There is Only One Bruce Willis

“The bedrock of the plot is the dogged determination of the Bruce Willis character. Jack may be middle-aged, he may be tired, he may be balding, he may be a drunk, but if he’s played by Bruce Willis you don’t want to bet against him. He gets that look in his eye that says: It’s going to be a pain in the ass for me to do this, but I couldn't live with myself if I didn’t. I always I believe that more easily than the look that merely says: I will prevail because this is an action picture and I play the hero.”

That’s Roger Ebert writing about Bruce Willis in the 2006 thriller “16 Blocks”, but it’s also Roger Ebert perfectly summarizing the Bruce Willis archetype in a single paragraph. So many actors these days, they just prevail in action pictures because they play the heroes. But Willis, he was always the embodiment of his bare feet in the first “Die Hard”, a manifestation of Russell Crowe’s incredulous, irritated line reading in “The Insider”, the one where he says, “What kind of shit is this?” Willis’s characters were always metaphorically dragging their bare feet across broken glass, looking at their own bloody toes and the whole surrounding mess, wondering, “What kind of shit is this?” I mean, it was good Willis starred in the seminal “Die Hard” because, well, obviously. But it was also good Willis starred in the seminal “Die Hard” because who else was going to make you believe “the same shit happen(ed) to the same guy twice” in “Die Hard 2” other than Willis? Dulles Airport was taken hostage exactly one Christmas Eve after Nakatomi Tower was taken hostage? In Willis’s hands that wasn’t just movie blockbuster convenience; that was life, in all its unlucky misery. He could carry roles, to paraphrase Ebert again, this time writing about Willis’s “Tears of the Sun,” “that would destroy others.” 

I once wrote a piece for the late Anomalous Material where I took this Rachel Weisz line from “The Whistleblower”, this line where she says, “I don’t want a scandal, I’m just doing my job”, and then theorized what other Hollywood actors were most equipped to sell it. Bruce Willis, as I recollect, was #2 on the list. And though I sort of described how other actors might say it, I just said something to the effect of, you know exactly how Bruce Willis would say this line. And you would; you do! You can hear it right now, can’t you?! You don’t need me to explain it! Now that’s not to suggest he was always doing the same thing. Far from it. Within his pronounced Bruce Willis archetype, he could make myriad modulations to best fit the material. 

In “Pulp Fiction”, he still allowed a bit of a boxer’s bravado to peek through here and there, transforming The Gold Watch into Butch Coolidge’s rope-a-dope against the world. In “Moonrise Kingdom”, he seemed to be playing to that old Springsteen observation about holding onto your idealism after you lose your innocence, and struggling to win that battle. In “Unbreakable” he transforms his weariness into reticence, someone who is usually so big on screen becoming so small...until he becomes larger than life. In “Ocean’s Twelve,” my beloved, misunderstood “Ocean’s Twelve,” he’s playing himself but he’s not, crucially, smartly, playing a parody of himself. He’s playing himself as a longtime friend of Julia Roberts who’s helping expose the Julia Roberts character who is masquerading as Julia Roberts (it’s complicated), becoming a private eye on the fly, his smirk communicating, “I’m on to you.” 

But look at me, writing in the past tense, like Bruce Willis has passed on. He has not passed on, but his family announced yesterday that he’s stepping away from acting on account of aphasia. “Aphasia,” the Mayo Clinic tells us, is a condition that robs you of the ability to communicate. It can affect your ability to speak, “write and understand language, both verbal and written.” Well, don’t that just beat all. Bruce Willis, master of the pained facial expression, virtuoso of the weary verbal expression, both of them taken away. What kind of shit is this? Life, I guess, and just proof that in this life you never really know what might be going on with someone. Willis became the butt of jokes in the last few years for an overstuffed IMDb page littered with unfamiliar titles. Just this past weekend the Razzies, the pointless, perspective-less, played-out Razzies awarded the Worst Performance by Bruce Willis in a 2021 Movie. (The Razzies are apparently discussing whether they will rescind this award. Rescind yourselves.) 

Maybe, in the end, Willis was just making as many movies as he could to make as much money as he could to ensure his family was set up, like Ulysses S. Grant putting down his memoirs before the throat cancer came to collect. Maybe, in the end, Willis was just making as many movies as he could because he knew...this was it. Maybe if his cognitive decline was an open secret within the industry, as many seemed to suggest, this was long overdue, and maybe prompts the question why it had not already happened. But that is all speculation and none of my business. Maybe we just shouldn’t judge actors by their IMDb credits. 

The Moment the Oscars Stood Still

At their best, movies are not a recreation of life but a reflection of it, even when they are surreal, perhaps especially when they are surreal, when everything plaguing your subconscious suddenly floats to the top. That’s movies, though, not the Oscars, which are theoretically about honoring the year’s best in movies but are as much about the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences trying to frame itself in a certain light. In 2020, “Parasite” winning Best Picture emblemized the Academy’s shifting demographics; in 2021, “Nomadland” earning the top prize was the Beautiful People letting you know they Feel Your Pain; in 2022, “Coda” became the first streaming release to win Best Picture, gobbled up from Sundance by Apple TV+ who then mounted a reported $10 million ad campaign mirroring the $10 million for which “The Spitfire Grill” (1996) was famously bought for all those years ago at Sundance, and which is what “Coda” most reminded me of, “The Spitfire Grill” (they’re both fine). “Coda’s” statue provided streaming platforms a gameplan for next year’s Oscars and a feel-good story for this year’s. Except.

These Academy Awards were tuned to a calamitous key even before they began. Producer Will Packer announced that eight of the crafts categories would be awarded during a pre-show show, one taking place while the biggest stars were still walking the red carpet, not aired live and to be edited into the broadcast later. If it caused outrage, Packer implored to reserve judgement. I did and now judgement will be rendered. These pre-taped winning speeches were ungracefully mixed in, mimicking NBC’s old plausibly live Olympics flim-flam, not telling anyone they were recorded earlier and then seeming to mix reactions from the pre-show show and the show-show while condensing the winning speeches for length, unintentionally suggesting the industry has an A team and a B team. What’s more, if the intention was to shorten the broadcast, it went well over its allotted three hours anyway, so insistent on beer and skittles, to borrow a phrase, that the show’s rhythm was not so much disrupted as without rhythm in the first place, rushed but paradoxically dragging on. Regina Hall’s COVID positive list bit, when no awards had even been announced yet, really lagged, and her joke about the open status of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith’s marriage was, in retrospect, a red sky at morning.

Even if it happened before The Event, Nicole Kidman’s reaction shot, as Nicole Kidman reaction shots always do, sums it all up.

