Shirkers

There is a sequence in “Shirkers”, a documentary whodunit of sorts when the director and narrator Sandi Tan seems on the verge of making a sleuthing breakthrough only to come up empty, finding no house where an address on an envelope says one should exist. She compares the moment to one in Michelangelo Antonioni’s avant-garde “Blow-Up” (1966) where the main character “returns to the scene of the crime and finds nothing,” a parallel Tan draws by showing herself in the present day discovering a bush and a large patch of empty grass where the house should be in lockstep with “Blow-Up’s” photographer David Hemmings circling a bush in a now empty park where a dead body once was. The similarity is self-evident and epitomizes both Tan and her movie’s worldview, one in which film frequently looms large, handy reference points though something even more, speaking for and defining people, like a crest of cinema. Though there are several fascinating relationships in “Shirkers”, it is this relationship to movies and how it simultaneously leads people astray and takes them where they need to go that lingers most.

“Shirkers” is a title with a double meaning, referring, obviously, to the documentary itself but also to the movie within the movie, also called “Shirkers” which Tan made as a teenager with her friends Jasmine Ng and Sophia Siddique and a host of others, including a prominent player from Singapore’s underground art scene. If “Crazy Rich Asians” savored Singapore’s opulence, sticking close to the wealthy and the wealthiest of the wealthy, “Shirkers” presents the flip side to that record, illustrating how such wealth went hand in hand with a society so rigid that chewing gum was forbidden lest it foul the look of luxury. As such, archival footage of Jasmine chewing gum on camera is a little act that looms large, putting their rebellion into perspective. This wasn’t acting out against nothing, as so much youthful drama is, but against an emotionally and artistically repressive society, one where movies were outlawed, which led to them creating one. And much of the footage Tan employs here feels like a collage, evoking the punk zine she created, an onscreen scrap book of the totems these teenagers carried to get through.

Though “Shirkers” was born of a DIY aesthetic, it was helmed by Georges Cardona, who taught a film class in Singapore in which Tan was a student, becoming not just her mentor but an enigmatic presence in her life, taking her for long nighttime drives and even a road trip through America. Simply in who he is, a married man with a child paling around with teenage girls, you can tell right away that he portends tragedy which eventually bears out. Upon completion of the film, as Tan, Ng and Siddique return to college, Cardona intends to edit “Shirkers” into a finished product only to vanish, taking every canister of film with him, never to be heard from again.

If “Shirkers” is partially about trying to discover this lost film, it dawns on the viewer fairly quickly that the footage interspersed throughout the documentary is “Shirkers”, cluing you into the fact that Tan and her friends eventually recover it. That’s not a problem, reshaping the movie more as an investigation into Cardona himself, who, we learn, claimed to be the inspiration for the main character of Steven Soderbergh’s “Sex, Lies and Videotape”, never mind telling the tall tale that he saw Jayne Mansfield decapitated at the time of her terrible death, as if attempting to insert himself into his favorite movies. Indeed, an old photo shows Cardona smoking a cigarette with a chill smile. He did not smoke, his ex-wife explains, reasoning that he was simply playing a character in the movie of his own mind.

In a way that parallels Tan herself, who draws inspiration from “Shirkers” with the road trip she takes with Cardona and who by playing herself in “Shirkers” is essentially creating a hyper-version of her own reality, rendering life as she wants it, or perhaps dreams of it, turning her index finger into a gun to shoot other characters down. Yet in re-tracing her steps, Tan essentially turns that “gun” on herself, thrusting who she was under the microscope and coming to discover she might not have been the person she thought she was, particularly where Ng was concerned, home movies of the two friends at the latter’s wedding proving particularly revealing if hard to watch.

In these dueling narratives between mentor and protégé, a paradox emerges, where movies are shown to have warped Cardona’s mind even as they are simultaneously shown to have helped inspire Tan to get out. And if movies are very much products of their time, as the footage of “Shirkers” the would-be feature go to show, they are also, when viewed through the lens of time, an avenue to other viewpoints, which is what leads to Tan’s self-reckoning. She deconstructs the myth of the magic of the movies not by denouncing it but by reorienting that magic into something more movingly practical.

Sorry to Bother You

The cult classic white collar comedy “Office Space” made great hay from observational humor, sending up inane bureaucracy and cubicle farms with great, ah, flair. And yet, just when the film seemed to ready to kick into overdrive with its protagonist earning a promotion simply by checking out, the film declined using this inadvertent career advancement to further expose corporate culture by opting for a revenge subplot instead, running out of steam and finding convenient means to get its character off the hook. “Sorry to Bother You” is different from “Office Space”, in tone and overriding intent, yet the former sort of picks up where the latter was set to explode, promoting its principal character and then taking him straight to the top. Its politics are never subtle, resembling the enormous protest earrings sported throughout the film by activist/artist Detroit (Tessa Thompson), not simply taking comical potshots but furiously upending the whole system.

“Sorry to Bother You” is the directorial debut of Boots Riley, who also the wrote the screenplay, and who comes from the world of music, a rapper and producer, which is no accident because this film feels as layered as an old Bomb Squad produced Public Enemy track. Indeed, Riley finished the screenplay in 2012 but was unable to go forward with production until 2017, and the finished product suggests someone tinkering with details over time, a la Steve Martin and “L.A. Story”, which “Sorry to Bother You” evokes in its endless well of creativity. Not for nothing are we introduced to Cassius Green (LaKeith Stanfield) in an intimate moment in bed with Detroit, his girlfriend, when the door suddenly flies open revealing the fact they are living in a garage, connected to the home of Cassius’s Uncle (Terry Crews). It’s the movie in capsule, every scene, every setting, every moment thought through, with Riley going so far as to even create a secondary world on television, like a hit TV show called I Got the Shit Kicked Out of Me in which people stand in front of the camera and, well, willingly get the shit kicked out of them, an apt metaphor for, say, 46.1% of the populace.

