State of the Union

Recently on the blog I name-checked Sheryl Crow’s 25-year old “Leaving Las Vegas” as a personal favorite. That’s because if I almost exclusively listened to rap in the early 90s, Crow’s tune, which strongly appealed to me for reasons I could never quite express then, and still sort of struggle to now, was a gateway to the glorious avenues of so many singer-songwriters I hold near and dear – Ani D. to Lucinda to Neko and on and on – and a line back to Bruce Springsteen, who I’d listened to in the 80s, of course, but not with similar intensity. And while I heard “Leaving Las Vegas” live – in person, on TV, and through various recordings – it never matched that original version, the ragged production and Sheryl’s voice, which really sounded like she’d been “dealing blackjack ‘til one or two” before she laid down the vocal track.

The master recording of “Leaving Las Vegas” perished in the 2008 Universal fire, along with countless other recordings, a terrible event which only came to light earlier this month through Jody Rosen’s stellar reporting for The New York Times. If so much lost was more culturally significant, the revelation of “Leaving Las Vegas” being gone was nevertheless the one that took my breath away and truly gutted me, like seeing Notre-Dame burn. “The metaphors we use to describe this mass of digitized sound,” writes Rosen, “bespeak our almost mystical sense that recorded music has dematerialized and slipped the bonds of earth.” But that’s not true, as Rosen painstakingly, beautifully details, writing “It enters the realms of aesthetics and phenomenology. Simply put, the master of a recording is that recording; it is the thing itself.” He continues: “It holds the ineffable essence that can only truly be apprehended when you encounter a work of art up-close and unmediated, or as up-close and unmediated as the peculiar medium of recorded sound permits.”

A recording, not a digital file, prevents it from becoming ephemeral. And it makes me think of Buddy Guy in David Remnick’s recent New Yorker profile of the legendary bluesman talking about playing the blues on top of Louisiana levees, the wind carrying the sound, and how a recording, just like Monet with an easel and an outdoor scene, could bottle up a moment like that and make it live forever.

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Fourths of July, unlike humankind, are not created equal. If some are filled with joy, this year’s make me want to take cover. And if Independence Day, as the moniker suggests, is about celebrating our declaring independence from Britain, it is also about celebrating what American declared itself to be, and what it strives to be still, falling short just as often as succeeding. America is an idea, and that idea takes root in America as a place, and that place is comprised of people, for whom the government is intended to work, not to prop up a Cult of Personality using people as props to help put a metaphorical bolt on the door to the place and to turn the idea into one of fear and hatred, which seems antithetical to home of the brave, though bravery these days, it seems, is tantamount to nothing more than threatening obliteration via Twitter. In current hands America has become less a promissory note than a patriotically correct brand, a corporation that has merged with The T*ump Organization, willing to strip everything beautiful about it and sell it for parts, where climate change is both a hindrance to this corporation and a reason for it to ramp up production.

I have no doubt T*ump would not care one lick about the Universal fire, if he even knows about it at all, since every breath he draws is further evidence of his philistinism, where artists matter only to him if they have kissed the ring, dismissed as overrated or phony if they haven’t. But the Universal fire is maddening, saddening evidence of the precarious nature of everything, and evidence of how much we stand to lose – nay, of it potentially already being lost – without even knowing it, those rallying cries of how we’ve survived worse than this looking more circumspect with each passing day, like we are in the part of the movie that is the flashback to how the really bad thing at the beginning of the movie came to pass.

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Earlier this month I attended my friend Jaime’s Walt Whitman bicentennial birthday party. It was a lovely afternoon along the shore of Lake Michigan, spent in the company of good friends, appreciating, discussing, considering art. I’ve only read a little Whitman, and can’t confess to knowing that much about him, so I was content to mostly sit back and listen, and I was moved by Jaime talking about how, despite the current state of things, where lamenting what America has become, and what it might never have been at all despite our fanciful foundational ideas, the prevailing mood du jour for so many, she was inclined to celebrate the good she still saw in our ostensibly United States.

In the run-up to this soiree for Uncle Walt’s 200th, she asked all the attendees to name the American artist for whom they had the most affinity. I answered Bruce Springsteen, who got me to read Whitman in the first place. And as people that afternoon talked about how Whitman very consciously positioned himself as the bard of America, I thought about how Springsteen sometimes gets that label now, which is why politicians from Both Sides Of The Aisle™ are always playing “Born in the U.S.A.” at campaign rallies. Of course, as even Bruce agnostics should be able to advise by now, that song’s lyrics are less than jingoistic, an honest reckoning with America’s past, just as the sonic short stories on the undervalued “Ghost of Tom Joad” still function, 20 years on, as a reckoning with America’s present. And if Springsteen frequently puts our no holds barred optimism under the microscope, he has not given up on the people, the place, the idea, evinced by his own explanation of how he writes lyrics: “The verses are the blues, the lyrics are the gospel.”

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His “Living Proof” has become the nearest and dearest Springsteen song to my heart in the last decade. Not the album version, mind you, but the one he recorded for “Plugged”, his alteration for the MTV Unplugged series, recorded with his nameless post-E Street backing band that might not have rocked as hard but had a sonic expansiveness on this track equal to any great E Street recording. And it’s funny: earlier this year, the Springsteen camp, as it often does, released a concert recording from that same post E Street tour where “Living Proof” sounds slightly different, less filled out, a more stuttering bass line, and an absence, at least as I could hear on the mix, of the concluding synthesizer. That sprung to mind when I read about the Universal fire. Because listening to that other version, I kept missing the little nuances that make the “Plugged” recording so astonishing, Shane Fontayne’s litany of delightful guitar fills that provide the song personality it lacked on the “Lucky Town” record, Zack Alford’s echoing, insistent snare drum evoking a really worked-up preacher’s refrain of “Amen”, Roy Bittan’s synth at the end bringing to life the cleansing “rain pouring down on our roof”, and the rumbling groove of bassist Tommy Sims, so unlike anything else in the Springsteen canon, especially the notes he uncorks after the first stanza of the last verse which sounds, dammit, like this whole heavenly, “To the Wonder”-ish firmament opening up around Bruce’s jubilant words, such a majestic sound I want to go check on the master right now because it needs to last forever.

Cinema Romantico’s taking a vacation starting today and through next week to spend 4th of July week under the cover of analog, as best we can, away from the social media scrum and terrible tumult of a clown who only ran for President, it’s become clear, to make himself the center of attention all the time, all 327 million of us be damned. I’d rather spend the week with the person I love, tuned into the things that truly make this country great, celebrating Bruce Springsteen’s America, the one where, as the citation on his Presidential Medal of Freedom stated, everyone has a place, one gloriously stretching out beneath the sky of that Tommy Sims bass line.

Some Drivel On...Men in Black

As summer movies have trended bigger (and longer), the larger the narrative stakes of these tentpoles have grown. Yet if the fate of the whole world frequently hangs in the balance, the movies themselves rarely feel like it, which Alexander Huls noted for The New York Times all the way back in 2014, writing that Hollywood had succeeded in killing death. By formulaically presenting death and then offering such easy resurrection afterwards, Huls noted, and which the recent “Avengers: Endgame” took to its (il)logical extreme, death is rendered meaningless, insignificant next to the power of a sequel. This occurred to me in the wake of “Men in Black International”, the fourth film in a series dating back to 1997 about the eponymous group of government operatives tasked with policing earthly alien activity, which I did not see but whose opening weekend haul of $28 million was, in the parlance of box office, considered “muted” which meant it “bombed.”

The original blockbuster “Men in Black” was prevented from earning 1997’s top box office spot only by the strength of then all-time box office champ “Titanic.” And if fans loved the first MIB, so did (ye gods!) The Critics, mostly. Owen Gleiberman, writing for EW, only gave Barry Sonnenfeld’s film a C+, writing “after a while the nonstop blitheness begins to make everything seem strangely inconsequential.” Later he writes: “‘Men in Black’ celebrates the triumph of attitude over everything else — plausibility, passion, any sense that what we’re watching actually matters.” Thing is, Owen’s not wrong; I just view his analysis as a positive, not a negative. Other critics felt the same way. “A lot of big-budget special-effects films are a hair this side of self-parody and don’t know it,” the late great Roger Ebert wrote. “‘Men in Black’ knows it and glories in it.” By turning everything into a joke, as Gleiberman notes, Sonnenfeld cracked the code that modern day blockbusters are content to ignore, both dialing the stakes all the way up even as he cools them all the way off, emblemized in the scene at MIB headquarters when Earth’s destruction is threatened by an alien race and we hear Will Smith, off screen, remark “That’s bullshit.”

