Friday's Old Fashioned: Charley Varrick (1973)

In 1973, the American economy was entering a recession and auteurs were running gloriously amok in Hollywood. Each element courses through “Charley Varrick.” The eponymous character (Walter Matthau) is an air circus pilot turned crop duster, and while his piloting abilities conveniently factor into the plot, allowing for sneaky getaways and a unique variant on the cinematic car chase, his crop-dusting business also carves out space for a little symbolic heft. His business slogan is “The Last of the Independents”, which was director Don Siegel’s working title for the movie, and is how Varrick views himself, lamenting a society being ground up by what he deems The Combine, big business freely intermingling with more evil forces, squeezing out run-of-the-mill folks like himself, which is why he has turn to bank robberies to supplement his income. Not that he is a post-Nixon Robin Hood. “Charley Varrick” is a violent, occasionally sadistic, often sexist, frequently heartless film. It opens with a montage of Americana, kids at play and adults strolling down the street, which, given the film to come, is not ironic counterpoint but Norman Rockwell existing side-by-side with Charley Varrick.

“Charley Varrick” opens with a carefully planned bank robbery that goes wrong when one of Charley’s accomplices winds up dead along with a couple cops. These deaths both are and are not collateral damage. The policemen, shot by Nadine (Jacqueline Scott), Charley’s wife and his small gang’s getaway driver, are just sort of written off, and because we are then asked to sympathize with the spouse of the women who killed them, Siegel is placing us squarely in the moral muck and mire. He ups those murky stakes in the immediate aftermath of the getaway when Nadine, wounded, passes out. Rather than taking her with them, hoping she hangs on, getting her medical assistance, Charley kisses her goodbye and then leaves her, still alive, in the car which he rigs to explode, evocative of the film’s overriding grim moral calculus, the necessity of what it takes to survive in a world gone cold.

That calculus becomes clearer as the robbery goes even more wrong after the fact, most of the money proving to be dirty, laundered through the small town New Mexican bank at the behest of the mob who tasks the casually cruel Molly (Joe Don Baker) with getting it back. Molly might be a typical heavy, but the implicated bank manager, Harold Young (Woodrow Parfrey), is not typical at all. In trying to convince the bank President (John Vernon) that the robbery wasn’t an inside job, he describes himself as a mere simple man who only wants a simple life. Boyle says he believes him, and you believe that he does, but the scene’s setting, filmed in one long take on a ranch with cattle sprawling behind them, nevertheless equates the bank manager with a patsy being put out to pasture. Young might well be a good man, but the he has been backed into this corner by the world, and his fate, perhaps the film’s worst, suggests that he knows he’s not cut out for it.

That’s the difference between people like him and Charley Varrick, who keeps playing the game as it unfolds before him, a pragmatist who even sells out his last living accomplice, Harman (Andy Robinson), though only after Harman has made clear his desire not to sit on the money but spend the rest of his life spending. It’s a predictable monologue, but one Robinson gives a convincing unhinged edge, someone who seems to recognize his fate even as he’s unleashing his words, as if just getting to have this much money for a minute is reward enough.

Harman’s comeuppance is delivered by Molly. Though being tasked with recovering money from a persnickety foe might suggest Molly as a precursor to “No Country For Old Men’s” Anton Chigurh, the former never ever comes across all that existential. No, he is employed by the mob and openly depends on them for funding and tips, even transportation, though must repossess the car himself to drive it. The ancient adage of the pursed and the pursuant – We’re not so different, you and I – does not apply here. Molly and Charley are at opposite ends of the spectrum; the business professional and the last of the independents. And in Charley’s efforts to get away, he is simultaneously attempting to evade being ground up in The Combine, though the conclusion suggests those dueling notions might well go hand-in-hand.

5 Potential Abel Ferrara Marvel Movies

At my screening of “Captain Marvel”, I sat next to, courtesy of the scourge of pre-selected seats, a couple little dudes who must have been 8 or 9 years old. In fairness, for being so young, they were as well behaved as I could have hoped even if occasionally they briefly chattered amongst themselves. But with roughly ten minutes left in the movie, the giant sodas and bags of Sour Patch Kids must have warn off because, my God, did circumstances change. Suddenly they wouldn’t pipe down about various intricacies within the Marvel universe. And though it was annoying, I mostly managed to block it out, and what annoyed me most, frankly, was not their semi-heated discussion but the state of superhero movie runtimes. “Captain Marvel” only ran two hours. If two hours wore them out, how could they make it through a longer Marvel movie?

Wouldn’t you know it, the very next week Marvel announced that its “Avengers: Endgame” would run three freaking hours and two minutes. How those two kids will survive 182 minutes without having complete meltdowns is beyond me. But then, these movies are for teenage boys, I guess, per the parlance of our times, not pre-teens and so the hell with those two little dudes. And to hell with me too, I guess. I don’t want to sit through three hours and two minutes of “Avengers: Endgame”! That’s not because I don’t like three hour movies, mind you, because I watched “Titanic” four times in the theater. No, that’s because the previous “Avengers” film had to spend, like a quarter of its run time just bringing its cavalcade of characters onto the screen, making the director as much a party host as an auteur, stopping every five minutes to tell you who these people are now. That’s why when I saw Scott Tobias’s tweet in the wake of this runtime announcement, I got to thinking, as I absolutely had to.

My oh my, what if an independent provocateur such as Ferrara was given the reins to one comic book movie character study infused with his patented grimy, (extremely) violent nihilism? I know, I know, these movies are for kids! But as we just established above, they are, in fact, not for kids because then they would not last so long. And if Marvel’s whole marketing strategy is just to keep bum-rushing the marketplace with content, why not let ol’ Abel generate a little content too?

5 Potential Abel Ferrara Marvel Movies

The Hulk. Ferrara specializes in monstrous main characters, whether it’s Christopher Walken’s mob boss in “King of New York” or Harvey Keitel’s “Bad Lieutenant”, so it only seems logical that if he went Marvel he’d explore a guy who turns into a literal monster. You could cast old Ferrara cohort Willem Dafoe as Bruce Banner, though I suspect Banner’d spend, like, 85% of the movie as The Hulk, smashing things from California to the New York island, incapable of un-Hulking and posing hard questions about whether forgiveness can be proffered when the transgressor has rendered a trillion billion in infrastructure damage.

Spider-Man. Peter Parker is protector of New York City, the very city Ferrara has frequently seen through a prism of brutality, depravity and filth, and so Ferrara’s “Spider-Man” would see the webbed warrior through that very same prism, his Spider-Man’s costume a little less red and blue and a little more, shall we say, putrefied. That means this Peter Parker would need to be Gen X, like if instead of going emo a la “Spider-Man 3” he was more akin to John Bender before he met Claire Standish, the webs he shoots and swings around on meant to symbolize what a tangled web your conformity and rules weave, man.

Scarlet Witch. According to one of the three dozen character biographies I found via the Google, the Scarlet Witch née Wanda Maximoff, saddled with the power of sorcery, wandered central Europe in the company of her brother Pietro, living off the land, after they were separated from their parents, “circumstances…so traumatic that not until well into adulthood could they remember anything but the barest details of their childhood.” So let’s have Ferrara go back in and fill in all those missing details, like a warped version of Jesus’s lost years, discovering it is difficult to love your fellow man when your fellow man keeps screaming that you should hate yourself, filmed in a grainy vérité emphasizing the squalor that goes hand-in-hand with living off the grid, becoming a literal witch-hunt in which, pursued by angry mobs, her hex bolts do not politely knock people back PG-13 style but graphically incinerate motherfuckers and savagely torch entire towns.

