Accents ’n Stuff

Back in 2006, the Paleozoic Era of this blog, meaning no link will be forthcoming, I wrote a review of “Mission: Impossible III.” In it, I briefly reference the scene where Tom Cruise’s IMF agent Ethan Hunt employs a bad Italian accent after breaking into Vatican City. At least, that was the exact adjective I used to describe his attempt at speaking Italian: bad. This description piqued the curiosity of Friend of the Blog Rory. He wondered if Tom Cruise’s Italian accent really was bad. So, he found a few clips of Tom trying out Italian and played them for an Italian woman in his department at Duke University. Her analysis: that even though you could tell he was clearly not Italian by contrast with an Italian native speaker in the scene where he passes a priest, she was nevertheless impressed by his pronunciation. I had been owned. 

It was a formative experience for me. Deeming Cruise’s Italian accent bad was merely a reflexive tic, I realized. Who am I, American Midwesterner, to judge anyone’s Italian accent. “Like I really know what I’m talking about,” George Costanza once said to Cheryl Fong upon ostensibly approving the taste of a just opened bottle of wine. I took that experience to heart and now refrain from judging an American actor’s foreign accent as good or bad. I’m really only qualified to judge central Iowan accents anyway. If I enjoy an accent, like I did Amy Ryan’s in “Gone Baby Gone”, I’ll say it. And if I admire an actor for attempting an accent, like I did Canadian Kevin McGarry in Hallmark’s “The Wedding Veil” because NO ONE attempts accents in those movies, I’ll say it too. Are they good accents? I haven’t the foggiest. 

That came back to me just recently when I noticed the above tweet by film and culture freelancer Patrick Gamble. After all, there have been innumerable reflexive dismissals of the Italian accent Jared Leto sports as tragic Paolo Gucci in “House of Gucci.” Peruse the social media channels or the Letterboxd reviews and you will find all sorts of would-be witty knee-jerk disparagements of the way Leto is speaking. Ask an Italian, though, and hey, you might find a whole different appraisal. Indeed, Gamble’s significant other essentially mirrors the assessment of the professional Italian dialect coach Garrett Strommen whom Heather Schwedel asked about the various “House of Gucci” accents for Slate. And while Strommen did confess that Leto had a tendency to overdo the voice by adding extra syllables, he also explained Leto did much right, especially hitting his consonants, even going so far as to wonder at one point if Leto was Italian because he did not initially recognize him in all that makeup. 

The first comment on Gamble’s Tweet, from Jessica Kiang, concurs, saying “He’s quite convincing as an Italian, less so as a human being.” Though she qualifies the latter in a parenthetical by saying “In a good way!” And this, of course, in the end, is all that matters. Madeleine Stowe’s English accent in “Last of the Mohicans” kinda came and went and so what? You’re gonna sit there and tell me she didn’t breathe fire? I am out of  my jurisdiction in judging Leo’s accent in “Blood Diamond” but damn if I didn’t love his zealous commitment to the part. And what of Claude Rains in “Casablanca” playing a Captain in the Third Reich in his native English timbre? It ain’t the accent; it’s the performance. 

Some Drivel...in Capsule: Playing Catch Up

As previously explained lamented in other posts, I got through my time in the Roman COVID hotel through year-end screeners. I watched a lot. And I watched some more when I returned, though my mind was still foggy (not that the fog has necessarily lifted). Writing reviews of all these, it just feels like too much, except perhaps in special circumstances. But I did jot down notes at the end of each viewing to preserve my initial reaction and mindset, at least, and so will, as writer brain fog permits, type up some drivel on those movies in capsule form. We begin today with “The Power of the Dog” (YES), “Don’t Look Up” (NOPE), God help me, and “House of Gucci” (GAGA).

The Power of the Dog: Though it was released almost 100 years after the movie was set, Joshua Ray Walker’s country tune “Cowboy” nevertheless kept echoing in my head throughout Jane Campion’s “Power of the Dog”, describing a modern-day dude playing at being some rough-hewn buckaroo. The song is not exactly a one-to-one for Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance as cattle-driving, bathing agnostic Phil Burbank, but it’s close. An early moment when Cumberbatch has Phil sidle up to a paper flower on the dinner table, his head cocked to one side, really wrapping his lips around a mocking description of the decoration as “puuurty”, is a glorious tell betraying the actor’s exaggerated mannerisms are, in fact, the character’s exaggerated mannerisms. He’s playing cowboy but change is not so much in the wind as within, evoked in a moment where, as he strides along the dusty ground of Big Sky country, Campion cuts to an interior shot, looking out at Phil through the window of a rural home. That change initially seems to arrive in the form of Rose (Kirsten Dunst), bride of his taciturn brother George (Jesse Plemons), brought into Phil’s haven of masculinity. That Campion cuts straight from Phil chastising his brother for settling down to a visceral castration is less effective, really, than the way Phil bullies what he sees as this interloper, glaring at Rose through doorframes at tilted angles, the sounds of his banjo functioning as his own monster movie theme. As this transpires, George gradually just sort of dissolves from the picture and Rose comes undone, Dunst evincing a performance like fragile china breaking before our eyes. That would be that if not for Rose’s son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Gangly and fashionable, he appears out of place, not just on the frontier but next to the intimidating Phil. Campion is messing with us, though, just as Peter, in his quiet way, messes with Phil, yielding a showdown that plays out more as subtext than with six-shooters out in the open, strikingly reframing everything we think we know about the look of self-possession. 

Don’t Look Up: There’s a throwaway joke in “Don’t Look Up”, Adam McKay’s broad farce fronting as a black comedy in which a comet screaming toward Earth becomes a metaphor for climate change, our irresponsible media and our distracted selves, when we see a photograph of Meryl Streep’s craven POTUS posing with Steven Seagal. It’s supposed to be funny, of course, because Seagal has gone to the right wing dogs, but it made me think of just how much “Don’t Look Up” had in common with Seagal’s vain, finger-wagging (forgotten) 1994 eco thriller “On Deadly Ground.” Indeed, Andrew Sarris once opined that “Responsible art is dead art.” He was talking about “Dr. Strangelove”, a movie which he did not admire as much as some, but which demonstrated how nuclear catastrophe might befall us because all our modes of government were populated by buffoons. There are plenty of buffoons in “Don’t Look Up” but McKay frames the entire movie through two scientists (Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) who know better, making them our window into the movie, giving us not so much someone to root with or even identity with as willfully keep us at a remove from the buffoonery, able to point our fingers and say, “They’re stupid.” At least in “The Big Short”, McKay’s farce of the 2008 financial crisis, when Margot Robbie explained mortgage bonds from a bubble bath, the movie was edgy enough to make fun of all of us right to our face. But rather than using jokes and gags to dissect and expose who and what it would skewer, a la his own “Talladega Nights”, McKay is not constructing comedy so much as merely copying and pasting real world situations into the movie to smugly ridicule them. Comedy is not dead, because I’m convinced you could make an entire Romanian New Wave movie just out of the subplot here where Lawrence’s astronomer is baffled by a Pentagon So and So who charges her for free White House snacks, but man, going from Will Ferrell as his foremost comic collaborator to a Bernie Sanders speechwriter might mark McKay’s point of no humor return. 

