This One Scene in Roxanne

If Steve Martin is the unquestionable star of the 1987 Cyrano de Bergerac homage “Roxanne”, having written the screenplay himself, making it feel as much like A Steve Martin Film as A Fred Schepisi Film, he nevertheless left plenty of room for Schepisi to stage gags while simultaneously surrounding himself with an impressive stable of supporting characters. Not just the major ones, like Shelley Duvall’s diner owner cum town counselor or Rick Rossovich’s firefighting dufus but the minor ones too. “Roxanne”, after all, is a movie about the town where it is set, a Washington state version of British Columbia’s Nelson, which Schepisi ensured was part of the film’s full fabric, and the town’s fire department, which has been populated with excellent character actors. Even the ones who don’t really get lines seem to have been chosen specifically for their eccentric faces. Michael J. Pollard, meanwhile, has good lines and an eccentric face.

Half-a-century on Pollard was probably still best known for his role as C.W., the getaway driver in “Bonnie and Clyde”, perhaps because that 1967 film remains a landmark of the New Hollywood movement. (In retrospect, I really wish Pollard had just sort of been hanging out over in the wings on the stage at the Dolby Theatre for no reason ever explained as Warren & Faye read the wrong Best Picture winner.) But he was a character actor extraordinaire and if you saw him in anything else, you probably never forgot him, no matter how small the role, like Bill Murray’s “Scrooged” or even “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming” where he didn’t get an official credit. His appearance in the ultra-weird “Arizona Dream” was highly appropriate; he was like the patron saint of character actors, bestowing his blessing on Johnny Depp, Lili Taylor, and Vincent Gallo.

If you saw “Roxanne”, you probably didn’t forget him. The esteemed Roger Ebert didn’t, noting in his original review how “all the corners of this movie have been filled with small, funny moments” and then singling out Pollard, before even mentioning Duvall or Fred Willard has the town mayor, simply deeming Pollard as “a weird little fireman.” It might not sound like much but there isn’t much else to say. Pollard’s Andy is sort of weird and little, just shuffling into his first speaking scene from off to the side, emitting the distinct sensation of someone who watches from afar but is mostly too timid to ever speak up.

But if Martin and Schepisi could have just left him as weird and little, they do an incredible thing much later in the movie in the briefest but bestest of scenes. It’s a moment in which Andy tells Martin’s fire chief, C.D., that he received a call from the eponymous rocket scientist. That’s it; that’s the entire point of the scene. But rather than having Andy just relay the information, the scene is set up as a simultaneous throwaway gag recounted in a single take shown in long shot. One fireman, conspicuously wearing boxing gloves, is sprawled out on the floor while another fireman hovers over him, trying to revive him. Andy is standing to the right, leaning against the wall, also wearing boxing gloves, but in a stance that’s less weird and little than Joe Cool. C.D. enters, looking at the fallen fireman quizzically but without comment, receiving the news of the phone call from Andy, and then departing. As he does, in a moment as shocking as it is comical, Andy points at the fallen fireman with his glove and remarks “He owes me fifty bucks”, his timidity apparently masking a vicious right hook, like you just discovered your mild-mannered neighbor across the street fought Hagler at Caesars Palace.

For one comical moment, Michael J. Pollard got to be heavyweight champion of the world. He died last week at the age of 80.

The Dead Don't Die

As Bill Murray has aged, his public life has often seemed to embody the anarchic streak of his younger movie self while onscreen he has only grown more and more mellow. In Jim Jarmusch’s latest postmodern whatizit, playing small-town Chief of Police Cliff Robertson, Murray is his mellowest yet, which is not just saying something, so to speak, but really saying something about the movie itself. It’s called “The Dead Don’t Die” because it’s about the undead, the reanimated, zombies rising from the grave and attacking the people of Centreville – “a real good place to live.” That sounds dramatic and urgent. But when the zombies begin wandering through the street, Cliff just stands there, along with his policing cohorts, Officer Ronnie (Adam Driver) and Officer Mindy (Chloë Sevigny), hardly moving, barely reacting, less panicked than resigned, like it’s “Gattaca” and they have just been handed a slip of paper denoting their date and time of death – right now, more or less. It’s a mood befitting Sturgill Simpson’s opening credit cut, named after the movie itself, which paints a thin line between the living and the dead. Not a new idea, necessarily, but rarely has a movie embraced an aloof tone so fully that its characters feel like, to paraphrase Simpson, ghosts inside a dream of a life they don’t own.

Jarmusch’s movies have almost always been at least partially self-aware, appraising and critiquing the genres they inhabit, and in “The Dead Don’t Die” everyone seems acutely aware of where they are beyond coordinates on a map, like Bobby Wiggins (Caleb Landry Jones), whose Centreville gas station doubles as a kind of horror movie memorabilia store with a CD for sale bearing the very same Sturgill Simpson song itself, a glimpse of the movie’s wry sentience. Indeed, throughout characters drop hints making clear they know they are in a movie, or some of them do, Officer Ronnie for sure, who even confesses to having read the script beforehand, a jokey kind of omniscience, sure, but also an evocation of the film's feeling of inevitability that gradually grows more profound.

We might not know precisely how big Centreville is but we know it’s at least big enough to have its own news station and anchor (Rosie Perez), glimpsed on TV throughout offering updates on the living dead. Yet Jarmusch provides a deliberately abstruse view of the town, glimpsed only in a few standard locations, like a motel and a diner, the shots looking out Chief Robertson’s window always cutting away quickly rather than lingering. It suggests the town as being cut off, from each other and everything else. If the appearance of a Keep America White Again hat and cryptic references to polar fracking as being the cause for this zombie apocalypse suggest brewing political commentary, none of this amounts to much, peripheral bits of business that “The Dead Don’t Die” doesn’t really consider because none of the characters do, painting the What’s Going On In The World as something to be blithely ignored.

In the run-up to the reanimated, Jarmusch cuts between a wide swath of different people, in groups or as individuals, from the police officers to an old hermit to three hip teenagers rolling in from parts unknown, a familiar tactic that seems destined to bring them together as events spiral. Yet Jarmusch forgoes such emergent togetherness, mostly keeping them apart, so that when one of the hip teenagers mocks Bobby as Bilbo Baggins it’s not foreshadowing for later, when his extensive pop culture knowledge might come in handy, but designed to leave a bad taste in our mouth. And if zombies are often just extras to be offed, here they just as frequently become a turn of the screw, asking the tolerant in the audience if they might get their kicks from chopping up a MAGA undead or if they might immediately revert to Darwinism, a la Officer Ronnie, who in Driver’s nonchalant air bizarrely if effectively takes so much gas out of the ostensible terror by just taking things as they come. (No wonder he drives a Smart Car!)

Officer Ronnie never quite becomes a hero, though, even if he sometimes feels as if he is being set up as one, just Zelda Winston, the new funeral home proprietor, played by Tilda Swinton with a precise Scottish accent and a gleam in her eye, never quite becomes one either, even if she knows her way around a Samurai sword. That’s the set-up destined to leave certain viewers conditioned for a traditional payoff either confused or possibly pissed off, so casually does Jarmusch expunge these presumed establishing devices, the notion that a hero might rise going up like one of the puffs of smoke every time a zombie is decapitated. No, the undead just keep coming, evoked in the recurring nature of Sturgill Simpson’s theme, driving Cliff so batty he finally throws the CD out the window of his cruiser, equating an unstoppable onslaught of zombies with the nagging sensation of getting a tune stuck in your head. That’s pretty funny when you think about it.