Unemployed and hard up for cash, Cassius takes a telemarketing gig, in part by lying during his interview, which apparently demonstrates initiative, epitomizing the worldview of “Sorry to Bother You”, or perhaps just our world in general. In peddling encyclopedias by phone, Riley ingeniously literalizes the profession’s brand of privacy invasion. And though Riley lingers over the eternal business management seminar twaddle of teamwork while also injecting new millennium nonsense like social currency, it is not the low (no) wage lifestyle that interests him so much as what it is propping up. Cassius becomes a dynamite salesman by, on the advice of a co-worker (Danny Glover), using his “white voice” on the phone, a hysterical, revealing device in which David Cross’s voice tags in for Stanfield’s, taking that line from “Night School” about not hearing color and then twisting it. Riley takes questions of black identity, and others too, to the next level as Cassius is whisked up a floor by gold elevator and making bank, and becoming unplugged, so to speak, from the matrix where he sees how modern slave labor gets bought and sold.

This idea of selling slave labor is connected to Cassius’s former colleagues, spurred on by Squeeze (Steven Yeun), attempting to unionize, as well as Detroit’s own activism, both through her art and an activist group called Left Eye (which may or may not be culled from the late rapper Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, though I’d like to think it is, an ode, say, to her declaring “realize the realism of reality treats us both the same”). Like the scene of the garage door flipping up to re-arrange your sightlines, Riley just keeps upping the stakes by flipping the script. It’s not that it’s too much, per se, but that Riley almost loses control, the pacing turning off-kilter, particularly in the conclusion which feels a bit too all of a sudden rather than a complete gathering of all its themes, while the veracity of interpersonal relationships is never quite given enough room to breathe.

Even if the speedy twists and turns threaten sometimes to send “Sorry to Bother You” careening out of control, Stanfield’s performance remains on point, taking his pained expression from “Get Out” as an emotional cue, never failing to evince emotional confusion amidst emergent absurdity. That absurdity, without spoiling it, essentially depicts and damns a world where the one percent has eliminated the middle class, leaving a mass of desperate plebes. But in Cassius’s changing fortunes, he occupies the space in-between, seeing where those worlds intersect, and becoming an agent not so much for change as revolution. And that’s where Riley brazenly leaves it, satirically grinding Both Sides-ism to dust, suggesting the only alternative left isn’t to make nice but kick down doors.

The Mojitos of Miami Vice (Mojito #3)

Here Detective Sonny Crockett enjoys a mojito with the apple of his eye, Isabella (Gong Li), re-proving the ancient cocktail adage that dates at least back to the dawn of the Republic of Cuba – two mojitos are better than one.

The Mojitos of Miami Vice (Mojito #2)

Here Detective Sonny Crocket revels in the sonic pleasures of Afro-Cuban jazz and his preferred Cuban highball at the Bodeguita del Medio in Havana, birthplace of the mojito, bringing the whole thing full circle.

The Mojitos of Miami Vice (Mojito #1)

Here Detective Sonny Crocket drinks a Bacardi Mojito in the midst of a stakeout at a Miami club because even if it is said you cannot mix business and pleasure, well, while that old bromide might be true in Georgia, or Nebraska, or even Rhode Island, in Miami business mixes with pleasure, like, say, white rum with sugar cane juice with soda with lime with mint.

The Mojitos of Miami Vice (introduction)

The Oscar nominations were today. I probably heard them and I probably have thoughts. But Chicago is currently in a deep freeze and I am jetting off to Miami with My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife.

I have never been to Miami. But one of my favorite movies is Michael Mann’s “Miami Vice.” I adored it in 2006 and my affection for it has only grown. It is an art film posing as action movie, as its other devotees can attest, though it is, to those of us who love it so, as meme-able as any longform sketch comedy fronting as a film. Indeed, few line readings in the new century are as pleasingly righteous as Colin Farrell as Detective Sonny Crockett explaining he is not merely a fan of mojitos but a fiend for them.



I have mentioned this before, but any time – and I do mean any time – mojitos are referenced in our everyday lives, I pitifully try to mimic this line reading to the weary chagrin of My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife. Imagine how many times I’ll say it in Miami! (My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife would rather not.) And that got me to thinking. Because though I plan on taking the rest of the week off, as I do these days when I go away, I do not plan to shutter Cinema Romantico. No, on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday the blog will briefly re-visit the three mojitos that mojito fiend Sonny Crockett imbibes in “Miami Vice.”

Join us, won’t you? I mean, would you rather read ANOTHER tome about what the Academy got wrong? Or would you rather go down the mojito rabbit hole? I thought so.

Ruminating on Oscar Nomination Eve (or: la meilleure affaire d’actrice)

Tomorrow, early in the California morning, nominations for the 90th Academy Awards will be announced. Instant reaction will spew forth. Cinema Romantico is traditionally among the spewers. After all, we retain a soft spot for Oscar festivities, even if we have, as most do, myriad nits to pick with the Academy’s practices, whether it is questions of the industry’s diversity or, of course, nominations that feel more indicative of the Eisenhower Era. However, this blog will refrain from spew tomorrow morning, not from any kind of self-righteous protest (ha!) but because we are taking a mini-vacation to parts elsewhere (more on that tomorrow) and our flight departs not long after the nods are revealed. Even so, tomorrow could bring glorious news seeing as how this blogger is a Little Monster and Lady Gaga may well be earning a Best Actress nomination for “A Star is Born.”

