Friday's Old Fashioned: Father Was a Fullback (1949)

“Father Was a Fullback” achieves a rare trifecta: it is a movie based on a play that feels like a sitcom. It is about a college football coach, George Cooper (Fred MacMurray), navigating both job pressure and pressure at home. And though the collision of his flailing character with so many others and the complications these collisions engenders all suggest a fast-moving screwball movie, director John Stahl dials down the pace and tone to such a degree that you can actually detect where the movie has its characters pause for laughs which for me, watching alone, never arrived. Where’s the laugh track when you need it? I kept imagining myself as Russell Dalrymple, President of NBC, expeditiously passing. What’s worse, rather than surreptitiously functioning as a screwball social commentary a la, say, My Man Godfrey“, “Father Was a Fullback” just sort of turns to sentimentalized stone, its sitcom aesthetic presaging the the golden age of American televised situation comedies and the Eisenhower Era values they often espoused more than tore apart. 

“Father Was a Fullback” opens with George, head coach at State U., losing yet another game in a winless season. The administration and the alumni are hot on his heels and, if you adjusted the tone here just slightly, the way MacMurray has Coop mope around would truly suggest living as a college football coach comes with an anchor permanently affixed to your neck. He gets calls at home from furious fans and helpful hints about what trick plays he might run to turn the tide. The latter seems poised to factor in as a crucial plot point, though no matter the emergent sentimentality, there is still a little truth tucked in here, about how boosters run these mini-empires more than coaches and how coaches depend more on recruits than schemes. Indeed, when Coop gives a speech to the boosters, he sort of unsubtly lays blame at the feet of the players; he doesn’t have “the material” he says, epitomizing the sport as an arms race for talent.

Still, the Sunday morning after a game Coop is not holed up in the film room, he’s at church, suggesting “Father Was a Fullback’s” overriding wholesomeness. And the living room of his home is the main place of action here more than the locker room as he navigates having two mismatched daughters and a maid (Thelma Ritter) who is literally betting against his team. As Coop’s wife, Maureen O’Hara is mostly called upon to just play semi-harried rock of the family and Ritter, so acerbic and so alive in so many roles, is sadly reduced to a more subdued Alice Nelson despite her gambling predilection. Natalie Wood, at least, brings a little energy as younger daughter Ellen, Margaret O’Brien’s Tootie in “Meet Me in St. Louis” with a little Gaby Hoffmann in “Sleepless in Seattle”, her character deftly playing parents against big sister and vice-versa and getting a kick out of it, so much so that I briefly let myself imagine the whole movie through her eyes. Her big sister, though, Connie (Betty Lynn), proves the movie’s key character, boy crazy and sort of played that way almost literally by Lynn, her father’s misguided attempt to manufacture a date for her yielding the big twist. 

Recently there was a real world scandal, of sorts, in which Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Urban Meyer was caught on camera, ah, shall we say, cavorting on the edge of a dance floor with a woman who was objectively not his wife. In a vacuum, this might not matter, something between a husband and his wife and his family, no more. Ah, but Mr. Meyer is the same man who, at the 2011 press conference naming him Ohio State football coach, revealed the quote-unquote contract his family made him sign to not neglect his duties at home upon choosing to accept the job. Why just a few weeks ago a segment for a Jacksonville TV station at the Meyer home revealed a living room coffee table weighed down with framed family photos, looking less like any actual person’s home than an exaggerated endeavor to demonstrate himself as a Family Man. Really, it should not matter to us whether Meyer is a family man but it has long been de rigueur for football coaches to publicly present themselves as Family Men nonetheless, mirroring the familiar cliche of football teams as families. And if the historian Murray Sperber has credibly argued how Golden Age movies like “Knute Rockne, All American” helped solidify the cult of the football coach, perhaps “Father Was a Fullback” did the same for the hackneyed notion of football coaches as family men, brought home in Connie’s falling in love with the nation’s primo football recruit and he with her, ensuring he signs with her Dad’s State U., leaving all barriers between team and family erased.

The Only New Robin Hood Movie I Will Accept

This week all of two people, one West Virginian and one Arizonan, are thwarting the possibility of generational social and economic progress for 329 million Americans. That thwarting includes a proposed Billionaires Tax, which Mountaineer State Senator Joe Manchin, the faux-maverick, waved off, telling The New York Times “It’s time that we all pull together and row together.” I keep imagining, say, billionaire Elon Musk, who in a twist worthy of Nicholas Sparks took umbrage with the Billionaires Tax, as the Winklevi in “The Social Network”, rowing and rowing, rowing away from us fast as he can. Musk, in fact, was defended by billionaire investor Ron Baron who told CNBC “It feels like Congress thinks they are Robin Hood, from the old days.” What?

This blog has gone on record ad nauseam that Robin Hood movies need to stop. They need to stop, of course, because 1938’s “Adventures of Robin Hood”, in glorious Technicolor, was definitive. It can be duplicated but it cannot be expanded upon. But they also need to stop because too often these new Robin Hood movies are straining, paradoxically, to make a myth real. It’s a myth. And yet. The Bozo of Baron Capital, in his oddly oblivious reading of famed English folklore, might be on to something.

