Settlers

Set at some indeterminate point in the future on Mars and told through a child’s point-of-view, “Settlers” is like a movie specifically from Newt’s POV in “Aliens” but if she had grown up on Luke Skywalker’s moisture farm absent all the attendant backstory. Granted, those are two action movies and Wyatt Rockefeller’s British sci-fi indie is almost entirely stripped of traditional action, the opening shoot-out, of sorts, a bit of a feint as what ensues is much more atmospheric and ambiguous. Indeed, “Settlers” never bothers with more grandiose matters of space, preferring to stick close to the ground, a three-hander giving way to another three-hander before giving way to something else, seeing space not so much as a final frontier, per se, but a new frontier, like their little colony is John and Alexandra Cameron’s cabin in “Last of the Mohicans.” The drama here is in how hope is tempered by the eternally imminent need for survival and how survival itself comes with a cost. 

As “Settlers” opens, Reza (Johnny Lee Miller) and his daughter Remmy (Brooklynn Prince) are looking at the stars. She picks out Earth, which is how we learn they are on Mars, Reza’s vague explanation that Earth isn’t what it once was sufficing as motivation for bringing him to the Martian frontier. Loving glances between Miller and Sofia Boutella as Ilsa, his wife, give a sense of familial bliss even if wide shots of their little farm underline the loneliness while snippets of whispered conversation between the parents bring dread. We hear the latter down a long hall, the camera looking up from Remmy’s point-of-view, an early signifier that this is her story, just as she’s the one who stumbles upon the terrifying order smeared on their home’s window: LEAVE. That command comes from Jerry (Ismael Cruz Córdova), claiming this was his childhood home, armed and ready to reclaim it, leading to a standoff that happens so early you can’t possibly think this is the whole movie. It isn’t, with some twists, or perhaps spoilers, as the old guard calls them, ahead.

Reza doesn’t survive, and though all of Jerry’s cohorts fail to survive too, he does, installing himself as the new man of the house, the isolation of their home putting into stark perspective the calculations that Ilsa must make for her child, even as her explanation for what happened to Jerry’s parents explains what she might also do to him. Like Cruz Córdova’s blue eyes, which can seem scary or soft depending on the light, his performance delicately shifts moment to moment, genuinely friendly toward Remmy one moment and then intimidating the next. The character is less frightening, in fact, stumbling about with some kind of Martian intoxicant than he is in a politer register, a true and terrifying manipulator. Prince, meanwhile, excels, giving an incredibly natural child performance in so much as she manages to truly the embody the sensation of being a normal child, existing in what is, to us, a strange world but is, to her, the only world she’s known, and epitomizing the sensation of being a young person acting out when life as she knows it is upended. And the way Prince gradually has Remmy shut down rhymes with how Nell Tiger Free plays the part upon taking the baton from Prince when “Settlers” flashes forward, as a sullen teenager who has entirely cut off communication and whose only rebellion is to escape.

Remmy also makes friends with a curious, friendly WALL-E-ish robot, whom she nicknames Steve, though “Settlers” never fully develops this unlikely relationship, exposing it as mere set-up for developments later when Jerry finally pushes this teenage girl too far. How the outpost runs, meanwhile, essentially fades into the background. Not that it’s the overriding point, of course, though the movie would have been strengthened with a sense of what this place is about. Still, the sense of place is strong, the desert of South Africa’s Northern Cape convincing standing in for Mars in such a way to make it feel like the red planet rather than the red planet as generated by a computer. And even though the narrative can’t help but feel as if it begins to spin its wheels, sort of duplicating story points from earlier, that also feels emblematic, of a world with no end, which is what the ending crystallizes in its own eerie way, a sci-fi bent on that youthful yearning to break away. 

Werewolves Within

“Werewolves Within” begins with a quote emphasizing the importance of community splayed across the screen and underscored with ominous music. As the music crescendos, none other than America’s most famous neighbor, Mr. Rogers, is revealed as the quote’s purveyor, transforming a jump scare into a punchline, revealing director Josh Ruben’s m.o. Though the movie, based on a video game in which players are made to guess what resident of a Medieval town is a werewolf in disguise, contains its share of violent frights, it exists predominantly as a comedy, sometimes an uproarious one. In seeking to marry those laughs to satire, however, “Werewolves Within” comes up short, too broad in its rendering to truly land piercing blows against our  present-day polarization.

