Friday's Old Fashioned: Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)

“Sorry, Wrong Number” was based on a radio play that, by all accounts, was essentially a one-woman show intended to tell a story virtually through nothing but a series of phone calls. If initially Anatole Litvak’s cinematic version appears intent to honor the play’s inherent over-the-phone storytelling, like a precursor to “Phone Booth”, just with an old rotary phone and a New York bedroom where Leona Stevenson (Barbara Stanwyck) as opposed to a New York phone booth, eventually the film admits it can’t quite sustain that ambitious aesthetic for a full 90 minutes and breaks away from the phone by having events recounted in those conversations by wire shown in flashback. These, though, and, even more, the flashbacks within those flashbacks honor the deliberately involuted storytelling, like so many switchboard operators inserting so many plugs into so many jacks, a dizzying array of information that despite reaching far and wide eventually leads directly back to that bedroom and that phone as the conversation Leona overhears as the movie begins when the phone lines are crossed about a murder being plotted turns out to be her own.

At first, when we meet Leona, sitting in bed, chattering away on the phone, her spoiled nature is clear. She’s bedridden but it almost took me a minute to notice it, her tone of voice and the very she emits seeming to suggest that having everything she needs right there in front of her, cigarettes and booze and lipstick, like Costanza and the recliner, is the result of significant swollen headedness. How she got to this point, however, becomes clear in the flashbacks, not a victim of any kind of illness but of her own psychosomatic disorder, brought on by her theatrical tendencies toward fainting spells and phony heart problems to manipulate the men - her husband Henry (Burt Lancaster) and her wealthy father (Ed Begley) – in her orbit. In the movie’s twisted web of logic, then, her winding up in this place and putting her in the position of her own murder, is her own doing. It’s the kind of self-inflicted egomania that almost makes you liable to root for Henry, if he didn’t turn out to be a vain, hapless narcissist himself, plotting his wife’s murder to not only get out from under her thumb but her father’s, conscripted into his company and then wanting to make it on his own even though making it on his own entails pilfering his father-in-law. Classic.

Lancaster, though, in a crucial part, frequently comes across out of place. His cold cynicism in the early scenes is on point, but he can’t make the turn to something of a put-upon sod, utterly out of his depth when he crosses the mob, never able to unmask the all-encompassing desire to be His Own Man as nothing more than a little boy’s nursery rhyme. I kept wondering what this role might have looked like with his sometime “From Here to Eternity” scene partner, Montgomery Clift, who might have aced the indignant temper tantrums. Stanwyck, on the other hand, begins stuck-up and manipulative and then, as her own manipulations circle back around to do her in, turns the hysterics up to 11, incapacitated but simultaneously completely undone.

That’s why “Sorry, Wrong Number” comes off even if there is no one, to use the parlance of our times, to root for, building to a moment of unbearable tension that defies release, both people These are bad people, yes, all the way around, and the unwinding of the mystery becomes a realization, for both wife and husband, where they have gone wrong. They are not repenting, exactly, in the moment but seeing, even if subconsciously, as in the case of Leona, how they have wronged themselves and one another. And in the frantic denouement, as Henry, knowing the murder he has set into motion is about to be carried about, bellows to ignore her manufactured illness and get up and use her legs and escape, the phone booth in which he’s standing becomes a self-made prison as much as the bedroom is for Leona, seeing the light just in time for the darkness to swallow them up.

Leonardo DiCaprio May or May Not Have Been Famous Before Titanic but He Was Definitely a Movie Star

I was desperate to see Céline Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” even before her interview at Vox where she compared her film to “Titanic”, which this blog was stanning for before stanning was a word and before, in fact, there were even blogs, you hear that, kids. What really shook the social media world, though, wasn’t so much the comparison itself as how she made it – that is, by saying this: “(Leonardo) DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were both not known—not stars—so there was no power dynamic between them.” Wait, the Internet seemed to say as one, was that true? Was Leo was not a star before “Titanic”? Many People had thoughts, including a whole legion of Slate scribes as Dan Kois demonstrated in reposting a Slack chat he deemed “the biggest argument in recent Slate history” about whether “DiCaprio was not yet a star in 1997, the year ‘Titanic’ was released.”

I don’t know if any of these Slate staffers have read Jeanine Basinger’s “The Star Machine”, which this blog has stumped for a thousand times and will stump for again right now, and which essentially says you know a star when you see one, which Slate’s Tom Scocca does say, to Kois’s semi-comic irritation, before she spends over 500 pages working that basic idea through to its dreamy end. Problem is, while the Slate Slack argument eventually devolves into “different wattages of stardom”, it never establishes the criteria for what this group thinks constitutes a Movie Star in the first place.

The chat begins, in fact, with Faith Smith saying “I’m sorry but Leo was famous well before Titanic” and that, in following the thread the whole way through, seems to be the predominant yardstick for what makes a Movie Star – fame. He was on the cover of Time (in the days when that meant something); he was nominated for an Oscar in 1994; “Romeo + Juliet” was No. 1 at the box office. But, as I’ve lamented so many times before, if magazine covers, Oscar nominations and, God help us all, box office receipts, are how you define a Movie Star then it’s no wonder the term has been devalued. Box office! What could be more boring?!

This sort of practical analysis in terms of something as ineffable as Leo’s Movie Stardom is not limited to Slate. In The Hollywood Reporter’s quasi-opus last year about Leo being “the last movie star”, it equated his Movie Stardom with nothing, really, much more than bankability. Allen Barra essentially agreed in his piece at Salon, in which he cited “Titanic” for hurtling the young actor to “superstardom.” Barra, though, never really defines Movie Stardom either, just sort of equating it with bold choices of roles, seeming to make an argument more akin to career savvy as Movie Stardom which sounds more like something you’d put on a resume. Like, imagine Jean Harlow billing herself as “Platinum Blonde” on ZipRecruiter®.

Scocca, despite being the one who notes the box office of “Romeo + Juliet”, gets closest to the more metaphysical reading of a movie star, saying “a Movie Star is not actually traceable to being in big successful movies”, though in saying it he links to his own piece about Angelina Jolie which essentially seems to be saying that she’s a Movie Star not because of anything she does on screen but because she’s famous. To each their own, of course. But I see (the spiritually mononymous) Angie as a Movie Star, and have said so repeatedly, not because she’s famous but because she knows how to harness the camera’s power, whether physically moving with an ultra-at ease rhythmic power in “Salt” or almost eating the screen alive in “Alexander”, remixing Anne Baxter in “The Ten Commandments” for a whole new generation, demonstrating that being a Movie Star is — should be — simply about your ineffable screen presence. That’s what no one addresses in this Slack chat.

Leonardo DiCaprio was born on November 11, 1974, marking him as Generation X, meaning, by birthright, he officially Doesn’t Care. He does care, of course, frequently, at least about acting, as I have written previously, which is why he finally won his Oscar for “The Revenant” by going full Method. But, true to his Gen X birthright, he only truly accesses his inner-Movie Star when he’s pointedly indifferent or tamping down his try-hard. He was never a bigger Movie Star than the first-class dinner scene in “Titanic”, where his entire mien was akin to the way he had his character bite into a dinner roll mid-monologue, winning them and us over by indifferently rolling with it, lighting up the screen by hitting the attitude dimmer. Even in “Blood Diamond”, where he’s speaking in that impeccably honed Rhodesian accent, when he’s with Jennifer Connelly at the open-air bar, charmingly cynical, suddenly, just for a second, a la Ray Stantz’s thought of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man just popping in there, DiCaprio’s innate Movie Star just pops out, Freetown ineffably becoming Hollywood. (This is what makes his performance in “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” quite possibly his best – it’s an actor’s commentary on stardom or fading stardom.)

