Entertainment Weekly Summer Movie Cover: Outtake

When I googled for “EW summer movie preview 1996”, the first correlating image I found was an Entertainment Weekly cover advertising “Twister”, this cover...

I must have looked at it for 30 seconds straight, maybe 60 seconds straight. I couldn’t get enough of it. I tapped My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife on the shoulder and told her to look at it too. It’s incredible! It was only looking at it for so long that allowed me to realize the words Summer Movie Preview were conspicuously missing. Alas, it wasn’t the Summer Preview at all. Still, that wasn’t going to stop me from posting about it. And while I considered including it in yesterday’s walk down EW Summer Preview lane as a kind of momentary fake out, I decided it deserved a post all on its own. Because rather than opting for a literal twister, like your less merry marketers undoubtedly would, they go for the pun. And if Chubby Checker’s “Twist” is a summer song, then this double meaning is perfect for a movie that set the 1996 summer movie season in motion, a pun putting into perspective how the summer movie season should just be, like, you know, fun. Hunt, meanwhile, is a little self-conscious in that smile but also totally game while Paxton, bless his heart, is just going for it as best he can, which isn’t all that much, though not all that much is just right in this context.

Who knows makes for an iconic magazine cover. It probably depends on your taste. Maybe you go for John & Yoko or Janet on the cover of Rolling Stone; maybe you opt for one of those covers as historical documents preferred by Life Magazine; maybe you want to call up some Rockwell for The Saturday Evening Post. I’ve always leaned toward the Seinfeld floating heads for EW, or Bruce unexpectedly showing off his ice skating skills for Rolling Stone, or Nicole screaming for the NYTM. But now I see it’s none of those. It’s this one. It’s the twist; IT’S THE TWIST!!!

A Walk Down Entertainment Weekly Summer Movie Preview Lane

Back in the day, I looked forward to the Entertainment Weekly summer movie preview issue almost as much as I looked forward to the summer movie season itself. If Santa gave you a Christmas list rather than vice-versa, like if he dropped off a Sears and Roebuck catalog at the doorstep of every good little girl and boy sometime after Thanksgiving, so you could go through it and check off what you wanted, that would have been like EW’s summer movie preview issue, this cornucopia of cinematic treats from which to choose. I remember getting that issue, from the Borders or the Barnes & Noble, the B. Dalton or the Waldenbooks, and telling myself the whole way home that I was allowed to only peruse one month a day – May’s movies tonight, June’s movies tomorrow, etc. I would never stick to that, of course. By the end of that first night, I already knew the major releases by heart and then I’d go through them again, and then I’d go through the smaller Other Movies section where all sorts of under-the-radar releases were given a one-sentence synopsis, taking notes on the ones that looked most intriguing, because those movies would never show up in a central Iowa movie theater, just at the video store eight or nine months later.

That’s all gone, of course. There is no need to wait for a special magazine issue because movie news is instantaneous now. I’m not saying it was better then. I remember watching movies and hoping – hoping – certain trailers would be shown because if I didn’t see them then, I would have to wait until the next movie I attended. In 2013 I could watch that first “Bling Ring” trailer 132 times the first day it dropped. At the same, though, there is nothing today that matches the all-at-once feeling of an EW Summer Movie Preview, myriad movie titles just suddenly dropped in your lap. And maybe because I’m looking forward to this summer movie season more than any in recent memory, simply because of what we went through last year when I couldn’t go to the movies at all, I find myself yearning for that EW issue more than ever. The best I can do these days is revisit the ones from the past. My past. Meaning, of course, the 1990s, when my love for movies bloomed. 

Take a walk with me...   

1990

You couldn’t put Nicole on the cover too? Nitwits.

1991

Woah. Now there’s a time capsule. What was it Willie Stokes said? “They can’t all be winners, can they?” 

1992

Sort of a microcosm of most of these EW covers, where despite Michelle Pfeiffer in the Catwoman suit, they’re essentially selling the movies based on the stars. 

1993

A little disappointed here, EW going back to the same well as 1992, though you can detect the shifting marketing dynamics. The velociraptor gets the spot that the top of the page, there, with Meg directly below. Meg would get completely shunted these days. (Whoopi’s on this cover too for “Made in America”, which I remember specifically because it’s what I was forced to buy a ticket for after I tried and failed, at the age of 15, to buy a ticket for Mario Van Peebles’ R-rated “Posse.” It was one of the first times I remember thinking: “Oh, all the funny stuff was in the commercials.”) 

1994

If they had Who Should Have Been on the Cover? lists like they have Who Should Have Won the Heisman Trophy? lists, EW probably would have penciled in Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves for “Speed” over Billy Crystal’s “City Slickers” sequel, “The Legend of Curly’s Gold.” Indeed, “City Slickers II” finished third at the box office the weekend it opened, behind “Speed” and “The Flintstones.” Still, I like imagining Billy Crystal doing an expensive photo shoot somewhere in the American West and then the EW finally just settling on this shot of him in a studio in Burbank holding a rope. 

1995

“Bridges of Madison County”, filmed due south of the county where I grew up, gets the cover over “Batman Forever?” It was a different time.

1996

What the hell is even going on here? “A Time to Kill”, which Sandra Bullock is shilling for, was set in Mississippi, not west Texas. And her character was from Boston! This appears to be an attempt to sell the movie more through sex appeal and I guess whoever was in charge of defining sex appeal on behalf of EW in 1996 had a cowboy fetish.

1997

Working as a concessionist at the Cobblestone 9 (vive la Cobblestone!), the summer of 1997 was the greatest summer of my life. And I will always consider it the summer of “Men in Black”, listening to Will Smith’s hip-hop theme song, like, eight times a night as I shimmied to it while sweeping up popcorn. And this walk down EW summer movie preview lane is a reminder that these covers merely took the temperature of the room before the season truly started, that quality was not grandfathered in before the movies actually screened, that we, the audience, not just The Critics™, could stand up and call crap crap. This also marks the three-year trend of two stars out of character on the EW summer movie preview cover. 

1998

Indeed, here is next year’s cover with Ben and Liv, shilling for “Armageddon.” And man, Ben. Dude’s been through a lot in the years since, including this year’s rekindling of the early-aughts Bennifer phenomenon with Jennifer Lopez, which was three or four years after this, if you can believe it. It’s nice to see Gen-X Ben again. His facial hair, in fact, does not look altogether different from the facial hair I was trying and failing, miserably, to pull off during the summer of 1998. In fact, let’s just move on.

1999

This is a pitch right over the plate, I know, Julia Roberts getting the cover, along with Hugh Grant, even though 1999 was the summer of “The Phantom Menace.” But in the space of that cheeky “And, Oh Yeah, Star Wars” subhead, I can’t help but wonder if there’s a lesson, the glimmer of what could be, a détente between IP-driven franchises and The Star Machine. If only. The whole point of this list, after all, was to feel a little wistful.

