A New Year’s Missive

The other day My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I took a walk along one of our usual routes, passing a house we had not passed more than a week ago. Except now the house was gone, having been knocked down, the bulldozer still standing there, as if proudly lingering over its demolition. If, as cursory research suggested, this bulldozing stemmed from the lot having been sold, whoever previously owned the house seemed to have left behind a few possessions, including a wooden rocking horse, sitting beside the front steps that now led to nothing. We had simply wanted to go for a stroll to get out of the house and to try and briefly fool ourselves into thinking it was not 2020 but here was a 2020 metaphor staring us straight in the face, the wooden rocking horse’s googly eye seeming stricken, like it was asking, in what I imagine as a high-pitched, frantic squeak, “What just happened?” The yard sign a few houses down decreeing that Everything Will Be OK felt even more untrue than usual framed through this light. Everything Will Be OK? Tell that to the rocking horse, man.

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As you get older, the so-called Magic of Christmas inevitably dissipates, not just in discovering how all those presents under the tree accumulate overnight but from the season’s overwhelming commercialization and how time just doesn’t stop when Christmas beckons, that life, in all its profound complications and misery, goes on. It is not just the Magic of Christmas that evaporates, however, but the less-mentioned magic of New Year’s Eve too. When you’re young, staying up until midnight means the forbidden is suddenly permitted, allowing you to experience how those hours you have heretofore only spent sleeping feel. It does not take long, though, for that innocent magic to be compromised, whether by drunken revelry that Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve somehow managed to keep offscreen or the shattered belief that a ball dropping in Times Square signals a Fresh Start, a New Beginning. The New Year’s Baby, it turns out, is a bigger myth than Santa Claus. 

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If last New Year’s Eve I had no idea in the coming weeks that, after My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife confirmed via phone with the CVS nearest to us that toilet paper was still in stock, I would be rushing out the door at 8:00 at night, past shuttered bars and restaurants with chairs up on the tables, no one on the street save for a lone dude in a mask passing me going the other way, a dog literally howling in the distance, I nevertheless had a sneaking suspicion that 2020 was going to be bad. I even have the blog post to prove it. And the wariness I took into 2020 is the same wariness I take into 2021, the belief that turning the page will not magically make everything from the last ten months, never mind the preceding four years, heal. But while I considered going to the Keira Knightley meme well one more time, in the manner my faithful frustrated followers demand, proffering an Unamused Keira face with a caption saying something like “tfw when someone tells you 2021 will be better”, I could not bring myself to do it.  

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I have been thinking a lot about New Year’s 1988. I had already stayed up until midnight for New Year’s, like the previous one, though we spent that December 31st at the home of family friends and what I remember is horsing around all night with their kids, not the clock striking midnight. At the end of 1987, on the other hand, in my own house and armed with noisemakers, I was ready. Mid-evening my mom instructed my younger sister and me to stay out of the basement so Grandpa and Grandma could take a pre-celebration nap. It didn’t make sense to me then, of course, but it makes sense to me now (like a couple New Year’s Eves ago when I took my friend Cindy up on her offer of 10:30 PM coffee). And I remember the cheerfully eerie feeling leading up to 12:00 AM. I didn’t have the understanding or vocabulary to explain it then but I do now; it was anticipation, like the feeling I get before a concert of a band I really, really like or a transatlantic flight to somewhere new.

Not long after midnight on that first day of 1988, my mom led my sister and me upstairs and told us to look out the back window, to “look,” she said, “at the New Year.” I remember seeing the snow, the way it sloped down the train tracks behind our house. I must have seen the grain elevator too, the faint red light at the top, and probably the Casey’s General Store across the way, closed up and darkened for the night. I do remember thinking how it didn’t look much different then it did a few hours ago. Still, I kept looking, hoping I might see something new. 

A Christmas Blog

Home for the holidays here in 2020 means, well, staying home – you know, the same damn place we’ve been since March. That’s why I was compelled to seek out “A Muppet Family Christmas” (1987). Though not one of the vintage Christmas television programs, a la “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “A Charlie Brown Christmas”, that re-airs every year, in our streaming age it’s out there and readily available on YouTube where, in lieu of being able to go home and hug my people, I watched it for the first time since I was ten. Indeed, it is not just The Muppets of the title present at the country home of Fozzie Bear’s mother but the Sesame Street gang and the denizens of Fraggle Rock too; it’s a Jim Henson Family Christmas. The familial mood is so jovial that by the end, Statler and Waldorf, the two most disagreeable hecklers alive, are singing “peace on earth, good will to men.” 

‘Round about then I realized that trying to elevate my mood with “A Muppet Family Christmas” just felt disingenuous, akin to piping in fake crowd noise at pandemic sporting events that probably should not be played in the first place; accept our miserable reality, you cowards. This, after all, is ostensibly the time of year to emphasize the unfortunate, food drives and the festive din of Salvation Army bells, except a great deal of people in positions to make a difference have played out A Christmas Carol Christopher Nolan-style, in reverse. Their tight-fisted hands at the grindstone despite the prospect for so many of a grim holiday without underlined the American divide between top and bottom that 2020 had already rendered so starkly, and that is to say nothing of the broader Scrooge-ish selfishness that still, even now, is being misconstrued for personal liberty. I identified more with the snowman who briefly becomes part of Fozzie’s act but, inevitably, upon starting to melt when brought indoors to tell jokes, gets left out in the cold.

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Growing up, my family was not a go-to-the-movies-on-Christmas kind, save for one Christmas, that is, December 25, 1986. For reasons I do not exactly recall, perhaps because it was the rare holiday in which none of our relatives visited, my mother and father decided we would be attending a screening of “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.” At that age, interested in college football to the exclusion of all else, I was incensed, what with being taken away from the Sun Bowl. But that Sun Bowl turned out to be a boring game and, anyway, “Star Trek IV” blew my mind. To this decided non-Trekkie, “The Voyage Home” is not just the high point of the series but a classic screwball comedy that just happens to involve time travel (with a green message thrown in). Still, when I think of “Star Trek IV”, I can’t help but think of that Christmas Day screening, a full theater full of laughter, evoking how the season’s oft-mentioned mirth can just as ably be conjured by cinema as caroling or trimming the tree. 

In the late 90s, I worked at a movie theater, meaning I spent some Christmases flinging concessions and threading projectors. A virtually empty lobby in the afternoon would give way to a crowded one at night. It wasn’t joyous, per se, for what job is truly joyous, but I always remember feeling less infuriated than festive. Everyone there was a family that desperately needed to get out of the house and had gathered around the sliver screen for silent solace. Marc Acito described this Christmas Day moviegoing tradition in his lovely 2008 NPR commentary, comparing the flickering myths of the big screen to the fires burned ages ago on December 21st to urge the sun’s return. It’s funny, in a normal year, home for the holidays, I wouldn’t even think of going to the movies. But in 2020, unable to go home, it’s all I can think about, sitting in the dark of a theater, appealing to the flickering lights for rebirth.