Last Christmas

There is a distinct tension in Wham!’s “Last Christmas” that has, I think, made it last. Sonically it’s a bouncy tune, epitomized in those melodic sleigh bells, though lyrically it skews darker, less about wishing someone a merry Christmas than telling an ex to go straight to hell – well, not really telling her, but thinking about telling her (“I’m hiding from you and your soul of ice”). Paul Feig’s “Last Christmas”, alas, while building to a rendition of the song, and while implementing a good many more George Michael songs along the way even if it refrains from becoming a true jukebox musical, rarely honors that tension. No, “Last Christmas”, despite co-starring and being co-written by Emma Thompson, is more prestige Hallmark Channel Christmas for the big screen. Indeed, much like those assembly line productions of dependable hokum, where if you twisted their tone just one degree this way or that way their insistence on Christmas Magic and secular faith in not being alone as the reason for the season, they could get really dark really fast, so too is “Last Christmas” balanced on the edge of something more grave. Kate (Emilia Clarke) has problems, real problems that the movie sees, and while it’s sort of letting her work them out on her own, it’s also not, inserting its own brand of Christmas Magic that tacks away from its inherent melancholy for something lighter and fluffier, less George Michael in the end than Michael Bublé’s “Christmas.”

The protagonists of such films tend to inhabit one of two possible character types: career-oriented and hard-charging or quirky and disease-ridden. Kate is the latter, saddled with complications from a heart transplant and guided by impulse rather than prudence, which Clarke highlights by finding just the right mixture of winning and overbearing, rendering it believable that people would both invite her in for the night and then, exasperated, ask her to leave the next morning. And that, more than the movie itself, honors the Sad Bastard, so to speak, genre from which Wham!, and so many others sprung, happy on the surface but desperate and depressed rumbling just underneath. Given her supposed medical condition, “Last Christmas” suggests a character perched on the edge of literal self-destruction, though Clarke doesn’t do much to convey the supposed physical tenuousness of her ailment while the movie seems less interested in accentuating the literal physical dangers than employing it as a device to demonstrate her need for emotional and social stability.

If Feig has the welcome sense not to construct her self-actualization, despite a looming Big Event, around completion of a task or some other outward activity, allowing her to figure things out on her own, the way in which “Last Christmas” conveys this individual liberation is a failure in both idea and execution. It’s a failure in idea because even if Kate’s dilemma is internal than external this internal dilemma nevertheless manifests itself in an external fashion that, alas, I am legally obligated not to explain in further detail except to say it involves a romance with Tom, a free spirit played by Henry Golding with a buttoned-up air that does not exactly convey the non-conformist the script suggests he is. If in the recent “A Simple Favor” he was the guy going 52 mph in a 75 zone where Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick were doing 83, easy, here he’s running at 33 1/3 RPMs compared to Clarke’s 78. And while that’s good in so much as his character provides a calming influence, it renders Tom more as a sponsor than a love interest, an idea which never jibes with what “Last Christmas” wants these two to be.

It’s on slightly more sure footing in the relationship between Kate and her Croatian mother Petra, perhaps because she’s played by Thompson, who co-wrote the screenplay. If I don’t feel qualified to speak on Emma Thompson’s Slavic accent, she has nevertheless perfected the art of that quizzical, mouth-agape squint conveying a mother who can’t quite figure out her own daughter and suffers from being an immigrant in a country that has turned toward Brexit. Sadly, however, this subplot is skin-deep, more about asserting moral correctness than casting that ongoing political calamity in any kind of revealing light, save for one offhand remark in which Petra notes who she thinks is responsible for such social strife, staring off into space as she says it, oblivious to its connotations, so casual it’s cutting, and in a split-second putting the blinkered nature of Brexit into rather harsh perspective. Kate, meanwhile, becoming an inadvertent volunteer at a homeless shelter is meant to transcend the very virtue-signaling another volunteer accuses her of by having the Christmas pageant she organizes aid her metamorphosis from selfish to selfless. Of course, it’s hard not to notice that during her triumphant singing of “Last Christmas”, naturally, all the homeless just sort of fade into the background, unnamed Supremes to Kate’s Diana Ross. It’s still her show.

My Favorite College Football Games: Game 13

January 1, 1988 (Sugar Bowl): Syracuse - 16 Auburn - 16

Syracuse quarterback Don McPherson should have won the 1987 Heisman Trophy. You can make this argument through the numbers, and some have, but he also had plenty of Heisman Moments™, which matter more (and should because pointless awards based on stats are boring and pointless awards based on the ineffable are fun), like unfurling an 80-yard TD bomb on the first play of his team’s signature win over Penn State and, especially, converting a 2-point conversion to beat West Virginia in the literal last minute with an undefeated regular season on the line by making an ultra-cool, at-the-last-moment option pitch to running back Michael Owens. But because of McPherson’s middling professional career, mostly spent in Canada, future Pro Football Hall of Famer Tim Brown of Notre Dame winning the 1987 award for college football’s best player saved us from a lifetime of McPherson getting dragged on those inane Who Should Have Won the Heisman lists, based entirely and contrarily off NFL success of which these list writers generally say something like “it’s not fair but perception is reality” before proceeding to further inflate that vacuous perception. That McPherson didn’t pan out in the NFL stemmed from his perceived flaws, like a lack of size, though such flaws are why I prefer the college game, where Aaron Rodgers, while at Cal, still held the ball way up high, near his helmet, akin to a baseball bat, a blemish inevitably ironed out at the next level. And, fair enough. Ironing out all the eccentricities is good for the bottom line. But who the hell ever said the bottom line made good poetry?

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If the ’87 Orangemen were undefeated at season’s end, they were stuck in the rankings at #3 behind also-undefeated Miami and Oklahoma, colliding in the Orange Bowl for the Mythical National Championship. Even so, as New Year’s Day 1988 dawned, Syracuse had a strange yet no less true chance at the title so long as they beat Auburn in the Sugar Bowl while Miami and Oklahoma tied. (Miami, alas, would win anyway.) As such, their Sugar Bowl showdown, one gloriously epitomizing the spirit of bowl season, where a provincial game suddenly turns national, a private research university in upstate New York squaring off against a public research land grant university in the Deep South, was lent palpable urgency even if it was raggedly played, not a defensive struggle exactly but never a jubilee of offense either, each team moving the ball but frequently failing to cash in, leading to lots of field goals and that strange-looking score.

That strange-looking score, though, is what made the game lasting, a tie born not accidentally, with the clock running out, or because there was no other choice, like Harvard “beating” Yale 29-29. No, Auburn, trailing 16-13, pulled off a last-ditch drive to Syracuse’s 14-yard line with one precious second left where Tiger Coach Pat Dye eschewed a do-or-die pass to the end zone and sent on, in a twist that will make you believe in college football providence, a kicker named Win Lyle whose 30-yard field goal ensured the 54th Sugar Bowl would have no resolution.

Everyone was mad. Not just Syracuse, whose Coach Dick MacPherson was not exactly gracious in his post-game commentary toward his counterpart’s unsporting choice, but the Auburn players too, most of whom wanted to go for the win, never mind the Orangemen fans who, in a peerless example of ex post facto trash talk, mailed Dye 2,000 ties. And yet, if I understand the frustrations of all those involved, the juxtaposition between Syracuse’s regular season-ending go-for-the-win 2-point conversion and Auburn’s actively choosing a stalemate only put an indelible cosmic point on the Orangemen’s grand achievement in the first place, the gridiron courage it took to go for immortality. And that’s what 1987 Syracuse, long removed from the program’s mid-century heyday, improbably coming off a 5-6 season, achieved – immortality, the school’s last great football team. They would have achieved immortality had they finished 12-0, assuredly, even if they finished 2nd in the polls behind Miami, but it would have been sans the strange clarity and revealing complexity of that poetically imprecise 11-0-1 record, an exemplar of college football’s true ideal. Just as the flaws destined to deny Don McPherson NFL stardom hardly mattered, neither did that lone blot at the end of 1987 Syracuse’s record line.

