Post Oscar Nap

It’s strange, even as I get older and time keeps scarily speeding up, with weeks going by in the snap of a finger and weekends in the blink of an eye, this movie awards season nevertheless managed to feel endless. And though it has ended now, winter, this brutal winter, hasn’t, and neither has February, and all taken together the first two months of 2019 have mostly managed to feel like an unfair 60 day add-on to 2018. So Cinema Romantico is laying down for a winter’s nap. We’ll see you next week.

Meet the New Oscars. Same as the Old Oscars.

It was the immortal Hollywood producer Stanley Motts who once observed how three principal actors died two weeks before the conclusion of principal photography on The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Producing, in other words, is rolling with the punches, which is just what Donna Gigliotti and Glenn Weiss did, much to their immense credit, in guiding the 91st Academy Awards through its great no-host fiasco and all other manner of productional setbacks. If just a week ago, in reversing their decision not to air several categories during commercial breaks after public blowback, the whole ceremony seemed destined to collapse, it not only ultimately held together but moved at the brisk sort of pace they promised, not getting in under three hours but coming as close as anyone could reasonably expect for such a live TV behemoth. And if Gigliotti and Weiss remained committed to playing Oscar winners off after their allotted time, they nevertheless kept the spotlight firmly on the winners throughout the night.

The show began smashingly as Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, and Tina Fey took the stage to (not) host. (Queen, subject of multiple award winner “Bohemian Rhapsody”, opened the ceremony with Adam Lambert substituting for the late Freddie Mercury. In a Red Carpet interview Lambert claimed he’d been told by Queen that Mercury would’ve been cool with this replacement. I found this odd because if there was anything “Bohemian Rhapsody” taught us, which wasn’t much, it’s that Mercury probably would not have been cool with it.) If any combination of this awesome comic trio has long been the dream hosts for a certain sort of movie fan (read: me), this trio is also fiercely intelligent and had long grasped that hosting the Oscars is a no-win proposition. So, they set the telecast’s refreshing template of brevity by riffing about not really being hosts and cycling through a few rapid fire Best Picture jokes, departing the stage almost as soon as they arrived, going out on a glorious high note. It made me dream of Poehler, Rudolph, and Fey as the modern variation of Bob Hope, (not) hosting on into forever.

It proved that losing most of the host’s traditional superfluous bits – think: jet skis, magic acts, and candy falling from the ceiling – will expedite the affair. True, had the telecast cut performances of all five of the original Best Song nominees, it might have come even closer to the fabled three-hour mark. But if great movies often contain great paradoxes, so did these Oscars, because if I maintain the Best Song nominees should not be performed, perhaps the show’s high point was this blog’s beloved, Lady Gaga, singing her “A Star Is Born” power-ish ballad “Shallow” with co-star Bradley Cooper. Gaga literally did not get an introduction because she literally doesn’t need one, the camera watching from the stage as the duo ascended from their front row seats, sat down at a grand piano, and proceeded to indulge in some serious Bruce & Patti Circa “Tunnel of Love” cosplay.

Gaga won the Oscar, along with Mark Ronson, Andrew Wyatt, and Anthony Rossomando who rightly deferred to Ms. Stefani Germanotta. “A Star Is Born” was Gaga, all Gaga, which Cooper, as director, both did and did not recognize, so her earning its lone statue was apropos. Ditto “Vice” winning Makeup & Hairstyling since that movie got by entirely on Christian Bale’s fake jowls. “Black Panther” won for Production Design, Costume Design, and Original Score, evincing its ace Afrofuturistic world-building, while “Bohemian Rhapsody” winning both Sound Categories probably just tied back to some Academy members thinking that Queen music on the soundtrack equates to, like, good sound. Right? “Bohemian Rhapsody” won Best Editing too, which felt wrong on a pragmatic level, though John Ottman’s put in his time and it’s reasonable to think that a movie which fired its awful excuse for a human being as director midway through might well have been salvaged in the editing bay.

The acting categories nearly went as expected, with Regina King winning Best Supporting Actress for “If Beale Street Could Talk” and Mahershala Ali winning Best Supporting Actor for “Green Book.” Rami Malek won Best Actor for “Bohemian Rhapsody” and, mimicking his whole awards season run, politically walking between the raindrops in his acceptance speech, forgoing any mention of his awful excuse for a human being as director. If Malek walked between the raindrops, or tried to, in winning Best Actress for “The Favourite”, Olivia Colman seemed to walk on air. It wasn’t an acceptance speech so much as a flabbergasted real-time reaction, where her concluding observation of “Lady Gaga” to Lady Gaga came across like disbelief that Gaga was down there and Colman was up here. If Best Actress had seemed like a coronation for Glenn Close going in, it had become something else, and Colman comically, movingly referenced it, instantly transforming them into equals rather than Winner/Loser. Hell, Close was nominated for “The Wife”, playing a woman that propped up a man and made him famous; I found myself dreaming of an alternate reality where Oliva Colman won Best Actress and Glenn Close won Best Actor.

In a year that came on the heels of Me Too, which came on the heels of Oscars So White, the winners parading across stage were frequently diverse. After the first few awards, in fact, there had been more people of color than old white dudes. For the fifth time in six years a Mexican director – Alfonso Cuarón for “Roma” – won Best Director, and Cuaron doubled down by winning Best Cinematography too. Ah, and then there was Spike Lee. Like he can capture your imagination just by sitting courtside at Madison Square Garden, he seemed to partially dominate the festivities by just being there. When Ruth Carter won Best Costume Design, she shouted out Spike with whom she got her start, and you could feel how his legacy was spiritually connected to all the “Black Panther” love in that room. And though Lee is first and foremost an auteur, meaning his first Oscar deserved to be one for Director rather than Writer, whatever. Seeing him win the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for “BlacKkKlansman” was sheer blinding jubliation that manifested itself in his jumping into an embrace of presenter Samuel L. Jackson. Lee fumbled reading his notes, I suspect, because his heart was beating just as wildly as mine. That Oscar was long, long overdue.

To paraphrase old Rose DeWitt Bukater, alas, the Oscars can always be counted upon, and in the end, much of their inclusive goodwill was undone just two short years after “Moonlight’s” it didn’t/it did triumph in one of the most mind-bending one step up-two steps back decisions you will ever see with Best Picture going to the rote “Green Book”, evoking inevitable shades of 1989. It was the evening’s most profound, confounding and disappointing paradox: a movie purporting to be both black/white conspicuously only seeing things from one perspective culminating what had organically become a celebration of the industry’s increasing diversity. The Academy might be changing, the Oscar telecast might be doing its best to improve, but the Oscar themselves stubbornly try to stay the same.

Lady Gaga: Oscar Winner

The Oscars have spoken. And more than even usual, there seems a lot to say. But I don’t want to say all that right now. I don’t even want to think about all that right now. Like Kramer waving off Jerry trying to talk him down for celebrating a Tony he didn’t actually win, nothing is taking me down off this high. Gaga, my girl, my hero, is an Oscar winner. Everything else is just noise. Talk to me tomorrow.

Oscars 2019: Best Dressed

Hi, y’all! It’s Saturday February 23rd! That means the 91st Academy Awards are not until tomorrow! And that means the Red Carpet is still over 24 hours away, slated to get rolling around 3:30 PM (PST) with Jamie Luner, Brooke Theiss, Heather Langenkamp, and JoAnn Willette, former co-stars of the wacky ABC comedy “Just the Ten of Us” (1987-90), scheduled for hosting duties along with Ryan “I Didn’t Know There Was A 1976 ‘A Star Is Born’” Seacrest. As such, we have no idea what any of the Oscar megastars will be wearing until then. Still, one need not actually see Saturn’s rings through the window of a passing spacecraft to know its circular water ice is the universe’s most luminescent. And one need not actually see Lady Gaga’s dress to know it’s already the most chic.

