Friday's Old Fashioned: To Catch a Thief (1955)

The backdrop for the opening credits of Alfred Hitchcock’s “To Catch a Thief” is a travel agency, with vintage posters advertising scenic getaways and a miniature Eiffel Tower on display in the window. When the credits finish, the camera presses in on one of the posters, as if we, the audience, are in need of a vacation. Granted, Hitch then cuts to a close-up of a woman screaming, victimized by a jewel thief, and a brief montage of other victims and scrambling police. But not long after, when the suspected cat burglar flees police, or seems to, Hitch films the chase from an aerial shot more invested, frankly, in the surrounding scenery more than the chase itself. Sometimes the camera loses sight of the car altogether! Who cares?! Look at the pristine blue sea! The crime and the cat burglar, in other words, are themselves the MacGuffin as much as anything else, and that travel agency window is as evocative of what’s to come as the window in Jeff Jeffries’s Chelsea apartment, in tune to the nature of cinema’s voyeurism, though in a less suspenseful way than insouciant. Relax, man.

About that burglary. The French authorities immediately suspect John Robie (Cary Grant), a long retired but still notorious thief whose work in the French Resistance has apparently not cleansed all his sins. The character’s seclusion rhymes with the real-life Grant, who had retired, ostensibly, but was convinced to take on the project anyway by Hitchcock, promising the scenic filming locations and work with a co-star as smashing as Grace Kelly as their own reward. Indeed, just as Grant took on the project so does Robie re-enter the game, in a manner of speaking, protesting his innocence and setting out to prove it by catching the current cat burglar in the act. This allows Hitchcock to intertwine a couple of his favorite themes, The Innocent Man and The Double. The latter emerges in the form of Danielle Foussard (Brigitte Auber), daughter of the wine steward at the restaurant where all of Robie’s ex-cohorts work. Tasked with ferrying Robie to Cannes by speedboat to evade police, she is costumed like a mirror of Robie with a scarf and a similar striped shirt. She is such an obvious double, in fact, that it essentially gives away the game.

Then again, everything in a Hitchcock joint is deliberate and the obviousness of the double only underlines how it’s not really the point in the first place. No, “To Catch a Thief” might be as close as Hitchcock ever got to the greatest of all cinematic escapist fantasies, “To Have and Have Not”, which had no other point than watching Bogey and Bacall watch each other. In this case, though, we are watching Cary Grant and Grace Kelly meet. Perhaps a discerning viewer might wonder why it takes them so long to meet then. Ah, but Hitch was the Master of Suspense for a reason, titillating us by prolonging the payoff, taking the roundabout way to get there, with Robie spirited to Cannes by water to evade police detection, swimming right up to the beach and then laying down amidst so many sunbathers only to be recognized in about 1.7 seconds, a sly commentary on Grant himself.

And if a moment like this purposely illuminates his star power, then acting opposite Grace Kelly only brightens it. She is Frances “Francie”, Stevens, daughter of an wealthy American Jessie (Jessie Royce Landis), in Cannes and a possible next mark for the next robbery. So, posing as an Oregon timber baron, Robie effortlessly charms his way into their circle. Despite the lurking criminal, the real game of cat and mouse is between Robie and Francie. If at first he hardly pays her mind and she hardly pays him mind, when he walks her back to her room, she leans right in and plants one on his lips, declaring both provocative intent and that she sees right through him. Why the ensuing day, in the film’s finest sequence, during a cliff-side drive, upon realizing they are being tailed, she floors it, roaring around hairpin turns with nothing but joie de vivre splayed across her face, a car chase less about the pursuers than seeing if the passenger is up for the ride. Sure, there is the later fireworks scene, as funny in its own way as the coital fireworks in “The Naked Gun”, but the real sex scene is right here, on the road, with the close-ups of Grant’s hands on his legs, folding and re-folding, as if trying to tamp down his, ah, excitement in the lower extremities. And when she breaks out the picnic basket with the roast chicken and asks if he wants, ahem, a leg or a breast, well, it’s not as good as “Anybody got a match?” but it’ll do.

Pitch Meeting: Rhode Island Rhapsody

Recently I was listening to an episode of This Had Oscar Buzz – a podcast all about movies that “once upon a time had lofty Academy Award aspirations but for some reason or another it all went wrong” – and co-hosts Joe Reid and Chris Feil briefly mentioned the Hollywood Film Awards. If I had heard of the Hollywood Film Awards before, I had forgotten them, but Feil explained that these ostensible awards were essentially bought by publicists, generally handed out before the winning movies themselves were even seen, recollecting that in one case Amy Adams won an award for “Arrival” before the movie even had a trailer. STOP THE TAPE. Before there was a trailer? Ok, ok, Feil hedged a bit, saying he wasn’t sure if it was true or not, though he also they would cut that part if it wasn’t, so it must have been? Doesn’t matter and I’m not doing the research to find out. What matters is that this newfound information, as it absolutely had to, got me to thinking.

It got me to thinking about, hmmmm, let’s say Joe Valley (Michael Shannon), a claims adjuster turned movie producer who can only view art in terms of risk management which is precisely why he’s never won an award. Deciding to take a risk and pull the kind of fast one he would have sniffed out from a mile away back in the day, Valley buys a Hollywood Film Award for a movie starring the last woman in town who will work with him, Kayla Prentice (Abbi Jacobson), a diva without the definitional success, constantly talking to her imaginary entourage, before the movie has even been made (!). When his non-existent film wins the Hollywood Film Award for Best Picture and Best Actress for Kayla, then, Valley has only 60 days to turn around and make an entire movie based solely on a title, enlisting the hapless but desperate Gordon Monson (Kevin Corrigan) who, thinking the title “Rhode Island Rhapsody” sounds funny, accidentally starts shooting a comedy until, sitting down to watch a cut of the movie, Valley realizes this and orders him to change it to a drama since comedies never win awards forcing Gordon to reshoot the entire movie in 17 days before its premiere.

Meanwhile, as the Hollywood gossip rags close in on getting the truth out of the party animal Hollywood Film Award President, Yale Manley (Jonah Hill), Glenn Close (herself), peeved that she may lose yet another Oscar race even after starring in “Eleanor of Aquitaine”, dispatches her personal assistant (Tiffany Haddish) to find out what’s really going on with “Rhode Island Rhapsody” and put a stop to it. The movie ends with Joe Valley and Glenn Close fighting in front of the Hollywood film sign if for no other reason than it makes for a striking image.

“Rhode Island Rhapsody?” Yale Manley asks watching the fight from below with a margarita in his hand. “I heard that was a real piece of crap.”

Red Penguins

The title of Gabe Polsky’s documentary “Red Penguins” refers to an uneasy joint venture between the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins and the Central Red Army hockey team of Moscow in the early 90s, after the Soviet Union had fallen apart and capitalism was trying to worm its way in. At one point in a talking head interview, then-Penguins owner Howard Baldwin references the mid-90s action thriller he produced, “Sudden Death”, where Jean-Claude Van-Damme fights off a terrorist threat at the Stanley Cup. If the unexpected mid-movie stock image of Van-Damme pummeling the Pittsburgh Penguin mascot might make you laugh, what stands out is the moment’s lack of absurdity in comparison to everything else you have already seen. Essentially Polsky is repurposing footage from “Sudden Death” to visually evince the old chestnut: truth is stranger than fiction. Alas, the remainder of Polsky’s work here is not quite at the level, alternating between talking heads and stock footage that underlines what’s being said without ever quite saying it itself. Still, “Red Penguins” is a galloping history lesson, the swiftness of the edits matching the Russian folk music-heavy soundtrack, moving so fast that the underlying tension and grave resolution seem to be getting a pass until the very end, when Boris Yelstin steps down and Vladimir Putin is named acting President and the whole bloody point is just dropped in your lap like a ton of bricks. 

