Coming Tuesday: Middling Thriller March

March means Daylight Savings, the long-awaited moment when we emerge from winter’s dark-at-dusk cocoon to finally spring forward. Cinema Romantico, on the other hand, this March, wants to spring backward. Our love of middling thrillers is no secret here; we have sought them out frequently during the Pandemic, getting lost in the cozy rhythms of their mere adequacy. But watching “The Little Things” (review to come) made us miss them all that much more. And so if for some the third month of the year means March Madness™ and the Spring Equinox, for Cinema Romantico, in 2021 anyway, it means Middling Thrillers, every Tuesday, on the dot, reviewed with tough love. Join us, won’t you?

Friday's Old Fashioned: Ruby in Paradise (1993)

Victor Nunez’s Ruby in Paradise (1993), bearer of Ashley Judd’s greatest performance, long unavailable outside a sketchy YouTube upload and other suboptimal means, has been re-released by Quiver Distribution, bless their souls, in high definition master to rent or to buy through various digital platforms and virtual cinemas. This is truly wonderful news. Perhaps Criterion could be next? In its honor, here is our 4-year old review of it, a Friday’s Old Fashioned second round. Then go watch it. 

“Ruby in Paradise” opens with Ruby Lee Gessing (Ashley Judd) fleeing her abusive partner in Tennessee by driving south, disappearing into the darkness as she does, before re-emerging in the light of Florida’s panhandle where she seeks to change her life. Life changes at the cinema often come about because of Big or Unplanned Events pulsing with readymade drama, and some movies do fine jobs of illustrating such transformations. But life just as often changes without capital letters, taking place quietly, by accumulating experiences and then allowing time for those experiences to be considered and put into context. Victor Nunez renders such a subtle transformation in “Ruby in Paradise” by simply observing Ruby as she spruces up her dingy living quarters, performs the menial tasks required at the tourist shop where she works, meets new people, learns from each of these seemingly underwhelming events, lessons she writes downs. Those lessons, befitting the cheap spiral notebook in which she pens them, are more functional than grandiose. 

Ruby comes to Florida because the lone good memory she clings to is a family vacation there, a fanciful notion that “Ruby in Paradise”, with its grimy yet hopeful air, both laughs at and embraces. Nunez gives her moments to stand on the beach, feet in the water, shimmering in the sunset, but he also counteracts these moments with all manner of mundane strip malls not far from the sand, and the shop where Ruby works, which, save for some tropical trinkets, could be anywhere. And that Ruby arrives in the off season, while a means to give her a little extra soul-searching time, illustrates a Florida away from the lull of tourism, where everyday locals work low wage jobs, an economic reality that comes through even clearer when Ruby briefly loses her position at the souvenir shop and finds work in an industrial laundry. During the latter, Ruby goes through the grueling motions, fighting to stay present, which her co-workers, seen laughing both on the job and off it, stress as being of the utmost importance, suggesting a life of such labor can drain all the life from you, a frightening proposition that “Ruby in Paradise” suggests might be the worst fate of all.

It’s also telling that at this job, like her job at the tourist shop, Ruby is principally surrounded by women. This is not just a movie told from an economically poor vantage point, but the from a woman’s point-of-view too. Sure, Ruby finds herself in the company of men too, like the shop owner’s son, a semi-smooth talking lout, a broad performance by Bentley Mitchum that is the movie’s primary weak point. Even so, it makes sense that Ruby would go down that road, reverting to previous behavior, like it’s been ingrained all her life, and ultimately reminding her she came here to break free. Her relationship with Mike (Todd Field) is more pleasant, because he at least treats her well and introduces her to new things, though cracks emerge there too, as he proves to be a pessimist by nature about nature, who loves the land but can only see the bad being done. Even more, though, his ideas of a relationship skew conservative, which is what eventually turns Ruby away, when he tells her “I’ll take care good of you” and she replies “Every girl’s dream” with the sort of voice that lets you know it damn sure isn’t.

In a movie where so little happens, in a traditional sense, where the journey is one principally taking place inwardly, the lead actress becomes paramount in propping up the production, and Judd, in her first feature film role, is up to the task. Consider a downturn for Ruby, stuck between jobs, when Nunez presents her with a momentary ray of light in the form of a piece of pie brought over by a neighbor. In the moment that Ruby eats her dessert for dinner, Judd does not overplay, refraining from some exaggerated “mmmmm” or some such, knowing the emotion is construed via the scene’s context and that all she needs to do is exist within it. With many of her character’s thoughts relayed in voiceover, Judd gives them not the ring of cemented truth but food for thought. And though Ruby assumes a determined air in applying for her first job, most elsewhere Judd is content to let her listen, and let you see her listening, and then sizing up what was said and deciding for herself. Movies so often insistently impress change upon their characters with external events whereas Judd pulls the niftiest actor trick of all – she lets you see how the change comes from within.

Legally Obligated Golden Globes Predictions

The Golden Globes cannot always be trusted, to paraphrase Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson) of “Jackie Brown”, but you can always trust the Golden Globes to be the Golden Globes. Indeed, last weekend, an L.A. Times investigation exposed the Globes’ governing body, the oft-derided Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), as nothing less than a corrupt cabal. The HFPA operates, it turns out, no differently than your garden variety crooked college football bowl game, ostensibly functioning as a non-profit to redirect compensation to themselves and taking money from a TV network (NBC) that has essentially transformed its ceremony into less of an autonomous awards banquet than a made-for-television event. And though I would like nothing more than to submit the GIF of Claude Rains in “Casablanca” declaring that he is “shocked, shocked to find there is gambling going on here”, The Globes, however frivolous you and I know them to be, have positioned themselves, not least through NBC’s platform, as an industry weather vane. That’s why the L.A. Times also revealing the HFPA’s membership includes zero black members was rightfully excoriated. It’s why so many people were furious when the universally trashed Netflix series “Emily in Paris” landed so many nominations and the critically acclaimed British series “I May Destroy You“ earned none. Award shows matter as much as we say they matter and so I have always wished we would treat The Golden Globes like what they are: a more glamorous version of the MTV Movie Awards or the Blockbuster Entertainment Awards (RIP). And yet, through their avarice and NBC’s insistence, the Golden Globes have attained significance. 

Of course, now we know, by virtue of the L.A. Times, those “Emily in Paris” nominations were, more or less, bought and paid for, the show’s creators flying 30 HFPA members to Paris and putting them at a five-star hotel, akin to “Doctor Dolittle’s” “prime-rib-and-free-booze campaign of dinner screenings”, to quote Mark Harris’s “Pictures at a Revolution” that garnered that stink bomb nine Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, proving the stuffy Oscars and boozy Globes are not all that different. And just as the Oscars have sought reform, not least through diversifying their ranks, the Golden Globes only hope may be reform too. But who on Earth aside from the most craven would want to join the HFPA such as it is? (Will someone from the HFPA get up there on Sunday night and blame Awards Show Cancel Culture, the trust fund cousin of Constitutional Cancel Culture?) No, you’d have to expunge them all, and if you expunged them all, would the HFPA be the HFPA? And would The Globes be The Globes? If your awards are predominantly a farce, how can they be farcical when buffoons aren’t running the show? Granted, if they did reform, for real, the non-profit could potentially be used for altruism. And my despite my recurring proclamation about The Globes merely being Hollywood’s Office Party, so stop taking them seriously, if they took themselves seriously, set an example and did some good for the industry, rather than the bad, well, I don’t want be the one jackass over here telling people to bring back the corruption and greed. 

In that light, the only Golden Globes prediction I will make is this: “Emily in Paris” winning for Best Television Series – Musical or Comedy. Because not only would that be the funniest thing ever, it would be the ultimate nail in the HFPA coffin. 