Going to the Movies

The Davis, the 3-screen theater in my neighborhood, opens into the lobby with a concession stand along the right wall, that lobby giving way to a hallway leading to the theaters in back. When I entered this past Sunday, for the first time in 17 months, since early 2020, having just fastened my mask to my face outside to observe the theater’s rule, I paused for a moment. The lobby has been mostly empty before, like the 100+ degree afternoon when I went to see that wretched Tom Cruise “Mummy” remake, but even then there was activity, the familiar sound of popcorn popping and concessionists cracking wise. This was different. It was eerily quiet. There was music but it was distant, being piped in through an open door from the adjacent Carbon Arc Bar, meaning the lobby felt a little like some dying mall’s atrium, a comparison so depressing I immediately put it out of my mind. The only other person was a single concessionist. As I entered, he stepped forward to his cash register, though he was masked too, of course, and, as such, I could not quite tell if his expression was eagerness, to serve someone, anyone, or apprehensiveness, from the whole situation. If I was a journalist, maybe I would have hashed things out with him, but this is just a dumb blog and I was just there to see a movie so I continued past him to the doorman in back where he printed out the ticket I pre-purchased. Though the doorman was masked too, his demeanor was easier to place, helped along by one Apple earbud in his right ear, treating the pandemic like he probably treated college applications, with a virtual shrug. It wasn’t Normalcy, per se, but it was momentarily refreshing, and it made me wonder how I, ex-movie theater employee from the era of 35mm film would have handled working in a pandemic. I probably would have been more like the concessionist, I thought. I would have been ready to help, quietly hoping I wouldn’t have to.

To my recollection, the Davis never had those earsplitting AMC-ish pre-movie ads, though maybe in the last year I had just forgotten, and when I entered Theater 3 for my 3:30 showing of “Those Who Wish Me Dead”, I was momentarily taken aback by the cacophonous advertisement for some TV show I’ve already forgotten. On the other hand, there was something comforting in the din of noise. “Ah yes,” I thought to myself as I plunked down in my seat, in the section closer to the screen, all by myself and away from the five other patrons, further up the stadium seating and toward the back, “this is what the movie theater sounds like.” Everything sounded so clear: the rustle of popcorn bags, the chewing of the popcorn itself, the whispers between the couple during one of the trailers, the soda cup hitting the floor which brought a smile to my face. It felt right. The trailers screened and the lights came down.

I had anticipated some moment of profundity when those lights went down, but it didn’t come until a few scenes in, when Angelina Jolie, as a smoke jumper, the magic of the movies in full effect, holds a red solo cup, holds court and holds the camera’s in a spectacular medium close-up where she is wearing Ray-Bans and smiling that cool, in-control Jolie smile. “This,” I thought, “this is why I’m here.” Not to see a movie over there, on the TV, or down there, on my laptop, but up there, on the big screen, where people like her belong. And if I had dreamed that Maverick’s return in the “Top Gun” sequel might mark my triumphant post-pandemic return to the theater, I knew seeing Jolie in Maverick-like Ray-Bans that the cosmos was communicating to me, telling me, nope, it was supposed to be like this all along. 

I’m reasonably certain I could have extracted a metaphor from any movie that was the first one I’d seen in a theater in 490 days. But hey, you only get one movie as your first movie back in the wake of the first global pandemic of your life and “Those Who Wish Me Dead” was mine. And here was a movie where the characters go through hell, forced to face down a raging forest fire and come out the other side. I was lucky, pandemic-wise. No one in my direct orbit died, few people close to me suffered in any real way, the pandemic isn’t even over in many parts of the world. But seeing Angelina Jolie smile that Movie Star smile, caked in Just-Survived-A-Forest-Fire Movie Makeup, it got to me nonetheless. Because of the movie and because of her, how she sells it, yes, but because of the whole world too. Typically I come to the theater to get rid of my troubles for a little while, and I did, but I was also here because those troubles had lessened a little. 

I left the theater and stepped out on the sidewalk. The temperature had dropped. I took my mask off, breathed in the cool air and walked home.

Stowaway

The deus ex machina is an age-old literary device, one culled from the Latin phrase meaning god from the machine because ancient Greek and Roman drama would often artificially resolve otherwise unsolvable drama by having a god appear in the sky. Resolution, of course, indicates the end of the drama whereas in “Stowaway”, writer/director Joe Penna’s new Netflix drama, the god of the machine does not get lowered in to resolve the drama but to kick it off, which at least in its own hoary way is sort of a fresh take. The movie opens with a three-person crew blasting off on a two-year mission to Mars. Not long into the voyage, however, Commander Marina Barnett (Toni Collette) discovers a stowaway. Well, make that accidental stowaway. A launch engineer, Michael (Shamier Anderson), who fails to properly secure a harness, or something, and becomes trapped behind a ceiling panel, knocked unconscious. It is not simply a deGrasse Tyson-ish minor plot point hang-up, it’s the genesis for the entire movie. And though there is something interesting in a random foul-up messing up a mission virtually calibrated down to the last breath, that very calibration is also what renders it almost utterly implausible, suggesting a lack of imagination on the storyteller’s part: uh, I don’t know, just stick him behind a ceiling panel. At the same time, though, his being an unintentional stowaway alters the perspective. If another movie would have made him put him there on purpose, likely up to no good, one more haunted house in space, “Stowaway” renders the villain more abstract.

The first few scenes after liftoff establish a friendly rapport between the crew, Commander Barnett joined by biologist David Kim (Daniel Dae Kim) and medical researcher Zoe Levenson (Anna Kendrick). It’s so friendly, in fact, that the seemingly lugheaded bit about David being a Harvard graduate and Zoe being a Yale graduate is there more to gently mock the notion of any kind of conflict. They get along fine, and that mostly remains true even after Michael’s surprising appearance, the trio welcoming and including him and Michael pulling his weight rather than slacking off or acting tellingly weird. No, the tension is not so much from Michael’s presence as what his presence has inadvertently caused, damage to the ship’s vital CDRA, scrubbing carbon dioxide from the air to ensure they can continue breathing oxygen to, like, you know, live. This damage in tandem with the mission specifically planned for three people does not leave enough potential oxygen for four, establishing “Stowaway’s” overriding moral quandary, whether the mission supersedes finagling some way to save Michael’s life. It evokes the pragmatic debates driving Danny Boyle’s superior “Sunshine” (2007), though there such pragmatism was balanced against the fate of the world whereas in “Stowaway” these questions are personalized, making it more about Michael as caretaker to his sister back home and David’s desperation at salvaging an algae project he has prepared for years. Even here, though, Kim does not play it like a mad scientist, merely a botanist forced to make an excruciating choice, which is admirable if not a little less entertaining.

