Holiday

Because this was supposed to be the time in the 2020 calendar when My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I jumped across the pond for some r&r, this was also supposed to be the time when the blog took one of its periodic vacations from posting. We did not jump across the pond, of course, because that would have required us to quarantine for 14 days before being released into an England that is mostly closed up anyway and, hey, to paraphrase the old cranky Midwesterner truism, why pay good money to quarantine when we are already quarantining for free at home?

Still. Everything’s fucked, as our being quarantined since, uh, christ, when was it, the start of The Spanish-American War, implies. The blog needs a freaking nap. And so even if that means you will have to wait even longer to read our thoughts on “The Last Dance”, The Content Mill churns relentlessly on and so, in Internet years, “The Last Dance” was yesterday’s news a few days ago. My un-published take is even now past its sell-by date. So we’ll see you, ah hell, I don’t know. Next week? Two weeks? Whenever, man. Until the next blog...

What Do We Need to Talk About?

-“We don’t just vanish.”
-“Are you sure about that?”

When I arrived home on March 11, I did what I have done nearly every night in mid-March for 30 years – put NCAA Basketball on the television. If the ACC Tournament ersatz showdown between North Carolina and Syracuse would have been meaningless in the best of times, it was rendered that much more meaningless in the worst of times, which is what that Wednesday proved to be. You lived through it too and so you do not require a refresher, but as the news rolled in, growing worse with every refresh of my phone, that game got smaller and smaller until, figuratively speaking, I could not even see it anymore. For the first time in my life, I palpably sensed life as I knew and lived it disappearing all around me.

Richard Nelson’s new play “What Do We Need to Talk About?” is part of his Apple Family Cycle, staged from 2010 to 2013, about four siblings, three sisters and a brother, in Rhinebeck, New York. The aim, according to Nelson, has always been intimacy, meaning that in our COVID-19 time this 2020 update translates smoothly to Zoom. That is the suddenly trendy video conferencing platform through which Nelson staged this spur of the moment, if still thought out, production, bringing the siblings – Barbara (Maryann Plunkett), Richard (Jay O. Sanders), Marian (Laila Robbins), Jane (Sally Murphy), and Jane’s partner Tim (Stephen Kunken) – and their conversation to us through the form of an online chat, the characters together but cordoned off into their own separate screen. The recent “Parks and Recreation” special on NBC was told via Zoom too, though its goal was nothing more than acting as a warm blanket, like finding a favorite song on the radio, epitomized in how it ended with an all-cast sing-along. “What Do We Need to Talk About?” is something else altogether. It never prescribes, explains or even consoles. “It’s like floating,” Barbara says, living through this Pandemic, and that’s the sensation Nelson captures, an emotional and material interregnum.

Theater, after all, more so than its television or cinematic counterparts, is about the live – nay, living experience. That feels demonstrably true with “What Do We Need to Talk About?”, and not just because it was shown live on YouTube. No, Nelson’s play manifests the notion not just of art as a working through but the actors being alive in that moment. Tim laments the closure of his restaurant but, as a part-time actor, also laments the death of a friend in the NYC acting a scene, a friend we realize is the late, real-life Mark Blum, an astonishing moment, as if the play is truly eradicating any boundaries between what is fiction and what is real, as if the actors are truly working through his strange new world hand-in-hand with their characters.

This moment is doubly astonishing, however, because it essentially pierces the play’s bubble, not just commenting on reality but bringing it into direct contact with reality. Right now, in the cultural discourse, much of it online, even in reviews of the play itself, people are hashing out whether art in this moment should merely be about taking us out of our suddenly strange lives or addressing the sudden strangeness of our lives. “What Do We Need to Talk About?”, as the title implies, is having that conversation with itself. The Zoom conversation centers on each character telling a story, frequently circling back around to art, with Barbara, an English teacher, putting the whole exercise into words by expounding on Boccaccio’s 14th Century The Decameron as being about “people telling each other stories while they wait out a plague.” Later, the play momentarily stops just to listen to Bach, music taking them (us) away. Yet after Jane’s turn entertaining the group, Barbara says “As you told that story, Jane, I did not once think about a pandemic,” effectively reminding us that once the story or the play or the music is over, reality rears its ugly head.

That reality is inherent in the play’s conveyance. The Zoom structure is at once invasive and just the way it is. The actors feel right at home, looking and acting like anyone I’ve had a Zoom call with the last couple months, though the very fact that Tim is self-isolating from Jane in a different room, the two of them communicating through the closed door, evokes how none of this is normal at all and that none of us know what is coming next. Marian’s story about their father’s mysterious brother, Paul, who up and vanished when he was young, “like he was wiped off the face of the Earth.” Where did he go? That is up for debate, and she speaks of Internet sleuthing to try and find him to no avail, the answer to the question arduous rather than conveniently expeditious.

Near the end, Jane mentions how her son’s girlfriend described the experience: “It feels like the world is ending just as we are arriving.” No one really says anything in response, no platitudinous mumbo jumbo about how she still has her whole life ahead of her, because no one really knows what to say. It feels as refreshing as it does frightening, a refusal to stoop to the level of American brands advertising our ostensible unity into oblivion and an acknowledgment of a sudden blank spot in our modern map.

“We don’t just vanish”, Marian says of their father’s brother. “Are you sure about that?” asks Richard. She chuckles. They all do. But the way Sanders says that line...man, it stuck with me, especially in a time where losing a loved one without the opportunity to say goodbye has become scarily prevalent. Zoom might be timely comic fodder, but in that moment Sanders makes it sound like they are sitting around a campfire, telling ghost stories. The play ends with everyone signing off, one by one, until only Barbara is left, looking into the camera, as if she is trying to square with what she sees, whether it’s real, whether this is all really happening. Then she ends the call and the screen goes black. She just vanishes.

Ray of Light

In the invaluable Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s crack profile of Val Kilmer for The New York Times, a bunch of paragraphs in, she considers her subject’s mid-90s grapple with leading man-dom and how, despite his struggles, he kept churning out “magnetic” work in smaller roles on the side. She cites “Heat,” writing “Forget that amazing shootout sequence that everyone talks about; the movie’s most mesmerizing moment is the 40-second microscene in which he watches a clerk verify that his fake license is real.” Hark, I thought, what’s this? An NYT profile lingering over a single cinematic facial expression? Cinema Romantico lingers over single cinematic facial expressions all the time. Cinema Romantico has lingered over the exact facial expression Taffy was talking about.

Of course, that is but one of many indelible Val Kilmer facial expressions in “Heat.” 