As the host of the 1996 MTV Video Music Awards, Chris Rock noticed the Death Row music executive Suge Knight in the audience, currently incarcerated for voluntary manslaughter, and said “Hi Suge, don’t shoot me.” He told Rolling Stone in an interview several years later that 2Pac approached him afterwards with a menacing smile, feeling as if the Death Row rapper was a few seconds away from punching him. Well, 26 years later, the cows, to paraphrase Frank Drebin, came home to roost. Because Rock’s dumb joke about Jada Pinkett Smith starring in “G.I. Jane 2” was a mean-spirited, if not outright cruel, joke too, given Pinkett Smith’s alopecia, an autoimmune condition resulting in hair loss. The camera caught Pinkett Smith rolling her eyes and maybe that’s how it should have ended, with Pinkett Smith allowed to deal with it how she saw fit. But that’s not how it ended.

Just five seconds before time briefly stopped, Will Smith was visibly laughing at one of Rock’s jokes, though maybe that was the performer playing the part of a Movie Star on Camera at the Oscars, consciously evincing his One of Hollywood’s Nice Guys image. Indeed, Candice Frederick wrote a piece for HuffPost about Smith reluctantly opening up in a kind of calculated effort often necessary to win an Oscar, and maybe having played the game for months on end had caused too many bricks in that finely calibrated persona to jostle loose. One of Hollywood’s Nicest Guys strode on stage, right toward Rock, as the camera stuck with a long angle, like it didn’t want to see what was about to happen. Some would later say they thought it was a bit, but I felt my stomach drop, and sure enough, Smith smacked Rock across the face on live television and returned to his seat. The two exchanged some terse, profane words and then Rock decreed in a halting voice that let you know this was no put-on, “That was the greatest night in the history of television.” That was how he said it, in the past tense, as if he already sensed this episode, like it or not, would be in the obit. 

Even if Rock managed to right the ship, the smack cast a pall over the proceedings in both directions, retroactively clouding the moving Supporting Actress and Actor acceptance speeches of Ariana DeBose and Troy Kotsur, diminishing Jane Campion’s win for Best Director. Smith even stepped on the toes of his fellow Philadelphian, Questlove, whose “Summer of Soul” won Best Documentary, the award Rock presented a few moments later. As for the smack, multiple things can be true at once, it shouldn’t need saying but always does, and here, multiple things are true at once, none of which I feel inclined to address, more inclined to agree with Alyssa Rosenberg’s take that “sometimes it’s worth letting a disaster just be a disaster in all its wretched clarity.” And what ultimately fascinated me most about the reaction to this terrible episode was the pointed lack of one in the room. The ensuing oddly upbeat in memoriam montage that I think was trying to emit the vibe of a New Orleans Funeral instead became the perfect ironic counterpoint to the suddenly grim boondoggle. Everybody just sat there, Smith just sat there, and the show just, like, went on?

Smith had broken the contract, to quote William Hurt in “Changing Lanes”, the social agreement not to go batshit. But then, that’s just sort of the national mood now, going batshit, countless stories of unruly airline passengers and enraged grocery store shoppers, “a collective trauma”, as The Washington Post put it in a piece by Marisa Iati, induced by the Pandemic. Everything feels frayed, everything feels broken, and yet this dogged insistence on everything going back to the way it was – the dreaded New Normal – persists; there are beans to be counted! Incredibly, improbably, the big, dumb Oscars managed to reflect our present-day reality more than any of its nominated movies.

Will Smith went batshit, sat back down, and then won an Oscar. Everything was not normal, but nobody said a word.

Legally Mandated Oscar Predictions

Best Picture: In this age of extreme polarization and divisiveness, where if I say jump to avoid that large puddle of raw sewage you say your order to jump infringes on my personal liberties and I will step right in that raw sewage, thank you very much, we are rarely interested anymore in who won an Oscar. We are rarely interested anymore in who lost an Oscar. No, what seems to drive the discourse, the godforsaken discourse, these days is not what won or lost but what should not have won. It’s like a double stuffed Oreo of outrage; something was unfairly snubbed while something else was unjustly rewarded. So, as Cinema Romantico sat down to dutifully record our Oscar predictions as mandated by movie blogging law, we thought about Best Picture from that perspective.

Who specifically would be the angriest over a victory by each Best Picture candidate? 

“Belfast”: Two-time Oscar host Jimmy Kimmel recently implored “Why do Best Picture nominees have to be serious?” and I feel like a movie about The Troubles is the Most Serious of all the nominees. Maybe if it wins Kimmel could make one of his patented funny jokes about it! “What’s black and white and puts you to sleep faster than Advil PM? The Oscar winner for Best Picture.”

“The Power of the Dog”: Sam Elliott, of course, but we will return to him in a moment. 

“Coda”: Film Twitter. 

“West Side Story”: Richard Brody.

“Dune”: Lynch-heads.

“Don’t Look Up”: Here it’s less a question who would be angry if it won than who would be angry if it did not win. David Sirota, that’s who, co-screenwriter, who would no doubt excoriate the Academy for not caring about climate change for not giving his movie Best Picture. (Don’t get mad at us, Sirota. You’ll get your moment in the sun when you win Best Original Screenplay while Paul Schrader sits at home, watching the Knicks, still Oscar-less.)

“Drive My Car”: Best Picture nominee completists who didn’t realize it was three hours. Additionally, it would confuse the people who think Uncle Vanya is an E&J Gallo wine.

“King Richard”: The ones who honestly (or disingenuously) think Serena Williams isn’t the G.O.A.T.

“Licorice Pizza”: The Culture Warriors. 

“Nightmare Alley”: Hmmmmmmm. Well. Can’t say I’ve seen much indignant spittle directed at Guillermo del Toro’s remake of the 1947 film. That doesn’t mean people won’t be angry if it does end up winning, but that the anger will be more in the manner of compulsive Yelp reviewers lodging half-hearted protests about the service at a Corner Bakery. That’s why I’m picking Nightmare Alley to win Best Picture. The discourse could use the break. 

Best Director: Steven Spielberg, West Side Story. Eschews giving a speech to challenge Kevin Feige to a duel for Hollywood’s soul.

Best Actress: Kristen Stewart, Spencer. Sends Nikki Reed in her place to accept the award and read out the printed lyrics of Black Flag’s “TV Party.”

Elliott’s coming for you, Cumberbatch.

Best Actor: Benedict Cumberbatch, The Power of the Dog. Remember at the 2000 MTV Music Video Awards (why would you?) when Limp Bizkit won Best Video and then Rage Against the Machine’s Tim Commerford climbed the tower on the stage directly behind Limp Bizkit and taunted the band from above? I imagine Sam Elliott climbing one of the giant Oscar statues on the stage and taunting Cumberbatch from above.

Winning and losing don’t matter in the Kiki Commune; we’ll be celebrating no matter what.

