Seeing My Favorite Movie on The Big Screen

As it happens, this week – today, in fact – marks 15 years since I attended the Minneapolis wedding of my friends Becky and Eric, one of the great contemporary marital celebrations, with a Unity Gong in place of a Unity Candle and pizza served at midnight to settle our stomachs, in a manner of speaking. The next morning, bright and early, I set off in my Honda Civic, down Highway 61 and through my dad’s hometown of Red Wing, MN, beginning a two-day trek across half the country, through Indiana, along the backroads of Kentucky, plunging into the Tennessee Valley and then climbing back up into the Great Smoky Mountains, ending in Asheville, North Carolina where I spent the next few days exploring the filming sites of my favorite movie, “Last of the Mohicans” (1992), a road trip I had been dreaming of since at least whenever it was in the summer of 1993 I rented the first of Michael Mann’s four magnum opuses and had my nascent experience, which I only realized many years later, of a movie connecting to my un/subconsciousness. This journey would not have even been possible for a directionally challenged idiot like me were it not for a book published by a pair of fellow “Mohican” devotees laying out in precise, helpful detail where to go and how to get there, a book I can recommend for the person in your life who last year mourned the passing of Colonel Munro. 

Last of the Mohicans: opening titles [credit: me]

Despite being a movie I loved so much I went to see where it was filmed, however, I had never seen it the way it was filmed – that is, on film, in a theater, projected up to a big screen. I was 15 and car-less when “Last of the Mohicans” was released, not quite as into movies as I was about to become, and though there are occasionally repertory screenings of it in New York, there had never one in a place where I lived, not even Chicago. Until Monday, that is, when the Chicago Film Society (its noble mission: to show shit on film) hosted its first indoor screening since early 2020 at the Music Box Theatre, a screening of “Last of the Mohicans.” And after too many years spent inappropriately watching Mann’s opus on my parents’ old Sanyo, or the 13-inch Samsung in my college dorm, or even my laptop last April during the Pandemic’s early days when My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife was working in the dining room but I had the day off and wanted to get lost in my favorite movie, I bought my ticket and went straight to the front row so the screen could properly overwhelm me. 

The screening was of a 35mm print the Chicago Film Society purchased off Ebay specifically because, given Mann’s tendency to tinker with his own movies post-release, it was the original theatrical cut rather than the Director’s Expanded Cut or the Director’s Definitive Edition. I have always preferred the theatrical cut, perhaps because it’s the one I fell in love with, renting it, recording it off some ABC Sunday Night broadcast, buying my own VHS copy. But it’s also my preferred cut because it contains the wry Daniel Day-Lewis one-liners (“We just dropped in to see how you boys is doin’”) eliminated in other versions, which joyfully heighten his character as a Saturday Matinee Hero, as does Clannad’s “I Will Find You”, laid out over the late-movie pursuit by our intrepid Mohicans of the Huron Indians from the falls to their village in the theatrical cut but then excised at discretion of the director. Maybe retroactively Mann thought a New Age tune had become, paradoxically, outmoded, but I have always liked that song there, functioning as a Hero’s Theme for Hawkeye as he scales cliff faces, and one could argue New Age is just right for a movie that ends looking east to west, toward America’s new age, for better and for worse and all that entails. 

In the end, though, the cut didn’t get me as much as, well, the movie itself. It wasn’t so much previously unnoticed details, like the water dripping from Day-Lewis’s hair when Hawkeye is advising Colonel Munro of the Huron war party, or even finally getting to see those ravishing close-ups in their intended gargantuan screen-filling manner, as it was the immersive, intense nature of the theatrical experience. There’s that line Cora has toward the end about the whole world being on fire, which I genuinely know now is not just a line but the feeling Mann evokes, from the earth-shaking cannon blasts to the literal thunder of the waterfalls to the music, my God, the music. When the title card came up and the Main Theme hit those familiar, famous notes and RATTLED the speakers, ENSCONCED the theater...Lord, I felt that in my bones. Movies now tend to confuse Epic with narrative, wide-reaching and interlocking, not rendering the genuine sensation of an Epic. Up there, on the big screen, the level of the sound design, the scope of the photography, the way Mann uses the tools of the medium to wordlessly tell the story and to impart emotion...that is Epic. 

The movie industry was already in flux before the Pandemic, of course, what with streaming’s ascent and the theatrical experience on some sort of wane. The issues, like all of them, are more complex than the social media warriors lobbing verbal grenades over digital trenches would make it seem and I grasp the differing viewpoints. I was lucky enough to grow up in a small town that was only a 20-minute drive from movie theaters, so I always had access to the big screen experience. But that didn’t mean we got every movie, not in those days, and I knew plenty of people who had to drive hours to see anything of consequence in a theater at all. The theatrical experience is not always readily available outside urban centers; streaming is a good thing. But the movie theater, that’s a good thing too, a special thing. I could appreciate “Last of the Mohicans” on a small screen, that goes without saying, but even if I have watched it dozens and dozens and dozens of times, at the Music Box, on Monday night, during the ambush scene, when Hawkeye helped Cora up and together they spirited off into the haze as the music swelled, I was holding my breath before I even realized I was doing it. 

That 35mm print was so old it was all scratched up, with a green line running down one side of the screen for a little awhile, but it still felt brand new. 

International Falls

“International Falls” opens with Ruthie (Jessie Sherman), manning the front desk of a motel in the eponymous Minnesota border town, gifting her co-worker Dee (Rachael Harris) one of those How to Perform Stand-Up Comedy books. It’s a little on the nose in conveying Dee’s dream, but there is nevertheless something about how Harris plays the moment that still makes it work, this kind of veiled annoyance portraying this as not the first time someone has bought her such a book. In a town as small as International Falls, your private dream can’t help but become public, though what Dee needs is not assistance off the bookstore clearing rack but lived-in experiences this moment at the front desk does not seem to suggest is possible. Then Tim Fletcher (Rob Huebel), a road comic performing at the local comedy club, walks through the doors and everything changes.

The emergent irony is that Dee and Tim share an arc, she’s just at the beginning of it and he’s at the end. She has come to realize her doofy husband Gary (Matthew Glave), skewing a little close to Gopher State stereotype, is cheating on her and that she wants to stop watching standup comics perform and perform herself. Tim, meanwhile, is going through a divorce, losing custody of his son and seeing the flame of standup comedy extinguish right before his eyes. In another movie called “International Falls”, the town itself would become the catalyst for change, reconfiguring Tim’s worldview, making Dee realize what she has. But director Amber McGinnis’s movie, based off a script by Thomas Ward which is on his own play, sees things with more grim clarity, including the town, mocking that simpleminded idea by having Tim wryly deem International Falls “a charming little Christmas town”, like it’s the Bizarro World version of a Hallmark Christmas movie. True, McGinnis is a little too reliant on characters literally saying “It’s cold” rather than imbuing the film with that sense of an overpowering chill, but she also presents the place matter-of-factly and without the kind of kitchen sink lyricism of too many American indies. 