 And that, as Rachel Syme noted via Twitter, is just what happened one year before “Titanic” in Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet”, when, at the costume ball, meeting his Capulet rose, he looks through that fish tank and, as if the refracted light is slowing down Luhrmann’s patented ludicrous speed aesthetic, time, Verona Beach bells and whistles and so much passionate iambic pentameter stop, and in that vague yet precise way that defines the You Know It When You See It certitude of Movie Stardom, Romeo falls away and all you see is Leo.

Forgotten Great Moments in Movie History

Last weekend was the 40th anniversary of the Miracle on Ice – you know, when a bunch of scrappy American college kids beat the Soviet machine in Olympic ice hockey. Though I am a noted Olympics enthusiast, I was not yet even three years old when the U.S. won 4-3, and so the closest I have ever come to experiencing the Miracle on Ice was through “Miracle”, Gavin O’Connor’s 2004 film recounting the improbable victory. I saw some sportswriters in the Twitter-verse over the ruby anniversary weekend call it the best sports movie ever, or one of the best, which are proclamations I always find a little suspect because much how many sportswriters limit discussions of sports’ best to the so-called Modern Era, like history gives them a headache, their declarations about sports movies never seem to include any films from before, like, the 80s, never mind 1950. (Monochrome! Egads!) However, while I will not say “Miracle” the best sports movie ever, I will say Kurt Russell’s turn as the real-life Miracle wrangling coach, Herb Brooks, is right near the top of best sports movie performances.

In E.M. Swift’s story for Sports Illustrated in which the entire team was named 1980 Sportsman of the Year, Brooks is quoted as saying “It was a lonely year for me. Very lonely. But it was by design. I never was close to my university players because they were so young. But this team had everything I wanted to be close to, everything I admired: the talent, the psychological makeup, the personality. But I had to stay away. If I couldn’t know all, I didn’t want to know one, because there wasn’t going to be any favoritism.” Uff da. That is a cold, hard truth, and one that Russell plays straight to throughout. Yes, he coaches, which is to say he shouts and stomps, but he also tempers so much hard-driving with moments of almost impenetrable introspection. In one extraordinary moment, at a Christmas celebration, the whole team gives Coach a whip, a joke gift to make light of all that shouting and stomping. And the way Russell meets the moment, with a little smile, evokes the quote the real Brooks gave Swift, appreciating the joke, yearning to express his appreciation, on the verge of letting his guard down, just a little bit, and then...not. He gets that pointed lack of favoritism just right. And what Russell gets right too, is the Minnesota accent.

We’ve discussed Minnesota accents before, as has every pop culture outlet every time a new season of “Fargo” premieres, but we will reiterate that while Kirsten Dunst – excuse me, the legend Kirsten Dunst – does an exemplary job in “Drop Dead Gorgeous” of going right to the edge of going too far without going over it and though Boston-born Allison Janney’s Minnesota accent is incredibly underrated in Juno (“Juno, did you barf in my urn?”) this blog’s vote for best Minnesota movie accent goes to Kurt Russell as Herb Brooks. My Grandpa Prigge was born, lived, and died a Minnesotan and what always stood out to be and lingers in my mind the most about his voice was not the roly-poly Os but the tense jaw, the way he flattened so many words out, like the last syllables were running into a wall. Listen in “Miracle” to the Big Speech before the Big Game, listen close to how Russell says “not tonight”; that’s the tense jaw.

In a scene before the Big Game between Herb and his archetypal Supportive Spouse (Patricia Clarkson), just there to be supportive, at an ice rink, half-watching his kids, she brings him a cup of coffee. And as she hands it over, he says “There we go.” And that matters. It matters because speaking Minnesotan isn’t just the accent, though Russell impeccably flattens that “There we go” out, but the phrases. There we go isn’t a phrase, exactly, not in the way of a You betcha, but it speaks to what Howard Mohr, author of How To Talk Minnesotan, has professed is the principal motivating factor in all familiar Gopher State phrasing, to be “as noncommittal and as indirect as possible”, the sort of passive-aggressiveness which simultaneously manifests in Russell’s apropos, regionally appropriate lack of eye contact throughout the scene. A standard thanks would do here, certainly, but instead the movie Brooks replies with a turn of phrase that is essentially purposeless, so Minnesota true that while the Big Speech gives me goosebumps, this “There we go” brings a tear to my eye.

The Two Popes

“The Two Popes” begins in 2005, just after Pope John Paul II has died, and the various Cardinals have been called to Vatican City to help elect a new Bishop of Rome. This includes Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce), the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, as well as German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Anthony Hopkins), among many others, and as they convene and go about their duties, director Fernando Meirelles alternates between staged footage of the papal conclave and real footage culled from newscasts, of talking heads and people waiting in the streets for the white smoke to emerge. Meirelles trips it up with constant quick zooms recounted in quivery handheld camera when he is in the Cardinals’ presence, eliciting the sensation of a docudrama looking over the conclave’s shoulder. This prologue, however, which ends, of course, with the traditionalist Joseph Ratzinger being elected Pope eventually gives way to a second conclave, one in which that Pope resigns to clear way for Bergolio. What happens in-between is where the movie takes its name, a dueling conversation between the Two Popes, aspiring, if unsuccessfully, to be “My Dinner with Andre” at Vatican City. And if “The Two Popes” begins by trying to look and feel like a documentary, Meirelles initially keeps up the ruse with more quick zooms before mostly abandoning that aesthetic, slipping into the cozy realm of fantasy in more ways than one.

Anthony McCarten wrote the script, basing it off his play, and he works hard to paint these powerful men as regular fellas, showing them watching soccer together and breaking bread by way of having pizza, chowing down in the Sistine Chapel, of all places. That scene ends with Pope Benedict briefly walking among the selfie-snapping tourists, a scene that recalls the one in “Darkest Hour” where McCarten repurposed a Churchill subway ride as a Sports Movie moment, which apparently his modus operandi. In “The Two Popes”, at least, the men meeting beneath Michelangelo’s ceiling evinces the idea of this as a spontaneous, two-man papal conclave, as their running conversation proves a job interview as philosophical bandy. Alas, if this is meant to be about “finding the middle ground”, as McCarten has purported in interviews, it’s hard not to notice how, in its broad way, their dialogue is less a true exchange of opposing ideas and considering what they mean in contrast to each other – nay, not an exchange of ideas at all – than a fulfillment of the end we already know is coming, frustratingly and overly intent on showing Ratzinger as Bad Pope and Bergolio as Good Pope.