That’s why today Cinema Romantico will go ahead and declare Lady Gaga as Oscar 2019’s Best Dressed. This is not confirmation bias, of course, because we do not yet even have evidence to be biased about, and this is certainly beyond the reach of any fashion market research, whether based on data-driven industry analysis or the whims of the “Just the Ten of Us” daughters. No, this is merely ahead of time inherent cosmic truth.

Speculative living sketch of Ms. Gaga’s Oscar dress

Countdown to the Oscars: Totally Unreasonable, Completely Legitimate Oscar Predictions

A reminder that Cinema Romantico’s Oscar predictions have no interest in getting anything right. I make Oscar predictions squarely with my heart, not my head. To paraphrase the Bodhisattva of “Point Break”, it’s not tragic to lose your Oscar pool picking what you love.

Best Film Editing: Barry Alexander Brown, BlacKkKlansman. For Christmas in 1992 my mom got me Ralph Wiley’s book “By Any Means Necessary: Trials And Tribulations of the Making of Malcolm X.” There were myriad filmmaking insights to glean but one that stayed with me was Spike Lee explaining all the elements the assassination sequence needed to contain and how he and Barry Alexander Brown cut said sequence to account for all those elements. And so, months later, when I ripped “Malcolm X” from one VCR to another (don’t tell!), I watched the assassination sequence over and over to put together in my own mind what Lee was saying. That was, more or less, my Intro to Film Editing 101. Not that I just want Brown to win for his work from twenty-seven years ago. No, “BlacKkKlansman” deserves this award for myriad reasons, not just the “Birth of a Nation” homage cum skewering late in the film nor the civil rights rally rendered as a moving Charles White exhibit but for that last phone call between Ron Stallworth and David Duke; that might be my favorite cut sequence of the year.

Best Picture: Black Panther. There were movies in this category I liked more, and though I’m a little leery of rewarding Marvel’s ongoing homogenization of the movie marketplace, “Black Panther” taking top prize would not only be righteously jubilant unto itself but might signal further tangible progress where the Academy’s increased youth and diversity is concerned.

Best Director: Spike Lee, BlacKkKlansman. I have written (and orated) some variation of this many times before, but Spike Lee was the first person who really made me, as an idiot teenager, stop and actually think about how movies were made (see above). That this is his first Oscar nomination is...what? Absurd? Cruel? An injustice? Vorshtein? Beyond words? I have a feeling it’s Cuarón’s award to lose, but what if Lee won? Wouldn’t it be something? Oh reader, wouldn’t it just be something?

Best Actress: Lady Gaga, A Star Is Born. My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife recently argued that while I, Little Monster, am undoubtedly rooting for Ms. Gaga in this category that secretly, on a pragmatic level, I know Glenn Close deserves to win for “The Wife” and that deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties I even want her to win. And My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife is probably right. Still, I’m not so much going down with Gaga’s ship, because this isn’t a ship, as soaring alongside Gaga’s space coffin, a la “Wrath of Khan”, as it is shot into orbit around Genesis.

Can’t wait until Ethan Hawke finally wins his Oscar for playing Duane Allman in a staid biopic.

Best Actor: I am sitting this category out in protest of Ethan Hawke not being nominated for “First Reformed.”

Best Supporting Actress: Rachel Weisz, The Favourite. I would love to see Regina King, who has always deserved quality leading roles in cinema, win, yet my heart remains tethered to Weisz whose ability in “The Favourite” to emit such straight-faced macabre witticisms to so many oblivious male dolts makes her the hero we most need right now. And though in a just another second I will whine about a young actor potentially earning two Oscars already, well, Weisz is a legend in her own time. If awards are meaningless, as any incisive social media philosopher can advise, two-time Oscar winner Rachel Weisz nevertheless sounds right.

Best Supporting Actor: Richard E. Grant, Can You Ever Forgive Me? If Mahershala Ali wins for “Green Book”, as he seems likely to do, then given his rightful victory two years ago for “Moonlight”, he will have as many Oscars as Grant and fellow nominee Sam Elliott for “A Star Is Born” have nominations between them. And though Ali is good in “Green Book”, it is nigh impossible to contend he is truly better than either Grant or Elliott (Elliott’s last moment when he drives away encapsulates the stormy emotions of a whole life lived), never mind Adam Driver for “BlacKkKlansman” (who I actually think is best in show). And though I understand Hollywood’s historically egregious attitude toward and recognition of African-Americans, the industry is also often ageist, and Grant and Elliott, I fear, have aged out of future It’s His Time Oscar possibilities. This is it; this is their shot. Go Richard E.

Best Original Screenplay: Paul Schrader, First Reformed. Can you believe this is Paul Schrader’s first Oscar nomination? How is this possible? And how can be possibly not win for “First Reformed”? Nothing else in this category is in its league. (He will undoubtedly not win.)

Best Adapted Screenplay: Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty, Can You Ever Forgive Me? Can you believe this is Nicole Holofcener’s first Oscar nomination? Do people in the Academy even read the copies of these scripts that get sent to them during awards season? (P.S. I loved how uncompromising this script was at its conclusion.)

Best Foreign Language Film: Cold War. I’m a sucker for bleak and beautiful.

Best Animated Film: Isle of Dogs. As a staunch Andersonian, I must stand by my man.

Best Cinematography: Alfonso Cuarón, Roma. While I am grateful this category will be announced during the actual show rather than at commercial, I still hope when ABC comes back from commercial just before Cuarón’s inevitable victory that all the cameramen have momentarily abandoned their posts in a show of solidarity.

Best Production Design: I respect the authenticity of “Roma’s” production design though there is something about it being a recreation of Alfonso Cuarón’s own childhood that knocks it down a sentimental peg to me in comparison to the righteous Afrofuturism of Black Panther. 

Best Costume Design: Sandy Powell, The Favourite. Typically I pick the legendary Powell whenever she’s nominated because it gives me an excuse to employ her quote upon winning this award for “The Young Victoria” about honoring the costume designers on contemporary and low-budget films who rarely get as much recognition but period pieces but.....did you see that white jacket Powell put Rachel Weisz in to shoot pigeons? My God.

Best Makeup/Hairstyling: Mary Queen of Scots. Like Alvy Singer can’t help but rip up his traffic ticket, I can’t help but pick against “Vice.”

Best Sound Mixing: Roma. From the soft notes of suds being sloshed around the tiles as the credits unspool mixing with the jetliner reflected in the sky to the cacophony of city streets, the sound is just as layered as “Roma’s” mammoth depth of field photography.

Best Sound Editing: First Man. The film’s frightening veracity when it comes to space travel is due in no small part to the sound design placing us squarely in the noisy headspace of a tottering tin can.

Best Visual Effects: First Man. If the sound effects mentioned above convey the terror of space travel so do the visual effects, which manage to convey the awe-inspiring through early NASA’s more primitive prism.

Best Feature Documentary: Free Solo. Given the state of his amygdala, I hope Alex Honnold skips the ceremony, a la the late William Goldman, not to watch the Knicks but to, like, climb the High Sierra.