So, if the town isn’t the catalyst, what is? It’s Dee, mentally acting out against Gary, going back to Tim’s room after he bombs his first stand-up set and, ah, pleasuring him, even though this scene is decidedly short on pleasure. Filmed in that harsh kind of motel light, it’s mechanical, weird, pitiful. But it’s also the movie actively rejecting any kind of staid romance for these characters while also showing them laid bare, willing to confess anything now that they’ve gotten that out of the way. Indeed, Tim, despite his defeatist, self-deprecating attitude, perfectly embodied by Huebel and his patented, perfect Eeyore voice, becomes an unlikely mentor to Dee, in comedy, yes, but also life. When Gary calls the motel looking for his wife, Tim takes the phone and lets Gary have it, the best scene in the movie, evoking this strange but wonderful let’s-lay-all-our-cards-on-the-table honesty. It also goes to show what must have made Tim a decent road comic at some point in the past, his ability to fight back.

Standup comedy, however, strangely gets the shrift. Though it is ostensibly of overriding importance, it also winds up on the backburner. Ward’s play apparently blended Tim and Dee’s conversations with Tim’s standup act, sounding reminiscent of the early episodes of “Seinfeld”, demonstrating how life affects comedy and vice-versa. Though that happens here occasionally, and only early in the film, the device never really works, hampered by the fact that Tim has essentially given up, which rather than unleashing sorrowful, enlightening truth in his comedy merely comes across aggressively unfunny. At the same time, though, it underlines his ostensible dime store truth that comedy is something akin to just being you, telling your truth, like it’s something that Tim lost along the way and Dee is now gaining in his presence, finally honing in on truths that no How to Write Stand-Up Comedy book could ever explain. She finally takes the stage near movie’s end, where Harris finds just the right balance of awkward and funny, as someone’s first ever standup set probably would, finding her way by getting personal. It’s not Tig Notaro’s I Have Cancer set, but what is?

What Movies Most Needed Individual Character Posters?

Despite already having a poster including most of its myriad characters, Denis Villeneuve’s forthcoming “Dune”, which early reviews tend to suggest needs to be watched somewhere around Barstow, near the edge of the desert, preferably after the drugs have taken hold, also released several individual character posters. The upcoming “Venom 2” did this too as did Wes Anderson for “The French Dispatch.” Anderson has done this before too, like with “Fantastic Mr. Fox”, and even went the individual character poster interactive route with “Moonrise Kingdom.” The Coen Brothers, whose films generally have as enjoyable a plethora of characters as Anderson’s works, released character posters for their black comic romp “Burn After Reading.” Back in the halcyon days when I was working box office at the Cobblestone 9, I suggested to the new head manager, seeking to decorate his office, to cover the walls with all the character posters from “Jackie Brown.” He did not heed my advice. Still, character posters are a stylistic choice I have always enjoyed and one which I wish the marketing departments of more movies would employ. What movies do I most wish had gone the character poster route? Well, thank you for asking!

Best In Show. Honestly, I was sort of surprised in Googling around that these didn’t already exist. 

Kicking and Screaming. Speaking of St. Posey. I’m sure the budget of Noah Baumbach’s debut feature film did not allow for individual character posters, but boy would those have been the rage of all the liberal intelligentsia college towns. I just sincerely hope they would have gotten all the way to Friedrich (Chris Reed) with an accompanying “Two grapes!” quotation. 

Ronin. In my faux-dream garish San Fernando Valley home, these character posters would line the hallway to the guest bathroom. 

Mars Attacks! If there was Taffy Dale character poster, I would still have it up on my wall. 

The Misfits. Man, the Rat Pack, the Brat Pack, none of ’em could touch The Misfits with a 10-meter cattle prod.

Top Gun. I mean, the closing credits essentially are individual character posters. I might have become a movie memorabilia nut, scouring the Earth for Sundown posters.

Conan the Destroyer. The best part here would have been the wide-ranging appeal. Wilt Chamberlain could have signed Bombaata posters at Lakers fan events; NYC dance clubs would have put up Zula (Grace Jones) posters; “Wonder Years” fan conventions would have sold Princess Jehnna (Olivia d’Abo) posters by the truckload. 

L.A. Story. Steve Martin could have had so much fun with this concept. I would like to think he would have included character posters for characters who were not even in the movie. Martin Short as Personal Trainer. Valerie Bertinelli as Brand Ambassador. Justine Bateman as Unemployed Actor. Etc. 

The Ice Storm. A series of posters of 70s suburbia characters looking glum, just every single one more miserable than the last, might not have been the most audience-friendly marketing campaign but, boy, would it have been glorious. 

Trees Lounge. These would have been great because you could be drinking at some random dive bar in some random city and look over and notice a faded, PBR-stained Seymour Cassel or Debi Mazar or Mark Boone Junior poster staring back at you from the wood-paneled wall. 

I Got Nothin’

Even as a 15-year-old, when I read in my 1993 summer movie preview issue of Rolling Stone how the Nintendo game Super Mario Bros had been made into a movie, I remember scoffing. Maybe that’s because even though I sometimes think I loved every movie when I was younger, I know that I really didn’t, as evinced by “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”, which I went and saw with a friend and spent the whole time thinking “Why am I watching this?” Indeed, 1993’s ostensible adventure comedy, or something, “Super Mario Bros.” proved a spectacular failure, recounted by Karina Longworth for Grantland in 2013. One would think such epic lack of success would cure anyone of wanting to make a “Super Mario Bros.” movie ever again but here, in The Future, where Intellectual Property has superseded Idea Men, nope, we’ve got another “Super Mario Bros.” go picture, Lauren Bacall help us, with Nintendo, Illumination, and Universal teaming up to provide an animated version next year. 

I honestly had no idea this movie was even happening until I logged into Twitter (big mistake!) the other day and discovered the news that two Wonder Bread Americans (Chris Pratt & Charlie Day) would be giving voice to, ahem, Mario & Luigi had unleashed a torrent of memes with myriad trap doors opening to various social media ethics debates. I confess, I like the Day voice casting, simply because the only people who should be making a “Super Mario Bros.” movie is the “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” gang. I mean, the movie itself will be whatever it will be but it was hard not to think the movie itself was beside the point in the way putting a decent product on the basketball court has become immaterial to so many NBA owners so long as they turn a profit. The 1993 “Super Mario Bros.” failed because it wasn’t a good movie; the 2022 “Super Mario Bros.” was seeking to set itself up to succeed even it isn’t a good movie.  

Anyway, in scrolling through all this madness, every seventh Tweet or so, a promoted Tweet from the Hulu show “Nine Perfect Strangers” kept popping back up. I have not watched that show, have no idea what it’s about, but it seems like it might have something to do with a cult? Because there was Nicole Kidman, her eminence, stirring up some magenta-ish smoothie, holding it out to me with a look less inviting than eerily intoxicating, and saying “Try it.” In that moment, I thought about accepting her offer. I really, really did.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Missouri Breaks (1976)

“Seems like there’s something new in the air,” observes ruster Tom Logan (Jack Nicholson). That something new in the air is Braxton (John McLiam), the cultured, conceited land baron who has just hung Pete (Richard Bradford), Logan’s foreman, but Nicholson’s line reading seems to suggest something bigger than that, something in the stars, a whole seismic shift of the American West and all that entails. Indeed, the opening shot of “The Missouri Breaks” is a close-up of a few undisturbed and undiluted wildflowers just blowing in the wind. Eventually, though, three men on horseback appear as tiny images on the horizon, gradually growing bigger as they trot further and further into the frame, as if becoming a blight on the land. These men include Pete and Braxton, the latter blathering on and on in that way self-impressed white dudes do, about how everything you see was just grass and how he has now acquired “8,000 cattle and 3,500 volumes of English literature in my library.” Law, order, civilization, they have all come to the west. By the end, though, such order will have been tempered. And if Arthur Penn’s movie might be most famous for co-star Marlon Brando’s on-set antics, so thoroughly improvising that he forced Penn to rearrange the ending mid-movie, this is one time the mercurial legend’s noted eccentricities enhanced rather than detracted. 

