Some Drivel On...It’s a Disaster

“It’s a Disaster” (2012”) sort of suggests Jenny Lewis’s 2014 track “Aloha and the Three Johns”, in which the end of a relationship possibly portends the end of the world. Indeed, writer/director Todd Berger filters the beginnings and ends and rekindlings and holding fasts of four couples gathering in Austin for a dinner party when a few dirty bombs go off downtown. The odds-on advent of WWIII causes them to seal up the house, fortifying themselves inside, and fortifying just how sealed off they were from each other and the outside world anyway. It’s a solid-set up, loosely suggesting Luis Buñuel’s “The Exterminating Angel” as directed by Richard Linklater, or something. Then again, Berger fails to scrutinize his characters’ inherent archetypes like Linklater might and his aesthetic is more sitcom than Buñuel surrealism. (Comparing him to Buñuel might be unfair in the first place.) Still, “It’s a Disaster” works well enough on its own wavelength as a comedy of modern manners even if it never quite becomes the Quarantine Movie For Our Times, though maybe that’s just because the characters can’t use social media since the power is out.

As the movie opens, Tracy (Julia Stiles) is arriving to brunch with her new beau Glenn, played by David Cross with just the right amount of eager apprehension, trying to fit in without causing a fuss. His first conversation with the host, Pete (Blaise Miller), is typical of the movie’s dialogue. If Pete offers Glenn some scotch and asks him a question, it proves not in service of ingratiating the newbie but seeking ratification of a previously held viewpoint, correlating to his faltering marriage to Emma (Erinn Hayes). Pete is not interested in learning about Glenn so much as projecting onto Glenn, emblemizing everyone’s self-involvement blinding them to their personal problems and the much, much bigger one. Berger plants little seeds of the suddenly crumbling world outside, from spotty cellphone reception to a panicked jogger, none of which the characters discern. It takes Pete and Emma’s neighbor (Berger) turning up in a hazmat suit to say, hey, the world might be ending, exposition that still functions as a means to reveal character.

What transpires is the characters reverting to their worst behavior. Rather than unite as one in the face of this cataclysm, they splinter into small groups, often of two, sniping at others behind their back, or seeking out the one they’re sniping about to snipe to his/her face. This sort of psychology, alas, mostly sticks to the surface level, stranding several of the characters as mere caricatures. And though it makes sense that the characters remain rather oblivious to the looming apocalypse outside their door, it also means “It’s a Disaster” wastes an opportunity to utilize the looming apocalypse’s tension to see why these characters tick. The movie’s best moment is when the couple that’s always late finally shows up, noses bleeding, looking worse for wear because it is long after the dirty bombs go off, begging to be let in. It’s Tracy who refuses, played deftly by Stiles as someone responding both to the present and the characters’ pasts, a brittle evocation of how stress lays bare her natural state.

That, though, along with a recurring visual gag involving the late couple after they perish, is as dark as Berger ever gets. More about artfully blocking than inducing claustrophobia, Berger’s frames maintain a polite distance, keeping the whole situation on a simmer. That sort of tamps down America Ferrera’s ostensibly frantic energy as her character, chemistry teacher Hedy, just sort of checks out in the face of the world ending, changing into soft pants and drinking and trying drugs, but otherwise provides the film the feeling of an apocalyptic shrug more than the apocalypse. Berger conveys a shrug, too, in his frequent diffusing of payoffs, like Hedy’s fiancé, Shane (Jeff Grace), role playing as a take charge leader.

Berger saves his biggest payoff feint for the conclusion. It builds off the revelation that Glenn is a religious zealot, convinced the Rapture has commenced, worried his new sinful friends will be doomed to wander the Earth, determined to poison their drinks and save them the trouble. That this turn works is because of how Cross plays it, with nary a change in tone, the same guy, really, as he was before, just revealing one more detail about himself, turning it into a commentary on dating as much as the end times. And if the group at first doesn’t want to play along, they change their tune after Hedy explains in monotone yet excruciating detail the tortuous physical fallout they can expect from the dirty bombs, a neat moment in which science and religion unexpectedly come together. Whether they drink the poison or not, well, seven years later, I’ll still leave for you to discover, though I found the moment even more strangely moving than I did the first time I watched it, a halting expression of holding on to hope.

Spenser Confidential

The mononymous Spenser (Mark Wahlberg) of Robert B. Parker’s novels which begat a 1980s TV show that begat a series of made-for-TV movies begins Peter Berg’s Netflix movie as an ex-cop behind bars for assaulting his Captain, John Boylan (Michael Gaston). Once Spenser is out, a former colleague is found dead in a murder-suicide, suspected of killing the same Captain he went to prison for roughing up. The burgeoning private eye, however, forgoing starting a new life by getting certified as a long-haul trucker, opens his own investigation, promising the slain colleague’s widow he will get to the bottom of the things despite, as he says, having “flaws. A lot of ‘em.” I thought, “Does he?” The “Spenser” script, penned by Brian Helgeland, takes immense care to write off each of Spenser’s questionable tactics as ethically justified. That includes his violent attack of Captain Boylan, seen in frigidly colored flashbacks, inserted amidst present-day plotting that made me fear the Oscar voter who struggled so terribly to follow “Little Women’s” time jumps must have struggled to follow “Spenser Confidential” too, where Boylan is seen physically abusing his wife. And though Spenser’s ex-girlfriend Cissy (Iliza Shlesinger) seems to abhor him and want nothing to do with him, she also explicitly seeks him out for a bathroom tryst, a scene suggesting Spenser gets to have his cake and eat it too. Flaws? Lots of ‘em? Nah, he seems like the consummate Man®.

The plot itself involves corruption with the police force, beginning with the Captain and then trickling down to Spenser’s ostensible friend, Detective Driscoll (Bokeem Woodbine). Woodbine evinces portent simply in his grin, not to mention the way he twiddles a toothpick between his teeth, a narrative plant that will give him away. That toothpick, though, is emblematic of the uncomplicated and unimaginative investigative dots, like when Spenser emerges from a building just as the suspicious yellow corvette he’s been seeking happens to drive by. What’s more successful, if not amusing, even fascinating, is Wayne Cosgrove, a muckraking investigative journalist working on the sly with Spenser to expose the crooked cops. Wayne is played by Marc Maron with his patented weary, kind of “C’mon, man” air as someone whose job has been so maddeningly redefined by – quote-unquote – Fake News that even when he finds himself face to face with a whole van pull of contraband he still wavers on whether it’s enough evidence to convince all the indoctrinated idiots.

This pro-press argument belies Peter Berg’s real-life left leaning politics, which are often at odds with his conservative feeling films. (Then again, one of the two federal agents Spenser pseudo works with is basically right out of central high school nerd casting.) What’s also at odds with Berg’s typical m.o. is the aesthetic. Normally reliant on the shaky cam school of cinema to inject nominal grit, Berg reigns in his camera’s movement, relying on cleaner edits. Cleaner edits in quieter scenes of characters conversing, yes, but even in many of the action set pieces. When Spenser and his Magical MMA Negro roommate Hawk (Winston Duke) send a truck careening off a freeway by hurling a sledgehammer through its windshield from the overpass, Berg simply shows the two men walk from one side of the bridge to the other, switching to a shot over their shoulder to see the truck wide up in the ditch, comically downplaying rather than wildly turning the moment up. Other scenes have a similar wry tone, whether it’s Spenser confronting toughs in prison and or a gaggle of angry cops in a bar, each one scored to classic rock, rendering it more as Spenser having run than being truly imperiled.