Best Live Action Short / Animated Short / Short Documentary. Yet again, for the third year in a row, this blog fell down on the job and failed to see most of the nominees for the short categories. Yet again, for the second year in a row, my Father-in-law is here to save me, having done his due diligence by seeing all the nominees. In Live Action he liked Marguerite and Detainment, and we will pick the former. In Animated Short he preferred Animal Magnetism and Bao, and we will pick the latter because what’s better than Liu Sha Bao? In Short Documentary, which my Father-in-law noted was a particular strong category this year, he singled out Black Sheep and Period. End of Sentence., and we are really happy he cited the latter because an Academy Award winning movie about Menstruation in the midst of the T*ump/P*nce Administration feels just right.

Original Score: BlacKkKlansman. Love how that electric guitar honors the era and evokes a police procedural while never emitting a whiff of processed cheese.

Best Original Song: Shallow, A Star Is Born. Come Sunday it will have been a decade and two days since Kate Winslet won her Oscar. No Academy Award will ever make me happier than that one. But this would come close (well...this, or Spike Lee). Put your paws up.

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Song Reimagined

In a pleasant twist, this year’s Oscar Best Song category eschewed its typical lackluster nominees for at least a pair of worthy entrants. This blog’s heroine, Lady Gaga, was nominated along with for “Shallow” from “A Star Is Born”, which accompanies the movie’s high point, while “When A Cowboy Trades His Spurs For Wings”, written for “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” by the impeccable Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, was a nifty austere sort of spin on Gene Autry. My heart desperately wants “Shallow“ to win, as you no doubt assume, but either song would be a worthy victor. Still, the modern art of selecting pop songs to accompany film moments continues to go unrecognized, and this blog continues to contend it should become the new basis of the Best Song Category.

So, as we do every Oscar season, Cinema Romantico reimagines the Best Song category as one in which pop music curation was rightfully honored and this blog and this blog alone was judge and jury in regards to the five nominees.

Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and His Comets in Cold War. “Once upon a time,”  Aaron Leitko wrote in a Washington Post article a couple years back reviewing a few music memoirs, “rock-and-roll was strange, wild and dangerous.” That’s true, as any cursory history of the movement can go to show, but that sonic menace has inevitably been strained out over the years. In “Cold War”, however, for one astonishing sequence, the best implementation of pop music in a 2018 movie, director Pawel Pawlikowski puts it back in. As Zula (Joanna Kulig) wastes away at the end of the bar, the sudden appearance of Bill Haley’s immortal chart-topper becomes a mythic invitation to freedom, and then danger, and then self-destruction.

Angel Baby by Rosie & The Originals in You Were Never Really Here. If pop songs are often used in juxtaposition to moments of brutal screen violence (see: Quentin Tarantino), director Lynne Ramsay is not seeking juxtaposition at all. No, this song was famously recorded on a two-track machine in an abandoned airline hangar, directly contributing to its rough, nigh eerie, sound, which is why it effortlessly harmonizes with rather than running counter to the eerie, oblique manner in which Ramsay recounts Joaquin Phoenix’s character violently liberating a young girl.


Too Late To Turn Back Now by Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose in BlacKkKlansman. We already wrote about this selection for our year-end Random Awards and, as such, simply re-offer our digression: What music does, whether it’s on your headphones, in person, or at a club, is let you slide into an in-between place for a few minutes at a time. That’s the sensation Spike Lee’s implentation of the Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose’s 1972 hit captures. And in “BlackKkKlansman”, after the thrill of the Kwame Ture rally and then the pain of the activists at the rally getting stopped by the police, when “Too Late to Turn Back Now” appears, that’s where the characters briefly, blessedly go...into the in-between of both those places.


Harvest Moon by Neil Young in A Quiet Place. If I told you that real-life wife and husband Emily Blunt and John Krasinski share a slow dance to this song in this movie you would probably retch. Ah, but in the film’s context, a world where positively no noise can be made lest monsters with acute sense of hearing come and eat you up, A Quiet Place’s single implementation of a pop song (heard through earbuds) therefore assumes deeper meaning, for them and for us, a reminder of how, in a cacophonous modern world of piped-in music everywhere you go, a single pop song remains capable of providing salvation.


Goodnight Ladies by Lou Reed in Can You Ever Forgive Me? If “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” is nominally about a forger who gets caught, it is also about an unlikely, effervescent friendship that forger forms as she breaks the law and which inevitably ends and pointedly without any sort of traditional redemption. That is what makes “Goodnight Ladies”, culled from the Bard of New York’s second solo album, such an ideal anthem. It is heard during the movie’s high point, a joyful night out, sung at a nightclub by transgender singer Justin Vivian Bond, before Reed’s original version plays over the closing credits after that joyful feeling has faded and the consequences of the characters’ actions are all that’s left.

Countdown to the Oscars: The Ruffalos

Back in the halcyon days of Bill Simmons’s late (best) web site (ever) Grantland, when I checked it as regularly as my Midwestern forefathers would check weather reports, my favorite podcast on the Interwebs was the aforementioned site’s liltingly titled Do You Like Prince Movies? It was hosted by Pulitzer Prize winning film critic Wesley Morris and ace culture scribe Alex Pappademas. And in the run-up to the Academy Awards of several years ago they bestowed their own set of acting prizes affectionately called The Ruffalos.

Mr. Morris and Mr. Pappademas did not define the criteria for their awards so much as just sort of shout out random guidelines in the discussion, but that was part of their charm. Ruffalos went to “People who aren’t getting nominated for anything.” To earn one “you gotta be playing the background a little bit,” or maybe not since some of the recipients were more in the spotlight rather than the background. And whatever, because The Ruffalos were more ineffable, something less stately and more tossed off, make-believe statues concerning a life-force that was more indelible than mere pomp. And because Grantland and, in turn, Do You Like Prince Movies? have been shuttered, Cinema Romantico, this itty bitty blog that most people stop reading at the first sign of a ham-fisted Keira Knightley reference, has taken on the task of keeping them alive. We did last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, and we do again this year.

The Ruffalos go to.....

Phylicia Rashad, Creed II 

The best scene in “Creed II”, and one of the best scenes in any 2018 movie period, happens when Adonis Creed approaches the woman who raised him, Apollo Creed’s widow, Rashad’s Mary Ann, for her blessing to fight the son of Ivan Drago. As Adonis, Michael B. Jordan is an exquisite scene partner, making clear both how desperate he is to get her blessing but also making clear how he is not being honest with himself about why he needs her blessing so much. And simply in her air, in her deft little smile, in the bemused way she reads her lines, Rashad makes clear why her character’s blessing is entirely immaterial since he’s already made up his mind. Drago’s son beats Adonis up pretty good, sure, but Rashad? She eviscerates him.

Jane Curtin, Can You Ever Forgive Me? 

As editor to an unpleasant, foul-mouthed motormouth like Lee Israel, Curtin, in just a few scenes, manages the delicate task of being both a through-clenched-teeth friend and having to tell it like it is.

Christian Slater, The Wife

In reading reviews of “The Wife” I came across a few dismissals of Slater as an author of unauthorized biographies being “miscast.” I could not disagree more. I found Slater PERFECTLY cast. Slater, in that brash grin and oily charm, has long excelled at exuding borderline sleaziness, which is precisely what the role requires, not just in grubbing for information but comically invading everyone’s personal space.

Andrew Dice Clay, A Star Is Born

Speaking of brash, who’s more brash than Andrew Dice Clay. And yet, as father to Ally, Lady Gaga’s eponymous star, he impressively recalibrates that brashness as something akin to a smothering conviviality that ultimately proves essential to his daughter’s emotional makeup.