In the wake of Pete’s death, Logan and his consigliere Cal (Harry Dean Stanton) choose to exact vengeance by purchasing a ranch close to Braxton’s property in order to rustle his stock, funding this venture by pilfering a train, a sequence denoting Penn’s mostly flippant attitude toward traditional action, illustrated in the escape where Penn cuts to Logan escaping the train only to realize the train is standing on a bridge, causing all sorts of comical complications. Braxton enlists Robert E. Lee Clayton (Marlon Brando), an Irish-American regulator, to sniff out the rustling perpetrators and resolve the problem. That sounds dramatic, but “The Missouri Breaks” is no hurry, adopting a languid pace and tone reveling in conversation, relationships, and character quirks. Nicholson develops a relaxed, lived-in tone with Stanton suggesting years on the trail and develops a convincing, off-kilter romantic chemistry with Kathleen Lloyd as Braxton’s daughter Jane, proto-feminist for whom Lloyd’s nigh modern dialect and temperament feel spot-on, epitomizing those changes in the wind. Thomas McGuane’s oft-kookily formal dialogue, meanwhile, is a delight to hear, especially in our current world, where writing lines that are fun to say comes across antiquated, making it all the more unfortunate that Brando saw fit to concoct his own equally kooky, less mellifluous, compelling dialogue. 

“Miss,” Logan says to Jane after asking if he can accompany her on a ride, “I’m gonna take this opportunity to be just a little damn bit offended. Cuz if there’s anybody in this district who’s got a right to think of themselves as wholesome companionship, why, it’s yours truly.” Not long after in the same conversation, Jane observes Samuel L. Johnson’s observation, the one about a blade of grass just being a blade of grass, “tell me about a human being.” Logan’s response in Nicholson’s voice is the verbal equivalent of a furrowed brow. “Well, I don’t understand that,” he says, emphasizing that, like what in tarnation does that mean, a reminder that if Nicholson spent much of the current century sliding into semi-parody of his Jack persona, once upon a time his elocution was absolutely electric and eccentric. 

It is not, however, just Nicholson’s elocution but the way he lives that elocution out, managing to come across both uncouth and unexpectedly refined in a scene where he brews Jane some tea. He makes his character’s affection for and intrigue in her ring true just as Logan’s wandering thoughts about leading the lawless life behind for a smaller one of love and farming rings true too. Brando, on the other hand, I don’t know. I’m not sure he makes anything ring true, at least in terms of character, just an odd jumble of tics, Brando’s expression in scenes where he really ramps those tics up coming across as self-impressed as Braxton’s when he hires Brando’s character to set things right. That Penn, by all accounts, including his, essentially gave up trying to direct Brando on set, however, weirdly magnifies not only how the actor adheres strictly to his own agenda but how the character Brando is playing adheres strictly to his own agenda too, ignoring Braxton to do as he pleases, ravaging Logan’s best laid plans along the way, a movie and man, a man and movie about the severe limits of control. 

Some Drivel On...White Sands

“White Sands” takes its name from the national park in southern New Mexico. Like no other place on Earth, its website boasts. I don’t doubt it. Alas, Roger Donaldson’s unremembered movie does not honor its impressive namesake. Granted, it is packed with actors who are like no one else: Willem Dafoe, Mickey Rourke, M. Emmet Walsh, Fred Dalton Thompson, even Maura Tierney, whose unique energy Hollywood, as “White Sands” reproves, has frustratingly never known quite how to harness. Daniel Pyne’s screenplay, though, is one that hangs its actors out to dry by over-relying on non-stop twists and turns taking us further and further away from what the actors seem to be trying to do in the first place, reaching the unfortunate point in the middle of the movie where you can tell the entire thing is just a house of cards waiting to collapse. The best shot in the movie, in fact, is the last one, doubling as a metaphor for the movie itself, so much sand running emptily through our hands.

Donaldson’s movie opens with small town Sheriff, Ray Dolezal (Dafoe), being summoned to the middle of nowhere in the White Sands where hikers have discovered a dead body and your standard-issue suitcase filled with $500,000. The coroner, Bert (Walsh), half-jokingly suggests to Ray they keep the cash for themselves, who would know, and Dafoe plays this moment marvelously, looking past Walsh as he suggests it, brushing it off without saying a word, silently establishing his worldview. It also establishes the rapport between the two actors, deepened back at the office where excavating a bullet from the body becomes an improbable comedy routine, evoking two people very used to working together.

It could have been the whole movie, really, Ray and Bert. But “White Sands” moves Bert aside early by having Ray decide of his own volition to go undercover as the dead man, Bob Spencer, calling a phone number off a piece of paper digested by the deceased and dug up by the curious coroner. Ray is in over his head almost from the jump, losing the money to a couple red herring characters and then realizing that money belonged to an FBI investigation that wants him to keep on the case not so much to find out what’s going on as get that money back. The lead agent is played by Samuel L. Jackson back in those strange early 90s days when filmmakers were just as liable to tamp down his patented frenzy as unleash it. 

On the other hand, Rourke, playing the magnificently named arms dealer Gorman Lennox, ably employs a laconic cool belying a violent streak that is rather effective, at least until his reveal, that he’s working for the CIA, which Rourke seems to play like the writerly b.s. it is, like even he doesn’t believe it, like this other guy’s more fun. Either way, Gorman leads Ray into the shadowy world of America’s military industrial complex in the form of a femme fatale, Lane Bodine (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), helping broker weapons to South American freedom fighters. That’s not a bad idea, but “White Sands” reduces it to a MacGuffin, preferring to hone in on the idea of Ray getting In Too Deep.

This never really works. Though Lane calls Ray out for being an undercover yokel almost immediately, she never exactly lords this information over him to make him do things he doesn’t want, as “White Sands” plays it more like a conventional love affair. And that temptation is supposed to be contrasted against Ray’s straight and narrow lifestyle, though his wife (Mimi Rogers) is never really established as a person, just an emblem, meaning such temptation holds no juice. (There is also the strange situation with Ray’s kid’s bike. That is to say, a couple times in the early scenes, we see Ray’s kid leave his bike in persnickety places, seeming to foreshadow some event where his bike either gets in the way or saves the day at a pressure-packed moment, only to never materialize, suggesting something was cut or dropped.) Dafoe, meanwhile, is almost always stepping wrong. When the character is supposed to feel the pull of an illicit lifestyle, he comes across too buttoned-up; when the character is supposed to feel buttoned-up, he comes across as if he’s feeling the pull of an illicit lifestyle. It leaves the whole movie and its emergent madness feeling rudderless and sort of intrinsically suggests that sometimes a movie’s plot grows so confusing, it can even confuse the great actor it stars. 

A Trip Down Entertainment Weekly Fall Movie Preview Lane

The first day of Fall, astronomically speaking, is today, September 22nd, the Autumnal Equinox, and slated to end on Tuesday December 21st, the Winter Solstice. The first day of Fall meteorologically speaking, however, began back on September 1st and will conclude November 30th, dividing the seasons into three four-month blocks rather than relying exclusively on the position of the Earth. Less well-known yet nevertheless accepted by some weather experts, especially those with a cinephilia bent, is Fall Movie Fall. 

