Pitch Meeting: Gale Force

I should clarify right up front: this is not my movie pitch. In a minor breach of protocol, I am pilfering someone else’s pitch. But, what choice do I have? See, in doing a little post-“Cliffhanger” research, I discovered that “Cliffhanger” only came to be when a previous would-be Sylvester Stallone vehicle, after multiple attempts, foundered. That abandoned project was “Gale Force”, a screenplay originally written by David Chappe and that Carolco Pictures producer Daniel Melnick bought for $500,000 in 1989, according to Anne Thompson’s reporting for Entertainment Weekly in October 1991. “Gale Force,” Thompson writes, “(was) a tale about a lone man defending a seacoast town from a band of marauders during a hurricane.” I mean, yes, absolutely, sign me up. Carson Reeves, writing for ScriptShadow in 2010, said “of all the Die Hard rip-offs I’ve read and seen throughout the years, this is clearly the best.” Yet that screenplay ultimately did not work for Melnick, who, as Thompson went on to report for EW, at some point sought a fresh take in the form of none other than Joe Eszterhas, who “scrapped the Chappe story,” per Thompson, for “an arty love triangle.” But that apparently didn’t work either, leading to more cracks at a reworked screenplay, all of which led Harlin to eventually opt for “Cliffhanger” instead

The first iteration of “Gale Force” makes sense; it would have been Sly’s answer to “Die Hard” a few years after “Die Hard.” Maybe then there never would have been a “Daylight.” And while Sly in an arty love triangle, never mind one set during a hurricane, doesn’t really seem to make sense, after the 3,327th social media kerfuffle of 2021, one involving Sharon Stone and Meryl Streep, I also kind of like imagining Stone and Streep as the two women involved in this stormy love triangle. Can we retroactively make this a go picture, just by dumping Sly and having, say, Andy Garcia take his place? Can we have two retroactive “Gale Forces”, like “Use Your Illusion I” and “Use Your Illusion II?” 

Alas, this is not 1990; this is now. And I’m looking to get “Gale Force” up and off the ground again for, say, summer of 2023. Problem is, we really don’t have someone who can do Sylvester Stallone stuff anymore. Liam Neeson, I suppose. We could put him in the arty love triangle “Gale Force II” with Julianne Moore and Nastassja Kinski. Or we could just put him in “Gale Force I” and have him reprise the whole “Taken” thing. But I don’t know. None of this feels like A Cinema Romantico Fake Movie.

The issue, I think, is that the actual Chappe script, as Reeves notes, does not contain pirates, not in the Warner Bros. swashbuckler vein, “just boring old modern day pirates.” That simply won’t do, not for this phony movie studio. When I think “Gale Force”, I think of that Capital One commercial, the one from over 20 years ago when the marauding pirates magically plunked down in the 21st Century are briefly thwarted by interest free plastic. So, with all due respect to my usual cast, for “Gale Force”, I’m seeing Mark Duplass as the owner of a ramshackle diner on a North Carolina cape who refuses to close in the face of an oncoming hurricane and then is forced to fend off Walton Goggins’s pirate cosplaying as Basil Rathbone in “Captain Blood.” Maybe Abbi Jacobson could be a tourist as a Tyler Endicott-like surfer in town to catch some Category 5 waves.

Some Drivel On...Cliffhanger

Renny Harlin’s action-adventure “Cliffhanger” was produced by Carolco Pictures, the infamous production company that churned out some of the 90s biggest hits before financially crashing and burning. By the time “Cliffhanger” was released in the summer of 1993, Carolco was already in the midst of the dreaded corporate restructuring and unsuccessful attempts to get other Sylvester Stallone projects off the ground meant that by the time they got to the actor’s mountaineering opus, they needed a little help, finding it in the form of TriStar, which agreed to finance half the movie’s hefty budget in exchange for distribution rights in North America and various other places. This joint venture inadvertently encapsulated “Cliffhanger” itself, the ultimate pitch meeting movie, where simply making a mountain rescue movie of dangerous stunts and spectacular scenery wasn’t going to do. Instead, “Cliffhanger” melds a skyjacking gone wrong with a mountain rescue. I mean, when you can make a movie in the Dolomites and have people literally dangling off the edge of cliffs and say the most dangerous stunt doesn’t take place in the mountains but in the air (a stunt moving between two jets at an altitude of 15,000 feet, performed by Simon Crane, just once and without safety equipment, which maybe feels like a metaphor for Carolco Pictures too), you’re not just thinking outside the box, you’re thinking in freefall, or something. 

The heist is pulled by Eric Qualen (John Lithgow), a former British Military Intelligence officer turned rapscallion, in league with a turncoat U.S. Treasury Agent, Travers (Rex Linn). But when the plane goes down high in the Rockies, they and their villainous cohorts force mountain rescue men Gabe Walker (Sylvester Stallone) and Hal Tucker (Michael Rooker) to lead them to three scattered cases totaling $100 million in cash. Given the prologue, in which Gabe fails to rescue Hal’s girlfriend from the top of a precarious peak, watching her plunge to her death, this ordeal is intended as his catharsis, though “Cliffhanger” does not build to that cleansing moment properly and just plunks it down mid-movie rather than at the climax. At least, however, Harlin’s movie has what these sorts of movies need most, dollops of fun-loving absurdity, what I like to call the Nitroglycerin Factor. That’s culled from another mountaineering action movie, “The Vertical Limit” (2000), in which a group of rescue climbers are forced to carry nitroglycerin canisters in their packs up K2 in order to blow open a crevasse buried under an avalanche. When in doubt, goes screenwriting code, add nitroglycerin. And so, if you will excuse me, rather than continuing a proper review, let’s simply rank “Cliffhanger’s” absurd dollops on a scale of Nitroglycerin Canisters (10 being the highest, 1 being the lowest).

John Lithgow’s English Accent: I really don’t care if Lithgow’s accent is “good” or not. “Good” in this context means actorly mirth, not mastery of the speaking style. And Lithgow is clearly having a ball. 7 Nitroglycerin Canisters 

Film Score: It was composed by Trevor Jones, co-composer of a little movie called “The Last of the Mohicans”, and there are moments when this score almost turns into the “The Last of the Mohicans” score. How dare you. 1 Nitroglycerin Canister

Taking Gabe’s Coat In Freezing Weather: Granted, this makes narrative sense, Qualen holding the coat as a form of insurance, given the snowstorm, when he sees poor Gabe off to scale a rockface to find one of the money cases. But, it’s also a nifty a way to ensure Stallone can, despite the frigidity, show off those pecs. 8 Nitroglycerin Canisters

Evan and Brett: Played, respectively, by Max Perlich Trey Brownell, these two dudes seeking to get radical, like two characters who accidentally wandered onto the “Cliffhanger” set from the set of “Ski Patrol”, should have been more shrewdly, which is to say amusingly, interwoven with the main plot. Screenplays can be important, even for mindless tentpoles. 1 Nitroglycerin Canister

Talking Killer Scenes: Qualen has two primary henchmen (Leon and Craig Fairbrass), each of whom get a Talking Killer Scene, blathering too much and leaving Gabe and Hal, respectively, time to turn the tables. Leon’s Talking Killer Scene turns oddly sadistic, even misogynistic, which simply isn’t fun. In playing an ex-footballer, on the other hand, Fairbrass’s Talking Killer Scene is properly hysterical, talking Hal through the finer points of how to take a penalty kick in advance of kicking him over the side of a cliff...only to unwittingly engender his own demise, of course. It splits the difference. 5 Nitroglycerin Canisters 

Goodbye in the Rain: When Gabe’s love interest, Jessie (Janine Turner), implores him to help Hal rescue these supposed stranded climbers, Gabe begs off, which she properly diagnoses as lingering fear after letting Hal’s girlfriend die. “If you don’t do this,” Jessie says, “you’re gonna be stuck on that ledge the rest of your life.” Alas, Gabe gets in his truck and drive away. Awwww yeah, that’s the good stuff. 9 Nitroglycerin Canisters

