If I Could Attend One Table Read...

If there was a great scene in Ben Affleck’s sports-movie-in-disguise “Argo” it was when CIA specialist Tony Mendez (Affleck), operating undercover as a Hollywood producer of some absurd sci-fi opus giving the movie its title, arrives at The Beverly Hilton for the star-studded read-through. Affleck the director shoots Mendez’s limousine arrival in slow-motion which feels just right, exaggerating the exaggerated hoopla, and scores the sequence to Van Halen’s “Dance the Night Away”, a song in which the melody, Chuck Klosterman once observed, “captures the specific atmosphere of a June evening five minutes before twilight.” It always feels like June in L.A., and it looks like five minutes before twilight across the Hollywood Hills as Mendez strolls through done-up revelers on the hotel terrace. Whether this how read-throughs really go, I don’t know, though I doubt it. And when I first scrolled upon Matt Oswalt’s tweet, this scene “Argo” flitted through my mind before moving on to visions of other table reads. I’d be riding the train, listening to music, and suddenly a movie would pop into my head and I’d think: “I would have loved to see that table read!”

After you get through the overused Twitter jokes of silent movies (or: “A Quiet Place”) in Oswalt’s replies, you get some delightful suggestions, like “Soapdish” (which I didn’t think of) and “A Fish Called Wanda” (which I did). Kevin Kline must be dynamite reading a script through. A few Mel Brooks movies were cited, and so was “Dr. Strangelove”, a solid choice simply to have seen Peter Sellers going back and forth with himself. Then again, aren’t George C. Scott’s facial expressions the best thing about “Dr. Strangelove”? Would you get those when you’re just reading?

Someone answered Oswalt’s query with “Boogie Nights” and that one occurred to me straight away too. I mean, maybe the “Oleanna” table read would have been stunning with William H. Macy and Debra Eisenstadt going back and forth, but who wants to see a two-hander table read? I want my Hollywood read-through to be a kind of purposeful variety show with a hodgepodge of different performers popping up between bouts of the emcee reading the screenplay’s action. And “Boogie Nights” would have been one helluva a read-through revue.

I imagine a similar vibe for “The Big Lebowski.” I mean, you would’ve been in the room realizing Jeff Bridges was doing that before the rest of the world. Plus, there would have been Steve Buscemi occasionally interjecting between mostly turning pages. And I half-wonder if Julianne Moore flatly reciting the word “Vagina” would have been even funnier in an arid Marriott conference room. “Wag the Dog”, one of my favorite screenplays, might have made for priceless in-person eavesdropping too.

Someone offered Oswalt the option of a “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” table read for the opportunity to see a pair of unimpeachable divas – Bette Davis and Joan Crawford (Joan Crawford and Bette Davis?) – basically playing a “High Flying Bird”-ish bout of conversational one-on-one. That’s a good one, though I mind drifted to another Bette Davis selection, “All About Eve”, if only to see whether Marilyn Monroe stole that scene at the read-through just like she did in the movie, and if it made Bette Davis give her the side-eye.

On the flip side, imagine sparks flying between Olivia de Havilland and Errol Flynn at some conference table in Century City during the “Captain Blood” table read. Or imagine Bogey & Bacall going back and forth over Styrofoam cups of coffee during a read-through, though I’d prefer the read-through to be “Key Largo”, to make way for Claire Trevor and Edward G. too, sort of the best radio drama ever but with me in the room.

Steven Soderbergh’s sorely underrated, nigh masterpiece “Ocean’s Twelve” sort of was a table read, in so much as it was just a bunch of famous people cracking each other up for two hours for the benefit of the camera. God, I love that movie. That might be my choice for one table read to experience.

But it’s not. No, if I could go back in time and experience one table read, it would be “Bowfinger.” Maybe because – circling, spiritually, back around to “Argo” – the one table read I most want to see is the table read for “Chubby Rain.”

Roll Red Roll

Nancy Schwartzman’s documentary “Roll Red Roll” takes its name from the chant for the Steubenville, Ohio high school football team, which was at the center of the 2012 Steubenville, Ohio rape case, two of its players standing trial for the assault of an unnamed Jane Doe and eventually sentenced to juvenile prison. Her film opens with stomach-churning audio excerpts of cell phone recordings from the night in question of boys who witnessed or heard second-hand about the terrible act, as well as images of text messages, including one to Jane Doe, superimposed on the screen over shots of a mostly sleepy Steubenville main street. It’s an effective device, evoking not so much a peek behind the curtain but a full-fledged dredging up of the rot masked by ostensible small-town values, the kind often referenced to shield precisely what this court case so nauseatingly uncovered. If Jane Doe remaining as such in the documentary is a legal matter, it’s also aesthetically right. It’s about her, of course, but also about rape culture and how if it remains unchallenged it merely festers. A Steubenville local wonders, after protests erupt in their small downtown, how this could happen to their town, and “Roll Red Roll” answers that it’s been happening, that’s been there all along.

Text messages and cellphone recordings, as well as Tweets, are not just an aesthetic device, however. They prove to be a backbone of evidence. If a Steubenville football player says one thing, he is later summoned again to police headquarters and told in no uncertain terms that they know about the pictures he has of the accuser on his phone. Tweets, meanwhile, show that while people claimed to have no knowledge of a rape having taken place, that, in fact, they did, using that exact language, and often in harsh, sickening language. Much of this information was first uncovered by a crime blogger, Alexandria Goddiard, who combed through social media to find various posts on different platforms by Steubenville football players and students and pieced together the timeline of the night in question. Local detectives, led by J.P. Rigaud, who is interviewed throughout, reached the same conclusion, though whether these dueling amateur and professional investigations ever truly intertwined unfortunately remains unclear.

In this way, social media emerges as something almost akin to an inadvertently willful surveillance state, kids both knowingly and unknowingly documenting their every move and thought not so much for posterity’s sake as potential evidence. The ethical implications of Goddiard uploading this information to the Internet, and subsequently drawing the attention of the hacker group Anonymous which leaked a video that stamped a face to rape culture, are mostly glossed over in “Roll Red Roll’s” refusal to editorialize, leaving it all to feel as a natural consequence of the digital world in which teenagers immerse themselves. But even if you think the kids who were not present or not directly involved did not deserve public scrutiny, this footage is revealing nonetheless, evidence of the chickens coming home to roost, a cautionary tale you can virtually feel passing right by viewers even as they watch it.

If the un-accused males come across cruelly blithe in the digital evidence that Schwartzmann submits, one of the kids assumes an entirely different air in front of Rigaud, as seen in interrogation room footage, where the high camera placement evokes God’s eye, from whom nothing escapes. This teen’s suddenly meek tune is difficult not to compare and contrast with the footage of his team’s football coach – Reno Saccoccia – in his own interview with Riguad. Here you can virtually see where the behavior of a patriarchal forebearer trickles down to those he is charged with overseeing, initiating a vicious cycle in which everyone remains trapped, unable to escape from absent reflection, the kind that seems impossible in a place programmed to circle the wagons in the face of the slightest question and then close down once it’s been asked.

Near the beginning, we hear audio of a local radio D.J. issuing the sort of victim-blaming heard the world over. Much later, after the truth has emerged and been born out by the facts, he says he just wants it to go away, as despressing an evocation as you will find of the longstanding belief that if we simply close our eyes, rape culture will disappear.