Tony Stark. It has long been (that is, since “Iron Man 2”) my dream to see an “Iron Man” movie where Tony Stark is never, not once, seen in the Iron Man suit, just in his well-tailored suits and ironic t-shirts as pithy playboy Tony Stark, thorn in The Man’s side, less superhero and more Van Heflin in “Johnny Eager”, imbibing cocktails and cracking wise. Of course, where Ferrara is concerned that is not near dark enough. No, his Tony Stark would have to become a Bad Superhero, one who loses the Iron Man suit playing Baccarat in Vegas and to get it back is offered millions of dollars by a U.S. Senator to assassinate the President’s insidious crony that the U.S. Senator is afraid will be pardoned for infinite nefarious deeds on the President’s behalf. Tony Stark agrees to fulfill the assassination, but before he can, the President announces denounces his crony, explaining no pardon will be forthcoming, leading Tony Stark to a dark night of the soul about the Deep State.

Captain America. America has splintered into a contentious confederation of states and Captain America wallows in self-disgust, anguished that he did not go down with the ship. He wanders the continent wearing remnants of his superhero armor, seeing Americans for what they really were, supercilious and squabbling and scared. As such, he becomes a Ronin reimagined as Randy Quaid in “Major League II”, wearing a helmet with the A crossed out, so convinced America should return to a pre-Constitutional Convention agrarian society that he takes jobs from pro-New Confederates to seek out and destroy supporters of re-unification.

Shout-Out to the Extra: School of Rock 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.

Last year My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I and a couple friends attended a show by bluegrass supergroup I’m With Her at Thalia Hall. Midway through the show, after a rousing number, as the crowd applauded the all-female trio, some male knucklehead in the balcony nosebleeds thought it a fine time to holler god-knows-what in the direction of band member Sara Watkins. I couldn’t make out what he was saying; no one around me could make out what he was saying; Sara Watkins couldn’t make out what he was saying. When his noisy mush-mouthed blather concluded Sara Watkins waited the perfect comic pregnant pause and then said into the microphone with this strained sort of voice as honest as it was humorous: “What?” The crowd laughed so loudly in unison that we drowned out whatever this dufus bellowed as a response Sara Watkins didn’t want to hear anyway. And I thought, That Guy. Every concert has That Guy.

A few years earlier when My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I saw the incomparable Nikki Lane at the Double Door (rip) some mostly bald, middle-aged moron in a black leather jacket kept hollering at Ms. Lane, like he was 22 and thought he was going to hook up with her after the show, when he wasn’t pointing at the guitarist after every one of his soloes like the two were axeman contemporaries. The guitarist deftly evaded eye-contact. At the turn of the century, at The Landing in St. Louis, when I was sitting in the grass listening to some band play a free show, I became so disgusted that they chose to play “Superman (It’s Not Easy)” (there is backstory I will not delve into) that I vocally announced my displeasure with their choice of cover. My friend Daryl then incredulously advised: “Uh, Nick, I think that’s their song.” Hells bells, it was. Five For Fighting, at the peak of his power, was playing a free stage, and I was mocking him for playing his own song. Some guy I didn’t know sitting nearby actually commiserated on my behalf that he didn’t know it was really Five For Fighting either. Still, if I’d been closer to the stage and Five For Fighting had decided to heckle me, I would have had no choice but to sit there like the idiot I was and take it. I, readers, was That Guy.

The climactic moment in Richard Linklater’s critically appreciated yet somehow still significantly under-valued “School of Rock” (2003) involves a band of musically gifted kids under the command of their metal axeman masquerading as teacher (Jack Black) playing The Battle of the Bands. They knock the gig out of the park. They are the clear winners, but, like Roy Jones Jr. inexplicably losing the Light Middleweight Gold Medal boxing match at the 1988 Olympics, lose out to the piffling No Vacancy. The crowd is chagrined. Well, not the whole crowd. As No Vacancy’s victory is announced, Linklater cuts to a wide shot of the audience, presumably to breathe in the pall that has just been cast. But one person, near the foot of the stage, over to the left of the frame, goes hog wild.

On the DVD commentary track, both Linklater and Black reference this dude. Black even calls the moment one of his favorite in the movie. Neither of them, however, indicate this was planned. Linklater, in fact, says that working with such a large crowd often results in unexpected moments of spontaneity. Many filmmakers, I reckon, might have edited this out, or before the next take told this extra to zip it. But Linklater, bless his heart, left the moment in. He knew what that extra was doing, and Black did too. That extra decided, in the moment, to make this concert feel truly authentic; he decided he would play That Guy.

Pour one out for the extra...

The Old Man & the Gun

Not long into “The Old Man & the Gun”, the eponymous gentlemanly bank robber, Forrest Tucker (Robert Redford), squires Jewel (Sissy Spacek) on something approximating a first date. Gratefully, writer/director David Lowery, working in conjunction with editor Lisa Zeno Churgin, does not limit this sequence to just a few snippets of conversation or a couple lingering looks and then a smash cut, say, to Jewel’s front door. No, the duo allows these actors to stretch their legs and lets this scene breathe, a series of reverse shots and then a lengthy medium shot from the side of the booth when Forrest and Jewel verbalize their seeming emotional connection, underlining it. One, it’s nice – nay, grand – to see a couple stars just luxuriating in their high wattage, having fun, as characters, sure, but also as themselves playing these parts. Two, it’s grand – nay stupendous – to see a couple stars this age get this much screen time all to themselves without the interference of any glam whippersnappers or fearful cuts away from backseat producers frightened any random kids in the audience will look down at their phones. That’s because even if this movie is about robbing banks, crime improbably becomes a conduit to The Old Man’s reckoning with Old Man Time.

The impetus for this first date, in fact, is Forrest making a bank robbery getaway, switching out vehicles and then stopping to help Jewel on the side of the freeway where her truck has broken down as the cops sail by. It might be a meet cute cliché, this, but Lowery subverts the cliché by employing it as an introduction of tone. Forrest robs numerous financial institutions throughout the film but each heist is evinced in a low key register, muting tension through a jazzy score and playing up the character's courtly air, evoking the opening scene to “Out of Sight”, again and again where every bank manager and teller makes sure to tell Detective John Hunt (Casey Affleck) that Forrest might have shown them a gun but that he was also smiling.

If that makes it sound like “The Old Man & the Gun” softens the inherent threat of its bank robber, Lowery carves out space to demonstrate the emotional toll it takes on others. A scene when Forrest commandeers a car finds him inadvertently taking a mother and her child hostage, and the way Redford plays the moment connotes the fear he can install in others. And crucially, Hunt’s trip to see a woman (Elisabeth Moss) who thinks she might be the bank robber’s daughter convincingly sketches the emotional wreckage that Forest unwittingly left behind.

Though Lowery is partially interested in the age-old notion of the detective and the robber squaring off, with the latter leaving the former a taunting note, he is more interested in using Hunt as a counterpoint to Forrest’s single-mindedness. If he’s an investigator, he is presented just as much with a father, often at the same time, in a bank with his son where he fails to realize Forrest is pulling a job and showing his children the result of his labors. He even gets pulled off the investigation when the FBI gets involved, a story point that doesn’t build to what you might think, with Affleck, in a deliberately weary performance, even admitting to his kids that the feds will probably do a better job.

Doing a job is what ultimately seems to drive Forrest, like an elderly football coach who worries retirement is what will kindle his kicking the bucket. “The Old Man & the Gun”, Redford has said, is his last movie. We’ll see if that’s true but taken in that light it’s hard not to see the swan song of Redford and Forest intertwining. In a conversation on Jewel’s front porch, where they dissect the matter of what someone does in advancing age, she cites the necessity of keeping on. As she says this, Lowery lets his camera drift to the left and away from them, looking out across a field, as if wondering what awaits in the great beyond. It foreshadows a later shot when they walk through the same field where Forrest stops moving and the camera closes in on him as he looks out in front of him. At what who knows, because Lowery never offers a reverse shot. And maybe that’s the thing. Maybe he doesn’t know what’s out there in front of him, just as we all don’t know. All you can do, as Forrest does in his own nontraditional way, is try and go out on your own terms.