What if we made a Robin Hood movie from the point of view of King John (Bill Nighy) and the Sheriff of Nottingham (Jack Davenport), framing Robin Hood (Eddie Marsan) as some bum looking for a handout and Marian (Keira Knightley, all befuddled “Laggies”-like facial expressions) as some entitled twat whining about paid family leave? The only worry, of course, is that people like Mike Pence, chief film critic at The Saturday Evening Post, who misread “Titanic” as a warning of the modern world rather than feminist manifesto, would take it the wrong way and argue that we should hang people in lower income brackets for failing to pull together and row together. But those are the risks you run with satire. I would try for a streaming deal with Amazon but, well, obviously. 

Let Him Go

“Let Him Go” begins with a scene of family idyll. Inside their Montana kitchen, listening to Buddy Holly on the radio, denoting the era as the early 60s, George (Kevin Costner) and Margaret (Diane Lane) Blackledge watch their son James (Ryan Bruce) and daughter-in-law Lorna (Kayli Carter) sing and dance with their infant grandson, Jimmy. It is so idyllic, in fact, that it can only be shattered. So it is, just a few short scenes later when James is thrown from his horse and killed. Not long after, Lorna marries Donnie Weboy (Will Brittain) and they up and move away to live with Donnie’s family with nary a word of warning. Margaret becomes intent on finding Jimmy, not simply to reinsert him in their lives but to bring him home, enlisting a reluctant George in her cause. And if Thomas Bezucha’s 2020 film, based off a novel by Larry Watson, initially suggests a quiet reckoning of grief, rendered in fine, subtle performances by both Lane and Costner, it ultimately transforms into something more akin to a true blue action picture, grandparents as vigilantes, two squabbling families pit against one another in arms, that is at once kind of disappointing and weirdly entertaining.

Bezucha denotes that Donnie is trouble simply in a shot looking over George’s shoulder from a parking lot as he glances up at Donnie leaning over a balcony railing, Costner’s demeanor conveying skepticism and speaking to “Let Him Go’s” welcome tendency to let an image speak a few hundred words. In other ways, though, Bezucha’s movie remains frustratingly vague. Though we know Margaret’s desire to rescue Jimmy is at least partially wrapped up in the physical abuse Lorna suffers at the hands of Donnie, gleaned in a shot from Margaret’s point-of-view, we never know what drew Lorna to Donnie in the first place. Why she stays with him could, one might theorize, connect to the era’s traditional mores, though that is never explicated, visually or otherwise. And that has the added effect of reducing little Jimmy to nothing more than a symbol. Indeed, that’s essentially what George says to Margaret, that her need to rescue Jimmy is tied up in needing to replace what’s been lost, an astute reading strangely eluding the movie itself.

Still, the journey out to North Dakota to find the Weboys and, by extension, Jimmy is some of the movie’s best stuff. Despite the quest’s urgency, the tone is languid, and Bezucha lets us luxuriate in the chemistry of Costner and Lane, these two glorious old pros who emit the full sense of having lived together so long, non-verbally communicating in these small, knowing smiles at the other’s behavior, the front seat of their car coming across no different than their dinner table, evoked in how they eat pie off their laps and sip coffee from a thermos. Their relaxed love, however, is contrasted against the Weboys’ distinct creepiness, epitomized in the matriarch Blanche (Lesley Manville), filtering Ruby Weaver through Lady Macbeth, or something. Her introductory shot, framed in the low light of a hanging lamp, clutching the sides of her dinner table, could have been excised from a Bond movie. And the way Manville relishes wrapping her lips around the words “pork chops” is at least as scary as Christopher Walken saying “Cornflakes” in “At Close Range”, her accent, if you will permit me, like Kate McKinnon’s Hillary Clinton at its most unhinged. And though Blanche might initially suggest the extreme antithesis of Margaret, her monologue about relocating her family from Florida to North Dakota to reestablish hereditary order by repairing their own domestic rift, suggests they are more alike than Margaret realizes. 

It might be the 1960s but “Let Him Go” winds up feeling just as much like the 1870s, like this is another Lincoln County War, a regional feud between factions. Blanche’s sons, in fact, never really feel like sons or characters at all, just henchmen, willing to be sacrificed for the cause, and the climactic confrontation in which George sets off, against his own better judgment, to set things right echoes Costner’s own “Open Range” (2003) in which his and Robert Duvall’s characters led an uprising in an 1880s frontier town. “Let Him Go” even includes a Native American character, Peter Dragswolf (Booboo Stewart), who offers shelter and aid to the Blackledges, and briefly suggests the family’s quest might be intended as some sort of spiritual balm for America. That’s a grand metaphor beyond the reach of Bezucha’s film, which never quite knows what to do with Peter’s character. But sometimes the ferocity of genre machinations supersedes the need for a broad societal statement, and the visceral power of Lane and Manville squaring off at movie’s end, it turns out, is all the truth “Let Him Go” needs. 