At the Heart of Gold

Early in “At the Heart of Gold”, Erin Lee Carr’s HBO documentary examining the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal that engulfed and infected the United States Olympic Committee (USOC), USA Gymnastics (USAG), Michigan State University, and others, we see archival footage of the exalted moment at the 1996 Summer Olympics when American gymnast Kerri Strug landed a vault on an injured ankle cementing her team’s Gold Medal. As the injured Strug is helped off the mat, however, we suddenly realize one of those people helping her is Nassar, the national team’s medical coordinator. It not only reframes a significant American athletic moment, the suddenness of its presentation conveys the sensation of Nassar as a snake in the grass, always there, lurking, waiting to take advantage. Carr further evinces this idea by providing no overview of the scandal as the movie begins, but rather providing a brief history of the USA Gymnastics program and just segueing to Nassar without really segueing at all, his name appearing without warning in the interview of a former female gymnast, and then another, and then another, evoking the documentary’s structure as a metaphorical tidal wave, interview after interview of young women whom Nassar abused, mirroring his eventual trial when the number of women giving impact victims statements ballooned from 88 to 156. It’s virtually impossible to sit through so many testimonials and so much evidence and not come away certain of Nassar’s guilt, though that apparently still happens, as some interviewees attest, recounting the standard-issue protestations about payouts and the like. If you believe all 156, you believe 1; if you don’t believe 1 then you won’t believe 156.

The dozens of ex-gymnasts interviewed attest to identical methods by Nassar, simultaneously professional and evil in the way he would utilize massages and other suppose fitness techniques for avenues of abuse. As these painful stories are recounted, Carr frequently cuts to footage of apparent Nassar training videos in which he explains what he’s doing, in the sort of Pleasantville-ish voice, while demonstrating his methods on gymnasts whose faces remain off camera. Standing apart from everything else, it would be hard to look at this person and think him capable of what he was found guilty of doing. But Carr keeps going back this footage, again and again, not asking us to scrutinize these videos for evidence but challenging our perceptions, telling us that our eyes can deceive us, imploring us to believe the women being interviewed.

Though Carr allows for a moment when Nassar’s public defender deems the cycle of victim impact statements as akin to a mob, closer to truth than a viewer might want to admit given the moment when one gymnast’s father tries to attack in Nassar in court and is physically stopped, she also almost entirely forgoes any opposing voices in the form of the USOC, USAG, or Michigan State. But then, “At the Heart of Gold” takes care to portray gymnastics as a world where the athletes are, in the parlance of coach speak, broken down and built back up into people specifically taught not to ask questions but to do as they are told. In this light, it becomes easy to understand why they would have allowed Nassar to continue treating them, sometimes even in the basement of his own home, even when intrinsically they sensed it all along that it wasn’t right because mentally they had been conditioned to shut up and accept it.

One of the coaches shown to have not only employed Nassar but apparently ignored repeated warnings about his behavior was John Geddert, a former club coach and co-head coach of the 2012 USA Olympics Gymnastics team. Video shows him instructing a gymnast through an uneven bars routine, just as you frequently see in televised competition, though here the sound is not tamped down for viewers at home so that we can hear every word he says, basically speaking the routine out loud for her as she does it, as if without his accompanying voice she would just fall off. At movie’s end, Carr returns to Chelsea Zerfas, one of Nassar’s victims, who painfully but pointedly discusses people questioning how she could even stomach gymnastics after her ordeal. But she explains the sport is in and of itself still inherently beautiful and that what Nassar and his myriad enablers robbed from her, and all the rest, was that beauty, that love for what they did.

The movie closes on images of Zerfas performing a bar routine. Noticeably, no coach is there issuing orders; it’s just her and the bars.

Friday's Old Fashioned Flashes Back to the Eighties

It’s everyone’s favorite time of year! By which I mean, it’s this blog’s least favorite time of year. By which I mean, the dog days of summer (ugh). Even now, 20+ years after I graduated high school, August still conjures up that oh-my-God-there’s-only-a-month-til-school-starts-again dread. I hate August. And so I find myself, as I do every year at this time, nostalgically and cinematically returning to the decade of my youth – The 80s. Which is why this year once again Cinema Romantico’s “famed” Friday’s Old Fashioned column – the only classic film column on the internet named after bourbon, bitters, sugar, orange, and maraschino cherry – is going straight 80s for August, beginning a week from today, August 2nd, with a semi-festive 80s-ish kickoff on Thursday August 1st. Hawks gets traded in for Hughes. Jean Harlow takes a momentary respite to allow face time for Jean(ie) Bueller. Harold Lloyd cedes the stage to Lloyd Dobler. So crank the Teena Marie, crack a Capri Sun and climb into my blogging DeLorean. Onward.

Forgotten Great Moments in Movie History

Quentin Tarantino, it goes without saying, though it still needs to be said for context, loves movies. His original Big Kahuna Burger, “Reservoir Dogs”, lifted its Mr. Black/Mr. White/Mr. Pink nomenclature bit from “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” (1974). And “Pulp Fiction” was just sort of one rolling movie-themed carnival, with a part-cinema wax museum, of sorts, where you could order a Douglas Sirk steak, never mind an all-important, never-explained briefcase that might’ve been pilfered from the set of “Kiss Me Deadly” (1955). In the morning after Butch has gone rogue, even, while Fabienne brushes her teeth, she’s got a motorcyle movie playing in the background, a detail I always loved because in Q.T. land, even when you’re on the run and in danger of being killed, people still watch movies. “Inglorious Basterds”, meanwhile was set in the midst of WWII’s European Theatre but it may as well have been on a movie backlot, with the movie industry itself playing a crucial part and a glorious old Parisian movie theater earning a starring role. Heck, “Django Unchained” and “Kill Bill” just are Blaxploitation and Chop Socky, respectively, duplicated and then expanded into A Band Apart Pictures (taken from a movie!!!) bouillabaisse. And Q.T.’s latest, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”, as the title implies, seems more of the same.

For all his references and outright homages to movies, however, the one thing that Tarantino does not serve up in his movies so frequently is the act of going to the movies. I mean, yes, people go to the movies in “Inglorious Basterds”, memorably, allowing for Q.T. to imagine the movie-going experience as something like the savior of the free world, which is a pretty righteous ode to the cinema, though that’s much more heightened than what I’m talking about. I’m talking more about the scene in “True Romance”, which was directed by Tony Scott but written by Tarantino and so just as much his joint, where Clarence goes to a triple kung-fu feature on his birthday and then is joined by Alabama and where, despite her being paid to be there, him and his love for the movies and the movies themselves lifts her higher. Even that, though, is pitched at a more romantic frequency than what I’m seeking in this here post about I’m about to unfold.

One of my favorite lines in Tarantino’s “Jackie Brown” is bail bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster) announcing his intention to go catch a movie leading his second-in-command, Winston (Tiny Lister), to ask what he’s going to see. “Something that starts soon,” Max replies, “and looks good.” And I love that line for two reasons. I love that line because it flashes me back to another time, one when you’d just watch wander down to the movie theater and, well, as he says, see what starts soon and looks good. You didn’t check Fandango on your phone; you just looked at a few posters and made a decision. Primitive, perhaps, but thrilling in its own low-key way, putting your fate in the hands of the movie gods. And I love that line because it evokes this man, Max Cherry, who’s his own boss and if he wants, in the middle of the day, can up and go catch a movie. Damn, ain’t that the dream.

That moment, however, comes later in the movie, and Max is saying it as something of an alibi for what he is actually about to go and do – that is, help the eponymous airline stewardess swindle $500,000. Tarantino, however, has set up Max’s ersatz solo movie date with a real solo movie date much earlier, one that we see just as it concludes, beginning with a shot just outside of the movie theater, its door still closed.

But then, the door flies open accompanied by a rush of music, presumably from the closing credits of the unseen movie, and this smiling couple, in the throes of post-movie enjoyment, which is key.

And after that couple passes by, and then another couple patrons, Max exits.

And he walks past a poster for “The American President”-

-and “Wolf”, pinpointing the time.

And...that’s it. We see him leave the movie. This is all set-up so he can run into Jackie Brown at the mall where the movie theater is located, but it’s this brief instant, this leaving the theater that nevertheless stays with me.

“Jackie Brown”, after all, is a movie about motion. It begins with Jackie aboard an airplane walkway, just standing there and letting it take her where she needs to go as the opening credits unspool. Over and over Tarantino just watches people walk, whether it’s Ordell and Beaumont walking and talking or Max following the money or Jackie in a burst of faux-commotion hurrying through the mall or Louis and Melanie haplessly wandering through the parking lot looking for his car or even a brief shot of Ray Nicolette sauntering into the office with his motorcycle helmet tucked under his arm. But none of these walks compare to Max’s. There’s that Bloodstone song dug up for the soundtrack by Tarantino, “Natural High,” “I’ll take to the sky on a natural high”, and what is the post-movie walk but that exactly that.

