Friday's Old Fashioned: Visions of Eight (1973)

Seen through the rearview mirror, Olympic Games tend to be distilled down to one athlete or event. The Montreal Games of 1976 shrink to just Nadia Comăneci’s perfect 10; the Berlin Games of 1936 are remembered solely through the prism of Jesse Owens sticking it to der Führer. The 1972 Munich Olympics, meanwhile, despite featuring Mark Spitz’s 7 Gold Medals, the controversial U.S./U.S.S.R. basketball game and Prefontaine’s epic 5,000 defeat to Finland’s Lasse Virén is known for the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes. How on earth could it be known for anything else? What else matters in comparison? Nothing, of course, but the Olympics went on, as they should have, since they were, in the vociferous words of Prefontaine, per teammate Kenny Moore’s telling, “our games!” They were. And so even as the official 1972 Olympics documentary, “Visions of Eight” (1973), solemnly acknowledges the massacre, it begins from the beginning, showing athletes of all colors and countries and creeds gathering, immediately establishing that these are their games. 

The film opens with a statement literally splayed across the screen: “Sunflowers are familiar to millions, yet no one ever saw them the way Vincent Van Gogh did. So with the Olympics.” That is why rather than following the XX Olympiad from a single director’s perspective, “Visions of Eight” employs an octet of auteurs from different countries, each seeing a chosen event from a unique angle. Arthur Penn recounts the Men’s Pole Vault competition, not succinctly or even clearly, quite frankly, but lyrically, segueing to it sans music, sans crowd noise, just the vaulters and their air space. And if TV telecasts unfairly reduce this event’s majesty by recounting it from one camera angle over and over, Penn prefers oblique angles rendering the vaulters as truly flying or truly falling. For the Men’s 100-meter final, Kon Ichikawa employs 34 cameras and 20,000 feet of film to capture an astonishing array of slow-motion shots transforming the human condition into one of pure physical agony. 

These films, like the others, jettison backstory and even, mostly, national identity, evoking the stated ideal of the Olympics being contests between individuals and teams, not countries. If that, as an avowed believer in the abolition of medal counts, pleases me, it can sometimes cause the documentary to suffer, such as in Michael Pfleghar’s passage, The Women. His intention might be noble, to honor what was, at the time, the most women competitors in the history of the games, but minus context it can veer too far into Male Gaze territory. The passage, though, in which he shows the entirety of Soviet gymnast Ludmilla Tourischeva’s uneven bars routine works. With no commentary, with no score in the corner of the screen, we are simply left to revel in the artistry.

Claude LeLouch, who made “13 Days in France” about the 1968 Grenoble Winter Olympics, my favorite Olympics doc, finds melancholy poetry in the losers. The chapter begins with a boxer who will not leave the ring after being beaten, at once ridiculous and poignant; Citius Altius Querulous. And the chapter closes with an injured wrestler who futilely goes on, nobly helped off the mat by his vanquisher. Best, though, is in-between, a montage of javelin throwers not living up to their competitive expectations. LeLouch never shows the outcome of these throws, keeping his camera fixed to the face, where the truth lies, a sort of remix of the sports blooper as comically moving poetry. (See below.)

That kind of unexpected comicality is also present in Milos Forman’s piece on the Decathlon. If that ten-part track and field event colloquially crowns the World’s Greatest Athlete, Forman imagines it as something else entirely, a stumble to exhaustion, for competitors and the judges alike, one of whom is shown falling asleep deep into the 2-day affair. And by scoring it to Bavarian music while occasionally cutting away to German beer halls, it suggests “Beerfest” (2006) by light of the Olympic flame. John Schlesinger’s ode to the marathon, seen through the eyes of the British runner Ron Hill, is not quite as humorous though still a more unconventional approach, focusing on fatigued and injured athletes and and rendering the medical vans and sweep buses and looming helicopters as much the point as the race, an entire carnival less about winning than survival.

“Visions of Eight” ends with Hill at home, sitting on his stoop and lacing his shoes, about to go for a run. It flashed me back to the second chapter, The Strongest, focused on weightlifting, of which the director, Mai Zetterling, confesses in voiceover she knows next to nothing. Indeed, her passage is the most artfully rendered, inserting computerized readouts of the lifters weight and height right before sudden, jarring images of slabs of beef being prepared, visually evoking the lifters’ fuel. And rather than obsessing over how much they lift, Zetterling is more taken with how they lift it, lingering over mid-lift facial expressions and accompanying screams, the pre-lift routines, including one competitor who prowls the floor, psyching himself up, before just erupting into his lift. 

This distinct approach ends with the competition literally ending, the lifting platform being torn down and put away. Just like that, the games are over.

In Memoriam: Olivia de Havilland

Where does one begin with Olivia de Havilland? Do you begin by saying she was the last star of Old Hollywood, one so consequential and monumental that even the most jaded modern film critics who spent time in her presence came away in awe? Or do you begin by saying that she, Old Hollywood’s last star, was also directly responsible for bringing about the end of Old Hollywood’s Star System and ushering in a new era of freedom for her acting brethren? Or do you begin with the famous feud between her and her sister, Joan Fontaine, for reasons they both took to the grave, and how the final scoreboard now reads: Olivia – 104, Two Oscars Joan – 96, One Oscar? No, I want to begin with “Captain Blood” (1935) and “Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938). I don’t remember watching either of these movies for the first time; I just remember that growing up in a house with a classic movie buff for a mom, these two movies always seemed to be playing in the background, on Betamax, as much the soundtrack of my youth as “Thriller.” They are essential parts of my moviegoing DNA, establishing a preference for fanciful and festive, not authentic and factual. De Havilland made these sheer entertainments with Errol Flynn, and though she was so much more than one-half of an onscreen couple, their chemistry was nevertheless unsurpassed by anyone in movie history, save for Bogey & Bacall. Of course, unlike Bogey & Bacall, who came across in sync the moment they locked eyes, Olivia & Errol were required by screenplay machinations to start at odds and then come around. Once they did, look out; it was manifestly the look of love. The conclusion of “Captain Blood” is such pure silver screen joy it will stretch your smile to burst. They do not make ’em like that anymore; they barely made ’em like this to begin with.

No one has seen it all, but de Havilland came as close as anybody. She died on Saturday, four months into the COVID Pandemic, 104 years after she was born in Tokyo the day the Battle of Somme began, July 1, 1916, two years before the Spanish Influenza. Soon after, she came to California with her mother and sister and was given the second understudy role of Hermia by Austrian director Max Reinhardt for his 1934 production of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” In a twist of fate that seems scripted but happened for real, the lead and the first understudy dropped out, ushering in Olivia’s liftoff. She excelled. And when Warner Bros. insisted Reinhardt use their contract players for his ensuing cinematic production of the same play, Reinhardt balked, bringing de Havilland onboard anyway. As such, she received her first notice in Variety, short but prescient: “Olivia de Havilland, as Hermia, is a fine artist here.”

Not long after, she signed a contract with Warner Bros. But because the contract locked her into an operation favoring expediency and economy born of tried and true production and story templates, she was featured in dreck and dishwater as often as the likes of “Captain Blood” and “Adventures of Robin Hood.” And though the latter were, truly, “the best of their kind” as de Havilland noted to the British Film Institute, per Farran Nehme’s essential de Havilland essay, “(t)he movies did not revolve around her character. She played these women with spirit,” Nehme notes, “but they were not complex, dynamic or conflicted.” To get those sorts of roles she had to be loaned out by Warner Bros., to David O. Selznick for “Gone With the Wind” (1939), where she pointedly wanted to play Melanie in an industry teeming with would-be Scarletts, as if more interested in humanizing the movie’s moral center, and to Paramount for “Hold Back the Dawn” (1941) where she skillfully evinces the transformation from shy schoolteacher to falling under love’s precarious spell, foreshadowing her mid-career turn to performances where she truly lived whole lives.