Cry Macho

The opening titles of “Cry Macho”, scored to Will Banister’s country tune, in which an old Chevy truck barrels down bucolic southwestern backroads, conjures up thoughts of an archetypal American Western. And even if you know, logically, going in that star and director Clint Eastwood is 91 years old, when the truck pulls to a stop and you see a close-up of those boots of the truck’s driver step down to the dusty ground, you might, for a half-second, fool yourself into thinking the camera will tilt up to reveal 70s Eastwood, his mane full and his visage smooth. What we see, however, is present-day Eastwood, carrying all those years with him, his hair thin and graying, his gait hunched and slow. Why I half-suspect the only reason his character, Mike Milo, pours himself a cup of coffee upon entering the office of his irascible boss, Howard Polk (Dwight Yoakum), is so we can see Eastwood’s hands shake while he drinks it. The ensuing scene, in which Howard goes on an exposition-filled rant, filling in Mike’s backstory all at once, a one-time rodeo rider of fine repute who has aged out into just being in the way, is something of a screenwriting disaster, even if Yoakam’s patented irritability semi-sells it anyway. “It’s time for new blood,” explains Howard in kicking Mike out the door, which is all he really needed to say, summarized in the momentous elderly image Eastwood cuts.

New blood or not, a year later Howard calls on Mike to find his teenage son, Rafo (Eduardo Minett), in Mexico, under the ostensible care of his mother Leta (Fernanda Urrejola), and bring him home. If Mike’s heeding the call is partly because he owes Howard for rescuing him from a fruitless existence of addiction after the death of his family, it is also because Howard cynically exploits Mike’s need to live up to some masculine sense of being a hero. It’s that idea Eastwood wants to wrangle with one more time, all these years after “Unforgiven”, not so long after “American Sniper”, of heroism and masculinity and the toll they take. True, in Mike’s quickly tracking down Leta, the character of Nick Schenk and N. Richard Nash’s screenplay not only lives up to the unflattering nutcase stereotype rather than subverting it any interesting way, she almost instantly tries to seduce Mike, despite his looking like a rickety grandfather in standing next to her. This speaks not only to how the role was likely written for someone younger, but how, even at his age and willing to show it and play it, Eastwood can’t help but an indulge a movie star maxim, an inadvertent if cutting commentary too. But while the emergent movie, in which Mike becomes unlikely mentor to Rafo in shepherding him back to America, never proves as biting nor witty as “Unforgiven’s” dissecting of machismo, in eschewing the savior complex that ultimately undid the similar mentor/ protégé relationship of “Gran Torino”, “Cry Macho” succeeds on its much more measured terms.

Though the plot suggests urgency, Mike and Rafo evading the police as they head for the border, “Cry Macho” kind of casually waves away most of the expected plot theatrics, epitomized in a scene where their stolen car is searched for drugs, seeming to set up the obvious, only to have an ornery Mike remark “we don’t have any drugs”, like Eastwood himself is telling you, the viewer, no, I’m doing that, that’s stupid. No, this is not really an action picture, even if Mike throws a punch, but a gentle drama of acceptance. It truly comes to life mid-movie when Mike and Rafo are forced to hide out in a small Mexican town, the widowed Mike finding a quiet kind of romance with the widowed Marta (Natalia Traven). In truth, she is not much of a character, mostly getting by on Traven’s own grace notes, but Eastwood, typically a nuts and bolts kind of director, also succeeds in these sequences by tapping into his inner-lyricist. Despite myriad echoes to his Eastwood’s own movies, in these passages, tending animals and riding horses, he achieves something closer to the prologue of “The Thin Red Line”, Mike finding a pastoral Eden, the scenes in which he and Marta dance becoming a lovely metaphor for falling into a place’s rhythms. 

More than a relationship between Mike and Rafo, frankly, this is what “Cry Macho” is, an older man finding inner peace, the striking purple sunsets standing in as a visual demarcation of Mike’s twilight.

 the guidance he passes on to his young charge sounding like . “I don’t know how to cure old,” he says of a sickly dog the small town’s sheriff brings to Mike in the hopes of finding a cure, though he might as well be talking about himself and Eastwood about Eastwood, the lines blurring between fiction and real-life the further “Cry Macho” goes, a companion piece, of sorts, to the autobiographical juju of “The Misfits.” In that 1961 John Huston movie it was virtually impossible not to see Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, and Montgomery Clift as versions of themselves just as it’s hard not to see Mike Milo as Clint Eastwood. The guidance Mike passes on to Rafo about the perils of acting macho come across as much Eastwood setting things straight for the record even as the open ending, Mike seeing through his obligation but dangling the possibility that Rafo’s father does not have the best intentions, suggests that even here, now, at age 91, Eastwood does not have all the answers. 

Adventures in Movie Posters, part 257

Nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes, and Twitter’s main character. The first two are ancient, of course, the latter a more recent phenomenon but no less insidious really. It goes like this, you log onto your second least favorite social media site to discover a torrent of weighings in on some Tweet or article you haven’t seen or read, probably don’t know anything about, but that is, more than likely, pertaining to something tone deaf, socially oblivious, or just plain stupid. But because of Twitter’s infinite Interwebs space, there are typically a subset of main characters, one for each of the myriad platform hives, like Film Twitter or College Football Twitter. (Only Kylie Minogue Twitter is free from this scourge. That’s because Kylie is, simply, an angel.) Yesterday, however, for a fleeting moment, Film Twitter did not have one main character but three of them.

