Closing Down for a Little While

America’s founding principles remain on the ropes, life has left me running on empty, an imperative vacation across the Atlantic beckons, and it’s to time for some more spiritual r&r. So pardon the blog while it powers down for a couple weeks and just floats away with the garbage.

Some Drivel On...Sunshine

As the solar eclipse of August 2017 approached, news outlets repeatedly warned not to look at the sun with the naked eye, except during the moment of actual total eclipse, lest you suffer significant eye damage. Inevitably, America’s President stepped onto the White House balcony in those landmark pre-total eclipse moments and looked directly at the sun. He’s not a bright fella, our Chief Executive. Still, I thought of him squinting into a solar eclipse as I toured the Palace of Versailles outside Paris a few months later where emblems of King Louis XIV’s self-imposed status as the Sun King abound. Nothing, of course, obviously, is more powerful in our solar system than the sun which no doubt makes kings – or wannabe kings vexed by pesky separation of powers – insecure. So, you take the sun’s name as your own or you look directly at the sun when you absolutely shouldn’t because the sun isn’t better than you. This differs, but only somewhat, from people like deceased legend Sir Isaac Newton who, at age 22, stared at a reflection of the sun and then 27 years later recounted the episode for John Locke. The results, as Newton explained them, may have been based on logic per what the brightest star in the universe does, but the language suggests something else. “I am apt to think that if I durst venture my eyes,” Newton wrote, “I could still make y phantasm return by the power of my fansy.” That’s a poetical explanation of what staring at the sun does to a man, causing someone like Sir Isaac Newton to talk in terms of phantasms rather than pragmatism. And that is the glorious grey area where Danny Boyle’s semi-forgotten personal masterpiece “Sunshine” (2007) manages to exist, honoring deep space’s conflicting ideas of light and darkness with a movie that drives reason and philosophy straight into each other.

The sun is dying, explains the film as it opens, leaving mankind in a lurch, causing a spaceship and crew (after the first spaceship and crew has gone missing) to set out for the sun to re-start it, “create a star within a star.” It’s a solid set-up, and while the principal objective of their mission and humanity itself is never overlooked despite the movie concentrating on several individuals, these characters’ respective crises and philosophical debates do not insultingly override their objective mission and humanity’s fate but intertwine. As the movie opens, Searle (Cliff Curtis), the ship’s psych officer is in the viewing deck, observing the sun through a modified prism that ensures, like, you know, his retinas don’t incinerate. Curtis’s air impressively evinces a regal deference to the solar deity, and when he asks the computer’s ship – a sunnier HAL – if he can see the sun at 4 percent brightness rather 2 percent, she explains that 4 percent would incinerate his retinas, epitomizing mankind’s propensity for tempting fate, which their ship name – Icarus II – also makes abundantly clear.

That ship name is evocative of how Boyle and his screenwriter Alex Garland build so many philosophical contradictions into the scaffolding of the screenplay, transforming abundant exposition into more meaningful meditations. When Cassie (Rose Byrne), the ship’s pilot, expresses fear at the looming mission to Capa (Cillian Murphy), the ship’s physicist, he explains how the payload works in a way almost befitting Newton’s musings about staring into the sun. “A big bang on a small scale,” he says. “A new star born out of a dying one. I think it’ll be beautiful. I’m not scared.” “I am,” she says.

That’s the question looming – not so much, will humanity survive, even if that question is never sidelined by narrative necessity, but what awaits each of us at the end, how will we get there, what it will be like? “What do you see?” Searle begs his ship’s Commander (Hiroyuki Sanada) as the latter races to repair the ship to salvage the mission as the ship’s rotation means the full blast of the sun is about to come into view and roast him. The Commander never says what he sees but he doesn’t have to, the film’s evocative, unforgettable music score mixing with the actor’s serene countenance suggest transcendence. How often do you see a Hollywood action sequence punctuated not with an explosion but enigmatic awe?

That this sequence happens at all ties back to the foremost plot complication – that is, in route to the sun, Icarus II picks up the signal of supposedly lost Icarus I, quietly camped out somewhere near Mercury. Though protocol dictates staying on mission since, hey, their mission involves saving Earth and everyone on it, they change course for the first Icarus anyway after a legitimate, logical debate about whether the benefit of possibly acquiring Icarus I’s payload in addition to their own outweighs the cost of deviating from their course. Mathematically speaking, Capa says, the answer is yes. But variables get them anyway, which makes their decision to fly toward Icarus I not narrative contrivance but a furthering of the film’s overriding philosophical debate.

It is also their undoing. The final act twist is that Icarus I’s commander, Pinbacker (Mark Strong), is still alive, having killed his crew himself, playing God after undergoing some sort of fundamentalist religious conversion from being in the sun too long, glimpsed in how he, the character, is barely glimpsed, his flesh having mostly melted away. It’s a haunted house, basically, as Boyle’s mostly clear editing suddenly gives way to quick-cut pyrotechnics. If my first time around I struggled with this passage, I ruminated on it for years and came around, particularly on my most recent viewing, where the adrenalized camera and narrative accentuate how the logic and reason of that do-we-rendezvous-with-Icarus-I discussion collapses into calamitous madness. Even as it does, though, Capa stays moving on a parallel track, rationally trying to complete the mission, fending off this encroaching mania yet ultimately surrendering to it. He sees the light.

keira knightley stares out the window

No, Honestly, I'm Really Asking, Where Did You Go, Joe Black?

If Film Twitter is frequently a black hole less comparable to Katie Bouman’s photograph and more in the vein of “Event Horizon”, it occasionally, unexpectedly opens up into a sun-dappled solarium, like it did last week, late Thursday, when I logged in and noticed that “Meet Joe Black” (1998), Martin Brest’s (almost) last stand, was improbably trending. The source of its social media resurrection, near as I could tell, was Rosie O’Shea (@ladyastronauty) Tweeting a one-minute and nineteen second clip of the film’s inciting incident in which Brad Pitt’s nameless but impeccably coiffed young man and Claire Forlani’s medical resident Susan Parrish, post-coffee shop Meet Cute, walk in opposite directions, each one pausing at the exact wrong moment to look back, suggesting a “Serendipity” precursor, where these two destined souls spend the entire movie apart trying to re-engineer their original soul connection. Alas, in a jarring moment tonally apart from the moment’s wistfulness, Pitt’s nameless but impeccably coiffed young man gets blindsided by a car, thrown into the air and then hit by another car coming the other way. “This is,” Tweeted O’Shea, “the most bonkers one minute of a movie I have ever seen.” Others seemed to agree, as a whole legion of Twitter whippersnappers apparently discovered the generally forgotten “Meet Joe Black” for the first time.

I used to watch this scene through the projection booth porthole of the multiplex where I started working in the fall of 1998 just to revel in the Woah There! reactions of movie-goers. And if just a couple weeks ago I was lamenting the myriad 1999 movies I watched by myself after building them reel by reel, none of those experiences all put together equaled “Meet Joe Black.” I still remember the deliveryman dropping off the reel canisters and just staring at them in disbelief, thinking “Can this be right? Can there be this many reels? Can it really be this long?” Yes. Yes, it could, and I know because I watched “Meet Joe Black”, all three hours of it, by myself in an empty auditorium. That 180 minute run time might have seemed suspect before I sat down to watch it, but it seemed insane after I finally finished, leaving a movie theater in the small hours.