In many ways, “Red Penguins” picks up where Polsky’s “Red Army” (2014) left off. There he charted the rise and fall of the eponymous Russian hockey team, its splintering and its players being dispersed to America and the NHL where they found a rougher, uglier game. In “Red Penguins”, on the other hand, American entrepreneurs go to a post-Communist Russia seeking to install a version of their preferred Capitalist Democracy, while self-servingly hoping to install a convenient pipeline to Russian hockey talent along the way, buying a half-share in the Red Army team and trying to turn into a thriving overseas business. The country they find, however, is not quite the one they expect, the cross-cultural divide comically and precisely laid out in the dueling reactions to the historical Moscow Ice Sports Palace housing a strip club in the basement and the subsequent crude marketing tactics enlisted by the yankee doodle businessmen. The Americans can’t believe a hockey rink would have a strip club; the Russians can’t believe the Americans would enlist the strippers as cheerleaders on the ice. In other words, how do you take your societal vulgarities: out in the open or behind closed doors? Strippers on the ice, though, proves a less extravagant stunt than bringing in a real-life bear to chug beer on the ice. The bear ends up biting off someone’s finger, half-bringing to life one of the most preposterous passages of the 2008 Will Ferrell comedy “Semi-Pro.” That’s pretty remarkable. 

The American marketer leading this Russian charge is Steven Warshaw, a gregarious interview who has no trouble retelling every story, at one point stopping a story in the middle when, as a Jewish man, he wants to confirm certain Christian terminology, restarting the same story, word for word, with nary a prompt, like he’s been telling it all his life. He talks like the avaricious American Dream and is juxtaposed, astutely and humorously, against the Red Penguins’ general manager, Valery Gushin. Every horror story told by Warshaw about imposing Russian mafia, men with machine guns under their trenchcoats, or Gushin and his allies pilfering profits is met in an ensuing frame by Gushin cracking up, as if remembering the funniest thing that ever happened, as if he were Wayne Arnold recalling beating up little brother Kevin. If Warshaw has a small smile in these present-day passages, it is nevertheless the small, hesitant kind of smile, one of still lingering fear but also incredulity, like the world of the Red Penguins remains foreign to him. Near the end of the documentary he explains that the Russians never got it, though by this point it is clear that Warshaw is the one who never got it, not the way the Russians did business or lived life. “You want democracy?” asks Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov, the then-Central Red Army team President who looks during his entire interview like he is deciding whether or not to order Polsky be offed. “It will be our democracy.”

At one point, Warshaw remembers how Gushin installed a spy in his office. When Warshaw pressed Gushin on this he remembers being told “Don’t ask questions or you’ll be hanging from your thumbs at the top of the arena.” Polsky then cuts back to Gushin, being reminded of this warning, who erupts into laughter. He laughs and laughs, for a full minute, literally dabbing at tears that form from guffawing so hard. As he tries to calm himself, off-camera Polsky can be heard trying to pin him down about this and that, seeking to grasp Gushin’s motivation. Finally, Gushin quiets down and his nigh-omnipresent smile vanishes. He says, soberly: “We will decide everything ourselves.”

Dick Johnson Is Dead

There is a moment in “Dick Johnson Is Dead” when we meet director Kirsten Johnson’s mother, deceased seven years ago. She is on camera, in the throes of Alzheimer’s, trying to recall her daughter’s name, really trying, and coming up empty. It’s brutal to watch, for multiple reasons, and betrays why Kirsten Johnson must have wanted to make a documentary about her father, Dick, in the first place, to freeze his image and to preserve his voice on camera. If that was it, though, “Dick Johnson Is Dead” might just be a moving photo album and not much else. Kirsten, though, pushes far beyond that simple idea. Indeed, the title, like so much else in the film, is a sleight of hand; Dick Johnson Is NOT Dead. He is very much alive but his daughter has thought to stage his death, over and over. He’s walking down the street and an air conditioner falls on top of him. He falls down the stairs and hits his head. In the latter, the camera looks down from above, made doubly eerie later when he learn his wife fell down the stairs too. But then Kirsten starts talking from just off camera, coaching him on how to look, both shattering the illusion and raising the dead, speaking to the nimble middle ground that “Dick Johnson Is Dead” occupies, a complexity belying its title. A longtime cameraperson, Kirsten has spent most of her life looking through a viewfinder and it only makes sense that in the face of her father’s impending earthly demise she might want to look through it to come to terms. And yet if the ensuing documentary reveals her far-reaching imagination, it also betrays the camera’s limitations. 

Kirsten is not only imagining her father’s resurrection, innately tied to his Seventh Adventist beliefs, that the righteous will be revived upon Christ’s return, but the afterlife too. She recounts these moments  with a virtual explosion of imagery in dreamlike slow motion. She even imagines his deformed toes, which Dick confesses to having bothered him all his life, being healed by water from Jesus, a filmmaker’s imagination rectifying life’s discomforts. But Kirsten’s cinematic healing powers are even more mundane and profound than imagining the great beyond. Her voiceover explaining how one frightful day when Dick unwittingly drove his car through a construction site signaled the early stages of his Alzheimer’s is set to a scene of Dick piloting a convertible down a sun-dappled freeway, as if returning to him the power to drive.

The camera in the backseat suggests not just safety protocol but the movie’s specific point-of-view, daughter looking over father’s shoulder and about her as much as him. Indeed, a moment in which we literally see Kirsten recording voiceover dialogue innately suggests just how personal this documentary is. And though Dick’s manifestly affable presence is willing to go along with this variety of stunts, one intimate moment of ostensibly behind-the-scenes footage forces Kirsten to reckon with what she is putting her father through, calling wrap on shooting for a day, as if her unnatural demands suddenly dawn on her. It suggests that despite these fastidious enactments of death and resurrection, she might not quite have control over everything. Later in the movie, when Dick briefly becomes separated from his family and lost, the setting, Halloween night, evoking a horror movie is entirely incidental rather than intended, making it doubly distressing.

Dick’s own backstory is mostly incidental too. This is not a deep dive into his personal history and the manner in which Kirsten inserts details of his backstory demonstrate what he’s losing, like having to shut down his practice as a therapist to move in with his daughter, standing at his office door one last time, taking a look around, like a piece of his already completed life puzzle being removed. Kirsten and Dick confront his looming death together and Kirsten freezes her father on film but she can’t stop what’s coming, a shot framing her father in a window with lightly falling snow bringing the fogginess of dementia to terrible, moving life. 

There is a moment when Dick rides in the passenger seat of Kirsten’s car as she ferries her kids to school. After the children are gone, he’s talking things through, saying he’s always been pretty good at living in the here and now. But then Kirsten holds the close-up. Look at him. He looks so far away.