In college football, you don’t have to go 12-0 to be perfect.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Cutter's Way (1981)

Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges), a drifting gigolo, might have a gig selling sailboats but he’s no man of means, which is why he’s introduced sleeping with someone else’s wife and then asking, not so much sheepishly as faux-sheepishly, if he can borrow few a bucks off her and driving a jaunty little sports car that’s a piece of crap, seen when the spotty engine gives way on the side of the road. That’s where another car pulls up behind him and a guy obscured by the darkness gets out, dumps a woman’s body in a trash can and then speeds away, nearly hitting Bone in the process. If this moment becomes the driving plot point, “Cutter’s Way”, directed by Ivan Passer, never turns exactly suspenseful or even urgent, more concerned with establishing a mood, the last vestiges of 60s radicalism having gone through the pungent tunnel of Vietnam and Watergate and wound up here in a cloud of bitterness and indifference. In retrospect, the 1981 setting looms even larger, on the cusp of Morning in America, which would merely leave the masses gasping for more air while they were told by everyone on top how good they supposedly had it, a blurry sensation evoked in Jack Nitzsche’s score wafting back and forth between wistful and festive.

The movie’s meandering pace evokes Bone’s own languor, brought home in a masterful physical performance by Bridges, all lazy posture, slung back in chairs and leaning against walls, sometimes listening, not always caring. It defines his lazy life, brought home perhaps a little too obviously in his supervisor and friend, George (Arthur Rosenberg), admonishing that “sooner or later you’ll have to make a decision about something.” Then again, immediately upon saying this, Bone makes a big decision, or so it seems, and yet even then Bridges hardly sits up; squint and you’ll see the makings of The Dude. His attitude juxtaposes with his friend, Alex Cutter (John Heard), a Vietnam vet who’s not so much disillusioned as defeated and agitating for some payback, sporting an eye patch, an obvious Ahab allegory that comes off not because Heard isn’t playing to it but is playing it to the hilt, like he’s read the book and is channeling the vibe. And so if Bone’s blasé attitude combined with his good looks (the only matter we truly see him attending too his moustache in the very first shot) allows him to move with relative ease between the worlds of the haves and have nots, looking equally at home in a schooner on the water and wandering into a bar after hours, Cutter sticks out like a sore thumb.

Their friendship, however, is complicated by Alex’s wife, Mo (Lisa Eichhorn). She doesn’t come between them, however, even if there are flickers of attraction between her and Bone, emotional leftovers from The Way It Might Have been. If anything, Bone comes between them, their marriage clearly at the end of its rope, with Cutter trying to incite arguments and Mo not so much brushing them off as ignoring them by perpetually existing in a haze of liquor. That’s not to suggest she’s just another underwritten female character. No, you occasionally detect flickers of life, like when she brings home a bag of groceries because she’s sick of subsisting on liquor, which the movie doesn’t prop up as some earnest attempt at sobriety but just a longing for when living mattered, all of which improbably comes home in the way she really, truly pronounces the “tomato”, longingly, like eating vegetables is talking in Swahili. She’s been written out of her own life, in other words, by Cutter, seemingly just sitting around to finally kicks off, not a femme fatale, as the typical noir might dictate, bringing ruin on the others, but being ruined herself by sticking with him.

Cutter pushes her to this point by going all in on a blackmail scheme when he and Bone think they’ve pinpointed the local rich fella responsible for the death of girl whose body Bone saw get dumped. The plan, in tandem with the dead girl’s sister (Ann Dusenberry), is not so much to get money off the guy, as press him into confessing by having Bone put a letter in his hands making clear he knows he’s responsible. Here, Passer makes an unlikely but effective choice, forgoing certain scenes that would seem part and parcel to such a ruse, like the actual delivery of the letter, which shows Bone marching in to confront the rich guy but cutting away before the delivery occurs, leaving us to assume it happened but dropping hints that it did not. This ellipsis, and others, makes us question the reality of what we’re seeing, whether this is all invented within their own minds, and whether what they’re doing is truly to avenge the woman’s death or to settle their own social score. And Cutter, and Heard’s performance, fiercely suggest it’s the latter. In one scene, Cutter stands at pool table beneath the glow of green lamps, photographs and maps and god knows what else scattered before him, very much cutting the figure of a conspiracy theorist and looking for all the world like, no matter what Bone says, he’s already got it all figured, see.

Some Drivel On...The Rainmaker

The official title of “The Rainmaker” (1997) is not, in fact, “The Rainmaker”, a la “The Firm” and “The Client”, but “John Grisham’s The Rainmaker”, giving prominent position to the author of the book on which the film was based. In one way, that seems right. I admit I was seeking out “John Grisham’s The Rainmaker” 22 long years after the fact because these days I crave middlebrow Grisham trash like I crave few other cinematic offerings. In another way, though, that seems strange, if not wrong. “John Grisham’s The Rainmaker” was not helmed by, like, journeyman Gary Fleder, who directed an adaptation of Grisham’s “Runaway Jury”, but a legend of New Hollywood – Francis Ford Coppola. But, 1997 was an odd time for the auteur. It was two decades after he released the masterworks that made him legendary, and one decade after his professional work had, fair or not, kind of combusted, and a decade before he chose to independently finance his own odd projects, like “Twixt”, a kind of late-career return to film school, which I say with love. “John Grisham’s The Rainmaker”, though, was the in-between, which is why the full title is so noteworthy; Coppola, Francis Ford, was a hired hand.

The story itself is, of course, vintage Grisham, a young idealistic buck, Rudy Baylor (Matt Damon), fresh out of law school and forced to take a job chasing ambulances before finding himself as the underdog lead attorney arguing a case against vile Big Insurance for a family whose son has died from leukemia. Damon does a solid job of threading the needle between over-his-head newbie and smarter-than-he-looks savant, downplaying amidst an impressive cast of semi-showy vets, most of whom inhabit the sleazier side of things. Indeed, we meet Rudy’s new boss, Bruiser Stone, played by an agreeably unctuous Mickey Rourke, as he fiddles with his cufflinks and holds court before a tropical fish tank, and Bruiser’s number two and Rudy’s mentor, of sorts, Deck Shifflin (Danny DeVito), wearing a properly rumpled suit and clutching a Chinese takeout box, two introductions demonstrating the movie’s propensity for having a low-key good time.

Coppola’s editors, Melissa Kent and Barry Malkin, are in no rush, honoring Coppola’s wide frames, which are not so much about taking in massive landscapes as giving plenty of room to his talented cast spread out in private offices or court chambers and go. It’s fun just to see the camera linger over the reactions of Jon Voight, as Big Insurance’s insouciant attack dog, react to his increasingly problematic predicament, or Danny Glover playing the trial Judge as a sort of driver’s ed teacher steering Rudy with one foot on the passenger’s brake while keeping Voight’s smug big shot under control. Then again, you might wish Claire Danes had more to do than sit around and suffer as a battered wife. Her subplot is less about her falling in love with Rudy, though that kinda happens, then illuminating Rudy’s humanist streak, which is sometimes at odds with the more unsavory methods employed by Bruiser and, especially, Deck.

Honestly, Coppola seems more interested in Deck as a character, in the ethical tension between him liberally bending the rules and bending them to help the good guys win, and how a guy who can’t pass the bar still knows how to throw a legal punch. In fact, while I don’t wish to rewrite “The Rainmaker”, I was a little disappointed the scene where Deck masquerades as a trial lawyer didn’t last longer. Then again, even if the Big Case, and Rudy’s Big Speech, can’t shed its tear-jerking nature, Coppola sees it less through a heroic light than a bittersweet one, underlined in Rudy’s narration where he expresses a love for the law and a contempt for how the game is played, which is why he ends the movie by getting out of it. You wonder if Coppola took that as career advice.