Phase Infinity

After Purdue and Virginia’s epic NCAA Tournament regional final clash in March, I yearned for a Curry Kirkpatrick game story of it in Sports Illustrated, one of his pun-laden pieces of stylistic prose that lingered over the individual moments yielding the end result as much as the end result itself, less concerned with x equaled y monochrome specifics than the specific sensation aroused by the contest itself. Of course, Kirkpatrick has long since retired and Sports Illustrated is now just a brand, literally, the once legit, legendary literary mag recently purchased by the repugnantly named Authentic Brands Group who will undoubtedly finally drive, once and for all, this formerly proud institution that made me fall in love with the written word into the ground. Needless to say, no one writes game stories like SI once published. No, all I could find in the wake of Purdue v Virginia was AP-ish boilerplate with blah press conference quotes signifying absolutely nothing, or articles in the vein of Matt Norlander at CBS sports who took a pre-packaged storyline and built the game story around it. The latter evokes the late Paul Zimmerman, also of Sports Illustrated, who frequently lamented TV sports broadcasts telling you what the storyline of the game would be in advance (and who would literally call out blah press conference quotes in his pieces as signifying nothing); the game itself, as he said, produced the storyline, and once you unearthed the storyline then the game story became a means of reckoning with how and why it became the storyline and what that meant.

It is not that the game story has become an anachronism in an age when every sporting event is televised. No, game stories reached far beyond mere recaps; essentially they were theater criticism, an aesthetic appraisal of a game or event in which the appraisal sought to extract a deeper meaning, or lack thereof. That’s why, I realize now, those game stories were more my introduction to movie reviews than movie reviews themselves. I not only devoured those game stories when my Sports Illustrated came in the mail, I tried to ape them. After the first weekend of my first Winter Olympics in 1988, so overcome by the pairs figure skating short program routine of Ekaterina Goordevea and Sergei Grinkov, I took a prosaic crack at my first review, in a manner of speaking, trying to summarize the awe-inspiring experience of watching their routine in my crude 4th grade language. (This is the first time I’ve ever admitted this out loud.) Few writers who dabble in sports, though, aim for such contemplation, if they are even allowed the space to attempt it. Louisa Thomas can do it about tennis. Spencer Hall can do it about college football, even if he writes true game stories too infrequently.

That lack of game stories speaks to a tweet from earlier this year sent out by Nathaniel Friedman, who used to run Free Darko, a legendary NBA blog that has long since shuttered but once used its space to see the metaphysical side of sports. After Portland’s Damian Lillard sank in an impossibly deep buzzer beater to oust Oklahoma City from the NBA Playoffs this spring, Friedman essentially noted how the instant nature of everything in our current age prevents people from lingering over such spectacular individual moments. Rather than waxing discursively in print about it, people fire off a few tweets and move on, gobbling up the experience and searching for another one rather than reveling in the one they just went through. The invaluable Bryan Curtis mentioned this Friedman tweet on his Press Box podcast a few months ago in discussing whether movie reviews of “Avengers: Endgame” had any real point in the grand scheme. Fans, he and co-host David Shoemaker agreed, of the MCU (Marvel Comic Universe) were not looking for aesthetic appraisals of the film or the franchise. It’s the franchise itself, Curtis argued, the experience surrounding it, of going to it, that excites its legions of fans. That’s why, Shoemaker said, in Kevin Smith’s podcast “review” of “Endgame” he was essentially just reciting plot. To take the old Roger Ebert quote and twist it, it’s no longer how a movie is about something nor even what it’s about but just, like, what it is; it’s the thing itself, the product – all meaning is concluded with the production of the content in the first place.

I thought of that in the wake of Phase 4. That’s the latest series of films, apparently, to come out of the MCU, announced at San Diego Comic Con, with five movies coming in 2020 and 2021 from Marvel and five more, apparently, through the Disney Plus streaming service, a big reveal that kicked up as many fireworks, if not more, than the actual movies themselves probably will. It evoked the conclusion of the recent NBA season where a wonderfully weird, theatrical Finals roared briefly and then was quickly supplanted by free agency, the entire league shifting so seismically and swiftly that it’s as if everything that happened before went up in a puff of smoke. The finer details of that Finals, the twists and turns, the plays and players, all the splendid moments that yielded the end result, just sort of fell by the wayside as everyone moved, rapidly, on to the next thing.

My observations here about the state of the movie industry are not new. After all, we have long known Phase 4 was coming, and anyway, you don’t have to watch Marvel movies, as faux-edifying tweets will always scold, until you look at the movie times for the summer of 2019 and realize Phase 1 and 2 and 3 have, sure enough, phased out Hollywood’s middle class; go big or stay home and watch Netflix, I guess. Mark Harris saw all this coming in his vital 2014 Grantland piece The Birdcage which in the wake of Marvel’s rollout for Phase 3 (“at a fan-service event that had every bit of the importance and money-consciousness of a shareholders’ meeting,” Harris wrote) led him to predict a Hollywood built not from any “evident love of movies” or “joy in creative risk” but “spreadsheets, P&L statements, demographic studies, risk-avoidance principles, and a calendar.” We’re here: in the thick of The Birdcage. And if the future has always been a place to look when the present has seemed too much to bear, I’m unsure where to look when the future is consciously designed to just be more of the present, and vice-versa, an endless and noisy echo drowning out everything else, a business model that accounts for everything except a sense of discovery, the meaning and storyline conferred beforehand, nothing left to appraise but the full-fledged arrival of our Disney overlords. After all, Phase 5 is already planned.

NYE Resolution: Mid-July Update

Loyal frustrated followers might recall that back in January, in the early days of 2019, which still felt a lot like 2018 to me, which felt oddly akin to 2017, and so on,  Cinema Romantico made one New Year’s Resolution and one New Year’s resolution only — that was, to rewatch “Once Upon a Time in the West.” And yet, while waiting for the righteous Steppenwolf production of Sam Shepard’s “True West” to start, when the pre-show music cued up Ennio Morricone’s “Man With a Harmonica” theme, I suddenly realized that to this point in 2019 I have not watched “Once Upon a Time in the West”, marking it as akin to most any New Year’s Resolution, made with a cocky gleam in the eye of winter only to realize in the heat and humidity of summer that, alas, the promise of the resolution has begun to wilt.

I have 162 days left to complete this resolution of course, plenty of time. But then, when you realize I have already wiled away 203 days in 2019 and have managed to watch “Valentine in the Vineyard” but not rewatch “Once Upon a Time in the West”, the pressure is suddenly on. See you in December.

Top Gun 2: Now or Then?

As “Top Gun” concluded, rather than fading to black, director Tony Scott chose to first roll his main cast’s credits over an accompanying live action image of each one, as if taking care to freeze that persona in time. That was appropriate. “(Tom) Cruise is Maverick. And Maverick is America, at least America back in the go-go 80s,” wrote Chris Nashawaty for Entertainment Weekly, a quote I referenced in my 2014 argument that “Top Gun” was the quintessential 80s movie, wholly, specifically of its time, a sort of maximalist the-present-is-so-bright-I-have-to-wear-sunglasses that defined the Reagan Administration – America, Now More Than Ever. In that way, “Top Gun” should have remained sequel-less; it is 1986, forever and ever. Then again, this is now, 2019, when not only is our dearth of creative cinematic ideas leading to a proliferation of ho-hum sequels but where much of America seems gripped by a political and social fetishization of 80s styled gung-ho patriotism, which is underlined in America’s current Man in Charge being a product of the Me Decade. And that might well make the “Top Gun” sequel, set for a 2020 release, the perfect movie to comment on our strange times.

