KIT Keep it Together

If some days the terrors promised by so many apocalyptic tech-noir films seems right around the corner, other days technology proves our only respite, like the Brown Bear webcam livestreaming straight from Brooks Falls along the Naknek River at Katmai National Park & Preserve in Southern Alaska. The sight of bears fishing for salmon and the sound of rushing water plunging over rocks pacifies. My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife introduced me to this webcam a few years back and if one of us or both of us had a rough day, we’d lose ourselves in the livestream. Of course, this is 2020. And in 2020, where we have learned that “virtually nothing” equates to roughly 200,000 and that American executive governance has been reduced to magical thinking and trolling, every day is a bad day. As such, we’ve foregone watching the Bear Cam for a few minutes here and there on the small screen of our phones and taken to watching the bear cam for hours at time on the big screen of our TV. And though there is no way I could ever literally turn and live with the animals, as Whitman wrote, boy is it heartening to imagine turning and living with them anyway. These bears, they are so placid and self-contain’d. I sit and look at them long and long. 

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The new Katy Perry album, “Smile”, has been heralded as a return to form, of sorts, for the musical superstar, meaning that after the wellness goo of “Prism” and the ineffectual confessions of “Witness”, she has re-embraced the exploding bubblegum pop of “Teenage Dream.” This yielded some minor accusations of being out of step with our present. We’re in the middle of a pandemic! Who wants to smile? But look at the album cover. Not only isn’t Katy pointedly not smiling, she’s not smiling while wearing a clown costume, a double ironic counterpoint to the record’s title. Indeed, the superb, thunderous opening cut, “Never Really Over”, evokes how painful memories might fade but never disappear, the ticking clock as the song concludes suggesting their return is only a matter of time, getting “Smile” off on a contrasting gloomy foot. And though many lyrics in the ensuing tracks espouse maintaining happiness at any cost, Katy’s voice hardly believes what she’s peddling, whether it’s “Not the End of the World” or a plea to “Cry About it Later” because “tonight we’re having fun.” The latter is such fiction, in fact, that she immediately follows it with another crying song, “Teary Eyes”, nothing less than that dancing, crying girl meme come to life. The booming banality of “Champagne Problems”, meanwhile, only brilliantly (if unintentionally) underlines the insignificance of those bubbly troubles. Even on the excellent, inspirational “Daisies”, Katy does not so much sing “til they cover me in daisies - daisies - daises” as scream it. By that last “Daisies”, you want to giver her some room; she’s screaming to keep from falling apart.

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As 2020 drags on into its undoubtedly terrifying final act, the air of America has come to evoke that scene in “Return of the Jedi” when our rebel friends are in the cockpit of the stolen shuttle trying to slip through the Imperial fleet to reach the forest moon below. “C’mon,” Han Solo offers, “let’s keep a little optimism here.” Of course, because it’s Harrison Ford, this plea for optimism sounds oddly pessimistic. That’s how any dose of optimism feels these days, futile, like the piped-in noise at sporting events that’s supposed to fool me into thinking everything’s normal when what it does is not simply remind me how  abnormal it is but how profoundly skewed our priorities are. We’re more devoted to finding a way to play football than to control the pandemic. And though the former could well dovetail with the latter, finding a way to implement the same sort of rapid testing for athletes across the full spectrum of society, that would require true leadership at the top. Instead we are stranded with a shit-for-brains more concerned with personal grudges and paranoia than people, continually claiming we’re rounding the corner or glimpsing a light at the end of the tunnel, like he’s Captain Carol Burnett (Matt Damon) on that episode of “30 Rock” promising the plane will take off in another half-hour, publicly downplaying, to use his word, COVID-19 while privately he does nothing about it, focused instead on ostensible election fraud limited to the Facebook chat groups he apparently frequents and within the doughy environs of his minimal brain. And while I want nothing more than to believe everything will be fine come November, that norms will hold, that our election will transpire freely and fairly, so many meeting our faithless, fearful leader’s recurring fascist overtones with a mixture of Kool-Aid, cowardice, and slippery political calculus leaves me feeling less than optimistic. 

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From a distance, that might not look like a bear. But it is a bear, I assure you, one we glimpsed not on the Falls cam this past Saturday but on the River cam, a little ways down the Naknek. This bear had staked out a shallow spot in the water, away from the shore, all on its lonesome, beneath the picturesque clouds, in the shadow of the mountain, and just...permission to speak freely? That bear just chilled the fuck out. Eschewing fishing and roving and rough-housing, that bear wasn’t doing, that bear was being, the apex of existence.

Being, what the French call Être, has been in short supply in 2020, if achievable at all. And if being is not the secret to life, though it may be, I’m still running tests, it is at the very least my own emotional sustenance. Without it, I’ve felt adrift, angry, exhausted. But that bear gave me hope. Not that everything will be all right, mind you, but that in this time of extreme unpleasantness, I might still summon the emotional wherewithal to be.

Ray of Light

Earlier in the Pandemic, maybe in April, perhaps May, possibly June, who knows, time is irrelevant now, My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I found an episode of “Murder, She Wrote” showing on one of those weird channels with commercials for things like a full-size replica of Noah’s Ark for $49.99. “Murder,” I said in faux-deep baritone while taking a long pause, “she wrote.” My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife just looked at me with great concern. I explained that’s how Pat Summerall, the old CBS NFL play-by-play man, would read the “Murder, She Wrote” ads since it always followed “60 Minutes” which always followed pro football on CBS Sundays. Unlike, say, Christopher Walken, who once said his first task with any screenplay he received was to remove all his character’s punctuation, Summerall honored punctuation to a tee. It wasn’t “MurderSheWrote”, all the words inelegantly piled on top of one another, it was “Murder-“ dramatic pause “-She Wrote.”

There are many lost arts but this is one: sports broadcasters reading ads. Do they even read ads anymore? They must, if not like they once did when broadcast TV was paramount. With so many college football games on ESPN, I suppose, the only relevant ads, really, are for, like, SportsCenter and SportsCenter doesn’t leave as much room for flourish, frankly, as “Murder, She Wrote.” Not that I can hear Chris Fowler, or even Joe Tessitore, emphasizing that comma with similar Summerall-ian flair; reading ads is just a job requirement. 

It was not, however, just Summerall who read ads. I’ve been re-watching old Nebraska football games via YouTube in lieu of my beloved Cornhuskers playing new games so far this season. One game I watched was their 1987 wild-assed affair with Arizona State. Midway through, Keith Jackson, the signature voice of college football, was tasked with reading an ad. This ad:

Like Summerall, Jackson, when confronted with these obligatory ad reads, could not help but embellish. But where Summerall was succinct and monotone, so much so that you were not sure if he was even in on his own proper punctuation joke or if he was just reading it the way it was written, Jackson was folksy, alive to the absurdity.  

The above he read began this way: “Tonight a blonde bombshell finds true love on ‘Once a Hero.’” [Beat.] “That’s what it says here.”

At that moment you can practically see the incredulous look on Jackson’s face, as if the spotter to his right and the statistician to his left were snickering and he’s communicating, hey, this ad isn’t my idea. He continues:

 

“Then Daryl Hannah, Tom Hanks, and John Candy are involved in the biggest fish story in history.”