Potential Actors for The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent II

Last week The Hollywood Reporter broke a story that Lionsgate was in final negotiations for a film called “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” starring Nicolas Cage as Nicolas Cage. “The character is desperate to get a role in a new Tarantino movie while also dealing with a strained relationship with his teenage daughter,” writes The Reporter. “He also occasionally talks to an egotistical 1990s version of himself who rides him for making too many crappy movies and for not being a star anymore.” It goes deeper, and if you failed to pick up on the story being meta, don’t worry, because The Reporter deems it “meta” twice in the article so we’re all real clear about what this one’s after. The article mentions Jean-Claude Van Damme’s “meta” movie “JCVD” as a comparison, which I thought of too, though I also thought of something else, which you likely already assumed. I mean, franchises are all the rage these days. So let’s franchise “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.” Let’s make it a series! Who’s next?!

Potential Actors for The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent II

John Turturro

He’d go all in. He’d play to “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent”, believing whole-heartedly in it and agonizing under the weight of it, shouting at kids on the street who quote Jesus Quintana to him and moping in trendy coffee shops, until things take a Paul Giamatti in “Cold Souls”-ish turn where Turturro realizes his actorly cortex has been severed and must travel to deepest Belgium for repairs.

Matt Dillon

Now in his mid-50s, the real-life Dillon has become a real-life member of the real-life El Flamingo Club, playing gin rummy with retired investment bankers, spinning nostalgic tales of attending the Oscar parties in 2006 even as he frantically leaves voicemails for Kate Hudson that she never returns about “You, Me and Dupree 2”, all the while arguing with a version of his “Flamingo Club” character who keeps roasting him for coasting on past glories.

Wesley Snipes

Ok, can we talk about it now? You know what I mean (you probably don’t). I’m talking about the part at the beginning of “Zombieland: Double Tap” when the characters are hanging out at the White House and we see them writing up a Presidential pardon for Wesley Snipes. You thought it was setting up a Snipes cameo, didn’t you? I sure did! How did it not? Did they reach out to him and he said no? I don’t know, but I do know that everywhere I go these days – EVERYWHERE I GO – I see teens and twenty-somethings rocking 90s fashion and so I ask: if mom jeans are back, why isn’t Snipes? And so, in “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent II”, as he’s filming some straight-to-DVD action movie called “Variance”, he argues with versions of his 90s action movie characters, all of whom keeping pushing him to perform the stunts himself, shunning his stunt doubles, each stunt growing riskier, until, nodding to the end of “The Wrestler”, Wesley Snipes, as the first notes of “Bitter Sweet Symphony” rise on the soundtrack, jumps out of an airplane without a parachute to prove he’s still got it. (How did this get so dark?)

George Clooney

After everyone refuses to reassemble for “Ocean’s 14”, George Clooney decides to shoulder “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” alone and make “Ocean’s 1.”

Parker Posey

“The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent II” is directed by Jim Jarmusch and finds Parker Posey road-tripping across to America to buy DVDs of all of her movies from failing video stores, placing each one in a designer knapsack, before arriving in California to triumphantly hurl the knapsack into the ocean.

Val Kilmer

If he’s become, shall we say, an eccentric recluse, the occasional public word from Kilmer nevertheless makes it clear his familiar cockiness has never really gone away. And his “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” might be something more like “The Weight of Massive Talent” where, evoking his own turn in “True Romance” as an Elvis ghost consulting with and giving confidence to Christian Slater’s character, he seeks not so much guidance as ratification of his own still considerable genius from his own Tom “Iceman” Kazansky as Kilmer self-finances a project in which be plays both William Clark and Meriwether Lewis.

Rachel Weisz

To my way of thinking, no one is more equipped to star in a sequel to “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” than her. Because I could really see her going through the frenetic motions of everyday Hollywood life and then getting a call from some mysterious producer about starring as Sherlock Holmes in yet another Sherlock Holmes adaptation only to find that she sort of becomes Sherlock Holmes for real in having to navigate the muck and mire of some faux investigation about the biggest Hollywood scandal ever that involves flashbacks and flash-forwards and ends with her, like, out beyond the reaches of the Solar System which I can’t really explain save for “That’s why we cast Rachel Weisz.”

Marion Cotillard

Whatever you do for Marion’s “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent”, please just base it entirely off this photo.

Harrison Ford

Disentangling himself from “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent”, Ford, taking counsel from his “Star Wars” self, tells everyone what to go do with themselves and then films a 45 minute documentary in which he builds an addition to his deck.

Amy Adams

“The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” of Amy Adams leads to a social media mix-up in which she is inadvertently cancelled, leading to a race against time in which Adams must prove her cultural innocence before it’s too late.

Greener Grass

Some movies trending toward bizarre tend to transmit on a low frequency, giving you time to find the film’s unique rhythm and tune in, kind of like a thick accent you need to for a little while before it makes sense. “Greener Grass”, on the other hand, provides no such time. Mirroring the pastel colors in which every character is dressed, effectively evincing that familiar, terrible sense of aggression by way of mandatory happiness, this vicious suburban satire written and directed by Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe essentially demands right up front “Are you in or are you out?” Indeed, at a children’s soccer game, when Lisa (Luebbe) admires the newborn baby that Jill (DeBoer) cradles in her arms, the latter hands infant right over to her friend; the baby literally belongs to Lisa now. It takes a second, a delayed kind humor where you process what just happened, and how quickly it did, and what it meant, and then you laugh, a brand of humor epitomizing a movie where horror and humor go hand-in-hand.

A wonder of world-building, “Greener Grass” creates a world so perfect it can only be creepy, its houses a series of Bluth-esque model homes and cars supplanted by golf carts, suggesting suburbia as akin to a golf country club, one spine-chillingly never-ending Augusta National. This might mean, as it usually does with these satirical residential nightmares, that the sordid stuff is happening behind closed doors, a la David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” or Todd Solondz’s “Happiness.” But there are no closed doors in “Greener Grass”, and no untoward sexual desires. In one scene, Jill and Lisa accidentally line up next to the wrong husbands and it takes a few moments of making out with the incorrect spouse before they even realize, like marriage is just a matter of whoever you’re standing next to for the Instagram op. The metaphors the movie deploys for child-rearing, meanwhile, are, similar to the opening joke, wicked in their Wait, Whatedness?, equating kids as ornaments of obedience.

DeBeor and Luebbe come from the Upright Citizens Comedy Brigade, a sketch comedy troupe, and though they provide a narrative framework of a serial killer on the loose, hinted at throughout in unsettling point-of-view shots, they are generally disinterested in any kind of traditional rising action. That’s not to suggest “Greener Grass” is merely an unconnected series of bits and skits. No, it uses these bits and skits to create a mood of something akin to hypernormalization, where everything that seems so fake starts to feel real, like the pool water Jill’s husband (Beck Bennett) freely ingests. If he hardly seems to bat an eye no matter what happens, Jill, in the movie’s real through-line, spiritually disintegrates, without even seeming to know it, which DeBoer’s performance improbably conveys. In a truly bananas sequence, her character returns home to find another woman there and cooking in the kitchen, insisting it’s her house, not Jill’s, which Jill, of course, denies, though DeBoer’s air in resisting this bizarro home invasion grows meeker and meeker, as if in real time she really is doubting the validity of her home ownership, and consequently doubting the authorship of her own life, causing a snap from this sickly reality that takes her to a hysterical point of no return.

