Friday's Old Fashioned: The Lady Vanishes (1938)

Steven Hyden deemed “Boxer”, The National’s 2007 album, as one “of its time: living in America in the waning years of the second Bush administration.” He continued: “Things had gotten bad, but most of the worst of it was far away geographically, our economy was a year away from collapsing completely, and if you were having an easy life to begin with, you could continue to do so and calculatedly shut out the rest of the world.” He tied it to the words of the album’s remarkable opening cut: “half-awake in our fake empire.” I kept thinking about “Fake Empire” as I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate British film, “The Lady Vanishes”, released in 1938, a year before Central Europe was rocked with war, though his film opens, deliberately, with a flight of visual fancy, a toy train and a miniature alpine village. It’s a reminder of how effects need not evince realism to be special, yes, but it also evokes the place, Bandrika, a fictional Balkan country, making it look like as much like a Lubitsch fairytale as a Hitchcock thriller. And even if you know what’s coming, the rhythms of the opening remain, a comedy of manners in which all the preeminent characters gather at a scenic inn before embarking for a cross-country train trip It’s not a feint so much as an evocation of, well, living half-awake in a fake empire. Listen to Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood), the English tourist headed home to be married, as she says: “I’ve no regrets. I've been everywhere and done everything. I’ve played baccarat at Biarritz and darts with the rural dean. What is there left for me but marriage?” She may as well be, to paraphrase The National, tiptoeing through Bandrika with diamond slippers on.

Hitchcock makes the idea of drowsy England waking up to the era’s brewing truths explicit through Iris, after the whimsical yet wistful prologue, embarking for the train and getting hit in the head by a falling flowerpot, knocking her out, as if she’s being roused into reality. Indeed, once on the train, after a conversation with Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), “rhymes with joy” as she explains, and which is what Whitty’s performance embodies, rendering their becoming fast friends believable, Iris dozes off and then wakes up, this time to something like a nightmare, evoked in the frightening close-ups of the passengers across from her – a leering gentleman, a disapproving woman, shown in the kind of straight-on close-ups that put you immediately at unease. That unease furthers when she realizes Miss Froy is not across from her, as she was when Iris fell asleep, and especially when Iris goes searching for the old woman and not only can’t find her but is told she was never on the train in the first place.

Gilbert Redmond (Michael Redgrave), the mischief making ethnomusicologist who begins at comical odds with Iris to help facilitate their romance, comes to her aid when everyone else on the train think she’s off her rocker. That, however, does not necessarily mean he believes her, at least not at first, the chemistry between Redgrave and Lockwood neatly intertwining their burgeoning love with his realization that she is telling the truth, their eventual mutual spark sort of suggesting Nick and Nora by way of Errol and Olivia. And though events turn dire and Hitch turns up the suspense, especially in a sequence where a key piece of evidence appears written in the window, just out of sight of the characters but completely in the audience’s line of vision, making us want to point and scream – RIGHT THERE! – like it’s the end of “Marathon Man”, “The Lady Vanishes” never entirely abandons its initial comedy of manners air. In fact, that air is intertwined with the mystery in order to proffer commentary by way of cocktail chatter, or something.

Iris and Gilbert’s fellow passengers don’t so much disbelieve their pleas as actively ignore them. Todhunter (Cecil Parker), a lawyer, is concerned getting involved in a missing persons case will damage his reputation and keeps his trap shut, imploring his wife to do the same, while Charters (Basil Radford) and Caldicott (Nauton Wayne), concerned an investigation will delay their arrival at a cricket match choose to stay out of it too. Let me be more emphatic on the last one: these two men are so afraid of missing the start time of a freaking cricket match that they pretend not to have known Miss Froy was on the train even though we pointedly see them see her on the train. It’s like a pre-WWII version of Larry David in “Curb Your Enthusiasm” where selfishness outweighs being a Good Samaritan.

The selfish characters do not emerge as Good Samaritans, exactly, but nevertheless become sort of conscripted into duty anyway when Iris and Gilbert refuse to give up Miss Froy to the baddies and gunfire erupts. And though the situation gets mighty real, it never descends into full-on darkness, Hitchcock allowing his characters to maintain their pithiness even as he exhorts them – and England – to get up and show some pluck. It’s a shootout, alright, but let’s call it a shootout with their diamond slippers on, metaphorically speaking, which just goes to show one need not pull the wool over his or her eyes; you can enjoy yourself and admit the world is burning.

Forgotten Great Moments in Movie History

No movie blog has written about John Frankenheimer’s 1998 thriller “Ronin”, currently registering a perfect score, as it has going on 22 years, per the Cinema Romantico Boysenberry Barometer, as much as this blog. And yet, for all the words we’ve spilled, the character of Seamus O’Rourke has mostly – if not entirely – been absent from the discussion. He’s The Man Behind the Curtain, trying to get the case, the case that everyone wants, even if they don't seem to know what the case contains because it’s the MacGuffin, but using the ringleader of the Ronin – Dierdre (Natascha McElhone) – to get to the case. He’s played by Jonathan Pryce, a recent first-time Oscar nominee for Best Actor.

Ronin, as the title cards explain, were masterless Samurai warriors, wandering the land looking for work, and “Ronin” honors that idea by making the backgrounds of these men and women vague, where details like Dierdre’s “charming Irish lilt”, to quote another character, are meant to fill in blanks, partially. Because Seamus, as his name implies, has an Irish lilt too, we can also assume his background. But his background takes a further twist later in the movie, at a precarious moment in which the all-important case is missing, when coy dialogue suggests he’s been cut out of the IRA loop, quite possibly because of his own dubious machinations. It paints Seamus with the brush of desperation, which Pryce plays to the sweaty hilt when he brings Dierdre back to his hideout where they have a row.

Before having that row, though, he has to rough up Gregor (Stellan Skarsgård), the double-crossing Ronin, and roughing up someone will wear the rougher upper out. So Seamus needs a roughing up digestif; he needs a shot of whiskey.

So he picks up the bottle and the shot glass.

But given the crude conditions, something, who knows what, is still in the shot glass, probably from the night before, so he dumps whatever-it-is on the floor.

And to get rid of the undoubtedly foul remnants of whatever-it-was, he takes his coat and wipes out the shot glass.

Then he pours his shot.

What was it Janis Joplin sang? Ah yes. Wiping out your shot glass with your trench coat’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

Adventures in Movie Trailers, Part 343

A few things you should know. I’m starting to suspect Disney is Cinema’s #1 enemy. I, like Dr. Indiana Jones before me, hate snakes. I didn’t even really like amusement parks and amusement park rides all that much when I was a kid. “The African Queen” is not one of my preferred Bogeys. And yet.

Well, wait a second. Before the yet. Let me say.

This might, like, 89.9% have to do with Emily Blunt, who typically does right even if the movie she’s in goes wrong, and we might well look back on this moment as the one signaling the industry officially breaking my brain, and I don’t want you to judge me, and I really, really (I cannot stress this enough) want you to read the question mark I’m deliberately choosing to end this forthcoming ostensible declaration. And that declaration, so to speak, is this:

I want to see “Jungle Cruise”?

Uncut Gems

In Josh and Benny Safdie’s previous feature film “Good Time”, their scuzzball anti-hero might have been fenced in by a police manhunt offering no escape but nevertheless remained so high on his pompous supply that in his white privileged mind he remained scot-free even when in handcuffs, brilliantly evoked in the final shot. The Safdie Brothers’ follow-up, “Uncut Gems”, is its own kind of adventure movie, though its protagonist, jeweler Howard Ratner (Adam Sadler), is aware of the damage done and his own smallness in the world, illustrated not just it in his mid-movie crying fit but the desperate hilarity of a shot in which he drags garbage cans to the curb. He might well be beyond escape, given the debts he owes and the reckless decisions he makes, yet still convinced he can attain it through one last score. If it sounds rote, the Brothers Safdie craft something thrillingly apart from a traditional heist movie, more like an elaborate house of cards that, by film’s end, has been erected to dizzying, dangerous heights.