If initially he poked fun at the proceedings, here he gives that “biggest fish story in history” all he’s got, treating Ron Howard’s 1984 romantic comedy with as much reverence as he might, say, Eddie Robinson, (at that time) the winningest college football coach in history. I kept wondering what Jackson might have sounded like reading other movie ads. “They shouldn’t have put him in the water,” you can hear Jackson saying of the ABC Saturday Night Movie Special “Striking Distance,” “if they didn’t want him to make waves.” 

Summerall, on the other hand, would have been aces with “Signs.” “Then, after ‘60 Minutes’, M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘Signs.’” [Dramatic pause.] “It’s happening.” 

Cinema Romantico's Ultimate Hypothetical Movie Oral History

There has been a rash of movie oral histories the last few years. On one hand, I understand this, it’s a neat pitch to your editor, writing something like a mini tell-all about a movie with a relevant anniversary or that has recently returned to the discourse. But an oral history suggests a study of a movie paramount to the culture and the majority of movie oral histories these days……I dunno, man. Do we need an oral history for “Mighty Ducks”? “She’s All That”? I think the movie oral history might have finally jumped the shark when I clicked over to The Ringer the other day and found an oral history of “The Town.” “’The Town?’” I thought. “We need an oral history of ‘The Town?’” “The Town” is, like, fine, just fine, but an oral history? C’mon, man.

I know why there is an oral history of “The Town” on The Ringer, of course. The site’s founder is one of Boston’s most famous sons. If it’s your site, you get to commission whatever oral history you want. And that, as it had to, got me to thinking (instead of reading the oral history of “The Town”). Because if Cinema Romantico were to commission an oral history, what oral history would it be?

An oral history of… The Paperboy. I have so many questions for Nicole Kidman. In fact, if the writer (me) gave the rough draft of the oral history to the chief editor (me), the chief editor would probably say, “Wait, this isn’t an oral history. This is an interview with Nicole Kidman. Why are there so many questions about ‘Australia?’ Why are there even more questions about ‘Malice?’”

An oral history of… Elizabethtown. It is not so much that Cameron Crowe’s, shall we say, less than lauded romantic comedy possessed a semi-troubled production history and an unexpected pop culture afterlife that would render it perfect for an oral history as it is Cinema Romantico, an avowed “Elizabethtown” stan, being the only blog in the stars willing to take on this task.

An oral history of… Cocktail. Coughlin’s Law: the clearest truth lies at the bottom of the glass.

An oral history of... L.A. Story. Honoring the film’s coffee ordering scene, an entire oral history done in the space of 20 seconds.

An oral history of... Ocean’s Twelve. The film’s own loopy artiness examining artifice and performance feels like the perfect vessel for satirizing the oral history. Then again, I don’t want my send up of the genre to be quite so conspicuous. Which is why I might also consider...

An oral history of… The Fugitive. If only because this movie had arguably Hollywood’s two most irascible leads as its stars who would probably grunt off participating meaning that the entire oral history of “The Fugitive” would be left to Joe Pantoliano and Julianne Moore and Jeroen Krabbé and Richard Riehle and Tom Wood.  

An oral history of… Serendipity. Like “Elizabethtown”, which we love as equally, if not as equally questionably, as this unremembered not holiday classic, we would treat a “Serendipity” oral history seriously. So seriously, in fact, that it would be less revealing, never mind interesting, than just kind of confounding, a series of interview subjects – Cusack, Beckinsale, Leo Fitzpatrick as the heroic leasing temp – expressing palpable confusion as to why this movie has an oral history in the first place.

The Sleepover

“The Sleepover” opens with adolescent Kevin Finch (Maxwell Simkins) standing before his grade school class, tasked with giving a speech about his family history but reciting the plot of Ridley Scott’s 2015 film “The Martian” instead. His teacher calls him out, of course, and his dad, Ron (Ken Marino), lightly scolds him. If it is meant to be funny, it is also intended to evoke Kevin’s penchant for tall tales and how “The Sleepover” will gradually become a tall tale itself as Kevin and his sister, Clancy (Sadie Stanley), discover their mother, Margot (Malin Akerman), is a high end thief in witness protection. But Kevin reciting the plot of “The Martian” rather than concocting his own cockamamie story from scratch also evokes how director Trish Sie’s film is less an original movie, in narrative or rendering, than so many borrowed ingredients and spare parts. It was distributed by Netflix, after all, just another cog in its content machine, where the ultimate point is not so much carefully crafting a fresh product as following a formula to get it made as soon as possible to upload it and provide the masses something else to watch. “The Sleepover” is one part “Goonies”, one part “Spy Kids”, one part “Adventures in Babysitting”, one part “Date Night” but with little creativity and even less panache of its own, a movie as a Jetson food pill, the kind not really designed to be criticized, let alone reviewed, never mind enjoyed, just consumed. 

Even the film’s title proves perfunctory as the sleepover in question, in which Kevin’s friend Lewis (Lucas Jaye) stays over the same night Clancy plans to sneak out with her best friend Mim (Cree Cicchino), is mostly just an excuse for this quartet to be present when Margot and Ron are kidnapped by thieves from her previous life after an inadvertent viral video betrays her location. After disappearing, a U.S. Marshal (Erik Griffin), having become aware of Margot’s exposure, appears, tied up by the kids in Christmas lights and questioned. It’s not a striking image, per se, though it sticks out given the film’s basic visual template, but it at least suggests a sort of rewiring of a cliché, putting the kid gloves on hostage-taking, or something, a quality in scant supply. Indeed,  as “The Sleepover” progresses, flitting back and forth between the kids searching for their parents and their parents trying to survive being enlisted for a big heist, it rarely sees these events through the eyes of a child. 

“Adventures in Babysitting” may have been trite in its romantic machinations, with one hopeless crush juxtaposed against another hopeless crush, but it succeeded by virtue of so many joyfully outlandish set pieces – need I mention The Babysitting Blues? “The Sleepover”, on the other hand, manages little in the way of such inventive spirit, falling back on typical genre elements, like a tricked out car the kids briefly pilot, a sequence that was played out when Richard Grieco did it in “If Looks Could Kill.” (Another ingredient!) “The Goonies”, meanwhile, in both its narrative and Oregon locations, embodied a true sense of adventure, getting lost somewhere else. Its characters, as its nicknames attest, were archetypes but also felt alive. The atmosphere of “The Sleepover”, however, is as sterile as the mansion where everyone eventually meets while the characters are reduced to tics, like Clancy’s fear of playing cello in public, that are never elevated beyond the humdrum, the child performances simply not enough to compensate. 

In the adult storyline, meanwhile, Margot is supposed to be tempted by a return to her old lifestyle, though Akerman never quite plays it that way, offsetting any of the ostensible tension between her and Marino. As if sensing this, then, Marino just goes all in on comedy. In doing so, the ideas of strengthening a romantic and familial bond just sort of fall by the wayside, overrun by his fish out of water insistence, though who knows what else he was supposed to do. When the movie won’t even give you lemons, just run around like a chicken with your head cut off. 

Bill & Ted Face the Music

Earlier this year, at the height of the boomer v millennial war raging across the Interwebs, Alex Pappademas wrote a piece from the perspective of Generation X, framing their notorious ambivalence and insignificance through the doomed campaign of its first Presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke. Pappademas concluded by urging them (okay, okay, us) to eschew statues and forgo naming monuments for our own, aligning ourselves instead with younger generations to offer help in any way we can since, hey, it’s their world now. Of course, William S. Preston Esq. (Alex Winter) and Theodore Logan (Keanu Reeves), two of cinema’s most celebrated Gen Xers, wound up with statues and schools named after themselves in a future they helped create, having saved the world, seemingly at odds with the entreaty of Pappademas. But then, that apparent incongruity is what renders “Bill & Ted Face the Music”, the third film in this series after 1989’s “Excellent Adventure” and 1991’s “Bogus Journey”, as something more than a quick cash grab, which would have been antithetical to Generation X, and more like a proper framing of the historical record. 