Originally a Universal Film, the distribution rights for “Red Notice” were acquired by streaming behemoth Netflix way back in 2019 and yesterday the $200 million budgeted film dropped a poster and a trailer, launching a thousand overworked Twitter jokes since the poster essentially looks like some banal absurdity that would have been up in the Paradise Twin when the “Seinfeld” gang tried to go see a movie. Now I’m not opposed to making such jokes, especially one that cost $200 million, but I don’t know, man. I’m not seeing the problem with this poster. This poster is the gold standard of middling. If I was running Hollywood and you just brought me this poster, sans treatment, I would probably greenlight a $200 million budget too.

On the middling thriller scale, Cinema Romantico gives “Red Notice” five out of a possible five Runaway Juries. Must see!

5 Actors to Play Bond

Ignoring the present to peer into the future...

It might seem to make no sense to discuss the next James Bond movie when the current James Bond movie, “No Time to Die”, has not even been out in theaters for two weeks. But not only do tentpole movies seen through the lens of the Hollywood Telescope cease to exist after opening weekend box office numbers (this one was a minor disappointment), in this bold new modern age the current movie is never as important as the next movie, always ensuring there is something else to sell. So, before we get to the current movie, we need to discuss the as-of-yet non-existent next movie, which means discussing who its James Bond will be since the current movie marks Daniel Craig’s last outing as Agent 007 and the next Agent 007 has yet to be announced. Cinema Romantico, of course, has some ideas. And while such lists might be the dregs of the Internet, loyal frustrated followers can attest this blog is as committed to unorthodox dumb lists as it is to critical rigor and ham-handed references to the Duchess of Cambridge. Stay with us!

5 Actors to Play Bond

Rachel Weisz

Really, if we were being serious here, which we are not, Weisz would be the appropriate choice. Not just to symbolically bring 007 into the 21st Century but because she possesses the mirth, the wit, the derring-do (see: “The Mummy”, “Chain Reaction”, shooting pigeons in “The Favourite”). Mostly, though, it would be kinda funny to see the spouse of Daniel Craig assume the part after Daniel Craig departed the role with some manner of irritability, forced to irritably dangle off Weisz’s arm on the red carpet.

Timothy Dalton

Much like the Raiders American Professional Football organization brought Art Shell back as coach in 2006 after firing him in 1994, let’s bring Dalton back for another go-around as Bond. Don’t you sometimes suspect Simon Skinner was the preeminent Agent 007 anyway?

Matt Smith

I mean, c’mon. There would be something inherently comical in casting one of “The Crown’s” Philips. You thought Brexit would plunge Britannia into chaos.

Kris Marshall

Everything is TV now. So, why not turn Bond into TV too? We will remake James Bond in the mold of one of those British PBS series, borrowing Kris Marshall, formerly of one such show, “Death in Paradise”, and drop a new episode on MGM-HD every Sunday night. 

Russell Crowe

He’s from New Zealand, yes, thank you, got it. But. Every time we cast another Bond, we are reminded of that quote from its creator, Ian Fleming, about Bond merely being “a blunt instrument...an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened.” It’s not that Crowe is merely a blunt instrument, far from it, but that he’s an actor who would be willing to truly play a blunt instrument. James Bond will return...in The Most Uninteresting Man in the World. Damn, would I pay money to see that.

Shout-Out to the Extra: Collateral Version

Shout-Out to the Extra is a sporadic series in which Cinema Romantico shouts out the extras, the background actors, the bit part players, the almost out of your sight line performers who expertly round out our movies with epic blink & you’ll miss it care.

Michael Mann’s “Collateral” begins with a hitman, Vincent (Tom Cruise), climbing into the back of a Los Angeles taxi driven by Max (Jamie Foxx) and proceeding to regale the cabbie with his thoughts on the disconnected urban sprawl of the City of Angels, laid out over the cool jazz on the soundtrack, making him sound like a disgruntled late night dee jay expounding for an audience of one. Of course, the movie to come, in which Max squires his gun-toting fare all over the city to carry out various assassinations related to a big court case, disproves the hitman’s theory, rendering L.A. as more interconnected than he ever would have dreamed, a violent evocation of that old semi-parable, it’s a small world after all. It’s a noisy one too; noisy, violent, and chaotic, which Max, as a cabbie, knows better than anyone. And one of Mann’s myriad sensational touches is how Max seals himself off from such noise, never more evocatively than his opening scene, when he enters his cab, closes the door, and, suddenly, all the cacophony of the garage cuts out on the soundtrack. For a second, Mann just lingers there, a second that feels like an eternity, giving Max space to indulge in this blissful moment of inner peace to steel himself against so many loudmouthed fares to come. It is not, however, merely Max who possesses this gift. 

Let us now flash ahead to the middle of the movie, after various machinations have caused Vincent to accompany Max on his nightly vigil to his mother’s hospital room, Max, sensing an opportunity to blow everything up, seizes Vincent’s all-important briefcase and flees down the corridor.

Naturally, Vincent gives chase.

But as he does, his path down the same corridor is briefly interrupted, forcing him to cut like a football running back to his left in order to...

...evade this hospital janitor wheeling a giant mop bucket down the hall. The janitor, however, is not bothered nor confused. Rather he makes his own evasive maneuver, tilting to his own left to allow Vincent, this man in a clear fit of rage, the space to get around. 