The conclusion, alas, deviates from that kind of fun, aside from one prolonged payoff tying back to Spenser’s ostensible long-haul trucking dreams. Otherwise, the Big Shootout isn’t much, settled so effortlessly, in fact, that Spenser winds up with the preeminent baddie in custody quicker than you’d expect. Then again, once he has him cowed, he lets him go, in a manner of speaking, imploring that they go mano-a-mano in a mixed martial arts showdown. It’s pretty stupid but also, its own way, the funniest and most revealing thing in the movie, temporarily stopping himself from saving the day to prove he’s a man.

At the End of the Day: A Football Rom Com

Sports, I think we have discovered over the last few weeks do not practically matter, unless you want see them through an economic prism, which maybe we should, though maybe that’s why first-year college football coaches should be paid as much as an adjunct professor. But if sports do not practically matter, I think we have also discovered that sports philosophically matter, which is why in this sudden period of sports stoppage everyone freaked out when NFL superstar quarterback Tom Brady left his seemingly forever team, the New England Patriots, to sign with the lowly Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Suddenly there were sports to discuss! I’ve barely even watched the NFL for three years, but I listened to the ESPN Daily podcast to hear the invaluable Mina Kimes talk to Seth Wickersham about the Brady move because, well, sports! I’m glad I did. Because during their conversation, Wickersham mentioned the “seeds planted for this breakup” between Brady and infamous Patriots Coach Bill Belichick and OH MY GOD STOP THE TAPE.

Breakup? I could not stop imagining Brady & Belichick in a gridiron-styled romantic comedy, “At the End of the Day”, in which a player and a coach fall in love, fall out love, and then, in a twist unlike the real story, fall in love all over again.

ACT I. At a pre-NFL draft interview, every question Mitch Maatkamp (Tommy Lee Jones), grizzled veteran coach of the Philadelphia Taxpayers, asks prospective quarterbacks knotty questions, demanding honesty, though his youthful charges don’t recognize this demand as a cunning test. At least, none of them recognize it except Henry Friedline (Jake Gyllenhaal), lightly regarded quarterback from Michigan State. Every question Mitch asks, Henry replies with a classic banality, especially At the End of the Day, as in, “At the end of the day, I just want to win football games.” Smiling, Mitch writes DRAFT in his notebook and underlines it three times.

Flash head to the Philadelphia Taxpayers winning their third Super Bowl with Henry at the helm. Afterwards, as confetti falls and Henry clutches the Super Bowl MVP trophy, he is asked what this means. “You know,” Henry says, “at the end of the day, it’s all about winning football games. And that’s what this was, just another game we won. And I can’t wait to get back into the film room, watch some tape, and start getting ready for a first preseason game next year.” Off to the side, Mitch wipes away a tear. We cut to QB and Coach in a windowless room, wearing Super Bowl champion hats still sporting the price tag and toasting bottles of Budweiser, watching game tape.

“A few years later” the Taxpayers have fallen on hard times. They are 5-5 and Henry is set to be a free agent at year’s end. He has begun wearing beatnik chic designer clothes; he complains to the media about not enough “flash and dash” in the game plan; he has established himself as an entrepreneur, in business with his new life coach and body technician and business partner, Sam Lovelace (Danny McBride). After another loss, when Mitch approaches his quarterback about watching some game tape, Sam Lovelace intervenes, leading Henry emblematically off toward the lights.

ACT II. One day Mitch passes by the third string quarterback, a rookie from Brigham Young, Zach Maribel (Colin Jost), offering banalities to a reporter. “At the end of the day,” Zach says, “I just want to do whatever it takes to help this team win.” Mitch walks over and invites Zach to watch some tape.

Henry, meanwhile, begins to feel weak, perhaps tying back to the antimatter diet espoused by Sam Lovelace, and struggles to break down opposing defenses, possibly a byproduct of Sam Lovelace’s idea that studying game tape should be eschewed for aromatherapy inducing the game plan. Henry’s wacky best friend wife (Jessica Biel) implores him to break up with Sam Lovelace.

At the end of the last game of the season, which they finish a paltry 7-9, Henry, getting dressed at his locker, is approached by the General Manager, asking the quarterback if he plans to resign with the Showboats or become a free agent. “We’ll see,” Henry shrugs as Sam Lovelace walks up, shrouding his business partner in a camel-colored cape. As the two mean leave, they pass the windowless film room, where Henry momentarily stops, seeing Mitch and Zach watching tape together.

ACT III. Henry arrives in St. Petersburg, Florida to interview with the General Manager of the Scalawags, Mike Slipovitch (Michael Rapaport). Oddly, Slipovitch is wearing a Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops and drinking a Sea Breeze. He offers Henry a cocktail too. Henry declines, citing his diet restricting him to Alkaline Water. When Slipovitch shows Henry the film room, Henry is stunned to see it’s less a film room than a solarium, with windows everywhere. “We don’t believe that winning is the only thing,” Slipovitch says as he sips his Sea Breeze. Henry gets a pained expression.

Back at the Philadelphia practice facility, in their windowless film room, Mitch asks Zach to diagnose a certain team’s pass coverage. “It is what it is,” Zach says. Confused, Mitch says, “But what is the pass coverage?” “You know,” Zach shrugs, “I just take each coverage one throw at a time.” Mitch gets a pained expression.

As the midnight deadline to free agency looms, Henry arrives back at the Philadelphia airport, thirty minutes to midnight, to find Sam Lovelace waiting with an army tank. “It’s your new ride!” he says. Henry shakes his head and catches a cab instead. “I thought football people loved military cosplay!” Sam shouts as the cab peels away. At the team facilities, Henry finds Mitch, drops his duffel on the floor, ditches his cape, and declares “At the end of the day, I just wanna be a Taxpayer.” They embrace.

Ruminating on My Favorite PG-13 F-Bombs

My childhood Lutheran pastor swore once in front of our confirmation class. It was not because he was mad at us, and it was not because he, like, tripped on a communion wafer, or something, and expressed foul-mouthed aggravation. No, he was proving a point, not unlike the one Q-Tip rapped in “Buggin’ Out”, from “The Low End Theory”, which was my personal Four Gospels rolled into one: “Occasionally I curse to get my point across.” That always stuck with me. A well-timed profanity is more impactful than a string of expletives, unless, maybe, we’re talking about Carrie-Ann Moss in “Memento” or Steve Martin in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles”, though that’s a post for another time. No, I think of the climactic moment on Rilo Kiley’s “Spectacular Views” when, suddenly, Jenny Lewis unleashes that “It’s so fucking beautiful”, her voice cracking on the F-bomb, making it feel like the walls are metaphorically tumbling down all around you, leaving nothing but an awe-inspiring natural vista stretching out to eternity. That right there is what a well-timed F-bomb can do. And because movies rated PG-13 are essentially limited to a single F-bomb, if they choose to use one at all, it forces them to be more creative in their deployment of it than an R-rated movie that can drop all the livelong day. They have to make their F-bombs count.

This is why I cherished Matt Singer’s post over at ScreenCrush last Friday a couple Fridays ago before the world ended about The Greatest F-Bombs in PG-13 Movie History. You can sometimes still find members of the Film Twitter Cognoscenti, the ones who purport to despise gatekeeping even as they mind the gates between Scholars and wastoids, dweebies & dickheads, lament innocent listicles on an Internet that is rarely run anymore because it has been stripped of its wild innocence. For shame. We here at Cinema Romantico still love listicles, so long as they are spruced up and really, like, fucking unique, you know? Like Singer’s, in fact, which is so good we are jealous we did not think of it first. So while we give Singer all due credit, and pointedly link to his list right here a second time, we would be remiss if we did not weigh in, not as a commenter asking What About [insert movie name here], because Singer’s list is Singer’s list, but, well, more in the spirit of “High Fidelity”, a list for a list. Consider this my Barry Judd off-the-cuff rejoinder to Singer’s Rob Gordon.