At a critical juncture, when the bank robbing crew of which Kilmer is part summons its newest member, Waingro (above), who is just not working out, to summarily dismiss him, Waingro, obliviously mellow, orders dessert and asks if anybody wants some pie. 

But this? This is a man who does not want some pie.

What Role in Road House Did Stephen Colbert Read For?

I am, for reasons that only concern us today in terms of expository purposes, an avid watcher of “Real Housewives of New York City.” I do not apologize. And like most Bravo programs, it is followed by “Watch What Happens Live”, a talk show, of sorts, hosted by the network’s impresario Andy Cohen, where he typically interviews both a personality from the show that has just aired and a celebrity guest. After last Thursday’s episode, however, Cohen had but one guest, Stephen Colbert. As he does with everyone who appears, Cohen asked Colbert a series of semi-serious questions, including about failed auditions. And it was then that Colbert, talk show host two times over and former correspondent on another talk show, sipping an espresso martini, advised that he once auditioned for “Road House.”

That’s “Road House.” [Pause to let the title sink in further.] The 1989 action thriller in which, to quote IMDb, “a tough bouncer tames a dirty bar”, that is, depending upon whom you ask, a cult classic, just a classic, bad, good-bad, in poor taste, high art, or director Rowdy Herrington’s second best movie after “Striking Distance.” This immediately prompted the question that this blog and this blog only is qualified to ask – for what “Road House” part did Stephen Colbert did audition?

Imagine this guy auditioning for Road House.

We can rule out certain roles immediately, of course. Colbert was not playing Wade Jennings or Brad Wesley, never mind Dalton. If Sam Elliott or Ben Gazzara or Patrick Swayze were asked to audition, then the casting director had done lost her mind. Colbert did once front a Rolling Stones cover band, but Jeff Healy is Jeff Healy even if he’s playing a character named Cody. Perhaps Colbert could have auditioned for Frank Tilghman, owner of the Double Deuce, the dirty bar in question, though the role would have to be reimagined as a first-time proprietor out of his depth and I don’t think the powers that be would have allowed such a reimagining even in the audition room.

I like imagining Colbert as Jimmy, Brad Wesley’s foremost henchmen, with his shirt unbuttoned down to his navel, but I’m not sure his martial arts expertise would have been up to snuff to get a reading.

Now Colbert might seem to make no sense as Tinker, the Capterpillar ball cap wearing henchmen with suspenders who gets maimed by a fake polar bear. But that’s only because John William Young made the part so indelible. Perhaps Colbert read for Tinker but played the part as a kind of out of time greaser?

Likewise, I can sort of see the more maniacal version of the Colbert Report Stephen Colbert driving a monster truck a la Brad Wesley’s henchman Gary Ketchum. Is there footage of 1980s Stephen Colbert pretending to be at the wheel of a monster truck?

Colbert does make some sense as Pat McGurn, the conceited, dummy bartender skimming the drawer, but John Doe was well known as the co-founder of the punk band X and I find it hard to believe he would have been made to read against a skinny dufus from Northwestern drama.

If, however, you take this Colbert, imagine him a couple decades younger, you can imagine him as the Dancing Shirtless Guy. (If you have seen “Road House”, you need no further clarification. If you have not seen “Road House”, you deserve to find out for yourself.) But do you read for the part of Dancing Shirtless Guy? What’s to read? Wouldn’t you just dance? Shirtless?

I’m not sure you would need to read for the part of the “Loudmouth” either, the dude in the floral print shirt who pulls a switchblade and gets roundly dismissed from the premises by Dalton, but it’s easy to see Colbert in that role. Not because of the floral print shirt, necessarily, though Colbert would look at home in one in the worst best way possible, but because I can see him brandishing that switchblade to the cocky hilt, teetering on the border of parody and a straight face.

But. I think in the end Colbert must have read for the part of Steve. As a hapless bouncer who gets roughed up, ruining his pretty face, and then gets unceremoniously removed from his position by Dalton for engaging in salacious affairs while on his ostensible break, the guy is mostly there for additional comic relief. Colbert could have played that part. And it’s good he didn’t, I think, because given Steve’s coda, Stephen might never have made it to The Ed Sullivan Theater.

Triple Frontier

As someone who wrote and directed “Margin Call”, putting the financial crisis into context for the laypersons, and “All Is Lost”, about a lone man stranded on a boat trying to survive, J.C. Chandor has generally preferred pragmatic procedure to pulp. And so even if his 2019 action epic “Triple Frontier” devotes a considerable chunk of time to putting a gang together and opens with a shootout at a South American discotheque, where the baddies pump out their own music as the bullets fly, a soundtrack to die to, it never becomes as pulpy as its intriguing “Three Kings” crossed with the opening action passage of “Predator” premise suggests. No, Chandor, in co-writing his film with Mark Boal, seeks to condemn avarice while also teasing topical notions overtly tacked on around it rather than embedded within, featuring characters who are mostly too nebulously drawn to make their warrior turned mercenary arcs resonate, rendering “Triple Frontier” as less exacting than as weighed down as the chopper carrying their score.

The ringleader is Santiago “Pope” Garcia (Oscar Isaac), a vaguely defined American military advisor who promises an informant he will give her safe passage out of Colombia. Safe passage out of Colombia, that is, so long as she gives up the exact location of an infamous drug lord hiding out in the jungle with millions just waiting to be stolen. This renders his motivations as conflicted, if not dubious, and Isaac plays the part slyly, not as an anti-hero but with a straightforward politeness where you can’t quite tell if it’s b.s. When he looks his pal’s teenage daughter in the eye and asks if her old man might be up for joining up, Isaac is daring you to call his bluff. The whole performance exudes such simultaneous cordiality and slipperiness that it feels as if some big payoff lays in wait, though all “Triple Frontier” manages is something akin to the T-1000 learning to shoot people in the kneecaps instead of the brain.

Pope’s crew is all ex-military, including single dad Tom “Redfly” Davis (Ben Affleck). Though the movie takes us through a day in his life, just the way he is costumed in his introductory scene as a realtor, in a red polo, baggy khakis and bulbous white sneakers, demonstrates a man entirely out of place. And once he is in the jungle, carrying a weapon and issuing orders, as played by Affleck, his demeanor does not radically shift but he suddenly becomes locked in, like it’s second nature, the decisiveness of his words and actions, even when he gets stars in his eyes looking all that money, neatly juxtaposed against his sloppiness back home. The other three men on the job, alas, two brothers and a former pilot who’s lost his license, lack definition, some muddled mixture of allegiance to their pal, not enough money, and the thrill of the action being gone, rendering them less compelling when the shit hits the fan.