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There was a significant astronomical event this week. The two biggest planets in our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn, aligned in the sky for the first time since 1226. It elicited comparisons to another conjunction, the Star of Bethlehem, the one that came to settle over where Jesus was born, luring the three wisemen, as told in the Gospel of Matthew. This Christmas Star, at least according to German astronomer Johannes Kepler, was not mythical but a factual supernova, Mars aligning with Jupiter and Saturn, in 7 B.C. Of course, the validity of Kepler’s theory has been questioned, if not shredded, just as you can question the logic of so many other purported Star of Bethlehem explanations. But that comes across like questioning the validity or logic of a monster lurking in the depths of Loch Ness. What interests me is not whether the Christmas Star was real but what that story in The Gospel of Matthew was meant to represent; namely, rebirth. 

The 2020 star would seem a great metaphor for our own time, not merely coinciding with the Winter Solstice but the release of COVID-19 vaccines that may finally stem our ongoing plague. But it is not lost on me that America’s ostensible leader, King Big Brain I, perhaps a spiritual descendant to Herod, spent much of 2020 twisting that metaphor of radiant renewal, citing a light at the end of the tunnel over and over in his patented mixture of imbecility, irresponsibility and magical thinking. And it is not lost on me that so many took his magical thinking as gospel. And it is not lost on me that so many people in positions of power to call out his magical thinking not only cowardly and cravenly fell in line but now are cutting to the front of the line for scientific relief, enacting another metaphor, the one about lifeboats and the S.S. Titanic. That ship sinking symbolized the end of the Gilded Age, or so you can extract, but the idea of our Biblical Plague symbolizing the end of Gilded Age II, which sounds neat, seems less and less capable of coming true, our Christmas Star a bright light yielding nothing but a New Normal (all over again).

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It’s weird to say but no less true, that in a year when my three favorite musical artists – Bruce Springsteen, Lady Gaga and Kylie Minogue – all released albums, the album release I most looked forward to was Kathleen Edwards’s “Total Freedom.” Every review and personal profile was obligated to recite its backstory, so we will try to keep it short: burned out on music and the music industry, the Canadian singer/songwriter quit in 2012 to open a coffee shop in her native Ontario called, aptly, Quitters. Even if at certain points in the last four years I listened to Edwards obsessively because I hungered for her commentary amid All This, I honestly thought she would never return. As much as I needed her then, though, who knew she’d come back when I needed her most? 

Music was my solace in The Year of the Pandemic more than movies. Not because the movies were bad, and not because of some undefinable but seemingly imminent wholesale shift in the industry itself, but because I discovered that my long-standing joke about the movie theater being a sanctuary proved to be true. The cinema, it turns out, is where I go to clear my mind and avoiding the cinema in 2020 meant my mind was, to quote Elaine Benes, not good. I survived weeks at a time on the strength of single songs and continually consulted certain albums when times got tough(est). My favorite album in 2020, though, was from 2019, Sturgill Simpson’s “Sound and Fury”, its noise and vitriol embodying everything I felt about being cooped up, overworked and living in a nation that struggled to deal with the pandemic not least because it would not deal with the pandemic in the first place, music as a middle finger. Kylie Minogue’s “Disco”, on the other hand, was the antidote to Everything, letting us lose it, to quote Kylie from a different album, in the music. “Where Does the D.J. Go?” was essentially her version of Springsteen’s “Out on the Street”; “the world’s trying to break me / I need you to save me.” In her accompanying livestream concert, she epitomized the album’s spirit, a dance party at home for one, the accompanying backup dancers more like figments of her imagination. .

On her new record’s autobiographical opening cut, “Glenfern”, Kathleen Edwards, as she will, met these ideas in the middle. The song is pure Kathleen, free of inspirational poster wisdom and castles in the sky, seeing things not through a silvery gauze but utterly clear-eyed, honest, unsentimental and profane. She takes stock of everything and decides that it was, simply, shit. Then, she gives thanks anyway. 

Top 10 Movies of 2020: Specifically 2020 Edition

It’s the end of the year and that means end of the year lists. Of course, this is the end of 2020 which, it goes without saying, though I’ll say it anyway, was a weird, miserable year. Many of the movies that were supposed to be released in 2020 had their release dates moved to next year. Movie theaters were shuttered across the country, some indefinitely, some permanently. What strange, new, possibly bleak future awaits the entire industry is subject to whenever we manage to extricate ourselves from this unrelenting pandemic. I watched 2020 movies, sure, many of them, if not as many of them as I would have in any other year. I liked some of them a lot. But now, as my inbox is flooded with year-end screeners, I feel, frankly speaking, burned out on streaming and just burned out in general, less inclined to watch new movies than ever. A typical year end list through this lens feels not so much impossible as something closer to a lie, not the kind of list to match the mood. Perhaps if this was another blog, another publication, subjected to an editor’s exacting standards, we’d have to play by the hoary rules. As it is, this blog answers to no one but itself. Here, in alphabetical order, are the best movies I watched in 2020. 

Top 10 Movies of 2020: Specifically 2020 Edition

The August Virgin (2020)

In evoking the languid atmosphere of a few hot August weeks in Madrid, director Jonás Trueba, who co-wrote with his star Itsaso Arana, equates Finding Yourself with an earthly miracle. 

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (2020)

The Ross Brothers’ not-really-a-documentary documentary reimagines the edge of the earth of ancient times as the last 24 hours of a Las Vegas dive bar, or something. 

Dark Waters (2019)

I want more Diane Lane Goes To Pretty Places movies, certainly, I have not been shy in professing that, but do you know what I really want? I really want more movies like “Dark Waters,” pop filmmaking with a serious auteurist bent. 

The Edge of Democracy (2019)

Less a documentary, really, than a personal essay, Petra Costa brilliantly, sorrowfully suggests democracy is less a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives, than an impossible dream always waiting to come true. 

Infinite Disco (2020)

Let’s be real, I was probably never happier all 2020 than I was during Kylie Minogue’s livestream concert in early November to promote her new album “Disco.” 

Last of the Mohicans (1992)

In my single experience, your favorite movie just pops that much more during a pandemic. 

Monterey Pop (1968)

With live music effectively canceled in 2020, I rejoiced in going back to Monterey Pop. Turns out Janis Joplin singing “Ball & Chain” was the prototype for Ally singing “Shallow.” 

Roman Holiday (1953)

Entertaining and affecting, affecting and entertaining, two Movie Stars acting and two actors being Movie Stars, director William Wyler utilizing an impeccably crafted screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, Ian McLellan Hunter and John Dighton to visually tell the story, yeah, I’m pretty sure “Roman Holiday” is the perfect movie.

Tokyo Olympiad (1965)

I’ll think about the Olympian eating a sandwich at the Olympics during his Olympic event for the rest of my life.