Ray of Light

The legendary Sports Illustrated scribe Dr. Z, née Paul Zimmerman, who died in 2018 at the age of 86, timed every rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner he heard. He wrote about this unique predilection in a piece, near as I can tell, since scrubbed from the Internet, though I remember the gist of it quite well, how the song, ‘To Anacreon in Heaven’, on which Francis Scott Key based his future National Anthem was a British pub tune in waltz time, a little ditty intended to be belted out quickly over a few drinks, not a marching band power ballad meant to herald flyovers. If the pre-game singing of a Star-Spangled Banner stretched longer than a minute, Z’s thinking went, you might be honoring America, albeit in over-inflated fashion, but not the song. So he clocked them all, searching for the 60-second versions, which were not entirely elusive but hard to come by nonetheless, too many destined to die on what he deemed Heartbreak Hill, the last two lines, when people threaten to extend that O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave into forever. If to some Whitney Houston’s Star-Spangled Banner before the 1991 Super Bowl was the greatest, to Dr. Z it was two-minutes plus. Nein. 

I have always sided with Z’s interpretation. I have a written a variation of this before but the stiff pageantry, not to the mention the patriotically correct add-ons (put your hand over your heart or else), frequently leave me feeling more distant from America than close to it. I do not mean to begrudge anyone for whom the Anthem culls genuine emotion. I feel it sometimes too, though generally from the circumstances, like an Olympian on the podium, rather than the song itself or the performance of it. The Star-Spangled Banner, as many more qualified to know than me have explained, is not inherently much of a song (Z noted The Battle Hymn of the Republic puts it away) and notoriously difficult to sing. Singing along to it, in fact, reminds me of my Lutheran pastor once instructing my confirmation class to recite the Lord’s Prayer, not with any feeling, just to prove we knew the words, which flashed me back to so many pre-class recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance and renditions of The Star-Spangled Banner before I-Cub games when my mind was anywhere else. Too often we sing the words without hearing them, a ceremonial formality, little else.

If, however, as Amanda Petrusich has argued for The New Yorker, the standardized Star-Spangled banner has made it sort of sacrilege to monkey with, what Lady Gaga did with the Anthem at President Joe Biden’s Inauguration last Wednesday was not reimagine it so much as refocus it. Like Bruce Springsteen seeing “When the Saints Go Marching In” not as joyful exultation but an apocalyptic hymn in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, or, more obscurely, how Jim O’Rourke heard something different and clear as a bell in mixing Wilco’s “I’m Trying to Break Your Heart” into a masterpiece, Lady Gaga saw The Star-Spangled Banner’s middle, not Heartbreak Hill, as the crux.

As The Washington Post’s Chris Richards notes, Key’s anthem contains a question, wondering if the American flag will still be there at Fort McHenry on September 14, 1814 after a night’s bombardment. Lady Gaga’s version of the song honored that question, filtering through the prism of what had transpired two weeks earlier at the very same place, the U.S. Capitol, where she was standing. (The War of 1812, really, was no less stupid than what transpired on January 6, 2021.) “Just as she sang, ‘But our flag was still there,’” Stephanie Zacharek wrote of the rendition’s crucial moment, “she turned and, astonishingly, with a sweep of the arm straight out of Puccini or Verdi or Bizet, directed our attention to the actual flag. Her intent wasn’t just a subtext. It was a shout of jubilation and defiance. After all of this, our flag is still there!” In that single sweep of her arm, Gaga bridged the gap of 207 years, drew on both the surrounding context and the words of the song, melding them as one, lifting it up beyond compulsory pageantry to give it a pulse. The end, then, became not the bombastic culmination, leaving space for imaginary F-16s, but the emphatic benediction.

I don’t know what Dr. Z would have thought about Lady Gaga’s National Anthem. Maybe he would have just thought: it ran 1:45. Or maybe he would have put the stopwatch down because occasionally, rarely, even a Star-Spangled Banner can transcend time.

Ham on Rye

No matter how many movies about teenage angst are made, there are always more, updating the formula to appeal to and comment on the current generation, like the recent “Spontaneous” and its literally exploding students evoking the very real terror of active shooters. “Ham on Rye”, on one hand, is entirely traditional. Its narrative, in so much as there is one, turns on a ceremony bridging the gap between adolescence and adulthood. On other hand, though, “Ham on Rye” is unlike anything you have ever seen, not so much dreaming up a whole new world as ever so slightly modifying the world in which we exist, recognizable but peculiar, as if it’s set on Earth 2 rather than Earth. If it will prompt myriad questions of logic, those queries should be discarded. Just as the queries one might pose about becoming an adult often prove futile in the face of, simply, going through it, “Ham on Rye” is best, simply, experienced, mirroring the sensation of one’s teenage years, just feeling your way through. 

As the movie opens, various cliques of kids are getting dressed in their grandparents’ clothes and heading off toward some ceremony described as the most important event of their lives. Each of these details sets “Ham and Rye’s” deliberately hazy tone, the former never fully explained, the latter not explained at all, leaving us in a state of limbo, like we can’t quite get a handle of exactly what’s happening. That is exacerbated by the mood. Though not an exact parallel for last year’s “Greener Grass”, “Ham on Rye’s” exacting vision and hyper-uneasy atmosphere are strikingly similar, rendered even more peculiar by dialogue seeming to foreshadow typical teenage rom com travails juxtaposed against incongruous images leaving an unsettling aftertaste: one of the boys sitting stricken in the grass, unable to move, his young friends hesitantly moving on as if they are leaving him behind on the battlefield.  

Their destination is a delicatessen called Monty’s, humorously underlining the arbitrary nature of any teenage ceremony in the first place, suggesting prom would function no less differently over sandwiches and potato salad than it would at a country club or in the gymnasium. That’s not to suggest the scene itself is humorous; if anything, it’s sincere, a stunning synthesis of nearly every teenage movie you’ve seen. It’s the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance lit like a scene from “The Virgin Suicides” with emphasis on dance moves that seem pulled from the utterly unique, spastic gyrations of Fogell from “Superbad.” As sweet as it is, though, it gradually turns dark. Trusting us, forgoing any exposition, director Tyler Taormina has the kids line up, like it’s the blacktop during gym class and kids are picking for the basketball or dodgeball teams. Gradually it becomes clear not everyone is destined to be picked, one girl running out of the diner in tears, while the rest of the kids move on, literally and figuratively, in a scene that might you dismiss if I clinically explained but will wholly believe as it happens on screen.

What happens is akin to a demarcation line, its rash of characters disappearing from screen, or most of them anyway, as a whole host of new characters several years older and heretofore not seen emerge. Their air is down-and-out, as is the movie’s, imbued with a low-key tension as the lush colors of the first half giving way to the black of night. If teenage movies are so often about reaching the cusp of adulthood and ascending, “Ham on Rye” is ultimately about those left behind, like the view has flipped and we are seeing what happens on the dark side of the moon, like coming out the other side of the star gate in “2001” to discover not a new beginning but a failure to launch.