Ray of Light

Last year, on this very blog, I deemed Alfre Woodard in “Clemency” as perhaps the best movie drunk I have ever seen. I stand by that, though in recently re-watching “The Philadelphia Story” I was reminded that if there is a close second, a worthy challenger, if not a usurper, at least from a different angle, it is Jimmy Stewart. It happens midway through George Cukor’s 1940 classic, the night before Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn) is to be married to What’s-His-Face, the guy who doesn’t stand a chance, destined to lose out to C.K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant). Before that happens, though, spurring it along, in fact, Mike Connor (Stewart), the reporter tasked with concocting a story out of this whole marriage, deeply suspicious of the rich & famous, gets drunk and seeks out C.K. to hash out his feelings.

Mike Connor: “Are you still in love with her? Or perhaps you consider that to be a very personal question. Liz thinks you are! Liz thinks you are.” 

The wag of the finger up there, that’s Mike decreeing “Liz thinks you are!”, truly honoring that exclamation point, like he’s caught C.K. red-handed. But then instantly, Stewart downshifts, bringing his own disappointment about that development to the surface, almost seeming to say the second “Liz thinks you are” to himself.  

Mike Connor: “Although of course women like to roman..romanticize things a bit.”

The ellipsis denotes a drunken hiccup, which in the hands of most mortals would have been a stagy affectation but as emitted by Stewart really sounds like the bubbly just expanded his stomach. 

C.K. Dexter Haven: “Yes, they do, don’t they?”
Mike Connor: “Yes they do, don't they.”

The rhythm Stewart hits on repeating C.K.’s line is verbatim is perfect. I have a friend, who shall remain nameless to protect the innocent, who I’ve heard, when inebriated, do a version of that and, man, Stewart’s version is dead-on. I mean, dead-on. Granted, Stewart gets the perfect scene partner here in Grant, playing the tee-totaler to perfection with that kind of bemused air you get when suddenly confronted with a drunk person less menacing or violent than comical and a little too unaware of personal space. But Stewart is not just playing drunk to be funny.

If Woodard’s drunkenness in “Clemency” quietly gave away how her prison ward character was holding by the slightest of threads, in drunkenly pressing C.K. on his feelings about this ex-wife, the scene itself finds Mike admitting his brewing infatuation with Tracy. Science may be skeptical of drunkenness as a truth serum but this isn’t science, this is art, and Stewart’s intoxication really does seem to yield unwitting authenticity. 

Some Drivel On...Salt

Here is something you may or may not know: Angelina Jolie is 5 feet 7 inches tall. That’s a fact, yes, but I don’t believe it. I do not believe that I am taller than Angelina Jolie. It’s inconceivable. That’s the irresistible lie of the big screen, how it can render someone the same height as Mark Zuckerberg bigger than the Sphinx. Movie Stars and the typically annoying conversations surrounding them – whether they exist, what makes them – tend, as I have lamented so many times before, to be frustratingly distilled down to box office receipts, or some irksome variation of analytics, as if you can quantify something as ineffable as screen presence. Angie cracked the code, if only more people would notice. You could see that presence beginning to fuse with her acting in “Alexander” (2004) where, even as she chewed scenery, she held the screen with a magnetism befitting the Queen of Macedonia. You could see it, too, in “Wanted” (2008) which, for all its bells and whistles, was best when Jolie was simply sauntering across screen or standing there. Seriously, no modern actor just stands on screen like Angelina Jolie; it is an elemental gift. But it was not until “Salt” in 2010 when a director, the veteran Phillip Noyce, truly seized on Jolie’s presence by making virtually an entire movie out of it.

Salt is the surname of Evelyn (Jolie), a CIA agent, one tasked with interviewing a Russian defector (Daniel Olbrychski) as the movie opens. The defector weaves a grand tale of Russian sleeper spies implanted all over the American government, waiting to strike, citing one secret agent in particular: Evelyn Salt. ’Tis a grand setup, truly grand, culminated in how Noyce shoots the immediate aftermath of this revelation in a finely calibrated series of close-ups, of Salt, of her superior officer (Liev Schrieber), of the CIA counter intelligence officer (Chiwetel Ejiofor) listening in, an early signal of Noyce honoring the principle tenet of the silver screen being about human faces. Indeed, that set-up is extra brilliant because it lays out in exact detail what is going to happen, the only question being whether or not Salt really is who the defector says she is, meaning that rather than digging in our heels and paying attention, we can lean back and lose ourselves in the movie, in exacting action sequences where Salt is locked in a contained CIA room and has to manufacture escape or, when seemingly cornered on a city street, leaps from a freeway overpass onto a passing semi-truck below. Whether the latter makes sense where the laws of physics are concerned, as a common action movie complaint goes, makes little difference because visually it makes complete sense. Noyce and his crack cinematographer Robert Elswit, bless their hearts, forgo blurs of close-ups to shoot coverage and maintain spatial coherence. 

As Salt, Jolie begins the movie in a familiar register, playing a woman who, initially, just wants to get home in time for an anniversary dinner with her husband (August Diehl) and then, once all hell breaks loose, assuming an air of determined desperation, evinced in how she grits her teeth as as the walls figuratively close in. But then, a curious, interesting thing happens. As it becomes clearer that Salt is, in fact, a Russian sleeper spy (11-year old spoiler alert), Jolie lets that sort of Richard Kimble-ish countenance fall by the wayside, simmering down. Jolie is doing this in part as a feint, to make us wonder what the character is up to as she assassinates the Russian President (or does she?). Whatever it means, though, proves less crucial to how it all feels, the powerful grace with which Jolie moves, highlighted in the elegant motion of Noyce’s camera, and, even more, the ultra-cool with which she does not move on camera at all, an action blockbuster merging with a study of performative charisma. When her character is momentarily caught mid-movie and raises her hands, her smile is more of a taunt, sure, but it’s also her ultimate movie star moment, the one when Jolie effortlessly harnesses the full capacity of the camera.

Initially Tom Cruise was slated to play Salt, then named Edwin, before he dropped out, apparently deeming the part too close to his recurring “Mission: Impossible” role. When Jolie stepped in, so too did screenwriter Brian Helgeland, tailoring the character for a woman. How much of a change there was, I don’t know, but it’s not difficult to imagine the most significant alteration as occurring less on the page than in actorly demeanor. In the increasingly excellent M:I movies, Cruise has perfected his own movie star persona, one I have previously appraised, harmonizing with his penchant for intense DIY stunts to aggressively demonstrate his commitment, in the way he squints, grimaces, runs, jumps. Jolie, too, was lauded for doing some of her own stunts in “Salt”, but rather than underlining it, strains all that zealousness away, opting for a potent manifestation of cinema’s oldest, truest rule: less is more. Rarely has less been so much.   

Soul

The title of the latest Pixar adventure, “Soul”, refers not to music, though jazz does play a semi-prominent role, but to the essential core of a person. Co-directors Pete Docter and Kemp Powers literalize and lampoon the notion of a human being’s soul, not unlike the way Docter’s “Inside Out” had fun with the human mind, while taking us to fantastical places, a la Pixar’s Coco conjuring up the Land of the Dead. “Soul”, however, in toggling between breezy comedy for the kids and more existential questions for the adults works against an emergent theme of life’s meaning being distilled down to an appreciation of the little things by succumbing to its myriad aesthetic complications, a strange, occasionally great, beautifully animated, frequently muddled stew.

As “Soul” opens, Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), a music teacher, is molding young musical minds. It’s a curious opening, if not a harbinger, where the kids come across inspired by Joe even as “Soul” simultaneously portrays him as teaching with one head out the door, more consumed with a desire to play jazz for a living, a message as distracted as Joe himself seems to be. At least, though, that distraction informs his downfall. After nailing an audition to play piano for a local jazz singer (Angela Bassett), Joe fails to see an open manhole in his excitement walking home and falls through. If this scene begins as comic setpiece of near misses, the transition is jarring in its suddenness, forcing us to recognize Joe’s instant death at the same rate as the character, while also proffering a subtextual lesson that wanting something too much or just wanting too much in general renders one blind to life’s peril.