The trailer that dropped last week for “Top Gun 2”, however, doesn’t look all that much like Now. Yes, it’s got Now Tom Cruise, but Tom Cruise of Now goes to great lengths to stay Forever Young which is fine for an “M:I” movie where escalation by way of repetition – even if directors change – is the point but oddly unsettling when pointedly flashing ahead 33 years. Why we see Maverick pull the cover off a motorcycle and go for a ride alongside a runway right straight into the sunset of nostalgia. But that’s not all. The trailer includes a brief shot of a volleyball game, sure enough, and a quick sliver of what appears to be a Goose-styled singalong at a Kanas City Barbeque-style joint, wouldn’t you know it, and, my God, even the light filtering across Tom Skerritt – er, Ed Harris’s – face there at the start makes it look like they haven’t changed the style of window blinds at the Naval Weapons Fighter School since, well, 1986. This looks suspiciously like fan service, “Top Gun” as “Solo: A Star Wars Story”, a narrative more chock full of Easter eggs than new ideas because all we want is what we already had which I thought was why we had home video but maybe the movie theater is the new VCR?

Of course, that in and of itself could become the ultimate commentary. Right? Make Hollywood Great Again by just playing the hits, whether earnestly or ironically, montages and machismo of a whole new generation. And that’s why we must reserve judgment until release. And anyway, even if intellectually my eyes rolled in the face of one more sequel whose makers seemed to have fallen asleep during the litany of “Great Gatsby” book reports, emotionally I felt a quiver in my heart when I heard the apparent update on Harold Faltermeyer’s score. “I can’t wait to see this,” I thought. In the end, I guess, I’m just like everyone else.

Some Drivel On...The Dish

Last year a mini-brou-ha-ha erupted after Damien Chazelle’s Neil Armstrong character study “First Man” scrubbed showing him planting the American flag during the 1969 moon landing. But at the beginning of this year’s BBC podcast “13 Minutes to the Moon”, Michael Collins, something of an expert on the lunar mission, stated he never understood why their achievement was swaddled in so much nationalism, explaining that on his and Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s worldwide tour afterwards everyone forewent saying you did it, opting for “we did it” instead. That global spirit is evoked in Rob Sitch’s comedy “The Dish” (2000), a personal favorite since the day it brightened my mood on a particularly scorching, miserable summer day when I lived in Phoenix, recounting the role Parkes, Australia’s observatory radio telescope played in Apollo 11 communication and transmitting its lunar images to TV. Granted, the film’s jokes skew as predictable as the era-appropriate soundtrack, but there is still an overriding sunny air that sticks with you, scenes frequently opting out of a comical capper for a cheery one. Indeed, if liberties are taken to enhance the drama, “The Dish” remains earnest, never artifical, the climactic moment of getting the satellite into position no different than the age-old notion of getting up the courage to ask someone out.

Both the worldwide spirit and the script’s commitment to hoary chestnuts are made plain in the quartet manning the observatory: solemn but warm Cliff Buxton (Sam Neill), anxious yet intelligent Glenn (Tom Long), boffo Mitch (Kevin Harrington), and the stiff-necked man from NASA, Al (Patrick Warburton). In their obvious dueling airs, the last two butt heads immediately, though rather than drawing this out to interminable lengths, Sitch moves it aside early when they both buck up and make nice, a demonstration of “The Dish’s” charity. This accord happens after Cliff rightly calls Mitch out, perhaps “The Dish’s” high point. “We are in the middle of the greatest feat ever attempted,” Cliff declares as the camera cuts to a momentous-underlining close-up. “And what are you doing? Standing around bitching.” It moved me then; it takes my breath away now, a prescient rebuke of our anti-everything present.

That scene epitomizes Neill’s performance, his voice rising only when necessary, otherwise not so much fading into the background as existing like the warm glue binding not just the team but all of Parkes together. That includes the Mayor (Roy Billing) who doesn’t bristle when his assistant hints at his boss’s political grandstanding but expresses honest shock. And even if the Prime Minister’s (Bille Brown) eventual arrival in Parkes underlines the toll politics can take, “The Dish” prefers the Mayor’s optimism, perhaps even to its Pollyannish detriment. This is a movie, after all, where a teenage band practicing for the ball to honor the American ambassador gets the plug pulled after a few bars of “Purple Haze” by some reactionary. The closest the “The Dish” gets to dissent is the Mayor’s daughter, Marie (Lenka Kripac), who has a Jimi Hendrix poster tacked to her bedroom wall and views the moon mission more as an exercise in government-funded egotism. This, alas, is played for amusement, merely a pesky teenager who Thinks Too Much About Things, an unfortunate misstep, meanness that doesn’t seem to know it’s mean in an otherwise compassionate movie, where even the détente she reaches with Al at the end of a Sunday roast is more about humoring her than taking her seriously.

Then again, a mid-movie montage is scored to The Youngbloods’ famed hippie anthem “Get Together”, including a scene at church, suggesting a kind of cosmic middle ground for the traditionalists and the free spirits, furthered in the predictable if still sweet moment where Marie lets the aspirant soldier next door watch the moon landing with her. And the ultimate drama of the landing stems from wondering whether Parkes will simply be able to fulfill its role, which is where a sense of local and national pride emerges, though that manifests itself less as drum-beating than simply overcoming fears of, in Cliff’s words, “stuffing it up.” And that fear is what makes the film’s biggest narrative stretch, in which Parkes briefly loses the Apollo 11 signal and lies about it, ring true anyway. Al reluctantly goes in for the ruse that arises to fool the American Ambassador (John McMartin), though, thankfully, the American Ambassador is not portrayed as a fool. He’s not portrayed as arrogant either, two stereotypes dispensed. When the teenage band at the ball mixes up the United States’ National Anthem, in fact, he hardly minds. Ah, if all Americans could be so chill.

No, Australians and Americans are on equal footing here, not because they are told to be but because the event around which they coalesce lifts them up, emblemized in how frequently the movie is just about settling down to watch people watch the moon landing television coverage, reveling in the awe and elation on their faces.

Memes Unlimited

If a meme was, as Richard Dawkins first defined it in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, and as James Gleick put it for The Smithsonian Magazine, connecting the evolution of genes to the evolution of ideas, it was only inevitable that those ideas would mutate into something else over time since that mutation was Dawkins’s whole point in the first place, even if that mutation took a different form than he might like. Indeed, in the 1990s Mike Godwin established a law that has taken his name, one stipulating that the longer an online discussion goes, the greater the probability that a N*zi or H*tler comparison will emerge, which, one might argue, crystallizes our current American peril. Memes, though, have taken other, less outright evil forms in the Internet age, a little less like the evolution of ideas and more like the evolution of inanity. If Tweets and texts have replaced letters and fully formed thoughts then memes by way of GIFS have replaced Tweets and texts. Why actually reply to someone with words online when you can still, now, in 2019, go to the dry well of that cat furiously clicking the keyboard GIF in moments of extreme online stress or offer congratulations via that GIF of Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Great Gatsby” raising his glass. Never mind that one blogging idiot who conveys his current state of mind not with words but screen shots of Keira Knightley doing things. (Seriously, give it up, dude.)

keira knightley finds out about this idiot’s meme of her

The Leo meme is instructive. If Jay Gatsby’s lavish parties belie the American Dream’s emptiness, as any grade school book report should be able to attest, the memeification of Gatsby making a toast to accompany one of those hollow soirees is at odds with the actual image’s intent. It is further evidence of the Internet Killed Irony argument, just like the oft-used Nod of Approval Meme is culled from Robert Redford’s “Jeremiah Johnson” (1973), a movie in which a war veteran walks into the wilderness and remains there, its 1973 release predating the online echo chamber but nevertheless foreshadowing a future where people of a certain variety yearn for the last place on earth without human noise, only marking this mountain man meme as all the more rich. This dumb bit of Internet comedy, however, took an unexpected twist when it was recently uncovered that a good chunk of the online community replicating it had no idea the person in the image was Redford, let alone that the movie was “Jeremiah Johnson.” What they thought it was – “Cry Wilderness” from “Mystery Science Theater 3000”? – seems less important than what it seems to say about our current cinematic state.