That pithy line reading by Smith counts for a lot. If modern day blockbusters evince any joy, it is typically from their twinkly performances, like Robert Downey Jr. self-knowingly vamping through the “Avengers” films, or Johnny Depp stealing the original “Pirates of the Caribbean” right out from under its elephantine plot and special effects. The latter is instructive. “Men in Black” did not hide its commercial ambition with an obvious Ray-Ban tie-in just as “Pirates of the Caribbean” was literally based on a Disney theme park ride. But Smith, as his character, Agent J says, really did make those Ray-Bans look good, transcending the tie-in. Indeed, “Men in Black’s” most famous recurring joke is how its agents flash a so-called neuralyzer in the eyes of any human who has inadvertently encountered an E.T. to wipe that person’s memory, the agents’ Ray-Bans preventing their own mind-erasure, never more memorably than when Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones), MIB partner and mentor of Smith’s J, keeps wiping the memory of medical examiner Laurel Weaver (Linda Fiorentino) , at one point so suddenly that J barely gets his specs back on, a swift bit of physical comedy Smith plays to the hilt.

I worked as a movie theater concessionist during the summer of 1997 and I would time my breaks to watch this scene over and over to just delight in the comic rhythms of Smith and Fiorentino. Those rhythms, in fact, are more the point than the narratively-important alien autopsy she is half-unknowingly performing, rendering this whole sequence not as, say, sci-fi screwball but just plain old screwball, with Smith’s character masquerading as a doctor, resulting in hysterical verbal misdirection and even a flicker of attraction between the fake doctor and the real one. Writing for Salon at the time, Charles Taylor notes the “flirtation between Smith and Fiorentino looks as if it’s going somewhere after she tells him he has beautiful eyes, but it gets left by the wayside.” This might simply stem from Smith’s too-frequent Tom Cruise-ish cinematic sexlessness, or it might stem from something deeper and more disturbing, as Taylor suggests, noting the actors’ opposing skin colors. Either way, it’s one of the films few missed opportunities.

Then again, the real relationship here is between Smith and Jones, the latter’s patented unamused stoicism playing perfectly off the former’s nigh manic energy. As the autopsy scene concludes, the two men exit the premises as J asks “K, did you ever flashy-thing me?” K replies: “No.” So J asks again: “I ain’t playing, K. Did you ever flashy-thing me?” K replies: “No.” If Smith intensifies his voice and alters the wording and cadence, Jones responds with the exact same flat beat, emblematic of their push and pull throughout, a yin and yang as crucial to the film’s tension as much as the villainous alien tied up in a quest to claim a galaxy.

That’s not to downplay the galaxy quest, which has a decent payoff, though it’s less interesting for the quest itself than for Vincent D’Onofrio’s performance, an incredible, nigh indescribable feat of inane physicality in which, playing an alien inside a human body, he’s something like Frankenstein’s Monster as a chaotic breakdancer. In Vulture’s recent oral history of the character, D’Onofrio talks about Sonnenfeld leaving him a great deal of creative space, and which the actor then indulged by adding practical effects, placing basketball braces on his knees to lock in his movement to help generate that uniquely stiff yet uncontrollable walk. It’s such a batty turn that D’Onofrio admits he made the production nervous, as if he might alienate audiences. That is reminiscent of  Disney’s initial fears about Depp’s theatrics in “Pirates of the Caribbean”, though we know how that turned out and, of course, how D’Onofrio’s work turned out too, each one suggesting that would-be blockbusters might do well to give up carbon copying and gives its performers and its makers a little more creative freedom.

Gloria Bell

“Gloria Bell” begins on the dance floor, at an over-50s club, and ends there too, with more scenes of the eponymous character (Julianne Moore) dancing throughout, where even if the ostensible goal is to meet men, she’s just there to cut a rug. And in-between all these scenes of getting into the groove are glimpses of Gloria singing in the car, each one demonstrating Moore’s natural performance, not dramatically throwing her head back in that way movie characters singing in cars often do but keeping her eyes firmly on the road and her hands tightly on the wheel, even as she warbles along with the lyrics. And these songs, both on the dance floor and in the car, are not hits of the day, mind you, but songs of her era, often disco, illustrating comfort in her own skin, a sensation furthered in those big glasses – wear what you want. Because even if she’s getting old, and even if the problems of the, ahem, present are occasionally glimpsed on the periphery, like a dinnertime conversation about gun control, or lack thereof, nothing can bring her down. “I hope I go out dancing,” she says in a line that Moore invests not with the naivety of youth but the hard-won wisdom of age.

Based on Sebastián Lelio’s own 2013 Chilean film, which I have not seen and therefore cannot comment on, “Gloria Bell” reminded me just as much of another 2013 American film anyway, Noah Baumbach’s “Frances Ha”, which, in turn, wore its French New Wave influence obviously, films comprised of jump cuts, collections of vignettes strung together, like “Vivre sa Vie”, or: “My Life to Live”, which might as well be an alternate title for “Gloria Bell.” The episodic nature deliberately resists any kind of traditional arc, all the way up to the end, emphasized by the episodes being given ellipses instead of periods. When Gloria is diagnosed with glaucoma in a curt, matter-of-fact scene, the movie just lets that moment lie there, never bringing it up again, just a glimpse at her future, like peering over the cliff’s edge into the abyss. This is balanced against other lighter moments, like yoga class and some sort of laughter therapy, none of them standing for anything more than feeding into Gloria’s overriding personality, all which Moore takes into performing account, like the scene at the gaming table where her character sidles up to another woman out of both earnest friendliness and palpable desperation to make a friend.

That delicate balance often extends to the sequences themselves too, such as an elongated one in which Gloria has dinner with her two adult children, ex-husband and his new wife along with her new boyfriend Arnold (John Turturro). If this sort of mixing is typically ripe for broad comedy or openings of old wounds, this scene exists agreeably in the middle, each actor accentuating the awkwardness without overdoing resentment, as if everyone here has long ago made arduous peace with this situation and now is just trying to survive the night. Arnold doesn’t survive the night, figuratively speaking, gradually slipping further and further into the background of the frames, and then out slipping out of the apartment undetected.

This foreshadows their semi-tumultuous relationship, one defined by Arnold’s own ex-wife and two kids, none of whom we officially meet but to whom he feels dutybound despite wearily knowing they take advantage. That duality comes through in Turturro’s quiet voice and deliberate gestures, where even as he claims in the presence of Gloria how it’s his life, his body betrays the familial weight pressing down. In another movie, he might have been the main character and she the rock on which he leans as he tries to become a New Man. But Gloria Bell isn’t his rock; she’s his b.s. detector, her verbal parrying of his first Take-Me-Back plea evidence of someone whose self-awareness divulges a lack of desire to be involved with someone who is lying to himself. And that is why this subplot isn’t so much about discovery for her as a a statement of purpose, brought home in its ultimate kiss-off, which I will not reveal but is nevertheless shrewdly set up and hilariously conveyed, its capping shot evoking a different kind of laughter therapy, and emblemizing a movie that is not about Gloria Bell finding herself but celebrating who she is.

Late Night

The screenplay for “Late Night”, in which famed talk show host Katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson) finds herself on the verge of forced retirement after too long coasting on faded glory (and booking Doris Kearns Goodwin in the age of YouTube stars), is frequently as hoary as that synopsis sounds, like something culled from “The Late Shift” days of the 1990s when these TV programs felt more like lighthearted extensions of the evening news. Molly Patel (Mindy Kaling, who wrote the script) might get belted with a bag of garbage while inspirationally reciting Yeats before her first day as a new staff writer on Katherine’s show, but “Late Night” is nevertheless as earnest as its character, seriously addressing core issues of the entertainment industry even as it cannot help but express eternal optimism for the late-night format anyway. Indeed, Nisha Ganatra’s film feels more indebted to the small screen than the big screen, evoked in the oddly cramped moment where Molly first steps on the Late Night stage, never going wide to revel in the splendor of the place and how its history overwhelms her. And though Thompson’s lead performance is so electric she livens up even the most basic point-and-shoot frames, she is screaming out for a close-up worthy of her movie star magnetism or a wide shot that lets us get a sense of how her energy can hold an entire cavernous room. Alas.