The acting in “Stowaway” is uniformly sound, as Collette balances a Commander’s sense of levelheadedness against an encroaching fear in nearly every scene while Kendrick’s patented eager beaverness is sort of remixing her “Up in the Air” character as an astronaut, finding the excitement of space morphing into something more terrifying and then, ultimately, more profound. That, however, also speaks to where “Stowaway” goes wrong. If there certain scenes of crew debate demand dialogue, frequently Penna eschews visually telling this story. When Michael discovers he is growing into himself from such an unlikely turn of events, Penna has him literally say this in voiceover rather than denoting it in through a scene or series of shots, just as Zoe’s ultimate moment of profundity is weirdly counteracted by a pre-existing voiceover plunked down over top of it to ensure we don’t miss the point. So, too, does “Stowaway” struggle at dramatizing its exposition, like a late movie solar storm that, without being satisfactorily set up, feels too much like, well, another god of the machine descended from the heavens at just the wrong time.

These missteps are unfortunate because at other points Penna does a strong job of exuding mood. Though the opening sequence recounting mission liftoff keeps the camera close to its actors’ helmeted faces while staying firmly within the confines of the spaceship, akin to “First Man”, “Stowaway” is less interested in conveying claustrophobia. Indeed, as the movie progresses and the situation grows dire and their initial camaraderie suffers, Penna emphasizes the loneliness of space. You see this inside the spaceship, constructed as a series of hallways and hatchways for which we are never given a precise kind of layout, rendering it plausible when characters speak out of earshot of other characters. And in the climactic spacewalk, where Zoe and David climb from the spaceship to the spent booster rocket in the hopes of acquiring leftover liquid oxygen for survival, Penna takes great care to paint these two astronaut suits as white blips against the vivid blackness, their ascent, or is it a descent, the perspective seeming to shift as they climb, equating them with mountaineers summiting a peak that keeps shifting. When they first exit the ship, Zoe looks up and the camera tilts back and up with her, the tethers leading from their ship to the rocket seeming to disappear into nothing, a movie portraying space travel as no big deal nevertheless reminding us that the final frontier remains the great unknown.

Greenland

Despite Ric Roman Waugh’s tale of a planet-killing comet being firmly in the disaster movie camp, “Greenland’s” forebearer is not an Irwin Allen or Michael Bay tentpoles nor one of Roland Emmerich’s cornfed Armageddons; no, it’s closest comp is Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds.” Released in 2005, that blockbuster take on the H.G. Wells classic was conscious of its post-9/11 world, literally equating an alien invasion with terrorists at one point, but filtered through the viewpoint of a fractured family, reemphasizing the importance of traditional values amid so much extra-terrestrial unrest. “Greenland” sees its story of a planet-killing comet through the eyes of a fractured family too. But instead of comparing the impending apocalypse to some other exterior threat, it turns it back around on us, one more trip to Maple St. to demonstrate who the monsters really are – us. That’s not new, of course, as “The Twilight Zone” reference suggests, but Waugh gives it more foreboding verve than I might have imagined, at least until a sentimental denouement bound to blockbuster rules.

As “Greenland” opens, John Garrity (Gerard Butler) gathers with his estranged wife Allison (Morena Baccarin), their son Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd) and a group of neighbors to watch television coverage of an interstellar comet passing by Earth. Though the tension between John and Allison is intended as pivotal, it feels off the rack, both in performing and writing, just obligatory conflict that never amounts to much, not even when the script trucks in a nominal reveal later in the movie, not least because Butler can never sell that he might have been something like a half-scumbag up to that point. The real conflict emerges when the Garritys receive an EMS message for emergency sheltering just as it becomes clear the comet is going unexpectedly haywire, their lives decreed as more valuable than their neighbors’ lives right in front of their neighbors’ faces. If Ed (Gary Weeks), the next-door acquaintance sporting a Hawaiian shirt, initially suggests Jimmy Buffett’s comic cameo in “Jurassic World”, squiring those margaritas to safety in the name of a meme, it’s testament to Waugh’s more grave vision that he renders someone so festively dressed as distressed, draining the joke right out of the costuming, leaving you with this strange sight suggesting there is no standard end of the world wardrobe.

The Garrity Family rushes to a military base, their names on this To Be Saved list because of John’s job as a structural engineer, glimpsed in the opening shot if for no other reason than to set up this moment, slated to be whisked away to underground facilities in Greenland that will keep them safe from impending Earthly destruction. John, though, goes back to the car for Nathan’s insulin, separating them and keeping them separated when the people not selected for emergency sheltering, protesting outside the base gates, invade the tarmac. If the insulin is just a means to elevate the family tension by forcing them to find one another, underlining the needlessness of John and Allison’s romantic strain in the first place, Nathan’s diabetes thankfully goes beyond that, keeping he and his mom off the plane too because he is deemed a medical risk ineligible for saving. This is conveyed in “Greenland’s” best scene where an Army Major (Merrin Dungey), brilliantly emitting the air of an overworked middle manager in the middle of an apocalypse, matter-of-factly explains the rules, forced to admit her own family was not chosen to be saved either, the cruel, convincing irony of an essential worker deemed inessential. 

Her mid-level role in the scheme of things also suggests who we don’t see – namely, the President. If normally the Commander-in-Chief would give a Big Speech in a movie like this, he or she is M.I.A., as are other top-level government officials, a smart decision evoking the sensation of not being in this together, the have nots forced to fend for themselves. A fleet of military planes in the sky is like the inverse of the shot from “The Day After Tomorrow” in which birds are flying south, the people in charge knowing what’s up without telling anyone else. Allison is forced to navigated a looted pharmacy with Nathan in tow, demonstrating a full-on breakdown in the social fabric, while one brief respite in his journey to reunite with his wife and son finds John standing near a raging party cheering as comets streak across the sky. He might shake his head, but what other choice do they have, a written-off doomsday cult by default. 

That’s bleak but that bleakness is refreshing, wrestling with the grim inevitable rather than concerning itself with some massive space mission to save the world, the lone scene where Butler plays action hero deliberately clouded by the moment’s moral relativism. Ah, and yet, “Greenland” is a mainstream movie, preventing it from being too bleak. That’s why the action-packed conclusion doubles as heartwarming, in its way, pledging allegiance to its main characters, meaning a movie considering whether some lives are worth more than others sort of unwittingly throws its hands up and admits “Yes?”