At my showing of “Toy Story 4”, across the aisle and one row up, a mom stood up and snapped a photo with her phone of her children watching “Toy Story 4.” She did not do this before the movie. She did not do this during the coming attractions. She did this DURING THE MOVIE. Forget for a moment the egregious example of moviegoing etiquette she is setting for her own children and consider how, in this example of egregious movie-going etiquette, she is reducing the film on the screen to a mere prop undoubtedly in service of a Facebook for Instagram post. “Toy Story 4” becomes nothing but a hashtag to help expedite the likes. That flashed me back to the screening of “The Trip to Italy” My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I attended in 2014. At the end, as an indelible Mediterranean sunset filled the screen, a patron down front and to our left, held up her phone and snapped a photo. My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I debated about the point of this photo. Was it just a keepsake? Was she going to share it online to show she’d been at the movie? Was she going to pass the photo off as her own?

In the end, it doesn’t matter. This picture, like the “Toy Story 4” family photo, diminishes the whole big screen experience to a personal instant Polaroid. I’m surprised the woman at “The Trip to Italy” didn’t slide in front of the screen to have her friend take a picture, like the big screen was one of those giant cutout boards at an amusement park where you and yours put your faces into some pre-made board and become a prairie family on the Oregon Trail, or something, which is probably our next level of god-awful future. And that’s essentially what memes are doing too. They are not Youtube clips which are, at least, in their own way, appreciations of the films from which they are taken. And they are not rap samples, which are borrowed, yes, but frequently form the sonic backbone of a song (like Tribe Called Quest sampling Art Blakely on “Excursions”). No, memes are disassembling existing images in service of something like a cinematic chop shop, not just ridding them of their original meaning but stripping them of all context, selling them as something else. And though it’s possible I am merely a Grumpy Gus trying to ruin everyone’s online fun, I nevertheless fear a future where what you call movies I call screensaver slideshows.

In Memoriam: Rip Torn

If we are going to talk about Rip Torn, we are obligated to start with how he talked. That voice was one of a kind. I’m tempted to deem it garbled but garbled elicits the impression that it was unintelligible and that’s not right. It was sort of like his own language in that way where it might take you a few minutes to get acclimated to someone’s native tongue but once you do, you lock right into the frequency. He was born in Texas and went to school in Texas and so he had a distinct southern drawl, one where as far back as “The Cincinnati Kid” (1965), one of Torn’s earliest film roles after studying at the Actor’s Studio in New York, he still sounds very much like a slippery southern quasi-gentleman. Flash ahead fifteen years, though, to the 1980s, when I first became aware of his presence, probably in “The Beastmaster” (1982), if I’m remembering right, and that already raspy voice had acquired a kind of idiosyncratic yet potent croak, frequently seeming to take the form of a parrot’s caw, like if a parrot was doing the imitation of a slippery southern quasi-gentleman. (His voice’s closest analog, frankly, is probably Elaine Stritch at her most withering.) In “Dodgeball” (2004), where Torn appeared as a foul-mouthed mentor, director and co-star Ben Stiller took great pains to invent a gravelly speaking style all his own, while Alan Tudyk was literally just trying to talk like a pirate, though neither of their studious pretend voices could contend with Torn’s real one. When Torn asks “Is it necessary for me to drink my urine?”, the line is meant to demonstrate his character having a screw loose, though the way Torn says it, running all the syllables of “urine” into one another, says it even more.

It was the kind of voice that could innately embody a gleeful lack of scruples, which is why Michael Mann cast him for a bit part as in “The Insider” (1999) as the public relations guy trying to browbeat the whistle-blower, his character’s whole smug air accounted for in the way Torn tells someone on the other end of the phone about telling Peter Jennings something. And Torn’s voice, no doubt, is partially why Sofia Coppola enlisted him as Louis XV in “Marie Antoinette” (2006) even if he didn’t speak French (no one did); it allowed for the aristocracies of France and the American South to intrinsically dovetail. In the latter, his voice just as effortlessly embodied a necessary monarchal pompousness, and that pompousness is what you heard in his brief turn for Curtis Hanson’s “Wonder Boys” (2000) playing a celebrated author giving a big talk in a college town. Torn famously fought with Norman Mailer for real in the latter’s “Maidstone” (1970), which I have not seen, and it’s not difficult to imagine that whatever ticked him off about Mailer found its way into how he played that author, Q Morewood. “What is the bridge from the water’s edge of inspiration to the far shore of accomplishment?” he rhetorically asks. “Faith.” And boy does Torn make you believe Morewood believes his own bullshit.

Not that Torn’s voice was simply a device to be full of itself. In Albert Brook’s comic fantasy “Defending Your Life” (1991), Torn plays a D.A. in something like Purgatory, seeking to argue his client’s case for Heavenly Judgement, playing the script’s notion that people on Earth only use 5% of their brains to the hilt. It’s fashionable, and not wrong, to say “Idiocracy” (2006) predicted our present, but Torn’s inadvertently egotistical incredulousness at having to deal with someone so dumb sort of presaged how Luke Wilson’s accidental hero dealt with an Earth of imbeciles. And in “Men in Black” (1997), as the eponymous agency’s chief, Torn razzed Will Smith’s alien-tracking newbie like a son-in-law, his baritone so patently distinct that at one point Smith’s character actually comments on it out loud. (“We’re not hosting an intergalactic kegger.”) And though Smith has, like, 47 extraordinary line readings, Torn might well still win best line reading in show. “Congratulations. You’re all we’ve come to expect from years of government training,” he says with all kinds of weariness from a lifetime of bureaucracy baked in.

Rip Torn died last week at the age of 88. In one of those infinite cosmic semi-coincidences, not a week earlier, I was playing the Eighties Edition of Trivial Pursuit at a friend’s house. One of the questions, demonstrating the severity of the Eighties-ness, posed involved naming a movie about a burned-out air traffic controller named Jack Chester. Even though it was every woman/man for her/himself, I tried to give my friend Willie a hint by explaining that no movie blog loved this movie more than Cinema Romantico. This hint did not help. Nevertheless, we come now to “Summer Rental” (1985), generally forgotten outside of this blog and, apparently, Trivial Pursuit 80s Edition, which starred John Candy as aforementioned Jack Chester, who gets back in the groove by learning to sail with the help of Torn’s Scully, proprietor of a resort town saloon.

The name conspicuously denotes a pirate and the costuming emphasizes it, with Torn’s durag, tricorn and hook for a hand. Yes. A hook. The hook is not completely explained, which feels right if only because this character, this person, who seems cut from a historical adventure novel existing in 1985 right alongside John Candy is never completely explained. And Torn, nigh unbelievably, plays to that enigma, wielding his above-mentioned vocal pirate caw so slyly that we never know if he’s putting us on or completely sincere. The character gets no backstory so it’s hard to say. And yet, if so much of the movie, particularly the back half, is littered with these little moments that surprisingly resonate with unexpected weight and empathy, none resonate more than aforementioned Jack Chester beseeching Scully if he knows what it’s like to wile away one’s Second Age. Torn’s reply improbably suggests that he does, creating Scully’s backstory out of thin air, as if he put on this costume to make an escape.

Apollo 11

Because NCAA Basketball’s climactic Final Four (stay with me!) is such a mega event, press row, where sportswriters and sportscasters sit, fills both sides of the court, meaning that frequently, if you know who you’re looking for, some sportswriters will pop up in the background of camera shots. That happened at some Final Four game, though I can’t place which one, involving Kentucky where the camera cut close to the team’s head coach John Calipari while in the background, for a moment, you could see The Athletic’s Nicole Auerbach at her laptop on press row, roll her eyes and shake her head and almost seem to exhale in that way you do when muttering something like “idiot” under your breath. Because it’s Present Day, many people mentioned this moment to her on Twitter afterwards, and she indicated she did not remember it nor what she was thinking and what might have caused it. I thought of that moment when, in “Apollo 11”, Todd Douglas Miller’s documentary of the first manned mission to the moon in July 1969, after several panoramic shots of crowds having gathered around Cape Canaveral to watch the launch of the Saturn V rocket, not inconspicuously evoking Woodstock, as if flower children and red-blooded Americans have spiritually merged, we cut to a close-up of a man in a lawn chair sipping a can of Busch Light. I would swear this man has a “This better be worth it” expression, but who knows? Who knows what he was really thinking?