Then again, death does not exactly enlighten Joe. Rendered a bodiless blob, Joe finds himself aboard a conveyor belt, imagining the ostensible sweet hereafter as a bleary subterranean airport walkway tracking toward The Great Beyond, a massive bright white light with a strange buzzing sound, like a refrigerator on the fritz. If other blobs simply stand there, at once transfixed and terrified, Joe turns and runs, still clinging to the belief his life had turned around, spilling off the walkway and into The Great Before, an enchanting place of blue fields and violet hills, where souls are molded for their Earthly descent to occupy a human. Mistaken for a mentor, Joe is assigned to 22 (Tina Fey), an insubordinate soul that has refused entering a human body for centuries, discouraged by the unpredictability of human life. Rather than guiding 22, however, she becomes something more like his co-conspirator, helping finagle a way to get Joe back into his body on Earth.

It is an inherently fascinating juxtaposition, a child, essentially, who does not want life to begin and an adult, more or less, who does not want life to stop. That 22 also takes Joe to The Zone, the mystical place where artists and athletes are said to lose themselves, but portrays it as a place where people are just as apt to lose themselves completely, “Soul” not only paints its two main characters as lost souls but brings to vivid life the scary side of obsession. Indeed, it redefines an earlier scene of Joe losing himself in music not as less moving than corrosive. From here “Soul” metamorphoses once again into a body switch comedy when the unlikely duo’s descent to Earth results in a mix-up: rather than re-entering his own body, Joe enters the body of a cat, while 22 enters the body of Joe. Though Joe finally transforms into something like 22’s shepherd through his feline form, the underlying connotations weigh this genre shift down. 

Though the nature of the movie’s soul suggests something apart from color, that’s the kind of cozy myth “Soul” cannot help but counteract in casting a white woman to give voice to 22, meaning it is a white voice coming out of a black body, a fundamental problem Docter clearly recognized by enlisting the black Powers as co-director. Granted, the involvement of Powers yields some of the movie’s strongest material, like a pair of scenes in a barbershop that feel delightfully as much like their own world as anything in The Great Before. As it is, however, an otherwise refreshing animated examination of black lives is compromised by this half blind point-of-view. 

At the same time, for all the The Great Before’s unique visual splendor, evincing its counselors as two-dimensional, almost like cubist paintings plucked from the canvas, as if whatever is Up There is beyond our imagination, the place itself is nevertheless strangely, even frighteningly, reminiscent of our world. Indeed, counselors dole out traits to souls like they are engines or hoods on an automobile assembly line, soul creationism, in a sense, mixed with the quota-based tempo of an American manufacturing line. Must even the afterworld assume the air of Amazon.com, Inc.?

It is in direct conflict, in fact, with how 22 autonomously grasps her essence. In this way, the body switch scenes, while tone deaf, are also the movie’s best, a variation on the idea of New York as a place to flee for reinvention. The animation of NYC might not be as imaginative as its invented worlds, inherently constrained by the real-life place, yet nevertheless achieves a transcendent beauty all its own. The dollops of autumn light, the way the light falls across the street, at once feels like both an identifiable New York and one that exists only in an idealized memory while everyday objects like a slice of New York-style pizza and a helicopter seed lyrically evince life’s (Earth’s) overwhelming beauty. “Soul” may be overstuffed and inconsistent, but when that seed falls from the sky, for a moment, being alive seems so simple. 

Who Should Play the Villain in Paddington 3?

On Wednesday, amid another day of dreadful news, one dispatch of joy briefly flashed through the social media sky when representatives of StudioCanal confirmed that “Paddington 3” was in active development. Glory hallelujah. Details were scarce, of course, at this early stage, and so naturally people wondered who might play the third movie’s requisite villain. That will be a high bar to clear. Nicole Kidman, after all, might have been the villain in the first “Paddington”, not the latest James Bond exercise, but she nevertheless played the best Bond villain since Jaws. In “Paddington 2”, meanwhile, as egomaniacal actor Phoenix Buchanan, Hugh Grant did the impossible and one-upped her eminence. That’s why one person on social media who suggested “Paddington 3” not have a villain at all might be on to something; you not be able to reach higher so maybe you could focus on interior conflict, rather than exterior. But that would ruin this post. And besides, a “Paddington 3” baddie is essential. 

A few possibilities: 

Richard E. Grant. If you want to cash in on the last vestiges of that “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” momentum. Just make sure you don’t suck out all his arch merriment a la “Th Rise of Skywalker.”

Emma Thompson. Perhaps the only way you could reach higher than Hugh Grant? Maybe she is an evil scientist looking for Peruvian Bear DNA for a Talking Bear Theme Park?

Sean Bean. I can’t stop imagining the grave commitment Bean would bring to his scenes opposite a CGI bear. [Circling Paddington tied to a chair.] “You know, Paddington, we’re not so different, you and I.” 

Ralph Fiennes. If you sand the edges off his villainous “In Bruges” turn by filtering it through the elegant if high-strung playfulness of “Hail Caesar’s” Laurence Laurentz, you might have something. 

Rachel Weisz. You toss that scene in “Runaway Jury” where she’s chewing on a pen and taunting Gene Hackman in a blender with Penelope from “The Brothers Bloom” and Sarah Churchill from “The Favourite” and then sit back and watch as she chews her way through the screen.

Timothy Spall. As the owner of a 300-year old pub with a no-music policy, Spall is vexed by an unlikely pub that opens next door, run by Paddington, of course, where that 5-piece Calypso group from “Paddington 2” becomes the house band and Paddington serves a jazzed up Marmalade IPA that is all the rage of the kiddos. 

Gina Bellman. In the end, I think this is the way to go, though StudioCanal is taking no advice from me. You do not try and go higher after you have already played The Stones and then The Beatles on the mix tape. No, you circumvent expectations by dialing it back, by playing some Michelle Shocked or some Ani D. Give Bellman the movie role she has always deserved.  

Pitch Meeting: Ups and Downs

On a recent episode of The Pressbox podcast, co-host Bryan Curtis interviewed NBC’s U.S. Capitol reporter Leigh Ann Caldwell about what it’s like to work on The Hill. In explaining the unwritten rules of asking Senators and Representatives questions, Caldwell revealed that because reporters can only be invited on to chamber elevators by Senators or Representatives, these lifts become something of a convenient escape hatch for politicians seeking to elude giving responses. Sometimes, she explained, the lift operators will even hustle to close the door on behalf of their charges, co-conspirators, so to speak, in evasive tactics. And that, as it absolutely had to, got me to thinking. 

It got me to thinking about a movie, “Ups and Downs”, in which a longtime Hill lift operator, Marvin Alexander (Kevin Corrigan), has befriended myriad politicians over the years, none more than Jim Mullins (Michael Shannon), Republican Senator from the great state of Ohio. An intrepid reporter, new to The Hill beat, from The District Blade, Taylor Stallings (Abbi Jacobson), has drawn the ire of Senator Mullins for repeatedly trying to hold him accountable for refusing to condemn a President (Jim Gaffigan) who has spent most of his first term trying to sell federal land to Wyndham Hotels & Resorts®. After all, Senator Mullins is a Wyndham® rewards member. And as “Ups and Downs” opens, Taylor is once again peppering the Senator with questions when, desperate to evade her, Mullins steps aboard the elevator as Marvin closes the door in her face, exchanging fist bumps with the Senator. “You’re alright,” says Senator Mullins.