The story is seen mostly through the eyes of Finn Wheeler (Sam Richardson), a forest ranger  reassigned to the sparsely populated northeast town of Beaverton. Once there, he meets cute with Cecily (Milana Vayntrub), her mailwoman occupation providing convenient means for a tour of the town to meets its miniscule residents, all of whom deliberately embody a stereotype, from Wayne Duvall’s gun-nut demanding Beaverton build an oil pipeline to the tech millionaire gay couple (Cheyenne Jackson and Harvey Guillén) to the ornery conservative couple (Michaela Watkins and Michael Chernus). All of them too, save for Guillén, are conspicuously white, placing the conspicuously black Richardson at the center of a spiraling situation in which a series of mysterious deaths and a snowstorm leave the whole town holed up at the inn where rather than some truly piercing Jordan Peele-ish sociological horror movie breaking out it instead becomes an Agatha Christie-like guessing game.

That’s not to take anything away from the actors, all of whom are firmly committed to the bit, including the always deliciously off-kilter Watkins, deliciously off-kilter again, and generating nice comic chemistry with Chernus, not working in contrast to her mania but, Frank & Estelle Costanza-like, at the same noisy level. Truly, though, “Werewolves Within” is Richardson’s show. Though we first meet Finn in the midst of him screaming at the top his lungs, this proves another feint, his ostensible aggression prompted by a cassette tape coaching him to be aggressive; he doesn’t really have it in him. And though there are moments, like Finn’s “Heavens to Betsy” proclamation upon finding a gruesome death scene, pitched at too high a parodic ring of Mayberry folksiness, Richardson’s wide-eyed demeanor is both the movie’s funniest element and most consistent through line, maintaining a pleasant face in a world gone mad.

Throughout, Ruben wrings great mileage just from his framing, dropping narrative clues and reveals by what isn’t in the camera and then, suddenly, what is. He mines this for suspense but for comedy and satire too, like the Thoreau book heretofore not mentioned or seen that, all of a sudden, is just jutting out of Cecily’s back pocket when she and Finn are sort of making time at the town bar, hysterically underlining the very point of the book in the first place, how it conforms to idiot male’s conscripting women into their own fantasies. And as the townfolk gather at the inn, Ruben repeatedly packs multiple characters, if not all of them, into single frames, providing these wondrously obnoxious outbursts from every which way, embodying the idea of people talking over one another rather than listening.

But in becoming overly focused on solving the inherent question – who’s the werewolf? – the movie loses focuses on the people, where rather than subverting or dismembering the archetypes, they just sort of helplessly revert to them nonetheless. And when the ostensible party at the inn breaks up and everybody just goes home, it’s like the script has run out of ideas. Rather than werewolves lurking within, there is simply a werewolf among them, emitting shades of the big twist in Patty Jenkins’s “Wonder Woman”, where rather than the Monsters who Are Due on Maple Street sitting back and shaking their heads at humankind’s penchant for being daft, they intervene. 

My Favorite College Football Games: Game 15

December 21, 1984 (Holiday Bowl): BYU - 24 Michigan - 17

The Holiday Bowl, a top-tier bowl name that might seem facile but effortlessly encapsulates how college football bowl games are intended as joyful respites from all the big picture hullabaloo, was born from necessity after the Fiesta Bowl severed its tie-in to the Western Athletic Conference when both Arizona schools bolted for Pac 10 Conference riches in the late 70s. That’s how a quirky outlier in the college football postseason, a Carter and Regan-era version of, say, the Cigar Bowl, came, in the most unlikely and jolly of scenarios, to host 1984’s National Championship game not on New Year’s Day but December 21st, the Friday before Christmas, televised on then-spunky upstart ESPN opposite new episodes of “Dallas” and “Falcon Crest.” It’s like if some football novice sat down to watch the Super Bowl and realized, no, the championship had already been decided on some December Sunday in some random game between, like, the Broncos and the Seahawks. And while I recognize this kind of peculiarity once exclusive to college football is what drove critics of the sport batty, such unique idiosyncrasies are what made me fall in love with it. And it’s why I have always considered the unbeaten, untied 1984 Brigham Young University Cougars as the sport’s supreme champion.  