“Meet Joe Black’s” premise, in which Bill Parrish (Anthony Hopkins), an aging billionaire, becomes the earthly guide for Death itself, taking the form of Pitt’s nameless but impeccably coiffed young man, before being escorted by Death off to The Great Beyond, is cribbed from “Death Takes a Holiday” (1934) which ran a scant 79 minutes. Though there are comic moments, “Meet Joe Black” is not, say, “Defending Your Life.” No, Brest strains for the operatic, only to frequently devolve into soap operatic instead, sentimental and syrupy, pouring over the romance between Susan, Bill’s daughter, and Death, all while negotiating Bill’s co-lead story and a corporate espionage subplot involving Susan’s villainous fiancé (Jake Weber). And while each piece falls neatly into place, Brest is not concerned with storytelling efficiency, preferring to linger, perhaps overmuch, though that is not the same thing as being superfluous.

Indeed, a shorter film might not have carved out time for such sterling supporting performances by Marcia Gay Harden, playing Danni Minogue to Susan’s Kylie with a rueful, graceful understatement, and Jeffrey Tambor as her spouse, Bill’s son in law, who gives the otherwise rote corporate espionage subplot some emotional oomph simply for the non-verbal way he takes the castigation of his manhood by Weber’s character, transforming audible heavy breathing becoming a miraculous sonic demonstration of tragic humility. Hopkins, meanwhile, has his character meet Death with a rich man’s arrogance suggesting he can stop what’s coming even as he simultaneously is humbled by the fact that he cannot, brilliantly harnessing the emotion of the weight of a whole life lived that is now slipping right through his fingers. And the operatic straining is what turns the Death/Susan romance into something less than clockwork, letting Forlani, whose eyes are a goddam supernova, hunger for Pitt the way thousands of millions of of women of the same era did. Brest even gives Pitt the, uh, climactic close-up in their sex scene, a $90 million Universal production released into the holiday marketplace as voyeurism.

Pitt simply could have slid by on his innate charm – in fact, most actors would have, and would have been coached to. But Pitt, bless his heart, was playing to the idea of being an inhuman life form having taken one as a vessel, like he’s figuring out his body, blank-faced because what’s emotion? It doesn’t always work, and it can be weird, comically so, like the GIF of Brad Pitt as Death eating peanut butter which made the rounds during last Thursday’s Twitter scroll down memory lane. But in seeing that peanut butter GIF over and over, I found the weirdness not nostalgic but refreshing, as if it was brand new.

It was ironic that the new “Star Wars” trailer was set for release the next day. Here we are, over twenty years later, and still returning to that well, dredging up every last bit. I’ve written about it before but what causes people to freak out over these trailers isn’t anything new but everything they know. I also gasped at the sight of Lando, and then I caught myself. It’s emblematic of Hollywood’s epidemic of spoon-feeding us the same ol’, same ol’, over and over, reboots, remakes, and sequels, oh my, easter eggs masquerading as protein. That’s the extent of filmmaking creativity these days, moguls making movies based on marketing plans rather than letting auteurists follow their own creative flow. And as everyone heckled “Meet Joe Black”, I found myself grieving for it. Though based on another movie, it was based only loosely, copping the premise but then roaming wherever it damn pleased, beholden to none but its own unique spirit. Would that it were more movie these days were bold enough to let themselves be called bonkers.

(untitled)

Jesse: “I heard this story once, about when the Germans were occupying Paris and they had to retreat back, they wired Notre-Dame to blow. But they had to leave one guy in charge of hitting the switch. And the guy, the soldier, couldn’t do it. You know, he just sat there, knocked out by how beautiful the place was. And then, when the allied troops came in, they found all the explosives just lying there, and the switch unturned.”
Celine: “Is that true?”
Jesse: “I don’t know. I always liked that story, though.”

I thought of that exchange from “Before Sunset” in the wake of Notre-Dame Cathedral burning yesterday. And I thought of that exchange not just because I bring most everything down to movies, though I mostly do, but because it so succinctly summarizes Our Lady of Paris’s status as a survivor. Goddamit, that immaculate French Gothic structure survived the Nazi occupation; it survived the French Revolution too, and years of neglect. It seems to have survived yesterday’s terrible, tragic blaze too.

I did not think of that exchange a couple autumns ago when I visited Paris in the company of My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and saw Notre-Dame up close (and from afar) with my own eyes. Because I don’t think you can really think about much of anything while looking at Notre-Dame. Its beauty overwhelms you. The Statue of Liberty did that too when I finally stood in its imposing shadow, though that sensation was different, culled from how Lady Liberty signified everyone who had come through this place.

Notre-Dame contains history too, sure, centuries of it, and that is significant and worthy of appreciation, just as it serving its role as a but a fully functional Catholic place of worship is not something I intend to downplay. But whatever your thoughts on practitioners of organized religion, “those bastards,” to paraphrase Ron Swanson, “knew how to build an edifice”, and in that building is where Notre-Dame’s greatest meaning emerges, a monument to something bigger and truer than mere architectural functionality or a product to be bought and sold; it’s an objective work of art. Art is a universal language. Jejune, perhaps, but accurate, at least when I stood inside and marveled at so many cultures and creeds marveling at the Rose Window, its stained glass beyond the scope of even the most futuristic smartphone filter, some genuine for your eyes only shit in this Instagram age, like Captain Miller and his wife and the rose bushes.

If it’s bad now, it’s always been just as bad before, and Notre-Dame, in its own way, is living proof. Still, I kept thinking this loss occupied some profound space beyond mere heartbreak and obligatory words of mankind’s propensity to rebuild what’s lost in the face of where this whole increasingly ghastly earthly show seems to be headed. When I saw that spire topple through the collapsing roof, it was as if some terrible rift had suddenly been slashed through the universe, threatening to take everything beautiful with it, a cosmic signifier of what’s been lost and stands to be lost still. And though one thing does not necessarily have to do with another, and though the onlookers singing Ave Maria in unison made my heart found full, the elemental indifference of those flames seemed to spiritually stand in for the indifference of so many to history and art, to all the beauty in this world that should be preserved and not run roughshod over, and I found myself hoping our era isn’t the one that finally hits the switch.

The Public

“The Public”, which refers to the Cincinnati Public Library, does not merely view libraries as collections of books and information but something more akin to an informal social hub, a gathering place for, ahem, the public where everyone, regardless of class and race, has access to knowledge, “the last true bastion of democracy” as one character puts it, which you gives a sense of the film’s from-the-ramparts dialogue. Indeed, “The Public’s” belief in libraries is earnest, opening with a 1950s PSA video on their behalf, closing with assorted images of the building at rest, though the actual library sciences are conspicuously absent, forgoing any sequences of actual collection or preservation, never mind simple organization. Then again, “The Public” does not yearn to be Frederick Wiseman’s “Ex Libris” (2017). No, this is a conventional drama, albeit one with a blatant advocacy bent, weaving several social themes through its booklined setting. But if writer/director Emilio Estevez has passion for these themes, his filmmaking is oddly dispassionate, laid bare in a conspicuous lack of world-building.