Back in September I wrote a post entitled Preparing for the Possibility of a Lady Gaga Oscar Nomination in the wake of its rapturous premiere. The post was tongue in cheek, I suppose, in that way of me wanting to frustrate loyal frustrated readers with one of my patented ridiculous recurring bits. But a funny thing happened on the way to the recurring bit – that is, I saw “A Star Is Born.” I never thought Gaga was going to be bad, mind you, but I also never thought she would take me to the mountaintop. I never thought she would make me feel like I was seeing her for the first time all over again, which is what she did when she sort of airily bounced away from the camera as her character walked out on her job, carrying me away on her Gaga feathers, and then showed up at the gig and almost impercetibly choked back vomit before she hustled out onstage and then closed her eyes and totally Gaga-ized the vocal and, sweet mercy. I waited a decade for her “Thunder Road” moment; that was her “Thunder Road” moment; I welled up.

Still, she was good in a way my exorbitant passion for all things Gaga does not do justice. She nailed line readings, sure, and added indelible little bits of actorly business, as that aforementioned nigh vomit suggests, but she was good in so much as she was, you know, giving a performance by creating a character. That her Ally could remain resolute as her star rose was directly connected to her father’s kitchen and her resolve in the face of him and his idiot friends. Gaga played the role like the character, to paraphrase Bruce Springsteen, knew where she came from every inch of the way. And so, her legit acting brilliance combined with my intense Gaga devotion made it so that I was no longer rooting for her Oscar nomination or even rooting for her to win the Oscar; I pulled a Jedi mind trick on myself and became convinced she really would win the Oscar.

She still might. Who knows? I certainly don’t. But Glenn Close winning the Golden Globe for Best Dramatic Performance in a mild upset (in so much as the Hollywood Foreign Press Association typically opts for drooling over its biggest stars) brought me back down to earth. It makes me think it might be Close’s “time”. Granted, I was ready for it to be Annette Bening’s “time” two years and she didn’t even get nominated. But the drumbeat for Close’s “time” seems louder. And whereas once, in the unlearned wilderness of youth, I was strictly opposed to “It’s Her/His Time” Oscars, I am now completely cool with them as something like professional karma, and Ms. Close has starred in over 50 feature films while Ms. Gaga has starred in 1. That is not to suggest Close’s performance in “The Wife” is not worthy; it is. I had issues with “The Wife” itself, but not with Close, as I outlined in my review. And this is not to suggest Gaga’s performance in “A Star Is Born” is not worthy. As a critic, I think it is. And as a critic, I see an even more interesting angle.

Closes’s role, as the title suggests, is an inversion of the Long Suffering Wife archetype. Her husband is a Nobel-winning author who (spoiler alert!) does not seem to have actually written his Nobel-winning work; his wife did. Gaga’s role is as a sudden singing star who quickly surpasses the mentor – Bradley Cooper’s rock star – who discovers her. Yet if Gaga’s character and performance define the film, the film is about Cooper’s character realizing he is being passed by and, failing to cope, checking out, spiritually and literally. It’s a curious thing, empowering her even if the camera turns its gaze somewhere else, cosmically linking these two women in a way, both more advanced than the men they stand beside that (reluctantly) stand beside them.

Gaga and Glenn were literally linked at the recent Critics Choice Awards where they tied for Best Actress. Ties, reader, warm my jaded heart. “Ties are Switzerland,” sportswriter Stefan Fatsis recently said on an episode of the Hang Up and Listen sports podcast. “And who hates Switzerland?” he asked before taking the position of a prospective dissenter and continuing, “But you say, Switzerland is boring. And that’s why America hates ties. We hate neutrality, we cannot abide indecision, we demand resolution.” Indeed, at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi American skiing great Picabo Street had a mega beef with the scoring system that permitted for a Downhill tie between Slovenia’s Tina Maze and Switzerland’s Dominique Gisin. Too bad Street couldn’t be a little more like Maze who saw her co-Gold Medal not as cause for grousing but the genesis for “two happy faces.” And that’s what I thought of when I saw Gaga and Glenn standing together.

Who knows what would happen if the Academy somehow managed to replicate that tie. I imagine Film Twitter would be full of Picabo Streets. But the Oscars have been down this road. You might remember the 41st Academy Awards. You might remember a famous singer winning Best Actress for her first acting role and you might remember a legend, a lioness winning Best Actress too. Sounds a little familiar. Sigh. A boy can dream, can’t he?

Friday's Old Fashioned: Flamingo Road (1949)

Joan Crawford, as Clarisse Loughrey put it for The Independent in August of last year, was a master of reinvention. Crawford’s screen story is well known, going from smashing success to barely hanging on, taking a contract at Warner Bros. and fighting Michael Curtiz tooth and nail before and throughout the production of “Mildred Pierce” (1945) for which she won an Oscar. If she eventually fell out with Warner Bros. too, she made 1949’s “Flamingo Road” before she left, also directed by Curtiz, which feels, in light of all that came before, like a kind of career summation and statement, a blending of person and persona. Though the film’s title refers to a well-to-do stretch of Boldon City, located somewhere in the American South, where the upper class is shielded from all the rank strangers, signaling plenty of class tension, “Flamingo Road” ultimately is about the age-old struggle between women and men.

The movie opens in the throes of a traveling carnival where Lane Bellamy (Joan Crawford) works as a gypsy dancer, a shot of precocious kids looking up at these dancers with wide eyes a throwaway moment that nevertheless deftly evinces the absurdity of the entire enterprise, a pretty astute mockery of cultural appropriation for peanuts. After the carnival leaves town, however, Lane stays behind, laying in a tent and listening to records, a wonderful shot where Curtiz briefly lets the character luxuriate in her newly declared independence. Of course, the harsh reality of that supposed independence is immediately put into perspective when Deputy Sheriff Fielding Carlisle (Zachary Scott) shows up and takes an interest in Lane. He gets her a job at the local diner and takes her out on a date. But even if the character is presented and played by Scott as a good-natured fella, his help casts her independence in a harsh light, and that light will only grow harsher as it quickly becomes clear that Lane’s lot in life will be tied up in Carlisle’s superior, Sheriff Titus Semple (Sydney Greenstreet).