The triple frontier of the title would seem in reference to the tri-border of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, an infamously lawless area, though despite giving Chandor’s movie its name, never gets explored, never mind shouted out, a stand in for global veracity. This odd vagueness is emblematic of the drug dealer himself who is seen, briefly, though he could have been faceless, a MacGuffin in human form. Honestly, the title should have been Mo Money Mo Problems. It would have been no less subtle than a mid-movie montage set to “Masters of War” yet more apt since the notion of American Interventionism and Imperialism is less the point, or even the sub-point, than old-fashioned greed, where even the gang’s chopper crashing in a remote village comes down to them buying their way out.

The chopper crash hampers their getaway, forcing them to walk through the Andes, the best sequence in the film, with rife with powerful details and images, a pack mule’s grisly death underscoring the quest’s cosmic pointlessness as powerfully as the men lighting stacks of cash on fire at high altitude for warmth artfully suggests how the wealthy have their heads in the clouds. These are isolated, though, rather than strung together in one powerful rising narrative to bring the point home, the allegory never scrupulously refined a la “All Is Lost”, the twist, if you want to call it that, still seeming, in its way, to suggest that despite so much trouble and considerable posturing to the contrary, money is what everyone needs.

Angel Has Fallen

If there is one constant in the so-called “Fallen” series, beginning with “Olympus Has Fallen” (which I have seen, grade four rotten potatoes) and continuing with “London Has Fallen” (which I have not seen), it is not the director, which has changed each time out, but the star, Gerard Butler as Secret Service Agent extraordinaire Mike Banning. If these are akin to “Die Hard” movies, just in a slightly more geopolitical zone, then Mike Banning is John McClane. But if John McClane was defined by Bruce Willis’s smart-alecky smirk, Mike Banning is defined by Gerard Butler gruffness. There is little behind those eyes, little humor in his heroism, he is taking this all a bit too seriously. That is not to suggest “Angel Has Fallen” itself is serious, though it is oddly topical in its plot points, as its narrative preposterousness ripe for legions of deGrasse Tyson-ish disciples to pick apart attests, but that its air is oddly solemn. This is a movie where, upon being wrongfully accused of attempting to assassinate the President, Mike hijacks a semi-truck. Alas, what should be an awesomely absurd twist on the car chase is just, like, just a standard issue car chase with a semi-truck as the pursued, less entertaining than mock dramatic. If we’re supposed to be having fun, then cut loose!

Director Ric Roman Waugh opens his movie with a fake-out, a nominal life and death rescue mission revealed as a mere training exercise, Mike giving a test run to a private military facility overseen by his old Army Ranger pal, Wade Jennings (Danny Huston). It suggests listless soldiers, like if Jeremy Renner of “The Hurt Locker” had no Mideast oil fight to avoid cleaning the gutters, forcing him to violently play-act instead. Indeed, in the ensuing scene Mike and Wade drink scotch and wistfully reminisce about when they were “lions.” But these scenes also suggest a private military preoccupation run amok, with Wade casually [cough, cough] suggesting Mike mention his training facility to the President, Allan Trumbull (Morgan Freeman), for a possible contract. And simply in the gravelly way Huston has Wade tell Mike this recommendation is no big deal, you know that it is, taking no great pains to hide that he’s the bad guy, seeking to kill the President and frame Mike for various underhanded reasons.

The attempted assassination occurs on a remote lake where the President is fishing, drones suddenly flashing in the sky. Another movie might have evinced this as wicked irony, perhaps a POTUS waging endless wars by drone suddenly finding himself on the receiving end, but “Angel Has Fallen” views Trumbull in a similar saintly light as Mike. Indeed, Waugh’s ideology is not exactly consistent, more a Political Chex Mix viewing the Federal Government less as a union of states or collection of representatives and officials and advisors than a President and Secret Service Agent who go it alone, surrounded by incompetent FBI agents (including Jada Pinkett Smith who is utterly, tragically stranded) who buy this frame job hook, line and sinker and scheming cabinet members, like the VP (Tim Blake Nelson). And that’s to say nothing of Mike’s father, Clay (Nick Nolte), whom Mike seeks out for help when he goes on the run.

Clay is an off-the-grid conspiracy theorist, evident as much in the grizzly beard Nolte sports as his being a Vietnam vet. “Angel Has Fallen”, however, is not the kind of movie to stop and note the irony of an anti-government tinfoil hat wearer teaming up to help save the Chief Executive of the Federal Government nor whether we are supposed to view this as a big cosmic joke or a restoring of true American order. It’s too bad because Nolte’s commitment in tandem with his character suggests Walter Hill’s much darker “Southern Comfort” (1981), as does the concluding shootout, spilling out into the streets of Washington D.C., these “lions” – Mike and Wade – escaping the zoo, in a manner of speaking. That allegory is beyond Waugh, however, as much as his own movie’s sense of politics. In the end, the Politics are really just Pyrotechnics, the myriad explosives Clay has planted around his property emerging as “Angel Has Fallen’s” most potent symbol, a Salute to Fireworks masquerading as as a belief in civil liberty, our inalienable right to just blow some shit up.

In Memoriam: Fred Willard

Jane Lynch has told the story, both in her 2011 memoir “Happy Accidents” and in media interviews, like for the late, beloved Premiere Magazine where I first read it, how during filming of the 2006 mockumentary “For Your Consideration”, Fred Willard, playing one-half of an Entertainment Tonight-ish anchor duo opposite Lynch, was told by director Christopher Guest to just talk over her. So, he did. Lynch, purposely left in the dark at Guest’s request to help render the moment more real, was stunned. Co-star Catherine O’Hara pulled her aside explained what just transpired: “You’ve just been Willarded.” And that is the perfect description of Willard’s patented brand of blustery, run you over comedy. When actors are said to steal movies, it implies standing out in spite of everyone else. Willard’s idea of stealing a movie, however, conscious of it or not, was more akin to Clive Owen’s “Inside Man” character casually if forcefully explaining that upon robbing a Manhattan bank, he was just going to walk right out the front door.