Singer’s #1 in fact, taken from 2011’s “X-Men: First Class”, is one I am not judged to dissect because I have not seen it. He includes the F-Bomb from the Catholic Priest in “Million Dollar Baby”, one of this blog’s favorite movies, though that would not make my list. Singer’s #5, however, in which Tom Hanks, of all people, dropped an f-bomb in “Catch Me If You Can” would make my list because, hey, that was the Hanks equivalent of when Henry Fonda appeared from the underbrush as the bad guy in “Once Upon a Time in the West.”

Singer’s #2, quoting “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy”, would make my list too. And while I have thoughts, well, Will Ashton (@thewillofash) summarized them for me. He tweets: “I'm sure I've said it before, but Anchorman's F-bomb drop is not only a funny, punchy joke, but it also progresses the plot and it leads to the main character's redemption. A really practical and clever use of your one allotted f-word.”

“The Naked Gun 2 ½” would make my list, throwing out its lone F-bomb right away, when Zsa Zsa Gábor concludes the police siren POV opening credits by emerging from a car to slap the siren silent, both parodying herself and forcefully pushing past the point of self-parody, declaring, in that immortal accent, “this happens every fucking time I go shopping.” Who else needs to swear after that?

Obviously the F-bomb in “Adventures in Babysitting” would make my list. What is this, amateur hour? It’s not so much the F-bomb’s shock and awe – “Don’t fuck with the babysitter” – as it is honoring Elisabeth Shue earning her stripes as a legit fucking 80s action hero.

And while, as stated, Will Ashton is spot-on in his analysis of the depth to “Anchorman’s” F-bomb, I slightly prefer the depth to another F-bomb, one culled from the eternally underappreciated “Bowfinger”, as my #1 PG-13 F-bomb. Because its F-bomb, nobly allocated to Eddie Murphy by writer Steve Martin even though Martin co-starred, is itself a commentary on movie dialogue. In fact, let’s just roll the whole exchange:

Agent: “The script has that moment.” 
Kit Ramsey: “When?” 
Agent: “You say, ‘I enjoyed meeting you, Cliff.’ Then you push the guy right over the cliff.” 
Kit Ramsey: “That’s too much for the audience to have to think about. They have to know that the guy’s name is Cliff, they have to know that he’s on a cliff, and that Cliff and the cliff is the same. It’s too cerebral. We’re trying to make a movie, not a film. You’re supposed to be the agent! You better find me a line like the time I told Tommy Lee Jones ‘Fuck y’all,’ and blew his brains out.”

Ray of Light (#2)

One of the myriad side effects of necessary stay-at-home orders is cosmetology. How are we supposed to get haircuts?! What will we all look like by the time America’s President, His Imbecility, King Big Brain I, consulting not with experts but the spray-tanned little man inside, opens our country back up for Easter break while a global pandemic keeps raging? Who knows, but here’s hoping that if the Rapture happens to coincide with the Resurrection in a few weeks time, we meet it face to face with hair as strikingly ample and messy as Penélope Cruz in “Volver.”

Forgotten Great Moments in Movie History

For one year or so in the mid-80s, my family got cable before we ditched it for a decade. (In retrospect, I’m thankful we ditched it.) That brief time we had access to a hundred channels, however, was when John Milius’s Cold War slice of surprisingly grim agitprop, imagining a time when other NATO allies ditched the U.S. rather than vice-versa (sigh), “Red Dawn” was all over HBO. My attention span, understandably, was short in those preadolescent days and so I mostly just watched the first fifteen, twenty minutes whenever it would pop up, setting the idyllic Colorado scene before WWIII starts and school is let out forever. As the streets descend into chaos, a few friends hop into the truck of Jed (Patrick Swayze), the emergent Subcomandante Marcos of Calumet, and hightail it out of town. Before vanishing into the Rockies, however, and gradually forming a small resistance, they stop at a convenience store run by the father one of the kids in the pickup’s bed. The father tells them get inside, gather supplies, which they do, in a frenzy. And though in the ensuing montage you don’t see them grab any packs of Charmin, you hear, in dialogue likely recorded post-production, a character demand “And get some toilet paper. I ain’t using no leaves.”

Because I was a typical preadolescent, numb to the complexities of the Cold War if not framed through an Olympic context, and because I rarely made it all the way to the end of “Red Dawn”, I saw it mostly as adventure story where kids ran away into the mountains to play hero. That’s why it was fun to play-act with friends. A few of us on the block would get together and decide who was Jed and who was Matt and who was Robert and who was Danny and if the two sisters a couple houses over were hanging out with us then we could even have Erica and Toni too. (Nobody ever wanted to be Daryl. Traitor.) And so, we’d all escape Calumet and stop for supplies as we fled, getting make-believe Wheaties and guns and toilet paper.

Red Dawn, brought to you by Wheaties & Capri Sun!

That all came flooding back to me Saturday afternoon when My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I took a walk down to CVS ahead of Chicago’s stay-at-home order going into effect to stock up on supplies. My youthful fantasies died off long, long ago, of course, but this wasn’t that; this was being brought face-to-face with a youthful fantasy for real. That’s not in the emotional manual. And I thought of that “Red Dawn” character opining that he didn’t want to use leaves as I made a beeline for the T.P. section and came up dry. We bought some napkins instead. Strange days, these.

An Elephant Sitting Still

Time, as it turned out, was the foremost subject at the movies in 2019. “The Irishman” ran three-and-a-half hours to demonstrate how all the time in the world is still not enough to come to terms with the things we’ve done. The underseen “Colewell”, meanwhile, conveyed how time gets away from us even if we manage to slow it down. And as time passed the characters of “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” by, they still found a way to stop and reverse it, briefly ceasing its inexorable march. Even the tentpoles, explicitly or inadvertently, dealt with time. “Avengers: Endgame” was all about a time heist, so to speak, while “Rise of Skywalker” manifested a never-ending urge to flip the page back after it’s been turned. And that, finally, brings us to “An Elephant Sitting Still.” Lord don’t let the people who thought “The Irishman” was too long see the run time on this one. At three hours and fifty-four minutes, the debut feature film of Hu Bo might seem endless but that, of course, is the point. And even if, as the saying goes, you “get it”, you won’t really “get it” unless you go through it, and feel how Bo expertly, effortlessly, exhaustively, exhaustingly contorts time so that it feels at once never-ending and devoid of all meaning.

I confess, I did not watch “An Elephant Sitting Still” in one setting. I watched it an hour at a time. So I can’t speak to the unceasing 234 minute experience, and perhaps that rules me out of order. But sliding in and out of its unchanging style seemed valuable, like returning again and again to an album that you think this time might work differently but doesn’t. That’s not to imply I disliked “An Elephant Sitting Still.” Far from it. Taking place over 24 hours, the unchanging grim, grey palette makes it feels like days and days rather than just one, as if a day last weeks and months or like weeks and months last a day. The setting is a northern Chinese industrial town, or maybe it’s the end of the world. Indeed, when the teenage Wei Bu (Peng Yuchang) pays a visit to his grandmother, her home has no door, just a blanket for a divider, and she’s dead, though the movie plays this much less as shock than a shrug, with Yuchang not changing his dour air one iota and the camera hanging back, as if the grief is far, far away. And when Wei Bu informs a nearby relative of her death, the relative not only hardly seems concerned but angry to have been told at all.