For a movie of frenzied realism, “Uncut Gems” begins with a bout of special effects, the camera tunneling into a precious gem found in Ethiopia and then emerging from, of all places, Howard’s colon as we realize he is splayed out on a gurney, under sedation as he undergoes a colonoscopy. It suggests the gem taking possession of him, just as it will take possession of NBA star Kevin Garnett, playing himself, who shows up in Howard’s store not long after the procedure. Demonstrating his propensity for misplace braggadocio, Howard can’t help but show off this priceless stone to such a celebrity, only to have Garnett turn the tables when he, too, falls under the stone’s sway, demanding literal possession of it, at least for a night. It leads to a temporary trade, Garnett taking the rock and Howard taking Garnett’s 2009 NBA Championship ring as collateral, though he immediately pawns the ring to place a bet on Garnett’s game that night in the hopes of making more money and buying back the ring, a maze of logic deliberately presented so that, initially, you can’t quite tell if this talky jeweler is a savant or a schlemiel.

That maze of logic is rendered almost unbearably tense through the film’s astonishing, noisy soundscape. Not for nothing do we meet Howard under sedation and silent, a provocative feint, for as soon as he’s up and on the movie, Howard never shuts up, not just when other people are around but in his own company, broadcasting internal monologues for all the indifferent world to hear. His omnipresent voice, dotted with attempted chummy citations of his conversation partner’s name and extraneous curse words, blends with the cacophony of the New York streets and that of his own jewelry store, where the bulletproof door’s buzzer becomes a recurring comic bit, all of it so grating that the movie seems to be mixed through the soundboard of WFAN, home of professional loudmouth Mike Francesa who, as it happens, is in “Uncut Gems”, as a bookie though mostly here, I suspect, just to add one more element to the overwhelming aural environment. Indeed, Warren Shaw might be the first movie sound editor to approximate the guttural sensation of enduring two hours of sports talk radio – MAKE IT STOP.

And yet, it’s an environment where Howard thrives even as it forever threatens to undo him, rendering his penchant for complicated parlay bets on sporting events as more than a narrative device, a manifestation of the way he lives his life, acting rashly in the moment in the name of some supposed grand vision that typically proves false. He begins the movie with a mistress, Julia (Julia Fox), only to ditch her when she’s unfaithful (too) and then plead with his wife, Dinah (Idina Menzel), for another go despite their mutual decision to divorce. Menzel, doing an A+ impression of a Real Housewife of New Jersey, receives his words and then hysterically dresses down his plea, his romantic parlay coming up bust. It’s a scene only slightly less pitiful than Howard trying to commend his daughter (Noa Fisher) on her performance in the school play. She doesn’t even make eye contact, treating her own father with as much palpable contempt as Keith Williams Richards’ raspy-voiced loan shark muscle. Howard is only rendered more ridiculous by the costuming, a billowy red shirt making him look as out of place in his kitchen as he does a little while later in the club, a man stranded in an unforgiving society.

These scenes at home don’t just temper the movie’s relentless pace but demonstrate how every aspect of Howard’s life exists in a similar vein, embodied in the nature of Sandler’s performance, where he plays each moment opposite whoever – Menzel, Fisher, Williams Richards, Kevin Garnett – in the same chattery, sweaty key, a father trying to hustle his wife and daughter the same way he tries to hustle crooks and clients. And when his wife blows up his get-romance-quick scheme, he goes right back to Julia, merely railing against his own failures harder, the pointedly ridiculous tattoo she gets of his name underlining an eternal regression to the juvenile mean.

And if getting thrown into a midtown fountain by menacing men would cause anyone else to reevaluate their life, Howard just shakes it off, like a dog coming in out of the rain, as “Uncut Gems” builds to an unlikely denouement in which a 2012 NBA playoff game is incredibly repurposed by The Safdie Brothers, encapsulating how a sporting event can yield as much primal tension as, say, the car chase in “The French Connection.” And if the stressful sequence’s conclusion might feel perfunctory, or even possibly like a cheat, it achieves something more akin to weird transcendence, like Howard has finally hustled his masterpiece into being. Look at how he’s framed and positioned in the final images; he’s finally at peace.

The Rise of Skywalker

A funny thing happened when I heard his voice – I welled up. “His” voice is Han Solo’s. And if you think that’s a spoiler, what movie do you think you’re watching? If the Skywalker Trilogy, wrapping up with this dead fish, has proven anything, it’s that it can’t and won’t let go of the past. The opening scrawl’s first words are “THE DEAD SPEAK”, referring to Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), whom I’m positive was thrown down a shaft situated aboard The Death Star which consequently was blown to smithereens as 1983’s “Return of the Jedi” concluded but, nope, who is apparently alive, if barely, and in control and now about to crush the Resistance just like he was about to crush the Rebellion. It all felt achingly familiar, which was the whole point, not quoting the original movies in its aesthetic but in its story points, an entire film as a John Williams leitmotif, sentimental repetition masquerading as innovation. Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), though, chief heavy, to his credit, in confronting his dad’s ghost, says aloud, “You’re just a memory.” At that, my eyes dried up and I realized whatever relationship I had with “Star Wars”, which once, a long time ago, in a lifetime far, far away, was substantial and important, was now just a memory too.

As “Rise of Skywalker” opens, Rey (Daisy Ridley), ex-Jakku scavenger turned Resistance rock star, is furthering her Jedi training by hovering in the air, guiding various also airborne stones around her. It’s a moment demanding patience, as Yoda used to preach, a faculty which “The Rise of Skywalker” hardly possesses, evoked in how the camera rapidly presses in on her, as if telling her to hurry up and get this meditation over with so the movie can get going. Sure enough, her concentration’s broken and the stones fall out of the sky. There is this new threat from the old Emperor, after all, deep in some uncharted Sith system, and Old Man Palpatine tells the trilogy’s chief baddie Kylo Ren to go find Rey and kill her so the First Order can blossom into the Final Order. That means Rey and the gang – Resistance fighter pilot (Oscar Issac), heroic turncoat Finn (John Boyega), and Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo) – need to find the Emperor first and, I thought, throw him down the shaft a second time though I suspected he’d survive that fall too and turn up in the fourth trilogy.

This is merely the MacGuffin, the meaningless element on which the plot hangs to engineer the adventure and point Rey toward her self-actualization and showdown with Kylo Ren. What’s strange, though, is how Abrams is as devoted to the MacGuffin as the adventure, never mind the characters, spinning it off into sub-MacGuffins, an endless series of plants and payoffs that keep the movie churning relentlessly forward without imaginatively filling in the space around them, a virtually craft-less story, the elegant adventure movie of the first “Star Wars” with rising and falling action abandoned to simply tie a brick to the accelerator. In the 1977 original, breaking out of an Imperial stronghold took nearly the entire second act whereas in “The Rise of Skywalker” it takes, what, five minutes, a whir of laser bolts and one double cross gone in the blink of an eye before the Millennium Falcon makes its escape in the background, ending not with a bang but a blip over someone’s shoulder.

Abrams’s chosen pace forsakes world-building, again and again, even when he shows promise, like the planet Kijimi, briefly emitting “Odd Man Out” vibes before quickly moving on while the movie only briefly revels in The Festival of the Ancestors. This celebration might only, as the eternally intrepid C-3PO explains, happen once every forty-two years, but even as Rey’s body language indicates a desire to participate, the characters and, consequently, the movie keeps her on schedule. The rest of the time, as her past comes into view and she has recurring dreamlike conversations with Kylo across time and space, she’s usually just agonized. For the most part, Abrams recounts this agony in close-up, meaning Ridley can’t do much but clench her teeth and squint, which, to her credit, she does with ferocious aplomb, never more than the lightsaber duel where, despite lackluster choreography, the manner in which she slams her lightsaber against Kylo’s harmonizes with the cacophony of the crashing waves.