That turn would make some doing. When her contract with Warner Bros. was up, she realized it wasn’t up at all. Having grown chagrined with her lack of challenging roles, de Havilland frequently refused to show up for work, causing studio chief Jack Warner to suspend her without pay…and tack additional time onto her existing contract, prolonging her servitude. Rather than remain stuck, she took him to court, seeking to release herself from “bondage”, in the word of Bette Davis who had a similar if unsuccessful fight with Warners in the 30s. Olivia did win, of course, in a landmark ruling emblazoned into the culture as The de Havilland Law, a victory for labor everywhere and the first genuine, significant blow landed against the theretofore indestructible Studio System that would soon topple. Every Hollywood actor working with who they want, when they want, owes de Havilland a debt of gratitude.

Finally, after two years of not working as the lawsuit dragged on, she came roaring back, seeming to make up for lost time by playing two parts in “The Dark Mirror” (1946) as twin sisters, doing extensive research for “The Snake Pit” (1948) as an apparent schizophrenic and in her first Oscar-winning role, “To Each His Own” (1946), as if repudiating years of typecasting, demonstrating impressive range by playing a mother searching for her daughter across decades, evincing young, old and in-between. And then there was “The Heiress” (1949). My god, was anyone ever better than Olivia de Havilland in “The Heiress”? Based on the Henry James novel “Washington Square”, she won her second Oscar for playing Catherine Sloper, the eponymous beneficiary who in being manipulated by both her suitor (Montgomery Clift) and her father (Ralph Richardson) lays bare the human condition. She begins the movie innocent and awkward, underlined in her timid posture, almost apologetic, like she’s sorry for taking up space, before de Havilland virtually hardens before our eyes, absorbing life’s cruelest blows and coming out on the other side.

Who knows what else she could have done? She was offered the role of Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951) but said nah. Indeed, if she fought Hollywood on her own terms, she left it on her own terms too, moving to Paris with her second husband in the mid-50s. She never really stopped acting, but in her own way, for all intents and purposes, she retired from the Hollywood lifestyle. She stayed in Paris for the remainder of her life, six decades or so, reinforcing my unproven theory that the best means to longevity is decidedly not treating time like money.

Olivia de Havilland, as so many film lovers and scholars noted over the weekend, was the last living link to Hollywood’s Golden Age, the only remaining observer of what film critic David Thomson has deemed The Whole Equation. That’s what makes her loss not simply sad but profound. Like losing the final eyewitness to some crucial historical event, we are all now twice removed from the industry’s headwaters, with nothing left but the accounts and the legends, which she surely was.

Olivia de Havilland: RIP

Olivia de Havilland, icon, was born in Tokyo in 1916 to British parents, came to California not long after, moved to Paris in the mid-50s and stayed there, but became an American citizen in 1941 and remained one. She died 25 July at the age of 104. Today the blog flies its flag at half-mast in her honor.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Tokyo Olympiad (1965)

Though Kon Ichikawa’s documentary chronicling the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics begins with an image of a bright sun in the morning sky, evoking his nation’s flag, ultimately it steers away from overt nationalism. This angered the Japanese Government and Olympic Committee so much they forced a a re-edited 93-minute version that, by all accounts, pales mightily compared to the film’s true 169-minute run time. That is not to suggest “Tokyo Olympiad” masquerades as if the Olympic Games are host-less; we see plenty of Japanese athletes in action. But it does not linger much on Tokyo itself and in the documentary’s opening minutes the narrator literally cites every single host city prior to the Japanese capital, as if they are all one and the same. And though the image of a wrecking ball bashing a building to bits in a muted grey seems to convey the Games’ propensity for ardent displacement as it does Japan’s post-WWII rebirth, in transitioning to the Opening Ceremonies and athletic points beyond, Ichikawa nevertheless ultimately goes all-in on the ostensible Olympic spirit.

Granted, Olympic Spirit is a term too evocative of the similarly jejune Magic of the Movies; accepting something nebulous at face value rather than seeking to explain or understand it. And though “Tokyo Olympiad” narrator occasionally comes across a little NBC-y in citing an athletes success as a demonstration of the Olympic Spirit, Ichikawa is determined not simply to cite that Spirit but to show it. He utilized over 100 cameras and 250 lenses, including breathless widescreen Techniscope, an image of the torch relay set against the backdrop of Mount Fuji transforming Japan’s highest peak into a Pacific Rim Mount Olympus. But the sheer number of cameras also provides a window into the kind of Olympics a normal telecast does not. If the aid stations are typically blurs during the Marathon, a place where we see the leaders quickly grab a drink or a sponge and then hurry on, Ichikawa evinces a day in the life of an aid station by planting a camera there. Runners do not just come and go; they stop and take a breather; it’s like an aid station as a cafe. And when “Tokyo Olympiad” checks out the shooting range, Ichikawa is as interested in how the competitors pack a lunch given the length of events as he is in the guns and the targets. I’m still thinking about the shot of an Olympian at the Olympics during his Olympic event just sitting there eating a freaking sandwich.

That sort of unexpected humanity is everywhere in “Tokyo Olympiad.” It is the sort of humanity, as many critics have noted over the years, not present in Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympia”, generally considered the model of Olympic documentaries in emphasizing poetic impressions of individuals over an expository narrative of events. Whether Riefenstahl's film was intended as Nazi propaganda can be debated but it’s clear why Nazi propaganda is what it became. In playing up individuals, Riefenstahl also played up their beauty, their strength, downplaying their humanity, turning them into unspeaking cogs in a churning athletic machine, evoking the idea of future Eastern Bloc gymnasts as robots within a system. Ichikawa, though, might linger over these athletes in slow motion and even manage to transform a stultifying-sounding event like sailing into pure thrill simply in how he recounts it with close-ups, but he sees so much deeper than that.

For races at the track, he likes his cameras not just up closed but often positions them in the infield, right in the middle of the race, rendering the races as spontaneous bursts of emotion rather than predetermined. When Ann Packer wins the 800m, it feels like a genuine surprise and in cutting next to her medal ceremony, it feels less about the flag being raised than Packer’s elated, overwhelmed reaction. For the shot put, the result is less crucial than the art of the actual throw as we several competitors in succession and their various unorthodox methods for getting ready to and then throwing, like the same scene in different light, a la Monet’s stacks of wheat, rendering each shot-putter as his/her own person. A thrillingly filmed judo final, meanwhile, lingers as much on the men’s faces in various forms of concentration and agony. And in the concluding marathon race, for several minutes Ichikawa’s camera tracks alongside eventual winner Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia, not from a distance but up close and personal, a pure evocation of the loneliness of the long distance runner, laying bare exultation, exhaustion and concentration at once.

As he runs, the camera briefly switches to a shot behind Bikila, seeing the Olympic flame burning inside the stadium’s cauldron up ahead. It is fuzzy and abstract, however, not brilliant and illuminating, as if such symbols hardly compare to this running human. Indeed, if Riefenstahl rendered Olympians in the image of Greek Gods then Ichikawa renders them as mortal. When a Japanese swimmer loses her race, Ichikawa does not cut away to the winner but keeps his camera fixed on the loser as she pushes away from the wall and floats toward one of the lane lines, leaning on it and looking off into the void, a human being living out her Olympic experience in real time.

Train of Thought (Ray of Light)

I swear, reader, this all happened in my mind last Saturday night around 5 PM (CDT) in the span of, like, 57 seconds just the way I am about to present it.

On Saturday, the New Beverly Cinema in L.A. tweeted that “Aliens” opened on this day in 1986 with the accompanying promotional photo.

Having just watched “The Old Guard” on Netflix, I wondered if it had a promotional photo too. I was surprised to find that it did, even though it can’t quite compete with the epic air of “Aliens.” Then again, having bandana-ed Jenette Goldstein and Paul Reiser in your promotional photo is kind of a promotional photo cheat code.