The Vast of the Night (2020)

Evokes the simultaneous terror and wonder in simply listening and looking up.

On the Rocks

“On the Rocks”, in which Laura (Rashida Jones) is pushed by her playboy father Felix (Bill Murray) to investigate her husband Dean (Marlon Wayans) possibly having an extra-marital affair, bears all the elements of screwball. What transpires, however, is not frenetic or even laugh-out-loud so much as chilled out, dry, like a deceptively strong martini that leaves you reeling. Sofia Coppola, who wrote and directed, in tandem with editor Sarah Flack, favors long shots and two shots of her two actors, usually drinking cocktails with an air of melancholy in dimly New York hotel bars. This makes great hay of Jones’s unmatched skepticism, pursing her lips and rolling her eyes, taking whatever bit of bluster masquerading as philosophy that Murray’s character emits at any given time and both letting it register and roll right off. In Laura and Felix’s first conversation over lunch, Coppola cuts between a medium shot of Murray and a reverse shot of Laura, quietly underlining the dynamic, how he fills a room at the expense of everyone else and she is forced to navigate his casual sexism, his offhand cruelty. After all, before the film even fades in, we hear Felix in voiceover state “And remember, don’t give your heart to any boys. You are mine until you get married. Then you’re still mine.”  

“On the Rocks” begins on Laura and Dean’s wedding night. Wearing just her skivvies and her veil, she jumps into a pool where Dean lounges, a romantic moment doubling as an emblematic leap of faith. But as the movie flashes forward to the present, her faith is being tested. Not just by Dean, away frequently on business with myriad conspicuous clues that he might be seeing a co-worker on the sly, but in her work as a writer and in her role as a mother of two. Coppola’s prologue before Felix enters the picture, of Laura ferrying her kids to school activities, getting them to bed, not so much talking to another mother (Jenny Slate) as just listening to her vent, trying to find time to write, deftly evinces a life flying by and standing still at once; a simple cut from giving her daughter a bath to boiling noodles brings home motherhood’s strange push/pull between satisfaction and sameness. This tone-setter concludes with Laura sprawled on her bed, echoing the opening shot to Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation”, though less wistful. Laura is just worn out. 

When Felix, shows up, he does not rejuvenate, despite what he may think, but complicates and frustrates and exacerbates. Murray deploys his patented master of ceremonies air to perfectly, comically embody the kind of good cop grandfather to Laura’s bad cop mom, walking right in and catering to his grandchildren’s every whim, making them milkshakes, letting them watch a television program for adults. That sort of here for you now, gone tomorrow vibe dominates his every decision, even as he inserts himself into his daughter’s life, not so much encouraging Laura’s suspicions about Dean as driving them, taking her on a wild ride, evoked in the literal car ride they take on a woefully designed stakeout where, in trying to follow Dean’s taxi, Felix runs a red light in his sports car and gets pulled over.

The scene is “On the Rocks” in capsule. Not only does Felix insert himself into his daughter’s personal dilemma and make it all about him, he charms his way out of a ticket, appealing to the cop’s sense of family (Felix knows his dad), quietly evoking a wealthy white man’s relationship with the police and demonstrating how easy the world is for him, how it bends to his whims even when he makes a mess of a things. But if “On the Rocks” has a breezy air about it, rest assured, Coppola, unlike the police, is not letting him off scot-free. Because Laura isn’t. In a late scene, she confronts him on making a mess of things, a question he dances around, admitting fault in the powerful man’s way, by not quite saying what he did and conspicuously stopping short of saying he’s sorry. It is a dark undercurrent in a movie where the narrative only appears slight upon first glance, not building to any grand revelation or life-changing admission but rather the gradual realization that life already is what you thought it was.

Friday's Old Fashioned: C'était un rendez-vous (1976)

In “13 Days of France”, the crown jewel of Olympics documentaries, chronicling the1968 Grenoble Winter Games, director Claude Leouch literally attached a camera to a skier as he followed another skier racing down the hill. To Lelouch, no matter how effective standard issue television camera angles were at capturing a skier fighting against g-forces and flying off hills, they did not sufficiently put you in a skier’s skis, living out the sensation of shushing down a mountain at speeds, it is sometimes said, you would not feel safe driving a car. And therein lies the irony of “C’était un rendez-vous”, Lelouch’s 1976 9-minute short film where he modified his move from “13 Days of France”, attached a camera to his own Mercedes-Benz 450SEL and filmed himself racing the boulevards of Paris at speeds you would not feel safe, well, driving a car, never mind downhill skiing. 

Lelouch’s 10-km route takes him from the Boulevard Périphérique, past such notable Parisian landmarks as the Tuileries and eventually up Montmartre, ending at the Sacré-Cœur Basilica. The latter is glimpsed, of course, in the beginning of John Frankenheimer’s “Ronin” (1998), the most famous of all Parisian movie scenes. [Editor: fact check this, plz.] “Ronin” had an astounding car chase through the streets of Paris, mostly shot without music a la Lelouch’s short, just the roar of the engine, though Frankenheimer maximized the drama by cutting between various camera angles inside and outside the car while utilizing close-ups of the actor’s faces. “C’était un rendez-vous”, on the other hand, just sets up the camera and guns the engine, letting you feel the contours of your own face freaking out as Lelouch turns theoretical postcard moments - there’s the Arc de Triomphe! - into moments of sheer terror. Essentially you are transformed into a version of Driver’s Ed teacher, stomping your foot in vain for the passenger brake as you careen toward landmarks, run red light after red light, even briefly going against traffic, a la “Ronin”, to avoid the cars in your own lane.

The latter is a necessary point. Though Lelouch made his drive at dawn to minimize automobile and foot traffic, there are still other cars, still occasional pedestrians. It is why Lelouch was arrested after the film’s premiere, though he was released, never charged. Granted, you see him slowing down at one point when the situation dictates it, but he is still flying blind around corners. It’s as if those sorts of questions about innocent extras as collateral damage in fictional films are rendered uncomfortably real, as if Lelouch, renowned figure of the French New Wave, had looked at the spate of impressively raw movie car chases, from “Bullitt” to “The French Connection” to “The Seven-Ups”, and sought to take the vérité as far as he could go. 

“C’était un rendez-vous” translates to “It was a meeting” and, literally speaking, that’s what the movie is: a dude taking a drive to meet his gal. When he finally stops the car, though, and hops out, his gal ascending a hill for an embrace, what you feel is not exactly romance; it’s relief.