This sense of being closed off from everyone is underscored in the claustrophobic camerawork, which is not merely a series of intense close-ups but a judicious consideration of what is and what is not in the frame. Frequently characters looming in the foreground listen, silently, as characters in the background, fuzzy and out of focus, if not off screen altogether, rendering their their words meaningless to the listener. If characters aren’t listening, they are most likely wandering, which isn’t just an adjective in place of walking but the truth, wandering with no point or purpose, the camera at their backs, suggesting the melancholy air over hovering over their shoulders even as the camera betrays how there is nothing in front of them but more ugly buildings, more grey skies. When Wei Bu comes across an immense train yard, his scream into the distance is virtually swallowed up by the imminent void.

There are not so much stories here as an accumulation of scattered details. Wei Bu’s father, his leg in a cast, out of work, bullies his son, who is bullied at school too, angrily if inadvertently shoving the bully down the stairs, killing him. The school, though, does not intervene, knowing the bully’s family runs the town, leaving the bully’s brother, Yu Cheng (Zhang Yu), to seek vengeance. Wei Bu’s friend Huang Ling (Wang Yuwen) is in a relationship with their school’s Vice Dean, which becomes public and a scandal. Each of these details is hardly seen through in any meaningful way, evoked in how slowly and dispassionately Yu Cheng tends to his task, admitting dislike for his brother, bound by pesky blood, epitomizing the futility of the setting’s institutions, families and the school failing each person, which is what leaves them to wander, untethered from any sense of connection with the community.

It’s a bleak portrait rarely, if at all, tempered by hope. That lack of hope comes through in the characters’ ostensible quest, which isn’t really a quest at all, just a recurring fantasy about a nearby city with an elephant, one who sits all day, they say, unbothered by society. That, frankly, sounds less like a dream than a metaphor for depression, maybe for something worse, which is why the awe-inspiring final shot, when the camera finally sees its characters in long shot, giving us room to breathe, feels like a release in more ways than one.

keira knightley self-isolates

Escape (The Piña Colada Song) Celebrity Sing-Along by Character Actors

Yesterday the social media world was aflutter with the faces of famous people, from Natalie Portman to Will Ferrell, gathered in their respective places of self-isolation by Gal Gadot to record smartphone videos of themselves singing John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Whether it was a sweet moment in the middle of shitstorm or merely the obnoxious out of touch crooning of the rich, who’s to say? I certainly don’t have the energy to debate it and I’d rather direct all my outrage at our ignorant, uncaring Slumlord-in-Chief, King Big Brain I, anyway.

Speaking of which, even if this celebrity sing-along was nice and all, I don’t know. I’m just not feeling it. It’s not emblematic of the national mood, I don’t think. You know what I have been thinking about a lot lately (not counting my own mortality and where to find toilet paper)? “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” by Rupert Holmes. No, not because it’s G-8, but because it was featured in the March Badness, the 2020 version of a yearly March Madness-style bracket about pop music from a specific era or a specific genre. Each song is argued for in essay and Holmes’s 1979 track was dissected by Nicole Walker. She wrote: “There is a reason “The Piña Colada Song (Escape)” has two titles. The dream and the specifics of the dream are at odds. Piña Coladas are frou frou drinks, easy to come by. Escape is, at least from yourself or from the planet, not easy at all.” You’re telling me!

And I realized, what the world needs now is not John Lennon’s “Imagine” but “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” by Rupert Holmes. But you can’t have Gal Gadot singing Rupert Holmes. Have you seen Rupert Holmes? He’s Social Studies Chic. No, for our celebrity sing-along of his magnum opus we need character actors. So. Let’s imagine [unavoidable, sorry] “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” as sung in snippets via smartphones at their homes by character actors.

We need a name to reel in the masses and so the first couple lines will be sung by Christopher Walken.

“I was tired of my lady, we’d been together too long
Like a worn-out recording, of a favorite song”

We will then cut to Donald Glover, a real singer, to make it seem as if this is a real thing, not just subpar karaoke for no cause.

“So while she lay there sleeping, I read the paper in bed
And in the personals column, there was this letter I read”

And as we transition to the chorus, we transition to Steve Buscemi, singing in the key of Donny in “The Big Lebowski” drinking Slice, incredibly well mannered.

“If you like Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain
If you’re not into yoga, if you have half a brain”

Matt Malloy gets the back half of the chorus because I really like thinking of him and his whole associate dean crossed with soda jerk aesthetic singing this, shall we say, carnal couplet.

“If you like making love at midnight, in the dunes of the cape
I’m the love that you've looked for, write to me, and escape”

The second verse, of course, is where Holmes laments the dreary recurring patterns defining existence. And who better to espouse such profound self-pity than a jaded Michael Shannon?

“I didn’t think about my lady, I know that sounds kind of mean
But me and my old lady, had fallen into the same old dull routine”

Paul Giamatti, then, will take the baton because he could give the follow-up a kind of self-impressed spin.

“So I wrote to the paper, took out a personal ad
And though I’m nobody’s poet, I thought it wasn’t half bad”

Who gets that immortal moment of music diction “I am into champagne”? William Fichtner, that’s who.

“Yes, I like Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain
I'm not much into health food, I am into champagne”

Walton Goggins could make neutralizing bureaucratic rules and procedures a little bit sexy.

“I’ve got to meet you by tomorrow noon, and cut through all this red tape
At a bar called O’Malley’s, where we’ll plan our escape”

With things primed for a tawdry turn, Luis Guzmán is our man, a bit too high on his own questionable supply.

“So I waited with high hopes, then she walked in the place
I knew her smile in an instant, I knew the curve of her face”

Shea Whigham will not only make a nation watching on Twitter remark in unison “That guy!“, he will bring the melancholy in these lines up in the mix.

“It was my own lovely lady, and she said, Oh, it’s you
And we laughed for a moment, and I said, I never knew”

Kevin Dunn will lead us back into the chorus, lazing in a recliner, maybe even clearly reading the lyrics off a sheet of paper, disinterested, yes, but also baffled as to why he is even doing this.

“That you liked Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain 
And the feel of the ocean, and the taste of champagne” 

Kevin Corrigan, obviously, gets the second go-around with this couplet because he and he alone can make it sound like a man in a tuxedo pitching you dinner by candlelight at a trash can for two in the alley.

“If you like making love at midnight, in the dunes of the cape
You're the love that I've looked for, come with me, and escape”

But then, when it seems as if things have become too real, we pivot to Billy Zane, emitting the vibe of that fake movie in “Poetic Justice.”

“If you like Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain
If you're not into yoga, if you have half a brain”

And we end with Bruce McGill, in front of (what I can only assume is) his seashell green bathroom tile, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, getting the song’s hammer because, hey, Bruce McGill should be in everything.

“If you like making love at midnight, in the dunes of the cape 
I'm the love that you’ve looked for, come with me, and escape”

Ray of Light (#1)

I had a sense this was going to be a bad year, but I had no idea it was going to be this bad. I mean, this is bad. This is bad-bad. This is I-Don’t-Want-To-Draw-A-Dumb-Movie-Allegory-To-Explain-How-Bad bad. It’s almost too much to take and it’s almost too much to take every second of the day. The other night I had a dream about going out to try and find toilet paper, woke up, fell back asleep, and dreamed my neighborhood independent movie theater had closed. It feels like the apocalypse and I don’t just mean that as some dumb hashtag.

This past weekend, we had a couple friends over, making it four of us, below the recommended thresholds but perhaps our last mass-ish gathering for…..you know what, let’s not talk about it. Our friends brought pie and pizza and we provided adult beverages. We watched a movie to take our minds off things. The selected movie as voted upon turned out to be “Bowfinger”, glory to the movie gods. And I’ll tell you what, even in a global pandemic, Steve Martin’s masterpiece is funny. And that’s the thing. Our first couple posts at Cinema Romantico this week skewed a little heavy. Now, we won’t be doing away with the heavy, mind you, or heavy-ish. The act of watching movies brings me comfort, and working through what I’m watching, figuring out what I did and did not like, what did and did not work, goes hand in hand with that act. So the critiques will keep coming.