That Molly, a quality control specialist at a chemical plant with dreams of writing and performing comedy, even gets the job is only because she happens to be interviewing for it with Katherine’s right-hand man (Dennis O’Hare) at the exact instant Katherine, having only recently discovered her show has long been written by a gaggle of white men, calls and harangues him to hire a woman. He follows the order, Molly earning the spot over the younger brother of the head monologue writer, Tom (Reid Scott). If to him this is merely a requisite hire for diversity, and if to her this is a triumph over nepotism, then to the movie it is refreshingly both, and which is where Kaling’s screenplay is best, threading both these ideas through the story rather than leaving them as one-off jokes.

Her character is made to earn her place, which she eventually does, not simply being forthright in her assessment of the show’s staleness but in concocting jokes and bits that play directly to the host’s candor and further the movie’s skewering of racial and societal assumptions, like recasting the old Letterman bit about a man in a bear suit trying to hail a cab as Katherine playing White Savior by hailing cabs for people of color, which Thompson plays less as social justice warrior and more with dry contempt for society at large. The other staff writers, meanwhile, while a Wonder Bread loaf of Harvard Lampoon dolts, are also portrayed as where they are because of a system to which they remain blind or willfully refuse to acknowledge.

Then again, these writers are mostly just one big entity, aside from Charlie (Hugh Dancy), who extends an olive branch to Molly. That he turns out to be a romantic grifter of sorts is obvious, though to Kaling’s credit the script does not linger overmuch – nay, it doesn’t even really linger at all – on her character’s heartbreak. In the typical scene where she shows up at Charlie’s apartment only to discover he’s with another woman, Kaling opts out of melancholy for a sort of “duh, of course he is!” self-amusement. Still, this subplot is evocative of the script’s penchant for the obvious and its sometimes more punchless politics, the character of Charlie mostly existing just to spring a narrative trap down the road, one involving Katherine, and then conspicuously evading the topic of workplace power dynamics.

But if the narrative complications are often only nominally complicated, Thompson’s performance is not, as she plays straight to the notion of her character having to embrace her own complications to alter her comedy to maintain commercial relevancy, fusing Katherine’s artistic enlightenment with practical business concerns. And though the character changes, she doesn’t really soften, Thompson recognizing that feisty exterior makes Katherine her, amending her approach without necessarily changing who she is. Plus, Thompson is really, really funny! She wrings 110% from 100% bits and lines and, even more impressively, wrings 100% from 75% bits and lines. Like, Katherine issuing her writers numbers since she fails to remember all their names, leading to a climactic punchline that you can, as they say, see coming from miles away but which still made me laugh out loud simply because Thompson’s drolly apologetic delivery is so damn impeccable; a la the great comic her character is supposed to be, Thompson makes the expected seem spontaneous.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974)

“Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” begins with the camera trained on an Idaho wheat field looking out toward a mountain vista, emitting a feeling of timelessness, far away from everything. This, we eventually learn, is precisely why Thunderbolt (Clint Eastwood), infamous bank robber whose preference for using an autocannon to crack a safe departs severely from normal safecracking methodology, has come here to drop out of society by masquerading as preacher to a small congregation. The scene in which we see him ministering feels like an inside joke; see Clint Eastwood in a cleric’s collar! But that collar gets removed right quick when a few enemies show up looking for money they are owed, apparently having ferreted out his ruse, and sending him running through those very same wheat fields, interrupting their idyll. That he escapes is only because Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges) happens to be passing by in a Trans-Am on a dirt road, allowing Thunderbolt to hitch a ride. Turns out these enemies of Thunderbolt’s are old cohorts who want money their owed and which the faux-man of the cloth has apparently stashed in, nodding to a bygone era, a one-room schoolhouse whose exact location proves elusive.

If Cimino’s film culminates with an invasion of an Idaho armory, it is never quite as spectacular as that sounds, content to meander along at its own pace, emblemized in the sequence where we see just how Lightfoot came to be in possession of this Trans Am – that is, by stealing it. But if it’s a robbery, it hardly feels like one, him getting behind the wheel of the car and conversing with the salesman, Bridges playing the moment less like a thief than a wonky consumer who’s trying to make up his mind in the moment whether to just drive the car right off the lot. Why once the two men become highway companions, it still takes at least half an hour before Lightfoot even broaches the possibility of a bank robbery, though even then it sounds impromptu, not a plan hatched but an idea just loosely mentioned, underscored by how its recounted in long shot, making it feel unceremonious. And this speaks to how Cimino, though he doubles as screenwriter, makes the wide-open locales and accompanying visuals half the point, evoking the lyricism of an American road trip, frequently capturing his characters under blue skies, like a hitchhiking scene where even as Cimino keeps his camera low, it doesn’t feel as if the two men are looming over us so much as the atmosphere looms over them. Even when the duo brawls with their pursuing enemies, Cimino allows them a catch-their-breath interval alongside a creek in a panoramic ravine.

When those enemies – Red (George Kennedy) and Eddie (Geoffrey Lewis) – do eventually catch up to Thunderbolt, and by extension Lightfoot, they demand what they are owed, only to be informed the money has gone missing because the schoolhouse has too. That leads to Thunderbolt suggesting a copycat of the armory heist he’s pulled once before to pay what’s owed. As elsewhere, however, Cimino chooses against rushing into things, lingering over the four men taking jobs to fund their operation to humorous effect, never more than a shot of Eddie, having taken a job peddling ice cream, emerging from a garage aboard his little ice cream scooter alongside several others, like a Bizarro World version of Brando’s “Wild One” motorcycle gang, stripping the sheen off any idea of these men as romantic outlaws.

Cimino skewers the very idea of romance too. Rarely are women glimpsed in “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” except as objects of lusty affection, and almost always through Red, whether his sweaty mug is listening to Lightfoot recount his glimpse of an unclothed woman or, in a moment involving the heist, walking in on a couple young lovebirds and, despite the situation’s prevailing urgency, spending a few seconds just watching. This is consciously contrasted against Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, where Bridges frequently has his character look longingly toward Eastwood’s in such a way to muddy the lines between paternal and carnal, looks that Eastwood receives coolly, acknowledging the deeper meaning without necessarily offending his no doubt masculine audience. Then again, one element of the heist involves Lightfoot donning a dress, and when he and Thunderbolt cruise into a drive-in, as if on a date, to briefly hide out, the implications are laid bare. So too are they when Red, as the heist goes belly up, gives Lightfoot a beating within an inch of his life, as if reestablishing heteronormativity through violence.

There is wicked irony in the heist not being new, merely a copycat of an earlier heist. If Cimino’s eventual cinematic boondoggle “Heaven’s Gate” returned to the start of American expansion westward then “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” picks up where expansion has essentially hit a brick wall, nowhere else to go but back to the same well. And even if Thunderbolt and Lightfoot make it out of the heist alive, and then locate the schoolhouse with the stashed money, the building’s location, having been moved and turned into a historical site, betrays the idea of the world moving on from and closing in on these two men. It’s telling that they drive off not into a sunset but toward the mountains, as if their destiny is simply to vanish among them, brought home in Lightfoot’s fate, a virtuoso bit of physical acting by Bridges where, his character apparently suffering the after-effects of a savage beating by Red, he improbably evinces the notion of all life exiting his body, transforming the words he spouts about feeling like a “hero” into a last-gasp effort to give his demise some sort of happy meaning, exposing it as cruelly meaningless.