When last we left Bill & Ted, they and their band, Wyld Stallyns, had won Battle of the Bands, tendering utopia across the land. “Face the Music”, however, opens with a prologue evoking a VH1 Behind the Music special which, as any Gen Xer who sacked out on the couch for a whole weekend during the 90s can tell you, never end well. It does not end well for Bill & Ted. Though it is prophesied they will write and perform the song uniting the whole world in rhythm, the two middle-aged San Dimas dudes have hit a songwriting wall, uncertain that fulfilling the prophecy is in them. “I’m tired, dude,” Ted says to Bill. Where once the tenor of Reeves’s So Co Spicoli-ish voice sounded so carefree, so earnest, so youthful, in this line reading it bears all the tire marks of middle age, a surprisingly poignant, even painful, moment of which there are many in “Face the Music” despite its commitment to comedy.

Indeed, even Bill & Ted’s bro bond, once their greatest strength, has become a weakness. Bill & Ted’s wives, the Princesses, Joanna (Jayma Mayes) and Elizabeth (Erinn Hayes), have grown weary of their husband’s emotional entwinement, so pronounced the couples reside in side-by-side homes, and insist on therapy. Rather than attend a session one couple at a time, however, Bill & Ted and Joanna & Elizabeth attend together, much to the comical confusion of the therapist (Jillian Bell), who tries ridding these two dudes of their tendency to see Joanna and Elizabeth strictly through the prism of their own inseparable friendship. Director Dean Parisot, though, is not interested in placing this co-dependency under the microscope, just humorously acknowledging it and moving on. There are more pressing matters, in a manner of speaking, namely that time and space are about to collapse in on themselves because Bill & Ted have failed to write their world-saving song. As such, the two friends time-travel into the future to try and find the place where the song exists and bring it back, a tacit acknowledgment of where their own present failure, providing a twinge of melancholy to the entire quest.

Keeping with the spirit of twos, a parallel story emerges. As Bill & Ted go forward, their daughters, Wilhelmina “Billie” Logan (Brigette Lundy-Paine) and Theadora “Thea” Preston (Samara Weaving) go back in time, creating a band out of most excellent musicians who will help their dads play the song to save the world. As both these stories unfold, in the future, The Great Leader (Holland Taylor), convinced Bill & Ted’s death, not their song, will heal the world, dispatches a robot (Anthony Carrigan) to kill these two would-be rockers. Carrigan is funny in playing a kind of confused, mechanized version of self-actualization though, alas, Kristen Schaal as Kelly, the daughter of The Great Leader, feels constrained, which is no easy anti-accomplishment given her unique zaniness.

Of course, it’s not really Schaal’s movie, nor Carrigan’s, not even William Sadler’s, back again as bass-playing Death, this time playing the Grim Reaper as something akin to a day job until such time as he can get back into the recording studio and jam. No, this is Winter and Reeves’s movie and the nearly 30-year break has not lessened their surfer dude screwball rhythms – listening, absorbing, confirming, proceeding – which in our present world, where most comedy is digested in GIF-sized bits, feels at once archaic and refreshing, as Zen-like as it ever was. The fate of the world might be at stake, but they take the edge off. Lundy-Paine and Weaving, meanwhile, rise to the occasion by not doing Winter and Reeves impressions, not exactly, more exuding the sensation of having inherited their dads’ prominent tics while still existing on their own wavelength. They also prove to be more talented, more informed musicians than their fathers, not just “Face the Music’s” secret ingredient but its ultimate message, the daughters’ movie as much as the dads’.

There are elements of a mid-life crisis movie here. In their time-travels, Bill & Ted confront older, disappointing versions of themselves before eventually confronting their elderly selves seemingly near death. But the whole point of death in “Bogus Journey” was to prove that it’s nothing to fear and that holds true here. If there is almost too much plot, so much so that sometimes “Face the Music” can feel as if it is spinning its wheels, that also feels true to Bill & Ted’s quest, which comes to be less about saving the world, in fact, than watching the world pass them by. Their prophecy gives way to insignificance, innately Gen X and true to Pappademas’s plea for deference. Bill & Ted don’t so much face the music, it turns outs, as pass the torch.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Italian Job (1969)

The opening credits of “The Italian Job” (1969) show what movies can do. A Lamborghini Miura, piloted by Roger Beckermann (Rossano Brazzi), a cigarette coolly dangling from his lips, winds its way along the Colle del Gran San Bernardo connecting Switzerland and Italy, putting us right in the passenger seat for head-spinning panoramic views of the Western Alps. Sure, sure, Beckermann is not long for this world, his luxurious car blown up in a mountain tunnel by the Italian mob, of whom this notorious thief has run afoul. But that’s not going to mellow “The Italian Job’s” buzz. We see Beckermann again, in fact, via video, passing along details to ex-con Charlie Croker (Michael Caine) about the heist of $4 million in gold giving the movie its title. It’s akin to the IMF receiving instruction in the “Mission: Impossible” TV series and subsequent movies, though less serious, underscored in how Charlie is snacking as he receives Beckermann’s casual directive. The side profile shot of Charlie, looking up at the screen, makes him look for all the world like he’s watching a movie. 

The proper story starts with Charlie exiting jail and going straight to a suit-fitting in a stolen car, demonstrating the film’s prevalent carefree attitude. Indeed, he picks up the plans for the job from Beckermann’s widow (Lelia Goldoni), dressed in black but willing to interrupt her mourning for a roll in the hay with Charlie. The scene segueing to this roll in the hay, in fact, contains a multitude of rolls in the hay, Charlie finding himself in the company of 12, 13, 14, 15, who knows, young women, all of whom have been enlisted purely for his pleasure. Afterwards, he departs the room and enters the hallway, wobbly, hardly able to stand he’s so worn down, and in that moment you can see the line connecting Michael Caine to Mike Myers as Austin Powers.

This is the Swinging 60s, after all, pre-crisis of British manhood, the one A.O. Scott wryly mentioned in his review of “About Time.” In “The Italian Job”, the sun, to paraphrase Scott, has not yet set on “John Bull’s manly old empire.” Quite the contrary, as Charlie goes to show, not to mention Mr. Bridger (Noel Coward), the gang’s benefactor who, despite being locked up in prison, is nothing less than a sort of virtual British King. His introduction is pompously played to the hilarious hilt, escorted to the bathroom by several deferential guards, accompanied by Rule Brittania on harpsichord, a kind of metaphorical ascent to the, ahem, throne. Not to suggest he doesn’t rule with an iron fist. Coward, that old pro, improbably combines the vibe of King George III in “Hamilton” with Michael Caine’s own Jack Carter, a mafioso as royalty, or something, epitomizing the movie’s tendency toward both goofball and violence.

The team Charlie puts in place is mostly beside the point, even Benny Hill as the computer expert enlisted to manipulate a traffic jam so the crew can pilfer the gold who offer suffers form a particular fetish, one intended to generate a few ostensible laughs. Maybe it was A Different Time, I don’t know, but they seemed like jokes that would still play in 2020 at Mar-a-Lago which means they’ve always just been south of sophomoric and manifestly stupid. In any event, Caine’s performance is truly that of a team leader, massaging egos but also breaking skulls, in a manner of speaking, when required. Caine impeccably manages these disparate tones, the master of ceremonies and the star of the show, the Danny Ocean and the Rusty Ryan and even the Linus Caldwell, getting off a few good disbelieving one-liners. 