The drama’s genesis is a supposedly life-threatening cold front that sends temperatures plunging and leaves the homeless population, with not enough city shelters to go around, shivering on sidewalks. I say supposedly, however, because even if this weather, as we are told, can kill people, characters still traipse around outdoors without scarves, while a scene in which villainous district attorney cum mayoral candidate Josh Davis (Christian Slater) made to lay down a sidewalk at a pivotal moment with no coat, hat or gloves finds him looking hardly the worse for wear, giving “The Public” less the feel of an arctic adventure displaced to Cincinnati than a Hallmark Christmas Movie where the characters are barely bundled because they are actually filming in July. This overriding lack of authenticity renders Estevez’s handheld, faux-documentarian aesthetic as artificial rather than artful.

Nevertheless, it’s cold outside! And so, the homeless, who frequent the library most days anyway until the building closes, and most of whom librarian Stuart Goodson (Estevez) knows by first name, lock themselves in, a demonstration of which Goodson willingly takes part and then takes charge. This leads to a standoff between activists and the authorities, the latter represented by Davis and crisis negotiator Bill Ramstead (Alec Baldwin), while a ratings-obsessed news reporter (Gabrielle Union) becomes something of an intermediary. It’s no secret whose side Estevez the director is on, painting the press and the police as instigators while the eventual SWAT team is just persons as props, faceless instruments of bureaucratic warfare.

The homeless, meanwhile, though nominally the whole point, are each generally limited to one dimension, like Big George. Though Che “Rhymefest” Smith imbues the role with a quiet humanity, the character’s mental illness, a serious issue you’d suspect would be paramount to such a socially conscious movie, is limited to his belief the government has implanted lasers in his eyes, which is not explored but mere set-up for a callback at an important moment. Estevez has said he sought to “celebrate the unsung”, a noble quest, which makes one wonder why he puts his character front and center most of the movie, underscored in the screenplay’s odd obsession with the vocative case, with nearly every other sentence beginning or ending with “Mr. Goodson” – things in the manner of, “What do you think, Mr. Goodson?” or “Goodson, what are you doing?” We are a long, long way from “Your Friends & Neighbors” never-actually-uttered Mary, Barry, Terri, Cheri, Cary, and Jerry.

The character name and incessant recitation of it is emblematic of a messiah complex, though Estevez’s performance is less grand than that might suggest, much more blandly mellow. And that mellowness courses through the whole film. No matter how many times Ramstead asks Goodson how this is all going to end, the stakes never feel life and death, epitomized in scattered shots of the often oddly unbothered homeless protestors sitting around with their noses in books resembles a church lock-in more than any kind of citizen uprising. At least, though, they are seen reading. Goodson, despite preaching the gospel of reading throughout, never is, aside from one scene where he recites from “The Grapes of Wrath” by phone to the reporter. And if the scene is lofty, never mind corny, it’s also one of the rare occasions when “The Public” feels infused with the fury ostensibly fueling this protest, and ostensibly fueling the movie too.

(In Advance) Early Sneak Peek of the Star Wars Episode IX Trailer

When One of Your Favorite Writers Whines About Plot Holes

“The Blair Witch Project”, a fictional found footage horror movie in which three teenagers disappear in the Maryland woods when attempting to film a documentary about the supposed eponymous specter, is 20 years old, meaning it has been dutifully covered in the ongoing cavalcade of 1999 Film retrospectives, usually in conjunction with its influence and marketing. (This blog wrote about it 3 years ago.) How The Blair Witch Project changed horror for ever, proclaimed The Guardian. How a Tiny Indie Film Became a Horror Sensation—and Invented Modern Movie Marketing, declared The Ringer. If these arguments are valid, they nevertheless tend to distill “The Blair Witch Project” down to a product rather than a film, disregarding, unintentionally or otherwise, its harrowing, minimalist aesthetic. And if a film is seen first and foremost as a product then arguments for or against are frequently lobbed through that commodified context.

Sigh. This blog loves Charlie Pierce. We are proud, annual fee paying subscribers to Mr. Pierce’s Esquire Politics blog. We tried to subscribe quick enough to get a free Esquire Politics tote bag but, alas, missed the cut. We would, however, have proudly carried that tote bag to the grocery store. Nevertheless, writing off “The Blair Witch Project” as a “scam” makes the movie sound like a piece of manufacturing rather than a work of art for the film de cinema. Lamenting, meanwhile, that the characters do not adhere to the tried & true boy scout tactic of following the river out of the woods is cut from the Reddit school of film analysis, which isn’t really analysis at all, just picking out plot holes, not engaging with the movie but exerting a sense of superiority, the ethos of the Neil DeGrasse Tyson Film Critic Academy.

This is all the more sorrowful because Mr. Pierce is more than capable of acute movie insight. He opened a 2012 piece for Grantland (rip) about Notre Dame football by citing a passage of the 1940 film “Knute Rockne, All American” in which the youthful version of the future Fighting Irish gridiron coach admonishes his father for speaking Norwegian since they were now full-fledged Americans. “Notre Dame,” wrote Pierce, “stood for the education they’d made central to their purchase on a place in their new country.” If the invaluable sports historian Murray Sperber has written about “Knute Rockne, All American” shaping how we view college athletics, akin to How a Tiny Indie Film Became a Horror Sensation—and Invented Modern Movie Marketing, Pierce read the movie’s inherent drama as a reflection of Irish immigrant values.  It’s an astute analysis of the actual film framed through a socio-political context, with which this blog, it probably goes without saying, has no issue.

Still, Pierce’s cogent argument is informed by his satisfaction with seeing the immigrant experience properly portrayed, suggesting a summation of a reality he knows well. And while I might be extrapolating, perhaps that lack of reality is what informs his opinion that the original “Blair Witch” was a scam. After all, Pierce is a former forest ranger. But merely reading the characters’ failure to follow the river out as a pesky plot hole fails to take the moment in the film’s full context. If these characters are pointedly portrayed as dismissive of the Blair Witch legend, indifferent to the area’s history and ignorant of their environs then all these elements rise up to disorient and eventually claim them; this cuts deeper than geography; this is a dark night of the American soul.

It’s Pierce who summarized modern college basketball best when he wrote: “There are, of course, no poets left in basketball. There are only salesmen, some better and more entertaining than others.” That still cuts straight to my heart. And I fear when it comes to “The Blair Witch Project”, like so many focused on its marketing rather than its aesthetics, that Mr. Pierce is only choosing to see the sale, not the poetry.

Cinema Romantico's Official 2020 Cinematic Endorsement Remains Up for Grabs

Last November, after conceding in a closely-fought Texas Senate race against incumbent Ted Cruz, who possibly lies about his favorite movies, former Congressional Representative Beto O’Rourke wrote a letter of thanks to his supporters, opening it by indicating his wife Amy and their kids were watching “Last of the Mohicans” in the other room. Loyal frustrated followers know that “Last of the Mohicans” is this blog’s favorite movie, and because this blog gives its cinematic endorsement to one Presidential candidate each election cycle, and because rumors abounded that O’Rourke might well toss his hat into the 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidate ring, this blog was keen to know if Michael Mann’s 1992 indisputable masterpiece was, in fact, O’Rourke’s favorite movie. Alas, we could but merely speculate.

Beto O'Rourke, whose favorite movie may or may not be The Last of the Mohicans

Since that time O’Rourke has officially entered the (very) early stages of the 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidate race. This has only made the status of his favorite movie more urgent. In discovering O’Rourke’s penchant for standing on countertops some have speculated that his favorite movie is “Dead Poets Society” which is an obvious joke and just not helpful, people. We have emailed Mr. O’Rourke at his official website in the hopes of confirming if “Last of the Mohicans” is his favorite movie but have yet to receive a response. We Tweeted at Mr. O’Rourke but our poor ol’ Tweet is still just sitting out there, wasting space, un-commented upon. As such, the imperative answer to the question O’Rourke’s favorite film remains elusive.