Best Supporting Actress: Kirsten Dunst, The Power of the Dog. When the Toronto Raptors won the 2019 NBA championship, the city’s Maple Leaf Square was rechristened Jurassic Park for fans to gather and watch the games just as the city of Milwaukee created the Deer District for its fans to gather watch games during the Bucks 2021 NBA title run. So, I feel like we Dunst Devotees who have been waiting for this moment for years should take over the Motel 6 Hollywood parking lot just up the road and transform it into the Kiki Commune. When she loses, and she will, we will say the hell with it and rock out to New Order’s “Ceremony.”

Best Supporting Actor: J.K. Simmons, Being the Ricardos. Ascends the stage with the same bemused air as his CIA superior in “Burn After Reading”, accepts the statue and says something like, “Honestly as I’m confused as the rest of you.”

Best Film Editing: After presenting the award for Film Editing at the much discussed (derided) pre-show show, the producers inadvertently fail to honor their pledge to edit the award’s presentation into the broadcast, missing the rich irony. Enraged, the Academy decides to radically revamp the 2023 ceremony by not voting on Best Picture beforehand and instead selecting a winner during the telecast in a format similar to the Iowa Caucus. 

The Arc of Will Smith

After years of only being on the mic as a Grammy-winning (Grammy-boycotting) rapper, when Will Smith first stepped in front of the camera in 1990 on the NBC sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” he could not really act. Smith has admitted it; his co-stars have lamented it. His performing skill set to that point, mugging to the cheap seats alone centerstage, did not lend itself to fitting in with an ensemble on a camera where smaller tends to be bigger and bigger too big. The moment in the tenth episode of the first season, in which the show’s Will sets up butler Geoffrey (Joseph Marcell) of Uncle Phil’s (James Avery) family on a blind date with a younger woman, Helen (Naomi Campbell), only to become infatuated with the date himself, where he boxes Geoffrey out on the dance floor to cut a would-be mating rug with Helen instead, evoked Smith’s own penchant for trampling over his co-stars. To his credit, though, Smith gradually grew as an actor, highlighted in Season 4 Episode 24, Papa’s Got a Brand New Excuse, when his character’s estranged father (Ben Vereen) visits Bel-Air and abandons his son all over again. 

After his father leaves, Will at first sort of hams it up, trying to hide his real feelings, before eventually breaking down on Uncle Phil’s shoulder. In a way, it mirrored Smith’s actorly growth, his initial comical exaggeration for emotional effect, rather than cheap laughs, transforming into poignant truth. The story goes that when they finished shooting the scene, Avery whispered into Smith’s ear “That’s fucking acting right there.” If Will graduated by dressing up as sunflower and singing “You’re My Only Sunshine” in earlier episode, this scene was Smith’s graduation from makeshift acting school. And given that Smith is on the verge of winning an Oscar for playing Richard Williams in 2021’s King Richard, it is tempting to see a cosmic echo between Avery’s benediction and the scene toward the end of “King Richard” in which the eponymous character says to his daughter Serena (Demi Singleton) that one day she will be the greatest tennis player of all time. 

 

Someone predisposed toward the conquering the world, however, was not going to wait around for the transition from small screen to big screen, and even before Smith got to that truly special Very Special Episode, he had already been featured in three movies. His first two roles of note were both in 1993 and suggest the differing routes his career could have taken – toward the broad comedy of Richard Benjamin’s “Made in America” or the more challenging dramatic work in Fred Schepisi’s “Six Degrees in Separation.” Instead Smith went bigger, starring first with Martin Lawrence in Michael Bay’s “Bad Boys” (like their co-star Kevin Corrigan, I’ve never seen it) and the 1996 box office champion “Independence Day.”

In the latter, Smith’s inherent movie star magnetism was such that even though director Roland Emmerich envisioned the movie as concept-driven rather than star-driven, and even though Smith did not show up onscreen for nearly 30 minutes, he still stood out. It also underlined how he could temper his magnetism to play with others, forming a nimble comic chemistry with Jeff Goldblum, one on even more winning display in his 1997 blockbuster follow-up “Men in Black” where another theoretical special effects movie was as much about Smith playing off the deliberately taciturn Tommy Lee Jones as a pair of government agents maintaining a secret extraterrestrial population on Earth. “Will is more generous than anyone, and he spreads joy,” said the notably irascible Jones and that’s how the whole movie plays, like a joy-spreading force. That Smith’s character has little backstory to speak of and is then rechristened as the deliberately anonymous “J” only underlines how the character just sort of is Smith – or Smith’s screen persona, that is.

I often like envisioning modern movie stars in Golden Age terms, imagining how they might have been plugged into the Star Machine to achieve maximum wattage. In Smith’s case, I would have latched onto what he’s doing in “Men in Black”, specifically the alien autopsy scene opposite Linda Fiorentino’s Dr. Laurel Weaver where he is masquerading as a physician, getting by on a comical irrational confidence. That, that thing he’s doing there, so, so funny but so, so charming, only he could do. But Smith thought of movie stardom not in terms of persona, or even presence, but formula, as the oft-cited story goes, in which he and his producing partner James Lassiter identified the traits of most major blockbusters: special effects, creatures, and a love story.

Indeed, the movies developed under his Overbrook Entertainment umbrella with Lassiter have tended to follow that template exactly: “I, Robot” (special effects), “Hitch” (love story), “I Am Legend” (creatures). (That umbrella also includes his two other Oscar nominated roles, “Ali” and “Pursuit of Happyness”, which, consciously or not, adhere to the Playing Real People Yields Oscar Nods equation.) His company’s mission statement, as he told Variety’s Tatiana Siegel in 2008, was “extraordinary entertainment art delivered to all people of the world.” That might be true, but Siegel’s piece is more interested in the latter part of that credo than the former – nay, only interested in the latter. That also goes for a similar Overbrook-themed New York Times piece from two years earlier in which the focus is overseas distribution; “you have to think with a global perspective,” says Smith in discussing how he and Lassiter focused on a new foreign market with each new release. 

In Stephanie Zacharek’s review of “Hitch”, she writes that pictures like it “aren’t “doing (him) any favors,” wondering why it’s so hard to build a motion picture around an actor so good. It’s an astute take that nevertheless does not consider Smith’s role as producer, essentially asking without asking why Smith doesn’t build better motion pictures around himself. Paradoxically, or perhaps not, it’s as if Smith the producer has creatively stifled Smith the actor, an issue which has only worsened in the Twenty-Tens, with movies like “After Earth” and “Concussion” and “Collateral Beauty” failing creatively and commercially. 

Of course, framing not just a contemporary actor but a contemporary black actor through the prism of the exclusionary Golden Age is far from fair. Smith took control of his own career rather than having the terms of it dictated, no small feat, so shrewdly that he was even able to reframe the infamous 1999 “Wild Wild West” calamity as the perseverance bullet point of his ongoing professional TED talk. And he was early in recognizing the industry, at least toward the top, almost entirely dissolving the lines between commerce and art. Siegel’s piece for The Hollywood Reporter in 2019 explains how Smith “cracked the code on making real money in Hollywood”, outlining “savvy social media moves and investments” more than any artistic choices, noting how starring in Netflix’s “Bright” “extend(ed) his global grand thanks to the streamer’s reach into more than 190 countries.” That it was a critical flop is not glossed over; it is not mentioned at all. 

