Post-Oscar / Mid-Spring Nap

 

The Anti Oscars

The first 15 Academy Awards, up through 1943, were held not in large auditoriums or theatres, but at hotels, the Biltmore, Roosevelt and Ambassador, the latter hosted inside their Cocoanut Grove nightclub. I, for one, had always longed for another Oscars to go the Cocoanut Grove route and when the 2021 version began, hosted principally inside L.A.’s Union Station, transformed into an intimate, coolly lit room of the Oscar nominees and their limited guests at small bar tables with lamps bearing shades festooned by Oscar men, I suddenly realized this was my Cocoanut Grove Oscars, or as close as we were going to get in this modern age. It was clear Steven Soderbergh, co-producer of the telecast, wanted a casual vibe as opposed to the over-the-top vaudeville aesthetic of essentially every other Oscars of my lifetime. The closest comparison, perhaps, was the 2009 Oscars, evinced in the similar personalized introductions of the various nominees. Of course, even the 2009 Oscars had song and danceman Hugh Jackman putting on a show; the 2021 Oscars were more like a hangout the cameras happened to be recording, even if you might have wished people to be imbibing champagne at those tables, if not smoking movie herbal cigarettes to really heighten the effect. Alas, necessary precautions reminded us we remain in the middle of a pandemic.

Soderbergh eschewed clips, which in recent years have just become purposeless, pedantic montages anyway, and part of me was disappointed since he might have been a unique curator of such footage. But. The Soderbergh calculation, clearly, was that doing away with clips would leave more room for acceptance speeches, refusing to play anyone off, another Oscar ceremony dream of mine come true. Did it work? Eh, yes and no, though just as Thomas Vinterberg, winner of Best International Feature for “Another Round”, said that directing was letting go of control, I’m sure Soderbergh was deliberately relinquishing control too. If letting speeches go where they may inevitably yielded some well-meaning duds, it also rendered the telecast’s highs, like Best Supporting Actor Daniel Kaluuya’s mom’s priceless reaction to his extemporaneous crack about his parents having sex (unless you want to argue this proves why cutting them off might save them), the wife of Best Screenplay victor Florian Zeller remoting in from a rooftop in Paris suddenly sliding into the frame and kissing his shoulder, Vinterberg having the space to talk about his late daughter, and, in the high point of the night, Best Supporting Actress Yuh-jung Youn for “Minari”, giving the Korean grandmother version of the speech Olivia Colman gave a couple years ago, endearingly, entertainingly taking the piss outta the whole thing. As Youn departed the stage, rather than instantly cutting to commercial, the camera followed her into the wings as presenter Brad Pitt followed, instructing her where to go, one of Hollywood’s biggest stars cheerfully acting as Yuh-jung Youn’s footman. It was wonderful.

Simply recreating a Cocoanut Grove-ish vibe, however, for an experimental filmmaker like Soderbergh was never going to do on its own. No, he also turned the Oscars into something akin to a movie, opening with a long tracking shot of Regina King entering the room while literal opening credits splayed across the screen. Images frequently honored the ol’ rule of thirds, blocking was occasionally an actual thing, like Boon Jong-ho’s presentation of the Best Director award from Seoul, while QuestLove as the Cocoanut Grove-ish D.J. often made semi-dissonant soundtrack selections, like Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” accompanying “Nomadland’s” cast and crew departing the stage after winning Best Picture. And oh yeah, the ceremony futzed with the order of things. Like, the literal order, opening with Best Original Screenplay, usually buried deeper in the telecast, as if immediately signaling its distinctive intention. Soderbergh, after all, even in his more mainstream movies, does not typically tell linear stories and he sure as hell wasn’t going to tell one for something as fuddy duddy as the Oscars. And that is where this telecast either went really wrong or really right, probably both, where he somehow managed to unmask the majority of viewers at home, at least judging by my social media feed, as Academy Awards traditionalists, even as, he, Soderbergh, director of “Ocean’s Eleven,” would wind up looking more like Terry Benedict, egg on his face, than Danny Ocean.

For awhile there, the 93rd Oscars were moving along briskly, basking in an international flavor and making history. In winning Best Actress for “Nomadland”, Frances McDormand joined the exclusive 3-timers club, along with Ingrid, Meryl, Jack, DDL, and character actor extraordinaire Walter Brennan. (Katharine Hepburn, of course, remains the only member of the 4-timers club.) Youn was the first Korean, and only the second Asian, to win an acting Oscar. Chloé Zhao became only the second woman to win Best Director for “Nomadland.” And the Oscars, the elephantine Oscars, were poised to pull off the impossible: finish in under 3 hours. Then, things started getting strange. Just when that 3-hour mark was beginning to feel plausible, the show stopped in its tracks, bringing on Lil Rel Howry for an extended comic bit of Oscar song trivia. If it led to an incredible moment in which Glenn Close doing “Da Butt”, suggesting her next go for that elusive Oscar should be comedy, it also signified when these Oscars, to quote the late sportswriter Dr. Z, “tore into the galley proofs and started ripping up big chunks of copy.”

Best Picture was presented not last, as per tradition, but third to last. This was, near as I could tell, a way to give the late Chadwick Boseman the evening’s defining moment, since it seemed likely he would win Best Actor for “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” Indeed, that was the last award presented, though the presenter was Joaquin Phoenix. This is because he won the award last year, of course, though the eccentric, oft-socially uncomfortable Phoenix is not necessarily the man to meet this kind of moment, suggesting Lou Reed presenting the ultimate Grammy. And when Phoenix opened the envelope, it was not Boseman but Anthony Hopkins for “The Father”, who was not at the ceremony and not beamed in from somewhere else. Just like that, the Oscars were over, an astonishing anti-climax that was like the inverse of the “La La Land”/”Moonlight” wrong envelope fiasco, a single decision rippling through the final few minutes by managing to inadvertently insult Boseman, unfairly turn Hopkins (who, by all accounts, gave an excellent performance and gave a gracious acceptance speech this morning) into an unwitting villain, and deny “Nomadland” its true coronation as the movie of the night. How different would the ceremony have looked if it concluded with Frances McDormand howling like a wolf? 

You know what it was like? It was like the end of Monte Hellman’s (RIP) “The Shooting” (1966), which I just watched for the first time. As I was trying to come to grips with what just happened, the credits for “The Shooting” just suddenly rolled, an anti-ending designed to flabbergast you and then quietly, wonderfully gnaw at your brain. Of course, mainstream movies tend not to have anti-endings for a reason. And I dare say most people tuning in to an Oscar telecast do not want an anti-ending either. 

I have no idea what the 93rd Oscars represent in terms of the industry. I’ll let others hash that one out. And I did not see enough of the nominees, and trended more toward indifference toward the ones I did see, to weigh in on anything as abstract as what they got Right and what they got Wrong. But I feel safe in predicting that come the 94th Oscars, it will be back at the Dolby Theater, someone like Jimmy Kimmel will be on that stage giving away a jet ski to the person who gives us the shortest speech and the telecast will drag on for almost four hours. Maybe that’s the way the Oscars should be. But here, now, at the end of the strangest year of my life, for movies and everything else, the Anti Oscars feel pretty much perfect. 

