In Memoriam: Chadwick Boseman

Chadwick Boseman died on Friday August 28 at the age of 43. To us, the general public, this was shocking, sudden. To Boseman, though, one can only assume it was anything but. He was, as his Instagram page reported to the whole world on Friday night for the first time, diagnosed with Stage III colon cancer in 2016. Prior to 2020, it advanced to Stage IV. That he kept this private was, not just on a physical level but a practical one, nothing short of amazing, if not admirable. And that during treatment, including surgery and chemotherapy, he still made multiple movies is astounding. Given that he famously portrayed T’Challa, protector of the fictional African utopia Wakanda in 2018’s soaring success “Black Panther”, it might be tempting to deem Boseman a real life superhero. We like to think of us flawed humans in extraordinary terms. But I feel safe in saying that Boseman, dead from colon cancer at the age of 43, knew better than anyone how human he was.

Boseman had a working class upbringing and attended Howard University, hoping to become a film director, though one of his instructors, Phylicia Rashad, encouraged him to consider acting. As Mike Barnes and Aaron Couch of The Hollywood Reporter noted, she helped him raise money to attend the British American Drama Academy to study acting. “After he returned,” Barnes and Couch wrote, “he learned that it was Denzel Washington who had paid for his trip.” That is not to suggest Rashad and Washington ushered Boseman to stardom; Boseman worked at it, earning his way, toiling in TV and getting his break at the age of 36 by playing Jackie Robinson in “42.” But that story also positioned Boseman as something akin to the descendant of Black Acting Royalty.

“The crown didn’t weight on him.” That’s what Wesley Morris wrote of Boseman in regards to his turn as T’Challa but he may as well have been speaking of Boseman in general. “We should not confuse representation with political power,” Clint Smith wrote for the Paris Review regarding “Black Panther,” “nor should we discount it. I know that black people, black children in particular, from across the country, and the world, seeing themselves on-screen as characters who have never before been depicted in film will have an effect that cannot be quantified.” Boseman seemed to grasp this idea. (His last tweet, on August 11, which I suspect was very much a conscious choice, a way of positioning himself one last time in the world, was of him and Kamala Harris.) He played his role onscreen and played the role offscreen too.

Even upon being diagnosed with cancer, he picked up where he left off after playing Robinson and James Brown in “Get Up” (2015) by playing another great Black American, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Even in last year’s “21 Bridges”, nominally just a genre exercise, Boseman exuded consciousness of what it meant to be a Black cop. He seemed determined not to let Black people, Black children in particular down, to help them understand their (his) history, as Michele Norris summarized it for The Washington Post.

Boseman’s last role before his death was in Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods.” There he played Stormin Norman, mentor to his Vietnam War African-American compatriots, “our Malcolm and Martin” as Delroy Lindo’s Paul explained. It might have been Boseman’s deftest performance to date. Glimpsed only in flashback, Boseman evinced the sense of how large someone can come to loom with the passage of time, how someone’s presence through memory can become heightened.

In one shot, the light softly settling on him through the trees, you can virtually see the moment where a mere mortal is elevated to a higher plane.

Friday's Old Fashioned: 16 Days of Glory (1985)

The victory by American Edwin Moses in the 400 meter hurdles at the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics was not necessarily thrilling. He was in the midst of winning 122 races in a row and won easily. Director Bud Greenspan, then, does not focus on Moses so much in recounting this race for “16 Days of Glory”, his official L.A. Olympic documentary, as Moses’s then-wife, Myrella Bordt, sitting in the stands, all out of sorts, like a parent watching their child. She weeps with relief at the end while Edwin just smiles an easy grin, like the race was never really in doubt. We begin here because this episode exemplifies Greenspan’s ability to hone in and find drama even when, on the surface, there would seem to be none, focusing on the human interest of the story rather than merely the feat of strength. He’s like Roone Arledge in that way, the former ABC producer who essentially created the televised American Olympics as we know them, concentrating as much on prepackaged stories on the athletes as of athletic events. And so if other notable Olympic documentarians, like Claude LeLouch and Kon Ichikawa, employed the medium and their own specific aesthetic to visually and wordlessly capture the athlete’s humanity, Greenspan is more akin to a sports journalist, cutting back and forth between talking head interviews and the events, letting the athletes and narration tell us as much about what’s happening as the images.

“16 Days of Glory” opens, as these Olympics accounts tend to, with the opening ceremonies, conspicuously absent 14 Eastern Bloc allies led by the Soviet Union. Greenspan’s narrator, David Perry, does at least mention nonappearance of these nations even if he forgoes the exact reasons, the tit for tat boycott after the United States led a 65-nation cold shoulder at the preceding Summer Games held in Moscow. That sort of controversy and nationalism, Greenspan went on the record as saying, never interested him where the Olympics were concerned, even if they were an incontrovertible part. And so in his telling the parade of nations is a party the Soviets lamely chose not to attend. It left me wondering if an official Greenspan documentary about the 1980 all-Iron Curtain Summer Olympics might have yielded unintentional Soviet agitprop.

Though “16 Days of Glory” is not literally a comprehensive account of the 1984 Summer Games, gees, it sure feels like one given its colossal four hour and forty-four minute run time. Even stretched out over a couple days, as it was with this reviewer, and essentially broken down into individual chapters rather than functioning as one true unbroken piece, by the time Placido Domingo uncorks a solo at the end, it feels less like an epilogue than overkill. And Domingo feels less true to the spirit of Greenspan’s film anyway than the synthesizer strain of Lee Holdridge’s score suggesting Tangerine Dream reimagining the “Independence Day” theme, or something. That part of the score, in fact, contrasts not just with Perry but with the dazzling peristyle arches and columns of the L.A. Coliseum, making the athletes on the track and in the field, where the movie spends much of its time, look like dazzling competitors beamed back from the future, more cutting edge in their superlative competition than the dude with the jetpack during the Opening Ceremonies