When does Fall Movie Fall begin? Well, that’s where it gets tricky. Some meteorologists tend to cite the Toronto International Film Festival as the beginning of Fall Movie Fall; other meteorologists view the start of Fall Movie Fall like its own kind of ever-shifting equinox, dependent upon when the first Fall-feeling movie is released. That means Fall Movie Fall began Friday September 10 when the new Paul Schrader movie, “The Card Counter” (👍👍), hit theaters. A more outmoded model of Fall Movie Fall,  meanwhile, pinpoints the publishing of the Entertainment Weekly Fall Movie Preview as the first day of Fall Movie Fall. Outmoded, of course, because Entertainment Weekly, now a digital-first entity that oxymoronically only publishes monthly, has lost most of its luster, meaning the Fall Movie Preview has lost its luster too.

For a long time this blog was among those who viewed the Entertainment Weekly Fall Movie Preview as the official start of Fall. That’s all gone now. And if autumn is a time of nostalgia, the beautiful death of all those leaves signaling the end of something even as something else begins, let’s take a brief moment here, to remember a time (the 1990s) when the EW Fall Movie Preview took us into a new season with glossy style...

As it turns out, Entertainment Weekly, which first published in February of 1990, did not even have a Fall Movie preview for its first two years of existence. It had a Holiday Movie Preview, as seen above, with Michelle Pfeiffer shilling for “The Russia House”, taking us back to the waning days of the Cold War and reminding me that I still need to see “French Exit.” 

Remember when transforming an old TV show into a movie felt unique?

Wait, what? The very first EW Fall Movie preview cover was MY FAVORITE MOVIE OF ALL TIME? 

What’s also interesting to note here is that while each subsequent EW Fall Movie Preview cover has a star or stars from the chosen movie posing in a kind of publicity shot, this cover is just a shot culled from the movie. I like imagining EW trying to schedule DDL for a photo shot and the mercurial acting titan simply saying “Nah, I’m not gonna do that.”

Yes, kids, once upon a time Marty Scorsese, bane of the Marvel Universe, could land magazine covers too. And though EW could have gone DDL two years in a row, or played to the Gen X crowd with Winona, it chose Michelle. Because that’s how big she was. Man, I really need to see “French Exit.”

Gump got the Oscar, but Pulp got the EW Fall Movie Preview cover.

Oops! John Woo’s “Broken Arrow” was supposed to be released over the Christmas Holiday of 1995 only to get bumped back when the special effects needed some ironing out. Who would have gotten the cover instead? Brosnan? Pitt? Cindy Crawford in “Fair Game”? Whatever, I’m happy to have this cover in my life, this image of Travolta and Slater palling around, and imagining it as a “Stripes”-ish buddy comedy instead, “Broken Bottles.” 

I’ll always have fond memories of “Ransom” simply because my faux-legendary run working for Carmike Cinemas, gradually working my way up from concessionist to manager, ending just before the turn of the century, kicked off the fall of 1996 with a “Ransom” standee staring me in the face every shift from across the lobby. Also, is “Ransom” the best Ron Howard movie? Is he better at workmanlike, genre-ish stuff than the prestige-ish stuff? A quick Ron Howard Top 5:

1. Ransom

2. Apollo 13

3. The Paper

4. Splash

5. Willow (if only because Howard, of all people, along with John Dahl and “Kill Me Again”, ensured we would always have cinematic evidence that Val Kilmer and Joanne Whalley were just so hot) 

This cover will always stir strange feelings in me. After all, the Fall of 1997 was my star-cross’d first semester at the University of Iowa, star-cross’d because I probably was more focused on memorizing all the release dates within this issue than with all that crap in class and spent as much time at the Englert and the Campus III as I did in the library. Did I learn more from a 155-minute movie than I ever learned in school? The floor is open for discussion. 

When I went to the corner bar a couple years ago around Halloween, I noticed “Hocus Pocus” playing on every TV hanging from the wall. “It’s ‘Hocus Pocus’ night!” the server cheerily explained. “’Hocus Pocus?’” I asked incredulously. “I’m a ‘Practical Magic’ man.’” (I did not say that. But I thought it.) Speaking of which, when can we get another Kidman/Bullock vehicle? And don’t tell me because “Practical Magic” was poorly received. I live in world where Hollywood keeps trying to make Ryan Reynolds a thing; you can give me another Kidman/Bullock vehicle. 

What a way to wrap up the century. You just know they were trying to get a cover with crackling sexual chemistry between Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas, couldn’t make it work, and finally, fed up and desperate, just took them down to the pool of the Four Seasons and shot this.

The Green Knight

There’s a scene in David Lowery’s second feature film “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” when Bob (Casey Affleck) explains to Sweetie (Nate Parker) how he escaped prison. It’s less an explanation, really, than a tall tale about how he had always planned to one day walk right out the prison’s front door because he’s got a greater purpose, see. Sweetie lets this flight of fancy drag on and then, when it finally ends, sits with it for a second. He says: “I heard you jumped off a work truck.” It’s hilarious, in its quiet way, and suggests how Lowery is fascinated by myths and their oft attendant b.s. Lowery followed that up by retelling Disney’s “Pete’s Dragon”, taking the mystical flying monster seriously by fusing a mythical world with our own natural world. So, it’s no surprise that Lowery has wound his way to the most durable and sizable of all myths – Camelot. “The Green Knight” is adapted from a 14th Century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Anonymous, one I will leave to the medievalists and poets to explain, and simply observe that Lowery seems to have chosen this material to dissect and then dismiss the grandeur of myths as matter-of-factly as Sweetie shrugging off Bob’s.

As “The Green Knight” opens, Gawain (Dev Patel) awakens in a brothel where he has spent Christmas Eve with Essel (Alicia Vikander). Patel’s loose-limbed physicality in this sequence and the ensuing one at home, tripping and falling in the brothel just as he falls into bed at home, rhymes with Lowery’s roving camera to heighten Gawain’s careless air, painting him as something akin to a spoiled Camelot rich kid. Indeed, at a Christmas celebration that night, King Arthur (Sean Harris) summons Gawain, his nephew, forward, asking to hear a story. Patel allows his heretofore cocky countenance to virtually dissolve before Royalty, as if he is not worthy, which he essentially admits he is not, confessing he has no story to tell like one would confess a sin. Lowery, however, intercuts Gawain’s confession with a scene of his own mother (Sarita Choudhury) weaving a spell, evoking the idea that she is conjuring up a story out of thin air to make him the nobleman he is not. In short order, The Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) enters King Arthur’s court and lays down a challenge for anyone to land a blow against him so long as he is allowed to return a successful blow one year hence at his home, The Green Chapel. Gawain accepts.

Looking like if Tolkien’s Treebeard was designed by Carlo Rambaldi, The Green Knight itself, in the special effects and sound design, is otherworldly, yes, but distinctly in the room with other characters, epitomizing Lowery’s world-building approach. If mystical movies tend to lean hard toward fantasy or trying too hard to render the mythical real, like Antoine Fuqua’s “King Arthur” (2004), “The Green Knight” creates a dark, grimy world where magic still exists, rendering the supernatural as terrifying as it is wonderful, something truly beyond normal understanding. Surely The Green Knight is beyond Gawain’s. Though beheading his foe becomes the advent of Gawain’s folktale, the scene itself feels like anything but mythmaking, more like a magic realist version of Printing the Legend. Patel’s manner in this sequence is less heroism than nervous determination giving way to an unhinged, indignant bloodlust when The Green Knight kneels, patiently waiting to receive the blow, like the callow Gawain is ticked off because he can’t figure this supernatural creature. And when the Green Knight simply picks up his own head, says he’ll see Gawain next Christmas, and laughs, that’s not a myth before you in Gawain; that’s just a man, taken aback and terrified.