Tenet

“Tenet” gives itself away with the title. It’s a palindrome, a word spelled the same frontwards and back, just as writer/director Christopher Nolan’s latest spectacle is essentially the same frontwards and back, a narrative moving forward until it stops mid-movie and then gets told backward. Is that a spoiler? Have you seen a Christopher Nolan movie? What, did you think “Tenet” was going to begin in the spring and ended in the winter? Turning time inside-out is his thing. His American breakthrough “Memento” was told in reverse and his bending of the the past, present and future has only grown more convoluted and spectacular to the detriment of all else, character and dialogue, even visuals. No, for Nolan, cinema has become something apart from a canvas for images, not the end, to dust off my Kent, but the means to it, telling stories by manipulating the minutes and hours. For awhile, at least, characters and moods could still emerge, like surrounding “Memento’s” deliberate zero (Guy Pearce) with entertaining balls of fire (Carrie-Ann Moss, Joe Pantoliano) or the drone chase in “Interstellar” when any underlying meaning falls away for thrill of the chase. But despite an impressive concerted effort by Nolan to finally be straight-up entertaining, by the end, character and mood in “Tenet” has completely fallen by the wayside.

More than most Nolan films, even, “Tenet” is at once elaborate and elementary. The plot turns on some mysterious device called The Algorithm, less a classic MacGuffin a la The Process in “The Spanish Prisoner” and more an element within the equation, not unlike the film’s protagonist, a CIA agent, named, ahem, Protagonist (John David Washington), merely underlining how little anything within “Tenet” matters. The Algorithm, it turns out, can reverse time and is tied to an evil Russian oligarch, Sator (Kenneth Branagh), a name almost as obviously emblematic as Protagonist, seeking to end life as we know it by erasing the past. Essentially, then, The Algorithm is a doomsday device, the fate of the world hanging in the balance, though the world is a hazy idea in “Tenet”, evoked in the opening at an opera hall where the audience is gassed, spectators as pesky distractions who hardly matter in the grand scheme of things. Nolan tries injecting some meaning by way of the oligarch’s wife (Elizabeth Debicki) and her son though this comes across like Insert Plot Point Here, waiting for further detail that goes unprovided. 

I keep thinking about how such simple-minded designations could have been comical or even revealing in the hands of someone else, like Charlie Kaufman, or, more accurately, his twin brother Donald. And that’s the thing, for all my past complaints about Nolan being so serious and refusing to cut loose, he is trying to have fun some here, even occasionally succeeding, especially in the series of setpieces and conversations comprising the film’s first half. The Protagonist is funded by Sir Michael Crosby, played by Sir Michael Caine, a British intelligence officer who is more like a Hollywood benefactor, giving the Protagonist an unlimited Amex and telling him to go wild. This scene takes place in a highfalutin restaurant where the Protagonist’s suit doesn’t cut it and he dryly asks the snooty waiter to box his order, maybe the most humorous thing that’s ever happened in a Nolan movie. A complex heist, meanwhile, turns crashing an airplane into a building into an elephantine punchline. 

Sadly, however, the humor mostly falls away as the movie meets itself in the middle and then the Protagonist goes backward through time, moving forward (literally) while everything that has already happened plays out around him, giving him the opportunity to stop Sator from seeing through his diabolical plan. The Protagonist crossing over into this alternate world is meant to invoke a sensation similar to “The Wizard of Oz’s” monochrome giving way to color, but like “Inception”, Nolan can only conceive of such a fantastical turn of events through the lens of action movie cliches, car chases, fleets of helicopters, etc., with nary a hint of flair or wit. In its Enchantment Under the Sea Dance rewind, the much maligned “Back to the Future II” managed this sort of parallel reality with more imagination and joy. Nolan’s determination to painstakingly connect the dots, on other hand, eventually overwhelm any sense of joy he has curated.

If dream logic is supposed to make sense until we wake up, it remains an ongoing issue with Nolan’s work that his dream logic makes no sense when we are under it, needing to be awake and pouring over message boards or rewatches to make sense of anything. Indeed, though his tongue may be firmly in his cheek when calling his Protagonist a Protagonist, when it comes time for a climactic monologue of exposition with accompanying flashbacks, no one in “Tenet” deems it a Monologue. No, this kind of monologue is merely Nolan’s own hallmark. “Don't try to understand it,” The Protagonist is told at one point. “Feel it.” Great advice! If only Nolan had followed it.

keira knightley is cautiously optimistic

tfw you are excited but vigilant, looking forward but cognizant of what happened and what is happening still, celebrating with a drink in one hand and cocking your other in a hand fist just in case 

Marking a Miserable Milestone

Once, years ago, not long after 2003 I’d reckon for reasons about to become clear, my friend Nicolle asked me if I had seen the Chris Rock political comedy “Head of State” (2003). “Have I seen it?” I asked incredulously. “I saw it with you!” I replied, also incredulously. “At the Wynnsong 16!” Being able to remember where I have seen every movie since I started going to them on the regular is, along with being able to name every U.S. capital and every Nebraska football starter since 1985, my superpower.

I saw “Groundhog Day” with my whole family at the Westwood 6 in West Des Moines, the same theater where in the same year I saw “Cool Runnings”, for free, summoned past the line and over the velvet rope by an usher who was the older brother of one of my friends, my own personal Copacabana moment. 

I saw “The Family Stone” at the Esquire in Chicago not long before it closed and saw “The Merry Gentleman” (twice!) at Piper’s Alley before it, too, shuttered. I saw “Spotlight” and “Brooklyn” on the same day with a break for donuts and coffee in-between with My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife at the Landmark Century which is an afternoon/early evening I have frequently dreamed about for the last year. I saw “Atonement” at the River East on Friday, saw “The Golden Compass” (Kidman!) at Webster Place on Saturday, wondering the whole time why I had not just a bought another ticket for “Atonement” instead, and then went and saw “Atonement” again at the Landmark Century on Sunday.

I saw “Ocean’s Twelve” with my best friend at the Ziegfeld in Manhattan and I saw “House of Flying Daggers” with my best friend and his future wife at some chain theater in Manhattan I admit I can’t name, though I do remember going up, like, 14 escalators, because even when I’m on vacation I still want to go to the movies.

Cities I have only briefly lived in I remember at least in part through where I saw movies. I saw “Cast Away” at the Shea 14 in Scottsdale, Arizona and “The Dish” too, which was my favorite movie-going experience in the Valley of the Sun, and “You Can Count on Me” and “Memento” at the Camelview 5 which was the one place in that sprawling suburb of a city housing anything independent. I saw “Scream 2” and “Starship Troopers” at the Campus III in Iowa City’s Capitol Mall, running into a dude in my rhetoric class at the former who was buying a ticket for “For Richer or Poorer” which prompted me to silently judge him on the spot, and “L.A. Confidential” and “Amistad” at the Englert (since transformed into a concert hall), the latter with a girl on what might or might not have been a date, I still don’t know.

I saw “Revenge of the Sith” at the previously mentioned Wynnsong 16 after a friend’s wedding, a reminder of a time when I could still stay up all night and still go to a movie the next day, and when I’d buy a newspaper, sprawl the movie times out in front of me on the kitchen table like an army general gleefully studying battle maps. Remember that? Remember just thinking, “Hmmmm, maybe I should see a movie today” and then figuring what’s playing and what you want to see and just, like, going? Remember that? [Sighs deeply.]