Sylvester Stallone’s One Liners: “I never could save anything,” he says after burning some of the stolen money. “Keep your arms and the legs in the vehicle at all times!” he yells before kicking Qualen off the helicopter at the end, which doesn’t even make sense. What is this, amateur hour? Negative 3 Nitroglycerin Canisters

Rex Linn Going Bananas: Near the end, when the tide has turned, Travers sort of loses it, even saying he’s lost it, driven around the bend by Gabe slipping through their itchy trigger fingers again and again, kind of a variation on the Sonny Landham character at the end of “Predator” in so much as Travers endeavors to confront Gabe once and for all, “the matador shall dance with the blind shoemaker”, to quote the immortal Jean Girard, and all that. If the payoff does not meet the moment, Linn’s loony vibe and the movie’s sly wink at action movie characters who walk between the raindrops still puts it over the top. 7 Nitroglycerin Canisters

Ending Action Scene: Battling atop an upturned helicopter dangling precariously above a gorge, this sequence isn’t bad. It’s just, watching for the first 28 years later, it can’t help but suffer in comparison to the climactic helicopter showdown in “Mission: Impossible - Fallout.” Graded on a curve, we give it 4 Nitroglycerin Canisters.

John Lithgow’s Facial Expression During the Ending Action Scene: Though there is a moment just before he drops to his death, inside the chopper as it crashes and then explodes, when Qualen says he’s not afraid to die, Lithgow’s expression in the moment just before he meets his maker suggests otherwise. He even kind of looks around, like he’s still trying to finagle a way out of his impending doom. It’s like the inverse of Liam Neeson in “Batman Begins” gallantly closing his eyes before taking the fatal plunge into the abyss. Those kinds of actorly flourishes, that’s what I’m looking for. It’s the moment that made me imagine Conan O’Brien “Cliffhanger” Lever. If only. 10 Nitroglycerin Canisters

In the Heights

There comes a moment during “In the Heights” when Nina (Leslie Grace) and Benny (Corey Hawkins) are standing on a fire escape framed by the sunset which is framed by the George Washington Bridge that gives the movie’s real-life Manhattan neighborhood its name. Benny’s body almost seems to float for an instant, like the fire escape is a space capsule, as he plants his feet on the wall of the apartment building, leading Nina in a dance that defies gravity. If it suggests Fred Astaire’s famous dance on the ceiling in “A Royal Wedding”, it also epitomizes the tone of Jon M. Chu’s movie, based on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical. Though fanciful and even breezy, despite the neighborhood enduring a heatwave, “In the Heights” is grounded in a real place with real problems, a strength giving way to a weakness. 

“In the Heights” is in the Heights, for the most part, assembling a rapid fire collage of the neighborhood as the movie begins to let us know the place itself will be paramount. That collage, though, is also emblematic of how Chu puts together the prominent musical numbers and accompanying dances in tandem with his editor Myron Kerstein, like most modern movies do, with considerable expedient cuts, generally eschewing full-bodied, lengthy shots of people in the groove. True, cinema is a different form than the stage, but cinema is just as much about bodies in motion as stage. At the same time, such editing is representative of what only the movies can do. The cuts themselves frequently embody the rhythm of the music to heighten their effect while at other moments, like insert shots of prepared food (fried chicken and rice, flan) leading to an insert shot of a record spinning suggest the essential ingredients of this world without having to say a word. 

“In the Heights” is seen through the eyes of bodega owner Usnavi (Anthony Ramos), illustrated in a magnificent shot where the dancers on the street are reflected in the window of his grocery where he gazes out upon them, as if we are seeing the story come to life before his eyes. Indeed, his bodega becomes ground zero for the opening number, sharing the same name as the movie, in which almost all the main characters are brought onstage at once, passing through to purchase café con leche and lottery tickets, including Kevin Rosario (Jimmy Smits), whose sing-songy greeting – “Good morning, Usnavi” – is the sunny emblem of the whole movie. And this song, despite introducing each character’s musical theme, goes to show how the music of “In the Heights” work best as a kind of community mosaic, how everyone plays off of everyone else and how they lift each other up even as Usnavi dreams of leaving the community for his Dominican homeland and his love interest, Vanessa (Melissa Barrera), dreams of leaving for downtown to find a job in fashion. 

In emphasizing the community, however, the individual stories suffer. The relationship of Usnavi and Vanessa generates next to no tension and the relationship between Nina and Benny, despite their airless dancing on that wall, generates next to no heat. The one relationship that does work is familial, between Nina and Kevin, the latter doing whatever it financially takes to put his daughter through Stanford even as Nina pushes back, seeing Stanford as a betrayal of her roots, putting into perspective how the movie’s real friction is more existential, between individual pursuits and responsibility to where you’re from. The emergent irony, though, is that where they’re from is being compromised too, evoked in the hair salon owned by Daniela (Daphne Rubin-Vega) being forced out of The Heights by rising rent. That gentrification wins and she is forced to leave mid-movie hints at the darker edges, though her leading the neighborhood in a defiant sing-along before she does epitomizes “In the Heights” sticking to the sunny side of the street.

These dueling ideas, of getting out or staying put, are brought home in Abuela Claudia (Olga Merediz), matriarch of Washington Heights, who raised Usnavi after his parents died. If Usnavi intends to take her with him to the Dominican Republic, she balks in the movie’s best song, “Paciencia y fe”, patience and faith, nothing less than Abuela’s life flashing before her eyes. And though it concludes by remarkably transforming a subway tunnel into a cosmic portal, it can’t compare to an accompanying reverse shot of Abuela looking out from her bedroom, at Usnavi and the others under her wing, illuminated by fireworks out the window, reminding how the simplest of shots can resonate just as much as elaborate ones. This, that shot says, is home.

As her surrogate son, Usnavi is positioned as her spiritual heir, evoked in the embroidered napkins that she gives him as a totem of the immigrant experience. “The little details,” she says of the napkins made by her own mother, “that tell the world we are not invisible.” It’s a great line, if not also revealing given how “In the Heights” has been roundly condemned for colorism. This is not misplaced criticism. Though the movie’s air is fantastical, its locations are real, which is to say it seeks to represent the real Washington Heights. And by failing to cast any dark-skinned Afro-Latinos that make up a predominant part of the real population of The Heights. the movie itself is rendering them invisible, running counter to Abuela’s own words. It does not rule “In the Heights” out of order as a movie but takes some wind out its sails nonetheless, especially given the effective misdirection of the framing device in which Usnavi is posted up on a Dominican beach telling the story of The Heights to his kids. If it seems like he is memorializing his neighborhood by looking back, the reveal instead transforms this device into looking forward (“Pa’lante”, as Daniela says), making it all the more disappointing that “In the Heights” has already taken one step back.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Indiscreet (1958)

In 1946 Ingrid Bergman starred opposite Cary Grant for the first time in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Notorious.” Though an indelible pairing, they did not duplicate until it a dozen years later for director Stanley Donen in “Indiscreet.” Why such a long wait? Well, Bergman was exiled from America, of course, after her affair with the also-married director Roberto Rossellini, which sent the American tabloids into a UK-style frenzy, prompted a U.S. Senator to arrogantly denounce her as a “vile free-love cultist” and turned the American public, livid that her ostensible saintly image proved otherwise, against her. She was essentially forced out of Hollywood. After separating from Rossellini, she returned to Hollywood in 1956 for “Anastasia” and then again for “Indiscreet.” The title makes it sound like a reaction to the absurd scandal Bergman was forced to endure and, well, it sort of is. But rather than rendering it as a screed or even a satire, Donen creates a full-fledged romance with comedy mixed in. It’s telling, after all, that Bergman plays an actress in the film, which does not seem so crucial until the conclusion comes to pass, which despite its screwball elements is notable for just how much true emotional power it contains, Bergman blending humor and melancholy so deftly that by the conclusion, I was kind of in awe.

