz, in attempting to both claim “Hoosiers” as another favorite movie and employ said movie in service of a political metaphor, called a basketball hoop a basketball ring. As Cinema Romantico wrote at the time:

I’m beginning to suspect that Ted Cruz lies about his favorite movies. He’s trumped up “Hoosiers” as a favorite movie too, but this whole "basketball ring" seriously calls that into question. You can’t have actually watched “Hoosiers” more than twice and not know it’s not a basketball ring. Furthermore, you can’t have watched “Hoosiers” more than twice and accidentally call a basketball hoop a basketball ring. Even a slip of the tongue wouldn’t somehow convert basketball hoop to basketball ring. No, this stinks to high heaven of watch-a-Youtube-clip-quick-before-you-take-the-stage. And if Ted Cruz did lie about a favorite movie all in the name of political gain...well, there can be no higher act of treason in the eyes of Cinema Romantico.

Indeed, in an unprecedented act of movie blogging, we were forced to withdraw our cinematic endorsement on account of suspicion that Ted Cruz lies about his favorite movies.

Why are we rehashing #OldNews, you might be wondering? Well, we here at Cinema Romantico know it’s only 2018, that the Midterms finally (thankfully) came to a close, and that the next Election is still two long years away meaning the Iowa Caucus is one long year away. It is the point in the proceedings where everyone wants punditry and electioneering to take a long winter’s nap. That’s cool, necessary, and we do not disagree. Still, if actual significant 2020 news breaks, it is a political writer’s duty to report and contextualize it, just as it is Cinema Romantico’s duty to report and contextualize any cinematic 2020 news. Ah, and reader, do we have some!

Beto O’Rourke, U.S. Representative for Texas’s 16th Congressional District, and who just lost to the aforementioned Cruz in a close race for the Lone Star State’s 2018 Senate seat, has been touted by some as a potential player in the Democratic Presidential Primaries for 2020. Whether or not that proves to be true, this blog is not in the business of knowing. What this blog does know, however, is that Mr. O’Rourke’s email to his supporters post-Senate loss began like this:

“Amy is watching Last of the Mohicans in the other room with the kids. We started it last night after Ulysses’ basketball game. Pizza, carrots, Mohicans and then early to bed.”

[Cinema Romantico runs around the room screaming.]

There are caveats here, obviously. Based on this sentence, we can neither confirm nor deny that Representative O’Rourke’s favorite movie is “Last of the Mohicans”, which, as loyal frustrated followers know, is Cinema Romantico’s favorite movie too. We literally attempted to reach out to Representative O’Rourke (or, more accurately, to his people) to confirm if it, in fact, was but received the following response: “We're sorry, but it appears that you live outside of Texas's 16th congressional district. Congressional courtesy requires that each Representative be allowed to respond to his or her respective constituents.” And this response was absolutely fair. The Representative and his people have better things to do than responding to an idiot movie blog’s idiot question about favorite movies.

Still, this is not going to stop us from parsing the first few sentences of O’Rourke’s expression of thanks, all of which seem to suggest the distinct possibility that “Last of the Mohicans” might well be something like an O’Rourke family favorite. When one wants a movie in time of comfort or of re-connection, does one not turn to an old favorite? Indeed, this idea seems supported by O’Rourke writing “I can hear Amy yelling in the other room ‘Don’t watch this part! Don’t watch it!’ And Henry saying ‘I’m watching it!’ and laughing.” That suggests watching a part they have watched a hundred times before (probably Magua cutting out Colonel Munro’s heart).

We may well have to wait until the early days of 2020 to truly get to the bottom of this, perhaps with Cinema Romantico sidling up to O’Rourke in line at the Iowa State Fair for a pork chop on a stick to  say, unprompted, in our blog’s best Steppenwolf ensemble member Tim Hopper voice, “What do we do about being under Crown Law?” to see if O’Rourke replies, without missing a beat, “I believe they set aside their Law as and when they wish.” And besides, Cinema Romantico, while ostensibly honest, is not ruling out stuffing the ballot box of its own mind should Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown actually run for President and proceed to cite, say, “The Great Waldo Pepper” as his favorite movie. Even so, and whatever may come, 475 days out from the Iowa Caucus, the first Cinematic Endorsement Straw Poll is in and Beto O’Rourke is in the lead.