Cedric the Entertainer, First Reformed

Let’s let Vanity Fair film critic K. Austin Collins just take the reins on this one: “I can’t say enough about Cedric “the Entertainer” Kyles—a comedian I grew up watching on The Steve Harvey Show-—whose pastor in the film is an essential counterpoint to the Rev. Toller because, although representative of a damningly business-oriented ideological position himself, he’s also sincere, funny, a good pastor. He’s the kind of pastor I grew up knowing in communities of my own; you sense a scam, but not because his godliness is unreal. You love him anyway.”

Vanessa Kirby, Mission: Impossible – Fallout 

Wicked and titillating, in a single breath Kirby exudes more of a palpable anarchist streak than, well, the dude who was supposed to exude an anarchist streak. Say it with me once more, for old time’s sake, why wasn’t SHE the principal villain?

Countdown to the Oscars: The Eternally Imperfect Oscar Ceremony

The first Academy Awards were famously short, running fifteen minutes, less a coronation than a quick if glamorous announcement given how the winners were known beforehand. As if sensing such brevity and seclusion would not do where show biz was concerned, the second Academy Awards ran for an hour, despite reducing their categories from 12 to 7, and were broadcast live on Los Angeles Radio. The third Academy Awards increased their categories from 7 to 8 while allowing for multiple nominations within individual categories, meaning that George Arliss defeated himself for Best Actor. The fourth Academy Awards did away with the latter, increased categories from 8 to 9 and changed the category Best Production to Best Picture, meaning “Cimarron” was technically the first Best Picture winner. And so on, the pattern of ceaseless Oscar changes emerging early. Indeed, the Academy Awards, I have realized in my 20+ years of avidly consuming them, are a glitzier version of your local airport or interstate, or your office email system. They are perpetually broken, changed and tinkered with, theoretically upgraded but never fixed.

The inevitable hullabaloo began this year when Kevin Hart dropped out as Oscar host for reasons we will refrain from rehashing here because that is not what this post is about (though a mere demonstration of empathy might have done the trick). That has left the Oscars host-less. You might presume that in the social media age, where every Oscar host is written off as a failure while still in the act of hosting, going sans emcee would lead to acclaim. Ah, but just as viewers often lament sports announcers as grating and gratuitous, when those same announcers are taken away, as they were by NBC in 1980, the calamity only amplifies, not unlike the host-less 61st Oscars of 1989 which went so well Janet Maslin began her commentary on it for The New York Times by fearing there would never be a 62nd. We, after all, like a fixed object on which to heap our scorn about the telecast’s setbacks, which is essentially what the host has become, technically a comic but symbolically a flak jacket.

Hosts, however, are also indicative of the Academy’s ongoing efforts for decades now to transform a ceremony officially intended to honor certain individuals for their outstanding artistic and technical achievements in the realm of Motion Pictures into small screen spectacle. The first televised ceremony, in fact, took place simultaneously in Los Angeles and New York. This belied the idea that each telecast would require something new or different to attract the masses, eliciting a long line of production bells and whistles, from Billy Crystal’s patented movie parodies to the 50th Academy Awards’ animated opening to Jimmy Kimmel’s more recent travails with ordinary citizens brought in to ogle the beautiful people. The success of such pageantry was, as it often is, in the eye of the beholder, and whether the ratings were good or bad or in-between, there were always post-ceremony gripes, leading each ensuing telecast to try and up the ante or modify its approach. And even as the ongoing spectacle contributed to longer and longer shows (the longest took place 17 years ago in 2002, running nearly a half-hour longer than last year’s three hour and fifty-three minute affair), the solution, as it were, tended to revolve around revising pomp rather than removing or significantly reducing it.

This year’s forthcoming ceremony, however, the 91st, has been noteworthy in its lugubrious attempts at something like real-time revision. Telecast producers Donna Gigliotti and Glenn Weiss initially announced their intention for a Popular Film category, the criteria of which was never actually disclosed, an apparent attempt to correct falling ratings that may (or may not) correlate to nominees not necessarily reflecting box office favorites. The outcry, alas, was so fierce and fast that the quasi-nascent category was dropped. Then Gigliotti and Wise announced their intention to have only two of the five nominees for Best Original Song perform, an apparent attempt to try and shorten the ceremony’s customary too-long length. The outcry, alas, never mind a possible intervention from the scheduled performers, was so fierce and fast that the telecast changed course and re-included the spurned trio.

Last week Academy President John Bailey announced several awards would be banished to commercial breaks, no doubt also intending to try and shore up running time, leading to yet another sustained burst of outrage from the cinephile masses. The Academy’s officers of its Board of Governors later released a letter clarifying that these awards would be shown, just later in the broadcast, evoking the old NBC Olympics argument of tape delay merely being plausibly live. Even so, they were giving away the game, admitting to shoehorning the presentation of awards into their planned spectacle rather than vice-versa, a fundamental misconception of the Oscars’ original purpose. Do I need to tell you the Academy backed down and reversed course? Bailey himself deemed the Oscars “a living entity” and, hoo buddy, did the last few months prove it. (Yesterday the Academy announced that Adam Lambert and Queen will perform. Perhaps the Academy was less than forthright in its expressed desire for a swift running time.)

One of the Best Original Song nominees, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’s “When A Cowboy Trades His Spurs For Wings”, culled from “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”, is partially about going up to the big blue yonder, but it’s also about the torch being passed, from one gunslinger to the next, an endless cycle of six-shooter showdowns, on into forever. And so even if I remain pragmatically opposed to the Best Songs being performed at all (that’s how you reduce time!), I wonder if this one being performed is nevertheless right on, summarizing the unintentional spirit of the Academy Award ceremony itself, one giving way to the next, host to (no) host, producers to producers, promising changes and improvements but really just making it all worse in its own unique way, a complaint department as ceremonial ritual, bury it and then fuck it all up again.

Green Book

Director Peter Farrelly became famous on the backs of comedies, like “There’s Something About Mary” (1998), in which no sacred cow was left deliberately un-tipped. And Farrelly’s “Green Book”, frankly, feels cut from the same universe, a joke in the background of “There’s Something About Mary” perhaps, with a fake TV movie trailer describing “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” meets “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” Indeed, if “Green Book” frequently seeks comedy through its story of a white and black man on a road trip through the Jim Crow Deep South, the jokes are rooted to clichés Farrelly timidly refuses to upend. No, this is more like Farrelly as Stanley Kramer, a well-meaning, good-hearted liberal who in his last major film nevertheless revealed racial and political blind spots, making a film less challenging than cozily reassuring. That’s “Green Book” pretty much. It doesn’t deign to “solve” race, at least, nor even pretend that everything’s hunky dory. Rather it professes to have two points-of-view even if it really only sees things through one character’s eyes.

“Green Book” is about a white man, Frank Vallelonga, better known as Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen), becoming valet to a black concert pianist, Dr. Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), as the latter goes on a two-month tour through the Midwest and Deep South in 1962. This neatly defines “Green Book” as a movie of contrasts. Black and White; Uncouth and Refined; Rock ‘n’ Roll and Classical. The intention, then, is the characters’ respective journey to the middle ground, one drawn with the sort of unsubtle touch evoked in how Tony shoves a pastrami sandwich into his mouth, unconcerned with getting grease all over his fingers and crumbs in his lap.