Captain Marvel

There is a scene in “Captain Marvel” when the eponymous superhero (Brie Larson) finds herself, and assorted others, in 1990s Louisiana and needing, for convoluted reasons, to upload a CD rom to a bulky home computer. A member of Starforce from the planet Hala, as advanced as a 2019 8 year old with an iPhone XR would appear to a jaded teen from the grunge era, she looks at Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), her right-hand man, confused about what’s taking so long to acquire the needed information. “It’s uploading,” Fury says. If it’s a cheap back in the day joke, it’s also emblematic of “Captain Marvel’s” editing and pacing, a refreshing departure from the favored frenetic, eye-wearying comic book movie aesthetic. Shots, bless editor Elliot Graham’s soul, are held for two, three, four, even five, seconds, like a tense moment where two characters board an elevator and the shot is held as is rather than cutting to a close-up of Fury’s“wait a second” face. Indeed, most every cut, like every zoom and tilt, counts, maintaining a linear progression of events so you see how each moment leads to the next. Best of all, however, is the editing’s emphasis on its Marvelous Captain, always ensuring she is the show’s star.

That should come as no surprise since writer/directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are dramatists whose oeuvre includes character-centric films like “Sugar” and “Mississippi Grind” in which their protagonists undergo odysseys toward fledgling states of self-discovery. That essentially describes “Captain Marvel.” Larson begins the movie as Vers, green-suited Starforce member in a galactic battle against the villainous shape-shifting Skrulls, eventually unlocking her true Carol Danvers self by coolly unleashing her superpowers rather than tempering them at the behest of her mentor Yon-Rogg (Jude Law) and modifying her uniform to the iconic red, blue and yellow. Her journey starts when a rescue mission yields imprisonment and a memory probe at the hands of the Skrulls’ Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), whose green reptilian face re-proves no actor is more committed to letting himself look like shit than Mendelsohn. But Carol escapes to the planet below, C-353, mid-90s Earth, as it turns out, meaning “Captain Marvel” hurtles into the past, mirroring its character’s emotional journey.

The 90s place her squarely in era of the Riot Grrrl. Among the tenets of the Riot Grrrl ethos, as explained in Kathleen Hanna’s manifesto, is how Riot Grrls “know that life is much more than physical survival and are patently aware that the punk rock ‘you can do anything’ idea is crucial to the coming angry grrrl rock revolution which seeks to save the psychic and cultural lives of girls and women everywhere, according to their own terms, not ours.” Carol Danvers, in other words, which is why her desert highway sequence aboard a motorcycle being scored to Garbage’s “Only Happy When It Rains” is not mid-90s nostalgia but an embrace of her inner riot grrrl. Alas, this remains Marvel, which demands action scenes, meaning that frequently physical survival, as flashbacks evince, tie into Carol’s psychic life and mostly, sadly trumps her cultural life. A photograph of young-er Carol in a Guns ‘n’ Roses t-shirt singing karaoke provides a glimpse of cultural life, but that’s all, just a glimpse, limiting the character’s backstory to a militaristic context, less a well-rounded person than a fighting machine figuring out who needs to be fought.

“Captain Marvel”, however, is not simply Carol’s spiritual reclamation but The Avengers’ genesis too. In her earthly battle with the Skrulls, she partners with pre-eyepatch S.H.I.E.L.D agent Nick Fury (a digitally de-aged Jackson) whose collaboration with Carol triggers the idea of enlisting superheroes to his Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division. Jackson hints at this idea by echoing Carol’s give-no-ground attitude, not awed, just impressed. At the same time, Jackson understands whose movie this is and willingly cedes the spotlight to his co-star (and the cat) when necessary. His being there also naturally allows for the intermingling of black and white, and then eventually green, which is as much allegory as “Captain Marvel” yearns to stress. Though there might be overtones of incendiary Middle East politics, Boden and Fleck limit the film’s air to a broader bleeding-heart liberalism, evoked in a dinner table scene near the end, heavy-handed though undoubtedly also destined to enrage bothsidesists because it, like, you know, presents all sides.

No, “Captain Marvel” works less as an allegory and more as Carol coming into her own and, by extension, Larson’s finely calibrated performance, one truly conveying the idea of maintaining an even keel in the possession of immense power. Larson grasps a star’s symbiosis with the camera is frequently dictated on less being more and even in a movie of grand set pieces, she generally remains still in frames, able to generate a laugh simply by rolling her eyes to the right. And she renders her entrance into a train car long after its left the station with such self-possessed charisma that it’s kind of the comicbook version of Lauren Bacall moving through the Martinique hotel bar in “To Have and Have Not.” Larson is so low-key, high voltage in this moment she even turns the obligatory Stan Lee cameo into a decent comic beat. The movie’s biggest moment, teasing a showdown seemingly set up since the first scene, becomes a comic beat too, where Carol does not finally recognize how to master her power but recognize she has had it mastered all along, reducing the conspicuous male across from her to a variation of Ron Burgundy priggishly screaming at Veronica Corningstone. The moment’s inherent simplicity might simultaneously epitomize the overall lack of more traditional thrilling blockbuster CGI sensation, but sometimes a single star is brightness enough.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Seven-Ups (1973)

Like so many cop movies of its era, “The Seven-Ups” makes great hay from its grainy NYC locations, evident from moment one as Buddy Manucci (Roy Scheider) paces back and forth on a New York City sidewalk, always looking over his shoulder, as if waiting for someone or something. That sensation is furthered in how the camera switches between shots from street level and from up on high, like he’s being watched, and if you did not know going in that Buddy was a cop, loosely based on Scheider’s “French Connection” character, you’d be liable to confuse him for someone up to no good. That’s part of his undercover act, however, and it is soon revealed that he and his Seven-Ups plainclothes squad is busting a counterfeit ring, a sequence that director Philip D’Antoni plays less for suspense than roughhousing comedy, leaving you to think The Seven-Ups would smash the Crown Jewels to get the bad guy. You are hard pressed to tell the busted and those doing the busted apart, “The Seven-Ups” in capsule, where they are not so much in too deep, which suggests a breakdown in grasping right/wrong, as right-side up with a casually brazen disregard for institutional norms.

This thin line between cops and robbers and is given added weight through the movie’s central relationship between Buddy and his informant, Vito Lucio (Tony Lo Bianco). Buddy might be using Vito for information, but he strikes a friendly tone, not from circumstances but from truth, Scheider’s very air cultivating the sensation they go back a ways. This proves the movie’s only relationship of consequence, much more so than Buddy and his Seven Ups, with the cop counseling that he’ll do whatever he can for Vito’s sick wife. And this makes it all the more troubling when it turns Vito is running a kidnapping scheme of mob men behind Buddy’s back, feigning incredulity when Buddy asks about it, all of which comes home to roost when one of Buddy’s Seven Ups winds up dead and his bosses try yanking him off the case.

That’s standard cop movie stuff that eventually explodes into an iconic car chase scene easily rivaling its contemporaries like “French Connection” and “Bullitt.” Forgoing geographic logic, Buddy’s pursuing his partner’s two killers through the crowded streets of New York and then eventually onto a highway just outside the city manages to both leave you horror-struck by the disregard for civilian life, with not just the baddies but Buddy accelerating right through a gaggle of kids, and make you empathize with Buddy’s antagonists by virtue of constant close-ups of the villain in the passenger’s seat whose faces of nigh comical terror are so raw that you’re just going with your gut. And though you inherently know Buddy can’t perish at the end, when the end does come, involving a fork in the road and a tractor trailer, the crescendo is so explosive that your inherent sense of film cliché is nevertheless drowned out amid the terrifying shriek of metal.