In Todd Haynes’s 1995 indie “Safe”, a suburban housewife (Julianne Moore) seems to suffer some sort of ineffable suburban malaise so acute that it literally infects her. Aesthetically that film bears little similarity to “Greener Grass’s” retina burning colors, though the cold and controlled nature of each one is, in its own way, striking similar, women who have reached a point where they can no longer exist in their environments even as their environments have stripped them of the intellectual acuity necessary to diagnose their emotional decay. And if it sounds strange, the end of “Greener Grass” nevertheless made me think of the end of “Last Christmas”, where the final shot of Emilia Clarke’s character shows her with a new hairdo, a familiar tonsorial means of communicating the girl’s gonna be alright. DeBoer’s frazzled ‘do, like she’s been electrocuted, sends up that cliché by sarcastically suggesting the exact opposite. When the movie ends, Jill’s back, but look at her – she’s gone.

The Lighthouse

“You sound like a goddam parody.” This is what Ephraim (Robert Pattinson), a lighthouse keeper, says to his superior, Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe), after the latter delivers his umpteenth purple sermon about one thing or another. Do you know what it takes to have such confidence in your own sense of craft, as director Robert Eggers does here, that you feel comfortable (cocky) enough to audibly acknowledge how your own movie is drifting toward the edge of parody? It takes brass balls. I’m sorry, what was that uncouth? Well, what did you think “The Lighthouse” was going to be about? The painstaking efforts to clean the lens? No, the lighthouse in this context, situated on some deserted rock off the coast of Maine, is less about serving as a traffic light to ships and more about its phallic symbolism, denoting the two-hander to come in which this pair of loutish males are driven to ostensible madness. I say ostensible because despite some truly scintillating sound design, an omnipresent foghorn suggesting an air raid siren on some island during the Pacific Theatre of WWII more than an Atlantic watchtower, the sense that these squabbling, drunken dufuses are going mad never comes across when the production is so finely tuned. Ephraim’s surname is Winslow, for God’s sake, as in Winslow Homer, the seminal American painter from the northeast marine landscapes clearly inspired Eggers, the sort of referential moniker that, pardon me for again being uncouth, is no less subtle than that lighthouse thwacking us in the face.

This epitomizes the sensation that Eggers obsessed over every detail, like the dialogue, for which Eggers and his co-writer, brother Max, studied the work of famed 19th century authors Herman Melville and Sarah Orne Jewett to get the salty slang just right, as well as the photography, the old Movietone, A 1.19:1 aspect ratio emphasizing height rather than width, and filmed on Kodak Double-X black and white to truly make it feel out of time. Even so, there are occasional flourishes betraying a modern attitude, like the almost mystical instigation of a massive weather event when the camera tracks hard to the left and then up the full breadth of the lighthouse to find the weather vane at the top ‘suddenly’ changing direction. Rather than evoking a supernatural sensation it feels like filmmaker insistence that, for all the movie’s presupposed ambiguities, like its conclusion, not to be revealed (even if we did…), feel as deliberately calculated as the aesthetic, a nominally haunting image with nothing behind it, not so much rising out of the movie as jerry-rigged by it with a mishmash of mystical and occult slumgullion.

To Eggers’s credit, he’s at least discerning enough to let some of the air out, most notably in the character of Wake, aided immensely by the performance of Dafoe, who both seems to be in on a joke and not playing to the idea of a joke at all, a shrewd actorly decision that takes his character down a peg even when he’s looming in tall close-ups. His soliloquy, of sorts, in ode to his cooking ends with an adolescent worry that Ephraim doesn’t like his lobster, a line Dafoe punctuates with a truly needy facial expression of hurt. It’s incredible, the huffing and puffing of his oration all at once giving way, like a gale that suddenly dies, laying bare all the bluster in his heart and the movie’s own, the phallic symbolism of the Lighthouse coming to stand for something less than the madness in the hearts of men than the dumb drunken urges you’d probably find lurking beneath Harvard’s Eliot House Tower.

This simple exhibition of machismo is furthered in Pattinson’s performance which doesn’t come across like a descent into madness so much as a pre-existing irritability. His first shot in the movie, upon arriving at the lighthouse, finds him looking directly into the camera and already appearing agitated, as he is later attending to chores. Though his tee-totaling nature suggests someone trying to keep a lid on something, Pattinson is more evocative of someone who just likes to pick fights, reminding me of no less an authority than Ishmael himself observing that “it is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.” No matter how many stately bells and whistles “The Lighthouse” proffers, all its secrets come up dry.

My Favorite College Football Games: Game 12

December 29, 1994 (Sun Bowl): Texas - 35 North Carolina - 31

Much like the last week of August instinctively fills me with dread, flashing me back to the start of school and my life being over for another nine months even though I haven’t gone to school in years, the week between Christmas and New Year’s instinctively cheers me up, a respite where real life gets put on hold, even though real life has ground on now during that week for decades. Whether bowl games are merely a manifestation of this idea or a direct contributor to it, I’m not sure, even after all this time, and not sure it matters; what matters is bowl games being liberated from the regular season’s tiresome insistence on politicking, punditry, and The Big Picture. Each bowl exists unto itself as a little fount of joy, like a window on a secular advent calendar, or something, waiting to be opened. Granted, a sad candy corn, “Bad Santa” style, might tumble out, like the 2004 Silicon Valley Classic, but, who knows, you might also discover a miniature Krackel, like the 1999 Gator Bowl. And then there’s the 1994 Sun Bowl, which was like finding a whole damn Paris-Brest.

You probably don’t remember the 1994 Sun Bowl. That’s because even if these mid-tier bowls are event-oriented, coming but once a year, they are also transitory, glorified exhibitions not meant to last beyond the moment in which they are played. That refreshing stakes-free sensation is often detectable in bowl game crowds, as it was in the 1994 Sun Bowl, where the 50,612 people in the stands did not generate a roar so much as background chatter akin to restaurant ambience. It lent the game an air of conviviality rather than tension, a rattling good afternoon out in which teams combined for over 900 yards of total offense with touchdowns being scored by land and by air, by offense and by defense and by special teams too, the winning six points not coming until the last minute.

It wasn’t just the fireworks, though, but their rendering. It was a peerless uniform match-up; that striking Longhorn Burnt Orange against that elegant Tar Heel Carolina Blue. It was aptly named Texas quarterback James Brown who in his very movements seem to embody a syncopated bass line of the other James Brown. It was Texas coach John Mackovic successfully going for it on 4th and Goal, admirably honoring the ephemeral nature of the event with a simple two-word strategy – Why Not? Later, Mackovic’s coaching counterpart, Mack Brown, employed the Why Not? approach too, dispatching junior wide receiver Marcus Wall to return a punt for the first time in his career. He promptly returned that punt 82 yards for a touchdown, of course.

Wall’s score, along with quarterback Mike Thomas’s 50-yard TD strike, put the Tar Heels up 31 – 21 with eight minutes left. But the Longhorns mounted a comeback on the strength of their star running back, a dude by the name of Priest Holmes, who scored once and then scored again, from five yards out on a splendiferous sort of in-the-air somersault. Because the game kicked off early afternoon, it began in the long shadows of a low winter sun and ended in the fading light, the kind characteristic of a late December afternoon when the air is so cold and so still that every sound dangles in the air just a bit longer, that strange, wonderful space where time seems to stop even as you sense it slipping away, a sensation which ineffably rose out of the way Holmes hung over top of the Tar Heel defense, just for a second, on that game-winning TD. It was the perfect ending to the perfect game, one which bore no lasting impact aside from the fact that a quarter-century later I still think about it.

