In Memoriam: The Varsity Theatre

Whereas once movie theaters focused on, say, in focus projection or, perhaps, proper decibels on the auditorium loudspeakers, now heed is paid first and foremost to amenities. Seats are typically reserved, so you can skedaddle in after the lights have already gone down and the movie has begun, making noise and disrupting those long since seated while trying to find your assigned seat in the darkness. And those seats are often quasi-plush leather, or recliners, or both, with ample leg room, and those seats sometimes are affixed with trays to which snacks can be readily delivered. After all, the data shows that fewer people are going to the movies these days. Declines in patronage have happened before, of course, like at the end of the Golden Age, when new-fangled TV and the studio stranglehold on theaters combined to curb box office. But, much like the current ails of American Democracy somehow feel more perilous than ever before, so does the movie-going experience.

My recent trip to an Arclight, however, found seats that were so dusty you’d swear they hadn’t been vacuumed in a month, which is hardly the filth I’d want in my home. Indeed, all these attempts at replicating your home for a night out feel impersonal. At the same un-clean Arclight a manager came in before the show to spew a few scripted words about…something. I couldn’t hear him. He was at too far a distance and his voice was too quiet. There’s a manager at the Chicago Landmark who often spews a few words pre-show too, and I can hear him, but nothing he says doesn’t feel like it’s straight off some corporate clipboard. No, this is strictly ersatz homeyness, like the Home Federal Savings Bank in “Seinfeld” where a policy of giving the customer $100 if they failed to receive a hello was more marketing-mandated posturing than personal care, the kind of personal care you received at the Varsity Theatre in Des Moines, Iowa, a one-screener with an unassuming facade that is set to close at the end of this year.

Bev Mahon, who opened the Varsity Theatre on Christmas Day 1938 and ran it until he died in 2009, would sometimes thank you for coming to the show. He would thank you afterwards, outside the theater, by the door, and not in the manner of someone reading off a script but impromptu, looking you in the eyes, genuinely thankful. After all, his theatre was independently owned, family run, by his daughter Denise after he passed. The seats were fine, the concessions were fine too, and they forewent pre-movie ads, a huge plus, though what made it really feel like home was Mahon’s careful curation.

In Des Moines in 1997 if you wanted to see Peter Fonda’s Best Actor nominated performance for “Ulee’s Gold”, you went to the Varsity. In Des Moines in 2003 if you, fledgling Sofia Devotee, wanted to see “Lost in Translation”, you went to the Varsity, which is when I remember Mahon saying thanks. I left Des Moines not long after, and things were already changing before I did, partially through the advent of the Fleur 4, an indie theater bringing choices to central Iowa that were not present 30 years ago. And nowadays, with independent offshoots of each major studio, the faux-friendly multiplexes show all sorts of indies that would have only been the province of the Varsity in years past. Even then, however, those showings are mandated, akin to a radio dee jay who cannot serve up the unknown, his/her hands tied by some sonically indifferent conglomerate. The Varsity, on the other hand, felt like going to an intimate neighborhood film festival.

Today, to paraphrase Sam Rothstein’s lament as “Casino” (1995) concluded, going to the movies is like checking into an airport. You might get chicken fingers delivered to your seat, but nobody cares about what’s showing on your screen. The Varsity Theatre, as its unassuming facade foreshadowed before you even walked in the door, did not have to sell you an experience; the experience, Mahon knew, was the movie itself.

Forgotten Great Moments in Movie History

Willie Dixon, the eponymous foul-mouthed St. Nick of ill repute in Terry Zwigoff’s 2004 cult classic “Bad Santa”, is, as it no doubt goes without saying, a non-believer. He didn’t celebrate Christmas, he explains in voiceover, not because he was Jewish but because his old man’s idea of a present was a daily punch to the back of the head. It is no wonder, then, that Willie uses his omnipresent Santa costume merely as a ruse to rob shopping malls blind, inverting the reason for the season. Willie’s eventual lady friend (Lauren Graham), meanwhile, is Jewish, or at least her father was, and her love of Christmas stems directly from the holiday being verboten, a perversion of seasonal joy given rise in her Santa Claus fetish.

It is only natural, then, that Willie’s non-beliefs will be juxtaposed against those who do believe, like the immortal Thurman Merman, a woefully uncool teenager of whom Willie, for reasons too convoluted to explain, will become a caretaker of sorts. Thurman’s dad might be in jail, and his grandmother might be constantly passed out in an easy chair, and he might have no friends, but he still believes, joyfully opening windows in an Advent calendar and babbling about his own unique faith system involving a talking walnut. Heck, there’s even Bob Chupeska, mall manager, who might have to endure Willie but nevertheless, in the air of Ritter, is the kind of guy you just know strings too many lights on his house and says thing like “How can anyone not enjoy Christmas?”

In their company, gradually, against all odds, Willie culturally assimilates in his own warped way. He might not want to participate in Thurman Merman’s neighborhood Christmas Eve lumanaria program but he finds himself out in the driveway lighting candles in sacks of sand anyway. And just as Marcus, Willie’s partner, assimilates in so much as the consumerism of Christmas gets a stranglehold him, so does it Willie, as his last act before the cops’ bullets cut him down is valiantly getting the present Thurman Merman wants back to the kid’s house. The epilogue may or may not be “Bad Santa’s” ode to Travis Bickle’s concluding “Taxi Driver” dream state, but Willie’s conversion is real.

There is one character we have not mentioned. He is Gin Slagel (Bernie Mac), security chief at the mall who is enlisted to try and force out Willie and Marcus only to, sort of, go partners with them. If, as the latter suggests, his character occasionally takes the initiative, he is more often presented as hanging back, reacting, sitting at his work desk, listening, chewing orange slices, taking in the world around him. He, unlike the surrounding characters, seems uninterested in and unaffected by Christmas. If initially this suggests Gin is merely a hardass given Mac’s general air, there is a single scene that concisely, comically reveals not so much his motivation as his nature. It happens when he ferrets out a teenager attempting to shoplift, not just taking back what the kid has sought to steal but also absconding with the kid’s own possessions, and bidding the would-be thief a ferocious goodbye by intoning: “Happy Kwanzaa.”

It’s a punchline as peek behind the curtain. Here’s a man who spends the entire movie enveloped in Santa and elves, reindeer and candy canes, Christmas carols as mall muzak, all this secular dogma imposing itself on him, and he has no recourse but to sit there and take it. Finally, however, in the presence of this kid, one no doubt about to get so much under the tree only to still want so much more anyway that he’s willing to steal it, Gin snaps back, spreading his own gospel, even if the late Mac gives it the already defeated ring of a man who knows, contrary to certain carnival barkers, that the war on Christmas ended a long time ago.