If Willarding eventually emerged as his forte, he could downplay too, as he did opposite Martin Mull as a kind of comical Ed McMahon in the late-70s TV series “Fernwood 2 Nite” and its other variations, as well as the bartender straight man to so many American Presidents as puppets in the short-lived late-80s sitcom “D.C. Follies”, which as a geeky kid who loved Presidential biographies I remember enjoying even as some jokes flew over my head. But it was in Guest’s movie mockumentaries where Willard made his true mark, honing his singular blowhard persona, epitomized in the name of his character from the 1984 classic “This Is Spinal Tap”, Lt. Bob Hookstratten, making him sound like someone too big for his britches but too dim to know it. His time onscreen was brief but he made it count, his brawny voice not so much booming as existing as an aggressive assembly line of prattle, talking over everyone, talking right through everyone, where he purposely does not even let the “I’m joking of course” breathe.



He was Willarding, in other words. Perhaps his most iconic Willarding was “Best in Show” (2000), a mockumentary about a prestigious dog show for which his character, Buck Laughlin, did the television play-by-play. There Jim Piddock played the color commentating straight man to Willard who hysterically rendered his character totally oblivious to being the butt of his own jokes over and over. He had too many funny lines to count and everyone has their personal favorite so I will let each reader think of her/his favorite here. (It says something, though, about how funny Willard was that you could credibly say he had the funniest line in a movie that also contains Parker Posey saying “This? This is a fish.”) In “Waiting for Guffman” (1996), meanwhile, about a small-town Missouri theater troupe, Willard impeccably embodied every provincial blabbermouth who peddles the same jokes day after day and thinks he knows everything despite having never been anywhere. When I was at a donut shop in a small Illinois town a couple years ago, a local entered and immediately went about dressing down the workers and the regulars with a relentless string of bad jokes. Oh my God, I thought to myself, he’s Willarding.

Still, as with so much in my movie-loving life, for me, it all comes back to “Roxanne” (1987), a personal favorite. That was Steve Martin’s movie, of course, but, as the writer (adapting from Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac) in addition to being the star, he left plenty of room for others, including Willard as the not-entirely-unlikable windbag Mayor of the small Washington state ski town who moonlights as a firefighter under Martin’s fire chief. “I want it to say action with style,” Willard says during a uniform fitting, “like a GQ firefighter.” He is not even the focal point of the camera when he says it, off to the side, but he takes ownership of the scene anyway. And in his best moment, after fighting a climactic blaze and leading the post-celebration, he essentially Willards right over the entire town. In fact, let’s allow him, Fred Willard, who died on Friday at the age of 86, to take us out...

Friday's Old Fashioned: Ace in the Hole (1951)

If it was sheer coincidence that I watched “Kill the Umpire” (1950) and “Ace in the Hole” (1951) back to back, it was also fortuitous. Because if the burgeoning umpire dufus, Bill (William Bendix), of the former encounters a stereotypical Hollywood Native American saying “How” by saying “How?” back, emphasis on the question mark, in an uncomfortably comical, exaggerated tone, there is a similar moment in “Ace in the Hole” when journalist Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) greets a Native American employee at the Albuquerque newspaper where he works by saying “How” in a smug tone stressing Chuck’s true shithead nature. In other words, “Kill the Umpire” might have been of its time, as the saying goes, but “Ace in the Hole” was ahead of its time. Maybe that’s why audiences famously did not like the latter when it was released. “Fuck ‘em all,” Wilder said of those audiences according to Ed Sikov’s unauthorized biography of the auteur. “It is the best picture I ever made.” Best? Well, that’s probably up for debate, as it is with just about any director, though that statement is nevertheless evidence of a similar combativeness within “Ace in the Hole.” The only person Wilder gives us to root for is deliberately doomed from the start as the movie spends of its one hour and fifty-two minute run time dredging the river of humanity and coming up empty.

Wilder must have seen something of himself in Chuck Tatum. Not just in the attitude, embodied in Douglas’s perpetual sneer and evinced in a scene after the character has been at his New Mexico job a year in which he laments this hellhole where he’s been forced to live, counting his sorrows to his colleagues, all of whom he manifestly considers beneath him. Put differently, Chuck is saying “Fuck ‘em all” right to their faces. He’s a newspaperman but we hardly ever see him typing, never mind reporting, laughing off the Tell the Truth slogan of his boss as the homely needlepoint it literally is, less a reporter than a storyteller, not simply writing down what he sees but adding flourish and, eventually, crafting the story to his own liking. When Chuck finds a local man, Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict), who has become trapped in a cave collapse, he butts his way in, not in the interest of any kind of rescue attempt but for the story, lying through his teeth to the Leo when he’s in the cave and then licking his lips with all the juicy newsy potential when he’s outside of it. He’s like James Cameron almost drowning Kate Winslet on the set of “Titanic” or Michael Mann filming during a literal hurricane warning on the set of “Miami Vice”; the person is just a prop.

The old adage is that it takes a village to make a movie and that’s true of Chuck too. He leans on Sheriff Kretzer (Ray Teal), desperate for re-election, to order that they drill from the top to get to the trapped man, which endangers Leo further but prolongs the rescue attempt to keep the story a story that much longer. Leo’s wife, Lorraine (Jan Sterling), meanwhile, introduced in the process of walking out on her trapped husband decides to stick around at Chuck’s behest, playing the part of a suffering spouse to turn a profit. Sterling and Douglas’s performances are an impeccable, incendiary yin and yang, her cruelly hollow expression and his wicked grin. And yet even as they reap their rewards, they are destined to reap the whirlwind, the walls figuratively closing in on them even as they literally close in on Leo, the character with whom we spend the least time, both too pure and beside the point.

The closer he gets to death, the bigger the crowd, lured by Chuck’s sensationalist storytelling, grows, the limits of life and manufactured suspense blurring, until the entire atmosphere becomes akin to a carnival (the movie was originally titled The Big Carnival). This is no hero’s story, of course, and it’s far too late once Chuck finally realizes he has literally doomed the protagonist of his own story. Even that fatalistic recognition, though, spurs no catharsis, never mind redemption, played to the hilt by Douglas, giving no inch, boldly, terrifyingly refusing to the very last to become likable. When Leo’s end comes, Chuck stands on the ridge above, staring down at the crowd, still sneering, and calls this callous, frenzied mass like he sees it. He may as well be looking in a mirror.

Ray of Light

Charles Grodin only has a few scenes in “Dave”, the first establishing his character, Murray Blum, as a CPA so that in the second, after his friend, mild-mannered Dave Kovic (Kevin Kline), has assumed the reigns of the American Presidency if only because he is a dead ringer for incapacitated President Bill Mitchell (Kline, also), summons him to the White House, he can do a little Federal Government accounting. In entering the Oval Office, Grodin plays the moment kind of physically off balance, as if he’s walking through a funhouse, as if he might fall down at any minute or suddenly be transported back to the proper dimension.