Unlike modern films in this vein, “The Italian Job” is in no hurry, taking its sweet time to put all the pieces in place for the heist, where the crew’s escape vehicles from the scene of the crime are Mini-Coopers, a Union Jack as mode of transport. This glorious car chase is epitomized in the moment when the fleet ascends the Fiat Building, evades the cops and then descends, captured not in suspenseful close-ups but frequent, comical long shots, letting us take in the whole scene like an entertained spectator. The cop cars are less pursuers than continual butts of the joke, like the sequence where they haplessly try following the Mini-Coopers thrrough the River Po and across a low dam. This moment, like others, is scored to Don Black and Quincy Jones’s “The Self Preservation Society”, underlining the inherent comedy, though the chase is equally funny when remaining au natural, such as the Mini-Coopers briefly invading a wedding party as the cars roll down the church steps. A stunt in which a car jumps from roof to roof was so dangerous that producer Michael Deely apparently had a plane on standby to whisk him out of the country in case things went wrong and the Italian authorities came calling. Perhaps that is hyperbole, but it speaks to how a movie can transform something so precarious in reality into something so blithesome on screen.

The chase ends, of course, high in the Alps with a literal cliffhanger. Perhaps, as some have convincingly argued, this emblemized Britain’s place in the world at that moment in time. Or perhaps it just goes to show that how it ends doesn’t really matter after all the joyful thrills we’ve already been through.

Ray of Light

Though this blog’s beloved “Roxanne” was released in the 80s, a very, shall we say, specific looking, feeling, sounding decade, it simultaneously cultivated a feeling of timelessness. This stemmed from its source material, Edmond Rostand’s everlasting 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, and which was emphasized in both Steve Martin’s often courtly, if relentlessly comical, air and in the soundtrack, employing Strauss’s Blue Danube Waltz and a Mozart string quartet. Still, if there was a decade that was difficult to entirely excise from a film, even a nominally ageless one, it was the 1980s. And so, the Me Decade emerges in “Roxanne” anyway, in the fashion, like Daryl Hannah’s striking jean jacket, and the music, which is not all familiar classical arrangements. The “Roxanne” score is a vintage slice of 80s synthesizer and soft rock saxophone, yes, but I’m thinking just as much about another song, one that appears in the background during a scene at the small Washington ski town watering hole.

It is not a song that dominates the scene like Teena Marie’s “Lead Me On” when Maverick and Goose enter the “target rich environment” in “Top Gun” because “Roxanne” is not that kind of movie. But the song is noticeable, underlining Roxanne’s would-be romance with Rick Rossovich’s hunky but hapless firefighter, and my ears always perked up when I heard it. It was not, alas, included on the official soundtrack, near as I can tell, though IMDb’s soundtrack credits helpfully list it. Oh. Right. The song. It’s called “Can This Be Love?”, written by Janet Minto, Pamela Barlow, Rick Boston, and some dude named –(assumes Dave Barry voice) I’m not making this up – Jeff “Skunk” Baxter. I dunno. A Jeff “Skunk” Baxter track seems like it would be more Skynyrd-y to me but appearances deceive. And anyway, it was performed by Minto and Barlow, who, I learned through the helpful Reverb Nation, were a songwriting duo in the 80s who, as “Roxanne” suggests, dreamt up songs for TV and movies. (Minto was also once married to some guy whose name I forget.) And Reverb Nation, as you can see below, helpfully provides the cut that the official soundtrack does not, one a little more buoyant in its club-readiness than Teena Marie’s boldly swaggering cut.

I have nothing else to say. Why would I? This Ray of Light is purely about the song, which flashes us back to, well, who are we kidding here, not a better time, per se, but that one its brief, transfixing spell of pure 80s provides resplendent temporary amnesia. Feel the glow! Let it show!

The Least Consequential Movie I've Ever Seen

Someone who has watched as many movies I have has encountered considerable inconsequential cinema in his time. In fact, I encountered a movie of little consequence a couple weeks ago, this movie called “The Sleepover” (review coming!). But then, “The Sleepover” is a Netflix movie, just grist for their content mill, meaning the whole point is to be inconsequential so I’m not sure that counts as the least consequential movie I’ve ever seen. And anyway, the question is, what’s the least consequential movie you’ve ever seen in a theater, not a virtual theater. (At one time I might have thought “Assassins” was among the least consequential movies I have seen but “Assassins” has inadvertently become significantly consequential given our brave new world of memes. Go figure.)

As some of our loyal frustrated followers may know, long, long ago, pre-Y2K, I was a movie projectionist/movie theater manager for a spell. And when you’re a movie projectionist, especially a movie projectionist at a freaking 16-plex, you see some inconsequential movies. Boy, do you. I spent hours putting movies together reel by reel and then would watch them to make sure I had not screwed those reels up. (I rarely did, aside from “The Mummy”, which suddenly started playing backwards late in the movie and caused me and the other theater manager watching with me to have to re-put “The Mummy”’ together at, like, 3 in the morning which was less than ideal.) Everything had to be screened, consequential or not.

I saw “Playing by Heart” which underlined its own inconsequentiality by changing its title from the from the striking “Dancing About Architecture” to that run-of-the-mill three words signifying nothing. (Good job, marketers!)

I saw “Sphere”, an experience crystallized in how the oft-frenzied Samuel L. Jackson spent most of that movie literally asleep. You and me both!

I saw “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” with that kid from “Home Improvement” during Thanksgiving week because I think it opened on Thanksgiving, or maybe the Wednesday preceding it, which was as transitory as a Lions game on Thanksgiving. 

I saw “Drive Me Crazy”, with Melissa Joan Hart, though now I wonder if I’m confusing that with “Down To You”, starring Freddie Prinze Jr. (Or possibly confusing both of them with “Get Over It”, starring Kirsten Dunst?) 

I saw “Random Hearts” where Harrison Ford’s performance approximated a weary husband on a Sunday at the department store with his wife who falls asleep outside the fitting room with a dozen shopping bags on his lap.

I saw that “Holy Man” movie with Eddie Murphy which, to paraphrase David Letterman’s classic crack about “Gigli”, was on cable television by the time I got home from the theater.

Possible fake Major League: Back to the Minors promo photo

I saw “Major League: Back to the Minors”, I know I did, though like our President believing one thing and then believing something else when Fox & Friends tells him something different, if you told me “Major League: Back to the Minors” was not actually a movie, just an IMDb entry masquerading as one, God, I might believe you.

I saw “Jack Frost” with Michael Keaton and- holy shit. I’d forgotten I’d seen “Jack Frost” until this exact second. It just popped in there.

Did I see “Dear God”? I think I did but now I’m honestly not sure. 

I saw “Inspector Gadget” with Matthew Broderick, I am sure about that, and now this whole thing has just become an exercise in reliving cinematic trauma. 