Notes on Hallmark Christmas Movie Set Design

My mom, a playwright, published and performed many times over, at one point in the past had a show of hers put on by a Des Moines, Iowa high school that shall remain nameless. Set in a high school, there is a pivotal moment late in her play when one character confronts a bully. But if this moment was written on the page as a dramatic one, and if the staging of it in other productions rendered it dramatic too, in this nameless school’s hands it became something else. One of the actors onstage, playing a stereotypical nerd, positioned himself between the bully and the character confronting him and nodded along with the latter, a goofy grin on his face, like he was the sheriff’s deputy, or something. This yielded laughter rather than rapt silence. My mom was incensed. And this was a formative experience for me, a distinct lesson in how the slightest shift in tone can entirely alter a scene in a play or a movie, not necessarily for the better and not necessarily in a way that’s true to the artist’s intent. Of course, in a movie you have more control over tone. This should not be an issue, really, the artist and the finished product tonally harmonizing, so long as everyone is on the same page anyway. And that, friends, brings me to Hallmark’s “The Christmas Bow.” 

The title’s pun means the focus is not on, say, a department store gift wrapper but a violin prodigy, one who, alas, has lost the love to play. She will find it once again by the end, of course, duh. Still, despite that duh, serious shout-out here to Lucia Micarelli playing prodigy Kate. This is Micarelli’s only acting credit aside from a few appearances on “Treme” and one on a TV show called “Manhattan” as it seems Hallmark was more determined to cast a true violinist, lending authenticity, the latter of which Micarelli, to her immense credit, evinces as much in her performance as her instrument playing. I have seen some good Hallmark Holiday performances over the years but those hue closer to rom com territory; Micarelli goes the other way, giving a quiet performance of a more indie kind. You rarely believe that people in movies like this have lost the love of their chosen profession but Micarelli brings it to life. She’s burned out and closed off, her speaking style befitting someone who doesn’t want to talk about it. That means when, in the movie’s climax, she takes to a stage and finally performs again, it feels emotional, not obligatory, a deft feat in Hallmark-land. Except.

Who did this? Whose idea was this? Who on the set design team thought it wise to have the backdrop behind our intrepid violinist include that ginormous grinning Santa Claus? Did they not see it on set? Did the cameraman not pick it up through the viewfinder? Micarelli must have seen it said, “Guys, what’s the deal?” Rarely have I seen such an egregious invasion of a triumphant character’s space. Here she is, at the pivotal moment, playing violin again (!), and the whole time your eyes are unwittingly drawn toward this overly jolly St. Nick. 

It’s a travesty, surely, but perhaps an appropriate too, crassly emphasizing the eternally looming tyranny of Christmas cheer. 

Christmas Waltz

In many ways, “Christmas Waltz” is no different than its myriad Hallmark brethren. All its sets, from homes to offices to dance studios, are oppressively strewn in Christmas lights, wreaths, hollies, garlands, etc., while scene transitions are marked by familiar second unit shots of New York at Christmastime. Yet even if parts of the plot involve the season, like the climactic dance taking place, as the title implies, on December 24th, what is most notable about Director/Writer Michael Damian’s film is how little Christmas is actually involved. No one says something like “Christmas is a time for miracles”, a Santa-like deus ex machina never swoops in and our ambitious, career-driven protagonist Avery (Lacey Chabert) does not need to let Christmas into her cold, cynical heart. If anything, “Christmas Waltz” does not treat that character description – ambitious, career driven – like typical Hallmark shorthand but sort of, kind of, a little bit, as much as a movie like this can, puts it under the microscope even if its diagnosis chickens out in the end. 

Sticking it to this endless genre’s customary structure, “Christmas Waltz” opens with Avery’s impending marriage dissolving. Mostly these would-be fiancés are vanilla zeroes but this one, who we will call Purple Suit Guy (Jeremy Guilbaut), is notably abhorrent. We call him Purple Suit Guy because he is introduced wearing a purple suit, not entirely unlike the abominable suit John Cusack is blackmailed into buying by Eugene Levy’s sales clerk in “Serendipity.” Cusack knew it looked bad; Purple Suit Guy doesn’t. What’s worse, Purple Suit Guy essentially breaks off their wedding upon accepting a job in Boston without consulting Avery and expects her to move no questions asked. If you wonder why she would agree to marry him in the first place, then, the moment is salvaged both by how Chabert plays it, like she’s realizing in the moment his god-awfulness, and the subsequent scene where her WASPy parents are less concerned with their daughter’s state of mind from the break-up then their daughter’s ongoing husband-less status. Damian even frames Avery with an empty chair looming next to her at the dining table, painting her as a burgeoning spinster. And her boss at the law firm (Fred Henderson), meanwhile, makes it clear simply in the way he speaks, a sort of waiting-to-be-dissatisfied grunt, that personal happiness always comes last. This is your life, Avery!

Avery’s change in latitude, change in attitude happens via the dance studio where she planned to take lessons with her fiancé and the dashing instructor, the appropriately named Roman Davidoff (Will Kemp). If Avery once had dreams of being a dancer, cruelly dismissed by her parents as mere childhood wishful thinking, Roman helps her reembrace those dreams as they simultaneously fall in love. This is Chabert and Kemp’s second pairing, after 2019 “Love, Romance, and Chocolate” which, yes, I have seen too, thank you very much, and it suggests Hallmark might we wise to foster recurring tandems rather than pairing off their regulars in different pairs. Chabert and Kemp feel natural and at ease, rendering their blossoming love not just believable but enjoyable as opposed to mandatory and tolerable. They work together so well, in fact, that when Purple Suit Guy makes his inevitable second-act reappearance, simply pledging newfound, if unbelievable, maturity to Avery is not enough; he also not-so-subtly threatens Roman. Seriously, it’s the closest, and it’s not even close, I’ve ever seen a Hallmark Holiday film come to suggesting violence. It’s not seen through, of course, just briefly gumming up the works to break Avery and Roman up so they can come back together but just that air of aggression is enough to briefly make it feel like “Christmas Waltz” is Dylan plugging in at Newport.

But if Avery tells off Purple Suit Guy once and for all and even convinces her parents to eschew the traditional Christmas dinner at Tavern on the Green (snobs!) to attends Roman’s Christmas Waltz instead, the circumstances of her job are less clear. So committed to Roman and dancing with him, she nearly forgets to close an important account just before the holidays, getting stern looks and words from her boss, seeming to suggest her professional heart has been led astray. Indeed, she helps Roman close a deal to open a second dance studio and through fate winds up dancing in the Christmas Waltz instead of watching, which is where the movie concludes, ending as the waltz ends too. It feels sudden, leaving the bigger question of her career hanging, almost as the movie has chosen to end by settling in for a long winter’s nap, conspicuously avoiding the most dreaded day on the Hallmark Holiday calendar: December 26th.

Good Morning Christmas!