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Package (1989)

“The Package” was directed by Andrew Davis, who most famously helmed “The Fugitive”, and though the former can occasionally feel like a dry run for the latter, it also finds something of its own wavelength in a story painted on a much larger canvas. What made “The Fugitive” so successful was its narrow focus, painting Dr. Richard Kimball into a corner and then watching him improvise his way out, cross-cutting between Marshal Sam Gerard, given incredible life by Tommy Lee Jones, a quiet, morally complex face/off between two men who do not truly meet until the end. Briefly “The Package” seems to have a similar set-up, its title referencing not a Fed Ex delivery but an Army deserter, Thomas Boyette (Jones again), being escorted by Special Forces Master Sergeant John Gallagher (Gene Hackman) from Berlin to the United States. Alas, Boyette makes a brazen escape. This is not just a chase movie, though, but a conspiracy theory movie broadening out into a plot to kill the President. As big as its story get, however, “The Package’s” tone is more reminiscent of Davis’s later masterwork, more about the nuts and bolts of the pursuit than evoking a paranoid atmosphere a la so many 1970s thrillers. That is brought home in Gene Hackman’s everyman performance, just doing his job, sir, allowing “The Package” to maintain a more rosy glow of America.

Promotional photos are fun!

Released in August of 1989, less than three months before the Berlin Wall fell, “The Package” might seem a case of being rendered almost immediately inconsequential. In the end, though, it feels more like a reminder of the moment’s uncertainty despite knowing in retrospect how it would all work out, duplicitous American and Soviet forces conspiring to inject the Cold War with more fuel to keep it going. The former is represented by a cloak and dagger Colonel played by John Heard with icy contempt for a boy scout like John Gallagher. It’s not just shady factions of the American military involved, though, but nebulous right-wing groups, too, one character seen passing out anti-communist leaflets on the streets of Chicago, a reminder the ostensible red menace is a convenient scapegoat in any era. In one scene, Gallagher briefly infiltrates a meeting by this group only to be told in no uncertain terms to split. When someone asks who those people were, Gallagher replies “Ah, just some neo-Nazis”, a hysterical line reading by Hackman that is not fury but comical exasperation, like he’s taking all the piss out of their knucklehead plight, equating them with petulant dipshits. 

Boyette, it turns out, isn’t really Boyette at all but the assassin enlisted to off the Commander-in-Chief at a big event in the Windy City. That’s too bad in a way, given the chemistry between Hackman and Jones. If Jones these days has sort of been memed into an unamused Grumpy Gus, this performance is evocative of just how light on his feet he can be, Sam Gerard melded with his “Under Siege” villain. His brief monologue about America as an evil empire sounds less like some traditional unhinged madman than a disaffected burnout and Hackman plays off it perfectly with that patented, American treasure chuckle of his that seems to say: “Can you believe this guy?” For a brief moment I had visions of a dark buddy comedy, a Reagan-era “The Last Detail.” 

No, the buddy in this buddy comedy turns out to be Gallagher’s ex-wife, Eileen (Joanna Cassidy), a Lieutenant Colonel, who John seeks out for assistance upon realizing he’s been lied to. It’s telling characterization, that he can trust his ex-wife, more than it is a rekindling of romance, a nice plotting decision by Davis that saves us from a tacked-on romance subplot. Gallagher comes to her because he can trust her, which says a lot about their post-marriage relationship, and which Hackman and Cassidy deftly evince in their behavior; you can tell where they busted up, but also why they got together, demonizing no one, their united front in the face of government operatives gone rogue painting them as decent people. Even so, I wished Eileen would have factored more into the climax rather than “The Package” having her hand the partner baton off to Milan Delich (Dennnis Franz), a detective with whom John goes back, upon arriving in Chicago. No shade against Franz, whose quiet, lived-in demeanor here feels like an in-advance 180 from NYPD Blue, but it would have been nice to see Hackman and Cassidy’s camaraderie all the way through.

Though Davis becomes a bit over-reliant on the Christmas setting as an ironic counterpoint, with Peace on Earth signs splattered everywhere, for the assassination attempt climax, he nimbly lays out all the details so that we are never confused, building to a sudden gunshot rather than some prolonged talking killer face/off. In that way, it is akin to “The Fugitive”, which isn’t a spectacular finale, per se, just workmanlike. In each case, Andrew Davis gets the job done.

In Memoriam: Charles Grodin

“What you want most in a Muppet movie,” Wesley Morris once observed, “is for the non-Muppets to seem happy.” Was any non-Muppet happier in a Muppet movie than Charles Grodin in 1981’s “The Great Muppet Caper”? As jewel thief Nicky Holiday, he buried himself in the part utterly, not so much falling in love with Miss Piggy, as the role required, as lusting after her, looking at her like Clark Gable looked at Jean Harlow in “Red Dust.” That commitment to the bit defined Grodin, whether he was picking apart not just the whole talk show format but the entire entertainment business in his knowingly grouchy tête-à-têtes with Johnny Carson and David Letterman or, as a disgruntled patriarch, dealing with the antics of that comical canine “Beethoven” (1992). “The disdain this one man had for his dog,” Trevor Dobbin wrote on Twitter, “was the funniest thing on the planet for a 5 year old Trevor. And it still is.” Fourteen-year-old Nick, meanwhile, had only begun to consciously grasp the fact that sometimes what made a movie with a big ol’ funny dog enjoyable was not as much the big ol’ funny dog as it was the irascible actor reacting to the big ol’ funny dog.

As that part suggested, Grodin often had the droll deportment of a straight man. That’s why when “So I Married an Axe Murderer” (1993) required someone disagreeably impassive to be at the wheel of the car Anthony LaPaglia’s detective commandeers, it enlisted Grodin. But that sells Grodin short. He was the rare actor who seemed to play both parts of a comedy duo at once, fusing a straight man’s air with the comic character’s hilarity. “The Lonely Guy” (1984) was Steve Martin’s movie, of course, but in his scenes with Grodin as a just-as-lonely-guy, especially their park bench conversations, forerunners to Jerry and George at the coffee shop, you realize that despite Grodin’s deadpan, the funny moments are just as often his, with Martin playing the observer’s role. A more typical version of “Midnight Run” (1988) would have made Robert DeNiro’s bounty hunter the straight man, reacting to the amusing eccentricities of Grodin’s accused embezzler, a la Steve Martin and John Candy of “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.” But in his almost severe demeanor, strategically needling the bounty hunter the whole way, Grodin feels as much like a straight man as DeNiro; it’s like a movie with two Steve Martins. Even when Grodin cuts loose like in a scene where he gets to impersonate the FBI agent that DeNiro’s character has already been impersonating, Grodin isn’t really cutting loose but having immaculate fun by playing a stiff-necked G-man. (“You seen any suspicious looking characters around here?” he says to an unassuming guy at the bar, a straightforward line that Grodin renders impossibly hilarious, accentuated by that turn of the head, burying his character in the part as much as Grodin is burying himself in his part.) 