Burning

I can’t shake facial expression of Ah-Inn Yoo in “Burning.” It’s not that his facial expression is terrifying; it isn’t. It’s this sort of slack jaw, mouth agape face one might make while staring up at a Times Square Billboard if it was showing one of those 3-D paintings and a person was not so much struggling to decode it as just sort of generally puzzled by it. This facial expression perfectly epitomizes Inn’s character, Lee Jong-su, one not so much belying the fact that he is slow on the take but perplexed with the surrounding world, like there is some code buried deep within the atmosphere that he struggles to see. He is a recent creative writing graduate, though one forced to take over the family farm in the wake of his father being jailed for an act of violence. And even if we never see him writing all that much despite claiming he’s working on a novel, it’s only because director Lee Chang-dong, working from a 1992 short story by Haruki Murakami, gradually lets us see that Jong-su is the character in the story of his life, one that his own blood seems to be writing.

The first time we see Jong-su we don’t even see him at first, just the trails of smoke from the cigarette he’s stealing around a corner. In the ensuing moments, he encounters Hae-mi (Jong-seo Jeon), a childhood classmate he doesn’t remember but who remembers him, dancing and handing out flyers for some discount store. They go out, wind up in bed soon after, though then she departs for a short trip to Africa, enlisting Jong-su to feed her cat, which may or may not be real, foreshadowing the film’s infinite enigmas. Indeed, when Hae-mi returns from the Africa it is in the company of Ben (Steven Yeun), a rich kid of means neither he nor the movie ever make clear. Jong-su dismisses him as a Gatsby, not that “Burning” has any interest in exactly approximating F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story. If Hae-mi occasionally references past events, the reality of these is placed in doubt by the recollections of other characters, and she claims to have gotten plastic surgery, as if suggesting the past is something from which we intently try to run.

If Hae-mi can sometimes feel underdeveloped, a la Daisy Buchanan, that is because Chang-dong views specifically through the prism of these two men. Jong-su looks at her longingly, even desperately, declaring his love for her. Ben might be dating her, but he comes across more disinterested than in love, never more so than when she demonstrates an African dance, what she calls The Dance of Great Hunger, evincing the timid accountant of “Shadows and Fog” saying that he couldn’t explain the meaning of life but might, if drunk, be able to dance it. As she sways, the camera catches Ben indifferently yawning, a heart-scorching smug dismissal of her soulful expression and a window into his entire worldview. This dance resurfaces in the movie’s most pivotal scene, positioned at the halfway point, where she performs it beneath the night sky, naked. It is a deliberate implementation of the Male Gaze, in so much as she remains purposely beyond it, demonstrated in how it is framed as if she is in communion with the cosmos above rather than with them.

If Hae-mi is communing with the natural world, the two men are beholden to their own respective nature, which Ben makes clear in a monologue, dismissing right and wrong as no match for “the morals of nature.” That’s a kind of hackneyed line, but it’s also the kind the kind of guy like Ben would probably say, and Chang-dong more stunningly breathes life into those words later, after Jong-su gets a phone call from Hae-mi in which they don’t speak but it is made clear she’s in trouble. When the line cuts out, the camera flips its focus from Jong-su to the trees behind him, the wind whistling through the crisp leaves, nature, in a sense, taking over, and leading directly into a slow-burning denouement. It centers on a mystery, the specifics of which I will not reveal, though the specifics are beside the point as this mystery gradually dovetails with “Burning’s” larger point. You see this everywhere, like Jong-su tailing Ben to try and get to the bottom of things, though Jong-su’s detective work is no less important than the striking disparity in their vehicles, his battered, muddy truck and Ben’s Porsche, delineating the class resentment revealing itself as crucial to the mystery as scorned love.

But then, that makes it sound all cut and dried when it’s the furthest thing from. I have not read Murakami’s short story, but I can imagine myriad interior monologues cluing us into Jong-su’s gradual break. Chang-dong has no monologues, forgoing voiceover, simply impressing upon us the character’s disintegrating mental state with moods, frames. When Jong-su takes a warehouse job during the long fall of the film’s back half, he stands in a line with his other new co-workers, that same expression stuck to his face. When the boss asks him a question, Jong-su doesn’t reply, he withdraws from the line and just sort of wanders out, without a word, turning away from the regular life this position might represent and going off to eventually burn it all down.

The Favourite

The immortal Rick Blaine once observed: “The problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” “The Favourite”, set in the early 18th century against the backdrop of the War of Spanish Succession, refutes this sentiment. In the heightened style of director Yorgos Lanthimos, the foreign policy of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman), lonely and stricken by gout, pertains strictly to her whims. These whims are guided and exploited by Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz), Duchess of Marlborough, who has installed herself as the Queen’s closest confidant, until her destitute cousin, Abigail (Emma Stone), shows up at the Palace and quickly insinuates herself into the mix, gradually gaining the Queen’s ear, though less from concerns of national interest than her own selfish pleasure and eventual distaste for Lady Sarah. The hunger for status and power suggests “All About Eve”, but there are also prominent notes of “Phantom Thread” given not just the motif of vomit but in the erotic power plays and how easily these women bend the men to their will. Spanish inheritance and European expansion might be at stake, but that doesn’t mean a hill of beans compared to the problems of three little people.

The period specificity is aesthetically on point, particularly Sandy Powell’s typically splendid costume design, not only charting Stone’s rise from servant to noblewoman through clothes but putting Weisz in a black and white jacket for pigeon shooting that would, even now, so many centuries later, if the world had wit, instantly become the New Blaze Orange. Despite these details, however, Lanthimos picks and chooses his history and then dementedly choreographs it, emblemized in a dance sequence between Lady Sarah and Baron Malsham (Joe Alwyn), Abigail’s eventual husband, that does not meld past and present so much as jettison past entirely; it’s like re-imagining Marty McFly at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance as Lady Gaga’s Monster Ball at Windsor Castle.

It’s a revisionist costume epic, in other words, and one placing women front and center. True, the movie essentially conforms to the old angry white man belief that women in positions of power will be subject to their, shall we say, feminine urges, yet Lanthimos paints his males with that same brush. Indeed, Abigail’s wedding night rendezvous with Baron Masham where she, ah, pleasures her new husband becomes a riotously ribald encapsulation of the old Jerry Seinfeld observation of how women are working on a whole other level; she literally holds this dithering idiot in the palm of her hand. “The Favourite” might believe, as “Dr. Strangelove” did, war is an extension of sexual desire and frustration by other means, but he also connects that idea to society itself. When Lady Sarah suffers a riding accident after being poisoned by Abigail, she briefly winds up in a brothel, and though she quickly escapes with Royal help, her departing macabre crack about gainful employment to fall back on acknowledges the slippery slope for women of the era and puts everyone’s role into perspective.