Partially left without a choice, Hopkins plays to this idea, his walking cane becoming a virtual emblem of being a stick in the mud, more believable as an out of touch elder whose favorite TV show is “Kommissar Rex” than the kind of theological heavyweight that would have ascended to this position in the first place, as much a failing of the script. Pryce, on the other hand, has a lightness of being that feels worn in, a decent man in the ongoing process of atonement, playing the part connected to 1970s flashbacks in which the young future Pope (played by Juan Minujin) is accused of collaborating with the emergent military junta, scenes in which we see him wrestling with micro v macro morals.

These flashbacks, though, in complicating Bergolio’s character, strangely, fatally gloss right over the current Catholic church’s predominant sin, the sexual abuse scandal. It is referenced, yes, but not really discussed, certainly not redressed, merely grafted onto the issue of overall reform, making it come across as nothing more than a piece of an evolving institutional puzzle, which is, frankly speaking, an abomination. What’s even worse, by making Bergolio’s flashbacks so prominent and running parallel to their conversation, the flashbacks become not a juxtaposition but something like a smokescreen, inadvertently equating one with the other, as if sexual abuse is an ethical quagmire and not plain wicked. And so the epilogue, of sorts, in which The Two Popes watch some futbol feels less cute than disingenuous, like a sportscaster blithely acknowledging an organization’s egregious deeds and then imploring the need to just move on. 

The Edge of Democracy

Though the timeframe of “The Edge of Democracy” is vast and its examination of Brazil’s political history is comprehensive, it nevertheless comes across wholly intimate. Not so much because writer/director Petra Costa has intimate access to key figures, like former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his handpicked successor, Dilma Rousseff, as the tone she strikes, which is involved rather than objective. I don’t know exactly what constitutes an essay movie, since the criteria for what defines one, near as I have been able to tell, seems nebulous, but that’s what “The Edge of Democracy” feels like, an essay film intertwined with a documentary, which is to say it comes across as a political history fused with a personal one, Costa going through a reasoning and reckoning over what happened but unabashedly from her own vantage point rather than a wide-ranging one, the narration sounding as much like elegiac diary entries as a history lesson. “Brazilian democracy and I are the same age,” she muses, “and I thought in our thirties, we’d be on solid ground.” When “The Edge of Democracy” ends, I swear, you can feel the ground shifting.

“The Edge of Democracy” goes back to the beginning, of Brazil’s democracy and Costa’s life, merging circa 1984-85, when the longtime military dictatorship gave way and Costa was born to revolutionaries who had devoted their lives to fighting the oppressive regime. She then tracks the arc to the election of Lula, celebrated founder of the leftist Workers Party, when democracy bloomed in full even as, the documentary outlines, it simultaneously began to wilt, as susceptible to corruption as any authoritarian’s reign. Costa sees this susceptibility in terms of her own family line, noting how as her crusading parents were imprisoned, her grandfather’s construction company prospered, presumably because it did not turn its cheek toward the dictatorship. It’s a rift she spends the entire movie exploring, underscored visually in how, as she notes this familial fissure, the camera soars above two lines of protestors, right and left literally separated according to their political leanings.

Costa demonstrates a poet’s sensibility, not simply tracing her steps back through time but evincing the push and pull of time itself, how history echoes across the years, introducing us to Lula, in fact, is him at the dawn of founding the Workers Party, black and white archival footage of him smoking a cigarette and giving an impassioned speech from a balcony to cheering throngs, profoundly rhyming with a similar scene much later where he addresses a different throng on the verge of going to prison, everything changing, nothing changing at all. And Lula’s runs for President are recounted in brief snippets of television advertisements, beginning when he is young, with noticeably darker, fuller hair, and ending when he is older, his hair gray, how revolutions can both feel a long time coming and here and gone in the blink of an eye.

We see home video footage of Costa casting her first-ever election vote, for Lula in 2004, her youthful eagerness intrinsically becoming a metaphor for a kind of naivety that democracy would solve everything. This footage also establishes the director’s leftist leanings and admitted lack of neutrality. Indeed, in another scene Costa’s mother converses with Rousseff, after the President has already been embroiled in a corruption scheme. If “The Edge of Democracy” lays out a convincing argument that Rousseff’s impeachment was a coup fueled less by her real transgressions, it nevertheless elides some of her administration’s harder truths, like manipulating the economy to aid her reelection. But if Costa partially lets Rousseff off the hook, she also does not, allowing the disgraced President’s words to her mother speak for themselves, citing an “immense freedom” that comes with being in hiding, suggesting revolutions are best fought outside the existing structure, doomed to fail inside them. And that is Costa’s ultimate takeaway. She counters footage of her voting for Lula, in fact, with a voiceover noting that he won only by compromising, agreeing to work with the business-oriented right wingers. The working class testifying on camera that Lula did good, then, belies the paradox that from the moment Lula was elected, the government was destined to tack the other direction, no matter what.

Early in the film, underlining the overriding personal feeling, Costa shows home video a relative shot of Brasília under construction, literally the foundations of government being erected. The film then cuts to the camera gliding over the structures in something closer to the present, reveling over their unique architecture and what they represent through the prism of the rule of the people. The camera keeps going, though, past the edifices and toward the far ground where protestors have gathered, being chased by riot police. As the movie ends, Costa returns to the same shot, or maybe just a similar shot from another time, suggesting the dream of democracy that she cites at the beginning as a recurring one, an altered consciousness eternally waiting to come true.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Holiday (1938)

At the end of last year, legions of United Auto Workers walked off the job at General Motors in the face of the longtime auto manufacturer making the sort of changes typical to corporations in our shifting economic and industrial landscape. That landscape has changed over the years, but it hasn’t changed that much, which is why in the late 1930s GM workers went on strike too, suggesting the worker as eternally pitted against the company, no matter who’s in charge. I mention all this not because George Cukor’s “Holiday” vaguely addresses the GM strike of its time but because explicitly does; when pressed for his philosophy, Johnny Case (Cary Grant), idealistic eager beaver, explains he asks himself what General Motors would do and then does the opposite. I swear, it sounds like something Elizabeth Warren would say on the stump. And if a title like “Holiday” suggests a bunch of people at a seaside resort or ski chalet, it’s quite the opposite, more the 1938 version of finding yourself, which is what Johnny Case yearns to do. It’s what Linda Seton (Katharine Hepburn) yearns to do too, and is why they are not opposites attracting, as rom com couples often are, but more like two people whose brains are on scan and trying to find the right frequency which just so happens to be the same one.

That the frequency takes so long to find is for the same reason Johnny meets Linda in the first place – that is, he’s become engaged to her sister, Julia (Doris Nolan). Before we see them in each other’s company, however, “Holiday” shrewdly shows us Johnny meeting with his friends, Nick (Edward Everett Horton) and Susan (Jean Dixon), at their regular, nothing-fancy-here apartment, underlining his status as a good-minded regular fella, deliberately demonstrating where Johnny comes from so as to juxtapose what he’s getting himself into by marrying Julia. She’s the daughter of a wealthy banker, Edward (Henry Kolker), residing in a tony Park Avenue mansion, an idea we know Johnny can’t quite fathom because he shows up not by knocking on the front door but the servant’s entrance, guided by the confused help into the spacious hall where Johnny momentarily. These are different sides of the coin and what winds up coming between them is the so-called Playroom, splitting the difference between both worlds, a kind of rec room as cozy study, designed by Linda and Julia’s departed mother to bring warmth to a place where so much architectural overkill brought chill. Not coincidentally, the playroom is where Linda spends most of her time, often in the company of her brother, Ned Jr. (Lew Ayres), one who tries drinking his reality away.