A year later, Gawain’s myth has burgeoned, brought home in a puppet show for kids reenacting The Green Knight’s beheading, but it has hardly strengthened his resolve to meet the moment. Essel wants him to forgo his journey and marry her instead, espousing the goodness over greatness, though the way she squeezes the corners of his mouth to move lips in faux agreement humorously renders him a person unable to even express what he wants either way. It’s only after Arthur essentially kicks him out of the house and tells him to get a job by way of King-ish poetry – “I do not know of any man who has not marched up to greet death before his time” – that Gawain reluctantly sets out. 

If this sounds like an extraordinary amount of plot, it is merely set-up, as much of the movie is consumed by Gawain’s journey across a vast, empty, uninviting landscape to meet his fate. A shot of Gawain sitting before a fire at night suggests the American West as much as Medieval England, evoking how “The Green Knight” comes to feel less like any sword and sorcerer epic than an Acid Western. That is partially because rather than gradually build to its Green Chapel showdown, “The Green Knight” turns slow and elliptical, using Gawain’s various encounters along the way to question backwards notions of honor this whole quest ostensibly elicits and sexual temptation that sheds light on his more craven desires despite an imminent higher calling. And it is partially because, well, while Gawain does not drop acid, he does ingest shrooms, portraying what follows as both a literal and figurative trip, the denouement nothing short of an epic vision, flash-forwarding far into the future. It’s an indelible sequence flirting with greatness, just as Gawain himself does, achieving the grandeur that comes from a myth granting immortality even as that immortality is wickedly undressed as the only thing that matters.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Thief (1981)

There is a scene in Michael Mann’s “Heat” when bank robber Neil McCauley (Robert DeNiro) convinces his lady friend, Eady (Amy Brenneman), to come away with him in spite of the big bank robbery going bust. It’s one of the very few scenes in one of Mann’s myriad magnum opuses that does not quite work, a little too rushed in Neil’s plea despite the moment’s enormity for Eady. You can see an extended cut of this scene, however, not in the “Heat” extras but in Mann’s “Thief” (1981), when the eponymous Frank (James Caan), late for his date with Jessie (Tuesday Weld), drags her to diner despite her reticence given his tardiness. If his dragging her there feels like pathetic male entitlement, it also comes across pitifully endearing, especially once he spills his guts about being in prison and remaking himself into nothing, to use his exact word, in order to survive being in prison. Now he wants to make himself into something more than a career criminal, a desire manifested in a photo collage he places before Jessie, representing his life’s ideals: wife, child, home. The collage is charming, childlike. Frank believes it can come true, which is why his going for broke on a first date does not come across far-fetched but just right, underlined in Caan’s extraordinary verbal delivery, belying his posture, sounding like someone who has both rehearsed a variation of this speech a thousand times and now is still searching for the right words. And unlike Eady, Jessie gets her say, copping to her own scattered, screwed up past, not wanting to take a risk now that she’s on the straight and narrow, epitomizing the upside down nature of Frank’s proposal. In asking for a normal life, he is taking his biggest risk yet. What’s Mann-land? That’s Mann-land.

Of course, processes fascinate Mann just as much as emotional and professional paralysis, and so before we even get to Frank’s diner entreaty, we are taken through his whole operation as a methodical safecracker. Mann views him less as some elegant cat burglar than blue collar, sparks flying as Frank employs a 200 lb magnetic drill to penetrate a gargantuan safe. After succeeding, he raises his welding mask and takes a drag from a cigarette, looking for all the world like a guy after clocking out from his 12-hour factory shift. When the police get wise to his scheme and bring him in for questioning, Mann takes care to portray the cops as on the take, simply looking for a cut of Frank’s action in order to look the other way. Frank scoffs at this, profanely telling these clowns to get a real job, the cops as criminals, the thief as an extorted worker. 

Frank, we learn, was schooled in the art of the steal by Okla (Willie Nelson), who is currently locked away in prison and dying. Frank remains loyal to him, visiting in scenes that are oddly charged despite the pain of glass separating the two men, where the gleam in Nelson’s eyes almost seems to suggest something even beyond fatherly affection. Mann, though, is content to let that linger in the air, the relationship more illustrative of Frank’s devotion to family, untraditional or otherwise. That includes not just Jessie, who in a distorted variation of meeting the in-laws is brought by Frank to see Okla, but Frank partner’s, Barry, played by Jim Belushi with a giant coif and sideburns that remind you the future star of “According to Jim” once had a little Elvis in him. The scene in which Frank and Jessie and their adopted son, Barry and his lady friend, congregate on a beach elevates the idea of family to a kind of Mann-ish myth.

Set to a Tangerine Dream’s aptly named “Beach Theme”, this scene is not almost too good to be true; it is too good to be true. To make enough money to break free from living on the wrong side of the law, Frank agrees to work with Leo (Robert Prosky), a crime boss who does not simply assign Frank profitable scores but deems himself, tellingly, Frank’s “father.” Leo literally purchases Frank and Jessie a son through nefarious black market means when she is unable to conceive, suggesting this notion of family is nothing but an illusion, one constructed by Leo and one Leo warns he will erase when Frank threatens to walk away. Frank walks away anyway, taking matters into his own hands in an operatic conclusion of slow motion violence, exacting vengeance on Leo for crossing him. If it is a Hero’s Moment, it is one rendered tragic, Frank saving his family by sacrificing himself. Not literally, mind you, just symbolically, burning it all down and remaking himself into nothing once again, a fate, it seems to me as he wanders off into the darkness of suburbia all alone, worse than death. 

In Memoriam: Norm Macdonald

Deducing Norm Macdonald’s ‘best’ joke is, of course, merely a matter of personal taste. I have always been partial to a relatively minor one from his time holding down the Saturday Night Live Weekend Update desk in the mid-90s. After explaining a daily fine of a million dollars was levied against Microsoft for trying to monopolize access to the Internet, Macdonald deadpanned “Analysts say that at this rate, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates will be broke just ten years after the earth crashes into the sun.” There’s a folksy fatalism to his delivery, both for our future and our present (past), that is right in my wheelhouse and at which Macdonald excelled. (“Note to self, ” he counsels his tape recorder in “Dirty Work.” “I don’t want to live.”) But, perhaps the most revealing Macdonald joke was the one you probably saw plastered all over the Interwebs the other day when it was announced, all of a sudden, that Macdonald had died at the age of 61 after an entirely private decade-long battle with cancer that retroactively makes perfect sense given that his autobiography was fiction. That joke, told to Conan O’Brien during his brief run on The Tonight Show, about a moth’s visit to the podiatrist, is not really a joke; it’s a shaggy dog story that takes an eternity in Network TV Time, building to a gleeful groaner of a punchline, leaving Conan hilariously, palpably desperate to just get this over with. Macdonald, though, sets up the joke by explaining it was told to him earlier in the day by his driver. Surely this was not true, but framing it this way emphasized how the joke wasn’t really in the joke itself but in the telling of the joke. To me, that was Macdonald’s gift. 