In a 152-year old sport it is virtually impossible to compare and contrast formidable teams across such disparate eras. How do you logically ascertain whether 1901 Michigan defeating its opponents, like Albion and Case, by a combined score of 550-0 was more/less impressive than 2001 Miami’s stunning array of 38 future NFL draft picks? But then, for most of its playoff-less existence, college football only ever determined mythical national champions, wholly subjective, through the whims of polls. And in determining the greatest mythical national champion, one must eschew data for gridiron astrology to see when the stars most aligned for a single team. And if 1990 and 2007 are frequently recognized as modern college football’s most ludicrous seasons, 1984 is not far behind, where nearly every major team finished the season with at least one loss, and most with two, while arguably 1984’s best squad, Florida, was ineligible for the postseason and the title on account of a scant 107 NCAA recruiting and rules violations, allowing for BYU, the ultimate outsiders from the aptly pronounced WAC (that’s so whack!), to gradually ascend from unranked as the season began to #1 when it concluded. If their strength of schedule paled in comparison to the bluebloods they usurped, the mystical transitive property was nevertheless on their side, noted by John Underwood in Sports Illustrated where he cited a BYU professor diligently charting “how everybody has lost to somebody who has lost to somebody...who has lost to BYU.” “But nobody beat anybody who beat BYU,” Underwood decreed. “Case dismissed.” 

In a way, BYU being relegated to the Holiday Bowl by conference affiliation and forced to play an unbecoming, if brand name, opponent in Michigan, having a down year, was poetically apropos. If you are willing to watch the whole game, getting past ex-Cougar Steve Young filling in as color commentator for the hometown broadcast and saying “No doubt about it” so many times you may punch YouTube, you will realize the 24-17 final score belies BYU’s domination. Michigan, coached by reigning Big 10 dinosaur Bo Shembechler, runs a ball control offense exposed as antiquated and unsightly against BYU’s proclivity for passing. Shembechler’s Wolverines mostly subsist on BYU’s miscues, including three interceptions, all of which epitomize how, despite existing as one of America’s most conservative educational institutions, the 1984 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Football Team manifested glorious pigskin progressivism, quarterback Robbie Bosco, who briefly gets knocked out of the game before returning on a gimpy leg, not just timidly dinking and dunking but gallantly gunning for the spectacular, over and over, leading directly to those interceptions. Even his 13-yard game-winning, perfectly placed throw to Kelly Smith has a high degree of difficulty; a bit lower and who knows, maybe the game ends 17-17 and the Washington Huskies win it all. Instead, Bosco goes for it, yielding bedlam, in San Diego’s Jack Murphy Stadium and in the CFB universe. 

In his excellent book The Perfect Pass, S.C. Gwynne charted the sport’s evolution from run-based and condensed to pass-heavy and wide open through the eyes of former Kentucky coach Hal Mumme, though Gwynne noted how Mumme liberally studied and cribbed from Lavell Edwards’s BYU teams. Indeed, watching BYU spread the field in the 1984 Holiday Bowl now, it’s as if you are watching the future, even as their winning the mythical National Championship in a small-fry game on December 21st evinces a quainter college football, an irreproducible wonderful relic of the past. 

From the Couch: the 2020in2021 Summer Olympics in Review

When Team USA entered the Olympic Stadium during NBC’s broadcast of the Opening Ceremonies for the Tokyo Summer Olympics, co-host Mike Tirico, in a semi-scolding voice, instructed us to feel happy for these competitors despite the unrelenting COVID-19 pandemic, insinuating that if the Games were called off, we would be depriving them of their dream. Leaving aside that Tokyo2020in2021 could have simply become Tokyo2020in2021in2022 to alleviate the issue, Tirico was eschewing considerable context. If these Olympics were all about the athletes, then why were all 11,000 of them subject to the American National Football League schedule, prompting NBC to insist the Tokyo Games be held in late July, early August, in the middle of typhoon season and when the hot, humid weather is least conducive to those athletes? And if these Olympics were all about the athletes, then why were they framed in a nationalistic context, as a nominal triumph for Tokyo, an ostensible comeback for Japan from the Fukushima nuclear disaster? And if these Olympics were about city and country as much as the athletes, why not mention the Japanese protestors outside the stadium who did not want the Games to go forward under a literal state of emergency? Did their voices not count? The Games might belong to the athletes, but their marching in an empty stadium put into stark perspective how they were being sacrificed at the altar of a business deal between NBC, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and the city of Tokyo, sent to compete not in The Glory of Sport but to help cut already gargantuan losses. Tokyo2020in2021 was not Faster Higher Stronger; it was grab as much as you can.