Friday's Old Fashioned: T-Men (1947)

The first thing you might notice about Anthony Mann’s “T-Men” (1947) is the narration. Many noirs have narration, of course, usually from an omniscient viewpoint, the main character looking back after the fact to bemoan his/her bad luck. The narrator in “T-Men” (Reed Hadley), though, is not the main character, and he is not bemoaning bad luck but celebrating the hard work of men who brought the bad luck upon the sort of rabble who might bemoan it. “T-Men” is set post-WWII, as most noirs were, but you could have clipped this narrator straight from a WWII propaganda movie. The voiceover might feel intrusive, but that’s part of the point, this guy butting in over and over to sing the praises of law enforcement. And despite an occasional scene of over-insistent patriotic bureaucracy, like a Treasury Agent scolding a cashier for accepting a phony bill, Mann doesn’t so much sing in tune with his narrator as use him for an effective counterpoint.

The T-Men are two treasury agents, Dennis O’Brien (Dennis O’Keefe) and Tony Genaro (Alfred Ryder), going undercover by posing as former members of the Green River Gang to bust a counterfeiting ring stretching from Detroit to Los Angeles. Each character is introduced taking the job, their backstories kept almost entirely out of the picture, allowing for no communication with the outside world except clandestine meetings with their superiors to exchange information. “Don’t forget,” O’Brien says at the outset of their job when Genaro mention his wife, “you’re not married. You’ve been divorced for reasons of duty.” It’s a demarcation line, and one Mann memorably brings to life in a later scene where Genaro, in the presence of another counterfeiter, the so-called Schemer (Wallace Ford), runs into his wife Mary (June Lockhart). If her friend doesn’t realize what’s happening, Mary plays along without skipping a beat, feigning as if she has no idea who Tony is and her friend has gone crazy from the heat. It might be a means to increase tension on Tony, but it plays as a cruel depriving of their love, filmed in close-ups where the love in her Mary’s cruelly gets no reciprocation.

O’Brien, on the other hand, is entirely devoid of personal attachments, and O’Keefe plays the part as if sliding into this gangster persona is the easiest thing in the world, chewing gum like it’s his madman method. In a scene at the Club Trinidad, when duty calls for him to flirt with a showgirl charging people to take their photographs, he comes across like a true male lout in giving her crap as he uncovers the information he seeks, like he’s not just trying to unearth that information but getting his rocks off doing so. It’s one of many moments scattered throughout where it becomes difficult to tell O’Brien apart from his alter ego, which Mann brings home in a suspenseful sequence set around a sink, where O’Brien is trying to retrieve a nameplate that has been left for him under the basin without the hood on the sink’s other side noticing, their side-by-side reflections in the mirror evoking a split personality.

Because Mann eschews soul-searching conversations between his two undercover men, this means the voiceover exists as the only window into their thoughts. And no matter how dire the situation gets, Hadley’s narration remains not so much upbeat as adamant, doggedly reminding us of the men’s heroism, which only renders his words more and more discordant as the T-Men plunge deeper and deeper into the criminal underworld, the way they look and what they are made to undergo squaring less and less with the patriotic wrapping. You see it most forcefully in the scene where O’Brien is forced to stand and watch as Tony, his real identity being outed, is shot and killed, as brutal as it is sudden, and which we see entirely through O’Brien’s reaction, the camera refusing to cut away, underlining the pressure he remains under not to react to lest he also be comprised. As Tony’s lifeless body falls, O’Brien’s head tilts down to watch and his eyes vanish into the darkness, as if his quick moment of mourning is over and now it’s back to work.

Forgotten Great Moments in Movie History

“Chinatown”, perhaps my favorite screenplay, written by Robert Towne, contains a plethora of punchy lines. The most famous is undoubtedly the last line – you know, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown”, delivered by Joe Mantello with an emphasis on the concluding word to make it sound less like the L.A. neighborhood where they are than a state of mind. Yet there is a line I have always loved a little more. It happens when Jake Gittes, private eye, pays a visit to Deputy Water Department Chief Russ Yellburton and Yellburton’s secretary tries warding this snoop off, saying Yellburton is in a meeting. Gittes says he’ll wait. The Secretary says Yellburton is liable to be tied up indefinitely. Gittes ripostes: “I take a long lunch hour. All day sometimes.”

The dry spin Nicholson puts on those perfectly penned words lets you know he’s seeking to get under the Secretary’s skin, sure, and quickly he does, but also that his character is telling the truth, which Nicholson emits throughout in his very insouciant air. He’s the kind of guy that takes a long lunch; all day sometimes. That, of course, is the benefit to self-employment, and probably not how most people lived in the 1930s. Yet I’ve come to view it as something like the dream, a future where automation is utilized for good rather than evil, freeing us from the ravages of work and leaving us to, like, ponder the cosmos and have plenty of time to pour over the new Frankie Cosmos LP. Lofty, I know, but I might have thought here, out beyond the gates of the new millennium, we would have made some honest to goodness work/life progress. Instead we’ve drifted further from the Gittes Idyll, into a Corporation First false idyll where companies create their own campuses as a means of entrapment and technology has rendered everyone reachable even during recess; they have analyzed the data, okay, and it should only take you 7-10 minutes to eat your lunch, so scarf it down and get back to work.

In a way, Jerome Facher saw all this coming. Maybe not the real Jerome Facher, retired partner at WilmerHale, but the Jerome Facher played by Robert Duvall in “A Civil Action”, certainly, a defense attorney representing a food company in a lawsuit pertaining to toxic groundwater. Facher is a villain, if an eccentric one, carrying around a ratty briefcase out of superstition, sitting apart from everyone else at a conference table, etc. These eccentricities sort of guard against the character’s ethical quagmire but also lead to my favorite scene in the movie, one where some overly-intrepid young law clerk makes the mistake of delivering a brief to Facher on his lunch break in the darkened bowels of the firm.

Clerk: “Mr Doyle asked me to bring this to you.”
Facher: “When?”
Clerk: “When did he ask me? Just now.”
Facher: “On your lunch break? That hardly seems fair.”
Clerk: “I almost never go to lunch, sir. Too much to do. I just grab something.”
Facher: “You know, I’d make a point of taking an hour or so away from all the noise and insanity of this place. I’d find a place that was relatively quiet and peaceful, have a sandwich, read a magazine. Maybe listen to a game if one was on. I’d make sure everyone knew not to disturb me during that hour. Because that would be my time – my own private time, which no one, if they had any sense of self-preservation, would dare interrupt.”

The way Duvall says my time, underlining “my” by pounding his finger on the table as he says it, oh, that makes me want to stand up and cheer more than any courtroom movie closing monologue. And even if Facher proves smarter than, frankly, everyone around him, on his side or against, they view him as some sort of bizarre dinosaur. And that, I suppose, is true. He’s a dinosaur of a more civilized age, a long time ago, before the efficiency experts helped us internalize lunch breaks as something to be whimsically laughed off.

A Brief History of Movie Characters Washing Their Hands

Max Cherry (Robert Forster) first encounters Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson), the gun runner who will inadvertently change his life, at least for a little while, in his bail bonds office upon exiting the bathroom to find Ordell waiting for him. “Ah, ah, ah,” Ordell scolds with an appropriately shit-eating grin, “I didn’t hear you wash your hands.” Perhaps the moment is merely emblematic of the foul business in which Max works and the even fouler business in which he is about to find himself entangled, but it’s also calling out a film cliché, the one Vanity Fair film critic K. Austin Collins mourned aloud in Twitter form over the weekend, wondering why we so rarely see characters soaping up their hands and then rinsing them at the movies.

Sometimes movie characters forgoing washing their hands is for the service of a gag, of course, like Otis exiting the bathroom in “Kicking and Screaming”, doing his belt buckle as he does so. “That is a really bad habit,” his surly friend Max observes of this belt-buckling. “You really need to finish that in the bathroom.” The same bathroom, presumably, where Otis did not wash his hands since I don’t know how you would while you’re still holding up your pants.