2020 Random Awards

As always, her eminence Nicole Kidman is here to present Cinema Romantico’s annual awards of cinematic randomness.

Line of the Year: “Could you box that for me?” - John David Washington, “Tenet.” Like Anthony LaPaglia’s detective feeling such joy at finally being chewed out by his Captain (Alan Arkin) in “So I Married An Axe Murderer”, my heart swelled when Christopher Nolan (!) finally created an honest-to-goodness funny in sending up British stuffiness that made me laugh out loud.

Line of the Year runner-up: “Woah, look out. That was good. That’s how you got to be when we’re recording. That was queen of Cayuga. You’re Five Hundred Watt Fay.” - Jake Horowitz, “The Vast of Night.” It’s the way Horowitz says it, yes, in that Beatnik dialect, but it’s also the words themselves, as written by Andrew Patterson and Craig W. Sanger, the rhythm of them, how I swear they named the fictional New Mexico town Cayuga and the co-main character Fay just for the mellifluousness of this line. This line is just so much fun to say!

Line Reading of the Year: “No, I’m not homeless. I’m just houseless.” - Frances McDormand, “Nomadland.” The whole movie is in that line reading.

Monologue of the Year: Ethan Hawke, “Cut Throat City.” Set in New Orleans, “Cut Throat City” is haunted by the ghosts of Hurricane Katrina and in this scene Hawke, as a good ol’ boy councilman sort of seeing the error of his ways, is literally talking to ghosts. It’s more Hawke’s Hamlet moment than his actual Hamlet moment.

Best Shot in a Movie: tie between, respectively,  “The August Virgin” and “Dick Johnson Is Dead”, though you really need to see the first one onscreen, the motion of the light being key, making it seem as if she is floating underwater.

The Annual Isn’t This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain) Award (presented to the best dance in a movie): “Palm Springs.” Here I quote myself from my own review: It’s like if rather than Schwarzenegger’s Model 101 Terminator from “Terminator 2” getting into a rumble in the biker bar to get some duds he suddenly found himself in an 80s New Wave MTV video instead.   

The Annual Tenzing Norgay Award (presented to the best reference in a movie): Edwin Moses, “Da 5 Bloods.” “Fly like Moses.” Long live The Streak.

The Annual Ruby Slippers Award (presented to the best prop in a movie): No Doubt show poster, “The Little Things.” How do you know “The Little Things” is set in 1990? Because Gwen Stefani is a brunette! 

The Annual Scarlett O’Hara Curtain Dress Award (presented to the best piece of clothing in a movie): Katy Perry Tour T-Shirt in “Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets.” As if the closing night of the bar at the center of this pseudo-documentary is akin to some big blow out Katy Perry show at The Hollywood Bowl.

The Annual Ruffalo Award (presented to the best unnoticed performance in a movie): Merrin Dungey, “Greenland.” More than the leads, frankly, Dungey’s one scene walk-off embodies the surprising wit of Ric Roman Waugh’s disaster flick. As an Army Major coordinating evacuation for select a few in advance of a planet killing comet, Dungey’s curt exhaustion reminds us that even the apocalypse has overworked middle managers.

The Annual “Now We Can Eat” Award (presented to the best meal in a movie): Noodles, “The Wild Goose Lake.” The way Hu Ge shoves and slurps up those noodles in the moments before his character’s house of cards finally collapses refashions the last meal not as some sacred rite but the desperate sustenance of the damned. 

The Annual “Then He Kissed Me” Award (presented to the best use of pop music in a movie): Kunta Kinte by The Revolutionaries in “Lovers Rock.” Like the second of Steve McQueen’s five-film anthology contrasts joy and release with more sinister forces lurking, when the D.J. cues this up for the movie’s virtually endless dance party, it feels like catharsis tipped at the edge of something utterly unbound. 

The Annual “Nowhere Fast” Award (presented to the best original song in a movie): Volcano Man in “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.” The ballad Husavik is the song from the same movie that got nominated for an Oscar, but it was the opening “Volcano Man” that stole my heart, like if Petra Marklund and Erik Hassle did a duet. Listen here.

The Annual Norma Desmond Award (presented to the best close-up in a movie): Delroy Lindo, “Da 5 Bloods.” In his climactic monologue (Monologue of the Year runner-up), he breaks the fourth wall, looking right at us, before the camera gradually drifts in, closer and closer, demanding us to look him right in the eyes as he decrees that he will live and die on his terms, that this Black veteran will not be forgotten. 

The Annual Bacall Award (presented to the best female performance in a movie): Kate Winslet, “Ammonite.” There was no Best Facial Expression Award this year because all the winning expressions were rendered by Winslet as real-life paleontologist Mary Anning. Expressions of frustration, fear, curiosity, everything in a glance, over and over. I mean, could anyone other than Winslet so effortlessly harmonize with the climate and terrain of the stark beach where her character hunts for fossils? I liked much of Winslet’s work in the Twenty-Tens more than many critics, but still. After a decade of semi-wandering in the wilderness, Kate the Great is back. It’s a pity more people didn’t seem to notice. 

The Annual Bogey Award (presented to the best male performance in a movie): Chadwick Boseman, “Da 5 Bloods.” He’ll win the Oscar for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, surely, and respect; I don’t want to rain on the parade. But. Boseman’s supporting work in Da 5 Bloods was a true blue, full-blooded movie performance, a complete, incredible understanding how to subtly harness the camera to truly render a character larger than life. God, the things the man who gave this performance could have done...

In Memoriam: Jim Steinman

“If you don’t go over the top,” the American composer, producer and songwriter Jim Steinman told Howard Miller in 2019, “you can’t see what’s on the other side.” Steinman was speaking of his jukebox musical, “Bat Out of Hell”, based on the famed 1977 album Steinman made with Meat Loaf, an especially apt quote for a production about which Miller wrote, not all that critically, “please don’t ask me to explain what it’s about.” That’s a fitting summary of Steinman. You didn’t need to know what “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, the 1983 chart-topper that Steinman wrote and produced for Bonnie Tyler, was about to innately grasp its sonic majesty. And though “Bat Out of Hell” might go down as Steinman’s magnum opus, I will always remember him for his work with Tyler, not just the epic “Total Eclipse” but the even more epic “Faster Than the Speed of Night”, the title track of the album on which “Total Eclipse” appeared, a propulsive six-plus minutes that in some way I know but cannot quite explain more utterly embodies the fantastical idea of a stairway to heaven than “Stairway to Heaven.” (I have long dreamt about Lady Gaga covering “Faster Than the Speed of Night” just as I long dreamt of a Lady Gaga/Jim Steinman collaboration, which probably did not happen if only because Earth, tedious Earth, could never have handled it.) The E Street Band’s Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg played, respectively, piano and drums on “Faster Than the Speed of Night”, just as they played on the whole album, betraying a similarity to Springsteen for which Steinman was often cited – at least, the early, mid-70s Springsteen, when he was as much “West Side Story” as Heartland Rock, though Steinman’s work always felt more intergalactic, catching a rainbow-colored wormhole, not a wave, to some other dimension. 