Forgotten Great Moments in Movie History

The first Jean-Claude Van Damme movie I ever saw was “Double Team” (1997). I saw it not because of Van Damme, mind you, but because of The Muscles from Brussels’s co-star making his movie debut – Dennis Rodman. The Worm, after all, was and remains my favorite professional athlete, dating back to his days with the Bad Boys-era Detroit Pistons, a defensive genius and rebounding savant, his basketball IQ hovering around 200. Yet I loved him just as much when he went full diva, coloring his hair, dating Madonna, hanging backstage with Pearl Jam, publishing ho-hum books, spouting banalities disguised as inanities. It was in his Diva Period when he made Tsui Hark’s “Double Team”, released as his then-team, the Chicago Bulls, were mounting their (eventually successful) assault on a second consecutive NBA title, like, I dunno, if Draymond Green had starred in the latest Johnnie To joint this spring. Rodman might not have set Hollywood figuratively ablaze with his turn, “mumbl(ing) his way through some unintelligible lines,” as Jeff Vice noted for the Deseret News, but he was, as Vice also wrote, “less wooden than his Chicago Bulls teammate Michael Jordan (“Space Jam”).” Take that, your Airness!

Indeed, while it might be traditional for NBA players moonlighting as actors to play a loose version of their basketball playing self, if not just playing themselves outright, be it Jordan in “Space Jam”, be it Julius Erving in “The Fish Who Saved Pittsburgh”, be it Kyrie Irving in “Uncle Drew”, Rodman both did and did not follow this template. Yes, he was playing an arms dealer named Yaz, but Yaz recolored his hair so frequently and dropped basketball references so incessantly, including his former team (“I don’t play with the bad boys anymore, only the good guys”) that it was difficult not to read him as Rodman. That is why the best moment in “Double Team”, as most cinematic scholars agree, occurs when Rodman’s character, in the throes of an arms sale with Van Damme’s, counters the latter’s observation that “Offense gets the glory” by remarking “But defense wins the game.” No one has ever been more qualified to give that cliché a ring of Socratic truth than Dennis Rodman. In his 1996 profile of the future Hall-of-Famer for The New Yorker John Edgar Wideman wrote that “His helter-skelter, full-court, full-time intensity blurs the line between defense and offense”, suggesting Rodman as the living, breathing embodiment of his “Double Team” wisecrack.

As a hardwood-obsessed international man of mystery, Rodman was, in a way, presaging his bizarre, tragic, dude-you-gotta-stop self-appointment as American emissary to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea since, his Basketball IQ failing to translate to international diplomacy, he seems to view, a la our current American Ringmaster-in-Chief, the Supreme Leader as a charitable dude. North Korea, of course, hacked Sony Pictures in 2014, and targeted American businesses earlier this year as T*ump and Kim Jong Un were meeting, to say nothing of Russia’s attempts to hack into the American Presidential Election of 2016. It was these attacks, and others, that led, as The New York Times recently reported, and as The New York Time’s Daily Podcast recently recounted, to the United States Defense Department forming a Cyber Command, one that is currently hitting back at Russia, an online arms race of sorts, leading Daily Host Michael Barbaro to summarize “You have to go on the offense to really be on the defense”, at which point I paused and marveled, just marveled, at a current state of affairs so preposterous they were prophesized by Dennis Rodman.

Notes on the You Oughta Know Scene in Booksmart

These days everywhere I, forty (one) year old man, go, I see young women who were probably barely alive when I was teenager, if they were alive at all, dressed like Alicia Silverstone in Aerosmith’s “Cryin’” video. You know what I’m talking about Gen Xers: the red flannel, the boot cut jeans, the combat boots. This is not a new observation, of course. Fashion, like everything, is cyclical and so every generation experiences it. One of my senior photos from the mid-90s involved wearing a polyester shirt and striking the “Saturday Night Fever” pose. But that makes it no less weird when it’s your generation’s turn. And what makes copying Alicia’s look weirder is that Alicia’s look was deliberate disinterest – it declared: “I don’t care how I look.” For Gen X, it wasn’t cool to care, see. That’s why in the video she reeled in Stephen Dorff by making him care and then shoved that care right back in his face with the bungee jump fake-out concluding with the most memorable middle finger in the history of the world.

I tried to act like I didn’t care in the mid-90s but it never really took. That’s why when I arrived a few seconds late to Mr. Calvert’s sociology class knowing full well that his rules dictated showing up after the bell meant a detention, I didn’t challenge his rules by coolly acting apathetic toward them but dutifully showed up for detention the next morning. And that’s why I loved Alanis Morissette. Oh, Alanis was ironic too, sure, of course, which is why her biggest hit was literally called “Ironic”, a song constantly cited my pseudo-observationalists (sic) for not really being ironic at all which, of course, duh, is ironic. But her first hit, “You Oughta Know”, released in the summer before my senior year, an Alternative “You’re So Vain” fiery screed against an ex, was earnest, vehemently so, not ironic. I had no exes, mind you, to hold grudges against because I had no exes at all, but I sort of semi-innately grasped that I preferred being earnest to ironic and I cherished the blood-in-the-mouth earnestness of “You Oughta Know.”

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“10 Things I Hate About You” was released at the tail-end of the late 90s teen movie boom. And though in his disaffected air Heath Ledger’s Patrick Verona seemed to emerge straight from the Seattle (where the movie was set) grunge scene, when it came time for his character to declare romantic affection for Julia Stiles’s Kat Stratford by publicly serenading her he did so not by singing a song of the era but by reaching back, all the way to 1967 and Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.”

I heard “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” frequently on KIOA, the Des Moines, Iowa oldies station, which is what me and my best pals Jacob and Kris were often tuned into while riding around in Kris’s car with no real point or purpose, through the quasi-mean streets of West Des Moines or along scenically rural Highway 6 toward Adel and then possibly north to Panora, where Kris’s parents had a lake house where we would listen to more KIOA while playing ping pong in the basement. One summer night – and I hesitate to divulge this information – the three of us were up way too late and kept calling in to the poor late night D.J. requesting songs which led to him playing a Billy Joe Royal tune of his own accord and then instructing us to call back in after the song was over to discuss it which we did because we were hella cool. KIOA was a constant, joyful companion.

“There Goes My Baby” by The Drifters. “Be My Baby” by The Ronettes. “Back in My Arms Again” by The Supremes. These were, and remain, some of my favorite songs of all-time. These were not songs I loved ironically. These were songs I loved as much as “Check the Rhime” by A Tribe Called Quest, “Creep” by TLC, and “Leaving Las Vegas” by Sheryl Crow. I was falling in love with the same music my parents fell in love with when the music was brand new, which wasn’t bad or troubling, just disorienting, at least for them.

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One of the most delightful moments of Olivia Wilde’s “Booksmart” finds one of her co-protagonists, Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) at a night-before-graduation party being forced by the girl on whom she’s crushing into performing “You Oughta Know” karaoke, an interesting song choice given it’s a quarter-century old. Wilde is apparently a fan of Alanis’s hit and, per the HuffPost, wrote a letter to Morissette hoping to acquire the rights which, obviously, were granted. In the letter, Wilde gushed about what the song meant to her, and at the end of the article she spoke about introducing the song to a whole new generation. To that point, I have encountered scuttlebutt, mostly in the is-this-real-life-or-not environs of Twitter that have questioned the song choice and how it differs from, say, 2017’s “Lady Bird” which employed an actual song (“Crash” by Dave Matthews Band) of the actual time (2002) for its big musical moment.

But in the same HuffPost article Dever cited “You Oughta Know” as her karaoke song, suggesting it already has trickled down to today’s youth, which is precisely why I, aging Gen Xer, who used to rock out to “You Oughta Know” in his car on the tape that I recorded it to from CD, found this scene as disorienting as I did moving. It’s as if I was suddenly transported back to the house I grew up in but not as myself, no, but merely an impartial observer, watching my parents watch youthful me, seeing what it was finally like for them to see their son singing along to KIOA, the passage of time laid bare even as it simultaneously blurred all lines.