The sequence puts Buddy firmly on the same unethical ground as “The French Connection’s” Popeye Doyle though overall “The Seven-Ups” proves less interested in stressing these dubious motivations. That’s partially a difference in the actors. If Hackman excelled at simmering rage and resentment, Scheider exudes more cool control. In an early scene where he overhears his commanding officer being reamed out for “The Seven-Ups’” methods, Scheider has Buddy lean against the wall while listening, patiently waiting for the reaming to end. There is little challenge to his worldview, which is why the conclusion amounts to little more than revenge rather than toppling the bad guys, with Buddy eventually turning his back on Vito, a sequence which, in its own way, is not as abrupt as the conclusion to the car chase though no less emotionally intense, as cold as that wind must be blowing in off the Harlem River.

Living in the Future (part 2)

This post (which, I think, remains unfinished, a bunch of thoughts not completely unified) is how I wrote my way into yesterday’s post. But rather than let it waste away in the drafts folder, I chose to publish it anyway. It’s my blog and I can do what I want to.

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Last spring My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I attended a matinee of Aaron Katz’s “Gemini” at the ArcLight. There were maybe three other people in the theater and dust had settled over the seats, so much that we had to brush it off before we sat down. It seemed emblematic, as if I had wound up in Anarene, Texas, the setting for Peter Bogdanovich’s beloved “The Last Picture Show” (1971), a beautiful, bittersweet, fundamentally paradoxical film that was part of the New Hollywood movement in the wake of the big studios collapsing in on themselves even as its setting – 1950 & ’51 – harkened back to the studio stranglehold of the Golden Age. “The Last Picture Show” was about many things, but it was mostly about being in the moment when one era is passing to the next, culminating in the closing of the local movie house with a screening of John Ford’s “Red River.”

“Red River”, as it happens, factored into a piece David Thomson wrote for Harper’s Weekly in 2015 about how the difficulty of maintaining physical film has led to so many films, of the Silent Era and beyond, being lost. Tucked within there, though, was also a lament for how a certain way of watching movies was being lost too. “‘Red River, ’” wrote Thomson, “was a river as much as a story, and forced you to stay with it. With a book, you could pause before the denouement and have a nap. The book would wait patiently. The music you liked was on a record; you could go back and revisit its immediacy until you knew it by heart. But a movie was wild and it went away.” Now, in the age of streaming, a movie can wait like a book, and you can go back revisit a movie like a record. This is not necessarily bad. New Yorker critic Richard Brody has emphasized the virtue of pausing a movie mid-stream to better soak up the experience, and rewatches of movies frequently open them up further in our minds, allowing us to really get a handle on how what a movie’s doing to make us love it so.

What Thomson is talking about is not really Slow Cinema, a style of filmmaking emphasizing flat visuals and long takes, but Slow Cinema’s intent to envelop you in the experience still cuts to the heart of what Thomson suggests is being lost. Paul Schrader, who made his recent film “First Reformed” in the Slow Cinema vein, noted in a recent Now interview how old movies look slow to us now because “We’ve retrained our brains to perceive imagery at (a hyper-speed) level,” a product of the unrelenting technological advances in our world, a progression that Thomson charted in his mammoth 2012 book “The Big Screen”, where he both grieved for what was, acknowledged inexorable change, and fretted over how that change is poised to leave movies not so much dead as dead as we currently know them; or, how we used to know them.

Therein lies the recent Netflix v Steven Spielberg debate that touched off a little while back when the latter implored the Motion Picture Academy to change its award guidelines so that only films with a minimum 4-week theatrical run would be considered Oscar-eligible. Spielberg is a populist, no doubt, and, who knows, he may well be seeking to discredit streaming entirely on its own terms. If so, that is a reductive stance, one that films such as “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”, one of last year’s finest releases in any format, whole-heartedly refutes. What’s more, streaming has leveled the playing field, with Ava DuVernay noting on Twitter that Netflix “distributes black work far/wide.” That’s a noble aim. And Netflix’s response cited the access it provides for those further from movie theaters.

But sometimes I wonder about Netflix, and I’m sure Spielberg does too. Its classic film stable, especially where streaming is concerned, is, as many have noted, not just lacking but downright pitiful. Archival of what’s past is vital and streaming entities like Netflix rarely make a point of such archival. This is why so many mourned the passing of FilmStruck late last year. Schrader might have been spiritually speaking for Spielberg when he told Vulture: “I suspect that Amazon and Netflix are not so much outside the box as they would like you to believe. Netflix, for example, operates under the theory of, if you liked this, you will like this. And of course, when you have a film that’s unique, that runs against the thinking of that model.”

Indeed, Netflix’s model is a burgeoning monolith, evoking shades of the old studio system. The studio system had myriad problems, absolutely, and needed to be broken, no questions asked, from a labor point-of-view, but they also knew how to craft movies. Netflix, frankly, is less about craft than filmmaking formula based on algorithms and flooding the marketplace with that algorithm-inspired content. Can you imagine Netflix giving rise to something as potent as Film Noir? Why do you think Netflix cuts off closing credits filled with the names of so many hard-working crew members to cue up the beginning of another film or TV show their calculations have ascertained you will might not enjoy?

That’s not to suggest the theatrical experience, which is on the downslope of its glory days anyway, is some guarantor of good tidings. Marvel runs a similar content-generating model to Netflix with a focus on theatrical blockbusters. In response to the Spielberg v Netflix kerfuffle, Schrader cited, on his Facebook page, the so-called “theatrical experience” as an original matter of “exhibition economics”, nothing more, laying bare the colloquialism (sometimes attributed to Spielberg) that the cinema is akin to church. Schrader noted that a filmmaker adapts to technology, and perhaps that is similar to movie fans, which Vulture film critic Emily Yoshida essentially noted when she tweeted: “I love movies. Movies are a big part of my life. Netflix can claim to feel love toward whatever it wants but I love Netflix the exact amount that I loved my VCR in 1995 and my DVD player in 2001.”

And I suppose that’s where I land. Means of distribution are not my wheelhouse; I just want good movies! And if the way they are being screened, and if the way they are being created, is metamorphosing, what’s the big deal so long as what is being created frequently achieves aesthetic lift off. “The fragmentation of movies that made video possible is not going to end,” Thomson wrote in “The Big Screen.” “It’s already advancing and taking us back to a wealth of short films.” He noted that no less an authority than Samuel Beckett “mistrusted the medium whenever it turned portentous. True depth of feeling, even tragedy, he felt, could be best found in brief comedies.”

That screening of “Gemini” began with “Aspirational”, a 2014 short film starring Kirsten Dunst skewering selfie art but also illustrating how so much of current culture is consumed through the screens in our hands. Two young women, spotting Dunst from their car, stop and get out to snap selfies with the undoubted intent of utilizing this celebrity encounter in their Instagram or Snapchat stories, suggesting narrative as the sort of Godard-ish fragmentary inserts that Thomson pinpoints as an early indication of where movies were headed all along – that is, here. I watch “Aspirational” and feel the jolt of its sun-dappled message and feel not only in lockstep with Dunst but Thomson too when he writes “If you really want to watch a film, you must be ready to recognize your own life slipping away.”