Ned is not quite a “Days of Wine and Roses” drunk but neither he is Nick Charles; he’s more the emblem of what happens when your dreams fade, still demonstrating an ability to read what’s happening and how Linda feels but unable to deal with or get himself out of his current predicament. And because he’s been conscripted into his father’s company, he evokes what might happen to Johnny if he goes the same route, a route his fiancé and future father-in-law make gradually clear they want him to take in lieu of his expressed desire to become willfully unemployed and seek some unassailable life truths. Grant modulates ever so slightly in these moments, the boyish enthusiasm he effuses throughout, which gives life to the acrobat moves that otherwise might have felt forced, is tamped down, the fire going right out of his eyes.

Linda, meanwhile, though she has not allowed herself to become officially dragged down in her father’s corporate interests a la Ned Jr. has become emotionally adrift anyway, which is why her father and sister talk behind her back like she’s a problem. It dampens her spirit but doesn’t douse it, which is how Hepburn plays it, bummed out but still looking for brawl. That she wiles away most of her days – even parties – inside the playroom might denote a longing for the past but also evinces, well, not an alternate reality, exactly, but the reality she yearns to create for herself, and creation is paramount in the playroom. Not for nothing do Johnny’s friends find themselves almost ineffably drawn here when they are invited for a party, like a tractor beam, away from the hoity-toity hobnobbers, trying to nudge Johnny and Linda together not just out of love but what they see as this duo’s obvious intrinsic embrace of a nonconformist lifestyle.

Looking back through the prism of time, “Holiday” might initially appear out of touch. Who are these people to be complaining not about having money but what to go and do with it during The Great Depression? The juxtaposition, though, of Johnny wanting to strike out on his own and make a new way of living with his fiancé and father-in-law insisting he settle in and maintain the status quo intrinsically resembles the same questions facing America in the moment, whether to start again or go back to the same banks that made everything go bust. And I wish, I so desperately wish, that we, here, right now, were making movies, movies with, say, Julia Roberts and George Clooney, that were as light on their feet as this one even as they addressed the heavy stuff.

Clemency

Alfre Woodard might be the best movie drunk I’ve ever seen. I understand that might be a strange place to start with “Clemency”, writer/director Chinonye Chukwu’s plaint against capital punishment, but Woodard’s occasional lapses into intoxication are a window into everything else. She is a prison warden, Bernadine Williams, who begins the film overseeing a death by lethal injection that goes horribly wrong. These moments encapsulate how Woodard mostly plays the part, someone who has been at this a long, long time and whose stoicism is not so much a hardened nature but a mask, one rigidly affixed to her face, so rigidly affixed that it hardly ever comes off, rarely even at home in scenes of would-be domestic bliss. No, the only time it does is when she’s drinking, like an early scene with her deputy warden, and which are not theatrical, Tennessee Williams-ish bouts of boozing but just a subtle variation in her character, which Woodard evinces with just the right physical variations, tipsy physicality and slurring. Here, the interminable pent-up aggravation melts.

Everything she otherwise carries with her does not so much leave Bernadine imprisoned in her own mind, as a metaphor might go, but numb to life. Her first scene at home is in bed with her husband, Jonathan (Wendell Pierce), and ends by them calling it off, as if too much human touch is too much to take, as she retreats, downstairs, zonking out to late night TV, the modern-day living dead. She’s an empty shell, as Jonathan says, evidence of their dialogue’s tendency toward cliché, though Woodard’s tightly controlled performance exudes that sentiment all on its own, her frequently big, searching eyes suggesting a desperation for but impotence toward communication. Much later, when the Prison Chaplain (Michael O’Neill) tells Bernadine about his own emotional struggles with the job, Woodard incredibly has Bernadine receive these words like he, the Chaplain, is giving confession rather than vice-versa.

The one scene in which we see Jonathan, a teacher, in his classroom feels more like him unloading his own burden than instructing his students, reading from Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” – “I am invisible, understand, because people refuse to see me.” He’s talking about himself, certainly, but this moment is also spiritually connected to “Clemency’s” other major character, Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge), on death row for killing a police officer when he was a teenager. Chukwu might make his notion of being a caged bird too explicit, not so much in the way he circles a cage during brief time outdoors as in the drawings covering his cell, but she is less overly emphatic in presenting the idea that the convict, like the warden, is black, letting this similarity speak for itself. If typical movies like this put a white person in position of power, their identical skin color renders Bernadine’s crisis that much deeper and damning, as if she is in league with the very people Ellison renounces. What’s more, the lawyer (Richard Schiff) working on behalf of Anthony is white, and his recurring conversations with Bernadine are played in weary tones, two people tired of this irreconcilable dance.

That he works so hard for his client is tied to the notion that Anthony might well be innocent, waiting for possible clemency from the Governor. This never becomes the crux, like it might in a movie about a crusading lawyer, but it can sometimes feel antithetical to the actual overriding point. True, it highlights a flaw in the death penalty system, where innocent people can be written off, but the pervasive notion of his innocence simultaneously saps the intrinsic idea that capital punishment is, inherently, at the root, wrong. And while Hodge’s performance is sometimes heartbreaking, like a late scene with a woman from his past where he realizes even if he were to be granted clemency how so much of his life is already taken from him, also rarely seems to suggest his character might have done what he supposedly did, which makes it less powerful than, say, Sean Penn’s turn in “Dead Man Walking”, where you were asked to consider redemption for someone ostensibly unworthy of it.

In the end, though, “Clemency”, while never exactly taking anything away from Anthony’s tragic ending, makes it clear that the conclusion is more about Bernadine, the final execution almost entirely recounted in a close-up of her rather than various cuts of the execution itself. It’s not just the close-up, though, and how Bernadine’s tear echoes a tear Anthony sheds earlier, and it’s not even Bernadine’s long walk down a corridor afterwards as it is how the corridor is lit, the movie’s omnipresent gunmetal greys giving way to an unfamiliar yellow-orange, making it appear as if the institutional rot is eating her alive.