It was a weird Olympics. The Games, both Summer and Winter, have been television shows, really, since Roone Arledge began producing them for ABC in 1964, though that sensation became even more acute in 2020 (2021). Athletes mugging for cameras is nothing new, but in 2020 (2021), their mugging in conspicuously empty stadiums was an incessant reminder that were it not for TV, none of this would be happening in the first place. The Olympic Village, normally ground zero for celebration, was, by many accounts, like American beach volleyball player Phil Dalhausser’s for The Financial Times, “kind of a bummer.” It was much more than a bummer for Belarusian sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya who was granted a Polish humanitarian visa after being ordered home to her autocratic country for criticizing her coaches and refusing to board the flight, a reminder that life goes on even when the Olympic flame is lit. Medal ceremonies, typically half-minute bursts of joy were necessarily compromised by medal recipients wearing masks. The women’s semifinal soccer match in a barren stadium between U.S. and Canada felt depressingly leaden, like it wasn’t the Olympic Games at all but the Nova Scotian Soccer League. Nothing was weirder than Beach Volleyball. A sport that typically evinces a party atmosphere came across apocalyptic in an uninhabited arena with vacant seats stretching to the sky, like Manhattan Beach had become a deserted Thunderdome, where the weather changing from pouring rain to such immense heat the sand had to be hosed down yielded brutal conditions. NBC marketed April Ross and Alix Klineman so heavily that their eventual Gold Medal on the overcooked beach felt pre-ordained even if their two-week ordeal felt less like winning than surviving. 

USA Gymnastics was counting on Simone Biles, GOAT™, to carry the team just as NBC was counting on her to carry their coverage, all of which felt inevitable because that’s how Biles’s talent has always felt. But that’s a strange paradox. She is capable of athletic maneuvers far beyond her Earthly peers, inherently underlining not only their difficulty but literal danger, and yet we – me – were simply conditioned to expect – assume – her flawlessness. As Biles struggled in the Gymnastics preliminaries, the NBC announcers continually reminded us that this was merely qualifying, that these scores did not matter in so much as gymnasts did not carry them into the ensuing stages of competition, missing the forest for the trees. Biles carries everything with her. Not just as an Olympics linchpin but as the emblem of a USA Gymnastics program that fostered an abhorrent system of sexual abuse and utter neglect for the mental and physical well-being of athletes in their care. That the national governing body expecting Biles to single-handedly earn them Gold was the same national governing body that hung her out to dry was an irony as rich as it was appalling. 

One-time American skier Krista Schmidinger once observed of her sport, where actual flying features as prominently as gymnastics, “When you’re in the air, you just have to accept that you’re in the air and have a good time up there.” You can’t have a good time in the air, however, when you’re lost, which Biles said she was, explaining she literally could not tell up from down. The Twisties, they call them, which makes them sound like baseball’s Yips, the go-to comparison for most commentators, though considering the peril of flying through the air and not knowing where you might land makes it sound more like a Formula 1 driver being wracked with hysterical blindness mid-race. And if once upon a time Biles would have been programmed to still put herself in harm’s way, she had the willingness, if not the exclusive status unshared by other athletes, to opt out.

The Biles-less team rallied and earned silver; her teammate Suni Lee won the hallowed individual all-around; her teammate Jade Carey won the Floor Exercise; Biles even came back at the end of competition and won Bronze on the Balance Beam, momentarily putting her hand to heart as she came off the mat, looking less like the GOAT™ than a person afraid from flying who had just exited an airliner. In a Sports Illustrated piece about his experiences at the Munich Olympics defined by violent tragedy, Kenny Moore noted “the essential lesson of all athletics: Everyone suffers. It’s what you do with your suffering that lifts and advances us, as swimmers, softball players and gymnasts. As a species.” True, though for too long in sports suffering has been viewed as an end unto itself. Biles redefined suffering not necessarily as something to be lionized, casting all manner of herculean Tokyo struggles in a different light. 