But. If we are not into the fallacy of escapism, we understand you have to open the shade once in awhile and let a few rays of sunlight in, get that Vitamin D. So going forward, whenever the mood strikes, whenever something we watch or think about sparks us, whenever it’s been 40 degrees, cloudy and rainy in our souls for too long, we will provide a little blogging ray of light. Like this one from “Bowfinger.” Stay strong, friends.

...searching for my silver screen bar...

For reasons I don’t remember, this post had been sitting in my drafts folder, a few sentences short of completion, since the halcyon days of March 2016 before a human trash heap became our quasi-steward. But now that bars, as they absolutely should be, are shuttering all over America for the foreseeable future, who knows when you once again might be given the go-ahead to mosey over to your favorite one and have a pint. So, rather than adding to the immense and justified global freak-out, I thought, why not add those missing sentences to this post, update it a little, and take a virtual trip to the bar? Wherever you are, crack a cold one and belly up to the blog.

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 There’s a scene in Quentin Tarantino’s “Jackie Brown” when the eponymous flight attendant (Pam Grier) has just been sprung from the clink by a bail bondsman, Max Cherry (Robert Forster), who’s driving her home. But then he wonders if she might like to stop for a drink and discuss her case. He suggests the Riverbottom. “It’s a cop hangout,” he says. She nixes that suggestion. Then he offers the Hilton, the one out by the airport. “It’s kind of a sports bar,” he explains. She nixes that suggestion too. I mean, these? These are the bars he’s offering? A cop hangout and a sports bar by the freaking airport? She says she knows a place and, well, Tarantino’s screenplay says all you need to know: “The Cockatoo Inn is just what Jackie was looking for.”

When it comes to a preferred bar, I dare say we all know what we are looking for. Like, I’m looking for the Four Moon, in my old Chicago neighborhood, with impeccable beer on tap, superb music selected by its staff, warm lighting and wondrous decor, and a staff that will engage if you want to be engaged and leave you alone if you want to be left alone. It’s alehouse Elysium. But thinking about that scene in “Jackie Brown”, as I did during “The Drop”, a gritty crime thriller set predominantly in and around a neighborhood bar, when a detective asks a regular a few questions and the regular curtly if passionately replies “Don’t fuck with my bar”, made me wonder about bars on the silver screen. If I could have one bar stool at the movies to call my own in what watering hole would this stool reside?

You can consult the Internet, of course, Googling “Best Movie Bars” which returns all manner of lists, but that’s like consulting Yelp. Any list of “Best Movie Bars” simply rounds up the usual suspects: Rick’s Café Americain in “Casablanca”, Mos Eisley in “Star Wars”, the Korova Milk Bar in “A Clockwork Orange”, The Bamboo Lounge in “Goodfellas”, and, of course, The Titty Twister in “From Dusk ‘til Dawn”, hangout headquarters of men’s rights activists everywhere since 1996.

Everybody goes to Rick’s, and I’d like to go there too, except…..well, it’s always really, really crowded and I’m an introvert. Mos Eisley looks cool, sure, and it’s got the Cantina Band, of course, leaning on that one song like The Kingsmen lean on “Louie Louie”, but need I remind you it’s “a wretched hive of scum and villainy”? What are the odds are some crazy Alsakan will wanna off me? No thanks. Ditto The Bamboo Lounge which despite its ambiance would leave me scared off a mobster going all mafia on me. The Titty Twister has snakes, as well as all the aforementioned men’s rights activists. I don’t want to be anywhere in “A Clockwork Orange”, let alone anywhere that makes me drink milk. No, these bars are not what I’m looking for.

In discussing “The Strange Science of Creating a Perfect Bar” for the esteemed New York Times in 2013, Rosie Schaap reckoned “there’s that metaphysical quality that’s hardest to capture and impossible to fabricate: something like what Romans called genius loci, the spirit of the place. It doesn’t really matter what kind of bar we’re dealing with: It either has it or not.” That spirit cannot be faked, and is why another prominent Kubrick bar in movie lore, The Gold Room “The Shining”, when Jack Torrance, desperate “for just a glass of beer”, In his mind’s eye The Gold Room is swank and old school, like the Algonquin of the Rockies, but, of course, because it’s just a head trip. Even my beloved Westin Hotel of “Out of Sight”, with the snow falling just outside the window, feels a little too much like a waking dream, as if the obnoxious ad guys just “in from the apple” are just mirages of machismo.

The Park Hyatt in “Lost in Translation”, however, that opulent hotel bar of hard drinkers with weary souls bathed in Sofia’s melancholy light...that’s got the genius loci I’m looking for. And yet, not only am I worried that woman from Sausalito would try to talk to me, I cannot help but feel that a hotel bar would never be my bar. And that’s because I’m a man who appreciates a good dive bar.

The noted sportswriter gastronomist Wright Thompson knows dive bars. He once wrote: “A dive bar is a deeply personal thing, and the things that draw us back to them over and over often have to do more with the warm buzz of nostalgia than the actual brick and mortar.” That’s true. It might seem difficult to summon nostalgia for places where you’ve never actually been, only seen, but nostalgia comes easy to me, and I can long for their fictional stools and countertops as much as any real ones, I assure you. But then, nostalgia can also spring traps, and I must be cautious in not allowing those wistful movie memories to cloud judgment in the all-important selection of my movie bar. That’s why I can’t allow myself to be emotionally hoodwinked by thoughts of Brian & Jordan pouring drinks at Flanagan’s Cocktails & Dreams, a place connected only to the splendid escapism of guilty pleasures. That is not the bar I am looking for even if I think it is.

Now The Basement Tavern in “Inglorious Basterds”... that could be the bar I’m looking for. I love a good basement bar, particularly one in the idyllic French countryside where the bartender reads books between filling mugs.

Now The Crow’s Nest in “The Perfect Storm”... that could be the bar I’m looking for, what with Springsteen on the jukebox and disinterest in small talk, where you come to get drunk and drunker still, except the locals would probably also wonder what this hipster dufus is doing here and punch my lights out, and besides which, I’d also be disappointed when there wasn’t a Nor’easter about to blow in so I could say, Andy Garcia-like, “Storm’s comin’”

Now The Penguin in “Kicking and Screaming”... that could be the bar I’m looking for, because it’s divey and a townie bar and has Jimmie Dale Gilmore on the jukebox except that it would also be overrun with graduate students and undergrads posing as graduate students discussing philosophy like people who just discovered philosophy.

At this point I began to worry. I began to worry that perhaps the movies’ dependence upon action and interaction inherently precluded my kind of bar from existing. Movie bars may not need to be places where everybody knows your name, necessarily, but they need to be places where anyone can approach you and talk about stuff and all I really want is to generally be left alone and watch the world go by. Wait, watch the world go by? That’s when a voice entered my head. It was a craggy voice, a melancholy voice, a voice that hadn’t given up but was getting there plum quick. It was a voice that went like this……

“Near the plaza was a little cafe, called La Mar Azul next to a movie house. I sat there in the afternoons and drank beer. I used to sit there half-asleep with the beer and the darkness. Only that music from the movie next door kept jarring me awake.”

That’s Robert Mitchum talking his Mitchum-y jive in “Out of the Past”, the greatest of the noirs, as he wiles away the days in an Acapulco joint waiting for Jane Greer to maybe show up. And Acapulco is crucial here, because I considered The Ship Inn in “Local Hero”, except that’s on the Scottish coast and why would I want to sit there half-asleep with the beer and the darkness when the Scottish coast is right outside my door?