The “creative rebirth” that one exec mentions is creativity more in terms of marketing, similar to the final analysis Julian Kimble proffers in a Smith overview for The Ringer, writing “Only now, his persona no longer rests solely on the success of his movies. It’s taken Will Smith a decade to figure out the lay of the new land, but now that he finally has, his movies are less of a defining proposition than they were when he ruled a foregone iteration of Hollywood.” That is written in a tone of triumph, but it just sounds like tragedy to me. “His movies are less of a defining proposition” drifts close to movies as Jetsons Dial-a-Meal territory, cinema reduced to content marketing. And it’s why, in the end, I don’t feel the cosmic echo between his character in “King Richard” and James Avery telling Smith all those years ago “That’s fucking acting right there.” No, the echo seems to be more in Richard Williams concocting a 78-page blueprint for making his daughters into champions, a man who sees life as as a business plan and balance sheets in the stars.

337 Words On...The Worst Person in the World

“Who IS this Douglas Raymer?” That’s what a schoolteacher character in Richard Russo’s “Everybody’s Fool” wrote in the margins of a paper written by another character in the book. Maybe it was just because I was reading Russo’s sequel to “Nobody’s Fool” when I watched “The Worst Person in the World”, but that recurring line seemed to echo Julie (Renate Reinsve), the twentysomething titular Worst Person in the World not because she really is, though perhaps a little, but because that’s how it explicitly feels when you’re in your twenties and can’t get your shit together. The movie is mostly about Julie’s struggles to get her shit together, opening with a spectacular shot of her half-looking out over the harbor of Oslo, as if the whole world is laid before her, offering any on ramp she wants, though mostly she flits about off ramps, evoked in the movie’s 12-chapter structure, all of which come to feel disconnected rather than linked and making it so impressive that Reinsve manages to fuse them together by maintaining a true imprudent emotional core, as bored by life as she is buoyed by it. Trier treats her professional ambitions – cycling from medicine to psychology to photography to working in a bookstore (the twentysomething’s hero’s journey) – with an indifferent shrug, all of them more about what she doesn’t want than what she does, not unlike her romantic life, where she pushes back against commitment with the intellectual Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie) for heedlessness with the shallower Eivind (Herbert Nordrum). In one incredible moment, Trier literally brings time to a standstill as Julie races from her apartment with Askely to be with Eivind, past people frozen in the streets. If it’s romantically rendered, it also evokes pushing back against the advance of life itself, refusing to meet that looming responsibility, a surprising dissonance that marks the entire movie. Indeed, its conclusion calls to mind the wicked concluding about-face of “Young Adult”, not quite a happy ending but a rom com blood splattered smiley face.

291 Words On...Passing

In adapting Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel exploring race in 1920s Harlem, director Rebecca Hall takes the same tack as Maggie Gyllenhaal in adapting the novel “The Lost Daughter” in so much as she eschews voiceover to express the interior thoughts of protagonist Irene (Tessa Thompson) entirely through camera placement and editing. Hall favors close-ups and point-of-view shots of Irene, whose life is turned upside down when she reencounters an old friend, Clare (Ruth Negga), “passing” as white and married to a racist white man (Alexander Skarsgård, casual, terrifying). Their introduction sets the tone, alternating between straight-on shots of both characters that in Negga’s unwavering gaze and Thompson’s expressive fumbling is just about the purest evocation of someone seeing straight through you that I’ve ever seen and foreshadowing a relationship in which Clare, coming to Harlem on the regular and indulging her true racial identity, throws Irene off balance. Because if Irene’s husband (Andre Holland) wants to be up front with their sons about racism in America, she wants to protect their innocence for as long as she can, a nonacceptance “Passing’s” dreamy black and white suggests, that she is sleepwalking rather than facing up. Clare changes all that. And though Negga gives Clare considerable interior life, her character also becomes a reflection of Irene, evoked in Irene catching her own shaken visage in mirrors and evoking the DuBois idea of double consciousness, which “Passing” proceeds to play out almost in the manner of a thriller without really being a thriller at all. As such, the climatic sequence evokes the conclusion of the 2013 indie “Coherence” in so much as it essentially brings Irene face to face with herself, seeing herself through the eyes of someone she doesn’t even seem to know.

297 Words on...The Tragedy of Macbeth

Joel Coen (with his brother Ethan previously) has specialized in hard luck losers in hermetically sealed words designed to ensure their loss. As the years have gone on, perhaps they have shaken up that insulated world-building but in “Tragedy of Macbeth”, an adaptation of That Scottish Play from Stratford-upon-Avon, the tragic world of its vicious anti-heroes has never felt so confined. Filmed on a Warner Bros. Burbank lot, it is a triumph of moody German Expressionism exaggerating the darkness and emptiness of the Thane of Glamis cum Thane of Cawdor cum King of Scotland (Denzel Washington), massive and empty interiors so when there is knocking up above it seems to ensconce the whole room, immersing Macbeth in the echo, the movie feeling most untrue, frankly, when more characters are involved onscreen. Scotland, never mind its people, have never felt further away, as if all this madness of murderous politics undertaken by politicians has little bearing on them, just the power-hungry, their political posturing played out on a (gloomy) stage where they perform simply for themselves. In casting an older Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, respectively), the sort of Coen-ish dark humor gets even darker, their lack of an heir underpinning the whole scheme as no less ludicrous than Jerry Lundegaard’s in “Fargo”, yet somehow still compelled. I confess, that came through for me more in Washington than McDormand, not just in the late movie shot of him slumped on his throne like an exhausted thirty-year man at Met Life who just wants this all to be over and eat his retirement cake, and his conversational Shakespeare which sounds like a man talking himself through things he can’t quite understand. “Come what come may,” he says, a man grudgingly ready to play his part.

Intermezzo

America’s grand sporting saga, the NCAA Basketball Tournament, commenced over the weekend and though there are four rounds still remaining, the event is for all intents and purposes over. In upsetting mighty blue blood Kentucky in the first round and then vanquishing a comparable Cinderella in Murray State in the second, Saint Peter’s University of Jersey City, New Jersey, enrollment 2,300 (approximately), with an athletic budget so minuscule it could not even afford to bus its cheerleaders to the game and with a home arena gymnasium that heroically eschews a corporate title for, what I can only assume, is a name honoring track 1 off Sheryl Crow’s “Tuesday Night Music Club,” became the most dazzling Tournament spiritual champions in many a March Madness® moon. (National Championship banners are merely accounting for blue bloods.) All this program singularity was only heightened by the fact not one school of the 357 others in Division I shares their moniker: the Peacocks.