If the constant presence of American athletes might have imbued “16 Days of Glory” with an overwhelming sense of American jingoism fashionable to the era, Greenspan mostly elides this potential problem through Perry’s dry, just-the-facts narration. It’s like if John Facenda, the original Voice of God, was reading a VCR instruction manual, like if NFL Films had been filtered through an episode of NOVA. Some of his lines might be rife with fanfare but he manages to filter most of the fanfare out. It has a strange effect, downplaying the myriad sob stories that Greenspan tells, yes, but simultaneously distancing us from these bursts of incomprehensible athletic brilliance. Not for nothing are the most indelible moments Greenspan lays out the story in visuals, like before Mary Lou Retton’s famous Gold Medal-sealing vault, a single cut to Retton’s foremost competitor, Romania’s Ecaterina Szabo, evoking how gymnastics reduces you to a spectator in your own event while Perry’s voice drops out entirely just before Retton’s final sprint down the vault runway and lets the athlete carry us away.

Ray of Light

With “Willow” (1988), George Lucas, who both conceived the story and produced, a la “Return of the Jedi”, copied his own “Star Wars” moves by concocting a pastiche of various movie and literature references, mimicking both the story of Moses from Bible and “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and filtering it through a sort of sword and sorcerer-ish “Lord of the Rings” adventure. The one thing it did not have much of, however, was romance.

There was a love story, yes, between the swordsman extraordinaire Madmartigan (Val Kilmer) and Sorsha (Joanne Whalley), who switches sides from evil to good, despite being the evil queen’s daughter, after some opposites attract business. This is a PG movie, though, mostly for kids and so even if Lucas could not help but cram in a few film critic potshots – villainous General, ahem, Kael and a two-headed monster named, cough, cough Eborsisk – that went over this ten year old’s head, he tamped down any sense of steam between Madmartigan and Sorsha. And that’s a shame. Because after reading the “Willow” chapter in Kilmer’s memoir “I’ll Be Your Huckleberry” (see: yesterday’s post), I did what anyone reading this memoir in 2020 would do – I googled “KILMER WHALLEY WILLOW.” I found this image.

In the last few years I have, at the behest of My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, been watching the Bravo reality cooking competition “Top Chef” even though my gastronomic knowledge is on par with Jack in “Sideways” listening to Miles espouse the finer points of rosé – “When do we drink it?” But even if the sincere and oft-insightful devotion to real culinary craft occasionally runs aground on the inherent aggravating conventions of the reality TV format, I enjoy the show, primarily due to the entertaining critical theater of co-hosts Padma Lakshmi and Tom Colicchio. The moments when in a single bite of food Tom’s expression lays bare its great failure crack me up, man. And Tom has something of a “Top Chef” spinoff called “What Would Tom Do?”

There Tom takes the same dish that a chef contestant failed to pull off and reimagines it as his own. And though I generally believe a good movie reviewing rule of thumb is not to imagine how you would make the movie but merely appraise the movie as-is, well, this is not a movie review. Besides, “Willow” is, like, 30 years old. It was 12th at the box office in 1988. “Willow” made hay. “Willow” is going to be fine. And while I understand I’m taking my life into my own hands by asking What Would Nick Do? about a movie that made harsh film critic jokes…did you see that photo up above? WHAT WERE THEY DOING? What would Nick do? Nick would scrap all that For the Kids junk. Nick would ditch Willow entirely, rename it Madmartigan & Sorsha, upgrade from PG to NC-17, and go full Harlequin Romance. It might have finished 117th at the box office instead of 12th, but the cult of “Madmartigan & Sorsha” would still be a talking about it a whole lot more, it and its ravishing aesthetic, more than anyone presently is talking about actual “Willow.”

The Voice of Val Kilmer: A Celebration

I just finished reading Val Kilmer’s memoir “I’m Your Huckleberry.” As Kilmer revealed in the run-up to his memoir’s release, he was diagnosed with throat cancer several years ago, underwent a tracheostomy and “no longer sounds like Val Kilmer,” as the inestimable Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote in her NYT profile of the actor earlier this year. “He hasn’t since his tracheostomy. He can still squeeze air up through his windpipe, however, and past the hole that was cut into his throat and the tracheostomy tube, in a way that makes him somewhat understood — not very, but somewhat. The sound is something between a squeak and a voiceless roar.” Kilmer acknowledges this straight away in his memoir, deeming the sound of his voice as akin to Marlon Brando’s “after downing several bottles of tequila.” “Speaking,” Kilmer writes, “once my joy and lifeblood, is now completely out of my control.” The book can be evasive in its tendency toward woo-woo, but that line…that line broke my heart. I realized a celebration of Val Kilmer’s voice was in order.

When you begin with Kilmer’s voice... No. Strike that. When I begin with Kilmer’s voice, I am hard pressed to begin anywhere else but “Top Gun.” His supporting role as fighter pilot extraordinaire Iceman, antagonist to Tom Cruise’s Maverick, is brief yet never stopped looming large because of the eccentricities Kilmer brought to the part. Some of those were physical, yes, like the pen twirling demonstration, fiddling with his wristwatch, or that puffed-up peacockish way he would have Iceman confront Maverick. But he was also pleasingly off-center in his dialogue, like trying to console Maverick after his best buddy Goose has died. “I’m sorry about Goose,” he said before inhaling through his nose in this strange but strangely affecting way like a jock who’s never had to be nice trying to learn what sympathy is on the fly. “Everybody liked him.”

Just as good, though, is the monologue about his rival delivered to his rival: “It’s not your flying, it’s your attitude. The enemy’s dangerous, but right now you’re worse. Dangerous and foolish. You may not like who’s flying with you, but whose side are you on?” It’s always sounded so incredible to me because Kilmer gives it a prudish ring, like he’s a schoolteacher, but like he’s a schoolteacher at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, not at Naval Weapons Fighter School in Miramar. And that’s why even though the scene presents him as a conformist to Maverick’s dissident, he still sounds cool. It’s a trick only Kilmer could pull. It’s that voice I read most of “I’m Your Huckleberry” in. (The most spiritually gooey parts I read in Kilmer’s voice from “The Saint” where he’s pretending to be a South African artist which Hollywood.com has called the worst movie accent which is why it appears in parentheses.)