No, in the course of my travels over the last few years I have come to learn that what I need is not even so much a bar as a bar en plein air, a mixture of Parisian café culture and the Mexican custom of just chilling in the jardin; La Mar Azul is just what I’m looking for.

Notes on Steppenwolf’s Production of Bug

As Steppenwolf’s recent production of Tracy Letts’s “Bug” opens, Agnes (Carrie Coon), is standing at the door of her rural, seedy Oklahoma motel room, back to the audience, staring out. And because the door is opened halfway, we can see outside, where the set design team has crafted a sky backdrop that is not painted an ominous black or green or grey that you might expect given the Tornado Alley setting but a pleasing pinkish one, as if at twilight. She gazes for a good several seconds, maybe a few more than that, as if debating whether she would walk out the door and go stand underneath that sky. Then, the phone rings and she shuts herself back inside, pointedly closing herself off to the outside world. Indeed, “Bug” is not a play where the single setting is a matter of narrative convenience but the whole point, the characters consumed by their paranoia and unwavering faith in what their paranoia has led them to believe. That is evoked in Takeshi Kata’s spectacular second act set design in which the motel room becomes a tin foil fortress, the characters sealing themselves inside the buzzing noise of their own delusions, impervious to dissenting voices.

Agnes is holed up, away from her ex-husband (Steve Key), whose abuse eventually surfaces in dialogue even as Coon makes it clear long before in her body language when he turns up unannounced, subtly turning away from him. It’s no wonder, then, that she’s so drawn to Peter (Namir Smallwood), veteran of the Gulf War. If emergent events suggest he has gone AWOL and suffers from mental illness, Smallwood evinces an air at once edgy and polite, getting their crack pipe ready for a few hits with a similar studiousness as later when he’s studying ostensible bugs through a microscope, this odd brand of courtliness making it scarily believable that he could rope her into his dangerous fantasies. This gradual and unwitting seduction is evoked in the beeping of a broken fire alarm that for a brief spell drives them to distraction, giving momentary rise to the incessant noise inside his head. “They’re dangerous,” Peter says of the smoke detector, “more radioactive than plutonium.” “No wonder I feel so lousy”, Agnes replies, Coon’s deadpan not merely eliciting a genuine laugh but coming across like the key that turns the lock.

The back half of “Bug” is a violent, terrifying descent into paranoia as Smallwood lets Peter’s edginess and politeness collapses into righteous indignation, the character claiming his body is infested with bugs stemming from a military-sanctioned experiment, bugs which no one else that enters the room, either Agnes’s ex or the vaguely defined doctor (Randall Arney) trying to track Peter down, can see. Agnes can, or says she can, and Coon’s voice suggest she is just as dubious as she is desperate to believe, until the play’s money moment. Not the end, no, which I won’t give away, but which feels less shocking in a mouth agape, Where Did That Come From? kind of way then from its own twisted sense of logic. “Bug” reaches that end point from an astonishing back and forth in which Peter eggs Agnes on to invent a conspiracy theory pertaining to her own life, the rising insistence of her voice manifesting this transition from skeptic to true believer. Once she finishes, you know it’s all over; they’re gone, in more ways than one.

In a time when everything someone doesn’t care for can be broadly written off as the vile workings of the Deep State, the machinations of the Establishment, the overarching evil of The Government or some nebulous “They”, this remount of Letts’s play feels apt. “If you look at the years since ‘Bug’ premiered,” wrote Catey Sullivan for the Chicago Sun-Times, “monsters that once seemed unthinkable are now not uncommon.” “American discourse has so coarsened, and the nation’s checks and balances have so eroded,” opined Chris Jones for the Chicago Tribune, “that we now are at the point where ‘Bug,’ once a pulpy play, feels like it has become part of our not-so-shared architecture.” Read Letts’s conversation, however, with director David Cromer in the show’s program notes and he traces the genesis back to the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing in his native state and how the Internet broadened access to conspiracy theories, providing a broadband avenue to connecting the dots, even if people weren’t connecting the dots any more than Agnes is when Peter wills her to an “explanation”. “Bug”, then, isn’t so much timely as timeless, suggesting an obsession with conspiracy has always been embedded in our DNA, putting our long festering paranoia under the microscope and letting us see it in full.

Some Drivel On...Contagion

“It’s an Irwin Allen movie, at the end of the day,” Mr. Soderbergh told Dennis Lim of The New York Times in 2011 about his then upcoming film “Contagion.” “We’re doing exactly what he did, using a lot of movie stars and trying to scare a lot of people.” Except that one paragraph before expressing this sentiment, Soderbergh deemed his work “an ultrarealistic film about a pandemic, and that’s the key phrase.” He continued: “We were looking for something that was unsettling because of the banality of the transmission. In a weird way, the less you trump it up” – WOAH!!!!! – “the more unsettling it becomes.” Those two readings of his film don’t quite jibe. “Contagion”, in rewatching it, like most of America is rewatching it, proved not to be anything like an Irwin Allen movie – “The Global Pandemic”, or something. There are a lot of movie stars, yes, but Allen’s m.o. was, like his acolyte Roland Emmerich, long, melodramatic wind-ups, bringing all the characters on stage and setting up their personal backstories, threading each one through the ensuing disaster and then, finally, rendering that disaster with as many fireworks as finesse.

In “Contagion”, Soderbergh essentially cuts to the pandemic already in progress with a Day 2 title card over an image of Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow), patient zero, already looking at death’s door as she rummages around in a bowl of cocktail peanuts, lingered on in close-up like Frankenheimer lingered on the tin cup in “Ronin” before DeNiro ambushes Skarsgård with the coffee percolating within. Sure enough, a couple scenes later Beth is dead and her husband, Mitch (Matt Damon), listens to a doctor cruelly explain grief counselors can help find “resolution” when he can’t even tell Mitch what killed her. “What happened to her?!” Mitch demands. Getting no response, he helplessly hollers again: “What happened to her?!”

It could have been Damon’s “I didn’t kill my wife!” You know, confused by the confusion, he sets out to uncover what happened to Beth and discovers a cure for the disease along the way, ordinary man cosplaying as hero. But Soderbergh isn’t playing by arcane rules, which is aesthetically comforting and literally, in this moment, here (looks at watch: eight-twenty eight a.m. central standard time), kind of terrifying. When Marion Cotillard’s WHO expert, Dr. Leonora Orantes, is dispatched to trace the virus’s origins, she strides through an airport terminal in long shot with a cocksure smile, a hero shot if there ever was one. Rather than get to the bottom of things, though, she winds up kidnapped and essentially held for ransom until a vaccine is found. As C.D.C. Inspection Officer Erin Mears, meanwhile, Kate Winslet plays the part galled but determined to keep hacking through red tape even as she simultaneously lets out so much air when the character wakes up in a hotel sick and knowing what that means. Erin isn’t sainted, she’s just fucked.

Indeed, this is why as the movie opens on Beth, the tone of her phone conversation implying that she’s having an affair, which will be made explicit later. That doesn’t so much mean she’s punished for her sin when she is subsequently killed off so much as it signals Soderbergh skewering the rigid, prehistoric notion of what defines a movie rooting interest. You only wish he was a little more creative where the predominant villain was concerned. Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law), a blogger, espouses blatant mistrust of the government and peddling a cure that we are not quite sure he believes is the real thing or not or just a means to enhance his brand as everything goes to hell. Though Soderbergh flouts his suspicion of the state by consistently returning to a C.D.C. research scientist (Jennifer Ehle) toiling away for a cure, he never demonstrates how or even if Krumwiede’s disinformation spreads. He’s just eating the sins for all the unseen know-nothings convinced they know everything.