O’Rourke’s love of punk music is frequently cited, which suggests his favorite movie might be Penelope Sheeris’s “The Decline of Western Civilization.” He often cites his favorite book as Homer’s “The Odyssey”, which suggests his favorite movie might be The Coen Brothers’ “O Brother Where Art Thou?” In the Vanity Fair profile accompanying his Presidential bid launch, O’Rourke compared his forthcoming campaign to “every epic movie that you’ve ever seen, from ‘Star Wars’ to ‘The Lord of the Rings.’” Even if both these films are epic, though I’d contend “LOTR” is more epic in terms of being a time-wasting leviathan, what, I ask, is more epic than “Last of the Mohicans”? Nothing, that’s what! “Last of the Mohicans” is the apex of epic! True, it’s my favorite movie and I’m biased. But then, if it really was O’Rourke’s favorite movie, would he not have it included it when describing epic movies? I would think so. Then again, he is, at present, in his platitudinous way, playing the part of a populist, and so perhaps he was merely reciting the hits. Who can say? He can, that’s who.

“Just What Does Beto Believe?” asked Politico in early March. I wonder.

Private Life

Stasis is difficult to capture cinematically. After all, stasis implies a state of inactivity and movies are about drama and drama typically implies a series of events each one requiring, as any ex-student of Robert McKee can tell you, a fundamental change. But in “Private Life”, writer/director Tamara Jenkins, borrowing heavily from her own life, has movingly brought stasis to the big screen, or the little screen, since “Private Life” is a Netflix production. That is not to suggest nothing, as they say, happens; plenty happens. Its principal characters, Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) and Richard (Paul Giamatti), are in the throes of trying to have a baby by any means necessary. Yet if the plot can feel busy, packed with trips to the doctor and burgeoning familial drama when Richard’s niece, Sadie (Kayli Carter), comes to stay on their couch, the preeminent sensation nevertheless remains inertia. Even when prototypical dramatic routes are dangled, Jenkins refuses to follow them, creating a cinematic experience as stasis, showing people stuck in the same routine even as they fail to be present in their own lives, life lived as a tunnel where the light at the end isn’t brightening but dimming even as you inexorably move toward it in spite of yourself.

Jenkins sets the mood by opening with a shot of Rachel stretched out across her bed and seen from behind, placing her derriere on full display. If it suggests the opening image of “Lost In Translation”, any romantic notions are swiftly squashed when we realize she has assumed this position merely so Richard can give her a hormone injection. Indeed, Jenkins is not starting from the beginning but dropping us right into the middle, long after the initial joy of their decision to have a child must have passed leaving only agony and exhaustion, reducing the miracle of childbirth to an endless series of waiting rooms and scientific alternatives to the scientific alternatives that did not already work. The pent-up performances of Hahn and Giamatti only exacerbate this mood, their characters suffering but never getting a handle on what they’re going through, generally coming across checked out on the entire ordeal, as if they are just slogging through what they see as their earthly duty. One extended conversation on a sidewalk finds Richard repeatedly trying to comfort Rachel in an embrace only to have her slap his hands away, over and over, and the smothered hostility is so palpable that I kept thinking the extras on the sidewalk, half-looking as they pass by, might not have been extras at all but unsuspecting passerby in a guerilla operation, underscoring the scene’s stormy meshing of private and public life.

It’s a story that comes to feel as if it can only be resolved by a bomb, and so it is, sort of, when Sadie’s parallel story of leaving college just a semester short of graduating and taking a crack, or thereabouts, at school-free life in New York eventually converges with Rachel and Richard. Her writing dreams are a reflection of her new caretakers, their own lives as artists, or one-time artists in the case of Richard, emblemized in books covering the apartment from floor to ceiling, which almost seems to partly imprison them, suggesting a past life flung aside in the name of so many pregnancy attempts. Rather, however, than Sadie initiating a remembrance of their old lives and reinvigorating their current ones, she furthers their stasis by taking a job at Richard’s artisanal pickle company, which Giamatti invest with nothing more than somber duty, and agreeing to donate an egg to their cause. And though this causes the trio to coalesce into something like their own family, that idea, like all other ones, becomes narratively stuck. If Rachel’s body is put through so much, so eventually is Sadie’s, a physical shattering of youth’s invincibility, her grand gesture falling flat through no fault of her own yet fostering emotional scar tissue you can see in Carter’s initially blithe performance gradually showing cracks of anxiety.

For all the accruing melancholy, Jenkins nevertheless opts for a partly sunny conclusion, allowing space for rays of hope to filter in despite the narrative ellipsis. Then again, “Private Life’s” disinterest in traditional resolution is also what yields an overlong sensation, as if Jenkins is searching for some type of wrap-up, glomming onto different ideas, and just keeps going. In that way, the ending is a proper spirit animal, a sequence alluding to an earlier one, suggesting that the film has come full circle only to then transform that circle into a continuous loop, keeping right on going into the closing credits, suggesting ennui as infinite.

Us

It’s not a spoiler to say the title of the film and though “Us” could very well speak to nothing more than the characters of said film speaking about themselves, well, that overly-conspicuous Jeremiah 11: 11 cardboard sign turns up for a reason, signaling the movie’s double meanings even while giving the less theologically minded something to Google on their phones in the theater lobby afterwards. “Us’s” opening image is of a television set, its dated commercials indicating the time is 1986. But when the ad ends, the screen momentarily goes black, leaving a reflection of Adelaide (Madison Curry). It’s the first time we see her, the mirrored reveal foreshadowing how the impending horror of writer/director Jordan Peele’s film comes in twos. Still, a filmmaker does not open with a vintage Hands Across America TV advertisement and then echo it with hand-holding imagery throughout if he is not cultivating a deeper point. And unlike Hands Across America ultimately being remembered more in the abstract, “Us”, despite overstuffing on symbolic flourishes, is an objective success.

The inciting incident of “Us” takes place at a nighttime carnival on a Santa Cruz pier where Adelaide drifts away from her squabbling parents, off the boardwalk and down to the beach. There, as lightning engulfs the sky, an eerily lit funhouse beckons with its neon slogan “find yourself”, a hoary mantra the ensuing sequence literalizes in a fiendishly clever way. Indeed, when Adelaide wanders inside, subsequently becoming lost in a hall of mirrors, what she finds is not a reflection but a literal double, though the scene cuts away before we fully grasp the true meaning of what we’re seeing, the ensuing film gradually filling in that deliberate ellipsis.

That triggers a cut to the present-day and an SUV bearing adult Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), her husband Gabe (Winston Duke) and their two kids – Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex) – in the backseat, bound for their summer home near that same Santa Cruz beach. Even if this returning-to-the-scene-of-the-scary-experience locale was not explicitly cited, Nyong’o’s closed-off, clammed-up performance evinces the Something in the Air vibe anyway. Not that Peele hurries to unleash mayhem, planting infinite set-ups as the family goes about getting settled, all of which might come across more telegraphed if these scenes were not simultaneously such a convincing, true-to-life evocation of an equally loving and exasperated family unit.