Bergman’s Anna Kalman has, as such characters will, given up on love, signified in how as the movie opens she’s staying in for the evening with cold cream on her face and drinking a cold glass of milk at her breakfast nook. Even when her sister, Margaret (Phyllis Calvert), tries convincing her to go out for the evening, she declines. At least she declines, that is, until her brother-in-law’s, Alfred (Cecil Parker), work friend, Philip Adams (Grant), appears at the door. If up until this point Donen has emphasized the set design, gloriously mismatched color photograph frames and eye popping pillows on the plush couch, suddenly, in a single shot, our attention is drawn away from all that extravagant ornamentation to Philip - nay, Grant - emphasized in how Donen frames him in a long shot, as if his mere presence puts everything else in the room aside. Indeed, Anna just stands there, virtually gawking, momentarily forgetting she has cold cream on her face, a moment remixed several scenes later when they have breakfast together in the same nook, where he gawks at her. Both these moments may as well as speak for us, the audience, since much of “Indiscreet” is just about that - gawking, at Bergman, at Grant, at Bergman and Grant, movie stars. [Faints on fainting couch.]

Famously, to get around censors who did not want Grant and Bergman to share a bed onscreen, Donen employed split screens, with the characters talking by phone from their respective sleeping places instead. Even better, though, is a sequence preceding these split screens. After a night out, Philip and Anna return to her apartment building, taking the elevator up, turning toward one another and just standing there, looking at one another, making love with their eyes, you might say. When the lift stops, he escorts her to the door where she asks if he wants to come in for a drink. “Yes, I would,” Grant says in a voice so libidinously emphatic it’ll knock your socks off. Then, they enter her apartment and close the door behind them, the camera pulling them back, providing them privacy that somehow makes it feel even more carnal, like you’re imagining what’s going on behind that door. It’s a reminder that while censors were undeniably drag, directors evading their demands could make for more creative, even higher, art.

It’s all so perfect, it can only go wrong, and so it does. If Anna deems Philip transparent, there is deep irony in this observation, given that his wife, the one from whom he claims to be permanently separated but unable to divorce, is a confection to ensure he can have a relationship without the eternal responsibility. If it feels manifestly like a reaction to Bergman’s real word problems with American prudes, a helpful reminder that ostensibly dignified men can be pigs, the screenplay by Norman Krasna, based on his play, also elegantly carves it out as a commentary on performance. If Philip has been giving one, now so will Anna, the professional. First, she understandably blows up. “How dare he make love to me,” she intones, “and not be a married man,” storming into her bedroom. But she when she reemerges, she is cool, collected, and in character; she is ready to give her own performance. And so she does, the screwball antics of the denouement belying the way her turn brings out the truth. 

Palate Cleanser

There’s the moment from “Sideways” I think of often, the one when Miles (Paul Giamatti) is going through his whole Proper Way to Taste Wine spiel and his pal, Jack (Thomas Haden Church), is patiently listening to it before, finally, at some point after the digression on oxygenation, asks “When do we drink it?” It’s partly Haden Church’s delivery, not quite droll, because he knows that Jack knows that this is just the way Miles is, but almost genuinely curious, like he really wants to know, is this it? Is this when we get to drink it? I often think of it when I’m watching Top Chef with My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife. Because I know as little about food as Jack knows about wine and I like to do this extremely unfunny bit where I imagine myself at Judge’s Table saying things like that, “When do we eat it?” Now that’s not to suggest I don’t appreciate food. I appreciate it very much and I know what I like; I just can’t get into the finer points with you, the nuances, the techniques. And that’s why I loved - loved - last week’s episode when guest judge Ed Lee went to bat for Dawn Burrell at Judge’s Table. He was listening to Padma and Tom and Gail and the rest go on and on and he said something to the effect of, look, we can talk technique all day, but fact is, her food? Her food is fucking good. It was more eloquent than that, of course, but you take my point. 

When you watch so many movies and write about so many movies and think about movies all the time, it’s easy to wind up in the weeds. Not that being in the weeds is inherently bad. Getting into the finer points of movies, the nuances, the techniques, has only made me appreciate them and their specific brand of magic so much more. But sometimes I don’t want to dissect movies, or discuss movies, I just want to talk about movies, like Jason Benetti and Steve Stone, the all-aces Chicago White Sox broadcast duo, talked about movies in the middle of a game the other night. 

[The conversation has been slightly edited and condensed.]

Jason: “I felt old today, Steve.”

Steve: “Why should today be any different?”

This is announcer humor and we will let it slide. 

Jason: “But I said to Andrew Vaughn, we had mentioned once before that he looks a little like Emilio Estevez. And he said ‘Who?’ And I said the coach of ‘The Mighty Ducks.’ And he said ‘What?’ I said, you haven’t heard of it. He said, ‘I’ve heard of ‘The Mighty Ducks,’ I haven’t seen it.”

Here Jason, ever the professional, pauses to call a strike.

Jason: “You can see it, right? A little bit of Emilio Estevez in Andrew Vaughn?”

Steve: “Absolutely.” 

Andrew Vaughn does not look like anything like Emilio Estevez. But never mind.

Jason: “He was like trying to commit the name to memory. And I thought, my goodness, where have I gone?”

At which point, Steve Stone references Emilio Estevez having been in a cowboy movie, which renders Jason incredulous.

Jason: “What cowboy movie was that?”

Steve: “Well, it wasn't ‘Blazing Saddles’, I can tell you that.”

Now a few seconds of silence passes which I like to imagine were Jason and Steve wracking their brains to come up with the movie but which we all know was really the moment when the unseen researcher in the booth handed them the name of the movie on a notecard. 

“‘Young Guns!’” they both blurt out. “Young Guns” indeed. 

Deadspin Defector has the practice of Remembering Guys, when you simply name a sport and then remember some guys. This was nothing more than Remembering a Movie. I wanna remember some movies too.

Regarding Henry.

Brokedown Palace.

Lucky Number Slevin. 

Young Einstein.

Captain Ron.

First Daughter. 

Mixed Nuts.

Feeling Minnesota.

We Bought a Zoo.

Those were movies. 

[Ed. Note: the previous version of this post employed the incorrect form of ‘Palate’, which should merely re-underline the state of mind I was in when blogging. We regret the error.] 

Some Drivel On...the Twister Soundtrack

The “Twister” soundtrack was released on May 7, 1996, a Tuesday as was customary in those days, three days ahead of the movie itself. The movie finished second at the box office that year, though the soundtrack was a little less sucessful, peaking at #28 on the June 1, 1996 Billboard chart, right behind 2Pac’s “All Eyez On Me” and two spots ahead of No Doubt’s “Tragic Kingdom”, which really does feel of its time, or my time, at least, since I probably listened to those two albums more than any others in 1996. (Alan Jackson’s Greatest Hits was wedged in at #29, probably an album played against my will at the pizza place where I worked.) But the “Twister” record also felt of its era in a larger sense. The 90s were a boom time for movie soundtracks. Not the standard-issue ones with the musical score, no, but collections of pop songs, even if they were not featured in the movie, in which case they were deemed as being “inspired by” the movie. If this soundtrack phenomenon sometimes felt spot-on, like the “Singles” soundtrack capturing the grunge era, or even the heavy metal “Judgement Night” soundtrack epitomizing its hapless middle class suburbanites going hardcore, more often these albums were merely sonic marketing ploys, a secondary revenue stream for any would-be blockbuster, throw some songs together and make a few extra bucks.

Both “Batman Forever” and “Batman & Robin” went this route, enlisting the likes of U2 and The Smashing Pumpkins, respectively. “City of Angels” is probably less remembered for the movie than its soundtrack while both the apex and nadir of the genre might have been “Godzilla”, with then-Puff Daddy being featured alongside The Wallflowers, Ben Folds Five, The Foo Fighters, Rage Against the Machine, Silverchair, even Jamiroquai, a weird, right mélange of 90s sounds. “Twister” was in this vein. “Like the force of nature it’s named after,” Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote for Entertainment Weekly, “the soundtrack for Twister careers across the land, never settling anywhere.”