That “Star Wars” shout-out is not incidental. Three hundred and sixty-five days ago I went to the ArcLight and saw “The Rise of Skywalker” (bleh). That is to say, it has now, as of today, January 19, 2021, been exactly one year since I have gone to a movie.

I really want to go to a movie.

Some Drivel On...Clear and Present Danger

“Clear and Present Danger” (1994) was the third movie based on a Tom Clancy novel and the second directed by Phillip Noyce, who also helmed the previous entry, “Patriot Games” (1992). In the latter, Noyce really made a movie, mostly just extracting the thrills as opposed to the plot, reducing it to a successful exercise in tension, even adding some genuine stylistic flourishes along the way. In the former, however, back in the director’s chair, Noyce seems more committed to the author’s vision and the novel’s scope. Undoubtedly he cut plenty of material to engineer a two-hour run time, but “Clear and Present Danger” still feels vast despite, like “Patriot Games”, essentially being a revenge epic. Of course, if the revenge sought in “Patriot Games” was by an IRA terrorist on our CIA hero, Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford) in “Clear Present and Danger” violent, personal retribution is sought by, egads, the American President (Donald Moffat). But if that would suggest a moral grey area as opposed to the ostensible black & white of the red, white and blue, “Clear and Present Danger”, despite literally saying this out loud (“The world is grey, Jack!”), does not quite have the temerity to see this idea the whole way through.

The far-reaching story concerns the President ordering, not in so many words, a clandestine reprisal against a Colombian drug lord, Escobedo (Miguel Sandoval), for murdering the POTUS’s businessman friend, never mind that his businessman friend had been skimming millions from Escobedo’s cartel, recasting the War on Drugs as a Steven Seagal thriller, or something. Ryan, who becomes the CIA deputy director when Vice Admiral Greer (James Earl Jones) takes ill, is none the wiser, even going on The Hill to unwittingly lie to Congress to help fund these covert actions. If this sound simple, it is far from, involving myriad moving parts, all of which Noyce, in tandem with his editor Neil Travis, deftly lays out so that we are never confused, utilizing crosscutting to make it seem almost as if we are virtually flipping from chapter to chapter of a 688-page book. Granted, this clinical style mutes the thrills, even the action sequences, all of which Noyce makes feel not so much like firefights in and of themselves but mere extensions of backroom power players carried out by shady black ops wranglers like John Clark (Willem Dafoe). 

If Alec Baldwin, who I glimpsed in a partial rewatch of “The Hunt for Red October” sometime last year, played the Jack Ryan part with more of a gleam in his eye, as did Chris Pine in the one that starred Keira Knightley, Ford truly encapsulates the ethos of a boy scout, not just in the actions his character takes but in the actor’s almost quizzically defiant air. When Ryan flies down to Colombia to team up with Clark for the film’s denouement, the way Ford wears those Ray-Bans and that windbreaker, the determined but innocuous way he carries himself, improbably suggests a dad coaching middle school basketball going black op. It’s really quite impressive. And though Noyce does a fine job visually communicating that Joaquim de Almeida’s Cortez is the true brains of Escobedo’s operation, concluding his scenes on shots of his character rather than the #1, de Almeida does not make as good a villain, frankly, as Moffat. Indeed, Moffat spiritually presages Dubya, evincing both oblivious folksiness and knowing menace, so much that sometimes you have to squint to tell if you’re being put on. If Moffat is slippery, so is Dafoe, utterly inhabiting the air of a spook who cavorts around Panama in an actual Panama hat. Though his character and Ford’s are kept apart until the very end, they emit an unlikely kinda buddy CIA agent vibe that a movie like this is simply unequipped to explore. It made me wonder if Tarantino’s next genre reimagination should be the Tom Clancy thriller? That’s neither here nor there. 

If Ryan sticks out like a sore thumb in Clark’s company, he still gets the job done, discovering the American government is cozying up to Cortez to get Escobedo out of the way and then seeking out Escobedo to let him know, deliberately pitting bad guy against bad guy. This builds to a moment where, briefly, tantalizingly, it appears as if Jack Ryan, boy scout, is going to sit back and watch a Pablo Escobar ringer beat his lieutenant to death with a baseball bat. Through a red herring, though, “Clear and Present Danger” manages to extract Ryan from that murky middle ground and then tacks on an epilogue where he confronts the President peddling b.s. I dunno. Through an objective lens perhaps it’s all a bit much. But I watched this scene less than a week after January 6, 2021 and some scattered semblance of American insurrection, the moment which drove so many craven bootlickers not to confront the President about his incitement of fear and violence but to resign and cowardly clean their hands of it. And if I may step out of the review for a moment (why not? It’s just drivel!), when Ford gritted and his teeth, went full-growl and stood toe-to-toe with a lying, sniveling Commander-in-Chief, boy, I tell ya, despite my jaded critical perspective, my heart swelled. 

Jack Ryan, it turns out, really is a myth.

Pitching More TV Shows as Movies Starring Nicole Kidman

Earlier this week it was announced that Nicole Kidman, her eminence, and Javier Bardem would star in Aaron Sorkin’s forthcoming film about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. This elicited mounds of casting second-guessing and fair enough. Is Nicole Kidman really the right choice to play Lucille Ball, never mind Lucy Ricardo? Would Anna Faris be better? Debra Messing? Who can say? What I can say, immense Kidman bias accounted for, is this: Nicole Kidman can do anything. She played Ann-Margret in “Any Given Sunday.” You didn’t know that, did you? Nope, I didn’t think you did. As such, the question is not how good Kidman will be in the role (very) or whether the movie itself will be psychologically astute or prestige-y drivel but, in the wake of tackling the sitcom’s greatest leading lady after already starring in a movie version of “Bewitched”, what TV show will Kidman bring to the silver screen next? 

A few ideas: 

Remington Steele

Queen Latifah is bringing Robert McCall back to life as Robyn McCall so why not give Hollywood’s other Queen the chance to resurrect Laura Holt? You could even have Pierce Brosnan reprise his role as the eponymous thief. {Blinks.} I just saw the poster. 

Soap

“Soapdish”, I guess, was kind of an indirect version of the 70s afternoon soap opera spoof. But it didn’t star Nicole Kidman. And Nicole Kidman was made to spoof the daytime soaps. “The Paperboy” meets “The Bold and the Beautiful.” The second Oscar should be imminent.

Laverne & Shirley

Did you know that Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts, B.F.F.s, have not starred together in a movie since 1991? That’s pre-Clinton Administration! If we can’t have Nicole & Naomi getting into hijinks around Melbourne then let’s have them get into hijinks in Milwaukee! No? Have I crossed the sitcom sacrosanct line? Fine, if Nicole Kidman as Laverne DeFazio and Naomi Watts as Shirley Feeney is too heretical then we will just… 

Kate & Allie

…cast Naomi Watts as Kate McArdle and Nicole Kidman as Allie Lowell. You’re welcome!

The Flying Nun

As mentioned, her eminence already has a “Bewitched” movie, though it remains one of the few Kidman movies I have not seen, and so we will have to translate “The Flying Nun” to the big screen instead. What was “The Flying Nun” even about? No idea. Doesn’t matter. Jan de Bont hasn’t directed a movie since 2003. Let’s enlist him and turn this “Flying Nun”’ into an action-thriller, balancing poverty and chastity with broom chases and pyrotechnics and watch those sweet, sweet bucks roll in. 