1917

“1917” concludes with a postscript thanking Alfred Mendes, grandfather of director Sam Mendes, for “the stories”, presumably those from his time as a British Lance Corporal in WWI. That is not just a dedication, however, but a key to unlocking “1917” itself. Mendes’s film, co-written with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, is not so much about two British Corporals in The Great War tasked with getting a message from the rear to the front warning of a German trap and impending massacre as how it’s about it – that is, filmed in a single take. Well, it’s not really a single take in so much as it is made to look like a single take, obscured through various editing effects, which might well rule Mendes’s attempt out of order, a gimmick, as the phrasing goes, where almost subliminally he’s encouraging you to try and pick out the disappeared cuts rather than disappear into the adventure. And, true, there are moments when you can sort of see the movie reveling in its own sense of scale and showmanship, like a couple era-appropriate planes high in the sky and off in the background that fly past and, as the camera half-circles to the characters’ left side, are picked up by the camera again. And yes, the occasional conversations might benefit from the camera just calling it off for a second and going to a standard shot-reverse shot. Then again, “1917” might have done better to cut all the dialogue save for the most necessary exposition – take this, go here – since the movie itself plays like a manifestation of Alfred Mendes telling young Sam and whoever else about this one day during The Great War, dressing it up for effect and excising the gory details; the movie is a conversation, a one-person conversation,

The movie begins with Lance Corporal Will Schofield (George MacKay) sleeping under a tree, woken by his fellow Lance Corporal Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman), deliberately shattering a stolen moment of peaceful splendor. If a few of the film’s later passages, taking place at night, especially a blazing French village, evoke the underworld, their descent into such fiery torment is foreshadowed right here at the start, slipping from the daylight into the darkened, candlelit interior of the tent belonging to their commanding officer, General Erinmore (Colin Firth), where they are given instructions and then dismissed to go try and save the day. Upon exiting, Will and Tom are different then when they entered, clearly rattled and trying to come to terms even as they get on with it, the single take, in this moment, underscoring the changing emotions of the moment and how, as actors, MacKay and Chapman are required to live all that out.

“1917” sort of suggests Ridley Scott’s “Black Hawk Down” in so much as it’s about the relentless shape-shifting nature of a military mission. Granted, the latter was merciless in its grisly realities of war whereas Mendes opts for a stately presentation. Still, he effectively captures the sensation of imminent danger and how quickly things can change, not just in the roving camera but in his patented painterly canvases, which reminded me of Gottfried Reinhardt’s “Betrayed” (1954), in which his frames of WWII drew inspiration from Dutch masters. The darkly beautiful skies of “1917”, with smoke billowing from the leftovers of some far off battle, are eerily beautiful yet belie how a plane might just drop out of it, while the sight of that burning French village is so arresting that it stops Will dead in his tracks, momentarily rendering him oblivious to the approaching enemy. I’m currently reading Rick Atkinson’s “The British Are Coming” and in culling numerous post-facto diary entries from both British and Colonial soldiers, he shows how these men were at once awed and alarmed, prone to lyrical descriptions of obvious horror – “Soon after candlelight, came on a most terrible bombardment & cannonade on both sides as if heaven & earth were engaged” – and frequently concluding their observations with exclamation points that seem more rapturous than scared stiff. And while it might well render Mendes’s film as just “another goddamned recruiting film”, in the famous words of Samuel Fuller, Mendes is nevertheless effective in conveying his story with rapturous exclamation marks.

In the space of a whole book, of course, Atkinson has the space to zoom out and consider the wider perspective, which is what Scott did in “Black Hawk Down”, establishing place and situation in the beginning to underline American futility even as they press forward. In committing himself to a single take, Mendes is literally and figuratively forgoing the zoom out; if anything, he’s zooming in, all the way in, underscored in how the fate of so many rests in the feats of just two. Of D-Day, the historian Douglas Brinkley reason the only way to understand it honor “fully as a battle is at its smallest: that is, one soldier and one reminiscence at a time.”

5 More Actors Who Could Win Their Oscar for Playing Joker

Now that Joaquin Phoenix has won his first Oscar for playing the Joker, eleven years after the late Heath Ledger posthumously won his first Oscar for playing the Joker, it’s become clear that embodying the crazed D.C. Comic villain is as much a surefire avenue to Academy Award glory as taking the lead role in a musician biopic. And so, a year after Rami Malek for playing Freddie Mercury led us to wondering what non-Oscar winning actors could earn their first one by playing a famous singer, we now wonder what non-Oscar winning actors could earn their first one by playing the Joker too. Joker movies for everybody!

5 More Actors Who Could Win Their Oscar for Playing Joker

Liam Neeson. Remember the “Extras” episode where Liam Neeson plays himself as a frighteningly serious man trying, with no success whatsoever, to be funny, only more terrifying, even creepy? I mean, there’s your Joker, people.

Richard E. Grant. His Joker would be like Jack Nicholson’s version crossed with Hugh Grant’s Phoenix Buchanan, meaning we could maybe Bring Together comic book nerds – sorry, aficionados – and hoity-toity critics who adored “Paddington 2.”

Sam Elliott. As a rodeo clown who ages out of the business, he goes rogue, reimagining Joker as the anti-hero of a revisionist western, or something.

Harrison Ford. He would be great, I think, except that his Joker performance would be the same one, more or less, that Tina Fey already gave in the immortal 2012 “30 Rock” episode where she essentially morphed into the Joker by way of transforming into the most cranky misanthrope imaginable. No disrespect to Joaquin or Heath or Jack or Cesar Romero but on Cinema Romantico’s scorecard, Fey’s Joker remains the singular reading. Next.

Edward Norton. Reimagines the Joker as a Silicon Valley tech bro who uses an app to infiltrate the nation’s preeminent biennial electoral event in order to sow the seeds of...no, too soon. Next.

Willem Dafoe. Except I don’t want him winning his overdue Oscar on a technicality. Next.

Tom Cruise. What about that madman’s grin and psychotic’s cackle doesn’t scream sadistic prankster?

Michael Shannon. Well, it was always going to end here, wasn’t it? And speaking of which, I think Michael Shannon’s “Joker” should be about Michael Shannon as a single guy in the city who, with nothing else to do on Halloween, gets dressed up as the Joker and goes to the corner bar and sits on the corner stool. The bar is empty, of course, aside from the philosophical bartender (Kevin Corrigan), who’s really more of Marvel guy, and the woman sitting on the completely opposite end of the bar who refuses to movie down since, hey, he’s a guy in a Joker costume and so she just shouts her dialogue from 16 stools over the entire movie (Abbi Jacobson), a device amplified by how she will never be seen in close-up, just long shots from Shannon’s side of the bar. Marisa Tomei, of course, cameos as a woman who shows up midway through dressed in a Catwoman costume to buy cigarettes.

This will win Michael Shannon the Oscar, right?

Post-Oscar Nap

Yesterday I was happy, which once, in a different age, long, long ago yet somehow less than a decade, was my prevailing mood after every Oscar Sunday (or Monday, for you old-timers reading), even when there was rain on the red carpet and my favorites didn’t win (or weren’t even nominated). And I want to stay in the afterglow. So, if you don’t mind, while all the takes and counter-takes pile up around ye olde blog, I’m going to block them out for a bit by laying down to sleep the sleep of the content.