Neither of them, though, I decided, have the je ne sais quoi of the original “Alien” promotional photo which is just a promotional photo masterpiece. Everyone is doing something different, everyone is in a different frame of mind for this obligatory salesmanship.

That reminded me of this “Attack of the Clones” promotional photo which is just something else. McGregor, bless his heart, is committed to the bit. Portman doesn’t know what the hell she’s supposed to be doing and doesn’t care that she doesn’t know. Christensen is, like, using his lightsaber as a back scratcher.

Any “Star Wars” promo photo makes me think of this one, obviously, because it looks like the cover of Luke & Leia’s lost 70s FM Laurel Canyon record.

Which always makes me think about how this promotional photo doesn’t look like any album cover. It looks like Tom Cruise is seriously uncomfortable, like he’s thrown his hips back because the photographer told him to and not because he’s devoted to the idea.

Tom Cruise only looks slightly more comfortable here in the ultimate “Top Gun” promo photo but, whatever, who cares, because my God, man, Kelly McGillis is pure fucking 80s! She’s leaning on the wing of that plane like it’s her locker and she’s the coolest damn girl in school.

You know who is even cooler? These two. You will never be this cool Gen Z. NEVER!

And that, of course, as always, brings me here, to what I always tell people is my favorite movie promotional photo of all time even though...

...secretly this is my favorite movie promotional photo of all time. THE PASSION WILL FLOW LIKE LAVA.

Talladega Nights Explains America

The Talladega Superspeedway is uniquely American. Dreamt up by Bill France Sr., founder of NASCAR, for no other reason, really, than wanting to erect a motorsports track bigger and better than his own Daytona International Speedway, it illustrates our nation’s obsession with size just as the legend that Talladega was built on an Indian burial ground underlines the draconian steps our nation took to exploit our nation’s literal size. It only makes sense, then, that Adam McKay and Will Ferrell’s 2006 comedy “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” exists as one of the most enlightening movies ever made about modern America.

It begins with a bout of myth-making, its future NASCAR star, Ferrell’s Ricky Bobby, born in the backseat of his good-for-nothing father’s (Gary Cole) car and eventually graduating to star race car driver, learning all the wrong lessons along the way, tuning out his mother and taking the words of his good-for-nothing father to heart, coming to believe heartily in his own myth. “I wake up in the morning and piss excellence!” he hollers at his Father-in-law (Ted Manson), presumably of the greatest generation but told his only societal contribution was making a hot daughter, before leading his family in a grace that contractually mandates his mentioning PowerAde, a comical collision of Christianity and Consumerism.

Ricky Bobby, of course, must go on his own version of the hero’s journey, receiving the call after winning another race, in a scene at a bar called the Pit Stop. The scene begins with Ricky and his buddies, including Cal Naughton Jr. (John C. Reilly), Ricky’s put upon best friend, just sort of joshing, a scene that feels improvised which makes it ironic when it was interrupted by the sounds of Charlie Parker, the improvisation master himself, coming from the jukebox.



Jazz has been called the Devil’s Music, typically by whites communicating in code, and that’s how Ricky Bobby and friends react, like they’re trying to shake the devil out. The song has been played by Ricky’s emergent nemesis, the French Formula One driver Jean Girard (Sacha Baron Cohen), who asks why the jazz music has been stopped when someone pulls the jukebox plug. Demonstrating the thinly veiled meaning of Devil’s Music, the gruff bartender declares: “We keep it on there for profiling purposes. We’ve also got The Pet Shop Boys and Seal.”

Striding across the room, cigarette in hand, Jean Girard is like a French New Wave character striding straight into a broad American sports comedy, his stylish black suit juxtaposed against the extras behind whose shirts and hats are specifically color-coordinated to evince, of course, red, white and blue. Girard is here not just to challenge Ricky on the track but to question America itself, which Ricky unintentionally instigates when he misunderstands oui as we.

Ricky: “We? No, we are not French. We’re American, because you’re in America, okay? Greatest country on the planet.”
Girard: “Well, what have you given the world apart from George Bush, Cheerios, and the ThighMaster.”
Ricky: “Chinese food.”
Girard: “That’s from China.”
Ricky: “Pizza.”
Girard: “ltaly.”
Cal: “Chimichanga.”
Girard: “Mexico.”

In this moment, Jean Girard is quite literally the Other, everything the kind of American Ricky Bobby represents has been made (told) to fear, a foreigner whose accent sounds like “peanut butter on the roof of (his) mouth” and an intellectual unmasking, point by point, their sense of American Exceptionalism as being the work of someone from somewhere else. So naturally, with his insecurity already activated, when Girard expresses his sole reason for coming to America as defeating Ricky Bobby on the track, Ricky lashes out, attacking this Frenchman, the soundtrack evoking a showdown in a Western, as if John Wayne is going after Alain Delon. Girard, however, proving he is faster, pins Ricky to a table, threatening to break his arm...unless the NASCAR driver issues one simple declaration: I like crepes.

This was 2006, remember. Only three years after France declined America’s invitation to the so-called Coalition of the Willing to invade Iraq, prompting geniuses of the American Government to declare French Fries as Freedom Fries and French Toast as Freedom Toast, that Patriotically Correct form of American Patriotism cheapening our nation’s ideals rather than honoring them. “Don’t you say it, ”Cal councils. “These colors don’t run.” “I’m not gonna say it,” Ricky confirms. As Ricky half-lies there, held down, however, a funny thing happens: he learns the true nature of the crepe.

Cal: “You know, just to put this in there, I had a whole mess of crepes this morning. They’re just like pancakes, maybe even better.”
Ricky: “Wait, are they the really thin pancakes?”
Girard: “Yes they are. They are the really thin pancakes. It’s just a French word for them.”
Ricky: “Oh, my god, I love those.”

That leads to an extended conversation on kinds of crepes — fromage-crepe, crepe suzette — and the tone of not just these three men but everyone in the room palpably changes. They are getting along! No one insists they get along, mind you, it just happens of its own accord, as if suggesting this how it could always be if we just let our preconceived notions fall away. But, of course, Ricky can’t do that. And when Girard offers a compromise, to say I love really thin pancakes instead of I love crepes, Ricky refuses to say it. Why? “Because you don’t understand freedom,” Ricky explains. “Because you don’t understand liberty.”

It’s strange days in America...but then again, maybe they are not so strange at all. As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, even after four months of evidence and research strongly suggesting that wearing a mask in public can greatly help tamp down the spread of this strain of Coronavirus, a certain sect of Americans refuse to cover their face. Why? Individual liberty, or something like it, is typically the reason given, a la Ricky Bobby, because this is America and we have the freedom to do anything we want. Of course, as smarter minds than me have eternally argued, liberty without responsibility is meaningless, and responsibility is tied to rationality. Each of us has the responsibility to be rational in the face of a health crisis like this to help preserve the health of the country that provides space for our liberty in the first place.

The scene in “Talladega Nights” ends with Ricky refusing to say I love really thin pancakes and Jean Girard breaking his arm. “He actually did it!” Ricky screams as he winces in pain. Rationality calls his bluff.

Dark Waters

“Dark Waters” is director Todd Haynes changing the key of 1970s paranoia thrillers. It’s as conspiracy-minded, yes, but in the aftermath of Watergate those conspiracies tied directly back to The Government. In “Dark Waters”, the black helicopter briefly glimpsed in the sky represents not The Government but Big Business, demonstrating how the former now bows to the latter. Companies, after all, like DuPont, will lie right to your face, make your life better even as they are making your life worse, daring you to look beneath the waters, literally and figuratively, to see how they are poisoning you even as they put food on your table. Robert Bilot (Mark Ruffalo), corporate defense attorney, he looks.