There is a patented pompousness to Kilmer’s Iceman voice that pops up in other roles, like “True Romance” where he is playing a ghostly vision of Elvis giving guidance to Christian Slater’s. Kilmer is not doing an impression, exactly, more a precursor to Michael Shannon’s work a couple decades later in “Elvis & Nixon” though Shannon was spotlighting the King’s late period weariness while Kilmer is highlighting Presley’s King Creole cool. Still, it’s even a little more than that. “I’ve always liked you, Clarence,” he says a couple times like the world’s most fab enabler. In “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”, meanwhile, Shane Black’s 2005 action comedy, the dialogue, as is typical with Black, requires precision and Kilmer is up to the task, rendering tongue-twisters — “My two-thousand dollar ceramic Vektor my mother got me as a special gift you threw in the lake next to the car.” — with the cockiest of ease. And in “Alexander”, as Philip II of Macedon, he mostly communicates in these vainglorious bursts that make you believe it when another character councils the eponymous Alex to ignore his dad: “‘Tis the wine talking.” Yeah, it is.

If in those roles Kilmer was accentuating the verbal style, in his first movie role, 1984’s Team ZAZ comedy “Top Secret!”, he stripped away style completely. As an Elvis-like touring singer caught up in the world of international intrigue, his love interest asks him what his name, Nick, means. “Oh, nothing,” he says. “My dad thought of it while he was shaving.” If Leslie Nielsen made this movies famous by reciting similar deadpan dialogue with an alternating grave or self-impressed air, Kilmer gives it an entirely innocent ring.



In a strange way, his work there foreshadowed his turn in “Heat”, mostly opposite former Heavyweight Champion of the World Robert DeNiro. Kilmer was not trying to one-up his scene partner, like co-star Al Pacino’s famously amplified turn, only strategically blowing his stack, like in his first scene opposite her eminence, Ashley Judd. Otherwise, Kilmer is calm and cool in a way befitting the character and his lifestyle. When DeNiro’s character asks him if he really loves Judd’s Charlene, the way Kilmer replies “For me the sun rises and sets with her, man” does not sound anything like that line as written would suggest. Kilmer strips it of any and all purple excess; he is merely stating a fact. Nine years later in “Spartan” he does something similar in a somewhat different way. That was a David Mamet movie and, as everyone knows, Mamet dialogue is to be spoken so specifically it has its own name: Mametspeak. It’s not supposed to sound like real life. But Kilmer...man, Kilmer makes Mametspeak sound like real life. How did he do that?

If there was a role where Kilmer eschewed real life to truly evince a heightened rhythmic sort of speaking tone, it was “Tombstone.” A subplot there involves a traveling theatre troupe but, let us be clear, Doc Holliday is giving the real performance. In the famous scene where Doc first confronts Johnny Ringo (Michael Biehn), the way Kilmer says “The deadliest pistoleer since Wild Bill, they say,” has a sing-song quality. Ostensibly he’s speaking to his ladyfriend, Big Nose Kate, though really he’s speaking to the whole saloon, playing his role. And though Johnny Ringo counters “Yeah, you look it” after Doc claims to be in his prime, the darkly comic way Kilmer says it is tantamount to stepping on Biehn’s comeback.



The sequence ends, of course, with Doc mocking Johnny Ringo’s showy display of gunspinning by twirling his tin cup. It’s hysterical, most definitely, but it also hardly matters. By that point, in just a few lines, with just a few words, Doc Holliday, Val Kilmer, has stolen the show.

Some Drivel On...End of the Line

“End of the Line” (1987) begins by juxtaposing plaintive monochrome archival images of railroad workers with suits in some corporate boardroom who, based on their raised hands and lowered hands, are taking some kind of vote, one that proves to be about a fictional railroad company called Southland about to be phased out for airline freight. This was the late 80s, after all, in the midst of a Presidential Administration that famously went to war with railroad unions and this prologue seems to portend a righteous fury. So does the poster. Wilford Brimley and Levon Helm armed with guns aboard a locomotive that the blurb positions directly above their heads denotes they have hijacked. These guys, one reckons, must be pissed. The movie director Jay Russell makes, however, strains away most of that anger in search of a more Capra-esque tone, a wistful fable about finding the end of the rainbow at the end of the line, which might have worked better if “End of the Line” did not pull the wool over its own eyes.

Set in the fictional small town of Clifford, Arkansas, “End of the Line” was shot on location throughout the Razorback State and with cooperation of the Missouri Pacific Railroad. It looks it too, the production both inside and outside coming across suitably lived in. Russell, though, seems more concerned with shoehorning in Coca-Cola products, cans and vending machines, then he does evoking the sort of life that aging, longtime Southland employees Will Haney (Brimley) and Leo Pickett (Levon Helm) live along this railway day after day. Mostly such an existence is just assumed. And though Russell builds up a convincing community around these two men with some formidable actors, Oscar-winner Mary Steenburgen as Leo’s wife and a young Holly Hunter and Kevin Bacon as, respectively, Will’s daughter and harebrained, hot-tempered son-in-law, the movie lets them all fall away once the train gets hijacked, setting off on its railway to nowhere.

Will and Leo intend to ride the rails north to Chicago where Southland is headquartered to demand the chairman of the board (Henderson Forsythe) return their jobs. It is not a well thought out plan and the movie does not really pretend it isn’t. In fact, even as the law gives pursuit, their journey is deliberately stripped of the seemingly inherent drama as Russell even turns a scene of the locomotive smashing through a cop car blocking the tracks into a comic set piece rather than a thrilling one. The scenes are a little lengthy and wandering; at one point Helm just sort of seems to improvise a monologue for the camera. Still, it can’t help but devolve into some amber waves of grain applesauce with Leo even briefly reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. It’s that kind of movie. And when they arrive in Chicago, where the Southland President (Bob Balaban) has sought to get ahead of the story by brokering something like a truce with the hijackers by exploiting them for purely commercial purposes, what suggests scathing anti-business satire instead gives way to cracker-barrel shenanigans as Will and Leo faux-kidnap the chairman of the board instead.