“Murray, I can’t tell you the whole story,” Dave explains, “it’s kind of a National Emergency kind of thing.”

“You gotta help me cut the budget a little.”

Initially, Grodin has Murray say nothing, just responding with this, an incredible stupefied stone face.

Finally, he speaks, his head never shifting, not one inch, his lips moving only so slightly. “You gotta cut the budget?” he does not so much ask as repeat, as if it’s a punchline, a bad one, and he’s waiting for Dave’s laughter.

And his lips settle into this, this smirk. He has just gone ahead and decided that it must be a punchline.

But it isn’t. Dave says: “About six-hundred and fifty-million dollars.”

And Grodin...well, Grodin doesn’t change a thing from the previous shot. It probably still is the previous shot. Why would he need to change? This is better than an official White House portrait.

Someone like You (a non-review)

Unbelievably I had never seen the 2001 rom com “Someone like You”, which did not presage Adele’s immortal pop gut punch a decade later and which was released in the UK under the title “Animal Attraction” because American marketers are more into bland b.s. monikers that only emerge after suffering through a dozen focus groups which pretty much describes how American rom com filmmakers tend to operate these days too. Less isn’t more, nothing is something. Come to think of it, “unbelievably” is perhaps not the word I was looking for there, though it is still something of a, shall we say, minor surprise that “Someone like You” remained unseen by me all these years. That it’s a minor surprise is not only because it stars Ashley Judd (see: this blog’s banner) but also Marisa Tomei, who should be in everything. As I said to My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife as we fired up the film holding down the 85th spot in the 2001 Box Office sweepstakes during our 2020 Spring Self-Isolated Rom Com Fest and I saw these names drift across my screen, “Did I cast this movie?”

No. I did not cast this movie. Because even if I would have cast Ashley and Marisa, not to mention Ellen Barkin as a talk show host, I might have foregone casting Greg Kinnear as Ash’s good-for-nothing ex. Too obvious. Hugh Jackman is better as Ash’s emergent paramour but, well, is it obvious I’m stalling? I don’t really want to critique “Someone like You”. There is so little to critique. Like a Dial-a-Meal in The Jetsons, just take your single food pill and move on, “Someone like You” felt like Dial-a-Movie, like a transitory cinematic breeze that passed unnoticed in front of my face despite improbably running 97 minutes, every move it makes not so much predictable, which can still be rendered with some flourish, as mechanical. I hardly remember anything. All I really remember is thinking how on Earth could anyone waste the talents of Ashley Judd and Marisa Tomei that badly? What were you doing?

These two should have been...

...more like these two.

Listen, Hollywood, I am not kidding around here. Never waste the considerable skill of these two women again.

In Memoriam: Jerry Stiller

Jerry Stiller, after serving in WWII and studying speech and drama at Syracuse University on the GI Bill, commenced his long, successful run in the entertainment business as one half of a comedy duo with his wife, Anne Meara, conveniently called Stiller and Meara. I can’t claim much knowledge of Stiller and Meara, aside from the 1999 indie film “A Fish in the Bathtub”, which I rented from Blockbuster and remember enjoying. But Stiller’s start nevertheless intrigues me because it created a perfect cosmic bookending to his career, beginning as one-half of a marital comedy duo and ending as essentially one-half of a marital comedy duo too.

That brings us to the NBC sitcom “Seinfeld” where, officially beginning in Season 5 of 1993, Stiller first appeared as Frank Costanza, father to George (Jason Alexander), husband to Estelle (Estelle Harris). (Technically the character of Frank had appeared in Season 4 for one episode, but was played by John Randolph, replaced by Stiller, the latter later re-filming that episode’s scenes for syndication.) As has been chronicled and proving how much of an individual stamp Stiller crucially put on the character, Frank Costanza was originally conceived as a docile character dominated by Estelle. But Stiller, after trying to follow the way it was written for several days of rehearsal, could take it no more. And when Estelle Costanza yelled again, Stiller improvised and had Frank Costanza yell back. That was all she wrote. Frank & Estelle became the noisiest house in Queens where, during those memorable mid-season episodes where George was forced to move back home, he was frequently positioned in frames between his father and mother, often looking skyward in futility, virtually swallowed up by the cacophony of their arguments.

Frank and Estelle’s relationship was not so much a give and take as just giving it to one another over and over, comedy routines comprised of berating one another, the tiniest detail igniting a shouting match, Stiller and Harris egging one another on with increasingly vociferous line readings. There was a reason, after all, that Frank and Estelle briefly separated. My favorite Frank & Estelle scene, alas, is nowhere to be found on YouTube, culled from “The Andrea Doria”, in which George summons his folks to the coffee shop, wanting to discuss his childhood. Before they can get to that, though, Estelle, feeling a draft, asks if they can change tables, unleashing a typical back and forth

ESTELLE: “Frank, I’m cold!”
FRANK: “Order a hot dish.”
ESTELLE: “Why can’t we sit over there?”
FRANK: “That’s not a booth!”
ESTELLE: “Who says we have to sit in a booth?!”
FRANK: “I didn’t take the subway all the way to New York to sit at a table like that!”

When they finally get around to George’s childhood, the son, realizing his entire adolescence has been laid before him, begs off. The scene’s capper is given to Stiller, quizzically looking up, as if the previous sixty seconds have been forgotten, and asking “Where’s that breeze coming from?”, underlining the inherent pointlessness of every argument they ever had.

That line demonstrated Stiller’s equally deft command of the deadpan though, rest assured, Frank Costanza’s bluster was his most prominent trait. Seinfeld played coy with George’s heritage, whether he was Jewish or just half-Jewish, meaning it played coy with Frank’s heritage. But then, Festivus, Frank’s self-invented holiday rebuking the commercialization of Christmas, evinced a belief system deliberately apart from standard organized religion. Festivus, of course, included the traditional airing of grievances and that, I suppose, was Frank’s most fervent belief system – airing his grievances. Even his famous relaxation mantra of the last season – “Serenity now” – became, in Stiller’s hands, not a peaceful intonation but weary exasperation aimed squarely at Estelle.