In the mid-90s, Grodin left acting, staying away for 12 years, opting to do a talk show instead. In an interview with Nathan Rabin for The AV Club in 2009, Grodin explained that with his son entering first grade at the time, he no longer wanted to travel. It’s a noble reason, certainly, but as Rabin notes, it does not sound like Grodin missed the business, and Grodin basically he admits he didn’t. “No, I don’t miss acting, he says. “I don’t even see movies.” Rabin, perhaps out of respect, never brings up the 2007 remake of Grodin’s stone cold comedy classic “The Heartbreak Kid” (1972). Where the former was cruel, callow and false, the latter was caustic, complex and true, a masterpiece if I can use that term, with Grodin playing a man who falls in love with another woman while on his honeymoon, trying to boldly remake his life even as he is essentially rearranging a couple deck chairs on a ship plunging into the sea. The best scenes in the movie are Grodin just riffing, if only because the character is riffing, trying to work up the courage to end his marriage and then explain himself, not once but twice, to his prospective Father-in-Law, Grodin building this elaborate house of cards through philosophical b.s., not mixing up but somehow mixing valor and bluster. It is a performance as deep and rich as any dramatic one; “so earnest that it must be a put-on,” wrote The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, “so transparent that he can’t fool anyone.”

Grodin, though, was one of those actors who didn’t even need lines, improvised or otherwise, because just a look, a single expression, could garner the kind of belly laughs typically reserved for some ornate setpiece of buffoonery. Gary Ross’s 1993 comedy “Dave”, in which Kevin Kline plays dual roles, as the lecherous President and the good-hearted stand-in lookalike for the Commander-in-Chief, might have the perspective of a Pollyanna, wanting to believe politics had not gone to the goblins. But that’s why you cast Grodin, to add a little skepticism. 

As Dave’s accountant pal, the magnificently named Murray Blum, summoned to the White House to improbably help balance the national budget, Grodin at first can’t believe he’s in the White House and then can’t believe his friend’s request. “You gotta help me cut the budget a little,” Dave explains. “You gotta cut the budget?” Grodin does not so much ask as repeat, as if it’s a punchline, a bad one, and he’s waiting for Dave’s laughter. “About six-hundred and fifty-million dollars,” says Dave. To which Grodin responds with a look so good that no words, least of all mine, could hope to describe it.

Charles Grodin died on Tuesday. He was 86.

It's Time to Retire Sweet Caroline

In the high school reunion romantic comedy “Beautiful Girls” (1996), when the old gang has reunited at The Johnson Inn in fictional Knight’s Ridge, Massachusetts, pianist Willie (Timothy Hutton) sits down at the keys to noodle a little bit. No one in this group, though, is in the mood for noodling. So Kev (Max Perlich) plunks down next to him on the piano bench and makes a request. Willie pounds out the notes to Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” as the whole gang and the rest of the place erupts into a joyous sing-along. When you see this scene, you can instinctively understand why, at least according to Thrillist, bartenders consider it one of the worst songs to play in bars. It’s the kind of song liable to result in raised glasses while belting out the lyrics and raised glasses while belting out the lyrics result in lots of spilled lager. You don’t see the spilled lager in “Beautiful Girls”, obviously; that’s the magic of the movies.

 

Given the celebratory nature of this scene, then, it makes sense that one year later when Amy Tobey, in charge of curating in-game music at Fenway Park, was looking for something new (old) to get the crowd going, she opted for “Sweet Caroline.” MLB.com claims this was because Tobey knew someone who just had a baby named Caroline; Boston.com indicates that Tobey had noticed other sporting events playing “Sweet Caroline” and followed the trend; Susan Orlean’s 2005 NPR report on the origins of this tradition reported that “She just liked the song. That’s it.” Who knows? A legend should have a little mystery. Tobey continued to play it, albeit sporadically, when the Red Sox needed a pick-me-up, or something, but in 2002, when new management took over Fenway Park, they requested “Sweet Caroline” be played in the bottom of every eighth inning, sort of an encore to The Seventh Inning Stretch. That’s why one of the montages in the Red Sox romantic comedy “Fever Pitch” (2005) honors this tradition.

Now it’s 2021 and “Sweet Caroline” is still going. If Tobey did, in fact, copy other sporting events, other sporting events have now copied her. The Carolina Panthers play it; the Pitt Panthers play it; the Iowa State Cyclones play it; even Oxford United plays it after matches. It’s become so synonymous that it has inevitably reached the point where some Red Sox fans wonder if it’s time to retire the song, pick something new. I would go one further. After twenty-plus years of singing along to it at Fenway Park and influencing fans, the song has run out of steam altogether; like “You Sexy Thing”, it’s time to retire “Sweet Caroline.”

You could see that “Sweet Caroline” had already gone one round too many in “The Midnight Sky.” That was George Clooney’s 2020 Netflix opus cutting back and forth between the last man on earth and the last space mission. For something like a spacewalk sing-along, Clooney calls up “Sweet Caroline”, a la Amy Tobey so many moons ago. The sequence, though, is a far cry from “Beautiful Girls”, oddly flat, like it’s forced festiveness, karaoke in an insurance office. I mean, really; listen to Demián Bichir and Kyle Chandler in this clip and try to tell me their hearts are in it. Clooney clearly does not mean for “Sweet Caroline” to be ironic but in this airless context it can’t help but feel it, unintentionally pointing out how Neil Diamond’s song is running on empty. 

We can pinpoint Sweet Caroline” hitting “E” to 2017 in the Barry Levinson HBO movie “The Wizard of Lies.” That was the movie about the Ponzi pissant, festering dickdrip (coinage: David Simon) Bernie Madoff (Robert DeNiro), who kicked the bucket a few weeks back. “The Wizard of Lies” did not move the needle much for me, though there was one significant sequence toward the beginning, when the amoral ferret (coinage: David Simon) throws an extravagant party for his family and workforce in the Hamptons. At dinner, Madoff insists his son he eats the lavishly priced lobster even though his son would prefer steak, like Henry Hill bringing home the most expensive Christmas tree from the lot just because, men who have never needed nor wanted to cultivate their own appetites, artistic or culinary. It’s evocative of another rich dufus, the 45th President of the United States, King Big Brain I, His Imbecility, whose taste, once memorably described by David Roth as something like “a tufted settee that somehow has shoulder pads, or a photo of himself with two Cincinnati Bengals cheerleaders taken at Joe Piscopo’s 40th birthday party”, is not really taste at all, more like, as Roth writes, “what he believes he deserves.” Everyone in Madoff’s orbit deserves lobster; taste is irrelevant; Madoff has no taste.

And that is what “Sweet Caroline” comes to represent in this sing-along scene: the choice of the tasteless. It is the song you choose for a sing-along when you have no favorite songs of your own, a human being as an iHeartRadio algorithm. The death of a song, or of a musical genre, when it passes from cool to uncool, from in to out, is not always observable, typically defined by myriad factors over a period of time. But in the image of Bernie Madoff, albeit a fictional one, cutting a rug to “Sweet Caroline”, it becomes clear the song has nothing left. 