“Keep Pushing the Envelopes”: the 92nd Academy Awards

Immediately, the Oscars begged forgiveness. After all, a mere four years removed from the Oscars So White controversy, here the Academy Awards had gone again and nominated merely one black actor, Cynthia Erivo, and for playing Harriet Tubman, no less, which, as Emily VanDerWerff noted on Twitter, felt “like an on-the-nose joke in an episode The Critic.” So naturally the first face on screen at the 2020 Oscars was pop star Janelle Monáe, reimagining the role of frequent old guard Oscar host Billy Crystal and his opening song parodies; it was paean to youth and to people of color. Regina King, last year’s Best Supporting Actress winner, presented the first award of the night and Mindy Kaling, an American of Indian descent, presented the second. And before King announced the winner for Best Supporting Actor, she cited a few past recipients, including Louis Gossett Jr. and Denzel Washington, as if the Academy was imploring “See?! We nominate black people! Even in the 80s!” And because the Oscars went host-less again, one of the Not A Hosts providing the opening monologue was Chris Rock, who hosted those Oscar So White Oscars. He and his co-not-a-host Steve Martin mocked the awards’ “progress”, noting that the first Oscars in 1929 had no black nominees. And while, yes, just a few years ago “Moonlight” won Best Picture, and last year Regina King and Mahershala Ali won both Supporting Actor awards, these are fits and starts, progress as chicken scratches, and evidence, as the oft-perceptive film historian Mark Harris has noted, of an industry at war with itself, diversifying even as it seems to simultaneously retreat. The 92nd Academy Awards, thankfully, felt like an advance, and the air in the room (at least, from my vantage point on a Chicago couch) seemed even to suggest that this time, the industry might hold some of that newly gained ground.

In fact, if going host-less at last year’s Oscar was such a good move, the proceedings moving at an impressive (for the Oscars) clip, I fully expected them to reverse course this year and proffer a classic 4-hour marathon. They did not, however, letting Rock and Martin needle the Academy a little (and Jeff Bezos, who briefly looked like His Imbecility at Barry’s Correspondents’ Dinner) and then handing off the M.C. duties to a rotating committee, like Josh Gad impressively telling jokes on climate change, healthcare and Adele Dazim in a mere 30 seconds and, winning this year’s honorary Why-Don’t-They-Host? Award, Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig sort of duplicating and expanding Jon Lovitz’s old Master Thespian bit which I loved because I really felt like they could have just been performing for themselves in someone’s Malibu living room. (Best Line Reading of the Night: Maya’s “I’m PO’d!”)

In fact, not having a host once again proved so effective in terms of time that, like last year, if the telecast’s producers had just ditched the song performances, I swear, they could have finished at 10 PM CST, 10:05 at the latest. The 2020 Oscars, though, were strangely music-focused, like a baffling after-commercial recap of everything that had already happened, performed as a rap by Utkarsh Ambudkar , and Eminem turning up 17 years after he spurned the ceremony despite winning Best Song for “8 Mile” to perform that track, “Lose Yourself”, an out of the blue overdue coronation, or something. Hip-hop has become the dominant force of the music business and, to an extent, pop culture, and it’s entirely possible that a show always being dinged for lack of relevancy was trying to install an update. But then, couldn’t you bring out, like, Little Simz to rap about Skimbleshanks? Eminem’s a legend in his field, but given the time warp of Today bringing him out there is the equivalent of all those Academy Awards of years past when they’d roll Mickey Rooney out there and he wouldn’t leave the stage until everyone had wearily risen to their feet and given him the standing ovation for which he so clearly pined. Billie Eilish appeared to sing “Yesterday” for the In Memoriam montage but her unofficial role appeared to be giving confused reaction shots, about Eminem, about Maya & Kristin singing “Lady In Red.” I mean, Billie didn’t who know who Van Halen were, you think she’s gonna know Chris de Burgh?

Best Dress goes to Penélope Cruz for its pockets and because we don't hide our biases.

Whatever the show was trying to prove, the awards frequently just went ahead and proved it for them, demonstrating how the industry is already growing more diverse, perhaps foreshadowing the night’s conclusion. Hildur Gudnadóttir, for “Joker”, was the first woman to win for Musical Score. Women won for Best Feature and Best Short Documentary. For the latter, Carol Dysinger said of her film, “Learning to Skateboard in a War Zone (if you’re a girl)”, “They teach girls courage to raise your hand, to say I am here, I have something to say, and I’m going to take that ramp – don’t try to stop me!” And in winning Best Animated Short, Matthew Cherry said “we wanted to see more representation” in animation, evoking how representation needs to be addressed at the beginning of a production, not the end.

The major awards mostly followed the predicted path, with Laura Dern and Brad Pitt winning the Supporting Actor statues for, respectively, “Marriage Story” and “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood”, and Renee Zellweger and Joaquin Phoenix winning the Leading Actor statues for, respectively, “Judy” and “Joker.” If the latter two were as foregone as foregone gets, their speeches went the other way. Zellweger began, yes, by listing a bunch of names but then just sort of seemed to let the winds of the moment take her as they may. I didn’t know exactly where we were going but I was happy to take the ride, and I’m sure everyone who bemoans a lack of eccentricity in acceptance speeches bemoaned this one’s smattering of it. Indeed, my 2020 Oscars vow was to avoid social media, during and after, and so I’m not sure how  Joaquin’s Pure Joaquin acceptance speech is playing but I have an idea, especially the part about dairy farming, which is ripe for the self-impressed smarm of the age. All I know is, everything Phoenix said was coming from a real place. Ladle up your gruel, if you must, I’ll have the champagne and caviar, chumps.

The night, though, was truly made by what bookended the Best Actor awards. First, disproving punditry truism that Best Screenplay is a consolation for the person who doesn’t win Best Director, South Korean Bong Joon-ho, who had already won Best Original Script and Best International Feature for his critically acclaimed “Parasite”, took the award for Best Directing too. He’d already given two acceptance speeches and didn’t seem to have anything planned for this one, more for the better too, because he cited his fellow nominee, Grandmaster Martin Scorsese (for “The Irishman”), as an inspiration, and just sort of improvised a standing ovation for him rather than for himself. It felt a little like that time at The Golden Globes when Ving Rhames gave his award to Jack Lemmon, but less bizarre, more off-the-cuff and inspiring, something profound and moving in how Bong was given the award by Spike Lee and then cited Scorsese, this kind of auteur circle of life, living out what Joaquin Phoenix would say shortly about not feeling elevated above any of his fellow nominees or people in the room. And even if I wished Greta Gerwig had been nominated for “Little Women” to properly complete this cinematic constellation, in that moment, the Dolby Theater still glowed. It glowed even brighter, though, when, three awards later, “Parasite” became the first foreign language film to win Best Picture.

“Moonlight” was unfairly robbed in 2017 of the true emotional rush it earned and deserved because of the envelope snafu. There was no snafu here; just joy. It was a moment you didn’t want to end, emblemized in how upon the producers bringing the lights down after the first speech, presenter Jane Fonda pointedly refused to do her Good Night, Everybody bit (you think Jane Fonda’s gonna stand down?) and the audience implored them to bring the lights back up. They did and Miky Lee, grand matriarch of South Korean cinema, closed the night, thanking not Hollywood but her Korean audience, for “never hesitat(ing) to give us straight-forward opinion” which “made us really never be able to be complacent and keep pushing the directors, the creators”, eliciting the idea of cinema as a conversation between its creators and its audience, as if cosmically calling out every American patron content to just be spoon-fed status quo content; art can and should be more. “Keep pushing the envelopes,” she said in a wonderful kind of minor, pseudo, lost in translation malapropism, emphasis on the plural, that made me laugh and cry, like the movies weren’t just Hollywood’s and Disney’s but the whole wide world’s.

The past year, I’ve felt so much doom and gloom about the state of the industry, and maybe it was just a fleeting moment, but last night I felt unexpected rumblings in the battered Pollyanna parts of my soul. Last night, I felt like the movies we’re going to be alright.