It’s strange, in a way, that it failed to get settled because “Twister” itself is more music-centric than you might remember. An early scene of the storm chasers making preparations in an Oklahoma field cuts from Jo (Helen Hunt) fiddling with the doppler above her truck to Dusty (Philip Seymour Hoffman) fiddling with the speakers he has installed above his van. Indeed, he is introduced singing along with Eric Clapton’s video for “Motherless Child” and later, when the team heads out in search of its first tornado, he cranks Deep Purple’s “Child in Time”, broadcasting it over those same speakers we seem fiddling with to the ostensible benefit of every other car in their storm chasing line. (Neither of these songs was part of the official soundtrack.) Not that everyone wants to hear Deep Purple. The camera tracks to the stationwagon in front of Dusty, piloted by Preacher Rowe (Scott Thomson), who is listening to the William Tell Overture, while ahead of him, Beltzer (Todd Field) and Haynes (Wendle Josepher) belt out “Oklahoma” from the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical.  

It’s a missed opportunity, really, to go through everyone in this scene and reveal their musical choices. I imagine Sanders (Sean Whalen) being into early R.E.M. (not on the soundtrack); Brian Laurence (Jeremy Davies) probably dug Minutemen (not on the soundtrack); Joey (Joey Slotnick) might have been into Rusted Root, which makes their presence on the soundtrack feel more allowable than the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Soul Asylum. No one here is listening to them. Mark Knopfler? Eh, maybe Rabbit (Alan Ruck), though I have to confess, when I really stop and think about it, I picture him saying the immortal words of my seemingly square high school pre-algebra teacher (and this is an exact quote): “There hasn’t been a good band since Alice Cooper.” (Alice Cooper is not on the soundtrack.)

Of course, that’s the whole problem with the “Twister” soundtrack, it too often makes no sense, in terms of character or in terms of the movie. It’s why even if most of these songs do seem to appear in the movie itself, they are often brought way down in the mix so you can barely hear them. Even when they aren’t, they don’t always fit. If I believe Jo might listen to Alison Krauss, the Krauss track here doesn’t quite fit the eerie moment when a tornado tears through a drive-in showing “The Shining.” On the other hand, it’s totally believable that the roadside service station and coffee shop where the whole gang briefly stops would have Shania Twain playing. Would Jami Gertz’s un-immortal Dr. Melissa Reeves have been into Tori Amos? k.d. lang? Belly? C’mon. She would have listened to Celine Dion and even then, only because the Adult Contemporary station in Oklahoma City told her to.

The big song here, of course, was Van Halen’s “Humans Being”, which did ascend to the top of the Mainstream Rock charts for a couple weeks. I can hear the so-called Extreme version of Bill Paxton’s Bill Harding listening to Van Halen, and probably Dusty too, though probably early 80s Van Halen, not Van Hagar, especially not mid-90s Van Hagar. And though in imagining the song’s conception, Chuck Klosterman pictured “somebody from Universal Pictures (being) like ‘We need a song that feels like a tornado’, and some guy taking the meeting for Warner Brothers (being) like, ‘I think I know who to ask’”, I’m not sure I agree. What do people always say when asked what a tornado sounded like? That it sounded like a train. Wouldn’t Johnny Cash sound more like a tornado than Van Halen?

“Twisted”, which was written and performed by Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, did not get the attention of “Humans Being.” The former is heard in the movie, though at such a low level you have to strain to hear it, which Nicks herself knew all too well, telling Uncut in 2014 that “When songs go into movies you might as well dump them out the window as you’re driving by because they never get heard.” I’m inclined to agree with Stevie’s lingering notes of bitterness. I mean, it’s a movie about a squabbling couple chasing freaking tornadoes. If you’re not making the song by Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, pivotal figures on the greatest breakup album of all time, your anthem, you’re not doing your job. 

The Dry

I have seen enough movies in my time to know that when one begins with a title card stipulating it has been nearly 365 days since rain that, come the conclusion, precipitation will pour down from the sky. And yet, Robert Connolly’s mystery thriller “The Dry” ends just as arid as it begins, which is not so much a spoiler as a consumer-friendly tip, making plain the movie as unbeholden to such antiquated cinematic notions of setups and payoffs. Granted, “The Dry” spends much of its run time devoted to unraveling a mystery that, frankly, speaking, Connolly the director seems less interested in than Connolly the screenwriter (he co-wrote with Harry Crips, adapting from Jane Harper’s novel). For all the emergent suspects and motivations, this puzzle fails to stand out as much as the atmosphere and the mood, epitomized in the Australian locale gleaned in the title, aerial shots of cracked land and even a brief shot of dust devils that, rather than prompting a dramatic sequence, simply effuses a sense of eerie foreboding, all brought home in Eric Bana’s simmering performance. It’s a weird irony that Bana, who tends to be best roles in utilizing his kind of twitchy charisma, has too often been stranded in roles where he just comes across...dry. But here, despite underplaying every step of the way, he becomes the movie’s mythical thundercloud, amassing rage without ever erupting. 

Bana is Aaron Falk, a federal agent, returning to his hometown of Kiewarra after a 20-year absence to attend the funeral of Luke, a childhood friend who apparently killed his wife and son before turning the gun on himself. When Aaron first arrives, Connolly’s camera captures him on the edge of frames and in the back of rooms, pointedly on his own. Indeed, he soon becomes clear he is unwanted there, a past memory haunting not just him but the town itself, when 17-year Ellie (BeBe Bettencourt) died under mysterious circumstances pertaining to Aaron and possibly Luke too. Ellie’s fate becomes “The Dry’s” second murder mystery, running parallel to the present-day, glimpsed throughout the movie in flashback. These flashbacks, though, while occasionally proffering crucial information, are not rendered in a typically convenient expository manner. They are frequent, virtually omnipresent, and often not even so much flashbacks as just little flashes, moments running through Aaron’s head as he goes about everyday life, an effective illustration of how memories can inundate a person, little pangs of grief dogging him at every turn.

More than a murder mystery, really, that’s what “The Dry” is, a character study of grief. There might well be a conflict of interest in Aaron becoming the co-investigator of Luke’s death along with Greg (Keir O’Donnell), the local sergeant starstruck by this hometown fed, he is not getting to the bottom of things so much because of subtle professional skills (Bana shifts from friendly conversation to probing query almost imperceptibly) as his willingness to dredge up the readily apparent. He is threatened by Ellie’s family for showing up and snooping around, true, though “The Dry” makes this point even better in an exchange between Aaron and Greg’s pregnant wife, Rita (Miranda Tapsell) over dinner. She quietly if forcefully points out Greg is an expectant father and that reopening the case rather than letting it remain as-is and closed might bring about harm. It’s not that she’s unsympathetic, not at all, or dismissive of the truth, but in tune to the murky compromises of Kiewarra that allow people to co-exist. This is evident, too, in Aaron reconnecting with his childhood friend Gretchen (Genevieve O’Reilly), at first a friendly ally but of whom he eventually becomes suspicious, building not to a revelation as much as a sudden disintegration, a moment played with palpable disgust by O’Reilly, a bridge burned. 

The crime-of-the-week sensation of the present-day murder mystery, its result failing to satisfactorily intertwine with the larger idea of grief, not to mention the mystery of the past hinging on information conveniently unearthed at the last second, siphon a little punch from the conclusion. A little, though not all. In a way, the wrap-up’s superficiality, unintentionally or otherwise, feels almost profound given how the resolution brings no closure, epitomized in the agony that Bana visibly still carries on his frame and the rain that never comes, casting The Dry as something close to a Biblical plague.