House of Gucci: [Disclaimer: I’m a Little Monster.] Just as Patrizia Reggiani infiltrated the House of Gucci and helped blow it up, so does Lady Gaga as Patrizia Reggiani enter what director Ridley Scott seems to imagine as a semi-stately prestige pic and shake it up. That is not to suggest Gaga is the only one giving a good performance. Adam Driver’s understatement and emergent out-of-his-depth vanity is just right as her husband, Mauricio, and even the wildly ridiculed Jared Leto is pretty good so long as you realize he is singing in the key of a big, sad, tragic clown. Nevertheless, this House of Gucci is really the Haus of Gaga. She effects a woman not of the cultured class who knows she’s not of the cultured class, resenting it and then performing like she belongs anyway, her costuming and gestures growing more and more exaggerated, thwacking a mini spoon against the edge of her espresso cup like she’s bringing the guillotine down on her husband’s mistress’s neck. You can chart the progression through Patrizia’s increasingly batty scenes with a psychic (Salma Hayek), like “Mistress America’s” fortune teller sequence filtered through “Nocturnal Animals.” And even as all the Gucci men and their various advisors bicker over the Gucci brand, what it is and what it should be, it is Patrizia who truly inhabits the name, or thinks she does, spiritually ascending from knock off Gucci to the real thing, concluding by walking not into her close-up, a la Norma Desmond, but into her house and closing the door on reality. 

The French Dispatch

Early in Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch” we see a close-up of a serving tray as it gradually acquires drinks, various aperitifs, an absinthe, even a cola, all rendered in sepia tones, like a vintage Bon Appétit cover from the 1960s. The tray will soon be carried up several flights of stairs to the offices of the eponymous fictional New Yorker-ish literary magazine in the make believe Ennui-sur-Blasé, France, but this image really exists as an emblem of Anderson gathering all the tools in his aesthetic toolbox. Throughout the ensuing hour and forty-eight minutes you see it all: different aspect ratios, color and monochrome, even animation, relentlessly playful costume and set design, not to mention hyper-specific story details, like inventing an entire mode of cuisine. It has already become de rigueur for critics to deem “The French Dispatch” as the most Wes Anderson-y Wes Anderson movie, and that is not untrue, filled to bursting with his preferred themes and motifs, narratively and visually, so chock full it might well require two viewings to truly imbibe it all. This is not, however, an illustration of the age-old, oft-unwarranted accusation that Anderson is all style, no substance. Far from it. You might not know it to view it, given the lack of a character as true Anderson stand-in, a la “Rushmore’s” Max Fischer or “The Grand Budapest Hotel’s” Gustave H., but “The French Dispatch” is Anderson’s most personal work yet, the style intrinsically merging with the substance to become a manifestation of art as individual expression. 

Though we see editor-in-chief Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray) and his staff hash out The French Dispatch’s latest issue, Anderson is less interested in presenting the nuts and bolts of publication than he is in bringing a magazine issue to life. He does this not just by creating an anthology film but by structuring his anthology like a magazine, with a Talk of the Town-ish prologue and a culminating obituary sandwiched around three feature stories. And though these stories feature their writers in one form or another recounting their creations, the articles essentially emerge from the pages to become the movie, as if a New Yorker lying in your lap has been beamed up to the big screen. And even if the stories within are fictitious, this fiction feels as true to Harold Ross and William Shawn’s periodical as any inspired by adaptation, an animated sequence like a New Yorker cover as Loony Tune and nearly every Adrien Brody line finishing with a comic aside that might as well be a droll parenthetical. 

As is typical with Anderson, there is more than a whiff of nostalgia, though it is never so simple or saccharine. In his previous “Grand Budapest Hotel”, his main character lamented a world on its way out, if not already gone, though concluding developments raised the question of whether that world ever really existed to begin with. And though by setting “The French Dispatch” in the 1960s, Anderson is referencing a time gone by, when magazine writers could be reimbursed for holing up at an expensive, exotic resort to write their stories and editors had more clout than venture capitalists, he nevertheless imbues a love of journalism, the written word, and art in general that is tantamount to a rallying cry for its continued preservation. Indeed, the introductory travelogue, in which Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson), shows us “a day in the life of Ennui over 250 years”, evokes the old Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr observation that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The first feature, “The Concrete Masterpiece”, is spiritually a three-hander about an artist, his muse, and his benefactor in which an art dealer, Julian Cadazio (Adrien Brody), turns Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio del Toro), serving a prison sentence for murder, into a worldwide sensation after buying the inmate’s nude portrait of prison officer Simone (Léa Seydoux). In reproving himself as apparently the director most adept at harnessing Brody’s unique livewire energy, Anderson in tandem with his actor transforms Cadazio into a living, breathing paradox of art as commerce as Brody leaps back and forth, mid-scene, mid-sentence, from profit-making philistine to genuine artistic appreciator. Honestly, this is one of my favorite performances of the year, just sort of hiding in plain view. With his calm yet cantankerous air, del Toro embodies Anderson’s ultra-dry joke about a tortured artist while Seydoux’s stone face in combination with her character, willing to sit for the artist while also smack him one when he gets unruly, quietly embodies the age-old, more recently controversial notion, of respecting the art, not the artist.

“Revisions to a Manifesto”, the second feature, refers to a declaration being penned by Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet), student revolutionary being chronicled by The French Dispatch’s Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand). Thought the passage might reference France’s May of 1968 protests, Anderson is not re-imagining those real-life events so much as putting his own nostalgic sensibilities under the microscope, both satirizing the idea of youthful rebellion and holding it aloft as the ultimate ideal. (In one bravura sequence, Anderson recounts Zeffirelli’s play about youthful ambition and looming adult responsibilities by moving the camera so close that he virtually merges a stage production with his own cinematic format, so that when a character in the play ostensibly jumps out a window, the technique makes it seem as if he really does, but one example of Anderson’s astonishing visual poetry.) He does the latter most specifically through Krementz, whose emergent relationship with Zeffirelli not only probes the idea of journalistic neutrality but brings her close to something in which, figuratively if lyrically speaking, she discovers she can no longer participate but still appreciate.

In the climactic third feature, “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner”, a food writer, Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright), profiles a chef, Lt. Nescaffier (Steve Park), specializing in the mythical haute cuisine of Police Cooking. Though seemingly superabundant with unharmonious narrative elements, these are delicately layered to draw other elements out, a prisoner who becomes the object of a ransom demand emphasizing how Roebuck got his start with The French Dispatch, Nescaffier’s experience as a immigrant evoking Roebuck’s, and so on, so that an ostensible piece about Nescaffier’s gastronomy becomes as much a Roebuck himself, a personal history intertwined with a profile, all building to the crucial moment when the author and editor disagree over whether a certain quote should be included in the final piece, nothing less than an illustration of contradictory aesthetic interpretations. 

In a way, Anderson is communicating the same idea to his audience, that this, his film, is open not only to interpretation but appraisal. Do you like it or don’t you? If you do, thanks; if you don’t, so be it, not that he would change a thing. The epilogue is an obituary for Howitzer himself and The French Dispatch honoring his specific, unsentimental request that the publication itself be terminated along with him, the presses dismantled and liquified. This, however, is not so much a eulogy for the character as Anderson’s own version of a manifesto. Because if someone else is going to tell him how to make “The French Dispatch”, then you might as well disassemble the whole cut and burn it.  