“Dark Waters” opens in Parkersburg, West Virginia as three drunk teenagers climb a fence at the DuPont Chemicals Company and go swimming. The scene is conspicuously set in 1975, the same year “Jaws” was released, and the scene is not so much an homage to Steven Spielberg’s iconic opening as an apocalyptic remixing, the lurking monster not a shark nor some prehistoric creature but the water itself, a contaminated landfill. Flash forward twenty years and a Parkersburg farmer, Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp), bum rushes the office of Rob, who has just been made partner, a true to life detail that nevertheless spotlights how effortlessly the screenplay of Matthew Michael Carnahan and Mario Correa ramps up tension at every turn, committing to classic reversals of fortune to maintain drama every step of the way. Wilbur knows Rob’s grandmother and though the latter, as he explains in a compassionate tone of voice rather than outraged, defends chemical companies, the anecdotal evidence feels as overwhelming as the actual evidence will prove to be.

At first, Rob just sort of nudges DuPont in the ribs, conveyed in Ruffalo’s almost apologetic demeanor as he consults with one of their execs, Phillip Donnelly (Victor Garber). Eventually, though, Rob comes face to face with the truth, a harrowing scene in which he gazes out at Wilbur’s pasture cum graveyard, the vertical lines of the frame seeming to cast Bilot on the opposing side of the truth. And though the chilly hues of this scene epitomize the outdoor scenes, both rural and urban, with indoor scenes warmer in their lighting, gradually the interiors take on the same sort of icy blue, mirroring Rob’s journey of discovery. That journey is laid out in an indelible montage where Rob explains the sordid history of Teflon for his wife, Sarah (Anne Hathaway), recited not in a courtroom but in his kitchen, said not triumphantly but bleakly, the camera closing in on the characters as they stand motionless around the kitchen table, the center of the home, quietly evoking how that poison has seeped into the life of every American family.

This montage demonstrates Haynes’s propensity for employing and subverting the sort of devices typical to similar legal dramas. By my count, there is only one A Ha! Moment, in which some everyday item (in this case, a children’s book), helps crack a case within a case, the screenplay otherwise allowing the facts to credibly lead the way. Most impressively, “Dark Waters” manages to subvert the Supportive Spouse archetype, a rare feat. Granted, the script does not lend much shading to Sarah’s own life but it simultaneously conveys her own lack of dimension is because his life is tethered to his, not simply his rock but in this with him. Indeed, when the real-world implications become clear, Sarah encourages Rob to keep going. And in a late scene, when overwork leads Rob to the hospital, she calls his boss Tom Terp (Tim Robbins) on the carpet, seen in a long shot of the hospital corridor where, for a second, you think he will exit the scene only to have her pull him right back in. What’s more, Terp, in just a handful of scenes, is convincingly drawn, attuned as much to principles, and the firm’s lack of them, as to the bottom line.

As Rob, Ruffalo is perfectly cast, not for his real-life environmental activism but because of how ably he embodies in his very physicality the idea of an immovable object. It is not simply how he is frequently placed alone in long shots, either at conference tables in the office or at the kitchen table at home, but how his hunched posture seems to embody the very essence of carrying such a massive burden. There are plenty of facts to be uncovered, certainly, but “Dark Waters” evinces not so much an untangling of a conspiratorial web, a la Woodward and Bernstein, as a stubborn perseverance to wait Big Business and its minions out.

Da 5 Bloods

In “BlacKkKlansman”, director Spike Lee made a movie about a true story from the past that was communicating with the present, foreshadowing our current crippling racial polarization. In “Da 5 Bloods”, on the other hand, telling the story of five American Black Vietnam veterans, one of whom died during the war, by jumping back and forth between the late 60s and right now, the past and the present are having a conversation. If Lee changes the aspect ratio between eras, that is more to signify the switches, because “Da 5 Bloods” blurs the lines between eras, living out the idea of the past not being dead. Rather than cast younger actors for the flashback scenes, or even opt for digital de-aging effects, Lee simply has his four older actors work right alongside the younger Chadwick Boseman. The effect is brilliant, conveying how the remaining 4 bloods were both made by their Vietnam service and how hardened they have become in the intervening years when seen standing next to the young, idealistic Boseman, a radical frozen in time.

The movie opens in the ebullient vein of a hangout movie as the remaining Bloods — Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) — meet up in Ho Chi Minh City and boogie their way through a nightclub conspicuously called the Apocalypse Now (this is a real place). As young Vietnamese cheer the men on and slap their backs, all the famous portent of Coppola’s film just seems to drain away in real time, hinting at a kind of peace. When Da Bloods are a bought of round of drinks, however, by a couple aged ex-Viet Cong and raise their glasses to the end of The American War, all the jovial air in the movie vanishes, just for a moment. And if this sequence epitomizes “Da 5 Bloods’” tendency to render its Vietnamese characters as mere bystanders, it all also efficiently illustrates how for these Black American men, the war remains an open wound.

Nominally Da Bloods have come to find the body of Boseman’s Stormin Norman in the jungle and provide a proper burial; really, they are here to honor something like Stormin Norman’s dying wish. In flashbacks we see Da Bloods unearth a cache of gold bars, intended as payment from the United States to the South Vietnamese. Stormin Norman, however, argues, in commanding rhetorical flourish by Boseman, to keep these gold bars, not as payment for themselves but as reparations. And so, Da Bloods’ present-day journey upriver is not into a heart of darkness but toward something like the light, glimpsed in a flashback where the camera looks up at Stormin Norman, the sun falling on him through the trees, casting him in the image of a martyred saint.

This scene is also evocative of Lee’s penchant for just letting his characters talk. Film might be visual medium, but Lee has never been shy about opening the floor up to debate. He has also never been shy about just sort of stopping a movie in its tracks o tell you what he wants to tell you. And if “Da 5 Bloods” opens with an electrifying visual essay, cutting between images of Vietnam and the American Civil Rights moments, convincingly arguing that for Black Americans the real war was back home, it continues raiding the archives throughout. When Otis cites Milton Olive III, Lee proudly puts the Medal of Honor winner’s visage on screen. Even a dramatic moment deep in the jungle finds time for a moving, wonderful, Only-In-A-Spike-Lee-Joint Edwin Moses reference. The French characters who join Da Bloods midway through their mission are not much more than emblems, though Lee deems their representation as atonement for French Colonialist sins too crucial to cut. And though the daughter Otis did not know he had with his long-ago Vietnamese girlfriend gets next to no screen time, that lack of presence proves deliberate, a moving means to bring home the movie’s ultimate argument.

Paul is not history; he is living and breathing and breathing fire. Though he is riddled with PTSD, brought to life in Lindo’s bulging eyes and rapid edits that do not take your breath away but make it feel as if you truly can’t breathe, Lindo is not playing the part as someone who went to Vietnam and never came but came back from Vietnam to find nothing for him at all. It makes sense, then, that he would be a Trump supporter, all his rage and resentment at being left behind taking root in that red cap on his head. In going back to Vietnam, he is not seeking to expunge what he felt but looking to get his, to take what he’s owed. That, however, puts him at odds with the expressed original intent of Stormin Norman which Paul’s son David (Jonathan Majors) is on hand to represent, tagging along as the new 5th Blood, pointedly written as a Professor of Black Studies at Morehouse, as if he, not his pops, has carried on Norm’s legacy. And if Paul descends into madness, he descends so far that in some strange way he loops back around and meets at the truth, breaking the fourth wall, looking right at us, talking straight to us, not appealing but telling, ensuring this forgotten man will be remembered.