I once read where Christopher Walken said the first thing he did with any screenplay was remove all the punctuation, allowing him to outfit each line with his unique cadence. I imagine Stiller doing the same thing with periods. “Would you believe when I was eighteen,” Frank asks George in “The Puffy Shirt”, “I had a silver dollar collection?” And though the line is a question, Stiller brilliantly adds an exclamation of his own accord, dialing up the verbal intensity so that as the sentence ends, the query improbably morphs into an emphatic statement. He did that over and over, episode after episode. When he’d clap his hands together and grimace he was, as longtime “Seinfeld” director Andy Ackerman has noted, trying to remember his lines, but it also embodied Stiller’s “halting way of speaking”, as one character on the show literally put it, and made Stiller sort of resemble a human geyser, rumbling, about to discharge another aggrieved bellow.

If Jerry’s dad, Morty (Barney Martin), began the show more in the realm of reality, a retiree who often came across exhausted by familial obligations, ready to just sit on the couch and relax, he gradually grew more eccentric and kooky, echoing the trajectory of the show itself, and not always for the better. Frank, on the other hand, came onto the show shouting and left it shouting, literally, hollering at Estelle as their son was hauled off to jail in the final episode, “We have to beat the traffic!” If the show’s mantra was No Hugging, No Learning, Stiller’s final scream was sort of a perfect epitaph.

 Stiller died on Monday. He was 92.

Extra Ordinary

In “Extra Ordinary”, Rose Dooley (Maeve Higgins) is an ex-paranormal investigator, akin to “Ghostbusters”, though when that inevitable reference is made, she says she doesn’t get it. This does not suggest the character’s pop culture obliviousness, however, so much as a movie that simply acknowledges its forebearer while maintaining a unique wavelength, one evoked in the title, a useful pun breaking up extraordinary to suggest a life of hyper-normality lived in the realm of the supernatural. Indeed, Rose’s late father, Vincent (Risteard Cooper), a ghostbuster himself of some renown, is heard to proclaim ghosts as “stuck people, lonely people.” Mike Ahern and Enda Loughman’s film might dabble in the occult but its tone skews sweet-natured, David Lowery’s “A Ghost Story” reimagined as a deadpan small-town Irish comedy. The ghosts here are less spooky than sorrowful, just looking for a friend to give them a wave, which Rose is happy to do, suggesting how, despite an effusive personality, she has essentially become a ghost in her life, though Ahern and Loughman’s script is smart enough not to have her say that out loud, allowing wide frames to illuminate isolation as much as lurking apparitions.

Ever since Vincent died in an exorcism gone wrong, Rose has shunned her self-described spectral “talents” by becoming a driver instructor. The occupation is not superfluous but a manifestation of Rose’s own loneliness, the need for conversation and companionship that she struggles to get from other people simply seeking help with ghosts. Single father Martin Martin (Barry Ward), meanwhile, his very name evincing a sense of extra ordinary, suffers not so much from loneliness as too much togetherness, his wife Bonnie deceased but still around, a shrewish specter still running her husband’s life from the in-between, demonstrated in how Ahern and Loughman wryly bend the ghostly cliché of a message in a mirror into Bonnie nagging her spouse by steam.

This scene is emblematic of “Extra Ordinary”, which is not a scary movie, per se, distinctly a comedy. When Bonnie takes possession of her husband’s body, it’s in service of a bizarrely comic love triangle while the villain, an American one hit wonder named Christian Winter who has holed up in an Irish castle for tax purposes, is played by Will Forte. And just as Martin Martin cannot find the wherewithal to ask for Rose’s help to be rid of his wife’s haunting presence, Christian Winter cannot summon the strength to write a new hit song on his own, turning instead to Satan, offering a virgin sacrifice in exchange for climbing the charts. His virgin of choice turns out to be Martin’s daughter, Sarah (Emma Coleman), forcing Martin to call on Rose to initiate a race against the clock to stop the sacrifice.

Despite that premise, Forte’s performance is the most heightened element of the film, utilizing his gift for pompous line readings to render him as both bigger than he really is in his own mind and just a little boy, whining whenever something does not go his way. Higgins, on other hand, is entirely low-key, finding the funny merely in how she says something. Her chemistry with Ward is less heated or even romantic than romantically tentative, though that’s not a problem considering the meddlesome politeness of their characters and the ending twist, one of several. That conclusion is a rush of information and the movie’s biggest leap into special effects, though it never goes off the rails, chiefly by maintaining an impressive commitment to deadpan. So deadpan, in fact, that it honors Peter Venkman, even if Rose has no idea who that it is.

keira knightley may have reached the end of her rope

Ray of Light

Topper Harley: “Interesting perfume.” 

Ramada Thompson: “It’s Vicks. I have a cold.”

This is probably not the funniest thing in “Hot Shots!”, the 1991 lampoon directed by Jim Abrahams, the ‘A’ of “Airplane!’s” Team ZAZ. It is probably not one of the 25 funniest things in “Hot Shots!” Maybe it’s the 48th funniest thing, or the 49th funniest? Maybe it’s not even in the Top 50? Who knows? Why am I trying to rank things? The point is, because “Hot Shots!” is so committed to making you laugh every second that sometimes jokes can run right over one another, leaving jokes to slip through the cracks, this one included. And so, on an awful day in an increasingly awful America, where it was becoming clear the Federal Government was abdicating its responsibilities and willing to write off thousands and thousands of American lives in the name of The Economy, our One True God, when My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I could simply take no more bad news and found “Hot Shots!” showing on STARZ and I heard this joke, it was, reader, I swear, like I was hearing it for the first time.

I laughed, immediately. But my laugh also kind of carried on, not like a Mariah Carey hitting a high note but in the manner of Mariah Carey hitting a high note, continuing on past when you would have thought it might end, because I was simultaneously processing the inherent comedy of the line and how I had not remembered the line. “That’s funny,” I literally said aloud. “Yeah,” My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife confirmed with impressive incredulity.

Team ZAZ’s “Airplane!”, according to Helen O’Hara’s “Best Movies of the 80s”, had 2.6 jokes per minute, making it 223 jokes in 84 minutes. I could not track down the laughs per minute of “Hot Shots!”, alas, but rest assured, there are enough that 29 years later I was able to discover, on the day I needed it most, another one. Glory hallelujah.

What Books [Movies] Would I Display on My Shelf?

During the Pandemic, My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I have taken to watching PBS NewsHour most evenings at 6 PM CST. The voice of Judy Woodruff is the closest analogue to the late Peter Jennings, famously of ABC World News Tonight, in his calming but inquisitive air always the #1 evening news anchor of my heart. When I watch PBS NewsHour, I feel among adults, which is more than I can say for most TV broadcasts these days. When COVID-19 forced Judy from the studio to her home for filming, she set up shop, like most in these times of home offices have, in front of a bookshelf where, for the first couple of weeks, looming conspicuously right behind her was Ron Chernow’s recent Grant biography, as if nudge-nudge-wink-winking at us to remember a Chief Executive who really did hold the nation together through perilous times.