Greenstreet evinces a helluva heavy, his girth intrinsically suggesting an immovable object though his smug air does too, speaking in a kind of casual, self-satisfied grunt that suggests he knows whatever he says is gospel. Indeed, much of “Flamingo Road” roads turns on Semple’s desire to turn Carlisle into a marionette of a Senator, a process that is not shown, simply declared; Semple says it will be and then, a few scenes, later it is, including Carlisle ditching Lane at Semple’s behest and instead marrying a more Political Spouse appropriate woman. That’s how “Flamingo Road” views politics, less a matter of ideals out in the open than deals being cut in back rooms, predominantly between Semple and his frequent foe, Dan Reynolds (David Brian), the two of them discussing who is best fit for what office as if suggesting that the votes of hard-working Americans mean nothing, everything merely pre-arranged by the Flamingo Road elites. That Lane eventually marries Dan might well evince real love, but it’s also hard not to read this marriage as being Lane’s best career option.

If, however, noir conditions lead us to believe that whichever way the protagonist turns, fate will sticks out a foot to trip you, as Al Robert memorably observed in “Detour”, a linchpin of the genre, “Flamingo Road” flips the script. The conclusion might feel oddly sunny for noir yet it is nevertheless supremely satisfying and engendered by an intense confrontation anyway. If neither Carlisle nor Dan nor anyone else for that matter manage to stand up to Semple and stop him, Lane does, refusing to stand by her men any longer. She might pull a gun but this is no mere evocation of Chekhov’s dramatic principle; this is Lane taking matters into her own hands.

New Year's Resolution

It’s early days of the New Year and, as everyone knows, it is officially customary to kick off the New Year by making resolutions. A New Year’s resolution, of course, is a tradition in which a person resolves to make some sort of substantial change in order to improve his or her life. Indeed, this plays into the notion of the New Year as a fresh start, a reboot, a chance to wipe the slate clean and begin again. This is why you see so many people in the gym come January (and why you hear so many people in the most obvious, annoying humblebrags of all time complain about all these people in the gym come January).

Perhaps. But I don’t know. 2019 is feeling a little 2018-y to me so far. Kinda like how 2018 felt a little 2017-ish. Kinda like how 2017 felt oddly 2016-esque. Indeed, I’m starting to suspect that much like, say, the Northern Lights were not, as the Lapps believed, energies of the souls of the departed but the result of collisions between gaseous particles in the Earth’s atmosphere with charged particles released from the sun’s atmosphere, that the New Year is not a personal, professional or global rebirth so much as, you know, nothing more than the start of Earth’s next rotation of the sun. As such, after re-noticing the “Once Upon a Time in the West” poster on the wall of our home office/spare bedroom, Cinema Romantico’s New Year’s Resolution is to re-watch “Once Upon a Time in the West.”

That’s it. That’s my New Year’s Resolution. Nothing else. I have [checks calendar] 348 days left to accomplish this goal.

Please stay tuned to this space for updates. #MakeYourResolutionAReality

What Other Directors Could Merge Movie Universes?

“Glass”, the latest M. Night Shyamalan joint, opens this week. The title refers to Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson), villain of Mr. Shyamalan’s 2000 superhero film “Unbreakable”, who now, almost twenty years later, receives his own sequel in the company of his heroic antagonist, Bruce Willis’s David Dunn. Ah, but Shyamalan, true to his gotta-be-a-twist brand, expands “Glass” by including a character, James McAvoy’s Kevin Wendell Crumb, he of the 23 going on 24 split personalities, from his own film “Split”, suggesting both films (all his films?) take place in the same M. Night Created Universe.

I saw “Unbreakable”. I have not seen “Split” (2016). I probably will not see “Glass”. None of that is the point. No, the point is that linking up two of his own movies got me to thinking, as it absolutely had to, about other filmmakers that could link up their own work. A few suggestions:

 The Coen Brothers — Amy Archer, “The Hudsucker Proxy” / Llewyn Davis, “Inside Llewyn Davis”

Llewyn Davis was last seen sitting in an alley, nose bloodied, shouting au revoir, sort of at the person who just punched him but mostly at the world itself, passing him by. Since then, he vanished, figuratively and literally. As such, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Amy Archer has been tasked by Life Magazine with tracking Llewyn down. Not to argue for him as some misunderstood folk talent but as a case study in emotional human waste. She’ll stake her Pulitzer on it.

Christopher Guest — Terry & Laurie Bohner, A Mighty Wind / David St. Hubbins & Nigel Tufnel, This is Spinal Tap

Seeking ways to sonically reinvent themselves after growing tired of folk music’s limitations, The Bohners have broken apart from The New Main Street singers and sought the guidance of Spinal Tap, seeking them out at the Illinois State Fair, in the hopes of pulling a Pat Boone.

Jan de Bont — Jack Traven, Speed / Jo Harding, Twister

When central California is improbably threatened by a tornado with a bomb ingeniously attached to its vortex by a demented meteorologist fired from The Weather Channel, Jack Traven must consult with Dr. Jo Harding, flown in from the Oklahoma Plains, uniting de Bont’s greatest box office triumphs in a spirited comeback attempt.

 Chris Columbus — Kevin McCallister, Home Alone / Chris Parker, Adventures in Babysitting

The adult version of Kevin arrives at McMurdo Station in Antarctica on a geological survey. But upon arriving, he receives a taunting voicemail from The Waterlogged Bandits, Sons of The Wet Bandits (Channing Tatum & Jonah Hill), cluing him into the fact he has inadvertently left Kevin Jr. home alone. Alas, his hands are tied since the next scheduled flight out of McMurdo Station is not for three months! On a tip, he uses a satellite phone to call Chris Parker, head of the C.I.A.’s elite babysitting extraction division who agrees to lead a rescue mission.