Moxie

It’s a bold move deploying “Rebel Girl”, Bikini Kill’s Riot Grrrl lodestar, as your movie’s creed. After all, that 1993 refreshing blast of punk rock talked openly of feminist revolution while the band’s ideology, immortalized not just in music but in its Riot Grrrl Manifesto, came off “rooted rather than received or rote,” as the famed music critic Robert Christgau wrote, “so they scare people.” “Moxie”, on the other hand, Amy Poehler’s Netflix comedy, based on a novel by Jennifer Mathieu, comes across afraid of frightening the dainty algorithms of its streaming platform, forgoing the rattle-the-cages radicalism that defined Bikini Kill. There is a wonderful sequence in which the camera tracks with 16-year old Vivian (Hadley Robinson) and her B.F.F. Claudia (Lauren Tsai) as they make their skeptical way through a raging house party, past keg stands and beer pong, fending off dumb bros, only to find sanctity with their fellow new wave Riot Grrrls in an otherwise empty room. They have broached the walls! They can take it all down, the patriarchy and the callow teenage comedy too! But the dynamite they appear to have in their ends turns out to be just a few trick candles.  

“Moxie” is seen through the eyes of Vivian, a wallflower who becomes radicalized in the wake of an annual social media ranking kept alive by the school’s preeminent jock, Mitchell (Patrick Schwarzenegger), of girls in school, from Best Rack to Most Bangable. Inspired by the nonconformist new girl, Lucy (Alycia Pascual-Peña), and fueled by the discovery of her mom’s (Poehler) Riot Grrrl memorabilia, Vivian decides to secretly create a feminist zine called Moxie, sending up the antiquated phrase of the do-nothing Principal (Marcia Gay Harden) suggesting Connie Britton in “A Promising Young Woman” as Principal Vernon. These are some of the best scenes in the movie, creativity as empowerment, montages as something to akin mini-music videos, in which the school hallways are no longer places to keep her head down and hide but to live out this brewing sensation of empowerment, her own and everyone else’s.

If “Moxie” is mostly about Vivian, her story is reflected through Lucy and her Claudia. The former reflects the zealot in Vivian then the latter reflects the the desire to follow rules and not rock the boat, causing them to grow apart as the movie progresses and Vivian’s rebellion grows larger. If Claudia at first disappointingly suggests something like a mere Miss Manners, her story broadens into more, a first generation Chinese American under enormous pressure from her mom to live a steady life and succeed. Tsai embodies that pressure with impressive vulnerability, allowing Claudia to grow into herself without becoming merely two-dimensional, always retaining that sense of not wanting to let down family. Lucy, on the other hand, never develops into such a complete character, just there as a kind of weather vane for Vivian’s level of commitment. And rest assured, Vivian does become too much, leading into the movie’s emotional downturn, where Vivian’s disgust with and determination to bring down the patriarchy, damn the torpedoes, suggests a more mainstream version of the teenage girl in “Future Weather” (2012) who becomes overwhelmed by the fear of climate change and so determined to stop it that she becomes unhinged, another effective variation on the age-old cinematic wisdom that young people have to come to grips with the universe expanding and learn to live with it without going off the deep end.

There is something respectable about staking out such middle ground even as staking out such middle ground is ultimately causes “Moxie” to capsize. Toward the end, a sexual abuse subplot is trucked in, one demanding the utmost narrative care though here it insultingly exists as mere catalyst for the conclusion, never truly lingering on the hurt caused or the character who was hurt, and ultimately transforming the abuser, villainous though he may be, into nothing more than a sin-eater, as if his comeuppance is enough to set literally everything else right. Indeed, a movie that begins by figuratively throwing bombs, backs off, like one of those brands that issues a vague statement of support in the wake of something tragic but little else, content that it’s done enough. 

Miss Juneteenth

As “Miss Juneteenth” opens, Turquoise Jones (Nicole Beharie) is scrubbing the bathroom of the barbecue joint where she works. A co-worker enters and marvels: “I will never get over seeing Miss Juneteenth cleaning toilets for a living.” If the line seems an on the nose conveyance of backstory, that Turquoise once won a prestigious Miss Juneteenth pageant and now has been reduced to this, by the third or fourth time someone makes a variation of the same jokey observation, it feels less on the nose than right on. This, you realize, is how Turquoise is seen, in that small town way where you are less a sum of everything than merely razzed about your greatest failure or singular accomplishment, especially if it ended in failure too. Juneteenth, as a pageant coordinator in the movie reminds its contestants, is a celebration of when America’s slaves were truly, literally, finally emancipated, and director Channing Godfrey Peoples innately ties these two ideas together, that overdue emancipation and Turquoise seeking liberation from that Miss Juneteenth label and how it signifies the foundering of her existence.

What went wrong after winning the Miss Juneteenth crown is not immediately clear and, even then, not subject to some expository flashback, just scattered details. The emergent irony, then, is that even as Turquoise works two jobs to try and give her teenage daughter Kai (Alexis Chikaeze) the life she deserves, she insists Kai enter the Miss Juneteenth pageant too. This is not only forces Kai to defer her own dream of trying out for the dance team, it is as if Turquoise thinks her daughter can somehow avoid where she went wrong, or perhaps right where she went wrong. If it’s familiar, that’s the point, an eternal loop of irrationality, where even as Turquoise takes guff from her mother (Lori Hayes) for failing to be a good Christian woman, she turns right around and gives similar guff to her own daughter for not dating The Right Guy. 

That irony trickles down to Turquoise’s own love life. Though the owner, Bacon (Akron Watson), of the mortuary where she works makes his feelings known for her, she continues seeing Kai’s father, Ronnie (Kendrick Sampson), even though they are officially separated. Intelligently, Godfrey Peoples keeps the dichotomy smaller between the two men than you might expect. Though Bacon cares for Turquoise, he is also aloof, as if he’s keeping a wall up even as he tries reaching her, while Ronnie is not a bad man, just endearingly in over his head. Even his crucial moment of unreliability, failing to purchase Kai’s pageant dress, comes across more than mere forgetfulness when he admits to using the money for a down payment on a car repair business. It paints dreams as something tangible rather than ephemeral, which echoes the advice given to Turquoise by Wayman (Marcus Mauldin), her boss at the BBQ joint, even as “Miss Juneteenth” never denies Ronnie’s fatherly failure. 