The preceding “Last Jedi” seemed to suggest an almost history-free arc for Rey, but “The Rise of Skywalker” tacks hard back toward the series’ familiar narrative flourishes, epitomized in those blue Force Ghosts, which going back to “Jedi” inadvertently foreshadowed the franchise’s unfortunate future. It might not be so eye-rolling if this deference to the past was reckoned with in any real way, like a possible opportunity in C-3PO’s memory being wiped. That, though, like so much else, is just played for a laugh and forgotten, Abrams content to proffer myriad Easter eggs shouting out movies gone by, like Wedge Antilles (Denis Lawson), the famed X-Wing pilot making his return, which isn’t a scene, just a shot, a moment so visually unimaginative that it could well have been filmed post-production, who knows. And a movie that in its new faces and names might have boldly pointed toward the future instead, once again, in its final line, retreats to the past.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Murder on the Orient Express (1974)

Sidney Lumet’s 1974 adaptation of Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express” is notable for its frequent exterior shots of the eponymous long-distance passenger train rattling along its scenic railway and of the introductory moments where everyone boards said train, the camera tracking down the walkway to revel in the locomotive and the impressive set design surrounding it. By far, though, the most striking practical effect in “Murder on the Orient Express” is not the Orient Express itself but one of its passengers – that is, Hercule Poroit (Albert Finney), In the books Christie described this “detective of international fame and distinction” as “egg-shaped” and, by God, as played by Finney and costumed by Tony Walton, he really does look like an ovoidal person, like if he accidentally fell on his side in the cramped train quarters he would go rolling down the aisle. And yet, that natural appearance is juxtaposed against a peculiarly vain man, his hair drowned in so much Brilliantine that despite the 1974 aesthetic it still stands out like modern-day high-definition and a moustache so finely honed he slips on a moustache guard at night to keep it in place. Finney, meanwhile, merely plays up this preening nature to the hilt, delightfully eschewing any need to be traditionally likable.

His one-of-a-kind nature comes through when an American businessman, Samuel Ratchett (Richard Widmark), complaining of threats against his life, tries to avail himself of Poirot’s services as a bodyguard for a hefty sum and the detective churlishly declines. As Christie would have it, though, Ratchett winds up dead overnight, apparently not long after taking the sleeping draught brought to him by a valet (Sir John Gielgud), the same valet who finds him the ensuing morning, dead. Upon finding the bloody corpse, the valet expresses understandable shock, dropping his tray, falling back, though the previous evening, just after dropping off the draught, the camera lingers in close-up on the valet’s face, an expression decidedly communicating that Something Bad Is About To Happen. Lumet repeats this device later when passengers undergo Poirot’s interrogations, after the train becomes stranded due to an avalanche, to get to the bottom of things, like the Count (Michael York) and Countess (Jacqueline Bisset), who in answering the detective’s queries exchange looks throughout of two people having just memorized lines for a play and each one trying to mentally guide the other. Lumet, in other words, is not trying to feign the characters’ innocence but finger every one of them, which isn’t just subterfuge to distract us, the viewers, but ultimately the point.

Then again, much of the point is just watching Poirot’s interrogations which is why Lumet assembled an all-star cast, from Bisset and York to Anthony Perkins, whose guilt seems embodied simply in his endlessly twitching forehead, and Lauren Bacall as the American widow Mrs. Hubbard. In Cinema Romantico’s 2018 overview of cinematic gum-chewing we regretfully failed to include Ms. Bacall, who in one scene snaps at gum with a patented Bacall-esque fury, not only bringing the Stupid American stereotype to comic life but embodying her entire turn. If everyone else is trying to play it cool, she’s all up in Poirot’s face, walking right up with him the murder weapon when she happens upon it and playing her character’s ultimate reveal with all kinds of “Yeah, so?” pizazz. Her train passenger, Ingrid Bergman, won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar but I’d like to retroactively nominate Lauren Bacall for 1974 Achievement in Attitude.

The resolution to the stabbing, given the conspicuous 12 stab wounds and the number of passengers might well be foregone, though that did not bother me as much as the resolution’s shift in tone. That tonal shift doesn’t come out of nowhere, set up by the eerie prologue, a prologue correlates directly to the resolution. It’s dark, this resolution, though it’s also something more than dark, something like vengefully emphatic, even empathetic, in its way, an empathy that Poirot is forced to consider. The Whodunit becomes more about Whytheydidit and the Whytheydidit winds up playing at an emotional level the Whodunit can’t fulfill.

The Report

“Have you read the report?” This is what Daniel J. Jones (Adam Driver), a Senate staff member, asks President Obama’s Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough (Jon Hamm). The report to which he’s referring was a big damn deal, the largest investigative review in Senate history, a thorough reckoning with the CIA’s activities during America’s so-called War on Terror. But no, McDonough says, he hasn’t read the report because, he explains, it’s longer than the Bible. And therein lies writer/director Scott Z. Burns’s challenge and purpose, to take a report as long as the Bible and not render it merely coherent for viewers but entertaining. In that way, his task is akin to dramatizing the thoroughly un-entertaining Mueller Report, which was literally assumed by some of Hollywood’s best in June. They gave life to that massive document as a table read, however, which is a far cry from a film, and “The Report” just sort of is a moving table read – solid acting but visually inert.

Granted, some of this detachment deliberately stems from Driver’s performance. When his character is tasked by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening) to compile the report, she makes clear the necessity of his remaining unbiased. In these moments, Driver does not maintain a poker face, not at all, but seems to genuinely let all feeling evaporate from his face. He’s not hell bent, like Jessica Chastain in “Zero Dark Thirty”, just tireless, to a fault, turning his recurring exchanges with a security guard about “Do you ever sleep, bro?” less into the responses of a burned-out workaholic than amusing recurring comedy. He’s not a cipher, exactly, more like a blank slate, which is what the drab basement office he is more or less imprisoned and its equally drab walls come to represent, a chance to dig into the information and see what comes up, letting the evidence take him to the simple if difficult truth, the altar boy for everyone’s wistful non-partisan dreams, a government employee who believes, to a fault, in government diligence

Feinstein is his partner in ferreting out war crimes, so to speak, and if Driver lets Daniel’s righteous indignation gradually flow to the top the more he uncovers until it’s practically bursting, sometimes standing in meetings and gesticulating with his hands, Bening maintains an even keel even in the face of the nigh unspeakable. It’s not so much a hardened shell from a life in politics, or something, that Bening is playing to as the need for her to be the buffer between Congress and that righteous indignation. Of course, she’s a Senator on Capitol Hill, not Hal Holbrook skulking around a parking garage, and so if there are occasional undertones of “All the President’s Men”, Burns pointedly eschews conspiracy for something more high-minded, even bringing the movie to the precipice of Pentagon Papers-ish twist a la “The Post” and then saying no. Sen. Feinstein, after all, believes in government diligence and, as she says, doesn’t care for Edward Snowden. “Citizenfour”, this isn’t.

It’s not “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012) either. That’s not just me being flip. There is a scene where Daniel watches a trailer for “Zero Dark Thirty”, making the point of “The Report” as rejoinder to that criticized 2012 film explicit. And fair enough. One movie critiquing another is fine. Still, in “Zero Dark Thirty”, faulty facts or politics aside, Kathryn Bigelow proved, once again, that she’s a filmmaker while in “The Report” Scott Z. Burns mostly just proves himself a correspondent. Switching film stock between past and present to underline the stark clarity of the Daniel’s investigation and the ethical queasiness of what he’s investigating only goes so far while the most interesting visual in the movie isn’t really a visual at all – the government-employed torturers explaining their methodology for some government muckety-mucks by way of Power Point. What’s the saying about the banality of evil? “The Report” may or may not traffic in the truth more than its 2012 counterpart but as the esteemed Roger Ebert noted about his infamous run-in with Walter Cronkite, the movies are not a medium where the truth overrides aesthetic.