It also epitomizes how delicately “The Favourite” straddles the line between brutish drawing room farce and just brutish, underlined in a musical score toggling between baroque strings as laugh track and a single tense piano note, and with which Weisz beautifully harmonizes by playing both hysterically icy and plain icy. In one of the year’s best scenes, Weisz’s character has it out with Tory Opposition Leader Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult) who can’t deal with the war’s extravagant cost. Lanthimos shoots this scene looking up at Lady Sarah, where Weisz’s rock-solid posture suggests an immovable object, and, fed up, Harley kicks a table, leading Lady Sarah to observe that a war is on and every penny counts, a deft line reading where Weisz’s inflection communicates that the Duchess knows she is landing a comic haymaker. Then the moment flips, briefly, as Harley rushes at her, staring her down, evoking and slyly inverting the familiar sexually tense old school movie shot where the leading man stares down at the leading lady before planting one on her lips. In this moment, Weisz is astonishing; she doesn’t buckle, but she also looks like she’s about to burst out laughing at this blockhead.

Weisz’s wicked restraint is countered by Stone’s more broadly comic performance, complete with reaction shots made for belly laughs. But if her performance is bigger, it is also true to the character of Abigail, introduced covered in mud, suggesting what she is willing to roll around in to get what she wants, flipping between virtuous and vile to do so. The character might have a tragic past suggesting a glint of humanity, but Stone chooses to play the part not as if that humanity has been repressed but eliminated, treating her relationship with the Queen as a cruel joke.

That cruel joke connects to the film’s ultimate tragedy, which is The Queen herself, a character who is easy to laugh at yet also to empathize with, even, in a way, when she is screaming at subordinates for the sin of simply looking at her. The character is at once emotionally isolated and physically surrounded, always in the glare (hence, the recurring fish eye lens), a dichotomy that Colman improbably embodies, teetering on the edge in every frame, trying to keep it together even as she seems mentally checked out. She is not really Royalty, not in the heightened way we think of it, but nor is she like you and me; she’s just wrecked. When she stuffs cake and her mouth only to immediately throw it back up, she might as well be throwing up all over the monarchy.

Christmas on Honeysuckle Lane

“Christmas on Honeysuckle Lane” revolves around a secret – nay, two secrets. If these Hallmark Holiday movies typically begin with exposition bombs and unrepentant telegraphing to ensure the audience on its couch at home will not change the channel, “Christmas on Honeysuckle Lane”, based on a novel by Mary McDonough, resists. Yes, an opening airport conversation between Emma (Alicia Witt) and her sister Andie (Laura Leighton) establishes a few crucial details, but it is more notable for what it withholds, emblemized in the lead-in sequence where Emma won’t take a call from Ian, her good-for-nothing gluten-free pancake making ex-beau. And that withholding nature is what Witt, in the 2018 Hallmark Christmas Movie Performance of the Year, plays straight to, deliberately refusing to make eye contact with Leighton in their introductory scene, visually conveying the idea of something gnawing at her. You see it more explicitly in a later scene where she clenches a wooden nutcracker; you’d swear if director Maggie Greenwald held the shot just a little longer that Witt’s grip would grind that nutcracker to dust.

That is not to suggest Witt is simply playing a Grinch destined to transform into a merry Celebrant. She deftly toes the line, glimpsed in the scene where she first encounters Morgan Shelby (Colin Ferguson), an old foe destined to become her flame, while also encountering an old family friend. Witt throws shade at the former even as she simultaneously, earnestly glows toward the latter, suggesting, contrary to popular belief, that occasionally, in the hands of the greats, characters on the Hallmark Channel can contain multitudes.

Those multitudes come to include her family home (on Honeysuckle Lane) which she returns to, along with Andie and their brother Daniel (Jordan Dean), to sell, both their parents having died, a metaphor for the past that kept her away for so many Christmases, re-visited in flashbacks where the diffused lighting meant to represent the fuzziness of memory instead lends the appearance of a soap opera. It is a home filled with antiques in need of appraisal, causing Emma to enlist the town’s foremost antique appraiser, who, of course, is Morgan. This might be by narrative default, but their transition from at odds to in love nevertheless comes off because rather than just passing the screenplay’s mile markers, they really seem to come to enjoy one another’s company.

Together Emma and Morgan unearth clues about her parents’ history, lending her emotional clarity, though she, and eventually Andie, choose to keep these clues from their brother. That might sound like a convenient means of delaying the reveal until late to spur a third act dramatic confrontation, but in the case of Daniel it is entirely narratively copacetic. He repeatedly implores that this Christmas, the last one on Honeysuckle Lane, needs to be perfect, pleas that Dean dresses up in a nigh jittery verbal inflection and a squinty facial expression evoking Nathan Fillion if he was a legit basket case rather than comically harried. I don’t think the movie realized it, but this poor guy needs therapy.

But if he seems set to explode, he never does, just as the secrets, when finally brought to bear, are not nearly as disreputable as the movie seems to be claiming. But that, alas, ties into the movie’s failure to honor Witt’s impeccable acting unpredictability by turning totally predictable, and not in fun ways but hoary ways, like Ian turning up at just the wrong moment and putting an engagement ring on Emma’s finger that gets stuck meaning Morgan sees it and yada yada. And though I admittedly sign away the rights to most critical concerns the moment I click on the Hallmark Channel, Emma, as written and played, screams of someone who hold that ring up for everyone to see and say “Nope! Stuck!” Seriously, Hallmark, don’t hang Alicia out to dry.

Still. Despite pivoting off an ancient sort of misunderstanding, the conclusion finds emotional truth, particularly because even if the script conspires to keep Emma and Morgan apart, it does not mystically rush them back into one another’s arms at the end. No, it allows them to sit down and communicate, a surprisingly affectionate scene where Ferguson actually has his character just sit and listen to what she has to say. Contrary to Hallmark’s slogan, finding love at Christmas does not require a miracle; it requires acting like two grown ass adults.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Star Wars Holiday Special (1978)

The “Star Wars” Holiday Special of 1978, it turns out, at least based on what appeared to be an old VHS copy uploaded to the Interwebs, was sponsored by GM. I mention this only because it instantaneously brought home why I sought out this infamous CBS production in the first place. Last year, as America 2017 wound down, I sought out John Denver’s ABC 1975 Holiday special “Rocky Mountain Christmas” to soothe my soul. But as America 2018 winds down, I do not want to soothe my soul; I want to court disaster. And what is more legendarily disastrous than the “Star Wars” Holiday Special, which nearly every December inspires editors to demand articles recounting, once again, the Special’s confusing genesis, confounding rendering and wretched product. Those articles are usually fun, but they allow you to maintain your distance, like watching a garbage barge from the shore through binoculars. That, in America 2018, is the coward’s way out. I wanted to go straight to the source; I wanted to see for myself; I wanted to stand amidst the trash and breathe in the fumes.