Countdown to the Oscars: Totally Unreasonable, Completely Legitimate Oscar Predictions

Best Picture: Little Women. Doesn’t look my dream of Greta Gerwig’s Best Director snub leading her film to Best Picture glory will come true. Instead it appears likely that Gerwig’s observation of stories about male on male violence always taking precedence will be borne out, once again. Still, we use this pick to remind readers that Cinema Romantico’s Oscar predictions have no interest in getting anything right. To paraphrase the Bodhisattva of “Point Break”, it’s not tragic to lose your Oscar pool picking what you love.

Best Director: Martin Scorsese, The Irishman. C’mon, artsy-fartsy allies, you want him to win and tell Marvel to stuff it too. Think of all the content it would produce!

Best Actor: Antonio Banderas, Pain and Glory. A guy who now, before the Oscars, says he is “very satisfied, very fulfilled. I’m not in a hurry to demonstrate anything” is just the sort of guy who, like the guy who doesn’t want to become King becoming King, should win the Oscar.

Best Actress: Saoirse Ronan, Little Woman. I understand that Saoirse’s “time” will come, or so they tell me, but what if it doesn’t? (See: Antonio Banderas above.) So let’s just save ourselves heartache later and take care of this now.

Best Supporting Actor: Brad Pitt, Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood. Picking Pitt immediately dooms my longstanding dream of going 0 for 24 in Oscar picks. But that dream only deserves to come true if I’m being honest and not predicting Pitt would mean I was failing to be honest. I want him to win, so much.

Best Supporting Actress: Laura Dern, Marriage Story. See above. I mean, I know we always want surprises at the Oscars but, honestly, the two things I most want at the 2020 Oscars. Well, make that the third and fourth things I most want at the 2020 Oscars. Because...

Preemptively ordained as Oscar Night's preeminent power couple.

Best Original Screenplay: Noah Baumbach, Marriage Story. I was planning on wearing a blazer with a pajama top in honor of what might well be Bambauch’s first Oscar win...

Best Adapted Screenplay: Greta Gerwig, Little Women. ...until I realized I need to wear a blazer to honor Baumbach and the Greta Gerwig t-shirt my in-laws got me for Christmas to honor, well, obviously.

Best International Feature: Pain and Glory. In hopes of sending a little more juju toward “Parasite” for Best Picture. Plus, I just really liked “Pain and Glory.”

Best Feature Documentary: The Edge of Democracy. Because at this moment in time we need Petra Costa to get up there and say some shit.

Best Short Documentary: Walk, Run, Cha-Cha. Because it gives me hope that age will be no impediment to a cutting a rug.

Duke Caboom should be recognized.

Best Animated Feature: Toy Story 4. 2019 was The Year of Keanu and this is the only way we have to officially recognize it.

Best Editing: The Irishman. Just to give everyone who think it’s too long an aneurysm.

Best Costume Design: Little Women. For Jo’s writing jacket alone.

Best Production Design: Parasite. Not to discount its myriad other elements, but in so many ways that house is “Parasite”.

Best Visual Effects: The Irishman. Technically speaking, the de-aging effects, making Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci look so much younger, did not always work. And yet, in helping to achieve the film’s loftier aims about recounting the passage of time, it did, and that’s enough for me.

Best Makeup & Hairstyling: Bombshell. Not for Theron as Kelly or Lithgow as Ailes but for subtly making Connie Britton look like a megachurch pastor’s wife.

Best Cinematography: Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood. That scene with the neon signs!

Best Sound Editing & Best Sound Mixing: Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood. Sound played as big a role here as it did in “Uncut Gems” and since “Uncut Gems” isn’t nominated.....

Best Live Action Short & Animated Short: A Sister for Live Action and Kitbull for Animated. I drew the names out of a hat. If it’s good enough for the Iowa Caucus and the future of democracy, it’s good enough for us.

Best Original Score: I’m sitting this category out in protest of Fatima Al Qadiri not being nominated for “Atlantics.” That non-nomination was absolute insanity.

Best Original Song: Sitting this category out in protest, too, on account of Mary Steenburgen not being nominated for “Glasgow (No Place Like Home)” for “Wild Rose” which she co-wrote with Caitlyn Smith and Kate York (who I once saw live, opening for Kathleen Edwards, for whom York said she was the perfect opener because – and I think I’m remembering these adjectives right – Edwards was always pissed off and she, York, was always depressed). I mean, you’re gonna do Mary Steenburgen like that, Academy, you’re gonna do Queen freaking Steen like that? A plague on all your branches.

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Song Reimagined

Today Cinema Romantico re-imagines the slowly-becoming-irrelevant Oscar category of Best Song as if it was one combined category and the songs did not have to be “original” or fit some other antiquated piece of Academy criteria and I and I alone was judge and jury in regards to the five nominees.



The Dead Don’t Die by Sturgill Simpson in The Dead Don’t Die. For one film, at least, Jim Jarmusch brings the movie theme back with Sturgill Simpson’s country-western throwback. And while the song, sharing the film’s title, sets the stage, certainly, it keeps coming back throughout, like “The Ballad of Higher Noon”, but to even slyer effect, transforming the sensation of the living dead into one of getting a song stuck in your head.



Road to Nowhere by Talking Heads in Transit. The lyrics might be on the nose, given how “Transit” ends, which I won’t reveal, though not only does the song’s buoyant tone in the face of calamity fit snugly with the ending nonetheless, that familiar chugging rhythm also feels true to the film’s temporal loop. It hits so perfectly, you laugh; then, you cry.



Dancing in the Dark by Bruce Springsteen in Blinded by the Light. When Javed (Viveik Kalra), a Pakistani immigrant in 80s London, first hears Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark”, it is on a dark and stormy night, which sounds stupid but is just right. The inner-teenage tempest is universal, after all, and when he hits play and that song comes rushing out, he suddenly an outlet for everything he’s feeling. And even if a song often speaks for the person singing it, like “Dancing in the Dark” did for Bruce, it just as frequently, whether the creator likes it or not, speaks for the person listening to it, which the movie’s presentation of it denotes, the lyrics splayed across the screen. The synths, non-reactionary Springsteen fans know, aren’t gloss of the era but howls of desperation, and when Javed hears them, he plugs right into them, connected to the Springsteen current; he, like Bruce, is just about starving tonight.



Control by Janet Jackson in Hustlers. Famously, Janet Jackson’s second album was the first she made free of the domineering interference of her father, which is why she titled it “Control.” And so it only makes sense that “Hustlers”, which is all about women exerting control, would open with Janet’s 1986 title cut, its introductory manifesto, and close with another Janet track, “Miss You Much.” She’s the soundtrack to female empowerment.



Out of Time by The Rolling Stones in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood. The greatest Quentin Tarantino needle drop, which is really saying something, I know, and which is why I don’t say it lightly, believe me. He repurposes The Stones’ stay-away-girl slice of baroque pop, improbably, to craft his own version of The Busy Sunday sequence in “Goodfellas”, elegiac rather than out of control, a dirge for the Sixties, and all that term entails, and for Hollywood too, one that might never have existed, which, epitomized in all those neon signs that spring to life as the song winds up, shines bright one last time. It was my favorite single movie sequence in 2019.