Though Brimley is the first-billed star, he somehow manages to recede before our very eyes as the film progresses despite being in most of the scenes. Indeed, in a Chicago-set scene, as Will and Leo are made to film a Southland commercial, Brimley communicates his distaste for the entire stunt by hardly having his character react. Brimley is not only conveying an inherent instinct that Southland is trying to use and abuse Will and Leo but that here is no pot of gold at the end of the line. In a scene before setting off for Chicago, on the porch with his wife in the middle of the night, just the way Brimley has his character stare off into the distance manages to suggest both the futility of their quest and that if he failed to take the quest in the first place that he would not be able to live with himself. This is a grim recognition of reality that “End of the Line” only tacitly acknowledges, concocting a conclusion where it both gives it characters what they want and acknowledges what they get is all just a fantasy. I feel like if Wilford Brimley had come across the movie one night on cable television, he would have scoffed by chortling and changed the channel.

Represent

The title “Represent” bears a double-edged meaning. It is not just that director Hillary Bachelder’s three subjects are running for various positions of representation within their local governments but how their attempts shine a stark light on our continuing need for greater diversity in that representation. Women, not just men, young and old, black and white and Asian, or maybe just Americans, as the Asian-American Julie Cho running for the State House in Illinois says, suggesting how such diversity implicitly expresses our ideals. “Represent’s” two other women, Bryn Bird and Myya Jones, juxtapose small town and big city values, the former seeking the position of trustee in her rural Ohio town while the latter tries to launch a campaign for Mayor of Detroit. Talking head interviews with all three women are sprinkled throughout, and Bachelder provides swooping aerial shots of the communities in question, but “Represent” best honors its plain intimacy by maintaining a fly on the wall approach, the camera observing by just sort of hanging around, capturing political campaigning as bare bones operations rather than complex command centers.

For Cho, door-to-door canvassing underscores not only the necessity of truly reaching out to each constituent for each vote at a local level but the almost herculean task running as a Republican in a blue district (Evanston, IL). If she is focusing on her own community, stressing that a representative works for his/her constituents, rather than the whole country, she carries the burden of Trump nonetheless. That makes her radioactive to Democrats, as we see, though her stated platform is ridding the district of gerrymandering, giving the people of color a voice, and infiltrating a party overrun with old white folks who, in one painful scene Cho handles with grace, we see she has to reach out to anyway. This is not Both Sides, either in a satiric or sincere sense, but how the lines both blur and keep us apart.

Bird, on the other hand, is a progressive in a conservative town, though “Represent” sees her story less through a political lens than the struggle of running for office as both a woman, a mother and a member of the community. Nearly each scene of Bird talking strategy or campaigning includes a simultaneous need for familial obligation, pushing a baby stroller as she stumps her for herself while walking in a parade, while the after-effects of her campaign yield as many personal and professional ramifications as rewards that go to show it’s not just the bigwig bureaucrats in the Beltway getting harangued at restaurants who suffer.

Her own story is contrasted against that of a current trustee against whom she is running, also a woman, who explains of feeling excluded in her role, forced to walk on eggshells around her fellow males lest they simply ignore her. They may differ in values, but their plights mirror one another, and as Bird adopts a strategy of asking people to only vote for her, no one else, she is helping herself while harming a fellow woman, a political consequence Bachelder is content to let speak for itself. This game plan is hashed out in a scene at Bird’s kitchen table, her child wailing in the background, ostensible down-home politics cast as quietly cutthroat.

Jones has the nigh insurmountable obstacle of not only being a woman but being black and being young, just out of college. One citizen she talks to, who is also black, explains his reluctance to vote for her because only white people get things done as Mayor because only white people have the necessary clout simply on account of their skin, a harsh judgment Jones hardly knows how to answer. Others question her age. “How old are you?” one asks with a condescending smirk. If her lack of experience is not glossed over, it is also readily met by Jones’s heartbreaking observation that “As a young black woman, my life is not promised.” No political analyst has an answer for that kind of harsh truth.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Marathon (1993)

The Marathon, among the oldest modern Olympic events, contested at every one since 1896, is perhaps the Games’ centerpiece, generally the last event held and winding its way through the streets of the host city, one last goodbye to the competition and to the place. So in his 1993 documentary officially recounting the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, director Carlos Suara makes the men’s marathon the through-line, starting with it and then cutting back and forth to it as he captures other events from across the full two-week spectrum. At first, this device might seem to add little, a grace note rather than adding up to anything meaningful. But Suara is no hurry, gradually allowing its significance to take hold.

In truth, “Marathon” does not begin with the beginning of the marathon; it begins with the opening ceremonies. That’s true of many Olympic documentaries, of course, and like those Suara revels in the Parade of Nations, including America’s famed basketball Dream Team, the camera singling out Magic Johnson and other NBA stars who chose to attend the festivities, lingering over them here, gathered in the infield with everyone else, as long as he does later on the actual basketball court, as if impressing upon us that their fame is what made them stand out as much as their talent.

More captivatingly, though, Suara devotes significant time to the Ceremonies’ narrative, especially a colossal rendering of the myth explaining Barcelona’s name, showing Heracles, crossing the Mediterranean on his fourth labor, as one of his ships becoming stranded in a storm, wrecking at Montjuic, site of the Olympic stadium, naming it Barca Nona. There are sweeping panoramas of this massive artistic creation from above and below but just as frequently Suara brings his camera in close, disappearing the crowd, just leaving you with this impressive manmade sea, truly placing you inside the narrative and lifting it up to genuine mythologic pitch, a far cry from seeing it on NBC with Bob Costas and Katie Couric providing analysis off a spreadsheet.