Paul Thomas Anderson — Lieutenant Detective Christian F. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen, Inherent Vice / Maurice Rodriguez, Boogie Nights

You thought “Bigfoot” Bjornsen had it bad trying to deal with the persnickety remnants of the 60s counterculture?! You ain't seen nothing yet! Just wait until he is forced to deal with the inclusivity of disco culture as he is tasked with escorting witness Maurice Rodriguez to court, “Midnight Run” style.

Mick Jackson — Mike Roark, Volcano / Harris K. Telemacher, L.A. Story

After retiring from OEM, Mike Roark takes a job as a local weatherman simply on the strength of his fame stemming from saving L.A. from the infamous La Brea Tar Pit Volcano of 1997. Alas, he butts heads with wacky weekend weatherman Harris K. Telemacher who, in a desperate bid to remain relevant, has become a “comical” climate change denier.

Let the Sunshine In

“Let the Sunshine In” opens with Isabelle (Juliette Binoche) and Vincent (Xavier Beauvois) in bed. He expresses his desire to pleasure her; she says she has already been pleasured enough. Binoche’s line reading suggests she might not be telling the whole truth and Vincent’s line makes clear he is not listening anyway, a communication breakdown if there ever was one. Later, Isabelle, who is divorced and spends the whole movie on a search, or thereabouts, for love, or something like it, is out with a moody actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle) who spends the entire evening blathering about his insecurities and then tells her she should not have been forced to hear anything he had to say. “Finally,” she says just before they fall into bed. “No talk.” If, say, “Before Sunrise” was chock full of words searching for romantic meaning, so is “Let the Sunshine In”, though the latter sees its endless torrent of conversations as ultimately meaningless, dancing about architecture and all that. It is not words that drive Isabelle so much as urges.

The narrative follows those urges too, forgoing any kind of narrative structure, which, even if Isabelle often comes across trapped within the neurosis of her own mind, makes the film itself feel free. That freedom is furthered in director director Claire Denis’s elliptical structure, not just from scene to scene but within the whole movie itself, so that whenever you think you have a handle on where you are in the space time continuum, the whole thing flips. deliberately making a gorgeous mess of the notion of so many romantic comedies, which “Let the Sunshine In” is at its core, that neat and ordered storylines progress to true love. Indeed, Denis’s camera work furthers this notion, often jarring us by cutting to close-ups of Binoche mid-conversation, eliciting the sense that whatever’s being said to her is something she is struggling to square.

Yet even in those close-ups Binoche remains markedly distant, frequently looking away, never quite letting us all the way in. That might seem odd given how we spend the entire movie in her presence. But then, how do you get to know someone still in the process of figuring herself out, a remarkable assertion for a middle-aged character, allowing Isabelle the freedom to fuck up as much as any rom com twenty-something. This riddle is what prevents the movie from simply being a series of episodes in which a woman keeps placing herself in situations with terrible men. She shares blame too.

While Denis might not have traditional interest in the old proverb of the Meet Cute, she presents one anyway, on a dance floor where mysterious suitor suddenly appears to the strains of Etta James’s “At Last” as they just sort of fall into an elegantly primal dance. Denis allows the moment to last the entire song, a lyrical evocation of instant sexual attraction, and the joy with which Binoche allows Isabella to luxuriate in that desire is palpable. You almost wish it would end there as one song of bliss. It can’t, of course, so they see each other and when a friend, possible partner, questions this new suitor’s compatibility, it goads Isabelle into doing the same, a heartbreaking scene where Binoche manages to convey regret in the midst of the breakup itself, as if her character is willing herself to do something she does not necessarily believe in, still trying to make up her mind even after she ostensibly already has.

That air of synchronous confusion permeates “Let the Sunshine In”, right down to its conclusion, involving a Gérard Depardieu cameo, shot mostly in close-up, first in shadow and then gradually illuminated, underscoring how the scene gradually unwinds its truth, incredibly managing to live out its title even as it skewers that title too. I will not spoil it precisely, but suffice to say that it reorders things, a marvelous bit of subterfuge, existing as both a beginning and an end, or maybe an end and a beginning, depending on your half full/half empty mindset. And Binoche, bless her, splits the difference with a smile that summarizes the whole damn movie. Both things, as the political pundits are always advising these days, can be true.

Roma

The modus operandi of “Roma” is, as it generally is with director Alfonso Cuarón, ravishing images recounted in long takes. You see this straight away as the title cards slowly unspool over a close-up of a floor tile in the movie’s monochrome being inundated by soapy water before gradually a reflection of the sky reveals itself amidst the suds, planes flying high above. This reflection foretells “Roma” as a reflection of Cuarón’s own childhood even as this symbiosis between something as prosaic as the freaking floor and as dreamy as the sky simultaneously evokes how the images frequently merge the background and foreground, demonstrating how our individual stories are always linked with the world around us. And that immersion with the surrounding world is furthered by the sound design, heard in this scene too, forgoing a traditional musical score, as the whole film does, for the water’s gentle lapping across the tile, intrinsically asking us, the audience, to settle down and focus, perhaps, but also illustrating how the characters in the film are seeking peace within amidst so much cacophony.

Eventually, the camera tilts up to find Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), maid to a sprawling family in Mexico City’s Colonia Roma neighborhood, mopping up a floor covered in dog feces. It instantly places us on her level. This is crucial. “Roma” might be positively Proustian, with this washing of tiles as the entry point to Cuarón’s childhood, the onscreen home a careful reconstruction of his own, the family approximating his, though the movie is not just a flash, like the confit byaldi momentarily transporting the egotistical restaurant critic in “Ratatouille” back, but, as the aforementioned overriding aesthetic implies, immersive.