That wearying modern lament about a War on Christmas is one typically made, ironically, in bad faith. I mean, if you’re a devout Christian upset over the secularization of a religious holiday, fine, fair enough, but take it up with Clement C. Moore and Rowland Macy, not the liberal media. No, like so much These Days, an ostensibly non-political argument is strictly political. Take one look, “Christmas is”, as Billy Mack once sang, “all around.” Christmas Muzak is omnipresent two, three months of the year, the cosmopolitan elite craft breweries are stacked to the rafters with Christmas Ale, snobby Starbucks cup might not cite Christmas but every other damn thing in the store does, and the Hallmark Channel, those purveyors of Holiday – oops! – Christmas spirit begin running their slate of Yuletide-themed movies before Halloween. Movies like “Good Morning Christmas!”, in fact, where that excessive exclamation point underlines – nay, emphasizes – one character’s ultimate transformation from Grinch into believer that Christmas is, unreservedly, the most wonderful time of the year. 

“Good Morning Christmas!” is about a Kelly and Michael like talk show called, heaven help me, Bright & Merry, hosted by Brian Bright (Marc Blucas) and Melissa Merry (Alison Sweeney), a pair of names demonstrating Hallmark’s unrelenting penchant for subtlety. Bright & Merry is the number one talk show in America which we know less because the movie submits true evidence for their quality as on air act or America’s love of them than a poster that simply states it: the number one show in America. Party pooper Brian, though, his eyes on greener pastures, wants out, hanging Melissa out to dry, which will come to a head during their Christmas week broadcast from Mistletoe, Maine where romance will bloom and Brian, kind of Tom Brady as Ebeneezer Scrooge, will get over his aversion to Christmas.

That aversion to Christmas, as it often is in Hallmark land, is rendered as something akin to a moral failing, unnatural, the movie blind to its own wild-eyed Yuletide insistence. When Brian explains he plans to spend the holiday with his fiancé in a sunny locale, Melissa expresses extreme skepticism over a Christmas sans snow, as if forgetting good chunks of the globe spend their December 25th in warmth and sunshine. Through this light, the movie’s routine ice skating sequence, gingerbread house making scene, tree lighting ceremony, etc., are not mere paint by numbers plot points but Brian being hooked up to a steady drip of holiday joy. 

Granted, much of “Good Morning Christmas!” is too ho-hum for it to excel when measured against the best Hallmark Holiday offerings. The secondary characters are unconsidered nonentities, the obligatory third act reversal and resolution are lackluster and the romantic chemistry between Blucas and Sweeney is nil. Even so, Blucas gives the movie its kick, rendering his holly jolly metamorphosis not by being subtle but over the top, drunk on too many cups of cheer, embodying the guy who wears the Santa hat at the office Christmas party and truly cannot grasp why a non-gentile might not feel the spirit of the season. He fought Christmas and Christmas won.

Christmas in Vienna

2020’s “Christmas in Vienna” arrives on the heels of 2019’s “Christmas in Rome”, the Hallmark Channel’s recent foray into productions extending beyond their usual Canadian backlot environs. If it sounds like a cheap way to draw viewers in, director Maclain Nelson’s film is not just a tourist postcard for the benefit of people watching from home who can’t go anywhere courtesy of a pandemic. If we sometimes take production design and location work for granted in Hollywood blockbusters, you don’t realize how crucial it is in Hallmark-land until you watch a dozen of these movies and become zombiefied to the sameness. In the recent “Christmas Lane”, for instance, the eponymous shopping district is meant to be an old fashioned alternative to Denver’s new-fangled high rises, though second unit footage of Colorado’s capital sprinkled in cannot disguise that Christmas Lane is merely Hallmark’s familiar village set repurposed yet again, counteracting the ostensible magic this location is intended to conjure. In “Christmas in Vienna”, on the other hand, it is not so much St. Stephen’s Cathedral that sticks out as the wintry light looking right in the low skies, the extras genuinely bundled rather than trying to appear cold during obvious middle-of-the-summer filming conditions. Indeed, characters simply walking through Vienna’s Christkindlmarket provides the kind of sense of place that these films can never manufacture on their own.

The story. Right. Of course. Jess (Sarah Drew) is an American violinist who has come to Vienna for a concert. Staying with her college roommate, however, she becomes part-time nanny to three kids, two of whom are inevitably struggling to come into their own, and whose Dad just happens to be Mark (Brennan Elliot), the American diplomat with whom Jess Meets Cute in an early scene. These movies frequently sink or swim on account of their Meet Cutes and this one is solid, not putting them at odds but presenting them as kindred spirits, meaning their romance turns less on having to overcome a series of inevitably boring barriers than each one helping the other realize what they want most of out life.

At the same time, though, that’s where “Christmas in Vienna” struggles. The chemistry between Drew and Elliot is solid, granted, as they appear energized by the actual Austrian locations in their myriad walk and talk scenes. And Drew does a solid job selling her personal crisis in moments of dialogue even as the conception of this crisis lets her down. That crisis is her character not wanting to play violin anymore, which we only learn after Jess says it and which the movie does nothing on its own to sell, not in the lead-up to this confession or the aftermath, a reminder of how rarely Hallmark Christmas movies are allowed to think of story in truly visual terms. Mark, on the other hand, alternates between stammering and insecure and charming and careerist, dueling notions that Elliot can’t quite sell as much as he needs to though the blatant push/pull in the writing does him no favors. His role as a diplomat exists simply to fuel the drama - will he move his family to Zurich for a professional opportunity or won’t he? - and the chance to see this sometimes bumbling guy bumble his way through foreign affairs goes unexplored.

I don’t need to tell you how this one ends, of course, just as I don’t need to tell you how any of these movies end. That Jess is a part-time nanny means she becomes a surrogate mother for these three kids struggling to deal with the mother they lost. And though Jess is at least allowed to maintain her professional commitment in re-realizing the love of the violin, she can only find it once she has assumed her proper societal role within the context of a nuclear family. Shoot in Vienna, shoot in the British Columbia backlot, but that part, I guess, never really changes. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: From Russia With Love (1963)

Though “From Russia With Love” was merely the second movie in the gargantuan James Bond series, it was already beginning to move Agent 007 into the realm of the mythic, opening with a feint where the preeminent baddie, an emotionless assassin named Red (Robert Shaw), coming on like Ivan Drago’s father, kills Bond only for us to realize the very recognizable Sean Connery face is, egads, a mask. That sets up the British agent as some sort of nigh unkillable antagonist, where Red is concerned anyway, the highest prize, a superhero of sorts, requiring special training by way of play-acting to ensure he can be slain. Even then it’s another ten minutes or so before Bond shows up onscreen as first we see the nefarious SPECTRE put his nefarious plans into place, taking council with No. 3 Rosa Klebb (Lotta Lenya) and No. 5 Kronsteen (Vladek Sheybal). Then again, if all this waiting adds drama to Bond’s entrance, once he appears he is just taking it easy, drinking champagne and having a roll in a flat-bottomed boat with a comely lady. It doesn’t take him long, though, to get a call from headquarters, which he accepts despite the lady’s presence, bringing home how Connery plays the part throughout – managing to mix business with pleasure even if, at the most crucial moments, he knows how to keep them apart, a subtle actorly decision adding so much.