Sports-wise, Suara is most fascinated by the track, recounting sprints, distance races, and field events, like the long jump duel between Carl Lewis and Mike Powell where an image of the latter with his hands folded in prayer after his last leap summarizes how Suara communicates almost entirely through images rather than commentary. He likes showing a race at full speed, then stopping and running it back in slow motion, turning low-angled shots of runners with the crowd rising up behind them into virtual paintings of spectators appreciating sport. Best, though, are the unexpected bursts of emotion, like Voula Patoulidou of Greece unexpectedly winning the 100 meter hurdles. If we know it’s unexpected, it’s because of her reaction, stupefied exhilaration and then, as she celebrates with people sitting in the stands, she literally seems to faint, if only for a moment, made so powerful because of the raw presentation. Nothing away from the track, alas, quite lives up to it, lovely images that are nevertheless context-free which undermines the ultimate point. (Also, a pointless personal quibble: no scenes at the Montjuïc Municipal Pool, the most striking Olympic venue of all time.)

That ultimate point begins to emerge mid-movie when Suaron recounts the women’s marathon. He focuses on the race, yes, as well as the medal winners but he focuses just as much on everyone else, all the finishers, and the agony splayed across their faces and their exhausted bodies after they cross the finish line some collapsing, some carried off on stretchers, some just putting their hands to their hips. One brilliant shot watches one competitor, having just completed the race, almost limping off, away from the track, while another runner enters the stadium (one runner goes one way, the other runner goes the other way), summarizing this endless procession of endurance tests. One runner staggers to the finish, her legs seeming to seize up, and after she finishes, medical people surround her and help her onto a stretcher, her wide eyes hardly seeming to comprehend what’s even happening but to exhausted to ask. It’s the struggle, I suddenly thought to myself, not the triumph.

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These days, 30-plus years after its release, when we talk about “Hoosiers” (1986), we tend to talk about it through a social, romantic or analytic lens. The first two I’m ok with, the last less so, a strain of the deGrasse Tyson school of film criticism filtered through the Bill Simmons sensibility, debating, like, whether Norman Dale is a good game coach or how Jimmy Chitwood’s recruiting report would have read. What we don’t tend to talk about these days when we talk about “Hoosiers” is its aesthetic. We just sort of take Gene Hackman’s turn, holding the movie down at its center, for granted and we gloss over how director David Anspaugh opens the movie with something akin to a series of Norman Rockwell postcards before pulling the rural Indiana rug out from under us by evincing so much small-town nastiness. And we also don’t talk about the basketball scenes, at least not how they are shot.

Anspaugh mostly prefers montages set to Jerry Goldsmith’s A+ score, but occasionally “Hoosiers” lingers over game moments too. At the end, yes, when Jimmy makes the winning shot, and such, but also at the beginning in the Hickory High’s first game that goes awry. In several key moments, Anspaugh puts the camera low so that we see Merle (Kent Poole) and then, later, Rade (Steve Hollar) advancing the ball up court.

Merle has a heedful look about him but one tinged with the slightest anxiety, as if trying to adapt to his Coach’s strange four passes and then a shot strategy.

Rade, on the other hand, is head-up and alert in advancing the ball, disguising his shoot-first mentality.

Buddy (Brad Long), meanwhile, who ultimately winds up as the team’s true point guard, plays his role as facilitator of the offense with his head not down but tucked in, protectively, combining ball security with court vision.

All this popped into my mind last Saturday watching, really watching, for the first time since everything went to hell, an NBA game, between the Portland Trail Blazers and the Memphis Grizzlies with a playoff spot on the line. And more than anything, I just got lost in watching Blazers point guard Damian Lillard and Grizz point guard Ja Morant. Not just in watching them shoot and score, yada yada, but in dribbling, in watching them simply advance the ball.

Lillard has a kind of casual swagger to the way he brings the ball up court…

…while Morant looks like a damn triple jumper, hopping and skipping and then unleashing himself into the air.

And thinking about them, I thought about others. I thought about James Harden of the Rockets, who so often seems to get dinged for his foul and free throw heavy style of play though in bringing the ball up court he has this kind of incredible cocky insouciance, looking, I swear, like a 1957 Chevy Bel Air Tropical Turquoise convertible coolly cruising the streets of Havana refashioned as an NBA superstar. 

And then there’s Gabby Williams, my new favorite basketball player, a sometime-point forward, of sorts, for the Chicago Sky who epitomizes the John Wooden chestnut about being quick but not in a hurry by somehow embodying the notion of having one hand on the emergency brake and one foot on the accelerator at all times.

And...I don’t know. I’m not sure I have larger point. I just know that even without movies, even without museums, I’m still searching for beauty. And on that this past Saturday, this is where I briefly found it. 

Ray of Light

When I saw this Tweet, this Tweet from the invaluable David Roth, our foremost T*ump chronicler, it got me to thinking as it absolutely had to. Not that I mean to impugn his choice for The Most Purely 90s Shit In Film History but, my God, what a thought exercise: determining The Most Purely 90s Shit In Film History. And that’s crucial, that “Shit”, because that’s a different sort of descriptor than, say, seminal. Like, “Singles” or “Reality Bites” or “Clerks” or “Fight Club” might well be the seminal 90s film, given, in order, their grunge scene atmosphere, Gen X irony, talky slackerdom and end of the century opining on the culture of too much stuff. But seminal, that’s not Shit.

“The Matrix” was the perfect apéro for Y2K while “The Net”, and even “Virtuosity”, in its own way, were indicative of a particular 90s cyber culture but not representative of this sort of 90s Shit aesthetic. Ditto the fashion of “10 Things I Hate About You” or the slang of “Clueless.” The Most Purely 90s Shit In Film History goes beyond simple artifacts of the era.

Parker Posey was just, in general, iconic, the shit, but not The Most Purely 90s Shit In Film History.