Not that this is simultaneously a criticism of Mortensen’s performance. If anything or anyone embodies the intended middle ground it is Mortensen. He is not so much a caricature as he is wholly committed, taking the advice of the character’s father to always gives 100% as his actorly guidance, playing the whole part in the manner of Tony folding up an ENTIRE pizza and shoving it in his mouth. And the way he has Tony throw a couple juice glasses in the trash that have touched the hands of African-Americans, denoting his racism, is the same way he has Tony eventually confront a few rednecks, a similar bearing marking his obligatory enlightenment as surprisingly natural.

If Mortensen takes his cues from how his character eats then Ali takes his cues from how Dr. Shirley sips scotch, deliberately and all alone. One of the film’s three writers, Nick Vallelonga, the real Tony Lip’s son, has said that Shirley saw himself existing on an island, a sentiment which Ali plays straight to, not putting on airs but remaining aloof, so much that you can sense an invisible sort of emotional wall between the front seat and back seat in the myriad car scenes. He is purposeful in every gesture and line reading, underlining a severe consciousness about how his character presents himself to the world. And though Shirley cites the necessity of “dignity”, it is less dignity Ali gets at than fear, emitting a sense of not so much sanding away rough edges as sanding away everything, an understanding of the mid-American 20th century truth that a black man had to subsist by not standing out.

“Green Book”, however, comes across oddly incurious about Shirley’s music, the thing theoretically driving the whole plot, with Tony saying he plays like “Liberace, but better” and mostly content with that as a descriptor. The problem is not so much that Tony teaches Shirley about rock ‘n’ roll and whether that is true to life, but that even as Shirley learns about rock ‘n’ roll, neither the film nor Tony take any interest in Shirley’s classical music, betraying the film’s odd insistence at only looking through the looking glass one way. The pianist might well teach his valet a few things too, such as playing de Bergerac for Tony in the letters the latter writes to his wife, but these scenes remain rooted to Tony’s point-of-view, a trait that defines the film. Though “Green Book” is nominally about two men, it opens not by cutting back and forth between them but by introducing only Tony and his work and home life, and only introducing us to Shirley when Tony is introduced to him too. And Shirley’s lessons are conspicuously colorblind whereas Tony’s rock ‘n’ roll instruction, never mind fried chicken eating etiquette, are not, inadvertently underlining prevailing post-racial myths.

“Green Book” was inspired by a true story, much like 1989’s “Glory”, Edward Zwick’s telling of the African-American 54th Massachusetts Civil War Infantry regiment that took heat for its main character being white. That criticism might well have been valid from a pre-production standpoint, but the screenplay, written by a white man (Kevin Jarre), did carve out space for scenes entirely from a black perspective. What’s more, as I have written before, the movie ultimately became about its white protagonist trying to find some way to see the world through his black soldiers’ eyes. “Green Book”, though, rarely makes this attempt, simply seeking reconciliation without true atonement, evoked in the closing sequence where a gaggle of white people look up, slack-jawed, at a black man suddenly in their presence and then go on like they weren’t just weirded out, pulling the wool over their own eyes.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Lifeguard (1976)

“Lifeguard’s” opening images of sun-splashed California beaches and girls in bikinis suggests a certain sort of movie, especially when the eponymous 32-year-old character, Rick Carlson (Sam Elliott), arrives at his lifeguard as the movie opens and summer begins and converses with a gaggle of horny pre-teens, not so much dressing them down as comically sympathizing with their aim. Rick is a pre-Apatow man-child, you think, one destined to confront adulthood’s inexorable truths when he receives an invite to his 15 year high school reunion where former classmates’ more traditional success will no doubt stare him straight in the face. But if “Lifeguard” never entirely usurps your expectations, an unanticipated and refreshing air of melancholy nevertheless gradually envelops the film, evoked in the lite FM soundtrack. What initially emits whimsy gradually becomes wistful without you, maybe even without Rick, noticing.

In a way, “Lifeguard” suggests a darker “Summer School”, the partially remembered 1987 comedy where Mark Harmon’s beach bum cum high school teacher is forced to square with his own arrested development. Of course, he also dates a student in a subplot the story refrains from scrutinizing as much as its dubious ethics suggest. Rick winds up in an underage relationship too. He meets Wendy (Kathleen Quinlan) on the beach, who is 16, and while the illegality is acknowledged, it is also brushed off, with Rick addressing it less gravely than in the tone of a man fed up with Big Government Regulations. (Note: It was not a differen time.) No, director Daniel Petrie forgoes examining behavioral standards to merely employ Rick’s dalliance with Wendy as a potential avenue to maturity, establishing Rick as a highly irregular father figure while also functioning as a counterpoint to a developing relationship with his high school ex, Cathy (Anne Archer), who he re-encounters at the reunion.

If Cathy, child in tow, suggests a future of settling down, so does a job offer from another classmate to work at a car dealership, trading in his rescue buoy for a stable 9 to 5. The dilemma is obvious but “Lifeguard” is impressive in staying true to its character. Even when Rick goes in for his job interview, he maintains the same disposition. If anything, he’s made with peace with who and what he is, even if that is at odds with the conventions around him, which gradually emerges as the real moral dilemma. In a scene where Rick has dinner with his folks, his dad, grousing about work and upset with his son’s supposed lack of purpose, hollers that life isn’t fair. Rick parries: “Who says life’s supposed to be fair?” That’s an obvious line, yes, but what is not obvious is who’s saying it. That line would normally be said to Rick; instead Rick is saying it to someone else. He resents being told his way of living is worthless, which Elliott plays straight to, his agreeably laconic air gradually giving way as the social pressure mounts.

The conclusion proves a little more welcomingly arty than I might have wagered, with Rick, weighing his options, plopping down on his lifeguard tower one California morning, not in his uniform, mind you, but denim, shirt and jeans, though barefoot, as if suggesting he is suspended between the two worlds. That’s how he looks too, the camera starting low, down on the beach, and then gradually lifting up and over the tower’s rail, finding Rick slumped and staring out at the water, a man who can barely bring himself to leave where he is. The sound of the waves in this moment assume a hypnotic quality, washing over him, lulling him into a false sense of security.

Shout-Out to the Extra: Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again Version

Shout-Out to the Extra is a sporadic series in which Cinema Romantico shouts out the extras, the background actors, the bit part players, the almost out of your sight line performers who expertly round out our movies with epic blink & you’ll miss it care.

Spoiler: In “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again”, Andy Garcia’s legendarily gravelly hotel manager Señor Cienfuegos has his name withheld nearly the entire movie because his name turns out to be Fernando, perhaps the most preeminent ABBA song not employed in the first “Mamma Mia.” We learn his name when he spies Ruby, mother to “Mamma Mia!” protagonist Donna, grandmother to “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again” protagonist Sophie, and Señor Cienfuegos’s long lost love. And because this is a jukebox musical, when they spy each other, they sing “Fernando.”

As they sing, they cross a scenic terrace, meeting halfway, meaning they move through a convocation of extras. And yet, if these two stars make the scene, the nameless people on the periphery, as they so often do, enhance it.

Like this extra, who does not simply stand and watch but swoons.

Or these extras who, as Garcia passes them, turn to one another, raise their glasses and share a toast. These are extras not merely getting into the spirit of the scene but reveling in their good fortune to be part of it.

And then you have these extras, all of whom are like background snowflakes, each one special in her/his own way. You’ve got the guy sitting in the bottom right-hand corner who has decided to play this moment like he’s really hearing what Cher has to say, you know? You have the woman in the striped top just above the guy sitting down who looks as if she’s trying so hard to figure out what kind of face to make that her face has instead become frozen in impassiveness. But it’s the three women on the left hand side of the frame that really make it.