Ok. Where was I? Right. Least consequential movie I’ve ever seen. You know what movie honestly occurred to me when I began this post? “Forces of Nature”, the rom com with Sandra Bullock and Ben Affleck. And it occurred to me not because the experience of watching “Forces of Nature” was inconsequential but because, well, let the esteemed Roger Ebert explain: 

“So I'm sitting there, looking in disbelief at the ending of "Forces of Nature,'' and asking myself--if this is how the movie ends, then what was it about? We spend two endless hours slogging through a series of natural and man-made disasters with Sandra Bullock and Ben Affleck, and then ... that's it? Bronwen Hughes' "Forces of Nature'' is a romantic shaggy dog story, a movie that leads us down the garden path of romance, only to abandon us by the compost heap of uplifting endings. And it's not even clever enough to give us the right happy ending. It gives us the wrong happy ending.”

A lot of movies pass unnoticed or evaporate almost immediately from the mind but “Forces of Nature” itself is inconsequential. 

Some Drivel On...The Peacemaker

“The Peacemaker” was the inaugural release of DreamWorks Studios, the brainchild of heavy entertainment hitters David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg, which was mandatory to mention in a 1997 review, a binding critic contract we will honor in 2020 too. But perhaps being the first film out of that much-hyped stable was why they took a classic Everything and the Kitchen Sink Approach, dabbling in stolen nuclear warheads, massive New York City traffic jams, and a car chase through the Vienna streets, all serviceable though never striking, a stew of spare parts. The director was Mimi Leder, her first big screen outing, which in many ways was as admirable as it must have unanticipated, DreamWorks giving the keys to first production to a woman, in 1997, when women had it even worse in Hollywood than they do now. She came up through television, notably “ER”, and much of “The Peacemaker” feels akin to an episode of “ER”, a constant roving camera and frequent long takes, all of which feel apiece of the globe-trotting nature of the film, hopping from the U.S. to Asia and back, but the plot churns so relentlessly that its ostensible real-world implications fail to take hold and the two stars, Nicole Kidman and George Clooney, are hung out to dry, given so little space to perform, aside from a few promising scenes at the beginning, that they never catch fire. 

As the film opens, ten Russian nuclear warheads are being carried by train from a missile base to a dismantling site only to be hijacked midway through by a Russian turncoat, who takes nine for himself and leaves one behind to blow, a blast conveyed to us from the perspective of an old married couple we have only just met getting incinerated by the blast, not a human touch, reducing them to physical props to demonstrate the colossal blast zone. The turncoat, though, is just a feint for the real baddie, Dušan Gavrić (Marcel Iures), “a Serb, a Croat, a Muslim”, a piano teacher disgruntled not so much with the ongoing Yugoslav Wars as outsiders sticking their noses into this war, like Exceptionalist Americans, self-professed peacekeepers whom he aims to put in their place by detonating one of the warheads outside the NYC U.N. It’s a solid set-up, culled from a book by Andrew Cockburn and Leslie Redlich Cockburn, that adds little dimension to Gavrić’s plight, essentially just using his political statement as a thriller device, all leading to that countdown clock on a nuclear bomb that not only makes the Americans the heroes, spitting in its supposedly sympathetic villain’s eye.

It also has the Americans fall in love along the way. Well, they are supposed to have fallen in love, given the film’s final scene. And so here, faithful readers, is where we really get to the grits of the review, the reason why I am writing about a 23 year old movie that left little impact either in terms of box office or critical appeal. And that, of course, is because of its stars. Kidman is Dr. Julia Kelly, the White House’s top nuclear specialist, and Clooney is Lt. Col. Tom DeVoe, emerging as her military liaison when she is called upon to suss out what this nuclear blast means and what they should do about it. Kidman’s Aussie accent occasionally spills out when her voice rises but who cares? Why did I even mention that? She believably evinces on-the-job stress, like the conclusion. Maybe red digital readout on the bomb is cliche, as Ebert noted in his assessment, but the way Kidman has Julia master her panic to get down to brass tacks and solve this momentous problem comes across compellingly entertaining. This was pre-“Out of Sight” Clooney, of course, before Soderbergh help cure him of the head-down/eyes-up style upon which he leaned so heavily, but that roguish charm can still be glimpsed, not just in his overconfident smile but in the way he kind of shakes out his shoulders over and over, a below the neck extension of that overconfident smile. (Perhaps Clooney’s rudimentary black polo and khakis are true to military liaisons but, whatever, this is a movie, son, and he always looks better in a suit, whether rumpled or finely pressed.)

Kelly and DeVoe are set up, as they should be, as opposites waiting to attract, with Kidman introduced in a scrum of men, telling them all what to do, and Clooney found giving testimony to a Congresswoman about some undercover black market deal gone wrong culminating in a bar fight. At this point, I was, like, “Yeah, let’s do this!” Alas, if their first few scenes together, especially their Meet Cute, where he literally hijacks the meeting she’s running, suggests a Golden Age action-adventure, where the global intrigue is merely the romance’s leavening agent, their attraction mostly falls by the wayside. The tension between subsides and the screenplay troublesomely forgetting to author them crackling, never mind witty, dialogue, the plot leaving them behind.

7500

Even if you did not know that 7500 was the aviation emergency transponder code for unlawful interference – read: hijacking – you sense straight away that director Patrick Vollrath’s film is about a hijacking nonetheless. The opening images are of airport security cameras, though the footage of conspicuously Middle Eastern men is less compelling than the industrial hum in the background, like the hidden track on Wilco’s “A Ghost Is Born”, immediately evoking an eerie, unsettling sensation. That hum is evocative of “7500’s” ace sound design, from which it extracts a ton of mileage, though the security images also epitomize the film’s limitations, using the men’s presumptive nationalities as a kind of code that it never rebukes. Alas. What’s more, it suggests these men passing through security as characters and that is never the case, not quite, more just the engines of “7500’s” plot, less an authentic drama than a cinematic exercise in generating and attempting to sustain suspense for 92 minutes. 

Aside from those opening images and a couple closing ones from the cabin of an airplane, “7500” takes place entirely within the claustrophobic confines of an airline cockpit. The crew boards, including First Officer Tobias Ellis (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and immediately goes about pre-flight routines. Gordon-Levitt plays the part with a stoic professionalism, hardly moving his face, a smart decision that pays off when the shit hits the fan. Over-emoting likely would have been too much for such a small space and so he reins it in, giving us space to breath even amidst such tension. His character is in a relationship with one of the two flight attendants, Gökce (Aylin Tezel), though despite the subtle, loving looks exchanged between them, and Tobias’s ensuing confession to the Captain (Carlo Kitzlinger) about their being together, can’t help but feel more like a narrative seed than true love.

Those seeds are everywhere. When the hijackers finally mount their assault, springing into action during meal service, only one of them reaches the cockpit, seriously wounding the Captain and hurting Tobias too, before the First Officer pushes the cockpit door closed and locks it. He brutally knocks out the hijacker and manages to jerry-rig some rudimentary handcuffs, though the hijacker merely being unconscious, not dead, means his awakening and attack must happen at some point. Nevertheless, in these moments, “7500” is at its best. Vollrath and his sound design team create a convincing, exasperating cacophony through the jet’s typical white noise, the constant squawk of the control tower and a hijacker repeatedly beating he cockpit door, futilely trying to break it down, with a fire extinguisher. It’s enough to drive you batty and though Tobias impressively keeps it together, when he finally hollers into the radio that he has control of the plane but, dammit, he needs a minute, you can sense the edge. The sound puts the whole sequence on edge.