Canada’s Andre DeGrasse, always a bridesmaid, yada yada, won 200 meter Gold, and while athletes posing with flags looked that much more like pure photo ops this year, his still moved me in a melancholy sort of way, slumped on the track in the Maple Leaf, his elation shading into relief. Relieved is how American basketball coach Gregg Popovich sounded in confessing the weight he felt shepherding Team USA to an expected Gold Medal in Basketball, that expectation seeming to render the whole exercise as dutiful joylessness. Sifan Hassan of the Netherlands pulled an improbable triple on the track by winning Gold, Bronze, and Gold in the 5,000, the 1,500, and the 10,000. After the last, an excruciating crucible in the stifling heat, she said all she wanted was to sleep and that, upon waking up, felt stress-free now that her task was complete. By the end of the same interview, though, she was already pondering running the Marathon in Paris 2024. Olympians don’t sleep for long.

No squad ever had more fun than the U.S. Women’s Indoor Volleyball Team

As a counterpoint to all this weight, the U.S. Women’s Indoor Volleyball Team felt like they were floating all the time on air. In ranking literally every Olympic sport for Slate, Mike Canter, while placing Indoor Volleyball high, nevertheless intoned “The only confounding thing is why everyone on a team has to high-five after every point, no matter what happened.” Confounding?! The high-five after every point, no matter what happened, is the point; like every long distance run is a little life, to paraphrase Alan Sillitoe, so is every point in volleyball like a little life, each one to be celebrated or exorcised, frequently a snapshot of electric athleticism, like Jordan Thompson, an outside hitting superhero, every swing a cartoon KaPow! There was no one I enjoyed watching the first week of these Games more than her. And when Thompson rolled her ankle against Russia – excuse me, the Russian Olympic Committee – and the U.S. lost, things suddenly looked dire. But the Rolling Carnival of High-Fives just plugged in Annie Drews, there to chew bubblegum and kick ass (she never ran out of bubblegum, fyi), and high-fived to the top of the podium. After their throttling of Brazil to win the Gold, I felt like a theater kid striking the set; this team was so much fun, I didn’t want its run to ever end.

From a distance, the Canoe Slalom course looked almost as peculiar as the empty Beach Volleyball arena, manmade whitewater set down before the looming Daikanransha, the Giant Sky Wheel, as if Coney Island had instituted river rafting. And while the empty stadium seats beside the course did not exactly fool one into thinking these people were paddling up on the Kennebec, when the paddler would push off from the starting gate in the calm water and set off into the current, those empty stadium seats disappeared completely from the camera’s view and I was riveted, for every single run. And in going last in the first-ever Women’s Canoe-1 Slalom, with a seemingly insurmountable time to surpass, Australia’s Jessica Fox surpassed it, ripping through all 25 gates with no errors, winning Gold. In a historical context, it was significant; in a vacuum, it was bodacious, dude. 

Cyclists, in their rad bike helmets and completely cool, completely expressionless faces hardly seem to be aware of the crowd even in the best of times and in Tokyo, in the worst of times, wrung plenty of thrills from the empty velodrome anyway. It’s the build-up in sprint cycling, I’ve come to realize, the stillness of the cyclists as they gear up contrasted against the eventual explosion of speed which I love so much. After going through myriad heats in the Women’s Keirin, which begins with a pace setter, like if the Daytona 500 was only 6 laps, Shanne Braspennincx of the Netherlands, upon holding off her hard-charging cohorts, finally exploded too, unleashing a cathartic cry of exultation that felt so good. 

Nothing, though, usurped the Men’s High Jump, a breathtaking contest in which all manner of dudes from different countries pushed the boundaries of their own possibilities. Australia’s Brandon Starc did not even medal, finishing fifth, but proved no less moving than the victors when he tried to jump the Olympic record of 7 ft 10 in and smashed into the bar on the way up, weirdly moving, like some Project Mercury astronaut battering himself against the edge of space, trying to break through. The event concluded in a tie between Gianmarco Tamberi of Italy and Mutaz Essa Barshim of Qatar and while tradition, if not procedure, dictated a jump off should settle matters, when an Olympic official explained this to the two men, Barshim posed a simple question in the manner of a little kid asking if he and his friend can each get a scoop of chocolate ice cream. Barshim asked: “Can we have two Gold Medals?”