Little Women

Greta Gerwig emerged from Mumblecore, which, whatever you thought of the movement, was about auteurs leaving their actors plenty of space to improvise, to invent. No one did it better than Gerwig and she brought that singular talent to the mainstream. In her performances, yes, but now, with her adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women”, to a movie too. Her version never feels like a remote retelling of a familiar text but an immediate unveiling, a sensation Gerwig achieves by taking the two-part story and merging it into one, jumping back and forth in time, flashbacks to when the March girls are young and under the care of their mother Marmee (Laura Dern) and flash-forwards to when they have grown up. This creates a freewheeling forward momentum, even when looking back, that only further illuminates Gerwig’s second and most consequential revision – that is, transforming “Little Women” the movie into a telling of Jo March writing “Little Women” the book.

That’s why “Little Women” opens with Jo (Saoirse Ronan), living in New York in the movie’s present, trying to convince an editor, Mr. Dashwood (Tracy Letts), to publish her story. Letts leans back in his chair, imperiously, as he reads, not looking noticeably different – aside from the mutton chops – than how he imperiously leaned back in his chair as Henry Ford II, a man’s world spread across the centuries. He buys her story, but with the gruff note that “people want to be amused”, a truism cutting across the ages too, flouted as much by Jo as Gerwig. Indeed, if Jo was an Alcott stand-in then here Jo is a stand-in for Gerwig, which is perhaps why she chose Ronan in the first place, who also played a version of the director’s teenage Sacramento self in “Lady Bird.” Granted, Ronan’s performing style is not an exact Greta match (whose is?), less unbound physically and verbally than constrained by the surrounding environment and pushing back, a frequently burning fire in her eyes manifesting itself in bursts of verbal insistence. When she comforts her sick middle sister Beth (Eliza Scanlen) on the beach, the force of her words – “I will stop the tide” – seems to fill the empty space above, as if giving the clouds their heavy hue.

This image speaks to Gerwig’s visual style, which she has discussed, taking great American painters as inspiration in composing meticulous frames, though not as portraitures but huge canvases in which the subjects are frequently caught in motion. These are, after all, little women, and so Gerwig demonstrates their kinesis, in the plays they put on for family and friends and the words they speak, the latter recounted conversationally, lines running right on top of each other, sometimes even over each other, the speed of the edits mimicking the words.

The scenes of the March girls as children are all cast in vivid golden hues, a deliberate contrast to the more stark lighting of them as adults, evincing in tandem how childhood exists in a warm cocoon and how Jo is taking these memories of a young woman’s life, so devalued by bloated bellyachers like Dashwood, and lifting them up. That’s true even of Beth, shy and withdrawn and fated to die. She plays piano and their next-door neighbor, Mr. Laurence (Chris Cooper), graciously encourages her to come over and play his, which in one scene she does as Mr. Laurence sits listening in the next room in an immaculate long shot allowing Beth’s melody to virtually fill the space.

The shot is typical of the movie’s men. That they fade into the background is no oversight but the point, duly noted by Cooper who gives a performance that’s something like a metaphorical tip of the cap, gracefully taking second billing in every scene. The casting of Bob Odenkirk, meanwhile, as father to the Marches seems designed wholly to subvert his typically eccentric personality, like even someone as comically indelible as him can’t quite keep up in the presence of these women. Only Laurie can. That’s Theodore “Laurie” Laurence ( Timothée Chalamet), Mr. Laurence’s nephew, Jo’s eventual suitor, and then little sister Amy’s (Florence Pugh) too. Chalamet evinces a loose-limbed amusement impeccably playing off Ronan’s determination, each of them maintaining an easy ability to parry, both verbally and physically. Their chemistry is not romantic, exactly, more two teenagers, whether dancing on the porch or roughhousing on the beach, overwhelmed by pheromones. But the movie’s emergent tension is less romantic than societal, the world’s idea of what a woman should be and how these women see themselves.

That causes Meg (Emma Watson), whose trajectory is more conventional, to wane, even if Gerwig treats her yearning for marriage and family with respect. Respect, on the other hand, is not always something Amy shows toward her siblings, Jo in particular, of whom her little sister is envious, manifesting itself in brattish behavior even as she metamorphoses into a worldly young woman living in Paris. Here Gerwig’s structure truly pays off, not only allowing us to see where our youthful selves both stay with us even as they melt away but how Pugh deftly alters her very air between time jumps, taking possession of herself as she goes, ultimately accepting and mastering the rules of the game.

Jo, on the other hand, continually seeks to upend those rules. So does Gerwig. The denouement, really, is is all about settling love’s loose ends, right down to a 19th Century version of running to the airport, feeling at odds with so many other progressive ideals bursting through. This, of course, was Alcott’s concession to constrictions of the era, which Gerwig, using her publishing framing device, calls out even as she faithfully conveys it, an ingenious metatextual twist that I don’t think would have the author rolling over in her grave but offering a clenched fist of from-the-great-beyond solidarity.

20th Century Fox Is Dead. Long Live 20th Century Fox.

The liner notes for the release of the Special Edition “Star Wars” soundtrack noted now John Williams had composed his famous opening fanfare in the same key as Alfred Newman’s opening fanfare for 20th Century Fox so that when the movie segued from the studio logo to the opening title and scrawl it didn't miss a beat. It was a brilliant move, and is why, even now, the 20th Century Fox theme aurally conjures up visions of “Star Wars” much like Leo Arnaud’s Bugler’s Dream aurally conjures up visions of swimming and running and speed skating. Of course, Newman’s theme was a fanfare for a reason and functioned as an equally excellent introduction for any other movie, like the opening credits to “The Grapes of Wrath.”  And even the logo itself is so striking that when a motion picture does away with the fanfare, like my all-time favorite movie “Last of the Mohicans”, it still works as its own kind of figurative ceremonial flourish, where the propulsive drums of Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman’s score mirror the flow of the logo’s indelible searchlights.

20th Century Fox, like just about anything in business, did not begin as is but was born of a merger when in 1935 the independent Hollywood studio Twentieth Century Pictures merged with the foundering Fox Film Corporation founded in 1915 by William Fox. The irony was that by 1935 William Fox was no longer even in control of his film corporation, having been forced out, meaning that from the get-go, the name 20th Century Fox was something like a lie. Still, the name stuck and stuck around so that when, oh God, Rupert Murdoch appeared in the 1980s and gobbled the property up, the broadcasting company that Murdoch began on October 9, 1986 would take Fox for its name. And it’s that correlation to odious F*x News that caused Disney, having acquired 20th Century Fox in the late stages of the Twenty-Tens, to, just last Friday, drop Fox from the name, going back to its roots, in a sense, just 20th Century, even though it is, as many astute social media users noted, the 21st Century.

In one way, it’s odd that 20th Century Fox held on as a name this long. In another way, it shows how the name 20th Century Fox improbably metamorphosed over the years into something less about lame business interests and more about the cinematic experience. That theme, that logo, stopped representing just a movie studio and collectively, cosmically became ours, as much a signifier that, okay, shhhhh, settle down, the show is about to start as Please Silence Your Phones.