Then the janitor continues down the hall without so much as looking back.

The extra could have played this moment as most extras would, reacting, overreacting, trying to make a moment to sell on that reel, at least ensuring his face gets seen. This extra, however, locks in with Mann’s groove, deciding that his character would not react but remain indifferent, if not bravely oblivious, to the world’s noise. 

Closing Down for Awhile

This is the last time I’ll mention the 35mm screening of “Last of the Mohicans”, I swear, though this isn’t even about the screening or the movie. No, it’s about this guy a few seats over who was talking to his friend before the screening started. As I gathered it, this guy used to write about film for a living but, as many who have tried writing about film for a living soon ascertain, it was not putting coffee in the coffeemaker. So, he took a day job, still writing about film at night but confessing a salaryman’s lifestyle was not conducive to his best work. Kind of a lose-lose situation. Even if it wasn’t 2021 and I wasn’t wearing a mask, I wouldn’t have approached him or chimed in because I’m an introvert-introvert, but I spiritually high fived him nonetheless. Sir, I thought while internally nodding along, I feel your pain. 

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I saw a headline a week or two ago, though now I can’t source it, so maybe I just imagined it to explain away my own state of mind, about how a large percentage of Americans queried for some survey felt less hopeful now than they did at the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic. True, I did not exactly feel hopeful back in March 2020, more scared out of my mind. But the contagion’s relentlessness, even as things have bettered to a certain degree in the States, has so methodically beaten me down that it’s hard to feel anything but exhaustion, mentally just trying to put one foot in front of the other, frequently struggling to accomplish even that . Why just this week I went out to attend my friend’s surprise birthday party. As I sat there, however, at the restaurant, waiting, along with My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, understandably assuming I knew how to read a calendar, and wondering why no one else had shown up, it suddenly dawned on me, with a humiliating spark of recognition, that I had shown up on the wrong day. It was Monday and the party was Tuesday. It has become commonplace in this strange stay-at-home present to say time has become meaningless, that the days all bleed together, and in that moment, for me, it was no longer just an expression; I genuinely had no idea what day it was.

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Recently I saw Courtney Marie Andrews at Old Town School of Folk Music, my first live music show since January 2020. I love live music because it’s a way to get outside yourself, to have the music subsume your brain in lieu of, like, you know, everything else. I had missed that sensation terribly, to be somewhere else, figuratively as much as literally, but after Andrews’s first couple songs, I realized I had barely even heard them, which is not in any way a commentary on her stellar performance but my own state of mind, still unable to tamp down the buzzing in my brain of the last 20 months. I got locked in eventually, I focused and I listened, but I really had to concentrate, which seems like the direct opposite of the concert as a waking dream. I enjoyed the show, honest I did, but it didn’t clear my mind.

Tomorrow I leave for Minnesota’s North Shore, renewing my family’s annual-ish trip there after it was called off last year, which is why Cinema Romantico will be going dark for a week or so. The place we stay, it’s right on Lake Superior, the deck perched over the water so that it feels like you’re on the deck of a ship, only the horizon ahead of you. I plan to sit and stare out across the water for as long as it takes to finally not think about anything at all.

Who's a Fiend for Mojitos?

Vulture film critic Bilge Ebiri recently charted the evolution of “Miami Vice” (2006) from, as he put it, misfire to masterpiece, noting that Michael Mann’s movie version was both nothing like either the 1980s TV show on which it was based or the “kitschy, colorful snarkfest(s)” that defined TV shows as Movies of the era. No, it was something else entirely, “a dream,” Ebiri wrote, “of tortured romanticism...unbridled intimacy...downright transcendentalist focus on element over incident, where darkening skies and undulating waves and distant glimpses of lightning seem to say more than any line of dialogue ever could.” That, it goes without saying, was never going to be box office manna and it was only later, freed from “the expectations of industry journalists and box office prognosticators and audiences looking for something familiar and satisfying” that it found an audience. 

Ebiri notes that some critics fell hard for Mann’s fourth magnum opus all the way back in 2006. Not to toot my own horn, which is what one says in advancing of tooting his or her own, I knew it was a masterpiece, not a misfire, when I saw it on opening night, July 28, 2006. I wrote a rave, just a few days later, though that was Cinema Romantico’s Paleozoic Era and wild horses could not drag the link out of me. (You can dig around the blog a little bit and find it if you want.) My prose was crude and, most importantly, I did not yet have the tools in my critical toolbox to truly explain why it worked. Then again, I have spent the ensuing 15 years mostly fumbling around to explain why “Miami Vice” worked, usually falling back on bad poetry and absurd similes. The latest crack I took is as close as I got, I think, deeming it cinematic impressionism, which is a made-up term, granted, but don’t movies sometimes  exceed the lexicon as it exists? How else do you describe a movie that feels unlike anything else?

I was thinking about “Miami Vice”, actually, just last week, after watching Mann’s “Last of the Mohicans” (1992), my favorite movie, on the big screen for the first time. The last 10 minutes of that movie, but especially Alice’s denouement, were the first time a movie ever opened a direct channel to my un/subconsciousness. That, though, was not even something I truly realized until years later, probably around the time I saw “Miami Vice” and the first few moments of the opening scene plugged into my un/subconsciousness too. 