This is a split-second that nevertheless encapsulates “Apollo 11.” Because Miller, in gaining access to never-before-seen footage and audio recordings of the eponymous mission, forgoes accentuating it with talking heads or off-screen interviews, limiting detailed information to barebones graphics or the solemn intonation of Walter Cronkite. The latter naturally emits the air, then, of a television broadcast, and that is why Miller’s documentary suggests Brett Morgen’s “June 17, 1994”, which culled television images of the day in question, all from various sporting events, where literally or philosophically, centered around O.J. Simpson’s White Bronco chase down the L.A. freeway. Morgen’s intent, however, was to show not so much life as we live it but life lived through the prism of a TV set, his editors essentially functioning as the remote control, flipping us around, his access to behind the scenes footage only making clearer how much of what is shown can be easily manipulated. Miller, on the other hand, removes that filter, creating something akin to direct cinema, an evocation of reality as close as it can possibly be.

It’s not verité, not like Damien Chazelle elicited through his space-set scenes in “First Man”, though the space footage of “Apollo 11”, unbroken and frequently obfuscated shots of Earth or, breathlessly, the dark side of the Moon through the spacecraft’s compact windows often makes clear just how right Chazelle got it. No, Miller knocks that wall away. And that’s why his most conspicuous misstep involves the astronauts themselves, whom we do not even see at first, Miller first lingering over the immensity of the Saturn V itself, the scale harmonizing with the gaggle of white-shirted NASA men at mission control, before cutting to Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, already in their spacesuits, all these images taken in tandem suggesting no one is more important than the other. And as the three space pioneers wait for transportation to the launch pad, we briefly see Armstrong just, like, staring into space, a shot rhyming with the Busch Light sipping man from earlier.

The other day, waiting at the corner of Illinois & Columbus, four firetrucks sped by, a big blaze having broken out somewhere, and as the last truck passed, I saw a firefighter seated backwards, his hood already in place, but not looking concerned nor determined but...contemplative? His hand was in his jaw and, hand of God, he looked just like Armstrong did in that “Apollo 11” moment, equally unreadable. What was that fireman thinking? What was Armstrong thinking before he flew to the freaking moon? And that is why, just after seeing this shot of Armstrong, Miller suddenly inserting archival footage of the three lunar-bound astronauts, like home movies and black and white photos, is a violation of his direct cinema approach, momentarily, jarringly, oddly inserting his directorial presence and telling us what to think.

While Miller does end on JFK’s immortal declaration of “we choose to go to the moon”, the event is not necessarily being politicized despite scenes of NASA men waving American flags as they break out cigars and even the astonishing audio of mission control discussing the news of the day – Chappaquiddick. That’s because the latter feels profound in a different way, part of the reality surrounding the reality of the moon landing, life just going on. And so at the documentary’s end, aboard the aircraft carrier where the three astronauts return after their water landing, even if we do see President Nixon there to greet them, the shot remains wide, and gets wider still, allowing the President to just blend into the crowd, another reveler, his thoughts as hard to interpret as those of pre-flight Neil Armstrong and the nameless man sipping Busch Light.

Wild Rose

There’s that scene in “Walk the Line” when Johnny Cash auditions for Sun Records with some run-of-the-mill gospel tune and gets dressed down by Sam Phillips for not singing what’s really in his heart. The moment, never mind the dialogue, is, like a lot of the movie, a bit purple, but the point remains. And then Johnny sings “Folsom Prison Blues” and the rest is history. Of course, “Walk the Line” only shows a little of what led to this moment because it’s a comprehensive biopic spanning years. Tom Harper’s “Wild Rose”, on the other hand, a fictional film about a burgeoning country (not western) singer in Glasgow named Rose-Lynn Harlan (Jessie Buckley), is beholden to no such limitations and so the film essentially builds to its own version of that Sam Phillips showdown. And if considerable drama on the way to that rousing climax is ripped from the Inspirational Movie playbook, the screenplay by Nicole Taylor proves far more clever, using those expectations against us, not skewering them but gently usurping them.

Rose-Lynn is released from prison on a heroin rap as “Wild Rose” opens, which in its rapid-fire edits of her strutting around in white cowboy boots and white fringe jacket comes across like a triumphant music video, culminating in her return to the Glasgow’s Grand Ole Opry, where the people in charge seem less than excited to her, brought home in how Buckley frequently plays the part full of herself, like the aspiring country stardom she constantly cites is just her God given right. Her entitlement is as flagrant as the “three chords and the truth” tattoo on her forearm, enough to make you wince, to think, does the movie really believe this? It doesn’t, thankfully, not entirely, brought home when she tacks a map of Nashville to her bedroom wall. In that moment, pointedly stripped of her country (not western) costuming, she looks less like a ball-breaker than a young girl, and Nashville looks so far away.

Rose-Lynn’s attitude is contrasted against her being a mother, of a little girl and a little boy, ages eight and five, who are in the care of her mother (Julie Walters) and who she goes to see after getting sprung from the clink only after having drunk a beer and shagging her boyfriend, shining a harsh if effective light on where her kids stack up in the order of things. Her boy being reduced to just screaming things like “I hate you!” while slamming doors and her girl hardly able to talk at all might denote ignoring the hard work of turning pre-teen characters into real people, true, but it still works by putting into perspective how they don’t really know their mom as mom. If everywhere else Buckley is kinetically, even frightfully at times, alive, in scenes with her kids she shrinks, hunching over, and almost lets her mouth fall open in a way suggesting she wants to say something but doesn’t know how to speak to them at all. And occasionally the resentment that builds up in Buckley’s eyes, and the editors going to close-ups in those moments, even lets the notion uncomfortably hang in the air that she doesn’t want these kids at all.

This family responsibility, then, exerts dramatic pressure on her country singing dream, much more so than the foible of not knowing someone in the industry, one which gets cleared up right quick when Rose-Lynn takes a job cleaning house for Susannah (Sophie Okonedo). The labor such a job entails is forgotten almost straight away when Rose-Lynn is caught in the midst of an “All the Right Moves”-ish solo dance party, instantly cluing Susannah into her employee’s talent and thereby finding ways to help her dream of going to Nashville come true. Susannah might exist merely as a conduit to Rose-Lynn’s aspirations, but Okonedo’s deft performance nevertheless brings the character to life, playing the part with a good-humored eagerness that suggests despite obvious love for her own children she is still pining for some, any, artistic fulfillment. And even if Susannah’s career aid comes easily, it also slyly plays up the class divide, demonstrating how little it takes for the rich to summon assistance when necessary.

“Wild Rose” seems to be trekking along a predictable path of uplift, right down to the False Crisis. But just when it seems to be ramping up for the big ending, Harper and Taylor make a helluva move, damn near dissolving with Rose-Lynn still in her fantasy. That would have been chutzpah, and part of me is still a little disappointed that it didn’t, though what it does do is strong enough. Early on Taylor’s script plants the seed that Rose-Lynn is just a singer, not a writer, dovetailing with how loudly the character can talk even if at the most crucial moments she doesn’t know what to say. And as the movie concludes with Rose-Lynn taking the stage, she finds her voice.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Ride the High Country (1962)

Sam Peckinpah’s “Ride the High Country” (1962) opens with the camera looking down on a street in Hornitos, California through which Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) rides his horse. McCrea was a Western staple, of course, and each of those roles feeds directly into the character of Steve, his bolo tie giving him a stately presentation while the conspicuous grey hair on his temples evokes the time it takes to earn that stature. It’s easy to assume, for us and for him, an ex-lawman known for cleaning up tough towns, the cheering throng lining this street are there for him. That’s why Steve waves at them, almost despite himself, only to then be nearly run off the road as a race between horses and a camel barrel in behind and then past him like he’s not even there. It’s a bizarre, comical image, one implicitly suggesting the world passing him by. It is, after all, the early days of the 20th and any motion of the noble cowboy has melted along with California’s milk and honey.