Naturally as the Peacocks of Saint Peter’s University gloriously surged into the so-called Sweet 16, many a Twitter user found the gif of Mark Wahlberg as comically hapless Detective Terry Hoitz trying to prove he possesses an individual policing spirit and is not simply one of, as the title of director Adam McKay’s movie suggests, “The Other Guys” (2010) crying out “I’m like a peacock, you gotta let me fly!” It’s a funny moment, surely, one where Wahlberg allows his typical cocksure countenance to metamorphose into insecure desperation, more Dirk Diggler than Brock Landers. Still, when it comes to “The Other Guys,” I have always preferred Michael Keaton as Gene Mauch, Captain to Hoitz and Will Ferrell’s Detective Allen Gamble. At one point we learn Mauch moonlights at Bed, Bath & Beyond, explaining he does it to put his kid through NYU, a comic bit that does more to epitomize the economic anxiety of the era than any of McKay’s broad potshots at our current blinkered society in his more recent “Don’t Look Up.” But don’t get me started. 

The funniest recurring bit in The Other Guys is Mauch’s penchant for speaking in TLC lyrics. Indeed, when he shoos the overstepping Detectives from his office in the manner of fed-up police captains immemorial, he councils, “One more thing, do me a favor; don’t go chasing any waterfalls,” borrowing the chorus of the 1994 mega-hit by the immortal R&B girl group. Later he will reference TLC’s equally classic “No Scrubs,” “Creep,” and “Ain’t 2 Proud 2 Beg,” always claiming when the detectives point out the band’s connection to his words that he doesn’t know what they are referring to.

Like the great actor he is, Keaton never betrays whether the character is on the gag. In fact, when you learn the backstory, that McKay envisioned Mauch driving his son to school and his son playing TLC the whole way, father not knowing who or what he was listening to, just sort of ingesting the lyrics, you realize that’s what Keaton is playing to. Mauch is someone who has assimilated the wisdom of T-Boz, Left Eye, and Chilli just as someone might soak up the pseudo-wisdom of Tony Robbins. 

I don’t know if an “Other Guys” sequel is in the offing. Probably not given the Ferrell/McKay feud I only just recently learned about. That’s probably for the best; we don’t need another unnecessary sequel. Still, as all this passed through my mind over the weekend in the space of, like, 90 seconds, I dreamt, as I sometimes do, of an imaginary moment in an imaginary Other Guys 2 where at a climactic moment, as a bad guy speeds away, leaving Hoitz and Gamble standing there helpless, Mauch would suddenly roar up in a convertible, with a Kangol driving cap...turned backwards. “C’mon, we gotta go, gotta go,” he’d say as Hoitz and Gamble climb in. “Hat to the back.” “You have to know that’s a TLC lyric,” Gamble would retort. “Guys, seriously, no idea why you keep bringing that up,” Mauch would reply as he peels out. 

Institutionalized Defeat: our diametrically opposed Winning Time miniseries

HBO’s miniseries “Winning Time”, chronicling the rise of the famed era of Los Angeles Lakers professional basketball colloquially known as Showtime, recently premiered. I have not watched it and as such, can offer no critical commentary. But the miniseries’ quality interests me less, honestly, than a much more pointless, much more pressing question – that is, what if Cinema Romantico were enlisted to fashion its own “Winning Time”-esque miniseries? What NBA team would we choose to document? Ah, now that’s a thought exercise.

The choices are plentiful, that goes without saying, and many of them are obvious. We could dramatize “The Last Dance”, the recent ESPN documentary examining the Chicago Bulls dynasty of the 1980s, or the ESPN documentary about the Detroit Pistons back-to-back champion Bad Boys squads, or the title-winning 1977 Portland Trail Blazers, a colorful cast of characters spearheaded by the gregarious free spirit Bill Walton. We could simply mount a miniseries of the 80s Boston Celtics, the Showtime Lakers’ chief rival, except than Boston’s preeminent native son, who works for HBO, would no doubt want to get involved and make it hagiography and that’s no good. And anyway, this is a Cinema Romantico project, savvy? This pointedly is not Winning Time. We very much do not want winners. Even the losers, baby, should get miniseries too. If your team won a title, you’re out.

That still provides myriad options. We could employ Chris Herring’s recently published “Blood in the Garden”, which I’m desperate to read, about the delightful, mean New York Knicks 1990s zoo crews as source material, or we could get the rights to Sam Anderson’s magnificent “Boom Town” and bring the Oklahoma City Thunder up in the mix just a little bit more. We could shower love on the transplendently nicknamed Run TMC Golden State teams of the late 80s, early 90s; we could soar high above the Rocky Mountains with the 1980s run-and-gun 100-points-game Denver Nuggets (I’m already envisioning a poster utilizing their dazzling skyline uniforms). We could make a movie about the 2001 Philadelphia 76ers and their mesmerizing MVP protagonist Allen Iverson, the ultimate Win the Season Even If You Don’t Win the Title team.

They can’t call be winners, can they?

Still, there’s way too much success there for this blog’s taste. We need a more anguished tone. Maybe that means we eschew the 1992 Dream Team (tired) and make a movie about the 2004 ill-conceived quasi-Dream Team that got crushed by Puerto Rico and crashed out to Bronze (wired). Perhaps we make a miniseries more in the tone of Lifetime about the so-called Jail Blazers teams of the late 90s, early 00s or the Gilbert Arenas-led Wizards teams of the aughts that despite some success proved as comically disastrous as their teal uniforms. Conceivably the misadventures of the early 80s Cleveland Cavaliers under the nominal stewardship of woebegone of owner Ted Stepien (Will Ferrell?) would make for an entertaining series as could the doomed 2010-2011 post-LeBron Cavs.

That’s more infamous, though, and I’m not quite sure we’re looking for infamy. The woeful Charlotte Bobcat franchise is to our taste, but the literal worst team of all-time is just too on the nose. We are tempted by the Sacramento Kings, sort of Bizarro Winning Time, and would strongly consider making a miniseries in the space of their legendarily disreputable 4-point quarter against the Lakers in 1987 that encapsulates their whole rolling trainwreck of franchise. But again, that’s just pitched at too operatic a level of terrible. 

We’re looking for something else here, something in the space of a piece Colin McGowan wrote for RealGM back in December, how “coaches labor under the necessary delusion that progress is always being made, that they are close to cracking it. Nevermind if the meteor is screaming earthward and they’ve got, let’s see, a whistle, a clipboard, and a degree in communications from San Diego State.” That is what I’m looking for, a kind of kitchen sink non-“Winning Time”, maybe more IFC Channel in the 90s than HBO, not “A Season on the Brink” but a season that’s just a slog. 