Disney, of course, has transmitted the predictable claptrap about how despite the renaming, the logo and theme will remain in place, don’t worry, everything’s cool. Of course, Disney, as exhaustively, invaluably reported by Matt Zoller Seitz, is quietly hiding classic Fox films in its vault, refusing to hand prints over to repertoire movie houses, seeming to try and erase real movie history right before our very eyes. Indeed, for the most recent “Star Wars”, Disney chose to remove the 20th Century Fox logo and theme, severing its most exalted connection, not so much signaling a new creative frontier as circling the wagons, mere corporate consolidation. Maybe it doesn’t sound like much now but who knows, maybe one day you’ll wake up and, like the city of Baltimore waking up March 29, 1984 to find their Colts suddenly gone, discover Disney has expunged something more precious to you than just a name.

a note

As Cinema Romantico’s most loyal frustrated followers might attest, aside from Keira Knightley memes and posts about Penelope Cruz’s hair, the blog’s most longtime recurring feature is Friday’s Old Fashioned, a review of an old(er) movie served with a figurative bourbon, bitters, sugar, and a maraschino cherry. And don’t get jumpy, classic film enthusiasts, because we are not cutting off the fifth day of the week beverage service. We still have old movies to watch! My in-laws graciously gifted me a subscription to The Criterion Channel over the holidays! My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife just curated a double feature of mysteries on a train just last weekend! I want to watch old movies! They’re great! And watching old movies only helps put new movies into perspective.

But, the bartender is busy these days. I’m absolutely not closing the bar, mind you, so it can turn into, like, a Verizon Store or a Bank of America, and I’m certainly not selling the bar for the 4 cents it’s worth to some content mill. No, the bar is staying open, though there will be some Fridays when Old Fashioneds might not be on the menu or when there will not be anything on the menu at all. Like a dive bar taking no pains to entice clientele, perhaps even actively trying to drive them away (see: Keira Knightley memes, above), we have always eschewed traffic and trends, preferring to go at our own chosen speed. And so, in an online world where at present everyone’s brand is to overwhelm you with content, it only makes sense that for Cinema Romantico to remain on brand we would pivot to something like slightly less content. Cheers.

Colewell

“Colewell” refers to a small town in Pennsylvania where the post office is about to be shuttered, a victim of cost-cutting, threatening to sever the community’s heart, not to mention the livelihood of its sole, multi-decade employee, Nora (Karen Allen). It suggests rural America left behind, and though that idea lingers on the periphery, writer/director Tom Quinn eschews topicality to filter the metaphysical through the kitchen sink settings. Indeed, “Colewell” might be far from Philadelphia, but it’s not that far off from “The Irishman”, in so much as it becomes a kind of meditation on time, how life is both “forever and not long enough”, the line functioning as a prologue before being repeated later, where you don’t even sense the years just slipping through your fingers until most of them are already gone.

The movie opens by lyrically recounting Nora’s morning: putting on coffee, making eggs, getting the paper, opening the post office that doubles as her home. And this post office doubles as the community’s beacon, where locals converse with Nora and with each other, Quinn allowing us to hear snippets of these conversations, an early indicator that he will let his characters talk, meaningfully, rather than reducing them to passing symbols in a montage. There is a benevolence to the rhythm of this routine suggesting Jim Jarmusch’s fabulous “Paterson.” Yet whereas routine in “Paterson” was treated with something close to reverence, Quinn honors it before not so much tearing it down as quietly challenging it, honoring the opening line’s paradox in portraying the routine as giving and taking away. And though another performer might have foreshadowed the curtain being pulled back in these early moments, Allen remains committed to the moment itself, even when she’s pulling on her uniform in the mirror. It renders her character’s unmooring from what sustains her extra powerful, where the way she simply smiles at a mother and her kids in an unfamiliar town where her job might go look like someone casting about for a life preserver.

Cleverly, if not a little cruelly, “Colewell” ties its challenging of Nora’s routine to the routine itself, a letter arriving by mail indicating her office’s impending closure. It’s a decision that cuts to the community, certainly, seen in a convincing moment of civic outrage suggesting an outtake from Frederick Wiseman’s documentary “In Jackson Heights”, correlating rural and urban, though the scene ends with the camera finding Nora and slowly zooming in on her, as if the moment is designed most to cut her heart out. Indeed, she might wonder aloud if that window between her and her customers is her only window into fellowship, but Quinn evokes this in more than mere dialogue, demonstrating how her only relationships center around work, right down to the delivery man (Kevin J. O’Connor) who shows up every morning, looking at Nora with concern sometimes threatening to shade into pity, not that Allen, in her subtle steeliness will accept it.

No, Nora’s only friend outside work is Ella (Hannah Gross), something of a drifter, though Quinn remains elusive about exactly who she is. That vagueness is not a flaw but a means to have Ella work as something like a youthful echo of Nora. She turns up midway through the movie for dinner, the camera cutting between close-ups of the two women, underscoring the intimacy of their conversation, Nora finally but conversationally revealing what brought her to Colewell and why she stayed. The close-ups, though, don’t just underscore that intimacy but deliberately feel apart from the visual scheme up to this moment, the camera mostly having maintained a polite distance from its characters. It suggests an instant bond between the two, also evoked in how Ella just walks right in the door, without knocking, exchanging a smile with Nora as she does.

Maybe this is a recurring moment between the two, Nora giving brief food and shelter to the itinerant Ella, though the dialogue hints at something closer to cosmic connection even as it refrains from spelling it out. If they eventually part ways, they never feel apart, the back half of “Colewell” alternating between them, as if they are leading parallel lives. They might be. A scene of Ella hitching a ride with a trucker, foreshadowed in that opening dialogue, never quite shows the trucker and mostly shows Ella through the trucker’s rear view mirror, alluding to her life as something like Nora’s past, which she is now reflecting on in this great upheaval. I honestly half-expected the closing credits to say Gross was playing Nora.

“Colewell”, given frequent poetically enigmatic shots of foggy bathroom mirrors and characters obscured by drapes, seems like one of those movies destined to dissolve rather than end. That’s not quite true, though. It doesn’t build to some climactic showdown between the citizens and the United States Postal Services, thankfully, but to something more muted and powerful, a close-up of Ella that Quinn holds for a long time as she just sort of settles in with a cup of coffee and tries to find something like inner peace before a cut to Nora leaving her coffee cup, steam rising, on the counter to walk out the door. The routine is severed.

Atlantics

Mati Diop’s “Atlantics” is defined by dueling visual motifs, the ocean giving the movie its title brushing up against the Senegalese coast and an under-construction skyscraper. This edifice is so enormous it hardly fits in the movie’s opening shot, looking down a Dakar street, squeezing in just the building’s base on the right hand side of the frame, though eventually we see it from afar, looming over the capital city. It is digitally created, which is not a flaw but just right, merely enhancing its inherent futuristic feel, coming across less like anything of this world than the Iowa shipyards in J.J. Abrams’ “Star Trek.” Not that Dakar turns on Trekonomics. The building’s height signifies nothing if not the consolidation of wealth, all going into its raising, which is why Souleiman (Ibrahima Traoré) and his construction worker pals are not paid and why the girl Souleiman is seeing on the sly, Ada (Mame Bineta Sane), is engaged to a wealthy man, Omar (Babacar Sylla), she does not necessarily love. Ah, but if the tower would seem to pull on the tides, like a capitalist lunar cycle, or something, “Atlantics” proves it’s the other way around.

The opening moments, in which Souleiman and his fellow workers storm the construction offices, demanding to be paid, only to be told, in that familiar undertow of circular logic, that the administrative people, too, are just doing their job and, hey, there’s no money, suggests a film of verisimilitude, underlined in the camera’s close proximity to the characters. That’s not a feint, exactly, because Diop paints a realistic portrait of life in Dakar, but it belies an emergent mystical bent. Indeed, the ensuing scene finds these empty-handed workers in the back of a pickup truck speeding along a highway near the shore, the camera cutting between the men singing, though Souleiman seems to be mired in a state of extreme agitation, and the rolling ocean waves. This scene goes on for three minutes, illustrating how “Atlantics” is not so much a movie to be watched but an experience to be had, pulled along less by what’s happening than what you’re feeling, evoked in the incredible, mostly electronic score by Fatima Al Qadiri. Cursory research tells us that Al Qadiri was, in her synthesizer, conjuring up the sound of the thumb piano, or Mbira, which is sometimes utilized to call a spirit or possess a medium, and which, in retrospect, is essentially what the scene is doing in the music and the call and the rhythm and the waves. I sort of want to say “there’s your Cinema!”, but let’s not open that can of worms.