Then again, not connecting Krumwiede to the panicking masses underlines the character’s self-interest which underlines just how little people mean in the grand scheme of “Contagion” anyway, mercilessly left by the wayside. The characters might struggle to contain and understand the virus but its relentless spread makes sense to us because of how deftly Soderbergh toggles from place to place and visually traces its otherwise unseeable line from person to person, just like that [snaps finger], his own narrative presentation proving “as ruthlessly effective as the malady at its cool, cool center,” as Manohla Dargis astutely wrote for The New York Times, cutting to the heart of how Soderbergh does not simply recount the story of a pandemic but embodies its own sense of clinical, swift devastation. There comes a moment when Mitch sits down and cries, which is less notable for the tears themselves then when they happen in the movie – that is, at the end. It happens so fast, he doesn’t know what hit him. I don’t remember what I thought of that scene in 2011; right now, I could relate.

Curating a Fake March Madness

Hi, friends. This is a movie blog, of course, first and foremost, and always will be. And we have no plans to go anywhere as everything goes to hell, not least because, well, we literally probably won’t be going anywhere. Besides, writing this morning helped clear my mind and bring some comfort! COVID-19 can stop sports but it can’t stop Cinema Romantico. (Yet.) And that brings me to my main point. Sports are stopped, including the NCAA Basketball Tournament, America’s great three-week sporting extravaganza. There’s nothing like it. But it’s all gone, at least for this year, stopped cold, the plug yanked, to quote Elaine Benes as she popped a can of soda open, like you’re starting a mower. Suddenly, those of us who planned to spend the next few weekends consuming an all-you-can-eat buffet of March Madness – whoops! sorry! that’s, March Madness™ – are left not even with scraps; just…..nothing. So if you’re feeling blue and suffering hoop withdrawal, I have, drawing from my deep (disturbing) knowledge of NCAA Tournaments past, curated a six-pack of historical March Madness classics, all culled from the first and second rounds, since those rounds are the best, for your viewing pleasure (and mine) over the next week, should you so choose. What other choice do you have? This is all we have left.

Georgetown - 50 Princeton - 49, First Round 1989. Obviously I was starting here. It is, as I’ve written before, the greatest college basketball I’ve ever watched. And you should go back and watch it too, the moment when the 450 million to one shot Ivy League champions nearly toppled then-hardwood colossus Georgetown. If the game’s pace feels deliberate, that’s because it is, in the era of a 45 second shot clock, one which Princeton consistently, smartly milks. But if that sounds boring, it isn’t, not just in the rising tension of the game but in Princeton’s offensive choreography, lulling you into its pleasing rhythm as much as it lulls Georgetown. More than that though, today, I think about the crowd. As the now canceled Tournament was briefly planning to go ahead without crowds, it led to several writers and commentators noting how the games are essentially a television product anyway and a lack of spectators would not impact the viewing experience, perhaps suggesting their future. Maybe not, but the crowd in Georgetown v Princeton enhances the viewing experience, the way it gasps at every Princeton make and moans at every Princeton miss; you FEEL them feel what’s happening. It doesn’t matter if you know how this one ends, I assure you, the event’s electricity sweeps you up anyway.

Loyola Marymount - 119 Wyoming - 115, First Round 1988. Do the kids today know anything about, never mind remember, the famed Paul Westhead Jesuit & Marymount teams of the 80s? The ones that led the nation in scoring three years running at 110 points a game or higher? Do they remember Hank Gathers? Lord, were the Lions of Loyola Marymount something fun. So cue up this first rounder in which both teams combined for 234 points in just 40 freaking minutes. It’s like a roller coaster refusing to stop. Bonus: you get to see All Time, All Name First Teamer Fennis Dembo, “the only Wyoming cager”, as Chuck Klosterman once wrote, “who’ll ever be on the cover of Sports Illustrated.”



Ball State - 62 Louisville - 60, Second Round 1990. The run of David Letterman’s alma mater to the Sweet 16 in 1990 was beyond compare, knocking out Gary Payton’s Oregon State team in the first round and then pulverizing Louisville in the second. Indeed, long before Florida Gulf Coast earned the moniker Dunk City, the Louisville Cardinals of Hall of Fame coach Denny Crum were the Doctors of Dunk. And yet. In this glorious upset coated in two layers of majestic irony, the other Cardinals of Ball State came out and threw it down all over the Doctors of Dunk, like the emphatic slam up above, the one, fabled time Cinderella didn’t wear a slipper but showed up in boxing shoes and threw a damn left/right body blow.

Georgia Tech - 94 LSU - 91, Second Round 1990. If there was ever a barnburner, this was it, complete with a colossal comeback that didn’t happen at the end but the beginning when Georgia Tech fell behind 24-5 and then electrolyted [sic]. With four future lottery picks – two apiece for each team – featured, this gives you a chance to see Georgia Tech’s Kenny Anderson, maybe the best college basketball player I ever saw, one of the precious few who could make the indoor game feel like the playground, going against Baby Shaq. I mean, what else do you need?

Iowa - 84 UTEP (University of Texas El Paso) - 82, Second Round 1987. Granted, I’m a native Iowan and so my bias is showing here but…seriously. Did you ever see these late 80s Iowa teams play? They were hell on wheels, running the full court press full stop for 40 minutes, with Roy Marble (the late Roy Marble, alas) who, to a kid from small town Iowa, was cooler than Jordan, running and gunning and dunking. Marble put up 28 in this second round tilt that was resplendent helter skelter, not least because UTEP had Tim Hardaway (Sr.) running the point, practitioner of the UTEP 2 Step, a crossover dribble from Mars, who was born to break a press. This game never let up, frentic to the last. It might be over 30 years old but compared to the control freak coach choreography of so much of CBB today, I swear, this 84-82 ragged masterpiece will look like a different galaxy, in the best way.

Arkansas - 96, Syracuse - 94 (OT), Second Round 1995. For spring break my junior in high school, I went not to, like, South Padre with my bros but to Winter Park, Colorado with my Lutheran church youth group for a skiing adventure. But because we left early Sunday morning, I missed the last day of that year’s NCAA Tournament opening rounds, a day, friends, which proved legendary, one still fondly remembered 25 years later. Georgetown won on a last second shot and Memphis (State) won on a last second shot and UCLA, eventual national champion, won on a last second shot and, finally, Arkansas and Syracuse played a game infamously decided by the latter’s Lawrence Moten calling a timeout his team didn’t have, belying a scintillating contest that was astounding, epic, dramatic, basketball on a stage as much as a court. Or so they say. I never saw it because I was on the road to Winter Park. And friends,  I’ll be honest here and say I didn’t much care for skiing much and have never skied since. And while I enjoyed parts of the trip, like sitting in a hot tub looking at the Rockies, I still, to this very moment, regret missing that Sunday of basketball. I always will. It’s just how I’m wired. And so, why not, a quarter of a century on, sit down and finally see what led to that (non) timeout.

keira knightley catches up on the news

A Brief History of Movie Characters Washing Their Hands: Reprise

As COVID-19 remains on the warpath, leaving you, discerning citizen, to wonder if The Media™ is being too alarmist or not alarmist enough, we here at Cinema Romantico thought it might be a good time to remind people to wash their hands by way of a post about movie characters washing their hands. Then we remembered! We already made that post! Last year! Since that time, K. Austin Collins, who sent out the Tweet that originated said post, has been chased off Twitter by one of the angry roving social media Kancel Krewz, for reasons we won’t get into here, and washing your hands has become a literal global concern. How does that Interwebs meme go? Ah yes. Life comes at you fast. Sure does! So we’re republishing our post from last November as an important PSA.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

21 Bridges

The title “21 Bridges” isn’t so much a misnomer as a sleight of hand. It refers to the 21 bridges in and out of Manhattan, of course, which an NYPD Detective André Davis (Chadwick Boseman) demands be closed after two cop killers elude police when their cocaine heist goes awry. The Deputy Mayor acquiesces, sort of, giving Davis and the narcotics detective with a name straight out of a Springsteen song, Frankie Burns (Sienna Miller), who is assigned the case too, until 5 AM to nab the bad guys. That suggests a thriller, but “21 Bridges”, despite requisite chases and gunfights, never quite becomes one. Indeed, if André’s big speech about closing the bridges never achieves the lofty entertainingly melodramatic heights of Tommy Lee Jones’s aria about going after “The Fugitive”, Dr. Richard Kimble, that’s partially because Boseman and director Brian Kirk don’t want it to. No, those 21 bridges ultimately come to symbolize the routes taken by intrepid NYPD into a city they serve and protect but where they can’t afford to live, downtrodden and put-upon and wanting theirs no less than the killers trying to score that cocaine.