The production, subject to differing reminiscences as creative debacles often are, seemed to spring from both CBS’s desire for a Holiday-type variety show to capitalize on the massive box office success of the (real) first “Star Wars” and George Lucas’s insistence that the Special’s narrative backbone be – God help us – Wookie home life. The result, in which Chewbacca’s family’s concern over the famous Wookie’s failure to return home for something called Life Day (likely leaving a certain kind of contemporary viewer to wonder why they don’t celebrate Christmas in a galaxy far, far away), is both metaphorically and literally unintelligible, giving rise to the late Roger Ebert once asking in a review: “Does Han Solo really understand Chewbacca’s monotonous noises? Do they have long chats sometimes?” I don’t think he would without the benefit of the screenplay. Half the dialogue, so to speak, is just Wookie noises regretfully sans subtitles, a little like “2001’s” Dawn of Man sequence absent any artful touch.

This is truly explicated in the sequences where Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher as, respectively, you know who, are made to communicate with Chewbacca’s family by way of wall screen, or something. The actors are not Phoning It In so much as Unsure of What in The World They Are Supposed to Be Doing. Hamill’s double-take, in fact, epitomizes this confusion, truly looking like bewildered man without an acting partner. Harrison Ford, who the Special occasionally cuts to in the Millennium Falcon with Chewebacca as they try to get him home, comes across disinterested, though he came across disinterested in “Star Wars” too, which fueled his roguish charm and implies context counts for so much.

The aesthetic, meanwhile, is the Special’s downfall and saving grace, at least to someone watching it in 2018, with the Wookie home something like the dodo family house in “Follow that Bird!” crossed with Barbarella’s cockpit. And if that sounds risqué, well, I haven’t even mentioned the apparent mind evaporator (which I can only namecheck courtesy of Wikipedia), into which an impressionable Wookie places his head where we suddenly find ourselves teleported out of a galaxy far, far away and into a Disco-era music video starring Diahann Carroll. This moment is evocative of the entire Holiday Special, at once family-friendly and not family-friendly at all, like when I saw “Jurassic Park” in the summer of 1993 and decided, afterwards, to see “Rambling Rose” because it had Laura Dern too.

The mind evaporator is representative of innumerable other gadgets and gizmos the Wookies mess around with, which, and I’m admittedly stretching here, sort of evoke old school holiday RadioShack ads, a tie-in I’m surprised was overlooked. And it is through these screens that the clearly overmatched Holiday Special writers are able to incorporate their variety show add-ons, like a Jefferson Starship performance, or a cartoon featuring a pre-“Empire Strikes Back” Bobba Fett which is probably the closest this hootenanny gets to True “Star Wars” (unless you count the actual “Star Wars” footage the Special employs because it wouldn’t have afforded or managed the effects otherwise), or, best of all, Bea Arthur.

Bea Arthur serving Mos Eisley booze out of a Kool-Aid pitcher, apparently.

Upon first learning years ago that Bea Arthur was in this thing as proprietor of the Mos Eisley Cantina on Tatooine, I imagined it as a “D.C. Follies” situation, complete with a laugh track. What transpires, however, is less simply comic than theatrically surreal. To say this is what the “Star Wars” Holiday Special could have been is out line because even if had been just this it would have only appealed to leisure suit lounge lizards. Still, it’s the lone moment truly trying to approximate a “Star Wars” revue as Arthur, who might not have been game so much as “oh, the hell with this” professional, tries to kick all her extra-terrestrial clientele out of the cantina due to an Imperial-mandated curfew by leading the whole place in a singalong to some sort of riff on “The Alabama Song.” “Just one more round, my friend,” she sings, “just one more dance, my friend,” advising the aliens to leave even as her song intrinsically encourages them to stay, spiritually embodying the Holiday Special itself, a precursor to the unrelenting cycle of “Star Wars” spinoffs and by-products, claiming we don’t want more but mindlessly consuming it anyway.

Parsing Miami Vice: Figurative Screen Shots on the Wall, part 4 (conclusion)

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

Earlier this year I saw my man Claude’s painting Antibes, 1888 at The Courtauld Gallery in London. The placard quoted Mr. Monet himself: “What I bring back from here,” he said of Antibes in the south of France, “will be sweetness itself, white, pink and blue, all enveloped in this magical air.” Truth. The gallery room bearing the painting was small, empty, and I spent a long time with it. The tree, as are so many other objects in Monet paintings, just a kind of formal specificity in the foreground; the point is everything else.

Not everyone was dismissive of “Miami Vice” upon its release, as this blog can attest, and as, say, the righteous Manohla Dargis review in The New York Times can go to show, but the box office was nevertheless lackadaisical and the grades at that bastion of math, Rotten Tomatoes, were low. But that, as the reappraisals have gleaned over time, stemmed from the movie’s disinterest in narrative and its avant-garde leanings, preferring visual poetry culled from negative space, which is how Steven Hyden put it for Uproxx.

You see this in the dramatic lead-up to the climactic shootout, where the people are just sort of blots against the big blackened sky.

You see this when Justin Theroux’s character is standing guard as his machine gun, enveloped in the darkness, becomes beside the point, deferring to the puffy white clouds.

You see this on a rooftop where the charged nature of the characters’ conversation’s got nothing on the looming mounds of cumulonimbus.

You see this is in a romantic episode down Cuba way where a movie of drug cartels and white supremacists momentarily makes like a damn gallery postcard.

You see this in a speedboat race through Biscayne Bay where we never even find out who wins because none of these go-fast boats can compete with that aerial panorama. 

That, as our sporadic 2018 blogging art show winds up, brings us to the best shot in “Miami Vice.” I have written about the shot before, but that was less a contemplation of the actual frame than a romantic speculation of its genesis. And I suppose I know I loved the shot from the beginning simply because I am a sucker for storm clouds.

But considering this shot in lockstep with Claude, I see now that the jet, while proffering the trigger for the scene, is also just the tree in Antibes, 1888. And what would normally seem the negative space in the frame becomes, in fact, the point. Here, in the space of that sky, lo and behold, Michael Mann, genius evermore, did not just capture a Miami sky on camera; he brought the sweetness of that goddam sky back with him.

Support the Girls

“Support the Girls” opens with a montage of location shots showing the Texas Interstate system where multitudinous cars rush around mix masters and along multi-lane freeways. If it does not seem part and parcel to the film’s predominant setting, a Hooters-ish independent restaurant called Double Whammies, the familiar omnipresent sonic whoosh that goes hand in hand with traffic congestion sort of evokes the white noise of testosterone-themed restaurants like the one in question where all the waitresses in low-cut tops and tightly cropped shorts are conveyed as window dressing, scantily clad ornamentation in addition to the big game on the big screen, clearer when the cable TV keeps going out and the patrons look past the ladies in search of a signal. “Support the Girls”, then, as the title implies, becomes about restoring the humanity of these women, though without turning sanctimonious, as writer/director Andrew Bujalski threads the needle between light and dark, droll and sincere.