Souleiman and his friends, we learn after the fact, have fled to Spain to find work which will presumably pay. They don’t reach their destination, alas, perishing along the way, and Ada winds up going ahead with her marriage to Omar, the wedding sequence shot in such a bright way that, despite the groom’s father’s earnest words, it looks like a ceremony in a serial killer’s basement. Those bad vibes take the form of a fire that incinerates the bed where the newlyweds are supposed to consecrate their union and initially the presumed dead Souleiman is fingered at the arsonist, one of Ada’s friends swearing she saw him just before. This might suggest a brewing ghostly whodunit, but if you go in searching for finite narrative details, you will wind up like the poor police inspector (Amadou Mbow), confident he can crack the case even as he suffers enigmatic fainting spells in the hot sun. This is not a story told by conventional means but through the pull of the tides, the sway of the moon. And that isn’t just romanticized prose. Over and over, Diop returns to shots of the setting sun, the hanging moon, the rolling tide, which are not transition shots between scenes but akin to the creator. I don’t know if Mati Diop listens to Neko Case but I kept thinking of her line “God is an unspecified tide.”

Diop furthers this natural connection by frequently eradicating the regular barriers between interiors and exteriors, whether it’s the spot where Soueliman and Ada steal away together or the dance club where Ada and the girlfriends of other construction workers gather to wait for word from their voyage at sea, as if the natural world is gradually encroaching on the industrialized one. In a way, it is as Ada’s friends become possessed by the spirits of Souleiman and the perished. If it sounds intense, Diop carves out something more eerie, and eerily beautiful, the girls’ eyes when possessed not quite rolling back in their head, just turning a ghostly white, imagining the walking dead as moving marble busts, their self-possession the symbol of their souls being set free.

Some Drivel On...the Oscar Nominations

“It’s easy, and dangerous, to overnarrativize the Oscar nominations,” Mark Harris wrote in Vanity Fair. Sure, but it’s also true that the Oscars are an annual referendum on the industry as much as they are a celebration of it. If there is to be true change from a diversity and inclusion standpoint within the guts of the industry, where it really counts, then these are the moments when the industry needs to be called on the carpet rather than just waved off in the name of letting them walk the red one in a month’s time. And so, yes, here we are, yet again, of course, discussing a Best Director field entirely devoid of women. How did this happen?

I mean, obviously, yes, we know why this happened, generally speaking, but really, how, dammit, did this happen? No one in 2019 deserved Best Director more than Marielle Heller for wresting something difficult and interesting - fascinating - from a lukewarm screenplay for “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” but she somehow wasn’t even in the conversation around the nominations. And then there’s Greta Gerwig, whose masterful adaptation of  “Little Women” scored a Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay nod but not one for Director. She was eschewed for “1917”, “The Irishman”, “Joker”, “Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood”, and “Parasite.” Think of those nominees as you will but whatever you think it's impossible not to hear the words of Gerwig herself, words she wrote for Vanity Fair literally two days ago. “I still think we very much have a hierarchy of stories. I think that the top of the hierarchy is male violence.” As prescient as the Academy is predictable. Undoubtedly she will win for Best Adapted Screenplay and, who knows, perhaps like the snub of Ben Affleck for “Argo” all those years ago carried it to a Best Picture win so too will Greta’s snub take her film to the same heights. But I doubt it. Don’t bet against male violence.

Best Actor: The nomination of Antonio Banderas for his understated work in the Spanish-language “Pain and Glory” is wonderful even if it feels destined to lose to Joaquin Phoenix going to DEFCON 3 for “Joker.” I’ll just imagine this as Joaquin’s makeup Oscar for “Two Lovers.”

Best Actress: This category contains the lone black acting nominee, Cynthia Erivo for “Harriet.” That’s Harriet Tubman, which, all things considered, doesn’t feel that different from putting the Underground Railroad’s most famous conductor on the ten dollar bill and calling it even. Renee Zellweger, meanwhile, seems lock-ish, I guess, for “Judy”, based on the inexorable sway of the biopic, which seems odd because I feel like no one is talking about this performance, though maybe it’s all anyone can talk about at parties in the Hollywood Hills, I don’t know. And though Renee is fine, even pretty good, and while I loved Saoirse Ronan in “Little Women” and really liked Scarlett Johansson in “Marriage Story”, this category nevertheless comes across like one where the Academy truly failed to expand its horizons. The Independent Spirit Awards did it! They’re based out of L.A. too! It’s easy! Just open your eyes!

Best Supporting Actor: Sort of a Good Ol’ Boys Club here with Hanks, Hopkins, Pacino, Pesci, and Pitt. Like, wouldn’t it have been cool to see Wesley Snipes all of a sudden slide in there for his first Oscar nod ever for “Dolemite Is My Name”? Still, while I haven’t seen the turn of Hopkins, the others are high quality, in particular Pitt who in his charismatic yet prickly languor seems to embody all of “Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood” just in the way he walks. This is it. This has to be it. It’s Brad’s Time. Even Pesci, I’m honestly willing to bet, and for whom you could mount a compelling counter-argument on either acting or sentimental grounds, would tell you the same thing.

Best Supporting Actress:

Sun Bowl Follies

It’s a year old, this Brian Batko piece for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recounting in oral history form the historically hideous 2008 Sun Bowl in which Oregon State eked out a 3-0 win over Pitt. But thanks to a link from Banner Society, I only just discovered this article, and of all the details, one, predictably, caught my eye. The Sun Bowl, for you understandable non-CFB devotees in the audience, is played in El Paso, the stadium mere miles from the border, and in the piece Pitt backup quarterback Pat Bostick advises “I remember vividly, if you were to cross the border and come back alive, you’d be sent home on a Greyhound bus. That was the [message] — you’d get a bus ticket home. It was on every page of our players’ manual for the week.” STOP THE TAPE.

Part of the Don’t Go to Mexico orders, granted, stems from very real-world problems. I understand that. And I respect that. And I don’t want to make light of those issues. But, Ciudad Juárez, the city directly across the border from El Paso to which the coaches were referring, has been trying to improve both its reality and its image. And maybe we can help a little with our roaring college football comedy that rather than taking the worst headlines as inspiration will take inspiration from the 1977 Sun Bowl, which I’ve written about before, the one with Burt Reynolds – that’s right – as color commentator alongside play-by-play man Pat Summerall. SBNation briefly recounts this significant occasion and a mid-game exchange:

Summerall: “Wind blowing left to right.”

Reynolds: “On its way to Juarez, right?

Summerall: “Blew us over there a couple of times.”

Read lightly between the lines and you can see the tequila flowing between our intrepid announcing team on Sun Bowl Eve. And so, our roaring college football comedy will bunk down with the Michigan State Spartans as they arrive in El Paso for the Sun Bowl. We choose the Spartans because their coach is Mark Dantonio and his, shall we say, gruff personality evokes the kind of coach waiting, yearning to be displeased simply so he can unleash wind sprints on his immature charges meaning that automatically the stakes will be sky high.