Other times, naturally, not seeing characters wash their hands is merely to streamline the action. “They must have washed their hands in ‘It’s Complicated,’” said My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife when I mentioned Collins’s Tweet, “before they made croissants.” To the YouTube! Alas, Meryl Streep and Steve Martin did not wash their hands before making croissants. I mean, they probably washed their hands but the scene was never written because you don’t need it, not dramatically, though, this, of course, is precisely what Collins is lamenting. He doesn’t want to assume Meryl & Steve washed their hands; he wants to see it.

As it happens, the 1940 noir movie I just watched for my #Noirvember review coming Friday, called “T-Men” (1947), included a scene where the main character played by Dennis O’Keefe washes his hands. But this scene, filmed from an intoxicating kind of low angle, is less about cleanliness than generating tension, looking up so we can see O’Keefe, standing at the sink with another character, a bad, bad dude, trying to reach for something under the sink while trying to not look like he’s reaching for something under the sink.

Ditto “The Insider” where a scene of Russell Crowe washing his hands exists to fuel the drama too, bringing marital resentment to the forefront, his wife admonishing him for washing his hands in the kitchen sink, which is for food only, after coming in from the garden. Still, give Crowe’s character credit for cleaning up after digging in the dirt; that’s something!. And while you can read the transplendent “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” bathroom fisticuffs in any way you want, one detail not open to interpretation is that while Tom Cruise and Henry Cavill’s characters are fake washing their hands, the character they’re looking for, phony John Lark, is not fake washing his hands at all. I don’t know if a dude as dastardly as Fake John Lark gets let through the Pearly Gates, but observing proper sanitation at least gives him a fighting chance.

“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”, meanwhile, long a point of contention for cinema’s Plausibility Police, with art & leisure writers on slow weeks seeing if they can replicate the entire journey that Ferris and Sloane and Cameron make, has the scene in Chez Luis’s bathroom where Ferris washes his hands. [Pause.] Okay, okay, you got me, Plausibility Police; I’m extrapolating. When the movie cuts to Ferris in the bathroom he is already in the process of drying his hands and so we don’t officially see him wash his hands. But. Right after Ferris departs the restroom, you will recall Ferris’s Dad exits a stall and walks to the sink…where he washes his hands. Like Father Like Son?

If we can’t officially confirm that Ferris washes his hands, we can at least confirm that Jules, our man in Inglewood, and Vincent, our man in Amsterdam, wash their hands in “Pulp Fiction.” Uh, well, Jules washes his hands; Vincent just gets his hands wet, or at least that’s what Jules claims, fiercely critiquing Vincent’s hand-washing technique, rendering it as a kind of profane if no less crucial PSA. Wash your hands, motherfucker!

That brings us to John McClane, a confirmed hand-washer. I know because, like the studious researcher I am, I fired up the blu-ray and literally confirmed it. Upon meeting Holly, his estranged wife, at her Nakatomi Tower office, he goes back to her private bathroom and, yes, is seen with his hands under running. The guy may end the movie by tying a fire hose around his waist and jump from the roof of a 35 story building just ahead of a massive explosion, but he begins the movie, after disembarking from an airplane, “where up to 20% of passengers may develop respiratory infections within 1 week (of travel)”, and then washing his hands. And if you want to argue that John McClane became an American legend on the strength of saving so many in Nakatomi Plaza, and Dulles Airport, and New York, and America, well, never forget where it all started – practicing good hygiene in the lavatory.

Parasite

“Parasite” begins in a dingy Seoul basement apartment belonging to the Kims, a family of four, as the college-aged children, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-sik) and Ki-jeong (Park So-dam), seek cellphone reception, moving from room to room, holding their phones up higher and higher, eventually making contact. It evokes modern life, yes, but just as aptly epitomizes all ages and eras, the circumstances necessary for being connected to the outside world, the Elois and the Morlocks all over again. That speaks to the class commentary director Bong Joon-ho is fond of, like 2014’s “Snowpiercer”, though the divide here, while no less explicit, contains a more vicious bite, not least because of Bong’s immense command of his craft, so effortlessly and electrically blending comedy and suspense that you don’t even realize when he’s led you right into an emotional trap.

At the suggestion and inflated recommendation of his friend, Ki-woo takes a job as English tutor to the moody daughter, Da-hye (Jung Ji-so), of a wealthy family, the Parks, living in an avant-garde mansion, its wide-open design and expansive window looking out onto an immaculate lawn juxtaposed against the Kims cramped abode with a window looking up and out into an alley where drunkards urinate. Do you know how much a Malibu view costs? This incites a larger scheme where through phony recommendations made by each successive family member, all the Kims wind up working for the Parks. Ki-jung becomes art instructor to their son, Da-song (Jung Hyun-jun); the father, Ki-taek, (Song Kang-ho) gets a job driving for Mr. Park (Lee Sun-kyun); the mother, Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin), becomes the Parks’ new housekeeper. Bong has said “Mission: Impossible” inspired these passages and it shows, a gathering of the team, in a manner of speaking, their mission, which they choose to accept, infiltrating the lap of luxury. Though they never sport latex masks, each one is nevertheless in disguise, never more humorously than Ki-jeong who demonstrates how merely expressing brisk attitude makes you seem like you belong.

If the Parks are never exactly faceless villains, neither are they presented as well-rounded people with whom we empathize, Bong deliberately playing up the cocoon in which they reside. Da-hye is only being tutored in English to make eyes at whoever her tutor happens to be; her brother’s ostensible art genius is outed as a fabrication. Their exceptionalism, in other words, is just sort of assumed and then automatically confirmed by the size of their bank account. It’s the bubble, in fact, that makes it so easy for the Kim family to dupe the Parks over and over, though it’s also the bubble that keeps them insulated. When a family camping trip is ruined by rain, the Parks simply come home, calling ahead for Chung-sook to prepare noodles, which clashes obviously but no less ferociously with an astonishing sequence in which the Kims return home that same night through the driving rain, descending staircase after staircase, so many sets of stairs, under grimy freeways and down hills, returning to their poverty-stricken neighborhood to find it flooded out, desperate characters floating along on makeshift life rafts. Bong introduces this unstoppable inundation from above, suggesting a God’s-eye view, though in this case it’s hard not to read the Rich as God, looking down on all the rest. Even the idiom that Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall cuts across class lines; more rain falls in some lives than others.

The sequence ends with the Kims packed into a gymnasium alongside hundreds of others who have been flooded out, like survivors of a sinking ship, the S.S. Titanic all over again. Not that Bong is consumed by that “Snowpiercer”-ish populism. While his sympathies clearly lie with the Kims, frequently framing them together while showing the Park family in separate rooms and places, apart, stressing the importance of that community, he also tweaks that community and the idea of their moral relativism, and ours. We become complicit, the “M:I” homage designed to rope us right in to their side even as their tactics skew dubious, never more than an invented case of T.B., the capping shot to this semi-comic sequence making me laugh out loud until I realized what I was laughing at. If the Kims are tight-knit, this tightness becomes their own kind of cocoon, and the ensuing brooms Bong sticks in his own cleverly designed narrative wheel, illuminates this idea.

When the Parks go camping, the quartet that has figuratively taken over their home takes it over literally, eating and drinking in their living room, sleeping in their beds. The tension here seems obvious – when the will the Parks come home? But Bong has something else in mind. What it is, this review will not say, but it brings out the diabolical nature of the Kims own actions, how most anyone, rich or poor or in-between, will sacrifice the greater good to protect their own. It’s an age-old divide, one for which Bong sees no solution, taking sides in his sentimental ending as one of the two families fades from view, even as he lays the truth of that divide bare. In the climactic scene, right before things take a gruesome turn, the two patriarchs kneel inches apart, staring right at one another even as the look in each of their eyes makes it clear they can’t see each other at all.