One evening both Marvin and Taylor are dragged to a karaoke bar on 14th St for “Hamilton” Night (celebrate Big Government with the Lowest Prices on beer!). They meet cute and bond over their belief that Sondheim’s “Assassins” is the superior musical, doing karaoke to “The Ballad of Czolgosz.” They fall in love, though Marvin repeatedly states he cannot let her on the elevator without Senator Mullins giving the go-ahead. “It’s the code of The Hill,” says Marvin.

Meanwhile, one day Senator Mullins notices that his nemesis, Democratic Senator Olivia Kratzer (Jada Pinkett Smith), from the Great State of Michigan, invites a reporter onto the elevator, explaining that she made one compromise with a Republican Senator on a particular bill in order to get a dozen other items added to the bill that would benefit her constituents, resulting in a glowing profile. In the Senate dining room, Senator Mullins reluctantly breaks bread with Senator Kratzer about how they can prevent the President’s expressed desire to sell the American side of The Great Lakes to Canada given how would adversely affect each of their states. One condition of their plan, however, is that Senator Mullins must publicly resign his cherished position as Honorary Chairman of the Wyndham® Golf Championship.

When the President, in a desperate bid to interfere with The Hill hearings on his Wyndham® Resorts Scandal, goes on prime time television and tells the nation he has hidden a special prize inside the Capitol Dome and that a huge reward awaits whoever finds it first, the Capitol is besieged the following morning. As alarms sound and people flee, Senator Mullins steps aboard his usual elevator to be whisked to safety. A frightened Taylor looks at the elevator, desperately, and then at Marvin, who looks at Senator Mullins, who finally says between gritted teeth “Permission to step aboard.” 

When the power is cut, the trio is stuck on the elevator, discussing their fears, their desires, their secrets. Senator Mullins admits he wants to cut Defense spending; Taylor admits that even though her Twitter bio says Dog Lover she is really more of a cat person; Marvin admits elevators make him nauseous. 

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

I have never seen August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, one of his ten-part Pittsburgh Cycle, but George C. Wolfe’s cinematic adaptation makes it seem like it must be something special. A recording session by the celebrated blues singer Ma Rainey (Viola Davis) becomes the jumping-off place for a dramatic exploration of how so much American art was not merely influenced by African-Americans but co-opted or stolen from them, an injustice not only part and parcel to the broader systemic racism of America but one that directly fed into the sort of violence typically and ignorantly dismissed as Black on Black as a way to ignore what led to it in the first place. This material grades out at an A and my main takeaway from “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” is that I really wish I could see it on the stage.

This is not the stage, though, alas, and Wolfe’s film opens with a few superfluous exterior shots clumsily trying to suggest cinema without any sense that cinema denotes telling your story through visuals. Upon entering the recording studio where Ma has come to cut a record at the insistence of a producer Irvin (Jeremy Shamos), yearning to make her a crossover star, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” mostly falls into the rhythm of a photographed play, a flaw that cannot simply be written off on account of its performances because the nature of its photography in part hamstrings those performances. What’s more, by beginning outside the recording studio, providing glimpses of Ma Rainey performing and striding through her hotel, Wolfe undermines how the movie’s early scenes are supposed to be, simply, waiting for Ma Rainey to appear, building up her presence in our mind. At least the irony that once she does arrive, even though this is her music and her band and her session that, as a black woman in 1927, her authority remains constricted, is effectively conveyed. All they want is my voice, she says, referring to the recording label bigwigs but the whole world too. As such, moments like Ma stalling the session until she gets her contractually mandated Coca-Colas are among the most successful, playing less like flagrant Diva behavior than comic exhortations of what little power she does have, spotlighting her true place in the world.  

Levee (Chadwick Boseman), her young trumpeter, is a bundle of cocky contradictions. He, too, recognizes his place in the world, as several blistering monologues make clear, and yet he simultaneously sees his own talent and the white man’s ability to purvey that talent as his way out. He has brought with him a batch of his own songs to show to the producer, but also brays about making Ma’s material better, all of which she predictably shrugs off, seeing him as arrogant and in over his head. This hostility boils over to her girlfriend, Dussie Mae (Taylour Page), at whom Levee makes less than subtle passes, a subplot that despite Levee’s over the top seduction, remains strangely coy, especially where Ma and Dussie Mae are concerned, reduced to rote conflict.

All this tension is meant to take root in and manifest itself in the very blues which Ma Rainey sings, though that the proves perhaps the film’s gravest failure. Just as the bright white light cascading in through the windows never quite captures the deadly mood air lingering in the air and that will eventually come home to roost, the presentation of Ma Rainey’s music fails to evince the essential juxtaposition of the blues between its righteous fury and joyful raucousness. That is true of Davis’s performance too. Though she implicitly captures Ma’s swaggering bullishness, she never lives out the blues, never finding momentary freedom in them, perhaps compromised in part by having someone else lip sync the songs, like Davis is not really even there at the moment of truth. 

As Levee, meanwhile, the inherent electricity in Boseman’s preening and strutting is too often counteracted by a claustrophobic camera. True, the claustrophobia is part of the point, the rehearsal space where Levee and his bandmates spend much of the movie squabbling, a brick walled room with a door that is permanently locked, underlining the Black American experience of figurative, if not literal, imprisonment. But when Levee chastises God as nothing more than the Almighty of the White Man, the thunderous nature of his words is virtually crying out for the camera to cut to a wider shot, to give him room, to let his words truly echo. Wolfe, however, never goes wider, incredibly stifling all that fire and brimstone. This is the very staginess often employed as a critique of stage to screen adaptations, one dampening the character’s own livewire spirit, the sensation that anything could happen. Indeed, rather than a sudden explosion stemming from so much insidious, unwitting social rot, the ostensibly stunning conclusion feels premeditated, intellectually impressive but ultimately short on raw emotional truth. 

Lovers Rock

It’s a staple of the movies, the reason why there should be an Oscar category honoring the best use of pop music in a film, though I understand that’s neither here nor there, when a director briefly ceases narrative momentum, drops the needle and lets his characters lose it in the music. This happened in Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman”, when Ron and Patrice briefly found solace from being black in America in 1972 in the Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose, and this happened in Oliver Stone’s “Platoon”, when half the unit takes momentary leave from hell through Smokey Robinson. These scenes stand out because they innately capture something fundamental about music: “Routine, responsibility, decay of institutions, corruption: this is all the world closing in,” says Bruce Springsteen. “Music, when it’s really great, pries that shit back open and lets people back in.” Part of the considerable genius of “Lovers Rock”, part 2 of Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” series for Amazon, an examination of West Indian lives in London, and which I am counting as a movie because I can’t stop dreaming about how it might feel and look on the big screen, is that he sculpts an entire hour-plus out of such sonic amelioration.  

As “Lovers Rock” opens, a couch is being moved into a backyard. Though this briefly suggests moving day, it is merely a reorienting of the home’s communal center, paving the way for a dance party that night. When the dee jay plugs in the chord and turns on the mic, the shot switches to high above, underlining how the music fills up the room. People fill up the room too, later, the afternoon sun giving way to the warmth of a makeshift dance floor, bathed in cool crimson, as ample partygoers move in time to the rhythm, the reggae epitomizing Lovers Rock itself but also hits of the day, like “Kung Fu Fighting.” The latter is a legitimately transcendent moment that treats the song seriously in so much as it provides a genuine snapshot of a cultural moment rather than resorting to parody.

If motion pictures are, as that moniker implies, about movement, these scenes bring that idea to life. That earlier shot from above gives us a sense of the room’s space because from there on out, the camera is close, not so much a fly on the wall as part of the scrum, weaving through the dancers, not in some herky-jerky fashion, either, but fully in the groove, lingering on the people, how they move, how they touch one another, how they throw their heads back in ecstasy, romanticizing the perilous trek any of us might have made during a live show through a crowd, feeling the sweat and the spilled beer, just going with the flow, capturing that paradoxical but perfect juxtaposition between being part of a mass on the dance floor yet simultaneously in your own world. Those two lines blur on Janet Kay’s “Silly Games” when the crowd keeps singing the song even after the song fades away. The Revolutionaries’ “Kunte Kinte”, on the other hand, transforms into an anthem of aggressive release, as if for a moment those perspiration-lined walls threaten to topple.