Speaking of Springsteen, Walter Hill’s 1984 cult-ish classic-ish rock musical “Streets of Fire” took its name from Bruce’s 1978 song of the same title. Billed as “A Rock & Roll Fable”, “Streets of Fire” was set in “Another Time, Another Place”, one that felt like a mishmash of the 1950s and 1980s, just like its music, akin to Springsteen’s “Born to Run” running, to quote Greil Marcus, “on melted down Crystals records.” It’s a movie I dearly love, “an extravagantly stylized pulp burlesque,” wrote critic Sean Burns in 2018, “that is at once an objectively lousy picture and just about the coolest damn thing I’ve ever seen”, which doesn’t feel too far off from Howard Miller essentially throwing up his hands in the face of “Bat Out of Hell: The Musical” and just taking the ride.

The production originally intended to use Springsteen’s “Streets of Fire” as its closing anthem, to be performed by the movie’s rock ’n roll heroes, Ellen Aim & the Attackers. (Diane Lane played Ellen Aim with Holly Sherwood’s voice dubbed in for the music.) But when Bruce, notoriously protective of his work, learned the vocals would be re-recorded by someone else, he withdrew permission. And really, that was for the best. I’m not sure his “Streets of Fire” would have fit. Jim Steinman, then, was enlisted to write a song to take its place, coming up, reportedly in all of two days, with “Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young”, a glittering ballad if not quite at the level of his song that opened the movie - “Nowhere Fast” - if only because “Nowhere Fast” is soundtrack royalty, top of the movie-song pops, an astonishing expression of That Teenage Feeling of being in a hurry with nowhere to go.

This blog has referenced “Nowhere Fast” ad nauseum over the years. In fact, tomorrow’s post, in the can for a week, references it. A few months back we painstakingly confirmed it to be the Best Fake Song In a Movie. No, it did not win the Best Original Song Oscar in 1984 because it was not even nominated for the Best Original Song Oscar in 1984. But, who needs an Oscar? Don’t let the man get you down, as Mr. Cool noted in “The School of Rock.” There has never been a better Original Song in a movie than “Nowhere Fast”, written by Jim Steinman, dead on Monday at the age of 73, and there never will be.

Vive la Ellen Aim. Vive la Jim Steinman.

Time

On September 16th, 1997, Sibil and Robert Richardson, with four kids at home and twins on the way, attempted to rob a Shreveport, Louisiana Credit Union. Sibil took a plea deal, getting 12 years in prison, but Robert misguidedly rejected his plea deal and wound up with 60 years, no parole, the last detail being the one that truly stings, transforming his wife into an advocate for his release and providing the genesis for Garrett Bradley’s documentary “Time.” But if this movie lingers on the severe inflexibilities of both the legal and prison systems in America and the ensuing affliction such obstinacy can cause, the movie itself is ultimately defined by a bit of productional serendipitousness. If Bradley originally intended for “Time” to be a short film focused strictly on Sibil’s present mission to pressure for her husband’s early release, as filming ended, Sibil approached Bradley with reams of home movie footage she herself had shot documenting life between her own release and the present. Bradley, then, smartly reworked “Time” into something else entirely, not just a deeper rumination on her eponymous subject but where rather than telling Sibil’s story for her, she allowed Sibil ownership of her story, a powerful innate through-line in a movie where control of a person’s life is taken away.

 You see this elaborate relationship with time straight away in the opening image which doubles as the first image of Sibil’s video diary, setting up the camera one way, then setting up the camera another way. In fact, you hear her saying she doesn’t know exactly how to set the camera up. Flash forward a few minutes, though, in film time, but 20 years or so in life time, and there is Sibil, having rechristened herself as Fox Rich, entrepreneur, owner of a car dealership talking to a young director about filming an advertisement, conveying complete knowledge about to look and act and talk on camera. It’s like night and day. How do we get here from there? In-between Bradley culls a montage from Rich’s recordings in which we see her and her kids all grow up before our very eyes, a moving mosaic underlined by the movie’s score, composed by a 96-year old Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, classical-ish recordings originally released in the 1960s that feel entirely timeless, providing the perfect counterweight to a movie sculpted entirely out of time. And in pogoing between past and present, we see both how time goes by in the blink of an eye and how it changes these people, physically, emotionally and spiritually, even as it juxtaposes that change against the presence – or, decided lack of it – of Robert Richardson. Instead Bradley cuts back, again and again, to this same shot of Robert, in a white t-shirt sitting in the sun, unchanged, an idea captured with an even sadder sort of irony in the his cardboard cutout the family keeps, the reminder that as the rest of the family transforms, in their minds he remains the same, stuck in the past when he left them.

“Time” is not a voguish kind of true crime investigation, reopening the case and trying to prove Robert’s innocence. Guilt for the crime is not simply implied but emphatically stated. Fox’s own mother becomes a kind of arbiter of justice, appearing on present-day camera a few times, including once to declare, with a ring of disappointed judgement, “They did it, you know?”, as if ensuring no one misses that immutable fact. Indeed, Fox’s spiritual makeover is a crucial part of “Time”, preaching the error of her decision to large groups, seeing the light and sticking to it both as a younger person and her current incarnation, an implicit argument for prison as a place of reform, an argument that both goes against 60-year sentences with no chance of parole and strikes right at the heart of an ostensible Christian nation ostensibly all about forgiveness. Fox is heard asking for that forgiveness, then and now, an ongoing project, and the maturity and intelligence with which her sons are also seen conducting themselves and preparing themselves for the road ahead lend great aid to the idea of what forgiveness and reform can accomplish.

But if forgiveness and reform run up against the punitive nature of incarceration, they also run up against the whole system’s indifference, the shrug that doing the crime means doing the time, to deliberately borrow a trite phrase, even if time equates to nothing less than a whole life. Throughout “Time”, Fox’s calls to the office of a judge weighing the possibility of Robert’s release get nowhere because of impersonal bureaucratic dickering. In one sequence, Fox is told by the go-between in the same sentence that there has been no decision and that the go-between has, in fact, not followed up to see if there was a decision in the first place, essentially lying right to Fox’s face. As Bradley’s camera slowly zooms out and then back in, mirroring her subject’s emotional journey in this moment, Fox at first finds strength in her mantra – “Success is the best revenge” – before, suddenly, briefly, becoming enraged, even profane, for the only time all movie, demonstrating the toll such a life can take even for those on the outside. There is another moment when she makes a call in search of the judge’s ruling, put on hold, and kept on hold. Bradley cuts back and forth between Fox and her son, just watching them wait. No music plays, there is only the silence of the room. The moment lasts, maybe, a minute. It feels like a lifetime.

Nomadland

Director Chloé Zhao lays the foundation for “Nomadland” in her first three shots. First, in a handheld close-up we watch middle-aged Fern (Frances McDormand) moving possessions from a storage unit to her van. Second, Zhao cuts wide, showing the van against the backdrop of the storage unit which is against the backdrop of a mountain vista and the empty valley below. Third, Zhao cuts closer again, into a medium shot of Fern and the Storage Unit manager, apparently friends, saying goodbye. If the first shot sets the scene, the second and third shots introduce the primary tension, between Fern and a desire to be alone amid the vast American landscape and a sense of community and camaraderie. Though the death of her husband combined with the closure of a Nevada gypsum plant where she worked forces her to not simply hit the road but live there, tricking out her van as a kind of moving domicile, it becomes clear that this is Fern’s personal choice rather than a mere concession, brought home in McDormand’s agreeably vinegary performance. When the daughter of a friend asks if she’s homeless, Fern corrects that she is houseless, not homeless, adding “There’s a difference, right?”, the distinct edge in McDormand’s voice letting you know this question is rhetorical.