The scene in “Truth or Consequences, N.M.” where Martin Sheen chops off Max Perlich’s fingers while Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party” plays in the background captures the 90s cinematic zeitgeist even more than “Pulp Fiction” because “Pulp Fiction” rip offs were the rage du jour while Chris Tucker quoting Barry White in “Money Talks” embodied the 70s coming back around in the 90s (just as the 90s have been coming back around right now). But the zeitgeist, that ain’t the Shit.

The Shit is more like if you could somehow take a moment of American film and peddle it at some interstate truck stop as Americana. That’s why My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife suggested Ethan Hawke’s hair in “Before Sunrise” as The Most Purely 90s Shit In Film History; you could see Jesse Wallace wigs being sold at some Twenty-Twenties version of Route 66 souvenir shops. But hair is too tangible to ultimately be the Shit. Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains appearing as the CopyMat employee providing Zen-like reinforcement to Tom Cruise in “Jerry Maguire” reflects the self-referential nature of many 90s film but that sort of sentience is not evocative of Pure Shit. The closing credits to the rom com trying to springboard Jennifer Aniston from sitcom ensemble to silver screen leading lady, “Picture Perfect”, being set to Texas’s “Say What You Want” feels like it might be in the ballpark, though still too much about the surrounding context rather than just about itself.

No, do you remember “Wild Things”? Of course you remember “Wild Things.” And do you remember when Denise Richards and Matt Dillon and the other guy (Cory Pendergast) are riding in the jeep listening to Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life?” Yup. That’s it. That’s The Most Purely 90s Shit In Film History.

Some Drivel On...In Transit

Though “In Transit” is a documentary, not a drama, it still reminded me of Tom Quinn’s “Colewell” (2019) in how it intrinsically becomes a meditation on time and how its brief one hour and nineteen minute run time still seems to encapsulate a whole life. Or maybe that should be lives, plural, since its set entirely aboard the Empire Maker, the Amtrak train running from Chicago to Seattle and back again, over and over, on into forever. As the 2015 documentary credited to five directors (Albert Maysles, Lynn True, David Usui, Nelson Walker III, Benjamin Wu) opens, we see a young kid, excitedly talking about having literally walked out on his job, taking his last paycheck and splitting, lighting out for greener pastures in the Pacific Northwest. He talks like someone’s who got it all figured out, in that way that youths do, and rather than wanting to scold him from my early 40s time zone, I smiled wistfully, remembering how good that feel, suspended in a moment where it felt like things were going to be different before they inevitably wound up the same. When this sequence ends, the camera looks out the back of the train, at the rails receding behind it before cutting to a shot looking out from the engine at the track coming up, visually evoking the train as a space in-between.

Through this light, the Empire Maker bisects beginnings and ends, the American Dream and the laughable futility of it. “In Transit”, mind you, is not mocking its subjects, not any of them, viewing the kids who form an impromptu “American Pie” singalong, like it’s the quad of some liberal arts campus, in a loving light. Even so, it is also not shy about calling such ideals on the carpet, like an older man late in the movie chastising some unseen youth opining about going snowboarding to get through a crossroads by explaining that is not a crossroads but a vacation, citing his own harsh life experience as a true crossroads. It’s as comical as it truthfully stinging and a truth the documentary is content to just let speak for itself as it is most every truth there, emblemizing the overriding approach. “In Transit” sees these various people in rhymes and echoes, going to and from the same place, feeling the same kind of emotions, just from their own vantage points, those feelings like variations in light.

The camera sees an older woman by herself, eating breakfast, and then cuts to her speaking to the camera, spilling her life story. If, for a moment, you thought she might have had nothing to say, she does, evoking how every person we see in these sports of spaces - a train, a plane, a bus - is sitting on his or her own life’s tale, if only we’d think to ask. Likewise, an older gentleman works as both a sounding board and a semi-guidance counselor to a younger black woman. It is only after she gets off the train that we then hear him tell us what he is about, underling how he generously gives her space to sound off.

We hear announcements of where the train is stopping but we are deliberately unmoored from a linear journey, just seeming to jump in and out, mornings, noons and nights, sunrises and sunsets, all blurring together, just a collection of stolen moments, underscored in how we glimpse people between half-opened doorways. Yet even as time seems to fall away, “In Transit” quietly shapes a narrative, one beginning with people who are trying their luck somewhere new and ending with people who are returning to the places where they are from. Reality always beckons again.

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets

It’s morning in a bar. Or, who knows, perhaps it’s the afternoon by now. Either way it isn’t five o’clock, at least not here, and a guy is bellied up to the counter and drunk. This would already be a problem. But then the bartender gets a phone call. It’s from the drunk guy’s place of employment; he’s supposed to be at work. So the bartender and Mike, who cleans the bar up in exchange for a spot at the counter all a day and a couch in the corner, shepherd the drunk guy to the door and into a cab. Did this guy make it to work? How would he have worked? Or did he just go home and sleep it off? And did he lose his job? Who knows? Once the drunk guy steps from the bar into the blinding sunlight, he disappears.

The Ross Brothers’ (Bill & Turner) “Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets” is a documentary/fiction hybrid about the last 24 hours in operation of a Las Vegas bar, The Roaring 20s. It’s a name neatly summarizing the film’s encroaching sensation: life’s a party and then it all goes to hell. Snippets of a local news traffic report on the TV and a patron bringing in donuts, before proceeding to drink so many pints I lost count, communicate that “Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets” begins in the morning. Time stamps appear on the screen sporadically, but the setting still feels airless, windowless, timeless. The immersive sound design, especially as the night wears on, palpably captures the essence of holding down a bar stool, the noise omnipresent but often unintelligible, the camera seeming to focus on one conversation even as you overhear another. And when the camera focuses on a non-talking patron, like the Vet frequently stationed at the end of the bar who continually appears on edge, it frames that person in an even lonelier light.