Macdonald was a remarkable stand-up comic. The best, as David Letterman, whose smart aleck groove was similar to Macdonald’s, proclaimed on Tuesday. “Always up to something, never certain,” Dave Tweeted of Norm, “until his matter-of-fact delivery leveled you.” Matter-of-fact delivery; what a way to say it! If anyone taught me that comedy was as much a matter of tone as material, it was Norm Macdonald. The bit in his 1991 HBO special, “One Night Stand”, about waking up in the middle of a dream - “You ever have a really good dream and then right in the middle of the dream you wake up? And there you are, back in your stinking life again?” - was not especially penetrating in its insight, just in the golly gee willickers, what are you gonna do way he said it.

In telling that Bill Gates joke, and thousands of others, Macdonald would take his voice up a decibel on the punchline and then pause, staring you down, figuratively or literally. Almost every O.J. Simpson joke he told on Weekend Update, the ones that probably got him fired from the same gig, were like that, punchlines as blunt instruments designed to obliterate any Both Sides rejoinders before they could even begin. I remember Bob Newhart once describing a joke as the kind you laughed at in the car on the way home. Macdonald, on the other hand, wasn’t waiting for you to get in the car; he was waiting for your response right now. If you didn’t laugh, he figured he’d done his job just as well as if you had. Letterman did this too, of course, that way he would go back to a joke that didn’t work, again and again, but Macdonald, if he wanted, could build an entire set out of those jokes. 

My favorite Norm, though, was always the storyteller. His numerous appearances on Letterman, in fact, were less interviews than the Norm Macdonald Storytelling Hour, the host setting him up with some ostensibly innocuous question and then giving his guest the floor. My favorite Norm appearance on Letterman, maybe because it was one I happened to watch when it originally aired, was Macdonald recounting his game of Scrabble at a Victoria Island bed and breakfast run by “Old Harold Delaney.” It’s not a joke but it’s not quite a shaggy dog story either; it’s like a long drawn-out skit told to us rather than performed, a 1930s radio bit with a 1990s sensibility. (You can watch it here. Fast-forward to about the 17:00 minute mark.)

Macdonald appeared on that 1998 Letterman episode to promote his new movie, “Dirty Work.” It was not well received critically, currently pulling down 14% on Rotten Tomatoes, as if that means anything. “(M)ore groans than laughs,” goes the pull quote of the L.A. Times’ David Kronke, seeming not to get what the movie’s star is all about in the first place. About Macdonald’s Mitch and Artie Lang’s Sam opening a revenge-for-hire business, “Dirty Work” is not plot-less, per se, but pretty close, more like a series of Norm Macdonald stories strung together by semblance of a plot, every joke made in the image of Macdonald’s ironic aloofness and wry bemusement. At the conclusion, when Mitch is purposely wrecking an opera sponsored by property developer Travis Cole (Christopher McDonald), the movie’s villain, Cole cries “You’re ruining Don Giovanni!” “Don Givoanni?” Mitch asks, the tenor of Macdonald’s voice essentially breaking the fourth wall without him having to look at the camera. “Who’s that dude?” “The opera!” Cole clarifies. “You’re ruining the opera!” “Oh, the opera. Yes,” Mitch confirms, as McDonald suddenly seems to remember now that, yes, he’s in a movie. “Yes, we are ruining that.” The mock confirmation in Macdonald’s voice there, it slays me.

 

The high point of “Dirty Work” is kind of a shaggy dog story through the looking glass the other way. Mitch and Sam hide dead fish all over a drug dealer’s McMansion to exact revenge in the name of a fed-up neighbor. In the middle of their mischievous act, however, the homeowners return, picking up the scent of the rotting fish which causes their current drug deal to suddenly combust yielding an explosion of violence. Crucially, the movie never cuts to what’s happening in the other room; we just listen, as the savagery and death absurdly escalates. It’s basically a visual manifestation of one of Norm’s rambling stories, just told by the voices in the other room, cosmically transforming Norm into Conan during the Moth Joke, listening in abject horror, waiting for the whole thing to be over. 

Preexisting Movies as Elvis Movies Starring Madonna

Normally I try to avoid so much as even half-glancing at those links at the bottom of web articles, the obvious clickbait ones decreeing faux-alluring schadenfreude malarkey like Why Jennie Garth Isn’t Welcome In Hollywood Anymore, because just to see them, even for a split-second, makes me feel scuzzy. But. The other day, at the end of some article I can’t remember, as I tried to avert my eyes while clicking away, my eyes could not help but scan the words Madonna and the phrase Elvis Movie at the bottom of the screen. Like Pimento Cheese and Arugula trigger me on food menus, so do the words Madonna and Elvis Movies. So, Lauren Bacall help me, I clicked. Turns out it was about Debra Winger explaining she turned down Penny Marshall’s “A League of Their Own” because Madonna’s presence rendered it a would-be Elvis movie rather than a thoughtful examination of a worthy topic. Whether “A League of Their Own” really wasn’t at least partially thoughtful, however, is not the point of this post. Because, while I respect Winger and admire her for having principles in an industry where there are few, when I read what she had to say, my mind could not help but drift...drift to other movies that might have benefited from Elvis-ish Madonna star vehicles. 

The Flamingo Kid. I mean, “The Flamingo Kid” should have been a musical in the first place. So, exchange Janet Jones for Madonna, write some 1960s pop songs with an 80s bent, and you’re not looking at me, kids, all like “there was a movie called ‘The Flamingo Kid?’”

Quicksilver. The epic bicycle messenger movie could have become the “Footloose” for the streets of San Francisco, or something. Alas. 

The Secret of My Success. You switch out Helen Slater for Madonna and you reimagine this as a go-go Reagan Era “How to Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.” Can we replay the 80s?

Reindeer Games. Come on, the name of the movie is culled from a song. Who wants a crime thriller when you can have a comic musical caper? Replace Charlize with Madonna, Ben Affleck with Hugh Jackman, Gary Sinise with Enrique Iglesias, Rob Marshall for John Frankenheimer, and boom! You’ve got “Bad Santa” for theatre kids. 

Waterworld. Dryland is so predictable. Ditch that plot device and instead center the action on a Thunderdome-like floating tiki bar lorded over by Madonna. And though everyone probably still remembers it as a flop, it costs a lot less and becomes a cult classic among the “Elvira: Mistress of the Dark” crowd.

Out to Sea. It just sounds like a dumb, wonderful Elvis movie: two friends posing as dance instructors on a cruise ship. It could have been the nominal sequel to “Viva Las Vegas” with Elvis and Cesare Danova as the dance instructors and Ann-Margret as the woman who comes between them. So, in our time machine back to 1997, we will ditch Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau and Dyan Cannon (no disrespect) for Kevin Kline and Val Kilmer and Madge. Who says no? [20th Century Fox hangs up.]

Keeping the Faith. This forgotten comedy, in which a woman comes between a Priest and a Rabbi, sounds like a dumb, wonderful Elvis movie too, but with the added bonus that it would have allowed for Madonna to simultaneously defame some Catholic iconography. We’ll bump it up from PG-13 to NC-17.