 
Lindo’s denouement evokes “Da 5 Bloods’” turn toward “Treasure of Sierra Madre” with all sorts of hands wanting a piece of the gold bars the men lug out of the jungle. And if Lee has been tweaking war movies, cuing up “Ride of the Valkyries” during Da Bloods’ tourist boat ride, the more it transforms into one, leading to a standoff between Americans, French and Vietnamese. This arc reminded me less of any war movie, really, than “Unforgiven” in which a movie picking apart myths yields to them. And though “Da 5 Bloods” cannot quite square with the idea of taking gold intended for the South Vietnamese, there is still considerable power to the conclusion and the honoring of Stormin Norman’s wishes, linking Otis’s finally meeting his daughter with MLK’s closing words about letting America be great again. The latter can only happen when we finally, fully face our history.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Roman Holiday (1953)

Though William Wyler’s “Roman Holiday” (1953) sets the stage with a newsreel account of Ann (Audrey Hepburn), crown princess of an unnamed European nation, traveling across the continent, it begins for real at a ball in her honor in Rome where she is made to stand in a receiving line and greet a parade of guests. A modern film likely would have sped up the editing here, showing even more people, perhaps, but not imbuing a similar sense of weariness. In hearing the name of each guest, and in seeing over Ann’s shoulder how the receiving line stretches into forever, the monotony of the ritual sinks in. And as the scene drags on, Ann loses a shoe, glimpsed in insert shots beneath her massive ball gown, as she struggles with one foot to find and retrieve it while still saying hello. It’s a nifty metaphor for the arduous delicate balancing act she performs, in this moment and throughout life, and speaks to how Wyler denotes a lifetime of feeling into just a few images. 

The screenwriting economy is also evident in the introduction of Ann’s emergent love interest, American newspaperman Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck), playing poker with a few friends, foreshadowing his penchant for turning all life into a gamble. Upon leaving, he encounters Ann, having escape her embassy in the middle of a night, sleeping on a bench. Though she has been knocked out from a delayed sedative taken a few hours earlier, he assumes she’s drunk and ferries her to his home. Another movie might have delayed the reveal of her true identity longer, but “Roman Holiday” allows Joe to realize it the morning after, deciding to give a scoop to the American News Service about the runaway Princess, employing a cameraman to follow them around as they take a variation on a holiday.

If he makes a bet with his boss that he’s got the story of a lifetime, the introductory poker playing also informs Peck’s performance, a virtual poker face in his intentions, never quite letting you know if he’s really into her, merely using her, or a little of both. And that plays perfectly off Hepburn, famously in her star-making role, who is not evincing an innocence so much as a kind of ebullience. It’s funny, I re-watched “Roman Holiday” a month or so after re-watching “Eat Pray Love” and though the latter espouses the sweet art of doing nothing, the movie is so damn busy it never really lets Julia Roberts embody it. Hepburn, on the other hand, is brilliantly given all the room in the world to embody it and she does, physically evincing how all the rigid tension of that opening scene falls away. In one moment, at an outdoor café, slouching in her seat, it’s as if she has spiritually become one with the setting.

That’s vital. Wyler and his cinematographer have incredible grasp of space in “Roman Holiday” and how Hepburn fits in. This shot at the café, in fact, goes hand in hand with an earlier shot, in her bedroom at the mansion, in bed, being doted on, and the headboard is so huge it virtually dwarfs her, denoting the very idea of Ann being overwhelmed by her role in the world. And later, when she’s out walking the streets of Rome, the camera hangs back and just sort of lets her vanish into the crowd, evoking this escaped Princess as now being, well, if not of the people, at least among them.

As Ann and Joe’s day continues and the more fond they grow of each other, the less he wants to write his story and the more she comes to realize she will, eventually, have to go back. It’s a deft trick Hepburn pulls, self-discovery and bittersweet acceptance, embodied in her final scene, back at the embassy, neatly bringing the story full circle, meeting the people of Rome one more time, including the press, her own clever, covert way of saying goodbye to Joe. And as he waits for her in the final shot, I thought less of any fairytale than of “The Third Man” and Holly (Joseph Cotten) waiting in vain for Anna (Alida Valli) just as Joe waits in vain for Ann.

Ray of Light

Audrey Hepburn...in “Charade”...in black...in a Parisian cafe...

…that’s all…

…keep calm and carry on.

Some Drivel On...Sleepless in Seattle

Perhaps ‘daring’ is not the right word to describe Nora Ephron’s 1993 rom com “Sleepless in Seattle” but, I dunno man, where modern Hollywood studios are concerned, when you’ve got two big stars like Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, just standing right there on your poster, making a movie with the intention of keeping them apart for two hours, that’s a little daring, pushing back against formula. What’s more, if you are Hanks, you are relying on Ryan to properly do her job in the other scenes and vice-versa. If he/she isn’t, you might be getting hung out to dry, people asking “I get this, but not this.” It’s like they are Jaeger pilots in “Pacific Rim” but if Jaeger pilots were in different Jaegers. It takes a lot of belief in your co-star, which is what “Sleepless in Seattle” comes back to, a certain amount of belief, in what you believe you deserve and how it could happen. But who knows, maybe Hanks and Ryan were told, make this one apart and you’ll make one together in five years.

That movie five years later was “You’ve Got Mail”, of course, about the mysticism of dial-up Internet dating. If that felt fanciful for the time, though, “Sleepless In Seattle” is like two whole castles in the air, one on each opposing coast, in Baltimore and, as the title implies, the Puget Sound metropolis. Ephron’s variation of a fairytale begins when eight year old Jonah Baldwin (Ross Malinger), despondent about his dad, Sam (Hanks), who is despondent about his deceased wife, the reason father & son came to Seattle in the first place, phones a romantic radio show hosted by Dr. Marsha (Caroline Aaron) and puts his dad on the phone. Though Aaron is never seen, she does excellent voice work, mixing helpful and haughty. As good as Aaron is in this moment, though, Hanks is even better in coming across both put upon but willing to go along, suspect of his sudden guidance counselor but sincere in what she helps him access. It’s quite a feat, illustrating the delicacy of his overall performance, not simply a rom com leading man waiting around all movie to fall in love but a widowed father who is trying to both maintain and move on.

As good as Hanks is, however, Ryan might be even better, or at least just as good, in a trickier role as Annie, the woman on the opposite coast who hears Sam on the radio. This scene takes place in her car on a long drive home and as he listens and Sam keeps opening up, the camera keeps cutting closer and closer to Annie until, in a glittering close-up of her big watery eyes, for a second, truly, seems to fall under the spell of romance. Indeed, she uses her position as a journalist to try and find out about Sam even as she, like so many others, sends Sam a letter which Jonah, working as self-appointed screener along with his pal Jessica (Gaby Hoffmann, manifestly hilarious), likes the most. Even so, Annie is engaged to Walter (Bill Pullman), which is where Ryan truly shines. If it’s not enough that she is emotionally cheating on her future spouse with someone that she has never met, Walter, while written as something of a stiff, his prominent allergies fashioned into a recurring joke, is nevertheless a good, if boring, guy. Ryan, though, imbues her part with a kind of I-Don’t-Know-What-I’m-Doing bungee jumping glow, embodying the idea of, quote-unquote, Following Your Heart, for better or worse, rather than settling, deftly maintaining our sympathy. And when Annie and Walter finally break up, Pullman improbably owns the moment, as a gallant a gentleman as, I don’t know, real-life Tom Hanks. You want them both to have a happy ending.

In most movies, Walter is just an impediment to what we’re all waiting for but the plays a bigger role here, a window into the real world, despite his comical eccentricities, that Annie is leaving behind. Admittedly Ephron leans a little too heavily into the Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus trope with Annie and her friends being devotees of Leo McCarey’s 1957 “An Affair to Remember” while the same movie just makes Sam and all the dudes roll their eyes. Still, the recurring presence of this movie within “Sleepless in Seattle” is not just a recurring joke but the whole point, the latter ending in the same place as the former – atop the Empire State Building. Ephron uses McCarey’s film to poke holes in Annie’s romantic inflations, her best friend (Rosie O’Donnell) astutely observing “You don’t want to be in love, you want to be in love in a movie.” True. But rather than dissect rom coms within its “An Affair to Remember”-ish structure, “Sleepless in Seattle” gives itself over to the fantasy, evoked in how Annie and Sam upon finally meeting (spoiler), don’t even speak, they just look at one other, dumbfounded and starry-eyed, and then walk off screen together into their rom com Camelot.

Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga

The annual Eurovision song contest is not so much internationally lauded as laughed at, in a good way, adored for its extravagance and insanity, an American Idol on the Moon, or something. Up to a point, new Netflix comedy “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga” honors this spirit of excess, not merely in its theatrical song performances but in Anna B. Sheppard’s crack “Hunger Games” chic costume design, never mind Pierce Brosnan’s impressing revolving wardrobe of woolly ugly Christmas sweaters. This enormous aesthetic, however, belies a story in which childhood friends and adult bandmates Lars Erickssong (Will Ferrell) and Sigrit Ericksdóttir (Rachel McAdams) fail upwards to Eurovision that comes across strangely conventional, closer to a semi-earnest Will Ferrell sports comedy than an exaggerated Nordic musical myth as that title, “Fire Saga”, suggests. Even a subplot involving Elves is rendered cute rather than off the wall while the emergent Central Bank of Iceland villain ends up feeling out of place amidst such innocence. As the movie ends, the closing credits pair each actor’s name with the flag of his/her nation, a tip of the cap to Eurovision bringing together fifty-two countries. “Eurovision”, though, ultimately feels American, perhaps explaining why Lars, a generally decent person, still spends most of the movie haranguing American tourists; guilt.

As the movie opens, young Lars is moved to dance when ABBA appears on that year’s Eurovision, though this is less triumphant than tragic, only causing Lars’s disapproving dad (Brosnan) and his beer-drinking friends to laugh, rendering Lars’s trajectory as I’ll-Show-You rather than Yes-I-Can. That fear of being laughed at, however, pertains not just to Lars but to his pops, too, which is why he semi-shuns his son, a subplot resigning Brosnan to just being unpleasant; Hannes Óli Ágústsson as a bellicose local has more to do. The public-service broadcasting organization, RÚV, meanwhile, responsible for choosing Iceland’s contestant for Eurovision, believes a promising singer (Demi Lovato) can win until fate intervenes, forcing the small nation to send Fire Saga instead, not so much hoping for the best as fearing the worst.

Fire Saga is a joke, in other words, given that their Eurovision appearance is not really merit-based, hardly up to the level of the Russian Alexander Lemtov (Dan Stevens) who in his comical swaggering self-aggrandizement seems in every scene to have just emerged from the Winter Palace. Initially, Alexander, along with the Greek representative Mita (Melissanthi Mahut), seem like villains, luring Sigrit and Lars to a party and then separating them. True to the film’s earnest spirit, however, Alexander eventually proves a comrade, with Stevens evincing credible if comical candor despite being attired in flowing jackets with no undershirt. He is what comes between Lars and Sigrit, or at least between Sigrit’s unreciprocated affection for Lars. There is a running joke about them being mistaken for brother and sister, tying, I think, to everyone in Iceland essentially being related, but really just emblematic of how little romantic exists between the characters in the first place. Even if Lars is purposely written to resist the attraction, the performance of Ferrell, remixing his “Blades of Glory” character Chazz Michael Michaels as Craig, the Spartan Cheerleader, is entirely sexless. Director David Dobkin is asking us to simply take their would-be love at face value; I believed more readily in the Elves.

“Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga” does, at least, put in the work where their stage shows are concerned. Absurdly elaborate, involving harnesses and hamster cages, these are as much action/suspense set pieces as song performances, seeing whether or not the characters will pull it off. That feels true to the spirit of Eurovision, though, I must admit, through this reviewer’s ears, the curtain-raising “Volcano Man” was the band’s strongest number, bridging the gap between Reykjavik club and Monty Python the way “Let's Duet” bridged the gap between Robert’s Western World and “Weird Al.” The climactic ballad, on the other hand, summarizes not just Sigrit’s arc but the movie’s own tendency to play it safe.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Monterey Pop (1968)

D.A. Pennebaker’s concert film of the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, opens not with, I don’t know, “The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)” but Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)”, a staple of oldies stations that quite famously John Phillips of The Mamas and Papas wrote to settle the nerves of people who did not want Monterey to host all these damn hippies in the first place. As the song plays, “Monterey Pop” just sort of people watches, cutting between an assortment of bohemian revelers. During the Summer of Love, of which Monterey Pop was part and parcel, tourists flocked to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood to see the hippies up close, sometimes even taking bus tours, like these nonconformists were rare specimens in the San Francisco Zoo. And so it’s easy to wonder if that’s how these members of the counterculture who attended the fest felt about Pennebaker’s cameras, rendering us, the viewer, similar to the Haight tourists, voyeurs through the camera lens.

Still, if “Monterey Pop” might be a wax museum with a pulse, the music is undeniable. It is now universally accepted that despite its place in lore, Woodstock, two years later, was about something else entirely than the music while the music made Monterey. Pennebaker’s document bears this out. Occasionally his cameras are at the front of the stage, like capturing The Who in all their instrument smashing glory, as well as Jefferson Airplane, to record the moment when Grace Slick, biding her time downstage, suddenly slides into the DMs, so to speak, of all the others. Mostly, though, his camera remains off to the side, watching from the wings, letting us see these bright stars of the universe up close. Pennebaker furthers this intimate sensation by mostly forgoing wide crowd shots, preferring to cut between close-ups of the performers and close-ups of individual audience members, like a young woman bathed in red watching as Jimi Hendrix lights his guitar on fire as if the flames have put a spell on her.

Monterey famously helped push Otis Redding to stardom and in the denouement of his stunning rendition of “I’ve Been Loving You (for Too Long)”, we see him behind as his head bobs up and down, the spotlight in front practically blinding us each time does, improbably rendering him as he was — a star shooting across the sky. And then there is Janis Joplin whom Monterey helped make too. She was fronting Big Brother and the Holding Company, a bluesy outfit, whom we see noodling for a brief moment before Janis, foreshadowing the band’s turn, takes over, the editing creating a rhythmic sway by cutting between close-ups of her at the microphone and full shots from the rear where she kicks her legs. And rather than exploding at the conclusion, like a balloon popping, she almost seems to float away in the manner of a balloon instead, bouncing to the back of the stage, high on what she knows she just did. You know in the most recent “A Star is Born” when Jackson Maine cedes the stage to Ally and she shines so bright? That’s this moment for real. It’s astonishing.

It was also her second performance of the festival with Big Brother and the Holding Company. They had performed previously during the festival, though the set went unrecorded, causing them to play a couple songs on a different night for the benefit of the cameras, inadvertently going against the counterculture’s anti-consumerism stance to sell yourself, the very one The Grateful Dead honored by refusing to perform for the cameras. If these dueling ideas suggest the eventual decline of the hippie movement, Pennebaker nevertheless gives it a rousing moment in the sun. Because if “Monterey Pop” seems on the verge of ending with images of festival-goers packing up and moving out, Pennebaker returns to the stage for a set by Indian musician Ravi Shankar. He cuts back and forth between the sitar and drums, the tight close-ups of their frenetic playing echoing earlier close-ups of Keith Moon’s wildly eccentric drumming for The Who, cosmically linking two disparate styles. And rather than exit early from Shankar’s performance, Pennebaker lets it go on and on, effectively drawing us in, expanding our consciousness.

Ray of Light

Earlier this year on This Had Oscar Buzz, a podcast all about movies that “once upon a time had lofty Academy Award aspirations but for some reason or another it all went wrong”, co-hosts Joe Reid and Chris Feil covered 2000’s “Finding Forrester.” I totally saw that movie but completely forgot everything about it, save for Sean Connery barking “You’re the man now, dawg!” at Rob Brown. Uncomfortable racial connotations, considering it’s an old white man hollering the line at a young black man, aside, it was the kind of trailer line, as Reid noted, that had the movie been released in 2020, would have been memed into the ground, a la “A Star is Born.” Indeed, it’s the sort of movie trailer line destined to imprint itself in your brain, whether you like it or not, like Harrison Ford growling “I already work around the clock!” in that movie that no one remembers but which got memed so hard so fast a new trailer was immediately constructed with that line conspicuously disappeared.