Army of the Dead

Life’s funny. When Zack Snyder’s “Dawn of the Dead” remake was released in 2004, it was knocked in some quarters for lacking political subtext present in George A. Romero’s original. Flash forward, though, to 2021 and here’s Snyder’s newest zombie movie, “Army of the Dead”, weighed down by laborious politics that he should have either A.) Figured out how to graft on more elegantly or B.) Jettisoned altogether. See the brief clip of Donna Brazile and Sean Spicer arguing in “Army of the Dead” and, hoo boy, 2004’s “Dawn of the Dead” starts to sound a whole lot better. Indeed, despite the snappiness of its premise, pitching a $200 million heist in zombie-infested Las Vegas, “Army of the Dead” is a drag. That it’s about to get a Hulu series spinoff makes sense, given how its overabundance of characters and subplots and world building (and drab color palette) makes it feel like an overlong movie in search of a Netflix tv series, overlong but also undercooked, the perpetual modern movie paradox. 

“Army of the Dead” starts well, at least, with a jaunty, gory opening credits sequence recounting Sin City as ground zero for zombie apocalypse, its hordes looking very much like a bloodsucking version of the tourist throngs that descend upon Las Vegas near the end of Martin Scorsese’s “Casino.” It’s an inspiring if fleeting flash of satire. Because if this opening suggests a kitschy romp, the tone almost immediately changes when casino owner Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) approaches ex-mercenary Scott Ward (Dave Bautista) about breaking into the walled off city to abscond with the plethora of cash sealed inside Tanaka’s own obligatorily uncrackable vault before the American government obliterates Vegas and its undead population with a 4th of July nuclear strike. Snyder recounts these moments not with an “Aliens”-ish yippee ki ay energy but a conspicuous somberness, underlined in Scott’s estrangement from his daughter Kate (Ella Purnell) over having been forced to kill his wife, Kate’s mother, when she becomes infected. The funereal rendering of this in flashback is a long way from, say, “Zombieland” which deftly melded goofy and grave. 

That sort of tonal balancing act almost entirely escapes Snyder, lurching back and forth between breezy and solemn while tacking on myriad cumbersome subplots. Scott not only gets an estranged daughter, he gets an ex-girlfriend (Ana de la Reguera), and each storyline follows virtually the same outline and builds to virtually the same climax.. There are so many subplots that the centering heist plot loses any sense of urgency. Even when the nuclear strike is moved up, meaning the characters will be incinerated in, like, 20 minutes if they don’t get a move on, “Army of the Dead” doesn’t get a move on at all. It’s supposed to be on a clock but Snyder just keeps hitting snooze. 

Scott’s team sneaks into Vegas by following Lily (Nora Arnezeder), a so-called coyote, one of Snyder’s many lunges at topicality. Indeed, the quarantined camp outside the city’s wall can be read as akin, maybe, to internment camps at the Mexican-American border or, perhaps, in relation to the COVID-19 Pandemic where temperature guns are wielded like weapons that can make or break you. Either/or/both, it doesn’t really matter. Like that Brazile/Spicer clip, Snyder specializes in a choose-your-own-metaphors absent any conviction. Like the casino towers named Sodom and Gomorra, “Army of the Dead” doesn’t really have anything to say but wants to seem like he has something to say. This is true even of the zombies, some of which are Alphas, intelligent and capable of organization, virtually human in a sense, suggesting unexpected empathy, though that threatens to put a crimp in the all-important zombie killing so the other sect of zombies are old school, mindless shamblers, just there to get chopped up and shot to smithereens. Cover all your bases!

A zombie movie, of course, should have no problem dispatching zombies; that’s why we’re here! But even there Snyder too frequently displays a lack of imagination, never utilizing the Vegas setting like he does in that prologue, the crutch of CGI, as it so often does, hindering a more practical kind of inventiveness. (With each passing movies these days, the more I find myself thinking about the mall scene in “Commando.”) The closest he gets to blending the two is the CGI tiger, a mauling more memorable than the bear mauling in “The Revenant”, frankly, because rather than trying to effuse some sense of violent vanity, it’s just frivolously grotesque. So, too, does the vault break-in inspire as an homage to “Indiana Jones” booby traps where the safecracker, Ludwig (Matthias Schweighöfer), and his cohort Vanderohe (Omari Hardwick) deploy an un-alpha zombie as test bait.  

Though Hardwick and Schweighöfer achieve a delightful kind of Odd Couple chemistry, better certainly than Bautista and de la Reguera’s, there really aren’t any standout characters or performances, no one able to invest their archetypes either with fresh-feeling zest or unexpected depth. All, that is, except for Tig Notaro as Marianne Peters, helicopter getaway pilot. Her odd duck turn, it should be stated, comes with backstory. During actual production, Chris D’Elia played the helicopter pilot role, only to be hit with numerous, disturbing accusations of sexual harassment afterwards, leading Snyder to scrub D’Elia from the role and replace him with Notaro. Because filming had wrapped, her scenes were shot separately and then digitally added. It is not, shall we say, seamless. And while that might be of issue to editing perfectionists, Notaro’s remoted in work winds up working quite well, by which I mean it doesn’t really work well at all. I’ll try to explain.

She’s the comic relief, made to deliver all sorts of humorous lines, some of which are objectively funny (“He spent all his money on that fucking miniature”), many of which skew more toward action movie cliche. And while Notaro generally always speaks in deadpan, it’s a different kind of deadpan here, detached, out to sea. That might have been nothing more than Notaro reading her lines to no one. Whatever it is, though, conscious choice or not, it works extraordinarily well, not so much pitched in the vein of irony as in the vein of nothing at all. She manages to drain all the platitudinous applesauce from every line and leave those lines splayed on the ground, betraying their original nothingness, a sensation rhyming with her physical and emotional distance from every character around her. How many times have you seen a movie like this and seen one performance and said, “They’re in a totally different movie.” Notaro really is. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)

The American southwest town of Black Rock in John Sturges’s 1955 drama is not so much one that time forgot as one seeking to ensure it is not remembered, or perhaps not even known about at all. The opening images of a train knifing through the desert suggest that dividing line between out-of-date and modern, between Old West and New West, the distinction similar to so many western movies. Gradually, though, we realize this isn’t the 1800s nor even the turn of the century; there are cars and then, even later, talk of Pearl Harbor. That last one is the crucial clue. If 1955 America was knee-deep in the Eisenhower Era post-war boom, “Bad Day at Black Rock” came along to ensure America’s transgressions of the preceding decade were not shoved out of sight, dragging the Japanese interment sin back out into the light, brought home in Spencer Tracy’s costuming, dressed in a black suit, like an undertaker.

Tracy’s one-armed character, John J. Macreedy, has come to Black Rock in search of an old friend named Kokomo, though who Kokomo was, what happened to him and what Macreedy wants with him are all effectively teased out over half the movie. That deliberate narrative boosts the drama while Sturges mostly prefers telling the story through atmosphere, acting and visuals. Though in wide shots from above Sturges initially paints Macreedy as a lonely man in a lonely place, this gives way to continuous scenes of Black Rock’s ornery citizens nipping at heels. Indeed, Sturges gets great mileage just from his framing, virtual paintings of small town persecution, inside and outside, Macreedy constantly boxed in and squeezed out of shots by threatening townfolk staking their territory. That title, “Bad Day at Black Rock”, almost sounds droll in nature, suggesting Macreedy is enduring a kind of cosmic crucible, all of which Macreedy meets with a Biblical patience, brought out in Tracy’s taciturn smile that quietly needles the men needling him, like he knows the answer to a riddle they don’t.