The plot is, of course, convoluted and beside the point, the title stemming from a Soviet cryptograph machine stolen from the Brits by SPECTRE to sell back to the Brits. It suggest something less than global stakes or world domination, a game of cat and mouse between two adversaries, epitomized in the Bond Girl, Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi), who is working Bond while unwittingly being worked by SPECTRE. Ostensibly she falls in love with the secret agent despite herself, though her mawkish murmurings of “James” not quite conjuring the necessary lusciousness, hueing a little too closely to Priscilla Presley in “The Naked Gun” territory. Still, the question of whether she will ultimately turn on Bond lingers, adding to the suspense, more the point than the big action

Like the preceding “Dr. No”, “From Russia With Love” was directed by Terence Young, albeit with double the budget. That money shows. When No. 5 is summoned by SPECTRE in the middle of a chess game, it might seem like a set-up for later, No. 5 being drawn into some chess game opposite Bond, or at least an emblem of how such spy games are akin to the Queen’s Gambit, or something, though really it just seems an excuse to show off an ornate set. That sense of lavishness, alas, never quite translates to the bigger action setpieces, a shootout amid gypsies that involves a catfight of the less said, the better, and a speedboat chase which despite a concluding explosion hardly rises above passable. No, like Young found a way to cleverly bend his budget to great effect in “Dr. No”, his “From Russia With Love” works best on a small scale.

That includes his eventual showdown with Red, one set entirely within the claustrophobic confines of a train car where Bond is forced to utilize his each and every advantage, from the Q-approved briefcase to preying upon the heretofore emotionless Red’s sense of greed. No matter how cool Connery might be throughout, here he lets you see 007 sweat, which is not any less right than Roger Moore moving through action sequences like Bobby K. Bowfinger in “Fake Purse Ninjas.” In the end, however, no one, not even Connery, sweats like Rosa Klebb. If No. 3 is essentially told by SPECTRE get Bond or else, her climactic assassination attempt, kicking and swinging that memorable shoe knife is in no way as ridiculous as a shoe knife sounds. Dr. Evil might have rendered Dr. No’s power moot but Frau Farbissina, it turns out, has not counteracted Rosa Klebb. No, in this moment Lenya oozes desperation shading into something like violent resentment that this guy will not just die, virtually flailing as she tries to off Bond, before succumbing to a bullet, the brutal suddenness and finality of death brought to bear, Lenya’s final mannerisms evoking something close to indignant hubris. Me? Dead? Though the playful capping scene between Bond and Tatiana in a Venice canal is tradition, a reminder not things are not so serious, after Klebb’s outro, I couldn’t really take it seriously. 

Some Drivel On...French Kiss

As previously noted, My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife has been curating a stay-at-home Rom Com fest throughout the pandemic. Her latest programming selection was Lawrence Kasdan’s 1995 “French Kiss”, previously unseen by me, starring first ballot Rom Com Hall of Famer Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline with a French accent and a glorious moustache. The movie itself is, like, strange? Ryan is an American living in Canada who follows her fiancé (Timothy Hutton) to Paris after he phones to indicate he has met a Parisian woman and intends to marry her. On the transatlantic flight Ryan’s character Meets Cute with Kline’s charismatic jewel thief, the latter smuggling home a stolen diamond necklace. The movie’s own air suggests general indifference to the plot, not really working to make these various complications and convolutions sing, even as it strangely remains overly dependent upon them, especially moving into the homestretch, trying to ramp up stakes that already feel as if they got ditched by the side of the Seine. Like I said, a strange experience, like an American in Paris who cannot decide whether to stick by the guidebook or go with the flow. Nevertheless. 

Anyone who knows me knows my long obsession with the Eiffel Tower appearing in movies and its magical ability to be glimpsed from everywhere. My friend Daryl and I used to joke about making a movie scene in a Parisian apartment where you gradually realize all four windows on all four walls somehow have a view of the Eiffel Tower. So I confess, I was amused by “French Kiss’s” recurring Eiffel Tower shtick. 

First, Meg Ryan totally misses the legendary latticework as it passes behind her.

Later, she misses it again when she meanders into the middle of the avenue...

...and, as if sensing its presence, turns toward it the split-second after its sparkling nighttime lights shut off, le tour de Eiffel as Snuffleupagus. 

Finally, of course, on her way out of the city, there it is, looming. And that might seem a stretch except it was only on our last night in Paris that My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I realized you could see the Eiffel Tower searchlight from the window in the apartment where we were staying which isn’t exactly the same but close enough.

Of course, you don’t come to a Meg Ryan Rom Com for the Eiffel Tower; you come for the Meg Ryan facial expressions. Like this one, as Kevin Kline says one obnoxious thing or another, which leads directly into...

...an even better one accentuated by Kline’s quizzical expression rebuttal...

...unbelievably usurped by this judgy one as he imbibes his pilfered mini bottle of vodka. “Who is this character?” she seems to be wondering. “The love of your life!” we reply in unison.

And though the screenshot fails to capture it, this eye roll in motion would satisfy the curiosity of any of the kids out there, those darn kids, about why, once upon a time, Meg Ryan was as big a deal as Billie Eilish memes. Meg Ryan facial expressions were our memes. 

Speaking of The Kids...here’s a screenshot for them. Weird, wild.

But back to the facial expressions. Because while Meg Ryan is Meg Ryan, well, an emergent subplot of “French Kiss” is how Inspector Jean-Paul Cardon (Jean Reno), who I chose to believe was Vincent before he became a “Ronin” (1998), is on the trail of Kline’s thief but also Kline’s protector because the thief once saved his life, a knotty little relationship that is not played knotty at all. Indeed, after Kline evades the Inspector by hopping a train, we get this Reno reaction...

...which is just about the most quasi-grudgingly respectful “You rapscallion” expression I’ve ever seen. Maybe “French Kiss” wasn’t so transitory after all. 

16 Baguettes out of 30

Diane Lane Going to Pretty Places Movies Part II

Three years ago, on the heels of “Paris Can Wait”, which was 13 long years after “Under the Tuscan Sun”, both starring Diane Lane in a movie where her character goes to a pretty place, this blog imagined a whole series, maybe a whole genre, called Diane Lane Goes to Pretty Places. None of these movies came to pass, of course, though since that time there were another eight Marvel movies. That’s not to say Cancel All Marvel movies. But can’t you invest in one, just one, middlebrow Diane Lane Goes to Pretty Places movie too? How many times have we been told this is going to be the longest, darkest winter of our lives? How glorious would a third Diane Lane Goes to a Pretty Place Movie be right now? Like anything else these days, at least we can dream.