Though the film and consequently Cleo are seen through the eyes of Cuarón, “Roma” is not a looking back, rediscovering, reckoning, realizing that, hey, this woman really was human all along. No, Cuarón is showing us as he saw her, part of the family but not necessarily of it, as a scene where she watches television with the family only to then be dispatched by mother Sofia (Marina de Tavira) to fetch father Antonio’s (Fernando Grediaga) tea, demonstrates. And even if Cuarón elucidating through visuals limits the revelations of Cleo’s inner thoughts, the delicate performance of Aparicio hints at those anyway. When the family arrives at an Uncle’s hacienda for Christmas, Cleo notices the stuffed heads of family dogs on the wall, one of whom, she is told, was likely poisoned by villagers upset with the Uncle’s handling of their land. Though Cuarón punctuates the moment with the latest family dog licking Cleo’s hand, he gives space in the moments just before to show her looking up at the mounted heads, Aparicio’s expression seeming to consider the effect of revolutionary ideals even as that expression’s solemnity acknowledges her personal duties come first.

Cuarón’s principal concern is not traditional narrative structure, despite threads suggesting one, but space, both within the home, where so much of the action takes place, and outside of it, and how Cleo fits into and moves through it. Upon discovering she is pregnant, Cleo, yearning to tell her employer, first brings Sofia coffee before being dispatched out into the rain to summon the kids and then, finally, confessing the news, all relayed in an unbroken take, the camera panning with Cleo and then tilting one way and back again, that connects the idea of sense of self coming second. When Cleo’s boyfriend Fermín (Jorge Antonio Guerrero) leaves her in a movie theater after she admits to missing her period, nary a word is spoken, as he gets up from his seat, ostensibly to use the bathroom, and never returns, forcing her to suffer a private emotional breakdown in public, first inside the theater and then outside of it, so much ordinary life indifferently transpiring all around her.

These wide frames and long takes might be epic but they are never aloof, extracting astonishing intimacy, virtual paintings affording each viewer the time to pick through each element and eventually focus on the emotions of an individual. In contrast, Cuarón’s occasional close-ups are deliberately devoid of such intimacy. Antonio’s introduction, navigating the narrow contours of his family’s garage as he attempts to park his giant Ford Galaxie, is a series of quick cuts never quite allowing the patriarch to come into full view, suggesting his eventual abandonment of wife and kids. Indeed, when he leaves the next morning, nominally on a business trip, the way de Tavira has Sofia hold onto him, evinces his forthcoming abandonment too. Throughout this nigh frightening embrace, a marching band can be heard in the distance, and as Antonio drives away, the marching band parades right through Sofia as she watches her spouse go, her melancholy juxtaposed against their joy, a shot spiritually linking her and Cleo more than any explicative line of dialogue.

If this shot links Cleo and Sofia, there is a later shot, another exquisite long take, linking Cleo with us. It occurs on a beach where Cleo has been left in charge of the children. Though she cannot swim, when a crisis emerges involving a couple of the kids, she wades into and then pushes through the waves, a remarkable feat of cinematic veracity. If so many of Cuarón’s frames revel in depth of field, this one is slightly different, putting the camera to the side of Cleo and watching her move forward so that we cannot see what is ahead. Here, we are side by side with her. And when the moment culminates in the shot giving the movie its poster, which blunts none of its impact, she is one with the family, which is where, we realize, “Roma” has been headed all along, this familial embrace.

The noise of the ocean continues roaring in the background, though here Cleo and the kids, momentarily, all piled on top of one another, have found peace in each other.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Withnail and I (1987)

As I watched Bruce Robinson’s beloved British comedy “Withnail and I” (1987), my American mind kept flashing back to an American comedy, “Kicking and Screaming” (1995). That’s because both movies involve aimless young men whose dread about getting on with their lives gets release, so to speak, in the form of drinking. And yet, despite so much dyspeptic dialogue that is the hallmark of Noah Baumbach, the latter ultimately reveals itself to be partly sunny more than mostly cloudy whereas Robinson’s film, honoring perhaps the English climate, is mostly cloudy – nay, rainy, very rainy, very rainy and grey, as evoked in the characters’ country retreat which is like the wicked kin of the characters in “Local Hero” getting stranded in the fog. Maybe this ultimate divergence can be traced to the time, seeing as how “Kicking and Screaming” was released in a decade that went Boom while “Withnail and I” might have been released in the 80s but was set at the end of the 60s, the very end, as the glories of what that decade had promised were fading from view, and had, in a sense, receded all the way by the time 1987 would have rolled around.

“Withnail and I” opens with the I of its title, Marwood (Paul McGann), bursting into his flat after sitting in a café and jealously watching another patron chow down on an egg sandwich, the basics of life which in his unemployed actorly lifestyle he can barely attain, ranting and raving as he violently comes down from some epic high. As it happens, that’s the movie in capsule, coming down from a high. As the movie begins, King Curtis’s cover of “Whiter Shade of Pale” plays, which, I only learned afterwards, was the saxophonist’s last live recording, intrinsically setting the mood. These characters are stuck in the death rattle of this madness into which their lives have sunk, trying to stave it off any way they can, an idea which a consistently committed Richard E. Grant wrings maximum hysterical terror from when his nigh unhinged Withnail guzzles lighter fluid.

The apartment, with its dirty dishes piled high in the sink, feels infested, and both Withnail and I seem to be itching to crawl out of their own skin. Their remedy to this is r&r in the countryside, staying at the cottage of Withnail’s Uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths), the paranoia of these urban dwellers only amplifies, glimpsed in a scene where Grant cradling a shotgun in bed and blasting a hole in the ceiling makes a comical argument for the necessity of firearms training. Their facing the prospect of killing a chicken, meanwhile, suggests Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo were plunked down in Thoreau’s Walden. Nature provides no respite to inner-frenzy.