In a sense, threading the needle is the job description of Double Whammies’ general manager Lisa Conroy (Regina Hall). As the movie opens, she is crying in her car even as she pulls herself together enough to ask a co-worker how she’s doing, a delicate strength embodied in Hall’s entire performance, her air remaining staunch even if she lets pockets of stress peek through in her eyes and inflections. Lisa’s life is non-stop. Never mind normal considerations like employee shifts and unruly customers, there is a burglar trapped in the air ducts who necessitates the cops who accidentally knock out the cable which agitates the clientele, while Lisa also devises a makeshift carwash fundraiser for one of her employees in need of a legal fund, which is the movie ingeniously repurposing an activity where management exploits labor. If the latter suggests what Lisa will do for her co-workers, so does the former since it eventually connects to a cook, in a scene where Lisa demonstrates empathy even as she gently fires him, and letting him finish shift because she is cognizant that his presence is necessary . This, in other words, is her family, which becomes apparent not just in the way she babysits the kid of an employee, Danyelle (Shayna McHale), who can’t get a sitter, but when the subject of her actual home life is eventually broached.

Every family, though, has an elder and that is the owner, Cubby (James Le gros), who shows up at the worst possible time and has a heated argument with Lisa about hiring practices, laying bare not just her true place in the hierarchy but everyone’s, all subject to the top dog’s impulses. Bujalksi sets this scene in Cubby’s car, concluding it with a moment of road rage gone wrong as his would-be confrontation with a driver cutting him off is less a violent release than a sudden, hysterical diffusion of the bomb that seems set to go off as Cubby gets punched once in the you-know-what, both his aforementioned impulses and his precious masculinity skewered. Bujalski shows us this moment, however, from inside the car so that we can’t even hear it, emblematic of the film’s overriding deadpan humor, glimpsed later in a confetti cannon putting an exclamation point on the film’s come to Jesus moment, revising a hackneyed marketing tool as a colorful kiss-off.

That epiphany, however, unexpectedly, incisively happens apart from Lisa. If the narrative seems to be shaping up as a Day in Lisa’s Life, she suddenly gets moved offstage as Danyelle steps into her management shoes, not a triumphant moment but a realization of everyone’s disposability in the world of unskilled labor. The movie culminates by conforming to and upending your expectations in a lengthy, funny, unsettling sequence allowing the women to maintain their dignity even as it acknowledges how nothing truly changes for them at all. Indeed, the denouement, spread across a couple scenes, is sort of a new beginning of old ways, a cruel contradiction, but one that Lisa meets with a defiance akin to the whole movie, standing on a rooftop, screaming at the freeway traffic below, a release even if all the pent-up rage let out only seems to dissolve into the white noise.

Skate Kitchen

As “Skate Kitchen” opens, teenage Camille (Rachelle Vinberg) is skateboarding in her Long Island neighborhood, alone. As “Skate Kitchen” closes, Camille is skateboarding through the streets of New York City, but in the company of several new friends, their bond having been tested but reaffirmed. It’s an ancient arc, yet director Crystal Moselle lends vitality by blending fiction with docudrama (most of the teenagers here, including Vinberg, are playing versions of themselves), investing each decision Camille makes with the sensation of impulse rather than storytelling necessity. A scene outside some faceless, nameless corporate building where Camille talks a fed-up security guard into giving back her skateboard by saying she just wants to make peace and go home really feels, for a moment, as if she’s being earnest. Then, upon having her board returned, when she pulls a trick right in front of the incredulous guard anyway, it feels totally spontaneous, not some dramatic hurdle to cross but a real time throwing caution to the wind.

Through and through, “Skate Kitchen” is a hangout movie, where we spend most of our time in the company of Camille and her skateboarding clique as they shit-talk each other and skate, skate and shit-talk each other. That has typically been the province of males, like the recently reviewed “Summer of 84”, though there the characters were rarely given space to actually, you know, hang out whereas despite the frequent close confines of Moselle’s camera, she provides plenty of downtime, where often aimless chit-chat suddenly bursts into straightforward profundity, lending credibility to how Camille’s friendships can suddenly spiral on a dime. She enters this fold after a no more skateboarding ultimatum issued by her Mom (Elizabeth Rodriguez), with whom Camille butts heads throughout, a story genesis that could have been contrived if not for how Rodriguez deftly emotes a consistent panic born from knowing she’s losing control of her daughter as well as Camille’s moving monologue to Janay (Adrelia Lovelace).

The monologue is the heart of the film, explaining Camille’s plight, living with her father after her parents’ divorce because she could not stand her mother, only to move in with her mother when she realized her upbringing required a woman’s touch, alienating her father, forever emotionally stranded between two points. Indeed, even as she makes friends with her roving female gang, Camille is often off to the side and back of center in frames, staying out of group photos intended for Instagram until she is physically pulled in. She remains unsure as she works to open herself up, and so when she eventually finds herself drawn to Devon (Jaden Smith), the ex of Janay, she can’t help but be drawn into his orbit too. It evokes “Everybody Wants Some!!”, by Linklater, master of the hangout movie, in so much as she is sort of moving from one subculture to the next. If the guys accept her, the social dynamic nevertheless proves untenable, engendering an absolution with Camille’s original crew that feels wholly believable in how youth allows grudges to just be shaken right off.

If she and Devon can’t last, him taking pictures and filming videos of Camille skateboarding elicits the impression of him seeing through to her core, never more than a moment where they do something like an ersatz photo shoot in the shadow of The Empire State Building. Moselle shoots scene this looking up, as if from Devon’s vantage point, where it is just Camille, her skateboard and 102 stories of impeccable Art Deco. In the endless hustle of the city, which these characters frequently roam through, where the ground-level aesthetic lends a guerilla vibe, this moment of just them in the shadow of a massive tourist attraction, feels intimate, stolen, not unlike, you suddenly realize, every time they step on a skateboard.

Who Was the Golden Globes-iest Golden Globes Nominee?

Nominations for the 76th Golden Globes were announced last Thursday. If they were, as pundits noted, diverse, one year after Natalie Portman memorably, righteously threw a stink bomb right in the middle of an awards announcement when she called out the complete lack of women in the Best Director category, well, hey, look! There are no women nominated for Best Director! And this in a year when the Best Director of 2018 was Lucrecia Martel for “Zama” (not that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has seen it). What’s more, nearly thirty years after “Driving Miss Daisy” won Best Picture at the Academy Awards while “Do the Right Thing” was snubbed from being nominated at all, we have a Best Director showdown between Spike Lee for “BlacKkKlansman” and Peter Farrelly for “Green Book”, or “Driving Miss Daisy 2.” The arc of justice bends...how does that go again?