If they are tight, their family friends, Kitty (Elisabeth Moss) and Josh (Tim Heidecker) Tyler and their twin daughters, are more of a Real Housewives of Santa Cruz situation, with Josh casting garrulous judgments about Gabe’s possessions and Kitty, in a deliciously wicked comic performance by Moss, sipping rosé to emotionally ghost on her own life. If you might wonder why they are friends, Peele is more concerned with juxtaposing their respective economic realities, the Tylers insulated and oblivious and reliant on an Alexa soundalike eventually employed to the terrifyingly yet hilarious hilt while Adelaide and Gabe are defined more by the latter’s motorboat, an emblem of pointless striving that wonderfully comes home to roost in both literal and figurative terms.

That happens when a seeming family of four – hands conspicuously linked – threateningly stands in the shadows of Adelaide and Gabe’s driveway and eventually forces its way inside. Once this opposing family emerges from the shadows, we realize they are played by the exact same actors, explicitly illustrating them as doppelgängers, made clearer in one of the movie’s several exposition dumps, Peele honoring genre even if the movie’s narrative nimbleness elsewhere makes you wish for more explanatory ingenuity. Still, the clarification is lent indelible primacy by Nyong’o playing her opposite with a strained voice that sounds as if her throat is constrained by a chain. The opposites’ identical red garb evokes prison uniforms, giving an idea of where they might come from, though when Gabe questions their identity the reply is this: “Americans.” It’s so on-the-nose as to invite laughter, though where “Us” goes, and the color of the characters’ skin, also invites comparisons to W.E.B. Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness, all the rage these days in cinema, where he writes “One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro.”

Not that Peele forgoes thrills for theme. “Us”, even more than his preceding “Get Out”, is pure horror, morphing from a home invasion movie to a blood-splattered chase, equally suspenseful, unsettling and with just the right doses of tension-releasing humor, yielding jumps, gasps and laughs in equal measure, each seed Peele plants sprouting to full effect, none more than a pesky outboard motor. It is a regular horror movie, in other words, and though Peele inundates these scenes with social commentary, he also cleverly seeks to use the normal horror movie watching experience, in which we are compelled to root for the protagonist, against us, waiting to spring his final narrative trap.

It’s an incredible emotional rewiring that forces you not so much to rethink every preceding story detail but how each one made you feel, as if uncovering a betrayal of your instincts, a sensation that coursed through my body in the climactic moment involving Adelaide and her double where Nyong’o’s incredible guttural exertions occupies the unhappy medium between exorcism and possession. If this sudden mental backtracking, however, initially seems at paradoxical odds with the implied meaning of the worldwide stakes peripherally raised throughout, the emergent unsettling brilliance is how the movie has been running on a parallel track all along, not just flipping your perspective but tying your sympathy up in knots. As the chasm between America’s haves and have nots keeps widening, Peele ingeniously brings that divide to life through his deepening twists, a tale of simple survival curdling into a fight to stay on top.

My 10 Favorite Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Songs

The series finale of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” airs tonight at 7 PM CST (8 PM eastern) on The CW Network. You probably will not notice. Most of America will not notice. After all, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” has consistently been one of the lowest rated shows on all of television. Last season it ranked second-to-last (206 out of 207) in total number of viewers. And yet, The CW, bless its heart, refused to cancel the show. It is possible, granted, that creators and executive producers Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna were given an ultimatum of one more season only or else, but the network’s committing to four years from nothing more than critical acclaim and creative success remains an impressive win where data sets typically trump art. I mention it because I rarely watch TV shows beginning to end. I have too many movies to watch and only time for a precious few small screen ventures. If your show ain’t doing it, I’m gone. And though I came to “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” midway through the first season – at the behest of My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife – rather than right at the start, I have been with it ever since.

If the title suggests a show as unfortunate cultural cliché that is only because Bloom and Brosh McKenna have spent the entire show turning that cultural cliché inside-out, deconstructing the expression Crazy Ex-Girlfriend through the mental and emotional trials and tribulations of its main character Rebecca Bunch (Bloom), who has come to West Covina, California in search of her ex-boyfriend Josh (Vincent Rodriguez III), by examining how such expressions emerge from our warped perceptions and then warp our perceptions further still. And if in turning that cultural cliché inside out Bloom and Brosh McKenna have utilized myriad narrative truisms that is only because they have spent the entire show dissecting, skewering and transfiguring those truisms into actual truth, rewiring gods of machine into inner demons. If the storytelling is both satirical and sincere, elaborate and deft, the kind of duality I significantly value in art, it is also prominently both a dramedy and a musical.

Indeed, each show includes two musical numbers, drawing from a vast array of genres and styles, arriving, like any good musical theatre, not to accentuate certain moments but literally be emotional apexes, or nadirs, or points in-between. Such songs are not easy to pull off on a tightly budgeted show of this scale, which merely makes it an extra impressive achievement worth celebrating. And celebrating, I think, is an order. If the time seems right for a What’s It All Mean? piece, well, I’m not sure I could tell you What It All Meant until the show actually concludes and I’ve had proper time to ruminate. No, today, on the verge of this sensational show’s culmination, I would merely like to raise a glass to Rachel Bloom, genius, and all parties involved, and give a toast to my ten favorite “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” songs.


10. Santa Ana Winds. My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, in talking through this post with me, noted that probably no one liked this song as much as me, which is not me tooting my own horn so much as conveying straight away this is no definitive list, merely the designations of one idiosyncratic mind. After all, “Santa Ana Winds” does not tend to crack the Top 50 of various “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” song power rankings you can find all over the interwebs, never mind the Top 10, but as theme song to an episode in which the titular weather phenomenon makes everyone in West Covina get a little loopier than usual, it fits right into my sweet spot. Sonically, yes, between the Frank Valli-esque frontman (Eric Michael Roy) and especially that aces Phil Spector backbeat but also in how the song is recurring rather than one-off, with the singing narrator repeatedly popping up, his entrances growing more cuckoo. If to some this bit might get old, that’s why I love it, like the NBC version of David Letterman going back, again and again, to a gag that keeps bombing. Given the unwelcome insistence of “those damn devil winds”, it feels just right.

9. The Math of Love Triangles. As Season 2 began, Rebecca found herself with feelings for not just genesis-of-the-show Josh but malcontent Greg (Santino Fontana) too, not that either of them were sending similar signals back as her astute, eternally frustrated therapist Dr. Akopian (Michael Hyatt) notes. It is a deliberate refusal to the read the room of her life summarized in “The Math of Love Triangles”, a “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” spoof in which Bloom re-purposes Marilyn Monroe classic who-me? naivety. A chorus of dapper mathematicians answer her queries about love triangles in extremely literal terms, information she gleefully ignores, preferring to draw her own incorrect conclusions, rolling with the story she has already mentally penned and driving these erudite dudes comically batty.


8. Tell Me I’m Okay (Patrick). At the end of Season 2, when all of Rebecca’s self-imposed strain has her teetering on the edge, figuratively and eventually literally, she seeks validation of her increasingly off-the-rails life decisions from an unsuspecting UPS Deliveryman (Seth Green) who shows up at her door, imploring him, as the title suggests, to just tell her she’s okay. She makes this plea through the song where the setting suddenly changes from her front door to a stage with a fake skyline as backdrop and a piano at which the Deliveryman sits, still in his uniform while Rebecca is now decked out in a dress and pearls, a regular person suddenly pulled into this woman’s fantasy, Green’s bewildered “wait, what?” expressions emblemizing the inherent terror of being inside Rebecca’s over-active imagination. And though his eventual sprawling out on the piano illustrates a kind of amusing empathy, the song also ends with Rebecca’s fantasy wilting away; he doesn’t tell her she’s okay.