Countdown to the Oscars: The Ruffalos

Back in the halcyon days of Grantland, the best web site ever, when I checked it as regularly as my Midwestern forefathers would check weather reports, my favorite podcast on the Interwebs was the aforementioned site’s liltingly titled Do You Like Prince Movies? It was hosted by Pulitzer Prize winning film critic Wesley Morris and ace culture scribe Alex Pappademas. And in the run-up to the 2015 Academy Awards, they bestowed their own set of acting prizes affectionately called The Ruffalos.

Mr. Morris and Mr. Pappademas did not define the criteria for their awards so much as just sort of shout out random guidelines in the discussion, but that was part of their charm. Ruffalos went to “People who aren’t getting nominated for anything.” To earn one “you gotta be playing the background a little bit,” or maybe not since some of the recipients were more in the spotlight rather than the background. And whatever, because The Ruffalos were more ineffable, something less stately and more tossed off, make-believe statues concerning a life-force that was more indelible than mere pomp. And because Grantland and, in turn, Do You Like Prince Movies? have been shuttered, Cinema Romantico, this itty bitty blog that most people stop reading at the first sign of a ham-fisted Keira Knightley reference, has taken on the task of keeping them alive. We did last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, etc., and we do again this year.

The Ruffalos go to.....

Eric Stoltz, Her Smell. If Alex Ross Perry’s film is deliberately owned by Elisabeth Moss as a cantankerous, loquacious, volatile, possibly even possessed rock star plunging toward the abyss, Stoltz, playing her manager, exudes a man weathering a storm in a performance as a kind of virtual deep breath, those omnipresent cigarettes not just props but little buoys his character uses to ride out his meal ticket’s episodes. Indeed, throughout Stoltz ever so slightly lets his exhaustion shade into indignation, a man who knows her mental state is also his bottom line.

Hailey Gates, Uncut Gems. You could make a Ruffalo case for multiple “Uncut Gems” cast members, but Gates, I think, as the receptionist at a fancy-pants auction house where Adam Sandler’s jeweler is trying to sell a gem for millions, is most emblematic of the movie’s incredibly deep layers. In just a couple minutes, she evinces an unruffled, haughty air borne of turning the tables on pushy know-it-alls for a living which allows her, in the simple act of placing a follow-up phone call, to lay Sandler’s character’s haplessness hilariously bare.

Chris Cooper, Little Women. I know, I know. Giving a Ruffalo to one of the dudes in “Little Women”? But that’s the thing – Cooper gets it. He lets himself fade into the background in every scene.

Sophie Okonedo, Wild Rose. Okonedo’s character, Susannah, a wealthy housewife for whom Rose-Lynn (Jessie Buckley), the chief protagonist, might exist merely as a conduit to Rose-Lynn’s singing dreams, but Okonedo nevertheless brings the character to life, playing the part with a good-humored eagerness that suggests, despite obvious love for her own children, a deep yearning for artistic fulfillment.

Martha Kelly, Marriage Story. That the climax of “Marriage Story”, in which Charlie (Adam Driver) has to prove his capabilities as a father for a court-ordered social worker (Martha Kelly), descends into wrenching, sidesplitting farce is as much a testament to Kelly’s deemphasis as it is to Driver’s escalating comical frenzy. Her character’s presence might be the point, but she plays the whole scene like a wide-eyed bystander, where every question she poses becomes a needle prick she didn’t expect to draw so much blood.

Timothy Olyphant, Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood. Truly, a supporting turn is meant to help shine the spotlight directly on the star while the person in support dutifully steps out of it. And even if Olyphant is playing the lead actor on a fictional TV show in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s faded star is making a guest turn in support, Olyphant illustrates both a deference for DiCaprio and, on a deeper level, for DiCaprio’s character, like a protégé to a mentor, never more lovingly than in the scene where he just bides his time at a table in the foreground while DiCaprio’s character expresses immense frustration at screwing up lines.

keira knightley has no idea what the hell is even going on anymore

Countdown to the Oscars: Theorizing Possible Oscar Winner Reactions

You’ve probably seen this GIF. It’s Antonio Banderas, recent Oscar nominee for Best Actor for “Pain and Glory”, in the otherwise forgotten “Assassins”, though I’m old enough to remember seeing it in the theater when I would have no idea his co-star Julianne Moore had done a movie called “Safe” the previous year. It’s a moment in which Banderas’s character, whose name I forget and isn’t important anyway, but who is, as you might have guessed, an assassin, receiving a significant wire transfer and then leaning back, not just satisfied but, sort of, coolly ecstatic, maybe even, dare I say, turned on? The AV Club describes it as a “pantheon” level GIF, a go-to for social media expression of satisfaction, whether ironically or earnestly, letting people know that, at this moment in time, you’ve got it real, real good.

If Antonio Banderas were to win the Oscar [editor: plz insert praying GIF], that’d be swell. And my movie blogging pal Amir, esteemed member of the Toronto Film Glitterati, expressed his desire that if Banderas won, it might make the moment extra swell if the Spanish legend acted out the GIF, right there, live at the Academy Awards, with his Oscar in tow. His interview with Gabriella Paiella last year, in which he acknowledged he was aware of the GIF, even if he didn’t quite understand GIFs (no hard feelings), and proceeded to act out the GIF for Paiella, suggests this is a possibility. And that, as it absolutely had to, got me to thinking. What if other acting Academy Award winners this Sunday acted out memorable moments from their oeuvre at the podium?

Joaquin Phoenix. I want Antonio Banderas to win, though I also secretly wouldn’t mind Joaquin Phoenix winning, which he will, for career achievement, especially for his sensational work in the superb “Two Lovers” (2008). And rather than take the stage and act out any one GIF, I would just want Phoenix to recreate his entire Brandy Alexander sequence from “Two Lovers” which is the greatest screen embodiment of playing it cool collapsing into social awkwardness I’ve ever seen.

Renee Zellweger. Zellweger seems poised to win her second Oscar for “Judy”, sixteen years after winning for “Cold Mountain”, meaning she will have two Oscars, yes, but no Oscars, still, for playing Dorothy Boyd in “Jerry Maguire”, her greatest performance, a virtual gallery of transplendent reactions. “Jerry Maguire”, of course, was a long time ago and I really loved Zellweger’s speech at the Golden Globes not-so-subtly nodding how swiftly the industry will turn its back on one of its ostensible own until they do something – like, make a biopic – to re-curry favor. And so when she wins, I hope she busts out her most potent “Jerry Maguire” reaction, that one during Jerry’s drunken Lord of the Living Room speech, the one above. Thank you, Academy, and then walk right off the stage.

Brad Pitt. His incessant eating in the “Ocean’s” movie has been frequently celebrated, but none of his eating moments can top the one at the very end of the first film when, possibly wearing Ted Nugent’s shirt, he waits outside prison to pick up his prominent accomplice, devouring a meatball sandwich. He devours it so passionately, in fact, that he is stricken with a moment of heartburn (see: above). And so, when Pitt wins Best Supporting Actor “Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood”, I hope he ascends the stage literally eating a meatball sandwich, which would be even more relatable than him wearing a name tag, and then acts out getting heartburn.

Laura Dern. Lula 4-Ever