But reading the tea leaves of Hollywood’s Office Christmas Party is difficult and sometimes dangerous. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association speaks for itself, no one else, even if they often seem to operate from some place of doing in advance what they think the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is going to do so as to appear part of the big kid’s club. No, the HFPA is mostly interested in mingling with stars. And that is why, once again, as we do every year, Cinema Romantico is here not to contextualize this set of nominees in any meaningful way but merely to examine them and then determine which person the HFPA most likely nominated to simply to schmooze. I am here, in other words, to determine which of The Golden Globes nominees is the Golden Globes-iest.

Cinema Romantico’s own Golden Globes-iest Golden Globes Nominee is a tie between Eventual Oscar Winner™ Lady Gaga and Nicole Kidman, her eminence, for Best Actress. This is the award show equivalent of Jupiter aligning with Mars. Cinema Romantico strongly suspects the only reason Keira Knightley was not nominated for “Colette” in the same category was to prevent this blog’s head from exploding. But this is not, from the HFPA perspective, the Golden Globes-iest set of Golden Globes nominees. That is because, as intimated, Lady Gaga is going to win the Oscar (we have this on authority from the cosmos) and the last time Nicole Kidman gave a bad performance was – [checking notes] – oh, right, never. The HFPA surely wants both Gaga and Kidman at the party, but they also didn’t have to bend their rules to make it happen.

On first glance, Christian Bale’s Best Actor nomination for playing Dick Cheney in “Vice” might appear like the very bending of rules to which we just referred since his nod comes in the Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. But, while I’d like to think that’s just a drag on Cheney himself, it was probably a way to maneuver more room for nominations for Rami Malek and Lucas Hedges, which is the predominant purpose of having Both Dramatic and Musical or Comedy categories – that is, more invitations to go around. And anyway, I struggle to believe the HFPA wants to mingle with Bale. He strikes me as, shall we say, anti-mingle.

Robert Redford for “The Old Man and the Gun” feels a little Globes-y because he, too, is in the Musical or Comedy category, does not come across necessarily like an Oscar front-runner and his star power makes him a definite Would-Want-To-Mingle-With person. But, his presence also seems designed to elicit an appearance onstage along with Bob Woodward in the face of, well, everything, which, right or wrong, is antithetical to cocktail party ethos. No, there is another.

I have not seen “Dumplin’”. I might not see “Dumplin’”. It is the end of the year and I am busy, in life and at the movies and there are other movies I need/want to see first. And so I do not mean to cast aspersions against “Dumplin’”. But whatever the reason for Dolly Parton’s Best Song nomination for her “Girl in the Movies” for “Dumplin’”, it adheres to Southern Living® Magazine’s #1 rule for hosting a party. Rule #1 is: if Dolly is available, invite her. The HFPA did. She is Golden Globes-iest.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Olympic Games Held at Chamonix in 1924 (1925)

Though Sochi, Russia hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics, it was less of a winter resort than a tropical one, perched on the sea with mild weather. As such, it lacked the winter sports infrastructure necessary for a winter sports hosting gig and had to erect one from scratch, less an ode to the ineffable glory of sport than to the Russia overseer himself, what’s-his-name, crystallizing the modern Olympics as a Potemkin sort of experience. ‘Twas not always so as the clearly titled “The Olympic Games Held at Chamonix in 1924”, the official Olympics film of the first Winter Games ever held, goes to show, opening with a shot of the small skiing village of Chamonix, France in the shadow of Mont Blanc, evoking the wondrously Pollyannaish phrasing of the late William Oscar Johnson, who once wrote how the Winter Olympics “always seemed to have taken place in a chilled, charmed kingdom somewhere over an Arctic rainbow.”

Director Jean de Rovera’s film emits a distinct fairytale vibe to a contemporary viewer’s eyes given how it presents more primitive versions of these various sports we have been accustomed to over the years through a silent-era aesthetic. Figure skaters, keeping their skates on the ice, forgoing all those lutzes and salchows we are accustomed to in the here and now, are dressed like weekenders on the pond; hockey is played on an outdoor rink with no padded walls; bobsledders are more like tobogganers rocking back and forth to generate forward momentum as they go sledding down a souped-up hill; ski jumpers don’t fly through the air so much as flail. Even the opening ceremonies are just a parade, and not into some mammoth stadium destined to be an empty blight on the community but along a snowy trail and past a small crowd. It’s quaint, even thrifty.

Indeed, the 1924 Winter Games lasted 12 days, less than two weeks, which feels like a blip compared to the most recent version in Pyeonchang which actually kicked off competition a couple days before the opening ceremonies, stretching the whole thing out to nearly three weeks. As such, even if the documentary’s scant 38 minute running time leaves you wishing for a little more footage, it also feels just right, not overstaying its welcome and wearing you out. “The Olympic Games Held at Chamonix in 1924” underscores this by not focusing on any precise narratives, just letting the footage speak for itself, reveling in the feats of strength, and reveling sometimes in slow motion that comes across as breathless as any modern footage, an evocative reminder that athletes of any era are a sight to behold.

“The Olympic Games Held at Chamonix in 1924” is markedly different from Bud Greenspan’s “16 Days of Glory” films, which he did for L.A. in 1984, Calgary in 1988, and Lillehammer in 1994, among others, which were lengthy presentations that explicitly and lengthily focused on individual athletes and their respective competitive battles told in self-serious tones. That’s not a bad thing. I get a kick out of the Olympics taking themselves incredibly seriously, at least on the playing field, a la the nigh comically operatic 1976 Winter Olympic film “White Rock.” But there is something to be said for the lickety split approach of de Rova too, who reminds us that the Olympics really are just games. The closest the movie gets to recounting any individual stories is simply placing an athlete, or a team, on the camera with an intertitle proclaiming who they are and what they have won. The expressions on the athletes faces often exude a kind of bemused incredulity, as if they can’t even fathom what all the fuss is about.

Creed II

If “Creed” was in dialogue with its predecessors’ history, “Creed II” is content to merely mimic it, as Sylvester Stallone, who has spent a career rewriting the formula that made him famous, rewrites “Rocky IV” for a whole new generation, though eliminating the Cold War tension. No, the tension here is fathers and sons, and hubris, so much hubris that the boxers both do and do not seem to know what they are fighting for. Boxing, of course, is inherently individualistic and violent, which is why Marvelous Marvin Hagler became something like a rageful monk in the run-up to bouts, and why Max Baer stayed down against Joe Louis, and why Sonny Liston may well have been, in his own way, the most honest man in boxing. “Creed II” seems to understand this too, if only sparingly, acknowledging it without really dissecting it and then, irony-free, embracing it whole-heartedly.