If there is a point of view it belongs to Martha (Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn), seen from the street below climbing out her bedroom window and shimmying down a drain pipe to catch a bus where her face momentarily adopts a look of guilt as a man passes by outside dragging a cross, two images denoting her constrictive home life with nary a word. She meets up with her friend Patty (Shaniqua Okwok) to hit the house party, joyous dancing by themselves gradually giving way to flirtations from suitors, including Franklyn (Micheal Ward), who wins Martha over. As they grow intimate, however, Patty feels rejected, spurning her friend mid-party by just walking out the door, a moment signaling McQueen’s intriguing approach to resolution – that is, providing none. We never see Patty again. This is not the end or the beginning, just the in-between. And when Martha unsuccessfully tries to chase her friend down, it momentarily leaves her face-to-face with a group of caucasian hooligans. Like Patty’s vanishing act, this group’s braying never amounts to anything. But in the face of the protective, bear-like Doorman (Marcus Fraser), who appears at Martha’s side, you see in a single second the hardened fury of facing down bigotry all your life. That kind of fear even exists among their own ranks, Martha rescuing another woman out back being assaulted, the chilly exterior blues juxtaposed against the orange warmth of the house party’s windows.

Though in many ways “Lovers Rock” is a kind of unconventional musical, it is these dollops of turbulence elevating the film to greatness, putting the music and the outside world in tension with each other, illustrating how the former becomes a reaction, a way of coping with the latter, what the dee jay on the microphone keeps championing as spiritual protection. In one remarkable sequence, Martha’s hot-headed cousin, Clifton (Kedar Williams Stirling), enters the party midway through and immediately falls into a wild argument with his relative. Not long after, he takes the dance floor, swinging his arms wildly, swigging from a bottle of beer, throwing his head back, full of aggression, teetering on the brink of falling apart, perhaps, even as the music itself momentarily grants immunity to what ails him.  

Friday's Old Fashioned: North Dallas Forty (1979)

When it’s not ethically repugnant, football is a funny game. We, the fans, tend to distill it down to a single 60-minute game on Saturday or Sunday, a winner and a loser, then tune in again next week. To the players, however, the game is the end point of a weeklong process of preparation, mental and physical, mostly the latter, especially at the professional level, where everyone is bigger and faster and stronger, meaning the toll those 60 minutes take is greater. There is a big game in “North Dallas Forty” (1979), based on the novel of former NFL player Peter Gent, though director Ted Kotcheff’s movie is less interested in that game’s outcome than the arduous process it takes for the players to get there in the first place, a football movie that, until the end, eschews platitudes or any predictable sports movie beats to evince a character study, a week in the life of a football player. 

“North Dallas Forty” begins by bringing the old chestnut about football players not wanting to get out of bed in the morning to life as North Dallas Wide Receiver Phil Elliot (Nick Nolte) is only able to pull himself out from the under the covers with the help of pills. When he lumbers down the hall, you can practically hear the creak in his bones. (Later, you literally hear the creak in his bones.) Nolte’s inherent weariness, embodied in that familiar rasp, makes him the perfect actor for this part and he plays it entirely in the key of Indiana Jones remarking that it’s not the year, it’s the mileage. The way Nolte stands, always at some angle, belies someone trying to find every advantage with a body that is already breaking down. Can a human approximate a used car? If so, Nolte comes the closest anyone ever has. And the myriad scenes of sitting in tubs, getting taped, guzzling beer in the locker room as unprescribed therapy, etc., all feel less like a conventional plot gradually building toward something than like scattered details of a beaten down person existing in a perpetual fog. 

That is not to suggest Phil has lost the desire to play. Indeed, he still retains a sense of mindless enthusiasm, a penchant for pranks and trash talk that innately suggests why he keeps going. Even so, Phil is in the twilight of his career and on the wrong side of his Coach, or more accurately, his Coach’s (G.D. Spradlin) data, suggesting that even in the prehistoric NFL decisionmakers were consulting computers over their gut. Thankfully “North Dallas Forty” does not delve too deeply into the specifics of this data, until a conclusion that turns oddly preachy, merely using it as a counterpoint to Phil’s plight, letting Nolte’s bullishness illustrate the idea of the NFL as a players game rather than one belonging to the coaches or the numbers crunchers. Of course, Phil’s commitment to the game is tested by a woman, Charlotte (Dayle Haddon). He meets her at a wild party in a scene that briefly suggests her character might be interesting, the camera glimpsing her in the background and circling the room before returning to her, as if it’s giving her space to enter the movie on her own sweet time. Alas, she never graduates to a rounded person, just a symbol of possible post-football existence.

The obliquely referenced championship game hardly feels representative of the sort of stakes we are conditioned to expect for such a climactic contest: no attendant hype, no outside noise, no crowd shots. (There is an earlier scene in which Charles Durning as an assistant coach reads the team a wretched inspirational poem that works retroactively as a comical counterpoint to Al Pacino’s Football Is A Game Of Inches speech in “Any Given Sunday.”) This, however, has the winning effect of making the game all about the players, their feuds and squabbles and shots at personal glory, the broad canvas of a big game revealing how, really, it has nothing to do with you or me or any of us, just them, one more schoolyard brawl that happens to take place at the highest level. The capping scene, however, in which Phil is called before team management and suspended under questionable circumstances, puts too many obvious points in Phil’s mouth, explicating the theme of “North Dallas Forty” rather than letting it bubble to the surface itself. It’s unfortunate, especially when his simply being in the office is perfectly and intrinsically contrasted against the gridiron, a reminder that even if you leave it all on the field, the chairman of the board is always waiting to pull the rug out from under you.

Ray of Light

Anheuser-Busch ran an advertisement during this past Sunday’s Super Bowl regathering the ostensible legends of so many Bud Light ads past. Watching it made me think about how Super Bowl commercials used to be so much better, a trite thought, truth be told, where it simply seems as if things used to better when framed through cozy nostalgia, unless you extract that sentimentality and look at it with clear eyes to discover it was more or less, give or take, all about the same. Still, as I thought about this, I was compelled to remember what I have always cited as my favorite Super Bowl commercial, a Leslie Nielsen spot for Coors Light in which he wore pink fuzzy slippers.

Because the Pandemic has broken me to the point where old advertisements instill a sense of longing, and because this is the modern age, I sought out that ad on YouTube. I found other Nielsen commercials, like this one, and I found one where Nielsen parodied the Energizer Bunny, that relentless 90s symbol of commerce, but not one where Nielsen was wearing fuzzy pink slippers. I began to suspect that my memory, as it so often is, was faulty. Had I conflated the Energizer Bunny spoof with the scene in “The Naked Gun 33 1/3” where Nielsen wears fuzzy slippers? Ah, but just when I thought I had made it all up, I found it, quite by accident.



Well, what do you think? Is that the best Super Bowl commercial of all time? Eh, I have my doubts. No one, I suspect, is putting that up against Mean Joe Greene, never mind Apple’s renowned 1984 spot, and yet. I had forgotten Nielsen’s ad came at the dawn of the 90s, citing the Silver Bullet as the one that won’t slow you down, “perfect for the fast-paced 90s.” Boy, that’s a time capsule. That is how the 90s felt, isn’t it, on the cusp of them, like you were segueing from the go-go 80s to something no doubt even swifter. Of course, you don’t need me to tell you, person reading this on your phone (!), that life has accelerated incalculably from there to a tempo that would leave 1990 Me clinging to the side of my vintage wood-paneled television set like I was on a boat in a storm. Which brings me back to Nielsen and his pink fuzzy slippers.