True, “Nomadland”, based on Jessica Bruder’s nonfiction book “Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century” is framed through a post-2008 Financial Crisis socioeconomic prism, meaning that Zhao’s tendency toward open road romanticism, no matter how many times she tries to offset it by having Fern go to the bathroom outdoors, can sometimes simplistically, if not insultingly, suggest making lemonade from the lemons of such devastating economic fallout. But even if the people Fern encounters on the road, especially at an Arizona gathering of like-minded nomads, including Bob Wells, playing himself as a proselytizer for the itinerant lifestyle, have actively denounced the avariciousness of American society, McDormand hints at something more enigmatic lingering within. Her character sits and listens to Wells in one scene, McDormand ceding center stage to her non-professional counterpart, but when Fern takes a walk through the campground later, politely spurning requests to join mingling groups, there is something in the way she wraps her arms around herself, almost folding into herself, that comes on like a gentle defiance, a no fences independence even as she simultaneously fences herself off.

For such independence, however, “Nomadland” is not always interested in the day-to-day details that would seem paramount for such an off the beaten path existence. Another nomad, the real-life Charlene Swankie, briefly lectures Fern on some of these particulars, but Zhao, as she does elsewhere, cuts away before we hear this crucial lesson in full, acknowledging innate hardships without really exploring them. Kelly Reichardt sculpted an entire movie out of a homeless woman’s car breaking down, but when the engine of Fern’s van dies, this proves mostly an excuse to usher Fern home, or, more accurately, to the home of her sister Dolly (Melissa Smith). This provides a glimpse into Fern’s against the grain past, accepting a financial bailout but forgoing an offer to stay with her, much as she forgoes a similar offer from a fellow itinerant, quiet, kind Dave (David Strathairn), after she spends Thanksgiving with him at his family home in Oregon. These are the types of offers afforded, shall we say, the houseless, not the homeless, letting you know she has a way out...if she wants to take it. That she doesn’t, then, is tied into Dolly’s observation that Fern is akin to a modern American pioneer.

This observation could have just as easily been a ironic sneer, but Smith’s delivery feels entirely earnest, revealing how despite McDormand’s balanced performance, the movie itself can sometimes idealize her character. Ditto the American West where canyons, plains and mountains are frequently framed in a Purple Mountain Majesties-ish light. Then again, by rooting the camera in these moments to Fern’s point-of-view, Zhao is not rendering simple scenic postcards but evincing Fern’s life-giving force even as such lofty landscapes are shrewdly tempered elsewhere. The yellow palettes of Fern’s seasonal gig at an Amazon warehouse rising high toward the ceiling suggest a different frontier, a new, frightening American frontier where someone like Fern, who cites her love of work, her need to work, can only find it by fulfilling the materialist ethos she has rejected.

There is a scene at Badlands National Park, where Fern hikes out into a maze of canyons along with Dave, working there temporarily as a tour guide, and some others. Fern presses on without the group. Dave calls out to her and walks in her direction, though Fern moves briskly to stay ahead, looking over her shoulder with a smile. She is lovingly teasing him, of course, though this moment evokes something so much more, her preeminent desire to stay just out of arm’s reach, at one with the land instead, and reflecting the impossibility of pinning down the American Dream, whatever that might be anymore. 

Collective

Alexander Nanau’s documentary “Collective” begins with simple white type over black, providing the pertinent, petrifying details of the 2015 nightclub fire in Bucharest that killed 27 people, injured 180, and eventually left 37 more burn victims languishing in hospitals dead. Director Alexander Nanau shows us the smartphone video of that event a little later, smartly opting not to utilize the footage as a cold open by reasoning it would have been too much to bear. As awful as it is, though, it is not even the overriding point of “Collective”, merely the stomach-churning genesis of a jaw-dropping investigation into a Romanian healthcare system that is so corrupt and negligent it caused the Social Democratic government in charged to resign en masse, allowing the Technocrats to step in. That investigation is spurred by Cătălin Tolontan, reporter at The Sports Gazette, who is seen asking families of the victims if they, too, were fed Government lies that the injured were being nursed back to health. They were not, as Tolontan and his small team uncovers through diligent reporting and a number of sources and whistleblowers, discovering that not only were the hospital’s disinfectants being diluted so severely as to render them negligible, but that the entire healthcare system was run on bribes. If this underlines – nay, highlights – the importance of a free press that does not hold the public’s hand in moments of crises, it also demonstrates how media is not enough to patch holes in the system. That’s why midway through, “Collective” hands its narrative off to the new Minister of Health, Vlad Voiculescu. If at first he suggests another in a parade of feckless bureaucrats, his insistent presence gradually comes to demonstrate that society cannot simply change from public pressure and protest; it demands systemic follow through. 

Nanau entirely eschews talking head interviews, opting for a fly on the wall approach, remaining nearly as minimalist as the plain white walls of The Sports Gazette’s offices. This decision, to recount the story through the people uncovering facts and hacking through red tape, both implicitly evokes that idea that talking heads, like politicians or their spokesmen issuing boilerplate statements, are evasive and full of it and emits a distinct real-time sensation, as if we are turning up the truth right alongside them. And those truths are brutal. There is a kind of black humor here that occasionally resemble the so-called Romanian New Wave, like “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” (2005) in which a man’s journey through the country’s healthcare system is less a journey toward the light than the dark. Of course, a movie like that might have wrung considerable humor from the idea that a sports newspaper, of all things, would be the one breaking such hard news whereas here, in “Collective”, like so much else, it is merely stark fact. Indeed, there is a truth is stranger (worse?) than fiction element to “Collective” when compared to the New Wave, as if those movies could not possibly envision such a woebegone structure, so at odds with the medical procession’s ostensible humanist goals, painting it as so entrenched in its for profit unscrupulousness that Vlad actually asks aloud if change is really even possible.

That is a fatalistic analysis, speaking to how grim the experience of watching “Collective” can be, though sucking it up and taking it is, frankly, part of the point. In one scene, Tolontan sits for a kind of debate TV show where even the moderator pushes back against the reporter, admonishing him for causing public fear, which sounds utterly ludicrous given the story is about medical facilities literally killing Romanians. Throughout “Collective”, Nanau returns to Tedy Ursuleanu, a survivor of the nightclub fire, though her head and body were significantly burned, her fingers amputated. If her transforming into an activist of healthcare patient rights is one of the documentaries few rays of hope, it ensures such hope is measured against reality. Indeed, Ursuleanu models for a series of paintings, putting her injuries, her pain, on full display. At the exhibit’s opening, Nanau lingers over a woman looking at one of the paintings, a necessary reminder that one can’t just make it all go away.