Grant, of course, is the taller of two, and McGann is often positioned in shots behind him, hurrying to keep up, as if he is being carried along in Withnail’s wake, a sensation Grant furthers with a performance that is not so much charismatic as delirious, accentuated by the burnout makeup design, and reminding me of Wayne Knight’s observation that his Newman character on “Seinfeld”, while inherently slovenly, actually viewed himself as princely. Indeed, when Withnail is wolfing down a literal plate of food with a glass of wine in the passenger seat of a car, he looks like a delirious prince. And if I is delirious too, the movie eventually becomes about his need to re-embrace reality, which only happens toward the end, after he finally lands an acting job, freshens up his unkempt appearance, and takes a walk in the rain with Withnail, not quite able to tell his friend goodbye but leaving him behind anyway.

The movie ends as Withnail recites a soliloquy from “Hamlet” with zoo animals as his only audience. There were also Shakespeare overtones in “Birdman”, another movie about a fading actor, though that movie could never completely relinquish its noble view of the profession. “Withnail and I” can and does. This conclusion is as sad a moment as cinema has ever produced, equating the passage of time, the ending of eras, as being left out in the rain.

What Film Genre Would I Want to Live In?

On the year-end episode of Slate’s podcast the Political Gabfest, tri-hosts Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson and David Plotz answered listener-submitted conundrums with which they proceeded to wrestle in front of a live audience. Of the many conundrums, one stuck out, Plotz posing a hypothetical in which they were forced to select a literary or cinematic genre to live in. Dickerson, apparently a Tolkien junkie, went for Middle Earth, but, as you might suspect, the literary portion of the hypothetical interested me far less than the cinematic portion. This was also true of Bazelon, Plotz and special guest Simon Doonan. The first two offered the Musical Theater genre while Doonan selected film noir. What film genre, I wondered, as I absolutely had to (and you should too), would I want to live in?

Well, we can eliminate the Western right away. No way could I handle a Western. Unless it’s a better version of “Wagons East” where I realize mid-wagon train I’d be better off east of the Appalachians in Boston or New York, I’m out.

Me?

Action-Adventure is no good either. I’d have to be Marcus Brody, I suppose, and not the “Raiders of Lost Ark” version but the comic relief “Last Crusade” one.

Ditto Thrillers. My greatest cinematic nightmare is ending up like Harrison Ford in “Frantic” or Woody Harrelson in “Transsiberian.” I end up in one of those movies and I’m toast. No thanks!

Sci-Fi and Fantasy are not my bag. Sports are but, man, Sports Movies tend to be as fantastical as Fantasy.

Comedy would exhaust me – like, stop cracking jokes for five seconds – and Rom Com would leave me wishing we could stop talking about our bad dates – like, can we talk about how good this gruyère is instead? – and while there are elements of Screwball Comedy I would find most appealing to exist in, well, the plots would just be too exhausting. It’d be ten minutes into the damn thing and I’d be wanting to just lie down and take a nap.

Also Me?

That’s why I’m almost tempted to go Indie. The vibe would be a lot more laid-back. I could just spend a lot of time with my feet kicked up, wiling away the day, while viewers turn away in droves. Still, indies tend to be pure angst and I’m not looking for more angst here.

Documentary’s no good, obviously, and though Mockumentary is a tempting off the beaten path choice, I keep worrying I’d be less Corky St. Clair and more Lloyd Miller.

I would love to just up and burst into song like a Musical. Why the morning before I concocted this post I saw a young woman standing on a median in the middle of Michigan Avenue listening to some groovy tuneage in her earbuds and dancing as traffic coasted by on each side of her and though for a split-second that I was in “La La Land” and wondered if I should just crank Gaga’s “The Fame Monster” and get publicly lost in the groove myself.

And yet.

Doonan, as mentioned, picked film noir, which is less a genre, per se, than a subgenre. And so I keep thinking about French New Wave. I keep thinking about how those New Wave maestros mixed genres. And I keep thinking about kicking back in a cafe like I’m in a indie...

...and then getting up and dancing like all my world’s a Musical.

Ben Is Back

“Ben Is Back” opens inside a church sanctuary during rehearsal for the Christmas Eve pageant as the camera pans down from above and past a stained glass window, coming to rest on Holly Burns (Julia Roberts), wide-eyed and wide-smiled, sitting in a pew, a classic kind of movie star shot. Immediately, however, “Ben Is Back” cuts from the church’s interior warmth to an exterior cold, drab grey where the eponymous Ben (Lucas Hedges), Holly’s son, vaping, his face nearly doused with a hood, stands outside a house, peering through the windows, a barking dog inside seeming to connote trouble, underlined by the shaky, jittery camera rooted to Ben’s level. It proves a bit of a dodge, as the home is Ben’s and the dog is too, though these dueling aesthetics nevertheless foreshadow the film to come, one in which cozy domesticity is so close yet so far away, with mother and son acting as if they are in the throes of it even if the rest of the film evinces how hard it is to attain. And while there might be a bit too much ginning up of drama, particularly toward the end, for my taste, “Ben Is Back” succeeds not just because of its two ace leading performances but because it ultimately opts for hard-to-accept truth rather than having it both ways.

Although the narrative gradually pieces together the trials bringing Ben to this point, the precariousness of his plight is nevertheless felt straight away in the movie’s air, how upon being let into the family home his sister Ivy (Kathryn Newton) keeps her distance, sending covert, fraught texts to her and Ben’s stepdad, Neal (Courtney B. Vance), while Julia Roberts’s famous mega-watt movie star smile is cleverly employed as something else, a frozen-in-place grin oozing forced enthusiasm, blocking out all the obvious perils connected to her son’s unexpected return, choosing only to see what’s good, or what she believes to be good about it. Hedges, meanwhile, his character chattering away about what he’s learned in rehab and repeatedly citing talking points from his sponsor, deftly toes the line so you can’t quite tell if he’s just full of it or energetic in that way that people sometimes are when they are trying so hard to both change and be on their best behavior. Gradually, both Hedges and the movie, which was written and directed by Hedges’s dad Peter, peel back layers to show that both things are true.