A couple days after the Super Bowl, the film critic Justine Peres Smith Tweeted that she was “Trying to imagine living in a world where you would physically go to and from work and when you were not physically at work, the only way they could contact you was to a call a telephone tethered to a specific place.” I virtually raised my hand. “I lived in that world,” I thought. “Once, long ago.” Say one thing mean about the wheels of technological process these days and you are branded a Luddite, of course, but while we have gained much, we have a lost a lot too. That 1984 Apple ad saw the coming benefit of smaller computers, though perhaps it did not foresee (or perhaps it did) a “world in which billions of people stare at their own screens even while walking, driving, eating, in the company of friends and family — all of them eternally elsewhere,” as Rebecca Solnit put it for Harper’s, rendering them “trackable at all times...savage privacy, break down journalism as we know it, and create elaborate justifications for never paying artists or writers.”

At first glance, the Coors Light commercial would appear to have no such vision. And yet, in its small-scale aesthetic of a guy, a chair, a curtain, a beer sign, and slippers, it does not epitomize the fast-paced 90s so much as Coors Light’s current slogan about being Made to Chill. It is almost as if Leslie Nielsen had seen the future and, contradictory to Coors Light claiming it was the beer that wouldn’t slow you down, was telling us to take it easy, for God’s sake, while we still had time.

I changed my mind. This remains the singular Super Bowl commercial.

In Memoriam: Christopher Plummer

Michael Mann’s “The Insider” (1999), which was remarkable upon its release and yet somehow still grows better, deeper, and more resonant with each passing year, was mostly about two real-life men, Brown & Williamson whistleblower Dr. Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) and 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) who fought to get Wigand’s story on the air, the former sort of passing the narrative baton to the latter midway through the movie. Hovering on the edge of both these stories, however, was famed journalist Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer), interviewing Wigand for the story and serving as something akin to Bergman’s consigliere. 

In his performance, Plummer took a cue from the first scene, interviewing Ayatollah Khomeini, where he argues with the Sheikh’s bodyguard to, in his own words, get his heart started. If it suggests an aging man, or deception, what it really foreshadows is this: theatricality. There is an air of performance to everything Plummer does in the part, gliding into a crowded Manhattan restaurant and basking in the glow of everyone who recognizes this prominent reporter, holding his reading glasses in his hand with a conspicuously studied air. Look at the moment when he settles in before a TV in a CBS hallway to watch himself give an interview to the Evening News; there is something he does there with his face, assuming this almost disquisitive expression, as if he is preparing to appraise his own performance. If there is a tendency in playing parts of famous people to sort of play it like you don’t know who you’re playing, like Henry Fonda playing just some chump from Illinois, Plummer goes the other way, playing Mike Wallace as Mike Wallace. That’s why Mann’s original desire to have Mike Wallace play himself would have been all wrong, like Kramer wanting to play Kramer on “Jerry”; Plummer could stand outside Wallace and see him for what he was. 

When Bergman first convenes a council to discuss bringing Wigand’s story to air by having him break his confidentiality agreement, others in the powwow see this as an impossibility. Not Wallace.   

“He’s got a corporate secrecy agreement? Give me a break. This is a public-health issue, like an unsafe airframe on a passenger jet or some company dumping cyanide into the East River. He can talk, we can air it.They’ve got no right to hide behind a corporate agreement. Pass the milk.”

It’s an astonishing moment, Plummer running that pass the milk on there without so much as a beat, as if he goes straight from delivering a monologue on a ledge to pouring a cup of damn coffee in the kitchen. And that’s what Plummer does in the role, somehow exist on two planes at all times. You see it especially in his show-stopping dressing down of Helen Caperelli (Gina Gershon), the face of CBS Corporate, where he masterfully amalgamates the seemingly incompatible notions of vanity and journalistic integrity, rendering a human being while still standing there and looking larger than life. More than most movie (more than any movies?), “The Insider” shows how our flaws and warts and selfish desires do not necessarily preclude us from knowing the difference between right and wrong. In his performance, Plummer lived it. 

Christopher Plummer died on Friday. He was 91.

Ammonite

“Ammonite” is about Mary Anning (Kate Winslet), a famed palaeontologist uncelebrated in her own lifetime, not least because she was a woman. Director Francis Lee, however, refrains from making anything like a conventional biopic, eschewing a delivery device for dates and facts to instead create a character study chiseled predominantly out of aesthetic and landscape and mood. That might leave you with questions about exactly what Mary does, what rendered her place in history, what that title even means, but this feels less frustratingly unintentional or deliberately vague than part and parcel to Mary Amming herself, a ferociously guarded person rendered mistrustful, as we see in an early scene with a self-impressed dude, by men who consider themselves her equal simply by being men. That Winslet holds us at a distance only brings Mary to fuller life. 

Mary gets by hunting for fossils on cold rocky British beaches and selling them to tourists out of a seasalt stained shop doubling as the home where she lives with her mother, Molly (Gemma Jones). Mom’s days are numbered, seen hacking up blood. Yet, in suggesting the apple does not fall far from the tree, she keeps this condition secret, though in one remarkable moment when she coughs, the way Winslet has Mary suddenly look to the right and hold and narrow her gaze quietly communicates that she may well know what’s up anyway. It is evocative of how Winslet, playing a character of few words, packs so much into the most minimal of body language, calcifying or softening her entire deportment on cue, manipulating her emotional body temperature to convey hot or cool. And when one of Mary’s buyers leaves his wife Charlotte (Saoirse Ronan) in Mary’s stead while he’s away, paying for this sort of spousal boarding, Winslet hardly lets her character conceal disgust. Still, if Mary and Charlotte do not get off on the right foot, an attraction blooms, with “Ammonite” proving less interested in societal restrictions than emotional ones, especially Mary’s, her affection has hard to excavate as some long buried relic. 

As Charlotte, Ronan does a virtual 180 from her turn as “Little Women’s” Jo, trading in that vigorous spirit for something more akin to a deer in the headlights, her wide eyes juxtaposed against Winslet’s brittleness. Though Mary clearly needs the money, Winslet initially plays the part as if Charlotte is dead weight, and she may as well be when Mary directs Charlotte to go swim at the beach, causing her to fall ill. It is not, however, Mary nursing her young charge back to health that causes romance to bloom so much as afterwards when Charlotte figuratively rolls up her sleeves to meet Mary on her terms by helping her literally dig up a fossil in the dirt, epitomizing how so much of “Ammonite” is inextricably tied to both climate and work.

Not for nothing does Lee open in his film not with an image of Mary’s ichthyosaur skeleton being rushed into the British Museum of Natural History, though that shot quickly follows, but a woman scrubbing the floor as the ichthyosaur skeleton is rushed into the British Museum of Natural History, bumping into her along the way, as if she is not even there, putting into focus both a woman’s place in this world and the toil of labor. Mary’s world is consistently overcast, the pall of the skies in harmony with her attitude, and a brief visit to the country home of a former lover, Elizabeth (Fiona Shaw), that briefly injects “Ammonite” with a rush of color feels otherworldly. Lee indulges in several close-ups over Mary’s callused hands and, before the movie fades in, lingers on the sounds of the sponge being wrung out, over and over, almost as if aroused by life’s grim verisimilitude. The sex scenes between Mary and Charlotte, though, while forgoing any soft-eyed romance are nevertheless romantic in their own way; raw, physical passion. 

Winslet had something of a tough twenty-tens, starring in several movies that might be described as less than good. Still, she was often good in them, finding something to play to, though she never had something to play to at the level she does in “Ammonite.” She is so good, in fact, that it is painful when Lee occasionally drifts from the elemental nature of his filmmaking to overtly push metaphors, such as having Mary explain aloud that she is like a fossil trapped under glass. There is no need to say it aloud. If you have been watching Winslet, she has already rendered that comparison clear as day. 