Newhart / The Bob Newhart Show

A crossover between Bob Newhart’s 1970s CBS sitcom set in Chicago and Bob Newhart’s 1980s CBS sitcom set in Vermont in which, after the latter’s famous It Was Just A Dream series conclusion where he woke up in the former’s reality, finds Joanna Loudon (Kidman) winding her way through the space time continuum to exact revenge for being left to run the damn inn alone, sort of Newhart as Cronenberg. 

Valerie’s Family

You will remember that “Valerie’s Family” was rechristened “The Hogan Family” after its star Valerie Harper left the show due to a salary dispute and a subsequent court battle. To make way for the new version of the show, Harper’s character was killed off in an auto accident. …… But what if she wasn’t? What if the auto accident was staged by Sandy Hogan (Carrie-Ann Moss) – née Sandy Raskopf – to get her hooks on Valerie’s Family and now Valerie is out to get her family back by settling the score?

D.C. Follies

As a District bartender surrounded by puppet caricatures of Presidents and other political and cultural figures, Nicole Kidman will not just sling drinks while playing the human straight woman in our cinematic version. No, no, no, no, no. She will uncover a political conspiracy being hatched over so many draft beers; “The Parallax View” with puppets. 

Ray of Light

The 2021 Golden Globes were not canceled, merely rescheduled for late February, much like the 2021 Academy Awards were rescheduled for late April. I know, as a Very Serious Critic™ I am legally mandated to issue a complaint about the fraudulent Globes and their celebrity obsessed governing body, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), but, as I have said so many times before, I can’t bring myself to complain about an event as transitory as Hollywood’s Office Christmas Party. I can walk and chew gum at the same time; I can evaluate art and appreciate Emma Thompson walking onstage at the Beverly Hilton with her heels in one hand and a martini in the other. And boy, I missed the Globes this year, given how recently they have always fallen right at the end of the worst week of the year, the one after New Year’s, this little bright spot in a room where the Christmas tree no longer stands and everything seems so vast and helpless. I wanted to imagine what Meryl Streep and Eddie Murphy were talking about between commercials; I wanted those weird little moments you only get at the Globes.

Weird moments like the 1998 Globes, an all-timer, when Ving Rhames gave his Golden Globe to Jack Lemmon just because he was Jack Lemmon, which seemed to deftly toe the line between both truly honoring Lemmon in Rhames’s own strange way and commentary on how getting a Globe in the first place doesn’t mean all that much, and Christine Lahti being in the bathroom when she won Best Lead Actress in a Dramatic TV Series. That last one is mentioned a lot. Less frequently mentioned is the 2010 Golden Globes when country western singer/songwriter Ryan Bingham missed winning Best Original Song for “The Weary Kind” in “Crazy Heart.” Bingham, however, was not in the bathroom; he was at the bar, getting some beers to bring back to his table. 

It has been a trying, terrible 10 months. And yet even as the pandemic continues to rage and American democracy teeters, as our psyches splinter and we are put on edge day after day, we are being tasked with maintaining the machines of capitalism like everything is normal, which merely doubles our pre-existing exhaustion, as Anne Helen Peterson wrote, if not quite in those words, smashingly, though sadly, on the recent nadir of America’s productivity obsession. I am not asking for us not to be vigilant, and I would like to think everybody here knows that, I am just asking for us to bring more of that Ryan Bingham being at the bar when his Golden Globes win was announced kind of energy, to eschew compulsion for nothing but the result, to allow space to switch off and recuperate, to say: give me a goddam minute. 

Keep the Blog Running

Some time last October was Cinema Romantico’s 15th anniversary, not normally a cultural recurrence worth lingering over, situated as it is between the more precise 10th and 20th. But hey, in Internet years 15 is like 30, right? Why not? So we will say that some time last October was Cinema Romantico’s ersatz 30th anniversary, still blogging in an age when most of the blogs, big, little or in-between, have shut it down, gone dormant, rarely post, or let their domains expire. And while there have been many times throughout those 15 (30) years when I have felt like walking away from this blog, 2020, for obvious reasons we need not rehash, is the one that left me closest to blogging exhaustion even as, paradoxically, 2020 was the year when I needed this blog most.

Like a lot of things in life, I came late to blogging, right around the time it was becoming mainstream, as sure a sign as any that you were tardy in reading the cultural tea leaves. I did not really round into top blogging form until the twenty-tens, maybe because my life didn’t really round into form until the twenty-tens, just as blogging was becoming out of date. That was the same point I took a stab at film criticism for a couple legit sites, even making a few bucks along the way, just in time to learn that film criticism as a means to make a living was on its way out too. If another blogger might have called it quits, I kept blogging, and kept blogging, and kept blogging. I think I have managed some of my best blogs in the last 5 years, some stuff I’ll put up against any ten-cent Tomatometer approved joint, ironic given how my readership has dwindled, reminding me of Helen Rosner observing a couple years ago that she could not “shake the feeling that (she) wasted (her) best writing years on bloggy ephemera that’s already platform-obsolete.”  

In 2019, Deadspin fell apart. (It still exists, but not really.) It had been a blog since 2005 too, albeit one with a slightly stronger foothold [sarcastic font], and it felt like the emblematic end of the blogging era. By their finish, perhaps, they had become something more, though that old blogging spirit remained, not sticking to sports even as it wrote about sports, housing both David Roth’s pre-eminent pieces of the godforsaken T*ump era and looking at moments in the sporting arena in a hyper-specific, passionate, profane way. Its core contributors reunited last year and formed the aptly titled Defector, of which I am a proud subscriber, and which Colin McGowan lovingly described as “just some idiots with a blog, following their interests.” He continued: “A lot of Internet stuff should be this simple, but almost none of it is.”

In a Defector post last week, Drew Magary went through something like the rise and fall of blogging, the outlaw-ish quirks of the early Internet but also how social media consolidated the collective Internet into something less fun, more corporate, as is the American way. At the same time, though, he speculated that perhaps the Internet was coming full circle, re-splintering into a cavalcade of niches. That’s what Cinema Romantico has always been: niche. Of course, Magary was referring to new niches, subscription indie joints like Defector, privatized social media and Substack, the current platform du jour. I have briefly considered – well, let’s say: thought about – Substack, beamed directly to your email. But I dunno. Substacks don’t get me going, aside from Katie Heindl’s Basketball Feelings, where you receive personal essays by way of poetry, much more preferable to me than newsletter round-ups, where too often the individual voice is strained out, like they’re trying to impress someone, like all the world’s brand management or resume writing. 

And that is when I realized that Cinema Romantico has, in its own way, come full circle too, just without ever leaving the same place it started, closing my eyes and tapping my blogging heels together three times. For me, it’s never been about the platform. Like John McClane incredulously, irreverently wondering, “Glass? Who gives a shit about glass?”, I ask “Who gives a shit about the platform?” It’s the words, stupid. More of those presently.  