The preeminent bully is Reno Smith (Robert Ryan). His profession is nebulous, as it is for everyone here, the town sheriff (Dean Jagger) asleep in his own cell when Macreedy finds him, putting into perspective how he’s not really in charge, true, but also how he has nothing much to do, like the badge is just part of a costume. In fact, Reno takes that badge away at one point, only underlining its meaningless and epitomizing his grip on the community. But in a conversation with Macreedy outside a gas station, the blocking illustrating the shifting power dynamics of their tête-à-tête, Reno’s half-confession of the truth about Kokomo’s fate is just as much about revealing his own insecurities about not being allowed to fight in WWII. All the intimidation of Macreedy up to this point, then, is rewired as something else, one insecure little boy posing as a big man deploying violence to cover up his own impotency, laid bare by the seemingly impotent one-armed Macreedy who turns out not to be so impotent at all. Because if Macreedy’s resistance to altercation might be a liberal sort of call to non-violence, he ultimately proves not entirely above dishing out a little violence of his own when finally pushed to it, in a skillfully staged scene at a diner that ends with Reno’s chief muscle (Ernest Borgnine) roughed up and standing, ridiculously, in a broken doorframe like Buster Keaton in the open window of the fallen house but if he were Biff Tannen in the boys covered in Hill Valley manure. 

By revealing the secret of Kokomo before the end, it forces all the characters in “Bad Day at Black Rock” to draw lines in the sand, like Doc Velie (Walter Brennan) finally seeing a way to repent for his sin or Liz (Anne Francis) selling out Macreedy in the end, culminating in an astonishing shot of her bright white face framed against the black of night behind her, crystallizing her forthcoming disappearance into the void. It’s indicative of a darkness that shrouds Black Rock despite a hopeful ending in which the good-minded holdovers plan to rebuild. That might sound absurd given how Black Rock itself never feels like much more than a series of false old west fronts waiting to topple in the wind. But this apparent flaw proves to be the movie’s greatest strength, as if Black Rock has been built on simmering rage and resentment rather than any kind of economy. And that’s why “Bad Day at Black Rock” feels timeless, as true to its post-WWII era as to our perpetually aggrieved, lizard brained present. 

Dream a Little Dream of Them

I think often about this one scene from “Ocean’s Twelve.” It happens near the end, when The Night Fox (Vincent Cassel) returns to his luxurious Lake Como villa to find his thieving rival Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and wife Tess (Julia Roberts) sipping his champagne on the balcony. It’s not so much what they talk about, no matter how crucial it may be, as it is the chemistry between Roberts and Clooney. To paraphrase former Notre Dame Football coach Lou Holtz explaining the campus’s mystique, Roberts and Clooney’s chemistry requires no explanation if you’ve seen it just as no explanation, really, would suffice if you haven’t. Their chemistry just is; it’s undeniable; it’s off the charts. They work charmingly, effortlessly, innately in one another’s company. Together, they reduce Cassel’s character to a bystander on the balcony of his own home, merrily communicating in what’s tantamount to secret code. (Roberts whispering into Clooney’s ear...shut it down. Just shut down the cinema and go home.) Every time I see it, every time I think about it, I think: God, what a waste, what an absolute waste that the movie industry has collectively, idiotically failed to harness this again in any real way since it happened nearly 20 years ago. That’s as big an indictment on modern movies as any.

I thought of this scene again just the other week when the 2014 Vanity Fair video of Julia Roberts and George Clooney having a side-by-side discussion for the magazine’s Hollywood issue of that year was uploaded to Twitter apparently apropos of no other reason than reveling in it all over again. Though the Vanity Fair interviewer asks them questions, their magnetism is such that they could be talking about anything, their star power virtually illuminated by the blank white wall behind them, putting the focus right where it needs to be. And though George mentions having a movie theater in his home, and though Julia cites the expensive Tiffany ring gifted to her by the “Ocean’s Eleven” team, they still come across not like you and me but relatable nevertheless because of the jovial way they b.s. one another. And that is to say nothing of Julia’s exalted laugh, which she deploys twice, the guffaw that elevates her into the firmament being the same thing that renders her down to earth. It’s always good hear to that laugh. 

I know, I know. Loyal frustrated followers are turning up their noses. “Is he on about this again,” you’re asking. He’s whining about a lack of Roberts/Clooney comedies every fifth post. But that’s the thing, I always wonder if I’m merely screaming into the void, consumed by an issue about which The People (as in, What The People Want) could not care less. And while reading the Twitter Tea Leaves is not the same thing as doing genuine market research, scrolling through the effusive replies and the quote tweets to this tweet of the Roberts and Clooney heartened me. I can’t say for certain that all these people were younger than me, but a good chunk seemed as though they were, and they were just as smitten with the self-evident chemistry. They saw it! They all saw it!

As much hope and joy as I felt scrolling through these replies, however, I also came away saddened by the fatalism in so many responses, those referring to Roberts and Clooney as the last two movie stars or the kind of white people, to borrow one phrase exactly, they just don’t make anymore. Maybe they don’t make ’em like Julia and George, fair, but the real reason we don’t see movie stars anymore is for the same reason that we too often discuss them in terms of box office receipts for some other sort of analytical b.s. unattuned to seeing movies as flickering myths. Movie Stars are about a feeling, the kind you get watching Julia and George in one another’s company, and it’s out there in other places too, I swear it is, in the space of Tessa Thompson and Michael B. Jordan in the “Creed” movies or Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in “La La Land”. Even Julia Fox in “Uncut Gems” “has got something”, as they said in “A Star Is Born.” Problem is, rather than specifically cultivating projects around stars, we have gone the other way. The concept, the almighty, dreaded I.P comes first. And though I know one viral Tweet won’t change anything, it was still comforting to see, if just for a moment, to see the allure of Roberts and Clooney justify its own existence, to see those stars shining so bright. 

For Comic Book Carnal Knowledge

The other day the invaluable culture critic Molly Lambert threw up a pseudo-contentious Tweet declaring that Batman was bad in bed. Comically, she decreed this as canon. If some social media users objected, as they often do, especially if their quarters are chock full of DC Comics back issues, it also broadened into various off-the-cuff good/bad in bed Batman power rankings that broadened into even more, ah, uh, theoretical specifics of The Caped Crusader’s carnal knowledge. And though I tend to evade The Discourse, especially where comic book movies are concerned, I confess this comic book movie conversation intrigued me, not least because it wasn’t really The Discourse at all, more like a fun-loving subsidiary of it, a reminder of how amusing the oft-tiring Interwebs can still sometimes be. Plus, for once it wasn’t an argument about canon where comic book movies were concerned (which Lambert’s tweet was parodying), what it got Wrong and what it Got Right, but merely digressing on, shall we say, cinematic sensual sensation which, I shouldn’t have to tell anyone but still totally do, are more what the movies are about than honoring source material. 

My two cents:

Was Michael Keaton’s Batman bad in bed? Eh, I’m not so sure. I sort of imagine Keaton’s prominent neuroses in the part of Bruce Wayne transforming him into Ewan McGregor from “A Life Less Ordinary” – you know, when he finds Cameron Diaz the morning after they sleep together and she says “You were great” and he asks, not says, confused, “I was?” 

Val Kilmer’s Batman, on the other hand, I can’t quite picture getting into bed at all. I mean, sure, half the movie is Nicole Kidman just sort of chasing him around, trying to get him into bed, like Elizabeth Banks chasing around Steve Carrell in “The Forty Year Old Virgin.” But in the case of Kilmer’s Caped Crusader it’s more like if Steve Carrell was less a lovable doofus and more like the CEO of a suburban golf resort.

I don’t know if Clooney’s Batman was good in bed but he was definitely doing it. Whatever “Batman & Robin” was, it had something kinky going on, I’ll give it that, which is why all those Bat Nipple complaints were undoubtedly made by puritans. It’s no coincidence “Batman & Robin” was directed by Joel Schumacher because this is as close as a comic book movie will ever get to all those shots of Ashley Judd and Matthew McConaughey lathered in sweat “A Time to Kill.”