The plot turns on backup quarterback, sophomore Drew Cortes, thinking he’ll have squat to do come Sun Bowl kickoff, ignoring his coach’s orders and crossing the border in the company of a few disobedient others. It is in Juárez, however, in the middle of we’ll write-in-later-what when the assuming backup gets the word from back in El Paso: the dadgum starting quarterback has suffered a norovirus and Drew is taking his place. That means he needs to get back across the border ASAP, which proves more difficult than initially expected, encountering comical character after comical character, including, naturally, a Reynolds-ish color commentator for the Sun Bowl TV broadcast (Glen Powell) becoming a Neil Patrick Harris in “Harold and Kumar” kind of tag-along instigator, the Sun Bowl Queen (Abbi Jacobson), not so much mystical as a mystic, forcing Drew and crew on a trek to visit an ostensibly supernatural blue agave plant she swears will help him win the game, a menacing border agent (Michael Shannon) with an unexpected bleeding heart, and, just at the last second, when all seems lost and about to be made worse, a chance encounter with Drew’s quarterback coach (Kevin Corrigan), evoking the urban legend of Lane Kiffin’s iniquitous alter ego Joey Freshwater who, rather than pulling rank, pulls a Jeanie Bueller and helps his young charge.

Finally, the next afternoon, just in the nick of time, the menacing but bleeding heart border agent ushers Drew across the border and into the stadium where, having a blue agave flashback late in the 4th quarter of a tie game, Drew calls, entirely of his own volition, the old hidden ball trick, scoring the winning touchdown. The Reynolds-ish color commentator, his eyes conspicuously hidden by massive aviator sunglasses, tells his play-by-play man, “You know, in the time I spent with Cortes leading up to this game, I really came away thinking, ‘Now here’s a young man who just likes to win.’” (A post-credits scene finds Fake Dantonio at a post-game press conference explaining he is very proud of Drew for “embracing the challenge” but, unfortunately, he now has to revoke his scholarship to make room for a 5-star recruit from Houston.)

Knives Out

At first, you hardly see him. He’s slung back in a chair, glimpsed over the shoulder of a Detective (Lakeith Stanfield) interviewing family members whose patriarch, Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), has committed suicide. The ‘he’ is Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), a private investigator, whose bemused smile shines so luminously even in out of focus long shots that you can’t help but notice him. Neither can Harlan’s family members. “Who is that?”, one of them finally asks, though a bit more colorfully than that, a question in the middle of questioning foreshadowing Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out” as a knotty whodunit with unlimited queries to untangle. And even if “Knives Out” is not especially visually rememberable, its images more about planting seeds to pay off at various points down the road, when Benoit finally takes a seat closer to the action and speaks, Johnson takes full advantage of Craig’s piercing blue eyes which, in an authoritative close-up from below, virtually glow against the mahogany backdrop extending all the way up to the ceiling. Craig has never looked more like a Movie Star.

That might sound weird. He was James Bond, after all. Yet he was saddled with the Gritty Reboot 007 phase, meaning his merriment only came in and fits and starts. It took Steven Soderbergh in “Logan Lucky” and now Johnson in “Knives Out” to truly harness that glimmer in Craig’s eye. Funny thing, then, that both movies have tasked Craig, an Englishman, with employing a southern accent. And while linguists can hash out the veracity of Craig’s drawl, I’m more interested in the drawl as an emblem of his finally getting to cut loose. Indeed, while Benoit indulging in a brief solo singalong to Sondheim might be Johnson’s nod to the musical master’s connection to murder mysteries, the moment mostly just works unto itself, nothing more than a chance to see Daniel Craig have fun. Remember fun? At the movies? Gosh, it’s the best.

Benoit has been called to the extensive estate under mysterious pretenses, an envelope of cash from an unnamed recipient instructing to show up and prowl around. It could have come straight from one of the celebrated novels penned by Harlan, a mystery writer whose bonafides are borne out in a flashback where he choreographs another character’s tracks-covering, a soliloquy delivered by Plummer with supreme cool, the accompanying visuals not even so much for our benefit as a manifestation of how it’s already playing out in his mind. Harlan’s mansion even seems to have been designed by a mystery writer, a labyrinth of secret doors and hidden rooms, all waiting to be opened and found as Benoit conducts an investigation in which the truth and fiction shape-shift, the case proving to be both as simple as it appears and not that simple at all, carefully constructed by Johnson to seem to be heading in one direction only, midway through, to stop dead in its tracks and pivot.

The twisting narrative coalesces around Harlan’s nurse, Marta (Ana de Armas). She, we quickly learn, cannot tell a lie, a la the mythical George Washington, but with a rub – that is, if she does tell a lie, she hurls. That’s a tic that could either be read as a colorful writerly means of upping the stakes in every situation, where other characters become aware of her tic and use it to their advantage, or as an emblem of Marta’s emergent righteousness. Probably it could be as read both. Because Johnson is not out simply to bend our minds into a pretzel but to transform this murder mystery into something approximating class warfare. In the opening moments, as Harlan’s clan gathers, everyone virtue signals directly to Marta, explaining who did and did not want to invite her to the funeral while offering vacuous queries of “Are you all right, kiddo?” That concluding informal noun evinces a smug sense of superiority that they are the adults in the room even though each one of them is presented as spoiled rich kids masquerading as adults, even a septuagenarian like Don Johnson, never mind Toni Collette as the widow of Harlan’s deceased son doing a sidesplitting send-up of the Resistance socialite.

That might suggest an eat the rich satire, but Johnson is less interested in casting Marta as an avenger than an angel, not simply letting her inherent goodness rise out of the action but having characters literally tell her she’s a good person. That coupled with a conspicuous lack of deeper characterization, her immigrant family existing more as a counterpoint to the squabbling Thrombleys than as flesh and blood, has the odd effect of inadvertently infantilizing her in the same way as all those insincere “kiddo” declamations. And that’s too bad, because de Armas refrains from overdoing the virtue, evincing something more like the bewilderment of a person thrust into an unexpected situation and finding the wherewithal to get through, even forming an entertaining duo with Craig in their moments together. And it’s Craig as Benoit, frankly, more than Marta or Harlan or whoever else, who becomes the movie’s through line, that arch smile not necessarily evoking someone one step ahead but someone always convinced there is “one central piece” waiting to reveal itself. And when it does, Craig gets to kick the tires and light the fires, reminding us that even if cinema is a visual medium sometimes its best just to watch someone say some stuff.

In Lieu of the Montage

The ancient lament is that the Oscars are too long. This goes all the way back to the very first Oscars, held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, more of a dinner party, really, than a ceremony and what dinner party in history didn’t go on too long? The late William Goldman, however, in the pages of the extinct Premiere Magazine, once posited an intriguing counter-argument: the Oscars aren’t long enough. This, he suggested, was because the Academy Awards were too concerned with stuffing the show full of fluff when they could instead build their production around numerous clips of the nominated movies. Like, say, rather than just reiterating that, hey, “BlacKkKlansman” is nominated for Best Editing, why not show that scene of the last prank call to David Duke (Topher Grace) concluding with the perfect capping long shot from above, marking him as the butt of a perfect cosmic joke, really letting the viewers at home get a sense of the scene’s rhythm? Maybe such a scene would be giving too much away, but you take my point. These are theoretically the best movies Hollywood has to offer and wouldn’t you better promote them with thoughtful curation of clips rather than inapt filler?

My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife brought this to my attention during Sunday’s telecast of the Golden Globes after a couple people trotted out for the seventh, or eighth, or ninth time to “introduce” one of the Best Picture nominees which yielded a brief montage of clips from (un)said movie. They didn’t always “introduce” these movies, as I recall, either at the Globes or at the Oscars, but these montages are now also sadly evocative of how nominated actors get introduced too. At the 1997 Academy Awards, when the Best Supporting Actress nominees were announced, Julianne Moore’s name for “Boogie Nights” was accompanied by a clip where her character, adult film actress Amber Waves, and her youthful charge, of sorts, the infamous Rollergirl (Heather Graham), are snorting coke even as they talk earnestly. Forget for a moment that ABC put a clip of Julianne Moore snorting coke on the teevee in primetime and instead focus on how this scene gave a quick, revealing window into what made Moore’s turn so grand, creating a motherly, druggie space cadet out of thin air.