Moving from back to front, you’ve got the woman in the black skirt and colorful white top. She is not swooning, not like the woman up above, nor does she quite have the appropriate basking in the moment’s romance reaction like the extra in the striped head scarf. No, this extra seems to be bubbling up with glee that Cher is passing by. And the extra in the red top and white shorts, meanwhile, right next to her appears excited AF that Cher is passing by. And the woman in the black dress....oh my. She looks like the ghost of the Virgin Mary is passing by, which is totally right.

Cher is playing a character, of course, but really, she’s Cher, in countenance, in spirit. More than likely if you went to see “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again” you knew Cher was in it and you were waiting for Cher’s moment and here it is, finally. And it is difficult – rightfully, respectfully – to take your eyes off her, or even off Garcia, who was, as many awards pundits have noted, snubbed for an Oscar nomination. As such, these extras transcend mere filler, becoming fill-ins for us, the audience.

Pour one out for the extras.....

Actorly Cosmic Connections

Certain actors loom large in the landscape of film fanatics. Back in the halcyon days of movie blogging, I remember several younger colleagues expressing curiosity at the cult of Parker Posey which found me, thirtysomething elder statesman, explaining Posey’s place in the 90s pantheon, and how whenever she turns up in something now it’s a like a bolt of lightning from our pasts but also an affirmation of our presents, that we are still here. Ditto Winona, which is why I looked forward to something as trifling as “Destination Wedding” about as much as I looked forward to anything last year. The sway the late Bill Paxton held was similar since he appeared in so many 80s cornerstones and then kept on keeping on, both marking time and rendering it immaterial, which was why his death stung so, so much. Every Daniel-Day Lewis performance is like a cave painting meant to record a supernatural event.

But then, those are names on the marquee, the Hamlets and Macbeths and Othellos. If film fanatics step back and examine the panorama of their film fanaticism then they will eventually spy a few Rosencrantz and Guildensterns too, actors eternally on the periphery, perhaps not informing our cinephilia, not exactly, but placing a subtle stamp on it nonetheless. I thought about this the other night during a re-run of “Seinfeld.” It was “The Chicken Roaster” episode, most famous for Kramer’s Kenny Rogers Roasters obsession which, for reasons too convoluted to explain, prompts he and Jerry to swap apartments thereby causing Jerry to become Kramer and Kramer to become Jerry. Also contained within that episode, however, are the continuing misadventures of Elaine as President of the J. Peterman Catalog, as a spending spree leads to a visit from accounting. The accountant is the impeccably named Roger Ipswich.

Roger Ipswich was among the innumerable “Seinfeld” foils, a character tasked more with getting in the way than being truly funny, leaving any humor to rise simply from the respecrtive actor’s air. In this case the actor was Michael D. Roberts, who played the part with a muted glee that he was the one about to put the nail in this overmatched big cheese’s proverbial coffin. That might suggest Roberts as a member of the Actors I Know First and Foremost From “Seinfeld” Club. Debra Messing was never Grace Adler; she was Beth Lookner. Bryan Cranston was never Walter White; he was Tim Whatley. When I saw “National Treasure” in the theater with my friend Dan and Don McManus appeared on screen I (loudly) whispered, a la the California Angels fan in “The Naked Gun” spying the faux Enrico Palazzo, “Hey! It’s Duncan Meyer!”

But me and Michael D. go back a lot further than “Seinfeld”, all the way to the spring of 1984 and the front row of the Valley 3 where I sat with my mom for a Saturday afternoon matinee of “Ice Pirates.” You probably don’t remember “Ice Pirates” and its band of H2O swashbucklers in a dry sci-fi future. That’s ok. You shouldn’t. But that was around the time I was first forming movie-going memories and so this one, like “Ghostbusters” in the same year, resonated. And besides, I loved liked “Ice Pirates” for the rainy afternoon Planters® Cheez Ball potpourri it was. It aired on Turner Classic Movies a couple years ago and I recorded it and re-watched it and, well, while a movie like “Ice Pirates” doesn’t exactly hold up since it’s the sort of movie struggling to stay aloft in its own time, I still enjoyed the low-key exasperation of Roberts, playing something like Little John to Robert Urich’s Robin Hood, all ironic closed mouthed eye raises and weary eye rolls, which transfused my nostalgia into something more immediate. (Anjelica Huston also managed to come off legitimately cool amidst such low budget absurdity, no small feat.)

That brings me to “A Star Is Born”, nominated for Best Picture, among other categories, at the upcoming Oscars. There is a lot I liked about that movie, and some things I loved, most of them connected in one way or another to Lady Gaga, including the scenes of her home life where she lives with (cares for) [cleans up after] her father, played by a touchingly noisy Andrew Dice Clay. He is a limo driver and the few times we see him he is predominantly rooted to his own kitchen, wise-cracking with his fellow wheelmen, betting on horse races. Because he is her father, he is the one limo driver we mostly get to know, though we also briefly meet Little Feet, played by Barry Shabaka Henley. There are other drivers, however, including Matty. He is played by Michael D. Roberts.

He doesn’t really get a line, not an official one, or even a moment. But background commotion is essential to the atmosphere of these scenes and Roberts ably, imperceptibly does his part, and it’s what I couldn't stop thinking about as I watched him for the umpteenth time as Roger Ipswich, how he’s an actor who ensures any scene he’s in has all its I’s dotted and t’s crossed. And how’s he always done that, all the way back to 1984, two years before Lady Gaga was even born, and how he was here with her, of all people, now, cosmically connecting dots of my own life.

Hearts Beat Loud

“Hearts Beat Loud” opens with Frank Fisher (Nick Offerman), record store proprietor, lighting up a cigarette in his own shop and telling off a customer who tells Frank to put the cancer stick out. The light confrontation is a feint, seeming to set up this widowed father of one as a malcontent when he proves to mostly be a music obsessed teddy bear, but it also establishes the fact that his record store is not long for this world when the irate customer goes outside and buys the album he was seeking to purchase through Amazon in a smartphone flash. The ensuing scene finds Frank’s daughter Sam (Kiersey Clemons) in a pre-med summer course, prepping for UCLA in the fall, illustrating Sam as being focused where her father is distracted. And if the record store signifiesFrank being bound to the past, his daughter’s class demonstrates her looking toward the future, and it is in the middle where they do not collide in this earnest musical comedy so much as haltingly, and then winningly, meet, if only fleetingly. A great pop song, after all, only lasts a few minutes.

The film’s kindling is a father/daughter jam session – him on guitar, her on keyboards – where he discovers she’s just written a song, suggesting Allison Russell fronting Frightened Rabbit, which they then quickly record in a lively montage. It’s the moment just before, though, when Frank first hears her synthesizer line and then finds the right guitar notes to accentuate it that really resonates. As this happens, as Frank drifts closer to Sam, the camera drifts closer to them both, underlining the musical harmony, a moving portrait of how father and daughter are drawn close over music even as life’s altering paths are pushing them apart.

He’s itching to use this song as the cornerstone of forming a father/daughter band, using it to spiritually delay his shop’s slow slide into oblivion, while she rightly yearns to focus on the future. Still, he uploads their track to Spotify and when he realizes it is the modern version of a hit for the Soundcloud age, the scene revels in a wonderful homage to “That Thing You Do!” where Frank magically hears his own tune not over the radio but in a coffee shop. And the way he tells taken-aback patrons “that’s my band” and then joyfully sprints down the street, a la Liv Tyler, my mind could not help but flash back to Offerman as the glorious crank Ron Swanson on NBC’s sitcom “Parks and Recreation.” There I never really noticed his blue eyes which in “Hearts Beat Loud” frequently pop off his salt and pepper beard, really making him look like a little kid, an exuberant Swanson opposite.