That Barshim and Tamberi were later revealed as the best of friends only made it more moving. American 400 meter hurdler Sydney McLaughlin edging past her friend, teammate and rival Dalilah Muhammad in the last ten meters of their final might have embodied the most visually axiomatic athletic truth in Tokyo (McLaughlin’s movement was so effortlessly smooth it rendered the drama moot and just made you shake your head at the sheer beauty of her stride) but in these improbable double Gold Medals, The Glory of Sport, too often unnaturally applied to certain moments at the Olympics to fit a narrative and a marketing purpose, manifested all on its own. Tamberi cried; Tamberi’s coach cried; Barshim’s coach cried; other random coaches and officials in the stands were crying; I was crying. After a tumultuous year that suddenly appears poised on the premise of further tumult, this provided unforeseen, jubilant release. I’m not sure it justified Tokyo2020in2021 itself, but sometimes in this life you have to let yourself savor the moment nonetheless.

Later

“It’s just the last couple of days my mind has been…not good.” – Elaine Benes

Here’s the thing, I was going to write a whole post explaining why the blog would be going dark for a couple weeks, how my mind feels muddy, how my body feels drained, how I’ve watched quite a few movies over the last month but am struggling not so much to form my thoughts, though there is some of that too, but getting my mind to make my hands type them out in some way that matches what’s in my head. But my mind is so muddy, my body so drained, that I’m not even sure I can manage that, even though I just tried. So, this is just a quick Lipton Cup-a-Blog to tell you that, after my traditional Olympics in Review post on Monday, provided my thoughts cohere enough on that one, and I really, really want them to because I really, really love writing that post (mostly for myself), Cinema Romantico will be going radio silent for a couple weeks. And maybe by the time we get back we will be able to...I lost my train of thought. 

(Reader’s Note: It has come to Cinema Romantico’s attention that this post may have engendered worry among our loyal frustrated followers. Alas, this only underlines the [lack of a] point of this post, my brain-fry preventing me from properly articulating my thoughts. I assure you, however, that this is merely general brain-fry, the kind suffered right now the world over. Here in America, where everything seemed poised to finally reach some kind of relative normalcy only to return to the precipice of dread combined with 16-ish months of working from home has just left me weary. But, as I have said many times before, this blog is my refuge, my garden; I won’t let it grow weeds for too long.)

My Favorite At the Movies Review

I have this mental image, which means it might not hold up under scrutiny by the Memory Police, of going along with my Dad to the tavern on the edge of my small Iowa hometown to pick up a pizza and seeing Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert sitting in their fake balcony on an episode of their syndicated show At the Movies on the big screen TV. As I remember it, the sound isn’t on, though that doesn’t matter because these two Midwestern movie-lovers are up there larger-than-life. Invented, semi-invented, or otherwise, this memory speaks to how prevalent Siskel & Ebert were at one time in the culture, as likely to be on the TV at your local watering hole as a Cubs game, which means the two late film critics also might be representative of a faded time in America when movies were truly monoculture, though that’s a post for another time.

Back then in central Iowa, when the Des Moines Register was a stone-cold great newspaper, before it was truly shredded by the Gannett vultures, they had a film critic, Joan Bunke, I regularly read. (I also occasionally read the Richards – Corliss and Schickel – in Time since my parents subscribed.) Even so, it was Siskel & Ebert who introduced me to film criticism, first by showing me you could have an opinion about a movie, that having an opinion about a movie made it art, or perhaps not art all, rather than mere caloric intake for a consumerist culture. And they showed me that there was this open-ended question in film criticism, one asked with every movie watched, whether you’re being tough enough when the quality isn’t there or if something good, perhaps even great, about an otherwise imperfect movie still renders it up to snuff.

That last one was captured for posterity in an At the Movies review of “Swamp Thing”, of all things, a conversation  heard in Brian Raftery’s new Ringer podcast, “Gene and Roger”, recounting the history and influence of At the Movies, in which Raftery contends the two men “taught an entire generation how to argue.” “And, for better and worse,” says Raftery, they “created the blueprint for modern media.” To back up this point, Raftery opens the podcast with audio culled from a clip of the old Siskel & Ebert At the Movies review of “Rocky IV” in which Gene begins by giving a good review leading Roger to volley a bad review right back even as you can hear Gene, off camera, to each point his antagonistic co-host makes, say, in a hysterically dry voice, “No.” 

It’s ironic, then, that while Siskel & Ebert made movie arguments go mainstream, my favorite review of theirs has always been one of accord rather than discord. Perhaps that makes me, as Gene Siskel was occasionally accused of being, contrarian. But I think the review speaks for itself.