Living in the Future (part 1)

Regulation time in the electrifying, extraordinary Game 1 of the last year’s NBA Finals concluded when the Cleveland Cavaliers’ mercurial J.R. Smith snared the rebound of a teammate’s missed free throw and, erroneously thinking his team up by a point with seconds remaining rather than still tied with the opposing Golden State Warriors, forewent a possible game-winning shot to dribble away from the basket and out toward the three point line, inadvertently running out the clock as teammate LeBron James, recognizing his Herculean 51 point effort was about to go for naught, launched the meme seen ‘round the world by incredulously excoriating his teammate. If the game was not technically over, emotionally it was, you could feel it, and so James and Smith trudged to the bench where they waited for the commencement of overtime (in which, yes, the Cavaliers officially lost) by sitting on the bench a few seats apart pointedly not talking. Because it was 2018, this entire moment was recorded for posterity’s sake. “Here’s Four Minutes Of Footage From Game 1 Of LeBron James Not Murdering J.R. Smith” went the headline on Deadspin where I watched the entire 4 minutes the next day, and then the next day too. It was riveting.

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That, over there to the right, which you can hardly see, is a movie.

A month earlier My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I went to the Tacita Dean miniature exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. This included Dean’s short film “His Picture In Little.” That title is cribbed from Hamlet because Dean’s film features three English actors – Stephen Dillane, David Warner, Ben Whishaw – who have played the Danish prince. And in “His Picture In Little” these three actors don’t do anything much. They were filmed separately in various states of repose then blended together into a collage, of sorts, lasting fifteen and a half minutes where we see them on screen smiling, laughing, considering, sitting, sprawling out, but never speaking because the film is silent, all rendered on a screen no bigger than an iPhone. If we did not plan on sitting and watching the whole fifteen and a half minutes, we did anyway, so absorbing did it intrinsically become, and I thought of “His Picture In Little” as I watched “Four Minutes Of Footage From Game 1 Of LeBron James Not Murdering J.R. Smith.”

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Paul Schrader made his stellar 2018 film “First Reformed” in the style of Slow Cinema, one dictating flat visuals and little camera movement, no music, frequent long takes, absorbing you into its rhythm, lulling you into a kind of detached yet heightened sense of spectatorship. In an interview with Now, however, during the publicity run of “First Reformed”, Schrader expressed fatalism about Slow Cinema’s place in contemporary cinema. “Slow cinema may be running its course,” he said. “It’s getting closer and closer to the art gallery and museum. It had a real interesting moment in the last 10 years, but now the novelty has worn off, and people are not as mesmerized as they were when the slowness was really being used as a new concept of film time.” Later, he re-underlined the idea of it spreading to art galleries, saying “You can’t go into a museum or a gallery any more without seeing a movie.” And that, of course, is where we were seeing in “His Picture In Little”, a sort of miniaturized version of Slow Cinema. And I wondered if Schrader’s prognosis was only half-right.

In a different interview with Vulture Schrader expressed confusion with motion pictures on a conceptual level. He said: “We don’t know what a movie is anymore. We don’t know how long it is, we don’t know where you see it, we don’t know how you monetize it. What if it’s a net series? That is half hours, or 15 minutes. What if it’s 115 minutes, you know? That’s still a movie, isn’t it? Yes it is.” These are ideas the film critic, my main man David Thomson, has been working through this entire decade, including in his books “The Big Screen” and “How to Watch A Movie.” In the latter, Thomson touched on the fragmentation of film, born of editing so hyperactive and disjointed that even lengthy movies can often feel more like individual bits acting independently of each other. Yet from that fragmentation, Thomson wonders, can a whole other sort of cinema emerge? Has it even been there all along?

He illustrates this through a Derek Jeter commercial, comparing it to a kind of short film, though even a commercial signals traditional artistic intent. What I’m wondering about goes beyond even that, those flashes on the screens of our devices existing as a kind of found art. After Winona Ryder’s life cycle of facial expression at the 2017 SAG Awards, Twitter was inundated with that clip and accompanying quotes like “Best Performance of the Year.” What if it was? The clip of President T*ump climbing the stairs of Air Force One in the rain, realizing he has no idea how to close his umbrella and then just leaving it sitting there upside-down at the top of the stair car was perhaps the most incisive piece of 2018 political commentary, the American people as the umbrella as the cake in MacArthur Park left out in the rain. And that brings me back to “Four Minutes Of Footage From Game 1 Of LeBron James Not Murdering J.R. Smith.”

Tacita Dean shot “His Picture In Little” in 35mm anamorphic color before reducing it to spherical 16mm and then actually exhibiting it on the miniaturized smartphone-ish screen, a process emblematically blurring the lines between big screen and small screen, as if illustrating filmmaking’s future. And if we tend to think of videos seen through the miniature screens of our phones as super-quick fragments, I wonder now if Dean consciously unlocked an alternate truth. If “His Picture In Little” slowed me down and brought me in, so, I realized, did ““Four Minutes Of Footage From Game 1 Of LeBron James Not Murdering J.R. Smith”, a theatrical experience in 4 inches. I’m starting to think that video should have won Best Picture.

Tag

If the characters of “Tag” suffer a disconnect between reality and the fantasy world they have created through a game of tag begun in their adolescence and continuing through adulthood, so does director Jeff Tomsic’s film itself suffer a disconnect in tone. It’s never not a comedy, mind you, smartly, since I’m not sure how else you could evoke a lifelong game of tag graduating from the playground to corporate boardrooms. Yet if the film sometimes exudes a sentimental streak stressing the importance of friendship, as if trying to honor the real life game of tag on which the film is based, the actual scenes of the game are less cornily lo-fi, like the real life ones we see over the end credits, than fantastical, even occasionally jarringly intense. A golf course showdown evokes Walter Hill’s “Southern Comfort” (1981), as if their suburban ennui is manifesting itself as amateur war games, an intriguing tack the movie never completely takes. Indeed, a scene where, for convoluted reasons, our main characters threaten to waterboard a gym receptionist teases a bracing metaphor for the characters own sense of desperation, bringing the movie to the brink of genuine madness only to pull back and opt for a safe verbal punchline, becoming a metaphor for the movie’s own paralysis of identity.

The opening scene, in which Hogan (Ed Helms), interviews for a janitorial job at an insurance company, might oddly excise its suspense due to the preceding prologue explaining straight away the game of tag and the absurd methods employed by these friends to make someone else “it”, but it also demonstrates how these characters frequently run up against the real world as the interviewer (Lil Rel Howery) incredulously struggles to comprehend Hogan’s objective. The objective, of course, is to tag his pal, Bob (Jon Hamm), the company CEO, and then pitch him a complex plan to tag their friend Jerry (Jeremy Renner), who has legendarily never been “it”, at his own wedding. Because Hogan tags Bob while the latter is being interviewed by a Wall Street reporter, Rebecca Crosby (Annabelle Wallis), she comes along for the ride, conveniently since the game’s exorbitant rules can be explained to her. You’re dying all movie to know what she thinks since she represents reality. But, expectedly, the movie does nothing with her, the editor sometimes forgetting she’s even there, and then remembering, catching glimpses of her stranded on the periphery with a dazed expression.

Then again, “Tag” does not have much thought about its male characters either. Tomsic gets by on each actor’s inherent personality. Hamm is a smarmy guy in a suit.  Helms is uptight and a little too earnest. Renner is cocky and a little aloof. Jake Johnson, as Randy, and Hannibal Buress, as Kevin, friends four and five, are, respectively, a pot-smoking slacker and rather chill but discerning. (Rashida Jones is here too, barely, and, as she will, floats above it all while side-eyeing everyone and everything.) All of them are generally funny in their individual ways, though the funniest thing in the movie is the slow motion mid-fight facial expressions, as if Tomsic took the opening to “Duplicity” as his action aesthetic inspiration. Buress, on the other hand, is just as funny in a more low-key way, and his laconic air and perplexed but pithy commentary emerges as the one element closest to breaking the movie’s code. In the golf course action sequence, where events spiral out of control, he says out loud how Jerry is a psychopath, which is so revelatory it almost has the feel of being improvised, as if Buress himself is stepping outside the movie in the moment and realizing exactly what’s going on.