That’s the problem, of course, his adult pipe dreams set against the wariness of a reality his daughter preaches, an ancient script just with the ages flipped, though director Brett Haley’s easygoing presentation of this script overcomes its familiarity; he never hammers away at these ultimate truths, he just lets them simply, intrinsically arise. That also goes for Sam’s transitory summertime romance with a burgeoning artist (Sasha Lane) that both characters are adult enough to admit can’t last. Frank’s semi-romance, meanwhile, with his landlord Leslie (Toni Collette), has the one plot point, their second act relationship downturn, where the gears turn too obviously, though it’s offset by Collette and Offerman’s natural chemistry.

If the dialogue might be intended to represent a kind of lyrical anthemic quality, it nonetheless too frequently trends toward slogans nailed to the metaphorical wall and proves more successful when the words are nothing much yet invested by the actor in question with considerable quality, like Offerman declaring “It’s fine” in such a way that suggests it’s absolutely not fine. And for all the verbal exchanges between father and daughter, nothing resonates more than the smiles and laughs they share during their band’s lone performance.

It is a musical movie, after all, one in which scene after scene after scene is adorned with carefully curated pop music cues, honoring its record store roots, and so it concludes with Frank and Sam playing a short show for a sparse, inadvertent crowd the night his shop closes. At one point during their last song Haley switches to a shot of the camera looking up, the lights on the store ceiling bouncing off Frank and Sam in such a way that it appears as if they are on a stage, rock stars, a cheerier version of The Beatles’ rooftop concert, one last jam session before the currents of life carry them away.

Free Solo

“Free Solo” is hard to watch. This is not, however, simply because “Free Solo”, as the title implies, chronicles a free solo rock climber, 33 year old Alex Honnold, meaning one who climbs rocks well above safe heights without ropes or any other kind of protective equipment, comically yet terrifyingly described by one rock climber as akin to an Olympic Gold Medal event where failure to win the Gold Medal means death. It is hard to watch because of this, certainly, but “Free Solo”, directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, is not content with mere stomach-churning mountaineering spectacle. Whereas the similarly themed “Sunshine Superman” chiefly evangelized for its subject of BASE jumping, and whereas the superb “Man on Wire” romanticized its death-defying wire-walker to the extreme, “Free Solo” picks the notion of thrill-seeking apart. Hoary observations about cheating death being part and parcel to Honnold’s dream are not allowed to slide, transforming elementally rousing images of Honnold as a mere speck against imposing granite into emblems of deliberate isolation.

The documentary turns on Honnold’s attempt to become the first person to free solo Yosemite’s 7,500 foot El Capitan, which Vasarhelyi and Chinn do a nifty job of setting up before it arrives as the film’s climax by way of computer graphics and tagging along on their subject’s test climbs so that when Honnold makes his history making assault we are not struggling to keep up but able to sit back and not so much enjoy the ride as just figuratively hold on for our lives. That ride is relayed through aerial photography peering over the top of El Capitan that will make your stomach drop as well as you-are-there camerawork from the rocks right alongside Honnold. Throughout this sequence, Chinn and his camera operators are seen on screen, watching right along with us, which is not so much the filmmakers imposing themselves on someone else’s story as an extension of the overall story itself.

Chinn and his crew debate the ethics of filming Honnold’s climb given the real-life stakes. You might take umbrage with the ultimate decision given that the movie is a thing you are watching because it exists, but still. It’s nice to see the question wrangled with honestly on screen rather than perfunctorily at a Q&A. Chinn even asks Honnold if the climber wants his crew to stop filming, which comes across genuine rather than drama for the camera, and which Honnold parries by observing that, hey, he could just go off and conquer El Capitan in private. Philosophically, I found myself half-wishing that he would, leaving the doc as a kind of cinematic Sagrada Familia.

Honnold himself wrestles with the idea of whether his yearning to free solo El Capitan is an honest one or mere navel-gazing for the camera, a fascinating question given the state of our all-access world, and one where “Free Solo” might have been better to dig deeper. At the same time, Honnold willingly places himself under the microscope, having an MRI done all in the name of which leads to a fascinating moment where his thrill-seeking is lent scientific credence as we discover his amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for decoding emotions, requires great stimulus to be engaged. This revelation colors Honnold in a completely different light, his lackadaisical air snapping into focus, his eternal bed hair becoming a tonsorial symbol for sort of sleepwalking through regular life. And it illuminates his romantic relationship with Sanni McCandless, presented in refreshingly candid terms onscreen, her confessionals alternating between acceptance and exasperation. They genuinely seem to love each other even if there is a palpable sense that they cannot quite completely connect.

Indeed, as the El Capitan climb draws nearer, you can literally see him growing distant from her and shutting down in their conversations, given additional weight by the close confines of Honnold’s living situation in a motor home, the camera painfully close, establishing a photographic harmony with so many intimate mountainside shots. In the end, he pushes her away from what he sees as pure necessity to achieve his feat. It’s cruel, and the movie never acts like it isn’t, even undercutting his supreme moment of triumph by sort of turning the admission that he never smiles this much inside out, evoked in a solemn reaction shot of McCandless in the wake of this elation, leaving you with the unspoken truth that free soloing will always make him happiest.

At one point, in voiceover, Honnold cites the warrior mentality, “where you give something one-hundred percent focus because your life depends on it.” Vasarhelyi and Chinn underline observation with shots of a cloud-consumed El Capitan, suggesting the apexical (sic) conclusion of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” His words come across ridiculous; his words come across real.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933)

Midway through “The Prizefighter and the Lady”, when the aspiring heavyweight champion of the world Steve Morgan (Max Baer) is at peak fame, he joins a stage revue. And for almost six minutes, director W.S. Van Dyke stops the movie in its tracks to join this revue too, watching Steve and a dozen or so dancers as they sing and rollick their way through a variety of moving sets. It’s not hard to tell how much fun Baer the actor has during this sequence, and as I watched it, I thought about “Cinderella Man” (2005). After all, “The Prizefighter and the Lady” was released in 1933 and in 1934 the real Baer beat the real Primo Carnera (also starring in the film as a version of himself) for the Heavyweight Championship and in 1935 Baer lost the Heavyweight Championship to underdog James J. Braddock, “Cinderella Man” himself. And while The Depression was very much present in the latter, casting Braddock in the appropriate underdog light, you hardly feel The Depression at all in “The Prizefighter and the Lady”, which transforms its own fictional underdog story into a cautionary tale of excess.

“The Prizefighter and the Lady” opens with a broken down ex-boxing manager, The Professor (Walter Huston), drunkenly reminiscing about the past only to see the future right in front of his eyes when Morgan, a bar bouncer, demonstrates his right hook in ridding the place of some lout. The Professor convinces Steve to enter pugilism on the spot which the bouncer blithely rolls with, an attitude that Bear embodies with great aplomb. Even upon discovering before his first fight that his guiding hand might be throwing him to the wolves, Baer counteracts his initial malice by throwing his enomormous arm around The Professor with a distinct jocularity, rendering his imposing physicality in the name of humor. He’s not taking it that seriously, and he doesn’t take it that seriously inside the ring, clowning and boxin in equal measure, a reflection of the real Baer’s fighting style.