The only time, in fact, when you catch Nanau truly imprinting a point-of-view on his images is when he tilts down from one of Tedy’s paintings hung from the health ministry wall to the table where Vlad is conducting a meeting. Then again, this also implies that Vlad, having met Tedy, has specifically chosen to hang this painting as a reminder of what he’s working toward. And Vlad gets as close as anyone conceivably could to reform, essentially gutting the Romanian medical system in an effort to build it back up. This means, however, that some medical procedures, like lung transplants, must be exported to other countries actually equipped to perform it. The Social Democratic opposition, then, seizes on this, by pitching an age-old argument of xenophobia, claiming this as an example of outsourcing jobs to foreigners, even though Vlad’s decisions are saving Romanian lives. Nanau films Vlad watching these attacks on television, his reactions of high-pitched laughter evoking not so much someone laughing to keep from crying as genuine amusement at the bald-faced bad faith. His intentions are noble, but he’s no idealist, conscious of what he’s up against, and “Collective” ends with the Technocrats being voted out of office. 

Vlad takes it in stride, but in a conversation over speakerphone, his father does not, lambasting people who vote for their own worse interests. He sounds like someone shouting into the void. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: California Split (1975)

“Jurassic Park” is among my seminal moviegoing moments. No, no, not because of the dinosaurs or the vibrating water cup; because of the scene where you see two conversations - one between Sam Neill and Bob Peck, one between Laura Dern and Richard Attenborough - happening simultaneously on opposite sides of the frame. That quietly blew my youthful mind. And just imagine how much my mind was blown when I finally got around to Robert Altman, celebrated purveyor of overlapping dialogue, like at at the beginning of “California Split”, where the clatter of chips and chatter of card-players in a Golden State poker hall is as true an evocation of a gambling den’s noisy ambiance as you are likely to find. And yet, for such distinct audio pandemonium, what ultimately stands out is the voice of Elliot Gould, playing professional gambler and/or gambling addict (is there a difference?) Charlie Waters, who strolls through the joint while waiting his turn to play, and up to a How to Play poker video that he talks right over the top of, to himself, like he can’t help it, epitomizing how despite “California Split’s” famed 8-track recording, it is Charlie’s voice that stands out, running roughshod over everyone, a conversational eddy just running round and round, waiting to pull you in. It pulls in Bill Denny (George Segal). Shuffling through the same poker hall as if he is looking for someone to talk to but can’t bring himself to say something to someone, he comes on like Charlie’s sheepish opposite. But when he eventually winds up playing at Charlie’s table, he covers for Gould’s loquacious cad when he cheats. This is crucial. In another movie, they would have been cheating together; here, the cheating brings them together. In other words, it’s their Meet Cute.

They wind up having a few drinks, getting pummeled by the same guy, Lew (Edward Walsh, a convincing sweaty mess), they bilk at the poker hall, arrested, thrown in jail, and then bailed out the next morning by Charlie’s lady friend, Barbara (Ann Prentiss), who shares a place with him as well as her fellow call girl, Susan (Gwen Welles). From here, “California Split” settles into a shambling groove, evoking the life of betting junkies, looking for another fix in the form of a bet to place, anything counts, even a pickup basketball game, where Charlie sort of suggests the haggard Herman Blume of “Rushmore” if that little kid’s shot he suddenly blocks was not simply mean-spiritedness but the product of some ludicrous wager. Every bet won yields a celebration, a cycle of instant gratification, nights bleeding into days and back into nights. Indeed, at Charlie’s place the morning after spending the night in the clink, the two men eat cereal and drink beer, and a later scene in which Bill leaves some gambling joint at some unknown hour, the low sun could be dusk or dawn, who knows. Charlies does not even appear to have a job, wandering from poker halls to the racing track. Bill at least has a job, at a magazine, though it’s vaguely defined, and when he’s in the office, he sits at his desk in something like I-Would-Rather-Be-At-The-Track anguish, a sardonic twist on the Time Is Money platitude.

Altman sees Barbara and Gwen with empathy, but they are there more as mirrors of Charlie and Bill, similar in their differing temperaments and also highlighting their unspoken but nevertheless emergent kind of bromance. When Charlie up and splits for Mexico, leaving Bill in the dark about his whereabouts, the latter turns up at Charlie’s house anyway, moping around, looking for companionship. Susan reciprocates. And when Bill tells her he has no money to acquire her, ahem, services, she tells him she doesn’t want any, that this is different, that she has feelings for him, the rare moment in “California Split” that is not transactional. As such, it’s doomed to failure. Barbara interrupts them by unexpectedly returning home and Bill pulls away, vanishing into the night. He is only reinvigorated when Charlie returns, though Bill reams him out first, like a spurned lover, which Segal renders with true heartbreak. It is heartbreak made all the more ridiculous when Charlie talks him down by playing piccolo, of all things, an incredible moment where Segal’s eruption of laughter, framed in close-up, feels less like relief than manic desperation with a touch of relief. 

Like most Altman movies, “California Split” remains indifferent to narrative, content to ride the waves its characters create, a Murphy’s Law of betting. One night when Charlie wins big, he immediately gets robbed, a moment Gould plays with no fear whatsoever, just You Gotta Be Kidding Me exasperation at his hasty downturn of luck; when he confronts Lew in a scene late in the movie, Charlie gets his nose broken first, then lays Lew out, a turn of luck the other way. And the conclusion at a Reno card game, which seems tailor-made to turn on the archetypal One Big Hand, win it all or lose everything, offers a cosmic evening out rather than synthetic closure. The movie does not even really end, it just sort of stops, exposing an addict’s ostensible moment of clarity as nothing more than suspended animation. 

Pitch Meeting: The Greatest Game Never Seen

Last week I was listening to an interview with sportscasting legend Al Michaels on The Ringer’s Pressbox podcast, ground zero anymore for all my inane movie ideas. Michaels talked at length about his start in the broadcasting business calling games for the old Hawaii Islanders, a one-time Triple-A Pacific Coast League team. He talked not only about essentially living right on the beach but how, to cut costs that traveling with the team would have brought, he would quote-unquote recreate road games by reading the live ticker and then calling the game as if it were happening right in front of him. You know what’s coming next. STOP THE TAPE.

This story got me to thinking. It got me to thinking about an aspiring baseball announcer, Lucy Davenport (Abbi Jacobson), relegated to calling games for some independent baseball team, the Hawaii Sea Turtles. Thinking no one will ever hear her in such a far-flung place, she is surprised when the owner of the St. Louis Cardinals, William Betterton (Carl Lumbly), vacationing on Oahu, happens to turn on a Sea Turtles game and hears Lucy’s call of a game-winning home run. Impressed, he seeks her out and advises his team’s current play-by-play announcer is contemplating retirement at season’s end. If he goes through with it, and if Lucy continues doing A+ work, then Betterton would consider her for the job. “I’ll be listening,” Betterton says. 

Alas, the Sea Turtles’ wily owner (Bruce McGill) pulls a fast one on a road trip, effectively canceling the season and destroying the team by selling all his players to opposing squads, like spare parts, all while they are still in the air, pocketing the cash high-tailing it for the Caribbean. Disheartened, Lucy tells her best friend, Kiana Lee (Sanoe Lake), with whom she plays in a co-ed softball league, who councils Lucy to not simply give up. “But what I do?” Lucy asks as they shag fly balls in the outfield. “The team doesn’t exist! They canceled the season!” “Not if you recreate it,” says Kiana.