There is a frightening dissonance that emerges between the sterile environment of the cockpit and the assumed struggle between terrorists and passengers in the back. That we never see precisely what is going on only heightens that dissonance further as Tobias clinically goes about the process of rerouting the plane to a different airport for an emergency landing, focusing on his job even as so many unseen lives hang in the balance. That kind of mood, though, while chilling and effective is not enough to carry the whole movie. And so upon realizing they cannot break the door down, the hijackers in back resort to threatening passengers’ lives. It is only a matter of time until they get to Gökce, forcing Tobias’s hand and asking the question of whether the life of someone we know is more valuable than the life of someone we do not. The lack of a true relationship between them, however, only unmasks this nominal drama as a screenwriting psychological text and robs it of much suspense. That lack of character also undermines the terrorists. 

Vollrath purposely keeps us in the dark, mirroring Tobias’s headspace. No subtitles are employed so when the hijackers communicate between themselves, we don’t know what they are saying or what they want. Even when they do briefly wrest control of the plane, we possibly infer what they are up to but don’t know for certain. That accentuates the unease, furthered in the rain-smeared window that prevents us from seeing exactly where they are headed, though the eventual denouement in which Tobias and a younger hijacker (Omid Memar) find themselves alone in the cockpit is when “7500” runs out of steam. That we don’t know their motivations means the conclusion must turn entirely on its own inherent suspense, which is fine, as far as it goes, but ultimately just one more trip to the “Dog Day Afternoon” well minus the eccentric, eerie poignancy. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Dr. No (1962)

The first film of any long-running movie series is uniquely positioned, of course, though that feels doubly true of “Dr. No”, the 1962 kickoff to the James Bond franchise that now runs 24 movies, 25 once “No Time to Die” is finally released. If movie franchises are often about deepening character and situation, the Agent 007 franchise is more about adding flourish and accentuating old bits, things like gadgets and quips and martinis. The latter means that even the smallest moments in a Bond movie feel oddly weighted, like everyone is waiting to see just how this Bond orders his martini. That’s why the moment in which Daniel Craig’s 007 model orders a martini by pointedly eschewing the historical shaken edict felt like a reaction to all these aesthetic prerequisites, like isn’t this all so exhausting? These films are ostensibly just big dumb thrill rides yet they are rife with their own form of baggage, which has caused their run times to increase and to become bigger and more bloated; account for everything! That can necessitate a Back to the Basics approach, which in some ways “Casino Royale” (2006) was, but you only get to be the first movie in the series once. And though “Dr. No” is, in some ways, a bit darker than subsequent films, it also comes across, through the lens of 24 other movies, light on its feet.

The curtain on “Dr. No” raises not with some elaborate action sequence but an MI6 Station Chief in Jamaica being killed. This death is what prompts MI6 to send Agent 007, James Bond (Sean Connery), to the Caribbean Island to investigate. This sets up director Terence Young’s saga as less a barn burning blockbuster than a detective story, the facts leading him to a remote island called Crab Key where the enigmatic eponymous character resides, ready to disrupt a space launch with his patented radio beam. 007’s getting to Crab Key, however, requires the aid of boatman Quarrel (John Kitzmiller), hailing from the Cayman Islands, which, in tandem with the prominent Jamaica setting, cannot help but draw out colonialist themes. Why Jamaica gained independence only a few months before “Dr. No” was released, giving the entire adventure a whiff of a last hurrah, this debonair Brit emerging to save the day. This idea is only enhanced by the stereotypical presentation of Quarrel, constantly drinking from a jug of rum, laughed by Bond and a white American CIA agent for believing Crab Key houses an evil dragon. Quarrel’s demise at the hands of that dragon, however, which proves to be a dragon-esque flame-throwing tank, proves the single most affecting moment in the whole movie, the slightly crude production design enhancing an unlikely sensation of vérité, truly epitomizing a nightmare coming true.

It is troubling, then, if not revealing, that “Dr. No” hardly lingers on this death - nay, does not linger on this death all. After Quarrel is killed, Bond does not shed a tear, does not even mention Quarrel’s name again. No, once Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress), the legendary bikinied shell collector appears, she becomes 007’s sidekick, as if the movie is trading a native for a white tourist. It is doubly illustrative of Bond’s casualness. Just like discovering the driver sent to pick him at the airport was not really sent to pick him up at all but take him out, or that Miss Taro (Zena Marshall), the Government receptionist, is a double agent, he hardly bats an eye, wading right into danger before leisurely turning the table. That’s true of all future Bonds, of course, and, like drinking shaken martinis, nonchalance in the face of danger has become a kind of recurring joke. And though Connery frequently walks through this movie, even through scenes in a radiation suit, with significant nonchalance, he sometimes seems to take the proceedings with such a lack of seriousness that he shades into smug misogynist. Sometimes, like in his scene with Miss Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell), where he cuddles her at her desk like they are beneath the moonlight, he does both.

Dr. No, meanwhile, the chief heavy played with considerable eccentricity by Joseph Wiseman, might deserve to be judged by his own merits rather than comparing him, long after the fact, to the Mike Myers parody of him as Dr. Evil in the “Austin Power” series. But much like “Airplane!” was so dead-on in its parody of “Airport” that it is hard to take the latter seriously, so has Dr. No, through no fault of Wiseman, been rendered moot in his villainous power. Watching him is like watching Dr. Evil deem his master plan the Death Star and not understanding why everyone is cracking up. That is not, however, to say that Dr. No is entirely incapacitated where evil is concerned. Quite the contrary, as the scene where he remains unseen, just heard, ordering a flunkie to take a tarantula and sick it on Bond retains all its power. This scene, apparently, came to be only because the production had next to no money left and set designer Ken Adam was forced to get creative, marking “Dr. No” as a throwback in more ways than one. The new Bond, “No Time to Die”, cost $250 million, the previous Bond, “Spectre”, cost anywhere from $245 to $350 million. Adam, by his own estimate, had all of 450 pounds to render Dr. No’s lair, a persuasive argument for not just throwing money at your problems and relying instead on a little good old fashioned ingenuity. I’d drink a martini, shaken or stirred, to more of that.

10 Not-at-TIFF Movies to Watch

This is normally the moment in the blogging calendar when Cinema Romantico proffers an alternate festival program to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), the epicenter of the film festival circuit. TIFF is still happening, if an altered format, and we still want to provide our loyal frustrated followers with 10 Not at TIFF movies to see. However, while our Not-at-TIFF slate is typically festive, eclectic, irreverent, this, of course, is 2020. And here in America, where COVID-19 is either just going to magically go away at some indeterminate point in the future, not that bad despite nearly 190,000 dead so stop wearing a mask and go sit indoors, you pansy, or a hoax perpetrated by The Media, the Radical Left Democrats, ANTIFA, and some new group of violent agitators that just emerged from the shadows of the alley behind a furniture outlet store that the President, King Big Brain I, only just learned about but is looking at very strongly, things are on an express elevator to hell, going down. And we want to honor that bleakness in our Not-at-TIFF slate. It wouldn’t feel right if we didn’t. We do not apologize. Ask His Imbecility for an apology (ha!) instead.

10 Not-at-TIFF Movies to Watch

The Towering Inferno (1974). Not a great movie, not even a good movie, but Not-at-TIFF 2020 is a theoretical program. And a movie about cost-cutting and magical thinking yielding disaster feels like the perfect curtain-raiser.

Last Night (1998). This is 2020. Enough with those End of the World movies where the world doesn’t actually end, okay?