A Simple Favor

Defining perfect casting is a difficult task. One assumes there is some data obsessive concocting a methodology right now to quantify movie casting, God help us. But if I was to mount an argument for someone being perfectly cast, I might do so on behalf of Anna Kendrick in 2018’s “A Simple Favor.” She plays mommy vlogger Stephanie Smothers, an incredible name suggesting a burgeoning artisinal jam empire, who opens the film mid-vlog, about to recite a recipe for all her followers only to first provide an update about the seemingly tragic disappearance of her best friend, a quick window into the film’s genre and tonal shape-shifting which Kendrick’s performance manages to glide through. Indeed, if she’s a great mom and excellent cook, Kendrick plays these domestic scenes with the air of a displaced high-strung A student putting too much pressure on herself, feeding into the film’s eventual threads of mystery, role-playing, even violence. When her character snoops around a Tom Ford wannabe’s office, Kendrick makes it feel not out of place or even like an unexpected rush, really, but an obvious outgrowth of who she already is, like cataloguing recipes and spying go hand-in-hand. And by blending these seemingly disparate tones, Feig elicits the idea of motherhood’s extreme stress, giving it a gravely comic ring, which is truly when the film is best, though it considerably weakens when trying to stretch out its mystery.

That mystery involves Emily Nelson (Blake Lively), Stephanie’s self-appointed bestie, a mysterious mother of another boy at Stephanie’s son school who the other parents – represented by a trio that seem displaced from a pure Paul Feig comedy – discuss in tones of humor barely concealing straight-up fear. And though it takes a lot to live up to a character who hangs a painting of her nude self in her own living room, Lively succeeds, who as a public-relations something-or-other does not curse people out over the phone in the manner of, say, Tom Cruise in “Tropic Thunder” but with a cool superiority to these faceless peons, copying her speaking voice from the way her character makes a martini – very dry. And that’s how she looks too upon meeting Stephanie outside her son’s school. Lively is eight inches taller than Kendrick, per the Interwebs, and Feig smartly accentuates this difference in their characters’ introductory scene, eliciting the distinct impression that even as Emily talks to Stephanie she is nevertheless talking right over her, and which Kendrick furthers by meekly withdraw into herself. And when Emily invites Stephanie over for gin & vermouth, it begins their dangerous semi-liaison.

Lively’s impeccably tailored costumes make her seem out of time and so does her sleek, modish home, all perfectly playing off Kendrick’s homeyness. And this otherworldliness becomes intoxicating to Stephanie, just as Emily does. Indeed, Lively’s performance is innately physical, the way she guzzles martinis and slings back on her sleek sofa, her cool langorousness emblemized in her vocal fry, which you can practically feel slicing open Stephanie’s cheerful reserve. And Kendrick doesn’t downplay the quixotic attraction she feels, her expressions making clear that this attraction is both real and sort of happening despite herself, like she can’t control it. It’s no wonder, then, that Emily so effortlessly reels in Stephanie’s most deep, dark secret, one that the movie never quite knows what to do with other than use it as leverage down the road, suggesting how “A Simple Favor” sadly trends second-rate when this tantalizing co-dependency is moved aside after Emily goes missing.

“A Simple Favor” is the rare movie that grows monotonous as it goes off the rails, failing to effuse the sort of energy that narrative rail-jumping sometimes entails, each twist escalating with such absurdity that if you do not see them coming, not exactly, you feel them coming anyway, which might as well be the same thing. What’s worse, as Emily vanishes, her husband takes her place in the plot, played by Henry Golding, who between this and “Crazy Rich Asians” is proving himself the consummate humdrum actor, specifically devoid of the devious energy “A Simple Favor” requires. When Emily summons him to a bathroom – twice! – for a kinky tryst he looks like he’s marching himself in chains. Unwind, my man! Have some fun! How he wound up with Emily, I have no idea, but it only puts into perspective that Emily and Stephanie were meant for each other, their bond the delicious hot mess the rest of this movie could never hope to be.

Non-Fiction

At one point in “Non-Fiction”, the plight of Parisian publisher Alain (Guillaume Canet) is compared to Ingmar Bergman’s “Winter Light”, the 1963 Swedish film to which last year’s marvelous “First Reformed” owed a great debt. That might sound odd given the grim aesthetics of the latter two and the breezy, French-influenced style of the first, but crises of faith come in many varieties. And in Olivier Assayas’s latest cinematic exercise in wordy philosophical wrangling, Alain’s livelihood is under siege, the digital age threatening extinction for the printed word, where the question bandied about is not so much what art means as what art is, where Tweets are compared to haiku with scornful surrender. And though “Winter Light’s” Pastor and “First Reformed’s” Reverend frequently suffered their anguish in solitude, Alain suffers it in the company of friends and family and others, over wine and food and in cafés, which sounds, frankly, less torturous than pleasant, and is, not incidentally, where professional and relationship predicaments go down like a shot of espresso – take it, move on. And if almost everyone is involved in the arts, Valérie (Nora Hamzawi) is not, a political consultant sarcastically derided for this occupation, as if trying to initiate change rather than merely pontificating about it denotes some starry-eyes. It’s telling that Assayas’s camera throughout never strays far from his actors, inducing a purposeful claustrophobia, tethering us to these people, just as they are tethered to one another, espousing endlessly in their isolated highbrow castles.

This conversational emphasis makes “Non-Fiction” a dizzying experience – particularly if you don’t speak French, as I don’t, and are keeping one eye on the subtitles and one on the faces on the screen – suggesting Steven Soderbergh’s all-talk all-the-time “High Flying Bird.” But then, “High Flying Bird” mainly consisted of conversations with significant transactional worth, and while that’s partially true of “Non-Fiction”, with the loose plot involving a possible sale of Alain’s publishing house, much of the technological small talk feels a bit dated by 2019 standards, which might simply stem from the release date but nevertheless stresses how quickly things change even as those changes elicit little difference, which “Non-Fiction” makes clear by quoting “The Leopard” (1963): “For things to remain the same everything must change.”

In his previous film “Personal Shopper”, Assayas fashioned a high-tech ghost story by equating the idea of nothing ever really being gone in the digital age with a sort of modern supernaturalism. And though questions of whether a digital imprint can last as long as print in a tangible text are raised throughout “Non-Fiction”, the film is more concerned with an obsession for the present, underlined not just in Alain’s ironic affair with his company’s digital strategist (Christa Theret) but how the fiction of author Léonard (Vincent Macaigne) is obviously pulled from his own life, including an affair with Alain’s wife Selena (Juliette Binoche), a fact which everyone is capable of recognizing but him. The latter makes for some of the film’s best humor simply in Macaigne’s semi-permanent state of hangdog bewilderment, as if he’s constantly trying to work out what makes the punchline of his own life so funny. And if you wonder why Selena might wind up with him in the first place, Binoche’s oft-cheerful uninhibited air suggests Why Not?, though she subtly turns her frequent smile into a shiv when it comes time to make things clear to him, a moment in which she has her character treat Léonard with the same casual contempt she directs toward a server over a needlessly iced glass of orange juice, momentarily puncturing the haughty bubble in which these characters exist.

Valérie, deliberately positioned as an outsider, punctures that bubble too, whether telling her spouse in no uncertain terms to buck up when his latest novel is rejected or not so much tendering forgiveness upon his confession of marital sin as negotiating compromise. The latter leads directly to the last scene in which ex-adulterous lovers and their spouses cordially convene, functioning less like a conclusion than the starting point and ending point of a circle, deftly bringing the borrowed “Leopard” quote to full life.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Battle Circus (1953)

“Battle Circus” takes its title from a MASH unit during the Korean War overseen by Chief Surgeon Jed Webbe (Humphrey Bogart), which is frequently on the move due to enemy movements, forced to roll up its tents, gather its considerable supplies, round up its myriad patients, trek to a new location, get re-settled there and then one, two, three, four days later do it all over again, just like the circus. That also, however, suggests a certain amount of fun, macabre or otherwise, a la Robert Altman’s famed 1970 film, “MASH”, and the beloved television series that followed in its footsteps. And though there are glimmers of such fun, particularly in an early scene inside the nurse’s tent where Lt. Ruth McCara (June Allyson) gets to know everyone, “Battle Circus”, directed by Richard Brooks, does not evince a humorously macabre air so much as one that wavers, oddly, between plain macabre and sweet, a dark-hearted docudrama and a romantic comedy, the waffling tone epitomized in the dueling lead performances of Allyson and Bogart.