Pain and Glory

If the oeuvre of renowned Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar has long evinced melodrama and exaggeration, his latest, “Pain and Glory”, is more mellow. Even his beloved primary colors frequently feel more muted, like his protagonist’s striking green leather jacket, its bold hues drowned out by the gloomy interiors of a doctor’s office. That’s not to suggest “Pain and Glory” forgoes Almodóvar’s preferred metatext and twists; they are just conveyed with fewer soap opera flourishes, evoked in the film’s indelible closing shot, not to be revealed, where the last piece of the puzzle falls into place with nothing more than a gentle pulling back of the camera. In this way, Almodóvar echoes the air of his leading man, Antonio Banderas, who in his conspicuously thick grey hair exists as a thinly-disguised version of Almodóvar himself, a brilliant but now reclusive Spanish filmmaker named Salvador Mallo suffering a litany of physical ailments, all of which Banderas brings to life not with elaborate gestures but minimally emphatic motions. And as the film opens, Salvador floats underwater in a pool. If it suggests relief from his intense pain, or perhaps his proximity to death, it made me think of a kind of underwater meditation where you become literally and figuratively weightless, releasing everything so you can let everything back in, which is precisely what “Pain and Glory” does too.

Almodóvar tells the story of Salvador in the present day while flashing back to his youthful upbringing, living under the watchful gaze of his devout mother Jacinta (Penélope Cruz) in a cave-like dwelling. The initial flashback finds the young Salvador on a riverbank with his mother, laundering clothes but singing, hinting at her son’s impending artistic soul. That river, though, doesn’t feel just like a picturesque setting but a telling metaphor – in “Pain and Glory”, memory is like a river, always there whether you see it or not, ready and waiting for Salvador to dip into. And Salvador’s emergent heroin addiction in adulthood also becomes the most frequent trigger of these flashbacks, which taken in conjunction with the oddly nonthreatening portrayal of this addiction, kicked with nothing more than a shrug, suggest nostalgia as a drug itself, which, in turn, “Pain and Glory” embraces and then gracefully expunges by looking back as a means to move forward.

The past and present become intertwined when a local theater asks to screen one of Salvador’s classics. This, though, becomes less the point than the director re-uniting and half-reconciling with his estranged leading man Alberto (Asier Etxeandia), whose performance in the ostensible classic Salvador criticized. With the passage of time, however, Salvador admits he sees more clearly what Alberto intended to evince, an admission that Banderas manages to delicately render as both cutting and just the plain truth, a window into his character’s professional air. The screening, which is as much about Almodóvar airing his grievances about the Q&A format (second!) as the screening itself, leads directly to Alberto staging a one man show of Salvador’s unpublished manuscript titled Addiction. In this stirring sequence, “Pain and Glory” becomes a virtual hall of mirrors, not just in the way Alberto is playing Salvador who is playing Almodóvar, but in how the real-life director and his editor Teresa Font whisk these images together to illustrate how art is a dialogue between artist and audience.

The human subject of this show, Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), it turns out, is in the audience one night. Long ago, in 80s Madrid, he and Salvador were hooked on heroin and on each other. Recognizing himself, Frederico approaches Alberto and then seeks out Salvador. The ensuing sequence in which the two lovers reunite for an evening is a short film unto itself. Font underscores their connection, despite so many years apart, simply in a symphony of reverse shots, the tight frames laying bare the palpable ardor virtually imprinted in their expressions, Sbaraglia in particular capturing the way deep love welled in with you manifests itself in the wideness of your smile, with occasional cutaways from the side briefly tamping down the magnetism of those medium close-ups even if the men’s emotional current remains evident. And every actorly gesture not only epitomizes the moment in which they are in but illuminates the past they share; watch when Frederico offers a toast to a female comrade and how Banderas lets his head fall gently to one side with an almost imperceptible nod and a kind of wordless sigh of recognition, a split-second effortlessly encapsulating an entire unseen relationship.

Despite their evident re-connection, however, in the space of their sad smiles it becomes just as clear they cannot recreate their moment of the past, the sequence ending on a bittersweet note that continues through an ensuing vignette of Salvador visiting with his aging mother and hearing of her desire to return home one last time. That desire proves no less ineffectual, leaving art as the last remedy, a way to freeze moments and places in time, an idea not only manifesting itself in a watercolor from Salvador’s childhood but in “Pain and Glory” itself, once the curtain is finally, not until the last moment, drawn back.

There is a moment during Alberto’s one-man show when, standing downstage, the camera pushes in on him. And if for most of this scene Almodóvar is switching angles to take in the full scope of the room, here his slow zoom removes all the people, all the negative space, even that crimson wall in the background, leaving us with just the actor’s face in close-up. It is nothing less than Almodóvar demonstrating how an artist can hone in on one image and give it permanence.

My Favorite College Football Games: Game 11

December 31, 2000 (Independence Bowl): Mississippi State - 43 Texas A&M - 41 (OT)

If there have been umpteen Games of the Century in college football, so too have there been frequent iterations of the so-called Snow Bowl. This, as the name implies, is when a game winds up contested in snowy conditions. Flurries, of course, don’t count; just snow. The 1950 Michigan/Ohio State game was a Snow Bowl, waged during The Great Appalachian Storm, and the dramatic 1992 Notre Dame/Penn State game, when an inch of snow covered the field by game’s end, earned that label too. Really, though, Snow Bowls are abundant. Last year I watched a good chunk of Wyoming beating Air Force just because it was played in a descending blanket of the picturesque white stuff. There is no one official Snow Bowl, nor should there be, but for a good part of the CFB populace, I suspect, the sort that has been around long enough to claim the Independence Bowl’s one true sponsor as Poulan Weed Eater, the one true Snow Bowl is the 2000 Independence Bowl between the Mississippi State Bulldogs and Texas A&M Aggies. This game, after all, was held not in the Pacific Northwest or Upper Midwest but down on the bayou, so to speak, in northwest Louisiana. If storms in that area trend toward rain or sleet, on New Year’s Eve 2000 it turned into snow, and by the grace of the college football gods the blizzard blew into Shreveport just as the game commenced, meaning its entirety was played in falling snow, not simply disappearing the yard lines, so that occasionally, if you weren’t paying attention, a touchdown could just materialize out of nowhere, but frequently falling in chunks so large they were detectable on screen; football has never been so visually glorious.

The unfortunate irony of so many Snow Bowls, alas, is how rarely they evoke their own weird, woolly weather; whiteout conditions are not optimal for coordinating eleven players. It’s why most accounts of the 1950 Snow Bowl stress how it was hardly a game at all. The 2000 Independence Bowl, on the other hand, lived its meteorological insanity out. Not just in madcap adventures, like woebegone kickoffs, a fumble on the very first play of the game, an interception setting up the tying touchdown in regulation, or even the blocked extra point in the ensuing overtime the Bulldogs returned with help of a loony lateral at the 50-yard line resulting in the extremely rare 97-yard two-point conversion. No, the game was an improbable offensive explosion, rife with long runs and deep passes. And though he lost, the Aggies’ legendary 281-pound running back Ja’Mar Toombs earned the game's MVP anyway, a beast on figurative ice skates, navigating the snowy field with ease to the tune of 193 yards and three touchdowns.

Now you, astute reader, are probably wondering why I, hep cat, was home on New Year’s Eve watching a football game. The details are simple yet boring and beside the point. The point is, in a sport the ungainly size of college football, with too many teams (116 in 2000) and too many bowl games (25 the same season), the potential for epic insanity looms at every kickoff. You never know when delightful madness might strike; you never know when the game of the year might happen. Sometimes you catch it; sometimes you don’t. The national championship game was played three nights later in the Orange Bowl, but who remembers that humdrum affair? As unlikely as a Shreveport blizzard, the Independence Bowl turned out to be the season’s best game. All I can say is, I hope you were lucky enough to stay home to see it.