After initially setting up André’s backstory, son of a cop who is killed ruthlessly in the line of duty, “21 Bridges” shows us the heist in its entirety, not to empathize with its criminals, Michael Trujillo (Stephan James) and Ray Jackson (Taylor Kitsch), who are portrayed as dangerous and violent, but to demonstrate they are simultaneously in over their heads, walking into what they think is a minor-league heist only to find themselves face to face with more cocaine than they were expecting and a team of police who show up on the scene far too quickly. The robbers, then, must shoot their way out, foreshadowing a movie in which the default mode of action setpiece is just spraying bullets every which way, sometimes effective on a level of sympathy, shifting ours throughout, but less so on an aesthetic one, never achieving the balletic gunplay of a John Wick joint, never mind the poetic rat-a-tat-tat of Michael Mann.

Arriving at the crime scene, the principles of detection tell André and Frankie that the bad guys will unload their score before fleeing, causing the order to lock down Manhattan to lock them in. That puts the movie on clock, literally, even, as a time stamp flashes on screen. Yet if this suggests a suspenseful countdown, what’s odd is how few times “21 Bridges” returns to that literal clock, underscoring just how little tension is created despite such a crackerjack set-up. And if Kirk demonstrates little sense of suspense, he’s equally unsuccessful at conveying scale. Perhaps it’s because he was shooting in Philadelphia rather than New York, causing him to switch between first and second unit footage, but, whatever the case, the herculean undertaking of shutting down Manhattan is not conveyed in any way whatsoever, written off to a few news reports in the background. And though the film’s pace is generally fast, the interchangeable action never elicits a sense of the walls closing in on the criminals.

That “21 Bridges” fails to excite is because it’s so wrapped up in unraveling its mystery, one tied back to the overworked and underpaid cops. It’s a twist that might have resonated had the movie done more world-building connecting to the idea of the words contained within the monologue functioning as reveal, aside from Frankie’s daughter, who is never seen, just referenced, a plot point, nothing more, while the turn of Frankie toward the end is not filled out with enough desperation by Miller. Alas, by improperly laying the emotional and situational groundwork, the cops and their ostensibly complex emotional ordeal fall by the wayside, reducing them to mere antagonists to André . And if he is set up as a guy too quick to pull the trigger, Boseman never exudes such an itchy temperament, playing more to the idea of a bloodthirsty monologue delivered by a preacher in the opening scene at the funeral of his father, rendering him as the chosen one, in a manner of speaking, underwritten by God. His skin color, thankfully, is just implicit, never explicit, and that adds a little gravity to the situation, though ultimately he never becomes more than a less exciting modern mashup of “Dirty Harry” and “Serpico”.

Buffaloed

“Buffaloed” begins with the ending, or close to it, as Peg Dahl (Zoey Deutch) races down the street in slow motion, aggressively clutching a gun, one she fires into the air upon reaching her destination, at which point director Tanya Wexler freezes the frame and flashes back to show how we got here. It’s not just that it’s a hoary device, though it most certainly is, but that the payoff, when we get back around to it, fizzles out. The fizzling is inadvertently emblematic of “Buffaloed” itself, set in the unsavory world of debt collecting and focused on a character, Peg, who is unrelenting her self-centeredness but oddly unwilling to see that character through to the sort of outrageous ending its own logic dictates. Peg suggests a small town version of Jennifer Lopez in “Hustlers”, a movie which vaguely referenced its characters pointed lack of scruples and then just sort of blew such moralizing off, ending pointedly with a song and a dance and champagne. But “Buffaloed”, despite Deutch's devil-may-care performance, takes its idea of debt following you forever rather literally, not exploring what leads to such financial debt in the first place but more consumed with the emotional debt that Peg accumulates, intent on ensuring she atone, even if that atonement feels tacked on and unconvincing.

Moving quickly through Peg’s adolescence to her young adulthood, she is introduced as someone who despises Buffalo so much all she wants, no matter what, is out. That’s all well and good, but “Buffaloed” does little to establish what makes Buffalo so unappealing in the first place, never mind Buffalo itself, save for a few shots of people in Buffalo Bills paraphernalia and a Judge oddly fixated on the city’s wings, prone to asking those on trial and those prosecuting them which Buffalo wings joint they prefer. Maybe this really happens in Buffalo, who I am to say, but it plays like broad comedy of an out-of-towner more than a distinct sense of place. (Brian Sacca, the screenwriter is from Buffalo, but it would seem some in the area quibble with his presentation.) And while the frequently wood-paneled interiors feel true to its rust belt setting, as does Peg’s mom (Judy Greer) running unlicensed salon out of her own home, the movie having been shot in Canada rather than its ostensible location might have contributed to the problem of a movie signaling a place with its title but never conveying it.

Getting into an Ivy League school but unable to pay for it, Peg falls back on nefarious moneymaking schemes, scamming unsuspecting Bills fans with phony tickets. This gets her locked up, foiling her higher education, and though Sacca’s script sets up one character in the clink (Lorrie Odom) for down the road, it mostly glosses over this experience behind bars, not just because it’s played more for comedy (a black eye!) than psychological acuity but because remorse and self-analyzing are deliberately portrayed as Peg’s weaknesses.

Wexler takes us through the debt collecting process with talking to the camera monologues reminiscent of “Wolf of Wall Street”, which is occasionally what “Buffaloed” suggests, a parable for a greedy, nasty society that doesn’t just exist in downtown Manhattan but upstate New York. The movie paints the debt collectors as evil but then tries to get out from under these queasy ethics by having Peg go it alone with the help of a motley crew that will push back, sort of transforming them into lovable losers even as fleece others. Lest you think I am Reading Too Much Into It, “Buffaloed” ending with a postscript citing a few facts about the scourge of debt collectors gives it aways it yearning for at least some sort of earnest commentary, which is undoubtedly why it forces members of Peg’s motley crew to call her out even as it simultaneously keeps trying to be humorous, a tricky feat exceeding its grasp.

You wanna be a comedy, be a comedy, go for it, gung-ho, and let your character be unlikable. Deutch, bless her, is willing to be unlikable. In her character’s relationship with a lawyer (Jermaine Fowler), who isn’t so much a Magical Negro as a kind of Saint Negro, Deutch evinces the air of someone waving off his concerns even as he expresses them right to her face, aiming her figurative car right at a wall and ignoring his repeated pleas to use an airbag. And as the movie builds to a moment when the walls close in on Peg, Deutch lets us see the walls close in on her, palpably denying it with a through-gritted-teeth frenzy, an indelible moment that gets to the truth of a character willing to sideswipe the members of her own family to flee the city where they seem content to stay. Like so many movies these days, “Buffaloed” comes across afraid to follow its own character over the edge, consumed by thoughts of having someone to Root For, failing to honor Peg’s (lack of) conviction.