Turns out, I don’t just miss going to the movies in these strange, awful days. I miss going to the movies to see movie trailers too, experiencing that moment when a line from one jumps out and, like it or not, jams itself into my head. I was so taken with Rachel Weisz declaring in purposeful monotone “I don’t want a scandal, I’m just doing my job” in the trailer for “The Whistleblower” (2011) that for a site that no longer exists I wrote an entire article speculating what other actors could have said this line and how it would have sounded. During the glorious summer of 1997, when I worked as a concessionist at the Cobblestone 9 Theater, the best job I’ll ever have, we were all obsessed with the “Air Force One” trailer and its quotes sustained us through the Friday and Saturday evening rushes. The soda dispenser machine breaks with a line fifteen-people deep? You’d say “How the hell did this happen?! How the hell did they get Air Force One?!” It’s so busy you don’t have enough people to cover both the theater-clean up crew and the concession stand? “There are no airborne scenarios!” A co-worker questions how well you cleaned the popcorn kettle? “Do you know who I am? I’m the President of the United States.” *Heavy sigh.* Those were the days.



But if there is any trailer I am prone to think of, not just from 1997 but in general, it’s one featuring Sean Connery’s “Rising Sun” co-star, Wesley Snipes. Remember “Murder at 1600”? It’s likely you don’t. The same year that gave us the infamous double disaster movie face off between “Volcano” (winner!) and “Dante’s Peak” also gave us the infamous double White House Murder Story face off between “Absolute Power” and “Murder at 1600” (winner!). The latter did not win just because of its trailer but that trailer certainly helped. Following a proper Don LaFontaine preamble, Snipes enters the frame with an era-appropriate mobile phone, into which he says, and I’m not making this up, “There’s been a murder at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. An address that changes all the rules.” I saw this trailer before some movie for some employee-only sneak preview and, man, let me tell you, the placed roared like Ben Stiller got the beans above the frank.

We didn’t have memes in those days, those long ago days during the second Clinton Administration, but we didn’t need them. If it was a long day, if you needed a little jolt, a little ray of light, you might say, you’d just wait for whatever movie with a “Murder at 1600” trailer attached to start and then sneak off to watch it for the 47th time.

Forgotten Great Moments in Movie History

When I revisited “The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991)”, I was surprised to recall how the plot of such a ludicrous movie turned on something as relevant as clean energy. In this case, the chief villains represented atomic, coal and oil energy, all determined to stop renewable energy before it can get started. That’s not me Reading Too Much Into It; that’s right there on the surface; that’s right there in the text. In one of the multitudinous hilarious moments, the movie’s John Sununu introduces a few energy suppliers at a White House dinner, like Terrence Baggett, “head of the Society of Petroleum Industry Leaders, better known as SPIL.”

That the series’ chief character, Lt. Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) of Police Squad, was a buffoon did not really have anything to do with his being a cop. He had to be a buffoon because that’s what made the jokes work. Still, dig just a little deeper and you find some comically serious shots across the bow, a movie that in its way takes a stronger stand for police reform than ostensible dramas, darkly lampooning rather than just mindlessly lionizing. At that same White House Dinner, in fact, Lt. Drebin is honored by the Washington D.C. Police Commissioner (Jacqueline Brooks) for his 1,000th drug dealer killed. “In all honesty,” he says, “the last two I backed over with my car. Luckily, they turned out to be drug dealers.” It echoes a moment from the first movie in the series, from 1988, when Drebin is briefly relieved of his position. “Just think,” Drebin says in a sorely disappointed tone, “next time I shoot someone, I could be arrested.”

I thought of Frank Drebin the other day when video of Moundsville, West Virginia (population: 9, 318) rolled out a $1m armored tank. After all, when Police Squad and an accompanying SWAT team has surrounded the house where Hector Savage (Anthony James) is making his last stand, Frank climbs into a SWAT tank. “You can’t drive that!” Captain Ed Hocken (George Kennedy) implores. “You’re not checked out on it!” Frank drives it anyway, plowing through the house and then the back wall and, eventually the zoo, freeing the animals who wreak havoc on Washington D.C., making a mess of everything. “Do you realize,” the Police Commissioner asks Frank later that night, “that because of you this city is overrun by baboons?” “Isn’t that the fault of the voters?” Frank asks.

Eh, sometimes.

Lenny Cooke

The 2013 documentary “Lenny Cooke” takes its name from the athletic phenom who in 2001 was the highest rated high school basketball player in the country, ahead of such future luminaries as Carmelo Anthony and, yes, even LeBron James. That’s why a filmmaker, Adam Shopkorn, followed Cooke around in 2001 with a camera, subsequently losing touch with his subject right around the time, it would seem, when Cooke’s bright prospects took a hit. A decade later, however, Shopkorn got in touch with the Safdie Brothers, Benny and Josh, basketball fans as their recent “Uncut Gems” goes to show, about helping finish the film. The Safdies poured through the footage, tracked Cooke down and captured the ex-ballplayer a decade out from his ostensible glory days. If that suggests a disconnected documentary, “Lenny Cooke” entirely hangs together, even when stock footage of the 2002 NBA Draft where Cooke is not picked betrays that he has gone MIA and crude analog video of the doc’s first half gives way to a more professional looking back half. If anything, this denotes the two distinct acts in Cooke’s still-young life, underlining all the ways in which he has changed and those in which he has not seemed to change much at all. This is made explicit in the transition from youthful, baby-faced Lenny to the filled-out adult version, cruelly conveying what it means to get old in an instant, like the daguerreotype in “A Quiet Passion.” “Lenny Cooke”, it turns out, isn’t so much about Lenny Cooke as it is about a conversation between two Lenny Cookes.

The Brothers Safdie admirably eschew many of the traditional sports documentary trappings, mostly forgoing talking head interviews to almost entirely construct “Lenny Cooke” through archival footage, rendering less an overview of the person than a dramatic film with Lenny as the main character. Whole scenes play out at length and backstory is intrinsic, like Lenny waiting in a bus station with his kid which is the moment we realize he has a kid, letting the audience wrap its head around this revelation in real time, providing a crucial sense of intimacy, like we are in on Lenny’s story rather than having it relayed to us through a hazy or gauzy filter. Occasionally, Lenny talks to the camera but these moments never come across like interviews, more like monologues, not rehearsed but unfiltered, sometimes so much that you swear you even catch him in the moment, by a look on his face, not exactly buying what he’s selling.

The basketball footage is mostly limited to summer camps, those untoward congregations of players, coaches, agents, hangers-on, etc. In workouts, Lenny’s indifferent work ethic readily manifests itself, not just in being late and not-so-sneakily opting out of mandatory push-ups but his mischievous smile, where he just looks like a kid who thinks he knows best. The centerpiece, though, is a camp showdown with the future King, LeBron, like a ghost in “Lenny Cooke”, what we know he will turn into hovering. And LeBron gets the best of Lenny, winning their game on a last-second shot while his rival struggles, appearing, to untrained eyes, frequently a step slow, a sequence scored to Yusef Lateef’s 1969 Like It Is, evoking the sorrowful sensation of something slipping away. And the track becomes Lenny’s leitmotif, returning in the Twenty-Tens footage where a bigger, slower Lenny balls out with his friends, the music evincing pain amid playfulness. And though in one soliloquy to the camera Lenny claims basketball was never his passion, in a late night scene, on his couch and getting a jump on a hangover with a snack, he watches LeBron highlights on TV, his melancholy laid bare in the look washing over his face.