Pitch Meeting: Football Monastery

In a recent piece for the Omaha World-Herald, Dirk Chatelain did a deep dive on the grand college bowl game drama (stay with me!) that played out across New Year’s Day 1971, culminating in a mythical national championship for my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers. The story is heavy on anecdotes and joyful specifics, none more than the one Chatelain pulled from the Rose Bowl between Stanford and Ohio State, the latter coached by the legendarily disagreeable Woody Hayes. Chatelain sets the unlikely southern California scene: “Hayes could’ve cut his team some holiday slack. He did not. The old tyrant lodged the team at a California monastery.” STOP THE TAPE. During the 2017 Rose Bowl, the Oklahoma Sooners stayed at the JW Marriott Los Angeles L.A. Live; the Georgia Bulldogs bunked down at the InterContinental Los Angele Downtown. The former claims to set “a new standard for luxury”; the latter “revel(s) in glamour and exhilaration that defines what it means to live the InterContinental life.” Hayes, to reiterate, lodged his team at a freaking monastery. And while it gave me a chuckle, it also gave me an idea. After all, I am a less than successful Hollywood producer, having brought you the likes of “The Sun Bowl Follies” and “Downtown Athletic Club — The Movie”, each one a quasi-uproarious college football comedy. No movie production company is more dedicated to quasi-uproarious college football comedies than mine. And here was another plot for one staring me straight in the face.

Chatelain’s teaser sent me Googling for more backstory. It did not take long to find a 2009 L.A. Times piece by longtime college football scribe Chris Dufresne (who sadly died last year) detailing Woody Hayes’s dedication to No Fun. “The Mater Dolorosa Passionist Retreat Center, still operational, was established in 1924 on 83 acres in the foothills in Sierra Madre. The monastery, built in the 1930s, was torn down after the 1991 earthquake. The property was taken over by the Army in World War II and used as a weapons staging area and a place to quarter wounded soldiers.” Dufresne continued: “Hayes could not have found a better place for solitude -- never mind that the monastery scared the wits out of many of his players.”

Dufresne quotes a guard on Ohio State’s 1968 team, Phil Strickland, recounting the team flight to the 1969 Rose Bowl: “(Hayes) had the trainers tape everyone up on the plane. That meant we were going to go directly to the practice field.” And that is where we will begin our tale — “Football Monastery” (a play, you see, on the old expression Football Factory) — with a Hayes surrogate, Joe Melch (J.K. Simmons), coach of Hart Crane College, going up and down the aisle making sure his players are being taped up, banning the flight attendants from food and beverage service and literally throwing the The Columbus Dispatch reporter (Abbi Jacobson) off the plane in a nod to “Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade.”  Upon landing, the team will go straight to the practice field for a brief and brutal scene before being bussed to the remote monastery, passing Knot’s Berry Farm along the way, the bright lights and towering roller coasters calling to them like a forbidden beacon. 

The rest of the movie, save for an ending we will get to, takes place inside the monastery. The real-life Strickland deemed his team’s experience as being akin to a Lon Chaney movie, star of silent horror movies, a genre which we will merge with both philosophical drama and John Sturges’s “The Great Escape” (1963) into Cinema Romantico Productions’ patented blend of quasi-uproarious comedy as the mad and controlling Joe Melch runs amok before facing up to his feelings and fears while in monk-like isolation (helped by chats with an eccentric monk, played by Kevin Corrigan, over Trappist ale in the grotto) and the players scrupulously plan a breakout attempt. Finally, on New Year’s Eve, when they are all supposed to be in bed early for the next day’s big game, the team flees as Joe Melch wakes bright and early the following morning to discover the monastery only contains monks. Ten minutes before the Rose Bowl, Melch finally finds his team at Knot Berry Farm. 

The movie cuts to the Rose Bowl where the head referee looks at an empty sideline and then at his watch in confusion. 

The movie cuts back to Knot Berry’s Farm where Coach Melch rides the Xcelerator, hands in the air, with his whole team. End Credits. 

State of the Union: The Capitol Dome

“Boys forget what their country means by just reading ‘Land of the Free’ in their history books. Men forget even more.” – Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)

In June of 2019 I returned, as I often do, with My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife to her hometown, the nation’s capital, Washington D.C. We spent an afternoon at the National Gallery on The Mall and, upon leaving, cut back across to Pennsylvania Avenue. Crossing at that spot, on 6th St, puts you in position for an ideal photo of the U.S. Capitol, heightened on this day by a typical summer D.C. thunderstorm rolling in. I paused in the middle of the crosswalk, snapped a picture and hurried on. I did not consider any looming symbolism in the moment; I just like the image of approaching rain clouds! But I have been thinking about that visual all week, how America has spent the last four years with thunderheads on the horizon, moisture accumulating in the form of hotheaded political rhetoric spewed by a craven President, enhanced by his spineless, self-serving enablers, waiting to unleash a deluge; finally, on Wednesday January 6, 2021, the clouds opened up.

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Looking back on it, was there ever a more suitable American actor to cry “Look! There it is! The Capitol Dome!” than Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”? No actor today could get away with that line; it would sound too mawkish. Stewart, though, had a way with words and when he gives his big speech, the one quoted above, his voice is virtually trembling, transforming the sentimentality of the dialogue into something respectfully fierce. As it happens, I have been slowly winding my way through Stewart’s westerns, the ones he made with Anthony Mann, which often run counter to the mythmaking of America just as so many 70s paranoia thrillers post-Watergate did too. “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”, on the other hand, culminated the end of FDR’s New Deal, Big Government’s shining moment. Of course, even “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” knew how belief in one’s government could wilt. When Stewart cries out upon seeing the Capitol Dome, the people around him can’t quite figure the fuss; the Capitol’s been there a long time, after all. You start to take these things for granted, see, the Dome loses some of its symbolic sheen and, before you know it, the whole system is teetering on the brink. 

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Destroying the U.S. Capitol, and its surrounding District landmarks, has been a recurring silver screen tradition, the modern masters of disaster, Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay, never passing up an opportunity to see the seat of our government go up in flames. (In fairness, Michael Bay would blow up the Bridges of Madison County if they’d give him a permit.) These scenes of destruction, though, tend to reflect the national mood, whether it’s “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers” (1956) and the ostensible red menace or Emmerich demonstrating how as abstract an enemy as climate change can topple the Statue of Freedom in “The Day After Tomorrow” (2004). Just as often, though, like the aliens of Emmerich’s ID4 (1996), destruction of the Capitol building bears no deeper meaning than The Glass Tower in “The Towering Inferno”, an edifice there just to get obliterated for our mindless entertainment, almost seeming to render us oblivious to how it stands for something so much larger than just ourselves. 