Diane Lane Going to Pretty Places Movies Part II

Diane Lane Goes to Barcelona 

As a career driven project manager who has just finished the project of a lifetime, Diane Lane still feels like something is missing. At the behest of a friend, she lights out to Barcelona for some r&r, only to find herself feeling discombobulated from a lack of control over her situation in a country where she cannot speak the language. Finally, on a tour of the Sagrada Família, confronted by and unable to process the fact that Gaudí’s basilica remains a work in progress, she comes unglued. Luckily her tour guide, a handsome Barceloní (Antonio Banderas), talks her down and takes her out on the town as she gradually falls into the rhythms of the city, opening herself up to new possibilities and letting herself go, learning that life is not a project be completed but an ongoing work of art. 

Diane Lane Goes to Santorini

As a travel agent who, ironically, has never traveled anywhere, Diane Lane is forced to take early retirement as her job becomes obsolete. Bored, lonely and adrift, she becomes the personal assistant to a travel influencer (Vanessa Hudgens), lighting out for the Greek Island of Santorini where the influencer yearns to Instagram the ultimate sunset. Diane Lane, however, takes the influencer under her wing, demonstrating that life is best viewed not through a camera phone but your own eyes. A striking Greek man, meanwhile, who has long rolled his eyes at tourists, makes eyes at Diane Lane, insisting that a Santorini sunset has nothing on a Santorini sunrise, a breathtaking reminder that the sun is not setting on her life, only coming back up once again.

Diane Lane Goes to Maldives

In an attempt to rekindle their marriage, foundering on account of his workaholism, Clive Owen brings his wife of almost 20 years, Diane Lane, to an ornate water villa in the Maldives. Alas, after a romantic first evening, Clive Owen is called away on business, leaving Diane Lane alone, atop the ocean, with only her misery for company. But that night, when a chartered stargazing yacht comically crashes into her villa, Diane Lane finds herself both at odds with and smitten by the roguish, handsome captain who works part-time at the dazzling Sky Bar and shows her how fate is written in the stars. 

Diane Lane Goes to Panama

As a career-driven journalist, Diane Lane hasn’t had a vacation in years. In fact, she’s so devoted to work, that when her apple-faced intern suggests she book a Panama Canal cruise, Diane Lane decides to tag along on a cargo ship traversing the canal for a story instead. More than the ingredients for a story, however, Diane Lane finds an awakening of her soul, setting down her notepad as she is drawn to this motley crew. She teaches the frazzled young second cook to make chocolate soufflé, helps the anxious third mate overcome his fear of water, assists the surprisingly sentimental Chief Engineer in writing love letters to his wife, and, of course, falls in love with the salty Captain who explains that no two trips through the Canal are the same, each one its own journey to self-discovery.

Diane Lane Goes to Switzerland

As a longtime New York judge jaded from passing down courtroom decisions all the livelong day, Diane Lane lights out for the most unobjectionable place she can imagine: Switzerland! Alas, when the mountain town she chooses becomes mired in a controversy over whether a quaint family-run ski chalet will be sold to an avaricious rental company, Diane Lane, falling for the chalet owner’s own, destined to take it over, and his lovable St. Bernard, discovers that, no matter how hard she tries, she cannot remain neutral. Roger Federer stars as himself, improbable owner of the local café who dispenses eye-opening wisdom with every cup of espresso and piece of Swiss chocolate served.

The Grizzlies

“The Grizzlies” begins with a young Intuit man, living in the small arctic community of Kugluktuk, sitting down in the middle of nowhere and killing himself. If it seems out of step with a movie billed as as an inspirational sports drama, it is a crucial evocation of the film’s stakes, underlined in the ensuing title card stressing the area’s high suicide rate and marking this prologue as a harsh fact of life. This grim way of living is evoked in a distinct sense of desolate place and finely honed observations of living in such a remote community. Each time Russ Shepherd (Ben Schnetzer), the ignorant new white guy in town, knocks on a door, he is incredulously reminded knocking is not required here, a recurring bit of comedy manifested as something more, suggesting how this Intuit community’s struggle is not hidden away but out in the open, if only anyone was willing to go through that door and look. And even if sometimes the screenplay by Moira Walley-Beckett and Graham Yost falls prey to the sort of unworldliness it otherwise seeks to subvert, “The Grizzlies” still has enough wordliness to succeed.

Russ is a young Canadian, dispatched to Kugluktuk to settle the remainder of his community service by working as a teacher. He doesn’t speak the language and knows nothing about the culture, dismissed up front by Janace (Tantoo Cardinal), the school principal and a community leader, as merely being there for his own selfish rewards. Russ will have to change, of course, and so he does, that lacrosse stick he hangs on his otherwise barren wall in an early scene the obvious key to unlocking his and the town’s true self. If this means “The Grizzlies” flirts with White Savior territory, the screenplay it evades this archetype by leaning into Ben’s obliviousness. Even as he forms an unlikely lacrosse team of disinterested students to give them focus, there remains a distinct boorishness in his insistence that he knows how to transform their lives with hardly even a passing recognition of their background, their customs, their hardships. And Schnetzer admirably plays straight to this idea throughout, still emitting an indignant know-it-all kind of air even after he’s won them over, lending credence to the predictable second act turn when he thinks about fleeing, a scared white dude who can’t hack it. And the Intuit actors opposite him, many of whom have few, if any, acting credits are worthy opposition, seeing right through him even as they literally look past him.

Yet, if “The Grizzlies” takes care to demonstrate the myopia of a white man insisting he has the remedy to an issue for which he manifestly lacks true understanding, it’s odd how the formation of the lacrosse team still tends to run roughshod over crucial subplots meant to embody indigenous beliefs. True, director Miranda de Pencier ensures the Intuit residents are rendered with humanity, though sometimes these moments can be distilled down to frustrating clichés, like a big speech. But if the family of Adam (Ricky Marty-Pahtaykan) insists he eshew the white man’s world and Janace admonishes Russ for not seeing the forest for the trees in his damn the torpedoes approach and fervent belief that getting out of Kugluktuk is what matters most, these storylines are not so much thoughtful portrayals of Intuit attitudes as antagonistic hurdles that need to be crossed in the name of forming the team, reminiscent of the subplot in this year’s “The Way Back” in which one father’s belief that basketball is not the only way out is just a pesky false crisis.

That’s not to say the lacrosse, how ever true to life it may or may not be, is without merit. In trying to convince the Intuit youth to play, Russ gives a brief history of the game, citing it not simply as Canada’s true national sport, as opposed to hockey, but one first played by First Nations people. That sets it apart from the similarly themed “McFarland U.S.A.” (2015) where a group of Latino kids were inherently talented runners without necessarily realizing it. The Grizzlies do not have any particular natural talent but in playing lacrosse reconnect with who they are anyway, a truly moving idea that de Pencier might have been wise to accentuate even further. As it is, it’s enough, and despite the expected bundle of montages and game action, the somewhat platitudinous dramatic conclusion in which the team travels to the big city comes off simply by how it finishes, proving that in the case of The Grizzlies, it really is more than a game.