Isla Fisher, as Hogan’s wife Anna, is equals Burress but pitched at a more cacophonous scale, wildly swinging from nigh violent Tag-obsessed mania to sunny domesticity, showing Rebecca pictures of her kids with a bright, earnest smile, suggesting something akin to a split personality. Other bits of characterization, meanwhile, are mere flashes. Kevin is introduced in a therapy session, but his friends sneak in and forcibly remove him; Jerry is seen in AA meeting, but his friends invade to try and tag him. Over and over, these characters’ respective realities are not so much ignored in the name of old fashioned escapism as pointedly introduced and then trampled over in favor of the game. This group of friends came of age in the 90s, evoked in the soundtrack, a high time for virtual reality. And though the film might not be computer-generated, it frequently feels simulated anyway, as if even in the most important moments of their lives, these people remain plugged into tag.

High Flying Bird

The pivotal moment in Steven Soderbergh’s Netflix production “High Flying Bird” occurs when two fledgling NBA players talking trash across social media during a leaguewide lockout on account of differences between labor and management suddenly find themselves face to face at a charity event in a small Bronx gymnasium. Forbidden from settling their score in official competition, they dare each other to a game of one on one. Yet just before the showdown commences, Soderbergh cuts away, limiting us to a couple oblique glimpses through a smartphone video later in the film. This is not, however, merely Soderbergh as haughty provocateur, depriving us of what we want just because he can. No, this is a continuation of the movie’s theme, explicated by the hard-bitten coach, Spence (Bill Duke), overseeing the charity event, as modern basketball being about “the game on top of the game.” It’s the game masterminded by avaricious white men in tall buildings rather than the game born on concrete courts, a series of transactions supplanting the sport’s streetball roots, which is why the cinematography emphasizes sleek office towers, as if employing that shot from Spike Lee’s “He Got Game” overture where the World Trade Center looms over a young kid shooting buckets as an overall theme.

Soderbergh, however, seeks to honor the sport’s streetball roots by essentially turning the entire film into a series of one-on-one, give or take, conversational showdowns, including the opening stanza where agent Ray Burke (Andre Holland) chastises his promising client, lauded first round draft pick Erick Scott (Melvin Gregg), for having taken a high interest loan during the lockout. Set in a glitzy restaurant, Soderbergh obliterates the 180 degree rule by shooting his two actors from every conceivable angle. Even if this flouting of cinematic convention retains emblematic weight, it is akin to a bout of swaggering streetball in the manner of, say, Coney Island legend Steph Marbury – snazzy and ostentatious. Even so, the scene ends with a nice narrative twist when Ray’s financial harangue concludes with his credit card being declined, betraying his precarious job status given that no NBA players are currently playing games. This necessitates a need to end the lockout which eventually ties back to that spontaneous one-on-one game making the social media rounds, threatening to usurp the owners’ bargaining power guerilla style, all of which gives Soderbergh’s decision to shoot on an iPhone an extra emblematic kick.

All this wheeling and dealing, despite involving the NBA global monolith, remains limited to but a few principal players, likely a budget constriction the iPhone photography suggests, with an unctuous Kyle MacLachlan representing the ruling class and Sonja Sohn standing up for the put-upon labor. Wedged between them is Ray, and standing alongside him is Spence, played by Duke with maximum gravitas, as figuratively rock-like as is possible, immovable in his principles, frequently peering out from beneath his ball cap with bright white eyes that truly evince the notion of having seen everything. The movie’s best joke, and a recurring one at that, is every time someone equates modern athletes with slaves, a common sportswriting refrain, Spence forces everyone to recite his mantra: “I love the Lord and all his black people”, like a makeshift preacher reminding his charges what’s most important. It illustrates Spence’s compassion, and he emerges as the lone well-rounded character, where despite these notions of black NBA players as mere commodities a fundamental humanity in the other persons present is conspicuously lacking as Ray’s backstory remains unbaked and Erick’s personality can come across as un-lived in as his apartment.

Still, ideas all on their own can yield drama and tension, and it is the ideas woven into conversations and taking root in Ray’s ultimate scheme that animate “High Flying Bird”, all of which screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney refuses to dress up in easy-to-digest metaphors a la “Margin Call”; it can be hard to keep up, but also invigorating. Ray’s scheme, without entirely giving it away, ties back to how the social media influence of that spontaneous pickup game unlocks the potential earning power that both Ray and Erick hold and can dangle over so many boardroom suits, honoring the film’s own DIY roots and highlighting how a pickup game revenges the game on top of the game. Despite their ultimate plan’s complexity, however, it narratively locks into place with odd pressure-free ease, diffusing any sense of surprise. Then again, “High Flying Bird” modifies its seeming MacGuffin right at the end, transforming a manila envelope from a device into a battle cry, leaving the more assiduous viewer with a little voluntary homework.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Bay of Angels (1963)

Jacques Demy’s “Bay of Angels” opens in a Parisian bank where Jean (Claude Mann) works. The scene, in the sound of numbers being crunched, in the similarity of the black suits, black ties and white shirts, less an emblem of finely cut cool here than a standard-issue uniform, feel distinctly airless. And though the notion of gambling is suggested to him by his co-worker Caron (Paul Guers), this airlessness feels like just as direct a contributor, a yearning to twist numbers into something more stimulating. And yet. Even after the film soon transitions to gambling halls, first nearby and then in scenic south France, there is deliberate sameness to the seemingly disparate locations, not simply in their monochrome but in their low watt ambience. Demy furthers this effect in the way he shoots the scenes of betting, typically around craps, where the dealer’s professional disinterest is palpable and the editing scheme, a workmanlike presentation of the chips falling into place and an emphasis on human close-ups, belies little destiny in the tumbling dice and pure desperation in those who pin all their hopes on it.

That might make “Bay of Angels” sound like a dour affair; it is anything but. Oh, it flirts with the idea of becoming a cautionary tale as Jean, who lives at home, is explicitly warned by his father not to be tempted by the sin of gambling or else. If this suggests Jean will sneak around once he gives in to the compulsion, he instead tells his father right off and flees for Nice. And though he does eventually place a call to his father for some quick cash, that potential storyline is never followed through just as the movie never resorts to any other sort of traditional predicament from which Jean must extract himself. And while “Bay of Angels” does demonstrate the dangerous lull gambling holds, it only does that by sort of going all the way around and then coming back out the other side, which Demy achieves through his other main character, Jackie, played by Jeanne Moreau.

If Moreau managed to both embody and transcend the femme fatale archetype in the masterful “Elevator to the Gallows”, in “Bay of Angels she personifies the loneliness and sadness that a gambling addiction can engender even as she improbably floats above it. Indeed, she does not so much enter the picture as just appear, sitting at a roulette table looking bored – no, not bored, detached from life itself. Yet when Jean enters the frame, standing on the opposite side of the table, looking down on her as the camera peers over her shoulder, his and our gazes are united, suddenly entranced as she and Jean place an identical bet and she almost seems to plug back in, triggering what improbably feels akin to a fast-moving slow burn, nights of gambling and gallivanting that span the rest of the movie until it suddenly ends.

Jackie is a divorced mother, yet mentions of her child feel incidental, not as if she is trying to suppress it but as if she has shed that along with her skin by the side of some French country road. Consider the suitcase she hauls around, technically allowing her to make threats of leaving but emblematically giving the sense of someone who lives out of it, epitomizing her thirst for the moment. The Moment might be a film cliché but Demy and other French New Wave masters excelled at acknowledging those cliches and infusing them with life. Why Demy has Jean acknowledge the cliché out loud. “I didn’t think such a lifestyle existed anymore,” Jean says to Jackie. “I mean, except in the movies or certain American novels. This hotel, this terrace, this band. This opulence. And you, too.”