Some Drivel On...Space Cowboys

The worst part of “Space Cowboys” is the beginning. Oh, not so much the 1958-set black & white sequence itself, in which two antagonistic best friends and Air Force pilots, Frank Corvin and Hawk Hawkins, reach the precipice of space in an X-plane before plummeting back to Earth. No, it’s that Eastwood, doubling as director, has chosen to dub the voices of these young actors with his voice and the voice of Tommy Lee Jones since they assume the roles in the present-day scenes. Continuity, schmontinuity (sic); it sounds odd and looks odd and feels odd. Then again in its own weird way, this aesthetic decision epitomizes the movie’s meditation on aging, reminding us that even these young bucks will one day grow up to sound like a coupla gravelly geezers. Eastwood, after all, would have been 70 when “Space Cowboys” was released and he must have seen the screenplay by Ken Kaufman and Howard Klausner as an opportunity to wrestle with getting old on his own terms, a geriatric “Right Stuff” in which the test pilot rogues of yesteryear approach one’s dotage with their determination to get in the ring intact. Indeed, though the retired Eastwood version of Frank Corvin is introduced in something of a “Home Improvement” outtake, struggling with an automatic garage door opener, this also provides an avenue to fooling around with his wife (Barbara Babcock) in the dark. In other words, the old guy’s still got it.

The monochrome prologue concludes with Frank and Hawk and their NASA compatriots Jerry and Tank (Donald Sutherland and James Garner, respectively, in the present-day scenes), having their dreams of going into space denied when bureaucratic boss Bob Gerson (James Cromwell in the present-day scenes) replaces them with monkeys. So, when the elderly Gerson calls on the elderly Frank to see what can be done about a failing guidance system of the latter’s design in an old Soviet communications satellite, on the verge of crashing back to Earth, the retired Frank is gift-wrapped a chance to get even. And that is just what he does, not so much negotiating with Gerson as blackmailing him into allowing his original team, attendant impaired vision and medical issues and all, to blast off into space and fix the satellite. This iconoclastic tendency infuses the standard-issue training scenes at NASA, in which the youthful astronauts show their feathers to this over-the-hill quartet and vice-versa, with a little unexpected juice, going to show how heroism and hotdogging so often go hand-in-hand. 

That is not to suggest the standard-issue training scenes sink. To the contrary, they also get by on the bountiful charms of Eastwood’s co-stars. Sutherland might be playing nothing more than a variation of the horny old coot, but he manages to transcend the stereotype by imbuing it with a poet’s soul, evinced in his well-timed joke in a scene on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Garner gets the least to do but makes it count anyway, like a scene in which he acts as Hawk’s spotter on a bench press, humorously sending up so much macho vainglory. Even Loren Dean succeeds as the younger straight man, his perfect coif and tight-lipped visage serving as the perfect counterpoint to Eastwood’s squint and “put a sock in it, sonny” countenance. No one, though, is better than Jones. 

If the actor has hardened into an unamused meme in the minds of so many, “Space Cowboys” is just one more pleasant reminder of his roaring liveliness, like if Sam Shephard’s Chuck Yeager had morphed into Jones’s Marshal Sam Gerard. Hawk even gets the foremost character complication, a pancreatic cancer reveal midway through, which Jones has Hawk carry with this impeccable kind of bemused dignity, no-big-deal on the surface but letting the fear and sadness peek through too. He also falls in love with NASA engineer Sara Holland (Marcia Gay Harden), who could have simply been a throwaway character, there to further shine a light on Hawk’s tragic diagnosis. Instead, Gay Harden makes Sara count, taking the scene where her character simply sits and watches the four burgeoning spacemen on The Tonight Show and effuses this contagious joy. The best scene in a movie about going to space might just be the one that is nothing more than Hawk and Sara sit together while gazing upon downtown Houston at night. Drinking beers while perched on the hood of a car evokes the sensation of Being Young Again, true, but their remarkably relaxing romantic chemistry befits two older people who are less insecure and tolerant of romantic b.s. 

If the first half of “Space Cowboys” is more of a comedy, the back half transitions into something more like drama, though Eastwood is careful to end not so much on a note of suspense or even triumph as wonder. The twist, that the communications satellite is no ordinary communications satellite but a nuclear silo in space, might merely have been a way to revive America’s long since dormant Cold War rival as the chief onscreen villain. “Space Cowboys”, though, despite its oft-modest vibe, aims higher, its conclusion spiritually connecting with the unforgettable culmination of Philip Kaufman’s “The Right Stuff.” Granted, Eastwood is not as lyrical a filmmaker as Kaufman and the final scenes of “Space Cowboys” do not reach the figuratively otherworldly heights as Kaufman’s 1983 opus. But Eastwood manages his own kind of functional poetry nonetheless. “The Right Stuff” ended by juxtaposing Chuck Yeager’s individual bravado in the form of an unauthorized test flight with the teamwork of the Mercury astronauts being feted by a massive audience while “Space Cowboys” ends with Hawk strapping himself to the satellite, firing the missiles’ engines, and rocketing away from Earth and into the black of space. He might be taking one for the team to save the whole world, but this valorous act is also portrayed as a wry and wonderful variation of his personalized moonshot, an aging (dying) NASA cowboy going for one last wild ride. 

Riders of Justice

After the unexpected death of Emma (Anne Birgitte Lind), a grief counselor tells both her daughter Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg) and husband Marcus (Mads Mikkelsen) to expect that neither of them will grieve quite the same way. After all, grief, goes the saying, takes many forms. Yet so many movies exploring this topic tend to ignore that universally accepted maxim, distilling their versions of grieving down to a single genre, comedy or drama, or action or thriller. Anders Thomas Jensen’s Danish sorta-epic “Riders of Justice” is not your normal movie, both in terms of quality and content. Absurd and sad, funny and violent, it encompasses every tone in the rainbow. How often can a reviewer compare a movie to both every Liam Neeson revenge thriller ever made and Peter Chelsom’s forgotten 2003 destiny-obsessed rom com “Serendipity.”

“Riders of Justice” begins with Mathilde’s bike being stolen, commencing a series of quick scenes that concludes when the train Mathilde is taking with her mother crashes into another train, killing the latter. The way Jensen and his co-editors Anders Albjerg Kristiansen and Nicolaj Monbergcompose this sequence, several seemingly isolated events like another girl wanting a bike similar to Mathilde’s and a man on the train, Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), giving his seat to Emma just before the crash, create the impression that they are not random but cosmically strung together. Destiny. This is further epitomized in Otto’s line of work, seen giving a presentation where he argues that coincidences are always the work of something larger, merely lacking sufficient data to prove it. The crash gives him his chance for proof, seeking out Mathilde’s father to pitch his theory that some strange men he saw on the train connect to a larger conspiracy.

Marcus is a soldier, stationed in Afghanistan as the movie opens, but summoned home after his wife’s death to care for his daughter. That does not go well. Though his character is closed off and detached, Jensen is smart enough not to distill Marcus’s psychology simply down to the empty beer cans surrounding him. No, the military man is an atheist, undoubtedly culled from his time on the battlefield, and when Mathilde asks him about the afterlife, he casually and cruelly explains that when someone’s gone, they’re gone. Mikkelsen’s intense dispassion in these moments comes across like some spiritually deficient metallic surface his daughter’s palpable desperation for connection just bounces right off. And though he doesn’t necessarily mean it that way, Marcus seems to argue for a meaningless in this world, one that sends his own daughter grappling for any kind of meaning at all, eventually devising a flowchart on her bedroom wall to try and formulate her own conspiracy theory.  