Pitch Meeting: Leigh

Forgive me for tardiness, since stories that happened two months ago in Internet Time are essentially as long ago as 1491, but I was checked into my Roman COVID hotel when the news came down through the social media chute and I was in no position to write anything other than a diary entry of gloom. But. In late November, in an interview with Christina Newland for INews, the acclaimed British director Mike Leigh confessed that his “steadfast integrity” in how he went about making movies was causing him trouble in finding funding for his next movie. He revealed: “Netflix just turned me down, which is a shame, because they have plenty of money. They said they couldn’t possibly contemplate backing it without knowing who the cast is or what it’s about. It’s nonsense, because if they made it, people would watch it – because it would be there.” It’s absolutely true; it would be there, right alongside “A Castle For Christmas”, which was filmed in and around Edinburgh and seems to suggest that Netflix is not against filming in the British Isles. Granted, Leigh, whose oeuvre includes films like “Career Girls” and “Naked”, might not scream Netflix, but as Witney Seibold noted for Slash Film, it’s not like he makes expensive movies. And even if Netflix figures viewers won’t cue up a Mike Leigh film, what does Netflix do if not game their algorithms? Do that thing you do, Netflix, and mindless content consumers will consume Leigh too. Maybe a few of them will like it! Maybe they’ll check out some more of his work! People are liable to think they dig store bought cheddar cheese until they get some English Cheddar straight from the source!

Whatever. What most amused me was Leigh saying this: “They said they couldn’t possibly contemplate backing it without knowing who the cast is or what it’s about.” Like that would change anything! I’m imagining him explaining who the cast for “Vera Drake” would be and what it would be about and the Netflix executives turning out the lights in the room while Leigh is still in the middle of his pitch and then pretending they were never there in the first place. But now I’m also picturing Leigh, in a meeting with Netflix executives, realizing they need a story idea and cast and just trying, off the top of his head, to make a pitch, telling them about some drama “about, uh, this bloke, this bloke from Croydon…” Netflix Execs’ eyes glaze over. “…and, uh, he works for this dying industry…” Netflix execs’ eyes start to close. “…and he inadvertently gets involved with MI6…” Netflix Execs wake back up, sit up straight. “...and it’ll star, uh, Jim Broadbent…” Netflix Execs slump in their chairs. “…And Lesley Manville…” Netflix Execs shrug, half-interested. “…And Timothy Spall…” Netflix Execs’ eyes glaze over. “…and, uh, The Rock!” Netflix Execs erupt from their chairs and immediately greenlight the picture.

So, rather than having a sequel to the 1999 Steve Martin comedy classic “Bowfinger”, we will have an equal in the form of 2022’s “Leigh” as Mike Leigh is forced to enlist Jim Broadbent and Lesley Manville and Timothy Spall and his writer (Dolly Wells) and cameraman (Rupert Grint) to follow an unwitting Dwayne Johnson around Los Angeles, filming him as the star of their movie without him realizing he’s the star of their movie, and desperately trying to make Rodeo Drive and Mulholland Drive and Colorado Boulevard look like London.

At the Movies

Meat Loaf, occasionally known as Michael Lee Aday, died on Thursday at the age of 74, meaning that both Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman, the collaborators responsible for the epic 14x Platinum 1977 album “Bat Out of Hell” and its 1993 sequel, died within a year of each other, which sort of feels cosmically right if also terribly sad. Meat Loaf, though, was also an actor, and a fairly consistent one, at least by mega-successful pop star standards. He was best known for 1975’s “Rocky Horror Picture Show”, of course, as well as David Fincher’s century-ending “Fight Club”, which probably has as big a cult as the former. But Mr. Loaf did considerable in-between stuff too, a lot which I know because it was in that late 90s, early 00s period when I was seeing, like, everything. He was in the Steve Martin / Debra Winger vehicle “Leap of Faith” (1992) and “Spice World” (1997) and “The Mighty” (1998) and “Crazy in Alabama” (1999) and “The 51st State”, née “Formula 51” (2001), the only movie ever made starring Samuel L. Jackson and Emily Mortimer and Meat Loaf. The latter was a forgotten middling thriller, as was 1998’s “Black Dog”, which is what I really want to talk about today. 

“Black Dog”, starring Patrick Swayze, a long haul trucker action movie, was released on the first of May that year during the spring when I was working in the box office at the Cobblestone 9 Theaters (still kicking, though an AMC now), mostly the weekday matinee shifts. And weekday matinee shifts were fantastic. For one thing, they were far less busy than evenings, never mind weekends, aside from one random February day when school was apparently out for some reason I’m not sure we ever discerned and so many teenage girls flooded the box office to see “Titanic” that, in an unheard of development, the early weekday show sold out. It wasn’t just that weekdays weren’t busy, though; it also meant you had something approximating regulars. The WHO 13 sports anchor frequently came to see a new release on Friday afternoons and there was a small battalion of individual retirees who did the same. One of those retirees was this guy who looked a little like Richard Riehle and always wore a feathered fedora. Often, he would stay for a few minutes afterwards to discuss what he’d seen. I loved listening to him, I really did, and I specifically remember him telling me the forgotten Elisabeth Shue noir “Palmetto” deserved a look. For that, he earned my everlasting respect, my fellow Shue stan. But we had another regular who came in not on Fridays but, I think, if memory serves, Tuesdays, more random, much, much less crowded.

This guy, a little like Pruitt Taylor Vince with a moustache, would pull into the parking lot about 10 or 15 minutes before we opened, hang out in his car, come in once I unlocked the doors, peruse what was playing, and then buy a ticket, usually for a new release. One of those new releases was “Black Dog.” As always, he returned the following Tuesday though it was a rare week in which we had received no new movies, meaning the slate was exactly the same as the previous Tuesday. Like always, he perused the movie times above the box office and then just sort of kept perusing, looking a little befuddled, like he must have missed something new. But he had not. And though I knew there were movies playing that he had not seen, when he approached the box office, he said semi-resigned, “I guess I’ll take one for ‘Black Dog.’” I will never forget this (obviously) and love to tell this story (like I am right now). Because I feel safe in declaring he was the only person in America to see “Black Dog” twice in the theater.

(I went down a glorious box office rabbit hole of trying to ascertain what else we would have been showing that week. My guesses: “The Object of My Affection”, “Major League: Back to the Minors”, “The Odd Couple II”, “City of Angels”, “Lost in Space”, “Nightwatch”, “The Big Hit”, and probably “Titanic” because, yeah, that movie was still playing in theaters five months after it opened. It was a different time.)

I am not making fun of him, this guy I haven’t seen in almost twenty-five years and will never see again, and I can’t stress that enough. I adored this guy, I really did. True, there is a counterargument to be levied against this guy’s method. By only seeing movies at the Cobblestone 9, he was limiting himself to strictly whatever we screened. If he is still doing this now, in 2022, he’s probably seen “Spider-Man: No Way Home” five times. I mean, did he know that just down the road at the Sierra he could see “The Spanish Prisoner” or “Two Girls and a Guy” or “Dancer, Texas Pop. 81”? Growing up listening to the radio in central Iowa meant I did not find out about, say, Jason and the Scorchers or Uncle Tupelo until years later. If you only eat Taco Bell, you may never know how good a homemade corn tortilla tastes. I might have seen the darkest, deepest holes of the various self-righteous factions of Film Twitter, but I am not going to Anchorhead to have my memory erased. But I also think that guy was on a different mission.  

I like to imagine Tuesdays were his day off and this was his treat to himself, going to the movies. Not going to a movie, necessarily, which is why he never picked it ahead of time. If it was “Black Dog” a second time, so be it. He had his popcorn and his soda, maybe some Milk Duds too, and Patrick Swayze on the CB. He was at the movies. 

Blog Brand Definition

Over the weekend, movie editor, director, and writer John Magary kicked up the daily Twitter dust storm when he noted that on a recent airplane flight he saw most of his fellow passengers watching movies like “Black Widow” and “Jungle Cruise”, finding a variation on the old cultural vegetables line by deeming this Disney content cultural baby food. “A 40 year old, watching Jungle Cruise,” he summarized. “This used to be considered embarrassing.” Astute readers of the blog may recall that just a few days ago I posted a review of “Jungle Cruise.” Because my schedule prevented me from seeing it on the big screen at the end of July, I only just watched it on my November flight to Rome. That means I was a 44-year old watching “Jungle Cruise” on a plane.