How about, say, the 1994-1995 Minnesota Timberwolves (record 21-61) coached by Bill Blair (who?) with a glorious roster of Some Guys and two surly actors at the top. “Imagine,” Sports Illustrated’s Kelli Anderson wrote in a season preview, “how it has been for Doug West, the one player who has been with Minnesota for every one of its six miserable seasons.” We will! Anderson characterized it as “institutionalized defeat” and that is our answer to “Winning Time.” LNFG

In Memoriam: William Hurt

“Changing Lanes” will be twenty years old in a couple months, a 2002 thriller directed by Roger Michell (who passed away last September at the age of 65) which despite a terrible (tacked on?) ending and occasional on-the-nose tendencies (set on Good Friday) is one of the new century’s thrillers that transcends middling, very good verging on great (argh, that possibly tacked on ending!). I have always loved it, in part because Michell transformed it into an actor’s showcase, not just for the leads (Samuel L. Jackson and Ben Affleck) but the supporting players: a spooky Dylan Baker, an idiosyncratic Toni Collette, a smug Sydney Pollack, an unctuous Richard Jenkins, a steadfast Kim Staunton, an immortal Amanda Peet (a mid-movie bolt of thunderous understated brilliance), an impeccably clerical-ish Matt Malloy. And then there is William Hurt who in the climax of his three-scene arc embodies what Sheila O’Malley has called the pulse of the playwright, illuminating every single thematic element of the film as a whole. 

“Changing Lanes” turns on two men – recovering alcoholic Doyle (Jackson) and hotshot lawyer Gavin (Affleck) – getting into a car accident on their way to NYC court. Rather than handling their post-crash business “the right way” as Doyle insists in his trying to be a better man, Gavin offers a blank check and drives off, inadvertently leaving behind the power of appointment he needs to present to a judge…or else. That power of appointment falls into the hands of Doyle and drives the action with Gavin doing anything to get it back and Doyle getting back at Gavin when he sees what that everything entails. This daylong feud escalates from something resembling reality to something entirely apart from it, which is not a flaw but a mirror of the men’s emotional journey, a living manifestation of the social contract being broken, reason giving way to anarchy, elucidated by Doyle’s AA Sponsor (Hurt) in a scene toward the end. “What you saw today,” the Sponsor says referring to so many preceding events that would have been mere overheated thriller elements under any other circumstances, “is that everything decent is held together by a covenant. An agreement not to go batshit.” It’s a deftly impassioned line reading of insistence, not anger, like he’s giving the keynote address at some social contract theory conference and peppering it with a bit of profanity to really get his point across.

Michell shoots this sequence in an alternating series of reverse shots and a medium long shot from the side, the Sponsor initially giving Doyle space and then getting right in his face, underlining his outpouring’s urgency. And though Jackson mostly downplays to highlight Hurt’s big moment, when Doyle insists that despite it all he did not have a drink, that not having a drink is “the point,” Hurt has his character just sort of disbelievingly take this in and then pivot, a teacher who has spent an entire semester instructing his pupil the 50 state capitals and now realizes the pupil doesn’t even know Topeka, in one ear and out the other, appallingly exclaiming “God” in contempt of a man who has forsaken Steps 2 and 3. Then he pivots again and lets Doyle have it. 

Because even if the movie has evinced what the Sponsor is about to say, that Doyle is “addicted to chaos”, no one has said it, no one has said it to Doyle, and now the Sponsor does. And Jackson’s reaction, his head turning ever so slightly, his eyes palpably widening, illustrates the “moment of clarity” he only refers to in “Pulp Fiction.” “For some of us,” the Sponsor explains, “it’s coke. For some of us, it’s bourbon. But you? You got hooked on disaster.” And the way Hurt chews up that last word – “disaster” – and spits it out becomes diagnosis as disgust. And then there is a pause. Because Doyle has nothing to say. And then a cut back to Hurt who has his Sponsor just look at Doyle with no expression, like he’s taking one last look because he’s been made to realize this is the end of their road, and then a “What can you do?” pursing of the lips and a heartbreaking shrug. He turns away and looks at his watch, an enormous bit of actorly business that I like to imagine Hurt added himself. He’s offering both an exit to this scene and a bridge to the next, suggesting the character is late for something, but which more deftly communicates this – I don’t have any more time to waste on you. 

William Hurt died on Sunday March 13th. He was 71.

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 continue our catch-up drivel today with “About Endlessness” (yes), “Shiva Baby” (hell yes), “The Harder They Fall” (grade: incomplete), “Encanto” (shout-out to the coffee kid), and “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar” (just a series of skits only in so much as tapas is just some small plates of food). 

About Endlessness. Many critics have noted that Roy Andersson’s sorta-documentary “About Endlessness” opens with an image of a couple flying above a city that echoes Marc Chagall’s 1913 painting Over the Town. Of course, Andersson’s image, as we discover when he returns to it later, is two people soaring not just over a city over a war-ravaged city. That doesn’t mean the sort of documentary is not a celebration, though, of life itself in its own way, where Andersson’s explicitly staged scenes of prosaic minutiae, often bleakly funny, sometimes just bleak, occasionally transcending bleakness, suggest staged photography, as if capturing random moments and than recreating them to accentuate how that randomness is, itself, something lyrical and significant. In one of the myriad snapshots, when a waiter pouring a glass of red wine just.keeps.pouring, spilling vino all over the white tablecloth, the narrator that chimes in from time to time observes “I saw a man with his mind elsewhere.” In that moment, in that time and place (read: after the last two years), reader, I felt seen.  

Shiva Baby. In adapting her NYU thesis as her first feature film, Emma Seligman utilizes something as culturally specific as a Jewish mourning ritual to render a movie that’s universal in feeling. Set almost entirely over the course of an afternoon at a Shiva, Seligman both draws out the tension that goes hand-in-hand with the ceremony’s familial pressure, shame and nit-picking and maximizes mankind’s tendency to let our problems pile up until they get dropped on top of us at once and at the worst possible moment, the room’s distinct claustrophobia a purgatory that Danielle (Rachel Sennott) must endure to get to the other side. It’s a socially anxious thriller, if you will, the best thriller of 2021.

The Harder They Fall. I’m still not sure if I think the end, in which a nigh omnipresent ebulliently cocky Jonathan Majors collapses, weeping, onto the shoulder of Zazie Beetz, re-characterizes all the splashy artifice we have seen as just that, or if it’s a substantial case of a movie having its camp bread and eating it too. 

Encanto. “Surface Pressure” > “We Don’t Talk About Bruno”

Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar. Like the suicide soda a character mixes for herself early on, Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo’s comedy is an unlikely amalgam of ingredients that harmoniously blends into something like a modern Elvis movie as that specific genre was covered by Team ZAZ in “Top Secret!”, transforming a small town Midwesterner’s fear of travel (to which I can totally relate) into an uproarious version of the Hero’s Journey. (Special shout-out to the ultra-committed Jamie Dornan in support. The way he reacts by not reacting, really listening during his back-to-back ridiculous walk-and-talks with Mumolo’s Barb and Wiig’s Star is Oscar-worthy.)