By far, though, “Miss Juneteenth’s” most complex relationship is between mother and daughter. Despite being at loggerheads over the pageant, Godfrey Peoples allows for myriad little moments of happiness too, shared laughter and a birthday cake for Kai illuminating a house otherwise darkened by an unpaid electricity bill, a visual defining the precarious edge on which the whole movie seems to rest. This paints them as more than mere antagonists and underlines why Turquoise is so insistent and why Kai is so willing to go along despite misgivings. As Kai, Chikaeze gives a tremendous performance that is almost entirely non-verbal, so much dismissive side-eye and head-down, eyes-up aggravation. Though there is a low-key comic moment in which Turquoise picks up her daughter in a funeral hearse, borrowed from Bacon when her car breaks down, but you don’t need this moment to understand Kai’s perpetual teenage embarrassment, Chikaeze existing in that familiar youthful agony of always wanting to be invisible in her mother’s company. And Beharie alternates between being severity and vulnerability, staring down her daughter’s boyfriend like she stares down some unruly customers, but in a single flourish cracking that hardened exterior open, trying to hold a whole world together that feels patched out of spare parts. 

“Miss Juneteenth” culminates with the pageant where Kai honors her mother’s wish to recite Maya Angelou’s Phenomenal Woman by making her own, recasting it as a rap and a hip-hop dance. As she performs, Godfrey Peoples keeps the moment intimate, cutting between Kai onstage and shots of Turquoise watching, like mom is realizing this performance is meant for her more than the judges, a daughter telling her mom she is a woman. Phenomenally. And that is why when the pageant winner is announced, Godfrey Peoples recounts the moment not in a close-up of Kai but a close-up of Turquoise, like it breaks the spell, like she is letting go and shedding all that baggage at once. The former Miss Juneteenth has finally been set free.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Terminator (1984)

“The Terminator” (1984) famously concludes in the mode of a slasher movie as the cyborg assassin (Arnold Schwarzenegger) sent from the future to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), mother of John Connor, future human resistance leader in a war against machines, will not die, coming back to robotic life again and again, eventually reduced to merely its metal endoskeleton, that mortifying red eye glowing in the dark. It might as well be a metaphor for “The Terminator” itself, in which writer/director James Cameron, both from his own storytelling ingenuity and out of financial necessity, reduces the film’s narrative to just the bare bones essential. True, in crafting that narrative Cameron pilfered from all manner of places: Greek myths, the Nativity, and from an episode of the 1960s television show “Outer Limits” so liberally a closing credit acknowledged it. For so many sources, though, “The Terminator” never feels convoluted, just elegant in its own brawny way, grafting any essential exposition into the few moments of necessary falling action, or even occasionally into the action itself, like a car chase, living out the inexorableness of the cyborg assassin itself, ultimately existing as the sort of cinematic experience the screenwriter Paul Schrader recently lamented as having neared extinction in an age of streaming, IP and endless prestige TV: “concise stories which land like a punch to the face.”

The basic storyline and all its attendant backstory, fleshed out over so many sequels, is so ingrained in the culture at this point that it’s sort of stunning to revisit “The Terminator” almost 40 years later and realize just how little we know upfront, how Cameron deftly unspools each informational kernel, keeping us on the proverbial edge of our seats. Two title cards break down the future (2029) and the present (1984), the rise of the machines and John Connor’s opposition, so that we have some sense when The Terminator and Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) appear in weird flashes of light that they are likely not from this world. Even then, though, Cameron withholds. While he hints at their differences in the ease with which The Terminator acquires clothes and weaponry and the struggle of Reese to do the same, we do not learn who Reese is until he finally confronts The Terminator just as we do not discover The Terminator’s true cyborg nature until, in the middle of that confrontation, the movie switches to the character’s digital readout point-of-view. The identity of Sarah Connor is revealed by connecting scenes of pages ripped from the telephone book by both men listing all the Sarah Connors in Los Angeles to a scene of Sarah seeing a news report of another dead Sarah Connor on the TV, evoking how Cameron consistently dramatizes information rather than spoon-feeding, ensuring the pace never slackens.  

That pace comes to life in the performance of Schwarzenegger, finding the perfect story and director to utilize his specific muscular presence, where simply placing him in a car, narrow his eyes and scowl, mechanically look right and look left paint an unforgettable picture of a remorseless, relentless killer. As Reese, who is resourceful rather than inevitable, Biehn’s desperate humanity works as the key counterpart to the purposely emotionless Schwarzenegger. Hamilton, meanwhile, is a far cry from the chiseled action hero she would become in later movies, evincing an arc from blissfully unaware to almost preternaturally stoic in facing up to her destiny. And even Paul Winfield scores in a bit part as the kindly if overmatched detective offering aid and shelter to Sarah; the way Winfield moves with a cup of coffee in his hand, eyes looking up over reading glasses, through a cacophonous precinct epitomizes someone who has found a way to live on Pacific time amid a world gone mad.

All these years later, The Terminator’s assault against the entire police precinct, triggered by the famed “I’ll be back” declaration, still imbues a distinct guttural sense of helplessness, though the defining action sequence remains the shootout in the dance club where Sarah briefly takes shelter. It’s not just that Cameron deftly converges all the storylines at once before spinning off into another direction, but that the dance club itself became the literal emblem for the entire genre “The Terminator” helped to create. Cameron called the club Tech Noir to evoke a hybrid of American noir and a sort of dystopian sci fi, a fatalistic sense that technology has both taken over and ruined us. Indeed, the few flash-forwards to apocalyptic 2029 do not look especially different from 1984, save for the lasers and flying machines. The present day atmosphere is akin to the Los Angeles of John Carpenter’s “They Live” (1988), a burned out wasteland suggesting we have turned our backs on humanity, lending credence to the idea of opting for faith in machines instead, transforming the emergent romance of Sarah and Reese into something like the divine without having to expressly say it, and all wrapped up in Brad Fiedel’s score, that sinister metallic rumble juxtaposed against the majestic like-a-phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes melody. 

The success of “The Terminator” demanded a sequel, of course, and so it came to pass in 1991 with “Terminator 2: Judgement Day.” Flashing ahead a few years, with a scarred Sarah and her son now a teenager, the impending apocalypse was not only acknowledged but averted, rewriting the future. It did that well, certainly, though the darkly grand climax of the original endures. It is at once deterministic and hopeful, contradictory ideas rattling around in Sarah’s tape recording for her future son, winning the day to lose the battle to win the war, or something, brought home in that Biblical matte painting storm into which she drives as the credits roll, destiny decreeing the rainbow is only on the other side of hell.