Steve has shown up for a job guarding a shipment of gold High Sierra mining camp back down to Hornitos, one, alas, he cannot do on his own, causing him to enlist an old colleague, Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott), reduced to a huckster running a rigged pistol shooting game, suggesting the grizzled Impresario of “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” if he’d been Wyatt Earp in a previous life. Gil signs up and brings along a young buck named Heck (Ron Starr) who demonstrates his worth in a bar fight, a playful scene belying Peckinpah’s patented and emergent no holds barred nastiness. Indeed, though the scenery is spectacular and frequently feels untouched there is a moral rot to the land, one that a certain kind of western would have blithely disregarded, which makes it all the more profound that characters played by these two stalwarts of the genre are forced to confront it, as if McCrea and Scott are answering for the mythos they helped sculpt.

That rot is evinced when they spend the night on the farm of Joshua Knudsen (R.G. Armstrong). He might tithe one egg to the men out of respect to the Lord, but he overcharges them for the rest, suggesting that Christian doctrine and business principles do not mix, and domineers his daughter Elsa (Mariette Hartley), essentially considering all men beneath her even if she’s engaged to a miner, Billy Hammond (James Drury), at the same camp where Steve and company are headed to pick up gold. The name Joshua evokes the movie’s Biblical bent, not just in he and Steve exchanging bullets by way of out-of-context Bible verses, as if prophesizing a modern-day phenomenon, but Steve later explaining his life’s mission is to enter “my house justified”, paraphrasing the Book of Luke and transforming Scripture a personal code. That’s why when later that night in the barn Heck kisses Elsa and then won’t stop kissing her even as she asks him to, Steve sets his wayward colleague straight.

Then again, this moment foreshadows Elsa’s forthcoming plight by summarizing a woman’s place in this man’s world, which is why she’s dressed like one when we first meet her, working on the farm, as if such manual labor might cause her ovaries to fall out. She is pointedly portrayed as having no agency, which becomes viciously clear when she flees from her father and catches up to Steve, Gil, and Heck, going along with them to Coarse Gold Mine Camp to wed Billy. The camp, however, lives out its name to a tee, populated not just by Billy but all his brothers, louts improbably evoking Pete Hogwallop and Delmar O’Donnell of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” filtered through the brutal villains of Peckinpah’s own later film “Straw Dogs”, as if the greed of the gold rush has mutated these men into vulgar sadists. If Steve, Gil and Heck detect straight away the sort of scum they’re dealing with, the same can’t be said of Elsa (Mariette Hartley), who allows herself to be whisked back to Hornitas and married in a ceremony that quickly becomes clear is more about officially deeming her personal property of all The Hammond Brothers than Billy’s wife.

Her fate becomes intertwined with that of the gold, a shipment that Gil and Heck long to steal, a plot which Steve divines before it can play out. As a reprisal looms from the Brothers Hammond, however, for these do-gooders having absconded with Billy’s bride, Steve needs his old friend’s help, a back and forth that both is and isn’t as simple as right and wrong but much more murky, evoked in the black hat that Steve wears and the white one adorning Gil’s head. Indeed, the marriage might well be legal, and Steve might well be a man who bends toward the law, but he also knows right and wrong, an internal code that Steve verbalizes, yes, and that McCrea also just possesses in his dignified air. That the judge who married them is drunk suggests the view “Ride the High Country” takes toward the letter of the law, ruling in favor of the spirit of the law instead, an ethos evinced in the closing shot, a pan up to a mountain peak, the doorframe of the Lord’s house Steve is about to enter, content, at least, in his own heart.

Toy Story 4

When we last left our gaggle of toy buddies, they had been boxed up by their beloved college-bound owner Andy and gifted to Bonnie (Madeleine McGraw), ensuring them a new playmate rather than an eternity gathering dust in the attic. If it seemed a logical and satisfying place to leave the Pixar “Toy Story” series, these movies have always been about charting the bends in the river of life through the animated perspective of toys, and the existential crises accompanying each one, and so it only makes sense that the second act of these toys’ lives would involve as many complications as the first. And while the adventures of Josh Cooley’s “Toy Story 4” bear conspicuous similarities to the previous ones, there are just enough new ideas to see it through, not to mention new characters, the latter profoundly explicating a toy’s life cycle.

It’s no accident, of course, that the preeminent toy of this universe is Woody (Tom Hanks), a Sheriff, symbolically establishing him as the gang’s leader, despite constant questions about his place in the hierarchy. As “Toy Story 4” opens, Woody is stowed away in the closet by Bonnie in favor of Dolly (Bonnie Hunt), meaning she rules the roost. I thought of the late great Roger Ebert’s line about John Ford’s “Red River”, men under the big sky with a job to do, suggesting that job gave them life, and how Woody emotionally deflates, as he has throughout the series, without one, an emotional pickle that Hanks the voice actor is tailor-made to suffer, his words bursting forth in half-laughs so eagerly that you can hear the desperation seeping through, adding cosmic profundity because Hanks is America’s Dad, like even America’s Dad is in danger these days of being laid off.

But Woody, always a boy scout as much as a lawman, seeing Bonnie’s fear at the first day of kindergarten in one of those majestic Pixar shots demonstrating the expressiveness of animation, stows away in her backpack and then, in a moment literally bringing to life the notion of toys as transitional objects, gathers unwanted accoutrement from the trash and leaves it for Bonnie to find as she proceeds to create a new friend by way of a toy from scratch, a spork retrofitted with pipe cleaners, christening him Forky (Tony Hale). In being salvaged from the trash, however, that’s how Forky sees himself: as trash. He spends his first scenes trying to return there, only to have Woody re-salvage him, innately illuminating the eternal dividing line between what a child and a parent think constitutes mere junk while improbably addressing pervasive questions about purpose through cutlery.

Not that a movie like “Toy Story 4” lingers in the bleak depths. If for no other reason than to keep the plot moving, and then continued by sometimes contrived means that nevertheless paint a comically deft picture of Bonnie’s dad (Jay Hernandez) being brought to the stressful edge, her family departs for an RV road trip. Not long into it, Forky hurls himself out the motor home window, prompting Woody to go after, the two of them vanishing into the void together. Later, when pressed by Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) why he went to such heroic lengths, Woody cites his inner voice, causing Buzz to confuse the official Buzz Lightyear slogans programmed into his voice box as own inner voice, spot-on sardonic humor suggesting vacuous inspirational quotes tacked to the walls of some Fortune 500 behemoth.

Woody’s philosophical pep talk convincing Forky of his self-worth proves more effective, persuading him to catch up with Bonnie and her family at an RV park. Yet if that sounds simple, “Toy Story 4” gets sidetracked even as it comes alive when Woody and Forky enter a nearby antique store where the cowboy thinks his long-lost love Bo Peep (Annie Potts) might be waiting, her possible presence hinted at in the vintage novelty lamps glowing in the window, where airborne dust particles kicked up by the sunshine epitomize the loving attention to aesthetic detail defining this entire excursion, each antique looking timeworn or beautiful depending how the light hits it. Once inside, alas, Woody and Forky must escape the vile clutches of a bitter doll named Gabby Gabby (Christina Hendricks), initially suggesting a mere “Toy Story 3” Lotso retread only to metamorphose from similar heartlessness to more of a twisted heart, a la Magua in “Last of the Mohicans”.