So, with the help of her producer, Jake Garbanzo (Kevin Corrigan), refashioning himself as a 1930s radio special effects man, Lucy keeps calling the Sea Turtles’ non-existent season by concocting a sea story in which a tidal wave has placed the team’s field underwater and forced them to play the remainder of the season the road. She recreates games all the way to the championship at which point, taking things too far, she recreates their field as being reopened just in time for the Big Game. Big mistake! Betterton phones, saying he plans to attend the championship, forcing Lucy to employ Kiana and the rest of her co-ed softball league in a desperate bid to recreate a Sea Turtles game...for real!!!

Will the ruse work? If it does, will Lucy really decide to forsake paradise for the humidity of the Midwest? And will the sexist windbag of Honolulu sports talk radio, Devin Blabelford (Michael Shannon), who has made it his life’s work to expel every woman from the announcer’s booth, succeed in exposing Lucy’s gambit, or will he come to realize she’s the best at what she does after all? 

Kirsten Dunst Characters as the 16 Personality Types

Friend of the Blog Rory sent me a Tweet a couple weeks back in which Hannah Seidlitz contended that a favorite Kirsten Dunst film is “the fastest way to identify anyone’s taste.” As she stipulated, if you cite “Melancholia” over “Spiderman”, or “Bring it On” over “The Virgin Suicides”, your taste becomes apparent pretty quick. It makes sense. Dunst’s filmography is so dense and varied that whatever you pick as your favorite is liable to stand out against everything else. That variance, though, is what got me to thinking in even grander terms than mere taste. It got me to thinking about Kirsten Dunst movies in terms of personality. In 1921, the preeminent Swiss psychologist Carl Jung published Psychological Types, categorizing people into 16 different personalities. Those types were given monotonous titles like ISFJ and ISTP, each one bearing descriptions that sites like 16Personalities.com have broken down into more easy-to-digest monikers. Even those, however, are a bit too mundane for an exotic year on the calendar like 2021. So let’s take those 16 Personalities and ascribe them a coordinating Kirsten Dunst character. I think it’ll make it more fun for the kids in sociology class. I’ll expect the textbooks to update accordingly.

Kirsten Dunst Characters as the 16 Personality Types

Campaigner: Betsy Jobs, Dick

Architect: Claudia, Interview With a Vampire

Logician: Mary Svevo, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Commander: Lizzie Bradbury, Wimbledon

Debater: Betty Warren, Mona Lisa Smile

Advocate: Justine, Melancholia

Mediator: Kelly Woods, Get Over It

Protagonist: Amber Atkins, Drop Dead Gorgeous

Logistician: Vivian Mitchell, Hidden Figures

Defender: Edwina Morrow, The Beguiled

Executive: Regan Crawford, Bachelorette

Consul: Claire Colburn, Elizabethtown

Virtuoso: Torrance Shipman, Bring It On

Adventurer: Mary Jane Watson, Spider-Man

Entrepreneur: Marion Davies, The Cat’s Meow

Entertainer: Nicole Oakley, Crazy/Beautiful

Palm Springs

As “Palm Springs” begins, Nyles (Andy Samberg) is attending a wedding in the eponymous California desert community as a guest of his girlfriend Misty (Meredith Hagner). He’s not into it, the relationship or the wedding. He shows up at the afterparty wearing a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, chugging beers, evincing a prominent devil-may-care countenance, and when he grabs hold of the microphone during the toasts, it looks like there is going to be real trouble. There isn’t. His speech is gracious, inspiring, and informed; it moves the whole suspicious audience. “That was unexpected,” I thought. Ha! Oh, just you wait. Because if for one blessed moment you merely think appearances deceive, that the casually bedecked are just as capable of heartwarming speeches as the formally dressed, it turns out Nyles is simply stuck in a time loop, has been for a long, long time, and has been reliving this day, November 9th, over and over again, “Groundhog Day” style. And I thought: we’ve reached a strange point in modern movies. We’ve reached a point where a basic character reversal is more shocking than being stuck in a time loop; high concepts have ruined me. 

In fairness, that patented goofy air of Samberg’s, which is nicely dried out a little more this time, helps sell the concept despite its weird obligatory feeling. “Groundhog Day” is never mentioned, but when Nyles tells Sarah (Cristin Milioti), sister of the bride, who becomes stuck on November 9th with him, that we’re in “one of those infinite time loop situations you might have heard about”, he gives it the ring of a man who has been watching Harold Ramis’s celebrated time loop comedy for reference. And there are crucial divergences from “Groundhog Day.” If there we tracked the entire progression of Bill Murray’s weatherman Phil Connors, here we meet Nyles deep into the rabbit hole, just as Sarah does, making her our surrogate. She’s the one who wants to get out, and tries unsuccessfully, eventually acquiescing to Nyles’s resigned go-with-the-flow explanations. And once she does, “Palm Springs” is at its best, settling into the mid-tempo groove of a hangout movie, a little like if Jake and Beverly from “Everybody Wants Some!!” got stuck in a time loop, a high concept character study in which the concept puts their selves under the microscope. 

This kind of movie, though, is as much about sticking the landing, because once you write yourself into the corner at the beginning, how are you going to get yourself out? And that is where “Palm Springs” runs into trouble. The ending, rather than truly culminating a character arc, is more about narrative machinations, finding some way to trick the system, more or less, and fashion the happy if formulaic ending. Neither Samberg nor Milioti, meanwhile, can quite make the elegant turns of Murray, which, honestly, is probably asking too much of anyone. Not that I want to end with a complaint. Because wherever “Palm Springs” goes wrong, where it really goes right is when Nyles and Sarah, at their zero fucks peak, invade a biker bar they occasionally frequent and both amuse themselves and baffle everyone with a preposterous choreographed dance. It’s like if rather than Schwarzenegger’s Model 101 Terminator from “Terminator 2” getting into a rumble in the biker bar to get some duds suddenly found himself in an 80s New Wave MTV video instead. Who would ever want to leave a such a paradise?

One Night in Miami...

The night of February 25, 1964, after defeating Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title, Cassius Clay met up in a Miami hotel with three more Black American icons: singer Sam Cooke, football star and nascent actor Jim Brown, and activist Malcolm X. What was discussed, what happened, no one knows, though it became the genesis of Kemp Powers’s 2013 play “One Night in Miami...” Regina King has adapted that play for the big screen, though it is hard not to notice the film’s theatrical roots, given the limited setting, considerable conversation and dramatic structure. Still, not only does Powers’s adaptation of his own work build out the film with evocative add-ons, King utilizes space in that motel room as much as she can, visually and verbally, allowing pauses and ruminative close-ups amid the constant confrontation, as well as a gliding camera akin to her visual style for Cassius’s big bout, suggesting the real fight come after. 