Otto pinpoints the possible perpetrators as the Riders of Justice motorcycle gang, seeking to eliminate a witness from testifying against them. This is both a red herring and revealing in so much as the real Riders of Justice of “Riders of Justice” becomes Marcus and his motley crew, including not just Otto but Otto’s colleague Lennart (Lars Brygmann) and their portly hacker friend Emmenthaler (Nicolas Bro). Though they band together to hunt down and kill the perpetrators, it is mostly Marcus doing the killing. These scenes are furious bursts of violence though it is not, refreshingly, graphic violence for graphic violence’s sake but an illustration of how here, on a twisted version of the battlefield, with an avowed enemy, Marcus excels, the cold-blooded efficiency of his warpath juxtaposed against the mess of things in his homelife.

The men scheme their retribution in the cavernous barn on Marcus’s property, prompting questions from Mathilde about just what’s going on. Therapy, her father says. It is a lie providing his daughter false hope, though what makes “Riders of Justice” truly great is how it stretches narrative notes like this one. Mathilde wants to have a therapy session too, causing Lennart, emboldened by his own 4,000 hours of therapy, to slip into the part of analyst. This has all the makings of a classic comedy scene, especially given Brygmann’s wonky deportment, but once the scene gets rolling, it evokes the blissful tendency of “Riders of Justice” to always zig. Just as “Riders of Justice” always takes Mathilde seriously as a character, rather than merely a reflective character of her father, it takes this scene seriously too, allowing for a genuine back and forth between Mathilde and her pretend therapist that yields something like genuine progress. 

This sequence also illuminates “Riders of Justice” as being a therapeutic process unto itself, this unlikely band of misfits not necessarily working out but working through their issues. The portly Emmenthaler, an overgrown child whose self-loathing is frightfully, funnily brought straight to the surface by Bro, would seem to have nothing in common with the muscular, macho Marcus. But when the nouveau Riders of Justice go into the woods for arms training, Emmenthaler demonstrates himself as adept with a weapon as Marcus, suggesting they are not so different, until the moment of truth when he can’t pull the trigger. That Emmenthaler falls completely apart, then, only underscores how close Marcus himself likely is to falling apart too, men hanging on my virtual threads. 

There’s a shot near the end, looking up at Markus as he kneels in his barn, making it seem for all the world like he’s kneeling at a pew, his hands briefly threatening to fold in prayer only to clench his fists instead, emblemizing the whole balance this film rests on, in trying to find comfort or dispensing with it for vengeance instead. In the end, though, “Riders of Justice” does not exactly give us either. A late movie moment in which the rug gets pulled not so much out from under us as them undermines the notion that everything happens for a reason and leaves the characters floating in a kind of virtual ether, unmoored from their sense of putting things right. That might make it appear odd when the movie still climaxes with a thunderous discharging of arms and frames its motley crew as heroes. Jensen, though, brilliantly wants us to give us the traditional ending in order to go right past it, to another ending, a little weird, a little funny, a little uncomfortable, suggesting that there is still emotional work to do. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Hit (1984)

“The Hit” (1984), like most road movies, is in no particular hurry. But then, this isn’t a movie about a estranged friends from high school road-tripping to their reunion, or a weary person driving west in America to reinvigorate his or her soul. “The Hit”, as the title implies, is about two hitmen, Braddock (John Hurt) and Myron (Tim Roth) transporting a one-time London gangster, Willie Parker (Terrence Stamp), from his Spanish hideout to Paris where his imminent execution awaits. Along the way, circumstances force the two hitmen to take an additional prisoner, Maggie (Laura del Sol), who will do anything to survive. Yet director Stephen Frears never really exploits this inherent tension, opting for a chilled out, contemplative vibe, evoked in the flamenco score by Paco de Lucia, weirdly if wonderfully rendering an ostensibly suspenseful situation as more of an eerily mystical one. When the Spanish youths dispatched by Braddock to get Parker corner the gangster on his Spanish villa’s roof, it is not so much Ebert’s Climbing Killer Syndrome come to life as it is Parker deliberately taking a moment for one last look.

The movie opens in the past, with Parker testifying against his criminal cohorts in court, who serenade him – “Until we meet again” – as they are led out of the courtroom. If it demonstrates “The Hit’s” macabre humor, it also lets Parker know he’s a marked man, no matter what, and as we glean in the ensuing car ride across the ever-changing European landscape, he did not spend those years frittering away his time but philosophically preparing himself for just moment. True, he quotes John Donne, but Stamp’s indelibly pacific air embodies his character’s enlightenment all on its own, his big, piercing white eyes balanced against that epic canvas of his face, looking like a man who has seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

Parker needles Braddock and Myron, sort of pitting them against one another, putting ideas in their heads, or at least in the youthful Myron’s, even if sometimes Myron comes across perplexed by his charge’s pontifications, brought to hysterical life in Roth’s slack-jawed expressions. This suggests Parker as a drier, more, well, British version of Charles Grodin in “Midnight Run.” At the same time, though, Parker does not necessarily come across desperate to escape. In one sequence, when Braddock leaves Myron in charge, the kid falls asleep, providing a perfect avenue for Parker to flee. Instead, Braddock finds Parker admiring a waterfall where the way Hurt points his gun at Parker seems born more out of palpable confusion, like Parker has ascended to some metaphysical plain these puny bullets will never reach. And Parker’s stillness is contrasted against the desperation of Maggie. She is the Spanish girlfriend of an Australian man, Harry (Bill Hunter), who are occupying an apartment Braddock mistakenly believes empty. Braddock offs the man but takes Maggie prisoner as del Sol gives a virtually silent, animalistic performance, as if gnawing through her own leg to escape a trap.

If Myron begins as an obedient underling to Braddock, he sympathizes with Maggie as the movie goes along, only too willing to be prodded in that direction by Parker, going whatever way the wind in his ear advises. A sequence in which Myron attacks some Spaniards harassing him at a roadside bar isn’t just “The Hit” killing time, it is evocative of how “The Hit” uses seeming throwaway scenes to reveal character, Myron’s innate youthful recklessness finally burbling to the top. The way Roth happily slumps in the backseat after making off with a few free beers suggests this is the moment when Myron is most himself. Hurt, on the other hand, keeps Braddock a closed book, nigh impossible to read. He’s all too willing to shoot an innocent gas station attendant when it becomes necessary, yet never does the same to Maggie even as it becomes pointless to keep her alive, Hurt’s lips curling into a mischievous grin as the two eye each other, the close-ups between Hurt and del Sol portray an emotional game of cat and mouse entirely independent of the others, almost like to him it’s some sort of game. 

Before Braddock kills Harry, he allows the Australian man a moment of peace, watching his favorite soccer team on the tube. If it imbues both the scene and Braddock with a surprising humanity, it also foreshadows “The Hit’s” denouement, in which Frears proves less interested in some traditional big narrative twist than finally, once and for all, seeing how these men react to death when it is truly staring them in the face. For Parker, his preternatural calm falls by the wayside when all of a sudden Braddock announces that Parker’s time is up. “That’s not the job,” Parker says, Stamp’s voice shading from indignation into desperation. “The job ends in Paris.” It is gut-wrenching and gut-wrenchingly comical to watch, the mask of stoicism ripped away, suggesting that no matter how ready we might presume ourselves to be, we never ever are. Then again, Braddock’s death seems to suggest something else. Frustratingly, it’s the sole moment in the whole movie when Frears lays his aesthetic on too thick, cuing up one of Parker’s earlier musings in voiceover to tell us Braddock’s eyes closing already do, that maybe death, even for a baaaaaaad man such as this, is nothing more than a flame extinguishing forevermore.