TCM indicates that Allyson took the role to help shed her so-called Girl Next Door image. Yet she is introduced blundering into harm’s way and then resisting the overtures of Webbe, adherent to a strict moral code that feels suspiciously like a Girl Next Door. What’s more, her chemistry with Bogart is all wrong. His character spends most of his time making passes at her, drunken or otherwise, which is not played by Bogart as “it was different time” indecorum, like some oafish sitcom character, but real edge at decided odds with Allyson’s innocence, making him seem like a lecherous predator, which Bogart’s leering smile suggests was intentional. This is well done, in its unsettling way, and in need of a more iron-willed co-star for bawdy give and take, while their occasional comical encounters feel cut and pasted from a different movie entirely.

A comedy “Battle Circus” mostly isn’t, particularly in scenes of surgery, which Brooks films with maximum gravitas, not simply to demonstrate Webbe’s ability to curtail his drinking when a patient’s life in his hands but to give us a true glimpse of wartime triage. Here you can sense an alternate movie that Brooks might have yearned for, with no comedy whatsoever, just war and what it does to those who go through it. There is a sequence inside the medical tent where a Korean prisoner, mentally undone by the noise of the operating room, filmed in a series of quick cuts making clear this unraveling, leaps from the table, gets hold of a grenade and threatens to send the whole place sky high. He’s talked down by Ruth, suggesting it’s a sequence to lend her character a sense of heroism, though it’s more notable for the atmospheric terror it engenders, essentially stripping these ostensible enemies of that classification and rendering them equally desperate.

A scene in which Webbe overrules the Camp Commander and performs an all-night open-heart surgery, the hours and manpower required be damned, evokes not simply the toll of operation but the weariness of war itself, which is burning out Webbe and which suitably manifests itself in both his drunkenness and lecherousness. At one point his character is made to lament the possibility of the Korean War becoming the third World War, an interesting line that puts into perspective how this movie must have felt in its time, released into the era of the war itself. That release date, however, also seems to portend the movie’s conclusion as Webbe, with Ruth’s aid, gives up the bottle and eventually guides his Battle Circus to safety through a war zone, something less than the fog of war and more like the battlefield as inspirational grounds for becoming a new man. Uncle Sam gives it two thumbs up.

Acting! (or: a semi-philosophical rumination on some clickbait)

Last week one of the old guards of Internet trolling, Jezebel, arose to incite a social media riot by way of a post called, simply, Actors Who Are Bad at Acting. The ensuing list of actors was just that – a list of actors. It was a list of twenty actors by name with no evidence cited as to precisely what makes them bad at their chosen profession. The defining criteria was this: “This is a list of actors who are not really good actors, contrary to what you might think. These are people who make you stop and wonder, Hm, are they good?” Ah yes, of course. “Contrary to what you might think.” This would seem to suggest their self-evident badness stems from others – that is, you, reader, or skimmer, since there isn’t, really, much to read – thinking they are good. And if you think they are good then they must, per the rule of contrarianism, be bad. Classic! What’s more, the lack of evidence allows the writer in question can to adopt any post-listicle stance she wishes. The list speaks for itself! The list is ironic! The list is meant to spawn a conversation! Don’t take the list so seriously, man! And while this is the point where I am supposed to indicate I will not provide a link to said list because it’s clickbait and they want you to click, well, as a blog that proudly asks for no clicks and will happily scrub your click from our stats if you’re not satisfied, everyone here is an adult and can decide to click or not to click as she or he wishes. So, here it is.

The responses to this, ahem, piece, whether in the comments, on the Twitters, or places in-between, were predictable. Oscars and Oscar nominations were cited as rebuttals in and of themselves, evoking Movie Stars being declared simply on the strength of box office or, ye gods, literally just starring in a movie, receipts and un-critical literalization taken to their inane extreme. Many responses were as vague as the initial list itself with one commenter incisively remarking “Brie Larson, Amy Adams and Emma Watson can totally act, the rest of the list is correct” leading another commenter to insightfully parry “Most of the list is incorrect, but Watson is not good.” Glad we cleared that up!

There were many, many GIFs and YouTube clips provided as standalone ripostes, particularly where Nicolas Cage is concerned, because Nicolas Cage’s infamous bouts of frenzy are ripe for such memeability. Here the person who typed up names for the, ahem, piece seemed to convey her in-on-the-joke bonafides by posting her own Cage clip with the trendy uncapitalized, unpunctuated addendum “i love him he’s great at screaming.” Whether Cage, who has given his share of subtle, tamped down performances, is making a conscious actorly decision to brighten trash by going berserk is apparently beside the point; make a funny and go viral instead!

GIFs and clips speak to the old line about knowing it when you see it, which Jeanine Basinger referenced in her excellent book about what makes a movie star. That’s why I thought about posting, God, I dunno, take your pick, a clip of Michael B. Jordan playing the perfect scene partner to Phylicia Rashad in “Creed II’s” best scene by knowing his character thinks the moment all about him even though he, the actor, knows it’s all about her, or Jennifer Lawrence commanding the whole room in the pivotal scene of “Silver Linings Playbook” not by running roughshod over everyone but playing it cool and letting everyone be gradually drawn into her scruffy orbit, or Sienna Miller evincing grief that her husband’s gone and contentment that he went on his own terms in the last scene of  “The Lost City of Z”, or Mark Wahlberg’s astonishing innocence in that scene on the dance floor in “Boogie Nights” where he blathers about his special edition limited silk print Italian nylon shirt, or even just Chloë Grace Moretz on “30 Rock” exclaiming “Damn you, Donaghy” which I sometimes say aloud to myself because thinking of that line reading can hearten even the most miserable days.

Then again, these are isolated bits of acting wonder that don’t necessarily get to the deeper question of whether these are good actors and what the hell that even means. One commenter chimed in: “I’d agree that a lot of the actors on that list are fairly limited, and don’t have much range. I wouldn’t call most of them bad though.” That, in its way, is interesting! That’s interesting in so much as suggesting that being a good actor directly connects to having range. Says who?!

Is the famed range of Daniel Day-Lewis what makes him a great actor? Was it a similar ability in Philip Seymour Hoffman that made him one too? Is it Dame Meryl’s virtuosity with accents that elevates her? If you can’t change identities are you automatically bad? Because, I mean, hasn’t Amy Adams, who was on the list, proven that she has range? If range constitutes Good acting, why would she be Bad? But then, what constitutes range? Does range mean, as one commenter said, that Adams was in both “The Muppets” and “The Master” within a year of each other? Does range mean going from the feigned innocence of “Miss Pettigrew Lives for the Day” to the genuine yet compromised innocence of “Junebug?” Does range mean intentionally giving a ho-hum performance in “American Hustle” as an ersatz English lady while, as that same ersatz English lady, you are conveying the earnest arousal from playing make-believe? Or does range simply mean making more convincing, ahem, “animal noises” than Will Ferrell in “Talladega Nights”? What about Kevin Costner, who was on the list, and is often saddled with the label of Everyman? Does being Everyman mean he is incapable of doing anything else, or is their significant value in how Costner almost aways know each and every one of his Everymen and their respective idiosyncracies inside and out?

Tom Cruise did not make the Actors Who Are Not Good at Acting list – he must be Good at Acting! – but a tussle broke out in the comments anyway about his acting quality, with someone citing his inability to create a character out his recurring “Mission: Impossible” protagonist Ethan Hunt as indicating his flaw as a lack of range, that when you see Ethan Hunt you just see Tom Cruise. But, this is bad? The brilliant “M:I – Rogue Nation” harnesses much of its adrenalized je ne sais quoi from Cruise as Cruise, making his personal sense of, to quote the movie itself, manifest destiny the whole point. That mirrors Angelina Jolie, who was on the list, who is best and the best movie star period when her character is sculpted in her own movie star image.

Of course, utilizing your onscreen aura to do the heavy lifting veers perilously close to the Sergei Eisenstein idea of an actor’s deliberately neutral expression being manipulated by the camera, which another commenter astutely cited, suggesting a good performance is the product of a director and an editor, not the actor at all. I do frequently suspect Scarlett Johansson, who was on the list, got by in the otherwise ace “Under the Skin” with such assistance, though I am adamant that Brie Larson, who was first on the list, in “Captain Marvel”, did not, sharing telepathy with the camera, deliberately wielding her neutral expression so as to precisely modulate it when necessary for supreme effect.