Jasper Mall

“Jasper Mall” might well be a documentary about a once-thriving shopping mecca in northeast Alabama but co-directors Bradford Thomason and Brett Whitcomb forgo a traditional history, eschewing archival footage of the mall’s 80s and 90s heyday, save for a lone monochrome photo buried post-closing credits. Instead Jasper Mall’s zenith is remembered via on camera anecdotes, by a jeweler whose shop is foundering and on the verge of moving, and through yellowed newspaper clippings pulled up by a florist whose shop will have closed by movie’s end, emitting the sense of something long ago, existing only in memory, leaving us to imagine as much as them what this place might have looked like with crowded walkways. What’s more, Thomason and Whitcomb provide no autopsy for the mall and are not really even sending out an S.O.S., just hanging back like flies on the wall and watching, proffering painterly Maysles Brothers-like images of a place out of time, the mall walkers passing empty, gated stores looking like the walking dead. 

The mall is seen predominantly through the eyes of its manager, Mike McClelland, a gregarious, colorful fellow who grasps the commercial realities while still projecting a humanist sense of positivity, hearing out a regular’s joke with impressive patience. Eventually we learn he once operated a private zoo, a la the Tiger King, an exotic kind of lifestyle effectively juxtaposed against his current existence, watering plants and cleaning public restrooms. And even though McClelland’s upbeat spirit rubs off on you as he routinely asks customers how they’re doing before replying, no matter what, with an “I’m doing great” and really sounding like he means it, as he tries to navigate the increasingly empty spaces in his building by phone with potential vendors, a noticeable pessimism nevertheless creeps in. 

McClelland, though, is not the only human interest story. Thomason and Whitcomb wander into various stores, finding workers in the midst of just being, like the young hair stylist who, in an intimate afterwork moment, talks with a friend about the boxes society expects young women to check, expressing a half-serious desire to split and follow her dreams. Another teenage mall employee explains his penchant for travel and a desire to see new things while taking out the trash. That we never see him again is apropos, closing the door on us in long shot before the movie cuts to McClellan wiping a table down, his work continuing regardless, and then the regular, elderly domino players, their routine contrasted against this fleeting nature of youth. The young interracial couple we briefly meet don’t even spend their introductory scene in the mall, attending a carnival in the mall parking lot that McClelland hopes will drum up business, lot of good it does, as we see the bright lights from within the personless mall interior, making it seem a world away.

There are moments in “Jasper Mall” suggesting Dan Bell’s YouTube Series, aptly titled “Dead Malls”, in which he records his experiences as a firsthand witness to the dirge of these once culturally relevant empires and uploads them to YouTube. Filmed with small, hidden camera so as not to tip off touchy mall security and peppered with Bell’s own personal impressions, these are home movies by necessity, good at what they do yet devoid of the lyrical humanity that Thomason and Whitcomb’s approach yields. Indeed, while in interviews Bell has compared so many dying malls to the sinking of the Titanic, “Jasper Mall” brings this statement to rich life. When the cameras follow McClelland into the cavernous, darkened space that used to be the anchoring Kmart store, illuminated only by a single flashlight, passing a fitting room and what used to be a customer service desk, it looks for all the world like we have plunged into the abyss by submersible, making it seem as if this one-time fortress of consumerism has sunk to the bottom of the ocean floor. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Career Girls (1997)

Mike Leigh’s “Career Girls” is divided into two overlapping sections. In the present, old college friends Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge) and Annie (Lynda Steadman) reconnect for a weekend in London, recalling events from their past when they were flatmates while attending Polytechnic of North London. Leigh delineates these jumps through color, seeing the past in chilly, often off-putting blues, like you want to just wrap your arms around yourself and wishfully think “everything will be ok”, while the present is seen in lighter beiges, evoked in Hannah’s airy flat. It’s almost Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” in reverse, seeing days gone by not through the prism of cozy nostalgia but cold self-reproach and seeing the here and now through a much more bright lens. Of course, where Gerwig is earnest, you can sense a smirk forming on Leigh’s lips as he almost imperceptibly brings past, present and future on a collision course. 

Leigh draws these contrasts between past and present further through the performances of Steadman and Cartlidge and, later, Mark Benton, who we will get to. In the flashbacks, we find the two fast friends as psychology majors, another touch of the ironical, given how emotionally unhinged they come across. As Annie, Steadman suggests something like an across-the-pond Molly Ringwald, eczema on her face and a hitch in her facial expression, like she can’t quite bring herself to look at people. As Hannah, on the other hand, Cartlidge provides an indelible sense of aggression, frequently adorned with sweat, like drinking pints at the pub is her aerobics, physically lashing out for emphasis as she talks, suggesting Amanda Plummer in “Pulp Fiction” if she didn’t have a gun, just an index finger. If the performances can sometimes feel over the top, that’s deliberate, These people pointedly feel like the furthest thing from the women we encounter in the present, though Leigh’s title is best said with a smirk, since the older, ostensibly wiser versions of Annie and Hannah talk little professional shop, the frequent flashbacks evincing how they still have not squared with everything they went through.

The closest “Career Girls” comes to any kind of traditional action is Annie going along with her friend as she apartment hunts, which only underlines a sense of transition rather than stability, leading to a couple comic encounters with loutish males. That includes one who seems to live almost in his own universe, with Hannah wryly, hysterically noting from the scenic balcony that you can almost see the class war from here, and Adrian, who has a connection to both Hannah and Annie’s past. He has changed, as the baby photos in his wallet illustrate, but, at the same time, hasn’t really changed at all, as his smug air and perhaps deliberate inability to recognize them can attest. The circumstances of this encounter might be contrived, but his showing up nevertheless demonstrates how little people move from their innate setpoints, as Jesse Wallace once opined, explaining “nothing much that happens to us changes our disposition.” 

The other prominent boy from their past is Ricky (Benton), whose own foibles are tenfold compared to Hannah and Annie, and whose disposition is one that never changes, sadly, if not tragically. As played by Benton, his character is impossibly even more mannered than Annie and Hannah put together, seeming to talk with his eyes closed most of the time, using his hands to almost underline in the air the words he manages to emit. He is their unlikely friend, and then their unlikely roommate, and though he develops romantic feelings for Annie, those are only reciprocated on a platonic level. In returning to their old haunt near movie’s end, Hannah and Annie are stunned to find Ricky sitting on the curb, dressed in a suit that feels like an ironic assessment of him as a grown salary man. Their fateful meeting does not go well, triggering flashback to the last time they saw him in their youth, an encounter that goes awry too. And if “Career Girls” is sort of writing off Ricky in service of Hannah and Annie, using him to demonstrate how they have moved on when he hasn’t, the way in which Leigh shoots these two scenes, Hannah and Annie’s old mannerisms suddenly cropping back up as the cold, bright light of the two outdoor scenes merges, implicitly suggest how easy it is to find yourself innately drifting, drifting back toward your setpoints.