Introducing: the Hollywood Party Planning Committee

This week NBC announced it would not be airing the 2022 Golden Globe Awards. This was a major blow to the Globes’ governing body, the infamous Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), since, as the Los Angeles Times exposed in a February piece ahead of this year’s ceremony, the HFPA makes its living wining and dining movie stars almost exclusively from that television money. Without that money and broadcast TV platform, what is the HFPA? A cabal of journalists, give or take, no one knows with, as the L.A. Times also reported, next to no diversity and, per Scarlett Johansson, pervasive sexism. Tom Cruise, meanwhile, announced he would be returning his three Golden Globes in protest. And while that, like NBC choosing to pull the plug not after the L.A. Times story but after the broadcast, might be mere virtue signaling, well, I enjoy envisioning Tom’s Golden Globes sitting outside the Beverly Hilton - because who knows where the HFPA is headquartered - waiting to be brushed away by a street cleaner. Whether this is truly the end of the HFPA or if, after some cosmetic reform, the industry and/or NBC sign back up for more is TBD. 

Cinema Romantico, of course, must stipulate that it has always been a staunch supporter of The Golden Globes. Not, to be exceptionally clear, the HFPA or even the awards they hand out. No, I have long enjoyed the Globes simply as the boozy soiree they are, a glorified cocktail party of movie stars that happens to be on TV, the (un)official, as I have said ad nauseam, Hollywood Office Christmas Party. And that’s why this week’s overdue events brought me a moment of clarity. Why does Hollywood need the HFPA to hold its (un)official Office Christmas Party? It’s Hollywood! It’s an official organization, right there on 1 Hollywood Rd Hollywood, CA! They can do this themselves! It’s time to seize the means of party-planning production! As such, I have drawn up the first ever Hollywood Party Planning committee. We (they) have eight months.  

Introducing: the Hollywood Party Planning Committee

Committee Chair: Tom Hanks & Rita Wilson 

Event Coordinators: Anna Kendrick, Stanley Tucci 

Creative Committee: Maya Rudolph, Gabrielle Union, Awkwafina, Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Public Relations Coordinator: Sandra Bullock

Treasurer: Lisa Kudrow

Adventures in Movie Posters, part 235

True story. When I was compiling my list for Monday’s post about what movie would mark my triumphant return to the theater, I initially included “Stillwater.” After all, it made my Middling Thriller Movie Preview of 2020, posted on March 5,2020, when things seemed so innocent, six days before the world ‘ended.’ I have been desperate to see “Stillwater.” I mean, read this synopsis and levitate: “An American oil-rig roughneck travels to Marseille, France, to visit his estranged daughter, in prison for a murder she claims she didn't commit.” But when I went searching for a promotional still of “Stillwater”, there were none to be found. Most articles mentioning “Stillwater” utilized a still of Matt Damon from “Ford v Ferrari” resplendent in a cowboy hat which seemed to befit an oil-rig roughneck showing up in Marseilles. You can see it, right? It would be a little like Josh Brolin from “Everest”. But without a proper accompanying image, I left “Stillwater” off the possible contenders list. And then, as if by fate, a day later, there it was. Glory hallelujah.

My God. Sculpt this poster in marble outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. You know in “Bowfinger” when Robert Downey Jr.’s bigwig movie producer reads the first and last page of “Chubby Rain” and then says, as if a marketing angel tapped his forehead, “I just saw the poster”? If he read “An American oil-rig roughneck travels to Marseille, France, to visit his estranged daughter, in prison for a murder she claims she didn't commit” he would instantly envision this poster. Let us hope - let us hope - Damon gets to say “Gotcha suckas” when he finally springs his daughter from the clink.

It’s Damon, of course, cutting the image of a certain kind of college football fan, the kind that’s positive there was some sort of conspiracy to keep 2014 TCU out of the playoff and is looking at you like you just told him there wasn’t. But it’s also the tagline, Secrets Run Deep, a hoary chestnut so faux-majestic you can imagine, to paraphrase Roger Ebert, the marketer sitting “back from his word processor with a contented smile on his face, another day's work done”, rhyming with that image of body floating in the water; it’s a metaphor! (There is a trailer too but I haven’t watched it. I don’t want to watch it! I want to let this poster speak for itself for awhile.) True, “Stillwater” was co-written and directed by Tom McCarthy, an Oscar-winner who is no hack. But that merely piques my curiosity even more. Is the poster simply the work of an ostensible ad wizard and misrepresentative of the film itself? Or is “Stillwater” McCarthy’s “Runaway Jury”? And are these trick questions? Isn’t the answer to each one a resounding OK!

One more question. Would “Stillwater” have usurped Those Who Wish Me Dead for my Triumphant Return to the Theater? Doubtful. There is the July 30th release, of course, but also The Jolie Factor which is just too strong with this blog. But now another question emerges. What do I see first on July 30th? “Stillwater” or “Jungle Cruise”? Decisions, decisions. What is it the cool kidz on social media keep memeing about these days? Nature, it’s healing.

What Else Could Tom Cruise Hang From?

A couple weeks back the Interwebs were sent into a tizzy by the image of Tom Cruise hanging from the side of a speeding train in next year’s “Mission: Impossible” movie. This, of course, has become the “M:I” calling card of Cruise – actor, producer, stuntman. In “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” he hung from the side of the world’s tallest building; in “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” he hung from the side of an airplane as it literally took off; in “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” he hung from a payload hanging from a helicopter. And though you might suggest that Cruise hanging from a train in “Mission: Impossible 7” brings it all full circle since he hung from train in the first “Mission: Impossible” lo so many years ago in the summer I graduated from high school (therefore not to be named), this is Tom Cruise we’re talking about. You think he’s just going to call it a hanging-off-stuff day after hanging off a train once more for old time’s sake? Please. If I know anything about Tom Cruise, besides being the recipient of a Freedom Medal of Valor, it’s that he is always – always – just getting started. So. What could he hang from in “Mission: Impossible 8”? Thanks for asking! 

A few possibilities:

Hubble Space Telescope

This goes without saying.

Space Shuttle

Too difficult to film on the Hubble Space Telescope? Just film Cruise clinging to a shuttle as it lifts off from Cape Canaveral. Can’t imagine NASA doesn’t want to be in the Tom Cruise business.

Artificial Cloud

The 2022 World Cup humanitarian disaster is being held in Qatar where, as everyone knows, it can reach upwards of 250 degrees. That’s why artificial clouds are being constructed to help cool the fields. So what if Ethan Hunt’s mission, should he choose to accept it, has something to do with an artificial cloud heist during the World Cup Final in which the artificial cloud becomes an artificial thunderhead, leaving Ethan Hunt dangling from the artificial cloud amid artificial lightning strikes?

Petronas Towers

Cruise could hang from Tower 2 after performing a standing broad jump from Tower 1.

Kingda Ka

What if Cruise hung from the tallest rollercoaster in the world...for the entirety of its 28-second ride?

Submarine

I have long dreamed of an Angelina Jolie movie where she breaks into a submarine while it’s submerged. But maybe like Angie took the baton from Tom for “Salt”, Tom could take the theoretical baton from Angie, hang onto the submarine as it dives and then perform an impossible underwater break-in. Who says no?