Though “Creed II”pivots off the eponymous Adonis (Michael B. Jordan), son of the late Apollo, winning the heavyweight title, it begins not with Adonis but Viktor (Florian Munteanu) and Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), the latter the man who killed Apollo in the ring in as “Rocky IV” opened and was defeated by Rocky Balboa in the ring as “Rocky IV” ended. Director Steven Caple Jr. keeps the camera close to his characters in this sequence, removing any sense of place, making it seem like they could be anywhere, rendering what’s to come as Personal. And the handheld shot of the camera semi-circling Ivan evokes a “Bourne” movie as much as “Rocky”, painting him as even harsher villain than the first, living vicariously through his son. And while Muntenau’s performance is mostly just glowering, the movie at least places him just enough situations to specify how he’s under this dad’s thumb and not necessarily pleased.

This notion of fathers and sons – er, children – is furthered elucidated in the pregnancy of Bianca (Tessa Thompson), which Apollo’s widow Mary Ann (Phylicia Rashad), who raised Adonis, deduces even before the couple, underscoring how she sees everything everyone else fails to, which we will address further momentarily. The pregnancy comes in tandem with Bianca and Adonis getting engaged and re-locating to Los Angeles, never mind his eventual fights, symptomatic of how the performances often get shoved aside for plot, though there are occasional moments when Thompson and Jordan’s chemistry is allowed to crackle as palpably as “Creed I”, like in the wake of discovering she is pregnant where together they emit excitement and fear in the same breaths.

Even with a baby girl on the way, Adonis agrees to fight Viktor when the latter, egged on by his father and a shady promoter (Russell Hornsby), goes on TV and taunts the Champ. After all, when another guy lays down a dare, as Brian Flanagan once presciently observed, a guy’s gotta take it. Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) knows this sad truth and bows out as Adonis’s trainer after failing to talk his protégé down. The bout goes badly, leaving Adonis with a concussion when he fails to heed his agreed-upon strategy, an embodiment of masculine pride gone rogue.

If “Creed II” leans far too heavily on voiceover from real life sportscasters, mimicking our sports talk white noise modern hellscape, perhaps, but violating the let images speak for themselves cinematic pact, the one successful moment in this vein is ESPN anchor Scott Van Pelt asking from the television screen “where’s Adonis Creed?” as a means to try and stoke a Creed/Drago rematch. As he poses this question, we see Adonis alone with his child, effectively answering the question, seeming to put little Amara first. And yet in a subsequent scene, Adonis takes his baby to the gym and then hits the speed bag, virtually nuzzling up to the latter, like one would an infant, linking the two, evoking the idea of his kid less as flesh and blood than a balm to heal his soul. Why the notion of what truly goes into rearing a child is mostly beside the point, which is why a movie that lingers in slow motion over boxing brutality forgoes an actual scene of childbirth (gross!), and why one of the movie’s most unintentionally stunning moments is Adonis responding to a query about Bianca post-pregnancy by incredulously remarking “She’s good”, as if up until that moment he had not even thought about how she was doing.

If these middle passages tease Adonis getting his groove back, he can only get all the way there by fighting and beating Viktor, a remedying of his masculine pride. It does not ring false, mind you, not  even if it’s just copying and pasting Rocky v Drago for a whole new generation. No, this is what boxing is, always and forever, evinced in a shot as awesome as it uproarious, where old Rocky and old Ivan stare each other down in the ring before Adonis and Viktor square off.

No one knows this truth better than Mary Ann. Early in the film, in one of the best scenes of the year, Adonis struggles to tell Mary Ann he has agreed to fight the young Drago. She already knows this, of course, not literally but emotionally, which Rashad makes clear simply by wielding her incomparable small, bemused smile. Though she gets a line sort of saying it, Rashad’s entire air in these moments suggests that Adonis is his father’s son. And though Adonis seeks her blessing, she tactfully refuses to give it. Why would she? What does it matter? Haven’t you heard? A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

Some Drivel On...Creed

As “Creed” (2015) opens, the young Adonis Johnson, son of the legendary boxer Apollo Creed by way of an extramarital affair, is in a youth detention center. A fight breaks out, affording him the opportunity to foreshadow his future boxing skills, the ones inherently passed down from his father, though the sequence, given its setting and the subsequent scene, when Apollo’s widow Mary Ann (Phylicia Rashad) arrives to take Adonis in, evoke something further – the lack of and the need for a community. That is why even the flash ahead to present day, where adult Adonis (Michael B. Jordan) toils away at a white collar job in the immediate aftermath of taking fights in Mexico feels less like an obvious representation of the thrill being gone than a swift evocation of how The Boardley Financial Group (ick) isn’t the community Adonis is looking for.

No, the community he’s looking for is in Philadelphia, which is where he goes after resigning from The Boardley Financial Group (ick). He finds his community with Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), sure, his pops’s old friend and foe, who Adonis wants to train him, and who will, as he must, eventually come around, from love rather than obligtation. And Adonis finds it in Bianca (Tessa Thompson), The Woman Downstairs, less Adrian than Rihanna, an aspiring hip-hop artist with hearing loss, hashed out in a mini-monologue where Thompson truly goes for the Iggles accent, explaining it’s all about doing what you love for as long as you can, a truth that cuts straight to the heart of “Creed” even as her plight makes you want to stop the movie and listen to Side A of “Run-D.M.C” one last time because, damn man, your hearing might just go one day too and you might have missed your shot. She explains this foible in a scene over cheesesteaks, set at Max’s, a little real life flavor that Coogler smartly injects throughout, particularly later during the training montage which becomes more than merely obligatory with neighborhood motorbikes accompanying Adonis on his run through city streets.

The first time I watched “Creed”, I yearned just as much for a movie called “Bianca”, though watching “Creed” again made me yearn for a movie, any movie, where it’s just Jordan and Thompson, so crackling and natural is their chemistry. Verbally, dynamically, charismatically, they go toe to toe like Adonis and Pretty Boy Ricky Conlan (Anthony Bellew) go toe to toe in the climactic fight, more peacefully though, mostly, never to more stunning effect than when Adonis tries to decide, upon orders by Conlan’s people as a condition for finalizing their epic bout, whether to take the surname Creed. Coogler frames this scene so that Adonis and Bianca are in bed but sitting up, him braiding her hair, deliberately feminizing an otherwise masculine pugilist, like he’s meeting her in the middle, and which she also does with him throughout. He’s in her corner, and she’s in his, and when he expresses doubt about taking his dad’s name, her telling him what he needs to know with repetition of the word “right” is like the cadence of a coach to a boxer between rounds. It’s an incredibility intimate, deep scene, bridging their worlds and genders, signifying how he is emotionally letting her all the way in.