Indeed, as Katy Young wrote at The Guardian, the Pandemic has given us the opportunity to judge “famous people by their bookshelves.” Kate Middleton, for instance, had a bookshelf highlighting the canonical classics because of course she does. She’s the Duchess of Cambridge, son. Yamiche Alcindor, PBS NewsHour’s righteous White House Correspondent, has frequently positioned Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me” in a prominent place on her bookshelf, ensuring people see it, like her home is an independent bookstore and she’s offering a staff recommendation. During YouTube’s Stephen Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration, the legend Patti LuPone placed D.J. Taylor’s “Orwell” biography in a prominent place on the bookshelf behind her, flying her anti-totalitarian flag, just as Cate Blanchett, as reported by Gal Beckerman for The New York Times, shouted out“ Postcapitalism” in her Late Show With Stephen Colbert appearance. Desmond Howard, the ESPN college football analyst, went a step further during the NFL draft, but by utilizing records rather than books. Every time the camera cut to him at home, the 1991 Heisman Trophy winner had a different piece of vinyl propped up behind him, visually shouting out everyone from John Coltrane to Stevie Wonder.

If I was called upon for a televised segment to discuss, gees, I don’t know, the best Keira Knightley GIFs to use on social media during the Pandemic, I would probably ensure that my copy of James Harvey’s “Watching Them Be” or Jeanine Basinger’s “The Star Machine” were in prominent positions on my bookshelf to tout the Movie Star. Or maybe I would ensure that David Thomson’s, uh, unauthorized pseudo-biography of Nicole Kidman was conspicuously in view just to fuck with everyone. (If I was somehow a political correspondent I would, of course, have Unger’s “Lafayette” in bookshelf pole position.) The more I thought about that, though, the more I thought that, no, I would not want books on display, I would want movies. To that point, on the Press Box podcast in late March about this very topic, co-host David Shoemaker said  “Instead of books, I would have a shelf of VHS tapes…the worst ones I could find”, citing those infamous white, vinyl, giant Disney cases and the “Porky’s” and “Meatballs” oeuvre and a tape dedicated to Marv Albert’s sports bloopers. That sounded right to me.

Part of me would like to impress upon people my good – nay, eccentric – taste. I could put “Mistress America” next to “Mission - Impossible: Fallout”, and put “Meet Me in St. Louis” next to “Miami Vice” (2006), and put “Captain Blood” next to “Cold Weather.” But the more I thought about it, the more I kept thinking about a 2003 Onion classic with the apt, comical headline “Harsh Light Of Morning Falls On One-Night Stand’s DVD Collection.”

MILWAUKEE, WI–The harsh light of morning fell on the terrible DVD collection of Marc Koenig Monday, when Traci Pearle discovered it upon waking up from their one-night stand.

"It was a wild night, and from what I can recall, I had a great time with Marc," said Pearle, 25. "But I wonder if I would've felt the same way had I known the guy is the proud owner of Rollerball."

A nearby DVD shelf revealed similarly banal choices, including Driven, Evolution, Swordfish, Tomcats, Point Break, Pushing Tin, Bedazzled, Flatliners, My Blue Heaven, and Proof Of Life.

While acknowledging that the majority of Koenig's movies were "not out-and-out horrible," Pearle wondered why anyone would own those particular titles.

"They're the sort of things you'd rent, not buy, if you watch them at all," Pearle said. "Out of the thousands of movies you could own, why would you spend your money on this stuff? Don't you buy a movie because you're somehow passionate about it and want to watch it again and again? Does this guy feel that way about Hard Rain?"

That’s ticket, yessirree. I would position myself in front of a shelf of DVD titles like “Cliffhanger” and “Striking Distance” and “Out for Justice” and “Goodbye Lover” and “Best Laid Plans” and “The Sum of All Fears” and “Volcano.” So that when I was explaining to Judy Woodruff that “Anna Karenina” Keira GIFs are the best option in times of crisis, everyone watching at home would be squinting at the screen and scratching their head and saying “Why the hell does this guy own ‘An Innocent Man’ starring Tom Selleck?”

Some Drivel On...You've Got Mail

“You’ve Got Mail” is a movie, as all movies are, of its moment, not a time capsule buried in the Hollywood vaults only meant to be unburied and screened 22 years later. Still, it’s a fascinating snapshot of an era when going online and being offline were distinctly separate, a dividing line heralded in that wistful AOL dial-up sound, as quaint to a 2020 viewer as, say, an MCI long distance calling plan. More than that, though, Nora Ephron’s turn of the century rom com remembers when a big discount bookstore like Barnes & Noble was the enemy, out to squash its independent brethren, and not itself an in-person outlier in danger of being squashed by online retailers. Willa Paskin noted this irony for her Slate podcast the Decoder Ring, noting “’You’ve Got Mail’ could not imagine a world in which all brick and mortar stores are under threat from the Internet except for maybe the ones that are as singular as The Shop Around the Corner.” Then again, Paskin also said “we can’t tell if we’re overreacting in the moment because we have no idea what is going to happen.” You’re telling me! Paskin released that podcast on, ahem, March 2, nine days before March 11. Paskin could not imagine a world where COVID-19 had forced us all indoors and threatened every single brick and mortar small business on the block. An early sequence in “You’ve Got Mail” in which the main characters played by Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks walk through upper west side New York , carried along by the sweeping majesty of The Cranberries’ “Dreams”, supplies myriad images of security gates being raised on neighborhood mom-and-pop stores, rendering them as the fabric of the community. Meg Ryan was beaming, but I wanted to cry.

But enough about that! We’re here to discuss “You’ve Got Mail” not as an artifact but a rom com, and a damn good one too, not just relatively speaking, reuniting the “Sleepless in Seattle” power couple by updating 1940’s “The Shop Around the Corner” for an AOL world. Rather than exchanging letters, Kathleen Kelly (Ryan) and Joe Fox (Hanks) exchange emails, never betraying their identities or revealing specifics. She runs a children’s bookstore, respectfully named The Shop Around the Corner, while he helms a chain of Barnes & Noble-ish monoliths, Fox Books, along with his chauvinist father (Dabney Coleman) and grandfather (John Randolph). This puts Kathleen and Joe at odds, of course, in the real world, once they meet, though these spaces they inhabit in their Earthbound reality gradually proves apart from their authentic selves, or the selves for which they unwittingly hunger. If their online correspondence comes with a stigma, both of them sneaking around behind their respective significant others’ (Greg Kinnear, Parker Posey) backs to go online as the movie opens, director Nora Ephron – who co-wrote the script with sister Delia  – ultimately see email as okay, an avenue to, quoting the late Dolores O’Riordan of The Cranberries in “Dreams”, “a different way to be.”