I wasn’t mad. Why would I be? I’m 44! Live and let live, man. Besides, I was mostly just amused in noting the irony that I was one of the very objects of Magary’s ire. He is as entitled to his opinion as Bruce Steele and Edwin Arnaudin at Asheville Movies. And while Magary had all sorts of social media crusaders immediately swoop in to defend the honor of “Jungle Cruise” and the little engine that could Disney, well, you can read my review. I was not exactly a fan. Not that I was ashamed to watch “Jungle Cruise”, mind you. Far from it. I was excited to see if Emily Blunt could effect a Golden Age-ish adventure heroine and she sorta did. Indeed, this brings me to my point. 

Magary’s Twitter bio notes that he is the director of “The Mend.” It lists that movie as being released in 1977 but that’s just a little joke. “The Mend” was released in 2014. I know because I reviewed it for Slant Magazine back when I was still writing for them. In fact, not only did I review “The Mend”, I gave it a positive notice. In fact, not only did I give “The Mend” a positive notice, “The Mend” Twitter account literally cited me as being a person with impeccable taste (!). Me! A 44-year old who watched “Jungle Cruise” on an airplane! 

I watch box office behemoths on a plane; I watch indies that premiere at SXSW. 

Do I contradict myself? 

Very well then I contradict myself, 

(I am large, I contain multitudes.) 

Red Notice

Despite a marketing campaign that went heavy in promoting its three nominal movie stars – Gal Gadot, Dwayne Johnson, and Ryan Reynolds – Netflix’s “Red Notice” proves much more a product of its writer and director and co-producer, Rawson Marshall Thurber. “Red Notice” is moving at Ludicrous Speed, giving its stars little space to luxuriate within frames and moments, a movie in which reversals are the thing, over and over, as many as Thurber can dream up. And while there are moments when the screenplay threatens to become sentient, winking at us over this reversal bounty, it ultimately proves more like sleight of hand, Thurber seeking to distract for as long as he can until we realize nothing is there. Some might recognize the void sooner than others but it is undeniably laid bare by the biggest twist, one that makes no sense emotionally, finally leaving this $200 million Honda masquerading as an Acura to run out gas in the middle of the road. 

The plot turns on three bejeweled eggs given to Cleopatra two thousand years ago, one of which is still missing, sought by international art thief Nolan Booth (Reynolds) who is tracked by FBI profiler John Hartley (Johnson). Hartley, though, finds himself set up by the mysterious Bishop (Gadot), who wants the egg too, painting the profiler as a bad guy to put Interpol on his tail and force him to work with Booth to find the egg even as the Bishop keeps playing puppet-master. This engenders a great number of action scenes, none of which I could honestly recall a couple weeks after I had seen it, underlining their mere serviceableness, and innumerable location changes, from Rome to Bali to Russia to Argentina to Paris. Thurber, though, has copped to how the stars never really left the Atlanta shooting set (in fairness, due to the Pandemic), which the movie’s inherent lifelessness belies. Say what you will of “The Tourist”, feel free, but the first ten minutes in which Angelina Jolie is just walking – striding – around Venice – actual Venice – is more thrilling than anything in “Red Notice.” Indeed, there’s a ostensible throwaway moment when Booth returns to his beachside home after evading the authorities in Italy to find a decanter and a single [underline] tumbler just sitting there on the counter, waiting for him to pour a drink. Offer any fan theory you want about this oddly convenient tumbler (please don’t), but what the moment really does is betray the overall model home sensation of “Red Notice.” 

If Gadot had been born into a different era, say the Golden Age of movies, someone like Irving Thalberg would have seized on that incredible guilelessness she evinced with such charismatic ease in the first “Wonder Woman” and sculpted her ensuing movie loglines around it. As it is, we have her in “Red Notice” instead, struggling to play cunning never mind playfully lascivious. “Ta ta,” she says at one point by way of an exit and the “ta ta” just sounds so stilted, summarizing the entire turn. Reynolds and Johnson fare a little better, at least in one another’s company, suggesting “Red Notice” might have worked better as a buddy comedy than a trinity of peers. “You’re like a well-dressed wall,” Booth says of Hartley, referring to the imposing physicality of Johnson playing the part (he’s The Rock, after all) but it may as well be in metaphorical terms too. Johnson is made to just have Reynolds unceasing bevy of one-liners bounce right off, all irritated asides and weary side-eyes. Of course, this means it is very much a Your Mileage May Very situation. Reynolds talks as fast as the helicopter machine gun mans at one point fires, and if you don’t find his patter charming, it becomes exhausting really quick. And that is to say nothing of the would-be subplot involving never earning his father’s love, epitomizing how Reynolds, like his co-stars, brings absolutely no interior life to the role whatsoever. This is all emotional green screen. 

Johnson, however, has better chemistry with Reynolds than he does with Gadot, which is important because the big twist seeking to tie the whole room together is that Hartley is working with Bishop. (Spoiler alert.) And sure, ok, fine, whatever. But. If you thought Johnson and Emily Blunt in “Jungle Cruise” generated no heat, my God, Johnson and Gadot make Hallmark Movie couples look lewd, their mid-movie tango like a stove burner that just keeps clicking. It’s funny, throughout “Red Notice”, Booth is constantly getting meta, talking about how this or that is “foreshadowing” something, even dropping the term “MacGuffin”, as if we have suddenly wound up in a less witty “Adaptation.” You half-wonder if Reynolds improvised these moments because if “Red Notice” wants to get meta about itself, it only skims the surface, never seeking to become a spoof of the myriad movies it references. It’s no “Naked Gun 2 ½”, is what I mean, which is what I was thinking of, honestly, when Johnson and Gadot were tangoing, that comical dance scene between Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley (and Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley’s dance doubles). Nothing in “Red Notice” is as funny as that scene and nothing in “Red Notice” – God help me, I can’t believe I’m saying this – is as sexy as that scene. 

Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley, sexier than Dwayne Johnson and Gal Gadot. Strange days, these.

Jungle Cruise

“Jungle Cruise” is a spiritual successor to Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” series, not just because it is based on a theme park ride, God help us, but because it seeks to infused the spirit of a Golden Age adventure with modern special effects. Of course, the greatest special effect in “Pirates of the Caribbean” was not the zombie scalawags nor the octopus-like Davy Jones but, simply, Johnny Depp, as Captain Jack Sparrow, a performance I sometimes feel has become undervalued because of how far that franchise was stretched to make a buck. It is perhaps unfair to expect either Emily Blunt or Dwayne Johnson to attempt, never mind succeed, at creating something as transgressive as Captain Jack Sparrow, of course. And, in fairness, Blunt does a solid job of quoting Katharine Hepburn while adding her own aroma and flavor. Johnson, on the other hand, is painfully short on any kind of edge or unpredictability. Indeed, director Jaume Collet-Serra might well intend to give “Jungle Cruise” a “Romancing the Stone” kind of kick, but Johnson is no Jack Colton, his performance as smoothed over as the special effects. 