Rather than simply open in the motel room, “One Night in Miami...” does not so much introduce us to all four men as reveal them in their present 1964 element, where even Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), the best football player in the world, cannot enter the home of a white family friend (Beau Bridges) because he is African-American and a white audience at the Copa is left indifferent to a burgeoning recording legend like Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.). The opening scene is a different Cassius Clay (Eli Goree) fight, against Henry Cooper (Sean Monaghan) in London, which he treats less as a bout than a canvas for clowning, until he briefly gets floored, yielding a reaction shot from his corner that is more comical than dramatic, demonstrating that for so much heavy talk “One Night in Miami...” can still be light on its feet. And by revealing Clay’s penchant for performance over purpose, this moment also establishes the film’s through line. Indeed, the first shot of Brother Malcolm (Kingsley Ben-Adir), in fact, is of him through the television set, sitting for an interview, then a cut to him at home with his family, a deft demonstration of how Malcolm had to negotiate his public and private worlds and how those unavoidably collided. Through this light, the kind devotion of nigh omnipresent security detail, Brother Kareem (Lance Reddick), becomes, well, not quite comic relief but a quietly comic reminder of solitude’s unattainability.

Part of the drama stems from Clay’s decision to join the Nation of Islam, one he has been keeping private but which comes to the forefront as the evening progresses, culminating in his announcement to the press. In this scene, the hotel room essentially becomes the wings and the balcony the stage, Clay stepping outside with Malcolm to make his forthcoming conversion official. Goree’s preening and strutting for the press does not feel quite as pronounced, perhaps, as the real Ali, or even as Will Smith performing as Ali, but his private persona feels spot-on, like it’s taking a page from David Maraniss’s portrayal of him in “Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World” as something more like a rambunctious teenager. There are moments when Clay, the heavyweight champ, remember, pointedly feels out of his depth among these men, underscored by how King has him fade into the background of frames. Jim Brown is on the opposite end of the spectrum, perhaps the least vital of the four figures in this context if only because he feels the most sure of himself, which Hodge’s cool charisma underscores. 

It might be Cassius’s evening but “One Night in Miami...” mostly boils down to Malcolm and Sam, the former prodding the latter to use his performance genius as protest, utilizing a tale of his seeing Sam live as something akin to a parable of connection, and even playing Cooke’s beautiful if skin-deep songs side-by-side with Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” The latter is an indelible moment, innately tied to now as much as then, conjuring up not merely notions of how easier it is for white people to lodge public protest without engendering blowback, a kind of dare with genuine weight. At this, Sam leaves the room, and for all his first-rate singing, it is Odom Jr.’s finest moment, rendering the pain palpable and personal. And yet Jim pushes back against Malcolm afterwards, pointing out Sam has economic freedom, the only true independence in a capitalist society, muddying those moralistic waters just a bit more.

The argument is settled, in a way, by the film closing on Sam’s public performance of “A Change is Gonna Come”, suggesting he has heeded Malcolm’s call to arms. The denouement of Spike Lee’s X biopic, of Malcolm on his way to the Audubon Ballroom, began with his patented floating shot scored to the same song and, true to that sensation, the activist’s fate looms over the entire movie, evoked in Kingsley Ben-Adir’s performance, which sometimes can feel entirely chiseled out of that stutter, desperate, cracking, someone who senses his time on this Earth is nearing an end and is pushing himself to ensure the cause will be upheld. At one point, Sam says Malcolm is talking to them in private the way he talks to everyone else in public. He means this as a criticism. But that’s the thing, even if the very premise of “One Night in Miami...”, imagining a summit untold to the outside world, suggests otherwise, the movie goes to show that for men like these, eventually, your private life and your public persona, like it or not, are one and the same.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Aaron Loves Angela (1975)

“Here’s a movie,” Wesley Morris wrote of Adam’s Leon impeccable “Gimme the Loot” (2012), “that looks like it hails from a real place.” Gordon Parks Jr.’s “Aaron Loves Angela” feels like it hails from a real place too, even if that place no longer exists, not really, being 1970s New York, specifically Harlem and Spanish Harlem. The camera is at frequently at street level, like it’s catching events on the fly, or at a distance, the actors conspicuously talking in looped dialogue, allowing them to be right in the middle of some cityscape. The basketball game that opens the movie is seen from high atop in one of those bandbox gymnasiums with seats straight to the top, the camera hovering over them and swinging this way and that way, just like a spectator. Key events turn on an abandoned tenement building, which doesn’t feel like a set but a place where the film crew just went and set up shop. It also innately epitomizes the neighborhood. Teenage Aaron (Kevin Hooks) wants to turn a floor of this building into a clubhouse, and sort of does, though that clubhouse is compromised by the drugs a local dealer has stashed on another floor, putting into perspective the harsh realities of this world, one Aaron seeks to escape. Initially it seems like basketball is the way out, his father Ike (Moses Gunn) literally equating buckets with bucks, though in that opening game, when Aaron catches a glimpse of Angela (Irene Cara) in the stands and suddenly finds himself in love, everything changes.

“Aaron Loves Angela” sort of suggests a Romeo & Juliet-styled romance, epitomized in the names of the basketball teams, the Harlem Saints versus the Puerto Rican Devils. And that is there, a little bit, with the characters sneaking around behind their parents’ backs and a scene where Aaron is chased out of Spanish Harlem. But the movie is not titled Aaron & Angela but “Aaron Loves Angela” for a reason, revealing that it sees this story strictly through his eyes rather than hers, as much Aaron’s life and his neighborhood as it is about their romance. That’s not to suggest Parks Jr. shortchanges Angela. She is worldly, having traveled with her mother, in a way Aaron is not, and refreshingly she refuses to be at Aaron’s beck and call, urging more from him, not simply waiting around for him to change, calling him when he won’t. When we briefly see her on something approximating a date with another guy, it sets Aaron off, as such things will do to impetuous teen boys, though Parks Jr. is not callowly portraying her as a shrew. Rather, she is figuring out her own life on her own time. Cara embodies such poise, even if she convincingly lets in cracks of hurt when Aaron messes up, and boy does he. Aaron is as endearing as he is frustrating, the latter of which I mean in a good way, Hooks’s performance alternating between completely cocky and totally clueless, sometimes both at once, as true a teenager as you will see.

Angela is the way out, Aaron gradually begins to see, not basketball, though this subplot could have been sharpened. The game just sort of falls away after the opening scenes and when Aaron explains to his father he is not good enough to earn a scholarship playing hoops, Parks Jr. has submitted next to no evidence as to why this would be the case. On the other hand, while a father living out his failed dreams through his son is nothing new, “Aaron Loves Angela” nevertheless brings it to life with considerable terror and melancholy. In a scene where Ike drunkenly berates his son, the slide projector on which dad had been watching his glory days playing football still whirs in the background, each slide like a flash of memory as a shiv into the defeated man’s side. Ike owns a joint, a kind of bar slash ribs joint, though Parks Jr. juxtaposes this kind of practical entrepreneurship against the unscrupulous Beau (Robert Hooks), a drug dealer and a pimp. In one scene he sits at the counter of Ike’s place, chowing down on ribs with a cocky air, contemptuously asking about his playing days, forcing Ike to just stand there and take it, and then asking for more sauce as a means to reinforce who comes first in this world. But he also saves Aaron at a delicate moment, telling the kid he’s owed a favor, though “Aaron Loves Angela” is not the kind of moving to turn that into a plot point. It mostly futzes up the morals, a little, reminding you that somehow Beau remains on Aaron’s side even as he floods the neighborhood with drugs. 