The interiors of Roaring 20s are juxtaposed with exterior shots casting Sin City in an eerie red, rendering it as an almost desolate Martian landscape, making those twinkly Christmas lights of the Roaring 20s that much more inviting. This is a place to take refuge. And its regulars do, their easy, familiar interactions, the sense of routines and recurring conversations, evoking a full-fledged sense of community, men and women, white and black, young and old, a daytime bartender who strums guitar, a nighttime bartender who takes no guff. The question looming, then, is that what happens to this community after the bar closes shop.

The Ross Brothers, though, are content just to let that query loom rather than searching for answers or having the characters pontificate about where they might go or where they might end up. We never even learn precisely why the bar is closing. The customers evince denial by watching Jeopardy, playing music on the jukebox, dancing, telling stories, arguing, pronouncing, and drinking so, so much. There are occasional moments toward the end of the night when the dialogue strains more earnest and melancholy, though it’s difficult to tell, as in any bar situation, whether that is merely the alcohol talking. As Mike tells a young dude in a Katy Perry tour t-shirt to stop coming to the bar, the young dude’s grinning face betrays that he’s hardly listening.

None of this real, of course, which is why it’s a hybrid, shot to look like a documentary (the cameraman is glimpsed on occasion) but pure fiction, made on a Louisiana soundstage. This is not a “Blair Witch”-like ruse; The Ross Brothers made this clear pre-release. And the small subplot involving the teenage son of the night bartender and his friends hanging around, trying to sneak a few beers, sort of gives away the game anyway, its presentation conspicuously artificial in comparison to the rest. The subplot also feels like an attempt to head off criticism of exploitation, signaling the perils of drinking, since the movie feeds these mostly non-actors alcohol and then allows them to improvise, capturing their drunken soliloquies for posterity. That “Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets” ultimately avoids the exploitation charge is because it is not about drunks but about the larger situation, the one drifting, mostly unmentioned but still ominously, just off screen.

Timeliness is a fraught term for critical appraisals, even more so now, given how everything, art or otherwise, feels framed through the prism of our strange, awful present. Too often timeliness is mere coincidence. But the Brothers Ross were specifically making a film at the end of one era and the dawn of another, even if they did not quite know it then, referred to in both the brief reference to You-Know-Who and a fleeting graphic on the TV about Election Night. “Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets” did not see this - our strange, awful present - coming but as it ushers its patrons out the door, one by one, one last time, it nevertheless consciously sent them into the scary unknown. 

keira knightley needs a time-out

The Old Guard

It’s an inherent and unavoidable flaw in most action movies: we know who’s going to live and who’s going to die. Gina Prince-Blythewood’s “The Old Guard”, however, based on a graphic novel by Greg Rucka, does not so much solve that problem as cleverly get around it by creating a band of immortal warriors who do not not die but do die. They die again and again and then return to life. The opening image is of bullet casings falling to the floor and the face of Andy (Charlize Theron), the most immortal of the immortals, lying on the floor, beaten and bloody, definitely dead. It seems like a classic Start With The End, Flash Back To The Beginning set-up but it’s not. This moment is just a few scenes later and Andy and her three ever living besties rise from the dead and attack their would-be assassins, a scene elevated far beyond the usual swordplay and silver screen karate into the realm of majestic, conveying the resurrection as something akin to a sports movie moment, the fallen athletes digging deep to battle back. Alas, to Andy being everlasting has become nothing but a pain, made clear in Theron’s properly weary voiceover. But if this teases “The Old Guard” as an existential action epic, such notions, while not exactly window dressing, nevertheless drift further into the background as “The Old Guard” too often gives in to more standard issue cinematic mission of rescue and revenge.

Andy’s weariness stems not merely from never dying but from the world around her that is, in her own words, not getting better. In some ways, this idea seems to be one sculpted from the very fact all of us are being forced to watch this movie at home since the only real evidence mounted by the movie itself pertaining to the lamentable state of the world is a few cable news flashes of current events. If anything, Andy’s journey proves more personal, the ultimate reveal tied to the selfishness inherent in wanting to just be dead and buried. If there is any light, it glimmers in Nile (Kiki Layne), a U.S. Marine who discovers she’s immortal after dying in battle and then, suddenly, coming to. She reluctantly winds up part of the gang and the first time she and Andy fight is one of the few times Theron truly turns her lips upward into a grin, luxuriating in the thrill of a real foe. This scene, taking place on a drug plane on which they are hitching a ride, where, for a split-second, you really think Andy might crash the plane just because she can, “The Old Guard” almost suggests “Only Lovers Left Alive” as an action movie, immortality as cool ennui. Alas, that tantalizing bout of atmosphere gradually dissipates in the favor of conventionality.

The villain, pharmaceutical bro Steven Merrick (Harry Melling), kidnaps the warriors in order to study them for a possible life-extending drug. It’s not a bad hook and opens up fascinating questions about whether these characters would owe it to society to be studied or if opening that door would unleash some kind of Frankenstein’s monster. Those questions, though, fade away and the bro, like Gary Oldman in “The Professional” filtered through Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network”, is more a standard-issue smarmy villain than philosophical provocateur. And as Nile is forced into the role of rescuer and then team member, the action ceases to illuminate emotion, regressing into customary set pieces to keep the story moving, not really even dazzling simply via their style. 

As Andy, Theron broods real good, matching her character’s distaste for what society has become, as if humanity’s inability to evolve beyond the same century-old grudges has left her blue. But while Andy is intended as something of an enigma, she also feels strictly modern, a la Matthias Schoenaerts as her main cohort Booker. We see a brief flashback to The Crusades but Andy never exactly looks or acts like someone who would have existed unto each era, carrying so much worldly knowledge and pain. In some ineffable way, she looks like she’s always been around indoor plumbing. Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli), on the other hand, while initially appearing to merely be the token tagalongs as a gay couple are eventually elevated into a little more. Rather than predictably playing a literal ancient couple as a couple bickering hags, they evince a sense of knowing each other so well their love has been stripped of any superfluous horseshit and just…is. When they kiss, it doesn’t ring hollow, like that little moment at the conclusion of “Rise of Skywalker”, but counts, rendered as a touching answer to so much surrounding condescending machismo.