Set during The Great War, the plot turns on a Fountain of Youth-ish elixir, in this case the Tears of the Moon, petals from mystical healing Amazonian tree, sought by Dr. Lily Houghton (Emily Blunt) for altruistic reasons even as the petals are similarly pursued by the dastardly Prince Joachim (Jesse Plemons) working on behalf of the Kaiser. As “Jungle Cruise” opens, Lily pilfers an arrowhead right from the under the noses of both Prince Joachim and The Royal Society, believing the artifact in tandem with a map to be the keys to unlocking the Tears of the Moon, a strong curtain-raiser in which the nimble cinematography and crack editing combine to create one of those action sequences as comical as it is rousing, all while intertwining the underlying theme of Lily’s attempts to infiltrate a hierarchal male society that will not have her even if she has more gumption and know-how than the lot of ‘em. 

This sequence bodes well, and Collet-Serra maintains it for a little while, up through Lily and her brother MacGregor (Jack Whitehall), if John Hannah in “The Mummy” were Stanford Blatch, enlisting skipper Frank Wolff (Johnson) to pilot them down the Amazon. In escaping various ne’er-do-wells as they depart the dock, another zippy action sequence builds to a solid Butch and Sundance-ish revelation. Best of all, though, Collet-Serra roots the action to the real world. Granted, such veracity is not always necessary for these sorts of movies, but the further “Jungle Cruise” goes, the more its exotic plot demands exotic special effects in return, all of which are disappointingly lifeless and plastic-y, weighing the subsequent action down. Prince Joachim’s U-boat in the Amazon is an enjoyable idea that Collet-Serra can never quite render enjoyable while a scene in which Frank’s scrappy boat stares down a mammoth waterfall is stripped of all suspense in the obvious cuts between real-life interiors and phony exteriors. Worst of all, however, are the computer-generated slithery, disgusting creatures that have no business living amongst us. 

Here, your humble correspondent is of utmost use. Because this reviewer’s single greatest fear, bar none, is slithery, disgusting creatures that have no business living amongst us. And if your computer-generated slithery, disgusting creatures that have no business living amongst us do not really frighten me, you have irrefutably not done your job. No, Paul Giamatti as the ornery harbormaster is more convincing than any of these effects, even if the filmmakers and producers refused to let, as Giamatti expressed to Men’s Health, the character have a monkey who lit his cigars. It’s reminiscent of the ludicrous turn Depp took as Sparrow, which famously terrified Disney producers even as it was allowed to proceed, richly rewarding them. Now, however, we have reached a point where Depp-styled madness must be prevented at all costs.

Yet even the slithery, disgusting creatures that have no business living amongst us feel at least a little more real than the all-important romantic chemistry between the leads. Johnson has qualities as an actor. His droll line readings here are frequently on point and making a punch land like a punchline is, for him, second nature. But asking him to channel Jack Colton, never mind the Humphrey Bogart of “The African Queen”, is just too big an ask. Johnson’s character drinks incessantly but never shows the effects, which might be explained away by the plot but is more evocative of Johnson’s inherent Superman-ish air. He simply is not equipped to play a rogue. So, even if Blunt tries to sell their burgeoning love, in one underwater kiss literally grabbing the back of Johnson’s head, like she is fighting to make him romantically reciprocate, their vibe is as much brother and sister as Blunt and Whitehall, fatally damaging the denouement in which Lily makes a personal choice in the name of love and ultimately causing this cruise to founder.  

Cinema Romantico 2022 Movie Preview: THRILLERS ONLY

One of the big industry stories over the holiday was whether the glaring box office failures of movies directed by the esteemed likes of Steven Spielberg and Guillermo del Toro were just more Pandemic (lack of) movie-going collateral damage or the direct result of being released opposite Spider-Man: Bringing Home the Bacon. Time, as it does with so much, will tell, though that will not stop people from having theories. All this blog knows is the movie middle-class was dying well before Christmas 2021 and a perusal of the myriad Most Anticipated Movies of 2022 lists only reinforces that idea. These lists are virtually nothing but sequels and comic book movies, comic book movies and sequels, until your eyes glaze over. But we here at Cinema Romantico are not interested in what the “people” want to “see”. Please, if every movie studio decided that tableware was going to be the next thing to mine for content and started filling theaters with movies based off the Williams Sonoma catalogue then rest assured the “people” would watch the new blockbuster about the stainless steel salad spinner that ate New York City. No, this blog has no interest in the forthcoming blockbusters, only the middling thrillers, which is why our 2022 Movie Preview is the only Movie Preview on the Interwebs longing more desperately for the next Gary Fleder movie than “Avatar 2: I’ll Believe It When I See It.” 

(Releases are, of course, ranked on the Runaway Jury Scale, measuring each new thriller’s potential for glorious middlingness, 1 being the lowest and 5 the highest.)

Cinema Romantico 2022 Movie Preview: THRILLERS ONLY

Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. Everything is cyclical. Women who had barely been born when I was a teenager are now dressing like Rachel and Monica in “Friends” and Guy Ritchie’s 90s Thriller aesthetic has totally become chic again. We give it...3 Runaway Juries

The 355. Already released, this all-female Action/Thriller has been met with universal denunciation from my fellow critics, like Vulture, advising us that “The 355 is proof that women can make middling action movies, too.” Middling, you say? Don’t mind if I do... 3 Runaway Juries

Moonfall. After tackling aliens, climate change and the Mayan Doomsday, Roland Emmerich, the master of disaster, goes into orbit with a movie about a mission to prevent the Moon from colliding with Earth. I mean, have you seen the trailer? The only real question here is whether I will quadruple mask so I can sit in the front row on opening night. 5 Runaway Juries

Deep Water. Once upon a time this thing would have gotten the cover of Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone with big fawning accompanying stories and Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas would have been interviewed by Paula Zahn and Harry Smith on CBS This Morning. Instead, it gets shunted to Netflix and DON’T TELL ME THINGS CAN ONLY GET BETTER. 3 Runaway Juries

Pursuit. Speaking of “Runaway Jury”... I know Cusack has rearranged his priorities and he’s more of an activist now, and maybe he’s just deep in character there, but boy, the poor guy looks miserable. 1 Runaway Jury

The Outfit. A tailor outwitting the mob? What happened here? Did this script just get stuck in the drawer of some executive at Universal in the 90s? Can we comb through all the drawers at Universal? 4 Runaway Juries

The Contractor. Not be confused with 2007’s “The Contractor” starring Wesley Snipes as an assassin coaxed out of retirement to exact vengeance or 2013’s “The Contractor” starring Danny Trejo as a violent and vindictive actual contractor, 2022’s “The Contractor” stars Chris Pine as a discharged Marine involved in some nebulous paramilitary operation. I don’t know. Can we just re-release the one with Snipes instead? In fact, can we get a movie called “The Contractors” starring Wesley Snipes, Danny Trejo and Chris Pine? Is that script in a Universal exec’s drawer? 2 Runaway Juries

Misanthrope. IMDB says: “A cop is recruited by the FBI to track down a murderer.” When they finally make movies in Jetson Food Pill form, so you can go straight to the post-screening Tweets about What It Got Wrong without having to actually watch it, I imagine they will all sound a lot like this. 1 Runaway Jury

Blacklight. Listen—stop talking. I don’t need to hear the rest. The first half of the sentence was genius! “Liam Neeson plays a shadowy government agent named Travis Block and…” And? What “and”? No ‘and’ necessary! Are you kidding me? I’m sold. Sold! (The Onion. All You Had To Say Was ‘Owen Wilson Befriends A Dolphin’ And I Was Sold. 2007.) 4 Runaway Juries 

Memory. Not only do we get Neeson not just as a shadowy government agent named Travis Block, we also get him as an assassin-for-hire named Alex Lewis...in a movie helmed by Thriller Hall of Famer Martin Campbell and co-starring Monica Bellucci who should be in every fourth American thriller. 5 Runaway Juries

Bullet Train. Sandra Bullock replaced Lady Gaga. Not cool, Sandy. 0 Runaway Juries 

Who Should Host the Oscars?