The Christian Bale Batman, he just strikes me as a Ken Doll. There was no heat between he and Rachel Dawes, in either movie; they were more like best friends. And even though Anne Hathaway’s Selina Kyle was sort of trying to mimic Kidman’s Chase Meridian in kind of trying to pull Batman toward the sack, even at the end, I didn’t quite buy it. We were a long way from Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief. I imagine a scene on the cutting room floor of Bruce & Selina in their Florence hotel room and the set design forcing them in Hays Code-style separate beds. 

I haven’t seen Ben Affleck’s Batman, but I’ll just assume he’s like Mr. Furious having the hots for Claire Forlani in “Mystery Men” but totally straight-faced, like Liam Neeson trying to do comedy in “Life’s Too Short.” 

In Memoriam: Ned Beatty

I love Robert Altman’s “Cookie’s Fortune” (1999) so doggone much that most days I think my favorite performance of everyone in the cast, with the exception of Julianne Moore (for whom I have, like, seven favorite performances), is their performance in “Cookie’s Fortune.” That includes Ned Beatty, dead Sunday June 13, 2021 at the age of 83. The movie is theoretically a murder mystery in so much as the eponymous matriarch (Patricia Neal) dies as the movie opens. But she dies by taking her own life, a scene that isn’t as sad as it sounds, oddly jubilant in its own way, an early signifier that Altman isn’t playing by antiquated rules, only to have her suicide note literally eaten by her villainous niece Camille Dixon (Glenn Close) and the setting restaged to look like a murder, lest this act ruin their good family name. That we know it’s a suicide, however, wonderfully takes the expected piss out of the mystery, transforming the movie into an evocation of faith, underlined in the Easter weekend setting, faith that all will be set right. That faith comes through most prominent in Beatty.

He is Lester Boyle, lieutenant to the chief of police (Danny Darst), and Altman does not so much establish their easygoing rapport as just pick up in the middle of it as-is, their conversation drifting out the windows of their police cruiser. They are not hapless, not at all, professionals, if laid-back professionals, their demeanors in-tune with the southern heat, though still forced to deal with the inexperienced, overeager newbie on the small-town force, Jason (Chris O’Donnell). When the latter storms into the crime scene, which already has yellow tape and investigators everywhere, with his gun drawn, Beatty’s exasperation is palpable and hysterical, like a parent dealing with a kid, sort of trying to order O’Donnell’s character to do three different things at once, but knowing none of them will take, and finally settling on a stern, if desperate, “just be careful.”  

Beatty’s character is tasked with talking Willis (Charles Dutton), the movie’s main character and the emergent suspect in her “murder”, through his initial grief after he returns home to find Cookie dead. The scene is a perfect duet between two men still trying to process what has occurred. “It’s a tough one” Lester says of Cookie’s death, a line that sounds so inadequate typed out, so simple and small, but which belies the extraordinary depth that Beatty gives it. Like, you can imagine Lester declaring Ole Miss’s loss to Mississippi State in the Egg Bowl as “a tough one”, but in a totally different way than he does here, a modulation of a folksy, all-purpose phrase that meets the moment. 

Lester maintains Willis’s innocence, which is a conflict of interest, I suppose, opening Willis’s cell door and playing scrabble with him over Dr. Peppers, but the generosity of the movie’s tone makes this work nonetheless, a police lieutenant indebted to the law, yes, but also to the law of his fellow man – or, more accurately, the law of fishing. When he’s asked how he’s so sure Willis is innocent, the camera suddenly zooms in on Lester’s face. “Because,” Beatty giving the line a matter-of-fact ring, “I fished with him.” Fishing often yields spiritual metaphors but in Beatty’s hands this line doesn’t need its spirituality explained; you hear it, clear as day.

Another spiritual Beatty performance, of sorts, was his monumental one scene walk-off in “Network” (1976), playing “the corporate communications overlord who comes in to read the riot act to Howard Beale (Peter Finch), the mad prophet of the airwaves,” as Owen Gleiberman wrote for Variety. “In the mesmerizing monologue that follows, Beatty proceeds to explain The Way Things Are,” Gleiberman continues. “He sounds like a Pentecostal preacher (he has said that he drew the performance, in part, from his youthful memories of church), a lawyer for God, and, at several points, God himself. He’s lecturing Howard Beale, but he’s really speaking to all of us. ... Spewing out language so fulsome the words seem to be dancing, Beatty explains that there are no nations, no peoples, no America, no democracy, no Third World; these are all illusions. ‘There is only one holistic system of systems,’ he says, still roaring, but now he’s feeling the music of it. ‘There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and Dupont…Those are the nations of the world today.’ He’s bringing the news of the corporate takeover of our political and spiritual lives, and he delivers it with a sense of mission, in full fulminating cry. But then, at moments, as he reverts to a normal voice, we realize that his whole raging rant has been a performance. That’s what the voices of corporations do. They act. They create their own illusion.” 

Gleiberman goes on: “It’s an ecstatic piece of over-the-top acting in which Beatty seems to be making up what he’s saying on the spot, because that’s how much he means it. It pours out of him. He has seen the truth — the dark truth, the one television is designed to cover up — and he wants to share it. As Beatty acts, you don’t just listen; you see the new world he’s talking about. He makes the darkness visible.” 

In “Network”, Beatty showed us the darkness. But in “Cookie’s Fortune”, he showed us the light. 

Dissecting a Scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark

This past Saturday marked the 40th anniversary of Steven Spielberg’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Considering we are as far from its original release as the movie was from the adventure serials that it inspired it, it’s remarkable to note just how well “Raiders of the Lost Ark has held up. It has held up despite the parts, as Brian Phillips noted in his commemorative piece at The Ringer, that very much do not hold up. That, I think, is a testament to Spielberg’s filmmaking, if not also Michael Kahn’s crack editing. In fact, in some way, given the sameness and CGI-dependence of so many modern movies, “Raiders of the Lost Ark” has looped back around to feel new, like a breath of fresh air. And rather than explore that idea by examining the Bigger Picture, I wanted to drill down, to a single scene and go over it, as we do, in our ongoing nod to the late Roger Ebert and the Conference of World Affairs, shot-by-shot.

It is not one of the action scenes; it is one of the intimate scenes; it is, perhaps, the most crucial scene, if, as Phillips notes, Karen Allen’s Marion Ravenwood is critical to humanizing what otherwise might have been a cartoon character in Indiana Jones. It’s a scene this blog has dissected before, in fact, though that was during the blog’s middle ages, when we were just beginning to figure things out. This scene is so good, it deserves so much better. Let’s get to it. Here’s looking at you, “Raiders.” 

Phillips writes that “There’s a moment for everyone when that ahh hits them...the moment you know you’re in for something special, a story where every scene, every set piece, every throwaway line, every happy accident of filmmaking, are going to conspire together in the interest of sheer delight.” For me it’s when Indy first takes flight across the Pacific and we follow his flight path via the map superimposed over the screen. It ends here, in Nepal, the map bleeding into an image of mountains and the Raven, the saloon Marion runs. Even the segues crackle with absolute glee. 

The scene begins with a long take. And while I’m sure Spielberg is showing off to some degree, he does not look like he’s showing off, to paraphrase another Harrison Ford character. Indeed, the take just makes sense. It begins high in the bar, seemingly in the rafters, setting up another shot for later but also setting the scene, The Great Patan Drinking Contest of 1938.

The camera keeps gliding, in closer to the table and to the left...

...where the credited Australian Cimber (Patrick Durkin) downs a shot.

The camera then follows the Climber’s hand to the center of the table, where he turns the glass upside down-

-and watches as Marion’s hand enters to the frame to take her next shot glass. 

She drinks the shot.

But when she finishes, her body language suggests a beaten contestant, this instant evoking how this dramatic sequence is shrewdly chock full of micro-moments of drama, which is what keeps the whole movie churning, over and over.  

That seeming defeat is denoted in the exchanges of cash among the surrounding betters that suddenly fills the frame. 