It’s that Gene line about Steve Martin playing at a “Ginger Ale level”, which I carry with me as a verbal totem of how to go about colorfully describing elements that moved me in reviews, but mostly it’s about the intrinsic joy. “What do ya know,” Gene says, “ya got one right.” “Can’t even have an argument,” Roger confesses. Even if your brand is based on disagreement, when a movie speaks truth, you have to honor it.

Adventures in Movie Posters, part 72

It has been 25 years since I graduated (gulp) from high school which means it’s been 24 years since I arrived at Hillcrest Hall for my star-cross’d stint as a would-be English major at the University of Iowa, where I filled the dorm walls with a few choice cuts I found at the movie poster fair held in the lounge. That included a Mia Wallace poster, not exactly like the one below but close.

I only mention it because if, by some cosmic, comic coincidence, as if I were somehow starring in a bad remake of “Back to School” and wound up enrolling at Great Lakes University, I was moving into my dorm at the end of the month, I would put this poster up on my wall. 

That’s all.

Some Drivel On...The Goonies

Not long after the four misfit kids, billing themselves The Goonies, have set off in search of One Eyed Willie’s mystical riches, they enter the Lighthouse Lounge, a run down restaurant on the Oregon coast their treasure map indicates might provide access to the pirate’s booby-trapped cavern below. Of course, the Lighthouse Lounge has become temporary hideout for the Fratelli Family, a notorious band of criminals seen breaking one of their own out of prison as the movie starts, and so when the kids enter the establishment, the Fratellis have to act as if this is all normal, as if they are proprietors and the kids are customers. Needless to say, this doesn’t go so well, not just because hardened lawbreakers cannot really tamp down their malevolence but because a bunch of adolescents can’t really tamp down their inner impulse to be loud and over-inquisitive. Indeed, director Richard Donner mines great, if not truly cacophonous, comedy from this scene, transforming the dilapidated eatery into something more like a day care center, where low angled shots of the kids truly evince that frightening youthful sensation of unexpectedly being on your own and in over your head while high angled shots of the Fratellis, in particular Ma, brought to delightful life in Anne Ramsey’s aggravated air, suggests a substitute teacher who has had it up to here. The sequence ends with her leaning against the closed doors after she has chased out all the kids and saying, in a voice that Ramsey strips of any affect, like she’s about to collapse from exhaustion, “Kids suck.” 

That might have been the critical consensus too. “The Goonies” is frequently derided by grown-up critics as noisy. Leonard Maltin deemed it “exceptionally noisy” while Janet Maslin lamented for The New York Times how the Goonies traveled in “a noisy pack.” “The screenplay,” wrote Roger Ebert, “has all the kids talking all at once, all the time.” This is true and one of my most prominent takeaways in rewatching “The Goonies” for the first time in eons was how even when one character in the foreground was talking, often saying something important, another one, or two, or three, or four characters would be in the background chattering too. It has a cumulative effect of wearing you down. Donner himself cops to the noisiness. In a 2015 interview at Empire with Donner and the main cast for the film's 30th anniversary, when Josh Brolin notes how “The Goonies” sort of comes across like a movie kids might have made, Donner quips “A very loud one.“ No wonder I loved it so much as a kid: it was broadcasting on my frequency!

“’The Goonies,’” Maslin wrote, “doesn’t even pretend to court the grown-up set.” That’s true, if not something I was aware of back when I was younger and tended to catch bits and pieces of it here and there, again and again, at my best friend’s house on HBO. The movie was directed by Donner and written by Chris Columbus, but executive produced by Steven Spielberg who also gets A Story By credit. He was fresh off “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom”, darker than its predecessor, which caused a hubbub with the Motion Picture Association of America and the proper rating for its graphic content, not as kid-friendly as its original PG rating might have made it seem. And though “The Goonies” has some bad language, as Ebert notes, it is nevertheless more kid-friendly in so much as it is kid-centric, making the youngins the star of the show, all little Indiana Jones’ in their own way, each one getting to save a portion of the day along the way. Even their reason for seeking out the treasure, to save the home of Mikey (Sean Astin) from demolition to make way for a golf course, is tinged with a childlike fear of having your whole life just suddenly implode.