“People are always afraid of what’s different,” noted philosopher Yul Brynner opined in the not-yet-released-to-Criterion 1993 comedy classic “Cool Runnings.” Indeed, even if there if always clamoring for the Oscars telecast to do something different, a few years of doing something different, specifically going without a host, culminated in last year’s Steven Soderbergh-helmed Academy Awards casual trainwreck. Now things will return to some semblance of normal – A New Normal? (throws up in own mouth) – by not only returning to an early spring telecast but by re-instituting a host. One problem: no host has actually been named. That led to a great deal of social media fun the last couple days with Internet comedians suggesting hosts like Werner Herzog, the baby puppet from “Annette”, or Jared Leto in character as Paolo Gucci. Whoever it is, of course, has no chance, because, as we have written before, the only thing one can count on with the Oscars is that no matter what they do, no one will like it. Not that this will prevent us from proffering a few emcee suggestions. We wouldn’t be properly filling up space on the Interwebs if we failed to suggest the next Oscar host.

Nothing to see here, please disperse.

My Faux-Serious Suggestion: Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer. This, however, would be contingent upon them being left alone by the producers to do whatever they wanted which would never happen. And anyway, I would never ever want to put this juju on Abbi & Ilana. In fact, forget I ever wrote this.

My Not-Serious (Totally Serious) Suggestion: Brad Pitt as Westray, his character from “The Counselor.” I have lobbied for this before, as loyal frustrated followers might remember, to no avail. Still, I’m hoping to see it, Pitt Westray in a luxury sling back chair off to the side, wryly commenting on the proceedings. “Near as I can tell, the people most liable to tell you awards don’t matter, are the ones who’ve never won any.”

My Real (Sort Of) Suggestion: Like the “Point Break” stage show where the character of Johnny Utah is not part of the cast but selected from the audience at random, let’s just pick an Oscars host from the audience at the start of the show. I imagine Lady Gaga enthusiastically raising her hand, desperate to be picked, and Adam Driver, sitting right next to her, slinking down in his seat, hoping not to be noticed, and being seen anyway by Tina Fey who I’m picking as the Oscar-host picker because I like imagining Tina Fey in her Tina Fey voice saying “You, Driver, get up here.” And then an absolutely miserable Adam Driver having to go through the motions of hosting the Oscars.

My Other Real (Sort Of) Suggestion: Let’s continue with the “Point Break” stage play theme but combine it with that Jimmy Kimmel Oscar bit where he brought a bunch of unsuspecting tourists in off the street to gawk at Hollywood’s finest wherein one of the tourists is chosen by Jimmy Kimmel to host the Oscars. Except we will plant Matt Damon as his “Stillwater” character in with the tourists and have him be picked as Oscar host, a kind of comical fake populism that should helpfully fuel the social media discourse for days. 

Golden Globes Updated: There Will Be No Golden Globes

Everybody knows the meme. Or, everyone who is plugged in, probably a bit too much, knows the meme. If you, like, see Rocky the rescue cat belonging to Capitol Hill correspondent Lisa Desjardins on the PBS NewsHour, or if you are watching an old “Golden Girls” rerun and suddenly Mr. Wilhelm (i.e. Richard Herd) shows up, you post the picture to your social media account of Leonardo DiCaprio as washed up actor Rick Dalton in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” pointing himself out on TV in an episode of F.B.I. which he is watching with his friend and consigliere of sorts Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). “I saw it!” you’re comically telling the whole world. I bring it up because the fictional Rick’s house is in the Hollywood Hills, and in December, when the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, elite level hobnobbers, pledged to still hold its annual Golden Globes Awards despite NBC pulling the plug on the telecast over the HFPA’s lack of diversity, this blog speculated the HFPA might still hold its glorified cocktail party in a Hollywood Hills garage. Who wouldn’t at least turn into a livestream of some confused celebs showing for a Costco shrimp platter?

Well, as Decider reported, now the Golden Globes will not even be livestreamed (possibly from an HFPA member’s Hollywood Hills garage). No, an HFPA spokesperson explained “This year’s event is going to be a private event and will not be livestreamed.” The spokesperson continued: “We will be providing real-time updates on winners on the Golden Globes website and our social media.” So, now I’m picturing a few HFPA members, whichever ones decide to show up for this ignominious faux-affair, sitting around someone’s Hollywood Hills living room, a la Rick and Cliff, swigging Whiskey Sours, Tweeting out winners they just sort of randomly decide in the moment (Hannah Waddingham for “Ted Lasso” because everybody loves “Ted Lasso” and now nobody will be mad at us anymore, right?) and then every time they see on of their own Tweets scroll across their own timelines, sitting up excitedly and pointing at it. 

Has the Hollywood Party Planning Committee been formed yet?

The Covid Hotel Blues

View from a COVID Hotel

There is a nun in a surgical mask walking down the street on a chilly November morning in Rome. It would be dystopian were I not already starring in a dystopia, sitting alone in the third row of a three row SUV and wearing my own surgical mask, my luggage ensconced in trash bags. There is a plastic divider separating the rear of the van from the front seat where an imposing bald man in a yellow hazmat suit is at the wheel. He never once glances in my direction, not even through the rearview mirror, like he’s frightened of me, which he probably is. After all, a few days earlier, ahead of the flight home after the long-planned vacation My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I have taken to Rome, I tested positive for COVID-19. It’s the Wednesday before Thanksgiving but I’m not going home; I’m being taken to a COVID hotel at the Villa Primavera, which is less lavish than it sounds. Imagine a single-bed hospital room but with even fewer amenities. Indeed, I spend turkey day washing my underwear in the sink. 

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When My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I originally booked our Roman vacation in very early 2020, it was merely an extension of our ongoing European adventures. But by the end of 2021, after we had delayed the trip by a year for reasons requiring no explanation, it was less about adventure than escape, relief from almost two years of working from home, not going much of anywhere but from the living room to the kitchen and back again. That’s why if we toured the Colosseum, went to the Vatican and saw the Sistine Chapel, what emerged as our unofficial motto was Do as The Romans Do, like the Uber Eats dude that we saw roll up to La Gelateria Frigidarium, not grabbing a delivery but taking a timeout for his own gelato cone. I’ll never forget him, him or his Zubaz pants, an emblem of the kind of Roman life leisure that will always remain foreign to ABC (always be closing) Americans. The night before, we had dinner at a nondescript neighborhood place in Trastevere, across the Tiber, where everyone was speaking Italian, a whole family was having a feast with no qualms about keeping their gaggle of kids up past 10 PM on a Sunday, and the older couple along the wall took extensive breaks between bites, reveling in the atmosphere. My friends are always poking fun at the unhurried way I eat, but this couple, they took as long to eat as me. “Maybe I’ve always Done as the Romans Do,” I thought. “Maybe I’m home.” 

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My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife thankfully tests negative and flies back the Sunday before Thanksgiving as planned. Saying goodbye to her in that moment is as sad and scared as I have ever felt. True, in the last few years I have become a much more experienced international traveler and am no longer intimidated by, say, shopping at a pharmacy when I don’t speak the language. But this is something altogether different. After she leaves, I sit in the nearby wide-open space of Piazza Navona, indifferent to its remarkable beauty, masked and distanced, waiting for my hotel room to be ready so I can isolate, overwhelmed and at the mercy of the mean world, feeling my small-town Iowa-ness more than I have in a long, long time. 