He takes boxing only slightly less seriously than he seems to take his (brief) relationship and subsequent marriage to nightclub singer Belle (Myrna Loy), who he rescues from a car wreck and falls in love with instantly, though she is already the squeeze of ganster Willie Ryan (Otto Kruger). She spurns Steve’s advances but he keeps at it, not so much winning her over as just sort of mystically marrying her. I say mystically because their marriage happens offscreen after, like, a day or two of pseudo-dating. That offscreen ceremony might yearn to drum up suspense involving the incensed Willie Ryan, still stung from Belle breaking up with him for this boxer, but aesthetically it seems to stem from the movie moving so fast narratively it doesn’t have enough time to render it believable. Even Loy, whose gloom when her character’s heart is broken moves the needle, struggles in these moments of falling in love, not least because Baer struggles as a scene partner, too stiff where romance is called upon, his lines sounding as if they are coming right off a script.

This makes the push and pull of Steve and Belle’s marriage a little less than credible, which makes the aforementioned cautionary tale, as Steve’s dalliances with other women threatens to break up their union, resonate far less. If you might think the real Baer would have read this script and come away thinking that between his bouts with Carnera and Braddock, he should not take his eyes off what really mattered, well, the way Baer goes through the marital motions but lights up in that stage revue foreshadows precisely what was to come.

Legend has it – or at least, Myrna Loy has it, according to an interview she apparently once gave – that Baer defeated Carnera on the strength of tips he acquired during filming of “The Prizefighter and the Lady.” Who knows if it’s true. But it does make for a good story. And the fight makes for a good piece of filming that is sort of staged half au naturale. That is to say, Van Dyke does not go straight into the boxing. No, if he cedes the film for six minutes to a song and dance, here he cedes the film for a few more minutes to the ring referee, who goes through a long list of special guest introductions, including former heavyweight champions Jack Dempsey and James Jeffries. These are not cameos with any kind of creative purpose; these are cameos for the crowd. And even if the fictional fight between Steve and Carnera, which concludes in the manner of “Rocky”, is tightly edited, it reminds you of the original purpose of the movies. Nowadays you can pull up a Baer right on YouTube, but back then if you couldn’t get a ticket to Baer vs. Carnerna, well, you could go see them fight in “The Prizefighter and the Lady” instead.

Oscar Predictions: Purple Mountain Majesty Revision

This past Saturday, the world’s most famous groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, predicted an early spring. And you know what that means! Only three weeks until the Oscars! (Last year Punxsutawney Phil predicted a long winter which meant, of course, the Oscars were not until March.) And in the wake of the Directors Guild, Producers Guild and Screen Actors Guild announcements, in the midst of this volatile Awards Season, where the historic performance and valuation of predictive analysis performed by awards pundits have really struggled to make sense of the major races, Cinema Romantico is here to weigh in with a revision of the original revision of its revised Oscar predictions. Our updated picks are very much sans analysis for what analysis is required when the most consequential category has already been written in the stars?

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: .....

Bohemian Rhapsody

Early on “Bohemian Rhapsody”, which was directed by Bryan Singer before he was fired (and who has more serious problems that should effectively end his career) and replaced by Dexter Fletcher, makes a compelling argument against itself. This happens when its subject, British band Queen and its flamboyant, mercurial frontman Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek), meets record executive Ray Foster (Mike Myers), a composite of real life music bigwigs, who argues vehemently against the band yearning to use the confounding symphonic epic giving the movie its name as a second album single, preferring the simplistic “I’m In Love With My Car.” Foster loses the battle, of course, because, as this scene makes clear, he has no vision. The irony is awe-inspiring, swearing by the exact sort of singularity the film itself consistently fails to engender. You could take this scene word for word, shot for shot and plunk it down in Jake Kasdan’s 2007 “Walk Hard” which satirically tore the musical biopic limb from limb, and which no one involved in “Bohemian Rhapsody’s” making apparently consulted, and it would play as comedy.

The screenplay was by Anthony McCarten but it could just as easily have been penned by Donald Kaufman, the fictional screenwriting brother of “Adaptation” who takes the principles of real life screenwriting guru Robert McKee as gospel. “A principle says this works,” Donald says, “and has through all remembered time.” Indeed, it does, and so does “Bohemian Rhapsody”, in its own assembly line way, condensing the band’s story and fictionalizing some of its inciting events, turning scene after scene into the sort of dramatic reversals that McKee also preaches, so that when, say, Freddie Mercury tries to join the band he is told to bugger off until he belts out a few notes and they say come along. It all writes itself. Remove the specifics, examine the structure and the entire movie would look exactly like the Johnny Cash biopic “Walk the Line.”

Both movies open in the future at their respective musicians’ most famous live shows – Cash’s at Folsom Prison, Queen’s at 1985’s Live Aid. Yet “Walk the Line” views its moment through the prism of Cash and June Carter, suggesting how it frames it story through their fraught courtship, whereas “Bohemian Rhapsody’s” ultimately comes across as a shameless attempt to – paraphrasing McKee – get ’em with the ending. Why “Bohemian Rhapsody” even imagines a band break-up prior to Live Aid to up the all-important Stakes. True, this fake disbanding, instigated by Mercury’s visions of further grandeur, are also meant to make a case for the band as family and family coming first. But this metaphor, like everything else, is drawn transparently, as is the parallel to Mercury’s own troubled family life, which feels cut and pasted from a 70s sitcom, right down to the laugh track you here in the background from a sitcom on TV as a young Mercury tells off his Dad. And so even if the whiplash editing is meant to evoke the “cabaret-style drama and performance art ingenuity” that the Rock ‘n’ Roll of Fame cites in Queen’s bio, it mostly comes across as a frazzled attempt to distract.

These familial rifts and reconciliation run parallel to Mercury’s sexual awakening. If he initially falls for and becomes engaged to Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton), a fashion shop assistant who aids his stylistic endeavors, he eventually suspects he might be bi-sexual though the film plays incredibly coy with this discovery. Perhaps this is because Mercury struggles to open up to himself, but even when he seems to, the movie remains oddly incurious about his self-discovery, as if frightened of ruffling certain viewer feathers. It’s a bit akin to “Colette” which aesthetically buttoned up its protagonist’s changing sexual desires. Then again, “Colette” at least dynamically presented her straight lover whereas Mary, despite the best Boynton can do, is never as interesting as the character, who stayed close to Mercury throughout his life, suggests, gradually becoming less an untraditional confidant than an almost matronly presence.

If Mercury is flattened out, Malek at least imbibes much necessary flamboyance, particularly in the early-going where he plays the frontman not so much overconfident as sort of swaggerlingly prophetic. And though his overbite might be overdone, his frequent little snigger is not, communicating the character’s lurking insecurities far more than any rote monologues in the rain (I see you, Donald Kaufman!). In the musical performance scenes, meanwhile, he struts with great purpose even if it cannot help but feel like anything more than impersonation.

If the real Mercury sought communion through performances, as performers often do, this becomes one of the movie’s overriding points, explicated in the sequence where Brian May (Gwilym Lee) dreams up “We Will Rock You.” Yet the song’s performance opts for colorless cuts between the band onstage and rows of feet stomping, evoking noise rather than communion, while the crowd shots in the climactic Live Aid performance feel as if they were shot on a different day than the fictional Queen’s performance, severing the supposed bond, reducing it to the recreation it is. The music's great, sure, of course, but that’s why YouTube exists.