Light Sleeper (1992). I have never really had trouble sleeping but in 2020...I’m having all kinds of trouble. In fact, it was the preeminent political pundit Sebastian Bach, who in talking with Esquire about His Imbecility’s imbecilic moniker for his challenger, said “And then he says Sleepy Joe. I can’t think of something I’d rather do more than get a good night’s fucking sleep. If Joe Biden will bring us a good night’s sleep after four fucking years, who won’t vote for that? Bring on the sleep, man.”

He Loves Me… He Loves Me Not (2002). My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife has spent most of 2020’s Never Ending Quarantine Because America Can Do Anything Except Get Its Shit Together When People Ask Them To Wear Masks curating a rom com film festival. And I get it. Rom coms go down easy. But this is Not-at-TIFF 2020. Our vibe is different. And Audrey Tatou’s ’02 rom com only begins as a rom com before pulling the rug out from under us.

The Stepford Wives (1975). You’re frightened the Radical Left is going to abolish the suburbs through decree by way of waving a leftist magic wand? This is why they should abolish the suburbs, you bunch of cowering country club freedom fries.

Rollerball (1975). That phrase you keep using, that one about how sports are a distraction that we need right now, might not, to paraphrase Inigo Montoya, mean what you think it means.

Saturday Night Fever (1977). Eventually every kid who’s been taught by the oblivious brainwashed masses that Disco Sucks! and thinks “Saturday Night Fever” is some So Bad It’s Good slice of processed cheese finally watches it and is forced to confront the fact that it’s dark and depressing and all about how dreams don’t come true and that disco, beautiful disco, was the only escape.



Some Girls: Live In Texas ’78. Live music does not appear to be coming back any time soon. So let’s watch The Rolling Stones at the height of their powers. Because I don’t want sunshine or spirit; I want the Stones at their sleaziest.

Night Train to Paris (1964). Sorry, pal, but this isn’t the festival for wacky Leslie Nielsen comedies; this is the festival for early, serious Leslie Nielsen movies you didn’t even know existed.

Mars Attacks! Don’t worry, if you think Not-at-TIFF 2020 has been too much of a downer, we’ll end here, with the US Capitol burnt to a crisp, yes, but a mariachi band playing The Star Spangled Banner, All Time Top 5 President Taffy Dale (Natalie Portman) and Tom Jones, heroically emerging into the light, a renewal, a rebirth. I can’t wait.

Ray of Light

Ed Harris eating Saltines in “The Firm.” That’s all.

Some Drivel On...The Firm

Released in June 1993, six months ahead of “The Pelican Brief”, “The Firm” was the first of the not-called Grisham Wave, movies culled from adaptations of John Grisham print legal thrillers. As someone who has grown weary of a Hollywood only interested in big, bigger or biggest, I yearn for middlebrow trash in the vein of Grisham and finally, for the first time since I rented it from the small video store in my hometown so many moons ago, I returned to the semi-big bang of the Grisham-verse. But if I went in hoping to uncover something new about what makes courtroom cinema click, I unexpectedly came away with a deeper understanding of Cruise – that is, Tom.

“The Firm” begins with Cruise in full “Cocktail” mold, playing Mitch McDeere, a striving eager beaver who has just graduated from law school. It makes sense, then, given that Cruise go-getter grin, that when some unknown law firm in Memphis make Mitch and his wife Abby (Jeanne Tripplehorn) an offer too good to be true, he would seize on it. It turns out, of course, after they settle in and Mitch signs on The Firm’s dotted line that not everything is copacetic. No, The Firm is a front for the Mafia and the Mafia’s money laundering. It’s obvious, maybe, but the way it ends, with a punchline more than a punch, turning on the Firm’s propensity for overbilling, almost makes one think the movie might be on its own joke, seeking to portray corporate America and the mob as one and the same. But Grisham, as he did in “The Rainmaker”, cannot help but make googly eyes at the Law and all that the capital letter entails. By following it, Mitch is able to thread the needle.

In doing a little post-movie reading, I discovered “The Firm” had a little pre-release squabbling. It seems that upon entering the production late, Gene Hackman, playing Mitch’s Firm mentor Avery Tolar, asked for his name to be placed above the title on the poster. Cruise’s contract, however, stipulated that only his name appear above the title. Hackman then requested his name appear nowhere on the poster. In some ways, this saddened me, a noted iconoclast like Hackman caring in the first place about such minor marketing rubbish, though he was a temperamental iconoclast so perhaps it rang true. Whatever, this dispute did not affect his performance. I struggle to describe what he is doing except to say you do not really notice what he’s doing; he just does it. He innately inhabits his character, a little slimy, a little unscrupulous but quietly sympathetic in the way he seems to acknowledge without really acknowledging at all how this life in the Firm has spiritually undone him. Cruise, on the other hand, lets you see what he’s doing every step of the way.

One of the emergent plot narratives is that when Mitch and Abby learn The Firm’s dark secret and cooperate with the FBI, sort of, they are required to act like nothing is amiss. Cruise, though, approaches myriad moments as if EVERYTHING is amiss. The most unbelievable element of “The Firm”, in fact, is that Avery never deduces Mitch’s real motives considering Cruise allows the whole truth and nothing but the truth to be written across Mitch’s face. But at the same time, whenever “The Firm” indulges its inner-thriller and really requires Cruise to get physical, his ultra-commitment works. There is a moment near the start when, upon seeing a kid performing gymnastics on the street, Mitch just erupts into a series of back flips. It’s set up for later when, pursued by The Firm’s assassin, Mitch hides by hanging from the ceiling. But simply to see Cruise in this moment, hanging from the ceiling, sweat accumulating on his face, is to believe his character could do this regardless of whether or not we see him back flipping. Watch how he runs, either after his wife or away from the bad guys, still carrying a briefcase and improbably you see a logical line from “The Firm” to the recent scene in “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” when he runs for, like, five minutes through the streets of London. To see Tom Cruise run is to see Tom Cruise in his natural acting habitat, not having to convince us of anything but his own unrelenting sense of physical purpose.

We all remember when Tom jumped up and down on Oprah’s couch; it made him the butt of all the jokes. But Cruise was telling us something about himself, something that you see just as clearly in “The Firm” as in these recent “M:I” pop masterpieces. In that moment, on Oprah’s couch, he stripped away everything else, leaving only the zany-eyed commitment. 

My Favorite College Football Games: Game 14

Loyal frustrated followers might recall that last autumn, Cinema Romantico, nominally a movie blog, departed that realm on Saturdays to discuss its favorite college football games. Turns out this series no one probably read might have come a year early, though perhaps not, since I felt as if there was something I needed to get out about my love of this complicated game before…who knew what. Who knew what might well be all this. But. There was one more game, a 14th game, I wanted to write about right at the end of the series and did not because I could not quite figure out what I wanted to say about it. That game, however, is generally considered one of college football’s worst, if not the worst, and given what’s going on, well, it seems appropriate, if not poetic, to write about this game in 2020 rather than 2019. Cheers, or whatever the sorrowful opposite of cheers is. 