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The U.S. Embassy agent advises I hunker down in a hotel and wait for the local medical authorities to contact me even as he advises the medical authorities will likely move as Romans in piazzas do – with little alacrity. Sunday passes, Monday passes, Tuesday morning passes, the Embassy assuring me they are pressuring Rome to get in touch. In Paris I made My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife recreate a scene from my beloved “Ronin” through photographs, but in Rome I live “Ronin” out. “It would be nice to do something,” says Gregor (Stellan Skarsgård) as the crew holes up in some staid south of France flat. “We are doing something,” corrects Sam (Robert DeNiro). “We’re waiting.” I drink instant Nescafé in my hotel room and wait too. In many ways, this is the worst part, wracked from anxiety in not knowing where I’m supposed to go or what I’m supposed to do or how I’m going to get home. “Once I’m taken to my COVID Hotel,” I think, “I’ll be able to handle it.” Oops. 

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There’s another American on the floor of my COVID hotel, I realize at some point, and though I’d like to trade notes with her, I can’t, because we are expressly forbidden from leaving our rooms. The door locks from the outside, and the key is always in the door, meaning the door is always unlocked, meaning that even if I’m almost always in the room, it’s also never quite private. And for the next 17 days I am in that not-quite-private 10x13 room with bars on the window, a bed tantamount to a cot that creaks, a couple pillows essentially equaling one, a little bureau, a desk functioning as my dinner table, and a crucifix hanging on the wall over the bed because it’s Italy. Later in the week I am emailed a screener link of Paul Verhoeven’s “Benedetta”, the one about 17th-century nuns having an affair that Catholics are protesting outside Chicago’s Music Box Theater. I am desperate to watch the movie but don’t dare, afraid that if I do the crucifix will come to life. 

Vaccinated and boosted, I’m thankful to essentially be feeling fine, save for some minor head congestion, suggesting I have been tagged with the Omicron variant, news of which breaks while I’m confined. Every morning I open my Nescafé jar and breathe in the fumes of the grounds, making sure I can still smell. The Italian woman across the hall translates for me when I can’t quite communicate something to the nurses in their language and when I need a prescription filled, the process is arduous, but the minimal cost puts into ridiculous perspective American Big Pharma’s predilection for price-gouging. Meals are hospital food, albeit Italian hospital food impressively emphasizing the four food groups, but coffee, so crucial, is another matter. My first morning I ask the woman dispensing coffee for two 5 oz Dixie Cup sized cafes and she gladly obliges. The next morning, though, it’s a different woman serving and when I request “due?” she says “solo uno” (only one). My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife keeps telling me this isn’t a prison, that if I ask for something they must give it to me. Intellectually, I know this is true, of course, but she also hasn’t seen the stern, belittling face of that woman when you ask for two cups of coffee. 

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I love Monica too

My best friend theorizes I could transform this experience into my own superhero movie – you know, the montage where the main character is in isolation, whipping his or herself into shape. I have grand designs when I first arrive. I’ll sit at the desk and write, like I’m in a Paul Schrader Man at the Table movie. I’ll stare out the window at the leaves and scaffolding and wooden pallets and have deep thoughts. I’ll read more than ever before. Those dreams quickly fall by the wayside. At first, I’m shaving each morning and even gelling and combing my hair, trying to institute normalcy. I’m doing jumping jacks and knee bends and stretches. But after 9 days, when I finally get to take my test in the hopes of testing negative and getting out only to test positive, I eschew combing and gelling my hair that morning. The next morning, I forgo shaving. The following Tuesday I test positive again. It’s official: I will be quarantined the full 21 days. The jumping jacks and knee bends and stretches innately fall away. I try to start Charles Yu’s “Interior Chinatown” five times and can’t make it more than a few paragraphs. The book seems great, my mind not so much.

My second Thursday here I can’t remember if it’s Thursday or Wednesday; or maybe my second Wednesday here I can’t remember if it’s Wednesday or Thursday. Returning texts to friends nobly seeking to keep my spirits up becomes a chore. I take long naps after lunch but wake up tired, and though my boss is helpfully empathetic, telling me not to worry about work and to just get home healthy and safe, when I do think about the work waiting for me upon my return, whenever that is, I just want to go back to sleep. If I came to Rome to recharge, I have managed the exact opposite, my mind in even more disarray, my spirit even more drained. I watch a ton of year-end screeners, but none bring comfort as much as foreboding old favorites like “From Here to Eternity” and “The Third Man.” Best of all, though, I watch “L’Eclisse”, one of Antonioni’s great Italian forays into existential dread, starring the legend Monica Vitti – whose image I see a few days earlier on a wall of graffiti not far from the Basilica of Our Lady in Trastevere – in perpetual motion around Rome, searching for something, never finding it. I imagine her starring in a COVID isolation movie, prowling this room, praying to the crucifix and getting no answer, staring longingly through the window bars, the movie ending with the camera circling the room only to find she’s no longer even there, whether COVID got her or the void of existence itself left up to the viewer. 

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Back there, in the dark, is a Caravaggio

My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife speculates that I got COVID in the Sistine Chapel and I like thinking of it this way. It makes sense logically, the room the most crowded one we were ever in, the warmth from the body heat palpable. But it also makes sense lyrically, the staggering beauty of the place set against the idea of it transmitting something so terrible. It suggests one of the myriad Carravaggio paintings we encounter at churches all over Rome, like his Madonna di Loreto at Sant’Agostino, how the light of the Virgin Child illuminates the dark world. The oil canvas is just tucked away in a tiny chapel, meaning if you go in the evening, as we did, you wouldn’t even see it if you didn’t know it was there. We pop a euro into a lightbox to illuminate the painting, if only for a couple minutes, a more potent metaphor, really, for 2021 than (possibly) getting COVID in The Sistine Chapel. Because if 2021 seemed poised to be so much better than 2020, especially with the miraculous vaccine’s advent, that vaccine, and so much else, did not prove to be light transcending darkness so much as a mere euro dropped in a lightbox, briefly brightening the world before everything went dark again. 

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If My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I crown every evening with a cone of gelato, we inaugurate every morning with a cup of espresso, usually at Tazza d’Oro right around the corner, and often get espresso in-between, like at Bar San Calisto, where a fashion shoot taking place right outside on the street can’t stop us. (The craft services table for this fashion shoot, I notice, has boxed pastries and a literal chocolate cake. The craft services table for an episode of “Chicago P.D.” that I happened by in October only seemed to have Slim Jims. *Americans*.) And if a single espresso might not seem like much, the ornate ceremony of the service and presentation turn a ten-second coffee into nothing less than a work of art, celebratory rather than functional. On the morning of our 10:30 AM Colosseum tour, I hit the caffè when it opens at 7:30. It’s just me and Roman cops. “I could get used to this,” I think. 

But after 17 days of a single minuscule cup of coffee each morning, a strange thing happens: I crave American coffee. I dream of a semi-burnt Venti from Starbucks; I dream of asking for that fifth refill of so-so diner coffee at Golden Nugget even though I really don’t need it; I dream of sitting on the couch with My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife on a Saturday morning and going back for one, two, three helpings of my coffee in my giant Lady Gaga mug. When I sat on our couch for 18 months, all I could think about was drinking coffee in Rome. Now that I’m drinking coffee in Rome, all I can think about is drinking coffee on my couch. All I want is to click the heels of the Pumas I bought specifically for this trip and be magically transported home.