But then those hands all pull back out of the frame as Marion tells everyone to hold on just a damn minute. 

Her lips twist into a smile. This contest ain’t over. And how about that extra? She isn’t just smiling too; she looks like her horse just won the Kentucky Derby. 

The camera follows Marion’s hand back to the center of the table where she turns her shot glass upside down. 

And then the Climber’s hand is re-entering the frame, though in the way it sort of burrows through the other empty glasses rather than nimbly avoiding them, it evokes motor skills on the wane.

And here’s where we should pause a second to return to Phillips’s observation of how everything conspires together in the name of sheer delight. Do you need to know this guy is an Australian Climber? No, not really - nay, not at all. It’s the face. The face imbues all the character you need. You know everything you need to know from a single expression, like this one right here, indelible smug I Got This inebriation. 

He drinks the shot...

...and finishes it, that face improbably growing in intoxicated complacency, the second false ending simply in the space of this single long take. 

Because the Australian Climber’s sobriety gives way as he passes out in the arms of the betters. 

Now Spielberg and Kahn cut, going high again to put Marion at the center of attention as she stands and collects her winnings, seemingly sober in an instant, suggesting her about-to-lose moment of drama was gamesmanship. Maybe?  

As she counts the money, revelers begin filing out...

...underlined in the shot of the front door where this guy ushers people out. 

Then back to Marion, now alone, her back to the door.

Though the camera subtly pulls back just a little, leaving space in the wall in front of Marion so you-know-who, entering from behind, can fill it up with his shadow in the shot I once tried - really tried - to duplicate in my parents’ basement with my VHS camcorder and a few table lamps. 

But first things first. A cut back to the door so that we see the doorman escorting out the last patron, visually denoting that now Marion and Indy are alone. 

At which point Indy says Hello, causing her to spin around and face him, though we still only see him in shadow. 

And when she sees him, she closes her eyes, just for a second, almost like she wants to appreciate that this moment has come to pass before it passes. 

And then she takes a few steps toward the camera, filling the frame so that her physical presence is now identical to his, the camera putting them on equal footing. “Indiana Jones,” she says. “I always someday you’d come walking back through my door.” It’s a line teasing heartbreak as much as love. 

Indy, though, he just hears the love. When she says that, the camera cuts over Marion’s shoulder, to finally let us see Indy, whose grin feels real, less mischievous than Marian’s.

But then she moves toward him, asking him what he’s doing in Nepal. 

She might be genuinely curious, but it feels like a set-up. Because when the camera reverses, her smile is conspicuously gone and Indy is on to business, explaining he needs an archaeological piece, a medallion, of her father’s. 

He turns away, which Ford sells by sort of making it look like Indy is looking around, taking in the place, giving Marion that opportunity to rear back. 

And sock him right in the face, Max Baer-style, Allen gritting her teeth, making it seem like Marian has waiting been to throw this punch. 

And here’s were shot-by-shot dissections come in so handy. Because that Ford Face, that’s a gem that speaks for itself. 

She half-circles around him, declaring she’s learned to hate him in the last ten years, though I thought, for years, that she said she had learned to hit him in the last ten years. 

And now leaving him alone in the frame, where he issues the standard-issue dude apology of not meaning to hurt her. 

Now a cut back to Marion, where her telling him she was a child, hinting at an age-inappropriate love affair turns the whole scene on its head. 

And when he blows that declaration off, claiming she knew what she was doing, he walks toward the bar-

-as the door opens in the background and someone enters, leading Marion to admonish him to get out. It’s not essential, really, though it also is, background business that makes the whole scene feel that much more lived-in.

As the guy in the background leaves, Indy half-circles around, just trying to push past his misdeeds of the past, remorselessly acknowledging them, asking for her help now, as if that somehow squares things. 

A cut to a longer shot from a different angle so that Marion can walk to the table, where she starts gathering up shot glasses. More movement to keep the scene fresh.

As she does, Indy approaches, explaining the piece he’s looking for, demonstrating its size, wondering if she knows the one he means. 

Yeah, I know it, she says as the angle switches again, striding right past him as Allen effuses this So effing What? energy. 

The camera tracks with her to the bar, and so does Indy, who asks where her father is. She closes her eyes again, bracing against the truth. She tells Indy her father is dead.

When she does, he comes around to to tell her he’s sorry to her face, even if she’s pointedly not looking at him.

“Do you know what you did to me, to my life?” she rhetorically asks, eyes closed but tilting her head back and sort of shaking her shoulders as she says it like she’s trying to shake him and their past off. 

And when he says he can only say sorry so many times, she jerks the tray, sending the shot glasses flying, telling him to say sorry again. 

Then a cut back to the longer as she heads back to the table for more glasses. 

“Everybody’s sorry for something,” she says.  

And then she returns to the bar, briefly, just for a second, yielding this shot, which looks more like something out of “Barfly”, framing them like two lonely souls wallowing in everything they’re sorry for. 

And then a cut to the angle behind them again as he asks, again, if she’s going to give him the medallion. 

“Maybe,” she says, going back to the third table a third time, clearly using this as a way to control the rhythm of the conversation. “Maybe I don’t know where it is.” 

“Maybe you could find it,” he says, turning and producing a wad of cash, three thousand bucks. 

She walks back toward the bar, semi-dismissing his offer as not enough. 

At which point, he takes hold of her and turns her toward him.

Into a medium close-up, the first close-up of the entire sequence, suggesting how cagily Spielberg deploys them rather than just making the whole scene out of them, their faces eerily illuminated by the fire. 

And then a close-up of Indy. “It’s important,” Marion, he says. “Trust me,” a cool, cocky line reading by Ford that seems to suggest he should not be trusted, evocative of the sly dimension. He’s supposed to be the hero, remember!

But when she turns away, he grabs her again, a little rougher this time.  

And she tries to ring his bell again, that smile on Allen’s face suggests Marion is almost having fun.

A close-up of Indy again as she shoves the cash into her hand, the look on Ford’s face in this moment damn near unhinged. 

Marion looks at the money. 

And then Allen erupts into this glorious shit-eating laugh. Dammit, she is having fun. She tells him to come back tomorrow. 

Why? Indy asks, a line reading that really seems to indicate he doesn’t quite know what she’s up to. 

Because I said so, that’s why. Taunting him, now. 

Then back to the angle behind them as Marion returns once more to the table. 

And into this side shot of Indy as he pushes off from the table, making it seem for an instant like he’s going on the attack. 

Cut behind Marion in lockstep with the above shot as Indy veers off instead toward the door, though not without giving her a look, like a boxer retiring to his corner. 

See you tomorrow, Marion bellows, Indiana Jones, the best recitation of his name in any of the movies because it’s the one that both acknowledges the iconic status of the moniker even as it cuts that icon to pieces. And the shot! The woven window of the door casting a shadow, just leaving that white eye, putting the hero on his heels. Obviously you’re going to see him again but, God, this shot, on its own, its sending him off into the unknown, like you really might not see him again.

The door closes. Indy’s gone.

And back once more to that wide shot from the ceiling. Now, finally, Marion is alone. 

She gets up from one table and walks around to another. 

Framed through the flame of a candle, she reveals the medallion in question, tucked away beneath her shirt. 

She examines it. And as she does...

...the flame emblematically flickers, as if for you-know-who. 

That flicker catches Marion’s eye and Allen’s expression here...it’s subtle, like she’s catching the universe’s vibe but not necessarily buying it. 

A shot from the side where she seems to contemplate the money. 

And then breaks into yet another grin as she looks back toward the medallion, which doesn’t suggest a decision on whether she’s going to help Indy or not as it does something more like, yeah, I’m totally inside that jackass’s head. 

The succeeding shot, though, this is her most plaintive moment in the entire scene. In the end, there’s just a little more on her mind.

Then she hangs the medallion around the wooden centerpiece in the middle of the table, dangling there as set-up, each sequence surreptitiously designed to lead to the next.