Wonder Woman 1984

There is a moment in “Wonder Woman 1984” when the President (Stuart Milligan), not so much a dead ringer for Reagan as a nod to him, takes stock of events from the Resolute desk and says words to the effect of “There’s something strange going on here.” It reminded me of the moment in “Delirious” (1991), the comedy where John Candy’s soap opera writer can magically dictate events in his life through the written word, when Raymond Burr’s character looks around, confused at some implausible turn of events, and wonders “What the hell is going on around here?” That might be an obscure reference, but just as “Delirious” deliberately lost the plot so, too, does “Wonder Woman 1984” continually lose sense of itself as it goes along. It is funny and serious, huge and intimate, fast and slow, and not from intriguing juxtaposition but from a kind of clearance sale story. If the first “Wonder Woman” succeeded because of an impressive modesty in its storytelling, its sequel falls apart in the same way its villains do: that is, wanting more. That might have been a sly commentary on the era in which it is set, though such biting irony escapes WW84, mostly just regressing to the Comic Book Movie mean of too much and not near enough. 

“Wonder Woman 1984” begins with a flashback to Themyscira, the homeland of Wonder Woman – née Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) – as a child, competing in something like a variation of the Amazonian warrior Olympics. If it’s a show-stopping starter, of course, it is also the story promise, ending with some proffered wisdom about truth and lies destined to come around in again in the end. That promise takes root in the movie’s modern day, 1984, in the nation’s capital, Washington D.C., where Diana, working as a Smithsonian archaeologist, comes into possession of a mysterious dreamstone, sort of a geologic genie’s bottle. Alas, a would-be oil tycoon, Max Lord (Pedro Pascal), gets his hands on the dreamstone by seducing Diana’s frumpish colleague, Barbara Minvera (Kristen Wiig). And though he winds up in league with a few Arabs, an uncomfortable nod at 80s American cinema’s tendency to vilify them, Lord’s real model is a red-blooded American, a PG Gordon Gekko. He brings the world to the brink of Armageddon, or something, through the dreamstone by literally giving the whole world whatever it wants, Pascal’s escalating physical tremble embodying how greed can eat someone from from the inside-out. It’s a tidy set-up, a plot and theme no less simple, really, than those wacky kids in “Weird Science” (1985) learning to be careful what you wish for, and yet the cumbersome execution by director Patty Jenkins, emblemized in that egregious two-and-a-half hour run time, renders the whole thing as a slog.

Though “Wonder Woman 1984’s” shopping mall setpiece homage to “Superman III” gets by on a distinct sense of joy, most of the action scenes here are not so much perfunctory as deadening. Rather than build from the deeper part of the narrative, elucidating the character or her quest in a meaningful way, a la that spectacular WWI trench scene in its predecessor, they are simply productionally mandated pyrotechnics bringing the movie to a halt in the middle of itself, ugly to look at and tedious in their depiction. Since when did the action scenes become the bathroom breaks? Smaller moments work better, like Barbara, having transformed into her dynamic Cheetah alter ego, mauling a male ogler on the street. It’s dark and kicky, though ultimately her subplot merely skims the psychological surface, the character and performance only carving out, say, a C- on the Michelle Pfeiffer Catwoman scale. 

If Barbara evolves from socially hapless physical comedy to mean and sober, WW84 itself does not quite chart the same trajectory, unable to either settle on cataclysm or comedy or nimbly blend the two. In a late scene after the whole world’s wishes have gone awry, cows graze on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol, which is not as funny as it sounds, a surreal CGI spectacle that just lies dormant on the screen, like it’s waiting for a sitcom laugh track. The successful comedy concerns Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), Diana’s first movie flame, the WWI flying ace. Indeed, if you wondered how WW84 might resurrect Steve even though he died, the rapacity that is the very object of the sequel’s scorn becomes its saving grace, allowing Diana’s involuntary wish that Steve was still alive to conveniently grant Pine’s entrance. Given the setting, his character, in modeling 80s clothes and riding escalators, becomes the fish out of water that Diana was in the first movie, though this simultaneously highlights the singular weakness of WW84: that is, Wonder Woman herself.

If Diana was neatly folded into a small band of brothers in the first film, she also stood out, the character’s hell-bent earnestness, so ably evinced by Gadot, carrying the movie along no matter how huge the surrounding context grew. In “Wonder Woman 1984”, on the other hand, despite being front and center so much, its eponymous character improbably recedes before our eyes. She is never afforded space truly reckon being in love with a character that is, more or less, a ghost and the character’s inherent selflessness is never properly weighed against the selfishness of all the others. The conclusion is ostensibly moving in its notion of forgiveness, though it also oddly underlines just how little Diana ultimately has to do with the resolution in the first place. Unlike Steve, Diana might be real, but, really, it’s as if she is never there at all.

Some Drivel On...The Gates

“The Gates” begins with the efforts of artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude to surround the walking paths of New York City’s Central Park with 7,500 free-hanging orange fabric panels and ends with those Gates having been erected. If that sounds simple, however, it is not, which the 2007 documentary directed by Antonio Ferrera, Matthew Prinzing, David Maysles, and Albert Maysles makes plain in its own plain way. Indeed, a lawyer for Christo and Jeanne-Claude remarks that the artists insisted on filming everything, not just the finished product but the extensive bureaucracy that went hand-in-hand with getting the project off the ground. That transforms “The Gates” into something akin to urban planning as art. And if the artists are repeatedly accused of being driven by ego, paying for the project entirely out of their own pockets, which seems harmless enough until the matter of political kickbacks is inevitably broached, the gaggle of directors gradually, gracefully allow Christo and Jeanne-Claude to fall out of the picture so that by the end all that truly remains is their creation.

Their Gates dream went all the back to the late 70s when it failed to come off, done in by the apprehensions of both city government and the public. This is baked into the official name of The Gates, 1979-2005, suggesting the initial failure was baked into the project, all of it recounted here in video footage from the time, the visual demarcation line between 1979 and 2005 being when public officials are smoking in conference rooms and when they are not. We see numerous real-life instances of what the NBC sitcom “Parks and Recreation” not entirely unlovingly deemed crackpot conventions, town hall meetings, where people are allowed to ask questions and vent frustrations. Unlike Leslie Knope who remained steadfast in the face of so many, by the end Christo is stranded in the back of the frame, slouched and dispirited, the reminder that democracy can equally frustrate as easily as it can facilitate.  

That the project is so easily reborn in 2005 runs counter to traditional drama but is also evidence of the kind of power that then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg held. There is something funny about watching “The Gates” now, in 2020, after Bloomberg’s failed Presidential run. If in seeking the highest office in the land his haughty air and expressions became fodder for so many liberals who saw him as a smug, out of touch rich guy, here his haughty air and expressions in a press conference with the media posing questions about Christo and Jeanne-Claude more or less telling the citizens of NYC to eat cake, a la Marie Antoinette, take on a whole different tone. Here stands Bloomberg the famous philanthropist, committed to art, who in jocular tones expresses his confusion as to why the project was ever scuttled in the first place.

Of course, portions of the public still did not care for The Gates, even in 2005, and their anger is documented. Not the anger of celebrities, like David Letterman, but ordinary folk in the park who in the days as the gates are initially being raised look at them with both disbelief and ire, as if they are nothing more than a saffron stain on something nature had already rendered beautiful. When the artists or the documentarians push back by pointing out that the park itself is manmade, not a a genuine environmental marvel, they still seem to view it as The Joker in Tim Burton’s “Batman” adding his own touches to various masterpieces at the Flugelheim. Still, in moving Christo and Jeanne-Claude aside not long after their creation is completed,  “The Gates ” ultimately leaves only the work hanging on the screen. The camera observes The Gates from all angles – up close, far away, from above, from below, in the morning and at night, in the sun and in the snow, with wind blowing through them and not, documenting their ever-changing nature, like Monet’s stacks of wheat – and gives the last scene to a Central Park vendor whose seemingly off the cuff summation feels like the kind of matter of fact critique a public art project meant for everyone, like it or leave it, deserves. 