Just as ably, “You’ve Got Mail” demonstrates a different way for rom coms to be, or maybe just how they used to be. In a late scene, after Kathleen has been forced to close her store (spoiler alert!), the one her beloved mother opened so long ago, Ephron indulges in a moving flight of fancy, a manifestation of a dream, as Kathleen watches a vision of her younger self dancing across the bookstore with her mother. I sometimes felt the same way watching the expert rom com construction, wishing, hoping we could have Nora Ephron, who died in 2012, back, for just one more crack at this foundering genre. It’s odd, I kept thinking, how in a modern world where the Movie Star has all but been eradicated by devotion to the Concept and IP, filmmakers still tend to sculpt romantic comedies around two leads. What they forget, however, is not just the twinkly presence of pros like Ryan and Hanks but the satellites orbiting them, which is “You’ve Got Mail’s” true profundity, how every supporting character exists on her/his own terms even as she/he illuminates some aspect of Kathleen or Joe.

Though Kathleen does not possess the narcissism of her newspaper columnist boyfriend, Frank (Kinnear), nor even his extreme Luddite tendencies, played to much comic effect, she is nevertheless nostalgic, yearning for the world her mother grew up in and that The Shop Around the Corner represents. Joe’s significant other, meanwhile, Patricia (Posey), has a contemptuousness baked into her smile that mirrors Joe’s. At the same time, he is both son of his smug, sexist father but also, in what he astutely deems “a modern American family”, nephew to an 11-year old aunt, Annabelle, and half-brother to 4-year old Matthew, suggesting the sweet kid that lurks inside, glimpsed in a joyful Saturday afternoon outing that ends at The Shop Around the Corner where Hanks where Hanks lets pockets of sincerity shine through his hardened businessman exterior. Both of these attitudes are wresting for control and Hanks dexterously lets us see them in equal measure, not exactly likable in his in-person scenes with Ryan even as, over email, not just in what’s written but in the inflections of his voiceover, he suggests a better man struggling to burst forth.

It’s what makes the master narrative stroke work so well, in which Joe realizes Kathleen is his pen pal before she does. In consulting with her about this mystery email writer, then, he is not really manipulating her but trying to will his better self into being, which is not so easy, while simultaneously Kathleen is struggling to leave her old self, represented by The Shop Around the Corner, behind. That last one, as Paskin noted on her podcast, is tough, a lot tougher than you typically find in a rom com. Indeed, Fox Books receives no comeuppance, Kathleen’s store is not saved and when she tells him at at movie’s end “I wanted it to be you”, it sounds less certain than hopeful.

The Whistlers

There is a moment in “The Whistlers” when a dirty Romanian cop, Cristi (Vlad Ivanov), and some gangsters have occupied a warehouse on La Gomera in the Canary Islands. There is an unexpected knock at the door. They answer, finding an American film director, explaining he is scouting locations, wondering if he can examine the warehouse interior. If this might suggest the moment when “The Whistlers” transforms into a movie within a movie, the truth is, it is already a movie, in a manner of speaking, portraying the Romanian surveillance system not simply as the state monitoring its citizens but as a kind of omnipresent movie camera itself, evoking life as reality TV where you are always ‘on’. Look at how director Corneliu Porumboiu frames the gangsters when the American director appears, in a wide shot and spread out, the blank backdrop rendering them as actors in some sort of storefront theater. Not for nothing is one of the few places the characters can communicate without a watchful eye the movie theater, a perversion of the old Godard line about cinema being truth twenty-four times per second.

The title refers to a whistled register of Spanish called El Silbo, used by some inhabitants of La Gomera to communicate across great distances. In this case, the gangsters will teach Cristi to whistle El Silbo to evade the never-ending surveillance to aid their efforts to spring a pal, Zsolt, from the clink. This is such a neat idea that it’s disappointing Porumboiu does not explore it further, less interested in the mechanics of El Silbo and Cristi learning them then as a kind of metaphor for the movie’s inspection of linguistics. (It might be a Romanian movie centered on a Spanish language but much of the dialogue is English.) A hotel called the Opera factors into the plot, yes, eventually, though the hotel clerk, not to mention Porumboiu, mostly get a rise out of forcing arias upon visitors and the audience; vibrato is a language too. A sex scene, meanwhile, between Cristi and Gilda (Catrinel Menghia), his gangland go-between, becomes its own weird means of risqué communique, like “Citizenfour” crossed with “Last Tango in Paris”, happening only to throw off the police state watching outside his apartment and in. When Cristi gets a little too rambunctious, Gilda pushes him back down, an ersatz impassioned now now.

Whether we are meant to laugh at this scene is hard to know, epitomizing “The Whistlers’” drollness. When Poromboiu cuts to the surveillance agent watching Cristi and Gilda get physical, there is pointedly no reaction, comical, titillated or otherwise. It’s only when the movie cuts to the next scene, Cristi in the Canary Islands, that we realize her act of nominal passion was paramount in getting him there. That is when I chortled, the moment evoking the old Bob Newhart idea about a joke you laugh at in the car on the way home, an apt description of “The Whistlers” itself, a movie to be worked out in the car ride on the way home. In fact, the movie does not build to anything, despite teasing out a possible romance between our two bed play actors, so much as stretch everything out, suddenly stopping in the middle of itself over and over again to throw up an intertitle with a character’s name and then either flash back or flash forward, expanding the puzzle in the midst of putting it together rather than adding pieces to it and getting closer to completion.

If the Romanian New Wave, of which Porumboiu is part, has generally eschewed music to heighten the verité, Porumboiu has occasionally employed music, albeit in very specific, interesting ways. His “Police Adjective”, to which “The Whistlers” is very much a companion piece, involved a conversation about song lyrics that essentially defined the movie’s relationship to the nature of bureaucratic language. “The Whistlers”, on the other hand, opens with an extended passage in a car roaring along scenic Canary Island roads as Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger” blares. It feels more like Tarantino, frankly, a moment with no need to justify itself beyond its manifest coolness. Indeed, the la la las of the song have always sounded to me like that kind of indispensable pop music poetry, inherently without meaning, more about eliciting a striking sensation, which may as well define “The Whistlers” itself.

Ray of Light