7. Settle For Me. Though a spot-on elemental homage to Astaire & Rogers, with the monochrome and mid-song tap breakdown recounted in a full shot rather than disguised cuts and close-ups, “Settle For Me” just as ingeniously sends up the iconic dance duo’s familiar romantic push and pull. Though in every Astaire & Rogers movie their characters are clearly meant to be, she nevertheless resists, until her heart can no longer deny what is obviously real and their true love explodes in dance. “Settle For Me”, on the other hand, as the title suggests, is Astaire and Rogers’ emotional opposite with Rebecca not so much resisting and then admitting what is true as refusing to get dragged down to Greg’s glum level and then shrugging and getting tugged into the muck anyway, turning the climactic dance into less an expression of unbridled joy than show-defining deluded dysfunction.


6. Who’s the New Guy? When, late in Season 2, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” went the way of so many shows before it and introduced a new character in the form of water polo playing bastion of white male privilege Nathaniel Plimpton III (Scott Michael Foster) to complicate Rebecca’s love life, it was only inevitable that a show so meta would address this ancient TV narrative maneuver. And though it did by turning a boring old office into a Broadway stage through a chorus number with simple yet hysterical choreography, “Who’s the New Guy?”, true to the show’s overriding spirit, also worked on its own terms, a comic ditty of employment anxiety to which any post-2008 white collar peon can totally relate.

 5. Don’t Be A Lawyer. It was admirable how much Bloom emphasized her supporting cast as the show went along and primo evidence was this last-season song in which hapless attorney Jim (Burl Moseley) is afforded the spotlight. Though “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” honored hip-hop frequently and righteously, particularly in Season 1’s “JAP Battle” (that’s, Jewish American Princess) between Rebecca and nemesis Audra Levine, I was most enamored with this ode to New Jack Swing, complete with appropriately boxy suits that could have come straight off the Guy album cover and utterly committed backup dancers, in which Jim makes like legend Teddy Riley in evincing the stressful perils of the eponymous profession. The bleak comedy is firmly in my wheelhouse, epitomized in both the closing shot, where you really need to pay attention to the woman’s face in the bottom left-hand corner, and perhaps my favorite “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” song couplet: “It’d be great to be on the Supreme Court / But you’ll never be on the Supreme Court.” Those lines are a simple yet diabolical evisceration of every You Can Do Anything You Set Your Mind To motivational poster ever.


4. Friendtopia. One of my favorite developments during the show’s run was how Rebecca and Valencia (Gabrielle Ruiz) transformed from enemies to friends, subverting the trope of fighting over a man into a statement on girl power. In doing so, this truly allowed Heather (Vella Lovell), FCOS (favorite character on the show), into the mix, at first merely a more psychologically astute vocal-fried Waldorf & Statler before growing into herself too without betraying her flippant attitude. If there were ever a “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” movie – and to set the record straight, I don’t there should be – I’d like to dream of it as a sort of “Spiceworld” fronted by these three (and the invaluable Donna Lynne Champlin’s Paula), which is why I flipped my lid when this trio chose to tell the world about becoming besties through the framework of a Spice Girls anthem with an agreeably dyspeptic streak toward the world they have banded against through their alliance. “We’re going to braid each other’s hair / Then cut each other’s braids / Connect the braids to build a rope / To hang all of Congress.”

3. Gettin’ Bi. In the moment Rebecca’s quirky one-eighth Chippewa boss Darryl Whitefeather (Pete Gardner) came out as bisexual by song I thought about that dreadful moment in “Almost Famous” when Stillwater’s drummer came out as gay in one of those false, humorless bits where, only at the point of dying, does he admit it, and grudgingly, like he hates himself. Darryl doesn’t hate himself. In a show where characters frequently struggle with confusion, indecision and insecurities, “Gettin’ Bi” isn’t Daryl asking a question – “Am I bi?” – but jubilantly declaring that he absolutely is, which makes “Gettin’ Bi’s” Huey Lewis homage so appropriate since his and The News’s only objective was to make you feel good. And if the irked reaction of Daryl’s coworkers seems at odds with the moment, well, that’s probably only because they don’t care that he’s bisexual, ok, it’s perfectly fine, whatever, they just wonder why he has to shove his bisexuality in their face.

2. End of the Movie. If “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” has a thesis, it is probably this song, concluding an episode in which Rebecca commits her most egregious act of self-destruction during the show’s entire run. Reality, the song explains, “doesn’t make narrative sense”, which speaks not only to Rebecca’s ongoing predicament but to the Bloom and Brosh McKenna’s penchant for spotlighting and then twisting narrative banalities, a single lyric explaining “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s” overriding point. What’s more, the song belongs not so much to Rebecca but to Josh Groban, his cameo functioning in the moment as the voice in Rebecca’s head, which is why his capping joke, repeated twice, is not only perversely hilarious but self-flagellation, as true an evocation as you’ll ever find of laughing ‘til you cry.

1. Let’s Generalize About Men. Ours is a time of endless anxiety and anger, both self-made and from outside, where one is essentially forced to, now and again, go crazy to keep from losing it, especially, I suspect, if you are a woman in an age where you are told (generally by old, angry white men) that all things are equal now even as evidence continually emerges to suggest that, no, all things are absolutely not equal now. That’s what makes “Let’s Generalize About Men”, which comes on like the lost great Bonnie Tyler track (she could have squeezed it in between “Take Me Back” and “Straight from the Heart” on “Faster Than the Speed of Night”, rounding it off to even 10 tracks), an anthem of empowerment by way of pent-up aggression, the opening lines intentionally determined to peeve the same men born to complain about female empowerment anthems. Yet if the song honors the fury of Rebecca, Paula, Valencia, and Heather as both necessary and righteous, it simultaneously uppercuts their fury at every turn, a comical tangle of lyrics that the quintet of superb singing actors sell with extravagant gusto, so furious they never see the forest for the trees even if the song cleverly allows us to see it, the disconnect coming through with the capper, so hilarious and so churlish you stop laughing because your jaw – still frozen in a smile – falls wide open. This is the “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” song I’d take to a desert island.

What Movie Robots Could Become Baseball Umpires?

On Monday’s episode of the Slate Hang Up & Listen sports podcast, co-host Stefan Fatsis, in discussing the just-started Major League Baseball season, asked guest Ben Lindbergh about the professional, independent Atlantic League’s MLB-funded rule tinkering for the 2019 season. This apparently includes robot umpires, which no doubt is less absurd than it sounds, but nevertheless yielded some comical back & forth about what inherent baseball paradoxes could potentially cause these officiating robots to go haywire, never mind the thought of ex-Baltimore Orioles manager, the late Earl Weaver, hauling himself out of the dugout to go scream at a machine about some horse’s ass of a call.

If we’re making a comedy, where John C. Reilly is the anti-science manager of the Norfolk Tides, then you’d have to draft the “Short Circuit” robot, I suppose, or WALL-E, though Disney would never give up the rights without paying Mike Trout kinda cash. It’s comical to imagine hapless C-3PO getting inadvertently plunked by Rick Vaughn and reacting like Han Solo just threatened to leave him on Hoth. I liked Fatsis’s suggestion of Woody Allen’s robot from “Sleeper”, which isn’t really a robot at all but Allen’s character pretending to be a robot. That would be comedy gold! A real person pretending to be a robot umpire! It’s like Frank Drebin as Enrico Palazzo as a Robot! Imagine John C. Reilly yelling at him!