Scored, as Ebiri notes, to JAY-Z and Linkin Park’s “Numb/Encore”, the first shot is a virtual explosion of sight and sound, a silhouette dancing against all that color. 

Then the shot switches to the side of the stage where people are dancing, the camera sliding from right to left behind our three intrepid members of Miami Vice. 

Then a cut to the front. 

Then a cut to the side. That’s it. But, of course, that’s also everything. 

“Miami Vice” is nominally about a detective, Crockett (Colin Farrell), who gets so deep undercover that he longer knows, as his partner intimates, which way is up. He might as well be describing the viewing experience itself. Mann is asking you to forgo what you think you know about movies: how they feel, how they look, how they tell their story, if they even tell a story at all. And this opening scene is not so much an introduction as total immersion, plunging you straight into free fall, not asking you to let yourself go but clarifying you already have. 

Notes on Set Design

It has been 10 years since the release of Bennett Miller’s “Moneyball.” And given that the 100-win Tampa Bay Rays, maestros of the Moneyball ethos, are about to gear up for another run at the World Series they almost won last year, it would seem an appropriate moment to write about the movie’s examination of the ancient grudge match between science and romance. We are not, however, here to write about science and romance. We are here to write about set design, which in the world of cinema is just as important. 

Because when we first see the bachelor pad of Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), it looks all wrong, too interior decorator, not enough baseball lifer. But upon further reflection, you realize it is just right. It’s just right because he probably did hire some interior decorator to plot this whole place out, this kind of place where some powerful dude would hole up, this kind of place that would look classy and of a certain salary, and instead wound up with a home where he looks entirely out of place. 

No wonder he listens to his team’s road games in an empty Oakland Coliseum; those stadium seats are more homey to him than his couch!

In a way, Billy’s house does not look all that different from the house of his ex-wife Sharon (Robin Wright) and her new husband (Spike Jonze). And when Pitt has Beane take a look around, he looks like he knows he’s out of place, and is sort of half-realizing in the moment. “Awwwww, man,” you can imagine him thinking in a voice that probably sounds like Floyd from “True Romance” if Floyd had played Little League. 

And his awkwardness is slyly contrasted against Sharon’s comfort, evinced in how Wright cozily kind of draws herself into the sofa. 

The bedroom of Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), meanwhile, Billy’s assistant GM and prominent Moneyball proponent? I dunno, man. The general barrenness might be on point but the Plato poster? That’s overkill. You already told us he majored in Economics at Yale. Chill out.

Forgotten Great Moments in Movie History

There’s a great line in John McNaughton’s under-appreciated “Mad Dog and Glory” (1993) when the Chicago cop, Wayne (Robert DeNiro), goes to see the stand-up comedy set of crime boss Frank (Bill Murray). Afterwards, Frank asks Wayne what he thought. “I heard two Buddy Hackett jokes, a Pat Cooper and a half a Lenny Bruce,” Wayne says. That’s sort of how I think about the Daniel Craig James Bond movies; you’ve got two Christopher Nolan movies (“Casino Royale”, “Skyfall”), a Paul Greengrass (“Quantum of Solace”) and half a Marvel (“Spectre”). I say half a Marvel movie because I assume the last Daniel Craig entry in the series, the forthcoming “No Time To Die”, will be the other half. It’s not that movies can’t have influences, of course, because most of them do. No, it’s how they use those influences, whether they merely duplicate them or expand them upon them, utilizing them to help find their own groove. Bond movies have always been about comfort, adhering to a similar formula but, in the best incarnations, adding distinct flourishes. It’s hard to feel comfortable, though, when you’re just lurching around, trying to glom onto whatever style is fashionable at the moment, hoping to remain relevant. And yet.

I will admit to having come around on the back-to-basics “Casino Royale”, a movie I did not like initially, probably because I was younger and stupider and entered that movie with preconceived expectations. When those expectations were not met, I felt let down. On its own wavelength, more brutal and more soulful than its predecessors, it works. Where it really works, though, is with its 007. In essence, every 007 is a like cat that lands on its feet, but those landings are generally taken for granted. You never exactly feel genuine danger when Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan get themselves into a pickle, never mind Roger Moore, who sometimes looks like he expects his stunt double to take over for him in the non-stunt scenes. Even Timothy Dalton, who emitted a vibe closest to Craig, had an it’s-all-cool smirk. Craig has a smirk too, but it’s on a different frequency, like a pirate, to quote the esteemed Charlie Pierce, who enjoys his work. And when his Bond jumps, he doesn’t necessarily seem to know he’s going to land on his feet, infused with some of that mania Johnny Utah had when he leapt from the plane parachute-less in “Point Break”, giving the stunts in “Casino Royale” not just an unexpected verisimilitude but aggression. Even in downtime, Craig is not exactly laid-back.

My favorite scene occurs right after Bond has been poisoned during the big card game, barely made it to his Aston Martin, injected himself with Lidocaine, and then, after passing out while trying to defibrillate himself, is saved by the requisite Bond Girl, Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), who administers the shock for him just in the nick of time. Bond quickly suits back up, returns to the card game, and wins a hand. “You know,” he says to Vesper, “I think a celebration’s in order.” “You were almost dead an hour ago,” Vesper points out. “Come on,” he says taking her hand. “I’m famished.”