My Favorite College Football Games: Game 16

January 1, 2022 (Rose Bowl): Ohio State - 48 Utah - 45

Perhaps the least surprising element of a most surprising Rose Bowl game was just how undramatic the ostensibly dramatic game-winning field goal with nine seconds remaining felt. Up until then, the 108th edition of the first college football bowl game, pitting the Big 10’s Ohio State Buckeyes against the Pac 12 champion Utah Utes, was an exuberant seesaw, wild swings of emotion and momentum generated by even wilder feats of strength. But in setting a Rose Bowl record with 15 catches and an overall collegiate football bowl game record with 347 receiving yards, earning him the contest’s MVP award, the Buckeyes’ 19-year old wide receiver from Rockwall, Texas, Jaxon Smith-Njigba, rendered the Granddaddy of Them All the same as another Texas legend, Vince Young, 16 years ago – inevitable.

Until kickoff, most of the discussion surrounding this Rose Bowl was concerned with what it was not and who would not be playing. The 2022 game was not part of the 4-team playoff, the Cotton and Orange Bowls assigned those spots in a pre-set rotation, leaving the Rose Bowl to exist as the meaningless exhibition it was always meant to be since the inaugural 1902 version. That exhibition status is why several star players, like Ohio State’s wide receivers Chris Olave and Garrett Wilson, opted out of participating, choosing to guard against injury and potentially hurting their forthcoming professional football interests. Such businesses decisions caused both the general public and the sport’s most entrenched ambassadors to question the heart of its players and how that alleged lack of heart has stained the postseason, save for its relentlessly publicized playoff, as insignificant. And so even if the sun shined bright in Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco at kickoff, a metaphorical gloom hovered, the latest modern college football crisis point. Then the game commenced and intrinsically refuted every critique lobbed its way.

Sporting all-white helmets with a rose looped through the double U’s commemorating their first appearance in Pasadena on January 1st, the Utes stormed to a 14-0 lead behind the pinpoint passing of quarterback Cam Rising. This fast start seemed not to demoralize the initially sluggish Buckeyes but awaken them, in particular Rising’s Los Angeles native counterpart, C.J. Stroud, throwing his first of six touchdown passes en route to 573 yards through the air, a Rose Bowl record too. Utah’s Tavion Thomas countered with a six-yard TD run, granting the Utes a 21-7 lead midway through the second quarter, at which point the gridiron deity at the controls revealed his or herself as apparently still tipsy from the previous evening’s libations and determined to give us two Rose Bowls in one after a lack of the real thing during 2020’s Pandemic season. Each team proceeded to score a pair of fantastic touchdowns in the span of just over two minutes, the game briefly and ecstatically exceeding the speed of sound.

Feasting on a Utah secondary so depleted from injury that running Micah Bernard was forced to pull old-fashioned two-way duty, Smith-Njigba reeled in a couple scoring passes, the first a fifty-yarder memorably concluding with him subliminally installing himself as a Heisman Trophy contender next season by stiff-arming a Ute defender for the final ten yards across the goal line, the second a fifty-two yarder in which he juked a defender just across midfield and then outran several more to the end zone. Utah countered with Britain Covey, its 5’8 24-year old junior folk hero, and Rising each creating astonishing bits of Johnny Manziel-ish improvisation, the former on a 97-yard madcap kickoff return to the house and the latter an improbable 4th and 1 conversion in which the quarterback pinballed out of a pocket of Buckeye defenders to race to the end zone, concluding with a celebratory shimmy on the sideline. Incredibly, Smith-Njigba, slithering wide open down the middle of the field, would have responded with yet another 50-yard touchdown reception had Utah cornerback Clark Phillips III not punched the ball out of the receiver’s arms, creating a fumble his teammate recovered in the end zone, a valiant effort defensive effort providing the Utes a crucial 35-21 cushion at halftime.

In the second half, Ohio State’s much maligned defense emerged as a key supporting character, not stonewalling Utah’s offense but fending it off just enough, limiting the Utes to a mere field goal in the third quarter as Ohio State added three points of its own and two short touchdown passes from Stroud to Marvin Harrison Jr. to deadlock the game at 38-all early in the 4th quarter. Here, a delightful game took a horrifying twist. Perhaps poised to author his legend, Rising was thrown to the turf by a pressuring Ohio State defense, his helmet noticeably bouncing off the turf as he fell, leaving him lying motionless on the field. Eventually, he departed under his own power and, afterward, Utah coach Kyle Whittingham indicated that Rising never lost consciousness. But ESPN reported the quarterback’s helmet was nonetheless stowed away, a precaution against his attempting to re-enter the game. And the moment embodied not only the ethical minefield that is watching football, even during a game as grand as this one, but why players like Olave and Wilson opt out of these games in the first place.

If the Rose Bowl always assumes a cinematic quality in the 4th quarter, after the requisite spectacular sunset over the San Gabriel Mountains ringing the 100-year old stadium, when darkness descends and the lights illuminate the players like stars on a red carpet, this one really did become a motion picture. For after Ohio State took its first lead with a precise pass by Stroud and a sensational over-the-shoulder grab by Smith-Njigba for a 30-yard touchdown that momentarily recast the wide receiver as Willie Mays and the Rose Bowl as the Polo Grounds, leaving Utah behind 45-38, the Utes were left with no alternative but to call upon backup quarterback Bryson Barnes to pilot its offense. A walk-on who grew up on a pig farm in a small southern Utah town, population roughly 1,400, who had never thrown a collegiate pass, you could see the potential story taking shape in the mind’s eye of every sportswriter, so enticing were these poetic details, and it was evocative of this Rose Bowl’s quality and unbelievability that they really did get to write that story. Suddenly tasked with airing it out to try and win the most hallowed of bowls, Barnes was first aided by Covey engendering a pass interference penalty on third down with a nifty bit of brisk misdirection catching his defender flat-footed. Then Barnes took an unexpected deep shot, drawing a second flag for pass interference and instilling the backup quarterback who had never completed a pass with a confidence that bore fruit when – you’ll never guess – he completed a 12-yard pass to tie the 108th Rose Bowl with 1:54 remaining. 

Had they stopped the game right here, at 45-45, it would have been flawless, to a neutral observer, even in lieu of a real result. Indeed, if Whittingham received valid post-game criticism for not attempting a 2-point conversion to try and take the lead, given his defense’s struggles, it also unwittingly allowed not just the fans but his team to bask in that moment, of the game being even and what transpired to make it so, of hope and possibility briefly, gloriously stretching out into the New Year’s evening. It’s a feeling, I suspect, the whole of Utah will recall years from now much more than the one Ohio State will remember. Forced into an ultimate case of pick your poison, either jam Smith-Njigba at the line of scrimmage and hope he would not run past their defenders for a touchdown (which he undoubtedly would have) or play back and allow him space to get wide open underneath the coverage and gradually advance down the field anyway, Utah chose the second option. Njigba-Smith caught two passes on Ohio State’s concluding drive all the way to Utah’s two yard line where Noah Ruggles booted a 19-yard field goal as the clock neared zero to win it. Like I said, inevitable.

True, this denied Smith-Njigba a similar regal climax to Vince Young’s last-second touchdown scamper in the 2006 Rose Bowl just as Ruggles’s field goal did not win a national championship a la Young’s celebrated run. But, in the end, the 2022 game was no less thrilling for its result. College football has always been an illogical sport, bowls played after the champions were decided for much of its existence, those champions determined by pollsters for even longer, capriciousness reigning supreme rather than reason, a unique concoction that always flouted the sort of meaning the modern critics complain it lacks. But that has never meant college football is meaningless. It imposes meaning in its own way, by the players as much as anyone or anything else, the effort that they give, the manner in which it is given, the experience that it yields. And in the 2022 Rose Bowl, Ohio State and Utah elevated a game that meant nothing in the grand scheme into something monumental. I’m not sure a Rose Bowl ever mattered more.