If we’re making a cautionary tale then HAL 9000’s gotta be the guy, foolproof and incapable of error, going off script during the World Series and seizing control of the game. Then again, you could go the other way and have RoboCop installed as the Robot Umpire, less about getting balls and strikes correct and more about cleaning up a game that takes too long and is rife with PEDs, leading to him laying down the law against greedy owners who fleece taxpayers for new stadiums they don’t actually need. “Make ‘em robots,” guest co-host Mike Pesca said of the umpires, “but don’t tell the players”, an idea suggesting “The Stepford Wives”, where only after the crucial, controversial out of the World Series does the incensed son of Willie Mays Hayes takes his bat to the umpire and discover the truth, or an “Alien”-like behind-the-plate Synthetic revealing sinister motivations at the wrong time.

If we’re making a more action-oriented product then you could have a manager, on the hot seat and on the wrong end of too many robot calls, creating his own automated umpire which inevitably unleashes inadvertent but very destructive chaos, sort of a “Mechagodzilla vs. Robot Umpire.” You could also put the T-1000 behind home plate, eliminating any player and/or manager who dared argue his calls, accruing so much evil power that true baseball believers call up the T-800 umpiring the minor leagues to try and save the day.

If we’re making a heartwarming, “Angels in the Outfield”-ish story perhaps The Iron Giant could begin umpiring in some Independent League though the conservative MLB Commissioner seeks to eradicate him, explaining “robots are no match for human aptitude.” Yet despite the MLB’s attempts to destroy the robot umpiring Iron Giant, he saves the day by stepping in front of a Sidd Finch-level fastball to rescue our youthful co-protagonist. Or, of course, Gort of “The Day The Earth Stood Still” could show up with a humanoid explaining that Gort is the answer to human umpiring’s inexactitude.  When the Commissioner and owners, however, tell the humanoid to buzz off, the humanoid goes undercover as a duplicitous, backstabbing owner to work his way into the game to convince the other owners and the Commissioner to let Gort in. And as umpiring only gets worse and worse, the World Series decided by a series of unspeakable umpiring gaffes causing the public to turn against the game, it becomes clear that if baseball continues on its present course, the sport will die.

In the end, though, I most like the idea of our Robot Umpires being rendered as “Blade Runner” Replicants. Are the umpires real people or are they merely eerily human-like? Is that bad call we all remember from Game 7 of the 1984 World Series real, or is it just a figment of our imagination? And, of course, the Blade Runner tasked with ferreting out these replicants comes to wonder if he too is a Replicant, leading us all to wonder if, in the end, fans and umpires are not really so different.

The Winner (Loser) of Cinema Romantico's Pop Culture Bracket Is...

Today is April 3rd, which means March has concluded, and because it was just March, a month dominated by March Madness™ wherein college basketball teams are slotted into a big bracket and made to square off until a champion emerges at month’s end, every content farm on the Internet was stricken with the need to create its own kind of bracket, usually pop culture related, and usually while stipulating that they, like, totally wouldn’t be doing a bracket, man, if culture did not, you know, demand it. What’s even more, this is 2019, meaning 1999 was twenty years ago. And because 1999 is often cited as a seminal one for the movies that means just three months into this year we have already been inundated with reminiscences from the turn of the century, like a New York Times oral history of “10 Things I Hate About You” (2019 pop culture bracket winner for ‘best’ 1999 Movie Pickup Line: “I’m thinking of getting a Tercel. That’s a Toyota.”) or “Fight Club”-centric excerpts from a book about “How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen” (2019 pop culture bracket winner for Most Told 1999 Movie Lie: “I knew Tyler Durden wasn’t real all along”, a slight upset over “I knew Bruce Willis was dead in ‘The Sixth Sense’ all along”).

It might have appeared that Cinema Romantico was abstaining from bracket madness but, I assure you, we were not. After all, 1999 marked my last year working as a multiplex movie theater manager, sometimes, as would have been normal procedure in those halcyon pre-Y2K days, putting movies together reel by reel and then screening them to ensure I correctly spliced those reels. If this sometimes yielded movie-watching joy, like a particular ebullient screening with other managers and a few select employees of “Go” or just me and my managerial pal Dan screening “Deep Blue Sea” and openly rooting for LL Cool J to survive ‘til the end, it just as frequently found me all alone in an otherwise empty auditorium at 1:30 in the morning praying for some godforsaken screening of something-or-other to end. And it was those movies, the godforsaken something-or-others, that not only got me to thinking but slotting 1999 movies I watched by myself at midnight into an imaginary bracket within my mind that then played itself out over March.

Others have been ruminating on how “The Matrix” foreshadowed our future; I have been thinking about Robin Wright finding Kevin Costner’s “Message in a Bottle.” Others have been arguing for Sarah Michelle Gellar helping to spark the rom com’s demise with “Cruel Intentions”; I have been reminiscing about Sarah Michelle Gellar being “Simply Irresistible.” Others have been drifting in the warm, wonderful, masterpiece-y waters of “The Insider”; I have been sinking in “The Deep End of the Ocean.” In the end, though, the bracket broke much like I suspected it would, leading to a wholly unmemorable yet utterly epic clash this past weekend between two titanic, totally forgettable 1999 movies for the championship of nostalgic blah.

vs.

Honestly, “The Mod Squad”, which reminds us how nostalgia moves in 20 year cycles, was so unmemorable I hardly remember it, aside from the insipid, nigh insulting (to her!) scene of Claire Danes having to cry in the closet when she discovers her significant other is (ye gods) the bad guy. Gross. I remember more about “Blast From the Past”, like the way Christopher Walken says “I was examining this rear hatchway” toward the beginning, referring to the hatchway of his bunker he has erected in his 1960s home due to Cold War fear, a line reading that made me laugh. That it made me laugh, should, I suppose, be points in its favor. Nothing made me laugh about “The Mod Squad” and, to reiterate, honestly, after straining my brain, I still can’t remember anything about it other than the crying in the closet.

No, what I remember about “The Mod Squad” is less the movie itself than a general viewing air of indifferent but resigned ick, like a man who must eat dinner in a regional airport with no dining options but Pizza Hut, force-feeding himself doughy crust and freezer-burned pepperoni. That’s pretty awful. Still, “Blast From the Past” was nevertheless more tragic, coming a few years after Alicia Silverstone gave one of the best performances of the 90s in “Clueless”, which seemed to portend a glittering movie star future. But if Brendan Fraser was at least committed to his fish out of water “Blast From the Past” bit, Silverstone appeared adrift, playing even the moments when she was supposed to be falling in love with the same surly air, like she couldn’t or wouldn’t commit to the material. Taken in conjunction with her mixed 1997 – an awkward Batgirl and the shoddy “Excess Baggage” – I remember watching “Blast From the Past” and thinking the Silverstone Comet was fading from the sky. Perhaps if I’d been in the company of others the experience might have been tolerable, all of us cracking jokes to endure what we were going through. In the company of one, alas, all I could think about was the fickle nature of stardom, how swiftly it blooms and then wilts if not properly tended, metamorphosing from leading roles to Whatever Happened To…?

After the movie ended, I locked up the theater, climbed into my car in the deep dark of some cold, unremembered Februrary night and drove home in silence.