Extended clips are meant to convey what a performance, or a movie, or a part of a movie are doing. These modern montages, on the other hand, convey nothing, less highlights than bullet points, compiled by some junior business analyst dispatched by a so & so who thinks all movies are filmed in one take to find the most Eye-Popping Moments per Burbank Focus Groups. Indeed, in the run-up at Sunday’s Golden Globes to Tom Hanks being given the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement, we were treated to a litany of the Hanks hits. It was an impressive collection of titles, absolutely, but it reminded me of a Time Life CD ad, Soul Hits of the 60s or something, scrolling through song after song after song, offering snippets of a few, glossing over the rest, lip service rather than illumination.

Why not compile a package of clips demonstrating how Hanks is, as My, Beautiful Perspicacious Wife frequently notes, the master of the regional American accent? Moreover, why show just a split-second of that closing sequence to “Captain Phillips” where Hanks brilliantly lets the control of his performance give way to an acute outburst of emotion? If you really want to illuminate what makes Tom Hanks a genius then all you need to do is cue up that whole scene and let it run.

keira knightley has a headache

Is Brad Pitt a Titanic Truther?

The Golden Globes, a cocktail party hosted by fawning junketeers, are an iffy barometer of their more formal non-counterparts, the Academy Awards, and so I hesitate to draw too much from a result of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association naming Brad Pitt Best Supporting Actor for “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.” But still. If this next month is just a predictable, inexorable march to Pitt’s first Oscar (not to mention Laura Dern’s, who earned the Globe for Best Supporting Actress), I’m here for it. I did not do a Favorite Performances of 2019 list this year but Pitt would have been near the top, maybe at the top, giving a supremely, innately physical performance as Cliff Booth, befitting the character’s stunt man nature, evincing this almost preternatural ease in his body, going from cool swagger to sixty in the blink of an eye. Pitt’s past due for his Academy Award and I think it’s a fine time for it to finally be his Time.

But wait! What was that Mr. Pitt said in his Globes acceptance speech? Let’s check the tape. “I also have to thank my partner in crime, LDC.” (We’re calling Leo ‘LDC’ now?) “He’s an all-star. He’s a gent and I wouldn’t be here without you, man. I thank you. Still, I would have shared the raft.” This, as astute Internet users quickly pointed out, was a reference to the former Box Office Champion of the World, “Titanic” (1997), where Leo – er, LDC’s – character perishes in the icy North Atlantic when he deduces, his mind perhaps clouded by said icy water, that there was not enough room on the door-as-makeshift-raft for both he and Kate Winslet’s Rose.

This, of course, is the Internet’s foremost cinematic conspiracy theory. It is a conspiracy theory  prominently flouted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist who spends significant time in his areas of expertise combating so many tinfoil hat wearers, the kind of people who prefer elevating conspiracy theories simply because it makes them feel smarter than so many would-be sheeple. And that’s precisely why deGrasse Tyson peddling “Titanic” Truther flimflam has always perturbed me so much. Like, say, an astrologist telling an astrophysicist he just doesn’t get it, we cinephiles are forced to endure deGrasse Tyson ignoring aesthetics in the name of artistic truth to cherry pick scientific inaccuracies to ensure we all know he’s smarter than us. Bo-ring. And so I wondered, does this mean Brad Pitt is a “Titanic” Truther too? Will I have to root for Joe Pesci?

I don’t think so. Pitt’s line and Leo’s giggly reaction suggested something less than smirking superciliousness and more like a simple inside joke between co-stars. And besides, if Pitt’s Cliff Booth and Leo’s Rick Dalton had, for some far-fetched reason, wound up stranded in the icy North Atlantic I have no doubt they would have staked out that makeshift raft for themselves, while taking swigs from the margarita pitcher they had managed to pack while abandoning ship, and sunk straight to the bottom, whining about steerage scum the whole way down, just going to show once and for all that the scientific principle of buoyancy is no match for overbearing male wiseasses.

Watching Notting Hill on a Plane

For the holidays, my father-in-law received “The Movie Musical!”, the new book by Jeanine Basinger. Naturally I mentioned that Basinger had authored one of my favorite movie books, twelve years ago, “The Star Machine”, an equally pragmatic and philosophical account of and reckoning with the Movie Star, which naturally caused My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife to inhale deeply because I’m always – always – prattling on about that book. I can’t help it! Nothing vexes me more than the ongoing tragic plight of the Movie Star. Not even Disney! I’d cut Disney a little slack if I had confidence they could churn out Movie Stars like the old Star Machine. But Disney ain’t a Star Machine; they’re a Content Machine and the people in their Content are a dime a dozen. [Cries.] Anyway.

The previous afternoon, on Christmas Eve, flying out east to spend the holidays with my in-laws, I noticed the gentleman sitting a row in front of me, catty-corner, had tuned the screen on his American Airlines seatback to the twenty-year old rom com classic “Notting Hill.” The critic K. Austin Collins has written of the immense value in watching other people’s airplane movies. This is partially, as Collins notes, about an airplane being a shared space where, rather than everyone’s attention being strictly focused on a single movie, like in a regular theater, a person’s individual taste is broadcast to everyone around her/him. That’s why on a transatlantic flight this past May I watched “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” and “Casablanca”, to let these whippersnappers know just how I rolled, dammit. But Collins also notes how watching a movie on an airplane over someone’s shoulder is a window into filmmaking 101: with dialogue gone, you’re left to make sense of things from acting and cutting and framing, that’s it.

Retroactive 1999 Scarlett O’Hara Curtain Dress Random Award goes to...

I had seen “Notting Hill” and had seen televised bits and pieces of it over the years, meaning I knew what was going on. But as I watched it in silence over a stranger’s shoulder, ignoring the book in my lap, scenes like the dinner party where all of Grant’s friends react to the presence of Roberts’s movie star character Anna Scott would let you know, in and of themselves, that her character is someone important. And the way Roberts plays these moments, with a coy yet intrigued smile, compared to other moments, when she suddenly swoops in to encounter the jackanapeses saying things about her or fields questions at a press junket, demonstrate how she flips a switch, moving from, respectively, elegant confrontation and quiet comedy to cool command. Truly, Jules owned that screen even on mute.

And as I watched with nothing but the noise of an American Airlines Airbus for a soundtrack, the meta qualities of “Notting Hill’s” narrative fell away and I just saw her, Julia, the movie star. I felt like Hugh Grant in the scene where his character just sits back (sits forward, actually) and watches Julia’s character in a movie within the movie. The scene took me back to my friend’s holiday party a few weeks earlier, where another friend, over our seventh or eleventh cup of festive punch, elucidated his belief that movies were about, more than anything, the human face. I nodded along. That’s a belief my main man David Thomson has elucidated too, writing “In an age of special effects, the most special effect of all is the human face.” As it turned out, of all the movies I saw on the big screen in 2019, none looked any bigger than Julia Roberts in “Notting Hill” on a screen the size of an iPad on an airplane seatback.

A Few of My Favorite Movie Shots in 2019

And though I typically refrain from saying anything about my favorite shots of the year, just letting them speak for themselves, this last shot, my favorite shot of the year, culled from and culminating Jennifer Kent’s “The Nightingale”, might appear in and of itself, as nothing special, just a sunrise, looking out across the expanse of the Pacific Ocean. It’s not just the shot, though, as none of these are, but how it marries its themes to the image, laying bare the one bromide that frustrates me the most – that is, The Sun Still Rose. Culminating an arduous 136 minutes, set sometime in 1820s Tasmania, during The Black War, when British colonists were essentially committing genocide against the Aboriginal Tasmanians, this shot sees the sun rising, true enough, and ferociously asks, “Yeah? So what?”