November 19, 1983: Oregon – 0 Oregon State – 0

In writing about the fabled 1992 NCAA Tournament East Regional between Duke and Kentucky, Sports Illustrated’s Alexander Wolff provided defining criteria for what constitutes a great basketball game: drama, significance and quality of play. Let’s apply Wolff’s idea to college football and tweak. What would make for a bad college football game – nay, the worst college football game ever played? First, college football’s nadir should be a game that was, simply, ineptly played, like Iowa averaging one yard per rush and gaining but 168 total yards while “holding” Penn State to a couple safeties in an odious 6-4 win in 2004. Second, the worst college football game ever played must stand out in some way, attaining an infamous sort of significance, like Texas Tech and Centenary in 1939 combining for an NCAA record 77 punts in a rain-ridden scoreless tie. Finally, the worst college football game of all time should broach the realm of tragicomic, like Wake Forest’s double-overtime 6-3 win over Virginia Tech, so amusingly woebegone it launched a beloved meme, or Georgia Tech’s legendary 222-0 demolition of poor Cumberland in 1916, accompanied by as many tall tales as eye-popping stats, a necessary chapter in any book of strange but true sports stories.

Oregon and Oregon State achieved all this and more on November 19, 1983. A faux-festive glut of gaffes, the teams combined for 11 fumbles, five interceptions, and four missed field goals in what will stand the test of time, given the sport’s advent of overtime in 1995, as the last 0-0 game in college football history. Played in an onslaught of Pacific Northwest rain, vividly described by Oregon Coach Rich Brooks as “coming down the steps like waterfalls”, the game has colloquially come to be known as The Toilet Bowl. That nickname, in fact, so apropos and descriptive, is what, I suspect, has made such a woeful game everlasting. After all, contested in an era when few games were televised, it’s not like many people saw it. Was it that bad? Well, reader, by virtue of the Oregon State Athletic Department recording a game seemingly without any virtue at all and uploading that video to the Internet, I, having watched it, can confirm the legends are true.

Though the announcers repeatedly deem it a game of field position, suggesting it as one in which the defenses hold the offenses at bay, it’s more an unrelenting comedy of errors, where for every good play there are nine bad ones and three egregious ones, foreshadowed in an opening drive that concludes with Oregon State fumbling the ball away. Attempts at downed punts near the opponent’s goal line are muffed and quarterbacks and running backs go the wrong way on simple handoffs and collide. When a receiver is wide open in the end zone, the Oregon quarterback throws the ball at his feet and when the Oregon quarterback hits a wide receiver square in the numbers, the receiver drops it. Oregon tries a trick play early in the 4th quarter by having a running back throw deep though his fake run is hardly convincing, more bizarrely shambolic, and his hurl into triple coverage is inevitably intercepted; on Oregon State’s ensuing play, they try to a run a reverse to the tight end but the play ends before it starts, called off by a procedure penalty. This is how it goes. If the game can be defined by a single play it is the first one of the second quarter when the Oregon State punter fields the long snap, nearly fumbling it given the rain, and kicks it away to the Oregon return man who fields it and, yes, fumbles it right back to Oregon State. As the Oregon State defender sprints off the field, celebrating, he loses his grip on the ball and, trying to snag it out of mid-air, loses his footing and tumbles to the turf along with the ball. It’s the rare pratfall dead ball fumble. It’s the slapstick aurora borealis.

We have a predilection for finding inspiration in the worst moments. It’s instinct to watch the Toilet Bowl and want to dress it up in some unlikely encouraging light. But there is no light to be found, only grey skies and rain, which Ladd McKittrick, the unfortunate Oregon State quarterback that day, understood. “Are you really going to do this to me?” he asked OregonLive for a commemorative Toilet Bowl piece, admirably forgoing applying some quasi-silver lining to a painful memory to essentially plead the fifth. “I wasn’t there. I don’t remember it.” In that same article, Rich Brooks was quoted as telling reporters afterwards: “It was like neither team wanted to win. It seemed like there was a force out there that said, ‘We aren't going to let either team score.’” That is a familiar losing refrain, writing off losing as cosmic intervention rather than looking inward at what you, as coach, might have done wrong. But in the case of 1983 Oregon / Oregon State, reader, I am, for once, inclined to accept this explanation as not mere coach speak but astute observation, an apt description of gridiron destiny.

On the game’s first drive, Oregon State’s play-by-play man mentions that a colleague has literally opened an umbrella inside the press box on account of sideways rain, an image the cameraman picks up a little later. It’s not just funny, it’s the Toilet Bowl in visual capsule, the rare time a football game was not just a football game but something more, a manifestation of that old idiom: into each life a little rain must fall.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Saturday's Heroes (1937)

“Saturday’s Heroes” opens with a couple folks trying to buy tickets to the big Calton college football game only to find they are all sold out. Not to worry as an unscrupulous scalper with a suitably thin mustache immediately approaches and offers them a couple tickets at an extraordinarily higher price. Nevertheless, these eager fans accept, and in the next scene we see with whom the unscrupulous scalper is in league: none other than Val Webster (Van Heflin), star quarterback of the Calton team! Egads! Not that it matters, really, since we see his coach, Doc Thomas (Minor Watson), see his star with the scalper and shrug it off as just one of those things while the puffed up news reporter, Red Watson (Richard Lane), hanging around promises Val more problems with what he puts in print about the cock of walk’s quarterbacking than these sorts of pesky illegalities. These interconnected opening scenes deftly set up college football’s ecosystem, then and now, revolving around a big game generating a pretty profit that doesn’t go to the players, causing them to find other ways to get their share of the pie, while the media – pardon me, The Media™ – wields influence over the whole ethically questionable stew. Rather than continuing along this track, however, dramatically rendering the game’s corruption and transgression to lay it all bare, director Edward Killy and his trio of writers combine a pronounced anti-pigskin PSA in the manner of so many 1930s anti-reefer films (don’t play college football, kids!) with elements of a lighthearted college football comedy also emblematic of the era. If the result is short, running not quite an hour, “Saturday’s Heroes” still feels both ham-handed and leaden.

In his early scenes, Val has a cocky gleam in his eye, getting his, selfish and proud of it. This selfishness does not go unnoticed by Red, who writes it up in the papers, leading to a fistfight between reporter and player, the glory days when such disagreements were settled by fists rather than Tweets. Val, of course, must get called on the carpet for his sins and so he does, both by his girlfriend, Frances (Marian Marsh), and his friend, Ted (John Arledge), two relationships evocative of the tonal split in the movie. The former tries to impress upon him the need for working hard to get by rather than scamming the system; she is also the coach’s daughter, setting up rom com machinations that never take flight. (It also made me envision an alternate universe where ex-Alabama quarterback A.J. McCarron dated Kristen Saban instead of Katherine Webb.) Ted, on the other hand, is a sadsack, pressed into service against his wishes as a ringer for another college football team, found out and then left to take the fall himself. He commits suicide, which feels slightly at odds not just with Val and Frances’s will they/won’t they but with the dumb comedy on the side, like Val’s slow-witted teammate repeatedly suffering as the butt of semi-funny jokes.

“Saturday’s Heroes” might have worked better by carving out time to see Ted’s story. As it is, he’s hardly in the movie, just a tragic martyr invented to get offed so Val has some inspiration to go on the offensive. Likewise, Frances is mostly just a scold, there to stand in the way or help him along, inadvertently underlining the notion that Val puts himself on a pedestal; he’s the only character the movie really sees. Though Heflin excels in his moments of smug justification, the two-dimensional screenplay hems him in as he becomes a crusader, never quite able to let his dueling qualities properly bleed into one another. What’s more, his character’s scheme for exposing the system’s corruption is to get a role coaching another team, all leading to a showdown on the field, allowing “Saturday’s Heroes” to end with a big game even as it ostensibly calls out the game’s hypocrisies, hypocrisy in and of itself, perhaps a fitting end for a movie about a sport that can never reconcile its own failings.