If Aaron is told by his father that basketball is the way out because basketball provides money, Beau becomes something of an inadvertent middleman to that possible escape. When a deal with the mob goes wrong and Beau winds up shot, laying on a staircase in Aaron’s clubhouse with a briefcase full of cash, he hands the $250,000 over to the kid, telling him it’s the way out. The mob finds out Aaron has the cash, of course, leading to a climax in which he and Angela are pursued through the Harlem streets. The score, however, by Jose Feliciano is not dramatic or suspenseful, it’s jaunty, maintaining a wry distance from the seemingly high stakes. Indeed, upon scaling the staircase toward a train, Aaron turns and hurls the briefcase into the air, sending dollar bills fluttering. He and Angela laugh and embrace. A lot of movies will tell you love is the answer, but I have rarely seen a single image so joyously live it out.

Harrison Ford Says the Titles of His Movies

After re-watching “Clear and Present Danger” a few months ago, I told My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife about Harrison Ford - er, Jack Ryan - confronting the evildoing The President. This was not long after January 6th, not long after Nancy Pelosi had deemed our then-President, His Imbecility, a clear and present danger. And so My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife wondered, given the title, if that’s what Harrison Ford - er, Jack Ryan - called the movie President. Alas, he did not. But boy, I suddenly wished he would have. And that, as it absolutely had to, got me to thinking. It got me to thinking about Harrison Ford dispensing title drops of all his movies. Ok, ok, not all of them. Harry’s  made a lot of movies, man. But these were the ones that occurred to me.

American Graffiti. “When I’m through with you, kid, you’ll just be American Graffiti splayed across the road.”

Star Wars. “Besides, attacking that battle station ain’t my idea of courage. It’s more like, suicide” becomes “Kid, I’ve had it about up to here with all these Star Wars.”

The Empire Strikes Back. “It’s a good bet the Empire knows we’re here” becomes a rueful “The Empire Strikes Back” in the vein of “It’s all simple tricks and nonsense.”

Return of the Jedi. Falls out of the carbonite. Looks up. “Well, well, the return of the Jedi.”

Raiders of the Lost Ark. Slaps Sallah on the back while digging up the Well of Souls. “Guess we’re just a bunch of Raiders of the Lost Ark, huh?”

Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. Knight: “You’re dressed strangely...for a knight.” Indiana Jones: “I’m not a knight. I’m Indiana Jones...and this is the last crusade.”

Frantic. [Husky shout.] “I’m frantic!”

Presumed Innocent. Ok, I’ve never actually seen “Presumed Innocent.” But if Harrison Ford never gets to bark “Whatever happened to presumed innocent until proven guilty?” then someone really fell down on the job.

The Fugitive. Tommy Lee Jones already has this one covered. Next.

Patriot Games. [Shoves Sean Bean against the speedboat railing.] “I’m through playing all these Patriot Games. ”

The Devil’s Own. “Thought he was a good kid. Turns out he was The Devil’s Own.”

Air Force One. Glenn Close gets the title drop here, of course, and respect. But I’m a little disappointed that when Ford says “Do you know who I am? I’m the President of the United States” we couldn’t have tacked an “And this is Air Force One” onto the end of it.  

Six Days, Seven Nights. “This has been the longest six days, seven nights of my LIFE.”

Random Hearts. Kristin Scott Thomas: “What the heart wants, it’s so random.” Harrison Ford: “I guess you could say we’re just a couple Random Hearts.”

What Lies Beneath. “When I first met you, all I wanted was to spend the rest of my life with you. If only you’d known What Lies Beneath.”

Firewall. “This is the strongest firewall in America!”

Cowboys & Aliens. Looking through field glasses from high on a ridge. “I’ve never seen so many Cowboys and Aliens.”

Hollywood Homicide. Josh Harnett: “You’re saying what happened in Hollywood?” Harrison Ford: [breathes through nose] “Homicide.”

Greyhound

There is a shot in Aaron Schneider’s WWII film “Greyhound” in which USS Keeling Commander Ernest Krause (Tom Hanks) looks out across the Atlantic from beneath his combat helmet that mirrors a shot in “Saving Private Ryan” (1997) where Hanks’s Captain John Miller looked out from beneath his combat helmet aboard a Higgins boat on D-Day. That is not to suggest these are similar films. If “Saving Private Ryan” had an elaborate wind-up prior to sending its characters on their mission with myriad philosophical ruminative pauses along the way, “Greyhound” is something different, 78 minutes shorter, a tightly calibrated action movie as opposed to a war epic. It opens by simply relaying all necessary exposition via title cards and time stamps before flashing back to a scene in which Krause proposes to his girlfriend (Elisabeth Shue). When she suggests they wait until after the war for marriage, it provides the through-line, a reason for his getting home alive, and then, just like that, “Greyhound” goes.

“Greyhound” is set in the so-called Black Pit, a danger zone in the mid-Atlantic where a convoy of Allied supply ships protected by the Keeling and a few other naval destroyers are left without air cover, leaving them vulnerable to lurking U-Boats. Abiding by the film’s storytelling alacrity, a U-Boat wolfpack pops up right away, throwing the Keeling and all the rest straight into the fury of battle, triggering “Greyhound’s” elegant rising and falling action, thought the latter is kept to a minimum, where even a funeral is cut short. The cat and mouse game sometimes resembles a submarine movie, take your pick, from “Run Silent Run Deep” to “Crimson Tide”, though in sticking to action above water rather than below, “Greyhound” does not induce claustrophobia so much as isolation. The waves are CGI, obviously, but they still effectively convey a sense of the Black Pit’s loneliness, grey, roiling water stretching in every direction, looking very much like a looming, watery graveyard. The Nazi villains are never really seen, only heard, taunting Krause and the Keeling with radio messages, the first of which is conveyed in an eerie scene at night, the American command room bathed in the night vision-necessary red light that makes it feel like a nightmare coming true. 

That isolating air is enhanced by Schneider keeping the action firmly within the Keeling. Though the convoy contains 37 ships, some of which are lost in the fight, there is no cross-cutting between them, limiting communication to the radio. Indeed, though the battle is chock full of maps, radars, bursts of transmission, the nexus is Krause, the camera sticking with him through everything to emphasize how every decision goes through him. It is the kind of actorly responsibility Hanks was born to wear, his face etched with determination and concern in equal measure for every decision he makes, and renders the metaphor of his character being a man of faith, wondering if his men will keep the faith in him, almost superfluous. Though a longtime officer, this is his first voyage as a commander, meaning some of the men under his command have just as much if not more experience in these situations, and the emergent tension is as much between the fretting faces and Krause’s as it is between the Keeling and the U-Boats.

That’s how “Greyhound” prefers to draw characterization, in the essence of the actors, the epxression on their faces. There isn’t time for dialogue to cut to the heart of the matter, just character revealed under extraordinary pressure, Schneider reducing everything here to the most elemental. Late in the movie, a U-Boat torpedo knifes through the water, so close to the Keeling that Krause leans over the railing to watch as the weapon of destruction slides by. It is a harrowing moment, no doubt, yet strangely lyrical, serene even, laying bare war’s thin line between survival and death.