There is something about Craig in the ensuing scene, something that has stayed with me longer than any of his others moments as Bond, something in his behavior, something subtle but huge. That moment before, having just survived a brush with death, would normally be forgotten about as soon as it’s happened in these movies, smirked off. But here, in the low lighting of a late night dinner, it lingers in the air, not just in the conversation but the way Bond behaves, in the way Craig has Bond behave, echoed in that undone collar, a little less fussy than usual. He eats the food with relish; he drinks the martini. Every James Bond, in one way or another, is an epicurean; this James Bond is happy to be alive.

The Card Counter

There is a scene in “The Card Counter” when the eponymous William Tell (Oscar Isaac) finds Cirk (Tye Sheridan), pronounced Kirk, but mostly just called The Kid, less a mentor and a protégé than a Sherpa and a reluctant mountain climber, sitting on a casino couch. The set design is worth lingering over. The couch is plush and the backdrop swanky but in that lifeless underlit way of modern gambling dens. The Kid’s air matches this distinct cheerlessness. He’s there but not really present, and having been on the road together for a few weeks, going from card joint to card joint, Tell asks his young charge if he likes this life. “It just doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere,” The Kid explains. “You just go round and round,” Tell matter-of-factly rejoinders, underlining this observation while making a circular motion with his hand, “until you work things out.” Repetition, in other words, which is germane not just to “The Card Counter” but to writer/director Paul Schrader himself. This film finds him in a familiar mode, what he has famously deemed Man at a Table movies, lone men of intentionally ascetic lifestyles scribbling in diaries to expunge their demons, from Travis Bickle of “Taxi Driver” (which Schrader wrote) up through Rev. Ernst Toller of “First Reformed” (which Schrader wrote and directed). Each of those men were ex-military, disillusioned, and inexorably moving toward violence. And though Tell charts a similar path, “The Card Counter” concludes on a note that, unlike Travis Bickle’s culminating heroic delusion, is of genuine, moving enlightenment. 

William Tell, as you might surmise, is not really the man’s name. “Bill,” says La Linda (Tiffany Haddish), his emergent card-playing manager, the comically heightened emphasis Haddish puts on that one word all at once suggesting that’s not your real name and you know that I know that it’s not your real name but I’m not going to ask you why it’s not your real name. It takes us awhile to glean the exact reason for Tell adopting this pseudonym, though clearly it connects to an eight-year prison sentence. That’s where he learned to count cards and took an unexpected liking to incarceration’s circular rhythms, epitomizing why he now prefers an unvarying one-man circuit of card-playing by way of card-counting, earning just enough to get by and not arouse suspicion. In big close-ups, Isaac as Tell betrays nothing, a true cinematic representation of the ancient poker face axiom, though slow zooms become virtual drills to Tell’s head, like one in his motel room where he tosses and turns as he sleeps, slowly boring in on his secretive past.

Tell, it turns out, less like any kind of big reveal than merely a big piece of the psychological puzzle, is Tillich, formerly Private first class, who was stationed in Abu Gharib, where he interrogated detainees by torturing them, yielding his jail sentence. Occasionally, “The Card Counter” flashes back to these scenes of terror, cacophonous and rabid where the rest of the movie is calm and controlled, recounted in extreme wide-angle lens that makes it seem as if he have been dropped into a distorted funhouse of America as Home of the Brave, the garishly bright lighting rendering those terrible images of that American tragedy as a brutal exploitation film. Tell’s disciplined card-playing allows him to cope with his anguish, though not cure it, evinced in a military conference he attends where the way he walks past tables looking, but not touching, suggests a ghost visiting old haunts. This is also where he meets The Kid.

The Kid’s father was at Abu Gharib too, knew Tillich, and carried the same emotional toll. Rather than play cards, however, the old man acted out, violently abusing his family and eventually committing suicide. Having inherited his father’s emotional burden, accruing considerable financial debts and leading an aimless existence, The Kid decides the overwhelming need to make right what is wrong means somebody needs to pay. That somebody is both his dad’s and Tell’s ex-commanding officer, John Gordo (Willem Dafoe, his wild hair denoting all we need to know about the character), who The Kid wants to kidnap and torture, a woebegone plan culled from third-hand Internet information that Sheridan has his character recount in a zoned out if weirdly serene and confident voice that is at once frightening and pathetic. Tell cautions The Kid against the futility of an eye for an eye, though he also enacts practical measures, agreeing to play poker tournaments under the eye of La Linda for bigger purses and more money in an effort to pay off The Kid’s debts and allow him to start his life over. 

As a character, Tell, really, is nothing more than two traits, card-counting and his torturing past, which might seem to suggest he is lacking in some way, missing crucial dimension. That lack of characterization, however, is the character. Schrader even has La Linda point it out, asking Tell if he has interests beside cards. Isaac’s grayish hair rhymes with his colorless clothing which rhymes with his nondescript hotel rooms, even before he swaddles everything in white sheets to duplicate a prison cell. This austere lifestyle might be a hallmark of Schrader protagonists, but even “Light Sleeper” explored the finer points of the drug trade while “First Reformed’s” Toller not only led his church but gradually transformed into a climate change zealot. No matter how many times Tell breaks down the finer points of card game, on the other hand, the detachment in Isaac’s voice, a far cry from, say, Robert DeNiro’s rollicking explainers in “Casino”, betrays the card games as not being the point. No, in “The Card Counter” the nature of playing cards, going from town to town, sitting in a circle, dealing a new deck, takes on a quiet spiritual quality, going round and round, just like the character says, trying to work things out.