The fight is the film’s climax, of course, just as it was in every “Rocky” movie before it, including the original, which Adonis vs. Conlan quotes from liberally, not just in Bill Conti’s famed music cue at a dramatic moment, but in how Adonis seems to gain strength by not putting up his hands – even as you keep hearing the corner cry out for him to do so – and taking constant punches to the face, classic Balboa, man. It’s all thrilling stuff. But like the rest of the movie, Coogler adds crucial texture to this fight by giving Rocky Balboa his own fight outside in the ring in the form of cancer. If that sounds maudlin, it does not come off that way because of how Stallone has Rocky meet the diagnosis with a small, sad smile, as if humored by the cyclical nature of the universe. His verbal explanation is mostly superfluous, just the character’s penchant for babbling, as the split-second in which Stallone softly holds his porkpie hat to his chest communicates everything, a man who is watching his life flash before his eyes. He tries to keep it secret, but Adonis makes him spill it and convinces (forces) his mentor to face the disease head on. And if Rocky is introduced alone, running an Italian restaurant no one seems to visit, chatting to the spirit of his wife in the graveyard, he finds a sense of community too.

The original “Rocky” ended ringside, but “Creed” goes one scene further, returning to the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum where so many mornings ago a younger Rocky first ascended in side-clenching pain and then later took several steps at a time as if he had wings on his feet. Now, older, feebler, he needs help to ascend, which Adonis is there to give. If that’s all it was, the scene would be incredibly moving. But these steps, of course, are as famous in pop culture, like the Rocky statue itself, which is glimpsed earlier in the movie when Adonis visits, using a real thing based on a movie in a movie based on the movie that brought about the real thing, blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, inviting us all in to the share the moment, connective tissue to the franchise’s considerable history, a sense of belonging for characters and viewers alike.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”, a Western anthology of six short films written and directed by Ethan and Joel Coen, concludes with a passage in which five disparate strangers take a stagecoach to a frontier outpost as the light outside gradually dissolves into darkness, evocative of the movie’s ever-shifting emotional palette. Indeed, even as the characters inhabit archetypes with a comic twinkle, the specter of death hangs over everything, with frequent intrusions of grisly violence. That violence is at once sudden and inevitable, embodying the idea of the American West as a roughhewn place where men and women, cowboys and Indians, all kept moving even as they waited for the other shoe to drop.

The anthology’s jarring shifts in tone are evident straight away as we meet the eponymous Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson) astride his horse, singing a song, guitar in hand, in some Monument Valley locale where The Coen Brothers have great editing fun, showing Buster up close with the song right in our ears, and then cutting to the singing cowboy from a distance with the song echoing off canyon walls, and even tucking a camera looking inside out from Buster’s six string. When he stops at a saloon and pulls his six shooter instead, that swell spell is quickly broken when he blows the fingers clean off his opposition. Yet Buster’s demeanor never changes, as if Gene Autry is starring in “The Wild Bunch”, never quite letting you get a full handle on your feelings, blending myth and veracity so artfully that you’re never quite sure which is which as it’s going down. And Buster’s concluding ballad is synchronously rosy and a requiem; you don’t laugh to keep from crying so much as just shake your head because you feel like doing both.

The second story embraces laughter too, where one grave decision by a bank robber (James Franco) elicits an extended series of reversals pogoing from western motif to western motif, a hanging to an Indian attack and back again, as Franco goes through all this without hardly batting an eye, evincing that it’s all in a day in the life on the American frontier, uproariously brought home in a climactic punchline. Yet rather than end on this wickedly funny joke, the Brothers Coen pivot again, as everything, in one sudden cut to a point-of-view shot where everything goes black, pointedly rejecting the preceding story’s almost whimsical spirituality.

That spiritual absence links it with the ensuing story, the anthology’s darkest, mostly, Meal Ticket, which is both wordless and full of words in following a grizzly impresario (Liam Neeson) cart a limbless reciter (Harry Melling) from town to town where he orates from the back of a covered wagon, like a prototype nickelodeon. If a few early moments suggest the impresario’s fatherly affection, the title betrays the truth, as does Neeson’s gravelly, incredulous, indelible chuckle at the short’s pivotal moment, a whole new world suddenly appearing before him, in an instant painting Manifest Destiny as the capitalist junk of a huckster.

As a nameless Prospector, Tom Waits, despite his character being left virtually alone for the duration of his short, is not as silent as Neeson. No, the eccentric Waits acutely captures the eccentricity of a man who is his own company, as his virtual privacy out in the open merely underscores the vast emptiness of the American West. Yet that emptiness, a striking demonstration of location work, with a creek that truly appears untouched by all of mankind’s foul habits, evokes its own privacy, which the Prospector invades by digging it up in search for gold, his own footprint the violent turn in this passage as much as the actual violent turn.

That notion of unwanted invasion deliberately bleeds into The Gal Who Got Rattled, the richest in terms of character, not least because it is the longest of the six, which allows us more time in the company of Alice Longsbaugh (Zoe Kazan), bound for Oregon by wagon train to be married off to someone she does not know at the behest of her aggrandizing brother. This storyline illuminates the anthology’s lack of female characters, as her entire existence is at the mercy of men, less a life lived than a series of business transactions where she is the product being bought and sold, which Kazan underscores with an overly humble performance emitting the pained air that she is always in the way. This short allows the most room for Native Americans, though even here they are seen from distance, “savages” of a war party, though their prevalence in this short above all others seems by design, a deliberate linking to The Gal Who Got Rattled herself, a people with too little say over their own fate. The most ferocious bullet in the entire movie is fired here, though we never see it, just the after-effects, which might well speak for the fate of Indigenous Americans too.

The concluding passage, The Mortal Remains, with its five characters of varying professions and nationalities, is a summation of the previous five passages. If it begins with an homage to John Ford’s celebrated 1939 film, it gradually morphs into something more akin to the eternally terrifying silent “The Phantom Carriage” (1921), the neat trick of the light fading into a ghoulish green, which you only realize after it’s already begun to happen, like the light of your own life is dimming, receding, which the coach’s inherent claustrophobia clarifies. And when philosophical conversation grows touchy and a cry for the coach to stop is issued, it is not heeded. The driver never stops, it is explained, because that’s the policy, mimicking the passage of our own lives, rushing headlong toward some destination that we cannot know even as it proves identical for all of us, a familiar observation perhaps, but rarely conveyed with such eerie clarity.

(Revised) Oscar Predictions

The National Board of Review and New York Film Critics Circle bestowed their 2018 awards last week with numerous other critics awards and nominations for Hollywood’s Office Christmas Party coming up soon meaning we have entered the First Sunday, so to speak, of Awards Season. As such, it is time for Cinema Romantico to Officially revise its Official Oscar Predictions.

Best Picture: .....

Best Director: .....

Best Actor: .....

Best Actress: Lady Gaga, “A Star Is Born”

Best Supporting Actor: .....

Best Supporting Actress: .....

Best Original Screenplay: .....

Best Adapted Screenplay: .....

Best Foreign Language Film: .....