Who Was the Golden Globes-iest Golden Globes Nominee?

Much like so many office Christmas parties were forced by obvious circumstances to move online, corporations gleefully rubbing their hands together as one more pesky barrier between the separation of home and work falls, the Golden Globes, Hollywood’s office Christmas party, has trundled on too in the form of a bi-coastal event, switching between the Beverly Hilton in L.A. and the Rainbow Room in New York, though likely in some socially distanced, limited person sort of way. This is sad in so much as the best part of The Globes is watching celebrities gossip between commercials and get soused on champagne in close proximity at their tables. On the other hand, the possibility exists that a semi-online Globes could be festive in its own janky way. Maybe Amal could accidentally Zoombomb George; maybe Sacha Baron Cohen and Isla Fisher could parody all the worst Zoom types; maybe Spike Lee could continually get caught streaming the Knicks game on his laptop and yelling at R.J. Barrett. (Editor’s Note: “Da 5 Bloods” earned no Globes nominations. Spike can watch the Knicks in peace. He is undoubtedly happier.) Who knows, I’m just glad it’s going forward (even though I am simultaneously not since holding it in a COVID hotspot is pretty stupid) and crossing my fingers that it is perplexing and ridiculous in all the best ways since that’s what we want from the Globes. Ok, ok, apologies; that’s the royal we, or the blogging we, I just slipped in there, when I meant it’s what *I* want from the Globes. In 2021, believe me, I am less interested in your pseudo-hot takes about a glorified cocktail party getting things wrong than ever. If they didn’t get things wrong, they wouldn’t be the Globes! Which, of course, in the wake of the 2021 Golden Globes nominations, brings me around to our annual exercise of determining the Golden Globes-iest nominee. Not the best nominee, or the most deserving nominee, but the nominee that most succinctly summarizes the HFPA’s mission statement to f*** stars.

First things first, three years after Natalie Portman righteously dropped a cherry bomb in the whole Globes toilet in announcing the Best Director winner by caustically noting all the nominees were male, the Globes have nominated three women for Best Director. More women than men! Then again, maybe that’s just because at some point even idiots cannot deny the truth. Then again, they did nominate Aaron Sorkin in the passably directed “Trial of the Chicago 7”; that’s more Globes-y. Plus, all that “Mank” love makes it clear Netflix was sending myriad members of the HFPA fruit baskets. (This is pure speculation! Do not report as fact!)

Kate Hudson?

As always, the categories of Best Actress and Actor in a Musical/Comedy in addition to the more formal Best Actress and Actor in a Drama cagily allowed for the Globes to sneak in a few extra party guests: namely, Lin-Manuel Miranda for “Hamilton” and James Corden for “The Prom.” That is so Globes-y. Nicole Kidman in all likelihood would have scored a nod for “The Prom” too as a way to ensure she could attend the party if she had not already scored a nod in the TV category for “The Undoing” which means Kidman’s nomination retains more classiness but I repeat myself. At the same time, Kate Hudson earned a nomination in the Best Actress Musical/Comedy category for “Music.” Which, what? The Madonna music video? Is it like one of those Living Planet movies but for art: Music? [Googles.] No, it’s a new movie that has yet to be released. Hmmmmmm. Perhaps this is like the Hollywood Film Awards? Whatever it is, Kate Hudson’s nod is pretty damn Globes-y.

But what’s this over here? Jared Leto for Best Supporting Actor in “The Little Things”? Where did that come from? That’s not even Globes-y; that’s insane. Who wants to invite Leto to the office Christmas party? Leto’s the guy who you tell the party is at the Holiday Inn out by LAX and then turn off your phone. Did HBO Max send fruit baskets too? (This is pure speculation! Do not report as fact!)

Glenn Close in “Hillbilly Elegy” feels like one of those moments when the HFPA was just conforming to the tedious awards handbook. Not near Globes-y enough.

And so. That brings us back to Best Supporting Actor and Bill Murray in “On the Rocks” who wins this year’s honorary Meryl Streep Award for the Golden Globes-iest Golden Globes nominee. Look, I liked “On the Rocks” and I liked Bill Murray in it. I have no idea if he’s a true awards or contender or not. But this has nothing to do with any of that, understand. Go debate ‘worthiness’ somewhere else. Ensuring Bill Murray gets to attend the We Don’t Even Know How The Hell These Are Going To Work, Let’s Wing It Golden Globes is inspired work from the HFPA’s Cruise Director. We want him at these Globes; we need him at these Globes; I’m picturing him remoting in while doing some variation of Brad Pitt in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” up on the roof fixing the satellite feed and guzzling beer and just sort of hijacking the entire telecast for 10 minutes. We should be so lucky.

Escape: The Film Festival

The Sundance Film Festival began last Thursday, continuing through today, and like most everything else in the Pandemic era, it has been moved online. This, of course, is antithetical to the film festival experience, which is as much about the place and the hordes of the moviegoing faithful, or the less than faithful, the movers and shakers, buyers and seekers, people who want to be seen and people who want to be seen more. If you’re not waiting in a long line, did you really go to a film festival? Of course, ever since film festivals became so entangled with the awards show industry complex, not to mention the advent of social media, the rush to pass instantaneous judgment has virtually overwhelmed their other purposes, altruistic or otherwise. The buzz and condemnation on Nate Parker’s “Birth of a Nation” came and went before I even saw it and each year round about this time my social media feed is flooded with Tweet reviews that may well not be the last word but front like they are anyway. Part of this, of course, is the festival bubble; when you’re in it, the outside world ceases to exist. That’s good! That’s the point of the festival! But at some point the line between the festival bubble and the real world began evaporating and, this year, in 2021, Pandemic Earth, the festival bubble has both been pierced and left us all trapped within. I am not at Sundance and, yet, Sundance and its attendant hubbub is all around.

All this rushed through my mind over the weekend when my sister alerted me to Gothenberg, Sweden’s 2021 Göteborg Film Festival which has, as Lisa Abend puts it for The New York Times, not “so much accepted social distancing as escalated it.” That is because in addition to holding screenings for a single person at different urban venues, they also held an online video contestant attracting 12,000 applicants to send one person to the remote North Atlantic island of Pater Noster to screen the entire fest alone in the lighthouse keeper’s house. A 41-year old emergency nurse from Skovde, Lisa Enroth, won. “Enroth won't be allowed a cellphone, a laptop, a book or any other distractions,” writes Francesa Street. No Tweet reviews! Not that her solo film festival will be some arduous game show-ish nonsense. “The stay at the island will be perfectly safe,” Street quotes the festival’s artistic director Jonas Holmberg saying. “The person will have a soft bed and nice food.” Enroth herself weighed in by online video diary: “I have been chosen to stay in this marvellous place for a week, just watching movies and enjoying the nature and the serenity and the loneliness.” I almost shed a tear.

It’s strange. Much like the line inside and outside the festival bubble has blurred, so has the line between homespace and workspace, between personal space and the steady, maddening drip of the world, leaving me with nowhere to go to shut down and shut off, the invasive white noise of the outside world having finally punctured my last, sacred vestige of privacy, lying awake at night, the flashing lights, to quote Arcade Fire, settled deep in my brain. And so I find myself yearning not for the slopes and scenic streets of Park City, nor for the French Riviera of Cannes, nor for the Valhalla of the TIFF Bell Lightbox, but for a distant island in the North Atlantic with just movies, rattling around in my head as I listen to the crashing waves. And maybe a bottle of Lagavulin too.