In this way, both The Kid and La Linda become pointed reflections of Tell. What Tell is trying to leave behind, The Kid lets gnaw at him and ultimately consume him. La Linda, while describing early-life difficulties, also explicitly states she has found a profession she’s good at, content with, and Haddish’s laid-back but effusive demeanor evokes someone entirely comfortable in her own skin. The Kid is what Tell is; La Linda is the plain to which he’s trying to ascend. In the end, he gets there, through an astonishing sequence that narratively is nowhere near as mystical as the floating sequence in “First Reformed” yet formally just as transcendental, an image of human connection that seems to virtually eradicate a partition between Tell and La Linda. In that moment, Tell’s cycle of suffering ends. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Across 110th Street (1972)

As “Across 110th Street” opens, a pair of white mafia men arrive at a Harlem apartment to count and collect the money from their Black-run numbers racket. Soon after, there is a knock at the door. It’s the cops, but they aren’t really cops as the submachine gun Jim Harris (Paul Benjamin) carries and the getaway driver we see outside suggest. No, they are small-time crooks disguised as cops who burst inside and demand all the money. Director Barry Shear dials up the intensity of this sequence by shooting in a series of quick close-ups, toggling from the money to the barrel of Jim’s gun to the faces of the each man. When the suitcase inadvertently falls from the table to the floor, one of the racketeers goes for his gun, prompting Jim to riddle them all with bullets. And if just a moment before Jim’s pal Joe (Ed Bernard) has been gleefully gathering up those stacks of cash with his eyes virtually bugging out, he turns to look at the dead men like this is own death sentence too. Before long, they’ve killed a couple real NYC cops too, putting them on the run from the mafia and the police, where their hope of escape feels DOA from the jump. Indeed, “Across 110th Street” is fatalist though that fatalism is not unearned, the movie, based on a book, convincingly demonstrating a system and a place designed to keep men like Jim fenced in.

That fence is nothing less than 110th Street itself, the dividing line between the lush greenery of Central Park and the urban war zone of Harlem, a demarcation explicated by a mafia don to Nick D’Salvio (Anthony Franciosa), his son-in-law, in advising of the robbery and how Nick needs to find these thieves to send a message to maintain authority. The words matter, of course, but so does the view, from some ritzy apartment overlooking the park, two men on top of the world looking down on Harlem as theirs. The apartment may as well be a castle in the sky to someone like Jim who we see later in a viscerally dingy, windowless walk-up, a gas meter for a decorative artifact, emblematic of both “Across 110th Street’s” stellar location work, making it feel as if Jim is squatting at the end of the world, and the omnipresent handheld camera, which allows for Shear to film in such tight spaces but also emphasize that tightness, underscoring the idea of how despite having scored all that cash, Jim still has nowhere to go. His girlfriend wants something more for him than a life of crime, a predictable refrain though the movie makes it count for so much more in the way he excoriates her for aspiring to something that is not theirs. “You’ve gotta get your mind out of that white women’s dream,” he intones in a biting, incredible line delivered with all the bitterness it deserves, calling out the American Dream’s discrimination. 

The robbery takes place in the jurisdiction of Captain Frank Mattelli (Anthony Quinn), Italian-American and unreservedly a racist, in attitude, action, and words, even though he takes money from Harlem’s Black crime boss, Doc Johnson (Richard Ward), a suggestion money can, sometimes, cross all prejudices. It’s not Mattelli’s case though, assigned instead to African-American Lt. William Pope (Yaphet Kotto), strictly a political appointment, to make the city look good. Mattelli accepts it, if barely, encouraging his new superior to get down and dirty, pointedly asking if he’s a cop or a social worker, a striking line that seems to predict our current future (or suggest why our present is a product of and not so different from our past). Pope, though, remains adamant in wanting to solve this case and get his promotion on, as he says, his own terms. Perhaps, but Kotto lets you see how Pope seethes with his own kind of resentment that goes hand-in-hand with having to twice as dutiful and good as corrupt cohorts. Quinn, meanwhile, reduces nearly his entire performance to a virtual manifestation of physical anger and violence, like it’s what he runs on, bubbling up in almost every line, every gesture. 

Such violence is omnipresent. This is a gruesome movie, though such gruesomeness is more than mere empty spectacle. When Nick is torturing Joe by dangling him from the roof of an under-construction high rise, Shear repeatedly cuts back to a pair of Nick’s African-American associates, the wordless anguish in their eyes palpable, reckoning in real time with this insidious presence they have allowed to fester in their community. Jim’s submachine gun is not just a sensation prop but a virtual extension of his character, the cacophonous spraying of bullets both at the end and the beginning a product of his being cornered, just like he is in the world itself, reduced to no other option than violent crime, transforming the hoary cinematic chestnut about going down with guns blazing into one of supreme tragedy.