She looks like something out of a movie, her costuming popping off the screen even in black and white, her vivaciousness standing both in deliberate contrast to so much vapidity of gambling halls and even standing out in shots placing her on beautiful beaches and empty streets. She carries Jean along in her wake, entangling him in the circular logic of her win/lose/win/lose/etc. lifestyle, which is given breathtaking thematic heft in the closing sequence where she threatens to leave – him, the casinos, the south of France, all of it – only to turn around and return to his arms, their romantic embrace like a spiritual vice squeezing down on the last of their souls.

Cinematically Cataloguing the Recent Past

This year is my 14th living in Chicago. I’m a transplant, yes, but the city’s become my home. I’ve put in my time. I’ve stared down Rahm and won. I’ve gone to The Waco Brothers’ Holiday Show at Schubas (more than once). I know how to do a Peter Francis Geraci impression. I got married here! So it surprised me that I was so surprised this past weekend, having lunch in Chicago’s Chinatown neighborhood with My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, when a black double-decker bus rolled by outside bearing the words Untouchables Tour. “There’s an ‘Untouchables’ tour?” I incredulously asked. Somehow, despite having been here since 2005, I had never seen one of these buses. Turns out, after a little research, this is not a tour of the filming locations for Brian DePalma’s 1987 film but a tour of gangsterland Chicago sites with dudes dressed as Prohibition Era mafiosos for tour guides. Frankly, that sounds a little too Tony n’ Tina for me, and so I preferred imagining the Untouchables Tour as a movie tour, spiriting tourists from the Great Hall at Union Station to the Our Lady of Sorrows Basilica where one by one, just for $5 extra, you can kneel at one of the pews and exclaim “That’s the Chicago way, and that’s how you get Capone!”

My own hang-ups aside, this Untouchables Tour, the real one, would be about seeing Chicago of the present but imagining Chicago of the past, which is sort of what “The Untouchables” itself is doing, the magic of the movies transforming South LaSalle into a Roaring Twenties recreation. Any movie from that era set in Chicago would have been filmed on a studio backlot, and so this is as close as we’re ever gonna get. Movies, after all, musn’t merely be transportation to another time and/or place but an evocation of the way a place once was, which is why even the Windy City postcard that is “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” can be importantly historical. The Sears Tower is cited as “the world’s tallest building” and as the famous 1961 Ferrari 250GT rolls down Michigan Avenue you can spy, over the characters’ shoulders, a pre-Millennium Park Loop.

This visual archive is evident in other films too. “The Fugitive” captures the city’s downtown St. Patrick’s Day Parade along its old route on Dearborn passing the Daley Center. And if, as the Chicago Cubs have transformed from lovable losers into a Nuveen-sponsored monolith, Wrigleyville has gone from odd, uneasy merger between daytime baseball and nighttime punk to bro-infested frat party to burgeoning family-friend theme park, John Candy’s “Only the Lonely” exists to bring that old, faded Wrigleyville back into focus, freezing its less spit and polished self on screen forever.

Almost 10 years later, “High Fidelity” encased Lounge Ax, a famed Lincoln Park music club where every notable indie band performed throughout the nineties, in cinematic carbonite before it was, ahem, axed, ensuring it would live forever in the ether as the low-lit space where Marie de Salle improbably makes magic out of Peter effing Frampton. I always wished I could have seen a show at Lounge Ax. Funny thing is, I did see a show at the Double Door – a lot of ‘em – which was where Jack Black performed as Barry Jive and the Uptown Five for “High Fidelity’s” climax. But Double Door closed when it was evicted after a long, contentious dispute with the city in 2017, leaving Barry Jive’s cover of “Let’s Get It On” as a kind of unintentional eulogy.

Jack Black on stage at Double Door

“The Weather Man”, which intrinsically captured Chicago’s soul-deadening winters better than any movie, froze the Esquire Theater and its vintage, picturesque marquee on Oak Avenue in time before the 1930s movie house was gutted in 2011. Joe Swanberg’s ode to Chicago’s superb craft beer scene, “Drinking Buddies”, was released only in 2013 yet found itself archiving the Black Rock, the bar a couple blocks west from where I used to live, home to a gluttonous mac & cheese burger, and which was demolished in 2017. And in “Princess Cyd” (2017), which intrinsically, lovingly captures my current neighborhood, evincing how Chicago can be just as restoratively leafy green in the summer as it is soul-deadening in the winter, has a scene at Lincoln Square’s Brauhaus, where so many of the faux-fabled, so-called “German Nights” I’ve had with friends tradtionally concluded. The Brauhaus closed at the end of 2017.

The Brauhaus in Princess Cyd

“Princess Cyd”, whether it meant to or not, spiritually preserved the Brauhaus, just as “Drinking Buddies” preserved the Black Rock, “The Weather Man” preserved the Esquire, “High Fidelity” preserved Double Door, and so forth. And I realize: if the Untouchables Tour, or just “The Untouchables”, is about conveying a historical Chicago, I have now lived here long enough to see Chicago places I knew so well become history, perhaps not a symbol of our sped-up society so much as a reminder of the way it’s always been, wrecking, planning, building, breaking, rebuilding.

College Admissions: The Movie

Yesterday a total of 50 people were indicted, per CBS News, in a widespread college admission bribery scandal. Academically un-gifted students of well-to-do parents were recruited as athletes despite possessing no athletic talent to elite universities where they were given help in cheating on their entrance exams. (The details are dizzying.) Among those charged were Hollywood actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin. And Cinema Romantico would not be doing its job if it did not turn this tale of spectacular privilege and wealth run stupidly amok into a movie pitch. I’m so sorry (you’re welcome). 

College Admissions: The Movie

In a nod to Lori Loughlin’s Hallmark Channel roots, we will cast Candace Cameron Bure (shout-out to my friend Naomi for this suggestion) as Laura Laffler, the Lori Loughlin character, and Hope Davis as Fable Moritz, the Felicity Huffman character, who conspire to get their spoiled, less-than-academically-inclined daughters into prestigious University of California Catalina Island (UCCI) on bogus beach volleyball scholarships (sex sells!). When the moms are busted by the FBI, they are summarily locked up as cellmates where they are forced to search their souls.

We will cast Vanessa Hudgens as Ophelia Laffler, daughter of Laura, and AnnaSophia Robb as Savannah Moritz, daughter of Fable, whose scholarships are revoked when their moms go to jail. Alas, UCCI is down one beach volleyball team when its two best players are coincidentally injured in a parasailing accident, forcing the beleaguered athletic department to strike a deal: Ophelia and Fable can earn back their scholarships if they win the beach volleyball conference title. Thus, these two good-for-nothings are forced to dig deep for something more as they reach for the stars, learning to volleyball and love themselves along the way!

Dina Meyer will play their coach, Karla Sloan, a disgraced former beach volleyball star who was caught doping at the Olympics and is promoted from who-cares assistant to win-at-all-costs head coach when her boss is implicated in the admissions scandal. Though Karla seeks to have Ophelia and Savannah dope too, since what other hope do they have, she eventually learns performance enhancing drugs are no match for a little hard work. 

Kaitlin Olson will play Ophelia and Savannah’s supervisor at the Whataburger where the two girls are forced to get jobs to pay their way after the government freezes their family’s assets and they got no money.

Queen Latifah will play Tina, prison mentor to Laura and Fable, who is jovial and full of helpful advice despite serving a 20 year rap for loitering. At movie’s end, Laura and Fable are released on good behavior despite an early comical scene where they bungle an escape attempt; Tina is denied parole.