The manner “Ben Is Back” peels back those layers, alas, can sometimes feel a bit too dramatically contrived, with all sorts of telegraphed events setting up just so to engender the ending, while also occasionally evoking something more akin to an action-adventure film, such as when Ivy and her laptop briefly transform the proceedings into “Mission: Impossible”. Even so, there is something emotionally affecting about how all these machinations force Holly to confront the truth about her son, that he was genuinely a bad person when under the awful spell of drugs, and though you might occasionally find yourself wondering if she would keep pressing forward so deep into the unknown as those aforementioned dramatic contrivances grow bigger, well, that aforementioned frozen smile is all the backstory you need to believe she would. There is an almost paralyzing sense of mother love here, so much so that she finds herself lying to the other half of her family, in effect becoming her son, even if you wish Peter Hedges might have pushed the consequences of these dubious ethics a little bit more.

Movies in this vein tend to conclude by either leaning too far into easy sentimentality or cheap cynicism, and while both potential avenues are glimpsed, whether it’s a wrap-up, while foreshadowed, hueing a little too close to an episode of “Lassie” or Ben’s plight taking the turn you are expecting all along, “Ben is Back” threads the needle. It manages this feat by transforming the mother/son quest not into a solution for the whole problem but rather a cosmic means waking them up to the next step for their reality.

Vice

If Christian Bale, disappearing beneath prosthetics and mounds of makeup, ever truly becomes former Vice President Dick Cheney in “Vice”, it is as a smug supervillain, leaning back in an office chair like a self-appointed Lord of America’s manor, sucking air through the side of his lips in the manner of nothing less than a Lizard King. Eek. If something deeper lurks below, Bale rarely finds it, aside from a few isolated moments, as if theorizing that Cheney ditched his humanity along the side of the road, leaving nothing more than towering condescension and self-importance. Oddly, that puffed-up-edness comes to define “Vice” itself, written and directed by Adam McKay, which seeks not only to recount the horrors inflicted upon America by Richard Bruce Cheney but to scold so many average Americans for failing to pay heed as it was happening, a pretty bold position to take when your own movie isn’t much more than a sensationalized Wikipedia entry.

“Vice” opens by first showing us a young, hellraising, socially disinterested Cheney before cutting to a future Cheney on 9/11 who instantly recognizes the opportunity to grossly consolidate power in the wake of a national tragedy, indicating the movie’s desire to chronicle how we got from the first place to the second place. But while a movie following Dick Cheney on his megalomaniacal rise might seem readymade to tease out its diagnosis of his psychological temperament, “Vice”, in fact, identifies the problem straight away, in a scene where the young Cheney is working on powerlines in Wyoming. When he comes across a co-worker who has fallen and shattered his leg, begging for help, the camera looks up from the injured man at Cheney, and Bale has his character register this moment with a terrifyingly placid indifference.

Granted, “Vice” does portray Cheney’s devotion to and focus on American branded evil as being initially motivated by his wife Lynne who Amy Adams plays not so much convinced of Cheney’s predestined greatness as insisting he be great, relatively speaking, or else. She is Shakespearean, in other words, in her machinations, which “Vice” briefly literalizes in a bout of bedroom iambic pentameter between Dick and Lynne, a comically distinct sequence where getting to listen to Bale as Cheney as the Thane of Glamis. It’s a kick, and it is emblematic of the myriad bells and whistles that McKay injects throughout, copying his “The Big Short” blueprint for spotlighting how modern America frequently fails to notice dangerous shifts in societal tectonic plates because we are subsumed by the noise of our respective cocoons.

That is not unnecessarily untrue, and yet “Vice” is mostly just noise itself, a series of incidents failing to culminate in anything piercing or profound. When the young Cheney asks his mentor, future Secretary of Defense in Cheney’s – er, Bush’s – administration, Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell, gleeful in his evil disregard), what they believe, Rumsfeld just laughs. They don’t believe in anything, really, and every fancy aesthetic flourish throughout just reiterates this point, leaving you with nothing much more than a Aren’t These People the Worst? Compilation, and often in a tamer manner than the movie itself to seems to think. Though the opening title cards claim a kind of gonzo journalism, “Vice” nevertheless comes across a lot less gleefully exaggerated than, say, “Winter Kills” (1979), which was truly off the rails even as it simultaneously provided clarity into the Washington madhouse. McKay might spotlight the Vice’s vision for Unitary Executive Theory, yet he suffers from his own lack of cinematic vision, merely parading all the bad things Cheney did across the screen like a collection of souped-up skits, assuming it will suffice.

The closest “Vice” gets to illuminating its subject involves Cheney’s daughter, Mary (Allison Pill), in a mid-movie scene where she comes out to her father and mother. “It doesn’t matter,” her father says, a line reading that Bale injects with a truth impressively pushing past the usual “As a father of daughters…” politician platitudes. This becomes a through-line to the movie’s end where Cheney essentially goes back on these pre-established beliefs about same-sex marriage, all of which becomes tied up in his heart transplant. Here McKay makes the age-old joke of the former Veep having no heart literal, though he is also pinpointing this as the moment in which Cheney became heartless, which is at odds with the remainder of the movie, all the way back to that Wyoming telephone line worker, which consistently renders him heartless. Cheney contains no multitudes, in other words, because the movie forgoes drilling down into his psyche, as if putting him on the witness stand and then never really asking the right questions. Why you can almost imagine the real Dick Cheney watching “Vice” and deploying the smirk Bale so accurately captures.

Cheney’s right there in front of us, but once again, he gets away scot-free.

Post-Golden Globes Oscar Predictions

The Golden Globes, Hollywood’s official Office Party, were last night. There were a lot of unexpected results. You can scroll through news, in a manner of speaking, relating to those and what they may or probably do not mean in the vat of sulfuric acid that is Film Twitter. Or you can just go see a movie and, like, form your own opinion, man. Either way, in lieu of the Golden Globes, we have officially revised our 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: .....

A Few of My Favorite 2018 Movie Shots