If I’m merely offering counterpoints here to the list, which is precisely what K. Austin Collins argued against in his own Tweet saying he “would rather know what people think great acting even is .............. much more interesting/productive than a bunch of counterpoints to a list that we’re all saying doesn’t even matter lol”, I’m only doing so in some sort of slapdash way of trying to get to the first part of his Tweet, to think about what truly defines great acting. It’s something I think about a lot, and something that can’t be summarized in a sentence, or a paragraph, or a whole blog post, but movie by movie, performance by performance, examining and dissecting what each one is doing. I try to do that in my reviews, which makes me think of Matt Zoller Seitz saying at some point in some piece or Tweet I can’t source about how critics have an obligation to always address a movie’s visuals in their reviews.

I’m leery of placing any mandatory criteria on reviews, but I take Seitz’s larger point anyway, that describing what we see should be paramount. But what we see also involves an actor’s performance, which we are dutybound to discuss too, whenever possible, eternally wrestling with what makes an actor’s performance good (or bad) rather than simply issuing piffling decrees about who is Good and who is Bad.

Leia Organa II

“No, there is another.” 

TV shows can last years. If they do, roles typically remain set in concrete, but not always. As such, if roles in a long-running show change midway through, it is noticeable and frequently disconcerting. Think “Roseanne” where oldest daughter Becky Connor was played memorably the first five seasons by Lecy Goranson only to be replaced by Sarah Chalke for seasons 6 and 7 as well as Season 9 for reasons too convoluted to get into here. Chalke was fine, in her own way, but Goranson had laid such a specific air that adjustment was nigh impossible. The same was true of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” where Janet Hubert-Whitten played Vivian Banks, Aunt to Will Smith’s central character, for the first three seasons only to be replaced by Daphne Maxwell Reed for the concluding three. The tone of the character completely changed, and not for the better. Let me be clear: Hubert-Whitten was the one, true Aunt Viv.

This happens occasionally at the movies too. And even if The Incredible Hulk going from Bana to Norton to Ruffalo allowed for the right actor to finally emerge, more often Julianne Moore takes the baton from Jodie Foster to play Clarice Starling or, as much as it hurts my heart to say it, Elisabeth Shue takes the baton from Claudia Wells to play Jennifer Parker and the air goes out the room. It is not easy – not easy – to just up and change roles, any role, never mind one of the most iconic roles in the history of American culture. I say all this to illustrate the danger of what I am about to say.

Carrie Fisher died on December 27, 2016. Given her place in the pop culture as Princess cum General Leia Organa, her terrible, terrible death rippled throughout all of society. And this terrible, terrible death placed the upcoming conclusion to the new “Star Wars” trilogy in a bind since General Leia Organa was set to play a prominent role. The makers had to adjust on the fly. After all, how can you replace the original Leia Organa? You can’t. You absolutely can’t. And yet.

The other day My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife was watching Darren Star’s TV Land comedy-drama “Younger” (season premiere tonight on TV Land!), which she loves, starring Sutton Foster as Liza Miller, a 40 year old woman masquerading as a millenial to infiltrate an industry of age-ism. One of the show’s recurring characters is Cheryl Sussman, a business rival, who uncovers Liza’s secret and holds it over her. Cheryl is played by Martha Plimpton. And as I plopped down on the couch to watch along, I overheard a Plimpton put down. And in hearing that Plimpton put down, reader, I swear, like a bolt out of the blue, I heard such distinct echoes of Fisher’s husky timbre, the vocal incarnate of side eye, that I almost fell on the floor. She sounded just like Carrie Fisher, I said. And in that moment, I saw, I swear, a “Star Wars” with Plimpton as a certain Alderaanian cracking wise and running shit.

Granted, to blaspheme like this is to open a whole hornet’s nest, the “Star Wars” cognoscenti telling me that Plimpton’s just Mary Frann to Suzanne Pleshette, or Sammy Hagar to David Lee Roth, though that’s not right. No, this would be more akin to AC/DC replacing Bon Scott with Brian Johnson, eerily similar yet strangely unique, though even that isn't right because this is not an either/or. It would be like this: There was only one Carrie Fisher, certainly, just as there is only one Kate Middleton. But there are, as it turns out, two Duchesses. And while The Duchess of Cambridge, as everyone knows, might be the greatest, paradoxically, yet truthfully, The Duchess of Sussex, as everyone knows, is the greatest too. And if The Duchess of Sussex is an outsider, a commoner free of the monarchal roots, so too is Plimpton in so much as she stands firmly outside official “Star Wars” nobility. This will never happen, of course, merely one blogger’s pipe dream, but then, an American Hallmark leading lady becoming Duchess Kate’s Royal running mate was a pipe dream too.

Serenity

“Serenity”, released this past January to near-unanimous WTF? thumbs-downs, finds its leading man, Matthew McConaughey, firmly in the glorious post-McConaissance landscape, both totally attuned to the parodies of him and not so much transcending them as embracing with them with such wonky pep that he simultaneously makes you understand why they exist in the first place and why no parody of him is as good, never mind as funny, as the real thing. Here he is Baker Dill, deep sea fisherman on a fictional Floridian island called Plymouth, tormented by an elusive tuna, which just sounds funnier than elusive marlin, which was the fish that evaded Santiago in “The Old Man and the Sea” and which “Serenity” sort of resembles, at least at first, gradually evolving (or: devolving) into “2001” penned by Hemingway, or something, an absurd-sounding amalgam that McConaughey nevertheless lends a crazed kind of credence, suggesting his “Mud” character if he never left the island and became spiritually sunburnt.

No actorly task goes unnoticed by McConaughey, squinting at the sky, scribbling coordinates, and manning a deep sea reel with equal ferocious commitment; when he tells a couple rich, drunk tourists who have rented his boat to sit back down when it’s time to try and catch fish you can tell in McConaughey’s unhinged expression that this stems not from safety protocol but trying to even the score with the sea. Even when he’s driving drunk he acts like a drunk guy trying to sober himself up while staying on the road. That might sound like nothing, but it as emerges as sort of incongruous with the screenplay in question, which becomes the movie’s downfall and saving grace, a leading man who, seemingly unbeknownst to writer/director Steven Knight, has broken his movie’s code.

Throughout we can tell the story is not so simple, and not just because of McConaughey. If the island is small and slow, where everyone knows everyone and “Old Wes” never leaves his table at the island’s lone bar, the editing never harmonizes with such a seeming life of leisure, opting for frequent cuts even in the simplest scenes, suggesting something weighing on Baker’s mind beyond his mysterious underwater opponent. Even when he lays up at nights, smoking, the island’s lighthouse shines its beam through his open windows, suggesting the beams of light eerily illuminating Rick Deckard’s apartment in “Blade Runner”, evoking neo-noir.

Indeed, “Serenity” truly begins its long strange trip to haywire when Baker’s ex-wife Karen (Anne Hathaway) appears, suffering abuse at the hands of her new husband (Jason Clarke) for whom she has planned a fishing trip to Plymouth with emergent “Double Indemnity”-ish intentions. This ties back to her and Baker’s son, seen in isolated shots locked in his room playing video games, and who can apparently converse with his father, and father with son, through some sort of mystical connection never exactly defined but seen anyway. And this hints at The Big Twist.

Hathaway hints at it too, her sultry introduction involving a line reading so phonily femme fatale I laughed out loud. That phoniness permeates her entire performance, as if she’s taking her cues from someone else, a sensation connected to The Big Twist, one which is, without giving it away, a little underhanded in how it can be used to forgive any aesthetic sins as the whole point, insulting in how it lets the overriding implications of physical abuse simply slide and even a bit unpleasant in how it re-contextualizes preceding scenes, like a steamy scene between Baker and Karen in his boat cabin where his kiss-off line metamorphoses in retrospect from crudely comical to ewwwww, gross!

What’s worse, the twist isn’t all that flabbergasting, not merely telegraphed early and often but born of a thousand Big Twists before it. In the end, it’s got nothing on McConaughey anyway. He plays the climactic beach-set exposition scene not with an A ha! glimmer but a fatalistic edge, like he’s already advanced multiple levels beyond where the out-of-place character he’s conversing with is, level being a word I use with extreme intent. Because while “Serenity” proves overly concerned with who is playing God to make us go “Whoa”, McConaughey’s already left all that Big Twist bunk behind; he is the whoa. He’s not playing God; brother, he’s speaking to God.