This is why adults are the villains. The Fratellis, of course, certainly, but also Mr. Perkins (Curt Hanson), millionaire owner of the country club who wants to buy Mikey’s home to tear it down. Seeking Mikey’s parents to tie up some paperwork ends in an early scene, he condescendingly deems The Goonies “little guys” before asking “Is your mommy here?” You don’t even need to here the satiric response of Mikey’s brother, Brand (Josh Brolin), who might be older but revealingly without a driver’s license, like he still hasn’t graduated to true young adulthood, about his mom having gone out to buy them Pampers to glean the smug baby talk spin Hanson puts on his character’s words. That’s how The Goonies are viewed, of course, as nothing more than children, unimportant and always in the way. And yet, they are the only ones who take initiative, more than their mother, who has already mentally checked out, and more than their father, hardly glimpsed and talked about in such a way to suggest he has already surrendered to life’s cruelty. That initiative might be framed in storybook terms but fables have kernels of truth and I kept seeing parallels to modern child activists seeking to clean up the messes made by patronizing adults. Kids suck, but they’re our only hope. 

Summer of 85

In a small boat off the coast of Normandy, teenage Alexis (Félix Lefebvre) takes down the sail and lays out in the sun, a smile on his face. He is jarred awake, though, sometime after by a thunderstorm moving across the water. If this moment becomes the impetus for drama, in which the taller, more assured David Gorman (Benjamin Voisin) lives out those qualities by coolly sailing to Alex’s rescue after the latter capsizes, it doubles as a nifty metaphor for the teenage experience where one moment everything is hunky-dory and the next a tempest within is positively raging. It’s the sort of tempest ostensibly coursing through Alex, torn between continuing his studies and going to work, though Lefebvre’s performance and director François Ozon’s tone render the character’s emotional state less like a violent storm than a sun shower, further hindered by a framing device that takes the piss outta the whole thing.

“Summer of 85” is told in parallel narratives. That at-sea rescue occurs in the past, sparking a romantic relationship between Alex and David. If that seems to suggest Luca Guadagnino’s “Call Be Your Name” (2017), Ozon’s film, based on a 1982 novel by Aidan Chambers, is less about sexual awakening than inventing the people we love, to borrow Alex’s phrase. Indeed, the reverie of their teenage dream comes across both deliberately coy in its physicality, staging scenes of their lovemaking like covers of romance and novels, and narratively over-the-top, akin to David’s pronouncements about recklessly speeding on his motorcycle, how going fast is forever out of reach, evoking the gleefully precise bad poetry culled from a teenager’s diary which I mean as a compliment. And that’s just their love affair is, or seem to be anyway, a series of purple diary entries, since the present-day scenes reveal that David is dead, Alex has been implicated in his death in some way, and Alex’s writing teacher (Melvil Poupaud) has encouraged his pupil to explain what happened for the authorities by way of a story, meaning what we are seeing is a story Alex is telling.

This narrative conceit creates a big issue even as it simultaneously writes that issue off, somewhat. If you think David is too good to be true, that’s essentially because he is, as the introductory rescue dramatically denotes. His sizes makes an almost comical counterpoint to the smaller Alex, larger than life, looking a little like if Malcolm of “Malcolm in the Middle” had hooked up with Oliver of “Call Be Your Name.” And if David’s sudden behavioral shift in the middle of the movie seems to come out of nowhere, that’s because it does, the emotional lurches having less to do with him than how Alex views it, growing enraged when an English tourist, Kate (Philippine Velge), comes between them. And Kate proves even less a character than David: first the wedge, then Alex’s co-conspirator, and eventually his momentary oracle. It’s funny, really, when you think about it, hilarious even, the prism through which boys tend to view girls, as either helpful to their self-centered causes or a hindrance to them. In a way, her phoniness is the truest thing in the film.

This suggests Alex as unreliable narrator. But that’s the thing, despite bearing all the hallmarks of an unreliable narrator within the narrative, even briefly raising the possibility of Alex suffering from a mental disorder, all this is taken at face value. True, Alex’s mother (Isabelle Nanty) casts a wary eye toward nearly everything he does, Nanty’s performance deftly evincing her character as mere spectator in her son’s own life, but Alex’s teacher receives the story as gospel. What’s more, while the denouement is littered with increasingly histrionic events, none of them are rendered with any sense of exaggeration or irony, the story of “Summer of 85” growing wilder even as Ozon reins in his aesthetic, creating a fatal contrast. By playing it straight, Ozon is both hanging Lefebvre out to dry, translating his performance as callow and self-absorbed rather than romantically unhinged, and boxing David in as a fantastical projection rather than a person, insultingly transforming his death into nothing more than Alex’s catharsis.