Melissa McCarthy is the UCCI dean attempting to prevent Ophelia and Savannah from winning the beach volleyball conference title to save scholarship money. When Ophelia and Savannah emerge victorious anyway, they accept a free meal from a fast casual restaurant, unbeknownst to them a violation of NCAA rules. Their title is forfeited, their scholarships remain revoked, and the Dean receives a bonus comprised of money from the very same college admission scam slush fund.

What They Had

“What They Had” opens with matriarch Ruth Everhardt (Blythe Danner), suffering from Alzheimer’s, waking one wintry Chicago morning by getting dressed and putting on makeup, as if she’s going out to dinner and a show, leaving the house and wandering off into a blizzard. If the scene is essentially terrifying, its presentation is quite calm, even beautiful, the camera low and looking down one of those classic back Chicago alleys, big snowflakes falling in the distinctive orange light as Ruth walks away from our view. It’s early in the morning; it’s quiet; it’s peaceful; it is, in fact, the most peaceful moment in the entire movie because from this point forward director Elizabeth Chomko’s film becomes something akin to a never-ending argument.

Indeed, once Ruth wanders off, her daughter Bridget (Hilary Swank) and is summoned from her unhappy marriage in L.A., recounted in a few brief scenes shot in Lite Fincher Blue to ensure we understand the coldness that has settled around her marriage, along with her brother Nicky (Michael Shannon) who stayed in Chicago to run a bar and look after his folks. And though Ruth is quickly found unharmed riding the Metra, her husband Bert (Robert Forster) refuses to concede that his wife needs assisted living, convinced he alone can take care of her, prompting infinite disagreements between dad, daughter, and son about what to do with mom. And though she might be the subject of the story, she is somehow never a part of it, talked about and dealt with but stranded on the movie’s periphery.

Shannon spends a lot of the film shouting wise, but few actors shout wise as well. And if his antics seem a stretch, well, reader, I assure you, had you walked into the old Cork Lounge beneath the Addison Brown Line stop, you would have seen this dude holding court on a barstool. Granted, he and Swank do not physically match up, but they emotionally go together. In frames, they often stand side by side with Shannon, the taller of two, lording over her, imposing a sense of their rapport, how he hollers what he considers to be the unvarnished truth, her looking up at him and quietly scolding him and then trying to re-phrase what he just said in a gentler way. The movie frequently gets by simply on the way these two interact.

Forster, meanwhile, channels the same grouchy air that caused his character to punch that annoying kid in “The Descendants”, effectively playing someone resistant to advice; you never doubt he raised Nick. As much as they spar, however, their best moment occurs when he finally visits Nick’s bar and simply sits back as Nick concocts a Manhattan. Here, both actors are fabulous, Shannon evincing a bartending craftsman at work, Forster pretending to have his character read the paper even as he side-eyes Nick the whole time, as if he’s a judge grading his son’s performance. That no dialogue is forced is right on; this isn’t a peace deal but an emotional armistice.

Yet if “What They Had” works better in its natural moments, the script only strays further from these as it goes along, falling back on narrative contrivance to spur the movie toward a conclusion in which Bridget brings Ruth to relieve the load Nick has been carrying. If Nick makes clear the arduousness involved, none of this appear very hard, rendered in sun dappled scenes and scenic gardens where all the preceding anger and bitterness does not get solved or even managed but rather melts away in a bout of mysticism.

Minding the Gap

Film editing is inherently a manipulation of time. Few movies grasp this more than “Minding the Gap”, Bing Liu’s feature debut documentary, retroactively in my 2018 Top 10 (but who’s counting?), which sometimes slows down to revel in the glory or the grisliness of the fleeting moment and sometimes speeds up to accentuate the sensation of life’s emotional weight pressing down. Indeed, if Liu had originally intended a documentary celebrating the youthful skateboarding lifestyle of he, Keire and Zack, a couple of his Rockford, Illinois pals, picking up a camera and figuring it out how to shoot and edit along the way, with each passing year, the more “Minding the Gap” morphed into something else, spawning different questions and new angles. In a way, “Minding the Gap” is akin to a non-fiction version of “Boyhood.” Yet if the life of that film’s protagonist stretched across years, demonstrating the weight of time even as it led him to the ultimate realization that “it’s always right now, you know?”, Liu begins with that conclusive truth and then works backwards.

To Liu, Keire, and Zack, skateboarding is respite from youthful languor and adulthood’s encroaching realities, a truth we are not just told but shown, in giddy ground-level Glidecam shots of Keire and Zack soaring through the streets as if they have wings on their heels if not quite hope in their hearts. Zack recounts how taken aback he was the first time he saw these scattered images edited together by Liu, how perfect it made their lives appear, an observation underscoring not only how editing exerts influence but how the time aboard those skateboards is like riding a train to the land of make-believe. And if Liu opens “Minding the Gap” by highlighting the escape skateboarding can provide, he picks apart that illusion, not with any malice or even seeming intention but a kind of gradually emerging awareness of surrounding reality.

Initially, it turns out, Liu intended to include voiceover, even recording it though eventually scrapping it. This decision was wise. It’s not that “Minding the Gap” isn’t reflective, because it very much is, but rather than looking back it becomes about moving – haltingly – forward, and everything that happens to this trio therefore lends an organic feel to its burgeoning themes of fathers and sons, and of fathers and sons and abuse. These themes pivot off Zack becoming a father with Nina, his girlfriend, though bouts of beer-slurping between diaper-changing betray his eventual fleeing responsibility, his self-loathing and self-destruction palpable in on-camera confessionals, particularly one on a riverbank where he mostly refuses to look at the camera, revealing himself both in tune to his own failings and completely oblivious to them.

Those failings include physical abuse. If Nina first reveals it, she then pointedly asks Liu not to press Zack about it, a real-time questioning of a documentarian’s ethics that never not quite gains a resolution if only because there isn’t one. Liu honors her request, though Zack eventually confesses to it anyway in his own ignorant way, a confession that assumes added gravity given how both Keire and Liu wrestle with abusive fathers in their past too. This abuse proves as much a spiritual link as skateboarding, an idea Liu furthers just as much in his editing, a late film sequence cross-cut between the trio where they consider their respective presents and pasts with so much emotional ferocity it momentarily feels like one of those pulse-pounding action movies.

Liu makes clear Rockford’s hard times in news clips and shots of boarded up buildings, but just as much in shots of skateboarding through empty where the movie’s progression retroactively provides clarity about all that in-town emptiness. It’s easy to read these harsh economic circumstances as a correlation to the abuse that Zack doles out and Keire and Liu suffered, yet Liu, as director, has no interest in providing absolution. Footage of a younger Keire shows him lashing out, taking the skateboard of another kid he’s just beat up and then stomping up and down on it until the board breaks. He has his father in him. Yet that never seems to take hold, Keire’s infectious grin and garrulous laugh eventually winning out, as he quietly pulls away from Zach and toward a new group of friends, takes beaming pride in a promotion at work, and resolves to get out of Rockford. If he seeks real escape as opposed to the fleeting kind, Liu spends the movie going back, taking Keire’s observation that these on-camera confessionals are like therapy as gospel in delving into his psyche, revisiting his childhood home, trading terrible stories with his brother about their stepfather.

In one scene he sits down with his mom for an interview about why she endured her husband’s abuse. It’s not just her on camera, however, but Liu too, filmed by a different crew, almost like a documentary within a documentary. It’s not meta, though, but something else, evoking Bruce Springsteen sitting down in his New Jersey bedroom so many winters ago and recording “Nebraska” on 4-track. Springsteen’s best pal Steven Van Zandt said it was the most personal statement an artist could make because he was literally singing for himself. “Minding the Gap”, with its Oscar nod and critical ballyhoo, might have reached the masses too, but it still feels like Liu is filming for himself.