The most moving love story, however, belongs to Andy and Quynh (Van Veronica Ngo) even though the latter is only in the movie for a few minutes and their love is more implied than declared. Glimpsed in a mid-movie flashback, the two women were original partners in action-packed good deeds only to be taken prisoner during the Salem Witch Trials. When their captors realize the women cannot be killed, they lock Quynh in an iron maiden and dump her in the sea, sentenced to a life of drowning, reviving and drowning all over again. Though the aesthetically tidy recollection of this memory is at odds with the wrenching nature of the event, it is nevertheless inherently so awful, it induces a shudder and leaves you wondering about an entire movie made in its image. It also proves to be set-up, not unlike “The Old Guard” itself, less a standalone experience than yet another episode of serialized cinematic TV. Immortality, I guess.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Melbourne Rendez-vous (1957)

“The Melbourne Rendez-vous” opens with images of smoggy smokestacks and steel mill blast furnaces, putting into perspective mid-20th century Man’s reliance on machines, shunning his physical grace and movement. And though the giant airplanes glimpsed in the sky not long after might seem at odds with this lament, they are merely carrying waves and waves of athletes to Melbourne, Australia for the 1956 Summer Olympics where for a fortnight individuals from everywhere will refute our mechanical dependence. If that opening sounds solemn, director René Lucot’s official documentary of the games is anything but, much more easygoing and very, very quirky. The narration by François Périer is not incidental but indispensable, a jaunty emblem of the film’s observational tone, like comparing the time it takes for a spectator to smoke his cigar to the length of a 10,000 meter race. Périer comes across less like some television broadcaster pontificating from on high than a true blue spectator just watching the events from a café, taking stock of what most intrigues him. He is also casually sexist to a remarkable degree, describing nearly every other woman competitor as lovely, claiming they cry more than male athletes and pointing out their propensity for shopping on days off even though later we see a male athlete shopping too. Yes, yes, it was A Different Time, as they say, to which I say: It sure was! This is the proof!

Track and Field events pique Lucot’s curiosity more than any other event as he spends most of the movie’s time at the Olympic Stadium in the company of the runners and jumpers and throwers. He sometimes cuts back and forth between different events rather than giving us a linear progression of each one, sort of mirroring the all-consuming madness of an Olympic schedule, though he also pointedly drains much of the typical drama. Périer is already citing American sprinter Bobby Morrow’s victory in the 100 meters before he’s left the blocks. No, “The Melbourne Rende-vous” sees the events through a more idiosyncratic lens, like the high jump, Périer comparing it to a playground, though I saw it just as much as a park, perhaps like one in the sprawling Melbourne suburbs, with athletes camped out in the grass, even sleeping. The competition itself goes so long it ends at dusk, the medals conveyed in the near dark, a reminder of a more quaint time when the brightest lights were the athletes themselves.

“The Melbourne Rende-vous”, though, is not merely focused on competition, indulging in the place where the competition is set, the de facto Aussie capital, lingering over the charming downtown, gliding through the suburbs, showing wildlife. In recent times, Olympic hosting duties have become a way for the hosting cities to clear out and displace who and what they do not want, not to mention for the ostensibly altruistic International Olympic Committee to brazenly profit. If nothing else, Lucot reminds us that rotating host cities was once intended as a way to show off a new place before global travel was so easy, a postcard beamed to the rest of the world. And Lucot does not merely show off Melbourne but finds unique ways of tying it to the competition, segueing from the city’s nightlife to the cycling velodrome under the lights, evoking these more fringe sports as being something like underground. At the rowing competition, he lingers just as much on the swans, as if sculling is just a day on the lake.

Then again, elevating the swans above the athletes almost diminishes their feats of strength and underlines how Lucot does not necessarily treat all sports the same. Yachting he dismisses as essentially unworthy, given that its competitors are in boats, evoking the machines of the doc’s opening passage, while the boxing he brushes aside as nothing but a gaggle of “amateurs.” (Did anyone forward Lucot tape of one Cassius Clay at the Rome Olympics four years later?) In concluding with the marathon, on the other hand, “The Melbourne Rende-vous” is unconventional without being dismissive. Rather than scored to dramatic music sweeping the runners along, Lucot opts for the counterpoint of a jazz number that underlines the throngs lining the marathon route, cars parked right there, people standing up close, no barriers, so much so that at one point after the lead runners pass by, the camera catches a dog running from one side of the street to the other. If it’s not exactly a walk in the park, it nevertheless renders the Summer Olympics as something like a summery jaunt.

Ray of Light

Last week Deadline broke the news that Amy Adams will star in a movie with a title that I desperately wish I could hear my ex-movie theater manager (throw your hands up if you know who I’m talking about) announce to a crowded lobby is now seating: “Nightbitch.” Adams plays a woman convinced she is turning into a dog. The Amy-Adams-Will-Do-Anything-To-Win-An-Oscar tweets wrote themselves. The foremost question, it seems, whether she really is turning into a dog remains TBD because the movie is based on a book that has yet to be published. That, though, interests us here at Cinema Romantico less then another hypothetical: what if other Amy Adams movie characters thought they were turning into dogs? And more specifically and much more crucially, what kinds of dogs would her characters turn into?

A few thoughts:

Dr. Louise Banks, Arrival: German Shepherd

Ashley Johnsten, Junebug: Golden Retriever

Delysia Lafosse, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day: Pomeranian

Rose Lorkowski, Sunshine Cleaning: Australian Cattle Dog

Susan, Talladega Nights: Pit Bull

 
Lois Lane, Man of Steel: Alaskan Husky

 
Susan Morrow, Nocturnal Animals: Weimaraner

 
Sister James, Doubt: Greyhound

 
Charlene Fleming, The Fighter: Mutt

 
Lady Edith Greensly (Sydney Prosser), American Hustle: Elvira’s Poodle

 
Peggy Dodd, The Master: Frank the Pug, Men in Black