Always Be My Maybe

Everything at stake in “Always Be My Maybe”, whether it’s love, food, community, or music, concerns authenticity. Of course, authenticity can be difficult to achieve in a genre as formulaic as the rom com, which director Nahnatchka Khan’s Netflix film is, generally required to hit certain narrative beats at certain intervals, which “Always Be My Maybe” faithfully does, never mind montages, which are not relied on to move the plot too much, thankfully, but nevertheless still feel intrusive in a movie trying to renovate an existing sort of screenplay structure. Still, despite such predictability in the nuts and bolts, the motivations here feel earned and true, never obligatory, and the world these characters inhabit feels paramount to who they are even if fewer customary establishing shots of the Golden Gate Bridge might have been nice.

Sasha Tran (Ali Wong) is childhood best friends with Marcus Kim (Randall Park), having spent as much time with his family as hers, learning to cook with Marcus’s mother. But when Marcus’s mother unexpectedly dies, it sends both her son and Sasha spiraling, culminating in his car’s backseat where the movie’s periodic propensity for unmasking clichés is demonstrated by comically presenting, ah, automobile sex as the irregular, uncomfortable act it actually is. This ends in a shot from above where Wong’s gift for transmitting terror purely through facial expression denotes the splintering apart to come, her decamping to Los Angeles and becoming a celebrity chef while he stays behind in San Francisco. Circumstances, however, intervene when she returns home to open a new restaurant, an obvious device lent humorous truth in how Michelle Buteau, as Sasha’s assistant, plays matchmaker for these ex-friends with impudence rather than coyness.

Marcus has remained home partly because of emotional stasis but also to care for his ailing father, emblemizing the Asian focus on elders, and also his community, represented by his band, one that proudly just plays the block in his neighborhood where palpably POC crowds cheer him on. Sasha’s celebrity chef status and culinary genius, on the other hand, never stands for much more than a platform to crack wise about what Emeril might have wearily lamented as New California Cuisine, using it as counterpoint to more traditional Asian home-cooking, not just in what young Sasha makes with Marcus’s mother but in the brief shot of her making spam and rice for dinner when she’s left home alone. These latter details feel profound, and might have been profounder still, lending true weight to her ultimate career decision, had the juxtaposition between the two schools of dining not been so glaring.

That send-up of high-concept cuisine is furthered in the film’s funniest, and surely destined to be most talked about (and GIFd), passage involving Sasha’s new beau Keanu Reeves, which is to say Keanu Reeves as Keanu Reeves, going out to dinner. Reeves is sensational, wholly sincere by being wholly and sincerely in on the joke, playing himself with such loopy gusto that his inane mysticism shrewdly appeals to bleeding hearts and those who mock bleeding hearts alike as if Keanu, and Keanu alone, might well, in the space of a Netflix rom com, bring us all together for a few uproarious minutes. Of course, it says something that the film’s single most animated sequence belongs to Keanu and not the film’s true stars. Yes, Park gets to play off Keanu to humorous effect throughout their characters’ escalating confrontation, but Wong is mostly just there.

If this whole bit successfully puts into perspective for her character the vapidity of celebrity culture, it also puts into perspective how Wong, a comic with dynamic vocal inflections is rarely allowed to similarly cut loose. The closest she comes is telling off her tedious boyfriend by phone, inevitably ending with a gaggle of stone-faced people overhearing, where the ultimate punchline isn’t even hers. She co-wrote the script, and it’s admirable that she might delineate moments for other people, but there are droves of rom com leading ladies and it’s disappointing to see her more frequently inhabit the archetype than transcend it.

Still, if the script takes Wong’s character to an obvious end point, it never betrays her intellect, allowing her to stay true to who she is without needlessly sacrificing something in the name of drama. Ditto Marcus, whose own arc is as much about coming into his own as it is falling in love. And though Wong and Park’s romantic chemistry isn’t electric, that’s by design, two friends trying to negotiate tricky emotional terrain and find their way back to what left them confused so long ago, rendered in a car scene rhyming with the first one epitomizing the sudden joy of seeing clearly now. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Man Between (1953)

“The Man Between” opens with Susanne Mallison (Claire Bloom) taking a plane from London to Berlin to visit her brother, British Major Martin (Geoffrey Tune), picked up at the airport by his new German wife Bettine (Hildegarde Neff), and driven home in a spot-on sequence making the audience feel like wide-eyed tourists as much as Susanne, familiar scenic sites quickly giving way to the reality of so much rubble and, eventually, the grim circumstances of the communist controlled East. Yet even if director Carol Reed waits to pull back the social mask, he nevertheless instantly conveys the East vs. West reality anyway upon Susanne’s arrival as we see the eye of a young boy with a bicycle just outside the airport peering through a window at Susanne, less an emblem of voyeurism than surveillance. Indeed, he seems to follow her everywhere she goes, the frequent side shots reminding us he lurks nearby, setting the visual tone, characters repeatedly peering out windows and from behind doors opened just a crack, evincing how everyone is being watched and how much here remains behind closed doors, waiting to erupt into the open, all of which Susanne gradually determines and then becomes swept up in. Not for nothing is the most intimate moment one Susanne shares with a man from the East, Ivo Kern (James Mason), during a snowy chase sequence in which they hide from their pursuers, as if Cold War Berlin only allows for intimacy in secrecy.

Though the prologue on the plane into Berlin suggests the rollercoaster to come, with a passenger gesturing at Susanne to buckle her seatbelt, simultaneously telling us to fasten ours, her lack of guile, conveyed in Bloom’s wide eyes, does not immediately grasp the dangerous situation into which she enters. As such, Reed waits to break out those “Third Man”-ish askew angles until much later when she’s knee-deep in the espionage muck. No, initially Susanne is all smiles, like an indelible nightclub scene where she catches Bettine suddenly turning sorrowful from something seemingly deep within. When Bettine notices Susanne, however, she twists her lips into a broad, forced grin, an indelible close-up cluing us and Susanne into the fact that something is rotten in the state of Berlin. What, exactly, Susanne doesn’t know, and if initially she suspects something romantically nefarious, the near constant presence of the boy with the bike, not to mention the general vibe “The Man Between” emits, it is never not clear Bettine’s secrets are something more, making Susanne’s haughtiness at sticking up for her brother feel like an elongated punchline. This marks the early pleasures of “The Man Between” as akin to John Le Carre, the narrative continually re-shaping, with Susanne thinking she knows what’s going on only to be told by whomever she’s called on the carpet that, no, she doesn’t know what’s going on and then after being told what’s going on comes to realize that she has no idea what’s going on still.

The who’s-it-what’s-it gradually gains focus as the action moves from west to east, where Bettine takes Susanne at her sister-in-law’s request, which is where they encounter Ivo, who seems attracted to this young Englishwoman. That attraction, alas, masks a dubious existence, one that involves kidnapping westerners and smuggling them to the east. When Susanne realizes she’s been duped, she aids West German intelligence in trying to nab Ivo, though it their ruse fails when Ivo gets tipped off, and she winds up kidnapped, albeit on accident, with Bettine the intended target at East German request. If it sounds terrifying, the way Bloom plays this kidnapping aftermath, however, does not suggest fear so much as intrigue, like the virginal character is sort of getting off on this cloak-and-dagger, which is as interesting at the film gets again.

That’s because as “The Man Between” makes it true transition from west to east and the city’s atmosphere grows that much gloomier, the narrative lets in just a little more sunshine as Susanne, in attempting to escape back to the city’s other side with Ivo’s help, falls in love with her helper. This love stems from her seeing the good in him, though that is merely said aloud by Susanne since neither the film nor Mason nor Bloom lend the idea much credence. Mason’s character helps her because he thinks overseeing a kidnapping going the opposite way over the wall will grant him full-time passage to the west, a devious motivation that Mason keeps playing to even as they are supposed to be falling in love, while the emergent kicks that Bloom’s character seems to be getting as she is pulled into the mystery deeper just evaporate, rendering a tonal paradox that Reed can’t overcome and leaving the conclusion with none of the tragic gloom the impressive location work otherwise imparts.