The Matrix Resurrections

When last we left Neo (Keanu Reeves) in “The Matrix Revolutions” he…well, I confess I had to look it up. I was pretty sure that Neo had died, rendered in the requisite Christ pose, savior of humanity over the machines. But how could there now be a fourth movie if he kicked the bucket? Well, he did die, his life sacrificed, according to the Research Institute of Wikipedia. But in a closing scene I did not recall, The Oracle (Mary Alice), the old lady who smokes cigarettes in her kitchens, says that she thinks they’ll see Neo again. So, apparently “The Matrix Revolutions”, despite being envisioned as the conclusion to The Matrix Trilogy, left the door open to the possibility of a fourth film down the road. Not that The Wachowski Sisters were especially interested in making a fourth movie even here and now. Indeed, Lana Wachowski directed last year’s “The Matrix Resurrections” alone, without her sister Lilly, and wrote it with David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon, and only after Warner Bros. insisted that in the I.P. Or Else era they needed one because new ideas are no longer like assholes, to paraphrase Sgt. O’Neill of “Platoon”, nobody’s got one, and if Lana didn’t want to dredge up her old vision they would enlist someone else. But not only did Lana refuse to let someone else direct, she baked her anger and the project’s own inherent, unavoidable cynicism into the movie itself, rendering a commentary as much as a slam bang action thriller. Who knew when I sat down to watch “The Matrix 4”, I would wind up seeing “Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money” instead? 

Events in “Resurrections” pick up some sixty years after the conclusion of “Revolutions”, though Neo himself has only aged 20 years, narrative flim-flammery that mostly puts into perspective the leading man’s apparent agelessness. Not that Neo is happy. Where’s the drama in that?! No, Neo has become Thomas Anderson again, having more or less reverted back to where “The Matrix” began, emphasized in how the movie opens by essentially recreating the original’s opening. Thankfully this is not just a maudlin facsimile. Thomas is a video game developer who has created an ultra-successful game based on his memories from The Matrix itself, though he doesn’t understand these memories are real. In one scene Thomas meets with Warner Bros. marketing executives clamoring for a reboot of his “Matrix” game which devolves into a montage of marketing verbiage set to Jefferson Airplane’s acid trip anthem “White Rabbit.” And though this would seem on the surface a sonic commentary on the movie’s through the looking-glass sensation, Wachowski counters it by having Thomas pop blue pills at his therapist’s insistence, as if all this inside baseball engenders complacency and ignorance rather than setting your mind free. 

And yet even if “The Matrix Resurrections” is taking direct aim at our ceaseless nostalgic cravings rather than challenging ourselves with something new, the fourth film falls back on old aesthetic tropes, a tendency to have its characters exist as nothing more than delivery devices for exposition, standing around and talking, and not with the thespian touch of “Dune” but in the bleary monotone of “Matrix” movies past, deadening so much of the brutal irony. And that is to say nothing of the action sequences, the majority of which feel perfunctory, a director uninspired to wage them waging them nonetheless, bringing little of the game-changing energy of “Matrix Reloaded.” On the other hand, there is something delightfully contradictory in how Wachowski refuses to let Neo graduate to the Neo of old. Struggling to get back into battle shape, he mostly takes it on the chin throughout hand-to-hand combat scenes and never quite emerges from this funk, a human flak jacket more than The One. But it’s not only that Wachowski is denying us these simple pleasures; she is also retrofitting the story to make it less about Neo than Trinity whose new name Tiffany evokes how she has become an everyday zombie going through the motions, unwittingly waiting on enlightenment. 

This will sound strange, coming from a “Matrix” agnostic, who mostly was not moved by the Neo/Trinity relationship at the core of the original trilogy, but something here got me. I was reminded of watching the mediocre “The Rise of Skywalker” and how I teared up when I saw Han Solo, but realized my tears were coming from a place of cheap sentimentality, of what the character and those movies once meant to me but no longer do and how J.J. Abrams was merely exploiting it for modern purposes. In a sense, “The Matrix Resurrections” functions as criticism of that exact idea, suggesting the characters within its own movies have been blue pilled into being exploited for a similar purpose. That familiar but always strategic stone-faced air of Keanu Reeves, then, is matched by Carrie-Ann Moss’s similarly numbed countenance, playing two characters subsumed by a universe they no longer want a part of and from which they eventually break free. If Neo flying at the end of the first “Matrix” was a kind of pinnacle of his learned abilities, in “The Matrix Resurrections” it becomes their means of escape, flying through the air to fly away. I hope they never ever come back. 

731 Days

March 10, 2020

March 11, 2020

March 11, 2021

July 4, 2021

November 13, 2021

November 20, 2021 - December 12, 2021

March 11, 2022

Pitch Meeting: Method Madness

In a recent interview with the Daily Mail (grain of salt), Tom Cruise’s first manager Eileen Berlin said that in 1981 her client refused to speak to a waitress who asked him if he was one of the actors in “Taps.” “Tom said to us, ‘Please tell her not to ask me any questions. I’m still in character.’” It mirrors the story Alana Haim told of Bradley Cooper working for a mere 5 days on set of “Licorice Pizza“ and staying in character the whole time. This is often thought of, rightly or wrongly, as The Method, born of Konstantin Stanislavski’s so-called Magic If. “To get audiences to suspend their disbelief,” Alexandra Schwartz recently wrote in The New Yorker of Stanislavski’s system, “actors must suspend theirs.” “But could it work so well that an actor loses sight of reality in the process?” Schwartz rhetorically wondered. “Nemirovich-Danchenko, the first in a long line of skeptics, called the system stanislav-shchina: ‘the Stanislavski sickness.’”

All that, as it absolutely had to, got me to thinking. It got me to thinking about a movie called Method Madness if only because the studio would never let us get away with a title called The Stanislavski Sickness. It’s a movie where an intense Method actor, Albert Brust (Michael Shannon), playing the megalomaniacal villain of a doomsday epic gets so deep into character that he gets stuck in character and can’t get out, literally walking off the set in the middle of the scene where his megalomaniacal villainous character is setting off to steal nuclear launch codes. Frantic, the movie’s young, overmatched producers Jordan and Evan (Abbi Jacobson, Burl Moseley) summon Albert’s long-suffering agent, Lonnie McVain (Kevin Corrigan), who, unsurprised and unpanicked, tells of the urban Hollywood legend of an actor who got so deep into character as Macbeth that he walked off the stage as Macbeth, causing the production to hire another Method actor to get so deep into character as Macduff that he “kills” Macbeth and brings the actor back to “life”. “So who can we hire to track him down?” the producers ask of Brust. “There’s only one actor up to this job,” replies McVain.