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Based on nothing more than a series of cult trading cards, and featuring a climatic scene of a bird perched on the shoulder of Tom Jones (as himself), “Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks!” (1996) destroying a sacred symbol might seem unserious too. Yet few films have treated the treated the hallowed east end of the National Mall with quite as much irreverent reverence. Not the destruction of the building itself, which happens mid-movie, but the concluding scenes on the Capitol steps. I have written about this scene before, where the dead President’s daughter, Taffy Dale (Natalie Portman), who I have written fan fiction about before, honors the unlikely donut shop worker, Richie Noris (Lukas Haas), who has saved the world. In its droll way, this moment epitomizes everything about America, our diversity (the mariachi band playing The Star Spangled Banner), our utopian vision juxtaposed against our sinful past (Richie arguing for a return to teepees), our absurdity (the scene’s entire air), and our belief that we can somehow hold together this grandiose experiment even when it is on the verge of collapse. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Red Balloon (1956)

As a kid the best week of the year was always – always – the week between Christmas and New Year’s, when school was out and I was home, just bowl games and bliss. Of course, the week following New Year’s was the flip side to that coin, the worst week of the year, doubly ironic and sad since it was the first week of the year, when everything was supposed to be looking up, starting anew. But it couldn’t be helped. I mean, you just survived four months of school for what? Another five months of school?! Oh, the vengeful gods and their cruel pranks. Granted, sometimes January 1 fell on, like, a Wednesday and you could ease into the transition. But just as often January 1 was a Monday, leaving with you with four brutal days of re-entry. It was more than an adolescent soul could bear. When we would drop off my visiting grandparents at the airport and then watch their American West flight take off, I remember wishing I could join them and just fly away. 

Albert Lamorisse’s beloved 36-minute short “The Red Balloon” (1956) begins with a wide shot of Paris seen from atop a hill in the Ménilmontant neighborhood. A young boy, Pascal (Pascal Lamorisse), wanders into view, the huge frame emphasizing that he is alone. That loneliness, however, is rectified by the red balloon he finds tied to a lamppost in the next shot, which he sees before us, the camera tilting up for an eye-popping reveal, the redness of the balloon brilliantly contrasted against the drab greys of the surrounding buildings. Indeed, coming only a dozen years after the end of WWII, “The Red Balloon” leans into its bleak war-torn environment. That reality not only highlights the balloon visually but imbues what is essentially a fairytale with an impressive verité, hinting at how, despite so much kid-friendliness, the movie does not shy away from complex emotions

The stray kitten Pascal briefly comes across in the film’s opening shot emblemizes how the balloon becomes akin to a pet, the string like a leash, proudly leading him around the neighborhood. There is something moving in how Lamorisse conveys this story entirely through visuals, excising any explanations or expository philosophy, simply allowing the balloon and the boy to exist on their own terms, an unlikely friend providing this young boy strength in himself to navigate the cruel world. The world is cruel, after all, brought home in a group of bullies taking umbrage with this balloon if for no other reason than to stomp out any joy in the world. And they do stomp on it, literally, the balloon that is, after it has been punctured and fallen to the ground as Lamorisse transforms a familiar moment of a balloon running out of air into nothing less than a death, a darker, more lyrical version of the goldfish toilet funeral meant to ease children into lessons about passing on. 

And though “The Red Balloon” might have ended there, Lamorisse has one more twist up his sleeve, all of Paris’s balloons floating in, as if as if by spiritual instinct, when Pascal’s red friend passes away, to band together and lift him up. It evokes “Up”, though that animated film’s balloons came at the beginning rather than the ending, a crucial difference. Though Lamorisse takes great care to temper this fantasy with striking doses of reality, in the end, he still allows Pascal to float away. 

The Gospel of Rahad Jackson

Well we finally got there, to the Alfred Molina scene, that is, in our ongoing American production of “Boogie Nights.” Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.

The Perfect Phone Call

Over the weekend, the ostensible President of the United States, King Big Brain I, placed a phone call to Georgia’s Secretary of State in which he explained, more or less, that he had been beamed up to a UFO in the middle of the night by aliens who proceeded to show him tremendous evidence of voter fraud the likes of which you have never seen before. In a normal administration this might have caused a multiple-alarm fire; in this administration it was just another day at the office with the classy gold drapes. Why this wasn’t even His Imbecility’s first election fraud phone call! He’d made one of those in 2019 to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, proffering a quid pro quo in his typical crude manner, leading directly to his impeachment and causing him to deem the phone call “perfect.” 

He has yet to deem the second phone call perfect, at least so far as I can discern, but I assume he thinks it is perfect because he assumes everything he does and says is perfect. And I suspect he labeled that first phone call perfect because his limited vocabulary prevented him from describing what he meant by perfect, leaving behind the most crucial question: what makes a phone call perfect? Is it content? Is it length? Is it tone of voice? Is it verbiage? Is it honest back and forth? Is it getting to the bottom of the something? Is it beginning the call the right way; is it ending the call the right way? Is it convincing the customer service rep to waive the late fee? Is it getting that stooge on the other end of the line to purchase a subscription to Better Homes and Gardens? Is it the phone lines going down and not having to make the call in the first place?

You might not immediately think of the phone call between master thief Neil McCauley (Robert DeNiro) and the businessman cum money launderer Roger van Zant (William Fichtner) in Michael Mann’s “Heat” (1995) as The Perfect Phone Call. After all, the phone call is nothing less than McCauley threatening van Zant’s life – nay, telling van Zant in so many words that he’s “a dead man.” That doesn’t sound so perfect. But as King Big Brain I goes to show, who says a phone call needs be humane or within the law to achieve perfection? 

Let us now recount the call in full...

McCauley: “Roger van Zant?” 

van Zant: “Yeah, who’s this?” 

McCauley: “You know who this is.” 

van Zant: “Yes I do, yes I do. I sent a guy to deliver the package. He didn’t call, is everything all right?”

McCauley: “Tell you what, forget the money.”

van Zant: “What?” 

McCauley: “Forget the money.” 

van Zant: “It’s a lot of money. What are you doing? What do you mean, forget the money?” 

McCauley: “What am I doing? I’m talking to an empty telephone.”

van Zant: “I don’t understand.” 

McCauley: ‘“Cause there is a dead man on the other end of this fuckin’ line.”

To begin with, while McCauley’s phone call to van Zant might well be, in its own way, a business call, it is simultaneously the spiritual antecedent to the most dreaded of all phone calls – the sales call. McCauley is not pitching van Zant anything; in point of fact, he’s telling van Zant to “forget the money.” This alone, this admirable, even heroic, refusal to sell something, puts the call on the road to perfect, personal, in its way, rather than transactional. 

What’s more, McCauley, aided greatly by the esteemed actor playing him, forgoes chit-chat or any annoying pretense of aggravating pleasantries. He confirms the person on the other end of the line is the person he’s trying to reach, avoiding the insultingly superfluous Start-Talking-Only-To-Realize-This-Isn’t-The-Right-Person red herring. From there he does not so much deflect as commendably reject van Zant’s attempts to stall and make the phone call unnecessarily interminable before, upon van Zant trying to butter him up with a little small talk before they get to the brass tacks, shutting him down by inserting the brass tacks a mere five exchanges in, keeping the phone call on schedule. And at that point, rather than hanging around, wasting his time and van Zant’s (after all, van Zant’s a dead man so he better get to living while he still has time!), McCauley states the phone call’s ultimate intent and then, once he does, eschews a banal have a good day, nice talking to you, etc., to simply hang up, ensuring the phone call is all of, what, forty seconds? 

If McCauley famously espoused the philosophy that one must be willing to walk out on anyone or anything in 30 seconds flat if he/she feels the heat around the corner, he might have been just as smart to espouse a similar philosophy about making a phone call. Never make a phone call you are not willing to hang up on in 40 seconds flat if basic intelligence suggests there is no reason for it to continue.