This image of Lenny beneath the blankets, watching LeBron, demonstrates how Benny Safdie, who edited the movie, finds echoes between their footage and Shopkorn’s. This moment arrives at the end of Cooke’s 30th birthday party, a scene juxtaposed against his 20th birthday at a restaurant in Brooklyn where he declares that he will spurn college, sign with an agent and enter the NBA Draft where, alas, he is not selected. The latter is also where Shopkorn loses touch with Cooke, save for a brief curbside scene where Lenny consults with his agent, a guy who comes across more like a boiler-room stock salesman; you don’t have to see anything else to know his client is getting screwed.

There is a moment young Lenny listens to NBA coach Mike Fratello lecture on the financial rigors of adulthood. And if afterwards Lenny says the message made a mark, older Lenny essentially says it did not leave a mark at all. The moment looms even larger when we learn Lenny has become a motivational speaker, a living, breathing representation of Fratello’s warning. But then, the only person we see Cooke motivating is, through an impressive bout of special effects, his younger self, a stunning, sorrowful evocation of the age-old question If You Could Go Back In Time, What Would You Tell Yourself? It doesn’t really look like young Lenny is listening.

The Last Dance

The ten-part ESPN/Netflix co-production “The Last Dance” opens and closes with Michael Jordan, in some luxurious oceanfront property, smoking a cigar and staring out across the water. It is his world, in other words, both as a transcendent athlete and unprecedented celebrity. If, however, these images would seem to suggest the greatest basketball player of all time as content, they go hand in hand with another shot in Episode 8 where Jordan, after losing a playoff game to a trash-talking former teammate, sits in the locker room, looking less like a basketball player than a mob enforcer, smoking a cigar and wielding a baseball bat. He explains that anyone can talk trash when the game is over but real men talk trash when it’s 0-0. Perhaps, but what is “The Last Dance” if not Jordan talking trash, over and over and over, long after winning, ensuring he gets the last word over everyone? Indeed, throughout director Jason Hehir plays footage of other interviewees in the doc for Jordan on a laptop and then lets his subject literally get the last word, refraining from serious follow-up questions. That’s why it’s crucial to think of Hehir less as a director than an autobiographical ghost writer, not challenging or even really investigating Jordan but acting as a myth-cementing agent.

The documentary’s title is culled from Bulls coach Phil Jackson christening the team’s sixth title season, 1998, as The Last Dance in light of the curious, premeditated decision by the front office to essentially disband the incredible dynasty at year’s end, championship or not. This looming break-up informs the entire movie but is never exactly explained, then-owner Jerry Reinsdorf let off the hook in interviews, seemingly because Hehir – nay, Jordan – are intent to wholly lay blame on General Manager Jerry Krause. This portrayal is not entirely unfair, the doc credibly arguing that Krause wanted to remake the organization as a way to demonstrate his own genius in contrast to Jordan’s. But because Krause passed away in 2017, he is unable to speak for himself aside from isolated clips, mostly rendered as a short, paunch punching bag with innumerable scenes of MJ ridiculing his GM right to his face, an emphatic and emphatically un-empathetic portrayal of Krause as the black hat to Jordan’s white hat.

Part of the doc’s ostensible allure is behind-the-scenes footage, heretofore unseen, that was shot by a film crew throughout the 1998 season. It is often underwhelming, sometimes incisive, occasionally even poetic, in its own way, like an out of nowhere inadvertent black and white beer ad where prominent players imbibe post-game Miller Lites. Mostly, though, this footage just feels tacked on, never the point, and it is easy to imagine a more lyrical filmmaker, like Brett Morgen, chiseling an aesthetically fascinating documentary strictly from the archives. There is a shot of 1993 Jordan lazing on a hotel couch, hiding from the adoring, frenzied throngs outside that all on its own says more about the literally frightening scale of his popularity than anything anyone dutifully recites on camera.

No, “The Last Dance”, in taking us through all six championship seasons as well as the interval when Jordan retired to play baseball, prefers the typical ESPN house style of alternating between banal post game press conference-type insights and game action, the latter sometimes scored to SportsCenter anchor footage, literally rendering it as a glorified highlight reel, compelling in the manner of a history book providing the broadest overview of a pivotal era. If Hehir transcends this basic approach, it is in how he jumps around in time, admirably refusing to tell a linear story. (I’d like to know how many people who struggled with the time jumps in “Little Women” also struggled with these.) By doing so, he finds both historical rhymes, how emotional and physical burnout culminating In Jordan’s first retirement also culminates in his second, suggesting the price he pays for such hyper-focus and celebrity, as well as its echoes. No footage is as moving as the 1998 All Star Game where we see a young Kobe Bryant juxtaposed not only against an older Jordan but a retired Bird and Magic, rendering it less as a locker room than the Lodge.

There are even rhymes the movie does not quite see, like the Detroit Pistons’ Isiah Thomas’s shifting story on why his teamed walked off the floor without exchanging traditional post game handshakes in 1991, none of which Jordan buys, unintentionally paralleling Jordan’s own shifting story about his “Republicans buys sneakers too” quote, which he has said he never said but seems to indicate in “The Last Dance” that he did say…just as a joke. If these time jumps periodically allow for other players to take center stage, like MJ’s wingman Scottie Pippen and his 1998 contract dispute and legendary eccentric Dennis Rodman and his going on walkabout to Vegas with then-girlfriend Carmen Electra, each one of them nevertheless ends framed through Jordan’s eyes, diagnosing Scottie’s selfishness or being the hero in bringing Dennis back to be with the team. They are satellites in “The Last Dance”, orbiting around him. Even Steve Kerr, hero of Game 6 in the 1997 NBA Finals, who gets the best and most moving individual passage in Episode 9, puts a period on it with a self-deprecating story about #23.

[*Removes Critic Hat* *Puts On Dennis Rodman Spurs Jersey From High School* While the doc portrays the 1996 Finals turning on Seattle coach George Karl ostensibly slighting Jordan, that six-game series sealing the title for the legendary 72-win Bulls had as much to do with the play of Dennis Rodman. Read any contemporary account. *Takes Off Dennis Rodman Spurs Jersey From High School* *Puts Critic Hat Back On*]

That isn’t entirely wrong. As “The Last Dance” outlines, Jordan entered the league onto a Bulls team that was nothing and remade it in his image, imploring those around to keep up and get out. Still, despite overly focusing on him, this is not exactly a complex portrayal of Jordan the man, more content to skim the psychological surface and allow brief overviews of the more unsavory parts of his past to suffice. Talking head interviews not there to scrutinize, never mind dispute, but mostly just nod along with what we already know or what Jordan.

If “The Last Dance” marshals any argument about Jordan, other than He Sure Was Good At Basketball, it's that his pathological intensity directly contributed to his success. The story of Michael Jordan punching Steve Kerr in the face at practice, dutifully recounted here, is canon, but Hehir gives time to every grudge and every slight, real or imagined, and every on-court reprisal and in-practice dust-up. Scott Burrell, a hardly remembered member of the 1998 squad, becomes a major supporting player, a frequent target of MJ’s ire in NSFW language in an attempt to build his unheralded teammate into a more valuable one. It does not work, as Jordan acknowledges, and these bullying tactics are an interesting juxtaposition to Jordan citing his beloved father’s advice about turning a negative into a positive, an irony that goes unnoticed much like those unseen rhymes.

One of the frequent criticisms lobbed at “The Last Dance” involved Jordan’s editorial insight. It is valid and speaks to the documentary’s lack of psychological insight as well as the curious absence of his family, save for a few cursory moments near the end. But then, the lack of his family only underscores Jordan’s sense of self-sacrifice in the name of winning just as his editorial oversight underscores the dictatorial tendencies he also displayed to continually achieve victory. And that’s all “The Last Dance” goes to show, dusting off the old quote that Vince Lombardi may or may not have said about winning being the only thing. Hehir never asks Jordan if it was all worth it. Why would he? The documentary is confirmation that it was.