Cut to: Jordan and Evan wearing totally inappropriate clothes for ascending a windswept English hill in the middle of nowhere ascending a windswept English hill in the middle of a nowhere to find a small cabin where Daniel Day-Lewis (Daniel Day-Lewis) currently resides, alone, making porcelain figures of famous English footballers. Though Day-Lewis tries chasing these pesky producers out, intoning over and over that he’s retired from acting, Jordan and Evan finally appeal to his inner-acting titan by explaining it’s the role of a lifetime. “I’ve played the role of a lifetime,” Daniel Day-Lewis irritably replies, “twenty-three times. What can you plebes possibly offer me?” “A chance to save the world,” says Evan. “For real,” Jordan adds. Daniel Day-Lewis sets aside his half-finished Raheem Sterling figurine and accepts the role.

After a training montage in which Daniel Day-Lewis gets into character as the world’s greatest tracker, he tracks Albert Brust halfway across the world, swimming the whole Atlantic along the way, and finally meeting Brust mano-a-mano on a gravelly backroad beneath a darkened sky where Day-Lewis, really getting into the swing of things, thunders “With the fate of the world on the line, I meet you here, rabid scum, on this rocky road-” Except it turns out that Brust’s Method safe word is rocky road ice cream, immediately causing him to break character. The world is saved; Daniel-Day Lewis wins his fourth Oscar. 

*In Case Of Emergency: if Daniel Day-Lewis does not agreed to be lured out of retirement to play himself lured out of retirement, we will instead enlist Keira Knightley to play herself as a brilliant (I repeat myself), demanding, tempestuous Method actor who agrees to re-Method herself as the bounty hunter Domino Harvey and go after Albert Brust. 

Get Back

In January 1969 John, Paul, George, and Ringo (i.e. The Beatles) gathered to write an album they would then perform and record at month’s end. That both did and did not work out as they planned, memorialized in Michael Lindsay Hogg’s 1970 documentary “Let It Be” which patched together images recorded during these sessions and cemented them in lore as what capsized The Beatle boat, painting the four lads from Liverpool as at odds and each already with one foot out the door. In a way, that’s still true in “Get Back”, director Peter Jackson’s reassembly and reimagining of the same footage. But in choosing the title of a different song from those sessions, Jackson is sort of fashioning an answer to “Let It Be”, that as bad it was it wasn’t quite that bad, all while simultaneously rendering an extraordinary and extraordinarily intimate look at the recording process and bringing The Beatles, if only for a fleeting few hours, back to life.

If nothing else, and it is a whole lot more, “Get Back” is a triumph of editing and visuals. Jackson and his team combed through 60 hours of footage and 150 hours of audio, synching up footage that had no audio with audio from other scenes, a process the finished product proves as seamless as the colorization process Jackson borrowed from his own 2018 movie “They Shall Not Grow Old.” The color in “Get Back”, it’s not just how much it makes the incredible of-the-era costuming of George and Ringo and even producer Glyn Johns, who might prove the most dapper in show, pop, but how it transforms “Get Back” into a waking dream. When John, gone these 40-plus years, first walked into the room, I gasped. It puts you there, which is to say “Get Back” is not so much a fly on the wall documentary as an in the chair documentary, like you’re pulling a seat right up alongside Yoko doing her correspondence and taking the ride, furthered in Jackson eliding any present-day talking heads for a zoomed-out view. Other than some title cards when necessary to provide pertinent facts, “Get Back” is in the moment.

That moment is fraught. If the goal is for The Beatles to write an album’s worth of songs in just a few weeks, the recurring graphic of an X going through the latest day on a calendar becomes a constant reminder of just how little songwriting and rehearsing The Beatles do. Much of the movie is just The Beatles jamming to old favorites, scenes illustrating the tonal duality of the entire appreciation. It’s fun to see them in bar band mode, just as it’s fun to see John and Paul, antagonists of the fuzzy imagination, cracking each other up as they literally sing at one another through clenched teeth. But it also speaks to the inherent tension, a delaying tactic as much as joyful release, and when they’re horsing around while concocting “Let It Be”, a cut to Glyn Johns is comically illuminating. You can see the expression on his face subliminally trying to communicate one desperate plea: for the love of God, don’t screw this up.

In these moments of John and Paul buddying up, meanwhile, George tends to conspicuously vanish from the frame. And when he does appear, his face is often adorned with uncomfortable laughter, the kind you get when you’re laughing at a joke you’re not in on. This underlines his status as the band’s overlooked middle child and paints his mid-session decision to quit the band not as some dramatic dust-up – indeed, in “Get Back’s” telling, one day he’s there and the next he’s not – but mere familial neglect. And that, “Get Back” intrinsically argues, is what broke The Beatles up as much as anything, the unavoidable rust of time and togetherness. (Depending on your point-of-view, Ringo, who hardly says a word, is either checked out or just riding the wave.) There’s a comically astute moment when Paul jokes that in 50 years people will blame Yoko for the band’s break-up, even though her constant presence here is entirely benign, but there’s another moment when Paul is sitting and staring and sort of talking through the possibility of a break-up with what maybe my mind imagined as a glimmer of a tear in his eye. He very much cuts the figure of a man who sees the figurative writing on the wall.

For all that drama, though, “Get Back” really hits its groove, paradoxically, when nothing much is happening. That’s the secret weapon. Divided into three parts that run over seven hours total, it might sound like “Get Back” is too long. And it might feel like “Get Back” is too long, loaded with ostensibly extraneous parts. How many times can we see Ringo idling on his drum throne, how many cups of tea can we see consumed, how many slices of toast and marmalade can we see eaten? It’s repetitive but it’s repetition with a purpose, not condensing studio time down to just the thrill of Paul conjuring “Get Back” out of thin air. No, that moment, in its way, is the series’ linchpin, showing Paul just strumming his guitar, strumming and strumming, looking for all the world like Tom Hanks in “Castaway” trying to ignite that spark. And then, suddenly, “Get Back” is there, as if appearing out of a thick fog.

That sensation is analogous to the famed rooftop concert atop their Apple Corps headquarters. After being crammed inside the recording space where you can practically smell the Beatles’ unkempt hair and body odor of Paul wearing that same damn orange sweater again, being up there on the roof becomes a breath of fresh air, for them and for us. The concert is intercut with footage from a hidden camera in the Apple Corps reception area as a pair of apple-faced cops turn up, soberly responding to noise complaints but told to wait, looking like such total squares, man. At the same time, a man on the street interviews various unassuming passerby transformed into spectators, some aware of who they are watching, some not, as well as a few grouches lamenting the sonic clamor who seem cut straight from a Monty Python sketch. It adds extra atmosphere to the sudden show on the top of the world, where when the cops finally breach the roof, you see George Harrison really swing his axe while he’s looking right at them, crystallizing rock ‘n’ roll as rebellion. And that’s when it hit me. Up there, away from everyone, playing essentially for just themselves and their closest family and friends, The Beatles, the most famous band in the world, were, for just a moment, four lads from Liverpool playing The Cavern Club all over again.