Though the ensuing showdown with Gabby Gabby can sometimes come close to spinning its wheels, and though its blueprint feels borrowed from “Toy Story 3’s” daycare breakout, this antique store adventure nevertheless eventually finds its own adventurous wavelength, evoking The Island of Misfit Toys as the frontier town of an old western where Sheriff Woody unites a motley crew to defend its interests. That motley crew includes Duke Caboom, a Canadian motorcycle stuntman with a catchphrase so good it deserved to be his alone, a winning mixture of swagger and self-doubt, stellar animated detail (those hands!), and exemplary voice work by Keanu Reeves spotlighting the haltingly charismatic tone of his inflections, each word sounded out for maximum effect, previously evident in his “John Wick 2” gin order. Granted, spending so much time in the company of new toys mean we lose time with old ones, like Rex (Wallace Shawn), my favorite anxious Tyrannosaurus, basically reduced to a cameo. In that way, though, “Toy Story 4” not only reminded me of being a kid but crystallized Woody’s apprehension of a toy’s arc.

I went in yearning to hang out with Rex, but by the end I just wanted to kick up dust with Duke Caboom. There’s joy in moving on.

American Woman

“American Woman” is perhaps only called “American Woman” because the name of the American Woman in question – Deb (Sienna Miller) – isn’t sufficient to carry the title all on its own, or to convey the sweep of the movie itself, not like, say, Suzanne, which was the title of Katell Quillévéré’s 2013 French drama, a not altogether successful but still frequently compelling film encompassing years in a person’s life rather than a handful of weeks or months. “American Woman” spans years too, though in the company of a character who is less of a troubled free spirit and more reminiscent of Uma Thurman’s flawed if well-meaning “Hysterical Blindness” protagonist, with occasional notes of Amy Ryan’s “Gone Baby Gone” aggression, and not content simply to observe her stasis but how she eventually breaks it and moves on. That means the movie, despite a lived-in setting, with conspicuous rusted aluminum siding and grimy light switches, is less interested in how the place itself correlates to these circumstances than the ongoing dramas in which she becomes mired and tries to overcome.

Deb lives at home with her daughter Bridget (Sky Ferreira) who is, in turn, caring for her own infant son, a familial congestion furthered in how Deb’s sister Katherine (Christina Hendricks) and brother-in-law Terry (Will Sasso) live directly across the street, allowing for several comic confrontations, never more than Deb and Katherine arguing by phone as they glare at one another through their respective front windows. Deb is a livewire, evoked predictably in an affair with a married man but more effectively in Miller’s mere being, treating her sister’s kitchen countertop, say, like a pool table as she dangles her legs over it while slurping beer, and how the character then challenges Katherine’s own adulterous fantasies with Terry right out there in the living room. Not long after, when Bridget doesn’t return home after spending the night with her child’s immature father, Deb rushes by car to confront him, trailed by Terry, brought to life with a humorously but believably frantic air by Sasso, as if he’s a security detail struggling to keep up with his client.

The disappearance of Bridget fuels the movie to come, leading Deb down the dark rabbit hole of depression, culminating in an incredible scene where enraged, drunk and driving, she lets go of the wheel of her car and deliberately crashes, a scene with a more eerie air than horrifying one, as though by releasing the wheel she’s checking out of her own body, improbably bringing to life one of the greatest of all Bruce Springsteen kickers, the one to “Highway 29”, ending on a car crash that might be a dream or might not, as he whispers “I was running – yeah, I was running then I was flying.” And director Jake Scott makes this seem like a dream too, showing her walking away from the wreckage in long shot, nothing heard except the sound of her shoes scraping across the cement, her white costuming emitting the air of a heavenly robe, walking directly toward the camera and then out of its purview, the movie cutting to several years in the future, completely eliding the fallout of the wreck and, as such, rendering it more like a symbolic act, a rebirth. Indeed, from there the movie metamorphoses into the beginning of the rest of Deb’s life, which covers so much ground that frequently “American Woman” feels as if it doesn’t linger enough, particularly where Deb going to school and her eventual full-time job are concerned, the latter concluding in a scene that fails to denote its ostensible triumph because we never see what leads to it.

No, “American Woman” is more interested in the difficult day-to-day details of a poor woman raising a grandson alone, dating and living with an abusive man (Pat Healy, convincingly demonstrating a blown emotional fuse just in the way he seems to twitch at the kitchen table while reading the paper) in a relationship where the transactional necessity is painfully laid bare, Miller’s riotous, incredulous laugh when Deb is asked if she intends to marry this loser belying that painful truth before the chararacter verbally cops to it. If it speaks to Deb’s plight, it also speaks to Miller’s performance, one morphing from angrily obtuse to levelheaded, where in each scene she gradually cools off and paints in a little more mindfulness, so that her character’s arc rings true no matter what, like a late movie marriage that despite overly conspicuous plotting gains credence in both its swift union and eventual dissolution simply from Miller’s solid disposition. In fact, the scene where Deb calmly confronts her spouse rhymes with a later scene, one bringing the preeminent plot point of her missing daughter to a close. There is a cosmic meaningless in each one, which might have rendered cheap cynicism if Miller had not already made implicit Deb slowly infusing her life with meaning, dealing with the unbelievable by finding the wherewithal to believe in herself.

King of Comedy

In his big, his very, very big, okay, 4th of July address to the nation, President T*ump had some oratory problems, most notably during a brief interlude on the Revolutionary War, which, if you need a refresher, took place from 1775 to 1783, around the time the first editions of the steamboat were being built. We quote the President of the United States of America: “The Continental Army suffered a bitter winter at Valley Forge, found glory across the waters of the Delaware and seized victory from Cornwallis of Yorktown.” [Editor’s Note: Lord Charles Cornwallis, born in London, was not of Yorktown but positioned there at Sir Henry Clinton’s order. It’s very confusing!]  “Our Army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do.” Eh, come again? “...(I)t [as in, the Continental Army] took over the airports.” That’s airports. I repeat: AIRPORTS. My beloved General Lafayette stormed a redoubt at Yorktown, absolutely, you’re damn right he did, but he did not take over the Newport News/Williamsburg International Airport which was built in the wake of WWII a few decades after The Wright Brothers first achieved flight. My friend Mary, meanwhile, noted Paul Revere really erred in failing to take into account three if by air.

Predictably, the President blamed this citation of the Continental Army taking over the purported colonial airports on the teleprompter. “We had a lot of rain. I stood in the rain. The teleprompter went out. It kept going on, and then at the end, it just went out. It went kaput,” he explained. “I guess the rain knocked out the teleprompter. I knew the speech very well, so I was able to do it without a teleprompter. And it was hard to look at it anyway.” Forget for a moment, as many pointed out, that T*ump once criticized President Barack Obama for using a teleprompter and consider, if you will, the President’s following sentence: “I knew the speech very well, so I was able to do it without a teleprompter.” This would strongly suggest his mention of the Continental Army taking over the purported colonial airports was intentional. Like, if President Big Brain “knew the speech very well” and therefore “was able to do it without a teleprompter” this would mean his mention of the purported colonial aiports was actually in the speech as written and not a flub. Unless, of course, the teleprompter, which he was not reading anyway since he “knew the speech very well”, going out emitted some flash that just sort of momentarily short-wired his otherwise tremendously Big Brain and the word “airports” just popped in there because the last thing he saw on F*x News before he took the stage was a comprehensive report about the Denver International Airport functioning as headquarters for the meddlesome Liberal Illuminati. 

Anyway. This movie blog merely brings it up because, as some of our most loyal frustrated followers know, once upon a time Cinema Romantico wrote screenplays like it writes blogs now. And among our most ersatz famous scripts was the epic flamingo invasion movie Paint the White House Pink in which millions of flamingoes run roughshod over the United States, sort of “Independence Day” crossed with “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.” Among the most (not) famous scenes was one in which the comically hapless President was tasked with addressing the nation as the flamingos laid waste, a speech which goes awry when — you’ll never guess — his teleprompter goes out.

Friends, I worked hard on that fake speech. I did my best to conceive theoretically humorous lines that a comically hapless President might desperately belch forth in a moment of extreme pressure that he is not in any way equipped to handle, some that even took on this ridiculous sing-song quality. And I have to say, none of them — not a single one — was anywhere near as good as  “Our Army manned the air, it ran the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do. And at Fort McHenry, under the rockets’ red glare, it had nothing but victory.” I would hesitate to declare anything I wrote qualified as genuine comedy but nevertheless, T*ump, I guess, really has killed it.