Widows

“Widows” opens by cutting back and forth between the tranquil intimacy of Veronica (Viola Davis) and Harry (Liam Neeson) Rawlins in a bright white Chicago high rise and the cacophony of a violent nighttime robbery masterminded by Harry gone wrong. The elliptical editing generates tension, no doubt, but also deliberately obfuscates who’s and what’s what. That’s because director Steve McQueen gradually pulls back, bit by bit, to reveal the narrative’s full tapestry, suggested in scenes where medium shots and close-ups eventually give way to long shots, allowing us to see the space inhabited by the characters. As such, “Widows” becomes a heist thriller fused with a political drama, a generally successful hybrid that still struggles, with often potent commentary occasionally drifting toward incomplete button-pushing polarization. The political power struggle, meanwhile, reveals itself more about the powerless struggling just below it, where a palpable cynicism creeps in even as the eponymous widows find self-preservation by getting theirs, as if the only solution to the Chicago Machine isn’t shutting it down but momentarily sticking a broom in the gears.

When Harry dies in the opening getaway along with his crew, Veronica receives a visit from the man Harry ripped off, Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry), running for alderman of the 18th ward, demanding compensation or else. The only way to pay, she realizes, is by making like her late husband and pulling a score of her own, enlisting the crew’s other widows, Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) and Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), in her cause. Working with writer Gillian Flynn, McQueen presents just enough of a window into each woman’s world to unearth motivation, from the ice cold shoulder Linda receives from her mother-in-law to Alice’s manipulation at the hands of her mother, urging her daughter to continue leaning on men, a cycle that Alice indulges and then breaks, and which Debicki brings home in a performance that becomes, truly, the film’s single most joyful thing. And though Belle (Cynthia Ervio) does not get as much screen time, a few concise scenes conveying the heavy burden she carries to make ends meet renders her sudden role as getaway driver believable, as does Ervio’s formidable staredown of Davis.

If Manning is the impetus of the heist its target becomes Manning’s Alderman opponent, Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell), son of prominent old coot (Robert Duvall) who is mainly on hand to spout racist, sexist bile, though Duvall’s absent-minded delivery manages to elevate the character anyway, making him seem like he is lost in the fog of that bile, determined to keep his family name on top of the neighborhood’s proverbial marquee, the Chicago Machine in action. Both candidates, in other words, are corrupt, a harsh if predictable assessment of the city’s politics. What’s more interesting, if cynical, is how little value “Widows” sees in grassroots activism.

Manning is introduced in the ironic locale of a church campaign headquarters, conspiring with his enforcer brother Jatemme (Daniel Kaluuya, chilly if too enamored with his own chill). Eventually McQueen cuts to a long shot where we see the two men through a gaggle of empty chairs and tables with various supplies strewn about, suggesting the nefariousness that takes place after campaign workers have gone home, depicting their beliefs and hard work as inconsequential. Jack’s later speech to a conspicuously small crowd in his ward about minority women owned work (MWOW) deliberately comes across like lip service, underlined in his limousine ride home where the city streets morph from rundown to stately and secure as he rants about his constituents from behind tinted windows, the unbroken shot unequivocally illustrating distance and proximity between the electorate and the elected. No, in McQueen and Flynn’s telling, MWOW stands for hitting back at the system directly, Robin Hood style, an idea which “Widows” teases out until the very end, providing set-up that you wish was a little more filled in.

What it doesn’t set up so much is the heist, giving us an overview of the Widows’ forthcoming invasion of Jack’s home but leaving out many of the intricate details, effectively elevating the suspense as the robbery plays out since we don’t know precisely what’s coming any more than they do. At the same time, however, McQueen conveniently lines up a few ducks right in a row to get waxed, an inadvertent but righteous cleansing, perhaps, but also a betrayal of moral ambiguity. That betrayal is just as present in the movie’s most noxious scene, a brief flashback in which the black son of Veronica and Harry is shot and killed by a cop at a traffic stop, so quickly sketched that it plays as mere provocation.

What makes it more egregious is that Davis convinces us of that grief all on her own, occupying an emotional space between hurt and dignity throughout the movie, a moving evocation of what it takes to stand up on your own after being knocked down, albeit by slightly untraditional means. And even if the movie skews politically cynical, there is something about the smile that Davis has Veronica muster at the conclusion that doesn’t feel artificial but earned, as if corruption’s only antidote is the wherewithal to find faith in people.

The Standoff at Sparrow Creek

The inciting incident in “Standoff at Sparrow Creek” is a mass shooting at a police funeral, never seen, only heard eerily from a distance. Yet the eponymous standoff does not involve the police and the shooter but the all-male members of a northern Michigan militia group who convene in their warehouse headquarters immediately after this shooting happens. Though the door is secured with a code panel which only they know, one of their AR-15 rifles and a Kevlar vest have gone missing, suggesting one of their own did it. But who? Ah, that’s the question, one rendering “Standoff at Sparrow Creek” as something akin to Agatha Christie with a white nationalist bent. And while budget limitations likely forced writer/director Henry Dunham to employ this one-location set-up, he does an exemplary job of weaving that limited locale into the narrative’s already conspicuous topicality. Alas, he can’t cover for his limitations the entire time, and the conclusion, where more visual ingenuity might have done to truly add an exclamation point, falls back on Private Investigator Martin Arbogast-ish clarification.

As soon as it becomes clear what they’re up against, with police no doubt scouring the countryside for all known militia, Ford (Chris Mulkey), the group’s terse leader, tasks Gannon (James Badge Dale), an ex-police interrogator, with ferreting out which member carried out the shooting since none will confess, setting up a series of questions and answers uncovering backstory and elucidating theme. This becomes the best trick that Dunham pulls even if the character details too frequently feel wanting, like Keating (Robert Aramayo) the mute who eventually won’t shut up carrying a copy of “The Catcher and the Rye”, which seems so quirkily off the shelf I kept waiting for Dunham to send it up. Still, without spoiling an early twist, reasons are given for Gannon to possibly have his own motivations, and Dale keeps us guessing in a slow-burning performance that feels like it’s hiding something. Near the end when his character gets a big confessional, I half-thought, and still do, he might have been making the whole thing up.

Nearly the entire film is cloaked in shadows, a means, perhaps, to obscure the similarity of the warehouse location, even when switching rooms, but also a figurative means to demonstrate how the characters are being kept in the dark about the apparently escalating white nationalist uprising in the outside world. If they are kept in the dark, however, so are we, rarely omniscient so that we are always guessing at least a little, even regards to an early twist I will refrain from revealing that shades Gannon’s cross-examining motivations. At the same time, alas, these deliberately darkened rooms limit our glimpses of this militiamen world. We never quite get to know principally why they exist and what their aims are, leaving you to wonder why all these rather disloyal militiamen are friends in the first place. The film being swathed in darkness only reinforces these blank spots, making the warehouse feel more like a stage and the rifles and water jugs like props.

Then again, this palpable antipathy for one another and ersatz aesthetic also aids the point to which Dunham builds. The interrogations that Gannon conducts blur the line between confessions and coercions, and each character monologue these interrogations eventually render blurs the line between reality and mere deep-seated desires. And if the concluding twist feels as much like button-pushing as a re-leveling of the playing field, likely to stoke America’s of the moment divide, it also intrinsically suggests the war each of them professes to be fighting only exists in their heads.